Yay Movies!

2009-05-10T23:40:00.000-07:00

This blog isn't really dead. It's just moved here, where I can be less embarrassed about it.

101st post

2008-12-06T17:32:00.000-08:00

Well, I posted on here a hundred times, and I'm not entirely satisfied with the results, so I'm going to retire this blog. ("retire this blog..." Is that even a meaningful thing to say?) The main purpose was that I wanted to get myself to write more about movies I was watching, since I was watching a lot of movies. I haven't been watching all that many movies lately... and then when I have watched movies that I've thought of things I might want to write about them (or other things besides movies), I've not got around to it, partly because I felt like "what's the point?" when I'd watched so many and skipped writing about them. There was something that felt productive about this for a while, and I think I want to try to get back at that, but in a more focused way. I do, eventually, want to have a career as a professor, a central aspect of which will be doing scholarly work--and I like that idea because I do like doing that, but I also think that in order to get better at things like that it would help to make writing about things I read/watch/listen to something that I do often. And seriously. But I won't be doing that here. Maybe, non-existent readers, it will be at this address.

Body of Lies

2008-10-13T23:46:00.001-07:00

Someone could probably very easily make some kind of Orientalist reading of this movie. Actually, probably a lot of them. Like, how there's supposed to be this contrast between the way American intelligence operates and the way Oriental intelligence operates, where the Jordanian intelligence is controlled by one man, a guy who's almost a prince or royalty for all practical purposes, whereas American intelligence is run by normal guys, who have to run their whole thing literally while unpacking their kids from the mini-van for a soccer game. I think in the movie that whole "normal family" thing was supposed to highlight how this is all just a job for the Americans, their essentially employees or something... And I think, in some kind of vague sense, therefore "democratic," like how we are. Except, of course, Leo and Crowe seem to pretty much be doing whatever they want, beholden to nobody. I'm not sure if the movie was aware of that or not. I think not, but I might just not be giving it enough credit.

But, whatever, I don't feel like doing that. It was fun, and really the only thing that had me conflicted is that by using a "real" setting I'm pretty sure somebody thought they were making some kind of noble point. Which is too bad. Cuz that would be a hopelessly idiotic thing to think.

The only real problem, formally, was the end: Why have such an unrealistic ending when you could just as easily have given the audience an ending that was tonally identical but not factually problematic? I mean, you can't just quit being a super-deep spy by saying, "I quit" and then going to buy some at an outdoor market. Leo could have just as easily talked about quitting, and, like, meant it (Acting!) and everything, and done it all for the hot Jordanian nurse lady, and it would've been just as satisfying. Whatever.

Videodrome

2008-10-10T23:21:00.000-07:00

A resounding yes. For some reason I've never completely trusted Cronenberg, and I don't know if Videodrome has totally convinced me about him... But I kind of can't believe I've never seen this movie before, or even heard very much about it. I had this weird feeling through most of the first half, a feeling that I don't recall every having before, but it was something like regret at never having seen this before. Strong regret. Like I wished I'd watched this on VHS back when I was in high school and used to stay up late watching movies on my little white TV/VCR. Strange...

Here's something solid: unlike most movies that rely on bending the 'reality' of the narrative, there's not any clear real/hallucination divide here. I love that. Also, James Woods sometimes grows a giant vagina in his stomach.

But then, I think why I can't completely trust Cronenberg is that despite all his grossness he still seems very much "high art" to me. Like he thinks he is and is committed to being high art. I can't say exactly why. But I just think that. Maybe it's cuz he's British. Is he British? I think he's British. Oh, never mind, I guess he's Canadian. Still, I bet he's very expensively educated and is proud of that fact and has spent his whole life almost exclusively around other expensively educated people. For some reason, I just don't think I like him, even though his movies are...

Well, this movie is seriously fucking good.

Sleepaway Camp

2008-10-10T20:09:00.000-07:00

The most interesting thing about Sleepaway Camp, as I'm sure anyone who's seen it would agree, is the ending. But a lot of how effective the ending is has to do with the rest of the movie, and especially the tone. There's not a lot of sudden violence, even in the most directly presented murder scene--the sexy/snotty counselor getting stabbed in the shower. Instead, the movie mostly opts for a kind of subdued ambient feel, beginning with the slow tracking shots across the empty playgrounds, and most memorably (in my mind) the really excellently well done long shot of all the kids arriving at the camp, the huge pan from left, across the three buses, with the kids streaming across the shot as it pans right and down into the camp, the loud camp-director guy standing in the middle and shouting--but even here obviously not "acting," at least in any competent sense. The "classical" score adds to this part of the tone.

I'm not sure what to make of the bad acting as far as how it serves to help the movie--and maybe it just doesn't. No one has a boring performance, though. There are no flat line readings. But pretty much nobody here is in any sense a "good" actor. Certainly that works for the kids, who are all appropriately aged, and so their inability to actually act always reminds us that these are obviously real teenagers, quite often behaving exactly how "real" teenagers would behave at a camp like this. It's probably less effective, though, with the older "actors," who all seem to be at least trying to "act" in a way that only makes the viewer aware of how bad they are at acting. Sometimes it's quite funny, this way, but I don't think it really adds to the movie the way the non-performances of the kids and most of the counselors does.

And I think it's important that the campers are all real kids because this is a summer camp slasher movie, and it is very obviously a summer camp slasher movie, by which I mean that is not trying to be anything else (which seems important to me), and the viewer is likely (almost certainly) aware of certain expectations for this type of film--which almost certainly include sex being had by the campers, and of course nudity. But here, because the performers are kids, the viewers expectation of this, and more especially the viewers obligatory desire for this, is thwarted--nobody actually wants to (want to) see real naked teenagers. So the movie sets up a little bit of disgust for the viewer to direct toward him/herself, since we're trained to want the voyeuristic thrill of nudity in movies like this, but we're constantly being reminded that this would be a genuinely perverse desire in the case of this film.

So there's already this seed of frustration and disgust throughout the movie--which, I should add, is quite often actually really well done, especially the "good old summer camp" scenes with the boys horsing around, playing baseball, etc, but when it veers back into the set forms of slasher movie the viewer can't help but be a little uncomfortable about it. And then there's the big "shock" at the end, which is genuinely pretty shocking--but I think the most shocking thing about it is that it is suddenly so absolutely tasteless. There's at once this "shock" of the narrative "twist" that's completely dwarfed by the shock of how blatantly tasteless the actual reveal itself is. ... I'm not quite sure exactly how to express this. I think it's extremely interesting that the shock you feel at the end of the movie is really more about feeling disgusted at the movie itself, not actually a shock within the narrative of the movie. And that it's very specifically disgust at the tastelessness of it. But it's somehow not, I think, "anger" or anything like that being felt toward the fimmakers. You don't think they're jerks, or monsters, or something. Maybe crude... But it seems so intentional, and not sophomoric, so it's not even being let down by them. ... I think it's incredibly effective, and I think it's interesting that they're using this provoked reaction of disgust toward the movie itself as a way to slam home the ending... And of course there's also probably something about how the ending is finally nudity, but it's shocking male/ambiguous nudity that you don't get to enjoy at all. ... But it's not emotion the way you normally expect to feel emotion in watching a movie--it's not at all cathartic. It's not an emotional response directed toward or even projected from within the narrative of the movie, which is I think how emotion almost always works in movies. It instead provokes an emotional response in you, the viewer, directed not inside the movie but at the movie itself. ((And I think part of what's been interesting me so much about horror movies lately is that horror movies often are looking to provoke something more like this kind of emotional response, a response of viewer at movie rather than viewer within movie, or a kind of actual physiological response that isn't purely emotional, but I think that even in horror movies it's often still tied to the narrative of the movie, and it's nearly always perfectly cathartic, even at it's most tasteless.))

Pick Up on South Street

2008-08-25T22:00:00.000-07:00

The McCarthy-era would've been an especially shitty time to live in this country. This movie had a decent thing going until everyone suddenly freaked out about the Commies, and suddenly fighting the Commies makes everyone (even the sleaze-ball abusive pickpocket the heroine inexplicably falls in love with) into a hero. Thelma Ritter's performance as Moe is pretty outstanding, on kind of a different level from all the other actors in the film. And I suppose Candy's love for Skip McCoy was supposed to be redemptive or something, but it seemed symptomatic of an abused woman who goes from one abuser to another. The movie was extremely well shot, though, with some really tight action. I just didn't buy the rosy, "We got those commies!" ending.

Forbidden Planet

2008-08-25T19:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, so Leslie Nielsen looked weird when he was younger. Some people only get better looking with age, and I guess he is one of them. The movie itself was actually better than I thought it'd be, with a lot of really interesting-looking special effects that I assume must have been absolutely top-notch for the time it was made. Much like many modern sci-fi flicks, all the attention to the special effects obviously came at the expense of attention to everything else: script, acting, etc. There was a pretty (accidentally) hilarious attempt at comic relief by way of a subplot involving the ship cook and his love of Kansas City bourbon, but it was somewhat undermined by fact that the actor playing the cook seemed pretty bored by the whole thing, too. I guess they must've been trying to treat the spaceship crew the way they'd treat the crew of a navy boat in old movies or something. All the "romantic" interactions seemed bizarre, largely as a result of their exaggeratedly forced enactment of gender stereotypes of the day. There's also the whole fact that apparently Nielsen's character is supposed to be perceived as heroic and wonderful when he's actually a grade-A dick constantly trying to "subtly" advance himself, performing some pretty blatant cock-blocking by ordering his second-in-command to stay behind while he goes to grab some nookie with Morbius's daughter (which, hilariously, number two gushingly congratulates him for, saying, "She got the right man!"). The only confusing part about it was I couldn't tell if we were supposed to not realize how much a dick he was, or if that was all supposed to be part of why we thought he was heroic, or if the writer's didn't notice/care that he was such a dick...

Best line: "We're all monsters in our subconscious! That's why we have laws and religion!" said by Leslie Nielsen through gritted teeth as he tries to choke Morbius into unconsciousness.

Transsiberian

2008-08-24T15:01:00.000-07:00

On my way out of the movie theater, I concocted a highly complex response to this movie, and then I voiced it to my companion, "It was good enough." I stand by that claim. Woody Harrelson is pretty delightful as that relentlessly upbeat brand of meathead, although, like always, he's still Woody Harrelson (which, as far as I'm concerned, is a reason to like him). Actually, the four main characters are all kind of stereotypes, and Harrelson was the only actor who sort of transcended his, although, like I said, I think that's mainly because even when he's shooting really hard at embodying a stereotype, he's still Woody Harrelson.

The only really impressive thing about the movie, though, is they how subtle they are about Kate Mara's character, "Abby." It's just a couple of throwaway lines here and there that didn't even register for me until well after I'd the movie was over, but after piecing a few things together, it's possible that her character is actually the most in control character in the entire movie, aside from that little slip up of being captured and tortured. I'm also not sure, at this point, how much Emily Mortimer's character "Jessie" comes to understand about Abby. There's actually about three different ways you can read their final scene together, and I'm not at all sure which is the most likely. What I like the most about this whole mystery is that it's not at all made the focal point of the climax. So, there's that.

Hellboy II, The Dark Knight, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk

2008-07-26T14:55:00.001-07:00

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

That screenplay isn't so bad that it really ruins anything, but it definitely is the weakest part of the movie. The strongest? The special effects! And I don't mean the way they were awesome in T2 or anything. All the mythical creatures throughout the whole movie were great, even good enough that they pretty much justify the movie. I don't know anything about how they were done, but Del Toro pretty much know what he's doing when it comes to this. I found myself thinking, "This guy should've directed the new Star Wars movies," mainly because he manages a bunch of creatures with as much charm as any I've seen since the original Mos Eisley cantina band, and all of that stuff was mainly what distracted from the thinness of the plots in the original Star Wars films. Also, Ron Perelman is pretty much perfect as Hellboy.

And there was just enough weirdness to the story that it stayed interesting, at least. It was totally baffling how the main baddy kept just appearing in random places, like suddenly on the roof of a building that Hellboy had scaled, but the unabashed lack of concern for plausibility w/r/t the dude's whereabouts almost ended up giving him some kind of vaguely symbolic function that made it forgivable (obviously, the fact that he delivered the most heavy-handed little speech to Hellboy about "they'll never accept you" and whatever helped in this respect). And the way nobody seemed overly concerned with the agents getting pretty brutally killed by the little magic termites at the beginning placed the film in a pretty different moral universe than we're used to seeing in big action/superhero movies.

I've never read the comic book, so I don't know to what extent this is just because of the comic book, but this seemed by far the least comic-book-movie-like of the big summer comic book movies.

The Dark Knight

Not much point in mentioning that this movie was good. I do think it's interesting that the Nola's have managed to make two insanely good comic book adaptations by taking exactly the opposite tactic of everyone else making comic book adaptions--by dialing up the (perceived) realism, even to the point of letting Batman stand in the middle of a brightly lit interrogation room and not framing him to look like anything other than a guy standing there in a bizarre suit. And it's always nice to see a big budget movie that's taken obvious care with the cinematography. It's just all so... stately, and huge, and crisp. The shot from the mayor's office (I think that was it) with the view of Gotham was one of the most beautifully photographed scenes I remember seeing in a contemporary movie.

Oh, and now people who loved the movie are getting mad that people are pointing out how much of the movie mirrors the administrations responses to the war on terror. Um, really, you didn't notice? I thought it was pretty obvious and obviously intentional, and kind of a little heavy-handed. The whole total surveillance part was the dumbest part of the movie, I thought, and seemed like it was only there as some kind of a bid for topical relevance. And I thought it was a little weak the way they let themselves off of the hook by having Morgan Freeman take his big principled stand that really amounted to, "well, okay... just this once," which is ultimately not much of a principled stance. Cuz, of course, Batman does use the total surveillance to catch the Joker, and it's the only way he could've caught him, and we're supposed to believe that just because he has it self-destruct that he's "aware" of the questionable morality of it? Why not just accept the fact that the Batman you've created isn't exactly a hero to be admired? That's kind of why he's so much more interesting as a character than almost all other comic book heroes in adaptation are.

Iron Man

Quite a ways on the other side of the "pure fun" spectrum from the Batman movie. Ultimately, the movie seemed like not too much more than a setup for something else, and it's small ambition served it quite well. It was good to see the amount of work Favreau let get done by his actors, though. They're really what pull the movie along. Downey's charm is through the roof, and he and Paltrow really make the sexual tension sing, which is pretty impressive considering the not-much they had to work with scriptwise. And Jeff Bridges is just fucking scary. Why doesn't he get to do cool stuff like this more often?

The weakest part of the movie is it's own rather clumsy bid for topical relevance. Super heroes only make sense when they're fighting super-villains. When Iron Man decides to try to take on terrorism, it just doesn't make much sense, because ultimately the problem is not one that can be handled with just better and more powerful weapons. The scene when Iron Man lands in the town and there's a brief break in the fighting while all the baddies have their hostages held in front of him, I was actually kind of excited for a second because I thought I saw some kind of realization of exactly that futility coming, but then he happened to have exactly the right super-powerful weapon. Oh, well. It got around to its super-villian eventually, and then it made more sense again.

The Incredible Hulk

Nothing in this movie made any sense. It was terrible. I never understood why people hated Ang Lee's Hulk so much. It was certainly way the fuck better than this piece of garbage. I'm just not even going to bother listing off everything that was wrong with it, but while I was watching, I found myself grumpily thinking things like, "WTF? Why is it suddenly raining?"

Wall-E

2008-07-03T09:05:00.000-07:00

Before I went, my dad told me, "It's pretty boring. Nobody talks for like the first half of it." Conversely, most reviews mentioned this exact thing as a positive, as if the movie was very experimental for doing so and successful in its experimentalism. Then later while I was driving through Wyoming this guy on NPR was talking about how they made us connect to the robot by giving him toddler-like features, with big eyes and head, short stubby arms and legs, fat torso. I thought that was all old news, like who doesn't know about those tricks? Anyway, the movie, like all Pixar movies I've seen, was thoroughly enjoyable. I especially liked the no talking parts, which felt, far from being experimental, like a throwback to Charlie Chaplin, where the humor and delight is all in the movements alone, and the fact that they were able to accomplish this in animation seems worth celebrating to me. The robots all seemed more likeable and quirky and ultimately human than the actual humans, but of course that was on purpose. My favorite robot was the little scrubber robot, and his burst of excitement, like a giant blocky exclamation point, when he jumped off the path of the little line laid out for him. Utterly delightful.

Jurassic Park

2008-06-17T08:40:00.000-07:00

I have no idea how many times I watched this when I was a kid, but I realized while watching it I pretty much had every line memorized. I knew exactly what everyone was going to say before they said it. Of course, that's also a function of the screenplay being little more than a collection of phrases. Nobody is even close to being a character, which wouldn't be a bad thing except that the screenplay obvious thinks that it's doing a lot of things to establish characters. Basically, it's just a downright awful screenplay. I'm not even going to get into it; it's just terrible on every level.

Which is kind of too bad, because Spielberg really was at one of his peaks when he directed this. The fluid way the whole first half of the movie flows from scene to scene is really well done, and as close to being subtle as probably would be possible in a blockbuster about dinosaurs. And once it gets down to business with the monsters, the action scenes are still seriously scary. I mean, I actually felt my heartbeat elevate. And despite the fact that none of the main characters ever actually gets killed or eaten, unlike in the new Indiana Jones movie, there is a serious feeling of danger--you actually feel like the main characters are genuinely having their lives threatened. Frankly, after reading the screenplay, Spielberg should've just cut all the dialogue and decided to revive the silent film. The dialogue is so bad it actually ruins the tension a number of times.

My only other complaint about the movie is that it's a little too efficient. I guess this was before it was okay to stretch a movie very much longer than two hours, but I really think the movie could've used some more time on the island before everything went to shit. I guess that's why the score goes nuts when they first see the Brachiosaurs: Spielberg was trying to milk every possible bit of emotion out of that scene because it was the only scene in which he got to really show the wonder of the island. I just don't think it quite worked, or I mean it doesn't quite manage to make up for the fact that it's the only scene like that.

Kung Fu Panda

2008-06-17T08:29:00.000-07:00

Something about watching kids' movies makes you, an adult person (or at least, me), watch them even more closely for the moral message, because somehow it just feels like ultimately the point of a kids' movie is it's moral message. Maybe it's because I don't really think kids are complex enough to handle a movie without a clear moral message--although I think this reveals a certain bias on my part (that I'm a little uncomfortable about being aware of) toward judging movies based on their moral message. On that level, I guess Kung Fu Panda is fine. I saw the big reveal of what the Dragon Warrior scroll was going to be coming from pretty much the second it was set up as the ultimate prize. And from a critical perspective, I'm a little curious about the fact that after getting it Po is suddenly able actually do incredible Kung Fu. And I'm a little wary about how much this movie (and, I can't help it, "movies like this," whatever that actually means) just gloss over the amount of actual hard work required to become very good at some skill. But, whatever. This movie was probably the most genuinely fun kids' movie I've seen since Spy Kids (I'd count Pixar, but Pixar movies always go for the heartstrings at some point, and I've decided arbitrarily that is grounds to exclude them from this short list). Jack Black and a lot of the visual gags are really really funny, and the action sequences are just delightful. And it's really hard not to be completely won over by a movie when, during the climactic battle, there's a little girl behind you screaming "Go Panda! Go Panda! Go Panda!"

True Stories

2008-06-17T08:14:00.000-07:00

For about ten or so years there, David Byrne was pretty amazing. He still manages to pull off some pretty great stuff (see "Empire" from Grown Backwards) although he never has and never will match the consistency of his output from then. True Stories is almost like "The Big Country" from More Songs about Buildings and Food turned hilarious and stretched out into a feature length movie. It pulls off the same feat of being trenchantly of "the blandness of middle America" while at the same time being just as critical of the reflexive nature that criticism has for coastal people (he pulls this off, I think, by having the song/movie be from the perspective of a narrator who is obviously not from the place he's describing (and I think, though I may be projecting my actual knowledge of Byrne onto this, just as obviously from one of the coasts) and having that narrator adopt a faux-naive tone--or he seems to at once know more than he's letting on and not to know nearly as much as a he thinks he knows), but the movie/song isn't just critical. Both manage to also be kind of celebratory of the very differences they exploit to lay their criticisms. Also, they're very funny and moving. Byrne was just kind of brilliant.

Indiana Jones

2008-05-31T09:06:00.000-07:00

Crystal Skull & Raiders of the Lost Ark

Harrison Ford is old. I used to have fantasies, back when I watched The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles every week and Harrison Ford (i.e., Han Solo/Indiana Jones) pretty much defined the masculine ideal for me, back when I first heard there were plans to make another Indiana Jones movie even though Ford would obviously be to old, that they'd make it a different kind of Indy movie, like where Jones is now an old tenured professor, way way smart and cunning and everything but just not able to keep up with all the kinetic action of his younger self, who either has to guide some younger hotshot through some ordeal or has to actually outwit instead of out-athleticize his nemesis. Instead, Crystal Skull is just one giant piece of denial of age. None of the people involved in the original are still up for this sort of thing, and yet here they are trying to do it all over again, in precisely the same way, except this time Jones actually marries the hot Ravenwood chick, happy to take on the full responsibilities of adulthood only about forty years too late, rather than leading her on and leaving her so he can have a new blond bombshell in the next flick. Crystal Skull is fun enough while you're watching it, so its not as complete a failure as the Star Wars prequels, but there's not really much at all to admire about it.

Rewatching Raiders for the first time in I-have-no-idea-how-long, I was surprised at how much there is actually to like about how it's done. It's just a flimsy a fantasy as it should be, but Spielberg really knew how to put together a movie back then, and Harrison Ford actually had the charisma to pull off his non-character. One thing I noticed: just like the original Star Wars, a lot of the strength of the story here is how it is constantly subtly implying a back story that's never quite articulated, so the viewer gets to supply a backdrop that's just as operatic as he or she wants it to be. With Star Wars, that backstory is really what captured my little imagination, even more than the story of the films themselves; they always felt to me like the final conclusion of this huge, impossibly morally complex and sweepingly dramatic, decades-long story that was never actually presented to me. Then when Lucas did decide to present that, I felt betrayed, literally feeling like, watching Revenge of the Sith, "That's not how it happened!" With Raiders, that back story is not as much the point, but it is what allows us to flesh out Jones as a character--since there's not really a whole lot of character development going on here. And how could there be? Like a full fourth of the movie is taken up with that over-the-top chase scene, then there's the opening action set piece, the fight in the bar, the fight in the streets of Cairo, etc. etc. Really, the only time in this movie Harrison Ford is anything more than a stunt man with a few lines are the scenes at the university, and all we learn about here is that he's smart and sassy and likeable. It's the off-hand references to his past, the way characters are all people he's known before and has a history with, that allow us to buy him as a real person. At least a little bit.

Of course, even still, he's not a real person at all. One of his defining lines early in the movie is when he tells Marcus he doesn't believe in "superstitious mumbo-jumbo" or something like that, w/r/t the Ark's power. Of course, at the end of the film he is presented with proof of exactly that, the type of thing--I mean, we're talking actual experiential proof of the existence and power of God, here--that would through a thinking atheist like Jones into, at the very least, a bit of personal crisis. But he's not even phased. He's just happy to get out of it alive with this hot lady from his past. So maybe in the next couple of movies he's more willing to believe that weird things happen sometimes, but he's certainly not a man who's come as close as anyone ever to seeing the face of God and surviving. He experiences all of this religious mythology (and now pseudo-new-age alien stuff) pretty much the same way we, the audience, do--as little more than excuses for some spectacularness.

So why is Crystal Skulls so much less satisfying than Raiders? First of all, I think some of it is all the CGI action pieces. In Raiders, as spectacular as it was, there was still at least something of a sense of real danger, and I have to assume that at least some of that was because they were limited to filming things that a stunt man partly had to actually do. Shia LeBouf swinging through the trees like Tarzan isn't even plausible the way that everything Jones does in Raiders is at least plausible. Plus, when the opening sequence concludes with Jones being blasted a few thousand feet inside of a refrigerator that he promptly stumbles out of, not even dazed, we know we're in a world in which Jones is now essentially indestructible. But the other thing, I think, is that Spielberg and Lucas tried to put some character development into this movie--which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, I think, except it's so shallow. In Raiders we accept that Jones is essentially impervious to character development, so it doesn't really bother us when none of it happens. Here, Jones is treated as more of a character, who's supposed to learn things and, you know, develop, which he kind of does by marrying Ravenwood at the end and kind of trying to suddenly develop fatherly feelings for LeBouf--except that this is the same Jones who, as I mentioned above, survived the presence of the Lord and now has just learned about the existence of trans-dimensional beings, and all he can think about is belatedly doing the right thing by his woman? By trying to give Jones a little depth and failing so spectacularly at it, Spielberg and Lucas force us to notice how kinda dumb and shallow Jones is as a character, and he's instantly a lot harder to love the way we love the unabashedly shallow Jones from Raiders.

