bruceb

No, I hadn't heard of it either. :)

A guildmate recommended this to me, and since we've been trading recommendations, I figured, sure, I'll give it a try. I didn't realize until looking at the credits that it was written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, which explained a few things

This is a buddy flick, y'see. The hero from the mayor's rich family teems up with the hero from the poor farmer's family to get revenge on the grasping robber barons who are making life bad for everyone in the area. It's just that the buddies are played by Penelope Cruz and Salma Hayek, and the movie paints a really sympathetic picture of Mexican society getting crushed by American enterprise.

It's funny. It's got some great action, and some amazing horsework. The scientific detective sent to investigate the bank robberies the leading ladies commit is delightful. I had a great time, and highly recommended it. It's very much in the spirit of other movies Besson & Kamen have written, like The Fifth Element and The Transporter - mighty good fluff, a thing that takes more art and craft than it's foten given credit for.

Look, there's no point in getting all technical about this. I had a lot of fun. Watching this at home, propped comfortably on my couch, undistracted by idiots in the theater, gabbing about it as I watched with friends, I oohed and ahhed, enjoyed the zooms and bangs and everything, and very much enjoyed John Turturro's struggle to beat the benchmark for crazy agent performance set by Jeffrey Combs in The Frighteners. (I'd call it a draw and want to see a face-off to settle it.)

The use of the lost Beagle 2 rover mission to Mars is what really won my heart. That was such a disappointment for a lot of folks in and around NASA - certainly Dad felt an ongoing connection via labors of love to the unmanned space program, and failures like that left him sad, too. When I saw the suppressed seconds of footage, I could very easily picture him struggling to keep a straight face and saying, "Well, you see, that's not a formal design parameter..." I chortled and cackled on his behalf as well as mine.

I'd watch it again with good company.

I've been hearing ever since this came out about how great it was, from folks whose judgment I generally trust. It rose to the top of my Netflix queue and, well, they're right.

The conceit is simple: take all the conventions of classic film noir or hardboiled detective fiction of the '30s-'50s, and put them into a modern Southern California high school. The main character is one of the relatively nerdy guys, investigating the disappearance and then death of his ex-girlfriend, who got tangled up with the high society and jock scene, and...well, y'know. It's al there. Femmes fatale, kingpins of crime and their underlings, the quiet guy who has all the connections, and some very classy music along the way. What makes it work is that it's played straight: the characters don't think they're being funny and the movie doesn't do anything to suggest otherwise.

I found it altogether successful. It's a delight. I recommend it.

If you like monster movies, you probably have times when you want something that's just plain reliable: a group of people get together someplace interesting and/or do something interesting, run into a monster, most get eaten, one or a few get away, and maybe there's a twist at the end. It's desirable that no element in this mix be actively bad, and it's nice if some part is actively good.

Well, The Cave is that kind of movie.

The setting is select portions of a large cave system in the Carpathians, a nicely exotic sort of locale (along with a good teaser look at underwater caves in the Caribbean). The actively good part of this movie is its cave photography, and particularly the underwater cave photography. It is a marvel of textures, shapes, and colors that simply don't occur on the surface, rendered in gorgeous clarity. The characters are archeologists and cave divers exploring this. The monster is typical cinematic riffing on some bits and pieces of real cave biology, all ramped up. The monster is designed by Patrick Tatopoulos, and looks pretty good in its various forms - certainly not the best I've ever seen, but serviceable.

It's worth a look if you like cave photography and don't mind the rest, pretty much. I had fun.

Wow. This is one of the just plain most beautiful movies I've seen in ages. The trailer shows you what's up: it's an sf noir story rotoscoped from live action into animation and processed into nearly pure black and white. It could easily have gotten harsh in 1h 45m, but it stays fresh, and repeatedly dazzling.

The story is pretty straightforward. A brilliant young scientist is abducted, her patron the megacorp that looms over 2054 Paris wants her back, and the cop assigned to find her finds lots of other things, too. There is a nice level of ambiguity about the motives of key players, and a darkly satisfying ending. (Not what I was expecting, actually, but as soon as I realized where it was going, I thought to myself, yeah, that works.)

In addition to the brilliant animation, it's got some fine voice work. Daniel Craig is the detective, Jonathan Pryce the CEO with secrets, Ian Holm the aged scientist with secrets. It took me a while to place the folks whose work I know from other films because none of the people rotoscoped for the film are those actors. For instance, the CEO is a short, slightly jowly guy who reminded me of Joe Pesci. Pryce's voice fits him very well, it's just not the voice you'd expect for that particular look.

