Movies By Month: November 2011

Paranormal Activity 3:  2011 horror film directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman and starring Chloe Csengery, Jessica Tyler Brown, Lauren Bittner, and Christopher Nicholas Smith.   It’s similar to the first, and I’m assuming also to the second.  Are there ghosts?  Let’s set up some night vision cameras and find out!  The twist with this one is the little girl with an imaginary friend.  As a former little girl with an imaginary friend, it freaked me out on that level.  But aside from a few jumps and some surprisingly good acting on the part of Csengery, it was kind of forgettable.  Decent, but not great.

Attack the Block:  2011 British sci fi thriller directed by Joe Cornish and starring Jodie Whittaker and John Boyega.  Sam (Whittaker) is returning to her apartment complex after work when she’s mugged by a group of teenage boys.  In the middle of the attack, a strange object plummets from the sky, giving Sam time to escape.  Moses (Boyega), the leader of the gang, goes to investigate and is himself attacked by a strange creature.  They manage to kill it, but other larger creatures are soon on their tail.  Since it turns out they live in the same complex as Sam, she’s soon dragged into the fight and must work with her former muggers if they’re going to survive the alien invasion.

          It’s funny and exciting and scary and interesting and I loved it and you should see it.  The acting is pretty fair, the aliens are realistic enough to be scary but not gross or ridiculous, the pacing is excellent, and there’s a cameo by Nick Frost!  Seriously, SEE IT.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea:  1954 Disney adventure movie directed by Richard Fleischer and starring Kirk Douglas, James Mason, Peter Lorre, and Paul Lukas.  It’s based on the Jules Verne novel, you know the drill:  some dudes are on a mission to find a giant sea monster when their ship is destroyed, they’re rescued by Captain Nemo who turns out to be master of the submarine that’s being mistaken for said sea monster.  Because he’s sinking ships.  Because he’s totally nuts.

          Douglas is great.  He’s at the height of his vigorousness, he gets drunk with the ship’s pet seal and plays a ukulele made out of a sea turtle.  Just delightful.  And Mason brings his freakish seriousness to the role, which gives it a little more heft than your average Disney movie.  As a child I was hugely into live-action Disney movies of this era, both musical and non-musical, and this one definitely holds up to viewing as an adult.  Assuming you share the same proclivity.

Rocket Science:  2007 dramedy directed by Jeffrey Blitz and starring Reece Thompson, Anna Kendrick, Nicholas D’Agosto, Vincent Piazza, and Aaron Yoo.  Hal Hefner is a sweet kid with a stutter, an unbalanced klepto older brother, and a crush on Ginny, his high school’s rock star debater.  Under the tutelage of Ginny he ends up learning about the awkwardness of crushes and first kisses and emotional revenge.  Oh, high school.  I found the music almost oppressively indie twee (thanks a lot, Clem Snide), and the narration a little much at times.  But Kendrick’s Six-of-Blossom-like speech pattern was adorable, and Piazza is f-ing brilliant as Hal’s older brother.  Overall it’s an OK movie with a few perfect scenes.  And it made me want to be 15 again just long enough to awkwardly and frantically run down a high school hallway.

Breaking Dawn, Part 1:  2011 young adult vampire drama, you already know all this.  I have no excuse.  I would just like to point out that we all have our guilty pleasures, and this is my most shameful.  They’re totally ridiculous movies with little redeeming value and I enjoy them immensely.  Deal with it.

Season of the Witch:  2011 supernatural action movie directed by Dominic Sena and starring Nicolas Cage, Ron Perlman, and Claire Foy.  Yet another Black Plague-era witchy movie.  Cage and Perlman are knights escorting a prisoner of the church to some monks so they can perform a ritual that will supposedly end the plague.  But is the girl a witch or a scapegoat? 

          I was feeling ambivalent about everything else in my Instant queue, so I thought what the hell.  Why not.  It was surprisingly not totally awful.  I mean, it certainly wasn’t good, and you should keep in mind that I enjoy ridiculous action movies.  I will say that Black Death is better, but that shouldn’t surprise you.  Who do you want to see as a medieval knight fighting the forces of darkness:  Sean Bean or Nic Cage’s terrible hair?  

Badlands:  1973 crime drama directed by Terrence Malick and starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek.  Loosely based on the real-life spree killers Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, the film follows teen couple and mass murderers Holly and Kit as they traipse around South Dakota messing people up.  Think Swiss Family Robinson meets Bonnie and Clyde: building tree forts and laying snares and killing the law.  It was visually beautiful, the music was appropriately weird, and the acting seemed to lack . . . pizazz?  I guess?  But perhaps that’s because they’re supposed to be misanthropic teens?  Dunno.  It was fine.  Fun fact for West Wing fans: Kit puts his jacket on the same way Josiah Bartlett does.

