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!

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

Law Abiding Citizen (2009)

dir. F. Gary Gray

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

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

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

14 March- "You lost your arms in battle! But you grew some nice boobs."

Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993)

dir. Mel Brooks (Blazing Saddles, 1974)


CAST
Cary Elwes (The Princess Bride, 1987)
Richard Lewis (Leaving las Vegas, 1995)
Roger Rees (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1999)
Amy Yasbeck (Pretty Woman, 1990)
Dave Chappelle (You've Got Mail, 1998)
Issac Hayes (Dr. Dolittle 2 (voice), 2001)
Megan Cavenagh (A League of their Own, 1992)
Eric Allan Kramer (True Romance, 1993)
Tracey Ullman (I Could Never be Your Woman, 2007)
Chuck McCann (Dracula: Dead and Loving It, 1995)
Brian George (Blind Date, 1987)
Herman Poppe (Pale Rider, 1985)
Patrick Stewart (Gnomeo & Juliet (voice), 2011)
Dom Deluise (The Muppet Movie, 1979)
Mel Brooks (Young Frankenstein (voice), 1974)
Dick Van Patten (Spaceballs, 1987)
Clement von Franckenstein (Just Married, 2003)
Tyce Diorio (Epic Movie, 2007)


I watched this with the little brother last time I visited the fam'ly in Philly. He had never seen it before, can you believe it! There's a lot to enjoy about this delightful comedy, but don't forget that some of the chastity-belt-centric jokes may go over a 9-year old's head.

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.

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- "Let's just assume for the moment that everyone in here doesn't like me"

Tangled (2010)
dir. Nathan Greno, Byron Howard (Bolt, 2008)

VOICES

Mandy Moore (The Princess Diaries, 2001)

Zachary Levi

Donna Murphy (Spiderman 2, 2004)

Ron Perlman (Hellboy, 2004)

M.C. Gainey (The Haunting, 1999)

Jeffrey Tambor (Flypaper, 2011)

Brad Garrett (A Bug's Life, 1998)

Paul F. Tompkins (Magnolia (voice), 1999)

So much for a summer filled with catching up on all the high-culture cinema I missed in the theaters the first time around. Instead I've pretty much been caving whenever my little brother wants to pick the evening's movie (he's 8!). Yesterday my Momma went to a dinner party or something, so it was a Kiefer-Paris day. I asked him what he wanted for dinner in advance, and he said chicken wings. So I made some really nice wings roasted with garlic and sweet onion, and then Kiefer helped me make a honey-mustard sauce. We also had cucumber salad and coconut-mango-strawberry smoothies. Am I the best big sister?? Preliminary polls suggest that yes, I am the best big sister. Then we took Timber to the dog park and Kiefer practiced catching with his new lacrosse stick, and then we came home and Kiefer asked if we could watch Tangled. And so we did.

I think this would have been really cute if it had been animated for realzies (I mean with pencils and shit) but as it was it was still okay. It seemed like there had been a half-hearted attempt to add in some musical numbers in the style of classic Disney animated motion pictures, but these songs were sporadic, unmemorable, and sort of awkward to sit through.

Rapunzel is such a familiar story I'm surprised it hasn't been interpreted into a movie already, but it has and I just missed it. I suppose the reason for that is that it's sort of an uneventful story. How much can you elaborate on a girl trapped in a tower? It would seem to follow the formula of the older Disney movies, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, passively waiting for their princes rather than much more dynamic characters like Jasmine, Ariel, and Belle, who are adventurous and gutsy. This movie solves that problem by giving Rapunzel and MacGuffin-sort-of-goal, to see the floating lights in the sky on her birthday, which are in fact lanterns released by her royal Ma and Pa mourning their missing princess. In ths way, while Rapunzel is fearful of the world and utterly naive, she also has a determination which allows her to conquer her conflicts. Flynn Ryder, her roguish love interest, is more often in need of Rapunzel's assistance than the other way around.

But in my opinion, this story omitted the most compelling part of the Rapunzel story, which is the beginning, when the pregnant mother, in the intensity of her hormonal cravings, demands that her husband steal the rapunzel growing the neighbor's garden, and when he is caught, the punishment is that the parents must give up their child to their neighbor, who was a witch. In this way, the parents weren't blameless. They were greedy and so they lost their kid. In this movie, instead of craving the rapunzel plant, the mother is very sick and requires a magic flower hidden by the witch, which she uses for everlasting youth. I think the key is that the witch uses the flower sustainably, while the royal family destroys the flower while using it to save the queen. The princess is born with the remnants of the magic flower, which gives her hair healing properties as long as it is uncut, at which point the power is lost, and so the witch conspires to keep Rapunzel in a tower and never cut her hair, so the witch may continue to use the magic to retain her youth.

