2 July - "I'm the thief you tried to cheat"

The Saint (1997)

dir. Phillip Noyce (Clear and Present Danger, 1994)

CAST
Val Kilmer (Batman Forever, 1995)
Elizabeth Shue (Leaving Las Vegas, 1995)
Rade Serbedzija (X-Men: First Class, 2011)
Henry Goodman (Notting Hill, 1999)
Alun Armstrong (Braveheart, 1995)
Evgeniy Lazarev (Iron Man 2, 2010)
Tommy Flanagan (Braveheart, 1995)
Pat Laffan (War Horse, 2011)
Malcolm Tierney (Braveheart, 1995)
Tony Armatrading (Eragon (voice), 2006)
David Schneider (28 Days Later..., 2002)
Emily Mortimer (Transiberian, 2008)
Velibor Topic (Robin Hood, 2010)
Barbara Jefford (The Ninth Gate, 1999)
Julian Rhind-Tutt (Stardust, 2007)
William Hope (Sherlock Holmes, 2009)
Roger Moore (voice) (The Spy Who Loved Me, 1977)
Richard Cubison (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, 2007)
Michael Byrne (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, 2010)

If you like terrible action movies, as I do, The Saint is not one to miss. Notable mainly for Val Kilmer infinitely amusing disguises and accents. The romance is ridiculous, although Elizabeth Shue's character is charming, in her own way. If you discovered that the poetic South African who seduced you was actually an international thief, would you be delighted to see him again? And if the  woman you seduced and then thieved surprised you at the airport, would you exclaim with a smile, "You found me!"?

I think it's the earnestness of the lead actors that makes one bad action movie delightful and another just boring. If I feel like the actors aren't having fun, aren't even trying, then I don't see any point in trying to get into the story either. The Saint is a ridiculous mess, but it's is a sincere mess.

11 Feb - "as far away from the darkness as we can possibly get"

The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008)

dir. Chris Carter


CAST
David Duchovny (Evolution, 2001)
Gillian Anderson (Princess Mononoke (voice), 1997)
Amanda Peet (The Whole Nine Yards, 2000)
Bill Connolly (Pocahontas (voice), 1995)
Mitch Pileggi (X-Files: Fight the Future, 1998)
Xzibit (Hoodwinked! (voice), 2005)
Adam Godly (Love Actually, 2003)
Callum Kieth Rennie (Case 39, 2009)
Stephen E. Miller (Best in Show, 2000)
Lorena Gale (Snow Day, 2000)
Donavon Stimson (Fantastic Four, 2005)
Dion Johnstone (Dreamcatcher, 2003)
Sarah-Jane Redmond (Case 39, 2009)

Thus ends the era in which I had yet to see all nine seasons of The X-Files plus two feature films. This last movie was released a few years after the series had already ended. At the end of the series, Dana Scully and Fox Mulder left the FBI and fled the UNited States, because they knew too much. An impeding Alien invasion was alluded too, indicating that it would never truly be blue skies for our star-crossed investigators.

X-Files had two basic episode structures. There were episodes that propelled the mythic arc and related to a conspiracy to cover up an colonization program and the creation of human-alien hybrids. There were also monster-of-the-week episodes, in which Mulder and Scully had to discover and defeat some sort of paranormal menace within the confines of a single episode. This movie could only be said to conform to the latter model, and it wasn't particularly interesting at that.

10 Feb - "I've nurtured every sensation man's been inspired to have"

The Devil's Advocate (1997)

dir. Taylor Hackford (Delores Claiborne, 1997)

CAST
Chris Bauer (Snow White: A Tale of Terror, 1997)
Caprice Benedetti (Practical Magic, 1998)
Kim Chan (Desperately Seeking Susan, 1985)
Marcia DeBonis (The Truman Show, 1998)
Tom Riis Farrell (Sleepless in Seattle, 1993)
Charles A. Gargan (Serendipity, 2001)
Juan Carlos Hernandez (War of the Worlds, 2005)
William Hill (Analyze This, 1999)
Judith Ivey (A Life Less Ordinary, 1997)
Jeffrey Jones (Ferris Bueller's Day Off, 1986)
Monica Keena (Orange County, 2002)
Susan Kellermann (Planes, Trains and Automobiles, 1987)
Vincent Laresca (The Associate, 1996)
Heather Matarazzo (Welcome to the Dollhouse, 1995)
Debra Monk (The First Wives Club, 1996)
Craig T. Nelson (Troop Beverley Hills, 1989)
Novella Nelson (It's Kind of a Funny Story, 2010)
Connie Nielsen (Rushmore, 1998)
Benny Nieves (Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous, 2005)
Al Pacino (Heat, 1995)
Keanu Reeves (Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, 1989)
John Rothman (Ghostbusters, 1984)
Vyto Ruginis (Cliffhanger, 1993)
Charlize Theron (The Burning Plain, 2008)
George Wyner (Spaceballs, 1987)


