Movies, March 2010

** The Horse’s Mouth
*** Body Heat
*** Rainbow Kids (Daiyukai)
*** Anvil: the Story of Anvil

I thought The Horse’s Mouth oscillated between somewhat entertaining, boring, and annoying. That does not make for an enjoyable time, especially when you keep thinking of better ways you could spend your two hours. I don’t know if we were just supposed to enjoy Alec Guinness’s character’s antics, or if it was meant to express something universal about the artistic temperament or something, but snuh. Also, the fake voice, meh.

Hey Body Heat that was a pretty good noir thriller. It being a noir, you pretty much know the general outline of how it’s going to go, but it was fun getting there.

I don’t remember where I heard of Rainbow Kids, but it was a very pleasant little surprise. The story involves a trio of inept kidnappers who kidnap an old lady who turns out to be rich, powerful, and much smarter than they. She takes over the kidnapping and orchestrates it the way she wants, and a good time is had by all.

Anvil was awesome. The obvious comparison is Spinal Tap (but real!) but it reminded me more of American Movie, the documentary about the guy desperate to make his horror movie “Coven”. This one had a similar flavor (absolute dedication to their art, a certain midwesternness, loved ones who are both supportive and exasperated). American Movie’s Mark Borchardt, though, was kind of an asshole, single-minded in his pursuit. These guys are a bit more gentle (in spite of being the demigods of Canadian metal), and some of the best scenes come when they fight and make up.

Movies, February 2010

**.5 Tristram Shandy
*/**** Silk Stockings
*** Jane Eyre (1996)
**** The Hurt Locker

Tristram Shandy was funny but ultimately felt empty and disappointing. As Gillian Anderson says after the screening scene at the end, is that all? The movie has very little Tristram Shandy in it and a lot of Steve Coogan — which is okay, Steve Coogan is funny, especially playing a sort of exaggerated Steve Coogan (if it is exaggerated) — but it doesn’t really amount to much. I know this was kind of the point, Tristram Shandy being itself crazily postmodernally self-referential and so forth, but the ultimate question is whether I feel like I’ve had a satisfying interaction with some interesting people. I don’t really feel like I got much of either Tristram or Steve, and so the laughs I did get didn’t end up being that satisfying. I have trouble recommending it, but I have trouble giving it the pretty weak two stars too. I guess if you like Steve Coogan (which I do) and think he is funny (which I do) you will likely enjoy this.

Silk Stockings was pretty rotten. It’s got Cole Porter music, Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, and Peter Lorre and it’s still pretty rotten. It’s not so much they’re bad but that no one (except Cyd Charisse) really seems to be trying. It’s all bad music, bad lyrics, apathetic dancing, mediocre singing, forgettable choreography.. except Cyd Charisse. She’s terrific. Her character is the humorless Soviet kommissar and she plays it pretty much like Arnold as the Terminator. That part is awesome. And then as she lets Paris infect her, she has a wonderful dance scene with Astaire where she slowly unbends and they dance a duet. Then later, alone in her hotel room, she takes out the beautiful Parisian underthings she’s bought and hidden away and dances with them. If you just take the movie as the story of her finally letting go of her duty for the sake of pleasure, it’s appealing, and those two scenes are moving. Then she gets to tell off Fred and go back to Russia, where there’s a remarkable ensemble scene of a bunch of happy Russians dancing the “red blues”. If the movie had ended there, it would have been nice, but of course she has to end up back in Paris with the tasteless conniving Astaire, to be happily married. Truly, it’s a rotten movie, but if you like Cyd Charisse, you might find it worthwhile for those few scenes.

This is the 1996 William Hurt/Charlotte Gainsbourg Jane Eyre, which we thought was pretty good. We’re both big fans of the book, and were pleasantly surprised how well this one came out.

The Hurt Locker really deserved that Oscar.

Movies, January 2010

*** Lost Season 1
*** Bleak House

Lost season 1 was pretty good, even though some of the characters are kind of annoying. We burned through every DVD we got and waited impatiently for the next one, which is pretty much the entire goal of a show like this. The show has a great sense of having a grand plan behind all the strange incidents that you really really want to figure out, which is what keeps yu coming back. Though comments I’ve gotten from people who have seen most of the other seasons suggests that’s not really true, that new mysteries just keep being introduced, old ones are left dangling, and stuff just gets made up along the way; which is why, even though we enjoyed season 1, after finishing it we were debating whether to continue with 2.

