It's been a while

There are a lot of red faces around here. I may just start posting again. Tonight, though, I'm just posting quick and dirty, something I found today and love. Design*Sponge has a category called "living in," which functions as a purchasing guide for movies with a great aesthetic. Here are the movies I'd like to live in:

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Annie Hall

The Fantastic Mr. Fox

Amelie

Grey Gardens

Rear Window

Two for the Road

And here's one for Thad.

my ignorance of certain genres is a real problem

My recent suggestion that you all start a regular screening of westerns for my education was not met with the unmixed enthusiasm I anticipated. But I'm trying again. People, I need to see westerns. I cannot understand other movies. Once when I was very young I saw Bronco Billy on TV when my mom thought I was asleep. I saw Drums Along the Mohawk in a course on Images of American Indians in Film. And while I would still argue that The Big Lebowski is a western, I don't think it really counts as, you know, canon. I'm pretty sure I've never seen a John Wayne movie all the way through. I mean, except this one.

I saw The American last weekend, and I think it was a Western, but I can't be sure. George Clooney is a crafty gun maker--a definite contender for the handmade Oscars this year, if anyone is keeping track--and maybe he's also an assassin, and he's hiding out in a tiny town in Italy. He is in a restaurant and a movie is on the TV, and someone explains (to us? to Clooney?) that Sergio Leone was Italian. Who knew!?


People love this movie, and I understand why; it's very beautiful to look at, whether you prefer looking at crooked Italian cities or implausibly beautiful Italian prostitutes or George Clooney's lean torso. I loved how silent it was (or...I would have loved it, had I not been trying to eat some nachos in a very crowded theater, but I can hardly blame Anton Corbijn's for the fact that the Bow Tie ran out of soft pretzels).George Clooney does this grave, understated, crafty thing, and he does it very well. There is a lot to like in the construction and the performances.

But it is also kind of a movie about cartoon butterflies. It is about redemption, and I'm not very interested in the character's redemption. There is a love story, but I don't understand why anyone loves anyone in this movie. There is a priest who has lots of aphorisms ("You cannot deny the existence of hell. You live in it.") and shadowy moral failings (I know, shocking). And, seriously, there are a lot of cartoon butterflies.

James Franco Dream

We're moving to Virginia and our house is all messy and full of boxes so you and I go to a bar to hang out and drink and talk, you know, like we do.* We have been having a James Franco Retrospective conversation, so we bring his old movies and paraphernalia (I think we own posters?) and we talk through the good times and the bad. A while later who walks into the bar, but James Franco himself. He sees his dvds at our table, assumes we're fangirls, and joins us. We have a long conversation that evolves sort of like his career--first dopy, then serious, then funny, then weird, then sort of offensive. Somewhere in the middle I'm sort of in love with him, but by the end he's talking exclusively about himself, except for an unfortunate period where he assumes we're college sophomores and boasts he can certainly guess our majors. He guesses poorly. Right about the time when we think we've had enough James Franco for life, and the novelty of actually meeting him is gone, the bar door swings open (Western style) and Jake Gyllenhall enters with a gang of (cow/frat)boys, all in cargo pants and baseball caps. They swagger up to our table and exclaim YOU'RE OUT OF CONTROL JAMES FRANCO, which is sort of true but melodramatic all the same. We take the opportunity to leave, though in retrospect this intervention would probably have been the most interesting part of the evening. We go home to this red brick house we've bought and are unpacking for a while when James Franco drives up looking for us, yelling to the house things like "Hey ladies! We were just starting to have fun!" We ignore him, in part because he's driving a really tiny volvo with a white bengal tiger in the back. James Franco just doesn't know when to stop. He's drunk and mad, and as he drives away he crashes into a fire hydrant. The crash site looks like a cartoon--water shooting up in the air, and both Franco and the volvo are humorously compressed into an accordion shape. "Crap," we think, "Now there's a tiger loose in the neighborhood." We bolt the doors and windows, and turn off the lights, because basically this new house is like our tiger fortress. I believe I used that exact phrase to describe it. It is not, however, a movie star fortress, because along comes Jake Gyllenhall and his band of goons, all of whom have mistakenly assumed we're Franco's oldest friends. They bang on our door, walk in (didn't we lock it? no, because tigers can't use doorknobs) and demand we do something about Franco's antics. "He needs his friends right now" they yell. We are definitely not his friends, and anyway they're going to let that tiger in, but they aren't listening, and the tiger gets in before they go. Now there's a tiger in the house, and it's sort of like a cricket: we can hear it, but we can't ever find where it's hiding.

