Film Countdown

[handful_ofdust]

Naturally I saw a lot of movies over the holidays, because what else are you gonna do when you're sick and/or at loose ends? They were, in no particular order:

Dark House, a crappish horror movie in which Jeffrey Combs plays William Castle and claims to have invented "3-D holograms" that need a computer system to filter themselves through--a system vulnerable to possession by ghosts! Not great on any level, though certainly watchable, and it does do a neat-o 180 degree POV turn near the end.

Fantastic Mister Fox, which was actually really great, so much so that I went out and bought myself a copy of it on Boxing Day. Now, I am not a fan of Wes Anderson in general--my favourite part of Rushmore remains the stupid-ass joke which has Jason Schwartzman saying to Luke Wilson, in response to: "These are my O.R. scrubs", "Oh, are they?" So that should tell you how surprised I was to love each and every part of this extremely silly yet weirdly engaging film, which constantly contrasts threadbare stop-motion animation with George Clooney's smooooth vocals and every character's tendency to suddenly randomly spin 'round and start acting like a genuine animal in the middle of a scene. (See the early scene in which Bill Murray tries to dissuade Clooney from buying a tree within easy stealing distance of Boggis, Bunce and Bean, Clooney responds with "The cuss you say?", and they spend thirty seconds snarling at each other like they're about to start tearing out throats before Clooney just snaps: "BUY it!")

The Merchant of Venice, Michael Radford adaptation. See my review in comments, here (http://handful-ofdust.livejournal.com/365918.html?thread=1623134#t1623134). What else can I say--it's damn hard going, but it's also beautiful, and very worth your time.

The A-Team, OTOH, manages to make LOUD LOUD ACTION very, very boring. Best thing about it: Sharlto Copley, hands down, though I also like that they seem to acknowledge that Face is really only charming in his own mind. The sting at the end with John Hamm is slightly funny, too.

And speaking of John Hamm...I really liked The Town, which I realize puts me in the minority, but there ya go. Personally, I think that Ben Affleck's lack of charisma as the main character is perfectly in character--both he and his lady-love are cautious, wounded people, surrounded by loud freaks who've given up and surrendered to Charlestown's constant downward momentum. Jeremy Renner's quite something, as always, and I enjoyed the silence/noise dynamic Affleck played with during the heist sequences. Plus, Pete Postletwaite, looking absolutely like he's just about to die and rocking the house nonetheless. (Secondary honors go to Chris Cooper in his one scene, plus every actual Bostonian Ben saw fit to cast.)

And hey, you know what's really depressing? The Road. As I sort of thought it would be. It's also amazing and weirdly gorgeous, in its own dirt-hued way, but there were a lot of scenes I watched with my hands firmly over my face. Jesus, though--Charlize Theron, not to mention Robert Duvall. And Viggo, getting thinner and thinner and thinner. Kodi Smit-McPhee I'd already been introduced to via Let Me In, but here he's a raw nerve. By the end, it made me both want to hug Cal hard, and wonder at the same time if I'd have the strength to kill him quickly, if and when. (I remember at the time it came out how people roundly mocked the whole cannibalism angle, like "oh, THAT would never happen!" As though horrible fucking things weren't already going on every day all over the globe, without the world having even ended yet! No, believe you me...pretty much from the day that we first turn on the taps and water doesn't come out, things are going to spiral pretty fucking quickly.)

After that, we had a brief side-bar into Redacted, which I saw enough of to know I'd like to see the rest, and Despicable Me, which I saw enough of to know I could happily live the rest of my life without finishing it. Followed by Salt, which was both interesting and harrowing--Angelina makes a fine ticking time-bomb, though I really do wonder if a guy could have gotten away with some of the things they have her do. There's a fair deal of trading on people's ideas about her innate feminine weakness/emotionalism, and the shock which comes from her subverting those same ideas. But because it's a deep cover narrative (this is not much of a spoiler), she's constantly running game which causes us to doubt she has any attachments at all, to anyone/-thing. This is where Angelina's icy hauteur comes in particular handy. Also: Makes a lot of sense that this is the same screenwriter behind Equilibrium, since she's essentially a test-run for the same sort of emotionless human weapon Christian Bale plays so well. Without the drug, though, which eventually does throw it all off-track...

