Movies - Still yet more indie films
This will be the last of them for a while. Really.
Today on the blog:
① Robot and Frank
② Fritz the Cat
③ The Company You Keep
BLOGGING NOW: - Robot and Frank
- Fritz the Cat
- The Company You Keep
MOVIES TO BLOG: - Inception
- Sucker Punch
- Police Story
- Police Story II
- Supercop
- New Police Story
- Surrogates
- Stranger than Fiction
- Rocky Balboa
- Shall We Kiss?
- The Expendables
- A History of Violence
- The Good, The Bad, The Weird
- Shaolin Soccer
- The Guard
- Real Steel
- Easy A
- The Artist
- Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
- Summer Wars
- Jiro Dreams of Sushi
- The Avengers
- Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
- The Great Gatsby (1974)
- The Great Gatsby (2013)
- The Amazing Spider-Man
- Ted
- Battle Royale
- There Will Be Blood
- The Expendables 2
- Fight Club
- Chicken With Plums
- The Amazing Spider-Man
- Argo
- Searching for Sugar Man
- The Life of Pi
- The Hobbit
- There Will Be Blood
- A Place at the Table
- Silver Linings Playbook
- No Country for Old Men
- Iron Man 3
- Star Trek Into Darkness
BLOGGED: - nothing yet
So... Let's begin, shall we?
More Asimov, less Terminator
Frank is a retired jewel thief. He is now suffering from early-stage Alzheimer's disease and becoming forgetful enough that his life is becoming unmanageable. His son, who visits each weak from a great distance, decides to buy him a domestic robot specially designed to care for dementia patients. (It looks rather like Honda's ASIMO.)
He resists the robot's advice and assistance as much as he can, and even enlists his daughter, an anti-robot activist, into helping him get rid of the thing. (She ends up giving up after realizing how easy life is with the robot cleaning up.) Frank eventually comes around when his renewed mental stimulation and the robot's flawless digital dexterity give him an idea: He can come out of retirement and burglarize the home of some out-of-town rich douche-bags.
As a side note, I have no idea who Frank married, but if their kids are played by James Marsden and Liv Tyler, she must have been GORGEOUS!
The movie has a lot of heart. We get a well-acted window into Frank's frame of mind: How he dislikes his situation, how he misses the past, how he loves his kids, and soforth, are all brought to life quite well by Frank Langella, even when he is playing against a featureless machine. You'll laugh, you'll cry (especially at the ending), and I'd recommend this movie to everyone - even those who do not care for robots. Rotten Tomatoes thinks you should, too, rating it at 87% fresh.
X-rated toons.
It is the only animated feature ever to be rated X by the MPAA. It is also the only one that ever will be, since the X rating was replaced by NC-17.
And no, it's not porn, though it does include explicit sexual content.
R. Crumb and Ralph Bakshi left the animated porn-only porn to the Japanese.
Let me get something out of the way first: When somebody says, "I watched an X-rated cartoon from the 70s," two questions immediately pop up:
[1] Was it porn?
[2] How bad was it?
The first question has already been addressed.
In response to the second, let me say that it was pretty hard-core, with its sex, drugs, language, and mature themes. But it's no different from the R-rated fare brought to theaters by Seth MacFarlane or Parker & Stone.
Actually, it's a lot different from Seth MacFarlane, which is gross-out humor for its own sake. And whereas Parker & Stone's South Park movie addressed the hypocrisy of American censorship (censor foul language, but not blood and gore), R. Crumb takes social commentary to a whole new level, bringing the underground comic sensibilities of his time to the big screen. His work has more substance than his present-day counterparts.
Much of that sensibility, though, is likely to be lost on today's audiences; indeed the ideal demographic for "Fritz the Cat" currently ranges from their late fifties to their early seventies. I say this because the target of satire in this film is the privileged, know-it-all, hippie-generation pseudo-philosophizers and activists, who claimed to know all about the problems of the day (race, poverty, war, and soforth), even though they didn't have a clue what was going on beyond their proverbial ivory towers. In other words, if you're not old enough to remember hippies, you probably won't understand the point this film is trying to make.
Fritz is a would-be Jack Kerouac, a college student who proudly declares himself a writer and wants to travel the countryside looking for the life experiences of "real" people, rather than "phonies." To this end, he pals around with a black crow in Harlem (whom Fritz gets killed after inciting a riot), a drug-addled biker, and said biker's anarchist cult. Despite Fritz's big talk and his self-delusional "expertise," what he really wants out of life is to smoke pot and get laid a lot.
Speaking of hippies...
"The Company You Keep" has two leading men: Robert Redford for those old enough to remember the Weather Underground, and Shia LeBouf for those young enough to look need to them up on Wikipedia.
A member of the radical, left-wing group, a member who was part of a group who robbed a bank and killed a security guard, got picked up by the feds. This alerts the other members involved, who are getting picked up one by one. They have been hiding for more than forty years to escape jail time, and are now being outed and captured. Ambitious young reporter Ben Shepard then goes about piecing things together, even staying one step ahead of FBI Agent Cornelius.
Two members in particular are actively evading capture: Their former leader and still-radical Mimi Lurie, and quiet family man Jim Grant (who is really named Nick Sloan) who is actually innocent. Jim/Nick (or "Jick," if you prefer) wants Mimi to surrender herself and fess up so he doesn't have to lose his daughter. Ben chases Jick for the big scoop, but risks unraveling other, more personal secrets being kept by the retired Weathermen. (No spoilers. Go watch it!)
On Rotten Tomatoes it only has a 57%. The main complaint is that the pacing is too slow. Personally, I had no problems at all with the pacing. Robert Redford directs a great movie here, and almost every character in the film is played by Oscar winners or Oscar nominees. You can watch the movie and go "Hey, it's that guy/lady!" and yet still be wrapped up in the intrigue and suspense. This is a fantastic movie.
In summation...
See "Company."
See "Frank."
If you like underground comics in general, or R. Crumb in specific, then you might like "Fritz." If you're younger than 25, though, don't expect to get anything from it beyond shock humor, like a Seth MacFarlane cartoon.
Cue status bar!
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