One of a Million

Movies Watched In 2012

2012-01-04T06:05:00.000-08:00

Rankings are out of 10 with half points.
Anything 5.0 and higher is more or less a thumbs up.
Anything 4.0-4.5 is a somewhat admirable failure.
Anything below that is varying degrees of despicable failure.

January:
01.03:
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011) - Tomas Alfredson - Theatre (2.5)
01.04:
Drive (2011) - Nicholas Winding Refn - AVI (3.5)
01.05:
Certified Copy (2011) - Abbas Kiarostami - Instant Watch (9.0)
01.09:
Zombie Apocalypse (2011) - Nick Lyon - DVD (2.0)
R.E.D (2010) - Robert Schwentke - DVD (3.0)
01.11:
I Am Number Four (2011) - D.J. Caruso - Blu-Ray (3.0)
01.12:
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) - Brad Bird - Theatre (3.5)
01.14:
Moneyball (2011) - Bennett Miller - DVD (6.5)
01.19:
In Time (2011) - Andrew Niccol - AVI (2.0)
01.28:
Contraband (2012) - Baltasar Kormakur - Theatre (4.0)
A Dangerous Method (2011) - David Cronenberg - Theatre (2.5)
01.29:
The Killer (1989) - John Woo - Blu-Ray (4.0)

Movies Seen In January: 10

The Horde (Yannick Dahan & Benjamin Rocher, 2009)

2011-09-08T18:56:00.001-07:00

Made it considerably less far into this, my second foray into French as the only movies I'm watching. Begins as a cop revenge movie, only to have the police hit squad out for revenge bungle so badly that half of them die in the opening sequence. I presume, once the zombies show up sufficiently, that cops and crooks will have to work together in an attempt to survive. Unfortunately, I only made it twenty minutes into the proceedings. The film showed no flair for tension nor any decent idea of how to shoot a frightening action scene. The first zombie that shows up enters with a flurry of quick cutting and semi-hilariously sped-up footage. Benny Hill meets George Romero. Throw in a little extraneous close-ups of gnawing flesh and you have a film that feels mostly like incompetent pandering. The only halfway interesting character in the film is one of the first to die, and the rest seem to have no personality. This wouldn't be a huge deal, as Assault on Precinct 13, which the film is obviously modeled after, has characters who are closer to archtypes than people. But that movie had John Carpenter. This is probably the most superficial thing I've written for this blog, but there honestly isn't much to say. If one expects a cops vs robbers vs zombies movie to have a lot to say about real human life, one is probably going to be disappointed. I wasn't even expecting that and I still managed to be too quickly bored to contine.

36th Precinct (Olivier Marchal, 2004)

2011-09-08T14:09:00.000-07:00

The first in my experiment to watch almost exclusively French movies for the rest of the year (exceptions will be: movies seen in the theatre and when I feel like it). Though, to be fair, I haven't actually even finished it and am not sure that I will. I watched half of it before going out to a late dinner last night and have not yet had the will to resume it. It begins somewhat interestingly -- a kind of mood piece in which the viewer is thrown into a series of scenes that don't quite add up to a story. Police parties, heists, violence, political intrigue. Each scene almost seems to exist for itself, for the emotion it generates and for the piece of law enforcement that it represents. Later on, however, it's difficult to tell if this ambiguity is intentional or simply the result of poor plotting. It seems difficult to believe that the same person who would have intentionally crafted these sequences would have agreed to a scene in which an officer who has just filed for transfer and has X days until he leaves would be shot in slow motion while the main character yells NOOOOOOOOOOOO (or, since it is a French movie, NOOOOOOOOOOONNN).

36th Precinct's about-face is easy enough to pinpoint -- it begins with a disturbing and gratuitous sex scene. Well, disturbing to me anyway. However much I complain about chinless nerds as the new male hetero cinema icons, they still can't beat the French for their fascination with plain old seriously ugly old dudes. Both Gerard Depardieu and Daniel Auteuil have wives who seem far too attractive and sexually voracious to be married to such unappealingly glum and work-obsessed men. After this we get a series of home scenes which fill in unnecessary back story elements of each officer's characters and the rest of the movie from there is content to pack on the cliches and sentiment. With over an hour left to go, I am unsure what they could introduce to bring it back from such an edge. Thus I will also be starting to indulge in another experiment: that of quitting while the quitting is good. Too often lately I have made myself suffer through a movie long after I know it won't offer anything to me.

Pitch Black (David Twohy, 2000)

2011-08-18T18:43:00.001-07:00

An unsuccessful mish-mash of George Lucas, Ridley Scott, John Carpenter and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Twohy betrays his occasionally keen visual eye -- I actually the movie's burnt orange, overexposed look during the early sun segments -- with nonsensical editing, cutting irregularly between various shots of the same action in a confusing flurry of activity that diminishes, rather than heightens, the tension of an unknown predator hunting them. The film's writing is similarly miserable, relying on tough guy '80s one-liners in place of characterization, often resulting in characters who do things without explicable motivation. This latter problem wouldn't be of great concern in what is, essentially, a retread of Alien if the movie didn't leave such little else to worry about. I value a well-made suspense sequence far more than, as Rosenbaum once put it, modern cinema's "tendency to turn people into garbage," but this movie spends most of its time on jump scares and red herrings before devolving into a completely wasted premise. There are so many cool ways to make a suspense film based on the idea that characters have to stay in the light in order to survive, but nearly all of them are mangled. Exactly how many light-making objects they have is constantly unclear, leaving the loss of one or two less disastrous seeming than it should be; the characters fail time and time again to manage the priority of surviving above petty bickering, making them seem like childish infants; and each individual sequence appears and is gone before the gravity of the situation has time to properly settle in, giving the feeling of very little consequence. This feeling of empty action is heightened by the film's rather glib attitude towards death. I count at least four deaths in the film that we are, at least slightly, encouraged to guffaw at. And this encouragement of laughter, other than being admittedly a little icky, serves to break the tension that the chaos of trying to survive on a hellish alien planet is supposed to instill.

I Wanna Go (Chris Maars Piliero, 2011)

2011-07-16T07:26:00.000-07:00

Britney's new video, I Wanna Go, continues in the vein of Hold It Against Me -- taking a song that hints little if at all to her ongoing love/hate relationship with fame, notoriety, the press, her old image -- and meshes it with a video overloading on those elements. Here she and director Piliero craft a pastiche of Old Brit references: skull Mickey Mouse shirt, makeup, hair styling and close-ups reminiscent of Lucky video, a Got Milk? parody, a reference to Crossroads, and likely others that I missed, in an attempt to recontextualize her media breakdowns and burn outs as a combination of pseudo-fuck you rebellion and the pent-up dissonance between the person she feels she is and the person the media/world perceives her as. Somehow the whole thing never quite comes together. As with many pop stars, her acting abilities are relegated mostly to facial expression and anytime she's required to emote with spoken lines, a certain flatness appears inescapable. The oddly literal reference to Half-Baked at the end of the press conference does nothing to enliven the situation.

Her coy stroll through fan groping, indecent exposure and cop seduction is better-handled, but still lacks a certain oomph -- neither filled with the manic, albeit reprehensible, energy of Avril Lavigne being a dick to some dude's girlfriend (whose terrible videos were clearly something of an inspiration for this one) nor an actually sleazy coat of grime that might add character to Britney's well-traveled road of public misperception. This is, I think, the biggest reason the video never quite gets off the ground. Unlike her first video for Femme Fatale, Hold It Against Me, she has retreated back into the mindset of blameless victim, forever at the mercy of a media attempting to twist her words and actions around, rather than the more ambivalent truth of the subject.

The physicality of Britney vs Britney in Hold It Against Me is replaced here with a much tamer fight sequence (full of bad, weightless CGI). If you're going to do a Terminator reference, I suppose paparazzi as unstoppable, bloodthirsty machines is as good a way to do it as any, but there's no real sense of dread or terror that the idea of Terminators are intended to instill. Like most of the other references, it feels like the director is nudging you in the ribs and winking really hard before moving on to the next bit. The Thriller reference is similarly unearned, which is a shame because, upon reflection (and with a little knowledge of Britney's real-life history) it suggests a somewhat tragic parallel with her own brief relationship with paparazzi photographer Adnan Ghalib. If I Wanna Go had stripped down some of the ideas and focused on this push-and-pull relationship, it could have been something darkly confessional and interesting. Instead, like almost everything else, it's a one-off that simplifies, rather than complicates, Britney's ongoing struggle with being Britney Spears -- and trying to figure out who that person even is.

The Hangover Part II (Todd Phillips, 2011)

2011-07-09T08:23:00.001-07:00

I walked into The Hangover Part II with an expectation that I would not like it. While I had not ever seen the first film (I hesitate to call it "original"), I had seen several previews for both. They did not inspire confidence. But, after a frustrating day, sometimes you just want to have two beers and go to a midday showing of a movie you fully expect to not be good. This is the part of the review in which a person might normally admit to being wrong. That all this expectation was for nothing, and it was merely the marketing executives doing what they do (using advertising to make their movies look worse than they are). This is not what happened. The movie advertised, especially the strangely eerie trailer of Ken Jeong and Zach Galifianakis slowly singing to elevator music, make the movie look better than it actually is.

It begins just fine. Whoever was the Assistant Director on this movie, actually, is working his or her ass off (probably his, sadly) to get a real job as a director. Almost all the shots that do not involve any of the principle actors look fantastic. While it is probably not that difficult to go to Thailand and film what is, in essence, a pretty looking travelogue of pseudo-exoticism, AD still kinda nails the hell out of it. And compared to how bland and typically comedy movie-looking the rest of the film is, these throwaway moments are a wonderful change of pace. Even the opening of the post-Hangover wake up in a small Bangkok hotel room, there's a tinge of moody loneliness to all the shots leading up to the actors getting up and doing things.

But, other than that, the movie is more or less worthless. I cannot understand the appeal of Galifianakis' movie persona. His psychotically boorish tendency to make every situation he's in worse for the other "protagonists" is acknowledged at the very beginning of the movie, yet the characters still allow themselves to be guilted into keeping him around. With less exaggeration this could be a plausible storyline, but Galifianakis' character is so obviously mentally ill and in need of serious psychological help that he simply becomes sad and pathetic, rather than humorous. It's impossible to quite be angry with him, because he is clearly incapable of any form of impulse control, yet it also feels weirdly cruel to laugh at anything he does -- malicious, even. It helps that, at least to these ears, his lines and delivery are never funny.

Ken Jeong does battle with Galifianakis for most awful thing about the film, and mostly manages to win with an awful caricature of "ching-chong-y" Chinese stereotypes, speaking in an exaggerated accent that he can't even keep up a decent portion of the time (dropping into a higher-pitched version of his normal English, which is, at least, less offensive if no less obnoxious).

In the film's opening post-Hangover scene, Jeong overdoses on cocaine, has a heart attack and dies. The other characters then decide to stuff his body in an ice chest, rather than attempt to call any authorities or make any serious attempt to revive him. They come to this conclusion so nonchalantly, and with very little moral panicking or indecision, that it makes it immediately impossible to see them as anything but reprehensible human beings, even if three-quarters of the way through the movie it turns out Jeong isn't dead after all. They thought he was, and they reacted in the most self-serving and awful way possible, without even much flinching. And, in the end, that is all that really needs to be said about these characters. We are expected to embrace and relate to them and their plight to discover what, exactly, they did the night before, and yet they are such reprehensible low-lifes, and the movie is so patently unaware of this fact (save Galifianakis, though even he is sympathetic) that it is a movie that has failed as soon as it begins. And its failure continues from there, an almost endless stream of racism, cliches and hatefulness in celebration of exactly the disgusting American tourist entitlement that, say, Hostel satirizes so viciously.

Mom's House Movie Round-Up

2011-07-05T09:49:00.001-07:00

I spent a week at my mom's house, during which time I watched something like a dozen movies. Her TV is set up in a way where huge boxes of glare shine into the center of the screen, making actual enjoyment fairly difficult. As such I mostly tried to watch movies I was vaguely curious about seeing, but suspected I wouldn't like.

In an effort to speed along this blog process and catch up to something close to where I should be with my movie reviews, I've decided to give these dozen movies short shrift and stick them all together in one hastily written post.

The Last Man on Earth (Ubaldo Ragona & Sidney Salkow, 1964)
By default the best adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. None of the three are good, but this one is, I suppose, the least bad. If I'm being honest I sort of hate Vincent Price's theatrical acting in this. I am not familiar enough with his work to know if this is his typical style of acting, or if too long pauses and over-emphasis on the dramatic words of a sentence are simply his forte. In any case, it gave everything a feeling of Masterpiece Theatre, which the grimy desperation of the character needs anything but. The Omega Man must've got the part where the main character becomes a martyr, rather than realizing he's the monster, from this movie. Kinda defeats the whole point of the book.

The Box (Richard Kelly, 2009)
Lately I've fallen in love with describing certain movies as "cinema wallpaper." It seems a short and easy way of stating that they feel a whole lot like watching nothing. There are things happening on screen, but none of them seem to add up to an experience that is like watching a whole movie. The Box is certainly like that, and, sadly, that's enough to make it Richard Kelly's best movie (based on Donnie Darko and the 20 minutes I was able to get through of Southland Tales). Again, like in DD, he uses period detail without much point -- the film takes place in the '70s, but it could just as well be now (and, for a lot of it, now would make more sense). But, again, I guess nothing beats the low-hanging fruit of Donnie Darko's attempts at '80s satire. It's pretty difficult to even understand why or how this was made.

Swordfish (Dominic Sena, 2001)
Uses that Matrix rotating camera trick to much greater effect than was ever used in the Matrix. Gave the feeling that, despite the awfulness of Travolta's opening monologue, I might actually be about to watch an interesting movie. Unfortunately it turns out the opening sequence is one of those Begin at the End hooks, and the ensuing flashback to Hugh Jackman as a paroled hacker (quite easily the buffest man to ever be jailed for spending 16 hours a day sitting behind a computer) being enticed back into the life is dull nonsense -- though, at least, breezy, hastily paced nonsense. I didn't hate it, even if all the potential was eventually wasted, and the movie can never decide whether it wants to be a big, outlandish cartoon of an action movie or a gritty, violent down-to-earth action movie with Jackman as a plausible moral center, trapped in a world of chaos and violence.

Man on Fire (Tony Scott, 2004)
Honestly, I was completely surprised how much I enjoyed this. My general feeling towards Tony Scott is that, despite certain critical opinions, he is in fact even worse than Ridley. This, however, is the most I've enjoyed a movie by either of the two brothers, which I guess puts Tony back in the lead even if Ridley never made a movie I hated as much as True Romance. It is mean and bleak and gross, and wearing its "gritty" Denzel broken down Man of Action heart on its sleeve does it no real favors, but its ultra high contrast music video cinematography is so gorgeous I could watch nearly anything happening to it and be enthralled. Perhaps it speaks to my sense of aesthetic (and how bad it is), but I just plain love looking at this movie and if I could make a movie that looked just like it I would be pleased as punch. Dakota Fanning is pretty good, too.

The Manchurian Candidate (Jonathan Demme, 2004)
At first looks and feels like a bad attempt to revive '70s paranoia-style filmmaking, with weird deep fisheye cameras and strange zooms. This visual style eventually stopped bothering me, though it never completely gelled with the rest of the movie. Despite these stylistic problems, and Meryl Streep's boring Meryl Streep performance, Demme's attempt to make a big budget movie also be somewhat politically subversive ends up giving it enough oomph to push it into a pretty decent movie. The way it mirrors the hypnotic suggestion of its characters with the rhetoric of television punditry and political speeches to suggest that our entire political system is a broken down mess of mass hypnosis and it doesn't really matter which party you support, as long as everyone is talking the same way about the same things is a pretty unusual (if a mite obvious) outlook for a Hollywood political thriller, even if Demme eventually becomes trapped in offering the audience an easy happy(-ish) ending escape.

Freejack (Geoff Murphy, 1992)
Actually starts like an interesting movie, possibly. Though that is only because I misinterpreted the opening sequence to think it was about something completely different. The opening intercuts Emilio Estevez in a bright, sunny, idyllic, Best Day of My Life scene with a dark Mick Jagger-led post-apocalypse wasteland. The implication at the time, to me, was that Estevez was jacked into some kind of virtual reality world where he relived the positive aspects of his life as an escape from the reality that he was seriously injured or something along those lines. You could go interesting places with a concept like that. Instead it's about how in the future you can snatch people's bodies just before their death and, if you have enough money, transfer your personality into them to live forever -- like some kind of reverse on the Bradbury story Sound of Thunder. Estevez escapes and the movie proceeds from there in a series of poorly executed chase sequences until it eventually ends.

X2: X-Men United (Bryan Singer, 2003)
Still too long, just as I remembered, but otherwise an efficient slice of superhero action movie. Singer is, with little doubt, one of our best living action directors and this movie goes far to demonstrate just what is dull and lacking about the sleepwalking action sequences in Matthew Vaughn's newest X-Men movie. The tension, the sense of place and motion, in the opening action sequence alone would probably make it one of the best American action scenes of the last decade or so. It moves with a steady, pure kinesis that is almost unseen in action movies lately. I also have to admit I appreciate the mutants as metaphor for the struggle for gay rights, and the goofy fun Singer has with it ("have you ever tried... NOT being a mutant" asks a fretful mother) a lot more than I like it as a metaphor for black civil rights ala the new one. Guess I should finally get around to watching Valkyrie and see if it has some glimmers of awesome in and around how awful I expect to find some of it.

X-Men: Last Stand (Brett Ratner, 2006)
Actually not as awful as I remembered. Kelsey Grammar is a terrible choice for Beast (come on, it's fuckin' Frasier, how did anyone think this wasn't ridiculous), and it mostly skates along without any ideas about anything -- it doesn't, for instance, even attempt to grapple with the idea that despite Magneto hating Nazis he basically wants to be a mutant Hitler. But it does skate along briskly and with a kind of gleeful abandon. No doubt working with the knowledge that this was gonna be the last real X-Men movie, Ratner and screenwriters spare no opportunity to kill off as many main characters as they possibly can. And while this is, in itself, not anything like an inherently good thing, I can find a small amount of pleasure in it compared to the usual way of handling super teams in movies. Cover it with an ecstatic layer of sentimental cheese and you have a movie that, while not at all something good, is at least a joyful and unbridled show of passable mediocrity.

Jurassic Park III (Joe Johnston, 2001)
I guess this would be kind of the opposite end of a similar sequel spectrum. This is even more unapologetically schlocky than Last Stand, yet it works far less well. The biggest issue is that Joe Johnston is so obviously beholden to Spielberg's work that what he ends up with is merely sticky, oozing Velveeta Spielberg. An indiscernible mess of could-be Spielberg, yet everything about it looks, feels, tastes and smells wrong. Even the music is weird, having been able to successfully license the Jurassic Park theme song -- but not John Williams himself. So we alternate between big, uproarious moments with the (actually pretty annoying) theme, then seque into some not at all good faux-Williams music for the next part. Then the movie will do something completely inexplicable, like try to reprise that first Jurassic Park moment, when you've spent 20 minutes talking about dinosaurs and getting hints of dinosaurs, then you get the big BAM moment when there's a dinosaur... only they do it 3/4ths of the way into this movie, which has already been filled with dinosaurs since the beginning. Why are you trying to replicate (almost exactly) the big majestic moment at a completely ill-fitting time when everyone is trying to run away and not get eaten? While I can understand not liking The Lost World, or probably honestly any of the Jurassic Park movies, do not trust anyone who claims this is better than the second one.

Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002)
So after all that fake Spielberg I decided to watch a real one, albeit not even close to one of his best. In many ways this is the most conflicted of his movies that I've seen, constantly battling itself between his impulse for humanistic gravity about the future, where America/humanity appeared to be heading in a post-Patriot Act world of security and paranoia -- and a bunch of awful jokes like Tom Cruise chasing his eyeballs down a ramp and Peter Stormare as a doctor blowing snot everywhere. This is definitely Spielberg at his most weirdly unrestrained, apparently literally throwing every idea he can think of into the movie whether good, bad, offensive, childish, interesting or dull. Just a whole big kitchen sink of a movie which, somewhat unfortunately, also happens to have some of the most interesting sci-fi world building that exists in a recent movie -- blending utopic and dystopic ideas into a world that seems like a plausible reality in 20-30 years (Xbox Kinect already offers the ability to control TV menus by moving your hands, and, from what I hear, cars that drive themselves are in a constant state of testing).

The X-Files: I Want To Believe (Chris Carter, 2008)
A ridiculous exercise in combining what would be, even by its standards, a pretty bland episode of the show with a seemingly endless string of kowtowing fanbase appeasement. Mulder and Scully are finally together and doing it as they get roped back into working for the government for One Last Job. Xzibit co-stars as the only black guy, who also happens to be surly, dislikeable and useless. Even late in the movie, when it appears his time for redemption has come, as Scully angrily calls out his masculinity ("if you can't do it, find me someone with the balls who will") instead is just an excuse to bring back Skinner for a worthless cameo and Xzibit never appears in the movie again. Also attempts to mirror the killer with an at first extraneous seeming medical case Scully is working on, where a boy is probably dying from a rare brain disease and an experimental and highly painful treatment has only a very small chance of saving him. The killer, meanwhile, is kidnapping people and sawing them up with the hope of curing his husband's cancer. The question, eventually, appears to be: How far is too far to save someone you love? But then the end completely ignores this connection, as Scully powers on with the treatment. Mercifully, we never find out whether it works, but it still seems completely at odds with what the rest was trying to suggest. Easily the worst movie of the trip, despite Duchovny's charming attempts to rescue it with every scene he's in. (Gillian Anderson is also completely awful, it is little wonder her career has stagnated without the show)

Mission: Impossible III (J.J. Abrams, 2006)
Watched this both because I had not seen it since the theatre, and as a primer for my anticipation of seeing Super 8 when I arrived in Atlanta. That it turned out to be much better than that movie was a surprise, although it is still nothing worth writing home about. The bit of stunt casting that put Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the villain's chair likely won Abrams much of the movie's critical respect, but to me he does nothing but exude a pale, mealy-mouthed narcissist's idea of quiet, direct menace. He's so obviously caught up in trying to be scary without being overtly scary that it ruptures the entire movie's existence. The whole fiasco is a case of Actors Gone wild, as Cruise pulls out all the stops in appearing as Tom Cruise-y as possible at all times, while Billy Crudup tips his hat too early by being oily and shooting furtive glances. The rest of the movie is the usual Abrams celebration of gender roles, with Cruise as the jaded spy who falls in love with a girl because of her innocence and naivete (creepy), then must rescue her when his life, and his mistakes, ensare her. A few of the espionage aspects seem interesting at first, though eventually end in cliche (one particularly elaborate sequence's finale comes down to spilling a drink on someone and then ambushing them in the bathroom). Here's hoping Brad Bird's first foray into live-action can breathe some life into this tired franchise (but, sadly, who's really holding their breath?), as who doesn't love the idea of spies doing cool spy stuff?

Cobra (George Pan Cosmatos, 1986)

2011-07-01T20:02:00.001-07:00

Cobra is so vile and complete an embodiment of '70s-'80s fascist vigilante romanticism that it could almost be a parody of these ideals, if not for its complete straight face -- excepting macho-cynical one-liners, of course. A gang of psychotic cultists spouting apocalyptic nihilism are taking over the town and it's up to one cop in a vintage sedan to stop them. His superiors don't understand his brand of no-nonsense, get results, shoot the bad guys police work. A material witness who is also a pretty lady needs his protection and he'll stop at nothing to give it to her. One of the bureaucrats always standing in Cobra's way is secretly working with the cult. Hits every cliche plot nail on the head and lacks both the gorgeously scummy look Don Siegel brought to Dirty Harry, as well as that movie's occasional acknowledgement of/ambivalence towards the titular character's gross methods/outlooks. If this were possible to be taken seriously by anyone, this movie would have made me very angry. Instead, it was just annoyingly icky -- like the sheen of sweat from a muggy summer day spent doing nothing much but writing about terrible movies (hint: today).

Hot Tub Time Machine (Steve Pink, 2010)

2011-07-01T17:12:00.001-07:00

A telling cultural placeholder -- a fitting affirmation of just how far we haven't come since the '80s. Manages to mix the homophobia, misogyny and racism of yesteryear with all the new ways we've discovered to oppress people in the two decades since. I'd say Craig Robinson ought to be ashamed of himself, but he has already proven himself a man without shame.

The film's premise is, actually, not without potential. Sad sack middle-aged guys trying to relive their glory days accidentally get time-warped back to them. If the film had gone from there to become an indictment of the vanity and privelege of male mid-life crises, as well as an attempt to slap in the face the entire idea of rose-tinted nostalgia for the '80s and all the awful things about that decade, all while embodying the tone and feel of an '80s comedy (the one thing the actual movie does get kinda right), well, that actually sounds like a movie I'd want to see -- a lot. The movie has a banquet of satirical subject matter to work with, and all it ends up with is some jokes about neon and slack-jawed Red Scare jokes that were likely tired before the '80s had ended.

And the actual plot involves none of this premise. Instead, it is the exact opposite. It is about how, hey, now that we're old and we see all those mistakes we made, wouldn't it be great if we could go back to our young, hot, virile bodies, but with the life experience we have now? We would rule EVERYTHING. So it becomes an extended, unfunny exercise in male wish fulfillment. John Cusack, in the present, is reeling from a recent divorce in which his Bitch Ex-Wife(TM) took everything and left him a shallow husk of a man. The solution, in the past, is to meet a "quirky" girl with almost no personality and get her to fall in love with you despite the fact that you are exhibiting personality traits in life with both A) a mopey, recently dumped creep ex-boyfriend and B) a legitimately mentally ill person who believes he is from the future. There is literally no way a young, successful writer for a music magazine would ever be interested in him. Craig Robinson, in the present, is an emasculated cukold too much in love with his wife to confront her about his knowledge of her affair. The solution, in the past, is to call his 9-year-old wife-to-be on the phone and scream obscenities at her until she cries. This move proves so emotionally scarring, that when he returns to the future she would never dream of cheating on him (though, of course, she doesn't know it was him). The entire movie is like this. Men behave in such disgusting, self-serving, completely inhuman ways and are then rewarded. We are supposed to buy into their ending as being a happy one, because, I guess, that the only thing really wrong with the world is that men don't have enough control over it.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2011)

2011-06-28T09:57:00.000-07:00

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is, basically, nonsense. A labored attempt to cross several millenia of generations by introducing the oldest known visual arts to the latest in 3D technology. It's an intriguing idea, but it fails on so many counts that even what is intermittently interesting about it is swallowed up in memory by everything that is botched. The most damning, maybe, is that 3D does not look at all like how we actually perceive the world. An art history professor I discussed the film with said that she did appreciate the 3D in some ways, having looked at quite a number of normal photographs of the art work. I hadn't seen any 2D versions to compare it to, but the strangeness of 3D actually worked against my enjoyment of the pieces -- like the new technology was battling the old art and winning in a big, big way. The most interesting moments, for me, were shots of the caves and surrounding landscape without the paintings in them. The ability of 3D filmmaking to transform something real and palpable into a disorienting, surreal version of itself is the only possibility of 3D that seems honestly worth exploring to this writer. To turn real life into a bizarre theme park ride.

Late in the film Herzog travels to an indoor replication of a tropical jungle to further pontificate on the oldness of alligators and their perceptions of things. From nearly any kind of standpoint it, it's a self-consciously silly aside that, like much of the rest of the film, seems to be Herzog playing up his wacky German persona. Whether this Troy McClure-esque act is a cynical money-grab, playing on America's fondness for goofy foreign caricatures or Herzog actually beginning to buy into his own mythology is difficult to discern. In any event, there's a shot that travels through some leafy palms and opens up into the aquarium that felt so much like the realization of all those goofy early '90s Virtual Reality promises of the future that it made me wish his next project would be a 3D Aguirre revisited trek into the Amazon. Preferably without his voice anywhere near it.

The rest of the film, unfortunately, is a strange mixture of a talking head documentary in which no one seems to be saying the things Herzog wants them to, so he badgers them into answering questions in a weird way, or the pictures of the 3D images. This is where my interest in the movie will veer into the purely subjective and possibly ignorant. I don't really care about the paintings at all. Some were interesting, some less so, but as an artifact of pre-history I was unable to glean any compelling story from their existence. And, as a relative novice in the field of painting, their composition did not strike me in the way it seemed to pound many of my contemporaries. I am a man trapped in the modern(ist) world, and much of my interest in art lies only with its ability to comment on itself and a world I recognize. Without a historical context to attach it to (something that, obviously, can never exist), I find it difficult to feel anything but indifferent about most of it. This is my own personal failing, and something I cannot necessarily hold against the film.

But everything else, especially Herzog's own juvenile and obnoxious pontification on nature and the world are things that, at least from my perspective, are real problems that dampen a once-in-almost-anyone's-lifetime experience. Herzog seems to be fighting a company's desire to turn the film into a more normal, everyday Discovery Channel-esque movie, but this fight makes the film so much more annoying than something along those lines would be. To make matters worse, his narration is mixed so high in the soundtrack that its booming insistence makes his platitudes all the more groan-worthy, given their Voice of God status. In all honesty, I wanted to be much more specific in this section of the review, but two months after the screening I'm having quite a lot of trouble remembering any specific lines. It has all achieved a droning hum of Herzog's accented lisp saying "nature" over and over.

Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995)

2011-06-26T06:39:00.000-07:00

Paul Verhoeven's 1995 film, Showgirls, was critically and commercially decimated upon its release – reviled for its campy acting and dialogue and almost universally declared one of the worst films of all time. As years passed, and no doubt partially inspired by famous Cahiers du Cinema critic Jacques Rivette's claim that Showgirls was “one of the great American films of the last few years,” (Bonnaud) other critics started to acknowledge that, perhaps, they had overlooked the film. Australian critic Adrian Martin even admitted “I learnt the lesson that Showgirls knew more than I did.” (Martin) It is with very little shame that I admit the same was true of me, upon my first viewing. Despite my fondness for other Verhoeven films, especially Robocop, I was unprepared to accept the level to which Verhoeven would mix sincerity and irony into an ambivalent postmodernist stew of indulgence and critique. I, as so many other viewers did, took the film at its very face value – I called it “fantastically directed kitsch” – and laughed callously at star Elizabeth Berkeley's flailing gesticulations and Gina Gershon's hollow, now-you-see-it, now-you-don't Texas accent. What I didn't realize was that I was becoming the exact thing that Showgirls was satirizing – an opportunistic viewer, gazing at the characters depicted on screen and, in my gaze, robbing them of their humanity.

