Movies: Christmas til end of 2008
Hollow Triumph (The Scar). An educated crook gets out of prison and assembles his old team for one daring heist that goes terribly wrong. The guy whose casino they tried to knock off is viciously vindictive and so the crook goes on the lam. Through good luck, he arrives in a town with a psychoanalyst who looks exactly like him, save a facial scar, and soon desperation gets the best of the crook. Except nothing's as easy as it seems... Early on, I had passed this movie off as not having much depth, but there were some developments that I didn't anticipate and add some delicious irony. The two leads are quite solid in their acting and the main guy looked like a cross between Humphrey Bogart and Kevin Spacey. While the plot could have been fleshed out a little more, it kept up a good suspense. Perhaps the most memorable aspect of the movie was the camera work, including two eye-catching closeups where the person looks straight into the camera. Also some camera jostling, which I didn't think was possible with the equipment they had back in the 40s (all the cameras were mounted and heavy, so I'm very curious how they acheived that one shot). A solid noir. 7/10. Side note: gas in the movie only cost 20 cents per gallon!
Pineapple Express. Seth Rogen is a lowkey pothead who witnesses a murder and is forced to run away with his dealer. I purchased this movie on our JetBlue flight to Buffalo since I remember the NYT review not being bad and I think some friends liked it. So, based on those recommendations, I had thought I'd laugh at least once, but I didn't. The humor at least was not pitiful like other "comedies" where you groaned at what the writers considered funny. Some jokes weren't that far off from being funny, but none tickled my funny bone. I also wasn't convinced by James Franco's drug dealer. Several times I couldn't help being reminded that this was not some deadbeat, unmotivated, dirty guy with greasy hair, but rather a good looking actor with well-toned muscles. Based on these considerations alone, I would be content leaving the movie with a 6/10, since the story wasn't boring or anything. What dropped it an extra point was all the casual graphic physical violence. I don't find it funny when someone's ear gets blown off and we have to watch someone gruesomely try to put the piece back on. I don't find it funny that someone's foot gets blown off for no reason. The amount of blood spilled (nearly everyone dies at the end) and the way it was all spilled was too much of a comedy killer for me. I don't mind some violence in my comedy, including people getting killed. The distinguishing factor at play here was that the violence was mean (not to be confused with wicked, which is what makes black comedies delightful) and that kills any shred of lightheartedness. Since there was nothing to redeem the violence, I had a somewhat unpleasant experience watching the film and hence the 5/10.
Ordinary People. An affluent suburban family come to grips with their eldest son's death. At the heart of the greatness of this movie is its reliance on almost no actual action. It entirely consists of interactions between the characters and self-psychoanalysis. Furthermore, the interactions aren't focalized around one person like in other character movies, but rather the graph of interactions under examination is nearly a complete graph, with each relationship being shaken. The whole movie's forward motion hinges upon peeling the layers in suppression of emotions and underlying drives. The acting was pretty darn fantastic. Not only did it concern what was said and not said, and how it was said, but the body language in this film became such and integral part of the characterization. There's one scene that really sticks out in my mind, where the parents, played by Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore, are having a discussion in a mall food court. The scene ends with them extending conciliatory hands across the table and then the shot switches to a wide angle and you see the two characters in full. Their body posture completely encapsulates the emotional conclusion of the scene, with the father in one state and the mother in a completely other one. The whole cast is extremely strong, and when they seem to overdo their roles a little, you're never sure if it's the actor overacting or the actual character's facade or overreaction. Out of the entire ensemble, I was most impressed with Donald Sutherland. In fact, this is the second movie I've seen him in recently where I was blown away by the nuance he adds to what could be a very one-dimensional character. The first performance was him as Homer Simpson in The Day of the Locust, where the character could have been dumb and pitiful, yet he turned him into a poignant, blindedly optimistic person who believed in the ultimate good nature of people. The descriptor of "idiot" only fleetingly crosses your mind when you watch this character. In Ordinary People, he plays a father figure who comes across as anything but patriarchal. Rather, he's an appeaser performing damage control, which engenders an air of weakness and impotence to his role in the family. Yet he ultimately pulls out very natural rumbles of struggle and altruism, and this sense of principle and of always binding the family that make his role profoundly paternal and strong. Another intelligent, insightful film from Robert Redford, who has quickly become a director I greatly admire. 9/10.
