James and the Giant Peach & Flight of the Navigator

James and the Giant Peach has bad songs, and the live action sections are full of overacting. But the stop animation work is typically brilliant Henry Selick. I probably should have seen this film years ago, but thanks Netflix.

Flight of the Navigator is another film I am pretty sure I had seen before, but I don't really remember it at all. So I watched it again, and realized that it's actually a pretty good kids film. Who knew that Disney was capable? And Sarah Jessica Parker all-80s'd up? Well, not really attractive. But I still wish that Four Weddings and a Funeral had costarred her instead of Andie MacDowell, or Jeanne Tripplehorn for that matter. Anyone other than Andie MacDowell. So bad.

The Talk of the Town, Fury, The Great McGinty, The Sea Hawk, & The Street with No Name

The Talk of the Town really doesn't quite match the title. Is anyone seriously talking about Cary Grant running from a lynch mob? And Jean Arthur and Cary Grant and Ronald Coleman are all well and good, but who eats borscht? It lost me with that, but the whole thing just seemed over the top, and not in the good screwball way. The debating scenes were just boring. Too much political diatribe, not enough comedy.

Fury is another film about a guy hiding from a lynch mob that took a very different approach. Too bad it suffered from the inability of the code to accept that a hero can be evil. Because man, I didn't want Spencer Tracy to be at all good. I wanted him to be an avenging angel, exterminating those who wanted to railroad him. I bet the original script had him painted in more shades of gray, maybe even made him evil. Because that would have made me like the film, rather than just have been bored with it. Well, not bored, because there were some good scenes, but it doesn't work as good as it should have.

The Great McGinty doesn't work as well as later Preston Sturges films, but really what does work as well as... well, any of the films he made over the next couple of years? The film has a place in any film lovers heart, because it allowed Sturges to make his later films, plus it helped to create the writer-director, which gave us such great cinematic geniuses as David Lynch, David Cronenberg, and Edward Burns. Brian Donlevy is great as the corrupt beggar, voter, and politician who gets a conscience and suffers his downfall for that reason. It's still a funny film, and all, but it's short and really feels it.

The Sea Hawk is worth it just for Claude Rains as a Spaniard. Who knew? Well, the swashbuckling is a little on the eh side, not nearly as good as some of Flynn's other works, like, ummm, his prodigious sexual appetites. And the expression "In like Flynn", and being responsible for one of the good songs on Combat Rock, in a roundabout way (his son was the Sean Flynn of the song, and who attended Duke University). The film itself is a weird combination of one that goes on far too long, and doesn't do enough. Or maybe I just couldn't pay attention to the boring bits.

The Street with No Name is no good. It's a "realistic" film noir, but it doesn't work nearly as well, as other docudramas of the era, like Call Northside 777. And Mark Stevens was a stuffed shirt. The only thing at all worthwhile in the film is Richard Widmark, but he's far better in other films, like, ummm, his war or western films, or Pickup on South Street. Don't watch a bad film just because it has a good actor in it. I still haven't quite learned that lesson. And don't even get me started on those scenes at the FBI. Such a waste of time.

Inferno, The Transporter 2, & The Sea Inside

Inferno is... bad. Not nearly as good as Suspiria, which would probably have made me appreciate the film a little more if I hadn't seen it before. But I didn't care for it at all. Yeah, it's stylish, but who cares. It makes no sense.

The Transporter 2 is worse than the first. And it's not just because Qi Shu isn't in it. It's because it isn't any good. About the only thing worthwhile in the film is the scene where Frank beats the crap out of guys with the hose. Which I saw before the movie premiered on some video sharing site. But it was on HBO or something, so I DVR'd it and wasted an hour and a half.

The Sea Inside was a movie I wanted to see because it was done by Alejandro Amenabar, who did Abre Los Ojos, Thesis, and The Others. Too bad all three of those films were much better than this. Javier Bardem was good, but the movie was far too long and I just couldn't get involved.

Casino, Borat, & The Quiet American

Casino is overly long, but it's a very good film. I highly recommend it. I have no idea why I hadn't seen it before. I really don't. I mean, Goodfellas is a great frickin' film, and Scorsese doing gangsters is just good. Well, Scorsese in general is good.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is funny, but the more I think about it, the less I'm impressed with it. I enjoyed it while I was watching it, but I pretty much never have to watch it again. And I never want to watch the wrestling scene ever again.

The Quiet American actually was closer to the remake than I was expecting. Yeah, there's the expected cop-out ending, because you can't have an American being a terrorist, but it was pretty good until that point. I still have a soft spot for Audie Murphy, so I enjoyed it, but it's not really a good film overall.