Following mammoth box office successes with Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990), and Basic Instinct (1992), Paul Verhoeven seemed set for a long, successful career in Hollywood. Working with Basic Instinct screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, and given the greenlight by backing studio MGM to explore the recently minted NC-17 rating (designed to replace the older X rating, which in the public's eye had become synonymous with pornography) in a big budgeted drama about Las Vegas show life. The resulting film, Showgirls, grossed only 28 million dollars domestically, compared to its 45 million dollar budget (Box Office Mojo). It won a then-record seven prizes at the Annual Golden Raspberry Awards (Scheers vii), including Worst Director and Worst Picture. Eventually its more campy aspects would be embraced in the home video market, earning it 100 million in home video sales and making it one of MGM's top 20 best-selling videos (MGM.com).

While some would argue that its campiness is unintentional – that Verhoeven believed he was making a serious film and accidentally made something hilarious – I would say the truth is much more ambivalent. Showgirls is both kitschy and serious. What other way could there be to depict Las Vegas, a city so cartoonishly surreal and yet so celebrated as a pinnacle of modern American capitalism? The artifice of the performances and dialogue, which are almost all consistent in tone, are an extension of Vegas' existence as a city of smoke and mirrors. Verhoeven claimed his interest is in realism, but he bends the idea that the words “realism” and “realistic” are necessarily interchangeable. Showgirls is not realistic, but to Verhoeven's mind it is realism. What he depicts is an honest summation of his feelings about humanity, especially as it relates to America. As Rivette puts it, “it's about surviving in a world populated by assholes, and that's his philosophy.” (Bonnaud) This is especially apparent in scenes between Elizabeth Berkeley and Gina Gershon. Despite their outwardly obvious and sometimes baffling dialogue (bonding over a childhood love of dog food), they eye each other with a shared sense of distrust tinged with hints of malevolence. Berkeley, especially, uses a form of stripped down acting in which she and the character fuse into one indistinguishable person. Over the course of the film she, just as her character Nomi Malone does, “learns” how to act. Early on she is full of wild fire, throwing herself into every emotion with reckless, occasionally ludicrous, abandon. But after Nomi's ascension to star of the show Goddess, she transforms into a replica of Gershon's Crystal Connors – eyes twinkling with deceit and lustful power.

By choosing a story about strippers, and using a rating intended for Adults Only, Verhoeven is able to extend the metaphor in many different directions. It is a film critiquing the world of cinema, and the unrealistic power fantasies it creates. It is a film critiquing the world of Hollywood, and it's role as a town – like Vegas – that feeds off new life, before eventually spitting it out, chewed and broken. Especially as it pertains to young, hopeful performers. And, of course, it is a critique of the real place, Las Vegas, and the world of strip clubs, prostitution and the sometimes blurry line between the two. In every instance there is a huge gulf between the promised fantasy and the lived reality. This, I suppose, is true even of gambling itself. Gambling, in its own way, is a microcosm of the ways in which rich people offer a hint of The American Dream to the working class, encouraging people to say “what if I win?” and ignore at what cost their small winnings came from.

This is the format with which Verhoeven uses a postmodernist lens to examine the history of the Hollywood musical. Behind the scenes films such as 42nd Street (1933), All About Eve (1950), and A Star is Born (1937, 1954) (Henderson) are the fodder with which Verhoeven assails musicals, and, by extension, film itself, as a morally bankrupt dream factory that has helped create a world like Las Vegas. But, at the same time, Verhoeven is aware of the hypocrisy inherent in this kind of message. He doesn't shy away from an understanding and sympathy with the audience's desire for fantasy. In Total Recall, he was delighted at the audience's relief when main character Doug Quaid, forced to confront whether or not he has been living a dream, decides it isn't a dream and shoots the target of his confusion. The audience wanted to believe so badly that, even though it was a movie, what they were witnessing was real within the context of the movie, that Arnold shooting a man is a cause for celebration and relief from anxiety (Scheers 223). Thus Showgirls is structured to take maximum advantage of the audience's desire for internal consistency and genre formula. Viewers want to root for the main character and root against the bad guy, so Verhoeven pushes hard to make both of those things difficult to do. Malone's dissolution from naïve girl from out of town to cocaine-snorting opportunist stretches the boundaries of audience willingness to sympathize. This combines with Nomi's eventual attempt to reclaim her lost sense of self and fight back, literally “kicking the shit” out of Andrew Carver for the rape of her best friend, being both a fulfillment of audience desire and a cold nod to the reality that a small measure of revenge doesn't balance the world's order. All it does is invite Nomi back into living the fantasy, dooming her to repeat all the decisions she's made. This gives the film a frightening sense of despair, using a mirror effect of the sign post to Vegas in the film's opening shots to the sign post to Los Angeles in the ending, to imply a fatalistic circle of entrapment. The poor and disenfranchised, particularly women, will be locked into roles at the mercy of men for the rest of their lives.

Men are central to much of the concerns of Showgirls and their odious, completely self-serving, behavior throughout the film is evidence of a strong leaning towards feminist theory on Verhoeven's part. Once again toying with notions of film literacy and archetypes, he sets up three familiar “meet-cute” scenarios. The first occurs in the film's first scene, when a drifter in a brown duster picks up Nomi hitchhiking. In a typical film romance, this could be the beginning of a relationship. He's even kind of a jerk – prime material for the “opposites attract” formula Hollywood has been pumping for years in their romantic comedies. By the end of the road trip they are getting along and he even offers to help her get a job at the Riviera, where his uncle is floor manager. He gives her $10 for the slot machine and says he'll be right back. This scenario ends, of course, with him making off with all her worldly possessions and disappearing for almost the entire film. This pattern of men swooping in to Nomi's rescue, only to selfishly backstab her at the earliest convenience, is played out two more times in the film – first with a bartender/dancer James, and then again with creative director of the Stardust Hotel, Zack. Each of these again toy with the audience's expectation for wish fulfillment. Each man appears nice, and would be plausible as the film's romantic interest, but their disregard for her well-being proves a one-way street. The women in the film can only screw over each other and have no real power over the other men, especially the rich ones like Zack. After nearly two hours of being at the mercy of her male handlers, Nomi's small exploitation movie-esque revenge fantasy against pop star Andrew Carver feels hollow and useless. Quite plainly, in a world in which women are prized for their beauty and a man can walk up to a girl down on her luck at the slot machines and ask “Lost all your money? Wanna make some more?” there is almost nothing one can do to escape the institutional oppression that movies help socialize us towards. Even when men mean well, they cannot escape the base nature of their feelings, as when Verhoeven gives pretty much everyone the middle finger by capping a clichéd, heartwarming reunion between Nomi and her previous bosses, Al and Henrietta with Al telling Nomi “Must be weird not having anybody come on you.”

This fatalistic attitude is at the crux of Verhoeven's arguments throughout his career. There's a sense of bleak inevitability to his films, as he acknowledges their existence as representations of people rather than as real human beings – caught as they are in the machinations of a script already written. And then he uses this idea to paint broad strokes about our own nature as people, and the ways in which we seek to serve ourselves at the cost of others. This level of moralizing might be off-putting in the hands of a less skilled director, but Verhoeven cloaks his moral stance in such a pointed satirical gaze that it never comes off as casual nihilism. Instead it elevates Showgirls, and much of the rest of his oeuvre including more recent films like Starship Troopers (1997) and Hollow Man (2000), into an apparently perpetual state of relevance as America marches forward every year with new versions of the same old fantasies to force feed its increasingly class divided youths.

Dellamorte, Dellamore (Michele Soavi, 1994)

2011-06-08T14:46:00.001-07:00

A little less than a month later, and the addition of alcohol those 25 days ago when I watched it, and I barely remember anything about this movie, other than I hated it a lot. I seem to remember Rupert Everett as a kind of forlorn cemetery caretaker, pining for a love of his own. Enter an actress who plays multiple characters and, I think, screws him over as each of them? I remember it basically being a movie about how women are the worst and they always ruin guys' lives. It also was not funny at all, except in that trying too hard way that lots of horror "comedies" seem to do. Also had a very film school overachiever look to it, with lots of pseudo-artsy shots that exist mostly for their own sake, rather than what they contribute to or comment on the actions/ideas/themes onscreen. I actually honestly have difficulty understanding the film's appeal as a cult favorite. What does it offer that, well, almost anything can't offer better? This is the worst review I've written in a while. I should've written it right away, as I have nowhere to go with it now. It also has lots of mean-spirited, malicious jokes directed at Everett's assistant, an embodiment of the slow-witted Igor trope.

Time Regained (Raoul Ruiz, 1999)

2011-06-08T14:22:00.000-07:00

Rosenbaum, an ardent Ruiz champion, once described him as one of cinema's "more literary" directors. Perhaps he worded it differently. Maybe he said "most" instead of "more" or simply described him as a literary director. The idea intrigued me, as I have taken steps towards moving away from an idea of a pure cinema -- that the camera's placement and the cutting from one shot to the next is the idea to be held above all others. That a film must first succeed at that before other ideas, themes, explorations should be warranted. It's a little bit of a silly idea. I still like it, especially as it pertains to action films. But it is reductive, when movies are capable of so much beyond those two things. So I went into Time Regained without knowing anything about it, save the idea Rosenbaum planted in my head, and that it would star Catherine Deneuve.

A little over an hour later I walked out, with probably another hour and change left to go. Perhaps if I'd done a little more research, and discovered that it was based on Marcel Proust's most famous novel, the enormous tome Remembrance of Things Past, I might have been more adequately prepared for the movie, its setting, characters and the way it moved through time. I had scarcely heard of the book before I saw the movie, and I continue to be mostly unaware of it save its title and notoriety. But it still might've given me something to hold onto, to help wade through the dense forest of faces, many mustachioed men that I could not tell from one another. A flowing and ebbing tide of names and people, unsure who was supposed to be who or when was supposed to be when. As it was, I had no basis for entry into this film and I could not reasonably justify watching more, as all I felt was a strange bored frustration, unable to access what I was being shown and just feeling sad and alienated. I am partially willing to admit that the fault is my own, or, at least, the movie is not for me. In a way, it's kind of wonderful and admirable that Ruiz was able to make a pretty well-budgeted adaptation of a French novel that is, quite probably, only for the people who have read it.

But, having said that, what little I could access cinematically told me that I needed access to anything else to get something out of it. The cinema, as one might expect from a director labeled "literary," was a mostly dull series of stiff shots broken up by mostly silly surrealist touches. And I mean silly as in ridiculous, rather than whimsical. Mostly they have a touch of whimsy, but are too clumsily handled to come off as charming. A prime example would be a scene in which a young Marcel enters a room. Across the room is an older man, and between them the floor is scattered with men's hats, like a landmine. It's a strong image, that perhaps suggests the impending war and likens it to adulthood. But then Marcel begins to make his way through the hat field by walking rigidly towards a hat, pausing, and then hopping over it in an exceptionally mannered fashion. This pushes it too far, trying to achieve a dreamlike state that is, I would guess, unlike dreams almost anybody has. It is too arch, too self-conscious and robs it of whatever power it had before. The similarly shifting furniture, gliding back and forth across the floor, is more contrivance than cute. Though a sequence in which a man appears to rise up off a ballroom floor seamlessly is nice, and unexpected. I guess this suggests that Ruiz through all his ideas at the cinematic canvas, hoping that some would work well enough to offset the ones that didn't. For Rosenbaum, and maybe others, they did. For me, not as much.

I haven't given the film a rating, being that I feel uncomfortable assigning it a negative number simply because I walked out of it. I wasn't prepared to give it a decent shot. And, even if I had been, it is in all likelihood a movie that is not for me, given that the chances of me reading a 4300 page book ever in my lifetime, no matter how good it is, are completely unlikely.

Robocop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)

2011-05-18T08:48:00.000-07:00

For many years, even as I understood more strongly what he was doing to undermine the very genres he was inhabiting, I still maintained that Robocop was my favorite Verhoeven film. Despite my propensity to abandon nostalgia, I had grown up with Robocop. It helped that it was one of the few films from my youth that, upon adult reflection, is still actually good. But I think there's a reason for my holding onto it that demonstrates an adolescence of taste and need for cinema to be a certain thing that I had always expected it to be. That is to say, I wanted it to be grounded in a level of reality and, for want of a better word, sentiment about its world and characters. Despite its more satirical and incisive political elements, Robocop still takes its story more-or-less seriously. Its view of a man who becomes a robot and interest in the loss of human psyche to machinery/technology is one based in pathos. And, in a lot of ways, this is what makes the movie more limiting than Verhoeven's later American films. It is about a man and, despite some hints of ambivalence, his triumph at the end is a real triumph. This is a stark contrast to Verhoeven's very next feature, Total Recall, in which none of the characters represent real people so much as postmodern representations of film iconography and the ending triumph is a lampoon of action film wish fulfillment/escapism.

I find it a little hard to say that a movie that cares about its characters as real people, and wants the audience to care about them, somehow makes it worse than other movies that don't do this. Fortunately, I guess, Robocop is still a good movie, even if I will no longer call it my favorite (or, perhaps, even include it in my top 5 Verhoevens). Made on a relatively small budget, it says some surprising things about privatization and American corporate fascism -- surprising mostly for their context in the still Red world of Ronald Reagan (and, soon, Bush, Sr.). I suppose its context as a sci-fi film and its low budget were the only things that allowed this fairly clear anti-Red message to get through. Or, to be a little more bleak about it, perhaps corporations already realized that they could be made easy scapegoats for the world's ills without affecting their bottom line. While there were no doubt earlier examples, I suspect they were less successful, so in some ways Robocop can be seen as the precursor to the modern action/thriller formula, in which corporate greed threatens to destroy a lone man or woman just trying to make it in the world. Especially in television, in which a huge number of modern sci-fi/action show made in the last 10 years has some elusive, privately backed "Company" as its big boogey man (Heroes, Alias, Lost, Dollhouse, others). I suppose the way it justifies it is the way capitalism justifies everything, that is not All Companies that are evil, greedy, shameless abusers of human rights, but rather This Specific Company. In a way, I am sad to say, even Robocop plays a little fast and loose with its intentions. The older, real head of OCP is seen as mostly genial and unaware of the machinations of his head underling, and the film's main villain, Dick Jones. And, despite the ambivalence of transforming a human into a robot crime fighting machine, the movie does imply that Robocop is making things safer and better.

This, I guess, would be the main reason that Verhoeven's attachment to Murphy/Robo as a character makes this a lesser film than his later works. Because we are supposed to like him, and see him as the good guy, in a way it means we must endorse his methods, which mostly involve violent abuse of criminals and a willingness to ignore the way socio-economic factors affect crime. These are ideas that are vaguely hinted at throughout the film, but Verhoeven mostly skirts them in favor of less pointed attacks on Jones and the other ruthless executives. I will say, however, that the way he ties Jones to Kurtwood Smith's wonderfully slimy Clarence J. Boddicker, and the implication that moving up the criminal ladder really isn't so far from moving up the corporate one (in that they both involve a willingness to be heartlessly opportunistic) is, of course, fairly obvious, but Verhoeven isn't out to hit you over the head too hard with it. And its observation that Detroit would become a gutted urban wasteland seems frighteningly prescient (though my history is a little stiff, perhaps it was apparent even by 1987 that the American automobile was going to lose the race badly).

The ending, too, is surprising and, sadly, completely implausible in a modern action movie. It ends on exactly the note it should, without wearing out its welcome with an unnecessary epilogue about Robocop returning to the streets and having come to terms with his existence as part man, part robot. I guess it's strange to contemplate the '80s, which are often held aloft as the worst decade in American history, in terms of social and political progress -- and to yet even see that the films being made in that era take wild chances that would be unheard of in a modern Hollywood picture. I guess bemoaning the fate of Hollywood is another boring standard of the critical world, but here I am. The main reason is, likely, that it's difficult for me to put my finger on what it is about Robocop that is so interesting to me, still. I mean, there are the obvious factors, like that it moves efficiently and still looks fantastic. There's the mirroring elevator scenes with Miguel Ferrer that, while obvious, that still have a disturbing casualness to them. Honestly I wish I'd written this two weeks ago when I first watched the movie. Now, it feels like there's something missing from my brain that I wanted to say about it.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Michael Bay, 2009)

2011-05-09T21:43:00.000-07:00

I have a difficult time defending Michael Bay, sometimes even to myself. There is so much wrong with his movies from an ideological perspective that it often threatens to overwhelm the qualities that are good about them. Other things that bother me less, like the consistently poor quality of his scripts on a dialogue level, seem to define the critical reception of his films. I think this, in a way, is what inspires me to defend him on certain levels. I think that analyzing what are, primarily, action movies, based on the relatively thin context filmmakers provide as an excuse for that action is only relevant if the filmmakers clearly wish it so. Something that aspires to be a more cerebral, more "intellectual" piece of genre filmmaking is worth looking at for what it attempts to do. The recent Anton Corbijn film, The American, stripped of all context save its three action scenes, would be a pretty effectively tense action movie. It would also be about 8 minutes long. The rest of the film has pretenses of elevating the action thriller to a realm of philosophical discourse and, in these aspirations, it fails mightily. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen never threatens to be anywhere close to an intellectual pursuit. It dodges and flees any notions of wit and self-reflection. It is, however, an occasionally beautiful and balletic action film. And, because it has no higher aspirations than that, I feel it should be judged mostly on these facets. Having said that, it is also worth exploring the ideological ramifications of much of what Michael Bay takes for granted in his pursuit of adolescent satisfaction. These, I feel are issues that could easily be avoided and, even if he does not encourage you to consider them, are still worth considering for what they say about Bay as a filmmaker and, perhaps, us as a culture. But even these are much different than the dialogue and plot, which are the main things reviewers seem to latch onto in dismissing his works (and, by extension, his abilities as a craftsman). Perhaps reviewers are just as guilty of taking what is problematic about his films for granted as he does.

So it is, with a strange sense of regret, that I must admit I did not enjoy Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, with anywhere near the pleasure I did upon my first two viewings. The very first time, in the theatre, I fell into the crowded mess of conceits that bloated the film to 2.5 hours long as a symptom of Bay's generosity. I believe he believes he only wants to make movies that make people happy. There were so many movies he would like to make, that he ended up stuffing them all into one movie as a way to give people everything. Comedy, drama, romance, action, suspense -- the things people sometimes insist they want to see all of in a movie. So we have a strange military scenario, with meddlesome Washington administrators getting in the way of Real Heroes trying to fight terrorists with a college comedy about a freshman trying to cope with an expanding world and maintain a long distance relationship and then thrown in the middle is a plot about robots fighting each other and someone trying to destroy the planet. Because of Bay's skill at rapid pacing, the movie's expansive overreaching and mixy-matchy-ness went down smoothly, and I appreciated his gusto and willingness to look silly by giving far more than was probably necessary. The second viewing was not as fond, though I still appreciated much of what I did previously. Now, perhaps my eyes are less tightened by fandom for Armond White and a desire to defend Bay for his formal qualities (which are considerable) at the expense of everything else. I see what people are saying when they complain about his unabashed conservatism. I see the weird, and frankly ridiculous and gross, ways Bay has likened Decepticons to underground terrorist cells. And the flat, personality-less Fox who exists as teenage boy titillation and nothing else. The movie clearly assumes that girls are never going to watch it, ever. Unlike many people, I have no problem with Shia LeBouf. His rat-tat-tat stream of neurotic pseudo-geek consciousness does, at least, feel like a cartoon version of a possibly real person. But what do they have in common? It falls into the same poisonous trap that John Hughes spent much of his career suggesting, that nerdy guys deserve to date girls because the guys are sweet and caring and the girls they deserve to date are the "hot" popular girls, because they're the girls "all guys" want to date. The women are reduced to objects and it's really just strange that this continues to be un-addressed and is continually gaining popularity. Is this an accurate reflection of what women want -- that the ideal woman continues to be thin and popular and pretty, but the ideal man is now a neurotic guy with no chin? Is this a terrified mass exodus of the female population for something Ben Affleck, former hearthrob and symbol of all that is chiseled and chinful did?

All these problems and more (the twins -- siiiiigh, the twins) begin to dissipate from memory, though, the moment Optimus Prime goes crashing through a forest, sliding along the hillside, flipping and twisting in a dance of mechanical violence. There's a fluidity to the pleasure of these moments, and their brutality is tempered by their existence as fictional constructs made of machinery (in the movie) and computer-generated images (in reality). The separation from anything resembling real-life creates a detachment that allows torn off limbs and exploding faces to exist as a pure kinetic pleasure, delightful for the ways in which they move and conflict with each other. I have no idea if this detachment presents any problematic implications in the long run, but for the short term I am willing to accept them as an effective substitute to pretending real human beings are disposable (the way much of the rest of the movie does, as countless infantry die without any explanation as to why they are even there to begin with). I don't know, Michael Bay, why can't the whole movie be super robot battle ballet. I would like that movie a lot. Instead I like these parts a lot, and the rest of the movie kind of not a lot.

Fast Five (Justin Lin, 2011)

2011-05-05T11:08:00.000-07:00

There's a certain, somewhat admirable quality to Fast Five. In an IM the other day Reuben asked me whether it was 5x as fast as the previous ones. While it may have been a glib joke, the answer, somewhat surprisingly, is yes it is. If the original The Fast & the Furious was Rob Cohen's often hammy and awkward love letter to the burgeoning Los Angeles street car scene, reveling in car porn of all facets (construction, movement, destruction) then by now the series has stripped itself of all that social context and, other than a few sleek rides, much of the car porn in order to transform itself into what hackneyed TV blurbs call "a non-stop thrill ride." Gone is much of the characterization, using slivers of hyper-sentimental platitudes as emotional and relational placeholders. The entirety of the script has been boiled down to that one infamous scene from the first film, when Vin Diesel's Dominic Toretto describes the events that landed him in jail, then repeated throughout the film so that nearly every scene with dialogue is a variation on that motif. Platitudes, almost laughably earnest delivery, seriousness. The other characters, notably Tyrese Gibson, show up to try to (fuel) inject the movie with some fun and laughter, but it mostly gets lost in the neck-deep syrup of Diesel and protege Paul Walker.

The purpose for all this condensation, and what I consider admirable about the film, is so the filmmakers could stuff more explosions and action sequences into the movie. I have long been a proponent of the idea that an action movie does not require characterization or political stance in order to be successful. Because a movie is a series of images supplanted to the screen, the interplay of these images through composition and editing can certainly be compelling on their own, and without the need for explicit motivation and character development (the best music videos are a prime example, reveling in their status as visual/audio kinesis). One person wants something, the other person wants to stop them from getting it. A filmmaker, quite honestly, never needs a more compelling conflict than that if they have the skill to put together a great sequence.

The only problem with Justin Lin, despite his returning the series to mostly real crashes and explosions, rather than the overreliance on CGI that has plagued it since 2 Fast 2 Furious, is that he doesn't have the knack. Many of the action sequences feel like watching nothing. There's no reason two cars dragging a flipping, moving, crashing giant steel safe down a road shouldn't be a fantastic action sequence. It's a pretty ingenius conception on its own, so it would almost suggest that even a midlevel hack could pull it off with a bit of panache. And Lin almost does. Despite the fact that it is never quite exciting, it is memorable for its uniqueness, and the sheer amount of creative destruction the safe wreaks as it slides and tumbles down freeways and through crowded metro streets.

Add to this the increase in action apparently means an equal or greater increase in beefy testosterone, as perpetually sweaty Dwayne Johnson faces off with Diesel in two separate Rocky-esque fisticuff showdowns that simultaneously feel a little gross and parodic while also being the closest to a compelling action sequence the movie has. I suppose one reason is that it manages to convey the feeling that something is at stake. The rest of the sequences lack a feeling of improvisation, of mistakes and re-calculation. Even when, narratively, things go wrong, it still feels like, cinematically, everything is going according to plan. There's no push and pull. No feeling that one side has the upper hand, now the other is going to take it back. This, I think, could've partially overcome the fact that Lin fails to make the camera part of the action. Set-ups are rudimentary and cuts seem below the level of utilitarian. The best I can say, I guess, is that it never relies on quick pans and shakiness to obscure, rather than show, the action.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)

2011-05-05T10:35:00.000-07:00

In addition to what I wrote previously, I would say my second viewing of Uncle Boonmee definitely helped to solidify the feeling of ongoing class tension and resentment going on in Thailand. However, it does so without mean-spirited self-righteousness. Despite their classist attitudes, both Uncle Boonmee and Auntie Jen feel like compassionately realized characters. Weerasethakul understands their biases, even if he does not accept them, and works hard to demonstrate that having these attitudes does not make you not a human being. Because of the strict structure of the Thai government, much of what he has to say must be veiled in metaphor, or hinted at obliquely through small patches of dialogue.

There are two mirroring sequences, one of a Thai princess and the other of a modern-day Buddhist monk, in which the characters remove the social and cultural signifiers of their status and are then reborn as normal people. These suggest, to me, Weerasethakul's desire, which is in stark contrast to much of the Thai cinema I've seen, to embrace modernity and a new set of values. But, surprisingly, he does this while still maintaining a connection to Thai roots and avoiding romanticizing (or villifying) metropolitan areas like Bangkok. He recognizes the strength and beauty of the forests and rural areas of his country, while still being willing to question the way traditional values have been twisted to create a controlling government. A flashback evocative of both 2001 and La Jetee suggests a future where those who disagree with the government are made to disappear, their lives projected onto a flickering screen until they are forgotten. Upon first viewing, I was baffled by this long sequence and what he was suggesting. Now, on contemplation and another viewing, it seems obvious he is talking specifically about censorship of film and media. The way those who disagree are forced to hide their stories and ideas in the media world, but can even then only put them in when they are obscured almost beyond recognition.

But even these struggles are not the main thrust of the film. Merely one facet of a movie that also meditates on the nature of mortality. The title, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, suggests concepts about Buddhist reincarnation. This much is true, as we do see Uncle Boonmee's life first as a cow, then as the aforementioned Thai princess. Other past lives are hinted at. But more than just this more expected (and, for what it is, literal) definition of past lives, the film also recognizes that our memories are, in a way, our past lives -- that within our brain are millions of past lives, almost like movies, and we can recall the ways in which we have changed and progressed. This, I think, is part of what encapsulates what is great about the movie: something so simple attains a kind of revelatory status, merely by being shown in a way that hasn't been before. Long, unbroken, almost actionless takes reflect the presumed feelings that, when one knows he/she is approaching the end of his/her life, each moment seems memorable and worthy of consideration -- that there is no more time to move fleetingly through life. Because it takes its time, these moments are also memorable to the viewer, sticking out long after other, faster and less careful, films are forgotten. Honey, dialysis, dinner, all these words (and likely more that I can't think of at the moment) suggest moments of a life that is rendered unforgettable, regardless of its fiction, by the power Weerasethakul invests in it.

There is also, in a way, a sense of tension and dread about the movie. While I think he is completely uninterested in the idea, many aspects show that Weerasethakul is capable of making an extremely taut and terrifying horror/suspense film. That he melds these easily and casually with the many other aspects of his filmmaking is a testament to his skill and craft. The film transitions gracefully from hazy, dreamlike idyll to a kind of haunting, unexpected tension. He could take a place next to (Kiyoshi) Kurosawa as a master of spellbinding, uncomfortable exercises in modern life examination. But Weerasethakul is more sardonic, more bemused by modern living than the clearly frightened and offput Kurosawa (who is not without a sardonic himself, it should be mentioned). Perhaps it comes from the difference in their upbringing. The stereotypes about the two countries are wildly different, with Thai people known for their friendly easy-going nature, while Japan is more notorious for a kind of polite rigidity. In any case, the two are probably not worth spending all this time comparing, but they do share a small spat of similarity I thought it worth noting. And, as always, I am never quite sure how to end these things. This is good enough, I suppose.

The Princess and the Frog (Ron Clements & John Musker, 2009)

2011-04-27T11:18:00.001-07:00

Based on this film and last year's Tangled, Disney appears to be making a fairly earnest step towards grappling with their problematic past and setting out new, less conservative, values for the children of today. If Tangled was a coming-of-age remake of The Little Mermaid, in which personal growth and independence were the main goals, with romance pared down to a sidenote, rather than the main impetus behind her desire for a new life, then The Princess and the Frog is an attempt to revise the Disney formula to acknowledge things like class differences and privilege, and the way that getting what you want may not be as easy for you as it seems for others. These bigger, messier, more difficult problems to tackle result, predictably, in a less successful distancing from the Disney of the past.

The first, of course, is the main character being Disney's first black lead heroine. It would be remiss not to call this a fairly major step in Disney's path towards something approaching The Right Direction. But as many problems as are addressed, even more seem to arise. The love interest, Prince Naveen, being a major concern. His race is, as far as I can tell, completely indeterminable. He hails from a made-up country, Maldonia, and speaks with a vaguely french accent and has dark-ish skin, which seems to suggest he would be from one of the African countries colonized by France. But his facial features otherwise look like any old Disney Prince Charming. Nothing, save his darker hair and skin, would at all suggest African descent. More strangely, it almost ignores all issues of race. If everyone in the movie were white, and Tiana was simply poor rather than poor and black, not much about the movie would change. Despite taking place in the South in the '20s, only one person says anything derogatory about her, and what he says could be construed as class-related as much as race. Her best friend is white, and while she is seen as an exemplar of rich, white privelege, this only serves to make their friendship even more nonsensical. It is, disappointingly, still ferrying in fantastical, revisionist history. This is all not to mention one of the more glaring eyesores, that of casting a voodoo witch doctor as the primary villain. Which is something of a shame, because a lot of the animation revolving around the demons and long, ominous shadows is legitimately frightening, especially if I'd been a little kid when I saw it.

There are positives, of course. The comic relief is less unbearable than it has been lately, with Disney -- better than Tangled, even, on many occasions. And the increase in female agency displayed in Tangled is still avaialable here, as the ending feels more like two people working together towards a goal than a poor girl, held back by the rich and greedy, being saved by a wealthy and wonderful prince (ala Cinderella). And, despite many problems with it, I have to admit the song and dance number Almost There, with its blatant rip-off of the paintings of Aaron Douglas, echoes the hopefulness and majesty of those paintings pretty well (though, again, it fails to address the fact that, despite his optimism, things have improved for black people in America at a far slower increment than I think he was hoping for). Speaking of the music, it is much catchier and along the lines of the Disney heyday of the late '80s/early '90s (not quite as memorable, but far less bland and forgettable than the mess Tangled has going on). And the best friend is far less villainized than, say, the stepsisters in Cinderella. Honestly, she would almost be a better choice for a main character and the idea of her coming to terms with her own rich, white privelege.

