Images, A Wedding, Exiled, Rocket Science, & Mansfield Park

Images & A Wedding are two more Altman films. And are the last two I plan on watching for quite some time. I need to rewatch The Player just to remind me that he is a great talent. Because these two were just messes, although Images had some interesting ideas, A Wedding was just a typically messy version of a film done by many others, this one a wedding that goes crazy, with some extremely flippant jokes about the death of characters. They didn't bother me much, or at least they wouldn't have if they hadn't just reminded me of all the other messy Altman films I've watched over the past couple weeks. So I just wanted to say that I added a bunch of Altman films at once, and then put a foreign film in between (they were all Japanese except for the next film). And I didn't like any of the Altman films. Such a disappointment.

Exiled is Johnny To, being extremely stylish, with Anthony Wong and Simon Yam being their normal awesome selves, about a group of friends who grew up in a triad together, two of which were sent to kill one of them, and the other two were sent to protect him. And then they go off on some adventures, being awesome and stylish all over Macao. I'm not sure about a bit in the final scene, but the rest of it was very enjoyable. To is basically the best action director working today. Can't do a lot of other things, like make a sensible plot, but the action scenes are wow.

Rocket Science is all about high school debate. It features a boy with a stutter who is picked to be a member of the debate team by a girl (who MBG was all about as "hot debate girl" (and is 22, although still a little disturbing for me)), and then does terribly, trying many different ways to overcome the stutter. And it features a hilarious Steve Park as the Korean judge who sleeps with the mother of the main character. Just quite awesome. I didn't like it nearly as much as MBG, but it was an enjoyable way to spend the time.

Mansfield Park is the next Austen adaptation from Masterpiece, being the last 90 minute one, again trashing a perfectly good novel, although it isn't as bad as Persuasion or as good as Northanger Abbey, at least some of this is a result of there being no good Northanger Abbey before, and a very good Persuasion. The BBC miniseries from the 80s is apparently good, but the earlier movie (about which I wrote when I saw it in 2004: "Mansfield Park was an interesting Jane Austen adaptation. Very clever, lots of great lines, and there were some nice touches I didn't expect from the movie. Like sex, and some very anti-slavery drawings. A surprise that I liked it? Hell no. I'm the Jane Austen fan in my generation. And Frances O'Connor wasn't too unattractive to look at.") wasn't entirely an adaptation of the book. Although this was an adaptation, I didn't care for Billie Piper as Fanny Price or basically anyone, except for Blake Ritson as Edmund Bertram. Well, I actually didn't even like him, as he was a little emo for the time period. My Austen-ite friend describes this version as a "just slap and a tickle in fancy Regency dress". Basically sums up the movie far better than I have. Anyway, there's only one more new Austen adaptation, Sense and Sensibility, but I have the Austen biography and rewatching Pride and Prejudice (because damnit, I love that so much) and Emma (with Beckinsale being far better than Gwynneth ever could) before that.

Kill!, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, & Hyperculture

Kill! is based on the same novel as Sanjuro (about which I wrote "Sanjuro was good, but not as good as Yojimbo. It was funnier, but a little too preachy. Still, a mediocre Kurosawa film is better than the best of most other directors. The ending blood was completely out of character for the movie, but it was ok." when I saw it back in 2003), and was directed by Kihachi Okamoto, who also did Sword of Doom. This was pretty funny, but not nearly as good as Sanjuro. Mainly due to the two leads not being Mifune and Nakadai, the two best actors of their generation in Japan.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (no, I didn't rewatch the movie, I read the novel) is a book by Dai Sijie, who was sent to be reeducated, and ended up going to France to write this novel in French, which was then translated into English. So this was doubly translated, although once by the author himself. The story was still heartbreaking, although the added bit about the Three Gorges Dam wasn't from the book, but it probably needed a little extra due to the lack of that much movie in the relatively short book. It certainly could have worked, but it needed an ending. It could have ended like the book, but that's not going to bring the kind of closure that most movie goers expect.

I also wrote up the Hyperculture exhibit at the Kennedy Center, so if, for some reason, you read this blog, but not that blog, this is my time to tell you to read that one. It has robots, koi, polka-dots, and me almost falling asleep in public.

