Tangled

Seen at: AMC Promenade in Westminster, Sunday evening.

I was delighted to accept my sister's invitation to see this with her daughters while I was staying down in Westminster at their house over Christmas.

Neither of us was looking forward to it that much as a movie. The trailer had looked atrocious. But thankfully, like so many trailers, it misrepresented the nature of the story.

Alice---of course I thought of you, not just because of the particular angular letter in the name of the main character, or because it's about a young woman held prisoner for eighteen years (seriously, really?), or because of her huge emerald eyes that remind me of a pair of contacts you once owned. It was all of those things, and more. Perhaps I just see you everywhere lately.

The story is more of a family reunion (girl reunited with parents) than a love story, and thus it was a bit deficiency. The romantic hero didn't really win her at the end. He wasn't put through enough trials. For example, there is no scene in the movie in which the hero thinks he has lost her entirely. It is in that black moment that we learn that he will do anything to get her back. That is how true love is tested.

In any case, it worked on enough levels to not be offensive. On the way home in the van, with the girls zonked out in their car seats, I told my sister about the movie. We both liked it better than we thought. We both agreed that the horse stole the show (second movie in a row for me). The idea that hero and horse are at odds with each other through much of this story says a lot about our culture. Horses are physical manifestations of human virtues. In this case the horse embodies the dogged unswerving tenacity that the hero lacks. For the hero to be a true hero, one who wins the heroine fully as his true love, the hero and horse have to be united. He must be as tenacious as the horse was, in this movie.

I also told my sister that I loved the idea that a man's hand can be healed by touching the hair of his true love. That's very romantic. But her true healing power doesn't come from her hair. That's not enough to bring him back to life. Instead it's her tears of mercy that do it, even if her hair has turned brown---or any other color for that matter.

Secretariat

Seen at: Cinema Saver 6, last night.

Alice---thought of you while seeing this movie, for obvious reasons, if you ever see it.

The movie unfortunately is rather dreadful---an amateur screenplay and textbook clumsy direction. You can really see the cast straining at the lines they are having to say. It's rather reactionary and cloying in the not-good sort of way, while simultaneously endorsing the worst of postmodernism.

The most interesting scenes were the close-ups of the horses themselves. They should have done more of that, I think---made the whole movie from the horse's point of view.

Nevertheless, I rooted for this movie. I remember the headline from the Triple Crown horse race that summer in banner type on the front page of the Des Moines Register. And that photo of that one horse, all alone, gallopping across the finish line to victory. Thirty one lengths---The number always stuck in my mind.

That's the way I thought of the world back then, that I was living in a perfect time, when the greatest of everything was happening, and that the wildest kinds of magic were possible, and that there was no reason I couldn't be a part of it too.

And the epilogue---that was freaking hilarious---snow angel hilarious.

Despicable Me

seen at: Cinema Saver 6, about seven weeks ago, I think...

Smitty---has it really been less than two months since we saw this together? Then you went and did what?

So glad you had a great visit out to Coop and Betty's. Too bad about the cell phone. But you saw what mine looked like. I took your cosmic hint and got a new one too.

We both liked Despicable Me, as I remember. Wasn't that a good movie? Suprisingly so. I thought the trailers were dreadful, but it turned out they highlighted the worst part of the movie. The rest was almost charming.

Definite surprise of the year for me.

So glad you're back in town. What do you want to see next?

Metropolis (restored version)

Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, last month.

When I mentioned that this was coming to the Lyric, my dad said he really wanted to go. So for the second time in a year, I found myself going to a movie with him. I even got to introduce him to Ben, who was working the counter that night.

On the way there, my dad mentioned that the restored version was considered to have a very strong Nazi message. I had seen the old American recut version on TCM a few years back and thought it was a masterpiece. I wondered just how a re-editing could make it a Nazi movie.

After the movie was over, on the way home, we both agreed that there was no question what made this a Nazi movie.

The key to understanding it is to realize that we have essentially been fed a load of malarkey about what Nazism was about. We've been conned into thinking it was all about anti-Semitism, which in fact was a side issue in the main philosophy of the Third Reich.

Metropolis had to be lost and destroyed in its original version, I think, because it shows what the real philosophy of Nazism was about, especially in regard to the bloodline-based hierarchical and authoritative organization of society. It is the part of Nazism that survived the war intact, and was proffered to us as the New International Order after World War II. In order words, this movie shows how even though Germany lost the war, the Nazis triumphed.

But other than that, it's a brilliant movie. One of the greatest masterpieces of all time. It was a pleasure to watch every scene. My father thought it was "overly theatrical" like an old movie. I had to tell him that was part of German Expressionism at the time---the exaggerated sets and gestures, as well as the lingering camera shots.

I'd see it again and again, even if I get cold chills seeing the older Federson and his henchmen, who provided the textbook lesson in how to act like a Nazi for many members in the audience. The reason this is not an American movie is simple---the bad guys suffer no downfall. There's no revolution at the end. It turns out they were the good guys after all. They just needed to realize that it takes an upper-class scion of a powerful family to save us all. Gee, where have I heard that before?

Angelina Jolie as the New Role Model

Sure got a big kick out of this TED talk, as one might imagine. Towards the end, it degenerates into a celebration of almost everything about postmodern pop culture that I have come to find as disgusting as drinking sewer water.

AJ as the new James Bond, indeed---a soulless psychopathic agent of the global elite, remorsely killing to keep the powerful in their powerful places. My ideal woman---NOT!

Well, to be fair, I should have thought of that before I spent 200,000 years oppressing and enslaving the women of the world!

Salt

Seen at: Cinema Saver 6, about three weeks ago.

Any of my Facebook friends will already know what I thought of this one. I usually don't mention movies there (for one thing, I haven't seen that many of them lately), but I made an exception in this particular case.

Indeed, I surprised myself. Over the last two years there were so many times I just wanted to walk out of a movie, but until now I always restrained myself, telling myself that if I started to do that, I might walk out of half of the ones I was going to.

But everyone has his/her limits, and Salt pushed me over the line finally.

So sad---I was looking forward to it for months, and waited until it got to the two-dollar theater. Over the summer, it was one of two Hollywood releases (the other being Inception) that I thought might have a chance. I was even willing to give Angelina Jolie another chance.

Inception crashed and burned for me during Act Three. It could have been a good story, but it collapsed utterly at the end (Ben agreed with me that it failed to advance the "false reality" genre even an inch).

Salt, on the other hand, had me churning in my seat from the opening scene---featuring AJ gettting waterboarded in a North Korean prison. What the hell is this, South Park in 2005? Even the promise of a generous role for Liev Schreiber couldn't kindle my interest.

I could have weathered that opening piece of merde, but it just got worse very quickly. The minute I realized that Jolie and Schreiber were CIA agents, and this was going to be another movie where "romantic, heroic CIA agents save the world" as I said in my FB post, it was all I could do not to throw something at the screen. Good thing I didn't have a tomato with me. Pardon my French, but I just don't have time to watch this kind of bullshit anymore.

It doesn't matter to me what the story is---probably something about a "rogue, bad" agent that has to be put down. It's too late for that---way too late. Anything short of a full indictment for that nest of wretched America-killers just doesn't cut it for me now.

Jolie just struck out in my book for the last time. She's on my banned-forever list of movie actors. Go find something else to do, Ms. Jolie, preferably not helping a bunch of rich assholes depopulate Africa so they can turn it into their private game park, like they want to. You suck, Angelina.

Still at this point, I remained in my seat. What finally had me fleeing to exit was a story premise at about minute twenty. Lee Harvey Oswald was a Soviet agent all along, you see...

We don't have time anymore for diversionary revisionary fantasies about what happened in Dallas in 1963. Nothing short of full sunlight matters now. There is too much at stake. Given the recent important disclosures about the JFK case, and what they actually mean, this was beyond insulting. It borders on treason.

I sprung from my seat and uncontrollably yelled "bullshit!" at the screen and stormed up the aisle. For the six or seven other patrons in the auditorium, I suspect I gave them more entertainment than they got from the rest of the movie.

It was the first movie I'd walked out of since my ex-wife and I abandoned The English Patient in Austin in the mid 1990s. I'd rather sit through that twice over before seeing ten more minutes of Jolie's ghastly, snarky smirk in Salt.

But what door have I opened now? Can I possibly force myself to sit through these turkeys anymore. Well, it is Thanksgiving season, at least. And the restored Metropolis is at the Lyric...

By the way, I was quite surprised at the response to my status update on FB. I went away from the screen for a hour and came back to find four "likes" to my post, all from female friends. Seems I'm not the only one who feels this way about these kinds of movies.

Verdict: I'd say burn all the prints, but probably good to keep this one around as reference for just how bad Hollywood got, before it all imploded.

Twilight Saga: Eclipse

Seen at Cinema Saver 6, about six weeks ago (on its last possible showing before it left town).

Pretty much had to see this installment, because I'd seen the first two as part of my "see everything" project.

I was not offended by the first two movies. They were empty of any real substance, but the first one took advantage of the spookiness of the Pacific Northwest in a unique way (at least, since First Blood (1981)). The second one had a similar romantic sheen because of the scenes set in Tuscany.