Honestly, I don't quite know what to say about it. I want to applaud the people at Disney for making a more concerted effort and, at least, it is smart enough not to go too far into the overly familiar, pretending that everything is all good so it's cool if I say something weird and a little racist cause we're all friends here (see: Easy A, lots of TV lately). But all the other stuff still weighs too heavily, and I think we're not gonna get anywhere as long as they keep resorting to exotic and "geographically related" villains. Keith David's witch doctor is certainly no less an icky caricature of all the stereotypes about voodoo than Jafar was of Middle Eastern mysticism on Aladdin.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Chris Columbus, 2002)

2011-04-25T00:29:00.001-07:00

Like the first movie, this plays like a bad clip show rather than a fully formulated movie. Scenes transition awkwardly from one to the other, never giving the feeling that they exist as real places in time for a group of friends in school. School itself is relegated to an almost non-entity, as the big mystery eventually takes hold. For being 2.5 hours, this is a film in which it never feels like enough has happened. In one sense, this is a good thing, as the laborious Draco Malfoy red herring only takes a few minutes to sort itself out -- whereas it consumes a huge chunk of the source book's length. The rest of the time, however, it results in something wholly inorganic and, mostly, boring. Chris Columbus is not a very good filmmaker and, for once, the dislike for him that caused me to skip out on these first two movies for so long turned out to be correct (though my reasoning for disliking him would've been something about him being generic and making "sappy movies," so let's not give young Basil too much credit).

I suppose calling him generic is accurate. He has very few visual ideas, for certain, as this movie is filled with moments of creepiness and/or strange realization that are accompanied by the camera slowly tracking in while rotating left and right (I guess, to suggest the discombobulation?). The films have none of the luster, the grand celebration and strange mystique that I imagine Hogwarts having for students. I guess that applies to everything -- nothing ever feels like it's on their level, nor is it on the adult level. Even when compared to Columbus' own meager Home Alone, it lacks a revelry in the stars' penchance for impish mischief. Everything is so sterile and stately and reverent. One need point to nothing besides Richard Harris' portrait of Dumbledore for exactly what is wrong with the series. His Dumbledore has all of the soft-spoken, approachable, yet dignified of a perfect Dumbledore, yet lacks any convincing humanity to make him seem like more than Masterpiece Theatre. Every attempt at the bemused goofines demonstrated in the book feels too self-conscious and wink-y. I guess that sums the whole thing up in a word: rigid. Everyone is apparently so afraid of making an unsuccessful movie that they forget how to do anything (except make creepy animatronic Mandrakes -- the stuff of nightmares those faces are).

Let's take, for a specific moment, the spiders. The climax of this scene was completely nonsensical to begin with, yet the movie finds a way to compound it by having it take place in a tightly packed thicket, to which the entrance looks almost exactly big enough for a car to fit through. It's like Columbus wanted to let everyone who'd read the book know right away, without any doubt, "don't worry -- we are gonna keep this awful scene exactly how you remember it."

On the plus side, Kenneth Brannagh somehow manages to be the best thing about the movie (surely for the first time in his career (zing)), using his tendency for theatrical acting to his advantage by turning the dial up ever so slightly into something that almost plays like a keen self-parody. Even Alan Rickman, previously the only person in Sorceror's Stone who didn't appear to be attending a funeral, is clearly a man who showed up for a few days to cash a paycheck and move on. Strangely, the trio of heroes managed to become worse actors in the space between first and second film. Or, perhaps, it was shuttled out so quickly that the creators didn't have time to properly mold every line reading. In either event, the children have never been even partway good since. How critics gag at the Twilight gang, yet suspend disbelief for Grint's hollowed out comic timing is, I suppose, evidence of a lot of theories: that people would rather see someone who looks like they are reading off a teleprompter than Stewart's tic-y willingness to risk absurdity, that suspension of disbelief is more malleable when castles and magic are involved (see: Orlando Bloom ever having a career), or the obvious idea that the source material's reputation gives it a boost when it comes to what is and is not questioned.

This is far more words than this movie probably deserves. I think I have a problem with conclusions in my reviews. I'd prefer to just stop when I have no more I feel like I want to say, yet I'm trying to practice writing semi-plausible essays instead of critical word-vomit.

Dhoom (Sanjay Gadhvi, 2004)

2011-04-21T16:20:00.001-07:00

I will have far less to say about Dhoom than I will the other two movies I have written about today. This is built on a combination of the fact that it is far less interesting, and that I have already expended most of my writerly energies on the other two articles. Dhoom is, in its own way, an embodiment of adolescent machismo. A super cop faces off against a super criminal in an increasingly outrageous pissing contest about who is more intelligent, manly and awesome. Occasionally, this results in satisfying moments of ridiculous, music video-esque action sequences. At other times, it results in long, unbearably dull verbal one-upmanship, or the threat to at some point in the future one-up the other. A lot of the dialogue in this movie is based on John Abraham, the villain, and Abhishek Bachchan, the hero, telling each other how much better they are than the other. The rest is Bachchan and Uday Chopra exchanging buddy cop cliches, as Chopra, far more buff and good-looking than his awful haircut and endless biker headbands give him credit for, provides comic relief as the guy who falls in love with women immediately, but never manages to snag one (until the end).

Having already seen the sequel, Dhoom 2, which is an upgrade in almost every way, this was an unexpectedly flat experience. Aside from the few sequences mentioned above, one of which involves a motorboat being dragged along a freeway by a speeding truck, there really wasn't much going for it. Most of the dance sequences feel like turn-of-the-century MTV, with extended (and mostly boring) synchronized moves. There's very little fire or chemistry between any of the characters as they dance, resulting in something that is competent, but uninvolving. Since dancing is one of my favorite things to watch in a movie, I was surprised to find myself zoning out. Other than a car mechanic in the rain bit, I actually can barely remember what the other dance sequences were (only a day after watching it). I don't know, there really isn't much to say. It is a movie built completely on the idea of style over substance, in which all the substance is owed to other famous action movies, such as Michael Mann's Heat (and a weird Casablanca reference at the end). But, in this case, the style isn't exciting or ridiculous enough to hold much attention.

Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)

2011-04-21T16:15:00.000-07:00

*Note: If you have not seen it and have the capability to, I heartily recommend watching Certified Copy before reading this. It is an astounding piece of filmmaking and deserves as much of your money as you can give it. Also herein lie spoilers*

After seeing Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives earlier this year, I quite honestly thought that I was unlikely to see a better movie for the remaining 10 months. Instead it took only two months (to the day!) to see Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy. In the interest of being fully upfront about things, I have never seen an Abbas Kiarostami movie before. I have seen parts of his very literal examination of the nature of watching movies, and the fabrication of that experience, Shirin, and I have seen the movie he scripted for Jafar Panahi, Crimson Gold. As I stated in my entry on that movie, Abbas Kiarostami quite honestly confounds me. What I had seen, up until now, seemed too far above the level of film viewing I am capable of. The layers, the examinations, the insight and patience required of me to get what he was going for, was too much. As a result I did not enjoy those movies as much as I could conceive a more intelligent viewer doing. This is not the case for me and Certified Copy. I am not sure if he was simply being pandering, and creating a movie that is more universally accessible, or if there was something more ambiguous going on and for whatever reason, on that night, at that time, I was ready to get what Kiarostami wanted to give me. I'll go with the former, though, cause I honestly almost skipped the movie in favor of watching the Portland Trail Blazers' opening playoff game. Despite a feeling of lethargy and reluctance about a two hour, possibly confounding work by a director I have consistently avoided out of fear of boredom and being exposed as not a very good film watcher, here Certified Copy was to give me an experience fairly close to life-altering. At least, as life-altering as a movie honestly can be.

It begins with a shot that I didn't think it capable of topping. In a maybe nod to John Cage, the opening credits play out over a single shot of an empty podium with two microphones and a copy of a book (which shares the movie's title) setting on it. Kiarostami is a little more generous than Cage, however, supplying a murmur of manufactured background noise to insinuate the presence of an audience within the movie, as opposed to just us. But the conflating of the two, in-movie audience and real movie audience, is what seemed so startling and caused me to think the movie could not get any better. Impatient Portlanders began whispering to their partners, glasses and plateware clinked, backsides shifted in seats, and instead of distracting me from the magic of immersion as these things usually do, it aided in the process. The movie and the real world were, for all intents and purposes, the same thing.

Soon, however, this revelation eluded me. Even though I'd noticed it right away, I started going back into normal movie mode. I worried about the precociousness of Binoche's son. I was bothered by the banality and seeming self-awareness of much of the dialogue. I concerned myself with typical movie-going complaints like plausibility. I was, as usual with my experiences with Kiarostami, missing the point. Certified Copy does not exist as a narrative in any fashion. Like I suggested earlier today in my entry on Total Recall (the two movies share some striking similarities), I believe the movie works best if you forget about thinking whether this interpretation or that interpretation of the movie is "right." The fact of the matter, I would suggest, is that none of them are. There is no right, because the story exists as an exploration of genre and performance and emotions/ideas we get from watching movies. It is a deconstruction of the romantic comedy film genre that moves so far into abstraction that it ends up encompassing huge, expansive ideas about life and love and marriage and the nature of being a human being who is alive. And all this snuck up on me so slyly, so invisibly, that it wasn't until the final scenes that I even realized for sure I was watching a masterpiece.

But when I did the whole movie just clicked. Suddenly I realized the level to which Kiarostami had been manipulating me, and it made me feel great. It felt like a metaphorical actualization of the best things about Hitchcock's work, slowly and steadily feeding small pieces of information and working the audience over with a precision that comes from a mastery of craft. Long sequences feel natural, occasionally raw, possibly even improvised, but the camera's moving, long, unbroken takes would suggest a carefully studied dance of speech and movement. This ambiguity gets at the crux of the argument -- that everything in life is a kind of performance. Many of our lines in life are scripted in a way, prefashioned by social expectations and years of rehearsing being yourself. One of the reasons I think I enjoyed the movie so much is that it is not trying to layer its ideas in ambiguity and misdirection, choosing instead to highlight very obviously what it is about, and leave the viewer to relish in the myriad ways he explores them.

This, I think, provides the explanation as to why, once Binoche begins to pretend she and Shimmel are married they suddenly are. Once Shimmel apologizes for being unable to speak Italian, saying he only studied French in school, suddenly he can speak and understand French. Film, by its very nature is a copy. It transmits a recording of "reality" via a process that only works by manipulating our senses. Yet because it comes as close as any reproduction yet can to simulating a real world, we have come to expect certain things of it when we engage with it. This is where notions of plausibility and verisimilitude come from and our desire for them. I once spoke with someone about movies who insisted that the very first thing a movie must do to be successful is establish plausibility. If he couldn't buy into the idea that the characters, their actions, their locations, existed in a world that he could believe in, then, to him, the movie had already failed. I should note, quickly, that the world it existed in did not have to be our own, but it did have to have rules and parameters that made it its own. I wonder what he would have thought of this movie, which goes out of its way to smash these notions of plausibility, to deny the viewer the comforts of formula and relational cohesion. Of course, I personally believe it only succeeds because of this abandonment -- that what is accomplished would've been lessened had Kiarostami used more traditional narrative techniques.

There is so much more I'd like to talk about this movie, about the way it transforms the camera into a mirror, and we watch as the characters regard themselves through how we see them. Are they good-looking? Are they satisfactorilay put together? Do we desire them, or to be them? Or, in a melodramatic argument at a restaurant, the camera alternately becomes each of the two characters, so that Shimmel's frustration and Binoche's discontent are expressed to us, rather than each other. And though the dialogue has the ring of cliche, existing in a world of movies in which thousands of movie couples have fought over dinner at restaurants, the layers Kiarostami has enveloped over these proceedings manage to make it both distinctively fake and performative, but also brimming with poignance and empathy. That, I guess, sums up the whole movie, and is a decent enough way to end this. I would like to write more, but 1300 words is a lot and I must admit I am out of breath. Anyway, my #1 movie of the decade so far (haw haw).

Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990)

2011-04-21T14:27:00.000-07:00

Total Recall is, somehow, even better than I remembered it. I would argue against the idea that the death of the psychologist marks the film's turning point, and at that time Arnold is now trapped inside Rekall and the rest of the film is his paranoid/fantastical delusion dream world. It is very nearly plausible, except the film is not strictly told from his point of view. If we are operating on the assumption that everything is implanted memories then it doesn't really make sense for him to remember things he was not there for. But more than this, I think this argument is somewhat irrelevant. Whether what we're seeing is "really happening" or "all part of a dream' within the context of a film in which none of it actually happened seems a little like an exercise in missing the point. Maybe it makes more sense in a movie that takes its narrative more seriously, but as far as I'm concerned Verhoeven is using everything in the movie metaphorically, so that there is never any need for us to put it together or make sense of it in a real-world context.

Instead we should look at it from the obvious set-up of a movie that embodies the format of an escapist sci-fi action film for the express purpose of pointing out how silly escapist action films are. In doing so it captures much of the duality inherent in this exercise, alternating seductive glimpses of power fantasy and then attacks that seduction with a series of layer-peeling reveals that expose the fantasy for what it is. The film opens with a dream that segues into sexy pillow banter between Arnold Schwarzenegger, the '80s paragon of manliness, and Sharon Stone, the coy yet caring and devoted blonde wife, and culminating in an unseen sex scene with Stone saying, "I'll give you something to dream about." Later Arnold visits Rekall and is asked to supply attractive attributes for his ideal woman. He picks a woman more or less like the wife he already has, only brunette instead of blonde -- perhaps a winking nod to the cliche about the grass being greener, as his ideal woman is different only on a superficial level. By the end of the movie he has traded one girl for the other under the pretense that one's love is real, and the other's is a manipulation. Yet we never know any more about the brunette than her original qualities, while Stone has much more depth and far more closely resembles a real person. An early breakfast argument between her and Schwarzenegger feels like a stage-y movie marital disagreement, yet is plausibly grounded compared to the melodramatic slapping and life-and-death of his interactions with Rachel Ticotin. The point I guess is that everything is a little bit fake, so it doesn't really matter whether some of it is Really Fake and some is only Kinda Fake.

More jokes abound involving the idea of tourism and vacation as an inconvenient hassle and that, if given the chance, most people would probably rather remember a good vacation than risk taking a real bad one. This also raises ideas about the nature of memory, as well as our tendency to gloss over negative experiences when it comes to visits to other places. There is an expectation that we will have a good time and so that's what we convince ourselves. That's not exactly revelatory or anything, but the jokes are cleverly spiked in and the movie wouldn't have quite the same punch without them.

Finally, the movie treads similar ground to Robocop (although, I'd say, more successfully), in its anti-'80s indictment of privatization and the idea that it can only lead to exploitation. It also goes down a hilarious rabbit hole of paranoia and distrust, finally ending with the joke that Schwarzenegger cannot even trust himself. As punctuation to an era of vastly shifting political alliances and some of the more heated Cold War panicks, with Reagan introducing all kinds of new ways for America to be jingoistic and xenophobic, it's a pretty fantastic final touch.

Hanna (Joe Wright, 2011)

2011-04-15T22:27:00.001-07:00

Hanna is either a high concept gimmick as an excuse for an action movie, or else an action movie as an excuse for Joe Wright to revel in high concept gimmickry. I'm not entirely sure which, but I suppose I would lean towards the latter. The action sequences are only intermittently interesting (most of the movie's midsection is relentlessly dull in this aspect), while the emotional cues are all infused with the kind of overwrought E-M-O-T-I-O-N that can only come from someone who sincerely believes he/she is saying something of great worth about the human condition. It stinks of Art, I guess you could say.

Unfortunately, that something he's saying about the human condition either isn't there, or is so poorly extracted from the material that the end result is the same. There's a heaviness of emotion and an attempt to examine the idea of growing up in seclusion and being thrust upon a strange, alien, oddly shaped world. But what does that say that isn't fairly obvious? If the message is that we shouldn't raise our kids in the wilderness and teach them nothing that doesn't come from a book, well, I would expect that by putting that message in a movie you are already preaching to converted. If it is an attempt to say something larger about the process of raising children and forcing yourself to let them grow up and experience the world, and Wright has chosen to tell this story via a fairytale action movie metaphor about a homicidal teenage girl, well this narrative concept has abstracted the idea to such a great length that it no longer has any real-world relevance. Wright attempts to fill this void of meaning with a highly touted Chemical Brothers score mixed way, way into the forefront, as if the throbbing electronic beats can somehow pound the poignance into you. The highly stylized camerawork is similarly overbearing and insistent, assaulting the viewer's eyes with visual cliches at a rapid-fire clip (a sun-dappled Hanna hangs her head out a car window, hair blowing slowly and wonderously in the wind; Bana dispatches a group of assailants in a whirling Scorsese meets Oldboy single-take set piece).

Worse, like Kick-Ass, it never makes any attempts to address Bana's systematic destruction of a girl's childhood for the sake of a mostly-empty vendetta. While it does a better job than that movie about questioning his tactics, it never once questions his motives. The audience is expected to take it as a given that if Bana had tried to raise her in a normal life somewhere, anywhere, in the world, that the all-encompassing arms of the CIA would eventually find them and kill them. This seems a very curious leap to ask, and is far less plausible than the idea that Bana's character is simply a psychopath. And, going further down the rabbit hole, the audience is never asked to reflect upon Hanna's path of destruction, which results in the deaths of numerous military and government personnel, but also a fairly large number of civilians. While she is not directly responsible for the latter deaths, it is somewhat difficult not to hold it against her, especially in moments where she fights a few guys, then proceeds to run away, leaving her innocent benefactors to whatever fate they're destined for. This seems weird, especially since it runs against the only idea Wright semi-coherently manages to state over Hanna's inflated 113 minute running time -- that, despite whatever we may convince ourselves, empathy does come more naturally than not-empathy, and there is a short little window from the time we are self-involved children to the time we are self-involved adults when we don't know how to not be empathetic. I don't know that I'm 100% on board with this idea, yet it's fairly clearly there -- only to be shaken apart by aforementioned Hanna totally manhandling the hell out of some dudes then inexplicably running away.

Also, can we all just acknowledge that Cate Blanchett is an awful impersonation of an actor at this point? She's like the world's most serious little kid playing dress up -- throwing on all kinds of wigs and accents and somehow making that whimsical idea an exercise in joyless austerity. Regardless of project, her acting tone always consists of the same theatrical demand for recognition. You're not gonna get an Oscar nomination for this one, I'm afraid, so can we please just stop pretending you're performing brain surgery on the Dalai Lama.

Now that I'm finally caught up on these, I'm going to try to start writing longer(-winded) pieces that deal with more specifics than I've previously been doing. I think it's good exercise to mix in both the thematic overview and the more surface-level examination, plus I'll only have to write one or two a day so I think I can then pour all the words I would've written on 3-5 of these trying to catch up into one movie I've seen recently and remember well enough to write more specifically about!

Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011)

2011-04-12T08:43:00.001-07:00

In some ways a mirror of Jones' earlier film, Moon. While my largest problem with that film was that it spent its first third tricking the audience into thinking it was watching a different movie -- a movie that, for me, felt a little lifeless and dully conceived to begin with, I would say that Source Code's strength is in its premise and beginning. In some ways playing out like a cinematic video game, the main character must solve a mystery in which eight minutes of real time pass before he "dies" and, in video game terms, gets a game over. Then he must try again, but armed with the knowledge he gained on his previous game. In a way it's a little like an action-mystery Groundhog's Day. This, I think, is fine for the length of time that the movie continues its eight-minute, real-time structure. It also manages to subtly introduce ideas about the way we interact with each other, as minor sentence structures alter without even being prompted by any other changes. Unlike Groundhog's Day, in which actors minutely repeat the same lines with the same inflection (whenever possible, I would guess, using the same takes), implying a fatalistic attitude towards our behavior and demeanor on any given day, Source Code uses the impossibility of actors completely mimicking their previous takes to its advantage -- suggesting that any time we speak there are a myriad of ways that sentence could turn out. It gives a nice juxtaposition of freedom and chance when combined with the movie's repetitious structure, as Jake Gyllenhaal, again, unlike Bill Murray, is not the only person who's decisions affect the day. He is not god, tinkering with the lives of playthings for his own bemusement and eventual self-improvement. He's just one guy in a world where everyone's decisions matter.

Unfortunately, this begins to break down about halfway through the movie, as impatience and sentiment get the better of Jones. Soon the rigidity of the eight minute structure is broken down, with quick cuts through time that destroy the world's cohesion. Rather than a delightfully repetitious exercise, we are back to watching a normal mystery. One in which time no longer matters or exists. And this introduction of melodrama and happy endings and swelling orchestral music is unbefitting what begin as a cool, calculated exercise in confusion and tension. On a semi-related side note, how is it that the son of David Bowie is so awful at music? The punchy, force-fed emotional cues of both Moon and Source Code are by far the worst aspects of each movie, as they make what could be poignant and heartfelt into something cheap and saccharine. That is how I feel about the ending, regardless of the many interpretations and plot holes that reveal it to be even weirder and more thoughtless than Jones may have considered.

Office Killer (Cindy Sherman, 1997)

2011-04-12T08:18:00.001-07:00

Buries most of its most salient points about women in the office world, the beginning of the end for the print industry and the cutthroat nature of business downsizing in a heap of Freudian psychology by-the-numbers. Not content to suffer the titular character with one or the other, the film chooses both an implication of sexual abuse from the father and an endless stream of repressive scolding from the mother. Some might argue that this is part of the film's existence as a maybe-parody of typical slasher films. Yet despite its moves into dark, and occasionally grotesque, humor, I don't really see this movie as a parody. It feels more like an embrace of genre types as a shorthand to suggest something frightening and inhuman about the corporate world. And when it hits these moments with gusto and strength unburdened by easy pop psychology explanations, it strikes an unexpected chord about the dismantlement of the American job market into the bare minimum of specialized occupations.

What Sherman does get right almost 100% of the time, as expected, is a suffocating visual aesthetic long before the movie veers into the grotesque. The office seems an inescapable labyrinth of tall walls and maze-like walkways. Despite my reservations about Carol Kane's mother as a character, the upstairs-downstairs dynamic is compellingly handled. As a somewhat new fan of Sherman's work, I was definitely excited to see this movie. While I didn't love it as much as the beginning made me think I would, I was not disappointed, either. I'm honestly surprised how much critics hated it. And sad that that hatred probably means Sherman won't make another movie.

Speed Racer (Andy & Lana Wachowski, 2008)

2011-04-11T22:09:00.000-07:00

Triumphantly, an action movie that embraces movement in an all-encompassing tribute to friction and gravity. It creates a wonderful movie that lasts 18 minutes long. Then it continues to be a movie for two more hours, sometimes including parts that are good enough to be in that 18 minute movie. Other parts are not. The parts that are not eclipse the parts that are by quite a large quantity, yet these drowsy moments of slippery gloss are not enough to keep the hard, crushing, bouncing, diving, swooping, cheering parts from boggling the eyeballs. When I was talking about movies taking inspiration from video games, this is what I meant. A cavalcade of weighty, beefy CGI race cars hurtling at and through and over and against each other in spinning, exploding, joyous ways.

It's difficult for me to come to terms with the idea of car racing being a sport, exactly, I suppose for the reason that, despite the great physical skill and stamina required, the car is the real participant. And, though likely for different reasons, Speed Racer is all too willing to indulge in my distinction between driver and car. Unlike Sucker Punch, which likely could've increased its watchability ten-fold by simply being a 100% animated movie, the faces of drivers are only seen in close-ups, while CG cars bounce and shift and slide in their own cartoon world gloriously divorced from reality. This is the movie I was hoping for when I started to watch Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which was insantly bogged down by endless chatter and an awful sense of how to make movies. The Wachowskis, whatever their faults, apparently can actually make movies. And make em good. If only this weren't a flash in the pan in a long and strange career that apparently has them moving away from genre exploration and into that most turgid of film exercises, the hot button political drama.

The world should apologize for this movie's flop at the box office. In the same way that Usher's Love in This Club promises a pop world we are not good enough for, Speed Racer should've ushered in a beautiful new era of action filmmaking. Maybe in some alternate reality Thor and Captain America wouldn't look like awful husks of comic book antiquity, and people everywhere are grooving to delirious ambient space pop. I wanna be in that world so bad.

Tangled (Bryan Howard & Nathan Greno, 2010)

2011-04-11T21:21:00.000-07:00

This is, in essence, a remake of The Little Mermaid, only better. It's a literalization of the idea that part of growing up means moving outside your comfort zone and making mistakes and basically floundering around without much help until you figure out how to do things. It's messy and fun, just like this movie! And, unlike The Little Mermaid, Tangled shows a surprising amount of female agency for a Disney movie. Rapunzel's desire to escape her perceived parental entrapment (much more literal here, since the ocean is, uh, actually way bigger than the not ocean) is motivated by curiousity for the outside world and nothing more, whereas Ariel's curiousity is at least in part inspired by her affection for hot dude whose life she saved. Rapunzel also spends much of the movie acting of her own volition, solving her own problems, and, for the most part, helping herself. This is a fairly stark contrast to Ariel, who is mostly helpless without her animal friends and spends much of the movie not even being able to speak -- certainly problematic as a portrait of the supposedly "ideal" woman Disney tries to paint her as.

Now I cannot honestly trumpet Rapunzel as a strong, feminist portrait. She is, in her own somewhat different way, a sensualized idealization along the lines of Ariel or Aladdin's Princess Jasmine. There is also something about the suddenness of the relationship that develops between her and Flynn Rider, which, I suspect, is as abrupt as it is because it is one of the few Disney films in which the love story is not the point. They go from disliking each other to liking each other to maybe being in love far too quickly. If Disney can go this far out on a limb, it would be nice to see them go even further and maybe suggest that it's okay to date someone BEFORE you fall in love with them, rather than the other way around.

It's interesting to note, though, that the promotional material for the movie actually creates a completely false impression of what the movie is. More so than usual, I suppose I should say. Rapunzel is depicted as a mysterious other, showing up first as magic, violent hair defending itself from Flynn Rider's intrusion. She doesn't show up until part way through the trailer, giving the impression (along with the movie's ambiguous title) that the movie is far closer to Aladdin than The Little Mermaid. What was the motivation behind this? Was there some kind of 7-10-year-old focus-testing that showed little boys would refuse to see a Disney movie if they thought it was about a girl, but that little girls had no such qualms about a movie about a boy? Depressingly, that whole sequence of events doesn't seem implausible. But I really wish it did.

Crimson Gold (Jafar Panahi, 2003)

2011-04-08T13:53:00.001-07:00

The relatively few Iranian films I've seen have all, more or less, been an attempt to address gender relations in Iran, and put forth ideas for more forward-thinking views of women's rights. So it was a surprise that this movie was not about that at all, instead tackling ideas about class stratification in Iran, and the resentment that builds among lower classes due to their poor treatment.

I will go right out on a limb now and say that Abbas Kiarostami still confounds me. While he technically didn't direct this, he did write it. And despite Panahi's usual human, involved, directorial work, it was difficult for me to parse in a way that neither The Accordion nor Offside were. Kiarostami is like the cinematic equivalent to physics, for me. At this point in my life, I just don't have the knowledge base and tools to properly comprehend the information he's trying to give me. I could make some of it out, and the main actor, Hossain Emadeddin, gives a frankly astounding performance, eliciting a world of emotions with small, reluctant gestures. Two sequences stand out immediately for the typically Panahi-like warmth and poignance -- sequences so memorable and effective in their simple pleasures that it makes me want to revisit the movie immediately, as I only understood their effect on me later on, as I thought about it. This is a stark contrast to Offside and The Accordion, two movies so upfront and raw about their emotions as to verge on sentiment, but never quite spill over into it.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is that, sadly, I don't have much to say about this movie. I enjoyed it a lot, and the emotions still resonate with me when I think about it almost two weeks later, but as for higher understanding you will have to seek someone with a better knowledge base.

Dying of Laughter (Alex de la Iglesia, 1999)

2011-04-08T12:52:00.000-07:00

An interesting, if not quite as successful, dry run for his latest film, The Last Circus. Both deal intensively with the entertainment industry, and a kind of decimation of Spain's humanity brought on by the fascist government. While The Last Circus takes place entirely within the fascist regime, climaxing just as Franco was about to die, this continues from that ending in to the present. Both suggest that Franco's influence continues to be felt in modern Spain, the only difference is literal (in Dying of Laughter) versus figurative (in The Last Circus). The difference between the two comes down to how far de la Iglesia is willing to push the audience. In The Last Circus he pushes them to the brink, then jumps so far into the abyss that there is no hope for escape. Dying of Laughter is a little nicer, only forcing the audience to lean uncomfortably far over the edge.

I'm not quite sure what to say about it, really, that I didn't already say about The Last Circus. The movies are honestly that similar. Both involve a duo of public entertainers who privately despise each other, coveting what the other one can do and what they have before dissolving into hideous, monstrous caricatures of their former selves. Both movies look deep inside the idea of fantasy and come out of it with the conclusion that these fantasies are ugly and hollow and we've lost something humane and real in the process of fooling ourselves.

The Fighter (David O. Russell, 2010)

2011-04-08T11:52:00.000-07:00

Of all the simplistic movie formulas, I think the sports movie formula is the one I am most likely to fall for, regardless of the film's actual qualities. Somehow, the notions of competition and underdogs and come-from-behind victory resonates with me in a way no other formula I can think of really does. I'm not quite sure what this says about me (psychologically, I worry that it means I can relate to winning more than I can to, say, falling in love -- but I hope that's not the case).

So even though Christian Bale would rank highly among my least favorite working actors, I still went ahead and watched this out of a combination of curiousity at David O. Russell doing such a straightforward genre piece, and my aforementioned sucker-status for a well-crafted sports movie. Well, I wouldn't exactly say it disappointed. It's right there on the line, hovering, depending on how I feel at the given time I think about it, between something I'd tell people I enjoyed and something I'd tell people I almost enjoyed. Wahlberg's sisters are a particular low point, echoing the same women who exist only to be obnoxious and repressive in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love. That Russell wants the audience to cheer when Amy Adams finally has enough and takes it to a couple of them is, uh, pretty icky, to say the least. I've never (well, not never, but at least since reaching cognitive adulthood -- i.e. a year or two ago) really liked the idea of the crowd-pleasing punch, when someone is being so odious and awful that the sympathetic, put-upon character unleashes some violence to the face and then we're supposed to find this cathartic?

