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?

12 March - "You are about to change someone's life forever"

Tomorrow, When the War Began (2010)

dir. Stuart Beattie

CAST
Caitlin Stasey
Rachel Hurd-Wood (Peter Pan, 2003)
Lincoln Lewis (Aquamarine, 2006)
Deniz Akdeniz
Phoebe Tonkin

Here's one of the first new, truly fun and enjoyable movies I've seen in a while. Think of it sort of like an Australian Red Dawn, although apparently it's based on a book which was like a bestseller or something. Anyway, a bunch of teenage archetypes: The Princess, the criminal, the jock... all go camping one weekend only to discover upon their return that their home town of Wirrawee has been occupied by enemy combatants! So obviously they go Wolverine-style vigilante and learn a lot about themselves and each other in the process.

22 Dec - "Are you so naive as to think that they won't battle their own extinction?"

X-Men: First Class (2011)

dir. Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass, 2010)

CAST
David Agranov (Just Married, 2003)
Kevin Bacon (Planes, Trains & Automobiles, 1987)
Randall Batinkoff (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1992)
Jason Beghe (Thelma & Louise, 1991)
Rose Byrne (Bridesmaids, 2011)
Matt Craven (Devil, 2010)
Don Creech (The Professional, 1994)
Tony Curran (The 13th Warrior, 1999)
Michael Fassbender (Jane Eyre, 2011)
Brendan Fehr (A Christmas Kiss, TV 2011)
Jason Flemyng (Spice World, 1997)
Edi Gathegi (Twilight, 2008)
Demetri Goritsas (National Treasure: Book of Secrets, 2007)
Michael Ironside (Desert Blue, 1998)
Corey Johnson (Kick-Ass, 2010)
January Jones (Love Actually, 2003)
Zoe Kravitz (Twelve, 2010)
Olek Krupa (Burn After Reading, 2008)
Jennifer Lawrence
Morgan Lily (2012, 2009)
James McAvoy (Gnomeo & Juliet (voice), 2011)
Glenn Morshower (The Crazies, 2010)
Oliver Platt (Love and Other Drugs, 2010)
Sasha Pieterse (Good Luck Chuck, 2007)
Ludger Pistor (The Informant!, 2009)
James Remar (Pineapple Express, 2008)
Rade Serbedzija (Middle Men, 2009)
Lucas Till (Hannah Montana: The Movie, 2009)

I love the X-Men. I think they're a hoot and a half, but the problem with a movie like this is you're sacrificing character development for the insertion of a panoply of characters which are already beloved in the canon. So they say, "Oh, more people will see the movie if it has Emma Frost, Havok, Sebastian Shaw, etc., plus the characters we liked best in the other movies, like Mystique" and then you've got all these characters bumping around and it just muddles up the story. My favorite movies have small casts. Another problem was that the development of the conflict wasn't very well thought out. The main story should have been about Sebastian Shaw and his cronies attempting to incite war between the U.S. and Russia (Although even now I'm sure exactly why this was the case except a vague Magneto-esk desire to assert Mutant superiority). This challenge should have been faced and overcome by Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr, and framed in the development and then demise of their friendship. Instead we get all sorts of identity issues from Mystique and Beast and a bunch of other young mutants thrown in for zazzle without actual depth and relationships. The episodic unraveling of the plot made me feel like the story lacked clarity and cohesion, so while there were good elements and good scenes, I couldn't say with confidence that this is a good movie.

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.

13 Dec - "Obviously, doctor, you've never been a 13 year-old girl"

The Virgin Suicides (1999)

dir. Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation, 2003)

CAST
James Woods (Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (voice), 2001)
Josh Hartnett (The Faculty, 1998)
Kathleen Turner (Peggy Sue Got Married, 1986)
Scott Glenn (The Silence of the Lambs, 1991)
Danny Devito (Romancing the Stone, 1984)
Hanna Hall (Forrest Gump, 1994)
A.J. Cook (Final Destination 2, 2003)
Robert Schwartzman (The Princess Diaries, 2001)
Kirsten Dunst (Elizabethtown, 2005)
Hayden Christensen (Star Wars: Episode II- Attack of the Clones, 2002)
Giovanni Ribisi (voice) (That Thing You Do!, 1996)

This movie is one of those surprising examples of how Kirsten Dunst can act pretty damn well when she's cast in the right role. In fact, this movie was surprising in a lot of ways, and it was better than I anticipated. It was sort of like a mystery movie, as you know when the movie starts that these girls aren't going to make it, and you keep watching as you're guided through the film by a third-party narrator, studying their words and their faces to try and figure out what was so wrong with life that these five pretty sisters decided it wasn't even worth trying anymore.

