What I'm Anxious to See This Year

This should be pretty comprehensive. However, there are always movies that seem to go under my radar. This will at least cover summer 2009. I opted not to post the trailers with it because it takes up to much space, I suck at formatting on this thing, and anyone can just go look them up at trailer addict or apple trailers etc. Anyways, 2009 has already been a great year in film and only looks like it will get better. So here's what I'm most excited to see (kind of in order):

Inglourious Basterds
Public Enemies
Funny People
Drag Me To Hell
Shutter Island
Sherlock Holmes
Up
Where the Wild Things Are
Away We Go
Extract
Moon
The Girlfriend Experience
Limits of Control
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Star Trek
Terminator Salvation

Ponyo

Taking Woodstock

Recent Rentals

Short Cuts:  The movie Magnolia ripped off.  That was harsh, it just took the premise and did something else with it and PTA isn't ashamed to admit that (and he shouldn't be).  But anyways, that's how I heard about this great Altman film that he made in like 1993.  It's very much like his Nashville, with no real plot but instead weaving together many stories taking place at the same time in Los Angeles.  Great character studies played by an awesome ensemble cast (Robert Downey Jr., Tim Robbins, Lily Tomlin, Chris Penn (RIP), Julianne Moore,  Jack Lemmon, Tom Waits etc.)  As always, Altman keeps this 2 and a half hour, plotless film interesting with engrossing and emotional stories and some signature interesting camera work.  Also, chooses to focus on the lives of middle and working class people in LA in the 90's, many of the stories intersecting without the characters even knowing it showing how people are shaped by and respond to their environment and times.  Rent it.

Rashomon:  My introduction to Kurosawa (very late, I know) and this was as great as it could be.  I still can't believe this was made in 1950 - I mean four, incongruent stories, with no real resolution, told through the character's perception.  I was always amazed at what Wilder, Kazan, and Ford could do in the culturally repressive 1950's, but even with that this still seemed so ahead of its time.  Great, great movie. Rent it.

Dark City:  I thoroughly enjoyed this as well.  Proyas paints a beautifully, dark, German expressionist, noir-ish, claustrophobic future.  It's just so great to look at the whole time. This really feels like the Blade Runner of the 90's, and looks and plays almost as good.  A very interesting premise, I don't want to spoil the ending so I won't.  William Hurt, Jennifer Connelly, and Kiefer Sutherland are all good in this.  Great storytelling and plenty of weird sci-fi philosophizing about what it means to be human in our increasingly urbanized and mechanized world (and it's good because it doesn't totally have the fear of technology and progress that others in the genre contain).  It also has a Matrix-y feel to it, and that's almost unfair to say because it came out one year before.  Rent it!

Hard Eight:  PT Anderson's first feature and it's no wonder he was able to get work right after. Awesome casino rip off sequences, that have a more solemn feel than the epic ones in the Ocean's movies.  Hard Eight instead focuses on its character's development on the margins of society, in the city of sin, taken in by the all-too-lovable Sydney (Philip Baker Hall), an old man who knows a little too much about scamming casinos and getting money fast.  Anyways, great cast (John C. Reilly, Gwenyth Paltrow, Samuel L. Jackson) with great dialogue.  There's a twist at the end that makes this movie a question about the possibility of redemption. That's all I'll say about that.  PT Anderson continues to be one of my all-time favorite directors. Rent it!

Secret Honor:  Ok this was a great addition to my new favorite historical figure/movie subject - Richard M. Nixon.  Altman made this in the early 80's when memories of Nixon's presidency were still fresh and it was based on a solo-act play.  Philip Baker Hall plays our 37th president, alone in a room, speaking in a stream-of-conscious manner to a tape-recorder for an hour and a half.  Hall is amazing in this, carrying this film the whole way with his powerful, and sometimes humorous portrayal.  Altman also keeps it interesting with camera movement that definitely transforms the source material from a play to a cinematic representation.  He cuts to portraits of different presidents on Nixon's wall, shows his paranoia with his four camera security monitors (that make for an amazing ending with four Nixon's yelling "Fuck em'), close ups on different objects in the room, and shots that follow his pacing and reflect his energy and moods.  The subject matter deals with Nixon thinking about his political career, his legacy, and hating on any and everyone.  We get a sense, in this room, as this shamed president slowly disintegrates, that he is fully conscious of the weight of American history and wanting desperately to look favorably upon his legacy.  Some arguments are convincing, some aren't, but this is an amazing film. Rent it!

