Archive for July, 2008

Youtubish glory!; Das Boot review

July 17, 2008 at 2:34 am · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , ,

So, in addition to the amazing music video I linked to yesterday, a couple amazing video clips online have caught my attention.  The first one is a 20-second clip titled “The Dramatic Lemur” which, for my money, totally owns “The Dramatic Chipmunk” (which is really a prairie dog anyway).  The second one is far more legitimate.  It is not a Youtube clip.  It is a musical entitled “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog“.  I’m going to state just the facts about it, because those are all you need to shit your pants in amazement.  It is created by Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and Firefly.  It stars Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion (star of Firefly) as a supervillain and a superhero, respectively.  It is a musical in three parts that are free online now, but will not be beyond Sunday.  It is so amazing I can’t stand it.  That last part was opinion, but damned if I don’t believe it’s fact.

Das Boot is a German movie made in 1981, written and directed by Wolfgang Petersen and starring Jürgen Prochnow.  It is not the weird-ass drinking game featured in the climactic scene of Beerfest, though that also featured Prochnow, coincidentally.  I assure you, he is not a strangely non-threatening corporate villain here.  He’s a totally badass, half-crazy submarine captain.

This movie clocks in at 3 and a half hours, meaning it’s a real commitment of a movie, and like most commitments, you’re not really sure that everyone will survive the whole way through, and by the end, you’re sure everyone will not survive.

But let’s get one thing straight: this movie kicks total ass.  I would not have expected a movie that’s so dark and introspective to have so many awesome badass moments, but this movie was choc-full-o’ them, and most of them came from Prochnow.  He had this look that he would give from time to time that I would just pump my fist at, where his eyes would just narrow and slide lazily from a thousand-mile stare towards the person he was addressing, and he would break into a smile that was either rueful or sly, depending on the situation.  I really was thinking, “Wow, this guy’s either totally insane or the most sane guy ever, but I can’t tell which yet.”  However, as the movie progresses, I leant more towards the crazy side, though that really took nothing away from his character’s pathos.

Like with most of the movies I have reviewed positively on this site that may not be the most watched among my readers, I’m going to stray from spoilers, so I’ll focus on the technique side of things, since the plot is pretty consistenly great and in my mind, unassailable.

The writing: Awesome, because it has those long pregnant pauses that can build drama like words never can, and a great movie knows when to let a moment breathe; it also has those one liners that are like the word GRAVITAS!!!! scrolling across the bottom of the screen – like when the submarine is shipping out to sea and the reporter is taking pictures, Prochnow’s character says, “Take pictures of the crew returning, not putting out to sea.  They’ll have grown beards by then. It would shame the Tommies to see mere boys give them Hell. Baby faces. Ones that should still suck mama’s breast.”  He shows cynicism for the higher-ups in war, and for war in general, but he shows nothing but pride for his men, even though he knows they’re still children.  The perfect leader.

The acting: Beyond Prochnow, it’s mostly awesome, though there were a couple of the minor sailors I thought were just not developed actors – not really anyone’s fault, they needed to cast young, so they got young actors.  However, a couple supporting characters really caught my eye.  Heinz Hoenig played Heinrich, the boat’s sonar operator and medic, and it’s sad that the movie was made nearly twenty years ago.  Otherwise, I would have a new mancrush.  He’s completely magnetic, and that comes without overplaying a single line.  His performance was flawless.  Also, Hubertus Bengsch plays the 1st Lieutenant, who is the staunch patriot for Hitler, who says all the right things, whose beliefs get broken down as he gets more broken down over the course of the movie.  When he starts growing a beard with everyone else, you can tell and it rules to see that kind of character development.

The technical aspect of the movie, from directing to editing to sound and everything was the real star, however.  I don’t want to get into real specifics, I just think that the very intimate and claustrophobic submarine setting was emphasized incredibly well, and I wish that people who see this movie after reading this try to keep that in the back of their mind when they watch the movie, because it really deserves appreciation.

This is one of my longest reviews, which is appropriate for a long movie like this, so I won’t drag it along any farther.  Good movie.