And, for those who care, apparently the Edison Chen sex scandal may be over, just like the writer's strike! Boo-yay!

Yakuza Graveyard, Samurai Rebellion, A Perfect Couple, O.C & Stiggs, Northanger Abbey, & No Country for Old Men

Yakuza Graveyard is actually not the film I thought it was. I got it confused with Graveyard of Honor, a different Yakuza film directed by Kinji Fukasaku, and remade relatively recently by Takashi Miike. This one actually felt like a slightly restrained Miike film, full of yakuza and half-breeds who don't fit in, although this one only had female characters who are basically gangsters, druggies or whores. Or all three! Miike tends to have slightly more developed female characters. Only slightly, and they really depend on the film. Meiko Kaji, she of The Yakuza Papers (an earlier Fukasaku series of films about the problems with both the yakuza and related police corruption), the Lady Snowblood films, and the Female Prisoner Scorpion films, is the main female, but she really doesn't get that much to do. I vastly preferred The Yakuza Papers, which had a far greater sense of history and scale, although this one dealt interestingly with the economic reality of mid-70s Japan and police involvement in the Yakuza. So, while it was interesting, it didn't grab me as much as I would have wanted.

Samurai Rebellion was directed by Masaki Kobayashi, director of Kwaidan and Harakiri, and all around anti-Samurai man. This one is again about the corruption of the Samurai culture, like Harakiri, except that this is more about moral corruption, as the mistress of a Lord who has had his son is forced to marry the son of a great swordsman. When the lord needs to marry her to make the son the official heir due to the death of his other son, she's kidnapped and the son and the father must decide whether to fight or allow the woman the son loves to be taken from him. Of course, the main point is that Toshiro Mifune and Tatsuya Nakadai have a swordfight. Which makes the film, no matter what else is in it, it's worth it for that scene. That the rest of the movie is quite excellent is just a bonus.

A Perfect Couple is another late 70s Altman film after Quintet, although it's considerably better. Altman really doesn't do romantic comedy well, and this one is quite fluffy, with long musical interludes of a terrible (and I mean terrible) soft rock band breaking up a weird story of an older antique dealer who falls for a backup singer for the aforementioned band through a computer dating service. It's also very strange to see Dennis Franz in a very early role as Paul Dooley's brother and Henry Gibson (so much a one of those guys guys that I actually had to look him up because I couldn't remember what his name was). Ebert's review is actually fairly accurate (except for his saying the music wasn't terrible), as it was just all over the place, which works in some Altman films, but not this one, as pretty much any scene with the band was painfully bad.

O.C. & Stiggs has an interview with Altman saying that of all his movies, this one was watched most often (or nearly the most, I can't quite remember) at his place when he had friends over. He said that he wasn't sure whether people were more likely to laugh at or with the film. Considering the film isn't very funny, it's far more likely to be that they were laughing at it. It's a horrible mess, an unfunny "teen comedy" with bizarre Vietnam analogies and a ridiculous plot that doesn't make sense even after it's explained.

Northanger Abbey is, in my opinion, the new best version of Northanger Abbey, altough, based on the previous version I saw, that wouldn't be very hard. This one, though, was quite good and captured the ridiculous humor of the novel, even if it suffers from the same trimming of the other new Austen adaptations. Northanger Abbey is, by far, the funniest Austen work, mocking the horrible clichés of gothic novels with the humor that only shows flashes in most of her works, but here is almost constant. Felicity James is an outstanding Catherine Morland, and JJ Fields as Henry Tilney is the most perfect Austen hero. Well, Darcy is still the best, but Tilney is quite good, because of lines like "Now I must give one smirk, and then we may be rational again." I like Andrew Davies's decision to use Jane Austen's voice to help fill in the vast parts of the novel that needed to be cut for the 90 minute running time. As much as I love Pride and Prejudice, I have to say that Northanger Abbey was the most enjoyable Austen to read.