I think there are two ways you can look at it. One the one hand, you might think that the girls are a bit narcissistic, and that the drama of strict parents and boys who don't call back (am I right?) was the only impetus for them to make some grand gesture indicating that they were simply fed up with all the bullshit. After all, they were too young to know actually misery. They had nice parents and a nice home and everyone liked them. Right?

But I think that theory doesn't really add up under a closer scrutiny. At least, not in a poetic, cinematic world. I think maybe the girls were suffering from a severe case of ennui, and having briefly tasted love, adventure, etc. were frustrated to discover that this was all life had to offer, and decided to opt out for lack of anticipation. Peter Pan style: "death will be an awfully big adventure."

But the movie was intentionally unclear. Our narrators adore and admire the sisters from afar, intimately collecting the details of their lives, but never actually try to befriend the girls discover what they really are. And so there's also an tone of loneliness to the movie. I suppose that's the nature of loss. Never knowing what lies at the core of someone else's heart, then suddenly that person isn't there anymore, and you're never certain why she left or how life could have been different.

29 Nov - "cookies and wine"

On Strike for Christmas (TV 2010)

dir. Robert Iscove (Cinderlla, TV 1997)

CAST
Daphne Zuniga (Spaceballs, 1987)
David Sutcliffe (Half Baked, 1998)
Chelah Horsdal (X-Men: The Last Stand, 2006)
Julia Duffy (Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd, 2003)

Onward with the Christmas specials! On Strike for Christmas is about a housewife who gets sick of all the demanding holiday chores (including throwing separate parties for her husband's office and her son's friends) and goes on strike because boys just don't understand holiday cheer. The moral of the story is that when you're feeling overworked, it's totally okay to call a catering and send e-cards instead of paper cards. The other moral is that it's not a good idea to shape your entire identity contingent on your ability to perform as an ideal homemaker at Christmastime.

3 Nov - "What's the point of being a teenager if you can't dress weird"

Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

dir. Francis Ford Coppola (The Outsiders, 1983)

CAST
Kathleen Turner (Romancing the Stone, 1984)
Nicolas Cage (Kick-Ass, 2010)
Joan Allen (Face/Off, 1997)
Kevin J. O'Connor (There Will Be Blood, 2007)
Jim Carrey (Earth Girls are Easy, 1988)
Sofia Coppola (Star Wars: Episode One - The Phantom Menace, 1999)
Helen Hunt (Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, 1985)
Lisa Jane Persky (When Harry Met Sally, 1989)
Glenn Withrow (The Outsiders, 1983)
John Carradine (The Secret of Nimh (voice), 1982)
Sachi Parker (Scrooged, 1988)

It's fortuitous that I chose to watch this movie, which has been sitting on my "I need to watch this again" list for a while now, so recently after I watched Kick-Ass and after I read this blog post which reviewed several vampire movies including the 1989 Vampire's Kiss, because I totally had to step up and defend Nicolas Cage's honor the other day and I was totally loaded up with fuel for my righteous fire.

So this dude pulls out the totally tired shtick about how Nick is a poseable action figure who can't act and I'm all like, "excuse me? Have you ever seen Leaving Las Vegas? Raising Arizona? Valley Girl?"

and then he counters with a, "Sure, his early stuff..." he was already losing steam

So I say, "Yeah, but his early stuff was GREAT, and then there's Adaptation., Matchstick Men." I'll concede that he's not at his best when he does action films or thrillers, but all actors do shitty movies for money. Nick Cage is at his best when he's playing loony, breakable men who are hanging at the end of their rope.

And so this guy goes for the ace in the hole and that's where I got him

"What about Wicker Man?"

Wicker Man is AWESOME! People love to shit on that movie because it truly truly hits that so-bad-that-it's-good sweet spot. And who puts it there? Nicolas Cage. Anyone else in that role would have hammed it up and the whole debacle would have passed like a shadow in the night. But it stays with us and stands up to multiple and giggly rewatchings because Nicolas Cage decided to go 100% whackadoodle crazy and that's why he's awesome and always will be. Match point.

