Reviews

It’s been a while, I know. I’ve missed writing up a few movies, but I don’t recall which ones and, really, if I can’t recall that much, how am I going to remember enough to say anything about them? So instead, I’ll talk about a couple I’ve seen in the last week that you might get a chance to watch.

John Carter (2012)

John Carter takes place on another planet, but it’s more high-fantasy than science fiction. The universe of John Carter is manipulated by godlike beings whose unexplained powers might as well be magic, and Mars itself is peopled by fantastic creatures clearly intended as analogues to races and animals in our world. That’s not to say the movie isn’t successful. As a pulp fantasy story, it’s well-crafted, with only a few missteps in tone, none of which were fatal to my enjoyment of the movie. It’s nice to see a film like this mostly avoid the pitfalls of this genre—epic slow-motion battles were thankfully rare and short, and fight scenes didn’t suffer the disorienting editing that is miserably common in modern big-budget action films.

John Carter’s greatest achievement is knowing when to stop. It gives us some scope of the film’s world, but it keeps its eye on the story. I think the director has something to do with it—you might recognize Andrew Stanton’s name from Pixar favorites Finding Nemo and WALL-E. It’s a shame John Carter is being viewed as a huge bust, because it’s better-made and more entertaining than the sprawling CG messes that have dominated the fantasy genre since the Lord of the Rings movies.

Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie (2012)

I like Tim and Eric, but their first foray into feature-length films feels like a misstep. The fundamental nature of the medium pulls them away from one of their strengths: brevity. A product of two guys best-known for rapid-fire absurdist sketch comedy, Billion Dollar Movie is saddled with the unfortunate need to be funny all the time, which turns it into an uncomfortable onslaught of things you want to laugh at but can’t. This isn’t a problem with the material per se, but just that if it’s all stuff you’re supposed to laugh at, your laugh circuit shorts out pretty fast. There are a few bits that are delightfully memorable (the first fifteen minutes or so are gold, and there’s a scene where Tim steals a man’s son that is perfect in its cruelty), but there’s a lot that seems like filler. Surreal filler, stylistically-interesting filler, but still filler, needed to pad out ninety minutes for guys who are used to working in 1-5 minute chunks.

Their TV show Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job! transcends into a level of comedy I didn’t even know existed, and I suspect the movie will be a revelation for people who haven’t yet seen the show but have the right sense of humor to enjoy it. But to me it seems more like a novelty intended for existing Tim and Eric fans, and not really satisfying them either.

Soon:

• 21 Jump Street (2012)
• The Hunger Games (2012)

It was a week of Quentin Tarantino films at the film series this week, so that’s most of what I watched. They ran both Kill Bill movies today, too, but I opted to skip them. I love Tarantino, but the idea of four hours of his style of film sounded exhausting. So I went to watch a cartoon instead.

Reservoir Dogs (1992)

It’s famous for being a bloodbath, and it is, but most of the blood is from wounds we barely see inflicted. That famous torture scene is memorably disturbing but mercifully short. However the film is nihilistic. The wry sense of humor can’t mask our intuitive knowledge that pretty much everyone we see onscreen is going to die, and the most decent people will die the most horribly. Not that there are a lot of decent people. There are a lot of likable people, though.

Diablo (2011)

A Tarantino-inspired blend of dark humor and extreme violence. Not a bad film, but it suffers from a lot of the same shortfalls that Tarantino often does—-lagging the story pacing for the sake of clever dialogue, and violence that seems indulgent to the point of excess. I’m not familiar with the rest of the director’s work, so I’m not sure if his other films are half-imitation and half-love letter to other filmmakers. I hope they’re not. This one had very bright spots, but it got a little tiring.

Pulp Fiction (1994)

A familiar classic, and pretty much everyone’s favorite Tarantino movie, for good reason. Just enough crime-novel grindhouse grime, combined with humor and really fantastic stylized dialogue of the kind that writers have a lot of fun writing, actors have a lot of fun saying, and everyone has blast listening to. The choices of music are sublime. Tarantino’s visual and musical taste is great, but where he really shines is in overlaying multiple stories in a single movie. Pulp Fiction’s different stories are all told well, though they all seem sort of like tangents from a central plot that doesn’t exist. This movie is like an act of defiance against central plots. The characters are all pretty crummy people, but they live in a crummy world and exude a charm that makes you want to join them there (until they start killing people, at least).

