Beats, Rhymes & Life:The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest (Sunday, July 31, 2011) (62)

Actor Michael Rapaport directs Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest, a documentary about the history of the hip hop group and their current struggles to stay together. It's a documentary with a similar feeling to Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, that is not only about the biographical look at the band, but also an evaluation of a beef between two leaders that they're having a hard time settling.

Q-Tip and Phife Dawg, the two MCs of the group were childhood best friends, but always had a different view of their craft. For Tip it was always a serious job that demanded the most accurate attention. His passion has always laid in finding amazing music to sample on each track and knowing exactly how the layers of sounds would would perfectly together. For Phife (aka, the Funky Diabetic), he was always more interested in amazing rhymes and the more poetic aspects of the art. This always worked well for them, as they made six albums in about 12 years, including The Low End Theory, one of the best rap/hip hop albums of all time.

By the late 1990s, however, they were fighting more and more and seemed less interested in keeping the group together. They had already lost one of the original members, Jarobi, who seemed to be less into the touring thing than the others, and their DJ, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, seemed to not be interested in fighting the two titans he worked with. The band melted away, but they remained friendly. Sort of.

Phife was always upset that Tip became known as the "leader" of the band and didn't like how he would run things; Tip didn't like that Phife was never as serious about the work as he felt it necessary to be. When they got together for a reunion in 2008 at the Rock the Bells show (to help Phife pay for medical issues relating to his juvenile diabetes), they ended up fighting constantly and not speaking to one another by the end.

Rapaport talks to most of the important rappers whose styles either were influenced by Tribe or developed at the same time. Interviews include members of De La Soul, The Jungle Brothers, Monie Love, Prince Paul, Common, Questlove, Black Thought and Pharrell Williams, to say nothing of appearances by Mary J. Blige, Busta Rhymes and Mos Def. They all talk about how important Tribe's music was to them. Common has what is probably the most important comment that they all had access to the old vinyl that Tribe found their beats and samples from, but Tribe were the first guys to actually listen to those albums and use them.

Rapaport, as passionate as he clearly is about Tribe, is not a great documentarian and the film loses some power with a very sloppy style and inconsistent pace. There are some frustrating transitions and at least two albums (of the six they released) are barely discussed at all.

This is a good documentary from the point of view of telling a story of a band and getting a generally good understanding about their history. Unfortunately the issue of Phife and Tip not liking one another is not really dug into very deeply. Rapaport presents the fight they're having in it's basic terms, but doesn't really get deep into why they are fighting (unlike how Berlinger and Sinofsky handled a similar event in Some Kind of Monster). This is not a very deep movie, but it does have great music... which Rapaport can't take credit for, of course.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Another Earth (Sunday, July 31, 2011) (61)

As Another Earth opens, the young Rhoda (co-writer Brit Marling) is partying in her Connecticut town before she goes off to college at M.I.T. She drives home and hears on the radio that a new planet has entered the solar system and is now visible with the naked eye. Transfixed by this tiny blue dot in the night sky, she does not pay attention to where she's driving and crashes head-on into another car with young family inside.

When Rhoda gets out of jail (a four-year stint for manslaughter), she seems to be a changed person. Sober now in every sense, she realizes that she was reckless as she tries to re-start her life in a much more modest way. During the the four years that have passed, that blue dot in the sky has come closer and closer to Earth and scientists have studied it and have come to understand it as an Earth clone, Earth II, which seems to have the exact the same land masses, cities and people that we have on our planet. That is to say there is a likelihood that each person has a double on Earth II.

What is wonderful about Another Earth is that while this very challenging string-theory-multiple-Earths story line is going on, what we experience from scene to scene is really just a very down-to-earth tale of Rhoda coming to terms with killing two people and trying to make right with the man who survived the accident, John (William Mapother). In order to do this, she becomes his house cleaner, trying desperately to help him through his depression and trying to find the right moment to reveal her identity to him. It is clear that such an existential change as Earth II affects everyone in dramatic ways, but this is much more of a melancholy drama than it is a sci-fi movie (the way Moon, District 9 or 2001: A Space Odyssey are really just dramas set in a sci-fi genre).

I really like the moody, gray-green look to the film. That it takes place in winter, gives everything a cold and wet look, which is very important to creating an interesting atmosphere. We're constantly reminded of how mediocre life is for most and the outside world works as a nice objective correlative for the internal struggles of both Rhoda and John.

As the film moves along, there's a lovely idea that Earth II represents a mulligan, a do-over, for people on Earth (I). Clearly Rhoda and John are in need of such a do-over, though as much in an existential sense as a literal one. This is a lovely device, if a bit heavy-handed. (In fact it's perhaps that it's so unapologetically heavy-handed that it works so well. Co-writer/director Mike Cahill and Marling never flinch from the inherent silliness of the story and never stop to answer questions, like "won't this new Earth crash into our Earth?" Nobody ever blinks about this construction and it works because it's so earnest.)

Marling is really amazing in this movie, particularly for a new actress I've never seen in any major role before. OK, first, she's objectively beautiful, sorta a grown-up looking Jennifer Lawrence or blond Jessica Chastain. But she brings with that a self-effacing honesty and an elemental naturalness that's refreshing and particularly rare for actors of her age. She feels like a mumblecore star with a legitimate script and real makeup. Rhoda is ashamed of what she did and feels obliged to suffer now that she's out of jail and "free," but also is a bit of a mouthy 22-year-0ld whose first-instinct sometimes is to talk back.

Sadly the third act of this film is a complete mess, filled with sentimental, romantic garbage that feels contrary to the real dark story of angst and self-torture (although I'm sure it puts butts in seats, as they say). This sequence is much more typical of what you would expect from a Hollywood production than an independent one (though it's hard to begrudge the filmmakers for wanting to be able to sell their movie, I guess). I should say my favorite directing moment happens here, when an aleatory pants pulling gives a glimpse of unplanned reality. Sometimes the best moments in movies are unscripted.

This film really is good, even if the last 20 minutes are annoying. I like the way it's a movie about the effects of science, but not really about the science itself. I think as an atmosphere piece it is very effective and indelible. I look forward to seeing more of Brit Marling and more from Mike Cahill. Clearly they're talented and know how to do the things they do.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Devil's Double (Saturday, July 30, 2011) (60)

The Devil's Double, directed by Lee Tamahori, tells the story of Latif Yahia, an Iraqi man who became Uday Hussein's body double in the years just before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The story does not get into the interesting stuff you would want it to get into like doppelgangers, doubles and loss of identity. It is basically an action movie with lots of tits and ass and no interesting narrative.

It seems that Latif knew Uday from some level of school, though it's not clear exactly when (maybe elementary school). At any rate the moment he returns from the battlefield of the Iran-Iraq war around 1989, he is called to meet with Uday, Saddam's oldest son. Latif and Uday look alike because they're both played by Dominic Cooper (just like Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap!). Latif is reluctant to become the double because he's not a Ba'athist and worries for his safety. He ends up taking the job and getting some plastic surgery to make him look more like his boss.

As he does stand-in appearances fro Uday, he meets all sorts of business and political contacts as well as hundreds of bikini-clad hot women. It seems that Uday's main squeeze is a prostitute named Sarrab, played by the magnificent Ludivine Sagnier (OK - she might not really be a prostitute as she really only works for Uday, but he does give her a lot of money for sex and there is a suggestion that she was a prostitute at some point in her life). Over time, Latif realizes that Uday is a psychopath who enjoys murder and chaos as much as fast cars and expensive champagne. Latif has to figure out a way to get out if his situation without dying.

The film has no particular flow, and we mostly just see a list of events from the period around 1989 through early 1991. There is no sense that the story moves in any particular way. Uday is always outrageous and turns up the craziness when he throws big parties: In one party he makes his guests, male and female, strip down naked and dance (sadly Sagnier does not join them); at anther party he literally guts one of his father's lackeys with a hunting knife for speaking back to him.

The most frustrating thing is how terrible basically all of the decorative aspects of the film, from the makeup and hair to the sets and decor look totally fake, as if they were being presented on afternoon television. The film opens with Latif riding in a car to Uday's palace and the rear-projection landscape that passes is laughable. Every close-up we see is terrible because all we can concentrate on is the caked-on makeup and prosthetic or teeth on Cooper. Even the furniture in Uday's palace looks fake and cheap.