But, to my surprise, I found Bale surprisingly tolerable. His scenery chewing Method Acting fits perfectly into the role of Wahlberg's narcissistic, attention-starved older brother. And Wahlberg brings his usual laconic tenderness, making him a plausible foil to the fast-talking, egomaniacal Bale. Melissa Leo and the sisters are the only real problem bogging this down from being a completely enjoyable entry into the canon of middling sports movies. But it's solid enough, and works the working class hero myth in a way that isn't completely obnoxious.

Raw Deal (John Irvin, 1986)

2011-04-08T10:56:00.000-07:00

A strange amalgamation of Miami Vice-like style -- a constantly tracking camera, glitzy locations, shimmering glass and towering modernity -- with Arnold. Even in fancy suits his hulking, enormous frame looks completely out of place. Which I guess is something of the point. In the high life world of corruption and murder, who can one trust but the completely ridiculous, Superman embodied that is Arnold Schwarzenegger. But, unfortunately, the film takes this implication at face value, rather than trying to exploit his mythic figure as a satirical statement about ourselves, as Mark L. Lester did a year earlier in Commando. We trust Arnold because he is one of the good guys, and of course anyone who has ever done anything bad to Arnold is one of the bad guys. Unlike most films involving undercover police work, this one is completely uninterested in the moral grey area that can come from working alongside the so-called enemy. Instead, it ends with a rather abrupt and kinetically vacuous shootout, where Arnold gets revenge on all the bad guys by shooting them to pieces, then is rewarded with commendations, his old job back, etc. etc. It's the usual macho cop fantasy storyline, existing in a world where shooting a hundred people has no repercussions.

The vacuousness of the finale is the real disappointment, however. Up until that point the film had handled its action sequences with a certain joyous aplumb. A vehicular chase at a lumber yard early on showed a speed and weightiness that is generally lacking in today's digitally recreated stunts (not all, of course, but it seems like most). And a fist fight in an alley began with some neat tension, exploiting long shadows and a certain ryhthmic, careful pace. So it's too bad to see it all go down the drain for what should be the biggest part, but I suppose gun fights between a bunch of guys and the decidedly not-acrobatic Arnold would be difficult to choreograph in any interesting way, and John Irvin doesn't have Lester's cheeky sense of humor to fall back on. So the movie is a failure, but by no means as big a failure as many others would likely suggest. And the reason for its failure doesn't have much to do with its laughable script (which is quite bad, but I don't know who would expect otherwise).

Sucker Punch (Zack Snyder, 2011)

2011-04-07T18:43:00.001-07:00

This movie is exactly what it looks like: a series of video game cutscenes without a game attached. A while back I was talking about action movies on a video game forum and I suggested that they could actually do with borrowing some ideas from video games. When Zack Snyder read that comment of mine and then proceeded to make a movie that did just that, I'm not sure he entirely understood what I meant. What I was saying is that action movies are far too padded with dialogue, back story and unnecessary attempts at characterization. What they could use is some stripping down, as many video games have done, so that the viewer can revel in the kinetic pleasures of motion and tension, which film can do exceedingly well, without being bogged down in banality. Unfortunately, Zack Snyder took it to mean throwing a bunch of junk in a blender, pressing "badass" and then showing us the end result. Unfortunately, Snyder makes two fairly egregious errors on his way to presenting Cutscene: The Movie. The first, and slightly less offensive of the two, is that the movie is so joylessly serious. It takes action movie tropes and tries to tie them to a story about female struggles with sexual abuse, then fits this weird stylization to the entire proceedings, which only serves to make this serious undertaking seem ridiculous. There's nothing reclamatory about what he's trying to do here. The women are hollowed out shells of every girl group action trope that exists -- an ugly, brown, fantasy/sci-fi Charlie's Angels, but about how awful rape is, I swear. Okay, maybe that's actually worse than part two, which is that, like 99% of video game cutscenes, the action isn't interesting. It's weightless, lacking anything resembling verve or energy. The girls spin and move through a plasticine world of computer-generated everything, slipping through setpieces like buttered soap. But here games have an advantage. In a game, something is always at stake. There is almost always the possibility of losing. Movies do not have that. So they must make up for that by successfully imparting a feeling of physicality and realness that suggests more outcomes than there are. Sucker Punch cannot do this. Every outcome feels inevitable before it starts.

On a side note, I was surprised to find out this was an "original" idea pitched by Snyder himself. The whole thing certainly feels like the kind of high concept bargain basement comic book writing Hollywood has taken to adapting lately. I would guess that the film's disappointing box office performance will mean that Hollywood won't be as eager to take a chance on more original ideas, when what it should really mean is that they shouldn't be as eager to take a chance on any of Zack Snyder's awful ideas.

The Red Shoes (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1948)

2011-04-03T18:37:00.000-07:00

Aside from the virtuouso titular sequence this movie has far less to recommend than I remembered. A movie I was once proud to call one of my favorites ever (even though I'd only seen it once), it now feels like a series of gorgeous baroque paintings -- prettily lit, sumptuously colored, but a little flat and uninteresting nowadays. (I'm making that observation with little to no art history background, so feel free to call me out if the baroque period is actually awesome and I'm thinking of something else)

Anton Walbrook is more stiff than I'd remembered, and the movie honestly doesn't even quite feel like it gets going until after the titular sequence -- at which point it's almost over. There's something... underdeveloped about the tension that they're trying to convey. The stress and push-and-pull of a woman being forced to choose between the typical life of a domestic wife and the grandiosity of the stage only begins to cohede just as the movie comes to a startlingly abrupt end (I'd remembered the finale, but was surprised to discover it coming -- "oh, it's over already?").

But with all that, the sequence itself is truly a bit of amazing, expressive dancing -- every bit worthy of the praise that's been lavished upon it. And even the parts that are not it, but involve dancing, said dancing always shines in a way few dancing movies can pull off in this day and age. And there is the delightful silkiness of the pictures, that have a warmth and glow and look the soft, lush way that velvet feels. If only the characters, action, dialogue and thematic resolution could keep up, it would still be every bit the masterpiece I remembered it being.

Paul (Greg Mottola, 2011)

2011-04-03T13:39:00.000-07:00

Astute audience members will more or less realize the trouble they've got into from the opening -- an ugly, terribly shot ode to Spielberg's E.T. After that there's a momentary spark of hope, as Paul at least proves itself to be the only movie about nerds I've seen that doesn't try to play off semi-malicious "haw haw, nerds" as "affectionate ribbing." The movie shows genuine fondness for the characters and their eccentric interests, rather than the usual have-it-both-ways that often comes off more as condescension than real endearment. Unfortunately, even this "high point" is made ugly by an awkward encounter with a non-American worker and jokes about Pegg and Frost's enthusiasm for aliens (the extraterrestrial kind) making him confused and uncomfortable. Ha ha? Soon the movie embraces all the most boring formulas of the buddy road movie, with titular character demonstrating an Amazing Superpower that nearly everyone should recognize will come in handy during the seemingly dire last act conflict.

Along the way the movie stops to take potshots at just about every easy target, Middle American stereotype one can think of -- from outwardly homophobic and violent rednecks (as opposed to the main characters, who are homophobic in the more polite, good-natured kind of way of us fine, upstanding liberals) to Bible-thumping "wacko" creationists to the usual boring jokes about incompetent government officials. And, unlike Michel Gondry's work in The Green Hornet, Mottola lacks either the skills or the interest to reign in Seth Rogen's occasionally insufferable riffing, leading the movie down long stretches of meandering, unfunny gags. Also there's the icky subplot involving a newly unburdened Christian falling for Simon Pegg's character, with all the man-showing-woman-the-ways-of-the-world baggage that goes with it. I don't know, while I didn't exactly have high hopes for this one, it did manage to let me down in almost every way imaginable. Even Sigourney Weaver is wasted in a thankless role of not funny bossy voice lady. And eventually the movie ends by moving from not-always-clever, but at least somewhat hidden references to a string of line-for-line cribbing that demonstrates a complete descent into creative bankruptcy.

Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995)

2011-04-02T23:02:00.001-07:00

There's something about the spectacle of hundreds of people in period clothing all running at each other that CGI still hasn't managed to capture. No amount of modeling, crowd-cloning, or crazy specific detailing seems capable of convincing my eyes that what I'm seeing isn't at least a little bit a put on. Which is mostly fine, except that what these scenes always seem to want is a gravity and power and verisimilitude that convinces people we are actually watching a bunch of dudes about to kill each other. They can't ever just give completely into the idea of it as a fantasy, and their desire to trick us makes the scenes even less powerful than they are. So, that is the benefit of Braveheart. It is, probably, the last movie to show huge groups of people with such a minimal amount of special effects (if any), that it really does look like huge swaths of men charging into one another. It makes the battle scenes believably dirty, violent and like there is something real at stake for the upstart Scotsmen fighting for FREEDOM.

Unfortunately, there's the whole rest of the movie. Having watched this now, Gibson's weirdo beliefs should've been apparent miles away. How did everyone else miss it back then? Gibson and his Scottish cohorts as bristling, masculine ideals of rugged, uncompromising manliness. The king's son as a flustered, gay child who deserves to have his lover thrown out the window and to be cuckolded by the sensitive, yet impassioned, sexually amazing and absolutely 100% not gay William Wallace. Not to mention not-so-subtle ideas that even the most prim, proper and upright of women cannot keep their legs closed for the testosterone-y, probably musky smelling, men of the earth. His strange gender attitudes, homophobia, xenophobia, unbridled emotion, it is all on display here for everyone to see. And it is, in its own insidious way, nearly as ugly as everything we know about the man now.

Monsters (Gareth Edwards, 2010)

2011-04-02T22:45:00.001-07:00

The only redeeming facet of this movie is that it occasionally has beautiful pictures of a river that remind of the Amazon in Aguirre, only shot on a DSLR. While it never approaches that film's most memorable moments, it does, at least, remind the viewer of just how awe-inspiringly beautiful the lush green jungle river can be. But those moments last perhaps 2 minutes in a 90 minute feature. The rest is a blanket of naively un-self-aware pandering to the converted mixed with yet another sticky representation of people of color as literal aliens. Why is there more than one movie like this? Wouldn't it only take one to convince pretty much anyone that this is actually a TERRIBLE IDEA? Like, no matter how sound your intentions are, this will always come off as condescending and just, like, unspeakably gross. But even if you manage to ignore that, the ham-fisted explications of the theme of aliens as metaphor for Latin-American workers work only as self-congratulation. There's nothing compelling about two of the most boring white people ever conceived uttering lines like, "I thought I'd be happy to be home, but now all I want to do is go back" and depicting America building a giant, Great Wall-like structure to keep the aliens out. Like, ha ha, get it? This is what crazy tea party America will do if you let it! But the aliens, they're actually really beautiful and peaceful and amazing if you get to know them. I don't know, there really isn't anything to say -- except, at least, that Gareth Edwards made a fairly handsome movie for however much the probably low budget was. Too bad about the writing, editing, acting, everything else.

Behind Enemy Lines (John Moore, 2001)

2011-03-30T09:09:00.001-07:00

Several near-brilliant, terrifyingly suspenseful action sequences are marred by rampant, incessant jingoism of the most uncomfortable order. The Serbian people are depicted as a nation of ruthless and untrustworthy murderers who delight in the slaughter of innocents. While I will admit my knowledge of all the things going on in Bosnia during the '80s and '90s is very slim, it's been my experience that no war is as cut-and-dry as the U.S. would like to pretend it is. I guess at this point in my life I'm much more interested in demystifying war and struggles between nations rather than continuing to mythologize our involvement in said things.

There's an interesting moment partway through the film, when a NATO admiral tells a US admiral something about the US being obsessed with getting their soldiers back, but what if getting this one man back costs thousands of lives later? This is, rather obviously, a real concern and something the movie would've done well to explore. The cavalier attitude of the U.S. in its involvement in foreign policy and peacekeeping is absolutely worth examining, but soon after this line is uttered the NATO admiral is made to look weak and the US admiral, played by Gene Hackman, to look self-sacrificing, strong, and heroic. And the idea of one man's life costing thousands is averted, as suddenly main character Owen Wilson also has vital information that can SAVE thousands of lives and the insidious Serbians have already completely violated the tenuous peace treaty anyway, so GO USA! USA! and save that dude no matter what the cost!

Still, as noted above, many of the action set pieces are occasionally astounding works of spatial relations and terror. I only wish the movie could've focused on them, rather than dragging the awkward politics and hammily-handled backroom politics into it. John Moore would later go on to do another, occasionally effective if weirdly racist, remake of The Flight of the Phoenix before making Max Payne, a movie that eschews any kind of political commentary for a purity of narrative that I think is a pretty excellent and underrated movie. Here's hoping for more like that and less like this from him in the future.

Red Riding Hood (Catherine Hardwicke, 2011)

2011-03-30T08:43:00.000-07:00

Walked into this most certainly wanting it to be Catherine Hardwicke's masterpiece -- the fullest expression of her love for teenage sexual awakening and all the sometimes messy, sometimes amazing, always pushed to the forefront, emotions that come along with it. One scene succeeds so greatly that I am willing to cut the rest of the movie, which manages to stuff itself to the gills with ideas, yet never quite completes or satisfactorily fleshes out any of them, a lot more slack than I probably otherwise would. But that one scene, or I guess sequence, is so charged with emotion and erotic tension that it makes me wonder if all the other teen movies about sex are directed by people who maybe never had sex when they were teenagers. Or, if they did, don't remember what it was actually like. But, unlike her previous Twilight, it approaches the idea of dangerous, bad boy teenage infatuation with more straightforward adoration, rather than the teeter-tottering ambivalence that made Twilight so surprising and unfairly maligned. Red Riding Hood's love for bad boys is more about the attractiveness of teenage infatuation, rather than curbing that infatuation with the knowledge that teen sexual obsession can also be weird and gross and unhealthy.

My biggest complaint is that the film's narrative structure holds back the expression of most of the ideas. The paranoia and fear-mongering of possible attack from an unknown assailant awkwardly evokes the condemnation of the Patriot Act (certainly something we can all agree with, but is handled rather poorly) and the amount of joy gained from certain mysteries about the identity of the wolf, and the fact that it could be any of the men in Amanda Seyfried's life isn't enough to make up for the fact that keeping the mystery going the entire film's length prevents many of the ideas from achieving any kind of maturation. Especially because the finale, while handled somewhat clumsily, introduces a brand new concept that is one of the most worthy of exploration, suggesting something sinister and incestuous about fatherly protectiveness over the burgeoning sexuality of teenage daughters. This slyly evoked metaphor is absolutely worthy of exploration, but by the time it comes up the mystery has been solved and the movie, therefore, feels it must end. A better movie would've been able to keep the mystery, but trim it down to the first half -- excising Gary Oldman completely would be a start, as his status as an outsider come in to straighten up the town and prepare it for attack undermines the idea of national paranoia in times of panic -- and spend the second half evolving the previous theories on teenage love and its strange, and often creepy, facets.

Paycheck (John Woo, 2003)

2011-03-28T12:10:00.001-07:00

I haven't seen any Hong Kong John Woo movies in years and years, but every time I see one of his American ones (I also recently watched Broken Arrow), I suspect that I won't like them. Maybe America really did kill everything that was exciting about him, but these movies are so crappy and ineptly constructed and, despite all their whirling movement and sometimes-intricate choreography, so weightless and inconsequential. This movie feels like amateur-hour, which, for such a heralded and longstanding action director, is pretty much baffling.

This part might not exactly be his fault, but sorta like Unknown it goes to great lengths to squander a fairly promising set-up. Both movies have the ability to use their mystery status, with a protagonist lost in a world he doesn't quite have a grasp on and trying to make sense of it while people are possibly trying to kill him, as a way to explore tension and suspense in a "is it real or am I crazy?" way, but both move too quickly into their respective plots and spend too much time on the least interesting aspects of their narratives.

Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright, 2007)

2011-03-27T20:01:00.000-07:00

An interesting mirror of Pegg and Wright's previous feature, Shaun of the Dead. That movie is more interesting to me, now, as it compares with Hot Fuzz than as a piece of its own. Both take similar comedy formulas, involving Pegg's growth and change over a two hour comedy away from outlandish working world extremes (listless slacker in Shaun, semi-fascistic workaholic in Hot Fuzz) and towards a happier, more psychologically healthy middle ground.

My preference for Hot Fuzz comes from two better-handled aspects that both share. While Shaun concerns itself with the city life of England, wrapping working-class life in invisibly-veiled metaphors for the walking dead and acting as though people who buy into working at their jobs and being adults are obnoxious douchebags (Peter Sarafinowicz more or less reprising his role on Spaced), Hot Fuzz treats its depiction of Pegg as a workaholic cop with a bit more interesting ambivalence. True, it doesn't shy away from his status as something of a fascist, seeing the rules as unbendable procedures that were not created by flawed human reasoning, but his ideas about these previous concretes soften without ever completely losing the dedication and ingenuity he brings to his job. Shaun, meanwhile, spends much of its energy on the titular character's status as a someone who lacks said ingenuity and uprightness, while never really suggesting that the characters were anything but absolultely correct about the previous opinion that supposedly "dead-end" jobs should be mocked and scorned.

The other aspect that Hot Fuzz handles better is the impetus for Pegg's change of character. In both films Pegg's character is dumped by his girlfriend, then dumped into a strange and discomforting new world and forced to adapt. But unlike Shaun the happy ending in Hot Fuzz does not arrive with rekindled love, nor with the other stereotype of finding a new girl who appreciates the new you. Instead Nicolas Angel gains a bromance-type friendship with Nick Frost, but also a camaraderie and working compromise with his other fellow police officers. I appreciate nearly any movie that can start off with heartbreak, but doesn't have to resort to romance as the only possible way to learn from that experience.

Also the satire of weirdo upper-class ideas of elaborately manicured neighborhoods and icy perfection is much more hilarious than the artsy classism of the aforementioned working-class snobbery Shaun evinces.

Following (Christopher Nolan, 1998)

2011-03-27T17:08:00.001-07:00

An early indication of Nolan's greater interest in cinematic sleight-of-hand than anything resembling human interest. Begins with an actually pretty sublime premise: an out of work writer begins stalking random people he sees, getting a vicarious thrill out of following them and attempting to piece together the world that is their life. It's a premise with many thematic possibilities: obsession, voyeurism, detachment, the alienation of large cities, the tendency among people to, in a way, think of the other people on subways and in crowds, standing in lines at the store, as a kind of window dressing for the movie of their own life. It could go into the meta aspect that film as a medium has opened us up to thinking of our own lives as a kind of movie, and to regard who are the major players and who are simply extras -- then take that notion and turn it on its head a little bit. Explore that kind of narcissism. I saw Following once before (it was released on video with a big new label to capitalize on Memento's popularity), but when I read the description on Instant Watch I was shocked that I couldn't remember anything about the movie -- and that Nolan had come up with such a ripe concept.

The reason I couldn't remember is that Nolan all but abandons the concept as quickly as possible. The film opens with the main character telling his story to an unnamed other character and the actual titular "following" only takes up perhaps the first 7 minutes of a feature that runs a little over an hour. After that the main characters begin some other, more blatant forms of voyeurism (breaking into people's houses to gaze at their things -- and also steal stuff). Then it attempts to be a kind of film noir pseudo-parody, resting a hapless character as the mercy of larger machinations that unfold into a characteristic Nolan twist ending. But, while it uses these genre types knowingly, and with a slight wink, it really doesn't offer any explication of them and their relevance to our larger world, or even the world of film. They exist only to make cineastes feel smart for catching his references, and Nolan look smart for so slyly referencing them. Worse, neither the beginning following sequences, the house-breaking sequences, or anything else, really, has a feeling of genuine tension. Its low budget is obviously no excuse, as the film actually does the opposite of many low budget features, relying far too much on a diet of facial close-ups -- refusing to show us the space we're supposed to be existing in and, therefore, mostly denying its reality. So if we must exist in a fantasy of his concoction, shouldn't we then at least enjoy being in that fantasy? The amount that this can be enjoyed depends solely on how charmed one still is by time narrative jumps, by how much seeing something deliberately incongruous makes you think "Ah! I wonder how he got beat up/why he has a new haircut/why he's wearing a suit!" and how much satisfaction you gain from that wondering. For me, it is, as I have mentioned and, likely, as I will mention, practically nil.

Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009)

2011-03-23T17:59:00.000-07:00

Moon is one hour of a pretty decent, not bad movie, and half an hour of good at all movie. That it is split up into a convenient division between the two parts is nice (the first half hour is not good, the rest is sometimes pretty decent), but it also serves to make it feel as though the movie has not even started until it's almost a third of the way over. It is, in fact, deliberately misleading -- an attempt to trick the audience into thinking it is watching one movie, only to switch to a completely different movie at that half hour mark. It begins as a movie about isolation and paranoia in a harsh, unfeeling area of desolation, ala The Thing and probably a thousand other movies (Moon is also hampered by its need to reference other films, and to make those references as immediately apparent as possible), but by the second half has shifted to an actually sometimes interesting movie about the nature of identity, and the way in which habits transcend consciousness. Which is not to say that explorations of isolation and paranoia are not interesting, just that the movie does not handle them in a very interesting way. Perhaps Jones was too excited to get to the "real" part of the movie.

Sam Rockwell is as good as advertised, despite being hampered by the fact that Jones is not entirely sure how to shoot an actor talking to himself all that confidently. Too often the movie relies on easy back and forth close-ups, which is fine to emphasize their separateness and other ideas, but eventually distracts from the emotional development of the characters, as the fact that it's one guy playing both parts is constantly being reminded to the audience. This combines with the score's tendency to be like the wretched lovechild of John Williams and James Horner to rob nearly every scene that Rockwell plays brilliantly of any emotional weight it would've had.

Man, I ended up being a lot less nice to this movie than I meant to. It's really not that bad. If it weren't for Source Code's awful trailer, I'd be interested in what Jones has to offer in the future, once his talents are more matured.

Unknown (Jaume Collet-Serra, 2011)

2011-03-23T17:33:00.001-07:00

It seems almost too easy to compare this to Taken, given the combination of action movie + Liam Neeson + American dude in exotic European locale, and because I never shy away from doing the easy thing, that's what I'm going to do too. Taken, as it turns out, is one of my favorite action films of the new century. Neeson brings an inspired amount of gravity and seriousness to the role, without falling into a joyless and overbearing BIGNESS ala Christian Bale in Terminator: Salvation. He has a sort of natural, empathy-invoking charisma that, when mixed with Luc Besson's stripped down and streamlined script, works something close to wonderfully better than it has any right to.

Unknown is not that movie. While many of the action scenes are paced and put together well enough (once again, European filmmakers take American staples and re-invigorate them long after America has forgotten how to use them properly), the movie suffers from a burdensome, overplotted script that thinks the best way to keep action fans entertained is to also throw a fairly useless mystery into the mix. My disdain for mysteries may not be well-documented, but I am about to begin documenting it. Mysteries are boring. And, lately, they are an excuse used by entertainers in order not to say anything interesting. Well, that's probably not the real reason. The real reason is that everyone actually seems to like mysteries. They like the act of trying to figure out if they can spot the twist before the movie gives it to them. They like trying to guess whodunit. Well, I don't. The fact of the matter is that the average whodunit, it really doesn't matter whodunit. If it can be any number of red herrings, then it is thematically inconsequential which one it is. So I would much rather a filmmaker use what time he has to offer me to keep me thinking in a much less superficial way than to ask, "What's the answer to this riddle?" In Unknown, the answer is not easy to guess, mostly because there are no clues and it comes so far out of left field that, while it technically makes sense, is not really even a game between the viewer and the writer anymore. It's more like a magician's "ah-ha!" moment. Fair enough. It could be worse.

But in the mean time, it has wasted a bunch of great promise and screen time that could've been better spent with more action and/or suspense sequences. There's a moment in which Neeson is walking down a long corridor in a Metro station and a man may or may not be following him. The tension generated in this scene is so immaculate and fist-clenchingly good that it made me think "This is what The American should've felt like." But, of course, because the movie is so concerned with its mystery and plot, it turns out the guy totally is following him, because there isn't enough time to "waste" on actual paranoia. A shame, because I still think The American is a good idea. And this could've been a Total Recall meets The American type moment, except for how little interest the movie has in exploring either of those ideas.

Cure (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997)

2011-03-23T13:14:00.000-07:00

A haunting examination of repression, passive-aggressiveness and the police procedural genre, Cure is, for the most part, brilliantly conceived and executed in a way that makes my own meager ideas filled with envy. The plot involves the potential of hypnosis, and the idea that within everyone (or, at least, all Japanese people) there is a repressed, hungry desire to lash out at the people they feel closest to. That Japan's extreme emphasis on politeness and the shamefulness of extravagant expressions of emotion creates a building resentment that can unleash itself at any time -- and the only way to be free of it is to let all that is inside be on the outside. The film also equates the methodical actions of the, uh, killer hypnotist with the film's protagonist, a police detective, and then again with a doctor attempting to investigate symptoms. In this way the film plays on ideas of power relationships, between people who ask questions and people who must answer them, regardless of their desire not to. The film's "villain" is so frightening partly because of the way he confounds would-be investigators, displaying an emptiness that makes him impervious to being known by others. The film suggests that telling other people things gives them a power over you, but that not being able to tell people things is somehow equally frightening. Perhaps it's suggesting not so much that telling people things is bad, but that our distrust of it, and the way we have come to shape it as something that gives them power and should be avoided, is the real problem. That open dialogue is not here, and the fact that it isn't is something to be feared.

Stylistically, the film also goes to great lengths to prove to the viewer that hypnosis exists and it does so by often lulling the viewer into a state of hypnosis while watching the movie. This, I think, is what sets the film apart from almost any other that I can think of. It proves its assertions within the film so perfectly, that often viewers probably don't even realize what's being done to them.

A small thing to note, and I'm not quite sure how to feel. I always thought that, for such an ambiguous movie, the ending was too neat. That it set things up in a much too A-B-C manner. Now, having recently watched and discussed this movie for my film class, I'm not so sure that's the case. I seemed to be the only person in the class that came to the conclusion I did about what was happening at the end. Maybe I'm actually going crazy and the ending I've seen is not at all what the movie is supposed to be saying? Anyone who has seen it and would like to chime in, please do so.

The Last Circus (Alex de la Iglesia, 2010)

2011-03-21T11:15:00.001-07:00

When I walked out of this I told the first person I talked to that it made me want to cry and throw up at the same time, but in a good way. The unexpected emotional gut punch of the film floored me. I could barely speak. While the effort towards macabre jokes actually does some work to undermine the film's powers and strengths, it's possible that going so far out on a limb as to not be able to recognize what works and what doesn't is part of what gave de la Iglesia the ability to make such a terrifying piece of filmmaking in the first place.

The film is, above all, rooted in its place as being part of the end of the Franco era in Spain. Admittedly, this is an era I don't know much about, other than what everyone knows: socialists and anarchists fought the fascists in the '30s and lost, Franco rules the country after that for something like 40 years. But something about the deconstruction/rabid demolition of fantasy taking place in this movie is obviously strongly influenced by the feelings de la Iglesia must've felt growing up around this time. In some ways, this movie is the perfect antidote to the terrible, hideous Pan's Labyrinth, which also involves both fantasy and fascism, but with a much more ickily unearned hopefulness, suggesting that in times of terrible atrocity the only option we have is to escape into fantasy. This completely dismantles that notion, using a seemingly sweet stereotypical movie dork guy, who falls in love with a beautiful woman and must find a way to woo her away from her terrible, abusive boyfriend as the starting point for a movie that gets increasingly more horrific and frightening, culminating in a fairly audacious setpiece reminiscent of Hitchcock's North by Northwest finale, though more effective (especially if, like me, you happen to be afraid of heights). Alex de la Iglesia suggests the exact opposite of Guillermo del Toro's seriously terrible "fairy tale for adults" -- that the only way to truly survive in horrific conditions is to look without flinching and not let yourself be lost in a fantasy.

Mutant Girls Squad (Noboru Iguchi, Yoshihiro Nishimura & Tak Sakaguchi, 2010)

2011-03-21T10:18:00.000-07:00

I am not exaggerating when I say that this is, almost without doubt, the worst movie I have ever seen. Ineptly constructed, built on the theory that violence and wackiness are inherently hilarious, self-consciously nonsensical and immensely sleazy, there is literally nothing to ever recommend about this movie. If someone I knew saw it and told me they liked it I would probably stop talking to them forever. I don't want to know the kind of people who like this movie. Towards the end I could feel myself, partially inebriated and drowsy due to the fact that it was a midnight show, walking some line between being able to stay awake and falling asleep. With a little bit of effort, my body could've gone either way, but I actually chose to go to sleep as a way to just be away from this awful movie for a little bit. If I hadn't been there with friends I would've walked out after the first ten minutes, pretty convinced I'd made the right choice. And it would've been! It was completely without redeeming content. Without hyperbole, I did not laugh once. Though when I say worst, I mean mostly from a construction standpoint. It is not the worst in that watching it made me feel the dirtiest or most angry or that its being embraced felt like some weird omen of how lost in the dregs our society is, though there are inklings of that in parts. Overall, it is not so hideous and despicable that I am filled with self-righteous fury over its existence. It's close, but it does not beat out things like Piranha 3D or Punisher: War Zone or Enter the Void for ugly, hateful movies I've seen lately. But it is far worse made and more hideous to even look at than any of those movies.

The Man Next Door (Mariano Cohn & Gaston Duprat, 2009)

2011-03-21T09:59:00.000-07:00

Wastes a few neat shots, including one with mirrors that's pretty excellent, and a house that is a ridiculously great feat of interior design, with an extremely on the nose "satire" of how rich people are jerks. An attempt to do one of those "pull the rug out" movies, in which the person you think you identify with is not the person and it turns out the other guy who was maybe scary and intimidating and boorish and a jerk at least has his heart in the right place and is a much less awful person when push comes to shove. There really isn't much to say about the movie beyond that, as the machinations it's going for are so apparent from the first few scenes that there's no surprise. I would've been just as happy and satisfied to say, "Oh, I see where this is going" and left half an hour into it.

