Z10Z?
So, here are a few thoughts about playing Celebrity with a fourth round, wherein you have to do wordless charades while under a sheet:
*I still don't know if this is a real thing, or just something we did because Allison told us to.
*At first I was dead-set against it because I didn't see how it'd be possible, but it works if you have a hat to keep the sheet in place and a person to hand you the next clue under the sheet.
*If you're starting to feel like maybe you're getting a little too good at Celebrity collectively-you start to know who would be known and who wouldn't within one group of people, and you make sure to avoid including people like Benedict Cumberbatch who would be impossible to act out in the third round-you need the sheet round. It stops you from finishing the game too quickly.
*After a while, it starts to get pretty warm under the sheet.
So, that's how my 2011 ended. It was pretty great.
Actually, all of my end-of-year holidays in 2011 were pretty great. Some proof, from a set I just uploaded to Flickr with all holiday photos, starting with Thanksgiving:
The end-of-year movies-which, thankfully, were plentiful-had more ups and downs. Here are the movies I saw in December.
The Artist: A
Lovely! This movie is about a silent film star at the dawn of talking cinema, and it recalls Singing in the Rain in all the right ways without being anything like Singing in the Rain. (For starters, it's near-silent, so it's not built around musical numbers.) The lead actors are so expressive, and I love how they both get to do charming silent-film schtick. (My favorite part might be when Peppy puts her hand in his coat sleeve while it's on the coat rack and acts like it's his arm.) So many parts are handled in such a clever way, especially during the big climax at the end. Even the background details, like the names of the movies, are pretty smartly done. And yes, I didn't even mind the bit with the dog.
*We Need to Talk About Kevin: D
The titular Kevin should be on a constructs-not-characters bowling team with the kid from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (see below). This movie has one idea-kids are evil because we are evil-and hammers the same point for 112 minutes. Apart from Tilda Swinton's character, who has some interesting moments, the rest of the characters in the movie aren't real people, they're ideas that support the central point. (This is why I was surprised to find out it was based on a book. The movie didnt really have enough ideas to fill a novella.) It gets really tedious really quickly. I'm shocked that it wound up on so many critics' top-ten lists, and I wonder how many of those critics saw Joshua, which has the same premise but actually executes it with suspense.
The Sitter: B-
I mentioned this in my year-end wrap-up, but David Gordon Green is not a natural at comedy. Case in point: The best part of The Sitter is when Jonah Hill's character has an emotional, wordless moment with one of the kids while they're riding the subway. It's a fleeting instant of character development, but for me it landed harder than a lot of the jokes (which were often a lot of incident rather than punchlines). But Jonah Hill is a natural comedian, and Sam Rockwell is all-out hilarious. (And he dances!) And, since it's David Gordon Green, there's a lot of shots in there that are far nicer than they need to be. Still, though David Gordon Green is a far, far better director than Chris Columbus, I cast my lot in with Adventures in Babysitting, since nobody leaves that movie without singing the blues.
Young Adult: B-
I'm still unsure how I feel about Diablo Cody. On one hand, the dialogue in this is a lot less annoying than the dialogue in Juno, which I soured on more and more as time went on. It wasn't just the slang in Juno that bothered me (and made parts of Jennifer's Body nonsensical), it was the long asides about pop-cultural opinions that seemed to matter more to the writer than to the characters or situation. In Young Adult, all of that is reigned in, which is great. (There are still a couple of iffy lines that real people wouldn't say, but not as many.) Yet it still feels like some kind of revenge fantasy on the popular high-school girl. Even as someone who was far from popular in high school, I was all, "Axe to grind, much?" Still, as far as being a bitchy Queen Bee, Charlize Theron is great and does a perfect job of walking the hate her/pity her line. There's a terrific confrontation with her, and I even liked the ending, which I know a lot of people were split on. It still doesn't feel like enough of an idea for a whole movie, unless you like seeing pretty people taken down a peg.
The Adventures of Tintin: B
Before this year, I didn't know there was a difference between Tintin and Rin Tin Tin, so this movie had a lot of ground to make up for me. And, with one amazing, spectacular, complicated, unending chase scene, I got on board. There are a lot of enjoyable bits in the rest of the movie, but even if it was all building up to that one chase, I'd say it's worth it. Voice-casting Jamie Bell doesn't hurt it, either (wink).