Movies By Month: October 2011, part 2

The Last Exorcism:  2010 “found footage” horror film directed by Daniel Stamm and starring Patrick Fabian, Ashley Bell, Louis Herthum, and Caleb Landry Jones.  Reverend Cotton Marcus is a slick, charming preacher who used to perform exorcisms, and is now on a mission to debunk them.  He and his film crew travel to a remote area of Louisiana to document how he heals a supposedly possessed girl by tricking her with lights and sound effects and sleights of hand into thinking she’s being cured.  But could she actually be possessed?  And if not, can his smoke-and-mirrors routine help her?

          I liked this immediately.  It’s clever, and even though we’re all past the Blair Witch found footage crap I didn’t mind it at all.  It should be noted that I do not scare easily.  I jump in my seat now and then, but it takes a hell of a movie to really freak me out, and this definitely did.  Right up until the WTF ending, that is, which was so hokey and stupid it killed the mood that was so carefully set by the first hour and a half of the movie.  That being said, had it not taken that route, I would probably avoid rural areas and farms and woods and the dark for a long time.

What?  I do yoga.

Of Human Bondage:  1934 drama directed by John Cromwell and starring Bette Davis and Leslie Howard.  A medical student pines over a bratty waitress who uses him for his money.  But you can’t turn a ho into a housewife.  Davis’s cockney accent is terrible.  This movie was remade twice for reasons I don’t understand.  It was lame and I had little sympathy for the mopey main character.  Grow a spine, dude; she’s not even that cute.

The Descent 2:  2009 British horror film directed by Jon Harris and starring Shauna Macdonald, Gavan O’Herlihy, and Krysten Cummings.  Have you seen the first?  It’s much the same.  If not, spoiler alert!  A group of hikers has gone missing and the lone survivor has amnesia.  The hiking rescue team takes her back into the cave system and she’s like:  Oh yeah, there are totally creepy blind pale mutant people-things down here who killed all my friends, so we should probably get the frak out of here.  The ending was dumb, much like the first.  But it was all right.  Keep your expectations low if you liked the first movie and you might enjoy it.

Hisss:  2010 “movie” directed by Jennifer Chambers Lynch and starring Jeff Doucette, Malika Sherawat, Irrfan Khan, and Divya Dutta.  This guy has brain cancer and steals a snake-god’s mate to get this stone that’ll give him eternal life.  The snake god can take human form and she takes revenge on bad men who are mean to women or something.

          So . . . yeah.  It was campy beyond excuse, the special effects were terrible, and the acting was abysmal with the exceptions of Khan and Dutta.  I mostly want someone to watch it so we can discuss how ridiculous it is, but I can’t endorse you losing hours of your life on it either.

George Washington:  2000 drama directed by David Gordon Green and starring Candance Evanofski, Donald Holden, and Paul Schneider.  It’s mostly about a tragedy in a rural town in North Carolina, and kids wandering through abandoned buildings.  Criterion rarely steers me wrong, but it was plodding, the music was annoying (too loud, maybe?  Too insistent?), and the acting was a mixed bag.  I will give credit to Eddie Rause, who played an uncle of the main character.  He was great.  Skip it.

Hardcore:  1979 drama directed by Paul Schrader and starring George C. Scott, Peter Boyle, Ilah Davis, and Season Hubley.  Jake Van Dorne (Scott) is a religious single father and wealthy businessman in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  When his daughter disappears during a youth group trip to California and it seems she’s run off to be a porn star, he decides to track her down and bring her back home.  Because nothing is greater than the allure of mid-Michigan, folks.  I had a tough time committing to this one.  There’s really no explanation given for why she went so far astray.  She’s not just doing porn.  She’s in on the craziest, far-outiest shit there is.  I just didn’t buy that big of a leap with no details about her thoughts and feelings, what led to this.  The ending also felt unrealistic.  All that being said, Scott’s performance is out-freaking-standing.  So if you’re a big fan of George C. Scott, then see it.

Hairspray:  1988 comedy directed by John Waters and starring Ricki Lake, Divine, Debbie Harry, Sonny Bono, Jerry Stiller, Leslie Ann Powers, the list goes on.  It’s about zaftig women and giant hairdos and amazing clothes and interracial tensions and awesome music and cameos by Josh Charles and Ric Ocasek and DANCING.  You know I like the dancing.  I’m not ashamed to admit that I danced around my living room quite a bit while watching this movie.  It was adorable, in that very special Waters way.