I think this dream might actually be about Joaquin Phoenix's documentary, which comes out next week.


*we don't.

James Franco: Renaissance Man

"I often think about driving off the side of freeway overpasses, just plunge Grandpa's old blue boat through the cement guardrail: The sculpted barrier crumbling about me and Grandpa's blue machine; a great moment of metallic explosion and heavy ripping and jerking and then release; a soft, slow dive of arcing color through the windshield, into a hard second of impact, just before the black. What an adventure lies behind one quick turn of the steering wheel. A great screaming, and then, slip away."

from his short story in Esquire

Why Lydia Didn't Totally Hate Fireproof

Dear Lydia,

This is the least necessary review I will ever write on NTC. If there's one movie you won't ever watch because you have no expectation of liking it, it's Fireproof. But here we are.

Except, wait. Unless I'm mistaken, there's one thing you liked. If you're like me, and I suspect in your unwillingness to pay money to see this movie you are, you watched it on Youtube. So you probably noticed at some point that the videos average about 120,000 views. Most of the feedback is positive and deeply religious.

As far as I can tell, that means about 120,000 Christians stole this movie.

Sincerely,

Kristin

I have lost predictions.

Because I'm watching it months after everyone has moved on. At the close of season 2, these are my predictions:

The island is more densely populated than their original destination of LA. Sun establishes a community garden, designs well protected green space, and a new school district is proposed to accommodate the island’s growing child population.

Jack continues to Deliver Lines With Intensity, often to the point of being a raving jackass (apologies), after which he cries to remind us he is sensitive, and has been hurt.

More survivors admit that they, too, have killed a man. Kate and Sawyer feel threatened, and he begins to sacrifice a baby polar bear hourly to maintain his current rep as bad boy. Kate disapproves as sexily as is humanly possible.

Locke continues to be the best character, for which the writers heap and unbelievable amount of misfortune on him via flashbacks.

Among these misfortunes are 5 car accidents, 2 freak hanggliding mishaps, a one night stand who steals his other kidney, and a bullet to the spinal cord, none of which explains his paralysis.

Hurley continues to be overweight, which means everything that happens to him is funny, even when it’s tragic.

10 percent of the survivors continue to make the decisions for the other 90. The death toll of the other 90% is remarkably high, but they remain incredibly grateful.

In a shocking revelation of interconnectedness among seeming strangers, every living soul on the island has a photo of the same aunt Clara in his or her pocket. Flashback: family reunion, 1982.

I link everyone to the Gashlycrumb Losties via every possible social networking forum I can find.

[photo: Locke hears my pleas and kills almost everyone on the island. The next 3 seasons are his and Hurley's voice overs as they live out their days in peace. This is a fantasy, not a prediction.]

Sex in the City II

I often vow to pretend a movie doesn't happen and then post a link here to a snarky review of it. Turns out I value cattiness over stoic maturity anyday. With that in mind, visit Miss Maggie Mayhem for a real hit and run of Sex in the City II. A preview:

I’m positively fascinated by this film because somehow a group of people got together and created something that everyone can be sincerely self-righteous about from the comfort of their home...If you screened this film for an audience composed entirely of sex-positive radicals and neo-conservatives they would all have something to talk about over drinks together. On the day this film was released, America was somehow truly united.

And a side note: with some exceptions I like how Sex in the City fetishized fasion. I really do--weird I know. But it made me think about fashion, which I value (even if it often was to shriek in shock that anyone would ever wear such a thing). When I saw SitCI I went for the clothes, but was so horrified by the content I had to swear off. So, I'm feeling vicariously superior via other blogs.

Second side note: MMM's blog is not workplace appropriate. Not even a little.

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

And what better way to celebrate it than with the final shootout from The Wild Bunch!

