Seven Psychopaths

2012 black comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A screenwriter wrestling with a story is dragged into gangster shenanigans after a dog is stolen.

Wow. I watched this a long, long time ago. It's a mess of storytelling, but the characters are a lot of fun, and just like director Martin McDonagh's In Bruges, this feels really fresh. The thing just sparkles, mostly because the characters, though not especially well written, are unique and played perfectly by a who's who of cool, including a so-brief-you-might-miss-'em random appearance by Crispin Glover. Ferrell's the likable straight man stumbling around in the comedic darkness, and it's almost like his character is forced into the situation he's in by giggling gods. The ubiquitous Sam Rockwell shines, his comic timing and mannerisms nearly perfect. He's hilarious. Tom Waits gets to hold a rabbit and shoot people, and it looks like he's having a blast. Woody Harrelson's as funny as he gets, and he can get funny. Love his line "Peace is for queers, and now you're gonna die" in this. Harry Dean Stanton can steal a scene when he's doing nothing but standing around, and he does a great job of standing around in his limited scenes. And then there's the always-fascinating Christopher Walken who is maybe the best I've ever seen him. You just hang on his every word in this. And I love when he shoots somebody and makes the sound effect. Almost enough cool to make the entire movie explode. There's even a Townes Van Zandt song. The ultra-violence will turn off some, and the twisty plot that kind of changes tone about midway through might be a little too much for others. Rockwell's character says, "You're the one who thought psychopaths were so interesting. They get kind of tiresome after a while, don't you think?" at one point, and if somebody told me that they got tired of these psychopaths after a while, I could understand it. I thought the thing was a blast though and would definitely watch it again.

Rubber

2010 killer tire movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: An abandoned automobile tire rolls around the desert and uses its telepathic powers to destroy any trash, bunnies, or people who get in its way. A crowd of people is given binoculars to watch the proceedings.

Like Christine or Maximum Overdrive or Duel but with only a tire. Or like your typical 50's monster movie except instead of a guy in a rubber suit causing mayhem, you just get the rubber. From a technical standpoint, I enjoyed trying to figure out how the tire was brought to life. It may be a much easier special effect than I think it is, and it certainly wasn't a special effect you'd describe as flashy. Most of this movie is the tire rolling around, only stopping to quiver and make a loud noise and make something explode, or people sitting around watching the tire, a meta-cular cinematic joke that's the sort of thing Soderbergh might put together in his spare time between Oceans 19 and Oceans 20. We're told at the beginning that this film is an "homage to the most powerful element of style" in movies--a lack of reason. It frequently falls into annoying cutesy-clever territories, turning into the kind of indie production that you want to take out back and slap around a bit. But was I entertained? Heck, yeah! It's a tire rolling around making bunnies explode! How could I not be entertained? Funniest bit involves a cop taking a tire off a car and saying, "This is what our killer looks like." No, the funniest bit is probably where they set a trap with an explosive dummy. I also can appreciate any movie that has a scene implying that a tire has jerked off while watching an exercise video. I'll give director Quentin Dupieux credit for seeing this ridiculous idea to its end, but his message about movies comes across like a film school student trying to impress his professor who rambles on and on about arthouse cinema every class.

I'll probably lose any chance at a Father of the Year Award for admitting this, but I was watching this with a couple of my children until the moment when heads started exploding and I told them to go upstairs. They didn't enjoy the bunny explosions at all and were probably disappointed that their father laughed at it.

Alice

1988 animated classic

Rating: 17/20

Plot: See Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

My favorite retelling of Carroll's book, Svankmajer's Alice is, in my opinion, represents the master animator at the peak of his grotesque powers. The story's essentially the same, and most of the characters from the novel find their way into Svankmajer's Wonderland. Svankmajer's vision and leftfield creativity breathes unique life into them, making the White Rabbit a sawdust-leaking stuffed buck-toothed thing, the March Hare a wind-up toy, the Mad Hatter a wooden marionnette, the Caterpillar a sock puppet, and, most disturbingly, Bill and the White Rabbit's other pals a perverse menagerie of skeletal reptilian things. The pace is quick, and there's plenty to see, especially for lovers of quirky nightmares. The narration kind of annoys me, probably more so because of some terrible dubbing, but I can put up with that because it's such a treat visually. I definitely could have done without half the lip close-ups though. Nevertheless, bitchin'!

The Brown Bunny

2003 movie

Rating: 2/20

Plot: Bud finishes a boring motorcycle race and heads out on a boring road trip to California. Along the way, he has boring encounters with desperate women who all have flowery names. His mind can't shake reminisces of an ex-girlfriend Daisy.

