Little Miss Sunshine, Hearts and Minds, Head, Hold On!, & Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter

I saw Little Miss Sunshine at a free preview on Wednesday. Yay for free movies. It was also a good movie. Yay for free good movies. Actually, it was a great film. Steve Carell and Paul Dano and Alan Arkin and Toni Collette and Greg Kinnear and Abigail Breslin were a very good dysfunctional family. There was a considerable danger of the film becoming just way too quirky, especially the scene in the hospital, and of course all the coincidences that just happen to come out on a cross New Mexico, Arizona, and California trip was somewhat bothersome. But these were just small complaints, as any movie that ends with that kind of scene at a beauty pageant was nice. Beauty pageants are evil, and child beauty pageants are vastly more evil. So disturbing. Although I'm not sure about how appropriate that last scene was, but oh well, it lead to a happier family, which was nice. And it was weird to see Mary Lynn Rajskub in a small role. I'm so used to seeing her on TV, and parts with lines. Not too many for her in this one. Although really, I just thought of Rush Limbaugh and that was disturbing.

Hearts and Minds is strangely more important and a better look at Vietnam than many films with a lot of distance from the conflict. I'm not sure about that scene in the whorehouse, seemed a little gratuitous for me. A very important film, and one that more people need to see. An outstanding film. And even better with the knowledge that John Wayne denounced it. What a good sign for a film. Stupid right-wing ass.

Head is bizarre. And it leads to some funny misunderstandings, like when I said, "I apparently need to be on drugs to fully appreciate Head." Yay for silly things. Well, pretty much everything in it is bizarre. And there's a lot of very clear drug influences, and there's anti-war statements as well. Not as sure about the soundtrack, as really the only song I was familiar with was The Porpoise Song. Well, you'd have to be a huge Monkees freak to know any other songs from the soundtrack. At least there were lots of cameos... because what a disjointed drug movie really needs is a way to make people think, "Whoa, that's Frank Zappa." At least it's more obviously a joyous mess than Magical Mystery Tour, which pretty much only had a better soundtrack than this. But this movie was just a movie for people on hallucinogens, which really takes me out of the intended audience. And of course, watching lots of movies just leads to strange coincidences like the fact that Bert Schneider, producer (and Oscar winner) for Hearts and Minds also produced Head. And Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show, and Days of Heaven. Not a bad bunch of films. Well, except for Head. And of course, this movie that seems like a bad trip and is clearly very drug influenced was rated G. Of course.

Hold On! is a movie I have wanted to see for a long time. For some reason it's very hard to just come across a Herman's Hermits film on TV. Or get someone else who wants to watch it. Of course it's terrible. Nowhere near as good as A Hard Day's Night or Help!, which the film shamelessly apes at every chance. At least it's utterly ridiculous. And they barely moved during the songs. No stage presence. At least they tended to have a lot of women in 60s clothes dancing around them. Seriously, Herman's Hermits make almost no impact on the movie. Whoever decided to use the same screams and make them alternately loud and absolutely quiet doesn't really understand how this all works. You don't have a screaming mass of girls just go silent and then all start at once. And an 18 year old Herman just can't be the center of a film. Man, this depresses me. Stupid guilty pleasure. Certainly not the movie.

Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter finishes off my little manufactured 60s pop group movies. It's just as ridiculous as Hold On!, but with the added bonus of being shot in lovely 60s Manchester. Such a beautiful town. Oh, but there is a song about Manchester United and Bobby Charlton, It's Nice To Be out in the Morning, which does elevate it over Hold On! As little as that means. Slow movie though, and the writer didn't write anything else ever, so there goes that. It feels more like a movie rather than an excuse to string songs together. Too bad the acting from the Hermits is just as bad. The lower emphasis on songs would only work if the rest of the film made up for it, which it doesn't.

Be Cool & War of the Worlds

Be Cool is not cool. Be Cool be sucks. Be Cool is be bad. Be Cool shouldn't be made. Well, actually Andre Benjamin was just about the best thing in the movie. Well, besides the playing of Bob Dylan's Knockin' on Heaven's Door. Andre Benjamin was good with everything he did. Seth Green was utterly wasted. And the music sucked pretty much. Man, that sequel just didn't need to be made at all. Why was it made? Were there things that needed to be said after Get Shorty? And then there was the changing of the soundtrack, almost the entire cast, and especially the style.

War of the Worlds bothers me for a lot of reasons. Mainly it's that Miranda Otto and Tom Cruise would never produce a kid that looks like Dakota Fanning. Also, I was rooting for Tom Cruise to die. Not because he's Tom Cruise, but because he was wearing a Yankees hat. His son, of course was in good because he was wearing a Red Sox hat, well, at least he was until he decided he wanted to get up close and personal with the aliens. I have an inherent bias towards the story, due to both being a big reader of science fiction, a fan of Orson Welles, and especially, of a collection of short stories written about the invasion as imagined by a lot of real people. It was a fascinating collection, full of crazy stories, some better than others, but they're all interesting. Anyway, I am a big nerd, and I liked it even if most of the reviews didn't. The movie, on the other hand just feels like a crappy Hollywood film. The obvious linkage of the aliens to terrorism was the only interesting part of it, and even then, beh. Why bury the tripods underground? Why make that much effort to take over a planet and then miss out on figuring out that the atmosphere is toxic? It just doesn't make any sense? Is it right that I'm rooting against the humans? Every one in this movie is a moron. And the payoff was ridiculous.

Apparently it was crappy recent movie last couple of nights. Dunno why that happened. I am however planning a bunch of 60s non-Beatles pop music movies. Monkees and Herman's Hermits, here I come!

The Blue Kite, Dead Man Walking, & National Treasure

The Blue Kite is actually pretty depressing. Oh, wait, because every movie banned in China for being an accurate portrayal of post-revolution China and the many re-education programs that went on, leading to many, many deaths and very little progress. This is really messed up, but I guess that's why China is so messed up and why people study that time period so much. I would like to know more about this time period, although really, my best bet is to talk to my friend who is going to start studying China next month. Or at least ask her advice as to how to learn about this. Anyway, I really don't have a lot to say besides man, China was messed up, and the constant need to be counterrevolutionary is a serious problem with every communist country (and pretty much all authoritarian regimes). So messed up.

Dead Man Walking is really well-made. I'm not sure what else I can really say about it, because there was nothing wrong with it at all, and it's just well-done in every way. I can't think of anything wrong with it, and nothing I can make fun of it for. Sort of makes it difficult. I mean, if there's a movie that is so utterly ridiculous, it's easy to write about, or if it deals with something I want to talk about, that's easy. But when it's a reasonable look at the death penalty and I really hate the death penalty, that's about it. I just don't think anyone should be ending anyone's life, for any reason. Then again, I really haven't had anything horrible happen to me or my family, so I can't say ultimately what I would want in the situation in the film.

National Treasure is actually better than I was expecting. But why does Sean Bean keep getting typecast as the bad guy or someone who's completely incompetant? Have people not seen the Sharpe series? And if not, why don't they watch those to get an idea of how good Sean Bean can be. Nic Cage is too hyperactive in it, but that's a fairly normal thing for him. It's full of fun little historical facts, most of which are pretty easy, and fairly well known, but still, the movie promotes early American historical knowledge, which is good. I do know that the mason stuff is generally hokum, but it's a thrill a minute thrill ride. Of course there are serious problems. But somehow it's also so horribly cheesy and ridiculous that it doesn't really matter. I'm happy that a movie like this did fairly well, when it could have been a movie with no redeeming values at all.

King Arthur

King Arthur was one of those movies that had a great concept. In fact, a good friend of mine was working on a script with this same concept before the movie came out and was pissed that they ruined it for him. That is, of course, not the biggest problem with the film. The biggest problem is the bloated and craptacularness of it. Plus, it's really distracting to try to put names with faces, at least the Arthurian legends names. It's a typical Hollywood action film, with the faux historical trappings that were an attempt to make the movie more important. It's fluff, not good fluff, and silly to boot. I can't recommend it to anyone, even if it wasn't terrible. Just so utterly worthless that it isn't bad enough to mock, just bad enough not to be worth the over two hours I spent in the same room with it playing. Thank you, Internet, for giving me something to take my mind off it. Oh, and Antoine Fuqua can continue to Fuq-off. Yes, I'm a 12-year-old boy, what of it?

Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream

Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream is about the 1970s Midnight movies. So it's about a lot of movies I don't entirely like, like El Topo, Pink Flamingos, and Rocky Horror Picture Show. And some better films like Eraserhead, The Harder They Come, and Night of the Living Dead. Only Night of the Living Dead was actually a good movie, one that is a serious film, one that isn't a mess in some way. The Harder They Come has an amazing soundtrack, but a rote story. And Eraserhead feels a lot like a film student's film. Which it really was, but a hell of a lot better than pretty much every other student film. The first three, however, were trash, intentionally maybe, but trash none-the-less. The 90 minutes of the documentary, however, is about the right amount to deal with those films. More and I would have just gotten pissed watching more of Rocky or El Topo. Oh, and the movie had almost all of Bambi Meets Godzilla, which unfortunately cuts some of the effect of it. I'm happy to have seen all these movies, even the ones that are terrible, just because of the importance to film history, or more. If you weren't as interested in film history, you wouldn't enjoy the film as much as I did.

Johnny Mnemonic

Johnny Mnemonic is horrendous. Just as bad as everyone said. I've enjoyed the few short stories of Gibson I've read, so either he was just completely out of his depth writing the screenplay, or, much more likely, hiring a music video director and having Keanu Reeves try to act was a horrible decision. Gibson is, of course, an extremely prescient writer, but his writing was better for the ideas rather than the writing style. Too bad the movie doesn't really get the style right. The cast is also full of people who do some terrible work, and only Takeshi Kitano has really been in a good movie, so I was rooting for him to win. Would have made me much happier. Dolph Lundgren, Dina Meyer, Ice-T, Tracy Tweed (younger sister of Shannon), Henry Rollins, and the great Udo Kier are all horrible. Well, actually my choice of great as an honorific for Udo Kier is only somewhat tongue in cheek, since he was actually enjoyable in Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula. And Henry Rollins can be non-horrible, but certainly didn't try very hard in this role. And, seriously, Dolph Lundgren? What the hell are people thinking when they give him a role? Besides, "I have a role that could be acted by a hamster. Wait, that would actually mean there was some acting talent involved. Damn, let's just get Dolph Lundgren." Anyway, the whole 80GB storage in Keanu Reeves's brain may actually be about accurate. I love that 320 is too much for him though. If you were to digitize memories, you'd come up with something much, much more than 320GB. Strange how that is. And it's 2021, and 320 GB is supposed to be a lot of space? I mean, I have 60 GB in a container that only five years ago used to hold 5 GB. Which means that by 2021, we're talking over 100 TB of data in a container the size of an iPod. And, of course, you wouldn't need the audio or video capacities, meaning it could be much smaller. Ridiculous just how small technology has become over the past few years. It's just an utterly ridiculous movie that probably would have been better had it been made ten years later by someone who was a talented director.

