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."
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Friday, May 28, 2010
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."
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."
Sunday, May 23, 2010
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?
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?
Monday, May 17, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, May 14, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
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!
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!
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, May 10, 2010
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.
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.
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