Chalk

2006 pseudo-documentary

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Follows the insanely typical school year of three inexperienced public educators and one first-year vice principal

I believe that a large bulk of this was entirely improvised by students and teachers at a real school somewhere in Texas, and it's amazing how well they pull it off. Great ensemble cast. The Office-like mockumentary does a good job showing the nuances of the profession and the daily combination of humor and funk. I smiled watching rookie mistakes, a lot which I made my first few years (see setting up students only to watch them call the bluff) and some which I've made recently (see the hurling of desks). And seeing the despair on the completely inept, first-year teacher Mr. L. was heartbreaking. So much of this is believable that it just had have been scripted by teachers--interaction with parents, interaction with peers who are a bit too straight-shootin', interaction with students who just don't want to be there. Some scenes which stretched too long (the slang spelling bee) and some scenes that seemed completely out of place (what's a dream sequence doing in a documentary?), but the documentary format worked well and allowed the individual stories to meander and keep things episodic and fresh. Occasionally, there was a dip into the overly sentimental, but the characters never seem to ask the audience to feel sorry for them and the funny, mostly unpredictable script worked throughout. And I still can't believe how real the (I guess) real students looked--so authentic in their apathy and dismal expressions.

Favorite line (paraphrased): "How are you going to staple 30 tests without a stapler? You can't!" Favorite snippet just might have been when the vice principal sat down at a piano and sang, "You can teach if you want to. You can leave no child behind" to the tune of Men Without Hats' "Safety Dance."

Here's somebody who often wishes he did something else for a living watching Chalk:

Haxan: Witchcraft through the Ages

1922 Danish silent documentary

Rating: 16/20

Plot: The documentary covers the history of witchcraft and proffers an explanation that hysteria was the cause of strange symptoms that were seen as signs that a person was a witch in the Middle Ages and beyond. Yeah, it seems like odd subject matter for a 1922 silent documentary.

This had to have been the feel-good hit of the summer of '22! The movie had a little bit of everything! An Al Gory slide-show presentation with shots of diseased people, bewitched shoes, witches milking broomsticks, orgies. A pointer was even used to specify! There were monks poisoned by cat feces and dead bird juice, monks later transformed into vile grabass monks!There were numerous scenes of demon fellatio! Witches dancing with reindeer! A woman with gigantic hands shoveling what appeared to be syrup into her mouth! Yep! She was a witch! Filthy elderly person torture! Insect demon birth! Horse skeletons! Disembodied souls and ghostly-white witches superimposed over cloudy skies! Soup made from babies and toads! Two scenes (I do not shit you) in which demons ferociously churned butter. Old women throwing buckets of piss at cursed doors. Homoerotic S&M scenes! Preconception abortions. Urinating kitty vandals! More torture! Satan bludgeoning nuns! As usual, the pictures speak more loudly than the words. Satanic blow jobs:

There was some interesting information in this odd little movie, and lots of the camera trickery/special effects were probably pretty innovative for 1922--see the aforementioned witches, the scenes of hell, and especially the nifty stop animation used to animate coins. A lot of the imagery reminded me of F.W. Murnau's Faust which came out four years later. There could have been less narration (I'm not Danish, after all, and therefore do not like to read), and I never was clear whether there was a tongue firmly planted in cheek with this or not. Honestly, it doesn't matter. It's worth seeing just for those two butter-churning scenes.

Note: This was rereleased in '68 with a Jon Luc Ponty jazzy score and William S. Burroughs narration. I've got that on now, and despite the fact that I love Burroughs' voice and like Ponty just fine, this shorter version really doesn't work at all. Those silly avant-gardists!

Trivia: The director, Benjamin Christensen, actually plays both the devil and Jesus.

Here I am learning all about the history of witchcraft:

Tuvalu

1999 German nearly-silent futuristic fairy tale

Rating: 15/20

Plot: An ugly blind man, his ugly wife, and their uglier son try to save a dilapidated bath house from demolition and the threat that it could be replaced by something that isn't a bath house. Anton, the ugly son, falls in love with the smell of Bjork's undergarments and eventually gets to see her swimming naked with a fish. Ostensibly, there is a woody (i.e. hard-on). Unfortunately, tragedy strikes and Bjork seeks the thuggish and more than likely shaggy arms of a slippery-lookin' devil named Gregor (also ugly), and Anton has to simultaneously fight for the love of the pop star and for the survival of his family's bath house.