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid is a movie that I had heard many horrible things about for years. That the casting was horrendous and that the only thing worthwhile in it was Knockin' on Heaven's Door. Which is an awesome song, and is used beautifully. I saw the reedited version, apparently done last year by Roger Spottiswoode, which still had some awkward castings, but it's not like Bob Dylan ever could act. This longer version has more character development, although I imagine a large portion of the nudity was also added. Because if you take out all the character development, all you have left is nudity and violence. Probably wouldn't sell. And appropriately the first version didn't sell. This version was much better. Peckinpah can make a western like no one else. Even when he wasn't making a western by location, he made a western by plot.

Clean

Clean is the a movie that should have, again, made Maggie Cheung a huge star in the US. I mean, she is, by far, the reason to see this film. That's not to say it isn't a good movie, because it is, but Maggie deserved her award. I knew she was good in Cantonese and English, but I really didn't know she knew French. Impressive. And I didn't know that she could sing, even if it was about the same way that Nico sings. I wasn't too happy with the kid playing Jay, but that's because there are so very few good child actors out there. The music was interesting, and good for the most part, although a little ambient for the most part. Of course, I did go and try to find out what it all was before the end of Metric's song. Mainly because I recognized that song, but couldn't place either the band or the song. Of course it was Dead Disco. Good song. Anyway, the movie is Maggie's, and she owns it like few people are capable.

Bill Maher: Victory Begins at Home & Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

Bill Maher: Victory Begins at Home was watched because yesterday sucked. For a lot of reasons. So I decided to watch a three year old Bill Maher special to remind myself of just how much I hate Bush, and why the hell he should never have been reelected. It was funny, but really, it's three year old material.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence made no sense. I really don't know what was going on in it at all. I mean, I almost thought the DVD skipped for a while there. Plus, the CGI looked very good. The handdrawn animation looked good. But putting them both on the screen just made it abundantly clear what was CGI and what was handdrawn. Especially when there was a simulated camera movement. Geez, you'd think that a large budget film could merge the two better than a TV show like Futurama, but the CGI, while pretty clear in Futurama, never just screamed CGI nearly as much as it did here. It's because the CGI isn't trying to be hyperrealistic, it's trying to ape the handdrawn. In GITS2:I, it's just trying to be as realistic as possible, meaning it really doesn't fit the handdrawn style at all. And whenever there's movement in front of a CGI background, it just was too freakin' obvious. At some point, someone besides Studio Ghibli is going to make an anime film that I actually like, right? It's not like I don't like sci-fi or action films, so why can't they make one that actually makes any sense?

The Exterminating Angel, Diary of a Country Priest, & Weeds

The Exterminating Angel is Bunuel being his typical anti-religion, -bourgeois, and -fascist self. The entire movie is pretty much making fun of the upper class and how they're not really human and are just going from one prison to another, from the dinner party that doesn't end to the church. I wonder about the summoning of the devil, though. That just seemed a little much. And that bear should have been attacking people, not the most sensible character in the movie.

Diary of a Country Priest is reason enough for me to go through my entire Netflix queue to make sure I don't have too many movies by the same director too close to each other. And sometimes I just add movies just because I want to see the director's movies. I regret that sometimes. But I know that I'd just sit there and wonder about how the movie is. I have a serious problem. My anti-religious nature really makes me not particularly care for religious movies. It's a fairly typical one, although done with a little more style than some. I was not particularly happy with that final shot though. And there was too much narration. If you see something on screen, you don't need someone explaining it.

I also watched all of the first season of Weeds. It's not as good as HBO shows, but I didn't regret watching it at all. Maybe I just need a deaf girl.

Into the Woods & How To Steal a Million

Into the Woods is a Sondheim musical, and as such, has very complicated and well-structured music. I first saw it, I think, 12 years ago, in Manchester with my family. As a much younger person, I didn't realize what Sondheim and James Lapine were trying to do, and while I vastly enjoyed the first act, I didn't care for the second. Now that I've had enough time to become extremely cynical, I realize that they were pointing out how even the "good" people in fairy tales don't always think through their actions and are selfish. And Sondheim has, what I believe to be, his best score ever. Vastly better than the badness that was Pacific Overtures, and better than Sweeney Todd, A Little Night Music, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. I certainly remembered Into the Woods, but I had forgotten Children Will Listen and No One Is Alone, the two best songs in the musical. And some of the best Sondheim ever did. The entire cast was very good, but Bernadette Peters as the witch and, especially, Joanna Gleason as the baker's wife were standouts. It's too bad that this was such a weak DVD, with no subtitles, which are occasionally needed with Sondheim's music, since he puts a lot of very important words in not that much space. At least he's a hell of a lot better than Andrew Lloyd Crapper.

How To Steal a Million is Audrey Hepburn and Peter O'Toole as a pair of art thieves. Well, sort of, but to say much more about it would spoil the fun. It's delightfully flufftactular. There's a nice Hitchcock reference early on, but all that does it heighten the fact that the movie would have been vastly better had it been done by Hitchcock instead. That's not to say that Wyler isn't talented, even though he made Jezebel, a movie so horrible I can't begin to describe how much I hate it, but it feels like To Catch a Thief, but not nearly as good. About the only real reason to watch it is to see Peter O'Toole and Audrey Hepburn together. Although Hugh Griffith is also good. The movie just never coheres like it should.

A Man Escaped & Dead Reckoning

A Man Escaped is a brilliant escape film. Knowing that it's a true story unfortunately gives some hint as to what will happen, but Bresson's film style fits perfectly with the tension created by the almost constant repetition, closeups of hands, and the completely uninflected acting. Weirdly Francois Leterrier, the lead, started to be a director and directed Goodbye, Emmannuelle. Pretty much everyone did nothing before acting in it, which is just how Bresson liked it. I kept thinking back to Le Trou, another film about escaping from prison, and they're very different films, though. Maybe it's the fact that A Man Escaped was set in a German prison in occupied France and has Mozart as a soundtrack, while Le Trou is set in a normal prison and focuses more on the hammering that was needed to build the hole. The thing is, there need never be another French prison escape film. These two have been the ultimate in the genre. No American film has come close to it. People who love The Shawshank Redemption should see these films to know what a great prison film should be. Too bad the subtitles and filming style would turn most of them off. Few films piss me off for being so highly regarded as The Shawshank Redemption does. I can't figure out what makes me annoyed about it so much. Maybe it's the fact that the IMDB rates it as the #2 film of all time, when it was the fourth best film nominated for the Best Picture Oscar that year, behind Four Weddings and a Funeral, Pulp Fiction, and Quiz Show. Only better than Forrest Gump, mainly because Forrest Gump sucks. I could go on listing other films much better than The Shawshank Redemption like Heavenly Creatures, The Madness of King George, Hoop Dreams, Red, and Eat Drink Man Woman. All of which are great films. The Shawshank Redemption is one of those films that frat boys think are great films. There are vastly better films that people need to be exposed to or else they say that Titanic is a brilliant film. And that is the sure sign that someone needs to have a full frontal lobotomy.

Dead Reckoning is almost too hard-boiled. The almost constant voice-over and dialogue was over the top, too wordy, and too distracting. Also distracting was Lizabeth Scott, who was attractive but not as good as the role demands. Apparently, she's a lesbian, and that kept her from being a bigger star. I do wonder about that being her actual singing voice. It seems dubbed. Of course, the role should have been for Lauren Bacall, who would have been absolutely perfect in it. Anyway, I just wish that the film did a little more showing and a little less telling. I mean, it shows it, mainly, but then it has to explain just what happened. The audience is apparently twelve years old. At least it has Humphrey Bogart in the lead, making it watchable.

Broadway Danny Rose & The Ox-Bow Incident

Broadway Danny Rose is a Woody Allen film I hadn't seen. Probably because it was a Mia Farrow serious film. At least I think it was supposed to be a serious film. It certainly wasn't a comedy, because I didn't laugh very much. Then again, it could have just been a failed comedy. It does work as a slightly comedic drama, though.

The Ox-Bow Incident was a short movie, looking at the dangers of mob justice. Henry Fonda is very good, as is most of the cast, although you really don't get much chance to get familiar with most of the other characters, since 75 minutes and many characters means not enough time for characterization. It's very well-constructed, although a little too easily moral, with the bad guys clear and the good guys just as clear. Then again, mob justice is pretty evil, no matter the evidence.

I guess I just wasn't too inspired by either of the two movies to write a lot, even though they weren't bad movies. I do want to add Holly Hunter to the list of actresses of whom I've seen their hoo-has and respect as an actress. I completely forgot about that little bit in The Piano. Which I saw years and years ago and keep forgetting on that very short list. Actually, I mainly just wanted to write hoo-ha in a post. Such a ridiculous euphemism. I heartily endorse it. By the way, the other actresses are Jenny Agutter and Toni Collette. I had to go through my entire archive of my old blog searching for various vagina euphemisms to find those two. In case you were wondering, the magic word was labia.

Downfall

Downfall is great. Fascinating, horrible, insane, claustrophobic, well-made. I am not entirely sure whether the movie portrays Hitler as the insane person he clearly was, or whether it humanizes him. It does, but the fact that he's a friggin' insane person doesn't entirely help. Yeah, the people who surrounded him at the end were just as insane as he was, mainly, so just showing him going about his business with a bunch of crazy people will make him seem less insane. Put him together with a bunch of normal people, then he is clearly the nutter he was. There's really not that much else to say, considering the film ends the way it does. A lot of reviews out there blame the film for humanizing Hitler, but it does only to people who are capable of forgetting not only the history not entirely stated in the film, but also the touches added where Hitler complains about the international Jewish conspiracy. They're all insane in the film, it's just the one's who start to feel bad about it that you start to feel for. And then you see the SS uniform and realize that no one is free from guilt. Although Traudl Junge, Hitler's secretary, was young and unaware of what was going on, she clearly recognized, before the end, that she should have figured out about the Holocaust.