Faust & Man with the Movie Camera

Faust and Man with the Movie Camera are two late-era silent films by European directors, Faust by F.W. Murnau and Man by Dziga Vertov. Murnau, of course, is a vastly talented director, while I've never heard of anything by Vertov. It's an experimental film, following a man, who just happens to have a movie camera, around the Soviet Union making the film that we're watching. It's... strange. It's interesting, but it just seems a little too out there for me. Faust is one of the classic stories, and it's a very good retelling. Well, the impressive imagery is typical of Murnau, but there are typically melodramatic touches that hurt the film. Of course, they weren't as cliched back then, but they are now. Faust is the better film, but Man with the Movie Camera is the more important film in history for it's cinematic inventiveness.

Loves of a Blonde & Closely Watched Trains

Loves of a Blonde and Closely Watched Trains are two of the best Czech New Wave films. Also both are all about sex. Well, Closely Watched Trains is also about the anti-Nazi resistance late in WWII. Loves of a Blonde is a Milos Forman film, while Jirí Menzel directed the other one. I don't think I know any of his other films. They're both about young people who are immature about love, Loves being about a factory girl who follows a pianist to Prague, and Closely Watched Trains being about a train dispatcher who loves a conductress but can't get it up. Of course, both are really about the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. It's more obvious in Closely Watched Trains, but the totalitarian society that has a factory town of 16 women to every man clearly just is depressing. Both are worth watching, but I prefer Closely Watched Trains. Only partially because of Jitka Bendová. Yeah, she's hot. But it also just feels more important of a film. Anyway, definitely see them.

L'Avventura, La Notte, & L'Eclisse

me: hey, I have a question for you
Auto response from male friend: When they turn 18, upper-class children attend a secret Thai language school, disguised as a ski resort, in Grindelwald.
male friend: do you
me: yeah, and first off, good quote
male friend: oh thanks
male friend: it's true
me: but what the hell is l'avventura about?
male friend: have you seen it?
me: I just watched it
male friend: well...
male friend: there are two answers...
male friend: 1)put simply, it's about a woman who disappears on an island, and the relationship that develops between her best friend and her boyfriend as they search for her, ...
me: I got 1
male friend: and 2)...
male friend: it's about Antonioni being a f---ing madman (but an awesome one)
me: hmm, ok, I understand that as well
me: so can you explain why the hell that movie was so long to prove those two points?
male friend: there are a lot of bizarre subtleties that he concentrates on about the relationship and everything...but I like just cause it's like this hypnotic visual thing
male friend: but it is pretty f---in boring at times
me: yep
me: I almost fell asleep a few times
male friend: i did fall asleep the first time i saw it
me: bigger issue was that the version I watched had these itty bitty subtitles and they went by very quickly sometimes, and I figured that it wasn't important what they were saying
me: I couldn't follow the plot anyway :-)
male friend: yeah..there's some stuff that i didn't catch at first...like when sandro destroys that guys drawings
me: why did he do that? I just figured that he is a complete asshole
male friend: well in terms of motivation...i guess he's just really frustrated at that point in the movie...but i just didn't get what was going on the first time i saw it...i thought there must be some larger significance to the drawings...
male friend: which is one of the difficulties...since the movie is set up like a mystery, but it never actually goes anywhere
me: well, I kept thinking something was going to happen, and there'd be some deep meaning, but after thinking about it, there was nothing happening, and there was no deep meaning
me: I think I prefer fellini
male friend: well fellini is all about an overload of madness...
male friend: and antonioni is all about minimal madness...
me: damnit, you were faster than me
male friend: so there sort of opposite ends of the pretentious lifestyle
male friend: ha ha
me: but at least blowup had that mimed tennis match
male friend: that's true
me: this just had a bunch of characters who were bored because they were too rich, and so they didn't even need to go look for the girl who disappeared
male friend: and the sex on purple paper with two chicks
me: well, yeah, full frontal nudity is never something to ignore
male friend: true
me: speaking of which, what did you think of the buffy finale?
... The conversation went on to discuss the Buffy finale, showing movies outside, buying Criterion films randomly (something I'm very guilty of), and why the hell The Rock was released as a Criterion collection DVD. What does this have to do with Antonioni's trilogy of L'Avventura, La Notte, and L'Eclisse? Well, basically, just showing that I both have a 500+ page collection of my last blog's posts, with an occasional movie review that I feel might be relevant. Or maybe if I ever get around to it, finally going through the last couple years of it and putting them all together and adding to my blog.

Anyway, as to the actual films, I didn't like either of them, although La Notte was better than L'Eclisse. Neither was as effective of a film as L'Avventura. L'Eclisse was just boring, with nothing else for me, except for the scenes in the stock market, which is saying something, when that's about the only thing I found fascinating about a movie. Well, that, and that the DVD I got was scratched to hell in the middle of that scene and I couldn't finish that copy so I had to get it re-sent. Beh to that all. La Notte was still as boring, but at least there wasn't anything like the last few minutes of L'Eclisse. And I felt like it was slightly more structured. I mean, neither of them really made me think too highly of Antonioni's films. Damn shame about that. I hate it when I feel like I should like films much more than I do. Because Antonioni is a much better idea than a reality.

