Archive for Movie Reviews

Jews on Christmas; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button review

January 8, 2009 at 4:52 am · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve already had one heated argument over this movie, which seems to do that to people as only really long movies and really short ones can.  I saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button on Christmas, in a packed theater of Jews (or people who thought it would be fun to act like Jews), and I was stuck all the way to the side in the second row.  So my neck was craned awkwardly and most of my views of the characters were a bit skewed – and I STILL loved this movie.  I don’t think it’s good enough to crack my top three movies of the year, because those three (The Fall, The Dark Knight, WALL*E) are pretty impervious.  But still, it was an absolutely wrenching tale for me – a fully realized document of a life.  And that sounds kind of trite when I read it back, actually.  But dammit! It’s fucking true.

Benjamin Button, played subtly and stoically (too much so for any real shot at Mickey Rourke or Sean Penn’s Oscar) by Brad Pitt, ages backward, and grows up in an old folks home where he is left by his horrified father immediately after birth.  Though his body ages backwards, his mind is where his real age lies (a radical departure from the source material which at least one person I know thinks is awful).  His unique situation leads inexorably to an interesting life – people tend to be drawn to him at all stages of his life except for the radical edges, when they are repulsed.  When his body’s old but his mind is that of a preteen, people like my favorite character, Captain Mike, are charmed by his youthful enthusiasm despite his (apparent) advanced age.  Captain Mike helms a tugboat with a ragtag (of course) bunch of sailors that eventually sails to Russia, taking the mentally-teenaged Benjamin with them.

Okay, I just caught myself at really stupid plot summary.  Instead of continuing that, I’m going to give a list of people who affect Benjamin’s life in a meaningful way.

  • Queenie – Benjamin’s mother for all intensive purposes.  She raises him, gives him guidance rooted in a deep, deep faith and a seemingly endless well of kindness.  Although this kind of down-home, southern black TLC female character has gotten plenty clichéd by now, that doesn’t mean the role is just in the bank no matter what actress you pick.  Taraji P. Henson owns this role.
  • Ngunda Oti – Probably the most minor of these roles, but one of my favorites.  He’s the African pygmy who (based on a true story) lived in a zoo after being taken from his home in Africa.  He lived for a time in the old folks’ home with Benjamin, and taught him about self-confidence.  Rampai Mohadi was incredible here, he stole his scenes as a person who has that special light around him, the kind that makes any audience want to know him, and want him to have what he desires – to be home.
  • Thomas Button – Benjamin’s father who abandons him at birth, he’s the head of Button’s Buttons, a successful button company, and after running into (mentally) young Benjamin, decides to keep tabs on him and invite him out for the occasional drink.  The sheer emotional anguish of these encounters from Thomas’s side is fascinating, since he’s not really a monster – he just made a bad decision.  That doesn’t mean he’s a good person either (we never really can tell), but he has plenty of humanity.  Thomas does care about Benjamin, leaving his button factory to him at death, and (SPOILER) though Benjamin resents him after the reveal for abandonment and subsequent deceit, he can see what we see. (END SPOILER)
  • Captain Mike – Don’t we all wish we knew a Captain Mike? He’s radically free-spirited and independent, but with a killer sense of nobility.  When called upon at the outset of World War II, he knows what he (and members of his crew) must do. (SPOILER) Mike’s death slams home like a hammer, the hardest death of the movie, mostly because he was the only one that died before his time.  Up until this point, Benjamin’s only knowledge of death was the old folks who came through the home at which he grew up.  There, death was natural and expected.  But here, Benjamin learns that death can be surprising, and can be tragic.  Mike’s last words were my first almost-cry of the movie.  The hummingbird bit, though, seemed a bit much.(END SPOILER)
  • Elizabeth Abbott – I’m split about this one.  She’s the wife of a British spy in Russia, played with sort of a cold warmth that only British ladies like Tilda Swinton can master.  There are some lines in her sequence that are the most realist of the whole movie – natural, as opposed to literary, like the rest of the movie.  But there are some lines that are also stilted, shoehorned in to give context.  Really watchable, but not as profound as the rest.
  • Daisy – Where to begin.  As a child, she was okay – the well-known curious girl that a boy her age can’t help but like.  But once Cate Blanchette takes over, she is devastating.  Maybe my favorite narrative function of this movie was due to the framing of the piece as being told to Daisy from Benjamin’s journal on her deathbed while Hurricane Katrina was closing in on New Orleans by her daughter.  What this allows for is the completely realized perspective of both main characters.  Although some have criticized this part as director David Fincher and writer Eric Roth talking down to the audience, I really appreciate knowing character’s motivations instead of being forced to assume, sometimes without enough information and sometimes incorrectly.  Daisy’s narrative presence as the grounding force (that is, the perspective of someone aging forwards) is a crucial part of this story, and makes it feel as whole as it does.  And the fact that she gets so damaged, so affected by Benjamin’s condition might be my favorite part of the movie.

As you can tell, not a perfect movie, but an extremely good one, completely filled with huge, huge emotions.  Of course, there’s a lot more to this movie, like the painful, wrenching limits of time – but I can’t really say it in any more profound a way than AintitCool’s Moriarty did in his swan song review for the site.  This is really the best I can do.

And there’s also this old guy who talks about getting struck by lightning a bunch of times that provides some classic comic relief stuff.  This movie, until the real heart of the Daisy love sequence, isn’t tragic – it has some wry moments.  But these little lightning scenes took the audience by such surprise that a little soundless clip got huge, HUGE laughs.  And the last bit, even in the midst of some of the heaviest moments, made the audience laugh just as hard, but through their tears.

It seems we finally have our theme for comparing 2007 and 2008 as years in movies.  Although no one would begin to argue that 2008 rivals ’07 as far as the quality of their movies (I hope), what ’08 does provide that ’07 didn’t (except for in a couple of instances) were movies about big emotions, big feelings, as opposed to big concepts, big thoughts like in There Will Be Blood.  And as far as the magnum opus of each year, that movie really fits into my comparison when against, say, The Fall, which I’ll deal with in my year-end list, and against this movie.  I look forward to seeing this again when I don’t have to crane my neck.

Okay, I realize I did this character list twice in a row.  But they were far apart, the reviews both took a long, long time to finish each, so cut me a break.  Reviews of Milk and Let The Right One In will be my last before the year-end list.  After that, this blog will hit a crossroads that might need a full post in itself to discuss.

Comments (2)

Is that emotion I’m feeling or is it my stomach eating itself? Sunshine review

December 29, 2008 at 12:58 pm · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

So I have a bunch of movies on my computer that I’ve recently…acquired…in HD. Not Blu-Ray level, exactly, but it looks like they were ripped from Blu-Rays and compressed just slightly. Every time I…acquire…them, they say 720p, and I’m inclined to believe that. Most of the movies I have like that are ones I’ve already seen, that I just wanted in high quality, because when you have an HD-capable screen such as that of the MacBook Pro, you want to test its capabilities. And these certainly pass that test.

However, there are a couple movies that I acquired that I hadn’t seen, and figured HD was the way to do it.  The first of these that I’ve seen is Sunshine, the last movie from director Danny Boyle before he made critical darling Slumdog Millionaire, which I’m still waiting to see.  Let me tell you – I do not ever want to see this movie in any lower quality now.  The visuals here are completely breathtaking.  Is this what HD movies really are all like? Because the other ones I have look incredible, but they don’t quite look like this one.  Maybe it’s the sci-fi aspect of it, whatever.  I’m getting a little preoccupied here.

And the fact that the visuals are incredible really informed my opinion of this movie more than visuals usually do, and they kind of keyed a mindset change for me.  I’m going to try to do that every time – not say “well, this movie has great visuals, but it sucks because the story’s stupid.” I think that’s a bad way to look at movies –  a movie can be bad despite great visuals, but the visuals still have to come into play – good visuals make a movie better, simply.

And I don’t think this movie is terribly smart, but I have a positive feeling about this movie because of the sheer wonder of the visuals.  The score gets a little too imposing at times, but for the most part it just serves the visuals perfectly, like at the beginning, when you’re getting the feel of the spaceship.  The string swells are so warm, I felt welcomed to this place – Danny Boyle’s trademark, everyone says, is highlighting the pure humanity of his characters.  Here you get that a lot.

But though the characters were incredibly fully realized, I thought they fell a little too much into tropes.  For this bullet point section, there are abundant SPOILERS.

  • Cillian Murphy as Capa: The main character, thoughtful, a little introspective, is blamed for a lot of things, a bit of a martyr complex, a bit reflective of all the neuroses of the rest of the crew.
  • Cliff Curtis as Searle: The guy who has an obsession with something weird that creeps out the rest of the crew, that is reflected in his demise.
  • Michelle Yeoh as Corazon: The female crew member who is all about good-naturedness (and nature); her name’s fucking Spanish for heart, for chrissakes.
  • Hiroyuki Sanada as Kaneda: The captain who is chill and under control, self-sacrificial.  He dies pretty soon, of course.
  • Rose Byrne as Cassie: She’s a little out of place, because her character is a straight-up horror movie chick character – and I mean chick.  All she does is get scared and do things as a result of being scared.  Actresses who bore the crap out of me in interviews when they say “I only want to play strong roles” say things like that because they’re complaining about these characters.  Come on.
  • Benedict Wong as Trey: The guy who fucks up, and can’t get over it.  Easy.
  • Chris Evans as Mace: The badass/asshole who gets everything done.  Generally, you’re not supposed to like characters like him 100%, but I do.  He’s totally badass, and the mission would have gone nowhere without him.  The crew seems to like him begrudgingly, but they also seem to recognize that he’s always right – about EVERYTHING.
  • Troy Garity as Harvey: The smug prick with a little power who is always looking out for #1.
  • Mark Strong as Pinbacker: You’ll find out.

And since I don’t want every meaningful bit of analysis to be spoiler-laden, let me just say that I had problems with the ending.  Everything stops making sense, which Sam Walker tells me (and Danny Boyle would agree, I’m sure) is by design, but that didn’t get through to me while I was watching it.  There were just too many what-the-fuck moments that took me out of the film at the end – things that are in bad horror movies that badass mofo’s like myself who are NEVER SCURRED laugh at because they’re totally stupid.

But like I said earlier, I have to give this a positive review – the negative things I pointed out were really my only problems with it, and this movie was exquisitely watchable (in the most positive connotation of the word), and had a sort of surreal/real interplay – the story was obviously not grounded in reality, but the psychology of the characters seemed very realistic and relatable – something that I canNOT enjoy a movie without.  And that makes me very excited for Slumdog Millionaire, which I plan on seeing very soon.

Comments (1)

Forgetting Sarah Marshall review, because I can

December 18, 2008 at 4:25 pm · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Warp speed, captain! Spoilers ahead!