Faces, A Woman under the Influence, & Colossus: The Forbin Project

Faces is a hard to watch film, although in this case, it's not because of its uncomfortable subject matter or because it was bad. It's because it's intentionally shot mainly handheld, but also a lot of closeups, which were very distracting. The acting is outstanding, and it was so strange to see Seymour Cassel as young, because I really hadn't seen any of his earlier films when I knew who he was. But really, it's because he always looked old. I don't remember his small role in The Killers, even though I saw it very recently. It's a powerful film, worth seeing if you can handle your films depressing.

A Women under the Influence is from a similar emotional place as Faces, although it's far more polished. Some of it may be the higher budget and the use of color, and some may be that Peter Falk is a good actor. Although his eyes will never stop being freaky. I know it's very superficial, but they're just freaky. The movie is just outstanding. Definitely one you need to see. I'd like to thank TCM for having a little John Cassevettes mini-fest last week, and I'd like to thank Comcast for stopping the signal for around a minute right after the ending of the movie, so I didn't actually miss any of this film. Otherwise, I would have been pissed, since TCM never replays films within a reasonable time.

Colossus: The Forbin Project is a precursor to Wargames, but without the goofy Matthew Broderick fooling with NORAD. It's also very late 60s/early 70s, not quite as paranoid as mid-late 70s films, and there's a little bit of flower power anti-war thrown in. Not that Wargames also wasn't anti-war, but this one is more explicitly pro-peace. I don't know any of the actors in it (although most main people were in other films I've seen) besides James Hong, who's there so you have the token Asian, and there's a token black guy (who, of course, dies), and a couple women, making sure that all races and sexes are well-covered. Wouldn't want to suggest that all scientists are white men. Pretty progressive for a film make in 1970. Anyway, it's sort of like the difference between Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove. Both about similar plots, but they take very different approaches. At least we should be pretty sure that giving all power to a computer to control nuclear weapons is a bad idea. I mean, is there a movie where that ends up where a computer controlling things doesn't go insane? At least the nude scenes were very tastefully done, up there with those early ESPN the Magazines.

11'09''01 - September 11

11'09''01 - September 11 has an unwieldy title. And some of the segments are terrible. The Egyptian one was some of the worst 11 minutes of my movie watching life, completely self-centered and just stupid in every way that a film could be stupid. And Sean Penn's wasn't much better, although seeing Ernest Borgnine still alive was a surprise. Alejandro Gonzalex Inarritu (too lazy to pull accents) for him was very uncomfortable. But the others: Claude Lelouch, Amos Gitai, Shohei Imamura, Ken Loach, Samira Makmalbaf, Mira Nair, Isrissa Ouedraogo, and Danis Tanovic all did a good job. Imamura's was, by far, the strangest. Very snake-y. Ken Loach definitely took advantage of the coincidence of September 11th, and our completely fouled up relationship with dictatorships. Lelouch's was hokey, but still done well. Makhmalbaf's was interesting, as was Mira Nair's, although neither really stood out. Ouedraogo's was a goofy little story about Osama being seen in a small Burkina Fasoan town, but turns out that it's actually about how much our money that we waste could actually help improve the lives of most Africans. The Bosnian one was, by far, the most heartfelt, as sufferers of one tragedy are capable of remembering more than one at a time. Something of which not enough Americans are capable. But my favorite one was Amos Gitai's segment. An outstanding 11 minute shot of the aftermath of a car bombing in a crowded Jaffa marketplace. As much as I couldn't stand Kippur, this one makes me very impressed with his fimmaking abilities, as making an 11 minute shot is difficult, especially one as complicated as this one was (although that hesitation at the beginning distracted me a little... you'd think they could have covered that up better). My favorite tracking shot is still the opening to Touch of Evil (the restored version, of course), and then The Player, but all extremely long tracking shots are impressive. Unless they're done by Brian DePalma at the beginning of Snake Eyes, and then they suck, because the movie was so terrible.

The Last Days & Zhou Yu's Train

The Last Days is about the destruction of the Jews in Hungary at the end of WWII. But really, it's about five particular Hungarian Jews. Unfortunately, I'm really just Holocaust-documentary'd-out. I know it's really evil for me, a Jew, to say this, but there's no escaping it: a Holocaust documentary really needs to be outstanding to rate. About the only thing that really stood out in this one was that it included interviews with Tom Lantos (D-CA), the only Holocaust survivor to be elected to Congress. I found him more interesting than the others. Otherwise it's just a 90 minute very, very brief overview of Hungarian Jews in the Holocaust with some footage of some of them going to the camps afterwards. But very little makes this one stand out from others. It's clearly just the Zionist conspiracy that got this one the Oscar. Well, I haven't really seen any of the other documentaries that could have won an Oscar then, but I doubt it could be better than Regret to Inform. That one is probably outstanding.

Zhou Yu's Train has the bad Tony Leung. Well, he's actually the not quite as good as the awesome Tony Leung, but that's way too long of a title. And the movie had censorship problems in China because of some sex scenes. Appropriately, it was rated PG-13 in the US. At least I'm not trying to watch movies there. My complaining about NC-17 films here probably would be a serious issue there. Then again, Category III films in Hong Kong are pretty much all R-rated here as well. As for the movie, as much as I find Gong Li extremely attractive, was there a need for her to play two parts? And then edit the film in a very confusing fashion so that it's not really clear as to whether the characters are the same person at different times in her life or if they're two different people. I mean the ending seems to suggest one thing, but beh. It's a well-filmed movie, but the plot was a mess. It also was an obvious attempt to use crappy slo-mo to heighten the effect of some scenes. Just because Wong Kar-Wai does something very well doesn't mean you all have to rip him off. Be your own director! I need to avoid renting films just because attractive Asian women are in them. I need to stick to renting films that have attractive Asian women in them and are good! At least the movie makes me want to go on long train rides...

The Education of Shelby Knox & (the bad) Breathless

The Education of Shelby Knox is the story of a 15 year old girl in Lubbock who wants comprehensive sex education in school and then begins to work for equal rights for the gay students. It's depressing that there could be that many people out there who are so clueless about sex education. Then again, I'm not really sure what the sex ed was in my school. I know it was a rich suburb, so I imagine it wasn't as repressed as in Texas, but I don't really remember it. It was taught by this guy who was clearly very uncomfortable. There was at least one class that was split into male and females. I'm pretty sure there was no hands-on putting condoms on anything resembling a penis. There were probably diagrams, and there was some movie, but I don't remember how explicit or anything about it really. Anyway, it's good to know that some kids of very Republican families can turn out tolerant, even if their pastors feel that that is somehow not Christian. What the hell-ass bitch? Seriously, Christianity is not a tolerant religion? Do these people just read the parts about what you're not supposed to do and then ignore the parts that Jesus actually says? There's a serious problem when you ignore your religion's prophet. It makes me happy that I'm Jewish and not very religious. You don't see too many Humanistic Jews going on and on about how everyone is doomed to go to hell. Mainly because there's no hell in Judaism, but also because we just like people. People are inherently good. It's just when they get taught to hate that they become dangerous. Anyway, I've gotten off my soapbox for this film, and I just wanted to say that I wish the movie were longer. 75 minutes is just not enough time to spend dealing with this issue. And Corey Nichols is a prick. As is Fred Phelps, but he's a very different type of prick.

Breathless is unbelievably annoying. Plus, it's not actually good. The whole remaking a great film, one that's almost perfect, is stupid. Remaking one that's 20 years old, and only adding Jerry Lee Lewis, Richard Gere's penis, and the Silver Surfer is utterly worthless. Why was this remade? Was it really just an excuse to see Richard Gere naked a couple more times? If so, I clearly am not the target audience for the movie. There are just some movies I have to see to be able to complain so much about them. This is crappy acting from Gere, horribly fake rear projection during car scenes, and just in general bad. Oh, and Valerie Kaprisky is horrible and only notable for her nudity. Which is shown enough in the movie to be almost worth watching. But then you realize that you could actually watch a good movie to see nudity. Much better to do that than support some crappy movie by spending your time on it. I am quite capable of multi-tasking, so I don't feel like I'm wasting time.

My Sassy Girl

My Sassy Girl is a little Korean film that just happened to be a huge hit based on a blog. Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my closeup! It's Caseus Velox: The Movie time! Ok, not really, but man, I want my blog to be rich and famous someday. Maybe it'll share some of the spoils and give me some of its castoffs. I'm better than Turtle. Why would a Korean kid in 2001 have a Colorado Rockies pennant on his wall? Apparently, no Korean players played for them then, so he had to like the Rockies. What the hell-ass? And why am I such a total sap? Yeah, I cried at the end. There's just something about a completely hokey ending that can get me. I think I saw a little too much of myself in Kyun-woo. At least my relationships have rarely been that abusive. I know there's supposed to be an American remake of this film. It will suck. There is no doubt in my mind. The complete unpredictableness of the plot and some very Korean aspects of it (The Shower? What?) will resist all translation to America. And there's just something about an attractive Asian girl that makes it hard to take her beating the crap out of a guy seriously enough to have a major problem with it. It was much better than every other Korean comedy I've seen, although that isn't really that many. A few years ago, I said that every Korean film I saw was crap. Of late, I've seen quite a few movies that put that statement to rest. I apologize to the Korean film industry. You're not complete crap. Just make more movies like this and Tae Guk Gi and 3-Iron and less like Sex Is Zero and Lies and I'll be a much happier person.

The Man Who Loved Woman & Wide Sargasso Sea

The Man Who Loved Women is interesting, but I really didn't care for the main character, or pretty much any of them. It does have a lot of fairly famous French actresses in the late 70s, but I just felt it was eh, due to the fact that I don't like people in it. That's a serious problem for a film that depends on one person to carry it. I know that the unlikable character was intentional but I just got tired of women falling for this ass. I'm probably just bitter.

