16 June - "Without Green Destiny, you are nothing!"

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

dir. Ang Lee (Lust, Caution, 2007)

starring

Chow Yun Fat (Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, 2007)

Michelle Yeoh (Sunshine, 2007)

Ziyi Zhang (Memoirs of a Geisha, 2005)

The first time I saw this movie, I was about ten years younger and I though to myself - Aww dang, a subtitled movie :(

But by the end I was totally engrossed, I forgot that I was reading and just got lost in the story. But I still must have been hopping around my bedroom because somehow I missed that whole romance between Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun Fat, which was lovely and tragic.

It reminded of someone saying, and I probably heard this in another movie, that you have to be even braver to make the decision to be happy, because it's always easier to make no decision and keep being frustrated*. These folks are making the easy choices, choosing to empower the status quo rather than admitting that they would be happier doing something else.

The primary conflict is created by a rogue warrior, the Jade Fox, a woman who turned bad because the teacher of wutan (their flying-around fighting style) kept her around as a consort but would not teach her the secrets of fighting, and so she stole the book and took a wealthy bureaucrats daughter as her apprentice. The student soon outmatches her teacher, but is uncertain whether she want's the pursue the path of her wayward teacher, flee with her true love - a bandit king from the desert - or stay at home and get married. She leans toward the latter option until she get in over her head stealing the sword of Green Destiny.

I'm trying to think of lesson, or to relate this to my own life somehow. Maybe it's something like the way you don't get the chance to make everything right until it's too late. Maybe the important thing was the way the warriors were able to float up walls and fight on the tops of bamboo branches. It might be a metaphor for being untethered to the world, the freedom of being unbound by custom, and yet the inability to create a bond with anyone else. Which might be why the young girl wasn't able to be with her love, because it was too late to undo the things that had been done.

The end was very sad.

* I remembered! It was Kamikaze Girls - A really great movie

17 June - "The bartender never gets killed"

Desperado (1995)

dir. Robert Rodriguez (The Faculty, 1998)

starring

Antonio Banderas (Shrek 2 (voice), 2004)

Salma Hayak (From Dusk Till Dawn, 1996)

Cheech Marin (From Dusk Till Dawn, 1996)

Steve Buscemi (Big Fish, 2003)

Quentin Tarantino (From Dusk Till Dawn, 1996)

Danny Trejo (Heat, 1995)

I said to somebody the other day, "I don't usually like Quentin Tarantino movies, but Desperado is pretty cool." and he says that Desperado wasn't directed by Quentin Tarantino, but by his buddy, Robert Rodriguez, and so it is! I'm not crazy about Rodriguex either, but Desperado doesn't get chintzy until the very end, when two guys inexplicably start shooting through machine guns shaped like guitar cases and the realism gets lost.

I thought I was the kind of person who liked camp, though. I like Buffy the Vampire Slayer... I'm not sure what the toxic element here is. I suppose it's disappointing when the awesome revenge killings turn into something stupid that only appeals to the perverse reaction to thrilling violence.

Truth be told, there's a lot of superfluous details in this movie, and I've said before that I'm conservative when it comes to plotlines (except when Wes Anderson is involved). So, Danny Trejo's character, he's confusing, where does he come from? What's the deal with those throwing knives? There's also that chick who hangs around Bucho, you get the sense that she's a little more competent than the other roughs, why doesn't she have any lines? What's her deal? These directors (Rodriguez and Tarantino), I get the sense that they are like children throwing in details - What if this was like this? What if?? - but not sticking with them until the end. Development, you guys? Depth?

So maybe I don't like Desperado as much as I thought I did. Maybe I just like Antonio Banderas.