War Horse: B-
Of course, this is a Spielberg movie, so it's beautiful from beginning to end. And the path that the horse takes and the people the horse interacts with kept me interested, even if it could get a little sappy at times. But, good God, whenever they cut back to the main human character, all he's doing is talking about how much he misses the horse. I got the sense that he spent the entirety of the war doing nothing but going on and on about the horse. I'm not that interested in horses in general, so I started to think that if I were there I'd want to throw myself in some barbed wire rather than spend another minute with him. It's just such a weight on a story that's both goregous and harrowing without him. C'mon, Spielberg, even the kid from E.T. knew when to shut up about his favorite non-human companion, and he had a freaking alien in his bedroom.
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol: B+
We watched all of the M:I movies before this one, and I feel that only did favors for Ghost Protocol. Actually, the first one was better than I remembered-it still had De Palma's fingerprints even though it was work-for-hire. I remember hating the second one, and it was worse than I imagined, because the Tom Cruise character is a total Mary Sue (and it ends with everybody doing wheelies on motorbikes). What I loved most about Ghost Protocol is how much Tom Cruise gets knocked around. There are three or four (maybe one too many?) big setpieces, and he doesn't sail through all of them so effortlessly, and there's not a wheelie to be found. There might have been too much Incredibles-style we-need-to-do-this-together moralizing at the end, but there's enough action, humor, and head-bumping for me to forgive it.
Arthur Christmas: B
I admit: My expectations were low. Arthur Christmas came out in a glut of children's movies I was far more excited about, such as Hugo and The Muppets. The designs were a little ugly, and the ads didn't really get at what the movie was about for a long time. Turns out, I was dead wrong. On the surface, it's a boilerplate Christmas story about trying to get a forgotten present to a girl before she wakes up on Christmas morning. But there's a really cool world created in the North Pole with interesting ideas about Santa succession, which was good enough on its own. Then there's the Aardman humor, which doesn't come across in any of the trailers or commercials I saw but was in full effect in the movie, to the point where Jesse was laughing harder than the kids in the audience. Aardman, I apologize for ever doubting you.
*Melancholia: B+
I "hard-copy live-tweeted" this for Jesse, because I watched an awards DVD screener while he wasn't home. Most of the things I wrote down amounted to "OMG THIS MOVIE IS SO SAD." It's funny how both Melancholia and Another Earth had the same idea, to make a movie about another planet that's almost identical to Earth that suddenly reveals itself. And both movies use this not as the main story, but as a backdrop to tell the saddest stories they can. No offense to Another Earth, which obviously had a much lower budget, but Melanchoia is more beautiful (especially in the weird, Tree of Life-esque prologue) and more affecting. Way to go, Kirsten Dunst, for carrying a movie that's not a teen flick. Now, let's never watch it again.
Carnage: C-
To be fair, I don't think anyone could have made a movie out of this material that I would have liked. I don't enjoy anything where I feel trapped in other people's arguments. It's why I didn't like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Revolutionary Road, and a number of other movies/plays-though it seems to happen more often in plays-with that kind of setup. But even given that I don't enjoy this style of drama, these four characters were nothing but yuppie parental stereotypes and gave me no insight into anything. (And poor Jodie Foster had to be the cartooniest of the cartoons.) Wow, these parents in Brooklyn Heights pretend to be liberal and PC, but they're really selfish and awful? You don't say. So, yeah, it wasn't good enough to make me not feel guilty for supporting Roman Polanski.
Sherlock Holmes: A Dance with Dragons: C+
Jesse and I split on a lot of movies at the end of the year, but I agree with every breath he's uttered about the newest Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes. The chemistry between Robet Downey, Jr. and Jude Law is superb. The action scenes are inventive and entertaining. But the thing that drives them from place-to-place is so, so thin. Add in a pretty weak villain, overt chess metaphors, and a Holmes-sees-things-before-they-happen trick that's pulled at least three times in the movie, and it all starts to feel pretty clunky. Does this put me on Team Benedict Cumberbatch (with founding-member Sabrina)? I'm not sure, but it doesn't make a strong case for itself.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: B
This movie-and I haven't read the book or seen the Swedish version of the movie-is part lurid-serial-killer story, part investigation-procedural. Only, as far as David Fincher movies go, the lurid-serial-killer part isn't as good as Seven, and the investigation-procedural part is not nearly as good as Zodiac. But, given that it is a David Fincher movie, that still makes it better than most of the thrillers out there. Everything looks fantastic. Sweden seemed really neat. Rooney Mara, who I thought would be too pretty for the role after seeing The Social Network, was fantastic, as were many of her costars. I just wish that the mystery gave them more to do.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: C
Again, I haven't read the book. But the movie version of this story's main character doesn't seem much like a character at all. Instead, he's like a laundry-list of precious literary personality quirks. (He plays the tambourine to calm himself down, for crissakes.) And this little construct goes on a journey where he meets people who have all of the rest of the precious literary personality quirks he's too young to have. And this is all framed as some kind of 9/11 story, when the post-9/11 setting isn't essential at all, so it feels manipulative.
