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.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Monday, March 17, 2008
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
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.
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
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.
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.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
10,000 BC
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...
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...
Monday, March 3, 2008
The Other Boleyn Girl
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!
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!
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Be Kind Rewind
(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...
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...
Sunday, February 17, 2008
No Country for Old Men
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.
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.
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