Tuvalu is quirky, gorgeously filmed, and almost too precious for its own good. The set design, with a multi-storied bath house with crumbling walls and a labyrinth of rusting pipes looked like something straight from a Mad Max movie, apocalyptic and at times nightmarish while somehow always remaining whimsical and beautiful. The feel of the set was further enhanced by the use of both old school black 'n' white and old school color, lots of sepia tones for the indoors scenes and lots of off-blues for the water and outdoors scenes, both used as an homage to silent movies. Both the colors and the set, the herky-jerky plot, the use of ugly European actors, the lopsided cinematography and weird close-ups of the ugly actors' faces, and the dry humor were all reminiscent of Delicatessen, so much in fact that I probably should have deducted points for the blatant rip-off. Oh, and the overly-exaggerated sound effects--lots of creaking and squeaking. The film had no dialogue other than various grunts and squeals and the occasional uttered name, and this, with all the sepia and the Chaplinesque slapstick, recalls the silent film era. Parts of this cross the line into way-too-silly territory, but it's a fun, very French little fairy tale of a German movie that I'm glad I got to see.

Here's a picture of an ugly person with Bjork followed by a picture of an ugly person watching Tuvalu:

Ran

1985 Kurosawa samurai

Rating: 18/20 (Abbey: 1/20)

Plot: see King Lear. . .or, samurai try to survive in 16th century Japan after a nuclear holocaust. . .or, two of three sons (the two dumbasses) betray their father in an attempt to have the best picnic locations in all of Japan. They fight over robes and decide in the end to put a stop to the madness (the "chaos" in the title) like all real men put a stop to madness--an epic masturbation contest!

Surprise surprise! Another masterpiece from the greatest director who ever lived. I can't imagine the care and time taken to paint this epic. Such a striking use of color and both natural (i.e. rolling hills) and man-made (i.e. burning castles) imagery. The scene with the biggest chunk of violence completely captivated me, a scene with almost no sound, startling images (men holding their own severed arms, lots of blood and arrows), and no extraneous effects. It is a little disarming getting a glimpse into the director's old age worldviews and ideas about life, an apathetic God, lost humanity--ideas so depressing, cynical, almost hopeless. Absolutely stunning stuff.

Here's a still from the controversial "Masturbation Contest" scene:

And here I am with Abbey. She watched about an hour of this with me, asking me what the subtitles said when she couldn't catch all the words. When asked what she would rate it, she said she'd give it a 1 out of 20. I asked her why and she said, "I'd give it a one because it was stupid."

Pandora's Box

1930 German Pabst silent melodrama

Rating: 16/20

Plot: This is the tragic story of a woman's face and three too many erections.

Another moody, bleak one. I thought the storytelling was a little sloppy and about 30 minutes too long. The sloppiness may be part of the point as Lulu (the "Pandora") and the poor unfortunate souls she comes in contact are pummeled with life and circumstances that seem random and unfair but are almost entirely the result of Louise Brooks and her pretty pretty eyes. This was decidedly modern--in the camera's movements and in almost all of the acting, the lilts and gapes of the former and the uncharacteristic (for the time and genre) lack of pomp of the latter. Brooks herself was fantastic, and she needed to be considering the amount of time the camera would focus on her face. It's also amazing how few title cards were needed to carry the plot--the actions of the story did it just fine. This is one of those silent pictures in which the silence really helps create the atmosphere for a lot of the scenes. Bleakly, the darkness grows progressively in this until it almost becomes suffocating, all the way to the point when the piled-on sins of the characters become deadly.

Trivia: First lesbian role in motion picture history

Speaking of lesbians, here's a big ol' lesbian checking out Lulu's curves in Pandora's Box:

Mamma Roma

1962 Italian Drama

Rating: 13/20

Plot: A middle-aged prostitute retires after she saves enough money to buy a fruit stand and a house in order to give her son a better life. It doesn't work.

This was bleak and dull. Anna Magnani was at times very powerful in the role as the title character and at other times a little too melodramatic and distracting. The black and white cinematography added to the bleakness--a run-down Rome and long stretches of dialogue while the characters walked perpetually toward the camera. The movie lacked style and the characters lacked depth needed to make me really care about them all that much. Maybe I'm just callous.

