movies

In a mostly empty Alamo Drafthouse, I saw Candy Von Dewd last night, a movie made by my high-school friend Jacques.

The movie can be aptly described using one of the better lines in the movie:

Wow, he’s really fucking that plant!

The movie is trippy and pretty non-linear, with obvious references to Barbarella and perhaps-unintended references to Babylon 5: Crusade, among other things. Jacques himself mentioned to me “I’d
like to encourage people to see it the way 2001 was marketed, that is to say, see it high.”

Jacques was making amateur movies back in high school. He finished one project that was very gritty and down to earth–more like the 400 Blows than anything else. But he started on another (which I helped on, in a very minimal way) that had a lot in common with this. I got the impression that with Candy Von Dewd, he was sort of wrapping up something that had been in the back of his mind for half his life. Gwen got some ideas for her Halloween costume.

Bonus! Candy Von Dewd trading cards

Tomorrow night at 9:45, Alamo Drafthouse will be showing Candy Von Dewd, an underground science-fiction movie made by a good friend of mine from high school, Jacques Boyreau.

Be there.

Two days ago, Gwen and I saw a movie that reminded both of us of Ghost World. Today, we saw a movie starring one of the actresses from that movie, Scarlett Johansson: Lost in Translation. Very good and very melancholy. The story is less sad than Sofia Coppola’s previous movie, The Virgin Suicides, but it feels sadder, somehow–Virgin Suicides had a very detached quality to it; this had a very intimate quality. It also made me very nostalgic for Japan, and a little melancholy about my own experiences there.

Gwen astutely commented that it was sad seeing Bill Murray, an actor we’ve grown up with, not only playing (well, being) an old guy, but in a role where his age is a key part of the role. She also pointed out that a scene where the two main characters were chasing through a pachinko parlor seemed like it was lifted from another movie we had recently seen, but neither of us could quite put our finger on which one.

Ideal double-feature companion movie: CQ: both movies address the isolation of smart young Americans abroad. Both use the movies as a schtick in the movie. And both are made by second-generation Coppolas.

Finally got around to seeing American Splendor last night. Very good. If I’m ever feeling down about my own life, I can console myself with the thought “at least I’m not Harvey Pekar.” That sounds mean, but come on–a file clerk who says “every day’s a struggle” is automatically pathetic and self-involved.

Despite the aggressively mundane quality of Pekar’s world, and his almost complete inability to find any joy in it at all, the movie’s funny. The little observations within the movie are funny, and the wacky metafiction mashups are funny: the real Harvey Pekar provides voiceover, and occasionally the scene shifts to a white space, cluttered with some of the set dressing from the previous scene, with the Real Harvey giving some insight on what’s going on. This might sound annoying, but it is necessary, if for no other reason than Toby. Toby is one of Harvey’s coworkers depicted in the story, and he is such an oddball character that one would be forced to conclude that his depiction, if not the person himself, was fictionalized. But eventually we cut to the Real Toby, and that’s exactly what he’s like, and we realize fiction is hard-pressed to keep up with truth for strangeness. In that shot, we see Real Harvey talking with Real Toby, as Paul Giamatti (portraying Harvey) and Judah Friedlander (portraying Toby) sit on folding chairs in the background. That’s meta.

Paul Giamatti wears a scowl through the whole movie that’s constantly on the verge of a grimace. He probably had to do face-yoga at the end of every day of shooting. The shots of Pekar himself today show that he’s mellowed a little bit with age, and he occasionally breaks into a smile.

Ideal double-feature companion to this movie: Ghost World. Both are comics-inspired, and Harvey Pekar seems to have been the inspiration for Seymour in Ghost World.

“No special effects…no stuntmen.” That text flashes across the opening shot of a surfer dwarfed by a 20′ wave. It is a documentary, after all, but it’s interesting that the director felt the need to point that out, and refreshing to see a movie so visually exciting that doesn’t depend on tricks. Step into Liquid is a documentary about surfing, and it’s beautiful. It has its faults–the voiceover is annoying half the time, the interviews are self-indulgent most of the time, and the soundtrack is bad some of the time, but so what? The main course–surfing footage–is great. Shot from helicopters, jet-skis, and from underwater–the underwater footage was jaw-dropping–we get an amazing view of the action and the waves.