So the parents are portrayed as blameless and the witch as greedy, but really they are the same, because if such a magic flower exists, it should be used to help many people, and not just one person. The Queen destroyed the magic flower because she thought her life was more valuable than the witch's or anyone else's, but they don't talk about that. This is a good vs. evil story.

24 July - "Oh-llo?"

Megamind (2010)

dir. Tom McGrath (Madagascar, 2005)

voices

Will Ferrell (Stranger Than Fiction, 2006)

Brad Pitt (Burn After Reading, 2008)

Tina Fey (Ponyo (voice), 2008)

Jonah Hill (Strange Wilderness, 2008)

David Cross (Small Soldiers, 1998)

Ben Stiller (The Royal Tenenbaums, 2001)

J.K. Simmons (Burn After Reading, 2008)

A couple things come to mind when I'm thinking about how to start this one. The first is that I really just don't care for these chintzy computer-animated movies with the bright colors and the vomitingly (I made that an adverb) predictable ending and the complete and utter lack of charm.

I guess it was like, six or eight months ago when a fella asked me if I wanted to see this with him. I like it when someone asking me out has already picked the movie (or whatever the plan is, since a friend of mine told me that movie as a first date is bullshit because you're supposed to be engaging with each other) - but if we are going to see a movie I like it when the guy has already chosen one because it seems lazy otherwise. As if, hey I want to hang out with you, can you organize an interesting and fun evening? No, I say, if you want my company so bad, you gotta do the legwork.

Anyway, so my normal M.O. is to agree to whatever movie my prospective suitors suggest, because at that point I'm more interested in the person than the movie (a surprising confession, I know. This is why I ended up seeing Superman Returns TWICE in the theaters! But I still think the worst date movie I ever sat through was Enchanted, which ended up being quite pleasant when I watched it later on DVD with some girlfriends, so yeah, I think the company you've got during a movie is important)

I am having a hard time getting to the point. The point is that even though it usually doesn't matter to me what movie a guy picks, and even though I hate picking date movies, and even though I really liked this guy and wanted to go out with him, I was still like, Hells no, I don't wanna see Megamind, I will call you back in 20 minutes with a revised itinerary. We ended up seeing It's Kind of a Funny Story instead; it was a rather arid week for cinema in Athens, but I thought it was a reasonably good choice. It didn't work out, though, c'est la vie.

So I watched it because I wanted to watch something On Demand with my lil bro, we also saw Tangled (upcoming!) and we may resort to Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2. It was fun with him because we laughed at the funny jokes, but, honestly, this movie was artless, it wasn't cute at all, it was pandering and easy and heavy-heavy and clumsy, like someone who's trying too hard to be your new best friend and I just wanted to be alone after the whole confrontation.

My brain is all over the place right now. Still sick in bed, by the by.

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

Hang 'Em High (1968)

dir. Ted Post

CAST

Clint Eastwood (A Fistful of Dollars. 1964)

Pat Hingle (Batman Forever, 1989)

Ben Johnson (Red Dawn, 1984)

Dennis Hopper (Waterworld, 1995)

Bruce Dern (All the Pretty Horses, 2000)

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

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

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

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

1 May - "Now that's what I call an idea"

District B13 (2004)

dir. Pierre Morel

starring

Cyril Raffaelli

David Belle

Dany Verissimo

Oh MAN! This movie was all kinds of awesome. You know, sometimes I shy away from the ones with subtitles because I some kind of compulsive disorder where I can't stand to not be doing something with my hands and it bugs me when I have to sit still and read the dialogue, but it's usually worth it, and this this time it definitely was.

Basically, District B13 is a walled-off ghetto in France ruled by a gangster warlord named Taha. Our hero, Lieto, is an idealistic roughneck who believes that the French government has abandoned District B13 unjustly. Lieto's sister, Lola, is kidnapped by Taha and Lieto gets arrested and has to team up with a cop who needs to break in to District B13 to diffuse a stolen bomb. There's lots of mixed martial arts and I think parkour, if parkour is what I think it is. Whatever, it's cool. I don't ususally go in for artfully choreographed fights scenes - I guess I prefer my cinema violence to be a little more raw and blunt, we aren't at the ballet. But this was cool. I caught myself exclaiming out loud "oh shit!" a couple of times. So I guess that's good. I will recommend this movie to male types so they will think I am cool, but they'll be right in that assumption. Because I am.