The Darkest Hour: D+
I can imagine this movie's pitch meeting: "Let's make an alien movie!" "Oooh, aliens are expensive." "I know, they'll be invisible!" Afterward, we were debating the merits of this movie vs. Skyline. The points of that conversation aren't worth repeating, but you know your movie is in trouble when people compare it to Skyline. But, man, if you're looking for a movie that will give you endless stupidity to make fun of, The Darkest Hour is your movie.
*The Iron Lady: D
This movie has all of the hallmarks of both a bad student play and a bad student film. It starts with a dodgy framing device, with Old Margaret Thatcher puttering around her house half-remembering and half-imagining moments from her life. While I'm sick of the straight-ahead, three-act biopic, this is far worse (and totally out of character with the way she's portrayed in the rest of the movie). Then, there are these awful visual tics, like constantly having shots of her feet. (She's a woman in a man's realm, so her shoes are different. Get it?! And as she gets richer her shoes get nicer. GET IT?!) Meryl Streep and Alexandra Roach, who plays Young Margaret Thatcher, are fine in it, but I hope to see someone else take a crack at this story-someone who can do it with fewer shots of shoes and imaginary people.
*My Week with Marilyn: C+
As I mentioned in The Iron Lady, I'm into non-conventional biopics. I like that this one focuses on a limited, one-movie period in Marilyn Monroe's life, and you can extrapolate about her life and personality from there. And I don't really know much about Marilyn Monroe, but Michelle Williams does a great job of creating a character for her, with tons of charm but also tons of insecurities. The problem is the black hole of charisma that acts alongside her. I don't know if it was just a bad match for the part, but I saw nothing in Eddie Redmayne. Not even a glimmer of something. Poor Emma Watson has barely anything to do in the movie, but she in all her scenes she unfortunately has to pretend to be interested in Redmayne's character for some unexplained reason-and I was hoping that, in the scenes-between-the-scenes, she was getting with Dominic Cooper. Some like it hot, but Eddie Redmayne is a cold fish.
*I didn't see these in the theater. It might make a difference
*I still don't know if this is a real thing, or just something we did because Allison told us to.
*At first I was dead-set against it because I didn't see how it'd be possible, but it works if you have a hat to keep the sheet in place and a person to hand you the next clue under the sheet.
*If you're starting to feel like maybe you're getting a little too good at Celebrity collectively-you start to know who would be known and who wouldn't within one group of people, and you make sure to avoid including people like Benedict Cumberbatch who would be impossible to act out in the third round-you need the sheet round. It stops you from finishing the game too quickly.
*After a while, it starts to get pretty warm under the sheet.
So, that's how my 2011 ended. It was pretty great.
Actually, all of my end-of-year holidays in 2011 were pretty great. Some proof, from a set I just uploaded to Flickr with all holiday photos, starting with Thanksgiving:
The end-of-year movies-which, thankfully, were plentiful-had more ups and downs. Here are the movies I saw in December.
The Artist: A
Lovely! This movie is about a silent film star at the dawn of talking cinema, and it recalls Singing in the Rain in all the right ways without being anything like Singing in the Rain. (For starters, it's near-silent, so it's not built around musical numbers.) The lead actors are so expressive, and I love how they both get to do charming silent-film schtick. (My favorite part might be when Peppy puts her hand in his coat sleeve while it's on the coat rack and acts like it's his arm.) So many parts are handled in such a clever way, especially during the big climax at the end. Even the background details, like the names of the movies, are pretty smartly done. And yes, I didn't even mind the bit with the dog.
*We Need to Talk About Kevin: D
The titular Kevin should be on a constructs-not-characters bowling team with the kid from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (see below). This movie has one idea-kids are evil because we are evil-and hammers the same point for 112 minutes. Apart from Tilda Swinton's character, who has some interesting moments, the rest of the characters in the movie aren't real people, they're ideas that support the central point. (This is why I was surprised to find out it was based on a book. The movie didnt really have enough ideas to fill a novella.) It gets really tedious really quickly. I'm shocked that it wound up on so many critics' top-ten lists, and I wonder how many of those critics saw Joshua, which has the same premise but actually executes it with suspense.