Fresh (Boaz Yakin, 1994)

2011-03-20T21:14:00.000-07:00

Fresh seems like an easy movie to dislike. It is, in fact, so easy that I would have trouble finding fault with a person who didn't like it. For one, it is written and directed by Boaz Yakin, a person who has done nothing worth note since and did almost nothing worth note before it. For another, it straddles a strange line between the lower-class America social observation of something like The Wire (clearly somewhat influenced by this movie) and a weirdo Hollywood fantasy about "The Hood." Where the fantasy element comes in is its plot and structure: young chess whiz is just trying to get by in a poor neighborhood until a horrific tragedy sparks him to take revenge; manipulates gangster thugs and the police like chess opponents.

But what differentiates it is actually part of what makes it sound awful on paper. The chess metaphor, while somewhat hackneyed and on the nose, actually functions as a higher symbol of the quote-unquote civilized life Fresh wants to escape to. And through this symbol the film implies that both worlds operate on similar levels of ruthlessness and while Fresh may have succeeded in escaping, the cost required of him to escape -- sacrificing his childhood, figuratively, and the life of a friend literally -- and the not-so-different world he is escaping raise questions about whether everything he did was worth it. The ending, which I won't discuss in much detail, is what finally separates the film from being a classic underdog formula. It somehow hits home the idea that the father figure Fresh looks up to is more deserving than he actually appeared of his isolated status and the implication early on that Fresh is not supposed to be hanging out with him. Even though the father, played by Samuel L. Jackson before he'd developed into SAMUEL L. JACKSON, makes attempts to separate himself from the drugs and gang-related affairs of their neighborhood, it's clear he is operating on a similar level of cutthroat competition and that it is only through his encouragement that Fresh becomes the kind of person that can do what he eventually ends up doing. So when we get to the end, the victory is far less sweet and far more bitter than it appears it will be. This, I guess, is what wins the movie over for me, even if I can understand how some might be put off by its occasional devolvement into what Armond White so cleverly termed "poverty porn."

Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004)

2011-03-20T17:09:00.000-07:00

The most notable thing about Shaun of the Dead may be its modesty. I say this not as a slight against the movie -- to imply that modesty is all it has going for it -- but to say that in an era when genre filmmaking is at, most likely, its most hyperbolic, overextended, high-concept peak, it's gratifying and relieving to watch an unassuming horror/comedy zombie movie in which almost nothing happens.

The plot is essentially a rehash of Wright and Pegg's previous work on the TV show Spaced, in which Pegg is a loutish slacker trapped in adolescence who is eventually motivated to be a more practical approximation of an adult. Unlike the majority of my colleagues, I find Wright's stylistic flourishes towards combining this idea with horror movie tropes, notably the mirroring long-take walks to the store and back only mildly diverting. For me, the jokes about their obliviousness to the outside world's disaster, and the larger implication of our culture's retreat into an awareness-nullifying pop culture womb, go on far too long. Each one is individually okay enough, and the slight knife in the ribs to its own audience is well-appreciated, but it eventually adds up to a bit that is far too drawn out.

More successful is the eventual idea that while we may rise to adversity as it comes, we have cultivated in ourselves a natural inclination towards inaction rather than action. That we take tragedy and untimely circumstance and find a way to weave it back into our daily lives in a way that it no longer stands out or impresses us. This actually unexpectedly predicts many of the ideas Romero would address in Land of the Dead a year later, and is a cynical, but not dishonest, evaluation of the cultural landscape of 2004. Without mentioning it or even alluding to it, Shaun of the Dead seems like the flipside of Spider-Man 2's assumptions about the world post-9/11. It is mostly due to my own predilections that I find Spider-Man 2's ideas more compelling and, I hope, more accurate, but I suspect the truth is sometimes closer to Shaun's side.

Avant Garde Shorts Collection (2011)

2011-03-17T17:30:00.001-07:00

The rest of the shorts I saw at the Film Festival are undeserving of their own entries, so irritatingly self-indulgent and mind-numbing were they.

Long Shadows (Josh Bonnett, 2009)
Mamori (Karl Lemieux, 2010)

These are indistinguishable in my memory almost a month after having seen them both back to back. Apparently I liked Mamori even less than Long Shadows, though I have no idea what prompted that small decision. Both are exercises in repetition of non-narrative black and white images with obnoxious musical scoring. Maybe I liked Mamori less because I seem to remember its soundtrack being played by a real, thoroughly hissy, 45 plugged into the speaker system. Either way, both were obnoxiously abrasive and seemed to serve no thematic or aesthetic purpose beyond annoyance of the audience.

April Snow (Lewis Klahr, 2010)

After 25 minutes of irritation, this almost seemed a promising respite. Opens to the delightful refrains of The Shangri-Las' "Out in the Street" -- a song so girl poppily perfect I was ready to hail this movie as a masterpiece just for having it (and following such languid torture exercises). Unfortunately, the sheen of pop luster wears off almost immediately, as the film fills itself with stop motion cut outs of mid-century kitsch and banal comments on the phoniness of this era. Also the song is only 2m49s and the video is 10 minutes, moving on to other stuff that was not nearly as enjoyable (or memorable, apparently)

Cry When It Happens (Laida Lertxundi, 2010)

Exactly what I was talking about in my earlier review of Me Broni Ba. A movie so bereft of aesthetic pleasure and thematic cohesion that it rests on its self-indulgent laurels of throwback '70s photography and inaccessibility. So mind-numbing I ended up skipping the movie I'd already paid to see afterwards, because it actually made me feel I needed a break from being in the cinema -- perhaps the only time I'd felt that way in my entire life. Thanks to you, Laida Lertxundi, I may never know if Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow is an awesome movie. THANKS A LOT, JERK.

Atlantiques (Mati Diop, 2010)

2011-03-17T17:14:00.001-07:00

Less diluted by its existence as an "avant garde" piece than by its low production values. A group of black men sit around a camp fire at night, mourning the unlucky fate of having to choose between emigrating to Europe to look for work, or staying in Senegal where work is scarce. The stylistic choice emphasizes the actors' dark skin, as they seem to almost barely exist in the small, flickering fire light. The only problem is its status as being shot on exceptionally cheap digital, giving the night scene an ugly, pixelated and unreal quality. If the same scenes had been shot on film (or, at least, HD video) the actors would've blended more seamlessly into the background, enhancing the power of the commentary of the African plight as something invisible and unspoken among the Western (as represented by cinema) world. It's actually a pretty brilliant visual metaphor only marred by the lack of visual quality -- strange, since the reported budget was 30k Euros. What'd he spend it on?

Me Broni Ba (Akosua Adoma Owusu, 2009)

2011-03-17T17:05:00.000-07:00

Part documentary, part non-narrative pseudo-avant garde bit of filmmaking about pressures put on African women about their hair. The problem I've found with most avant garde filmmaking I've seen is that it always feels lazy. Like the thing many of these so-called avant garde filmmakers find most compelling about it is the "freedom" from the constrictions of typical plot and narrative. But in my eyes it seems that most of what this freedom allows for is indulgence and half-formed or barely there ideas, hiding under a blanket of obtuseness and detachment in order to prevent criticism. Me Broni Ba appears to have some interesting ideas about social pressures of aesthetics as they relate to women of color (especially in Africa, obviously), but these ideas are presented in such an oblique, convoluted package as to become nearly useless due to their desire to remain "artful" and inaccessible. Occasionally offers some compelling images, and I would never exactly try to talk someone out of seeing it -- it's just disappointing given what it feels as though it could've been.

My Tehran For Sale (Granaz Moussavi, 2009)

2011-03-16T23:18:00.000-07:00

Is it okay to like a movie more for the conditions and context in which it was made than for the movie itself? I open with this question because I'm not actually sure of the answer. Ideally, a movie's success or failure should be judged based on its attributes as a film, with the context and conditions playing a strong role in supporting this outcome. As it is, there is so much about My Tehran For Sale that pushes negative buttons in me as a filmgoer that I am not at all convinced of its merits as a piece of cinema. It flashes forward and backward in time as a way to temper all the movie's joyous moments with a hint of "but soon it will all go terribly wrong... bet you're wondering how, right?" This is one of my largest narrative pet peeves, as it comes off as nothing but the laziest way to foreshadow some impending doom. Worse, these moments are occasionally completely baffling -- leading to an ending in which I only understood what had happened after I pieced it together on my way home. And I don't mean this in a thematic, rolling over of ideas and suppositions, or even that the movie ends on a kind of cliffhanger, simply that the plotting was so poorly executed that I had to put much of the fragmented pieces together myself. To add to this, many of the emotionally revelatory moments are more like the audience being told how to feel than something that wells up naturally from the characters. This lack of emotional resonance and clarity is surprising, considering Moussavi is apparently one of Iran's most well-regarded poets. Much of the metaphorical and poetical devices of the film are the least successful parts. And, for a movie that is such a relentless downer, it's actually the happy moments that feel the most genuine.

But after all that, I am still goint to hesitantly suggest that the ideas this movie posits are ones that bear telling. Filmed in secret and completely illegal, it is the least veiled critique of the Iranian government I've seen. In many ways it feels like a check list of ways the government's oppression hurts the people, from police crackdowns on parties and inter-sex mingling to a complete dearth of options for those unfortunate enough to be infected with sexually-transmitted diseases to suppression of underground artistic expressions to to to... But many of these things, especially the frightening way STDs can be spread without anyone ever knowing it (one of the characters discovers it only because they're trying to get a Visa to be married and immigrate out of the country) and the lack of sex-related health care once it is discovered. So, I don't know, each of these moments would seem very rote, preachy and clumsily handled in an American movie. But because it was expressing these things in a place in which they are far less talked about, it seemed somehow fresh and possibly important? I don't know, the act of writing this may have talked me out of these feelings and maybe even made me feel that I am engaging in my own form of exoticism. To be somehow surprised that many of these problems that we still don't quite know how to handle in America would exist and be even more problematic in somewhere like Iran. Yeah, I don't know, maybe the movie's not even so good as to kinda recommend it.

Flamenco, Flamenco (Carlos Suara, 2010)

2011-03-16T13:13:00.000-07:00

As someone who has a love of dance movies and a general dislike for the plot elements of most dance movies, I am not ashamed to admit I was more excited for Flamenco, Flamenco than possibly any other film at the festival. It was, as these things tend to happen sometimes, by far the biggest disappointment. The concept is a series of flamenco performances introduced without narrative pretense or introduction, strung together into 90 minutes of performance bliss. As concepts go, it's pretty fantastic. I have long been a proponent of the idea of kinetic cinematic pleasure for its own sake, stripped of ideologies so that it may revel in beautiful motion. Unfortunately, in the process of stripping down the narrative into almost nothing, the director has also stripped away the cinema. Each performance looks as though it was shot in one take, which would be fine if they did so with an elaborately conceived filmic way to present it in mind. They did not. The camera is reduced to a useless proxy of a theatre audience member, trapped in a stilted, lethargic medium shot with occasional cuts from dancers to the musical performers often seated around them. And, while I would never call myself a musical expert, these cuts seem to belong to a rhythm I cannot in any way comprehend. Many of the best dances are undone by the lack of build-up in their execution -- it seems that just as the energy is beginning to flow and we're about to be taken somewhere awesome and inspiring the movie cuts to a singer or band player, destroying whatever momentum was being developed.

I gather that most of these performers are famous in their native Spain, so the director was attempting to pay them proper tribute and not focus solely on the dancers. But compelling cinema is not about making sure everyone feels like they got enough camera time. An easy way to fix this problem would've been to introduce the band at the beginning of the sequence, with whatever kind of introductory editing and camera movement the director felt worked best, then progress from there into the dancing. This could've been a great way to showcase the fact of dance as a natural, visual expression of music. I mean, after all, we still get to hear the songs the entire dance number. Is listening to music not the best way to appreciate it? At any rate, the dullness of the movement and editing lulled me almost to sleep periodically throughout this, and I exited as quickly as possible when it was finally over.

There were a few highlights, though, including one dance number with a group of women shrouded in sheer black veils that stretched to the floor. It had a beautiful, funereal element that mingled with the ecstatic dancing to create something that was both harrowing and joyous at the same time. Too bad that even this scene the director tries to ruin with static camerawork and baffling editing choices.

The Housemaid (Sang-Soo Im, 2010)

2011-02-26T10:27:00.001-08:00

A gorgeous house is more or less the only reason to watch this movie, especially the crazy and beautiful chandelier. Well, it's not a reason to watch the movie, but it is a thing to enjoy if you somehow find yourself having to watch it. And despite the production team's obvious adoration for beautiful aesthetic, it's just another dull hodgepodge of a poor, naive, innocent, unadulterated, sweet, childlike, etc. etc. girl being manipulated into the Machiavellian machinations of the twisted, evil, greedy, self-involved, cruel, heartless, etc. etc. rich upper classes. Other than Yeo-Jong Yun as a self-loathing servant the characters and performances are all dully one-note. And the "erotic" part of this supposedly erotic thriller is mostly comical, featuring silly camera placement that feels completely abnormal and Jung-Jae Lee as the male lead exclaiming some weird things you're unlikely to even hear a guy shouting in your average porno flick. The thrills don't add up to much, either, unless you get your jollies watching a helpless girl being slowly trapped into a situation you know she will never escape from (maybe Lars Von Trier is a fan). The ending, too, is a confused mess, seemingly poking fun at the naivete and uselessness of the very character the film spent its time trying to get us to root for.

Uncle Boonmee

2011-02-26T09:24:00.001-08:00

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)
A Letter To Uncle Boonmee (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2009)

While this is neither the first, last, nor probably the best or the worst example of this idea, it is AN example, and so I am going to use this film to talk about a broader aspect of filmmaking. It is true that Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives occasionally moves at a pace that a snail would laugh at. But what it accomplishes in this slowness is the reclamation, or, at least, reinvigoration, of editing. At one point a cut in a film was a surprise. Eventually, it became the norm, and so now there is a heavy expectation to cut. The audience may find itself bored if there aren't enough cuts. What Uncle Boonmee does is take the idea that the audience can be bored by not enough cutting and use it against itself, making the audience look at a still frame for so long that the viewer's eyes become so accustomed to looking at it that they might begin to think the movie may never cut again. The benefit of this is that when the cut does happen (which is usually not long after, at least to me, I began to feel that feeling), suddenly editing is surprising again and the juxtaposition of images becomes even more pronounced and more affecting. No longer is he simply telling a story through a series of different pictures, but he is actively inviting us to contemplate how the previous picture and the one you're seeing now work together (as well as conflict) with each other. There are very few cuts that I remember specfically in films, but a couple of them are in Uncle Boonmee.

As to the rest, and the reason I put A Letter to Uncle Boonmee as part of the same review, is that I think that short film helps clarify much of what is difficult, at first, to comprehend in the feature film. There are implications of class tensions, and of Thailand's battle against communists during the '70s, and the slaughter that many governmental soldiers carried out. But all these things are implied rather than stated, and much of the viewer's work comes in piecing these hints together to form a coherent vision of familial separation and anxiety and loss. Of the otherness that can sometimes stem between adults and their children as those children also become adults. The divide between generational politics and ideas and the abuse that can stem from failing to recognize the humanity of others. I have not yet seen his other features, but I intend to soon. There is more to write, but I'm not quite sure how to put it in words and I fear that the longer I put off writing this the less satisfied I'll be with the results. It is, so far, my clear winner for the Portland International Film Festival and the best movie I've seen in theatres in the last two years.

The Double Hour (Giuseppe Capotondi, 2009)

2011-02-25T12:34:00.000-08:00

Apologies if my last few (and next few) reviews don't seem up to their already low standards of quality. I've seen a lot of bad movies at the Portland International Film Festival and I'm trying to plow through them as quickly as possible to get on to the good stuff (also I'm blocked on my totally rave review of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which looks like it's gonna be the far away winner unless Alex de la Iglesia's new movie blows me away tomorrow (a possibility, de la Iglesia is awesome!)). Promise they'll get better once I start writing about stuff I like again.

One might call director Giuseppe Capotondi generous, in a way. Instead of one bad movie he decided to give us two, loosely connected by a mid-section twist that works in the sense that it would be impossible to predict, but doesn't in that the only reason it is impossible is because it makes almost no sense. Given the buzzing conversation of patrons as I walked out (and the fact that the festival arranged for an extra screening, because the movie was proving so popular), it seems that this kind of mystery-weaving is what people want these days. The forsaking of ideas for the minute pleasure of confounding us. It's a neat trick -- a sort of magician's distraction -- showing people two things that don't go together, but feel as though they should, and letting people use that as a means for discussion, causing them to ignore the bigger issues of why the director even asked us to watch it in the first place. It even goes to the effort to throw in a last-minute reference the way Inception does, inviting the viewer to wonder what is real and what is not real as they throw their leftover popcorn and soda in the trash can.

I don't know, to me it's a thriller without any thrills (mostly lame jump scares, and zero scenes with a hint of built up tension), a romance without much chemistry, and features a main character who early on has sex with a woman and then basically tells her to get the fuck out and the movie somehow appears to be on his side. He's sad and dark and conflicted, so it's sorta okay that he treats some poor lady like a prostitute he didn't have to pay. Nah, not buying it. The movie, the actor, the character, the gimmick, none of it.

The Six Dollar Fifty Man (Mark Albiston & Louis Sutherland, 2009)

2011-02-25T11:57:00.000-08:00

Kudos, at least, for packing an awful 90 minute formula of the bullied school kid overcoming obstacles to get the girl and win his classmates' respect into a 15 minute movie. I don't have much positive to say besides applauding its brevity. Nor much to say at all, really. It's sappy, rote and filled with a dim kind of nostalgia for the simplicity of youth. Exactly the kind of short film I would expect to be nominated for an Oscar (and it was).

Little Children, Big Words (Lisa James-Larsson, 2010)

2011-02-25T11:49:00.001-08:00

The only of the bad children's shorts that I had more execution problems with than ideological problems. The idea, that it's important to teach children about language and what words mean, even when doing so is uncomfortable and fraught with pitfalls, is something that isn't brought up enough in works intended for children.

Unfortunately the film mishandles the premise with melodramatic close-ups, the main character's performance, filled with aching, glassy-eyed remembrance of some past traumatic event, and the strangely fantastical and aura-like lighting that rob the idea of its weight, rather than infusing it. It's a textbook case of a director not trusting the material to speak for itself, so she feels the need to hit the audience hard over the head with it. Makes me appreciate even the relative subtlety and poignance Pixar, despite their many flaws, are capable of bestowing children's films.

The Wonder Hospital (Beomsik Shimbe Shim, 2010)

2011-02-24T09:06:00.001-08:00

After watching Cyriak's experiments in turning the everyday into something frightening and nightmarish, this comes across pretty dull and flat-footed. Mirrors the previous short, Flawed, in that it is possibly for children and about perceptions of attractiveness and the terror of cosmetic surgery. Though not only cosmetic surgery, but hospitals in general. Which draws a very fine line when crafting entertainment for children, raising some chicken/egg questions with regard to its depiction of hospitals as a terrifying and monstrous world. Like, at what point are we no longer reflecting children's views, but instead supplanting them and making them afraid of an entity that, for very many practical reasons, we should be encouraging them under all circumstances NOT to be afraid of. As a child I was never afraid of hospitals, because I never thought that I should be. In fact, I was always weirdly jealous of children who got to spend the night in a hospital for various ailments (usually tonsils being removed). To me it seemed adventurous, like when we'd go traveling and get to stay in a hotel. A new place! Had I seen this short I might've thought otherwise.

But to an adult none of the imagery is as frightening or mind-boggling as it seems to think it is. Only a pair of gloves flapping in the wind of a small desk fan, blowing empty fingers across a clacking typewriter seem like the kind of strange and imaginative imagery the entire movie seems to be trying very hard for. And even it is emphasized for so long that it ceases to be weird and becomes just another thing in the large number of things that sit there and don't do anything. There's never a feeling of tension that something bad might actually happen to the child, as everything is so outlandish and feels more like decoration than something existing in an unreal world, that it's a bit like a dull museum of oddities. Atonal soundtrack does much to increase this feeling of bored annoyance.

Flawed (Andrea Dorfman, 2010)

2011-02-23T17:54:00.001-08:00

If Panahi can consistently find the perfect balance of emotional thrust to be affecting without being cloying, then Andrea Dorfman's Flawed would be a sort of antithesis to that, coming off as a pandering, endlessly didactic film that must be aimed at children, as it has absolutely no value to any reasonably well-thinking adult. But, like the worst of children's literature, it suffers from a lack of self-awareness about the message it purports to be teaching. It suggests the old platitude that we should accept people for who they are and not judge them based on superficial looks, but it does so by relating the story of a woman who ends up in a relationship with a plastic surgeon. I suppose because it is told from the woman's point of view (and narrated by the director, implying an autobiographical quality to the film) it somehow justifies that her opinion on the matter is the one that is depicted and the film achieves its happy ending when she has convinced her surgeon boyfriend to see things from her perspective, yet it comes off as narcissistic and braggy. What about his opinion? What about encouraging children not only to look deeper than the surface, but also to have healthy and meaningful conversations with the people around them rather than resorting to manipulation and celebrating "winning" the argument. She never once asks why he became a plastic surgeon, only telling him why she resents them and our superficial culture. She also somewhat suggests that people with things that make them different should be okay with martyring themselves to ridicule and emotional suffering for the greater good of eventually convincing everyone it's okay to be different.

As a person who generally feels that cosmetic surgery is a bad way to stem the tide of superficial prejudice, this film somehow made me walk out being more okay with it than I was walking in. It convinced me that maybe, if I sounded like her, I might be the one who was wrong.

The Accordion (Jafar Panahi, 2009)

2011-02-23T17:31:00.001-08:00

Am I allowed to use "sentimental" as a positive description? I don't even know if sentiment can be considered a positive thing in this day and age, but I am about to. Based on the two Panahi movies I've seen, Offside and now this short by him, I would definitely say he at least leans towards the sentimental side. Perhaps I'm just so unaccustomed to this level of sweet, honest caring for humanity that it strikes me as sentiment. Either way, I cannot say enough good things about both of these movies. The only thing keeping me from rating The Accordion even higher is that it is a short, albeit one that somehow almost made me cry in almost 9 minutes. But no short, no matter how good, can quite grab me the way a feature can. I need time to let myself breathe into a movie, to get a feeling for what it's trying to do while it takes me wherever it's going. But the 9 minutes of this movie bodes extremely well for the feature film Panahi was making that goes along with it, assuming he is ever released from prison and allowed to make it. Now I don't know if I can ever watch this again, actually. At least, not until he's released.

The film, as it is, succinctly addresses ideas of forgiveness and solidarity in the face of adversity. It is a moving portrait, powerful not because of ideas it tackles (which would fit just as easily in an after-school special), but in Panahi's patience in handling them. The pacing, in particular, uses a soft and quiet kind of reflection to emphasize the emotions without thrusting them upon the viewer. It's a delicate balance when it comes to dealing with emotional material, and one Panahi (again, based on the small amount of his work I've seen) may be better at handling than any living director I'm familiar with. As a small aside, and something absolutely worthy of note, is his continuing interest in female androgyny in Iran. It's a much smaller aspect of the whole than in Offside, but is a less explored facet than other female rights issues and yet another reason to wish for his speedy release. I wish I hadn't waited until he was in prison to start caring about his work.

Incident By A Bank (Ruben Ostlund, 2009)

2011-02-23T14:34:00.000-08:00

Since the Portland International Film Festival started I've managed to catch two separate programs of short films, totaling 13 small movies. Of those I only liked one of them. This was not it, though I would hesitantly call it the second best, mostly due to conception and execution. It's a ten-minute, single-take view of an attempted bank robbery from what would be someone's balcony or maybe second-story window. The point-of-view gives a nice feeling of voyeurism, as it pans and tilts and occasionally slowly zooms into the action. Even though the zoom is by far the least natural of camera movements, here it comes as close as possible to replicating the way our eyes focus on faraway objects, ignoring things in our peripheral vision.

And the film begins well enough, introducing us to two characters who will become, if there is such a thing in this movie, the protagonists. One of them thinks some guys pulling up on a moped intend to rob the bank. What follows is an attempt to examine the strange surreality of witnessing an event we've seen countless times in movies actually happening. What actually follows is a bit of a muddled mess, which often feels more like a cinematic version of those Dumb Criminal stories that were all over the internet 10 years ago than any real attempt at asking why we experience such strange occurrences with an odd sense of detachment. And to further complicate matters, the film eventually switches gears and becomes inexplicably serious, showing bank guards manhandle the would-be robbers in a way that is not funny and actually kinda sad. But, based on the previous material, the director doesn't seem to have all that much sympathy for them. Then a joke at the end diffuses the seriousness, giving me tonal whiplash. For something that took so much time and effort to orchestrate, one would think they'd have spent more time getting a better handle on what they were trying to communicate.

Exit Through The Gift Shop (Banksy, 2010)

2011-02-23T12:40:00.001-08:00

If Exit Through the Gift Shop were merely an elaborate hoax carried out by Banksy to comment on the way hype has supplanted genuine artistic excitement in the world of upper-class art patrons it would be, well, funny enough, if not exactly profound. The idea that most people who buy art know almost nothing about art is something that has probably been around as long as art and commerce have co-existed. While many of the reasons seem obvious, I think it's much more interesting to think about why artists are so resentful of the very people who continue to make their world possible. Banksy can certainly say the money means nothing to him, but to me that's always been something only people who don't have to worry about money can say. I would guess he certainly appreciates the extra time he can devote to his work that comes from not having to bag groceries or sit in an office all day. Though, given that the words were directly from his (heavily modified, anonymous witness-esque) lips and were said in this movie, perhaps Banksy is doing what he often does -- saying something fatuous and cliche with a kind of self-aware irreverence.

What sets the movie above the status of entertaining, if not that interesting, prank is the closeness of Mister Brainwash's work to Banksy's own. If it is sorta-bad art created by Banksy for the purpose of this elaborate hoax (and I don't see how it can't be), it's interesting that he chose to make this bad art seem so much like the (good, in my opinion) work he puts out. It gives the movie a strange, and endearing, insecurity. Like Banksy is trying to come to terms with his own mild disbelief at the fame and notoriety he's achieved as an artist. The feeling that I'm sure strikes most successfully creative people from time to time -- that they really aren't as good or worth as much as everyone else seems to think they are. The personal doubt and worry of spinning your wheels creatively and no longer contributing to a larger discussion. I think viewing Mister Brainwash less as a broad lampoon of art's more self-aggrandizing impulses and more as an alter-ego built to, with a level of bemused detachment, investigate Banksy's own neuroses gives the piece a much more interesting level of poignance. Though, again, due to that detachment, it's entirely possible I'm just making this all up.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Gavin Hood, 2009)

2011-02-20T08:10:00.001-08:00

Seals the deal on Gavin Hood's irrelevance as a filmmaker. Back when Tsotsi came out I never bought into the hype, feeling it a pretty sloppy and stickily sentimental movie that seemed much more at home with bland feel good television than the indie social examination of African destitution it was being trumped up to be on the festival circuit and in the local art house.

In between that and this (something that is not exactly worse than Brett Ratner's excursion into the world of X-Men, but is, at least, a different kind of bad) he made some movie with Reese Witherspoon that a lot of people seem not to have liked. I guess I'm glad he didn't waste time revealing himself to be a bland shill with no more aspiration than collecting paychecks.

All one really needs to know about this movie is that it has not one, but TWO, scenes in which someone falls to their knees, looks up at a birds-eye camera angle and screams NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. The whole movie is a little like that. Lots of lazy, over the top melodrama with forced emotional cues.

The action sequences are, at least, coherent enough, if just as lazily conceived and executed. I guess now that this movie exists we can be glad it's over, though the new X-Men movie coming out in a couple months looks no better. I guess now that Bryan Singer has left it's time for me to stop believing this can be one of the few decent superhero franchises in the movie world.

The Woodmans (Scott Willis, 2010)

2011-02-18T10:09:00.000-08:00

Manages to overcome its relatively dull execution with one thing (and one thing only, for the most part): Giant, beautifully displayed images of Francesca Woodman's photographs. As someone who is distressingly uninformed about the art world, I had never seen any of Woodman's photographs before. But, to spin that in a positive way, there is almost no better way I can think of to see them for the first time than blown up to awe-inspiring proportions in a darkened movie theatre. They are as incredible as the movie makes them out to be, at least from this amateur enthusiast's perspective.

The rest, however, is an experience that is, at best, not bad. I feel that the talking head documentary is such a compositionally and structurally restricting format that it makes all the other cinematic devices a director has (editing & sound foremost) of even more importance than usual in order to be successful. The cuts must be so smooth and emphatic and perfect that the viewer could never suggest there might have been a better way to do that. Scott Willis has not done that. The Woodmans, as a crafted cinematic expierence, is only a few shades above middling. Some sections even descend into outright amateurism, as the camera shifts and makes slight zooms to better arrange the composition as the person is talking. Perhaps he thought these moments of haphazard improvisation would lend more credence to the talking head formula, as if to convince us that there wasn't any rehearsal for what's going on -- one take and that's it. To me, this is not so important. I have an inherent awareness that nothing I watch in a movie is there for the first time and, quite frankly, I prefer that kind of practiced artifice to the strange, stage-y feeling artifice of unrehearsed reality television.

On top of the rather static, uninteresting creation of the movie, is the strangeness of the people talking. There is always going to be an element of suspicion in watching people talk about someone who is famous, dead, and has been dead quite a long time. Nostalgia seems like an inescapable aspect of these interviews, and one which is never actually addressed. No one they spoke to is willing to admit they weren't amazed, astounded, floored by her photographs when they saw them. The world, the movie posits, was not ready for her pictures when she was alive. This is no doubt true, in a way, because she is famous now and could not sell her pictures then. But it would be interesting to find people who were active in the late-'70s and early-'80s New York art world and find out why people weren't ready. I mean, can you do that? It's not as if she wasn't putting herself out there. The only moments of strange revelation come from later interviews of her father, both watching him work and hearing what he says. There's something decidedly weird and creepy about the way he talks about his daughter, and then the way he emulates her work with his photography as something like a coping mechanism. The whole movie could've been about that and it would've felt like something that was about a real moment -- something inescapable and odd and human in a messy, uncomfortable way.