It's really terrible that there couldn't have been a slightly deeper level to this story (even if it might have touched the line of cliche). There's no reason why we couldn't have learned about the psychology of Latif as he becomes a double for a monster (for the devil). Was he ever excited by the violence and power himself? Did he really not enjoy the whores and money that came with his job? Latif is so clean and Good and Uday is so dirty and Bad that the film becomes more of a comic book tale than a real interesting narrative. It's really just long and tedious... and even Sangier can't save it.

Stars: .5 of 4

COWBOYS AND ALIENS: The Film Babble Blog Review

COWBOYS AND ALIENS (Dir. Jon Favreau, 2011)

When I first heard about the summer movie concept of fuckin' James Bond and Indiana Jones (Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford respectively) fighting aliens in the Old West, I was all 'sign me up', especially since it was being helmed by IRON MAN's Jon Favreau. But less than halfway through this messy overly formulaic film, massive boredom set in.



It started out promisingly with Craig waking up in the desert with a strange piece of artillery clasped to his wrist.



Craig is a man who can't remember his name, obviously because of an alien abduction as we see in quick fleeting light-filled flashbacks, and we follow him as he can takes out a crew of wranglers on the trail, on his way to the protypical wild west town of Absolution.



The town's sherrif (Keith Carradine) arrests Craig, along with the trouble-making gun toting brat Paul Dano the son of a ruthless cattleman (Ford) who acts like he owns the town, because he does.



Ford demands that his son be let free, but before they can sort anything out the town is under alien invasion, with a bunch of figher jet type spaceships laying waste to property and literally lassoing away various townsfolk.



007 and Dr. Jones, sorry Craig and Ford, form a posse to go after the aliens and get back their loved ones, and we get a long dull stretch full of old timey philophizing and poorly constructed character development.



When we finally see the aliens, like in a close-up shot stolen from ALIEN, it's disapointing how generic they are. They're the same green scaley disgusting man-creatures with hidden orifices and tons of teeth. Minus the multiple legs they look like the Skitters from the new show Falling Skies or from hundreds of other alien attack scenarios from T.V. and movies.



The profusely predictable plot concerns infiltrating the alien's headquarters, hidden in the picturesque terrain, which by the way is beautifully shot by Mathew Libatique (IRON MAN, BLACK SWAN), to save the abducted, with a ginormous battle climax in which cowboys join forces with Indians and outlaws to bring down the intruders from outer space.



It's not Craig or Ford's fault - nor love interest Olivia Wilde's, or Samuel Rockwell as a sensitive saloon owner - it's the undercooked treatment given to overdone material. The special effects are fine but far from mind blowing (they make the claim that the aliens don't see well except when it's dark so we get a lot of murkiness), and when the alien's motivation for world domination is revealed it's in one or two flimsy throwaway lines.



Craig's stoic beefiness matched with Ford doing his gruff old man routine to greater effect than his last few films, does make for some fanboy pleasing moments, but they aren't enough to make this anything more than a barely passable popcorn picture.



More later...

CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE: The Film Babble Blog Review

CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE (Dirs. Glenn Ficcara & John Requa, 2011)

At the beginning of this ensemble rom com, after an opening montage of the feet of restaurant patrons playing footsy, Steve Carrell is told by his wife of 25 years (Jullianne Moore) that she wants a divorce. This sets off a chain of vignettes that are more about clichéd silly lust than what the title wants us to think.



This is a simple-minded movie more concerned with setting up cheap gags than actual character connection. Like in the scenario where Carrell befriends a womanizing Ryan Gosling at a bar.



Gosling assigns himself as Carrell's wingman, so, of course, there's a shopping mall montage where Carrell gets new hip clothes and a snazzier haircut, and before you know it he's a success with the ladies. This kind of sequence should've been retired the second the '80s ended.



Meanwhile, Carrell and Moore's 13-year old son (Jonah Bobo) has a crush on their babysitter (Analeigh Tipton) who he's over-texting, Moore is fending off the further advances of a sleazy co-worker who she had an affair with (Kevin Bacon, who's really getting around this year), and a seemingly unconnected Emma Stone is pining for Josh Groban as a dorky lawyer.



There are 2 twists that are revealed in this material - one which you can see coming if you are paying attention, and the other is of the "oh, come on!" variety. I won't spoil what they are, but I will say that one of them involves Marisa Tomei as a squirmy, and completely unconvincing woman that Carrell has a one-night stand with.



The cast defintely has plenty of comic chops (as in EASY A, Stone has a way with one-liners), and there are some juicy jokes here and there in CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE, but I cringed much more than I laughed. It contains a lot of talk about soul mates, but that's just audience pandering talk. I never believed it ever really cared about matters of the heart.



In one scene, Carrell watches sadly as Moore drives off and it begins to rain. Carrell: "That is such a cliché." It sure is, yet at least in that moment the movie owns up. If only it did at its other dishonest cloying turns, then maybe it would be a movie with a soul instead of a big screen sitcom that might as well have a laugh track dubbed in.





More later...

American Grindhouse (Tuesday, July 26, 2011) (59)

American Grindhouse is a fun documentary about the history of exploitation flicks and B-movies, featuring interviews with contemporary directors who were either influenced by those pictures or merely grew up in their heyday. Made by Elijah Drenner, the movie shows rather soberly this wild and limitless group of movies.

We see how early filmmakers experimented with sex and violence, until the Hollywood Production Code forced such pictures out of the mainstream and into alternate theaters. Then we see how over time, these movies became more and more popular with a public eager to see skin and/or blood, until Hollywood pictures themselves started emulating these depraved or gonzo films.

There are dozens of interviews with film histories, Hollywood directors (John Landis and Joe Dante probably the two best known of this group) and grindhouse directors, now as old men. There are fantastic clips from some of the most terrible films, including Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS and Blood Orgy of the She Devils. There's a wink with everything we see, as it is all so crappy, it's hard to take very seriously in any context other than a sociological appraisal of the culture at that moment.

One very interesting thing is to see how close some of these films are to experimental films by artists such as Stan Brakhage, Bruce Connor and Jack Smith. It's clear that these filmmakers looked to grindhouse fare for inspiration, and this really underlines how bizarre and unconventional such films were (like pregnancy movies or the psychedelic bloody orgy movies).

John Landis probably has the best line of the documentary, saying that The Passion of the Christ is the best grindhouse film of recent years. It is indeed - great because it's terrible and offensive.

Stars: 3 of 4

PAGE ONE: INSIDE THE NEW YORK TIMES: The Film Babble Blog Review

I saw this film last April at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham and really love it. I saw it again this weekend at the Colony Theater in Raleigh where it will play through next week. It is also playing in the Triangle at the Galaxy Cinema in Cary.



PAGE ONE: INSIDE THE NEW YORK TIMES (Dir. Andrew Rossi, 2011)

Andrew Rossi's new documentary poses the question: are we witnessing the death of print media due to the internet, or are we just in a transitional period in which institutions like the New York Times will figure out how to adapt to the changing technological landscape and ultimately survive?



This film convincingly argues the latter, but it's going to be quite a struggle in the face of online competition such as the bloggosphere and Wikileaks.



Rossi's unprecedented access to the media desk of the New York Times for a year (2009-2010) has us listening like a fly on the wall to key players including Executive Editor Bill Keller, blogger turned Times writer Brain Stelter, Media Marketing Editor Bruce Headlam, and Baghdad bureau chief Tim Arangoand media and culture columnist David Carr who steals the movie over and over with his dead on acerbic comments.



We learn about the "New Times Effect," in which what the Times prints one day will set the agenda for what every other news outlet prints the next.



We learn about how Judith Miller's false reporting of Weapons of Mass Destruction damaged the Times' credibility.



From old grainy footage we learn about the newspaper's history, especially in clips of Allistar Cooke visiting the Times from the program Omnibus in 1954 I'd sure like to see more of.



As I said before Carr steals this film, but he also symbolizes the fight that the Times has left in it. One particularly amusing scene has the former crack addict turned media columinst vaporizing (his word, not mine) a blogger opponent at a SXSW panel.



PAGE ONE is a masterful piece of infotainment that captures a turbulent time for the Times. Since we're still in that time it really shouldn't be missed by anybody who has even a passing interest in the state of modern print media. Or by those who love an extremely well made engrossing documentary.



More later...

Brighton Rock (Monday, July 25, 2011) (58)

Rowan Joffe's Brighton Rock is an adaptation of a novel by Graham Greene (which he also adapted into a screenplay for a film by the same name in 1947). As is typical of Greene, the film deals with the underbelly of society and with Catholicism. This is a generally good reexamination of the book with a slightly simplified structure that focuses more on the central characters and relationships (also typical of Greene).

Pinkie (Sam Riley) is a young thug rising up the power ladder of the Brighton underworld in the early 1960s (the book was originally set in the 1930s). He seems to have absolutely no ties to society, no family or friends and no ability to trust anyone of his mobby cohorts. He is, however, a Catholic, at least in name, though he seems oblivious to sin or any sort of real religious practice. He's a total wild card who might strike out violent at any moment.

As the film opens, he witnesses the murder of his gang boss and mentor by a rival gang and decides to kill the assailant. When he does this, a naïve young woman, Rose (Andrea Riseborough), sees him and he decides the only way to protect himself and his gang is to get her to fall in love with him to make sure she won't tell the cops what she saw. As the two start spending time together, Rose's boss in her tea house, Ida (Hellen Miren), begins to understand that Pinkie is dangerous for Rose, though she can't convince her to dump him.

As all the mob action is going on, there's a war between the Mods and the Greasers, with a totally over-the-top Vespa-riding sequence ripped out of Quadrophenia (or The Young Girls of Rochefort). Though this really doesn't relate well to the greater story, it does allow for more gang violence and looks pretty cool.

Almost everything we see in Brighton is dirty and ugly. There's a scrappy quality to both Rose and Pinkie, her hair is always disheveled and never looks washed, his room in his boarding house and the apartment she lives in with her parents are totally falling apart and filthy. Its hard not to notice that Britain was in the middle of very tough economic times during this era. Meanwhile, Joffe does a great job, though of showing how Pinkie and his gang live in squalor, while the rival gang boss, Colleoni (Andy Serkis) lives in the posh environment of a fancy, sleek hotel.

There is a constant sense that Pinkie is dangerous and unbridled by "societal norms". He cuts people and takes power without any sense of decency or morals. He speaks to Rose about his Catholicism (though much less then he does in the book) and how it's the only thing that makes sense to him, the only thing that he finds reliable. It's never totally clear, however if he's doing this to sell himself to her (and her family) or if he really believes it.

He seems to be like the character of the Misfit in Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find, where he's got religion figured out to use it for his dark ends. I can imagine Pinkie explaining that he'll be forgiven for his sins when he dies, but in the meantime, he will keep killing. Sadly, he never seems self-aware or deep enough to have such an interesting thought.

The acting throughout the film is fantastic, most notably Riley and Riseborough. They both seem like kids who are in love. She has no self-confidence and understandably things that Pinkie is the best she can get; he's conniving in the short run and thinks he can out-maneuver anyone who comes his way. They're a great pair, filled with young angst and a bit cheeky that they know what they're doing is wrong.

Joffe really does bungle the ending here, drawing it out to a silly 15 minutes, when it could end in one and then giving us a sad and disconnected idea of Rose's victimhood. I wish he had ended it about four times before he did (or rearranged the kicker into a different part of the script). Really the whole second half of the film (after the Mods and Rockers riot) is a forgettable mess, though it still looks good and has some redeeming elements.

Joffe does admirable job directing this film, using really great editing to give a constant sense of violence lying just below a peaceful surface and updating the film noir model. His real problems here are in his script (well, his adapted script), where characters are underwritten and scenes are misplaced in the narrative or unnecessary altogether.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Myth of the American Sleepover (Sunday, July 24, 2011) (57)

Summer nights are really long in Southeast Michigan. At least that's what we learn from David Robert Mitchell's The Myth of the American Sleepover. We certainly never know what exactly the myth is, though it seems to have something to do with kids hooking up or making out or something. Somehow the kids are able to fit a year's worth of searching for love into several hours of darkness. Oh, and also, there are no adults and no black people in suburban Detroit.

The story follows four teenagers (well, three teenagers and a kid who's probably about 21 or so) as they drive, walk and bike around their pristine mid-'90s suburban town looking for very specific people to hook up or make friends with. The first is Maggie (Claire Sloma) who is a bit of an alterna-chick (with a few piercings on her face) going into her freshman year of high school (actually, she might be a rising sophomore... It's confusing which kids are in what year because they all do the same things). She lusts after a guy she sees at the public pool as well as another guy who cuts grass around town.

Then there's Rob (Marlon Morton), also a freshman, who sees some blond girl at the supermarket and spends the rest of the night searching for her at the two slumber parties and several other house parties there are. Then there's Claudia (the very fetching Amanda Bauer) who is new to the school, but somehow already hooked up with the high school stud guy (I guess it doesn't hurt that she's cute, blond and skinny... ah, high school). She's invited to one of the parties, not knowing her new beau and the hostess have a history.

Finally there's Scott (Brett Jacobsen), who is going to be a senior in college, but unsure of his direction (The Not-Yet-Graduate, I guess) and decides it would be a great idea to track down twin sisters he had a thing for (four years earlier) in high school who are that night at a freshman orientation "sleepover" at the University of Michigan.

Many of these stories crisscross, where one guy will go to a girls' sleepover to look for someone and then leave to go to another party where he'll bump into another one of the characters. This seems to be set in the 1990s, so they don't have fancy things like mobile phones, let alone Facebook or iPhones. There's actually an interesting sweetness to the analogue nature of the evening, where the kids actually have to meet and talk to people and go to find others if they want to... although, this is all possibly a bit precious and a bit too soon for such nostalgia.

I feel like Mitchell spends so much time setting up his suburbia uber alles that he ignores the fact that we still need to connect to these characters on levels beyond just that we might have had similar experiences in high school. I like that most of the kids are looking to just "hook up" or "kiss" others (and not have sex with them) because that's all you really want when you're 14 or 15. But those desires aren't very deep or very interesting. I feel like every character is just a bunch of nerves and a list of personality traits, but not really fully developed. When Claudia discovers the true story of her boyfriend's past, she move fast to avenge the past, but we never really see very far inside her, what her own history is with guys, what she's thinking about starting at a new school or how she found her boyfriend over the summer.

Scott is more a comic book kid than any naturalistic character. His trek from the suburbs to Ann Arbor to seek out the twin cuties feels rash and unrealistic. Its banal romanticism should have more motivation than it does, and we're left saying, "what the hell is he doing? This would never work." (There is a clever, if shallow, homage to Godard's Band of Outsiders running in an upper floor of UM's Angell Hall... Go Blue!)

This film is a first work and it does show some promise in small moments. There is some very clever, snappy dialogue ("menage a twins") and a few wonderful moments (such as the scene in slow-mo of the kids filing into their respective parties like ants as a song by Beirut plays on the sound track), but the film really only ever rises to a be a collection of short stories that are all a bit too emotionally simplistic and rely too much on our nostalgia for our own childhoods. Sentimentality has never really worked for me, and neither have the lily white suburbs.

Stars: 2 of 4

CAPTAIN AMERICA: The Film Babble Blog Review

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER (Dir. Joe Johnston, 2011)

Although I am not a comic book guy, I have more and more been developing an admiration for how Marvel has been expanding their movie universe.



Now Captain America joins Iron Man, Thor, and the Hulk, in this surprisingly solid summer super hero movie that just might be the best of the bunch so far.



Much like the recent X-MEN: FIRST CLASS, this is an origin story crossed with an alternate history scenario, and also like that film, it largely works.



Here our hero played by Chris Evans, who we first meet convincingly CGI-ed as a scrawny runt constantly rejected by the military, gets genetically modified into a tall muscular super soldier for action in World War II by a German scientist (Stanley Tucci).



The villain, the intense Hugo Weaving as a Nazi official with a sinister secret, is planning on destroying the United States with his HYDRA terrorist organization ("Hail, HYDRA!"), and, of course, it's up to Captain America with the help of love interest Hayley Atwell, best friend Sebastian Stan, and the always reliably gruff Tommy Lee Jones as a stern army Colonel to stop the looming wave of world domination.



