Amber Tamblyn and W.B. Yeats

"Book Inscription for 1/2 of the Coen Brothers"

Dear Mr. Ethan Coen,

In the interest of time and saving paper
here's something to read while you're on the crapper--

You're the shit.

Up yours truly,
Amber Tamblyn

From "Sailing to Byzantium"

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

The Singles Ward

Because "Mormon" is already a tag, I figured I might as well review The Singles Ward, which I watched with no small amount of fascination. The Singles Ward is one in a series of Mormon comedies made by two members of the Church of Latter Day Saints. The plot follows Johnathan Jordon, idealistic young Mormon who come home one day to find his wife with beer in the fridge, rock on the radio, and a cigarette in her mouth. She leaves him that day, and Jordon is reassigned to his local singles ward (as opposed to the family ward), a humiliation he can't take. He leaves the church and becomes a stand up comedian, which he pursues until he meets another young Mormon woman who brings him back to faith and good behavior.

The movie charts Johnathan's plunge into sin as only a movie made by the devote could. It starts perilously with his purchase of soda, follows him to a blockbuster where he rents all the Die Hard movies, and ends with him flirting at a bar with a woman who is definitely interested in having sex with him (they don't, but...the offer was there). Requiem for a Dream this is not. The filmmakers are sort of like my Amish family. They definitely know sin is out there, but they've definitely never seen it. They describe it with innocence and in hushed tones.

The movie makes a bizarre attempt to emulate the colorful youth / college films of the 80s. We have all the stereotypes: the great looking stars, the crazed goofball who can't stop mentioning how he dropped his car off a cliff, the inseparable band of lovable geeks, etc. etc. etc., all the way down to the final text snippets revealing what shocking/touching/humorous futures await our characters beyond the movie's plot. It takes a truly kind heart to tell oneself that there can be any jokes or surprises here. Everyone marries. Everyone has children. Everyone serves with honor at whatever mission site the church designates.

There is one sort of sad scene in the movie, where Johnathan realizes that his new squeaky clean act won't serve him on the college stand-up circuit. In fact, faith renders his professional life pretty much impossible. I'm not sure the filmmakers ever really took this moment to heart, as the movie ends somewhat optimistically "John and Cammie moved to California, where she became a mother, and he became a screenwriter." I assume John is the author of this very film, and it's hard to imagine that the Mormon movie market can support a family. In a way, it explains why there is a need for distinctly Mormon cinema when we already have a G rating system. If Mormons don't support Mormon screenwriters, who will? Even G movie stars drink Mr. Pibb, a much maligned figure in the singles ward. [Photo: Oh how zany! Has ever such a motley crew been so pious?]

The Fantastic Mr. Fox

It's a Wes Anderson movie all the way: quirky, mid-life-crisis-y, a fable. It doesn't really feel like a movie, and it has some charming moments. The adaptation is not terribly faithful, but if you can get past that and the emphasis on Man Malaise I think it's pretty fun. Plus, it's not computer animation.

I know we said Bright Star was the clear craft Oscar for this year, but I need a nod to The Fantastic Mr. Fox. There are some cute little knits on those animals:

Yup. Pretty cute. Also, don't you want to pet their small heads? I do. And also, there's a pretty funny bit with a wolf.*

I have a theory that a midlife crisis movie, plus a book adaptation, plus the unexpected use of George Clooney can only mean one thing: Wes Anderson wants to be a Coen. What could this mean for hipster film? We'll have to wait and see.

*A lot of bloggers have been calling the wolf gag racist. I'm normally the first to shriek "racism!" at movies, but I didn't get that at all here. I vote not racist, but if it is, then it only further supports my Coen theory.

A Serious Man

Kristin and I just watched A Serious Man with some degree of enjoyment. I equivocate because I still haven't really thought the film through (I'm somewhere about the first time Larry Gopnick calls Columbia Records Album of the Month Club). However, most of the film is what I've come to expect from the Coen Brothers, but it did get Kristin and I thinking about putting together a film retrospective. Here's my tentative line-up. If you notice something clever about a combination, of course it was my first thought.

1. Burn After Reading and A Serious Man
2. Intolerable Cruelty and Raising Arizona
3. Big Lebowski and No Country for Old Men
4. Barton Fink and O Brother, Where Art Thou?
5. The Hudsucker Proxy and The Man Who Wasn't There
6. Blood Simple and Fargo
7. Miller's Crossing

I hope Kristin will not be upset that I broke up the big night featuring our favorite films back to back (Fargo, Miller's Crossing). I thought it was important to remember that the Coens are relevant (and still making movies) in large part because of Frances McDormand. Forgive me.

On to the list. The first night consists of the latest films, which I think are the same film or at least the same ending. The second night will be a date night, third night - westerns, the fourth night - a battle of Johns (Turturro and Goodman), and the fifth night on the dangers of industry. The sixth night will be all about Frances and the final night will be my favorite of bunch.

Submit your restrospective and let the 'dualing' begin...


Oh, and in honor of having finished teaching Russian film for the quarter, I will include a review for A Serious Man: Many movies deal with problems of society and families and this is interesting in A Serious Man.

Zombieland

The walking dead should walk slowly. They should not run. Think of these corpses, raised from slumber by some unknown and incomprehensible force. They are new to this form of locomotion, and their muscles do not respond as expected. Wanton disregard for their own well-being has, in many if not most cases, caused them to sustain multiple injuries. Even if they feel no pain (and “zombies” do not feel pain in the way we do, although they may feel something), they cannot run on a broken ankle, or a torn achilles. Poor zombies.

But it seems zombies have been working out. More and more, the undead are portrayed as faster and stronger than the living humans they subsist on. These fast-moving flesh eaters can be scary in their own way, but they are more like the old monsters: werewolves, or yetis, or lions and tigers and bears. They are predators, and we can escape them through our superior wits and technology, but we cannot outrun them, because they are essentially the same beasts we have feared since we first stood up on two legs. Zombieland’s undead are decidedly in this latter category, the athletic undead.

What makes the living dead of the classic Night of the Living Dead scary is not simply the fact that have been reanimated. Nor is it their modified cannibalism (Question: is it technically cannibalism when they eat only the flesh of living humans and never each other?), although the images of vacant-eyed undead masticating arm muscle certainly produce some visceral reaction. The truly frightening—and new—thing about Romero’s undead comes from their weakness, the fact that individual zombies are so easily eluded or defeated. It does not matter that you can outrun the shambling corpse in the graveyard—and you certainly can—because there will be another near the car, or behind a tree, or looming up out of the darkness in your front yard. There will always be another.

That Zombieland features zombies who run is a failure not of Zombieland itself, but of the entire zombie genre to which it is a response. Zombieland is a movie about zombie movies, and in the cultural contest between high-speed, Danny-Boyle—style undead flesh-eaters and the lumbering living dead of Night etc, it is pretty clear that the scarier and more interesting slow zombies have already lost. Zombieland is the proof, because Zombieland exists in a cultural setting where an explanation of the plague—what caused it, how it spread, where it started—is almost irrelevant, and certainly unnecessary. Everyone knows what a zombie is.