Some of the less-likely aspects of surfing showed up. Surfers in Sheboygan, Ireland, and Easter Island. Surfing the wake of a supertanker. Hydrofoil surfing. And it was interesting to see that all the surfers, even the guy in Wisconsin wearing his Blatz work shirt, had that surfer squint.

Just go see it. It’s shame that we only had a chance to see it on a relatively small screen–this movie deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible.

Saw And Now…Ladies and Gentlemen on Saturday with Gwen. We missed the first few minutes, which may have been important. The rest of the movie is a time-shifting montage from which, eventually, we were able to extract what seems to be a coherent storyline. It was, all in all, very entertaining. Jeremy Irons was excellent but creepy, as usual (I’ve never seen him do comedy, but something tells me he would kill). Two thumbs up. The story is hard to describe and not so much of interest as the characters.

Saw The Magdalene Sisters with Gwen and Lissy while in Chicago. The movie tells the story of Ireland’s magdalene asylums, a system of homes for wayward girls run by the Catholic church. A girl could be committed to one of these by a guardian for getting pregnant, being too pretty, or just being inconvenient. Once in, they could be locked in there indefinitely. They worked as indentured washerwomen, symbolically washing away their sins (real or invented by the nuns), and the nuns apparently had a tidy little laundry business going. For their part, the nuns treated the girls with anything from contempt to sadism. The closing credits inform us that the last asylum closed in 1996.

Watching this movie made me want to go out and throttle a nun. There’s so much about the story that is shocking: that this went on under everyone’s noses with (apparently) no great outcry. That organized religion could practice such institutional cruelty upon its own members. That the Catholic church had so much power in Ireland that the civil authorities didn’t stop what amounted to systematic kidnapping and enslavement. The storytelling in the movie is simple and understated–it doesn’t need to hit the viewer over the head with ham-fisted dialog to get the point across.

The day before we saw this movie, I took Gwen down the street where I had grown up. Half of the block was occupied by a Catholic-run hospital, and the nuns who worked their were widely despised in the neighborhood. An example of why: The street is very narrow, and parking is very tight on the block. One night, when I was little, there was a fire on the block. The hospital had an empty lot on the block, and the firemen wanted to tow some cars into the lot to gain better access to the fire scene. The nuns formed a human chain in front of the lot to prevent the firemen from doing so. The hospital is closed now.

Saw The Legend of Suriyothai last night. The first Thai movie I’ve ever seen, this tells a story, apparently out of Thai history, of Princess Suriyothai, who was somehow involved in the goings on during a turbulent period in the country’s history in the 1530s.

The movie is epic in scope and length, and may be guilty of biting off more than it can chew–at several points, I wished I had a scorecard. In a period of roughly 20 years, Siam burns through four kings, what with civil conflicts, civil strife, usurpers, and the permanent threat of invasion by a drag queen in Burma.

There is as much treachery and intrigue as you’ll find in any two Shakespeare tragedies put together, along with a character, Srisudachan, who makes Lady Macbeth look like a harmless biddy. For that matter, Srisudachan’s maid makes Lady Macbeth look like a harmless biddy.

The eponymous heroine, however, is a model of wisdom and selflessness, and the whole story strikes me as a Buddhist allegory–world of strife, self-sacrifice for the good of others, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Saw The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. An absolute stinker. Don’t bother. Confused action sequences, confused plotting, and extraordinarily uncharismatic-yet-improbable characters. Obvious computer-graphic imagery.

Some people have referred to this as “steampunk.” It is not. It is modern gadget-oriented action in pseudo-sorta-somewhat Edwardian drag–an anachronism piled on top of an anachronism.

Saw Capturing the Friedmans this past weekend.

