Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell, 2012, USA)

Over the years I've had a number of friends who were bipolar or some other kind of crazy that was in the same ballpark. Lord knows I'm probably not too far off that field myself. Thus, I confess to having been pretty excited about seeing this movie, though somehow I resisted, presumably out of fear of disappointment. I finally went to see it the other night after the Oscar nominations were announced since it was one of the handful of nominated films I hadn't seen yet. While I'm a little surprised by all the acting nominations, I have to see I was more or less satisfied with the movie. There are a few rough patches toward the beginning, generally the parts that try to present "mental illness" to the naive audience. I understand how problematic those scenes can be so I wasn't really surprised that there were moments that didn't quite ring 100% true. I was surprised that every scene involving the shrink seemed off. I don't know if he was miscast or the part was 'miswritten,' but it was a minor distraction. It's a slight film, but at its heart it's more or less truthful about its subject matter. True to the director's style, the film contained scenes that were so energetic that they seemed improvised, and these were probably the strongest moments in the movie. I really believe that the scene where they make the crazy bet that sets up the big climax is the reason this film received so many nominations. I understand the criticisms about this movie being too optimistic about this couple's chances. Certainly there will be rough patches, but I don't think that negates the ending. B+

Worst Comedies of All Time

I guess FILM.COM has this list of the worst comedies of all time. Apparently over there at film.com the world started in 1984. Probably these kids are sheltered and don't know anything about movies from before E.T., though one of the authors, let's call her Molly Q. Millennial, says in a comment that the worst comedies are all from the past 20 years. I guess it never occurred to her that people thirty years from now will never have heard of Freddy Got Fingered. In general, the list is pretty uncontroversial, except for what kind of psychopath would include Who's That Girl on a list like this unless they were born after 1985 or before 1965? Also, it's not controversial to put All About Steve on this list, but I always felt that it was better than The Blind Side anyway, not to mention countless 'successful' romantic comedies like Sweet Home Alabama. Of course, I went into All About Steve expecting it to be bad so maybe my expectations were too low. I actually thought it was better than a lot of the movies of its sort. I mean, I haven't even seen New in Town, but I'm sure it's substantially worse than All About Steve. But why do people always have to be hating on Pat? Bullies, I say.
Anyway, I'd also suggest that Rhinestone (1984) transcends the conventional good/bad dichotomy, though I wouldn't necessarily go as far as saying I would watch the movie in one continuous sitting. Of course, this brings us back to what a questionable exercise it is to assert a supposedly objective evaluation of art. I'm willing to concede none of these movies are particularly good, with the exception of Who's That Girl of course, but I'm not sure it's a very well considered list of the the 'worst comedies of all time.' Which comedies have you seen that were more painful than these? For the record, the worst SNL films are Coneheads  and MacGruber.

Madea's Witness Protection (Tyler Perry, 2012, USA)

As painful as Diary of a Mad Black Woman was, I thought for some reason that this movie would outlandishly bad enough to be entertaining, but I guess I don't feel like that was the case. The acting is beyond dreadful, which may or may not have to do with the script of the editing or I don't even know, but this film might contain the worst performances by Tom Arnold or Denise Richards to be caught on film, if you can believe it. Some of the characters are sort of likeable, but the dialogue is so grating, it's hard to feel at ease at any moment in the film. I guess nobody goes into these Tyler Perry movies thinking they'll be any good, but you always want to believe that something this popular has some kind of redeeming quality.
I guess the real problem is that the whole things feels very amateurish, from the plot to the dialogue to the performances. It all feels sort of thrown together, like they made the whole movie in two weeks.
F

Ted (Seth McFarlane, 2012, USA)

That this cinematic atrocity has earned almost a half a billion dollars already and critical approval around the world will likely be a source of despair for me at many points throughout the rest of my days. Seriously, I'm starting to wonder if the only thing that separates man from monkeys is an aversion to feces. I sort of suspected that this movie would be what it ended up being, but I guess part of me thought the presence of quasi-respectable actors like Mark Wahlberg and Mila Kunis might indicate that it would pleasantly surprise me. Oh god, how it was worse than I could have imagined.

I think I chuckled twice in the hour and forty-five minutes this film ate up of my life. Once when a fat kid was called Susan Boyle, and once when the fat kid was punched in the face and Joan Crawford was invoked. Beyond that, it's just a lot of really stupid humor that would seem best suited to boys who are technically too young to watch this movie. Seriously, it's a lot of jokes about retarded people, fat people, women as sex objects, and hitting bongs. I am a stranger in a strange land.
F (for fuck this shit.)
Edit: I forgot about the scene with Giovanni Ribisi dancing in front of the television. In context it's stupid, but taken on its own, it's weirdly delicious. In fact, I guess I'd say that creepy ass Giovanni Ribisi is probably the only reason to watch the movie, though it would be a long walk for a short drink of water, if we're being honest here, which of course we are, because we're friends like that.