Zombieland is not a bad movie. Every aspect of the film does what it means to do; it is funny, romantic, gory, smart. The performances are strong, especially one awesome (and often spoiled, but far be it from me…) cameo. Here is Jesse Eisenberg, still playing the same thoughtful, neurotic descendant of some hybrid of Woody Allen and Holden Caulfield that he has been playing since he was tiny (and here I am again, sort of liking him in spite of the fact that I was sure I had heard enough stories about how hard it is to be a smart, introspective, adolescent white boy growing up in middle America). And here is Abigail Breslin, who no longer looks like a little girl, trading one-liners with Woody Harrelson.

Like in the superior Shaun of the Dead, the zombies in Zombieland are mere background, in this case for a family road-trip action comedy (sort of like a National Lampoon’s Summer Vacation, with automatic weapons). Unlike Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland has no rough edges. It is slick and fast and full of self-confidence. Maybe that is the difference between the zombie movies Zombieland is responding to and the Romero family of zombie movies (which SotD is about); Romero gleefully explores a crazy idea, while the fast-zombie movies are sardonic and a little smug, and their underlying idea is ultimately safe.

For lovers of Night of the Living Dead, there is something sad about Zombieland. It feels like a nail in the coffin of the thing Romero invented, which was maybe the first new thing in horror in a century. The shambling, slack-jawed, vacant-eyed animated corpse that feeds on the flesh of the living, that can be killed with a shotgun blast or a good solid blow to the head, that can be outrun by any child, but can never be defeated because the one thing this threat requires to keep coming is the one thing we will never stop providing: more corpses.

Double Feature: Cache and Big Bang Love Juvenile A

We paired these two coincidentally, but the pairing really worked for me (it worked even more so for BBLJA, the far superior film).

Cache

Cache follows an upper class French couple and their son as some unnamed person sends them hours of video tape of their house and then menacing drawings of a child vomiting blood and a decapitated chicken. The movie’s main gimmick happens immediately: it’s never clear whether you watching the movie, or the taped footage the couple receives in the mail. This narrative trick has two fatal flaws:

1. This is a surprising and unsettling device, drawing attention to the voyeuristic nature of both fictional and documentary film footage, exactly once. Not repeatedly.

2. In order to achieve this ambiguity the director was forced to fill the film with endless boring street scenes.

After the first unexpected rewind, the director did nothing interesting with the device. There was no moment where this drastically affected the plot, my sense of time, or my urgent desire to see an event unfold in real time, as opposed to second hand footage. This might be a great approach to a horror film, where revealing a scene to be previously shot and in the process of replay might mean something devastating for my ability to observe something horrifying as it unfolds (or thwart my hope for a better ending). Here it’s boring. Endless hours of film of a man’s home and life are mind numbing, no matter how dysfunctional you write his family. And the unsettling sin in the man’s past that the footage finally points to? It incriminates his parents more than it does him. Who gives up an adopted child because another kid accuses him of killing a chicken? Seriously? Also, the drawings so clearly implicate Majid, why bother with the ambiguity of not confirming this? There is one excellent visual shot, in an elevator. It was worth the 2 hours. [Photo: Even the Laurent family often jumps at the chance to fast forward through this tedious documentation of their entirely uninteresting lives]

Big Bang Love Juvenile A

Another movie about movies, but this time from Miike. I don’t know how to explain this, except to say:

It's like the title: a jumble of unrelated bits that add up to something compelling. Or, it’s what you would get if Sarah Kane directed a prison sexploitation film set physically between a rocket to the moon and an ancient pyramid, the three of which exist in a remote field (of dirt? Concrete?) so far removed from the world that there appears to be no real reason to lock up the prisoners. Inside the prison life transitions inexplicably between a gritty noir detective movie, an action film, a tender coming of age romance, and a desolate Beckett play. The physical environment of the prison shifts to epitomize the genre of the moment. Butterflies fly throughout.

It’s…great? The cinematography is beautiful, the love story is touching, the noir is fun, the kung fu is exciting, the sexploitation is unsettling, and Beckett is the only thing that could possibly tie all this together. I say it’s also a movie about movies first because it’s such a motley crew of genres, settings, characters, and aesthetics, but mostly because structurally it’s all about revealing narrative through repetition and slight revision. I think it’s an excellent non-musical example of a fugue. Miike filmed maybe 35 minutes worth of plot, but replays it from various perspectives and angles until the viewer finally has the whole story. [photo: Don't be fooled by the existential despair evoked in the theatrical space. 20 police ninjas are about to jump that guy.]

I almost forgot, but for the the deafening internet hysteria

New Moon is out. I was going to see it and be sarcastic, but Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian has done it for me: "There will be no end to the parade of neo-horror archetypes who are not getting anywhere near Bella's silver ring of abstinence." Consider Mr. Bradshaw officially invited to this blog.

A Raisin in the Sun

I first read Lorraine Hansbury’s play in high school, and still today I think it’s a powerful response to Langston Hughes’s poem. This play is a true Greek tragedy, but with an extra act. It’s…the saddest movie ever to have a happy ending (and ending which I think, despite the film’s misguided final music, is ominous at best). Hansbury does a beautiful job imaging a single family’s myriad disappointments in the face of a deeply tragic history, and woeful economic hardship. Though I haven’t read this play since, I remember very clearly the piteous and hateful Karl Linder, who so obsequiously tries to tell the Youngers they aren’t wanted in their new neighborhood. But there are many details I had forgotten—most of all Beneatha, whose chaotic interests (that made her seem so flighty to me as an adolescent) now look like a surprisingly lighthearted examination of many perspectives on the question of evolving African American identity. Hughes experimented with all of these extremes, whereas Hansbury herself seems to settle in a modest version of the American dream:

“We have decided to move into our house because my father—my father—he earned it for us brick by brick. We don’t want to make no trouble for nobody or fight no causes, and we will try to be good neighbors.”

The Youngers are decent people, and just want some time and space to live as such. The rich debates about black identity, the agenda of the NAACP, though all valuable, aren’t practical for them. They want little more than a little peace. The other aspect of this that escaped me till tonight is the somewhat sad turn around gender at the end. The strength of this play has always seemed to me to be its three strong central female characters, though tonight I noticed how clearly the play is really about one boy becoming a man. I feel a little cheated by that, but certainly it’s a good opportunity for Poitier to make speeches. Oh right. Poitier. Did I mention I’m reviewing the movie and not the play? Yeah. I am. As hard as it is to watch and as disappointing as I find the end, I do still love this movie. [photo: This movie is so much sadder than it looks.]

