Caseus Archivelox: Safe, The Rules of Attraction, & Blade II

2002-12-09 - 11:27 p.m.
I just watched Safe, the Todd Haynes film with Julianne Moore. And I can't recommend it highly enough. Very disconcerting movie, (in a good way, unlike Titanic which was disconcertingly long or Armageddon which was disconcertingly suck) and Moore was excellent. It is a great multi-layered film like Haynes's other films, and it makes me want to see Far from Heaven an immense amount. And I still want to see Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story more than any movie ever made. Mainly because it's illegal, but also because Haynes, while frequently frustrating, is one of the most talented directors out there. Anyway, Safe had so many good things that the few things wrong with it were overcome.

2002-12-15 - 11:06 p.m.
Last night I went to see The Rules of Attraction, and have decided that the movie had more style than almost any other movie I've ever seen. The travelogue of Victor's trip to Europe was absolutely stunning. It was pretty well done. A little too snazzy for it to be perfect, but it was easily the best thing that James Van Der Suck has ever done. And it makes me realize that I probably would like Bret Easton Ellis. And I'll get to him at some point.

2002-12-19 - 9:50 p.m.
I got Blade II in the mail today, and it really wasn't as good as the first one. A little too sequel-ly. And then there's always the fact that Del Toro made a much better vampire movie in Cronos. Would have been much better had it been more like that one.

Caseus Archivelox: I Am Trying To Break Your Heart & Baran

2002-12-08 - 10:58 p.m.
I saw I Am Trying To Break Your Heart. It was a really good documentary about Wilco. If you hadn't heard of Wilco, then you probably wouldn't like it. For those who like them, then it's a generally well-done, if unenlightening, look at the band. And the performances are very good. They did play a lot more from Being There than I was expecting. And only one song from Summerteeth. So I was surprised, if not unhappy. And I didn't know that Jeff Tweedy is me as I want to be. In that he's a rock star, and he has migraines. Ok, so I don't want to have migraines, but he gets them, and the camera follows him into the bathroom to watch him puke. Which is just not right. There also wasn't much about Jim O'Rourke. Which isn't cool. And it was a little too "We're sticking it to the man". The music was good enough that I can forgive a lot of problems with the movie. Which is just the opposite of Muriel's Wedding, which was a good enough movie to overcome serious problems with the heavily ABBA soundtrack (EDITOR'S NOTE: I am complaining about Dancing Queen).

Today I watched Baran, which is about as far from an American film as you could imagine. One: it was about Iran. Two: it had, as a main character, Afghanis. Three: both Iranis and Afghanis were portrayed sympathetically. Four: it was in a foreign language. Five: the ending was not a traditional American ending. It was open to debate what would happen at the end. And six: it was slowly paced. But it was very good.

Snow Angels, Taxi to the Dark Side, The Damned United, Sita Sings the Blues, & The Prisoner

Snow Angels is a depressing film by David Gordon Green, director of the excellent George Washington, the less excellent Undertow (the first time I think I'd ever seen Kristen Stewart), and Pineapple Express. This falls much more towards the first two, a look at a divorced couple and their daughter and the boy that the wife used to babysit. It's full of good performances: Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell, Nicky Katt, Amy Sedaris, Michael Angarano, and hipster-to-be Olivia Thirlby (seriously, just look at the glasses and the camera). I think I wouldn't have liked it as much had there not been as much growth from Michael as the boy, because otherwise it would've been a little too depressing.

Taxi to the Dark Side is another in a long line of documentaries about how messed up Iraq and Afghanistan are/were. Better than some, although not as masterfully frakked as Standard Operating Procedure. Maybe I should check to see if I have any more documentaries about the War on Philosophy and maybe move them much further down in my queue. Possibly even off it entirely. I'm not sure I need to keep watching them.

The Damned United is the story of probably the biggest flameout in sports history. Seriously, it's the stupidest job decision ever. What the hell was the board thinking when they offered Brian Clough the job at Leeds United? And what the hell was Brian thinking when he took it? It's really quite a good film, with strong performances from Michael Sheen and Timothy Spall. It's about a time in English soccer that I really didn't know that much about. Dirty soccer being played with lots of diving and cheap shots? Certainly wouldn't pass in current days, and I imagine the better sports coverage allows for more obvious penalties. Certainly that New Mexico player may have gotten away with it during the game, but the cameras caught everything.