Justified

I love Westerns. Old Westerns (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), new Westerns (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), Sci-fi Westerns (Outland), Australian Westerns (The Proposition written by Nick Cave?!), Czech Westerns (Lemonade Joe) and even Russian Westerns (The Elusive Avengers), which are called Easterns because they’re all about Siberia. I love Clint Eastwood, John Ford, Sergio Leone, Yul Brenner, and Cleavon Little. I pretty much love everything about Westerns with one major exception: Marion Mitchell Morrison. But at least Bruce Dern shoots him in The Cowboys.

I guess what I find to be most appealing about the genre is really something that isn’t expressly revolutionary or exciting. In my mind, Westerns are all about our desire for justice and going beyond the reasonable and moral limits to enact it. If nothing else, Westerns show us that deep down inside even good people are murderers, and we fully support even the most despicable acts if they are “on the side of the law.” In Westerns, democracy, the law, and morality are all proven to be nothing more than a facade and humans are just atavistic beasts who haven’t evolved. Or, as Ike Clanton puts it in Tombstone, “Having that badge don’t make you right.” Just like Timothy Olyphant’s character in Justified.

Everything about Olyphant’s character conjures up the vigilante of old (yes he wears a cowboy hat and everyone talks about it, yes he wears a hip holster and is a quickdraw artist), but at work in a world that has no use for such barbarism. Of course the plot is cliched, but Elmore Leonard is just the writer to turn the cliched into the interesting and entertaining show that Justified is. Did I mention the show take place in Kentucky and makes Kentucky seem like an interesting place?

Ignoring the hat and boots, Olyphant has all the necessary traits to be a great Western sheriff. He’s a roguish gentleman, he believes in traditions, he’s honest and a natural leader. Allow me to translate. He’s a chauvinist, conservative technophobe who doesn’t mind sacrificing anything and everything to get an arrest. Oh, and as far as honest goes, in a recent episode he states that he’d rather, “stick [his] dick in a blender,” than go to a gallery of paintings by Adolf Hitler. All in all, I think Justified is going to be a solid show because, unlike Westerns where vigilante justice tries to right the lawless society, Justified is all about the vigilante in a hyper-legal society. There is no better expression of this change in tone than the way everyone talks about the way Olyphant gunned down the hitman in the first episode. In Justified, shock has replaced awe, but it’s still all about terror.

Titles IV

How have I not posted this yet? I found it on my hard drive today, left over from when I was collecting my favorite movie title shots.

Note to all who watch 30 Rock obsessively

and think to themselves "Was that funny commentary on racism, or was that racism?":

Behold. They're having the argument for us over at Tiger Beat Down.

The Crazies (2010)

There are a lot of reasons to remake a movie, none of them very good. Sometimes there have been so many sequels already that the only way to continue the franchise is to restart it. We have seen a rash of these in recent years, Nightmare on Elm Street being the newest (note: I don't approve of rebooting the franchise, but I sure do like the idea of Jackie Earle Haley as the new face of Freddy). Sometimes a movie has a small but loyal following and the filmmakers hope to gain a wider audience for something they consider great by releasing a new version of it. Or technology has changed since the time of the original, and the filmmaker feels he can make a better-looking version of the same story. I suppose this is what justified remaking King Kong. Perhaps the hardest remake rational to argue with is when the original director himself remakes his own film, as Michael Haneke did with Funny Games last year. If anyone has the right to tamper with the legacy of a film, surely the director does. But if you go down the road of creator ownership, eventually you will run into George Lukas, and you will have to admit that just because a person created something, that does not mean he understands it. 

The Crazies was not remade for any of these reasons. Director Breck Eisner approached the project with the question, "What would George Romero have done with this if he had had more money?" So far so good. First, he hired real actors. Fine. He added big explosions. Fine again. Then he edited out all the really terrifying parts. You know, the horror. 

It's been a long time since I saw The Crazies. I saw it only once, and I remember it for one reason: because it was horrifying. 

The Crazies was very much in the Romero mold: mysterious illness infects a population, no one knows who to trust, a small group of unconnected people are thrown together in rural Pennsylvania, where they all turn on each other. Ugly things happen. Some not-very-subtle points are made about human nature and/or politics and/or society. Very ugly things happen. Roll credits. 