This one made me understand just how awful the books of this series must be. I could barely stomach listening to much of the early dialogue, and had to curl up and not look at the screen at times, it was so wretchedly juvenile. It was on par with the corniest short melodramas that came out Edison's studio a hundred years ago. Has Hollywood really lost that much of its storytelling ability?

The direction and editing is as clumsy as the worst of recent Hollywood films, quite surprisingly so, given the marquee status of the franchise. Yet the cinematography ironically is superior to the first two films, and we get some gorgeous shots of Kristin Stewart trying out her hand at advanced eye-acting in close ups.

The last half hour of the film perked up my interest a tad. It was a novel-enough take on a battle royale between super vampires and a team of other such vampires aided by werewolves. You've got my attention, at least, and I was far more entertained than I was in the dreadful collapse at the end of Inception. It almost made sitting through the dialog of the first ninety minutes worth it.

Winter's Bone

Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, Thurs. Sept. 8 at 6:00 pm

People were talking this movie a lot, and the concept---neorealistic suspense in the Ozarks made with local actors---was intriguing, but still I waited until the last showing at the Lryic before it left. Too bad. It would have been good to have been able to recommend it before it left.

As I went into this movie, I was musing on a theory of movie narrative I've been toying with. It goes like this:

Every movie has a climax. At the moment of the climax, the main character or characters typically are forced to make a decision regarding an action. If we only saw that moment of the movie, that particular decision by that character might seem bizarre or incomprehensible. The purpose of the movie narrative is to bring us from complete ignorance about the character to a sympathetic understanding of the motivations of that character at the climax. It does this by taking the viewer through a series of emotional states that accompany revelations about the character(s).

Superior movies tend to be the ones that provide solid and satisfying emotional insight into climax-decisions that would be otherwise completely outside our understanding, were it not for insight engendered by the emotional journey of the narrative.

I tested my theory in Winter's Bone. I wondered what the "climax decision" of the main character would be. In this case the protagonist is a seventeen year-old girl taking care of her siblings in their house in the hills of southwestern Missouri and immediately facing the threat of losing her house and land, unless she can locate her absent father and convince him to show up to a court date.

What is the decision she is forced to make at the climax? Well that would be a spoiler, and there's no good in spoiling this movie. But let's just say it was an auspicious start for my new theory.

Winter's Bone advances horror, suspense, and mystery in tangible ways. It is somewhat in the subject-matter genre of the The Blair Witch Project (1999), but without the POV style, and with a much more sophisticated story. We've come a long way since then.

The story is fresh and unpredictable. There's even a cool dream sequence (cf. Inception), used in exactly the way you would want a dream sequence used. The heroine is awesome in her heroism. She embodies the real struggle of Americans right now in a way that Hollywood is flat out ignoring.

I'll throw my wager in with those saying this is going to win Best Picture next March. Given the last two winners, it's hard to see Hollywood not recognizing when it has been bested.

Inception

Seen at: Carmike 10, Ft. Collins, at 4:25 p.m. on Sept 10

This was a fun movie-going experience, because I saw it with my dad on his 70th birthday. I bought the tickets, he bought the popcorn. Off the top of my head, the last time I remember seeing a movie with my dad was 1972--and that was with the whole family.

My dad is a hard-core science fiction fan from the early post-World War II days. He has an incredible depth of knowledge about science fiction paperbacks by the great classical writers, and all the pulp of varying quality that came along with it over the years. While I was growing up, those kinds of paperbacks and copies of little Analog magazine filled our house.

After the end of Inception, I was eager to hear what he thought about it. Most of our movie discussions are me just talking about things I've seen by myself.

I offered my cautious entree to get things going, saying that I was "not sure" about it. He concurred. I could see it was a genuine opinion, and he wasn't just following mine.

Over the next couple of hours, it turned into a rout. Then, and over the following afternoon at the celebration my sister held at her house in the north Denver suburbs, we piled thought about thought about why Inception was so bad, and was one of the most disappointing movies I have seen in a long time.

It's so disappointinga movie, and so deceptive about its premises, that I hesitate to open up the catalog of my thoughts again, lest I feel compelled to write a long treatise on it.

Certainly it is solidly in the genre of Hollywood film that emerged in the 1990s centered on the premise that some or all of the primary characters introduced in Act One are either in some sort of alternate reality state and are either unaware of it, or are dead (in which case the characters in flashback are doomed but are not aware of it).

That being said, Inception utterly fails to advance the genre by even an inch. It's a cop-out, a retreat. The twist of the entire movie turns out to be (spoiler........) that there is no twist and the story is completely linear within a world in which lucid shared dreaming exists. The only plot conflict is about a man getting over his deceased wife---nothing else. That I didn't care at all about the characters, who were like video game characters, can be used to support the idea that the entire framing story is thus also a dream state. Ah, that's it. This movie is about the psychological effect of people living their lives by the quest narratives of video games, and missing out on the real world and family. OK, I get it.

Inception reminded me a lot of Shutter Island so much that they seem as variations on the same movie. With Scorcese, I pretty much know that I'm going to hate anything new he puts out, and now I can add Christopher Nolan to the list. I should have known. Inception is also the same movie as The Dark Knight, in that they are both incoherent on a basic level of narrative logic, but in different ways.

The Dark Knight's incoherence is on the level of morality and motivation: it uses the mask of classicism, for example the the prisoner's dilemma that the Joker sets up on the ferry boat, to fool the audience into thinking that the story says something meaningful about Batman's choice at the end of the movie. Inception has a much deeper level of narrative disconnect, almost like the molecular bonds of character structure are being dissolved.

The people who liked this movie--well, I suspect a lot of it is because of the special effects. The last half hour ofInception is amazing long and boring for minutes on end. The too-forced parallel narrative structure of the dream levels each coming to their respective climax had me rolling my eyes. But the anti-gravity scenes in the elevator and hallway were unique and interesting such that they are deserving of an Oscar nomination, and perhaps even a win depending on the eventual competition. But not the score. Please not the score.

My greatest anger against it comes from the movie's utter failure to use it's science fiction premise (lucid, shared dreaming) to say anything meaningful about the reality in which we live right now via our shared culture and media. There isn't the slightest hint of this in the movie, really. It's as if one took The Matrix and drained it of all its connotation. You've got some innovative arm flailings enhanced by CGI to be sure, and pretty much nothing else. Is the metaphorical premise of Inception really that "you can't put an idea in someone's head, it has to come from them." That's the only interesting question about psychological that the movie even attempts to raise. To be sure, this was debated in the context of lucid dreamnaut experiences, but the problem is: this kind of dreaming experience doesn't exist in reality. The only meaningful debate is about what this means in our "real" reality.

So is the movie saying that you can't put ideas into people's heads? Is this really a deep philosophical question or is this just the Postmodern shell of the appearance and trappings of rational inquiry? I think it is the latter.

As far as lucid dreamnaut movies go, put Dreamscape (1984) in your Netflix queue instead. I haven't seen it since it was in the theaters back then, back when I'd walk over from our house on Purdue Road to see flicks at the now-long-gone University Triplex. But I thought it was fun when I saw it, and certain images and scenes have stuck in my head from it since then.

The Expendables

Seen August 29, afternoon at the Fox 5 in downtown Sterling, Colorado.

A strange way to break a month's fast. A spontaneous three-day road trip last month took me out onto the Eastern Plains---one of my favorite places to drive for hours on end without seeing anyone.

After two days of that, little Sterling seems like an oasis of civilization, a space colony in the midst of a void---cleans motels, a lovely museum well kept up, about the Rural Electrification Project.

The downtown multiplex is a coverted single screen establishment off the main boulevard. I arrived just in time to catch this movie, which I call the It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World of 2010.

Stanley Kramer's 1963 madcap epic was the end of a era, a last hoorah for an entire generation of the cast in many ways. The world was about to change in big ways.

Now, among other things, the action star as we know it is fading into history. There is a sadness among the old men in this movie that there is not a next generation. Cinema has moved on.

But it's much more than that. The mercenaries in the movie somehow know something went really, really wrong with America, and they identify it as stemming from the Serbian War. Very intriguing idea.

It's camp and pretensious on every level, and the action scenes rather bored me at times, but I still liked it for the reasons I've just described.

The finest scene in the film is a short performance by Mickey Roarke, as a hip Austin motorcycle tatoo artist and retried mercenary. He delivers a soliloquy in a close-up while bent into purple light as he concentrates on one of his designs. "We used to stand for something," he says.

I think of his character here as essentially the ghost of his character from The Wrestler, speaking form beyond the grave, mourning the death of the America we all knew and loved, and for which Stallone thought he was fighting, in his own Postmodern way.

I hear ya, brother. I hear ya.

Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop

Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, three weeks ago.

I saw this on the first Friday afternoon showing when it came to Lyric last month. I had just happened to be in the neighborhood, but this meant that I got to screen it with Ben, the Lyric owner, and a few other people.

For most of the time during the movie, I thought it was an interesting documentary on the street art movement, which is NOT graffiti (think posters more than paint) and which is much fascinating that I had thought. There is plenty of valuable archival footage of the creation of various projects by famous street artists.

Toward the end, the story seemed to lag a little, but that was okay. In the lobby, I swapped opinions with Ben, who had almost the same reaction I did.

