27 May - "Always count your bullets, senoritas"

Bandidas (2006)

dir. Joachim Rønning, Espen Sandberg

CAST
Penelope Cruz (All the Pretty Horses, 2000)
Salma Hayek (Desperado, 1995)
Steve Zahn (That Thing You Do! 1996)
Dwight Yoakam (Wedding Crashers, 2005)
Sam Shepard (Black Hawk Down, 2001)
Gary Carlos Cervantes (Scarface, 1983)
Joseph D. Reitman (Lady in the Water, 2006)
Daya Fernandez (Minority Report, 2002)

Bandidas is a comedy about two oversexualized Mexican women, one who is from a wealthy family and knows about archery and horseback riding and etiquette (Hayak), and one who is from a poor family and is rough-and-tumble (Cruz). At first they hate each other because Hayak is snooty and Cruz is ill-mannered, but when a land-baron has both of their fathers murdered, they team up and become friends instead. Steve Zahn plays a nerdy detective and although the ladies engage in a rivalry for his attention, he ends up with a white woman from the good ol' U.S.A. instead. This was an amusing movie, but it was also racist and sexist and it's important to acknowledge that sometimes we find ourselves amused for all of the wrong reasons.

1 April - "That wasn't one of my first instincts "

Law Abiding Citizen (2009)

dir. F. Gary Gray

CAST
Jamie Foxx - Toys (1992)
Garard Butler - The Ugly Truth (2009)
Colm Meaney - The Commitments (1991)
Bruce McGill - Elizabethtown (2005)
Leslie Bibb - Iron Man 2 (2010)
Michael Irby - Flightplan (2005)
Gregory Itzin - Adaptation. (2002)
Regina Hall - Danika (2006)
Christian Stolte - Stranger Than Fiction (2006)
Annie Corley - The Cider House Rules (1999)
Richard Portnow - Kindergarten Cop (1990)
Viola Davis - The Help (2011)
Michael Kelly - Did You Hear About the Morgans? (2009)
Dan Bittner - Adventureland (2009)
Brooke Stacy Mills - Hairspray (1988)
Brian Anthony Wilson - The Happening (2008)

I didn't like this movie at all. I don't even have anything good to say about it. It's about a guy who's wife and daughter are murdered, but through legal whateverness one of the guys who did it gets a light sentence because he cooperated with the rest of the investigation. The Gerard Butler character is so pissed off that he goes totally batshit crazy and orchestrates a complicated scheme to get back at the justice system. What I particularly dislike about this movie is not even the ambiguous morality, its the lack of a clear division between anti-hero and antagonist. My friend Cora clearly was in the anti-hero camp. She said that the point of the movie was to figure out how Gerard Butler was achieving these heinous murder-plots. I thought that was horrible to watch because most of the people that Butler's character killed were only tangentially related to the incident which pissed him off so much in the first place. He wasn't fighting for anything, and that made him a bad protagonist to root for. On the other hand, he makes a fatal error in the end and blows up, making Jamie Foxx the "winner" of the story and Butler the "loser." But even in that perspective I don't think any clear statement about the evils of either the justice system or the evils of vigilantism was made. And the grrrwehatecorruptlawyers trope induced in my the repulsive horror of what those ideas mean to people who really believe in them. Batman is pretty cool, but in the real world I don't condone vigilantes.You can't just go around killing people. Do I even have to say that?

The absence of a conflict resolution (was there even a conflict to begin with?) made me feel like I had only seen half of a movie. This wasn't a story, it was just a bunch of stuff that happens. I've seen movies about dudes with misdirected anger before, but Gerard Butler lacked the compelling interior logic of a character like Hannibal Lector. I say, if you're going to make an anti-hero, go all the way. It works for Dexter. But if you're going to waffle in-between you aren't going to accomplish anything meaningful.

23 Mar- "Whatever you do don't let them starve"

The Hunger Games (2012)

dir. Gary Ross - Pleasantville (1998)

CAST
Stanley Tucci - Easy A (2010)
Wes Bentley - American Beauty (1999)
Jennifer Lawrence - The Burning Plain (2008)
Elizabeth Banks - Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008)
Sandra Ellis Lafferty - Walk the Line (2005)
Paula Malcomson - The Green Mile (1999)
Rhoda Griffis - Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997)
Josh Hutcherson - Howl's Moving Castle, voice (2004)
Anthony Reynolds - Down in the Valley (2005)
Woody Harrelson - Zombieland (2009)
Toby Jones - Les Miserables (1998)
Lenny Kravitz - Precious (2009)
Donald Sutherland - Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)

Of course, everyone who's anyone who gives a shit has already seen The Hunger Games, but I was there on opening night, in the fifth row, craning my neck upwards to watch the story unfold. I liked it, I enjoyed it. I thought it was visually appealing, but I also think it could have been better. Here's why:

1) Adaption of a book based on a first person perspective
The book is told from Katniss's perspective, and the readers are limited in our understanding of her world by her physical limitations. For this reason, we can't really understand what goes on in the minds of the other tributes, for example, and we can't see the reactions of the audience in Panem. The medium of film is almost always in third person perspective (with the exception of found-footage based movies). That means we lose Katniss's inner dialogue, which is tough because she isn't a very verbal character, but it also means we are able to see a lot of the world than Katniss is. I don't think the filmmakers took advantage of that strength. The other tributes were irritatingly flat characters. In the book five out of the twelve were portrayed largely as mindless killers, but that doesn't mean the filmmakers couldn't show them as being more rounded out. Which brings me to the next point.

