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.

30 June - "There are no second chances here. This is the last chance house"

Double Jeopardy (1999)

dir. Bruce Beresford (Black Robe, 1991)

CAST

Tommy Lee Jones (Small Soldiers, 1998)
Ashley Judd (Flypaper, 2011)
Jay Brazeau (Watchmen, 2009)
Bruce Greenwood (Star Trek into Darkness, 2013)
John Maclaren (The Day After Tomorrow, 2004)
Annabeth Gish (Beautiful Girls, 1996)
Michael Gaston (Hackers, 1995)
Gillian Barber (Jumanji, 1995)
Daniel Lapaine (The 10th Kingdom (TV mini-series), 2000)
Roger R. Cross (The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2008)
Keegan Connor Tracy (White Noise, 2005)
Dave Hager (Lincoln, 2012)
Spencer Treat Clark (Gladiator, 2000)

Although the essential premise, that having been framed and convicted for the murder of her husband Ashley Judd as Elizabeth Parsons can now hunt down and execute her two-timing, death-faking husband without fear of legal repercussion, is inherently flawed (they could still charge her with a multitude of other offenses), the idea is still a fun one to explore. Double Jeopardy may be near the top of the list as far as my favorite movies go. Of course, that it is basically a female-driven version The Fugitive doesn't hurt, replete with Tommy Lee Jones' Travis Layman being essentially the same as his Lt. Samuel Gerard.

Ashley Judd lends her own flair, however, and adds herself to the delightful group of leading ladies who can reasonably pull of the character of a mom-who-kicks-ass. Tommy Lee Jones, in turn, complements but doesn't overshadow, and is totally comfortable in his familiar space of a crotchety official who gradually begins to believe in the mission of his adversary.

Also, when Parsons surprises her incognito husband at a bachelor auction: delightful!

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.

26 March - "Fancy me a heroine"

The African Queen (1951)

dir. John Huston (The Unforgiven, 1960)

CAST
Humphrey Bogart - The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Katharine Hepburn - Little Women (1933)
Peter Bull - Dr. Dolittle (1967)

The African Queen is set in Africa during WW1. When Germans take over a village where a missionary and his sister are staying, the missionary dies of fever and despair and his sister, Rose, is left on her own to find a way to survive and get home. She teams up with Bogart's lowbrow character Charlie Allnut, but this odd couple ends up having more in common than they thought when Rose develops some spunk and decides that the pair of them need to take their little steamboat (the title character!) to liberate Lake Victoria from a German warship blocking English ships from entering the interior.

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 Feb - "I've tried to live my life without breaking a single rule"

Les Miserables (1998)

dir. Bille August

CAST
Kathleen Byron (Emma, 1996)
Claire Danes (Romeo + Juliet, 1996)
Lennie James (Lost in Space, 1998)
Toby Jones (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (voice), 2002)
Hans Matheson (Sherlock Holmes, 2009)
Liam Neeson (Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (voice), 2010)
Frank O'Sullivan (The Wind that Shakes the Barley, 2006)
Geoffrey Rush (The Warrior's Way, 2010)
Uma Thurman (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, 1990)
Zdenek Vencl (The Beautician and the Beast, 1997)

I never read the book, I never saw the play, so I was pretty excited to see how the plot unfolded! It's great when somehow I manage to get through my life without having the ending spoiled, especially for a story that's so prevalent in pop culture.

One of the first things I thought was that the character of Jaubert was a lot like Lt. Gerard from The Fugitive. That is, both had an inflexible interpretation of the law and little regard for the spirit of justice. Jaubert knows that Jean Valjean is a good person and yet he pursues him even until his death. On the other hand, I might also suggest that Jaubert's definition of a criminal was equally inflexible, the idea that a good person can do a bad thing, or the opposite, is inconceivable to him, even as Jean Valjean proves himself again and again. Lt. Gerard is the same. Even though in his heart he knows that Richard Kimble is innocent, the letter of the law demands that Kimble be captured again. The idea that Kimble might slip through the cracks and manage to live a benign, unremarkable life is intolerable. The thought of it haunts Gerard.

Therefore it was this relationship that was most remarkable to me. Even though there were others that could be remarked upon. The love story was just fluffy, though.

Dec 30 - "What is this new devilry?"

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

dir. Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, 2002)

CAST
Sean Astin (The Goonies, 1985)
Sean Bean (National Treasure, 2004)
Cate Blanchett (Robin Hood, 2010)
Orlando Bloom (Elizabethtown, 2005)
Billy Boyd (Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, 2003)
Marton Csokas (Timeline, 2003)
Ian Holm (Alice Through the Looking Glass, TV 1998)
Christopher Lee (Return from Witch Mountain, 1978)
Ian McKellen (X-Men, 2000)
Dominic Monaghan (X-Men Origins: Wolverine, 2009)
Viggo Mortensen (Appaloosa, 2008)
Craig Parker (Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, 2009)
John Rhys-Davies (Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981)
Andy Serkis (13 Going on 30, 2004)
Liv Tyler (Empire Records, 1995)
Hugo Weaving (Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole (voice), 2010)
Elijah Wood (Back to the Future Part II, 1989)

I watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy (extended edition, obviously) with my little brother over the course of three nights around the new year. He kept interrupting to ask whether or not a certain scene was "extended edition" or not. I said, "no, I think this was original" or, "yeah, this seems new and different."