Thieves' Highway

2008-04-08T18:25:00.000-07:00

The DVD for this movie contains a ridiculously charming ten-minute interview with Jules Dassin. I watched the interview before the movie, which was maybe a mistake if I wanted to have an "unbiased" viewing or something, but it was hard not to like this movie after watching that.

The Naked City was really good, but a lot of that had to do, I think, with its central gimmick being so interesting. With Thieves' Highway, there's nothing like that that could end up being seen as a weakness. It's just a good movie, with the exception of a few scenes that seemed a little superfluous; and here the interview especially helped because it explained why those scenes ended up in the movie in the first place.

Richard Conte plays Nick Garcos, the son of a California truck driver who has just returned home at the beginning of the movie. He finds out his dad's legs were lost in a trucking accident, probably because he got screwed by a San Francisco produce mogul named Figlia. Nick vows revenge, hooks with another trucker, buys a bunch of apples and trucks them north to San Francisco, where not really everything works out quite as he'd hoped. I was thinking for a minute how it was interesting that the movie has a very noir setup, but in place of the usual criminal underworld the action all takes place in the cut-throat world of produce shipping, but then I realized that, of course, that was the point. Apparently Dassin didn't get blacklisted for nothing (I mean the whole blacklist thing was stupid, but Dassin's got his communist heart emblazoned proudly on his sleeve here). The ordinary capitalist system that leads to you finding your fruit in the supermarket is here shown to be just as underhanded and bluntly evil as the criminal underworld, full of double-crosses, exploitation, and outright physical intimidation and violence.

Which is what made the tacked climactic scenes so interesting. I mean, they just don't work if your trying to evaluate the movie from a purely aesthetic sense, since they're just not done as well as the rest of the movie and they're thematically so different. But when the cop's head is suddenly full frame and he's yelling directly at you, the viewer, "You shouldn't take the law into your own hands! That's our job!" well, that's actually really interesting, I think. It's like... well, I can't think of any really good things to say that it's like, but it's kind of awesome. It was obviously an attempt by the studio to try to undo the "damage" the rest of the movie might have done, but by making the point so clumsily and overbearingly it kind of just goes further toward undermining traditional ideas of authority. I really was annoyed when the scene happened while watching the movie, but thinking back on it I actually think it makes the movie loads better.

Also, just like in The Naked City, the villain is ultimately more compelling than any of the heroes, for whatever reason, although it's not quite so pronounced here. And the prostitute with a heart of gold gives him a run for his money. If a filmmaker wanted to see how to do subtly sexy, s/he could do worse than to watch the initial scene when she takes Nick back to her room, and when she turns away from the camera to reveal that the top buttons on the back of her blouse are undone. I've seen whole movies that were based around trying to be sexy that didn't even come close to matching that one scene.

Dark Star

2008-04-05T00:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, if someone had said to me "John Carpenter is a great filmmaker," I would have accepted it. I mean, the guy pretty much invented the American '80s psyscho/slasher horror movie with Halloween in 1978, and on top of that he made The Thing, Assault on Precinct 13 & Escape from New York, and I'd have accepted those as enough evidence. I might not have made the argument myself. I'd have accepted, sure, but ultimately I'd have thought that he was in some important way a pretty limited filmmaker.

Dark Star is the type of movie I wouldn't have thought he was capable of--or probably more accurately, interested in--making. The movie is basically a small, slo, subtle movie a group of four guys alone on a tiny spaceship who shoot around the galaxy in search of planets to blow up. They're searching for planets with irregularities in their orbits that they blow up in order to prevent the future possibility of the planets careening off their orbits and, I guess, becoming dangerous. That's really all the explanation there is in the movie of the overall setup. Sure it's a sci-fi flick, but it's also a comedy, and the type of comedy that I guess I'd have to call existential. That said, it's also ridiculously entertaining. Nearly every scene is hilarious, and they're all funny in different ways. There's the obviously Douglas Adams influenced climax with the talking bomb that is persuaded not to explode through the use of "phenomonology", the long slapstick sequence of trying to feed the alien (hilariously just a beach ball with clawed feet), the sequence of Pinback's video confessional/journal, the conversation where Pinback explains that he's not really an astronaut but just happened to be wearing the wrong suit when the spaceship left along with the absolutely bored reactions of the other crew members, and then the brilliantly boring sequences of the three astronauts sitting together in the control room and nodding their heads to the countdown. Of any John Carpenter movie I've seen, Dark Star easily has the best screenplay for him to work with.

I think what surprised me most about this movie as John Carpenter movie was that it doesn't ever rely on anything sensational. Not that I ever think the sensational in any of his other movies is a weakness, because part of what made him so good was how all-out sensational he went, but it's particularly impressive to see him handle something so thoroughly non-sensational so deftly.

Aliens

2008-04-04T21:00:00.000-07:00

Confession: I've hated this movie for a long time. The reason was based on some kind of resentment for Aliens not being as good a movie as Alien. But, when I saw that Aliens was the middle part of a triple feature, between Explorers and Dark Star (a movie I knew absolutely nothing about), I was sold.

I still think Aliens is nowhere near as good as its predecessor, but it's kind of a pointless observation because Aliens is not interested in being the same kind of movie much at all. Aliens just wants to be an action movie, flat-out. sci-fi action, sure, but mainly action. It might have been one of the reasons that science fiction has become mostly just a sub-genre of action movies, but it does it so well that it's hard to blame everyone from trying to copy it. (It certainly looks easier to copy than something like Alien, although I'm not sure that's true.)

The thing that really did disappoint me about the movie this time, though, was that it really looked like it was shot for TV. The framing was pretty much all set up to be easily cut in half of a square set, and so many frickin' closeups! I have no idea if the foreknowledge of the video market actually had anything to do with why it was shot this way (although it seems likely enough), but in any case I was bored enough with so much of the cinematography that I started hypothesizing reasons for why it looked that way.

What it especially excelled at, though, and probably a lot of why it was so popular, was essentially the movie version of a splash page. Watching this with a lively audience really hammered it home to me: there are so many places where the movie basically pauses for you to look at how awesome something is and for you to scream out in acknowledgment of the awesomeness. And that is just fun.

Also, I was a little put off at first by Bill Paxton gung-ho dumbass character, especially after getting so used to him on Big Love, but his performance grew on me pretty strongly after a while. He pretty much took the loudmouth dumbass as far as it could go. He was pretty much the incarnation of that archetype in this movie.

Explorers

2008-04-04T19:00:00.000-07:00

I honestly have no idea how many times I've seen Explorers, but it actually may have only been once before last Friday. I remember going through a period where I was obsessively trying to find it to watch it again, but this was pre-Netflix, and for whatever reason I never tried to buy it off Amazon or something.

Regardless, I'm pretty sure that the last time I saw it I was like eight or nine, but I still remembered so much of it. Kind of amazing. I don't think I can think of a single other movie that I remember so much of that I watched that long ago. Watching this movie might have been the first time I ever self-identified as a nerd in a positive way. That's probably a lot to do with how well I remembered it.

And I did remember that the whole trip to meet the aliens was pretty freaky because the aliens were so frickin' weird and completely unlike what I would've expected the aliens to be like, and I definitely remember how uncomfortably sexual the female alien was, arousing all sorts of disturbing and conflicted feelings in my little pre-pubescent boner. I wasn't really prepared, though, for how genuinely great that whole sequence actually is! Whoever edited all the video for that section deserves some pretty serious kudos.

And then there's the whole pointless/pointlessly disturbing subplot with the old helicopter pilot. I think as a kid it might've made some kind of sense to me and I would've been very empathetic toward that guy--which might actually speak to how well Joe Dante knows kids, I guess--but as an adult, that guy was way beyond sad and not at all empathetic. He was frickin' creepy, especially the way he manhandles poor Ethan Hawke in his driveway. No way should that guy be flying helicopters!

The Naked City

2008-03-31T20:58:00.000-07:00

The main gimmick of this movie is the narrator, who maintains his kind of breathy 1950's "Aw shucks" attitude throughout the whole film, even while the story is at its darkest noir moments. It really holds up pretty well as a device, giving the movie a tone that I don't think I've seen in any other movie. The closest thing I could think of would be the scenes from Natural Born Killers with the laugh-track and Rodney Dangerfield, but this is so so much better than that. I think Stone was pretty much mocking the sit-com tone in those scenes (it's been such a long time since I saw that movie), but I don't think Dassin was strictly going after satire with the voice-over in this movie.

The only other Dassin movie I've seen before this was Rififi, which is one of the most amazing movies I've ever seen. I was expecting some kind of flair here, after I realized it was the same director, but there's really not a whole lot in this movie. That's probably necessary. I think if too much of it had looked like a really well-shot movie, it would've undermined the thing it had going with the voice-over guy. I do, though, wonder if it was intentional that the most compelling actor in the whole movie doesn't show up until the end: the killer. He actually managed to convince me they'd somehow got the wrong guy, despite the obvious impossibility of that.

And what was up with Niles's smokin' hot housewife?! Was she supposed to represent some kind of extremely subtle critique of late-forties societal sexism (because structurally she doesn't occupy a position that's supposed to be sexualized on the screen, but, seriously, she sure made me feel sexualized...)?

Ultimately, though I did want the actual noir part of the story to be darker and more intriguing. The actual plot itself just wasn't up to par with the device built around it. Also, I think the photography of the city was supposed to be impressive, but I don't think I know enough about the context or about the way cities were normally photographed in movies at the time, because I didn't see a whole lot that I felt impressed by, other than the final chase scene and the killer's ascension of the bridge tower.

Vertigo

2008-03-30T13:45:00.000-07:00

It was pretty awesome to get to see this at the Castro. I should've known, I think, that this was filmed in San Francisco, but I didn't. I guess that made me enjoy it even more, since I was watching it at my favorite place in the whole city.

Hitchcock fuckin' knew how to make movies. It's as simple as that. And this one is probably about as perfect as they get.

My five favorite things:

1. The opening shot, with the extreme closeup of the ladder rung, the city all blurry behind it, and then the fairly quick pull out until it's just a small part of the overall shot, and then the criminal guy, the least important person in the whole movie, is the first guy we see.

2. The animation in the dream sequence. It surprised me, but it was beautiful.

3. The opening credits. I didn't get to watch the whole of 'em, but what I did see was astonishing. Possibly the best title sequence ever. No joke.

4. Midge literally painting herself into the position of object of desire, since no way would James Stewart ever actually do that himself. This was all really transparent Freudian stuff, but done so well that all you can do is just applaud it.

5. The whole introductory sequence of Madeline/Carlotta. That should be studied in school the way they make you study the Odyssey.

Conquest

2008-03-28T23:47:00.000-07:00

I want to say something more than that was ultimately kind of boring. But this movie frankly had no reason to be as boring as it was, so I'm kind of mad at how boring they managed to make it. The music was almost worth it, though. Hard to beat late-seventies synth stuff, especially when it's trying to sound all mysterious. But with some really great beats in there, as well, almost like whoever made the score had been sent back in time from the mid-nineties to show the fools some beats. I bet whoever did the score here hated Vangelis.

Oh, and the glowing bow with its light arrows. Well, okay, so it was actually lame, but it looked fookin' grand! So much prettier done this way than it would've turned out done by some discount CGI time, which is what would happen if this movie were made these days. I just like the fluidity of light they got with the old method of drawing right on the frame (I think that's how they did it...). Likewise, the black arrows from the... um... well, apparently the two dudes got attacked by some kind of plant? That hummed and shot hundreds of arrows of pure darkness right above their heads? Really pretty great to watch, though.

Okay, I take it back, this movie did pull some things off. How, though, did they manage to get Monty Python's Flying Circus to lend them all their hermit/cavemen to populate the countryside?

Rarely does it bother me when a plot is completely stupid. In fact, I generally would say, at least with a movie like this, that the stupider the better. But I did find myself wondering if whoever wrote this movie actually thought the plot was not stupid. Because it was absolutely moronic. And it wasn't even fully realized moronicness. It was just like this half-assed moronic idea that I hope they were making up as they shot, because if they thought about it at all then they deserve to have their brains gnawed out of their severed heads by a naked chick wearing a bronze chick-mask over her head, which was actually about the coolest idea in the whole movie.

Alucarda

2008-03-21T23:26:00.000-07:00

I felt like it probably would have helped me enjoy this movie a little more to have had some kind of stake in the Catholic Church. Which is not to say at all that I didn't enjoy it, but that the movie was really serious in a way that most movies this ridiculous are not serious, and ultimately I don't think the serious aspect of it really got to me.

I mean, I really did appreciate the way all this really fucked up iconography from was being manipulated, cuz I think stuff like that is pretty interesting. And as far as pure blood and gore and satanism and nudity: totally satisfactory. Another thing about all that: with almost all horror movies that contain nudity it is really obviously there as fulfillment of the purported viewer's desire. That is especially the case with exploitation films. In Alucarda, though, I think Moctezuma was trying to do something more with the nudity. What exactly that was, I'm not really sure. But it didn't seem to just be an answer to the demand of the audience that the chicks' clothes get removed.

Oh! And the scenes with the nuns and the priests flagellating themselves were pretty frickin' rad. And the little switcharoo the movie manages, where it seems really obvious that we're supposed to be go along with how totally messed up and evil the church leaders are, that there's this free/subversive aspect to the satanic girls and it's evil that the church leaders are trying to oppress that and only couching it in terms of good vs. evil, but then as soon as the burned chick's body came back to life and priest guy has to hack away at it with a giant machete, and suddenly you realize you have no actual choice but to side with him.

Finally, I'm sad the chick who played Alucarda was apparently not in much else. She was totally compelling in a way that I think is pretty rare in cinema, in that she wasn't necessarily attractive and you didn't (or at least I didn't) want to be around her or whatever, but I just wanted to keep watching her. She really wasn't even a good actress, I think. She was just compelling in a very real way.

The Majorettes

2008-03-19T22:12:00.000-07:00

Well, it satisfied my desire to watch a slasher flick. Really bad acting, although not atrociously so. Oddly enough, though, actually a pretty good screenplay, and well done cinematography throughout. I'm not sure if I've actually ever seen a small non-suburban town shot so well, and there were a few moments of actually kinda exciting framing, especially the marching band scene. And the typeface of the opening titles made me really happy, as well. I wasn't expecting all that.

Maybe in a different mood I would've been more pleasantly surprised when about 2/3 of the way through it suddenly turned into a Rambo style action flick, complete with shirtless gun-toting guy, but really I just didn't want it to stray from the crazy-psych-with-a-knife-randomly-murdering-majorettes theme. Oh, well. I'm glad I watched it anyway.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

2008-03-17T21:37:00.000-07:00

It's hard after watching 12:08 East of Bucharest, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and now this--it's hard not to assume that Romanians are just built for making movies, or something. All of these movies--made by different people--are so good, and so good for a lot of the same reasons.

I put off watching this movie for a long time, clogging up my Netflix account pretty badly, mainly because of it's length (two and a half hours) and how bleak I assumed it'd be. I mean, did I really want to sit down and watch two and a half hours of a guy dying? Awesome... I finally put the movie in but started out by only giving it half my attention, I think kind of as a way to prevent myself from becoming overly attached to the character, but by the time an hour had gone by it had my full focus. It's done with much less of a flourish, ultimately, than 4 Months was, but it's no less perfectly crafted. Where are these Romanian directors finding all these amazing actors? They're all so good at seeming like their not acting--I don't mean just that they're good at playing their characters, but that they really don't even seem to be putting on a performance ever. Part of that, I'm sure, is a trick of directing. I wonder if it helps that I don't speak Romanian? Maybe they'd sound a bit more like amateur line readings if I spoke the language? Don't know.

I wound up thinking this movie is a lot like Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold, both because of the obvious thematic similarity, but also in the way story not only worked in spite of the climax being the first thing you know about, but actually made use of that fact throughout the telling/showing of the story. Although, the movie seems nowhere near as semi-biblically fatalistic as GM's novel. We don't sense that some external power is pushing everything toward the climax of Mr. Lazarescu's death, rather that... I don't know how to finish that sentence. It's certainly a failure of a system, but it's also just the way minor everyday dramas can end up taking up yr whole existence and prevent you from really weighing properly the importance of what's happening around you.

Doomsday

2008-03-17T00:51:00.000-07:00

I really wanted to like this movie. And in the end, I think, I did. Sure, the whole thing is just a series of blatant rip-offs of Escape from New York, The Lord of the Rings(?), and The Road Warrior, in that order, and nothing new is brought to the table w/r/t any of them, but at least they chose the right movies.

I liked that this movie was really in love with its gore, and wanted you to enjoy it as well: it was never trying to gross you out or make you feel bad about it. And, and, and... really, there is a lot here to like, if you like these kinds of movies.

But: wtf was up with the music? The only times the music in this movie succeeded at all were the parts when it was blatantly copying John Carpenter's score from Escape from New York, and it wasn't doing that enough. But what made them think the appropriate music for the cannibal carnival scene should sound like Huey Lewis and the News with more distortion? Really, the music was about the only really horribly wrong step in this movie. Also, the movies this movie was sourcing everything from had waaaaaaaay the fuck better cinematography, and I couldn't help but be disappointed after just about every pointless cut. What's the point of having two chicks have a swordfight when you don't even get to see the fight because there's a .66 second time limit between cuts? The blinking of the severed head that the fight culminated in, though, (nearly) made up for it.

I'd like this movie to become a hit just so it could maybe lead to more ridiculous movies like it with a real passion for ridiculous movies, but I don't think that's gonna happen... too bad.

10,000 BC

2008-03-13T16:28:00.001-07:00

At least this movie manages to be kinda funny, albeit completely without charm or likability.

What, though, is the point of calling it 10,000 BC and sort of pretending that it's taking place in the ancient past on our planet, when nothing about it makes any sense if you assume it is supposed to have anything to do with the past of our planet (the holes are innumerable, so I won't even bother...). This movie is really just a Fantasy movie, but by calling it 10,000 BC and then having the climax take place at the pyramids, it's like a really clumsy way of avoiding being just a fantasy movie. I guess then they're hoping to get people to come who wouldn't go to something that is obviously a fantasy movie. Except, even then, I'm not sure the people making this movie even realized that they've just made a really bad and generic fantasy movie...

It's kind of amazing, though, to see how bad Hollywood can be at making bad movies. They overdo the seriousness through the whole movie and as a result bleed out every possibility there was for a charming ridiculousness. How can you make a movie called 10,000 BC and not realize that the one thing the movie actually has to have is some charm? I guess they used it all up on the title...

The Other Boleyn Girl

2008-03-03T00:46:00.000-08:00

So so so so so so fucking stupid.

I don't really know why I went to this movie, actually. But it sure sucked. Everything, literally every single thing, about this movie was bad.

Storywise, on a scene-by-scene basis, it was basically the equivalent of a two-year-old telling you a story: "This happened and then this happened and then this happened and then this happened," with not really any sense of meaningful connections between events beyond chronological. Then, they way it was photographed was completely sloppy and inconsistent. Sometimes, at completely random moments, the camera would be still and characters placed in such a way that it was like they were acting out a tableau; other times, at completely random moments, the camera would whoosh around with that sweeping "historical" whooping you see sometimes; once the camera even came down from the clouds onto a castle scene--again, randomly, for no apparent reason, and completely jarringly since nothing like that had ever happened in the movie before or after, and it wasn't like the scene called for some kind of "god's-eye-view" any more or less than other scenes. Seriously, the people who made this movie just had no fucking clue what they were doing.

The one thing that was potentially cool in the movie was the scene when Princess Amidala wakes up in the middle of the night, lifts up her covers and then pulls this absolutely ghastly horrified face--and it's only cool if you just ignore the context around that scene, which I did, for my own amusement. Other than that, the movie, which already was playing it pretty loose with history from what I understand (and, normally, that type of thing wouldn't bother me, except that with how crappy the script was the only reason I could think of for this movie to justify its own existence would be its portrayal of history, and they didn't even get that part right) totally missed an opportunity for a pretty great scene, when Amidala and that attractive british kid from that shitty Beatles musical thing, brother and sister here, were gonna do it to save Amidala from having to tell the king she'd lost the baby, and then they chickened out--absolutely the movie should have had the scene where british fellow's crying and Amidala's crying and they're faking sex, so for that one moment the actors on the screen would be acting out exactly what it feels like to sit through the movie: having crying sex with your sister.

So many stupid and clumsy things:

-The Boleyn's mother is not really a character but is obviously a mouthpiece for a contemporary semi-feminist critique of the society of the day--semi-feminist because the things she rails against or just so obviously evil according to our standards, so it's only feminist insofar as the idea that it's bad for men to whore out their daughters for political gain is feminist.

-I actually laughed out loud toward the end, when the movie goes into that mode where there are static shots of characters along with words at the bottom of the screen explaining what happened to them, and there's a shot of The Hulk (King Henry) brooding at an empty table, and it says, "Henry's decision to split from the Catholic Church changed the face of England forever." AAAAhahahaha!

Be Kind Rewind

2008-02-24T19:00:00.000-08:00

(3/12/08)

My favorite thing about Be Kind Rewind, and I oddly enough haven't seen this mentioned in any reviews, is how much it actually manages to feel like the type of movie you might have randomly picked up from an old video store, the way that wandering around in a well-stocked video store always made it feel like there were just an infinite number of movies out there and if you were in the right kind of mood you could just pick up some movie because it had an interesting box, and it didn't really matter if it was good or not, it was just that sort-of discovery... or something... Anyway, because video stores really only thrived like that for a certain time period, and because when I was in high school their back catalogue consisted largely of movies from the mid-eighties to the early-nineties, the type of movie that I associate with that video-store discovery is from that time period, and not exactly indie but low-profile enough that I hadn't really heard of it. Somehow, this movie was a really well-done evocation of that. From the not especially well-thought-out characters who make perfect sense within the logic of the movie but who absolutely could not exist outside of it, the one bit of "spectacular" special fx (when Jack Black is zapped by electricity from the power station), etc. Which is not to say that it's like a B-movie by any means, but still that a lot of the charm of this movie is in its sloppiness, or maybe casualness.

And of course there's the pure joy of some of the visual hijinx of Gondry, like the the perfectly camouflaged suits of Black and Mos Def when they're breaking into the power station, and the cardboard gangster cars in the homemade bio of the jazz legend guy.

Let's see... I also really enjoyed that the "villain" in this movie is nothing more than the manager of a local DVD store, who seems to have some unexplained history with the heroes, a history that isn't explored at all or even explicitly commented on in any way. Again, I guess, it was just a charming sort of sloppiness. Not the same sloppiness of a good B-flick, not the same annoying sloppiness of something like that shitty Boleyn Girl movie...

No Country for Old Men

2008-02-17T14:32:00.000-08:00

I went to this again to try to get 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days out of my head. To no avail. Nevertheless, I at once was more impressed by this movie the second time and didn't enjoy it quite as much. I was more impressed, I think, because the first I watched I had the book so freshly in my mind so I was mostly trying to compare scenes to the book (which I believe it compared favorably in virtually every respect). I enjoyed it less just because 4 Months kind of changed the size of the scale.

Javier Bordem and Tommy Lee Jones, especially, were way more impressive to me this time. The first time I thought Javier pretty much let his haircut do his acting for him, but, no. He nailed the part. And he totally inhabited that haircut. That one shot, basically at the beginning of the movie, like the clamactic scene of the prologue it was I'd say, where the Coens' really go for their only flourish of the movie, with the camera slowly spinning down from above while Javier makes probably the creepiest face anyone with a normal face has ever made, some sort of inexplicable combination of... shit... I dunno... evil joy, menace, anger... it's both completely unrecognizable as a facial expression and perfectly transparently expressive, the only indication ever of any kind of interiority on Chigurh's part.

Anyway, the movie's also a lot funnier the second time. Especially Tommy Lee Jones's ultra dry line readings. Best actor worthy? I mean, I guess if you're not gonna even nominate Casey Affleck for either of his incredible part this year (see Gone Baby Gone, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), which I guess obviously you're not since Best Actor is an old man's award, then... OK.

