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.

4 Dec - "What happened to all the celestial fire?"

Don Juan DeMarco (1994)

dir. Jeremy Leven

CAST
Marlon Brando (A Streetcar Named Desire, 1951)
Johnny Depp (Rango (voice), 2011)
Bob Dishy (Jungle 2 Jungle, 1997)
Rachel Ticotin (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, 2008)
Stephen Singer (The Happening, 2008)
Faye Dunaway (The Rules of Attraction, 2002)
Tommy 'Tiny' Lister (The Fifth Element, 1997)
Tom Mardirosian (Lady in the Water, 2006)

This is one of those relative reality movies like Big Fish or The King of California (now that was a good movie). Our hero Don Juan, played by Johnny Depp, is probably crazy, but he also has these occasional moments of self awareness that suggest he consciously prefers the illusion to the reality, and then of course there's little snags that suggest the merest possibility that he's actually telling the truth, but no, that would be impossible. So this guy Don Juan, who dresses like Zorro, has to undergo a ten day psychological evaluation to determine if he will be committed. His psychiatrist is  retiring in exactly ten days, and is determined that Don Juan should be cured in that time. The primary narrative focus is Don Juan's self-reported life story, his sexual exploits and the loss of his one true love. We also get a sub plot of Marlon Brando's character battling with his own life's expectations and making a mad grab at the sense of drama and romanticism that Don Juan represents. I guess the point is that life is what you make it, and if you are unhappy with reality as it is working out, just do something different.

2 Oct - "What did you find, Cortes?"

 Monsters (2010)
 dir. Gareth Edwards

CAST
Scoot McNairy (Sleepover, 2004)
Whitney Able

I've been meaning to see this movie for a while, and I'm glad I did because it pretty much met all of my expectations. It's slower than you might expect for a movie about aliens. It's much more in the slightly-documentary precedent set by Cloverfield in 2008 and then by District 9 in 2009. Of course, these aliens are even less anthropomorphic than those crawfish-like guys, and until the very end we don't get any insight into what these are like or what they want. They are just scary and far away, is all. This movie reminded me of nothing so much as this song by The Dead Milkmen. It goes:
Big lizard in my backyard
Can't afford to feed it anymore
Big lizard in my backyard
Busting down my neighbor's door
I bought a big lizard
Only a dollar fifty
Well, that's pretty neat
Yeah it's fucking nifty
But I just can't afford to feed it
And you should see the way it shits
...
I was knocked outta bed
Late last night
I was woken up by the sound of dynamite
I ran downstairs to find an army man
He said, "We gotta blow up those things we don't understand!"

Do you dig it? Has there ever been a better written anthem to xenophobia and the denial of responsibility? I was prepared, going into this movie, to take the easily interpreted metaphor. After all, they built a really big wall to keep the aliens from getting out Mexico. Right? But, NO! There are turtles underneath those turtles.

I talk about the alien metaphor for xenophobia a lot, but I think in this case the aliens represent a much less tangible allegory for the impending threat of global catastrophe. At this period of time, a disproportionate burden of global environmental degradation is borne by developing and underdeveloped nations. In the mean time, the industrialized nations do everything they can to keep the impacts of their lifestyle outside of their borders. It doesn't work, though, because problems like that burst through all sorts of walls. I guess the lesson is that you have to learn to live in the world you live in.

10 March - "bitten on the balls by a tarantula? I mean, that's embarrassing"

Rough Magic (1995)
dir. Claire Peploe

CAST

Bridget Fonda (Jackie Brown, 1997)

Russell Crowe (Gladiator, 2000)

Jim Broadbent (Moulin Rouge, 2001)

My first impression was that this movie was made a lot earlier than 1995. It seemed to me to follow that late '80s theme of adventure and society-girl paired with Roughneck male a la Temple of Doom (1984), Romancing the Stone (1984) and Crocodile Dundee (1986). Rough Magic seemed like a pale imitator to those films.

Not that it didn't have a lot of potential. The plot was strong, the conflict intriguing. It's about Myra, a magician's assistant, who's about to get married to a wealthy senator candidate who she doesn't love. When the Fiancé kills the magician, Myra promises to honor his dying wish to find a powerful medicine-woman and finally master her craft by getting real magic powers. She also took a photograph at the exact moment that the villain killed the magician, that's important because he hires Russell Crowe to track her down in Mexico. You can guess how that works out.