Watching this movie reminds me of when I was just a little kid, maybe around Kiefer's age or maybe younger, and my older brother & I sat in my mom's big bed whie she read us The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I don't know know how far along we got in Tolkien's great trilogy--I'm also certain we never finished it--but I always rememer how I scared I was at the part where Frodo is leaving the Shire for the first time in his whole life, and the Black Riders are chasing him and he and Sam and Merry and Pippin are all hiding under the embankment on the side of the road and the Black Rider is right on top of them but somehow they manage to escape anyway. That was a very scary scene.

I also remember the par to of the book where Frodo tries to give the ring away to Galadriel, and she becomes a very scary and terrible version of herself and tells him that if she were to have the ring she would become as terrible as Sauron, that "all would love me and despair" but then she sort of wilts back to her normal self and declares that she had always wondered if she would be able to pass the test that Frodo had just put to her, and since she had she would herself begin to fade away.

Of course there are dozens of great nuggets to pull out, but it's hard for me to say that The Fellowship of the Ring really works well as a movie. It's too episodic, like three movies crammed into two and a half hours. First Frodo and his pals have to flee the shire, the threat of the black riders is introduced, then they meet Aragorn, who escalates the action, then they have to fight the black riders at Weathertop and Frodo is wounded, then they have to race to Elrond's place to heal Aragorn. That would be a movie in itself, but they the romance between Aragorn and Arwen is introduced, we meet Boromir and his impending doom is foreshadowed, the Fellowship is finally introduced and the gang sets off with high spirits to Mordor. They have to change routes twice and finally decided on the scary route through the mines of Moria. They have to fight a lot of goblins and ogres and orcs in the mines and Gandalf dies. There's another little narrative arc for you, but THEN there's still another forty minutes in which the gang reaches Galadriel's kingdom and some more foreshadowing ensues. Boromir gets darker and darker until he finally tries to roughhouse Frodo who runs away with Sam, meanwhile the crew is attacked by the Uruk-hai (which are introduced at some point prior as hybrid super-soldiers, also it's established that Saruman is a bad guy with a vendetta against trees and I forgot to mention the part where Gandalf rides an eagle) and Boromir dies and Pippin and Merry are captured. I think that's how it ends but I'm sure there's even a bit of denoument tagged onto that.

So you see as a saga it's very engaging, but as a movie the storyline isn't tight enough. There are too many highs and lows. That's not to say I demand an easily digested plot that doesn't make me think too hard, but even so there's only so much time I can spend sitting still. Trying to get it all into one movie was a worthy effort, luckily I think the next two movies did much better.

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.

6 Nov - "Does my face scare you? ...Scares me, too."

Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997)

dir. Michael Cohn

CAST
Sigourney Weaver (Alien, 1979)
Sam Neill (Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole (voice), 2010)
Gil Bellows (The Weather Man, 2005)
David Conrad (Wedding Crashers, 2005)
Monica Keena (Orange County, 2002)
Anthony Brophy
Chris Bauer (Fools Rush In, 1997)
Andrew Tiernan (300, 2006)

I've talked about this movie before, I'm sure of it. I'm a big fan but hardly anyone has even heard of this movie because the studio pushed it straight to video. This year there are two Snow White adaptations being released and I feel it's time for this movie to be revisited and review it's full due. It's set in Dark Ages Germany, and the Crusades along with the bubonic plague, are referenced to give it all a little bit of temporal context. As I think will prove to be the case with the upcoming films, the evil witch, played by Sigourney Weaver, is the real star of this movie. It's definitely dark, which perhaps added to it's dis-appeal back in '97 but makes it a sure-fire hit these days. It has elements of a horror film without ever quite pushing it that far. Even though I've seen this movie at least three times I still have a bit of a hard time understanding this witch character. She's definitely twisted, tormented, and the way the film portray's her magic is even a little sick without being so gory.

My criticisms are that the lead was not given to a strong enough actress, Monica Keena. Her acting is, at best, reactionary, but she effectively gets us from scene to scene. Sam Neill's role was not strong enough for his talents. There are two stars in this movie, Weaver and the Dark Forest.

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 :)

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.

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.

23 July - "Fellas like you and me, we don't run."

The Warrior's Way (2010)
dir. Sngmoo Lee

CAST

Dong-gun Jang

Kate Bosworth (The Rules of Attraction, 2002)

Geoffrey Rush (Elizabeth, 1998)

Danny Huston (Leaving Las Vegas, 1995)

Tony Cox (Beetlejuice, 1988)

I'm sick with some sort of heinous derivation of a summertime flu and life is basically miserable for me now as I sit and wait to see how my body will let me down next. The silver lining is that this is a perfect time to take advantage of Mom's On Demand and buy all these movies that I've been wanting to see (and a few just so my little brother will sit quietly with me).