Here are Lucy and I making out during a particularly boring scene:

The Navigator

1924 romantic comedy

Rating: 17/20 (note: changed from original 16)

Plot: Buster Keaton and his special lady friend find themselves trapped on a drifting, fifty-foot yacht with no clue how to operate the thing. They share misadventures, including a hunt for a place to sleep, a fight with a swordfish, and attempted cannibalism, and their love grows.

Nice little movie with some great gags and early action-adventure scenes that really hold up well. I'm not sure any Buster Keaton movie is actually laugh-out-loud funny, but I did smile out loud. The portrait scene was my favorite, and there was lots of good physical comedy. This wasn't as perfectly executed as The General, but people who like silent comedies should find lots to enjoy.

Trivia: According to my father, Buster Keaton's parents were from Terre Haute, Indiana, my birthplace. They apparently moved prior to Buster's birth to travel with a minstrel show.

More trivia: I'm not expert, but the nicely-filmed fetish sex scenes in this have to be among the first in movie history. As you can see from the pictures below, this is pretty graphic stuff for 1924.

Beginning of the infamous swordfish-on-Buster sex scene.

Buster nearing climax.
Later, the human characters.


And Buster has what might be the first Hollywood orgasm.

Here I am watching Buster Keaton gettin' busy:

El Topo

1970 surreal western

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Title character and his naked son ride into a town where everybody, including the animals, has been brutally murdered. He rides off to take eyes and teeth and meets a woman. He ditches his son and rides off with the woman into the desert. There, he kills 4 master gun men in order to prove his love. She leaves him for another woman after that. He dies, is taken into a cave by a bunch of deformed people, and is shaven. He makes it his responsibility to dig these people out of the cave to connect them with a town full of religious nuts. I guess that's why he's "the mole."


My favorite movies are those movies that are singular and visionary, movies that absolutely under no circumstances could have been made by any other director. Inland Empire is a good example actually. This is another one. The imagery is iconic. Religious allusions abound and the desert and old cowboy movie sets are beautiful and full of character. Profoundly violent--swinging corposes, a literal river of blood, a crucified lamb, a naked man stumbling to his suicide following castration, lots of dead bunnies. This seemingly has a lot to do with religion, both organized religion and spirituality, but the symbolism is thick and it's another film that requires multiple viewings. But whether or not there are answers or puzzle pieces that fit together doesn't even matter. Jodorowsky has created something that surely won't be enjoyed by many people but will be impossible to discard or forget.

Note: Alejandro Jodorowsky was actually a pupil of Marcel Marceau. No kidding. That mime is all over the place!

Here is Eye watching El Topo:

Inland Empire

2006 David Lynch joint


Rating: 16/20

Plot: A complex glimpse at what might be the inward journey of a woman who may or may not be an actress and who may or may not be guilty and/or delusional. She may or may not be co-starring in a remake of a cursed Polish movie, and she might be obsessed (or she might not be) with her co-star, a cool guy who may or may not exist. Things get menacing, seemingly, and a murder or two probably take place. But I'm not real sure about that.

Difficult, sometimes frustrating, and very long, this is the typical David Lynch movie. He doesn't create narratives, at least conventionally, and instead of concrete characters developing conflicts and simple cause-and-effect relationships creating a plot, he lets the moods he creates tell the story. In fact, I'm pretty sure there is one concrete character in this, but all of the other characters (a phantom, actors, a director, a bunch of Polish people, street people, whores) might just be extensions of the protagonist's warping psyche. This is definitely a movie that you don't really watch; you sort of have to feel your way through the three hours, and for most of the time, I felt like a blind man groping my way through a maze of pudding. I would really need to watch about fifteen more times (that would be forty-five hours of movie watchin') to get a firmer grasp of what's going on and what rating this actually deserves. It could be a 10; it could be a 19. It was self-referential and the use of color, references to both light and time/watches, and music and sound effects all seemed like they could be important clues to what the heck is going on here. Those are things I could pick out a little more easily with subsequent viewings. Maybe. I doubt it.

I've got no clue what's going on with these rabbits, but they made me giggle uncontrollably every time they were on the screen.

Note: Laura Dern was fantastic in this.