Rewatch! The Pianist:  2002 biographical drama directed by Roman Polanski and starring Adrien Brody and many others (sorry, there are a lot of people with small to medium roles all of whom are equally important.  Too many to name).  Wladyslaw Szpilman is a famous pianist working for Warsaw Radio when Poland is invaded in 1939.  As the movie progresses we see the evolution of the lives of Warsaw’s Jewish population:  restrictions, armbands, relocations, camps.  I saw this in the theater and was sobbing by the end.  Then I read the memoir this is based on, and was again sobbing.  So it’s amazing, but prepare yourself for a cry.

Movies By Month: October 2011, part 1

The Rachel Papers:  1989 British romantic comedy directed by Damian Harris and starring Dexter Fletcher, Ione Skye, James Spader, and Jonathan Price.  Charles (Fletcher, who played John Martin in Band of Brothers) is a dating chameleon, changing his personality, tastes, even how his apartment is decorated, to land his conquests.  Skye is Rachel, his Mount Everest.  If you’ll forgive the pun.  Sadly, the perfect girl already has a boyfriend.  And when he does finally get her, he discovers that—surprise, surprise—she has quirks and annoying tendencies like every other girl he’s dated.  It was fine.  I was happy with the ending, at least.  Which is rare for romcoms.  I wanted to see more of the lesser characters.  Price is hilarious as the insane brother-in-law.  Spader was barely present, and dammit, I just want all the 1980s Spader you can throw at me.  Jared Harris also has a small but decent role.

  

The Atomic Café:  1982 documentary directed by Jayne Loader and Kevin & Pierce Rafferty.  Using government propaganda films, old news reels, Army films, and the like, they piece together a history of the atomic age with a bit of snark.  I thought it was pretty interesting, especially the recommendations for supplies in your family fallout shelter and the whole Duck & Cover nonsense, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re really into the Cold War.

The Debt:  2011 thriller directed by John Madden and starring Helen Mirren, Sam Worthington, Martin Csokas, Ciaran Hinds, Tom Wilkinson, and Jessica Chastain.  The movie is split between the past and the present.  Past:  It’s 1965, and three Mossad agents have been tasked with capturing a Nazi war criminal and returning him to Israel for trial.  Present:  It’s 1997, and despite being hailed as heroes for the last 30 years, things didn’t really turn out as planned.  There’s been a cover up, and now it’s up to the agents to do some damage control. 

          First I would like to say that Martin Csokas is a joy in my life, and whenever I see him in a movie it makes me happy.  You may remember him from a bit part in The Bourne Supremacy.  Or if you’re a total nerd, you may remember him from the LOTR movies, in which he played Celeborn, husband of Galadriel, Lord of the Galadhrim, co-ruler of Lothlorien.  He’s delightful.  But I digress.

          This sounded like my cup of tea:  Mirren, Mossad, retribution, the Csokas.  But it was utterly predictable until one of the very last scenes, and even then the shock of something unexpected was temporary.  I would say skip it.

Stevie:  2002 documentary by Steven James.  James returns to Pomona, a small town in southern Illinois, to reconnect with a man he used to be a Big Brother to.  They have a brief reunion, then the movie picks up again two years later after Stevie is charged with child molestation.  I’m torn on this one, I have to say.  I like James.  I really enjoyed Hoop Dreams, and I’m looking forward to seeing The Interrupters.  It’s an excellent documentary, but holy shit is it depressing.  And while I think it’s very honest, it also felt a little exploitative at times, of Stevie and his family and the victim, who is sort of glossed over.  The guilt James feels is clear, you get that he’s trying very hard to be fair, but on occasion it starts to drift over that line.

          But it IS excellent.  It shows all sides to the questions it raises.  What is the responsibility of Big Brothers/Big Sisters and similar organizations to those they help?  Is it fair or appropriate to beat yourself up if someone you mentor makes the wrong choices later in life?  Does being a victim excuse victimizing others?  Could you continue to support someone who is guilty of child molestation?  Should you?  Do sex offenders need punishment or treatment or both?

          If there is any light in the DARK PIT OF DESPAIR that is this movie, it is seen only briefly in Stevie’s former foster parents, whose sympathy for this seriously fucked up man is so genuine and pure that it almost almost restores your faith in humanity or the system or whatever.

