The Fall

2006 fantasy thing

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A paralyzed stuntman in a 1920's Los Angeles hospital meets a girl with a broken arm and begins telling her a story about five vengeful heroes and a monkey. She enjoys his disjointed tale of a search for the evil Lord Odious, but the storyteller might have ulterior motives.

I had to take a point away from this because the director, Singh, chose to go by a single name, Tarsem, for this production. And then there's the issue of this poster which is one of the ugliest things I've ever seen. I've seen The People's Tongue album covers that are easier on the eye than that. But then there was a really nice tribute to silent film stuntmen with Beethoven's 7th Symphony, 2nd Movement that teared me up a bit. Of course, it made me wonder if that particular piece of music, which I plan on dying to some day, is overused these days. It's no "Beyond the Sea" yet, but it's getting there. This is a movie with so much beauty in its individual parts that it's almost overwhelmingly sloppy. The sheer amount of locations the filmmakers would have had to travel to is impressive enough. Tarsem's visuals are often stunning, and the swimming elephants, dazzling colors, butterflies that morph into islands, and human meat chandeliers can remind a person why they watch movies in the first place. Unlike Alexandria, played by Catinca Untaru in a child performance that ranged from touching and with surprising depth to sort of annoying, I didn't care much for the story the guy was telling or its flat characters. But I was enamored with the visuals, these characters traveling to places that movies can usually only take us through the magic of CGI. I'm just going to assume computers weren't involved because it makes me like the movie more. Just as this movie's story and its story-within-a-story are all over the place, this is thematically all over the place as well, touching on dark thematic issues like depression, child labor, immigration, and suicide and happier ones like the powers of imagination. And movies. This doesn't always work and feels a little too long, but when it connects, it's almost magical. Buster makes a few appearances in that stuntman montage, by the way.

Midnight Cowboy

1969 Best Picture

Rating: 18/20

Plot: The titular cowboy moves to the Big Apple to make it big as a gigolo. He struggles until he runs into a two-bit criminal named Enrico Rizzo, and then he winds up struggling even more. Regardless, the two strike up a friendship and become roommates.

Everybody who knows me well knows of my affinity for Harry Nilsson, and I could hear "Everybody's Talkin'" 14,000 times without getting sick of it. Actually, I'm pretty sure I did hear it 14,000 times during the first half hour of Midnight Cowboy. Here's a classic that is not without its share of problems--the oft-imitated style makes it feel dated, as does the drug and sex and late-60's counterculture references. I'm not sure I care about the artsy-fartsy flashback sequences, but the experimental choppy editing gives this an almost nightmarish vibe that I really like. It keeps things ominous even though there's a sad humor just below the surface, almost like these two characters could have been plopped into a wacky sitcom in the late-70s and been just fine. Those characters? This movie's as much about New York in the late-60s just as much as these two, but it's a study of an unlikely friendship that never makes a lot of sense but is nonetheless touching. Voight's wide-eyed outsider, naivete dripping from his boots, keeps him likable even though he's too stupid to root for and is tough to pin down. Is he angry? He should be. Does he really think he's going to make it? He shouldn't. Hoffman creates this limping barely human character that you also like even though he gives you no real reason to like him. I like the nuances with his character--the reaching for the spare change in every pay telephone coin slot, the persistent coughing without a single covering of the mouth, the darting eyes. He's almost street smart, and you almost wonder what the circumstances were that put him in the situation he's in. And you almost believe him when he tells us that the two basic ingredients to sustain life are sunshine and coconut milk. The famous "I'm walkin' here" that leads into a pedestrian's shocked "What's that?" is pure 1960's movie magic. Voight and Hoffman are both great playing these characters who really should clash, but they have this weird chemistry and the friendship they develop is touching in a very strange and ambiguous way. This is a movie made of a lot of fine moments, a couple that work almost like little short stories. Buck's "I want to see the Statue of Liberty" come-on line that leads to a rendezvous with a cougar and a remote control ends in irony that might have been from an O. Henry story that never made it past the censors. And I just love the expression on the dog's face after that plays out. The movie's also got a great tragic ending. All Dustin Hoffman movies should end on a bus, I think. And hey, that's Bob Balaban!

