Blue Film Journal

Intro to Fassbinder post, originally posted to Facebook

2011-04-24T05:50:00.001-05:00

Instead of writing my applied sociolinguistics paper, I'm obsessing over Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who still manages to be my all-time favorite filmmaker. Many of people remain unfamiliar with his work despite my obsession, which is really a travesty because most of them are pretty much his target audience, I think.

I've been trying to get my boyfriend to watch The BRD Trilogy but I think there's a resistance in people to German film. Fassbinder is one of those things --maybe like Fellini-- where they resist it like mad because they think it's going to be a snooze but then they finally watch it and they get it and they know.

First of all, I decided to list my favorite of his movies for you because that's fun and I hope it will guide you toward his riches so that you may one day soon understand why every weird person you know is a fan of Fassbinder's Women on Facebook. Generally, his most well-known movies are his BRD Trilogy, which looks at Germany's postwar economic miracle through the lens of the melodrama. Each of the three films (The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lola, and Veronika Voss) is in completely different style. The narratives are unrelated so you can watch them in any order. As you can guess from the titles, each one follows a female protagonist through this period. They're not what you're thinking though because Fassbinder is a genius. Marriage of Maria Braun is the most famous but I love Veronika Voss the best and M---, of course, loves Lola because it's about whores... (J----, on the other hand, seems to love most Whity. It's a fun movie but I haven't connected to it like he did.)

If you're into lesbians or fashion or masochism you'll probably love The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.

He also made a couple of movies in English. The one you're likely to easily get hold of is his gayest film (by far) Querelle. It's possibly the gayest movie ever made. It's campy and dark and absurd and fabulous and way better than Genet's novel upon which it is based. Sadly, Fassbinder died right before he was to direct Jane-fucking-Fonda in a biopic of Rosa Luxemburg.

Top 10?

1. It's hard not to think of Berlin Alexanderplatz as his magnum opus. It's a 16 hour adaptation of his favorite novel and it's really like a culmination of everything else he ever did. Unfortunately it's not entirely accessible. I think you should hold off on watching it until you've seen at least like ten of his other films. Also, the last hour or two are mindblowing and worth the hours and hours that come before it but there are moments in the 'miniseries' that drag.

2. Veronika Voss, of the BRD Trilogy is probably the most lurid movie ever made without the cooperation of Tennessee Williams. You've got a sports reporter taking an interest in an aging former star whose career was tainted by her association with the Nazis. The morphine addiction is only the beginning of her madness. You'll die over her masterful rendition of "Memories Are Made of This" and the mindblowing way it's filmed and edited. All in the most sumptuous black and white you ever saw in your entire life.

3. I personally think Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is the most accessible of his films, at least his earlier ones. It's a really touching story and it's not quite as weird as some of his other works. It's basically about an older cleaning lady that falls in love with a younger man, who is black and Moroccan. His work is generally characterized by an uncommonly astute understanding of the social and psychological realities of his characters but in this film it is lovely without being as disturbing as it is in some of his other movies.

4. Chinese Roulette doesn't seem to be one of his more popular movies but I thought it amazing. He's looking at cruelty and facades and the editing is as riveting as the snappy dialogue. It's kind of stunning the way he indirectly comments on the Nazi past via his characters.

5. Lola is all pinks and blues. Pimps and ho's, but all hypocritically bourgeois. Barbara Sukowa is amazing as Lola and the songs she sings in the bordello are like crack to me. I can never get enough of the Capri fishers or the day that the rains came.

6. The Marriage of Maria Braun might be his most maturely realized film. Hanna Schygulla navigates her way through the ruins of post-war Germany and eventually ends up on top. It's a more complex film than one might imagine and it's one that you may find yourself pondering now and again for years.

7. In a Year of 13 Moons is both heartfelt and highly unusual. It's about a post-operate transsexual who pals around with hooker with a heart of gold Ingrid Caven. There's the famous scene at the slaughterhouse and a spontaneous dance sequence.

8. Querelle may be the apotheosis of camp. Pretty faithful to the Genet novel, it's about a sailor of ambivalent sexuality who likes crime and rough sex. What he doesn't like is his deranged twin brother. It's madness, honey.

9. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is one I didn't like when I first saw. It was one of my first Fassbinder films. I rented it along with Querelle and Fox and His Friends when I was 16 or 17 and I think I was probably too young and inexperienced to really understand it. It seems kind of exquisite to me now. It's also rather delicious visually, which is why I'm surprised you don't have it in your collection.

10. In Fox and His Friends a gay carnival worker wins the lottery and makes his way into the higher social classes. A nasty, astute critique of the upper middle class, etc.

Fassbinder more or less had three periods in his work. His early films are sort of like Godard films. They're very political and not very aesthetic. They tend to have a bunch of static shots of young people sitting around blabbing and such. Some people love them but I tend to prefer his later films.

During his middle period, he started to become more influenced by the melodramas of Douglas Sirk and the political nature of the films is tempered by and increased role of psychology and social psychology.

As the 70s move on he moves into the final phase of his work. The films are increasingly stylized and the production values increase. There's also a lot of excess going on. One of his primary themes throughout his career is the way people treat the other people in their lives as objects, mere means to the tangible and intangible things they want. I think it's helpful when watching his movies to think about things like that, especially as you see more of his movies. His body of work truly is much greater than the some of his parts.

Other films:

Martha is a stunning film about masochism and cruelty. It makes a great companion to another Fassbinder film Fear of Fear, which is sort of a riveting portrait about a woman with bad, bad anxiety on her way to crazytown.

The Third Generation, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, and Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven are among the more overtly political of his films. They're action packed and enjoyable but they might be hard for some people to get into because they're stylized and unconventional and pretty specific to their time and place. I'm not sure if you'd necessarily understand what they were about if you didn't know about what was happening in Germany during that period. It's sort of related to the story in Baader-Meinhof Komplex, if you saw that.

Satan's Brew is a strange "comedy" I never really cared for too much. It's about this guy who is supposedly a great writer. He's also sort of a prick and a womanizer. Then he seems to be possessed by this dead gay poet named Stefan George you never heard of because you didn't major in German.

The American Soldier is probably the only early film of his I particularly cared for. It's a sort of film noir and it kind of foreshadowed some of his later work.

The Merchant of Four Seasons is another relatively early work of his that I quite like. It's about this likable produce vendor driven over the edge by the general shittiness of human beings and it has more style than many of his previous films.

Effi Briest always struck me as a dull adaptation of a novel I never read. It's worth watching for Hanna Schygulla though.

Whity, Pioneers of Ingolstadt, and Beware of a Holy Whore are weird and entertaining.

Love Is Colder Than Death, Katzelmacher, Rio das Mortes, Gods of the Plague, and The Niklashausen Journey aren't quite as entertaining. He also has two early short films that are on the DVD for Katzelmacher or something. They're okay.

I haven't seen his other movies so I can't comment much on those. What I've seen of his other English-language film Despair has me a more worried than enthused. I'm dying to see Lili Marleen and World on a Wire.

That's pretty much an intro to all of his well-known films. Go watch them now.

Best Films I Saw of 2010

2011-02-07T16:30:00.005-06:00

It could be because I didn't go to the Chicago International Film Festival in 2010 but I had a lot more excitement about the movies I saw the previous year. There were 2009 movies I saw that didn't even make my top 13 list that I liked better than some of the movies on this list. Where has the good stuff been hiding? Is culture winding down? Maybe I just haven't seen enough Romanian or South Korean films this year. Though I have seen several. I guess last year the English language was represented by Julia and Avatar. This year Another Year is all by herself apart from the two political documentaries.

1. Lourdes (France)
2. A Prophet (France)
3. The Illusionist (France)
4. Another Year
5. Dogtooth (Greece)
6. I Am Love (Italy)
7. Ajami (Israel/Palestine)
8. Cell 211 (Spain)
9. Soul at Peace (Slovokia)
10. Inside Job and/or Casino Jack and the United States of Money

Honorable mentions: Black Swan, Blue Valentine, Brotherhood (Denmark), A Call Girl (Slovenia), Catfish, A Farewell to Hemingway (Bulgaria), Gordos (Spain), Harlan: In the Shadow of Jud Suss (Germany), Jack Goes Boating, Mary and Max, Milk of Sorrow (Peru), The Other Irene (Romania), Prima Primavera (Hungary), Please Give, Rabbit Hole, Winter's Bone

And movies I quite liked that came out in 2010 but which I saw in 2009 but which didn't make my 2009 list: Fish Tank, Mother

And for being fun cinematic experiences: Inception, Tron: Legacy

What this list wants you to know is that you should be sad if you don't live in a city that has the Gene Siskel Film Center or the Music Box. (Unless you happen to live in New York or San Francisco or something in which case consider yourself a victim of my evil eye of envy.)

5 Worst Movies I Saw of 2010

2011-02-07T15:46:00.001-06:00

Last night I finally saw an English language movie from 2010 that I thought could be worthy of the title "Best English Language Film of 2010" so I decided to reverse my previous decision of not making a top ten list this year. It's a month late but it shall follow. As a prelude, here are the five movies I hated the most this year:

1. The Secret in Their Eyes

I hope I will be able to say that this is the worst movie to be awarded Best Foreign Film in my lifetime. It's cheap. It's predictable. It insults your intelligence at every turn.

2. Casino Jack

Why is Kevin Spacey allowed to make movies?

3. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Why is Michael Douglas allowed to make movies?

4. Slaves in Their Bonds

I feel like the running theme here is: It's cheap and predictable and insults your intelligence at every turn.

5. Get Him to the Greek

Why is Jonah Hill allowed to make movies? All of these dumb comedies in recent years are such a putrid blend of poor taste and cheap sentiment.

Runner up:
Sex and the City 2,

Burlesque (Steve Antin, 2010)

2011-02-06T09:18:00.001-06:00

All Cher's whores and all Cher's mens could not put this turkey together again. Cher was pretty fun to watch in this movie but the rest of the movie was pretty much a waste of time. The songs ran the gamut from bad to mediocre, generally. There wasn't really anything inspired about the movie except for the casting of Cher and Christina Aguilera. Christina Aguilera is magnetic but she acts at a level that is appropriate for a music video. I'd probably like her to make more movies but only if she studies acting hardcore before doing so. The guy who plays her boyfriend is unnaturally pretty and has a lovely form from head to toe but he's not that interesting. In fact, none of the characters are any more interesting than the story. I got the feeling the script was salvaged from some bin of unproduced screenplays from 1988. Financially strapped nightclub threatened by an unscrupulous real estate developer? Add a couple of hired goons and this becomes a flashback to USA UP ALL NIGHT. Rhonda Shear is on the line, Mr. Antin. D

happythankyoumoreplease (2011) / The Illusionist (2010)

2011-02-06T08:13:00.003-06:00

happythankyoumoreplease reminded me of those indie comedies from the 90s that dealt with various creative New York people and their romantic goings on. It's about a short story writer who wants to be a novelist but who lacks the maturity for that and he finds a lost boy on the train who doesn't want to go back to foster care and ends up keeping him for a while. He also picks up this bartender named Mississippi and they amble towards couplehood while his best friend and his cousin (stepsister?) work through their own emotional hangups. It's not groundbreaking and its pretty slight and periodically very cheesy but it was generally entertaining. C

I found The Illusionist to be a film of real grace and a beauty that was at once complex and simple. An elderly French magician in what I assumed to be the late 50s travels around the UK working thankless jobs for an audience that has moved on from his old-fashioned amusements. A young girl attaches herself to him and she seems to believe he's a real magician who can supply her with all the things she desires. They live together. He tries to please her. Life goes on. There was this intense authenticity running through every scene and watching it was an experience of aching beauty and wonder. It's really amazing how affecting all the little details and background characters are. It's definitely the best animated film I've seen in the last year. Maybe in the last ten years. One of the best I've ever seen, I think. It's a little sad that Toy Story 3 is going to win this year just like whatever bogus nonsense beat The Secret of Kells last year. A

How to Train Your Dragon (Chris Sanders & Dean DuBlois, 2010)

2011-01-15T12:50:00.000-06:00

Another overpraised mainstream movie I didn't get, I suppose. I thought it was a big boring mess. The animation feels as wooden and lifeless as the inconsequential plot. It occurs to me that the one curious thing about the movie is there weren't any adult female characters. I didn't believe the relationship between the kid and the dragon so much. And I guess I didn't really care about any of it. C-

Red (Robert Schwentke, 2010)

2011-01-13T04:51:00.000-06:00

It's poorly written and ridiculous. It's morally inconsistent and places too low a value on human life. Nonetheless, it manages to be engaging throughout. C-

Cell 211 / Celda 211 (Daniel Monzón, 2009, Spain)

2011-01-13T02:57:00.004-06:00

Gosh, on the one hand it's a genre film. It's a movie about a prison riot and it features many of the expected tropes. Unlike A Prophet though, its production values are probably more in line with those of a made for television movie. Still, it really won me over. Beautiful Juan has left his pregnant wife at home so he can go in for a sort of orientation at this prison where he'll be working. He finds himself in the middle of a prison riot and poses as a prisoner. The prisoners are using a guard and three Basque prisoners as hostages. There are all sorts of moral and political considerations at play.
I sit here after watching the movie feeling really moved, pretty close to tears. It's interesting the way the film sets up the guards as civilized and the inmates as animals throughout most of the first twenty minutes. I mean, I was prepared for the inevitable reversal but I really found it to be done suavely. I appreciated the moral complexity, as most American mainstream films are about as morally complex as a tater tot. A-

The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond (Jodie Markell, 2009)

2011-01-12T23:53:00.000-06:00

The reviews weren't great for this but it was more interesting than most mainstream American movies I saw this year, in the way uneven indie dramas tend to be. The piece is very Tennessee Williams. It's lurid and sentimental yet possesses a compelling sensitivity in moments. There's the diva at the center and the play between wealthy and working class. There's madness and decadence. I'm not sure how well it was carried off though. It seems intriguingly anachronistic, with certain elements seeming too contemporary and of course I couldn't stop trying to imagine how it would have been handled had it been produced in 1957 when it was written. It's pretty film though. The lead actress is particularly lovely, though I did remark that she looked like someone had put Debbie Harry's makeup on a much younger face. This certainly isn't one of Tennessee's best and I doubt much will linger with me but I liked it in the way I enjoy his lesser short stories. By the way, if you happen to read this and you haven't read any of Tennessee Williams's short stories I'd highly recommend that you seek them out because they're really lovely, many of them. C

2010 in Review at a Glance

2011-01-11T01:48:00.038-06:00

I didn't do a great job of keeping up with this journal over the last year but here's my little summary of 2010.

There is, for various reasons, a bit of overlap between this year's and last year's lists. I have to say, the year doesn't seem so impressive to me. It seems like people's standards are going down. Que penses tu?

Loved it
Another Year
Dogtooth (Greece)
The Illusionist (France)
Lourdes (France)
A Prophet (France)

Really liked it
Ajami (Israel/Palestine)
Animal Kingdom
Black Swan
Blue Valentine
Brotherhood (Denmark)
A Call Girl (aka, A Slovenian Girl) (Slovenia)
Casino Jack and the United States of Money
Catfish
Cell 211 (Spain)
The Chaser (South Korea)
Cropsey
A Farewell to Hemingway (Bulgaria)
Fish Tank
Gordos (Spain)
Guidance (Sweden)
Harlan: In the Shadow of Jud Suss (Germany)
I Am Love (Italy)
Inside Job
Jack Goes Boating
Mary and Max
Milk of Sorrow (Peru)
Mother (South Korea)
The Other Irene (Romania)
Prima Primavera (Hungary)
Please Give
Rabbit Hole
Soul at Peace (Slovakia)
Tron: Legacy 3D
Winter’s Bone

Liked it
The American
Easy A
Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (Portugal)
Everyone Else (Germany)
The Girl Who Played with Fire (Sweden)
Harry Brown
Inception
The Kids Are All Right
The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond
Love and Other Drugs
Micmacs (France)
Red Riding: 1974
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
The Secret of Kells
The Social Network
Storm (Germany)
Shutter Island
Tangled
Unstoppable
Vision: The Life of Hildegard von Bingen (Germany)
Wild Grass (France)
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

It was okay
127 Hours
Bluebeard (France)
Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Collectress (Lithuania)
December Heat (Estonia)
Despicable Me
Eyes Wide Open (Israel)
The Fighter
The Ghost Writer
Hadewijch (France)
How to Train Your Dragon
I Love You Phillip Morris
I’m Still Here
Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
Kick-Ass
Knight & Day
Megamind
Salt
Somewhere
Sweetgrass
The Tourist
Zero (Poland)

Blah
Chameleon (Hungary)
Date Night
Disengagement (France/Israel)
Exit Through the Gift Shop
Green Zone
House of Boys (Luxembourg)
The Killer Inside Me
The King’s Speech
The Last Station
The Misfortunates (Belgium)
Monsters
Never Let Me Go
RED
Restrepo
Soul Kitchen (Germany)
The Town
True Grit
Whiskey with Vodka (Germany)
The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner (Bulgaria)

Didn’t like it
Alice in Wonderland
Around a Small Mountain (France)
The Bounty Hunter
Burlesque
Enter the Void
Get Him to the Greek (or did I HATE it?)
Leaves of Grass
Let Me In
Sex and the City 2
Toy Story 3

Hated it
Casino Jack (and the united states of kevin spacey)
The Secret in Their Eyes (Argentina/Hell)
Slaves in Their Bonds (Greece/Hades)
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (Wall Street/Hollywood)

Everyone Else / Alle Anderen (Maren Ade, 2009, Germany)

2010-12-25T10:31:00.002-06:00

Alle Anderen is about a youngish German couple on vacation in Sardinia. He's an architect just starting out. His backside is strong but his hair is beginning to thin. She's a publicist for a band nobody has ever heard of. The relationship is one of those where the partners are attached to each other despite being fundamentally incompatible. If you've ever been in a relationship like this you know that although there is a small chance of making this sort of relationship work, the pair must necessarily act out all kinds of drama that stems from the uncertainty produced by such an unfortuitous pairing. This movie definitely knows what it's talking about and that's part of why it's hard to watch. The way the characters behave dysfunctionally even when they must know they're not making things better feels disarmingly authentic. I guess what I felt was lacking in this movie was anything to pull you in other than the familiarity of the dysfunction. I'm not sure the film is beautiful enough to hold its cruelty, although I find it growing on me as it has time to settle. C+

Sweetgrass (Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, 2010)

2010-12-25T10:12:00.001-06:00

Sweetgrass is a documentary about a sheep ranch in Montana. From the 19th century until about 2003, if I'm remembering correctly, ranchers would take their livestock to graze in the mountains during the summer. The film starts off with the most enchanting, beguiling, and sometimes gently disturbing series of episodes in which the sheep are the central characters. The people almost seem like machines and there's something uncannily reminiscent of a Holocaust film in some way. I thought that might be me reading something into it because I just spent a semester contemplating the Holocaust but my boyfriend said he was thinking the same thing. As the film progresses the perspective gradually shifts to the men of the ranch. This is done pretty craftily but I have to say that the film kind of lost me by the time this shift was complete. Part of me this morning, the morning after, wonders if it might have hit kind of close to home since those are the sort of unintelligible, emotionally immature salt of the earth types that to some extent populated my early years. I kind of wish the filmmakers had included less footage of the guy's lunatic rampages. I think it crosses the boundary from pathos to pathetic and that's unfortunate because if the characters didn't devolve into such infantile wretches there might have been more weight to the yearning towards the comfort of modernity that seemed to propel their discontent. I mean, I guess it's sort of a real life version of that Marilyn Monroe film, The Misfits inasmuch as it's about people who have been passed by by the world's progress. It's really sad in this case because what's modern is likely much more barbaric than the primitive. I'm happy this wasn't any sort of dumbed down IMAX nonsense like March of the Penguins or something but I guess I was hoping for something more. Or less. C+

Rabbit Hole (John Cameron Mitchell, 2010)

2010-12-24T20:29:00.000-06:00

Talk about a tough sell. I was initially thrilled about Rabbit Hole because I love John Cameron Mitchell's two previous films, Shortbus and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Then I heard about the subject matter and got nervous. It could have gone terribly wrong but I think it went mostly right.

