the hangover II: movie starring bradley cooper, ed helms, zach galifianakis, justin bartha, ken jeong, mason lee, and jamie chung
nice to see jamie chung again. in a world in which some people are pretty good looking, jamie chung is so freaking beautiful. she had no lines and wasn't allowed a character, but she was absolutely lovely, so there's that.
insofar as the premise of the hangover II is that it's a stepped-up version of the hangover I, this movie is successful. it's a stepped-up version of the hangover, that is for certain. instead of a tiger, you have a drug-dealing cigarette-smoking gay monkey--instead of the groom being lost, you have the brother--instead of mike tyson, you have paul giamatti (and also mike tyson)--instead of vegas, you have bangkok. it's not funny and it's not very entertaining, but that can happen when you try to do the same thing again but different, and that's definitely what they were trying for, i think.
i mean, the whole remaking-the-same-concept idea can go well or it can go poorly. i haven't seen all of the road to... series, but the ones i have seen seem to be pretty consistently amusing, just as a possibly kind of dumb example. maybe some concepts are just one-trick ponies (that sounds dirty). for example, the blair witch project II: not a good idea! momento II: i don't know if it exists, but if it does: so not a good idea! the ring II (american version--i haven't seen the japanese one): oh my god not not not a good idea! and don't get me started on 28 weeks later. or transformers II: revenge of the fallen (dumbest...ever...why...robbed of faith...michael bay...whyyyyy). not going to mention the heavy preponderance of horror film sequels in here. oh wait i just did. i may not have what is sometimes described as "taste" in my moviegoing experiences.
now, on the other hand we have movies like shrek II (one of my favorite movies ever), gremlins II (so much cuter than the original!), empire strikes back (my favorite of the original trilogy [and as always, of course my opinion counts for just everything]), and i assume chucky II has to be better than the original because the original is really really kinda stupid. i also liked kung fu panda II very much (though i don't know if it was for personal reasons or the merits of the movie, so i'm not going to review it). step up 2 was more fun, i thought, for reasons of the heroine being adorable, than step up. and iron man II is hecka pretty good (scarlett johansson may or may not be wearing a freaking catsuit some of the time--that's neither here nor there).
what conclusions can we draw here? okay. DO NOT SEQUENTIATE YOUR MOVIE IF:
-it requires creepy little girls to drag out of wells...again.
-it will gain nothing from special effects (blair witch project II--just stick with the original budget of $50 and two free packs of teriyaki beef jerkey, i beg of you)
-it involves a major concept, like a virus or a memory deficiency
-it involves sexy sexy robots
-it involves michael bay
GO AHEAD AND SEQUENTIATE YOUR MOVIE IF:
-it involves magical furry creatures or a member of a race of space-furries
-it involves animated animals (as a main component--those deer in the ring II weren't doing it any favors)
-there is a large dancing component
-it involves sexy sexy robots
-it involves an evil doll (presumably)
ergo, the hangover II did not have enough magical/sci-fi furries, evil dolls, and dancing--it did not involve enough sexy sexy robots (though that might have worked against it)--and it had too much budget, concept, girls crawling out of wells, and michael bay, with not enough $50 and beef jerkey.
wow, how universal is this? i have discovered the universal standard as to whether to make a sequel to your movie or not! i am literally a genius!
and it brings up an interesting point: the reoccurance of a funny animal component was not enough to make the hangover II a good sequel. therefore we may logically conclude that the animal component in a sequel must be more magical and/or animated than that chain-smoking gay monkey in order for the sequel to be successful. how much mor magical and/or animated? interesting question, and one i cannot answer. perhaps we can find out if they (GOD FORBID) try to make a the hangover III...maybe an advice-dispensing cocaine-sniffing walrus will do the trick? maybe if he is a main character. perhaps zach galifianakis can be granted powers of animal speech by saving a butterfly's life and they can work it in that way. OR, the mason lee character can fall in love with an animatronic toaster decepticon (but be careful, because if michael bay is involved, this can backfire).
OR, maybe they'll get to meet dorothy l'amour.
i leave it to the creators' discretion.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
bad teacher: or, how cameron diaz has such great gams they should just call her gam-eron di-thighs
bad teacher: movie starring cameron diaz, jason segel, j-timb, wonderful redhead, and attorney wayne jarvis...
...who a friend of mine has babysat for! or is it "whom?" and i know her, and he knows jane lynch, who knows the cast of glee, including jayma mays, who knows eric mabius who knows katherine moennig!!! who knows pam grier!!! AUGH!!!!!
but this is neither here nor there.
what i have to say about this movie is that i really liked it. it was pretty dang funny, and all the cliched moments were done really well. like the moment when cameron diaz character finally connects with one of her students--we knew it was coming and we were kind of hoping for it, but the way she does it is funny and original.
hunh, actually i think i do have something to say about the movie besides "i unqualifiedly enjoyed it very much." it had a lot of examples of, like, actors doing something subtly different than what i've seen them do before in a really cool way. the most obvious example of this is jason segel, because i've seen him in the most stuff (i think). i mean, he gives good very-sweet-guy in how i met your mother and forgetting sarah marshall; he gives good cute-idiot in freaks and geeks; and he gives good smarmy-but-fun guy in knocked up; but i don't think i've seen him do anything as...sincerely, or something, as in bad teacher. i mean, he really gives an honest performance or something. not that he's not honest in other stuff, just not this honest--he's really honest-appearing in this. his eyes get darker, for instance, and his delivery gets even more subtly off-the-cuff. he has a capital-c Character, and he acts it as such. the p.e. teacher he plays isn't a nice guy. he's maybe a good guy, but not a nice one, which is a distinction that doesn't immediately spring to mind when one is thinking about decency in men (for me), but he makes that distinction clear (i mean, this is one way of explaining what i'm talking about) and it's extremely enjoyable to watch. phyllis smith is another example. god knows how much of the office i've watched, and it's been enjoyable to see phyllis lapin turn from a very sweet, shy, unhappy woman with an inner core of bitch fighting to get out, into a confident, still-sweet, still-bitchy woman with a core of solid steel. it's an interesting character arc, and gives phyllis smith range to act in, but i don't think i've seen her do the exact type of shy and sweet that she does so well in bad teacher. finally, john michael higgins plays that tightly controlling and hilarious character a lot (particularly enjoyed him in fired up and of course freaking arrested development), but, again, i don't think i've seen him have the sort of human-ey integrity he plays as having in bad teache--WOAH HE'S DUCKING BEHIND THAT LITTLE GARBAGE CAR!
the man's a pro.
it's like, all these people are playing types of parts it would seem i've seen them play before, but they're doing such a good job with them that they might as well be new types. and that's what i mean, i guess, about liking bad teacher so unqualifiedly. it's a type of movie i've seen before, done really well. like bad santa. or fired up, for that matter. these are high compliments, people. high-ass compliments.
...who a friend of mine has babysat for! or is it "whom?" and i know her, and he knows jane lynch, who knows the cast of glee, including jayma mays, who knows eric mabius who knows katherine moennig!!! who knows pam grier!!! AUGH!!!!!
but this is neither here nor there.
what i have to say about this movie is that i really liked it. it was pretty dang funny, and all the cliched moments were done really well. like the moment when cameron diaz character finally connects with one of her students--we knew it was coming and we were kind of hoping for it, but the way she does it is funny and original.
hunh, actually i think i do have something to say about the movie besides "i unqualifiedly enjoyed it very much." it had a lot of examples of, like, actors doing something subtly different than what i've seen them do before in a really cool way. the most obvious example of this is jason segel, because i've seen him in the most stuff (i think). i mean, he gives good very-sweet-guy in how i met your mother and forgetting sarah marshall; he gives good cute-idiot in freaks and geeks; and he gives good smarmy-but-fun guy in knocked up; but i don't think i've seen him do anything as...sincerely, or something, as in bad teacher. i mean, he really gives an honest performance or something. not that he's not honest in other stuff, just not this honest--he's really honest-appearing in this. his eyes get darker, for instance, and his delivery gets even more subtly off-the-cuff. he has a capital-c Character, and he acts it as such. the p.e. teacher he plays isn't a nice guy. he's maybe a good guy, but not a nice one, which is a distinction that doesn't immediately spring to mind when one is thinking about decency in men (for me), but he makes that distinction clear (i mean, this is one way of explaining what i'm talking about) and it's extremely enjoyable to watch. phyllis smith is another example. god knows how much of the office i've watched, and it's been enjoyable to see phyllis lapin turn from a very sweet, shy, unhappy woman with an inner core of bitch fighting to get out, into a confident, still-sweet, still-bitchy woman with a core of solid steel. it's an interesting character arc, and gives phyllis smith range to act in, but i don't think i've seen her do the exact type of shy and sweet that she does so well in bad teacher. finally, john michael higgins plays that tightly controlling and hilarious character a lot (particularly enjoyed him in fired up and of course freaking arrested development), but, again, i don't think i've seen him have the sort of human-ey integrity he plays as having in bad teache--WOAH HE'S DUCKING BEHIND THAT LITTLE GARBAGE CAR!
the man's a pro.
it's like, all these people are playing types of parts it would seem i've seen them play before, but they're doing such a good job with them that they might as well be new types. and that's what i mean, i guess, about liking bad teacher so unqualifiedly. it's a type of movie i've seen before, done really well. like bad santa. or fired up, for that matter. these are high compliments, people. high-ass compliments.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
x-men first class: seriously.
x-men first class: movie starring mr. rochester as magneto, the dude from wanted as professor x, kevin bacon, and many others...
why did i delay so long in writing this review? i saw this movie, twice, like two weeks ago (or maybe it was one week), and i thought it was awesome, so why the delay? i think it's because there are a lot of things that i thought it did unusually well, and they're kind of complicated to talk about...and i am lazy. note the entire lack of capitalization in its proper grammatical place anywhere on this blog.
so let's start with the simple stuff.
1. magneto's little soundtrack motif: awesome. it's an awesomely james bond-esque sound (that rubber band snapping bass sound) without being at all corny.
2. magneto period: awesome. i knew michael fassbender could do something great if given half a chance. in x-men first class, he's given that chance, and he takes the heck out of it.
3. kevin bacon speaking russian: not 1000% convincing, but totally awesome.
4. the art on the walls of kevin bacon's blimp: i don't know enough about modern art, but it looked like faux thiebauds or something. anyway, AMAZING.*
5. BEST USE OF NAZI COIN EVER.
6. young mystique: beautiful, complicated, funny, intelligent performance by jennifer lawrence.
stuff about the movie that was complicated and good:
sexism. one of the things i loved about this movie was that it depicted without condoning sexism. professor x's line that he uses on every girl, the way the cia treats its lady operative (threatening her with the typing pool), the way shaw uses emma frost as a glorified ice machine, the way magneto, even, in treating mystique as close to a person, both highlights the sexist conditions she endures and the way she sees herself as enduring them... this is all good stuff, people. and--and, the way the woman characters don't quite rebel against the treatment. they take it. they don't fight it. the way that the american agent lady deals with it is by ignoring it, focusing her energies away from it, and not begrudging professor x his assumption of her support. mystique has a complex relationship with being a woman, because she's got a lot more to deal with than just having boobs--her self-esteem is overly wrapped up in a lot of different factors--and hence magneto's call for her to regard herself as lovely in her natural state seems to have something to do with her femininity as well as her mutantinity... anyway, it was just interesting.
hetero-ism: i have a friend who objects to what he thinks of as closeted attractions between characters who might as well be gay (i may not be doing you justice, brian). in the case of x-men: first class, i liked the absence of...like, considerations-of-gayness, because i think it made room for the magneto/prof x relationship that there wouldn't have been if the movie were set at a later date. much as i love a lot of judd apatow's stuff, the question of just how gay the bromances he depicts are is an overriding one ("you know how i know you're gay? you are eagerly awaiting the response to this question"). they're stories of men trying to love each other in a world in which men loving each other is gay. they're about more than that, too, but that question--how do we know how gay we are--is a real concern (i'm talking all lit theory right now--i apologize). but in the world of x-men first class, that question isn't exactly a concern. gay isn't something that you might be--you either are it, or you aren't. and so magneto and prof x aren't gay for each other. they're in love with each other, but they aren't gay for each other. and that gives their relationship a lot of freedom, and that freedom is explored really thoroughly and honestly by the film. professor x comes off as a bit of a leightweight who has never suffered for his ideals; magneto comes off as a freaking badass (and much more convincing speaker of german than kevin bacon, much as i laud mr. bacon's attempt). but magneto's slightly pathetic eagerness to accept professor x's friendship shows how much he needs help, companionship--their relationship may be flawed and in the end unsustainable, but it's based on a really sympathetic platform.
and there totally may be gay characters in x-men: first class. it's just that gayness isn't part of the landscape yet, so they don't depict it. mystique could yet become bi; she's just at the beginning of figuring out her own identity.
that's what it is: they all are able to discover as much about themselves as the cultural landscape of the world of the movie will allow. when homosexuality becomes a part of the discussion, they will probably be able to develop along with the questions it asks. because those questions haven't been asked yet, they haven't been answered, and prof x and magneto can this healing and growing connection thing and it's cool and stuff.
in short, x-men first class is totally first class in my opinion**. and it's so much fun to watch, that's the other thing. really really fun. of course at this point literally everyone in the world has seen it. i just hope you all agree with me.
*i wonder how one would check up on this. google "art on walls of sebastian shaw submarine?" i tried it, and didn't come up with much. oh well, at least i've given my all.
**i had one objection: guess which named character dies first? yes, by pointing it out in my completely insignificant movie blog, racism in america will someday be wiped out entirely! you're welcome, dr. king. you're welcome, sun-ra (space is no longer the only place!). you're welcome, america.
why did i delay so long in writing this review? i saw this movie, twice, like two weeks ago (or maybe it was one week), and i thought it was awesome, so why the delay? i think it's because there are a lot of things that i thought it did unusually well, and they're kind of complicated to talk about...and i am lazy. note the entire lack of capitalization in its proper grammatical place anywhere on this blog.
so let's start with the simple stuff.
1. magneto's little soundtrack motif: awesome. it's an awesomely james bond-esque sound (that rubber band snapping bass sound) without being at all corny.
2. magneto period: awesome. i knew michael fassbender could do something great if given half a chance. in x-men first class, he's given that chance, and he takes the heck out of it.
3. kevin bacon speaking russian: not 1000% convincing, but totally awesome.
4. the art on the walls of kevin bacon's blimp: i don't know enough about modern art, but it looked like faux thiebauds or something. anyway, AMAZING.*
5. BEST USE OF NAZI COIN EVER.
6. young mystique: beautiful, complicated, funny, intelligent performance by jennifer lawrence.
stuff about the movie that was complicated and good:
sexism. one of the things i loved about this movie was that it depicted without condoning sexism. professor x's line that he uses on every girl, the way the cia treats its lady operative (threatening her with the typing pool), the way shaw uses emma frost as a glorified ice machine, the way magneto, even, in treating mystique as close to a person, both highlights the sexist conditions she endures and the way she sees herself as enduring them... this is all good stuff, people. and--and, the way the woman characters don't quite rebel against the treatment. they take it. they don't fight it. the way that the american agent lady deals with it is by ignoring it, focusing her energies away from it, and not begrudging professor x his assumption of her support. mystique has a complex relationship with being a woman, because she's got a lot more to deal with than just having boobs--her self-esteem is overly wrapped up in a lot of different factors--and hence magneto's call for her to regard herself as lovely in her natural state seems to have something to do with her femininity as well as her mutantinity... anyway, it was just interesting.
hetero-ism: i have a friend who objects to what he thinks of as closeted attractions between characters who might as well be gay (i may not be doing you justice, brian). in the case of x-men: first class, i liked the absence of...like, considerations-of-gayness, because i think it made room for the magneto/prof x relationship that there wouldn't have been if the movie were set at a later date. much as i love a lot of judd apatow's stuff, the question of just how gay the bromances he depicts are is an overriding one ("you know how i know you're gay? you are eagerly awaiting the response to this question"). they're stories of men trying to love each other in a world in which men loving each other is gay. they're about more than that, too, but that question--how do we know how gay we are--is a real concern (i'm talking all lit theory right now--i apologize). but in the world of x-men first class, that question isn't exactly a concern. gay isn't something that you might be--you either are it, or you aren't. and so magneto and prof x aren't gay for each other. they're in love with each other, but they aren't gay for each other. and that gives their relationship a lot of freedom, and that freedom is explored really thoroughly and honestly by the film. professor x comes off as a bit of a leightweight who has never suffered for his ideals; magneto comes off as a freaking badass (and much more convincing speaker of german than kevin bacon, much as i laud mr. bacon's attempt). but magneto's slightly pathetic eagerness to accept professor x's friendship shows how much he needs help, companionship--their relationship may be flawed and in the end unsustainable, but it's based on a really sympathetic platform.
and there totally may be gay characters in x-men: first class. it's just that gayness isn't part of the landscape yet, so they don't depict it. mystique could yet become bi; she's just at the beginning of figuring out her own identity.
that's what it is: they all are able to discover as much about themselves as the cultural landscape of the world of the movie will allow. when homosexuality becomes a part of the discussion, they will probably be able to develop along with the questions it asks. because those questions haven't been asked yet, they haven't been answered, and prof x and magneto can this healing and growing connection thing and it's cool and stuff.
in short, x-men first class is totally first class in my opinion**. and it's so much fun to watch, that's the other thing. really really fun. of course at this point literally everyone in the world has seen it. i just hope you all agree with me.