Ghostbusters

2004 ghost comedy

Rating: 15/20 (Emma: 14/20; Abbey: 17/20)

Plot: A trio of paranormal psychologists open up a ghost extermination business after getting kicked off the university campus in which they research. They become a phenomenon as ghost encounters in Manhattan grow with the impending arrival of some devil thing.

Silliness abounds in this picture that adeptly combines comedy and horror in a very mainstream way. The special effects range from very good (the ghost in the hotel, the stuff in the library, the climactic arrival of the marshmallow man) to "How the heck did anybody think that looked good enough to be in a movie?" (the dog chasing Rick Moranis around). More subtle effects would have worked better for some of the monsters or the big castle thing, too. The story and comedy ranges from clever, especially when things are subtle, to just a little too much. Bill Murray is perfectly funny, and like a lot of his stuff, you really have to pay attention to his face even when he's not the one delivering the lines that are supposed to be funny. A Ghostbusters 3 just wouldn't work without him, and they should abandon the project immediately. The other guys are funny as well, and Sigourney Weaver maybe never looked better. Neither has the ultra-sexy Rick Moranis who also looks like a comedic genius here. And my argument hasn't changed much from when I first saw this in a theater: There's nothing more exhilarating than seeing that grinning marshmallow man. It's impossible not to see that monstrosity and laugh, isn't it?

I think I caught the sequel to this but remember nothing about it. Worth my time?

Tere Bin Laden

2010 movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Ali Hassan is a young Pakistani man with aspirations of making it in America as a news reporter. Unfortunately, his visa application is refused over and over again because of an incident where he kept using a couple no-no words on a flight to the United States. Things are looking bad until he runs into a Bin Laden look-a-like while covering a cock opera. That's right--a cock opera. Let's see if that word combination gets me some Google search hits! Anyway, Hassan decides to use the faux-Laden to record one of those wacky videos the real-Laden used, and the entire plan, as you'd expect, backfires.

Cock opera? Is that just as punnish in Urdu or whatever they speak in Pakistan? The cock opera sequence and all of the scenes with the Bin Laden doppelganger were funny. Mostly, however, this has a liveliness to it that is infectious without being all that funny. It's colorful and most of the action zips by so briskly that you can't get bored. The film's star, the Indian Zach Braff (Ali Zafar, but he should just change his name to "Indian Zach Braff" actually) sure is likable and full of energy. I'll tell you one thing though. I've not watched a lot of movies from India compared to other countries, but it seems that Bollywood sure likes its montages. And loud soundtracks. There's some very light and playful satire (love that the American military action is called Operation Kickass) that more than likely isn't going to offend anybody from anywhere who stumbles upon the movie. Things are lighthearted. Still, I appreciate the ballsiness.

Seriously, check that guy out. He's the Indian Zach Braff. They should get him to star in an Indian Scrubs, but it probably wouldn't make much sense since they don't have hospitals in India.

I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK

2006 quirky love story

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Cha Young-Goon's family has a history of mental problems. She becomes convinced that she is a combat robot and has to be committed. The doctors desperately try to get her to eat something, but she just wants to lick batteries and watch her toes light up. She meets a masked kleptomaniac who steals her panties and tries to trick her into eating.

