"Harry, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it, don't wait for it, just let it happen. Could be a new shirt at the men's store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black coffee. Like this."  -Dale Cooper

Rachel Getting Married  

I wanted to like this movie.  I've always enjoyed Jonathan Demme's movies, admired his choices.  Loved his Talking Heads concert documentary Stop Making Sense.  And his documentaries about New Orleans post-Katrina on the Tavis Smiley show were great.  He says he had decided not to make fiction films anymore...and maybe he should have stayed with that decision.  Rachel Getting Married plays like a documentary of a wedding, with the requisite recovering addict daughter bringing emotional upheaval. The two-hour long bobbling hand-held video left me nauseous and with a headache.  Anne Hathaway surprised me, and Debra Winger was great to see.  But the rest of it felt self-consciously experimental.

Gardens of The Night

What a uncomfortable topic: eight-year-olds abducted outside of schools and forced into a life of child pornography and prostitution, ruined, and irrevocably FFL (fucked for life.) Tom Arnold and Jeremy Sisto play two of the child-exploiting shitbags.

Ryan Simpkins (also of Surveillance) is the little girl, and she can act circles around Dakota Fanning at that age. Will have to check her out Revolutionary Road.

After the Wedding - A Danish film by Susanne Bier.  Jacob runs a struggling orphanage in India. A billionaire offers to save the orphanage from closing, but Jacob must return to Denmark to meet with him personally.  A seemingly offhand invitation to the billionaire's daughter's wedding turns into much more. A compelling film, filled with moral ambivalence.

The Band's Visit - a light and humorous balance to the Bier film.  An  Egyptian police band takes the wrong bus on arriving in Israel for a concert at the Arab Cultural Center.  Instead, they find themselves in a desolate, desert Israeli village. Their interactions with the locals make for a fun, cross-cultural comedy.

&

Choke.

Both decent. Nothing I'd watch again. Like Sam Rockwell and Julianne Moore in everything I've ever seen either in.

Superhero Movie

Oh what a terrible movie, luckily it's just barely over an hour long.

The Lost Boys & Lost Boys: The Tribe

There was one point in the first movie where an overwhelming sense of the eighties fell over me, and it felt good. And the movie is pretty good too, unlike the sequel, which is terrible.

No Country for Old Men

Didn't realize that this movie is set in the early eighties until Brolin's character said he was a Vietnam veteran.
I liked it, and it was nice to see a good Coen movie, even though there was not much Coen-esque about it.
Unless the ugly yellowish color that their latest movies have had is a new Coen trademark... it looks like they have kept the movie stored above a stove for a couple of years.

Synechdoche, NY- What the hell did I just watch?  I have a feeling it was supposed to be a profound existential meditation on the human condition, but what I saw was a filmmaker crawling up his own ass and making a movie about a playwright who crawls up his own ass.  Neither of them get out.  I get enough of this in real life, thank you.

 p.s. If you want to puke, two of the homliest humans in showbiz get it on in the film. (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Samantha Morton.))

The Fallen Idol

Back in time to 1948, this movie was the first of three made by director Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene (before The Third Man).  Starring Ralph Richardson, it is a neat blend of suspense and farce, exploring lies, loyalty, and betrayal.  A young boy suspects his beloved butler of murder, and the mystery gets more and more convoluted as the boy's lies deepen in an attempt to save his idol.  I enjoyed it.

The Happening

Oh, my. I dug Sixth Sense, loved Unbreakable, and thoroughly enjoyed Signs. So wha' happened, M. Night?

At times I wondered if Tommy Wiseau came in and did a polish on the dialogue. I watched this with the Rifftrax, but the guys' commentary was rather superfluous. This film is a laugh riot by itself.

Logic Hat Online- logichat.org

Let the Right One In - Couldn't finish it.  Bleak, white bullied boy in Sweden meets vampire girl who's impervious to the cold.  Blood, snow, vampires.  Yawn.  Maybe it got better but the copy I watched was dubbed with actors who seemed to doing a first read through of the script.  Horrible. 

The Wackness - Fantastic!!!!  Josh Peck is phenomenal and I predict a big future of Oscar nominations and wins for him if his film choices are good.  Ben Kingsley and and an Olsen Twin! Clever storyline.  I LOVED it even though I'm not a big fan of drug dealing and/or rap music.  Nothing much better than a pleasant surprise!  Five stars. 

Susan

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Dark Reel

Way to go, Josh!

Cute S&M love story, starring the woman who ruined the script for American Psycho as a shockingly hot domina.

It was okay. I found it hard to sympathize with any of the characters. Evan Rachel Wood chewed up the scenery there at the end. Marisa Tomei has always played dips who get naked, here she plays an older, rode-hard dip who gets naked.

Man, Rourke's gotten funny looking since 9 1/2 Weeks. They made him look better in the movie than he does in real life, and that's not saying a lot. Yeesh. Drinking? Crack? What did him in and what happened to his lips? So big and waxy and shiny. Is that his real leathery hide, too?

Anyhoo. Those were my only real responses, I was hoping for something more harrowing.

No, not Heathers. (The Last Word.)

 Did you miss "Comfortably Numb" then?  That was my fave part.

Susan

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Monster.  Better late than never.  Well done film that seemingly retells the true story accurately, at least as I remember it.  Bleaksville but worthwhile. 

Susan

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Finally watched Quantum of Solace.  It was okay.

I'd like to be able to read the script before Paul Haggis was involved, because I really wasn't impressed with what got to the screen.  The one really good line was in the trailer and belongs to a throwaway character, and the rest was different flavors of meh.

I still like Craig, and I liked the gals.  Dench got good face time, but was given nothing significant or interesting to say.  The bad team were all okay, although the holdover guy from the last one (Mr White) was the only one who was all that compelling.

A lot of the chase action was incomprehensible, and shaky cam took the place of direction and choreography -- or plausibility (the boat-rescue scene was absurd, even for an advanced suspender of disbelief such as myself, and editing it down into quarter-second fragments didn't make it less so).

Plus, I'm getting tired of the pacing of these action scenes in which every three seconds contains some impossible obstacle that comes out of nowhere that the hero (and sometimes the villain) slips through -- the scaffold is collapsing, but they leap! but the thing they grabbed is on fire, but it's extinguished as they slide through a waterfall!  but the waterfall is a thousand feet high, but they bounce off a hang-glider into a forest!  but the forest floor is quicksand, but they're tangled in ropes dropped by a passing zeppelin! etc., ad infinitum.

The opening song was not interesting past the 30 second mark.  The opening credits looked pretty enough, but didn't make the impression that Casino Quarter Pounder's did, and even the Chris Cornell song was better (and it takes a lot for me to write that).  The best joke of the movie was that the closing credits are titled "Crawl, End Crawl", which makes me like Four Tet even more than I already did.

The Mathis comes out of retirement in his beautiful villa to help Bond thing made me mad.  Not for how it was concluded (which was actually one of my favorite scenes in the film), but because the arc is so cliched that the moment the idea arose it was immediately obvious where it would end up.

Overall I felt they were trying to bring back a little of the tonal range and revisit the catalog of set pieces that belonged to the previous Bonds, and I don't blame them, it's not automatically a terrible idea.  But it was kinda flat this time out.

Highlights:
- the opening chase
- the Vesper's dude wrapup
- the Tosca board meeting
- Fields

Next time:
- More Leiter
- Less car goes down a secret tunnel to HQ that is so narrow Bond would never be able to get out of his car unless the door happened to be torn off, which it conveniently was style-over-substance
- Better dialog
- Complete excision of all Minority Report-style computer interface nonsense jerk-off design-school bullshit
- Someone on the set to tell them when a scene is likely to be accidentally funny (ie. Bond shooting the other guy at the end of the fight whee they're swinging around like Cirque du Soleil)
- the cellphone stuff was cool, but a couple more toys wouldn't hurt
- no amphetamines allowed in the editing room