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Long weekend over; Dante’s Peak review

July 16, 2008 at 3:47 am · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , ,

Long story short: I had a really busy few days and decided to de-prioritize blogging for a while, but I’m back with a couple movie reviews (tonight and tomorrow) before I get to some music from the upcoming Siren Music Festival at Coney Island.

A personal note first, though: I submit to Nicole a nomination for a BOTO pick for worst shoe salesman ever – the guy at Finish Line who recommended these Nike Shox shoes because I told him I had low arches.  He gave me a size 10 shoe along with “ThinFit” insoles, meant to be worn in dress shoes that you’ve outgrown but would still like to fit in (read: NOT RUNNING SHOES).  What’s so wrong with that? Well, there’s a story that explains that.  When I went out for my first run in these new shoes, after about two minutes of running, my feet were in excruciating pain that was making its way up all the joints of my left leg.  I decided something was wrong and went back the next day to Finish Line, and talked to the manager.  Turns out that my feet were actually 11’s, and I was informed about the insoles I previously mentioned.  Rage, then the purchasing of New Balance shoes, followed.

Dante’s Peak is a hilariously bad movie, the reason I chose to watch it rather than the last hour or so of Das Boot, the review of which will come tomorrow.  I wanted the review I came back with to be a light one, and what could be more light than a town-destroying volcano?

I’m not going to go into too much depth about the movie itself, and this won’t be a terribly long review.  Here are some quick hits:

  • Wow, they really tried to make Pierce Brosnan an American character.  Wow, did it not work.  At all.
  • I love how the giant cloud of ash overtakes the entire town in mere seconds, save for the one street on which Pierce Brosnan’s truck is driving, natch.
  • If you read this and then watch the movie, try not to imagine the red-bearded guy as Timothy Busfield.  Go ahead, try not to.  Now you can’t.
  • Aw, the mayor still works at the coffee shop she owns in town.  You’d think that between those two jobs, she could pay for one waitress.
  • Speaking of the mayor, if her last name is Wando, she’s not blonde and blue-eyed, and she doesn’t live in the Pacific Northwest.  At least if it was Watto, she’d be more qualified to run the coffee shop, provided it sold a few spare parts and gambled away a few child slaves.
  • All hail Pierce Brosnan’s shirt, which has the power to withstand sulfuric acid better than a metal boat.  All hail.
  • Here’s to you, Grandma Ruth.  Let’s go over how many different ways she fucked up: She suggested a swim in the acid lake, refused to leave her cabin-on-the-volcano, which prompted her idiot grandkids to drive up to try to save her, prompting their idiot mom and idiot Pierce Brosnan to drive up and save them, which led to them all going boating through the acid lake, where, when the acid ate the propeller of the boat they were taking across, she jumped into the acid to pull the boat to shore, then seemed surprised to find that the acid was, in fact, painful.  After being carried halfway down the mountain, her last words were, “At least I got to die on the mountain,” completely ignoring that the mountain, in fact, murdered her.  Here’s to you, so drink.  Drink up.  Drink up.  Drink up.
  • Props to Ethan for pointing out the worst-delivered and worst-written line in the movie.  I can’t possibly relate how bad it was in text, so just watch the last ten minutes and find the line by the mousy-haired girl on the volcanology staff.  It will probably jump out at you.
  • There were a couple of what I like to call “foreshadowing hammers” here (meaning, times where the movie hits you in the face with a hammer labeled FORESHADOWING), but my favorite was when the squirrels were laying around dead, and the mayor of the fucking town, responsible for the well-being of the town says, “Must be some sort of squirrel epidemic,” then just moves on.  Well, doucheclown, don’t you think it’s your job to alert some sort of person qualified to investigate “squirrel epidemics”?
  • My favorite “oh my god, that’s actually blatantly false” quote comes from Mayor Wando and rounds out this review that wound up pretty long because I like bullet points: “A man who looks at a rock must have a lot on his mind.”

