Rushmore

I don't have as much to say as usual. I put this on to end another long night of writing. Mostly I put it on to see one scene very early -- Max Fischer seeing Miss Cross for the first time, since so much of the movie is carried by his ridiculous, unrealistic, unrequited love for her. Rushmore is about a precocious dreamer who really doesn't understand how real people act in a real society, but whose tenacity is an unstoppable force. His inability to grasp that he can't get his way is the main ingredient of his success. There's something similar in the hearts of Max Fischer and my script's main character, though I'm not sure which is the more exaggerated version.

As Wes Anderson films go, this one feels more emotional than the rest, and in a weird way probably his most personal -- there's something honest and self-deprecatingly two-sided in the depiction of Max's insularity and the limitation of being so sure of your own dreams that might speak to the filmmaker himself and the nature of his output.

I also noticed a lot of odd cuts in this film, sloppy cuts on action to too-similar framings that on the one hand smacked slightly of a filmmaker still finding himself and not quite mastering his craft, but on the other hand came off as refreshingly uncontrolled and raw compared to the too-tight artificiality of his later projects, which added a right kind of plucky Max Fischerness to the film.

Last quick, disconnected comment: I do believe we get to watch Bill Murray actually act here, something I know the man can do but I tend to think he doesn't like to unless he has to -- he seems perfectly comfortable to coast through a film "being Bill Murray" (something he's very good at doing) when he can get away with it. But Rushmore was one of the first out of a slump, wasn't it? And as such, he maybe had less leeway to ride the wave of his own cool factor.

Red Planet

Red Planet came out to ride the coattails of (or "compete with," if you want to be generous) Mission To Mars, and I remember both being fairly sloppy, disappointing, with pretty hokey dialogue and hokier plots, but this is by far the lazier of the two movies -- the story seems lazy, the science seems really lazy, and the themes feel more like they were added to the dialogue the day of the shoot. Clunky editing doesn't help either (like flashing back to deleted or extended scenes to let a couple of characters have superfluous character moments).

Plus, as a study in the Act One world-building exposition-delivery stuff, this was lazier and stiffer than The Angry Red Planet, which at least gave me characters talking for a reason. Here we get a big (mostly unnecessary, as it turns out) infodump from Captain Bowman, who is neither our main character nor our most important. Something interesting could have maybe been done with her as their eye-in-the-sky (kind of an inverse man-in-the-hole), an overseer to the heroes' adventures and struggles -- almost as if she was the Computer Voice in all those space operas and starship adventures, but of course Bowman has her own computer voice here, which sort of muddies up that analogy -- but they never really do. Instead, she's (I guess) more like Penelope to Gallagher's Odysseus, except a) the closest thing they have to a romance is he sees her naked and later we see a flashback to an earlier scene where they almost kiss (which apparently wasn't important enough to leave in the movie except as a flashback), and b) Gallagher is a far cry from Odysseus going on a voyage (again, that's a direction they might have taken things, were this a very different story).

Part of the problem with the story is that no time is spent building up the urgency or need of the characters. We're told Earth is overpopulated, running out of clean air and water, a dying crowded mess of a planet, and that all the international organizations have banded together to send five white Americans (well, one vaguely Latino guy and an old Brit among them, to be fair... plus isn't Val Kilmer Native American or something? I'm kidding) to find out why the long-distance terraforming efforts like algae-bombs and habitat-landers seem to be missing.

Along for the ride, the old Brit mentioned above, is a tragically, preposterously wasted Terence Stamp as a "former scientist" (?) named Ch'something, not worth looking up, whose clever little exposition-tag our narrator-captain offers us is "the soul of the mission." He hasn't found God, exactly, but apparently he's given up science because he is looking for God, and so he turned to... philosophy? It's all a little sloppy and confusing, but from a dramatic standpoint I guess he's there to suggest that some things can't be explained by your precious science. The movie then goes out of its way to make sure you see that, yes, everything can be explained by my precious science (even if that means all of the mysteries of the planet can be explained by secret Martian bugs ["nematodes," a fun word] that eat algae, and also metal, and also love human blood the most, and are extremely combustible, but when they aren't termiting you they produce breathable oxygen and are slowly terraforming Mars all on their very own).