I went on my way, on my downtown errands, then remembered I had left my reading glasses, so I came back to get them at the theater. Ben was holding them when I walked in. As he handed them to me, we chatted about the movie again, and he asked a simple question regarding a rumor he had heard in connection with the movie, specifically one concerning Banksy's relationship to the artist who is the subject of the movie.

An hour later, we were still sorting it all out, and along the way we both agreed that Exit Through the Gift Shop was an utter masterpiece. We were laughing not only at the movie, but at our own stupid initial reactions to it.

Thank god I forgot my reading glasses that day.

At the Starbucks laptop table today

"Can the Undead be Role Models?" asks the USA Today on the top of the front page. The Postmodern summer rolls on.

City Island

Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, 3:30 pm today

After the houselights came up, I was the last one in the number two auditorium at the Lyric. Ben came in to walk through to the projection room. As the last credits rolled, he asked me, "So how was it?"

"My kind of movie," I said. "It's a New York neighborhood-family movie, which I like a lot."

I added that Andy Garcia's performance was superb. "You know how every year the Academy nominates an Indie performance for the acting Oscar. Last year it was Richard Wright."

He knew what I meant. "Well, Garcia could be it for this year."

Then I added that the movie got a little goofy at the end, and got fairly Postmodern when Garcia's character actually goes from being a prison guard to an actor, and Martin Scorcese is explicitly invoked.

The story here has a Postmodern dysfunctional family that is healed by bold Classical honesty and courage. It occurred to me that in Scorcese's earlier films, and also in Saturday Night Fever, the New York Catholic Family that Screams (NYCFTS) was not so much Scorcese showing us a New York phenomenon (witness his own personal upbringing), but rather the Postmodern one, albeit in New York garb and patois. In City Island, it's come full circle---the New York screaming family now looks normal American, because we've all become that, somewhere along the way.

But like I said, some good performances by a great cast, and I learned a few things about the place where I dined on lobster on my 35th Birthday, having visited all five boroughs in one day of fun. The film did not let down any of my memories.

Letters to Juliet

Seen at: Carmike 10, two weeks ago

It's almost cruel---over the past three months we have gotten three incredible performances by Amanda Seyfried, my favorite 20-something actress. What a year so far for her.

The cruel part? I felt it strongly while watching Letters from Juliet, a lighthearted and fairly straightforward romantic comedy set in Tuscany, in which Seyfried stars (and holds her own against Vanessa Redgrave). The story is fun and predictable, but earnest and quite watchable within its genre. And yes, Taylor Swift makes an appearance in the soundtrack in Act Three.

Watching Seyfried cross the screen in the echoing streets of Verona and Sienna, or sitting on a Tuscan hillside in the sun, or under a starry sky, was for me, in that moment, to feel the majesty of film to capture the beauty of creation on screen, and to ache in my soul to know that such beauty exists. It is not a longing for possession of the actress herself, or even desire for her, but something more transcendental that springs from the power of art itself. It is cruel in how fleeting it is. It is the tragedy and triumph of cinema, as it reflects life, when something is so beautiful that it hurts in your soul, pleasantly so.

One of my favorites of the year so far. If Amanda didn't appear in anything else for 2010, she'd already be on the shortlist of my Actress of the Year.

The great cinematic experiment ends---but goes on

Wow. It's late June already, and I've been busy not seeing lots of movies. In fact, I've been really enjoying not seeing movies lately, after the expiration of the two-year project to see "as many movies as possible that are released in theaters in the U.S."

That last statement in quotes is what this thing evolved into. The two-year timeline is what it became when, as it approached this spring, I could started to get increasingly unenthusiastic about cinema-going, even to movies I wanted to see.

Since mid-May, when I decided I'd had enough and could call it quits (because I'd seen nearly every movie released since mid-May 2008), I suddenly felt as if I had lots more free time and energy. I was no longer a slave to the movie listings.

But we like our chains, don't we? So immediately I began to miss the weekly regimen of cinema strategizing that became combined with trips to the Denver suburbs to catch movies that had left Fort Collins already.

Since then I've seen about a movie a week, on average. All of a sudden, I like going to movies again. I can pick and choose. It is delightful.

Ironically I could pick up again with the "see-everything" plan and hardly have missed a beat, since most of the movies released since mid-May are still in theaters. But I've already decided to pass, for now, on many of them. Just as I left several 2008 and 2009 missed movies unseen, so too will these become future DVD watchings, perhaps, years down the road, when I want to see this time in cinema history with fresh eyes, to verify if my judgments back then (that is, now) were (are) on the mark.

What will I leave unseen for now? I think the remake of Nightmare on Elm Street, released in early May, is where I decided to call a halt to this. Technically I could have invoked my "didn't see the others in series" rule, on which I have passed on the Saw sequels recently. But really it was because every time I thought about wasting an afternoon in the Carmike seeing it, I suddenly could think of better uses for the five dollar bill in my wallet.

I've also decided to pass for now on Shrek 4, Robin Hood (probably), Killers, Toy Story 3, among others.

My regrets are that I didn't act quickly enough to see Magruber, which came and went out of all theaters in Colorado/Wyoming within about three weeks. When a movie bombs that bad, something is compelling about seeing it, especially since it spent a week in the two dollar cinema. What a shame. It's not even playing anymore at the Elvis Arvada.

This still leaves me with a raft of movies I've never written up. I think I'll have to shotgun them with one-paragraph reviews if I can.

The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band)

Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, a couple months back

This was an Oscar nominee that was playing at the Lyric during Oscar week. I didn't wind up seeing up before the Awards, but saw it a few days later. It didn't win in Best Foreign Language Film.

Interesting characters and setting in early 1910s Austria that really do recall life in a rural European village, including quietness of no television, etc., and the shift in social relations that entails. Emphasis on class distinctions that have analogues in American towns of late 19th Century. The power of the story is in the ending, which is unexpected but speaks to the difference between narrative and real history.

"That's pretty typical Michael Haneke," said Ben, in the lobby of the Lyric after the show. "His movies all have that kind of twist somehow."

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, last night


The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo out of Sweden was one of those movies people have been talking about all spring. I'd put off seeing it during its lengthy run at the Lyric because it was two hours and thirty minutes long: anything over 2:05 begins to seem like a long movie to me. Ben, the Lyric owner, had seen it and proclaimed that it was a half hour too long. After the movie I agreed with him.

It was an interesting mystery story for much of the movie--a Swedish newspaper reporter is asked to solve a decades-old mystery of a missing young movie---pure Raymond Chandler type stuff.

There is a horrible sexual assault scene---one that the made the teenage girl in front of me cover her eyes. Then there follows, fifteen minutes later, a second much more brutal sexual assault scene with the same characters. Really? I needed to see two in a rows?

The solution to the mystery devolves into a rather trite "racist misogynist madman" theme. I couldn't help thinking that it was really (again) the same movie as Antichrist, but without the ironic twists and artistic sensibilities that make us question our assumptions. No room for that here. The heroine is stone-faced, because she has to be. The patriarchy made her so.

It's all very, very serious. By the end of the film, I figured the entire screenplay could have been written by a Women's Studies Symposium at a northeastern liberal arts college circa 1993, with Scandanavian self-righteousness thrown in for good measure.

It all would have made better sense if I'd only known the Swedish title in advance: it translates to "Men Who Hate Women."

Iron Man 2

Seen at: Carmike 10, last week, matinee

Iron Man 2 was among the better movies to come out this spring. The first installment two years ago was one of the more interesting movies of 2008, storywise and productionwise, and the second movie builds on successes of the first.

In the first installment, the hero finds power. He uses the power, and is threatened by someone jealous of it, whom the hero defeats.

The second movie is about how the hero discovers that power has a consequence, in that for power, he sacrifices love. The hero has to reconcile his power to his heart. Because this is a superhero movie, the symbolism is all literal. But that's ok.

The problem of the movie is discovering a narrative path towards endorsing the idea that Tony Stark must be CEO of his enterprise, and not Pepper Potts. The story does this in a fresh and interesting way for 2010.

There's interesting political commentary. (Spoiler) Stark resists the demand of Congress to hand over his suit, on the grounds that it is his private property. He somehow manages to hand it over to the government---in the form of benevolent Don Cheedle playing a USAF colonel. But the way Stark lets it play out, this appropriation appears to have it have been against Stark's will. We're supposed to think that this is a good thing, when Cheedle flies away in a copy of the suit. Or are we?

Ghost Writer

Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, about five weeks ago.

This film---the latest from Roman Polansky---is certainly the best film I've seen over the last few months. Without giving any endorsement to any of Polansky's actions outside of being a movie director, let me just state that this a superb thriller, and a near perfect suspense story about high level corruption, at least until the last half of the third act, where the resolution of the story is not quite what I'd hoped for.

Nevertheless it scores very high on my Condor Index---a 1-10 rating system I invented for movies that expose high-level corruption and real conspiracies among the elite, with Three Days of the Condor (1975) being at the top of the scale as the best one could legitimately expect from Hollywood. Of course, 1975 was the year of the Church Committee hearings on the domestic intelligence operations. We've never matched that level of public awareness since, and started backsliding immediately afterwards (when you-know-you was appointed head of the CIA).