I've seen this film dismissed as "grief porn." My first problem with this is that it implies that movies about grief are as hollow, perverse, and pandering as "torture porn" or actual pornography and this is not something I think is even true in bad movies about grief. Certainly there is an element in exploitation in many of the movies about grief that have popped up in recent years, particularly since In the Bedroom, and that this charge might even be leveled against a pretty good film like Ordinary People. Whatever. I personally feel that all but the cheapest of these films are valuable because they provide the purifying vicarious experience that the word "catharsis" was pretty much born to represent. I also feel though that this isn't one of the cheaper films so the term is empty regardless.

I found the picture of grief presented in this film honest enough. The performances are great. Sometimes Diane Wiest reminded me of Brenda Blethyn's somewhat campy turn in Lovely & Amazing but I liked that thing so it worked for me. Anyway, I also found her performance reminiscent of the role(s) she played in Synecdoche, NY. I guess there's something about this movie that felt like a revision of Revolutionary Road but I think it's less crass than that film. The performances are great. Everybody knows that by now. What I loved about this movie was how gently it evoked an authentic experience of grief. I don't agree with critics who have suggested that this film offers no light to the viewer. I kind of feel that anyone who feels that way has never really experienced that sort of loss. I will say that some of the plotting felt a little off, particularly some of the details of the story involving Sandra Oh. B+/A-

Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich , 2010)

2010-12-24T19:59:00.005-06:00

Toy Story 3 is one of those movies about which I feel so at odds with the prevailing opinion about (even among my friends) that I start to psychoanalyze myself as a result. I thought this movie was at least as dull as the others. I found a couple of the toys cute and I liked the girl and thought the movie would have been more interesting if she had been closer to the center of it. I thought the ending was unforgivable schmaltz and I thought the plotting seemed almost color-by-numbers. I guess one thing that's always bothered me about this franchise is its aggressive lowbrow Americana. It's nostalgia and kitsch and the exultation of empty consumerism and smug bourgeois mediocrity. Whenever people talk about these movies I always think to myself, "Is this really how you want to program your children?" Fortunately, I've grown polite in my old age and I've learned to use my alienation as a springboard to the comforts of endless introspection.
As my best friend shockingly took to the defense of this film, I turned toward introspection. It occurred to me that I didn't care for any of these toys as a child. I got to thinking about how I didn't have many toys as a child, how we grew up in the middle of nowhere and how playtime meant going out and making believe in fields and forests or communing with horses, barn cats, and other animal life. This led me to my troubled childhood and something I've realized at least since high school, which is that I have always felt at odds with the physical realm. This is naturally a problem but although a film like Toy Story 3 calls a number of related issues to mind, I'm pretty sure I don't want any remedy nor any solution to which the appreciation of empty crap like this is part. D+

PS: Give me a hollow Care Bears redux over this quatsch any day. :-*

Coming Back to the Five and Dime and a Carey Mulligan Double Feature

2010-12-24T19:31:00.004-06:00

I've been so overwhelmed with being back in school that I have hardly had time to watch movies, let alone keep up with this journal. I'm going to try to fill in some of the gaps over the next couple of weeks, with all due respect to any friends who may have enjoyed the sudden decrease of activity on Google Buzz that coincided with my Rodney Dangerfield back to school moment. For my second post today I present a double feature that illustrates that it takes more than a delightful turn by Carey Mulligan to rescue a weak script.

I can't remember why but I expected more than this from Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. I feel like I heard an interview with Oliver Stone talking about Gordon Gekko and about how his new movie was going after Wall Street. The final product is far too silly and poorly written to worthy of its subject matter. Not even a charming performance from Carey Mulligan can redeem this movie. Shia Leboeuf is serviceable here and could have seemed better if the material hadn't been so rotten. Michael Douglas, on the other hand, manages to be worse than the screenplay. His anachronistic hamming that might have served the original Wall Street (which I also dislike) render this 2010 film as absurd, particularly since he looks like a withered sack of reasons to take it easy on the cosmetic surgery. Maybe it isn't even just Michael Douglas who's doing his best attempt to portray an old man in 2008 who's thinks he's still a young man in 1988. I feel like the whole movie is dated. The cameo by Charlie Sheen didn't help things, let alone the cheap gag about the 1980's cellphone. It almost seemed like the movie was waiting for Molly Ringwald to show up and ask where's the beef. I haven't had the time or opportunity to watch Inside Job yet but I'm hoping that'll be the movie this should have been. D-

Never Let Me Go reminds me of Perfume in that it was a relatively faithful adaptation of a book that I found both dazzling and unsatisfying. It's not quite as faithful as Perfume of course, because otherwise the audience would have have sat there for half the film wondering where Carey Mulligan and Keira Knightley were. Ishiguro has an amazing gift for conjuring life and sensitivity but I wasn't really convinced by his book and I was probably convinced even less by the film, despite an effective performance by Carey Mulligan. The movie certainly lacks much of the depth and texture that made the book so enthralling but it doesn't even attempt to answer the holes in the book. In fact, the weaknesses of the book are laid bare when Ishiguro's sensitive prose and thicket-like progression are stripped away. When you aren't as invested in the mind of the character, the willingness to suspend disbelief falters detrimentally in this film adaptation. They needed to have found a way to trim less from the book. I understand that the stars of the movie needed to be at its center but even a cheesy solution like telling the story of her childhood in a series of several flashbacks would probably have been more effective. Other than adding depth, this would have given the excellent supporting cast more screen time. Sally Hawkins, Charlotte Rampling, and Nathalie Richard were perfect for this movie but their characters were robbed of the gravity they possessed in the book such that their performances emerge as odd curiosities that leave the viewer wondering what Charlotte Rampling is doing in this movie anyway. I don't know, the film struck me as much too morbid, where the book was haunting. I felt like the book failed in not providing an adequate justification for itself and the movie didn't even attempt to address this. C

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (Ricki Stern & Anne Sundberg, 2010)

2010-12-24T18:40:00.003-06:00

I've always found something compelling about Joan Rivers. Even before she looked like she might be Amanda Lepore's biological mother. It's clear that she's intelligent and funny even though much of her humor is unintelligent and unfunny. It's like she's this great star devoured by her insecurities and half defeated by her own bitterness. I felt like the scene where Melissa talks about how her mother unconsciously works to make people dislike her could be expanded to cover her career. I guess the trouble with her is that her humor isn't clever enough to make up for how hostile she is.

The movie is engaging but it doesn't really rise to the same level of, say, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, which I confess to adore. She may certainly have opened a lot of doors for a lot of comediennes but I wish the film had paid tribute to other early comediennes like Rusty Warren or Fanny Brice or spent a moment talking about her relationship to other comediennes in the cannon. Of course, that would have turned this into an A&E special. I just felt like the scope was too narrow at times and it lacked the dramatic intensity and vulnerability that made the Tammy Faye piece so compelling. Even when I compare this to other recent profiles like the Jimmy Carter documentary or The September Issue, I'm just not sure it was as layered or ambitious by comparison. C+

The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)

2010-12-15T06:23:00.002-06:00

Instead of working on my finals and so forth I ended up reading best of the year stuff and The Social Network seemed like the favorite. I haven't seen many new movies since the spring and wasn't in a big rush to see this movie but it was all right. I feel like it's overrated but it's more effective than I expected it to be. I guess I got sucked into the plot but it didn't really make me think about much other than how awful most of the characters were. I guess that caused me to think more about my relationship to Facebook in particular and to the internet in general. The acting was good, I suppose, although Justin Timberlake's performance has been exaggeratedly praised. I thought the most interesting thing about his performance was that the most interesting thing about it was contemplating the changes in his face. I guess I hoped that he got all Marilyn Monroe and hired a deranged Russian acting coach to turn him into a legend but he seemed like the next Mark Wahlberg (or Ryan Phillippe?), at best. Not that that's necessarily something to scoff at.

I'm just not sure the story as it was told was the story that should have been told. It's interesting because Facebook plays such a central role in the lives of almost everybody I know but I guess it seemed like it was missing something. Whether it was context or depth or humanity I don't know.

I guess I liked the way Fincher handled the business with the privileged Winklevoss brothers. I guess that aspect of the movie might have been the most worthwhile for since it showed an aspect of our culture that is rarely acknowledged seriously (or at all) in popular media. One of my literature professors said that what she's noticed about American students compared to Europeans or Canadians is a tendency to focus on extracting a moral purpose or didactic intent from works. I guess for me that's what interesting, from a sociological or psychological standpoint. When I think about it, I suppose I appreciate that they depict more realistically what kind of assholes men are than you usually see. That's really a running theme here. Men are assholes and women are crazy. People in suits are just as bad as you thought they were. It's interesting though that the movie is book-ended by two of the three sympathetic characters in the movie: first the girl who dumps him (and of whom he's thinking in the final scene) and then the lawyer lady who kindly tells him how it is at the end. The only other character who seemed particularly sympathetic to me was the discarded best friend. I feel like I'm dancing around what was missing in this movie and I can't put my finger on it. C

cricket cricket

2010-11-28T23:17:00.000-06:00

I haven't updated this in forever. I went back to school this summer and I've had very little time for movies, let alone trying to keep a film journal.

The last movie I remember really liking was that old East German film Jakob, the Liar, which I justified watching since it was related to a class I'm taking.

A friend dragged me to the movies a couple of weeks ago to the new Woody Allen movie (You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger). I thought it was all right but I was hoping for something fun like Scoop and it was just all right. Better than that one with Larry David though.

I also lived dangerously last weekend and caught the one of the last screenings of Margarethe von Trotta's Vision at the Music Box. I thought it was lovely and I liked the storytelling. I didn't really get the acting all the time though. As a German student, it was nice to hear some polished German.

I had sworn that I'd make another desperate move this weekend and see White Material but I didn't have the chance after all and here I am taking a break from my linguistics homework to think about what might have been ;)

catching up...

2010-07-12T12:11:00.006-05:00

I've been too slow to pick this thing up since my little road trip and my move decreased the time I spent online or watching movies. I'll probably hurriedly try to catch up with some of what I've watched in the past few months, just so I can continue to have a record of all that.

Last night I watched Storm, a German movie about a war crimes trial that played last year at the Chicago International Film Festival. I skipped it then because the reviews seemed rather tepid but I ended up enjoying it. It's basically about the how and why that all these unstable places like Bosnia are getting packed into the EU and what some of the costs are. I thought it was acted and produced well and as to the reviews that damned it for looking like a German made-for-TV movie, I'd say that German made-for-TV movies are often a lot better than what gets put into theaters. B+

Prior to that I had watched a 2007 German comedy called Mein Führer. It's basically about how Goebbels gets this Jewish actor out of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp so he can work as Hitler's acting coach. It's not quite as distasteful as it sounds but it didn't quite win me over either. It was all right. B-

I also watched this documentary called A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash. Unsurprisingly it was about the coming oil crash. Like most of these documentaries it suffers for being a sort of introduction for people who don't know anything. As such, I thought it did a pretty good job and I felt like I learned a few things as well. C

The Silent Star is an old East German science fiction movie about this international team of scientists who head out to Venus after a mysterious cylinder is found at what was believed to be a UFO crash site. The lady physicist is naturally responsible for making sure everyone eats and aside from looking at a microscope a few times mostly just chases people around with jars of liquid nutrition. The main point is that that Americans are like the Venusians who destroyed themselves while trying to take over the world. Hiroshima is invoked about a half dozen times. It was interesting as a Cold War artifact. C-

After years of trying, I finally made it through Godard's overrated film Breathless without falling asleep. I'm not sure I really get Godard. I'm never sure of how I feel about the morality of his films and I don't often find myself caring about his characters. C-

I'm not sure why I enjoyed Claude Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two, since it seemed kind of empty. I like Ludivine Sagnier and she was good in this movie, though not particularly mesmerising. I watched it while I was starting to come down with something so I could have been a little scrambled in the brain but I feel like there is something there worth liking that rises above the lurid subject matter. And I'm sure there's something to the ending but I was too tired to piece it together. B

Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam is yet another Nick Broomfield documentary that manages to be fascinating even while it makes you uncomfortable because there's something incredibly slimy about Broomfield. Aside from the fact that he's kind of gross, I felt like the film lacked a certain scope. He's always leading you down the garden path and fixating on one thing and ignoring a few other things. Instead of focusing on Fleiss's personal life so much, I guess I'd have liked to know more about her prostitution ring and her trial. C

Mary and Max is sort like Muriel's Wedding crossed with 84 Charing Cross Road and blended with Wallace and Gromit. I really liked it, though the second half lost a little steam for me. It's another movie I skipped at the film festival last year because of negative reviews... B+

The first time I saw My Winnipeg I had accidentally gotten drunk at lunch and I ended up passing out during it. I was really sad. What I saw coincided really well with my drunken feverishness but my good friend Mark, with whom I saw it, said it was just all right or something. I finally got the chance to revisit it the other day when I noticed Netflix had added it to their instant viewing selection and I really loved it. I love that deranged blend of fantasy and fact. A

This isn't going so well. I think I have the flu or something.

Lourdes (Jessica Hausner, 2009, Austria/France) A

2010-05-16T22:46:00.002-05:00

I thought this movie lived up to the hype but it's another one of those movies that's almost universally inaccurately described. The movie takes place during a sort of pilgrimage to Lourdes where a group of people with all sorts of disabilities and afflictions go with some clergy folk and sundry volunteer candy striper sorts in search of miracles. The main character is relatively quiet woman with MS who wants to live a better life. Will she find her miracle? Does she? What happens and how does what happens affect all the people with her. There's so much going on in this film and I found myself relating to it not in my typical cerebral manner but instead in this sort of emotional and spiritual way. By the closing credits I truly felt like I wasn't in a movie theater at all but had been sitting in a church praying for some time without even knowing I had gradually teleported to a fantasy cathedral. Of course, the fact that I saw this film in the main theater at the Music Box may have played a large part in creating that sensation. Anyway, I'm not a religious person and I can't say I'm any less of an atheist now than I was three hours ago but I quite liked this film and will likely see it again some day. There was so much going on in that last scene. I was riveted to my seat until the last frame of the end credits... A

Can you believe it?

2010-05-16T14:42:00.002-05:00

I feel like I haven't watched an entire movie in a month. Of course, I was on a road trip for two weeks and am about to move but this is completely blowing my mind. I think the only movie I've watched since my last review might have been This Film Has Not Yet Been Rated, which was interesting enough but which hardly blew my mind.

I'm supposed to go see Lourdes tonight. Let's cross our fingers.

EDIT- Upon further investigation I have discovered that I have watched a few other movies since the last one I reviewed here.

I revisited Deconstructing Harry, although I was super sleepy and didn't finish it.

I also watched most of The Happening with some of my boyfriend's friends while we were on vacation and it was beyond dreadful and possibly worth watching because of that.

I also watched Claire's Knee and I definitely liked quite a bit about it but I didn't get a chance to put my thoughts together about it (or review it) in time to say something about it before I went on vacation and now I've sent it back to Netflix...

Even you, Andrew?

2010-04-24T17:47:00.003-05:00

It's so sad to see a respectable critic like Andrew O'Hehir join the ranks of people who ought to know better but were duped by that awful Argentine film that won the best foreign film Oscar this year.

Read it and weep.

I've hardly watched any movies all month. I think I must be cleansing my palate after an overloaded winter of filmgazing obsession.

EDIT-
LMAO. I can't believe that I thought this was one of the three worst movies I saw last year (Worse than A Single Man even.) and a friend who saw it first said he was terrified I'd like it because it'd mean he could never respect me anymore and here's yet another critic frothing about how wonderful this film is.
Roger Ebert, I never!

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Werner Herzog, 2009)

2010-04-16T00:19:00.001-05:00

Really, I don't like the original by Abel Ferrara. I thought it was long on kitsch and short on enjoyment. I thought it was dumb as well. Herzog's film isn't really dumb but it is a kind of a huge mess. As with much that Herzog has done, I didn't know how to connect to this movie at all. The one Herzog movie I've really loved was Stroszek though and the interesting thing about this movie is the way I could see it as a dialogue between that movie and the Abel Ferrara Bad Lieutenant. I'm puzzled by why so many people liked this movie. I mean, I think I understand it adequately, I just maybe didn't see it like they saw it. I was more or less completely unengaged in this film. I found it dull and frustrating. Nonetheless, I'd watch it again probably because it seems like it might have slight potential to improve on second viewing. C-

Tin Man (Nick Willing, 2007) / Comedy specials on Netflix Instant Viewing

2010-04-15T21:29:00.002-05:00

Even if I haven't been going to the movies, I have been putting various things on via Netflix. The ones that I actually watched are the Tin Man miniseries from the Sci-Fi channel and two stand-up comedy specials I've watched in moments where I was desperate to be buoyed.

I think it'd be easy to dismiss Tin Man as something slight but it was really more imaginative and inventive and well put-together than I had expected, especially after having read Wicked and then endured the play. It's a sort of update of the Wizard of Oz story starring Zooey Deschanel as DG and Alan Cumming as a sort of strawman. I love that this movie isn't as literal minded as a lot of these sort of updates are. It went in directions I didn't quite expect, even if it's naturally a little predictable. I thought it might be based on a graphic novel or something but that doesn't seem to be the case. The acting is decent for the medium. The only other actor that was familiar to me was wicked long-lost sister Azkadellia (Kathleen Robertson), whom I recognized as Rhonda from Psycho Beach Party. B

I felt extremely ambivalent about Daniel Tosh's special Completely Serious. It certainly deals with some very important issues of today and it does so in an incredibly politically incorrect fashion and he's probably being tongue and cheek but I'm not sure I could really go with him. Even though I felt like there was parody and satire happening, I felt like the bite wasn't sharp enough and that he might just be too much of an asshole for my comfort. I liked the way he referred to his technique a lot. It was like taking apart a machine while you were running it. That's the sort of post-modern I kind of like, especially since I don't think people are aware enough of the machines that drive them. C-

Anjelah Johnson: That's How We Do is nicer than the other comedy special, even the politically incorrect bits don't feel malicious like Mr. Tosh's bit. She's likable and funny, mostly inoffensive. I didn't know her from MadTV. Not spectacular but it was a pleasant diversion. C
PS- This post feels half-assed. I got trouble in mind today. But I'm almost caught up now so that's all right.

We Live in Public (Ondi Timoner, 2008) / Afghan Star (Havana Marking, 2009)

2010-04-15T19:58:00.004-05:00

It's spring in Chicago and it's been too gorgeous to sit inside all day watching movies, not to mention the apartment hunting that was going on, so I've hardly watched any movies in the past couple of weeks. I was sort of Jonesing yesterday so I stopped in at Specialty Video on the way home from a haircut and picked up a couple of documentaries: We Live in Public and Afghan Star, which I had been really excited about seeing in the theater last year but which I unfortunately missed when I had the chance. Neither of them lived up to my expectations but both were engaging and worth watching.