I should have seen this before, Apatow, yah yah, well, it’s very funny, but not elite like Superbad or Knocked Up or Anchorman…Jason Segel, you could have made this movie without showing us your penis…Kristen Bell is good in this and there’s plenty almost-boobage, but she doesn’t do the comedy as well as she does the emotional scenes – shame…Russell Brand is un-fucking-believable as the rocker.  A brand of humor we haven’t seen before in Apatow movies – mayb it’s the British thing.  Best line in the movie is his introduction, “Excuse me, missus, I’ve lost a shoe… like this one. It’s like this one’s fellow… it’s sort of the exact opposite in fact of that – not an evil version but just, you know, a shoe like this”…Jonah Hill has finally become annoying…Mila Kunis is smoking hot when she’s not acting like a shallow high school bitch in That 70’s Show…I couldn’t help thinking every time the black bartender was on screen that Craig Robinson could have done it better.  Still, he had some awesome one-liners…I really hope that the Dracula song gets the Oscar for best song – it’s in the final 50, at least…I don’t know, Paul Rudd, you had a lot of classic potential in this character, but you played up the stoner aspect too much…I was constantly expecting a hilarious joke from Bill Hader while he was on screen, but he was painfully straight…best moment of the movie is easily Jason Segel’s reaction when the photos are deleted.

Good breakup movie – the emotion is genuine, as we’ve come to expect.  But you can feel with this movie that the Apatow gold had finally worn off – this was still better than most comedies this year, but something was missing.  And then Drillbit Taylor came out.

Leave a Comment

Champagne and pseudonyms; Notorious review

November 26, 2008 at 12:51 am · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I couldn’t be more proud of my readership for kicking into gear over the past couple days.  Speaking of readership, I forget if I’ve named you all.  Mr. Menick has his VCA, what should I have?  The Eaters? Suggestions would be appreciated in the comments section.

Continuing along my delayed Hitchcock kick, I was inspired to finally watch Notorious by my discussion with the aforementioned seasoned blogger about Hitchcock during some downtime at a certain debate tournament at which a certain less-seasoned blogger made a certain sum of money for judging a certain activity.  He brought up that Notorious certainly deserved to be mentioned in the same breath as Rear Window, Psycho and Strangers on a Train (were those the three?), and was probably above any breath that involved Vertigo and North by Northwest.  Rope, I think we agreed, was probably not even part of the same respiratory system (in a…good way?).  So that pushed me over the edge into seeing a movie I was already planning on seeing.

So that was an incredibly roundabout way of simply saying that Notorious, directed by Mr. Alfredonius Hitchcock himself and written by some guy named Ben Hecht, (Just kidding.  You can’t be considered just “some guy” when you write two movies like Notorioius and Gilda in the same year.) is the movie I’m reviewing this time.   The absolute first thing that jumps out at me about this movie is the unique and interesting way it uses three of the biggest actors of the time: Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains.  Well, that’s more fair to say of the first two than of Rains – we’ve established even within the humble confines of this blog that Mr. Rains was a chameleon; a god among character actors, who manages to make all of his roles complicated and interesting.

But enough hero worship of Claude; we’ll discuss him more specifically to this movie later, along with the other biggies.

Notorious is the story of Alicia Huberman (Bergman), the daughter of a German-American convicted of war crimes committed during World War II who is asked by the United States Federal Government to work undercover in Brazil trying to catch some of her father’s associates doing…bad things.  Her liaison, TR Devlin (Grant), whom she meets at a party she threw to drink until she can’t feel anymore in reaction to her father’s conviction, is the one who introduces her to the mission.  She accepts after being reminded how much she loves America (and thus hates Nazis), deciding to abandon a family friend who wanted to take her on a boat cruise of the world, I think.  While in Rio (by the sea-o) de Janeiro, awaiting assignment and generally just hanging out, guess what the pair do? Give up? They fall in love.

But when they get the assignment, they find that Alicia has to woo an old acquaintance who is all kinds of creepily in love with her in order to get information.  He’s Alex Sebastien, played by Claude Rains, and he’s a former Nazi socialite.  It would be pretty stupid to do plot summary from that point forward, for a number of reasons.

As far as Grant goes in this movie, it’s not the only time he was in a Hitchcock movie (I count three: this, To Catch a Thief, and North by Northwest), and though I haven’t seen To Catch a Thief, I know that in North by Northwest, Grant also has moments where he (Devlin) vilifies his love interest for being unfaithful to him while in the line of duty.  But here, what’s interesting is he never even gets attached to Alicia (Bergman) to begin with.  He doesn’t trust her because of her history, even though he falls for her, and his exchange with Alicia about her seduction of Sebastien is less about feeling hurt and betrayed, and more about taking sick satisfaction in twisting the knife over Alicia’s guilt about her mission.  The racetrack scene is just fascinating, and what happens immediately after is positively Hithcockian (duh).  But that’s too spoilable to talk about, regrettably.  You’ll just have to be satisfied with me telling you it rules.

Bergman’s Alicia character is an incredibly compelling one, and for my money it blows her performance in Casablanca out of the water because Alicia actually has depth – emotions that go beyond “I’m conflicted.”  This is an incredibly well-developed and fully-realized character, and I was so impressed by her subtlety of expression.

Claude Rains, though, is the absolute top dog here.  You’re introduced to him as Alex Sebastien, a former Nazi before he ever steps on screen, so my feelings towards his every action were that everything was coated with this sinister, invisible layer.  But the more I watched Alex around Alicia (which is 90% of his screen time), the more I came to realize that his feelings for her were sincere, despite his evildoings.  In reflection, I feel that Rains lent such depth to his character that I could analyze it til the cows came home, and still be interested.