Ghost Writer, despite its less than impressive conclusion, still scores, oh, about a 9 on my Condor Index, the highest such ranking I've given over the last couple years of moviegoing. It legitimately raises the issue of whether or not certain foreign leaders are actually in the pay of the CIA, all the while mostly avoiding the X Files-type Hollywood trap of predictive programming, i.e., falsely "exposing" a legitimate issue in order to debunk it to the public: "oh, silly, you saw that in a movie."

I cannot speak of the truth of the rumor that this movie so angered Polansky's powerful globalist friends that they almost allowed Switzerland to deport him back to the U.S. recently, just to put the fear of "God" (i.e. the Bilderbergers) back into him. In any case, score one for him, and for us.

And yes, there's Pierce Brosnan again, the man who can do everything, back in his natural element as a British leader, instead of attempting a Brooklyn accent.

How to Train Your Dragon

Seen at: Carmike 10, about six weeks ago.

This is a movie I did see in 3-d, because it was meant to be in 3-d, and everyone was talking about how good the 3-d was, by the time I saw it. I guess so. But honestly, when I started this review, I thought: "now did I see this 3-d or not...let me scour my memory."

This turned out to be the sleeper hit of the Spring. This is not surprising to me, since it is a kid's movie, which always have good legs if they are not heinous or stupid, which this movie is not. But it didn't blow me away either.

I was bored much of the time because it has what is now the standard Hollywood love story:

1. Nerdy boy-man is stuck in adolescent state.
2. Boy meets girl-warrior, who kicks his ass with her prowess in fighting. He falls in love with her.
3. Boy overcomes his nerdiness and becomes a kick-ass warrior too, and earns respect/love of the girl who originally kicked his ass.

Notice the use of the phrase "kick-ass" in there. It's not an accident.

Hollywood sees contemporary men as so enfeebled that they must be shamed by women into any mature solidity of character. Women, immune from the types of egotism that keep men in childlike states, must hold together society and civilization, not only through traditional female roles (which are devalued---only lesser women confine themselves to such activities) but also the traditionally male ones, in particular war and combat. Women are better men than men.

OK, now I'm straying from the movie of Dragon a bit. It's not a bad movie at all, but on some level I could never take this movie seriously because of its embrace of the standard love story above. I'm so tired of it. It's no longer fresh. But we've backed ourselves into a corner culturally. If women stop being the sword-wielding warriors in movies, does that mean it's back to domestic enslavement and traditional roles? Hollywood has no answer for that yet, so in the meantime we all get to go around chopping off heads of flying reptiles. It's the sexy thing to do.

Clash of the Titans

Seen at: Carmike 10, six weeks ago.

This was probably the second most notable movie of the recent stretch. I'm a big fan of the original (1981) and was afraid it would be spoiled, in particular by having Andromeda become a "girl with the sword."

They didn't do that, to their credit, and it made the movie interesting to me. The problem is solved by introducing a new character, Io, who is unfortunately supernatural, but that's ok in this genre. She's an active, yet feminine. The way she handles a whip in the scene with the Scorpions is downright sexy. In the credits, I looked for the actor's name: Gemma Arterton. "I've looked for her name before," I thought. But where? Turns out she was the Bond girl in Quantum of Solace. She's in Prince of Persia---the female lead---coming up in a couple weeks. Mark her name.

Back to Clash of the Titans---unfortunately the story with the Gods sucked, and didn't even make sense. Zeus is bad, then good. I later read that the director had actually created a much more intricate story, where Zeus is indeed the bad guy of the movie, and the humans do indeed revolt. It was supposed to be really epic, but the studio got final cut and rearranged the entire movie, and largely ruined it. Like I said, I was just happy that it didn't suck in the way I thought it was going to.

I did not see it in 3-d, because it was not shot in 3-d. I'm not going to pay extra for that.

I still prefer the old version by far---claymation Medusa rules!

Alice in Wonderland

Seen at: Metrolux Loveland, about two months ago

This is the movie that kept me from writing my blog for a while. After I saw it, on a whim after driving through the backroads of Weld County one sunny afternoon, my thoughts got all jammed up. There was too much to say about this movie. I had to let my thoughts simmer down, so I could be succint.

This movie will not be particularly enjoyable by most people who see it. Certainly it gave me a queasy feeling at times. But it is probably the most significant Hollywood movie to come out in the Spring of 2010.

Why? Because it encapsulates so much of what Hollywood is trying to say lately. It is the apotheosis of the "girl with the sword" motif that Hollywood is shoving down our throats lately. Moreover the girl with the sword is sweet Alice, a Victorian young woman.

It has the Postmodern fascination with prophecy. Instead of Lewis Carrol's (classical) mathematical puzzles, we get a magical scroll that shows the future, one in which Alice is destined to pick up a sword and slay the Jabberwock. But the poem says "he" instead of "she." Very gendy-bendy.

There were a few moments that were really hard to take. When Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum seize Alice by the arms and drag her away, I felt my Victorian sensibilities being violated to an extreme degree.

But this is not about the Victorian era. It's a fucked up mirror to our own fucked up times, even more fuckeditty-upped than Shutter Island. It's a must see, if you want to understand what 2010 is about.

Wonderland is really Underland---the Underworld, that is, Sheol, the pit, or Hell. Alice has gone to Hell.

The three-D sucks. It wasn't shot in 3D. It certainly washes out the color (they should have done the Wizard of Oz thing, made it 3-D only after Alice goes to Wonderland/Underland.

The chess pieces no longer move in their prescribed moves. They just charge ahead and attack each other chaotically. It's a civil war of the female: bad mother versus good mother. Do you want to know why the Mad Hatter is mad? It's because of the War. The War drove him mad.

See what I mean? What an awesome movie, in a certain way. The ending was to die for: Alice goes off and founds the opium trade. I kid you not.

War. Opium. Insanity. Johnny Depp breakdancing. This could be the movie of the year.

Goodbye Boondock Sandler

Has it been three weeks since I wrote anything? It's hard to believe it.

A bout of late season flu laid me up for more than a week in late April. After I recovered I went on an incredible run of theater-going. Now I have fallen way behind on this blog. Actually this lag in my write-ups has been good thing, because it allows me to boil down what I was going to say, into just a few statements.

Among other things, I've made a decision: at the end of May, it will have been two years exactly since I set off on the quest to see all the movies released in theaters in the U.S., or as many as possible. I've done pretty well, by my reckoning, but all good things must end.

Frankly I'm tired out. I was going to suspend this at the first of the year, but Extraordinary Measures gave me a late rally to finish it out until now.

This doesn't mean I'm going to stop seeing movies---in theaters or otherwise---anytime soon. It just means I'm not geoing to be obsessive about seeing everything in the theaters. I'll probably still see almost everything at the Lyric (although Ben tells me that he'll look out for any Boondock Saints II that I could skip), and I'm still going to see plenty of first run movies, the ones that people talk about. I'm still going to write about it all here in this blog.

But last week while watching a trailer for the new Adam Sandler movie, the one where he pees in the swimming pool, and after seeing that it wasn't coming out until June, I felt a great sense of relief in saying to myself I'm not going to see that movie.

Nordwand (North Face)

Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, Thursday afternoon

This German production is one of the most brutal and intense outdoor movies I've ever seen. I saw just after coming down from a hike up to Arthur's Rock, where, if you read my FB posts, I got "swooped" by a turkey vulture. I was proud of myself after that hike, but after seeing this movie I realized that I'm the most amateur of amateurs, and always will be.

(Spoiler)

When I walked into the theater, I was under the impression this was a period piece, set in the 1930s, about the first successful attempt to climb the north face of the Eiger, "the last unsolved problem in the alps." Thus the ending ot the story caught me off guard. Like I said, very brutal.

Creation

Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, about a month ago.

I knew little about this movie---a biopic on Charles Darwin during his writing of Origin of Species---until I walked in to see. When I noticed it was one of the BBC Films production financed by the UK National Lottery, I knew what kind of movie to expect, namely a fairly well-made, tight script that plays to the middle of the culture road, thoroughly exploring a certain range of sentiment without going too far in one direction.

That's pretty much what I got here. As I told Ben, the Lyric owner, as I left the theater, it was about "the trials of historical figure to complete or continue their work while facing a personal problem that threatens to derail his/her entire legacy." In a way, it's very Classical, albeit safe in tone, as all Classical movies are lately.

The story strove to give a balance between science and religion, and succeeded fairly well I thought. Jennifer Connelly gets to play her usual role as the wife-who-doesn't-really-go-along-with-her-husbands-plans, and she spends most of the movie with her skeptical pose. By the end of the movie she actually has some interesting scenes where she gets to emote, and show any sort of vulnerability.

Worth seeing for everyone, for historical reasons above all else, but also a well-told story.

Edge of Darkness

Seen at: Cinemark 16, Ft. Collins, at 12:40 pm at Feb. 28

This Mel Gibson was suprisingly among the best of the spy-oriented thrillers I've seen recently, which surprised me. For once I wasn't disgusted by a movie that appears to implicate high-level governmnt officials in malfeasance, and then brushes it off by the simple interpretation of being due to a few "bad apples." I enjoyed the CGI effects to create a secret defense installation on the Connecticut River in Massachusetts. All in all much better and more enjoyable than the trailer indicated.

Kick-Ass

Seen at: Cinemark 16 in Ft. Collins, at 11:45 am today

Good god. What a horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible movie.

