49 posts tagged “big screen”
I am not in the habit of seeing animated movies theatrically, if at all. In my adult life, here are the animated features I have bothered to see on the big screen:
- Aladdin
- The Incredibles
- WALL-E
The reason I don't usually bother with these films is pretty simple: they usually suck. Also, they always cram in a bunch of stupid singing to disguise the fact that they don't have more than 40 minutes of story. ALSO, it's becoming more and more common today for the average quickie animated movie to feature CGI that looks worse than a community college student's final Computer Animation project.
But make no mistake about this film: this is a work of art, by craftsmen who care very deeply about such moldy old concepts as story, character and theme. These concepts are not just rickety skeletons upon which to hang a sequence of tacky gags; they are the fundamental ingredients of a timeless story.
Admittedly, the third act is not as intriguing as what came before, and the story does inevitably bow to the demands of formula. This is, after all, in the final summation a kids' film. A very good kids' film, but a movie for tykes nonetheless.
Unless you are possessed of a cold, flinty heart of emotionless obsidian, this movie will touch you, and you will believe that a junky old robot can find love with an iPod.
Pros: Everything about this film, even the too-pat third act, except for:
Fuck-You-in-the-Eyes Cons: The pet cockroach. I'm sorry, Disney Pixar: I can believe in the central premise of your film, but I CANNOT suspend my disbelief enough to swallow a cockroach who acts like a puppy dog. Fuck whatever focus-group jagoff convinced you to put this bullshit in your movie.
I went to see it yesterday. Here's the official site for those of you unaware of this film. I have mixed feelings about the movie. On the one hand, the scale is quite epic and the battle footage appropriately grisly. The whole thing is filmed with that "tasteful" veneer that you often get with historical epics. My main problems with it are these:
- After 120 minutes with the character of Temudgin, he is still an utter enigma.
- The story is very choppy and episodic. At one point, he leaves his wife and rides off alone, and the next time you see him he has assembled an army of hundreds and is fighting the final battle to unite Mongolia. At least a damn montage showing how he called all of these people to his side would have been nice.
- The film definitely suggests that he was aided at a couple important moments in his life by Tengri the Sky God. I'd like a little less mysticism in my historical epic, please.
So, what you have here is a very well-made movie which purports to tell you the "untold story" about Ghengis Khan, but which doesn't tell you anything you can't get from a Wikipedia article, gives you absolutely no insight on what drove the man, and is told in a very narratively disjointed fashion. I still enjoyed it, but I can't help thinking that maybe we got an overly-edited version of the original Russian film.
(Aside: Was Temudgin's wife Borte really the cutest girl in Mongolia as portrayed here?
I don't know, but YUM. Good on you, Ghengis!)
The advance reviews suggest that it's chock-full of George Lucas's typically tone-deaf "humor" and set-bound, bloodless CGI and green screen. Is there NOBODY that can stand up to his cheesy, lazy impulses? Back when Lucas and Spielberg and Ford were all successful but still hungry young filmmakers, George's crappy ideas could be held off by Steve and Harry, but now it seems that the waddle-necked tycoon cannot not be dissuaded from cramming his childish bullshit in wherever it will fit. This doesn't bother me with Star Wars as much as it used to, because Star Wars was always childish, and was always for kids.
But Indiana Jones is for teens and young adults. It's for people who like a little blood and danger and cursing with their adventure, and who don't have the comedic tastes of a 5-year old (or a guy in his 60s, apparently). I hear that the beginning of the movie has some "hilarious" cutaways to CGI prairie dogs in it.
PRAIRIE DOGS. CGI PRAIRIE DOGS.
FUCK ME.
Fuck me, and FUCK YOU, LUCAS. Furthermore, FUCK YOU, SPIELBERG, for not having the balls or the pride or the sense of professionalism to KEEP GEORGE ON A FUCKING LEASH. Or maybe you thought CGI prairie dogs were fucking hilarious, too. Perhaps you've lost it as badly as your buddy. After all, you're the guy who said that if you made Close Encounters of the Third Kind today, you wouldn't have Roy Neary get on the mothership at the end, which is like saying, "If I made Jaws today, I wouldn't have the shark eat so many people." You're the guy who replaced the guns of federal agents with walkie talkies in your Special Edition of E.T.