So this review has kind of turned into boot-licking, and I’m going to cut it off there.  Just know that the strength of this movie is in the lead performances, possibly more than any other Hitchcock film.

Comments (2)

Double digits, maybe?; Zack and Miri Make A Porno review

November 21, 2008 at 8:11 pm · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

All I’m gonna say is that it’s sad to look at my blog stats and see that I have 6 consistent readers.  You 6 are awesome people who I love dearly.  The rest of the world can go suck it.  I wouldn’t mind having the word spread though, if only for my own ego-stroking.

All right, that’s enough of that.  Zack and Miri Make A Porno is exactly what a Kevin Smith movie should be – and it’s probably just as much of a central thesis to Kevin Smith movies as Chasing Amy.  If you’re not a Kevin Smith fan by now, this review will not be for you, but by all means, read on.

I only saw Chasing Amy a couple of months ago, and it lived up to the hype of being the central Kevin Smith movie in that it had a really well-constructed plot, well-written characters, incredibly obscene dialogue, and Jay and Silent Bob, as well as a not-completely-absurdly-but-still-pretty-happy ending.  Throw in a love story, and there’s your Kevin Smith movie.  Now, of course, every Kevin Smith movie doesn’t have all of these – in fact, none but Chasing Amy do, even Zack and Miri – but they all have all of the first three, and one or two of the latter three.

But if Chasing Amy is your paint-by-numbers Kevin Smith thesis movie, then Zack and Miri is your big-picture companion.  There’s just this feel that you get with this movie, with the absolute great chemistry of characters and just the joy that comes from the eye of the camera at spending time in the world and spending time with the people.  One of the central motifs of all of the small-scale Kevin Smith movies (read: not Dogma or Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back) is that none of the central characters are bad people, or even unpleasant (all right, unpleasant in a bad way).  Life’s not all roses and lollipops, of course, but any dick isn’t given more than one scene to stink up.  All the drama in these movies (especially Zack and Miri) is between good-natured people who may have a kink that doesn’t mesh with others or just may be human – and that’s the source of drama.  That’s what’s so relatable and great about Kevin Smith movies.

Here, the two main good people are Zack and Miri, lifelong best friends in a less homoerawkwardly way than Jay and Silent Bob, who are absent from this movie, to some’s delight and some’s regret (I fall in between, and I’ll explain later on).  There’s definite sexual tension between them, but it often gets defused pretty quickly, just because they’re such good friends, and most of the time, it’s pushed on them by others.  Because they’re completely broke (and thus desperate) and they run into a gay couple, one of whom is Miri’s high school crush, which is why they meet, and one of whom is a porn star, played INCREDIBLY by the INCREDIBLE Justin Long (and thus inspired), they decide to make a pornographical moving picture, with a nice loan by the inimitable Craig Robinson, who plays Zack’s friend and coworker.

I don’t really like the story idea on the whole, but Kevin Smith is so damn talented as a writer that the central story comes about organically.  That’s what impressed me the most.  What also impressed me is, well, everything.  To be honest, though I was really excited about this movie, I wasn’t expecting lofty things because I didn’t like the idea of the story – I just felt it was an excuse for more Kevin Smith sex jokes, brilliant as they are – and because I kind of feel awkward at how pervasive Judd Apatow’s influence has gotten over the comedy landscape.  It just feels like if a comedy is in any way publicized or popular over the last couple of years, it has some Apatow in it.  And the farther away from actually being an Apatow picture it is, the worse it is, because they all try.  The ones that try independently, fail.  And I originally felt that Kevin Smith’s switch from his time-honored favorites to an Apatow roster was a little like selling out – that Smith saw the landscape, and was afraid of his inability to keep up, so he just ditched his stalwarts (for whom Smith’s movies seem to be their only roles) and made his play.

And while I still feel that way generally about Apatow, though I’m as huge a fan of his (actual) movies as anyone, Smith saved himself from falling into that pattern by writing a) Elizabeth Banks better than anyone has before, and turning her into not just a humongous new crush for everyone who feels like they missed their chance with Joey Lauren Adams, but a comedienne to be feared, b) a Craig Robinson character with some actual depth, so he is now guaranteed to have a real, hopefully incredible and long, acting career, and c) a romantic comedy that everyone can get behind.  Seeing this movie as a couple is a treat – thankfully I have that opportunity – because whereas movies like Love Actually (which is really the ceiling for the category I’m lumping right now) are great, there are always moments that make the girlfriend fawn and the boyfriend roll his eyes, and that could get awkward, Zack and Miri has absolutely zero of these moments, and the scenes that would normally have them are totally honest.  And that above all is the strength of these movies.

I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I got a little scared after Clerks II, even though it was hilarious, because it seemed like his only options as a filmmaker were making okay romance films like Jersey Girl that no one could love, but some could definitely hate because it was so rude to all of the fans that loved his comedic writing, or movies entirely rooted in his View Askewniverse that were about the same people, and he would make those movies until they were set in some New Jersey retirement home.  I though that that could happen, and while the movies would be good, they would get depressing fast.  Zack and Miri Make a Porno is probably better for me and Kevin Smith fans than it probably is in a vacuum because it gives Kevin Smith a real future as a filmmaker, a film that tells people he can make whatever movie he wants and pull it off too.  And thank God for that.

I know I didn’t comment on anything like the great performances by the leads and the music or anything like that like I normally do, but you can go anywhere else for that.  And besides, I can’t think about those things when I think about this movie; they get washed out by my above thoughts.  And if you really want all that stuff, just go here or here or here.