Eight hours after seeing it I can't even muster the sputtering disgust at this diarrhea-on-film that I was just forced to sit through. Of all the movies where I've had to restrain myself from walking out lately, this took the most effort to stay in my seat. I got half way up, almost started moving toward the exit, but curiosity to see how far it could go kept me there.

I didn't have any clue it was going to be so bad. Last year, after Watchmen, I wondered where the superhero genre could possibly go, since Watchmen had seemed to put the capstone on it. When the trialers for Kick-Ass started showing up a couple months ago, I thought I had my answer: Kick-Ass appeared to be the logical extension from Watchmen. In a sense, it does that, but really it takes everything that is problematic with, say, The Dark Knight, and magnifies it by an order of magnitude.

But that hardly begins to describe it. Kick-Ass is nothing else than the sick, twisted elaboration of the girl-assassin-with-the-sword fascination that literally has Hollywood masturbating (see first scene of Kick-Ass, complete with a waste basket full of spermy kleenex).

Let me put it bluntly: anyone who thought making a movie about an eleven-year-old girl who turns into a remorseless psychopathic killer who gleefully jams a samurai blade into defenseless people fleeing and begging for their lives, and which endorses these actions as fun, wholesome and righteous, is, in my book fucking insane on a level that makes all other Postmodern dysfunctions seem like quaint melodrama.

To everyone who made this movie: go fuck yourself. Fuck you for getting me to sit through this.

This is what Hollywood at nadir looks like. Can it get any lower?

Here's Ebert's Twitter on this movie.

update: I'm with Roger.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid

Seen at: Carmike 10, 4::05 pm today

Where did this movie come from? It just showed up a few weeks ago at the Carmike. I thought it was one of those obscure Christian movies, perhaps, but it actually beat out Jennifer Aniston's new movie the weekend it released.

It's a somewhat cute story of a scrawny preteen boy, following him from the first day of middle school until the end of the first year. His quest is to be popular, and everything that he does makes him more miserable, and more of an outcast.

He's selfish---but that's ok because he's a child. Yet we can still judge his actions when he screws over his friends and acquaintences, thinking that they are less valuable than he is. His best friend, originally an outcast with him, winds up becoming popular in the way he wishes for.

The setting is fairly Postmodern---we accept without reservation that a typical American public middle school is an utter cesspool hell of torment. The mission of the boy's older brother is simply to make the protagonist's life as miserable as possible. Moreover the adults, including the boy's parents, are clueless to help him navigate the shoals of this transition to his teenage years.

The story mixes both live action and animation---in the form of moving stick-figure drawings supposedly drawn by the protagonist himself. I found myself wishing for more of this animation, and less of the live action.

But I was rooting for boy, enough to make it enjoyable to sit this through without wandering around the auditorium in boredom too much (I was the only person for the matinee). The sceenplay earned my respect early on, in a scene at the kitchen table during breakfast before school. The boy is forced to sit next to his much younger brother, who is astride a child's potty while eating at the table. It was a disgusting image, the kind of visual cue that sums up how I feel about much of contemporary culture and cinema at times. The boy objects to the presence of the toilet at the table. Amen, little brother!

Date Night

Seen at: Carmike 10, 4:55 p.m. yesterday

Yesterday afternoon I showed up at the Carmike on a whim, coming home from a long walk, and hit the showtime for this on the button. As I mentioned before, it's nice to see a movie on the opening weekend so that one is not deluged by headlines of reviews on the web. Date Night was the only wide release film to come out on Friday, so I had no excuse not to tackle this one right off the bat.

Going into it, I knew it was only ninety minutes long. Watching TCM a couple years ago, I used to love the "eight reelers"---the old classics at 85 minutes or so. I give a lot more leeway to films that come under the hour-and-half mark.

This one worked well enough, and at times I found myself comparing to it romantic escapade comedies of recent eras. A film that can do this while offering fresh contemporary tweaks and twists is also one to which I can give much leeway.

The freshest (or perhaps most Classically retrograde) aspect of Date Night was Tina Fey's performance. Although I could imagine an actor other than Steve Carell as the male lead (perhaps not as good, but I could at least imagine it), I simply could not see anyone else besides Fey pulling off the character of Claire.

Fey's secret is that she completely thwarted what we have come to expect of the Postmodern marriage: adult wife, baby husband, where the story is driven around the failings and immature frailties of the male character. Fey's ability to self-deprecate, and still remain powerful female, puts her in a league by herself right how, and points the way to the Post-Post-Postmodern with a big blinking neon sign message.

Thus we have a story about a non-dysfunctional marriage that still has "problems" that need to be solved, ones that don't simply fall back on the formula of "husband needs to grow up, and wife needs to realize that husband will never really grow up all the way she wants him to."

All this was enough to keep me entertained through most of the film. The film seemed well written in the first act. I was impressed by small screenplay touches in the opening minutes, comparing the two principals at their jobs. He's a NJ tax accountant. His wild young clients reject his advice as being too staid and conservative. She's a NJ real estate agent. Her older mature clients reject her advice as being too rash, given market conditions. They both wind up in the same place, by parallel routes.

The story somewhat comes unglued in the last fifteen minutes, as so many of them do. I actually got bored in the scene in the strip club at the climax, where Fey and Carell are forced to perform ludicrous unsexy sex dances for the bad guy. I could barely look at the screen, as it kept going on and on way too long (although at least it speaks to the central issue of the sexlessness of their marriage, and what that means for them as a couple). Not a fatal flaw, just a little bit of discord.

On the other hand, we have one too many scenes involving Mark Wahlberg opening the door of his apartment without a shirt. Twice was OK, but on the third time, my mental "script error" starting flashing bright red. Oh, and the fun, friendly Mossad spy references were enough to make me gag a little (Die, Ziva, die!)

Yet there were plenty of fun things in this movie to forgive the errors. Were I putting together a New Jersey film festival of recent releases, this would certainly belong in it.

As for Fey, in a different era, she would be a blockbuster movie comedienne, and perhaps she will be, but what makes her a genius also have a somewhat of limiting quality to her story range. That's to our loss.

update: forgot to mention that this movie is full of fun supporting performances. I especially liked see Taraji P. Henson again. Hadn't seen her since her outstanding performance in Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys.

:Classical derangment

Tonight I was listening to KRFC-FM on the radio. Thor has a regular show, and I've expanded from listening to him and his collaborator into listening during the whole week. Togight Lyle Allen does the regular show in the hours before midnight. He has a quirky style. He likes it when his fans call up and chat with him. He told everyone to go to his Facebook page to see his dog, so I did.

After Allen's show, the KRFC overnight mix comes on---a randow shuffling from pre-made CDs of heterogeneous genre that the station airs in the overnight hours when they have no regular show. The mixes can get old, if you hear the same one over and over, as I did a couple years back. But tonight's mix was new to me.

As the shuffled songs played on the radio, I busied myself with pre-bedtime chores, filling up my Nalgene and arranging things in my room for a hike I'm planning tomorrow. As I was laying things out, and cleaning up, I noticde that the radio is playing "Tangled Up in Blue"---not the Dylan original but a contemporary slackerish bluegrass cover version.

Mayble it was because I hadn't hear the song in any form in a while, but the freshness of the cover compelled me to listen a bit, and to anticipate certain of my favorite lines.

The singer was about to get up the line "She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me, written by an Italian poet from the Thirteenth Century." I've always liked that particular line.

But that's not what the singer sang. Instead he sang, "...written by an Italian poet from the Fifteenth Century."

My thoughts came to a screeching halt. You could have knocked me over. I'm thinking: Fifteenth Century? Are you kidding me? That's two hundred years off! You just changed the whole meaning of the song!

Later through Internet research I determined he might have meant Ludovico Ariosto, although his most famous work did not appear until 1516. It must be a bluegrass thing.

The Spy Next Door

Seen at: AMC Promenade in Westminster, Feb. 4 at 2:10 pm

A couple weeks ago I was having dinner with Agnes and Thor. I mentioned having seen this movie a month or so back. We all agreed that not only was Jackie Chan underrated, but that he is perhaps the best living cinematic dancer in the Classical masculine tradition of Gene Kelly.

One can see this latter aspect in several scenes in this movie, in particular during a chase-fight duet sequence with the Russian bad guy (played with hilarious tongue and cheek by Icelander Magnus Scheving (imDb). From this scene alone, one can see that Scheving was cast because of his ability to follow Chan in disguising Classical studio-era Hollywood dance as Postmodern martial arts combat.

That's the secret to understand Chan's real talent. One minute he's fluidly doing Kelly's unmistakable scissor leg swing over a metal staircase to chase the villain. A few minutes later, he's sliding down a drain pipe of a suburban home like Buster Keaton.

Here Chan plays about as goofy as role in as goofy a story as Kelly did in The Pirate (1948). The portrayal of the CIA is about as absurd as it gets. But who cares? It's too much fun.

Actually the story is deliciously Classical inside a Postmodern shell. Chan is paired with a pretty thirtysomething widow (Amber Valetta) with preteen children. Chan and the widow are boyfriend-girlfriend at the beginning. His girlfriend's children hate him because he is a typical Postmodern milquetoast man, a doormat for the assertive mother. Even the use of the term "boyfriend" in the movie seems to demote Chan's character to being like an extra child in the family, rather than the prospective man of the house.