Weaving, especially after being revealed as Red Skull (not sure I want to try to explain that), appears to be having a blast with his scenery-chewing-and-spitting out prowess, and his treatment of Toby Jones as a beleagured Nazi chemist/lackey is terrifically savage stuff.



The star-spangled man with a plan (as Jones calls Evans) is as engaging as he is unshakable in fight scene afer fight scene. Evans mostly acts with a stoical demeanor, but its not without humor.



There's a satisfying use of circular dialogue throughout in which key lines are effectively repeated, and Evans holds his own with the exceedingly capable cast.



Director Johnston handles with film's aesthetics, at times metallic; at times grimy, beautifully, with all the gravitas that GREEN LANTERN was so sorely missing, and he sets a sturdy tone that takes itself just seriously enough.



There were some pacing problems here and there, and Alan Silvestri's generic action movie score was a bit intrusive, but since CAPTAIN AMERICA is such a smart and ginormously entertaining mainstream Marvel movie, I feel like a heel complaining.



As for the Marvel Universe aspect, you can always expect cameos from franchise characters such as Iron Man's dad Howard Stark (this time played by Dominic Cooper), and Samuel Jackson as Nick Fury (that can't be a SPOILER! right? I mean, he's in all of these films).



You can also expect the traditional Stan Lee cameo, and more importantly, the after-the-credits scene which here doubles as a teaser trailer for next summer's THE AVENGERS which, as you probably know, assembles several of their super hero strands into one big ass Marvel movie event package.



Here's hoping that will be as solid and super as this is.

More later...

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 - 3D (a.k.a. HP7P2-3D) (Sunday, July 17, 2011) (56)

So here we are. We've reached the end of the Harry Potter movies. The seven books, having been stretched out to eight films and nearly 20 hours of screen time and are now totally over forever (until J.K. Rowling writes a new book that is turned into a new movie). It's one of biggest, longest, most profitable film franchises ever. It's also a lot of fun. (If you haven't seen any of these movies, or none since the first, ignore the rest of this post as you will be bored miserably, I'm sure.)

HP7P2-3D is basically the second half, or really the last third, of the seventh and last Harry Potter book. It begins with a running start with the Harry, Ron and Hermione trio on the hunt for more of Voldemort's horcruxes (small things into which he injected parts of his soul to make it harder for him to be killed). They go to Gringott's to get one of them, and then realize one of the last ones is back in Hogwart's, from which they have been truants for the whole school year (no comment on how in a book about seven years at a school, they only spend about six there, with the last one a year of non-lesson-based Evil Lord-fighting. But J.K.R. wants kids to stay in school, or something).

When they get to Hogwart's they find the school in dark lock-down, now run by Snape, where the professors teach the kids all sorts of terrible magic to inflict pain on others. There are Death Eaters all about and all sorts of people in black leather (hot, if you're into that sorta thing). Harry gets a little help from his friends (students and teachers) in Dumbledore's Army and what's left of the Order of the Phoenix. They fight a massive knock down, drag-out fight with the bad guys before Harry's final one-on-one with Voldemort.

I think the movie smooths over some rough patches that I never liked in the book, particularly with Snape. I always felt like the 'Snape is a good guy' thing that we're told near the end was a bit too hard to swallow in the book. Here, however, director David Yates and writer Steve Kloves do a wonderful job of showing how Snape was always massively conflicted about Harry, about his eternal love for Harry's mom, Lilly, and his deep hatred for Harry's dad, who was probably a total douchebag who deserved to be killed by dark magic. The last 20 minutes of the film are particularly wonderful. The epilogue especially always felt forced and precious, but here feels totally natural and necessary. It's a lovely ending to a great epic story.

What I particularly like about this last film is how it brings in traditional themes from human existence and classical art: the idea of one person doing something alone versus someone working with their friends and allies to get a job done. It is very reminiscent to me of the classic story from Hollywood lore that after seeing Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (a story about a marshal who can't get help and is forced to defeat a bad guy singlehandedly), Howard Hawks decided to make Rio Bravo (a story about a sheriff who gets all the help he needs from his friends to defeat the bad guys) in response.

Voldemort is Marshal Will Kane and Harry Potter is Sheriff John T. Chance. We are constantly reminded here about how Voldemort (né Tom Riddle) is one of the greatest wizards ever, for better or worse, and how Harry is really only an average wizard who excels at making friends and having them help him. (There is even an suggestion, posited by Snape, that Harry is a proud prima dona and somewhat of a talentless jerk.) When Harry goes searching for the missing horcruxes, he does find a few on his own, but also needs help from his associates to find the others. Meanwhile, Harry is told that Voldemort found all of them on his own. I guess the idea that this Lincolnian leadership style is more effective, at least less demagogic and less evil.

I'm also very interested in the revisionist look at Snape as a reluctant collaborator. In this film, he's Maréchal Pétain, a stooge put in a position of power and told to stay quiet while terrible things happen inside his domain (the school). Unlike the general understanding of Pétain, however, Snape is hiding the fact that he's really on the side of good and not evil. Was Pétain trying to work against the Nazis and destroy the Reich from the inside? It's a very hard sell.

(Of course, we shouldn't forget that Snape did witness lots of evil things happen at Hogwarts and his Death-Eater days and it's hard to forgive him for those things. I don't care that Colin Powell didn't believe in the testimony he gave at the UN Security Council in 2003, he said it and it sent us to war and thousands of people to their death. He should have resigned if he was so morally torn. I won't forgive him now.)

The 3D worked really well in this film, probably better than I can remember in any Hollywood picture where I've seen it used. Some of the scenes play very well with the depth of focus and the disorienting quality of the enhanced image, like Gringott's sequence at the beginning. In other scenes, where there is little action, the 3D is used gently to simply show us how basic things recede into space. I would hope in years to come, directors use 3D more in this way than they do with some movies where it seems that dumb tricks are inserted into every shot to make sure we know we're seeing it in 3D and make sure we feel like we're getting our money's worth (we never get our money's worth as it's still way too expensive).

As with the last film, there is no need to see this movie if you haven't seen all the other ones, and particularly if you haven't seen the first part of this one. It is, however, very solid, much more interesting than I would have expected and a lot of fun from a sheer entertainment point of view.

Stars: 3 of 4

Old School Pooh

WINNIE THE POOH (Dirs. Stephen J. Anderson & Don Hall, 2011)

The good news up front: the new WINNIE THE POOH isn't an all CGI-ed modernized re-imagining with pop culture references and big name celebrity voices. It's an old school hand-drawn throwback to Disney's classic '60s and '70s Pooh period, with a tasteful choice of un-imposing actors (narrator John Cleese and Craig Ferguson as Owl are the most recognizable names here), and a light infectious sense of whimsy.



The bad news is that its so slight it could get blown away by a gentle breeze.



A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh ,Tigger (both voiced by Jim Cummings), Rabbit (Tom Kenney), Piglet (Travis Oates), Owl, Eeyore (Bud Luckey), Kanga (Kristen Anderson-Lopez), and Roo (Wyatt Dean Hall), mistakenly think a note from their best human friend, schoolboy Christopher Robin (Jack Boulter) is stating that he was captured by a Backson.



Robin wrote "back soon" you see and somehow the cuddly gang concocts an evil dangerous monster of the woods that they must capture if they want to rescue.



Easy mistake to make, right?



The characters are all well played as they get in such predicaments as getting trapped in a pit they dug to catch the creature, bickering with humorous disconnected dialogue, but such scenes still feel sketchy.



Pooh isn't a very interesting protagonist as he only cares about finding honey (or "huny" as its often spelled in the film), and his comical air-headed demeanor wears out its welcome early on. Still, there is a neat honey fantasy sequence that is one of the movie's highlights.



The directors, Anderson and Hall along with almost another dozen of writers worked on the story, and there are 18 songs (several featuring Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward), so it's surprising that it's only a little over an hour long. To somewhat make up for that there is a animated short "The Ballad Of Nessie", about the Loch Ness monster, narrated by Billy Connolly, which isn't bad.



Take note that WINNIE THE POOH is a film that will most likely please toddlers much more than older kids, but some nostalgic parents may appreciate its charms. If you do take the kids, stay through the end credits because there's a final bonus bit that shouldn't be missed.



With a film this short and slight, you should definitely get your moneys worth.