Comments (1)

The rare combo review: W. and Choke

November 7, 2008 at 6:59 pm · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Actually, that title was a lie.  I really really want to review Choke because it’s so damn interesting, and even though I really did like W., there’s really almost nothing I can add to the already-present conversation about it, so just read this review that I agree with completely, then come back here for my own extra two cents.  I’ll wait.

Okay.

First off, the performance of Thandie Newton as Condi is the only real weak spot as far as acting goes.  It realizes the fears that every movie fan had of the whole movie in that it delves into caricature and becomes largely unwatchable.  And, as Harry Knowles of the very same Aint-it-Cool-News to which I linked you pointed out, that’s kind of how she already is, which means that those who like Condi may not mind Newton’s performance.  But I don’t buy that 100%.  Also, SPOILER the final dream confrontation between the two Bush presidents is really cool on the W. side of things (that should go without saying, since Josh Brolin rocks every scene), but I think Cromwell as H.W. in the scene plays it a bit too smugly and makes it a comedic scene when it really shouldn’t be. END SPOILER And I think everyone should see this movie if they like politics even one little bit.  It’s a really self-affirming movie for those of us who do.

Okay, now let’s get to the real meat.  Choke is a book by Chuck Palahniuk of Fight Club fame, and from what I’ve heard by Chuck fans, it’s not one of his best.  Still, there seems to be something about his works that makes adapters drool.  David Fincher did an unbelievable job with Fight Club, of course: I don’t think there’s ever been a movie that’s had the clichéd “incendiary” title slapped on it as much as that one, and it deserved it all to boot.  But those who are expecting Choke to be for sex what Fight Club is for terrorism are in for a rude shock.  It’s really a character study of Victor Mancini, played by the awesome Sam Rockwell.

Hi, his name is Victor, and he’s a recovering (kind of) sex addict.  He takes absolute joy in being a degenerate who flouts the rules of the pre-American Revolution historical site at which he works as a reenactor/peasant and makes extra cash by choking at restaurants and asking the people who save him for money by mail.  This is his life – being a half-assed colonial American, choking for money, and having lots of meaningless sex with random people.  Oh, and visiting his mother who has severe early-onset Alzheimer’s so bad that she doesn’t even know who he is.

Victor’s a complicated guy, which is made harder by the fact that he’s a total asshole, and revels in it.  The ongoing conflict for the viewer is whether or not to root for Victor.  His undying attachment to her is totally selfless at first glance – she thinks that her son never visits and turns the whole hospital against him, despite his devotion – it turns out that his repeated death wishes on her aren’t just latent resentment; he actually wants her to die, just only after she discloses his father’s identity.  And that search takes such a ludicrous twist that I won’t even go into it at all.

The other thing that happens at the upscale hospital where Victor’s mother (played incredibly by Anjelica Huston) is staying is that Victor meets Paige Mitchell, a new doctor taking care of his mother.  Where their relationship goes is purely fascinating to me, but other people I talked to were not as impressed.

This movie was adapted and directed by Clark Gregg, who also plays Victor’s boss (and kick-starter of most of the funniest scenes in the movie) and played Agent Coulson of SHIELD in Iron Man over the summer, for those who want a better mental image.  I really like the direction – the flashbacks are all necessary and don’t feel cheap, which lots of flashbacks do when they’re pulled off wrong.  I’m pretty sure this is Gregg’s first effort in both writing and directing, so kudos for him and I hope to see more work.

I think the strength of the screenplay is that all of the major characters are dynamic – their personalities, or at least how the audience views them, change over the course of the movie, so that the audience doesn’t feel like they’re a step ahead of the script – in a way much different from Fight Club, I feel compelled to add.  While Huston’s turn as the mother is obviously the best supporting job, I think that Denny, Victor’s best friend, played by Brad William Henke (I haven’t heard of him either, but he’s apparently in the upcoming Star Trek movie playing some guy named “Uncle Frank,” which makes me twice as excited for the movie just because there’s an Uncle Frank) is pretty close.  He goes from a chronic masturbator with an attitude almost as bad as Victor’s into a genial, peaceful guy that just seems content with who he is and what he does.  It doesn’t seem like an earth-shattering transformation  while it’s going on, but when I thought about the movie after, it really hit me how much he changed and how much for the better.

Sorry for the delay in posting this – again.  It was one of the tabs on my browser, half-written, for days and days.  I think I’m going to do another combo review next – a rap roundup, if you will, of some major hip hop releases of the year, like Lil’ Wayne and T.I. and maybe something else.  Stay tuned.

Leave a Comment

Party, I mean, WOO PARTY; Harold and Kumar 2 review

September 24, 2008 at 4:00 pm · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

So after a few weekends in a row of getting trashed one day or the other, with each successive weekend getting weirder (Part 1: Matt insults a transgendered student, Part 2: Matt meets 40 different people around Oberlin and has to be reintroduced to about 30 of them in the next week after remembering 0 of them, Part 3: Matt is part and parcel of a naked party, and promises himself not to drink Old Crow whiskey ever again, Old Crow having been responsible for parts 2 and 3), it was nice for last weekend to have been a quiet one.  I watched a couple of movies, played well at the frisbee team’s scrimmage, stayed sober.

That’s good, because this weekend might be my most insane weekend ever.  Friday night is a decades costume party for a friend’s birthday (I’m going in a zoot suit), Saturday morning-afternoon is a frisbee tournament, Saturday evening another birthday party, Sunday morning-afternoon the continuation of that  same frisbee tournament, Sunday evening my birthday party, which is really just going to a Born Ruffians concert in Cleveland.  Homework, we hardly knew thee.