* * * * *
(3/12/08)

It's occurred to me that I maybe shouldn't be giving the Coens too much credit w/r/t a certain aspect of this movie. When I first saw this I was comparing a lot of it to the book, and the most significant part of what I thought they changed seemed to be the speech the old uncle gives Sheriff about how there's always been evil the world. I saw that speech as being something of a rebuttal to the book's having never made that gesture, and letting Sheriff get away with a lot of unexamined assumptions about how much worse the world is now than it was. So, what I was thinking yesterday or the other day is that this rebuttal, that, "No, actually, the world has been full of evil all along," isn't that much more useful of an ideological stance. Mainly because, there's the specific part in the book at least where Sheriff mentions some survey done of school kids in the forties and then repeated at a time approximately contemporary to whenever this movie's supposed to take place, the difference between the answers being really telling: the survey asked what their primary worries were, and in the forties one it was grades, the opposite sex, whatever; in the contemporary one it was guns, crime, drugs. Obviously, there's a lot of room for holes and drawing conclusions from just that brief a description of the survey, but the major point is still valid, and can't really be explained away by "well, the world's always been full of evil." And what that answer really does is push just as strongly against an actual analysis of the situation as does the original idea from the book that world is just going straight to hell. There are actual causes for the changes in the answers to that survey, and those reasons are material and have causes of their own and are a part of reality that can actually be effected by public policy and other things. Just saying that "the world's going to hell" or "no, there's always been evil," both of those ideas just make that downturn (or some other better word) a fundamental part of reality, not something that can be changed by actual people living in the world. And so they're both bad ideas, I'd say.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days

2008-02-16T16:00:00.000-08:00

One of the best movies I've ever seen. Everything the movie tries to do it does perfectly.

It's almost too bad that Mungiu chose to center the movie around an abortion, since abortion is one of those things that is just an "issue" and that is almost impossible for people to actually talk about in any truthful way because it's so hard to see past the "issue." It's not "almost too bad" because it's in any way a flaw of the movie; in fact, among the many many amazing things about the movie is the fact that it is a movie about an abortion--and the trouble that surrounds having an abortion in a place that it's illegal--that actually manages to not be about "the issue" of abortion (that is to say, the characters and the plot and stuff never once come even close to becoming allegorical). It's just too bad that because the movie is about an abortion, so many people will probably end up not seeing it or not being able to see past the abortion issue to the actual movie. It's one of the most incredible movies ever made by human people.

I'm still kind of in awe right now.

* * *
(next day)

I had the same type of feeling after seeing this movie that I first identified after reading Endgame by Beckett, which is that the subject matter of the movie is really pretty depressing, and the whole move makes you feel very tense (Robin said, "I just need a drink!" while we were on the bus after the movie, and a random other bus passenger then said, "Did you just see that 4 Months movie, too?"), but despite that and what most of the reviews I've read have referred to as the "bleakness" of the movie, I left feeling totally exhilarated, and that exhilaration was just about how incredibly made the movie is. It's like this exhilaration about the sheer amazingness of human creation, and when it's this good it really trumps any level of bad shit (ie, existential angst, trying to obtain an abortion in Ceausescu's Romania). I mean I feel like it actually completely overcomes it. In some way. Or something. I don't know. This movie is just frickin' good, though. I'm still thinking about how perfect random shots were, and there really wasn't a single one that wasn't perfect. God. Wow. Shit.

* * *

I just got a new high score in Jetman! 2479! While I was playing, I was thinking about this movie and how a lot of other movies that I would group into a "like this one" category, largely based on the really long takes, which isn't really an especially useful category, but I was thinking that a lot of movies that I would group into a "like this one" category, like movies by David Gordon Green and Lost in Translation and Cuaron's movies, that a lot of the complaints about these movies is how "nothing ever happens," in them, or how they generally also avoid a tight plot, seemingly as a part of their adherence to greater realism or something. Which I would sort of agree with although it's not really a "complaint" in my book. But one of the things that was so incredible about this movie was how it was a "like this one" movie (duh!) that also was super tightly plotted. The plot was done so well because it never felt like the plot was driving the movie along, but it was definitely very tightly plotted. Reviews say almost Hitchcockianly so, which just makes me realize I need to watch more Hitchcock.

And also about the absence of music, which never felt like a device at all, it just seemed like it didn't need music, and I had this idea that most other movies that don't use music totally use it as a device although I can't really think of any good examples except No Country for Old Men, and not that that's bad to use no-music as a device, but that it's impressive to use it not as a device. Although maybe it still is. Anyway, that scene of blondie sitting at the chair and not saying anything, after the dude left, that went on for quite a long time, that scene would have been absolutely ruined by music. (Rififi, of course, used the abscence of a score to incredible effect, although that was only for part of the movie. That may be the only example I can think of that used it so effectively.)

Then I started thinking about how I totally set a new high score in my Jetman game and that I did it while thinking about this movie so I should totally blog about it. Then I tried to not think about that but instead to think about this movie some more, but it didn't work. Then I lost.

SF Indie Fest

2008-02-15T19:00:00.000-08:00

Sleepwalking through the Mekong

Sleepwalking is a pretty amazing documentary. It's main thrill is from watching something as cliched as "the power of music to bring people together" actually happening in a way that doesn't seem really forced at all. I guess that aspect of it works mainly because the interviews with the band members make them seem really likeable and down to Earth. You get the impression that the just went on this trip essentially on a lark and they're just as wide-eyed about the level of connection they're able to achieve with the Cambodian people, just by playing their music. It's such a common thing to believe in for the type of people who like to believe in that sort of thing, and this film captures it actually happening without any ponderous ruminations on "the power of music to bring people together." Yeah, I liked it.

Also, aside from all that feel good stuff, the film is just incredibly well shot. There's some (especially) amazing shots of dusk and night in Cambodia that are absolutely beautiful.

The New Grass

This little doc was good enough to make me interested in checking out both the bands featured in it at some point, which I guess is probably the main point of it, so, kudos.

La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo

There are some really good ideas behind this film, but that's the best thing you can say for it. The problem is that a lot of the good ideas didn't actually make it into the film. I suppose it could succeed as something to show in a class about revolutionary Marxism, because ultimately what we get here is a movie that really needs every bit of external support to hold it up. Which I don't think is necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but there's no reason for none of that external stuff to actually be folded into the movie. If the conceit is that it's a "found" video of these women in this prison, just extend the conceit to include the idea (or fact or something...) that whoever found the footage actually turned it into a watchable movie. I feel a little bit uncomfortable about this criticism because I feel pretty sympathetic toward the idea that a film (or anything) doesn't need to be self-contained, but in this case the exclusion of that stuff from the actual film itself doesn't add anything to it's effectiveness, and actually kind of prevents the movie from being watchable. I mean, I was fucking bored out of my skull through most of this, and I never get bored watching movies. And, sure, I even agree that boring isn't necessarily bad, but in this case it is.

Cave Flower

Harmless.

Actually, there were a couple of really great things about this short: the first being the way the girl is reintroduced when she gets on the subway with shyguy: just that quick flash of red first through the window and then as she walks in front of the camera, and shyguy's reaction. It's impressive the level of control of the colors that the little shock of red sticks out so much that you know immediately it's her. Then shyguy's little fantasy dream shot on eight millimeter, with the footage of boating around and the shots of trees and stuff, all of that was very excellent. The whole romanticizing of the squatting life? Meh. (This part especially seems gross to me, considering the fact that in the post-viewing Q&A the director and actress both said they were pretty horrified being in squatting-guy's room to see the squalor and the used needles everywhere... even contact with and disgust of actual squatting apparently isn't enough to break through upper-middle class romantic notions of the freedom of absolute poverty...) The whole "quirky" meet cute where shyguy gets up the nerve to ask red girl for a date? Yuck.

I have to admit, though, the little touch of having her write the credits on a pad when she's supposed to be writing her number was pretty charming. Although I was a little disappointed to discover that's what she was writing after she began by writing "Cable: Youngblood" which immediately made me think the movie was suddenly veering into some completely unexpected place of geekdom. Alas.

(2/24)

Tarkan Vs. The Vikings

2008-02-14T23:26:00.000-08:00

How do you make it look like a dog is climbing a stone wall? Tilt the camera sideways! How do you make sound effects for arrows? Have your foley peeps make loud unvocalized "whick whick" noises! How do you make it look like underwater footage filmed in a pool is actually the ocean? Um... why would you need to do that? They're already under water! I guess you could kind of half-assedly wave some green shit in front of the camera, to heighten the "illusion," but, really, they're already under water! That's really all that matters! What if the shot you took of a guy walking out from the fortress to a boat to greet the king's just returned daughter turns out to be too long? Just speed up the whole shot!

Such are the technical innovations of Turkish Pop Cinema as presented in Tarkan Vs. the Vikings. Frankly, this part of the double-bill wasn't nearly as amazing as The Deathless Devil, but it was still quite enjoyable. But whereas Devil seems to have taken the technical limitations of Turkish cinema and somehow managed to use them to create a movie of almost pure kinetic energy, Tarkan only manages to be incredibly charming. Of particular note:

-The costumes! I think they were supposed to look like they were wearing animal furs or something, but it looks like they actually just slaughtered a nation of muppets and are wearing their skins around. The absolute best touches were the fuzzy shields, which were shields that inexplicably had a ring of day-glo shag around the edges. I guess so the vikings could use their shields as pillows during long nights of pillaging? Or for that point in the day when they all just take a nap at once on their boats, leaving the door wide open for their oarmen slaves to kill them all and escape... although, of course, the oarmen only took advantage of that opportunity when Tarkan was there...

-Of course, the Octopus! I love that they didn't bother even trying to disguise the fact that it was just a some giant rubbery inflatable thing. It was never really clear, when various characters were fighting the octopus, if they were winning or not. Especially the scene when the giant fights the octopus, the first of the obviously-in-a-pool shots, where from the underwater shots it was obvious that his head was above the water and he was just kind of floating near the surface while the octopus sank slowly down, which looked like he'd vanquished the monster, but the reaction shots of the other characters--and the fact that the giant never appears again and the monster does--make it clear that the shots were supposed to depict the giant being killed and eaten by the octopus. I have to say, though, that even though it never stops looking completely ridiculous, there is still something very subliminally menacing about the shots of people just standing there screaming in agony while the octopus's tentacles limply hang on their bodies--as if what the octopus is actually doing to them is so terrible that it can't really be depicted, or something...

-The dogs! Both named Kurt, apparently. Maybe that's the Turkish word for dog? Obviously they had trouble getting the dogs to do exactly what they wanted, so they just kind of let the dog do whatever it wanted and we figure out what it's supposed to be doing based on the reactions of the human actors. They couldn't even get enough shots of the dog barking, apparently, so they just played barking noises over shots of the dog standing there obviously not barking.

So, yeah, at best this movie is enjoyably silly. The only part that really matched Devil for kind of insane success totally in spite of itself were the orgy scenes, which were just far more chaotic and actually orgy-like than anything you'd see in "competent" movies, probably because their tactic for filming an orgy was to just have a bunch of actors all pretty much have an actual orgy. Likewise the chaotic final battle scenes, which, of course, were pretty much mixed in with the orgy scenes. I don't know if I've ever seen scenes shot with such a total embracing of the chaos they were trying to film. Obviously whatever was happening was pretty much out of the control of the director and the camera people. Another thing just occurs to me about these scenes, which is that in almost all other movies I can think of, which the possible exception of Clockwork Orange, because scenes like this are supposed to be obviously morally contemptible they're filmed toward that end, but throughout the whole three hours of Turkish Pop Cinema you have on this disc, it's totally clear at all times that every aspect of what's being presented is supposed to be a cathartic joy for the (presumed entirely male) audience. So the orgy scenes, or the scene where Lotus inexplicably does a striptease for Tarkan before she's going to kill him, these are all presented without any hint of moral conflict: they're absolutely there to be enjoyed by the audience. The audience is not supposed to wonder if these things are possibly bad or prurient or something: they obviously are in reality, but the whole point of the movie is expression of how fun they are when removed from reality. I don't really know a lot about Turkish culture and how different it is from American culture, but I'm sure there must have been tons of moral posturing by the types prone to that sort of thing in Turkey, but nevertheless, part of what is ultimately so exciting about these films is that the people who made them obviously had no such qualms, or even the slightest inkling toward them. The heroes are the good guys just because that's their function in the movie, and the villains are evil just because that's their function in the movie, and once that's established they don't feel really any need to prove it or show why. It's kind of at once very stupid, but also refreshing in that it doesn't presume an audience that needs to be taught those lessons for some reason. I guess, maybe, if the movies are just by default disreputable, they don't have to try to pretend that they're not?

Great World of Sound

2008-02-10T20:30:00.000-08:00

Elliot said he wouldn't be my friend if I didn't like this movie, and we seem to still be friends, so I guess that answers that question.

I did, though, think, "And here, of all places, I've stumbled across a perfect example case for an argument against trying to make characters wholly believable. Main character guy, the skinny white guy, whatever his name was, (Martin, IMDB tells me) is, I think, supposed to be kind of blank so we, the audience, can feel like we're experiencing the movie from his POV, but he's also supposed to be a fully realized "character," possibly the only real one in the movie. He stares meaningfully into the middle distance in that way that fully realized characters do when they're experiencing crises of consciousness or when they're suffering because their girlfriends don't understand them. He is quirky but not too weird. Etc. Anyway, I believed that he was realistic enough that I couldn't figure out for the whole movie why he hadn't just left this job immediately. It was so obviously a total scam, and the only way I could figure out that he didn't notice as soon as that Shank guy started talking what an absolutely illegal scam this company was is that he must have some sort of mental problem in which he can't really pay much attention to stuff that's happening around him and maybe when total scams present themselves he's busy watching those crazy leprechaun/zebras that keep growing out of the ceiling. Really, the only reason that he keeps the job is because the movie requires that he keep the job in order to get to it's gimmick: the music audition stuff. Which there should've been more of. More music; less Martin and his black "friend" trying to talk them into signing. Showing them do it once or twice outside of the key plot ones would've been enough. So what I meant way back up there at the beginning was that if Martin was not such a total cipher and was instead allowed to be as less-than-three-dimensional as every other actor's character in the movie was, it just would've worked better, and I wouldn't have kept wondering why he was being such an idiot. But, of course, it would've been possible for Martin to be a totally believable character who was just too stupid to catch on to what a total scam everything around him was. Yeah, that would also have worked. But then the filmmakers would've been asking the audience to inhabit a dimmer fellow than themselves, which just isn't really done (and maybe it's impossible?) and they seemed to want us to inhabit the main character so we would feel more strongly the moral dilemma he finds himself in. And that was the thing I liked least about the movie. Because, really, what moral dilemma? That it's bad to scam people? I learned that one already. There was almost no point during the movie at which I thought I couldn't have made a better decision than Martin did; and by "I" here I mean actually not myself but pretty much every person I know." But I was kind of just being a jerk. So what if everything that was really good about this movie was not the main character or his life? He's forgettable enough. Just ignore him and enjoy what's left, which is a lot.

* * *

Still trying to figure out a way to articulate my argument about main-character-guy: I do think a lot of what I find so problematic about him is that the movie makers work so hard at making him a realistic character, but his situation just isn't really consistent with him being realistic. Because he's doing something that's so obviously morally bad, and since the audience is supposed to at once like him and feel that he shares a basic moral set with them, the result is that he has to spend a lot of time in the movie being obviously introspectively tortured about the whole thing. This pops up in the meaningful blank staring that he does at various points as well as in his inability to communicate with his girlfriend: he's so conflicted about what he's doing that he can't focus on communicating with her properly, or something like that. But, again, the problem with all of that is that it doesn't really make any sense, given the presentation we're shown by the GWS folks, that he would ever go along with this in the first place. Contrast to a movie like Bay of Blood where the wife/daughter character is once shown being absolutely horrified by death and murder and then in subsequent scenes she is not at all those things and becomes the most rationally evil character in the movie, killing and encouraging her husband to kill purely for her own financial gain. Of course, the fact that her inconsistencies are not addressed and are ignored as if they don't exist makes the movie a "bad" movie, but, for me, it's just so much more interesting than all the work GWS goes through trying to resolve main-character-guy's inconsistencies. My argument is that the movie would be served better by taking that "bad" movie approach, that is, by having him apparently go along with the scheme in full force through most of the movie, and then having him, at the point of the movie where he needs to be morally superior to the GWS people, suddenly be so.

Rambo

2008-02-05T00:36:00.000-08:00

The opening credits say "A Film by Sylvester Stallone," and I know we're not speaking the same language. This movie is brutal, far more brutal than I expected going in. The violence is kinetic, with blood and whatever else is inside of people exploding out of them visibly and with such velocity that it all disappears, a mist, into the air in seconds.

At least, that's about all I remember of this movie and it just ended about half an hour ago. There also were some slow parts when Sylvester Stallone's face kind of sat there on the screen looking like he must have suffered a stroke (did he? I don't remember hearing about that...) at some point in the past, and once he said, "Fuck the world," and I think maybe he meant it. Later it appears that Stallone has stopped trying to portray a human character at all and has instead decided to portray some kind of Tyrannosaurus, or perhaps he's upset he didn't get to play Kong and that dweeby Andy Serkis guy did so he's showing Peter Jackson where he went wrong? Of course, King Kong was a far more expressive and sympathetic character than John Rambo is.

Right after the climactic battle (I saw this band play a while ago called "Health" who basically stood around on stage and screamed and hit their instruments with as much demonstrative force as they could manage; the battle scenes in this movie were pretty much the movie equivalent of that) the blonde actress lady looks up at Rambo from among the dead bodies and cries, but not really as part of the story I don't think, like not that she was crying because she just witnessed a disgusting bloodbath after being trapped in a cage for several weeks and presumably raped a lot of times, it seemed as if she were crying along with us, the audience, as some kind of final giving up to John Rambo, as if he'd just spent ninety minutes screaming in our faces that we say "Uncle" and we finally did even though we weren't really sure why he came up to and started doing that in the first place. Obviously, this time it was because I paid the man $9.50 to do it. But still...

And what of using a real-life human rights atrocity as the stage for this movie? Is Stallone trying to raise awareness? It seemed kind of cheap to me, because ultimately the movie isn't about actually ending the genocide of the Karen people, it's just about how missionaries shouldn't go in there because they'll get killed and raped, and then a bunch of annoyed macho dudes will have to go and kill a bunch of people to save them (and in the final moments of the film apparently Rambo has come home to where his dad lives (comically, the mailbox says "R. Rambo," which I couldn't help but pronounce in my head), so any character development that happens certainly doesn't involve Rambo learning to become conscious of the world around him and of his ability to have an effect on the bad things that are happening but instead of him learning to be an ordinary American who wants to reconcile with his parents). The Karen people were pretty much just props, fodder for the games of the bad guys so we wouldn't feel at all conflicted when John Rambo tears their throats out with his bare hands or cuts open their bellies so their intestines fly out of them while they roll down hills. Sure, it's cathartic after watching the brutal shit they were doing, but Rambo and his mercenary compatriots (not friends; Rambo can't have friends) didn't stick around to try save the Karen girls who were getting gang raped. They only cared about saving the blond missionary girl and her missionary friends. Although, really, they didn't care about saving them that much either, I don't think. Rambo has this flashback where he decides that he's just a killer, so I think ultimately he's using the blond girl as a convenient excuse to kill a bunch of people, is the point. I guess you kind of have to give Stallone credit for making a mainstream Hollywood movie with this bleak of a basic view of the world, if you feel like you should give people credit for things like that.

I stuck around for most of the closing credits, just to see if Stallone actually walked all the way down that dirt road to that farm house, and he kind of did; at the end he turned away from the farm house and disappeared behind a tree. I was wondering first of all if that really was Stallone who made that walk or if they hired a guy to do it. Also, that in some way the fact that he's walking down the dirt road to his dad's house after being gone for over twenty years, twenty years of absolutely no contact, that the walk leading up to that reunion was in it's own (less violent) way just as dramatic a thing as anything else portrayed in the movie, but that we're so disinterested in any actual human part of Rambo that the actual scene of that happening is just used as the flat backdrop for the final credits to roll over. Maybe Rambo 5 will be John Rambo taking care of his father as his mind and body deteriorate but he refuses to leave his isolated farm? And they learn to love each other again or something?

Die Hard 4 was certainly much more fun than this, but I have a feeling I'm going to remember the sheer visceral feeling of being at this movie way more than I remember that one.

I remember pretending to be Rambo when I was a kid a lot, but I don't know if I actually remember ever seeing any of the Rambo movies. Say what you will about Stallone, but he's portrayed (and in the case of Rocky, actually created) two characters whose names have entered the ordinary lexicon of Americans. "Rambo" is in the fucking OED, which is more than you could say for John McClane.

***

The ending credit scene is actually kind of ambivalently poetic if you imagine that as Rambo is making the slow walk down the gravel road to the country house nestled in the country hills of rural America the names scrolling up beside him, such as "Karen Naked Girl" along with the names of all the actors who played the kids who get asploded that its like those names are an actual manifestation of Rambo's conscience or of some aspect of his consciousness, reminding him of what he left behind in Burma in order to fulfill his self-centered desire to see "what's changed" back in America.

The Deathless Devil

2008-02-03T00:32:00.000-08:00

1. A brief attempt at justification for my thinking, while watching this, that it was kind of a triumph Jarry-an theater, at least according to Alfred Jarry's "Of the Futility of the 'Theatrical' in the Theatre," an essay I'd just read for my class:

Jarry:

The public only understood, or looked as if they understood, the tragedies and comedies of ancient Greece because they were based on universally known fables which, anyway, were explained over and over again in every play and, as often as not, hinted at by a character in the prologue.

Just like almost any comic book movie, this movie largely relies on the audience's familiarity with certain tropes, "universally known fables," in order for them to understand that characters. There is no explanation of the characters, they are simply: Scientist. Scientist's daughter. Hero. Mad scientist. Robot. Etc. You already know what's going to happen, essentially, before watching more than five minutes of the movie. The thrill is simply in watching it happen; not even in watching how it happens, since that's largely a given as well. Literally it is just about watching it happen.

Jarry:

The actor should use a mask to envelop his head, thus replacing it by the effigy of the CHARACTER. His mask should not follow the masks in the Greek theatre in betokening simply tears or laughter, but should indicate the nature of the character: the Miser, the Waverer, the covetous Man accumulating crimes....
[...]the eternal nature of the character is embodied in the mask.

Much like the last paragraph, this film accomplishes this largely because of the fact that it's so recognizably modeled after comic book tropes. Aside from Copperhead, of course, none of the characters wear a mask, but they may as well, really. Every character in the movie is given away completely by their face and their facial hair. The good men all have no facial hair, unless their old and distinguished in which case they may have a mustache. The bad guys all have facial hair. Etc. Likewise, nobody really has changing expressions. They sometimes convey emotions although they're all very basic emotions that are communicated more through the soundtrack and the way their faces are shot than by any actual facial contortions of the actors.

More Jarry:

They are simple expressions, and therefore universal.

This is the most Jarry-an aspect of the movie. There is not any attempt to convey actual human emotions, but rather every emotion portrayed is basic and universal. We do not have to wonder how a certain character might convey or deal with a certain emotion. They all convey emotions in exactly the same way, and, again, they're all conveyed mostly through sound cues and camera angles rather than through any actual "acting" on the part of the actors.

Well, enough of that. This movie is incredible. The soundtrack, for starters. All of the music seems to be stolen from mainstream American movies and thrown together without a lot of concern for consistency or anything, and mostly they are just clips of the most exciting bits of music, one leading directly into the next with no transitions or breaks. Add to that the exaggerated sound effects, especially from the fight scenes. The sounds for punching in this movie are amazing! They're just like this kind of explosion of random harsh-sounding noise, somewhat reminiscent of punch-sounds from other "better" movies, but in no way actually reminiscent of the sounds of real punching, and they sound like they've been turned up way to loud for the sound equipment, the sound of going all the way into the red. And really it is a result of trying to replicate an already faked sound but trying to outdo it.

And the movie just punches right along. There's so much plot in this movie, so many (completely expected) twists to go through, but it's only ninety minutes because the movie never bothers to slow down to give the actors a chance to try to actually portray characters or anything. It's just: exposition (always brief and concise), action, twist, expostion, action, twist, etc. I honestly don't remember ever seeing a single movie zip along as quickly and as excitingly as this movie. It was way more like an amusement park ride than, say, Cloverfield or even any slasher film, just because the movie isn't interest in engaging any emotions beyond excitement.

The "comic relief" guy who dresses up as Sherlock Holmes and feels like Dorf has just invaded the movie... the pointless sex scene... the Robot! Jesus, the Robot was incredible! Like, the ultimate slow crappy robot of all slow crappy robots, and everyone reacts to it as if it were the most horrible thing they've ever seen. No acknowledgment at all that it is slow and so immobile that it couldn't actually catch anyone. And their horror is so extreme!

And then there's the end, where the hero guy walks off balancing comic relief guy on his head! Just absolutely bizarre and nonsensical, but one of the most delightful things you'll ever see on film, possibly because of how bizarre and nonsensical it is.

I'm willing to acknowledge that a lot of what is so interesting about this movie is that it's a very rare example of an idiom that I've never been exposed to but that is very obviously a reaction to an idiom I very much am, so it inevitably seems fresh and exciting and new. But I don't care. This is flat-out one of the most exciting movies I've ever seen.

