Charlie Bartlett, Smart People, & Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay

Charlie Bartlett is directed by a guy who has an impressively bad collection of editing credits (note that I'm not including Cabin Boy as a bad movie in it, just pretty much every other editing job and honestly, the editing in Cabin Boy wasn't all that hot either), but it also has Robert Downey Jr. as an alcoholic principal. Basically that's his role now, isn't it? He just tries to find people with addictions and just be extremely awesome in those roles? Anton Yelchin and Kat Dennings (I'm not sure what to say about this head/chest shot) are charming enough, but pretty much everything that wasn't completely related to those three characters and their interpersonal relationships just didn't work well. The writer also wrote Youth in Revolt, which is coming out soon with Michael Cera being a badass. Or something to that effect.

Smart People got no reason, smart people got no reason, smart people got no reason to exist. And this film really, really makes that argument. I like Ellen Page, Thomas Haden Church, and Dennis Quaid, who've all done some good work occasionally, but Sarah Jessica Parker really is terrible. It's not particularly good, it's not horrible enough to laugh at, so it's just there. I guess having Ellen Page be an overachieving Young Republican is an interesting choice, but that's about it. If I'm going to see one film about a misanthropic writer learning life lessons in Pennsylvania, I'm certainly just going to rewatch Wonder Boys.

Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay starts with a fantasy sequence that is interrupted by a real-life White House staffer leaving a disgustingly loud poop. Which should give you an idea of the humor level of the movie. Disgustingly huge pubic hair on a dude? Yep (although that was in the middle of a many merkined bottomless party). Disgustingly stereotyped everyone in the movie? Yep. Disgustingly homophobic prison scenes? Yep. Disgustingly huge tits (on Tits Hemingway, who also likes the only Hemingway book that I think is remotely worth reading, A Moveable Feast)? Yep. All that said, I liked it, but it wasn't nearly as good as the first, since that one seemed to just be crazy pot humor, as opposed to some awkward political satire on top of pot humor. Neil Patrick Harris is great, in everything he does, and I now fully get the NPH on a unicorn in front of a rainbow reference I've seen online for the last couple years. Yay? It was fitfully funny, frequently stupid, and extremely disrespectful to Republicans and their ilk. One last thing, has anyone ever heard of anyone actually interrupting a wedding and having it end happily for anyone? It happens all the time in pop culture, but I have never once heard of it even happening in real life, let alone with a happy ending?

Hana, Maiko Haaaan!!!, The Eagle Shooting Heroes, & Ashes of Time Redux

Hana is a samurai film from Hirokazu Koreeda, who also made the amazingly good Afterlife. This one wasn't all that, but an interesting tale of a young man plotting revenge against his father's murderer. He falls for a woman with a young son and starts to teach writing and math to the local kids. And he has to decide what's more important to himself, revenge or living his own life. Of course, it's a subtle attack on the desire for revenge above all, and one of the things that I like: pointing out ridiculousness in history that generally gets ignored by most period movies. I liked it, but it's definitely not Koreeda's best, and not as good as Mabrosi, either.

Maiko Haaaan!!! is a slapstick comedy about a noodle bowl company worker who is obsessed with Geisha, to the point of ignoring his girlfriend and taking a job in Kyoto so he can meet Geisha. And then the girlfriend starts to become one, and he starts fighting in real life with someone flaming his Geisha website. And... well, it just gets far too ridiculous and stupid. The lead was distractingly over the top in a film with almost entirely real-seaming characters (some of the things they are able to do are silly, but they undeniably live in a real world, while the lead just doesn't exist in any reality remotely near ours), there are musical numbers, and the entire movie revolves around strip baseball, which I am pretty sure is just an extremely bad translation. There were no strip grand slams that I could figure out. Boo.

The Eagle Shooting Heroes is a slapstick wuxia film made at the same time as Ashes of Time (which, although I definitely watched when I had a blog, I never actually wrote up when I saw it in November of 2002, and was, in fact, my first ever movie from Netflix). This is horrible Hong Kong slapstick, full of mistaken identities, cross dressing, gay "humor", ridiculous wirework, fake sets, and just general crappiness. It's strange to see so many extremely talented actors (really, it's almost every famous Hong Kong star of the 90s except for Chow Yun-Fat) just horribly waste their talent in service of this crap. This was a perfect excuse to watch my Ashes of Time Redux DVD, though. As it has been about 7 years since I saw the original version of the movie, and it was a particularly crappy DVD, I can't quite say how much better this version was than the original. But I almost was able to follow the plot this time. Just kidding.