Tangled: 2010 Disney animated family movie directed by Nathan Greno and Bryon Howard and starring Mandy Moore, Zachary Levi, and Donna Murphy.  OK, think Rapunzel with several cute animal sidekicks.  Also her hair has healing powers.  I skipped most of the songs (the one in the tavern was worth watching) because Alan Menken wears on me sometimes.  I mean, I love Newsies, don’t get me wrong.  But there’s only so much I can take.  Anyway.  It was cute!  It was fluffy and funny!  And the Dashing Hero character reminded me of Craig Horner from Legend of the Seeker.  Miss that dude.

In the Company of Men:  1997 “black comedy” (really Wikipedia?  I beg to differ) directed by Neil LaBute and starring Aaron Eckhart, Matt Malloy, and Stacy Edwards.  Two middle-management dickwads decide it would be a lark to simultaneously date and then simultaneously dump their shy, self-conscious deaf coworker.  The acting is great all around, but I didn’t care.  It was awful.  It made me hateful.  People suck.

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil:  2010 Canadian horror/comedy directed by Eli Craig and starring Alan Tudyk, Tyler Labine, and Katrina Bowden.  Tudyk and Labine are Tucker and Dale, two buddies working on their vacation cabin in West Viriginia.  A group of college kids decide to camp nearby and due to a series of mishaps, coincidences, and perhaps seeing Deliverance a time too many, the kids start to believe that Tucker and Dale are backwoods psychos intent on murdering them all.  A theory that is reinforced when they start dying in freak accidents.  Think Shawn of the Dead, but with hillbillies instead of zombies.  I’m sorry, that’s insensitive.  I believe we prefer the term “yokel.”  It was hilarious, definitely see it.

Movies By Month: September 2011, part 2

The Bad Seed: 1956 horror movie directed by Mervyn LeRoy and starring Nancy Kelly, Patty McCormack, Henry Jones, and Evelyn Varden.  Rhoda is a perfect little girl.  She wears perfect little dresses and has perfect manners and perfect braids and is a perfect total sociopath.  The people in her life come to realize she’s a homicidal maniac, but how to stop her?  Soooo melodramatic.  Whatever, it was the ‘50s.  Jones and Kelly are way over the top as the creepy maintenance man and high-strung parent.  Talk about chewing the scenery.  But Eileen Heckart is AMAZING as Mrs. Daigle, the grieving mother of one of Rhoda’s victims.  Apparently the book had a different ending, which sounded way juicier, but the Hays Code put the kibosh on that.  Do yourself a favor and skip the hokey closing credits, it kills the tone of the final scene.

The House of Sand and Fog: 2003 drama directed by Vadim Perelman and starring Jennifer Connelly, Ben Kingsley, Shohreh Aghdashloo, and Ron Eldard.  Kathy Nicolo is a depressed alcoholic who can’t seem to get her shit together.  Massoud Amir Behrani is a former Iranian colonel who fled to the States with his family, and wound up working menial jobs.  Kathy loses her house due to a clerical error, Behrani purchases it from the bank hoping it’s the investment opportunity he’s been waiting for, and they spend the rest of the movie negotiating with each other over said house.  It’s not as boring as it sounds.  It’s really about two very different personalities from very different cultures trying to navigate a situation that both of their lives depend on.  Kingsley and Aghdashloo (heart) are particularly outstanding, and Connelly, of course, cries in like every other scene.  It’s really good, but definitely a bummer.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall:  2008 romantic comedy directed by Nicholas Stoller and starring Jason Segel, Mila Kunis, Russell Brand, and Kristen Bell.  Famous woman breaks up with sweet dude, he goes on vacation to get over her, runs into her with her new famous man, tries to tough it out in paradise while simultaneously developing a crush on the cute front desk clerk.  It must be said:  I hate romantic comedies.  Generally speaking.  But this was much funnier than I thought it would be.  I was totally surprised by Brand.  Jonah Hill was an annoying blip in the movie, and the whole sideplot with Jack McBrayer (Kenneth on 30 Rock) should have been left out entirely.  It added nothing to the plot, provided no real additional jokes, and felt like a distraction.  Overall, pretty solid guilty pleasure movie.

Bill Cunningham New York:  2010 documentary directed by Richard Press.  New York Times photographer and columnist Bill Cunningham might just be the most adorable person ever.  Despite being a HUGELY influential figure in the fashion world, he lives a Spartan lifestyle, wears the same blue work coat every day, rides a Schwinn even to black tie events, and eats mainly at cheap diners.  He’s kind and very particular and honest and you just want to be his friend.  It’s a really great documentary, even if you don’t care much for fashion.  In one of my favorite scenes, he’s waiting patiently to be checked in at Paris Fashion Week.  While a young intern is checking his credentials, another man comes swooping in, takes Bill by the arm, and tells the whippersnapper “Please, he’s the most important person on Earth.”  And Bill just smiles politely and goes inside.  Definitely see it.