No Country for Old Men is the best film I've seen so far that came out last year. It also moves into number 3 on my list of best Coen brothers films, behind Miller's Crossing and The Big Lebowski, and just ahead of Barton Fink. Javier Bardem, as Anton Chigurh, is the most evil person in a Coen brothers film, and possibly the most evil person in a film. Just irredeemably evil, and watching the slightly normal people react to him is a lot of the humor, although Woody Harrelson, Kelly MacDonald (who knew she could play a Texan?), Tommy Lee Jones, and Garret Dillahunt were all outstanding. Josh Brolin was ok, but his character just doesn't have the same punch that just about every other character in the film has. It really is just a darkly hilarious film, gorgeous in a dirty sort of way, and a depressing view of society. And, of course, they shot the dogs.

Quintet, Persuasion, & Never Let Me Go

Quintet is a 1979 Altman film, after his early 70s successes and before his late career resurgence. And thus, the fact that it's about a dystopian future where the human race is suffering through a new ice age and play a game of divided loyalties called Quintet, and you have a recipe for failure. And that's just what I got. Confusing as hell, I basically gave up midway through and stopped paying nearly as much attention to it as I could have. Not should have, because the movie didn't deserve it.

Persuasion is the first movie of the new Jane Austen adaptations shown on Masterpiece (apparently, the Theatre part of the title was just too much?). And while I liked Anthony Stewart Head as Sir Walter Elliot, most of the rest of the cast was not good. And cutting down a novel to a sub-90 minute movie just meant that actual characterization was sacrificed. And, as is usual for Austen, there was an extremely good version done in the mid-90s by the BBC. Probably my favorite two-hour version of an Austen novel. This one has a very weak Captain Wentworth, and some very un-Austen-y things, like running through Bath without a hat on. No one does that. Well, no one did that back in the early 1800s.

Never Let Me Go is Kazuo Ishiguro's most recent book, after the supremely excellent Remains of the Day, and the less good When We Were Orphans. I remember reading about it when it came out and thinking that it was sort of an Alice in Wonderland in a weird dystopian future with organ harvesting or something. I think that's slightly misleading, as it seems to be a weird science fiction-y present where cloning started soon after World War II, and there's a whole generation of children who were cloned entirely to provide organs for others. It's a pretty sad book, like Ishiguro's others. So much of what I watch, read, and come into contact with just leads to sadness. I really blame my intelligence for this. If I were stupider, things like Dan Brown novels and Jerry Bruckheimer movies wouldn't make me sick, they'd make me wonder just how they were able to put that much into a novel or movie. Instead, I'm stuck knowing they're crap and then looking for deeper things, and that way leads to depression. Which I've been getting significantly better at avoiding in the past couple years, but there are still things that just are extremely upsetting to me.

Children of Men, Casanova, & Infernal Affairs II & III

Children of Men is a little religious-y for my tastes, but it's also an outstanding film. Clive Owen is very strong in the lead, but the real star is Alfonso Cuarón's direction. The three long takes, during the first car chase/battle, the birth, and the final assault on the apartment complex are quite amazing. So much so that I was a little disappointed to read that the two battle scenes were not done without cuts.

Casanova begins my little very recent scandal minifest. Completely unintentional. I had no idea that Heath Ledger was going to die when Casanova hit the top of my queue. It's fluff. Utter, utter fluff, but it's got a cast of great actors. Well, Jeremy Irons, Oliver Platt, and Lena Olin. And man is Lena Olin gorgeous. She's 50 in this film, and holy crap, she is hot. Sienna Miller is attractive, and Heath Ledger is very passable, but the move depends on Irons, Platt, and Olin. I watched it on Blu-Ray on my new 42" 1080p LCD. It looked very pretty.