So it somewhat fails as a movie, yet to anyone, like me, who was unlucky enough never to have seen Francesca Woodman's photographs before, I would not hesitate to recommend it while it's in the theatres.

Son of Babylon (Mohamed Al Daradji, 2010)

2011-02-18T09:27:00.001-08:00

I am willing to partially blame myself for my mostly negative assessment of this film. Due to the crowdedness of the screening, and my lack of an advance ticket purchase, I was forced to sit about three rows from the front -- a distance I work hard to avoid whenever possible. It made the entire experience feel too close, too pushy. So when the director employed a fairly typically commercial style involving many sharp focus close-ups, the faces just looked too close. It felt claustrophobic and fisheyed. So, perhaps in different conditions, I might have liked this better.

As it is, I didn't. What I saw was several occasionally beautiful long shots that never felt like they had enough time to breathe. For all the supposed tumult and endlessness of the characters' journey, it never felt as though they were having as hard a time with it as it seemed. I like the idea of using a son searching for his father as a metaphorical representation of the cultural confusion and uncertainty that Iraq has had to deal with, both during and after the Saddam era. But the pathos is only successfully explored in vague, intermittent pieces, and the idea itself is stated and then left to sit for the rest of the movie. It becomes a piece that is more about the narrative than exploring the ideas the narrative posits. The sadness is what we're supposed to feel, but, either because the movie just isn't that good or because of my poor positioning (or, more likely, a bit of both), I didn't. Every time it used a close-up of the little boy crying, I felt like I was being manipulated rather than like I was watching something real unfold. Manipulation isn't necessarily a bad thing, of course, as long as you own up to it. Movies are, necessarily, all artifice. But we're mostly willing to believe that they aren't, as long as the filmmaker is willing to help out. Here, I felt like I was doing most of the work.

The Green Hornet (Michel Gondry, 2011)

2011-02-18T09:09:00.000-08:00

For once I am left without much to say about a movie, not because I didn't like it (I liked it a lot), but because other people have already said it better than I could. Both Armond White's review and a nice piece by Adam Nayman in Cinema Scope addressed all the positives I'd thought of while watching the movie and then some. White even mentioned the great Sugar Water reference Gondry pulls 2/3rds of the way through the movie.

What I guess I can add is that, despite lampooning the superhero film genre and recontextualizing Seth Rogen's usual extended adolescence motif to fit our own recent cultural obsession with superhero movies, it actually manages to have much better action than just about any of the movies it's parodying. It moves with an unforced grace that is exactly what drew me to martial arts movies to begin with -- the idea of cinematic fisticuffs being an extension of (and, somewhat sadly, mostly a replacement for) dancing in movies. It seems we would rather see people hit each other than love each other and, while I find that a little problematic, I would at least like the hitting to be as close as possible to being as delirious and beautiful as the dancing was. The Green Hornet mostly pulls it off, working in semi-long takes that revel in the movement of characters from place to place, rather than a simple, choppily rendered series of action and reaction shots. I have heard the 3D ruins much of the grace of these sequences, so I was fortunate to have waited to see it until I could watch it the normal way.

But, of course, there is all the other stuff that makes it great. The use of superhero fantasy as a way to expose upper-class white entitlement, the willingness not to be afraid to confront the problematic racial ideologies of both the previous series and with the American adventure genre in general, as well as confronting some of the sexist ideas inherent in that same genre. Not to mention pretty cleverly lampooning narcissistic image-obsession (James Franco's cameo at the beginning was what made me realize I was in for something special). It's everything Kick-Ass should've been, but was too busy trying to look cool to do. The only thing keeping it from being even better is that, even though Gondry does a good job reigning him in, the Seth Rogen Riff Machine does get a little tiring after a while.

Adam Nayman review
Armond White

The Art of the Steal (Don Argott, 2009)

2011-02-12T18:57:00.000-08:00

Pretty typical documentary paint-by-numbers. Filmmaker has an opinion on divisive issue, uses a series of images and talking heads and one-sided information to attempt to sway the viewer to his/her side of the story. How did documentary, the genre that by its very title suggests the closest film has to reality, become the most shamelessly manipulative of all film genres?

The movie somewhat "works" I guess in that its emotional heartstring tugging and complete villainization of the opposing side more or less made me think that I probably sided with the filmmakers on the issue, but the problem with these movies is that as soon as one starts to do their own research the entire thing falls apart. I guess it exists the way most news does, as something that assumes its viewer will take what it says at face value and buy into it for no other reason than because they state it with great authority.

And especially in this case, when they argue for the Barnes Foundation as a refuge for true art lovers to come and appreciate good art away from the horrors of silly faux-intellectual upper class elitists, just reeks of its own kind of elitism. Now that Barnes is dead who gets to appoint themselves the cultural gatekeeper who decides what a real patron of the arts is, as opposed to a phony who only pretends at art-loving? And why should we feel bad that the city of Philadelphia isn't going to let them?

Jellyfish (Shira Geffen & Etgar Keret, 2007)

2011-02-12T18:35:00.000-08:00

A precious Israeli Magnolia meets You and Me and Everyone We Know. A story of intersecting lives that is too caught up in its own narrative symmetry and quirky magical realism to invest the drama with the necessary heft. Fails to explore its ideas beyond superficial statements about struggling to please seemingly unpleasable people. Also spends quite a lot of time making people seem one-dimensional and thus easy villains for the more sympathetic protagonists, but then at the end shows them doing something nice and expects us to suddenly go "aww, they are real people after all!" No thanks.

Wish I had more to say about this movie, but I felt nothing through the whole showing except severe apathy and a constant need to check the clock to see if it was almost over.

The A-Team (Joe Carnahan, 2010)

2011-02-09T07:41:00.001-08:00

I've been putting off writing about this one because I honestly have no idea what to say. I was very drunk by the time I got to watching it, which you would think would help in the case of a dumb action movie remake of a terrible '80s television show, but being drunk appears to make me more difficult to please instead of less. My attention wanders more frequently, leading me to blame the movie for not keeping me drawn in and fixated. This causes me to look for things I don't like.

With A-Team it's not all that difficult. Three of the four leads have a kind of charm to them -- equal to if not better than the original cast members if you ask me (whoever plays Murdock is the one out, but it's tough to blame that on the actor -- it's just that the crazy guy archetype is a terrible one), but it doesn't make up for mostly unconvincing and poorly staged action. There's an overreliance on unconvincing CGI that mostly does the movie in, giving the feeling of tinkertoys more than anything real. I don't mind CGI, for the most part, but it takes a lot of effort to give something nonexistent the right kind of weight in the real world. The A-Team fails, especially with its crazy shipyard explosions at the finale. It's a great idea, actually, but never amounts to feeling like anybody is in real danger (and they aren't).

Kick-Ass (Matthew Vaughn, 2010)

2011-02-06T22:31:00.001-08:00

Without even having read Ebert's review "morally reprehensible" was the exact phrase that popped into my head while watching this movie. Unlike Ebert I was not convinced by the film's opening as it meticulously and dully went about crossing items off the Nerdy High School Dude cinematic checklist. The only thing setting it apart is just how unattractive the main character is. Between this and Bandslam it appears that the only advances in Nerd Dudes in the years since the '80s is the widening gap of attractiveness between the men and their idolized objects of desire (though Bandslam at least has the courtesy to treat said women as a somewhat close approximation of real people). Those in search of a social trainwreck will be heartened to know that this rote chauvinism paint-by-numbers is, indeed, the least of Kick-Ass' problems.

The main thrust of Kick-Ass is that if superheroes existed in the real world they'd be socially maladjusted nerds and crazy people. This is an obviously fair point to suggest, yet the movie is far more eager to embrace its comic book origins and deal in easy, one-dimensional views of crime and social disarray than it is to satirize notions of hero worship and fantasy. Other than fairly numerous injuries and mishaps nothing is really suggested about the main character's desire for justice. In many ways he's just a teenage rehash of Travis Bickle, seeing the world as a dirty cesspool filled with casual indifference. But the movie is no better, inviting us to laugh and jeer at the deaths of human beings on a regular basis. Tonally, it has no idea where it's at or what it's trying to accomplish. While the main character lacks Bickle's sociopathy, this is eventually made up for via the film's other superheroes -- the father-daughter duo of Big Daddy and Hit Girl. But, much like Taxi Driver, the film can't help romanticizing the characters' iconoclasm and thus becomes problematic whenever it tries to make any real points about their fascism and the blurred, possibly not even there line that separates them from their adversaries.

It's a shame, because Matthew Vaughn has real talent as a visual stylist. Through partial coincidence I ended up watching three action movies in one day and Kick-Ass had by far the best sense of spatial relations and kineticism. The fight scenes, as ugly and squemish as they were conceptually, had a verve and sense of movement I wished existed in a better movie. But, like Michael Bay, Vaughn is likely too entrenched in his own narcissistic adolescence to ever put his visual ideas to use in something that isn't at least somewhat offensive. Unlike Bay, Vaughn is too hip and detached and interested in phony realism to make anything as stupidly sincere and cartoonish as Revenge of the Fallen.

The Mechanic (Simon West, 2011)

2011-02-06T21:28:00.001-08:00

A fun, well-staged enough Jason Statham sexy machismo action fest that suffers greatly from an ending that, from any kind of thematic standpoint, makes almost no sense. It feels as though it exists almost completely as a fuck you to the idea of genre formula endings. Which is fine in a way, but when you've spent the rest of your work fully embracing the audience-placating aspects of your formula it feels a bit like you're just pulling the rug out at the end for the simple sake of doing it. "Gotcha!" isn't inherently worthwhile as a statement, especially when it means sacrificing whatever narrative and thematic cohesion that has been previously built.

Though narratively the movie isn't all that streamlined or confident, either. Individual setpieces work, but the movie feels like it's just about to introduce some big twist and instead ends. The twist is there's five minutes of movie left. Like The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, it's a movie that is almost all set-up. But unlike that film, the finale goes so smoothly and according to plan that there's never any dramatic weight, which is part of how it confuses things and seems to suggest there's more to come.

Statham is as perfect as he's consistently been: understated, suave but with a rough-hewn chisel, able to look far more fantastic in expensive clothing than most anyone ever will, and Ben Foster's erratic over-acting is a nicely defined contrast. A rather perfect bit of stunt-casting that deserves a director more willing to explore the contours of their chemistry, to let the movie breathe so that the ending can move with the weight it wants to suggest.

Runaway (Kanye West & Hype Williams, 2010)

2011-02-06T20:58:00.000-08:00

The Fifth Element meets Victoria's Secret in Kanye West's continually problematic relationship with women. His approach has softened since the infamous and banned album cover for My Twisted Dark Fantasy, as well as the infamous and not banned video for Monster, but is no less "uhhhhhhh......." inducing. He wants to explore ideas of the exploitation of innocence and the way social conditioning, especially among the upper-class, strips people of their messy uniqueness, but the video never reaches the power promised by the unexpectedly haunting and apocalyptic first shot of West running through the woods, ominous red fog seeping through the background.

Kanye vocalizes his troubles with women, singing about his status as a douchebag and his inability to talk to women (also referenced in the We Were Once a Fairytale video), but this is only a small piece of the problem. The romanticized ideal of a sweet, untouched woman lost in an ugly world is just as chauvinistic as the issues he is attempting to address. At least in Monster and the banned album cover it seemed to be suggesting something about outward social perceptions of black men and white women, rather than West's own idyllic views.

As a piece of frustrated, confused, self-indulgent confessional it is often visually striking and freed from commercial film's narrative constraints by its dubious status as a music video, though I wish it had gone even further with this idea -- stretching comfort and not being afraid to use his literal self as the cipher, rather than asking us to identify with the awkwardly depicted lingerie model angel. It makes sense from a cinematic perspective, as years of conditioning have taught us to sympathize more readily with vulnerable women than men, but, in the interest of moving forward, we should please try to get away from relying on that, especially without any real attempt to acknowledge that convoluted past. His detachment throughout the film, right down to his monotone delivery, makes connecting artist to product much harder than it should be and, when it comes to the baring of heart and soul and making people give a shit, this is more necessary than all the pretty pictures stylists can conjure.

Cabin Fever (Eli Roth, 2002)

2011-02-04T11:31:00.000-08:00

Having recently, for the first time ever, seen both Hostel and Cabin Fever in close succession I an now state definitively that I prefer Hostel. And it's not even very close (though Cabin Fever is still good!).

Hostel is, in essence, a remake of the previous Cabin Fever. Hostel is actually on my list of 25 movies to write about, so I won't concern myself too much with their differences and similarities here (it's more relevant to do it later), but suffice to say I think the cleaning up and honing done to the films' shared themese makes Hostel the far sharper, more acidic picture.

Cabin Fever is not without strengths, of course. As a precursor it does a very able job of setting up the ideas Roth will eventually come close to knocking out of the park with the follow-up. But, unlike many times in filmmaking history, the revelations of the latter film do not serve to make the former irrelevant. Two sequences in specific are so haunting they make me (literally, seriously, completely) shudder every time I think about them. Combining body horror with acute psychological observation in a way that, to be hyperbolic, is actually kinda mind-blowing. The first works to undermine the film's only semi-likable male protagonist. He climbs into bed with a girl he's been harboring a not-so-secret crush on for years. She never speaks and somehow, obliviously, he mistakes her feverish discomfort for sexual pleasure. The scene is shown from his point of view, so that the audience is fooled just as he is, making us complicit when Roth pulls the carpet out from under it. Like Hostel would later, Roth here shows his excellence in exposing male movie archtypes for their self-involved sense of entitlement. Because he was enjoying what he was doing to her, he naturally assumed she must be enjoying it too (especially because she didn't tell him to stop). Of all the things I was expecting from the movie, a treatise on sexual consent was not one of them.

The other scene comes later, after things have gone so wrong that nearly everyone has forgotten what it was to be right. Its place within the film is important, structurally, as it wouldn't have quite the impact had it come earlier. A girl, infected with the horrible illness the movie revolves around, shaves her legs. Unlike many horror films, in which the gore is a means to an end, Roth uses blood and effects intelligently, communicating layers of ideas beneath the superficial. Here he suggests an obstinate desire to achieve some shred of normalcy while everything descends into a horrific nightmare. The film sympathizes with her anguish, even as she is partially responsible for her place in the situation. Roth's ability to straddle the line between villifying and sympathizing with his characters is what distinguishes him as a horror auteur. At least, in his first two films. I remember Hostel II being awful.

Another aspect that sets Cabin Fever apart as more than just a practice run is the notion of leadership in a crisis. The film posits a depressing, but mostly pretty believable, idea that leadership has more to do with assertiveness than with any strong moral compass. Throughout the film Bert, who speaks most vocally, ends up swaying the more morally conflicted characters into things they mostly believe they shouldn't be doing. Thus the film introduces both the ideas of people's ability to rationalize doing terrible things in a crisis, along with their inability to stand up to the strongest voice, even when it is obviously motivated only by self-interest.

Where the film falls short, though, is in its depiction of the locals. Both Hostel and Cabin Fever are built around two sets of people: the main characters and everyone else. Hostel gains some of its success by not making it clear which is which at several points, while Cabin Fever keeps the line between the two always distinct. Both films, perhaps by necessity of their structure, are guilty of drawing upon uncomfortable aspects of the so-called Others, yet Cabin Fever fails harder by awkwardly alternating between jeering and understanding. Sometimes it's parodying the xenophobia of Deliverance and sometimes it just is Deliverance. This weaving back and forth is handled far less elegantly than it is with the main characters, making the film stumble and labor when it should be chugging smoothly. The budgetary constraints, too, as well as Roth's own inexperience, hinder the film as well. Much of the worst parts of the film are built on a kind of horror movie referentialism, expending energy to recall some of Roth's favorite films without properly tying those moments to the themes and narrative of the movie itself. The score, too, is terrible -- heavy-handed and distracting, pounding the viewer with an unnecessary aural assault.

Rabbit Hole (John Cameron Mitchell, 2010)

2011-02-04T11:23:00.001-08:00

There isn't much deep-digging to figure out what this movie is about. There are no buried subtleties or intricate explorations tucked beneath the surface. It wears exactly what it's about right there in the open, for everyone to see. But it does what it does with such a (mostly) deft touch that it ends up being an unexpectedly moving experience.

Most movies of the Family Tries To Survive Tragedy variety pretend at some greater knowledge of the human condition -- existing as a way to demonstrate to you what it must be like. There's an insistence to their tone that is off-putting, to say nothing of the unshakeable feeling of exploitation that usually comes with it. Rabbit Hole is not these things. The main reason that it works, other than the unified strength of the performances (even Nichole Kidman!), is that it seems more interested in asking questions than in offering answers. It feels aware of itself as not necessarily real, but like something that might be real. It's exploratory, as if it's just as unsure of where it's going as we are. This feeling of spontaneity, even if one acknowledges its artifice, makes it easier to forgive moments that might seem trite or possibly too neat. And there are a few, but they tend to fade from memory as the film's strengths grow sharper. I wish I'd seen it last year, so that my list of favorites wouldn't seem quite so anemic.

The Hole (Nick Hamm, 2001)

2011-02-04T10:46:00.001-08:00

Has several ideas, though none of them are executed well. Begins wanting to be a Rashomon meets police procedural story about unreliable narration, but poor direction keeps the film from ever sustaining a plausible point of view and about halfway through the film the Rashomon-esque quality is abandoned as a mere pretense for extending the film's running time. The film then somewhat attempts to become about the dissolution of humanity when faced with entrapment -- sort of a miniatuare Lord of the Flies. But this, too, is bungled by the film's attempts to continually withhold information from the viewer, cutting back and forth between the present and the past, consistently letting every character know more than the audience does before big reveal after big reveal. We are never allowed to live in a moment as if it's actually happening, as the movie is much more interested in trying to trick us than in trying to make us believe anything we're seeing. Thus we are removed from their suffering and, as a consequence, any ability to sympathize with their plight. Bodies begin to pile up before we even have a firm handle on who the characters are. Perhaps the comparisons to Rashomon were unfounded, actually, as this script clearly has another, more recent, movie in mind with its ending: The Usual Suspects. And, like that movie, ends up revealing nothing other than the fact that it has revealed nothing. But The Hole lacks the meta self-awareness of The Usual Suspects, pretending that its ending reveals some dark truth about ourselves. It does not. Because sociopaths are boring. They can do horrible things and not feel bad about it. Why is that interesting? There is something biologically wrong with them. I can understand being interested in that from a scientific perspective. How is it caused? Is it genetic? Can it be cured? These are things worth being curious about. Wondering exactly what kind of awful things they're capable of, I hope for obvious reasons, is not.

Bride Wars (Gary Winick, 2009)

2011-01-31T20:22:00.000-08:00

I like 13 Going on 30. I saw it a long time ago and I liked it a lot. I saw the end on TV a few months ago -- still liked it a lot. I like Jennifer Garner and the movie has a cute, bubbly atmosphere that really works for me.

I'd forgotten that my enjoyment for that movie was the reason that I wanted to watch Bride Wars -- Gary Winick being the connecting thread that ties the two movies. Unfortunately, they have almost nothing in common otherwise. Bride Wars exists in a weird, mean, not-cute-at-all world where feminism never happened. A world where platitudes about how extremely important a wedding day is for a woman can be uttered without any irony or self-awareness.

Plays like Rushmore, only if the creators thought the best part of the movie was when Schwartzman and Murray were being childish jerks to each other. The only semblance to 13 Going on 30 lies in the performances of the main characters. Like Ruffalo and Garner, Hathaway and Hudson have an unforced chemistry together, which is a shame because the movie is structured like the invert of a romantic comedy -- keeping the characters apart for 85% of the movie. I almost hated the movie, but anytime the girls were together and not hating each other the movie almost came alive. There's almost something homoerotic about how much chemistry they have together, compared to the lifeless shells the movie calls fiances. A braver movie would've had them both realize their dream wedding wouldn't be complete without each other in a much more literal sense than what ended up on screen.

Though I suppose that could've introduced a whole new set of problems, and since this one couldn't even get relatively small things like the fact that it's okay to be excited about your wedding and acknowledge that it's a life-changing day in any person's life without making it out to be some final piece in The Complete Woman life cycle, it's probably best they left it alone.

Give 'Em Hell, Malone (Russell Mulcahy, 2009)

2011-01-31T20:06:00.001-08:00

The kind of terrible, adolescent noir worship that is completely indefensible. Makes Brick look good. There's almost not enough bad things to say about this movie, but I guess the worst would be that it was somehow not made by rich 19-year-olds. If it had it might somehow be understandable. But this movie cost 15 million dollars. And stars Thomas Jane and Ving Rhames. Granted neither of these actors are at career high points, but were there any meetings between agents? Did people show them the script and say, "This will be good for your career." Are they that desperate for money? I have no idea of the inner machinations, but, thankfully, the world-at-large and I are, for once, in complete agreement. This movie was straight to DVD. That doesn't change the disappointment that comes from knowing it was made at all, but I'll admit it helps.

The mad scientists at the script lab came up with this noir style/dialogue/attitude fused with typical hitman action movie plot in which none of it works. Jane has never been more wooden, the girl he spends most of the movie "bantering" with is neither sultry nor badass nor compelling and the only guy who seems to have anything close to a pulse is French Stewart. I am wasting time and words writing about this movie -- a movie no one reading this would ever even contemplate watching, probably, but I watched the whole thing so here I go.

Or there I went. I guess I'm done, except for the part where an old dude hits on an Asian schoolgirl and she gives him a razor blade BJ as a way of killing him. Given the rest of the scene, it wasn't even necessary that he die, or that she take the time to get him into a room, take his pants down and momentarily have his penis in her mouth before he bled to death. I guess it shows how crazy and hardcore a villain she is, but, uh, she could've just shot him.

The whole movie is like that. Gratuity of the ickiest, most unpleasant variety.

The Final Destination (David R. Ellis, 2009)

2011-01-31T10:16:00.000-08:00

An exercise in joyless fatalism. It used to be I found these movies grimly cathartic -- to be reminded of all the ways in which I could be dying every day and yet wasn't -- but now their morbid infatuation with the characters' hopeless lot in life is too much to handle. I can no longer feel good about rooting for characters to die, even if they aren't real.

David R. Ellis uses the same skilled workmanlike craft he brought to Cellular and Snakes on a Plane. Many scenes create a palpable tension, even as their conclusions are preordained. That's certainly no easy feat, but I would prefer he get back to movies like those other ones, which at least showed a sense of humor that wasn't entirely founded in cruelty (this film technically has "jokes," but most of them involve asking us to laugh at the gory, splattered remains of the victims).

It's a shame, because there's hints of something better in here. An unexplored idea of paranoia, that surviving something horrible and traumatic changes you in a way that makes you infinitely more aware of your own impending death. That would be something worth delving into. At times the movie seems to be moving towards that, only to quickly pull away for the next Rube Goldberg-like death.

A Perfect Getaway (David Twohy, 2009)

2011-01-31T01:58:00.000-08:00

A film that becomes too enamored with its own genre awareness. Absolutely a post-Scream thriller in many of the worst ways possible. Unfortunate, as it wastes perhaps the only good performance of Milla Jovovich's career. Maybe it's just her own bad luck that the majority of her work has been with Paul W.S. Anderson and Luc Besson, two directors that, despite their many positive attributes, are more interested in archetypes and kineticism than realistic human emotion.

Twohy, taking a few notes from Hitchcock, uses the personas of his actors against the audience. Specifically Jovovich's naive, innocent work with Besson, as well as transforming Steve Zahn's perpetually flustered stoner act into a perpetually flustered uptight dude act. Then he sprinkles in Timothy Olyphant's penchant for charming sleaze to make a concoction that spends half the movie working pretty darn well, actually.

Unfortunately, the conclusion seems foregone as soon as it's suggested. In making us aware of its awareness about red herrings and the twists and turns of cinema thrillers, as well as a general condensing of suspects to an extremely limited number, it should surprise almost no one who has spent any amount of time watching movies just "whodunit." There's still an element of tension leading up to this unsurprising twist that keeps the movie watchable, but once the reveal is opened up for us the rest of the running time is spent spinning wheels. There's a lot of gruesome stabbing and shooting and maiming, but there's very little formal or psychological reason to care at that point. It's the equivalent of shouting "ta-da," striking a pose and then holding it long after the audience understands the trick and has started to become uncomfortable and unsure whether they should have gotten up and left already.

Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944)

2011-01-31T01:29:00.001-08:00

A fairly obvious precursor to Twin Peaks in their explorations of sexual obsession and romanticism of dead women. The choice to move Twin Peaks to small-town Americana is an interesting one, as Laura largely concerns itself with the rich upper-class elite and its seedy underbelly. Dana Andrews plays a working-class detective who acts as a cipher for the audience into the opulent and extravagant lifestyle of the rich and famous. Laura, too, is depicted as having worked her way up into this world with perserverance and smarts, rather than sneaky and underhanded methods of the people who surround her. This us vs. them mentality with regard to class in America, began in cinema as a reaction to the Depression, is a fertile playground still being dallied in today. It is not, however, the film's strongest point. Tough-talking Andrews is only sympathetic as a protagonist in relative comparison to the rest of the film's characters as the film's narrative economy leaves very little chance for the character to breathe and take on lifelike qualities. His defining trait is mostly the fact that he falls in love with Laura while investigating her murder case. Other women he's dated come up, and he discusses them bitterly. So the film appears to be trying to deal with the fact that it is easier to love a fantasy, as he does through the romanticized painting hanging in her living room as well as the biased accounts given to him by the many people he interviews, than to love a real person, who may contain all these lovable qualities, but also has a lot of messy, less easy to love ones.

The second act twist is a pretty great one, at least from a narrative perspective.. Even having seen the movie before, I'd actually somehow managed to forget it. But, upon consideration, it mostly only serves to complicate the whodunit mystery of the film without enlivening or trying to deal with any of the film's previous themes. Laura the person turns out to be just as lovable and sweet and innocent as Laura the fantasy, having somehow managed to exist in a world of creeps and swindlers without noticing or being changed at all by them. This makes the eventual coupling with Andrews problematic and unconvincing. Supposedly we are supposed to buy that their shared backgrounds of hard work and ethical beliefs tie them together in a way that the rest of her company cannot, but it raises unanswered questions about what attracted her to this world to begin with.

Ignoring these problems, though, the film is indeed a breezy and entertaining bit of noir. It drops the ball trying to be something more than pretty good, but that doesn't change the fact that it actually IS pretty good. Laura's omnipresence in the first half is handled very nicely, especially with the cute framing of the painting in her apartment, and for a whodunit it does manage to be fairly unpredictable, especially considering how many years Hollywood has had to grind most of noir's tropes into cliches.

South Pacific (Joshua Logan, 1958)

2011-01-30T22:04:00.000-08:00

A probably well-meaning film that tries to argue against racism all while demonstrating a patronizing, white-centric attitude that ably pinpoints why we haven't come nearly as far as we should have 50 years later.

The two main characters are a white nurse and an older French colonialist. She falls in love with him, but soon he reveals that he was previously married, that his wife was Polynesian, that she bore him two half-Polynesian children and then died. The wife and children are complete non-entities in the film, serving only as a narrative prop to "expose" the white nurse's racial biases and force the two lovers apart. The scene when they fight, set at night against a gorgeous purple and gold color scheme that made me wish every scene in every movie ever could look that good, is the only really resonant piece in the entire film, dealing mostly with the fact that the children would be a constant reminder of the fact that the man she loves had had sex with a woman of color. It's exceptionally didactic, but in a way that didn't bother me much and actually ends with one of the few memorable songs in the whole show.

The Frenchman, by contrast, is completely unburdened by any notions of racism. His status as a rich colonialist with a servant who never once speaks in the film is completely ignored, as is the rampant exoticism of the film's attitudes towards the Tonkanese locals on the island. Another of the main characters, a Marine lieutenant, is introduced to, and immediately falls in love with, a Tonkanese girl who speaks almost no English. There's a horrifying song number in which her mother sings a song and the daughter mimes the words she's singing along. That the film can slap the wrists of one character, all while championing his love of this cliched depiction of mysterious, submissive, exotic beauty is exactly why Malcolm X once said that the fight for equal rights would never get anywhere if they let liberal white people help them.

(Note: Being a liberal white person, I don't actually believe that's true, but it's easy to understand why he would think so, especially back then.)

A Serious Man (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2009)

2011-01-28T12:24:00.000-08:00

There is a moment early on in A Serious Man when the Coen brothers appear on the verge of a career revelation. The Man Behind The Desk is generally well-integrated enough into their works that his omnipresence is never as distracting or arbitrary as, say, Hitchcock's cameos, yet in the 25 years they've been putting him to use they have barely even attempted to comment on his existence. His status as a buffoonish stand-in for all the things in the world that might be stopping them, you, everyone, from achieving greatness is declared and then left to sit, as if the acknowledgement alone is enough. But, for a brief whisper of a second, A Serious Man seems ready to give us the punchline to a joke that's been a quarter of a century in the making.

The film is already a culmination of his place within their work, finally stretching him to his grotesque, logical conclusion by making the entire movie be about men sitting behind desks. Without counting, I would guess that something close to 75% of the scenes in the film involve someone sitting behind something that either is a desk or resembles one, from the opening scene of protagonist Larry Gopnick's son, Danny, listening to Jefferson Airplane during Hebrew class, to the second-to-last scene, with Larry himself behind a desk receiving still more bad news. And it's this aspect that is, for the Coens, a first. Never before (at least, to my recollection) has the main character of one of their movies sat behind the desk.

The first time we see Larry behind his desk is the very moment I alluded to. A foreign-exchange student from Korea has come to dispute his failing grade in Gopnick's physics class. In a film situated in the very specific world of Minnesotan Jewish suburbanites, this part offers an opportunity to counter-point the tense, suspicious relationship Larry has with his "goy" neighbor, and expose Larry's aloofness as its own form of American xenophobia. In this way, it could acknowledge the Coens' own position as Men Behind The Desk, and then evaluate our own complicity in laughing at (almost never with) the fuzzy, unreal archetypes the Coens place in front of us. But the movie never goes there. Quickly regaining the usual Coen detachment, the scene ends with an envelope of money on Gopnick's desk that will, eventually, have a 99% chance of being an attempted bribe (it's never explicitly stated, but no other explanation for the money's existence is ever introduced). And, in the meantime, we'll be asked to laugh at him and his occasionally difficult to decipher accent.