Fright Night. A teenaged boy becomes convinced his new neighbor is a vampire. This is one of those famous movies from the 80s that has lots of nostalgia value to people who grew up in that era, and surprisingly this was one that neither Christian nor I had seen (or at least, had remembered seeing). This movie suffers from there being no suspense at all! There's no doubt at all that the neighbor is a vampire. The vampire makes many threats, has NUMEROUS easy chances to kill the boy and does nothing except stall for time until the boy can handily escape. The plot is entirely transparent and has no drive thanks to everything being readily apparent from the moment a scene begins. There's not even a B-movie camp to this movie to save it. A terrible movie to watch. 2/10.
Dementia (Daughter of Horror). A young woman living in a flophouse with a blinking neon sign outside starts to go crazy, so she takes a late-night walk and gets pimped to an Orson Welles-like fat cat. This is a low budget horror film from the 1950s that has fallen into the public domain, and so in watching it I followed the site's advice to watch it as a silent film. It worked pretty well that way and there's some really well-structured scenes that use the black and white stock to an eerie end. The graininess that the film has acquired over time also lends itself to the vague creepiness, especially to the opening sequence against the night sky. No part of this film is truly revelatory in the way it captures the woman's madness, but it did a fairly good job, especially considering the low budget. A bit artsy, but also a little amateur; a bit of noirish dread, but not any horror. 7/10.
Murder by Death. A spoof of various murder mysteries from the 30s to 60s, a la Agatha Christie and the other great mystery writers of the day. There were some pretty spot on mockups of Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Detective Wong, Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon), etc. I most especially liked Peter Falk as "Sam Diamond", the archetypal Bogie character with a dame that he somehow never has much of an interest in, and Peter Sellers as "Wang", which was very appropriate since Detective Wong ALWAYS played by a white actor with a Fu-Manchu mustache and slanty eye makeup who never remotely looked Asian. I felt like those two characters had the most satire wrapped up in them -- Wang parodying the racist depictions of Asians in the 30s and 40s, while Spade bringing to the surface the latent racism, sexism, and homophobia of noir detectives. Maggie Smith also had some amusing zingers wrapped in British properness, which I wish had been more plentiful. The action in the film is fairly minimal, leading up to a completely nonsensical ending that could only be a purposeful spoof of how often in mystery movies the twists and revelations were so unbelievably far-fetched. It was fairly enjoyable, I just wish it had more outright comedy to it; Clue, which came a few years later, pulled off the feat far better. 6/10.
Lawrence of Arabia. The famed epic of the eponym's rally through the Arabian peninsula in World War I. Christian and I finally finished watching this film on TV (uninterrupted on TCM) here in Buffalo after starting it a year ago at Mischa's on his enormous screen. It doesn't have quite the same effect on the smaller screen since so much of the movie is presented in wide angle shots of sweeping horizons and massive crowds. Probably, this, coupled with the later resumption, are what made this not quite a perfect movie for me. I thoroughly enjoyed the exploration of Lawrence's straddling between two cultures. As he began understanding the Arabs more, he grew more at home with them, so as to have two "homelands". Ultimately, however, he could never be fully accepted with the Arabs and he felt equally a foreigner with the Brits. That theme resonated strongly, in part because I've now lived in several places, in several countries even, and each place I've spent enough time in has a piece of my heart. I have things that I connect to there: friends, places to go, and just generally local customs. Yet having spent time in all these different places means that I've had to not spend times in others, making me feel like quite the stranger when I go visit family in NJ. I bet it would be the same feeling in just a year if I revisited Berkeley (it'll probably feel that way, actually, when I return in May to file). A second theme that was done well, but which seemed secondary in development, was the soldiers fight the war but politicians determine its outcomes and get the spoils. Linked to this are issues of colonization and cultural hegemony. Other movies, to my recollection, handled these subjects far more thoroughly, but this one does a good job as well. The last major theme was the reluctant formation of a leader and what freedom you have in choosing your own destiny. I agree entirely with the proverb that the best leaders are those who least want the job, and Lawrence embodied that role -- he didn't want to be general or instigate war, but he saw something that needed to be done and he dutifully led people to do it. Once he had become a hero, however, his role ceased to be as clear because he learned more of whom he was serving--as a leader he was prone to being a tool and prone to taking unclear steps that may inadvertently conflict with his convictions. If you really care about the consequences of your actions as leader, about who benefits and who loses, then do you ever have sufficient certainty that your actions are "good"? The movie's a solid epic, with enough time to dote on all these themes and more. I guess the main things that provided minor detractions for me were the numerous battle scenes (pretty unavoidable in a war film, but the interesting developments happen off the battlefield usually) and Peter O'Toole's slightly too foppish Englishman. Sometimes you couldn't take him seriously. 9/10.
Thank You For Smoking. A few days in the life of a spokesman for the tobacco industry. An enjoyable satire. What I liked most was its astute capture of the rhetoric of talking heads on both sides of the issue, the misdirection, redirection, recharacterizing the issue as a criticism of a person's character, "what about the children???", etc. The movie was willing to throw some tough questions at its hero in order to watch him deftly squeeze out of them (though in one or two cases he did so with far too much ease). It wasn't phenomenal wit, but enough of it was there to keep you laughing and engaged. 7/10.
Tropic Thunder. Ben Stiller leads a team of actors filming in the jungle who get involved in an actual hijacking in the jungle. I had pretty high hopes for this movie since it had a high rating for a long time and the rumor mill was that it was pretty funny. But Christian, his mother and I laughed less than five times throughout the movie and not once in the final third (from the raid onwards). On top of that, the story wasn't as good natured as say, Pineapple Express, and got annoying at times. I have to agree with Manohla Dargis' review comment that Ben Stiller killed far more jokes than he milked, and Jack Black was his usual unfunny, obnoxious self. The one highlight of the comedy setup was Robert Downey, Jr.'s character, both alone and bickering with the actual black actor. Their odd couple was the main thing that kept the movie mildly interesting for me. There's lots of gross out factors in the beginning and it goes back to dumb humor including fart jokes. Less pleasant than Pineapple Express, although it did have a couple laughs squeak out. 5/10.
Soylent Green. Charlton Heston is a cop in a dystopian 2022 investigating the murder of a wealthy industrialist. It's too bad popular knowledge of cultural references has spoiled the punchline to this movie for so many people. Yet even though Christian and I both knew it going in, that didn't preclude the movie from being enjoyable. The future world it sets up is believable, a suitably depressing manifestation of some man-caused trend of the present--in this case pollution decimating most kinds of animal and plant life on the planet. The scenes setting up the mood of the film, particularly those with Edward G. Robinson as he reminisces of the not-so-recent past, were done quite well and give the film its weight. Some of the ideas of the future, such as the "scoops", are pretty horrific when you think about them realistically. However, the movie ultimately suffers from not having enough suspense, since the chain of conspiracy does not really unravel as much as plunk to a halt and then the full conspiracy is revealed. The characters besides Heston and Robinson remain peripheral and unidimensional throughout the film, which make for a fairly straightforward gait through the plot. Provocative ideas with lots of potential. 7/10.
Pineapple Express. Seth Rogen is a lowkey pothead who witnesses a murder and is forced to run away with his dealer. I purchased this movie on our JetBlue flight to Buffalo since I remember the NYT review not being bad and I think some friends liked it. So, based on those recommendations, I had thought I'd laugh at least once, but I didn't. The humor at least was not pitiful like other "comedies" where you groaned at what the writers considered funny. Some jokes weren't that far off from being funny, but none tickled my funny bone. I also wasn't convinced by James Franco's drug dealer. Several times I couldn't help being reminded that this was not some deadbeat, unmotivated, dirty guy with greasy hair, but rather a good looking actor with well-toned muscles. Based on these considerations alone, I would be content leaving the movie with a 6/10, since the story wasn't boring or anything. What dropped it an extra point was all the casual graphic physical violence. I don't find it funny when someone's ear gets blown off and we have to watch someone gruesomely try to put the piece back on. I don't find it funny that someone's foot gets blown off for no reason. The amount of blood spilled (nearly everyone dies at the end) and the way it was all spilled was too much of a comedy killer for me. I don't mind some violence in my comedy, including people getting killed. The distinguishing factor at play here was that the violence was mean (not to be confused with wicked, which is what makes black comedies delightful) and that kills any shred of lightheartedness. Since there was nothing to redeem the violence, I had a somewhat unpleasant experience watching the film and hence the 5/10.