I believe I'll be rewatching this a few times before returning it to Netflix. Some of these scenes demand more attention.

So is there anything left to do of any particular interest with Romero's mythos of the living dead? And is there anything left to do that's worth bothering with when it comes to mock-verite film making? Yup. This is not a great movie, but it is a good one with some outstanding moments, and I'm glad I saw it.

The framework is exactly what Romero's been using all along: one day right about now, for no reason anyone will ever learn, the dead start coming back to life. They're mindless, slow, and completely focused on eating other people, who will join the slow carnival in their turn. "Now" back then was the late '60s; now it's the mid '00s, but people are still people and they still use whatever tools come to hand, in whatever ways seem wise and moral to them when they're driven mad with fear and can't think straight and are watching their own friends and loved ones become the enemy too. In this case the group of protagonists is a bunch of film students making a cheap horror movie for one of them to direct as his senior project, and their advisor. They trek from University of Pittsburgh across Pennsylvania in search of home and imagined shelter.

The film is presented as the edit made by one of the survivors, for information and warning. What distinguishes it from works like Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield is that these folks have good gear and know how to use it pretty well. (These are in general people at a higher level of self-awareness and competence than in other films in the same general category, without the particular intensity of revealed whacked-out-ness that makes The Last Broadcast such a thing.) There's very little tilting or zooming, and the editing actually does juxtapose multiple sources in the interests of clarity, where possible. The narration is too heavy-handed for its own good, alas; it would have been better with half the voice-overs stripped out, and perhaps some brief comments from others besides the main assembler added to the mix.

The major theme of Romero's life work is, I think, that while we don't exactly deserve painful death at the hands of the walking dead, we don't especially deserve anything better. Never mind potential, look at what we're actually doing, what we're always actually doing, and say with a straight face that we deserve the mercy we never bestow. No change in that here, but the manner of presentation is different. The story ends on a different kind of a beat than his previous work, almost a dialogue.

There's lumpy stuff in the mix. Besides the narration, I have real trouble believing some of the character backgrounds, some of the pacing feels draggy or rushed. But there are some really marvelous pieces, too. I am glad to have the emerging community of black survivors, and the note-perfect argument between the lead documenter and his girlfriend, and the limits of the panic room, and a bunch else. Very much worthwhile for horror fans.

This was unquestionably the highlight of my day offline, my first time using Rifftrax. Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and sundry others write commentary, and Mike delivers it, in files you download to play in sync with your DVD. Or, in my case, you snag the thing from a Bit Torrent site with the extra sound embedded, laugh yourself hoarse, and go to the Rifftrax site and donate the amount the audio would have cost plus a premium for being a sleaze about it. (I should note that they have one of the very best no-nonsense approaches to that I've yet seen, welcoming contributions and saving the scold. I suspect it's profitable to do it that way.)

Anyway.

The real question is of course "Is it funny?" And the answer is "Oh yeah!" I'd put the pace of the commentary and its quality up with good late Joel or early Mike stuff from MST3K. It was fast, but not too fast, and while I've heard that Mike can get kind of mean in some commentaries, he didn't in this one. Weird Al was also very fine, and I feel confident guessing that a bunch of those net fandom jokes were his own. They had some good banter, and the whole thing was just very, very highly satisfactory.

I watched it twice. I'll probably watch it again tomorrow. I have missed this kind of humor.

There's something I meant to touch on and forgot to, that both Hostel and the much weaker Hostel II do exactly right: they avoid exposition. One of the temptations for anyone making a story about people doing humane things is lecturing, to explain (hopefully at a dramatically suitable point) just how the principle of human evil is made manifest in this particular scheme. Roth doesn't do that, and it gives the work greater clarity. We see enough of how the "hunting lodge" works to give us a sense of what the protagonists are up against and nothing else. Is it native to Slovakia? How does the word get around? Etc etc? Dunno. Don't need to, either. The answers to questions like that would make the films into some other stories, and Roth seems much more interested in showing us how it affects the people it uses up than in explaining organization trees. And more power to him for it.

He's mentioned being interested in doing something PG-13, perhaps a giant monster movie, and if he could bring that same aesthetic to bear as Cloverfield did, this could be very interesting indeed to me.

I'm not often tempted to lock comments. I am tempted this time around, simply because I know from watching others' experience that any effort to look soberly at what Eli Roth has done with Hostel is likely to become a fight over things other than the film. Make me proud, please. :)

This is an extremely difficult film to say anything intelligent about.

