Month: March 2009

Tell Everyone

to skip Tell No One, or at the very least ratchet down the hype and lower–no, more than lower: shove to the floor–your expectations. Imagine a more gallic Ron Howard taking a mediocre thriller, pumping it full of old r&b standards, long shots of hero doctor widower mooning about his allegedly-dead wife, scissoring the timeline so that plot revelations seem startling (when, in any kind of cold expository light, they are pretty damn loony). This is a cheesy late-night cable thriller with a personality disorder, mistakenly assuming it’s a vivid use of thriller filler as fodder for more serious explorations of mood, reveries about love, leisurely paced to please the NPR crowd.

I probably hated this more than it deserved, but… to quote Chris Howell, fuck I hate the middlebrow. At the 1:35 mark I gave up, couldn’t even bring myself to trudge through another 35 minutes of suspense just to get the painfully ludicrous exposition I had already mostly pieced together.

Four sweater vests!

I’m tempted to write down any number of great lines, or even to upload me humming some of the catchy verses — but we haven’t got the technology. Yet.

Go rent Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Outstanding entertainment — funny, and smart, and (damn!) at the end even surprisingly moving. It’s short, and began life as three acts of an online film, but don’t hold that against Joss Whedon’s genius here, against Neil Patrick Harris’ perfection as the eponymous Doctor, against the criminally-undervalued Nathan Fillion yet again showing why we should scratch our heads that the guy isn’t in many more films than insert-action-comedy-lead here.

The Class

I need to think more–and have more time to try to compose some kind of response to–Laurent Cantet’s The Class, but it is the best film I’ve seen in some while, even following my great experience the other evening with Happy-Go-Lucky. I could have watched the film for hours; it felt like we’d fallen into a world, and in its short running time the film worked the kind of wondrous challenging representation of the experience of public education undertaken over the course of the whole of season 4 in “The Wire.” (I actually have no idea how long the film was, as I felt both lost in it for some while and surprised/saddened as it came to a too-fast close.)

The first great film I’ve seen this year. And I guess actually better than anything I saw last year, to boot.

Gomorra

I (sort of) enjoyed this film, directed by Matteo Garrone and based upon the book by Roberto Saviano–the much talked about exposé of organized crime in Naples. The film adopts the multi-plot structure. The story of a war between two factions within the Camorra (hence the title–in Italian, the C is soft like a G) is told from five perspectives. One is of a grocery delivery boy named Totò. He manages to work his way into one of the factions by returning a gun and some cocaine that was dropped by a gangster during a police chase. Another is of Pasquale, a tailor who makes high fashion knock-offs (one of the big sources of cash for the Camorra) who then sells his talent to a rival, a Chinese-Italian who runs a factory making even cheaper high fashion knock-offs. Continue reading Gomorra

Battle in Seattle

A decade after the events that gave us the name took place, along comes this deeply disappointing movie. Battle in Seattle is a fictional account of four days at the heart of the anti-WTO protests. It is, to some extent, a vanity project of Charlize Theron and her husband, Stuart Townsend, who wrote and directed the movie. There is an aspiration to be something like the wonderful Bloody Sunday, a docudrama that shows both sides (or multiple sides) of a dispute in a gritty street-level drama. Continue reading Battle in Seattle

The Mighty Boosh

This might be my favorite British TV show since The League of Gentlemen (Not that I’ve seen a lot since then. Though Peep Show was funny).
It’s going to start running on Comedy Central in April, and like League it also came from a live stage show and radio program. It’s somewhat akin to Flight of the Conchords since there are songs, and it focuses on a duo, one more handsome than the other. Continue reading The Mighty Boosh

What needs to be done

Is anyone else watching 24 these days? Does it strike you that it plays to a right wing desire to not only feel self-righteous about taking the necessary “harsh” measures but to feel martyred as well (weak people don’t understand; the most noble man is victimized, etc.)? In the last episode it even includes a visit by Jon Voight (whose movies get worse the further right he goes?).

Bad Late Night Decisions

One of my favorite moments from Family Guy is when Peter Griffin beats Jimmy Fallon nearly to death for constantly laughing and smirking at his own jokes.  Remember those appalling bits with Horatio Sanz, another guy whose ability to amuse himself far outstripped any talent? Now the guy gets a late night gig, while Conan, a desperately bad interviewer, gets bumped up to 11:30. What goes on in a TV programmer’s mind?  Will Triumph be on the tonight show or does he skew too nasty?