Outrage, Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl, & Monty Python Almost the Truth

Outrage is all about Gay Republicans being outed. As such, there wasn't all that much I didn't know about. Although I was heartened to see just how much there was about Charlie Crist being a big homo. Because he is. Seriously. He did have the best dirty trick against himself though: he leaked that he had an illegitimate child. Brilliant. No gay person could have ever had a child with his beard. Kirby Dick actually made a much less sensationalistic film than I was expecting, dialing back on the worst part of This Film Is Not Yet Rated (the PIs tracking the MPAA ratings board members). I also got to see one of the few local politicians I have ever voted for to win (didn't happen a lot in Cincinnati) in David Catania. That was nice. Basically everyone interviewed in it, short of Andrew Sullivan and Barney Frank came off as supportive of the outing, and it's more that Barney was a little ambivalent. After the Maine election being supported strongly by the Catholic church, however, he seems to have changed his tune.

Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl is not as good a collection of Python bits as And Now for Something Completely Different, and the shots of the crowd just reminded me of how much drugs were probably being consumed and were going through the bloodstreams of the audience. At only 77 minutes long, it also strangely felt padded with unfunny songs from the post-show career that just aren't nearly as good as anything done on the show. So pretty much frustrating, but full of funny bits. Just stick with watching the TV show.

Monty Python: Almost the Truth is the six part documentary about the history of the Monty Python troupe. It's funny, full of clips, interviews (can someone please tell me how Russell Brand is liked by anyone?), and behind the scenes tidbits. If you like Python, it's pretty interesting.

The Spirit of the Beehive, City of Men, & The Counterfeiters

The Spirit of the Beehive is the film that Pan's Labyrinth was clearly very influenced by. Except this one has a lot less Pan or Labyrinth, and much more Spanish Civil War is bad. I actually watched this... back last semester with Sally Albright, for her Spanish class. I seem to have not written up a review myself though. Because I own the DVD and didn't remember to list it when I was writing up stuff. Let's see... the main character is obsessed after watching the original Frankenstein, and seems to think that a deserter is actually Frankenstein's monster. Is this really all it's about? It's a metaphor for what happened in Spain during and after the Spanish Civil War, and yet it was still made under Franco's rule, it's a beautiful film about death, and most importantly, it's a masterful film. Even if it weren't amazing, that it inspired Guillermo del Toro to make Pan's Labyrinth, it would deserve a place in film history.

City of Men is the movie finale (maybe?) to the stories started in the absolutely brilliant City of God, and slightly less good City of Men tv show. This follows that trajectory. I'm not sure that we needed to spend more time with them, although the ending was quite a bit more Hollywood than I was expecting. It's weird to have seen this so soon after watching Rio be awarded the Olympic games and the high-profile anti-gang violence in the favelas that followed. Definitely seems like Rio and Brazil may have a struggle to stop things like this movie happening and possibly involving some Olympic athletes.

The Counterfeiters won the Oscar for best foreign language film. Up against a bunch of other films I haven't seen, I can't judge whether it deserved the award, but it covered a part of the Holocaust (and WWII) that I didn't know about: the German attempt to destabilize the English Pound and American Dollar by producing huge amounts of counterfeit money and dropping them over enemy lines. You'd think that with all of my knowledge of Jews and the Holocaust, I would have seen something about this, but nope. I am a sucker for a good Holocaust film, though, and this was really good, with a great performance from Karl Markovics as the slimy titular counterfeiter.