Sita Sings the Blues is an animated film almost entirely done by Nina Paley. It combines the story of her husband leaving her, the story of Sita and Rama (told by people who can't quite agree on what was happening and when), and has musical interludes of Annette Hanshaw songs that comment on the links between the two stories. It's an interesting film, although I wouldn't say it was great. I object immensely to the rights issues that she had to go through to get this film released. Annette Hanshaw stopped recording in the 1930s. This was released last year. The rights holders were asking for $220,000 for a small film that few were going to see? That's utterly ridiculous. These were state laws rather than federal laws, but this is clearly stuff that should be in the public domain, because it's been almost 80 years since some of these recordings were made, and the performer is dead. There's no excuse for this. None.

The Prisoner ends with seriously one of the most messed up finales of all time. It's batguano insane, and although the episodes leading up to it were also pretty messed up (I watched it in the KTEH order, as opposed to the DVD order, which is really annoying, having to change DVDs almost every episode, or at least the order), it's really pretty hard to understand just how messed up it is. I know that Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have seen this show, and I have this fear that they're going to go this route with Season 6. But they're at least going to have a little more time to put this together, since there're some weird shifts. I don't want to be more specific, because you should really see this, in order (I almost totally agree with the KTEH order rather than the DVD order, which is what I saw it in college). Lost has been pretty trippy, but I expect an online revolt on the order of the ending of The Sopranos except nerdier (and far less stupid) if the ending is anything like this.

You Don't Mess with the Zohan, Mad Dog and Glory, Knocked Up, & The Rug Cop

You Don't Mess with the Zohan is occasionally very funny. And frequently very stupid. If only hummus could actually solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Maybe we need to send Michael Buffer there to unite them in anti-Bufferness. Did you know he's doing the intros for Duke players at Cameron this year? What the hell?

Mad Dog and Glory would have been better had it been cast the way it was planned with Robert DeNiro as the gangster-comic and Bill Murray as the cop-photographer. Uma Thurman can be the moll anytime. Richard Price scripted it for John McNaughton, two talented people, but it didn't work as a comedy or as a drama. I did like seeing Richard Belzer as the MC at the comedy club.

Knocked Up is a movie I'd seen over half of on E! in a censored version, which is probably not the best way to watch it for the first (or, really, any) time. Eh, I'm not really that sure that anything could have made this movie a comedy through and through. Maybe I just shouldn't expect that from a Judd Apatow film, but this bodes poorly for my appreciation of Funny People. I want them to be funnier than they are, and the overly treacly baby montage really just sucked the funny out of the end of the film. Because otherwise, it's a completely unrealistic relationship, but things were pretty funny otherwise. Actually, can anyone, anywhere, remember an actually funny music montage (besides meta-montages like in Team America)? I'm probably being far too hard on the film.

The Rug Cop is by the same guy who did Executive Koala. So it's weird. In this case, it's about a cop who gets dumped because he's bald, and then discovers he can use his toupee as a weapon. He joins a police station with a handsome cop (women commit crimes just to be interrogated by him), an old cop, a fat cop, a short cop, a young female police officer, and a cop nicknamed Big Dick, who uses his enormous penis as a weapon when he gets aroused. Normal cop film otherwise, really: cop discovers terrorist plot, and then through a series of investigations and random coincidences, solves everything, and ends up with a happy ending. The musical interlude was way too long, causing the film to feel much longer than the short 80 minute running time. The best scene in the movie, though, is the first one, where the Rug Cop foils a bank robbery using only his toupee. Oh, and the most important thing about the robbery is that the robber is the ventriloquist dummy. Not the ventriloquist. It's delightfully low budget. Not as good as Executive Koala. See that one first, and if you want more weirdness, see this.

The Serpent's Egg, The Last Laugh, Inglourious Basterds, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, & Star Trek

The Serpent's Egg is just depressing. David Carradine is a Jewish trapeze artist whose brother kills himself and whose sister-in-law starts to break down, and this is all against the backdrop of 1923 Weimar Germany. And there's lots of foreshadowing of the rise of Nazism and the horrors of the Holocaust. Ingmar Bergman moved out of his comfort zone and just whiffed on this one.