The remake of The Crazies is a perfectly adequate epidemic movie. Timothy Olyphant is a likable small-town sheriff, Radha Mitchell is a likable extremely hot small-town doctor. Joe Anderson (who I did not remember from the three movies imdb tells me I've seen him in) was very convincingly not British. There are jumpy moments, and big fires, and one pretty cool scene in a carwash. But I will forget all those things pretty quickly. I will never forget a certain scene from the 1973 movie. If you've seen the old one, I bet you know exactly what I'm talking about. 

p.s. Was it the music or the hand-held camera or the hot teenagers that made me think more than once that I was watching an episode of Friday Night Lights? Am I the only person who had this experience? The Internet says I am. 

The Wolfman (2010)

Guest reviewer, Ben: "I understand the silver bullets, but why waste the silver on shell casings?"

Food Documentaries

The Botany of Desire

Now a PBS piece done as a companion to Pollen’s book. On the surface, Pollen’s work is about helping humans realize they are not managing the natural world with the control they believe they have. In reality Pollen’s work is another way of making the natural world seem more manageable. It casts simple characters like potatos and apples as sweetly manipuatlive friends, who coax us into a hidden and happy partnership. I suspect this is the over-simplification of science that so angers almost everyone I know, but there’s something I like about it. First, it’s all about narrating the natural world, which is (finally!) my own interest--not the nature, but the narrative. Second, it recognizes animal activities like the import and export of agriculture as “natural,” which it is, in a culture that often see species transplantation as an unnatural crime committed by humans alone (no one here is defending cane toads, but certainly many of our mistakes are often very natural indicators of how commonly species break the balance of their ecosystem). Finally, even when I find some of Pollen’s analysis a bit dumbly uninteresting, I also find it sweet to see grown adults doing what children do: telling stories that are only a fraction of the apparent truth in an attempt to more easily live in the world.

I Like Killing Flies

I Like Killing Flies was recommended to me by a family member who loves both documentaries and oddball behavior. This movie must have been an easy win. It follows the move of Shopsin’s, a diner/grocery in New York from its long standing location in Greenwich Village to a new space in the Essex Street Market. The diner is notable for two reasons: its wholly unusual fare and its erratic chef and owner, Kenny Shopsin. Shopsin barks his way through the documentary, berating customers and family alike while pausing to debate at length his many personal philosophies with the filmmaker. Shopsin is amusing and contradictory, but after a while he seems hardly worth the film stock. For a personality project, Shopsin strikes me as another egomaniac, encouraged far past what might be amusing by a community a little too eager to boast of local color. The documentary was fun to watch, but it sadly neglected the real star of Shopsin’s: the food. The cooks at this diner have developed a 6-page menu almost as crowded as the kitchen—around 900 recipes total. The recipes are bizarre and funny and look delicious. I suppose the fascination with Shopsin stems from the public’s amazement that such beautiful and unlikely dishes come from so course a cook, but that narrative seems far less interesting than the story of the food itself. So, I’ll close this post by saying if I were in New York right now and in a group of fewer than 5 people I’d be ordering an avocado cheese tortilla soup, or a tofu pea peanut rice, or some lemon ricotta pancakes, or possible one of the brunch combination platters, either C, F, or N.

Titles III

For the sexiness.

Italy, how far you have fallen.

In today's BBC:

Italians shocked as horror film sparks panic attacks.

Parents and politicians in Italy are up in arms over US horror movie Paranormal Activity after several cinema-goers have panic attacks.

Did we watch the same movie? Pray Italy never meets with the likes of Takashi Miike.

Another snowday: nerdy documentaries

Frontrunners

I thought I’d love this because I enjoyed Spellbound. I am starting to sound like Netflix, or Pandora. The fact is, subject matter isn’t always a great predictor. I did love looking into the lives of Stuyvesant, perhaps New York City’s most prestigious high school, students. But the documentary, which follows 2 candidate’s run for Student Union President, fails to create the driving anticipation I hoped to feel. It clearly thinks it’s suspenseful—it invests a lot of time in dragging out the results with emotional and contemplative shots of the candidates. In the end, however, the race is at every point a total landslide. There’s no question who will win, and the movie fails to make me feel like a high school presidential campaign is important. Isn’t that what these movies are supposed to do? Help us see, for two hours, why something so inconsequential is of such great consequence to a small and loveable motley crew of Very Human characters? It was nice enough, but it didn’t.