Bleak House was really good. Gillian Anderson was amazing and most of the other roles, big and small, were very well performed. Bleak House is definitely one of those Dickens books with lots of funnily-named characters (Snagsby! Smallweed! Tulkinghorn! Guppy! Skimpole! Dedlock! Bucket! Krook!) and a lot of them looked pretty fun to perform too, with some over-the-top dialogue and accents. And the story itself is good, with plenty of tragic and comic bits.

Movies, December 09

** Royal Deceit
*** Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog
**** Amadeus
*** Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince
*** Lost Season 1, eps 1-8

Royal Deceit is supposed to be a movie adaptation of the original “rougher, more viking” story that Hamlet is based on. Unfortunately, the adaptation is kind of cheap and feels silly in places. I did eventually get into it enough to finish it (E gave up on it after half an hour), but I don’t really recommend it. If you’re a particular fan of Christian Bale, Gabriel Byrne, or Helen Mirren, you might like it.

Dr. Horrible was funny, as you’d expect. Not much more to it than that, but it was a good time.

Amadeus really is as good as it’s supposed to be. I hadn’t seen it since it originally came out and really enjoyed it. I like its approach to presenting genius — most viewers (me certainly included) probably can’t really grasp what makes Mozart so good compared to his contemporaries, so having Salieri as the interpreter for all us ordinary people works well, giving us a true musician’s insight. And of course, the original brilliant step was to make this story about Salieri, not Mozart; in Salieri, we have a wonderful antihero, jealous and vile but unable to resist the music.

Harry Potter was okay entertainment, but kind of annoyed me. This book was my favorite of the series, focused as it is on Snape, one of the few complex characters in the whole story. And yet, the whole central thread of the book, the half-blood prince, was basically reduced to: “hey I found this book, it makes me great at potions, but gee the guy who wrote it seems kind of twisted!” “Yes, I was the half-blood prince all along! ha ha!” It’s incredibly stupid, like the reveal at the end of a Scooby-Doo movie. Yes we get the big journey to retrieve the horcrux and of course the omg snape kills dumbledore moment, but all the other development.. gone.

Lost.. I will go into more when I review the whole first season.

Movies, November 09

**** House of Cards
*** Where the Wild Things Are
*** Bride and Prejudice

House of Cards was tremendous, Ian Richardson (who should look familiar; I had just seen him as Mr. Book in Dark City) was a very very good wicked politician, with his asides to the camera, his almost-indetectible smirk, and his polished sheen masking a malevolent mind. Susannah Harker (Jane in the 1995 Pride & Prejudice) was good as the young reporter, and the rest of the cast were all good. The story is nice and twisted, with Richardson slowly plotting his political rise by taking out everyone in his path, while letting them continue to believe he’s on their side.

I suppose it would be impossible to make a movie of Where the Wild Things Are without fleshing it out a bit, unless you wanted to make a very short movie. I liked some things about the way the story was fleshed out, and a lot of the look and feel of the movie, and some of the monster interactions, but I got kind of bored with the “ha ha monsters have interpersonal problems too!” aspect and the whinier monsters and the middle of the movie, which just seemed too long.

Bride and Prejudice was pretty good but not as good as I’d remembered it.

Danger Man to The Prisoner

It’s easy to suppose that Patrick McGoohan’s John Drake from Danger Man is the same man as #6 from The Prisoner. Both are resourceful spies, ruthless but with a core of integrity, and of course with McGoohan’s sometimes bizarre but wonderful personal tics. But the most fun thing about such speculation is the occasional flash of the future prisoner in certain episodes of Danger Man. Oh, I know there probably wasn’t any grand intentional scheme that tied them together, but there are episodes of Danger Man where Drake begins to become dissatisfied with his masters. And there’s even one about a sort of proto-village. It transitions into the Prisoner rather nicely. Also, Drake often says “be seeing you”.

Probably the first episode in which Drake clashes with his masters is Whatever Happened to George Foster, in which Drake learns that a wealthy British lord is subverting the government of a small country for his own ends. The lord manages to influence Drake’s own boss (and his boss’s boss’s boss, the foreign secretary) to have Drake removed from the case, but Drake continues on his own and ultimately stops the lord by uncovering enough dirt on him to blackmail him.