The Last Laugh is one of the most famous silent films of all time, mainly due to there being no intertitles. Well, there's one, and honestly, I would have liked the movie much more had the entire ending not been there. When you have the movie just come out and say "I've added a happy ending because I don't want you to be depressed", that's just crap, although the coming out and telling you just how cynical the ending was made it clear that Murnau never would have done it without being forced. Before that point, it's a depressing look at a doorman, played by Emil Jannings, who is fired basically for being old, and he starts to be ignored by everyone and spirals into horribleness. Technically masterful, definitely a worthwhile silent film.

Inglourious Basterds has Emil Jannings appear, who was in real life a huge Nazi. I think that was just the topping on the cake that was the most satisfying WWII film I've ever seen. And I've seen a lot. Really, the film has a Jew beating on a Nazi with a baseball bat (what can you do?). Besides that, it has Quentin Tarantino being ridiculously awesome with his dialogue and full of hilarious film references. There's just so much awesome in it that it's hard for me to remotely objective. Samuel L. Jackson as the narrator of the story of Til Schweiger as the Nazi-hating German, B.J. Novak in the interrogation scene, Michael Fassbender's explanation for his accent, everything that Christoph Waltz does in the entire film (especially the strudel), and Brad Pitt. Just the way he says "Oblige him" is worth the movie. I also loved the switching fonts in the credits and the words not translated in the subtitles. Just all the bits of the film that call attention to the filmness of it just made me love it more. The few references to the original Inlgorious Bastards were minor, and really completely secondary to my enjoyment. Except that it's clear that if you want a great movie, you need actual talent involved.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is... utterly unnecessary. Even if it did finally give people something to say other than Jump the Shark. Nuke the fridge is only one of the many ridiculous things involved in this film, including ripping off better things from earlier Indiana Jones films, and is just... eh. Honestly, if the film were worse I'd have some kind of interest in mocking it, but it's really just not good enough to praise or bad enough to mock. Just eh.

Star Trek is the flip-side: big budget filmmaking that works pretty much unreservedly. Sure the lens flares were annoying, but when that's the biggest complaint you have about a film, that's not too bad at all. Everyone was just about right, the story was exciting, the call backs to Star Treks before were quite clever, and I am curious to know if this new timeline also has an extremely annoying Wesley Crusher? Actually, I really haven't seen any of the shows (an episode here and there), but I've seen 2-6, plus the first two Next Generation movies (so that's 7-8?). So I'm not a hard core Trekkie, but I am familiar enough with the Internet to know memes when they exist, and I've picked up quite a bit of Trek knowledge from my friends. But the film works quite well as an action movie.

More Gen-Y Cops

I'm not sure that I fully expressed the terribleness that is Gen-Y Cops in my review of it. As such, I think you need to go here and watch that video. Seriously. I'll wait.

Is that not amazing?

Link found due to the awesomeness that is Paul Rudd's obsession with Mac & Me, and the AV Club's obsession with covering everything that is awesomely terrible with this My Year of Flops entry. I remember watching and liking it when I was 9, but I don't remember the dance scene at the McDonald's or the Buccaneers participating in it (although their dancing explains why they suck). I do remember being insanely happy when Paul Rudd would do Conan and pull out that clip (which I did remember from the movie, because it's horrifying). My favorite part of the Rudd clip from MYOF entry? THE ENTIRE THING!