This is not the feel-good movie of the summer. This is a very hard movie to watch, although, like a car wreck, you can’t help yourself: a documentary about a family in which the father and one of the three sons are accused of molesting children that attended computer classes run by the father. I felt like I needed a bath afterwards.

The documentarians scrupulously present everyone’s side of the story, and perhaps inevitably, it winds up being a very Rashōmon-like mess. At the end, we really don’t know who to believe. We can triangulate on the truth to a certain point, but much is unclear. What is perhaps most surprising is the Friedman family’s penchant for self-documentary–they were avid home-movie makers, and much of their footage is incorporated into the documentary. But there’s no smoking gun to be found there.

Gwen and I joked about what would make the ideal double-feature companion movie to it. I suggested Auto Focus; she parried with Daddy Day Care.

On Saturday, the Paramount showed an excellent double-bill, The Day The Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet Both very entertaining and worthwhile movies. I had never seen The Day The Earth Stood Still at all, and hadn’t seen Forbidden Planet on the big screen, so this was a treat.

The program started off with a campy Batman serial episode from (I’m guessing) the late 40s. Shooting probably took only slightly longer than the finished product, on a budget that was probably scraped up by robbing schoolkids of their lunch-money. Hilarious.

The Day The Earth Stood Still gives form to a fear that many people had and still have, that this planet is irredeemably fucked up, and can only be saved by a benevolent alien who will force/help us to straighten up and fly right. Once upon a time, we called this kind of thing Christianity, and the Christian metaphors in the movie are barely concealed: Klaatu goes undercover as “Mr Carpenter,” dies, and rises again. At the time the movie was made (1951), the world was divided into Manichean camps, and the threat of total nuclear annihilation was itself a bit science-fictiony–the USA and USSR were nowhere the point of mutually assured destruction then. These days, that threat seems more remote, we’ve had more time to get used to that fear, and the world is vastly more complex.

Forbidden Planet deals with more universal weaknesses–hubris and the unbridled id, the hubris of forgetting the frailty that the id represents. From a technical standpoint, it is interesting how far advanced over The Day The Earth Stood Still it was–made five years later, we get the addition of color, Panavision, elaborate sets, props, matte effects, and pretty good (for the time) animated effects. Not to mention Ann Francis’ shapely gams. The movie was also an obvious inspiration for Star Trek, in terms of the look, setting, and plot elements and themes for the pilot and first episode. It was a surprisingly academic movie–there was some effort to get scientific references right, and a lot of polysyllabic words, like “instrumentality” and “philologist.”

Partly on the recommendation of my sister (who, having kids, probably only sees children’s movies), and partly because I’ll see any Pixar movie on spec, Gwen and I saw Finding Nemo on Friday. A 9:30 PM show, meaning there was only one bawling child in the theater.

The movie is very enjoyable. It has a typical Disney “child-loses-parent” plot, although unlike Bambi, Dumbo, the Lion King, etc, the child is reunited with the parent. While those are always coming-of-age adventure stories for the child, this one atypically includes as much coming-of-age adventure for the parent. But we weren’t going for the plot–we were going for the visual imagination and the comedy. Albert Brooks was great, as he always is. Ellen DeGeneres was perfect. Willem Dafoe, likewise. The quality of the images was stunning, and the artistry–which somehow made the fish look realistic and still anthropomorphic–was delightful. I want to know how they do that.

Coming home from a dour observance of Gwen’s sister’s birthday, we wound up railroaded onto I-35’s upper deck–apparently the lower deck was under construction. So as we crawled along, we half-joked about doing something fun downtown. Then I remembered there was a show playing at the Alamo that seemed interesting, and it was dollar night. So we went.

Now, the movie that I thought was showing was Schmelvis. It wasn’t: it was the Raiders of the Lost Ark remake (QT trailer, sorry, no official website or IMDB entry). This was a shot-for-shot homage to the original made by teenagers who began when they were 12 and finished six years later.