Wide Sargasso Sea is one of the most ridiculous NC-17s ever. Most of the NC-17s I've seen have been ridiculous and very little more than an R-rated film. Stupid prudish country. This may have been somewhat more sensual than some crappy R-rated film, but it's certainly not more explicit. Seriously, did you see how many penii there were in Before Night Falls? Just when you think you're all penised-out, the film just throws another at you. Not like this movie. Not that much full frontal nudity. But at least there aren't any horribe fake breasts in it. Maybe there was one too many thrusts, or one too many grabs of the crotch. Either way, it's a gorgeous film, but ultimately, it will only be remembered because it's NC-17. I imagine having read the book or Jane Eyre probably would have improved it a little. I'd hope at least. Based on the reviews, though, it seems like the movie just sucked. It was sort of strange to see Naomi Watts. It's not like it's her first film or something, but it was definitely weird.

Valley Girl, Ugetsu, Walk Don't Run, Out of Africa, & Last.fm

Valley Girl has one of the best soundtracks of any 80s films. Yes, I'm, like, totally serious. The Plimsouls, Josie Cotton, and, of course, Modern English, with one of the best songs of the 80s. I Melt with You was outstanding, but the third homage to The Graduate in the film (after Plastics and the entire scene between Skip and Suzi's mom) with that song playing was great. I know the song was great, but I thought it wasn't entirely necessary to play the song so often in the movie. But the music just was very good overall. And Nicolas Cage (in his first appearance as Nicolas Cage) was not too goofy, and there was much gratuitous toplessness, as is the point of a good 80s teen movie. Very few people in the movie really went on to do anything much afterwards besides him, but that's a shame.

Ugetsu, based on reading some reviews when it was released on DVD, was supposed to be a ghost story. After watching it, it still is, but it's much more about the problems with being very greedy, and the ghost story parts just happens to further emphasize that main moral. It feels very much like an early Kurosawa film, and subsequently, it was very good, even though it was more moral than I would have liked. I know that even a movie like Seven Samurai has a very pro-farmer message, but they just didn't feel as if they were morals.

Walk Don't Run is Cary Grant's last film, and it's also a remake of The More the Merrier, about a housing shortage in WWII DC. This time it's 1964 Tokyo during the Olympics. Jim Hutton is a starched shirt, making this film not nearly as good as The More the Merrier, especially as Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea were very good, as was Coburn, and only Grant really stood out in this one. Mainly because he's Cary Grant, and he's always the best thing in the whatever film he's in. This one does have George Takei as a policeman though, so that was a sort of strange thing to see. Then again, it does make sense, considering he's Asian, he was a somewhat famous actor in America, and the movie was set in Japan. Yay for Hollywood having a very small list of non-white actors to choose from in roles. It's clearly gotten better, and, in this case, Takei is at least Japanese, so it's better than others. Back to the movie, it's nothing particularly special.

Out of Africa is long and beautiful. I have a very strange strange mind and I won't say what I was thinking. Of course, Meryl Streep is very good. And the movie is beautifully shot. Robert Redford was British in the movie? Really? Did you know that Kevin Costner was English in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves as well? My, what outstanding accents these men had. If you haven't seen this, block out three hours of time and she it, it's worth watching.

I also added a little bit to know just how awesome my musical tastes are. Look on the bottom right under the Blogger button and the counter. And you'll see the last ten-ish tracks played by me on iTunes and my iPod, and by clicking on it you get to see a lot of info about how much music I listen to and what I do listen to. As it only goes back to March 2005 and doesn't even include a lot of the songs I played on my iPod, it's not entirely accurate, but it'll give you an idea of just how much my musical taste rocks. Note that I don't listen to songs over and over again. So that explains why songs I absolutely love don't get played hundreds of times.

Madagascar

Madagascar is too typically Dreamworks animation. Full of pop culture references in lieu of humor. Sure, it looks ok, even good at some times, but Dreamworks hasn't figured out what Pixar does perfectly. Although I haven't seen Cars, so maybe that's just as bad as it looks. Why exactly did I watch this? I like penguins and I read the penguins were good. Unfortunately, the penguins weren't in enough of the movie, and I had to sit through the annoyance of Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, Jada Pinkett Smith, and David Schwimmer. And it's also too bad that Sascha Baron Cohen and Andy Richter have little to work with. Such a stupid movie. Why are Dreamworks animation movies so insistent on being so "likable" rather than being good? Trying to add things for the parents watching by adding in a nod and a wink to a movie doesn't substitute for a good story, likable characters, impressive animation, and heart. Things this movie is sorely lacking. It does have monkeys who like to throw poo, but they're also sorely lacking in both lines and screen time.

Angels in America, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, & Tanner '88

Angels in America is very good. I also very much liked the little Cocteauan touches in the dream and heaven sequences. I really need to see Orpheus. That's in my queue. Of course, almost everyone in it is very good. I'm not sure if Al Pacino is overacting or if Roy Cohn really was that big of a prick. But he just got on my nerves so much. Or maybe it was just that everyone else in the film was outstanding and his mediocreness just looked like crap. I'd have to rewatch it, and devoting six more hours to a strangely uplifting story of gays and AIDS in America in the mid-80s just doesn't fit with how I want to spend my time.

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason is missing just about everything that made the first one good. Mainly any sense of actual goodness or Pride and Prejudice. And why, exactly was there a need for a sequel? Sometimes there are some stories that do just end with the characters riding off together into the sunset. The sequel is just Bridget embarrassing herself constantly. Blargh. So frickin' stupid. V. v. stupid. And you'd think I'd like any movie with a lot of scenes in a Thai woman's prison. But they're just ridiculous, like the rest of the film. And I know it's very shallow of me, particularly considering some of the women I've dated in the past, but Renee Zellweger looked horrendous in the film.

I also finished Tanner '88, which I thought was outstanding. I'm not sure how much I would have liked it without the bits of polling and focus group stuff. There are definite weaknesses, not the least being the horribly dated aspects of it. And it's loose as hell, and occasionally silly, but it's just very interesting and worth watching. Pamela Reed is the best thing, but there are good performances from most of the actors, except Matt Malloy, but the best of the playing themselves was Bruce Babbitt, someone I had pretty much forgotten existed. Which is a damn shame, because he was Interior Secretary under Clinton. And, of course, simply the fact that he wasn't anti-environment like Norton, he was a great Interior Secretary. The Altman and Trudeau influences were somewhat obvious, although Altman's fingerprints were all over it, while Trudeau isn't nearly as clear. Just the sort of political aspects from Doonesbury.

Eyes without a Face

Eyes without a Face is another little late 50s horror film, this time French not English. It's also very good, and pretty creepy. I was pretty impressed with the makeup effects. It's very impressive for a 50s film. Mainly that it was able to be shown in a movie. It was reedited and dubbed for American release, along with a supremely stupid title of "The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus". What the hell ass balls? The supremely freaky surgery footage made me somewhat uncomfortable. When that face got taken off... ewww... And then you notice that it was one take. With no music. And you realize that it was an absolutely outstanding piece of filmmaking. It's definitely creepier when you don't see edits that make it clear when they've made some different makeup or special effects changes.

Fanny and Alexander, Night of the Demon, & A Lion in the House

Fanny and Alexander is definitely a Bergman film, with its evil religious figure, the belief that there is no god, that we're all puppets, but the magic is real aspect is not something that really fits in with most of his other films. I liked it, but it was too long. It felt like it could have been cut a lot. I'm happy I didn't try to sit through the five plus hour long version. I've not enjoyed his later films nearly as much as his earlier ones. After Persona, I just don't like the films as much. His best period, the eleven or so years from Smiles of a Summer Night to Persona has his best films. Later films may be praised, but they just arne't quite as good.

Night of the Demon is Jacques Tourneur's entry into the demon and witchcraft genre. Not as good as Cat People, but still a very good horror film, even if the producers did force him to show the demon. That would have been better than the goofy looking thing they did finally use. The early English horror films all have a good bit of style to them, and this is definitely full of it. Tourneur also did Out of the Past, one of the best film noirs. He's very talented, and it's a shame that he didn't get better films and bigger budgets. I'm not exactly happy with the ending, but a lot of that can be blamed on the fact that the demon was shown. Would have been better if we never really knew if the demon was real or not. I wonder if the estate of Aleister Crowley was pissed about the movie? Or, more accurately, if he himself was pissed from his post-death state. Doctor Karswell is clearly based upon Crowley.

A Lion in the House is for people who want to cry for four hours. Because if you aren't crying very soon into it, you have no heart. I also thought it was nice to see Cincinnati Children's Hospital again. I recognized a lot of the doctors. Not that I knew them all, well, I did watch Dawn of the Dead with one of them, and I definitely have talked with a couple others during my two plus years working there. I had to wander around these halls for various job related things, and seeing these kids, and kids just like them struggling to live would make me happy to be working on improving their care and lives as much or as little as I was. Working there was a very important part of my life, even if I regretted every time I saw the kids in the cystic fibrosis area, knowing about it. I recognize just about everything in the movie, when they're going around Cincinnati. It's very nostalgic for me as well as a powerful film. I cannot recommend this film highly enough.

Missing, The American Friend, Madadayo, & Kids Return

Missing is the based on a true story about the disappearance of an American in Chile. Except that the movie doesn't actually use Chile as that would probably cause some problems. Although it's really freakin' obviously Chile. Well, I guess it is, if you know anything about South American history in the 70s. Man, America really messed up a lot of countries with our desire to involve ourselves in coups and corrupt dictatorships all the time. Now that the information showing the most controversial aspect of the film, that the US knew about the disappearance and death of Charles Horman, is true, the movie actually may not have gone far enough in its denunciation of the American government. The movie itself has a strong performance from Jack Lemmon, but the most important aspect of it is the coming out against American involvement in foreign coups. Which is really the sensible position, all considered.

The American Friend is Wim Wenders doing Tom Ripley. It doesn't actually feel like a Tom Ripley story. Maybe it's that I'm not really familiar with the Patricia Highsmith novels, and he's a secondary character in a lot of them, but this was all about Bruno Ganz coming to terms with his disease and keeping his family well-provided for after his inevitable death. That one character just happened to be Tom Ripley was very much secondary, except for the fact that you just knew the guy was going to be a crazy killer.