Infernal Affairs II & III are the second and third films in my recent scandal minifest. For those of you who haven't heard, apparently, Edison Chen is a little bit of a dick. And now, I've seen his. And more of Cecilia Cheung than I ever would have expected. I mean, except in my wildest dreams. Ever since I first saw her in King of Comedy, the quite excellent One Nite in Mongkok, and the only watchable for her Lost in Time, I have wondered what she looked like naked... well, I wonder no longer, as a few days ago, photos leaked to the net that Edison Chen took of him having sex or just naked pictures with Cecilia Cheung (who is clearly at least a little drunk), Bobo Chan, and Gillian Chung. Apparently, he sent his computer and phone in to get serviced and the pics were taken and then uploaded. There is also a video and photos of Maggie Q and maybe some other actresses, but those haven't leaked, as far as I know. Yep, you can go find the pics online if you want to see it. Of course, this is enormous in Hong Kong, as they're fairly famous, but of course, this isn't big news in the US yet. I, unlike a lot of people out there, do not blame the women at all. It's clearly Edison's fault, for being an idiot. You should know that you never, ever, ever send a computer with naked pictures off to get serviced. Seriously, just a dick move there. And ruining these women's career's is enough for me to hate you forever. So you better hope that it doesn't happen, Edison, because I will make sure you never work again. Anyway, Infernal Affairs II & III have Edison Chen as the young Andy Lau. So that's my rough link to that scandal. Infernal Affairs II is the prequel, and III is the sequel, both of which have parts that were included in The Departed. II is far weaker, and III is actually pretty good. I just really didn't like what they did in II, as I knew what was going to happen and Chen and Shawn Yue were not nearly as good as Andy Lau and Tony Leung. If you are interested, watch Infernal Affairs I & III. Skip two.

Actually, the entire post was more about making a post that will get hits forever, because I've mentioned hot Asians, naked, and Heath Ledger. Google hits, here this post comes!

Bubble, Heading South, Cloverfield, Triad Election, Voices of a Distant Star, She and Her Cat, The Descent, Mouchette, & Life on Mars? series finale

Bubble is Steven Soderbergh messing around with HD on an extremely low budget. Which is really obvious from the film, with completely inexperienced and bad actors in it. It's filmed in Belpre and Parkersburg, West Virginia. There was a brief period of time where I considered applying for a job at the Bureau of the Public Debt in Parkersburg, and then I was told never to work there unless you are married and have a family. Because Parkersburg is horribly boring. West Virginia in general is a state I prefer to avoid, but I had to drive through a lot, and so I became familiar with the interstates. And while the scenery was occasionally very nice, it's certainly no better than Virginia, or rural Ohio, or Pennsylvania, all states I have far fewer problems with. But apparently, Parkersburg does have black people, so that's a bonus I wasn't expecting. Anyway, bad acting, a boring story, and the only good thing is that it was only 73 minutes long. Even at that length, I was bored.

Heading South is set in Haiti in 1978, at a resort for older white women who have sex with younger black men. It was probably a movie my parents liked more than me, and looking, yep, they did. I guess that Charlotte Rampling was good, but I just didn't care about the characters. I didn't see myself in any of them at all.

Cloverfield probably was a better idea than execution. The plot holes were big enough to drive an enormous monster destroying New York through, let alone that I didn't want any of the characters to live. So I guess the film was ok from that aspect, but the shaky cam just made me horribly sick. But yeah, its immense opening weekend was at least partially due to me. Sorry everyone.

Triad Election is the sequel to the quite good Election, set two years later, and just as effectively mocking the Triads, although I think this one is better. Not much more to add than that, because I recommend it.

Voices of a Distant Star is a 25 minute anime film done in seven months almost entirely by one guy, Makoto Shinkai (who currently works for an eroge company making opening films). Based on the talent he shows here, maybe I should check those out. You know, for research purposes. No, really, he's pretty talented, and the short is the heartbreaking story of two junior high school friends/more who are separated by the need for the girl to go into space and fight aliens in a giant mecha suit and they keep in touch by sms which takes longer and longer to get back to earth due to the traveling through space thing. So sad, and so freaky to think that we will eventually start having to worry about how long it takes for messages to travel, even as the delay on satellite feeds now drives me crazy. If anyone wants to know why I will never leave this planet unless I have to, that's why. Because I need my messages to arrive immediately.

She and Her Cat is a short five minute piece also done almost entirely by Makoto Shinkai and included on the same DVD. It's about a cat falling in love with his owner and well done.

The Descent is a slickly done caving horror film. And through the beginning of it, all I could think was that that was a bad idea from a safety standpoint. Yes, I'm a caving nerd. I had problems telling a few of them apart, especially after they got all dirty. But it's very effective, and Neil Marshall shows that Dog Soldiers wasn't a fluke, and that he knows horror well enough to not just fall into the tired old tropes all the time.