From here on out the movie loses ground rather quickly, introducing more of the caricatures who speak in typical, carefully observed Coen speech patterns, yet never say anything believably human. They exist only as narcissistic impediments to Gopnick's desire for a simple, uncomplicated life. Before I get too far along with this, I should add that I don't necessarily have anything against the idea of outlandishly cartoon characters for the purposes of satire. What I object to is such a selective use of caricature. Gopnick and, at least within his social circle, his son, Danny, are mostly free of judgement by the filmmakers. The lone exception comes late in the film, when Richard Kind, as Larry's brother Arthur, is finally granted a scene of humanity. It's an unexpected scene, as Kind sobs and spits and wonders at his place in the world and, for once, the Coens roll with this emotional moment. Too little in the context of the whole, of course, but taken on its own this scene is a mini-revelation of pathos sans irony for the emotionally discomfited brothers Coen. But after it's over it only highlights the fact that Arthur, not Larry, should be the main character of the film.

I am being particularly hard on this movie -- a movie I do not even actively dislike (there are a few moments of interest, mostly dealing with faith and tradition and the confusion that comes with ritualism that has lost its connection to meaning) -- but in a way the watching of this was like a ritual slaughter of nearly the last remaining sacred cows of my infant cinephilia. Fargo was one of my favorite movies as soon as I watched it. The Big Lebowski I have seen probably a dozen times (though none of them lately). Miller's Crossing was, at one point, the movie I loved so much I even made my grandparents watch it. A time ago Kubrick appealed greatly to my adolescent misanthropy, but by my mid-twenties his frigidity and hatred tarnished my appreciation. Now I suspect that his more playful Minnesota children will follow the same fate. True Grit, despite its problems, shows promise. Here's hoping they can tie that movie's empathy to something a little less fleeting.

Project!

2011-01-28T12:11:00.000-08:00

I am working on a group of essays on 25 of my favorite movies. It's likely to be a year-long process, as I've been planning it since before the New Year and I haven't even been able to post the first one yet. School work is a necessary distraction, but much of my other free time is spent on things that are not quite as compulsory.

So, while I work on hammering those out, I am planning to try to write about every movie I watch in the meantime. I'll post each one as a small capsule review, using as many or as few words as I feel necessary to get across my feelings. They won't be very polished, as I don't have so much free time I can keep editing and re-editing them. They're rough-y first drafts, designed mostly to keep me writing and thinking about writing about film.

Top, Bottom & Everything In Between 2010

2011-01-02T21:58:00.000-08:00

Got kinda lazy writing about the stuff I didn't like, but I'd already started so I didn't exactly stop. Uh, guess 2010 was also The Year I Enjoyed Writing About Stuff I DID Like More Than Stuff I DIDN'T.

Top Movies I Liked In Theatre 2010:

01. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Inexplicably euphoric. A disaster of badly written, and occasionally offensive, jokes wedged between moments of grin-inducing goodness and with, in my opinion, Edgar Wright's wittiest and most clever visual dynamism so far. A movie that both makes me want to make movies and drives my neuroses to the absolute brink with the realization that I could never make a movie this good-looking and beautifully edited. I could watch an entire movie of these briskly flowing match cut jokes. Rented the Blu-Ray the day it came out, watched it, later watched the commentary with Wright and Bill Pope (only one of two commentaries I watched all year), then watched the whole movie again the next day. While it still suffers in the end in redeeming Scott Pilgrim too far, it does manage to say quite a bit about the silliness of dating and creepy, recessively adolescent tendencies of the modern 20-something nerd. The fight scenes work better conceptually than physically (as a metaphor for male possessiveness and insecurity w/r/t girls' ex-boyfriends) and the movie's first fight scene actually halts what was an almost-perfect (well, maybe almost-amazing) comedy dead in its tracks -- an awkward dead end from which it never completely recovers. But despite this, and many future stumbles (mostly during the fights, which range from, at best, sorta-funny to mostly not-at-all funny), Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a movie I wouldn't mind watching right now and then again tomorrow and probably again the next day, so densely packed is it with clever ideas and just plain gorgeous shots (it helps, too, that in the spirit of comic book paneling, Wright almost never repeats shots, resulting in something like 2500 camera set-ups in just under 2 hours).

02. Jackass 3D
There's something weirdly comforting about Jackass movies. It's just the right amount of prurient interest, plausible camaraderie and distillation of both narrative and stunt work into a kind of essence. Each sequence consists of three parts that function something like a narrative, yet with no fat: first the set-up, when they explain what's going to happen and give it an arbitrary name that is usually a totally non-clever, borderline literal explanation of the act itself (this somehow makes it funnier than if they did try to use puns or other wordplay); the part right before it happens, which is the real meat of the movie -- two movies + a TV show have given them plenty of experience with stretching the expectation of the event to the breaking point without feeling like phony, manufactured drama ala reality TV elimination processes; and then the actual event itself, which serves as both a gratifying release from part 2's suspense and as a hideous (and hilarious) punchline to the preceding events. Somehow it is almost always worse than what you expected. Only the few sequences of attempting to prank real-life people keep the movie from being even better, as they are all mostly atrocious and no amount of good will created by the previous hilarity can keep the laughs coming. I'm honestly surprised they survived the focus group process, as the whole theatre went from eye-watering belly laughs to near-crickets chirping at each one.

03. Cremaster 3
I walked in anticipating hating this. I'd seen Cremaster 1 & 2 earlier in the week and was only intermittently impressed, as 1 lacked the euphoria I would expect from an artsy ode to Busby Berkeley and 2 seemed like exactly the kind of endless, obtuse, indulgently symbolic and artsy nonsense that I'd imagined when I heard the words "avant-garde" and "cinema" together. Fortunately for me, Matthew Barney took the lessons learned from 2, got a big enough budget to afford a pristine HD digital camera, and set to work crafting some seriously beautiful and absurd images. It was like suddenly everything I'd disliked about 1 and 2 made more sense as a way of working through ideas to get to this culmination. The archly comic seriousness of American ritualism and backroom dealings as it relates to building a monument to the myth of capitalism struck an unexpected chord with me, even despite the aforementioned jabbering ladies in the audience. The second chunk was less successful, though I admit a lot of this could be lack of concentration due to distraction after The Event. Regardless, it felt like a semi-turning point in my movie-watching life. Like, hey guys, you were right and I was wrong -- maybe art is pretty cool after all.

04. Taboo
The first Nagisa Oshima film I've seen and it was something it took me quite a while to get a handle on. Right away I noticed the rather clever visual commentary on war and war training, as most of the film focuses on men practicing fencing with wooden kendo sticks and the camera follows the action with a detached, dispassionate steadiness, but as soon as the same men are thrown into a situation with actual swords and two guys trying to kill each other, the camera becomes a handheld, stumbling chaotic member of the fray. Like Full Metal Jacket, it suggests that no amount of training can prepare someone for the reality of war (though unlike FMJ, it only takes a couple of scenes to do so). The rest only came to me in pieces, later, and I still don't know if I made complete sense of the thing. I thought I was gonna watch a movie about gay samurais, but it felt more like a treatise on sex as a reflection of patriarchal possessiveness (sorta like Scott Pilgrim, but less sympathetic and more explicit) and status. Of the way hierarchies inspire power worship and the abuse of innocents for power grabbing. I never know how or where to rank movies that I walk out of feeling confused, but end up liking more as I think about them. Suffice to say it was enough to bump Oshima's early work up to the near top of my queue and I intend him to be the first director I investigate this new year.

05. (The Complete) Metropolis
This is a movie I feel like I have more problems with than nice things to say about, yet the awe that is inspired when I think about some of those great, monolithic sets compels me to say that it is a movie I appreciate, albeit with some major caveats. Firstly, let me just say that I think the film's soft, expressionistic lighting and sexual ambiguity was co-opted and then made much more potent by Howard Hawks in Scarface. I'll have more to write on that subject when it comes time for me to write my big, ambitious top 25-ish movie thing for the new year. Anyway, there's something very hypocritical and sanctimonious about Metropolis. The film begins by showing Froeder reveling in an Eden-like sanctuary of fruit trees and barely clothed women, gazing without much compunction at the scandalously visible nipples and curves of women vying for a chance in the hero's bed, only to later villify the wild seductress robot counterpart to the main heroine's chaste, virtuous school teacher. A million lascivious, prying eyes (an admittedly amazing sequence) don't do enough to gender balance the idea that in her eventual fate she gets not just what she deserves, but what she wants, as only the deathly fire seems to satiate her sexual lust. Awkward. Still just as awkward is the eventual ending, with Froeder serving as the metaphorical Heart that connects the Hands (the underground laborers who make Metropolis possible) and the Head (the cultivated, intellectual upper class who live in the lavish penthouses and Eden-like gardens) in peaceful harmony. It all seems weirdly patronizing and not at all in the supposedly socialist spirit of what they're getting at, as it still clearly divides the classes into people who are the Brain and people who are decidedly Not The Brain.

06. Resident Evil: Afterlife
This one is pure confectioners' sugar -- a sticky slow motion gun blasting bit of Wachowski-inspired cotton candy. Along with Jackass 3D, the only 3D movie I saw that felt as though it used 3D for its intended purpose. I am likely never going to buy that 3D is not a gimmick; that seeing something in 3D will somehow enhance the experience of watching a movie from a thematic or emotionally engrossing angle. It can be pretty, and goofy, and fun, and dizzying and will thus serve its purpose well for summer entertainments of this variety, but unless the technology grows by leaps and bounds very very quickly, it will continue to be something that enhances my distance from the piece I'm observing rather than its purported use of drawing me in further. But back to Resident Evil. Paul W.S. Anderson appears to have a pretty huge problem with a movie's mid-section. As in the first RE (and the only other one he personally directed), it opens with a fantastic and sustained bit of action filmmaking before spinning its wheels for several large intervals in the center only to whip out the figurative and literal big guns for the finale. The good outweighs the bad, the exciting outweighs the dull and the Matrix-y fights, while perhaps too close to their inspiration, are the first ones I've seen that expand on what worked about that movie 11 years ago, while cutting out all the stuff that didn't (like bullet-time -- seriously, it's really boring I don't know why it was a big deal other than nobody thought to do it before)

07. Despicable Me
To be honest I don't even quite remember what I liked about this movie (and for those who follow my numerical rankings, it just barely qualifies as a positive score with a 5.0), but here it is sitting at #7 on my list out of 40 movies seen in the theatre in year 2010. I guess there was something charmingly anarchic about the Looney Tunes-esque one-upmanship of the characters, as well as the kind of needless but a little bit sweet commentary on overbearing parents and childhood feelings of inadequacy and the desire for validation. It's certainly nothing new or unique, but in a year that saw me straining to eek whatever enjoyment I could out of most features, I did find myself almost never bored and certainly having to strain less than most.

Bottom 10 Theatre 2010:

10. The American
A waste of talent, as Clooney is clearly trying his serious best for a bid at Acting Recognition and continues to wear the hell out of a suit at all times, not to mention the three action scenes spaced out between a lot of fluffy sobriety are all legitimately exciting, proving that Corbijn could've made a pretty sweet action movie if he hadn't been all caught up in straight-faced art with a capital A. In crafting an ode to Melville Corbijn appears not to have noticed that, whatever its qualities, Le Samourai is a pretty damn silly movie and not at all without a sense of humorous detachment from its subjects. Nor would Antonioni ever trifle with as silly a metaphor as that butterfly shit.

09. The Expendables
Ugly, ugly, ugly. I didn't buy the revamped Rambo as anything but exploitation masquerading as anti-war sentiment and neither do I buy this as any kind of fun, go-get-em return to the heyday of '80s/'90s action. Only Terry Crews' big gun scene has any of the weird chutzpah mingled with self-aware winking that I kinda hoped the whole movie would be. The rest is just a weird series of people throwing, shooting, or otherwise attacking shit and then cutting to a guy who has popped out of nowhere for the sole purpose of dying. The movie has no idea how to film an environment and make it feel as if people are actually existing in it and moving through it. And even the worst '80s/'90s actioners at least let the audience know what was happening during the scenes, as this combines the worst of that era's careless body counts and awkward politics with this era's hideous editing and handheld camera.

08. Inception
Nearly everything about this movie irked me. From almost the first shot I felt as though the editing was going just a shade too quickly, as each shot seemed to cut at a rhythm that felt forced and unnatural -- just, weird and unpleasant. I was constantly distracted. Then people kept talking, basically forever. Explaining every aspect of every piece of every plot thread and seam to make sure even someone spending half the movie texting his girlfriend could still follow the action. Also, I didn't get what the big deal was with the rotating gravity hallway fight. Like every Nolan fight scene ever it was splotchy and borderline incomprehensible and hey I'm not gonna lie, I like the ending of The Transporter 2 with its spinning airplane cabin fight about a million times better. The snow bit, which everyone else seems to hate, was the only part that finally had my attention and made me wish the whole movie could be more video game-y and exploit having all 3 levels of dream world going on at once and each influencing the other. That's a good idea, but by the time it gets to that the whole heist is basically over and we get stuck with more boring Leo + wife drama.

07. Cremaster 2
Nearly kept me from even seeing Cremaster 3 (and did, at least sort of, cause me to skip 4 and 5). Everything that is good about 3 is sorta terrible about 2. It feels exactly as ponderous and artsy and wanting to look more beautiful than it actually ends up being as I feared the Cremaster cycle would be 7 years ago when it last played as a whole in Portland and was why I skipped the hell out of it then. Repetition that feels mostly for its own sake, as well as a looooooong and sloooooooow movement of ideas and events that is also mostly showyness rather than an attempt to entice contemplation.

06. Fred
I feel sorta bad putting this one in here, as it is a low budget short film that's the pet project of one of the claymation animators who worked on Coraline (pretty good movie). But I've had to suffer through it twice, as it was playing for a while at Portland's Living Room Theaters before their features, and suffer I did. I originally had it lower on the list, but I don't know that it's actively offensive like most of the lower categories -- just inept and dull and kinda depressing (titles before the film declare it a ten year labor of love, which just makes me feel bad -- like a jerk for hating it so much, but also just a weird and uncomfortable feeling of pity for the creators that they spent ten years making something so terrible (which I know is condescending and then I feel bad about that)).

05. Never Let Me Go
Do I remember this well enough to hate it (or, at least, intensely dislike it)? I remember spending the entire movie waiting to feel anything but apathy bordering on self-righteous indignation. I remember thinking they wasted three exceptionally capable actors on nonsense about our status as clockwork oranges in a horrible, cannibalistic society. Like Romanek set out to make the most boring version of The Island possible. Both movies are ideologically cringe-inducing, but at least one of them knows the best way to make people ignore squicky political views is with crazy car chases and beautiful, clean interior design -- not somber English countrysides and voice over narration.

04. Centurion
Previous to seeing this, it likely would've been Jonah Hex occupying this spot as the film that most felt like watching nothing, but Centurion heftily trumps that film, which at least had the weird part where he talked to his dead brother. This film is like a black hole of cinema, a place where you can go to watch and feel an endless void staring back at you. It is as if Neil Marshall hit a high point with The Descent and, like a roller coaster, decided now was the time to take a plunge back into awfulness with as much speed and force as possible. It makes me doubt even that film's qualities that the same person thought this scattershot hodge-podge of every sword & sandals cliche that never amounts to any feeling of viscera or pathos would ever be worth the time of a paying public. Not to mention, by far the worst offender of the teal & orange color scheme all year.

03. Dinner for Schmucks
The ultimate having cake and eating it comedy, as the titular sequence alternates asking us to laugh at the aforementioned schmucks before switching roles to feel sympathy for them and laugh scornfully at the dickhead rich people who have them over, it's The 40-Year-Old Virgin for eccentrics but without any of that movie's occasional insights into male stunted adolescence. Also, I do not get Zach Galifinakis' appeal at all. A waste of all the other more-talented cast members.

02. Piranha 3D
By far the ickiest and most depraved of all the movies I saw this year -- it feels almost like a cultural landmark that something this mercilessly cruel and hideous could be so highly praised by the collective critical body. Aside from Jerry O'Connell as the only person trying to turn all this macabre meanness into something that resembles an actual comedy, there is literally no reason to recommend this to anyone. It is hateful and, for a French director, embodies all the worst aspects of American horror puritanism and misogyny, alternately revelling in the flesh of nubile female bodies before eviscerating them in increasingly unnecessary ways. I now have a relative approximation of what it would look like to see a woman get her hair caught in an onboard motor and have that motor rip her scalp and the top of her face off. There was absolutely no reason at all ever to have this. Exhaustively depressing.

01. Enter the Void
Alternately depressing and aggravating, Gaspar Noe's treatise on the tragedy of wasted youth, love for your sister's and/or mother's supple mammaries and, of course, how awesome Kubrick's 2001 was. Abandoning actual mise-en-scene for 3 gimmick camera angles (POV, bird's-eye and a weird shot looking at the back of a head, forcing the audience to look around the head at the periphery of the image to make sense of the situation), he forgets that removing, or tightening to the point of breaking, one aspect of filmmaking gives increased importance to all the other parts. Unfortunately, mise-en-scene is not the only thing he abandons, as all the actors speak in halting monotones and utter pseudo-profound banalities contrived to sound, at least by Noe's estimation, like actual humans talking. So we have no characters, no dialogue, no acting and no composition -- only a film that feels like a prank. If it is a prank, well, congrats I guess? You got a seriously large amount of people to believe your movie is not a horrible piece of shit. Kudos? I don't know, this is the kind of movie that made me realize I can still get uncontrollably angry watching movies. So there's that.

Top 10 1st Time Viewings 2010:

01. Earrings of Madame de...
02. Stagecoach
03. 42nd Street
04. Man of the West
06. Gold Diggers of 1933
07. Snake Eyes
08. Osaka Elegy
09. The Tall T
10. The Naked Spur

Bottom 10 1st Time Viewings 2010:

10. Centurion
09. Youth in Revolt
08. The Twilight Saga: New Moon
07. Six-String Samurai
06. Suspect Zero
05. Dinner for Schmucks
04. 2012: Doomsday
03. Piranha 3D
02. Punisher: War Zone
01. Enter the Void

(At Reuben's Request) All Movies Of 2010 Ranked (more or less) In Order Of Preference:

*Note: I didn't exactly follow my numerical rankings, as numerical rankings are kind of a bullshit completely inexact science and for many I just went with my gut about how I think I feel about the movie right now.

Movies I Liked (or, at least, remember liking at the time):

Spider-Man 2
Munich
Earrings of Madame de...
Touch of Evil
Ugetsu
Torque
Rebel Without a Cause
The General
Stagecoach
42nd Street
The 400 Blows
Scarface
Street of Shame
Carrie
Man of the West
Singin' in the Rain
Gold Diggers of 1933
Snake Eyes
Hi, Mom
Osaka Elegy
The Tall T
The Naked Spur
The Beyond
Bend of the River
Cowards Bend the Knee
El Dorado
Blow Out
The Furies
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Dames
Day of the Outlaw
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Drums Along the Mohawk
Jackass 3D
The Island
On Dangerous Ground
Sisters of the Gion
Doppelganger
Saturday Night Fever
La Ronde
Twilight
Crank
Cremaster 3
The Red Balloon
Citizen Kane
Footlight Parade
Taboo
Blood Simple
What's Your Raashee?
Duel
Coraline
Pump Up the Volume
Spider-Man
Mission To Mars
Winchester '73
Joint Security Area
Sisters
The Lords of Dogtown
Patriotism
Jurassic Park
In a Lonely Place
Decision at Sundown
The Birds
A Serious Man
Paradise Now
Seven Men From Now
Empire of the Sun
The Lady From Shanghai
Metropolis
Le Plaisir
The Gold Rush (w/ Narration)
Gold Diggers of 1935
The Guard from Underground
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Bigger Than Life
RocknRolla
Trouble the Water
Resident Evil: Afterlife
Thirteen
The Lost World: Jurassic Park
The Weather Man
Anjaana Anjaani
Crank 2: High Voltage
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Hold You Tight
Ponyo
The Heart of the World
Charisma
Macao
Mad Max
Fiddler on the Roof
Border Incident
The Fury
The Bachelor & The Bobby-Soxer
Transformers
I Shot Jesse James
Role Models
Despicable Me

Movies I Had More Problems Than Not With, But Still Liked Certain Aspects Of:

Reign of Fire
Spider-Man 3
Mississippi Mermaid
An American Tail
Where the Wild Things Are
Gamer
I Can Do Bad All by Myself
Dirty Harry
Toy Story 3
Women of the Night
Election
Wallace & Gromit in 'A Matter of Loaf and Death'
Takers
Resident Evil
They Live by Night
The Quick and the Dead
The Kid
The Fugitive
True Grit (2010)
High Noon
Sansho the Bailiff
District B13: Ultimatum
Murder a la Mod
A Woman, A Gun and a Noodle Shop
Bad Boys II
Repo Man
The Aviator
Aguirre, The Wrath of God
Chungking Express
Mary and Max
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
North by Northwest
W.
Act Da Fool
The Fall of the Roman Empire
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
The Alley Cats
There Will Be Blood
Women Without Men
Notebook on Cities and Clothes
The Flight of the Phoenix (2004)
From Paris With Love
Flow: For Love of Water
The Stranger
Easy A

The Best Of The Worst:

Step Up 3D
Confessions of a Shopaholic
To Live and Die in L.A.
Synecdoche, New York
Clash of the Titans
The Baron of Arizona
Life During Wartime
Danger: Diabolik
Cremaster 1
The Social Network
The Town
Bottle Rocket (Short)
The Road
Date Night
Sherlock Holmes
Beavis and Butt-Head Do America
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans
The Dentist
Friday Night Lights
Star Trek
Around a Small Mountain
Wall Street
You're Never Too Young
The Punisher
The Loveless
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Hard Times
Killers
Jonah Hex
Eleven Minutes
Bandidas
State of Play
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
Spies Like Us
Unstoppable
Four Brothers
Monsters, Inc.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Paranormal Activity 2
Catfish
The American
The Expendables
Inception
Surrogates
Zombieland

Everything Else:

True Grit (1969)
Cremaster 2
The Counterfeiters
Brick
Crossroads
Broken Arrow
Rosewood (2009)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Book of Eli
Heartless
Eagle Eye
The Girl Who Played with Fire
Resident Evil: Apocalypse
An Unfinished Life
The Proposal
Never Let Me Go
Tron
Romancing The Stone
Donnie Darko
The Return of Frank James
Vampires Suck
Obsessed
The Dentist 2
Fred
The Rat King
Funny People
Gladiator
Centurion
Youth in Revolt
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Six-String Samurai
Suspect Zero
The Enforcer
The Delta Force
Dinner for Schmucks
2012: Doomsday
Punisher: War Zone
Piranha 3D
Enter the Void

Here's hoping for a more successful run (especially at the theatre) in 2011!

Movies Watched in 2011

2011-01-02T14:10:00.000-08:00

Rankings are out of 10 with half points.
Anything 5.0 and higher is more or less a thumbs up.
Anything 4.0-4.5 is a somewhat admirable failure.
Anything below that is varying degrees of despicable failure.

January:
01.01:
Harry Potter & The Sorcerer's Stone (2001) - Chris Columbus - DVD (2.0)
Offside (2006) - Jafar Panahi - DVD (8.5)
01.04:
Appaloosa (2008) - Ed Harris - DVD (5.5)
01.05:
Timecrimes (2007) - Nacho Vigalondo - DVD (2.0)
01.06:
Black Swan (2010) - Darren Aronofsky - Theatre (3.5)
01.07:
Irma Vep (1996) - Olivier Assayas - DVD (7.0)
01.11:
Timecop (1994) - Peter Hyams - DVD (5.0)
01.12:
Rumble Fish (1983) - Francis Ford Coppola - DVD (3.0)
01.14:
La Haine (1995) - Mathieu Kassovitz - DVD (3.5)
Hostel (2005) - Eli Roth - Blu-Ray (8.0)
The Ten (2007) - David Wain - Instant Watch (2.0)
01.16:
2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) - John Singleton - HD-DVR (3.5)
01.18:
Gold Diggers of 1937 (1936) - Lloyd Bacon & Busby Berkeley - DVD (6.0)
Next Day Air (2009) - Benny Boom - HD-DVR (6.5)
01.19:
La Jetee (1962) - Chris Marker - DVD (6.0)
01.21:
Bandslam (2009) - Todd Graff - HD-DVR (4.0)
01.23:
Tron: Legacy (2010) - Joseph Kosinski - Theatre (3.5)
01.24:
The Fast and the Furious (2001) - Rob Cohen - HD-DVR (4.0)
01.26:
A Serious Man (2009) - Joel & Ethan Coen - DVD (4.5)
01.27:
A Perfect Getaway (2009) - David Twohy - HD-DVR (4.5)
01.28:
South Pacific (1958) - Joshua Logan - Blu-Ray (2.0)
Laura (1944) - Otto Preminger - Instant Watch (6.0)
Bride Wars (2009) - Gary Winick - HD-DVR (3.0)
01.29:
Fast & Furious (2009) - Justin Lin - HD-DVR (4.5)
Rabbit Hole (2010) - John Cameron Mitchell - Theatre (7.0)
01.30:
Cabin Fever (2002) - Eli Roth - Blu-Ray (5.5)
01.31:
The Final Destination (2009) - David R. Ellis - HD-DVR (1.5)
Give 'Em Hell, Malone (2009) - Russell Mulcahy - HD-DVR (1.0)
Runaway (2010) *Short* - Kanye West - AVI Rip - (4.0)

Movies Watched in January: 29

February:
02.04:
The Hole (2001) - Nick Hamm - DVD (2.0)
02.05:
The Mechanic (2011) - Simon West - Theatre (3.5)
Kick-Ass (2010) - Matthew Vaughn - Blu-Ray (1.5)
The A-Team (2010) - Joe Carnahan - Blu-Ray (2.5)
02.09:
Jellyfish (2007) - Shira Geffen & Etgar Keret - DVD (2.0)
The Art of the Steal (2009) - Don Argott - DVD (4.0)
02.13:
The Green Hornet (2011) - Michel Gondry - Theatre (7.0)
Son of Babylon (2010) - Mohamed Al Daradji - Theatre (3.5)
02.15:
The Woodmans (2010) - G. Scott Willis - Theatre (5.5)
02.16:
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) - Apichatpong Weerasethakul - Theatre (8.0)
02.17:
Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010) - Banksy - Instant Watch (7.0)
X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) - Gavin Hood - HD-DVR (2.5)
02.19:
Incident By a Bank (2009) *Short* - Ruben Ostlund - Theatre (4.5)
The Accordion (2010) *Short* - Jafar Panahi - Theatre (7.0)
Flawed (2010) *Short* - Andrea Dorfman - Theatre (3.0)
The Wonder Hospital (2010) *Short* - Beomsik Shimbe Shim - Theatre (1.5)
Little Children, Big Words (2010) *Short* - Lisa James-Larsson - Theatre (3.5)
The Six Dollar Fifty Man (2009) *Short* - Mark Albiston & Louis Sutherland - Theatre (2.0)
The Double Hour (2009) - Giuseppe Capotondi - Theatre (2.0)
The Housemaid (2010) - Sang-Soo Im - Theatre (3.0)
02.20
Flamenco, Flamenco (2010) - Carlos Suara - Theatre (3.0)
My Tehran For Sale (2009) - Granaz Moussavi - Theatre (5.0)
02.22:
Me Broni Ba (2009) *Short* - Akosua Adoma Owusu - Theatre (3.0)
Atlantiques (2010) *Short* - Mati Diop - Theatre (4.0)
Everywhere was the Same (2007) *Short* - Basma Al Sharif - Theatre (2.5)
Long Shadows (2009) *Short* - Josh Bonnetta - Theatre (1.0)
Mamori (2010) *Short* - Karl Lemieux - Theatre (0.5)
April Snow (2010) *Short* - Lewis Klahr - Theatre (1.5)
Cry When It Happens (2010) *Short* - Laida Lertxundi - Theatre (1.0)
Shaun of the Dead (2004) - Edgar Wright - Blu-Ray (5.5)
02.23:
A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (2009) *Short* - Apichatpong Weerasethakul - AVI-Rip (7.0)
02.25:
Fresh (1994) - Boaz Yakin - DVD (7.0)
The Man Next Door (2009) - Mariano Cohn & Gaston Duprat - Theatre (3.0)
Mutant Girls Squad (2010) - Noboru Iguchi & Yoshihiro Nishimura & Tak Sakaguchi - Theatre (0.5)
02.26:
The Last Circus (2010) - Alex de la Iglesia - Theatre (7.0)

Movies Watched in February: 35

March:
03.02:
Cure (1997) - Kiyoshi Kurosawa - DVD (7.0)
03.05:
Unknown (2011) - Jaume Collet-Serra - Theatre (4.0)
03.09:
Moon (2009) - Duncan Jones - DVD (4.0)
Hot Fuzz (2007) - Edgar Wright - Blu-Ray (7.0)
03.10:
Following (1998) - Christopher Nolan - Instant Watch (1.5)
03.11:
Red Riding Hood (2011) - Catherine Hardwicke - Theatre (6.0)
03.12:
Paycheck (2003) - John Woo - Instant Watch (3.5)
03.16:
Behind Enemy Lines (2001) - John Moore - HD-DVR (4.0)
03.17:
Monsters (2010) - Gareth Edwards - Instant Watch (1.5)
03.20:
Braveheart (1995) - Mel Gibson - HD TV (3.5)
03.21:
Commando (1985) - Mark L. Lester - Instant Watch (8.0)
The Red Shoes (1948) - Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger - Theatre (6.5)
03.22:
Paul (2011) - Greg Mottola - Theatre (1.5)
03.23:
The Fighter (2010) - David O. Russell - Blu-Ray (5.0)
03.25:
Sucker Punch (2011) - Zac Snyder - Theatre (2.0)
03.27:
Raw Deal (1986) - John Irvin - Instant Watch (4.5)
03.29:
Dying of Laughter (1999) - Alex de la Iglesia - DVD (6.0)
03.30:
Crimson Gold (2003) - Jafar Panahi - DVD (6.0)

