Surviving Progress (Mathieu Roy, 2011, Canada)

Apparently based on the book A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright, this documentary looks largely at the inherent dark side of progress. If you're a thinking person, you've probably thought about most of this stuff already, but I did learn one interesting concept from the film: the progress trap. Essentially, progress has a tendency to lead to a saturation point past which dire consequences occur.  A primitive example is native people driving herds of mammoths over cliffs and driving the extinction of their main food source. The film features people such as Margaret Atwood and Jane Goodall talking about primates and progress and the ecological dangers facing us today. It's interesting, but I often found it difficult to pay attention to because it's so distressing. I think I will probably endeavor to read the book, and I may watch the film again when I'm feeling more emotionally robust.
B

Now streaming on Netflix, btw.

The Queen of Versailles (Lauren Greenfield, 2012, USA)

This film, which is recently out on DVD, is described as a documentary surrounding the construction of the largest home in America. Or something. Anyway, I feel like my experience of the film was colored strongly by two extraneous factors. One is the fact that the businessman, David Siegel, at the center of the film is the guy who made news recently for threatening his Vegas employees that they ought to vote for Mitt Romney if they wanted their jobs. The other is a piece I read recently in the New York Times, which discussed the subsequent lawsuit surrounding this movie, which is about as interesting a story as anything in the film. Other than giving some more insight into Mr. Siegel's perspective, the piece also left me with reservations about the filmmaker's approach. There are scenes in the film which are misleading, and some that are out of order. There are scenes in the film which were more or less choreographed by the filmmaker. I know this is very common practice among documentarians, but it makes me a little uneasy all the same.

Mr. Siegel is the very wealthy man behind the Westgate time share operations in Orlando and Las Vegas. His (third?) wife is a former Mrs. Florida and mother of 7+1 who kind of presides over the madness of the household with a kooky authority. The movie starts out fairly promising, if disingenuously so. The Siegels have begun building what is meant to be the largest home in America, inspired by Versailles. The time share business is more or less devastated by the financial crisis in 2008, and Mr. Siegel, who never set much aside, is suddenly in trouble. I felt pretty ambivalent about all the characters in the film, but the film certainly has something to say about a lot of facets of America, from just about any social, cultural, or economic angle you could think of.

I don't know, something in me rejected the film. Perhaps it's meant to leave you uneasy. From a distance, these aren't supposed to be very likable people, but they are actually likable to a point. And really, despite their extreme wealth and seeming detachment from reality, I'm not sure I've ever seen such authentically American people on film before. They really seem like anyone you've ever met who lives in the suburbs. Affable, delusional, entitled, and living beyond their means to some extent. And then you have the wife who is something like Norma Desmond or Little Edie mixed with your average billionaire soccer mom. Like I said though, I feel ambivalent about it. I'll probably watch it again some time.
B-

Caesar Must Die / Cesare deve morire (Paolo & Vittorio Taviani, Italy, 2012)

I can't believe this movie won the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival. It should play well with the sort of middle class elderly person that seemed to eat it up when I saw it because it's simplistic, phony, unoriginal, sentimental, and generally tedious. It presents itself as a documentary, but it seems pretty obvious that there is no spontaneous dialogue in the film. I can't tell for sure if the dialogue is as annoying and fake sounding in Italian as the English subtitles seemed to suggest, but I sure enough hated this movie all the same. Such a strange bit of well-intentioned exploitation.
This film, at least as bland as The Secret in Their Eyes, was submitted by the Italians for best foreign film. Given the track record of the award, I'll be surprised if this stupid movie doesn't take the whole shabang.
I think the only reason I'm not giving it an F is that it was at least handsomely filmed.
D

The Bella Vista / El bella vista (Alicia Cano, Uruguay, 2012)

This relatively short feature documentary sounded quite promising. It's the story of an old soccer clubhouse which has become a transvestite brothel, according to some of the film's subjects. Nevermind that it seems to be more of a bar than anything else. It's about this sort of tranny bar in this small town in Uruguay. Everything seems to be going fine until a small group of geriatric men who used to play soccer together decide they want to run the faggots out of town. They eventually do this under false pretenses, more or less, and the building eventually becomes a Catholic church. The film is far too concerned with the mundane lives of the idiots who persecute the transsexuals as opposed to the transsexuals themselves, in my opinion and the film is also too sympathetic to them. I mean, it's an interesting film and I understand that we're dealing with a certain sense of the past being eroded by the modern world, but the dominant culture shouldn't have its apologies made for it as it forces people who are different into a dangerous demimonde. It's nice how this film considers change, and it does in a shot of one of the transsexual walking a menacing street indicate that they're essentially beneath the wheel, to borrow a metaphor from Hermann Hesse, but I guess as I was watching the film I was irritated by the smugness of the male characters. It doesn't seem like anybody learned anything in this movie, which I guess is what makes it authentic. Even as things change, they stay the same. As you can see, I have mixed emotions on this one.
C

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

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+

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

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+

catching up...

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.

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

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-

Copyright Criminals (Benjamin Franzen, 2009)

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

Capitalism: A Love Story (Michael Moore, 2009)

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-

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

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-

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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+

The September Issue / The Informant!

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

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)

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+

February Omnibus Update #3

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-