If you really loved me, you'd buy me this for Christmas.
And they're selling really nice vinyl reissues of the first three White Stripes albums starting in December, too.
(via Third Man Records)
EDIT: They sold out of the White Stripes Vinyl Merch sets within hours of opening online sales. They do still have the (unlimited) Third Man Vinyl Merch sets, though.
I forgot to make a Roundup post last week, but I only saw two movies and was super busy anyway, so maybe that's all right. I'll include them here, plus everything else I've seen this week.
An Italian drama about a Roman fashion designer setting up shop in Venice, and the circle of people in various degrees of messed-up that she falls into quite by accident. I'm a little ashamed to say I had a tough time keeping my interest up in it. There were certainly some dark and interesting ideas at play here, and the film as a whole was certainly competent, but in the end I didn't feel like there was much to actually comment on.
I actually liked this one better than the first Mesrine movie (mentioned in the last Roundup). Killer Instinct was about Jacques Mesrine's rise to the top, and Public Enemy #1 focuses on his downfall, delusions, and to a certain extent, pathos. The first film wanted us to admire him despite ourselves, but I couldn't help but feel that the second film wants us to pity him. Don't get me wrong, this movie is happy to propel Mesrine to legendary status, showing numerous feats of ballsy recklessness--jailbreaks and robberies pushed to their almost ridiculous limit, which really works if you remember that this is a film about a real man who really lived and really did these things. But it's also happy to give us glimpses of why he's so reckless. He's very obviously not a well man, deeply wounded by insults and desperate for love. Vincent Cassell's character work as Mesrine really carries this installment in the two-film series. Everything else about the movie is strong--including the other performances--but, completely appropriately, Mesrine overshadows them all.
Somehow I got through childhood never having seen this movie. Seeing it for the first time as an adult, it is genuinely strange, and in part that's because the movie places heavy emphasis on the sexual tension between the teenage protagonist and a noticeably well-endowed David Bowie. Bowie's character, Jareth the Goblin King, is both utterly sinister and seductive, and he has a definite sexual power that I am certain is intentional given the context. (The context being the fact that the filmmakers gave him a huge codpiece to wear under his pants.) To be honest I got the feeling that the film as a whole was intended to be about the sexual awakening of young teenage girls, with a secondary emphasis on the universal nightmare of adolescence.
This is a relic of a time when you could cuss in a kids' movie and make a lot of really expensive puppets just because they look awesome. The purely-puppet characters are all amazing. The other effects kind of suffer--there's some really so-so green-screen work and some dubious-looking puppet replacements of real animals--but it was the 1980s. Though the film is dated and the script (or at least the acting) flawed, it ticks a lot of "universal experience" checkboxes. I can see why it's seen as a childhood classic.
Among the worst movies I've ever seen. I won't say it's the worst, because I have seen movies in which literally nothing was done right and in which there was truly no entertainment value at all. This movie, though probably truly unbearable when in a completely sober state of mind, at least has some (horribly unsettling) puppets and the hilarious image of a teenage boy wearing a wifebeater under a suit jacket and a sequined bow-tie.
It's been some time since I read the book, and though I did remember that basically the summary is "everybody dies," it's still jarring when, right out the door, beloved characters start dropping like flies. The tone of this movie is vastly different from the earlier installments--the previous six were boarding school movies. This one wouldn't be hard to shoehorn into the category of "post-apocalyptic." Harry, Ron and Hermione spend a lot of time roaming desolate landscapes to avoid being caught by Voldemort's lackeys. Virtually every human being they encounter is hostile--not always of their free will, but I'm not sure it makes much difference. Desperation makes men into monsters.
There's an awful darkness throughout the whole thing and some very disconcerting performances, too. Bringing torture and cruelty with this level of terrifying realism in a movie about wizards, yikes. Death is very much the central focus of the movie. To be honest, the Deathly Hallows stuff felt almost incidental in the book, but the whole idea of the futility of trying to cheat death fits in very, very well with the events of this movie. Speaking of the Deathly Hallows, that story-within-the-story was actually animated, which was a very pleasant surprise.
The movie is carried mostly on the charm of the central characters. It takes its time getting to the point--not surprising, because the book itself is quite bloated, but I'm honestly not sure what I'd cut. The scenes of Harry and his friends puttering around miserably in the woods were the ones I frankly found the most enjoyable.