I'm also a big fan of Kathleen Turner.

26 Oct - "One day with the top down is better than a lifetime in a box"

Poison Ivy (1992)

dir. Katt Shea

CAST
Drew Barrymore (E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, 1982)
Sara Gilbert (Desert Blue, 1998)
Tom Skerritt (Alien, 1979)
Leonardo DiCaprio (What's Eating Gilbert Grape, 1993)
Time Winters (A Little Princess, 1995)
Tony Ervolina (The House Bunny, 2008)

Like Devil in the Flesh, this movie is about a girl who is whackadoodle crazy and ruins a bunch of lives in pursuit of her silly exploits. Just like Rose McGowan in that movie, Drew Barrymore's character uses her sexuality and manipulative personality to get her way. She takes advantage of lonely, homely, and sexually ambiguous Sara Gilbert and weasels her way into her home and family. She seduces the father and murders the mother, intending to take her place so that they can become a family. Naturally, things don't work out as planned.

Unlike Devil in the Flesh, we don't get a back story for Ivy. She makes some allusions to a broken home, but most of the things that Ivy says are lies, so we can't believe her. All the same, Drew Barrymore can't help but play a more likable character than the perpetually unappealing Sara Gilbert, who runs after Ivy like a puppy dog and falls over backwards to give Ivy whatever she wants. Likewise, the father is a scumbag, lusting after Ivy the moment he sees her. He doesn't hesitate to have his way with Ivy the moment she gives him the opportunity, on the same bed where his wife is sleeping, no less. It's hard to like anybody in this movie. I think I prefer the sequel with Alyssa Milano.

3 Oct - "What kind of stupid did you eat for breakfast?"

Girl Fight (TV) (2011)

dir. Stephen Gyllenhaal

CAST
Anne Heche (Wag the Dog, 1997)
Jodelle Ferland (Eclipse, 2010)
Dawn Chubai (Eclipse, 2010)
Keith MacKechnie (Christmas Vacation, 1989)
Keely Purvis (X2, 2003)
James Tupper (Joe Dirt, 2001)
Lanette Ware (Music and Lyrics, 2007)

Lifetime movies are more annoying to make blog posts on because they don't have posters or DVD covers that I can easily put at the top of my post. This one is also very new and so there aren't any funny quotes on the internet and I forgot to write one down while I was watching so i had to think really hard and remember one. Like the last Lifetime movie I watched, I think the original source material wasn't really rich enough for an engaging story arc. It was more linear than anything else.

The thing is that this uncool girl becomes buddies with the coolest girls in school, and so drops her old nerdy friend who has glasses and a hat. Unfortunately, the cool girls find out about some ungenerous things the protagonist posted on Facebook and so they lure her to a house and beat the crap out of her for half and hour, and film the whole thing so they can post it on Youtube. Of course, the bloodied girl rats out those bitches right off and her parents get the video and press charges. There's an extended kerfuffle about whether the girl will testify against her assaulters, but I don't really see why that was necessary. It's on video! That's pretty much open and shut. They aren't going to get away with it. There's also some harumphing about what the sentence will be. The mother is in favor of life sentences but they end up getting like a year of probation, each. I think somewhere in the middle would have been more reasonable. I mean, that's some pretty sadistic tendencies they've demonstrated, a terrifying absence of empathy, kind of socio-pathic. They should have gotten some time to cool off, maybe a year? But I guess it's cool, because they'll never get good jobs now.

25 Sept - It's so important to be popular

The Bling Ring (TV movie) (2011)

dir. Michael Lembeck (The Santa Clause 2, 2002)

CAST
Austin Butler
Yin Chang
Jennifer Grey (Red Dawn, 1984)
Tom Irwin (The Haunting, 1999)
Scott Klace (The Pursuit of Happyness, 2006)
Spencer Locke (Spanglish, 2004)
Wendy Makkena
Renee Olstead (13 Going on 30, 2004)
Blake Robbins
Sebastian Sozzi (Choke, 2008)
Shawn Smith (Down in the Valley, 2005)


It seems like I'm watching all my movies with my buddy Cora these days. On Monday she invited me over for wine and a Lifetime channel movie. This is based on a true story, I guess. It's about some teenagers who go on a crime spree robbing celebrity's houses. There is one guy in the gang, pictured, he has social anxiety and the Asian girl is either in love with him or is crazy. He meets a girl and she totally flips.

