When the Levees Broke, Bitter Victory, & House of Bamboo

When the Levees Broke is powerful must-see filmmaking. There is nothing more that needs to be said. If it doesn't piss you off immensely, your last name is either Bush or Cheney.

Bitter Victory has Christopher Lee in it. Huh. But it's also the film that caused Godard to say, "henceforth there is cinema, and the cinema is Nicholas Ray." Does it live up to that? Of course not. Hyperbole of that sort pisses me off. Godard is a completely silly man. Is it a good war film? Yes. Richard Burton and Curd Jürgens having a constant argument ostensibly about anything other than that they both love the same woman, and that they want to kill each other but can't for various reasons. All set in the North African desert. You have the idealistic former archaeologist and the career army man. The deeper meanings of the conflict are pretty clearly similar to Rebel without a Cause and other angry youth films of the period.

House of Bamboo is why I watched The Street with No Name. Because it's a Samuel Fuller remake of that film set in Japan, and was the first Hollywood film made there. Those two reasons were more than enough. Too bad the original was so eh. At least they didn't bother to have any whites playing Japanese. Man, that pisses me off to no end. Fuller and the cinematography are excellent. It's a shame that the movie itself is so damn weak. It's the whole documentary touches that just take you out of the film that make it worse. Still suffers from "White-guy-yells-to-make-himself-understood-in-foreign-country" that just is annoying. The movie just doesn't work, but to the extent it does, it has nothing to do with the script. Also, eyebrows are attractive to Japanese women? Interesting...

Non-movie apology & PS3!

And with that, I'm caught up. However, don't expect me to see as many films in 2007 as I did for most of 2006. I bought a PS3, and I have to play through some games I missed since I don't have a PS2. But if you ever catch me humming along to the Katamari Damacy theme, well, that's the price you pay for me getting a PS3. Plus, you know, I'm running out of movies I haven't seen. And what's up with an insane amount of hits from Europeans looking for a blog named Caseus? I think that there might be a European sex blog with a name similar to Caseus. Man, if only I had a sexblog, I'd be raking in the cash. Everyone wants to read my comments on hoohoos and penii!

October, A Touch of Zen, Fitzcarraldo, & Murder on a Sunday Morning

October was pretty good, but it's nowhere near as good as other Eisenstein films I've seen. Damn shame too, that Trotsky was edited out. Stupid totalitarians and their desire to remove all history that doesn't dovetail with the prevailing point of view. Man, totalitarians suck.

A Touch of Zen is, seriously, one of the best wuxia films I've ever seen. I clearly need to see King Hu's Dragon Inn. Interesting plot, impressive visuals, and about the only thing I can really complain about it is that the DVD kept the film in two parts, with an extra credit sequence and the fight scene that ends the first part replayed. What's up with that? If anything were different, I would not complain, but the scene was pretty long and completely unnecessary to replay. Oh, and there were, of course, some awkward subtitles, and swords that were clearly not particularly sturdy, but that's to be expected. That it was outstanding really shouldn't have been, considering it's one of the many evil eunuch films. Man, eunuchs suck.

Fitzcarraldo was long, but a fascinating look at ice-making in Latin America. Oh, wait, that was The Mosquito Coast. I mean, this was a long, fascinating look at getting a steamboat over a hill and down the rapids. To build an opera house. In the jungle. In Peru. Yeah, it's not most people's idea of a good time, but I enjoyed it. Insane, but I enjoyed it. Klaus Kinski as a part Scot? Sure! Man, moving a steamboat over a hill sucks.

Murder on a Sunday Morning is a documentary about a black 15 year old kid who gets accused by the long arm of the law of killing a white older tourist by her husband, and is clearly not given due process. The lawyer who is involved is very impressive in his investigation, especially given that he's a public defender. It's a damn shame that more lawyers aren't that good. But everyone owes it to themselves to see the film. And learn, maybe, that everyone that gets arrested by the police isn't necessarily guilty. Man, Florida sucks.

Strangers with Candy, A Dirty Shame, Layer Cake, Walk on Water, & Transamerica

Strangers with Candy was funny, but it suffered from the same problems that most TV-to-movies suffer from: it's hard to hold someone's interest for 22 minutes at a time, and then try to make that character interesting for an hour and a half. That said, if you loved the show, you'll love the movie. I found some episodes great, and others not as good. So consequently, I found some scenes hilarious, and others just fell flat. Pretty much every scene with Allison Janney and Philip Seymour Hoffman stood out, and Colbert, Dinello, and Sedaris were all very good. Just some comedy, in my mind, didn't work very well. Others will clearly have differing views.

A Dirty Shame is pretty much the correct title for a film that, while filthy, is at least better than some of the crap that gets put out and gets lower ratings. It also doesn't work as well as Waters's "cleaner" films. Pecker, Hairspray, Cry Baby, and Serial Mom are all good films, but this was just a mess. Damnit Waters, I try so hard to enjoy your films, and even then, I just can't. So I will just continue to appreciate you as a filmmaker, while still enjoying many, many, many other films much more. I do, of course, commend him for releasing an NC-17 film, because not enough of them are released nowadays (except the straight-to-video Skinemax trash, or the American Pie series (technically unrated, but you know it'd be NC-17, because only those under 18 would be interested in that crap)).

Layer Cake actually made me want to see Casino Royale. It's really impressive. Man, Daniel Craig was good in it, and why hasn't Matthew Vaughn done anything since then? Why the hell didn't he work on Casino Royale? He would know exactly what to do. Of course, I am now interested in his next film, which is based on a Neil Gaiman novel, Stardust. Layer Cake is one of the better last drug score movies I've seen. Definitely see it, especially if you like stylish films about drugs.

Walk on Water is an Israeli film about Nazi hunting, homosexuality, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Israeli folk dancing, and the fact that apparently you can be naked on the shores of the Dead Sea. And the differences between circumcised and non-circumcised penii. An Israeli assassin (working for Mossad, but it never really is mentioned) starts to regret his career choice, but still is given a job to learn where the Nazi who killed his parents is, by leading his grandson around Israel on a tour. It works surprisingly well, considering how many ideas it tries to stick in the running time. I guess it's better for someone with an interest in all those things I said it was about, but even if you aren't interested in all of those (me!), it's not bad at all.

Transamerica is manipulative dreck. Seriously, it was all, GIMME AN OSCAR! and I WILL SHOW YOU FELICITY HUFFMAN WITH A DICK! Sorry, you need a non-cliched plot. Replace the transexual angle with just a normal deadbeat dad, and it's not noteworthy at all. Oh, sure, Felicity Huffman is "ugly" so she's a great actress! And it has a Dolly Parton song! Nevermind that the song sucks, and being ugly doesn't make you a good actress. About the only thing I really liked in it was Carrie Preston, someone I enjoy entirely because of her role in Wonderfalls as the wound-up penguin. Sorry, people who liked it. Watch more movies and you'll see many vastly better films. And you'll realize just how eh the film was.

James and the Giant Peach & Flight of the Navigator

James and the Giant Peach has bad songs, and the live action sections are full of overacting. But the stop animation work is typically brilliant Henry Selick. I probably should have seen this film years ago, but thanks Netflix.

Flight of the Navigator is another film I am pretty sure I had seen before, but I don't really remember it at all. So I watched it again, and realized that it's actually a pretty good kids film. Who knew that Disney was capable? And Sarah Jessica Parker all-80s'd up? Well, not really attractive. But I still wish that Four Weddings and a Funeral had costarred her instead of Andie MacDowell, or Jeanne Tripplehorn for that matter. Anyone other than Andie MacDowell. So bad.

The Talk of the Town, Fury, The Great McGinty, The Sea Hawk, & The Street with No Name

The Talk of the Town really doesn't quite match the title. Is anyone seriously talking about Cary Grant running from a lynch mob? And Jean Arthur and Cary Grant and Ronald Coleman are all well and good, but who eats borscht? It lost me with that, but the whole thing just seemed over the top, and not in the good screwball way. The debating scenes were just boring. Too much political diatribe, not enough comedy.

Fury is another film about a guy hiding from a lynch mob that took a very different approach. Too bad it suffered from the inability of the code to accept that a hero can be evil. Because man, I didn't want Spencer Tracy to be at all good. I wanted him to be an avenging angel, exterminating those who wanted to railroad him. I bet the original script had him painted in more shades of gray, maybe even made him evil. Because that would have made me like the film, rather than just have been bored with it. Well, not bored, because there were some good scenes, but it doesn't work as good as it should have.

The Great McGinty doesn't work as well as later Preston Sturges films, but really what does work as well as... well, any of the films he made over the next couple of years? The film has a place in any film lovers heart, because it allowed Sturges to make his later films, plus it helped to create the writer-director, which gave us such great cinematic geniuses as David Lynch, David Cronenberg, and Edward Burns. Brian Donlevy is great as the corrupt beggar, voter, and politician who gets a conscience and suffers his downfall for that reason. It's still a funny film, and all, but it's short and really feels it.

The Sea Hawk is worth it just for Claude Rains as a Spaniard. Who knew? Well, the swashbuckling is a little on the eh side, not nearly as good as some of Flynn's other works, like, ummm, his prodigious sexual appetites. And the expression "In like Flynn", and being responsible for one of the good songs on Combat Rock, in a roundabout way (his son was the Sean Flynn of the song, and who attended Duke University). The film itself is a weird combination of one that goes on far too long, and doesn't do enough. Or maybe I just couldn't pay attention to the boring bits.

The Street with No Name is no good. It's a "realistic" film noir, but it doesn't work nearly as well, as other docudramas of the era, like Call Northside 777. And Mark Stevens was a stuffed shirt. The only thing at all worthwhile in the film is Richard Widmark, but he's far better in other films, like, ummm, his war or western films, or Pickup on South Street. Don't watch a bad film just because it has a good actor in it. I still haven't quite learned that lesson. And don't even get me started on those scenes at the FBI. Such a waste of time.

Inferno, The Transporter 2, & The Sea Inside

Inferno is... bad. Not nearly as good as Suspiria, which would probably have made me appreciate the film a little more if I hadn't seen it before. But I didn't care for it at all. Yeah, it's stylish, but who cares. It makes no sense.

The Transporter 2 is worse than the first. And it's not just because Qi Shu isn't in it. It's because it isn't any good. About the only thing worthwhile in the film is the scene where Frank beats the crap out of guys with the hose. Which I saw before the movie premiered on some video sharing site. But it was on HBO or something, so I DVR'd it and wasted an hour and a half.

The Sea Inside was a movie I wanted to see because it was done by Alejandro Amenabar, who did Abre Los Ojos, Thesis, and The Others. Too bad all three of those films were much better than this. Javier Bardem was good, but the movie was far too long and I just couldn't get involved.

Casino, Borat, & The Quiet American

Casino is overly long, but it's a very good film. I highly recommend it. I have no idea why I hadn't seen it before. I really don't. I mean, Goodfellas is a great frickin' film, and Scorsese doing gangsters is just good. Well, Scorsese in general is good.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is funny, but the more I think about it, the less I'm impressed with it. I enjoyed it while I was watching it, but I pretty much never have to watch it again. And I never want to watch the wrestling scene ever again.

The Quiet American actually was closer to the remake than I was expecting. Yeah, there's the expected cop-out ending, because you can't have an American being a terrorist, but it was pretty good until that point. I still have a soft spot for Audie Murphy, so I enjoyed it, but it's not really a good film overall.

Faust & Man with the Movie Camera

Faust and Man with the Movie Camera are two late-era silent films by European directors, Faust by F.W. Murnau and Man by Dziga Vertov. Murnau, of course, is a vastly talented director, while I've never heard of anything by Vertov. It's an experimental film, following a man, who just happens to have a movie camera, around the Soviet Union making the film that we're watching. It's... strange. It's interesting, but it just seems a little too out there for me. Faust is one of the classic stories, and it's a very good retelling. Well, the impressive imagery is typical of Murnau, but there are typically melodramatic touches that hurt the film. Of course, they weren't as cliched back then, but they are now. Faust is the better film, but Man with the Movie Camera is the more important film in history for it's cinematic inventiveness.

Loves of a Blonde & Closely Watched Trains

Loves of a Blonde and Closely Watched Trains are two of the best Czech New Wave films. Also both are all about sex. Well, Closely Watched Trains is also about the anti-Nazi resistance late in WWII. Loves of a Blonde is a Milos Forman film, while Jirí Menzel directed the other one. I don't think I know any of his other films. They're both about young people who are immature about love, Loves being about a factory girl who follows a pianist to Prague, and Closely Watched Trains being about a train dispatcher who loves a conductress but can't get it up. Of course, both are really about the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. It's more obvious in Closely Watched Trains, but the totalitarian society that has a factory town of 16 women to every man clearly just is depressing. Both are worth watching, but I prefer Closely Watched Trains. Only partially because of Jitka Bendová. Yeah, she's hot. But it also just feels more important of a film. Anyway, definitely see them.

L'Avventura, La Notte, & L'Eclisse

me: hey, I have a question for you
Auto response from male friend: When they turn 18, upper-class children attend a secret Thai language school, disguised as a ski resort, in Grindelwald.
male friend: do you
me: yeah, and first off, good quote
male friend: oh thanks
male friend: it's true
me: but what the hell is l'avventura about?
male friend: have you seen it?
me: I just watched it
male friend: well...
male friend: there are two answers...
male friend: 1)put simply, it's about a woman who disappears on an island, and the relationship that develops between her best friend and her boyfriend as they search for her, ...
me: I got 1
male friend: and 2)...
male friend: it's about Antonioni being a f---ing madman (but an awesome one)
me: hmm, ok, I understand that as well
me: so can you explain why the hell that movie was so long to prove those two points?
male friend: there are a lot of bizarre subtleties that he concentrates on about the relationship and everything...but I like just cause it's like this hypnotic visual thing
male friend: but it is pretty f---in boring at times
me: yep
me: I almost fell asleep a few times
male friend: i did fall asleep the first time i saw it
me: bigger issue was that the version I watched had these itty bitty subtitles and they went by very quickly sometimes, and I figured that it wasn't important what they were saying
me: I couldn't follow the plot anyway :-)
male friend: yeah..there's some stuff that i didn't catch at first...like when sandro destroys that guys drawings
me: why did he do that? I just figured that he is a complete asshole
male friend: well in terms of motivation...i guess he's just really frustrated at that point in the movie...but i just didn't get what was going on the first time i saw it...i thought there must be some larger significance to the drawings...
male friend: which is one of the difficulties...since the movie is set up like a mystery, but it never actually goes anywhere
me: well, I kept thinking something was going to happen, and there'd be some deep meaning, but after thinking about it, there was nothing happening, and there was no deep meaning
me: I think I prefer fellini
male friend: well fellini is all about an overload of madness...
male friend: and antonioni is all about minimal madness...
me: damnit, you were faster than me
male friend: so there sort of opposite ends of the pretentious lifestyle
male friend: ha ha
me: but at least blowup had that mimed tennis match
male friend: that's true
me: this just had a bunch of characters who were bored because they were too rich, and so they didn't even need to go look for the girl who disappeared
male friend: and the sex on purple paper with two chicks
me: well, yeah, full frontal nudity is never something to ignore
male friend: true
me: speaking of which, what did you think of the buffy finale?
... The conversation went on to discuss the Buffy finale, showing movies outside, buying Criterion films randomly (something I'm very guilty of), and why the hell The Rock was released as a Criterion collection DVD. What does this have to do with Antonioni's trilogy of L'Avventura, La Notte, and L'Eclisse? Well, basically, just showing that I both have a 500+ page collection of my last blog's posts, with an occasional movie review that I feel might be relevant. Or maybe if I ever get around to it, finally going through the last couple years of it and putting them all together and adding to my blog.

Anyway, as to the actual films, I didn't like either of them, although La Notte was better than L'Eclisse. Neither was as effective of a film as L'Avventura. L'Eclisse was just boring, with nothing else for me, except for the scenes in the stock market, which is saying something, when that's about the only thing I found fascinating about a movie. Well, that, and that the DVD I got was scratched to hell in the middle of that scene and I couldn't finish that copy so I had to get it re-sent. Beh to that all. La Notte was still as boring, but at least there wasn't anything like the last few minutes of L'Eclisse. And I felt like it was slightly more structured. I mean, neither of them really made me think too highly of Antonioni's films. Damn shame about that. I hate it when I feel like I should like films much more than I do. Because Antonioni is a much better idea than a reality.

The Flower of My Secret, Waydowntown, Winter Kills, & Lackawanna Blues

The Flower of My Secret is, I think, one of the few Almodovar's I haven't seen yet. Well, at least from Dark Habits on, I only have to see High Heels, and it will be complete. This one is actually reminiscent of a lot of his other films, but it's not like he doesn't really deal with the same type of characters or plots in his movies. It's clearly in his mid-period of some crazy things, but mostly a normal movie with some very strong female characters. In that sense, it's actually less strange than most of his earlier films, so I guess it really isn't all that strange, but there were some very strange things, like the whole scene at the beginning of the organ donation, and the boots, and the bizarre family, and the oedipal ballet at the end. I mean, it's fairly normal within the scheme of Almodovar, but it's not normal. And I haven't even mentioned the NATO peacekeeper husband. Just overall enough to make me call it strange, but still, a good Almodovarian film.

Waydowntown is a little Canadian film about going insane after not going outside for around a month. Disjointed editing, dope smoking, a French version of Downtown by Petula Clark, a klepto boss, a coworker who goes crazy by stapling inspirational phrases onto his chest, and a two-liter bottle of marbles. I would say it's good, but it's definitely not for a lot of people. The editing style distracted me a lot.

Winter Kills is probably the most paranoid of the paranoid 70s thrillers. It's a not-very-well disguised theory about who killed Kennedy, based on a book by Richard Condon, writer of The Manchurian Candidate and Prizzi's Honor. Too bad this wasn't nearly as good as those two. It's not bad, but it's a mess of a movie, going from one theory to another without enough time for the audience to figure out what was going on. And it wasn't like I figured out what the end of the movie was going to be (even with the "big twist" ending) very soon after the beginning. Not to say that some things didn't surprise me (like, why did the maid-assassin have to have her shirt ripped open? I mean, I know it's the 70s and all, but huh?), but none of the big reveals did much for me. Maybe I have seen too many paranoid thrillers to be surprised by one that is mainly notable for Sterling Hayden's facial hair, but it just was a mess.

Lackawanna Blues is an HBO movie about a small kid at a boarding house in upstate New York in the 50s and 60s. It's full of a lot of fairly well-known (at least to me) black actors in small parts, like Michael K. "Omar" Williams as a knife obsessed boarder, and Jeffrey Wright as a murderous scrap-booker. The movie is basically an excuse to have S. Epatha Merkerson get an Emmy. That isn't to say it isn't enjoyable, but there are a couple of scenes, especially towards the end that are Emmy bait.

My Own Private Idaho, Jacob's Ladder, The Virgin Suicides, Piccadilly, & Long Day's Journey into Night

My Own Private Idaho has a great performance from Keanu Reeves, although it's similar to his performance in the Matrix, as in, he's supposed to have no emotions. River Phoenix on the other hand, just reminded me that Joaquin Phoenix sucks. Seriously, what an outstanding performance. I didn't care for most of the characters, and the faux-Shakespeare was distracting. So basically, it was really good, but should have been better.

Jacob's Ladder was a strange and twisted film. I'm not entirely sure what to think about it, because it's one of those movies that I generally hate because of the ending. But it was crazy with the whole thing. Very Ambrose Bierce, which I like as a short story, but seems cheap as an approach to a movie. It's the sort of thing that screwed with Stage Fright. Messing with the audience and showing something as true when it's not is just messed up. Of course, that was mainly just after watching it. With a little more time, it was clear that most of it makes sense in the sense that it's a struggle between heaven and hell for the soul of Tim Robbins. It doesn't really matter who won or who lost, because the movie was very superficial, and Adrian Lyne isn't a particularly deep director. All the deep aspects of the film are there in the script, but it loses a lot because the film is of his crappy movies. And even the script seems like an utter mess, not something that would surprise someone after finding out the guy also wrote Ghost, Deep Impact, and Stuart Little 2. Seriously, Ghost sucked and is a horrible blight on 1990 movies and the Oscars. Jacob's Ladder has some interesting things in it, not the least of which is Elizabeth Pena, someone I will always be excited to see in a movie, and was the only good thing in Tortilla Soup. Well, the only good thing that wasn't food. Well, all the girls in that were attractive.

The Virgin Suicides, which I'd seen before, and vastly enjoyed, was just about as good as I remember, and definitely captured the feel of the book perfectly. Kudos Sophia. I mainly just wanted to watch it again because I'd reread the book this summer and I am that excited about Marie Antoinette, and I would've seen it if it weren't for those meddling... job. Yeah, job really limits my ability to do what I want when I want. Damnit. And I hate that it got So Far Away stuck in my head for a day. Not as bad as the day I had This Is Our Country stuck there, though.

Piccadilly was only worth seeing for probably one of the least stereotypical portrayal of an Asian on film for a western film for, well... many many years. It was 30 years later that we still had Mickey Rooney doing "Japanese". Anna May Wong, while still being a quiet Asian woman, is, at least, a real person with feelings. There were so many crappy ways to use her talent, and, unfortunately, she suffered from the horrible racism that dominated Hollywood. She was clearly very talented (both as an actress and a very attractive woman), and that she lost out on roles because she was Asian is just wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. The film itself was nothing particularly special, except for some very impressive camera movements and stylistic effects, impressive for 1929.

Long Day's Journey into Night has good acting, but I just don't care. Sorry. Three hours of a family collapsing under drug use, alcoholism, and miserliness just was too much for me. Sorry, everyone involved.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated, The Departed, The Island, Walk the Line, & Bad Education

This Film Is Not Yet Rated continues the Great Documentary Revival of the last few years. Yay for that, and the movie was extremely satisfying for someone who has read multiple books about film censorship (some of them were even for fun) and finds the MPAA a bunch of morons. The interviews with the filmmakers were definitely worth seeing the movie for, especially if you want to see just how silly the rating system is. The private investigator scenes were sort of funny, because she was so insane, but also it was disturbing because these were vaguely illegal things being done to people, who, while perpetuating a stupid and ineffective system, are still human beings. Then again, the MPAA is full of crazy people who don't mind lying, so they deserve pretty much everything in it.

The Departed is my pick for best film of the year. And if Paul Haggis wins another frickin' Oscar I will have to come back here and complain about how stupid the academy is. Anyway, the accents were good, everyone in it was excellent, Nicholson didn't bother me, Leo again proves that he's not just a pretty face, Wahlberg had some of the funniest lines, and Baldwin was just Baldwin (who has been the best thing about 30 Rock, as well). Knowing how everything was going to pan out and most of the plot points allowed me to savor the little things, like the accents, the perfect cursing, the good musical choices (even if I did get Comfortably Numb stuck in my head for a while, and I don't even like Pink Floyd), and Walhberg making fun of his brother. Little things like that make me happy.

The Island, on the other hand, didn't make me happy. So much talent in front of the camera, why did there have to be so little behind the camera. Because Michael Bay is a no talent hack. A two hour chase scene is a great idea there, genius. No one will ever get bored by characters running from one implausible escape to another. Nope. All perfectly reasonable for Scarlett and Ewan to fall many many floors on an R and then get saved by a conveniently strung netting. Yep. Apparently, my intellect is far above what was needed not to have my intelligence insulted by the movie. At least it did allow me to play a lot of Ninja Gaiden Black, which is both insanely fun and insanely hard. I suck at it, but the opportunity to decapitate multiple people at once is... well, worth the many, many, many deaths you will suffer before you figure out how to do all the crazy moves.

Walk the Line is the white man's Ray with worse music and the least talented Phoenix. Man, why did River have to be the one to die? Couldn't it have been this one instead? Ugh. And I wanted Cash to stay with Ginnifer Goodwin instead of running off with that tramp Reese Witherspoon. And the music wasn't half as good as Ray either. And I say that as a white male semi-hipster who should enjoy outlaw country. But little in that movie was as good as Jamie Foxx doing What'd I Say.

Bad Education felt like a little bit of a retreat for Almodovar from the brilliance of All about My Mother and Talk to Her, and a move back to his crazy 80s roots, but with the artistic maturity of his more recent work, but it didn't work particularly well, in my opinion. I should have really loved the film within a film and the messing with the audience's expectations of what was real and what wasn't, but I just didn't entirely connect with anyone in the film. Was it just that I'm not gay, or a transsexual, or a pedophile priest? I'm not sure.

A Letter to Three Wives, Kwaidan, Touchez pas au grisbi, & The Scarlet Pimpernel

A Letter to Three Wives is the movie Joseph Mankiewicz made the year before All about Eve, one of the classics, and one of the few times I didn't hate Bette Davis. This one also won an Oscar, but I really don't know why. I mean, yeah, it's a movie from 1949 all about infidelity, but I think we should all have been beyond that. I mean, Kirk Douglas just gets to play an insufferable ass of a schoolteacher. Beh to the movie.

Kwaidan is a collection of four Japanese ghost stories made in 1965 and so not really scary as much as very creepy. They were all good in their own ways, but they have the moral of don't lie or cheat and be faithful and make sure your ears are covered with the holy word when you think a ghost is coming or else you won't have any ears. And really, really, don't mess with anyone who says that they'll kill you if you tell a secret, because they just might. And everything was done on a soundstage, which was obvious most of the time, which was intentional, but still somewhat distracting.

Touchez pas au grisbi felt like just another French heist film. Or at least a post-heist film. It just suffers from comparison with so many other, better French heist films. I'm sure I should have liked it more, but I just didn't.

The Scarlet Pimpernel is something I am pretty sure I had seen before, but back a long time ago, when I was watching stuff like The Fighting Prince of Donegal all the time. When I would watch anything because there were some sword fights. My taste wasn't entirely discriminating. Anyway, watching it now wasn't too bad, because it had Ian McKellan as the bad guy, who was awesome, and Jane Seymour who was hot. Even if her hair was enormous.

Thieves' Highway, Night and the City, & Attack the Gas Station

Thieves' Highway was weak. What's up with trucker movies? This and They Drive by Night were both bad. Oh, and Over the Top. Truckers just make for crappy movies. I know that there are probably good movies with trucks or truckers in them, but most are bad. I don't care about golden delicious apples, and I didn't care about anyone in the film short of Lee J. Cobb, but I just cared that he got to overact in a few scenes before he got his comeuppance, which, as this is a Hollywood film, would come soon enough.

Night and the City was a much better Dassin film, this about trying to corner the market on wrestling in London. Richard Widmark is great as the crooked guy putting everything in motion. And Gene Tierney is still very attractive.

Attack the Gas Station was insane. And bizarre. And crazy. But man, it was insanely, bizarrely, crazily awesome. Of course it was all a metaphor for the Korean society at the turn of the century. Which was obvious. I'm pretty sure it's obvious. I mean, otherwise it's just a crazy movie about four young men who knock over a gas station, and then rob it again a little while later all while making a lot of the people they were involved with have better lives. Well, except for the jerks. They got what they deserved. So many parts of this film were insanely awesome, like the backstories, the stick, the fights, the game, and head down. Really, it's just a movie that deserves to be seen by anyone with an interest in film.

Thank You for Smoking, Casque d'or, The Notorious Bettie Page, Shanghai Ghetto, & Last Man Standing: Politics Texas Style

Another long couple of weeks and half-assed reviews. I can't wait for election day.

Thank You for Smoking was pretty good, but a little weak in the satire part. I enjoyed it, but it just felt like it should have been much more pointed.

Casque d'or was not nearly as good as Le Trou. I just couldn't care about it.

The Notorious Bettie Page was a pretty good film, although with Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner behind the camera, it was expected. Well, apparently Turner wrote BloodRayne, so it's not a 100% thing, but American Psycho was great. Gretchen Mol was definitely better than I was expecting. And David Straithairn kicks ass in everything he does.

Shanghai Ghetto was a movie I'd seen trailers for when it came out. I saw movies in the same theater every week for a while, and it was before each film. Made me consider watching it in the theater, until I realized it's a Holocaust documentary. Doesn't need to be seen on the big screen. It's about something in history most people never knew about: that the Japanese allowed a large amount of Jews to get to Shanghai in the late 1930s. That they did so because they thought that the Jews controlled the world was a strange thing, but it could have been worse. They at least saved many lives. Their approach to enormous Jewish power was to try to be nice, while the Nazis clearly went in the other direction. I am continuing to see every single Holocaust documentary out there. It'll happen someday. They have to run out of interesting angles at some point.

Last Man Standing: Politics Texas Style was a really interesting look at a local legislative race in Texas, with a look at the 2002 Governor's race for Texas, which was just a big mess of a race. Seriously, why would anyone vote for Rick "I'm not a gay Governor" Perry? Is it just that he's a Republican? Because it's a shame that someone that much worse than Bush gets elected.

Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries, The Long, Hot Summer, Rhapsody in August, The Boys of Baraka, Notorious C.H.O., & The Science of Sleep

Stupid work has been keeping me from watching and keeping up on this nearly as much as I would like. I also have watched the second season of Veronica Mars and the third season of Arrested Development (both well-worth watching), along with worked insane hours of work, so that really explains why my movie watching was so low the past couple weeks. Probably won't increase much until after November 7th, either. Oh, and go Bengals and Buckeyes. So these are more half-assed than normal.

Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries was better than I was expecting. I really felt like I needed another show to make sure I never cleared off my DVR, and this was it. Lots of recommendations from Sci-Fi nerds and the promise that it was much better than most TV Sci-Fi. Well, it's not as good as Firefly/Serenity, but very little is. Certainly a worthwhile add to my Series recording list. Now, I just have to finish the first and second seasons before the third premieres on October 6. Or else I will continue to be someone who is alone in watching it among friends, rather than joining people at a Frak Party, or some such. Maybe I'll just try to watch as much as I can and still go. The effects were actually pretty good, the acting was generally not bad, and the story was interesting. (plus Grace Park and Tricia Helfer are attractive...)

The Long Hot Summer was another of those movies in the late 50s that should have been made a few years later, because the restrictions from the production code were driving me crazy. Yeah, they did get to say that women think about sex, but you could tell that if this were a little later, the son would have been made impotent and the daughter's non-Paul Newman beau gay. Damn them for neutering films. Then again, All the King's Men was a pretty neutered version of the book, and the remake is supposed to keep all that in and still be boring as hell. Not that the original was boring, I happen to really like it. It was weird to see Orson Welles, because at first I thought, "Orson Welles", and then "It can't be him", and I went back and forth until I just checked the IMDB.

Rhapsody in August is Akira Kurosawa making everyone feel really depressed because it's all about how people were affected by the atomic bombs. A little later than Hiroshima Mon Amour, but I still got a little weepy-eyed when the kids were wandering around Nagasaki looking at the various monuments and the like. Maybe some Americans don't want to remember that we're the only country who've ever used nuclear weapons in war, but it's pretty hard to forget that. Using the children as a way to get people to connect to the story was pretty effective as well, since there were four of them and most people could identify with one of them at least. And, of course, it was strange to see Richard Gere speaking in Japanese. I couldn't tell if it was halting or if he was mispronouncing words, but he seemed fairly up on it, at least when he wasn't supposed to be muffing words.

