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!