31 March - "Do you have any idea what it's like being English?"

A Fish Called Wanda (1988)

dir. Charles Crichton

starring

John Cleese (Shrek 2 (voice), 2004)

Jamie Lee Curtis (My Girl, 1991)

Kevin Kline (Wild Wild West, 1999)

Michael Palin (Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 1975)

Stephen Fry (Alice in Wonderland (voice), 2010)

This is a good movie. I think it's very funny.

I could probably end my review there. I have a lot of work to do tonight.

No, I'll tell you about it. I guess the real brilliance in this movie is how you've got two classical British humorists, Cleese and Palin of Monty Python's Flying Circus, balanced out by the American's Kline and Curtis, so if you're like me and never really for Monty Python or British humor in general, it's okay because Kevin Kline is hilarious in a very accessibly-American way and although Jamie Lee Curtis has never really been a comedienne, she's plays her part negotiating between all these extreme personalities very well.

The humor is mostly situational. A lot of it revolves around this theme of British people being very proper. My favorite part is when John Cleese, a worn-down barrister, is about to be seduced by Jamie Lee Curtis, the femme fatale, and she's upstairs and he's naked downstairs and this family walks into the "flat" and he's buck-naked and they just sort of exchange pleasantries like it's the thing to do. It's very droll.

The other great bit is when Michael Palin's character is trying to kill this old woman because she's a witness, but he keeps killing her little dogs by mistake. And he gets so upset because he's killing the dogs, and then when he kills the last one by accident again, the old woman's heart gives out and she dies and he laughs and laughs and laughs.

So, it's a heist movie, which is always good. And nobody trusts each other and everyone is lying. There are many layers of intrigue which only add depth to the situational comedy.

There's a sequel of sorts called Fierce Creatures. A sequel insofar as the plot and characters are entirely unrelated but the cast is the same. Same deal as Best in Show and A Mighty Wind. As in that case, the second attempt is not as brilliant as the first, but Fierce Creatures is still pretty funny. So there it is.

Better analyses when I'm less stressed out.

2 March - "What it is. Eternity - how do they know?"

Stone (2010)
dir. John Curran

CAST

Robert De Niro (Great Expectations, 1998)

Edward Norton (Down in the Valley, 2005)

Milla Jovovich (The Fifth Element, 1997)

Frances Conroy (Shopgirl, 2005)

Sometimes you see a movie and you think you're only a little disappointed. Like, that movie wasn't awesome, but it was pretty good, but then the more you think about it, the more you realize that you've been had. That movie sucked. That movie sucked two hours of your life away and is totally unapologetic about it. That's what Stone is like.

That's also what happened when Drew Speranza and I went to see Cyrus (2010), starring John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei and Jonah Hill.

They trick with the understated set design, the A-list actors, and the seemingly poignant dialogue. At first you think you don't understand it, you think it's one of those smart indie films you're going to feel better about yourself for having seen. We go into these movies wanting to be entertained. We give them the benefit of the doubt.

First of all, Edward Norton is awesome, and even here I think he takes what he is given and knocks it out of the park. His character, Stone, is a smarmy convict up for parole that has a spiritual epiphany, of sorts. I think in a later entry I'm going to have to make a list of the actors I have crushes on. In my eyes, Edward Norton can do no wrong.

Milla Jovovich, who is another favorite of mine, plays Stone's wife who might be a nymphomanic but maybe was just playing. Here's the thing, this movie was really played up as a psychological drama, but nobody was really playing mind games with anybody, there was just the sort of implication that everyone was being a bit insincere with everyone else. I mean, the wife seduces Robert De Niro's character, who is in charge of recommending Stone for parole, but she's just doing that to get her hubby out, right? I think that was pretty clear. I guess Milla also did a good job with her material, but I wish they had played her up as either more manipulative or more narcissistic or something. She wasn't fleshed out enough, the poor girl.

The symbolism, as well, was pretty in your face. I remember when I had to read The Scarlet Letter in seventh grade and they got to the part where Hester names her bastard baby Pearl, "because she came with a great price" and I exclaimed that the book was stupid and refused to have no more of it. Well, about thirty minutes into this movie Ed Norton's character says something about hearing God in the background noise and I said out loud, "Oh! I see what they're doing here," and in hindsight we could have stopped watching the movie there, because that was the most interesting point that highlighted the most interesting scene, which was the very first one. It was all downhill after that.