Videodrome:  I've been wanting to watch this for a while and it also did not disappoint.  This was a definite mind-fuck of an awesome sci-fi movie, with all the great direction and bodily horrors that I've come to expect from David Cronenberg.  James Woods is also cool as fuck as the lead, a sleazy owner of what basically amounts to a smut television station.  Debbie Harry from Blondie is also in this, as a sadistic, trippy, sci-fi femme fatale.  Lots of great ideas are contained in this, especially the theory that humans need to start biologically evolving along with the rate and expansion of media technology.  The lines between fiction and reality are constantly blurred.  These ultra-right wing, militarist owners of the videodrome think North Americans are getting to soft, and they need to be inundated with constant images of torture to catch up with the death squads in Latin America. There's some crazy twists and James Woods' literally has a handgun.  It's fucking awesome to see him pull that out of his stomach-vagina.  I hope you get a sense of the craziness/awesomeness of this movie. And that is why you must Rent it!

Adventureland

Alright, now I'm more up to date and almost caught up with everything I've seen in the theater recently.  Now I get to write about Adventureland, which I saw last week and is another great addition to a great year so far in movies.  First and foremost, the trailers totally misrepresented the movie as some kind of teen comedy, just like Superbad.  Instead, Jesse Eisenberg's character, James, is in a very similar position i will be in a couple of months - a college graduate with a not-so-lucrative liberal arts degree.  When he has to get a summer job, his degree does not even help for entry-level positions.  While my nervousness ambiguous position about graduate school and my future is more of a self-inflicted problem than Jesse's, which is more a product of circumstance, I definitely related to this movie in that sense.  How often do you see a movie about the exact same brief moment in life that you are experiencing.  It definitely feels like my Graduate.  Maybe that's a bit hyperbolic, but that's how I feel. Mottola, based this mostly on his own experiences, and shot and captured it well.

   Adventureland is very moody and awkward at times.  There is definitely a lot of comedy as well as romance, which are both executed well, but there is always a darker, more moody feel to it.  While that was all great, notably Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig's hilarious performance as well as the always awesome Martin Starr, I was most interested in Jesse's development and his experience in this weird moment in life.  I don't know, it was just very personal to me and just got the feelings of both fear and anticipation and the awkwardness in between.  Jesse Brennan is definitely more ambitious a character with his shit together than myself, but the themes and mood of the movie struck a chord with me.  All in all, it has a very John Hughes meets the Graduate feel, with a style and heart all Mottola's own.  

There's so many different things to enjoy and get out of this movie.  It's a personal, interesting take on the "coming of age" genre.  It's as funny as any comedy out without losing its seriousness.  It challenges American masculine ideals.  It takes an interesting look at relationships, family and friendships.  Hell, it does a great job of exploring the dynamic of an attachment to a shitty job, because of the people you meet and interact with and the possibilities of being thrust from college into a new and different social setting.  I hope I've sold you because movies like this need to keep getting made and unfortunately, Adventureland is not doing great at the box office.  So my hat's off to Greg Motttola and go see it!

Ride the High Country/Wild Bunch at the New Beverly

One of Katie and my favorite things to do in southern California is to see double features of great movies, for super cheap, in an old exploitation theater in LA - the New Beverly.  During Spring Break, the New Beverly continued to show the greatness that is Sam Peckinpah, whose films I had not seen until we caught Straw Dogs there a couple months ago.  Anyways, Straw Dogs blew me away and when a Peckinpah double bill fell in line with the time while I was in southern California, we had to go.

So the first film was Ride the High Country, which was one of Peckinpah's earliest movies, made in 1962.  A great revisionist Western,  Ride the High Country delves into the changing times in California specifically, but for the frontier of America as a whole, as the west moved from the highly personalized times of cowboys and yeoman farmers and the beginning of the Gold Rush to the large expanse of industrial development and the growing power of the corporation.  Steve Judd is a noble old cowboy lawman whose been displaced by the aforementioned social changes and is reduced to protecting gold being sent from the high country mines to the bank.  Throughout his journey, Judd is committed to his principles of honesty and loyalty, but they are constantly complicated and challenged through his journey.  His old partner, Gil Westrum and his young sidekick Heck, are trying to deceive him and really steal the gold for themselves.  Once you see the sniveling greed and weakness of the weasely bankers, it looks more and more like Westrum and Heck have a good argument for their theft and deception.  Anyways, throughout the film, the old and the new are constantly clashing, and Judd's rigid nobleness sometimes fits with these new times but mostly makes him an outcast, out of step with this new, dog-eat-dog world.  Peckinpah does a great job depicting these contradictions while maintaining a solid and engaging story.  We see the backwardness of the fundamentalist, yeoman father, and his daughter trying to break free from his abuse and control and wanting to go to the city and embrace the modern world.  The miners are poor and oppressed and semi-autonomous in their high country town, only being dictated to provide resources and make money for the banks.  This law is semi-democratic, but mostly personalized and easily manipulated.  Judd, while old-school, does not fit in with this either.

Anyways, Ride the High Country is a great film.  Peckinpah shot it beautifully, easily aided by the natural beauty of the California setting.  The shoot-out at the end was indicative of Peckinpah's trademark stylized action sequences.  It fully understands the historical themes that frame this entire story.  The last shot of a noble, dying, Steve Judd looking off into the high country as he fades out was beautiful and emotionally powerful.

As I was reflecting on one great movie, another, even better one began.  I don't know what to say about The Wild Bunch that has not been said before but I'll give my responses and thoughts.  I had always heard about how groundbreaking and great this film was, and now I know why.  It fully lives up to the hype.  The opening heist/title sequence is one of the best things I've seen.  The stylish freeze frames that almost turn the frame into what looks like a sketch look like it was filmed today - but this was a western in 1969.  The intercutting between the wild bunch's ride and setting up and execution of the heist and the world around them - a dispirited temperance rally, railroad thugs and lawman setting up to stop the heist, and the poor children watching ants overtake huge scorpions.  Just what an amazing sequence, followed by an awesome, ultra-violent, quick-cutting shoot-out.  It was such a kick in the nuts, and I can't imagine what it must have been like for audiences at the time.

I also love how the Mexican revolution was the back drop to explore the similar themes of the end of the old west that were prevalent in Ride the High Country.  Peckinpah is pretty implicitly sympathetic to the Villista revolutionaries, which is always great.  Even the self-motivated gang are eventually forced to take on the corrupt federale General in an orgy of action and violence.  It was also funny to see how every woman in the film was basically a malinche, and you couldn't help but be glad when they went down in gunfire with their oppressive men.  However, I don't think that was entirely Peckinpah's point.  He wanted to show the reality of the violence of the west and the Mexican revolution, and while he does an amazing, stylized, and brutal job of shooting it, the violence is not really romanticized.  I don't know I just responded to all the themes, the look, everything about the Wild Bunch.  A definite favorite, deserving of its pioneer status.  I'm really late in finally watching Peckinpah's films, but he's quickly become a favorite director and I highly recommend both Ride the High Country and the Wild Bunch, as well as Straw Dogs if anyone else is a late-comer like myself.  I look forward to watching more of his movies.

Sunshine Cleaning

  Once again I apologize (if anyone's reading) for being so late on this one too.  Not that Sunshine Cleaning deserves such lag!  In fact, it's quite the opposite.  I really enjoyed this movie for many reasons.  First would have to be the character development, particularly of the two leads, sisters Rose and Norah, brought to life by probably two of the best female actors working today, Amy Adams and Emily Blunt.  Throughout the film you become very attached to both characters and they are just a great screen pair.  Not to mention a movie with a fully developed, complex, and interesting treatment of women, which we don't see a lot.  Rose and Norah are very real, and are not simply spending the whole movie pining for a man to save themselves emotionally financially - in fact its the exact opposite in this movie.  As you all probably saw already in the trailer, they obviously take it into their own hands by starting the crime-scene clean-up business (which was a new and interesting industry and concept to explore).  

   Throughout Sunshine Cleaning there is a purveying sense of class disparity that is unfortunately becoming more and more relatable to most Americans (not that it didn't exist before our current crisis).  Not only does this film do a good job of subverting the buddy life journey/dramedy typically reserved for men by putting two fully realized female characters front and center, but they are also poor/working class women in a small, New Mexico town setting.  All three of these factors are in the forefront where they would be marginalized or not exist in some other movies.  Either way, this is no glorified notion of the romantic, Sarah Palin, small-town America - but instead the reality of poverty and a depressing sense of under-development are on full display as the setting of this movie.  Rose, as a working, single-mom is forced to go clean the houses of worthless, condescending housewives who simply married their way up the class latter.  The film pokes fun at these wealthy suburbanite women and their near perverted obsession with producing and raising children.  Anyways, that was a tangent, but I was just pointing out the many ways there is an implicit critique of class inequality and proscribed gender roles, that is not heavy-handed or unrealistic and works well with the story.

 

     While the film does tie things up nicely with Rose and Norah starting their Sunshine Cleaning business, their entrepreneurial adventure is not without its major set backs, and the film is hardly trite or conventional.  While you become very attached to the sisters and it feels good to see the success of their business, it would be a disservice to Sunshine Cleaning to simply boil it down to a happy story where anyone in America can make it by starting their own business.  I think the nature of the business, cleaning up the bloody messes produced by the grimy underside of New Mexico, is a new an interesting facet to be explored (as it is) in the movie.  Judgement is not passed on a wife who shoots her abusive husband.  How is it that cops and business owners could be so insensitive to a man blowing his brains out right in front of them?  Rose and Norah are so desperate and burdened by shitty, degrading jobs, unemployment and financial woes that they are willing to go clean rotting households full of blood, guts, and pieces of brain in order to escape from their circumstances.  In the process, they intervene into the lives of the people who lost someone they loved, sometimes for good or bad.  Also, on the surface, it is empowering to see a woman take control of her economic circumstances, and not just sacrifice her soul or brains to marry a prince charming to come save her.  

Anyways, I've drilled this point home too much.  Sunshine Cleaning is a great film, that is shot well, with a great story, an interesting concept, fully realized and developed characters played by superb actors, and an underlying theme of the class inequality in this country.  By making this about the lives and struggles of ordinary people in these trying times, Sunshine Cleaning is a movie that is both of and for the present, and the many people feeling the pinch experienced by Rose and her family.  I highly recommend it.

I loved I Love You, Man

It's unfortunate that a far less worthwhile movie gets more writing than I Love You, Man, but I had to let the world know how much "Merde" sucked.  Anyways, this was an amazingly hilarious comedy that we are coming to expect from the likes of Paul Rudd and Jason Segel.  It's not just funny, but also sweet and does not insult our intelligence.  I am very down for the "bromance" and continue to thoroughly enjoy these more interesting, smarter, and more complicated portrayals of manliness.  We don't have to be completely stoic, unfunny, retards and can go on man-dates in search of friends!  And while I think great comedies and comedians have done this throughout cinematic and television history, it really seems like this new renaissance of comedy has mastered it and continues to produce gold like I Love You, Man.  Rudd and Segel are an amazing comedic duo, and while this term has probably been played out, really do pull off a bromantic comedy.  I was rooting for them to be friends more than I wanted Pete to get with his wife.  The surrounding cast are all great, particularly Jon Favreau and Jamie Priestly, two people I love.  On top of other great familiar faces like Andy Samberg, J.K. Simmons, and Rashida Jones.  If you want to feel really really good after watching a movie, rush to the theaters and catch this.  I suggest it, tots mcgoats.

"Now I'm Useful": Tokyo! Review

Tokyo! is three short films by three different directors (Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, and Bong Joon Ho) doing each of their visions of the city.  While the trailer was wonderful, the movie as a whole is not worth seeing in theaters.  Gondry's "Interior Design" and Bong Joon-Ho's "Shaking Tokyo" are both interesting, look good visually, and are pretty engaging overall, but "Merde" by Leos Carax is the most painful 25 or so minutes I've spent watching a movie since I can't remember when.

"Interior Design" follows a young couple (Akira and Hiroko) trying to find a place to live in Tokyo.  Akira is trying to make it as a film maker and Hiroko does everything she can to support her self-indulgent, typical-film-student boyfriend.  I won't spoil anything plot-wise, but will say that this is the best of the three shorts in Tokyo!.  If you're a Michel Gondry fan (as I am) its worth renting when it comes out.  Its very visually interesting, contains his typical magical realism but has a darker tone, exploring darker themes and only lifted by black humor.  The characters are developed pretty well in a short period of time, and you become especially attached to Hiroko, who is slowly turning into a wooden chair (which is awesome).  Once again, "Interior Design" is the highlight of the whole movie and definitely worth renting so you can skip what I will describe next.

"Merde" is the next short in the movie, and the title (meaning "shit" in French) is perfectly fitting.  I wanted to needle-fuck my eyeballs throughout the entire time this was being screened.  It has the stupidest, most annoying, goblin-hobo-leprechaun creature that lives in the sewer and only comes out to terrorize the streets of Tokyo.  We see in the sewer remnants of Japan's brutal imperialist past ("Heroes of Nanking" is spray-painted on the wall where this creature resides).  Ok, I get it, this is the "shit", the brutal and oppressive events of empire that modern economic power-house nations (like Japan) want to forget about and keep buried in order to project a better image of themselves to the increasingly globalized world.  But you can't always bury that shit, and it may come back to haunt and condemn you.  A potentially very interesting theme that was executed in the worst way possible.  You don't care about anything while watching this, the creature is hard to watch and speaks his own language of ridiculous, horrible noises that punish your ears.  "Merde" ruined the entire experience.

The final short in the film was Bong Joon-Ho's "Shaking Tokyo".  While I did not enjoy it as much as "Interior Design", this was also interesting and done well.  It follows a hikikomori, which is a japanese term for what's basically a modern hermit, a man who hides from the city in his apartment.  Choosing to follow a man like this, and that Japan has a specific term for it, is a statement about the city on its own.  It's also neat visually to see the shots of this man's apartment, fully equipped with obsessive-compulsively organized towers of hundreds of delivered pizza boxes.  There's also a humor and a sweetness to it and an awesome shock at the end of it, that is indeed waking up what Joon-Ho sees as the isolated, repressed, and alienated people of Tokyo.  Watch "Interior Design", skip "Merde, and watch this.  Tokyo! has interesting components, but is not Paris, je t'aime, a movie with the same idea but much better.

I Agree with Peter Travers

Rolling Stone's film critic, Peter Travers' posted a great piece on "Comedy's New Wave" - our currently popular budding comedians that are the cream of the crop and will last.  Here's the link. I definitely agree with his choices and the only thing I would change would be to add others who I think are worthy of this new wave like Danny McBride, Aziz Ansari, Amy Poehler, and Bill Hader who all have proven themselves recently and have very interesting projects coming up.  Either way, Travers assembled and wrote a great list on this recent renaissance of comedy and who its principle players are and why. Check it out.

Watch the Watchmen

This is very late, I know, but I had to write something about the Watchmen.  I saw it 3 weeks ago on opening night and saw it two more times the same weekend (one being in imax).  That should be an indicator of not only how much I enjoyed the film, but how it's something I could not get out of my head and had to watch it multiple times.  It stays very true to the graphic novel and where it strays it delivers.  Most notably is the amazing title sequence, that brilliantly and stylistically throws you into the alternate universe that the Watchmen inhabit in about 2 minutes, perfectly reflected in and enhanced by Bob Dylan's "They Times are Changing".  Also, the ending (which should no longer be a spoiler), works better cinematically than Alan Moore's original.  

The film, like the comic, is enjoyable on many levels.  First, it looks amazing.  From Rorschach's scenes that alternate between a dark noir-ish feel and an even darker horror/slasher type scene to the science fiction world of Dr. Manhattan and the little world he creates on Mars.  The action is brutal and unforgiving and I would also like to point out that Nite Owl II's flying owl-ship "Archie" looked awesome coming to life as well.  While Patrick Wilson and Malin Ackerman give sub-standard performances, Jackie Earle Haley, Billy Crudup, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan capture their characters perfectly and give us great performances.  

It also works as a great mystery story, super hero movie, and character study.  Watchmen engagingly explores the effects superheroes would have on the real world and vice versa.  The government might use a god-like freak of science- product of nuclear arms building, to bring Vietnam to brutal end and secure a victory for U.S. imperialism.  They might also keep a highly trained and ruthless operative like the Comedian to further accelerate the Cold War by toppling leftist regimes all over the world.  Hell, the CIA were already training an army of Comedians with the likes of the Contras, Cuban emigres etc.  Also, how would the public react?  Superheroes would displace police and firemen, but would that be for the better? Where's their accountability?  The absurd plan of Ozymandias to blow up 15 million people and scapegoat Dr. Manhattan (or a giant squid) in order to stop the arms race and achieve world peace, was not only a comment on the genre, but reflected the desperation and bleakness of the Reagan/Thatcher era eighties, that Alan Moore was operating in and was captured beautifully by Zack Snyder in this film.  

With the current economic crisis and two seemingly endless unnecessary wars abroad, the audience can definitely relate to that desperation for a solution (hopefully channeling Dr. Manhattan's atomic power to blow up the major cities in the world doesn't cross their minds).  Anyway you look at it, Watchmen is a great movie on many levels, be it visually, plot-wise, its depth or for adjusting an adapting a great work of graphic storytelling to the big screen and capturing it as well as possible.  I  don't know what else to say, stop hating and go see it!