Madadayo is Akira Kurosawa's last film, appropriately titled Not Yet and all about growing old. That's appropriate since Akira Kurosawa was very old when he made this film. Is it as good as his earlier films? Of course not. It's very episodic, full of Japanese drinking songs, and an almost fanatical devotion to the pope... I mean a cat. I imagine the cat was a very nice cat. I like cats a lot. I hope, one day, to have someone who likes cats as much as me and then we could have a cat together. I just found it sort of strange about how the cat seemed like the only thing that was keeping the guy sane. Although, really, he was pretty crazy from very early on in the film. Or maybe it's normal for people to be afraid of the dark and lightning. And I'm not sure about the final shot, it seemed sort of a strange thing to end on. It was, as is typical of Kurosawa, well made and interesting, just felt a little more Japanese than I was quite able to handle. If I were more Japanese, I might have liked it more.

Kids Return is Takeshi Kitano's first film after the motorcycle accident that almost killed him, and it's very different from most of his films. It's also, interestingly, one of the better boxing films I've seen lately. Definitely better than that last boxing film, the vastly overrated Million Dollar Baby. Of course, it's not really entirely about boxing. It's more about young people in Japan, and how much they can struggle to find their place in a society that honors conformity above almost all. And there's the typical slapstick scenes as well, because what would a Kitano film be without some humor. I really don't know. It's a very good film, not as good as his best, but certainly worth watching. Especially if you like good movies. And finally, I wanted to mention that Joe Hisaishi, the best film composer in Japan, and probably everywhere, has another great soundtrack, including a few bits that sound like they would fit in perfectly towards the end of Civ III, which has my favorite music in any Civ game.

Amarcord, Vincent & Theo, & Kamikaze Girls

Amarcord just tells me that I need to stop watching Fellini movies until he is responsible for more of his earlier films, and less of his later films. I just don't like them much. I think I'm going to go avoid watching anymore Fellini for a while.

Vincent & Theo has a great performance from Tim Roth. It actually doesn't really feel much like an Altman film. Very strange that, since it is. There're some shots that are clearly Altman, with zooms on tracking shots, but there aren't so many overlapping dialogue heavy scenes. There are some gorgeous shots based on Van Gogh's paintings. So it's generally a great and beautiful film, but it doesn't quite reach past the biopic aspects. It's a little more about the creation of the paintings rather than the biopic, but it still is one.

Kamikaze Girls is a crazy full film. There's some crazy ideas, crazy shots, and it has some really terrible jokes in bad taste. It's also very alive, funny, and covers an interesting and not completely freaky group of fashions in Japan. I really enjoyed it. I'm not sure about the title change, since Kamikaze Girls sort of fits, but it also just sounds like an attempt to create a vaguely Japanese sounding title. It does feel very Japanese, and the Kamikaze aspect sort of describes Momoko's actions near the end of the film, but it also has a connotation for most Americans of Japanese pilots flying planes into ships. Doesn't really fit with a story about two 17 year old girls trying to find their place in a society that seems to ignore them. Well, except when they're not staring at their strangeness. It's strange that I entirely agree with Manohla Dargis's review. It's a movie that's just immensely satisfying. Even being someone who has no experience with either Lolita or Yanki culture, having just seen pictures of some of the Lolitas in Harajuku, linked as examples of how crazy the Japanese are. Then again, this does have Universal-Versach (yes, that is misspelled, and Universal and Versach are bleeped in the film) shirts, jackets and hats, which just adds to the ridiculousness for anyone who finds Engrish silly.

The Purple Rose of Cairo, Margaret Cho: Revolution, & Cross of Iron

The Purple Rose of Cairo is sweet and depressing. And the ending was extremely sad. Farrow was great, as was Jeff Daniels. It's definitely a little out of place with some of his more serious films and out of place with his comedies. I gotta love all the scenes in the film in the film. Very well done, Woody, very well done.

CHO Revolution or Margaret Cho: Revolution or whatever was funny, although it really does go over the same ground as a lot of her other comedy routines. It was funny, but just didn't work as well as her earlier ones. Although I guess I should just say I'm the One That I Want, since I haven't seen Notorious C.H.O. That's in the future, along with Assassin.

Cross of Iron is Sam Peckinpah doing the Eastern front, the most violent and deadly front in the war. Well, at least it was much worse than the Western front. As it's a typical Peckinpah film, there're needless slow motion shots, gratuitous violence and ummm, a "de-penis-tration"... I only wish I had come up with that word. It's a brilliant word. And a horrible thing to see. Teeth shouldn't be used. And, of course, the entire movie is really freakin' anti-war. I am very happy that I saw the full version rather than the bastardized one from the DVD released here. What's up with that? You're supposed to have a longer cut on the DVD not a shorter one. What the hell?

Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic

Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic would have been better had it been longer and had new jokes I really hadn't heard before. It's a problem that she doesn't seem to have new material. Shock only works for humor the first time. Over and over again just ruins any humor that existed in the first place. The new stuff was sort of funny, but there was too little. 70 minutes of film was short. Longer longer longer. And funnier. Which hurts, because I really like Sarah's humor. Too bad the music wasn't all that good, and there were some completely unfunny things in it, because she's talented. What the hell was she thinking? If only we could have just had a straight comedy show, it would have been enough. If only there had been new material, dayenu.

Tess & Debbie Does Dallas Uncovered

Tess is another of Polanski's films that are very much influenced by Sharon Tate, although in this case it's a direct influence rather than a sense of violence. No that there isn't in the movie, but that's from the book, at least what I remember from reading it in high school. I didn't particularly care for it then, and I'm not sure I particularly wanted to see an almost three hour long version of it now. That said, it's a gorgeous film, and Nastassja Kinski's very good in it. I'm not sure how closely this all follows the book, as really, I've forgotten almost everything except for the basic plot.

Debbie Does Dallas Uncovered goes behind the scenes of one of the most notorious porn movies. But one thing I wanted to know is will Debbie ever actually get to Dallas. Apparently, she never did, since she disappeared before they could do that movie. It's very different from a normal documentary, but fairly similar to Inside Deep Throat, although it's a little less involved with the history of porn and the effect of the movie on the industry, as opposed to the effect of the movie on the actors in it. It's really not that impressive of a film. I love the FBI agent in the film, especially his list of of things he hates, because I'm basically there with him, as he's anti-scat, bestiality, vomit, and child porn. All of which are disgusting. I guess violent porn should also be added. It's interesting, but not a really good film. And it's more of a mystery of trying to find Bambi Woods rather than looking at the movie. It gets a little better and more interesting, but never too fascinating. Although it's crazy that one of the stars of the film actually was in Cannibal Holocaust, the most notorious of the Italian cannibal movies. That's just insane. I didn't know that at all. Pretty damn cool. He was also in Eaten Alive and Concorde: Airport '79 and No Way Out and Spider-Man. Wow.

One year anniversary & iTunes meme revisited

Since it's the one year anniversary of this version of my blog, I felt I'd go back and redo the iTunes meme from last June, although I'm adding in some new words this time and a new sort. And note that I'm now at 3035 movies, meaning that in the last year I saw 400 movies. Yeah, that's right. I watch lots of movies. And yesterday was again the gay pride parade and I was annoyed by craptacular music played way too loud when I was busy not listening to craptacular music. And Comcast still hasn't really been on time yet. It's always been either almost late, late, or not at all. Saved me some money though.

How many total songs?
14846, that's 37 days, 12 hours, 41 minutes and 17 seconds. Or 55.11 GB. That's 4368 more songs than last year. Although if you go by when I added songs to my iTunes now, there are only 10226 or 4620 fewer songs. Since I deleted songs and replaced mp3s with rips from CDs purchased since then, that explains a lot of the difference.

Sort by Song Title - first and last?
'Round Springfield from the Simpsons' Songs in the Key of Springfield
Zürich Is Stained from Pavement's Slanted & Enchanted: Luxe & Deluxe
Interestingly, it's exactly the same.

Sort by Artist - first and last?
!!!
Zoot Sims
Last year was 13th Floor Elevators and Zoot Sims. I have a feeling I had a !!! song last year, but I probably deleted it.

Sort by Time - first and last?
Bonus Track from Ani DiFranco's Not a Pretty Girl
Symphony no. 9 from the BBC Philharmonic's Beethoven's Symphonies
Last year was Symphony no. 3, because they hadn't released Symphony no. 9 yet.

Sort by Album - first and last?
! from Dismemberment Plan
Zooropa from U2
Last year was Zen Arcade from Hüsker Dü.

Top Five Played Songs:
Some Small History from Portastatic on Old Enough To Know Better
Kicks in the Schoolyard from the Rosebuds' The Rosebuds Make Out
Art Class (Song for Yayoi Kusama) from Superchunk's Here's to Shutting Up
I Summon You from Spoon's Gimme Fiction
Galang from M.I.A.'s Arular
That's pretty different from last year, although it did have Spoon (I Turn My Camera On, which is still near the top), and Art Class. Since I don't play songs all that often, it sort of screws with my ability to figure out which are the most popular songs, so I had to sort of combine tracks and use my Last.fm account to figure it out.

Ten Last Played
Do You Still Hate Me? from Jawbreaker's 24 Hour Revenge Therapy
I Will Follow from U2's Under a Blood Red Sky
Game of Pricks from Guided by Voices's Alien Lanes
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da from the Beatles's Anthology 3
Candy from the Magnetic Fields's Distant Plastic Trees
This Is Just a Modern Rock Song from Belle & Sebastian's Push Barman To Open Old Wounds
Blinded by the Light from Bruce Springsteen's Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.
I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone from Sleater-Kinney's Call the Doctor
Just like Heaven from Dinosaur Jr.'s You're Living All over Me
Dollars & Cents from Radiohead's Amnesiac
None the same as last year, although that would have been pretty strange.

