Black & White World
You can tell by the lines I'm reciting, I've seen that movie too.
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Sunday, November 30, 2008
The Corporation (2003)
Comments coming soon.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Super Troopers (2001)
Comments coming soon.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Paper Clips (2004)
Comments coming soon.
Out of Sight (1998)
Comments coming soon.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Quantum of Solace (2008)
Movie-going experience here was five stars—saw the movie opening night at Hollywood’s famous Cinerama Dome at the Arclight Cinema. We saw Casino Royale at Graumann’s Chinese, which was also a great movie-going experience, and the audience there was a little bit more rowdy than at the Arclight.
The movie itself—three, maybe three and a half stars. The action sequences were all great, and I think Daniel Craig is a great Bond, and I love Judi Dench as M. The rest of the casting was so-so—I didn’t much care for the main Bond girl or the villain, but I loved Fields. I was hoping Fields would be a recurring character. Guess not.
As far as the plotline goes, until I see Bond driving around in a Prius, they maybe ought to stay away from preachy foreign-oil-dependency “go green” storylines. Just saying. When the movie was over, my friend Scott said, “I could really tell the dialogue that Paul Haggis wrote,” and I replied, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure he wrote all the stuff that annoyed me.”
Oh, nerd alert overload! We saw the trailer for the new Star Trek movie, and although I was skeptical when I first heard about it a few months ago, it only took one trailer to make a believer out of me. Opens May 2009—I am so there.
Sunday, November 09, 2008
Follow the Fleet (1936)
While this movie was fun and certainly had its highlights (more on those in a moment), it’s not my favorite of the Astaire/Rogers canon. For one thing, it is far too long—nearly two hours, which is a good 20 minutes longer than it needs to be. For another thing, it’s got this sort of heavy sub-plot, a sappy romance between Harriet Hilliard (later the Harriet half of Ozzie & Harriet) and her big lug sailor fella Randolph Scott (whose character name, unfortunately, is “Bilge,” which is what the subplot reminded me of).
In the best of the Astaire/Rogers musicals, you’ve got your standard A story, which involved Fred chasing Ginger (usually—sometimes they trade off the chasing, or it changes midway through). And then generally you have your B story, which involves nutty shenanigans with Edward Everett Horton and Alice Brady or Helen Broderick—essentially, you have a comic A story and an even more comic B story. Follow the Fleet falls down because every time we come back to Harriet mooning over Randolph, the movie just sort of takes a break. Or at least, this viewer took a break.
Highlights: frankly, my favorite part of the movie was a piano solo that Fred has towards the end. A man of many talents—I saw another film where he had a pretty rockin’ drum solo. I also loved the dance number for “I’m Putting All My Eggs in One Basket,” which is presented as though they have not yet rehearsed it, so they are continually banging into one another and screwing up—great fun, lots of physical humor in that one. “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” is the only “highbrow” number that they have together, and it’s worth the wait. Miscellaneous casting notes: a young, blonde Lucille Ball is on hand, as well as Betty Grable. It’s not one that I will rush out and see again, but it was certainly worth sitting through for those highlights.
Saturday, November 08, 2008
51 Birch Street (2005)
A family-centered documentary that reminded me a lot of Capturing the Friedmans—a family coming to grips with some demons in its past, although nowhere near the demons that the Friedmans encountered. Douglas Block, the filmmaker and also the only son in the Block family, discovers some hidden family secrets after his mother’s death, and the film is his attempt to put the puzzle together, through interviews with his father and sisters, his new stepmother, and old interviews with his mother.
No matter how many documentaries I see, I am continually amazed at the things people will say when they have a camera pointed at them. Take for example Block’s sisters, who are so forthcoming to the camera about their feelings about their parents, things that they never said to their mother and probably wouldn’t dream of saying to their father either—even knowing that they’re being filmed and their father is going to see it eventually. It’s odd.
I think it must be very frustrating to have a documentarian in the family. But at the same time, it’s these idiosyncrasies of the human condition—this is what interests me in these kinds of intense personal stories. Not the voyeurism, but these human moments where people just allow a stream of consciousness to take over—it’s in moments like these where I find people most relateable.