Jackie Brown (1997)

The most straightforwardly functional of all the Tarantino movies I’ve seen. This is a variant on a heist movie: flight attendant Jackie Brown (played by the marvelous Pam Grier) wants to steal half a million dollars out from under the nose of the dangerous weapons-trafficker, Ordell (as played by the always-intimidating Samuel L. Jackson), for whom she’s been smuggling money into the country from Mexico. The plot threads are woven together in such a way that it’s hard to tell what’s really going on in Jackie’s head—-who is she really working for? Is she actually stealing the money, or is she up to something else? Is she working with Ordell? With the cops? Or is she just using them to get the cash for herself? I was still trying to puzzle it all out up to the climax. You can’t turn your brain off for this one. You need to pay attention if you want to have any idea of what’s going on.

Besides Grier and Jackson, the cast of the film also includes Robert de Niro, Michael Keaton, Robert Forster, Bridget Fonda, and Chris Tucker. Compared to Tarantino’s other films, this one seems economical even at a runtime of over two hours. It’s not the length, it’s the trim. He hasn’t left much in Jackie Brown that didn’t absolutely need to be there. Though Pulp Fiction is still my favorite from his canon, I think Jackie Brown is his best.

The Secret World of Arrietty (2010)

The trailer for this one makes it look really bad, but it’s not. Of course it’s not bad: it’s a Ghibli movie. It’s based on the children’s novel The Borrowers, but it spends a lot of time on the quiet, meandering wonder that’s common to Miyazaki’s movies. There isn’t a ton of plot, but the story is based around a sickly boy’s discovery of Arrietty and her family. Like pretty much every other Miyazaki movie, there’s a little too much spoken exposition, and like every other dubbed anime, it suffers a little when some of the lines veer off into corny. The voice talent, many of them tremendous screen actors (Will Arnett and Amy Poehler play Arrietty’s parents!), end up sounding like generic English dub voice actors, their comedic timing washed away by the needs of lip-sync. But a movie like this is mostly atmosphere and beauty, and in those it’s extremely successful. It’s not quite at the level of Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, but it is very obviously their relative.

The Maybe List:

• The Descendants (2011) - This one is approaching the end of its theatrical run, so it seems likely I’ll miss it.
• Chronicle (2012)

I forgot to write something up last week, so I’ve included those films in this week’s write-up.

Red Desert (1964)

An Italian film whose impact for me was predominantly visual. It’s quite striking to look at, but this is one of those movies in which there isn’t much story. This is a meditation on one character’s internal strife.

The Trial (1962)

An Orson Welles movie based on a story by Franz Kafka. Set in a dystopia in which people are accused of crimes that are never specified and spend their lives trying to navigate a labyrinthine justice system (both literally and figuratively), it’s a dreamlike story that follows a man named Josef, played by Anthony Perkins, who wakes up to find police in his apartment, there to inform him that he is being accused. If any movie could be described as “paranoid,” this one certainly could. It plays like a fever dream, a nightmare of hopelessness and desperation in a world that doesn’t make sense, where a person is better off just giving up and being executed rather than fighting the system.

Le Havre (2011)

A French movie about an old shoeshiner trying to help an undocumented African refugee child escape to England, where the boy’s mother lives. The director took a cue from Jeunet on this one: the setting is modern, but everything feels like it’s taking place in a sort of idealized, timeless past. The whole movie is heavily stylized and borders on overly cute. It tries to address the topic of illegal immigration, but the seriousness with which it tries to approach the topic doesn’t really fit into the mood, which is pretty light and breezy. There aren’t any real threats, and, more damnable, the resolution of one of the plot threads is dramatically cheapened in the quest for a happy ending. It’s not a bad film, but it’s crippled by its desire to be likable, and ends up being forgettable instead.

Chico & Rita (2010)

A Spanish animated film, a love story between two Cuban musicians, one a piano player and the other a singer, and their rising careers. Theirs is a troubled romance that hits and misses over and over throughout their lives, and both of them alternate between joy and suffering for it. It’s a workable enough story in a unique setting, but it seems stale somehow. It’s pleasant to watch, though. The art is a typically-stiff rotoscope style for most of the film, but the simplified realism looks nice, especially alongside the music, which is Cuban jazz. There’s a jazzy dream sequence that loosens up the style for a few minutes, too. As an ode to a kind of music, the film is a pleasure, but I think the style of animation puts a lot of undesirable distance between the viewer and the characters.