The Flower of My Secret, Waydowntown, Winter Kills, & Lackawanna Blues

The Flower of My Secret is, I think, one of the few Almodovar's I haven't seen yet. Well, at least from Dark Habits on, I only have to see High Heels, and it will be complete. This one is actually reminiscent of a lot of his other films, but it's not like he doesn't really deal with the same type of characters or plots in his movies. It's clearly in his mid-period of some crazy things, but mostly a normal movie with some very strong female characters. In that sense, it's actually less strange than most of his earlier films, so I guess it really isn't all that strange, but there were some very strange things, like the whole scene at the beginning of the organ donation, and the boots, and the bizarre family, and the oedipal ballet at the end. I mean, it's fairly normal within the scheme of Almodovar, but it's not normal. And I haven't even mentioned the NATO peacekeeper husband. Just overall enough to make me call it strange, but still, a good Almodovarian film.

Waydowntown is a little Canadian film about going insane after not going outside for around a month. Disjointed editing, dope smoking, a French version of Downtown by Petula Clark, a klepto boss, a coworker who goes crazy by stapling inspirational phrases onto his chest, and a two-liter bottle of marbles. I would say it's good, but it's definitely not for a lot of people. The editing style distracted me a lot.

Winter Kills is probably the most paranoid of the paranoid 70s thrillers. It's a not-very-well disguised theory about who killed Kennedy, based on a book by Richard Condon, writer of The Manchurian Candidate and Prizzi's Honor. Too bad this wasn't nearly as good as those two. It's not bad, but it's a mess of a movie, going from one theory to another without enough time for the audience to figure out what was going on. And it wasn't like I figured out what the end of the movie was going to be (even with the "big twist" ending) very soon after the beginning. Not to say that some things didn't surprise me (like, why did the maid-assassin have to have her shirt ripped open? I mean, I know it's the 70s and all, but huh?), but none of the big reveals did much for me. Maybe I have seen too many paranoid thrillers to be surprised by one that is mainly notable for Sterling Hayden's facial hair, but it just was a mess.

Lackawanna Blues is an HBO movie about a small kid at a boarding house in upstate New York in the 50s and 60s. It's full of a lot of fairly well-known (at least to me) black actors in small parts, like Michael K. "Omar" Williams as a knife obsessed boarder, and Jeffrey Wright as a murderous scrap-booker. The movie is basically an excuse to have S. Epatha Merkerson get an Emmy. That isn't to say it isn't enjoyable, but there are a couple of scenes, especially towards the end that are Emmy bait.

My Own Private Idaho, Jacob's Ladder, The Virgin Suicides, Piccadilly, & Long Day's Journey into Night

My Own Private Idaho has a great performance from Keanu Reeves, although it's similar to his performance in the Matrix, as in, he's supposed to have no emotions. River Phoenix on the other hand, just reminded me that Joaquin Phoenix sucks. Seriously, what an outstanding performance. I didn't care for most of the characters, and the faux-Shakespeare was distracting. So basically, it was really good, but should have been better.

Jacob's Ladder was a strange and twisted film. I'm not entirely sure what to think about it, because it's one of those movies that I generally hate because of the ending. But it was crazy with the whole thing. Very Ambrose Bierce, which I like as a short story, but seems cheap as an approach to a movie. It's the sort of thing that screwed with Stage Fright. Messing with the audience and showing something as true when it's not is just messed up. Of course, that was mainly just after watching it. With a little more time, it was clear that most of it makes sense in the sense that it's a struggle between heaven and hell for the soul of Tim Robbins. It doesn't really matter who won or who lost, because the movie was very superficial, and Adrian Lyne isn't a particularly deep director. All the deep aspects of the film are there in the script, but it loses a lot because the film is of his crappy movies. And even the script seems like an utter mess, not something that would surprise someone after finding out the guy also wrote Ghost, Deep Impact, and Stuart Little 2. Seriously, Ghost sucked and is a horrible blight on 1990 movies and the Oscars. Jacob's Ladder has some interesting things in it, not the least of which is Elizabeth Pena, someone I will always be excited to see in a movie, and was the only good thing in Tortilla Soup. Well, the only good thing that wasn't food. Well, all the girls in that were attractive.

The Virgin Suicides, which I'd seen before, and vastly enjoyed, was just about as good as I remember, and definitely captured the feel of the book perfectly. Kudos Sophia. I mainly just wanted to watch it again because I'd reread the book this summer and I am that excited about Marie Antoinette, and I would've seen it if it weren't for those meddling... job. Yeah, job really limits my ability to do what I want when I want. Damnit. And I hate that it got So Far Away stuck in my head for a day. Not as bad as the day I had This Is Our Country stuck there, though.