Josh Harris made a bazillion dollars in the 90s through some kind of internet something or other, though I'm not entirely clear on what he earned the money for exactly. I feel like the NPR piece on this film, We Live in Public, was much more coherent and informative than the actual movie, which I guess is it's main flaw. If you've ever seen a documentary about something artsy that happened in New York where everyone is blowing it out of proportion and talking like they held Jesus's hand the day he walked on water, this movie is kind of like that. Essentially, he spends his fortune on these over the top ventures that seemed part venture capitalism, part unethical psych experiment that could never be approved by any ethics panel, and part performance art. His most famous experiment is often credited as being the first reality show. He basically put a bunch of New York lunatics into a bunker and filled it with food, booze, and weapons and filmed it all. Whether this was for the internet or not or whether anyone watched it wasn't made too clear in the film. I think one of the problems with the film is that the filmmaker was a participant in the narrative and was too close to achieve any real critical distance. The movie needed to be more reflective, I think. It also seemed to make pronouncements about the role of technology in our lives that were as quaint and obsolete as Blue Man Group. C-

Afghan Star was the UK's submission to the Academy's foreign film panel this last year. It's a documentary about this American Idol-type television show in Afghanistan and its role in the culture. There is an element of this film that seems like what you'd expect from a movie about a talent contest and that part of the film isn't that great. (See Every Little Step or Pageant for a more successful take on that narrative.) The stronger part of the movie is about the culture and politics of what's been going on in Afghanistan for the past few decades. It doesn't necessarily go into the whole story like a special on the History Channel or something but it sort of gets the story across. I guess what I wanted though was a more in depth look at how Afghanistan got where it is now, even though that's not necessarily the mission of this film. It was good. I just wanted a little more from it. B-

Harry Brown (Daniel Barber, 2009, UK)

2010-04-10T18:47:00.000-05:00

Harry Brown is a sort of vigilante justice movie about some old men living in a council estate (England's answer to the projects) that is somewhat reminiscent of the milieu of the apartment building at the center of Gomorrah. There's rampant crime involving drugs, sex, and illegal weapons, in addition to robberies and senseless harassment that calls to mind A Clockwork Orange. It gets to a point where Michael Caine has enough and decides to clean house. Emily Morter shows up as the heir to Helen Mirren's lady detective from Prime Suspect and she kind of represents the moral voice in the movie, which naturally gets drowned out. It's dark and gritty and a spare in parts. I generally liked it but I wanted it to go a little deeper. Instead of saying, "Make the world a better plays and flush the scavs into a fiery sewer," I wanted there to be some suggestion or indication of the structural elements that bring us to where we are in the film... C+

Reading Star Wars 2 to Filth

2010-04-07T21:20:00.000-05:00

Instead of watching a movie last night I ended up watching this 90 minute diatribe on the awfulness of the second Star Wars prequel. I've never actually seen any of the prequels from start to finish but he makes a compelling case. I was skeptical going in but I found this strangely watchable and weirdly engaging, as it were.

Watch it here if you're interested.

Battle in Seattle (Stuart Townsend, 2007)

2010-04-06T21:22:00.001-05:00

As the title implies, this movie is about the protests surrounding the WTO summit in Seattle in 1999. Being as my politics and worldview might best be described as "Naomi Klein individual (minus a little get-up-and-go)" I was naturally very excited when this movie came out. It was greeted with mixed reviews though and I never got around to seeing it until last night because I've been so terrified of being disappointed. It's hard to be objective about a movie that so clearly and unambiguously reinforces one's own politics but I really liked this movie. I can think of a dozen criticisms people might bludgeon this film with and I wouldn't say that it succeeds as great art. I wouldn't even say it succeeds so well at persuasively and articulately defining its politics since it's probably preaching to the choir. Nonetheless, this choirboy says "Hallelujah!" I notice that the director is an Irish actor who went to the same acting school as Colin Farrell and was engaged to Charlize Theron with whom he starred in Trapped, which I vaguely remember liking. The acting in the movie is decent but not so great that you'd write home about it. A-

2 short films: Spike Jonze & Guy Maddin

2010-04-06T19:42:00.008-05:00

Over the last few weeks the blogs in my Google Reader have been chattering about a few short films: Jonze's I'm Here, Maddin's The Little White Cloud That Cried, and Ramin Bahrani's Plastic Bag. I do most of my internetting at work (without audio) and it took me a while to get to the first two. The latter I still haven't gotten around to watching.

Given that the kind of person who has a film blog seems most often to the kind of person who likes both robots and Spike Jonze it seems natural that people have seemed to like I'm Here so much. My own circle of friends has given a range of responses that goes from "meh" to assorted vitriolic displays of scorn-fueled mirth. I'm more on the "meh" side of the spectrum. I thought the story was engaging enough but the metaphors and so forth aren't so great. I didn't really like philosophy driving the narrative. You can watch it on the official Absolut-sponsored page here but I found that page irritating and a little precious so I found it on this page which seems to be Hungary's answer to Youtube. C-

Guy Maddin basically brings us tranny art porn. If your math doesn't make that last sentence add up to "fabulous" you're clearly using the devil's calculus. It took me a couple of minutes before I was won over by The Little White Cloud That Cried but the important thing is that it won me over in a big way. Of course, I can't imagine most people enjoying it as much as I did because there are so many ways for people to criticize movies with hardcore sex involving pre-op transsexuals and a metaphysical edge. I liked it though. It's said to be a tribute to experimental filmmaker Jack Smith but I'm not very familiar with any of his work (which includes Flaming Creatures and Normal Love) so I can't even speak to any of that... Watch it here. If you dare. A-

Copyright Criminals (Benjamin Franzen, 2009)

2010-04-01T23:27:00.001-05:00

My boyfriend picked this up at our neighborhood independent video store yesterday and I ended up watching it tonight. It'll be late now. Sorry. :-) It's a short documentary about sampling that seems to have been taken up by PBS's Independent Lens. It's an interesting subject but I found the movie unfocused and superficial. They didn't talk to enough people and they didn't quite succeed at making a coherent piece out of the interviews they did get. I have to say, I found the show I heard about it on NPR more thorough and informative... I might say the length is what makes the movie necessarily choppy but the piece I heard on NPR was shorter than this film... C

Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937)

2010-04-01T13:58:00.001-05:00

Leo McCarey's film stars Beulah Bondi and Victor Moore as couple who have been married for fifty years and have lost their home to foreclosure. Their ungrateful children can't afford to take them on, it seems, and the two parents are split up, the wife staying with their son and his family in New York City, and the father staying with their horrible daughter and her husband three hundred miles away. It's a gorgeous film in some respects. There's something that reminded me of Frank Capra's 1930's films or even of John Ford's Grapes of Wrath. Those "regular people" movies from the time are so fascinating to me because they seem a little patronizing but simultaneously heartfelt. They're sentimental and hokey but manage to be profoundly affecting. Their notions of decency can range from seeming quaint to seeming almost revolutionary today. It was sort of disorienting though because you have this film that sort of feels like a Yasujiro Ozu movie tucked inside one of those '30s melodramas that almost seem to function like therapy for Americans who were exhausted from the preceding twenty-five years. I kept feeling this disconnect like my brain kept wanting to convert it to an Ozu film or even Koreeda. At the end there's this great sequence in the railway station that has called to my mind the grace and the emotional quality of moments in David Lean's Brief Encounter. I thought about rating this film with a lower score because of some of the hokiness but it had been a while since a movie made me cry and there's something timeless about the story and ache-inducingly beautiful about the trajectory. A

Brothers (Jim Sheridan, 2009)

2010-03-30T22:09:00.001-05:00

Tobey Maguire goes off to war in Afghanistan leaving behind his wife Natalie Portman and their two daughters. He's reported dead. Cliche ex-con brother Jake Gyllenhaal picks up the slack and he ends up kissing Natalie Portman on the lips. Tobey Maguire isn't dead though. That's not really a spoiler so if you're reading this just chill out, okay? Anyway, it's overblown and half-baked. The writing is terrible. The acting seems bad as well. I'm willing to blame the writer and the director but maybe these people are all hacks. I usually like Natalie Portman though and I expected better from Jim Sheridan. I don't know what the hell is wrong with "legitimate" film critics since they're always gushing about crap like this. Puke. I watched this with four friends the other night and it was a lot of laughing at it and looking at each other like, "What the hell is wrong with these people?" D

The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner / Светът е голям и спасение дебне отвсякъде (Stefan Komandarev, 2008, Bulgaria)

2010-03-30T21:49:00.001-05:00

The story begins with a car accident in Germany. Sashko, a beautiful and sexy man in his late twenties or so, survives the accident but loses his memory. His grandfather, who hasn't seen him since his parents fled Bulgaria with him when he was a child, comes to Germany to try to help him recuperate. They end up riding to Bulgaria on a tandem bicycle and their trip is intercut with flashbacks that tell some of the story of their emigration. The film is sentimental and slight and that's probably why it's so popular. I'm sure it's big with the Geritol set. Also, I didn't understand why they never saw each other after the fall of the Iron Curtain; that's one thing that didn't make any sense to me. C

Gordos (Daniel Sánchez-Arévalo, 2009, Spain)

2010-03-30T21:12:00.000-05:00

Gordos is a sort of black comedy about a group of people partaking in a sort of weight loss seminar. It's also about the people in their lives. I really liked it. It's funny. It's touching. It gets at some true things about the various long term relationships in our lives. The guy leading the seminar is the dreamy husband of a pregnant gym teacher. There's a guy who deals with his guilt by encouraging everyone else around him to eat up. It's also about his wife and their children and the issues in the family. The daughter is a student of the therapist's wife. Then there's the religious lady with her deranged devout boyfriend who wants to keep her fat. The high strung business lady in an LTR rut. The big gay spokesman for a weight loss program who's losing everything because he can't stop putting on weight. I thought the dynamics in the relationships were relatively true to life. It seemed like there were moments they could have done easy things like judge the religious people for example, but the movie is mostly unjudgmental. The audience seemed to like it quite a bit and I have to say I really enjoyed it. It tells some things I haven't seen in a movie before, even if parts of it are on the conventional side. B+

Around a Small Mountain / 36 vues du pic Saint-Loup (Jacques Rivette, 2009, France)

2010-03-29T22:07:00.003-05:00

When people talk about quirky French movies and roll their eyes or shake their heads or screw up their faces they're talking about movies like this. It's an essentially pointless, empty, quirky, romp around a mountain with a little circus that seems kind of lame and run down and surprisingly intimate for a production that has such a caravan... A woman breaks down on a mountain road. A mysterious businessman in a sports car stops and silently fixes her car in like three seconds. Then all this boring stuff happens where he insinuates himself into the circus community, which seems to be about four people, and tries to fix all the issues. It was dull. I dozed off for a few minutes. I read a review that said Jane Birkin was horrible but she was the only thing that made this movie at all interesting for me, not that her character or acting were too interesting, just her voice and her presence, I guess. I'd give it a lower score but feel like my dozing off for a few minutes could have made me miss something worthwhile, unlikely as that may be. I'm really surprised that this movie made it on a few critics' ten best lists last year. C

Brotherhood / Broderskab (Nicolo Donato, 2009, Denmark)

2010-03-29T20:45:00.008-05:00

The premise is gay love between a new initiate of a neo-Nazi group and a more seasoned member. It sounds like a lurid gay fantasy and there are definitely parts that play that way pretty strongly. The movie starts with Lars, a sergeant or something, being turned down for a promotion because of rumors he came on to some of his men at a bar. It seemed like this information may have been false but perhaps it's like The Children's Hour where a false rumor hints at something that might be near the truth... He's drinking with some friends at one of their homes and some skinheads come and start talking about the Muslims at the asylum center and at first he gets up to leave but he gradually gets sucked in and of course falls for the dreamiest, most secretly sensitive neo-Nazi you could dream up. Sometimes this movie is seems like such a sensationalistic, homo-fantasy that I found myself laughing a lot. What makes this movie remarkable, however, is that it really turns it around by the end. There were moments between these two guys that were really lovely and the drama that ensues is generally effective. I kept thinking, these guys can't just walk into the sunset because they've done some really objectionable things but it's also so boring and unsatisfying if they get murdered or end up all sad sack or hateful or whatever. You really see transformations in this film and I think the end managed to serve up both justice and a satisfying movie experience. I thought it was great. I'd recommend it to most of my friends, especially all the gay guys who inexplicably have endless fantasies about amorous skinheads... I was surprised at first that it won the award at the Rome Film Festival but it seems to make some sense now. B+

P.S., David Dencik is really dreamy as the Nazi rival cum love interest:

Whiskey with Vodka / Whisky mit Wodka (Andreas Dresen, 2009, Germany)

2010-03-29T17:36:00.003-05:00

Movies about movie shoots don't usually work out so well, in my opinion. This is a sort of German comedy about an alcoholic actor who seems to have a reputation akin to the Laurence Olivier of Germany or something. He's making a movie, which is said to be a great artistic film though it looks like it would be a terrible film and not particularly artistic but who can say? The last film he was on was never finished and the producer is worried the same kind of behavior from the leading man will sink this production as well so he comes up with the idea of hiring a second actor to shoot all the scenes in case the drunk mucks everything up. The idea seems to be that it might encourage the drunk to straighten out and get the job done. It's really not very interesting, except for Corinna Harfouch as the leading lady in the film. She apparently played Frau Goebbels in Der Untergang (Downfall) so that's probably why she seemed familiar to me although she also seems to have been in this crime caper I saw once about old ladies robbing a bank or something called Jetzt oder nie--Zeit is Geld. I liked her a lot, though she didn't have much to do and was kind of wasted here. I'd like to see her in something else. I wish we could get Tatort in America. Every time I watch a mediocre German movie, I just get wistful for the things I enjoyed on German television. Oh, Evelyn Hamman, how I miss you! C

Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont, 2009, France)

2010-03-28T01:20:00.003-05:00

Shortly after our story begins, our protagonist, a novice at a convent, is dismissed for going overboard with the abstinence and mortification. Her story is interwoven with the story of a bricklayer and petty criminal but I'm not entirely sure I know why. The mother superior says to go put herself to use in the world and she goes back to live with her wealthy parents in their majestic Ile Saint-Louis residence. She hooks up with some Arab guys at a cafe one day and goes with them to this MAJESTIC concert on the quay; it looks like punk but it's all accordion with itself. She ends up being friends with one of the boys, who has the hots for her, but she tells him she's with Jesus and that while she can ride around on stolen scooters with him and her dog, she's not going to put out for anyone but Jesus. She meets the kid's brother, who leads religious meetings upstairs from a shawarma place. There's all this religious crap that follows, including them suddenly being in the middle of a war zone in the middle east and then back in Paris seemingly up to no good. I didn't really buy it. I didn't buy the ending. I thought it was okay if you read it as a criticism of religious fervor that might indicate the thief has more to do with the main man in their fairy tale religion than anybody else. Or not. The music is lovely. The images are lovely. I liked the actors. I found the story a little cheap though. C

Slaves in Their Bonds / Οι Σκλάβοι στα Δεσμά τους (Adonis Lykouresis, 2009, Greece)

2010-03-27T00:43:00.006-05:00

I read somewhere that Greece originally submitted Dogtooth to the Academy Awards this year but changed their mind and sent this instead. Since I've seen both Dogtooth and Strella I'm completely baffled by this decision because this is one of those movies that has you thinking it must have been the only movie made in that country that year, which it obviously wasn't. This tedious period piece plays like the worst installment of Masterpiece Theater never made. Aside from being incredibly drawn out and uninteresting, it also seems like it was shot on a camcorder. The story involves a bunch of rich, boring assholes on the island of Corfu. It seems to take place around the beginning of the last century and it seems like the aristocracy is withering away and being replaced by a seemingly unsavory bourgeoisie. The main event in the movie is the family basically forcing their elder daughter to marry this slimy doctor who went out and bought up all the father's IOU's. The other daughter is rebellious and hot to trot. The elder son is a shiftless lawyer in a loveless affair with a woman married to a much older, wealthy man. The younger son is a gambler and a thief and not really different than rich people anywhere in his extreme self-centeredness. The mother is likable enough. I suppose the women in general are likable enough, possibly because they're so broadly drawn. I saw it in a theater packed to the rafters with Greeks and they seemed to like it pretty well. Of course, Greek people seem to like anything Greek as a matter of principle, in my experience. D

The Misfortunates / De helaasheid der dingen (Felix Van Groening, 2009, Belgium)

2010-03-27T00:15:00.004-05:00

This was Belgium's submission to this year's Academy Awards. It's a dingy movie about a boy in some small town in Belgium in what might be the 1980s, based on the Limahl haircut. He lives with his father, his grandmother, and his three (two?) uncles. The men are all drunks and deadbeats. The grandmother more or less silently makes the best of things. The kid's about puberty age and he's having trouble at school and things at home don't seem very healthy. The story of his youth is intercut with the story of him as an adult, a struggling writer who knocks up his girlfriend. The movie is funny sometimes but it isn't all that engaging because it's hard to care about the characters a lot of the time. Most of the publicity stills from the movie are from the town's yearly nude cycling contest. There's also a yearly event where all the men dress in women's clothing and drink for three days. The movie isn't attractive or engaging or enlightening, to my mind, but I think it was really honest so it has that going for it. You don't see many honest depictions of these kinds of people, I guess, and this one seems relatively unsentimental, which was nice. It seemed to ramble though and I'm not sure it was consistent philosophically. Maybe it is and I just didn't think it through rightly because it didn't sing to me and because I thought the story about the kid as a grownup was kind of weak. C

Capitalism: A Love Story (Michael Moore, 2009)

2010-03-23T02:32:00.007-05:00

This movie is basically stuff I already know about. I guess that's what makes me better informed than most people. I usually don't have the patience to explain my politics to people but I feel like this movie iterates my worldview pretty well. It might run a hair on the paranoid side but that's about it. In case you've been living in a bubble or Alabama or something, it's Michael Moore's movie about the financial crisis. There's grandstanding and foolishness but it tells this story which should be told over and over again in perpetuity. A-

Prima Primavera (János Edelényi, 2008, Hungary)

2010-03-23T00:13:00.004-05:00

Gabor is a fifty-something year old son of a Holocaust survivor. It's hard to tell if he's retarded, autistic, or if he just hasn't recovered from a painful event in his childhood. The movie starts with him and his mother in a beautiful cemetery next to a jail. He's lost and doesn't remember that the pine trees were cut down twenty years ago. The scene is a great example of the cinematography throughout. The shots are beautiful, if a little grainy or a little off in the coloring or a little too obviously digital. I found myself thinking in this movie that if there is a trade off of some technical aspects in exchange for a greater diversity in world cinema that means more lovely movies like this one then bring it on. The story gets going when Gabor and his mother go to the bank with their lawyer so Gabor can sign some papers that seem to relate to his inheritance, though he doesn't seem to be following what's going on, perhaps because he can't cope with the possibility of his mother's death, although while I was watching it I just found myself wondering if he was more seriously retarded than I had anticipated based on the description. Suddenly the bank gets robbed, Gabor intercedes in a way that makes things go terribly wrong but he ends up seeing the face of the gunman. Naturally, the gunman wants Gabor out of the way. He also wants the getaway driver out of the way, a prostitute who seems to have been the girlfriend of the robber who dies in the bank robbery. The dutch gunman enlists the prostitute, Joli, to help neutralize Gabor but they get away and go on the run. He tells her they can stay at his grandmother's house in Serbia and their adventure begins. I can see how some people might come up with some criticisms for this movie but I found it really winning. I could see someone calling parts of it cheesy but it all really worked for me. There were a number shots in the movie that were really lovely and I thought the story mostly worked through the whole thing, although the guy who plays the dutch gangster is a little broadly drawn and not acted as well as he might have been. It was a good time at the movies. I'd watch it again. This is another one of the movies at this festival that might inspire me to want to visit the countries depicted. I'm putting a bunch of pictures here and there are a few more on the website, which does a pretty good job of representing the film, I think. I enjoyed parts of the director's statement. B+

December Heat / Detsembrikuumus (Asko Kase, 2008, Estonia)