So the way they frame it up is that these kids are social outsiders, but by becoming criminals they suddenly feel accepted, popular, important. It's sort of like saying that society is responsible, for idolizing these celebrities to the point where normalcy is insufficient, or worse, extraordinary is the new normal and the whole universe is filled with nobodies.

Aside from that tepid analysis, this was just a hammy Lifetime movie. We've already decided to watch next week's movie, too. It's called Girl Fight.

17 Sept - "Well, anybody can look happy in a photograph"

Desert Blue (1998)

dir. Morgan J. Freeman

CAST
Casey Affleck (American Pie 2, 2001)
Richmond Arquette (Scream 3, 2000)
Daniel von Bargen (The Silence of the Lambs, 1991)
Sara Gilbert (High Fidelity, 2000)
John Heard (Home Alone, 1990)
Kate Hudson (How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days, 2003)
Michael Ironside (Top Gun, 1986)
Christina Ricci (Mermaids, 1990)
Rene Rivera (Disturbia, 2007)
Peter Sarsgaard (Garden State, 2004)
Liev Schreiber (voice) (Party Girl, 1995)
Brandon Sexton III (Welcome to the Dollhouse, 1995)
Ethan Suplee (Mallrats, 1995)


So the main reason I watched this movie was that there's this song on the soundtrack that I really like. It's by New Zealand singer/songwriter Bic Runga, and it's called "Lonely Lola Cherry Cola Girl." It's not on any of her albums. I managed to get a digital copy of it back in college, I don't know how. I wanted to imbed it in this this article, but I can't find it on the youtube. I'll imbed a different song, just for fun.

I like this song because it's about unrequited love, which is old hat, obviously, but then in the chorus she goes, "something good will come OUR way" which makes me think that things are going to look up not just for the singer, but for the object of her affection. That makes me think that things aren't going so hot for the other person either, which is sad but also reassuring. This is a good segway into the film analysis.

You mught notice a teenaged Kate Hudson up there on the cover, she plays a young TV actress who, while on a road trip with her father, gets quarantined in the small desert town of Baxter following a truck accident and a mysterious death. The trick is that this movie isn't really about that character, but it's really about Blue Baxter, son of the town's recently deceased founder, as it takes this monumental interruption to everyday life to make him come to terms with the impact of his father's death. The town's other teenagers, Casey Affleck, Christina Ricci, and Ethan Suplee, also grapple with the insidious revelation that not all dreams can come true, of course, some dreams are bigger than others. There's a cute little bit where the kids are sitting around a bonfire and Kate Hudson asks something along the lines of, 'If you knew you were going to die tomorrow, what would you do?" and of course they all start making out in pairs.

In other respects, this was a lot like any other lightly comedic, independent film about young people coming of age. I don't think it was anything particularly marvelous, but it was okay, I guess.

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.

31 July - "the first week of summer, a strange and breathless time"

Tuck Everlasting (2002)

dir. Jay Russell (Ladder 49, 2004)

CAST

Alexis Bledel (Sin City, 2005)

William Hurt (The Big Chill, 1983)

Sissy Spacek (Carrie, 1976)

Jonathan Jackson

Scott Bairstow

Ben Kingsley (Species, 1995)

Amy Irving (Carrie, 1976)

Victor Garber (Sleepless in Seattle, 1993)

Elisabeth Shue (Leaving Las Vegas, 1995)

This movie definitely tends towards the sweet and sentimental. I might pop it on the shelf next to A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, but of course this can't really approach the special place I've got in my heart for those two treasured classics. I never read read the book, but I think I might like too. The plot is endearingly simple. The main character, Winnie, runs away from her strict parents and discovers the fountain of youth in the forest and a family of immortals. Winnie has dual conflicts, first to protect the Tuck's secret, and second to decide whether or not she should drink from the fountain and join them.