More later...

Tabloid (Friday, July 15, 2011) (55)

When Randall Adams died the New York Times ran a rather lengthy and in-depth obituary for him, albeit more than six months late. He had been wrongly convicted of killing a Dallas police officer in 1976 and had served 12 years in prison for the crime. It was only after filmmaker Errol Morris dug into the story and turned up mitigating evidence during the making of his 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line that Adams got a new trial and released.

The Thin Blue Line is an *Important* film, not only for what it did for Adams but for what it did for the documentary format. Morris used a brilliant score by Philip Glass, wonderful reenactments that showed how moments described in testimony and witnesses' points of view are frequently hard to navigate and sometimes difficult to remember. He re-invented the interview documentary, showing that people sitting in chairs under artistic lighting can be interesting to watch. Most importantly, the film is much bigger than Adams or any of the people in the story. It becomes a story about humanity, the human condition, the fickleness of justice and the concept and understanding of memory.

Morris has had a brilliant career since then and several of his films aside from Blue Line (Vernon, Florida, A Brief History of Time, Mr. Death, The Fog of War) rank among my favorite films of all time. They all transcend their small, slice-of-life stories and show us a mirror into our souls as human beings. Morris latest film, Tabloid, though generally well made, is not particularly deep and delves into a subject that's simply not important enough for the filmmaker's effort. It is an decent film, but not brilliant and leaves us wanting a lot more in terms of interest or creativity.

The story begins simply enough. Joyce McKinney was a beauty queen who feel in love with a Mormon man named Kirk Anderson. As she was not Mormon, and neither particularly religious nor chaste, their relationship was immediately forbidden and he was sent on his mission as soon as possible. Not understanding the ins and outs of the religion, she thought he had been kidnapped by a cult, and raised funds to go rescue him in England.

When she got there (with a small posse of associates, most of whom were in love with her), she took him to a small inn on the coast and kept him tied up in bed for three days, while she forced him to have sex with her. He was declared missing by his church and McKinney's group was hunted down. After she was arrested, she became an immediate star through the work of two rival tabloid papers, the Daily Sun and the Daily Mirror, who were in the middle of a small war.

Each paper went to great lengths to dig up dirt on McKinney, and each got different information, which led to two very different portrayals of her on their pages. She was either a whore and a slut who posed for dirty S&M pictures to make money, or a sweet woman who was just heartbroken and was desperately in love with her ex (she really was the former, as much as Morris presents both sides).

We meet a few of the journalists involved in the coverage by each paper, a few of her former associates and McKinney herself. They all tell very different stories of the events, though one general narrative emerges over the course of the film. It is indeed interesting how each person sees the story differently based on his or her knowledge of the events and their stakes in the drama.

We never get, however, a real deep look into McKinney, the way we might have had of Fred Leuchter (Mr. Death) or Robert McNamara (The Fog of War). The film is ultimately just as shallow as the tabloid stories were to begin with. We never really see why this story was such a big deal - or if it really was a big deal outside of these two papers. It's clear that she was on the front pages for a few weeks or months, but we don't get any context or when she stopped being on the pages. The fact that the film is called Tabloid is a mystery to me, as the it is much more about McKinney than it is about the papers.

Clearly Morris is an artist and a master filmmaker, so he knows what to do and how to make something look good. He uses lots of found footage, industrial films and clips from old Hollywood pictures (not unlike Bruce Connor might have done). He uses his now-standard "Interatron" (or is the "Megatron"?) to interview his subjects (basically it's a two way teleprompter where the person sees the interviewer's face on a screen, through which the camera shoots the person). (I worry this style is getting a bit tired, honestly).

It all feels a bit like Philip Roth's novella Everyman, which was well received, but rather a phoned-in work in the overview of his oeuvre. Everyman was a re-hashing of the same ideas Roth had struggled with for the previous decade and brought nothing new to the table. Tabloid does not expand Morris universe and fits in much more with his First Person documentary television show (which is generally great).

I hope Morris can pick himself up, dust off the rather cynical and silly anti-Mormon junk and move on to make more interesting films. I hope this isn't the first sign that he's losing his magical touch (the way I worry Roth has in recent years). Just like Roth, though, Morris makes good art, it's just that it's not even close to what he's done in the past.

Seen in a vacuum this is a good movie, but seen from the inside of Morris' work, it looks like a failure. As I write that, I think about Morris' brilliant examination of an "event horizon" in A Brief History of Time. Oh, how the mighty has fallen.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Future (Wednesday, July 13, 2011) (54)

As trite as it sounds to say, Miranda July doesn't see the world the way you and I see it; she sees it through the eyes of an unconventional artist. Time after time in her newest film, The Future, she shows us something totally original, something we never would have thought of, as a way of telling a rather standard story. It is a wonderful view of the world, an incredibly sad and anxious view. It's the post-post-Graduate view of the world (or post-post-post-) where thirtysomethings are looking ahead not knowing their direction, not knowing about marriage or kids, not knowing about What Comes Next. It's a story of the fear of the future, either known or unknown, and a the uncertainty that comes from not having memories of the future (shit - I just blew my own mind there).

There is a traditional narrative story and a less traditional one that coexist simultaneously here. The film opens with a squeaky, non-human voice-over of a cat, who serves as a sort of Greek chorus, but in a much more Brechtian sense. When we finally see the cat, it's just a puppet of the front two legs and paws as in a cage. (This is the first of those totally creative and outside-the-box things that July gives us that probably no other director would have imagined or considered.) There is something particularly jarring, but appealing, about this, setting up a D.I.Y. world, a janky, wonderful aesthetic.

It's instantly comforting and sweet without being anywhere close to banal. (I have no idea who July looks to for inspiration, but this film feels like what a Michael Gondry film would be if he was more talented and also is very reminiscent of the fantastic Belgian film L'Iceberg, by Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy). It's a bit surrealist, a bit absurdist and much closer to experimental/art film than standard narrative fare.

Back in the human world, Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) are a couple in their mid-thirties who have been dating for about four years and living together for much of that time. He works from home as a phone tech-support clerk and she works as a dance teacher for pre-kindergarten pre-ballet students. They're both obsessed with modern conveniences (she spends hours watching a co-workers YouTube video of a cringe-worthy dance routine).

Once they decide to adopt that cat, Paw-Paw, they find they have a month before they can take him home (once its medical procedures have healed), a month before their serious adult lives will begin. They decide to quit their respective jobs, turn off their Internet service and change their lives. He starts to volunteer selling trees for an environmental nonprofit, more of a fill-in thing to do than a real career switch, and she begins to flounder, attempting and failing to post "30 dances in 30 days" videos to the Web. But then things start to go wrong when Sophie experiments with cheating on Jason and then tells him about it.

The idea of "memories from the future" is very significant in the third act of the film, and is something that really connects the standard narrative world to the atypical, creative one. As we see Jason's imagination of Sophie's future and his future without her, it becomes unclear whose point of view we're witnessing, whether we're really inside a dream-state or if it's really just the standard narrative again and when exactly this passage ends. Within Jason's mind, Sophie herself has revelations that we later see her responding to in her waking life. This is not him wishing she would learn some lesson (as a spurned lover might think of his partner), but him actually seeing a future where she learns these lessons and then her learning these lessons in the real world. Perhaps they're sharing the dream/fear and they're both in some collective unconscious. It is an absolutely brilliant illustration of an abstract, non-linear timeline.

In the middle of the film, we see several things that fall much more in line with July's own performance/video art background than with this, or any other, narrative story line. She gives us two funny, bizarre dances (if you liked the dance scene in Dogtooth, buckle up for what you will see here), both of them amazing and neither one necessarily advancing the story, but totally perfect in their moments. This still from the film is a perfect example of how the normal becomes a bit less than that in July's world. She's a bit too far out that window for a standard filmmaker to conceive of, it's a dramatic, almost violent, certainly sexual movement that has much more in common with silent film than anything we've seen in years.

As a short-story writer, July has a fantastic grasp of language and natural dialogue. Most of it is very funny and never feels forced. At one point when she's getting ready to go out, Sophie, looking in a mirror, says to Jason, "I wish I was a notch better looking; I'm right on the fence. I constantly have to make my case to each new person I meet." (Oh, I feel you, sister.) In another scene with her paramour, Sophie asks him what they're doing that night, to which he responds, "Well, we're going to fuck, then you can eat ice cream, then watch TV and then I'll watch you." To which she answers, "Is there really ice cream?" It's refreshingly realistic and painfully familiar.