*i wonder how one would check up on this. google "art on walls of sebastian shaw submarine?" i tried it, and didn't come up with much. oh well, at least i've given my all.
**i had one objection: guess which named character dies first? yes, by pointing it out in my completely insignificant movie blog, racism in america will someday be wiped out entirely! you're welcome, dr. king. you're welcome, sun-ra (space is no longer the only place!). you're welcome, america.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
bridesmaids: what has a cornfield done for kristen wiig lately?
*review contains spoilers. SPOILERS people.*
bridesmaids: film starring kristen wiig, maya rudolph, melissa mccarthy, rose byrne, wendi mclendon-covey, ellie kemper, jon hamm, chris o'dowd, and some others
due to the ambiguity of the title of this blog, i want to clarify right off that i liked this film very much. i thought the premise was funusual (combination of "fun" and "unusual"--you're welcome!), the acting was incredible, and the writing was often very funny.
melissa mccarthy!!! in a daringly makeup-free performance, melissa mccarthy was freakishly dead-on comedic. she got the broad stuff just right (speech to the air marshall was incredible), the weird stuff just right (more of a six dog than a nine dog person--amazing), and the sensitive characterization stuff just right (whole pep talk to kristen wiig character done very, very right, i thought. i mean, she was that character exactly while she was doing it, so it made me really respect the woman she was playing, and not in a grudging way [it would have been grudging if melissa mccarthy hadn't been so fabulous; i would have (being the paranoiac asshole that i can be) been like, "meh, this movie wants me to respect this character now so i guess i will because i have no reason not to, but i don't want to because this is kind of coming out of nowhere," but melissa mccarthy didn't make it come out of nowhere, she made it an integrated part of who the character was, and that toughness-through-vulnerability thing was quite awesome]). it was like melissa mccarthy asked the question, "how does this woman survive--nay, celebrate--being who she is?", found the answer, and went with it full-bore.
it's pretty super-easy to steal the show when you're playing melissa mccarthy's character, and i thought she did, so i'm not going to ramble about anyone else quite so much, but i really thought everyone was super-good. wendi mclendon-covey took her three jokes about the grossness of her marriage and really sold them; same to ellie kemper (some way in which she described wendi as like a disney princess and smelled good or something--very funny); i think rose byrne played her petulant, paranoid, managing, spoiled and vulnerable hot girl role very well, hitting all of that stuff at one point or another so that we did end up feeling sorry for her and liking her. i also really thought maya rudolph was pretty fantastic insofar as she didn't let her character get any less sweet despite her increasing gentrification.
a lot of what i'm talking about is attributable to the writing--i think, anyway, not knowing ANYTHING ABOUT FILMMAKING. i mean, like, rose byrne character could have been a managing maneater, but she wasn't; maya rudolph character could have gotten entirely and enthusiastically lost in the wedding stuff, but she didn't (that is, she got lost in it, but it wasn't for stupid superficial reasons like some films like to offer us--rose byrne character didn't have a stronger personality than maya rudolph character, for instance, and maya rudolph character was hardly a social climber or anything like that; her getting lost in the wedding stuff seemed eminently reasonable, is what i'm trying to say).
which is why when the film occasionally veered into algorithm-driven rom-com territory, it was kind of disappointing. i love the IT crowd, and i think chris o'dowd is a hilarious and pretty sensitive actor, but all the algorithmic rom-coming happened on his time, so he gets evaluated accordingly. okay, so let's break down exactly what leads up to his reconciliation with kristen wiig character: 1., they sleep together (oh, spoilers--why do i always forget to warn about spoilers? i'll do it now). 2., he asks her to bake with him and she refuses. 3., this pisses him off extensively. 4., she bakes him something he ignores. 5., he eats racoon food and then kisses her with that mouth. now, i'm not getting all the subtleties down here exactly, but the point is that chris o'dowd character, even taking into consideration the fact that he likes kristen wiig character a lot and that therefore her hurting him is extra-important and deserves a more sulky rom-com-esque punishment than it otherwise would, is either underwritten at this point, or is being sucked into rom-com algorithmia. she's already told him she doesn't want to bake, so he is actively ignoring her expressed thingee in getting the baking ingredients. of course she ought to bake, of course it's what's good for her, and he can go ahead and purchase the materials if he wants, he can push her, but if she refuses, it's kind of not her fault that she's not ready, and it's not realistic that he wouldn't acknowledge that without a more pressing reason than what we're given (that he really likes her and is a sensitive guy).
in most romantic comedy situations, the whole "it's not realistic" argument is...what's the phrase i'm looking for...completely irrelevant? sure, i'll go with that. but bridesmaids is good. sure, it has a little too much of kristen wiig falling apart in front of a cornfield, but she does it so well. her refusal to take care of herself is interesting and relevant and uplifting in a weird way and, like, doesn't gloss over failure stuff, really reflects what it's like to lose everything and have to self-destruct over it (aside from the super-cute outfits--when i get depressed i never bother to dress nice [though i know everyone is different, it would have been nice if she'd owned some sweatpants, but this is a very fine point]). and chris o'dowd's character is well-written and well-played too, as honest and gruffly charming dude. so why does a super-generic plotline have to swoop in and steal the sensitive sanity right out of the movie?
maybe it's because we don't know how to settle romantic conflicts in movies--maybe bridesmaids is trying to assure us it's more 40-year-old virgin than juno (though they're both awesome, and wildly popular, movies, and i don't see why a movie would want to be one more than the other). but i really don't have the answers.
final analysis: see movie! (keeping it simple.) for yea verily it is most enjoyable.
bridesmaids: film starring kristen wiig, maya rudolph, melissa mccarthy, rose byrne, wendi mclendon-covey, ellie kemper, jon hamm, chris o'dowd, and some others
due to the ambiguity of the title of this blog, i want to clarify right off that i liked this film very much. i thought the premise was funusual (combination of "fun" and "unusual"--you're welcome!), the acting was incredible, and the writing was often very funny.
melissa mccarthy!!! in a daringly makeup-free performance, melissa mccarthy was freakishly dead-on comedic. she got the broad stuff just right (speech to the air marshall was incredible), the weird stuff just right (more of a six dog than a nine dog person--amazing), and the sensitive characterization stuff just right (whole pep talk to kristen wiig character done very, very right, i thought. i mean, she was that character exactly while she was doing it, so it made me really respect the woman she was playing, and not in a grudging way [it would have been grudging if melissa mccarthy hadn't been so fabulous; i would have (being the paranoiac asshole that i can be) been like, "meh, this movie wants me to respect this character now so i guess i will because i have no reason not to, but i don't want to because this is kind of coming out of nowhere," but melissa mccarthy didn't make it come out of nowhere, she made it an integrated part of who the character was, and that toughness-through-vulnerability thing was quite awesome]). it was like melissa mccarthy asked the question, "how does this woman survive--nay, celebrate--being who she is?", found the answer, and went with it full-bore.
it's pretty super-easy to steal the show when you're playing melissa mccarthy's character, and i thought she did, so i'm not going to ramble about anyone else quite so much, but i really thought everyone was super-good. wendi mclendon-covey took her three jokes about the grossness of her marriage and really sold them; same to ellie kemper (some way in which she described wendi as like a disney princess and smelled good or something--very funny); i think rose byrne played her petulant, paranoid, managing, spoiled and vulnerable hot girl role very well, hitting all of that stuff at one point or another so that we did end up feeling sorry for her and liking her. i also really thought maya rudolph was pretty fantastic insofar as she didn't let her character get any less sweet despite her increasing gentrification.
a lot of what i'm talking about is attributable to the writing--i think, anyway, not knowing ANYTHING ABOUT FILMMAKING. i mean, like, rose byrne character could have been a managing maneater, but she wasn't; maya rudolph character could have gotten entirely and enthusiastically lost in the wedding stuff, but she didn't (that is, she got lost in it, but it wasn't for stupid superficial reasons like some films like to offer us--rose byrne character didn't have a stronger personality than maya rudolph character, for instance, and maya rudolph character was hardly a social climber or anything like that; her getting lost in the wedding stuff seemed eminently reasonable, is what i'm trying to say).
which is why when the film occasionally veered into algorithm-driven rom-com territory, it was kind of disappointing. i love the IT crowd, and i think chris o'dowd is a hilarious and pretty sensitive actor, but all the algorithmic rom-coming happened on his time, so he gets evaluated accordingly. okay, so let's break down exactly what leads up to his reconciliation with kristen wiig character: 1., they sleep together (oh, spoilers--why do i always forget to warn about spoilers? i'll do it now). 2., he asks her to bake with him and she refuses. 3., this pisses him off extensively. 4., she bakes him something he ignores. 5., he eats racoon food and then kisses her with that mouth. now, i'm not getting all the subtleties down here exactly, but the point is that chris o'dowd character, even taking into consideration the fact that he likes kristen wiig character a lot and that therefore her hurting him is extra-important and deserves a more sulky rom-com-esque punishment than it otherwise would, is either underwritten at this point, or is being sucked into rom-com algorithmia. she's already told him she doesn't want to bake, so he is actively ignoring her expressed thingee in getting the baking ingredients. of course she ought to bake, of course it's what's good for her, and he can go ahead and purchase the materials if he wants, he can push her, but if she refuses, it's kind of not her fault that she's not ready, and it's not realistic that he wouldn't acknowledge that without a more pressing reason than what we're given (that he really likes her and is a sensitive guy).
in most romantic comedy situations, the whole "it's not realistic" argument is...what's the phrase i'm looking for...completely irrelevant? sure, i'll go with that. but bridesmaids is good. sure, it has a little too much of kristen wiig falling apart in front of a cornfield, but she does it so well. her refusal to take care of herself is interesting and relevant and uplifting in a weird way and, like, doesn't gloss over failure stuff, really reflects what it's like to lose everything and have to self-destruct over it (aside from the super-cute outfits--when i get depressed i never bother to dress nice [though i know everyone is different, it would have been nice if she'd owned some sweatpants, but this is a very fine point]). and chris o'dowd's character is well-written and well-played too, as honest and gruffly charming dude. so why does a super-generic plotline have to swoop in and steal the sensitive sanity right out of the movie?
maybe it's because we don't know how to settle romantic conflicts in movies--maybe bridesmaids is trying to assure us it's more 40-year-old virgin than juno (though they're both awesome, and wildly popular, movies, and i don't see why a movie would want to be one more than the other). but i really don't have the answers.
final analysis: see movie! (keeping it simple.) for yea verily it is most enjoyable.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
the dolph lundgren the punisher: no, thank you, america
the punisher: '80's version starring dolph lundgren
i have been waiting to see this movie for a long long time. the tom jane the punisher is one of my favorite movies ever--can't exactly explain why (something about its extreeem baroque aesthetic), but i love that movie. and so naturally seeing one version of the punisher that makes one feel all fuzzy and violent inside makes one wish to see all versions of the punisher, and hopefully thereby achieve more fuzzy, violent feelings. the ray stevenson version was, as far as i remember, okay--i mean, it was awesome*, but was it anything more than awesome**? i don't know. i think i was drunk. i'll have to give it another shot.
the dolph lundgren version was...yeah. it had all the elements. the twisted moral platform, the racism against japan...the eyelid surgery by which dolph lundgren was made to look perpetually on psychotropics... no, i really enjoyed it. not as much as the tom jane version, but it was up there. here's the thing: it was totally racist, but it was more than that too. i mean, you can't just sell the mobsters' kids into white slavery, yakuza! that is uncalled for! BUT the pre-o-ren ishii female yakuza lesbian (?) boss (which just proves that quentin tarantino is a filter for everything that is cool) and her adopted mute (america's own deadly little miho) of a sidekick (who has next to nothing to do but is awesome nonetheless) in their ratted bangs and pleather are, like, really worth seeing. in the same manner that the tom jane version is baroque in its execution--that is, filled with ornate, replete details, crafted in ways that do not augment but rather become the point (which details are, in some ways, the essence of action movies, but most action movies aren't up-front about this, and most action movies don't spend enough time to make the details that they're really actually about as complete as they need to be), so that this "outside stuff" actually sucks right back to the center of the movie and the whole thing turns into some kind of tone-poem with a beating singularity at its heart (i really like the tom jane the punisher)--the dolph lundgren version has an almost rococo approach to violence and human suffering.
as opposed to sin city, which is much more italian rennaissance in its aesthetic. or to kill bill, which is definitely an el greco. WHAT?
what's the conclusion we draw here? that all punisher movies are NEAT. and that they should really re-release the dolph lundgren version on something other than videocassette.
and that die hard is attributed to peter bruegel but was probably actually a copy painted in the 1560's. here is a poem about it:
Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spotWhere the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
...and here is another (dub-cee williams, the filter for everything that is cool):
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was plowing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
the above is an example of the moveable foot. the dolph lundgren the punisher, on the other hand, was an example of the kicking-ass foot.
*like hotdogs
**like, for example, a billion hotdogs
i have been waiting to see this movie for a long long time. the tom jane the punisher is one of my favorite movies ever--can't exactly explain why (something about its extreeem baroque aesthetic), but i love that movie. and so naturally seeing one version of the punisher that makes one feel all fuzzy and violent inside makes one wish to see all versions of the punisher, and hopefully thereby achieve more fuzzy, violent feelings. the ray stevenson version was, as far as i remember, okay--i mean, it was awesome*, but was it anything more than awesome**? i don't know. i think i was drunk. i'll have to give it another shot.
the dolph lundgren version was...yeah. it had all the elements. the twisted moral platform, the racism against japan...the eyelid surgery by which dolph lundgren was made to look perpetually on psychotropics... no, i really enjoyed it. not as much as the tom jane version, but it was up there. here's the thing: it was totally racist, but it was more than that too. i mean, you can't just sell the mobsters' kids into white slavery, yakuza! that is uncalled for! BUT the pre-o-ren ishii female yakuza lesbian (?) boss (which just proves that quentin tarantino is a filter for everything that is cool) and her adopted mute (america's own deadly little miho) of a sidekick (who has next to nothing to do but is awesome nonetheless) in their ratted bangs and pleather are, like, really worth seeing. in the same manner that the tom jane version is baroque in its execution--that is, filled with ornate, replete details, crafted in ways that do not augment but rather become the point (which details are, in some ways, the essence of action movies, but most action movies aren't up-front about this, and most action movies don't spend enough time to make the details that they're really actually about as complete as they need to be), so that this "outside stuff" actually sucks right back to the center of the movie and the whole thing turns into some kind of tone-poem with a beating singularity at its heart (i really like the tom jane the punisher)--the dolph lundgren version has an almost rococo approach to violence and human suffering.
as opposed to sin city, which is much more italian rennaissance in its aesthetic. or to kill bill, which is definitely an el greco. WHAT?
what's the conclusion we draw here? that all punisher movies are NEAT. and that they should really re-release the dolph lundgren version on something other than videocassette.
and that die hard is attributed to peter bruegel but was probably actually a copy painted in the 1560's. here is a poem about it:
Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spotWhere the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
...and here is another (dub-cee williams, the filter for everything that is cool):
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was plowing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
the above is an example of the moveable foot. the dolph lundgren the punisher, on the other hand, was an example of the kicking-ass foot.