There is also a very sinister villain known only as the Man in a Yellow Suit. I think I would have liked to know more about him. There's one scene where he's sitting in a graveyard, perhaps contemplating his own mortality, and the priest comes by to say hi or something and the man in the yellow suit starts talking like what would you pay to live forever and the priest says, "You speak blasphemy," and the man in the yellow says, "fluently." I would like to know what makes that guy's heart so dark, and it was clever to make him wear such a lively colored outfit.

The immortality trope begins to wear thin, though. I mean in other movies like those ones about vampires or whatever and the people are always complaining about what a drag it is. But there's that awesome element to it as well, like, all the benefits. So what it there was a magical fountain that would allow you to live for, say, 500 years? or 1000? Would the negative aspects of immortality be tolerable if you knew there was an expiration date? Because the benefits seem pretty sweet. Not that I'm trying to provoke a Faustian deal or anything. Maybe I had better stop talking about it.

But the Bible talks about lifespans that were many times greater than we have here in reality. Methusalah, Noah, those types lives like 300 or 400 years or something. I guess they had to live that long to get about the business of populating the earth. Which reminds me of something else that been bothering me and has nothing to do whatsoever with Tuck Everlasting (which is an entirely compelling movie but I think I've grown bored with the topic and so I'm going to talk about the Young Earth Creationism instead). I met a gentleman a few months ago who told me that he did not believe the Earth to be much older than 6000 years. I don't have a problem with that standpoint but I do have a problem with the underlying logic. Archbishop Ussher was the first guy (I say that, but he was probably preceded by some lesser known Hebrew scholars) to calculate the age of the Earth to be about 6000 years old (he proposed the exact date of creation to be Sunday, the 23rd of October, 4004 BC). He did this by very carefully reading through the Old Testament and calculating the passage of time by the number of generations, because the Bible is really specific about who begat who and suchlike.

But if the Bible says that Noah died when he was 950, then obviously we can't be throwing around assumptions about the length of generational time. Ussher was throwing a crap shoot. And I read that the reason that all those ages are so big is because the Sumerian number system wasn't translated correctly into Greek, so Ussher wasn't even working with accurate sums!

So I say that it's cool if you're into literal Biblical interpretation and want to believe that fossils are red herrings buried underground by Satan to test your faith and that the uniform growth rates of coral reefs are something that you just ignore. But I don't think that the Young Earth Hypothesis, as based upon 17th century mathematical data, has any grounding in accurate Biblical interpretation whatsoever, and so the support of such data should in no way be considered the duty of any good Christian.

That chick was in Gilmore Girls.

26 July - "What happened to the rabbit, Valerie?"

Red Riding Hood (2011)
dir. Catherine Hardewick (Twilight, 2008)

CAST

Amanda Seyfried (Mean Girls, 2004)

Gary Oldman (True Romance, 1993)

Billy Burke (Eclipse, 2010)

Shiloh Fernandez

Max Irons

Virginia Madsen (Sideways, 2004)

Luke Haas (Witness, 1985)

Julie Christie (Fahrenheit 451, 1966)

Christine Willes (The Wicker Man, 2006)
Michael Adamthwaite (New Moon, 2009)
Dalias Blake

The name of the game, apparently, is fairy tale reinterpretations. I was hoping this movie about Little Red Riding Hood would be like Snow White: A Tale of Terror, but this was so much more like bubblegum pop-drama with pretty teenagers than a Grimm fairy tale horror.

As in Twilight, the heroine's desire to run away with the boy she likes is the primary concern, but she has a few reservations concerning a werewolf. Valerie's life outside of Peter, the bad-boy (he's always wearing black!) orphan woodcutter and Henry, the nice-guy her mother wants her to marry, is virtually nonexistent. She has two friends without personalities, and one of them turns out to be kind of mean. The big mystery is that we (with help from Gary Oldman, who is lovely and hyper-talented as always, injecting some character drama into this shallow movie) have to figure out who the werewolf is, and what its connection to Valerie is (the revelation will shock and surprise you!). What do I think? Swing and a miss.