From the descriptions I've read (because I don't think I actually watched a trailer for it) I was expecting a sort of inverted spaghetti-western, but running that phrase through my brain, I'm not exactly sure what that means. I guess I was thinking about The Magnificent Seven, which isn't a spaghetti western at all (usually when people are talking about those, they are thinking about Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) --Rather, The Magnificent Seven was westernized retelling of The Seven Samurai, which I've never seen but it's probably something I should get around to.

So I guess my point is that this movie is like how a Japanese person imagines and idealizes the old American West. It is spare in scenery and props, but all of the ones that are there are over-the-top and in-your-face. The villain is villainous, barely humanized. He rapes girls with good teeth. The hero is quiet and noble with a dark past. He barely speaks. The ending scene was anticlimactic, totally unnecessary to the conclusion of the story arc, but upon exit interviews, this scene held my little brother's favorite line of the movie, and my mother's favorite part as well. So, buttons.

This movie is good. It's unexpected and totally different. It uses a few common tropes, like the typical old-time circus characters, but these are satisfying and not boring. Kate Bosworth is sort of annoying as always (can I say poor-man's Jessica Simpson, or is that too cruel?) being the spunky-girl-in-the-old-west. OK, I get it. You're like Annie Oakley. Let's not overkill the folksy expressions.

I feel like this review was vague. I'm tired and sick and I have to make my own chicken soup and the kitchen stove doesn't work. Next I think I'm reviewing Megamind or else that one is coming up soon.

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!

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.

26 Dec - "You call that a knife?"

Crocodile Dundee (1986)
dir. Peter Faiman

CAST
Paul Hogan (Flipper, 1996)
Linda Kozlowski (Village of the Damned, 1995)
Mark Blum (Desperately Seeking Susan, 1985)






Crocodile Dundee II (1988)

dir. John Cornell

CAST
Paul Hogan
Linda Kozlowski
Luis Guzmán (Punch Drunk Love, 2002)
Juan Fernández (Arachnophobia, 1990)
Stephen Root (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1992)

Oh gosh, you guys, sorry about the extended hiatus, but I just couldn't bring myself to blog about the myriad Christmas movies I've been watching (topping the charts: A Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), starring the inimitable Michael Cain). Last night, however, I watched a pair of films of such cinematic excellence that they could not be denied comment.

I may have mentioned before that this is my favorite era of film. Because it still hasn't lost that theatrical aspect of older movies and yet everyone seems so excited about being modern. Of course Bret Easton Ellis's (omigosh I did it again) take on the same era is completely different. He saw the opulence, the modernity, and the high-society lifestyle as something very sinister and corrupting, while the movies I prefer are full of adventure and optimism. And yet you still get echoes of that darkness in Crocodile, I could see Richard, Sue's yuppie boyfriend that she ultimately dumps for Mick Dundee, having an alternate life not unlike Patrick Bateman. Similarly, Sue takes Mick to a high-class cocktail party where everyone is phony and superficial, and a man in the back room is snorting cocaine and Mick naively thinks he has the flu. By the time we get to the sequel, Mick has acclimated to city life, but many of the social mores and regulations remain illusory (The second movie opens with Mick fishing with dynamite on the East River, and the police laugh it off and let him get about his business. Mick copes with the culture shock by transforming New York into the Australian Outback, and playing by the rules that were applicable there, when he interacts with others, who at first don't understand him, he allows them to enter into HIS reality, and they are soon behaving in ways that would have been unusual).

The plots of both stories are a bit contrived, the second (in which the couple is being pursued by Columbian drug lords across the outback) more so than the first (in which a newspaper pays a reporter to interview some random dude in Australia and also pays for his visit to New York City). My favorite scene is at the end of the first movie where Mick and Sue are playing telephone with some colorful characters on a crowded subway platform. This is where Sue confesses that she loves Mick. I love it even more because as soon as this happens the movie ends on a sudden freeze frame with no denouement whatsoever.

One website pointed out that this movie is the only reason for the success of the Outback Steakhouse franchise. I guess that makes sense, they've sort of been riding the Australian fetish for a long time, I don't even think Olive Garden rubs it's ethnicity in your face that much. Of course, the "wild man" aesthetic will NEVER lose its appeal. Even in these movies, where you think it would be obvious enough, FREQUENT references are made to Tarzan, just in case you forgot why lean, wiry Paul Hogan with his leathery face and clear blue eyes was totally irresistible to New York urbanite professional Sue Somethingoranother. It's because he's REAL, he's ADVENTUROUS, and all those parties where the men look like women and the women are ambiguous (unless you're wearing a cocktail dress that leaves nothing to the imagination) and nobody ever says what they really mean and no matter how polite you are you still might be a sick fucker who murders a prostitute or your best friend at the end of the night, well, that stuff just sucks and I think if given a choice between staying in that cesspool or moving to the Outback with a dude who owns a goldmine, there wouldn't even be a contest.

I've probably overanalyzed this. But you know, I like movies about the 1980s.

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.