*like hotdogs
**like, for example, a billion hotdogs
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
check-up time
here's the thing: i began this blog as a way (in part) to find out what reviewers are thinking, how reviewers do what they do. i think i've learned a lot from it (not just about reviewers, but about aesthetics and the process of judgment), and i'm not going to stop doing it, but i have to step back and ask myself,
"is this honestly okay?"
now, i'm up-front about the fact that i'm not a trained moviemaker (am i up-front about it? i think i am--must go check--yes, i appear to be up-front about it [check the sidebar if you don't believe me]). a performer myself, i tend to be generous with actors and downright rude to producers. i profess to hate the hollywood machine (see entries about government-generated algorithms being used for writing evil scripts), and i draw a distinction between reviewing a multi-billion dollar industry and the kind of reviews that make me pretty mad--that is, the completely unsympathetic slams that get delivered to certain local performance companies who are trying to get by with about five dollars and a dream.
but how real is this distinction? should i be more sympathetic to...
wait a second. no. i am sympathetic. to a certain extent. i appreciate the struggles that people who are trying to express something go through--often... i don't appreciate it when there are no struggles and nothing gets expressed (except sometimes, in the case of dance movies, i really really do appreciate it).
or maybe i'm not sympathetic. i slaughtered the imaginarium of dr. parnassus--in my defense, i thought the movie sucked, but it still wasn't nice of me. i mean, is the epistolarium of clive and his cellist really a legitimate example of the hollywood machine being hollywoody and machinistic? i can profess to say, but i don't really know. i just didn't like it, and thought it looked high-budget.
the end diagnosis is that i have no idea if what i'm doing on this blog is right, or morally reprehensible. considering that i've probably gotten about six views TOTAL, this probably shouldn't matter too much to me. on the other hand, considering the fact that i occasionally scour google for my name, and end up hurt when reviews are anything but absolutely stellar...maybe i should be worried about the people i'm slamming.
okay, people i'm slamming (michael bay springs to mind, as does james cameron): if by some chance in hell i've hurt your feelings, i am truly sorry. i will probably not stop hurting your feelings, but as much as i like to pretend otherwise, i can't truly see into anyone's aesthetic soul, and therefore all that my whining about your movies really boils down to is "i don't like (many of) them." and what do i know? nothing. nothing period. and we all know what comes from nothing (hint: it's nothing. "nothing from nothing" is one of the best philoso-math-related relationship songs ever, in my opinion).
what have we all learned? sra admits to, a., being kind of a jerk, and b., thinking that she knows stuff but not actually knowing stuff. oh, and that billy preston plus parmenides equals awesome math funk.
"is this honestly okay?"
now, i'm up-front about the fact that i'm not a trained moviemaker (am i up-front about it? i think i am--must go check--yes, i appear to be up-front about it [check the sidebar if you don't believe me]). a performer myself, i tend to be generous with actors and downright rude to producers. i profess to hate the hollywood machine (see entries about government-generated algorithms being used for writing evil scripts), and i draw a distinction between reviewing a multi-billion dollar industry and the kind of reviews that make me pretty mad--that is, the completely unsympathetic slams that get delivered to certain local performance companies who are trying to get by with about five dollars and a dream.
but how real is this distinction? should i be more sympathetic to...
wait a second. no. i am sympathetic. to a certain extent. i appreciate the struggles that people who are trying to express something go through--often... i don't appreciate it when there are no struggles and nothing gets expressed (except sometimes, in the case of dance movies, i really really do appreciate it).
or maybe i'm not sympathetic. i slaughtered the imaginarium of dr. parnassus--in my defense, i thought the movie sucked, but it still wasn't nice of me. i mean, is the epistolarium of clive and his cellist really a legitimate example of the hollywood machine being hollywoody and machinistic? i can profess to say, but i don't really know. i just didn't like it, and thought it looked high-budget.
the end diagnosis is that i have no idea if what i'm doing on this blog is right, or morally reprehensible. considering that i've probably gotten about six views TOTAL, this probably shouldn't matter too much to me. on the other hand, considering the fact that i occasionally scour google for my name, and end up hurt when reviews are anything but absolutely stellar...maybe i should be worried about the people i'm slamming.
okay, people i'm slamming (michael bay springs to mind, as does james cameron): if by some chance in hell i've hurt your feelings, i am truly sorry. i will probably not stop hurting your feelings, but as much as i like to pretend otherwise, i can't truly see into anyone's aesthetic soul, and therefore all that my whining about your movies really boils down to is "i don't like (many of) them." and what do i know? nothing. nothing period. and we all know what comes from nothing (hint: it's nothing. "nothing from nothing" is one of the best philoso-math-related relationship songs ever, in my opinion).
what have we all learned? sra admits to, a., being kind of a jerk, and b., thinking that she knows stuff but not actually knowing stuff. oh, and that billy preston plus parmenides equals awesome math funk.
Thursday, May 12, 2011
thor: the hammer is so much more than his penis
*uh, this review contains a couple spoilers. consider yourselves warned, chumps!*
thor: starring natalie portman as the god of thunder
...no, wait, she was something else. and was she ever!
i really liked this movie. really, really, really. here's the thing: i feel like i liked it a lot because kenneth branagh directed--but hopefully i didn't like it because kenneth branagh directed, if you see what i'm getting at. in the best-case scenario (which is how i remember it happening, but i might not be remembering accurately), i was thinking to myself at the end, "hunh. this movie was not super-original, and sometimes the dialogue wasn't great. why did i like it so much? the acting? the directing?" and then kenneth branagh's name popped up on the screen and i was like "OH!"
the above sounds pretty harsh, or damning with faint praise, or what have you. but i think that plot and even dialogue are often just window-dressing. see previous entries to do with thoughts about a well done cliche being much better than a weak original idea (how to train your dragon is the main entry on this subject--there are also plenty of entries where i'm really mean about badly-done cliches. hey, i don't have to be consistent; i'm a woman!).
i liked it so much because it really was all about the characters. perhaps unfairly, i am attributing that to branagh. it reminded me of iron man (1), but a little more basic, though not in a bad way--the same sort of, like, "focused more on character development than originality" fight scenes (not that i've ever in my life attempted to write a fight scene, here), and the same sort of focus on expressing who the people in the film were as opposed to what they were up to (indicative detail of both sides of this point: thor fighting the frost giants with a grin on his face, completely despite the fact that the "action" of the fight was happening elsewhere). and so it was awesome, because no matter how semi-fleshed the plotline was (and it did occasionally have that hopping-from-sequence-to-sequence feel about it, which is, you know, pretty common to most movies that have a crapload of plot to cover in not a ton of time), there was always something you cared about watching to watch, and that something was always being done very well.
of kat dennings (playing the ipod owner) i've never had enough, obviously--she's always great. natalie portman (playing the assorted clothes wearer) was awesome--really great vulnerable-eager-quasi-unafraid thing going on. chris hemsworth (god of haircut) was really fabulous--both ripply AND emotionally on-point, straightforward without being stupid (i'm guessing not a simple balance to strike, but he did so real well). shout-out also to stellan skarsgard (furrowed brow), who didn't have a ton of things to do but did them all (including an evacuation scene made somewhat fatuous by lack of time) with an awesomely complete character, and tom hiddleston (sulky steve valentine), who played his gay satan role with its unbalance lingering very skillfully below the surface. everyone was good. i didn't like anthony hopkins as much in this as i did in the wolfman. i think he does bad daddy better than he does good daddy, but i still liked him.
half the time i thought the aesthetic of the movie was beautiful, and half the time i thought it was olivia newton john's xanadu meets bart station. but that stuff doesn't really matter. i'm just getting my digs in because i like to dig. because somebody (that would be me) is just a rude gus.
OH!! and the man of color DOESN'T DIE! heimdall, excellently played by idris elba, comes close-ish, but he doesn't!
and plenty of the time, the dialogue is quite good, by the way. thor's elevated diction and nordic god habits are confronted really well with the not-overdone disbelief of the human realm--and he doesn't just talk fancy without meaning anything (which in my opinion does sometimes happen, and i notice it, because i am stupid-picky).
the only thing i really violently protest is the tagline. "the god of thunder" isn't a tagline, it's too basic a description of the thing itself (would dub-cee* williams approve? food for thought...or not). maybe it's trying to capture the straightforwardness of the nature of thor-the-character's aesthetic? i just know it didn't work for me. i thought maybe they could have gone with "the hammer is my penis" as the tagline, but according to my movie friend, that would have been just as much a description.
*still william carlos williams' '90's emcee name. i am just too proud of it to give it up.
thor: starring natalie portman as the god of thunder
...no, wait, she was something else. and was she ever!
i really liked this movie. really, really, really. here's the thing: i feel like i liked it a lot because kenneth branagh directed--but hopefully i didn't like it because kenneth branagh directed, if you see what i'm getting at. in the best-case scenario (which is how i remember it happening, but i might not be remembering accurately), i was thinking to myself at the end, "hunh. this movie was not super-original, and sometimes the dialogue wasn't great. why did i like it so much? the acting? the directing?" and then kenneth branagh's name popped up on the screen and i was like "OH!"
the above sounds pretty harsh, or damning with faint praise, or what have you. but i think that plot and even dialogue are often just window-dressing. see previous entries to do with thoughts about a well done cliche being much better than a weak original idea (how to train your dragon is the main entry on this subject--there are also plenty of entries where i'm really mean about badly-done cliches. hey, i don't have to be consistent; i'm a woman!).
i liked it so much because it really was all about the characters. perhaps unfairly, i am attributing that to branagh. it reminded me of iron man (1), but a little more basic, though not in a bad way--the same sort of, like, "focused more on character development than originality" fight scenes (not that i've ever in my life attempted to write a fight scene, here), and the same sort of focus on expressing who the people in the film were as opposed to what they were up to (indicative detail of both sides of this point: thor fighting the frost giants with a grin on his face, completely despite the fact that the "action" of the fight was happening elsewhere). and so it was awesome, because no matter how semi-fleshed the plotline was (and it did occasionally have that hopping-from-sequence-to-sequence feel about it, which is, you know, pretty common to most movies that have a crapload of plot to cover in not a ton of time), there was always something you cared about watching to watch, and that something was always being done very well.
of kat dennings (playing the ipod owner) i've never had enough, obviously--she's always great. natalie portman (playing the assorted clothes wearer) was awesome--really great vulnerable-eager-quasi-unafraid thing going on. chris hemsworth (god of haircut) was really fabulous--both ripply AND emotionally on-point, straightforward without being stupid (i'm guessing not a simple balance to strike, but he did so real well). shout-out also to stellan skarsgard (furrowed brow), who didn't have a ton of things to do but did them all (including an evacuation scene made somewhat fatuous by lack of time) with an awesomely complete character, and tom hiddleston (sulky steve valentine), who played his gay satan role with its unbalance lingering very skillfully below the surface. everyone was good. i didn't like anthony hopkins as much in this as i did in the wolfman. i think he does bad daddy better than he does good daddy, but i still liked him.
half the time i thought the aesthetic of the movie was beautiful, and half the time i thought it was olivia newton john's xanadu meets bart station. but that stuff doesn't really matter. i'm just getting my digs in because i like to dig. because somebody (that would be me) is just a rude gus.
OH!! and the man of color DOESN'T DIE! heimdall, excellently played by idris elba, comes close-ish, but he doesn't!
and plenty of the time, the dialogue is quite good, by the way. thor's elevated diction and nordic god habits are confronted really well with the not-overdone disbelief of the human realm--and he doesn't just talk fancy without meaning anything (which in my opinion does sometimes happen, and i notice it, because i am stupid-picky).
the only thing i really violently protest is the tagline. "the god of thunder" isn't a tagline, it's too basic a description of the thing itself (would dub-cee* williams approve? food for thought...or not). maybe it's trying to capture the straightforwardness of the nature of thor-the-character's aesthetic? i just know it didn't work for me. i thought maybe they could have gone with "the hammer is my penis" as the tagline, but according to my movie friend, that would have been just as much a description.
*still william carlos williams' '90's emcee name. i am just too proud of it to give it up.
Saturday, May 7, 2011
sucker punch: EXTREMELY alien she
sucker punch: movie starring emily browning, vanessa hudgens, jamie chung, some other people, and jon hamm for about five seconds total
things that were awesome about this movie:
1. girl singer cover of "search and destroy." raw power is one of my favorite albums ever--and the cover featured in sucker punch was awesome. the "white rabbit" cover struck me as overproduced, but i remember really enjoying the "search and destroy" one, maybe just because it's a song we haven't heard covered like six thousand times in a movie context. apparently the band is called skunk anansie. it's possible i will be purchasing that album.
2. the ladies were quite good looking.
things that were not awesome at all about this movie:
1. i could talk about the acting (not given a chance) and the dialogue and the inception-lite plot, but what's the point? no real point. the movie wasn't good, but i forgive bad movies all the time (loved burlesque. saw it twice. thought it was crap, but i couldn't get enough of christina's wide open eyes and cher's sense of humor--and i wasn't even wild about the songs).
2. the real thing, for me, was what i've mentioned before in connection with percy jackson, and, much more recently, tron: the decline and fall of the strong pretty girl. there's always something exploitative about depicting shiny women in what basically amounts to underwear, but that exploitation itself can't be entirely bad all the time, right? just based on the principle that next to nothing is fundamentally bad? like, in mr. and mrs. smith (the pitt/jolie remake) when angelina had on that OUTFIT at the beginning--i saw that movie a long time ago, and it was a sexy shiny outfit, don't get me wrong, but the movie was playing around with ideas of surface identity versus connection and what it meant to exploit one's own possibilities for exploitation. i mean, in a way. and it certainly exploited brad pitt in a similar way (again, as far as i remember). there are arguments that context is just the excuse for experience, there are arguments that "bad" and "good" are childish qualifiers, and these things are possibly true, but i need my excuses and my qualifiers.
the best/worst part is that sucker punch seems to have no awareness of the fact that its ideological platform is CRAP (we can call this the boogeyman syndrome. but we don't have to).
or does it??? according to a small part of some dude's review that i just read on wikipedia, the "pseudo-feminist fantasies of escape and revenge" are an ideological platform that lead to the sucker-punch of getting stabbed through the eyeball (dude was Andrew O'Hehir). gotttta think about this one--was the sexism intentional?
oh, wait, i don't care. do i? no, no i do not. i didn't read the entirety of mr. o'hehir's review, and i know that magazine writers seem to have less leeway in their reviews than newspapers (and irate bloggers), so i won't turn his statement into some kind of bete noir, but if i were to accept that the crappitude of this film were accounted for by the director giving us "what we want (or what we think we want, or what he thinks we think we want)..." it's asking too much. the fact that both women of color die for literally no reason--sure, because there has to be a (meaningless, pointless) sacrifice--okay, it's a cliche, which i suppose in some very very scary way could be conflated with the things we want to see (insofar as we want to see what we know, as the mildest construction of the continuing reoccurance of this meme in "post-racial" america [seriously, i joke about this stuff in a mildly exasperated tone, but it's gross]). the tiny skirts and bustiers and what have you...do we want to see that? hell yes, councillor! do we want to see girls kick ass while wearing next to nothing? of course we do! so what's the issue? these aspects of the film are executed so idiotically that it's got to be pseudo-ideology, right?
right?
aha. the problem with this argument is that the movie offers us literally nothing with the necessary amount of substance to put in the place of the "pseudo-"ideological tenets of the world in which these "pseudo-feminist" fantasies take place*. in the absence of alternatives, we have to assume that the movie doesn't realize said fantasies are pseudo-feminist, and thinks that they are actually feminist. because shiny ladies with makeup on looking doe-eyed at a coruplent chef and wielding machine guns with pouty mouths to a grindy-poundy soundtrack is not feminist. my personal opinion is that mr. o'hehir's review is being nice on purpose--but if it's not, then i respectfully disagree with him.
i don't count a bunch of psychobabble about making the fantasy your own as a fair exchange for pseudo-feminism. and i don't mean psychobabble as in "much talk in a psychological vein." i mean psychobabble as in "WHAT??? HUNH?????" i mean psychobabble as in "DAMNIT, GOVERNMENTAL ALGORITHMS, YOU'RE GENERATING LINES AGAIN!!!" because someone plugged "feminist fantasy justification" into the machine, and look what they came up with! all they needed to get said lines totally ready for production was to type them into bing english-german translator, hit translate, have a chimp in a bowtie edit, translat back from german into english, and bam!, as emeril would say. delicious script-ness. half the words of an actual script, and with none of the fatty content!
and why was the asian one the one who ran the technologies?? (i was actually excited to see jamie chung because i enjoyed her immensely in dragonball [dragonball--another crappy movie that i liked--see? i'm not an unreasonable person], but she certainly didn't get enough character development to justify killing her [which is typical--it happened to jazz in transformers]). COME ON, MOVIE.
i had a stressful semester. this is my unwinding. sucker punch was bad enough that its badness probably spoke for itself. i should be more sympathetic. and would be, if these fools didn't keep coming in and messing around with the lady power. i'm not even an uber-feminist. the movies are just making me one. yeah, yeah, i shouldn't go to see them in the first place.
the soundtrack--full of cast-sung covers--has two songs on it** that were originally performed by women. this may not be a very good point on my part...maybe music transcends gender. but this film sure as hell does not.
*sorry so convoluted!
**it's three songs. i don't know what i'm talking about hardly ever.
things that were awesome about this movie:
1. girl singer cover of "search and destroy." raw power is one of my favorite albums ever--and the cover featured in sucker punch was awesome. the "white rabbit" cover struck me as overproduced, but i remember really enjoying the "search and destroy" one, maybe just because it's a song we haven't heard covered like six thousand times in a movie context. apparently the band is called skunk anansie. it's possible i will be purchasing that album.
2. the ladies were quite good looking.
things that were not awesome at all about this movie:
1. i could talk about the acting (not given a chance) and the dialogue and the inception-lite plot, but what's the point? no real point. the movie wasn't good, but i forgive bad movies all the time (loved burlesque. saw it twice. thought it was crap, but i couldn't get enough of christina's wide open eyes and cher's sense of humor--and i wasn't even wild about the songs).