Ordinary People. An affluent suburban family come to grips with their eldest son's death. At the heart of the greatness of this movie is its reliance on almost no actual action. It entirely consists of interactions between the characters and self-psychoanalysis. Furthermore, the interactions aren't focalized around one person like in other character movies, but rather the graph of interactions under examination is nearly a complete graph, with each relationship being shaken. The whole movie's forward motion hinges upon peeling the layers in suppression of emotions and underlying drives. The acting was pretty darn fantastic. Not only did it concern what was said and not said, and how it was said, but the body language in this film became such and integral part of the characterization. There's one scene that really sticks out in my mind, where the parents, played by Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore, are having a discussion in a mall food court. The scene ends with them extending conciliatory hands across the table and then the shot switches to a wide angle and you see the two characters in full. Their body posture completely encapsulates the emotional conclusion of the scene, with the father in one state and the mother in a completely other one. The whole cast is extremely strong, and when they seem to overdo their roles a little, you're never sure if it's the actor overacting or the actual character's facade or overreaction. Out of the entire ensemble, I was most impressed with Donald Sutherland. In fact, this is the second movie I've seen him in recently where I was blown away by the nuance he adds to what could be a very one-dimensional character. The first performance was him as Homer Simpson in The Day of the Locust, where the character could have been dumb and pitiful, yet he turned him into a poignant, blindedly optimistic person who believed in the ultimate good nature of people. The descriptor of "idiot" only fleetingly crosses your mind when you watch this character. In Ordinary People, he plays a father figure who comes across as anything but patriarchal. Rather, he's an appeaser performing damage control, which engenders an air of weakness and impotence to his role in the family. Yet he ultimately pulls out very natural rumbles of struggle and altruism, and this sense of principle and of always binding the family that make his role profoundly paternal and strong. Another intelligent, insightful film from Robert Redford, who has quickly become a director I greatly admire. 9/10.
Fright Night. A teenaged boy becomes convinced his new neighbor is a vampire. This is one of those famous movies from the 80s that has lots of nostalgia value to people who grew up in that era, and surprisingly this was one that neither Christian nor I had seen (or at least, had remembered seeing). This movie suffers from there being no suspense at all! There's no doubt at all that the neighbor is a vampire. The vampire makes many threats, has NUMEROUS easy chances to kill the boy and does nothing except stall for time until the boy can handily escape. The plot is entirely transparent and has no drive thanks to everything being readily apparent from the moment a scene begins. There's not even a B-movie camp to this movie to save it. A terrible movie to watch. 2/10.
Dementia (Daughter of Horror). A young woman living in a flophouse with a blinking neon sign outside starts to go crazy, so she takes a late-night walk and gets pimped to an Orson Welles-like fat cat. This is a low budget horror film from the 1950s that has fallen into the public domain, and so in watching it I followed the site's advice to watch it as a silent film. It worked pretty well that way and there's some really well-structured scenes that use the black and white stock to an eerie end. The graininess that the film has acquired over time also lends itself to the vague creepiness, especially to the opening sequence against the night sky. No part of this film is truly revelatory in the way it captures the woman's madness, but it did a fairly good job, especially considering the low budget. A bit artsy, but also a little amateur; a bit of noirish dread, but not any horror. 7/10.
Murder by Death. A spoof of various murder mysteries from the 30s to 60s, a la Agatha Christie and the other great mystery writers of the day. There were some pretty spot on mockups of Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Detective Wong, Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon), etc. I most especially liked Peter Falk as "Sam Diamond", the archetypal Bogie character with a dame that he somehow never has much of an interest in, and Peter Sellers as "Wang", which was very appropriate since Detective Wong ALWAYS played by a white actor with a Fu-Manchu mustache and slanty eye makeup who never remotely looked Asian. I felt like those two characters had the most satire wrapped up in them -- Wang parodying the racist depictions of Asians in the 30s and 40s, while Spade bringing to the surface the latent racism, sexism, and homophobia of noir detectives. Maggie Smith also had some amusing zingers wrapped in British properness, which I wish had been more plentiful. The action in the film is fairly minimal, leading up to a completely nonsensical ending that could only be a purposeful spoof of how often in mystery movies the twists and revelations were so unbelievably far-fetched. It was fairly enjoyable, I just wish it had more outright comedy to it; Clue, which came a few years later, pulled off the feat far better. 6/10.