Mouchette is another Robert Bresson film about people who don't fit within society, this one about a 14 year old girl who is the daughter of a dying mother and a drunken bootlegger. Unfortunately, I felt like Bresson just put all the things in the film without ever really trying to show any empathy for the characters. Lots of bad things happen, and there doesn't seem to be any real point to it all.

I also, this weekend, watched Infernal Affairs, The Departed, and The Wizard again. One of these three is not like the other. And the first two were just as good as the first time I saw them. The Wizard was another of my childhood memories ruined. Did make me want to play Super Mario Brothers 3 again. I want to praise Life on Mars? as an excellent show. And fear for the David E. Kelley written remake that may appear on TV when the writers' strike is over. The only thing that could have made it better was if BBC America didn't have to edit the shows to fit in commercials.

Waitress, Fighter, The Firemen's Ball, & Red Angel

So I moved the weekend of the 5th, and thus I've been very slowly putting things away, working very hard, and being social. That being social has severely limited my ability to actually watch movies. And thus, from Friday the 4th to January 14th, I only watched four movies. And three of them were over the last two days of that. Pretty much for eight days, I watched no movies. Probably the longest stretch in... man, maybe in my memory. Although that would include rewatching movies which I used to do often. But I didn't watch any movies at all for eight days. And I only felt bad when I saw the three Netflix movies next to my TV, because I was thinking, Netflix is finally not losing money on me. I'll get them back for that though. Unfortunately, I don't feel like writing a lot about the films. I generally liked all of them, although none were quite as good as I was hoping.

Waitress is a minor little film, although enjoyable. And not just because of my enormous man crush on Nathan Fillion. Keri Russell wasn't annoying, and Andy Griffith was funny. It's a shame that Adrienne Shelly was murdered, because she clearly has some talent. And man, the food porn... (Homer gurgling noise)...

Fighter is the first in a little Czech filmfest. Well, this one isn't Czech, it's an American documentary about two Holocaust survivors from Czechoslovakia going back to Europe to go see a lot of the places that are connected to their war time experiences. Their actual experiences are fairly similar to many other documentaries and stories, but what makes it interesting is the interplay between the two survivors, who are pretty different, having many personality conflicts.

The Firemen's Ball is Milos Forman's last film in Czechoslovakia before he came to the US, and this was a short comedic film about a dinner and lottery going horribly wrong. The petty corruption, thievery, and infighting are clearly metaphorical for the Communist party. Pretty much everywhere, the party becomes corrupt. Although really any bureaucratic group of sufficient power will eventually become corrupt. Anyway, it's not as good as Loves of a Blonde, and certainly not as good as his American films.

Red Angel is depressing as hell. It's about a Japanese nurse who gets sent to China during the Sino-Japanese War. She gets raped, tries to do the right thing, and then feels guilty over the death of many of those she's close to. It's really horribly sad. Almost unwatchably a downer. I felt pretty crappy watching it, because I was rooting for the Japanese soldiers to live, when I knew that these were the same people who were responsibly for countless atrocities at the time the movie was set. So it would be a twinge of guilt at my feelings, until that character died. And then I felt another twinge after realizing how I felt.

Love Liza, Factotum, The Double Life of Veronique, Music & Lyrics, & 3:10 to Yuma

Love Liza has a good performance from Philip Seymour Hoffman. Wait a second. It has a performance from Philip Seymour Hoffman. Therefore it has a good performance from him. As for the rest of the movie, I didn't entirely care for it, being not a fan of huffing fumes or radio controlled planes. The raw emotional film made me feel uncomfortable throughout most of it. So I can appreciate it, but I didn't like it nearly as much as I should have.

Factotum actually fits well with Love Liza. I just couldn't understand why Chinaski just couldn't try to conform a little. I know that's the point, but man, he needed a kick in the ass. Maybe I enjoy society a little too much to read and/or enjoy Bukowski. Good performances, in the service of another largely pointless film. Largely, as Marisa Tomei (she of the undeserved Oscar for My Cousin Vinny (still a film I utterly love and watched again this weekend)) is topless, as is Lili Taylor.

