Rock Band post

I normally would have posted this post about my experiences with Rock Band here, but I figured that considering it was asked for there, I would post it there. I am not sure if anyone doesn't read that and does read this, but anyway, go read that post. And realize it may be one of the nerdiest things I've written ever. In like a week.

Also, in other PS3 news: Everyday Shooter is awesome, as is Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. Assassin's Creed is quite fun for a while, but some of those informer missions are just annoying as hell. I am waiting (im)patiently for Little Big Planet. And for more good Rock Band DLC. And Gran Turismo 5 and for the Final Fantasy XIII games, all soon to come in 2009ish. If I'm lucky.

This Is England, Eastern Promises, Army of Shadows, An Unreasonable Man, & Flags of Our Fathers

This Is England is a movie about Neo-Nazis in England in 1983. Directed by Shane Meadows, who also directed Once upon a Time in the Midlands, which some people seemed to enjoy far more than me. This one is far better, a bitter tale of growing up when you don't fit in, and trying to find a place. It's full of great performances from people I hadn't heard of, and a truly menacing performance in the Russell Crowe role (see Romper Stomper) from Stephen Graham. And I would have gone after Smell just like Shaun did. Well, probably not as forwardly, as I tend to be far shyer than he was.

Eastern Promises features the longest nude fight scene I've seen outside of porn. So if you ever want to see Viggo Mortensen's naked, tattooed, and bloody self sticking pointy objects into two thugs, see Eastern Promises. Naomi Watts is once again absolutely perfect, and Vincent Cassell and Armin Mueller-Stahl made a threatening pair of Russian mafioso. Cronenberg made another great film, once again proving that he's one of the best directors currently working. He builds tension well, and films violence more effectively than anyone else making "major" Hollywood films. I do wish, very much, that he had accepted the chance to direct Return of the Jedi. Imagine the Ewoks replaced with Brundleflies. That would be completely awesome. If only.

Army of Shadows is number five in my list of nearly or perfect Jean-Pierre Melville films. A.k.a., I've seen five Melville films. This one is about the day to day work and fears of the French Resistance. It has Jean-Pierre Cassel, father of Vincent, for a nice little link. It's long, episodic, and depressing as hell. Who thought that a movie made by two survivors of the French Resistance would be ultra-realistic? And yet, there it is, probably the best film ever about the French Resistance.

An Unreasonable Man just makes me want to punch Ralph Nader in the head. Repeatedly. And his asswipe apologists. And I could have, had I lived in my current place back in the 1970s, because it's just a couple blocks from the Public Citizen headquarters. Man, I have more respect for Nader the activist (i.e. pre-1990) than Nader the egomaniac (post-1990). He singlehandedly cost this country everything that has gone wrong since 2000. Which is a hell of a lot. A President Gore... goddamnit. It just gets me more pissed off than almost anything else you could possibly do. For someone to do so much good in this world, and then piss it all away because he's such a friggin' egomaniac is painful.

Flags of Our Fathers has a great cast, including Chris "Frank Sobotka" Bauer, Neal McDonough, Robert Patrick, Melanie Lynskey, Jon Polito, Barry "Human Animal" Pepper, Ryan Phillippe, Jamie Bell, and Jesse Bradford. All of whom I love at least one thing that they did, or, in the case of Jon Polito, almost everything he has ever done. It's very well-made, but it really needs to be a little less facile. Oh, wait, it's written by Paul Haggis, that hack. I need to see Letters from Iwo Jima. It's definitely doing something different for an American war film. I don't think I've seen a war film that approaches actual fighting from the Japanese side. Films that take place during the war, yes. I need to watch my damn Janus films because I own Fires on the Plain. I seem to say this pretty often.

Like Water for Chocolate, Bender's Big Score, All the King's Men, Christmas in July, Naked, & The Up Series

Like Water for Chocolate is a movie that was given to my parents back on VHS (one of the very, very few they ever were given, since they never purchased them, and, as far as I know, they've never purchased a DVD either), but I never watched. I have remedied that. Magical realism is a soft spot of mine, and lots of food preparation just made it even more interesting to me. The copious nudity didn't hurt either. I just didn't connect with the film as much as the parts suggested I should.