Once they've explained to you in detail how it all makes perfectly logical scientific sense, within the confines of the fantastical story anyhow, Captain Bowman wraps things up with another bit of voiceover (or maybe it was a mission debrief to Houston? I forget, to be honest) in which she says "Ch'whatever always said there was more to the universe than science could account for, and I'm just the captain here who doesn't know what happened down below, but that sure seems to sum things up for me." Okay, it's a lousy and snarky paraphrase, but basically she suggests that hey, maybe it was all God's will after all, because of all the miracles we saw or something. The only miracle I can think of that we witnessed on Mars was the random upcropping of Martian life (about which we are assured "where there's air and water, there's life"); or maybe she meant the sudden self-awareness of the combat robot AMEE they decided to bring along (about which we are assured "her processor's been damaged"); or maybe it's the fact that no telemetry or telescope from Earth or Martian orbit could locate the glowing green or orange algae fields, or identify an oxygen-rich atmosphere (they couldn't even identify the oxygen-rich atmosphere when they were standing in it, until they almost died -- a fine moment for Gallagher to take a "leap of faith," but instead it was played as the grasping-at-straws backwards-thinking flailings of a desperate and dying man).

Anyway, it's silly and it's not very well thought out, nor very well executed, but it's a Martian Astronaut movie, so it's kind of fun. Actually, I wanted more astronautness here, more like Mission To Mars. Once they got there it played out more like a crashland-in-the-mountains kind of story than an astronauts-on-Mars kind of story. There's air, there's gravity, there's some kind of (robot) cougar stalking you, there's a horde of (alien) insects, and there's the same kind of mysteries and puzzles, obstacles and solutions that could have been told in some remote Antarctican or Andes Mountain story, with only a couple of tweaks.

Still, spacemen, am I right? And lessons in what not to do. Don't breeze over too much world-building set-up in verbal exposition. And don't bring Terence Stamp onboard to read a couple of embarrassingly hippie-ish lines and then give up and die without an ounce of gravity (heh) or punch. Lessons, noted and learned!

Rubber *

The first thirty or forty minutes of Rubber are exciting and energizing. Rarely has something been so pointedly unpredictable and self-aware without feeling overcooked or pretentious. Forgive me for taking the high-minded (read: totally pretentious) road here, but: on the one hand it was a skillful characterization of an inert, characterless object that said a lot about the nature of narratives and protagonists; and on the other hand it was a self-conscious anti-story deconstruction of everything the genre movie (and especially the exploitationy slasher film) means to be. For all of act one and the beginning of act two, this was something I'd never seen before, and it was fun, and funny, and exciting, and meta, and thoughtful, and strongly deconstructionist. It hit my high-brow and low-brow sides just right. But only for the first thirty or forty minutes.

Not that after that it's a disaster. I'm still glad I saw it. It's just that, once we've got the many conceits that get us into act two rolling, we don't really get any more flashes of brilliance. Instead we just ride the waves caused by those initial ripples for another forty or so minutes. It's still fun in bursts, and clever at times, but it loses its newness and its oddness. It may be strange to call the story of a psychokinetic murderous living tire rampaging through a slightly self-aware movie world monotonous, but there you have it. Once things get up to speed we never really change gears, and for that reason we kind of lose steam before the end (mixaphorically speaking). The end itself, of course, is the same unexpected and untelegraphed anti-end that you'd expect from something trying so deliberately to be an anti-story. It lacks resolution and satisfaction, pointedly, and I can live with that. But getting there should have had more of the original twists and turns that carried every minute of the first act forward.

I knew going in that Mr. Oizo had done the music for this, but I did not know, to be honest, that writer/director Quentin Dupieux was Mr. Oizo. In retrospect, that should have been obvious. On the one hand it seems very Spike Jonze (and Jack Plotnik, who plays the "Accountant," even looks like Spike Jonze in character) but more than that the way the personification of the tire is handled -- deadpan, casual, tragicomic -- reminds me somehow of the Mr. Oizo music videos, which were of course also directed by Dupieux himself.

Definitely glad I saw this, but it starts with a premise so bold and strong and unusual and novel that it's almost impossible to follow through, so it's not one I'm going to rush out to see again or rave to my friends about.

Seen at the Hollywood Theater as part of the Portland International Film Festival.