Helvetica



The movie about typeface! I loved it. I loved having a whole two hours dedicated to how typeface changed advertising, and to how advertising followed the advent of high modernism and facilitated the establishment of one unified voice for the commercial language of countless corporations and at least two nations. It’s a great introduction to modern design trends and a wonderful survey of some of the contemporary artists who work primarily with commercial media—products we all use every day.

The true success of the film is its ability to make wholly compelling arguments both for and against Helvetica. As much as I love design I have always considered it the art of aesthetic choice, of selection and revision, not (because design and content can be isolated from one another) of social, political, or personal consequence. This film convinced me, at least to some degree, that the question is not so simple.

My favorite moment in the movie, without a doubt, occurs when a design artist is tasked with choosing the font for a book on his work and, because he finds the text boring and badly written, selects zap dingbats.

Titles II

These are my next title favorites because darling illustrations have been dreadfully overused in title shots since 2000ish, and neither of shots are precious. For They Live the graffiti points toward lawless humans as the "they" - an economic other more frightening probably than the aliens. For A Scanner Darkly I like translating the biblical glass to a sink drain.

Title screens

I've shared this already on Google reader, but I'm on an NTC posting binge, so why not? The movie titles collection that this graphic designer has posted is a wonderful way to lose hours of your life. The real beauty of this site is that many of these titles, on mouse over, give you the end screen of the movie. It's fantastic. Point A to point B in one mouse shift. I can't get enough of it. I now find titles so *meaningful*. I never realized how overdone white text on black screen is. I have finally confirmed my sense that font is so important.


So, because I don't want to work today, I'm going to post some of my favorite title shots from this afternoon's browsing. I tried to group them thematically below, but had tons of trouble with formatting. So I'll post them throughout the next day or so, as I feel like it.

First:

Billy Elliot and Elephant because they are beautiful.

Star Trek TNG season 4

CRAAAAAAAAAAP!

Lost, you pale in comparison.

Post-Birthday, Post-Apocalypse....

If I learned anything from the Hughes Brothers' The Book of Eli, I learned that three things will survive the apocalypse. First and foremost, the violence, hatred and ignorance brought about by religion will survive us all well into the sun-scorched deserts of post-apocalyptic America. Wait, that's already three things. Let me start again, the five things that will survive the apocalypse are those three aforementioned principles of religious thought and advertising. Appearances by Dr. Dre's headphones, iPod, J. Crew (skinny jeans fit better when you're on a steady diet of cat meat), the Coffee Beanery, GMC, and Puma remind us of the sins of materialism and as Eli tells Solara, "Then, people threw away what people today kill each other for." But there is hope. For in the future with the voice of God ringing in our ears and advertising clouding our vision, there will be a prophet to lead us. No, it's not Denzel Washington or Mila Kunis who will murder anyone who might stand in the path of God's doing. And it's not Gary Oldman who rightly believes that the Bible is "a weapon." No, we humble sinners have found a voice, a gravely voice, the voice of Tom Waits.

THE BOOK OF ELI: Ohhh Sweet - The best video clips are right here

To be serious for a moment, I'm a fan of the Hughes Brothers and I thought Dead Presidents and From Hell were impressive films. If nothing else, the Hughes Brothers tried to defy the notion that directors should work within a genre or specific style. When the trailers of The Book of Eli hit Apple's website, I felt justified in maintaining this stance and I don't think I'm wrong, yet. Because as much as this film is about the hope and resolve given to Eli in his quest to protect the Bible, there is no question as to the moral hypocrisy that comes with it. Eli is violent and unforgiving arbiter of God's will and he kills upwards of forty people on his quest. At times he's called on to protect the defenseless but this isn't always the case. Early in the film Eli watches the murder and rape of two travelers muttering to himself, "Stick to the path, stick to the path," only to deviate from this "path" and save Mila Kunis from a similar fate. Why Eli chooses to save one over the other is perhaps only explained by the fact that Kunis's character is a believer and the others did not yet know the Word. Ultimately, this film is an Old Testament parable about the might and power of God, and it doesn't leave out the hatred and intolerance that comes with it. I guess you could say it renewed my 'faith' or complete lack thereof.