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No prologue – Ratatat review

July 11, 2008 at 3:43 am · Filed under Music Reviews ·Tagged , , , ,

For those who don’t know, Ratatat is a couple of guys who like to play electric guitar and synth, and combine the two into relatively downtempo electronic music.  Their first album, which was self titled, was a fun listen, pretty even throughout.  What jumped out at me was their sound – just the general tone of the music is pretty cool in kind of a Flash-era Queen/Daft Punk way which I really dug.  Then their second album, Classics, was more of the same.  More of exactly the same.  It was pretty damn striking how little was different between the two albums, and that was a huge disappointment.

Their third LP, cleverly titled LP3 (Hey! Yeah! I get it! Exactly like Portishead did earlier this year when their third album was called Third! Exactly the same! Sooo clever! Ha ha! Cleverness!), is thankfully a progression, and if you like midtempo electronic music, I have a hard time seeing why you wouldn’t like this album.  As opposed to being just guitar-onica, this uses more straight techno influences as well as some latin spice thrown in (“Shempi” could come from a Kinky album, if it was a little faster and a little softer).  I mean, two of the tracks are Spanish words, for chrissakes.  But really, none of these terms apply to every track on the album, and I think that’s the biggest step for Ratatat: a more varied approach.  Classics, and even Ratatat to an extent, was downright boring because it was so one-note.  This keeps it varied.

“Brulée” has a bit of a Margaritaville tinge, if you can believe it.  “Mumtaz Khan” has some definite Middle Eastern and Indian influence, with a smidge of Reggae thrown in.  I really think Ratatat is at the top of its game here; its influence-mixing is really great to hear, but that’s the one problem I have with Ratatat that I don’t think is possible to fix.  Even at what I think is their peak, they’re not good enough to rise above their influences, which is really the mark of a great band.  Though their sound is unique, it’s really on more of a horizontal level, as in, using influences to be different on the same level, than on a vertical level, which is using influences to create something that goes beyond.

I think this is as good as Ratatat gets, which is very good, but not great.  But hey guys, prove me wrong with LP4 (which is actually the fucking name of the next fucking album, completely fucking serious), why don’t you?

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No review tonight

July 10, 2008 at 2:38 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged

I just plum ran out of ideas for what to review tonight, since I didn’t have time for a movie, and I always need to listen to an album I review for a couple days.  I promise another review tomorrow night.

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Siren Music Festival prep; Beck review

July 9, 2008 at 2:28 am · Filed under Music Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’m beginning to compile music from artists playing at Siren Music Festival, the festival of the free variety at Coney Island Saturday, 7/19 that I am looking forward to immensely.  I want to get to know bands so I can choose correctly between the two stages that will have acts then.  Bands that I will try to get to know better: Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks (like I’m going to miss them anyway), Islands, Ra Ra Riot, The Helio Sequence, Jaguar Love, Annuals, Film School, Parts & Labor, and These Are Powers.  Anyone with a stock of recent albums by these guys shoot them my way if you please.  Reviews of these will probably come in some volume.

I’m a Beck fan, despite the fact that it’s no longer trendy to like him, and I even liked Guero a considerable amount, and didn’t think The Information was too awful.  The one gripe I’ve had with almost all of his albums though, has been that they’re just too long.  I try to appreciate albums from beginning to end, and I take points off personally when it’s a struggle to do that.  I think that the fact that Beck’s brand new album, Modern Guilt, is only 33 minutes long, is a positive stroke, and that alone will bring people back into his camp.

As many know, DJ Danger Mouse, whose genius is becoming more and more universally accepted, produced this album, and though it’s not as obvious as his work with Gorillaz on the awesome Demon Days, it obviously helps, and the tracks that are more unique for Beck (and thus, better songs, because unique Beck = good Beck) are the ones that Danger Mouse had a bigger hand in.

This album isn’t great, but thank God, it isn’t half bad either.  Unlike the great Beck albums of yore, the first track is decidedly not the best on the album – gone are the days of “Loser”, “Devil’s Haircut” and “Sexx Laws”.  The album doesn’t really get going until the last minute of the second track, “Gamma Ray”, when the instrumentation shifts a little.  I had a little “Awww yeah” moment there.  Third track “Chemtrails” is pretty good, as well, and gets way better in the second half.  It’s easily traceable to Mutations, though.