Bender's Big Score is a Futurama movie. If you don't think that the show was consistently the best animated TV show ever, then you're plain wrong. It took the best of the Simpsons, and added insanely geeky references (just watch the half hour long math lecture included on the DVD for the proof), and extremely effective pop culture satire, and just made extreme hilarity a constant feature. I utterly loved it. Of course I wanted more, and the next three films will have to do, but why the hell did Family Guy, that unfunny piece of crap (one of my favorite gags was the Family Guy calendar advertising 12 jokes a year), come back, while Futurama was so royally screwed throughout almost its entirely too short broadcast time? I also wasn't expecting nearly the amount of nudity I got from the movie. And I wasn't the one who brought up the fact that Amy Wong is cute. All this comes down to is how much you can ignore the blase decapitations and just enjoy Zoidberg, Farnsworth, Nibbler, and Bender doing their thing for 80 minutes, with cameos from just about everyone cool from the show. And Hanuka Zombie. Voiced by Mark Hamill.

All the King's Men is another version of one of the greatest American novels, by Robert Penn Warren. The 1949 movie version was excellent, with Broderick Crawford a mesmerizing Willie Stark. Sean Penn and James Gandolfini, among almost every other major actor in this film, can't even keep their accents the same throughout each scene. It's long, it's unnecessary, but I've seen it now. On a scratched Blu-ray disc. If you absolutely cannot read the book, see the earlier version. Avoid this one like the plague. I object to movies that aim for greatness and fail miserably far more than movies that aspire to be entertaining and only fitfully succeed.

Christmas in July is Preston Sturges's follow-up to The Great McGinty, and to be followed by a string of comedies over the next four years unsurpassed by a writer-director (The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and Hail the Conquering Hero). Unfortunately for me, it was more like The Great McGinty, in that it has moments of brilliance, but ultimately falls a little flat. Partially due to Ellen Drew's poor performance, but also due to a slightly unbelievable plot (a guy enters a coffee slogan contest, and his coworkers convince him he's won, goes out to spend his winnings, marry his sweetheart, and everything has to end happily). Sturges's trademarks are there, with slapstick, ridiculous names, and William Demarest, but the brief movie (only 67 minutes long) never feels like it has time to set.

Naked, on the other hand, is 130 minutes of pain. Not at the quality of the movie, but it's the raw emotion from David Thewlis's performance that makes this uncomfortable film with two pretty anti-women male characters worth seeing. The fairly constant violence against women made me feel icky, and I had to have the subtitles on, due to a low volume sound mix and Scottish accents (Ewan "Spud" Bremner!). I may not have entirely enjoyed the film, but I can heartily recommend it for anyone who wants to see David Thewlis wandering around, abusing women (mostly psychologically), getting beaten up, having philosophical conversations with random people, and generally being an observer of other people's messed up lives.

The Up Series starts out strong, as Seven Up!'s kids say extremely funny (and occasionally classist and racist) things, although Seven Plus Seven is fairly weak, with a bunch of fourteen year olds not the best communicators out there. But the later ones become meditations on fame, relationships, and just how hard it can be to live in world of the late 20th century (and early 21st in 49 Up). I wish that the one kid who ended up working at the BBC had been willing to talk. And it was extremely frustrating to watch Neil spiral into homelessness and mental illness, although he was able to recover. But having no foreknowledge of how they will grow up, have their hopes realized and demolished over the period of 42 years made it heartrending. Seeing marriages dissolve made me feel overly voyeuristic. It's basically actual reality TV, with as little preening for the TV as you never see on reality TV in this country. I can't wait for 56 Up in another five years. I need to know that they're going to be ok. Watching them all over the last couple weeks has suggested that this wasn't a good idea, as there's a fair bit of repetition, with many older clips used to occasionally take the piss out of them, other times showing how they had done just what they expected.