Piccadilly was only worth seeing for probably one of the least stereotypical portrayal of an Asian on film for a western film for, well... many many years. It was 30 years later that we still had Mickey Rooney doing "Japanese". Anna May Wong, while still being a quiet Asian woman, is, at least, a real person with feelings. There were so many crappy ways to use her talent, and, unfortunately, she suffered from the horrible racism that dominated Hollywood. She was clearly very talented (both as an actress and a very attractive woman), and that she lost out on roles because she was Asian is just wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. The film itself was nothing particularly special, except for some very impressive camera movements and stylistic effects, impressive for 1929.

Long Day's Journey into Night has good acting, but I just don't care. Sorry. Three hours of a family collapsing under drug use, alcoholism, and miserliness just was too much for me. Sorry, everyone involved.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated, The Departed, The Island, Walk the Line, & Bad Education

This Film Is Not Yet Rated continues the Great Documentary Revival of the last few years. Yay for that, and the movie was extremely satisfying for someone who has read multiple books about film censorship (some of them were even for fun) and finds the MPAA a bunch of morons. The interviews with the filmmakers were definitely worth seeing the movie for, especially if you want to see just how silly the rating system is. The private investigator scenes were sort of funny, because she was so insane, but also it was disturbing because these were vaguely illegal things being done to people, who, while perpetuating a stupid and ineffective system, are still human beings. Then again, the MPAA is full of crazy people who don't mind lying, so they deserve pretty much everything in it.

The Departed is my pick for best film of the year. And if Paul Haggis wins another frickin' Oscar I will have to come back here and complain about how stupid the academy is. Anyway, the accents were good, everyone in it was excellent, Nicholson didn't bother me, Leo again proves that he's not just a pretty face, Wahlberg had some of the funniest lines, and Baldwin was just Baldwin (who has been the best thing about 30 Rock, as well). Knowing how everything was going to pan out and most of the plot points allowed me to savor the little things, like the accents, the perfect cursing, the good musical choices (even if I did get Comfortably Numb stuck in my head for a while, and I don't even like Pink Floyd), and Walhberg making fun of his brother. Little things like that make me happy.

The Island, on the other hand, didn't make me happy. So much talent in front of the camera, why did there have to be so little behind the camera. Because Michael Bay is a no talent hack. A two hour chase scene is a great idea there, genius. No one will ever get bored by characters running from one implausible escape to another. Nope. All perfectly reasonable for Scarlett and Ewan to fall many many floors on an R and then get saved by a conveniently strung netting. Yep. Apparently, my intellect is far above what was needed not to have my intelligence insulted by the movie. At least it did allow me to play a lot of Ninja Gaiden Black, which is both insanely fun and insanely hard. I suck at it, but the opportunity to decapitate multiple people at once is... well, worth the many, many, many deaths you will suffer before you figure out how to do all the crazy moves.

Walk the Line is the white man's Ray with worse music and the least talented Phoenix. Man, why did River have to be the one to die? Couldn't it have been this one instead? Ugh. And I wanted Cash to stay with Ginnifer Goodwin instead of running off with that tramp Reese Witherspoon. And the music wasn't half as good as Ray either. And I say that as a white male semi-hipster who should enjoy outlaw country. But little in that movie was as good as Jamie Foxx doing What'd I Say.

Bad Education felt like a little bit of a retreat for Almodovar from the brilliance of All about My Mother and Talk to Her, and a move back to his crazy 80s roots, but with the artistic maturity of his more recent work, but it didn't work particularly well, in my opinion. I should have really loved the film within a film and the messing with the audience's expectations of what was real and what wasn't, but I just didn't entirely connect with anyone in the film. Was it just that I'm not gay, or a transsexual, or a pedophile priest? I'm not sure.

A Letter to Three Wives, Kwaidan, Touchez pas au grisbi, & The Scarlet Pimpernel

A Letter to Three Wives is the movie Joseph Mankiewicz made the year before All about Eve, one of the classics, and one of the few times I didn't hate Bette Davis. This one also won an Oscar, but I really don't know why. I mean, yeah, it's a movie from 1949 all about infidelity, but I think we should all have been beyond that. I mean, Kirk Douglas just gets to play an insufferable ass of a schoolteacher. Beh to the movie.

Kwaidan is a collection of four Japanese ghost stories made in 1965 and so not really scary as much as very creepy. They were all good in their own ways, but they have the moral of don't lie or cheat and be faithful and make sure your ears are covered with the holy word when you think a ghost is coming or else you won't have any ears. And really, really, don't mess with anyone who says that they'll kill you if you tell a secret, because they just might. And everything was done on a soundstage, which was obvious most of the time, which was intentional, but still somewhat distracting.