Robin and the 7 Hoods

Musicals are a funny genre. I guess I did grow up on some, but only a special few, and they were never really my thing. So watching them now, with critical eyes, is interesting. The thing they remind me the most of are Muppet movies, with winkingly hammy performances and an obtuse and circuitous plot that doesn't really reward much inspection. Despite them not being "my thing," they sure are a lot of fun. It's hard to disapprove when everybody is having so much fun. Watch Peter Falk do an Italian crime boss (with the ever-so-Italian name "Guy Gisborne"); watch Bing Crosby roll through a rat-a-tat assault of three-dollar words; watch Sammy Davis, Jr, do a surprisingly funny song and dance routine about loving his guns. It's just a fun world.

To the extent that the plot or themes matter, this is the story of a smalltime hood who becomes a celebrity for giving to charity. Somehow this makes him a more successful hood (the best I can figure is, more people come to his speakeasy and gamble/drink because he gives the proceeds to orphanages and soup kitchens), and this continues to snowball until the jealous mob boss Gisborne and the confusingly devious Marian each want a piece of the action. Considering that crime is the name of the game here, it's hard to see how Gisborne can't win with his 7-to-1 manpower, massive empire -- stolen from Marian's father, Big Jim (a cameo from Edward G. Robinson, no less), though he managed to convince the revenge-hungry Marian that the sheriff was behind it all. Plus, Marian seems to drop the whole "I'll pay you any amount to avenge my father" as soon as Gisborne has the sheriff murdered, even though it sure looked like every crimelord in the city (except Robbo and his "merry men") partook in the murder simultaneously. Once dropped, Marian becomes a conniving mastermind, convincing the weaker willed men around her one by one to front her as she counterfeits money and hides behind Robbo's Robin Hood image.

It's interesting that every (halfway successful) attempt against Robbo is done by using public opinion against him. First he's framed for the Sheriff's murder, but it doesn't stick because Gisborne and his cronies try a little too hard. Then the funny-money gig blows up in his face (even though it was started by Little John and Marian while Robbo was being tried for murder) and again, it's public opinion vs Robin Hood. That's a nice touch.

I'm not sure what to make of the end -- our three main heroes dressed as Salvation Army Santas and ringing bells while Allan A. Dale (heh) runs off with Marian and -- as far as I can tell -- the accompanying fortune. Our plucky sort-of-anti heroes accept their fate with something akin to humility, sing Alan A. Dale's own song "Don't Be A Do-Badder" and carry on. Sure, they're merry men to the end, and Robbo and his men never do any real wrong (except for gambling and liquor, and some destruction of private property and so forth), but what does it mean that the prissy man who runs the orphanage gets the (evil) girl and the (dirty) money, and our relatively upstanding heroes get the shaft? Your guess is as good as mine.

But musicals are fun worlds. Like I said, everybody has fun, and it doesn't quite matter if it makes sense. And now, I'm neglecting a houseful of family on Christmas Eve, so I should get going.

The Year of Our Lord 1974

It's funny, because the first time I watched this I remember being fairly impressed until about halfway through, and then spending each scene of the second half increasingly less engaged and hopeful than the last. Too much comes too easy, and though the scenes are all crafted with a viscerality and a punchy wit, it doesn't really ever amount to anything. It's all so direct.

But then I got to thinking (in large part because the DVD of this film opens with unskippable trailers for the other two films in the Red Riding trilogy), maybe I'm taking this too much at face value. This is part one of a trilogy, right? And the other films continue the hunt for this killer through almost an entire decade of storytelling, and small characters and events from previous stories pop up again in future stories, right? In retrospect, maybe the discover of, hunting down of, and eventual SPOILER revenge-killing of John Dawson is supposed to be just too damn easy. His toss-away response to "what about the children" is that he's no angel himself, a comment so glib that Eddie has no compunction about following through with murdering him, but the more I watched this I kept thinking that Sean Bean's sleazy political-minded real estate developer was evil, but not the kind of evil who sawed the wings of swans and stitched them onto the backs of underage little girls, whom he then raped and murdered -- let alone the kind of evil that's crazy (or dumb) enough to dump the bodies on his own lots, where they will be easily discovered.