Speaking of party, there isn’t a party on Earth that could top the jubilation Harold and Kumar must have felt at the instantly-classic bottomless party in Harold and Kumar 2: Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Oh sure, the party has very, very little to do with the plot of the movie, as do most of the events, but it is easily the most memorable scene.  It’s hard to forget full frontal nudity, both the easy-on-the-eyes female kind and the as-hard-on-the-eyes-as-two-diamonds-scraping-together male kind.  HK2:EGB follows much the same formula as the first movie: Harold and Kumar are constantly on a singleminded mission, but spend more time sidetracked with crazy people in crazy situations than actually moving toward their purpose.  And Neil Patrick Harris is a crazy bastard.

This movie is not as fantastic as some people make it out to be, but it’s also by no means bad or even mediocre.  It’s a funny movie with some pretty serious flaws.  What pushe HK2:EGB into the positive side is the great delivery of every single line by John Cho (Harold).  He is so pitch-perfect in this movie, even making mundane lines funny.  If I type out, “We’re on a plane to Amsterdam.  It’s the weed capital…of the world,” nothing special.  With Cho’s delivery, it becomes a quotable quote.

Kal Penn as Kumar is funny too, he has some great lines, but he gets scenes stolen from him left and right.  Mostly by Cho.

Rob Corddry’s character, the unbelievably stupid Homeland Security agent who is the profiler and the massive racist, is pretty divisive.  People who love watching assholes and who don’t mind horribly bigoted actions like dropping pennies in front of Jews as an interrogation torture technique will probably like his character.  People who quickly get tired of Al Qaeda and North Korean jokes will not.  I was kind of on the fence, but I definitely didn’t like him.  I’m on the fence about whether I hate him or not.

Neil Patrick Harris is a god.  Anyone who’s seen this movie or Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog, reviewed on this site, probably knows this by now.   I just wanted to let you know, whoever you are.

Also, keep an eye out for “Terrible” Terry Tate.  I really wanted him to tackle Rob Corddry after the grape soda incident.  Just know, we got Triple T up in this bitch.

Comments (2)

Oh, great, I’m doing this again; In Bruges review

September 19, 2008 at 12:19 am · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

What a douche I am.  I promised an early return to blogging, what with arriving on campus two weeks before class with nothing to do, and wound up with not just an on-time return, but a late return.  I guess once I got used to not writing, it all just went downhill.  Anyway, after BOTO got its act together, it was time for monkey see, monkey do.

I’ve done plenty of watching movies recently, not so much listening, and some creative writing.  So we’ll go easy on the music reviews for the time being, but being at Oberlin – meaning being within Oberlin’s majestic file-sharing network – should give me plenty to stock up on.

My first review of the semester is Martin McDonagh’s brainchild In Bruges, actually his first feature film.  It’s quite ambitious for a debut, though he must have had some confidence based on the fact that his only other studio film, a short subject titled Six Shooter, won the Oscar for best live action short back in ’04.  In Bruges, like Six Shooter, is an incredibly dark comedy.

I’ve never seen the short film, so I’ll stop making comparisons at this point.  In Bruges is about two hitmen, Ray and Ken, played greatly by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, ordered by their boss to hide out in Bruges (pronounced broojh), Belgium, after a job gone bad.  We don’t exactly know what exactly went bad, or why Bruges, but this movie isn’t about the mysteries of that.  Gleeson and Farrell take time debating it out loud, so the audience doesn’t have to get too preoccupied with it.

The entire film’s formula goes as follows: the dialogue is hilarious – exactly what you imagine British/Irish repartée to be in film, with some midget and drug jokes thrown in (Lots of midget jokes, actually),  And the action and plot events are black as the night.  Everything goes sideways, people’s past actions come back to haunt them, etc.  And when I say “formula”, I don’t want that to be taken as an insult.  I really only realized this about the movie now, and I saw the movie a couple of weeks ago.  It didn’t tarnish my viewing at all.

The writing in this film is a joy (see above, British/Irish repartée), with lots of merry cursing (“You retract that last bit about my cunt fucking kids!”) to liven it up.  Colin Farrell seems like kind of a divisive, or at least divided, actor.  He has mostly done pretty bad movies, but has made a couple interesting choices, and he seems to be getting better into his 30’s.  I personally liked Alexander, though it was a bit long.  I thought Farrell was great, although overshadowed by the even-more-interestingly-careered Val Kilmer in their scenes together.  Here Farrell is very good, if not the strongest actor in the movie.  He really knows how to get a laugh, it’s when he gets weepy that he drops off a bit.  But not all that much.

The strongest actors are Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes, Fiennes a bit more so.   Gleeson is paternal, wise, workmanlike, a bit presumptuous, and a bit simple.  Those may seem contradicting; they don’t to me and aren’t in the movie.  Fiennes is a cunt. (The movie’s words, not mine.  But I would have to agree.) A wondrous, wondrous cunt who, when his wife tells him to stop bashing a phone against a desk in anger (“It’s an inanimate object!”), screams “You’re an inanimate fucking object!” (Farrell notes, “Jeez, he swears a lot, doesn’t he?”)

This review was pretty crappy and fragmented, because it was written in spurts over a month’s time.  I promise to come back stronger with my next review.  Keep your ears to the ground.