Reports of its gore are not overrated. For most of its length, it actually has less gore and guts and stuff than many action movies or, for that matter, the evening news. But its major set pieces are really horrific, and to my mind, this counts as a perfectly good reason not to watch it, which lets out a lot of people from saying much more than "I just don't want to handle a major bloodbath."

On the other hand, I think that the gore here actually does serve a point of social commentary, and not just in the Grand Guignol style of making a token wave at some moral concern. The film as a whole is another of those social critiques by demonstration: it's about the predatory impulse in humanity, and just how true it is that whatever your weakness may be, there's someone there ready to exploit it for their own gain.

The plot's simple enough. American tourists bumming around western Europe fall in with a smooth-talking buddy who promises them cheap ultimate nookie over in the east, because with the Balkan war and social chaos, guys and money are in short supply. Off they go to a hostel in Slovakia and the promised babes. What a pity for the travelers that they turn out to be someone else's prey, and that there are rich guys enough to let someone make a business out of supplying victims for those who'd like to kill other people without having to do all their own procuring. (Roth hasn't touched on this in the interviews I've read, but I was strongly reminded of the kind of "hunting" Dick Cheney was doing when he accidentally shot a long-time acquaintance in the face - lamed, over-stuffed prey barely able to move, all but staked out for point-blank shooting.) Most of the protagonists die off terribly, and the ending suggests that escape ain't all that grand. (The opening of Hostel II only confirms it.)

What makes the film interesting is the details in all this. The American guys (all but the token shy one) are loud, rude, clumsy, and in general very much the way Americans are when dealing with the rest of the world, confident that there's nothing having money and being American can't fix. And yet...they're also capable of genuine kindness, their friendships and enthusiasms are real, and near the end, the last survivor puts himself at great risk not out of any grand moral design but just because he hears some suffering he thinks he might put an end to and has to try. It's a very naive and spontaneous goodness, but then part of the ambience of this story is that calculation is usually about using others, while helping them is a thing you do when the spirit moves you.

Furthermore, the atmosphere of exploited pain is just astounding. I don't know a lot about torture and execution myself, but I grew up with classmates who did, or who had family who did, and I was struck by how much Hostel reminded me of them. There's an exaggerated care in the wary movements of a victim who can't quite trust that their escape was for real, for instance, and that's here. There's also a real swagger in the movements of those who know they've gotten away with literal murder - a look we sometimes saw in American politicos twenty years back and are now seeing again - and that's here too. There's also a dark, murky sheen to any place that's been dirtied and cleaned and dirtied and cleaned too often, and also to any place where there's been a lot of blood and damaged bodies, and those are, too. It's not beautiful, not without surrendering one's own moral judgments, but it is captivating, and it's on film here, too.

I'm hesitant to recommend it, and I don't think that one is a better person for having the particular kind of toughness it takes to make it through such a film, nor a worse one for not being sprung that particular way. But I don't regret having seen it, and it's haunted my thoughts in a good kind of way.

Every so often there's a movie adaptation that utterly captures the spirit of the work it's based on, thoroughly makes use of the film medium it's in now, and just plain works. L.A. Confidential was one of those, maybe the paragon of the field for recent times. A Simple Plan is another.

I've commented on the book over in my 100 books thread, and won't repeat that stuff here. Super compressed version: this is a story of two brothers and a friend who find millions of illicit dollars and propose to make it theirs. Complications ensue, one thing leading to another, and crime does not pay.

Director Sam Raimi and writer Scott Smith set up a fantastic framework here. Raimi is one of the kings of dynamic camera work and highly gonzo action, and you'd never know that from this movie. It's a quiet story of people who aren't obviously different from the norm, their lives collapsing after a radical intrusion, and the production matches. And Smith did a wonderful job boiling down his story to fit the necessities of length and medium. Passages of exposition from the novel fold seamlessly into the dialogue. The ending is overhauled some, to the better; more on that in spoilers below. The best passages from the book are all there, pretty much, and served well.

Billy Bob Thornton and Bill Paxton, who play the brothers, are two of my favorite actors. I'm pretty sure they pass the phone book test: "Would I want to see these people read the phone book?" Thornton in particular captures the depths of misery his character is in, and Paxton makes a wonderful foil, learning how much he's taken for granted about himself, his brother, and their family that isn't at all what he imagined. This 3m 38s clip on Youtube does not contain any spoilers, and illustrates the point well. This is Smith's distinctive prose brought to life as well as anyone could wish for.

(Warning: Some of those other clips do have big ol' spoilers, including the "A Simple Plan - Two Brothers" one.)

