Ex Libras
Birthday celebrations continued last weekend, and everything came in pairs.
People Celebrating a Birthday: Rob and Jesse
Movies: Looper (amazing!) and Pitch Perfect (super fun)
Concerts: David Byrne and St. Vincent, Dum Dum Girls (more on these TK)
Boxes of Birthday Cake Oreos consumed: 2
Eventually there will be photos, but, until then, here are the movies I saw in September.
Lawless: B-
Lawless was a fun collection of scenes that I enjoyed individually, but didn't add up to much of a whole. As always, I really got a kick out of Tom Hardy. Instead of doing a Bane voice and a Bane walk, he had this funny little grunt he would do that made me laugh every time. Unfortunately, the movie is mostly about Shia LeBoeuf, who really doesn't capture my attention despite being a competent actor. He has a romance with Mia Wasikowska-my Alice!-but it's more pleasant than dramatic. Then, off to the side amid all of this easy charm, Guy Pierce is off being crazypants. It was all fine without being thrilling. At the end of summer, it was nice to see a movie with real actors and real performances instead of nonstop action sequences (hello, Expendables), but I wouldn't go out of my way to watch it again. Boardwalk Empire is definitely where I get my fix for stories about the bootlegging biz.
Sleepwalk with Me: B-
To me, this was a dramatization of a story more than a movie of itself-but a really good, enjoyable one. What makes me think it isn't a movie in its own right, though, was that the best bits were the ones where Mike Birbiglia addresses the camera directly. ("Who dis?") He takes us through an interesting scenario, but, since it's about his own life, it doesn't really have a clear beginning or ending. Still, it's pretty funny and wryly observed, and I liked seeing all of the comedy cameos.
Liberal Arts
It wouldn't be fair for me to give this movie a grade, because Jesse watched a review screener of it, and I fell asleep for the first 20 (40? 60? How long is that movie?) minutes. But if I did give it a grade, it would be very low. I never really understood why people hated Ted Mosby on How I Met Your Mother, but his character in Liberal Arts amplified Ted's most annoying aspects and now I can totally see why people would be so irritated. Then, this pompous, conceited character walks around his old college campus, and women tell him very directly that they want to sleep with him, and kids want to befriend him, and Zac Efron really likes him, and he changes the lives of everyone he comes across. Barf! All of the characters only interact with Josh Radnor in a way that made me think it would turn out to be one of those split-personality movies, where he was really talking to himself in every scene. Maybe that would've been a better ending.
The Oranges: D-
This movie is merely very bad, and then my personal preferences put it into "hate" territory. The bad: Characters who are cartoonish and not very well-drawn-two middle-aged BFF couples, married and living across the street from each other in New Jersey-get involved in a dramatic situation that details the breakup of one of the marriages. The writing is pretty, well, what's the opposite of sharp? "Dull" isn't really the word. "Bad" I guess is more like it-things that you can tell are supposed to be funny are just not funny, the people have tics instead of character traits, side-plots are picked up and dead-ended, etc. The worse: The wives get a total raw deal in the movie, and, being a wife, I am offended. Jesse says I'm being too sensitive and that all the characters come out looking horrible, but the movie goes out of its way to make Hugh Laurie sympathetic, and doesn't really afford the same courtesy to Catherine Keener (who is shown as being so lame because she loves Christmas, which I also take offense to). She does things in the movie that make her seem like a straight-up crazy person, and the only character that has her back is Allison Janney, whose first line says basically that she needs to pretend her own husband doesn't exist to get through the day with him, and then is kind of a nag for the rest of the movie. (Leighton Meester-the mistress-is the only one who is shown as charming and likable, really, and I did like her in it.) Finally: Can we please have a movie about the suburbs that doesn't have to do with adultery and divorce? Other stuff goes on out here, I promise! Another reason why The 'Burbs is one of the best movies ever.