2010-03-22T23:09:00.006-05:00

This was Estonia's submission for the best foreign film Oscar. Of the ten I've seen so far, this one is currently ranked at number eight, between number seven from Romania and number nine from Hungary. It's handsomely produced, if melodramatic and intermittently cheesy, but the main thing is that it comes across as a little stridently political, almost propagandistic, which kind of makes sense since it seems like it was basically commissioned by the Estonian government to mark the 90th anniversary of the Republic. Of course, my knowledge of Estonian history is about as vague as possible and is mostly informed by my vague knowledge of the histories of the other Baltic states. I can't really find much information about the specific event depicted in the movie but it seems to have taken place in 1924. What was really strange is that the subtitles were intermittently inept and in particular the dates were rendered in such a way that I couldn't decide even what decade this was taking place in. I think it was more clear in the opening title but I didn't really process it all because of all these infernal latecomers. The dates in the subtitles during the movie ended up being three digits and a pound sign or a quotation mark or something. No, I didn't watch a bootleg with some half-assed internet subtitles, I saw this at the Gene Siskel Film Center as part of the EU Film Festival, for reals. Anyway... It seems that Estonia had a war of independence in the late teens where they gained their independence for the first time since 1227. Apparently, in 1924, Russia attempted to orchestrate a communist coup in Tallinn, the nation's capital. This is the story of how that coup was prevented, culminating in a sort of silly and hard to believe scene in a telegraph office. Most of the actors are fairly capable. The lead couple is attractive and likable. There's a story about a baker and his wife and son that's pretty effective. I sort of felt like the movie focused too much on a handful of rebels and military personnel and should have liked more context about the locals. It's interesting that the film seems firmly anticommunist and anti-Russian, perhaps resentful toward foreigners in general, but it also depicts rather overtly the abuses of the capitalists during the short-lived Republic. It was certainly engaging but perhaps not quite weighty enough and, I think, a little too nationalistic or something like that. C/C+

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2006, Romania)

2010-03-22T05:38:00.003-05:00

Mr. Lazarescu hasn't been feeling so well today. In the evening he calls for an ambulance, which arrives after a relatively long time. He needs medical attention pretty badly but there's been a big bus accident and the hospitals are swamped. They're also full of unfeeling, unqualified people, it seems, though they also have great employees. He's escorted throughout the night by an EMT nurse, rough around the edges but well-intentioned. The title pretty much tells you what the whole movie is about but it's so much more entertaining and thrilling and beautiful than I had expected. I also expected it to be very much about the failings of the Romanian healthcare system but most of what you'll see here could be translated to any city in America. This is the kind of foreign movie that should be remade in America, given our own healthcare crises. The actress who plays the nurse is pretty amazing. There are so many interesting details in this story. It's not only about more than the Romanian hospital system, it felt like it touched on many other facets of life. It's time for my bedtime but I'm really glad I finally watched this. It's not as dour and punishing as it sounds. Highly entertaining and also very beautiful. I highly recommend this movie. A

Zero (Pawel Borowski, 2009, Poland)

2010-03-22T01:05:00.003-05:00

Zero is a sort of network narrative investigating the underbelly of life in a large city in Poland. A lot of the characters are likable. Many of the scenes are charming or funny or shocking. Some of the situations are even quite compelling. I'm just not sure it fit together very well as a whole. I definitely checked the time a number of times when the movie seemed to be dragging or meandering toward nowhere. There's an executive who hires detectives to get a photo of his wife having an affair. A poor family who need money for their son's organ transplant. A pregnant pornstar and her deranged gangster boyfriend. A door to door puppet salesman struggling to make ends meet while harboring resentment for his son who committed a robbery a year ago. A creepy, kind-ish old man who says he's from a children's foundation. An old lady who needs sexual healing and the male prostitute who wants to marry his girlfriend. There are some great touches here. I like the way it begins and ends with the newspaper salesman on side of the busy road. I like that it's a dark movie with a glimmer of light. I can think of a lot of things I liked about this movie but I don't feel like it was fully realized as a whole film. And I can't forget how some of the parts were about as tedious as Disengagement, which I had just watched. C

Disengagement (Amos Gitai, 2007, France/Israel)

2010-03-22T00:49:00.007-05:00

The main good thing about this movie is that Liron Levo, who plays Juliette Binoche's adopted Israeli brother, is a heroic hunk of sex on a stick in it. It seems well-shot, too. I'm just amazed that this film has such a talented, attractive cast, a promising idea, and an acclaimed director and this movie is so off. I feel like a lot of it is that the pacing feels really off but I also don't know if I like the way it deals with the issues by the end of the movie. The movie begins with Uli (Liron Levo) on a train to Avignon. He meets a Palestinian woman and they get along well and end up making out on the train after schooling the passport guy about the nature of national identity in the modern world. Hiam Abbass, who was so fabulous in Amreeka, is also fabulous here as the Palestinian lady but she's only around for like three minutes. Uli makes his way to his father's deathbed in Avignon. The dad is dead. There's a black lady singing arias over the dead man. Juliette Binoche is the dead man's daughter and she's acting like a sort of spoiled lunatic. She tells her brother she wants to leave her husband and she dances around naked. All of this felt very dull and plodding. Juliette Binoche learns from the will about the identity of the daughter she had given away as an adolescent in Israel and that her father had had a secret relationship with her. She needs to go back to Israel with her brother to find her daughter in the Gaza, which is about to be evacuated. This movie had good moments but overall I found it tiresome. I also found these lunatics Jews in Gaza tiresome and felt like the movie was too kind on them. I mean, they were told to evacuate in advance. The issue requires a certain finesse and this movie didn't have it. Give me Eytan Fox over Amos Gitai any day of the week. C-

Soul at Peace / Pokoj v dusi (Vladimir Balkó, 2009, Slovakia)

2010-03-22T00:00:00.005-05:00

Tono gets out of prison where he's been for five years. He goes back to his home in the heavily forested Carpathian Mountains. The landscape in this movie is gorgeous and the town he lives in is like a postcard in almost every frame. The unfolding of plot and character are as graceful as the setting. He gets home and discovers the world pushing him back into a life of crime even though he wants to stay an honest man. He can't find a job. He's in debt. He thinks his wife has been unfaithful. Meanwhile, out of his sight, everyone around in him is involved in various grafts and corruptions. It's amazing that a film that seems to argue that the only choice for an honest man is to shun the world is so beautiful and kind of really made me want to visit Slovakia. I feel like this EU Film Festival is hammering me with the idea that Eastern Europe is a corrupt, mad, confusing place right now and their EU-ification is the source of a lot of anxiety. This movie seemed kind of grainy on the big screen, perhaps because it was made for television, but I thought it was really beautiful to look at all the same. I also loved the music. A-

The Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang, 1948)

2010-03-21T23:30:00.003-05:00

I caught the Fritz Lang noir matinee at the Music Box today, The Secret Beyond the Door. It's one of those 1940s Freudian thrillers. As a genre these haven't aged very well and this is no exception to that remark. It's really weak for Fritz Lang. It's like Spellbound without Ingrid Bergman or Salvador Dali. Or like Bluebeard rewritten by someone who just read a sensationalized paperback about psychoanalysis. A woman marries a guy she meets in Mexico although she knows nothing about him. She suspects he wants to kill her and naturally she's right. There's a lot of awful pop psychology here that doesn't work at all. It's interesting enough but kind of blows it in the final third. The atmosphere isn't as dense or lurid as I expected from Lang. C

A Farewell to Hemingway / Edinstvenata lyubovna istoriya, koyato Hemingway ne opisa (Svetoslav Ovcharov, 2008, Bulgaria)

2010-03-21T00:52:00.003-05:00

This movie dramatizes a fictional episode involving a young Ernest Hemingway in 1922. He's kicked off a train to Sofia, Bulgaria either for being sick or being belligerent. He's working as a war correspondent for some Toronto newspaper. He spends the night in this little station with the stationmaster and his daughter, who has studied English. The girl falls for him and they get along well and she really sees him as an escape from her dull life. The girl wants to run away to Paris with him so the father drugs them both and puts Hemingway on a freight train in the morning, leaving behind only his silver cross with a tag including his name. It's really lovely and there's actually a fair amount of texture to it. It sounds like I gave away the whole story but that's all in the description you'll read of the movie for every film fest screening it seems to have played at. I knew it all going in but the movie didn't seem to depend on that sort of thing. It was more how it all unfolded. I was really tired when I saw it. I want to watch it again. B+
I can't find any pictures of the sexy Hemingway guy. :(

House of Boys (Jean-Claude Schlim, 2009, Luxembourg/Germany/Netherlands)

2010-03-21T00:07:00.008-05:00

I'm really at a loss for how to respond to this movie.

Fathom a hard-hitting, penetrating, sexy drama about the onset of the AIDS epidemic from the vantage point of notorious Amsterdam gogo club cum bordello House of Boys. Blend this idea with a very special episode of trendy British teen soap Skins and a love letter to 80s New Wave. Now imagine that almost every moment of it is played like a skit from French & Saunders Go to the Movies or something.
I mean, the first thing you'll notice is that in the version of the Benelux nations presented in this film everyone speaks varying degrees of accented English, whether at home or in the locker room at school. The absurd, ridiculous writing will not be lost on you. You'll also notice that in addition to deliriously awful writing the acting is also pretty bad. Very teen soap / afterschool special. In the scenes that were supposed to tragic I find myself with my face buried in my jacket so as not to offend everyone around me since I was laughing so hard at the tragic AIDS death of a complicated gogo boy far from Kansas. I couldn't tell how to take any of it serious. I can't say I didn't enjoy it because it's more complicated than that. This movie is almost aggressively campy and shockingly the least campy things about this movie are the drag queens, most of the time. I certainly had a good time at this movie even though I felt really conflicted about it because I sometimes felt a little disgusted at the way this tragedy was being inadvertently burlesqued. This movie seemed about as fucked up as Dogtooth but I'm not very sure this movie was in on the joke. Although the production values were unexpectedly high compared to my expectations, I don't know what to make of the fact that this won the Luxembourg Film Award. I suppose it's one of those things that come across in English as a second language. The emblematic moment for me was one where the dying guy's eyes are all crusted shut with KS (makeup effects were not so hot) and his boyfriend's giant teardrops are dropping on his crusty eye as he's carrying on about the situation. I wish I could remember some of the dialogue so you wouldn't think I'm just being a cynical bitch. I would totally watch this again though I suspect that it mightn't be as funny the second time around. C

Dogtooth / Kynodontas (Giorgos Lanthimos, 2009, Greece)

2010-03-20T11:44:00.005-05:00

I don't know if I'm savvy enough to be able to even say how I feel about this movie. I might have loved it. It was certainly interesting. I certainly laughed a lot but I can't say if it was laughter because it was funny or absurdly horrifying or just shocking or what. Based on some of the reviews I worried about graphic violence or something similarly hard to watch but while there was one scene that had at least half the audience, including myself, covering their eyes and so forth it was actually pretty watchable. It's really a fascinating and, at least upon an initial viewing, a thrilling movie. It begins with a man driving a blindfolded woman with a security uniform. I almost feels like anything I could say about this movie would be a spoiler and it's a movie I wouldn't like spoiling for people, assuming someone might actually read this. It's about this family living in a nice house with a nice yard and a pool and giant fence surrounding the whole thing in what seems to be rather the middle of nowhere. The father works at a desk in an office. The mother stays home with the children, who all seem to be adults now (in their twenties?), though it's hard to say for sure how old they are. The inciting event, let's say, is rooted in the parents' apparent decision that their son needs sexual satisfaction. It seems like the woman hired to sleep with him might be their only contact with the outside world. The parents even remove the labels from food before bringing it in. (Speaking of labels, the children don't even have names.) The only movies they watch are home movies. The only book they seem to have is some sort of medical book guide that sort of reminds me of Our Bodies, Ourselves except it's not just about girlie stuff. When the children somehow come across words they don't know the parents make up new definitions. A zombie is a flower, for example. Basically, the film is about these parents trying to protect their children from outside influences in a way that is extreme and clearly insane. It's fascinating but the movie never answers many of our questions. It also ends in such a manner that is at once intensely frustrating and glorious. I think I loved it but I don't know for sure if it was love or novelty or titillation or what. I'd recommend it to almost everyone I know because almost everyone I know is totally the target market for this kind of batshit masterpiece. I'd also recommend they go in reading as little about this movie beforehand as possible because a pick part of this movie's kicks are it's surprises, which often enough make it into reviews... A-

The Puffy Chair (Jay Duplass, 2005)

2010-03-19T04:59:00.004-05:00

I've always shied away from watching any of these mumblecore movies because I assumed they'd be about these sort of bland, bourgeois, generic rebels that seem to pop up as friends of friends all too often. I thought Humpday seemed decent enough so I gave this one a chance, if only for cultural literacy. I have to say that while this movie was more or less exactly what I expected from it it was a little more interesting. Almost like anthropology or something. I always wondered what those people were like when left to their own devices and I thought this movie was really informative about that. It crossed my mind several times that this movie would have been a lot stronger if it were shorter by about a third. That'd make it just under an hour and I think that's about as much as the story needed. The acting seemed hit or miss. The brother in particular seemed kind of weak. He's also an annoying character but, having unfortunately had occasion to meet these kinds of people, he struck me as pretty authentic. There were some things I liked about this movie but I'm so judgmental when it comes to this breed of people, for whatever reason, and that distaste is too fresh in my mind to achieve any critical distance. The girlfriend is likable enough in that "I feel really bad for not liking you because you seem so likable but I just can't do it" kind of way, whereas the protagonist is endearing in that "This is the kind of straight guy I'd like to spend one night with just so I'd know what it was like and then never see again" sort of way. I guess it has me craving an old Dogme movie or something. C-

Bluebeard / La barbe bleue (Catherine Breillat, 2009, France)

2010-03-18T23:18:00.005-05:00

I guess you probably know this is Catherine Breillat's interpretation of the fairytale Bluebeard, which I've never read. The story is intercut with a story of two young sisters in the 1950s in an attic, the younger daughter reading the story to the older sister. The movie is definitely engaging, particularly on the strength of the cast. The girls in the contemporary story are particularly beguiling, especially the younger one, who is preternaturally adorable. No matter how many glowing reviews I read of this movie I can't seem to stop feeling like I wanted more from it. I didn't like the ending. I mean, I've defended the ending of Fat Girl but I'm not sure this one seemed justified and I haven't seen any of the critics address it at all. Oh well. C

Edit: The upside to writing about all the movies I see right away is that I don't find myself needing to write an update about 15 movies at a time. I'm really happy that I've been able to keep this going for a while because it seems like a nice habit. The downside to writing about them right away is that I haven't had time to think about them beforehand. It occurred to me when I was getting out of the shower today (I have no idea why) that the ending here might be about the end of childhood innocence. I'm not sure if that's what she meant but it worked for me. I guess I was so engaged in the story I couldn't really think about it abstractly. I don't know. I'm still not sure I liked the ending. It seems to have kept my unconscious mind interested at least twelve hours after seeing the film though since it just sort of popped into my head an hour ago and all.

The Collectress / Kolekcioniere (Kristina Buozyte, 2008, Lithuania)

2010-03-18T22:54:00.002-05:00

The Collectress, the director's MFA graduation project, is the winner of Lithuania's Silver Crane award for best feature film. It's about a woman who goes a little nutty after her father's death. There's something odd about his death but whatever the exact circumstance around his death was remains a mystery. While giving a presentation on speech therapy she discovers she can only feel anything anymore when she's watching herself on video, or "record" as the less than perfect subtitles called it. She ends up hiring this guy to video tape her doing various deviant and/or transgressive acts. Watching this movie, I definitely thought of Joan Didion's line about the dream teaching the dreamers how to live, because it seemed like any catharsis or resolution in the film should come from identifying with a mediated version of herself. Or something. Videodrome also came to mind a few times but I wonder if I would have thought of it some much if every description I read of it beforehand hadn't mentioned it. I don't know, it seemed to me there was something very 'Video made flesh' about the whole thing. It seemed like a watered down blend of David Lynch, David Cronenberg, and the grim Romanian film of your choice. I didn't get why this sort of mystery is set up regarding her father and then it's never dealt with or revealed. The character is frequently unsympathetic but it's in this way where you might identify her with the modern condition or what-have-you. I kind of agree with the review in Variety that the thing is too drawn out with repetitions of events, first as she's doing them and then as she's watching them. I think this is actually handled well in some instances but less well in others. It felt too long in some parts, despite that it's less than an hour and a half, and I think it could have used more meat, and more depth. I think the premise could be developed into a stronger film. It's interesting as it is and it's impressive as a grad school project but I find myself wanting more from it. C

Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970)

2010-03-18T05:04:00.001-05:00

Of course my main reason for watching this was the presence of Karen Black, who's typically fabulous here. I think I like most of the acting in the movie and I'm also a fan of the writing. I can't decide what makes these 70s movies seem so much more authentic. It's like, even the movies today that try to present real characters are so much more distorted, whether it be by irony, idealization, or stylization. I guess part of it is that the characters aren't just sympathetic or unsympathetic. They come across in a way that feels true.

Sally Struthers's performance surprisingly left me wanting more. I think hers was one of my favorite performances in the film.

Some of my friends think I think too much about class and I certainly feel like there's a lot about class in this movie but I feel like what you think it says about class is probably tied to your own background. I guess there's a sort of antipathy here for the intellectuals and the elite classes but I also feel like the protagonist is an embodiment of the selfishness and entitlement that comes from a privileged background. I don't know what it is about Karen Black in this movie that makes me identify so much with her. I guess there must be something in her that looks like a reflection to me. I'm sort of curious as to how Nicholson's character is perceived by most viewers. I sort of feel like he's supposed to be heroic but that to me he's the real metaphor in the film. Like the film sort of holds up a mirror to Mr. America and says, "Baby, you are the rot." It's time for me to sleep. Fortunately it's barely springtime so the sun isn't out yet. This is my time of day. The couple hours before the sky lights up. I wish it were place I could steal away to from time to time. B/B+

Women in Trouble (Sebastian Gutierrez, 2009)

2010-03-18T02:17:00.002-05:00

When I saw this movie last year at the Chicago International Film Festival, I mostly really liked it. I thought it was funny and delicious and I loved the cast of fabulous women. The main weakness, as far as I was concerned, was that it's final act was more or less dominated by a very weak and schmaltzy mother-daughter bit that threatened to sink the whole thing. I still feel that way. It's sort of funny but less funny than I remembered it. I really like most of the characters and I look forward to the sequel, even if all the critics are swilled to the gills with haterade. Pssss.

It's definitely one of those things you find yourself liking and don't know why. It's totally trash and I can't give any reason for it being funny that's half as compelling as all the reasons I've read it's not funny in the past several minutes. B+

Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010)

2010-03-17T06:17:00.002-05:00

So, Shutter Island isn't so very original and it isn't so very unpredictable yet I haven't figured how it manages to be so effective. I'll have to watch it again but, on an initial viewing, even though I sort of had the mystery figured out pretty early on I still found it pretty engaging. Scorsese's style is often pretty vexing to me but I quite enjoyed the style of this film. Patricia Clarkson's unexpected appearance was fabulous and Michelle Williams was good, as usual. I don't know what to say about this movie other than it should have been cheesy but I didn't think it was. It joins The Departed and The Aviator as the only Scorsese films I've particularly liked since The Last Temptation of Christ. B+

I Am Love / Io sono l'amore (Luca Guadagnino, 2009, Italy)

2010-03-16T14:01:00.004-05:00

I come away from reading reviews of this movie feeling like I haven't seen enough Visconti films. So far I've seen La terra trema and Senso and based on those I don't know that I'd have jumped to compare his work to this film. Of course, those are early films and probably not the ones people mean when they reference Visconti in relation to this film.