Touchez pas au grisbi felt like just another French heist film. Or at least a post-heist film. It just suffers from comparison with so many other, better French heist films. I'm sure I should have liked it more, but I just didn't.

The Scarlet Pimpernel is something I am pretty sure I had seen before, but back a long time ago, when I was watching stuff like The Fighting Prince of Donegal all the time. When I would watch anything because there were some sword fights. My taste wasn't entirely discriminating. Anyway, watching it now wasn't too bad, because it had Ian McKellan as the bad guy, who was awesome, and Jane Seymour who was hot. Even if her hair was enormous.

Thieves' Highway, Night and the City, & Attack the Gas Station

Thieves' Highway was weak. What's up with trucker movies? This and They Drive by Night were both bad. Oh, and Over the Top. Truckers just make for crappy movies. I know that there are probably good movies with trucks or truckers in them, but most are bad. I don't care about golden delicious apples, and I didn't care about anyone in the film short of Lee J. Cobb, but I just cared that he got to overact in a few scenes before he got his comeuppance, which, as this is a Hollywood film, would come soon enough.

Night and the City was a much better Dassin film, this about trying to corner the market on wrestling in London. Richard Widmark is great as the crooked guy putting everything in motion. And Gene Tierney is still very attractive.

Attack the Gas Station was insane. And bizarre. And crazy. But man, it was insanely, bizarrely, crazily awesome. Of course it was all a metaphor for the Korean society at the turn of the century. Which was obvious. I'm pretty sure it's obvious. I mean, otherwise it's just a crazy movie about four young men who knock over a gas station, and then rob it again a little while later all while making a lot of the people they were involved with have better lives. Well, except for the jerks. They got what they deserved. So many parts of this film were insanely awesome, like the backstories, the stick, the fights, the game, and head down. Really, it's just a movie that deserves to be seen by anyone with an interest in film.

Thank You for Smoking, Casque d'or, The Notorious Bettie Page, Shanghai Ghetto, & Last Man Standing: Politics Texas Style

Another long couple of weeks and half-assed reviews. I can't wait for election day.

Thank You for Smoking was pretty good, but a little weak in the satire part. I enjoyed it, but it just felt like it should have been much more pointed.

Casque d'or was not nearly as good as Le Trou. I just couldn't care about it.

The Notorious Bettie Page was a pretty good film, although with Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner behind the camera, it was expected. Well, apparently Turner wrote BloodRayne, so it's not a 100% thing, but American Psycho was great. Gretchen Mol was definitely better than I was expecting. And David Straithairn kicks ass in everything he does.

Shanghai Ghetto was a movie I'd seen trailers for when it came out. I saw movies in the same theater every week for a while, and it was before each film. Made me consider watching it in the theater, until I realized it's a Holocaust documentary. Doesn't need to be seen on the big screen. It's about something in history most people never knew about: that the Japanese allowed a large amount of Jews to get to Shanghai in the late 1930s. That they did so because they thought that the Jews controlled the world was a strange thing, but it could have been worse. They at least saved many lives. Their approach to enormous Jewish power was to try to be nice, while the Nazis clearly went in the other direction. I am continuing to see every single Holocaust documentary out there. It'll happen someday. They have to run out of interesting angles at some point.

Last Man Standing: Politics Texas Style was a really interesting look at a local legislative race in Texas, with a look at the 2002 Governor's race for Texas, which was just a big mess of a race. Seriously, why would anyone vote for Rick "I'm not a gay Governor" Perry? Is it just that he's a Republican? Because it's a shame that someone that much worse than Bush gets elected.

Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries, The Long, Hot Summer, Rhapsody in August, The Boys of Baraka, Notorious C.H.O., & The Science of Sleep

Stupid work has been keeping me from watching and keeping up on this nearly as much as I would like. I also have watched the second season of Veronica Mars and the third season of Arrested Development (both well-worth watching), along with worked insane hours of work, so that really explains why my movie watching was so low the past couple weeks. Probably won't increase much until after November 7th, either. Oh, and go Bengals and Buckeyes. So these are more half-assed than normal.

Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries was better than I was expecting. I really felt like I needed another show to make sure I never cleared off my DVR, and this was it. Lots of recommendations from Sci-Fi nerds and the promise that it was much better than most TV Sci-Fi. Well, it's not as good as Firefly/Serenity, but very little is. Certainly a worthwhile add to my Series recording list. Now, I just have to finish the first and second seasons before the third premieres on October 6. Or else I will continue to be someone who is alone in watching it among friends, rather than joining people at a Frak Party, or some such. Maybe I'll just try to watch as much as I can and still go. The effects were actually pretty good, the acting was generally not bad, and the story was interesting. (plus Grace Park and Tricia Helfer are attractive...)