14 May - "sobriety is for aardvarks, you ass"

Pizza (2005)

dir. Mark Christopher

starring

Ethan Embry (Sweet Home Alabama, 2002)

Kylie Sparks

Julie Hagerty (Confessions of a Shopaholic, 2009)

Joey Kern (The Sasquatch Gang, 2006)

Alexis Dziena (Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, 2008)

Mary Birdsong (It's Kind of a Funny Story, 2010)

I would sort this movie into the same group as Welcome to the Dollhouse, which I said was not quite as enjoyable as Napoleon Dynamite. Pizza is sort of like that, too (sorry, this is the best picture I could find without trying very hard). What happens is that this chubby girl on the cover, Cara-Ethyl, has a birthday party with no guests, so instead she runs off with the Pizza guy, who is a would-be intellectual who justifies being a layabout by saying that he's undermining the system, but he's really just using that as an excuse to continue hooking up with high school girls.

Cara-Ethyl is a lot like Napoleon Dynamite in that she isn't so much ashamed of her own weirdness as she decried the stupidity of others. At the same time, though, she really wants to fit in. The trick is that while Cara-Ethyl is the "dork" and Ethan Embry's character is "cool," the real winner and loser of the movie are inverted. Cara-Ethyl is going to Notre Dame where she will find a group of people just like her to be friends with, she'll get good grades and move on from that po-dunk town, while Ethan's going to be a pizza-delivery guy his whole life even until the high school girls are totally over him and his receding hairline.

This movie, was okay, it was kind of cute. I liked the parts with Cara-Ethyl's mom, who burnt herself while making donuts and thus had to wear bandages over her eyes. I wouldn't recommend it except in a very specific circumstance which has yet to manifest. Watch Napoleon Dynamite again instead.

8 May - "my God! The illusion is shattered!"

Easy A (2010)

dir. Will Gluck

CAST

Emma Stone - Zombieland (2009)

Penn Badgley - John Tucker Must Die (2006)

Amanda Bynes - What A Girl Wants (2003)

Thomas Hayden Church - Sideways (2004)

Patricia Clarkson - Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

Cam Gigandet - Pandorum (2009)

Lisa Kudrow - Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion (1997)

Malcolm McDowell - A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Stanley Tucci - The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

Fred Armisen - Anchorman: the Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)

Whoosh! That took a little while. Here is a long cast list of folks I recognized in this movie. But as I'm sure you're all well aware, a shitload of cameos does not a better movie make.

Amanda Bynes played the same character as Mandy Moore in Saved!, which was also better than this movie. I've always felt a little bit bad for Amanda because I don't think she's very funny, but she seems like she's trying really hard to pull it off. Her movies and sitcoms have consistently been seriously lame, and I didn't even like her bits on that Nickelodeon sketch comedy show, All That.

Notable mention: I think the best friend character is one of the Cheetah Girls (that's a super-dorky Disney channel reference, but I'll confess I'm sort of fascinated by [That's So] Raven's career development)

The saving grace of this movie is Stanley Tucci and Patrica Clarkson, who do a fabulous job playing Emma Stone's parents. They are hilarious and awesome and I want them to be in every scene. Let's have a spin off just about them and not this contrived teenager shit.

I'm starting to think that they stopped making good movies in the early 90s. This movie, which had an arguably clever premise (at least as good as Mean Girls, and that was only a pale homage to Jawbreaker), decided to cheapen the whole affair by shoving brat pack movie references down your throat the whole time. Yeah, I know Ferris Bueller's Day Off was a good movie. You are not Ferris, Emma Stone. Stop trying to be Ferris. Reminding me about movies I've enjoyed in the past isn't going to trick me into liking your movie too, gosh.

I don't know if anyone would agree with me. Or if anyone cares. Because we aren't talking about a classic 1980s movie or something that was black and white. But maybe in ten or twenty years someone will be thinking about cinema in the twenty-tens and try to derive some sort of doggy-bag message. And this is what I think of that:

The difference between Easy A and a really good Brat Pack movie is that if this movie had been made in the 1980s the main character would actually have been sleeping around, not just lying about it, and it still would have been just as funny. Remember Fast Times at Ridgemont High? There was an abortion in that movie! And society didn't crumble, we dealt with it! Because what all those movies had in common was a very shameless and dark sense of humor. I think they could have pulled that off here but it would have been a little harder. But not that much harder. And think of how much more poignant the story would have been with Emma Stone really hitting rock bottom but managing to rise above, still cracking jokes, and learn something from it.

I just worry sometimes about what they're teaching the kids these days.