George, Steve: you were once wizards, but now you are just sad old men sitting on the floor of your den pushing around the model vintage cars you bought from Sharper Image and making vroom-vroom noises. I hoped against hope that the magic would still be there, and I suppose I'll find out myself this weekend, but I'm not liking what I'm hearing.
My worst fears are being confirmed. It's Return of the Jedi all over again. It's Chewbacca issuing a Tarzan yodel. It's Ewoks. It's the pussification of Han Solo. It's the Special Editions. It's Han shooting first. It's the prequel trilogy. It's "Woo-Hoo!" and midichlorians and C-3PO as a child's model kit. It's JAR JAR BINKS.
I'll let you know how deeply saddened I am this Saturday. At this point, I'll just be happy if we make it the full running time without a fart joke.
Some pop culture heresy is about to transpire here.
First: I liked Iron Man very much. It's a fun, cool, exciting movie, and Robert Downey, Jr. is so at the top of his game, he's about to become one of the biggest movie stars in the world.
However.
I fucking LOVED Speed Racer. If I could inject this candy into my veins and feel all the time the way I felt while I was watching this movie, my face would eventually cramp up from my ever-present grin of childlike glee. It's tracking at something like 35% at Rotten Tomatoes, and I can only assume that it's because "serious" movie critics have either a) never seen the source material, which the movie captures perfectly, or b) forgotten how to have fun. This is a movie for kids, but unlike most kids' fodder nowadays, it doesn't talk down or pander to them (except for one monkey-poo joke, but no movie can be perfect when it's aiming to entertain the midget set). It's exciting, fun, filled with eye-popping action scenes, and grounded in surprisingly heartfelt emotion.
If you don't take your kids to see this, you are a bad parent; if you see it and don't love it, I'm sorry that your over-developed sense of irony has killed your inner gee-whiz.
I'm not even a fan of the cartoon, but I unreservedly LOVED THIS MOVIE.
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Not-for-kids addendum: Holy shit, Christina Ricci's Trixie is SO MOTHERFUCKING CUTE. You can upgrade my Mach 5 any time, sweetie. WOOF.
It's a funny, sweet little movie. I didn't laugh until tears ran (when was the last time I saw a movie I considered riotously funny? I don't know), but it had a couple good chuckles and probably will do well in repeat viewings. Anyway, all are funny, Mila Kunis is cute as hell, and the character of Aldous Snow deserves his own movie.
GET ON THAT.
Saw the trailer for Pineapple Express...that shit looks like a comedic fastball straight to the nuts. Can't wait.
This movie is going to make a lot of people who see it very angry. It's being sold as a thriller, but it really isn't. It's a treatise on violence and sadism as "entertainment" and it hates the very audience the advertising seeks to entice.
I never saw the original Austrian film that came out ten years ago, but considering that our American version is written and directed in virtual shot-by-shot replication by the original writer and director, and features two of the best English-speaking actors on the planet (Naomi Watts and Tim Roth), I think this is probably the most legitimate Americanization of a European feature ever.
What may startle the average viewer looking for some violent titillation is that the character played by Michael Pitt is completely aware that he is in a movie, that he is being watched by an audience, and that he is performing for their amusement. This film presents you with sickening, cold-blooded acts (which happen, for the most part, off-screen) and then dares you to be offended by them, because, after all, this is what you paid for, right? This is the entertainment you crave. The last image in the movie (UMM, SPOILER, I GUESS) is of Pitt, preparing to murder another privileged white family, staring directly, judgementally into the camera, as if to say, "Look what you make me do to these people, you sick fucks."
The performances across the board are terrific, especially Watts, who is so fearless and honest that she would deserve an award if movies like this got awards, which they don't. Michael Pitt also impresses with the perfect blend of charm and evil, officially joining the pantheon of Actors Kevin Will Pay Attention To (as well as Guys Kevin Would Do, but that's neither here nor there).
This is an intense, unforgiving, queasy, disturbing film that's probably going to piss off a lot of American filmgoers when it opens wider. Did I like it? I'm leaning yesward, but I don't know if it will hold up to repeat viewings or not. Recommended, but only if you're up to having your face shoved in your own filth for the duration.
