The X Files: I Want to Believe, Dedication, Romance & Cigarettes, Chess in Concert

The X Files: I Want to Believe was boring. Sally and I both fell asleep before the end. I missed the entire climax of the film, but I did see the kiss at the end. I read the X-Files wiki page on the movie though, so I really didn't feel like I missed anything by sleeping. It was so utterly boring. It would've been ok as a midseason non-sweeps episode of the show, but there was absolutely no tension in the film at all. I did wonder what the hell happened to Annabeth Gish and Robert Patrick's characters, but maybe Chris Carter had the sense to act like most of the last two seasons of the show didn't exist, like I have. Because they were not good. How can Fox have such a huge problem with running some shows into the ground and then cut so many others so short? Sigh. Anyway, I really feel like I should have more to say about the film, but the fact that I fell asleep watching a movie with David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Amanda Peet, Billy Connolly, and Callum Keith Rennie says a lot. Also, thanks, Chris Carter for your very subtle point about religion with the whole stem-cell treatment. I knew that there was something missing from the movie, and inept moralizing about how religion can kill hit the spot! There were two priest characters: one was a pedophile and the other wanted to kill a sweet kid because it would have been expensive and against his morals to save him. Ugh. If you aren't able to do so well, all you do is make people who agree with you pissed off. PETA, I want to eat sea kittens even more than I want to eat fish. They will be delicious and adorable as I eat as many as I can. And then I will continue to complain about your frickin' tone-deaf attempts to be the biggest assholes on this planet. At which you are succeeding.

Dedication was the first in an unintentional Mandy Moore filmfest. I definitely didn't go through and add movies from Mandy Moore to my queue. This one is a romantic comedy with Billy Crudup being a children's book writer whose longtime collaborator and only friend Tom Wilkinson dies, and so Bob Balaban pays Mandy Moore to illustrate his contractually obligated book. Martin Freeman has a small role as an English author and competitor for Mandy Moore's love. Justin Theroux began his directing career with this. He didn't do badly at all, and he's still one of those guys that you don't know you know. This film is a romantic comedy, but the script is slightly more interesting than others, at least in the details, because the plot is extremely basic romantic comedy tropes.

Romance & Cigarettes has a great cast, and lots of talent. And is terrible. James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi, Bobby Cannavale, Mandy Moore, Mary-Louise Parker, Aida Turturro, Christopher Walken, Elaine Stritch, Eddie Izzard, Amy Sedaris, and even Cady Huffman and John Turturro in small roles were not nearly enough to save this overblown mess. The musical aspects are just poorly done. I can understand wanting to get good actors, but their singing was usually terrible.

Chess in Concert is something I watched because I remembered watching this at Washington University in St. Louis back in... 1995? and hating it. I wondered if it was just the drama students or whether it was the musical itself. One Night in Bangkok is not a particularly good song, lending credence to the latter, so I was not entirely looking forward to this. But it's a musical by Tim Rice and the two male members of ABBA. Basically three people who are talented (seriously, once Tim Rice stopped working with Andrew Lloyd Webber, Andrew truly sucked) were behind it, but it's a musical about two chess matches and the cold war maneuvering behind them. But beh to this, and pretty much the musical as well. I did like seeing Clarke "Lester Freamon" Peters in it, even though he didn't really sing, but that was hardly worth the 2.5 hours of mediocre music.

Helvetica, Grey Gardens, Gone Baby Gone, & She's Gotta Have It

Helvetica is a documentary about a font (haha, typeface nerds, I said font, not typeface, so remember, there is a comment section so complain there). There were some interesting stories in it, but 80 minutes about it were at least 20 minutes too much. I get it, some people find Helvetica a nice clean typeface. Others object to its nice clean typeface look and prefer crazy grunge fonts. The best parts were when they talked to the English guy who had a great accent and good stories about the typeface. And when they went to the archives of the company that owns the rights to Helvetica and we met the dude with the blue bow tie and the plaid jacket. Most of the others were ok, but I just felt like it was a lot about the font.

Grey Gardens is the story of two of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' relatives, first told in a documentary in 1975 by Albert and David Maysles and was then filmed by HBO and aired earlier this year, starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange, along with Jeanne Tripplehorn. I felt so bad for the Beales and it was basically painful to watch. They're basically crazy cat ladies who have lived together for so long that it's clear that they've sniped at each other for years over the same issues. To watch them slowly attempt to clean and be more social just makes the arguments just worse. I watched both, and while the documentary is all the more painful due to the actual characters, the movie has great performances, even from Drew Barrymore. There are certainly some differences in scenes from both notable mainly due to watching them one right after the other.