Bachelorette: B+
This movie turned out to be darker, weirder, and way more interesting than I thought it would be when I heard it was about three girls (Kirsten Dunst, Isla Fischer, and Lizzy Caplan) doing a botched-bachelorette thing before the wedding of their high-school friend (Rebel Wilson, aka "Fat Amy" from Pitch Perfect). I thought it would be like The Hangover, but, while both movies are about bad things happening to bad people, Bachelorette isn't just about wacky incidents. It's more about the dark underbelly of female friendships blown out of proportion. The lead characters are like three different kinds of bad friends you've probably had in your life, if you're a girl-the dominating one, the out-of-control one that you have to babysit at parties, the one who thinks her life is messed up and unsalvageable-and while it's ostensibly about them trying to get Rebel Wilson's dress fixed before she notices they wrecked it, it's more about their personal dramas that the obstacles they have to cross to get the dress fixed. To me, that makes it far more fascinating than The Hangover, but it's also not as much of a funny/silly movie as I thought it would be. Still, I was pleasantly surprised, and I wish that it got a harder push from the Weinsteins. (Of all movies of theirs not to push, really Bachelorette is definitely better than Lawless.) In any case, I got to see Lizzy Caplan and Adam Scott paired up again, so I could pretend it was a fakie Party Down movie (even if their scenes included the saddest use of The Proclaimers ever).
The Master: B+
My only thought upon seeing this movie for the first time: I have questions. I definitely didn't absorb all of it the first time through. But even though I didn't quite get it, I still thought it was beautiful (even if the 70 mm was mostly used on craggy, ruddy, sweaty faces), and the performances were blow-me-away amazing. I was left wondering if a movie could be great without really making sense. I saw it a second time, and I understood it much better, but there are still lines here and there that stick out as either being willfully confusing or hinting at something that was ultimately cut out of the movie. (And a lot was left out of the movie, it seems.) For that reason, I don't love it as completely as I love There Will Be Blood, but I still hope Joaquin Phoenix will get heaps and heaps of praise/awards/treasure for it.
Perks of Being a Wallflower: B
I didn't read the book. (At the time, I was totally in the snotty "A genre for teenagers? Shouldn't teenagers be reading real books?" camp, which obviously I've come around on. I also half-remember reading the first chapter on Amazon and being irritated with the voice.) So since this book wasn't really an important part of my life, and since I've thus far been unimpressed with both Logan Lerman and Ezra Miller in other movies, I was prepared to be dismissive of the movie. But I wound up being won over by it and all its emo goodness. The movie does capture something specific about high school, Katie described it as being "weirdly obsessed with your friends," and I appreciated that. I thought Logan Lerman did a good job of being a clean-slate narrator, but the movie really belonged to Ezra Miller, who was pretty excellent in it. There were also a lot of good music choices, even if they weren't specifically period-appropriate (although I don't think the movie nails itself down to a specific date-it's crafty that way). It's sweet and moving, even if they're all stupid for not knowing that it's obviously David Bowie who sings "Heroes."
House at the End of the Street: C-
The hashtag says it all: #hates. Actually, it's not that there was nothing to recommend it. The story takes an interesting turn about halfway through. That turn, while making the movie more distinct from other horror films, takes the suspense out of the rest of the movie. It's hard to explain without going into spoilery detail, which I am happy to do in person if you want me to. The movie also inspired a debate between Jesse and me about what constitutes a cheat in a movie, and while results of the debate were inconclusive, the fact that we had it at all should be the indicator of something.
End of Watch: B+
As someone who didn't really get all the fuss around Training Day, I was surprised by how much I liked End of Watch. (I realize I've been saying this a lot. I swear, when I go into a movie, I want it to succeed on its own terms and give it the benefit of the doubt. But I also try to keep my expectations in check, and September had a bunch of pleasant surprises.) It's found-footage-style, which usually isn't my favorite, but done in a clever way, similar to Chronicle. And, like Chronicle, it's way more emotionally involving than those found-footage movies usually are. Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña are really a good match for each other, and their chemistry makes them fun to watch. I laughed out loud a few times. But then there was a part that was so horrific to me that I started crying. By then, I was so involved with the characters that the intense parts were even more intense. I guess all cop movies strive to do that, but End of Watch really nailed it. The Anna Kendrick bonus was just a cherry on top.
Trouble with the Curve: C
If you're going to yell at an empty chair and then put out a movie, you have to make sure it's a damn good movie. Trouble with the Curve is not enough to make me forget Clint's crazy-old-man shenanigans. Everything about it is rote. There's the old-man-with-instincts vs. the young-guy-with-computers conflict. There's the straight-down-the-middle story about an absentee father making amends with his adult daughter. There's a very standard romantic plot about a girl who puts walls around herself and the guy charming enough to break down those walls. There's even a very, very quick rich kid/poor kid subplot. Nothing is new or surprising. It's the movie equivalent of oatmeal; comforting and not at all exciting. Amy Adams and Justin Timberlake were super charming, and that's pretty much the best thing it's got going.
Looper: A-
How could I not love this movie? I'm learning more and more that my very favorite movies are ones that take place in a fully realized, stylized world (even if they're not necessarily fantastic ones, like The Royal Tenenbaums). Looper isn't really about the mechanics and tricks of time travel as much as it's about the future world in which this type of time travel exists. Rian Johnson is really a master at this type of universe-building, and I'd pretty much follow him anywhere at this point because you can tell he loves these types of movies, too. ("The movies you're copying are just copying other movies," might be my favorite line in the whole thing.) My one complaint is the weird makeup they gave Joseph Gordon-Levitt to make him look like Bruce Willis. I thought it was more distracting than the distraction of having two people who don't look alike play the same character. (JGL still has a totally different complexion from Willis.) If anything, they should've tried to make Willis look more like JGL.
Pitch Perfect: B
I do have nitpicks about this movie, especially regarding its fawning reverence for the mash-up, which was novel for me in 2000 but seems less and less clever as time goes on. (Anna Kendrick brings the mash-up to the a cappella world, something that's actually been happening for as long as I've known about a cappella.) But, if you're going to nitpick, why even bother seeing Pitch Perfect? This is a movie that says "just go with it." And, in that way, it's total, cheesy fun. There are songs. People sing them with their mouths. They get competitive about it. It's not as sublime as Bring It On, but it's close. Between this and her little character moments in End of Watch (especially when she sings "Hey Ma" in the car with Jake Gyllanhaal, which was adorable and apparently totally spontaneous [I die of cuteness]), I really just want Anna Kendrick to be singing and dancing all the time.
People Celebrating a Birthday: Rob and Jesse
Movies: Looper (amazing!) and Pitch Perfect (super fun)
Concerts: David Byrne and St. Vincent, Dum Dum Girls (more on these TK)
Boxes of Birthday Cake Oreos consumed: 2
Eventually there will be photos, but, until then, here are the movies I saw in September.
Lawless: B-
Lawless was a fun collection of scenes that I enjoyed individually, but didn't add up to much of a whole. As always, I really got a kick out of Tom Hardy. Instead of doing a Bane voice and a Bane walk, he had this funny little grunt he would do that made me laugh every time. Unfortunately, the movie is mostly about Shia LeBoeuf, who really doesn't capture my attention despite being a competent actor. He has a romance with Mia Wasikowska-my Alice!-but it's more pleasant than dramatic. Then, off to the side amid all of this easy charm, Guy Pierce is off being crazypants. It was all fine without being thrilling. At the end of summer, it was nice to see a movie with real actors and real performances instead of nonstop action sequences (hello, Expendables), but I wouldn't go out of my way to watch it again. Boardwalk Empire is definitely where I get my fix for stories about the bootlegging biz.
Sleepwalk with Me: B-
To me, this was a dramatization of a story more than a movie of itself-but a really good, enjoyable one. What makes me think it isn't a movie in its own right, though, was that the best bits were the ones where Mike Birbiglia addresses the camera directly. ("Who dis?") He takes us through an interesting scenario, but, since it's about his own life, it doesn't really have a clear beginning or ending. Still, it's pretty funny and wryly observed, and I liked seeing all of the comedy cameos.
Liberal Arts
It wouldn't be fair for me to give this movie a grade, because Jesse watched a review screener of it, and I fell asleep for the first 20 (40? 60? How long is that movie?) minutes. But if I did give it a grade, it would be very low. I never really understood why people hated Ted Mosby on How I Met Your Mother, but his character in Liberal Arts amplified Ted's most annoying aspects and now I can totally see why people would be so irritated. Then, this pompous, conceited character walks around his old college campus, and women tell him very directly that they want to sleep with him, and kids want to befriend him, and Zac Efron really likes him, and he changes the lives of everyone he comes across. Barf! All of the characters only interact with Josh Radnor in a way that made me think it would turn out to be one of those split-personality movies, where he was really talking to himself in every scene. Maybe that would've been a better ending.