There's a pair of moments in this one that touched me like nothing I've seen in any other recent romantic comedy. I can't give specifics because I wouldn't want to spoil this for any of my 4 1/2 readers, but one of them involves a cork and the other involves a door. There's another scene with a yodeling Japanese guy that also nearly made me weep. As did the line "A cat is, above all, a furry animal," a bit of dialogue that probably is funnier in context. This has a free-flowing cuckoo vibe, and people will call it a Japanese One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a movie that some people refuse to even watch because it beat an inferior Jaws for Best Picture. The craziness is movie craziness with an asylum that wouldn't actual exist outside of the screen. You get characters with silly mental disorders probably used for comic purposes. They color the movie but don't really serve any real purpose, at least regarding the plot, until another kind of touching moment that takes place in a cafeteria. You get a guy who walks backwards, a woman who can only look at people in a mirror, and a variety of other characters humorously sick in their heads. I liked how this one was filmed, flamboyantly and with almost a French whimsy. It breezes on by, and although it's never really all that profound (it is, after all, a romantic comedy), it's a cute little story with some beautiful visuals. I might be in the minority here, but I prefer this one to Chan-wook Park's Oldboy.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

2009 movie

Rating: 10/20

Plot: Following a difficult break-up, a graduate student dives right into her work, conducting the titular interviews with the titular hideous men.

I don't know why I watched this. I wasn't in the mood, had trouble staying focused, and haven't read the source material. I was curious to see what The Office's John Krasinski could do, I guess. There's just so much acting in this thing, and everything that was being said, whether it was in the interviews that served as little more than darkly amusing interruptions to a story that wasn't really going anywhere or the actual conversations the characters were having, just seemed so written. I was really kind of bored out of my mind. I also didn't care for the protagonist. Juliane Nicholson's performance is not good here, and the character lacked depth. The only reason I'm glad that I watched this was because there's a scene where a one-armed man makes air quotes. That was like a cinematic koan.

Leaves of Grass

2009 dark crime comedy

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Bill or Brady Kincaid has left Oklahoma where his identical twin brother, Brady or Bill, and his mother still live. He's an author and philosophy professor and wants nothing to do with his family or any state that has a panhandle. He travels back to his home state when he gets word that his twin brother has died.

This is a Coen-esque dramedy with some shocking violence and a humor from left-center field, but it's not as fully realized or, well, as brilliantly written as anything in the brothas' oeuvre. And whoa. There are at least three words in that last sentence that make me wonder if I should still be doing this blog. This is Tim Blake Nelson's baby. He wrote and directed, and he also plays a character who I'm convinced is actually just himself. Edward Norton, an actor my wife has a thing for, is good in one of those dual-performances, identical twins that are physically identical minus a mullet and some facial hair but completely different in the personality department. I always think Norton's convincing playing intelligent characters, and I think it's because of his voice. Here, he pontificates about Kierkegaard with the short-haired character and throws out Okies' jargon like "I don't cotton." He's convincing in both roles, and as strange as it seems to type this, he has really good chemistry with himself. Richard Dreyfuss also has a small role and gets to say, "I'd like everybody in the world to call me a cocksucker and give me a dollar because that way I'd be rich and everybody'd love me." Susan Sarandon's also in there, but she doesn't have any lines about being a cocksucker. The story's often implausible and things happen in this movie-quick way that never feels natural, but I do like the thematic tying-together of philosophy and meteorology. This might be like a diet Coen, but it's fairly entertaining, thematically easy, and well acted enough to make it worth your time.

Note: I don't remember if Norton's philosophy professor character (Brady or Bill) talked about Kierkegaard or not, but I thought it throwing that name in there would make me seem smarter and trick philosophy buffs into finding my blog.

Hands on a Hard Body: The Documentary

1997 documentary

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Twenty-four contestants participate in an endurance competition to win a brand new truck.

What I liked about this one is that a marketing gimmick turned reality television episode managed to transform into something a little more profound. The motivations of these various characters was fascinating, and psychologically, it was just interesting to follow the different states of mind of these contestants. There was a giggling fanatic who kept having these mini laughing religious experiences, a woman with no teeth supported by her husband with no teeth who claimed he could stay up without sleep for 101 straight hours and had a 20-ton air conditioning unit that could bring the temperature of his home to 12 below zero, a young woman who just wants to use the victory as a ticket out of town, and a former winner of the competition who had an almost zen-like approach. His description of this as a competition to see "who can maintain their sanity the longest" is accurate and makes for a fascinating contest, and there were some moments of real tension and suspense as the contestants started dropping. It's also one of those glimpses of something that could only happen in small-town America.