Gone Baby Gone was pretty good, especially for a film from Gigli. Mainly due to great performances from actors like Ed Harris, Amy Ryan, and even Casey Affleck. And the cast was full of some other good actors, like John Ashton, Michael K. Williams, and Morgan Freeman (not playing a magic negro like normal!). Michelle Monaghan, however, was terrible. Other than that extremely weak link, it was a pretty good story, although I have no idea how much of it was due to Dennis Lehane's novel, as Mystic River was almost an amazingly good film, until the ending few minutes which were utter crap. Really, Amy Ryan was so much better than Laura Linney that it's almost enough to note how the female characters are extremely one-dimensional. Which may also be due to Dennis Lehane's book.

She's Gotta Have It is Spike Lee's first feature length film, a feminist look at sex and relationships in the 80s. The acting is... well, pretty weak from almost everyone besides Spike Lee. That was kinda surprising, but then again, he was given the best male role in the film. But it's really Nola's film, and it's a shame that Tracy Camilla Johns never really had much of a career after this film.

Pierrot le fou & Play Time

Pierrot le fou is the first Godard film chronologically that starts to be too political to actually be much of a movie. Except that it keeps insisting it is a movie. Which is one of the charms of Godard, but this felt like a warm up for Week End, a better film, as they're both about a couple who goes on a trip and the world around them devolves. That one at least had the amazing tracking shot of the car accident, still one of the best things ever to be put on film.

Play Time is a semi-sequel to M. Hulot's series of films that included Mon Oncle. This is another satire of modern society, with a higher budget, and apparently did very poorly at the box office. I understand. I felt the length more this time. There were still some funny bits, but it felt like it was a satire for the 60s and I just don't find it as enjoyable. Maybe I'm getting jaded. Need new movies please.

Telekinesis! at the Black Cat 6/17

Somehow, someway, I wasn't actually the first person among my friends to find this band. They put out an album on Merge in April. And I didn't hear about them until around then. But MBG came in to work one day and said, "My new favorite band is on Merge." So I got the album and he was right. It's the best thing I've heard this year. There isn't one single bad track, and therefore no real standouts, as "Tokyo", "Coast of Carolina", "Awkward Kisser", and "I Saw Lightning", among others have been stuck in my head for various amounts of time over the last week. That was helped by my usual listening to the entire discography of the band before the show, along with a Tiny Desk set webcast on NPR (apparently Michael is a huge fan of Bob Boilen, and it'll be posted here at some point). During that, they played a bit of the old ELO song, Can't Get It out of My Head, which luckily I can't get into my head. My favorite thing about the picture? The Beatles Anthology book bookended with the Beatles bobbleheads. I want those.

The show was part of a co-headlining tour. An Horse opened at the Black Cat, when Telekinesis! has opened for them the night before in Philly. I'd never heard of An Horse, although they had apparently opened for Death Cab for Cutie in Australia and for Tegan & Sara in the US. There were many people there just for them, as the crowd noticeably thinned after they played. I didn't love them, but they were enjoyable enough, even with the thin sound only a guitar and drums can make, and certainly got me in the mood for Telekinesis!'s set. There were also many underage people there. I guess both bands were kinda emo-y, but I felt very old fogey-y. During An Horse's set, all of the members of Telekinesis! were within a few feet of me at various times. I did not know what the other, non-Lerner, members looked like, but I was too shy to tell him how great his album was. But I was literally standing right next to the other members and I didn't know.

With only one album at only 31 minutes long, and with only a couple EPs and a single out (most of the tracks on those were rerecorded for the album), they certainly couldn't play for very long. So I wasn't expecting all that much when they came out around 10:40. They played for around 40 minutes, missing "Awkward Kisser", but whipping out a pretty good Kinks cover in "A House in the Country" to replace it, and doing every other song from the album (I think). Yes, Telekinesis!'s touring band features an Asian female bassist (who was tatted up). Michael Lerner looked quite a bit like a muppet (Animal in particular), once he took his glasses off and was flailing around but still kinda in one place. The two guitarists, hipster/pedophile/70s Swedish softcore porn actor and Jared Leto were pretty good. The in-between-song banter was slightly repetitive (they said they were very excited about being in DC a few times), but it seemed like it was due to being charged up rather than anything else.

After Michael got out from in front of the drums (to play his small guitar for Rust, he saw there was also a slight problem with the stuffed raccoon on top of Michael's drum kit, as an anti-fur person put an anti-fur sticker on it. And then had a shouted disagreement with Lerner (a vegetarian) over whether it was a real raccoon or not. Seriously? It's, very obviously, a stuffed raccoon. What the hell? I may agree with you guys that fur is evil, but I think you're just a huge bunch of douchebags. You and PETA.

iTunes Meme Takes the Fifth

Four years into this, and I've decided to add to the content by reposting my old blog. So I'm redoing the iTunes meme again again, and noting that I saw 216 films this year (total of 3838 films), meaning I saw 79 fewer films this past year than the previous year. Successfully dating is to blame. Wouldn't trade it though. My consumption of most media has decreased over the past year. I don't even get the shakes if I don't see a movie in a few days.