The Oranges: D-
This movie is merely very bad, and then my personal preferences put it into "hate" territory. The bad: Characters who are cartoonish and not very well-drawn-two middle-aged BFF couples, married and living across the street from each other in New Jersey-get involved in a dramatic situation that details the breakup of one of the marriages. The writing is pretty, well, what's the opposite of sharp? "Dull" isn't really the word. "Bad" I guess is more like it-things that you can tell are supposed to be funny are just not funny, the people have tics instead of character traits, side-plots are picked up and dead-ended, etc. The worse: The wives get a total raw deal in the movie, and, being a wife, I am offended. Jesse says I'm being too sensitive and that all the characters come out looking horrible, but the movie goes out of its way to make Hugh Laurie sympathetic, and doesn't really afford the same courtesy to Catherine Keener (who is shown as being so lame because she loves Christmas, which I also take offense to). She does things in the movie that make her seem like a straight-up crazy person, and the only character that has her back is Allison Janney, whose first line says basically that she needs to pretend her own husband doesn't exist to get through the day with him, and then is kind of a nag for the rest of the movie. (Leighton Meester-the mistress-is the only one who is shown as charming and likable, really, and I did like her in it.) Finally: Can we please have a movie about the suburbs that doesn't have to do with adultery and divorce? Other stuff goes on out here, I promise! Another reason why The 'Burbs is one of the best movies ever.
Bachelorette: B+
This movie turned out to be darker, weirder, and way more interesting than I thought it would be when I heard it was about three girls (Kirsten Dunst, Isla Fischer, and Lizzy Caplan) doing a botched-bachelorette thing before the wedding of their high-school friend (Rebel Wilson, aka "Fat Amy" from Pitch Perfect). I thought it would be like The Hangover, but, while both movies are about bad things happening to bad people, Bachelorette isn't just about wacky incidents. It's more about the dark underbelly of female friendships blown out of proportion. The lead characters are like three different kinds of bad friends you've probably had in your life, if you're a girl-the dominating one, the out-of-control one that you have to babysit at parties, the one who thinks her life is messed up and unsalvageable-and while it's ostensibly about them trying to get Rebel Wilson's dress fixed before she notices they wrecked it, it's more about their personal dramas that the obstacles they have to cross to get the dress fixed. To me, that makes it far more fascinating than The Hangover, but it's also not as much of a funny/silly movie as I thought it would be. Still, I was pleasantly surprised, and I wish that it got a harder push from the Weinsteins. (Of all movies of theirs not to push, really Bachelorette is definitely better than Lawless.) In any case, I got to see Lizzy Caplan and Adam Scott paired up again, so I could pretend it was a fakie Party Down movie (even if their scenes included the saddest use of The Proclaimers ever).
The Master: B+
My only thought upon seeing this movie for the first time: I have questions. I definitely didn't absorb all of it the first time through. But even though I didn't quite get it, I still thought it was beautiful (even if the 70 mm was mostly used on craggy, ruddy, sweaty faces), and the performances were blow-me-away amazing. I was left wondering if a movie could be great without really making sense. I saw it a second time, and I understood it much better, but there are still lines here and there that stick out as either being willfully confusing or hinting at something that was ultimately cut out of the movie. (And a lot was left out of the movie, it seems.) For that reason, I don't love it as completely as I love There Will Be Blood, but I still hope Joaquin Phoenix will get heaps and heaps of praise/awards/treasure for it.
Perks of Being a Wallflower: B
I didn't read the book. (At the time, I was totally in the snotty "A genre for teenagers? Shouldn't teenagers be reading real books?" camp, which obviously I've come around on. I also half-remember reading the first chapter on Amazon and being irritated with the voice.) So since this book wasn't really an important part of my life, and since I've thus far been unimpressed with both Logan Lerman and Ezra Miller in other movies, I was prepared to be dismissive of the movie. But I wound up being won over by it and all its emo goodness. The movie does capture something specific about high school, Katie described it as being "weirdly obsessed with your friends," and I appreciated that. I thought Logan Lerman did a good job of being a clean-slate narrator, but the movie really belonged to Ezra Miller, who was pretty excellent in it. There were also a lot of good music choices, even if they weren't specifically period-appropriate (although I don't think the movie nails itself down to a specific date-it's crafty that way). It's sweet and moving, even if they're all stupid for not knowing that it's obviously David Bowie who sings "Heroes."
House at the End of the Street: C-
The hashtag says it all: #hates. Actually, it's not that there was nothing to recommend it. The story takes an interesting turn about halfway through. That turn, while making the movie more distinct from other horror films, takes the suspense out of the rest of the movie. It's hard to explain without going into spoilery detail, which I am happy to do in person if you want me to. The movie also inspired a debate between Jesse and me about what constitutes a cheat in a movie, and while results of the debate were inconclusive, the fact that we had it at all should be the indicator of something.
End of Watch: B+
As someone who didn't really get all the fuss around Training Day, I was surprised by how much I liked End of Watch. (I realize I've been saying this a lot. I swear, when I go into a movie, I want it to succeed on its own terms and give it the benefit of the doubt. But I also try to keep my expectations in check, and September had a bunch of pleasant surprises.) It's found-footage-style, which usually isn't my favorite, but done in a clever way, similar to Chronicle. And, like Chronicle, it's way more emotionally involving than those found-footage movies usually are. Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña are really a good match for each other, and their chemistry makes them fun to watch. I laughed out loud a few times. But then there was a part that was so horrific to me that I started crying. By then, I was so involved with the characters that the intense parts were even more intense. I guess all cop movies strive to do that, but End of Watch really nailed it. The Anna Kendrick bonus was just a cherry on top.
Trouble with the Curve: C
If you're going to yell at an empty chair and then put out a movie, you have to make sure it's a damn good movie. Trouble with the Curve is not enough to make me forget Clint's crazy-old-man shenanigans. Everything about it is rote. There's the old-man-with-instincts vs. the young-guy-with-computers conflict. There's the straight-down-the-middle story about an absentee father making amends with his adult daughter. There's a very standard romantic plot about a girl who puts walls around herself and the guy charming enough to break down those walls. There's even a very, very quick rich kid/poor kid subplot. Nothing is new or surprising. It's the movie equivalent of oatmeal; comforting and not at all exciting. Amy Adams and Justin Timberlake were super charming, and that's pretty much the best thing it's got going.
Looper: A-
How could I not love this movie? I'm learning more and more that my very favorite movies are ones that take place in a fully realized, stylized world (even if they're not necessarily fantastic ones, like The Royal Tenenbaums). Looper isn't really about the mechanics and tricks of time travel as much as it's about the future world in which this type of time travel exists. Rian Johnson is really a master at this type of universe-building, and I'd pretty much follow him anywhere at this point because you can tell he loves these types of movies, too. ("The movies you're copying are just copying other movies," might be my favorite line in the whole thing.) My one complaint is the weird makeup they gave Joseph Gordon-Levitt to make him look like Bruce Willis. I thought it was more distracting than the distraction of having two people who don't look alike play the same character. (JGL still has a totally different complexion from Willis.) If anything, they should've tried to make Willis look more like JGL.
Pitch Perfect: B
I do have nitpicks about this movie, especially regarding its fawning reverence for the mash-up, which was novel for me in 2000 but seems less and less clever as time goes on. (Anna Kendrick brings the mash-up to the a cappella world, something that's actually been happening for as long as I've known about a cappella.) But, if you're going to nitpick, why even bother seeing Pitch Perfect? This is a movie that says "just go with it." And, in that way, it's total, cheesy fun. There are songs. People sing them with their mouths. They get competitive about it. It's not as sublime as Bring It On, but it's close. Between this and her little character moments in End of Watch (especially when she sings "Hey Ma" in the car with Jake Gyllanhaal, which was adorable and apparently totally spontaneous [I die of cuteness]), I really just want Anna Kendrick to be singing and dancing all the time.