15 June - "Back of the car, not a rear-entry situation"

Burn After Reading (2008)
dir. Joel and Ethan Coen (O Brother, Where art Thou?, 2000)

CAST
George Clooney (Fantastic Mr. Fox (voice), 2009)
Brad Pitt (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 2007)
Tilda Swinton (The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 2010)

Frances McDormand (Fargo, 1996)

John Malkovitch (Being John Malkovitch, 1999)

Richard Jenkins (Eat Pray Love, 2010)

Kevin Sussman (Sweet Home Alabama, 2002)

Dermot Mulroney (The Family Stone, 2005)

J.K. Simmons (The Ref, 1994)
Olek Krupa (Behind Enemy Lines, 2001)

If you heard that this movie wasn't very good, you would be justified in believing those rumors. Burn After Reading wasn't very bad, but I certainly wouldn't plan on seeing it again either.

I think the problem is that while it's fairly obvious that it was meant to be funny, it very overtly missed the mark. First of all, we're tricked in the very beginning into thinking that John Malkovitch is the main character, maybe he was supposed be, but George Clooney and Frances McDormand take the lead, plotwise, for the bulk of the remainder. The big joke appears to be that McDormand and Pitt are running around talking to the Russians and pretending to be all conniving but what they've really got is a disgruntled analyst's crappy attempt at a memoir.

That's the joke, everyone dies for no reason at all. Sorry if I spoiled it. There seem to be some allusions to government ineptitude, but I am less clear on those points.

Gosh, I'm nearly ten days behind on my movie reviews. I have a backlog of two movies I watched after this one. Hopefully I have more to say about them more than a week after I watched them. More complaining: Never has a comedy been so boring. Really disappointed, Coens.

6 June - "Everyone knows the movies are full of shit"

Blade: Trinity (2004)
dir. David S. Goyer

CAST
Wesley Snipes (Demolition Man, 1993)

Jessica Biel (Elizabethtown, 2005)

Ryan Reynolds (Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, 2004)

Patton Oswalt (The Informant!, 2009)

Kris Kristofferson (He's Just Not That Into You, 2009)

Dominic Purcell

Parker Posey (Party Girl, 1995)

Natasha Lyonne (Slums of Beverley Hills, 1992)

John Michael Higgins (Best in Show, 2000)
Callum Keith Rennie (The Butterfly Effect, 2004)

This is quite possibly the worst movie to ever come out of Marvel, although I never saw Ghost Rider. That being said, it easily crossed that line where horrendous turns awesome. Reynolds and Biel (plus a bow and arrow) are two vampire-fighting vigilantes that team up with blade to take down the insidious vampire conspiracy to resurrect Dracula (who is actually a Sumerian, as in, cradle of civilization), led by chief vampire Parker Posey who is so fabulously whacked out that I want her to have her own spin off movie starring her crazy vampire chick and an army of vampirized Pomeranians (that's right!)

Ryan Reynolds is spot on in his portrayal of Ryan Reynolds, seamlessly developing the skills he later uses to act like Ryan Reynolds in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and presumably The Green Lantern. Jessica Biel is less convincing as a badass with a dark past. The writers were merciful and limited her speaking parts.

I think the biggest failing was the apparent absence of a threat. Dracula, or "Drake," as he was called. Was not a very threatening villain. His character was uncompelling, he only killed two goth kids, and it was unclear whether he was planning to lead a vampire revolution or whatever. As in Blade 2, the vampires were concerned with the possibility to transforming into Daywalkers, which is what Blade is (Quick origin story: Blade's mom was bitten by a vampire as she was in labor, so Blade is half-vampire, as strong as a vampire, but able to walk in the daylight. Side effects include a pesky bloodlust that is controlled by some sort of "serum"). However, Drake seemed to imply that this was impossible, neutralizing any sense of urgency. So the plot was totally vague, but there was a lot of vampire fighting, so it would be impossible to say that this movie failed to meet expectations.

