Real Life

1979 comedy

Rating: 10/20

Plot: Director Albert Brooks brings a film crew into the home of a typical American family of four living in Phoenix in order to film their real lives for the entertainment of future movie-goers. The filming, mostly because of the meddling of the narcissistic director, nearly ruins that family's "real life. Unfortunately, it's not very funny.

Sort of a precursor to modern reality television, and in a way, nearly prescient. So this could have and probably should have been very clever satire. Nope. Albert Brooks is annoying and splashes all over this one. There's not enough family, not enough Charles Grodin, not enough funny. There's too much snippy Albert Brooks narration, too many winks at the audience, too much 'look-at-how-clever-I-am" moments. True, that's part of the point and helps characterize Brooks' "character," but it's not what I wanted to see. The guys standing behind the family in the background of the poster up there? They're wearing cameras. They represent the only funny thing about the movie, too. Every time one of them wandered in frame, I almost laughed. Every time Albert Brooks was in a scene, however, I wanted to throw a glass through the television. I'm not sure why I expected this to be funny enough to spend an hour and forty minutes with, but I was way off. It's cynical and criminally unfunny instead.

Here I am enjoying Real Life:

The Naked Spur

1953 Western

Rating: 13/20

Special Note: More misleading breasts on a movie poster. This might be packed with technicolor thrills, but those breasts aren't in this.

Plot: Jimmy Stewart is looking for a man somewhere in the Rockies. Actually, he's chased said man all the way from Kansas. He meets a mentally-challenged failure of a gold prospector who agrees to help him find the man. The man, an unfortunate cowboy who suffers from that medical condition where he must perpetually wears a smarmy smile, is eventually found atop a rocky hill where he mistakes Jimmy Stewart and the prospector for a Jimmy Stewart lookalike and the ghost of his nemesis--the late Porcupine "Wildcat" Sam "Big Rifle" Skillet. He begins firing, and Jimmy Stewart and the other guy find themselves in a stalemate. In order to get the plot going again, they have to meet a third man, a man discharged from the military for having "a homoerotic mustache." Together, they come up with a plan to reach the top of the hill, only to find that the guy Jimmy Stewart has chased across the West has been traveling with a female companion, a woman who is exactly 1/4 the size of Jimmy Stewart (see poster). Jimmy Stewart, in a jealous rage, cries out, "Wh-wh-what's going on here? My junk's bigger than that there gal. What you pullin' here, Pete?" and then whips it out. The scene, as in all cowboy movies I've seen, climaxes with Jimmy Stewart spitting on his hand, lubricating Pete, and engaging in a little cowboy mountain love while the others look on. There are technicolor thrills galore as the others, and three mountain lions, join in. Then Jimmy Stewart's character remembers that he left his oven on, and everybody has to head back to Kansas.

Technicolor thrills! Gorgeous scenery and some complex characters make this a good-enough Western although it should have been more epic. Parts of the plot seem a little rushed and tension is lost because of it. I also had a hard time rooting for any of the characters. Their flaws are what pushed the plot along though. There's an interesting moral dilemma facing Stewart's character, but too much of this just doesn't seem real enough. Pretty average stuff.

Here I am wishing this was called The Naked Jimmy Stewart:

Nashville

1975 drama

Rating: 18/20

Plot: Lives converge in Nashville as folks gather to celebrate country and western music or rally behind a political candidate.

Meandering, clumsy poetry with biting irony. Robert Altman is very much in that like-him-or-not category, and I, for the most part, have always liked him. (Note: Not Popeye, Pret-a-Porter or Gosford Park, the latter which I didn't even understand.) This is a movie that is almost entirely characterization with bits of information slipping in and characters' lives weaving in and out. It's surface-scratching characterization, however, and characters are caught in stride and left shielding their eyes and glancing into the horizon. This series of snapshots on the surface adds up to not much at all, but the mosaic really creates a fragmented and especially fragile picture of the film's main character--America, not just during an actual specific time, but a timeless America. The questions Altman explores and never answers are just as vital in 2008 as they were in the mid-70s. The film's imperfect (too long? too much music?), but I'm not sure it ever had a chance to be perfect. Lively, but with Altman's misanthropic eye. There's humor and heartbreak and shock, often within a few seconds of each other, just a brilliant juxtaposition of scenes, dialogue bits, songs. And any director who can make Jeff Goldblum not annoying has to be something special. (The key, apparently, is to not give him any lines.)

Confession: Ok, I like Popeye. And Jeff Goldblum.

A Man Escaped

1956 French prison escape movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A Frenchman imprisoned by the Nazis plots an escape from his prison using primarily only a pair of spoons. Complications arise and then, as the title suggests, he escapes.

