Noises Off

1992 comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Some people try to put on a play.

I don't know why I'd never even heard of this movie until faithful reader Josh included it as one of his twelve selections on his "Museum Movie" list. I'm glad he brought it up because it was comedy gold from start to finish.

This is a Peter Bogdanovich adaptation of a stage production, and I imagine the camera's ability to move around a bit makes it more enjoyable that it would be in the theater. A lot of movies based on plays feel a little stiff; this is vivacious, mostly because of a rapidfire series of gags and great lines. This is in three acts where we essentially get to see the play performed three times--once in a last-minute rehearsal, once a behind-the-scenes look while it's being performed for an audience, and once more during a performance in Cleveland. Real-life conflicts intensify and get in the way of a production that depends on timing and rapport of the ensemble cast, and disastrous failure really isn't ever funnier.

Speaking of timing and rapport and ensembles casts, that's really what makes this movie so much fun. I guess one could make the argument that the script is so good--self-referential, stuffed with irony, peppered with smart slapstick and great visual gags that a lot of people might not even catch the first time through--that any performers thrown in there would be fine. I thought this collective was fantastic though. I haven't liked Michael Caine this much in a long time as the exasperated, philandering director. Comic legend Carol Burnett gives a spirited performance. Christopher Reeve, who I don't think I'd normally associate with comedy, is almost too big and dorky to fit on stage with everybody, but he proves he had some comedy chops. John Ritter always makes anything he's in better. I always love seeing Julie Hagerty. And Denholm Elliott is hilarious, too. Even if you hate laughing and have no interest in watching a bunch of people trying to be funny, this is worth seeing to appreciate the timing of these actors, the masterful way the visual gags--a simple thing like opening and closing doors, for example--are set up, and these performers not trying to outdo each other but working with each other to create something magical.

This should be closer to a highly-regarded comedy classic than it is. It's quick and witty, faithful to traditional Hollywood comedy while still seeming completely fresh almost 25 years after its release.

Mean Girls

2004 comedy

Rating: 12/20 (Jen: 15/20; Emma: 14/20)

Plot: Formally homeschooled Cady navigates the cliqueish waters of her new high school and infiltrates a group of preppy and snobbish mean girls called The Plastics.

I just want to point out that watching this was not my idea. It's not a Rachel McAdams thing at all. As likable as she is in the dozen or so time travel movies she's in--and I haven't stopped thinking about her since I watched About Time--she's completely unlikable here. Of course, she's supposed to be unlikable, so I guess it's a job well done. Lindsey Lohan is supposed to exist somewhere in the gray area between likable and unlikable, but I thought she leaned too much toward the latter to make the character work.

Tina Fey's written better stuff. This is a return to 80's teen comedies, like a Heathers without as much darkness or anybody doing weird Jack Nicholson impersonations. I don't think the satire really connects, and it's only funny in spurts. Tim Meadows was just about my favorite part of the movie actually.

Moron Movies

1985 collection of short films

Rating: 3/20

Plot: The story of how one man--Len Cella--came up with the idea for Vine, the short-video sharing technology.

See this guy?

That's Len Cella. If you don't like the look of that face, you're not going to watch this hour-long collection of his shenanigans because its the only face you're going to see.

These really do feel like Vines (I'm not sure if I'm using this term right. I'm too old to understand technology, after all. My son, in fact, just told me yesterday that nobody has or cares about blogs anymore, and here I thought my blog was about to take off.), and if I have to applaud anything, it's that Cella is doing something that I don't think anybody was doing at the time and really does kind of anticipate this whole anybody-can-be-a-celebrity idea that today's technology allows.

Unfortunately, I don't think there are a lot of people out there who would think Len Cella should be making short films for public consumption. I just can't imagine anybody being entertained by these, with the possible exception of Len Cella himself. As a kid, my brother and I made all these cassette tapes with these puppets we called Gnarlies. That's right--we recorded puppet shows on cassette. Why we did these with the puppets on our hands is still confusing to me. These weren't funny or clever or entertaining at all. They remind me of Len Cella, a guy who isn't really funny or clever or entertaining at all. The difference is that he should know better because he was an adult in the 80s when these were made. I imagine that he had some friends or coworkers always telling him how funny he was or something, and he decided that it was a gift that needed to be shared with the rest of the world.

Few, if any of these, were worth the amount of time it took for Len Cella to set up his camera. He rigs up things, little inventions like a cheap artificial heart or toothpaste tubes that he's punched holes in or boots tied to mattresses that he's leaned against trees, and probably is inventive enough to have one funny idea at some point in his life. Unfortunately, I don't think I saw that good idea anywhere in this collection.

Something strange happened as I watched these. And trust me--I did watch all 58 minutes of this first installment of Moron Movies. Yes, there is a sequel called, I think, More Moron Movies, something I doubt I'll ever see. But as I watched, I just kept getting sadder and sadder. I was sad for Len Cella who I dobut accomplished what he set out to accomplish. And I was sad for myself because I really started to feel that I was wasting my life away. It was one hour of my time, but this is the kind of shit I waste my time with all the time, and those hours with people like Len Cella add up.