The acting in this is wonderful. July is fantastic, vulnerable, weird, shy, self-doubting, but capable of normal interactions when she gains confidence (at least in Jason's mind). Linklater is great (he really is a great actor on stage and screen), also frustrated, unsure, quiet, scared and angry.

This film mixes all sorts of styles and formats, similar to how a video artist would do with found footage, creative ideas and abstract concepts. There's a sequence in the middle of the film where Jason meets a man who is selling a hair dryer for $3 in the local penny-saver magazine. We see a few scenes of the two men talking about life and love and getting a tour of the man's house and his weird collections. Although it's scripted, there's a cinema-verite feel to this, as if Jason (and Linklater) were stepping off the performance stage and into this man's living room.(July met the man during a non-fiction writing project she did; he is a non-actor.) This is yet another anti-establishment, risky decision that July makes, and, like the rest of the film, it pays off beautifully.

There's an amazing feeling I get as a viewer when I see something totally original, fun and interesting. The Future is all of those things and Miranda July is a brilliant artist and wonderful storyteller and filmmaker.

Stars: 4 of 4

BEGINNERS: The Film Babble Blog Review

BEGINNERS (Dir. Mike Mills, 2011)

Mills' second feature posits itself as a more poignant piece than his dorky debut THUMBSUCKER (2007). It involves an earnest, soft spoken as usual, Ewan McGregor dealing with the death of his 75 year old father (Christopher Plummer) from cancer.



Previously Plummer came out as gay after his wife of 40 years died. Through his daily depression, McGregor has many flashbacks that tell the story of his father's dying days from the personal ad dating scene to his dying bed.



McGregor inherits his dad's dog, a Jack Russell terrier, who he talks to, and the dog answers in comic subtitles like "While I understand up to 150 words - I can't talk." Cute, huh?



McGregor works as a cartoonist or illustrator (not quite sure which) for a firm that working on album art for an indie band called The Sads. Isn't that cute too?



At a costume party with his co-workers, McGregor dressed as Sigmund Freud meets Mélanie Laurent (INGLORIOUS BASTERDS) dressed as Charlie Chaplin who writes on a notepad to communicate because she has laryngitis. Got that? A major meet-cute.



Set in 2003, the film is full of a sort of slide-show framing device in which McGregor narrates over photos of people and places from previous periods in order for us to get the proper perspective. "This is what the sun looked like, the stars, this is the President" etc. Again we're drowning in cuteness.



If you haven't already guessed, this film struck me as way too cutesy.



The despair over losing a loved one, especially one whose real identity you are just beginning to process, is only touched on affectingly in the final scenes. Otherwise it's a eye-roller with little depth or narrative thrust.



Plummer is an excellent actor who puts a lot into his performance here, but it's an underwritten role. His relationship with the much younger Goran Visjnic, his first openly homosexual relationship, is thankfully not treated cheaply, but it just hangs there as a unexplored thread.



The film has unfinished thoughts as well about McGregor's career, his inability to commit to Laurent even after he asks her to move in, and his off kilter mother (Mary Page Keller) who we see in flashbacks acting all weird at home and embarrassing her son at an art gallery.



I feel somewhat Scrooge-ish in dissing this film, because I know there's an autobiographical element here (Mills' father died after coming out) and on the surface BEGINNERS is a perfectly pleasant indie movie with likable leads, a listenable soundtrack, and, yep, a lot of cuteness that some folks will think is just fine.



But to me it was cloyingly incomplete. An edgeless experience.



If Mills would flesh out his characters more and cut down on the cuteness, I would be inclined to get on board with his work since there's certainly heart there, but I just can't get on board with BEGINNERS.



More later...

Bill Cunningham New York (Monday, July 11, 2011) (53)

There is a moment in the middle of Richard Press' documentary Bill Cunningham New York, where the eponymous New York Times fashion photographer is at a gala dinner for the New York City Ballet where the organization is honoring billionaire, philanthropists and arch-conservative political stalwart David Koch (a big friend of Lincoln Center). Cunningham is introduced to Koch, shakes his hand and chuckles as he does with most people. For me, this instant gave me a strange feeling, as Koch has in recent months become the most visible money backer of the Tea Party movement and the most significant supporter of tax cutting and government spending cutting in the country (he's one of the most significant backers of the move in Wisconsin to deny teachers their ability to organize). Koch stands for his own wealth and, ultimately, killing the poor (who needs 'em?!). It reminded me of a comment in a Wallace Shawn essay where he says that artists live in mansions that are paid for by their rich neighbors who also live in mansions nearby - and how those neighbors who support their art get rich by paying their employees badly.

But this biodoc is the absolute opposite of anything political or polemical. It is light and fun and floats above the reality of the people on the ground who we see. In it we learn about the life and work of Bill Cunningham, the On The Street photographer for the New York Times Sunday Styles section, a passionate lover of stylish clothes, expensive and inexpensive, worn not just by models on the runway, but by everyday people. He is known by those in the elite society circles who go to black-tie events and by fashion wonks who see his work as the forward-facing reality of what they do (which frequently is backwards- or upwards-facing). (Of course, the people in the film who know Bill are also the people who specifically read the Sunday Styles section, and are also the same people who go to independent documentaries in New York City. This is photographing to the choir, or preaching in the darkroom, or something.)

Cunningham, himself is a wonderful anomaly. He is in early 80s, lives in a tiny studio in Carnegie Hall (well, he's kicked out at the end of the film along with the other 6 permanent residents, all older than dirt), rides a bike around Manhattan taking pictures of street style as he sees it developing. He studies Fashion (with a capital F) at the Paris and New York fashion weeks, and then sees how these designs spill down to the ground and are picked up by normal, non-model people who don't have perfect bodies (or tons of money). He doesn't seem to have any close friends, has no specific sexuality (though when asked, his demurral suggests he's gay... not that it matters much, because he's so asexual), apparently goes to mass on Sundays and almost never eats much. He has almost no "style" in his clothes, doesn't seem to own much of a sport jacket or suit, and mostly just wears one of those blue French street sweeper jackets (that he's buys at the BHV when in Paris every 6 months).

One of the many luminaries who speaks about him (a list that includes Anna Wintour, Tom Wolfe, Iris Apfel, Patrick McDonald and other famous and fashionable New Yorkers... or New Yorkers famous for their fashion) says that he's really just a documentarian of fashion and style. This is a very true thing. We see how what he does is much closer to a sociologist cataloguing the mores and trends of people over time than it is what you would find in Vogue or Elle.

When you see a montage of some of his layouts from over the years, you see that he was able to document that at some point (1985) off-the-shoulder was a popular look, and that at another (1993) black kids wore low-hanging jeans (not to say either of these styles are over today). The whole, "if-aliens-came-to-earth-what-would-they-think" question is very clear. If they saw one of his layouts, they would really have an idea of what clothes New Yorkers (and Parisians) wore during our era.

This is a very fun and sweet documentary and one that makes you laugh and smile a lot. I love movies about New York and this is exactly that. This is not particularly deep, but it is enjoyable. Cunningham is a lovable, weird guy. This is mostly fashion navel-gazing, but it's a fun show.

Stars: 3 of 4

HORRIBLE BOSSES: The Film Babble Blog Review

HORRIBLE BOSSES (Dir. Seth Gordon, 2011)

As the most recent in a spate of crude R-Rated comedies, HORRIBLE BOSSES is just funny enough to recommend. Although maybe just as a matinee.



Anybody who clicked on this review surely knows the plot, but I'll state it anyway: 3 guys who want to murder their bosses concoct a plan to do so with comical results.




As the 3 guys we've got Saturday Night Live's Jason Sudekis, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia's Charlie Day, and Arrested Development's (as well as the everyman in every other comedy movie made these days) Jason Bateman.



The bosses are Colin Firth with a combover as a chemical company coke-head who takes over Sudekis's workplace after his father (Donald Sutherland) dies, Kevin Spacey as a corporate asshole (shades of his likewise character in SWIMMING WITH SHARKS) who denies Bateman a promotion, and Jennifer Anniston playing against her girl-next-door type as a dentist who sexually harrases Day as her dental assistant ("Yours doesn't sound so bad" Sudekis says about Day's predicament).