2. the real thing, for me, was what i've mentioned before in connection with percy jackson, and, much more recently, tron: the decline and fall of the strong pretty girl. there's always something exploitative about depicting shiny women in what basically amounts to underwear, but that exploitation itself can't be entirely bad all the time, right? just based on the principle that next to nothing is fundamentally bad? like, in mr. and mrs. smith (the pitt/jolie remake) when angelina had on that OUTFIT at the beginning--i saw that movie a long time ago, and it was a sexy shiny outfit, don't get me wrong, but the movie was playing around with ideas of surface identity versus connection and what it meant to exploit one's own possibilities for exploitation. i mean, in a way. and it certainly exploited brad pitt in a similar way (again, as far as i remember). there are arguments that context is just the excuse for experience, there are arguments that "bad" and "good" are childish qualifiers, and these things are possibly true, but i need my excuses and my qualifiers.
the best/worst part is that sucker punch seems to have no awareness of the fact that its ideological platform is CRAP (we can call this the boogeyman syndrome. but we don't have to).
or does it??? according to a small part of some dude's review that i just read on wikipedia, the "pseudo-feminist fantasies of escape and revenge" are an ideological platform that lead to the sucker-punch of getting stabbed through the eyeball (dude was Andrew O'Hehir). gotttta think about this one--was the sexism intentional?
oh, wait, i don't care. do i? no, no i do not. i didn't read the entirety of mr. o'hehir's review, and i know that magazine writers seem to have less leeway in their reviews than newspapers (and irate bloggers), so i won't turn his statement into some kind of bete noir, but if i were to accept that the crappitude of this film were accounted for by the director giving us "what we want (or what we think we want, or what he thinks we think we want)..." it's asking too much. the fact that both women of color die for literally no reason--sure, because there has to be a (meaningless, pointless) sacrifice--okay, it's a cliche, which i suppose in some very very scary way could be conflated with the things we want to see (insofar as we want to see what we know, as the mildest construction of the continuing reoccurance of this meme in "post-racial" america [seriously, i joke about this stuff in a mildly exasperated tone, but it's gross]). the tiny skirts and bustiers and what have you...do we want to see that? hell yes, councillor! do we want to see girls kick ass while wearing next to nothing? of course we do! so what's the issue? these aspects of the film are executed so idiotically that it's got to be pseudo-ideology, right?
right?
aha. the problem with this argument is that the movie offers us literally nothing with the necessary amount of substance to put in the place of the "pseudo-"ideological tenets of the world in which these "pseudo-feminist" fantasies take place*. in the absence of alternatives, we have to assume that the movie doesn't realize said fantasies are pseudo-feminist, and thinks that they are actually feminist. because shiny ladies with makeup on looking doe-eyed at a coruplent chef and wielding machine guns with pouty mouths to a grindy-poundy soundtrack is not feminist. my personal opinion is that mr. o'hehir's review is being nice on purpose--but if it's not, then i respectfully disagree with him.
i don't count a bunch of psychobabble about making the fantasy your own as a fair exchange for pseudo-feminism. and i don't mean psychobabble as in "much talk in a psychological vein." i mean psychobabble as in "WHAT??? HUNH?????" i mean psychobabble as in "DAMNIT, GOVERNMENTAL ALGORITHMS, YOU'RE GENERATING LINES AGAIN!!!" because someone plugged "feminist fantasy justification" into the machine, and look what they came up with! all they needed to get said lines totally ready for production was to type them into bing english-german translator, hit translate, have a chimp in a bowtie edit, translat back from german into english, and bam!, as emeril would say. delicious script-ness. half the words of an actual script, and with none of the fatty content!
and why was the asian one the one who ran the technologies?? (i was actually excited to see jamie chung because i enjoyed her immensely in dragonball [dragonball--another crappy movie that i liked--see? i'm not an unreasonable person], but she certainly didn't get enough character development to justify killing her [which is typical--it happened to jazz in transformers]). COME ON, MOVIE.
i had a stressful semester. this is my unwinding. sucker punch was bad enough that its badness probably spoke for itself. i should be more sympathetic. and would be, if these fools didn't keep coming in and messing around with the lady power. i'm not even an uber-feminist. the movies are just making me one. yeah, yeah, i shouldn't go to see them in the first place.
the soundtrack--full of cast-sung covers--has two songs on it** that were originally performed by women. this may not be a very good point on my part...maybe music transcends gender. but this film sure as hell does not.
*sorry so convoluted!
**it's three songs. i don't know what i'm talking about hardly ever.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
jane eyre: notes after percolation
WHY JANE EYRE WHY??
now let's just all bear in mind that had i liked this film, i would have been somewhat disappointed. i came to watch it suck, and it sucked.
acting: quite good.
direction: not bad.
basic premise of fragmentary kaleidoscope of jane eyre plot-nessfulness: RUDE but promising, for the first half hour or so.
presentation of conditions of jane eyre's young life: not bad! helen burns was there and she didn't dispense any advice about advertising!
other points of eyre-y goodness: two whole rivers sisters! with lines! st. john/jane eyre relationship made interesting, and is not totally disrespectful of what appear to me to be bronte's intentions! jane eyre has no pretensions to being a naturalist...mia wasikowska gave a luminous performance...soundtrack could have been worse...blanche is not blonde...
it was the core rochester/jane relationship that sucked, though not for lack of trying. my personal opinion of rochester is that bronte gives a very exact depiction of him, and thereby renders him impossible to cast. jane eyre is also a very exacting character, but somehow you can get a likeable jane out of many different types of people (not charlotte gainsbourg, but many people [ruth wilson still being my favorite--though i have a friend that i think would play the part the best of anyone ever]). the closest i've ever been able to come to getting a good casting of rochester, though, even just in my head, is right now, when i'm thinking that kristin chenoweth would do a great job with the part, if hell froze over and she somehow got the opportunity. rochester is just impossible to make right. orson welles is all thunder and no humor, timothy dalton, though awesome, is too byron and not enough bothwell, toby stephens is way too suave... and i like all of these performances. i just feel bad for michael fassbender. he's trying to play this impossible part, and the only support he's getting from either the script or the production is a miniscule flower and a neckcloth. who could do anything with those materials? mcguyver? maybe he could make a weapon with which to free himself from a tricky situation (victorian england, for instance), but even he couldn't construct a rochester characterization worth balls. fassbender did a great job with what he was given--but this seemed to consist of, "okay, now stare at an angle to the camera. you can't flirt with jane, so just pant at her. make it more angry! now more sensitive! angrier! sensitiver! i don't know, something with your nostrils, maybe? are you wearing the neckcloth? do you have your tiny flower?"
i'm wondering how many woman directors there have been of jane eyre...how many woman screenwriters... it's sexist of me, i know. i didn't think the direction was that bad. i read a review at the movie theater (you know, one of those they post on cardboard) in which cary fukunaga discussed having read the book several times, and i felt like i could see what he'd read expressed in the movie. his interpretation of jane, who, as the review pointed out, can get lost in the furor sometimes, was quite respectable. not perfect (for a rabid fangirl, there is no such thing) but certainly well within respectable range.
to put it in the most abstract terms, i felt like the movie's intensity of purpose was admirable, and its use of its materials was kind of deplorable. it faltered worst when it came to rochester, turning the whole thornfield sequence into something almost painful to experience, and not in the i-identify kind of way, but in the i-wish-this-were-less-teh-suck* kind of way. a sequence of shots of cherry trees does not a romance make.
UNFORTUNATELY!! am i right? am i right?
hey, maybe robert downey jr. could rochester it righteously. i just like the idea of kristin chenoweth.
*rereading my megatokyo volumes; sorry.
now let's just all bear in mind that had i liked this film, i would have been somewhat disappointed. i came to watch it suck, and it sucked.
acting: quite good.
direction: not bad.
basic premise of fragmentary kaleidoscope of jane eyre plot-nessfulness: RUDE but promising, for the first half hour or so.
presentation of conditions of jane eyre's young life: not bad! helen burns was there and she didn't dispense any advice about advertising!
other points of eyre-y goodness: two whole rivers sisters! with lines! st. john/jane eyre relationship made interesting, and is not totally disrespectful of what appear to me to be bronte's intentions! jane eyre has no pretensions to being a naturalist...mia wasikowska gave a luminous performance...soundtrack could have been worse...blanche is not blonde...
it was the core rochester/jane relationship that sucked, though not for lack of trying. my personal opinion of rochester is that bronte gives a very exact depiction of him, and thereby renders him impossible to cast. jane eyre is also a very exacting character, but somehow you can get a likeable jane out of many different types of people (not charlotte gainsbourg, but many people [ruth wilson still being my favorite--though i have a friend that i think would play the part the best of anyone ever]). the closest i've ever been able to come to getting a good casting of rochester, though, even just in my head, is right now, when i'm thinking that kristin chenoweth would do a great job with the part, if hell froze over and she somehow got the opportunity. rochester is just impossible to make right. orson welles is all thunder and no humor, timothy dalton, though awesome, is too byron and not enough bothwell, toby stephens is way too suave... and i like all of these performances. i just feel bad for michael fassbender. he's trying to play this impossible part, and the only support he's getting from either the script or the production is a miniscule flower and a neckcloth. who could do anything with those materials? mcguyver? maybe he could make a weapon with which to free himself from a tricky situation (victorian england, for instance), but even he couldn't construct a rochester characterization worth balls. fassbender did a great job with what he was given--but this seemed to consist of, "okay, now stare at an angle to the camera. you can't flirt with jane, so just pant at her. make it more angry! now more sensitive! angrier! sensitiver! i don't know, something with your nostrils, maybe? are you wearing the neckcloth? do you have your tiny flower?"
i'm wondering how many woman directors there have been of jane eyre...how many woman screenwriters... it's sexist of me, i know. i didn't think the direction was that bad. i read a review at the movie theater (you know, one of those they post on cardboard) in which cary fukunaga discussed having read the book several times, and i felt like i could see what he'd read expressed in the movie. his interpretation of jane, who, as the review pointed out, can get lost in the furor sometimes, was quite respectable. not perfect (for a rabid fangirl, there is no such thing) but certainly well within respectable range.
to put it in the most abstract terms, i felt like the movie's intensity of purpose was admirable, and its use of its materials was kind of deplorable. it faltered worst when it came to rochester, turning the whole thornfield sequence into something almost painful to experience, and not in the i-identify kind of way, but in the i-wish-this-were-less-teh-suck* kind of way. a sequence of shots of cherry trees does not a romance make.
UNFORTUNATELY!! am i right? am i right?
hey, maybe robert downey jr. could rochester it righteously. i just like the idea of kristin chenoweth.
*rereading my megatokyo volumes; sorry.
Monday, February 21, 2011
i am number four: lay on moglodytes, and damned be he who first cries "*insert randomly generated script here*"
I Am Number Four: movie starring quinn from glee, that kid from that movie we watched that was, i think, england's answer to agent cody banks, and a bunch of special effects
oh man. well, yeah, it was bad, but, on the bright side, at least it wasn't oscar-nominated bad. and it was also kind of charming. i was expecting nonstop action; i did not get that. i got a paean to somewhere that read as forks, ohio. i got a lot of that blond kid with no shirt on. i got one or two voice-overs a la legion. and i got a darlingly improbable soundtrack (this is not intended to be sarcastic; i really liked the soundtrack. it was like the '40's circa the '80's--roy webb for a new millenium). i got an arty girl who of course lived in an attic.
and again, i got some really good acting. where have all the crappy actors gone? i remember in my youth, we had a lot of pretty faces playing a lot of interesting roles fairly badly. nowadays it seems like the faces are just as pretty, the performances are 100% more fantastic, and the roles are freaking stupid. maybe i've changed. it's certainly possible. i just find it bizarre that despite being extremely good-looking for-the-most-part-blond people, all of these kids were very, very excellent actors. they made their ridiculous dialogue sound almost reasonable.
main dude did sound like he had a russian accent, which was confusing as i thought he was masking an english one, but he was very good. i mean, the accent issue was pretty easy to ignore, because aside from the assorted voice-overs, he had about four lines period, but even without dialogue he managed to set him up the characterization. quinn from glee was also really good, even going so far as to develop a blonde ex-cheerleader character totally distinct from her glee blonde sometime ex-cheerleader character, which i think shows not just impressive talent, but impressive commitment to her art. her bullying ex-boyfriend was really good with his edgily-sneering-yet-more-than-quasi-gay lines. the emotionally abused weakling character was really good with his liquid billy elliot-style eyes and straightforward-as-a-choice delivery.
the plot made no sense. the dialogue made no sense. there was no point in attempting to make any sense of any of it. i was annoyed by main dude's failure to open the box that his legacy had left to him--i felt that we had been promised a box-opening scene that was denied to us.
but the movie was pretty entertaining, and the characters were likeable. kind of airborne meets predators.
and since michael bay was somehow involved, i'm sure we will see a sequel. because knowing what is actually inside that box is really going to haunt me. i'm guessing some variety of nut brittle--peanut, brazil nut, walnut, space nut? or maybe the little prince's lamb?
i did think of a way to address the nonsensicalness of the plot that i am fairly proud of: to every question your friend begins with "but why the hell did *insert something to do with i am number four here*?" you simply answer, "because of the *insert whatever qualifier and noun you choose here*." you are bound to be within an acceptable margin of correctness, because it's pretty probable that the point being questioned will make as much sense as your answer does.
example question: "but why didn't the protector and main dude have any chemistry when main dude was able to have chemistry with the very chairs around him?"
answer: "because of the janitorial catacomb."
question: "but why did the dialogue read like mad libs?"
answer: "because of the sad engine coolant."
etcetera.
one of my friend's triumphs was in pointing out that main dude WAS buffy. which is why (spoiler alert) they blow up the high school!
oh man. well, yeah, it was bad, but, on the bright side, at least it wasn't oscar-nominated bad. and it was also kind of charming. i was expecting nonstop action; i did not get that. i got a paean to somewhere that read as forks, ohio. i got a lot of that blond kid with no shirt on. i got one or two voice-overs a la legion. and i got a darlingly improbable soundtrack (this is not intended to be sarcastic; i really liked the soundtrack. it was like the '40's circa the '80's--roy webb for a new millenium). i got an arty girl who of course lived in an attic.
and again, i got some really good acting. where have all the crappy actors gone? i remember in my youth, we had a lot of pretty faces playing a lot of interesting roles fairly badly. nowadays it seems like the faces are just as pretty, the performances are 100% more fantastic, and the roles are freaking stupid. maybe i've changed. it's certainly possible. i just find it bizarre that despite being extremely good-looking for-the-most-part-blond people, all of these kids were very, very excellent actors. they made their ridiculous dialogue sound almost reasonable.
main dude did sound like he had a russian accent, which was confusing as i thought he was masking an english one, but he was very good. i mean, the accent issue was pretty easy to ignore, because aside from the assorted voice-overs, he had about four lines period, but even without dialogue he managed to set him up the characterization. quinn from glee was also really good, even going so far as to develop a blonde ex-cheerleader character totally distinct from her glee blonde sometime ex-cheerleader character, which i think shows not just impressive talent, but impressive commitment to her art. her bullying ex-boyfriend was really good with his edgily-sneering-yet-more-than-quasi-gay lines. the emotionally abused weakling character was really good with his liquid billy elliot-style eyes and straightforward-as-a-choice delivery.
the plot made no sense. the dialogue made no sense. there was no point in attempting to make any sense of any of it. i was annoyed by main dude's failure to open the box that his legacy had left to him--i felt that we had been promised a box-opening scene that was denied to us.
but the movie was pretty entertaining, and the characters were likeable. kind of airborne meets predators.
and since michael bay was somehow involved, i'm sure we will see a sequel. because knowing what is actually inside that box is really going to haunt me. i'm guessing some variety of nut brittle--peanut, brazil nut, walnut, space nut? or maybe the little prince's lamb?
i did think of a way to address the nonsensicalness of the plot that i am fairly proud of: to every question your friend begins with "but why the hell did *insert something to do with i am number four here*?" you simply answer, "because of the *insert whatever qualifier and noun you choose here*." you are bound to be within an acceptable margin of correctness, because it's pretty probable that the point being questioned will make as much sense as your answer does.
example question: "but why didn't the protector and main dude have any chemistry when main dude was able to have chemistry with the very chairs around him?"
answer: "because of the janitorial catacomb."
question: "but why did the dialogue read like mad libs?"
answer: "because of the sad engine coolant."
etcetera.
one of my friend's triumphs was in pointing out that main dude WAS buffy. which is why (spoiler alert) they blow up the high school!
