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.