Sauna

Finland is creepy. Beautifully creepy. Sauna is the story of two brothers, Eerik and Knut, who are mapping the borders between Finland and Russia after the Russo-Swedish War (1590-95). Eerik has served Sweden since he was sixteen and now bears the weight of the 73 souls taken during his time as a soldier. Knut is the aspiring professor mapping the borders for the empire in hopes of receiving work at the university back in the capital. Their small party of Russians and Finns encounters a village in the middle of a swamp (home to 73 souls, no less) not yet found on any map. The town is shrouded in mystery (no history, no children, no monks to fill the cowls that have been left lying around), at the center of which is a sauna.

For those of you not used to life in the Great White North of Europe, this isn't your typical gymnasium steam room. In medieval Finland, the sauna is the place where the recently born and the recently deceased are taken to have the past and their old sins washed away. A long bath for a man with 73 (or is it 74?) dead muddying his soul.

I don't know why I found Sauna so appealing. Most likely my nostalgia for the swamps off the Gulf of Finland, permanently overcast, steel-colored skies, and humid sub-zero temperatures were the cause. However, the novelty of the film's plot and setting impressed the neophyte horror fan in me. The time and place are long ago, but this isn't the gothic horror of Dracula and the Catholic Church. Finland is barren and empty. There aren't any churches or beasts to fill your nightmares, just the remnants of pagan belief and a porous border between the natural and supernatural. The film shows how terrifying it would be to live in an isolated, frozen wasteland even without the gore-dripping dead bodies that haunt Eerik and Knut and I think that that's why the film works. There is little in the way to make the audience jump or squirm, but you feel a little colder and a little lonelier with each passing minute.

Part of me hopes that there is more to come from Scandinavian horror as both Sauna and Sweden's Let the Right One In have been enjoyable alternatives to the stale horror films I know.

Yeah...

so, remember when we were having all those debates about blackface?

Cactus Flower

The plot: a dentist who is defensive of his freedom has fallen in love with a young girl who works at a local record store. The movie opens on her failed suicide attempt, a response to the dentist's claim that he cannot leave his wife and three children. The dentist, in truth, is unmarried. His story is simply to keep all of his lovers at bay. The suicide attempt convinces the dentist to marry the young girl, and then the plot unfolds as he asks his stodgy nurse to play stand in for his wife. Cactus Flower has a Breakfast At Tiffany's backdrop: a young girl about town lives next door to a young playwright who comes in and out of her window. The young man, however, is mostly a wry backdrop to Toni's machinations as she tries to be sure her fiance does right by his current wife. From the beginning it's pretty clear the four characters will eventually pair off by age--the two young neighbors together and the dentist with his nurse and assistant.


[photo: meh]

If I were to have one movie wish for this movie it would be to see this remade in the style of The Proposal, with all the roles switched. The problem is that Walter Matthau and Goldie Hawn are no where near as charming Ingrid Bergman and Rick Lenz (so fabulously named Igor!). Matthau especially is more a grumpy grandpa than a womanizing bachelor. Bergman, on the other hand, would make a wonderful independent dentist and Lenz an oh-so-charming record store clerk. Matthau is perfect for the judgmental desk attendant and Hawn was made to play the occasional jokester. In my movie dentist Bergman would, after much slap-stick hilarity, come clean to her young lover and they could run off together, leaving Matthau and Hawn to eye one another in the waiting room.


[photo: yeah!]

I am hoping this movie can kick off a new theme for me for November: women in comedy. I wanted to start by getting a sense of what Hawn did before the 80s. Cactus Flower is her first big movie. Also: Bergman in comedy--what?! That's like a grilled cheese with mayonnaise on it. Note to self: rent Indiscreet.

Season of the Witch

Am I the only one who will be singing this damn song all day?



Definitely the best of all the Halloween movies, Halloween III: Season of the Witch is senseless and unscary, but its goal--redefining the Halloween franchise as a Creepshow/Twilight Zone/Night Gallery style serial horror anthology--was an admirable one. For one thing, if it had succeeded, it would have spared us endless Michael-Myers-centric sequels, and even the John Carpenter fans among us (a.k.a. Charlie) have to admit that would have been a good thing. Of course, it did not succeed. No one is arguing that it succeeded.

Anyway, Happy Happy Halloween! Silver Shamrock!

Tis the Season

For making awful stuff

Carrie (1976)

I just rewatched Carrie last week. The weird part about watching Carrie is that I always forget about the whole telekinesis thing. I know it's sort of at the center of her character, but the images that stick with me from the movie are almost completely independent of the paranormal aspect of the story. For me, you could edit out the light-bulb-bursting, knife-hurling, door-slamming parts and have the same movie, or maybe a better one. The scary stuff is partly in Sissy Spacek's face, and mostly in Piper Laurie's intensity.

I suppose we're meant to view Carrie as a revenge movie. The popular girls mistreat the weird high school outcast, but they don't know who they are dealing with, so they get roasted alive in the gym. In fact, the gym scene comes off as very silly, while the scenes between Carrie and her crazy Christian mother remain unsettling and sometimes scary (okay, sometimes silly too).

Or is it just me? Is it just that I am terrified of weird Christians? (This would explain the time when Kristin and I were at Blockbuster in Urbana, and I was like "We should rent The Exorcism of Emily Rose! It's so scary!" And then we asked the guy behind the counter, and he was like "Dude, have you seen that movie? It's not even a horror movie. It's like, a courtroom drama. No, we don't have it." Sort of as if he had personally tossed it in the dumpster to save customers from having to watch such an unscary movie.)

Did everyone know a new Saw movie is coming out?

"I don't think any other producer in Los Angeles would make a movie whose main character is a serial killer with terminal cancer." - Mark Burg, producer of all 6 Saw movies.

Homework assignment...

After a long night of sulking and self-loathing, I was told I should write something about the women and horror class I'm taking to honor the blog's origins and the month of horror, October. What I would like to write about my class isn't fit for this blog as I respect the elevated discourse established by the writers and readers who contribute to the site. There is also my fear that any criticisms leveled at established academics will come back to haunt me at my future tenure defense.

Horror is a rather problematic genre for me mostly because I'm a snob. I hate the hokiness (hokeyness?), the gore, the predictability of the plot, but really what I hate is the idea that what I see on the screen should scare me. Heart attacks scare me, unemployment scares me, but a ridiculous puppet devising over-wrought methods of execution ala the Saw franchise does not scare me. Part of me realizes that this is my own shortcoming as a cultural critic and I hope to one day see just why horror is so good. The other part of me is shaking its head at that statement and wonders why this blog post isn't on Peter Greenaway's brilliant film about landscape drawing, The Draughtman's Contract.

Appropriately enough, my first horror review will be on one of the most cliched of all October films, Halloween. Today's in-class screening was the film that put Carpenter on the map and gave hundreds of scrappy, independent upstarts the incentive to make shitty movies. But what can I say about Halloween that hasn't been said in the film's nine 'sequels' or the dearth of scholarship written about the film or by people who put 'John Carpenter' in the same sentence with 'Alfred Hitchcock' when discussing great filmmakers? After racking my brain for minutes, I sadly came to the realization that perhaps Halloween should be dearer to me than I originally thought.