I'm swiftly developing an inordinate fondness for Al Pacino, because even though I used to think he was only in boringsnoring mafia movies, but now I see he can be a crazy wild card addition to a cast, and I like that. On the other hand, Keanu Reeves is about as charismatic as a baked potato, but he is clean looking and inoffensive enough to reasonably play the easily manipulated Southern hotshot lawyer Kevin Lomax. In the climatic scene, however, when Lomax is supposed to assert himself and, I dunno, express an emotion maybe, Keanu fell way flat. It was pretty uninspiring.

Charlize Theron was better than I expected, mostly because she still wasn't really on the radar when she did The Devil's Advocate. But she very convincingly fell into a maddening descent. I don't really know what else to say about this movie. It wasn't very remarkable, I guess.

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?

13 Aug - "It's like when people see Jesus in a pancake or something"

Devil (2010)
dir. John Erick Dowdle

CAST

Chris Messina (You've Got Mail, 1998)

Logan Marshall-Green

Jenny O'Hara (Matchstick Men, 2003)

Bojana Novakovic

Bokeem Woodbine

Geoffrey Arend (Super Troopers, 2001)

Jacob Vargas (Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion, 1997)

Matt Craven (Timeline, 2003)

Joshua Peace (Lars and the Real Girl, 2007)

So, Dowdle, who I've never heard of, was the director of this movie, but M. Night Shyamalan did the story. Poor M. Night, I think he's having trouble getting directing gigs since all of his movies made so little money. Personally, I think he's a fine director, it's his stories that are too heavy-handed with the symbolism. Devil certainly has the key characteristics of a Shyamalan film, beside the fact that M. Night himself is not in the picture. First off it is set in Philadelphia, home to both M. Night Shyamalan and myself. Secondly, it's got that final act revelation that really clearly spells out how everything else in the movie is interconnected, because you wouldn't want anyone walking away after the first viewing with any misunderstanding, and that's what kills me. Signs, The Village, even The Sixth Sense had these pandering endings where they flash back to all the relevant bits and hit you over the head with this grand revelation and I'd much rather than the filmmaker give me a little credit as a thoughtful human being and let me put the pieces together on my own. That's the difference between a great film, one that demands review and reinterpretation, and a dumbass one that makes fools feel clever. It's a soft pitch, M. Night, and that's why you weren't drafted into the big leagues.

Apart from that, though, Devil was a pleasurable psychological thriller that kept you guessing for a good long while.

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.

1 Feb: "I wear a dress like this!"

Elizabeth (1998)
dir. Shekhar Kapur

CAST
Cate Blanchett (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, 2008)
Geoffrey Rush (Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole (voice) , 2010)
Christopher Eccleston (28 Days Later..., 2002)
Joseph Fiennes (Shakespeare in Love, 1998)
Richard Attenborough (Jurassic Park, 1993)
Vincent Cassel (Black Swan, 2010)
James Frain (Where the Heart is, 2009)
Daniel Craig (The Quantum of Solace, 2008)

Whoosh! Long cast list! TWO references to the archives, no less! Someday I hope all the movie names I refer to will be hyperlinked, except Shakespeare in Love, because that sucked.

I chose Elizabeth in honor of finishing The Tudors, but actually I still have two episodes left, and I moved Lizzy up in my netflix queue because ten days without a posting is a bit much. I could upgrade my account to have more than one DVD at a time, but I'm not made of money, and I don't have enough time to be watching all these movies anyway. I wish the "watch instantly" option had better choices.