The Double Life of Veronique is a typical Krzysztof Kieslowski film about moral choices and coincidences, this one about two women, one named Veronique in Paris, and the other Weronika in Warsaw. Of course, they're deeply linked, and a strong performance from Irene Jacob ties the film together extremely well. And as typical for Kieslowski, I loved it. In this particular case, the Weinsteins asked to add in a couple extra scenes, included on the Criterion DVD (Have I mentioned how much I love them? Because I do), which are really unnecessary, unless you can't connect the clear trend of the film until the original end. If you can't figure out how the next couple of minutes would go without the scenes, you haven't paid any attention.

Music & Lyrics is a trifle, but Hugh Grant is eminently watchable. And how can you ever complain about Aasif Mandvi? Of course, it wasn't much of a plot, but the music (a lot by Adam Schlesinger, who makes pop music for movies that is far better than it has any right to be) and the likable cast made me not regret it at all. If you don't actually want to spend the 96 minutes to watch the entire film, you owe it to yourself to watch the video for PoP! Goes My Heart. Especially if you love utterly absurd 80s videos, of which this is a completely perfect parody.

3:10 to Yuma is the 1957 film that James Mangold just remade. The central performances from Glenn Ford (as the almost psychotic Ben Wade) and Van Heflin (as the honest but poor Dan Evans) are what elevates this film to more than its basic plot. And it's absolutely horrendous theme song. I didn't like the ending very much, although I'm not sure how else it could have ended in the days of the Hays Code. And I loved the sex scene. The horrible repression that led to that scene is why this country has this idea of the 50s as a clean time. Damnit, the bartender had sex with the leader of the gang after just a brief time. That's not a more innocent time than now. It's the same as it ever was.

Rock Band post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last Orders

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

Joyeux Noël, High Spirits, & Pootie Tang

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quick little note about my effect on the internet.

A few days ago, I was talking with some friends about the reason I stopped reading Ain't It Cool News, and it comes back to being called an "elitist" and being told to "fuck off" by Harry Knowles in a review he posted. Back in 2003, I saw a sneak preview of Old School, which I didn't particularly care for, but basically said that even though I liked other frat pack comedies of the time, I felt that this one wasn't up to snuff, and felt forced. I wish I had that email easily available, but it's hidden on an old hard drive, and I don't feel like plugging in my old computer for that. Anyway, I felt that I had a reason to write in, because the reviews had been pretty positive on the site, and I had a differing opinion. So I send in the email, and wait a couple of days before I start wondering what's up. The next day, this was posted, and I got my answer. Harry Knowles thinks I'm an elitist. And I think he's an apologist for crap because it has boobies in it.

Jigoku & Imprint

Jigoku and Imprint are two Japanese looks at Buddhist hell. Jigoku is one of the most disturbing looks at hell filmed in Japan I've ever seen, with gore galore in the story of a theology student who flees a deadly car accident and is tormented by guilt. And then people start dying and he has a friend who follows him around and knows his darkest secrets. And then the last forty-ish minutes are him wandering around a stylistically fascinating version of hell, looking far more impressive than the obvious low-budget film should have. Imprint, on the other hand, felt sort of like Miike just trying to be more disturbing than his earlier films. His problem was that he cast Billy Drago as the white man. Billy Drago can't act. In fact, Billy Drago is, without a doubt, the worst single actor I have ever seen in a Miike film. And that includes the porn stars who've been in his other films. Which is a shame, because otherwise I might have cared far more for his horrible fate. But really, his fate is because he's a stupid idiot. The fate of Komomo is the far worse part, being left as a prostitute, and then tortured in a brutal scene that I just couldn't watch. Which, considering that I've been able to watch other Miike movies without much problem (although the sounds in Audition when the man's feet are sawed off are what I will always think of when I hear the word audition), the pins and shibari were truly horrific. That she was in hell, as was the other prostitute (played by Youki Kudoh, who I have a soft spot for due to Mystery Train), is made obvious through the repeated flashbacks. But the incest, abortion, rape, murder, torture are Miike trademarks.