The hypothetical resignation almost could have come about as a result of It’s Up to the Lady (though this theory is really dismantled by the fact that the episode is from the first season), in which Drake is called upon to persuade a defecting Englishman to return home. (spoilers) Drake manages it by persuading the man’s wife to change his mind, and he seals the deal on a promise that the man won’t be prosecuted on his return home — a promise made to him by his own boss. However, when they return, the man is immediately arrested. Drake seethes at his boss in vain, and the disappointed wife simply turns her back on him and walks away.

One fun Prisoner-esque episode is Colony Three, in which Drake finds himself (spoilers) at a Russian spy-training facility in the middle of Siberia that is a perfect model of an English town, complete with English defectors who are forced to play along. It’s very much a proto-Village, even down to the forced frivolity and undercurrent of menace. The other episode is The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove in which Drake has a variety of very weird adventures that involve odd camera angles and sinister music. It turns out (spoilers) that Drake has gotten bonked on the head in a road accident and the whole thing has been imagined, incorporating the doctor and others standing around him, Wizard-of-Oz-stylee. It’s weird in a way that would become familiar in The Prisoner.

Movies – October 09

*** The Wicker Man (1973)
**** Coraline

The 1973 Wicker Man should not be confused with the recent Nicolas Cage remake, which by all accounts is horrendous. This one was good. It’s a little off-putting at first, at least if you don’t like weird hippy pagan musicals, but on the other hand there’s some boobs and after a while the musical stuff goes by the wayside as righteous christian policeman edward woodward battles against the depraved pagan hippies. The ending is kinda sweet.

I can’t imagine Coraline being anything other than terrifying for a child, but that aside we thought it was great. It will be a long time before we let NLP see it, I think.

Movies – September 09

*** OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies
*** Dark City

Kind of a slow month for movies. OSS 117 wasn’t at all what I expected — a lot more slapstick and silly than the sort of cool spy parody I was expecting. It was pretty funny in places, not great. E found it uninteresting.

Dark City was about as I remembered — interesting and with lots of good bits but on a grander scale kind of silly. As I so often say in my reviews, the setup and the first hour of running around and figuring out what was going on was pretty good, but the working out of the plot kind of meh. And good ol pre-24 Kiefer Sutherland with his various overacted tics was just sort of odd.

Movies – August 09

**** The Wire, Seasons 4-5
* Jubilee
*** I’m Alan Partridge, Season 1, ep1-3

I don’t really know what to say about The Wire. It’s as good as everyone says. I was that into the idea of it, but got hooked about ten minutes into the first episode and was hooked all the way through the last episode of the last season. So if you haven’t seen it, I’d say just go watch it.

E got Jubilee because she thought it was a different half-remembered movie she’s always wanted to see. It wasn’t. Instead it was some awful Derek Jarman thing (and all that that implies). We watched a little bit and fast-forwarded a bit and then just gave up.

I like Steve Coogan and I thought Alan Partridge was pretty funny (though it contains a lot of the discomfort humor that I find so discomforting) but after watching about three episodes I felt like I’d gotten my fill.

Movies – July 09

**** The Wire, Season 3
*** Zero Effect
* Bottle Shock
*** Up the Yangtze

The Wire is still great. Season 3 brings in politics more, but also explores Bunny Colvin’s radical solution to the drug problem in the western and features his awesome paper bag speech. As a sometime libertarian, I really got into that storyline, and thought they worked out the implications, good and bad, in a meaningful way.

Zero effect was pretty good. I had no expectations (can’t remember how it got on my queue), and it turned out to be some good entertainment.

We were so thoroughly uninterested in the people we met in the first 20-30 minutes of Bottle Shock that we just ejected it and sent it back to Netflix. Sorry, Alan Rickman, I promise to watch you in something better soon.

We missed Up the Yangtze, a documentary about the effects of China’s three gorges dam on people living in the area, at SIFF last year and were looking forward to renting it. It starts off slowly but gradually picks up and becomes a fascinating and understated story. It follows a girl whose family’s house will be covered (like many’s) by the new lake created by the dam. Her family sends her to do menial work on a riverboat to support herself and her family, instead of going to school as she wants. The contrast between her rural family’s life and that onboard the riverboat (both among the more modernized young people working there and the rich tourists coming through) is staggering, and underlined by the images of the new lake slowly consuming the family house.