2) Uncreative storyboarding
The point of the Hunger Games is that they are televised for the people of Panem. Since the book was from Katniss's perspective, we didn't get to see how she was portrayed on film. But this time it's in a movie and we are the audience. I would have liked to see some more creative changes in perspective that could drawn the audience into the story-world and potentially make the movie a lot more meaningful. After all, it's supposed to be a critique of the brutality of watching other people suffer. Let's make the audience feel a little less safe and a little more culpable.

3) Josh Hutcherson
How about we just get one of those big Easter Island heads to play Peeta?

21 Jan - "In God's name he took up the sword"

Black Death (2010)

dir. Christopher Smith

CAST
Eddie Redmayne
David Warner (Titanic, 1997)
Kimberley Nixon (Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, 2008)
Sean Bean (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, 2003)
Johnny Harris (War Horse, 2011)
John Lynch (The Secret Garden, 1993)
Tim McInnerny (101 Dalmations, 1996)
Carice van Houten (Repo Men, 2010)

In a lot of ways this movie was a lot like an inferior version of The 13th Warrior. The character is a less-than-enthusiastic monk who joins a bunch of religous knights on a witchhunt so he can actually ditch the monastery and run away with his girlfriend. Also, everyone's dying of the plauge. But when he reaches the rendevous point there's blood everywhere and it's presumed that his fair lady is deceased (except we all know that on TV and in the movies, no one is ever dead until you see a body). When they reach the bewitched village the necromancer apparently raises the monk's girlfriend from the dead and then there's a lot of quibbling about whether being Christian is actually helping anybody out or not, the nature of the plague as a divine retribution, and whether or not someone can be tortured into a believer. Sean Bean is drawn and quartered, it's pretty gross.

At first I thought the movie was becoming a sort of liberalist rant against organizaed religion (you know how they do!), but then the pagans turned into some real nasty jerks as well, so perhaps the critique is actually of a more generalized zeal. Can we trust anything you say when your actions are so shamelessly inhumane?

The witch turns out to be a charlatan, and the monk becomes a murderer when he thinks his GF has become zombified. When he discovers how he has been decieved, he goes sort of crazy and becomes a replacement for Sean Bean's ruthless character, but maybe worse. So is he driven by religious fervor, or just hate?

15 Dec - "Life is lonely, boring, and dumb"

The Doom Generation (1995)

dir. Greg Araki

CAST
James Duval (Independence Day, 1996)
Rose McGowan (Devil in the Flesh, 1998)
Cress Williams (2 Days in the Valley, 1996)
Margaret Cho (Face/Off, 1997)
Johnathon Schaech (Poison Ivy II, 1996)
Nicky Katt (The 'burbs, 1989)
Parker Posey (Blade: Trinity, 2004)

I can honestly say that this is one of the better movies that I've seen recently, and I'm going to stick it at the top of my list of movies about disaffected teenagers. The writing was phenomenal, I liked a lot of the one-liners and I had a hard time picking one to title this post. Here are the runners-up:

"That guy has the intelligence of a stool sample"
"Ever felt like reality is more twisted than dreams?"
"'I love you' can mean a lot of things, like, 'you'll do until someone better comes along,' or, 'I don't know how I feel but this is what I'm supposed to say,' or, 'shut up, I'm watching TV'"

So basically you've got these three kids, Xavier, the one on the bottom, kills a convenience store clerk and Amy and Jordan get implicated and all three go on the lamb together. Jordan is naive and optimistic, Amy is enraged and hateful, and Xavier is batshit crazy. But Amy really loves Jordan, even though she starts sleeping with Xavier, too, and Jordan always forgives Amy whenever she does anything awful to him. I guess the point is that the kids are apathetic about the world because the world is apathetic about them. They don't think about the future, only the present moment. There's symbolism in this movie, albeit unsubtle. Everytime they stop at a convenience store the total is $6.66, and Amy keeps getting misrecognized by strangers who call her Sunshine, Kitten, etc., and their rage at Amy's refusal to be recognized is homicidal.

Sometimes I've got to watch this kind of nihilistic movie just to make myself feel sane again. It's a road movie with no MacGuffin, and then at the end they just keep driving onwards without a destination, like it doesn't even matter if they get there or not.