Eddie Dunford killed the wrong guy, didn't he? Because if so, then I think I'm curious to continue the series, and I'm willing to withhold final judgment on the first act of the trilogy until I've seen it all the way through. I hope that the next two installments will make me look back on this one with a very different perspective. Partially because that might make me like it more (right now it's pretty so-so-at-best, as a standalone movie), and partially because that'd just be cool. Clever storytelling and all that.

So, here's hoping.

Rear Window

I watched this movie in portions over three days -- not the ideal way to watch a film, I admit, but it's not my first time through -- and my experience revisiting Rear Window was actually a lot like my experience revisiting Fight Club: it was weird to see how much of an impact this one film has had on the kind of repeated themes and events that occur in my own work. Somewhere between this and Don Quixote lies a certain kind of story I keep revisiting. I have my theories as to why, but this isn't about navel-gazing. It's supposed to be about my thoughts on watching a movie.

This film falls right on the cusp between what I love about Hitchcock and what I hate about him. It's got a lot of really stagy, obviously artificial setups, dialogue, sets and action scenes, but it also uses most or all of that to tell a story that is singularly Hitchcockian (I'm sure I didn't just make that word up), a novel exploration of suspense and tension, a slightly askew and cheeky morality story, and a bracing headlong dive into relatively uncharted psychological territory. Keeping all of the action across the way and through a window works, it implicates us in our desire to poke into others' lives, and it makes us all the more tense when things do (finally) happen across the way. A key element was Jeff's helplessness throughout: first his inability to convince anybody that mattered that Thorwald may be up to something, then his helplessness as he watched Thorwald move on Lisa, and especially the terror of his immobility when Thorwald turned the tables and came after him. That helplessness is a main ingredient in what makes the movie scary, tense. (Helplessness is a theme I'm exploring, so it's at the forefront of my attention lately.)

But on the other side of the coin, Hitchcock is at his worst when he tries to delve into common human dramas, characterization, relationships. Like Vertigo, like the opening of Psycho, like much of North by Northwest, whenever we have to sit with two characters flirting or two lovers arguing the notes ring a little false, a little bit looking-down-his-nose at the foolish plebes of his stories. (I know he doesn't write them, but the detached stiffness of each film rings similarly false, from writer to writer; I mean, it's hardly a bold claim to suggest that Hitch cares deeply about suspense, tension, and plot and not much at all for character, relationships, or ordinary human drama.) Rear Window slacks for a good chunk of it, especially as poor Jimmy Stewart has nothing to do but sit in a chair, fidget with a camera lens or a pair of binoculars, and twitch back back and forth between the window and the lamp. An inordinate amount of time is spent on tangential issues like whether or not silver-spoon Lisa is suited to traipsing about the globe with rogue-wanderer Jeff. I like that she proves infinitely more tenacious and resilient than he gives her credit for (this may be one of Hitch's most feminist characters), but I'm not sure the issue feels adequately resolved at the end for me, and I'm less sure that it matters ultimately to the story beyond giving Lisa motivation deeper than just echoing Jeff's intense curiosity for some of the bolder actions she takes. Proving something to her man is certainly adequate motivation, but the number of scenes it took to establish this felt a touch exhausting. At least in Vertigo, all the time spent on the strange relationships with women are directly linked to the themes of the story; they may feel dry and phony but it makes sense for them to feel repetitive in a story about obsession. Here, it just felt like constant reminders that Jeff's normally a take-action fearless kind of guy, and that Lisa is expected (by Jeff) to be a pretty princess and cosmopolitan socialite, above getting her hands dirty. All of that could be handled with a lot less.

Whenever I watch a Hitchcock movie, I always praise his sense of story and structure, and how he knows his way around a setpiece, but I also always come away griping that he spins plates too long, has no sense of pacing in his dialogue or character-building moments, and loses a lot of (or all) his well-built steam and well-earned excitement. Well, what can I tell you? This is no exception. It's a really, really good movie, except for the parts that aren't.