Henry & June:  1990 drama directed by Philip Kaufman and starring Fred Ward, Maria de Medeiros, and Uma Thurman.  Anais Nin had a lot of sex. Thurman’s accent is terrible.  That’s pretty much it.

Brick:  2005 neo-noir (stay with me, here) directed by Rian Johnson and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Nora Zehetner, Lukas Haas, and Emilie de Ravin.  Brendan’s girlfriend winds up dead, and it’s up to him to solve the murder.  Because that’s what high school students do, right?  Think Dashiell Hammett novel.  But with teenagers.  But in a good way.  It’s clever and the pace is exhilarating and the hardboiled detective story dialogue loses you occasionally but it’s fun trying to keep up.  I feel like I could watch this five more times and still catch something new.  Totally see it.

Doubt:  2008 drama directed by John Patrick Shanley and starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams.  Sister Aloysius is concerned that Father Flynn has taken an interest in a young altar boy, and the movie centers around her investigation.  Is there really something sinister going on, or is she looking for a reason to get the modern and unorthodox priest dismissed because she doesn’t like him personally?  It’s brilliant.  Streep’s severity is mesmerizing.  She just completely owns this movie.  Her performance is perfect.  Seriously.  She does more with a look, with a gesture, than most actresses can ever achieve with far more effort.  OK, I’m done gushing.  Hoffman is also excellent, Amy Adams holds her own, and despite her very limited screen time, Viola Davis totally earned her Supporting Actress nomination.

 

Movies By Month: September 2011, part 1

The Producers:  1968 satire written and directed by Mel Brooks, and starring Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, and Dick Shawn.  Max Bialystock (Mostel) is a Broadway shyster, taking money from elderly women to fund his terrible plays.  Enter Leo Bloom (Wilder), the adorably neurotic accountant who points out that if one were to oversell shares on a total flop, one could make scads of money.  They go into business together, find the most offensive play they can, and Springtime For Hiter is born.  Of course things don’t quite work out they way they planned.  Shawn is hysterical as the hippie actor who plays Hitler.  And who doesn’t love Gene Wilder?

Reservation Road:  2007 drama directed by Terry George and starring Mark Ruffalo, Mira Sorvino, Joaquin Phoenix, and Jennifer Connelly (or Weepy McCriesallthetime, as I like to call her).  Dwight (Ruffalo) is a divorced dad trying to keep his life on track, he kills a boy his son’s age in a hit-and-run accident, and while he’s trying to figure out whether and how to come forward, he’s hired by the boy’s family to investigate the accident.  That was his fault.  Phoenix and Sadface are totally believable as the grieving parents, because these kinds of movies are all they do.  They’ve had practice.  As Phoenix becomes more obsessed with finding his son’s killer, my sympathies almost switched to feel bad for Ruffalo’s character.  The ending is fairly predictable.  It was decent, not great.

Apocalypto:  2006 epic action movie directed by Mel-freaking-Gibson, starring Rudy Youngblood, Raoul Trujillo, Dalia Hernandez, and Gerardo Taracena.  In a jungle in 16^th century Mesoamerica, Jaguar Paw’s village is attacked by Mayan raiders, his people are mostly wiped out and the few survivors are taken hostage.  His pregnant wife manages to avoid capture by sneaking down into a pit with their young son, but the rope she used to climb down is cut.  So he must try to escape, run back through the jungle to their destroyed village with his captors in hot pursuit, and rescue his family before they starve or she goes into labor.

Holy shit this movie is so good.  I’m dead serious.  Mel Gibson.  I can kind of understand why it wasn’t a bigger success?  Mel Gibson.  Plus, the target demographic for this kind of film is the beer pong set, and I don’t think they like subtitles.  But honestly, it’s one of the best action movies I’ve ever seen.  Mel Gibson.  It’s interesting, good pacing, and the visuals are stunning.

Dogfight:  1991 drama directed by Nancy Savoca and starring River Phoenix and Lili Taylor.  Eddie Birdlace (Phoenix) and a few of his fellow Marines are on 24-hour leave before heading to Vietnam.  The plan is to attend a “dogfight,” the premise being they each show up with the ugliest date they can find, and whoever succeeds in bringing the ugliest wins a prize.  The dates, of course, are not aware of the wager.  Sounds nice, right?  Eddie stumbles across an awkward waitress at a coffee shop and convinces her to go with him.  After she figures out what’s going on, Eddie spends the rest of the night trying to make it up to her.  It’s a little too predictable, and they show so little of ‘Nam at the end that it would have been better to leave it to the imagination.  But it’s still cute, and Phoenix and Taylor are great.