The title track, number four, is the first really good Beck track here.  It’s an insecure shuffle which I really enjoy, and as opposed to afore-mentioned Mutations and Sea Change, sparse instrumentation actually helps drive the pace along, á la Spoon.  The future-hating theme is accentuated by the canned strings in the latter portion of the song.  Fifth track, “Youthless”, is probably the highlight, mostly because, like “Modern Guilt”, it’s a little tough to place among the rest of the Beck catalogue.  It’s closest to Guero, but it moves a bit too fast, and the production’s a bit too slick.  It doesn’t fit Midnite Vultures either, it’s a bit to unsettled.  So here we go, unique Beck.  Awesome.

I’m not going to keep going track-by-track, but I will say that the album keeps going great until the last song, “Volcano”, which drags pretty badly.  But then again, what are you going to do, it’s the last song on a Beck album, that’s what last songs on Beck albums do.  Beck has never been perfect, merely awesome.  Here, he’s not awesome, merely very good.  I’ll take that at this stage of his career; hell, by this point in their career, Pink Floyd had fallen off a bit, so we can cut Beck a little slack.

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Starting at Finish Line; José Gonzalez review

July 8, 2008 at 3:15 am · Filed under Music Reviews ·Tagged , , , ,

Daddy needs a new pair of shoes – running shoes, to be exact.  I’ve decided that I want to start jogging in the last month of summer, since I can only play frisbee once a week, and in order to do that, I need to ditch the joint-killing Pumas and get real running shoes, and all the online articles I’ve read tell me to go to a place with people who know their shit about running shoes, and Finish Line seems to be the only place of that kind around here.  So to Finish Line I go, I think tomorrow before work.  We’ll have to see.

I had this incredibly weird dream this morning, in between the alarm and the snooze alarm.  I dreamt that Oliva knocked on my door and invited me to go see a Yankee game with me.  It started at 7, and it was 6:35 right then, which I pointed out to him.  He responded, “Yeah, that’s why we need to get the fuck going.  I’m sending the others down in a Coach bus, you’re riding with me.” That’s where the dream ended, and I don’t want to analyze it really, I just felt that my high school friends would enjoy that in a creepy way.

So, to the music.  In Our Nature was released by José Gonzalez last year, iTunes tells me.  It feels like it’s been sitting in my library forever, with me only listening to one song, his cover of Massive Attack song “Teardrop”, better known as the opening song to TV show House.  And I listen to that song a whole lot, which is why this isn’t going to be the most initial-reaction kind of review that previous ones have been.  But I don’t care, because I haven’t had a fully positive review in a while, and I wanted to do one.

This album is so good I can’t stand it, and I wish it had come out this year so it could vie for the top spot in my year-end list, which I already am looking forward to making, with Vampire Weekend, Born Ruffians, the Dodos and Beach House.  It’s just so goddamn interesting, so simple and so analyzable at the same time, kind of like WALL-E in that way.  The music is very rarely more than guitar and multi-tracked vocals, sometimes with muted bongo drums, but never noticeably.  However, the music never seems empty, it just seems intimate, and I think a lot of that can be attributed to Gonzalez’s beautiful finger-picking – his ability to fill the music with his guitar is pretty awesome.

There are two more important aspects of his guitar playing that make this album what it is – for the first, I will quote iTunes in saying that “his style of performing is just very sharp, direct, and built around rhythym as opposed to melody.”  He hits the beat hard on his guitar, which gives it a pretty unique sound.  The second part is really just a result of the finger-picking.  He seems to be playing two parts at the same time, like an alt-folk Robert Johnson, which is what gives this album its sound.  With less complicated parts, this album would be unremarkable, and would fall in with so many other singer-songwriters.

This is a short album, and if you’re not careful, it just goes by without you noticing, which would be a real shame.  It’s a testament to the album’s quality that you can listen to it on any level of your consciousness and be pleased.  And let’s not forget José’s voice.  Oh, his voice.