羅生門 (Rashomon)

I've been reading about Kurosawa all week, so it was only a matter of time before I started watching his films again. Amazing that this has been my first complete Kurosawa film all year. Obviously the story here is pretty well known, but it was a joy to think about this untraditional narrative from a script standpoint and not just what it means in a grand sense. The order of the events, the details of each lie, fall in a precise order to maximize suspense. In each telling, for example, we know that the samurai is killed, but with each telling the how and why is drawn out with several twists along the way. In the medium's (the samurai's own) telling it appears that Tajomaru is going to kill him at the behest of the cruel, taunting wife, but Tajomaru (in that telling) proves honorable, offering to kill the wicked wife if the samurai just gives the word. In the woodcutter's telling, the protacted amateur sword fight between the two men leaves Tajomaru swordless and the samurai still armed, leaving us to wonder how possibly the tables will turn; followed by the samurai's sword being lodged in a tree trunk at a precarious angle (blade out), teasing the audience that it might even be purely an accident that befalls him. Plus, some details conveniently match up, like Tajomaru's chucking his sword into the bushes to kill the samurai, which occurs both in Tajomaru's own and the woodcutter's versions.

Moreover, it's smart of the story to have each suspect accuse themselves -- confess essentially -- of/to the same crime. Had the wife accused Tajomaru, or Tajomaru claimed the samurai had committed suicide, it would have looked like self-preservation, the most obvious (and understandable) kind of lie there is. Instead we are left to wonder why any of the three would lie to take responsibility. Fortunately the characters are developed enough that we can infer at least possible motives (Tajomaru for the glory, for his pride and reputation; the wife to save face and/or as an expression of her guilt and shame for any collusion, implicit or explicit; and the samurai to save his wife's neck and/or out of shame for his own desire in the moment to do so).

The story is famous for not telling you what happens, and it's difficult to not want to work out some kind of mental graph, a sudoku puzzle of which parts are true and which lies and get to the bottom of this. I'm reasonably sure there is no such solution. But where a lot of scholars and film historians (that is to say, bloggers I've been reading lately) seem to claim that the story's contribution to cinema is to trick us, to leave us back where we started and to prove that no answer is possible, I think Kurosawa may have been a little more holistic than that. I think the answer here is that everybody's right, to a degree, and that truth isn't the same as fact. I like to look at this and not see three or four liars, but three or four imperfect, self-aggrandizing interpretations. Everybody is looking at what happened and telling you the version they want to be true, partially as a series of conscious selections (lies) and partially as a simply skewed set of memories (misremembering), because that's the way everyone's memories are. Memory is hardly infallible, and memory is the primary source of knowledge, especially in this particular story. Therefore, what chance does knowledge have? Truth is barely even a reflection of fact -- more like its echo. A dim, distorted impression that once bounced against actual fact, but that's it.

Okay I got kind of esoteric there. I have been watching Bergman and Kurosawa, after all. What do you expect?

Red Road

I put it on for the voyeurism and the infiltrating-another's-world angles, basically for act one's and act two's hooks, respectively, as they kind of feel like they make this film exist in the fuzzy space between the short script I'm putting together and the feature I've been working on lately. But of course Red Road isn't a film you watch casually, and once you sink into that world, well it's just like Jackie and her pain: the only way out is through.

The immersiveness of the world is one thing, but what really pulls you in is the character herself, with so much history and conflicted, confused feelings -- the primary mystery of the story is why she's doing what she's doing, and as she solves smaller mysteries (like why Clyde is doing what he's doing) we work to piece together her backstory. This works so well because the character's obtuse motivation isn't just some dramatic trick of withholding vital information for the sake of a twist; it's reflective of her own state. She doesn't know what her intentions are with Clyde, and seems to flirt with every possible emotional response within each scene. Keeping the backstory from us puts us more in her shoes. If you told us up front the nature of her interest in Clyde (and it's not like there aren't enough clues we can't get the gist of it pretty quick) we'd be busy moralizing and putting our own emotional desires ahead of hers. Since we're unsure just how she knows him or just what he's done to her, we wonder how far she's able, or willing, or even justified, to go -- just as she is wondering herself. Of course it also gives us a nice third-act reveal, as with any good mystery it all comes together at the end, and Jackie's catharsis feels genuine and earned, most likely because it isn't easy or cut-and-dry. She punishes him, cleverly and savagely, and then she forgives him, and then she reaches out to him. And tellingly, he does the same to her, in small ways, before they wander away from each other and back to their worlds -- he to his estranged daughter and petty crime and poverty, she to her authoritarian dayjob and ghosts and loving in-laws, impatiently waiting for her to finally begin the mourning process.