Red White & Blue:  2010 thriller directed by Simon Rumley and starring Amanda Fuller, Noah Taylor, and Marc Senter.  I’m having a hard time trying to figure out how to describe this without giving anything away.  It’s a brilliant, fucking scary thriller; it’s totally messed up, and if you like thrillers and scary movies then you should absolutely see it.  Just be prepared:  the music is really intense, and within the first ten minutes you’ll see the main character sleep with five guys and take two I-hate-myself showers (there’s a point to it, it perfectly sets the tone of the movie and the character, trust me).  It’s violent, but not overly gory . . . well, you’re spared the moment of impact anyway.  Until the climax.  No one is a good guy. 

The Fall:  2006 adventure fantasy directed by Tarsem Singh and starring Lee Pace and Catinca Untaru.  Roy Walker (Pace) is a heartbroken stuntman convalescing in a Los Angeles area hospital in the 1920s, and he befriends a little girl named Alexandria (Untaru), a migrant worker who broke her arm picking oranges at a local farm.  Walker bribes Alexandria to procure him morphine so he can commit suicide (obviously she doesn’t realize what he wants the drugs for) by telling her a story of five heroes seeking revenge against the great villain Odious.  The film goes back and forth between the fantasy world and real life.  It’s absolutely gorgeous--think The Cell, which was also directed by Singh.  The dynamic between Pace and girl is excellent; their dialogue is ad libbed at times, and their interactions seem very natural.  It’s heartwarming and funny and sad and the ending is perfect and I want to watch it over and over.

Twelve O’Clock High:  1949 action movie directed by Henry King and starring Dean Jagger, Hugh Marlowe, Gary Merrill, and Mr. Gregory Peck.  It’s early in the days of America’s involvement in World War II (are you totally shocked that I watched this?), and the 918^th Heavy Bombardment Group is suffering heavy losses.  So Gregory Peck shows up to kick some ass.  He plays Brigadier General Frank Savage, who gets the boys in shape through discipline and orderliness and training and paperwork and long dramatic stares.  It’s pretty good.  See it if you like the Peck or WWII movies.

The Legend of 1900:  1998 drama directed by Guiseppe Tornatore and starring Tim Roth and Pruitt Taylor Vince.  1900 (Roth) is abandoned as a baby on an ocean liner, raised by workers in the boiler room, is recognized as a musical prodigy and joins the ship’s orchestra.  Max Tooney (Vince) is a trumpet player who befriends 1900 and tries to convince him to leave the ship and see the outside world.  It’s just OK.  There are some really good moments, just not enough of them to keep me interested.  There’s a showdown between 1900 and Jelly Roll Morton (played by Clarence Williams III), and that’s definitely worth looking up on Youtube.  OK, and I know this is a nitpicky thing, and he obviously can’t help it, but Vince has pathologic nystagmus, which causes his eyes to move back and forth involuntarily.  At high speeds.  Dude has a lot of close-ups in this movie.  It’s near seizure-inducing.  I feel bad, but I found it really distracting.

Movies By Month: August 2011, part 2

I know, I know.  I'm really far behind.  I'll catch up soon, I promise.  Don't worry.  The five of you who read this blog will have plenty of reviews coming soon!

The Conspirator:  2010 historical drama about the trial of Mary Surratt after the Lincoln assassination; directed by Robert Redford and starring James McAvoy, Rachel Wood, Robin Wright, and Kevin Kline.  Review for normal human beings and/or the average movie watcher:  it’s great.  I’m planning a more thorough review for the hardcore history nerds in the near future, so I won’t bore the rest of you with the little details.  It’s very well done, the acting is excellent for the most part, the cinematography is beautiful.  See it if you like historical dramas or are as rabid a McAvoy fan as I am.

Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.:  1999 Errol Morris documentary about execution expert and Holocaust conspiracy theorist Fred Leuchter.  Leuchter was a solver of execution “inefficiencies.”  Electrocution, lethal injection, gallows, gas chambers—he did it all.  He speaks about electrocution mishaps matter-of-factly; seems more concerned with the engineering problem than the desire to lesser human suffering.  He’s eventually called as an expert witness in a Canadian Holocaust-denier’s trial, and his methods of obtaining evidence and testimony lead to his downfall.

Leuchter is entirely unsympathetic, but fascinating to watch.  The lack of empathy in his interviews is striking.  This is one of the better Morris documentaries in my opinion.  There’s this weird blinking on and off thing that the camera does that’s really annoying, but other than that it’s excellent.