The Boys of Baraka was an interesting look at the Baraka program, which takes high risk kids from Baltimore and sends them to Kenya to try to get them out of the areas where they're likely to go to into the drug trade or get into trouble with the law. It was interesting, especially comparing that to the somewhat bleak view that the Wire is seeming to get into this season. I'll have to think about them together at some point in the future (may not actually happen).

Notorious C.H.O. is Margaret Cho's second concert film, and this one was more about sex and, consequently, I didn't care for it nearly as much as her other films that I've seen. Just wasn't nearly as funny to me. Eh.

The Science of Sleep was strange, in the wonderful way that a Gondry film can be. It felt much less organized than had it been written by Charlie Kaufman, and it was much more visually impressive, like his videos. It reminded me of Eternal Sunshine, as they're both about relationships, although clearly opposite ends of them. I'd like to think that I don't go quite as bizarre when one of mine starts, but then again, my imagination does like to get way ahead of reality. Can't quite remember my dreams, though, so I can't tell whether I've ever gone so far as to have them end up becoming real. And that is, if there is even one, the problem with the film. If you're looking to find a movie with closure, or one that isn't going to confuse you at all, you're not going to like the film at all. In fact, you may even hate it. I can see someone hating it very easily. It takes both an ability to separate dreams from reality and an overactive imagination in the realms of love and relationships to get, and some people don't really want to work that hard while watching a film. It's not as immediately brilliant as Eternal Sunshine, but really, few films are. It's more of an earworm, slowly burrowing in, taking over your life, until you'd be happy to ride around on a mechanical horse below cotton ball clouds with the woman you love (and may or may not love you back). Then you wake up.

Smiley's People, Igby Goes Down, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, Silkwood, & Norma Rae

Smiley's People isn't as good as Tinker, Tailor, but it's still a superior miniseries. Neither of them have nearly enough Patrick Stewart, and really, that's a damn shame. I know that the books didn't have more, but it's like Hearts of Darkness with the Kurtz section down to a page or two. Seriously, I hate when someone is all over it all and doesn't really appear. Damnit. Guinness is brilliant again, and the supporting cast is also good.

Igby Goes Down has some very very good scenes, and some very very good things in it, but there are some things that don't seem right at all. Good cast, even with not one but two Culkins. It just sort of felt like a movie that was trying to do way too much with not nearly enough. I think it has to do with the Culkins. I still can't get past them. He wasn't bad at all, just felt slightly off. I can't even put my finger on why I found the movie slightly off-putting, except that I also hated The Catcher in the Rye. Young angsty jerks don't tend to agree with me.

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne is an early Bresson film, but I really didn't care for it. Had a feeling of pointlessness. And it was slow, even at only 86 minutes. I think I'm going to hold off for a long while before I check out another Bresson film.

Silkwood is an excuse for Meryl Streep to use another accent. And to put another Confederate flag on screen. I'm just wondering if there's a point to saying that she was very good in it? That Kurt Russell and Cher were good was only a little more of a surprise. Craig T. Nelson was a bad guy, rather than a dad in this film. You know that he only has two roles, right? Dad and bad guy. The ending of the film is way too mawkish. Can't there be a ban on endings just like that? Amazing Grace over a montage is just eh.

Norma Rae is a movie I had seen the most famous scene in my true film class back in college. One of our projects was to use a scene from a "true" movie and then write a paper on it. I wanted to do the famous one take call in All the President's Men, but that was too long, so I apparently wrote about a scene in Erin Brockovich where she gets a phone call. Clearly I wanted to deal with phone calls. Actually, looking through my papers from that class, I wrote about a different phone call in All the President's Men. I was obsessed apparently. Norma Rae is a better film than Silkwood. Probably would have had an even worse impression of Silkwood had I not seen Norma Rae right afterwards. Of course there are problems with this movie as well, but those are fairly minor compared to Sally Field as Norma Rae.

Yeah, I watched two straight 70s liberal films. So?

Cure, Our Brand Is Crisis, & the entire Sharpe series

Cure is the movie that made Kiyoshi Kurosawa a star, and it is very good. It's also somewhat disappointing in that I think I had it built up in my mind as a great film, and it's merely very good. Of course, the very good film Fallen is similar, so it's not like I don't like movies like this. It's more about the detective rather than a supernatural being inhabiting the bodies though. It's not as good as Pulse, but it's better than most serial killer movies made of late.

Our Brand Is Crisis just makes me happy I never work for bad candidates... oh, man. I could tell some stories, but I won't. At least I don't work for Bob "0 for 7" Shrum. Just watching these guys try to struggle to reframe the election explains why Democrats have been screwed for a while. Ugh. I wonder, though, can we blame Bob Shrum for all the deaths in Bolivia during the revolt? I'd like to. It's not like we can't blame him for a lot of other deaths through his incompetant campaigning.

Sharpe (and his miniseries of now 15 movies (which I've watched over the last fifteen weeks)) follow Lt. Sharpe (and his various promotions and demotions) and British troops from Portugal through Spain, France, England, Belgium, and on into India during and right after the Napoleonic wars. As I'm a fan of the Bernard Cornwell books and had seen the first few when they originally aired on PBS back in 1993 and 1994, I enjoyed them all. Until it got to the one not based on a book of Cornwell's, Sharpe's Justice (although Sharpe's Mission wasn't based on a book, it was at least still set during the war), which is set in Yorkshire after Napoleon was exiled to Elba. And is horrible. Really, just very out of place in otherwise superior TV movies. The series has a lot of people I enjoy in sometimes small, sometimes large roles, ranging from Brian Cox, Pete Postlethwaite, Elizabeth Hurley, and Paul Bettany to Alexis Denisof, Alice Krige, and Phillip Glenister. And that isn't to forget Sean Bean as Sharpe and the very good Daragh O'Malley as Sgt. Harper. The main cast is generally very strong, and the theme song (of sorts), Over the Hills and Far Away, gets stuck in my head quite a bit.

Superchunk at the Cradle 9/1/06

Because I was out of town for Labor Day weekend, I didn't get to watch as many movies as normal, but instead, you, dear readers, get something much more rare: a concert review. Yep, I actually went to a concert. In a club! And not just any club, but one of my favorite places to see a show, especially now that it's smoke free. The Cat's Cradle is very nice. And a concert there with one of my favorite bands of all time is very very nice.

Cadmium
Animated Airplanes over Germany
Rainy Streets
Art Class (Song for Yayoi Kusama)
Learn to Surf
Song for Marion Brown
Nu Bruises
Winter Games
Package Thief
Seed Toss
Sunshine State
Why Do You Have To Put a Date on Everything?
From the Curve
---------------
The First Part
Detroit Has a Skyline
Cast Iron
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Slack Motherfucker
Precision Auto

Opening band was Tenement Halls, who were... boring. I mean, it wasn't bad or anything, but they barely talked, the music all sounded the same and I just couldn't get too excited. Could've been the migraine I had though.

Superchunk just continues to be lots of fun. Good setlist (although no Driveway to Driveway or 100,000 Fireflies or Brand New Love, and I don't really care for Seed Toss), and the two new songs were good. After The First Part, I was thinking I really hope they play Detroit Has a Skyline, and then they did. It made me very happy. In the second encore, I tried to get them to play Brand New Love or 100,000 Fireflies, but apparently, my power was used up on Detroit. I think I need to work on improving that. That power could be used for good. Or evil, but I doubt I'd go to the show and use the power to play Swallow That. Anyway, now that I've just made a joke that very few people will get, mainly because it's not funny, I will mention that they said there'd be a new album in 2012 and it would be beamed directly into our brains. That'd be awesome. Not the 2012 bit, but the brain-beaming of new music.

Fighting Elegy & The Mosquito Coast

Fighting Elegy is a satire of the militarism that lead to Japanese involvement in World War II. It's very well done and touching, although the touching parts depends if you can handle a character playing the piano with his erection. Actually, it's not really touching. Well, the erection is touching the piano, but the movie is just touching in the normal way. The most interesting aspect is just how ridiculous everything is played out in the film, with Kiroku feeling frustrated by the fact that the Catholic girl he's in love with is not going to get physically intimate with him, and taking out his sexual frustrations with violence. And, by extension, suggesting that a lot of militarism is a result of not enough sex. I'm not sure where the writer was going with Michiko's statement about why they couldn't be together. Maybe there was something more explicit in the original novel, because that seems a little bizarre and like it came out of nowhere.

The Mosquito Coast has one of Jason Alexander's first roles. I didn't recognize him, but the IMDB did. Harrison Ford is very good, and it's an interesting premise, but I just don't understand how someone can be so obsessed with something so ridiculous. I mean, building an ice-making machine in the middle of the Honduran jungle is really crazy. A young River Phoenix was nice. It seems like something that probably would have been better in the original novel, again. Weird how that is.

The Great White Hype & Scarface

The Great White Hype is pretty darn bad. Maybe Ron Shelton did only have one good screenplay in him. And the cast (Samuel L. Jackson, Jeff Goldblum, Corbin Bernsen, Jon Lovitz, Cheech Marin, John Rhys-Davies, Jamie Foxx, Damon Wayans, and Method Man) is much better than the material deserves, but can't make up for the craptacularness of the material. And it is craptacular.

Scarface is a movie I hadn't seen in so long I couldn't remember much of it (but I still had on my list as having watched it, and with the same rating as I gave it this time...). Then I watched it and remembered why I had blocked it out. Overlong and boring. Oh, yeah, just like many other Brian De Palma films. At least the worst ones. And why are so many of the Cubans played by Italians? Ugh. About the only time I thought anything good about it was when Harris "Quentin Travers" Yulin showed up. I always enjoy recognizing actors from the Whedon-verse. The movie just doesn't end, is full of either cardboard cutouts or completely despicable characters, and is just another example of De Palma and his desire to remake everything. I know, Stone did the screenplay and De Palma joined the film late, but ugh. And the soundtrack is the worst of 80s excess in overuse of synthesizers. Moroder, ummm, really didn't do much good in soundtracks. Cat People has a good song, cowritten with David Bowie, but man, most 80s soundtracks sucked, and Moroder is at least partly responsible for that. Why the hell can this movie be so popular? I mean, I know why it's so popular, but why do people like it so much? It's not a good movie, there are much better gangster films. And why the hell would anyone want to be Tony Montana, unless you're seriously messed up in the head? A drug-addicted asswipe in love with his sister? Man, I want to be him!