The Long Hot Summer was another of those movies in the late 50s that should have been made a few years later, because the restrictions from the production code were driving me crazy. Yeah, they did get to say that women think about sex, but you could tell that if this were a little later, the son would have been made impotent and the daughter's non-Paul Newman beau gay. Damn them for neutering films. Then again, All the King's Men was a pretty neutered version of the book, and the remake is supposed to keep all that in and still be boring as hell. Not that the original was boring, I happen to really like it. It was weird to see Orson Welles, because at first I thought, "Orson Welles", and then "It can't be him", and I went back and forth until I just checked the IMDB.

Rhapsody in August is Akira Kurosawa making everyone feel really depressed because it's all about how people were affected by the atomic bombs. A little later than Hiroshima Mon Amour, but I still got a little weepy-eyed when the kids were wandering around Nagasaki looking at the various monuments and the like. Maybe some Americans don't want to remember that we're the only country who've ever used nuclear weapons in war, but it's pretty hard to forget that. Using the children as a way to get people to connect to the story was pretty effective as well, since there were four of them and most people could identify with one of them at least. And, of course, it was strange to see Richard Gere speaking in Japanese. I couldn't tell if it was halting or if he was mispronouncing words, but he seemed fairly up on it, at least when he wasn't supposed to be muffing words.

The Boys of Baraka was an interesting look at the Baraka program, which takes high risk kids from Baltimore and sends them to Kenya to try to get them out of the areas where they're likely to go to into the drug trade or get into trouble with the law. It was interesting, especially comparing that to the somewhat bleak view that the Wire is seeming to get into this season. I'll have to think about them together at some point in the future (may not actually happen).

Notorious C.H.O. is Margaret Cho's second concert film, and this one was more about sex and, consequently, I didn't care for it nearly as much as her other films that I've seen. Just wasn't nearly as funny to me. Eh.

The Science of Sleep was strange, in the wonderful way that a Gondry film can be. It felt much less organized than had it been written by Charlie Kaufman, and it was much more visually impressive, like his videos. It reminded me of Eternal Sunshine, as they're both about relationships, although clearly opposite ends of them. I'd like to think that I don't go quite as bizarre when one of mine starts, but then again, my imagination does like to get way ahead of reality. Can't quite remember my dreams, though, so I can't tell whether I've ever gone so far as to have them end up becoming real. And that is, if there is even one, the problem with the film. If you're looking to find a movie with closure, or one that isn't going to confuse you at all, you're not going to like the film at all. In fact, you may even hate it. I can see someone hating it very easily. It takes both an ability to separate dreams from reality and an overactive imagination in the realms of love and relationships to get, and some people don't really want to work that hard while watching a film. It's not as immediately brilliant as Eternal Sunshine, but really, few films are. It's more of an earworm, slowly burrowing in, taking over your life, until you'd be happy to ride around on a mechanical horse below cotton ball clouds with the woman you love (and may or may not love you back). Then you wake up.

Smiley's People, Igby Goes Down, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, Silkwood, & Norma Rae

Smiley's People isn't as good as Tinker, Tailor, but it's still a superior miniseries. Neither of them have nearly enough Patrick Stewart, and really, that's a damn shame. I know that the books didn't have more, but it's like Hearts of Darkness with the Kurtz section down to a page or two. Seriously, I hate when someone is all over it all and doesn't really appear. Damnit. Guinness is brilliant again, and the supporting cast is also good.

Igby Goes Down has some very very good scenes, and some very very good things in it, but there are some things that don't seem right at all. Good cast, even with not one but two Culkins. It just sort of felt like a movie that was trying to do way too much with not nearly enough. I think it has to do with the Culkins. I still can't get past them. He wasn't bad at all, just felt slightly off. I can't even put my finger on why I found the movie slightly off-putting, except that I also hated The Catcher in the Rye. Young angsty jerks don't tend to agree with me.

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne is an early Bresson film, but I really didn't care for it. Had a feeling of pointlessness. And it was slow, even at only 86 minutes. I think I'm going to hold off for a long while before I check out another Bresson film.

Silkwood is an excuse for Meryl Streep to use another accent. And to put another Confederate flag on screen. I'm just wondering if there's a point to saying that she was very good in it? That Kurt Russell and Cher were good was only a little more of a surprise. Craig T. Nelson was a bad guy, rather than a dad in this film. You know that he only has two roles, right? Dad and bad guy. The ending of the film is way too mawkish. Can't there be a ban on endings just like that? Amazing Grace over a montage is just eh.

