Movies, December 2010

*** Archer (season 1)
* Afro-Samurai
** The Tick
*** The Fellowship of the Ring
*** Cowboy Bebop (episodes 1-5)
* Dr. Who
** MI:5
**** Black Swan

Remember Coach McGuirk from Home Movies? Well the same guy voices the title character in Archer, and the show is sort of like Coach McGuirk becomes a much better-looking international spy. So the result is pretty funny. I’m looking forward to the next season.

Afro-samurai is such a dumb-sounding name (and looked so ridiculous, like a parody of a stereotype) I figured it had to be pretty good or it would have been laughed out of town. But I couldn’t get very far into it. Maybe it is pretty good, but it just seemed like a parody of anime combined with a parody of blaxploitation, but taken seriously. Not good.

The tick was sort of funny but just… I don’t know, I wasn’t in the mood for that brand of goofy (and its low-budget bad-actingness), so I didn’t continue beyond a couple episodes.

For some reason, I got a craving to watch The Fellowship of the Ring again. And again, it was a fun adventure but my god some of the acting (hi, Gimli). And then there’s Hugo Weaving as Elrond; at the time, The Matrix was pretty recent and it was hard to see him as anything other than Agent Smith, which was just not right. Well, almost ten years later, he still just isn’t right. And then there’s my favorite, the chubby elf (Haldir, I think). The elfy hair just does not look good on a pasty, chubby man. I think since the third movie came out, the tendency has been to see these as some kind of modern epic classic, but I think, on the whole, they’re just what they are: big hollywood action movies. Enjoyable, but pretty quickly forgettable as soon as you leave the theater, without a whole lot you need to chew over in your mind. That about describes how I feel about the books, I suppose (one of the main things worth chewing over being the exact nature of Tolkien’s views on gender, race, and good/evil) , though I know some people think otherwise.

I first watched the whole Cowboy Bebop a few years ago, after hearing how great it was. I enjoyed it but was not blown away. Recently, I read most of the Overthinking It series on Cowboy Bebop (plug: I love Overthinking It), which made me want to re-watch the whole thing with my new deeper Overthought understanding. And this time around… I enjoyed it but was not blown away. Bebop is good and interesting and well done, and there are many things about it to enjoy or appreciate. Stokes’s articles rightly point out a number of those things; but most of what he focuses on were less things to be directly enjoyed than things to chew over afterwards. I might enjoy debating the meaning of Bebop with others who were watching them, but I watched them alone, and they didn’t end up adding a whole lot to my watching experience. Perhaps if I had literally studied them right before watching, but I don’t watch movies in order to have additional homework. This is not a knock on Stokes and Overthinking It: I literally enjoyed reading his articles more than I did watching the actual show (again, this is why I plug Overthinking It). But I did not feel like going through Bebop again and gave up after a couple of discs.

E and I decided to try out the recent Doctor Who reboot and did not get very far into it before deciding it looked awful and we couldn’t bear to go on. Deliberate or not, it seemed to exactly reproduce the cheap & cheezy feel of the original, and I don’t have enough nostalgia for the original that that interests me. MI:5 also failed to win us over. We might give it another shot, since people say it’s so good, but the first episode at least just was not that interesting and we were not particularly interested in sticking around to see what these people did next.

I’m not even going to try and review Black Swan much, beyond saying that E and I both thought it was terrific. I know some people think it was awful and some think it was glorious camp and unintentionally funny, and many don’t particularly like Aronofsky’s work (I liked Pi, but hated Requiem so much I hadn’t seen any more of his movies until now). There’s no question it was melodrama, but the thing about good melodrama is that if you accept it and enter its world, it can be very compelling. I entered Black Swan’s world completely and found it “holy shit!” worthy.

Oscars Party Menu

Cocktails
Anisette Bening

Snacks
Ruffles have Bridges
Mark Ruffleos
Darren Pretzelnofskies
Crispian Kale

Salad
Jesse Eisenberg Lettuce Salad with Shaved Jeremy Fennel and Javier Bacon Lardons

Soup
The King’s Beets, Geoffrey Russian Style

Mains
Natalie Porkmans
James Franc’n’beans
Roasted David O. Brussels Sprouts
Joel and Ethan Coen on the Cob, with Salt

Afters
The Cakes are All White
Nicole King Dons
Selections from our Helena Bonbon Cart
Lady Finchers

Oldman

optic: lol http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyfbRz4ObFY
optic: love that scene
luna: gary oldman rules
optic: EVERYONE
luna: i especially loved gary oldman in the fifth element
optic: i felt like his role in leon and his role in the fifth element were pretty much the same role with slightly different props
optic: who is dumb enough to make a nefarious deal with a giant ever-expanding maw of pure dark evil chaos
optic: or whatever
optic: i mean, how can that possibly end well
luna: agrd
optic: if i ever am running my own company and need to call an all-hands meeting, im using gary oldman
optic: depending on how much money the company has, possibly the actual in-flesh gary oldman
luna: i would use alan rickman
luna: now i have a machine gun. ho-ho.
luna: best line ever?