But all this is just an act! In reality, in his job, Chan's character is a cool, confident superspy with amazing ninja talents who fights supervillains to save the world from destruction. Yet he cannot reveal this to his girlfriend or her children because to do so would compromise not only his own job secrecy, but would put them in physical danger. He resists all temptation to reveal who he is, even though it would put an end to the ego bruising that he takes. That, folks, is pretty much the very paradigm of honor for Classical heroes.

The story of course will force his hand. It must, for the secrecy he is required to enforce is at odds with the Classical (and Postmodern) principle that there can be no such secrets inside conjugal relations. Before he can become the step father, he must come clean to his wife, and through the extension principle of remarriages, to the children as well.

The bad guys in the story thus function as the plot device to force him to reveal his real self to his new family.

Can you see how subtly brilliant this movie is? It didn't get much hoopla at the time, and I suspected that in part it was because the idea of the "perfect stepdad" is just too bizarre for many people to swallow these days, especially disgruntled divorced women who bring their children to places like the Westminster Promenade for matinees. Yet any kid oriented movie will live a thousand lives on Redbox and Netflix, so the producers will recoup their money many times over. No tears must be shed for this.

And why should they? This is Classical comedy!

After talking about Chan, I posed a follow-up question to Agnes and Thor, to get their opinions. Consider this: everyone knows that Astaire and Kelly, in no particular order of 1 and 2, are the two greatest male dancers Hollywood has given us over the last century of movie making. My question: among men, who is third?

Agnes suggested Russ Tamblyn, who is certainly on my short list. I stated that I lean towards Groucho Marx.

click here for bonus clip to this post

Chloe

Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, last Tuesday afternoon

Let me wax a bit about Amanda Seyfried, who has recently become one of my favorite young actresses, and who plays the title character in this movie, the lastest issue from Atom Egoyan, about a Toronto prostitute who wreaks havoc in the life of an older married coupled (played by Julianne Moore and Liam Neeson).

I mentioned Kristin Bell in my last post---Seyfried was in a supporting role in Veronica Mars, but lately she has zoomed past Bell to emerge in a varieity of interesting roles that give evidence that she is probably the superior actress, all in all. Not that Bell is bad, but Seyfried, so far at least, has proven that she can more than cope with a challenging roles like this one, and hold her own against heavyweights like Moore (ostensibly the lead here) and Neeson.

To be sure, there were a few brief moments in monologues where the idea of Seyfried as a hooker strained credibility, but here I mostly passed them off as a relic of the fantasy nature of this story, and the way Egoyan deals with this type of subject in his screenplays and his direction.

This story is not meant to be a "realistic" one but one that swims in the lotus-scented waters fantasy. I noticed that given several framing shots of Moore's character looking out a glass window of her office, one could interpret the entire story (on one level) as being the fantasy product of the imagination of Moore's character as she watches a beautiful young woman (Seyfried) leave a luxury apartment building, creating an entire story around her that reflects her own fears about her husband, her marriage, and her lost youth.

Seyfried certainly has a preternaturally beautiful face, at least when shot from full forward. Her round full lips almost look like a sex doll when made up the right way. One of the interesting parts about Chloe is that Egoyan also gives us plenty of unflattering shots of Seyfried here as well, particularly in scenes in which Seyfried appears in profile (much less flattering to her) with stringy hair and looking less than glamorous.

The opening scene---pure Egoyan---has Seyfried in a voice-over monologue as we see her in her undergarments, dressing after visiting one of her clients. Who would not want to see Seyfried half-naked? Yet even here the interplay between the elastic of her undergarments with the shadows of the room seem to highlight bits of cellulite on her that a cleaner and less self-conscious attempt at eroticism would have avoided showing. Right the first we see the flaws in Chloe's pefection. Seyfried sails through it all like a seasoned pro.

This seemed a far more mature statement that Egoyan's Exotica (1994). Here he revisits the same realm of sexuality and voyeurism but in a way that feels updated for the 2010s, in particular in the switch to female voyeurism. Moreover one should not be surprised to encounter the use of audio narration, one character to another, as a way of driving the story (as in, say, Ararat (2002)).

It's far from a perfect movie. The twist was fairly easy to see coming (not a bad thing in this case). The ending was a bit of a letdown, not because it was wrong, but it was the simplest way of bringing the story to resolution, and letting us emerge from the envelopment of the fantasy. I wouldn't have minded the film being fifteen minutes longer, to ease the narrative abruptness.

But really who's complaining? Certainly one does not need to salivate over Seyfried's naked body to appreciate her, but if she does the rest of her career covered from head to toe, at least there is this movie to draw in, if you want to see her undressed.

It was a courageous role for her, and one in which she succeeded. Letters from Juliet, a sappy-looking romantic comedy set in Tuscany is next up for her. I'd go see even if I weren't seeing every movie.

Now if only Seyfried could star in a movie with Pierce Brosnan. That would awsome! Oh wait, it already happened. And she sings!

When in Rome

Seen at: Cinemark Greeley Mall, March 10 at 2:30 pm

As I've mentioned before, in the Postmodern Hollywood paradigm, traditional Christian religion, along with a belief in God, has been largely exiled to fringe movies like the one in my last post. But that doesn't mean Postmodernity is atheist. Instead, we get a smorgasbord of spiritual beliefs in curses, legends, and disconnected spiritual forces that affect our lives.

When in Rome is a good example of this, in the context of a romantic comedy. Kristin Bell, a decent actress of her generation who seems to be gravitating towards harsher bitchy role as she matures, is a romantically down-on-her-luck heroin who blatantly invokes such spiritual forces as a revenge against the Goddess of Love.

She does this by picking up coins out of "the fountain of love" in Rome, thinking it will save the poor lovelorn saps who have thrown in the coins. Later she finds out that according to her Italian brother-in-law, this act by her invokes magical forces that will cause the coin-throwers to fall in love with her. If you've seen the trailer, you will have gotten this premise of the story.

Of course this being a romantic comedy, we know that somehow she will wind up with her soul mate.

How is this Postmodern? So far, it is not explictly so. This could be the set-up to a Classical comedy. The difference is that in this case, the magical forces of the fountain turn out to be absolutely real, instead of simply a legend, as they would be in a Classical story.

Another way of saying this is that there is no naturalistic cover in this story. The actions of the male coin throwers can be explained only by believing that the curse/legend of the fountain is real. As I'm watching this I'm thinking, "wait till this gets out on the Internet about this fountain of love!"

By contrast, a Classical version of the story would have somehow explained the coin-throwers' encounters with Bell's character in a way that did not explicitly endorse the reality of the magic fountain. This kind of thing was taboo in Classical cinema to a large extent, because it violated the Christian paradigm of free will.

So instead of the universality of God, in Postmodernity we have a world in which every petty old wives tale turns out to be mystically true. I've seen it over and over again in Postmodern cinema, to the point where I'm beginning to think of it as the "Postmodern Religion."

Forutnately there is a little more to the movie that this premise. The real love story of the movie turns out to independent of curse/magic of the fountain. This is the twist at the end of the story, one that very easy to see.

We may be in Postmodernity and wallow in our belief in animistic magical forces around us, but Postmodern women still want and need to believe that men fall in love with them not out of compulsion from magic, but from free will.

To Save a Life

Seen at: Cinemark 16 in Ft. Collins, late January

This one---a Christian movie that came through town early in the year---has been sitting in my pile of ticket stubs for a while, waiting to be written up. Since this was Easter, I figured it was time.

The story is about a teenage boy who struggles with his conscience when a former childhood friend, whom he blew off when they both entered high school, commits suicide. He eventually finds guidance through Christian faith.

What made the movie interesting was that the writer acknowledged that Christianity is not really very cool to a lot of young people, and moreover than many Christians, including pastors and their families, are blatant hypocrites about their values and faith. This self-consciousness of the narrative made it interesting to follow.

Of course this had the feeling of an after-school special at times, but I've come to appreciate that these movies have a place in the ecology of American cinema. To judge by the few I've seen, Christian movies are usually not about social issues in a judgmental way, but more about family and social bonds. There's very little preaching and dogma to be found. In a way, they are old Classical themes and stories recycled with a dash of Jesus.

I saw it on a school day, however. There were moms with kids in the audience. Were they ditching? Tsk, tsk. Silly me, these were homeschoolers of course.

Youth in Revolt

Seen at: AMC Promendade in Westminster, late January

I had to chase this movie down in Westminster, after I let in leave Fort Collins early in the year. I saw it on a trip to my visit my sister's family.

This was not the movie I expected it to be, but this is an earlier effort by Michael Cera, that is just now getting released after his success, so I don't bedrudge him this role.

I thought it was going to go like this: sweet young Postmodern adolescent boy discovers that sweetness only makes life very frustrating for him, when it comes to women. Somehow he gets in touch with his "bad boy" side, creating an alternate persona with a French accent and a mustache who is the manifestation of this side of himself, and shows him how to "have success" with women. At first it seems to work, and he has "success." He meets a girl who could be his true love (could be, because they are teenagers) and wins her love (through innocence amidst his new persona). But eventually he takes the "bad boy" thing too far. It causes him heartbreak and the (temporary) loss of the affection of his could-be-true-love (the heroine). Somehow he is able to tame the "bad boy" (on his own terms) by a fusion of the spirit of it, back into his "sweet" self (his true character). The mustached persona fades away into oblivion, but not really, because it was the hero all along. By his renewed humbled innocence, and no longer the pushover Postmodern boy, he wins back the heroine. All's well that end's well--for a teenage comedy.