The Orphanage

2008-02-01T21:42:00.000-08:00

Sooooooooooooooo scary! Seriously, I haven't been anywhere close to this scared from a movie since The Others, and even that movie wasn't all that scary so much as it just made me tingly when there was the big reveal and I realized what was going on. Like The Others, a lot of what's so effective about this movie is its commitment to atmosphere. I wonder, also, if a part of the reason is that it ultimately only had one big scary scene? Most of the movie was just buildup to this scene, either establishing the atmosphere or whatever, and even though I guess other scenes might be considered scary, there definitely is that one scene that made the guy in the theater behind me go, "AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH HOOOOOOOOOLLLLLYYYYYYYSHIT!" I appreciated that guy a lot. I almost wonder if he was paid by the movie people to be there, except that I went to this at a late night showing on a random Saturday night well after it'd been out for several weeks, so I can't imagine they would actually have paid someone to be there to do that. I don't know why I actually bothered to refute that idea...

Aside from the whole commitment to that one absolute scary scene being the reason for that scene's total scariness, the other theory I concocted for why it works is that it's such a primally scary scene: alone in a dark house at night, wide open room behind you, if you're at all ever scared of the dark like I am sometimes you've swung your head around and expected there to be a ghost behind you. Well, that actually is what happens here. Kudos for tying in the childhood game they're playing at the beginning as well, which I thought was totally creepy when they were doing at first anyway, before they were little ghost children. But, god, they did it perfectly. She turns around and there is a fucking ghost child!

I didn't get the gore with the old lady, really, though. It seemed like the one thing that really kind of broke away from the atmosphere of the movie. She got nailed by the bus, which was a total cheap shock just like they pulled in that Final Destination movie, fine, it was cheap but whatever... But then why the flash of her destroyed face? They cover it up first and you get just the vaguest hint that her face has been mangled by the fact that mouth-to-mouth guy has blood all over his face, that seemed bad enough and really, to me, kept with the way the movie was playing with your imagination a lot. But then the cloth gets pulled away and we get to see the really great work some make-up artist or set-design person or somebody did creating this gruesome smashed face, and we make a little "oh gross" gurgle, and then we wonder why we had to just see that. The only thing I could think of was that they were trying to unsettle us in a different way, like throwing in a body blow after a long series of precise jabs just to throw off our defenses a little (I don't know anything about boxing). All it did for me was make me think for a brief moment that the movie was going to go somewhere way more gruesome than I expected it to, which felt like kind of a let down. I'm glad I wasn't let down in the end.

Some people might think the weird fake smiley ending with the husband looking up and smiling at what might be ghost of his wife entering the room was a little cheesy, and it was, but I didn't think it took anything away and it was just denouement anyway. Plus, it was totally the police counselor showing up all happy that his wife was dead, not his wife's ghost. I'm sure of it.

Invisible Invaders

2008-01-30T00:51:00.000-08:00

1959 B-grade sci-fi flick in which invisible aliens from the Moon come to Earth to take it over by inhabiting the bodies of the dead, with a very 1959 sci-fi anti-nukes pro-world peace message.

In a word: amazing!

Best parts:

-After the alien-zombies contact Dr. Pemmer to tell him they're going to kill everyone on the planet unless they surrender and then he gets his daughter's "just friend" to go to the press with this story "This old retired scientist just told me that his dead friend's body walked into his living room and told him he was really a moonman inhabiting a corpse and demanded that we all surrender or they're gonna kill us all!" Instead of the press just ignoring him (like they don't get calls like that a hundred times a day?) every single paper apparently made huge front page stories making fun of the crazy old scientist. I wish the press really operated like that...
-The first disaster was a plane crash, which was portrayed via footage of a plane crashing directly into a gigantic 'X' painted on the side of a hill. Here's a hint: don't paint gigantic white 'X's on the sides of hills. Pilots are irresistibly driven to crash into them.
-Throughout the whole movie there's a voice-over narration which overexplained nearly everything thin the movie. Whenever something happened that wasn't re-explained by the narrator it was almost a surprise. Probably not exclusive to this movie, but quite charming nonetheless.
-The scientists decide that the aliens' only real weapon is their invisibility: that's why they have to take over our dead people and use our weapons against us. Um... seems to me that maybe the fact that they also have spaceships and are capable of "entering a dead body through the pores of the skin" would also count somewhat as weapons. But, then, I'm not a scientist...
-Lots of easy pickings, actually, of hilarious bits in this movie. My absolute favorite part, though, came when the intrepid quartet of humans had trapped an alien in the chamber (labelled above it in big white letters: "CHAMBER"), after the alien threatens them again saying they can't win and resistance is futile and all that, the army guy yells at him over the intercom, "Listen, friend! We're the ones who've trapped you!" I love that he called the alien "friend"! These things flew across space just to take us over and kill us all, but even that can't break the 1950s leading-man veneer of friendly speech! (Of course, GWBush has many times in the past referred to terrorists as "folks" so maybe this isn't that bizarre...)

Really, though, the best part of the whole movie, and this is not something I'm making fun of, was that at the end, when they finally figured out how to make the Invaders visible by shooting them with a sound gun, we're shown a couple of shots of them shooting the sound gun at animated corpses which then crumple to the ground and, after a few seconds, the translucent lumpy bodies of the aliens emerge from their bodies, stumble around a bit, and then collapse into little balls of mush. These shots were almost haunting, since what they actually looked like, aside from the context of the story, were little animations of men suddenly dying, their souls then emerging from their bodies but apparently weighed down by something. Unable to ascend or really go anywhere, the souls just collapse into a pile of glop. Wow.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

2008-01-26T23:34:00.000-08:00

(along with Bay of Blood)

There's not really any great reason for writing about these two movies together, except that I happened to see them on the same day, and I enjoyed one of them (Bay of Blood significantly more than the other (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), and I'm not exactly sure if I can articulate why. Part of it, of course, is just that I enjoyed the slasher flick more, but I also think it was actually a better movie. Like, I'd recommend Bay of Blood to people as a movie that they actually should watch, whereas The Diving Bell is more just an accomplishment. Well...

Diving Bell is extremely well done right from the beginning. By starting with the waking up of the protagonist, actually inside his head, what he's actually seeing as he wakes up from a coma, you're not really introduced to him as a character but it's more that you, the viewer, are made to be the main character, the person who is waking up from a coma unable to communicate at all with the people you're seeing and hearing. That's the major accomplishment of this movie, and how much it succeeds seems to be pretty much contingent on the extent to which you feel like you've sort of experienced what the main character is experienced. Obviously, that can't literally happen, unless of course you do get "locked-in syndrome," which could happen, but anyway obviously the movie couldn't literally replicate that experience, but I think it does about as good a job as it would be possible for it to do. My thing, though, is that there really is this wall that you end up running into as far as that goes, that it would literally be impossible to accomplish what the movie tries to accomplish, and I always feel like it's more important to acknowledge that limit and to not try to accomplish something that actually breaks that limit. Eventually, the movie got even less interesting as it broke out of its own conceit and started presenting more and more from outside the POV of the main character. Frankly, he just wasn't that interesting of a character, and the only thing that draws you in at is the difficulty of surviving such a situation, so once we're outside that situation and just watching this other person try to live through it, I don't know, I just wasn't all that compelled. Maybe I'm a jerk (which is the other thing; this is one of those movies about which I feel uncomfortable saying things like "the guy wasn't that interesting," and I'm really distrustful of things like that from an aesthetic standpoint). The scrawled font of the credits, though, was incredibly beautiful and absolutely my favorite thing about the movie.

As for Bay of Blood, there were 13 murders in ninety minutes, which is all Mario Bava set out to do. He set up an actual accomplishable goal and then he went out and did it. Okay, that's a little cheap. This movie was just so much fun though. My favorite things about it: (1) how the German chick, the kinda hot redhead who was flouncing around in a dress that didn't fit her and then got naked and jumped in the lake just so we could watch her do it, how she was sooooo much hotter after she got killed, so much so that I'm sure Bava meant it that way, and (2) everything else (the octopus crawling over dead-old-guy's face!). It's basically a whodunnit, except that the "who" is pretty much every character. Even the kids get in on it at the end! I guess this movie is supposed to be what inspired the original Friday 13th, but this is waaaaaaay the fuck better.

A real thing that is so much more interesting about Bay of Blood than Diving Bell, and this is something that I'd say you could pretty fairly chalk up to some kind of storytelling incompetence on Bava's part but I don't care, is the way the characters work in Bava's movie. Diving Bell goes so far out of its way, like pretty much every mainstream indie movie made these days, to have consistent, realistic characters. Obviously, that's not a criticism of Diving Bell in any way. Verisimilitude accomplished. Congrats. Not so in Bay of Blood. Especially the redhaired wife, the daughter of the guy who married the old lady who owned the lake: she's at first horrified by the dead body of her father, and then almost made catatonic by the bodies in the bathtub, but within the matter of a few minutes she's suddenly an absolutely cold calculating psychopath encouraging her husband to murder people and then doing it herself. This transition makes absolutely no sense; it's just not at all how a normal person would ever behave, and especially it's not how you'd ever imagine a person behaving, even a movie psycho character, if you were going for an accurate and indepth portrayal of an actual human psyche. She only behaves that way because it makes the story: we're allowed to believe the movie is a traditional whodunnit longer because she reacts in the normal way you'd expect a potential victim to act, and then, just because the movie wants to turn the tables on us, she suddenly becomes another murderer, and the movie doesn't even bother to try to explain it away or anything. My argument would be that this second thing, Bava's way in this movie, is much more actually interesting than the normal, verisimilitudinous way.

Bay of Blood also has some pretty memorable murders: the machete that bisects the whiney student's face was pretty great, especially as his eyes rolled around while he was writhing on the floor. The best, though, the coup de grace, was the impaling of the copulating coeds, one thrust, all the way through both of them, pinning them to the bed and to each other, the girl on top and her breasts squished against the boy's naked chest. Yeah, I'm sick, but that was effing brilliant.

12:08 East of Bucharest

2008-01-26T12:27:00.000-08:00

Romanian movie I got from Netflix a few days after reading a write-up about Romanian cinema in New York Times Magazine... Gosh the internet age is great!

I watched this twice, and liked it even more the second time. It's deceptively tight: that is, the first time through, a lot of stuff that felt loose and kind of random turned out to all be pretty obviously deliberate and productive (plotwise) while watching it the second time. Which impressed me a lot, for whatever reason. Especially when the station owner guy is looking for his Mythology Dictionary, which I'd completely forgot about by the time it got to the show and he started quoting Heraclitus and discussing Plato's cave the first time I watched it.

I especially liked the way the really long take following the car around the town seemed to go on just way too long, so eventually you start wondering why it's going on so long, and then, cut, we're at the beginning of the show. Very nice touch.

The ending also elevated the movie beyond just being the really enjoyable and likeable little comedy it was: when the voice from behind the camera starts talking (I really couldn't figure out if the voice was supposed to be one of the characters in the film or if it was the director), counting down while we watch a streetlight, getting impatient, then counting down again, and it turns on, and the voice says "It's calm and beautiful. Just like my memory of the revolution. It was calm and beautiful." And more silent shots of the streetlights turning on. One of the most perfect endings for a movie that I can think of, even as I wonder exactly what such a claim might mean to people who lived through that revolution (it's my understanding that Romania's revolution and overthrow of Ceausescu was especially violent as far as Eastern Bloc revolutions went, ending with the public execution of Ceausescu and his wife (I'm not checking my facts here, but I don't think I'm far off), so saying it was "calm and beautiful" seems like it might be kind of bold and maybe even a bit antagonistic? My sense is that, I guess cuz I'm always looking for this kind of thing, just as the whole movie was set in this small out of the way town, this description of the revolution as being "calm and beautiful" is meant to describe the actual environment around the speaker at the time of the revolution, emphasizing that this immediate environment around him--the calm and the snow and the beauty--was more real to him than the violent events going on in Bucharest.)

Also, I really thought, at first, the women at the beginning were maids, since they were all so industriously setting about the housework while the men lazily wandered around their apartments waking up. I have no idea, knowing little about actual Romanian culture, if this was intentionally exaggerated for comedic effect or if this was meant to just be a matter-of-fact portrayal of the way most husband and wife households work.

Bay of Blood

2008-01-26T00:08:00.000-08:00

(along with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)

There's not really any great reason for writing about these two movies together, except that I happened to see them on the same day, and I enjoyed one of them (Bay of Blood significantly more than the other (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), and I'm not exactly sure if I can articulate why. Part of it, of course, is just that I enjoyed the slasher flick more, but I also think it was actually a better movie. Like, I'd recommend Bay of Blood to people as a movie that they actually should watch, whereas The Diving Bell is more just an accomplishment. Well...

Diving Bell is extremely well done right from the beginning. By starting with the waking up of the protagonist, actually inside his head, what he's actually seeing as he wakes up from a coma, you're not really introduced to him as a character but it's more that you, the viewer, are made to be the main character, the person who is waking up from a coma unable to communicate at all with the people you're seeing and hearing. That's the major accomplishment of this movie, and how much it succeeds seems to be pretty much contingent on the extent to which you feel like you've sort of experienced what the main character is experienced. Obviously, that can't literally happen, unless of course you do get "locked-in syndrome," which could happen, but anyway obviously the movie couldn't literally replicate that experience, but I think it does about as good a job as it would be possible for it to do. My thing, though, is that there really is this wall that you end up running into as far as that goes, that it would literally be impossible to accomplish what the movie tries to accomplish, and I always feel like it's more important to acknowledge that limit and to not try to accomplish something that actually breaks that limit. Eventually, the movie got even less interesting as it broke out of its own conceit and started presenting more and more from outside the POV of the main character. Frankly, he just wasn't that interesting of a character, and the only thing that draws you in at is the difficulty of surviving such a situation, so once we're outside that situation and just watching this other person try to live through it, I don't know, I just wasn't all that compelled. Maybe I'm a jerk (which is the other thing; this is one of those movies about which I feel uncomfortable saying things like "the guy wasn't that interesting," and I'm really distrustful of things like that from an aesthetic standpoint). The scrawled font of the credits, though, was incredibly beautiful and absolutely my favorite thing about the movie.

As for Bay of Blood, there were 13 murders in ninety minutes, which is all Mario Bava set out to do. He set up an actual accomplishable goal and then he went out and did it. Okay, that's a little cheap. This movie was just so much fun though. My favorite things about it: (1) how the German chick, the kinda hot redhead who was flouncing around in a dress that didn't fit her and then got naked and jumped in the lake just so we could watch her do it, how she was sooooo much hotter after she got killed, so much so that I'm sure Bava meant it that way, and (2) everything else (the octopus crawling over dead-old-guy's face!). It's basically a whodunnit, except that the "who" is pretty much every character. Even the kids get in on it at the end! I guess this movie is supposed to be what inspired the original Friday 13th, but this is waaaaaaay the fuck better.

A real thing that is so much more interesting about Bay of Blood than Diving Bell, and this is something that I'd say you could pretty fairly chalk up to some kind of storytelling incompetence on Bava's part but I don't care, is the way the characters work in Bava's movie. Diving Bell goes so far out of its way, like pretty much every mainstream indie movie made these days, to have consistent, realistic characters. Obviously, that's not a criticism of Diving Bell in any way. Verisimilitude accomplished. Congrats. Not so in Bay of Blood. Especially the redhaired wife, the daughter of the guy who married the old lady who owned the lake: she's at first horrified by the dead body of her father, and then almost made catatonic by the bodies in the bathtub, but within the matter of a few minutes she's suddenly an absolutely cold calculating psychopath encouraging her husband to murder people and then doing it herself. This transition makes absolutely no sense; it's just not at all how a normal person would ever behave, and especially it's not how you'd ever imagine a person behaving, even a movie psycho character, if you were going for an accurate and indepth portrayal of an actual human psyche. She only behaves that way because it makes the story: we're allowed to believe the movie is a traditional whodunnit longer because she reacts in the normal way you'd expect a potential victim to act, and then, just because the movie wants to turn the tables on us, she suddenly becomes another murderer, and the movie doesn't even bother to try to explain it away or anything. My argument would be that this second thing, Bava's way in this movie, is much more actually interesting than the normal, verisimilitudinous way.

Bay of Blood also has some pretty memorable murders: the machete that bisects the whiney student's face was pretty great, especially as his eyes rolled around while he was writhing on the floor. The best, though, the coup de grace, was the impaling of the copulating coeds, one thrust, all the way through both of them, pinning them to the bed and to each other, the girl on top and her breasts squished against the boy's naked chest. Yeah, I'm sick, but that was effing brilliant.

The Thin Red Line

2008-01-19T23:00:00.000-08:00

So after finding out the put the Siskel & Ebert archives on the internet and needing something to watch while I ate my Subway sandwich, I checked out their discussion of this movie. Siskel said it was the best war movie ever (probably pronounced "finest war film"), Ebert said it wasn't quite that though it was good (he actually said he thought Malick basically just remade Days of Heaven and set it a Guadalcanal, mistaking style for substance). I guess I agree with Siskel.

Unless you forget when this movie was released, it's hard not to compare it, at least a little bit, to Saving Private Ryan. Although I don't think it's possible that it could've been conceived as a response in any way to that film, it does essentially invert the structure of SPR: where Spielberg begins with an extended battle scene, then fills the middle of the film with a picaresque tale of the soldiers on their way to finding Matt Damon, bookended on the other side with another extended battle scene, Malick starts off with the non war stuff, as the main soldier guy isn't even with the rest of the army, having gone AWOL to hang out with natives on some SoPa island, who pretty obviously represent to him at this point the unspoiled natural world (although this is complicated a little bit by his voiceover ruminations about nature being at war with itself and stuff), then there's the leadup to the battle that focuses more on the characters than on the actual leadup to the battle, then we have the big battle for about an hour, then there's the rest of the movie after that when we get back to the soldiers just hanging out, talking about life and stuff. I guess there is again the little battle piece in which daydreamerguy gets killed, but it's really just a skirmish. Anyway, aside from the fact that neither Spielberg nor Malick are actually as interested in their characters as they want to be, Malick doesn't fall quite as deeply into the trap of making war seem pretty awesome despite trying to make an antiwar movie as Spielberg does. (Let me explain that a little bit more: Spielberg is just a little to good at making satisfying blockbusters for his own good with SPR. He wants the movie to show the brutality of war, which he does about as good a job as anyone has, but his instincts as a hugely popular filmmaker require him to also make the war scenes satisfying in the traditional way of making the battles a thrill ride. Malick almost completely avoids this: though it is fairly exciting when John Cusack steps in as action hero and leads the small group of soldiers to take out the bunker, for the most part the huge battle is actually the least interesting part of the film, and what's most interesting about the battle scene itself isn't really the battle but the way the characters act during the battle. It's actually possible while watching Malick's war film to wonder why these guys are even fighting this battle since it's pretty obviously not what any of them want to be doing and because there's an actual world that's been explored and portrayed around them that seems more important in lots of ways than the battle itself. By starting in the middle of a battle already in progress, Spielberg doesn't really allow for that type of questioning. And the final battle is also kind of inevitable, the way SPR's story is structured.) So Malick's film is ultimately more successful as an anti-war film that Spielberg's is. Whether or not it's actually better as just a plain movie, aside from it's message?

Well, I'm a little partial here. Malick makes movies that beautiful in ways that movie made by no one else (except Malick imitators) are, and The Thin Red Line might actually be his best one. But I should watch The New World again before I can really say that for sure. One thing I think this movie has over Days of Heaven is that it's just as beautiful a sound experience as it is a visual experience. Also, for fun, I think I'll read this book...

51 Birch Street

2008-01-19T19:03:00.001-08:00

This movie is really, really good. Despite the fact that the music is kind of cloyingly bad, and it's very few interesting shots, and the way it's edited is quite often just as cloyingly sentimental as the music (wait a minute... what does cloyingly even mean? I totally am just using that word because I've seen it used in that exact way as a criticism for other things... whatever...), something about the movie works. Lots of the reviews discuss how incredible it is that the movie gets so much mileage of what is, really, a pretty average story. It's quite incredible that Block's parents stayed together for fifty years, but it's certainly not that out of the ordinary--at least not for people of their generation. Ultimately, I think what gives the movie it's profound emotional heft is that it really is a chronicle of Doug Block setting out to make a real connection with a person (his father) who's always been closed off to him--and succeeding rather remarkably. By the end of the movie, you can sense just how well he's managed to get to know both of his parents, and how he's managed to come to actually understand very deeply these two other human beings. It's not really the story of the marriage of his parents and how they made it work or even his father's largesse that is so satisfying, it's the very genuine connection the he makes with his father (and, I think, even though she's no longer alive, so certainly in a different way but still it's there, with his mother) that leaves you feeling you've just witnessed something pretty profound.

Cloverfield

2008-01-18T23:35:00.000-08:00

As a thrill ride, this movie is pretty much a complete success, I guess. Just cuz I'm me, I could quibble about all sorts of things like how they could have had this amazing shot of the monster walking through the city when the characters had pointlessly made their way back into the city and to the top of the building Rob's gf was dying in. That at least would've made their little trek worth it; Beth's impaled-yet-miraculously-spry body on the floor of her apartment did not.

I can practically hear the director or screenwriter or whoever on the commentary track of the DVD saying something like "You go in thinking you're going to watch some big monster movie, but really we wanted to make a movie about love and redemption," and he'll be completely wrong. Nobody watching this movie cared at all about any of the characters; most of the theater groaned/laughed when Beth opened her eyes and she and Rob had their "Of course I came back for you" moment (what the hell happened to that Justin guy, by the way? Did the sheer force of Rob's stunted-growthed love overtake the fabric of the movie's reality and whisk Justin out of existence? Or did he fall out of the building and nobody cared because Beth only took him to the party to make Rob jealous and they're both total narcissists?), so despite all the filmmakers' machinations to try to foreground the 'human' story, ultimately we probably care less about the characters than we do in most traditionally filmed monster flicks. Which, I guess, just goes to show that making people care about characters isn't accomplished by the style of photography, but by the actual writing of the movie.

Also, the giant lice things were dumb. There's already a ginormous monster trashing the city. If you can't get enough horror or spectacle or suspense or whatever out of that then you're not even a good enough writer to be making a monster movie. Congratulations.

The Omega Man

2008-01-15T22:00:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I couldn't help comparing this to "I am Legend." What is Hollywood better at doing than they were when this was made (or at least in this movie)? Well, lots of little things. "I Am Legend," or really any modern big-budget film, looks so much more slick than this movie did, and nearly every scene--heck, nearly every camera cut--is highly stimulating. There's so much slack in "The Omega Man." Even the scenes in "I Am Legend" with Smith hanging out with his dog and such don't have the feel of slack that there is in this older film.

Also, Heston didn't look insanely ripped like Smith does. I guess in contemporary movies the hero has to look so much more awesome than most people could ever be. Meanwhile, old Chuck Heston actually has the physique that you'd more expect out of a guy in his position.

Overall, I think the story in "The Omega Man" is more interesting than that of "I Am Legend," but ultimately they're both a little unsatisfying. I like "The Omega Man" better because it's way more interesting for the zombie/enemies to be some kind of weird Luddite cult than to just be CGI's screaming hugemouthed rage.

Days of Heaven

2008-01-12T16:00:00.000-08:00

I love Malick. So much that I was kind of shocked after watching this to realize that he's only made four films, and that this is the last film of his that I hadn't watched yet. I mean, I kind of already knew that, but somehow the fact just didn't feel right. Anyway, I wish I could see this in a theater someday. Everything anyone says about the cinematography being amazing is true. It is.

It occurs to me as I'm writing this that part of why I felt like I'd watched a lot more Malick than actually exists is because I was forgetting that I've watched a lot of David Gordon Green's films, and his approach to film-making is to try to make more Malick films. I really can't distinguish between their films, I think, except by being aware of who made what. I feel like I should probably back off my Malick worship until I can tell the difference between his stuff and the stuff of his followers (followers? worshippers? acolytes? copiers?).

As I explained to Elliot, I really don't understand why so many people find Malick boring. I mean, I understand that it's because there's not a lot of dialogue and little plot and stuff, but I get kind of exhilarated watching his films cuz they're just wall-to-wall gorgeous. So I don't really understand how people don't respond to that.

More than "The New World," which is the other most recent Malick film I've seen, the plot seemed really tight in this movie, actually. It was really skeletal, but the scenes that advanced the plot did so incredibly efficiently, often with just a half a line of dialogue. In the end, though, I think kind of because of that swiftly moving plot, I felt like it was kind of short. I definitely wanted it to be longer, with more room to breathe. Which probably makes me very weird, I guess.

Juno

2008-01-04T19:00:00.000-08:00

Funny. Over-written, but then, that was kind of the point. I mean, I liked it, but I couldn't help but notice that the only character in the whole movie who is really criticized is Jason Bateman's, the mid-thirties musician with a case of arrested development (coincidence? hm?) Why is it that in virtually all movies the mid-life guy who's still into horror movies and collecting music is shown to be shallow and maladjusted in the end? Really, Bateman's only sin is not being a famous musician: he's sold out and can only make music for commercials, so it's wrong of him to still be into music and movies the same way a teenager is. Also, Superbad was funnier.