Find "sex," how many songs show up? 69 (by track is 36, and Song against Sex and You Sexy Thing tie with 5)
Find "death," how many songs show up? 98 (by track is 36 as well, and no song has more than 2, meaning I deleted one copy of Death & Destruction from last year)
Find "love," how many songs show up? 752 (by track is 481, with 12 Love Will Tear Us Apart's winning, well ahead of the 8 (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding?'s, meaning that it doubled it's lead from last year)
Find "peace," how many songs show up? 21, with the same amount by track, WSFBPL&U? winning this one (16 last year and WSFBPL&U? having 5)
Find "rain," how many songs show up? 253, with 128 by track, having Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head winning with 5, although these numbers include things like train and brain (last year was 92 by track and 181 by all, which means that It Takes a Lot To Laugh, It Takes a Train To Cry ties with RKFOMH with four)
Find "sun," how many songs show up? 211. with 139 by track, and Island in the Sun winning with 5 (last year was 119 and 92 by track, with IITS still having 5)
Find "you," how many songs show up? 1690, with 1165 by track and I Wanna Be Your Dog, Here Comes Your Man, I Summon You, and Anything You Want with 6 (last year was 1123 and 798 with IWBYD and HCYM having 6)
Find "home," how many songs show up? 88, with 65 by track and Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) with 4 (last year was 65 and 46 by track with When Will You Come Home having 3)
Find "boy," how many songs show up? 433, with 141 by track and Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone? with 8 (last year was 354, and 86 by track with This Boy and I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend having 3)
Find "girl," how many songs show up? 300, with 185 by track and I Wanna Know Girls with 5 (last year was 220, and 120 by track and Girl with 4, but all different songs, so it should be Another Girl, Another Planet with 3)
Find "hate," how many songs show up? 68, with 35 by track and no track having more than 2 (last year was 43, and 27 by track)
Find "wish," how many songs show up? 48, with 31 by track and I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine and Blown a Wish for 3 (last year was 30 and only 13 by track, so none had more than one)

Deathtrap

Deathtrap is a very good twisty mystery. Although you just know that some of the twists are coming. But you won't get all of the twists, because that's insane. Too bad the DVD was full screen, which really annoyed me. Why do people ever want to fullscreen a movie? It sucks so hard. As for the movie, Caine and Reeve are very good. Dyan Cannon on the other hand was horrendously bad. So bad that you're happy she dies. So horrendously annoying. And that sort of twist isn't still in the first of two acts. There are so many other twists, both reasonable and unreasonable, that it does devolve into self-parody. But it is all intentional. That it's intentional is clear just from the fact that the people plotting it are mystery playwrights. It felt very play-ish, as the attempts to expand it from a play to a movie failed pretty much. It feels like a five-person play, and the other characters and scenes just felt tacked on.

A Prairie Home Companion & the finale of The City of Lost Souls

A Prairie Home Companion is great Altman. It's not a brilliant film, there's not too many cool film things in it. But it's full of hilarious lines. Almost everything Guy Noir (Kevin Kline) says is hilarious, mainly because he's such a horrible cliche. And Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly are also hilarious as well, especially their song titles and the Bad Joke song may have some of the best worst jokes ever. And, of course, what would the movie be without Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin? They're the most Altman-esque aspect of it, with them doing the overlapping dialogue telling crazy stories about their youth in the industry. But the best surprise in the film was just how good Maya Rudolph is. Vastly better than anything she's done on SNL. The movie is just fun. Pretty good music, as well, especially knowing that everyone in it is singing and playing their own instruments adds to the impressiveness.

I also finished off a different DVD of The City of Lost Souls. I think it should have ended when the last DVD stopped working. Maybe it was trying to tell me something. I didn't care for the epilogue. End with the blood in the alley.

Primary Colors & The City of Lost Souls

Primary Colors is a very cynical film. Beh. And I guess it's sort of a very sensationalized version of Clinton, or something. Too bad it goes so far over the top by the end that I just thought, "This is crap, and Joe Klein can suck it. Hard. In the private office of the President." Too bad that George Bush doesn't have the conscience to deal with his coke use and gay past, unlike Picker. I guess the movie was well made, but it was such junk that I didn't really care. And it's also too bad that Allison Janney didn't get a bigger role, but at least she did get the role as C.J. because of this.

The City of Lost Souls has a CGI kung-fu cockfight. That spoofs The Matrix. Plus it has the gorgeous Michelle Reis. Is there any reason not to like this movie? Maybe its incredible focus on defecation. Except there's Michelle Reis turning vodka and a lighter into a flamethrower. Which is hot. In both senses. But at least it's a pro-immigration and getting along with those who are different movie. Maybe Tom Tancredo should watch it. Although he'd probably give up after the shot of the main actor's ass very early on, since it's a very nice ass. He'd probably think he was going gay. And the violence. He'd be all turned on by the violence since it's all brown on yellow and yellow on yellow violence. And we know he's all about there being fewer whites to pollute his precious bodily fluids. Well, I shouldn't just limit this to him, it's also Inhofe and a lot of other crazy friggin' Republicans and (to a much lesser extent) Democrats. Anyway, it's fairly typical Miike, well, that's not entirely true, it's a fairly typical restrained Miike. There's craziness, like there always is, but it's not so overwhelming like a lot of his films are. And it's all about Brazilians in Japan, some of whom wear Brazilian jerseys, so it's a very appropriate movie to start the World Cup season with. Inadvertently. Had I wanted a soccer movie, I'd have gone with Victory, which sucks because they cripple Pele. Or Shaolin Soccer, which I have already seen as well. Or Trainspotting, but that's getting a little obscure on the soccer references, even if they play soccer and a porn tape in a soccer video case is a plot point. At least I didn't mention Bend It like Beckham or Kicking & Screaming. Eesh. I think I'll stop doing this now. Oh, wait, one more: Just for Kicks, the worst movie according to the IMDB with soccer in it. It has Tom Arnold and Cole & Dylan Sprouse (the male version of the Olsen twins (I'm not sure there are any Sprouse countdown clocks though)), is written and directed by someone named Sydney J. Bartholomew Jr. who hasn't worked since, but was a production designer on a bunch of Farrelly brothers movies, and the "visual consultant" on the visually stunning There's Something about Mary. Anyway, I keep getting away from discussing the movie. There's ping pong, though. And the ultimate in final statements. Or at least I think it was... the DVD I got was so scratched it wouldn't play on one of my DVD players, and stopped on my backup with about five minutes to go. And then it just wouldn't play. So I think I got it all.

Drop Dead Gorgeous & Millions

Drop Dead Gorgeous is intermittently very funny, but also it's very easy satire. Especially if you think that mocking small town midwestern people is easy satire. However, those very funny bits make the movie worth watching. Plus, it has a great cast (Kirsten Dunst, Ellen Barkin, Allison Janney, Brittany Murphy, Michael McShane, and, of course, Adam West). It's also cool that the director was Michael Patrick Jann, of The State, which needs more recognition for its brilliance. So basically, it's a fun little 100 minutes, with an interesting soundtrack.

Millions is an outstanding family film. But it has something for people who got completely confused by the saints, in that the soundtrack is typically good Danny Boyle. Any family film that uses Hitsville U.K. is good with me. It's just very well done, especially the neat camera tricks. The moral values taught in it are also a lot less in your face than an American film would be. Even if it's a very similar plot to that John Cusack movie, Money for Nothing. Except that was based on a true story, instead of just using some real events to add some reality. I did especially like the touch of how the robbers got away from the police. Brilliant.

Fellini's Roma

Fellini's Roma is only a half-assed movie so it only gets a half-assed review. If you want to see what Rome was like in the early 1970s, I'd recommend watching a different movie. Or at least fast-forwarding through large swathes of this bloated mess. Because there's nothing else to call it. That also seems to fit well with Fellini's idea of what prostitutes look like. I never need to see anyone who looks like that naked again. Thanks Fellini for ruining my dreams for days. Well, not really, since I actually watched this late last week, and just forgot about it in its total boringness, and I haven't had any dreams about BBWs since then. Not that I ever have them, just saying Fellini didn't make them start.

Boiling Point, Yi yi, Bush's Brain, & The Hospital

Boiling Point is Takeshi Kitano's second film, and it's my least favorite of his. In fact, you could say that I was supremely disappointed in it. If you don't want a spoiler for the film, just go on to the next paragraph. Why, exactly, did he decide to make the movie into one big dream sequence? What the hell? There were some nice scenes in it, but I hate movies that end up being completely in the head of one of the characters. Boo to him. If this were the first of his movies I'd think he was a terribly hacky director. Good thing I've seen almost all of his other films.

Yi Yi is long. Long long long. Three hours of Taiwanese family drama. Bits and pieces kept reminding me of things from other movies, especially other Asian films, but this had everthing in it. It was very well made, well acted, and interesting, just left me somewhat cold.

Bush's Brain is another film that had little to no new material for me. I think mainly because, while I haven't read the book, I have been reading liberal blogs for years now. It's good to have an hour and a half of how bad Karl Rove is, but eh now. I guess it would have been good to get this thing out to more people before the 2004 election. Oh, yeah, it was released in a bunch of blue states and Texas. Well, that seems like a very useless release. Why no red states? Probably because the movie never would have played there. Oh well.

The Hospital is one of those movies that probably would have been more effective if it hadn't been made in the 1970s. Well, it's quite possible that Paddy Chayefsky is a one hit wonder. I haven't seen Marty or The Americanization of Emily, so maybe he has done other good movies besides Network. Too bad this movie is a complete mess of a 70s film. Yeah, it may have been a good decade for films, but it also has more than its share of complete freakin' messes. The comedy doesn't work, the satire only intermittently works, and it's all way too heavyhanded. Good thing he eventually did get work again, since Network is outstanding.

Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, & Elevator to the Gallows

Memento Mori is actually not a horror story. Unless you think sympathetic portrayals of Korean schoolgirl lesbians is horrific. Which basically means I'm clearly out of that group. It's a sort of sequel to Whispering Corridors, but only in the sense that they're both about Korean schoolgirls and are sort of ghost stories. Whereas Whispering Corridors was more about the actual horror film aspects of it, Memento Mori was almost entirely about the relationship. Which was, of course, a complete shock to the backwardsness of Korean society. Because apparently, they measure heights, weights, and breast size in class and announce numbers in front of everyone. And 71 cm? That's frickin' tiny, even for a 17 year old Asian girl. It just seems like the uber-repressive society is just backwards when it comes to how to not have a lot of teenage girl suicides. And, again, there's a bit of teacher-on-student violence. Is this acceptable? And if so, what the hell, South Korea? Seriously, that's just really messed up. Maybe you should be a little less repressed and then you'll have more sex. Even if [redacted] is what caused the major problems in the story in the first place. Anyway, it's very good, very good at building suspense, only occasionally confusing near the beginning (it's those damn uniforms, I really can't tell them apart when they all dress the same), very much about the characters, and only the ending, which makes the ghost story aspect explicit, has anything I didn't entirely care for. Apparently there's a six-disc set of the movie, with an edit of the film that's about twice as long as the one released here. I can't imagine. Well, actually, I can, because the movie originally was much more explicit in the treatment of the physicalness of the lesbian relationship (note that it's a Korean movie, so it's not really explicit nudity, if any at all). So you'd have more kissing and touching and probably even more dealing with the societal backlash against their holding hands and kissing in public. Or maybe just more of them on the roof. Either way, I think it works very very well as it is.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie has an outstanding performance from Maggie Smith in the lead, and a good performance from Pamela Franklin as one of her students. I was bothered by the apparent love of fascism, but then again, I think it was supposed to be bothersome. Definitely a movie worth watching.

Elevator to the Gallows is both Louis Malle's first film, and it has a score by Miles Davis. One of those is just of some interest, and the other is absolutely imperative. Miles Davis was just reaching the height of his talent, and while it wasn't his best backing band, it wasn't too shabby. As an early French New Wave film, it's a very strong little thriller, and while it's not quite as visually stylish as some of the later movies, the score and performances are very much worth it.

Finding Neverland & F for Fake

Finding Neverland was much better than I was expecting. Very emotional movie, and my biggest complaint about it is the fact that it's not really true. It's more effective in the fictionalized version of the events than in the true story, so it's not a big problem. Depp is, of course, amazing. What the hell was he doing for all those years of not acting well? Oh, that's right, he was just picking some bad movies. It's also nice to see Kelly Macdonald in a role, and Ian Hart. This was a much better film than Monster's ball, so at least that movie did one good thing.

F for Fake is outstanding. There is nothing at all wrong with it. It's a masterpiece of editing, fakery, storytelling, and just overall awesomeness. It's a shame that F for Fake isn't up there with Touch of Evil and Citizen Kane as Orson Welles's best films. Or maybe it is, and I'm just not up on the general consensus of film critics on Welles's films. It's just a magnificent little film, well worth watching. Just don't trust anything. Which Welles himself says early and often in the film. The use of his own history in the film, and his referring to filmmaking as the ultimate fakery just adds another level, along with his illumination that Citizen Kane was originally about Howard Hughes rather than William Randolph Hearst. Well, possibly, because why should we believe anything that Welles says in this film. I'm not really familiar with the Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving stories, beyond the very basic parts. I watched it on TCM, on a special night picked by Penn & Teller, meaning that they had both an intro and exit by them. Pretty interesting, and it really does fit in perfectly with their show. Their show is like little half-hour bits of them both exposing as fakes and completely misrepresenting everything in it, just like the 85 minutes of F for Fake. And I just love that it's an ostensibly true story, and a documentary, but so much of it is from such a biased vantage point, that it actually feels just like a normal political documentary of today. If Michael Moore hadn't seen this film, I'd be amazed.

Munich, Soldier's Girl, The Horseman on the Roof, & The Assassination of Richard Nixon

Munich is now the best movie of last year I've seen. At least, until I think of something else. Syriana, A History of Violence, The Constant Gardener, Pride & Prejudice, Match Point, The Squid and the Whale, The New World, and probably a few others also would have been good movies to be nominated for Oscars over Crash (which still sucks), Capote, and Good Night, & Good Luck, none of which were particularly amazing movies. I still haven't seen Brokeback Mountain, but I'm pretty damn sure I'm not going to enjoy it as much as my list of great films of last year. Munich was a little long for my tastes, but it's a damn good movie anyway, and it's got an amazing central performance from Eric Bana. I'm not sure that Spielberg made quite the movie with no real moral judgments on terrorism and the responses to them that he says he did. The final shot sort of belies that doesn't it? Anyway, it's Spielberg's best film in years.

Soldier's Girl is really good. Too bad the DVD I got had no menu, frequently popped up a "Property of Showtime" message and just sucked. What the hell? Apparently, this has happened to a few others, who've purchased the DVD. What the hell Showtime? You make this good movie about a transsexual and the soldier who loved him/her and how the military is seriously messed up with respect to sexuality. Andre Braugher, Shawn Hatosy, and Troy Garity are all good, but Lee Pace is amazing. If I didn't know that Lee Pace was a guy (from the very excellent Wonderfalls, no less), I would have been shocked to find that out. Not an amazingly attractive woman, but still pretty good.

The Horseman on the Roof was weak. There are times when I just randomly added movies to my queue based on good reviews from the NY Times. This was clearly one of them. Sure, a story about cholera and revolutionaries in post-Napoleonic Europe sounds like a fascinating story, and Juliette Binoche and Olivier Martinez are both attractive, but there was just no there there in the movie.

The Assassination of Richard Nixon just sounded like too interesting of a movie to skip out on. Based on a true story of a guy who wanted to hijack a plane to fly it into the White House and kill Nixon? Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Don Cheadle? Where did it go wrong? Probably because I don't really care to see a man broken down throughout the entire film.

The Naked Kiss & Whispering Corridors

The Naked Kiss is a great Samuel Fuller trashy movie. That ends up being something much more than the sum of its parts, mainly because Fuller is so capable of turning the myriad clichés in the film on their head. A prostitute beats the crap out of her pimp with a shoe (very effectively filmed) and then two years later tries to go straight after sleeping with a cop and then plans on marrying a pillar of the community? Seems sort of cliché, but then the little twists, the little strange bits start coming up and you realize that it's a great feminist movie. And that murder can be justified if the murderee is evil enough. And there's Charlie, something that struck me as bizarre from the opening credits where he was credited as himself. That's usually a dog or a horse or some other type of animal. Not in Fuller's movie though.

Whispering Corridors has a lot of Korean schoolgirls in uniforms. If that does it for you, you will love this movie. And if you like Korean schoolgirls in uniforms and creepy horror films that are actually somewhat scary, then you will love this. And since it's me, I enjoyed it. A little difficult to tell the many many different schoolgirls apart, except for a couple of them. And it certainly wasn't a great film, or anything, but it was much better than a lot of the more highly regarded Asian horror films I've seen, since it doesn't just repeat what's been done before. Well, at least not as much as most of the other ones I've seen. The DVD was a little on the weak side, with pretty weak video and little to no extra content, as I'd be sort of interested to know if it's common for male teachers to be so sexually suggestive with their young female students or even have them beat the crap out of them. Anyway, it's fun that I went on a journey into my feminine side last night.

V for Vendetta, Waterland, & The King of Comedy

V for Vendetta is a problem for me, because the movie is actually pretty good, manages to fit in a lot of plot points from the comic, and doesn't mess around too much with it. That said, it does mess around enough that it bothered me about a few things. Why didn't they destroy 10 Downing Street at the end, not the Houses of Parliament? I know that Americans don't know what 10 Downing Street is and... Oh, yeah, it's the Americanization that bothers me. And it doesn't capture the spirit of it quite well enough to make the changes it does make to have it fit more as an American version of the story work. And I don't like the different ending at all. The ending to the comic fits much better with the previous story. The ending to the movie just doesn't work. Natalie Portman also is too old for Evey. And I didn't like the retelling of Guy Fawkes, which was just a blatant tip to the non-English audiences who wouldn't be familiar with him. Why should that matter? And no LSD trip? And nothing about how V blew up the camp or the poetic justice deaths for the torturers? And Susan is a bad name? And the simplification of everything in it bothers me. I agree with Moore that movies of his works generally don't work out. I really am not looking forward to The Watchmen movie. That will inevitably suck. Then again, I didn't hate this at all, and I feel that almost every one of my complaints is due to how much I really enjoyed the comic and that the movie succeeds on its own. Still a somewhat mindless action flick, but not too bad. And I wanted more Storm Saxon. So ridiculous in the comic.

Waterland isn't as good as the book. That said, it does somewhat capture the spirit of the book. And it has Maggie Gyllenhaal's first performance. Which was just a "Hey, that's Maggie Gyllenhaal. How'd she get that part? Oh, yeah, her dad directed the movie..." part. It's weird that I had a little unintentional Sinéad Cusack film fest yesterday. Didn't realize that was going to happen. I really liked the book, and I really recommend it to all. The weird bits of the merging of the past and the present sort of make the theme of the book obvious, and therefore don't bother me at all. I also liked that Jeremy Irons played a creepy old guy again. Seriously, he always does that. It's like he stepped out of the womb a fully formed old creepy guy. It's a good thing that he has already played Humbert Humbert, otherwise there'd be a serious deficiency in his filmography. At least he's married to Sinéad Cusack. That helps a little.

The King of Comedy doesn't work as well as I think it should have. I think the identification with the evil people has something to do with it. I don't like Sandra Bernhard at all, that also sort of hurts it. However, it's a good biting satire of the society that we really have become. Much better than Natural Born Killers. And it has Jerry Lewis's best performance ever. Well, according to Netflix, I've never seen a Jerry Lewis movie. So at least it's the best one I've ever seen. Much better than his weak performances on all those telethons. I couldn't believe he actually cared about all those kids. Just seemed fake. Good thing I don't believe in hell, or else I'm sure to go there for that crack.

Pom Poko

Pom Poko suffers from overlength, its episodic nature, and an obsession with raccoon testicles. But the ending is surprisingly touching, after I felt like the movie just wouldn't end. Plus, the movie is utterly obsessed with raccoon testicles. And their use as weapons. If I were a person, attacked by raccoon testicles, I would freak out. There are some very funny things, and the ending is great. It's just the long, episodic film beginning and middle that detract. Unless I hadn't become familiar with the signifigance of Tanuki after the bizarre (from a non-Japanese standpoint) use in Super Mario Brothers 3 (plus the leaves), I would probably have been entirely confused. The message of the film, that protecting the environment is important, is a very important message, and if you can handle the use of testicles as weapons, and you think that your kids could handle it, then it's great. I probably could have mentioned raccoon testicles being used as weapons a few more times.

