Movies by Month: June 2012, part 1

Snatch:  2000 British crime film directed by Guy Ritchie and starring a great ensemble cast including Jason Statham, Brad Pitt, Stephen Graham and Vinnie Jones.  It’s hard to go over even the basics of the plot without giving too much away, but it essentially involves a diamond heist, gangsters fixing boxing matches, and gypsies.  The pace is quick and light, it’s funny, and Brad Pitt is brilliant.  Seriously.  It’s hands-down my favorite Guy Ritchie movie, and if you like heist movies or action movies or boxing movies then see it.

Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels:  1998 British crime film directed by Guy Ritchie and starring a decent ensemble cast including Jason Statham, Nick Moran, Dexter Fletcher and Vinnie Jones.  A group of four friends are involved in a card scam, and when it goes awry they end up owing a mob boss thousands of dollars.  Luckily (?) they stumble across an opportunity to steal some loot from a group of thieves.  Who are stealing from a group of drug dealers.  And here come the antics!

I saw this movie years ago but didn’t remember much about it, and since I was on a Guy Ritchie roll I figured what the heck.  It’s good, but not as good as Snatch. 

Haywire:  2011 action film directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Gina Carano, Channing Tatum, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton and Michael Fassbender.  Mallory is a military contractor working in conjunction, I guess, with the U.S. government.  A standard operation goes bad and she realizes she’s been double-crossed.  She goes into hiding and then starts to track down the men who want her dead.  And then some fights happen.  There’s a car chase.  And so forth.

                Look, it was fine.  It was a decent action movie with a great cast, and I tip my hat to Soderbergh for taking on this kind of film with a woman in the lead role.  And Carano’s fight sequences were pretty awesome.  But she’s completely wooden when she’s not kicking ass.  Not like I’m-stone-faced-but-obviously-roiling-with-controlled-anger-underneath-my-icy-exterior-I-will-totally-fuck-some-shit-up-in-like-30-seconds-but-right-now-I’m-just-biding-my-time.  Like made of wood.

Fast Five:  2011 action film directed by Justin Lin and starring Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.  It’s the latest installment in the Fast-Furious franchise, and if you’ve seen any of the previous movies you pretty much know what to expect.  Diesel’s character breaks out of jail and it’s time to steal some cars!  In Rio!  GET SOME!  It’s entertaining, the jokes and one-liners are fairly predictable, and now I totally have a crush on Sung Kang.  Also there’s an interesting twist after the credits.

The thing that surprised me the most was the serious level of smoldering homoeroticism.  There’s just so much testosterone, so many feelings dying to be expressed.  The Rock oozed muscularity and glistened with sweat in nearly every scene; on occasion it looks like someone has misted his beard with olive oil.  My sister even pointed out the scene in which it’s clearly established that Vin Diesel is The Top in their relationship, and I thought she was joking but she WAS RIGHT OH MY GOD HE’S THE TOP. 

Sorority Row:  2009 slasher movie directed by Stewart Hendler and starring Briana Evigan, Leah Pipes, Rumer Willis, Jamie Chung and Carrie Fisher.  A group of sorority sisters play a prank that goes terribly wrong, and a year later they start dying one by one on graduation night.  It’s typical.  Slick, good production values, predictable plot, gratuitous nudity.  It was fine.

Blood Creek:  2009 horror film directed by Joel Schumacher and starring Michael Fassbender, Dominic Purcell, Henry Cavill and Emma Booth.  Evan’s brother has been missing for a year when he shows up in the middle of the night looking like Castaway and insisting that his brother bring weapons and help him kill some family.  OKAY!  Turns out that the family who had been keeping him hostage were in turn being held hostage by a former Nazi occult specialist.  Who is now kind of literally a monster.  And has kept them sort of frozen in time since 1939.  It’s actually a pretty decent horror movie, and it’s not quite as ludicrous as the plot summary sounds.

El Bulli:  2011 documentary directed by Gereon Wetzel, about a season at chef Ferran Adria’s restaurant in Catalonia.  The film starts at the close of the previous season, when the restaurant shuts down for several months so the staff can prepare a new menu.  First the restaurant’s main chefs work in a test kitchen, experimenting with ingredients in meticulous fashion, documenting everything with photographs and notes.  Eventually the film moves to the pre-opening preparations:  cleaning the restaurant, training the wait staff and assistant chefs—“We don’t lean here, we’re not in a disco.  Always proper bearing.”  And the restaurant opens and we see the final menu.

I found it relaxing (for the most part) and interesting.  If you enjoy minimalist cooking shows and don’t mind total lack of narration, then you’ll probably like this.

The Caller:  2011 supernatural thriller directed by Matthew Parkhill and starring Rachelle Lefevre and Stephen Moyer.  Mary is a young divorcee who just moved in to a new apartment.  There’s a cool old phone in the apartment that she starts receiving strange calls on.  At first she thinks it’s her abusive ex-husband harassing her, but then eerie things start to happen.  It was okay.  Definitely not the route I thought it would take, kind of a bummer.

The People vs. George Lucas:  2010 documentary directed by Alexandre O. Philippe.  In case you’re not even remotely a Star Wars fan, here’s the crux of it:  George Lucas created a hugely successful film trilogy in the late 1970s, with the promise to follow up with three prequels.  His loyal followers waited with bated breath for nearly two decades, and were essentially handed a giant pile of shit.  THEN Mr. Lucas decided that the original three Star Wars movies were “unfinished,” so he rereleased them with some CGI bullshit and poor editing choices.

The question the documentary explores is this: does an artist have the right to revisit and make significant changes to their work once it’s been shown to the masses?  Good points are raised on both sides.  Neil Gaiman points out that if he took every fan’s suggestion or preference into account while writing his novels he would end up creating the same plot with the same characters over and over again, and still would not have pleased everyone.  But it also points out that Lucas testified to Congress about the need to preserve films in their original, unaltered state, and then 20 years later decided to change his movies and not release the original versions on DVD.  And he basically made the Academy Awards the original films won for editing and visual effects moot.

Respect the fans even if, or maybe because, they are this rabid.  Even if those fans show no tolerance for your later work.  I really liked it, but probably because I really like Star Wars.

Han shot first! 

Movies by Month: May 2012, part 2

Giuliani Time:  2006 documentary directed by Kevin Keating about the career of Rudy Giuliani.  The film mostly focuses on pre-9/11 Rudy, which I knew next to nothing about before watching this.  It covers his childhood and his family’s supposed Mob connections, his start in government and his switch from Democrat to Republican, and his years as Mayor of New York City.  This last part was the most interesting to me; they go into detail about the instituting of CompStat and his fights for and against the police unions during the more controversial police violence cases.  It’s an intriguing documentary about the evolution of a major political figure, but it just ended up adding to my cynicism.  Like most of these documentaries.

Girlhood:  2003 documentary directed by Liz Garbus.  It follows Shanae Owens and Megan Jensen for a three-year period beginning in 1999, when they’re incarcerated at the Waxter Juvenile Facility in Baltimore.  Megan is in for attacking a fellow foster kid with a box cutter.  She’s the more vivacious of the two, and has been in and out of foster homes and facilities most of her life.  She willfully breaks the rules with a smile on her face, but I found myself rooting for her even while she’s talking back to facility staff and plotting her escape. 

Shanae was sent to Waxter for killing another girl in a knife fight when she was 11, during a period of downward spiral after she was gang-raped by five boys.  She says she has little memory of the incident, but her release is contingent upon her owning up to her crime and taking responsibility for it emotionally.  She’s quieter than Megan, more reserved, younger and more naïve. 

The movie goes into their respective pasts just enough to let you know it’s really fucked up.  It’s riveting, but really sad.  The ending is bittersweet and hopeful, but it’s a toss up for me about recommending it.

The Fly:  1986 sci fi film directed by David Cronenberg and starring Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis and John Getz.  Veronica is a sharp young reporter for a science journal, and while she’s scouring a terrible cocktail party for a lead on the Next Big Thing, a scientist named Seth Brundle convinces her to come back to his lab to see his top-secret invention.  What a line, am I right ladies?  And oh wow it’s a teleportation device WHAT COULD GO WRONG?  You know the story:  Brundle decides to test the device on himself, a fly gets in with him, they combine somehow and he starts to mutate over the next few days.  The make-up team did a bang-up job with this one.  It’s a really decent horror movie, though not really scary and very very gross, like really very gross.

Pee-wee’s Big Adventure:  1985 adventure comedy directed by Tim Burton and starring Paul Reubens, Elizabeth Daily and Mark Holton.  That’s right, I’d never seen this movie until now.  Oh sure, I’d catch bits and pieces here and there, and I liked the television series, but somehow never got around to watching the whole thing.  Pee-wee’s bike is stolen and he goes on a cross-country tour of strangeness to find it.  If you like Pee-wee Herman even a little bit, totally see it.  In fact, if you like ‘80s comedies in general I would say it’s worth a shot.  I loved it.  Obviously.

Stolen:  2006 documentary directed by Rebecca Dreyfus and starring Harold Smith, featuring voice work by Blythe Danner and Campbell Scott.  In 1990 a group of thieves entered the woefully unsecured Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and pulled off the largest art heist in modern history.  They walked away with 13 priceless pieces, including paintings by Vermeer, Manet, and Rembrandt.  Enter Harold Smith, Badass Art Detective.  He wears a bowler hat, a prosthetic nose, an eye patch, and is more energetic in his 80s than I am now. 

                  The movie goes back and forth between Smith’s investigation and the history of the collection’s acquisition, which is less interesting.  He flies all over to meet crazy informants, whose theories of who the thieves were range from the IRA to Whitey Bolger to a conspiracy between US Congressmen, the IRA and Whitey Bolger.  It’s a cute documentary; Smith is by far the most interesting aspect. 

The Hurt Locker:  2008 action movie directed by Kathryn Bigelow and starring Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty.  William James arrives as the new team leader of a three-man Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit, and quickly alienates his fellow unit members with his disdain for procedure and severe adrenaline habit.  It’s a nail-biter, really intense, and goes above and beyond the typical day-in-the-life-of war movie.  I loved it, and I love Bigelow; that lady makes a damn fine action movie.  Renner is brilliant.  I mean, it’s really really super good.  It takes a hell of a war movie to make me cry.

Seamless:  2005 documentary directed by Douglas Keeve about the first Vogue/CFDA Fashion Fund competition.  The film follows three of the competition finalists:  Doo-Ri Chung, Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCullough (the duo behind Proenza Schouler) and Alexander Plokhov.  The style and personalities of the designers differ greatly, which I really liked.  The viewer is given a sneak-peak at the judging process, but most of the documentary focuses on the designers.  Though very different, they are all struggling with balancing work and personal relationships, they all struggle with production problems and tight deadlines and STRESS.  I’ll say it again, I love watching fashion shows and documentaries because they make me feel better about my crazy job.  I wanted all three of them to win, and I felt like the judging committee went with the safe bet.  But this was made several years ago, hindsight 20/20, all that.  It was pretty fluffy, but I liked it