1 March - "How do you kill a tofu?"

Dreamland (2006)
dir. Jason Matzner

CAST

Agnes Bruckner

Kelli Garner (Lars and the Real Girl, 2007)

Justin Long (He's Just Not That Into You, 2009)

John Corbett (My Big Fat Greek Wedding, 2002)

This movie is sort of like a girl-protagonist version of What's Eating Gilbert Grape. I mean, it has a lot of the same themes: altruistic teenager sacrifices ambition to serve family and friends in a small town until the arrival of a love interest sparks sudden dreams of an un-frustrated life.

I think I've mentioned before how I tend to be attracted to movies set in deserts. This movie was set in a trailer park in the desert and it was totally poetic. It reminds me of a painting in the art museum at Cornell. It was all pink and gold and the first one you saw when you got to the fifth floor. It also reminds me that I've always wanted to go to one of those places where everything is flat, and nothing's blocking your view of the horizon in all directions.

Objectively, I think Gilbert Grape is still a better movie, with better fleshed-out characters. But this movie is sweet in its simplicity, and refreshingly takes on the familiar theme of two friends in love with the same guy.

21 Feb - "You really think I'm punk!? I mean, it's not as cool as new wave, but it's a lot better than pre-teen!"

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun (1985) 
dir. Alan Metter (Back to School, 1986)

CAST

Sarah Jessica Parker (The First Wives Club, 1996)

Helen Hunt (Pay it Forward, 2000)

Shannen Doherty (Heathers, 1988)

Here's an asinine, formulaic movie about the 1980s. It's not quite bad enough to be good, but it's close. Frustratingly, infuriatingly close.

Skip the obvious riff on SJP - she's only a teenager here, gang, and cute in a whiny sort of way.

The plot is that the new girl in town (SJP) befriends the fun-loving class clown (Helen Hunt, or as I like to say, poor-man's Kathleen Turner) The pair then decides to enter a dance competition for the grand prize of winning a spot on DanceTV - which is like the big TV show everyone's into. But the dad is a retired military guy and he's really strict and doesn't think SJP should be competing in a dance contest so she's gotta practice on the sly. There's an obnoxious rich girl who's also trying to win the contest, who hates SJP for no obvious reason than to be antagonistic. And the love interest is SJP's dance partner, who is from public school (gasps!)

Lots of: leotards, lasers, backflips, montages

Not so many: People of color, actual dancing, plot twists

8 Nov - "Fuck off! For Sure! Like totally!"

Valley Girl (1983)
dir. Martha Coolidge

CAST
Nicolas Cage - Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)
Deborah Foreman
Joanne Baron Real Genius (1985)
Colleen Camp - Wayne's World (1992)

Valley girl is one of those Nicolas Cage movies I've been trying to get around to watching for a long time. That and Leaving Las Vegas, plus I don't think I ever saw the end of Raising Arizona, although I assume that they gave the baby back. I don't know if this counts as a chick flick in the vein of my last two movies, since Nick is clearly at least half of the protagonists, but it's certainly an 80s teenager movie. I don't think it represents the decade as fabulously as Desperately Seeking Susan.

So We've got a Romeo and Juliet-style story between Julie, a bubbly valley girl, and Randy, a punk from Hollywood. Naturally, her friends disapprove, as does her preppy ex-boyfriend. At some point, the pressure gets to Julie and she breaks up with Randy, and he goes to extreme lengths to win her back. Of course it all comes to a head at the PROM.

I guess the first assumption one would make is that Julie is a vapid and impressionable twit who doesn't know what she wants. But then again, all the characters, even Randy and his punk friends, are kind of dopey and just doing their best to fit in. Maybe Julie just wanted Randy to prove that the she was worth some extra effort. All these girls are just clucking all of the time about who's a babe and who's bodacious and tubular or whatever, and they're fooling around with each other's boyfriends and being conniving all the time. You'll have to recall from yesterday that the moral of Kamikaze Girls is everyone else can just screw off, because you gotta be true to you. And if those dopey teenagers want to be mismatched airheads together, godspeed.

Which is why I think this era is Nicolas Cage at his finest. Face/Off and The Wicker Man, aside, Nicolas Cage has continued to make some quality pictures, usually playing the slightly loopy depressed guy as in Adaptation. and Matchstick Men. It's like a grown up version of the well-intentioned dope embodied by Randy. Some people say they can't stand Nicolas Cage, but I think the real problem is that they can't stand Ghost Rider.