Soon:

It’s Tarantino Week, so…

• Reservoir Dogs (1992)
• Pulp Fiction (1994)
• Jackie Brown (1997)
• Kill Bill Volume 1 (2003) and Volume 2 (2004)

Only one this week. IFS is back on now, so hopefully I’ll be ramping up the roundups again.

Another two weeks, another volley of movies. I ended up seeing the 3D edition of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, too, but that’s such a classic that I’m sure I don’t have to say anything about it. Except perhaps that it’s a tale of Stockholm Syndrome in a world where a gigantic monster that keeps you imprisoned in his castle is still a more appealing lover than anyone who lives in your hometown.

Well! It certainly has been a while, hasn’t it? The holidays were pretty busy, but I ended up seeing a lot of movies anyway, because I guess I’m just that kind of nerd now. Some pretty good stuff came out at the end of the year.

Sorry for the hiatus, folks. I missed a week there, and then there was a week where I didn’t see much of anything due to travel and other nonsense. But I’m stepping back up to the plate now. IFS is over for the semester, so it’s going to be new releases from here on until January. Luckily the holiday movie season isn’t looking that bad. We’ve got some strong starters this week.

I only saw one of this week’s movies in 3D (Hugo, a wonderful movie, see below), but I was completely swamped with trailers for 3D re-releases of films from the 1990s, among them Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Titanic, and, I kid you not, Star Wars Episode I. Loathsome as it might seem, Titanic actually makes a lot of sense as a 3D re-release in the wake of Avatar, and of course Disney re-releases can’t go wrong, either. But I don’t think anyone even liked Episode I when it came out, did they? But of course that movie is now old enough to start milking nostalgia from those who were young children when it came out and thus barely remember it, except for thinking it was cool (though that’s kind of the effect the Star Wars series has in general, if we’re being honest).

Both of this week’s movies were weird artsy stuff. Not too weird. But kinda weird.

The Last Movie (1971)

A rare experimental Western directed by Dennis Hopper, shown on one of two known existing 35mm prints. Universal sat on the movie after it was made, and it never got a distribution. The “why” of that is up for debate—-was it a fear of experimentation, or of having a protagonist who’s abusive and cruel to his girlfriend? Dennis Hopper plays his main character, and manages to play it simultaneously as a sympathetic character and a real scumbag. I’ve always been fascinated by this kind of characterization. It’s a hard thing to pull off, but it’s always interesting to see when it works well.

The experimental editing is sort of dated, but it’s mostly concentrated at the start and end of the film. The middle is pretty linear. It’s an intriguing film, maybe not an enjoyable one in the traditional sense of the word, but it’s fascinating and quite rare, to boot. See it if you get the chance.

World on a Wire (1973)

An artsy German sci-fi movie about scientists creating a world inside a computer, and the mystery that grows around the sudden death of one of the primary scientists. It’s pretty predictable, plotwise, but it’s visually beautiful. Some of the visual compositions are pretty contrived, despite the fact that it’s a pleasant film to look at.

I think a lot of the predictability stems from the fact that about a billion movies and stories have played on the same ideas about what’s real and what’s not. But it’s the kind of story I like.

Soon:

• Night Tide (1961)
• Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life (2010)
• The French Connection (1971)
• Being Elmo (2010)
• Take Shelter (2011)

The Maybe List:

• The Rum Diary (2011)
• The Way (2010)

Halloweekend. Lots of good stuff this time around!

Revengers Tragedy (2002)

An adaptation of the Middleton play, with its setting changed to Liverpool in a dystopian 2011, blending the past and the future in a way that probably shouldn’t work as well as it does. The movie itself is a black comedy, at some times wonderfully silly, though it does dip down some very dark paths. Chris Eccleston’s performance in the lead role is a delight—-his character is arguably motivated by grief, but sometimes he seems to be enjoying the process so much that I started to wonder if he liked the scheming and plotting for its own sake. But that’s a lot of the fun of watching him, and the corruption of otherwise good people by the actions of bad people was a major theme of the film.

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

A barely-narrative movie starring David Bowie as a space alien who becomes a decadent captain of industry. Despite a hefty runtime and a very loose narrative stretching over decades, this is a visual pleasure, and just surreal enough to prickle the back of my brain in a way I really like. It floats on a combination of its own weirdness and its cast’s charm, most of all Bowie’s. He plays the lead with a combination of awkwardness and sincere charisma that is simply wonderful.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

The original zombie film. I saw the remake a year or two ago, but the original is monumentally grim by comparison. You do not get a lot grimmer than the ending to this movie. But the pessimistic view of humanity is part of what makes this movie so brilliant—-an early example of the “but we’re the real monsters” angle that so many horror movies take, and a very effective one. There’s a reason why this is a classic.

Its one real flaw, though, is its female characters. All the women are effectively stupid children when they’re alive, and the first woman we meet spends most of the movie catatonic and dies in the most boneheaded way possible. Romero and Russo apparently had no idea how to write women as human beings when this movie was made. But then again, not many guys making genre movies did in the ’60s, and that’s actually still sadly true fifty years later.

The Oregonian (2011)

This film starts off strong, pushing us into a disorienting journey through a vaguely-threatening nightmare world. Unfortunately, it’s not able to sustain the tension it mines so successfully in the beginning, and it gradually descends into tedium when it becomes clear that this is all about atmosphere and isn’t going anywhere. By the end it feels like an exercise in endurance, but thank god it’s short.

It reminded me most of my least favorite David Lynch film, Inland Empire, a movie so tedious to watch that it put me off his other work for years. Like that film, there are positive points here: the first thirty minutes or so are nearly-perfect at creating a reality that’s like a very scary dream. But the rest is garbage. There are some neat ideas here, but it’s not the sort of thing you want to sit down and watch.

The Exorcist (1973)

Widely heralded as the scariest movie ever, but that’s not quite right. It’s a creepy movie, sure, but its strength is in the fact that it’s a great drama first and a horror movie second. It’s a slow build from the first supernatural manifestation, the motion of a Ouija board cursor without human aid, to the sequences of full-blown demonic possession that the film is famous for. It doesn’t really follow the sort of structure you’d expect a movie of this kind to have—-the psychologist priest’s story thread is kept separate from the little girl’s escalating symptoms of possession until quite late, but it works brilliantly. Seriously, I cannot praise this movie enough. Sad thing is, I don’t think there are many modern studios that would let a movie like this be made. It’s a horror movie that’s not so much about scares (though there are a number of those) as about people fighting against an atmosphere of growing fear and hopelessness.

Soon:

• The Last Movie (1971)
• World on a Wire (1973)
• Being Elmo (2011)
• Take Shelter (2011)

The Maybe List:

• La Fee (2011)
• The Three Musketeers (2011)
• The Rum Diary (2011)

Seems like missing out on stuff due to other obligations or simple forgetfulness is becoming a theme for me this IFS season. For shame! But next week’s schedule is killer so I’m pretty pumped!

Three Businessmen (1998)

A weird, funny, surreal movie that serves mostly as an elaborate setup for a pun. I’m serious.

It’s fantastic.

50/50 (2011)

A story that manages to avoid getting too trite or overly sentimental, and that’s probably the only way a story about a young guy getting cancer would ever sell to a younger audience. As much as I loathe the term, it’s probably best categorized as a “dramedy.” It’s legitimately funny, but the pain in this movie really is painful, and at times the jokes play almost as a coping mechanism. I thought it was a pretty strong movie, but it occurred to me while I was watching how white and male this film is, so that oversight was pretty obvious. While the whiteness can probably be blamed on the usual—-simply forgetting that other groups exist—-there’s an undercurrent of hostility on the writers’ part toward pretty much all the female characters. Even the nice therapist with whom the lead becomes romantically entangled (not a spoiler) is depicted as ditzy and unprofessional.

It’s sad to say that these are the kind of flaws I am not surprised by in mainstream cinema, and I’m therefore able to look past them. It’s a decent movie. Not perfect, but decent.

Real Steel (2011)

An underdog boxing movie, except the boxers are robots. It’s fairly standard for its type of sports movie, and the sci-fi backdrop is almost inconsequential, save for a few questions of robot sentience that are never really acknowledged. If Atom is conscious, isn’t it inhumane to order it into a fighting ring where it might be destroyed? That said, the movie’s a crowd-pleaser, good at creating the tension necessary in the fighting scenes for a boxing movie to work despite the fact that humans are never in danger in the ring. As for the other plotline, the story of the absentee father who finds a bond with his son entirely by accident is a familiar one, but there’s nothing really wrong with how it plays out here. The kid seems a little too precocious for my taste, but I’ve probably forgotten how sassy and witty 11-year-olds can be.

Soon:

• Revengers Tragedy (2002)
• The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) (yes, the David Bowie movie)
• Night of the Living Dead (1968)
• The Oregonian (2011)
• The Exorcist (1973)

The Maybe List:

• The Three Musketeers (2011) (don’t judge me)
• The Way (2010)