5 June - "You don't live with me. You live with the remains of dead people."

Heat (1995)
dir. Michael Mann (The Last of the Mohicans, 1992)

CAST

Al Pacino (Donnie Brasco, 1997)

Robert de Niro (Stone, 2010)

Kevin Gage (The 'burbs, 1989)

Diane Venora (Romeo + Juliet, 1996)

Natalie Portman (Black Swan, 2010)

Jon Voight (Holes, 2003)

Tom Sizemore (True Romance, 1993)

Mykelti Williamson (The Final Destination, 2009)

Ted Levine (Memoirs of a Geisha, 2005)

William Fichtner (Crash, 2004)

Val Kilmer (True Romance, 1993)

Ashley Judd (Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, 1992)

Hank Azaria (Love and Other Drugs, 2010)

Danny Trejo (From Dusk Till Dawn, 1996)

Martin Ferreo (Jurassic Park, 1993)

Jeremy Piven (Old School, 2003)

Wes Studi (Avatar, 2009)

Tone Loc (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, 1994)

The only kind of movie I watch less often than crime drama is courtroom drama (With the exclusion of My Cousin Vinny, which I watch at every opportunity and enjoy EVERY TIME). That's a funny pattern, because I LIKE crime dramas, just not quite as much as my usual fare of adventure, science fiction, and period drama. This movie is mostly about Robert de Niro, who sets up his crew to take one last big score, and Al Pacino, a work-obsessed detective (aren't they all?) in hot pursuit. It's one of those movies in which the tracker and the tracked discover they have more in common with each other than they originally thought. That doesn't change the nature of their relationship, though.

I think Michael Mann is a wonderful director. I appreciated especially, in this case, the depth of understanding that I got from the relatively minor roles of the supporting actresses, the wives and girlfriends of the criminals, and the detective's wife and stepdaughter. I had trouble, at first, determining the purpose of Al Pacino's suicidal stepdaughter, played by Natalie Portman. Maybe it seemed a little superfluous. Upon reflection, I decided that the take home message was about the futility of life, whether you make it by crime or by retribution, without anyone to share it with.

That seems a bit chintzy for a movie with so many gunshots in it. But really it wasn't as corny as that. The point is that Al Pacino's character was totally submersed in crimes and victims and criminals, but for all that he sacrificed to try and do something right, he was unable to prevent the victimization of someone in his own family. He chose de Niro over his wife and stepdaughter.

de Niro makes the same sacrifice. He has the opportunity to escape with his girl, but he chooses to make one last revenge hit before the airport, and so he abandons her, choosing the endless cat and mouse game with Pacino instead.

Ashley Judd and Val Kilmer have the sweetest romance. Their marriage is failing and you think she's been flipped by the cops, but at the last moment she signals to him to keep going, to leave her behind. It's a final act of sacrifice, but it's for love, not pride.

There's a blog I like to read that focuses on horror movies, i'm into survival (which inspires me to think of a better name for my little movie blog here, with its handful of readers). The most recent entry was about the second sequel to The Exorcist and specifically about the difficulty of establishing friendship between characters. That was something they were trying to do in this movie, and not entirely successfully. De Niro and Pacino had coffee in one scene, they lamented about their love lives and respectively admitted that "This is what I am best at. It's the only thing I know how to do." Perhaps this rapport could have been better established. To myself, I was drawing comparisons to Tommy Lee Jones' detective character and his relationships with pursued criminals Ashley Judd and Harrison Ford in Double Jeopardy and The Fugitive. Of course, in those Judd and Ford's character were both innocent. Even so, I enjoyed the relationship much better.

2 June - "Don't expect to be making any friends"

Elizabethtown (2005)
dir. Cameron Crowe (Say Anything..., 1989)

CAST

Orlando Bloom (Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, 2003)

Kirsten Dunst (Marie Antoinette, 2006)

Susan Sarandon (The Witches of Eastwick, 1987)

Alec Baldwin (It's Complicated, 2009)

Judy Greer (Love and Other Drugs, 2010)

Bruce McGill (Collateral, 2004)

Jessica Biel (Valentine's Day, 2010)

Paul Schneider (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 2007)

Loudon Wainwright III (Knocked Up, 2007)

Paula Deen

Ted Manson (Fried Green Tomatoes, 1991)

Drew Baylor (Bloom) gets fired from his job and attempts suicide, only to have his sister (Greer) call at the last moment and tell him that their father has died and that he must go to Elizabethtown (title drop!), Kentucky to see to the funeral arrangements. En route Drew meets stewardess Claire (Dunst) and then later they have a phone call and fall in love. Things work out well with the folksy southern family and Drew decides that life is worth living after all.