Big Trouble, Butte, America: The Saga of a Hard Rock Mining Town, and video games

Big Trouble by J. Anthony Lukas is about the murder of Frank Steunenberg, probably by members of the Western Federation of Miners in Caldwell, Idaho in 1905. Throughout the awesome book, he weaves in Ethyl Barrymore, Walter Johnson, Clarence Darrow, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, William Borah, and many more well-known people of the time, all of whom had some connection to the trial. Really, it's an amazingly well-researched book, and it's a shame that Lukas committed suicide before the book was published. I am a huge fan of sprawling historical epics, about society at the time as much as the "plot". This one has sections on theatre agents, detective agencies, baseball, lawyering, labor strife, forestry, the Spanish American War, racial strife, journalism, and... well... it really just covers so much. It may be a huge book, and it took me a few months to read it (with breaks for comics), but it's really good. I saw that PBS's Independent Lens was going to air a documentary about Butte, Montana and the mining industry there. Butte, America was only an hour long, and it focused much more on more recent labor troubles rather than the labor troubles that lead to Steunenberg's assassination, so I wasn't as into it as I thought. I wanted it to be much better than I got. Not to say it wasn't good, but I felt like it didn't go very deep at all. Ugh. Terrible pun.

Well, in the last three months, I've purchased five video games for the PS3 (The Beatles: Rock Band, Katamari Forever, Fallout 3, Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time, and Lego Rock Band) and one for the PC (Torchlight). Apparently, I do have too much money. I am singlehandedly keeping the video game industry alive. Well, at least I haven't purchased Dragon Age: Origins or Assassin's Creed II or any other games I've been tempted by, because my games are certainly taking up more than enough of my time as it is. Because that's why it was so long between posts. I am enjoying all of the games, and regret none of the purchases. Well, except for their effect on my ability to do anything else.

A Death in Tehran, TV Funhouse, Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 7, Bored To Death, & Andy Barker, P.I.

A Death in Tehran is a Frontline episode about Neda Agha Soltan's murder at the hands of the government militia in Iran. Everytime I think about Iran, all I can think about is the Twittervolution, which is just one of the many times that I feel like technology could be something really important, and yet, it can't do everything alone. I appreciate that so many people tried to do things from outside Iran, but a lot of it isn't going to make any real difference without government support both inside and outside the revolution. But it also feels like a revolution without a great deal of support outside of the middle and upper classes. Which hasn't been enough for a revolution since... well, I can't think of one. It's normally the other way around.

TV Funhouse is the short run series from Robert Smigel with lots of puppets doing very dirty things. I don't remember if I saw all of them when they first aired, but it is an occasionally funny show. Curb Your Enthusiasm's seventh season has the Seinfeld reunion that will never happen in real life, but worked very well as about 15 minutes of material (repeated in various forms) within the normal craziness that is Curb. I am not sure that bits of episodes worked as well as previous seasons, but the overarching plot was about the same quality as expected. I miss Seinfeld, but that is the greatest reunion show episode ever. Bored to Death is probably a little too pot-hipster-y. Which for some reason I don't really care for? It was ok, great cast, and could be good in the future if it comes back and figures out that it's a comedic film noir, and not just a film noir. Plus, I've rewatched the new DVD of Andy Barker, P.I. and concur with my previous estimation. Of both that and American Idol (with the added note that it's not just Since U Been Gone, it's all of Kelly Clarkson's output).

The Small Back Room, An American Crime, & Prick Up Your Ears

The Small Back Room is about a drunk bomb expert with a metal leg doing his thing in WWII Britain. As such, it really isn't all that interesting, but it's a Powell & Pressburger film, so I watched it. It's melodramatic to a fault that their other films never approached.

An American Crime has Ellen Page, Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford, and James Franco in a small role. It's about the true story of a woman who has her children and neighborhood kids torture a boarder in 1965 Indiana. Eesh. Miserable film, especially with the Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge ending. That this is based on a true story makes me wonder how people can do this sort of thing to other people.

Prick Up Your Ears is the story of Joe Orton, a gay British playwright in the 1960s, who was murdered by his lover. Stephen Frears directed, Alan Bennett wrote it, Gary Oldman, Alfred Molina, Vanessa Redgrave, Julie Walters, and Wallace Shawn are in it. So it's really extremely good. Maybe a little depressing, but man, Gary Oldman is great.

Outsourced, Perhaps Love, & Wristcutters: A Love Story

Outsourced comes up with a fake Kama Sutra position: Monkey Pulls the Turnip. What could the turnip signify? I need to know, but since it's not real, I got nothing. The film itself is a fairly typical plotted romantic comedy, although this did have the added bonus of Indians in cheese-heads. And some kind of idea of cultural critique of outsourcing and ridiculous Americanness. The lead female had huge eyes, and was in a Doctor Who episode and Attack of the Clones. And there was a poop joke, pretty early on. So, recommend or no? If you see one film about outsourcing leading to a cheesy George Washington commemorative plate wearing a third eye, see this one. It really all depends if you want to see a non-offensive romantic comedy in there.

