Current music: 3Ds - "Evil Kid"
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I haven't seen that much lately. In fact, I only saw one movie over the course of a nine day period. Having to work has a lot to do with it. I'm still forgetting something, and I need to write about 'Eternal Sunshine,' but that may take some time.
If I don't get another post up (I have a feeling I will), may I just say how happy I am that both UConn's men and women are in the Final Four and how badly I want to take it to Duke in every way on Saturday. There are few people on this earth who deserve to be loathed as much as Dukies. Most of them run small African nations, oil companies, or are members of the Saudi royal family. Any combination of the above would also do.
Anyway, it's already been a fun season. Anything at this point would be icing.
WINDTALKERS (2002) - d. John Woo
Oy, what a kick in the nuts. Is there a specific moment we can point to when 'A John Woo Film' became synonomuous with 'Hazardous Waste'? I'd like to say 'Broken Arrow,' but I love huge chunks of 'Face/Off,' one of the only decent Nic Cage movies not called 'Vampire's Kiss.' I can't wait for him and Mark Stephen Johnson to completely ruin 'Ghost Rider,' a comic that sucks. Regardless, Nic Cage sucks, John Woo now sucks. Chow Yun-Fat is coming back for the next one, but it's a weepy/epic thing about Chinamen building railroads and Nic Cage is going to be in it, so I'm just going to clock out now.
Adam Beach is good in this. Adam Beach is the only thing good about this. I watched it pan & scan, so I don't know if I really have that much right to speak, but I'll go ahead and say that this has some of the worst action sequences you'll ever hope to see. Forget how bad everything else in between is.
May I someday be old and senile enough to forget about the Navajo pipe and Christian Slater-on-harmonica duets. I kept waiting for some kind of smoke signal informing me that it was all a joke. This is honestly one of the worst movies ever made. Even people who liked 'City of Angels,' and its theme song - or Meg Ryan's new lips - will agree with me.
THIS SPORTING LIFE (1963) - d. Lindsay Anderson
Also a kick in the nuts, but in a good way. If I see two movies this good over the course of a year, it's been a good year. I'm worried that if I talk it up too much people will actually go out and rent it and find out that it's in B & W and that it's really slow and dark and decide that I have zero taste, but fuck it. I think it's amazing.
I really really love British cinema from the sixties. Everyone there was sitting around watching the French New Wave and the whole Italian scene, and instead of picking up cameras and doing the same exact thing, they applied an awkward and uniquely British slant to the proceedings. The resulting movies are a lot less graceful than anything by, say, De Sica, but they're better for it.
'This Sporting Life,' is the story of a professional rugby player, Frank Machin, played by Richard Harris, and it's an insane performance. This is poor, industrialized Northern England, the same barren landscape Ken Loach loves so well. Machin boards with a young widow and her two children. He loves her, but he's far too fucked in the head to make it work. Instead, he treats her like shit and suffocates everything in his path, including the audience. It's a horrible relationship, and it's one of those 'God, I hate being a man' movies like a 'Lilya 4-Ever' or something. It has the same kind of power that 'Darling' had, except this time around it's a man leading a soulless life in then-Modern Britain.
Some films are so powerful they just shift your head into a different gear. This did that for me. It's really very slow. Though the rugby sequences are dynamic and have a really authentic feel, there's just no arguing that most people will like this film. They won't.
Lindsay Anderson never made that much of an impact on the world of cinema, or even the world of British cinema, but after seeing this, I'm dying to watch 'If...,' the boarding-school-in-revolt film, that he made with Malcolm McDowell. I have a feeling it's a mindfuck.
DAWN OF THE DEAD (2004) - d. Zack Snyder
This is a lot to chew.
I liked it. I also didn't like it. Overall, I felt like it was money well spent, so I'm going to start off with the good.
No, wait, this was the first time I've been to a mall movie theater in North Carolina, and I'm going to start by whining about it. The biggest problem was the theater itself. We waited like twenty minutes to buy two sodas because this nine year old girl was trying to decide which candy she wanted while her mom - who was taking a nine year old to see a movie at ten o'f'in'clock - did nothing to hurry the process. When we got into the show, the only place with three seats was the front row. There seem to be two types of stadium theaters, and I'm not a fan of either. There are stadium theaters where you're in the front row and there's some space between you and the screen and the screen is really low - lesser of two evils - and then there's the type of theater where we ended up, where there's probably three inches between you and the screen, a screen which starts twenty feet above you. It was like Imax, except even Imax isn't this punishing. So that sucked. The other thing about seeing a movie like this in North Carolina is - just like in NYC - people aren't afraid to talk at the screen. I'm the last person to discourage that, most of the time it makes bad movies better. But, as my friends who were with me - and are locals - will attest, people who yell shit at the screen in North Carolina don't even try to be funny. Nothing clever to say and the worst comic timing this side of Mad TV. This is a problem. Between the screen and the other patrons - especially the kid sitting three seats away from us who kept standing up every time something disagreeable happened and shouting thing which made him sound like Shelden Williams - these were not ideal movie viewing circumstances, and we all had screaming headaches by the time the previews were over.
Here's what I liked:
It was a good idea to throw out much of the story from the original 'Dawn of the Dead.' What's in it's place isn't better than the original, but at least I wasn't sitting there holding it up to any kind of standard. It's got zombies and people hiding out in a mall. There are smaller similarities, but very little that made me say 'I liked this in the original better.' This is much more of a video game zombie movie, and, as far as my expectations are concerned, it surpassed them.
I'm not really a fan of Troma's films but I do like Lloyd Kaufman, because he doesn't pretend to be someone he's not: he makes unbelievably cheap films and people talk about them, and - even though he's screwing people over left and right - there's still others willing to work with him. I always admire low-budget fiefdoms, whether you're talking about working on a Ken Loach film or a Corman film (I guess John Sayles would be the real benchmark), and Kaufman's is one of the most effective. When I was a kid, my friend Zac and I got away with renting whatever we wanted, regardless of rating, and 'Toxic Avenger' and 'Class of Nuke 'Em High' were in almost constant rotation (I was ten or eleven the first time I saw both of those, so I guess I shouldn't be bitching about the candy girl). Anyhow, I just feel relatively let down by Troma since what I consider their late-80s heyday. Aside from a brilliant character idea in Sgt. Kabuki-Man (who's never been put to proper use in a movie) and 1996's masterpiece, 'Tromeo and Juliet,' they've left me more bored than anything over the last ten years or so.
My little Troma sidebar was really just an excuse to brag about seeing 'Toxic Avenger' at such a young age, but Elvis Mitchell brought up Troma in his review, so I feel entitled to my fair shot. Also, my Troma reference is better than his.
The reason Elvis brought up Troma was to bitch about what crappy movies they make, but also to point out that James Gunn, the writer of 'Dawn,' was the writer/co-director of 'Tromeo and Juliet,' and he has a small group of fans all his own. Gunn also wrote the 'Scooby-doo' movies, the first of which was more horribly directed than horribly written (a better director probably would've done a lot more with the same script - ah, for the Mike Meyers version of that film, with him playing everyone...), I don't know anything about the second one, so I'll just leave it alone. Anyhow, E.M. made the link in order to disparage both Troma and the movie, and I really can't say that I agree. I mean, Troma and Kaufman openly court criticism - it's what feeds sales - but I sort of feel like I sat through a different movie than my usually-favorite critic did (felt the same way about his 'Eternal Sunshine' review). 'Dawn of the Dead' may be about the apocalypse, but it's not a sign that the apocalypse is upon us.
Anyhow, more good: The start. Very good. Actually scary. Gunn knows how to move a camera around. Sarah Polley - I don't know what she's doing here, but I'm glad she decided to slum for once - I think I saw more of her feet than I needed to (Gunn and Tarantino should throw a foot-fetish party), but again, I'm really glad she's here. Other than that, the fact that it's actually gory really stands out. I loved how graphic it was. And it was graphic without being puerile-gory. The only two dudes who can really get away with puerile-gory are Raimi and Peter Jackson.
The BAD (and there's more, but I've forgotten it) :
Ving Rhames. Thanks for coming, Ving, please pick up your paycheck at the door. Everything after the extra people showed up in the mall. The whole "Andy" subplot. All the pretense of romance. The end sort of worked, but then what was that shit with the credits? Other than CRAP?
MYSTERY DATE (1991) - d. Jonathan Wacks
There's not much worth saying about this movie. Ethan Hawke is in it. He's very young. This and 'White Fang' were probably his first two starring roles. Teen comedy isn't good to him. The movie isn't that good, either. It's a hangover from the 80s, with bad shirts, teens behaving exactly like adults, adults behaving like teens, and a failed attempt at the same kind of darker humor that was all the rage once Hollywood unleashed 'The Breakfast Club.' Really, you can get a pretty good bead on this movie just looking at the director's last name.
The genre is ostensibly screwball, except the dame isn't trouble; trouble is trying to go out on a date with the perfect girl. It's about as funny as my 'Dawn of the Dead' audience was. In that sense, I guess, it's not a comedy at all. There's a shocking amount of blood and death, and a terrible job is done of explaining what's going on. None of the plot points ring true and nobody's actions ring true, either.
Still, you can't help admiring it for the simple fact that it couldn't be made today. In spite of a high body count and some relatively naughty language and behavior, it's PG-13, and I would be shocked if a studio would even let someone on the lot to pitch the story. So I have to give it some credit for that.
By the way, when 'The Swan' premieres on Fox, look for me in my bunker in Montana.
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