Norma Rae is a movie I had seen the most famous scene in my true film class back in college. One of our projects was to use a scene from a "true" movie and then write a paper on it. I wanted to do the famous one take call in All the President's Men, but that was too long, so I apparently wrote about a scene in Erin Brockovich where she gets a phone call. Clearly I wanted to deal with phone calls. Actually, looking through my papers from that class, I wrote about a different phone call in All the President's Men. I was obsessed apparently. Norma Rae is a better film than Silkwood. Probably would have had an even worse impression of Silkwood had I not seen Norma Rae right afterwards. Of course there are problems with this movie as well, but those are fairly minor compared to Sally Field as Norma Rae.

Yeah, I watched two straight 70s liberal films. So?

Cure, Our Brand Is Crisis, & the entire Sharpe series

Cure is the movie that made Kiyoshi Kurosawa a star, and it is very good. It's also somewhat disappointing in that I think I had it built up in my mind as a great film, and it's merely very good. Of course, the very good film Fallen is similar, so it's not like I don't like movies like this. It's more about the detective rather than a supernatural being inhabiting the bodies though. It's not as good as Pulse, but it's better than most serial killer movies made of late.

Our Brand Is Crisis just makes me happy I never work for bad candidates... oh, man. I could tell some stories, but I won't. At least I don't work for Bob "0 for 7" Shrum. Just watching these guys try to struggle to reframe the election explains why Democrats have been screwed for a while. Ugh. I wonder, though, can we blame Bob Shrum for all the deaths in Bolivia during the revolt? I'd like to. It's not like we can't blame him for a lot of other deaths through his incompetant campaigning.

Sharpe (and his miniseries of now 15 movies (which I've watched over the last fifteen weeks)) follow Lt. Sharpe (and his various promotions and demotions) and British troops from Portugal through Spain, France, England, Belgium, and on into India during and right after the Napoleonic wars. As I'm a fan of the Bernard Cornwell books and had seen the first few when they originally aired on PBS back in 1993 and 1994, I enjoyed them all. Until it got to the one not based on a book of Cornwell's, Sharpe's Justice (although Sharpe's Mission wasn't based on a book, it was at least still set during the war), which is set in Yorkshire after Napoleon was exiled to Elba. And is horrible. Really, just very out of place in otherwise superior TV movies. The series has a lot of people I enjoy in sometimes small, sometimes large roles, ranging from Brian Cox, Pete Postlethwaite, Elizabeth Hurley, and Paul Bettany to Alexis Denisof, Alice Krige, and Phillip Glenister. And that isn't to forget Sean Bean as Sharpe and the very good Daragh O'Malley as Sgt. Harper. The main cast is generally very strong, and the theme song (of sorts), Over the Hills and Far Away, gets stuck in my head quite a bit.

Superchunk at the Cradle 9/1/06

Because I was out of town for Labor Day weekend, I didn't get to watch as many movies as normal, but instead, you, dear readers, get something much more rare: a concert review. Yep, I actually went to a concert. In a club! And not just any club, but one of my favorite places to see a show, especially now that it's smoke free. The Cat's Cradle is very nice. And a concert there with one of my favorite bands of all time is very very nice.

Cadmium
Animated Airplanes over Germany
Rainy Streets
Art Class (Song for Yayoi Kusama)
Learn to Surf
Song for Marion Brown
Nu Bruises
Winter Games
Package Thief
Seed Toss
Sunshine State
Why Do You Have To Put a Date on Everything?
From the Curve
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The First Part
Detroit Has a Skyline
Cast Iron
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Slack Motherfucker
Precision Auto

Opening band was Tenement Halls, who were... boring. I mean, it wasn't bad or anything, but they barely talked, the music all sounded the same and I just couldn't get too excited. Could've been the migraine I had though.

Superchunk just continues to be lots of fun. Good setlist (although no Driveway to Driveway or 100,000 Fireflies or Brand New Love, and I don't really care for Seed Toss), and the two new songs were good. After The First Part, I was thinking I really hope they play Detroit Has a Skyline, and then they did. It made me very happy. In the second encore, I tried to get them to play Brand New Love or 100,000 Fireflies, but apparently, my power was used up on Detroit. I think I need to work on improving that. That power could be used for good. Or evil, but I doubt I'd go to the show and use the power to play Swallow That. Anyway, now that I've just made a joke that very few people will get, mainly because it's not funny, I will mention that they said there'd be a new album in 2012 and it would be beamed directly into our brains. That'd be awesome. Not the 2012 bit, but the brain-beaming of new music.