A couple bits of trivia from imdb.com: 1) Robert Altman planned to make a film based on this contest. That could have been terrific. 2) During the 2005 contest, one of the contestants stole a shotgun from a nearby K-Mart and killed himself during one of the breaks. Yikes. That person really stunk at the contest!

Chicken Run

2000 animated prison break movie

Rating: 17/20

Plot: A bunch of chickens, led by feisty Ginger, attempt to bust out of Tweedy farms. They fail many times, and things get more critical when the Tweedy decides to abandon attempts to make it with eggs and purchases a giant chicken-pie-making machine. A performing rooster named Rocky flies in and agrees, reluctantly, to teach the chickens to fly.

I love this little movie from the Aardman folk who bring us the Wallace and Gromit movies and not just because it can technically be described as a women's prison movie. Sure I wish they were a little more prolific, but these are labors of love, and the amount of detail that goes into these things makes them magical for children and adults. The details given to the strange looking characters and their odd expressions (I just love how the chickens have teeth in this thing) give them real personalities. The voice work is great in this, especially Tony Haygarth and Miranda Richardson as Mr. and Mrs. Tweedy and Benjamin Whitrow as the lone rooster Fowler. "The turnip's bought it!" and "Don't be ridiculous; I can't fly this contraption!" still makes me laugh. Mel Gibson, the only American voice in this thing, gives a terrific and inspired voice performance in something he could have been tempted to phone in so that he could concentrate on his first love--hating the Jews. The little details in the setting are also nice and give this location that you could easily imagine a Steve McQueen or Paul Newman trying to escape from a little of its own personality. There's so much on the screen to see here; it's so complex for a stop-animation feature. There are scenes where you have an impossible number of chickens making all these impossible-to-coordinate movements, and it's just amazing. Amazing, but I guess not impossible since they pull it off. Things get a little goofy at the end with an action sequence that crosses the line into absurdity and completely ignores the laws of physics, and a lot of people will get a little sick to their stomachs with the terrible puns delivered by a pair of questionable rats. Birds of a feather flop together, it's raining hen, "Dough!', poultry in motion, it's like an oven in here. Uggh. Otherwise, this is well written and clever with more than a few fun references to classic films. It's entertaining for the whole family! This is one of those movies that I have seen about a hundred times, by the way.

Oh, and it reminds me that I have a pirate movie to watch!

Hobson's Choice

1954 dramatic comedy

Rating: 17/20

Plot: The titular guy with really no choice at all (hence, a Hobson's choice) is a successful but aging cobbler who, as a widower, raises his three grown daughters. He's cheap, drinks a lot, and could probably be described as verbally abusive to his employees and family. He won't allow his daughters to marry because he's worried about paying a settlement, so his oldest daughter takes matters into her own hands, forcing Dad's top boot-maker to start a life and business with her. Then, she tries to help our her two sisters.

Love the opening shots of a creaking sign in the shape of a boot, a venturing into Hobson's boot shop, and an investigation of the setting. I like when the cinematography makes me feel like I'm intruding. I liked the characters, too, even though I went into this thinking they'd be a little more manic, more comedic. Like caricatures. Charles Laughton plays drunk well, that 1920's kind of drunk that Chaplin and probably every other silent comedian did so well. He shows a surprising physicality here, and he does this whole sophisticated irritation thing so nicely. I think that's how the English get irritated. But I also really liked John Mills as Will Mossop, the lowly bootmaker with no aspirations at all. The movie's as much about his metamorphosis than it is Henry Hobson or any of his daughters although Maggie is just as much a protagonist as she makes every single thing that happens in the movie happen. Brenda de Banzie plays her with just enough of her father's character in her to make her motivations and actions realistic. But Will's story was really the emotional heart of this one for me, and Mills takes us through the journey in what I thought was a very natural way. So for me, this is a story about realizing your potential more than anything else. Nothing hysterically funny here, but it's an amusing little comedy with some dark edges. The interactions at the Moonraker with his odd-looking friends were funny, and a chasing-the-moon sequence reminded me a bit of W.C. Fields for some reason.