The Inglorious Bastards, Kiss of the Spider Woman, & Cars

The Inglorious Bastards is the correctly spelled original, not the Tarantino reusing of the title. Still haven't seen that. This is... a mess, has the least realistic five guys go around and kill everyone with just a few shots, never reload and never get hit gunfights outside of a John Woo film. But at least there, they're filmed well. It's a late 70s war film with stupid characters, unlikely plot twists, a love story that's completely unnecessary, Fred Williamson there almost entirely so that the Nazis would never believe them as Germans, people throwing themselves off a train, and just general silliness. It's racist, misogynistic, and all the things you'd expect from a cheesy 70s film. It reminded me of the movies I used to watch back when I would watch anything about war. And it reminded me of that one scene in Commando where they burst into the next room in the motel just so you can see some tits. But this time it's naked women firing machine guns, sure to get any red-blooded American male hard.

Kiss of the Spider Woman is really good, and it led to thic conversation:
me: watching kiss of the spider woman
Sally Albright: that sounds terrible.
me: imdb it
me: it's really good
Sally Albright: not what I was expecting from the title
Basically, William Hurt puts forward one of the most impressive roles of the 80s, as an imprisoned gay man, sharing a cell with a political prisoner played by Raul Julia (shortly after his triumphant role in Overdrawn at the Memory Bank), and their brief time sharing a cell. It's a very simple plot, except that there's many layers, with Hurt telling the story of a half-remembered Nazi movie that touchingly reflects upon the action of the film. Definitely see this film.

Cars is... amazingly bad for a Pixar film. I have loved every Pixar film I have seen (although when A Bug's Life and Antz came out, I preferred Antz, but now see one as a somewhat enjoyable film and another as great), and their non-Cars films have been better and better going through WALL-E, but this was just offensive. And not funny or good in any way. There's the hippy who sells organic fuel, the sassy black woman, the Italian who sells tires and is obsessed with Ferraris, the Hispanic who has a low-rider and a bodypainting place, Larry the Cable Guy is in it... I mean, how much more offensive do you need to go? But really, the worst thing is that it is a completely non-funny spin of Doc Hollywood (still one of my favorite PG-13 topless scenes, everyone!). And I made it about two minutes before I tried to figure out how the world worked, and realized that there were no humans at all, but somehow they're able to use phones with dialpads, cars have headsets, cars have tongues, and the thing that bothers me is that helicopters don't have pilots. Basically the movie was one long "Make CV really annoyed". I made it through about an hour of it before others were not interested in going on, and I realized I was only watching it to see if it could possibly either be much worse or somehow get better. But it didn't seem like it was going to change, and watching extremely disappointing films is nowhere near as fun as watching films I know are going to be remotely good. And... um... I couldn't stop wondering how more cars are made? Is there car sex in this reality?

Caseus Archivelox: Firelight, The Best Man, Exodus, Harvard Man, & Time of Favor

2002-11-02 - 12:05 a.m.
The first one was Firelight. A sort of Romance novel filmed. With a crappy female fantasy of finding a rich man who is willing to pay for her and then kill his wife for her. Yeah. Really predictable, and any skill shown by Sophie Marceau or the director is wasted in a completely by the book movie. Except for the nudity. There was no time at which I didn't know what was going to happen really. I sort of expected a slightly happier ending, but eh, sadder ending was not any better. Title (Won't bend down. Wig'll fall off.) is something their butler said a couple times, which, while funny, was certainly not something you'd expect from a traditional film, showing a little too much self-reflexive humor for the movie.

2002-11-03 - 12:27 a.m.
The Best Man, an Italian movie from 1998. It was boring as f---. That's really boring. I didn't like any of the characters, it was slow, the dialogue was bland, and it was probably the worst Italian film I have ever seen. That I can remember. And I've seen Italian lesbian vampire films. So you know it's gotta suck. Maybe the last film will be better. I'll let you know when I see it. Oh, and this one has the stupidest opening scrawl and it has the stupidest last line. I think it was the title. I honestly was bored out of my mind for most of the movie, so I can't really remember if it was it or not. But it was set on New Years Eve, 1900. It just sucked.

2002-11-03 - 10:36 p.m.
The movie was Exodus, a special 40th Anniversary remastered version. And for a remastered version of a film, it was in the worst shape I've ever seen. There were lots of scratches, bad sound (sometimes even unsynchronized with the video), and there were scenes edited out. And the film didn't end, it broke. Can't anyone get a good print of a movie? The movie was still pretty good, if long, and a little too 60s for a movie set in the 40s. The movie was at the local big nice theater, and it was full of Jews. At least they had an intermission. They did give out a nice ticket and booklet full of stories from the production of the movie. It was nice.

2002-11-06 - 10:31 p.m.
I watched Harvard Man this evening. One quick thing to mention, would someone explain to me why it says that Ray Allen died in 2000 on the IMDB? I want to point that out before I tell them it's wrong. But it does say that he died on September 15, 2000 in Milwaukee. What's up with that? (EDITOR'S NOTE: This has since been changed.) It was good, nothing too special, except for the absolutely hilarious cameo in the middle of the film. Honestly, it's funnier if you don't expect it, so if you don't want to be spoiled, don't read anymore of this paragraph. I mean it. It won't be as funny if you know. Ok, so Alan took lots of LSD and was running around campus, and he runs into Al Franken and his erstwhile Duke student daughter, Thomasin. It was funny because he really wanted her to go to Harvard, but she mentioned Duke. Which is funny because she went to Duke for a year and then transferred to Harvard. And I saw a naked picture of her. Which is what, I'm convinced, caused her to want to leave Duke. In the movie, he said that she gets too easily embarrassed.

2002-11-13 - 10:41 p.m.
I went to see Time of Favor tonight. It was probably the best Israeli film I've seen. I really highly recommend it. I didn't know enough Hebrew to pick up a lot of the lines, but there were subtitles, even if they were plain white ones, the movie was generally dark enough that I only didn't see one word, and then the camera angle changed, so it was all good. The actors in it were all really good as well, even if the main guy looked like Liev Schreiber, the main girl looked like Amber Benson, the other guy looked like Alan Cumming. And that wasn't all, but I'll let you try to figure them out. Well, except for one, Mookie looked like 1955 Biff from Back to the Future. That should be fun. I can just picture you seeing it now thinking: What is Tara doing going for Cotton Weary? She should be going for Willow. And isn't Alan Cumming gay?

Caseus Archivelox: Insomnia & Last Orders

2002-10-31 - 11:23 p.m.
I just realized that I had forgotten to mention what I did Sunday night to require the taping of Alias. I watched the remake of Insomnia. Now, it's too easy to say that the remake is weaker than the original, but it really was. The acting wasn't noticeably better, and the script left a lot less to the imagination. One of the strong points of the original film was that it was difficult to tell why and whether Dormer (or whatever his name was in the original) killed his partner. And the fact that it all occurs during the bright daytime makes the dark aspects work better. The remake explains too much and the lack of darkness isn't as important. Chris Nolan is an obviously talented director (see Memento), but, in this case, he is working from a lackluster script and he gets bogged down trying to do too much with his cast. And Pacino was coasting. He plays the tired cop too well. That's not to say it wasn't a good movie, but it definitely doesn't compare favorably with the original Norwegian film.

What reminded me of that was that 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.

The stuff about Last Orders was already posted here, but I figured I'd just repost everything.

Caseus Archivelox: The Piano Teacher, Blow-Up, The Magnificent Ambersons, Happy Together, Fallen Angels, Kissing Jessica Stein, & Tape

2002-10-27 - 10:11 p.m.
I then went off to Griffith to watch The Piano Teacher. What the f--- is it with the French and pretentiousness films about sex? Baise Moi, Romance, Fat Girl, and The Piano Teacher. I've only seen Romance and The Piano Teacher, and neither were worth my time. Although now I can say that I've seen an Italian porn star's penis. That's not really something that I am proud of though. I just don't see the point in a movie about a sado-masochistic pianist who lives with her mother. And it didn't have an ending that made much sense. I don't see why the French make pretentious sex movies. And then they get praise or notoriety because of said stuff. I guess we Americans aren't completely immune, as we make a hell of a lot of porn each year and percentages say that some has to be pretentious. Hell, some softcore porn I've seen would fit into that category. As in, it tries to have some deep meaning, but it's really just an excuse to see silicone on screen. But at least most wasn't being raised to some lofty height and being suggested that it said something deep about the human condition. The movie was about Schubert and S&M, nothing more.