Phantoms: 1998 horror movie based on the Dean Koontz novel; directed by Joe Chappelle and starring Ben Affleck, Joanna Going, Liev Schreiber, Rose McGowan, and Peter O’Toole.  Zero exposition.  The scares start at minute 4.  McGowan and Going are driving along and then suddenly a bunch of people are dead and there might be a killer or alien or something bad.  Schrieber’s glasses are amazing.  So boring.

Jesus’ Son:  1999 dramedy (?) directed by Alison Maclean and starring Billy Crudup and Samantha Morton.  FH (Crudup) is a strange, sometimes clairvoyant young man drifting through the 1970s in a drug-addled haze.  It’s kind of about him working to get clean, I guess?  Not at all what I was expecting (hippies).  There’s narration that isn’t annoying, Denis Leary and Jack Black have small parts that are surprisingly well acted, and it’s kind of cute.  In an everyone’s-on-heroin sort of way.  I actually liked this a lot.  There’s a particularly hilarious scene in which a whacked out Morton dances around idiotically to the song “Sweet Pea,” and since I’m the kind of person who dances around idiotically for no reason whatsoever on a semi-frequent basis I appreciated that.

Stop-Loss:  2008 drama directed by Kimberly Peirce and starring Ryan Phillippe, Channing Tatum, Abbie Cornish, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.  Phillippe, Tatum, and G-L have just returned from a brutal tour in Iraq, and are dealing with PTSD, depression, alcoholism, and readjusting to civilian life when one of them is stop-lossed.  Choosing to go AWOL rather than returning to the place that emotionally damaged him and his friends, Phillippe goes on the run to track down a senator who promised to help him.  I was totally shocked by how good this movie was.  The acting is excellent (Channing Tatum!  I know!), it covers all different viewpoints on the war and the stop-loss issue specifically, the pacing is good, and it felt completely realistic to me.  Weird, right?  See it.

Tideland:  2005 fantasy-thriller directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Jennifer Tilly, Jeff Bridges, and Jodelle Ferland.  Apparently it’s about a little girl who’s essentially abandoned by her parents and creates this strange fantasy life that revolves around disembodied Barbie heads.  I turned it off after 15 minutes.  I’ve learned with Gilliam films that if I don’t like it immediately, investing another hour and a half isn’t going to turn that around.

Micmacs:  2009 Jeunet. ‘Nuff said.  Starring Dany Boon, Dominique Pinon (heart), and Andre Dussolier.  After suffering two traumatic experiences, Bazil (Boon) falls in with a group of artist-thief-scavengers and hatches a plan to take down the arms dealers who caused his grief.  Totally adorable, as per usual.  The Elastic Girl character played by Julie Ferrier is a little too much for me at times, but she evens out by the end.  Not my favorite Jeunet film—can anything top A Very Long Engagement?—but still totally solid.

Flame & Citron:  2008 action-drama about the Danish resistance in World War II, directed by Ole Christian Madsen and starring Thure Lindhardt and Mads Mikkelsen.  Flame (Thure) and Citron (Mads) are basically total badasses:  assassinating Nazi officers and Nazi sympathizers, getting it on with femme fatale double agents, and looking hot doing it.  All snark aside, it’s based on the lives of Bent Faurschou-Hviid and Jørgen Haagen Schmith, two of the most famous Danish Resistance fighters.

          Don’t worry, this isn’t one of those uber-nerdy period pieces that only I and my fellow history buffs enjoy.  I knew basically nothing about the Danish Resistance and still thought it was awesome.  I realize it’s completely unrealistic to ask for a happy ending in these kinds of movies, but maybe just once?  I really liked these characters and I wanted good things for them.  But yeah, duh.  It’s not going to end well.

Movies By Month: August 2011, part 1

Style Wars:  1983 Tony Silver documentary about early hip hop culture in New York, with an emphasis on graffiti.  It’s AWESOME.  Silver interviewed both well-known and unknown kids in the graffiti community, bboys, taggers, gallery owners, bystanders, and Ed Koch.  Even Crazy Legs is in it briefly—you may remember him from such films as Flashdance (he was one of Jennifer Beale’s doubles in the final scene) and Beat Street.  One of the best tidbits is a scene featuring the anti-graffiti PSA called “Make Your Mark.”  The clothing is fantastic, the music is great, and I learned a lot.  For example, the difference between graffiti artists and taggers, which seems obvious to me now but I didn’t know before I watched this.