18 Nov - "Not everybody can afford security"

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2009)

dir. Daniel Alfredson

CAST
Michael Nyqvist (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 2009)
Noomi Rapace (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 2009)
Lena Endre
Georgi Staykov

November 18th, I think sometime around midnight, brought me to the conclusion of the Millennium trilogy. The third installment commences after Lisbeth has been arrested for the attempted murder of her father and it is a race against time to see if the truth will prevail over corruption and iniquity.

Consequently, the film is dominated by the trial and plays out much like an episode of Law and Order, with the male protagonist Blomqvist trying to prove the veracity of Lisbeth's allegations against her father, her guardian, and psychiatrist even as Lisbeth refuses to testify in her own defense.

That's a curious point and one of the notable complexities of this character. It's almost as if she's daring the court to find her guilty, by refusing to defend herself and dressing like a caricature of a punk. You might also say that she refuses to legitimate the proceedings with her participation, and those who conspired against her rigged the evidence from the start. Why give them the satisfaction of watching you struggle in the trap they have laid?

24 Oct - "No means no. Don't you guys get that?"

Devil in the Flesh (video, 1998)

dir. Steve Cohen

CAST
Rose McGowan (Encino Man, 1992)
Alex McArthur (Conspiracy Theory, 1997)
J.C. Brandy (What Lies Beneath, 2000)
Phil Morris (Wag the Dog, 1997)

There seems to be a lot of movies that are about beautiful girls who go batshit crazy, contrive a romance with a totally innocent male victim, and almost ruin everything for anybody before their sexy conniving ways are revealed and the girl either dies or is brought to justice.

This is one of those movies.

What's frustrating is that this one was a little different in that it focused on McGowan's character, Debbie, instead of centering the narrative on her romantic interest and English teacher, Peter. This kind of turned Debbie into an anti-hero, she was just playing the odds! Unfortunately, as Debbie gets crazier and crazier, we get less and less insight into her mind as the story turns toward Peter trying to convince his virtuous fiance that all this is just in Debbie's head. But it's not! Peter plays into it, giving Debbie special attention in class and feeding her fantasy.

But I'm appealed by this idea of crazy-bitch-as-hero and I think it should have been explored more. In one scene, her grandmother hits her with a cane when she discovers that Debbie's been hiding her own clothes instead of wearing the outdated, conservative duds that granny provided for her. So Debbie rips the cane out of her hand and fights back with prejudice. The grandma begs for mercy, and in a vicious moment of self awareness Debbie says, "Fuck mercy! You don't have any mercy. My mother never had it, my father didn't have it, and I don't have it. It's a family thing!"

I found myself wanting Debbie to succeed in her escapist fantasy, until she started murdering people, and I find myself reflecting on that essential feminist critique, "how would this story be different with a male protagonist?"

12 Oct - "What money I have is about eleven years old"

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997)

dir. Clint Eastwood

CAST
John Cusack (Must Love Dogs, 2005)
Kevin Spacey (The Ref, 1994)
Irma P. Hall (Patch Adams, 1998)
Jude Law (Gattaca, 1997)
Paul Hipp (Face/Off, 1997)
Kim Hunter (Planet of the Apes, 1968)
Geoffrey Lewis (Maverick, 1994)
Leon Rippy (The Patriot, 2000)
Bob Gunton (Glory, 1989)
J. Patrick McCormack (Wag the Dog, 1997)
Rhoda Griffis (Road Trip, 2000)
Michael Rosenbaum (Sorority Boys, 2002)
Ted Manson (Elizabethtown, 2005)
Ann Cusack (A League of Their Own, 1992)
James Gandolfini (True Romance, 1993)

As a northern in the South, I empathize with John Cusak in this movie, because I feel like we're both working on uphill battles. The glory, of course, is that in the end the status quo hasn't changed a bit, because it never does here.

Everybody says exactly what they don't mean.

The movie is about a murder. Kevin Spacey's character, whose one of those elite Southern mansion types who walks around with Ugga, the UGA school mascot, shoots his young lover, played by Jude Law trying his best at a real low Southern accent. Over the course of the trial, Spacey's homosexuality is revealed, but the grand revelation, which should have ruptured the community, doesn't ruffle any feathers because everybody already knew he was gay, so they just shuffle side to side and bury their heads a little deeper in the sand.

They all know what they say they don't know.

Adding a little flavor to the mystery are the colorful side characters including my favorite, the Lady Chablis, a transvestite showgirl, and a voodoo priestess. All the glitz and distractions only remind you that Cusak isn't meant to solve the mystery, because in this place the party never stops and everyone just keeps smiling and smiling as the world around them crumbles. Savannah reminds me of decay and ruined lost cities like those in Mexico. One day tourists will be walking around those Southern mansions and wondering what kind of people lived in places like these.

The movie seems to jump mostly between various parties and courtroom scenes. Even as Cusak is trying to solve the mystery he has to respect social custom and play nice. Another difference between Northerners and Southerners: Northerners get about the business at hand while Southerners are always playing at niceties, but at least when a Northerner gets around to being nice you can be sure that it's genuine. I watched this movie a week ago so I'm not sure what else I wanted to talk about but I liked it. I think I might try to read the book.