It’s so tender and clean, and he never has a false step, and it just envelopes you completely.  His voice is really one-of-a-kind, in my opinion, for both the above reasons and for just its makeup and tonality.  He was born in Argentina and raised in Sweden, which gives him a unique accent that I dig completely.  Plus, I feel like he has a low speaking voice in real life and just sings highly, which gives his voice something extra – I don’t want to say ethereal, but it seems kind of appropriate.

Okay kids, I’m not making any promises about what kind of review you’ll see tomorrow, but you will see one, maybe not from me (nudge nudge, contributor-readers) but it will be here.  Until then.

P.S. – One last thing – does anyone want to go to this event with me on Monday, July 21st? I’d rather not go alone, but I’m going one way or another, and it promises to be a great time.

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Never forget; Beerfest review

July 7, 2008 at 2:50 am · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , ,

So I just now bought a hoodie online for next year, since I decided it was time for another funny shirt.  This one caught my eye not as a laugher, but as something clever and vaguely cool.  I enjoy it.  I was going to buy a funny t-shirt, but I have waaaaaaaay too many t-shirts as it is.

So let’s get the first negative review on this site out of the way.  Beerfest sucks.  Beerfest is a movie made by the Broken Lizard guys and directed by Jay Chandrasekhar, the guys who made Super Troopers.  Super Troopers was awesome. Beerfest sucks.

The plot of the movie goes as follows, and this is laden with spoilers because, let’s face it, who gives a shit about the plot anyway, even if you like the movie: Two brothers, after their grandfather’s death, take his ashes to his homeland, Germany, during Oktoberfest.   While there, they stumble onto a secret beer drinking and drinking game competition, Beerfest.  They get humiliated there and go back home to start an American team to compete at the next year’s competition, encountering numerous twists and turns while training, like ram’s piss and man whores.  You know, the usual stuff.  They get to the competition, losing to the unbeatable German team, and then improbably win a sudden death matchup.  Yawn, seriously.

As you can tell, this movie relies almost entirely on beer jokes and drinking/drunk jokes, all of which have been told in some way before by other people, none of which are more than a little funny here.  I can’t think of a single person who was funny in this movie except for Jay Chandrasekhar, who was pretty funny to start, and got less funny as the movie went on.  Then the outtakes in the credit sequence got funny again.  That was just about it.

Outrageous amounts of fake beer are drunk in this movie, and none of it is all that convincing.  I’m pretty sure they didn’t even drink the fake beer.  Also, most of the characters, while drunk, didn’t really act all that realistically drunk.  I mean, it’s hard to act drunk when you’re not drunk, and they would have to dynamite their livers in order to be drunk enough to do this whole movie realistically.  Not to mention that they wouldn’t be able to remember their lines or things like that.

Just for “shitsandgiggal”, as is said in the movie once or twice, let’s reel off the actors who weren’t funny in this movie: Paul Soter, Erik Stolhanske, Cloris Leachman, Jürgen Prochnow, Bjorn Johnson, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme (as the least-convincing geek Jew EVER), and the list goes on.  I’ll just wrap this up by saying I’ll probably have another music review for you guys tomorrow, and to encourage any and all of my contributors to just shoot me a review whenever they’d like.

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Douglas Adams tributes/honorifics in popular culture; Coldplay review.

July 6, 2008 at 3:07 am · Filed under Music Reviews ·Tagged , , , , ,

Bullets taken from Wikipedia page on Adams.