You guys, I'm not sure this movie was so great. In fact, I wasn't quite sure what it was about, lacking a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end, and I was never quite sure if Lord Robert was a good guy or not. Here is the synopsis, as I gathered:

Bloody Mary is the Queen of England but she's old and ugly and not pregnant and nobody likes her. She's mean to Elizabeth who denies having plotted to overthrow Mary and I guess we, the audience, are meant to take her word for it. And Catholic priests are evil and burnt a friendly-looking lady, but Mary dies of cancer and Lizzy gets to be Queen anyway. In the meantime Liz is entertaining a relationship with one Lord Robert, and I'm sure if he's on the up-and-up, since he's married already and she is the Queen. The ambassadors of France and Spain are pressuring her to marry someone from their respective countries, but the French guy is a cross-dresser and the Spanish guy isn't interested is actually co-habitating. A coup attempt by Lord Norfolk is intended to raise some sort of conflict or drama, but is quickly resolved and Liz decides to marry nobody but paints her face white and acts all dramatic.

I guess I'm supposed to think: Gee, it's tough being a powerful woman and choosing between having a man or having autonomy.

Stop telling me what to feel, Hollywood.

23 Jan- "I think the point is to make us despair. To see ourselves as animal and ugly. To reject the possibility that God might love us"

The Exorcist (1973)
dir. William Friedkin

CAST
Ellen Burstyn (The Wicker Man, 2006)
Linda Blair
Max Von Sydow (Minority Report, 2002)

I managed it on the second go this afternoon. And like most things, it wasn't as scary as the anticipation, and it's good that I can cross this off the classic movies I haven't seen yet list (Maybe Taxi Driver will be next).

I was surprised though, by the degree of sexual violence implied by possession. There's one part where the mother runs into Reagan's bedroom and she's bleeding as she stabs the crucifix into her crotch repeatedly, shouting, "Let Jesus fuck you!" after that, Reagan grabs her mother and pushes her head down, saying, "Lick it!" I guess the perversity was startling to me. It's not something I've seen in the more modern movies about demonic possession.

On that note, why is it that only girls are possessed? There's Exorcist (1979) and The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), The Last Exorcism (2010). Or how about The Reaping (2007), End of Days (1999), Ghostbusters (1984), Stigmata (1999), or that chick who needs to be rescued in Constantine (2005).

Can we think of men who are possessed? Sort of, maybe Constantine can be used again, since Keanu is sort of walking the line between life and afterlife in that one. For the same reason we could use Hellboy (2004), and Ghost Rider (2007), there's also Fallen (1998).

What's the difference? Besides the fact that the first bunch are, on the whole, better movies, the men who get possessed continue to act from a position of power. They use their new evil powers to fight MORE evil, or maybe they just go on a killing spree. They certainly don't get tied to a bed and wait for the evil to be beaten out of them - because they're men they get to do some beating of their own. Men gain control, women lose control.

I also have a rant about superheroines in movies as compared to superheroes. If I ever subject myself to sitting through Catowoman (2004), you'll get to hear it; unless someone wants to propose a superheroine movie they think it actually good.

13 Oct - "all we can do is run and hope that we are fast enough"

The Secret of Kells (2009)
dir. Tomm Moore, Nora Twomey

VOICES
Brendan Gleeson (Mad-Eye Moody, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, 2007)

So I started watching Paranormal Activity last night around 10pm - but then it got to that part (Night #3 I think) when the camera slowed down at 2:09am and then there was a scary noise and I thought "Oh no! Something terrifying will happen and it's NIGHTTIME and I'm HOME ALONE" so I quickly turned it off and watched The Secret of Kells from my bathtub instead.

I'll try again some sunnier time.

Secret of Kells reminded me of some of the movies Hayao Miyazake makes. Actually, it was a lot like Princess Mononoke in that there's this dichotomy between where the people are (Kells Abbey) and the Forest (Which is where that Pixie-girl on the poster lives). The Abbey is under the threat of an imminent invasion by Vikings, to protect the Abbey, the Abbot builds an enormous wall and he forbids anyone to go outside of it. The other monks complain that the Abbot has forgotten the true purpose of the order, which is to make books, and he makes the monks spend all their time building instead. So, stuff happens and he learns the error of his ways.

The artwork is awesome. They really play around with perspective and depth and incorporate a lot of Celtic symbols into the trees. There's one scene where Our Hero has to defeat a monster which resembles nothing so much as the "snake" game you probably have on your cell phone, but stunning. That was my favorite part. My only critique is that the snake monster didn't have a long enough scene.