Last Orders

Back on October 31, 2002, I wrote this on my thankfully long gone blog: "We watched Last Orders tonight. That and Gosford Park basically had every single famous English actor currently working. This one had Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, Bob Hoskins, David Hemmings, Ray Winstone, and Helen Mirren (also in Gosford Park, and Caligula, which I haven't seen, because I haven't found it in a video store in the uncut version). It was weird to see David Hemmings as a large man with huge eyebrows, one week after seeing him as the young, dashing Thomas in Blow-Up. I'd say it was weird to see Tom Courtenay again, but I'd only seen two movies he was in: Doctor Zhivago (which was so long I can't remember his character) and Leonard Part 6, of which I thankfully can't remember any. Bob Hoskins, Michael Caine, and Ray Winstone all made movies more recently, and the only major problem I had with Helen Mirren was that she didn't look 70 (the age of her character). That's obviously a backhanded compliment, because she looked her age, which was 55 or 56 when it was made. She was good, just I think it was weird that she had a 50 year old daughter in the film, because it didn't seem physically possible. The movie was excellent, and it makes me want to read Graham Swift's novel. I loved Waterland very much when I read it in 12th grade, and it made me want to go see the fens of England. Here's a hint: think of the flattest land you've ever seen, and then picture it ten times flatter, and you'd get some idea of the fens. There was also a terrible traffic jam when my mom and bro and I were there. We did stop off and see Ely (pronounced EE-lee) Cathedral, which stuck out like a sore thumb. Cambridge is also near there, but there was literally no hills, no nothing for miles around. I have a picture of myself on the side of the road, and I gave it to my English teacher to show her what the fens were like, and she put it up on the wall in the classroom. I doubt it's still up there, but that area was totally flat. Back to the movie: the skipping back and forth in time would be Tarantinoesque if it hadn't been done before, or if it weren't how Swift writes. Another little problem with the film was that they were speaking in heavy working class accents, which made it hard to understand, so we turned on the subtitles. Score another point for DVDs." On December 19th, 2007, I have finally finished reading the book (I only started a little while ago). Not as good a book as Waterland (although a better movie), but I didn't identify with the 70 year olds nearly as much as I did with the young people in love. Each chapter in the book, from single sentence length to multiple pages, is told in first person, with many skips in time, sometimes confusing the timeline initially, but it all fits together in a satisfying way. I also have seen Caligula since then.

Joyeux Noël, High Spirits, & Pootie Tang

Joyeux Noël is a weepy melodrama about the Christmas truce between the Germans and the Scottish and French troops in 1914 on the Western Front. It's effective, but clearly there are extensive liberties taken with history. An anti-war film, all I could think about the entire time was about the best way to break through the lines in 1914. How do you get past the best defensive weapon of the time before there's really any corresponding advancement in offensive weaponry? Clearly the current tactics were not working, and it's amazing that they tried the same things over and over again. Working with smaller forces attacking weaker points would have worked, and did, finally, by the end of the war. You would have thought that mass assaults that decimated the forces would have made them realize that wouldn't work. And that's basically everything I was thinking about for most of the movie. Especially anytime that Diane Kruger wasn't on screen. When she was, it was maybe 90% of what I was thinking.