  • There is an official appreciation society (fan club) named ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha after the sector of the galaxy in which The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy says the planet Earth is located.
  • 18610 Arthurdent is a small main belt asteroid. Felix Hormuth discovered it on 7 February 1998. It is named after Arthur Dent, the bewildered hero of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The name was officially published and announced by the Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union on either 9 May or 10 May 2001 (accounts differ) – a day or two before Adams’ death.
  • On 25 January 2005, it was announced the asteroid with preliminary designation 2001 DA42 had been named 25924 Douglasadams in his honour. It was chosen because it referenced the year of Adams’ death, his initials and the number “42“.
  • Every 25 May, Towel Day is celebrated in recognition of Adams.
  • In various British Universities, notably Cambridge, Oxford, York and Exeter, student societies, known as a “Douglas Adams Society”, or “DougSoc” for short, were formed to honour the spirit engendered in Adams’ works. At Cambridge, the appreciation group was called the Cambridge University Life, the Universe and Everything Society (CULUES)
  • On May 17, 2001 MIT students hung a banner reading “So long and thanks for all the wit” and a towel. This hack was not taken down for an entire day.
  • Deep Thought is a chess computer developed by IBM and named after the fictional computer in the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
  • Richard Dawkins‘ book The God Delusion is dedicated to Adams.
  • The British pop-funk group Level 42 took the numeric part of their name from Deep Thought’s answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything from Adams’ books, adding the ‘Level’ part “to pad it out.”
  • The 2005 DVD release of the Doctor Who serial City of Death includes the documentary “Paris in the Springtime.” Written by Jonathan Morris and produced by Ed Stradling, the documentary pays tribute in some detail to Adams’ contributions to the hit BBC series, and includes excerpts from two interviews with Adams himself conducted by Kevin Davies, who had worked as an animator on the 1981 BBC Hitch Hikers’ TV series . In 2007, Adams’ first Doctor Who serial, The Pirate Planet was included in the BBC/2|entertain DVD release of The Key to Time. This included another documentary, Parrot Fashion, produced Davies himself and featuring archive material of Adams, along with anecdotes from cast and crew, Adams’ half-brother James Thrift and his friend and biographer Nick Webb.
  • St John’s College, Cambridge awards an annual “Douglas Adams Prize” for a humorous piece of writing. Not to be confused with the Adams Prize in mathematics, also from St John’s.
  • Citizens of Portland, Oregon are petitioning the city to rename 42nd Avenue to Douglas Adams Boulevard.
  • The Black Library novel “Fulgrim” written by Graham McNeill, contains a passage saying “…Improbably the ship The Heart of Gold was destroyed…”, a direct reference to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its infinite improbability drive powered ship The Heart of Gold.

Add a new one to the pantheon – the third track on Coldplay’s new album, Viva La Vida, or Death And All His Friends, is titled “42”, and as the lyrics suggest, is about Adams’ death and lead singer Christ Martin’s views on death in general.  Adams was a self-proclaimed “radical atheist”, so titled to preempt any confusing his atheism for agnosticism.  His dying, as well as the death of famous atheist George Carlin, leads me to be a little more sad, because if those two are right, that means that they are not rewarded for being remarkable people with heads screwed so firmly on their shoulders that they actually enlightened large numbers of people to their viewpoints.  If they are right, then they just sit there in the ground like any old dead schmo.  The concept of afterlife terrifies me.  It’s absolutely impossible to imagine anything other than full consciousness.  When I’m dead, is there just empty blackness? What happens to my mind and viewpoints? Is my consciousness transferred to someone else? What HAPPENS? I honestly need to stop talking about this, because every time I think of this I get filled with dread completely.

I interpret Martin’s lyrics in the chorus of “42” as sharing my confusion about death.  He sings, “Those who are dead are not dead/They’re just living in my head oh…/And since I fell for that spell/I am living there as well oh…/Time is so short and I’m sure/There must be something more.” Even though Martin’s lyrics aren’t the most literate or deep, there seems to be real meaning behind them, like here and in the album’s best track, “Viva La Vida”, which also seems to have a bit of a preoccupation with death.

This album is really incredibly listenable – you can just coast right on through it, and enjoy it at any level – whether in close listening or as background music.  A big part of that is Chris Martin’s voice, which is like Thom Yorke’s if you removed all of the angst and took it down a couple of notches in pitch.  Another part of that is the production, which is very…soft.  Only a handful of times does one instrument break through to be a dominant part of the mix, and in those times, it’s normally just a strumming acoustic guitar or a keyboard, nothing jarring.  As a result, this album is very comfortable, even if it deals with unsettling material.