I'm a sucker for people-escaping-from-prison movies (and apparently television series), so this is right up my alley anyway. It's fascinating how director Bresson can create strong suspense even though we already know how things are going to turn out in the end. There's nothing fancy here at all, and Bresson uses non-professionals as actors. That--along with entirely empty sets, limited music (all Mozart), a focus on the minutia, and almost no scenes of actual action--gives this a realistic and claustrophobic atmosphere that keeps the tension high. Especially the minutia. In fact, most of the scenes are of the main character scraping at his door with the end of a spoon or meticulously twisting fabric to make rope.

If I had to escape from prison, I would hide myself inside a loaf of bread. Here I am, not in prison:

Harry and Tonto

1974 dramatic comedy

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Harry is a retired public educator and widower living in New York City with his cat Tonto. After he's mugged for the fourth time in a year and his apartment building is torn down, he moves in with one of his sons. It doesn't work out well, so he travels across the country with his cat, stopping every once in a while to meet random people or engage in disturbing acts of bestiality with Tonto.

Chief Dan George is the best thing about any movie that he is in. Harry meets him in prison, and I laughed twice during their encounter. "What are you in for?" "Peeing." "Oh. I once was ticketed for shitting." And also when Chief Dan George's character exchanges a medicine man cure for bursitis for Harry's underpants.

This meandering episodic movie doesn't really deliver humorously, dramatically, or philosophically and seems very much a product of 1974. There's nothing wrong with it, and I like movies where people (even really old people) embark on pointless excursions, but this just sort of starts, bubbles a little bit, festers, grows mold, palpitates, and then ends. None of the characters he meets really seem interesting enough to pay attention to. The acting is ok in this, but it's interesting to me that Art Carney beat out Nicholson, Pacino, and Hoffman (Chinatown, Godfather II, and Lenny, the latter which I have not seen) for best actor. I wasn't thinking "best actor" while watching this. Admittedly, I might be biased. I don't like cats. If Harry had a pet monkey or traveled around the country with a midget, I think I would have liked it a lot better.

Here I am watching Harry and Tonto:

Wicked City

1992 Japanese sci-fi romance

Rating: 4/20

Plot: I have no idea. There's some kind of war between monsters and people, and there's a Romeo/Juliet type relationship between a female monster and a member of the anti-monster squad. Tentacles and trippiness. There's a liquid monster and a woman who can turn into an elevator and a motorcycle and a man/monster who seems to be making love to a pinball machine. The monsters are trying to get everybody addicted to a drug called Happiness, and the world is blue tinted.

This was a really painful movie-watching experience. Wall-to-wall special effects mayhem, unhinged and bizarre. Obviously, this is the product of a disturbed mind. Either that or direct from the mind of an autistic child. I couldn't stop wondering if I was watching an episode of the Power Rangers or something slightly worse and more obnoxious than the Power Rangers. This movie was so ugly and loud. It was also 90 minutes of a pattern--bizarre action sequence that doesn't make sense followed by dialogue that supposedly explains the plot but that actually doesn't make sense followed by another bizarre action sequence that doesn't make sense followed by more dialogue that supposedly explains the plot but that actually doesn't make sense, etc. I would like to meet somebody who likes this movie just so I can rip off one of their nipples. It should also be noted that this movie made my dog extremely uncomfortable. Based on a comic book that should probably be burned.

Here I am enjoying Wicked City:

The Proposition

2005 cowboy movie

Rating: 12/20

Plot: A portly English guy captures half of the Burns brothers, a gang that has been terrorizing a community somewhere in Australia. That English gentleman, Captain Stanley, is going to civilize this land if it kills him! Aborigines, outlaws, and lawmen shoot at each other in hell. Nick Cave moans and fondles himself as characters show off his big big words. Stanley gives the best looking of the brothers the proposition the film is named after--he has until Christmas to capture his other two brothers or his younger brother will be hanged by the neck until dead in a festive celebration that all good Christians would surely enjoy. Charlie goes off on his horse to find the brother.

This isn't nearly as good as the films it imitates although it's entertaining, savagely violent, and bleak enough to be a serviceable western. The characters lacked character, and the plot wandered a little too pointlessly. I did appreciate the stark landscape and sets filmed beautifully and the violent effects were very well done, especially the gunfight at the very beginning and the scene with a spear going through a guy seconds before another guy gets half his head blown off. Nick Cave's screenplay is heavy stuff, but his only memorable line is probably the very last one of the movie. The score (Cave along with one of the Dirty Three) is silly. If there was one thing this movie needed a little more of, it's people urinating.

I urinated twice while watching The Proposition:

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 Pornographers

1966 Japanese drama


Rating: 15/20


Plot: A maker of erotic films lives with a woman and her two children. He occasionally sleeps with the woman although she becomes increasingly paranoid when her late husband, reincarnated as a large fish she keeps in a tank beside her bed, gets antsy. The son's a jerk, and the fifteen-year-old daughter, who could somehow be the protagonist's daughter as well, is a whore with a drinking problem. Or a drinker with a whoring problem. Regardless, he develops sexual feelings for her. The mother gets sick, and then everybody in the world gets sick.


Interesting imagery--scenes shot through water and fish and odd-angled cinematography--keep this visually interesting even when the plot gets bloated and overly complex and really pretty dull. A large number of scenes are shot from the outside through cracks in the doors or windows. That got annoying after a while, but it does make the experience more voyeuristic and uncomfortable. Conversations between off-screen characters starting to watch a movie at the beginning (they ask, "What's that fish doing there?") and finishing at the end bookend the film. Like a perverse soap opera at times, this was filled with interesting moments but at times tried my patience. I wonder how shocking this would have been to Japanese audiences in '66 though? Good final scene.


In a former life, I was a pornographic fish:

The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story

2003 documentary

Rating: 13/20

Plot: This is the story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd. Syd takes a lot of drugs, gets all crazy, and starts living someplace entirely different from where the rest of us live. The rest of Pink Floyd fall in love with lasers.

Ehhh. Some interesting archival footage, including video from Barrett's first LSD experience (?), some concert footage, and Robyn Hitchcock simultaneously making the audience uncomfortable (it's the blinking) and nailing "It Is Obvious." There's nothing enlightening here, and there's very little emotional pull. Instead, the story just plugs along monotonously, mostly through the memories of the other Pink Floyd members and a female narrator. I guess I didn't ever figure that Barrett played that backwards guitar on "Dominoes," and that makes that particular bit of that song just a little bit cooler. I've always been convinced that Barrett faked a lot of his mental illness to avoid the stresses involved with being a rock star, and this does nothing to change my mind.

Here I am, faking mental illness to avoid the stresses involved with being anything at all:

Don't Look Now

1973 psychological thriller

Rating: 18/20

Plot: Donald Sutherland and his wife are having difficulty getting over the death of their daughter. She drowned because they were too busy being pretentious. They get away to Venice, Italy, a place where they won't have any water to bring up memories or anything, and Donald takes on an ambitious church remodeling project. They meet weird sisters while dining, and the blind one claims to have seen the daughter and gives the couple a warning. Meanwhile, Donald Sutherland sees flashes of a red raincoat in the twists and turns of Venice's alleyways.

Profoundly creepy and thick with symbolism and strangely recurrent details, this based-on-Du-Marier movie is brilliantly executed. Creepy pacing, creepy imagery, creepy flashbacks, creepy Donald Sutherland's ass, creepy artistic shots, and most of all a creepy (and oddly vacant) Venice (seriously. . .doesn't anybody live there?) contribute to piece together something that sucks you in and then takes a bite out of you. A genuinely shocking ending. This seems less dated to me than other 70's horror classics, dated only, I think, by some of the music. I thought the acting was very good as the characterization (good) was mostly via gestures, glances, half-conversations. Roeg's virtuosic direction and meandering mystery make this required second viewing to spot the spots not originally spotted. Seemingly extraneous scenes morph into things sinister and profound thirty-seven minutes after the movie's ended. Such a simple, thick movie--a stylish toying of the spine. Dumb title though.

Note: This makes the tenth "midget" movie of the year. One out of every nine movies I watch has a midget? That seems either too high or too low. My wife thinks I watch movies for nudity. Maybe I watch for midgets!

Here I am wishing I had Donald Sutherland's hair:

Black Cat, White Cat

1998 cheerfully absurd fable

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Matko lives with his son Zare, and plots nefariously to get ahead financially. After some deal involving oil and a train goes horribly wrong, he owes money to the wrong person--big time gangster Dadan who sort of looks like a cross between Burt Reynolds and John C. Reilly. To pay his debt, he agrees to force his son to marry Dadan's last unmarried sister, a "grumpy midget" named Afrodita. Zare isn't happy. He has fallen in love with mischievous Ida and doesn't really want to marry a midget.


There's a completely out-of-place pop song in this with a gigantic beat, a male vocal that grunts "Pit bull!" and female vocals chanting "Terrier." The music is used almost like the theme song for the "bad guy" in this, and every single time it came on, I thought, "This is the best moment in movie history!" I pumped my fist thrice.