Ok, somebody should be arrested for giving Vincent Gallo the two hundred and fifty-three dollars to make this movie. It's January 8th. I've heard the best album of 2009 already, and I believe I've seen the worst movie I'll see this year. Self-indulgent, tacky, and extremely dull, The Brown Bunny starts nowhere (a pretentiously filmed motorcycle race) and ends with a shocking revelation that would make M. Night Shyamalan say, "No, that twist just doesn't work. It's, like, dumb." Gallo wrote, directed, and starred in this, but he probably should have found somebody else to do all three. Actually, he probably just needed to hire a plug-puller, somebody to say, "Vincent, this movie sucks!" before pulling the plug (literally...figuratively...it doesn't even matter!), destroying all footage, and giving the camcorder to a little girl so that she can film her My Little Ponies having a tea party--an NC-17, shockingly pretentious tea party. The movie's poorly filmed, reminiscent of a lazy artist's diarrhea, and the bulk of the ninety minutes is what looks to be home video footage of Vincent Gallo driving, eating, sitting there, driving, using the bathroom, driving, pumping gas, and driving. How this movie didn't ruin Chloe Sevigny's career is beyond me. Indianapolis was briefly in this movie and, I'm sure, is embarrassed about it.

Lynch (one)

2007 documentary

Rating: 11/20

Plot: A portrait of the artist as a strange man. Footage of Lynch making Inland Empire and interviews with the director as he expounds on subjects like film, transcendental meditation, art, and hitting bloated animals with pick axes.

I guess I knew I was in trouble when the director's name popped up on the screen and it was blackANDwhite. What a self-indulgent mess this turned out to be. I truly enjoyed listening to a lot of what Lynch had to say and watching him work with his actors or on his set design. Whether you like his movies or not, he's an interesting and funny guy, and as a glimpse into the creative process, this should have worked. But the direction of this thing was such a distraction. Do I really need to see Lynch from the perspective of the floor? Do I really need to see Lynch through a layer of gauze? This became less about David Lynch and more about how clever blackANDwhite could be. Shame on blackANDwhite.

The Hitch-Hiker

1953 psychological drama

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Two men take off on a fishing trip to Mexico. Unfortunately for them, there's a psycho-killing hitchhiker on the loose. More unfortunately, they happen to pick him up. Oh, snap! The hitchhiker, Emmitt Myers, doesn't want to go fishing. Instead, he wants to go deep into Mexico for an experimental eyelid transplant surgery. The three men play all kinds of fun road games--license plate bingo, spot the cow, the alphabet game, etc.--and listen to the radio.

Supposedly the only film noir directed by a woman, Ida Lupino. I don't know about that. 1) There might be other examples. 2) I'm not sure this is even noir. 3) Ida Lupino sounds like a made-up person. This is OK, but it lacks any real suspense or tension and the characters, probably more typical of a movie from 1953, are pretty flat. It doesn't stack up against better noir or thrillers from the era, and there's something that just tells you that the movie will end the way it does, probably because that's the only way the movie can end. I do like the psychotic hitchhiker, and the story, though it seems derivative, had potential. OK enough for me to make a bad joke about my thumb being up, I guess.

The Grand

2007 improvisational comedy

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Poker players converge on Jack Faro's The Rabbit's Foot casino for a winner-take-all ten million dollar poker tournament.

There's lots of talent in this one--David Cross, Harrelson, Michael McKean, Dennis Farina, Larry David's t.v. wife, Kotter, even Chris Parnell--and a few criminally unfunny ones. That's right, Raymond, I'm looking in your direction. There's also some neat cameos from poker celebrities (I especially liked seeing Doyle Brunson) although Phil Gordon, a poker player/commentator I actually like, overdoes it a whole bunch. It's a good ensemble cast with lots of eccentric goofball characters, most notably The German played by none other than Werner Herzog. There's a guy who, although his talents are behind the camera, needs to be in front of the camera more. Not necessarily in Harmony Korine movies though. The German talking about his need to kill something every day or looking for his pet bunny after his ousting from the tournament are hilarious. (A cut scene in which he reveals a secret he's discovered after travelling the world would have been the funniest bit in the movie.) The problem with The Grand is that there's far too much focus on the numerous subplots (relationships with fathers, attempts to save The Rabbit's Foot, the announcer's book, Raymond's worries about his fantasy football team) and not enough on the players doing their thing at the tables. When the jokes work, it's like flopping a flush, but when they fall flat, which they very often do, the feeling is more like having your opponent hit his three-outer on the river to take the rest of your stack. The poker in this, by the way, doesn't make a lot of sense. A movie pet peeve of mine is where chess doesn't make sense in movies, and although the poker looked real enough, the decisions these "professional" players were making annoyed me.