Another note: Lynch has this way of making the most ordinary objects seem really menacing. Lamps, doors, an empty street, silk, a screwdriver, an elderly neighbor's face. It's a gift.

A final note: "Locomotion" was part of the soundtrack for thematic purposes (probably), but that Beck song in the middle of this seemed completely out of place.

Here's a picture of Lucyfer the dog and me the human waiting for hot, lesbian action that, disappointingly, never happened:

Samurai Spy

1965 Eastern Western

Rating: 12/20

Plot: People in Japan stop getting along, have a war, and then stay mad at each other. A baffling amount of characters with nearly-identical names and indistinguishable wardrobes and personalities show up and prowl and pussyfoot around. They get confused about who they are, probably because they can't tell each other apart because their names and wardrobes are similar, so they backstab each other and then some of them stab in the front, too.

I'm generally a sucker for these samurai flicks. This had more weapon variety than others (flying stars and cute little shapely knives) and mute ninjas and was shot in crisp black and white. Typical of the genre, there were individual shots that were just beautifully structured--weeds blowing in just the right places, clouds and rivers as background characters, snippets of the story told in shadows and fog and slow-motion blades. The fight choreography, however, was really clumsy and lacked the poetry and emotion of superior samurai movies. The plot, driven mostly by long stretches of explanatory dialogue and (at the beginning) a narrator who seemed to be in a hurry, was convoluted and clunky. So many characters (none which I really liked), so many plot twists (none which I really followed), so many clans and place names (none which I could connect with anything). More than likely, a person a little bit smarter than me would have followed this more easily and given it a higher rating.

Trivia:

Apparently this was Sly Stallone's first role. It's uncredited, but you can clearly see that it's him in the picture I took. This would have been a full five years before he played "Stud" in the 1970 masterpiece The Party at Kitty and Stud's. Coincidentally (perhaps!), the subtitle about five seconds after this shot has a character saying, "Give it to me, Stud. Give it all to me. Go ahead, Stud, give me all your juice," just like Kitty in that first Stallone credited role.

Here I am enjoying snacks and watching Samurai Spy:

Lucky Number Slevin

2006 Feast of Blood

Rating: 12/20

Plot: A bookie gets killed. Then another bookie gets killed. A gambler gets killed. The gambler's wife gets killed. Then a horse gets killed. Then a couple black characters get killed. Then a couple Jewish characters get killed. The audience sort of wishes that Lucy Liu gets killed. Then a whole bunch of other people get killed. Then the movie reminds us of how clever it is. Credits!

This is the sort of movie that can distract you with blood, style, and more blood into thinking it's a much better movie than it actually is. It's pretty slick, pretty cool, and ultimately pretty empty. Like the Bourne movies, Snatch, Pulp Fiction, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and Big Top Pee Wee, this movie is probably just a little too cool for me. It's fast and glossy; has far too many undeveloped, flat characters (basically, they're cool); and cleverly-written dialogue that gives each of those undeveloped characters a chance to show off how nonchalantly witty they can be. Pulpy and with enough twists and turns to give me vertigo, this was fine for what it is--heavily and artificially buttered fodder. It's the kind of movie that stands in the corner with sunglasses and winks at all the ladies while not realizing those ladies can't see behind the lenses so he then surreptitiously walks to the bathroom, sits on the toilet, and bites his lower lip until it bleeds and says, "Ah, the hell with 'em. They ain't my type anyways."

Note...this movie:

came out at roughly the same time, won a whole bunch of awards and was critically acclaimed. Lucky Number Slevin is at least as good even though it has what has to be one of the worst titles in movie history.

Here I am trying to look cool enough to simultaneously watch this movie and be married to somebody much better looking than me...she didn't watch this movie, by the way:

The Three Musketeers

1973 Comedy Adventure directed by Richard Lester

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A bunch of flamboyantly homosexual men grow mustaches, arm themselves with feathers and swords, and throw some kind of wild flamboyantly homosexual party where they break things and say things that may or may not have been witty in 1973. There is a flamboyantly homosexual terrorist attack involving a wagon and half a donkey. The attack, apparently at least indirectly the result of Raquel Welch's cleavage, ultimately results in all seven of the musketeers losing their boots and being forced to dance across the marble in their bare feet. They steal a computer and use it to download short fuzzy clips of Raquel Welch blowing up balloons, and the little one says to the big one, "Hey! How did your sword get in my scabbard? Eh oh!" a fair question that the big one responds to with nothing but twenty-four minutes of uninterrupted giggling. Then...flamboyantly gay swashbuckling! They pause, pile on a pair of horses (also downloaded from the Internet via an illegal horse-sharing site), and return to a castle to finish their flamboyantly homosexual party. The night and the movie end with the musketeers shaving each other.

