Category: (by verdict)

To the list of things about which I will mutter angrily to my ingrate son, in my dotage, from the recline of my pseudo-lazyboy, in the grim home where he’s placed me, add

The Pink Panther 2. It makes you kind of fond for the days when Blake Edwards was trying to squeeze a last few dollars out of Peter Sellers’ corpse with that guy from “Soap.”

Families and the work of genre

I’m mainly putting a placeholder here, and a little shout of joy at two recent, wonderful film experiences — both of which I want to write more about, and around each/both of which I have been thinking through the ways certain hard-nosed depictions of Grim family emotions and realities are teased out through certain escapist genre conventions. But I don’t have time, nor have I really gotten my head around this analysis. So, for the moment, I’ll say:

—Coraline is the best children’s film in years, which may be faint praise, but add this: it’s also one of the best films I’ve seen in some time, rich in glorious technique and baroque narrative detail and the flush of emotions (fear, despair, joy, awe) of the best fairy tales. The 3d version is … well, stunning, but I think I’d have loved the film regardless.

–So different on the surface–in technique, theme, intended audience–that it might seem like a wholly different medium, Frozen River shows up two of the best performances from last year (Melissa Leo and Misty Upham) in a tale that begins in the familiar backroads small-town deadends of any number of great film noirs. It plays a little like dirty realism, hung on a suspense-thriller hook–and it’s just wonderful, and heartbreaking, in so many ways.

See ’em both. I’d really like to talk about them.

george romero’s sleepless in seattle

i learned from this interesting interview/”random roles” with illeana douglas on the onion’s av-club that martin scorsese was originally slated to direct schindler’s list while spielberg was supposed to direct the remake of cape fear. i have to say i can’t imagine what either would have looked like, but i’m pretty sure one would have been better and the other worse.

now i’m trying to come up with other incongruous directorial switcheroos (both directors have to be famous and interesting in their own right, and the films have to be notable as well, and roughly from the same time-period).

john waters, annie hall/woody allen, pink flamingos
werner herzog, tootsie/sydney pollack, fitzcarraldo
pasolini, harold and maude/ hal ashby,salo
john hughes, natural born killers/oliver stone, ferris bueller’s day off

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.