Movies Watched in March: 18

April:
04.01:
Tangled (2010) - Byran Howard & Nathan Greno - Blu-Ray (5.5)
04.03:
Speed Racer (2008) - Andy & Lana Wachowski - Blu-Ray (7.0)
04.08:
Office Killer (1997) - Cindy Sherman - DVD (6.5)
Source Code (2011) - Duncan Jones - Theatre (4.5)
04.15:
Hanna (2011) - Joe Wright - Theatre (2.5)
Total Recall (1990) - Paul Verhoeven - Blu-Ray (8.5)
04.16:
Certified Copy (2010) - Abbas Kiarostami - Theatre (8.5)
04.20:
Dhoom (2004) - Sanjay Gadhvi - DVD (3.5)
04.21:
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) - Chris Columbus - Blu-Ray (2.0)
04.26:
The Princess and the Frog (2009) - Ron Clements & John Musker - Instant Watch (4.0)
04.29:
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) - Apichatpong Weerasethakul - Theatre (8.0)

Movies Watched in April: 11

May:
05.03:
Fast Five (2011) - Justin Lin - Theatre (3.5)
05.05:
Robocop (1987) - Paul Verhoeven - Instant Watch (8.0)
05.06:
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) - Michael Bay - HD-DVR (4.5)
05.08:
The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) - Jacques Demy & Agnes Varda - Theatre (8.5)
05.11:
Time Regained (1999) - Raoul Ruiz - Theatre (N/S)
05.14:
Dellamorte Dellamore (1994) - Michele Soavi - DVD (0.5)
05.16:
Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011) - Werner Herzog - Theatre (3.5)
05.18:
Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) - Steve Pink - Instant Watch (3.0)
05.27:
Cobra (1986) - George Pan Cosmatos - Instant Watch (0.5)
05.30:
Railroaded (1947) - Anthony Mann - Instant Watch (6.0)
Ball of Fire (1941) - Howard Hawks - Instant Watch (8.5)
Showgirls (1995) - Paul Verhoeven - Blu-Ray (9.0)

Movies Watched in May: 12

June:
06.02:
The Hangover Part II (2011) - Todd Phillips - Theatre (1.0)
06.05:
Real Life (1979) - Albert Brooks - DVD (8.0)
X-Men: First Class (2011) - Matthew Vaughn - Theatre (4.0)
06.07:
No Strings Attached (2011) - Ivan Reitman - Blu-Ray (5.0)
06.08:
Blue Valentine (2010) - Derek Cianfrance - DVD (6.0)
06.10:
The Colonel's Account (1907) *Short* - Louis Feuillade - DVD (5.0)
A Very Fine Lady (1908) *Short* - Louis Feuillade - DVD (3.5)
The Tree of Life (2011) - Terrence Malick - Theatre (3.0)
06.11:
The War Game (1965) *Short* - Peter Watkins - Instant Watch (5.5)
06.15:
The Last Man on Earth (1964) - Ubaldo Ragona & Sidney Salkow - DVD (3.0)
The Box (2009) - Richard Kelly - DVD (2.5)
06.16:
Swordfish (2001) - Dominic Sena - DVD (3.5)
Man on Fire (2004) - Tony Scott - DVD (5.0)
06.17:
The Manchurian Candidate (2004) - Jonathan Demme - DVD (6.0)
Freejack (1992) - Geoff Murphy - DVD (2.5)
06.18:
X2: X-Men United (2003) - Bryan Singer - DVD (5.5)
X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) - Brett Ratner - DVD (4.0)
06.19:
Jurassic Park III (2001) - Joe Johnston - DVD (2.0)
Minority Report (2002) - Steven Spielberg - DVD (4.5)
The X-Files: I Want To Believe (2008) - Chris Carter - DVD (1.5)
06.20:
Mission: Impossible III (2006) - J.J. Abrams - DVD (3.5)
06.22:
Rango (2011) - Gore Verbinski - Theatre (2.0)
Scream 4 (2011) - Wes Craven - Theatre (3.0)
Limitless (2011) - Neil Burger - Theatre (4.0)
06.23:
Joy Ride (2001) - John Dahl - DVD (5.5)
Tangled (2010) - Bryan Howard & Nathan Greno - DVD (7.0)
06.24:
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) - Adam McKay - DVD (1.5)
06.27:
Bad Teacher (2011) - Jake Kasdan - Theatre (5.5)
06.28:
Super 8 (2011) - J.J. Abrams - Theatre (2.0)

Movies Watched in June: 29

July:
07.05:
Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) - Michael Bay - Theatre (4.0)
07.08:
Faster (2010) - George Tillman, Jr. - DVD (6.5)
07.09:
Horrible Bosses (2011) - Seth Gordon - Theatre (0.0)
07.10:
Skyline (2010) - The Brothers Strause - DVD (2.0)
07.14:
The Lincoln Lawyer (2011) - Brad Furman - DVD (3.0)
The Incredibles (2004) - Brad Bird - DVD (6.5)
7.16:
Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs (2009) - Phil Lord & Chris Miller - DVD (4.5)
The Green Hornet (2011) - Michel Gondry - DVD (7.0)
07.17:
Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time (2010) - Mike Newell - DVD (2.5)
07.19:
The Roommate (2011) - Christian E. Christiansen - DVD (4.0)
07.21:
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 (2011) - David Yates - Theatre (1.5)
07.22:
The Adjustment Bureau (2011) - Georg Nolfi - DVD (3.0)
07.26:
Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977/1997) - George Lucas - DVD (4.5)

Movies Watched in July: 13

August:
08.05:
Gun (2010) - Jessy Terrero - Instant Watch (2.0)
08.08:
Iron Man 2 (2010) - Jon Favreau - Instant Watch (1.5)
08.14:
Dragon (2006) - Leigh Scott - Instant Watch (1.0)
08.15:
30 Minutes Or Less (2011) - Ruben Fleischer - Theatre (4.0)
08.18:
Pitch Black (2000) - David Twohy - Instant Watch (2.5)
08.19:
Final Destination 5 (2011) - Steven Quale - Theatre (4.5)
Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) - Rupert Wyatt - Theatre (4.0)
08.20:
The Terminal (2004) - Steven Spielberg - DVD (3.5)
08.23:
Attack the Block (2011) - Joe Cornish - Theatre (5.0)
08.28:
Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2011) - Troy Nixey - Theatre (2.0)
Fright Night (2011) - Craig Gillespie - Theatre (3.5)
Conan the Barbarian (2011) - Marcus Nispel - Theatre (2.5)
08.30:
Colombiana (2011) - Olivier Megaton - Theatre (5.0)
08.31:
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) - Irvin Kershner - DVD (4.5)
Jumper (2008) - Doug Liman - DVD (5.0)

Movies Watched in August: 16

September:
09.01:
The Way of the Gun (2000) - Christopher McQuarrie - DVD (4.0)
09.08:
The 36th Precinct (2004) - Olivier Marchal - Instant Watch (3.0)
The Horde (2009) - Yannick Dahan & Benjamin Rocher - Instant Watch (2.0)
09.09:
Ratatouille (2007) - Brad Bird - DVD (8.5)
09.11:
Quarantine 2: Terminal (2011) - John G. Pogue - DVD (4.0)
09.12:
The Debt (2011) - John Madden - Theatre - (4.0)
09.13:
Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983) - Richard Marquand - DVD (3.5)
09.15:
CB4 (1993) - Tamra Davis - Instant Watch (3.0)
09.19:
Return of the Living Dead (1985) - Dan O'Bannon - Instant Watch (6.0)
09.28:
Stolen Kisses (1968) - Francois Truffaut - DVD (6.0)
Mr. Freedom (1969) - William Klein - DVD (6.5)

Movies Watched in September: 10

10.11:
M. Hulot's Holiday (1953) - Jacques Tati - DVD (3.5)
10.12:
Joy House (1964) - Rene Clement - DVD (2.5)
Stir Crazy (1980) - Sidney Poitier - Instant Watch (3.0)
10.14:
Conceiving Ada (1994) - Lynn Hershman-Leeson - Instant Watch (3.5)
10.16:
The Thing (2011) - Matthijs Van Heijningen Jr. - Theatre (3.0)
10.22:
Animal Kingdom (2010) - David Michod - Blu-Ray (4.0)
Cold Weather (2010) - Aaron Katz - Instant Watch (2.5)
10.30:
Moneyball (2011) - Bennett Miller - Theatre (6.0)

Movies Watched in October: 8

11.03:
Tangled (2010) - Byran Howard & Nathan Greno - Instant Watch (7.5)
11.05:
Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) - Jack Johnston - Blu-Ray (2.0)
Hesher (2010) - Spencer Susser - DVD (3.0)
The Ward (2011) - John Carpenter - Instant Watch (3.0)
11.08:
Ghosts of Mars (2001) - John Carpenter - Instant Watch (3.0)
11.11:
Drive (2011) - Nicolas Winding Refn - Theatre (3.5)
11.19:
Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 - Bill Condon - Theatre (4.0)
11.28:
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - Alfonso Cuaron - Blu-Ray (4.0)

Movies Watched in November: 8

12.03:
Friends With Benefits (2011) - Will Gluck - DVD (3.5)
Batman: Year One (2011) - Lauren Montgomery & Sam Liu - Blu-Ray (2.5)
12.09:
Hard Target (1993) - John Woo - Instant Watch (6.5)
12.10:
3000 Miles To Graceland (2001) - Demian Lichtenstein - Instant Watch (1.0)
12.11:
Last Man Standing (1996) - Walter Hill - Instant Watch (3.0)
12.13:
The Muppet Movie (1979) - James Frawley - DVD (2.0)
12.14:
Another Woman (1988) - Woody Allen - Instant Watch (4.0)
Daybreakers (2010) - Michael & Peter Spierig - Instant Watch (3.0)
12.22:
Friends With Benefits (2011) - Will Gluck - DVD (3.5)
12.23:
Warrior (2011) - Gavin O'Connor - DVD (4.5)
12.24:
Midnight In Paris (2011) - Woody Allen - DVD (2.5)
Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011) - Glenn Ficarra & John Requa - DVD (4.5)
Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace (1999) - George Lucas - AVI (2.0)
12.27:
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011) - David Fincher - Theatre (4.5)
12.30:
The Adventures of Tintin (2011) - Steven Spielberg - Theatre (3.5)

Movies Watched in December: 15

Movies Watched in 2010

2010-05-12T16:43:00.000-07:00

Rankings are out of 10 with half points.
Anything 5.0 and higher is more or less a thumbs up.
Anything 4.0-4.5 is a somewhat admirable failure.
Anything below that is varying degrees of despicable failure.

January:
01.04:
Confessions Of A Shopaholic (2009) - P.J. Hogan - Instant Watch (3.5)
Brick (2005) - Rian Johnson - Instant Watch (2.5)
01.13:
Bad Boys II (2003) - Michael Bay - DVD (4.0)
The Guard From Underground (1992) - Kiyoshi Kurosawa - DVD (5.5)
01.18:
The Island (2005) - Michael Bay - DVD (7.0)
01.23:
Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981) - Steven Spielberg - DVD (5.5)
01.24:
Gamer (2009) - Brian Neveldine & Brian Taylor - DVD (4.5)
01.25:
Transformers (2007) - Michael Bay - DVD (5.0)
01.29:
Romancing The Stone (1984) - Robert Zemeckis - Instant Watch (2.0)

Movies Watched in January: 9

February:
02.04:
Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom (1984) - Steven Spielberg - DVD (7.0)
02.07:
Star Trek (2009) - J.J. Abrams - Blu-Ray (3.5)
02.09:
Charisma (1999) - Kiyoshi Kurosawa - DVD (5.5)
02.14:
Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince (2009) - David Yates - Blu-Ray (3.0)
02.16:
The Earrings Of Madame De... (1953) - Max Ophuls - Instant Watch (9.0)
02.19:
An Unfinished Life (2005) - Lasse Hallstrom - DVD (2.0)
02.20:
Obsessed (2009) - Steve Shill - DVD (1.5)
02.21:
Touch Of Evil (1958) - Orson Welles - Instant Watch (9.0)
02.23:
Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade (1989) - Steven Spielberg - DVD (4.0)
02.24:
The 400 Blows (1959) - Francois Truffaut - Instant Watch (7.5)
The Stranger (1946) - Orson Welles - Instant Watch (4.0)
02.25:
Patriotism (1966) - Yukio Mishima - DVD (6.0)
02.26:
Eleven Minutes (2008) - Michael Selditch & Robert Tate - DVD (3.0)
Spider-Man (2001) - Sam Raimi - Blu-Ray (6.0)
02.27:
Spider-Man 2 (2004) - Sam Raimi - Blu-Ray (8.5)

Movies Watched in February: 15

March:
03.03:
The Lady From Shanghai (1947) - Orson Welles - Instant Watch (6.0)
A Serious Man (2009) - Joel Coen - Blu-Ray (6.5)
03.05:
Spider-Man 3 (2007) - Sam Raimi - Blu-Ray (4.5)
03.06:
Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (2008) - Steven Spielberg - Blu-Ray (4.0)
03.09:
Election (2005) - Johnnie To - Instant Watch (4.5)
The Alley Cats (1966) - Radley Metzger - Instant Watch (4.0)
03.10:
La Ronde (1950) - Max Ophuls - DVD (6.5)
03.14:
An American Tail (1986) - Don Bluth - Instant Watch (4.5)
03.15:
Fiddler On The Roof (1971) - Norman Jewison - DVD (5.0)
03.16:
Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen (2009) - Michael Bay - Blu-Ray (5.5)
03.18:
RocknRolla (2008) - Guy Ritchie - Blu-Ray (5.0)
Synecdoche, New York (2008) - Charlie Kaufman - Instant Watch (4.0)
03.23:
Duel (1971) - Steven Spielberg - DVD (7.0)
03.24:
Coraline (2009) - Henry Selick - Blu-Ray (7.5)
03.25:
Tron (1982) - Steven Lisberger - DVD (2.5)
03.27:
Munich (2005) - Steven Spielberg - DVD (9.5)

Movies Watched in March: 16

April:
04.01:
Eagle Eye (2008) - D.J. Caruso - Blu-Ray (2.0)
04.03:
Saturday Night Fever (1977) - John Badham - Blu-Ray (7.0)
04.04:
Reign Of Fire (2002) - Rob Bowman - Instant Watch (4.0)
04.05:
Paradise Now (2005) - Hany Abu-Assad - DVD (6.5)
04.08:
Twilight (2008) - Catherine Hardwicke - Blu-Ray (6.5)
04.09:
The Last Days Of Disco (1998) - Whit Stillman - DVD (6.0)
The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009) - Chris Weitz - Blu-Ray (1.5)
04.11:
Le Plaisir (1952) - Max Ophuls - DVD (6.0)
04.12:
Where the Wild Things Are (2009) - Spike Jonze - Blu-Ray (5.0)
Sherlock Holmes (2009) - Guy Ritchie - Blu-Ray (3.0)
04.14:
Beavis And Butt-Head Do America (1996) - Mike Judge - Instant Watch (3.5)
04.16:
To Live And Die In L.A. (1985) - William Friedkin - DVD (4.5)
04.22:
Trouble The Water (2008) - Tia Lessin & Carl Deal - DVD (5.5)
04.23:
The Punisher (2004) - Jonathan Hensleigh - Blu-Ray (3.0)
04.29:
Punisher: War Zone (2008) - Lexi Alexander - Blu-Ray (0.5)
04.30:
District B13: Ultimatum (2009) - Patrick Alessandrin - Blu-Ray (4.5)
Funny People (2009) - Judd Apatow - Blu-Ray (1.0)

Movies Watched in April: 17

May:
05.12:
Ponyo (2009) - Hayao Miyazaki - Blu-Ray (5.5)
05.13:
Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf (1966) - Mike Nichols - Instant Watch (3.0)
05.14:
Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call - New Orleans (2009) - Werner Herzog - Blu-Ray (3.5)
05.16:
The Birds (1963) - Alfred Hitchcock - Instant Watch (6.5)
Suspect Zero (2004) - E. Elias Merhige - Instant Watch (1.0)
05.18:
Cowards Bend The Knee (2003) - Guy Maddin - DVD (7.5)
05.19:
The Loveless (1982) - Kathryn Bigelow & Monty Montgomery - DVD (3.5)
They Live By Night (1949) - Nicholas Ray - DVD (4.0)
05.21:
Torque (2004) - Joseph Kahn - DVD - (8.5)
05.23:
Clash Of The Titans (2010) - Louis Letterrier - Theatre (3.0)
05.24:
Mission To Mars (2000) - Brian De Palma - DVD (6.0)
05.25:
The Flight Of The Phoenix (2004) - John Moore - Blu-Ray (4.0)
05.26:
The Lords Of Dogtown (2005) - Catherine Hardwicke - DVD (5.5)
05.28:
Blood Simple (1986) - Joel Coen - DVD (7.0)
05.31:
Thirteen (2003) - Catherine Hardwicke - DVD (5.5)

Movies Watched in May: 15

June:
06.01:
Donnie Darko (2001) - Richard Kelly - Instant Watch (2.0)
06.18:
El Dorado (1966) - Howard Hawks - DVD (7.5)
06.19:
The Dentist (1996) - Brian Yuzna - AVI Rip (3.0)
The Dentist 2 (1998) - Brian Yuzna - AVI Rip (1.5)
06.21:
Winchester '73 (1950) - Anthony Mann - DVD (6.5)
06.22:
Hold You Tight (1997) - Stanley Kwan - DVD (5.5)
06.24:
Killers (2010) - Robert Luketic - Theatre (2.5)
06.25:
The Furies (1950) - Anthony Mann - DVD (7.0)
06.26:
From Paris With Love (2010) - Pierre Morel - Blu-Ray (4.0)
06.27:
Jonah Hex (2010) - Jimmy Hayward - Theatre (2.0)
I Can Do Bad All By Myself (2009) - Tyler Perry - AVI Rip (4.5)
06.30:
I Shot Jesse James (1949) - Samuel Fuller - DVD (5.0)
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010) - David Slade - Theatre (3.5)

Movies Watched in June: 13

July:
07.01:
The Book Of Eli (2010) - Allen & Albert Hughes - Blu-Ray (2.5)
07.02:
Citizen Kane (1941) - Orson Welles - DVD (7.5)
07.03:
Hard Times (1975) - Walter Hill - DVD (3.5)
07.04:
Stagecoach (1939) - John Ford - Instant Watch (7.5)
07.05:
Zombieland (2009) - Ruben Fleischer - Instant Watch (3.0)
07.06:
Mad Max (1979) - George Miller - Instant Watch (5.0)
07.07:
You're Never Too Young (1955) - Norman Taurog - DVD (3.5)
07.08:
The Bachelor And The Bobby-Soxer (1947) - Irving Reis - DVD (5.0)
Bandidas (2006) - Joachim Roenning & Espen Sandberg - DVD (3.0)
07.10:
The Return Of Frank James (1940) - Fritz Lang - DVD (2.0)
Toy Story 3 (2010) - Lee Unkrich - Theatre (4.5)
07.12:
The Road (2009) - John Hillcoat - Blu-Ray (3.5)
07.13:
Metropolis (1927) - Fritz Lang - Theatre (6.0)
07.14:
Bend of the River (1952) - Anthony Mann - DVD (8.0)
07.15:
Joint Security Area (2000) - Chan-Wook Park - DVD (6.0)
07.17:
The Naked Spur (1953) - Anthony Mann - DVD (8.5)
Inception (2010) - Christopher Nolan - Theatre (3.0)
07.19:
Six-String Samurai (1998) - Lance Mungia - DVD (1.5)
07.20:
The Rat King (2010) *Short* - Benjamin Parslow - Streaming (1.5)
07.24:
Drums Along The Mohawk (1939) - John Ford - DVD (7.0)
07.25:
Bottle Rocket (1994) *Short* - Wes Anderson - Streaming (3.5)
07.27:
Despicable Me (2010) - Chris Renaud & Pierre Coffin - Theatre (5.0)
Rosewood (2010) *Short* - Marvin Choi - Streaming (2.0)
07.29:
The Heart of the World (2000) *Short* - Guy Maddin - Streaming (5.0)
Crossroads (2002) - Tamra Davis - DVD (2.5)
07.31:
Empire Of The Sun (1987) - Steven Spielberg - DVD (6.5)

Movies Watched in July: 26

August:
08.04:
What's Your Raashee? (2009) - Ashutosh Gowariker - Instant Watch (6.5)
08.08:
Step Up 3D (2010) - Jon Chu - Theatre (3.5)
08.09:
The Fugitive (1993) - Andrew Davis - Instant Watch (4.5)
08.10:
Dinner For Schmucks (2010) - Jay Roach - Theatre (1.0)
08.11:
Jurassic Park (1993) - Steven Spielberg - DVD (6.0)
08.14:
The Expendables (2010) - Sylvester Stallone - Theatre (3.0)
08.15:
Man Of The West (1958) - Anthony Mann - DVD (8.5)
Crank (2006) - Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor - Blu-Ray (6.5)
Monsters, Inc. (2001) - Pete Docter, David Silverman & Lee Unkrich - Instant Watch (3.5)
08.17:
The Proposal (2009) - Anne Fletcher - Instant Watch (2.0)
08.19:
Wallace & Gromit in 'A Matter of Loaf and Death' (2008) *Short* - Nick Park - Instant Watch (4.5)
08.20:
Seven Men From Now (1956) - Budd Boetticher - DVD (5.5)
Day of the Outlaw (1959) - Andre De Toth - DVD (7.0)
08.22:
Surrogates (2009) - Jonathan Mostow - Instant Watch (3.5)
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010) - Edgar Wright - Theatre (6.5)
08.23:
Crank 2: High Voltage (2009) - Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor - Blu-Ray (4.5)
08.25:
Snake Eyes (1998) - Brian De Palma - DVD (8.0)
08.26:
High Noon (1952) - Fred Zinneman - DVD (4.5)
08.28:
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) - Steven Spielberg - DVD (5.0)
08.29:
Decision At Sundown (1957) - Budd Boetticher - DVD (6.5)
Piranha 3D (2010) - Alexandre Aja - Theatre (0.5)
Mary And Max (2009) - Adam Elliot - DVD (4.0)
08.30:
Takers (2010) - John Lussenhop - Theatre (4.5)
Youth In Revolt (2009) - Miguel Arteta - DVD (1.5)
08.31:
Twilight (2008) - Catherine Hardwicke - Blu-Ray (6.5)

Movies Watched in August: 25

September:
09.05:
Hi, Mom (1970) - Brian De Palma - DVD (8.0)
Life During Wartime (2010) - Todd Solondz - Theatre (3.5)
09.06:
The Tall T (1957) - Budd Boetticher - DVD (8.0)
Friday Night Lights (2004) - Peter Berg - DVD (2.5)
09.07:
Blow Out (1981) - Brian De Palma - AVI (7.0)
09.08:
Murder a la Mod (1968) - Brian De Palma - DVD (4.0)
The American (2010) - Anton Corbijn - Theatre (3.0)
Mississippi Mermaid (1969) - Francois Truffaut - Theatre (4.5)
09.09:
Platoon (1986) - Oliver Stone - DVD (5.5)
The Delta Force (1986) - Menahem Golan - DVD (1.5)
09.10:
Border Incident (1949) - Anthony Mann - DVD (5.0)
The Fury (1978) - Brian De Palma - DVD (5.5)
09.12:
Wall Street (1987) - Oliver Stone - Blu-Ray (3.0)
Four Brothers (2005) - John Singleton - DVD (3.5)
09.13:
Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010) - Paul W.S. Anderson - Theatre (5.5)
09.14:
W. (2008) - Oliver Stone - DVD (4.0)
Women Without Men (2009) - Shirin Neshat - Theatre (4.0)
09.15:
Centurion (2010) - Neil Marshall - Theatre (1.5)
09.16:
Sisters (1973) - Brian De Palma - DVD (6.5)
Gladiator (2000) - Ridley Scott - DVD (1.5)
09.17:
Fred (2010) *Short* - Misha Klein - Theatre (1.0)
A Woman, A Gun And A Noodle Shop (2010) - Zhang Yimou - Theatre (4.0)
09.20:
The Town (2010) - Ben Affleck - Theatre (3.5)
09.22:
The Red Balloon (1956) - Albert Lamorisse - DVD (6.5)
09.23:
Act Da Fool (2010) *Short* - Harmony Korine - Streaming (4.0)
09.24:
Pump Up The Volume (1990) - Allan Moyle - DVD (6.5)
Danger: Diabolik (1968) - Mario Bava - DVD (3.5)
The Aviator (2004) - Martin Scorsese - DVD (4.0)
09.25:
Cremaster 1 (1996) - Matthew Barney - Theatre (3.5)
Cremaster 2 (1999) - Matthew Barney - Theatre (2.5)
09.27:
Rebel Without A Cause (1955) - Nicholas Ray - DVD (8.0)
09.30:
Cremaster 3 (2002) - Matthew Barney - Theatre (6.5)

Movies Watched in September: 32

October:
10.01:
Easy A (2010) - Will Gluck - Theatre (4.0)
10.02:
Doppelganger (2003) - Kiyoshi Kurosawa - DVD (7.0)
10.04:
Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972) - Werner Herzog - DVD (4.0)
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) - Oliver Stone - Theatre (4.0)
10.06:
The Social Network (2010) - David Fincher - Theatre (3.5)
10.08:
Carrie (1976) - Brian De Palma - Blu-Ray (8.0)
Never Let Me Go (2010) - Mark Romanek - Theatre (2.0)
10.09:
In A Lonely Place (1950) - Nicholas Ray - DVD (6.5)
10.11:
Stagecoach (1939) - John Ford - DVD (8.5)
10.13:
Dirty Harry (1971) - Don Siegel - DVD (4.5)
10.14:
Rebel Without A Cause (1955) - Nicholas Ray - DVD (8.5)
10.15:
Catfish (2010) - Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman - Theatre (3.0)
10.17:
Jackass 3D (2010) - Jeff Tremaine - Theatre (7.0)
On Dangerous Ground (1952) - Nicholas Ray - DVD (7.0)
10.20:
North By Northwest (1959) - Alfred Hitchcock - DVD (4.0)
The Enforcer (1976) - James Fargo - DVD (1.5)
10.21:
Scarface (1932) - Howard Hawks - DVD (7.5)
Notebook On Cities And Clothes (1989) - Wim Wenders - DVD (4.0)
10.27:
The Beyond (1981) - Lucio Fulci - DVD (8.0)
Paranormal Activity 2 (2010) - Tod Williams - Theatre (3.5)
The Kid (1921) - Charles Chaplin - DVD (4.5)
10.29:
Macao (1952) - Josef von Sternberg & Nicholas Ray - DVD (5.0)

Movies Watched in October: 22

November:
11.01:
Ugetsu (1953) - Kenji Mizoguchi - DVD (9.0)
Bigger Than Life (1956) - Nicholas Ray - Blu-Ray (6.5)
11.03:
Around a Small Mountain (2009) - Jacques Rivette - Theatre (3.5)
11.04:
Enter the Void (2010) - Gaspar Noe - Theatre (0.5)
11.06:
Vampires Suck (2010) - Aaron Seltzer & Jason Friedberg - AVI Rip (1.5)
Role Models (2008) - David Wain - DVD (5.0)
11.08:
Resident Evil (2002) - Paul W.S. Anderson - Blu-Ray (4.5)
Chungking Express (1994) - Wong Kar-Wai - DVD (4.0)
Sisters Of The Gion (1936) - Kenji Mizoguchi - DVD (6.5)
11.09:
The Baron of Arizona (1940) - Samuel Fuller - DVD (3.5)
11.10:
True Grit (1969) - Henry Hathaway - DVD (2.5)
11.11:
There Will Be Blood (2007) - Paul Thomas Anderson - DVD (4.5)
Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) - Alexander Witt - Blu-Ray (2.0)
11.14:
2012: Doomsday (2008) - Nick Everhart - DVD (0.5)
11.16:
Osaka Elegy (1936) - Kenji Mizoguchi - DVD (7.5)
11.19:
The Fall Of The Roman Empire (1964) - Anthony Mann - DVD (4.5)
11.20:
Women Of The Night (1948) - Kenji Mizoguchi - DVD (4.5)
11.21:
Ugetsu (1953) - Kenji Mizoguchi - DVD (9.0)
11.22:
Singin' In The Rain (1952) - Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly - DVD (8.0)
The Quick And The Dead (1995) - Sam Raimi - DVD (4.5)
11.27:
The Weather Man (2005) - Gore Verbinski - DVD (5.5)
11.28:
Unstoppable (2010) - Tony Scott - Theatre (3.5)
11.29:
The Gold Rush *w/ Narration* (1925/1942) - Charles Chaplin - DVD (6.0)
The General (1926) - Buster Keaton - DVD (8.5)

Movies Watched in November: 24

December:
12.01:
Flow: For Love Of Water (2008) - Irena Salina - DVD (4.0)
12.02:
Spies Like Us (1985) - John Landis - DVD (3.0)
12.03:
Footlight Parade (1933) - Lloyd Bacon & Busby Berkeley - DVD (7.0)
12.04:
Sansho The Bailiff (1954) - Kenji Mizoguchi - DVD (4.5)
12.06:
Street Of Shame (1956) - Kenji Mizoguchi - DVD (8.0)
42nd Street (1933) - Lloyd Bacon & Busby Berkeley - DVD (8.5)
12.08:
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010) - Edgar Wright - Blu-Ray (7.0)
Heartless (2010) - Philip Ridley - Theatre (2.5)
12.09:
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010) - Edgar Wright - Blu-Ray (7.0)
Taboo (1999) - Nagisa Oshima - Theatre (6.0)
12.11:
Broken Arrow (1996) - John Woo - DVD (2.5)
12.12:
Repo Man (1984) - Alex Cox - Instant Watch (4.0)
12.13:
State Of Play (2009) - Kevin MacDonald - DVD (3.0)
The Counterfeiters (2007) - Stefan Ruzowitzky - DVD (2.5)
12.16:
Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows (2010) - David Yates - Theatre (3.0)
12.19:
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2009) - Niels Arden Oplev - DVD (2.5)
12.20:
The Girl Who Played With Fire (2009) - Daniel Alfredson - DVD (2.0)
12.21:
Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) - Mervyn LeRoy & Busby Berkeley - DVD (8.0)
Anjaana Anjaani (2010) - Siddharth Anand - DVD (5.5)
12.25:
True Grit (2010) - Joel & Ethan Coen - Theatre (4.5)
Dames (1934) - Ray Enright & Busby Berkeley - DVD (7.0)
12.26:
Date Night (2010) - Shawn Levy - DVD (3.5)
12.27:
Easy A (2010) - Will Gluck - DVD (4.0)
12.28:
Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935) - Busby Berkeley - DVD (6.0)

Movies Watched in December: 23

Movies Seen in Theatre: 40
Movies Seen Total: 238