The film is really gorgeous. I often find myself wondering why so few filmmakers are interested in telling their stories with luscious, thoughtfully composed shots. The music in the movie is mostly pretty powerful as well. There's kind of a lot going on in this movie and I'm not sure I've come to rest on it yet. It stars Tilda Swinton as the Russian wife of the son of an aging Italian industrialist. Shortly before the industrialist dies, he passes the company on to Tilda's husband AND son. Much to her son's disappointment, her husband makes a lot of changes that are hard on the workers and eventually they sell the plant to some Hindi-American individual who seems likable enough but very much a proponent of the amoral avarice that has dominated business in recent decades. Tilda discovers that her daughter is a lesbian and this supposedly inspires her own transgressions. She falls in love, you see, with her son's best friend. A tragedy comes about in a cheesy way and then this fabulous ending comes about that is so lusciously art-movie-ish and there is a sort of escape. I'll really have to see it again because I was so dazzled by the sights and sounds I'm afraid a fair amount of stuff was lost on me. I can't decide if it's really as good as it seemed or if it's just glossy trash... B+/A-

The Other Irene / Cealalta Irina (Andrei Gruzsniczki, 2009, Romania)

2010-03-16T01:16:00.003-05:00

The Other Irina was described in Variety by Ronnie Scheib as a cross between The Vanishing and Jeanne Dielman. The first one seems clear enough but the latter seems to have eluded me. It's a typically spare Romanian film about a mall security guard whose wife works for a shady Arabic chemicals company and gets transfered to Cairo. He doesn't want her to go because he's afraid for her. She goes and comes back with a sort of makeover and after a little suspicious behavior she goes again. On the day she is supposed to return he discovers she is dead and her death is believed to be a suicide. He then has to unravel the mystery of his wife's death. Was she murdered? Was she having an affair? What is being covered up here? The film is incredibly ambiguous. The man is clearly in denial but is there something fishy here all the same? If you know me, you know I have a gay old diva complex and am not usually too interested in male performances but I think Andi Vasluianu deserves a lot of credit for the strength of his movie on account of the strength of his performance.

I've noticed that a dominant theme in most of the films I've seen at the EU Film Fest so far seems relate to the effects of the evolving cultures and economies of Europe. It seems like there's a lot of displacement and transformation and it seems like it must be a confusing time there. More in Eastern Europe but even in Italy's I Am Love, which I'll write about tomorrow when I'm not so tired and I can think better...

My brain isn't fully engaged right now but the short of it is that I liked this movie quite a bit. It's not as thrilling as, say, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days but it's at least as interesting as Police, Adjective. B+

Harlan: In the Shadow of Jud Süss / Harlan - Im Schatten von Jud Süss (Felix Moeller, 2008, Germany)

2010-03-15T11:58:00.005-05:00

The title of this film refers to Veit Harlan's autobiography, In the Shadow of My Films. It's sort of presented as being about the notorious Nazi propaganda film but I feel like Manohla Dargis does a better job of introducing and contextualizing this film in her review in the New York Times. The parts of the film that talk about Harlan's work tend to rambling and lacking in context and depth. The film succeeds however in that it is actually more of an examination of how this splintered family deals with the weight of the infamy of their father/grandfather's work. When the film first started, I kind of groaned because it sort of seemed like a very special episode of a news magazine show like Dateline or 20/20 but as the family members started talking it was like this amazing, graceful tapestry was being revealed in front of me. Like I said, the documentary doesn't succeed at presenting the film, the director's body of work, or the context of it all but his descendants are really fascinating people. They're all articulate, intelligent, thoughtful people and I really found it thrilling to watch the way they all dealt with it. I saw the film in a class on the history of German film when I was in college and I have to say I'm with the granddaughters who upon finally watching the film were so shocked that it's considered a well-made, powerful film because it comes across as kitschy and appalling. The film is sort of like a blend of early DW Griffith films like Birth of a Nation and Broken Blossoms but it lacks a certain fine touch that made those movies powerful despite their backwards ideologies. It's interesting how spread out the family became. You have a niece who is Stanley Kubrick's widow, three German granddaughters, a French granddaughter, and an Italian grandson. It's fascinating how many of his descendants went on to marry Jewish man and how their children process the fact that their maternal grandfather made propaganda that was used to exterminate their paternal grandparents. The middle part of the movie, where Harlan's work is described, feels often times like a tangent. The film would have been stronger if the narrative thread was tighter and if the editorial voice was more stronger and more probing, I think, but the film as it is is really fascinating and I'd certainly see it again if I had the opportunity. B+/A-

Chameleon / Kaméleon (Krizstina Goda, 2008, Hungary)

2010-03-15T10:46:00.002-05:00

Chameleon was Hungary's official submission to the Academy Awards this year. Naturally it didn't get nominated and it wasn't even shortlisted. It's an entertaining movie but it's not the kind of movie that would get a nomination, I don't think, aside from the fact that it's not as good as many of the nominations, though ironically it's stronger than the film that won, but then again so was All About Steve.

The film stars Ervin Nagy and Zsolt Trill as Gabor and Tibi, a couple of guys who grew up in a rural orphanage and promised themselves they'd do whatever it took to live in a big city and own a house, so they could be somebody. Tibi and Gabor work as cleaning men in offices and so forth and use the information they glean from garbage cans and psych files to seduce women and steal all their money while they're waiting at the altar. Gabor falls in love with a dancer whose poster he's seen and drops pursuit of an aging antique store owner to pursue this less attainable woman, the daughter of some wealthy business guy. The dancer has a knee injury that might keep her from being an international star and there's only one surgeon who can save her knee but he's also out of reach so Gabor gets to work at getting the girl by conning the doctor into saving her leg. He cons a number of other people along the way and it turns out that he's not the only one who's other than what he seems.

The film is entertaining but it's not very original and there's something about the ending that seems pat and contrived. I've seen this film referred to as insightful but I wouldn't agree with that, I don't think. It sort of seems to comment on Hungary's emerging economic status the way Slovenka commented on that of Slovenia but it's not quite as good as that film and doesn't have as much to say. I mean, all it seemed to say was a bunch of adolescent male nonsense about the value of money and assorted half-baked claims about women and so forth. The movie also plays with homosexuality in a way that's not common in Eastern European films, as far as I've seen, but it really should have been a little more daring. C

A Call Girl / Slovenka / A Slovenian Girl (Damjan Kazole, 2009, Slovenia)

2010-03-14T00:44:00.005-06:00

Slovenka is my very first Slovenian film, I think. It's about a college student from the provinces who's studying in Ljubljana and earning herself a bit of the new prosperity promised by Slovenia's entrance into the EU (a constant backdrop in the film) by working as a call girl. She's found herself a fabulous apartment, which she's barely holding on to and her grip in university is similarly tenuous. An ex-boyfriend has left his wife for her and is practically stalking her and a couple of thuggish pimps are trying to get their hooks into her. Meanwhile her father and estranged mother are off in her hometown of Krsk, which she makes frequent visits to. The allegory in this film, of Slovenka as Slovenia, is compelling. I read a bit somewhere that the director said that the people in the film are like Slovenians, always blaming outside circumstances for their troubles instead of taking control of their own lives.
The story is compelling and the acting is adept. I liked the visual feel of the last movie I watched, Jonas Jonason's Guidance, which was bright and grainy. This film was sharper and the shots were more composed. The colors were also more saturated. I quite liked a number of the shots but had trouble finding images online that reflect all that. The girl and her father both have this habit of licking the side of the cigarette before smoking it. It's done to death in the movie but I really liked the way it crafted a sort of continuity. B+

My experience with this fest is off to a good start. I'm so excited, I just can't hide it.

Guidance / Behandlingen (Johan Jonason, 2009, Sweden)

2010-03-14T00:19:00.006-06:00

I don't think I'd have ever seen this movie if it weren't for the Siskel Center's EU Film Festival that's going down this month. I've felt so lethargic and antisocial that this is the first time I've made it down there. I wasn't sure about this movie going in.
I wasn't sure what to make of the trailer. I ended up quite liking it though. It's about Roy, a 57-year old man who's been away from work for a year because of a bad back. He seems lethargic and depressed and he's stuck in a rut that he doesn't much seem to be getting out of. Carl, a self-professed alternative therapist overhears Roy's wife Ylva talking to a friend about Roy's malaise in what seemed like a mall. Carl convinces the wife to deliver Roy to him so he can undergo therapy. Things out at Carl's camp are little strange. Carl has some issues and the therapy seems erratic and not quite professional. Meanwhile, Ylva is up to her own mischief back at home until she gets worried about Roy as she senses things aren't really adding up and sets out to find him. There is something so fantastic about the light in this movie. It's at once warm and cool and it made me feel so good just to watch it. The end is a little strange but sort of delicious and it produced an unanticipated joy in me that I found myself wishing I could dwell in for a long time. I still haven't decided how this movie worked its magic on me but it was very engaging and there was something cathartic and uplifting about it. B+

EDIT- You know, I think part of the effect for me was the feeling that I might really want to undergo a treatment like that. Out in this desolate gorgeous Scandinavian coastal region without any modern conveniences or anything. It reminded me of a few years ago when I cut my internet usage to a minimum and stopped watching television and things. I felt so much more alive then and part of the world. I also read substantially more. It seems so unlikely to me that there was a time when I'd get home from work at midnight, read myself to sleep, wake up at six or seven and ride my bicycle along the lakefront, run assorted errands, clean the kitchen, and back to work again, with all kinds of reading and meetings at coffee shops and so forth. I guess that sort of ties in to my experience with No Impact Man and how disappointed I am that I'm so addicted to prepared foods that the idea of cooking something in my own apartment seems incredibly exotic and otherworldy domestic. Plus how I need a drill sergeant to make me run up mountains and so forth. There seemed something so idyllic about it that taps into the part of me that enjoyed growing up in rural northern Wisconsin and often tries to trick the addicted to big city life part of me that gets frustrated after about thirty hours of being outside the city. As to the wife's shenanigans, I can't decide what made that so compelling for me. I also feel like it's only compelling if I read it the way I read it when I watched the movie. There's a way to look at it that's less empowering but I'm choosing to believe the film is more progressive than that, if only to suit my own needs. This post has violated my vague guidelines about this space because it's too much about me. I guess this space is supposed to be a diary of the movies I watch and my reactions to them so we'll see how that develops...

The Yes Men Fix the World (Andy Bichlbaum & Mike Bonanno, 2009)

2010-03-13T11:44:00.004-06:00

I saw the original Yes Men film several years ago but I was probably to intoxicated to remember it too well, since I don't really. Culture jammers The Yes Men are back to their old tricks, using the media against itself and satirizing corporate culture. I know there's a way to be cynical about this movie and I know it's easy to dismiss many of the things they do but I think it's always easiest to be cynical. I must confess to generally being sort of cynical about culture jamming activities, although if there's anything No Impact Man had to say it's that the most important thing is getting people involved, and keeping them involved, I guess. I guess what this movie does is it sets up a rather ugly picture of corporatist culture in the status quo and then shows how possible it should be to change that. It's certainly entertaining but it definitely had highs and lows for me. My favorite part was where they blanketed New York with the fantasy New York Times for a month in the future when all these things has changed. I guess it's natural for people in New York to be thrilled about those kind of changes but I'm sure that the majority of the people in this country would feel elated if just some of those things started happening. I also like the bits that refer to restoring public housing in New Orleans and to cleaning up after the Bhopal disaster, not because they're particularly entertaining to watch but rather because they made me think a little bit about all that. I guess the weakest parts for me were, ironically, the one pictured above where they suggest fuel made out of dead humans at a gas and oil expo and also the one where they present a fake Halliburton product for surviving catastrophes.
I was a little surprised that they never mentioned Naomi Klein since they seemed to give an introduction to her theory of the Shock Doctrine and since there was so much in there about her bête noire Milton Friedman. I suppose it's intentional to keep the thing rooted in common sense and the better sense of our better angels than to start muddying the waters with an overt politicism that could prove alienating to some viewers? I don't know.
Anyway, I enjoyed the film and I feel like it's on the side of out better natures, which kind of means justice and goodness to me. B/B+

No Impact Man (Laura Gabbert & Justin Schein, 2009)

2010-03-13T02:30:00.004-06:00

No Impact Man is a documentary about a guy in Manhattan who decides he wants to write about book about him and his family spending a year trying to have zero impact on the environment. It was enjoyable but I'm glad I waited to see it on Netflix streaming instead of going to see it at the Music Box Theatre last year like I had planned to. The couple are quite likable. Their daughter is adorable. They're doing something admirable here but the movie isn't exactly bursting with surprises. I suppose it functions to show us that the way has been forged and it's all that much easier for us to be more responsible to the world. I think one of the most interesting things about it though is the way the media works in the movie. That's something that might make this movie worth watching again. There's also this old grizzled hippie who teaches the guy about farming and he has that annoying attitude where those 60s people think they had all the answers even though all they did was propel culture to its most self-absorbed extreme and hurtle the world toward destruction. Thanks, boomers! C

Rage (Sally Potter, 2009)

2010-03-13T02:19:00.006-06:00

One day I was brainstorming about female auteurs and somebody suggested Sally Potter. I'd only seen two of her movies (Orlando and The Man Who Cried) and I liked them both, especially Orlando, which I sort of love. I added this movie to my instant queue over on Netflix because it was there and because I'd heard it mentioned on the radio...
The filmmakers reportedly referred to this movie, Rage, as the first of a new genre of filmmaking called naked cinema, which to the best of my understanding seems to refer to the stripped down production. It's also pretty well-known for being released via cell phone. Or something. The story is basically that a student of some sort, going by the name Michelangelo, has gotten permission to video tape interviews with several people involved in a fashion show with his camera phone. As a week goes by, people start dying. It's really kind of a ridiculous mess but the generally strong cast and intermittent fabulousness make it all watchable. It's essentially just people in front of mostly brightly colored monochromatic screens. Or actually it looks like they were filmed in front of a blue screen and later each character was given a different color. Judi Dench, Jude Law, Dianne Wiest, Lily Cole, Steve Buscemi, and intermittently Eddie Izzard give strong performances. John Lequizamo is all right but has been better. The guy who plays the designer is really bad. There's a Latina woman who seems to be one of their mothers but I wasn't sure what was going on at that point so I can't say how effective she was since I was mostly just confused. It was a total mess but I'd watch it again. C

Not on the Lips / Pas sur la bouche (Alain Resnais, 2003)

2010-03-13T01:49:00.005-06:00

Pas sur la bouche, or Not on the Lips, is the eleventh film I've seen by Alain Resnais. I loved nine of them but this one and Same Old Song were just kind of okay. Like Same Old Song, it's a musical and although it seems kind of hollow it thankfully has a few high points to balance out the low points. It's based on an operetta from 1925. The plot concerns a woman who's married to a wealthy businessman and discovers her first husband, who her current husband doesn't know about, is her current husband's new business partner. Aside from a regular cast of frequent Resnais collaborators, the film also stars Audrey Tautou and Isabelle Nanty, the latter of which you'll remember as the cigarette lady in Amélie. The previous husband is a sort of broad caricature of the 'ugly American' and I guess the humor in general is a little too broad or just doesn't travel well or I don't know what. The high points are generally boisterous moments in the musical numbers, though the strong cast certainly buoys the dusty material. The opening titles are wonderful and so are the sets. C

Ranking 2009's 2010 Best Foreign Film Oscar Submissions

2010-03-12T16:14:00.025-06:00

Of the 65 films submitted for this year's Academy Award for best foreign film, these are the eighteen I've seen, in order of my preference.

1. France, A Prophet

2. Israel, Ajami

3. Korea, Mother

4. Germany, The White Ribbon

5. Peru, The Milk of Sorrow

6. Mexico, Backyard

7. Romania, Police adj.

8.Colombia, The Wind Journeys

9. Slovenia, Landscape No. 2

10. Estonia, December Heat

11. UK, Afghan Star

12. Denmark, Terribly Happy

13. Hungary, Chameleon

14. Bulgaria, The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner

15. Belgium, The Misfortunates

16. India, Harishchandrachi Factory

64. Greece, Slaves in Their Bonds

65. Argentina, The Secret in Their Eyes

I thought the top six were great, the next few were good, and the last two were horrible. I look forward to getting to see more of them as they become available.

Leaves of Grass (Tim Blake Nelson, 2009)

2010-03-12T14:24:00.002-06:00

Ed Norton stars in this quirky indie movie as a pair of twins. Bill is a philosophy professor at Brown University. He seems to be a rising star in the philosophy community. Meanwhile, his brother Brady is a zany white trash pot dealer with a warehouse full of state of the art equipment for his hydroponic marijuana production. Or something. We're told repeatedly that he's even more brilliant than his snooty brother but there's not much evidence of that on display. He's engaged to Melanie Lynskey, who's knocked up with this baby and he's pledged to quit smoking pot once the baby is born. Their mother has moved out of the house and into a retirement home, despite being relatively young and able, because she doesn't want to get caught in the middle of everything when Johnny Law comes raining down. Bill is lured, under false pretenses, back to Oklahoma because the brilliant white trash brother has an inane plan to get the Jewish drug kingpin (Richard Dreyfuss) in Tulsa off of his back. You see, Brady borrowed a lot of money from the Jew a year ago and hasn't paid anything back, though he's been selling to him at a discount. The Jew wants him to start manufacturing hard drugs like meth and so forth but Brady isn't having it. Things naturally go awry in a awry half-baked sort of way. Don't worry, there's time for Bill to meet and fall in love with Keri Russell, a well-adjusted high school teacher who inexplicably hangs out with Brady and his white trash friends. There's also this drama with a trumped up sex scandal back at brown but I'm not even sure what it's doing there since it's not really ever dealt with or anything. I suppose it's supposed to be about how the shit is raining down on him but it's so predictable and hollow, I just didn't buy it. I love though the way these movies always have the professor giving his dopey college lesson because they're always so cheesy and hilarious. There's also a part where English teacher Keri Russell tells Brown philosophy professor about Walt Whitman and blank verse. Um, okay, the guy is apparently familiar with chapter and verse of Latin poetry and so forth and he needs Keri Russell to give him some kind of remedial English schmaltz about Walt Whitman? And the movie has a moral, too. It's about balancing freedom with order. And, apparently, drinking lemonade in the rain. Also, Netflix said this movie had Rhea Perlman in it, but based on my eyeballs and IMDB, that's not true. Perhaps they mixed her up with her daughter, who plays Ed Norton's enamored student.

So, we've seen that the writing wasn't great. I don't know why Ed Norton took a pay cut because he was so desperate to make this movie except, "What ever happened to Ed Norton?" I seriously thought he might be in a drug binge somewhere but I guess he's just been making movies I haven't seen. The twin effect is rendered about as effectively as it was in the great Bette Davis twin movies of 1946 and 1964, although it's more reminiscent of a straight to video children's movie from the 80s or 90s. Technically, the film is about what you'd expect for a low budget movie like this. The acting is fair to good. The stars are mostly likable and they pretty much carry the movie, to the extent that it's carried. According to IMDB Lindsay Lohan auditioned for a part. I don't think she was right for any of the parts in the movie but they should have written a small part for her...

The one thing that struck me as a little strange was the amount of Jewish characters on the periphery. Aside from Richard Dreyfuss as the ultra Zionist drug dealer, you have a deranged orthodontist and his loud family, as well as their know-it-all rabbi and the love-struck student played by Lucy Devito. There's a moment where Ed Norton and the rabbi were talking and he wants her to know that something wasn't anti-semitic and she didn't believe him and really didn't even allow him to explain himself though she did give him some pretty sage advice about life. To repair. Because we are everyone of us breaking the world. So the best we can do is try to repair it. Or something. It worked for me. Anyway, it seemed weird that all of these tangential characters were Jewish, especially given that they're not all that sympathetic. It turns out that writer/director Tim Blake Nelson is Jewish. I guess that sort of makes sense. I guess most of the tangential gentile characters are unsympathetic as well. I guess Mr. Nelson was pretty damned happy to get out of Oklahoma and away from those rednecks and those Tulsa Jews... C-

Sherlock Holmes (Guy Ritchie, 2009)

2010-03-12T01:23:00.001-06:00

I finally got around to seeing this tonight, which is what I did instead of going to see that Romanian movie I had planned on seeing at the EU Film Festival at the Siskel Center. I used to really like Robert Downey Jr. but he's rather irritated me in recent years. It was refreshing to see him in another movie where I enjoyed him. I certainly enjoyed the movie more than I expected to, based on most of the word of mouth I had picked up on. I mean, it seemed like the prevailing wisdom when it was released was that it was terrible but it seems to me it's more successful than most big Hollywood movies of its kind. Jude Law was pretty decent in it as well and it's nice to see Kelly Reilly's still working. I've seen her in a number of things but never really caught her name or thought much about her though I liked her in those L'auberge espagnole movies. I finally know who Rachel McAdams is, I guess. That's one of those names I always read and never know who she is. She's pretty and such but she doesn't strike me as particularly interesting. The plot is ridiculous but entertainingly so. It was fun. I think it got a bad wrap. I agree that the score was pretty good and the production values were generally slick and fun and I'm giving this movie a C+/B-, I think.