Black Pond (Will Sharpe & Tom Kingsley, 2011, UK)

Out of the ashes of disappointment arising from a canceled screening of Garrone's Reality arose the small triumph of Black Pond. In this pseudodocumentary, which doesn't actually seem to be based on a true story, a family reenacts and deals with the fallout of the events resulting from an encounter with a strange man in a  nature area and his eventual death at their dinner table. If the fracturing of a family is less than entirely novel, I did find the treatment to be original. I found the film very funny and often quite moving as well. I really enjoyed it and would watch it again.
A-

35 Shots of Rum / Comedians of Comedy / In the Loop / The White Ribbon / Matador

I went to see 35 Shots of Rum the other night. I'd like to watch it again and I'd like to watch more of her films. I came pretty close to squealing a big gay squeal when Ingrid Caven's name came on the screen. She was fabulous in it but the sudden trip to Germany was one of those dramatic sections of the movie that didn't completely make sense to me. I feel ambivalent about the film. I liked the way the movie seemed to be alive. I mean, it had this magical quality to it. My feelings haven't come to rest on this movie. I don't know if I'll have a chance to see it again while it's still playing here at the Music Box though. A-

Also, in a mood to lighten up a little, I watched The Comedians of Comedy: The Movie on Netflix.com. It was all right but kind of dull. It was meandering and could have done with longer, more cohesive stand-up sets. They mentioned Sarah Silverman at the beginning and I couldn't help thinking how much better this would have been with her in it. I liked the lady with the voices. I liked some of the political humor, even though it was a lot of cheaps shots for the benefit of the choir. C-

I actually thought that In the Loop was pretty great. It was really funny but more than that it also came across as so brutally accurate. I know some people thought it was kind of blah and all I could think about that is that maybe they didn't know very much about the run-up to the Iraq war. For someone like me who started off as an NPR-fanboy before graduating to C-Span and ultimately shutting it all off to preserve my sanity, it was really great. Not only was this satire therapeutic, it was also pretty great because it seemed so honest and in this mendacious age a little bit of honesty feels like a sudden burst of oxygen to a slowly asphyxiating man. A

Then yesterday we went to see Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon. My first thought was that as a student of German it was beautiful to watch because of the language. It's crisp and somewhat poetic. I kept thinking it'd be a great film to show German students because most of the speech in the film is pretty much standard German the way you'd learn it in school. Based on the trailer and my past experience with the director I was expecting something less controlled. More dramatic, more deranged, more painful to watch. It almost seemed light and airy compared to my expectations. I think what I wrote on Facebook after seeing it was that it was like a Herzog movie where the audience and the characters could breathe. It's beautifully shot. Lovely and atmospheric. The performances are great. The writing is great. I found myself wanting something more dramatic but I think that's a result of all the hype. I guess I was desperate for this to be the one big powerhouse film this year but I'm starting to think there just wasn't one. I'll definitely be watching this one again. B+

I keep thinking about how last year I loved so many movies it was hard to think of what my favorite might have been. This year though it's more that I really liked a lot of movies but there aren't so many that I loved and the ones I did love are semi-obscure foreign movies. I didn't expect to be here scratching my head and wondering if Raging Sun, Raging Sky or Strella might really have been the best movie of the year.

EDIT: I almost forgot. I watched Pedro Almodovar's Matador last night. I had only seen it once, like ten years ago, and I don't even think I saw the whole thing. Now I've seen all of his films from start to finish at least once and I'm going back and rewatching them all, I think. I just watched the first three and now the fifth one. I have What Have I Done to Deserve This? on VHS so I'll be watching that in the next few days and then I'll move forward from there. As to the film, it seems like one of his weaker efforts. I liked it, I guess, but it seemed dated and I don't really relate to the ideas in the movie. As usual, the acting was good. In some ways it seems better than Dark Habits but it might also be less interesting. I guess he's doing some interesting things here reflecting back at cinema and playing with thriller genres but it didn't quite gel for me. B-

Pedro Almodovar / Kathy Griffin / Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn

In which I watched two more Almodovar films, checked out the new Kathy Griffin standup movie, rewatched an Almodovar film, and got around to watching Jamaica Inn, which I had started months ago and never finished.