The Sitter: B-
I mentioned this in my year-end wrap-up, but David Gordon Green is not a natural at comedy. Case in point: The best part of The Sitter is when Jonah Hill's character has an emotional, wordless moment with one of the kids while they're riding the subway. It's a fleeting instant of character development, but for me it landed harder than a lot of the jokes (which were often a lot of incident rather than punchlines). But Jonah Hill is a natural comedian, and Sam Rockwell is all-out hilarious. (And he dances!) And, since it's David Gordon Green, there's a lot of shots in there that are far nicer than they need to be. Still, though David Gordon Green is a far, far better director than Chris Columbus, I cast my lot in with Adventures in Babysitting, since nobody leaves that movie without singing the blues.
Young Adult: B-
I'm still unsure how I feel about Diablo Cody. On one hand, the dialogue in this is a lot less annoying than the dialogue in Juno, which I soured on more and more as time went on. It wasn't just the slang in Juno that bothered me (and made parts of Jennifer's Body nonsensical), it was the long asides about pop-cultural opinions that seemed to matter more to the writer than to the characters or situation. In Young Adult, all of that is reigned in, which is great. (There are still a couple of iffy lines that real people wouldn't say, but not as many.) Yet it still feels like some kind of revenge fantasy on the popular high-school girl. Even as someone who was far from popular in high school, I was all, "Axe to grind, much?" Still, as far as being a bitchy Queen Bee, Charlize Theron is great and does a perfect job of walking the hate her/pity her line. There's a terrific confrontation with her, and I even liked the ending, which I know a lot of people were split on. It still doesn't feel like enough of an idea for a whole movie, unless you like seeing pretty people taken down a peg.
The Adventures of Tintin: B
Before this year, I didn't know there was a difference between Tintin and Rin Tin Tin, so this movie had a lot of ground to make up for me. And, with one amazing, spectacular, complicated, unending chase scene, I got on board. There are a lot of enjoyable bits in the rest of the movie, but even if it was all building up to that one chase, I'd say it's worth it. Voice-casting Jamie Bell doesn't hurt it, either (wink).
War Horse: B-
Of course, this is a Spielberg movie, so it's beautiful from beginning to end. And the path that the horse takes and the people the horse interacts with kept me interested, even if it could get a little sappy at times. But, good God, whenever they cut back to the main human character, all he's doing is talking about how much he misses the horse. I got the sense that he spent the entirety of the war doing nothing but going on and on about the horse. I'm not that interested in horses in general, so I started to think that if I were there I'd want to throw myself in some barbed wire rather than spend another minute with him. It's just such a weight on a story that's both goregous and harrowing without him. C'mon, Spielberg, even the kid from E.T. knew when to shut up about his favorite non-human companion, and he had a freaking alien in his bedroom.
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol: B+
We watched all of the M:I movies before this one, and I feel that only did favors for Ghost Protocol. Actually, the first one was better than I remembered-it still had De Palma's fingerprints even though it was work-for-hire. I remember hating the second one, and it was worse than I imagined, because the Tom Cruise character is a total Mary Sue (and it ends with everybody doing wheelies on motorbikes). What I loved most about Ghost Protocol is how much Tom Cruise gets knocked around. There are three or four (maybe one too many?) big setpieces, and he doesn't sail through all of them so effortlessly, and there's not a wheelie to be found. There might have been too much Incredibles-style we-need-to-do-this-together moralizing at the end, but there's enough action, humor, and head-bumping for me to forgive it.
Arthur Christmas: B
I admit: My expectations were low. Arthur Christmas came out in a glut of children's movies I was far more excited about, such as Hugo and The Muppets. The designs were a little ugly, and the ads didn't really get at what the movie was about for a long time. Turns out, I was dead wrong. On the surface, it's a boilerplate Christmas story about trying to get a forgotten present to a girl before she wakes up on Christmas morning. But there's a really cool world created in the North Pole with interesting ideas about Santa succession, which was good enough on its own. Then there's the Aardman humor, which doesn't come across in any of the trailers or commercials I saw but was in full effect in the movie, to the point where Jesse was laughing harder than the kids in the audience. Aardman, I apologize for ever doubting you.
*Melancholia: B+
I "hard-copy live-tweeted" this for Jesse, because I watched an awards DVD screener while he wasn't home. Most of the things I wrote down amounted to "OMG THIS MOVIE IS SO SAD." It's funny how both Melancholia and Another Earth had the same idea, to make a movie about another planet that's almost identical to Earth that suddenly reveals itself. And both movies use this not as the main story, but as a backdrop to tell the saddest stories they can. No offense to Another Earth, which obviously had a much lower budget, but Melanchoia is more beautiful (especially in the weird, Tree of Life-esque prologue) and more affecting. Way to go, Kirsten Dunst, for carrying a movie that's not a teen flick. Now, let's never watch it again.