The Secret in Their Eyes / El Secreto de sus ojos (Juan José Campanella, 2009)

2010-03-11T17:48:00.004-06:00

I can't think of how to describe my reaction to this movie without using a string of strong epithets. I mean, seriously. This movie is BAD. Really bad. It's kind of like Law & Order: Criminal Intent but with even worse writing. Every single review I've been able to find of this movie online is extremely positive (even the review at Variety is glowing!) and refers to this movie as an exciting, romantic thriller. Um, okay. I don't think I'm giving too much away here by saying that the bad guy is pinpointed by the cop based on his eyes in some old pictures in some old scrapbook of the victim. And then the big insight as to how they'll catch the guy? He likes soccer. Yes, in Argentina, he likes soccer. They may as well have had the entire male population do a lineup for Jesus fuck's sake. But that's not all. I don't want to imply that this is just a police procedural. It's much more meandering and half-baked than all that. The protagonist is in love with his boss. I promise you that although this element of the film may intermittently seem like it has the potential to finally get interesting, it really doesn't. I feel like, if you're living in a retirement home and feeling nostalgic for the good old days when things were easy and you didn't have to think about things to know what was what, then you might like this movie. Otherwise, aside from a few competent camera shots, there is nothing interesting about this movie. I'm really appalled that this movie was shortlisted for the foreign film Oscar, let alone that it won! I mean, we all know that the Academy is composed of a bunch of idiots for the most part but who the hell was on the foreign film panel that thought this was worthy of being shortlisted, let alone being an actual nominee?!?!?! That is some fucking bullshit. So you have an empty plodding thud of a film beating out such outstanding films as A Prophet, The White Ribbon, Ajami, and The Milk of Sorrow. Wow. Fucking disgusting. Things like this make me hate this culture. I'm not even sure I care to find out what the hell is wrong with Americans that this is the kind of shit they like. It sort of amuses me that the Oscars and the Spirit awards were no better (and is many cases worse) than the Golden Globes this year. This movie is puke and not worth your time, if you have a brain, but watch it for yourself and let me know. F

16th "I hated The Hurt Locker" post. Reader in search of a writer.

2010-03-09T21:23:00.001-06:00

I, or the Oscars, or I don't know what, finally got my boyfriend to watch The Hurt Locker. He stopped short of calling it terrible, which I attribute to his good-natured bearing. He responded that he was peeved that it was even nominated and lamented that this country is so fake.

Meanwhile I'm sitting at work scrolling through my Google Reader feed and wondering who all these Hurt Locker-adoring people are with these film blogs I've added mostly because they've been recommended by various persons of various legitimacy. (This is what I get for taking advice from people like Michael Phillips.) While many of these bloggers are much better than the majority of the critics working in newspapers and television, I'm just kind of annoyed that the most interesting thing I tend to read in a day relates to some idiotic Armond White situation. In case you don't know, Armond White is the film critic at the New York Press. Imagine a well-educated provocateur with delusions of grandeur à la Camille Paglia but imagine all the wit and intelligence were surgically removed and replaced with a persecution complex and you'd basically end up with the inane ramblings of Armond White.

I'm really having trouble finding good film writing online. Most things I've found are so offensively middlebrow, though often well-written. Most of what I've found that isn't middlebrow is worse; it's academic gobbledygook à la Zizek except for much worse. I'm desperate for intelligent film writing that possesses grace and perspective. There must be something out there. Help?

The Milk of Sorrow / La teta asustada (Claudia Llosa, 2009, Peru)

2010-03-09T05:28:00.005-06:00

What a curious movie. It's hard for me to watch it without being conscious of the foreign film Oscar race. I've seen three of the other nominees and several of the other submitted films and I'm not sure this would have made my list of nominees. It's hard to say though because I feel like I'm still digesting this movie and want to see it again. I certainly loved the way the movie opens. The singing and the deathbed with the mountains in the window and all that are kind of thrilling. The story was touching. I appreciated the restraint. I don't know how I feel about this movie. I liked the music and the framing and the cinematography quite a bit. The mother was phenomenal in her one scene. The protagonist, Fausta, is mysterious and compelling. I sort of felt like there were things going on that I didn't understand culturally, such as the dynamic with the protagonist's boss. There's this great scene though where Fausta's going to work for the rich pianist for the first time and they walk into her yard through a sort of garage door type thing and that scene is an extremely effective evocation of class dynamics. It's past my bedtime. I don't know what I think about this movie yet so I'm going to give it a B+ for now. I think there is probably more depth and truth to this movie than in three or four of the other nominees but I guess I still would have voted for A Prophet just because of how intensely cinematic yet graceful it was. Of course, there's grace here as well. I just don't know. I'm rambling now. Bedtime!

Beavers: IMAX (1998) / Muppets from Space (1999) / Jetsons: The Movie (1990)

2010-03-09T00:20:00.004-06:00

My roommate and I watched this half-hour documentary about beavers on the projector tonight. I was sort of cynical and skeptical but it's really enchanting and fascinating and sort of wondrous. Granted I never watch these nature things so maybe it's old hat but I liked it. B+

My roommate put on Muppets from Space next. The Muppets and I were never really on the same wavelength. I'm having trouble focusing on this because now my roommate has put on Jetsons: The Movie and it's bending my mind with its awfulness. C-

The Flintstones is updated and blended with Avatar, Up in the Air, and a puke bucket. Tiffany is like a shooting star in a shit storm. The little Crayola-Care Bear-Ewok things in the asteroid are cute, too. D

Rant about The Hurt Locker and Avatar and the Academy Awards

2010-03-08T09:37:00.005-06:00

I think it's so funny the way people carry on about the money James Cameron spent on Avatar and act like the fact that The Hurt Locker was made for $11 million dollars is some kind of a mitzvah that qualifies a second-rate director like Kathryn Bigelow for canonization. Avatar is one of the finest spectacles in the history of cinema and I think the backlash against it is absurd. Are these the same people who liked Titanic, the Terminator movies, and the Alien movies? Pauline Kael wrote that we feel compelled to watch movies we won't like because we want to understand their effect on other people. I have to say, this Avatar vs. The Hurt Locker meme is one that has me feeling incredibly alienated, like I don't even know what kind of culture I'm living in. Clearly the writing in Avatar isn't great. It is however the best written movie James Cameron ever touched. Anyone who says it isn't is living in very tightly insulated nostalgia bubble. I think Avatar really is a great movie. Certainly it's flawed but whatever dismissive things people say about it being unoriginal or whatever seem so absurd to me. As if Shakespeare's plays were original. We remember them today not because they were original but because they were better done. (I am not comparing this movie to Shakespeare.) I can't understand how people can dismiss it by comparing it to any number of awful movies like Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, and The Last Samurai as if this movie doesn't do what all of those movies tried to do so much better. I'm a fan of the Joseph Campbell school of storytelling and I really think the world would be a better place if people told more of this kind of story. I also think that pretty much every discussion of why this film is somehow reactionary, hateful, or politically incorrect pretty much misses the point. It's pretty clear that Cameron is commenting on American foreign policy and our relation to the middle east and to the world as a reckless, imperialist nation. Some people have said this reading of the film in unfounded and those people are clearly either "slow" or weren't paying attention to the movie. I mean, if all the stuff about getting at the stuff under their feet and all that weren't pretty clear the Colonel very pointedly refers to his military offensive as "shock and awe." I know Joan Didion said the future was always bright in the golden land because noone remembers the past but, come on people, this was less than ten years ago. Anyway, the movie combines this very political statement with a classic hero myth. What's interesting about this myth, however, is that the hero doesn't become a hero until he turns his back on his old self and becomes one of the Na'vi people. For all those people who found it very easy to coast through college writing Marxist critiques about anything imaginable and have remained in that lazy stance, I would suggest that this movie is not about the white man needing to save the native people although clearly there is an aspect of that. It's about taking responsibility for our own sins. It's not about patronizing an imaginary race of natives, it's about returning to our ideals. Anyway, as a good friend of mine said after seeing the movie, "How could I not love Avatar? It's like somebody made a movie out of everything I worry about every day." Sure, it's kind of simple; I don't know if you've noticed but there are "legitimate" journalists debating whether global warming is a hoax or whether the president is a secret muslim spy. Furthermore, I'm not sure it's ever been established that simplicity is a necessary evil. I mean, this is an entertainment film. It's meant to be a spectacle, not a movie about ideas, which makes it pretty funny to me that there are more ideas in this movie than so many of the other groupthink favorites this year. I also think it's funny that some of the same people who criticize this movie (or the politics of Precious for that matter) have written defenses of The Blind Side. Anyway, I think there are flaws in Avatar but that some of the criticisms are petulant and absurd. I also think the series of rites of passages is thrilling, as are the battle sequences. I think that the planet is gorgeous and thrilling and all that pantheist mumbojumbo with the tree and everything is enchanting. Of course, this movie speaks to all my own beliefs and so forth and I understand that it wouldn't appeal to everyone. I think it's absurd though the way many people hate it, given all the horrible movies they seem to prefer.

As far as The Hurt Locker is concerned though I feel like I'm through the looking glass or something. It seems universally acclaimed, adored by both professional film critics and film bloggers alike. Strangely, nobody I really know in real life can stand the film. I went to see it because of all the buzz on NPR last year. A friend warned me I'd hate it and I assumed he was being an old sourpuss. I paid my eleven dollars and my mind was blown by how awful it seemed to me. I found myself texting my friend during the movie about how it was absolutely as bad as he had said it was and that it seemed to get more and more painful as it went on. The writing is a joke. The whole movie plays like a long, mean cliche. It's offensive to the soldiers and the Iraqis alike. It's grossly inaccurate. It presents a completely political war as apolitical. I don't understand what's to like about this movie. I did not like a solitary thing about it. The only thing that kept it from being my worst movie of the year is that I saw The Road directly afterward and The Road managed to be even worse. I don't know. I don't think Avatar was the best movie of the year but I do think a lot of these popular "critical favorites" were dreadful. I mean, The Hurt Locker and Precious won awards for screenwriting last night. If that's not bad enough, there is a huge group of seemingly intelligent people who seem to think that those awards should have gone to Inglourious Basterds and Up in the Air.

I don't know. I feel alienated from the world today. I know I dropped my film studies minor in college because I decided that people who study films tend to be geeky fanboys of assorted forms of trash. Boys in brown pants who wore glasses and talked all day about Tarantino and Godard.

My silver linings last night were that Quentin Tarantino lost to a movie whose writing was as uneven as Precious for screenwriting and that my favorite won for best live action short. Yay, The New Tenants!

2009 in Review: Updated and Final (je crois)

2010-03-07T07:36:00.021-06:00

Well, the Oscars are tonight and we're embarking on the third month of 2010 so it seems prudent to seal off my 2009 movie matrix. These are all 128 (if I've counted correctly) of the movies I've seen that could be construed to have come out last year. Not a single English-language movie made my "Loved It" list! Come on anglophone world, let's pick up the slack here!!! (Edit- In the Loop and Amreeka came close to making my "Loved It" list. Maybe I did love them and just don't know it yet...)

Loved It
Cherry Blossoms (Kirschblüten - Hanami)
Gomorrah (Gamorra)
Hipsters (Stilyagi)
A Prophet (Un prophète)
Raging Sun, Raging Sky (Rabioso Sol, Rabioso Cielo)
Summer Hours (L'heure d'été)
Who's Afraid of the Wolf (Kdopak by se vlka bál)
A Woman in Berlin (Anonyma- Eine Frau in Berlin)
A Woman's Way (Strella)

Really Liked It
35 Shots of Rum (35 Rhums)
Ajami
Amreeka
Avatar
The Baader Meinhof Complex (Der Baader Meinhof Komplex)
Backyard (El Traspatio)
The Beaches of Agnès (Les plages d'Agnès)
Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos)
The Cove
Crazy Heart
An Education
Every Little Step
Fish Tank
Flame & Citron (Flammen & Citronen)
A Frozen Flower (Ssanghua jeom)
Half-Life
The Headless Woman (La Mujer Sin Cabeza)
In the Loop
Invictus
Jerichow
Julia
Lorna's Silence (Le silence de Lorna)
The Milk of Sorrow (La teta asustada)
Mother (Madeo)
Precious
The Rapture of Fe (Ang Panggagahasa kay Fe)
Ricky
A Serious Man
The September Issue
Still Walking (Aruitemo aruitemo)
Treeless Mountain
Two Lovers
Valentino: The Last Emperor
The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band)
Women in Trouble
You, the Living (Du, levande)

Liked It
9
(500) Days of Summer
Antichrist
The Chaser (Chugyeogja)
Coco Before Chanel (Coco avant Chanel)
District 9
Drag Me to Hell
Eyes Wide Open (Einaym pkuhot)
Easy Virtue
The Fantastic Mr. Fox
Goodbye Solo
Humpday
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus
Import/Export
Ink
Julie & Julia
Made in Hungaria
New York, I Love You
Nine
Police, Adjective (Politist, adj.)
Revanche
Rory O'Shea Was Here
The Secret of Kells
Sherlock Holmes
Sin Nombre
Sita Sings the Blues
Sunshine Cleaning
Taken
The 'Thank You' Girls
Trucker
Tyson
Vincere
Whip It
Will Not Stop There (Nije Kraj)

It were so-so.
Adam
All About Steve
Brüno
The Brothers Bloom
Cheri
Coraline
Duplicity
Eastern Plays (Iztochni piesi)
fados
Food, Inc.
The Girlfriend Experience
Good Hair
Hidden Diary (Meres et filles)
The Informant!
Into Temptation
Kathy Griffin: She'll Cut a Bitch
The Last Station
Leaves of Grass
Make the Yuletide Gay
The Messenger
Michael Jackson's This Is It
Moon
My Brother Is an Only Child (Mio fratello è figlio unico)
No Impact Man
Of Time and the City
Paris 36 (Faubourg 36)
Princess and the Frog
Rage
Tokyo!
Up
Up in the Air
Whatever Works
The Young Victoria

Didn't Like It
Anvil: The Story of Anvil
Away We Go
Big Fan
The Blind Side
Bright Star
Case Unknown (Enen)
Funny People
The Hangover
Inglourious Basterds
The International
The New Twenty
Not Quite Hollywood
The Obama Deception
Public Enemies
Star Trek
State of Play
World's Greatest Dad

Hated It
El secreto de sus ojos
The Hurt Locker
The Road
A Single Man

A Prophet / Un prophète (Jacques Audiard, 2009, France)

2010-03-06T22:43:00.006-06:00

What serendipity that I happen to watch a movie like this when only this morning I had been revisiting Pauline Kael's "Trash, Art, and the Movies.". (Note her use of the Oxford comma!) This is quite an exhilarating film. At times the sustained tension is almost maddening. The film certainly created a tone and held me transfixed for the duration of the running time and although the character is certainly not a hero in any moral sense I certainly found myself pulling for him and feeling elated at his triumphs. Jacques Audiard is a director whose name I had not previously been familiar with although I watched his 1996 film A Self Made Hero almost ten years ago and I remember quite liking that film. His 2005 film The Beat That My Heart Skipped has been chilling on my Netflix queue for quite some time now and I'm certainly anxious to get around to watching that now.

I loved the use of music here, both on the score and the song that plays in the final moments of the film which is too surprising and fitting and perfect and fantastic to name here since I shouldn't like to ruin that surprise for anyone who might happen to read this. Tahar Rahim makes what seems most certainly to be a breakthrough performance as Malik, a 19 year old man who is being incarcerated for six years for some kind of violent incident involving a cop. The film sort of chronicles these six years. He has no friends on the outside and seems to have grown up parentless in assorted institutions. Shortly after he arrives in prison the Corsican gangster who seems to run the place informs him that if he doesn't kill this guy who's about to go to trial and make trouble for the Corsicans, he's dead. It's a great performance and the plot is exquisite with its connections and surprises. I'm not sure what to say here about it but I really loved this movie. I don't know if The White Ribbon is the best of the nominees in the foreign film category this year but, having seen three of the nominees, I'd probably rank it second or third, with A Prophet being my favorite. I think I'd even put Ajami in second place because it showed me some things I didn't know about the world. A+

Film Independent Phooey

2010-03-06T02:28:00.001-06:00

So the Spirit Awards are over. The winners are listed here. What a snooze that all is! I think it's nostalgia that makes me so irritated; when I was in college we'd act like the Spirit Awards were the Super Bowl or something. Of course, it all went downhill after they got rid of John Waters and starting changing their name or whatever. How do I take a film award seriously that nominates The Last Station and (500) Days of Summer for best feature and gives the award to Precious over Amreeka and doesn't even nominate Two Lovers in that category. Anvil! for best documentary??? Also, I really kind of liked Humpday but I think it's really disgusting that it beat out Treeless Mountain to get an award. Speaking of Treeless Mountain, it was totally robbed for best cinematography, with all due respect to A Serious Man. I also liked An Education but there's no way in hell it was better than the other nominees in the foreign film category. I mean, I've *seen* Mother and it's certainly not better than that. Maybe I'm just racist against white people. Like Woody Harrelson who deserved supporting actor awards for No Country for Old Men but not for a puke bucket like The Messenger. It's hard to say if I agree with any of the winners because I don't even think the nominations are legitimate. Oh well. FAIL.

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes, 1987)

2010-03-06T02:08:00.002-06:00

I feel like such an idiot for never guessing that this movie was so easily available on the internet. I'm sure I must have looked for it before but I'm kind of hopeless when it comes to finding digital contraband on the internet. It turns out that it's on Youtube but somebody sent me an AVI file so that was good.
It seems to be the film that brought Todd Haynes to prominence. It's the story of Karen Carpenter's rise and fall where all the actors are Barbie dolls. It's strange that it's the Carpenters who sued and had it 86'd and not Mattel. It's really kind of a fabulous film. It's played as less of a joke than I expected and it's much more touching than you'd think. It's a shame it's illegal to exhibit this movie. It should get an exemption for being art. B+

Revanche (Götz Spielmann, 2008, Austria)

2010-03-05T20:07:00.002-06:00

I've now seen four of last year's five nominees for Best Foreign Film. The one I've yet to see is Departures, the winner of the group. So far my favorite is probably The Baader Meinhof Komplex. Last night I watched the Austrian nominee Revanche. I haven't seen any of the director's films. I mean, I started watching Antares one day while I was killing time but then I had to go and I never got around to finishing the movie, although I was enjoying it. In any event, I watched this one last night. It starts of in a Viennese brothel called Cinderella. Our heroine is a Ukrainian employee of this establishment, working off a debt of $60,000. Her boyfriend, the bouncer, wants a similar amount of money so he can partner with a friend in opening a bar. The bouncer ends up being the protagonist, more or less. We find out that he's an ex-con with an ageing grandfather who lives out in the country. He decides to rob a bank to make their dreams come true and the girlfriend, Tamara, reluctantly finally agrees to support him on this if she can ride along in the car. He robs the bank. The cop husband of his grandfather's neighbor gets mixed up with them and inadvertently shoots Tamara through the rearview window. This is pretty much the setup for the revenge which I had read was coming but by this point I had completely forgotten about because I was so absorbed in the story of them escaping from the gangster pimps. I don't know what to make of this movie. My main thought is that it's beautifully shot. There were many striking shots in the film that had me "Wow"-ing. I don't know if this movie says much about revenge. Maybe it's just about grief? I mean, there is some revenge in the movie but I feel like it's mixed heavily with understanding. I don't know, I have a headache today. B

Boom! (Joseph Losey, 1968) --- I Am a Camera (Henry Cornelius, 1955)

2010-03-05T19:25:00.003-06:00

Tuesday evening I went to my neighborhood video store because I wanted to rent Hunger since my boyfriend was working and therefore unable to veto it. Sadly it was checked out. Not finding anything else to my liking on the new release racks I decided to raid the VHS section for movies I'd always meant to see and hadn't. I came up with Boom! and I Am a Camera.