I may live in Beaverton, but in my heart I'm a Portlander; I just can't afford to live in the city. I had a flirtation with New York recently. I visited, I loved it, I wanted to move there, but I was only moving there for a woman, a sexy young lady who enjoyed licking all over me and shared my sense of humor and love of horror movies, but in the end turned out to be a very confused and frightened little girl, as well as unbelievably cruel. But I was willing to do it, because I loved her, and more importantly, I loved her city.
But I spent a few hours in downtown P-town yesterday, and you know what? FUCK New York. To say that New York is better than Portland is like saying MacDonald's makes a better cheeseburger than your mother. My town rocks motherfucking ass.
I headed down there because the only theater playing Funny Games was the semi-arthouse Fox Tower 10 (more on that movie in another post; I liked it, but I'm still chewing over it), and I also wanted to hit Powell's Books and get the Moosewood Cookbook that had been recommended to me by half my neighborhood. I was also going to hit my favorite alternative lit and smut store, but I forgot to swing by there. Curses!
I spent about 4 and a half hours walking the streets, seeing the sights, and just feeling at ease. There's something about downtown Portland that is so warm and inviting and just cool. Even our psychos are more laid-back than other cities' psychos. I'm gonna make a habit of heading down there on weekends to explore. There's so much I've never done, never visited, never experienced. We have all the same stuff you can get in any big city, but you can see the edge. You can stand almost anywhere in my town and see where it stops. I like that. It's comforting.
After the movie, I came home, chilled out for a bit, and made pasta with broccoli sauce out of the Moosewood book. It was fucking delicious. A perfect cap to my awesome day. Although next time, I'm going to wear more comfortable shoes.
A solid British crime caper. The cast is great, the direction is confident, and there's plenty of tits and cracked heads. If you like this sort of thing (as I do), you won't be disappointed.
Short, propulsive, nasty, dumb and outrageously violent, Rambo is the movie to see if you want a shot of adrenaline at the theater, not that Cloverfield twaddle. It is a hero's story at its most basic: good guys get captured by bad guys, then other good guys go in to rescue them. Except these bad guys are genocidal Burmese army grunts, and the good guy is John "Motherfucking" Rambo.
If you like a good, violent shoot 'em up, I can't recommend this movie highly enough. Sure, the dialog is stupid and the characters are broadly drawn (although every actor in this movie, including Stallone, paints their characters so indelibly with so little time that they are all fucking Hamlet in comparison to Cloverfield's beautiful cyphers. My favorite? A tough-as-nails ex-SAS mercenary who, while held to the ground by gunpoint with one leg shredded by mortar fire, still has the stones to call the evil Burmese officer a "ladyboy cunt". Good on ya!), but this is a Rambo movie, not a Merchant-Ivory production.
If you know what you're getting into when you buy the ticket, you will enjoy Rambo. Admittedly, there were redneck assholes in the theater, and they laughed at the trailer for the new Larry the Cable Guy movie, but whatever. Fuck those guys; this movie is the real deal. One day those red-state douchebags will accidentally blow their heads off hunting deer, or roll their 4x4s trying to do something they saw in a truck commercial, and they will leave nothing to remember them by except the fetuses in their sisters' wombs. This is a film for discerning lovers of movie carnage.
Suck it, haters. ;)
It's undeniably a good film, but I don't know how much fun it is to watch. I liked it, and the performances are uniformly amazing, which shouldn't be a surprise coming from the director who got a good late-career turn out of Burt Reynolds. I don't know, I'd love to gush about how it's a goddamned masterpiece, but to tell you the truth I think a lot of the hyperbole is coming from critics because of the subject matter, and also Day-Lewis's Bill the Butcher-esque performance (I guess he's only coming out of semi-retirement to play total bastards, now?). It's a good film, I enjoyed watching it, and I'm glad I went to see it, to support risk-taking cinema if nothing else. But the end gets maybe a little too over-the-top, and Day-Lewis makes a couple acting decisions that I really question. I just don't think the story, up to that point, supports his lunatic turn in the third act.
Anyway, I recommend it, just so you can see what all the hubbub is about. Like I said: this is a good movie, an above-average movie, well-made and acted and directed and edited. It's all good. I just didn't feel it in my gut.