Movies, September 2010

** True Blood, Season 3
*** 30 Rock, Season 1
*** Firefly

Wow this was a long time ago. I’ve been really remiss in my book and movie reviews. Uh, True Blood was all right but I started to get annoyed with a lot of the characters. And I got kind of tired of what’s-his-name, the vampire king of Mississippi. Just like in season 2, when the whole thing was taken over by the dumb Maryann storyline, I felt like too much attention was paid to one “big bad”. Will probably get sucked into season 4 regardless though.

Hey, 30 Rock is funny. This is news to no one but me. But I started watching it with season one and have now been through every single episode available. Thank you, Netflix streaming.

I was really looking forward to watching and enjoying Firefly again, but I started and wasn’t motived to continue, not right then anyway, when there was 30 Rock to be watched. Maybe later.

Movies, July 2010

*** City Lights
*** True Blood, Season 2
**** Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day
*** I Am Love

I don’t really have much to add to the reams of ink and bits that have presumably been spilled praising Charlie Chaplin, except to say that I liked this movie pretty well. As with many movies this old, it sometimes was a little silly or a little slow for my modern attention span, but otherwise thumbs up.

I didn’t intend to watch True Blood with E, but I somehow got sucked in and watched most of Season 2. I thought it was mostly good, except I ended up getting very tired of the whole Maryann storyline. It just didn’t really make dramatic sense — she was far too powerful to have been around for thousands of years without anyone noticing, since she could basically go anywhere and make anyone do anything she wanted. Come on. Plus, she got really annoying.

I think I’ve said it before, but I think Miss Pettigrew is pretty much a perfect movie. It’s not big in scope or anything, but just about everything in it is perfect, and everyone and everything is so damn appealing.

E and I really liked I Am Love, in spite of its unsubtle symbolism and drama (and its sometimes intrusively overly-obvious music). The main reason, of course, is Tilda Swinton, who is usually amazing and was definitely here. She is simply a pleasure to watch.

Movies, August 2010

*** Inception
** Daniel Deronda
** Public Enemies
*** Cowboy Bebop, The Movie

Inception was pretty good. It certainly was fun to look at, and it’s fun to think about the various theories afterward — who was incepting whom? which of the various things we saw was “reality”, if any? though honestly, the question of whether the top stopped spinning was I think the dumbest of the bunch. Nolan might as well have tacked “OR IS IT?!” onto “THE END”. I don’t really agree with people who thought it was one of the best movies evar, but nor do I agree with people who thought it was hard to follow or basically incoherent. It wasn’t that complicated, it has a fairly straightforward interpretation that mostly makes sense, and the basic premise is good, though some of the details are pretty sillier (than no sillier than many other decent science fiction movies).

I didn’t really know what to expect from Daniel Deronda having neither read it nor heard much about it. It goes some surprising places, like (spoilers) having Daniel turn out to be Jewish and decide to become some sort of proto-zionist and having him end up with the poor Jewish singer girl rather than the beautiful blonde who appears to be the lead character. Some of this was probably the fault of this production — Gwen (the blonde) seemed to be a more central character than Daniel himself, and the two of them seem to have a lot of chemistry, so it’s a bit surprising that they don’t end up together. I simply wasn’t that interested in the Jewish “I must find my roots!” stuff, partly because it seemed so grounded in the idea that your born race/religion/whatever is your destiny, a notion I find repugnant. I didn’t hate this, but I don’t recommend it very strongly and it doesn’t make me want to read the book.

Public Enemies should have been much better than it was. If there’s one thing I love about a crime drama, it’s the classic heist setup and all that, and that was basically absent here. The movie drifted around for a while without setting up much dramatic tension, and there are a lot of characters that sort of come and go. Plus, the whole movie is unbelievable dark — like, literally so, so that it’s hard to see what’s going on. So, snuh.

I have been reading the unbelievable series on Cowboy Bebop on Overthinking It (I love that blog), which gave me a craving to see it again. Unfortunately, there’s a very long wait on the TV series DVDs at netflix, so I rented the movie. And the movie somehow failed to live up to my overthinking-it-stoked expectations. It just didn’t feel that compelling. I still want to watch the TV series again, though I fear that, as with many pieces of pop culture that get relentlessly analyzed, it may just turn out to be a piece of pop culture on which some creative person has heaped a lot of meaning that maybe wasn’t there in the first place. Or maybe not.

Movies, June 2010

**** Enchanted April
** Watchmen
*** 9
** Picnic
*** District 9
*** Out of Sight
** The Petrified Forest

I’ve always loved Enchanted April, and not only because it features Polly Walker wearing my favorite haircut. It’s just charming. I have to say that on watching it again after many years (though I reread it not too long ago), it was a little stranger and more off-kilter than I’d remembered. But that’s okay, it works.

Watchmen was fine. Watchable but ultimately forgettable, kind of a disappointment for such a good book.