Boom! is a 1968 Joseph Losey film that shows up on most lists of camp classics. It stars Elizabeth Taylor as Sissy Goforth, a deranged, rich American lady living in a mansion perched atop her very own Italian island. Richard Burton shows up and turns out to be some sort of Angel of Death character. Noel Coward makes a few appearances as Sissy's bitchy confidant the Witch of Capri. The film reportedly cost three times more than it was supposed to and you can definitely see the money on the screen. It's dull in some moments, fabulous in others, generally enchanting. I think Noel Coward's performance is generally overrated but Elizabeth Taylor's hats are everything you've been led to believe they are. Watching the movie felt sort of like reading a Tennessee Williams short story, a little rougher around the edges than his great plays. I'd really have to watch it again before deciding whether there was any real insight to be found here. It certainly made me want to read the play. The island and the mansion are gorgeous and while watching it, I kept finding myself transported to daydreams of being on that island. It's supposedly Sardinia so now I know where I want to go if I ever make it back to Italy. People always say Elizabeth Taylor was too young for the part but I feel like the movie implied she had some kind of a disease and it sort of worked for me. I didn't really think that Richard Burton clicked in this role though. It's a good movie for people who like weird, campy, quasi-metaphysical films. B

I Am a Camera is mostly known for being based on the same play that inspired Cabaret. I've neither seen the play nor read it but based on the film, it seems like both the book that inspired it and the musicals it spawned are superior. I like Laurence Harvey because he's cute and charming. Julie Harris seems slightly miscast as Sally Bowles although she's definitely more in line with the Sally of Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin than that of the musical. I have no idea why they have Shelley Winters playing the German Jewish love interest of a similarly miscast secret Jewish gigolo. Oh well. It was engaging enough but not terribly compelling. I don't know how well the story works without the sexual deviance and so forth. Maybe the movie's just too English for me. One of the reviews I've read suggests the blandness is a result of it being filmed in London instead of Berlin. C/C-

The Last Station (Michael Hoffman, 2009)

2010-03-05T16:52:00.002-06:00

I'm coming valiantly close to being caught up with what I've been watching. I saw this earlier in the week and I haven't really thought of much to say about it. It was interesting to learn a little bit about the sort of Tolstoy cult that I had seen hinted at before but about which I don't know very much. The trouble is it came across as kind of flat and superficial. I mean, there must have been real issues here but the film shows it as a sort of dry soap opera. I'm having trouble coming to the point I mean. In any event, I felt like the acting was off as well. Christopher Plummer hams it up like a sort of parody of a grand actor. Paul Giamatti is loathsome and cartoonish and typically irritating. With the exception of Helen Mirren the female characters seem similarly one dimensional. James McAvoy is charming and serves as a pleasant anchor to the piece but his character doesn't feel fleshed out enough. Helen Mirren is generally a pleasure to watch and is most of what makes this uneven movie at all worth watching. The cinematography seemed a little off as well. I can't profess to know enough about photography to speak of it intelligently but it seemed like whatever they were trying to do they only managed to do halfway. C/C-

A Second Look at Two Best Picture/Best Actress Nominees

2010-03-05T05:00:00.002-06:00

I went back and revisited An Education and Precious last week to refresh my memory. I still don't understand why Tilda Swinton wasn't nominated for Best Actress. Whatever.

The first time I saw An Education I loved it for the most part but I thought the ending kind of ruined it a little bit. This time I was less mesmerized and electrified throughout the movie but I also found it more even. I felt like I watched it more as a serious movie this time, slight though it may perhaps be, and I also appreciated the ending better. I think both of these movies have in common that they largely succeed on the strength of the performances of the actors though this one has better writing, better cinematography, and higher production values. I mean, I know we all get tired of these coming of age stories sometimes but I liked it. I don't know how to talk about this in terms of the Best Picture Oscar because the nominees for this and most categories this year are so ridiculous it's hard to take them seriously. My choice for Best Picture would be Avatar. Second place would go to A Serious Man and I'd probably give An Education the bronze. For the actress award I'd vote for Meryl Streep but Carey Mulligan would be my second choice. I kind of feel like both Mulligan and Sidibe are too young. I don't know what they can do. She was great in this movie. Maybe Gabourey was better but I'm not sure. One of the things I really liked about this movie was the supporting cast. Brenda Blethyn does her thing without overdoing it, like she sometimes lovably can. Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike are great as David's friends. Peter Sarsgard plays this role with such a great blend of charm and sliminess. It's not a movie I'm likely to return back to over the years but it's certainly well put together. B+

I guess I'd put Precious in third place for Best Actress and fourth place for Best Picture. The film is really powerful. The performances by Mo'Nique and Gabourey Sidibe are riveting. It's just that the writing isn't so great and some of the other characters, including the teacher, are kind of hollow. B

Oscar Nominated Live Action Short Films

2010-03-05T04:12:00.000-06:00

This is spoiler city so if you plan on watching these and haven't already I guess you shouldn't read this.

My boyfriend and I went to see the Oscar nominated live action short films last week. I had already watched the animated nominees online though I can see after seeing the live action ones on the big screen that it may have also been worthwhile to see the animated ones that way.

Kavi is timely and well-intentioned. It's also a pretty decent short film, even if it suffers from the sort of sentimentalism you might be afraid of... It's about a boy who lives as a slave with his parents making bricks all day in the hot sun while the private school boys play cricket in a small, neighboring field. At the beginning of the film, Kavi seems relatively happy, playing make believe games in his family's domicile, which is basically a brick cell. One morning he's working with his parents, very efficiently like a good boy, when he is distracted by some boys who are, for whatever reason, playing cricket in a small field next to this slave labor camp in the middle of nowhere. He's taken to the boss man and scolded and the boss says the boy is his fastest worker and if the boy can clear away this giant stack of reject bricks, they can play cricket together. As the boy is moving the bricks from one pile to another he overhears one of his fellow slave laborers talking to a couple of journalists or activists or something. They try to get the boy to talk but he runs off with a bottle of soda and his apprehended and punished by the guys in charge. He turns sullen and can no longer enjoy his life there. He gets in trouble the next day for throwing a ball back to the private school kids and the whole family gets beat up on and the boy is chained up in the office. The camp is suddenly evacuated and the cops show up with the two men who were asking all the questions in the woods behind the brick pile but there's nobody there and it seems like the man who runs the camp is going to get away with it but the buy escapes and runs out. There's a ridiculous moment where the boss tries to frighten the boy into keeping his mouth shut and the two activist guys are trying to get the cops to do something other than stand there looking disinterested. It ends with sobering statistics about world slavery. It's well intentioned, pretty to look at, and very engaging but upon reflection it seems kind of forced and manipulative. I mean, I kind of agree with WEB DuBois that any art worth giving a damn about is really some kind of propaganda but I don't think there was enough design here. It seemed simple and lazy, somehow. B

Miracle Fish was the one I had already seen before. I thought it was kind of bad. Both times. When I watched it online it just seemed kind of bland and pointless from start to finish. This time, it was more uneven. The movie starts with a mother dropping her boy off at school. It's his birthday. She has to go see his dad in the hospital. She gives him his lunchbox and tells him there's a surprise inside from his father. He sits in class and the kids behind him throw things at him. He goes outside for recess and finds a miracle fish in his lunchbox. The boys come over to rub it in that he didn't get anything for his birthday because he's poor and he makes up stories about all the stuff he got. They say mean things to him and go off. He goes to the nurse's office but she's on the phone so he shows himself into the sick bay and takes a nap. He wakes up and the school is deserted. He walks around. Finds a book about alien abduction and looks around. Goes to the school store and eats a bunch of candy bars and such. Walks around. You see a bloody handprint on the back of the door when he closes it. He hears a cell phone ringing. He finds and answers the phone and is told to hide. He stands there being difficult. The lunatic who was seen in the background when his mother comes down the hallway and into the room reciting a crazyman spiel like a first year acting student. They have some meaningless chatter. The man is shot. The boy is carried away by a policeman, never loses his composure. This is another movie that isn't thought through enough. This one is even worse though. I can't think of why it was even nominated. There's nothing interesting about this movie. I think this piece here sums it up better than I have. Oh well. D

The New Tenants ended up being my favorite, I think. I liked the weightier The Door quite a bit and I enjoyed the quirkier Instead of Abracadabra but something about this one just worked for me better. It starts with two gay men sitting at a table. One is smoking and reading the paper and the other is eating meat on a stick and, I believe, reading as well. The one who is eating complains about the other one smoking while he's eating and the other one launches into a tirade about any number of things, including Chernobyl, interestingly enough. The movie is basically them sitting there arguing and neighbors dropping by and acting crazy. You realize these guys have just moved in. All hell breaks loose and they do a sort of surreal dance. It's completely implausible but it somehow really works. A-

The Door only falls short of being my choice for the best of the nominees by a hair. It's about this couple and their daughter who are evacuated from their home after the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl. They leave their whole lives behind and like many other children, the daughter is lost to radiation sickness. The father defies the law and sneaks into the old apartment to steal the door so that he can carry his dead daughter on the door as they had done with his father (grandfather?) It struck me as a graceful, beautiful, humane film. A-

A friend of mine referred to Instead of Abracadabra as the 'Napoleon Dynamite' one. That kind of sums it up. I enjoyed it. I laughed too loud. It's a dark, quirky comedy about a dweebish man still living with his parents and thinks himself a magician. He convinces his parents to let him put on a show for them and ends up putting the mother in the hospital. He falls for the new next door neighbor and invites her to his father's party that weekend. He convinces them to let him perform at the party by saying he'll get a job. The show at the party is like a twisted take on the dance number in Napoleon Dynamite. It's amusing but I don't know if I really liked it that much, if that makes sense. Maybe it's just sort of quirky and disposable. I can't put my finger on what it's missing for me... B/B+

Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton, 2010)

2010-03-04T22:53:00.013-06:00

I got a chance to see the new Tim Burton update of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland at the IMAX at Navy Pier in Chicago tonight. I have to say I tend to agree with the reviews I've read that characterized it as a letdown because it certainly was for me. I mean, apart from the Cheshire Cat, which was enchanting, and the Dormouse, which was cute. The real world story was dull and the "Underland" story was uninspired. It almost seems like the writer and the director were bored, as though they had been there to pick up a check, though I doubt that's the case. Perhaps they were too distracted by the technology and the mise-en-scène. The Mad Hatter is definitely sympathetic here but it's just kind of blandly weird. It sort of reminded me of Harry Potter goofiness but less entertaining. I love Helene Bonham Carter but not in this movie. I didn't know she could be boring but in this movie I just didn't care. I also thought it was a very strange choice to cast dog-faced Anne Hathaway as the beautiful White Queen. Um, excuse me? She makes a good junkie but she was so wrong for this part it's unreal. And what is up with this movie tying beauty to goodness? I sort of thought Tim Burton might be above that sort of thing. It was all right, I suppose. I mean, the visuals keep you watching. It's just that the story is so bland. I feel like the critics of Avatar should take their knee-jerk contrariness and see this movie. I think the comparison highlights a lot of what Avatar did right. That Cheshire Cat deserved a better movie! C/C-

Edit- I don't know how I could have forgotten to mention that horrible Avril Lavigne song at the end credits. The movie was not strong enough to withstand the weight of that awful song being the last thing you remember...

Ajami (Scandar Copti & Yaron Shandi, 2009)

2010-03-02T00:40:00.005-06:00

I finally made it to see the Israeli nominee for Best Foreign Film today. It was really good. I've seen it described as a network narrative but I don't know that it's as sprawling as that implies. It has that puzzle out of order thing going on though and it actually ends up being pretty effective, I think. It takes place in what seems to be an Arab city on the outskirts of Tel Aviv called Jaffa. It's kind of set up into chapters and it starts off with a string of murders and a demand for blood money and there's all kind of misery and intrigue that follows. It seems pretty true to what's going on over there. It's a mess. But it's a powerful and beautiful film. Watching the movie, it's easy to empathize with most of the characters but you walk away wondering what it will take to bring about some rational decision making. The movie seemed similar to Gomorrah in parts but it ends up feeling more graceful. It's strange that a film with such an ending as it has--tragic and violent--can leave me feeling a kind of grace.

I've spent so much of the past fifteen years gorging myself on American films, sucking up everything on TCM or the Sundance/Landmark Theaters/Independent Spirit waves and now that I've started watching more contemporary world cinema, instead of fixating on those films highlighted in the Auteurs chapters of any film history textbook, I feel like a sponge desperate for news and truths from the world. In the past six months since I stopped reading books and starting binging on movies I feel like I've gained so much understanding about so many modes of existence I had never given enough thought.

It was really great. I hope you see it. A/A-

February Update #3: Trucker/Princess & the Frog and the Animated Feature Oscar/Miracle Fish/Amreeka/Moonfleet/The Cove/Dirty Filthy Love

2010-03-01T12:41:00.008-06:00

It's been winter doldrum season so I've sort of been slacking on this thing.
It's been a pretty uneven month, certainly last month was more fulfilling cinematically but I suppose I've filled in some gaps.

Trucker showed up on some end of the year lists and it caught my eye at the video store a while back and I finally got around to watching it a few days ago. Michelle Monaghan is a woman who had been married to Benjamin Bratt, seemingly a great guy, and abandoned him and her child. She works as a semi truck driver now and seems happy with her life of driving, drinking, and no strings sexual encounters. She has what seems like an ill-advised friendship with a married neighbor and after depositing him on his porch she stumbles home to find her ex-husband's wife waiting for her with the discarded son. It seems daddy is in the hospital with cancer and his wife's mother just died so she needs to go away for a few weeks and the mother is reluctantly stuck with her son who is naturally resentful. I guess you can imagine what comes next. The film is likeable. The mother's flight from the definitions the world has imposed upon her is understandable and the characters come across as authentic and compelling for the most part. There's an act of violence toward the end and I'm not really sure it worked for me. I love that it's about working class people, more or less, but it never really soars like Frozen River, as I hoped it might. B/B-

I finally watched The Princess and the Frog so now I've seen all the Oscar nominated animated feature films this year. I feel like this one is probably the weakest even though I think I rated all of them three out of five stars on Netflix, except The Secret of Kells, which I rated four stars. It feels like a Disney movie in sleepwalk mode. It's just a regurgitation onto a standard template with standardly unimpressive music. That said, it's kind of engaging in a slight way. It has the sort of charm I might expect from a well-done direct-to-DVD children's movie. I've never seen All Dogs Got to Heaven 2 but it felt like a sequel to All Dogs Go to Heaven somehow. Maybe the music and the attitude. I feel like it makes sense that their first black princess would find herself in the middle of a sort of bland undertaking and, culturally, it's probably for the best. I'm just glad there wasn't a single rap in the whole movie because that would have been really gross. I liked the touch of bayou flavor in the music and the attempts at local color but it was kind of insipidified during Disneyfication, I think. C

On the subject of the Animated Feature Oscar, I'm not sure if I have a horse in the race. It'll probably go to Up, which I didn't care for all that much, but I'd probably have voted for The Secret of Kells. My second choice would probably be The Fantastic Mr. Fox. I haven't seen Mary and Max and the word I've heard on it has been very splintered but I kind of expected that to get nominated.

Miracle Fish is an Oscar nominated live action short film from what seems to be a much hyped Australian production company. It's about an eight year old boy who gets picked on at school because it's his birthday and all his mom gave him was this lame fortune telling fish thing that looks like it cost one to two dollars. It looks like you can currently buy 12 for five dollars on their website. In any event the rest of the class goes on some field trip or something and he sneaks into this sick room in the nurse's office and wanders out to find an empty school and eventually a gruesome surprise that is neither believable nor interesting. There was something I liked about it but it was generally dull and maudlin and insipid. C-

Amreeka is about a divorced Palestinian woman in the West Bank who works in a bank and lives with her mother and her teenage son. She and her son have to cross through this checkpoint every day and that's fairly miserable and increasingly frightening. They get a permit to emigrate to the USA she had applied for a long time ago and the son convinces her they should go because there is no future for him in Palestine. Things naturally don't go smoothly when they arrive in America but there's none of that forced Lars-von-Trier-esque torture that you might expect from this sort of thing. The kid has troubles at school; they and the cousins they move in with must cope with increasing racism; the mother can find only the most menial of jobs despite her education and her experience. It's a really lovely movie though and it's more bouyant than it sounds. There's something so real and beautiful and human and significant about it. It was mostly all the things I look for in a film. If I had seen it sooner it would likely made my top ten list or at least the honorable mentions. A

Moonfleet is a 1955 Fritz Lang film based on a popular English children's adventure novel from 1898. Similar to Alfred Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn it begins with an innocent youth arriving in a sinister English coastal city that seems to make a lot of money off various forms of piracy. The youth naturally finds himself mixed up in the den of thieves and in deep trouble from all sides. I sought it out because it's listed in John Kobal's methodology-challenged book of the Top 100 films of all time but I really don't think it belongs there. It's a decent film but it's not likely that it would even make my top 10 Fritz Lang movies, let alone top 100 of ever. Stewart Granger is kind of dreamy though, Joan Greenwood is appealing as George Sanders's sassy wife, and Viveca Lindfors is kind of electric in her brief, mildly lurid performance as Stewart Granger's gypsy-esque mistress but the story didn't really do it for me. C

I finally got around to watching the Oscar-nominated documentary The Cove last night. The trouble with so many of these well-intentioned things is that they tend to overstep in their stridence. I think this movie escapes that pitfall though and it comes across as pretty veracious throughout. I think that's why it's so effective. It feels like the filmmakers are saying, "We want to level with you hear and we aren't trying to manipulate you except explicitly by showing you this video of a dolphin slaughter and letting you make up your mind." I like that the video is presented with only the sounds of the dolphins and that although the film is set up like a suspense movie it doesn't try to manipulate you with music and they never resort to the sort of hysterics that tend to alienate people from doing the right thing. It was a good and worthy use of time and resources. A

Lastly, the final film I watched in February of 2010: Dirty Filthy Love. It's a 2004 made for British television movie about a man (Michael Sheen) whose latent OCD and comorbid conditions sort of explode when his marriage disintegrates and he loses his job. He meets a plucky nut played by the fabulous Shirley Henderson, whom I've loved ever since I saw her in that Masterpiece Theater presentation of The Way We Live Now (2001). The nut recognizes his OCD and tells him to come to her support group and he does and it's well and then he has a breakdown when his wife gives him a false hope and then moves on. The movie's kind of out there--my boyfriend wasn't really paying attention to the movie and kept remarking that the movie I was watching was really weird--but it's really kind of good. It seemed like a generally honest depiction of a constellation of mental disorders and the acting was pretty good. If only we subsidized the film industry in the United States... It's kind of sad that our nominees for best picture are very often weaker than the average European made-for-TV movie... A-/B+

Correction: Can't you do anything right? Top ten edition.

2010-03-01T08:39:00.003-06:00

I realized yesterday that 35 Shots of Rum never made it on the list of movies of 2009 I saw that I based my top ten list on. I'm such a pillowcase.

Almosts: Treeless Mountain / Still Walking / Baader Meinhof Complex / Julia
10. Avatar
9. 35 Shots of Rum
8. A Woman in Berlin
7. Hipsters
6. Gomorrah
5. Who's Afraid of the Wolf
4. Cherry Blossoms
3. Raging Sun, Raging Sky
2. Summer Hours
1. Strella

It's March and I still keep updating my 2009 list. I just watched The Cove last night and I plan to watch Ajami, A Prophet, and The Last Station this week.