High Spirits is a Neil Jordan film, who directed the supremely awesome Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, and The Butcher Boy, along with the quite good The Company of Wolves, The Good Thief, Breakfast on Pluto, Michael Collins, and Interview with the Vampire. Basically, I like Neil Jordan, so when I was told that there was an 80s comedy with Peter O'Toole, Steve Guttenberg, Jennifer Tilly, Peter Gallagher, Beverly D'Angelo, Daryl Hannah, and Liam Neeson, I had to watch this. And it's just as bad as you'd expect a movie with Steve Guttenberg and a ghostly Daryl Hannah (doing her best Lucky Charms, which brings me to the review on Netflix that includes this: (save for Darryl Hannah as an Irishwoman--doesn't work, but they even purposefully have her lapse out at certain lines for comic effect, which shows they can make fun of themselves), which is so blatantly stupid that it's ridiculous). There are so many things that just don't work in this film that I was amazed that anyone thought it was a good idea. That it was funny in its terribleness is amazing. Just avoid this film unless you are with a lot of people who are very much into watching crap. I do very much want to see Neil Jordan's original cut of the film, especially considering the psychosexual aspects of The Company of Wolves, which this film clearly should have had more of. Also, the special effects were terrible 80s rear projection, models, and some stop motion. And there was the Duke University reference (more info about Duke's importance in Parapsychology here), which always reminds me of Carrie (the novel makes a couple references to Duke University scientists) and the opening of Ghostbusters, with the Zener cards. Of course, Duke no longer has it, but it's still in Durham. Ugh...

Pootie Tang is hilarious. In a good way. Also, what a cast: Bob Costas, Robert Vaughn, Chris Rock, J.B. Smoove, Wanda Sykes, Dave Attell, Laura Kightlinger, J.D. Williams, Jennifer Coolidge, Andy Richter, Kristen Bell (in her first credited performance! and just as hot as she is now), David Cross, Jon Glaser, Rick Shapiro, and Todd Barry. And a gorilla mauling. Plus it's full of good messages for the kids: don't eat sugary cereals, don't drink whiskey, don't smoke, respect women, and watch out for a man with a belt.

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, loudQUIETloud: A Film about the Pixies, Pusher, & A Scanner Darkly

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days actually has far less torture than I was expecting: none. Well, there's some keeping up all night, shining a light in their eyes, but considering waterboarding is A-OK (Hi, Mitt and Rudy), that's nothing. It's not clear whether there was any torture of others, although some sounds would tend to suggest that there was some. Certainly none of Sophie herself. The film just basically tosses the viewer in the middle of the war, well after she and her brother and friends have decided to pass out anti-Hitler propaganda leaflets. I would have been interested to see why a seemingly normal Hitler Youth girl decided to be all, Hitler bad, peace good, but that's only obliquely referenced in a couple of lines about the horrors of the Eastern front. I understand that most Germans would know the history of the White Rose, but I would have enjoyed a little more motivation. The final trial scene amazed me, in that these people were allowed to have a trial at all, let alone be so obviously anti-Hitler. Would we really have a trial of terrorists in this country allowing them to speak in public now? Makes me wish we had a little more openness. Yeah, I just Godwined the argument. I lose.

loudQUIETloud: A Film about the Pixies is about the reunion tour in 2004. I think I was getting it confused with The Pixies, which is fine, because MBG has a copy of that. I guess this was interesting, but it was pretty short, and the Pixies in 2004 were nowhere near as good as the Pixies in their heyday. Kim and Frank's voices are far weaker now, although I'm still excited for the new Breeders album next year. Because there are far too few of them, caused by Kim's heavy substance abuse, a constant part of the film. That and Lovering's drug use. And Frank Black not wearing enough clothes.

Pusher is a crappy Danish drug film. Low budget, with some bad acting and it's full of the worst worn out drug movie tropes. And is Danish, therefore it got some positive words (as the first of a trilogy, the latter two of which are no longer in my Netflix queue) on a blog I read, because had it not been in a foreign language it would have been just another crappy drug film. Of which there are too many.

A Scanner Darkly has a soundtrack by Radiohead, and based purely upon that, is an infinitely better film than Pusher. The rotoscoping animation seemed unneeded in most scenes, but when it was used well (to make sure that Winona Ryder's character was topless when she'd never have done so otherwise), it added quite a bit. And it looks fantastic. Anything that Linklater does is worth watching, as he has made two of the most romantic films of all time in Before Sunrise/Sunset. Although I will probably never see The Newton Boys just because I don't want my idea of him ruined. A Scanner Darkly has the three best druggies ever on film (well, ok, in real life as well, but we're missing Naked Bongo Boy) playing drug-addled people. So they do a good job.