First up was Dark Habits, Almodovar's third feature film. Now that I've seen all of them I think I can say with a fair amount of certainty that this is his weakest film. It definitely feels interstitial. He's working on finding his voice here. There are scenes that work and there are parts that are delicious visually but it doesn't come together as a whole. It reminds me of that bit from Crimes and Misdemeanors: "When it bends it's funny. When it breaks, it's not funny." It's his usual colorful parade of drug addicts and perverts and iconoclasts but it just doesn't sing. C

Then I watched The Flower of My Secret, which is the final piece in my Pedro Almodovar viewing puzzle (not including the Super 8 films and so forth) and it feels like a piece in a puzzle, too. It seems like a nexus almost, where there's all this stuff that he returned to later with other films, especially All About My Mother, Volver, and Talk to Her. I think some of the male aspect in the film can be seen in Live Flesh as well. It reminds me of the way Tennessee Williams would first write something as a short story, rewrite it as a one act play, and rewrite it again, if necessary, as a three act play. It seems like the bastard child of the Almodovar filmography because it seems pretty much universally panned but even after watching it twice I think it's a pretty strong film. It's a gorgeously executed melodrama that's more mature than the films that came before it but less serious than the films that came after it. It's also beautifully shot. My boyfriend and I both loved it. Marisa Paredes is wonderful in it, as are Chus Lampreave (as her mother), Rossy de Palma (as her sister), and Manuela Vargas (as the maid). And of course Kiti Manver as the character that seems to have become the protagonist of All About My Mother. I don't know how to explain to someone what make Almodovar's films so good and why they mean something to me and why this exquisite, lightly comic melodrama is one of my favorites but there it is. A

Kathy Griffin's She'll Cut a Bitch is probably the weakest stand up special I've seen of hers. I usually kind of like them. I mean, I've always been entertained by them, whatever you might think about that, but there seemed to be something sort of tired, forced, or desperate about this one. Like success has made a failure of our home. It also seemed to ramble and it also seemed like there had been portions of the show edited out, which was strange for the DVD version. I streamed it on Netflix so maybe there is more on the DVD. It's weird though because the amount of swearing makes me think it wouldn't have been shot to be shown on Bravo but it seems like it must have been, given the length. C

Jamaica Inn seemed strong at the beginning when I first started watching it. It seemed so lurid and cool. But when I watched it last night, the more it went on, it lost all that mystery that reminded me of an Iris Murdoch novel and it just started to seem kind of convetional. It was all right but by the end I didn't care too much. B-

Wild Side / Wanda Sykes / Kings and Queen / Bukowski

It's been a while since I updated. I was feeling under the weather so I had this combination of falling asleep during everything and then not being sure if or what to write about anything.

First I watched Sebastien Lifshitz's Teddy Award winning Wild Side and I quite enjoyed it. I mostly watched it because I was curious about the Antony Hegarty performance, which it turns out I could have seen on Youtube and which is in the first few minutes of the movie. I ended up quite liking it. I mean, I didn't love it. I don't know what it is about this particular film template but I don't really love it. This was kind of enchanting though and I really am keen to watch it again. B+

Wanda Sykes's stand up movie Sick and Tired was funny but I dozed off. I guess it wasn't anything other than I had expected. B-

Since I wasn't a particular fan of Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale, I was really interested in checking out Kings and Queen. They both reminded me of My Favorite Season, I decided. There's something more mature and adult about them than most movies but I'm not altogether sure I buy completely into the world they present. I like though the way you're primed to want this man to take care of this boy and you're primed to empathize with the protagonist and then the movie turns on you and says, GROW UP YOU'RE BEING STUPID. I don't know. Again, I feel like I need to watch it again. B

The problem with Bukowski: Born Into This is that I don't buy into the central premise of the movie that Charles Bukowski is a great artist worthy of frothing over. D+

more later...

Lorna's Silence / Anvil / Sunshine Cleaning / Gomorrah

It's true, I watched another four movies last night. There's something really satisfying about looking up from your movie to see the sun is rising and the falling snow is being lit by a soft, blue morning.