In fact, I really can’t single out any track as a worst, they are all pretty good at least, and I genuinely like this album; it just isn’t remarkable.  My main drawback is that sometimes the mix gets a little too soft, like a towel that has too much fabric softener and doesn’t really dry very well.  The music is so overproduced sometimes that it loses some of its functionality.  Also, none of these tracks seem like great artistic leaps, and while that sounds pretentious, I feel that if an artist is just doing something that they already know they can do well, and have done before (or that has been done before by plenyt of other people), what’s the point of the artist making more of the same thing?

And that’s really the central fault of the album – it doesn’t seem to have a raison d’être, it just kind of is.  And none of these songs are as good as the best song on X & Y, “Speed of Sound” – and I agree with basically everyone who says that’s a really crappy album.  So, go ahead and get this album, listen to it, enjoy it, just don’t expect something that grabs at you.

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I’m a lying liar who lies; Run Lola Run review

July 4, 2008 at 4:33 am · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , ,

So no Coldplay review tonight, because I wasn’t home in between the hours of 1 PM and 2 AM.  But I did watch a great movie last night which I will review now.

Run Lola Run, written and directed by Tom Tykwer, to use Harry Knowles‘ term, is bugnuts.  It’s only around 70 minutes long, and starts out with immediate intense action with only two small breaks.  Lola, played by Franka Potente (better known as the female lead in The Bourne Identity), is called by her boyfriend, Manni, who asks her why she was late and tells her that he’s a dead man because of it.  We (the audience) are confused.  We find out more from the rest of the conversation associated with flashbacks, and we discover that Manni, standing in a payphone, needs $100,000 in 20 minutes or he will rob the grocery store across the street, which is essentially suicide.  Lola’s job is to try to get the $100,000 before he does just that.  She goes to her father for the money, with varying degrees of success.

The story is told three times, each starting the same way and varying more and more as slight differences affect other events which interconnect and create three radically different storylines in a really cool way.  Most of all three involves Lola running.  Run, Lola, run.

The acting is really fun and cool in this, with some outrageous performances coming while being played straight-faced, especially from the father.  The writing is utilitarian – after all, it’s only a 70-something minute movie, so lines are short and sweet.  However, the concept of the movie is part of the writing too, and we can’t discount how awesomely this movie is thought up.

But, the part that makes all of this work is the directing.  I have no idea who Tom Tykwer is, but he really owns this movie.  The short animated sequences are awesome, the quick shots which sum up people’s lives in photos (really), the fades and split-screens, all of them are used perfectly and the movie just fucking bolts you to your chair while you’re watching.  I couldn’t believe how tightly this movie was made, how fast it moved.  In a way, I wish that this movie was longer, because the direction was so blissfully awesome and the feel of the movie was so bugnuts, but in a bigger way, I like how short it was, because that’s how short it needed to be.  Any longer, and the sequences would have to be slower, stories would have to be extended to near-breaking point, and the movie just wouldn’t work as well.

I don’t think this was a perfect movie, but this movie wasn’t built to be perfect.  People would love this movie like they would love Shoot ‘Em Up – don’t ask why, just enjoy the shit out of this movie because it forces you to.  I kind of feel dirty analyzing the movie as it is, because it is so NOT that kind of movie, but that’s why I’m not getting into plot choices or anything like that.  Suspension of disbelief is so key to this movie that overanalysis would sap enjoyment from this movie dumb quick.  I highly recommend this movie, and will show it to anyone who says they want to watch a fun movie and don’t have a lot of time.

P.S. – Franka Potente is super hot in this movie, so you know.  Rocking the pink hair.

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A latin translator told me that “for now” is “Pro iam”

July 3, 2008 at 2:06 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged

And I think that’s a load of shit.  But whatever.  I’m going to review a movie tomorrow, and hopefully have it done before midnight so I can do my normal routine of posting a review at a horrid hour.  The second review will probably be music, and will probably be the new Coldplay album, just so people can recognize the names I’m bandying about.  Pro iam, no review yet.  This post will be deleted if I don’t follow through on my promise so that no one will ever be the wiser.

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