When We Were Orphans, Werewolves in Their Youth, & Wonder Boys

When We Were Orphans is Kazuo Ishiguro's fifth novel, and he is best known for writing The Remains of the Day, the best Merchant-Ivory film. That novel was great, and while When We Were Orphans couldn't match that, it was an engaging story of a young boy, orphaned in Shanghai when both of his parents disappeared, and then growing up in England in the interwar years to be a detective, and his efforts to both save the world from World War II and to find his parents. For someone who has a well-known interest in both Asian and English culture and history, this book was right up my alley. I do not, in any way, regret purchasing and reading this book. Which is high praise.

Werewolves in Their Youth is a collection of short stories by Michael Chabon (including one in the guise of August Van Zorn, the Gothic horror author from his Wonder Boys). Digression to talking about Wonder Boys (which I read a couple months ago and was waiting to rewatch the movie before writing it up): being a big fan of the movie (back when Katie Holmes wasn't brainwashed), and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, I hadn't bothered to go find Wonder Boys or his other works. I have rectified that, and have to say that I like the book more than the movie. Mainly because there is more time spent with his in-laws, the scene in the parking lot, and the addition of the snake. Along with the trunk full of amazing things. Certainly, I can't complain about a Jewish family that has taken it upon themselves to adopt a bunch of Korean girls and screw them up just as much as Jews tend to screw up their own kids (Grady Tripp's sister-in-law was a great little character), so I have to say that the little bits that were cut out to make the film fit in two hours were some of my favorite parts in the book. Werewolves in Their Youth, on the other hand, was a collection of short stories, almost entirely about failing marriages (or failing families), except for the August Van Zorn Gothic story, In the Black Mill, a Lovecraftian piece of trash that works due to the sheer will of Chabon to keep to the pastiche. It's awkwardly written, sentence structures are far more complicated than they should be, and just works about as well as a Lovecraft story. I was hoping for some description of a tentacled beast, but was denied. The other short stories are occasionally good, occasionally not so good, but all paint a very clear picture of troubled people. So if that's what you want to read about, then go ahead and find a copy of this.

City of Men & Battlestar Galactica: Razor

City of Men is the Brazilian TV show that basically follows a couple of favela kids in Rio over about four years, with most of the people behind City of God also working on this. Because of that, it's extremely well-made, funny, touching, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting, although also longer than I was expecting. Three discs full of shenanigans, get rich quick schemes, macking on the ladies (who are hot Brazilians, of course), and occasional forays into animation, dream sequences, music videos, breaking the fourth wall (the entire last episode is one long semi-joke about taking people who were poor and giving them a taste of the high life and then forcing them to live their new life) and other post-modern touches. But it was generally enjoyable, and an interesting look at being both poor and black in a society that doesn't really care for either. Well, it's not like most societies like either.

Battlestar Galactica: Razor is a supersized BSG episode. Therefore I was thrilled. And it also allows me to talk up the wonders of interracial couplings (or more, as Soledad O'Brien shows), as Kendra Shaw is played by Stephanie Chaves-Jacobsen, a half-Portuguese, half-Chinese-Norwegian-English version of hotness. I've been told by people that she's possibly too thin, but I didn't notice that at all, as I was too busy being distracted by both her attractiveness and her Australian accent. Seriously, every woman should have a Commonwealth accent, because they just add to their being my fantasy. Ok, now that I've gotten that out of my way, I liked the action sequences, and even though I knew where the plot was going fairly early on (and the "twist" in the main plot was so cliched), I like the added character moments for the Adamas. And I will never, ever, ever complain about having more Michelle Forbes anywhere. And who didn't think that Starbuck was going to usher in the apocalypse, even if they didn't care about hanging out with Katee Sackhoff? Why the hell can't I stop talking about hot women in BSG? Because it's just impossible.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Who Killed the Electric Car?, Art School Confidential, Death in Venice, The Leopard, Street Fight, & Reds

Half-assed review time! Mainly because it's been almost a month since I last updated about movies watched. And split over a few posts.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu was pretty depressing. It's a Romanian film about an older Hungarian who moved to Bucharest, where he was left by everyone who might have had a reason to love him: his wife died, his brother and sister live hours away and he owes them money, his daughter lives in Toronto and never calls him, his neighbors can't stand him, and the only thing he has is his drinking and his cats. And this film follows him after he woke up one day with a headache and an inability to keep food down. Although many people whose movie taste I seriously respect called this one of the best films of last year, I thought it was very well-made, but just a slight eh. Still good, but not best movie of the year quality.