Sunday, November 02, 2008
The Ladykillers (2004)
See, this is what happens when you convince yourself to see every movie made by a certain director, or a certain actor, or in this case, a certain set of brothers who write and direct. Eventually you hit a real stinkeroo. The Ladykillers is rotten. I didn’t have very high hopes—there was a reason I hadn’t seen it before this, after all: because it looked rotten. But I guess in order to properly judge the Coen brothers’ masterpieces, I need to have seen a full range of their movies, even the failures. Now I just need to see Burn After Reading and I can rank all of them on a sliding scale.
One of the big problems in this movie is Tom Hanks, unfortunately. I say “unfortunately” because I’d love to see him do more comedies, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this one scares him away from the genre for a while. He is hideously miscast here. In fact, I don’t think he’s cut out to do a Coens movie, he’s just too self-aware. Some actors can’t pull it off. I think George Clooney might have managed it, but then you’d still have the problem of the Marva Munson character.
I can’t help but make the comparison to the original—in the Ealing version of The Ladykillers, the little old lady (Katie Johnson) was unbelieveably sweet—a sweeter little old lady you’d never hope to lay your eyes on. She has an annoying talkative streak, sure, but she’s just lonely! You want to give her a hug. Marva Munson, the old woman in the Coens’ version, is a sympathetic character, but she’s loud and gruff and annoying and she slaps Marlon Wayans halfway to hell and back throughout the movie. I won’t go so far as to say I wanted them to knock her off, but I certainly wasn’t rooting for her the way I was in the original.
Finally, in plain and simple terms, the movie makes the cardinal sin of being boring. I can forgive overacting and poor characterizations, but there’s no coming back from boring.
The Day of the Triffids (1962)
Wow. Day of the Triffids could use a nice Criterion-level restoration. There was a time that I didn’t care so much about picture and sound quality in the movies I watch, and the DVD prints available. That’s changed since I got my HD set. The DVD print was in pretty bad shape—pan ‘n’ scan, colors faded and bleeding into each other, and the sound wasn’t particularly good either. It would be nice to see a good restored print.
This is some fun cheesey sci-fi horror, a movie that puts Little Shop of Horrors into some context I didn’t have before. I have a feeling it would be a lot more fun to watch with a group of friends and some alcoholic beverages, with people hollering out comments MST3K-style. It was still enjoyable on my own, but less so. The cast was mediocre, but they didn’t have much of a script to work with. Like many of the horror and sci-fi movies of its time, it substitutes loud musical stings for any real sense of suspense or drama. There’s a line in “Science Fiction Double Feature” (from Rocky Horror) which goes “And I really got hot when I saw Jeanette Scott fight a Triffid that spits poison and kills.” I’d like it to be known that Jeanette Scott did not fight one damn Triffid in this movie. All she did was stand still and scream, she was absolutely useless.
Usually with sci-fi movies I have some inkling of some sort of allegory that the film is working towards, which I think is one of the sci-fi genre’s greatest strengths, in fact. But in this movie, I didn’t really get that. It was just poisonous walking plants killing people. It also wrapped up way too easily, as if they ran out of time and budget (maybe they did). I’m pleased to have seen it, and would love to watch it again in a group setting, but probably won’t bother with it again as a solo viewer.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Love Crazy (1941)
One of the things that I enjoy about seeing Powell/Loy movies that aren’t part of the Thin Man series is the joy of the romantic pursuit. Nick & Nora don’t need to chase after each other, instead they chase after murderers. And because they basically play the same type of characters in pretty much all of their movies, it’s kind of like getting to watch Nick court Nora.
Love Crazy is one I discounted on first viewing, I think I found the plot just a little too nutty, even for a screwball. But in subsequent viewings (which raises the question—why watch a movie again when you didn’t care for it much the first time?), it’s grown on me. It’s a lot broader comedy than Powell & Loy usually stoop to; Powell in particular is in full-on slapstick mode.
I think Love Crazy is most memorable for its final sequence, and in true Stennieville tradition, I won’t reveal the spoiler. But when I saw it for the first time and realized Powell shaved his moustache off to do it, I was pretty impressed. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him without the moustache before. I must say I prefer him with it, but it was pretty gutsy all the same.