How many total songs?
24268, that's 61 days, 22 hours, 28 minutes, and 10 seconds or 108.72 GB. That's 1866 more songs than last year, although by when I added current iterations of tracks, there are 2725 more tracks.

Sort by Song Title - first and last?
A.B.C. by The Jackson 5 on the Hitsville USA box set
___ from Regina Spektor's Soviet Kitsch
Same as last year

Sort by Artist - first and last?
a-ha
+/-
Same as last year

Sort by Time - first and last?
We're a Couple from the Spaced Soundtrack
Symphony no. 9 from the BBC Philharmonic's Beethoven's Symphonies
That cuts about six tenths of a second off last year's shortest.

Sort by Album - first and last?
The A List by Wire
() by Sigur Rós
Same as last year

Top Five Played Songs:
Holland, 1945 from Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane over the Sea
Drill Me from Portastatic's The Summer of the Shark
Blue Bird from The Rosebuds' Birds Make Good Neighbors
Sex Is Personal from The Faint's Blank Wave Arcade
Temptation from New Order's Substance
Pretty similar, although my love for Temptation has finally entered.

Find "sex," how many songs show up? 166 (by track is 56, and Song against Sex at 7)
Find "death," how many songs show up? 161 (by track is 55, with 3 The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrolls)
Find "love," how many songs show up? 1307 (by track is 769, with 15 Love Will Tear Us Apart's winning)
Find "peace," how many songs show up? 27, (by track is 24, (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding? winning this one at 8)
Find "rain," how many songs show up? 352, with 190 by track, having Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head winning with 5
Find "sun," how many songs show up? 343, with 219 by track, and Island in the Sun winning with 5
Find "you," how many songs show up? 2837, with 1887 by track and 11 Don't You Evah (well, one is technically Don't You Ever)
Find "home," how many songs show up? 233, with 110 by track and Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) with 4
Find "boy," how many songs show up? 638, with 248 by track and Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone? with 12
Find "girl," how many songs show up? 600, with 284 by track and I Know Ur Girlfriend Hates Me with 9
Find "hate," how many songs show up? 105, with 61 by track and I Know Ur Girlfriend Hates Me with 9
Find "wish," how many songs show up? 67, with 46 by track and I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine and Blown a Wish tied at 4

XXY, The King of Kong, Food Party & The Yiddish Policeman's Union

XXY is an Argentinian film about a 15 year old hermaphrodite who is struggling to find out where she fits in society, and society trying to come to grips with him. I think him, as that is what the end of the movie would suggest is Alex's choice. It's a shortish film, but great acting, and about something that a lot of people don't think about very much: hermaphrodites, and whether to allow them to make their own choices about what gender to live as. Few hermaphrodites are given that choice, as it is customary to turn them into women soon after birth. In many cases, however, this leads to a gender identity crisis and later decision to undergo a sex change operation. I would like to think that this sort of issue is well-understood, but it really isn't. And until the day when we can stop having huge articles in major magazines about the sexuality of some pop singer, I doubt that we'll ever have an honest discussion about gender identity.

The King of Kong is the great documentary about the world record for Donkey Kong. Of course, it's horribly biased, but I don't entirely care about its accurateness as history (so I'm actually looking forward to the fictionalized version coming to theaters soon-ish). It tells a extraordinary story with a huge asshole of a villain and an all-American hero. I never actually played Donkey Kong or most other arcade games (I have fond memories of the X-Men arcade game and the Simpsons arcade game, but not much else), so the bit of history was interesting, although I knew about the kill screen before, probably from reading a review when this first came out.

Food Party is a show on IFC. Normally I would ignore a weird cooking/craft/bizarre show. But I actually am friends (it's true, Facebook friends and everything!) with one of the cast members of the show. So I felt I had to watch it. I wasn't able to make it through any of the episodes on the website, due to the screaming and crappy sound, but the show itself was slightly better quality filming, and I actually laughed a few times, recognized my friend easily in his multiple roles. Will watch again.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a Michael Chabon novel I'd been meaning to read for a couple of years. And I finally started earlier this year until I was so rudely interrupted by my habit of buying and then reading comics. As a huge fan of The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay and Wonder Boys, and to a lesser extent his other works, I somehow put off reading it myself. I did, however, buy a copy for my dad pretty soon after it came out. I loved the book, and highly recommend it for anyone with an interest in Yiddish, policemen, alternate history, and a great detective story. As the complicated history and plot of the book would be far too complicated for me to get into in any detail without just reading the wiki page, I recommend you just read the wiki page. At least the setting part, as the plot is twisty and kept me guessing.