Sunday, January 2, 2011
black dynamite: and the feeling's right
Black Dynamite: movie starring Michael Jai White...
the below is an almost entire rewrite of the review i had up here previously, the which was a weird and wandering ramble through what i think of say yes to the dress and mystery science theater as opposed to a focused review of a film i totally admired. the two things i'm keeping from the last review (aside from the basic critique, which i'm going to try to obfuscate less) are, one, as regards michael jai white,
"who is the elisa to my hector moreda: i would totally switch for that guy,"
because he is super-good looking, and, two, the below, because any possible lyrics for manos: hands of fate: the musical must not be silenced!:
"yes i am torgo, quit your debatin'--
it's true that i serve a priest of satan!
however, my pride it is a salve to,
that the master wants you, but he can't have you!"
so. (again, not trying to change the basic premise of this entry, just trying to streamline it, like, a lot--i feel guilty for repeating myself, but i shouldn't, because i'm not trying to make a new argument.) what i thought was awesome about this film was the precision with which it made fun of low-budget genre films (not going to say Blaxploitation films, because i've watched some, but not nearly enough to claim some sense of how they generally go--however, i've watched a LOT of low-budget and genre films, and can say that black dynamite mocks these with hardcore accuracy). because it could almost pass for a really terrible film that was made in earnest. i was trying to explain in the earlier version of this entry that michael jai white does a fantastic job of acting the part, not of the character black dynamite, but of the dude who would have been hired to play the part of black dynamite had black dynamite been a serious film. it's not just that he acts as wooden and uncomfortable onscreen as the guy he's playing would have in the "real" version of the movie, it's also that occcasionally, like when the boom mike comes down and he kind of stares at it as if to say "this thing is in the shot but i'm going to keep going because nobody's saying not to," or when there's the imprecise cut that sneaks into the film, or the degree of contrast between his "bad-ass" acting and his "emotional" acting (that line about being an orphan), he shows us glimpses of the dude attempting to act the part, the one who clearly got hired because he looked like a badass, not because he had either acting talent or experience.
which is just FUNNY. i mean, the stuff that the character black dynamite does and says is also funny, but it's more about how he does and says it than what it is. and this "how" thing extends throughout every part of the movie. the soundtrack, which, with its specialized themesong moments and protagonist-centered lyrics, is really only a few steps away from some of coffey's soundtrack stuff, and the type of film or camera or whatever it is that makes the film look, like, perfectly low-budget, and the fact that the plot throws in everything and the kitchen sink, which is a move one sees a lot in bad low-budget genre films, presumably because their creators think, "if we put some version of everything we've ever seen in the real films of this genre into our film, someone's bound to like something in it."
in fact, you can kind of do the same characterization of the writers and director that you can for michael jai white-as-black dynamite-actor, if you want. like a lot of the filmmakers whose films were covered by mystery science theater (this is my knowledge base, and i am not ashamed!), these hypothetical "real" black dynamite writers wanted to create a Blaxploitation film that would make them some money, so they packed all the cliches in that they could possiibly think of, from a Vietnam flashback to a gently tear-struck prostitute (who, as i mentioned in the last version of this review, i loved--she's so good), into a blender*, and then the director went straight to film with whatever came out. the plot is awesomely ridiculous, and that is awesome, but the motivation for its being such a mess is almost funnier than the mess itself, though i haven't explained it very well. it's like, the production team was interested in making a Blaxploitation film for the sake of drawing a Blaxploitation audience so that they could make the money, and in order to do that they made the Blaxploitation-est film they could think of, and that is black dynamite.
in conclusion, yeah. black dynamite could totally pass for a really really bad really really low-budget example of Blaxploitation...except on purpose. i feel like it was made with a lot of love, or it wouldn't have had either the ability or the patience to be so damn accurate. it's hilarious. i recommend it to people who know bad movies and who like things that are funny. there was no badly-hit note. it was all awesome.
oh, and recommendations regarding the drinking game: the person who claims the word "jive" as their imbibement trigger is going to be very drunk, and the person who takes "turkey" isn't going to be far behind.
*just, coincidentally enough, in the same manner as crow accuses the wild wild world of batwoman of doing.
yes, this is the streamlined version of this review. whyever WOULDN'T america be grateful?
the below is an almost entire rewrite of the review i had up here previously, the which was a weird and wandering ramble through what i think of say yes to the dress and mystery science theater as opposed to a focused review of a film i totally admired. the two things i'm keeping from the last review (aside from the basic critique, which i'm going to try to obfuscate less) are, one, as regards michael jai white,
"who is the elisa to my hector moreda: i would totally switch for that guy,"
because he is super-good looking, and, two, the below, because any possible lyrics for manos: hands of fate: the musical must not be silenced!:
"yes i am torgo, quit your debatin'--
it's true that i serve a priest of satan!
however, my pride it is a salve to,
that the master wants you, but he can't have you!"
so. (again, not trying to change the basic premise of this entry, just trying to streamline it, like, a lot--i feel guilty for repeating myself, but i shouldn't, because i'm not trying to make a new argument.) what i thought was awesome about this film was the precision with which it made fun of low-budget genre films (not going to say Blaxploitation films, because i've watched some, but not nearly enough to claim some sense of how they generally go--however, i've watched a LOT of low-budget and genre films, and can say that black dynamite mocks these with hardcore accuracy). because it could almost pass for a really terrible film that was made in earnest. i was trying to explain in the earlier version of this entry that michael jai white does a fantastic job of acting the part, not of the character black dynamite, but of the dude who would have been hired to play the part of black dynamite had black dynamite been a serious film. it's not just that he acts as wooden and uncomfortable onscreen as the guy he's playing would have in the "real" version of the movie, it's also that occcasionally, like when the boom mike comes down and he kind of stares at it as if to say "this thing is in the shot but i'm going to keep going because nobody's saying not to," or when there's the imprecise cut that sneaks into the film, or the degree of contrast between his "bad-ass" acting and his "emotional" acting (that line about being an orphan), he shows us glimpses of the dude attempting to act the part, the one who clearly got hired because he looked like a badass, not because he had either acting talent or experience.
which is just FUNNY. i mean, the stuff that the character black dynamite does and says is also funny, but it's more about how he does and says it than what it is. and this "how" thing extends throughout every part of the movie. the soundtrack, which, with its specialized themesong moments and protagonist-centered lyrics, is really only a few steps away from some of coffey's soundtrack stuff, and the type of film or camera or whatever it is that makes the film look, like, perfectly low-budget, and the fact that the plot throws in everything and the kitchen sink, which is a move one sees a lot in bad low-budget genre films, presumably because their creators think, "if we put some version of everything we've ever seen in the real films of this genre into our film, someone's bound to like something in it."
in fact, you can kind of do the same characterization of the writers and director that you can for michael jai white-as-black dynamite-actor, if you want. like a lot of the filmmakers whose films were covered by mystery science theater (this is my knowledge base, and i am not ashamed!), these hypothetical "real" black dynamite writers wanted to create a Blaxploitation film that would make them some money, so they packed all the cliches in that they could possiibly think of, from a Vietnam flashback to a gently tear-struck prostitute (who, as i mentioned in the last version of this review, i loved--she's so good), into a blender*, and then the director went straight to film with whatever came out. the plot is awesomely ridiculous, and that is awesome, but the motivation for its being such a mess is almost funnier than the mess itself, though i haven't explained it very well. it's like, the production team was interested in making a Blaxploitation film for the sake of drawing a Blaxploitation audience so that they could make the money, and in order to do that they made the Blaxploitation-est film they could think of, and that is black dynamite.
in conclusion, yeah. black dynamite could totally pass for a really really bad really really low-budget example of Blaxploitation...except on purpose. i feel like it was made with a lot of love, or it wouldn't have had either the ability or the patience to be so damn accurate. it's hilarious. i recommend it to people who know bad movies and who like things that are funny. there was no badly-hit note. it was all awesome.
oh, and recommendations regarding the drinking game: the person who claims the word "jive" as their imbibement trigger is going to be very drunk, and the person who takes "turkey" isn't going to be far behind.
*just, coincidentally enough, in the same manner as crow accuses the wild wild world of batwoman of doing.
yes, this is the streamlined version of this review. whyever WOULDN'T america be grateful?
Monday, December 27, 2010
tron and narnia: tumty-tumty-tumty-tum i slew him! tumty-tum
tron: movie starring jeff bridges as tom hanks from the polar express (cuz he was cgi'd...you're welcome)
voyage of the dawn treader: new-breed narnia movie starring someone as someone else (it's called acting)
the subtitle to this post is sexism: not just for sexist stuff anymore.
it was a product of seeing the tempest, tron, and narnia within the space of a week that really did the damage: i first became conscious that sexism isn't just for people who are concerned with the size of a lady's paycheck anymore. it's out there in the movies, and it's ANNOYING THE CRAP out of me.
now, narnia couldn't help it, even if it had wanted to. as i tried to explain in coked-out detail to my friends*, c.s. lewis was a sexist barstard. i haven't read everything he wrote, but i did get through his theolo-sci-fi trilogy. i enjoyed the third one (i can't remember the names) in part because i thought he painted a realistic and interesting character for the woman in the overly-modern marriage. i found his solution to the marital issues of the couple to be quite modern, if by modern one is referring to the philoso-critical stylings of dr. laura schlessinger (so, about 15 years out of date). what i'm trying to say is, he was sexist. like dr. laura. lewis's lady-characters are sympathetic in themselves (i mean, excepting the white queen, who's just sexy), but the solutions he derives for the problem of their femininity are recockulous. he really takes the idea of separate spheres to a new plane of fairness. aslan, in narnia, rebukes everyone with the same unpredictability and gentleness, male, female, and reepicheep alike. but it's still separate spheres; susan still gets kicked out of narnia for liking make-up and nylons, because apparently you can't like boys and god at the same time (which sounds, frankly, like a bit of over-identification on c.s.'s part [actually, i don't get a gay vibe from lewis, but i should probably wikipedia him for solid evidence as to his sexual preferences. that's a joke. i'm not going to do that]). and lucy still has to wander around a bit like an idiot, because a lady's sexual awakening is much less acceptable in the scheme of things than a man's. after all, did adam pluck the apple? no sir! i mean, it's not even an illogical sort of sexism, considering the intellectual power lewis was bringing to bear on the conundrae (probably not a word) of christianity. but it is annoying. the spice girls would have something to say to it, if he were writing in modern (or my current particular frame of modern, apparently) times.
so disney can't help but make lucy a bit ineffectual and wander-around-y. she is a sweetheart, and legitimately so. but as a role model she's not going to make a ceo out of your daughter.
the same, unfortunately, can be said for the chick in tron. props to disney if they were making a kora in hell-frame kind of reference--according to online, they weren't; it's spelled quorra, and i can't figure out what it's supposed to refer to, but i'd like to know. anyway, she's useless. as usual, no shame to olivia wilde, who i thought was as good as possible under the circumstances, not to mention super cute. but that meme of the strong pretty girl is just ballooning into something ridiculously impossible. it's like "hey, this female character has fight scenes, so she must be an individual. you're welcome, feminists everywhere!" yeah. shove it, disney. i understand that quorra had to be female, not only to provide young flynn with a love interest, but also so that the final third of the movie could literally turn into star wars (for which operation one clearly needs a princess leia surrogate, not to mention a moody bishounen [sp?] with an improbable haircut for luke). but did she have to be so "teach me, you man-god! for i am your creation!" about it? why was she always crouching subordinately whenever one of the flynns was around? according to her account, old flynn earned her self-erasing, accolyte-like devotion by standing over her when she woke up. i mean, a rescue was implied, but literally, that's how she said it in the film. the whole character is just ridiculous. her whole race was destroyed and she's a super-human manifestation of god in the machine, but don't worry about any messy emotional reactions to either of these things, unless if you count her outburst about liking jules verne, certainly the emotional center of the film. i could be cautious and go with "underwritten," but i'm choosing to go with "ridiculously misogynist skipping the point in favor of the haircut bastard filmmakers."
moral of the story: standing over a woman when she wakes will make her all kinds of haircut.
or possibly, sexism annoys me. which is what i opened with. disregard all the in-between. it's like a newman-o but with filling from chernobyl.
*coked-out due both to the quality and quantity of the detail, and the fact that i had imbibed a great deal of diet coke during the movie (i'm not actually familiar with the type of detail that people on coke [the drug] tend to produce. i am a nice girl from a suburb, which would actually argue for the non-veracity of that statement but for the fact that i am, and always have been, a nerd [see every post on this blog]).
voyage of the dawn treader: new-breed narnia movie starring someone as someone else (it's called acting)
the subtitle to this post is sexism: not just for sexist stuff anymore.
it was a product of seeing the tempest, tron, and narnia within the space of a week that really did the damage: i first became conscious that sexism isn't just for people who are concerned with the size of a lady's paycheck anymore. it's out there in the movies, and it's ANNOYING THE CRAP out of me.
now, narnia couldn't help it, even if it had wanted to. as i tried to explain in coked-out detail to my friends*, c.s. lewis was a sexist barstard. i haven't read everything he wrote, but i did get through his theolo-sci-fi trilogy. i enjoyed the third one (i can't remember the names) in part because i thought he painted a realistic and interesting character for the woman in the overly-modern marriage. i found his solution to the marital issues of the couple to be quite modern, if by modern one is referring to the philoso-critical stylings of dr. laura schlessinger (so, about 15 years out of date). what i'm trying to say is, he was sexist. like dr. laura. lewis's lady-characters are sympathetic in themselves (i mean, excepting the white queen, who's just sexy), but the solutions he derives for the problem of their femininity are recockulous. he really takes the idea of separate spheres to a new plane of fairness. aslan, in narnia, rebukes everyone with the same unpredictability and gentleness, male, female, and reepicheep alike. but it's still separate spheres; susan still gets kicked out of narnia for liking make-up and nylons, because apparently you can't like boys and god at the same time (which sounds, frankly, like a bit of over-identification on c.s.'s part [actually, i don't get a gay vibe from lewis, but i should probably wikipedia him for solid evidence as to his sexual preferences. that's a joke. i'm not going to do that]). and lucy still has to wander around a bit like an idiot, because a lady's sexual awakening is much less acceptable in the scheme of things than a man's. after all, did adam pluck the apple? no sir! i mean, it's not even an illogical sort of sexism, considering the intellectual power lewis was bringing to bear on the conundrae (probably not a word) of christianity. but it is annoying. the spice girls would have something to say to it, if he were writing in modern (or my current particular frame of modern, apparently) times.
so disney can't help but make lucy a bit ineffectual and wander-around-y. she is a sweetheart, and legitimately so. but as a role model she's not going to make a ceo out of your daughter.
the same, unfortunately, can be said for the chick in tron. props to disney if they were making a kora in hell-frame kind of reference--according to online, they weren't; it's spelled quorra, and i can't figure out what it's supposed to refer to, but i'd like to know. anyway, she's useless. as usual, no shame to olivia wilde, who i thought was as good as possible under the circumstances, not to mention super cute. but that meme of the strong pretty girl is just ballooning into something ridiculously impossible. it's like "hey, this female character has fight scenes, so she must be an individual. you're welcome, feminists everywhere!" yeah. shove it, disney. i understand that quorra had to be female, not only to provide young flynn with a love interest, but also so that the final third of the movie could literally turn into star wars (for which operation one clearly needs a princess leia surrogate, not to mention a moody bishounen [sp?] with an improbable haircut for luke). but did she have to be so "teach me, you man-god! for i am your creation!" about it? why was she always crouching subordinately whenever one of the flynns was around? according to her account, old flynn earned her self-erasing, accolyte-like devotion by standing over her when she woke up. i mean, a rescue was implied, but literally, that's how she said it in the film. the whole character is just ridiculous. her whole race was destroyed and she's a super-human manifestation of god in the machine, but don't worry about any messy emotional reactions to either of these things, unless if you count her outburst about liking jules verne, certainly the emotional center of the film. i could be cautious and go with "underwritten," but i'm choosing to go with "ridiculously misogynist skipping the point in favor of the haircut bastard filmmakers."
moral of the story: standing over a woman when she wakes will make her all kinds of haircut.
or possibly, sexism annoys me. which is what i opened with. disregard all the in-between. it's like a newman-o but with filling from chernobyl.
*coked-out due both to the quality and quantity of the detail, and the fact that i had imbibed a great deal of diet coke during the movie (i'm not actually familiar with the type of detail that people on coke [the drug] tend to produce. i am a nice girl from a suburb, which would actually argue for the non-veracity of that statement but for the fact that i am, and always have been, a nerd [see every post on this blog]).