10 Oct - "I also got an appetite for greater things"

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

dir. Andrew Dominik

CAST
Casey Affleck (Good Will Hunting, 1997)
Brad Pitt (Tree of Life, 2011)
Sam Rockwell (Moon, 2009)
Paul Schneider (Lars and the Real Girl, 2007)

This wasn't quite what I expected! First of all, there was no outlaw-ing, except for one train heist at the beginning. This was clearly about the last days of Jesse James's life. Second, it was less about Jesse James than it was about his buddies, especially Robert Ford, obviously (why on earth was I so surprised about all this?) Ford's character was painfully awkward. He started out a total dork who idolized the James gang, and slowly transitioned into a really sucky adult who was still irritatingly self involved and although he still loved James, he hated him for being the larger-than-life character that Ford himself could never be. I guess the main plot of the movie is that degradation of hero-worship. But through it all, Ford still acts like a petulant teenager, angry that the world doesn't stop to present him with his heart's desire. And in the end, when he makes his desperate grab for fame - he's vilified, and you feel a little bad, but mostly deserves it, because he sucks.

Brad Pitt did a good job playing James as he must have been - a dark and moody man toeing the line of craziness. There's one scene where he's holding two snakes up for Ford to look at, and he says "I name them like my enemies" and then he cuts their heads off and keeps holding them, watching them continue to writhe around. There is no glorifying this character. He's a lousy murderer descending into madness. But he also plays with his children, loves his wife, and in the end, willingly steps up to his own death. It reminded me of a passage from Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, which I keep lying around, about the death of Magua, who was the villain;

"As the weapon passed slowly into his heart he even smiled, as if in joy at having found death less dreadful than he had anticipated, and fell heavily on his face, at the feet of the unyielding form of Uncas."

Not that Jesse James was stabbed, but I still thought of it.

Last point: Sam Rockwell was awesome, he always is :)

4 Sept - "everything that eats meat likes dead buffalo"

Appaloosa (2008)
dir. Ed Harris

CAST
Jeremy Irons (The Mission, 1986)
Timothy V. Murphy (National Treasure: Book of Secrets, 2007)
Luce Rains (3:10 to Yuma, 2007)
Boyd Kestner (G.I. Jane, 1997)
Ed Harris (The Truman Show, 1998)
Viggo Mortensen (Eastern Promises, 2007)
James Gammon (Major League II, 1994)
Timothy Spall (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, 2010)
Renée Zellweger (Empire Records, 1995)
Ariadna Gil (Pan's Labyrinth, 2006)
Rex Linn (Cutthroat Island, 1995)
Lance Henriksen (Dead Man, 1995)
Charlene Adams (Cowboys & Aliens, 2011)
Maria Bethke (Terminator Salvation, 2009)

This was an odd western, and most westerns are sort of odd. My first reaction was that maybe the whole murder and bringing the lawless rancher to justice was a red herring, and maybe the movie was REALLY just about Renée Zellweger's character acting sorta slutty. But of course that doesn't explain everything. So then I thought maybe, in the tradition of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, this was a buddy movie, about the tacit and unshakeable friendship between Ed Harris's character and Viggo Mortensen's character. When Renée comes onto him, Viggo says, "We aren't with each other, we're both with Cole."

Jeremy Irons, who played the villain, was an underdeveloped character, especially considering that Irons is the elite of acting quality. Come to think of it - Jeremy Irons character in this movie was an awful lot like Daniel Day-Lewis's character in There Will Be Blood, they even looked kind of alike if you don't see them side by side.

This movie was more along the lines I expected from Cowboys & Aliens. It was also a better performance than I expected out of Renee Zellweger, who is almost always irritating. However, she pulled off a desperate and worn-out widow quite well. Maybe someone should cast her in A Streetcar Named Desire.

27 August - "I didn't think people could dance around here. I thought they were all stiff."

Maria Full of Grace (2004)
dir. Joshua Marston


CAST
Catalina Sandino Moreno (Paris, Je T'Aime, 2006)
Monique Gabriela Curnen (Lady in the Water, 2006)

The last two movies I watched were both duds, so I decided to take a safe bet and picked a well-reviewed Spanish-language film; because I'm all about those. Unlike the last two movies - this was neither inane nor irritating.

The plot is that Maria, a seventeen year old living in rural Columbia, takes a job as a drug mule only to realize that the glamorous world of trafficking has a seedy underbelly.

The really compelling aspect is that Maria seems to be the only self-aware character in her world. Everyone else moves along with a status quo but Maria refuses to submit to normative behavior and she gets punished for it. When she accepts the mule job, it's partly because she needs the money and she's in a position of weakness, but mostly it's because she doesn't want to work on the flower plantation anymore. That's important, because it means that she's not a passive character - she isn't getting shunted around by the plot, she's making choices.