By the time this was over, I was as depressed as I have been for a long time.

The short pieces range from a couple of seconds to maybe 20 seconds. Actually, I doubt any of these hit 20 seconds. They go by quickly enough that you'd think it wouldn't matter if they were bad. If one of the comedy bits is terrible, you don't have to wait long for another one. But that doesn't really apply when they're all terrible.

Here's the kind of genius you can expect from the appropriately-named Moron Movies:

--A caveman looks in a mirror and says, "Damn, I'm just as ugly as my friends. We're never gonna get anywhere being this ugly."
--Mount Rushmore 2
--"They didn't have any fingers left so they gave me a monkey's tail. It isn't worth a damn." And in a separate short: "They didn't have any ears left so they gave me a foot. I hate it." Predictably, by this point, he's got a shoe balanced over his ear.
--A "hamburger comedian" and later a "chicken comedian," shorts where meat with Groucho Marx glasses is dragged across the floor.
--"Jello makes a lousy doorstop." This is exactly what you think it would be.
--"I can type 90 words a minute, but nobody will hire me because I'm a shark."
--Ass appreciation class ("This is a good ass.")
--Learning that 80 frog farts can propel a canoe sixteen feet.
--A bit called "Perverted Cameraman," featuring nothing more than several zoomed shots of animal butts.
--Speed reading. Then  speed writing. Then speed sleeping. The kinds of ideas a kid might have a recess. "Hey, guys, watch me speed read!" before flipping through pages really quickly.
--Walking a pet 2x4
--Several shorts where he's attached baby bottle nipples onto his face and says they're warts. It scares you because it makes it seem like Len Cella has actually reproduced.
--"How about Dickie DooDoo Disease?"

The worst thing about this? Len Cella's fake laugh he does in this. It makes me sick to my stomach just thinking about it.

I wept as I typed most of this.

Time Travel Movie Fest: Repeat Performance

1947 crime drama

Rating: 13/20

Plot: A woman kills her husband right after midnight on New Year's Day, but then finds herself starting the previous year over with a chance to make things right. Will she manage to change that tragic outcome or is she trapped by fate?

"She made a wish, a tragic one at a magic time." That's almost poetry!

I really liked the idea behind this movie and am surprised it hasn't seen a remake or two. I like what we learn with poor Sheila Page's story, about how destiny's a "stubborn old girl." It's a cool story, but it lags in a 1940's way, and most of the performers overact. Well, I take that back. The woman all overact with those sort of loud exasperated woman voices. The guys all act ike guys in noirish 40's pictures. The music's gigantic, really in-your-face at times. It's almost comical during one scene where a character says, "He can walk," a sentence punctuated with this huge music.

This movie might be worth watching if you typically like films from this period, but it's a little frustrating that a story idea with so much potential winds up being so hohum. It's almost like the makers of this were fatigued after coming up with the idea and had nothing left when actually trying to tell the story.

Chef

2014 food movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A chef who doesn't understand how social media works gets himself into some trouble following a bad review and has trouble finding another job in the kitchen. He gets some help from Iron Man and starts up a food truck business with his sous-chef and his son.

This is the second food-related movie I've seen in the last week, and apparently I really like food movies or scenes where characters work with food. Maybe I'm supposed to be a foodie, but I don't think so because I can't stand that word. But I've liked food documentaries (I Like Killing Flies and Jiro Dreams of Sushi) and foodie dramas and comedies (Tampopo, Ratatouille, Soylent Green). There might be a Food Movie Fest in our future.

This is Jon Favreau's baby, and it seems like he might be a foodie. It looks like he knows what he's doing in the kitchen anyway. I suspect that he wrote and directed this movie just for the chance to get close to Scarlett Johansson and Sofia Vergara. Those are a pair of attractive human beings. Favreau's an attractive human being himself, but Vergara and Johansson? I'm not sure there's a man alive who could catch the eye of both of those women. I guess that goes to show you what a good personality and mad cooking skills can get you in life. Which reminds me--I need to learn how to cook. And I need to get a better personality.

Favreau really is likable. He's written himself a character that is flawed but has the type of heart and personality that makes you want to hang out with the guy. It's the only way that John Leguizamo's decisions in this movie make any sense actually. I really liked Leguizamo, too, a guy who always just seems so natural on screen. Here, it's almost like he didn't even realize he was in a movie at all. It's like he just thought he was hanging out with some buddies, cooking things and traveling across the country. There's one scene where Leguizamo makes a sandwich, and I swear, it's nearly sexual. I like a lot of the cast actually. Johansson and Vergara could just stand in the background, and I'd enjoy their presence. Amy Sedaris and Robert Downey Jr. have roles that are closer to cameos. Bobby Cannavale is an actor I've always liked, and I thought Oliver Platt made a fine foodie blogger. Foodie. God, I hate that word.