But, whatever. Everyone laughed a lot and had a good time. Can't say that for every movie you see.

Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

2007-12-30T22:10:00.000-08:00

My favorite thing about this movie was the way the dead bodies slapped into the cement after going down Sweeney Todd's little barber chair chute. The insouciant way Todd slit the throats while singing his song was also rather delightful. I'd never seen the musical, but I imagine mostly everything that was cool about this came from that, and it was good enough here that I can't imagine they fucked up too much about the musical. Johnny Depp, of course, was enjoyable.

Someone needs to get Burton to back of the digital color manipulation though. He already's ruined a few movies with it's over/misuse, and could've done so here if the music wasn't good enough to inject life into the movie even though Burton tried to sap all the life from nearly every frame. Mrs. whoever's (HBCarter's) extended daydream with the extra-saturated color, though, was a nice touch, but it didn't need the grayed out London of the rest of the movie to make it effective. Burton decided, I guess, to make the whole thing seem as if the characters were all wearing the One Ring...

The Golden Compass

2007-12-16T13:42:00.000-08:00

It flew by really quickly and I felt very entertained, and it made me really want to read the book. No, really, when it ended I thought: when's the next one come out? I was seriously ready for about an hour more of movie. By which I mean, I guess, it felt like a lot was missing, but what was there was very good and made me want more. I just kind of wish this wasn't the finished movie, and I could go up to the filmmakers and say, "Yeah, that's a really good start. Keep going." I'm not sure if that's a bad thing or not.

I did feel like there was a pretty serious critique of authority kind of happening in the background... No, actually, I guess it was pretty explicit, it just wasn't actually very interested in it. I think that's why I want to read the books. I assume the book was actually interested in that aspect of it. If I read this book to my kids will they grow up to be good little anarchists? I hope so!

I Am Legend

2007-12-14T17:30:00.000-08:00

I really wanted this movie to be good, but it wasn't. It's stubborn refusal to actually go anywhere with any of the intriguing developments it presented completely ruined it.

Why did the zombie leader not do anything except scream? If he was smart enough to set up a trap for Will Smith? Are their people out there who really think huge-mouthed screaming is that awesome or scary? And why are those people allowed to make movies? Now I just want to watch the Omega Man again and dream about the present-day big-budget blockbuster that could really do this movie right and pretend this movie'd never happened.

It almost felt like someone had come in and decided that the three-hour movie the first hour and a half seemed to be setting up were just too long and so they ripped off a page from the Judge Dredd playbook and decided to blow everything up.

I've hated this movie more every day since I watched it a week and a half ago.

Duck, You Sucker

2007-12-12T13:11:00.000-08:00

Really kind of awesome, actually.

The introduction of James Coburn's character has to rank near the top of the list of coolest entrances ever--so great that it almost made me forget about the twenty minutes preceding it until just now, with Rod Steiger acting perfectly disgusting but still ending up more likeable than than the rich snobby folks in their coach. The closeups of their mouths while they were chewing seemed especially refreshingly un-Leone to me, an intrustion of a Fellini-esque weirdness into the hard edge of Leone's usual style.

I think it's probably that exact excess of ideas that is the major difference between this movie and Leone's earlier trilogy. They were so focused and sharp--even TGTB&TU at nearly three hours never really meanders. This has the first half hour of pure Leone coolness and then it kind of wanders into a more... something else... I guess if there's a genre of small-guy-accidentally-getting-caught-up-in-historical-events, a la Forrest Gump and Zelig, it was kind of that for a while... the momentum of that first half hour probably doesn't quite hold up the rest of the movie, especially with the draggy flashbacks to Ireland. They were so long and weird that I have to assume part of the point of them was their length and their weirdness, but I'm not convinced that they were very necessary anyway.

I really have no idea what to think of the final flashback, where Coburn hands over his girlfriend to his future-traitor friend. It was already creepy how happy they all were and how into watching them make out Coburn's friend was, but what exactly the hand-off was there for is beyond me, unless as some kind of indication that the revolutionaries in Ireland were also sexually liberated or something, which is a point that doesn't really seem to have a place in the movie. But, whatever. I'll give it points for being weird and for being the logical conclusion of all the creepy shoulder-patting by Coburn's friend while they were kissing.

Can't forget to mention the shot when they finally get to Mesa Verde and the camera pans across the posters of the governer and then stops to settle on one poster for a while until suddenly a finger protrudes from the white space to the left of the governor's face and tears a straight strip across his eyes, and then from behind Rod Steiger's eye's move into the light and look out from behind the governor's face. No word for that but 'awesome.'

In a Lonely Place

2007-12-03T22:26:00.000-08:00

Where this movie really got me was about fifteen minutes in (maybe less) when Bogart takes the coat check girl back to his place and she's blabbering on about the book, and the perspective switches for a few minutes so that she's suddenly talking directly at the camera. Except that I'm not completely sure that the camera was suddenly supposed to be in Bogart's head, because he wasn't in the same spot that the camera was when she started talking to it. Maybe it was still supposed to be a Bogey POV shot, but the effect was that she was talking directly to the audience. I just wasn't expecting it, and it completely sold the movie to me.

I do think I could watch Humphrey Bogart trade flirty barbs with his sassy costars for the rest of my life and never get bored of it. He just did it so well, and either he just got extremely lucky with his costars or he was able to draw it out of them, but I don't know that I've seen anybody else who could do it quite like that.

What was the deal with the masseuse lady, though, I wonder? Somehow she was supposed to be able to take care of any problems for Bogart's gf? It just seems weird that it was the masseuse who was supposed to be her savior...

Blade Runner: The Final Cut

2007-12-03T13:00:00.000-08:00

It was hard to watch this without trying to spot differences between this and the Director's Cut, with which I'm pretty familiar. I really didn't see all that many, aside from a few short shots that seemed new to me, and of course the different order of the ending sequences, so that Deckard runs away with Rachel after surviving his fight with Batty.

I was a little confused by his nod. Since everyone knows that after the Director's Cut the big question was about Deckard's human/replicant status, it almost seemed like having the nod be the last bit of expression we see out of Deckard, after he picked up the origami unicorn, it was pretty easy to assume that the nod was meant to be in response to that question, so that Deckard seemed to be actually thinking about that question more than I ever thought he was before, except that if that were the case, just nodding seems like a pretty stupid response to him making up his mind. Or maybe he just nodded because Harrison Ford couldn't figure out how else to respond to an origami unicorn, but thought he should respond somehow. Also, maybe the shot where Batty kills Tyrelle was held a little longer? I don't remember so much blood before, but I'm not sure.

I was really happy to be able to see it on a big theater screen, but I can't see the cut seemed to be that much of an improvement over the extant one.

(12/9/07)
Okay, so my worst fears have been realized. Here's Ridley Scott on "the nod"

Wired: You shot the unicorn dream sequence as part of the original production. Why didn't you include it in either the work print or the initial release?

Scott:As I said, there was too much discussion in the room. I wanted it. They didn't want it. I said, "Well, it's a fundamental part of the story." And they said, "Well, isn't it obvious that he's a replicant?" And I said, "No more obvious than that he's not a replicant at the end." So, it's a matter of choice, isn't it?

Wired: When Deckard picks up the origami unicorn at the end of the movie, the look on his face says to me, "Oh, so Gaff was here, and he let Rachael live." It doesn't say, "Oh my God! Am I a replicant, too?"

Scott:No? Why is he nodding when he looks at this silver unicorn? I'm not going to send up a balloon. Doing the job he does, reading the files he reads on other replicants, Deckard may have wondered at one point, "Am I human or am I a replicant?" That's in his innermost thoughts. I'm just giving you the fully fleshed-out possibility to justify that look at the end, where he kind of glints and looks angry. To me, it's an affirmation. He nods, he agrees. "Ah hah! Gaff was here. I've been told."

I've always kind of wondered how the guy who made Blade Runner and Alien could've also made Gladiator and... well... pretty much all of his other movies. Apparently it's because he's kind of an idiot (seriously, what kind of an imagination thinks "Yeah, when Deckard finds the unicorn he thinks 'Ah hah! Gaff was here. I've been told.' and then his response to learning unequivocally that he's a robot is to nod quickly and walk away"?) Oh, well. Blade Runner's still great (even if now it will forever have that silly nod), but I guess I can stop wondering what happened to Ridley Scott...

I'm Not There

2007-11-30T16:09:00.000-08:00

The movie itself might seem somewhat inexplicable, at least insofar as there's nothing really within the movie that ties any of the pretty much discrete narratives together, so it's interesting that the movie lets itself be propped up by the reality of Dylan's already gigantic mythology. It's not a biopic in the sense that it really tries to explain it's subject to the audience, or even present any kind of new insight into him. It seems like ultimately what Haynes tried to do--or at least all he accomplished doing--was to make a movie out of Dylan's mythology. And he even tied it less the actual Bob Dylan, or the actual Robert Zimmerman, than it already was.

I especially liked how each of the different narratives was really a completely different kind of film. Julianne Moore pretty much existed in a flat-out parody of Joan Baez from the Scorcese doc; Heat Ledger was in some kind of contemporary character-driven drama about a relationship and it's disintegration; Cate Blanchett wandered around in a Fellini homage; Richard Gere in an even more psychedelic version of the Billy the Kid story than Peckinpah's original, but that was obviously the reference. Christian Bale was also in some kind of movie, but I'm not sure exactly what. The only one who seemed to really exist in just this movie was the Franklin kid, but maybe there was another type of movie he was supposed to living through. I also liked the ways some of the stories bled into each occasionally without ever really trying to account for each other in any especially satisfactory or clear way.

Ultimately, though, like Control, I don't think the movie ever managed to explain why the subject was interesting. If you weren't already interested in Dylan, I doubt you'd walk away from the movie wanting to go out and get any of his albums. I wonder, is there a music biopic that makes its subject interesting to someone who might watch it with not interest in him/her beforehand?

Southland Tales

2007-11-24T00:37:00.000-08:00

It kind of makes me feel a little sad that most of the things I thought were so great about Southland Tales are exactly the reasons that most people will hate it. It probably goes out of its way to explain the whole "thing" behind everything than Donnie Darko did, but there's no character in the movie who's anywhere even close to as relatable-to as Donnie was--there aren't any characters who are even supposed to be as relatable-to as Donnie was. And most people need that in a movie, I guess. I don't, for whatever reason.

Wherever I read it was right: Kelly's better when his cosmology is hidden or obscured. I liked that there were many aspects of the movie that weren't explained completely, but I also imagine that Kelly has it all packed away somewhere the exact explanation for everything, and I just wouldn't really be interested in all of that. The reason is something like this:

By ignoring conventional questions of explicability and coherence, Kelly isolates the fundamental building blocks of film and lets them work together on their own without the scaffolding beneath of them of plot and character. I mean, I guess there's plenty of plot in here, but the best parts are, for instance, Timberlake lip-synching to The Killers in some kind of arcade while hot chicks in vinyl nurse outfits dance around him, and he pours beer over his head, and that scene is mentioned in virtually every review as being a part that its worth seeing the movie for, and it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the rest of the movie. Or: the whole thing with the Star Spangled banner being sung first in Spanish and then English over a discordant quartet (was it the Kronos Quartet?) while the Zeppelin went all shiny and new into the LA skyline and fireworks went off everywhere. These scenes are absolutely perfect and are pure film, and for whatever reason I like that they're allowed to exist in relative isolation because of the general incoherence around everything.

Also, what I think Kelly is especially good at, maybe as good as anyone aside from Lynch, is presenting to form of something, such as the climax of this movie that is only really a climax because it has the feel of a climax. I mean, it is the climax, but because the overall story has been relatively shapeless before that, it's not exactly a climax that exists because of the story. Or something.

But what bothers me ultimately about Kelly is that he does have a very clear idea some ridiculously complex sci-fi/supernatural/spiritual plot behind everything and he wants you to spend a lot of time decoding everything until you unpack it all and understand everything. Which just seems kind of lame to me: story as puzzle. So in the end, Kelly's just as stuck under the tyranny of narrative as virtually every other filmmaker in America.

Kiss Me Deadly

2007-11-24T00:27:00.001-08:00

Holy shit!

I cannot believe I didn't know about this movie. I can't believe I sat on it for so long, either (I got it in the mail from Netflix several weeks ago, maybe over a month ago, and just didn't get around to watching it...) The Netflix description on their little sleeve says:

"Shortly after sleazy detective Mike Hammer picks up a scantily clad hitchhiker, his car is forced over a cliff. He awakens from unconsciousness to find his passenger dead -- but it wasn't the fall that killed her. As Hammer sets out to uncover the woman's deadly secret and find her unknown assassins, he ignores explicit signs that he should mind his own business. This classic film noir was adapted from Mickey Spillane's novel by the same name."

Well, I guess that's not technically wrong in any way, but wow does it undersell the movie. In a way I suppose I'm kind of glad that I didn't really know what to expect when I went into it, because I probably wouldn't have been quite as floored by it, but how is it that I've never seen superlatives being thrown around w/r/t to this movie before?

Anyway, even before the ending it's amazing. Hammer is such a total sleazeball, and the way every woman just throws herself at him is almost surreal, especially with his complete lack of interest it. And there was actually a lot of really well-written dialogue throughout, mostly being spoken by women. And. And. And.

Okay, I don't really have a lot to say about this right now, except that I think that lots of parts of this movie must have been the source for various scenes in Lost Highway, and there were shots from this movie being watched in the background throughout Southland Tales, so apparently the movies known in certain circles.

I want to buy it.

Control

2007-11-21T17:00:00.000-08:00

Yeah, really very beautifully shot, no doubt. But ultimately it runs into the same problem that almost all musician bio-pics tend to run into, or troubled genius bio-pics run into, which is that it focuses too much on the turmoil in his life to the exclusion of his artistic life. Not that there should be less of a focus on his life. In fact, I do think that specifically for this movie at least, one of the things that it does right is that it doesn't really forgive Ian Curtis for being an asshole. (Even better, it also never really condemns him for it. It does really a pretty good job of letting us see how much of an asshole he ultimately is being while also allowing us to see how from his perspective he's just in an impossible situation and he doesn't know what to do about it.) Further along those lines, it does manage, mostly, to not add a whole bunch of extra symbolic meaning to Curtis's suicide. It kind of just seems like a particularly jack-assed thing for him to have done, in the end, and you don't really get a sense that he thought he was accomplishing much of anything by it. So, anyway, it does those things right. But it also falls into this very common trap of not portraying the creative process at all. Which I could forgive the movie for if it had at least tried, but it doesn't even care to look especially like it's tried. We see at the beginning that Curtis is a kid with exceptional musical tastes and capable of quoting Wordsworth and stuff, but he doesn't really ever talk about music with anyone and he doesn't really do a lot of writing throughout the movie. It's just like, he goes to a Sex Pistols show, then he tells the New Order guys that he should be their singer, and the next thing he's singing these amazing songs, and we're left to wonder where they've come from. It's like he just decided to be the singer in a band and all of a sudden he's singing songs. We don't even see him figuring out how he wants to sing or anything. (Also, the staged performances are really pretty spectacular. They almost make the movie worth it. Or they almost make up for the movie's giant gaping flaw.) And the fact that they didn't even try to put any of that creative process into the movie ultimately makes me assume that the director just must not have been very interested in it, which makes me not like him a lot, and made me spend a lot of the movie griping to myself that it was kind of a waste of time.

INLAND EMPIRE

2007-11-18T23:00:00.000-08:00

The ending of this movie, and I mean actually the closing credits of this movie, are one of the weirdest things Lynch has ever done in a movie. It's unclear at the end if Laura Dern is supposed to be Laura Dern or one or all of the characters she played in the movie, and then there's that chick from Mulholland Drive, the dark-haired chick, who wasn't even in this movie, blowing a kiss to Dern, who returns it. And then a bunch of girls who at first seem like they're the prostitutes from the movie because they're dressed like them but then you realize they're not all come out and dance and lipsink to a Nina Simone song. And it feels genuinely joyful and alive in a way that I don't think anything ever has in any Lynch movie before, even Straight Story. That is, it's obviously a staged moment, but it's also a staged real moment; it doesn't even pretend to have some symbolic referent that you might be able to get at to understand why it's there. It's just a bunch of women dancing to Nina Simone, plus Laura Dern and a few other people who are all pretending to or all actually are and probably a little bit of both enjoying it. I mean, the movie closed with a music video pretty much the way TMNT II did. That's fucking weird.

No Country for Old Men

2007-11-09T10:59:00.000-08:00

First Coen brothers movie in how long? I'd look it up, but I don't really care to. Definitely a return to an older style for them, having more in common with Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing than The Big Lebowski or The Man Who Wasn't There. And maybe more in common with Blood Simple than any other movie they've made due to the fact that it didn't seem like a rehearsal of a type of movie the way almost all of their other films do.

I actually did think a few more scenes could've used incidental music, but that's probably because I think the score from Fargo is so good and they use music so well in a lot of their other movies. The lack of it through most of the film definitely made the one scene where it finally showed up, when Tommy Lee Jones arrives at the hotel to find Moss dead, way more moving than anything else in the movie. They way Moss's death happens off-camera seems even more jarring in the film than in the book, since you kind of expect even more of a film that it will include you on everything important, and certainly the death of the guy who up until then seemed to be the protagonist is an important thing. But they got that structural move from the book, so they get props I guess mainly for recognizing how important it is for what the book/story is trying to do that there not be some kind of climactic battle scene between Moss and his killers.

I never thought I'd say this about any movie ever, but Tommy Lee Jones might've been the best thing about the movie. He was absolutely note for not perfect.

Watching the movie after having read the book so recently, and noting especially how closely they adhere to the book and to what it has for dialogue, the one glaring change they made really stuck out. The conversation between Tommy Lee Jones and his old uncle, the statement his uncle makes to him about thinking that the world has gotten so much worse on his watch being just vanity, seemed like the Coen brothers responding in kind to McCarthy, as if the movie was both an adaptation of the novel and a way for the Coens to respond to the book--I'd say engage the book in dialogue, but it's hard for me to imagine a way that McCarthy would then respond to the movie, so they kind of automatically get the last word in, which isn't really a dialogue.

*****

(11/14 10:30 PM)

I was also wondering a little bit about the female characters in the movie. The Sheriff in the book goes on at length a few times about how great his wife is, and how Llewelyn's wife is really the better half of that pair, and how he's sure Llewelyn knows it and whatever, and I'd say what you get of the female characters in the book kind of backs that up. The female characters are certainly not violent at all, and seem mostly unaffected by that whole violent world of drugs and money, up until Chigurh goes to visit Llewelyn's wife at the end. But her demise is described as Llewelyn's fault by Chigurh, and it either is or it's Chigurh's fault. In any case, the women are truly innocents. But they seem like real characters just as much as any of the men are real characters. In the movie, I'm not sure quite that that came across at all. I don't think the Coens were really interested in that aspect of the story much at all. Llewelyn's wife mostly seemed kind of hapless, and like just the type who sits and stares at the television and that's all she's good for. Of course, her mom was comic relief, and I think she mostly was in the book, as well, but it's weird that the only female character from the book that really got fully translated in the movie, and even got sort of amplified, is the elderly woman for comic relief. The Sheriff's wife was in the movie, and I can't remember if she actually appeared in the book or if she was always only discussed by the Sheriff. But she was very genuinely important to the Sheriff in the book, very genuinely important as a person, as his wife, as sort of his moral compass or something. I think she just kind of seemed like a benevolent non-entity in the movie. It would be hard to convey the importance of someone who's even more beside the story than anyone else in a movie, I guess. But they included the Sheriff voiceover stuff, and none of his discussion of how important his wife was made it into the movie. I think there was a subtle point being made by McCarthy in the book, and I think the Coens just ignored it or didn't notice it. I'm not sure I entirely agree with the point he was trying to make, but it did add a level of nuance to the novel that I think would've not been a bad addition to the movie. This isn't really all that much of a criticism, I'd say, but I did come up with it pretty quickly when I was thinking of something more to discuss about the movie to add the dialogue of the dying Mexican in my cover of the first chapter of No Country for Old Men for my National Novel Writing Month novel.

There Will Be Blood

2007-11-05T19:30:00.000-08:00

There were so many amazing things about this film that it's kind of a shame the final fifteen minutes had to happen. I guess there needed to be some kind of final confrontation between DDL and preacher-guy, at least from the standpoint of narrative and story arc and everything, I mean that it "needed" a "climax" to properly follow the rules of movie-story, but the scene kind of fell victim to that old Great Acting = screaming idea, and the only redeeming thing about the final scene was that there was, indeed, blood.

I suppose, since PTA aspires so much to be Robert Altman, that, like his hero, you just have to take the good with the bad. There was even some of that in Punch Drunk Love, when PTA let Phillip Seymour Hoffman go nuts with his little scream/acting bug.

Enough complaining, though; this movie was incredible right from the start. It was at least ten minutes in before there was any dialogue, and it would be pretty hard to convince me that the opening wasn't a pretty direct reference to 2001, with all the origins-of-man symbolism that might entail. The pan up to the hills with Jonny's score climaxing in a long martian-chord drone, and the score's subsequent descent as the camera pans back down, that whole little shot was easily one of the best bits of film I've ever seen. Worth the price of admission alone.

And it might even have been out done by the well explosion sequence: the way it comes out of nowhere, the totally arrhythmic beating and hammering that gradually finds its way into an insistent pounding not unlike a heartbeat, with the long takes of so many men running around frantically, and the oil geyser burning bright orange against a deep blue sky. I wish I could watch that scene over and over again. It was incredible.

Jonny Greenwood's score is incredible, and PTA is proving with this movie and PDL that he knows how to use scores better than almost anyone else out there, with the possible exception of that guy who made Huckabees, whatever his name is, which I should be able to remember but I can't.

No discussion of this movie should exclude a mention of Paul Dano. DDL was great, of course, but he kind of always is, and he's kind of always great in the exact same way. Paul Dano, though; wow. He might be the best American actor to hit the scene since Johnny Depp. His performance in Little Miss Sunshine was probably the most overlooked thing about the movie, and probably because of the fact that he wasn't speaking for most of the movie. Here he has no shortage of lines, and he should get some kind of Oscar recognition just for completely holding his own in every scene he shares with DDL. I'm really looking forward to watching this kid's career.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

2007-10-28T19:00:00.000-07:00

Like an apprentice Terrance Malick movie. Highlights: the law men descending from the patch of trees toward the house in the middle of nowhere, the snow being thrown on the frozen blue-ing body of... that guy they killed... (I'm writing this a long time after watching it...)

It's hard for me to really fault a movie for trying to be a Terrence Malick movie, but I thought it could've been improved by just completely going for it in a few places where it didn't quite.

Especially, I'm thinking of, the scene when someone is approaching from the horizon on horseback, and his approach is framed by a doorway, and on the inside of the doorway its not quite (very very close) black, and outside the sky is gray and the ground is white, and there's this slightly curvy but essentially straight path of darker gray dirt, and the guy on horseback approaches right down this path, and I know it would have been a reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally long shot, but I found myself wishing very strongly that the shot would have been held in real time for the guy's entire approach, where instead he faded out from the distance and faded in into the foreground. Boo...

But the colors and the light throughout was spectacular. I wanna watch it again for that reason.

I wasn't really interested in the whole epilogue part, though. Or, I mean, I don't think I'd want to watch that part again. It was good information-wise, I guess.

We Own the Night

2007-10-17T22:40:00.000-07:00

Pretty much exactly as good as I thought it'd be. At some point I'm going to have to forgive Joaquin Phoenix the grudge I hold him for being in Gladiator and then further soiling my memory with his performance in Signs, cuz he's really actually a pretty good actor.

The car scene, in the rain, was easily the best point of the film: the way they used no (or almost no?) incidental music through the thing, no exaggerated speed noises or screeches of tires, the way the overwhelming color was the actual blue color of rain, they way they kept the jump-cuts pretty minimal. It could've been better if they'd have let the seen run up a little bit before the point when you realize what's happening, with maybe a lighter beginning in the car or something, but the actual action itself was extremely well done, and in a subtle way you usually don't see in huge mainstream flicks like this: of course, it was allowed to do it that way because it's a cop drama, not a cop action movie.

But then they followed it up with the scene in the hotel room where Eva Mendez finds out that Joaquin "Bobby" Phoenix is taking the cop exam and gets upset, followed by Joaquin doing some serious "acting" like slamming his fist on the counter and tipping over the bottle of whiskey and screaming at her. It was such a half-assed scene, poorly acted by both the characters but it would've been hard to act right because of how poorly it was set up and the really bad dialogue for them to try to act around. Also, it'd been so long since we'd really seen anything of their characters by that point that there really wasn't much of a sense of who they were anymore.

There were some real chances for good shots in this: especially in the climactic scene, the wide shot of the grass burning and the overall scene of Bobby walking through the tall grass hunting Vadim, but the movie didn't linger enough for them to work like I wanted them to. (I'm thinking along the lines of the scenes in the grass in The New World, maybe).

