21 Hours at Munich: 1976 drama directed by William A. Graham and starring William Holden, Shirley Knight, and Franco Nero. A rather lame retelling of the events of September 4, 1972, when a Palestinian militant group took members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage during the Summer Games in Munich. It seemed like the filmmakers tried to take a stab at showing some of the political difficulties facing the West German police, the human side of the militants, and the planning errors that led to tragedy at the end of the day. But they weren’t really able to pull it off. It’s about a real international crisis, fraught with potentially disastrous implications for the volatile Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it’s all taking place in GERMANY for F’s sake! It shouldn’t drag! Fraught! And the acting is a mixed bag. Why doesn’t Holden have an accent?
Some movies keep you in suspense even if you know what’s going to happen—this isn’t one of them. Watch One Day in September instead.
The Roommate: 2011 thriller directed by Christian E. Christiansen and starring Leighton Meester and Minka Kelly. Actors from various CW television shows, the Twilight films and Billy Zane unite for what is essentially a shot-by-shot remake of Single White Female: girl gets roommate, roommate becomes obsessed with girl, tries to become girl, obsession becomes deadly. Watch SWF instead. But I must give Meester snaps for doing almost as freaky-excellent a job as Jennifer Jason Leigh.
Wild Hunt: 2009 Canadian horror/drama directed by Alexandre Franchi and starring Mark A. Krupa, Ricky Mabe, and Tiio Horn. Erik has a father with Alzheimer’s, an older brother who is super into the LARPing lifestyle and shirking his familial responsibilities, and a girlfriend whose interest in him is waning. When Evelyn starts following Erik’s brother to the LARP events, he gets suspicious that something shady is going on and hightails it to the land of elves and Vikings and shamans to win her back.
I really didn’t like it at first. It was weirdly funny enough to keep me interested, so I kept with it and holy CRAP I’m so glad I did. I didn’t think this Evelyn chick was worth the hassle. I will admit to yelling at the screen something like: “She cheated on you with a dude who thinks he’s a wizard named Murtagh. With a LARPER, man. Grow a pair.” But against my sage advice he goes there and is forced to enter the game as a player, and ends up disrupting the plans of Murtagh’s crew by stealing the fair Evelyn away. Shit gets real when the lines between game and reality blur. The ending was very The Departed. Totally see it.
Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey: 2011 documentary directed by Constance Marks and narrated by Whoopi Goldberg, about Kevin Clash, the puppeteer behind Elmo. Um, it’s adorable. I had no idea he’s been involved in so many other projects besides Sesame Street. He played the obnoxious Baby Sinclair in the TV show Dinosaurs (try not to hold that against him), Splinter in the first live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, and did muppeteering work on Labyrinth, Follow That Bird, and several Muppets movies. Anyway. I’m not really an Elmo person; I was far more partial to characters like Snuffy. C’mon: a huge furry elephant with an Eeyore-like disposition and giant eyelashes? Of course I liked him.
But I still liked this a lot. He seems like a really solid dude, it was nice hearing his history and learning more about the early days of the Henson crew. Definitely worth seeing.
The Guard: 2011 Irish black comedy directed by John Michael McDonagh and starring Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle. Gleeson is an unconventional, hilariously un-PC Irish policeman who finds himself working with Cheadle’s buttoned-up FBI agent to bring down a drug smuggling ring. I’d rather not say more. It’s darkly silly, engaging, uncomfortable at times, and I highly recommend it. It may not be for everyone, but if you liked In Bruges or Brendan Gleeson generally, then see it.
An American Haunting: 2005 horror film directed by Courtney Solomon and starring Donald Sutherland, Sissy Spacek, James D’Arcy, and Rachel Hurd-Wood. It’s based on the Bell Witch ghost story, and holy crap is it pedestrian. It’s boring, not the least bit scary, and up until the end seemed very much like a Disney version of a horror film. Except Pinocchio was scarier than this nonsense. The swooping ghost-POV camera shots were discombobulating, and sadly that was the only part of the movie that caused a reaction from me. The ending is really inconsistent with the almost wholesome tone of the rest of the film, which I guess may have been what Solomon was going for? But it comes off like a last-ditch effort to elicit scares and ends up just grossing you out.
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| Oh Jesus, not FEATHERS! |
If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front: 2011 documentary directed by Marshall Curry. It tells the history of the eco-activist group Earth Liberation Front, and the trials of several of its members. If you set a fire as a political statement, is it arson or terrorism? Should the ELF members on trial be shown leniency, given that they went out of their way to ensure no one was physically harmed by their actions? Do the ends justify the means? And what were the ends they were aiming for? How realistic were those goals? Have things actually improved, or did they set the environmentalism movement back? It’s a really intriguing documentary, very well done, and regardless of where you fall on the green spectrum I think it’s worth watching.
The Mist: 2007 sci-fi horror film directed by Frank Darabont and starring Thomas Jane, Andre Braugher, Marcia Gay Harden, Toby Jones, and like 5 people from The Walking Dead. A heavy fog rolls into town the morning after a nasty thunderstorm, and several townspeople take shelter in a grocery store when they realize the mist is somehow killing people. OK, I know. At first I was all “Oooooh mist . . . scary.” But it does get pretty scary once the source of the mist’s killing power is revealed. The acting is fairly solid all around. Harden is hilarious as the uber-Christian soothsayer who attempts to convince her fellow refugees that God’s Judgment is at hand. I wanted her to be less crazy in the beginning, and let it ramp up more slowly, but it’s still a solid performance. It’s not at all what I expected, half an hour too long, and the ending is brutal. I say give it a shot if you like Walking Dead, or the bleak no-light-at-tunnel’s-end kind of horror movies.
Incident at Oglala: 1992 documentary directed by Michael Apted, about the trial of three members of the American Indian Movement for the death of two FBI agents at the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975. The story is fascinating, but it’s a scattershot mess of a movie. The introduction is jumbled and clunky, the viewer is seldom reminded who the subjects being interviewed are, and even when that information is briefly provided it’s not often put into context. Who are these people, and what role did they play in the incident? I found it pretty disappointing. I expected much more given the solid subject matter.
Serenity: 2005 feature-length continuation of the space-western television series Firefly, directed by Joss Whedon and starring Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Alan Tudyk, Jewel Staite, the whole gang. Both the series and the movie follow a ragtag group of smugglers trying to get by on the fringes of space society in the year 2517. I don’t want to give anything more away. If you like Joss Whedon, then watch the series (start with episode 2, not the pilot) and Serenity, and revel in the Whedonius. I resisted this for a long time because I never could get into Angel and Dollhouse looked just awful and it’s a space western. I’m glad I finally came to my senses.
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