Perhaps Love is a big budget, for China, musical. It's about a director and actor fighting over the same woman, making a musical about two men fighting over the same woman. I think it's trying to say something, but I didn't enjoy the musical numbers and I didn't enjoy the film. Eh to it all.

Wristcutters: A Love Story stars Patrick Fugit as a guy who commits suicide (SPOILER ALERT!) in the first scene, and goes to a sort of halfway world of no smiles, weirdness, and little color. He meets a family of suicides and starts to wander around, picks up a hitchhiking Shannyn Sossamon, has to search for Tom Waits's dog, and watches Will Arnett be wacky. It's full of Gogol Bordello songs (and other great music) and Eastern European names, along with some strange ideas about what the afterlife would be like. But I enjoyed the film, and even though it's a little cheesy, it's an enjoyable film.

Day of Wrath, Alexander Nevsky, Love in the Time of Hysteria, Quartet for the End of Time, & Wedding Night

Day of Wrath was made by Carl Theodor Dreyer during the Nazi occupation of Denmark. And as such, it's a not-all-that-subtle attack on the Nazi occupation. A young wife falls for her older husband's young son (something that Bergman also dealt with, in much funnier fashion, in Smiles of a Summer Night), and when he dies, she's accused of witchcraft. But basically, it's using 17th century witchcraft and the craziness that came with it to comment on Nazism.

Alexander Nevsky is an anti-German Eisenstein film, with a remarkably wooden performance from Nikolai Cherkasov as the titular character. It isn't a film as much as an excuse for Russians to kill Germans. In the 13th century, which they're very careful to point out a few times. But really, Eisenstein definitely made better films, and the suppression of it after the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact may not have been all that bad. It really is just a horribly anti-German and Christian film. Also, the DVD is crap, with barely legible subtitles.

Love in the Time of Hysteria is an early Almodovar-esque sex farce, but made by Alfonso Cuaron (consequently much less gay sex), as the film that made him famous. And it's beautifully filmed with lots and lots of greens, as Cuaron is wont to do. And funny, but oh so wrong. A cad, who enjoys running down to get his paper in the nude, sleeps with his nurse, who gets very offended when he ends up having sex with a different woman in the next apartment basically at the same time, fakes tests so that he thinks he has AIDS. And then learns life lessons as he unwittingly sexually harasses his neighbor, a flight attendant. And there's a luchador and a conquistador in a bizarre dream sequence. And an American who microwaved her poodle is a running joke.

Also on that DVD are two short films, one from Alfonso, and the other from his brother. Alfonso's Quartet for the End of Time is about a loner. It doesn't work at all, but it's one of his earliest films, and as such, has a built in excuse. Carlos Cuaron's Wedding Night, on the other hand, shows his brother's focus on sex and comedy is a family trait, and is pretty funny.

Doomsday, Gen-Y Cops, & La Vie en Rose

Doomsday is a mess of a film, mixing 28 Days Later, Mad Max, and Reign of Fire together and getting a film that is much, much, much less than the sum of those parts. Bob Hoskins is fun, but Malcolm McDowell was utterly worthless, and Rhona Mitra is not a particularly good actress. Not a good movie, and makes me start to rethink my likes of Dog Soldiers and The Descent. Really, there's actual car stunts, decapitations, and crazy amounts of violence in this film, and I still hated it.

Gen-Y Cops is terrible. Paul Rudd, however, is in a Hong Kong action film where he helps to fight a robot. And, yet, reread that first sentence.

La Vie en Rose has some odd stylistic choices, like not one, but two newspaper montages, a completely gratuitous topless shot, and a wordless montage of Edith Piaf's big performance. The film was really just a mess. It could have been better, but it wasn't very good at all. Marion Cotillard was good, I guess, but I definitely do not think this movie was for me at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caseus Archivelox: Insomnia & Last Orders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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