The movie didn't go like that at all. It started off like that, but then it crossed the point of no return by having the hero go "full bad boy." He commits manifest crimes of property, threatening the lives of others. He disgraces and dishonors himself and his family in public. That is, he goes off the Postmodern cliff.

By any classical standards, the story has boxed the hero into a corner. He must go to prison at the end. There is no way around it. But because this is Postmodernity, he also wins the girl too.

One person who really liked this movie is my friend Ben, the owner of the Lyric. I told him how I had to go down to Westminster to see this, because it left the local multiplex after two weeks. That set in a motion a chain of events that has led to Ben declaring "war" on Cinemark.

I swear I didn't want it to come to this!

Remember Me

Seen at: Cinemark 16 in Ft. Collins, last Sunday afternoon

This year I took the occassion of the first day of Spring to do some hiking up in the Big Thompson Canyon, in Roosevelt National Forest. I'd rented a pair of Black Diamond trekker poles from REI, and I wanted to try them out in the recent snowfall, to see if I wanted to purchase a pair. After a jaunt up to the overlook on the Round Mountain trail, I decided that only an idiot would ever go hiking without them.

In the afternoon, after a wonderful outing, I rolled up to the Cinemark to see a show. I love seeing movies this way---just arriving and seeing whatever is showing next. Actually I cheated a little because I knew that Remember Me was showing there, and that since it wasn't showing at the Carmike, it meant that I better make it priority before it leaves town.

This ending to this movie was spoiled for me on the Internet before I even knew anything about it. Given the subject matter, I was glad it was spoiled, because it gave me a chance to look at the film while knowing in advance the fate of the protagonist (Robert Pattinson, from the Twilight movies), and the final twist.

(start spoilers here)

This is 9/11 movie, to be sure, but what's good about it is that it doesn't try to say everything about 9/11. Instead it looks at the life of one person who winds up being killed in the attacks.

The story kept me going without flagging. I was surprised to enjoy Pattinson in this role. His "listless young man" character (who of course works at the Strand Bookstore in the Village!) has more than a dash of Holden Caulfield in his character, especially when he is interacting with his younger sister (who is about ten years old, an age that many young women in the audience of this movie would have been at the time of 9/11). In a way, it is the younger sister through whom the sentimental "memory story" of the memory is cast.

I also noticed in this movie that both characters of the love story are supposed to be Irish-American (see the map of Ireland next to Chris Cooper in one scene). This lends a patina of Celtic mourning to the story, in an oblique way.

The casting was well done. It's always pleasing to see Pierce Brosnan as well, the second time this month. Here he is Pattinson's father, a powerful businessman who does not think much of what his son is doing. Brosnan is my favorite "actor's actor" who will apparently attempt any role (including being a centaur in the recent Percy Jackson release). Here he does a New York accent that doesn't really work, but that's about the only overt negative I can say about this movie.

Chris Cooper, another of my favorite supporting actors, was exactly in his element here, and reminded me of his role in American Beauty (1999), a movie that I have long thought of us as "America on the eve of 9/11."

Can't forget a surprise supporting appearance by Lena Olin. Always nice to see her on screen.

Yes, it has a downer ending, but in narrative terms it completely works (by a a first-time screenwriter, apparently). Moreover the film really impressed by what it didn't do. Leading up to the climax I began to worry that the movie was going to attempt to re-create the strike on the tower by digitally showing us a 767 flying into WTC 1.

The last thing we need is Hollywood to contribute to our collective false memories about what happened that day. Instead the film completely eschewed any special effects that would add to our collectively video vocabulary of that morning. When I realized this, I heaved a big sigh of relief in my seat. This gave me permission to like the movie, which I did.

On the other hand, there was ample implied horror, in that Pattinson's character is seen mounting to the very upper floors of WTC 1 right before the attack. Those people in the top ten floors were the ones who were doomed right from the very first moment, if they weren't killed outright.

(end spoilers here)

Don't expect much more than a young adult drama if you see it. The main narrative is driven primarily by father-son conflict, a theme that arguably is one of the strengths of Postmodern film.

Curiously it's also another entry in the recent string of Brooklyn films (three in one month), in that it is framed by a backstory involving an incident in Brooklyn that happens to the heroine in her childhood. In a way it thus contributes to the subgenre of films that speak to the Brooklyn-Manhattan divide, although in a way that seems far away from the viewpoint of Saturday Night Fever (1978).

This will probably remain a guilty pleasure for 2010. On the other hand, I feel no guilt about my new Black Diamond trekker poles, ones that purchased on the spot after returning my rentals. Some things are mandatory.

Valentine's Day

Seen at: Carmike 10, about 3 weeks ago

Last month my sister emailed me about this movie. She'd gone to see it with some friends on a girl's night out. They liked it; she hated it, and couldn't understand why anyone would like it. What did I think of it?

I wasn't particularly offended by this movie. It was pretty much exactly what I expected, with a few twists. The movies I truly dislike, especially among Postmodern romantic comedies, are the ones that take me to a new level of disgust, which this one thankfully didn't.

The story is based on a gag premise: imagine contemporary Los Angeles, and its dating workplace scenes and married couples with issues, etc., but set in an alternative universe.

The alternative universe is one in which Postmodern Weak Men (PWM) still exist (because who could conceive of it being otherwise, right?) but in which attractive single women actually crave the saccharine displays of "i wuv you" affection with which PWM attempt to find mates.

Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh on the male characters in this movie, but maybe you get my point. This movie uses Valentine's Day as the pretense for juggling the emotional rules of the courtship game to actual give guys a fighting chance to impress women.

If you can stomach seeing a half dozen mini stories like this for two hours, then you can make it through this movie. I think the only reason it held my attention was because it didn't try to inflate any one of these mini stories into a full-fledged plot.

The funniest twist of the movie for me was the unexpected reinforcement of the new Hollywood rules for categorizing Postmodern men into three basic types: (1) charming but weak and clueless; (2) strong vibrant complete assholes; and (3) gay.

Actually there is a fourth type, played here by George Lopez, namely the long-suffering family man who has achieved a zen-like detachment from it all, who no longer expects intimacy with his wife or any concessions to his manhood, but knows his place in the universe. He's the PWM who has achieved enlightened wisdom. Thus Lopez's character is essentially the axle around which the rest of the movie revolves.

As far as category 3, this is somethings I've noticed strongly over the last few years. According to Hollywood, the most emotionally mature and balanced men are not interested in women at all. On the surface that statement is extremely classical. But in the classical era, it meant that the hero was not really interested in any woman who did not deeply strike him as exceptional, and who was not really his true love.

In the Postmodern era, it means something different obviously. Nowadays we simply do not understand how men could be this way, that a man could turn down sex when offered to him by a woman (something every classical hero was expected to do). According to current reasoning, He must be gay.

Thus the two real male "catches" of this movie both turn out to be gay, and moreover in love with each other. We don't realize this until the end of the movie, when their two respective miniplots merge with a homosexual kiss when they finally meet. It was the iconic moment of the movie to me.

So what's not to like here, sis? It's a nice little Whitman's Sampler box of everything that Hollywood wants us to know about relationships right now. Since we live in such a vibrant, emotionally healthy society, this is only a good thing, right?

Well actually I feel a bit nauseated afterwards. Probably took too many chocolates from that Sampler box.

She's Out of My League

Seen at: Carmike 10, at 4:25 this afternoon

On the surface, She's Out of My League purports to follow the logical progression of the Weak Postmodern Man to its ultimate conclusion. The hero is an undereducated and underemployed young man, slender of frame and with a personality that is less than assertive. He is every "omega male" out there in America in 2010.

We meet him at the most awkward moment of his life so far, as he pathetically attempts to win back the love of an ex-girlfriend (whom we can tell is beneath him in character).

By fate he is going to run into a "solid 10" in the form of Molly, an event planner with sparkling blue eyes and blonde hair. Hence the title.

A review that I read on the web told me what to expect of this movie, namely that there is no realistic way that such a woman would fall for such man. The movie actually asserts this "He's a 5, She's a 10," and that's too big a leap to make.

Thus we have the rarified view of the Hollywood view of modern romance: all men are beneath all women. The strong men are assholes. The non-assholes are weak. All women realize this. Only the Goddess of Love herself keeps things going, by leading the heroine to somehow overlook the faults of the hero.

The movie lived up to my expectations on one level, but during the first scene in which the two principals meet, I could tell that the web review I'd read simply didn't understand the movie.

In the language of classical cinema, the movie was telling me that the premise of the story (that the hero is a typical omega male) was a ruse. In fact the hero had quite a few strong classical characteristics that made him exactly the kind of man that the "solid 10" heroine would be interested in getting to know.

Specifically, it is apparent that Molly knows very well that men slobber all over her when they meet her. They are distracted by her. They put her on a pedestal.