Back when my buddy Max was staying here for a few weeks "livin' la vida homeless," we went down to the zoo and milled around for a while in downtown Denver. I brought along my Canon A-1 and killed about six rolls of film. True to form, only a few of these are interesting enough to post. Even fewer are examples of genuinely good photography. But there were some happy accidents, at least. One roll ended up double-exposed due to a mistake of organization, and though this ruined a number of pictures that probably would have been good, it did create a few pretty cool images entirely by virtue of luck.
My friends are all handsome men.
These rabbits belong to Jon Visger, with whom Max and I spent two days playing Burning Wheel (a Dungeons and Dragons type role-playing game). Shut up, being a nerd is cool.
As soon as I got into Jon's studio, the flash on the Polaroid camera stopped working. I blame ghosts. It's too bad, because this room was really cool.
A ton of (crappy) stuff came out this week and knocked a lot of the more mainstream stuff I had an itch to see out of theaters. So all of this is IFS and Netflix.
Akira Kurosawa's adaptation of King Lear. I am ashamed to say that I have never read King Lear itself, nor seen it performed on stage or on film, so I can't really make a comparison between the original play and the adaptation, which places the story in feudal Japan. I can comment on Kurosawa's filmmaking, though.
The film is very much stylized in some respects. The speeches, the way the characters move, and even the use of color (which alone was worth the cost of seeing this movie theatrically--it is beautiful) are noticeably reminiscent of a stage play. Like a play, the film acknowledges its own unreality and asks you to accept its events and characters anyway. Yet the stylization is juxtaposed with some very grisly battle scenes that are uncomfortably realistic.
I needn't comment on the story. Shakespeare is the go-to guy for public domain stories that are genuinely great and compelling, and it's hard to adapt his work badly. Kurosawa's film is very Shakespearean in tone and structure, but he makes it seem uniquely Japanese.
The first of a series of two films about the French gangster Jacques Mesrine. Mesrine was a real person, but he makes a wonderful anti-hero--a real diabolical asshole, but compelling as a rebel who is compelled to expand his notoriety. It is violent and brutal, as a gangster film should be, but the visual style and editing are excellent. It's a well-made, solid action/crime film, and I'm looking forward to the second installment.
I would kill a man to have the chance to see this in a theater. It made the rounds last year as a very limited release, and unfortunately it didn't end up anywhere where I could see it. That's a shame, because its visuals are so stunning that, even on my TV at home, I was impressed. The Secret of Kells is an Irish animated film about medieval monks under imminent threat from an army of faceless, terrifying vikings (the "Northmen") that are more a force of nature than people. Strange to say it, but it is a very Irish film, immersed in Celtic history and mythology, despite the fact that the primary characters are all Catholics. A major supporting character is a very real fairy who does very real things, and never are she or her miracles ever seriously questioned.
It is heavily stylized, a rare thing in a full-length animated film these days. The imagery is iconic, and does not always respect ideas like perspective--instead it draws from medieval art and specifically the illuminated manuscripts that the story places such great importance on. This movie holds a reverence for preservation of knowledge, and if you've dabbled in art or writing, or you love books, you can probably sympathize with that.
Positioning itself as a documentary about the MPAA, this movie has a very specific agenda. Not one I disagree with, per se, but it's very obvious that the filmmaker has a bone to pick, and he intended to pick it in a very public way.
The central story in this documentary is about the MPAA's secret ratings board and the fact that none of its members are known to the public. Filmmaker Kirby Dick hires a private investigator to track down these people, and we find out their names and a little about their private lives (such as how many children they have, and what ages--the MPAA's claims that all raters have school-age children turns out to be an outright lie).
However, the really interesting stuff is the stories told by filmmakers like John Waters (whom you've probably heard of) and Kimberly Peirce (director of Boys Don't Cry) about the NC-17 ratings their films have received at the hands of the MPAA, forcing them to either accept that their movie will be unavailable in many theater and video chains (not an option for most big studio movies) or to make cuts. Often the "offending" footage is just nitpicking--too many uses of the word "fuck" or too many pelvic thrusts in a sex scene. This Film Is Not Yet Rated argues that the MPAA is a form of censorship, since it is so monolithic that few cinemas will run an unrated film, just as a matter of policy, and NC-17 is an automatic death knell, too.
The documentary doesn't propose a real solution to the MPAA, though, besides demanding that the list of raters be public. They do imply that maybe we'd be better off with a different kind of rating system or none at all, but they don't really discuss those options.