Lawrence of Arabia. The famed epic of the eponym's rally through the Arabian peninsula in World War I. Christian and I finally finished watching this film on TV (uninterrupted on TCM) here in Buffalo after starting it a year ago at Mischa's on his enormous screen. It doesn't have quite the same effect on the smaller screen since so much of the movie is presented in wide angle shots of sweeping horizons and massive crowds. Probably, this, coupled with the later resumption, are what made this not quite a perfect movie for me. I thoroughly enjoyed the exploration of Lawrence's straddling between two cultures. As he began understanding the Arabs more, he grew more at home with them, so as to have two "homelands". Ultimately, however, he could never be fully accepted with the Arabs and he felt equally a foreigner with the Brits. That theme resonated strongly, in part because I've now lived in several places, in several countries even, and each place I've spent enough time in has a piece of my heart. I have things that I connect to there: friends, places to go, and just generally local customs. Yet having spent time in all these different places means that I've had to not spend times in others, making me feel like quite the stranger when I go visit family in NJ. I bet it would be the same feeling in just a year if I revisited Berkeley (it'll probably feel that way, actually, when I return in May to file). A second theme that was done well, but which seemed secondary in development, was the soldiers fight the war but politicians determine its outcomes and get the spoils. Linked to this are issues of colonization and cultural hegemony. Other movies, to my recollection, handled these subjects far more thoroughly, but this one does a good job as well. The last major theme was the reluctant formation of a leader and what freedom you have in choosing your own destiny. I agree entirely with the proverb that the best leaders are those who least want the job, and Lawrence embodied that role -- he didn't want to be general or instigate war, but he saw something that needed to be done and he dutifully led people to do it. Once he had become a hero, however, his role ceased to be as clear because he learned more of whom he was serving--as a leader he was prone to being a tool and prone to taking unclear steps that may inadvertently conflict with his convictions. If you really care about the consequences of your actions as leader, about who benefits and who loses, then do you ever have sufficient certainty that your actions are "good"? The movie's a solid epic, with enough time to dote on all these themes and more. I guess the main things that provided minor detractions for me were the numerous battle scenes (pretty unavoidable in a war film, but the interesting developments happen off the battlefield usually) and Peter O'Toole's slightly too foppish Englishman. Sometimes you couldn't take him seriously. 9/10.
Thank You For Smoking. A few days in the life of a spokesman for the tobacco industry. An enjoyable satire. What I liked most was its astute capture of the rhetoric of talking heads on both sides of the issue, the misdirection, redirection, recharacterizing the issue as a criticism of a person's character, "what about the children???", etc. The movie was willing to throw some tough questions at its hero in order to watch him deftly squeeze out of them (though in one or two cases he did so with far too much ease). It wasn't phenomenal wit, but enough of it was there to keep you laughing and engaged. 7/10.
Tropic Thunder. Ben Stiller leads a team of actors filming in the jungle who get involved in an actual hijacking in the jungle. I had pretty high hopes for this movie since it had a high rating for a long time and the rumor mill was that it was pretty funny. But Christian, his mother and I laughed less than five times throughout the movie and not once in the final third (from the raid onwards). On top of that, the story wasn't as good natured as say, Pineapple Express, and got annoying at times. I have to agree with Manohla Dargis' review comment that Ben Stiller killed far more jokes than he milked, and Jack Black was his usual unfunny, obnoxious self. The one highlight of the comedy setup was Robert Downey, Jr.'s character, both alone and bickering with the actual black actor. Their odd couple was the main thing that kept the movie mildly interesting for me. There's lots of gross out factors in the beginning and it goes back to dumb humor including fart jokes. Less pleasant than Pineapple Express, although it did have a couple laughs squeak out. 5/10.
Soylent Green. Charlton Heston is a cop in a dystopian 2022 investigating the murder of a wealthy industrialist. It's too bad popular knowledge of cultural references has spoiled the punchline to this movie for so many people. Yet even though Christian and I both knew it going in, that didn't preclude the movie from being enjoyable. The future world it sets up is believable, a suitably depressing manifestation of some man-caused trend of the present--in this case pollution decimating most kinds of animal and plant life on the planet. The scenes setting up the mood of the film, particularly those with Edward G. Robinson as he reminisces of the not-so-recent past, were done quite well and give the film its weight. Some of the ideas of the future, such as the "scoops", are pretty horrific when you think about them realistically. However, the movie ultimately suffers from not having enough suspense, since the chain of conspiracy does not really unravel as much as plunk to a halt and then the full conspiracy is revealed. The characters besides Heston and Robinson remain peripheral and unidimensional throughout the film, which make for a fairly straightforward gait through the plot. Provocative ideas with lots of potential. 7/10.