Another quality Cory recommendation!

The Living Wake

2007 dark comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: K. Roth Binew, escorted by his only friend Mills Joquin, prepares for his titular wake by traveling about via rickshaw to invite his friends, family, and enemies.

Bonus point for the rickshaw. This doesn't seem to be a very popular movie, probably from the lot of people who hate the entire Eisenberg family who refuse to see the movie but still write bad things about it, but I thought it was very amusing and enjoyed its almost cartoonish philosophical themes and its go-nowhere plot. Speaking of Eisenberg, he's about right here except for an accent that kind of goes in and out, but he's mostly good for being out of the way of the real star of the show, Mike O'Connell as K. Roth Binew. Binew's a character you'll either love to hate, hate to love, or just plain hate. He's boastful with nothing at all to boast about, rudely brazen, ornery as five-year-old, and as animated as a character from a Monty Python sketch. He's a great half-realized character, but you'll hate him and most people, I reckon, will find him more annoying than humorous. I say half-realized, by the way, not as a criticism--it's appropriately for this character. His sole purpose on this final day of his is to create a complete life, leave a weird little legacy, build himself up into this mythic artistic genius, but from the episodes we get here, it's easy to see that his is a wasted life. There's just something nonsensically poignant about the whole thing. This isn't a movie that will likely ever have much of an audience, not even a cult one, and that makes me sad since it does have a rickshaw in it. Comedian Jim Gaffigan makes an appearance and doesn't talk about hot pockets even once. If this movie didn't have an Eisenberg in it and you'd told me it was a comedy from the 70's, I might have believed you. And I don't mean that as a bad thing.

They Live

1988 science fiction movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: An unemployed former wrestler exchanges his kilt for jeans and looks for a construction job. While crashing at an urban campground for the homeless, he stumbles onto a sort of rebellion centered in a small church. The government comes with powerful bulldozers, and the former wrestler finds a nifty pair of sunglasses that enable him to see the truth. He runs out of bubblegum.

The famous "I'm all out of bubblegum," "You know, you look like your head fell on the cheese dip back in 1957" (I rewound to hear this one three times to make sure I caught it correctly), "Mama don't like tattletales," and "And who are you, little fellow" are all lines that show what happens when you let Roddy Roddy Piper write his own dialogue. And no, I do not mean that as a criticism! It's taking the whole 1980's action movie one-liner thing, something I've always blamed on Arnold Schwarzennegar, to its logical crux. I just love what John Carpenter does with a limited budget here. The glasses effects are eerily fantastic, the switch to black and white and those expressionless alien faces combined with the subliminal messages make for some classic sci-fi horror with, more than likely, some heavy-handed satire. Personally, I don't mind heavy-handed satire. What does annoy me are action movie cliches, and this has more than a few of them as well as what is probably the longest and most absurd scene of extended fisticuffs in science fiction movie history. I think the fight between Piper and the black guy was probably longer than most of Roddy Roddy's wrestling matches though not, if I'm remembering correctly from back when I watched WWF wrestling (its golden age, in my opinion), nearly as long as some of his speeches. Piper, to be honest, makes the transition from ring to movie role much more smoothly than I expected. He plays Average Joe just fine and his action hero chops are as good as any other 80's superstar they would have thrown in there. Pretty cool sci-fi flick with several great scenes and a few that need to be reconsidered or completely removed before they do a remake of this in a few years, probably with Vin Diesel.