Silver City, The Saddest Music in the World, & Princess Raccoon

Silver City was a disappointing Sayles film. It felt like it was going to build up to something much better than it ended up as. He's clearly very capable of putting together a sprawling cast and making a brilliant film, but in this case, it just didn't work nearly as well as it could have. Had I not been such a big Sayles fan, I probably would have been more forgiving to the film, but I can't. And I only seem to like Billy Zane when he's making fun of himself, which both doesn't happen nearly enough and is a really bad sign for him and his almost non-existent acting talents.

The Saddest Music in the World is bizarre. I didn't recall that it was filmed like an early talkie with a filter for an almost black and white effect. But it was, and it was um... strange in a funny way? I really didn't know that Kazuo Ishiguro wrote the original screenplay. If you haven't read Remains of the Day, you need to, by the way, because it's excellent. Beer-filled glass legs, a ridiculous contest that rewards winners with a slide into a beer vat, and a crazy Canadian family are some of the things that make this film completely unique. Plus, there were lots of stereotypes and (I hope, intentional) mergings of cultures of the other countries involved in the contest.

Princess Raccoon is another unique film. Well, actually, I find it sort of a weird amalgamation of the crazy musical stylings of The Happiness of the Katakuris, the tanuki of Pom Poko, the colorwork of Tokyo Drifter (makes sense since it's also a Seijun Suzuki film), and both Snow White and Romeo and Juliet for plot. Oh, and it's also done with CGI and green screen work to make it look like a play. Seriously, just a weird frickin' movie. Some of the songs were also terrible, and in the styles of Edith Piaf, classic movie musical, rap, Metallica-ish rock, mariachi, and Buddhist chant, of course some were going to suck. But it's very hard to get past the pairing of Zhang Ziyi and Jo Odagiri, two very attractive people. Oh, and the subtitles were typical horrible mistranslations and grammatical mistakes. And how much more difficult is it to write out Princess Raccoon rather than just Princess? I know little Japanese, but even I know that tanuki hime means Princess Raccoon. Well, tanuki aren't exactly raccoons, more like raccoon-shaped forest sprites, but it's close enough. I know I say this a lot, but there are no movies like this. Even the closing dance sequence, somewhat reminiscent of Zatoichi's (Takeshi Kitano's brilliant film), just messes with you.

The Great White Hope & Chris Rock: Never Scared

The Great White Hope has very strong performances from James Earl Jones and Jane Alexander. You can tell that Jones is comfortable in the role, and it makes perfect sense when you know that he played the role on Broadway before, which won the author, Howard Sackler, a Pulitzer and a Tony. It also features a horrible Uncle Tom's Cabin musical. In Hungary. The entire thing is just depressing, because this all comes down to a bunch of white racists tearing a black man down for being better than the whites at something (in this case, it's boxing). Fight the power! It's based on Jack Johnson's life, which really makes me want to see that Ken Burns movie, Unforgivable Blackness. Or, maybe I could just watch The Civil War another time. That always makes me happy. Man, I've seen that so many times. What a great theme song.

Chris Rock: Never Scared wasn't nearly as good as his earlier work. It's still funny, but it feels like retreads of other comics and his earlier work. Shame about that. Plus, his yelling style just gets on my nerves now.

Not One Less & Bill's Run

Not One Less is depressing as hell, I mean, it's about how horrible the education system is in rural China. It was gutwrenching, and the ending didn't fit at all with the rest of the movie, but that was required by the Chinese government, because otherwise it would just be about how kids are being educated by people only slightly older than them and communities have to decide whether they'd have chalk or fixed desks and education in the rural areas is backwards. It's really depressing. And it's painful to see that people live like that. Damn white male liberal guilt.

Bill's Run is about a political race in rural Kansas. Well, it's not like there's that much that isn't rural Kansas, and it's not even that rural for Kansas. It's freaky though, that this guy ran as a Republican. Seriously, he's a pro-education, tax-and-spend, and pro-choice guy. But he does have a good name in Kansas politics: Kassebaum. And is therefore, the son of Nancy Kassebaum and grandson of Alf Landon, two big names. It's short and not nearly as much detail as I would have liked. It's still interesting, and the woman he's running against seems entirely evil (and unfortunately, she's in the legislature).

FLCL

FLCL (or, Fooly Cooly, or Furi Kuri, or lots of other things, but not eff-ell-cee-ell) is insane. And I generally hate insane anime. I mean, really a lot. But this is... insane in a good way? I think that it's actually making fun of a lot of anime conventions, like the almost constant upskirt shots (and the rest of fanservice) and robot battles. I think, so I could be wrong. But it has a soundtrack by the Pillows, a band I first found out about a long time ago on a messageboard far, far away. Or, more accurately, the old Superchunk board when someone linked to Hybrid Rainbow and said they sounded like Superchunk. I sort of saw the resemblance, but mainly I saw just how good they are. Yay for Japanese indie-rock! Increase hipster quotient immensely! Woo! Anyway, the anime makes up for being completely crazy by also being about the love of a 12 year old boy for an older alien who hits him with her Vespa and a guitar. And his older baseball playing brother's pyromaniac girlfriend. Seriously, what the hell, Japan? It can't be normal at all, can it? This all being said, I did enjoy it. And I highly recommend it to anyone who can sit for almost three hours and just accept that you'll be confused, but that it looks and sounds pretty good.

Pulse & Nine Queens

Pulse is both very creepy and about the dehumanizing effects of technology. Plus, it was directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who, while no relation to Akira, clearly is very talented, as he'd have to be to have a last name of Kurosawa and direct films. I think there are good things about having an enormous Netflix queue, and one of them is the ability just to sit down and watch a movie without even remembering much about why you wanted to watch it in the first place. I knew it was J-Horror, and was supposed to be much better than run of the mill stuff like Ringu and Ju-On, but I really didn't expect it to be so much better. There were some typical horror aspects to it (especially that the typical Japanese ghosts look the same as they do in most other J-Horror, but Kurosawa is capable of making it slightly less than cliched), but it was just vastly better than most. Almost makes me want to see the apparently terrible American remake. Well, it's mainly for Kristen "Veronica Mars" Bell (and Samm "Neal Schweiber" Levine and Ron "Arvin Sloane" Rifkin). Man, put a bunch of TV people in a movie directed by someone who only has one other movie to his credit and remake a Japanese horror film that's practically perfect (as in, I can't see a way to make the film better than it already was), and of course you're going to get dreck. Well, I can't blame those three, I blame the fact that Hollywood feels the need to remake great foreign films because people can't read subtitles. SPOILER: And the best thing about it is you think it's just a normal little horror film about terrorizing a few college kids when you get to the end and realize that it's about the end of the world.

Nine Queens was, speaking of remakes of great foreign films, remade a couple years ago, but this time it was remade with John C. Reilly and directed by someone who hadn't directed a movie before, but had been assistant director on a hell of a lot of great films. And Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, but really, he's worked with the Coen Brothers, Soderbergh, Hal Hartley, John Sayles, and Jodie Foster, so he probably has at least some talent. Of course, since I saw the original Argentinian version, I don't entirely see the point of watching what is probably a weaker remake. As I have a weak spot for twisty little thrillers that don't entirely give their plots away, I should have loved it, and I did, to a certain extent. My problem was that I've seen so many movies, I knew that the big plot reveal was going to be one of two things, because really, with two con men joining forces you're never going to get a straight forward plot. I think the writer-director, one Fabian Bielinsky, clearly has talent, and the movie was very well-made, but unless he wants to be an Argentinian Mamet, he needs to show that he's capable of making something more than a complicated and twisty thriller. I'm not saying that's bad, because we certainly could use more movies that don't insult the viewer's intelligence, but it's sort of disappointing to know a little about Argentinian history and see where one plot point was going. I mean, really, I wrote papers about it in college.

The Lower Depths (again)

The Lower Depths by Renoir suffers immensely from being watched so soon after Donzoko, a superior film. That one feels more like a play than this one, but that one felt much more real. Probably because the ending seems a lot better in the Kurosawa one, as this one just seems too forced. And I really don't like that the beginning of the movie just feels like an attempt to expand the play from basically one set. I have never read the play, and I'm not at all familiar with it, but the expansion just seems a little forced. After doing a little looking (yay for Wiki), Kurosawa filmed it in a much more accurate fashion than Renoir. Sometimes I like a happy ending, sometimes I like a sad ending, but I just don't think a happy ending fits with the rest of the story. And I don't like Jean Gabin nearly as much as Toshiro Mifune. So, basically, Kurosawa version=excellent, Renoir version=good.

Slacker & Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

Slacker is really a lot more like A Waking Life than I was sort of expecting. Well, it's a mess, but it's a strangely watchable mess. Some of the stories were great. Some were boring. The Kennedy assassination, Leon Czolgosz, and Mars stories were my favorites. And the Madonna pap smear, but come on, it's about someone stealing a pap smear sample.

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is pretty funny, and ridiculous. Especially the dueling Al Pacino impressions during the end credits. And pretty much anytime that Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are on the screen together. It's definitely a great movie. I think that this is my new, "Michael Winterbottom is a genius" film. Gillian Anderson and Kelly Macdonald are also great, and the cast is full of English actors I'm fans of, with Stephen Fry, Benedict Wong, Shirley Henderson, Naomie Harris, Ian Hart, Kieran O'Brien... It's just a long list of fun actors. Seriously it's just really really good. I really should read the book, but I have a feeling it might take me a while to get through it. Anyway, the movie's battle scenes were hilariously ramshackle, and the cast was bizarre, but brilliant. And the references to Fassbinder just remind me of my distaste for what I've seen of his work, but the Bresson was right on, sort of, but in an intentionally too emphatic way. And the use of the tongs to birth the baby was pretty darn disturbing. All the stuff about Tristram's nose was great. Anyway, back to the movie...

Mrs. Brown

Mrs. Brown you've got a... No, dear god, I didn't rewatch that. This is the Judi Dench-Billy Connolly movie about Queen Victoria and a Mr. John Brown. Who's body was apparently not lying a-mouldering in the grave. Important for the movie. Let's see... John Brown... Nope, I should stop making bad jokes and references. Anyway, it's interesting, and especially the look at Disraeli. I don't think I ever really put a face to the stories of Disraeli I'd read before. Didn't expect him to look so evil. It's the goatee. It makes pretty much every look evil. The acting is generally good, although a few characters were just there to be evil. Unfortunate. It's good, and it's certainly worth watching if you can handle British accents and not too much action, but lots of backroom political machinations.

The Lower Depths, The Aviator, Play It Again, Sam, & The Last Hurrah

The Lower Depths is unfortunately, the second movie on the two disc The Lower Depths Criterion set. I think someone is stealing my Netflix DVDs. I didn't get Slacker or the Jean Renoir's version of it, so I was just stuck watching Akira Kurosawa's version, with the always outstanding Toshiro Mifune. It fits very well with his other films. Not quite as comedic as I was lead to believe, it was just fairly humanist. And a little depressing.

The Aviator is a movie I really should have seen a while ago. Pretty strong and amazing cast, and it's always good to see Loudon Wainright, even if I also had to deal with Rufus. Man, he's overrated. Of course the movie is great. I mean, it's Scorsese, even when the movie is bad, he's still capable of greatness. This movie, however, was great, so he didn't have to do anything to improve it, but he did. My favorite scene was, of course, the censorship board. Stupid censors. About the only real problem with the film is that it's really too long. It's good, but not almost three hours good. Very few films are almost three hours good.

Play It Again, Sam is an early Woody Allen film, and so it's very hit and miss. Well, it's a Woody Allen film so it's hit and miss. It's less miss than some of his, but it's a minor Allen. Of course, my love for Casablanca clearly makes me more inclined to enjoy it than a lot of people would. I always used to get it confused with The Purple Rose of Cairo. I always seem to imagine Jeff Bridges getting on the plane at the end of the movie. Which is difficult, since Jeff Bridges isn't in this one, and that one isn't about Casablanca. I think it's just that I imagine Jeff Bridges in the Tony Roberts role.

The Last Hurrah is a fictionalized version of a corrupt Boston mayor. It's really not hard to figure that out, just like every other political movie based on a real person but fictionalized enough so that names are changed. I do sort of enjoy the old school politics, even though it's really set up to be rooting for a corrupt guy. And rooting against a guy who works for Planned Parenthood. I didn't realize just how old Planned Parenthood was. I mean, since I support them in everything they do, I never really spent a lot of time learning about them. I didn't realize that Margaret Sanger created the organization that later became Planned Parenthood. Thanks John Ford, for keeping that line in the film so I would be interested enough to look that up. Makes me think better of the group, even if I didn't already. Anyway, I seem to be incapable of talking about any movie without going off on a tangent somehow. Well, not somehow, that's how my brain works. I mostly don't feel like writing those all down. Back to the movie, it's a very interesting look at how candidates are created and other ones stay in power. Those parts were much more interesting to me than the family dynamics. And of course, it mainly ignores the fact that the center of the movie is a political creature who we really should be happy that he gets his just deserts. Plus, why is it that so many movies give the character a heart attack or something else illness-related to drum up a little sympathy at the end of a movie for someone we should hate? So cheap and easy.

Primer

Primer is an extremely low budget film about guys in a garage who invent a time machine. I'd heard good things, and, if you can accept that the film makes very little sense. It's very complicated, much like Pi, another film about complicated processes, and a very low budget. I don't entirely think that it's clear what the hell happens. The multiples of the characters made it less clear what was going on. This all being said, it's interesting. You don't see a movie like this too often, or even at all. I'm intrigued by Shane Carruth, and would be interested in seeing his next film. Probably'd have a much higher budget than $7k.

King of New York

King of New York was apparently produced by Silvio Berlusconi, through some intermediaries. Makes the movie about a drug dealer rising to power in New York and then giving the money to the poor slightly more interesting. Because man, it's pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty bad. Abel Ferrara, he of Ms. 45, the 93 version of Body Snatchers, and Bad Lieutenant, still wallows in the muck. I need to work on my interests. Just because it has Christopher Walken doesn't mean it's worth seeing. Especially this film. Seriously, man, just stop watching crappy movies just to say you've seen them. There's a lot of good actors in this film. And David Caruso is also in the film, for that matter. But no one shows that they have any talent. The movie is just both despicable and horrible in every way. Do not see. DO NOT SEE.

A Tale of Two Sisters

A Tale of Two Sisters has a English title that's unfortunately Dickensian, with a story that's anything but. In the middle is a twist that is both completely unexpected and also completely sensible. And after that happens, you keep waiting for everything to fall into place, and for everything you've seen to make sense. And in a devastating final scene it does. It's an outstanding horror film, in the finest tradition of being relentlessly creepy with only one or two jump scares, but it's more about regret. Regret for everything missed, everything ignored, everything family. I don't want to say too much more, because it would ruin it. Just know that while it may seem confusing at the beginning, it will make much more sense by the end, if not perfect sense. The movie itself was very well made, the house being a very important character, the cinematographer really bringing out the colors, and there were some very impressive scenes. I really can't say much, because going in with little information would be vastly better than knowing too much. It's nice to see an Asian horror film that, while it does have the creepy girl with hair covering her face that is the blight on vastly more popular films, is not afraid to have a movie that makes sense. Too few are capable of that simple request.

She Hate Me

She Hate Me is weak, and way too long. I do think that there are some interesting ideas, but did we really need to see two separate childbirths in close detail? I mean, I know I've seen some horrible things on Discovery Health, but did we need to see two enormously stretched vaginas? I just think he bit off more than he could chew with this very ambitious film. But there are some very terrible things in it, and it was very strange that the lesbians seemed to be enjoying the sex so much, and why did he need to service 5 women in one night? Couldn't they, I don't know, try to limit it to like three or so? I also didn't appreciate the fact that people seemed to be so concerned about the fact that John was having sex for money to sire kids. Why should anyone be upset about that? I mean, do we think that everyone who has ever gone to a sperm bank is evil? And man, that just is sad. So is some of the terribly heavy-handed political commentary. So basically, the few good scenes are more than made up by the messed up tone, messed up characters, and messed up plot. Oh, and a messed up title, that needed to be explained in the film for anyone to even attempt to get. I still don't think it makes any sense, but then again, I dislike the misuse of the English language by people other than me. Well, I dislike people misusing the English language when it makes no sense.

Election

Election (the Johnny To film, not the Alexander Payne film, which I immensely enjoy) is one of the better Hong Kong Triad films I've seen. Actually, it's by far the most realistic gangster film I've seen in a very long time. These gangsters aren't glamorous, they're just petty greedy thieves who'd throw their own mother overboard if they thought it would make them some cash. And Simon Yam... well, he's almost normal compared to some of the roles he's done before, but he's his typical great self. Especially when compared to the less-talented Tony Leung (Ka Fai), who overacts in almost every scene. But the movie doesn't suffer from that. It may be a little heavy-handed when it comes to pointing out just how ridiculous and stupid most gangsters are (the fat one's pants in jail and the monkeys in the last scene are a little obvious, aren't they?), but once you get past the slightly confusing loyalties and actors (it's generally easier in American films because you're more likely to know some of the actors and you don't have to keep putting names to faces you haven't really seen too often if it all), it shows that Hong Kong films are clearly competing directly in quality with American films. And, a lot of the times, vastly superior to them.

The Cocoanuts, Horse Feathers, & Mr. & Mrs. Smith

The Cocoanuts and Horse Feathers were two Marx brothers films I apparently hadn't seen. I know I've seen all of the other famous ones. I thought I'd seen these two before, but I hadn't. The Cocoanuts suffers immensely from having craptacular musical numbers that really just drag down the film and make it the worst Marx Brothers film I've seen. Plus, there were many points that just screamed early (sound) film and each of those things was worse in this one than in any later Marx film. Horse Feathers has Whatever It Is, I'm Against It and Everyone Says I Love You, two of the best songs in the entire Marx Brothers film catalogue. That really helps, and that the film is a very streamlined 70 minutes helps as well. Of course, the ending football game is silly, but there's enough other stuff that's worth watching that it falls just behind Animal Crackers, Duck Soup, and A Night at the Opera as the best Marx Brothers films.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith has two very attractive leads. Everyone else really doesn't do much in it, although Vince Vaughn continually wants to remind everyone that he exists. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are more than capable of carrying the film themselves, and Doug Liman lets them. Of course it's ridiculous, worse than a John Woo film for amount of bullets shot to amount of death brought, and the ending gunfight is very silly (you're telling me these guys are worse shots than stormtroopers?), but it doesn't really matter much because Pitt and Jolie are so very good together. Considering I don't really care for Jennifer Aniston, I say Go Brad (and Angelina). Make movies that are at least fun.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Clerks II, & A Canterbury Tale

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is pretty darn good. Mainly because of Alec Guinness and his voice. It was unbelievable just how much better that voice can be when he's delivering sensible lines rather than ridiculous Lucasisms. And the entire cast is outstanding. It's weird to see Patrick Stewart in a very minor role. Weird how that is. It's a pretty complicated, but, typical for le Carre, it's a well structured complicated mystery. If you can handle nearly five hours of spies, there's not many better ways to spend that time than watching this film. Just took me a very long time to find those five hours, as work was very long this week.

Clerks II was much better than I was expecting. It felt much more like an early Kevin Smith film than the last few. Not as good as Clerks or Chasing Amy, but not too far behind them. And the only part that didn't feel quite right was the ending, which seemed a little like a cop-out. I just think that it was a little too happy of an ending, one that just didn't quite fit right. Maybe it's just that I hate it when people have to learn a lesson in a comedy that was going along just fine beforehand. That switch from comedy to "life-lesson" is very tricky to carry out, and very few films have been able to do so. I can't even think of one right now, but I'm sure in a few days I'll come up with a few. If it weren't for that ending, I would have enjoyed it much more.

A Canterbury Tale is pretty darn special. I love that the Archers made movies like this to support the war effort, trying to promote Anglo-American unity. Man, if they could only make more great movies to promote friendship, we'd probably have a lot less conflict. Interestingly, the Criterion DVD has the prologue and ending from the American version, just going to show that American and English audiences just needed something slightly different. The opening stats to the American version were very funny. Although I kept wanting to know how they were doing these statistical analyses that came up with those numbers. Seemed a little made up to me. Apparently, though, the American version premiered in 1949, so maybe they were accurate, at least up until the time when it came to be very specific near the end. Anyway, it wasn't nearly as good as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp or A Matter of Life and Death, two of their other war films, but it's still very good. Makes me want to read A Canterbury Tale.

Mean Creek & Buffalo Bill and the Indians

Mean Creek has a great soundtrack. Spoon, Wilco, and (easily the best song from) Death Cab for Cutie, and there's a few other bands like the Eels, which I respect, but don't really listen to. And is a nice small little film. It's pretty good as well. Still can't see a Culkin without thinking about how terrible the Home Alone movies were. Maybe if they grow up a little, I'll stop thinking about them. Or, more accurately, I never will.

Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson is Robert Altman messing with us. Which is a lot of fun. It's still a mess, like most Altman films, and it's nowhere near his best 70s films, but I certainly preferred it to some. And it has a great line: "Listen, my glass got empty somehow, can you put a couple of fingers in there?" I do sort of wonder about how that glass got empty. I do wish that there was a little more Deadwood in it. It seemed like it could have gone there a couple times, but it was rated PG, so there went that.

Bad Day at Black Rock & A Little Princess

Bad Day at Black Rock is, apparently, one of the first movies to deal with the anti-Japanese racism so prevalent during WWII. And it has a great cast, with Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan, Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, and Walter Brennan. I appreciate the movie, as it's very well made. It just seems a little too easy.

A Little Princess is another one of those films I've wanted to see ever since I first saw Y Tu Mama Tambien. Cuaron is a freakin' genius. After watching this, it's abundantly clear why producers thought that he would do very well with Harry Potter. Damn shame that he wasn't able to keep working on them. Too bad about that map when Sara goes to America. Yugoslavia? A post WWII Germany? Syria? Iraq? At least make the effort to get an accurate map. There was Cincinnati on the American map, which was very appropriate, as it was a very important city for a while there. The movie is absolutely gorgeous and very green. Which is as you'd expect. And since I'm frequently a little girl, I loved the film. Eleanor Bron was excellent, and it's always fun to see Vincent Schiavelli. Yeah, the ending was kinda hokey, and really coincidental, but it doesn't detract too much from what had come before.

Lancelot of the Lake

Lancelot of the Lake has a decapitation within the first minute. And a crotch stabbing soon after. Too bad the movie gets boring soon after. Well, not boring, but not nearly enough violence for the middle hour. Lots of violence at the beginning, lots of violence at the end. In the middle is a look at a screwed up idea of loyalty. And that the entire myth of the Knights of the Round Table was just a pipe dream of impossible ideals. Although the use of cramped locations and ridiculous costumes just points out how most views of the Arthurian legend are not realistic at all. And I liked that it uses the French names and locations, because that just reminds me of Marie de France, a Frenchwoman probably living in England in the 12th Century. I read her lais back at summer camp. A week of mythology was a week of the most fun I had in a long time. I loved the stories, I loved that we watched Star Wars and Joseph Campbell (and I wrote a paper about the mythology common to them both), and wrote bad poetry (well, I just love writing bad poetry in general...). It was also the first place I remember learning anything about Freudian symbolism. A bunch of 7th graders discussing phallic symbols just led to a lot of giggling, but I do remember it all. Makes me giggle just thinking about it. Anyway, Bresson again pulls out all the stops with no acting and closeups of hands and legs. It just wouldn't be a Bresson film without them.

Little Miss Sunshine, Hearts and Minds, Head, Hold On!, & Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter

I saw Little Miss Sunshine at a free preview on Wednesday. Yay for free movies. It was also a good movie. Yay for free good movies. Actually, it was a great film. Steve Carell and Paul Dano and Alan Arkin and Toni Collette and Greg Kinnear and Abigail Breslin were a very good dysfunctional family. There was a considerable danger of the film becoming just way too quirky, especially the scene in the hospital, and of course all the coincidences that just happen to come out on a cross New Mexico, Arizona, and California trip was somewhat bothersome. But these were just small complaints, as any movie that ends with that kind of scene at a beauty pageant was nice. Beauty pageants are evil, and child beauty pageants are vastly more evil. So disturbing. Although I'm not sure about how appropriate that last scene was, but oh well, it lead to a happier family, which was nice. And it was weird to see Mary Lynn Rajskub in a small role. I'm so used to seeing her on TV, and parts with lines. Not too many for her in this one. Although really, I just thought of Rush Limbaugh and that was disturbing.

Hearts and Minds is strangely more important and a better look at Vietnam than many films with a lot of distance from the conflict. I'm not sure about that scene in the whorehouse, seemed a little gratuitous for me. A very important film, and one that more people need to see. An outstanding film. And even better with the knowledge that John Wayne denounced it. What a good sign for a film. Stupid right-wing ass.

Head is bizarre. And it leads to some funny misunderstandings, like when I said, "I apparently need to be on drugs to fully appreciate Head." Yay for silly things. Well, pretty much everything in it is bizarre. And there's a lot of very clear drug influences, and there's anti-war statements as well. Not as sure about the soundtrack, as really the only song I was familiar with was The Porpoise Song. Well, you'd have to be a huge Monkees freak to know any other songs from the soundtrack. At least there were lots of cameos... because what a disjointed drug movie really needs is a way to make people think, "Whoa, that's Frank Zappa." At least it's more obviously a joyous mess than Magical Mystery Tour, which pretty much only had a better soundtrack than this. But this movie was just a movie for people on hallucinogens, which really takes me out of the intended audience. And of course, watching lots of movies just leads to strange coincidences like the fact that Bert Schneider, producer (and Oscar winner) for Hearts and Minds also produced Head. And Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show, and Days of Heaven. Not a bad bunch of films. Well, except for Head. And of course, this movie that seems like a bad trip and is clearly very drug influenced was rated G. Of course.

Hold On! is a movie I have wanted to see for a long time. For some reason it's very hard to just come across a Herman's Hermits film on TV. Or get someone else who wants to watch it. Of course it's terrible. Nowhere near as good as A Hard Day's Night or Help!, which the film shamelessly apes at every chance. At least it's utterly ridiculous. And they barely moved during the songs. No stage presence. At least they tended to have a lot of women in 60s clothes dancing around them. Seriously, Herman's Hermits make almost no impact on the movie. Whoever decided to use the same screams and make them alternately loud and absolutely quiet doesn't really understand how this all works. You don't have a screaming mass of girls just go silent and then all start at once. And an 18 year old Herman just can't be the center of a film. Man, this depresses me. Stupid guilty pleasure. Certainly not the movie.

Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter finishes off my little manufactured 60s pop group movies. It's just as ridiculous as Hold On!, but with the added bonus of being shot in lovely 60s Manchester. Such a beautiful town. Oh, but there is a song about Manchester United and Bobby Charlton, It's Nice To Be out in the Morning, which does elevate it over Hold On! As little as that means. Slow movie though, and the writer didn't write anything else ever, so there goes that. It feels more like a movie rather than an excuse to string songs together. Too bad the acting from the Hermits is just as bad. The lower emphasis on songs would only work if the rest of the film made up for it, which it doesn't.

Be Cool & War of the Worlds

Be Cool is not cool. Be Cool be sucks. Be Cool is be bad. Be Cool shouldn't be made. Well, actually Andre Benjamin was just about the best thing in the movie. Well, besides the playing of Bob Dylan's Knockin' on Heaven's Door. Andre Benjamin was good with everything he did. Seth Green was utterly wasted. And the music sucked pretty much. Man, that sequel just didn't need to be made at all. Why was it made? Were there things that needed to be said after Get Shorty? And then there was the changing of the soundtrack, almost the entire cast, and especially the style.

War of the Worlds bothers me for a lot of reasons. Mainly it's that Miranda Otto and Tom Cruise would never produce a kid that looks like Dakota Fanning. Also, I was rooting for Tom Cruise to die. Not because he's Tom Cruise, but because he was wearing a Yankees hat. His son, of course was in good because he was wearing a Red Sox hat, well, at least he was until he decided he wanted to get up close and personal with the aliens. I have an inherent bias towards the story, due to both being a big reader of science fiction, a fan of Orson Welles, and especially, of a collection of short stories written about the invasion as imagined by a lot of real people. It was a fascinating collection, full of crazy stories, some better than others, but they're all interesting. Anyway, I am a big nerd, and I liked it even if most of the reviews didn't. The movie, on the other hand just feels like a crappy Hollywood film. The obvious linkage of the aliens to terrorism was the only interesting part of it, and even then, beh. Why bury the tripods underground? Why make that much effort to take over a planet and then miss out on figuring out that the atmosphere is toxic? It just doesn't make any sense? Is it right that I'm rooting against the humans? Every one in this movie is a moron. And the payoff was ridiculous.

Apparently it was crappy recent movie last couple of nights. Dunno why that happened. I am however planning a bunch of 60s non-Beatles pop music movies. Monkees and Herman's Hermits, here I come!

The Blue Kite, Dead Man Walking, & National Treasure

The Blue Kite is actually pretty depressing. Oh, wait, because every movie banned in China for being an accurate portrayal of post-revolution China and the many re-education programs that went on, leading to many, many deaths and very little progress. This is really messed up, but I guess that's why China is so messed up and why people study that time period so much. I would like to know more about this time period, although really, my best bet is to talk to my friend who is going to start studying China next month. Or at least ask her advice as to how to learn about this. Anyway, I really don't have a lot to say besides man, China was messed up, and the constant need to be counterrevolutionary is a serious problem with every communist country (and pretty much all authoritarian regimes). So messed up.

Dead Man Walking is really well-made. I'm not sure what else I can really say about it, because there was nothing wrong with it at all, and it's just well-done in every way. I can't think of anything wrong with it, and nothing I can make fun of it for. Sort of makes it difficult. I mean, if there's a movie that is so utterly ridiculous, it's easy to write about, or if it deals with something I want to talk about, that's easy. But when it's a reasonable look at the death penalty and I really hate the death penalty, that's about it. I just don't think anyone should be ending anyone's life, for any reason. Then again, I really haven't had anything horrible happen to me or my family, so I can't say ultimately what I would want in the situation in the film.

National Treasure is actually better than I was expecting. But why does Sean Bean keep getting typecast as the bad guy or someone who's completely incompetant? Have people not seen the Sharpe series? And if not, why don't they watch those to get an idea of how good Sean Bean can be. Nic Cage is too hyperactive in it, but that's a fairly normal thing for him. It's full of fun little historical facts, most of which are pretty easy, and fairly well known, but still, the movie promotes early American historical knowledge, which is good. I do know that the mason stuff is generally hokum, but it's a thrill a minute thrill ride. Of course there are serious problems. But somehow it's also so horribly cheesy and ridiculous that it doesn't really matter. I'm happy that a movie like this did fairly well, when it could have been a movie with no redeeming values at all.

King Arthur

King Arthur was one of those movies that had a great concept. In fact, a good friend of mine was working on a script with this same concept before the movie came out and was pissed that they ruined it for him. That is, of course, not the biggest problem with the film. The biggest problem is the bloated and craptacularness of it. Plus, it's really distracting to try to put names with faces, at least the Arthurian legends names. It's a typical Hollywood action film, with the faux historical trappings that were an attempt to make the movie more important. It's fluff, not good fluff, and silly to boot. I can't recommend it to anyone, even if it wasn't terrible. Just so utterly worthless that it isn't bad enough to mock, just bad enough not to be worth the over two hours I spent in the same room with it playing. Thank you, Internet, for giving me something to take my mind off it. Oh, and Antoine Fuqua can continue to Fuq-off. Yes, I'm a 12-year-old boy, what of it?

Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream

Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream is about the 1970s Midnight movies. So it's about a lot of movies I don't entirely like, like El Topo, Pink Flamingos, and Rocky Horror Picture Show. And some better films like Eraserhead, The Harder They Come, and Night of the Living Dead. Only Night of the Living Dead was actually a good movie, one that is a serious film, one that isn't a mess in some way. The Harder They Come has an amazing soundtrack, but a rote story. And Eraserhead feels a lot like a film student's film. Which it really was, but a hell of a lot better than pretty much every other student film. The first three, however, were trash, intentionally maybe, but trash none-the-less. The 90 minutes of the documentary, however, is about the right amount to deal with those films. More and I would have just gotten pissed watching more of Rocky or El Topo. Oh, and the movie had almost all of Bambi Meets Godzilla, which unfortunately cuts some of the effect of it. I'm happy to have seen all these movies, even the ones that are terrible, just because of the importance to film history, or more. If you weren't as interested in film history, you wouldn't enjoy the film as much as I did.

Johnny Mnemonic

Johnny Mnemonic is horrendous. Just as bad as everyone said. I've enjoyed the few short stories of Gibson I've read, so either he was just completely out of his depth writing the screenplay, or, much more likely, hiring a music video director and having Keanu Reeves try to act was a horrible decision. Gibson is, of course, an extremely prescient writer, but his writing was better for the ideas rather than the writing style. Too bad the movie doesn't really get the style right. The cast is also full of people who do some terrible work, and only Takeshi Kitano has really been in a good movie, so I was rooting for him to win. Would have made me much happier. Dolph Lundgren, Dina Meyer, Ice-T, Tracy Tweed (younger sister of Shannon), Henry Rollins, and the great Udo Kier are all horrible. Well, actually my choice of great as an honorific for Udo Kier is only somewhat tongue in cheek, since he was actually enjoyable in Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula. And Henry Rollins can be non-horrible, but certainly didn't try very hard in this role. And, seriously, Dolph Lundgren? What the hell are people thinking when they give him a role? Besides, "I have a role that could be acted by a hamster. Wait, that would actually mean there was some acting talent involved. Damn, let's just get Dolph Lundgren." Anyway, the whole 80GB storage in Keanu Reeves's brain may actually be about accurate. I love that 320 is too much for him though. If you were to digitize memories, you'd come up with something much, much more than 320GB. Strange how that is. And it's 2021, and 320 GB is supposed to be a lot of space? I mean, I have 60 GB in a container that only five years ago used to hold 5 GB. Which means that by 2021, we're talking over 100 TB of data in a container the size of an iPod. And, of course, you wouldn't need the audio or video capacities, meaning it could be much smaller. Ridiculous just how small technology has become over the past few years. It's just an utterly ridiculous movie that probably would have been better had it been made ten years later by someone who was a talented director.

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid is a movie that I had heard many horrible things about for years. That the casting was horrendous and that the only thing worthwhile in it was Knockin' on Heaven's Door. Which is an awesome song, and is used beautifully. I saw the reedited version, apparently done last year by Roger Spottiswoode, which still had some awkward castings, but it's not like Bob Dylan ever could act. This longer version has more character development, although I imagine a large portion of the nudity was also added. Because if you take out all the character development, all you have left is nudity and violence. Probably wouldn't sell. And appropriately the first version didn't sell. This version was much better. Peckinpah can make a western like no one else. Even when he wasn't making a western by location, he made a western by plot.

Clean

Clean is the a movie that should have, again, made Maggie Cheung a huge star in the US. I mean, she is, by far, the reason to see this film. That's not to say it isn't a good movie, because it is, but Maggie deserved her award. I knew she was good in Cantonese and English, but I really didn't know she knew French. Impressive. And I didn't know that she could sing, even if it was about the same way that Nico sings. I wasn't too happy with the kid playing Jay, but that's because there are so very few good child actors out there. The music was interesting, and good for the most part, although a little ambient for the most part. Of course, I did go and try to find out what it all was before the end of Metric's song. Mainly because I recognized that song, but couldn't place either the band or the song. Of course it was Dead Disco. Good song. Anyway, the movie is Maggie's, and she owns it like few people are capable.

Bill Maher: Victory Begins at Home & Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

Bill Maher: Victory Begins at Home was watched because yesterday sucked. For a lot of reasons. So I decided to watch a three year old Bill Maher special to remind myself of just how much I hate Bush, and why the hell he should never have been reelected. It was funny, but really, it's three year old material.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence made no sense. I really don't know what was going on in it at all. I mean, I almost thought the DVD skipped for a while there. Plus, the CGI looked very good. The handdrawn animation looked good. But putting them both on the screen just made it abundantly clear what was CGI and what was handdrawn. Especially when there was a simulated camera movement. Geez, you'd think that a large budget film could merge the two better than a TV show like Futurama, but the CGI, while pretty clear in Futurama, never just screamed CGI nearly as much as it did here. It's because the CGI isn't trying to be hyperrealistic, it's trying to ape the handdrawn. In GITS2:I, it's just trying to be as realistic as possible, meaning it really doesn't fit the handdrawn style at all. And whenever there's movement in front of a CGI background, it just was too freakin' obvious. At some point, someone besides Studio Ghibli is going to make an anime film that I actually like, right? It's not like I don't like sci-fi or action films, so why can't they make one that actually makes any sense?

The Exterminating Angel, Diary of a Country Priest, & Weeds

The Exterminating Angel is Bunuel being his typical anti-religion, -bourgeois, and -fascist self. The entire movie is pretty much making fun of the upper class and how they're not really human and are just going from one prison to another, from the dinner party that doesn't end to the church. I wonder about the summoning of the devil, though. That just seemed a little much. And that bear should have been attacking people, not the most sensible character in the movie.

Diary of a Country Priest is reason enough for me to go through my entire Netflix queue to make sure I don't have too many movies by the same director too close to each other. And sometimes I just add movies just because I want to see the director's movies. I regret that sometimes. But I know that I'd just sit there and wonder about how the movie is. I have a serious problem. My anti-religious nature really makes me not particularly care for religious movies. It's a fairly typical one, although done with a little more style than some. I was not particularly happy with that final shot though. And there was too much narration. If you see something on screen, you don't need someone explaining it.

I also watched all of the first season of Weeds. It's not as good as HBO shows, but I didn't regret watching it at all. Maybe I just need a deaf girl.

Into the Woods & How To Steal a Million

Into the Woods is a Sondheim musical, and as such, has very complicated and well-structured music. I first saw it, I think, 12 years ago, in Manchester with my family. As a much younger person, I didn't realize what Sondheim and James Lapine were trying to do, and while I vastly enjoyed the first act, I didn't care for the second. Now that I've had enough time to become extremely cynical, I realize that they were pointing out how even the "good" people in fairy tales don't always think through their actions and are selfish. And Sondheim has, what I believe to be, his best score ever. Vastly better than the badness that was Pacific Overtures, and better than Sweeney Todd, A Little Night Music, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. I certainly remembered Into the Woods, but I had forgotten Children Will Listen and No One Is Alone, the two best songs in the musical. And some of the best Sondheim ever did. The entire cast was very good, but Bernadette Peters as the witch and, especially, Joanna Gleason as the baker's wife were standouts. It's too bad that this was such a weak DVD, with no subtitles, which are occasionally needed with Sondheim's music, since he puts a lot of very important words in not that much space. At least he's a hell of a lot better than Andrew Lloyd Crapper.

How To Steal a Million is Audrey Hepburn and Peter O'Toole as a pair of art thieves. Well, sort of, but to say much more about it would spoil the fun. It's delightfully flufftactular. There's a nice Hitchcock reference early on, but all that does it heighten the fact that the movie would have been vastly better had it been done by Hitchcock instead. That's not to say that Wyler isn't talented, even though he made Jezebel, a movie so horrible I can't begin to describe how much I hate it, but it feels like To Catch a Thief, but not nearly as good. About the only real reason to watch it is to see Peter O'Toole and Audrey Hepburn together. Although Hugh Griffith is also good. The movie just never coheres like it should.

A Man Escaped & Dead Reckoning

A Man Escaped is a brilliant escape film. Knowing that it's a true story unfortunately gives some hint as to what will happen, but Bresson's film style fits perfectly with the tension created by the almost constant repetition, closeups of hands, and the completely uninflected acting. Weirdly Francois Leterrier, the lead, started to be a director and directed Goodbye, Emmannuelle. Pretty much everyone did nothing before acting in it, which is just how Bresson liked it. I kept thinking back to Le Trou, another film about escaping from prison, and they're very different films, though. Maybe it's the fact that A Man Escaped was set in a German prison in occupied France and has Mozart as a soundtrack, while Le Trou is set in a normal prison and focuses more on the hammering that was needed to build the hole. The thing is, there need never be another French prison escape film. These two have been the ultimate in the genre. No American film has come close to it. People who love The Shawshank Redemption should see these films to know what a great prison film should be. Too bad the subtitles and filming style would turn most of them off. Few films piss me off for being so highly regarded as The Shawshank Redemption does. I can't figure out what makes me annoyed about it so much. Maybe it's the fact that the IMDB rates it as the #2 film of all time, when it was the fourth best film nominated for the Best Picture Oscar that year, behind Four Weddings and a Funeral, Pulp Fiction, and Quiz Show. Only better than Forrest Gump, mainly because Forrest Gump sucks. I could go on listing other films much better than The Shawshank Redemption like Heavenly Creatures, The Madness of King George, Hoop Dreams, Red, and Eat Drink Man Woman. All of which are great films. The Shawshank Redemption is one of those films that frat boys think are great films. There are vastly better films that people need to be exposed to or else they say that Titanic is a brilliant film. And that is the sure sign that someone needs to have a full frontal lobotomy.

Dead Reckoning is almost too hard-boiled. The almost constant voice-over and dialogue was over the top, too wordy, and too distracting. Also distracting was Lizabeth Scott, who was attractive but not as good as the role demands. Apparently, she's a lesbian, and that kept her from being a bigger star. I do wonder about that being her actual singing voice. It seems dubbed. Of course, the role should have been for Lauren Bacall, who would have been absolutely perfect in it. Anyway, I just wish that the film did a little more showing and a little less telling. I mean, it shows it, mainly, but then it has to explain just what happened. The audience is apparently twelve years old. At least it has Humphrey Bogart in the lead, making it watchable.