One interesting thing is that Paxton and Thornton are substantially older than the narrator and his brother in the book - more than ten years older. This ends up working out great, I think; it just underlines the theme of stalled lives, and Thornton sharpens his character's trap until it brought tears to my eyes, in a way few performances do.

The music is as excellent as the rest of the film, and also unusual for its creator. Danny Elfman has a ton of good scores to his credit, but few as quietly menacing as this one. This sounds more like the kind of thing you'd expect from David Julyan, filling the quiet images with deep dark sounds.

I am a really, really happy camper about this film.

A few spoiler comments below the cut tag. Gonna compare the later acts of book and film.

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Harrumph. What a lumpy mixture this was. Its good parts are really good; its weaknesses seem so avoidable. Note: I have a separate harrumph about treating monsters as more than just symbols, spun off from an early draft of this post here. Also note: Sean Collins did his usual great job with this film earlier on, and is worth reading.

Now, I love me some fictional documentary, a lot. I really, really like seeing nonfictional forms used for imaginary purposes, going all the way back at least to Asimov's Encyclopedia Galactica. The Blair Witch Project and The Final Broadcast caught me off-guard, and surprised and delighted me. I'm the kind of person ventures like these are marketed at, pretty much. :) (I've never gotten into the alternative reality game stuff, but that's just a fluke.) On the other hand, while I don't seek out spoilers, I'd caught enough snippets of commentary from people I trust to tell me that the film had its problems, too. Right on both counts. I'm going to say good stuff first, and put some criticism behind a spoiler tag.

The good stuff is really good. Much of the film has the authentic quality of people shocked out of their gourds and doing stupid stuff because they're addled by fright and confusion. I know more about such things than I'd like, and I found most of what the characters did very plausible. The monster looked wonderful, and the urban destruction was awesome in the literal sense of inspiring awe. The ending surprised and pleased me.

A note about the urban destruction part: It's true that some key images were obviously taken pretty directly from 9/11 footage. But there's a good reason for that. How long had been before 9/11 that really major structures in a Western city had been destroyed without their owners planning it? There's the San Francisco earthquake, and a few other such, and apart from that the major urban destruction images of several decades are of earthquakes in places without skyscrapers and all, like Turkey. Now we have a clear record of what modern Western buildings do when they come down under externally created stresses. Of course that knowledge and those images will be influential. And most of what happens in Cloverfield has no real-world parallel, at least none that's occurring to me.

I do agree in a non-spoiler sort of way with those saying that the characters just didn't earn engagement and support the way that, say, Heather, Mike, and Josh did inBlair Witch Project. I can wave away much of that, but I wasn't really rooting for them in that way, or worried about them so closely. There's nothing as funny as Josh's line about "It's the Skipper" nor as heartbreaking as Heather's trembling apology. The Cloverfield characters are observers detached from things to a much greater degree.

(Actually, when we chatted about this in guild chat with some of my World of Regular regular buddies, pretty much all the women said they found primary narrator Hud actively repellent and were would like to have seen him die horribly anywhere along the way. The men's reactions seemed to range from annoyance to pity. The dividing line was quite sharp, in a way I seldom see it with these folks.)

I'm glad I saw it, and will likely get a DVD version with good extras in due season, but it fell short of what it could have been without (I think) much more actual effort, just differently aimed. I see that they're planning a sequel about a parallel story, and I hope that since these are tales of survivors and victims, there will be much stronger characters to deal with. That would crown the obvious effort that's going into them.

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I'm a big, big fan of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's first collaboration, Shaun of the Dead, which was a tremendously kind story about losers trying to rise to the challenges of a zombie invasion. Kindness is seldom in over-abundant supply, and there's a real art to portraying nebbishes in a way that invites sympathy and identification instead of just mockery. There's even more of an art to making that happen in a seamless fusion with genuinely good survival horror. When I heard they'd be back at it with cop action comedy, I had high hopes.

Executive summary: all of these hopes were fulfilled. I had a couple of moments of wondering if it would all collapse, but no, it does not. Everything thrown up into the air stays there until it's time for it to come down, and it lands with very nearly flawless timing and comedic effect.

I've seen a few reviews comment that the middle of the movie is a bit slow and would have been improved by losing ten minutes or so. In some ways I agree, in that I did wonder as noted previously, but I'm not really sure I can point at anything in particular and say, "There, that's the part that should go." Furthermore, there's a whole lot of setup going on in there for payoff in the absolutely glorious half hour, a fit of action lunacy to file alongside the end of Hard Boiled and the like.

