Month: January 2009

Possible one-word reviews for RocknRolla

Tripe. Shite. Crap. Crockoshitta. Blusterfest. Inert. Exasperilla. Tedious. Arrhythmic. Yawn-inducing. Dull. Thumping-dickfest. Fun [and here, by using the term “fun,” I explicitly mean not fun]. Not-awful.

This film was about three-and-a-half hours long, and it moved like a steam train going up a very steep, very long hill. It had all these recognizable elements of a fun movie, and yet rather brilliantly cooked them together into a not-fun movie. I suppose it’s not dreadful. That’s about as effusive as I’m gonna get.

To counteract its impact on my brain, I watched two episodes of Steve Coogan’s wonderful “Saxondale,” about an aging ex-roadie now working as an exterminator in one of Britain’s trademark brick-flat shopping-mall dead-end small cities (cf. Slough). Coogan is meaner and funnier than any seven of Ritchie’s characters, and his show is a far slyer send-up of masculine posturing, and he even deploys guns and violence (albeit with pigeons and animal-rights protesters) more pleasurably. Skip Rolla and head immediately to “Saxondale.”

noise

this is the 2007 aussie movie that won a ton of aussie awards and that one can watch “instantly” on netflix if one has fast internet access (michael, are you still cut off from the world?). i’ve been away from movies and tv shows for a long time because i developed a strange phobia towards live screens — they weren’t speaking to me or telling me what to do or anything like that, just making me very nervous. but now i’m back, and i can watch pretty much anything except sci-fi, which proves to me that my strange phobia had no relation whatsoever to content, as i always claimed. so i’ll write about this movie out of sheer happiness and relief at my return to the pleasures of cinema. Continue reading noise

Appaloosa

There seems to be a new yearly ritual wherein a Western is released and critics crow about its return to basics. I’ll give Appaloosa some backhanded props: it is not particularly ambitious about genre reinvention, or even reinvigoration. It very well could have been made on a backlot in 1952, and it would now play twice yearly on TCM, with little fanfare, after a brief pointless but information-dense introduction by whatever grey-haired guy they have doing the introductions now.

But I’d not call this a signal of its competence, just its conventionality. Continue reading Appaloosa

Ways to pass a snow day

So what do you do when it is bitterly cold out, your kids have a snow day, and you can’t be bothered to finish that conference paper? Well, going to watch Paul Blart: Mall Cop would be a mistake. Of course, I didn’t expect much, but the trailer looked amusing and I thought at least the kids would enjoy it. No. Every funny moment is in the trailer, and even those are less funny in the movie. It felt too long at 95 minutes. It never got beyond the obvious visual money shots. I did like Keir O’Donnell as Christian Slater.

“He used my great-grand-dad’s whoring spurs….

….Apparently whores back then were kind of logy. From all the tuberculosis.”

Frisky Dingo initially began, as I noted here, as a documentary about supervillain Killface’s attempts to destroy humanity. But things took a turn at season’s end: the super-annihilator machine’s couplers melted, and instead of driving the earth into the sun, the earth was simply moved about three feet further from the sun. (Oops — SPOILER.) Stunned by this event but not so stunned as to lose his tremendous, talon-footed agility, Killface ran for president. Season two–Behold a Dark Horse–is a documentary about his campaign, his opponent Xander Crews, and the various political functionaries attendant. And little baby penguin Lamont. It is the finest political documentary ever filmed.

Gorgeous Degradation

It’s hard to like a film about a broken-down, narcissistic head-banger with a special gift for sentimentalism and self-destruction. Having the character played by Mickey Rourke doesn’t make it any easier. I’ve always thought of Rourke as something of an oddball, and Darren Aronofsky has provided him the perfect character to both rehabilitate and reify his superfreaky aura. The first forty minutes of The Wrestler burn past with a searing, nearly anthropological furor. I have to admit I was initially enthralled by this portrait of a sub-culture that would ordinarily leave me more than cold. The writing is lean, raw and intense, the acting honest and risky, and Aronofsky utilizes hand held cameras to give the film a DIY, Def Leppard-worthy, visual punch. Shortly thereafter the film settles into something more recognizable and less surprising, but that’s to be expected I guess. Rourke is good, maybe even great. Marisa Tomei is also really good.

Curious Indeed

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a stunning technical achievement in filmmaking. In some ways it is a valentine to the grand pleasures of movie making, but director David Fincher has put his computers to use on a haunting, emotionally resonant, and deeply satisfying story full of heart and soul and loss and love. It’s a movie star movie—a sweeping, epic, Hollywood romance—and one of my favorite films of the year. Continue reading Curious Indeed