I wanted to say more about style and tone, as I'm kind of watching films with that in mind, and this one has a lot to chew on, but I pretty much filled up my quota and then some talking about the characters and drama -- and since that's where my heart really lies, I'll just let it be that Red Road is a film with both stylistic whizbang (haven't seen use of awkward video this good since 28 Days Later) and dramatic punch, but like it often does, the content trumped the style. Hard to complain about that.

Rec

I wish I'd seen this in theaters. I'm starting to realize watching movies on a medium-sized television screen in a dimly lit room while I eat buffalo wings and a cat chases a moth around just isn't the ideal environment to be scared in. But I'm not going to let this film off the hook that easy. Much of it was so chaotic, with screaming bloody-mouthed monster-people lunging at an all-too-conveniently-held camera but never really biting, and that just wasn't scary. It was exhausting, and a bit tense, and even dizzying, but much of what was happening could have been scarier. (The little girl, for one, and the handcuffed mother for another.)

But -- credit where it's due -- Rec is a lot scarier than most the films I've been trying out lately, especially as it ramps into its pretty stellar third act, which although a touch cliché was well done enough it didn't matter. What I liked best about this movie, though, wasn't its ability or inability to scare me; it was the unfolding of its story in nice layers. Elements that feel placed for one reason (a sick little girl who needs her antibiotics, but they're trapped outside...) sneak back to mean something bigger later on (she's infected from patient zero, the dog). Answers to questions (the dog is how they found out about the infection, so the dog is somehow the source of it) are incomplete answers that hide deeper ones, allowing them to come up as mild surprises later on (the mysterious man in the penthouse kept alive a young girl who is the true patient zero!). It's all very clever. The peril and the chaos -- I didn't hate them but they didn't do it for me. The mystery and the story, I quite liked.

I also got to pay close attention to some of the same old tropes, and what does and doesn't work for "scary." People coated in zombie makeup, not too scary; barely revealed anorexic actress wandering around nude trying to eat your face, only seen in hazy glimpses, notably scarier. The darkness alone, not too scary; the darkness when you know something is out there and all you can hear is panicked heavy breathing, notably scarier. I'm curious to see the American remake, though I hear it's not very good. I'm also curious to see the sequel, Rec 2, which to be honest I take for granted isn't very good.

Robin Hood *

I don't know where to start. The script feels obvious, formulaic and transparent in the worst ways. Every scene feels like an index card of what a scene needs. It even had a save the cat moment for Robin, a painfully unsubtle "look, our sourpuss killjoy protagonist is a nice guy after all!" moment. Scenes are crowded with characters just so they can be shifted around the board and ready for their next scene later on. Dialogue is rarely so beautifully leaden and expository as it is here. And the pacing! By the end you get that you're not watching a Robin Hood movie so much as an "origin story" for a Robin Hood series or franchise (that, god willing, will never come to be), but it still leaves you with the strange feeling that you just watched a 140 minute act one. Which isn't a good thing, clearly.

The story itself is exhaustingly predictable. Every single beat feels like it drags on, and as a viewer who is actively trying to lose himself in the story and just enjoy things, it's too easy to be three beats ahead of the narrative. I'm still watching the king give a speech and I'm already seeing both his death and the subsequent crowning of a new king. I'm watching Robin Hood meet Max von Sydow's Walter Loxley, and I'm already anticipating the reveal of his childhood past (though admittedly, I didn't think they'd resort to my singlemost reviled film cliche, the physically-flinching-from-the-intensity-of-a-flashback scene). It hurts to sit there and wait for the film to catch up with you, and by the time it does you're three steps ahead all over again.

But beyond all of this, the thing that stands out is the bizarro-world third act, which (SPOILER) involves every single character doing a personality 180 for the sake of satisfying a maximum of action movie cliches. Lady Marion becomes Eowyn. Friar Tuck dons chain mail and becomes another warrior in the "epic battle." Peter Pan and his Lost Boys Lord of the Flies kids joins the fight. King John grows a pair and becomes a noble leader. William Hurt's William Marshal (and everybody else in all of England) kowtows to some peasant-kid turned archer turned knight-impostor turned William Wallace, declaring that "France has surrendered... to him!" Robin himself becomes... I don't know... Gladiator? Lame? Boring? No, I guess there's no change there. Oh, also, we're subjected to shot after shot of whimpering, cowardly French, the bad guys (sort of?) dying pathetically as victims, in the middle of -- well, let's just say it, The Invasion of Normandy. Oh, right, and then somehow the film becomes this big long really unsubtle Socialist Diatribe. Weird.