Leave a Comment

Magnolia review, don’t hate

August 12, 2008 at 3:48 am · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

So thanks again to Max for allowing me to extend my break.  I forgot to take my day off Friday, so I figured why not make up for it Saturday, and then Max gives us a cool music review and I get a two-day break.  So now, back we are with a review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 awesome epic Magnolia, which I did watch on Saturday, so forgive me if the memories aren’t as vivid as they normally are.  But then, I’m writing this part before the actual review with plans not to remove it, so maybe you won’t notice the difference.

Magnolia is incredibly dense, incredibly deep and on an incredibly wide scale.  Clocking in at just over 3 hours long, this movie screams epic.  It interweaves nine separate storylines, all taking place in the San Fernando Valley.  PTA said he wanted to make “the epic, the all-time great San Fernando Valley movie”, and I can’t help but think that he succeeded.  In fact, there’s so much to this movie that I’m going to have to resort to bullet points, and I don’t know how far that will take us:

  • I just read the Wikipedia article for this, and it really gives you a sense of the depth of this movie, what with all the storylines and the thematic elements and such.
  • John C. Reilly is a chameleon.  He can be as silly or as serious as he wants, he can be in fucking Step Brothers or he can be in an incredible string of Oscar bait movies like Boogie Nights (also PTA), Chicago, Gangs of New York, The Hours, and The Aviator.  I just want him to come back to serious roles again, so he can be remembered for not just being Will Ferrell’s sidekick.  Then again, an Oscar nominee who makes viral comedy videos is amazing.  Oh, well.  By the way, he’s incredible here as police officer Jim Kurring.  That was my original point.  He seems to be one of three purely good souls that are main characters here.  The other two are about to follow, but I just want to say that if you want to remake any movie that had Karl Malden in it, please please please cast John C. Reilly.  They seem like they’d be perfect for each other’s roles.
  • The second good guy is Philip Seymour Hoffman as Phil Parma, and word has finally gotten out that this could be the best actor in Hollywood.  He hadn’t yet come into his own here, and I personally liked his work from Boogie Nights better, but he does the “I know how serious this moment is” cry very well, and a lot.
  • The final good guy is child actor Jeremy Blackman as quizboy Stanley Spector.  He’s solidly in Haley Joel Osment territory here, with big eyes that are very serious and a way of carrying himself that gives away how intelligent he is, or his character at least.  His character is possibly the most interesting.
  • I really wish Tom Cruise wasn’t a fucking douchebag Scientologist.  The douchebag part is more important, because everyone still loved Isaac Hayes, even after he quit South Park over his beliefs.  RIP Chef.  I wish Tom Cruise wasn’t a douchebag because he’s a great actor, really really creepy and awesome here as Frank T.J. Mackey, a guy who teaches other guys how to, you guessed it (actually, I really hope you didn’t guess it), turn women into their sexual playthings.  He gets a great reveal.
  • I get to talk about Jason Robards again! He’s so amazing here as “Big” Earl Partridge, probably my second favorite performance, and he gives vitality to a character on his deathbed throughout the whole movie, while adding the authenticity to that very deathbed.  He’s one of those actors that’s always himself as the role, like George Clooney or Cary Grant, but he makes it work better than anyone I’ve seen.
  • My favorite performance goes to William H. Macy as former quizboy Donnie Smith, a man who was warped by the childhood that Stanley Spector is on his way to having – his dad took all his prize money, and as he says, “I really do have love to give! I just don’t know where to put it.”  He’s so great and twitchy, I just love his character even though he has such little inherent pathos.
  • 728 words and only talking about the actors so far.  Jeez.  Okay, so the writing is so good it’s beyond comprehension.  The way that unrelated stories come together without you even realizing it – I mean, it’s not your classic come-together story in that all the stories converge on one point, it’s that every story influences another story in the movie, whether at the beginning, middle or end, and these connections are what the preamble of the movie talk about, how interlocking circumstance is really what makes the world go round, and if enough circumstances come together, real shit goes down.  And it goes down.  In addition, the dialogue has that great combination of being real and being cinematic and dramatic that now seems to be PTA’s trademark.
  • Let me backtrack for a second.  Paul Thomas Anderson is an incredible young filmmaker.  His three biggies have been, in succession, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood.  All of them are long, deeply interesting, engaging films that make you think, and hard.  He is on my shortlist of filmmakers to watch as I grow older.
  • He was the writer-director on all three of those films, and his directing here is also incredible, if a little Kubrickian in its mercilessness.  Its long closeups on the pained expressions of Cruise, Robards, Philip Baker Hall as game show host Jimmy Gator (also great here), and others are probably the trademark of this film.
  • Thematically, apart from the chance encounters thing that I talked about earlier, a lot of this is how familial relationships shape our interactions with the rest of the world, with Robards influencing Cruise, Stanley’s dad fucking him up, and others.  It’s a really tough theme, but PTA handles it well.
  • PTA’s director of photography for all of his movies, Robert Elswit, was great if not “oh my god look at that camerawork” great here.  Elswit did win the Oscar for TWBB, though I thought that Roger Deakins deserved it for the second best movie of last year, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.  Still, Elswit rules – he also did work for Michael Clayton, and surprisingly, Good Night and Good Luck, and anyone who’s seen that movie can tell you how much he did for that movie.