Fighting Elegy & The Mosquito Coast

Fighting Elegy is a satire of the militarism that lead to Japanese involvement in World War II. It's very well done and touching, although the touching parts depends if you can handle a character playing the piano with his erection. Actually, it's not really touching. Well, the erection is touching the piano, but the movie is just touching in the normal way. The most interesting aspect is just how ridiculous everything is played out in the film, with Kiroku feeling frustrated by the fact that the Catholic girl he's in love with is not going to get physically intimate with him, and taking out his sexual frustrations with violence. And, by extension, suggesting that a lot of militarism is a result of not enough sex. I'm not sure where the writer was going with Michiko's statement about why they couldn't be together. Maybe there was something more explicit in the original novel, because that seems a little bizarre and like it came out of nowhere.

The Mosquito Coast has one of Jason Alexander's first roles. I didn't recognize him, but the IMDB did. Harrison Ford is very good, and it's an interesting premise, but I just don't understand how someone can be so obsessed with something so ridiculous. I mean, building an ice-making machine in the middle of the Honduran jungle is really crazy. A young River Phoenix was nice. It seems like something that probably would have been better in the original novel, again. Weird how that is.

The Great White Hype & Scarface

The Great White Hype is pretty darn bad. Maybe Ron Shelton did only have one good screenplay in him. And the cast (Samuel L. Jackson, Jeff Goldblum, Corbin Bernsen, Jon Lovitz, Cheech Marin, John Rhys-Davies, Jamie Foxx, Damon Wayans, and Method Man) is much better than the material deserves, but can't make up for the craptacularness of the material. And it is craptacular.

Scarface is a movie I hadn't seen in so long I couldn't remember much of it (but I still had on my list as having watched it, and with the same rating as I gave it this time...). Then I watched it and remembered why I had blocked it out. Overlong and boring. Oh, yeah, just like many other Brian De Palma films. At least the worst ones. And why are so many of the Cubans played by Italians? Ugh. About the only time I thought anything good about it was when Harris "Quentin Travers" Yulin showed up. I always enjoy recognizing actors from the Whedon-verse. The movie just doesn't end, is full of either cardboard cutouts or completely despicable characters, and is just another example of De Palma and his desire to remake everything. I know, Stone did the screenplay and De Palma joined the film late, but ugh. And the soundtrack is the worst of 80s excess in overuse of synthesizers. Moroder, ummm, really didn't do much good in soundtracks. Cat People has a good song, cowritten with David Bowie, but man, most 80s soundtracks sucked, and Moroder is at least partly responsible for that. Why the hell can this movie be so popular? I mean, I know why it's so popular, but why do people like it so much? It's not a good movie, there are much better gangster films. And why the hell would anyone want to be Tony Montana, unless you're seriously messed up in the head? A drug-addicted asswipe in love with his sister? Man, I want to be him!

Silver City, The Saddest Music in the World, & Princess Raccoon

Silver City was a disappointing Sayles film. It felt like it was going to build up to something much better than it ended up as. He's clearly very capable of putting together a sprawling cast and making a brilliant film, but in this case, it just didn't work nearly as well as it could have. Had I not been such a big Sayles fan, I probably would have been more forgiving to the film, but I can't. And I only seem to like Billy Zane when he's making fun of himself, which both doesn't happen nearly enough and is a really bad sign for him and his almost non-existent acting talents.

The Saddest Music in the World is bizarre. I didn't recall that it was filmed like an early talkie with a filter for an almost black and white effect. But it was, and it was um... strange in a funny way? I really didn't know that Kazuo Ishiguro wrote the original screenplay. If you haven't read Remains of the Day, you need to, by the way, because it's excellent. Beer-filled glass legs, a ridiculous contest that rewards winners with a slide into a beer vat, and a crazy Canadian family are some of the things that make this film completely unique. Plus, there were lots of stereotypes and (I hope, intentional) mergings of cultures of the other countries involved in the contest.

Princess Raccoon is another unique film. Well, actually, I find it sort of a weird amalgamation of the crazy musical stylings of The Happiness of the Katakuris, the tanuki of Pom Poko, the colorwork of Tokyo Drifter (makes sense since it's also a Seijun Suzuki film), and both Snow White and Romeo and Juliet for plot. Oh, and it's also done with CGI and green screen work to make it look like a play. Seriously, just a weird frickin' movie. Some of the songs were also terrible, and in the styles of Edith Piaf, classic movie musical, rap, Metallica-ish rock, mariachi, and Buddhist chant, of course some were going to suck. But it's very hard to get past the pairing of Zhang Ziyi and Jo Odagiri, two very attractive people. Oh, and the subtitles were typical horrible mistranslations and grammatical mistakes. And how much more difficult is it to write out Princess Raccoon rather than just Princess? I know little Japanese, but even I know that tanuki hime means Princess Raccoon. Well, tanuki aren't exactly raccoons, more like raccoon-shaped forest sprites, but it's close enough. I know I say this a lot, but there are no movies like this. Even the closing dance sequence, somewhat reminiscent of Zatoichi's (Takeshi Kitano's brilliant film), just messes with you.