Think STRANGERS ON A TRAIN + THROW MOMMA OFF THE TRAIN (both of which are referenced in this movie), with a sprinkling of 9 TO 5 thrown in for good measure. It takes a bit to really get going, but when it does the frantic scheming of the 3 leads makes for some big laughs especially from Day doing his patented screaming, not-the-sharpest-knife-in-the-drawer, It's Always Sunny stuff.



Sudekis with his sex-snarkiness seems so much like his character in HALL PASS that I kept expecting him to call his wife back home, and Bateman is playing the same nice-guy notes he has in many a movie, but these guys' recognizable and relatable personas all anchor the movie nicely.



Spacey, Firth, and Aniston have fine funny moments, but none is funnier than Jamie Foxx who steals every scene he's in as a "murder consultant" the guys seek out in a seedy bar when they are looking for somebody to do their dirty work.



Scripted by John Francis Daley (who played protagonist Sam on Freaks and Geeks), and Jonathan M. Goldstein, the film feels oddly restrained at times - like it never quite goes over the top.



However when it busts out a car chase/phone sex climax it's gets mighty close.



More later...

The Sleeping Beauty (Friday, July 8, 2011) (52)

The very first image we see in Catherine Breillat's The Sleeping Beauty is a pair of old scissors that an old witch holds in the air over her head. Immediately our minds dive into the symbolism and connections of scissors and cutting: castration, self-mutilation, domesticity. The scissors here are used to cut a baby girl's umbilical cord (another significant symbol) and at the same time, the old witch puts a curse on the baby, saying she will die when she's 16.

We next see three silly teenage girls frolicking in a river. They seem rather contemporary and foolishly unaware of where they are or what they're doing. Next they show up at the baby's side, and seem to be three good witches, who change the curse by saying the girl will not die but sleep for 100 years when she turns six and that when she wakes up she will be sixteen. While she sleeps she will experience a bunch of interesting dreams.

The opening sequence seems to take place in the late 19th Century, and the girl, Anastasia, seems to be the daughter of a Frenchman and a Russian woman. They are very high class, live in a castle and refer to the young girl as a princess (though it's probably a term of endearment rather than royalty).

We next see Anastasia in her gigantic bed, setting dozens of alarm clocks (mostly from 1950s and pop culturey, like Mickey Mouse clocks) and reading a gigantic dictionary (of course this is a wonderful pun that the Sleeping Beauty is setting alarm clocks). She proudly declares that she enjoys reading the dictionary better than novels because she likes words and their meanings. From this moment, we understand that this film is about a conflict between words literal meanings and their symbolic, relative associations.

One of the words Anastasia reads is "hermaphrodite". She has already declared that she wants to be called Sir Vladimir and now she tells us that she should be considered both male and female, both Anastasia and Vladimir (both Anastasia Romanov and Vladimir Illyich Lenin? Interesting.). This idea is also very important as we see the idea of gender and sexuality move in a very fluid way form here out. At times Anastasia seems to be a girl, and at other times, she shows traits of a boy (particularly from a sexual development point of view).

When she does go to sleep, Anastasia goes on an epic journey into a dreamworld where we meet all sorts of interesting characters. One of her first stops is at the house of a mother and son who seem to live in the 1950s in the woods. There Anastasia falls in love with the boy, Peter, and his sudden departure from home gives her an excuse to move along to the next stop, in an effort to meet up with him again. She goes on to visit a kingdom of midgets (er... little people), an albino child prince and princess, a gypsy (er... Romani) family and a Snow Queen, to name just a few. At each stop she interacts with the people (in a sometimes sexual way), learning new things from each. With each one, the idea of time (either time flying or time being hidden) seems to be a theme.

This film is an amazing deconstruction of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale, from a Derrida-ist point of view. The way she took apart and explored the Bluebeard story in her last film, Breillat gets into our understanding of our contemporary sexuality and our understanding of feminism and Freudian thinking by tearing this tale apart and taping it back together.

As either a girl or a boy, Anastasia seems to follow a very traditional Freudian sexual development, where her latency stage is almost exactly when she is "sleeping" (this is a great and rather brilliant literal translation of this theory). Meanwhile, her dreams are chock full of amazing symbolism. There are lots of knives and trains, some candies and a lot of snow.

When she wakes, she is in a contemporary Paris (well, really in a castle somewhere not on a busy street, but close enough so that a Parisian Lothario boy, Johan, can visit her). Some of the characters from her dream re-appear to her, though whether they're really there or some middle dream-reality state is unclear.

She meets the now grown Romani princess, who seems to have aged at the same rate as she has (that is, 10 years in 100), and Johan says he's Peter's grandson. Again, there is a blurry line between reality and dreams, between real and imagined. We see how sex has now become less of a childish curiosity and more of a sensual or violent act. She is a grown woman, filled with real emotions and no longer a vessel for an education.

Breillat is a totally fascinating director and certainly gets me thinking about literary criticism more than just about any other director working today. That she tends to highlight feminist ideas and references contemporary philosophy (as only a French elite could do). Her films are full of material to unpack and investigate.

This is a beautiful film, aside from being thought provoking. It has wonderful and interesting art direction, costumes and photography and you get the sense that everything on screen is meant to be exactly where it is. This amazing attention to detail is part of the reason why I think Breillat is one of the best directors alive.

I strongly recommend this film, but fully admit that after seeing it twice (I had to see it a second time to be sure I understood what I thought I understood), I still have a lot of unanswered questions and there are still a ton of symbolic meanings that I'm sure I'm missing. To me, that's the sign of a great work of art. It's challenging but an amazing thing to explore.

Stars: 4 of 4

Blu Ray Review: HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN

HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN (Dir. Jason Eisener, 2010)

This is the second, and with hope the last, movie to be spun off of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s fake exploitation double feature GRINDHOUSE (2007). Like last year’s MACHETE, it’s based on one of the trailer parodies that were the best part of that failed experiment. Also like MACHETE, it’s a lame ass excuse for a film that should’ve remained a 2 minute piece of funny filler.



One of the only things the Canadian made HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN has got going for it is Rutger Hauer (BLADE RUNNER, THE HITCHER) as the title character. Hauer is intensely invested in his part, actually taking it seriously, while the movie around him is grueling and ugly. It's a simple story of a man who gets off a freight train in a ficticious hellhole of a city where gangs rule the streets, the cops are corrupt, and every woman is a prostitute.



There's a vicious slick-backed Brian Downey as the crime lord in charge who declares war on all the homeless after Hauer's attempt to clean up the streets with a newly acquired shotgun. One of the few laughs in the film is the headline: "Hobo stops begging, demands change."



The hobo befriends a hooker with a heart of gold (Molly Dunsworth) who, of course, he'll have to defend in the ginormous violent orgy of blood that concludes the film.



The conclusion cant come soon enough as this is one of the most unpleasant and least entertaining film I've seen since, well, MACHETE. There's little sense of fun or satire here, it's just a series of sick scenes with disgusting dialogue (like "First I gotta wipe this guy's ass off of my face") and pointless imitations of cheap '70s and '80s filming styles, or lack of styles more accurrately.



I know some folks enjoy this kind of carnage, but I couldn't stand seeing shots of Hauer eating glass, a schoolbus of children getting torched, or any of the irritating tortuous actions of Downey's amped-up sons Nick Bateman and Gregory Smith.



It's feels futile to call this a horrible movie, because that's what its trying to be - a purposely sleazy piece of cinematic crap, you know like they used to make and the kids used eat up. But as GRINDHOUSE and MACHETE have shown, the kids aren't eating up this stuff. They both flopped bigtime and HOBO has only made a third of its 3 million dollar budget so the phony exploitation thing really isn't flying.



Maybe now they'll give up the grindhouse and we can all move on.



Special Features on 2 Disc Collector's Edition: Digital Copy, Shotgun Mode (Behind The Scenes Interactive Movie Feature), Commentary with Jason Eisener and Rutger Hauer, Commentary with Eisener and writer John Davies, producer Rob Cotterill, and David Brunt, "More Blood, More Heart: The Making of HOBO AND A SHOTGUN", Deleted Scenes, Alternate Ending, Video Blogs, Camera Test Reel, Fangoria Interviews, Redband Trailer, and other stuff I'm too tired to type.