When the shit hits the fan one of the other girls dies because the drugs leaked into her belly and they cut her open to get the rest out. That's when Maria realizes that their bodies are valueless to the dealers and she steals the drugs and makes her friend Blanca run away with her. So really this is a story about self-actualization, wherein Maria struggles to achieve self-reliance against everyone who is trying to take away her autonomy. Her very body is turned into an object of transport but her goal is carry no one's burdens but her own.

22 August - "The way out is through love, and you are just horny and lonely"

Twelve (2010)

dir. Joel Schumacher (St. Elmo's Fire, 1985)

CAST

50 Cent

Ellen Barkin (Drop Dead Gorgeous, 1999)

Gregg Bello (G.I. Jane, 1997)

Chace Crawford

Rory Culkin (Signs, 2002)

Zoe Kravitz (It's Kind of a Funny Story, 2010)

Thomas McDonell (The Forbidden Kingdom, 2008)

Erik Per Sullivan (The Cider House Rules, 1999)

Emma Roberts (Aquamarine, 2006)

Charlie Saxton (The Happening, 2008)

Kiefer Sutherland (voice) (Stand By Me, 1986)

Everything about this movie was like reading the diary of an angsty, self-indulgent teenager. I'll bet it's on the favorites list of many a depressed 15 year old, and I bet at least one of them has written a poem about it.

Like a lot of the really crappy movies I've seen, I can tell that at one point there was a lot of potential in this script. Some of the narration by Kiefer Sutherland was honestly insightful. I think the major downfall was the tedious angst pouring out of the main character.

I am a huge fan of movies with the Grand Hotel theme-but they're hard to pull off well. In this movie, very few of the characters received the depth of treatment they deserved. The main problem was the main character, played by Chace Crawford --who is so conventionally handsome that I'm having trouble stomaching this poster I'm looking at. This guy has a shit backstory, his mom and so he's really dark and doesn't talk about feelings and is the dreamiest drug dealer (???) on the mean streets of whereverthehellthisis. Losing moms is way sad, don't get me wrong, but I don't think it justifies a whole movie of the protagonist acting like a tool. I much preferred the bitchy prom queen character, who has one brief moment of self awareness and vulnerability when she confesses to a guy that she doesn't really like the person that she is but nevertheless dies thinking about how nobody will ever stop talking about how cool her death was and how much they'll wish they were there to see it. Insight like that is wicked, it makes good movies.

Depression very rarely makes a good movie. That's because in the real world nobody gets to wear their hearts on their sleeve. Steve Carell can play a depressed guy pretty well (Little Miss Sunshine, Dan in Real Life), and that's because pulls off the necessary degree of black humor. He plays depressed guys who are nonetheless coping and that makes them admirable characters, characters we feel good about watching. This White Mike character sucked because he wasn't coping, he was wallowing-and that's when I said this movie was self-indulgent, because wallowing is self-indulgent. Watching it didn't make make me feel better about anything. It made me angry, not sympathetic.

The next movie I watched is really good, way better than this crap, I promise.

27 July - "I am already grown up. I just get older."

The Professional (1994)

dir. Luc Besson (The Fifth Element, 1997)

CAST

Jean Reno (La Femme Nikita, 1990)

Gary Oldman (Air Force One, 1997)

Natalie Portman (Heat, 1995)

Danny Aiello (2 Days in the Valley, 1996)

Michael Badalucco (Desperately Seeking Susan, 1985)

Robert LaSardo (Waterworld, 1995)

Adam Busch (Sugar & Spice, 2001)

Jernard Burks (The Hangover, 2009)

Peter Linari (Men in Black, 1997)
Maïwenn Le Besco (The Fifth Element, 1997)
Don Creech (The Island, 2005)

What a wonderful movie - this one is tops. I added the "Favority Favorites" tag - because that's for movies that I think are high caliber. First: Gary Oldman as the villain = genius. And he does this thing where he takes drugs or something before he did anything really evil and it was just so totally Oldman. He's tops, my favorite actor, I think.

Natalie Portman is also awesome, she's like ten or so in this movie and you can really tell that even at that point she was a skilled actress. Jean Reno, the star, is also fabulous, but unfortunately his entire career is pretty much the one role. In fact, I usually just refer to him as "that French actor" and people usually understand who I mean.

The Professional is the movie which, for me, at least, defines the older man-younger girl relationship theme. Natalie Portman's character isn't just looking for a father figure - she's clinging the best family she's ever known with the least likely candidate, the hitman who lives down the hall.

For me, the most moving scene in the movie is when Leon goes to see his boss, played by the quintessentially Italian Danny Aiello. At this point we see that Leon isn't exactly the brusque tough guy that we imagined him to be, and certainly not the untouchable tough that other hitmen movies present with their characters. Aiello dominates Leon, he can barely get a word in edgewise. We learn that he is illiterate, let's the Italian manage all of his money. Leon is afraid to ask for what is his. He's meek. The girl gives him something to stand up for. She gives him something to live for. It's phenomenal acting, there's a vulnerability in both the protagonists that is all too rare in this sort of movie. Because it's an action movie and ostensibly there's no room for emotion, but that's wrong. The subtlety of the emotion is what makes it work.