So you've got a romance. A pursuit. A fantastical twist. Some comic relief. This was a good movie! It should have been a GREAT movie and yet I was left feeling unsatisfied at the end. Not completely certain of what exactly went down. The whole thing felt rushed. Russell Crowe's character, for example, should have been more properly developed. They alluded to a tragic past, maybe some PTSD, it's unclear.

You could safely call this genre magical realism and true to that genre, the nature of the magic involved is not revealed. It's taken for granted that the medicine woman and Myra have these powers, and there's never really an Oh Shit moment when everybody might speculate on these new developments. And once the conflict is resolved and everyone is where they are supposed to be, there is no resolution to those fantastic elements. Maybe that's why I felt unresolved at the end, because magical realism rarely follows the classic heroic journey and that is the plot pattern I've grown accustomed to.

The closing scene was cute, instead of doing the typical pan to an open window, we get to focus on two white rabbits going at in next to the pile of Our Heroes clothes. haha.

Dec 1 - "What idiots! Now you're friends again!"

Y Tu Mamá También (2001)

dir. Alfonso Cuarón (A Little Princess, 1995)

CAST
Diego Luna (Milk, 2008)
Gael García Bernal (The Science of Sleep, 2006)
Maribel Verdú (Pan's Labyrinth, 2006)

Lately I'm really into the foreign films, if you all don't mind my sounding snooty for a moment, they just seem more sophisticated than American movies (what? more sophisticated than Miss March? Indeed!), and I'm not just talking about the sex scenes.

I said last time that I saw parallels between yesterday's trashier raunchy comedy and today's profound exploration of identity and personal growth. So, they say that there are no new stories, just new ways of telling old ones. Well, we've basically got two stories about young guys on a road trip talking about their cocks a lot. Except in Y Tu Mamá También (So titled because when Tenoch confesses that he banged Julio's Mom, Julio responds...) it seems nicer because they're doing it in Spanish.

The climax of the movie is pretty intense, also kinda hot. Like I said before, the story is very straightforward, Tenoch and Julio are two buddies who are taking Luisa, an older woman who just left her husband, to a beach that doesn't exist. But they discover stuff about themselves along the way. It's nice, but the climax is weird, and the denouement is a bit of a downer, but sometimes you can't really expect a happy ending. These Spanish movies are all kind of like that (I was thinking of Sex and Lucía, but I guess I watched that just a few days before I started blogging about all my media adventures [not exactly true, I also watch a lot of TV that I rarely talk about]).

I guess what makes this movie seem smart is the constant allusions to the world outside of the story. There was this weird stylistic thing where the camera would occasionally drift away from the protagonists and follow a background character for a brief period. I suppose this was to show the greater context of Mexican life. The political tumult that everyone seems to be involved with except for our two young heroes. These tangents were sometimes accompanied by narration describing something horribly tragic which happened to the person or place Our Heroes were passing by, but sometimes it was left tacit, the military stops another car by the side of the road and the protagonists laugh and laugh about something stupid. But we know better, we are the omniscient audience.

30 Oct - "I may be a bastard, but I'm not a fucking bastard"

From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)
dir. Robert Rodriguez (The Faculty, 1998)

CAST
George Clooney (Batman and Robin, 1997)
Harvey Keitel (Little Nicky, 2000)
Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, 1994)
Cheech Marin (Ferngully: The Last Rainforest (voice), 1992)
Juliette Lewis (What's Eating Gilbert Grape, 1993)
Salma Hayek (The Faculty, 1998)

Danny Trejo (Grindhouse, 2007)

Whoa! I guess this is my last horror movie for a while! I can't say that I'm not THRILLED about that, since I still haven't gotten around to seeing The Exorcist, which is probably good for my own peace of mind forever.

Let me start off by expressing an opinion: I don't like Quentin Tarantino. I don't his face, I don't like his voice, I don't like how he writes his own parts. Luckily he died about halfway through.

I guess the cool thing here (sorry I'm kinda tired this morning and my writing style suffers) is that the vampires are not integrated into the storyline in any kind of graceful way. It's a basic runnin' from the law kind of story and then, uh-oh, some whacky monsters show up. I thought the plot was going to a cool place before vampires became an issue. You had the two bank-robbers, the family held hostage, some good tension, maybe some stockholm syndrome. And then it all just devolves into a gory mess. Not a Tarantino fan.