I went with Blow-Up and The Magnificent Ambersons. Both excellent movies. Blow-Up would've been better had Antonioni used the Velvet Underground as originally planned, because all I could think of when I saw the Yardbirds was how much cooler it would have been with the VU. Mime tennis is also bizarre. Magnificent Ambersons had my new reply when someone asks me what I want to do with my life: a yachtsman. That sounds like a fun job. Neither movie was particularly happy (I choose to ignore the ending added without Welles's blessing).

I checked the online catalog and went with two Wong Kar-Wai films: Happy Together and Fallen Angels. I started with Happy Together, and it's a very gay movie. Lots of shots of the two main characters in tighty whiteys. It is full of wonderfully Wong Kar-Wai touches: fast-mo, slo-mo, freeze frames in the middle of shots, changing grains, going from black and white to color (much better than in the early version of 13 Days I saw), handheld shots, shakycam, very good use of music, lots of overexposure and very bright shots. I was just thinking that the major problem I had with The Piano Teacher was the masochism. I'm not a masochist, at least not a physical one, and I don't like pain, so I just felt incredibly uncomfortable, and I didn't like when she couldn't suppress her gag reflex. I do, however, seem to pick women who are likely to cause me pain. That's not really relevant to anything though. It was just a great movie. Wong Kar-Wai really knows what he's doing, and Chris Doyle is a perfect complement to his skills. I just checked and he also cinematographer for Liberty Heights (a beautiful movie) and for the as-yet unreleased The Quiet American. I really want to see that.

After that, I watched Fallen Angels, originally to be the 3rd part of Chungking Express. The DVD video quality was much worse than for Happy Together, with lots of obvious grain. The gunfights are staged to be as outlandishly over-the-top as John Woo's, but the plot is much more affecting. And the scene where He falls in love with Charlie is one very cool scene. And it hurts all the more afterwards. I mean, it was such a sad and beautiful movie. So if you're wondering what makes me cry: Fallen Angels. That is just a great movie.

I then went to see Kissing Jessica Stein at Griffith. I guess it was good but my friends and I all saw parts of our families on screen, but we also saw almost every plot twist telegraphed. One reason is that we've seen too many movies, but more likely it's that the movie (with the exception of the lesbian angle and the occasionally unnecessary jump cuts and other weird editing and handheld camera choices) was a fairly run of the mill romantic comedy: two neurotic New Yorkers meet, have some immediate attraction, and then have a series of humorous misunderstandings leading to eventual relationship difficulties and an eventual happy ending for all concerned. The only reason this got so much press (mostly good) was that the two stars wrote it and instead of a male and female lead, it was two women, showing that lesbian chic (postmodernly referenced in the movie by the two boorish men before finally driving Jessica into Helena's arms showing beyond a reasonable doubt (as in beyond the clichéd bad date montage) that men are pigs and that's why many women are driven to lesbianism) is still popular. I'll check and see whether I've put my lesbian vs. gay theory here, but I haven't, so here's the short version: anal sex=dirty, oral sex=clean. Thus, gay men are dirty and lesbians are clean. That and the whole having sex with two women at once thing, but if it doesn't concern the man as a threat to his masculinity and male dominance to have a woman probably pleasuring the other woman more than he can, than they are either supremely gifted or supremely deluded. Anyway, that's part of my rant about gays and lesbians. Also, what was with the hardcore rap song when Jessica and Helena were going at it? That attempt to be edgy worked as well as the bickering gay couple (BGC). Although for different reasons: rap didn't fit the film at all, and the BGC is so clichéd that it has its own sitcom.

I saw he had Tape and wanted to see that more, so we watched the little DV film Linklater did while waiting on the long postproduction for Waking Life. Ethan Hawke was excellent, Robert Sean Leonard (whom I saw on Broadway with Billy Crudup in Arcadia, one of the best performances of a play I've ever seen) was also good, while Uma Thurman was the weak link, if mainly for the fact that her character is strangely distant. There were also a lot of shots of the soles of their shoes. It's not a good idea to drink, smoke pot, and snort cocaine, because it really messes with your judgment. And the DV looked very impressive, with only some problems tracking quick movements betraying the DV rather than film.