I missed out on The Sacrifice because I didn't realize there was only one show on Wednesday night. I really wanted to see that, too. But I did stay home and watch some crappy talking animal movies with a buddy over Xbox Live, so the evening wasn't entirely a wash.
Not anywhere near as sex-saturated as a lot of folks think, despite being advertised as the first X-rated cartoon. I had seen this before and found it to sit on the border of "entirely unwatchable," but this time around I actually kind of liked it. Maybe that's the alcohol's fault.
It's still terribly uneven and has some of the worst pacing I've ever seen in a movie, but the Fritz character really clicked for me this time. It clicked for me in the sense of "I know people exactly like that--exactly like that in every way, oh my god." I think that's what it takes to really relate to this.
It also requires a kind of context-sensitive tolerance of uncomfortable stereotypes. Fritz the Cat is from the 1970s and definitely a product of its time. Consequently it contains some stuff that can be pretty hard to stomach. That said, racial issues are actually addressed in this cartoon. It's intended as a critical satire and social commentary, and sometimes it's surprisingly successful.
The drawings are actually kind of fabulous, too--the motion ranges from fantastic to so-so, but whoever was doing layout for this movie was pretty brilliant. Still-frame at any point and you will get an image that looks good.
The premise: Rodney Dangerfield is an animated dog and goes through the most typical Disney-style dog movie plotline. Think about that for a moment. The most typical Disney-style dog movie plotline, with a canine incarnation of Rodney Dangerfield as the lead character. Yes, he has a romantic arc. And a bunch of very awful songs. This was kind of hard to watch even while drunk; the whole thing is so inexplicable. How the hell did this get made? Even in the '90s when everyone and his brother was making animated movies, how was it possible to make the series of choices necessary to create this movie?
Surprisingly self-aware flick about a group of listless hipster friends all sort of growing up, in their own ways. It's pretty resonant if you can identify with the characters--all in their late 20s and early 30s, all lost and wandering through their miserable, broken lives in New York. It's not really heavy material, but definitely comforting (even these losers all find something meaningful and valuable in the end). I suspect most of my friends would like it.
I love Westerns. It's my favorite genre. This one is excellent and does everything you really want a Western to do--great shoot-outs and action, unbelievable odds against the heroes, a healthy sense of humor, the works--and Yul Brynner is a treat under any circumstances. There are so many characters that it's inevitable that most of the Seven are flat, little more than archetypes, but that's my only complaint.
What is really fascinating about this movie are the scenes where the adaptation shows through. If you didn't know, it's based on Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, which I have never actually seen, but I know enough about samurai stories in general to see a kind of Japanese-ness leaking through The Magnificent Seven. It's endlessly fascinating to see that influence in a genre that's typically considered all-American.
Hilarious story about a gay con man and the guy he falls in love with in prison. Jim Carrey stars as Steven Russell, the con man, and he is absolutely golden in the role of a guy who's destined to be an utter douchebag and ruin the lives of everyone he cares about. It's not really a serious role, but it's a more straight-faced comedy than any of us are used to seeing Jim Carrey in (I grew up with Ace Ventura, Pet Detective--no matter how many smart or serious roles he takes, in my heart he will always be the man with the talking butt). The comedy is in the tragedy, here. Russell is eternally ruining everything--for his boyfriends, for his ex-wife and kid, for himself--by lying and scheming, and the real tragedy is, he doesn't seem to be able to help it. He really wants the best for the people he loves, but it never really occurs to him to live by honest means.
This is a really, really funny movie. It's in festival rotation right now, so keep an eye out for it.
Everyone's seen the TV show--I had heard the movie was darker, but I guess I was expecting a Full Metal Jacket kind of dark, not quite what I got. There's a lot of funny stuff in here--a lot of very uncomfortable juxtaposition of an operating room full of grisly battlefield injuries with goofy banter, which just makes it all the funnier. And then there's the stuff that's just plain disturbing, like the running gag about the men repeatedly sexually humiliating the new head nurse, "Hot Lips," who is also probably-not-coincidentally the only woman in the movie who ever tries to stand up to the male characters. The humiliation scenes were just painful to watch--and hopefully that was intentional.
Since the film is a satire, I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt that the nasty way the "lovable" main characters treat women and the casual racism (Spearchucker as the nickname of the black football player? Seriously?) were intended to be uncomfortable and outlandish to the point where the audience is intended to think twice about how much they're willing to root for these guys. Any movie that can trick you into getting behind dudes who are objectively assholes is a pretty solid one, though.