Jen didn't stay awake for the entirety of this one.

I had to give it a bonus point just for getting to her Werner Herzog say, "I've had a goat. To strangle a goat. . .that makes you feel really alive."

I recently watched this again, laughing more the second time, I think, than the first. I own this movie and couldn't find another comedy to watch. I feel bad for writing bad stuff about Phil Gordon. He's fine here, and so is Michael Karnow as his obnoxious co-host who sells his own books on his poker systems. There is a lot of inside poker humor that might not appeal to people who don't play the game, but there's really enough kookiness for the whole family. And Herzog! Man, I had to watch a couple of his scenes twice.

Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus

2006 imaginary biopic

Rating: 9/20 (Jen: 11/20)

Plot: Diane (pronounced pretentiously as Dee-anne) is a housewife with dreams of being a photographer but tries to feel comfortable in a role assisting her photographer husband. When a masked stranger who later turns out to be an extraordinarily hairy stranger (a dog man) moves into her building, she allows herself to be seduced. A brand new Diane emerges as her dreams and fantasies are unleashed. A midget, a woman with no arms, a giant, another midget, another midget, and conjoined twins join in on the fun.

Yuck. I think I'd rather eat a handful of my own hair than watch this again. The actors seemed hypnotized. At least Robert Downey Jr. had a bunch of hair all over him to make his job more difficult. What was Nicole Kidman's problem?At times, the dialogue in this was so bad that it didn't even seem like the actors were on the same page in the script. There was a lot in this that looked very good (especially the naked fat woman within the first five minutes of the movie!), but I couldn't connect emotionally. A very flat, implausible movie.

Here's my chin trying to earn an Academy award:

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

1975 British comedy

Rating: 16/20 (Dylan: 12/20--laughed a lot but he wanted more plot coherence and a better ending)

Plot: King Arthur is riding around (sans horse) with hopes of recruiting valiant knights to sit as part of his round table in Camelot. He finds Lancelot, Galahad, Robin, and some other knights of varying degrees of bravery. After deciding not to go to Camelot after all ("It's a silly place."), they are directed by a cartoon deity to find the holy grail. Along the way, they meet black knights, pyromaniac sorcerers, a castle of siren-esque castle of beautiful women, bridges of death, snooty Frenchmen, and fluffy killer beasts.

This holds up so well as screwball period comedy, dada goofballery, and nutty absurdism. There are classic scenes (and admittedly a few that fall flat on their faces) and classic lines, stuff that college kids like to quote to each other while playing Halo or doing the drugs or whatever it is college kids do these days. There's also some quality low-budget set pieces that foreshadow Gilliam's later work, and some quality acting with the Monty Python chameleons playing multiple roles very well. Removing the problems with this movie (Dylan's problems with plot development and an ending he really hated) would take away almost all the appeal, by the way. There was a time, by the way, when I wanted to slap people who liked this movie, but I've gotten over it.

This is what I look like when I laugh:

Lunacy

2005 comedic "horror"

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Jean is returning from a journey in which he has buried his mother, a woman who spent the last few years of her life in an asylum. Jean himself is haunted by nightmares of being institutionalized by bulbous bald men who grunt and approach him with a straightjacket. He befriends a marquis after destroying his room at an inn and is taken to the marquis' extravagant home. There, he eavesdrops on some kind of blasphemous orgy and is the butt of many practical jokes executed by the marquis and his tongue-less henchman. Following another nightmare, he agrees to stay at an asylum run by a friend of the marquis because he has hopes of saving a woman he believes is in trouble. Chickens abound, and Jean has to make choices about who can be trusted.