The hero is somewhat immune to her, refreshingly, precisely because he is so beaten down. At the magical moment when their eyes meet (across a crowded airport screening area), he allows himself only the most temporary flash of true love. Then he returns to his placid acceptance of the reality of the situation--temporarily drained of self esteem, yet firm in his actions as an airport employee (because a man does his job).

He is at the low point in his life, and he barely keeps his eyes open. He isn't even interested in looking at her.

That's a necessary but not sufficient condition for the hero to pique the interest of the heroine.

What wins her over, in the first scene, is that he becomes her champion. When his fellow TSA employees are hassling her at the airport screening line, he naturally and without pretense takes the position of honor. He stands behind her, literally, and speaks up for her when she cannot (because then she'd be a bitch).

Moreover, we understand that his desire for her is not simply because she is a hot babe. In reality, they are alike, because he, as an intelligent young man, has to suffer a constant stream of indignities from his friends, co-workers and families. She reflects his own spiritual state, and that is why there legitimately is magic when their eyes first meet.

At this point, I knew the love story would work for me. It kept getting better after that.

For example, eventually if the hero is really win her completely, he must provide an overt demonstration of his desire, specially by a physical action which he initiates. The way the story handles this, subtly over several scenes until it reaches, uh, a climax (wink wink), made for a hefty portion of the charm of this movie.

The story here was quite clever on many levels. There is a fun play on the literal meaning title by the use of hockey, played in both a professional arena and in a family basement.

The story amazingly never took the painfully obvious route I thought it would. It put the characters in fresh scenarios of tension, instead of the same old Postmodern chestnuts. At every point it kept inventing a new way to have the principals move the story forward, and to create sharp but pleasing waves of tension when their love ambitions are temporarily thwarted (as it must).

This could almost be a Gary Cooper-Barbara Stanwyck movie, catapulted into the language of the early 21st century. Some loving and enjoyable second unit cinematography of Pittsburgh, including the Warhol Museum reception hall, made for a visually engaging film experience.

It had just the right dash of contemporary crudeness to speak in the vernacular of today's audience. What more could one ask for in this type of movie?

Moreover, in the climax it connects in a seamless way to the present-day cultural notion that asks women to become the active heroine, i.e. "the princess must save the (weak) prince, so that he is no longer weak." One saw the extreme version of this is the teeth-baring courtship rituals of Avatar. IN this movie, we understand the necessity of this active quality of the heroine as championess, because of the "perfection" (by cultural surface standards) of character Molly.

Thus in the climax of the story, it is she, not he, who must actually travel the furthest physical distance to where they can embrace (in the airport of course). In terms of courtship dynamics, it is he, not she, who must break away from his family to stand by her side (she is already her own woman).

Yet this apparent inversion (or warping perhaps) of the classical courtship paradigm leads back to a place that seems familiar in a classical sense. Namely, we arrive at the notion that seduction is the woman's game, not the man's, and that any intelligent woman knows instinctively that when she meets a good man, she must go out of her way to grab his attention. Like I said, this could almost be Cooper and Stanwyck, in a Postmodern Mobius Strip sort of way.

Extraordinary Measures

Seen at: Reel Mountain Theater, Estes Park, Colorado, about six weeks ago

There are two movies theaters up in Estes Park, but only one (the Reel Mountain) that is open all year round. I'd been meaning to get up there for some time, but mustering up the gumption to drive all the way up the Big Thompson Canyon just for a movie had been elusive.

To be honest, I wasn't even planning on seeing Extraordinary Measures. That's right---I was going to skip it. In January I decided I was tired from seeing movies constantly in the way I've doing for a year and a half. I privately decided to take a break. My plan at the time was to let some of the minor winter/spring Hollywood releases leave the theaters, then to catch them later on DVD by the end of the calendar year.

Like I said, that was my plan. Along those lines, I noticed that Extraordinary Measures (a movie that was not high on my to-see list) was leaving all the theaters in northern Colorado, even the ones in Denver. "It's time," I decided. The next Friday came around and Extraordinary Measures was officially gone. I'd crossed the Rubicon of my movie project.

But it was not to be. My plan was thwarted when the very next day, on a whim, I looked up the Estes Park listings on. I saw that Extraordinary Measures was now showing up the canyon!! It seemed like fate: at last I had a definite reason to go up there.

It turned out to be a nice result. In the morning, I used the opportunity to do some winter hiking on the trails on the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park. That afternoon, I drove into town to the theater, which I found to be a charming and quaint independent showplace on the edge of town---very well run and tidy. Five buck matinees and cheap popcorn too.

The movie itself more than surpassed my expectations, which were very low, actually. First off, I had developed an aversion to Brendan Fraser. He's really not a bad actor. He just seems to choose really awful screen projects. But in my contrarian way, at the start of the film, I decided, "Heck, I'm going to try to like Brendan in this one." I guess it worked because I became entranced by the fleshy protuberances of his one-of-kind profile as he was leaning into confort his sick child.

Yes, the sick kid thing, with the corresponding race against time to find the cure. That's certainly a barrier to my embracing a movie---one knows that the story's going to pull heartstrings, so one almost must take a defensive stand against the onslaught of emotion, to force the movie to be genuine. But the simple straightforward story in this case won me over, just as I was won over last summer (in a big way) by My Sister's Keeper. I came out of the theater a tad less cynical than when I walked in. Most people I know would not like this movie, but for the kind of movie that this is, it works.

Harrison Ford was certainly a surprise here. In Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, he looked like a tired old man doing a geriatric Saturday Night Live parody of his Indiana Jones character. Here he plays a (very) cantankerous University of Nebraska professor, and he seems to relish every minute of it, hopping and bouncing around the screen as if he were twenty years younger than in Skull (coincidentally Estes Park has multiple businesses that sell only University of Nebraska paraphernalia to the tourists---I guess I really did come to the right place to see this one).

This day-trip adventure to the mountains was so successful that I reconsidered my entire decision to take a break, and have forged onward (for now) without missing a beat. Soon after I discovered that forgoing the trailers really helped me with emotional stamina as well, so I got a second wind with movies in general.

Green Zone

Seen at: Carmike 10, this afternoon

Holy mackerel! This is the way to make a movie about the Iraq War.

Greg Kinnear is awesome in a supporting role as the villain. The "conspiracy" revealed in the story is that the Bush Administration actually knew in advance that there were no WMD in Iraq, but pushed the invasion anyway.

It took seven years, but Hollywood is finally opening its eyes just a crack. Director Greenglass shows the way. It makes me want to man up and finally watch his United 93 (2006).

Repo Men

Seen at: Carmike 10, at 1:35 pm today.

This week had been like a taste of early summer. Last night the temperature dropped and the snow rolled in. Smitty called in the late morning. He was having a snow day. I hadn't seen him since we saw Sherlock, so it seemed like a fun idea.

Repo Men just opened today, so in case you haven't seen the trailer, it is set in the near dystopian future, and stars Jude Law who is a repossession agent for a giant biomedical firm that sells artificial organs. When payment falls too far beyond, Law's character (or one of his comrades) is sent to collect the "artiforg." In certain case this results in instant death (for example, with heart repossession).

At one point in this movie, I thus realize that it is about psychopathic serial killers, in the guise of normality. It reminded me of Daybreakers a little, but much more sophisticated, using pure naturalism instead of supernatural.

Some impressive sci-fi in this movie. Original concept right that sheds light on the horror of contemporary society. I was hooked. For example, I was curious to know what it was, about this future society, that would cause so many people to need so many artifical organs? The movie gave a partial explanation, but left open to wandering about more of the back story about this horrible future.

That kind of open-ended wondering is a good thing for a sci-fi movie, in my opinion. It forces you to fill in the details on your own.

Another great thing about this movie was Liev Schreiber, one of the better supporting actors in Hollywood lately. He gets to play the heavy, as the head of the evil corporation, and he does it well.

Unfortunately there is a horrible plot twist in the last part of this movie, one that I saw coming a mile away. It completely changes the theme of the story at the climax, taking it from being a corporate dystopia movie to being a psycho-nihilistic thriller in a way similar to Shutter Island. Yes, it becomes one of those kind of movies, that want you to go back and re-evaluate earlier scenes, like a parlor game.

What an awful disgrace, that the movie had to be marred in this way. There was no reason to do this. The story worked beautifully up to that point.

It was a narrative train wreck at the end, to be sure, but not as bad as the plot malfunction at the end of Daybreakers, which was a more lower-level violation.

Along those lines, in Act Three of Repo Men (spoiler in this paragraph) there is an interesting bit of classical stitching that ties together the two pscyho-realties. In the "fake" reality inside the mind of Law's character, Schreiber gets tasered by Law a second time. Schreiber says sarcastically, as he slumps unconscious, "this again?"

At that instant, I immediately thought of the "variational rule" of movie plots: never twice should we see the same action with the same result (or almost never). That the story violates this rule is actually a signal that the climax of the movie is not "real," but a virtual one inside a character's dreaming mind. This kind of thing really impresses me, when I notice it.

But like I said, this whole twist was a pointless distraction, and even a dismantling of the up-to-then successful biomedical corporate dystopia story. Why wasn't it enough, to tell the dystopian story without the psycho-nihilistic plot twist at the end?

I think the answer to that question is a key to understanding Hollywood and America right now.