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
the tempest: it's taymor-riffic
The Tempest: movie starring the conceptual stylings of Julie Taymor mostly
first off, the acting was FUCKING BRILLIANT. miranda was amazing, caliban was amazing, and of course doc ock (name? alfred molina, apparently) and alan cummings were fantabulous--i thought chris cooper gave a good interpretation to a difficult part, as did the ariel dude, who we didn't really get to see due to the taymoring of the film, and, yeah, in my eyes, tom conti for the win. felicity jones was brilliant in a part that one doesn't really need brilliance in, but in which brilliance is possible--djimon hounsou (hopefully spelling that right) was brilliant in a part that may be difficult to do justice to--and he did do it justice, freaking fabulous--but always has a certain amount of cachet around it. i thought tom conti took a very possibly onerous part and turned it into something really really good. i was a little conflicted about helen mirren. i thought she did an excellent job of creating a character, but i wasn't sure that the character she created was being helped by the shakespeare. the lines made sense--made painstaking sense--and were deeply felt, but it was like she was acting despite shakespeare instead of through him, and that bothered me, but it shouldn't too deeply, because she was very good. reeve carney as what's-his-face was not good, but really funny, which made up for it. apparently he was too cool to enunciate. he had the immaculately kept iggy pop hair of edgy love, and nothing more was necessary than a few shirtless moments and an entirely inappropriate rendition of "o mistress mine" (yeah, why was that there? so taymor could taymor around with more gender-political "exploration"? if so, stop it, taymor! stop it now! the line "that can sing both high and low" was not written for you to dithyramb around with [or if it was, we truly do inhabit a creepy-ass universe]).
if taymor had to do with the choices of her actors, even if she fostered an environment in which they could make their choices, then she deserves a lot of credit for having done so. but i thought the movie was a mess. it was very entertaining--very entertaining. i should give it some sort of pass for making the shakespeare so eminently filmable (a friend of mine says that the tempest really isn't filmable, and i felt like taymor turned it into an opulent feast of filmability, so i'm sure she deserves credit for that too). but BOO!!! BOO!!!
BOO!!! it's like back in the day when i read an interview with the fool who directed that wildly awful version of mansfield park with frances o'connor, the one that in the end featured fanny writing sanditon or something for susan's amusement, in which above-mentioned fool of a director said something like, "i know there will be laura ashley bitches out there who will object to this movie because we show boob." no, director fool, no. we laura ashley bitches (i'm not actually one, but would much rather be ranged on their side than her's) are not objecting to your dumbass movie because it shows boob. we are objecting to it because it neglected to capture even the tiniest particle of jane austen's intention or spirit, as well as a good third of the plot.
taymor did not go nearly to these lengths--we did see boob, but it was hermaphrodite man-boob (and, yes, it was tempting)--but she did make a mess, what with her desire to shove a special effect into every insecurity of signification. i can't really go into specifics as deeply as i'd like without driving the blood pressure up dangerously high, but, as an example, the sandcastle miranda holds at the beginning: it crumbles. in the rain. when i pointed out how STUPID this conception of...whatever the hell it's supposed to mean...was, my friend said, basically, "but prospera starts out with everything and nothing and ends up with nothing and everything," and for a minute he made it sound good. but then i thought back, and, no. i mean, yes, my friend's interpretation of the significance of the sandcastle is awesome, but the sandcastle itself? no. no. that shit could mean pretty much anything. its meaning was entirely overridden by its desire to look cool. yes, the most obvious interpretation is...uh, that prospera, by calling in a thunderstorm, has unleashed the destruction of her own castle of sand, or whatever*, but it's just such an unnecessary interpretive move. it doesn't get us any nearer to the heart of matter (as niska would say)--sure, it's a visual metaphor, but it tells rather than showing.
what would i have her put in its place? NOTHING. INTERPRETIVE SILENCE. just STOP DOING STUFF. stop tim burtoning around. shakespeare didn't make it this far because his work could be twisted into meaning--it meant in the first place. it meant so much, taymor, (i'm a shakespeare-phile, i admit it completely) that even within your self-indulgent rigmarole it still surfaced at points. but it had to struggle. why make it struggle? that's just rude, taymor. be nice to sextacentarians (??).
i'm not saying that there's some ur-interpretation of shakespeare out there that can be latched onto and drug home like a theseus by the minotaur. i'm saying that some attention to the text is required when making a movie of a play--either that, or you peter brooks it, and make sure that the fish you're boning is known to be your own fish (rrow), a move that is a bit like throwing on a flak jacket in a nuclear blast, but can at least protect you to some extent from a reasonably fair mind (which mine, on this subject, may totally not be). shakespeare is not the instrument. you are the instrument. your own interpretation is entirely correct, but only if it's coming from the work--only if you're being plucked, like a fortepiano, from the inside. don't tell me taymor isn't doing the plucking. don't tell me she's not looking for opportunities to have harpies spit oil as a metaphor for...again, something (bp spill? peace in the middle east? bunnies?) and stupid, stupid gender-bending whatnottery for ariel, prospera, and the fools in their gowns.
it's like communist russia: the tempest pluck you. taymor is clearly no candidate for an un-american activities investigation. YEOUCH, sra. what a burn!
i should apologize for a lot of this, because much of the movie was very watchable. it just lit my fire, is all. i can forgive ridiculousness, i can forgive incompetence, i can forgive idiotishness. i CANNOT forgive all the jibber-jabber that films try to put us through, and the tempest's taymoring is a really prime example of it. i am not turning the tempest into an example (my example of terrible filmic incompetence is and always will be the hours)--i am just holding it responsible for itself, which maybe nobody thought to do. what the hell, guys? come on! stop plucking around!
*one of the bizarrities of my life is that, though a dedicated musician and quasi-dedicated writer, i'm not at all good at pinning meanings to metaphors. i cling to theorists like derrida and de man for that reason--the inaccuracies of metaphoric assumption as propounded by said thinkers are like manna to my brain (but not literally), not just because they're interesting, but because they give me a leg to stand on. but i should be completely clear that it's inability, not choice, that turns me away from the assumption that metaphors mean things (though thank god i have been turned away).
first off, the acting was FUCKING BRILLIANT. miranda was amazing, caliban was amazing, and of course doc ock (name? alfred molina, apparently) and alan cummings were fantabulous--i thought chris cooper gave a good interpretation to a difficult part, as did the ariel dude, who we didn't really get to see due to the taymoring of the film, and, yeah, in my eyes, tom conti for the win. felicity jones was brilliant in a part that one doesn't really need brilliance in, but in which brilliance is possible--djimon hounsou (hopefully spelling that right) was brilliant in a part that may be difficult to do justice to--and he did do it justice, freaking fabulous--but always has a certain amount of cachet around it. i thought tom conti took a very possibly onerous part and turned it into something really really good. i was a little conflicted about helen mirren. i thought she did an excellent job of creating a character, but i wasn't sure that the character she created was being helped by the shakespeare. the lines made sense--made painstaking sense--and were deeply felt, but it was like she was acting despite shakespeare instead of through him, and that bothered me, but it shouldn't too deeply, because she was very good. reeve carney as what's-his-face was not good, but really funny, which made up for it. apparently he was too cool to enunciate. he had the immaculately kept iggy pop hair of edgy love, and nothing more was necessary than a few shirtless moments and an entirely inappropriate rendition of "o mistress mine" (yeah, why was that there? so taymor could taymor around with more gender-political "exploration"? if so, stop it, taymor! stop it now! the line "that can sing both high and low" was not written for you to dithyramb around with [or if it was, we truly do inhabit a creepy-ass universe]).
if taymor had to do with the choices of her actors, even if she fostered an environment in which they could make their choices, then she deserves a lot of credit for having done so. but i thought the movie was a mess. it was very entertaining--very entertaining. i should give it some sort of pass for making the shakespeare so eminently filmable (a friend of mine says that the tempest really isn't filmable, and i felt like taymor turned it into an opulent feast of filmability, so i'm sure she deserves credit for that too). but BOO!!! BOO!!!
BOO!!! it's like back in the day when i read an interview with the fool who directed that wildly awful version of mansfield park with frances o'connor, the one that in the end featured fanny writing sanditon or something for susan's amusement, in which above-mentioned fool of a director said something like, "i know there will be laura ashley bitches out there who will object to this movie because we show boob." no, director fool, no. we laura ashley bitches (i'm not actually one, but would much rather be ranged on their side than her's) are not objecting to your dumbass movie because it shows boob. we are objecting to it because it neglected to capture even the tiniest particle of jane austen's intention or spirit, as well as a good third of the plot.
taymor did not go nearly to these lengths--we did see boob, but it was hermaphrodite man-boob (and, yes, it was tempting)--but she did make a mess, what with her desire to shove a special effect into every insecurity of signification. i can't really go into specifics as deeply as i'd like without driving the blood pressure up dangerously high, but, as an example, the sandcastle miranda holds at the beginning: it crumbles. in the rain. when i pointed out how STUPID this conception of...whatever the hell it's supposed to mean...was, my friend said, basically, "but prospera starts out with everything and nothing and ends up with nothing and everything," and for a minute he made it sound good. but then i thought back, and, no. i mean, yes, my friend's interpretation of the significance of the sandcastle is awesome, but the sandcastle itself? no. no. that shit could mean pretty much anything. its meaning was entirely overridden by its desire to look cool. yes, the most obvious interpretation is...uh, that prospera, by calling in a thunderstorm, has unleashed the destruction of her own castle of sand, or whatever*, but it's just such an unnecessary interpretive move. it doesn't get us any nearer to the heart of matter (as niska would say)--sure, it's a visual metaphor, but it tells rather than showing.
what would i have her put in its place? NOTHING. INTERPRETIVE SILENCE. just STOP DOING STUFF. stop tim burtoning around. shakespeare didn't make it this far because his work could be twisted into meaning--it meant in the first place. it meant so much, taymor, (i'm a shakespeare-phile, i admit it completely) that even within your self-indulgent rigmarole it still surfaced at points. but it had to struggle. why make it struggle? that's just rude, taymor. be nice to sextacentarians (??).
i'm not saying that there's some ur-interpretation of shakespeare out there that can be latched onto and drug home like a theseus by the minotaur. i'm saying that some attention to the text is required when making a movie of a play--either that, or you peter brooks it, and make sure that the fish you're boning is known to be your own fish (rrow), a move that is a bit like throwing on a flak jacket in a nuclear blast, but can at least protect you to some extent from a reasonably fair mind (which mine, on this subject, may totally not be). shakespeare is not the instrument. you are the instrument. your own interpretation is entirely correct, but only if it's coming from the work--only if you're being plucked, like a fortepiano, from the inside. don't tell me taymor isn't doing the plucking. don't tell me she's not looking for opportunities to have harpies spit oil as a metaphor for...again, something (bp spill? peace in the middle east? bunnies?) and stupid, stupid gender-bending whatnottery for ariel, prospera, and the fools in their gowns.
it's like communist russia: the tempest pluck you. taymor is clearly no candidate for an un-american activities investigation. YEOUCH, sra. what a burn!
i should apologize for a lot of this, because much of the movie was very watchable. it just lit my fire, is all. i can forgive ridiculousness, i can forgive incompetence, i can forgive idiotishness. i CANNOT forgive all the jibber-jabber that films try to put us through, and the tempest's taymoring is a really prime example of it. i am not turning the tempest into an example (my example of terrible filmic incompetence is and always will be the hours)--i am just holding it responsible for itself, which maybe nobody thought to do. what the hell, guys? come on! stop plucking around!
*one of the bizarrities of my life is that, though a dedicated musician and quasi-dedicated writer, i'm not at all good at pinning meanings to metaphors. i cling to theorists like derrida and de man for that reason--the inaccuracies of metaphoric assumption as propounded by said thinkers are like manna to my brain (but not literally), not just because they're interesting, but because they give me a leg to stand on. but i should be completely clear that it's inability, not choice, that turns me away from the assumption that metaphors mean things (though thank god i have been turned away).
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
for colored girls: is it me, or...
For Colored Girls: tyler perry film starring whoopi and some other perhaps distractingly attractive ladies
...are my tastes changing?
normally, a movie taking itself this seriously with this much intensity would have made me want to curl up and die. and don't get me wrong, i did want to curl up and die. but in the good way. dear god it was so good.
my friend, though he liked it, said that if the camera had focused one more time on a woman's face, getting blair witch up-close-and-personal with her expelling facial fluids, he would have abdicated the theater, like edward VII for wallis simpson*. and though, again, i normally would agree with him, in this case, no. no. that particular camera move, i thought, was something like a strophe in a poem, a rhyme scheme: a symbol of movement in vision. besides, that camera shot provided the actresses with the correct frame in which to get their acting done. no other frame was either possible or necessary. it was beautiful, what all of them did within that painfully intimate space. i couldn't take my eyes off it. i see on imdb (never read others' reviews, sra) that people felt like the poems' readings slowed the movie down, juxtaposed too strangely with the other dialogue. but i kind of feel like expectations might be getting in the way of a really thrilling reality: those poems are beautiful. and they are said beautifully. some of them are more seamlessly interwoven than others, but even if they hadn't been acted so well, the poems would have been worth hearing, period, and i thought that all of them were acted just wonderfully.
i can't say how affective the film was--i've run into this problem before. with anything that i don't like, it's often just sheer catharsis (as well as one hell of a good time) to rip and tear and maim, and call down my petty thunderings like isabella's jove. and with stuff i do like but am not "supposed to" like, defending my opinion becomes matter for discussion. but with something that moved me so much--that i think was felt so truly by its actors and its director--there's kind of nothing to say.
aside from, uh, "see it," i guess. SEE IT, YOU GLORIOUS BASTARDS!!! it's magnificent. hey, here's a thing: if kimberly elise actually gets nominated and/or wins best actress for this, my faith in the academy awards (absolutely destroyed like post-Gojiro box-tokyo by the multiple wins of Titanic) will be either partially or completely restored. she is so good. so many of the actresses are magnificent, but her part is...unbelievable, and she takes it and goes where it goes--she takes on the body of her part, which is so horrifying and amazing. of all the moments she has, i think i got first wrapped up in the way she says "i've loved you since i was fourteen" to her abusive alcoholic husband, and you see the resistance in her to what's in front of her, and some of its cause... i can't. i have no words.
of course, if she doesn't get nominated, then good bye academy forever and ever. yeah! i'm threatening the academy! i'll believe in you jagweeds even less if kimberly elise doesn't get nominated for best actress! grumble grumble...("i'll never let go, jack"--let go, kate! just let go! what the hell are you doing getting back on that boat??? another 125 minutes of my life, james cameron, really? spent on watching some people who we all know are going to die get wetter but not in a fun way? why of course i'll let you have those precious hours! what would i have spent them on, anyway? fighting cancer? writing my novel? washing the dishes? window shopping? microwaving a hot pocket and then eating only half of it? really anything else in the entire universe? why would i want to do that? curse you, academy! and your eleven wasted statuettes too!!! lord knows i am not as much of a fan of the sweet heareafter as some i could mention [really, sarah polley? you're just going to take that dude's dead wife's clothes?], but atom egoyan certainly deserved that statuette more than cameron, or whatever hung-over flunky directed kate and leo through those love scenes [love kate; love leo. hate titanic]).
oh, there was one thing. i thought the part just before the...uh, no spoilers? main event of the plot, should i say?--was overdone. i totally acknowledge that it was pretty dang difficult moment to do, but it didn't capture much of a feeling. though in a way, that kind of worked to the film's advantage, because the story even more clearly wasn't about the events of these womens' lives--it was about what they did with them, how they thought of them, and how, in the end, they turned them into poetry. it made me want to read the book. that, in this case, was the mark of a good film.
*it took a significant amount of wikipedia-ing to get that reference correct. i thought it was archduke franz ferdinand who abdicated, which had always confused me because i was like, well, what's even the point of assassinating him then? symbolic protest? don't like the hit single "take me out?" (really really dumb joke, sra.) but i was wrong. franz married a lady he shouldn't have, but he still got to be archduke. which did him a world of good. it was edward VII who abdicated. that wallis must have been something something.