Ostensibly, this is a story Jan Svankmajer adapted from stories by De Sade and Poe. There's a lack of animation in the actual storytelling--only a shirt and a cupboard, I believe, both in dream sequences. There are stop motion animated scenes, all involving meat and/or chickens (which, I guess, are also meat) that work as interludes between scenes. Those, accompanied by this insane carnivalesque music, are brilliant as always. The live action stuff is just as brilliant, at times threatening to unravel into nonsensical surrealism but always retaining a central story line. The anachronistic scenery outside a carriage ride with the marquis, the marquis' "prayer" while he hammers nails into a plaster Christ, the "art therapy" at the sanotarium, the tarred-and-feathered doctors gathering up patients after their escape, the marquis and his friend positioning the inmates to make a tableau of Delacroix's "liberty" painting, the marquis' friend's collection of faux facial hair. . .great, memorable splashes of chaos. And of course all that animated meat. Really, can a movie with animated meat be bad? More grotesque than the director's promised horrific, and really more comical than anything else. Atmosphere + humor = the absurd = insane brilliance. Not as consistently great as Faust or Alice or, my personal favorite Conspirators of Pleasure, but great nonetheless. Long live Svankmajer!

Note: Svankmajer isn't dead yet. He has, however, announced that his next film will be his last. I did read that his son is now making movies though.

I'm made of meat:

The Hills Have Eyes

1977 horror

Rating: 6/20

Plot: A family of idiots take their dogs and blue jean shorts on vacation to the desert. They befriend cavemen and have a squelching contest. The little guy wins, and a rudimentary medal is fashioned out of tin foil and stickers in the shape of stars. Everybody gets confused when they wake up on the seventh day and find a fax machine inside of shopping cart inside of a giant leather box inside of a shack. The family and cavemen decide to go to family counseling to work on some of their problems.

At least I laughed twice. This is a poor excuse for a cult classic. I expected creepiness (or something!), but the only thing scary was how bad the acting was. Well, that and the whiny guy's short shorts. I thought the performance of one of the dogs (Beast) was really good. In fact, this should have been more like a Lassie rip-off and centered on the dog. Woof! Woof! "What's that, Beast? Pa's being crucified by some dirty inbreds? Lead the way, boy!" Credit has to be given to this for a couple scenes which very obviously inspired the Home Alone movies. Not the first one though. Not even the second one. We're talking the third movie. I think it was called Home Alone III. The guy on the poster, by the way, has nipples that are at least three times the size of my nipples. He puts my nipples to shame! He's not the same guy who was in Goonies. I looked it up. He was in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest before he played Caveman 2 in this movie. He also played the devil in Highway to Heaven (Satan has big nipples. That's Biblical.)and was in an episode of Alf. Alf should have been in this movie as a matter of fact. Actually, the whole film would have benefited by having puppets. I know there was already a remake of this recently, but I'd like to see a remake with an all-puppet cast. Maybe the Muppets? Beaker and that bald scientist, Gonzo, that weird eagle guy, Animal (of course!), and Dr. Teeth can be the cannibal cavemen. The other Muppets can be the vacationing family. Kermit can sing a reflective song called "It's Not Easy Having Your Dog Eaten" and there can be a brutal scene where Miss Piggy is raped by Animal while Dr. Teeth bites the head off the family bird.

Replace these two with those two and you've got a movie!

Here I am wondering what a baby would taste like:

Simon of the Desert

1965 Luis Bunuel half-movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Ascetic Simon, after spending six years, six months, and six days standing on a pillar in the desert, comes back to earth into the arms of adoring locals and his mother. He immediately ascends a ladder to another nearby, taller pillar where he continues his prayers, his fasting, his lifting of hands, and his deliverances of words of divine wisdom, sometimes while battling temptation from Satan's breats and/or tongue, and sometimes while standing on one leg. Locals come and go, and a third tempting leads to a startling denouement.

Bunuel, I believe, ran out of money and wasn't able to finish this in a way that would match his artistic vision, hence the brevity. Too bad, because this is an intriguing, predictablably satiric and pessimistic look at religious devotion. Simon, despite appearances and wonderfully portrayed by whoever it is who portrays him, isn't a figure used by Bunuel to make direct attacks at organized (or disorganized) religion, but a complex figure torn between his sometimes fuzzy ideas and the ideas of a modern world. The temptation scenes--Satan incognito as a female, bearded Christ; a moving coffin opening to reveal a right breast--are surreal. The dialogue between Simon and the public is revealing. The humor is typical of Bunuel's work, sort of a subtle wittiness, funny more on the inside than out. The juxtaposition of the final scene with the rest of the movie (a final scene, I'll admit, made me think, "Yikes! This is really stupid!") unfolded into a thing of complete genius. Great use of a bowlegged midget, too! I could easily have watched another forty-five minutes of this one.