Enter the Void

2009 trip

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A drug dealer is shot and enters the titular void, an act which apparently involves a lot of floating and watching his sister have sex. Flashbacks reveal childhood tragedy and flashforwards reveal other things. Apparently, it's a Tibetan Book of the Dead thang.

Gaspar Noe makes incredibly happy films. In this one, he shows the viewer things they probably never thought they'd see and likely wouldn't want to. Queasy cinematography and hallucinatory hijinks, a true assault on the senses, make this unlike anything you've ever seen before unless you happened to see the only other Noe move on my blog, Irreversible. Noe attacks your eyes and ears and intentionally, I suspect, working to make the viewer a little nauseous, all while showing you things that you appreciate because you haven't seen anything like it on the screen before. I watched a great deal of this bloated guided tour through the world's most dismal kaleidoscope with mouth agape. And yes, I'm aware that there's a misplaced modifier in that sentence, but this movie took away my ability to fix things like that. Even the opening credits floored me, electric and shocking, especially when compared to the syrupy, more reflective pace of the movie. The mostly first-person perspective is unique, and Noe takes the viewer over the city, through light bulbs, deep into the past, despairingly into the future, into human beings, and pretty much anywhere else he feels like taking us. And looking at this from a purely technical standpoint, I don't see how he does it exactly and would label this a masterpiece, though not always an easy-to-watch masterpiece. The problem is that the movie is way too long, and the acting, especially from the kid who plays the lead, is bad in distracting ways. Both of those issues really take away some of the power this movie could have had. It's still an experience though, one that I'm not likely to ever forget, and I would recommend it to my more adventurous readers. Warning, however: It's not really very happy.

Visioneers

2008 dystopian comedy

Rating: 13/20

Plot: George Washington Winsterhammerman is a lowly employee at the Jeffers Corporation in the not-terribly-distant future. People begin exploding from stress, and when impotent and disenchanted George begins experiencing some of the warning signs, he looks for a way to prevent it from happening.

This feels way too much like something that I've already seen a few times. It also doesn't feel like a very complete movie. I like Zach Galifianakis fine as a bumbling everyman, but his story is a sketchy one, and I never really feel like I have a grasp on the world in which he lives. Or sort of lives. There are some nice enough ideas here, and I like what the movie has to say even though it's been said so many times already in other movies.

But I am glad I stuck around to see Aubrey Morris, that guy from A Clockwork Orange and The Wicker Man (the good one, not the comedy with Nicolas Cage), make an appearance. He's great!

Bunny and the Bull

2009 comedy

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Agoraphobic Stephen revisits a trip through Europe with pal Bunny by discovering artifacts from the holiday around his cluttered home. The flashbacks include visits to museums, a visit to a bed and breakfast with a stuffed bear, and the meeting of a Spanish waitress who tags along.

A road movie through a damaged subconscious. If you don't like quirkiness, have an aversion to British neo-Python absurdity, or just despise anything inventive, you can go ahead and stay away from this. Wackiness keeps the viewer from really feeling the characters. They're goofy sketches instead of fully-realized flesh 'n' blood folk, but that's probably my only real complaint. The characters are likable though. Visually, this is wild and a lot of fun, like a Michael Gondry daydream, and although I wonder if it's something that would be funny for very many people, it made me laugh a few times. The stream-of-conscious gags don't come quite as rapid-fire as in the Paul King television show The Mighty Boosh, but fans of that type of humor will have a head start here. It's not all whimsy, however, because there's this melancholic undercurrent throughout this poor guy Stephen's story, and although you don't really know how things will end up, you know there will be tragedy. What you'll remember about this is that set design though, a blend of cheap animation and live action. It never looks expensive, but it does look like a labor of love, and it's just so much fun watching the camera zoom into, around, and through some of these sets, taking the characters in all these unexpected places. I was a little stressed when I started this one, and it melted a lot of that right away. It was definitely hard not to smile while watching this one.