This is a sprawling and out of control and chaotic romantic comedy/gangster flick. So much absurd fun--a character obsessively watching, rewinding, and watching again the final minute of Casablanca; midget escape; love amongst the sunflowers; Matko trying to retrieve his briefcase from a murdered man (see below); a gypsy band tied to a tree; scenes showing a huge pig eating an automobile; a singer who can pull nails out of wood with her buttocks; lots and lots of animal love; fecal matter. The soundtrack is filled with wonderful traditional gypsy music, more than background music and nearly making this a musical. Unhinged gypsy comedy!

Here's a picture of the soundtrack and probably my favorite scene:

And here's a picture of me:

The Science of Sleep

2006 romantic fantasy

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Stephane, a mentally-challenged artist who frequently mixes up reality with his dreams and vice versa, returns to live with his mother in France after the death of his father in Mexico. He gets a job which he finds suffocating and falls in love with his neighbor. Life in the real world and Stephane's subconscious tangle, and the world is filled with puppets and cotton balls.

I really wanted to fall in love with this, but there was so much about it that was frustrating. It's a little too similar in feel and pace to writer/director Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind but a lot more difficult to connect with, mostly because the main character is really annoying. There is fantastic stop-motion plushy and cardboard animation that gives the dream sequences an otherworldly (dreamy?) feel; otherwise, too much of this seems rambling and artsy-fartsy and way too cute to really like. The multilingual script was clever at times but also made things a little difficult for my tired mind to follow. I probably need to see it when I'm not sick. My views also might lack accuracy because I watched this with my eyes open and my heart closed.

Here I am, sick:

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir

1947 romantic drama

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Mrs. Muir, a widow, moves into a pretty house on the shore despite the pleas of her befuddled in-laws. The former owner and soul currently residing in the house, the ghost of a saucy seaman, visits frequently to boss her around and growl saucy nothings into her ear. There's more sauciness (piles and piles of sauciness!) as she ghost writes an autobiographical novel. Then a real flesh 'n' blood jackass who, like L.L. Cool J. and Sir Mix Alot likes his women with big ole butts, comes along and steals Mrs. Muir's heart. The ensuing nutty love triangle is something that neither the Fat Boys or Salt 'n' Peppa would be able to adequately explain.

Melodramatism and 1940's acting got in the way here although this was certainly a pretty film--very crisp photography with some nice shadows and birds and landscape. The storytelling was clunky where it should have been soft, and too much artificial and soapy dialogue distracted from the poetic visuals. The repeated use of a golden phallic symbol (a telescope) offended me.

Here I am, as corporeal as I get:

Facing the Giants

2006 family football movie

Rating: 1/20

Plot: A struggling high school football program faces yet another losing season, much to the disappointment of the players, their parents, the administration, and the coach--a loser in his sixth year. He's not just a loser of a coach either. He drives crap, lives in crap, and, due to a problem with his junk, can't get his wife pregnant. His team, the Eagles, drop their first three games, and he finds out that people are conspiring to replace him. Rightfully so. He's a loser. However, when a soccer player with a crippled father and Jesus Christ Himself join the squad, everything changes.

When I found out that this was financed entirely by a Baptist church somewhere in George, I almost wanted to bump it up a few rating points. Then I remembered that I had just watched one of the most offensive movies I have ever seen in my entire life and kept the 1. This is so over-the-top religious (the central message seems to be that if you love Jesus and pray, you will get improbable football victories, brand new trucks, raises, and pregnancies) that it nearly seemed like a parody. Predictable, trite, sappy, sticky, cliched, and agonizing, this treats the viewer like an idiot and takes no prisoners in the war on common sense. There's a terrible script, acting that makes the script look even worse, and a feel that makes it seem like you're not only watching an after-school special but actually living one. There are twists and turns, but it's sort of like somebody saying, "I'm going to hit you in the head with a rolling pin," and then telling you that he was only kidding and won't hit you and then hitting you ten seconds later. The movie's plot twists aren't like that though. . .they are more like the 57th time when you know that you're going to get hit with the rolling pin even though he told you he wasn't going to hit you all because of what happened the previous 56 times. I did laugh a few times--once inappropriately (spoiler alert! nevermind. . . if you actually see this, you will know what is coming) when the kid with the crippled father gets ready to do exactly what you knew he would from the first moment his character was introduced while his father (are you ready?) stands up to cheer on his son. Simultaneously, God makes the wind stop blowing to make a field goal attempt a little easier. Nearly simultaneously, Jesus gets the coach's wife pregnant. Miracles, man! Actually, the true miracle is that God allowed this movie to be finished. God Himself would surely be offended at how his message has been bastardized. Seriously, if I see a movie this year that is worse than this one, I will take my own life before it's over. And if I ever get the opportunity to meet anybody involved in the production of this movie, I will spit on him relentlessly.

I was forced to watch this at school, so there isn't a real picture. I would have looked something like this though. (Special note: I have worn this tie 15 straight school days.)