29 June - "Ain't you glad the sun kinda sets. Prepares you like?"

Dead Man (1995)

dir. Jim Jarmusch (Broken Flowers, 2005)

CAST

Johnny Depp (What's Eating Gilbert Grape, 1993)

Gary Farmer (Smoke Signals, 1998)

Crispin Glover (What's Eating Gilbert Grape, 1993)

Lance Henriksen (Cyrus, 2010)

John Hurt (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, 2010)

Robert Mitchum (Scrooged, 1988)

Iggy Pop (Tank Girl, 1995)

Billy Bob Thornton (Love Actually, 2003)

Alfred Molina (The Da Vinci Code, 2006)

Jared Harris (From Within, 2008)

Gabriel Bryne (Stigmata, 1999)

The hard part, sometimes, is figuring out what's supposed to be symbolic and what's just a detail thrown in to just mess with your head. Dead Man is a movie like that. It begins with a silent and seemingly endless train ride in which the surroundings become more and more alien. Johnny Depp is wearing a very silly looking plaid suit in a caricature of propriety, the dignified man reduced to a fool. He checks his watch as if it matters. The lonesome twanging rhythmless music contributes to the feeling that something is always just about ot happen, but it never does and altogether the frustrated anticipation confirms the suspicion that, yes, this is what Limbo will be like.

A few weeks ago I met Gary Farmer at the Cayuga Picnic on the Share Farm at the northern tip of Lake Cayuga, New York. I was too shy to say hello but someone I was with pushed me up anyway and introduced me- even though Gary Farmer was right in the middle of eating!! I was totally flustered and tried not to say anything at all lest it come out in garbled nonsense syllables (something that happens only in cartoons and in my life). Here's the picture:

And here he is in Dead Man, tending to William Blake's bullet wound.

Gary Farmer's character in Dead Man, Nobody, is on the most basic level an Indian guide. However, in keeping with the bizarre tone of the rest of the film, Nobody is alternatively arcane and vulgar. At times he's bonking a chick in the middle of the woods and scolding William Blake for interrupting "a very romantic moment," and at other times he's reciting poetry and speaking in mysterious allegories. The line I keep going back to is this,

"Things which are alike in nature grow to look alike, and the speaking stones have lain a long time looking at the sun...Some believe they descend with the lightening, but I believe they are on the ground and are projected downward by the bolt."

Because I haven't quite yet figured out what this movie is supposed to mean (And I am determined as Hell to prove that it means something). I keep going back to that line and trying to figure out how it relates to the rest of the story.

The most obvious interpretation of Dead Man is that, like Lost or The Sixth Sense, Dead Man is about a man traveling into the afterlife. I prefer to think that William Blake does not die in the physical sense when he is shot by the factory owner's son, but that Dead Man is about learning to walk with dignity through life that may indeed take you on a path "through endless night."

I've this theory for a while that the recreational abuse of certain mind-altering substances has to do with a cultural mindset that is alienated from the transcendental state. That sounds wordy. I mean that because drugs like tobacco or alcohol or mushrooms or whatever have been traditionally used in ceremonies in order to access powers or spirits or knowledge which exists beyond and above the everyday world. It was controlled, it was mediated, and so maybe people abuse them because they are trying to access that transcendent state but they don't even why or how or the reason. So what happens in Dead Man is that everybody keeps asking William Blake for some tobacco and he keeps saying, No! I don't smoke! And when he finally gets some it's from a MISSIONARY! Don't you see what's happening?

He's trying to find God, but realizing that life nor death nor afterlife is straightforward like a westward train track. God is conflated in culture and nature but these things are as stones on the ground while the spirit ascends like smoke in a twisting cloud. 

So I don't think Dead Man is about death, I think it's navigating life. Nobody is the benevolent, but sometimes absent and confused Spirit of Goodness, and the bounty hunter, Cole is the force of darkness, the black devourer of souls. What Nobody implies by his speech about the speaking stones is that we are delivered upon this earth with a plan, no, nothing about William Blake's plan turned out successfully, but we find ourselves on the earth and what happens next is up to you.

More than anything, I would like to emphasize that this film is very visually striking.

27 June - "The little statue speaks"

Kiss of the Dragon (2001)

dir. Chris Nahon

starring

Jet Li (The Warlords, 2007)

Bridget Fonda (Rough Magic, 1995)

Tchéky Karyo (The Patriot, 2000)

I have to add Jet Li to my list of actor crushes, because that guy is so cute. Kiss of the Dragon is about a Chinese cop who is framed for a murder by a French cop. This movie has it all, Jet Li acting like he has no personality, Bridget Fonda as an American prostitute with a 12% plausible excuse for being in France, French ninjas...and so much more!

