recent watchings of whatever

[bad_juice]

it's saturday night and i am home alone drinking!

a perfect time to update.

the dark knight rises -- more of goyer's tin-eared dialogue and nolan's fondness for fascist apologia, both ramped up to often unbearable extremes. especially the latter's weirdo fox news digs at the occupy movement. after watching this movie i feel like nolan probably

Comments

[bob_le_flambeur]

the wrong man -- at times the most beautiful hitchcock movie i've seen (never watched rope) and simultaneously the most depressing. henry fonda's complete refusal to ever stand up for himself and the way he completely gives himself over to the societal mechanics of (alleged) crime and punishment even got a bit much at times, to the point that i found myself hoping for a weird "empowerment" scenario or whathaveyou. as a comment on how spoiled for such moronic bits of catharsis people (well, me anyway) can become, it was pretty effective. also if i'm not completely mistaken, the only form of rebellion hitch offers to fonda's model-citizen-catatonia is fonda's wife's mental breakdown and subsequent estrangement from everything and everyone. in that sense, not sure how the famous "miracle" sequence that godard talked about can feel anything other than completely cynical. and the ending too, jesus christ.

after having last watched it about 8 years ago, revisiting the godfather was a pretty drab affair: the lone highpoint was the sequence where michael visits his father in the hospital and ends up having to prevent his assassination, which balanced the idea of him as someone capable of outsmarting the system while also inevitably getting sucked further into it, and also just being a super suspenseful setpiece. that same sense of inevitability clouds everything else, though and the weird sense of "human corruption as profound truth" that rosenbaum wrote about permeates throughout the movie. soon enough the whole thing becomes near-unwatchable, as every female character is either dumb or hysterical and you're asked to sympathize with sentimental old-school family-values murdering psychopaths over their more overtly hypocritical murdering psychopath sons. and the lighting makes it all look like an antique store commercial.

on the other hand, the long kiss goodnight, another haven't-seen-this-in-ages watch, probably has the most lively sam jackson performance i've ever seen. he's just such an obnoxiously overpresent dude in my movie-related life (and his wiki says he's the "highest grossing actor evah" so that's not just me, i guess) that it's become completely moot that he's just phoning it in all the time. but here his goofy loser private detective (or whatever, the film's not really big on (back)story) chews the scenery in pretty fabulous fashion and even though renny harlin can hardly let a scene go by without fucking up the pacing with slo-mos or completely distracting cross-cutting, i enjoyed this one a lot, emabarassing santana music cues and all. and the way every supporting character is somehow a bluntly inverse archetype (geena davis' stay-at-home-love-you-forever husband, villain is a good-looking, smart, young white guy, brian cox' wise old mentor dude is just inept and lame and then dies all of a sudden) is pretty hilarious.