Category: (by verdict)

Face Down, Ass Up

Hey! I know you’ve been missing me terribly here, but the last movie we saw was The International. I have nothing interesting to say about it.

I thought this would be the best place to pose this question because I don’t have an e-mail address for Mauer, and I know Arnab and Reynolds at least will be able to help too. It’s a weird request that is guaranteed to bring down the tone of the blog. But it’s cultural if not related to film.

My dad has asked me to create a CD of “butt songs.” Continue reading Face Down, Ass Up

The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse

I just liked the title of that film. Not enough to rent, but I’d probably enjoy it more than the disappointing Ricky Gervais stand-up special. One neat bit, but mostly it seemed a little too planned and imitative. (I read an interview recently where he talked about his admiration for Louis C.K. I’d say grab some of LCK’s stuff.)

But the mash-up western horror The Burrowers is a helluva good little b-movie — atmospheric, carefully attentive to its standing in both genres, and with a smart, sly cast (and generally strong, if very lo-fi direction). It runs some very nice riffs on the captivity narrative, on the racism of the Western, but I don’t want to oversell–it’s mostly concerned with creepy, clever, carefully-paced fun. Two or three plot shifts caught me offguard, and it was well- and (for a great change) under-written. I suppose noting that it’s about creatures climbing out of the ground to grab humans will throw most of y’all off the scent, but it is well worth a gamble (and not too gory/scary).

I’ve Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t’aime)

I can’t find a reference to this movie on the blog, but it is the kind of title that the search function does not easily find. So apologies if there is already a thread. The plot is pretty straightforward: Juliette (Kristen Scott Thomas) is released from prison having served fifteen years for the murder of her six-year old son. She goes to live with her younger sister (who was barely a teenager when she was imprisoned), the sister’s husband and their two adopted Vietnamese children. At first, Juliette is practically catatonic, affectless most of the time, but ready to snap at people who tiptoe around her situation or use polite euphemisms (“‘Inside’? It’s called prison.”). The great bulk of the movie traces the slow thaw and return to normality of Juliette, as people come to terms with her, and she finds herself once again able to love: her nieces, her sister, a man. Continue reading I’ve Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t’aime)

Meet Me at the Santa Monica Pier?

The Society for Cinema and Media Studies will be holding their 2010 conference in Los Angeles. The conference theme is as follows: “SCMS at 50/LA: Archiving the Future/Mobilizing the Past.” I’m not really sure what that means, but I never really do. A close look at the conference program for 2008 suggests a fairly broad array of topics and approaches. Wouldn’t it be fun to put together a panel? I’m sure we could find some way to unite our interests. I delivered a paper at their 2003 Minneapolis conference, but I am not an active member. Anybody know more? Anybody interested?

doubt

i don’t see anyone having posted on this (did i miss it? i don’t think so), and since it’s replete with Themes that Interest Me, i’ll give it a couple of lines. simon and i agreed it wasn’t a good movie, mostly because it was the development of a thesis, not a movie. but the thesis is interesting, and the topic in general is interesting, and philip seymour hoffman is genuinely great. i think the playwright wanted to address the sex abuse scandal in a dramatic/theological light, bringing both psychological and Continue reading doubt

Art of the puzzle

Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes has great patience in setting up its jigsawed genre workout: we watch a bald, schlumpy, bulbous-nosed, non-hero-type fellow return to a vacation home, noodle about trying to nap, catch a passing glimpse through his binoculars of a naked woman, and wander into a loopy, neatly-closed loop of a time-travel plot. The dreamlike quality of the first thirty minutes had me enthralled: each crazy event led to the next, and our hero Hector never stops to think through what X and Y means–he just sees X, and assumes that therefore Y must follow. (If we ever stop to think too substantively about the choices most characters are making, I think the whole thing fizzles. But, like a dream, if you just keep wandering along, it makes perfect sense.)

Quite enjoyable. I think Primer was nuttier and neater, but also far knottier, and Timecrimes is remarkably lucid if utterly improbable in its plotting. But I urge you to rent it so that you can pull up from the extras a short film by Vigalondo called “7:35 in the Morning,” which works a small miracle on the improbability of song-and-dance numbers. A woman wanders into a cafe for breakfast, where the regulars fail to respond to her greeting and seem strangely quiet…. and then a man bursts from behind a pillar singing the title song, to which everyone in the joint joins. The reason for such behavior neatly reframes our engagement with the musical number, teases out the creepy and uncanny tone underlying most musical numbers — and it’s funny, smart, and well-shot. Great little short.

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.