Post-Soviet Russian Film

I realize that the BBC is deeply invested in giving Russia as much dramatically bad press as possible. Life in Russia is difficult, and no one here wants to claim that our coverage of Russia's political/artistic/social/criminal/etc. climate should be of the 99% POSITIVE REVIEW FOR FATHERLAND variety. I lived there, I'm a realist, and normally I relish my daily BBC feed--their reportage is usually delightfully terrible in the Fox News Melodrama kind of way. But today's article on post-Soviet Russian film really irks me for some reason. Perhaps it's the wistful nod to Lenin's love of film-as-propaganda in the beginning?

The government saw the medium as an ideal propaganda tool and promoted it from the outset, building thousands of cinemas in urban and rural areas. Consequently, Russian film-making flourished.

Yes, film as an art flourished in the Soviet period, but the decades when film had to agree with party politics at the risk of the director's life hardly seems a period when we can simply state things were great for film.

Or maybe it's the assertion that Russia's new cultural low can be seen in 1. lower earnings for local movies when contrasted with American film sales and 2. The prevalence of popcorn and cell phones in theaters.

Seriously? Do I need to invest the effort in Googling the international profits of Avatar versus the latest British blockbuster, or can I save my finger strength? Are we really going to pretend that American theater floors aren't sticky with popcorn bits and soda, or that theateres don't glow with the pale blue shimmer of a million texting cell phones?

This is not to say the article doesn't bring up some good points about distribution, funding, bureaucracy, and a lack of local interest for local films, all of which hamper the production of new films in Russia. These are certainly problems, as they are almost everywhere in the world. But the article entirely neglects a tremendously powerful film tradition that continues in Russia today. It's a tradition that could have benefited greatly from BBC coverage, had the BBC been worried about increasing awareness of talented filmmakers and not churning out yet another article dedicated to depicting Russia as a barren criminal hell-scape.

Ok, rant aside, here are some films that have come out of Russia after the fall of the Soviet Empire, all of which I believe are of note. They're not the best movies Russia has produced in the last 25 years, not by a long shot. But they are some of my favorites, and they demonstrate just how active and versatile Russia's film community still is:

* Peter FM - A simple romantic comedy, and fun.

* Burnt By the Sun - Beautiful cinematography and incredibly well acted. A family drama about a Soviet general.

* 12 - A modern adaptation of 12 Angry Men done by the same man who directed and starred in Burnt By the Sun. So well adapted I'd swear it was from a Russian original, but possibly a little too optimistic for a piece on Chechnya.

* Kakooshka - Another romantic comedy, but not at all simple. It's set during the war and follows two soldiers - one Russian and one Finnish - who are stranded with a young Lap woman on her farm. I find this movie hysterical, but that could just be me.

I'm stopping at those four because Thad knows better than I do, and can post here also. But note there are a lot more modern films that I'm looking forward to. Here are five:

* Hipsters - this movie looks weird.
* We're From the Future - this movie looks funny.
* Taras Bulba - this movie looks beautiful.
* Mermaid - this movie looks fantastic.
* Morphine - this movie is based on texts by Bulgakov.

See? There's so much modern Russian cinema I was able to get through this whole post without mentioning Night Watch.

Send Me No Flowers

A hypocondriac who mistakes indigestion for an impending heart failure sets out to find his wife a new husband, lest she fall into the hands of a man who can't be trusted.

"Hindus have the right idea George, when the husband dies the wife goes with him. She throws herself right onto the funeral pyre; that way the husband doesn’t have to worry about her."

Yeesh. But, like all Doris Day and Rock Hudson films it's fairly sweet and sexless. I really like the opening, in which Hudson's character wakes to several medical commercials. It implies that the movie will have more fun with the hypochondria than it does. That feels like sort of a loss, but even without I find Hudson so very likable. Together I think he and Day have all the makings of a good pajama party.