So, yeah. Historical detail to weaponry and warfare was okay. Everything else felt straight-up Screenplay Mad Libs. And Russell Crowe is just as uncharismatic and marble-mouthed here as anywhere. I'm sorry, but it is absolutely impossible to believe this filmmaker once made Blade Runner and Alien. This film, like all his recent work (even the "good" ones like Gladiator and Matchstick Men) has no personality and no vision. It just, blandly and generically, a movie.

Seen at Lloyd Center, with a couple of film critic friends, and I'm very grateful I have no responsibility to be fair or thorough in my assessment. I just like to drop my impressions in a disjointed ramble, call it done, move on.

The Room (with Rifftrax)

This gets more of an honorable mention than a full entry here. Full disclosure: I watched this while very drunk on whiskey, having been fed a hash brownie, with the Rifftrax audio commentary running, and at some point well after three in the morning.

Which, incidentally, is just about the most natural way to view this film there is. And that sums the experience up, I'd say.

All I can add is: the Rifftrax guys didn't try very hard here, and you can't blame them. Recording hilarious commentary for The Room is more often than not an exercise in keeping your mouth shut and letting the film speak for itself. (Since Rifftrax are obviously delivered separate from the actual video to you, they will occasionally speak a line from the film directly along with it so you know you're in sync. This is a clever low-tech way to keep everything moving, but I'd never listened to a Rifftrax before, and it was the fourth or fifth time they did this before I realized what they were doing. I just thought they were repeating the line because the line was funnier and weirder than any joke they could possibly make about it.)

The same night we also watched Antitrust, with some computer-savvy friends' running their own commentary over the top, but by then I was barely paying attention, so I figure it doesn't really count.

Raging Bull *

Funny enough, I'd only ever seen the first fifteen minutes or so of this. So now that I've finally seen it, I have to say: it was amazing to witness the gradual and profoundly convincing transformation from Robert De Niro into Albert Brooks.

No, but seriously. This is the antithesis of much of the cinema I've been watching lately -- of much of the cinema I am drawn to in general. The only word for Raging Bull is visceral. It's not a movie you're supposed to think about; it's a movie you're supposed to feel. Both emotionally and physically, this movie is about feeling. Man is an animal, and De Niro's Jake LaMotta moreso than your average man.

Interestingly, I'm not sure I have a lot more to say about it. I guess I can point out how it struck me that Scorsese seems to work from a lot of biopic or life-story types of scripts, that begin and end decades apart. Or that De Niro and Pesci have a very similar dynamic here as in Goodfellas and Casino, and that something really profound could possibly come from analyzing the three as one evolving relationship. Other than tangential stuff like that, it's easier to pay the film the respect of feeling it more than thinking it, and that doesn't lend itself to much in the way of insight.

I'm sure it says something about me that I find my lack of a thoughtful response to be food for thought.

Seen at the Academy Theater as part of the Beer-and-Movies Fest.

The Year of Our Lord 1974

I can't even remember what I'd heard about the Red Riding Trilogy specifically that made me think it was a big deal, but somehow it developed the reputation of an unfound gem, a trio of hot British crime films that hadn't surfaced in the states yet, so when my roommate Martha got a copy I was keen to watch. I'm sorry to report that I was severely underwhelmed.

At first I was open-minded, admiring how English cinema seems to embrace a genre's archetypes instead of spending half a movie trying to reinvent the wheel; then I started to think, You know, this reminds me of the worst parts of the BBC series Life on Mars, the hackneyed, too-obvious plot and the simplistic characters; and by the end... well, to be honest I was complaining out loud and throwing my hands up in surrender. And with that cast, it's a real shame. I may try 1980 someday. We'll see.

Ratatouille

I think Brad Bird's stories are a head above the rest of Pixar, and I consider this their pinnacle work. I actually suspect the entire thing is a metaphor for the secret history of the company, but all that aside: everything it sets out to do it excels at, and that list is too big to get into. I might put it on a list of films I'd call "flawless." A film with no missteps.