...are my tastes changing?
normally, a movie taking itself this seriously with this much intensity would have made me want to curl up and die. and don't get me wrong, i did want to curl up and die. but in the good way. dear god it was so good.
my friend, though he liked it, said that if the camera had focused one more time on a woman's face, getting blair witch up-close-and-personal with her expelling facial fluids, he would have abdicated the theater, like edward VII for wallis simpson*. and though, again, i normally would agree with him, in this case, no. no. that particular camera move, i thought, was something like a strophe in a poem, a rhyme scheme: a symbol of movement in vision. besides, that camera shot provided the actresses with the correct frame in which to get their acting done. no other frame was either possible or necessary. it was beautiful, what all of them did within that painfully intimate space. i couldn't take my eyes off it. i see on imdb (never read others' reviews, sra) that people felt like the poems' readings slowed the movie down, juxtaposed too strangely with the other dialogue. but i kind of feel like expectations might be getting in the way of a really thrilling reality: those poems are beautiful. and they are said beautifully. some of them are more seamlessly interwoven than others, but even if they hadn't been acted so well, the poems would have been worth hearing, period, and i thought that all of them were acted just wonderfully.
i can't say how affective the film was--i've run into this problem before. with anything that i don't like, it's often just sheer catharsis (as well as one hell of a good time) to rip and tear and maim, and call down my petty thunderings like isabella's jove. and with stuff i do like but am not "supposed to" like, defending my opinion becomes matter for discussion. but with something that moved me so much--that i think was felt so truly by its actors and its director--there's kind of nothing to say.
aside from, uh, "see it," i guess. SEE IT, YOU GLORIOUS BASTARDS!!! it's magnificent. hey, here's a thing: if kimberly elise actually gets nominated and/or wins best actress for this, my faith in the academy awards (absolutely destroyed like post-Gojiro box-tokyo by the multiple wins of Titanic) will be either partially or completely restored. she is so good. so many of the actresses are magnificent, but her part is...unbelievable, and she takes it and goes where it goes--she takes on the body of her part, which is so horrifying and amazing. of all the moments she has, i think i got first wrapped up in the way she says "i've loved you since i was fourteen" to her abusive alcoholic husband, and you see the resistance in her to what's in front of her, and some of its cause... i can't. i have no words.
of course, if she doesn't get nominated, then good bye academy forever and ever. yeah! i'm threatening the academy! i'll believe in you jagweeds even less if kimberly elise doesn't get nominated for best actress! grumble grumble...("i'll never let go, jack"--let go, kate! just let go! what the hell are you doing getting back on that boat??? another 125 minutes of my life, james cameron, really? spent on watching some people who we all know are going to die get wetter but not in a fun way? why of course i'll let you have those precious hours! what would i have spent them on, anyway? fighting cancer? writing my novel? washing the dishes? window shopping? microwaving a hot pocket and then eating only half of it? really anything else in the entire universe? why would i want to do that? curse you, academy! and your eleven wasted statuettes too!!! lord knows i am not as much of a fan of the sweet heareafter as some i could mention [really, sarah polley? you're just going to take that dude's dead wife's clothes?], but atom egoyan certainly deserved that statuette more than cameron, or whatever hung-over flunky directed kate and leo through those love scenes [love kate; love leo. hate titanic]).
oh, there was one thing. i thought the part just before the...uh, no spoilers? main event of the plot, should i say?--was overdone. i totally acknowledge that it was pretty dang difficult moment to do, but it didn't capture much of a feeling. though in a way, that kind of worked to the film's advantage, because the story even more clearly wasn't about the events of these womens' lives--it was about what they did with them, how they thought of them, and how, in the end, they turned them into poetry. it made me want to read the book. that, in this case, was the mark of a good film.
*it took a significant amount of wikipedia-ing to get that reference correct. i thought it was archduke franz ferdinand who abdicated, which had always confused me because i was like, well, what's even the point of assassinating him then? symbolic protest? don't like the hit single "take me out?" (really really dumb joke, sra.) but i was wrong. franz married a lady he shouldn't have, but he still got to be archduke. which did him a world of good. it was edward VII who abdicated. that wallis must have been something something.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
neowolf: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Neowolf: movie to-be-starring the next generation's equivalent of tom servo, crow, and mike/joel
HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAAHAHHAHAHA.
whyyy? why the enormous but malodorous bouquet of film editorial techniques? why did the entire movie take place with a fog machine working its little heart out? obviously the characters were smokin'--their looks were pretty much all they had going for them--but did they also give off such an intense bodily heat due to their werewolfiness that they literally generated whiffs of steam in all situations?
it was ba-ha-had. the only thing it had going for it was kevin, and he died.
oh, spoiler, sorry.
also the girl band was cute, but their music was te-he-he-herrible. not as a-ha-hawful as neowolf's music, but...not...great.
and oh my god, the sheer amount of slow-mo kissing that should have been sexy but COMPLETELY WAS NOT. here's a tip, guys: kissing is awesome; bare flesh is awesome; but neither kissing nor flesh can carry your movie when they are completely in a vacuum. sort of in the same manner that amplification alone cannot make a heavy metal song much better than it already wasn't. the movie was the antithesis of awesome, to the point that even its medium-copious amounts of slow makeout and nonspecific nudity could not make it awesome. neowolf was the black hole of awesomeness, and even the awesomeness of naked people and kissing was annihilated in its suckage.
the best-worst part was definitely the relationships, which made no sense. the directions the characters gave each other came in at a very close best-worst second, however: "that hotel on the edge of town" (a direction that gay boy gives to main girl) does not appear to me to be uber-specific. it may just be me. maybe there IS only one edge to the town, and one hotel ON said edge--i don't live in santa wherever-the-heck-ica, i can't judge. i mean, this direction apparently conveyed something pretty exact to main girl, because not only did she find the hotel, but she found main guy's steam-filled hotel room without any appreciable effort. or maybe the NAME of the hotel she was directed to was "That Hotel on the Edge of Town hotel." catering to all edge-of-town stayers, The Hotel at the Edge of Town hotel is ironically situated in the main shopping area--get the comforts of center-of-town-ness without sacrificing your raucous living-town-on-the-edge vibe!
the other good-bad direction (from alpha wolf to gay guy) was something like, "turn off at the exit near to where our next show will be--you can't miss it."
yeah. bet i can.
i'll just type that one into mapquest.
mapquest is asking for a city or a zipcode.
what the hell, i'll give it one.
the first five results of looking up "the exit near to where our next show will be, san francisco, california" on mapquest are as follows:
1. New Leaf Service for Our Community
2. Church-The Nativity-Our Lord
3. EXIT 434A/DUBOCE/N
4. Our City (it's apparently located on howard)
6. Lance Shows Photographer
ok, lance shows photographer was 7th on the mapquest list, but 5 and 6 were just more freeway exits.
i know what the problem is here! i should have used googlemaps!
looking up "the exit near to where our next show will be" on googlemaps resulted in locations in oregon and tennessee. i guess the band neowolf owns a really fast tour bus. or perhaps their "next gig" was a temporal anomaly, and they were in two disparate places at the same space-time. a temporal anomaly that has had unspeakable ramifications. those ramifications being the unleashing of the movie neowolf. it is upon us, america! noooooo!! the gods of the threshold are angry!!! the spiky laughing idiot gods are released!!!!! QUICK, SOMEONE GET THE PORCUPONICON*!!!
anyway, don't watch neowolf unless you're interested in seeing a how's how of film editing--from slo-mo to oh hell no. or you're interested in a very cursory and somewhat (according to my friend) fictitious history of wolfsbane. or you want to watch action silver bullet forging! now with 47% less action for your ease of delugtition!
or you want to see actors who look, respectively, like rebecca gayheart, johnny depp, zac efron, brendan fehr, and james callis. but aren't.
*the porcuponicon is, i think, pete abrams' intellectual property, and is entirely awesome. sluggy freelance 4-eva.
i have a fever. blame the previous version of this blog post (much less lucid even than this one--which is saying something) on illness.
HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAAHAHHAHAHA.
whyyy? why the enormous but malodorous bouquet of film editorial techniques? why did the entire movie take place with a fog machine working its little heart out? obviously the characters were smokin'--their looks were pretty much all they had going for them--but did they also give off such an intense bodily heat due to their werewolfiness that they literally generated whiffs of steam in all situations?
it was ba-ha-had. the only thing it had going for it was kevin, and he died.
oh, spoiler, sorry.
also the girl band was cute, but their music was te-he-he-herrible. not as a-ha-hawful as neowolf's music, but...not...great.
and oh my god, the sheer amount of slow-mo kissing that should have been sexy but COMPLETELY WAS NOT. here's a tip, guys: kissing is awesome; bare flesh is awesome; but neither kissing nor flesh can carry your movie when they are completely in a vacuum. sort of in the same manner that amplification alone cannot make a heavy metal song much better than it already wasn't. the movie was the antithesis of awesome, to the point that even its medium-copious amounts of slow makeout and nonspecific nudity could not make it awesome. neowolf was the black hole of awesomeness, and even the awesomeness of naked people and kissing was annihilated in its suckage.
the best-worst part was definitely the relationships, which made no sense. the directions the characters gave each other came in at a very close best-worst second, however: "that hotel on the edge of town" (a direction that gay boy gives to main girl) does not appear to me to be uber-specific. it may just be me. maybe there IS only one edge to the town, and one hotel ON said edge--i don't live in santa wherever-the-heck-ica, i can't judge. i mean, this direction apparently conveyed something pretty exact to main girl, because not only did she find the hotel, but she found main guy's steam-filled hotel room without any appreciable effort. or maybe the NAME of the hotel she was directed to was "That Hotel on the Edge of Town hotel." catering to all edge-of-town stayers, The Hotel at the Edge of Town hotel is ironically situated in the main shopping area--get the comforts of center-of-town-ness without sacrificing your raucous living-town-on-the-edge vibe!
the other good-bad direction (from alpha wolf to gay guy) was something like, "turn off at the exit near to where our next show will be--you can't miss it."
yeah. bet i can.
i'll just type that one into mapquest.
mapquest is asking for a city or a zipcode.
what the hell, i'll give it one.
the first five results of looking up "the exit near to where our next show will be, san francisco, california" on mapquest are as follows:
1. New Leaf Service for Our Community
2. Church-The Nativity-Our Lord
3. EXIT 434A/DUBOCE/N
4. Our City (it's apparently located on howard)
6. Lance Shows Photographer
ok, lance shows photographer was 7th on the mapquest list, but 5 and 6 were just more freeway exits.
i know what the problem is here! i should have used googlemaps!
looking up "the exit near to where our next show will be" on googlemaps resulted in locations in oregon and tennessee. i guess the band neowolf owns a really fast tour bus. or perhaps their "next gig" was a temporal anomaly, and they were in two disparate places at the same space-time. a temporal anomaly that has had unspeakable ramifications. those ramifications being the unleashing of the movie neowolf. it is upon us, america! noooooo!! the gods of the threshold are angry!!! the spiky laughing idiot gods are released!!!!! QUICK, SOMEONE GET THE PORCUPONICON*!!!
anyway, don't watch neowolf unless you're interested in seeing a how's how of film editing--from slo-mo to oh hell no. or you're interested in a very cursory and somewhat (according to my friend) fictitious history of wolfsbane. or you want to watch action silver bullet forging! now with 47% less action for your ease of delugtition!
or you want to see actors who look, respectively, like rebecca gayheart, johnny depp, zac efron, brendan fehr, and james callis. but aren't.
*the porcuponicon is, i think, pete abrams' intellectual property, and is entirely awesome. sluggy freelance 4-eva.
i have a fever. blame the previous version of this blog post (much less lucid even than this one--which is saying something) on illness.
hannah montana: goooo, pop cultural capital! gooooo!
Hannah Montana: the Movie: movie starring miley cyrus AS hannah montana!! or hannah montana as miley cyrus...whoah.
i've never seen the show (i SWEAR! no, i really haven't! don't you trust me?), and perhaps snobbishly, i was surprised by how much i liked this movie. or maybe it's not snobbish, because of the embarrassing amount of experience i've had with disney channel-style joints, from life-size to bratz.... the point is, having had some experience with the TERRIBLE AWESOMENESS that can result from bad bad bad marketed-to-children films, hannah montana: the movie was pretty much legitimately awesome. surprising? possibly. i don't know, because i haven't seen the show (really, i haven't. i really haven't).
first of all, miley cyrus is pretty fantastic. not sure i like her voice, but i really like the way she uses it. or used it in this movie. that's not a damning with faint praise, by the way. as a singer myself (you know, sort of), i think it's much more important how you sing that what you're working with--and that's been proved time and again. callas, for example. or johnny rotten. i like both of those singers better than miley cyrus, but that's a matter of personal taste. don't like most of the songs, but the way she sang "climb" was...good. really good. and i was completely into her acting. i thought all her choices were full of character, personal and original--i felt like she was really present in what she was doing.
not having seen the show (really, i totally haven't), i don't know if that was a product of the product of hannah montana: the franchise, or a product of some combination of the script and direction. again, i'm ABSOLUTELY NOT saying that some uber-talented director managed to draw a performance from miley cyrus that she never would have been able to accomplish without him--i felt like she was totally steering her own boat on the acting end of things. but the performances were pretty universally good, which, again, because i have experience with such things, i am qualified to say, is not always the case with disney-style movies.
allow me to stretch my imagination for a minute and say that what i feel like happened was:
a., the director came upon a quasi-ready-made cast, because of the show being a longstanding sort of thing.
b., the director was like, okay, let's get into these roles!
c., the director was maybe somewhat surprised by what the cast was capable of bringing to their parts.
d., the director was like, "let's go with this. you guys are totally awesome."
does that sound condescending? i don't have as much experience with tween t.v. as i do with tween movies, so it's so very possible i'm totally wrong about the way hannah montana: the t.v. show carries itself. but, like, even the friends of the skateboard girl who blew up the cake had, like, a lot of depth to them--more depth than you'd necessarily find in the beta-female sidekick of the lead girl in a romantic comedy (oh, you know exactly what i'm talking about)--and they only got, like, five minutes of screen time, and i wasn't wild about the stuff they had to do.
maybe it's a t.v.-to-movie thing, when t.v.-to-movie is done right. like serenity. not all of the NINE main characters got as much time as one would have liked (kaylee and simon spring to mind), but there was a certain vibrancy about all of them, perhaps caused by their having had lives previous to the movie.
this also might explain why melora hardin character fell a little flat. usually i freaking ADORE melora hardin (17 again??? totally amazing performance! and that one episode of the office where she and michael go to the party together and she's kind of drunk and talking to the camera and you can see her coming apart at the seams because of the sharp-edged way she laughs--just so good), but in hannah montana: the movie, she didn't seem to be as grounded of a character as the rest of them (even billy ray cyrus, who i liked, but thought was pretty bad as an actor--again, liked what he did, just didn't think it was good acting), and it fell kind of flat. which was too bad. because she's so good.
anyway, i may not go straight to target and buy hannah montana: the sheet set or hannah montana: the waffle iron, but i really liked this movie. it was neat. it gives me faith in this miley cyrus-obsessed next generation. in my day we had britney spears, who was always pretty much a disaster (sorry if this seems harsh; i do root for her personally, and feel like fame has given her a REALLY tough time. but there are two pretty much irrefutable arguments as to her not-so-greatness: "email my heart," and crossroads. though i like her work on how i met your mother. i suppose, like everything, it's a delicate balance). whether or not you think miley cyrus has talent, she has heart, and a spark, which is more than can be said of a whole lot of cultural icons, pop or otherwise (i am talking to you, elvis costello. i am always talking to you. "i don't want to go to chelsea!" bah! get off the train!).
and if she doesn't actually have the heart or the spark, she at least knows the value of faking such things, which, again, is more than can be said for some.
but just to clarify, i personally think that she is talented and she does have heart and spark.
which is surprising in one whose face can be bought on bright pink bathroom towels.
and i think i might go rent the show now.
oh, god, the embarrassing confessions made possible by the interweb.
not sure who might find it ironic that i like hannah montana the movie but not billy eliot, and who might find it typical...and who would agree with me. thank you, by the way, one person in the universe who would agree with me. maybe we'll meet someday.
i've never seen the show (i SWEAR! no, i really haven't! don't you trust me?), and perhaps snobbishly, i was surprised by how much i liked this movie. or maybe it's not snobbish, because of the embarrassing amount of experience i've had with disney channel-style joints, from life-size to bratz.... the point is, having had some experience with the TERRIBLE AWESOMENESS that can result from bad bad bad marketed-to-children films, hannah montana: the movie was pretty much legitimately awesome. surprising? possibly. i don't know, because i haven't seen the show (really, i haven't. i really haven't).
first of all, miley cyrus is pretty fantastic. not sure i like her voice, but i really like the way she uses it. or used it in this movie. that's not a damning with faint praise, by the way. as a singer myself (you know, sort of), i think it's much more important how you sing that what you're working with--and that's been proved time and again. callas, for example. or johnny rotten. i like both of those singers better than miley cyrus, but that's a matter of personal taste. don't like most of the songs, but the way she sang "climb" was...good. really good. and i was completely into her acting. i thought all her choices were full of character, personal and original--i felt like she was really present in what she was doing.
not having seen the show (really, i totally haven't), i don't know if that was a product of the product of hannah montana: the franchise, or a product of some combination of the script and direction. again, i'm ABSOLUTELY NOT saying that some uber-talented director managed to draw a performance from miley cyrus that she never would have been able to accomplish without him--i felt like she was totally steering her own boat on the acting end of things. but the performances were pretty universally good, which, again, because i have experience with such things, i am qualified to say, is not always the case with disney-style movies.
allow me to stretch my imagination for a minute and say that what i feel like happened was:
a., the director came upon a quasi-ready-made cast, because of the show being a longstanding sort of thing.
b., the director was like, okay, let's get into these roles!
c., the director was maybe somewhat surprised by what the cast was capable of bringing to their parts.
d., the director was like, "let's go with this. you guys are totally awesome."
does that sound condescending? i don't have as much experience with tween t.v. as i do with tween movies, so it's so very possible i'm totally wrong about the way hannah montana: the t.v. show carries itself. but, like, even the friends of the skateboard girl who blew up the cake had, like, a lot of depth to them--more depth than you'd necessarily find in the beta-female sidekick of the lead girl in a romantic comedy (oh, you know exactly what i'm talking about)--and they only got, like, five minutes of screen time, and i wasn't wild about the stuff they had to do.