9 was enjoyable — good animation, some compelling characters, and an interesting world for them to wander around in — but overall it didn’t quite come together for me. The story and some of the characters are fairly cliched, a lot of the details sort of sketched in, as though the director is really more interested in creating a mood and some interesting visual moments than in telling a story.

District 9 was also successful in some ways and not in others. My favorite things about it were first, the way the aliens and everything about them was made so matter-of-fact and quotidian, just another fact of life one has to deal with, and second, the way Wikus goes from being a total arrogant asshole to being an interesting character. His assholeness is kind of inherent in his sort of clueless arrogance, and in truth he doesn’t really stop being an asshole in that sense, but he turns out to have some reserves of decency. He’s a great character, and must have been fun to play.

Picnic was crazy melodrama. It was way over the top, sometimes amusingly — like the amount of screen time given to William Holden walks around shirtless while women ogle him, or the Rosalind Russell’s incredible bitchiness — but overall it just didn’t work for me (but then, I don’t really enjoy campy or ironically bad melodrama). The big mystery to me is why this movie isn’t more popular as a camp classic.

Out of Sight was pretty good. I’ve long heard of it as a good movie (or as a surprisingly good movie, given it’s Hollywood-cliche sort of story and casting), and it was surprisingly good for the basically empty entertainment that it is. Both George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez are appealing actors when they’re doing it well, and they do it well here, creating an appealing chemistry between their characters.

Petrified Forest was not bad but didn’t really work for me. I found the writing and acting too mannered, too self-conscious. It was a real old-fashioned melodrama, with conversations that were more the exchange of poetic monologues than anything like real dialogue between real people. It’s easy enough to see why Humphrey Bogart’s doomed, cynical gangster got so much attention, but in retrospect it’s almost a caricature of many of his later roles. His gangster, Bette Davis’s innocent girl yearning for freedom, and Leslie Howard’s jaded wanderer are all archetypes more than 3d characters, and while all three played them pretty well, I had trouble believing in them.

Movies, May 2010

** Longitude
** The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Not many movies this month. Longitude was a film adaptation of a book I’d had mixed feelings about in March (liked the story, was pretty iffy on the author’s take on it). The movie was better, perhaps because it had Jeremy Irons and Michael Gambon in it. We did get more focus on the principal characters and the amazing clocks, but it was still a little heavy-handed on the whole melodrama of who’s trying to sabotage whose efforts etc. In the end, I enjoyed it much more than the book and felt more satisfied with what I’d seen of Harrison and Gould and of Harrison’s clocks.

The imaginarium was kind of a hot mess of a movie, like most Gilliam efforts. Heath Ledger’s last, with Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell filling in as alternate versions of him to finish after he died. The various-people-playing-Heath-Ledger thing worked fairly well, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me that it wasn’t the original intention if Ledger hadn’t died. That said, it’s not that often that you see something strange and nonsensical in a Gilliam movie and think to yourself “that’s too strange for Gilliam to have intended it that way.” Overall the movie was… interesting. Not really sure what the point was supposed to be, and at the end I wasn’t really sure what I’d just seen, and mostly not in a way that involved wanting to go back and see it again. Not that I didn’t enjoy it while it was going on, but it didn’t make a lasting impression.

Movies, April 2010

** Lost, Season 2
*** District 9
*** Der Baader Meinhof Komplex

I enjoyed the first season of Lost pretty well, even while aware that it was a fairly silly and manipulative soap opera. Parts of season were still good, but I started to get tired of it, especially the way the characters just kept acting unrealistically stupid (let’s get the guns and run into the jungle again! let’s have the only doctor constantly put his own life at risk without ever training anyone else in basic first aid!). What kept me watching in the first season was the promise of having an interesting and mysterious world gradually pieced together bit by bit, but it started to become clear in the second season that a lot of things were just made up as they went along and that many questions would never be answered. And so I decided to stop there. Then, to satisfy my curiosity, I skimmed through the episode descriptions for season 3 and figured I’d made the right call — it seemed chock full of yet more new mysteries, full of pointless running into the jungle with guns, and not at all full of answers for anything. Having since dipped into the rest of the story and actually watched the series finale with friends — I don’t really feel like I missed anything, and after a few days of speculation I’ve almost completely forgotten about the show already.

District 9 was pretty great. I had no real idea where they were going to take the story, beyond knowing the basic premise, and it just went some really interesting places. Also, I liked the progression Wikus’s character follows from clueless asshole to interesting guy. Lots of good little details too.

Baader meinhof was interesting and compelling to watch, and the first half or so especially gave a great look at what the mood was like at that time in Germany. But as it goes more into the breakdown of the group and their time in prison, the new unexplained members of the group multiply, it is hard to follow what they are all doing or who relates to what, and some of it just gets annoying and dull. Overall a good movie, but I think it tried to cover too much and perhaps needed to focus a little more. Sure, history doesn’t make neat stories, but it’s good to pick and choose what you want to tell.