It's a Jet Li movie, so what you really want to see is a bunch of awesome martial arts, and wow, do they provide. I liked Kiss of the Dragon almost as much as District B13. Early on they find an excuse in the plot for why Jet Li doesn't have any guns, and so he just wails on everybody for like 45 minutes with whatever's at hand. He's like a tiny tornado of fury!

This still reminds me of a fella I used to date, sorry about the awful quality. Jet Li is short, that's what I'm trying to emphasize here. Although the contrast wasn't quite so stark between me and my former beau, because he didn't let me wear high heels :P

So the characters and plot lacked a bit of depth, but there were plenty of great setups for fight scenes. Like after Jet Li beats up Lupo the pimp and his cronies, this big black shows up out of no where and takes off his shirt! And all this is before Jet Li figures out that Bridget Fonda is the hooker who witnessed the murder he's being framed for!

Later, Jet Li finds a whole room full of ninjas, somehow, for some reason, they were all practicing together or something in a room adjacent to the villain's headquarters. This scene really made no sense whatsoever.

Of course Jet Li kicks all their butts!

15 June - "Back of the car, not a rear-entry situation"

Burn After Reading (2008)
dir. Joel and Ethan Coen (O Brother, Where art Thou?, 2000)

CAST
George Clooney (Fantastic Mr. Fox (voice), 2009)
Brad Pitt (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 2007)
Tilda Swinton (The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 2010)

Frances McDormand (Fargo, 1996)

John Malkovitch (Being John Malkovitch, 1999)

Richard Jenkins (Eat Pray Love, 2010)

Kevin Sussman (Sweet Home Alabama, 2002)

Dermot Mulroney (The Family Stone, 2005)

J.K. Simmons (The Ref, 1994)
Olek Krupa (Behind Enemy Lines, 2001)

If you heard that this movie wasn't very good, you would be justified in believing those rumors. Burn After Reading wasn't very bad, but I certainly wouldn't plan on seeing it again either.

I think the problem is that while it's fairly obvious that it was meant to be funny, it very overtly missed the mark. First of all, we're tricked in the very beginning into thinking that John Malkovitch is the main character, maybe he was supposed be, but George Clooney and Frances McDormand take the lead, plotwise, for the bulk of the remainder. The big joke appears to be that McDormand and Pitt are running around talking to the Russians and pretending to be all conniving but what they've really got is a disgruntled analyst's crappy attempt at a memoir.

That's the joke, everyone dies for no reason at all. Sorry if I spoiled it. There seem to be some allusions to government ineptitude, but I am less clear on those points.

Gosh, I'm nearly ten days behind on my movie reviews. I have a backlog of two movies I watched after this one. Hopefully I have more to say about them more than a week after I watched them. More complaining: Never has a comedy been so boring. Really disappointed, Coens.

May 12- "Some people call this hell, but you're still in Oklahoma Territory"

Hang 'Em High (1968)

dir. Ted Post

CAST

Clint Eastwood (A Fistful of Dollars. 1964)

Pat Hingle (Batman Forever, 1989)

Ben Johnson (Red Dawn, 1984)

Dennis Hopper (Waterworld, 1995)

Bruce Dern (All the Pretty Horses, 2000)

I got this one in one of those double feature DVD sets they sometimes sells at bookstores or in Target or something. The other movie was The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, which made me wonder why they hadn't chosen A Fistful of Dollars or, For a Few Dollars More to pair with it instead. I've heard of Hang 'Em High, mostly from a novel I read once about a little girl escaped from a correctional center and that was the only movie she had ever seen (seems like a macabre choice to repeatedly show delinquent kids, but whatever).

"They riddled him with bullets. They strung him up. They left him to die. But they made two fatal mistakes: they hanged the wrong man...and they didn't finish the job."

Sounds cool, right? Well, it is. Sometimes I have a hard time interpreting the endings of these old westerns, probably because the culturally salient themes aren't the same anymore. I think the point was that everybody is hunting for vengeance in one way or another. Our Hero, Jed Cooper, has a tangible scar to prove his point, but his associates, love interest Rachel, and the Judge, are also on a rampage of sorts, trying to figure out how many dead men it takes to heal a scar that no one can see.

Jed Cooper is after nine men who lynched him for a crime he didn't commit. The first one resists arrest and so Jed shoots him in self-defense. Two of them flee the territory. Another one dies in jail. Two more are killed in a shoot out after they tried to finish Jed off, and a third hangs himself before Cooper gets to him. Another is arrested and hanged for murder and cattle rustling. One turns himself in. Because that last guy is repentant, Cooper talks the judge into pardoning him and we are let with the implication that the judge is the worst murderer of the lot. Which I guess is true, in that he sentences men to die. But most of those guys of villains, and someone has to maintain law & order in Oklahoma Territory!