Shaun of the Dead had a really fantastic cast of folks I was pretty much unfamiliar with. Hot Fuzz has that plus an equally fantastic cast of high-powered celebrities. Timothy Dalton and Jim Broadbent are particularly fine as various flavors of lunatic. And it's worth noting that Edgar Wright and his director of photography Jess Hall and editor Chris Dickens oversee a technically brilliant movie. There is some stunningly good cinematography and superbly intelligent editing, none of which ever calls attention to itself apart from the story it's there to tell.

Throw this on the pile to get, too.

Wow. This was some mighty good stuff, and a refreshing change in gangster films for its attention to some things that are often taken for granted. In the history of organized crime, the shift from other kinds of black marketeering to a reliance on heroin and other hard drugs was really, really important: it changed the lines of power from top to bottom, and changed the society around the dealers. American Gangster is right in the middle of that, capturing the ways in which organized crime became significantly more vile than it already was for very traditional family-values sorts of reasons.

It's just plain beautiful. Ridley Scott has lost none of his touch, I see, with scenes full of ominous tension even when they're being very quiet, and the action is just riveting. It moves at human pace, too - the slow-motion and free-framing and al are used for things other than fighting, while violence we see at the speed it happens. The music is also a delight, subtle and supportive rather than demanding, with a lot of attention to period ambience and its uses.

The handling of violence is a pleasure. There isn't much. And as I just said up above, it isn't presented with a lot of editing tricks. But it's given weight in framing and presentation, so that each act of violence looms very large in characters' experience. That's unusual among films and shows I watch, and I wouldn't mind seeing the approach taken more often.

My DVD purchasing has been light in recent years and is lighter now, given that I expect to get a high-definition upgrade this year or next. But this is on the list for when I do resume purchasing, I think.

My friends know that I have a certain contrarian streak when it comes to movies of genre interest - I have this tendency to find merit in things others are dismissing, and to sometimes not be very moved by the current thrill. However, my 100 movies riff doesn't start that way. :)

For once I think the general critical take on Francis Lawrence's version of I Am Legend nails it. The first hour is really excellent. The last half hour is not, with shifts in the setup that simply don't fit with what's come before, either in terms of content or as matters of theme and tone. But I don't have much problem ignoring the parts I don't care for, and that leaves me with a wonderful hour of cinema, with some really stunning visuals and some mighty fine acting from Will Smith. The pacing is quite good - I really liked the handling of flashbacks - and did I mention the stunning visuals? This movie has one of the best empty cities ever.

It's not something I see myself buying until it shows up in a cheap used bin or something like that. But I'm really glad I saw it, and will be re-watching at least some of it.

ADDENDUM: There's a scene fairly early on when Smith's character goes into a dark warehouse/office building to retrieve his dog. I haven't seen a lot of comment about it, so I wish to flag this as one of the finest portrayals of just plain human terror that I've seen in a horror/sf/etc. flick in years. This isn't the uberman confronting the monsters with worried competence, this is a guy risking death for his companion while terrified out of his mind. I think it's very important in anchoring a lot of the emotional portrayal that follows.

I like brannonb's invitation to watch a hundred movies this year and write a little something about each. Before I start, though, a bit of musing.

I'm kind of notorious among some of my friends for enjoying things they dismiss as trash. There are times when it get a little tiresome, in fact, to defend having had a good time. But I am going to mention up front a couple of things that affect my responses, so you can keep them in mind when reading later comments.

#1. I look more actively for reasons to appreciate any part of a film than for reasons not to. This is a cultivated choice, a response to my health circumstances. I would rather be happy than not, and too much unhappiness of any kind is a dangerous luxury for me because of metabolic consequences. I'm not talking here about the rich satisfactions of a good tragedy - that's a kind of enjoyment, too - but about anger and unhappiness toward the work itself. If a work is making me feel that way, I'm most likely to just stop it. Conversely, if there's parts I'm enjoying, I tend to simply disregard parts that are less satisfying. As I've said in various contexts in the past, I tend to get bored before I get offended. Not always, but usually. So I skip over things that may hold another viewer's attention.

#2. I have less invested in most viewing. I never go to movie theaters anymore. It's far too much effort for a far too unreliable experience. I just don't do it. Anything I see, I'm seeing at home, via cable, Netflix, or torrent. With less at stake in terms of time, money, and effort, I can come away feeling like I got a good deal even if I'm just scavenging parts. Likewise, there's a lot of things my friends do that I just can't for one reason or another, so there's reduced opportunity cost in the sense of "I could have been doing X instead".

So I'm an easy mark in some ways. I like some trash as well as some works of genius. And if anyone feels inclined to get snippy about it in comments, well, I can always nuke those and get on with the rest.