Pennies from Heaven, Battle Hymn, & The Five Obstructions

Pennies from Heaven isn't as good as The Singing Detective. The songs aren't as organic, there are too many times when the song happens, and then the characters go back directly to what they were doing before, with little new information about the plot or even their motivations. The repetition of this process, completely unnoticed in The Singing Detective begins to drag down the movie. Plus, I'm really not sure about some of the completely unnecessary special effects at the end of the fourth episode. What was up with the record in space? The occasionally extremely distracting effects from using video also detract from the performances, which, from Bob Hoskins and Cheryl Campbell at least, are outstanding. And it is weird to see Kenneth Colley do anything other than kowtow to Darth Vader. It's pretty amazing that you can tell it's him at some times, and at others that he completely hides behind that scraggly hair.

Battle Hymn is... strange, in that, the main Korean-Indian is played by a Welshwoman. And it's also fun to see Rock Hudson act straight. I just kept screaming (in my head) "HE'S GAY!!!!" Oh well. The movie itself was horribly melodramatic, which is exactly what you'd expect from Douglas Sirk. It's fairly effective melodrama, but I don't like it nearly as much as the rest of his stuff. And I'm not sure why the hell they decided to have that soldier at the beginning saying "This is a true story". He was very awkward.

The Five Obstructions is actually interesting. It is a Lars Von Trier film I don't get angry watching. Mainly because Lars admits he's an asshole. Which he is. Such an annoying guy, gets to be annoying in this as well. But at least there's Leth to make it all better, and actually have a human being at the middle of it. I also thought the first four obstructions were actually interesting movies, while the fifth, of course, just apologizes for the earlier junk. Well, the second time was sort of weak, but the first was hypnotic, the fourth was amazing, and the third was interesting. Not really something I'd watch over and over again. But it's still worth seeing, especially if you are interested in filmmaking.

Dr. Lamb & Corpse Bride

Dr. Lamb is a movie I've been meaning to see since I first heard about it back in college. Which is strange that it took so long to actually get to it. However, maybe I should have waited a little longer. It was brought up in my true film class, as it's based on a true story of Hong Kong's first serial killer. And it was made in the heyday of Category III shockers. So there's a lot of nudity and gore, but this one adds in necrophilia. So yay for that, I guess. Considering how crappy the movie looks, how terrible the subtitles were (admittedly, it was an all-region DVD, so it clearly was not translated by someone for whom English was their first language), and how misogynistic the movie is (a recurring theme throughout Category III Hong Kong films), the only thing that makes it worth watching (unless you like severed breasts) is Simon Yam, who is very good as the over-the-top killer. Well, depending on your ability to handle crazy, you might think he's terrible. But for a Hong Kong film, he's actually occasionally restrained. Which is almost all you need in a movie like this. Also, what the hell's up with the title? I seem to have entirely missed the reason for it being called Dr. Lamb (apparently, the character is named Lam, which gives sort of half the title). And I just wanted to say that if you're going to use a camera on a tripod, don't act like there's a cameraman who's moving around during a murder scene video when you actually know that the murderer is alone with the victim and a camera on a tripod. Seriously, that just takes me out of a film. Pay attention and try not to screw up. Oh, and seriously, was that child porn? I think it was. What the hell?

Corpse Bride is a very different brand of horror, in that it's horror for the younguns. No gore, no nudity here. Still, the vague sense of darkness is something that Burton's other stop-motion films do perfectly. About the only thing I didn't enjoy immensely in it is the music, which is really not special at all. That said, it's not terrible, nor does it stick out horribly, it's just sort of there. Voice acting was good, Depp didn't seem too Depp-y, Helena Bonham-Carter was only recognizable because I'm very familiar with her voice, and about the only one I didn't like was the Peter Lorre maggot. But that's because Peter Lorre should be the only one who is allowed to do Peter Lorre voices. Meaning no one should do him. Such a cliche. Pick someone else, or, even better, just create a real character. It adds nothing to make the reference.

The Hills Have Eyes, Wedding Crashers, & random Alan Moore and other comics

The Hills Have Eyes was bland 70s horror. I am tired of movies being called horror classics when they just are boring. Plus, I wanted everyone to die. I hate crappy 70s crap. And this was full of it. So many better movies that could be called classics. Why is crap like this revered when much better movies are forgotten? Sad state of affairs.

The Wedding Crashers... well, speaking of sad states of affairs, why is it that I can watch what is praised by so many people as being hilarious and not laugh? At all? It's just like with Old School. It's not like I don't like movies in this new wave of comedies, as I really liked The 40-Year Old Virgin, and I like Rachel McAdams. Why is it that I didn't like this? Oh yeah, it's because, again, I don't actually care for any of the characters besides Rachel, and she was utterly wasted. I think I just don't like Vince Vaughn. I hated Starsky & Hutch, Dodgeball was utterly worthless, and maybe it's just him. Can't quite figure out why, since I did like Swingers. Then again, the only people in the cast who've really done anything worth watching since are Ron Livingston and Heather Graham. They wasted Bradley Cooper. Damnit, he needs good roles. So good in Alias. When they got rid of him, the show began a very fast descent. Also... I think the Wilsons' need to stick very close to Wes Anderson. And movies directed by Ben Stiller. Damn shame...

I've also spent this weekend reading comics. Here're my quick reviews: Serenity bridge comic between the show and the movie was nice to read, finally; The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was great, and really makes me wish I had never seen the movie, and that it never existed; V for Vendetta makes me want to watch the movie a lot, because it was very good; The Watchmen was interesting, but would make a terrible movie. I also tried to read From Hell, but it was very amateurishly drawn. I will have to retry it a little later.

The Killers x3, The New World, & A Woman Is a Woman

The Killers is an interesting remake of the earlier movies, in that it doesn't even really use Hemingway's story at all. It just kept the very basic idea of it, and then sort of futzed around similar to the 1946 version, except with car racing rather than boxing. Plus, this one had a really really evil Ronald Reagan, in his last performance before going into politics. I'd like to think that this type of role is why he left movies. Because he was pretty bad. Then again, I vastly preferred using the Hemingway story rather than beating up a blind lady, but the rest of the movie was actually pretty much better than the earlier one, although the Lee Marvin-Angie Dickinson pairing was much better three years later in the amazingly good Point Blank. That movie, by the way, is my favorite Lee Marvin film. Yes, ahead of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Dirty Dozen, and The Big Heat. All of which are classics. You know, the problem with Ronald Reagan in a movie is that all I can think about is Nancy Reagan, married to Ronald Reagan while she was three months pregnant, and famous in Hollywood for giving the best head anywhere. Once you hear something like that, it realy does ruin any positive view you have of their "moral cleanliness". Stupid hypocrites. At least Democrats are the pro-sex party. Yay for us!

You know, I also saw the earlier version of the Killers and Tarkovsky's version as well. Those followed Hemingway's story better, but were just not as good as Siegel's version. Well, Tarkovsky's version was only of Hemingway's story. Doesn't work as well in Russian as it does in English.

The New World is exactly what you'd expect from Malick. Dear god, it is the most beautiful film I've seen in a long long long time. I still hate Colin Farrell with a deep passion. At least Christian Bale gets the girl. Who is hot. Very hot. And way illegal, damnit. More people, however, should look as good as she does. Ignore the IMDB photo galleries, because she's wearing too much makeup. Most people, in my opinion, look better without makeup. Or at least the extremely attractive people do. Anyway, more miscegenation, especially when they can give us beauty like Q'Orianka Kilcher, a mix of Swiss and Quechua.

A Woman Is a Woman really messes with your head, which is, of course, what Godard is trying to do. The whole soundtrack dropping out entirely is very disconcerting. Very disconcerting. Especially when it's playing a good tune, and then it goes out. And the jump cuts, and other cuts where clearly more time takes place than the cut would suggest are just really all about Godard being all "I'm better at messing with you than you are about figuring out what's going on". And of course, he's Godard and clearly is. It never feels anything less than a film, with even multiple breakings of the fourth wall. Bizarre. It's a great movie though, alternately hilarious and depressing. Not as good as Godard's best films, but it's better than some of his others.

Brother's Keeper & Good Morning

Brother's Keeper is a depressing little documentary, because it's about a family of four brothers, and when one dies in slightly interesting circumstances, one is arrested for the murder. Then it gets horribly depressing in just how screwed up everything becomes when the prosecution horribly botches the investigation and the local community rallies around the brothers.

Good Morning has some of the most immature fart jokes in a movie. What the hell was the point? Shame that they were in an otherwise interesting Ozu movie about petty jealousy, Japanese culture, and television. Plus an almost constant string of fart and poo jokes. It also has a completely immobile camera. Which isn't apparent at all. Lots more cuts in this than in Tokyo Story.

Confessions of a Nazi Spy & Stick It

Confessions of a Nazi Spy is extremely dated, and it feels almost like a documentary rather than a fiction film. But the problem is that it never actually feels like any type of film, rather a warning shot across the American bow in an attempt to make them be sufficiently anti-Nazi. Some of the problem there is that it's so comically done that I don't think it's effective enough in the portrayal of Nazis as evil. Plus, Edward G. Robinson gets a crap role. All he does is play the FBI agent as smarter than everyone else in the film, and plays a few scenes silently because the narrator is telling the audience what the movie isn't good enough to show. It was also strange to see George Sanders play a Nazi. Just a whole bunch of strange in the film. At least it was an anti-Nazi film produced before WWII started, even though the extra scenes at the end, added after the re-release in 1940, put that added bit of anti-Nazi kick that the previous 100 minutes were missing. Because really, Confessions of a Nazi Spy just wasn't anti-Nazi enough. It's like the Diet Coke of anti-Nazi films. Just not anti-Nazi enough. And now I will shoot myself for not only thinking of ripping off Austin Powers, but then doing so.

Stick It suffers because of a horrible visual sense. I'm not even sure that most of the bits of the gymnastic routines can be done. I'm also pretty sure that the judging is about as stupid as it is portrayed. And what the hell was up with the crazy visual effects during the first meet? Why the hell was the kaleidoscope effect used? Why do I get embarrassed for characters who dance crappily? It suffers also because it isn't nearly as trashy fun as Bring It On. It's still trashy fun, but it isn't nearly as good. That said, it's so freakin' ridiculous that if you aren't leaving the theater just bouncing and making devil horns (possibly with two hands because this movie rocked too much for one hand), you suck. Seriously, this movie is ridiculous fun.