5 Feb - "Jesus drank wine every chance he got"

From Within (2008)
dir. Phedon Papamichael

CAST

Elizabeth Rice

Thomas Dekker (Heroes (TV), 2006-2007)

Adam Goldberg (Dazed and Confused, 1993)

Jared Harris (Lost in Space, 1998)

This movie is about a small, intensely Christian town which becomes subject to a series of apparent suicides. It is soon revealed, however, that the true cause is a curse cast by the vengeful sons of a pagan woman who was lynched for a crime she did not commit. The protagonist is a girl who is dating the pastor's son, but dumps him for the sensitive bad-boy. There's a race to undo the curse before the angry townsfolk kill the cute boy, while our Heroine races to save her new BF and her town, and not strangle herself death in the process.

No character was more irritating in this movie than the pastor's son, who, as the token best friend points out, "is the closest thing to royalty in this town." His radical turnover from a pleasant, trust-in-God's-will, sort of Christian to a kill-all-infidels sort of zealot is alarming and unexplained. By the end, he has replaced his father as the leader of the community and is willing to kill anyone and break any rule in the pursuit of his goal, which is to destroy the sensitive bad-boy who practices an alternative religion.

I can't help but point out that of the six possessions that occurred in this movie, only one of them was a man, and his "suicide" wasn't even an articulated scene, just a cutaway to a pair of hanging feet. I guess I won't go further into that because apparently some people get a little uncomfortable when I discuss the representation of gender in horror movies, and I'd hate for anyone to start thinking I was one of those "uppity" sorts of women that points out totally obvious patterns such as this and asks, why? Why is it so much more fascinating to see a girl covered in blood? Why does it seem so much more insidious when a girl is penetrated by a dark, uncontrollable force?

But we're not going to worry about those uncomfortable ideas, even though there's barely a point in blogging about movies if we aren't going to acknowledge such a blatant recurring theme.

It's a shame that I got all passive-aggressive here. I had some points to make about the title's metaphor. How the destruction manifested by the curse was actually a reflection of the town's dark secret, the murder of pagan woman referred to earlier, and the truth behind the murder she was killed for. She was scapegoated, sacrificed so the town, as an entity, could persevere in the face of irreconcilable iniquity. In turn, the nature of curse is that can only drive you to destroy yourself, it has no power beyond that. So the townsfolk are forced to turn their destruction back upon themselves in order to atone for the violence that came from within. Bang! I figured it out.

16 Jan - "But he's so cautious. He won't go into dark places"

Lust, Caution (2007)
dir. Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain, 2005)

CAST
Wei Tang
Tony Leung Chiu Wai
Leehom Wang

This movie is set in WW2-era Shanghai, and it's about a college drama club in 1940s China who discover and attempt to murder a high-level traitor collaborating with enemy Japan. The youngest member of the club, Wong, ingratiates herself with the traitor Yee's household and quickly becomes his mistress. The club gets drawn into the REAL resistance movement and the conspiracy deepens. Wong delves deeper and deeper into her make-believe role, rejecting her own true love for the farce of romance with the sadistic Mr. Yee. All of the heroes die.

You guys, this movie was super-sad. The heroine gave up everything to become the perfect spy, only to fall for her own act, and betray the people she swore to protect and die for. There's one part where the gang realizes that in order to carry on their scam, Wong is going to have to sleep with Mr. Yee. And so one of the other club members, the only one with any experience, is elected to show Wong how it's done. That's the part where Wong becomes a real outsider in the group, and her commitment to her alter-ego begins to overpower her own true self.

I think this was marketed as an "espionage thriller," I don't think that's right at all. I guess it's a "wartime romance," but a really twisted one. Lots of explicit sex scenes in here, but that's pretty much the name of the game with these foreign films. Plus, I think I watched the uncut version (it was 2:40 long)

Jan 15 - "Hold still, or it'll get messy"

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)

dir. Neils Arden Oplev

CAST
Michael Nyqvist
Noomi Rapace

I guess Scandanavian (I'm not even going to pretend to know anything about that corner of the world) cinema is on the rise. First there was Let the Right One In (2008) (recently remade in America, haven't seen that yet), then the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, and this year another movie which I'm eager to see called Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, about a very wicked and sinister Santa Claus.

Well, I didn't read the book even though it's been all over the place and on the front shelf at Borders for what seems like my whole life. I did read the first several chapters of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest on my Mom's kindle on an airplane until she made me give it back. It was pretty cool: fast-paced, mysterious element, quirky characters, etc. The characters are sort of one dimensional but at least they're consistent. Mikael Blomqvist is so dull he might be well casted with Kevin Costner, but I'm pretty sure they got Daniel Craig for the American remake so maybe he'll be able to pull some complexity out of his butt or something.

Sorry for being snarky. Too much coffee today. I'm gonna apply a "Don't watch with your Aunt" warning sticker to this movie, unless your Aunt is super cool like mine, because there are lots of sexy parts. Even worse, they are almost exclusively non consensual. Although this movie still has a lot more going on than appealing someone's perverse fascination with perversion. I think Noomi Rapace will be showing up in a lot more American movies, including a SciFi flick for 2013 that may or may not be a prequel to Alien (1979).