As cinematic art, the movie sucks: the video imaging was awful, the sound was worse (they really, really needed a wind baffle on the mic), and the acting left a bit to be desired. But as a monument of amateur enthusiasm and ingenuity, it is amazing. Amazing, I say! It’s also clear that these kids had very indulgent parents.

When the kids undertook difficult stunts, everybody cheered, because we knew they were working without a net. When the movie was over, everyone left with a big smile.

Saw The Matrix Reloaded last night with Gwen. I very much enjoyed it. Some people have criticized it for what it isn’t. I don’t care. What it is is visually interesting and imaginative, fast moving and audacious. It’s also a little pretentious in spots, but it also doesn’t take itself too seriously (nice gag: a cop radio calling “one-adam-twelve”).

Terminator 3 is coming soon. They really should have a mechanical-dystopia double feature of Matrix and Terminator. Gwen asked if there have been any SF movies over the past ten or so years that were utopian rather than dystopian. Apart from the Star Trek movies, I couldn’t think of any. Curious that distopian visions would be more popular.

If you aren’t completely sick of Matrix-mania, check out The Animatrix, which has some very well done animated shorts that give some back-story to the movie.

Saw X2, the X-Men sequel (I should probably say “the first of many X-Men sequels”). I was reasonably entertained by it. Drew liked it better than me.

X2 was much better than the first X-Men movie in terms of story, action, and characters: the story’s landscape of light and dark is interesting: the X-Men are the good-guy mutants, Magneto and his gang are the bad-guy mutants, and then there are the regular humans. But the line between good-guy mutant and bad-guy mutant is blurry: Magneto has a complicated relationship with Professor X, and genuinely doesn’t want to hurt him. Wolverine, a good guy, has no qualms about eviscerating anyone who threatens him. All the mutants were more sympathetic than many of the mundane humans, who either feared the mutants or sought to enslave them. The action and eye-candy were fast-moving and epic in scale–real big-screen material. The first X-Men movie portrayed the characters as embarrassingly incompetent in a fight. Not this one. And while many of the characters were wooden in both movies (notably Cyclops, who makes Al Gore seem as wacky as Al Yankovic), it was nice seeing Mystique’s character get fleshed out a little. Casting Alan Cummings as Nightcrawler was perfect, and what can you say about Ian McKellen? He’s great. Classes up the joint, too.

I felt the ending was extremely contrived and unsatisfying. Drew thinks its a setup for the next sequel.

Saw Spider last night. Interesting movie. It’s by David Cronenberg, and I’ll pretty much see anything from him on spec. Some parents had brought their kids (perhaps expecting Spiderman–children should never be brought to Cronenberg movies).

The movie, like its protagonist, moves very, very slowly. A madman sent to a halfway house in his hometown gradually recollects (and partly re-invents) his childhood, and the events that caused his madness, or were precipitated by it and exacerbated it–the movie is not clear which. The storytelling was very affectless–I don’t quite feel as if I got inside the character’s head–but is very atmospheric. Ralph Fiennes did an excellent job in what I’m guessing must have been a very difficult portrayal of the title role.

Saw Demon of the Derby (which, interestingly, is not in the IMDB) last night at the Alamo. This is a documentary about Ann Calvello, a roller-derby competitor who started in the late 40s and was still competing in the late 90s.

Ann’s an amazing person: someone who never quit, who never gave a fuck what anyone thought about her, who never got the message that getting old means taking up crocheting and staying in, who never quit wearing outlandish clothes, spiked heels, and unreal hair colors, and, sadly, who never got out of the sun, and is left with skin like leather. She demonstrates that sometimes the trivial and even ridiculous can become legitimized and even sanctified just through time and cussed endurance.

If you get a chance to see the movie, stay through the credits, which are hilarious themselves and are interspersed with some great clips, like Ann saying “the reason I don’t wear red lipstick is because it makes my face look like a baboon’s ass!”

After the movie, I chatted with some local roller girls (Riff Scandel and (I think) Cat Tastrophe), who had a bout on Sunday that I, regretfully, had to miss. But their next one is June 8, and I’m marking my calendar, hell yeah!