Carnage: C-
To be fair, I don't think anyone could have made a movie out of this material that I would have liked. I don't enjoy anything where I feel trapped in other people's arguments. It's why I didn't like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Revolutionary Road, and a number of other movies/plays-though it seems to happen more often in plays-with that kind of setup. But even given that I don't enjoy this style of drama, these four characters were nothing but yuppie parental stereotypes and gave me no insight into anything. (And poor Jodie Foster had to be the cartooniest of the cartoons.) Wow, these parents in Brooklyn Heights pretend to be liberal and PC, but they're really selfish and awful? You don't say. So, yeah, it wasn't good enough to make me not feel guilty for supporting Roman Polanski.
Sherlock Holmes: A Dance with Dragons: C+
Jesse and I split on a lot of movies at the end of the year, but I agree with every breath he's uttered about the newest Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes. The chemistry between Robet Downey, Jr. and Jude Law is superb. The action scenes are inventive and entertaining. But the thing that drives them from place-to-place is so, so thin. Add in a pretty weak villain, overt chess metaphors, and a Holmes-sees-things-before-they-happen trick that's pulled at least three times in the movie, and it all starts to feel pretty clunky. Does this put me on Team Benedict Cumberbatch (with founding-member Sabrina)? I'm not sure, but it doesn't make a strong case for itself.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: B
This movie-and I haven't read the book or seen the Swedish version of the movie-is part lurid-serial-killer story, part investigation-procedural. Only, as far as David Fincher movies go, the lurid-serial-killer part isn't as good as Seven, and the investigation-procedural part is not nearly as good as Zodiac. But, given that it is a David Fincher movie, that still makes it better than most of the thrillers out there. Everything looks fantastic. Sweden seemed really neat. Rooney Mara, who I thought would be too pretty for the role after seeing The Social Network, was fantastic, as were many of her costars. I just wish that the mystery gave them more to do.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: C
Again, I haven't read the book. But the movie version of this story's main character doesn't seem much like a character at all. Instead, he's like a laundry-list of precious literary personality quirks. (He plays the tambourine to calm himself down, for crissakes.) And this little construct goes on a journey where he meets people who have all of the rest of the precious literary personality quirks he's too young to have. And this is all framed as some kind of 9/11 story, when the post-9/11 setting isn't essential at all, so it feels manipulative.
The Darkest Hour: D+
I can imagine this movie's pitch meeting: "Let's make an alien movie!" "Oooh, aliens are expensive." "I know, they'll be invisible!" Afterward, we were debating the merits of this movie vs. Skyline. The points of that conversation aren't worth repeating, but you know your movie is in trouble when people compare it to Skyline. But, man, if you're looking for a movie that will give you endless stupidity to make fun of, The Darkest Hour is your movie.
*The Iron Lady: D
This movie has all of the hallmarks of both a bad student play and a bad student film. It starts with a dodgy framing device, with Old Margaret Thatcher puttering around her house half-remembering and half-imagining moments from her life. While I'm sick of the straight-ahead, three-act biopic, this is far worse (and totally out of character with the way she's portrayed in the rest of the movie). Then, there are these awful visual tics, like constantly having shots of her feet. (She's a woman in a man's realm, so her shoes are different. Get it?! And as she gets richer her shoes get nicer. GET IT?!) Meryl Streep and Alexandra Roach, who plays Young Margaret Thatcher, are fine in it, but I hope to see someone else take a crack at this story-someone who can do it with fewer shots of shoes and imaginary people.
*My Week with Marilyn: C+
As I mentioned in The Iron Lady, I'm into non-conventional biopics. I like that this one focuses on a limited, one-movie period in Marilyn Monroe's life, and you can extrapolate about her life and personality from there. And I don't really know much about Marilyn Monroe, but Michelle Williams does a great job of creating a character for her, with tons of charm but also tons of insecurities. The problem is the black hole of charisma that acts alongside her. I don't know if it was just a bad match for the part, but I saw nothing in Eddie Redmayne. Not even a glimmer of something. Poor Emma Watson has barely anything to do in the movie, but she in all her scenes she unfortunately has to pretend to be interested in Redmayne's character for some unexplained reason-and I was hoping that, in the scenes-between-the-scenes, she was getting with Dominic Cooper. Some like it hot, but Eddie Redmayne is a cold fish.
*I didn't see these in the theater. It might make a difference