The Da Vinci Code, Cutthroat Island, The Long Good Friday, Executive Koala, & Purple Rain

The Da Vinci Code clearly was going to be made, based on the huge sales of the book, but is there a more useless big budget film? Ridiculous, and somehow, for some reason, they changed the ending to make it much more ambiguous that Sophie is the descendant of Jesus Christ. Too bad, because that was just about the only thing that made the story remotely interesting. Of course, it's crap, based on misrepresentations and the like. Of course, I fully subscribe to the idea that Jesus was a normal dude, and the huge gap in his life in the New Testament, along with the idea that since I believe that Jesus actually did exist, it's highly unlikely that the huge inconsistencies and mistranslations in the Bible could possibly be reconciled. It's obvious that all religions are based on earlier ones, building on myths, trying to explain things that science hadn't yet explained, so a healthy skepticism of organized religion is good, but the least you can do is at least be honest. Dan Brown may be a compulsively readable author, but he's a first class liar.
Cutthroat Island is quite simply terrible in every way. But it's a different terrible from The Singing Forest. There's some talent there, but so little of it is in evidence anywhere remotely near this film that I wonder who decided to greenlight this with such a huge budget. Really, anyone who may have, at one time or after the movie, been a good actor/director/writer/anything seriously did not know what the hell they were doing. They replaced quality movie with explosions. And extra-long boring fight scenes with pirates, a monkey, and explosions.
The Long Good Friday is a great British gangster film. Bob Hoskins gives a riveting performance as a "middle-class" gangster trying to open a casino, and deal with bombings that seem to be trying to eliminate him and his woman, Helen Mirren. It also features a young Pierce Brosnan as an assassin. Really, it's quite good.
Executive Koala is a very strange film, a Koala is a salaryman at a pickle company in Japan, and his wife disappeared three years ago and his new girlfriend just disappeared. And he works for a bunny. Telling you much more about the plot would be ruining it. There's a musical interlude, some strange cultural satire, and some breaking the fourth wall. Definitely worth watching, because I have never seen a film that so nonchalantly deals with something so utterly weird.
Purple Rain has some great Prince tracks, and some terrible acting. The bluray didn't seem like it was worth getting, as it still looked like an old DVD, so maybe they just did a crappy job with the transfer? And Morris Day is supposed to be stupid, but his pants were just too high for me to take him remotely seriously.

CSS and Ssion at 9:30 12/20

So Ms. Sally Albright got me a ticket to the CSS show. I had heard their albums, and had the song from the iPod ad stuck in my head for as long as it had been on TV. With my recent (well, within the last couple of years) much larger interest in dancey electro poppy type of music, I certainly wasn't going to miss this show. Crazy Brazilian music? Yes, please.

The opener was Ssion (pronounced Shun), which she had apparently seen when they opened for The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. They're an art-punk music collective, led by Cody Critcheloe, from Kansas City. Apparently, there are insane people in every town. Insane people who put out amazingly catchy tracks. Saving you the trouble of googling for it, here's the video for Street Jizz (unfortunately with the correct number of z's). They played many tracks from Fool's Gold, along with a mediocre, at best, cover of Nightclubbing. Bits of New Kids on the Block and Michael Jackson lyrics also found their way into songs. Cody danced on a raised platform in front of a screen occasionally showing the lyrics of the songs, had two men in matching leotards dancing next to the platform, and the keyboardist in an outfit that reminds everyone that he is a Boy on both his jacket and hat, and a drummer keeping the insistent beat on orange see through drums. But the ending song, Street Jizz, is one of the catchiest songs I've ever heard. Just addictive to an extreme. Quite fun, and the members of CSS dancing on the balcony also seemed to be enjoying themselves.

CSS came out and put on a pretty fun show, playing all the tracks I knew (um, Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex, Let's Make Love and Listen to Death from Above, and... that's it), and ended with a huge group singalong to We Are the Champions. The show was enjoyable enough, even without knowing the songs, but they were kind of overshadowed by Ssion. For those of you keeping score, Lovefoxxx was attractive, but the weird outfit did nothing for me.

I Am Legend, The Polar Express, The Silent Partner, Overlord, Early Spring, & Equinox Flower

I Am Legend is pretty bad. The first parts, where Will Smith... oh, I mean, Robert Neville is wandering around a badly cgi'd New York City (and badly CGI'd deer and lions) are at least serviceable, but once the CGI'd vampires/zombies start dominating the screentime, it goes right off a cliff and never recovers. I watched it on HBO, so I didn't get to see the alternate ending in great quality, but I saw it online, and it certainly is better, although I wonder exactly why the studio had them change a happy ending to a depressing one. Aren't happy endings what Hollywood wants? Neither was particularly good, and the whole final siege scene was pretty much crap. Blargh. There's a good movie in there somewhere, but bad bad bad special effects just ruined it.

The Polar Express is a bunch of people dead behind the eyes, and the few people not played by Tom Hanks. The animation was off, because the eyes looked dead, and the faces didn't move right. Also, the movie was stretched to the point of pain. Barghle. Why did I sit through this? Stupid.

The Silent Partner has a great performance from Christopher Plummer as a crazy guy who robs a bank where Elliott Gould, Susannah York, and John Candy (!) work. But Elliott Gould took the money first. So Plummer starts about getting the money from him. It's written by Curtis Hanson, he of L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys fame. As such, it's an interesting little film, with nudity and violence against women (the second of which I was kind of uncomfortable with). But certainly goes to show that the 1970s were a very good time for movies.

Speaking of the 70s, Overlord was originally made in 1975, but vanished for about 30 years until it was redone by the Criterion Collection a few years ago. It's the story of a mild-mannered guy who joins the British Army during WWII and is on one of the first landing crafts to hit Normandy during D-Day. He struggles through basic training, and really is not the soldiering type. And all through this he is terrified by a vision he has of being shot while running up the beach. But the real reason why this film is interesting is the large amount of archival footage provided by both the Imperial War Museum as well as German film archives. John Alcott, who worked with Stanley Kubrick many times (including the brilliantly shot Barry Lyndon), matches the film stock perfectly. Not just a touching story, it's also one of the best movies about D-Day, even as it ends before any real fighting has happened. Definitely recommended.

Early Spring makes me wish I didn't feel this compunction to watch every film by directors I enjoy. It's a more biting film than many of his others, focusing on a salaried man's affair and hiding it from his family and coworkers, but still they all feel like he's telling a similar story in a slightly different fashion. Technically proficient, and with the same strong performances, but definitely of decreasing value to me watching them. Equinox Flower at least doesn't have a title of Relative Time Season. It's really close, but not exactly. The hero of this is a hypocrite about relationships with daughters, and it's about how the women in his life gently push him into the present with their roles in society. The use of color actually fits with the idea of pushing a somewhat backwards looking guy into the present, as Ozu finally moves into color filmmaking.

The Singing Forest, My Straight Boyfriend, Popcorn & Coke, Uninhibited, & Misguided Piss

The Singing Forest is the most immature film I have ever seen. And possibly one of the worst. I also watched it before the previous posts, but I somehow didn't write it up then. The Singing Forest, which isn't really obviously referenced anywhere in the film (I think it may have been the title of the article that the lead wrote after a visit to a psychic), was the screams of victims who were impaled on spikes. I would have known this had I been willing to watch Paragraph 175, but it sits languishing on my DVR, for over two years now. There's just something about a documentary about gay people being persecuted during the Holocaust that makes me feel like I should watch it, but not actually create any desire to do so. I could go through the many, many ways that this film was terrible, but suffice it to say that when the surf drowns out dialogue, that was the best scene in the film. Better than when the barking dog drowned out dialogue, or when we get to see the fiancee's penis because the father stares at him in the shower. All would be highlights of any other film, but only Jorge Ameer is man enough to put them all in one film. That's not mentioning the wedding, the daughter (conceived during a rape where the obviously gay father meets the now-dead mother) being named Destiny, the extremely awkward and terrible dialogue, acting, directing, editing, sound design, cinematography, and so on. I bet even the best boy grips were amateurish. Really, the movie is so bad it must be seen. And then ridiculed for days to anyone who hasn't seen it. Which is what I did, and why I have no idea how I could have forgotten to write about it.

Even better than the horrible main feature though, were the bonus features. It included four short films, one of which isn't on IMDB. My Straight Boyfriend starts with a guy walking into his room, getting naked, and masturbating. Which is totally normal. But then he gets under the covers and continues to masturbate, which, to me, just means messy sheets and a stain. So he's going at it for a while, until you start to realize there's someone in the bed, possibly giving him oral pleasure. At first it's clearly a woman, and then it turns into a sex doll's head (what?), and then the arms show up and it's clearly a dude. This is not subtle. This is stupid. Even worse was Popcorn & Coke, which was about a guy getting "seduced" by an awkward guy and a woman with bad taste in clothes that showed her backfat (which isn't a major issue, but just kind of a bad costuming decision), while the older woman sitting behind him looked on jealously. The star of it, Matthew Leitch, was in both The Dark Knight and Band of Brothers. So someone clearly thought well enough of his acting abilities. It's too bad Jorge Ameer has no talent. Apparently this was the introduction to The Glitter Awards, which he started and curates. In fact, just read his bio from the IMDB, which was obviously written by him (and according to his message board, definitely wrote it, and then changed his nickname). Uninhibited is about a guy who walks into his apartment and turns on the tv, which is showing The Singing Forest, in a not-so-subtle bit of product placement. And then hears his roommate having sex (with a woman!), so he crawls under his bed and when she leaves, and then the roommate clearly knows he's under there and tells him to come out. And then gets naked and into the shower where the guy follows and they start making out. Another winner by Jorge Ameer! But the clear winner for best short included on this was Misguided Piss, about a nerd who watches a great pickup in a bathroom. One dude pisses on another one's leg. This shot is repeated many times, on an already wet pant leg, which is just crap. Also there's a point of view shot of the guy's obviously fake penis pissing. Which is also repeated. So the pissee and the pisser leave the bathroom together, and so the nerd tries it with this big guido, named Rico Riconi (the actual actor), who doesn't take to it and punches him out. All through every one of his movies, he uses bad classical music, and one had a particularly bad cover of some terrible song, possibly Mandy. Now I'm completely blanking on this, so I don't remember. But it was terrible. Ameer's just one of the worst filmmakers currently out there.

Sooner or Later, Zigeunerweisen, Kageroza, Yumeji, & Underworld Beauty

Sooner or Later is an 11 minute short Hungarian film written and directed by István Madarász (and is Elöbb-utóbb in Hungarian). Normally I wouldn't bother watching random short films online, but io9 and Metafilter both linked to it, so go here and watch a short about a late-war secret Nazi experiment to use a time travel serum to go back to win the war. Worth 11 minutes.

Zigeunerweisen, Kageroza, and Yumeji are an informal trilogy of Seijun Suzuki films, and are bizarre and very nonsensical with ghosts and actors playing different people. Sorry, just didn't like them at all. They're basically his only major works from Branded To Kill to Pistol Opera. He clearly was still messing with people, but instead of it being the studio heads like in Tokyo Drifter and Branded To Kill, it is the audience. Underworld Beauty, on the other hand, is a quick little dirty, early Seijun Suzuki film, not as good as his later ones, but it's effective at what it does: a bunch of criminals are chasing after some diamonds. There's a tense scene involving a coal chute, and a lot of naked mannequins, but really, it's just a fun little film. Nothing remotely that interesting except for those who will see anything by a director of which they are a fan.

The Bourne Ultimatum, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Rescue Dawn, WALL-E, BURN-E, & Presto

The Bourne Ultimatum is the last (maybe? with a successful series, who knows?) Bourne movie, and as such, it finally answers some questions that you don't get from reading the books (which I did back in 2002 after liking the first movie). Julia Stiles is no Franke Potente, and Édgar Ramírez is definitely not Clive Owen. The second two films are different from the first one, but they're all enjoyable spy films. My only problem with them is that they've apparently heavily influenced Quantum of Solace and it isn't nearly as good as Casino Royale? I sort of want my Bourne films to be about revenge, and my Bond movies to be about awesomeness. Revenge shouldn't really enter into it. Maybe I shouldn't condemn it until I've seen it. Maybe it'll be out sometime in the spring on blu-ray?

Little Dieter Needs to Fly is the documentary that Rescue Dawn was based on, so I watched them both in one day. I recommend them both, although Rescue Dawn is considerably longer, but it does have Jeremy Davies and François Chau from Lost, so that was a nice touch. Dieter is Dieter Dengler, a young survivor of WWII who moved to the US to fly planes. In an early (his first, I think) mission into Laos, his plane was shot down and was captured a day later. He survived for months in a prisoner of war camp, and then eventually escaped and survived for a long time before being rescued. Also, Dieter was involved in four more plane crashes as a test pilot after the war. How much of a badass was this guy? The documentary is pretty short, but it covers everything that the movie does in a better fashion. Although, as Werner Herzog directed it, he puts Dieter through some mean things, like forcing him to be run through the jungle with his hands tied. He's a total bastard, but he makes good films. Oh, and Rescue Dawn includes a Steve Zahn decapitation. Not bad.

WALL-E is the newest Pixar animated film. It just won the best film of the year award from the LA Film Critics Association. It's a Pixar film. Of course, I absolutely loved it. Beautiful animation, an extremely touching (no pun intended, but I like it anyway) story, and funny when it wanted to be. I am not sure if it's the best Pixar film, but it's definitely up there. Also on the DVD were BURN-E and Presto. BURN-E is sort of like a deleted subplot than another movie, but it's enjoyable enough. Presto, on the other hand, is the hilarious and extremely awesome story of a magic pair of hats that a magician uses in his act and the bunny who turns the tables violently. Definitely worth a rental if you, for some reason, have seen WALL-E and somehow missed this. Pixar just knows how to make short films that are clever and interesting, and this homage to old-school Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry cartoons is just about perfect.