I suppose I might call it a close on 2009 after this parody of an awards show on Sunday.

My Bottom Ten Movies of 2009

2010-02-26T00:22:00.003-06:00

I saw about 95 movies that were released last year (not including those I counted on my 2008 list or Man on Wire would be on this list) and I liked these the least. Imagine what horrors I'd be subjected to if I didn't live in the third largest city in the country where I was too busy at art cinemas to be desperate enough to see things like I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.
Goodness, these were painful:

10. Public Enemies
9. Away We Go
8. The Hangover
7. Star Trek
6. The Blind Side
5. World's Greatest Dad
4. Funny People
3. A Single Man
2. The Hurt Locker
1. The Road

Top Ten of 2009

2010-02-25T19:34:00.006-06:00

I think I made a vague list of 30 or so of my favorite films of the year already but I never really committed to a Top 10. I don't think I've ever done that as a matter of fact. The staff at Facets posted their Top 10 lists today though and that was interesting enough so I thought I'd give it whirl. The trouble with my list this year is that it seems like I liked a lot of movies nobody else saw...

I'm cheating and making number ten a 4-way tie:
10. Treeless Mountain / Still Walking / Baader Meinhof Complex / Julia
9. Avatar
8. A Woman in Berlin
7. Hipsters
6. Gomorrah
5. Who's Afraid of the Wolf
4. Cherry Blossoms
3. Raging Sun, Raging Sky
2. Summer Hours
1. Strella

As far as I know, Hipsters (Stilyagi), Who's Afraid of the Wolf, and Strella (A Woman's Way) aren't available on DVD in the US and have no scheduled release dates.
Raging Sun, Raging Sky comes out on DVD on June 22.
Other than that, I think pretty much everything other than Avatar is available on DVD (and in most cases for instant viewing on Netflix).

The September Issue / The Informant!

2010-02-25T19:22:00.001-06:00

I really enjoyed The September Issue even if my boyfriend zoned out and relocated himself in front of the computer for a large portion of it. It's sort of about the making of the big September issue of Vogue magazine, as if you didn't know. On the one hand, I might have liked to see a little more detail into the actual process and nuts and bolts of it all. On the other hand, Anna Wintour, Grace Coddington, and Andre Leon Talley are so fascinating, you kind of just want to keep watching them. The critics were right; Grace Coddington is the heart of the movie. I think I'd have enjoyed it and forgotten it if it weren't for what she brings to the movie. I really enjoyed it but it might have been the wine and such. I'll have to rent it again some time. I angle to check out the deleted scenes anyway. B

The Informant! is the Steven Soderbergh movie with Matt Damon as that guy from that ADM scandal you may have heard about, price-fixing food additives and so forth. It was more interesting and entertaining to hear the piece on NPR about it. It was all right. It's nice to see Melanie Lynskey getting some work this year. C

Up in the Air and Good Hair, again

2010-02-22T17:59:00.001-06:00

Watched Up in the Air and Good Hair with some friends last night. Both of them were weaker the second time around. I was ambivalent about Up in the Air the first time but I didn't care for it at all the second time. I'm thinking Up might actually be less bad than Up in the Air, though I had thought the opposite before. It seemed sort of funny or sassy the first time around but this time it seemed glib and smarmy and irritating and unsavory. C-

Good Hair was mostly fun the first time, although parts of it were inane or half-baked. The second time it was still engaging but it seemed a little more glib and a little less credible. C

Good Hair (2009)

2010-02-21T14:22:00.002-06:00

I don't know how widely released this movie was. It played for a seemingly long time here in Chicago and it seemed to be recommended by all the movie recommenders. It's a documentary starring Chris Rock that looks into the mad world of black women and hair. Parts of the movie are really strong. Other parts not so much. For a part of the movie it seemed pretty good but then it either lost focus or they didn't have enough ambition or I don't know what. It reminded me of this documentary I saw once about women in Kenya and Tanzania, their relationship with skin tone, the dangerous chemicals they use to lighten their skin. And so forth. It was really eye-opening because I knew it was the same concept but I never really put the pieces together like that. I don't think Good Hair was as serious-minded as all that. It's playful and it challenges our ideas but it doesn't want to push too far. It was good but maybe a little lacking somehow. C+

Coco Before Chanel / The Messenger / Invictus

2010-02-19T06:52:00.002-06:00

It's almost turning into a habit to be ambivalent about everything I've seen lately! I certainly feel that way about Coco Before Chanel. On the one hand, it's handsomely made and quite engaging. On the other hand, there's something about it that doesn't ring quite true to me and on top of that, there's an element that reminds me of a tabloid, sticking its nose in a place where it doesn't belong and making dubious pronouncements and judgments. I didn't quite buy it. I don't know if it was accurate or not but it didn't come across to me as honest. How is this story relevant to us? I'm not sure I'm satisfied that the artistic value is worth the intrusion. It's funny, it reminds me of this Truman Capote story, "Music for Chameleons," in which a woman in Martinique talks about how coarse the Haitians are. It's said that the Haitians put their dead to work in the fields and that ghosts can be seen picking insects from the crops. She says in Martinique they leave the dead to their sorrows and their amusements. I feel like this movie feels like we're putting the dead to work. Maybe I'm being silly... C+

The Messenger is something of a mess. The premise does half the work for the film and you'd think a movie with such a rich premise and such a talented cast could come up with something more meaningful. The parts where they notify the nexts of kin and the kin react in various ways are generally the strongest, except the parts with Steve Buscemi, who seems extremely out of place in this movie. In some ways it's one of the stronger movies about the Iraq war. It's interesting that the best films about these late wars are either documentaries or movies about the drama at home, like In the Valley of Elah. I suppose there's also Rendition but I don't know if that counts. If only this movie could be crossed with The Hurt Locker, a decent script, and a good director. Dare to dream. C-

I thought Invictus was surprisingly good. Much more effective and less annoying than I had imagined. Another movie that is more deserving of an Oscar nomination than at least half of the actual nominees. It was so well-done, I forgot it was directed by Clint Eastwood until the closing credits rolled. I'll be surprised if Freeman doesn't win the Oscar, though I've been rooting for Jeff Bridges. It's kind of what you expect but it's executed better. You see? B+

Nine (2009)

2010-02-19T03:21:00.002-06:00

I expected a dumbed down remake of 8½ but it's actually a little more complicated than that. I mean, it certainly seems like more of a commentary on and a conversation with the original film. I think I appreciate the original film now in ways I hadn't before. I kind of feel like the film wasn't amazing by any means but that it's somewhat undervalued and I feel like that has to do with people's expectations, wanting another crowd-pleaser like Chicago, and with their unfamiliarity with the Fellini film. I kind of like the way Guido is takes his experiences and learns from them in this version, achieves a bit of humility. He's certainly more reflective here and the women make more of a stand here than in the original film. Perhaps it seems like revisionism or maybe adding a more satisfying ending can be called pat but I like that conversation. I like that it's sort of a musical and it sometimes seemed like a collection of musical videos--that's certainly what people say about it--but the music doesn't really stand out at all. I wondered throughout the movie why they don't adapt great musicals, of which I think there are some. You'd never know it by things like the Broadway in Chicago series (If that's what Broadway is, you can keep it!) but there are great musicals; I'm sure Hollywood would ruin them anyway. I liked it by the end, in any event. I think Penelope Cruz is good in it but she has such a small part, it doesn't seem like she has a chance for the Oscar she's nominated for, unless people (very unlikely) vote for her on the strength of her delightful turn in Broken Embraces. The nominated song is better than most of the other nominees but, as usual, all of the nominees are sort of hokey. My favorite of those is definitely "The Weary Kind" from Crazy Heart and this one is okay, as is the one from Paris 36. The two from the Disney movie on the other hand are kind of horrible, which is a good indication that one of them will win the award. It's interesting that I can't say that I loved any particular character or song or anything from this movie, it's more the conversation with the Fellini film that appealed to me... B

My One Star Movies

2010-02-17T20:03:00.002-06:00

These are the movies I rated one star on Netflix. Some might actually be two star movies but I'm not sure. I'm not very consistent, I guess. Also, some of these I loathed and others of these I sort of perversely enjoyed.

'Til There Was You, 28 Days, Ace Ventura I & II, Anchorman, Another Gay Movie, Armed and Dangerous, Back to School, Billy Madison, Bio-Dome, Blindness, The Bodyguard, Borat, Bringing Down the House, The Butterfly Effect, Caddyshack, Cadillac Man, The Cassandra Crossing, The Cheetah Girls, Circuit, Cocktail, Coneheads, Corky Romano, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Da Ali G Show, Dangerous Game, Daredevil, Deuce Bigelow, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Dr Seuss's The Cat in the Hat, Dukes of Hazzard, Dumb and Dumberer, Eating Out 3, anything with Eddie Izzard, Encino Man, Ernest Scared Stupid, Family Guy, Fast and the Furious, Flubber, Frequency, Hamlet 2, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, Haunted Mansion, Home Alone 2, Hot Shots Part Deux, The Hottie and the Nottie, The Hurt Locker, The Invasion, Iron Man, Jack, Jackass, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Just One of the Girls, King Ralph, Kiss Me Guido, Larry the Cable Guy, Last Samurai, Lewis Black Red White and Screwed, Look Who's Talking Now, Look Who's Talking Too, Man of the Year 1995, Man of the Year 2006, Meet the Fockers, Men in Black, Men in Black II, Metrosexuality, Michael, Michael Moore Hates America, The Mighty Ducks, Monster in Law, Mr Deeds, Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, The Naked Gun, The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear, Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, National Lampoon's Animal House, National Lampoon's Van Wilder, The Next Best Thing, A Night at the Opera (1935), Nuns on the Run, The Nutty Professor (1996), Patch Adams, Pay It Forward, Phenomenon, Prime, Reign of Fire, Rent, Revenge of the Nerds 2: Nerds in Paradise, The Road, Rock of Love: Season 1, Saving Private Ryan, Scary Movie, The School of Rock, Scrooged, Secret Window, Serendipity, Sin City, A Single Man, Slacker, Spaceballs, Species, Speechless, The Stepford Wives (2004), Sweet Home Alabama, Swept Away, Taking Care of Business, Things We Lost in the Fire, Three Men and a Baby, Trapped in the Closet: Chapters 1-12 R. Kelly: Trapped in the Closet, Tropic Thunder, Valkyrie, Very Bad Things, Virgin Machine/Die Jungfrauenmaschine, Wagons East, Wedding Crashers, Weekend at Bernie's, Welcome to Mooseport, Wild Wild West, Wonder Showzen: Season 1

Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

2010-02-17T12:37:00.002-06:00

My boyfriend was in the mood for a gritty crime drama last night and neither of us had seen this one so he went and rented it. I really didn't like it much from relatively early on and I never liked it much more as it went on. It's four hours long and the screenplay seems like a mess. It's yet another American glorification of criminality and it's particularly kitschy. It's sort of on the elliptical side the way it bounces around between three different time periods but that might just come off as a way to camouflage the holes in the plot. My boyfriend and I both saw the twist ending coming a mile off and it was completely gratuitous. I don't think I'm morally corrupt enough to know what the point of this movie is. It seems to be shot well and the acting is fine but pretty much every other aspect is kind of terrible. D-

February Omnibus Update #3

2010-02-16T20:31:00.004-06:00

The films I've watched since I watched Body Double, except The Blind Side, which I've already posted about: A Serious Man, The Secret of Kells, Bedrooms and Hallways, Not Quite Hollywood, Penelope, Bright Young Things, Rory O'Shea Was Here, Gitane Demone: Life After Death, Sandra After Dark, Kansas City, and California Split.

I had already seen A Serious Man in the theater. I made my boyfriend watch it because I felt like it was the only movie nominated for Best Picture for this year's Academy Awards that might deserve to win, except for Avatar. I was sick and I was tired when he was watching it and I wasn't paying close enough attention. It definitely had more magic in the theater than it even did coming across my roommate's projector. I like the way all the parts of the film fit in with its themes, like the way we don't get the answers to our mysteries in life and how the old ways of explaining the world were no longer adequate or relevant. I like the way it ends because it seems like the tornado mirrors the oncoming personal calamaties and augurs what's about to happen in American culture generally. B+/A-

The next morning I watched Oscar-nominated animated film The Secret of Kells. It's hand-drawn animation, which is nice. It's about a little boy in Kells abbey who becomes a sort of apprentice in the making of the book. The Vikings or somebody are stirring up trouble in the region and the abbot is scared and obsessed with his big gate. The boy meets a fabulous girl in the woods who seems to be a fairy. It's kind of enchanting but not really groundbreaking or surprising or breathtaking though some of the visuals are lovely. B

Bedrooms and Hallways was a movie I'd seen some years ago and mostly forgotten. It's your typical millennial British relationship comedy with alternative lifestyles and a mens' group and so forth. It's all right but I liked Love and Other Disasters better because Brittany Murphy was in that one. C

Not Quite Hollywood is a documentary about Ozsploitation films, which were basically Australian B-films from the 70s and 80s, mostly sex comedies and thrillers. It started off pretty fun and interesting but as it went on it seemed kind of tiresome and relentless. C-

Penelope is that movie where Christina Ricci has a pig nose. I thought it would be an inane Twilight Zone retread but it was actually more entertaining than that. I enjoyed it. C+

Bright Young Things is a somewhat entertaining film about sort of celebutante types in pre-War Britain. The actors are affable and the film is engaging but it's kind of so-so and doesn't have very much interesting to say. I certainly wasn't thrilled with the ending. C

Rory O'Shea Was Here is a British movie starring James McAvoy as Rory O'Shea, a Billy Idol type with muscular dystrophy who gets put into a residential hospital at the beginning of the film. It becomes a sort of buddy film as he makes friends with a guy with cerebral palsy, I think, and they move into their own apartment. I mostly appreciate this movie for even existing. I knew someone with MD when I was a child but I have to say I haven't thought about it much since then. It made me think about a reality I hadn't thought enough about before and that's great. B

Gitane Demone: Life After Death is a collection of various interviews with and performances by Gitane Demone in the 1990s. It's a 2-DVD set and clocks in around three and a half hours. As such a big fan as myself might anticipate, the best parts are when she's not trying to be all hardcore. There are some semi-successful experimental jazz performances that seem like a sluttier, less ambitious Diamanda Galas. The interviews are, at best, a mixed bag, but seem like a goldmine for aged gothboys like myself. There's a pretty good performance at a rock festival in Germany at the end of the first disc and a number of great performances on the second half of the second disc, although the sound quality is kind of bad and the guitars are pretty much uniformly too loud by half. Rozz Williams has a heavy presence in those performances on the second disc and I kept thinking how great it would have been if Rozz Williams would have had a side project with Eva O AND Gitane Demone. (With Paris on keyboards?) If you weren't a fan in the 90s, i doubt this video will change your mind. Strangely, some of the best performances are from her fetish phase and I love that album she made then but I found the performances a little tiresome, personally. Oh well. Somewhere between an A- and a D+.

The only thing they had at the merchandise table of the Sandra Bernhard show I went to over the weekend that I didn't already own was a DVD of this HBO special she did in 1996. An episode of this show called Sandra After Dark. It was a sad waste of $25, unlike the show, which was a fabulous use of $47. I only wish I had saved the money on the DVD and gone to see the show again the next night. The show is like this late night chat show except it's supposed to feel less like a chat show and more like a party. It hasn't aged well and I'm not sure why they'd be selling it at the show. Why not a DVD of Confessions of a Pretty Lady or some of the CD's she sells through her website? Oh well. Love you, Sandra! D

That brings us up to last night. I watched Robert Altman's Kansas City because my boyfriend put it on Netflix streaming and, as expected, promptly fell asleep. I like the cast but it's really not one of Altman's best. It's entertaining but just sort of okay. I mainly liked the way it plays against the genre and the audience's expectations thereof. Plus, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Miranda Richardson, and the pretty eyes of Dermot Mulroney. C

Then I put on California Split, the only movie I hadn't seen by Robert Altman that's available now for instant viewing on Netflix. It pretty much takes two actors I don't like very much, Elliot Gould and George Segal, and emphasizes what I don't like about them. I made it through 45 or 50 minutes before deciding I'd rather be asleep than watching this movie. D- EDIT: I went back and watched the second half of this last night. I found most of it relentlessly annoying but I liked the very ending enough to boost my rating to a C-

The Blind Side / Oscars 2010: How I'd Vote If I Were a Member of the Academy

2010-02-15T08:11:00.002-06:00

I watched The Blind Side last night. I'm not in the habit of watching illegal copies of films and can't remember the last time I had done so (four years ago?) but the opportunity arose to watch this last night and it's the only best picture nominee for the Academy Awards I hadn't seen. After paying full price to sit through such awful movies as The Road and The Hurt Locker, I wasn't about to spend $11 to sit through the likes of this and I'm glad I didn't.
Firstly, I think it's really gross that they nominated Sandra Bullock for this instead of nominating Tilda Swinton for Julia. I don't think she's bad or anything, really. She's not great though and the movie stinks. I think it's revolting that people would compare this movie to Precious at all and I think the strain of criticisms on the internets that this movie was better than Precious are clearly from sheltered suburban types who probably should have challenged themselves a little more in their humanities courses in college. I mean, some of the criticisms against Precious are so ridiculous. I'm not saying I loved the film but there's a big difference in a film produced for a black audience that shows a lighter skinned black woman teaching an underpriveleged darker skinned girl how to define herself and a movie made almost exclusively for a white audience about a black kid finding redemption by being defined by an exclusively white group and a white lady finding meaning by embarking on various ghetto safari adventures. I'm not saying there's something wrong with the real life story this is based on but I'm not really sure this is the story that we should be elevating right now. I mean, the movie isn't really that good at all. Parts of it are painfully bad. The only thing I can think is this is another example of a cultural institution reaching out to the South to make them feel part of the Union since this is a ridiculous southern movie about white people finding out that black people might all look like bulls but some of them are really like golden retrievers.
I don't know. This is a sappy, conventional genre film and it comes off as relatively reactionary. I don't want to come off as a booster for Precious because that movie didn't quite hit it out of the park for me either but I found that movie a lot more authentic and I feel like a lot of the criticisms about that movie are from white people who don't know very much about black people. D

It's a weak year for the Oscar nominations so I don't want anyone to think I loved any of these movies but this is how I'd rank them now that I've seen all of them:
1. Avatar
2. A Serious Man
3. An Education
4. Precious
5. District 9
6. Up in the Air
7. Up
8. Inglourious Basterds
9. The Blind Side
10. The Hurt Locker

Best Actor: Jeff Bridges
Best Actress: Meryl Streep (I havent seen The Last Station and I wouldn't mind Carey Mulligan getting it either.)
Best Supporting Actor: (have only seen one of the nominated performances)
Best Supporting Actress: Maggie Gyllenhaal (I liked Vera Farmiga but I didn't think the role was very good.)
Cinematography: The White Ribbon
Art Direction: Avatar
Director: James Cameron
Original Song: The Weary Kind, Crazy Heart
Animated Short: The Lady and the Reaper
Visual Effects: Avatar
Adapted Screenplay: In the Loop
Original Screenplay: A Serious Man
Animated Film: Fantastic Mr. Fox or Secret of Kells

oscar nominated animated short films

2010-02-11T02:24:00.004-06:00

Below are links to all five animated shorts this year. They were a lot better last year, I think. They're all sort of cute this year but none are particularly moving. I might vote for The Lady and the Reaper but it's hard to say since none of them really jumped out at me.

French Roast
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbFhATUfuow

Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty
http://www.grannyogrimm.com/#/the-film

The Lady and the Reaper
http://212.227.136.88/press/

Logorama
http://www.garagetv.be/video-galerij/buzzing_bees/De_kortfilm_der_logo_s.aspx

Wallace and Gromit: A Case of Loaf and Death
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=49816402

It's like, they're all sort of entertaining but none of them have the magic of last year's nominees.