I also kind of felt like the movie was working too hard to try to make a point at the same time that it was working too hard to appear like it wasn't trying to make a point. So you're supposed to walk away thinking, "Well, Bobby joined the side of the 'good guys,' right, but look where it got him? His dad's dead; his girlfriend's gone (highlighted by Bobby's misrecognition of a face in the audience at his graduation ceremony); and now his brother's getting a desk job so he won't get to work with him, either. He's really alone. So maybe he'd have been better off to stay out of it or something?" I don't know. Ultimately it just doesn't seem like that interesting of a question; especially because the binary between a rich life with lots of friends and the ascetic life of the strait and narrow is one that the movie totally created in the first place (not that it "created" it since it's obviously a long-standing idea in human consciousness, but that it created it for itself).

But, whatever. Could've used more and better eighties music, too. At least some New Order in the background or something.

***
(10/18)

The most actually interesting thing about the movie was the way it kept reiterating that the bad Russian guys "were not afraid" of the police. They didn't view the police as all-powerful, and they didn't see them as anything but another group of guys trying to fuck with their shit. The movie itself seemed to go a little out of its way to present the police as just another group of guys, as well. Most of the cops know Bobby, and the fact that his father and brother are high-ups in the department make all the actions of the police toward Bobby seem to be, at least to some extent, just and extension of Bobby's father's power. Similarly, Bobby's "conversion" to the good guys only comes about because he wants revenge against the guys who shot his brother and murdered his father, and it's really his family connections more than anything that makes it possible to join the police and suddenly be assigned to the same case that his brother's working on. The most hammer-over-the-head moment along these lines comes when Bobby's kind of beating up his old friend, and he says something like "I'm a cop now, so I can do anything I want." In other words, to a degree the film is trying to expose the monopoly on power that the police have as being nothing more than just their assertion of that monopoly, not something granted them by God or, more mysteriously, "the public." The police in the movie behave in pretty much the same way you'd expect a rival mafia to behave if the movie were just about two mafias. Even the film's title, which apparently comes from some slogan on NYPD badges is just an assertion of power, nothing at all like the mystical force for good we're conditioned to believe to be the case in our society.

Really, though, I wonder how different this is than a lot of cop movies, like even Dirty Harry, where the cops are portrayed as loose cannons, etc.? The most important difference, I guess, is that even in the Dirty Harry movies, the organization of the police itself is never really exposed or questioned, it's only the individual cops. And, actually, I do think the movie succeeds a little bit in its attempt to expose and critique the state monopoly on power, but I wonder if, by making the film a period piece, it might not weaken the critique just a little bit.

Here's James Gray on Bobby in his movie: "He became a police officer and abandoned his true self." Gray seems to think that's the heart of his movie that everyone's missing. It seemed pretty obvious to me. There's the opening scene, with Eva Mendes's boob, and Bobby saying "I could die right now and I'd be happy" and then the closing scene, where Mark Wahlberg says "I love you very much" and Bobby repeats it back to him, but it's obvious that he's not happy. But, I don't know, "abandoned his true self?" That's such a lame problem, this pining after yr "true self," like that's some actual thing out there that you have to discover and then adhere to. In a more realistic interpretation of Bobby's character, his problem at the end seems to have a lot more to do with loneliness than any true self abandoning. He loved Eva Mendes but he lost her because he acted like a dick and treated her like an accessory to his own, more important life. But he was kind of doing that before he abandoned his "true self;" at least some of why he chose her as the girlfriend to bring to meet his family was that he knew bringing a Puerto Rican would piss his dad off, and making out with her in the stairwell while the cops had a moment of silence for a fallen comrade was consistent more with that. But that's enough psychology. There's too much shoddy psychology in movies, this one included.

Eastern Promises

2007-10-14T14:15:00.000-07:00

Kudos to Cronenberg for keeping me completely in the dark until the big reveal of Mortensen's characters true nature, and similarly for not treating it like this huge deal, like the way Shyamalan or even someone not quite that shitty would've. Also for not having Mortensen really give away his secret to Naomi Watt. But I really did not buy the kiss between them. It was the type of kiss that only happened because this was a movie; there's no way two people in the situation would've decided to kiss. It was just ridiculous. Did some suit make Cronenberg do it, or was that really all his decision? Or in the script I suppose...

Micah thought this could be a good set up to a series of films, and maybe it could be but I think I like it as just it's own. It's pretty obvious where Vigo's going from there, and subsequent films would just consist of arbitrary complications in order for there to be a plot. All the big work that the film wanted to do is already done, I think.

Really, really great Russian accent by Vigo. I wish I could do a Russian accent like that. I wonder if that's even an actual localized accent he had that was in some way different from the accents of the other characters?

It's almost kind of funny how obvious it is that Cronenberg wants to really show us the gore: like the shot of the frozen finger being snipped off or, especially, the kid pulling down his scarf so we can see the slit in his throat and the blood starting to come out. And, like KSM mentioned, how obvious the prosthetics are sometimes: especially the guy in the barber's chair.

In retrospect, though, it doesn't make a whole of sense for the barber guy to make the kid do it. It seemed like it was setting something up at the time, but I'm not sure that it ever paid off.

Mean Streets

2007-10-13T23:39:00.001-07:00

It's kind of unbelievable how good this movie gets in the third act. Not that it's bad before then, but even though you know it's going to explode eventually, even though you see it coming through the whole movie, when everything goes to shit it's still shocking. And wow could Harvey Keitel and Robert DeNiro act back then. Did they just get sick of it or something?

Also, even though Scorsese's never really gone quite the way of those two, there's a real anger (or something, something trying to get out) that I'm not sure is present in his more recent string of really good movies. Maybe should see the Departed again, just for comparison purposes.

It could be that there's just something I find inherently more interesting and powerful when you can tell a person's trying to figure out there craft, that explosion of creative energy and power when they're just starting see what they can do and are maybe even a little in awe of it themselves, more interesting in that case than the type of controlled mastery Scorsese's been showing off lately.

I still don't think this is quite as good as Taxi Driver, though, but it certainly erases any sense that Taxi Driver's whole understated opacity was just all Scorsese really knew how to do, which I think I kind of thought. Though a lot of this movie is just about as opaque as Taxi Driver was, there's not a whole lot about that's understated, I'd say.

Plus, who knew that Wes Anderson cribbed his whole slo-mo film w/pop music thing from Scorsese? Some of the times Scorsese does it in this almost made me think I was watching a Wes Anderson movie for a second, but of course there's not even a hint of that storybook cuteness that Anderson somehow gets in every single frame. (A lot of that probably has to do with the framing of the shots.) I wonder if Scorsese did that a lot in his other movies? I don't remember seeing it anywhere else before...

The Darjeeling Limited

2007-10-12T21:45:00.000-07:00

This was certainly better than I thought it'd be, I guess because for some reason I was thinking Wes Anderson was bound to descend into a mid-career slump of crap for a while here... Not sure exactly where I got that idea. But I would say he hasn't exactly entered that phase of his career. Though he has got the point that I don't think he's really trying to figure out anything new; he's just working on perfecting what he's getting at. I'm worried he's getting close to arriving there, and I hope he knows where to go from there.

I'm not sure that I've ever seen a filmmaker aside from Kubrick who can actually control everything that you see in the frame to the extent that Anderson has managed to do at this point in his career. Even things you notice going on in the background have probably been consciously put there by Anderson, or at least taken into account. He goes about as far as it would be possible to go toward separating what he's shooting from reality. It's certainly a feat.

What does it mean that the main characters in this movie are probably the most mature main characters in any of his movies? And is that even true? I think it might be, except for maybe Anjelica Huston in Tenenbaums. It was great to see her pull off her character in this movie, too. There was no way she should have been able to make her character seem even remotely believable, but she ends storming into her scene like she's the only one with anything real going on. Wes Anderson should make a movie with Anjelica Huston as the main character. He owes it to the world. What he manages to get out of her is on a whole other level from everything else he's doing--even his resurrection of Bill Murray. Actually, I think that's a really good idea. Maybe it would allow him to escape from his little world of arrested development that, while certainly unique and interesting and entertaining, gets further and further from seeming like there's actually anything at stake in every film. I probably wouldn't even feel that way about it if it weren't for Anjelica Huston in this movie. But she really did seem more actually compelling than the three brothers during her brief intrusion into the movie.

***
(10/18)

The thing that bothered me the most about this movie, and it's something I tried to articulate to Elliot but that I also admitted to being uncomfortable with (it's a criticism I'm a little uncomfortable having) is the way the movie used the death of the Indian boy to trigger whatever "real" spiritual awakening the three brothers are supposed to have. First of all, it's just such an obvious move: the death of the Indian boy brings them out of themselves so they have to experience something beyond their own self-centered world; except that it's obviously the function of the death of the Indian boy to be that for them, so, for the movie, the death of the boy is just as much about them as everything else. I kept waiting for some moment when the audience would be forced to see the death as something outside of the symbolic world of the three brothers, but the movie never takes that step. I don't think it's just the fact that it's an Indian death triggering a spiritual experience for three white Americans: it's the fact that the narrative is so focused on the three brothers that really nothing outside of them can exist in and of itself, and this fact gives the audience permission to experience the boy's death as something purely functional and symbolic (along with everything else in the movie, of course...) And if a narrative is really nothing more than a creative presentation of thought or thinking, which it is, then this form of thinking encourages the audience to enclose experiences in symbolic trappings. I'm uncomfortable about this criticism because it's such a moralistic critique.

Escape from New York

2007-09-20T20:07:00.000-07:00

There were things about this movie that were much better than I expected. The cinematography, especially was really pretty, with lots of lens flares and stuff done very well--it seems more than in most movies.

Particularly, the whole opening sequence, with its long tracking establishing shots, with Carpenter's characteristic music. And then Kurt Russell shows up with his eye patch and kind of tears a hole in that whole thing. So it was all very pretty to look at, for pretty much the whole movie, but I can't help but think they totally fucked Russell's costume in this. Maybe it's because I just watched Death Proof so recently, but I know Russell is capable of seeming way more rugged and cool than he ever does in this movie, and it starts with how shitty is costume is. The eye patch just looks silly, and then, what, is he wearing that Under Armour stuff? And his nicely combed hair... Obviously, someone on the set knew how to do costuming, because Romero is fucking awesome--really creepy and cool looking, and he manages to do the creepy laugh thing right, so it actually is kind of creepy. Other than Romero, though, most of the costume stuff that is supposed to be awesome is pretty much not awesome.

What especially doesn't work is the script, which is so bad you'd almost think it must have been created just as a challenge for the actors--and a challenge that none of them are particularly up for, save Harry Dean Stanton. Even he obviously struggle to put something into the words, but at least a few times he manages to deliver effectively. Oh, yeah, and also Romero. Was someone else just in charge of everything involving Romero, or something?

I can't forget, either, the part when Russell (or Snake... oooohhh!! Snake!) floats into NY on his glider, the music playing is a Carpenterized La Cathédrale Engloutie! It was really pretty perfect actually. Which is exactly the embodiment of what is so weird about this movie. There are some things about it that are done so well, especially the cinematography, and basically all the scenes except for the fight scene when nobody's talking... But as soon as it comes to directing the actors or the action sets, it's just all so flat. Which is especially weird, because wasn't Carpenter supposed to be like an action director? Has the action in action movies really gotten so much better since 1981?

Actually, the establishing shots and all the longer takes and everything made me think, once again, that film vocabulary, as far as how you film a scene and set up the players and everything, was significantly better in the late seventies and into the very early eighties than it is now. Not that I want to be one of those people who's always complaining about all the quick cuts in movies now or anything, but they are a technique that is overused, for sure. It's so much more compelling when things are captured in one shot, generally, than a bunch of cuts. Specifically, here, when Snake and Brain and the Prez and Maggie (?) all come out of the room where the President was being held, after killing Romero, they run across a fairly wide shot, and as the camera pans to follow them, the shot is interrupted by a guy in the foreground shadows, who watches them run off. I think in most contemporary movies that would've been accomplished with a cut, but there's something so much more interesting about doing it the way they did it here, I think.

Heart of Glass

2007-09-11T00:14:00.001-07:00

This movie is pretty much a failure. It's an interesting failure, but a failure. There's just not a whole lot that really works.

I somehow had forgotten that this was the movie where he used hypnotized actors the whole time, and I guess that adds a bit of interest to the film, but I'm glad that I was able to watch it w/o that knowledge--although I did find myself thinking a few times, "Why is everyone acting like zombies?" There are whole sections where the actors just stand there and proclaim their lines, and I'm not sure it would've made much difference had they been hypnotized or instructed to act hypnotized.

What I mainly thought while watching it was, "Here's a bit of proof that it really is hard to do a film like Lynch and get it right."

It seems like Herzog is at his best when he creates a situation in which he's inherently out of control and films the results. Even in Fitzcarraldo, for which he got the reputation of being a maniacal control freak, a lot of the things that are most interesting are the result of the difficulties involved in undertaking such an insane project, so there's so much that is just beyond his control, no matter what he does. Here, though, it seems like Herzog is in control of nearly every action, and nothing is quite as interesting, somehow.

The only part that really worked the way it was intended was the final bit about the two islands with the narration by the prophet guy. Herzog is just great at using long tracking shots of beautiful extreme landscapes with perfect music and sounds overlayed. The island was breathtaking, and the long shot all the way around with the lone figure standing on the precipice is pure Herzog at his best--the type of thing that I want to find a word for, something better than "Herzogian." Also, the shot from the inside of the little boat that they're rowing out to see was pretty incredible, followed by one of Herzog's many long takes of flocks of birds, another thing that he captures like virtually no one else.

There were a few other mildly interesting bits, but overall it felt like a lot of flailing around trying to find something interesting. Which is still interesting, and you have to give him credit for really trying to create something unique. But it's just never really interesting as a finished project. That's not a criticism; it's a description.

Also, the opening shots were very good. He'd already figured out how to do all that at this point in his career. The mist cascading over the wooded hills; the cattle idly chewing away at the grass in the foggy morning; and all those broad landscape shots that I think were maybe being filmed as a projection onto heavy cloth? Pure Herzogian goodness.

3:10 to Yuma

2007-09-09T21:00:00.000-07:00

I went to this movie to recover from the Bears loss, and it worked well enough for that. It's gotten some pretty amazing reviews, all of which indicated that it is a "good" movie, a serious film that is good because it takes itself seriously, because it allows viewers to project conflict between the protagonist and antagonist into something vaguely philosophical/meaningful, because it has some serious acting in which the actors fully inhabit their characters, etc. (I need to come up with a better formulation of that idea. Essentially, it's that the "good" movie is as much a genre of movie as action, comedy, romance (or romantic comedy?), etc. Mostly, the "good" movie is just a subgenre of drama, and critics tend to go nuts when a Good Movie disguises itself as a less reputable genre--typically some offshoot of action, like sci fi. Still need to come up with a better articulation of all of this.)

Anyway, critics love this movie because it takes the somewhat disreputable genre of the Western and turns it into Good Movie. And it does a pretty good job of it. Russell Crowe is about as fun to watch as he's been in any movie I've seen him in, except for maybe Master and Commander. And I always love watching Christian Bale act. Oh, and Tucker! from Flash Forward! !!! Is really very good as the creepy super villain guy, who functions mainly to be shot by Crowe at the end so the audience can really feel that Crowe has changed somehow.

Really, the climax was the part that I thought worked the least. Even though the scene with Bale and Crowe alone in their room was supposed to be the big crux of the thing, and there was evidently supposed to be some kind of big meeting of their souls or something, I just didn't quite get it. It pretty much just let the audience off the hook, I think. The movie had moved itself into a situation where there wasn't really a possible good ending, and then suddenly Russell Crowe realizes that Christian Bale is the only guy in the film who can equal his charisma, or something? I mean, it was a very satisfying ending, because Crowe was just too likeable to be all bad, as Bale's son correctly surmised. I think what bothers me most about it is that it really is just shallowness, and pretty extreme shallowness, masquerading as depth, because this is a Good Movie, so it's obviously deep. Ultimately, the ethic of the movie is that charismatic people are less dispensable than non-charismatic people, and that likeable people always have a good heart, deep down--at least when it comes to people they recognize as similarly charismatic and likeable. Because Bale is the only person in the whole movie who dies who the audience even cares in the slightest that they've died, and his death is avenged immediately by the slaughter of all of Crowe's posse by Crowe. But Crowe's character is a truly reprehensible person, and Bale's is actually kind of an idiot who sacrifices his life for his sons' adolescent fantasies of heroism, but there's supposed to something noble about the way it all ends.

I thought Tucker from Flash Forward's character, who really consisted of nothing more than an impenetrable set of tics and an unblinking stare, was the highlight of the movie, and in the end is the most honest thing about the movie. By never acting recognizably human he manages to be extremely charismatic and enjoyable without suckering the audience into buying his personal code of ethics. He obviously has one, but we are left to judge it instead of invited into it. Why do I find that preferable? I don't know... I'm not sure why "honesty" seems to me like such an important measure of a movie to me... or what exactly I mean by "honesty," here...

Shoot 'Em Up

2007-09-07T11:00:00.000-07:00

I'm writing this immediately after writing my note about 3:10 to Yuma, which is on Monday 17 September. In some ways this movie was a good contrast to that movie. It did not once try to be anything like a Good Movie, and has been thoroughly snubbed by critics for precisely that reason. Well, and it's just not as good of a movie as Yuma, but it's not as much worse as the Metacritic score might lead to one to believe. (Ebert, at least, sorta gets it.)

The basic problem with this movie is that it is never as clever as it wants to be. Really, the only thing that I thought worked on all of the levels it wanted to was the part in the opening sequence when Clive Owen's character shoots the umbilical chord after realizing that he doesn't have anything else to cut it with. Actually, the whole delivering a baby during a shootout thing was very awesome. But too much else in the movie just fell flat. What was up with the carrot thing? The only good (not really good, actually) thing that seemed to come out of it was the "What's up, Doc," line, which at least managed to do for "wit" what much of the rest of movie did for "plot", "action", or whatever.

If this movie had come with a text opening explaining what year it was, what had happened to America after the nuclear war, etc., absolutely everything else about the movie could have stayed the same and it would have been a perfectly believable bad scifi movie, a la Judge Dredd or Demolition Man. All that would have been missing was some obligatory explanation of some High Tech weapon some random character would've felt compelled to make. But, even with that missing, I think it would have been completely buyable as a sci-fi action movie. I'm not sure what that means, other than that Hollywood seems to think that sci-fi seems to mean B-Action movie.

It really is too bad that Monica Bellucci isn't in more movies, though.

Stardust

2007-09-03T13:00:00.000-07:00

I never would have watched this if Rachael hadn't wanted to go, and I'm glad she did. It was way better than any of the advertisements made it seem like it would be. It's weird when a film is so misrepresented by its advertisements... Could they really not figure out a way to market this film? It was just fun, sort of the way Shrek movies are fun, except way less annoying.

All that said, I don't remember a whole lot about the movie, which I can hardly believe I saw only a week ago. De Niro's portrayal of Captain Shakespeare was pretty funny, and I thought he played it far better than the role even needed him to.

I did have to wonder, though, why Michelle Pfeiffer's sisters were both played by young people with old person makeup on, since neither of them ever had to change into younger looking versions of themselves. It's hard enough for aging actresses to find work in the Hollywood world that it seems almost immoral to cast young actresses in the role of older characters for no reason.

Detour

2007-08-30T01:07:00.000-07:00

The bad transfer is almost like an extra stylistic effect, making the story seem even more murky than as it was originally filmed--and it was plenty murky. Neal's Roberts probably isn't supposed to be but comes off as kind of deranged. One minute he's a sullen pushover, but then he flies off the handle at slight provocation. The strangest shift was probably at the beginning of the flashback, when he gets sore that his dame is moving to LA and promised not to speak to her ever again. Next thing, he's pounding away at the piano in his club without a band, playing really brilliantly except he keeps shifting to a new song every twenty seconds or so. That is something that didn't seem intentional, although I'd believe it was. It makes the whole thing seem just a little bit more like a memory--a much more interesting way of accomplishing that than the standard fog flying around everywhere through these early scenes.

Further evidence for the total subjectivity of the flashback: his gf, once she's out in LA, apparently just sits there waiting by the phone with a blank hopeful expression on her face. Roberts apparently only remembers his side of the conversation, as he doesn't leave time for her to respond to any of the questions he asks. There's even a cut to her open face while he just rambles right on through her lines. Maybe he was on speed? It's the only time he ever appears happy in the film, and it seems like crazy happiness, not just being really happy about anything. Also, I think he just got up in the middle of his shift playing the piano and left the club to make his manic phone call.

Best shot in the whole film is Ann Savage walking toward the car after Roberts says he'll give her a lift. It's held just a little longer than it needs to be for the effect of just pushing the plot along, and it's really kind of a beautiful shot, with Savage's road-weary face and hair and her sure stride. The length of the shot turns it into something far prettier than it was intended to be, and it's kind of funny that it was probably basically an editing blunder, because I don't know if the vocabulary for that type of shot quite existed yet at the time this was made. But it's pure film, right there.

Then, later, in the car, with Vera sitting in the passenger seat exactly as Haskell had when he died, and Roberts is talking about that very fact, and suddenly Vera's eyes are open! Totally creepy! I didn't see her eyes open or anything, and she doesn't move her head or body at all which just made it extra scary. Her eyes are just suddenly open and she's staring at him, and he doesn't notice at first so he just stares out ahead of the car and rambles on in the voiceover. Then, Bam! Closeup of Vera screeching, "What have you done with the body!" Really brilliant!

Ann Savage really does steal the movie. She seems to be the only one in the show who can actually act, and the way she screeches half her lines outshrews even Liz Taylor, but with barely even a breath she's sometimes all of a sudden very sexy. It's amazing how she goes from repulsive to sexy so quickly, often without the help even of changed camera angles or anything. But you never really feel anything about her but fear.

Really funny but kind of cheap how Roberts lectures Vera on the way to the used car guy about how she should let him do all the talking, but when they get there he doesn't say a word. And then in the voiceover he talks about "we haggled" for the right price, but it still seems like he probably didn't speak.

Also it was especially creepy that Vera seemed the most purely attractive and sexy when she was dead. She was shot to look beautiful at that point, even. Instead of showing what would have been a truly gruesome picture, most likely, at that point she becomes a true femme fatale.

Nightmare Alley

2007-08-26T23:41:00.000-07:00

I definitely want to see this one again.

I wasn't expecting much. I just wanted to watch an old noir movie, and I didn't have any Netflix on hand, so I decided to try to find one on Netflix's Instant Viewing thing, but, surprisingly enough, it proved pretty hard to find old noir films they have ready for instant viewing. Nightmare Alley was the only one I found after about thirty minutes of searching, so I decided I'd settle for it. But I really was not expecting I'd find such an enjoyable little movie.

The whole "Are you going to marry her," seemed to me like a sinister version of that question as it's posed by all sorts of children, especially the way they forced Stan to marry the girl. It actually took me a couple of minutes to figure out that it might have been not as bizarre a thing for its setting. It was how they showed Stan had had sex with her.

wow I'm tired right now... write more later....

Killer of Sheep

2007-08-26T01:23:00.000-07:00

(backlogged to 9/10/07, 1:21am)

I'm glad I found out about this movie being shown at the Red Vic, since it's apparently kind of hard to find.

After about two and a half weeks, the strongest image in my mind of this movie is the scene when Stan dances with his wife, the way she starts to so hungrily kiss and grope him and how distractedly he just kind of walks away; it could've come off as too disaffected like the worst Antonioni or something, but it doesn't, it felt really potent. And then Stan's wife standing there, and does she leave the frame or not? and the window, empty, divided into nine smaller squares of white against the dark gray and black everything else, burning away in the middle of the frame. The way Burnett held the shot, too, on just that empty window. It's just so amazing when the reality of a specific object in actual time pokes through the narrative of a movie. (is that maybe part of the secret of how this thing works?)

The whole part where Stan goes with his friend to get the motor, the quirky behavior of the people in the house who sell him the motor, his friend hurting his fingers and then carelessly leaving the motor on the back of the truck, that whole scene was probably the most narratively fulfilling: it was funny and heartbreaking, very much in the way of an old Italian movie, like Umberto D or The Bicycle Thief.

The scene toward the beginning with the kid peeking out from behind the wooden board and the other kids throwing rocks at him, that scene was kind of ruined by my reading of Ebert's review before watching it. I tried to hard to make what I was seeing seem as perfect as how it had sounded as described by Ebert: there's a true instance of a spoiler!

Many of the reviews had said the scenes in the slaughterhouse were so disturbing, but I wasn't really all that disturbed by them. I mean, slaughterhouses suck, but I already knew that. Why was that such a sticking point for so many of the reviewers?

Deep Red

2007-08-25T23:39:00.000-07:00

I read in a Reel.com review of Blowup that Dario Argento, who was a film critic at the time of Blowup, was upset by the invasion of the two teenage girls while David Hemmings is assembling the narrative of his photographs. He apparently thought it was indicative of Antonioni's inability to keep the plot moving. Which really seems to me like it was kind of the point of that scene, but whatever. The Reel.com review said something about Deep Red, which also stars David Hemmings, being Argento's response or corrective to Blowup. I think that negatively influenced my viewing of the film at first. I kept looking for parallels, or things that might seem to be directed at Blowup. Frankly, if this was meant to in some way one-up Blowup, it's a complete failure.

There are a lot of weird things in the movie, though. The Blue Bar: was it supposed to look like that famous painting of the Hollywood bar at night, the one with Marilyn Monroe and James Dean? I don't know enough about that painting, but the bar looked so much like it that it seems like the painting must either have been painted of the exact bar used in the film, or it was meant to look like that. I couldn't figure out what the point of the reference was there, though.

About the only thing that really seemed like a nod at all to Blowup was the way David Hemmings sees for just one second the murder-lady in the window when he walks into psychic-lady's house, but Argento lets it go by quickly and Hemmings is never really sure what he saw until the very end. That was easily the best thing about the movie, even though Argento almost ruined it with the flashback when Hemmings is investigating the apartment again. The flashback completely eliminated the question mark in the viewer's mind about what Hemmings saw.

The parts that were meant to be scary really worked, unless the violence was supposed to be scary. Especially the weird little robot thing that floats toward the professor before he gets killed. It was one of the most legitimately creepy things I've seen in a movie, especially because it seemed completely out of place. And then when it turns out not to be supernatural but to be a robot thing, well, that's not an explanation of why it's there. Also, the scene when David Hemmings sets the flashlight on the table and then hacks his way into the walled-in room, with the darkness behind the hole because of how bright the light immediately on this side of the hole is, was really creepy. Even the pulled back shot of Hemmings looking into the room with rotted corpse in the middle of his flashlight light was creepy.

At least in this movie, Argento obviously had some fascination with random things from the world being dangerous. Hemmings' little scare on the outside of the old house, when the facade starts crumbling beneath him was the first instance I can think of it, and it really was bad. It just seemed like random suspense for no reason, and the fact that it was because Hemmings had just stupidly decided to scale the side of the building without a ladder or anything made it even dumber. I mean, it was kind of funny, but completely out of the place for the movie. Then Carlo gets hooked by a passing garbage truck, is dragged through the streets until he's nearly dead, and has his head smooshed by a random passing car. All of which was actually pretty funny, I thought, but I wasn't sure that Argento meant it to be for laughs. And the final scene with murder-lady, Carlo's mom, who gets her necklace caught in the elevator which then beheads her. So anticlimactic from a plot point of view. And, really, the shot of her head being severed was kind of hilarious.

The murder scenes were easily the most compelling scenes in the movie, which was kind of the opposite of Belly of the Black Tarantula, in which the scenes with the investigator and his wife were most enjoyable to watch. The domestic scenes in this between Hemmings and reporter-chick were not especially compelling. There was this weird kind of slapstick thing going on with reporter-chick's car, and their conversations about chauvinism and feminism were really stupid. And the arm-wrestling scene? It's possible that was in there to make you think reporter-chick might be the killer, since she was demonstrating her strength. But overall, their romance seemed to come out of nowhere and Argento either didn't care enough to bother with it or really had no idea how to develop that kind of thing. It as interesting to the extent that reporter-chick seemed to be invading from some other movie every time she was on-screen. Then Argento seems to pretty much forget about her after she gets stabbed. Clearly, the relationship between Hemmings and reporter-chick was not as important as the amount of screen time it got.

Almost forgot: the conversation between Hemmings and Carlo about what Hemmings saw also seemed to in some way be a nod to Blowup. Was having it come out of Carlo's drunk ass meant to be mocking Blowup pretensions? It was all one shot, with Hemmings on the far left and Carlo on the far right, and most of the middle of the shot taken up by the statue of some reclining god. Really, it was almost a good shot. I wonder now if knowing who that god was would have added anything to it?

The other weirdest shot: Hemmings and reporter-chick walking down the hallway of the school. They kept looking at each other in a way that seemed like it was being kind of pointed out, especially reporter-chick, but it was unclear what the significance of it was. I actually really liked that. It was intriguing and not confusing in a bad way.

Blow Up

2007-08-24T01:13:00.001-07:00

(with commentary)

For some reason, I was kind of excited when I saw there was audio commentary with auther Peter Brunette on the Netflix DVD I have, even though I have no idea who Peter Brunette is. I just tried watching it, but I could only make it about a third of the way through. I had to stop when Peter said, "presumably the line about queers and poodles wouldn't have made it into the script these days." Come on. Why not? Because he finds the line offensive, or because he assumes that everyone would find the line too offensive, or because he thinks everyone's more enlightened these days, or because he thinks the PC police would have stopped it? I mean, I assume this guy's supposed to be some kind of film historian or something, but does he watch any movies that actually come out these days? Of all the things in this movie that wouldn't make into a "Hollywood" film these days, why choose that to single out? Especially when I don't think there'd really be much fuss about the line anyway. What world does Peter Brunette live in?

The other problem with the commentary was just the general problem that many movie commentaries seem to have, which is that he kept talking about the film in such a way to avoid "spoilers," but why? Who is going to watch the movie for the first time with the commentary on? I think if you're doing a commentary, you can safely assume that anyone who listens to the commentary has already seen the movie at least once. So talk about the movie that way.

Peter Brunette, although he seems like a pleasant and intelligent enough guy, fell back too many times on his little critical tricks. Also, although he paid lip service to the complexity of the presentation of photog guy, he seemed incapable himself of anything but disgust for him. Even ordinary things like how he flips the camera from one hand to another, Brunette couldn't point out how suave it was without the word "suave" having some pretty obvious disgust quotes around it. Also, the fact that the junk shop leaves him utterly speechless is a little disappointing. He can't seem to talk about it because he doesn't know what it "means," because it doesn't fit into any of his critical tricks. Although I'm not saying this is the ultimate thing about the junk shop scene, it seems to me like at least one worthwhile conjecture is that photog guy is there because he thinks junk is interesting. Maybe Brunette couldn't offer that or another opinion because there wasn't anything easily condemnable about his interest in the junk shop? Who knows... Actually, it seemed to me like a simple case of not being able to offer any idea about the junk shop because he couldn't think of anything "profound" about it.

I really was hoping for an interesting commentary, though. Pretty much everything Brunette said about the film was obvious, surface-level criticism. "He's setting up a binary between the merry-makers and the poor people." Not only is that obvious, but it doesn't really expand on any of the oddness of the merry-makers. Or the fact that if that's all it is, it's a completely unbalanced binary, because the merry-makers veer so close to the completely surreal that the almost seem like they have to have some kind of rhetorical weight, whereas the poor people who come immediately after do not seem at all surreal. So while there's certainly an intentional juxtaposition of the merry-makers to the dour faces of the poor, they can't simply be a binary; they're not equivalent enough.

I worry, though, that by being so dismissive of Brunette but so emphatically in love with the movie that I'm setting Antonioni up to be "the master" just as much as Brunette so nauseatingly does in his commentary. Well... The film is a truly singular example of a spectacular film. Brunette's commentary is mediocre commentary. Nothing too disturbing about that formulation, I think. Or I want to think right now.

Another annoying thing Brunette did: all that talk about the camera being this "cold, medal" thing that was "mediating" between photog guy and the supermodel, or some such nonsense. Now, it is interesting that photog guy does seem to get some kind of emotional distance from reality through his camera, but that's more a psychological thing that's specific to him; there's nothing less real about taking a picture of something than just looking at that thing. Yes, it changes the way you're interacting with that thing, and just as with photog guy here it is possible for a person with a camera to use the camera for some kind of emotional distance from what they're photographing, but that's a psych thing, not an ideological thing. But simply taking a picture of something does not make your experience of that thing somehow less authentic. It merely is another aspect of your experience. The garbage Brunette spewed about the "cold, medal" camera was just lazy falling back on crit speak.

Blow Up

2007-08-22T01:24:00.000-07:00

2nd time

Memory is weird. I didn't remember at all the scene when photog guy goes and actually sees the corpse in the park, even though this time it seemed like a very striking scene. I wonder if it was so striking because I didn't remember it? When he went to the park the second time, I thought it was the scene when he went and found nothing, so the sudden presence of the corpse was rather alarming.

Also, at the end, I was sure there was a shot of a tennis ball bouncing away, or something like that. I was sure of it, in fact. I kept expecting it, and the whole time was composing this sentence in my head, "The final shot of the tennis ball bouncing is the only misstep in the whole movie." Does that mean, then, that there are no missteps in the whole movie?

I can still remember things about when I watched this for the first time, with Joe, who didn't like it at all, but it was one of those movies I didn't think all that much of at first. I thought there were some kind of intriguing things about it, but mostly was kind of boring. But letting it float around in my head for a while really worked apparently, because I knew well before I watched it this time that I'd like it a lot if I ever saw it again.

Seeing the scene with Vanessa Redgrave "dancing" to the music this time reminded me of something else I'd seen, but probably what it reminded me of was that very scene. The way she moves is amazing. Of all the near-explicitly surreal moments in the film, that is by far the best. I almost want to call it Lynchian, even though this was way before Lynch. I can't think of anything like it an any other movie I've seen, though.

Listing to the "music only" track right now. What a strange feature for a film with almost no music through the first five-thirteenths of the movie.

At present, Wikipedia has this to say about the movie:

"Ultimately, the film is about reality and how we perceive it or think we perceive it. This aspect is stressed by the final scene, one of many famous scenes in the film, when the photographer watches a mimed tennis match and, after a moment of amused hesitation, enters the mimes' own version of reality by picking up the invisible ball and throwing it back to the two players. A tight shot shows his continued watching of the match, and, suddenly, we even hear the ball being played back and forth. Another version of reality has been created. Then, at the very end, Hemmings, standing all alone in the green grass of the park, suddenly disappears, removed by his director, Antonioni."

I don't know why I find that such a stupid explanation of the movie. Is it "the film is about"? I don't know. But it not only seems really pretentious to me, it also fails completely to capture or explain what is so compelling about the movie. I mean, I guess whoever wrote that isn't a professional critic or anything... But I do imagine that it's probably a paraphrase of what's written an many Film 101 textbooks.

(later) The scene when Vanessa Redgrave disappears into the crowd is one of two Antonioni moments that I know of that are technically amazing. I have no idea how he did it. I slowed down the DVD, and I just can't figure out at all where she goes, how she disappears, etc. Maybe if I knew more about technical aspects of film it would be easy. Maybe it's a simple thing. But I can't see it. It doesn't look like it'd be possible for it to be a simple splice of one shot with her into one shot without her; there's too much else going on. The other scene is in The Passenger the final long shot looking through the window where the camera moves forward and somehow passes through the bars of the window, even though I know the camera must be too big to make it through there. How did he do it?! Brunette, of course, is no help, but he does point out the interesting (though obvious, but I had meant to write it here) point that when seeing that scene for the first time the viewer does wonder just as much as photog guy presumably does if he's actually seen Vanessa Redgrave standing there before she disappears. She's only there for a couple of seconds, and it of course takes a couple of seconds for us to recognize her, and then she's gone. And watching this movie in a theater when that was the only way it could be seen, wow that would've been frustrating. I would've had to pay to see it again and if what I really wanted to know was if she was there the I would've had to sit through the rest of it and try to remember exactly what to look for, and then it would've been over so quickly again, and I wouldn't have been sure if she really did disappear or if I just kind of lost her in the crowd of other people, and there would've always necessarily been a lot of time in between every time I was able to see it. What an incredibly frustrating bit of film.

Superbad

2007-08-17T19:10:00.000-07:00

As funny as expected. I'm really looking forward to watching Michael Cera's career. Hopefully it's a long one. Dude is hilarious.

The scene with Michael Cera singing in the room full of drugged out guys: I'd hate to think how that scene would've ended up in Adam Sandler's or most other comedy director's hands. Or maybe it was just all Michael Cera, and nobody could've fucked it up. The weird thing is when I saw that scene in the previews, I thought it was him trying to be cool with a bunch of friends or something, and it was exactly as funny.

Elliot thought the stuff with the cops was the funniest stuff; I definitely thought the interactions between Michael Cera and the guy who played Seth were the funniest. How much of that is because I loved Arrested Development so much?

I thought the blood on the pants thing veered a little too close to American Pie 2 territory for me, but I guess really the movie had no pretension to be anything other than a really good example of exactly that sort of thing, so it's probably unfair of me to be put of by it. But I still was.

Why is heterosexual male friendship always to be interpreted as homoerotic among a certain significant portion of the intelligentsia? It's always pronounced in this way that makes the pronouncer superior to the characters; like the pronouncer has seen through the two males' relationship in a way that the two characters would just never be able to. It seems, if anything, more an example of the way most people think men are just never not thinking about sex, or that men are oversexed or something. These two guys' friendship is indicative of their repressed homosexual longing for each other that they can never express because they are forcing themselves to be heterosexual, as if it were completely impossible for a man to feel closeness to another person without it being sexual. Sure, some guys might have problems expressing their emotions to each other because they've been conditioned to think of themselves as compulsively oversexed creatures who can't truly feel emotions without sex. Whenever there are movies about female friendship (which, sure, are sadly too rare and far less common than male friendship movies) there is not this kind of snarky chatter about how they're really lesbians.

Went to this with Patrick, Elliot, and Erin.

The Long Goodbye

2007-08-17T17:00:00.000-07:00

I absolutely loved this movie. Robert Altman seems to be a frustratingly mixed bag. This movie in incredible, and from what I remember I liked Nashville a lot, but it's been years since I saw that. Three Women was okay, but not even close to this, I think. Short Cuts was kind of interesting, but not only in a TV movie on a Sunday afternoon kind of way.

The camera is almost never still in this movie, but it's not jerky the way non-stationary cameras usually are on contemporary movies. The camera floats around outside of every scene. It's beautiful. I especially liked the way the camera sometimes would float backwards out of the scene, to the point that the actors seemed to be performing in the background, although there was nothing in the foreground. It's such a weird little touch that I can think of very few movies doing, and it would be really hard to do it, I think, without it becoming annoying. Maybe a lot of people would find it annoying here, too, but I, obviously, loved it.

Elliot Gould is really what makes the movie, though. His performance just might be one of my favorite film performances ever. The way he basically mumbles every line, to the point that it sometimes doesn't seem possible that the other characters actually hear anything he says. The effect of that little quirk is the viewer feels closer to Marlowe than any of the other characters, because it is almost like we're getting to hear his private thoughts--without any voiceover narration or any actual private thoughts being aired.

The cat in the first scene really acted like it lived in that house. I wonder how they did that. Was it actually the cat of the house? The cat also seemed really familiar with Elliot Gould, which makes me wonder if it was Gould's cat, if that was Gould's house. I doubt it, but however they did it, the cat looked really naturally at home, which I think is kind of amazing.

My favorite shot in the whole film came when the husband and wife were talking to each other and they sent Marlowe outside. So the scene is their discussion, which you see through the giant window, and in the reflection of the window you can see Marlowe strolling around on the beach, throwing stones or whatever. It is really a beautiful shot. It did seem a little out of place, though, only because it's the only time in the movie, I think, where there's a significant amount of time spent with Marlowe not as the focus of the scene, or not really present. There are small moments of that throughout, so it's not like it violates any precedent really, but the length and seeming significance of the shot did seem sort of out of place. The shot was so pretty, though, that it didn't really matter.

The chicks, though, who live in the apartment across the way from Marlowe, seemed like a total misstep by Altman. They were far enough outside the realm of normal human behavior that they bordered on surreal, which made them seem as if they must be there for some kind of symbolic purpose, but I don't think they really were supposed to be. I assume that simply the weird surreal thing is what Altman was going for, but they just didn't really bring anything to the film aside from the funny couple of lines by the guy who was supposed to be following Marlowe.

Also, from a plot standpoint, Marlowe tracking down his old friend in Mexico seemed closure enough. The fact that Marlowe then shot him was really jarring, and frankly I think it shouldn't have happened. Based on the little bit of the interview with Altman I watched, I assume this was supposed to be Marlowe's ultimate giving in to the new morality or lack thereof. It almost seemed like some sort of following of the dictum that the main character of a story must be a protagonist, which means he must undergo some kind of change. But the change seemed completely forced. It was not consistent with Marlowe as he was at any other point in the film. It seemed kind of like adding an exclamation point tacked on the end of an ellipsis. I have this idea that that's the sort of thing you have to deal with in Altman films, though: sometimes really misguided things put in that he probably thought were really smart or cool but are actually just kind of stupid.

Black Belly of the Tarantula

2007-08-17T14:36:00.000-07:00

My first giallo! Actually, it was a little tamer than I expected after the first couple of minutes. The first murder was by far the goriest, and I figured that each muder would escalate in goriness, but that wasn't the case. The first instead set the tone and you just let your imagination run away with what was going on in the other ones, if you wanted. Which I kind of didn't. Or did. I dunno.

I was surprised, though, that the most interesting parts of the movie were actually the parts when the inspector guy is just hanging out with his wife. Interesting in a way that was not at all forced. They didn't try to be anything other than just them hanging out, talking about furniture, I think, mostly. The sex scene was really nice and, well, loving. I assume it was done that way so when we see the rooftop peeping tom watching them, we don't feel implicated along with him. I think if there had been nudity in that scene (or more nudity), if it had been filmed to be an obviously sexy sex scene that the viewer is supposed to get off on, we would have then felt complicit when it cut to the peeping tom guy watching them. It also helped us feel extra embarassed for him when all the police are watching the tape and making crude comments. It was all handled actually kind of deftly in a movie that elsewhere has a decent amount of boobs and blood, and opens with a long slow shot up and down the naked body of the woman getting the massage.

The score was wonderful, of course. Ennio Morricone rules. I especially liked the whispers and hums that seemed to come out at random times.

The whole "psychological" explanation of the killers motives seemed kind of pointless, though, if an obvious nod to Hitchcock. It didn't add anything really to the movie, because we were never wondering about what made the killer click. Kind of like how all the investigation into the life of that VTech shooter guy and his movies and his plays and stuff doesn't make the tragedy any less disturbing or more meaningful, if that had been the point of the final scene. But I don't think it was the point. It seemed like they thought it was some kind of necessary conclusion to that part of the story, but it just seemed empty to me. A place where "depth" isn't actually deep, doesn't actually open up your understanding of anything. It's really just more noise.

Nemesis

2007-08-17T13:59:00.000-07:00

8/13/07 Laptop alone 1:00pm

I remember watching this movie at my dad's apartment in Yankton, or I remember my dad watching it. I'm pretty sure it was this movie anyway; the Netflix version was a TV edit and the only image I remembered strongly from the movie was a butt. I'm pretty sure I know which scene it was from, but there was no butt. Mainly I remember the butt and the gritty neo-noir type feel copped from Blade Runner, which describes the first half of the movie fairly well. The title sounds right. It must have been this movie.

I think I mostly read a book while dad watched it, because I was pretty contemptuous of movies like this. Not a "real" movie, just a stupid scifi actioner. Now I'm almost more interested in movies like this than "real" movies, sometimes.

The opening action scenes were actually pretty bad, though. The type that remind me of the gunfights in The Life Aquatic, where people just pose in the middle of the frame and fire their guns, and then you cut to the people whom they're aiming at and watch various of them get hit or other things explode around them. No attempt to make individual gunshots correspond to any individual hits. The characters firing generally don't even appear to be aiming at all. Sometimes they hold their guns stationary; sometimes they wave them around in broad circles. The effect is the same. I wonder why even bother shot an action scene like that. You'd think if you're making an action movie you'd at least be interested in the action enough to try to make it have some kind of order or sense to it.

It's weird how the movie seemed to completely changed once it moved to Java. All of a sudden, the villains got way more weird, as if they just let the actors go crazy. Where it seemed like it was trying to strike a "restrained" note through the first half of the movie, once they go to Java it seemed to be much more about just trying to have fun.

The "fun" seemed most present with the weird well-dressed smiling guy cyborg, who showed up about ten cuts before he really became relevant, almost as if the movie was trying to warn us that we should be ready for him. He seemed to be kind of equivalent to a later level boss in a game like Final Fight or something. He was built up to be like some kind of badass, but as soon as he's dead he doesn't matter. As soon as he enters the movie for real, though, he jumps main-character-cyborg guy and they fall through a window on what appeared to be one of those giant slides they have at carnivals that you ride down in a potato sack. This quick trip down the slide led to two of the weirdest shots in the whole movie. The first came as the two are struggling, with smiling guy on top trying to choke main character guy, and first there's a POV shot from main character guy's perspective, a close up of smiling guy making a weird facial expression and reaching toward the camera. This shot is followed a few seconds later by a shot of what is supposed to again be a POV shot from main character guy's perspective, but this time the background behind smiling guy is all pink and glowy, and he's not wearing a shirt, appears to actually be standing still, and smiling open-mouthed at the camera, when his face cracks open to reveal a gun behind his right eye. They'd had a cyborg do this earlier, but the weirdest part about it was that he wasn't wearing shirt, which made him look like he actually was naked. One of those moments that's almost more surreal than anything an a "surrealist" movie, since it's not lingered on or presented as a surreal moment or anything.

The other interesting thing comes at the end of the slide, when main character guy shoves smiling cyborg's head into a big pipe that's suspended over the slide. Then we watch as the cyborg, whose head is apparently stuck in the pipe and possibly completely destroyed, we watch as his body, practically hanging from the pipe, the lower parts of the legs limp, the arm pointing a gun and randomly firing into the air, making the body wobble back and forth. It's really a pretty creepy little shot. Possibly one of the only shots in the whole movie that really works on the level it's intended to.

Throughout the movie, the characters keep making references to the main character guy's level of humanity. "86.5% is still human!" he says. "You're practically a cyborg anyway. You should join us!" The funny thing is the movie doesn't really seem interested in the slightest in the question of whether he's still "human" with all the mechanical parts in him, which ultimately isn't really that interesting of a question anyway. But it's brought up in just about every conversation main character guy has with another character. It's like the movie thought it had to pay lip service to the idea since it was a science fiction movie and there is often this idea that science fiction movies should explore some kind of question like that, at least a little bit. But really it was nothing more than a recitation of the question. And, ironically, the question probably would've seemed more relevant to the movie if it'd never even been mentioned.

Rocket Science

2007-08-17T13:17:00.000-07:00

8/10/07 Embarcadero, w/ Elliot, 7:30pm

Indie-comedy paint-by-numbers, (Rushmore + Royal Tenenbaums + Squid and the Whale + Napoleon Dynamite + Election + Thumbsucker), which isn't meant here to be a criticism. The movie was extremely enjoyable. Afterwards, I told Elliot, "It made me wish I was in high school again," which them prompted me to go off about how much fun all that angst was, which ultimately let to me saying something like "It was all [the angst] so visceral!," and "I mean, it wasn't fun at the time. But looking back on it is fun to remember." Any movie that makes me wax nostalgic about high school must have done something right.

What made this most different from Rushmore, and part of the reason why it probably isn't as good or why it would not hold up to nearly as many repeat viewings as Rushmore, is that the movie is very much from the perspective of the main character. The viewer sympathizes with him, and as much as we laugh at him trying to throw the cello through the window, in the end we want him to get it through. You can't really ever see him from another character's perspective. In Rushmore, it's easy to watch it from the point of view of Bill Murray's character, or the teacher lady. It's also easy to see Max from the perspective of his little friend or his father or the headmaster. In Rocket Science, the other characters exist only insofar as they matter to the main character.

The only possible exception is the character of his father, who avoids that fate mainly by not appearing in the movie after the opening scene until the closing scene, which is possibly the best scene in the whole movie. The way the father at first doesn't even answer the kid's question and instead starts to talk about how he had trouble getting off the interstate to pick up the kid instantly gives the father way more depth as a character than anyone aside from the kid. And the weary way in which he finally does answer the question with pretty much "I don't know," tired but not exasperated at the kid. The scene also opens up the world of the two characters because the conversation is obviously just another scene in the relationship of the two, a relationship we haven't really seen at all. Really, the whole movie is probably best viewed as a perfectly entertaining setup to the final scene in the car.

The other great thing in the car is the moment when the kid says something about how one day he's going to find a way to say what he needs to say at that moment. Like Elliot said, it makes you hope the movie is autobiographical at least a little bit, and that the movie is in some way the way the kind found to speak.

The voiceover narration that opens the movie at first felt a little to close to that of Royal Tenenbaums', but it was written really well and was actually quite a bit denser than RT's. I couldn't figure out why Elliot & I were the only two laughing; it was hilarious.

Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade

2007-08-16T02:49:00.000-07:00

(8/10/07 w/Elliot & Patrick, the Mariott at California Extreme in San Jose, 7:00pm)

1) Really funny and snappily edited in most places. The 3-D animation of the 2-D games was a great touch; there should've been more of it.

2) I think they were really trying to just make every person in the story as human as possible, but because of the number of people and the short run time, it kind of ends up just showing off the funniest aspects of their lives for us to gawk at. What a bunch of bizarre geeks!

3) The cut from the two guys explaining their bread knife technique of getting the high score on Track & Field and how that "just blew everyone's mind," to the critic, who'd obviously just been told the story, saying, "that blows my mind!" Excellent.

4) Why was Mr. Awesome in this movie? He didn't seem to have any real connection with anyone else in the movie, and it kind of seemed like he was just there for us to point and laugh at. Granted, he was hilarious, but the time wasted on him could have been better spent on some of the actual subjects of the film.

5) Like Elliot said, even though I'd spent the whole day playing old video games before I watched this, when it was over I just wanted to go play more video games.

The Driver

2007-08-16T02:48:00.000-07:00

(8/12/07 laptop, by myself, 4:30 pm)

1) I have to find more movies with Bruce Dern in them. He is awesome.

2) This movie really gives a good sense of being in the city it's filmed in. The way the characters wander around back alleys and the cars fly up and down empty night streets, it feels like it's actually happening in a real place that real people live in.

3) I like that the movie didn't go out of its way to try to invent some pop-psych motive for the characters, especially the Driver. In the hands of lamer folks, there would have been a scene between the Driver and the alibi chick where she asks him why he lives like he does, and either through flashback or based on something he says, we would learn that he was abused as a child or that his dad abandoned him or something--all done under the false impression that it would somehow make his character more "interesting." Instead, it's not even clear what the Driver does when he's not driving other than lie on his bed and stare at the ceiling. If the viewer wants, she can invent all the psychological trauma for him that she can.

4) The car chases are actually kind of beautiful, especially the shots from the "front" of the car, with the bright buildings shining in the black night sky.

5) The whole scene on the AmTrak seemed kind of pointless, though. I'd have cut it. Or at least made it shorter. It messed with the rhythm of the film just a little bit.

Happy Birthday, Wanda June

2007-08-16T02:46:00.000-07:00

8/9/07 The Castro, by myself, 5:15pm

1) I'm really glad I got to see this. Hopefully it gets a DVD release. I wasn't even aware Vonnegut had ever penned a screenplay.

2) In the vein of Edward Albee-like theater of the absurd, with more straight comedy so it's nowhere near as oppressive as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Vonnegut lets the gags take over, and while he does the tension between Penelope Ryan and the returned Harold Ryan is significantly more compelling than during the final twenty minutes, when the gags mostly drop and it focuses in on Harold and Penelope. The final climactic condemnation of Harold Ryan--"You're a clown! That's what you are! A clown!"--kind of misses whatever mark it was aiming for, since up until that point, everyone in the movie is a clown except for Penelope.

3) Wanda June's monologue is the most inspired thing in the whole movie. "Don't feel bad about killing someone, because they're in Heaven now and they're happy you killed them." Sort of the opposite of the running South Park gag where everyone who is dead is in Hell--which always seemed to be a dig at the Evangelical belief that everyone who isn't born again is going to Hell--here the joke seems to be more about the very idea of an afterlife at all, or at least the idea that moving on to an afterlife is just like moving to a new place you can only get to by dying.

4) William Hickey was hilarious as Looseleaf Harper. Too bad it looks like he mostly had small roles in movies around this time. Never heard of him before.

5) The other funniest thing in the movie was the at once obvious and subtle joke when the Baron stands outside the bar in Heaven and takes a leak, followed by a cut to Harold and his son standing on a balcony, where it suddenly starts to rain.

The Bourne Ultimatum

2007-08-16T02:44:00.000-07:00

(8/2/07, 8/8/07. alone, both times, AMC Metreon. 11:00am, 9:50pm)

1) Action fun with a serious face, that is sometimes gleeful about its own machinations but can't ever crack a smile, as opposed to Die Hard, which was like a little kid on a roller coaster, ear-to-ear grin the whole time.

2) All the quick cuts make everything seem extremely precise, even the shaky camera. I could almost believe Greengrass planned every little twitch.

3) Really liked the shot of, um... what was his name... the "source" for the British journalist, when they're meeting, how the corner made by the journalist's shoulder and neck frames the source's right eye, then he rubs his forehead and sighs and tilts his head a bit and locks his other eye right into the same position. Dunno why, just seemed really pretty.

4) The Bourne Ultimate Democrat Fantasy: people with consciences inside the gov't release to the public the secret bad stuff, and then Congress comes down on the officials competently and powerfully. Pamela Landy for President!!!

5) An all-out dis of the War on Terror by the guy who directed United 93? Is he trying to karmically pay for it, or is United 93 not the pure propaganda job I figured it for?

Rescue Dawn

2007-08-16T02:43:00.000-07:00

(8/2/07 alone, at Embarcadero Center, 4:00pm)

1) The thing is, it's a very good movie, but it's hard not to wonder why exactly Herzog made it. Somehow, by making it into a well done war/prison/survival/escape movie, the movie becomes less compelling than the story as told in "Little Dieter Needs to Fly."

2) Probably because of "Little Dieter," it was impossible to ever really feel like Bale was actually the character he was portraying, in the way it normally when watching a good movie. Not at all to fault Bale's performance.

3) My favorite pure poetic/Herzog moment from "Little Dieter," was when the slo-mo napalming video was played with the weird bouncy tribal/folk music over it. Herzog uses the same bit of film here, this time zoomed in on specific parts, with more traditional movieclassical music played over it. Again, the result is that it's not as compelling here as it was in "Little Dieter," or at least not in the same way.

4) Is this in some way a kind of indictment of the traditional Hollywood war/prison/survival/escape-type film? Nothing specifically about the movie itself made me think that, but reflection on the differences between this and "Little Dieter" has made me wonder. I need to see "Little Dieter" again. Even if that wasn't Herzog's intention, I think this movie ultimately functions that way. "Indictment" is the wrong word.

5) Yet another. I was way more disturbed by Dengler's recounting of his friend's death in "Little Dieter" than I was by the portrayal of it here. Here it just felt kind of like another in a long line of such events being dramatized in a movie. There it was singularly horrifying. I need to watch both of these movies again.

The Simpsons Movie

2007-08-16T02:42:00.000-07:00

(7/27/07 Century in SF Center 8:00pm w/Patrick, Elliot, Erin)

1)Just like an 87 minute episode that they worked really hard on and filled with as many jokes as possible, and pretty much everything works.

2)A guy sitting behind me said "What the hell?!" at every funny bit in the dumbest-sounding voice imaginable. What an unfortunate way to laugh.

3)Some chick came dressed as Marge and then everyone sang her "Happy Birthday" for some reason.

4)What was with the previews, though? It's like they thought that since it's an animated movie they show previews of family and kid movies. Some demographer messed that one up!

5)Someone should put out a collection of songs that Homer sings. The Spider-pig song was probably my favorite bit in the movie.

The Last Man on Earth

2007-08-16T02:40:00.000-07:00

(7/23/07 laptop, archive.org, 1:00am, just me)

1) Vincent Price was definitely not a physical actor. Why the hell would you put your hand in your pocket before throwing a burning torch? And his attempt to casually lean back onto an outdoor table has got to be one of the creepiest bits of forced nonchalance I've ever seen. The fact that he actually outruns somebody is probably the least believable thing in the whole movie.

2) In the flashback scene, I just couldn't tell if Price was married to the younger hot lady or if he was her dad. It looked like he was trying to kiss her on the face, but it's hard to tell really what the hell he was doing, and all of his other contact with her looked very paternal.

3) When Vincent Price's little granddaughter or daughter was dying on her bed, the half-assed way the little girl didn't even bother to pretend she was acting blind while saying, "Mommy, I can't see you!" actually kind of made the scene more interesting than it would've been if they'd used a competent child actor. I think more movies should use kids who aren't interested in acting like they're in a scene for little bit parts like that.

4) "No. I won't let them put you there, Virg. I promise. No. I won't let them put you there." If only he'd stood there shaking his head and repeating himself over and over again, as the camera zoomed in slowly so you could see with ever-increasing clarity his jowls flabbing back and forth, until the camera finally did that thing where it gets so close to his face that it loses its focus, and then faded out. That would have been amazing.

5) "There was a time when I shopped for a car. Now I'm looking for a hearse." It's somewhat disorienting when a well performed line pops up out of nowhere after half an hour of poorly written dialogue being poorly performed. This film definitely suffers when there's not a voiceover. Price's voice is so good for it that it almost makes sense why he'd be cast in the lead here.

The Karate Kid

2007-08-16T02:39:00.000-07:00

(7/12/07 Dolores Park, w/Ell, Erin, Patrick, Zab, others, 7/12/07 9:30pm. Probably 5th or 6th time?)

1) Watching this in a crowded park made it really obvious how structurally good the movie is. There was at least one thing to cheer about every ten minutes.

2) The payoff scene when Miagi shows Daniel how all his hard work waxing on and off was really karate training is just incredibly emotionally satisfying. One of those scenes I wish I could forget about just so I could see it again for the first time, as it were.

3) Another film with a perfect ending. They don't even bother with a denouement, because what would be the point? He kicks evil guy's face, evil guy cries in admiration while he gives Daniel the trophy, everyone cheers, The End.

4) No wonder my younger self had such a huge crush on Elisabeth Shue: she was the gf in this movie and Back to the Future II. It was like a conspiracy to make me fall in love with her.

5) The shower Halloween costume has got to be the best Halloween costume ever. I want to meet the person who thought of that.

City Lights

2007-08-16T02:38:00.001-07:00

(7/9/07, castro theater w/Ell&Erin, 7:00p)

1) This movie is just good and fun and happy and beautiful

2) The ending is perfect, and it would make a good example if one were making an argument for the relevance of silent films. No amount of dialogue could have made that ending any better or more perfectly executed. All he needed to do was smile shyly. Reminds me of the likewise perfect ending of Before Sunset: it's all in the way Julie Delpy dances and Ethan Hawke smiles. And, of course, the fadeout.

3) Interesting how the drunk driving scenes are played up for light laughs. I can't imagine anything but the crassest of contemporary comedies using drunk driving in that way.

4) I love the early twentieth century faith and hope in science demonstrated by the blindness cure. Of course science will cure blindness! And then the blind person will be happier and more prosperous! (or maybe some of the prosperousness had to do with the thousand dollars the tramp gave her... also, I think the newspaper said the procedure was free for poor people, so I'm not exactly sure why she needed the money for it...)

5)Easily the greatest boxing scene ever filmed.

The Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer

2007-08-16T02:36:00.000-07:00

(6/23/07 AMC Loews in Metreon w/Ell. 7:00p)

The single biggest problem with this movie (aside from Galactus being an apparently non-sentient space-tornado) is that the Silver Surfer is able to stop Galactus single-handedly... and survive! Which means that it was within the Surfer's power to stop Galactus the whole time, and he really had no motivation NOT to stop him, but he simply sat back and watched Galactus devour all the other planets he'd devoured... How did no one on the writing staff for this movie not notice that?

American Cannibal

2007-08-16T02:35:00.000-07:00

(6/24/07. Red Vic w/Ell & Erin. 7:00p)

1) My fellow filmgoer said to me that there would have certainly been ways for the makers of the documentary to find out if the girl had actually died or not, and I'm unsure about whether or not that's true, but I definitely was a little uncomfortable about the way they kind of made the confusion the focal point of the end. I guess, if you're making a documentary and someone in that documentary suddenly and unexpectedly almost dies, it would be pretty difficult to resist the feeling that you'd just struck oil, at least for the part of you that is thinking constantly about how you can shape everything you're filming into a narrative. The death of an innocent is, after all, pretty damn dramatic. But if you're trying to make a point that reality TV is disgusting because the people making it are cavalier about the lives their filming, jumping all over the result of that carelessness and running around the country to shoot the insouciant face of that girl's brother seems to kind of loosen your foothold on the moral high ground. I guess if they reall do have no idea what happened to the girl, though, there's not much else to do with it.

2) I sort of kept expecting throughout the film that there would be some dramatic "reveal" moment, where the audience would suddenly be let in on some level of trickery or plotting on the parts of either Gil & Dave or the documentary filmers. I kind of still am expecting that.

Live Free or Die Hard

2007-08-16T02:33:00.000-07:00

(6/28/07. Century 9 in SF Center, alone. 1:00p)

1) Bruce Willis has a nearly perfect head.

2) Classic Hollywood computers! When the bad guys try to kill Mac guy's puter, it says "UPLOADING VIRUS."

3) Every shot in this movie is super slick, so it's weird when Mac guy and Bruce Willis are arguing at Woodlawn and there's a rather obvious editing fake, and Mac guy is obviously not saying the things you hear his voice saying.

4) "Yippee-ki-yay mother[blam]" ?! I didn't even notice it was PG-13 until that point. Why the fuck was this movie PG-13?

5) The "Asteroids" arcade machine in Warlock's basement. I wanted them to stop the movie so I could play it.

The Muppet Movie

2007-08-16T02:31:00.000-07:00

(7/1/07. YBCA w/Elliot & Erin. 3:00p)

1) Kermit, by himself, singing, "Life's like a movie. Write your own ending." Gave me goosebumps.

2) When Miss Piggy pulled Kermit down into the bushes, where the camera couldn't see them any more, I definitely had some disturbing images running through my poor little head.

3) It's always good to see a little Steve Martin from back when he was just about the funniest guy on the planet.

4) Plus: Richard Pryor? James Coburn?! Orson Welles!!

5) I wish I had never known about Gonzo's relationship with his chicken. I grew up on Muppet Babies, and being a chickenlover is not where I wanted to see Gonzo go... I'll try to remember him floating majestically away with his balloons instead.

Transformers

2007-08-16T02:30:00.000-07:00

(7/4/07. AMC Loews in Metreon, w/Elliot & Erin. 4:00p)

1) Michael Bay, you still suck, but this movie was awesome!

2) John Turturro should be in every movie.

3) The hot girl telling John Turturro to take his clothes off after Bumblebee peed on him: creepy. The "S7" superman insignia on the front and "SIMMONS" like a jersey name on the back of his wife-beater: hilarious!

4) Witwicky and the hot chick didn't feel weird that the Transformers just kind of sat there and stared at them while they were making out? Couldn't the Autobots at least have revved their engines in conspiratorial approval of Witwicky, or something? Would that have made it more or less creepy?

5) Spontaneous applause when Megatron says, "I AM MEGATRON!!!" to the giant empty chamber he's just thawed out in. That's how you know a flick's good.

The Great Dictator

2007-08-16T02:25:00.000-07:00

7/6/07. Laptop in by bedroom, by myself, 11:00pm

1) This film is not at all self-contained. I don't know if it would be possible to really judge it in any way except as a response to the rise of fascism in Europe. You could try but you'd kind of be missing the point.

2) So its 1938 or so and you're the most famous filmmaker in the world, and its obvious to you that what's happening with Hitler in Europe is all sorts of fucked up, but for some reason a huge percentage of everyone else is not seeing coming what you're seeing coming. What more could you think of to do than to make a film portraying Hitler as absoulutely ridiculous?

3) What did it mean to be the most famous filmmaker in the world in the late '30s? Certainly it meant something different than it would mean today. How would you feel about your film if five years later it turned out that the guy you did everything you could to make appear absurd was responsible for the horrific deaths of millions of people? I mean, at least you tried, but how would that effect your idea of the potential power of film?

4) So many hilarious moments in this film, but the ballet Hynkel does with the balloon/globe thing was funny and beautiful and pathetic and horrifying all at once, especially when he lays on his desk and bounces it in the air with his butt.

5) Film critics are dumb. The barber's speech at the end is effective because it doesn't fit in with the rest of the film. It's not a flaw.

Thesis Statement

2007-08-16T01:17:00.000-07:00

This post sort of functions as the thesis statement for this blog.

I wanted to start keeping track of every movie that I watched, plus where/when/w/whom I watched it. It seemed like a project that would be way easier to accomplish as a blog than on paper, since a blog could easily store everything and would allow easy searching for when I wanted to look back to see what I'd thought about a movie, or something.

The reason for wanting to do this in the first place is that I watch a lot of movies, and I wanted to start keeping some kind of record of that so I could look back and see just how many movies I'd watched, and also to prevent myself from becoming a totally passive viewer. If I'm going to be spending such a large portion of my time on this activity, I'd like to make it productive for myself in some way. I can't help it; I'm just built like that.

That said, what I'm not really interested in doing is rating or reviewing movies. A lot of movies that are technically bad end up making me think a lot more than movies that are technically very good. Or at least an equal amount. So this is my little space for that.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser

2007-08-15T21:00:00.000-07:00

(written 8/23/07, 11:14pm)

2nd time.

The opening shot of this movie is, I think, better than anything else that follows it, but not because the rest isn't really good. The opening shot is one of the most pure examples of that thing that I mostly only find in Herzog movies that I rarely find anywhere else. There are some other good examples of it throughout the movie, but the opening shot presents it without any connection to anything else, so it's not diluted in any way by the narrative around it.

Could a whole film be made of nothing but these moments? To what extent is "Fata Morgana" an example of that? I don't know... I need to watch "Fata Morgana" again...

The German title is kind of amazing, but I guess "The Enigma" is really a better title. Hard to say, though. I like the way the German title works on a more purely poetic level, I'd say. Or, at least, an associative level. It's not just a name for the movie but adds something to the meaning of it. (meaning? ugh...)

The weird flattened shots that are maybe supposed to be through Kaspar's eyes are also good examples of that Herzogian thing; also, the scene with the blind guy playing the piano, and that amazing little song he sings. I wish I knew if it was really a song.

Even though the penultimate scene with the doctors satisfying their perverse curiosity by taking Kaspar's body apart and dissecting his brain is an obvious Romantic argument by Herzog against the dispassion of science and I probably wouldn't agree with him about it exactly, the scene works in exactly the way he wants it to. Those scientists are fucking dicks. Put Kaspar back together!

Another example of pre-Lynching Lynch: the scene when Kaspar runs back to the doctor after being stabbed, with his arms in the weird position the whole time he's running and his mouth open in a silent scream (is it silent? I definitely remember expecting it to be silent, but now that I think about it he may have actually been making some nows when he ran on screen, just not a normal "OHMYGODIVEBEENSTABBED" noise.) Bruno S. pulls it off exactly.

Overall, though, I just can't buy into Herzog's argument that Kaspar is somehow "smarter" than the nineteenth-century intellectual straw men Herzog surrounds him with. It's a definite example of Herzog getting in his own way. Sure, there were many problems with nineteenth-century thought, but trying to make it like someone who just has pure thought, undiluted by society, will naturally turn into a person who says things that make more sense or are more amusing to a twentieth-century audience is kind of silly. Things we think now will seem kind of dull to people in a hundred years; not necessarily because they are dull, but because that's just how these things work.

Also, like The Elephant Man or many other movies, this is an example of allowing the audience to congratulate itself for being morally superior to "humanity," by presenting an intriguing character who is obviously misunderstood by the cretins around him. The audience gets to feel good about itself for understanding in a way none of the other characters in the film do, and it's not because the film has opened up a way into the character in such an effective way, but just because that's how the film's set up. In The Elephant Man and, I think, most examples of this type of thing, it's tolerance for the grotesque or, more generally, "tolerance" in general, that the audience gets to feel good about. Here, it's more along the lines of seeing through the superficialities of intellectual thought. I just can't trust that type of thing unless the film has tried equally as hard to make the other viewpoint as understandable, but I'm not sure if that could really be done.

Aguirre, though, doesn't fall into this habit of forcing the audience into identification with some character. The audience most likely does identify the most with the dark-haired chick in Aguirre, but she's not really a major character. Anyway, it's not like Herzog isn't capable of making a movie in such a way that doesn't try to make the audience feel good about itself, but that's obvious how much of Kaspar Hauser works.

Which is sort of like something I remember thinking about while watching it this time: that this is one of the few Herzog movies where part of what is so fascinating about the movie is the psychology of the protagonist. In that way, I suppose, the film kind of has to try to make the audience identify with Kaspar, so that the opening up of his mind can be as fascinating as Herzog wanted it to be. But in the end I guess I have to say I prefer the more Herzogian stuff in other Herzog movies. Need a better way of describing that...

Aguirre the Wrath of God

2007-08-15T19:00:00.000-07:00

(written 8/23/2007, 10:51)

2nd time. The first time I saw this was on my 25th birthday, and I wrote a poem out of it. At the time, it was maybe the second or third Herzog movie I'd seen, and I was still trying to figure him out. I definitely had not decided he does things in his films that are completely different from the way most movies work, and seem in some ways more related to poetry than to novels. Although generally there's still an overall narrative around them, I'm referring mostly to isolated scenes in Herzog movies, whose power is not at all taken from the narrative of the movie, but are just perfect images or bits of film or whatever exactly you call them...

Before the movie, they ran a preview for "Le Doulos," during which some annoying guy behind me clapped loudly when the name of the lead actor (who was also the lead in Breathless) was shown. Same guy clapped really loudly when the words "Directed by Werner Herzog" were on screen. Yeah, I get it, you've seen Breathless... you know who Werner Herzog is (although, really, why the hell would be be attending a double feature of Herzog movies if you didn't at least know who he is?)... Shut up!

The movie definitely seemed a lot slower the first time I saw it. I was surprised to find out this time that it's actually only slightly under two hours long. It felt far tighter, this time. Also, definitely a different translation, which confused me at first, because the first line of my poem, "In the morning I read mass, then we descended through the mountain pass," was taken from the subtitles, and this time it was translated as "In the morning I read mass, then we descended through the clouds." Frankly, I like the second translation better, but no idea if it's more accurate or anything.

I had this distinct memory of Klaus Kinski hunching his way across the screen, and in the middle of his crossing turning his face out toward the camera so his blue eyes shone, but that never happened. I must have invented it. It would've been a cool shot, though, in a very Herzogian way.

I still think one of the most interesting things about this movie is how I feel just much fear (not exactly fear, but some kind of anxiety) for the actors on the rafts as I do for the characters, if not more. This doesn't seem like a mistake on Herzog's part, but rather kind of the point. You just can't fully surrender yourself to the idea that these are sixteenth or seventeenth century soldiers because it's obvious that the people on the rafts really seem to be in danger, and because they danger seems real and not "real," we direct our anxiety to the actors and film crews instead of the characters and their situations. The only other examples of this I can think of come from Herzog movies, for the most part. Although it's exactly what I found so amazing about the car chase scene in Tarrantino's half of Grindhouse: the whole part when the stunt-chick's on the hood of the car, she appears to be in real actual danger as a person not just as a character, which makes the whole thing so much more thrilling, or actually thrilling in a completely different way, than even the most exceptionally choreographed action/chase/stunt scene in most films. We never really worry about Matt Damon in The Bourne Ultimatum; we only worry about Jason Bourne. Is it ethically okay for Herzog to do this? I certainly would not want to appear in one of his movies.

There are so many incredible scenes in this movie. The horse scene. Aguirre chasing the monkeys around the dying raft. The tiny jungle creature baby (a sloth?) The boat in the tree. (Did Herzog plan the boat in the tree, or did he find it? Either way, it's a supremely poetic shot.)

Also one of the few Herzog films where I think the dialogue lives up the movie Herzog has shot around it.

I really had not been expecting this movie to be as good as it was before I watched it the second time. Right now, I'm practically vibrating with how great this movie is. Absolutely worthy of that word. I think I had a hint of that after watching it the first time, but it was a little bit outside at the time of my realm of understanding of movies.

Coffy

2007-08-14T21:00:00.000-07:00

(written 8/23, 10:40pm)

My first blaxploitation!!! Things I assume are par for the course: the theme songs for the Coffy and King George (which were incredible), overall the wonderful soundtrack, the gratuitous display of female breasts, the empty nods to black empowerment.

There were some very charming things about this movie, beyond just all the breasts. That main thing, obviously, was Pam Grier's presence. The only movie I'd seen with her in it before was Jackie Brown, in which I've always thought she's really good. Maybe I've seen her in other things, but this was, at least, the first movie of the type that gave her her fame. She actually wasn't an especially good actor in this, delivering none of her lines in a way that was convincing from a character standpoint, but she definitely had some incredible charisma going on. I just couldn't take my eyes off of her when she was on screen, even when her breasts weren't exposed.

The movie does not try in any way to remove the viewer's complicity with any of the brutes who tear off the women's shirts. They are obviously bastards for doing that, but it's also obviously done for the viewer to get to see the breasts. Same thing with the almost sex scene between King George and Coffy. King George is a creep for making her take off her clothes and getting her to humiliate herself on the ground, but the character is also doing it so that the audience gets to see it and get off on it. Not that any of that is in any way unique to this movie or even this type of movie, but it happens so often throughout the movie. Maybe even a majority of the scenes function in this way.

King George's yellow leotard, complete with male camel toe, is simply amazing.