The Thin Blue Line:  1988 Errol Morris documentary about Randall Adams, a man erroneously convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of a police officer in Texas.  Errol Morris is a weird guy.  I’m working my way through all of his movies, and so far I’m 50/50:  loved Gates of Heaven, didn’t care for Vernon, Florida.  I’m lukewarm on this one.  The story is interesting, but the reenactments of the murder were overly stylized and a little strange.  He does this a bit in Mr. Death as well, but it annoys me more in this movie.  Nothing about what happens to Mr. Adams was very surprising to me, but maybe in the late ‘80s this was way more scandalous.  It was just okay.

Bubble: 2007 “improvised thriller,” directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Debbie Doebereiner, Dustin James Ashley, and Misty Dawn Wilkins.  Martha (Doebereiner) and Kyle (Ashley) are friends who work together at a doll factory in a small town along the Ohio River.  When a new coworker (Wilkins) is found dead they try to piece together what happened to her. 

Wonderfully subtle.  Soderbergh used non-actors from the town the movie is based in, and they improvised the entire script based on an outline only.  Maybe I liked it more because I knew this about the film before I watched it.  But that’s totally risky, right?  Ashley and Wilkins are okay, and believable especially if you grew up in an area like this.  But Doebereiner is the highlight, by far.  Her performance is brilliant, all things considered.  I really liked it.
 

Match Point:  2005 Woody Allen dramatic thriller, starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, and Emily Mortimer.  Chris (Meyers) is a former tennis pro who befriends a wealthy family, marries the sister, Chloe (Mortimer), and falls in love with the brother’s fiancé, Nola (Johansson).  Torrid affair ensues, and becomes more intense as Chris’s marriage becomes more dull; but when Nola pressures him to leave his wife he balks at the thought of giving up his cushy lifestyle.  It was decent, not what I was expecting.  Better than Scoop, not as good as Vicky Cristina Barcelona, if you’d like to compare Allen films featuring ScarJo set in Europe.

Transsiberian:  2008 thriller directed by Brad Anderson and starring Woody Harrelson, Emily Mortimer, Kate Mara, and Ben Kingsley.  Harrelson and Mortimer play Jessie and Roy, an American couple on a little adventure through Siberia.  Because doesn’t that sound like fun?  On the train they befriend Carlos (Eduardo Noriega) and Abby (Mara), a globetrotting couple that you instantly know will be trouble.  Suddenly people go missing, there’s an accidental death, and everyone’s being chased by Russian narcotics officers.  It was SO GOOD.  Nice to see Mortimer less buttoned-up, like that episode of 30 Rock when she drops accent and freaks out on Liz Lemon.  Lots of twists and turns.  Also, I might love Woody Harrelson now.  See it.

The Human Stain:  2003 romantic thriller based on the Philip Roth novel, directed by Robert Benton and starring Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Gary Sinise, and Ed Harris.  Coleman (Hopkins) just got fired from his position at a New England university after being accused of making racist remarks.  So he starts sleeping with a woman who’s at least 30 years his junior (Kidman) and has a crazy ex-husband (Harris).

I didn’t like it, but not for the reasons I thought I wouldn’t like it.  If that even makes sense.  There’s a lot of jumping back and forth in time, which at first seems utterly pointless, and by the time I realized why learning all this crap about Coleman’s past is relevant I’d stopped caring.  And there are no real links between the possibly-racist-but-look-what-happened-to-him-in-the-past storyline, and that of the affair with the younger woman.  It’s like two separate movies that are both boring.  There is an adorable little dance scene with Sinise and Hopkins, and Anna Deavere Smith (Nancy from The West Wing) has a small role; but those things weren’t enough to keep me interested.

Hoop Dreams:  1994 documentary directed by Steven James, that follows the high school basketball careers of two boys living in Chicago.  Arthur Agee and William Gates are recruited from Cabrini Green and West Garfield Park, respectively, to attend St. Joseph High School in the suburbs, a predominantly white Catholic private high school with a very successful basketball program.  The fortunes of the two boys wax and wane in opposition; as one does well the other starts to slip.  It’s LONG, but worth the nearly 3-hour time commitment.  It’s sad and funny and heartwarming and heart-wrenching and one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen. 

The Last House on the Left:  1972 Wes Craven horror movie starring Sandra Cassel and a bunch of other people.  Who cares.  I had been under the impression that the Torture Porn subgenre of horror movies was a relatively new thing.  This is incorrect.  Apparently I’d forgotten about movies like I Spit on Your Grave and Deliverance.  An innocent young girl and her friend are held captive, raped, tortured, and killed by a group of weird people with unfortunate hairstyles.  This group ends up staying at the house of one of the girls they just killed, the parents discover the murder, revenge is carried out.  Super super gorey, not at all my cup of tea.