Who Killed the Electric Car? is another frustrating documentary about reasonable things being destroyed by big corporations and the government in cahoots, this time about how GM built an electric car that could have gone 300 miles between recharges, but was sabotaged by GM and a government trying to keep the old internal combustion engine industry going. And replace one destructive engine with a less destructive but far more inefficient one (hydrogen fuel cells). Why couldn't we just have electric cars? That would be awesome. Also: Mel Gibson's beard was awesome. If only he weren't a crazy person.

Art School Confidential felt like a satire of art schools in search of a plot. The murder plot didn't feel like it worked nearly as well as the parts about how stupid and ridiculous art school can be. Art may be subjective (de gustibus non est disputandum and all), but some art is bad. Objectively.

Death in Venice I just didn't like very much, as it was a movie about a pedophilic composer who is dying. It looks gorgeous though. Luchino Visconti can make a beautiful film, but sorry, I just didn't feel it.

The Leopard has Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon playing Sicilian aristocrats struggling to find their place in a unifying Italy in the 1860s. I'd complain, except that it's Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon. Who are great actors. It was pretty long, and the battle scenes were a little confusing (I had trouble telling white people apart! They were all wearing the same orange uniforms! And the Italians weren't diving!), but the use of color was outstanding, and the unification of Italy is really an under-covered aspect of history in American high schools. Because I remember it as maybe two days where we discussed that and the unification of Germany together.

Street Fight is especially interesting to me, due to the fact that I heard my two of my bosses in the movie (and another former coworker as well). And that the fight for the soul of black community in 2002 was between Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson on one side and Spike Lee and Cornel West on the other. Now, as a young white liberal Jewish man, who could I possibly be more in favor of? Ignoring the fact that it's a 32 year old Rhodes scholar/Stanford football star who has worked to improve Jewish-black relations vs an old crusty vulgar corrupt dude who votes enormous pay raises for himself, Spike Lee and Cornel West are pretty awesome, and Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have this tendency to say anti-Semitic things and not be awesome at all. Although I knew the ending beforehand, it was disgusting to see just how terrible Sharpe James was in his attempts to ratfuck Cory Booker. Just goes to show that The Wire is capable of being an accurate representation of not just the drug trade, or stevedoring, or the schools (and soon to be the media), they got local politics just right as well.

Reds is a very long film, and just reminds me of how Warren Beatty has so much talent, and has squandered so much over his career. You have great films like Bonnie & Clyde and McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and crap like Town & Country (a movie that's supposed to be so bad, I'm tempted to see it, even though I know I'll hate myself in the morning). The movie is so long that it can't fit on one DVD. I bet they could have though, it's only 194 minutes long. The cast is full of famous people, from Beatty, Diane Keaton, and Jack Nicholson (acting!) to Edward Hermann, Paul Sorvino, M. Emmet Walsh, Max Wright, Maureen Stapleton, and even Gene Hackman in a small role. Could have had about an hour or so cut. I'm not sure why all those interviews were included in the film, most of them were just duplicating what was shown in the film proper.

Pushing Daisies & 30 Rock

I finally watched last week's Pushing Daisies, a show that is the best show of the new season. This episode was about dog breeders and polygamists. The main dog-breeder polygamist, though, was Joel McHale (of The Soup fame). Which was awesome. As was Emerson Cod's Vertigo dream sequence. And the almost constant dog puns. Seriously, there is no scripted show on TV that makes me as happy as this one. I just grin from start to finish. But also, 30 Rock is completely freakin' awesome. I hate you media companies for the future delay in new awesome TV (and the current lack of late night TV). Give the writers what they want.

I will write up lots of stuff sometime soonish.