Best of all might be Emjay Anthony, this kid they found to play Favreau's son. I'm often overly critical of child actors, but Anthony was good, almost as much of a natural as Leguizamo. The actors, including Anthony, had a great rapport. The father/son relationship is as important to the movie as the food plot. All plots and subplots are a little uninspired and standard, and it's really the only thing that holds this back at all. It doesn't make anything that happens less sentimentally gripping, and Chef satisfies emotionally from beginning to end.

Actually, there's something else that annoyed me about this movie. Along with some modern references to reality television (Hell's Kitchen, Honey Boo Boo), a lot of this feels like an extended advertisement for Twitter. I wanted to penalize this a point for that, but the soundtrack, a just-about-perfect collection of eclectic sounds, is so good. It's heavy on Latino sounds and has a liveliness that perfectly accompanies this chef's journey.

And Mr. Bonetangles:

I could have watched that puppet for another 30 minutes.

Anyway, this is a very likable movie, one that inspired me to put cornstarch on my balls.

Time Travel Movie Fest: 12:01

1993 time loop adventure

Rating: 13/20

Plot: An office worker finds himself reliving the same day over and over again and tries his best to hero-up and save a woman he has a crush on from being murdered.

Same source material as the last movie in my Time Travel Movie Fest--a short story by Richard Lupoff--but with dramatically different results. This is more of a sci-fi thriller but with some comedy mixed in. The blend of lighthearted goofiness and the serious violent business doesn't always work all that well. This isn't terrible at all, especially for a television movie, but it has an inconsistent tone and suffers a bit from coming out around the same time as the more-memorable Groundhog Day.

I liked that we knew what was going on with the main character before he did. There's a little inconsistency with Jonathan Silverman's character Barry because he seems like a bumbling idiot a lot of the time and a little more heroic and suave at other times. There's more inconsistency with his love interest Lisa played by Helen Slater. Her shifts from icy to warm don't always work, and I'm not sure I ever liked her nearly as much as the main character. Martin Landau's in this, and he brings this dignity to the proceedings.

Unlike Groundhog Day, this makes an effort to explain scientifically what is going on with this character. Of course, it didn't make any sense to me, and I'm not sure if it's because it's just not sound science or because I'm stupid. Either way, the explanation isn't really anything I need in a movie like this.

I suspect that while I'll remember the big plot points for this one, the smaller details won't be all that memorable. This movie is likable enough but is strangely derivative for a story that should have been more wild or original.

Oh, and look! It's Danny Trejo playing a guy in jail. He played a prisoner in at least 8 movies from 1983 to 1993.

Time Travel Movie Fest: 12:01

1990 time loop story

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A guy with a briefcase finds himself stuck in a time loop that forces him to relive the same hour of his life over and over again. At least it's during his lunch.

I watched two versions of this Richard Lupoff story, and this short (around 25 minutes) was definitely the one I preferred. It stars Kurtwood Smith (that guy!) as the unfortunate soul stuck in this purgatorial crisis, and his best moment is when he goes completely nuts and just starts screaming. I waited for this to get wacky, but it retains this consistent existential tone. It begins in medias res, and unless you know there's a time-loopy plot, you really don't know what's even going on, just that Smith's character is a little intense for some reason. The explanation for the time loop is all pseudo-science mumbo-jumbo, but the science doesn't need to matter anyway. Instead, you're forced to think about what this poor individual is going through psychologically, and, for me at least, it made the experience a little horrifying. This kind of had the feel of a colorized Twilight Zone episode but without any Rod Serling. I really enjoyed it.

You can find this on Youtube if you're interested.

Time Travel Movie Fest: Premature

2014 teen sex comedy

Rating: 13/20

Plot: A teenager finds himself stuck in a raunchy rip-off of a Groundhog Day time loop ending and beginning each time he ejaculates. He finds himself reliving the same day over and over again until he gets it right.

I can't say I'm a huge fan of the genre, but I thought this movie was pretty funny. That plot synopsis up there probably makes it sound a little cheaper than it actually is. It's one of those movies that's clever while at the same time not being as clever as it thinks it is. The comedy is quick and modern. I don't like references to contemporary things--like Ellen Degeneres here--and not all of the jokes in this are going to stick. No pun intended. But the jokes come--no pun intended--fast and furiously, like a teenage boy, so you don't have to wait around too long before you find something that sort of works.

The protagonist is likable and, more importantly, believable. His dilemmas are your typical high school senior dilemmas--being bullied, finding love, getting into college, having your mother catch you post-jerk-off. I think I like the character more because he's never whiny, dealing with what comes at him with wit. His friend reminded me of Boner from Growing Pains, but a Boner who's freed from television to say whatever he wants to. The friend is played by Craig Roberts who I really liked in Submarine. Roberts gets a lot of the funniest lines. Brian Huskey gets a small but funny part as the principal, some kid named Adam Riegler adopts a unibrow to play an uber-smart kid, Steve Coulter plays the protagonist's dad and gets to say "When I was his age, I could fill a bucket," and there's a hilariously odd Israeli kid played by Jonathan Kleitman. Best of all is Alan Tudyk as the interviewer from Georgetown. Anytime a character can make you laugh at the word "lupus," you know an actor's nailing it.

This isn't for everybody, but if you've ever been interested in seeing an R-rated Boner, it's probably for you. I like these time loop movies, and this one has a nice little embedded lesson that I probably could have used back when I was too young to watch movies like this. It doesn't stray too far from its genre, but it's definitely not a complete waste of time and might be worth it just to see Alan Tudyk cry and ask, "Why were there only one set of footprints in the sand?"

Boner Stabone

Bad Movie Club: Thunderstorm: The Return of Thor

2011 superhero movie

Bad Movie Rating: 4/5 (Amy: 1/5; Fred: 2/5; Libby: 1/5; Ozzy: no rating; Johnny: 3.5/5; Josh: 4/5)

Rating: 2/20

Plot: Some devil worshipers led by a bald guy who overacts have to collect the Dragon's Crotch in order to summon Hel, a mean woman. It's up to a cop and a guy with a plastic superhero suit to save the day.

Libby: "Does this movie come with complimentary lube?"

This seems less like a movie and more like a group of people getting together to pretend to make a movie. It's endearingly cheap. The female baddie's name is Hel, so apparently they couldn't even afford that second L for her name. Her outfit appeared to be grabbed from the Halloween clearance shelves at a dollar store. Thor's hammer seems to be made out of the exact material that those jumbo wiffleball bats are made from. I mean, just look at these fuckers:

Do any of those people look like they belong in a movie? Do they even look like they belong on a community theater stage? The guy on the right is Jody Haucke who played the leader of the people who summon Hel, played by a wonky-eyed Emanuelle Carriere, a woman with the worst evil laugh I've ever heard. Haucke threw everything he had into his villainous enunciation. The hero was played by Ray Besharah who was too lame to be an actual superhero, something that worked in his favor since he was only accidentally a superhero anyway. After all, he wasn't Thor. Thor, or more accurately Thor's head, was played by writer/director Brett Kelly. Besharah played the guy who wore this:

I'm not even sure that picture makes the costume look all that cheap. His friend's bad hair and bad posture probably distracts you. But the bottom half of the costume is just a pair of black tights, and we suspected that Thunderstorm wasn't even able to move his arms in that suit.

Oh, but the piece de resistance:

That is a stop-motion dragon thing, and it's a work of art. It's a stop-motion creation that would make Harryhausen shit himself. The appearance of this thing in the final act of the movie elevated it from bunch-of-people-with-fifty-bucks-and-a-camera-hanging-out-and-making-a-movie-mostly-in-the-director's-garage to something close to award worthy. I'm not sure what awards those might be, but it's worthy of them.

You'll have to get past a 10-minute introductory scroll that is also read to us in a voice made inaudible by a loud soundtrack, but this is a fairly entertaining good-bad movie. There's some terrible fake blood, horrible writing, lame comic relief, henchmen who say "Yeah!" in unison way too much, about 1,000 uses of the word Ragnarok, my favorite line ever ("Whoa! Easy, fella!") following a death scene, and some of the worst fight scenes ever. You almost want to applaud the effort of the people involved with this because they're clearly having some fun; most of you, however, just wants to tell them to stop.

Special Television Show Post: True Detective (Season One)

2014 crime show

Rating: no rating

Plot: Troubled men try to solve a crime committed by people who might be even more troubled.

People who know me know I don't watch enough television. There were years I didn't even have access to television, and for significant chunks of my life, I haven't had cable. I've never had HBO. You hear enough about television shows though, and you want to fit in with the rest of the people, and this was one I figured I needed to check out. This is television that I think people will not only be watching years from now but probably even still talking about it.

I don't really like cop and crime shows, and in a way, this is just a bloated 8-hour episode of one of those. The extra space makes these characters and their sins--because we all, as this show constantly and bleakly reminds us, have our sins--authentic. Even at its wildest or most preposterous, this feels real. It's like an exaggerated version of the darkest and most degraded bits of human existence, but there's still something real about it, and that's because the characters are allowed to breathe. The mystery's allowed to breathe, too. Things unfold delicately, and even though there are definitely some cliffhanger moments strewn throughout the duration of this season, it's really the quieter mysterious bits that keep your eyes glued to the screen.

Those characters. Man, those characters. I'm not sure this works without Matthew McConaughey (have to look it up every single fucking time) and Woody Harrelson. There's not any insane deviation from what either of these guys normally do. McConaughey's playing the same guy he plays in the car commercials, quietly faux-philosophizing and always seeming a little alien. Harrelson's that same earthy male, the type of guy you worry might emerge from your television screen and thrust his belt buckle in your face. Both characters--Rust and Marty--spend considerable amounts of time brooding, and the hate-love relationship they build throughout this story is just terrific. You just know that one of these two guys will kill the other unless, more tragically, they end up killing each other. One thing you see over and over again is a shot of the two detectives in a car with McConaughey (I had to look at the beginning of the paragraph for the spelling this time) saying something wackily profound or profoundly wacky and Harrelson looking disgusted. As many times as that happened during this season, I never got sick of it. These are two characters who don't really like each other and can't really understand each other yet absolutely need each other, probably in ways that don't even make sense to them. And the performances from these dual-leads make the characters memorable and a lot of fun, even when they're at their most monotone. McConaughey gets great lines, most written like the type of thing that would come from an inebriated Raymond Chandler after a really bad series of days.

Reggie Ledoux. I have a theory that the makers of this show came up with that name first and said, "Wouldn't it be cool if Matthew McConaughey said that name?" and then wrote an entire show just to make it happen. I haven't been able to stop saying Reggie Ledoux using my best Matthew McConaughey impersonating skills--an impression that could only be described as horrific--since I first heard him say the name in episode three.

The auxiliary characters add so much color. Old black preachers, Southern white tent revival preachers, police guys with layers of movie grit, prostitutes, mentally-challenged individuals, And beautiful women. Alexandra Daddario is the type of actress who can cause you to start a midlife crisis, and part of me only wants to watch movies with her in them for the rest of my life. Michelle Monaghan makes you wonder what's going on in Marty's head. Beautiful actresses. I would argue that there's a little too much sex in this. I realize that makes me sound old though.

The best character isn't a character at all. It's the setting. This has a moody, Southern gothic feel, almost a Twin Peaks vibe without the backward-talking little people. Post-Katrina Louisiana feels a lot like a purgatory with it's wind-torn trees, flooded lands, dilapidated houses, places that are "like somebody's memory of a town." There are certain locations--a tree, an old fort, an abandoned church--where it seems like they found the location first and then figured out a scene that could be shot there with these characters. They started with Reggie Ledoux and moved on to the settings.

The music really works, too. I got sick of the theme song by The Handsome Family although I'm listening to it right now and like it out of that opening music context. T. Bone Burnett brought attention to some great American folk music with what he collected for O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and he might do the same here with gospel and new-folk weirdness. Burnett has a gift for finding music that is perfect for the setting and probably, if I'd pay a little more attention, the themes. Here, you get a lot of gospel, some blues, some country, the Kinks, little Dylan, Vashti Bunyan, Townes Van Zandt, Father John Misty, and so on. It's an eclectic mix that somehow all manages to sound like this exact place and time.

People keep telling me that television productions have become just as good as movies, and I almost believed them with Breaking Bad. This is tense, impactful storytelling with a philosophical edge, and I'm glad writer Nic Pizzolatto wasn't constricted by the confines of a 2 hour movie. Cary Fukunaga has a great last name and must have had a nice budget to work with. This has many great individual scenes, but there are two that I want to bring up as the best example of how television drama has caught up with movie productions.

First, is a scene where McConaughey's character is working undercover. Things go great, pretty much like you expect them to, and there's an extended sequence shot that was as good as anything you'll see in a movie. The camera movements are sophisticated, and there are so many characters and so much action that you watch the whole thing stunned, not because of what was going on with any of the characters but because of the technical aspects. At least I was.

The second is a scene where they catch they get their man. You know the characters are going to survive because you see them talking in the future and know it's all a flashback, but there's still some great tension. And there's great juxtaposition between the story they are telling the interviewers and the reality that we see on the scene. It's masterfully done.

True Detective is as dark as anything you're likely to see on television, and it's not just dark because of what is happening on the screen but in the way it kind of gets under your skin. You might see a little of yourself in these exaggerated characters, might identify with their situations, and as they progress through this murky story, it makes you feel a little dirty. If you don't see yourself, you'll definitely see that this storyline with its disturbed characters doing disturbing deeds is definitely holding a filthy mirror to society, that the issues raised here and the philosophies and illnesses driving this are burbling beneath the surface of the real world. And that's what really makes things so dark, cynical, pessimistic. You recognize it. At the end, there are characters using a cheesy star-and-sky and light-vs.-dark metaphor. The characters, like they do throughout this entire season, don't agree. I was definitely on the Woody Harrelson's side on this one though, and that's not just because he had a belt buckle and a giant chin.

Seriously, Woody Harrelson's chin is huge now.

I easily liked the first 5 episodes more than the last 3 episodes in this season, but the whole thing kept my interest during the two days I watched this. I probably won't watch it again even though I'd love to look for more ways to connect--thematically--the issues with Marty and his family and the criminal acts at the center of this. I will, however, look forward to subsequent seasons to see how they explore these themes further. I'm not sure how they can dig deeper into the darkness, but it'll be fun to watch them try.

By the way, I want to point out that as horrible as I am at figuring out mysteries and seeing twists way ahead of big revelations, I had a hunch about this one that turned out to be correct. Maybe it was supposed to be more obvious than I thought it was.

I should get a belt buckle.

Time Travel Movie Fest: The Last Mimzy

2007 family sci-fi movie

Rating: 9/20 (Abbey: 11/20; Buster: stopped watching)

Plot: A pair of annoying children find a magic box with a stuffed bunny and a bunch of rocks that they keep referring to as "toys" for some reason. They all try to solve the mystery of where this crap came from and why.

Sprite, the preferred soft drink of Mimzies. That and some sneakier Intel product placement are sickening.

This movie has enough ideas for sixteen different movies. At one point, a black guy says, "Am I the only one here who doesn't have a clue what's going on?" I answered my television, "No, you aren't!" I was confused, and it wasn't in that pleasant way where a movie is mysterious and allows you to gradually figure things out. No, this just seemingly throws every idea the writers have ever had at you with the hope that you won't be bored by anything. There are kids hitting golf balls 300 years ("Whoa! We've found your sport!" is one of those reactions that makes it seem like the writers don't know how humans really act), levitation with everybody screaming and screeching, Lewis Carroll allusions (I guess I should have recognized "mimzy" from "The Jabberwocky," but I believe it's spelled with an 's'), aliens that the Doctor Who show would reject for not looking real enough, floating rocks, Hindu ritual symbols, palm reading, techno-bunnies. There's just so much going on all the time, usually accompanied by an unrelenting score. Blame Howard Shore for that.

You can't blame Howard Shore for the acting. Rainn Wilson plays a hippie teacher, and his performance is almost embarrassing. I blame the writing more than I blame Wilson though, and I even suspect that the actor, after spending a few weeks reading these terrible lines, just decided to sabotage the production. Just listen to him yelp out, "What are you doing driving a truck? You're a little boy!" Wilson isn't the worst actor in the movie. No, that blue ribbon goes to Julie the Babysitter played by Randi Lynne. Her lone scene features this freakout, and I'm wondering how many times they had to film it before deciding that they weren't going to get anything that was more realistic.

Maybe I was supposed to think the babysitter scene was funny, but I know I wasn't supposed to be laughing at some of this. The awkward scene where Rainn Wilson's girlfriend is reading palms:

"This is a very good hand."
And later: "This is a very special hand!"

The Roger Waters song that plays over the end credits also made me laugh, but then it made me cry. It's the kind of thing that happens when Roger Waters and Howard Shore combine forces, I guess. Look at these crappy lyrics:

"Is there anybody in there?
Have you heard, it was on the news,
Your child can read you like a bedtime story,
Like a magazine,
Like a has-been out to grasp,
Like afternoon TV.
Why is my life going by so fast?

Hello I love you.
Is there anybody in there?
Put down the phone, shut up the shop, make all the techno babble stop.
We'll find a short-wave frequency,
The wave connecting you and me.
Hello I love you."

You can look at those and probably know exactly what this song sounds like because all of Roger Waters' songs sound exactly the same. It's one of the most awful things that's ever happened.

I also laughed at the seizure the little girl has after seeing those Doctor Who aliens. And really, you should never laugh at a little girl having a seizure. I laughed at how fake-looking it looked when the FBI busted into the house to arrest everybody. I laughed when a scientist ripped the stuffed bunny from the little girl's hands. I laughed at a line--"Do you have a copy machine? We have to figure out a way to document this!"

The biggest problem with this movie is that it forces you to follow around some annoying children for an hour and a half. Rhiannon Leigh Wryn has a pretentious name and plays the little girl in this. She was somewhere around six when this was filmed, so everything she does can probably be forgiven. However, Chris O'Neil is the type of kid you wish you could create a time-traveling punching rabbit for so that you could cheer yourself up on bad days by sending it into the past to attack him. Yes, I realize how cruel that is, and I'd probably think more seriously about editing it right out of there if I ever proofread these things or if I thought anybody might read it. It's not the child actors as much as it's annoying characters. At times, this feels like a public service announcement for getting rid of technology. The kids always have their faces in video games, even a portable device when they're on a boat. They watch television at dinner. And they also cheat on math tests. This movie really does make children look terrible. It would be interesting to send a copy of this movie into the 1950's via a time-traveling bunny just to see how kids in that decade would react to seeing how kids in the 21st Century act. That might actually save future children from their fates. 50's children would turn into adults who think, "No! No! We can't let this happen to humanity!" and make sure emoticons and Pong never happen.

At one point, the dad tells his son that he's the "greatest kid [he knows]," and I was thinking, "Have you seen the beginning of this movie, Dad?"

Ok, I'm in too bad of a mood to write a blog entry about a family movie. Blame Howard Shore, Roger Waters, and Sprite.

I'm guessing this is their reaction to seeing their work in this movie.

This movie really did put me in a bad mood while watching it. And now, while writing about it, it's put me in a bad mood again. I'd like to apologize to anybody whose feelings I might have hurt in this blog entry. 

Not you though, Roger Waters. You're the one who owes me an apology. 

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift

2006 sequel

Rating: 10/20

Plot: A troubled teen moves in with his father in Japan and gets involved with the racing scene. Drifting.

I'd probably have to watch the second installment in this franchise again, but I think I like this one more than 2 Fast 2 Furious. Not that I liked it though. This suffers from the lack of Vin Diesel, something that still feels like a weird thing to type. New protagonist Lucas Black has almost no charisma. He's just a punk kid, and it's not surprising that they decided to leave him out of these other Fast and Furious movies although I think I heard he's in the new one. Shad Moss, better known as Bow Wow, does bring a little more character as Twinkie and has most of the best one-liners. Loved the bit where he hands Black a box of Kleenex before a ride in his ridiculous car--"for when you blow your wad, man." And really, how could you not blow your wad when you're riding in a car that looks like this:

Hell, the thing's got hair! 

Sung Kang's Han character isn't a terribly interesting character in the Fast and Furious movies that follow this one--you know, the Tokyo Drift prequels. I'm still not entirely sure how that works exactly and how the post-credits scene in the sixth one even makes sense, but if you're looking for movies that make sense, perhaps this isn't the franchise for you. Kang spends much of this movie snacking in a cool way. I was most excited to see Sonny Chiba's name attached to this. For whatever reason, he's JJ Sonny Chiba, and he unfortunately doesn't have a whole lot to do. He doesn't even drift! Not even once! 

Here's a confession: I only watched this movie because I thought it would help me with my Mario Kart skills. I've been driving a Mario Kart vehicle that is shaped like a bear which, if you think about it, isn't that much sillier than some of the cars you see in this movie. You know, like the one with hair and fists popping out the side. There's also a scene where a character throws a blue shell at another character. After watching this drift-heavy movie--seriously, if you play a drinking game where you drink every time a character talks about drifting, you'll die while watching this--I started drifting for every single turn in the game, but it didn't help. In fact, I went from my usual 9th place finishes to 10th or 11th place. 

Without charismatic characters--Vin Diesel does, by the way, have a brief cameo at the end, but it's too little and too late--you have to depend on the cars to bring the personality. Things start fine. This movie doesn't waste any time at all and throws the stupid at you right at the beginning with a race that would never have happened and doesn't make any sense while it's happening. Once we get to Tokyo, the cars all look pretty much the same to me, and there really isn't a single race or chase that grabs me like the action sequences in movies 4-6. Maybe those spoiled me since I watched them first. 

Thematically, this feels a little dangerous to me. One character tells another to "make choices and don't look back," and it just seems like that "No fear!" philosophy could get people in trouble, especially since most people are incapable of making good choices. If you're going to live your life following that advice, I guess you'd better make sure you have a good supply of Kleenex. 

Favorite moment: A Snickers commercial in the middle of the movie. It's embarrassing. 

Time Travel Movie Fest: Sound of My Voice

2011 mystery

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Two documentary filmmakers infiltrate a cult led by a woman who claims to be from the year 2054.

This is a movie you either like a little bit or really hate. I'll know exactly why people hate it. Those who hate it will cite its inability to answer questions or its deceptiveness, and I wouldn't blame them because those are the reasons I might actually hate this movie, too. However, there's just something about this one that grabbed me and kept me interested for the duration. There's a mystery here, mostly because characters on both sides of the argument are so sure are so sure about what's happening that you really want to believe them. You want to side with the skeptics because that's what common sense tells you to do anyway, and you've got presuppositions about cults anyway. And you want to side with the people all ready to drink the Kool-aide because their leader is hot and they have a really cool secret handshake.

Side note: I'm probably not going to join a cult although I did attend Johnson Bible College (now University) for 3 semesters which is close enough. But if I ever do join a cult, I hope they don't have a secret handshake because I'm not convinced I'd be able to remember it.

The characters are all so sure of themselves that all the cracks on either side just ooze. It makes it impossible to know what to trust, and Zal Batmanglij (wait a second--Batman with a typo after it?) toys with the audience in a way that, at least for me, didn't seem to obvious or annoying. The mystery evolved organically, and we get the find out things pretty much when the documentary filmmakers find things out.

This could have easily been yet another found footage affair, and I wonder if it wasn't planned to be something like that. As much of a fan as I am of the found footage genre (I'm one of the few who isn't tired of the whole thing), I'm glad this wasn't. The more-traditional storytelling, even though this doesn't have a beginning/middle/end that will satisfy most people, worked well. I also credit this with refusing to become something that you might expect it to be. It could have transformed into more of a thriller or even a horror movie; instead, it just kind of remains mysterious.

The acting's adequate enough to make this all believable enough, and Brit Marling--as the cult leader who may or may not be from the future--comes close to standing out. The control she has over her lines and this character is almost hypnotic, and there's a great moment where she sings a song by the Cranberries where there's this alluring vulnerability. It's one of those cracks that I was talking about earlier, but at the same time, the confidence her character has in the story she's trying to tell mystifies.

The God of Cookery

1996 cooking action movie

Rating: 13/20

Plot: The arrogant title character gets his comeuppance and has to climb his way back to the top with the help of some new friends.

This story's derivative, the kind of thing that clashes with the sort of energetic creativity you'd expect from a Stephen Chow movie. This is more manic than your typical action-comedy hybrid, but it's not quite as nutsy, or as polished, as Chow's more famous-in-America later films. A couple years before Shaolin Soccer, this movie feels like a guy still trying to find his voice. Most of my issues with the movie involve the storytelling. First, Chow's playing a character whose redemption is tough to root for. He's just such an asshole for the first twenty minutes of this movie. "Asshole," is the word they use, by the way. There are so many uses of that epithet, and I wasn't sure if it was a recurring joke (definitely possible), lazy writing, or lazy translations. Even when we reach a point in the movie where we're supposed to start liking Chow's character, he still kind of seems a little jerky. I guess they attempted to make the villain, Bull Tong, a more despicable character, but it was still pretty neck and neck. Bull Tong, which isn't dirty at all, sounds like it should be dirty.

There's a character in this named Wet Dream, by the way.

Another storytelling issue is the pacing. There's a moment in this movie where the romantic side plot made things wacky. You suddenly get people being shot in the face, Chow ages dramatically, and you have no idea what just happened. Later, they flashback to explain the whole thing, but it's almost like they had to do that because they forgot part of the story. Of course, even the totally random musical number about honesty sung by Turkey, a woman with jacked-up teeth, winds up factoring into the story, so maybe this storytelling is tighter than I thought.

If Jennifer Lopez played Turkey in a remake of this, you know she'd throw in a "Gobble Gobble" or two. 

The plot or even the characters aren't really what's important with this movie though. This is more about a series of madcap scenes that add up to something fairly entertaining. I enjoyed the cooking scenes, movements accentuated with kung-fu sound effects. A lot of the food prep montage stuff is very entertaining in this, most notably when Chow fries an egg in his hand. You know, because that is a badass move. There's also a fun moment where characters are lined up and have to say some variation of "Scumbag, go shove your beef balls right up your backside" so that a tough guy can figure out how dared say that to him. I wasn't quite mature enough to handle a scene where character discuss "spitting beef balls," or a character named Goosehead trying them, drenching everybody around him with beef juice, and then dancing gaily on the beach in a dream sequence. Some of the dialogue in this is fun, sometimes because of the dubbing/translations. "I will walk all over your dead body in victory!" is the type of line that more cooking shows needs, and I'm going to have to try to remember that if I'm ever engaged in competition of any kind. Best of all is a trio of flashbacked appearances by the 18 Brass Men of the Shaolin Monastery. You've got to like their style, and you've got to like how when they're engaged in fisticuffs, at least two of them just kind of pose in the foreground for no reason. This movie's got a wacky ending with dogs and angels and a twist that I predicted, probably because it was easy to predict. Nothing set me up for "Joy to the World" being played over the closing credits. What the hell was that all about? 

Spitting beef balls. Wet Dream. Nope, I wasn't mature enough to even watch this movie. 

The Conformist

1970 drama

Rating: 18/20

Plot: Marcello wants to be like all the other Fascist family men, but he's having a difficult time after being sent to Paris to assassinate his former professor.

I could easily write a thousand words, but you wouldn't read them, they probably wouldn't make that much sense, and pictures are better anyway. They're better in the case of The Conformist, at least, since the very best thing about this incredible movie is how it looks. The composition, the cinematography, the haunting colors, the camera angles. This is one of the most beautiful movies I've ever seen. Don't believe me? Click on the picture below to go to a site that collects a bunch of stills from this movie.

Everything's so perfectly framed, but it's not in a way that seems artificial. It's dreamlike, visuals that fit the anti-fairytale story, and it's really exhilarating. I think my favorite shots out of all the beautiful shots in this involve Stefania Sandrelli, the woman who plays Marcello's fiancee, a woman in a white and striped dress moving about a room where Venetian blinds cut stripes in the room. Or maybe it's a scene where a painting transitions into a coast, the clouds in the painting lingering to become the clouds in the sky. Or maybe it's a shot in a club where a window above the characters' heads shows pedestrians' legs passing back and forth. Or maybe it's that low-angled autumnal shot of swirling leaves and an automobile. Or maybe it's the shot of an eagle statue and a bust being carried, symbolism that I don't even understand. Or maybe it's lights breaking through winter trees.

Jean-Louis Trintignant stars in one of those complicated roles. There's a humor to the character, or at least a mild absurdity. Ultimately, he's a tragic figure, and that's not spoiling anything because you know he's going to be a tragic figure the whole time. I've liked Trintignant in the past--Amour, The Great Silence--and he's really good here. The woman, Sandrelli and Dominique Sanda, are alluring in their different ways, and they needed to be; otherwise, the story doesn't work. I also liked Gastone Moschin playing this sort of heavy, especially when he was silent. They're all pieces in a psychologically complex story complete with political intrigue, sex, and murder. My knowledge of European politics and especially fascism isn't strong enough to fully understand all the angles of this story. The connection between sex and violence puzzled me, too. The connection seemed obvious, but I didn't quite get what was being said, at least universally.

This isn't all despair though. There was quite a bit of humor in this, too. And I loved this line, one delivered by a blind person if I'm recalling things correctly: "A normal man is one who turns his head to look at a woman's bottom and notices that five or six others have done the same thing." That's a paraphrase, by the way.

Go look at more stills from this movie.