maybe it's a t.v.-to-movie thing, when t.v.-to-movie is done right. like serenity. not all of the NINE main characters got as much time as one would have liked (kaylee and simon spring to mind), but there was a certain vibrancy about all of them, perhaps caused by their having had lives previous to the movie.
this also might explain why melora hardin character fell a little flat. usually i freaking ADORE melora hardin (17 again??? totally amazing performance! and that one episode of the office where she and michael go to the party together and she's kind of drunk and talking to the camera and you can see her coming apart at the seams because of the sharp-edged way she laughs--just so good), but in hannah montana: the movie, she didn't seem to be as grounded of a character as the rest of them (even billy ray cyrus, who i liked, but thought was pretty bad as an actor--again, liked what he did, just didn't think it was good acting), and it fell kind of flat. which was too bad. because she's so good.
anyway, i may not go straight to target and buy hannah montana: the sheet set or hannah montana: the waffle iron, but i really liked this movie. it was neat. it gives me faith in this miley cyrus-obsessed next generation. in my day we had britney spears, who was always pretty much a disaster (sorry if this seems harsh; i do root for her personally, and feel like fame has given her a REALLY tough time. but there are two pretty much irrefutable arguments as to her not-so-greatness: "email my heart," and crossroads. though i like her work on how i met your mother. i suppose, like everything, it's a delicate balance). whether or not you think miley cyrus has talent, she has heart, and a spark, which is more than can be said of a whole lot of cultural icons, pop or otherwise (i am talking to you, elvis costello. i am always talking to you. "i don't want to go to chelsea!" bah! get off the train!).
and if she doesn't actually have the heart or the spark, she at least knows the value of faking such things, which, again, is more than can be said for some.
but just to clarify, i personally think that she is talented and she does have heart and spark.
which is surprising in one whose face can be bought on bright pink bathroom towels.
and i think i might go rent the show now.
oh, god, the embarrassing confessions made possible by the interweb.
not sure who might find it ironic that i like hannah montana the movie but not billy eliot, and who might find it typical...and who would agree with me. thank you, by the way, one person in the universe who would agree with me. maybe we'll meet someday.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
the last exorcism, or, how ELSE to give that "the creeping terror" monster indigestion
The Last Exorcism: movie starring the hand cam of a palsied man
before i go into a lot of material (which i'm going to enjoy doing, b-t-dub, so much) about the documentary style of filming a horror movie, i'm going to say what i thought of the movie. this is quite simple: i liked it. very much. i thought it was quite sympathetic, and the acting was great. NOT a "set 'em up, knock 'em down," this was more of a "when you are a linen-suited preacher looking into the void, the void is looking into your linen suited self as well" kind of thing. it was real good.
i think. i did have to skip about half of it, either through bodily absence or else by closing my eyes, because the camera WOULD NOT STAY STILL. in normal circumstances, even when i haven't eaten a whole passel of mall food and topped it off with reese's pieces, this style of cinematography isn't the kindest to my intestines. but in this case, it was just such an extra-special experience.
"bon" mots related to this second aspect of the movie are as follows (and there's nothing after these, so if you want to stop reading, go ahead):
-pumas. highly endangered. don't endanger them further by renting them from the zoo and strapping cameras to their backs and then having them film your movie for you. in fact, while you're at it, don't rent those monkeys that swing from tree to tree either. and if you're going to use elephants, don't attach the camera to the trunk.
-i am familiar with the term "jazz hands" from bring it on--it may be a legitimate dance thing, but why are you applying it to cinematography, camera guy? too busy fosse-ing to mockumentarize the horror as it deserves? are you actually IN chicago? is the director using your footage to check up on how well you've learned the dances? are you going over it now? "keep that camera hand circling nice and tight," he or she is telling you. and you did. congratulations.
-it's called a tripod. paranormal activity had one. spoiler: granted, having one got that dude killed, but spoiler: not having one doesn't do you much good either.
no, it was good. but you got to treat it like that hotbox yoga.
before i go into a lot of material (which i'm going to enjoy doing, b-t-dub, so much) about the documentary style of filming a horror movie, i'm going to say what i thought of the movie. this is quite simple: i liked it. very much. i thought it was quite sympathetic, and the acting was great. NOT a "set 'em up, knock 'em down," this was more of a "when you are a linen-suited preacher looking into the void, the void is looking into your linen suited self as well" kind of thing. it was real good.
i think. i did have to skip about half of it, either through bodily absence or else by closing my eyes, because the camera WOULD NOT STAY STILL. in normal circumstances, even when i haven't eaten a whole passel of mall food and topped it off with reese's pieces, this style of cinematography isn't the kindest to my intestines. but in this case, it was just such an extra-special experience.
"bon" mots related to this second aspect of the movie are as follows (and there's nothing after these, so if you want to stop reading, go ahead):
-pumas. highly endangered. don't endanger them further by renting them from the zoo and strapping cameras to their backs and then having them film your movie for you. in fact, while you're at it, don't rent those monkeys that swing from tree to tree either. and if you're going to use elephants, don't attach the camera to the trunk.
-i am familiar with the term "jazz hands" from bring it on--it may be a legitimate dance thing, but why are you applying it to cinematography, camera guy? too busy fosse-ing to mockumentarize the horror as it deserves? are you actually IN chicago? is the director using your footage to check up on how well you've learned the dances? are you going over it now? "keep that camera hand circling nice and tight," he or she is telling you. and you did. congratulations.
-it's called a tripod. paranormal activity had one. spoiler: granted, having one got that dude killed, but spoiler: not having one doesn't do you much good either.
no, it was good. but you got to treat it like that hotbox yoga.
fighting, or, how not to enunciate ever and still get your point across
Fighting: movie starring channing tatum as a tough guy with a sensitive side and a past, and terrence howard as a man in two pairs of pants
again, probably not selling the whole "i'm NOT an octegenarian!" aspect of my internet persona, but my main problem with this movie was that i couldn't understand about two-thirds of it. i'm not talking about the plot. there were at least flashes of insight when it came to what was going on with the plot. i'm talking about the actual lines, which for the most part i couldn't make out. the subtitles helped, but my friend and i commented almost as much on how we couldn't figure out what the heck was being said as we did on how gay everything seemed.
which, considering that it was a fighting movie, and considering the way we tend to joke in the first place, is SAYING SOMETHING.
now, i'd just like to take a step back, and point out that my reaction to fighting is just as formulaic as fighting itself. guess. go on and guess what i did and didn't like.
i'll give you a hint: the plot. its existence. do you think i found it original, or otherwise? and who do you think i'm going to blame for this? the actors, the writers, or the director?
actually, in this one instance i'd fool you. i thought the direction was pretty awesome. let's all just keep in mind that i don't know the first thing about moviemaking, but i found the camera work detailed and sympathetic, kind of like how the director to youth in revolt took an otherwise fairly revolting film and made more of it than he or she had to, except i liked fighting better than youth in revolt.
i mean, in a formula film, which i'm pretty sure fighting inarguably is, there's, you know, opportunity for good stuff to happen, and because that good stuff kind of exists in a vacuum, you do notice it pretty acutely.
terrence howard, for instance. OH MY GOD. either he IS that guy, or that was one FRACKING AMAZING performance. i can put it best like this: if a formula film about dance or street fighting or whatever is kind of like an opera seria, in which the plot takes place so that we can watch the featured subject happen (fights, dancing) as if it were arias surrounded by recit, than terrence howard's performance was a sonata in the middle of the opera. it's not like he stole the show; stealing a show is pretty unprofessional, in my opinion. it's just that his performance was so good, so detailed and eerie, sad and whole*, that it drew itself together throughout its disparate time-space in the movie. he wasn't the only one who acted beautifully. channing tatum was really really good. and brian j. white was just awesome: he would come onscreen and shower this brilliance that wasn't solely an effect of how cute he is. not solely. which, considering how cute he is, is, as usual, saying something--his acting was...yeah. awesome.
i'm kind of blathering.
i mean, the plot was pretty much nonsense--but there were layers; the idea of fighting was a metaphor, not just a descriptive thingee, so that though the sequence of events only kind of made sense, the underlying idea hanged together. it had heart, or something.
i'm glad i saw it.
no, thank YOU, america.
*ha ha, talk about your doctrine of the affections.
seriously, sra? seriously?
again, probably not selling the whole "i'm NOT an octegenarian!" aspect of my internet persona, but my main problem with this movie was that i couldn't understand about two-thirds of it. i'm not talking about the plot. there were at least flashes of insight when it came to what was going on with the plot. i'm talking about the actual lines, which for the most part i couldn't make out. the subtitles helped, but my friend and i commented almost as much on how we couldn't figure out what the heck was being said as we did on how gay everything seemed.
which, considering that it was a fighting movie, and considering the way we tend to joke in the first place, is SAYING SOMETHING.
now, i'd just like to take a step back, and point out that my reaction to fighting is just as formulaic as fighting itself. guess. go on and guess what i did and didn't like.
i'll give you a hint: the plot. its existence. do you think i found it original, or otherwise? and who do you think i'm going to blame for this? the actors, the writers, or the director?
actually, in this one instance i'd fool you. i thought the direction was pretty awesome. let's all just keep in mind that i don't know the first thing about moviemaking, but i found the camera work detailed and sympathetic, kind of like how the director to youth in revolt took an otherwise fairly revolting film and made more of it than he or she had to, except i liked fighting better than youth in revolt.
i mean, in a formula film, which i'm pretty sure fighting inarguably is, there's, you know, opportunity for good stuff to happen, and because that good stuff kind of exists in a vacuum, you do notice it pretty acutely.
terrence howard, for instance. OH MY GOD. either he IS that guy, or that was one FRACKING AMAZING performance. i can put it best like this: if a formula film about dance or street fighting or whatever is kind of like an opera seria, in which the plot takes place so that we can watch the featured subject happen (fights, dancing) as if it were arias surrounded by recit, than terrence howard's performance was a sonata in the middle of the opera. it's not like he stole the show; stealing a show is pretty unprofessional, in my opinion. it's just that his performance was so good, so detailed and eerie, sad and whole*, that it drew itself together throughout its disparate time-space in the movie. he wasn't the only one who acted beautifully. channing tatum was really really good. and brian j. white was just awesome: he would come onscreen and shower this brilliance that wasn't solely an effect of how cute he is. not solely. which, considering how cute he is, is, as usual, saying something--his acting was...yeah. awesome.
i'm kind of blathering.
i mean, the plot was pretty much nonsense--but there were layers; the idea of fighting was a metaphor, not just a descriptive thingee, so that though the sequence of events only kind of made sense, the underlying idea hanged together. it had heart, or something.
i'm glad i saw it.
no, thank YOU, america.
*ha ha, talk about your doctrine of the affections.
seriously, sra? seriously?
Monday, August 16, 2010
scott pilgrim vs. the world: sra like
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: movie, starring michael cera
i enjoyed the SHIT out of this. before making it clear that i'm not going to go much deeper into analysis of my reaction to it than what i've just stated, i should point out that i realize that "i enjoyed the SHIT out of this" is a pretty lame, nonspecific--in short, critically flabby--reaction. reasons i should be exerting more judgment on this movie are as follows:
1. i haven't finished the comic, but did read and enjoy about 4 of the books, before getting too weighted down with guilt about not returning them to the friend i'd borrowed them from. ergo my reaction should encompass various aspects of whether or not the movie represented the source material, etc.
2. i'm always an asshole, except about stuff i like. why is that? why can't i be more of an asshole about stuff i like, and less of an asshole about stuff i don't? wouldn't the world be a better place if people were more assholes about what they liked and less about what they didn't? ergo my critique should acknowledge that, even when i like something, i have an obligation to be critical of my enjoyment, so as not to employ a double standard. i owe this attempt at acuity, not just to america, but the WORLD(-orld-orld-orld).
3. i can be pretty harsh with movies that don't manage what this one did--that is, ones that are all slick bits of fluff with a lot of modern things in them (that whole clause could be read, by the eager mind, as a double entendre. the mind would have to be pretty eager, though). just cuz scott pilgrim vs. the world was a slick bit of fluff with modern stuff in it that i enjoyed the SHIT out of, doesn't mean that i get a pass in calling it out for its slick bit of modern fluffery (getting worse and worse, sra). or, at least, if i CAN give myself a pass in calling it out, i should explain WHY.
bah. screw 1 through 3. reasons why scott pilgrim vs. the world was an awesome movie and 'nuff said are as follows:
4. it managed its cameos with grace. there are some movies where i'm like, "if you shove a single 'nother pop culture movie actor reference down my throat i will scream--i promise you," which is an empty threat, but it makes me feel better. but scott pilgrim vs. the world's cameos were fun. they were kind of just there so that we could all say, "hey, there that is," and it was awesome.
5. the day after seeing it, i don't feel bad about liking it. at a distance, the plot does get a little more hole-filled, but not in a way that makes me feel duped exactly. i didn't like the ending...but i didn't like it in the theater either.
6. okay, and then the fun stuff was awesome! the cinematography and the fights and michael cera, who again i thought was wonderful, and the jokes and all the actors esp. knives chau (ellen wong, who has beautiful eyes) and MAE WHITMAN IS BACK!!! and i really liked mary elizabeth winstead's understated performance (i bet she's getting that "understated performance" bit a lot) and i freaking REALLY ENJOYED THE SOUNDTRACK which could have gone beyond wrong and did not.
it was like sin city, which i also enjoyed the shit out of, except i think i will object to having liked it less in the future than i object currently to having liked sin city.
hmm. it was like sin city, except without alexis bledel being sooooo from the south.
okay, no, i've got it. if sin city is the sin city version of, say, the adventures of food boy (watch it and you'll see what i mean--the adventures of food boy puts the "ur?" back in "disturbing"), then scott pilgrim vs. the world is the sin city version of the apartment.
oh, i said it. because nobody else has the...(uh, insert pertinent noun here...[i don't know what it is]) to do so!
i enjoyed the SHIT out of this. before making it clear that i'm not going to go much deeper into analysis of my reaction to it than what i've just stated, i should point out that i realize that "i enjoyed the SHIT out of this" is a pretty lame, nonspecific--in short, critically flabby--reaction. reasons i should be exerting more judgment on this movie are as follows:
1. i haven't finished the comic, but did read and enjoy about 4 of the books, before getting too weighted down with guilt about not returning them to the friend i'd borrowed them from. ergo my reaction should encompass various aspects of whether or not the movie represented the source material, etc.
2. i'm always an asshole, except about stuff i like. why is that? why can't i be more of an asshole about stuff i like, and less of an asshole about stuff i don't? wouldn't the world be a better place if people were more assholes about what they liked and less about what they didn't? ergo my critique should acknowledge that, even when i like something, i have an obligation to be critical of my enjoyment, so as not to employ a double standard. i owe this attempt at acuity, not just to america, but the WORLD(-orld-orld-orld).
3. i can be pretty harsh with movies that don't manage what this one did--that is, ones that are all slick bits of fluff with a lot of modern things in them (that whole clause could be read, by the eager mind, as a double entendre. the mind would have to be pretty eager, though). just cuz scott pilgrim vs. the world was a slick bit of fluff with modern stuff in it that i enjoyed the SHIT out of, doesn't mean that i get a pass in calling it out for its slick bit of modern fluffery (getting worse and worse, sra). or, at least, if i CAN give myself a pass in calling it out, i should explain WHY.
bah. screw 1 through 3. reasons why scott pilgrim vs. the world was an awesome movie and 'nuff said are as follows:
4. it managed its cameos with grace. there are some movies where i'm like, "if you shove a single 'nother pop culture movie actor reference down my throat i will scream--i promise you," which is an empty threat, but it makes me feel better. but scott pilgrim vs. the world's cameos were fun. they were kind of just there so that we could all say, "hey, there that is," and it was awesome.
5. the day after seeing it, i don't feel bad about liking it. at a distance, the plot does get a little more hole-filled, but not in a way that makes me feel duped exactly. i didn't like the ending...but i didn't like it in the theater either.
6. okay, and then the fun stuff was awesome! the cinematography and the fights and michael cera, who again i thought was wonderful, and the jokes and all the actors esp. knives chau (ellen wong, who has beautiful eyes) and MAE WHITMAN IS BACK!!! and i really liked mary elizabeth winstead's understated performance (i bet she's getting that "understated performance" bit a lot) and i freaking REALLY ENJOYED THE SOUNDTRACK which could have gone beyond wrong and did not.
it was like sin city, which i also enjoyed the shit out of, except i think i will object to having liked it less in the future than i object currently to having liked sin city.
hmm. it was like sin city, except without alexis bledel being sooooo from the south.
okay, no, i've got it. if sin city is the sin city version of, say, the adventures of food boy (watch it and you'll see what i mean--the adventures of food boy puts the "ur?" back in "disturbing"), then scott pilgrim vs. the world is the sin city version of the apartment.
oh, i said it. because nobody else has the...(uh, insert pertinent noun here...[i don't know what it is]) to do so!
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