Shane of the living room:

Week End

1967 avant-garde comedy/drama

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A bourgeousie couple take what is supposed to be a pleasant trip to visit the parents of one of them, although secretly, they are hoping for their deaths. The trip starts out terribly with a fender bender that leads to neighbors shooting bullets and arrows and serving a barrage of tennis balls at them. The trip only gets worse--ghastly traffic jams, numerous burning automobile accidents, kidnappings, and a piano concert that seems to go on forever.

Radical filmmaking reminiscent of Bunuel's choppier surrealist works and Songs from the Second Floor, crazily episodic, disturbing, and darkly humorous. This benefits from a very made-up-as-it-goes approach, and although not all the extended scenes work, they all manage to seem really important. Classic epic traffic jam scene featuring giraffes, chess players, broken bodies, picnickers, and people playing catch between cars and building to a devastating denouement is jaw-dropping, one extended tracking shot nearly worth the price of admission alone. Very meta film--minor characters ask if they're real or part of a movie and flashy title cards proclaim the film as the end of cinema. I didn't care for all the political stuff (nor did I completely understand it...indictments of both Western Culture and cinema) and those title cards seem tacky and overdone, but this is very entertaining absurdism. Comedy roadkill and satiric chaos! As the opening credits promise, this is a "film adrift in the cosmos."

Here I am, also adrift in the cosmos:

El Topo

1970 surreal western

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Title character and his naked son ride into a town where everybody, including the animals, has been brutally murdered. He rides off to take eyes and teeth and meets a woman. He ditches his son and rides off with the woman into the desert. There, he kills 4 master gun men in order to prove his love. She leaves him for another woman after that. He dies, is taken into a cave by a bunch of deformed people, and is shaven. He makes it his responsibility to dig these people out of the cave to connect them with a town full of religious nuts. I guess that's why he's "the mole."


My favorite movies are those movies that are singular and visionary, movies that absolutely under no circumstances could have been made by any other director. Inland Empire is a good example actually. This is another one. The imagery is iconic. Religious allusions abound and the desert and old cowboy movie sets are beautiful and full of character. Profoundly violent--swinging corposes, a literal river of blood, a crucified lamb, a naked man stumbling to his suicide following castration, lots of dead bunnies. This seemingly has a lot to do with religion, both organized religion and spirituality, but the symbolism is thick and it's another film that requires multiple viewings. But whether or not there are answers or puzzle pieces that fit together doesn't even matter. Jodorowsky has created something that surely won't be enjoyed by many people but will be impossible to discard or forget.

Note: Alejandro Jodorowsky was actually a pupil of Marcel Marceau. No kidding. That mime is all over the place!

Here is Eye watching El Topo:

Inland Empire

2006 David Lynch joint


Rating: 16/20

Plot: A complex glimpse at what might be the inward journey of a woman who may or may not be an actress and who may or may not be guilty and/or delusional. She may or may not be co-starring in a remake of a cursed Polish movie, and she might be obsessed (or she might not be) with her co-star, a cool guy who may or may not exist. Things get menacing, seemingly, and a murder or two probably take place. But I'm not real sure about that.

Difficult, sometimes frustrating, and very long, this is the typical David Lynch movie. He doesn't create narratives, at least conventionally, and instead of concrete characters developing conflicts and simple cause-and-effect relationships creating a plot, he lets the moods he creates tell the story. In fact, I'm pretty sure there is one concrete character in this, but all of the other characters (a phantom, actors, a director, a bunch of Polish people, street people, whores) might just be extensions of the protagonist's warping psyche. This is definitely a movie that you don't really watch; you sort of have to feel your way through the three hours, and for most of the time, I felt like a blind man groping my way through a maze of pudding. I would really need to watch about fifteen more times (that would be forty-five hours of movie watchin') to get a firmer grasp of what's going on and what rating this actually deserves. It could be a 10; it could be a 19. It was self-referential and the use of color, references to both light and time/watches, and music and sound effects all seemed like they could be important clues to what the heck is going on here. Those are things I could pick out a little more easily with subsequent viewings. Maybe. I doubt it.

I've got no clue what's going on with these rabbits, but they made me giggle uncontrollably every time they were on the screen.

Note: Laura Dern was fantastic in this.

Another note: Lynch has this way of making the most ordinary objects seem really menacing. Lamps, doors, an empty street, silk, a screwdriver, an elderly neighbor's face. It's a gift.

A final note: "Locomotion" was part of the soundtrack for thematic purposes (probably), but that Beck song in the middle of this seemed completely out of place.

Here's a picture of Lucyfer the dog and me the human waiting for hot, lesbian action that, disappointingly, never happened: