The Darjeeling Limited

2007 dramatic comedy

Rating: 15/20 (Jen: 18/20)

Plot: Three brothers who haven't seen each other in the year following the funeral of their father embark on a spiritual journey via train through India. Along the way, they annoy people, argue, whine about stuff, search for spiritual awakening, get high, act like Americans, nearly bond, argue again, and annoy more people. Relationships are strained as they run into problems and uncover truths, and they eventually find themselves thrown off the train and stranded in the desert with far too many suitcases and a laminating machine. Hotel Chevalier, a short featuring Jason Schwartzman's character and co-starring Natalie Portman's ribs, preceeds the feature.

More amusing Life Aquatic than brilliant Rushmore or Tenenbaums but filled with plenty of heart and subtle humor just like you'd expect from Wes Anderson's movies. The movie bursts with color, and meticulous direction (I can just imagine lots of "That camel needs to be moved two and a half feet to the left.") adds to the already natural on-location beauty. The characters, though wallowing in their own faults, are likable, and their rapport is often hilarious--the "asshole" line forced a giggle out of me again, and a character's line about a tiger got me this time. Lots of film-school-type symbolism in this, especially in the end, and the story seems a little clunky at times. I believe I liked this exactly .5 points more than when I saw it in the theater (Jen's rating increased a full point), and there may be more connections or secrets picked up in future viewings. And that's really the best thing about Anderson's movies--I can watch these again and again. He's another director whose quirky attention to detail and subtle humor molds movies that couldn't be made by anybody else. Oh, and the music, mostly recycled stuff from Indian film soundtracks with some Kinks and Rolling Stones thrown in, really works well throughout.

Us:

Color Me Kubrick: A True...ish Story

2005 comedic biopic

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Alan Conway, a man who knows seemingly nothing about reclusive director Stanley Kubrick (even which movies he directed as one scene indicates) or looks remotely like him, tricks people into thinking he is Stanley Kubrick, successfully getting them to give him money, buy him drinks and cigarettes, or have sex with him. Based on a true story.

This was humorous and it was a lot of fun watching Malkovich chew up scene after scene. His performance really is exciting to watch--he contorts, his face dances, he switches from accent to accent, the comedic timing is great. The frequently obnoxious overacting just felt right for this role. Not sure about the pay-off; at times, this seemed like a 90-minute meandering joke. Lots of musical and visual references to Kubrick's films, especially A Clockwork Orange, but that sort of comes across as a bit too much.

Note: Reference to Luis Bunuel--there's a rock band in the movie called Exterminating Angels. Conway rides in their colorful van, and they buy him drinks and fags.

Here I am impersonating myself (unsuccessfully):

The American Astronaut

2001 science fiction western musical comedy

Rating: 16/20
Plot: The title character, a Hans Solo-esque smuggler, delivers a cat to the owner of a bar on an asteroid near Jupiter. He's given a case containing the goods needed to clone a real live girl. Girls apparently are rare in space. While at the bar, a pair of men take a picture of him while he's on the toilet. The astronaut meets up with an old friend, the Blueberry Pirate, who deals in some kind of illegal interplanetary fruit trade. They win a dance contest after an elderly man tells a painfully long joke. A task is assigned: the astronaut needs to transport the real live girl to Jupiter, exchange her for The Boy Who Actually Saw a Woman's Breast, take the boy to Venus (a planet inhabited by only women), and then do something else. Complicated plan. I lost track. A sinister serial killer called Professor Hess hopes to foil those plans.
Rating note: I took the average of what I would have rated this movie now, what a normal person would rate this movie, and what I would have rated this movie in high school when it more than likely would have been my favorite movie of all time. It only seemed fair.
Creative, juvenile fun. It's a science fiction western musical comedy after all. There's an almost unbearable amount of campiness but at the same time spectacular cinematography, creative set design, really solid acting, and low budget artsiness. Cheap special effects (slowing down film shot at twice the speed, lots and lots of shadows to take advantage of the crisp black and white, the use of paintings of asteroids and spaceships and space barns to show spaceflight) add charm, and I really liked the rock songs, awkwardly traditional and absurd (see "The Girl with the Glass Vagina"). Sort of like a trippy Buck Rogers with the cinematography and cadence of Eraserhead , almost like a 12-year-old Luis Bunuel trying to direct a sci-fi flick right after he'd discovered girls and Rocky Horror. Beyond quirky, sometimes almost frustratingly so, but at the same time completely original and lots of fun. This is Cory McAbee's labor of love (he wrote/storyboarded for three years, directed, starred in, and performed all music with his band The Billy Nayer Show), and it's created with unbridled enthusiasm and vision. It's unfortunate that he probably doesn't have the money or the audience to do much more.
Here I am enjoying The American Astronaut:

Performance

1970 half-Gangster/half-psychedelic movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Chas is a heartless thug of a gangster who ticks off his boss, Harry Flowers. Flowers sends other thugs to rough up Chas to punish him for his choices, and during the proceedings, one of those thugs is murdered. Chas is then forced to leave the gangster movie and enter a trippy rock 'n' roll video. He hides out in the basement of Turner, an aging rocker played by aging rocker Mick Jagger, and gradually the madness and counter-culture of Turner and his two female roommates assimilates Chas until boundaries are broken and identities merge.

Disorientingly lewd enough to, according to legend, cause a Warner Bros. exec's wife to vomit during a screening. Lots of color swirls, jump cuts, general choppiness, and experimental shots make this an interesting product of the late 1960's. The juxtaposition between the worlds of the gangster and the rocker is jarring but blurred mostly by eccentric offbeat style--jumpiness, weird angles, close-ups, crazy Moog music, psychedelic colors. That juxtaposition is a common theme with Nicholas Roeg, it seems. (See The Man Who Fell to Earth and Walkabout.) Like almost every other Roeg movie I've seen, it just seems incomplete; something missing is keeping it from being a really great film instead of just a really interesting one. (Note: co-directed by Donald Cammell) Visually arresting and thematically compelling, including a final twenty minutes that seems deliberately perplexing and left open to interpretation, this is something worth seeing again.

Lucyfer the Dog trying to stop me from watching Performance:

Girl on a Motorcycle

1968 drama


Rating: 9/20


Plot: A leather-clad woman sneaks loudly away on her motorcycle while her husband slumbers because she'd rather be with another lover, a guy whose hair doesn't sit nearly as high. Along the way, she drives recklessly and, when not writhing on her seat with a goofy expression on her face, thinks way too much.


aka Naked Under Leather, this erotic psychedelia has a few moments as exhilarating as I imagine either riding 120 mph on a motorcycle or wearing leather or a combination of the two would be. Most moments unfortunately are just dated--the use of superimposition and acid colors made it seem like I was looking at the backdrop of a Jefferson Airplane concert at times. There were also too many scenes in which characters drove through Sillyland, very obviously in front of a screen and not on an actual moving motorbike. The story should be simple enough, but it's clunked up with flashbacks and fantasy and sometimes flashbacks within flashbacks and flashbacks within fantasies and fantasies within flashbacks. There might even be a fantasy inside of a flashback within another fantasy. The narrative is also dominated by an annoying voiceover that eventually made me wish Marianne Faithful would crash head on into something and fly through the air into the windshield of an oncoming car. Admittedly, I was a little cranky after a circus dream sequence near the beginning that ended much too soon. Actually, I would be very interested in watching a 91-minute prequel called Girl Standing on a Horse, but I'm not sure I want to see the current Marianne Faithful naked.



On second thought!

Here I am, bored with the movie and wondering if I should get my own motorcycle:

Die Hard

1988 action adventure

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A tough New York City cop flies to L.A. on Christmas Eve to spend the holidays with his wife and children. He's dropped at a 40 story skyscraper by his crazy limo driver because that's where the Super Ultra Fun Classical Music Christmas Extravaganza is being held. While washing his armpits, terrorists led by Professor Snape bust in with a too-elaborate plan to steal some things from the building and then go spend time talking about the time they came up with an elaborate plan to steal some things from the building. They break in, kill a couple people who may or may not have even gotten their names in the credit (Guy Who Died After Silly Dialogue #1 and Guy Who Died More Painfully After More Painful Dialogue #2?), shut down all the elevators, take an elevator to floor 30, begin shooting unnecessarily, and take hostages. Meanwhile, John McClane finishes washing his second armpit. He sneaks away, forgetting his shoes, and then causes all kinds of problems for the terrorists. Professor Snape gets mad. There are lots of explosions. They decide to settle things the way all men should settle things--a quip off! The antagonists exchange witticisms via walkie-talkie until one gives up and commits seppuku. Then everything explodes!

Silly fun and thrills, probably top shelf action movie stuff but nonetheless big and dumb. A lot of this just doesn't make sense, and the script is peppered with that typical 80's action movie banter and one liners. An adrenaline rush, and I had popcorn by the fistfuls. More popcorn than you can shake a machine gun at, motherfuckers! There wasn't much at all realistic about this, but at least John McClane is neither flat or invincible. The static setting of the 40-story building, partially incomplete, adds tension, and the special effects help make this as ridiculous as a movie should be allowed to be.

Here I am wondering if Bruce Willis's character is going to survive the movie (Spoiler alert! He does!):

The Saddest Music in the World

2003 dramatic comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: It's 1933 in Canada, and a legless woman has hopes of selling lots of beer. A contest to see which country has the saddest song is announced, and hopefuls flock to Winnipeg to induce tears and try to win 25,000 depression dollars. A World War I veteran and his two sons are reunited as they represent Canada, the United States, and Serbia in the contest. The father longs for the legless woman, a woman whose legs he amputated (one by mistake) following a car accident. One son happened to be driving that car, wrecking after the beer baroness was through pleasuring him orally. The other son mopes around because his wife disappeared after the death of their son. He carries that son's heart in a jar and whines a lot. The countries have their battle of the bands, the winners receiving a thumbs-up from the host before taking a slide into a giant tub of beer. Happily, the beer baroness gets a new pair of legs fashioned entirely from glass and filled with beer. Unhappily, the father and sons find it difficult to discover happiness in their attempts to produce sad tunes.

It's all about the images, the tone, and the texture with this one. Guy Maddin pays homage to the silent era with his films, filming this one with ancient equipment and forgotten techniques, mixing fuzzy black and white with tempered color scenes and blueish or sepia tones. The result is startling, and along with a jarring soundtrack and perverse camera angles and oddly rich and rhythmic backgrounds, this manages to remind you of Metropolis and exist as something entirely new at the same time. This forces you to watch carefully, sucking you in with absorbing imagery and constructing this odd little dreamlike world around you. There are some campy moments, but the dark humor and quick pacing make this something that I almost want to immediately watch again. I've only previously seen one other Maddin movie (Tales from Gimli Hospital which, after reading my notes, I didn't seem to get), and this retains the weirdness and personal filmmaking touches but has lots more story. Nobody makes movies as ridiculous and ridiculously beautiful as The Saddest Music in the World. Special note: Maria de Medeiros is stunning and has the perfect face for a 1920's silent movie. I think it's the eyes.

Here I am, just as stunning:

Knocked Up

2007 romantic comedy

Rating: 7/20 (Jen: 11/20)

Plot: A woman gets knocked up by a loser. Lives are changed.

I didn't like this movie at all. I do sort of like Seth Rogan as an everyman, but he doesn't have enough character to sustain a movie that is far too long. There wasn't much that even scratched the surface of funny, and topical material will keep this firmly in the late oughts even with the timeless subject matter, subject matter, I might add, that is ALWAYS hilarious. I believe this might have worked for two and a half seasons as a television sitcom, but only if it came on right after and right before shows that people really like to watch. This idea of making 'chick flicks' with vulgar humor to appeal to male undergrads is probably a good one though.

Note: Tom Waits makes an appearance on Paul Rudd's character's shirt. It's the cover of Raindogs, the same picture used in one of Jim Carrey's memories in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That movie is referenced with a movie poster that Seth Rogan's character hangs in his apartment. It's the circle of life!

Me and part of Jen's head:

Grandma's Boy

1922 romantic comedy

Rating: 12/20

Plot: A lily-livered nerd likes a girl. His childhood nemesis, a bully, likes the same girl. In the small rural community in which that title character lives with his grandmother, a tough old bitch, there's a fugitive robbin' and murderin' miscreant on the loose. Cowardly Grandma's Boy joins a group of men who set out to capture the tramp but can't overcome his fear. His grandmother tells him the nutty story of his Civil War hero of a grandfather and gives him a special amulet, and then the movie ends exactly how you think it will.

This is far too typical, and the gags seem at least 85 years old. Gags, like bread, can't survive for 85 years. Harold Lloyd pulls out the whole step-on-a-rake-and-hit-yourself-in-the-face gag. And if I find out that this is the first film that used the step-on-a-rake-and-hit-yourself-in-the-face gag, I will deduct 13 points from my rating and give this a negative rating. This was made a couple years prior to the only other Harold Lloyd movie I know (Safety Last! with the brilliant skyscraper stunts), and seems leagues away and doesn't have any memorable scenes or images like classic silent-era films. Some 1920's charm, but far too much 1920's predictability. It's entirely possible that I'm being too harsh here. This could be better than I think it is. I just can't get that scene with the rake out of my mind.

Here's my right eyeball, laughing hysterically:

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters

2007 animated comedy based on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim stoner nincompoopery

Rating: 8/20

Plot: French Fry Man, Mister Shake, and Meathead have to combine their talents to stop a destructive piece of exercise equipment threatening the very existence of our world. Along the way, there is are aliens, rap music, more aliens, a sinister guy with bad hair, attempts to woo, roller coaster rides, time travel, and Satan.

Ok, I'm not the audience for this one. For the first 15 minutes, I laughed, especially digging the fake theater public service announcement at the beginning featuring cartoon food both wholesome and hard core. The lyric "Did you bring your baby here? Throw your seed outside!" made me laugh. I also laughed later when one character shot another and said, "Now you're going to hell. Feel the sweet embrace of Satan's hoof across your face." But when I nudged my friends watching the movie with me, I found nobody to nudge. I was completely alone, in a darkened room, an artificial hand down the front of my pants. It was a bitter experience. I injected Diet Mr. Pibb into my jugular, and after feeling no effect whatsoever, injected some between each of my toes. I felt more alone, wept bitterly, put the scissors away. I turned to Bronson Pinchot beside me (sitting a little too closely beside me, but who's complaining) and said, "Feel the sweet embrace of Satan's hoof across your face, Balki Bartokomous!" Alas, only a hallucination! Perhaps the Diet Mr. Pibb was having an effect after all. I paused and leaked and ate everything in the house. The neighbors knocked on the side of my house and yelled, "What's going on in there?" There was a penis joke, and I almost laughed but was too sad to laugh. At least audibly. Despair. Ennui. I drank the rest of the Diet Mr. Pibb and belched loudly. And audibly.

I sort of like the television show, a show which I have never actually seen because I do not have cable television. The spurts of dadaist humor blended with cheaply animated potty jokes works well for ten minutes. The main problem with this is it's nine times as long as the television show. I was entertained for that ten or fifteen minutes. Then, boredom. How about that movie poster though? That's a good one.

Here I am, probably right before I got bored:

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

2006 action

Rating: 12/20 (Dylan: 14/20)

Plot: All of the characters from Pirates of the Caribbean: Give 'em the Rum so's He'll Stop 'is Whinin' return and huddle up to try and remember what had happened to them at the end of the last movie. A wedding is interrupted by arrest, and Captain Jack Sparrow has to find a squid-faced guy's heart so that he can pay off a debt. Then everybody else decides they might as well look for squid-faced guy's heart, too. A giant tentacled sea creature rapes a boat. Sparrow is diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, but that doesn't stop the cannibals from trying to eat him. In the middle of the movie, the characters have to again conference to attempt to figure out what's going on, and following that, they decide to have a swordfight. CGI-pirates frolick and gesticulate, sometimes in that order and sometimes in the opposite order. The movie ends just in time for the third part of the trilogy--Pirates of the Caribbean: Where'd You Park the Boat, Matey?

I enjoyed the first of the trilogy more than I thought I would and possibly more than I should. I still like Depp's character and visually, this was a lot of fun. The computer effects don't get in the way, used more effectively to paint artistic artificial sets than the action scenes with the giant sea creature or Davy Jones' and his mutants. The story's sort of a mess, really loopy and goopy and scattered and battered, and this lacks some of the charm and fun and creativity of the first movie. Subplots and sub-subplots emerge and muddle things up. Honestly, I'm not even completely sure what's going on leading into the third movie because one character's actions seem contradictory and I couldn't even understand what another character said half the time. The stunts and action scenes in this were over-the-top (the hour-and-an-half sword fight, the escape from the cannibals), but there's enough excitement in this, as well as more than enough attractive imagery, to make this worthwhile.

Note: There are a pair of pirates used for comic effect in this. They're sort of the R2-D2 and C-3PO of the Caribbean. I looked up the one with the artificial eye because he seemed familiar and remembered that he was the guy from The Office (the boring English version, not the superior American one). His first film credit is something I absolutely have to see--The Man Who Fell in Love with a Traffic Cone. Come on!

The Haunting

1963 horror

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Dr. Markway, a researcher in psychic phenomena, gathers together a group to spend several nights in the supposedly haunted Hill House. It's a house with a violent history, described as one character as a "house that was born bad." Skeptical Wally (Beaver's brother), a lesbian with esp, and a woman who may have had experience with poltergeists meet so that they can overact and say witty things to each other. Paranormal activity ensues which gives the four actors an excuse to overact even more. Seriously, just check out the poster to the left. It's motionless overacting. That can't be easy! Based on a Shirley "The Lottery" Jackson novel.

Let me start with this--I hated every single character in this. I hated their voices, their facial expressions, their rapport, their gestures, and (in the case of one woman) their audible thoughts. The story was dopey, and the music score and pacing dated this considerably. In fact, I would have guessed this was produced five to ten years earlier than it was. I'm not good at guessing people's ages either. All faults can be nearly forgiven, however, because of two things: the technique and the setting. The latter, a creepy mansion shown in exterior shots against eerie blueish clouds (note: the movie is not color), is almost a character itself, and camera tricks--puzzling angles, artistic effects, and swooping movement--add to the creepiness of the characters' situation. There's plenty to see in the architecture and decor of the house, and the director Robert Wise takes advantage of all the available sights both exterior and interior. The source of the haunting is never really palpable. The characters and audience never see anything concrete, although I guess they do hear noises and see a rubbery door and feel cool breezes or, in one scene that should have been great, feel something else. So I suppose there's palpability, but it's not the typical scare tactics of traditional horror flicks. Nothing jumps out at you or bleeds or oozes or growls. I don't have much horror film background, and I wonder if The Haunting is unique in not showing the ghosts or monsters or martians or murderers or what-have-you that is threatening the characters. This is psychologically intriguing but ultimately misses. Also important to note: There was a subplot involving lesbianism. No nudity though, Jen.

Here I am with my own special effect:

Woman in the Dunes

1964 drama

Rating: 18/20

Plot: A teacher with an interest in entomology takes a three-day excursion to the dunes to find desert insects and hopefully discover something that will get his name in a book. He misses the last bus and is persuaded by the desert inhabitants to stay with the title character. She happens to live in a rickety shack at the bottom of a sand pit. Upon waking up the next day, he realizes he's fallen into a trap and since he can't get out of the sand pit, has been effectively tricked into having what amounts to a marriage with this woman. Along with the woman, a widow who refuses to even attempt to leave because her husband and daughter are buried in the sands nearby, he has to shovel sand to be lifted out of the pit in baskets. Apparently, it's being sold by the neighbors. He plots various escapes using bondage, futile climbing, and birds, taking breaks only to get himself a little somethin'-somethin' or to get sand out of his crevices.

This isn't erotic or even romantic as the cover seems to suggest. Instead, this works (I think) as a rich, dark, cynical allegorical/metaphorical take on marriage. There's plenty of despair, and I'm not even sure if the ending qualifies as a happy ending. Director Hiroshi Teshigahara ends indeterminately, in a way, and doesn't spell much out. The majority of this is driven by symbols (sand, lots of water, masks, flesh, soap, ladders, birds. . .all working as metaphor), but it doesn't come across as pretentious at all. Instead, it's completely beautiful and engrossing filmmaking. This director's got himself some eyes! Almost every shot in the 2 1/2 hour film is crisp, interesting, beautiful, and at least nearly perfect. The shots of gently moving insects, skin smooth and rough, and especially drifting and shifting sands are breathtaking. It was really difficult to want to move the eyes down to read the subtitles half of the time. Absolutely fantastic cinematography, and I honestly can't imagine a black and white film looking better than this one. "Slow" moments also force reflection like many Japanese pictures seem to do.

Note: I seem to be watching a lot of movies with deserts and/or kidnapping. Simon of the Desert, El Topo, Black Snake Moan, The Collector (this was nearly a reversal of that one except the kidnapee was the collector of insects), The Edukators, The Mummy.

Here I am watching the best movie I've seen this year:

The Beastmaster

1982 fantasy

Rating: 12/20 (Dylan: 10/20 although he said he liked this. I'm not sure the boy understands the rating system. I mean, didn't he see the breasts?)

Plot: A trio of hideously deformed women who apparently left their pants on the set of Macbeth warns Rip Torn and his evil eyebrows that a baby is about to be born that is gonna get all up in his bidness. Rip Torn sends a witch to perform a forty-seven step abortion involving blue Jello, a cow, a fire, cackling, and fingernails. A nosey guy interrupts, awkwardly kills the witch, and adopts the boy as his own. At some point, he's named Dar which, I should note, is Rad backwards. That's not a coincidence because Dar has a truly radical talent--he can communicate and control animals. After his village is slaughtered by Rip Torn's thugs, Beastmaster takes a journey seeking revenge. Well, that and finding some animal pals to accompany him. Oh, and checking out the breasts of naked slave girls.

This was a likable, but dated, fantasy flick. There was so much (especially with the script but also with the set design and cinematography) that keeps this a product of its time. I thought the pre-CGI special effects were great, and the work with the animals was really good. Moments annoyed me (see: the cute ferrets) and moments were unintentionally funny (I had to pause every time he introduced himself with "I'm Dar" so that I could laugh for twenty minutes. . .during some scenes, I had throw in my own "I'm Dar"), but for the most part, this was a fun little movie. Creativity (those cannibalistic robed things and the eye ring were cool) and some interesting shots (mostly exterior stuff but also some interesting mood-aiding set design) make this worth watching.

Note: My wife claimed after hearing about this that I have an obsession with breasts and only watch movies because of the boobs. Little does she know, I actually have a (probably unhealthy) sexual attraction to Dar. Can't fault me for that though! Dar!

I'm not Dar:

Dylan is hiding.

Simon of the Desert

1965 Luis Bunuel half-movie

Rating: 16/20

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

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

Shane of the living room: