we like to watch

just saw nelson. without gosling, epps, some cool photography, and the occasional good lines, this would be offensive, all those stereotypes lined up like pins and all. as it is, it’s watchable. gosling is an incredibly charismatic actor. i saw him for the first time a few days ago in fracture, which held mostly because of him. he seems to have been born in front of the camera. i wonder, though, if he ever acts without all those twitches. in fracture the twitching was even worse than in nelson, even though his character was as sober and clean as a whistle.

So, someone came up with a movie-studio version of those fantasy-sports games: pick your summer movie slate, compete on profits, etc. I started a league which can be found here, called “Watchers.” The password to join is “arnabpoop”.

Oh: I sent an email to almost everyone, except Sunhee and Michael, for neither of whom I have an email address. But–join! Others? (Lurkers? All welcome.)

Nothing special, but a real blast. From the same team that brought us the wonderful Shaun of the Dead, this movie parodies cop action movies, repeatedly name-checking Bad Boys, Die Hard, and Point Break. These are not difficult to parody, but Hot Fuzz does it in a fresh, and uproariously funny way. A much smarter, funnier Reno 911. Supercop Nicholas Angel is sent to a bucolic English village as punishment for showing up his colleagues in the London police. Pretty soon the body count is on the rise, and the movie becomes ever more manic until it climaxes in a joyfully excessive 20 minutes shoot ’em up. Lots and lots of fun.

First out of the box is Spiderman 3. It is by no means the best of the three, but this is certainly very enjoyable, and it shows that Raimi has stayed largely true to his vision of Spiderman. This is long (135 minutes), and even more talky than its predecessors. There is endless discussion of doing the right thing, of always having a choice, of being true to oneself, and saintly Aunt May is finally beginning to grate on me. Both Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst are too whinny and self-absorbed to really enjoy watching (unlike both the earlier movies). Maguire has become the Frodo Baggins of this franchise: he sucks the life out of it whenever he is out of costume.

But the movie succeeds because of the villains: they are all wonderful, and there is enough ambivalence and complexity about their characters that they never become cartoonish (if one can say that as a positive thing about a movie based on a comic book). James Franco returns in the Green Goblin role, and does a great job of managing his conflicting impulses. There is a great moment when he winks at Peter Parker and his entire face changes. He becomes the spine of the movie. Then Thomas Haden Church portrays Sandman, and again every scene with him conveys a tragic sense of despair. Finally we have Topher Grace as photographer and slime villain. He mostly provides comic relief, but he is so much more lifelike than Maguire that he steals every scene that they are in together.

The action sequences are astonishing, and worth whatever the CGI budget was. An aerial chase with the Goblin is particularly good. Finally, Raimi’s old pal from the Evil Dead franchise, Bruce Campbell, has a hysterical scene as a French maitre d’. It is played strictly for laughs, and I strongly recommend that you try to watch it in a French movie theater to see how the French react.

I had no idea that The Wicker Man was a comedy.

The plot is straightforward. The sun is dying and a mission is sent to drop a giant “solar” bomb on/in the sun to reignite it. The crew of 8 are meant to detach from the bomb and return home. An earlier mission (the spacecraft nicely called Icarus) failed for reasons unknown, and now the Icarus II is hoping to succeed. It will not be a spoiler to say that pretty much everything goes wrong. The cast includes Michelle Yeoh and Cillian Murphy and nobody else I have heard of.

I recommend this, but not as much as I had hoped. It is a Danny Boyle film, and I had hoped for something a little different out of a genre movie, just as Trainspotting and 28 Days Later offered a twist on our expectations, and also a little of Boyle’s dark humor. Instead we get a highly competent, and certainly gripping (I have no nails left), but otherwise entirely conventional sci-fi disaster movie: The Core made by adults who understand how to craft a movie. Everything takes a back seat to the special effects, which are terrific. The psychological drama of the crew falling apart and contemplating death doesn’t appear to concern Boyle at all, which is lucky because only Yeoh and Murphy appear able to act. The sun deserved a place in the credits, as there is wonderful use of light — blinding light — as the crew expose themselves to the sun voluntarily and involuntarily. Initially, it looks as though Boyle is offering an homage to 2001, as the dialogue is sparse and we are treated to endless shots of the spacecraft and its “payload.” But while Kubrick offered us a sedate, near silent, antiseptic future, Boyle’s is just plain loud, and every contemplative moment is displaced by the crash of machinery or drums and bass on the soundtrack. Near the end Boyle introduces an almost supernatural figure, which I think was unnecessary and a cheap plot device.

I have made this sound worse than it is. I just had high expectations. It is a pleasure to see a genre movie executed this well, but he could have done more.

Fun fun fun. I can’t remember when I’ve had more fun at the movies. I love old American International exploitation flicks, and love the trailers for those movies even more, since the movies themselves could frequently be a bore, waiting for the killings or flash of breasts or car crashes. There’s a big helping of both trailers and waiting-for-action going on here. This has been written about to death everywhere of course, which is maybe why no one is bothering here. (If only Bakunin had written about it, then at least maybe John would have deemed it worthy of a mention.) A little too much reliance on Rose McGowan throughout, but the Josh Brolin / Marley Shelton bits made up for it. Continue reading Grindhouse / ATHF