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 RashÅmon-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!
The Alamo Drafthouse was having a “stag night” downtown. Gwen and I thought this sounded like fun, so we hied ourselves on down. There were a couple layers of difference between what I was expecting and what we saw. I was expecting, you know, stag movies. Grainy black-and-white porno shorts where the guy’s eyes had black bars across them. In fact, what they had planned to show was a more conventional porno movie, Fantasex Island (not even in the IMDB, but hey, look, it is in the Adult Film Database, mysteriously listing Holly Near in the credits!).
Well, it turns out that, according to the jackbooted thugs at the TABC, establishments that serve alcohol cannot show porno. So the people putting on the stag show edited it down to the non-pornographic parts–about five minutes (which, frankly, was enough)–and ran that.
For the main feature, they showed something much stranger: Sinful Dwarf, AKA “The Abducted Bride.” This was an English-language Danish horror movie, where a depraved dwarf and his hideous, washed-up showbiz mother lure young women into their attic, get them hooked on heroin, and use them as sex slaves for hire. Part of the schtick was that the sound was turned off, and a crew of four (?) live performers in the room took over all the voices, sound effects, and music. As near as I could tell, they stuck pretty closely to the original dialog, adding in a few of their own zingers along the way.
[Later] It turns out that none of the people in this movie have a Bacon number higher than 4. Amazing.
So, okay, that was weird. Watching it, we wondered two things: 1. What ever made anyone think that the movie had any artistic or commercial merit? and 2. How in the hell did somebody in Austin ever find this stinker and decide it would be fit to show in public?
After that was done, we then headed over to the Ritz for a night of ukulele music. The opening act was Sonic Uke (a great name that unfortunately appears to have been taken already). The three members all work at Cafe Mundi, so they were more or less familiar to me. The guy singing was doing a Bill-Murray-Lounge-Singer routine, and the chick had on a bizarre wig (as did Carl, on the uke). Most of their material was pretty weird, but not unpleasant–they do have musical talent, and they weren’t going out of their way to conceal it.
They were followed by Shorty Long, which always puts on a good show. The Ritz was filling up at this point, and not a lot of people really seemed to be into them, for some reason.
The third act was probably what most people came for: Petty Booka. A couple of Japanese chicks who cover a wide range of pop and country numbers in their quasi-Hawaiian style (along with some original numbers). I’d heard their stuff before, and appreciated it for the novelty value (which is high), but seeing them live, I realized that they really had serious musical talent, singing in harmony that reminded me a little of David Seville and a lot of a 60s girl-group like the Ronettes. I expected to see just the two of them–in fact they were backed up by a standup bass, guitar, and a very young-looking but talented Mexican guy on a slide reverb guitar. They covered everyone from the Ramones to Patsy Cline. Great show.
There was a fourth act on the bill, the Meat Purveyors, but I’ve heard them and it was already pretty late, so we left.