The Naked Prey, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, 2 Days in Paris, & Elizabeth: The Golden Age

The Naked Prey has a monkey fighting a cheetah. Oh, and it's basically like The Most Dangerous Game, except in this case, it's far more racist because it's set in Africa in the 19th century and it has a white guide for a safari being the only survivor of a native massacre. But he only survives to be released naked and then hunted for sport. It was made in 1966. There's genuine footage of animal-on-animal and human-on-animal violence. And man-on-man violence. The story is based on the true story of a white man who was hunted by Black Foot Indians in 1807, and he survived after 11 days of running back to civilization (there's an awesome Paul Giamatti-read version of the story on the Criterion DVD). The movie itself is beautifully shot vistas in South Africa, but man, the racial implications of this film make Rush proud.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is a much shorter film than I was expecting, even though it was only about a day in the life of a generally unpleasantly judgmental person. No, it wasn't about me. I have never been a maid. Or a social secretary. Frances McDormand was pretty enjoyable, I will never complain about Lee Pace getting work (the second to last episode of Pushing Daisies wasn't quite as good as the third to last episode, but still better than almost anything else on TV), Ciaran Hinds was enjoyable, as was Shirley Henderson and Amy Adams. Basically, an enjoyable film that doesn't really say anything or mean much of anything. But if you want an enjoyable fast-paced film, you could do far worse.

2 Days in Paris is clearly a personal story for Julie Delpy, writing, directing, starring, casting her parents as her parents (following Before Sunset), and her former boyfriend as her boyfriend. And I think it's mainly about the differences between the US and France. But it's also a belated let's make fun of Americans for being idiots and supporting Bush.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age is the entirely unnecessary sequel to Elizabeth, which was excellent and a much better movie than Shakespeare in Love. I just found this movie boring. Sorry, Cate Blanchett and Clive Owen. I generally like you both, along with Geoffrey Rush and Samantha Morton. But it appears that Shekhar Kapur just couldn't do it again. The sense of watching something that never needed to be made was something I couldn't get rid of throughout the film. And now you've made me retroactively less happy with Elizabeth. Success, Mr. Kapur? I hardly think so.

Weirdly all of these films have non-sexual nudity. 2 Days in Paris has weird pictures with penii and balloons. The others were mainly asses, although The Naked Prey has naked native women breasts.

The Wayward Cloud, Passing Fancy, & Exte: Hair Extensions

The Wayward Cloud is the final (?) film in Tsai Ming-liang's trilogy that includes What Time Is It There? and The Skywalk Is Gone. In this one, thet main male character is a porn star, and he meets up with the main female from the earlier films. There's a drought in Taiwan, so everyone is eating and drinking watermelons. It's extremely bizarre, slow-moving, there's not just a hint of necrophilia, and, oh yeah, it's a musical with very little dialogue. They sing old Taiwanese songs, almost all of which are terrible. Basically, there's a dude fingering a watermelon as a stand-in for a vagina, there's fake-looking sex (I mean, seriously, he wasn't even hard, how could he possibly have actual sex with a dead woman?), forced fellatio (at the climax of the film, pun intended), and man, I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as the earlier two films.

Passing Fancy is an early Ozu film, and it was released in a pack of 3 from Eclipse (the budget Criterion line). As such, it doesn't get the same treatment as Criterion from a visual standpoint, as it looks like crap. And there are far too many intertitles. Hitchcock would have objected to that. I just objected to the boringness. I don't know if there's anything else I could possibly get out of watching more Ozu, considering how many I've seen, so I actually just took the others out of my Netflix queue.

Exte: Hair Extensions is a Japanese Horror film. About murderous hair extensions. Somehow this is not the most ridiculous Japanese horror film I've ever seen. It stars Chiaki Kuriyama (Kill Bill and Battle Royale) as the hero, and Ren Osugi (The Twilight Samurai, Dolls, and a huge bunch of awesome Takeshi Miike films) as the insane morgue attendant who sells hair extensions that start taking over the brains of those who wear them and then having them kill people. Evidently, there's some story about a woman who is kidnapped and her body parts are sold for transplants, or something, but who really cares? Hair kills people! And grows out of wounds and around tongues and over eyeballs and through fax machines and you get the idea. Sion Sono (who did the earlier (and not nearly as deliriously funny) Suicide Club) shifts tones like a wild man, but it just feels like it is supposed to be like that. And I didn't even mention my favorite part (besides the abusive mother and her boyfriend getting their comeuppance and why people would ever want to grow up to wear stupid hair like that): the movie introduced Chiaki's character by having her bike in to work late but narrate everything like she's a film noir heroine. Except that instead of doing it in her head, she does it out loud, explaining she saw someone do it in a terrible TV show and found it funny so she started to do it herself. Which is strange, but then she meets up with her best friend, who also does it, and it becomes another layer of hilariousness.