I Like Killing Flies

2004 documentary

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Kenny Shopsin's operated a restaurant where he's put a variety of things in pancakes for over thirty years in Greenwich village. Like the Soup Nazi, he's got an eccentric personality and a series of rules he expects his customers to follow. He loses his lease and is forced to move down the street. He was already grumpy, and this development isn't going to help his temperament any.

This is the sort of oddball, like Timothy "Speed" Levitch, who I enjoy spending some time with. I'm not sure I'd want to eat the food after watching it prepared or getting a glimpse into the guy's kitchen. This is the kind of old guy that, given the right circumstances, I'll likely turn into. He's a colorful personality with an interesting life perspective. This documentary is quotable and endlessly entertaining as he tells the camera that "This [stove] looks like a whore's ass" or that new customers "have to prove it to me that they're OK to feed." At the end, he gets downright philosophical, discussing the need for people (specifically, his children) to realize that they're "not so terrific" and encouraging people to "pick an arbitrary, stupid goal, become involved in it, and pursue it with vigor." Shopsin's looks like a fun place, and I'm glad this little documentary gave me the opportunity to visit it. Still not sure I'd want to eat something that's been prepared on a whore's ass though.

The Sound of Insects: Record of a Mummy

2009 documentary

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A guy takes some water, some writing material, a few books, a piece of plastic to use for a tent, and a desire to die into the woods. He eats nothing for a few months and dies. A trucker stops to take a piss in the woods and discovers his body. No, maybe that was the Lindbergh baby.

You know what this is? It's a really good book-on-tape. It's not a great documentary, especially visually as it's just a random series of images to accompany the guy's diary. The images, like a half-assed collage, grew a little pretentious, and you can wait for them to develop and add up to something insightful but they never really do. Still, the text is so gripping that the experience is worth it. I do wonder how we're supposed to think about this guy, however. I imagine a lot of readers (or viewers or, listening to my recommendation, just listeners) are going to see this as some act of courage, and I don't think that's fair to either insects or mummies. The insight and honesty of the starving man was fascinating to me though. There are these moments in the writing where he knows it's his last chance to back out of the plan, and that there isn't much of a conflict between his desire to die and a human being's natural will to live is really depressing.

By the way, it should be noted that I enjoyed a bowl of clam chowder while watching this movie. Chased it down with a large portion of banana pudding.

Daisies

1966 Czech feminist film

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Two girls (Marie I and Marie II) decide that the world is bad. As a result, they decide to be bad, finding various ways to misbehave by conning perverse butterfly collectors, playing with the food, playing with their food more, breaking stuff, drowning, and being general nuisances. Honestly, you're going to be frustrated if you like movies that have plots and characters who aren't named the exact same thing.

Yet another Eastern European movie, Czech even. At times, you could accuse this of looking like a film school project that the professor didn't even like very much. It's an artsy-fartsy dadaistic clash of visual trickery and tomfoolery. You've got rapid and maddening color changes, weird sound effects (like creaking door sounds when the gals move their limbs or typewriter noises when there's nary a typewriter), lots of scenes involving the slicing and dicing of phallic symbols, the best scissor fight you're likely to see, and lots of scenes that seem to go on forever. But it does all add up to something, again with sort of an obvious film schoolish theme, and it is visually arresting and completely interesting considering the time and place it was made. It didn't last long, by the way. Czechoslovakia banned, so nobody would get to see the fantastic scene where the Maries take after Shirley Temple in The Littlest Rebel (a movie that should have been banned in Czechoslovakia and everywhere else; and I'm not even pro-censorship!) and mimic trains while in blackface. There's some Svankmajer-esque animation with the quicky-shots of things like locks, butterflies, word shavings, and colors. This is not exactly a movie that stands the test of time, and the stream-of-conscious delivery and too-lengthy scenes will annoy most people, but I'm nevertheless happy I watched it.

Food, Inc.

2008 horror movie

Rating: 15/20 (Jen: 19/20)

Plot: Troubling expose about how food production has changed. It's not good. Essentially, we're all going to die if we keep eating.

Scary stuff, people. There's not much that was really revolutionary here. Animals are being maltreated. A handful of corporations run everything. Corn is used too often. We eat things that are unfit for animals. The meat we eat is filled with hormones and fecal matter. The government doesn't really care about us. Corporations try to mislead consumers or keep them in the dark about what is in the food they eat. A waterfall of chickens, no matter what anybody else says, is really kind of funny. They're mostly lessons already learned and this is a ton of information to try to digest. It's a ninety minutes bursting at the seams, like the typical American threatening to break apart the fragile fabric of his action pants. It's presented very well, however, and the documentary is as entertaining as it is informative. Similarly to Al Gore's horror movie about how we're all going to drown (same producers actually), this spits out the problems but left me pessimistic. There was a flashy little list of tips before the credits, but most of the solution to our food production problems can't be solved by the average Joe Blow. And this particular Joe Blow is way too lazy to really do anything about all of this anyway.

I believe this was recommended by Oprah. I wouldn't want to eat her either.

Julie and Julia

2009 duo-biopic

Rating: 13/20 (Jen: 16/20; Becky: 18/20; Tom: 8/20)

Plot: An extremely whiny wannabe writer named Julie moves to Queens with her supportive and loving husband. She hates her friends and her job and doesn't understand why nobody else thinks she's the most important person on the planet. Since all egomaniacal whiny wannabe writers wind up starting blogs, she decides to start her own, a three hundred and sixty-five day adventure in which she'll cook all five hundred and some recipes in the Julia Child cookbook. Her irritating story is juxtaposed with Julia Child's life with her own supportive and loving husband and her developing interest in cooking. The two meet, and the bitter elderly Julia Child (***spoiler alert***) defeats Julie in an epic fight with utensils and rolling pins and then forces her husband to watch as she debones her and devours her lifeless carcass while giggling madly through blood-stained false teeth.

I would have really liked this if it was just called Julia. Meryl Streep is great in her portrayal of the quirky and fascinating Childs. There's some humorous banter between her and her husband, and there are also some very touching moments as well. When the movie focused on Julia Childs, this was actually good. Unfortunately, there's a Julie in the story, too. She wrote the blog, she turned the blog into the book, and the book and blog gave her the easy fame she longed for. If the character in the movie is anything like the real person, as I suspect is the case, then the real person is irritating, pretentious, and hopelessly self-centered. The most revealing part of her story is when she finds out that Julia Childs hates her. It was easy to see why. Almost everything she says is irritating, and every minute detail of her life is blown up into a major drama. As my faithful readers know, I'm not generally a hateful fellow, but I genuinely hope that people start randomly attacking her with food at all her future speaking engagements. Julie is played by the mousy Amy Adams, sort of a Meg Ryan lite. And it's hard to imagine an actress lighter and fluffier than Meg Ryan. This is the type of role that will likely cause me to never give her a fair chance in another movie. Actually, her annoying character in this might cause me to completely avoid any future Amy Adams movies unless Crispin Glover or Vincent Price happens to be in them as well. So, to sum it all up: Meryl Streep is great. Somebody needs to slap around Julie Powell. Oh, one final note. If you watch this hoping to see a Julia Child sex scene, expect to be disappointed. Close counts only in horseshoes and hand grenades and not in Julia Child sex scenes.