Here I am laughing uproariously while enjoying the swashbuckling:

L' Iceberg

2005 Belgium romantic comedy

Rating: 15/20 (Jen: 13/20)

Plot: A woman suffers through a night in a restaurant freezer only to realize that her husband and two children didn't even realize she was missing. She becomes upset and begins an obsession with the cold and with burly sailors. She flees her dull life for one with a little more excitement and adventure. And ice.

Really enjoyed this cutesy and charming little romantic comedy. Extremely humorous--dry and charcoal gray if not black--and quirky with well-structured shots and fine performances.

A nod to J. Tati's films, especially with the use of intelligent and poetic slapsticky humor (see also Chaplin and Buster) and the lack of dialogue. In fact, the director(s) almost seemed to be using dialogue as a game--inserting one-sided phone conversations in which the character would be asking the same, obviously unanswered questions; arguments mumbled into pillows that neither the audience or character can understand; and numerous attempts to converse with a deaf man. The camera didn't flinch throughout the movie, and the situations were set up perfectly within the confines of the shots. Much to laugh at--the husband's spontaneous reactions, a surprise driver, a weird love scene (I think), old people, possibly the greatest dancing scene in the history of film, the A.M. iceberg sheets, another old person, a scuffle. I probably laughed outloud more than I actually should have, but I am not ashamed.

Here are Jen and I laughing admiring L' Iceberg:

Paris, je t'aime

2006 romantic thing


Rating: 15/20 (Jen: 16/20)


Plot: 18 directors spit out short snippets about love and lonliness in Paris.


Another movie with a mime! Hot cha!

I expected this to be hit and miss with such a collection of directors, some whom I didn't even know, but there were a lot of hits here--the humor of the Coens' segment with Buscemi, Chomet's mime assault, the touching final short with a woman narrating her story in French with a terrible accent, and the one with the dying guy and the nurse were my favorites. Oh, and the one with the woman in the red trenchcoat. Surprisingly, there were only a couple that I disliked (Wes Craven's, although it was beautiful to look at, and the one that seemed to take place in Chinatown) and one that I absolutely hated--an out-of-place bit of emo cheese trash with a vampire. I'd have to see a list, but I believe there was some order to the madness with stories about meeting and falling in love leading to stories about love leading to stories about love ending or threatening to end. I'm not sure how consistent that was though. Really enjoyable series of romantic blasts nevertheless, interestingly filled with mostly dialogue but still appealing to people with short attention spans.

Jen and I watching Paris, je t'aime:


She hated both the mimes and vampires. How's that for an idea, by the way? A mime vampire movie? I don't see why that wouldn't work!

Peeping Tom

1960 psychological thriller

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A psychologically-damaged serial-killing voyeur films the fear of the women he kills with his portable camera/weapon. As he lurks around acting all creepy, his weird-looking downstairs neighbor becomes interested in him and his work. A blind woman says some perplexing things.

The ideas and images in Peeping Tom ruined director Michael Powell's career. Critics blasted it as "perverted nonsense, "frankly beastly," and as "the sickest and filthiest film [the critic] can remember seeing." One critic wrote, "The only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeing Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it down the nearest sewer. Even then the stench would remain." I haven't seen a film hated that much since that Tom Green movie where he swings a baby by the umbilical cord and diddles a horse's genitals. I remember that artistic masterpiece getting similar reviews.

This one dug into ideas about voyeurism and the role of the audience in horror/thriller movies, and although it wasn't terribly realistic or even close to flawless, it did manage to create tension and suspense and mood without showing any violence at all. Textured, colorful, and visually interesting, this just seems thematically and stylistically ahead of its time. I do question the decision to cut the scene featuring the protagonist admiring and filming an ejaculating elephant, but what do I know...

Here I am watching the first part of Peeping Tom after waking up on the 1st (had to finish it on the 2nd):