My favorite 'low' genre has always been comic books. Nerdy kids like to read and mostly we like to read about muscle-bound heroes with super powers that have earned the trust and respect of everyone around them. Namely, characters who represent everything we aren't. However, comic books see fit to mock their fanbase by having Captain Pectorial spend 30 pages using brute force to beat his foe, guy with brain/mental/doctor/professor/science in his name. To sum up, guy I want to be constantly beats up guy I am and I love him for it. But more on my self-loathing in a moment.

Ignoring the theory of the 'final girl' and gender studies for just a moment, I'd like to think about the film's views on education. Laurie escapes horrific death not because she's a frigid virgin, but because she's a nerd and smart people survive (to remain virgins) in the world of horror movies. What frightens Laurie early in the movie? Leaving her chemistry book at school and therefore losing scholarships that would get her a better education and thus a better job. Well, she doesn't come out and say that but a nerd knows a nerd by any other name would still dread bad grades. And who does Michael Myers kill? People who run rampant over the English language using 'totally' as flippantly as people today use 'literally.' And what greater confirmation do we have for the endorsement of education than having a doctor act as the arbiter of justice filling Michael Myers full of lead. That's right, a paunchy, bald guy with no less than three degrees gets to save the day. Is that me on the screen? Am I finally a hero?

So, thank you, John Carpenter but not for turning nerds into knights and finally giving me my place in the sun. That theory has more holes in it than any ten of your films. No, thank you for letting the horror-hating guy I am take a beating from the horror-loving guy I'd like to be. You've so brilliantly recreated my relationship to comics that I might have to give this horror thing a try...

Zombieland (pre-review semi-rant)

I've been trying to decide if I want to see Zombieland or if I want to be a zombie-snob and insist that the golden age of the undead is behind us (by "golden age" I mean "time of troubles"). Last week Tor.com ran an interview with the director, praising the movie more than I had anticipated, and quoting him as saying "Well, I really think the thing that informed it most was my music video background." Hm. I have yet to decide how I feel about that. We can all name some directors who do have done innovative work in both music videos and feature length films: Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry, etc. I wasn't sure, however, what Ruben Fleisher's "background" entails. So, in the spirit of research, If found the following:

1. Fleisher is responsible for a number of commercials, including one of those creepy Burger King ads in which a plastic-faced king delivers someone a whopper on a silver platter. Probably a good history for someone interested in the consumer culture tendency to slap -land to the end of something and start selling tee shirts. Also, I think the title Zombieland is funnier than I gave it credit for. It seems to me a little bit more honest than Land of the Dead. As much as Romero may have wanted to slam consumer culture, zombies are the new franchise, and, frankly, Romero's cultural critique is about as plastic and marketable as counter-culture thinking gets.*

2. Fleisher's music videos are extremely concerned with vintage and kitsch, drawing extensively on American pop culture. "Vintage" here especially means old AV technology (hand-held cameras, manual focus, boom boxes etc.), and pulp media (print ad culture, the formulaic music videos of the 60s, cartoon-y reinterpretations of late-80s/early 90s street culture):




3. Fleisher has some short videos that seem to be in response to army ads, and which are pretty sarcastic about the military. That seems good for mocking the extreme survivalist bent of a lot of zombie movies. Bad for those sort of serious about post-apocalyptic survival. Which, I mean, isn't us obviously.

4. He says he grew up in DC, but I'd bet $10 he grew up in northern Virginia.

5. He's uses a lot of color. I like that.

So I think he's the perfect person to make a movie like Zombieland, I'm just not sure I'm the perfect person to like it. I like the meta-media stuff he does in his videos, but I don't always like how clever his videos think they are. I'm afraid Zombieland will be the sensory-overload answer to Shaun of the Dead--less funny and less watchable. I fear Fleisher will become another director to overlook the lesson of Romero: the yammering, shopping masses are funny until they vote you their beloved leader.

All that said, I don't normally pre-review, and I'm looking forward to seeing how solid my predictions are. I will see it, and trusting Tor I've decided to see it in good faith.

*I concede, there are some possible exceptions.

Happy Birthday, NTC

It's been a year...

Netflix has given me the gift of movies...

...whose previews I watched but never thought I'd actually see. My queue/saved movies as of 10:15 tonight:

Rudo i Cursi
An American Werewolf in London
Chandni Chowk to China
O'Horten
The Class
Good Dick
Departures
Guest of Cindy Sherman
Herb and Dorothy
Pray the Devil Back to Hell
Soul Power
Tokyo Sonata
The Garden
Eden Log
Frontrunners
Shiver
Splinter
a *lot* of Doctor Who

Movie night?

The Unborn

Friend: What is wrong with you lately? I mean there wasn't even a good 5 minutes of footage demonstrating that you normally have a cheery personality. You've been weird since the opening shot of this film.

Casey: OMG it turns out I was a twin. So was my grandmother, who I just found out is a survivor of Auschwitz, where her brother became evil and possessed due to Nazi experimentation.

Friend: ....

Casey: and now the dybbuk that possessed him and tried to possess my twin fetus-brother has a taste for my family's blood and wants to kill me.

Friend: wait, what?

Casey: You have to stay away from me. It's totally not safe.

Friend: Casey, this sort of sounds like a way of talking about survivor's guilt.

Casey: Stay away! The dybbuk comes for your family and your friends! It will kill everyone I love because it wants me!

Friend: That sort of sounds like you're talking about the SS.

Casey: No you don't understand. This is why my mom killed herself.

Friend: You know, the children of Holocaust survivors have a really difficult time coping; often they show symptoms of psychological strain similar to PTSD.

Casey: We are NOT CRAZY. I need to find a rabbi to perform an exorcism.

Rabbi: An exorcism? That sounds sort of crazy and catholic.

Casey: No. This plot is totally Jewish. See how I wear a star of David to protect me? When I touch it to the skin of someone possessed by the dybbuk it burns, just like a cross on a vampire.

Rabbi: You're so right! This text your grandmother gave you is totally in Hebrew. Because it is Hebrew, and I am a rabbi, I can read it. I know just the priest who can help us.

Priest: I can help you.

Casey: Are you sure this will be legitimately Jewish? I really don't want a Christian exorcism.

Priest: No totally. The way I do it is...really...Jewish....

Rabbi: Yes. Totally Jewish.

[10 minutes of traumatic exorcism footage]

Rabbi: I cannot fucking believe you were actually possessed. No one saw that coming.

Casey: Thank you for helping me! Can I come to temple on Friday?

Rabbi: Absolutely not. Never.

[epilogue]

Doctor: Congratulations Casey!! It's twins!!!

Casey: Congratulations? Are you kidding me? I'm like 17. I still live at home.
[photo: ... אבינו שבשמים, יתקדש שמך, תבוא מלכותך ייעשה רצונך כאשר בשמים גם בארץ]

Sukiyaki Western Django

You want to hear a funny story about Takashi Miike?

Once upon a time, when I was a naive young movie snob, I had never heard of Takashi Miike. I was happy. I lived in a little house in a little town, across the street from my best friend, Dave. One Sunday, as I puttered around, looking for something to do, my friend crossed the street for a visit. "I can't stay," he said, "but I brought you something." He handed me a dvd he had burned. "Kristin and I watched it. I think it's...artistic." Then he left, and I looked down at the dvd in my hand, at the handwritten title: Audition.

When people hear this story, people who have seen Audition, they are amazed that Dave and I are still friends. They question my judgment. Sometimes they question whether I should still be friends with Kristin, since she could probably have known, and warned me.

Later that day, after I had watched the movie, Anna came to visit, and I remember her look of concern when she saw my face. "Are you okay?" she asked. Well, no, not really.

Audition might not be the scariest movie I have ever seen, but it definitely belongs on a short list of the most disturbing. Audition sneaks up on you (I can only speculate, but I suspect this would be true even if you knew its reputation beforehand), because the story is so ordinary, and then suddenly, without warning, extraordinary.

I don't really mean to talk about Audition, but the truth is that having seen a few (maybe half a dozen) of his myriad films, I still always think of Audition as the Miike yard stick, because Audition does so well what it sets out to do, which is cause anxiety.

Sukiyaki Western Django does not aim to disturb. It belongs somewhere in the family of genre-exploding films, playing on the themes of B-westerns, but very much in the Tarantino mold* (as opposed to, say, the Kurasawa mold, or the Coen bros). This sort of film (Kill Bill, Death Proof), smirkingly points out that what we are dealing with is a traditional form, and leaves it at that. After watching these movies, a person doesn't come away with the sense that something has been said about that tradition (in this case, the western). If you love westerns, it is probably entertaining enough to recognize the homages and roll with the formula, and allow the movie to make up in style what it lacks in substance.

I guess Sukiyaki Western Django does what it sets out to do. I'm just not sure that what it sets out to do is all that interesting.

*and with his participation, including a quite hard to watch recurring cameo

Generic...

As the perhaps only person on this blogspot to go see Tarantino's newest film, Inglorious Basterds, I felt a certain obligation to write something about it. I'll leave better bloggers for what will no doubt be better films (Avatar), and humbly accept my fate as the lone Tarantino fan.

My normal defense for Tarantino's output rests almost entirely on his attention to the history of popular/pulp genres, and his suggestion that there is high art in the low brow. Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, and Death Proof reevaluated the importance of seedy cop dramas, poorly dubbed kung-fu features and car-chase films in the context of the history of cinema. Vanishing Point may never make it to Criterion's ranks, but Tarantino does present a compelling argument as to why it should not be immediately disregarded.

So why then does Inglorious Basterds fall so short? At first I thought Tarantino was a director so entrenched in the film making of the 1970s, he was ill-equipped to handle a "period" piece. Though Samuel L. Jackson narrations over Shaft-esque action sequences missed the mark in this film, they were at the least mildly entertaining. Ultimately, what fails this film is what has made so many Tarantino films so good: attention to the trappings of genre. When Tarantino wants to make a film, he consumes every film that might remotely resemble the anticipated project and plucks from each one a shot or a scene that gives the genre relevance. With a genre like car-chase films, you've got 5-6 films to work with and it creates a need for attention to detail to find the diamond scenes amongst the glass. Now Tarantino has nearly 60 years of films to choose from, and as you guessed he didn't want to leave one out. The movie itself is a reference to a 1978 film released under a similar title (this might illuminate part of the problem) but the citations don't stop there. Le Corbeau, The Great Escape, A Bridge Too Far, Saving Private Ryan, and most of the Leni Riefenstahl films make an appearance. The end result is a film with the most abhorrent nazi villain (Christoph Waltz is wonderful, wunderbar, merveilleux and meraviglioso), complex issues dealing with who is an enemy and a circus of bizarre antics that just don't fit (midget painters, Mike Meyers, etc.).

As this blog post is needlessly longer than it should be (emblematic of its subject at 153 minutes), I want to close on the film's lone saving grace. Tarantino's film challenges how genres don't seem to work over time. The war films of the 1940s aren't much like the war films of the 1950s and even less so when compared with films of the 1970s. Yet they are all found in the same section of your local video store clumped together without only the war as their unifying factor. As time goes on, we get films like Inglorious Basterds, a clear descendant of the genre but with a lineage we might expect of a true bastard: related but we don't know how.

Julie and Julia

Julie and Julia was not our first choice for our inaugural Richmond movie experience. Of the movies currently playing, the only ones we really wanted to see were Humpday and The Hurt Locker, but they started too early. (I sort of thought moving to a bigger city would give us more choice in movies to see in the theater, but it turns out the same twelve movies are just playing at twenty different locations here.)

I can't help thinking of Julie and Julia as two different movies.

Julia

It is maybe redundant to even bother mentioning that Meryl Streep is a brilliant actress, but I can't help saying it again, because Julia Child is an impossible role. Everything about Mrs. Child was so huge: her personality, her height, her voice -- oh man, that voice. Who could play Julia Child better than Dan Akroyd? What I mean is, a perfect portrayal of her would almost have to play like a caricature. And that's how I felt at first. But then. I was convinced, and then I was drawn in, completely. Sincere, mature love stories are rare in the movies anyway, and this one is unconventional in many ways.

Oh, and Jane Lynch! It might be the most serious role I've seen her in (Or the first? Does Joyce Wischnia count as a serious role?), and she was perfect. There is this moment at the wedding, an overhead shot, that could have been cheesy, but it wasn't quite cheesy.

Julie

First I should say that I agree with everyone else on planet earth that Amy Adams is delightful and charming and adorable and everything. From Junebug to The Office to Enchanted to the recent Night at the Museum movie, she always seems to stand out, often as the only thing on screen worth paying attention to at all.

But this movie, the Julie half of Julie and Julia, I just can't get behind it at all. The characters keep talking about how narcissistic and selfish Julie is, but then they go on to reward and praise her narcissism. She talks constantly about how she was supposed to be a writer, but really, who thinks sloppy online babbling is writing? (To paraphrase Capote: That's not writing, it's blogging.) Seriously, is there anything more pointlessly unoriginal than writing a completely derivative blog, whose stated purpose is solely to respond to the creative work of someone else?

Jeez, fictional Julie Powell, get a life.

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

I thought seeing The Wizard of Oz at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater would be a perfect end to the Bloomington chapter of my life. I love seeing movies at the B-C. I love movies from the 30s. I was a card-carrying member of the International Wizard of Oz Club in 1995. I love the fact that the theater has started showing old movies on Sunday afternoons, instead of Tuesday afternoons (I had to skip work to see Rear Window a few months ago). So I was very excited to take a few hours out of my busy stuffing-things-into-boxes schedule last Sunday, buy some tea and chocolate at Farm, find a seat in the familiar back right corner of the house. But I forgot one thing.

I HATE The Wizard of Oz. It's just awful.

To begin with, Judy Garland is way too old to play Dorothy. It's weird to see her stuffed into that little pinafore and bobby socks, pouting through the songs like the grotesque grown-up Baby Jane Hudson.

I don't even like the music that much. I know, "Over the Rainbow" is a classic, one of the greatest songs in the history of the movies, etc. It is impossible for me to evaluate whether I think it's a good song because it is so overplayed. I suspect its resonance is strongly tied to the creepiness of Judy Garland, tragic woman-child.

The main thing I hate is the movie's sense of humor, the way Burt Lahr makes these cringe-inducingly weird faces, the way Frank Morgan is this understated straight man by comparison. It's not like I don't like physical comedy - I do. But I don't think Ray Bolger is particularly good at falling down.(There is exactly one joke in the entire movie, which is when the Tinman repeats "Oil can" and the Scarecrow says "Oil can what?" That's pretty funny.)

But it's not just bad in a vacuum; The Wizard of Oz is hurting my movies. I am almost sure it's the most widely watched movie from the 1930s . So I'm afraid that when people think of Old Movies, nobody remembers the breath-taking glamor of an Astaire/Rogers dance number, nobody thinks of Eric Blore's comic face-making. Instead, they think of this shiny mess. Which is depressing.

Now, if you want to see Frank Morgan overact, please go watch The Shop Around the Corner.

Cue the soft focus, hardcore....

Collars...Baby Face is a story about collars. The Great Depression left most of America in a state of financial ruin with only a person's collar as an effective mark of your station in life. Barbara Stanwyck's role as Lily Powers (aptly interpreted by Lydia in words I won't use here) shows the rise and triumph of a woman who claws her way out of a collarless (think so poor that they can't afford a collar, let alone a choice of blue) factory town to the mink-lined big city life.

Or it's about Nietzsche.

The uberfrau in question learns the hard way that to get ahead means to give...up any sense of moral compass and move beyond good and evil. "Exploit men," becomes Lily's rallying cry as she moves up the corporate ladder through the corporate bedrooms and sleeps her way to the top of the Trenholm banking empire (represented by the long pan up the side of a NYC skyscraper showing the various offices where Lily does her duty). With every new floor comes a new man, new apartment and new collar, which suggests that all in all her actions aren't without benefit. I mean, look at this collar. I'm pretty sure it's platinum.

But let us not forget a cameo by John Wayne, Chico the "fantastic colored girl," and all of the crassness that makes this film disgustingly enjoyable. Every soft focus close-up of Stanwyck with her 'come-hither-into-this-lady's-room' look and every raunchy jazz riff reminds us that the generation of our grandparents was nothing if not obsessed with sex. After all, Lily sleeps with SEVEN (count them in the final montage) men to get what she wants. And what is it that she wants?

The dressless collar...

Guest reviewer: Mogwai

Mogwai covers her eyes in response to "He's Just Not That Into You"

Why we all like Joe Vs The Volcano

Dear Everyone,

Yes. We like Joe Versus the Volcano. We like it, and we need not feel shame.

It's difficult to enumerate why exactly it's so popular--the movie has a lot going against it. Meg Ryan just isn't a character actress, and normally if we want to watch one person play a multitude of roles we can always fall back on Kind Hearts and Coronets. And to be honest, it's not just the acting is it? The writing leaves much to be desired, the direction is confusing, and for some reason all the great actors are buried in less than 3 total minutes of footage. But I think we can love this movie, and these are the reasons why:

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the depiction of the island inhabitants is a fairly funny satire of the tradition that precedes it. After a lot of debate our ruling is: not racist (the wisdom of the African-American chauffeur is a pointed stereotype in a movie where for no clear reason every character, and indeed every passing dog is a source of insight...right?...) .

If for no other reason I will stand by this movie because it reminds me of innocent times, when Tom Hanks stranded and desperate on a unknown island was one a short and funny excuse to make fun of adventure movies. Not, as it was later (in the dark times): a painfully long FedEx commercial masquerading as an insightful character study of man in extreme isolation. For the record: depression era movie renters want their disaster films colorful, and full of gratuitous shopping montages.

Last, and foremost, this movie is an ode to quitting. I *love* that about this movie. Some things, work, bosses, and even living, suck, and if ever anyone wanted to sit back and wish they had an inexplicable brain dysfunction that would allow them a week of bad behavior and unwarranted merriment, followed by a quick and notable death, Joe is just that person. So here's to recognizing that some projects aren't worth continuing. Sometimes being stranded on a raft where the only land for miles has just sunken in a smoldering mound of lava beneath a hostile and probably shark-filled sea is simply better than that miserable job. So here's to resignation letters, and to the *British* version of the office--without the Christmas Special.

-Kristin

What Kristin Thought of The Baxter

Hi Kristin,

You asked me to watch The Baxter, so that you could shamelessly adopt my opinion of it as your own. Okay.

Here is what you thought of The Baxter. You liked a lot of things about it, especially the classic zany comedic performances of both leading actresses. And don't get me started on how much you loved the little 1940's dresses Michelle Williams kept wearing. You sort of hated Michael Showalter, but then you've always sort of hated him, ever since The State. Remember when you used to watch The State on MTV when you were in high school, after all those years with no TV? Michael Ian Black is so cute and funny. He reminds you of Maisie when she's like "Let's be serious." You should be following him on twitter, if you're not already. He's so hilarious. Also, Rob Cordry.

Even though the writing was weirdly uneven (the scene with Peter Dinklage as the wedding planner, for instance, caused you to alternate wildly between rage and mystification), you could appreciate what the film was trying to do. The romantic comedy from the perspective of the guy-not-taken, a sort of Rashomon for the whole romcom genre. But it never really decided whether Showalter was the Perfectly Nice Guy who doesn't get the girl (Ralph Bellamy in, oh let's say, His Girl Friday would be a good classic example) or The Wrong Guy who deserves to lose because he's so mean/stupid/sexist/dorky/etc. In the first scene, voiceover explains that a Baxter is a perfectly nice guy, who never gets the girl. But by the end of the movie it seemed that a Baxter was simply a person who is being rejected at the moment, and this annoyed you slightly.

As always, you thought Paul Rudd was adorable (although of course he'll never top his finest performance).

Now please tell me why I like Joe vs. the Volcano.

Thanks,
Lydia

Star Trek

(Wrote this a long time ago, forgot to post it...)

There is something a little cheap about returning to the beginning of a franchise - remember in Episode One, when R2-D2 showed up, and you knew that there was just so little substance to the movie that they decided to pack it instead with misguided nostalgia? That's a danger of prequels.

Well, Star Trek is all nostalgia. Every fifteen minutes, you meet another character you already know. Lots of lines got big laughs from the opening-night audience I saw it with, and I assumed that the ones I didn't recognize were were also in-jokes for the Trek fans who made up a large portion of the audience.

I'm not saying I didn't enjoy watching the movie. I did. Every actor impressed me. Because I think they are better actors than the original cast (well, the one obvious exception is Leonard Nimoy, who is about the same. No, maybe a little better, although he seems to have a bit of a denture problem? Am I making this up? It seems like he's always afraid his teeth are going to fall out) and they managed to play these characters we all already know, and be true to the original, but take themselves seriously, but not too seriously. Also, Chris Pine is very pretty. And he's in a zombie movie that's coming out this fall.



Note: Nokia = Bazoomercom

Drag Me To Hell

Drag Me To Hell looks back on an era when horror movies worked through creepy moods and shakes, rather than (just) fake blood and prosthetics, and it's largely successful at doing so. Better, it vacillates between scenes that are genuinely suspenseful, if not really ever unsettling, and the kind of slap(st)ick Raimi is so known for, over the years, resulting in the same kind of confused mishmash that made Evil Dead II so wonderfully deranged.

Although Drag successfully captures the innocence-gone-wrong feel of the Seventies horror films (partly because they appear to have actually told the set designer that the movie was set in 1978--the protagonist even has a sunburst clock on her wall!), it fails to match the depth of the best of them. Rosemary's Baby is about the terrible experience of being unexpectedly pregnant the devil's baby, sure, but more than that it is about the terrible experience of being unexpectedly pregnant. Nothing in Drag Me To Hell ever has any resonance with the rest of life.

Unfortunately, although Drag successfully captures the strange mixture of approaches that made EDII insanely great, it fails to update the formula in any meaningful way.

Had it been made in 1978, this would have been a great movie. Drag looks back on a high point of the horror genre...but it says nothing more than "weren't these great?". And they were, but they're already there. It's not clear to me what the need was for a new one. Unfortunately, Drag provides little more. This movie was well worth seeing. It's probably one of the best movies I've seen this year. But in the future, if I want to watch an intelligent, creepy horror, I'll watch The Stepford Wives, or Alien. If I want the perfect mix of goofy and gorey, well, I'll watch The Evil Dead II.

Parents

I really thought Parents was going to be about cannibalism, but mostly it was just about how a kid feels when his parents have sex. There's probably a lot I could say about the weird relationship between pre-adolescents and their parents, but I feel Liz Lemon said it best:

"I don't have a lot of personal life experience, but if I have learned anything from my Sims family, when a child doesn't see his father enough, he starts to jump up and down and then his mood level will drop till he pees himself."

The exciting news is that as I pack I'm watching everything that looks even barely decent on Hulu. I may just start updating this blog again.

Terminator Salvation

For whatever reason, I enjoyed the newest Terminator movie. I went on a very hot day, and I paid $5 to get in, and I guess all I really wanted was some big explosions and some cool/scary machines (and some ice cold movie theater air conditioning).

But it's a pretty terrible movie. It doesn't make any sense. Here's one example. Spoiler alert. You know that scene in every movie, in which we think the hero is dead, and then someone administers CPR and even though he's been dead for twenty minutes, he perks right up? In T4, the hero in this scene is a human-cyborg hybrid* and a CG Arnold Schwarzenegger has some trouble killing him, until he realizes that his weakness is (you'd never guess...) his human heart, at which point the terminator reaches into his chest and crushes his heart with his bare hands. John Connor subsequently administers CPR to his completely crushed heart and he comes back. Cut to scene in desert, where we learn that Connor's heart is bad. He's going to die, we find out from his wife (who between T3 and T4 has changed from Claire Danes's sassy veterinarian, to Bryce Dallas Howard's, apparently, Greatest Heart Surgeon in the History of the World). He can be saved, but only by a heart transplant. Dramatically, the human-cyborg hybrid (who's heart was just crushed by a terminator, remember?) offers his heart. Everyone is very moved.

One more thing: How and why is it that Terminator ladies have gone from ordinary to amazing to senseless and spunky to quite literally barefoot and pregnant in the course of these four movies? Sure, B Howard's Mrs. Connor is a magically skilled physician, but she's also a simpering whiner throughout most of the movie. I might have forgotten, but I don't think she even holds a gun. (I mean, not that holding a gun is the only measure of toughness. Um.)

* Note: But aren't they all human-cyborg hybrids? With the human skin that gets them through the time travel and so forth?

dave, on Star Trek

"What have we gotten out of Star Trek for the last decade? Ever since TNG, it's just a bunch of pretty successful reboots. It's like they're running Windows 2000."

-Dave

mostly I just like the zombies

Let the Right One In

Reviewers for The Gaurdian have been examining Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In so frequently that I’ve felt redundant contributing when I know at least some of you are readers of their horror archives. However, I’ve finally begun to disagree with their reviews enough to post something argumentative here. Actually, I don’t completely disagree with their reviewers---I also loved the movie very much, and am struck with utter dismay to hear that “A wholly unnecessary American remake is in pre-production.”* Each of their writers has enthusiastically embraced Alfredson’s film as the newest in a fresh wave of Scandinavian horror, citing it repeatedly as the mindful alternative to the American Twilight. They are right—Let the Right One In succeeds in ways Twilight most definitely fails; it’s a thoughtful, tender, and somewhat emotion-rending study of the agony that is adolescence. It is, however, in no way a horror film, and unlike Twilight, it’s quite aware of the limits adolescence places on any love story. Comparisons to George Romero and Abel Ferrara are painfully mistaken attempts to comprehend the film through the often-reductive lens of a genre—something that simply overlooks everything valuable about the movie. Comparisons to J.K. Rowling’s writing are simply too absurd to address.

The movie is rather a self-aware revision of Twlight: it’s a love story with a refreshing understanding that seeking love as an antidote to profound isolation courts relationships framed with violence and abuse. Oskar and Eli’s interaction is far more compelling than that of Edward and Bella. It’s tender, hasty, and mutually abusive; it’s the kind of dynamic we find when we don’t characterize children as ideals, or pretend they can love with the consideration that only comes with maturity. Eli and Oskar are first and foremost children: sweet, selfish, and extremely unpredictable. Any romantic belief that a child vampire can possess an immortal love bought by perpetual youth overlooks the film’s most heartbreaking character: Eli’s caretaker and (presumably) former childhood sweetheart, who, with age, increasing senility, and incompetence, fails to care for her or fulfill the goals of his own affection. His fall and replacement are simply tragic, and though every phase of Eli and Oskar’s romance is so touching, it is also reasonably pessimistic. Claims that the director and writer have “sacrificed the value of narrative in favour of horror and fear” are almost shameful misreadings of a film that is all narrative, and no horror, save that felt when watching children struggle to face a fundamentally hostile world. The horror of reality is so great that a young girl childishly indifferent to the coagulate glutting her teeth and staining her clothes is an attractive alternative, and I am somewhat inclined to read Oskar’s beloved Eli as a fantasy, a psychological escape from one violence to another (this is my tentative reading of Eli’s unexplained scar). Whichever way you read the narrative, the fantasy feels deeply real, and the film seems an apt overture to our misguided fascination with young love.

*This article cites the possible location of the remake as Littleton, CO, the place of the Columbine shootings. I am not sure I need to say so, but for the director of Cloverfield to make a vampire movie about school bullying in which the heroine brutally slaughters the bullies seems to me to be the least tactful of all possible courses of action.

Junebug

I finally saw Junebug. I liked everything about it, except that I find it hard to believe that a man who does woodworking as a hobby only owns one screwdriver.

Watchmen

When I walked out of Watchmen I thought it was, eh, fine. Visually, very true to the novel, but I have never actually finished the novel. I thought, I'm not really the target audience.

But as time goes by, I notice my response has become more and more negative. By the end of the week, I will become enraged at the mere mention of the film.

These are some of my questions.

When Rorschach drops articles in voice over, I like it, because he's reading from his journal, where people often use shorthands ("Dead dog in alley today" vs "I came across a dead dog in the alley today..." or something. Or whatever). When he does it in dialogue, it sort of makes him sound like Cookie Monster.

Do these people have some sort of superpowers or not? I thought they didn't (obviously with the exception of Dr. Manhattan) but they appear to. I mean, if I'm supposed to understand the story as a critique or dismantling of traditional superhero notions, why do I still have to accept that they will win every fight (or be just fine after plummeting two stories in a flaming building) for the simple reason that they are the protagonists?

Why are so many of the thugs who get beaten to death in bloody slow motion Asian? Is it because we won the Vietnam war?

Am I meant to feel any sympathy at all for Holis Dan/Nite Owl or Laurie/Silk Spectre? I find them so entirely repellent, from the visually unsettling scene in which they balletically beat a group of thugs to death with their bare hands to the even visually ickier scene in the hovercraft, of which the less said the better.

Actually, I take that last part back. I think the sex scene was my favorite part of the movie, because it was the only time I knew where I stood, which is neck deep in irony. From the soundtrack (can you tell I'm rolling my eyes right now?) to the utter lack of chemistry between the actors, it's embarrassing and kind of hilarious.

I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. Lots of people liked it. (Charlie? Prove me wrong? That's what the comments are for...)

Movies About Movies

I saw this and immediately began to wonder about your favorite films that are essential about the experience of cinema.

Below are a couple of mine. Post yours here so I can watch them all and co-opt your opinions as my own.

The Muppet Movie

Sullivan's Travels

Rear Window

And The Ship Sails On

Fringe

Butterflies are creepy and intimidating. I've always thought so.

I just decided to catch up on Fringe, having missed the last six or so episodes. The first scene I see is this poor guy lacerated to death by a herd of sharpened butterflies.


I feel so vindicated.

Also, does this amazing sweater have an Intarsia color-work killer whale on it?



Sigh.

Happy-Go-Lucky

Let me just say right now before I start in on all my thoughts about Mike Leigh and what has happened with Mike Leigh over time, that I'm deeply in love with Sally Hawkins. I love her pretty face and her funny teeth and that odd twitchy thing she does with her breath. I loved her in Fingersmith, and in Persuasion, and even though I might have forgotten she was in Tipping the Velvet, I am sure I loved her in that as well.

In Alma, Michigan, where I went to college, there were just two pathetic video stores (in one, I had a fight about The Godfather with the clerk and was too shy return), but the Alma College Library had one wall of amazing movies. This is where I discovered a delightful movie called Life is Sweet, which introduced me to the following: David Thewlis, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Spall, Jane Horrocks (maybe you remember her as Bubble on Absolutely Fabulous? If you are reading this and you have not seen Little Voice, please go add it to your queue right now) and Mike Leigh.

Early in his career, Mike Leigh made a bunch of movies (many for TV) that were just about perfect as far as I'm concerned. In particular I am thinking of Meantime and Life is Sweet -- these little movies expose the ordinary lives of ordinary people, most of them middle class or poor, who are naive and optimistic, cheerful, pathetic, racist, charming, sincere, conniving, funny, tired. The dialogue is mostly improvised, and the actors are amazing - Meantime was one of very first movies of both Gary Oldman and Tim Roth, as well as Alfred Molina. I loved these movies because they made me see both the good and the bad in ordinary people, and they left me feeling hopeful, believing in a sort of basic humanity that could make life worth living. This sounds like hyperbole, but it's pretty much how I feel.

Then I saw Naked, or rather, started to see it. Naked is a weird exploration of sex and power and rape, and it's probably a good movie, but I just wasn't compelled enough by the story to endure all the horrific images. So I turned it off. Since then, Mike Leigh has made a lot of other quite good movies, and I have seen some of them: Vera Drake, Topsy Turvy, Secrets & Lies. The ones I've seen have been solid movies, but sort of weighty and important. None of them have been, for me, quite the revelation those earlier movies were.

Happy-Go-Lucky is the Mike Leigh movie I have been waiting for. There is no major conflict/conflict resolution, no Big Issues, just an almost (but not quite) impossibly optimistic person, living her pretty good life. It is a two-hour defense of cheerfulness. When you meet Poppy, you might think she is not a great teacher, because you might think she is a pushover, who gets by on charm with her students and everyone else. Poppy's classroom is chaotic and colorful. But when it comes down to it, when someone (her driving instructor, Eddie Marsan) pushes her too far, she is very capable of drawing a line, always with compassion.

The only weak point in the movie is a way-too-easy scene with a counselor (/love interest), who psychoanalyzes a young boy in about ten seconds flat. "Why are you angry? Draw me a picture. Why is your mother's boyfriend in a different room? He hits you? That's not very nice." But even that character subsequently won me over with his awkward first-date flirting.

I've just discovered that a BUNCH of Mike Leigh's early movies are instant-watchable on netflix. This is very good news.

p.s. You can watch a tiny fuzzy version of Meantime right now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgFLbDkXeuQ

Dollhouse

I watched Dollhouse. I was able to see the conversation Joss had when creating it.

ELIZA DUSHKU: I need wear hot outfits. But how will I do it?

JOSS WEADON: Let’s make a witty show full of great dialog.

ELIZA: But will that show me off in hot outfits enough? Will the Dialog distract?

JOSS: You may be right. What about a straight-up action show?

ELIZA: I will wear hot outfits, right?

JOSS: Sure. But it will be on FOX.

ELIZA: How will that affect the hot outfits?

JOSS: Have you seen what they’d done to Summer Glau on Terminator?

ELIZA: … Let’s do it.

I’ll keep watching it, because I have know that dude can write. I just wish he had done this with Quantum Leap.