While there's nothing I could precisely pinpoint as unpleasant in this movie, it still fails to stand out in any enjoyable way. I expect that in a week or so I'll have forgotten the storyline altogether, except that the romance between Kirsten Dunst and Orlando Bloom was very, very contrived. It was certainly a charming movie, with quaint characters, but it neither stood out as a romantic comedy, although it certainly elements of such, nor as a narrative of self-actualization, a young man coming into his own, which is certainly a common and always poignant theme in cinema (Like Big Fish, or the always relevant Star Wars). I could not enjoy it as a dark comedy nor as a family drama (Such as in The Squid and the Whale, which succeeded as both.

Instead, Elizabethtown seems to hesitate between two ends of the emotional spectrum, and in so doing fails to make an impact on either front. To emphasize a belabored point, the two highlights of the movie were the interaction between Drew and Chuck, the perceptively wasted groom getting married in the same hotel, and the flashback scenes to Drew's childhood memories of his father as he is beginning his drive back to Oregon (something about saturated photography and child-parent nostalgia always makes me teary).

It's obvious to me now why this movie receded into the background almost immediately after it's release. If you're hearing about this for the first time right now, just let it slide by you. If you're a big Orlando Bloom fan, maybe watch it if you're really curious, but honestly, he's hotter as Legolas.

30 May - "We need cultural experts, not scientists"

Timeline (2003)
dir. Richard Donner - Conspiracy Theory (1997)

CAST
Paul Walker - She's All That (1999)

Gerard Butler - Nim's Island (2008)

Frances O'Connor - A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

Billy Connolly - The Boondock Saints (1999)

David Thewlis - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (2010)

Anna Friel - A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999)

Matt Craven - Disturbia (2007)

Ethan Embry - Pizza (2005)

Michael Sheen - Blood Diamond (2006)

Neal McDonough - Tin Man (2007)
Stephanie Biddle - The Whole Nine Yards (2000)
Amy Sloan - A Diva's Christmas Carol (TV 2000)
Marton Csokas - The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)

Timeline is based on a Michael Crichton novel, like Jurassic Park and Congo, but not like Outbreak. This is about a group of archaeologists who are sent back in time by a technology corporation that has been funding their research into medieval France. They have to go back to rescue their Professor, because he was accidentally left behind in a previous trip. So they are plopped down in the middle of the hundred years war the day before the big invasion, ruh roh!

What I like about this movie is the utter lack of concern for a technological explanation (A 3D fax machine and a wormhole, OK let's go!), even though that's what takes up the lion's share of any Crichton novel. I also recall that one of the big conflicts in the book was the language barrier. All the old-timey people were speaking Ye Olde Angle-ese and no one could understand what was going on, but they chose to streamline that conflict in the movie and all the English folks were as comprehensible as one of Darth Vader's generals. They didn't even blink an eye at the wonky accents of our Heroes ("We're Scottish!" Assures Gerard Butler in a sexy way)

So the good guys are the French and the English are uniformly evil. The saddest part is when Francois gets skewered by Lord Oliver because he can't hide his French accent, awww.

Conclusions: Fun! A adventure in a more esoteric time period, which keeps things unpredictable, although I would have preferred if the storyline had remained more neutral in picking favorites between historical figures (I'm sure the invading English had some redeeming qualities, The Tudors seemed to work it out, well enough.) I was also disenchanted by Paul Walker as the lead, he was far upstaged by Gerard Butler, who is a better actor (and that's saying a lot) and had a more interesting character. The romance between Chris and Kate was poorly developed and unnecessary to the plot, they should have eliminated Walker's character and allowed O'Connor to carry those scenes on her own, and stuck to the dual conflicts of rescuing the Professor and Lady Claire.

I still enjoyed it, though!