More later... 

Bad Teacher (Thursday, July 7, 2011) (51)

So Bad Teacher is a movie directed by Jake Kasdan (le fils de Larry) with a highly-praised script written by Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg (whoever they are). It has all the makings of an interesting, dark and biting comedy, something that could possibly be as brilliant and enjoyable as Hesher or Observe and Report. Alas, it is not any of those things - it's totally banal, painfully unfunny and hardly hard-hitting.

Elizabeth Halsey (Cameron Diaz) is a good-looking gold-digger who only hopes to catch a man who can pay for her expensive tastes and buy her a new rack. When she's dumped by her millionaire fiance she sets her sights on a substitute, Scott Delacorte (Justin Timberlake) at the middle school where she's a homeroom teacher. Somehow Scott is a millionaire and a perfect pedagodge. Whatever.

Meanwhile there's a goody-two-shoes teacher, Amy Squirrel (Lucy Punch), who wants to be friends with Elizabeth until she finds out her motives and then becomes her enemy, and a gym teacher who lusts after Liz, but isn't hot enough for her (Jason Segal). Liz figures out a way to use her status as a public school teacher to extort money and buy her new tits herself.

The story and dialogue is so broadly written that the jokes come off as mostly dull and moderately uncouth, but never particularly dirty or bitter. At some point, Elizabeth says to a guy "I want to suck your dick like I'm angry at it"... which is a quotable line, but nothing particularly creative or pathetic. It's just broad and blue, meant to make the over-50-set re-adjust in their seats. (The single best line has to do with a guy being called "Faggy Hitler," which is simple, offensive and hilarious... but not overdone.)

I think this story suffers from not knowing what it really aught to be or is. It's not very dirty, but also not at all a "family comedy". It's somewhere in between; neither fish nor foul (fowl). It is a bit too filthy to star Tim Allen or Kevin James, but much too ordinary (and much too complicated, by the way) to be really interesting or exhilarating.

Cameron Diaz is a banal as a comedienne as the manila folder she resembles - mostly we're just forced to watch her because she's a frat-boy's idea of a "hot chick," having never really shown the chops we've always been promised. (Being John Malkovich is very funny, but I give most of the credit for that to Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman.) Beige.

Does there really have to be a happy Hollywood ending in this story? Are we so dumb and boring that we have to see right winning over wrong? Pfffft.

Stars: 1 of 4

Project Nim (Tuesday, July 5, 2011) (50)

Project Nim, a documentary by James Marsh (who made Man on Wire and Red Riding: 1980, both very good films), tells the interesting and heart-breaking story of Nim, a chimpanzee who was raised from two-months-old to age five by (human) grad students studying language and communications in chimps. Nim's raising was anything but scientific, but not entirely surprising considering the early-1970s era in which he lived.

At Columbia University in 1973, Linguistics professor Herb Terrace enlisted grad students (and his sometimes paramours), to raise the chimp, cleverly named Nim Chimpsky. Over the first three years of Nim's life, he had no fewer than five human minders and teachers, each one different in style and scientific method than the last. He was taught American Sign Language and was ultimately able to express his basic desires ("I want a hug," I want a banana," "I need to use the toilet"), though his ultimate ability to "cummunicate" his emotions or anything other than his wants was debatable.

Shuttling between humans who had very different ideas of the project, Nim was either closely minded or let to roam free and "be an ape". (One of his human minders, a grad student in psychoanalysis, apparently was interested in his masturbation and breast fed him from her own breast. Ew.) Ultimately, around age 4 he started acting like the chimp he really was the whole time, biting people who he perceived as threats and becoming less and less fun and cute. At this point the Columbia project ended and Nim's life as a post-experimental chimp began, moving from medical research labs to chimp jails.

This is a very interesting examination of the scientific method gone wrong, and how humans being humans are sometimes more animalistic than an ape being an ape. The film is largely unsentimental, although, there are several moments when Marsh relies on our connection to Nim and our anthropomorphizing of his plight to pull our heartstrings. I could have done without these moments (mostly because such things are so banal and shallow).

Still, there is a lot of interesting material that forces us to ask ourselves interesting questions. If humans are able to smoke pot, why can't chimps? Is it at all humane to test medicines on chimps if it will save human lives? At what point in a non-physical psycho-sexual relationship between a chimp and a human should administrators step in to block it? All very difficult and interesting questions....

Stars: 3 of 4

Aurora (Sunday, July 3, 2011) (49)

Cristi Puiu's first major film to be released in the States, The Death of Mr. Lasarescu (2006), is an amazing existentialist story of life and death in Post-Communist Bucharest. It is the most successful and greatest of the Romanian New Wave films to hit these shores, incredibly simple in story (a man slowly dies over the course of 150 minutes and we watch unable to do anything about it), reserved but powerful in style and devoid of any real structure. It's the very definition of the RomWave. In his newest film, Aurora, which he wrote, stars in and directs, Puiu brings us another brilliant work, this time even more obscure and more unlike anything we've seen before... and this time adds another half hour of content.

The story of the film is so very unclear (or unknown), that it's enough to just know the basic characters involved. Viorel (Puiu) is a 40-something man with two young daughters and a woman who seems to be his wife. He also has an elderly mother he looks after and she has a new husband who he hates. The film opens with him talking about the daughters with his wife in the kitchen as she gets dressed. She gives him a bag lunch and sends him off. For the next 45 minutes or so he wanders around with no particular direction, at some point buying a shotgun. It is never totally clear that he has a job or anywhere to be and circles back to places he has already been several times.

Unlike Mr. Lasarescu, and unlike Radu Muntean's recent Tuesday, After Christmas, this is not really about the brokenness of Bucharest and the old Communisty aesthetic, nor is it about how the city is a modern European capital. It falls somewhere in between. We see the back allies and rail yards (which look crappy in any town in the world), and also see the fancy boutiques on the boulevard.

When action does pick up a bit (it never really gets much faster than a crawl, but at some point there are a few things that happen) there is a sense that there is an everyday human level to living and a separate "rule-of-law" world of right and wrong, but the two remain separate. This is not too dissimilar from Puiu's comment in Mr. Lasarescu, that people die and the system can't help them, though in that it's rather directed at the whole system (hospitals, medical care, ambulances), while here it's more directly existentialist about the inevitability of stuff and the fact that the police (or lack of them) are an agent, but not the pure cause of badness. Viorel never rushes, he never panics, he walks and drives around carefully, knowing full well that he is heading in a specific direction.

It's impossible to proceed without mentioning all that the story owes to Camus, Sartre, Becket, Antonini and Bergman. It is clear that Puiu is a good reader and watcher and that he's studied his nihilistic absurdest existentialists. Life for Viorel is a series of moments that connect to one another; for us, however, his story is somewhat choppy and sometimes unmotivated. Puiu never gives us much background on actions. Viorel does things that don't totally make sense and then we have to either guss at their meanings or wait until they're explained (three hours later). In this way, Puiu puts us in the story by showing us that life is about randomness and non-understanding. Puiu might have a direction, but it's unclear to everyone else. Life for us is about experiencing other people as they go about their business without explaining thier actions to us. This hyperrealism is one of the keys of the RomWave and it is fantastic.

Just because the film is 181 minutes long, doesn't mean it's boring or dull. One of my favorite things about the film is the amazing dialogue and the fact that Puiu's script is full of jokes and humor. Yes, most of it is dark comedy, but it's very entertaining, particularly toward the end, when Viorel's tour is revealed to us a bit more. He's the world's greatest baadasssss, at times talking back to school teachers and kindergarten classmates of his daughters, insulting his mother's new beau or scolding the police. He says what we all wish we could say, but don't figure out until it's a minute too late. (There's also a fantastic piss joke around minute 178.)

I'm a bit stumped by the title of the film. I guess this is about the dawn of a new day for Viorel, or possibly a dawn of a new era for Bucharest and Romania. Perhaps it refers to how when we see stars and light they're actually gone light years ago or that there is no substance to lights in the sky, but just gasses and electricity. All of this connects to Viorel's situation, that we don't really notice him until he does something big or talks back to others.

Stars: 4 of 4