We started off with Lorna's Silence, oddly enough the first movie I've seen by the Dardenne brothers. Somehow I never got around to seeing Rosetta despite that it sounded up my alley. The story is basically that this Albanian woman is in a sham marriage to a Belgian junkie so she can gain citizenship, get rid of the junkie, and marry a Russian crime boss so he can gain citizenship and use the money she earns to open a snackbar with her boyfriend. She starts to have second thoughts when the junkie husband cleans up his act and she wants to get a divorce instead of killing the guy but the shady guy brokering the deal is not so keen on that idea. Hilarity ensues, as it were. It's a really engaging and beautifully shot film. I like the way it leaves the most dramatic episodes of the story out of the film so it doesn't ever feel like you're being distracted with fireworks or anything. The reviews I read suggested that the film is about the position of real people in international commerce. The effect currency has on people and what they'll do to get it. That actually seems to be a big theme for a lot of the movies I've been watching lately. I've also been reading Uncle Tom's Cabin and I guess I've been seeing everything through that lens, where people are trapped in their ugly situations and what choices they make when they don't really have any real and viable choices to choose. I sort of liked the ending, perhaps, which is kind of ambiguous and not quite literal but it didn't really gel for me. The only thing that didn't seem to make sense in the story was why the crime boss didn't just marry a Belgian woman: a junkie, perhaps. Perhaps I'll have the opportunity to watch it again some time. B+

Then, I fell prey to the hype surrounded by Anvil: The Story of Anvil. My boyfriend liked it. He said I'm too cynical. I'm not sure if he was teasing or not. I thought the movie was kind of sad and silly at the same time. Perhaps I'm too arrogant for these people. Maybe they're too much like the people I grew up around to have the same kind of trailer park tourist appeal that they must have for many of these professional film critics. It's hard to say right now but it probably warrants further consideration. The movie is about some heavy metal band from Canada who purportedly did what they did before Metallica and Megadeth did it. I grew up surrounded by white trash heavy metalloids and I can't say I've ever managed to nostalgize that scene. I admit to feeling some kind of pity for these people, who mostly seemed detached from reality and kind of ridiculous but I also thought they were annoying, unlikable people who belonged on one of those self-help type reality shows. It was interesting though, perhaps in a kind of emotional pornography way, though it was also interesting to watch the behind the scenes reality on their tours. The making of the album was sort of interesting but I could have done with less petty squabbling. It made me think of those people who attach themselves to a certain mythology and then live entirely in the tropes and the cliches of their myths. I kept feeling that each episode in the story started out interesting but overstayed its welcome. C-

Sunshine Cleaning was something I thought looked promising but stayed away from because of tepid reviews from friends as well as from critics. As I sort of expected, I kind of liked it. I mean, it's the kind of movie that 3.5 on a scale of 5 was made for but in this case that's kind of a good thing. I enjoyed it and would watch it again. Basically, Amy Adams and her sister Emily Blunt are a couple of beautiful women with working class troubles. Amy works as a maid and her son is more or less kicked out of school so she needs to find time inbetween cleaning houses and boffing her high school sweetheart Steve Zahn, a married cop, to make a way to get her son into a private school of some sort. Emily, on the other hand, is a deadbeat who gets fired from her job as a waitress in a cheap restaurant. Add an eccentric patriarch and some issues surrounding the departed mother and the pieces are in place. The cop hooks them up with these lucrative jobs cleaning up crime scenes and things and it's engaging and sweet and intermittently funny, if also intermittently annoying. A pleasant surprise, since I hadn't paid attention to the opening credits, was the appearance of Mary Lynn Rajskub as a sapphic phlebotomist. Me likey. I always think the sudden appearance of Mary Lynn Rajskub is a jolt of 'good' in any film. There were really only two things that bothered me about the movie, Alan Arkin and an explosive sort of deus ex machina that propels the story forward. I guess Alan Arkin seemed too Little Miss Sunshine and his zaniness was tiresome to me. The event that mixes everything up seemed dishonest and silly. Nonetheless, I felt like it was a really winning film. I liked some of the emotional/psychological bits and I thought the ladies turned in good performances. B/B-

After Sunshine Cleaning, I felt like something serious and foreign and although I was in the mood for something more lyrical I decided it was high time to get around to watching Gomorrah, which, it turns out, was kind of lyrical, just like what review I read before watching it said it was. It really is a well-made film and it has this sort of epic quality to it where the characters seem to represent the everyday people who live those sorts of lives. There are multiple characters and story lines that mostly revolve around this certain housing project in what I believe is Naples. There's a mafia war going on between two warring factions. There's a high body count. Narcotics trafficking. Loan sharking. Extortion. Illegal disposal of toxic waste. Rigging the textile industry in the world of haute couture. The film definitely wants you to believe that everything it shows you is true and representative. It also has that theme I was talking about with Lorna's Silence where you have these people living in impossible situations with no good choices, the daily reality of millions of people I think. Like so many films a friend of mine might disdainfully refer to as ghetto safari films, I really think it's about what people do when the closest thing you have to a noble goal is making sure you're not the next to fall beneath the wheel. A/A-