To save others from what I endured:
Don’t Meet the Fockers. Even with Dustin Hoffman’s enthusiasm, an exercise in apathy. Imagine if Bresson made a Hollywood comedy, then got drunk and let his monkey direct.
Stay away from R-Point, which is a war-slash-ghost movie from Korea. A troop ends up in the middle of no-man’s-land, and so do viewers. There’s no good violence–nothing lopped off, only a few stray bullets and carefully-sprinkled blood (yawn)–and the pallid female ghost with long unwashed hair, required for all horror films made in Asia these days, doesn’t even hunch over or crawl on the floor.
Did you imagine Meet the Fockers would be anything else but monkey business?
Neil Gaiman’s role notwithstanding, don’t bother with MirrorMask either. Kind of a poor man’s Labyrinth with a kaleidoscopically surrealistic mise-en-scene (though the CGI is substandard). Actually, I found this film to be rather boring and inconsequential BUT it made me think about the lack of content-appropriate films for teenagers. I might have really liked this film 29 years ago when I was fourteen. Do they make films for teenagers anymore (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants anyone)? Did they ever? Certainly there are plenty of films about teenagers but the majority of those seem to be either nostalgic reveries or full-blown adult narratives with teenage characters. Chris you have a teenager. Does one move directly from Harry Potter to Larry Clark’s Kids or is the jump one from Pixar to Michael Bay and the Wachowski Brothers? What lies between?
Do they make movies for anyone but teenagers? Just kidding–I get your point.
Um, Fockers, yes. I have this option right now of going in and “editing” everyone’s recent comments, and I was tempted to go in to yours and write an ode to the sentimental glories of the film, passing it off as your own take on that crap film. But I avoided the temptation. I got Fockers free from the library. I find myself jealously protecting my Netflix queue, trying to get Hollywood dross or Irish whimsy from the library, saving my queue for the precious precious. But I’m not sure I “saved” much by wasting time with the movie, even free. And then I got R-Point from the precious, and so paid for shit in that instance. Alas.
(i’ve moved all the edit/profile conversation to the tech updates and glitches discussion)
mike, i watched parts of fockers over a few sessions on ondemand. it is horrible, yes, but doesn;t seeing hoffman and deniro demean themselves so deeply exert a kind of weird fascination? how much lower can deniro go? when does he show up in a straight to dvd american pie flick?
american history x. why was there so much fuss about this movie when it came out? a completely unconvincing cartoon, though compelling enough. worth watching finally only for parts of norton’s performance and most of furlong’s.
Yeah, Norton is good in that. It’s also notable b/c the director, Tony Kaye, is crazy. He’s been unable to finish another film since this one and it’s rumored that Norton re-edited the film himself. At the time, it was assumed Norton wanted to put his character in a better light, but in actuality he might have saved a complete disaster of a film.
After that, Kaye demanded that his name be changed in the credits to Humpty Dumpty, which didn’t happen, so he sued them. He also apparently worked for a year on a film about an obnoxious guy in a lobster suit.
Short takes:
Speaking of Irish whimsy (reynolds), I watched Philadelphia, Here I Come last night, a nice adaptation of a not-so-great play by Brian Friel. Wondering if you’ve seen it.
Likey: V for Vendetta. I’m still mulling it over, so I may post a long take comment later.
Likey: Strangers with Candy. What made it more fun was that no one in the theater was laughing.
And speaking of American History X. What’s up with Elliot Gould? A totally puzzling performance. I was especially disturbed by the dinner table scene, when Derek goes off. On Gould’s face, was that smugness or sadness? I couldn’t tell. Shouldn’t we be able to tell? Derek’s big breakthrough comes when he shares some laughter with an African American inmate during laundry chores. Nice idea, but not convincing.
Hey, since we’re back on this thread:
I haven’t seen the Friel adaptation, but I’ll tell Kris, with trepidation (as all things Irish are pushed up my queue, displacing obvious better choices like Doom).
I watched Dead Man’s Shoes, a grim revengers’ tale with Paddy Considine ripping up some lowlifes in a small Midlands town. Shane Meadows does some interesting stuff as a filmmaker, and the film has many lovely moments. Even as it hews so (too) closely to the conventions of Get-Carter-esque vengeance and violence, there are some great bits where the thugs are just noodling around in their respective grungy flats, shooting the shit, riffling through porn, lifting weights (with cigarettes dangling from their mouths). And Considine gets to expunge all the leftover Irish whimsy from In America, channeling some pure and frightening rage. He’s good. But, all told, there’s not much new here, and it gets kind of stuck between satisfying the genre conventions and seeking some alt-art-movie existentialism.