The only thing we saw in the theatre was True Grit, which I liked unreservedly, and would probably like to see again. Some say it's not a "real" Coen Brothers film. I say: Man, a fuckin' frontier dentist-vetrinarian wearing a bear enters stage right halfway through, toting a corpse Hailee Steinsfeld's already cut down from a high, high tree and asking, in a sonorously strange voice: "Dooo either of yoooou neeed...medical attention?" Yeah--it's pretty Coen Brothers. Everyone's a chatterbox, nobody listens, they've all got blinkers on like whoah, and we end up with an OT3 that probably only became clear to Mattie ten years on, retrospectively; she probably woke in the middle of the night going: "Really, brain? Really? Well, I'm damn well not goin' to Texas!"

Then we have two British horror films--Salvage, which is indie and gritty and set in Liverpool, and The Broken, which is upscale, rather beautiful, and set in London. Both satisfy, though only for a little while. Oh, and I also saw Hidalgo, which probably bears talking about further. But I'm tired, so--there we stop.;)

You?

Comments

[poisoninjest.livejournal.com]

Some say it's not a "real" Coen Brothers film.

I think it's because it's half Western and half satire of Western, and it's like people can't wrap their minds around a Coen film that isn't in ironic quotation marks from beginning to end.

I love Radford's MoV and am glad you do as well, as it seems like hardly anyone's seen it. I gave a paper on it at Pop Culture Association a few years back, not long after it came out, and no one showed up for our panel. (Granted, a porn panel and a Lord of the Rings panel were both going on at the same time.)

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

That is indeed hard competition. I think it also has a lot to do with the subject-matter, though; the innate beauty of the text is how much it's compromised by that one simple core creator assumption, which is: "But of course you're going to be on the gentiles' side in the end, no matter what, because basically? Judaism is icky</>."

[marcy-italiano.livejournal.com]

"No, believe you me...pretty much from the day that we first turn on the taps and water doesn't come out, things are going to spiral pretty fucking quickly."

HA! Um, yeah. Seen it, and that's pretty much how the wiggy shit starts. ;)

We don't get a lot of movie time, but I'll keep these in mind!

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

I actually found myself looking at The Road in the $9.99 remaindered bin at Rogers today, then thinking: "What the fuck is wrong with me?"

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I still have to disagree on True Grit (I think because it turns out I hate old-fashioned Westerns after all), although the bear-on-the-horse was my favorite scene of the movie.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Although I do agree with you on Salt. I wasn't expecting to like that one, and it was both entertaining and unpredictable.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, Salt spins on a sort of cultural demonization that I find really hilarious--the old-school idea of Communists as literal Other, as though Russians are Klingons or something: Crazily tough, passionate yet subsumed to zealotry, capable of anything in the service of their Cause. Like suicide bombers, but they look white! It's pulpy in the extreme. But in the end, it's also a story about how someone who's been trained since birth to have no sense of self becomes Individualistic Will incarnate, acting only for herself, judging and executing people strictly by her own standards. Her ruthlessness and self-sacrifice is really amazing, but it sure doesn't make her Bourne-style "likeable".

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I've never seen the Bourne movies. I kind of liked her anyway (even though she became almost non-recognizable as a character as the movie went on), but I think it was because of her context - when she turned out to actually be a Russian spy I was like, "holy crap, are we actually seeing a Russian spy as the hero? Is she actually going to assassinate the Vice President? This is amazing!" Almost like I was happy to cackle maniacally with her.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

I'm beginning to think maybe Westerns are either an acquired taste or an in-born taste that simply can't be acquired, because certainly, the narrative is inherently compromised by its characters' almost complete inability to understand their own context. I myself had a weird little tweak of something during the trading-post scene where Rooster keeps routinely kicking those little Native kids off the front porch: Racism? Inherent meanness? The fact that they were tormenting that burro? All three? Or just the same inappropriate behaviour that leads him to keep telling Mattie his entire convoluted marital history? In a lot of ways, Westerns are like a comedy of bad manners to me--awful people doing awful things under awful circumstances, occasionally broken up by blundering back into fulfilling their own ridiculously stringent codes of honour and/or necessity/practicality. The consistent intersection of lies and myth.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

You're probably right about Westerns being a certain taste, although it's not the comedy of bad manners that riles me but the heroic/epic overtones that follow up on this comedy of bad manners - maybe because they don't feel heroic/epic, because it feels unearned. My speech coach in HS was obsessed with Tombstone and quoted from it constantly, and I thought it was really cool because my coach was a cool guy. But when I saw the movie I was underwhelmed by the moment ("who has the guts to play for blood?"). Maybe as much as I deride traditional Hollywood epics as cliched and whatnot (I'm thinking of Gladiator here, since it was on last night), I actually appreciate that their characters elicit an emotion in me? But anyway - I didn't grow up with them, and how some people feel about Westerns is probably how I feel about samurai movies.

Yeah, IDK what was up with that scene. That was one of those "laughing uncomfortably" scenes in my theater. But I likened it to when he's talking about his own estranged son in the next scene, about how he was really rough with him but he "didn't mean anything by it."

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Yes! To the samurai movies connection...like the cowboys would be samurai, loyal to the death to their towns/employers, and gunslingers or outlaws-turned-lawmen like Rooster would be more like ronin, reduced to their own personal code. But you also have to add in on top the fact that people who instinctually drift towards "the frontier" are people who don't really want to build or maintain the "civilization" Western development and Manifest Destiny is supposed to bring along with it--they want to escape it. And thus they know, on some level, that they're eventually going to end up on the dust-heap along with the same Natives and criminals (the "barbarians") that they spend their lives pursuing and/or eradicating. This is what gives a lot of Westerns that tragic tinge--it's a moment of inextricable change, a memory that can never be altered.

Or, to return to True Grit: This journey costs Mattie a lot--almost everything--and it defines the rest of her life in ways that render her utterly unfit to be "normal". In a lot of ways, it makes her an outlaw, too--someone who does what they say they'll do, no matter the cost to themselves, as well as everyone around them. But within her calcified fourteen-year-old's world-view, she'd probably consider an arm for getting to kill Chaney a Biblically fair trade.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

And by "cowboys", I mean guys like LeBoeuf. "Awways stalwart!"

[readingthedark.livejournal.com]

The Road ranks as the best film I've seen in over a year. It messed me up more than a little, but that's pretty much what I live for when it comes to film.

[sovay]

I say: Man, a fuckin' frontier dentist-vetrinarian wearing a bear enters stage right halfway through, toting a corpse Hailee Steinsfeld's already cut down from a high, high tree and asking, in a sonorously strange voice: "Dooo either of yoooou neeed...medical attention?"

That sounds like something that would happen to Chess and Morrow.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

Except in their universe the guy would probably be an actual berserker veterinarian.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

OK, now I really want a series (any medium) called ‘The Adventures of Doc Bjorn, Berserker Veterinarian.’ Eventually there would be a crossover with Dr. McNinja.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

Though actually, I think I’d rather see it done more-or-less straight, as pulp Weird Adventure, and any crossovers would be with Manly Wade Wellman’s universe.

[sovay]

Except in their universe the guy would probably be an actual berserker veterinarian.

. . . What was he here?

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Just your average roaming veterinarian wearing a hollowed-out bear for a hat and coat.You know; like one does, when it's cold.

[sovay]

You know; like one does, when it's cold.

Right. Silly me.

[baggyeyes]

I distinctly recall a bear-thing in there. And a dentist.

[baggyeyes]

I've read The Road...a very dark, disturbing read. Somebody wrote that there's a sort of enouraging ending, but I dunno.

The film, if I recall the stories correctly, pulled back on the more gruesome parts of the book. I haven't seen the film because I thought just reading the story was hard enough.

Thoroughly plausible, and that's what's scary.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

They certainly didn't go the grilled-babies-on-skewer route, no--but then, they didn't have to. And yeah, I know what you mean about the ending. In the book, it seems pretty uplifting; in the movie, you have no internal narrator telling you there's going to be a future with these people. You keep looking at Guy Pearce and his wife's kids, and thinking: Do they look scared? Should Kodi be scared? Is Kodi going to be dinner tonight?