SPOILERS

  • If this film is remembered for one thing, it will be the frogs.  Oh my god, the frogs.  Why they fell from the sky, no one tells you when you’re watching the movie, except for Stanley when he says, “This happens” at his moment of childhood serenity that happens for most kids at the end of movies of depth (see the two good M. Night movies, Star Wars Ep. I, literally any teen movie that has a protagonist).  See the wikipedia article for its significance, I’m still not entirely sure about it, but what I do know is that it’s done so artfully and epically that I don’t need to know what it means.  It seems like it fit at the time when a beloved TV icon was about to kill himself after revealing that he may have molested his daughter, when the greatest misogynist the world has ever known cries at his father’s deathbed for abandoning his mother, and when a quizboy-turned-thief has a change of heart for the wrong reasons.
  • I didn’t know that kids say remarkably profound monologues when they pee their pants.  I want to see if that happens a lot.
  • The whole issue with Donnie Smith and the braces made me want to cry in the best way, because it’s such pure heartache and unadulterated, adolescent love in the craziest way that I have no idea how else to react.

Okay, nearly 1400 words is enough.  Hope you got through it all and don’t hate me for it.  I know you won’t, Kriti, I’m talking to everyone else.

Comments (2)

Other players are waiting for your turn in Scramble; Vertigo review

August 9, 2008 at 4:58 am · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

What I don’t understand is that after Scrabulous got so unceremoniously dumped, people turned to Scramble, a far inferior word-forming game that’s all based on speed and small words, and doesn’t have the great reasoning skills that Scrabble does.  I mean, Wordscraper is the same game, made by the same developers, just with some changes in format that I bet were put in place to make it lest lawsuitable.  And yet, all but two of the games I started on Wordscraper have gone inactive.  What’s the deal? We all loved Scrabulous!

So I crossed another movie off of my IMDb top 250 list, and this one was a biggie, one of the real culturally important ones: Vertigo, the Hitchcock classic.  Having proclaimed myself a Hitchcock fan to those with whom I talk about movies, I’ve often received incredulous looks for this gap in my film catalogue.  I’ve now seen Vertigo, Strangers On A Train, North By Northwest, Psycho, and Rear Window, and I think those are the real biggies.  There are plenty more on the list – he’s the biggest director on it, which I guess means that IMDb users consider him the best director of all time.  Though that’s not exactly fair; he was extraordinarily prolific in comparison to almost every other filmmaker, so quantity is not exactly the best indicator.  Still, most of his titles are substantially up there.  But I digress.

No longer will I have to apologize, explain away, or shrug my shoulders, for I now know what all the fuss was about, and it was certainly about something.  What separates Vertigo from the other Hitchcock movies I’ve seen is that there isn’t much of an undercurrent of suspense.  Oh, sure, there are suspenseful scenes – Hitchcock is called “The Master of Suspense” after all – but we aren’t kept on the edge of our seats the whole time.  Most of the movie involves star James Stewart as John “Scotty” Ferguson either following or interacting with Kim Novak as Madeleine Elster, trying to decipher the mystery of her and Carlotta Valdes, whose spirit appears to have possessed her from beyond the grave.  Even after the semi-climactic scene about two thirds into the movie, the pacing is very naturalistic – the scenes are functional, the plot is structured in a very rational way, so every scene is necessary, but just a logical progression.  Scotty isn’t on the run from the law, isn’t trying to prevent his own death, he’s just doing his job at first, and trying to piece his life back together later.

SPOILERS

I absolutely loved the writing decision to have Judy actually write out the letter, then tear it up.  It’s one of those brave choices in a movie – that, coupled with the flashback, lets the audience know the real deal though the protagonist doesn’t, turning it into a different kind of movie than it was before, less about figuring out what’s really going on and more about Scotty’s increasingly disturbing attachment to Madeleine.

It’s such sick pleasure along the lines of the Henry Fonda scene in the movie that I just reviewed last week to watch Jimmy Stewart turn into a crazy person who tries to control someone’s life, just the kind of scumbag you would hate with every fiber of your being if you caught his story too late in its arc.  But you still kind of half-sympathize, especially with the knowledge that the person who drove him to it is now the victim.

END SPOILERS

Stewart is, of course, still a god here, like in every other damn movie he makes.  You just can’t find fault in his performances, especially under Hitchcock.  What’s interesting here is that he doesn’t do the same trick he does in lots of his other roles that I’ve seen, where he kind of tilts his head back and looks down the bridge of his nose when he’s confused or curious about something.  No, that move is too warm for this movie, and Stewart’s character, while pleasant, is not really a nice guy, and gets less and less so as the movie unfolds.  I love that both Stewart and Hitchcock recognize that this is not just another Jimmy Stewart movie – it’s not really about him, it’s about what happens to him.

I also love that the title of the movie as a theme isn’t beaten to death, it’s only selectively used at key points.  This makes the scenes where it is used more effective and anxious; because every time Scotty goes up stairs, we hold our collecive breath a little, so when the vertigo does kick in, we don’t exhale, and that’s how Hitchcock wants it.

Novak is serviceable here, but as far as I’ve seen, Hitchcock’s only great female role/performance was Janet Leigh as Marion Crane in Psycho.  All the other female leads have just been functional, exactly what they needed to be, but not eye-catching in anything but looks.

Yawn, just another fantastic movie to add to my ever-expanding list of favorite movies on facebook.  But I refuse to subscribe to the growing trend of people who want to distill by saying bullshit like “I like movies, all movies” or “movies that don’t suck”, or “Tarantino, Kubrick, Hitchcock, Bay…no, that can’t be right…” It’s okay to have a bunch of favorite movies.  I have a huge amount of favorite movies; that doesn’t make Fargo not a favorite movie just because it’s not on my top 10 list.  I love Fargo!

P.S. – It seems to be deadlocked 1-1 between those who want to stay out of the know, and those who want more detail.  I think I’ll just cordon off the spoilers until I get a definitive majority, like they do it over at AintItCoolNews.com.  Cheers all.

Comments (4)

Older Posts »