I've wanted to see the 2002 Sam Rockwell vehicle Confessions of a Dangerous Mind since about the time it came out, but never got around to it until now. If I were going to do a tweet-review of this, it would be "Way darker than I expected; don't watch it if you're in a misanthropic mood."
You think YOU've got it bad? Try being Woyzeck for a day. He's a grunt in an indeterminate mid-1800s European army—I assume German, but he could be German-French in the same sense that most movie Romans are British-Roman. He's being cuckolded by his young wife (who looks like Jewel Staite with a crushed spirit) and the high-school-quarterback-like drum major. He's also a human guinea pig for an ambitious scientist who's been feeding him nothing but peas, and who rewards him with much-needed cash every time he behaves crazily.
Naturally, therefore, Woyzeck's descending into insanity, and just as naturally, there's no going back…since this is a Werner Herzog film.
Rewatching 2001 recently, I was struck by just how slow it is. I mean, you can't not notice it, but this time through it almost felt like it was daring people to finish it (as was, inarguably, Barry Lyndon). I don't think this is, as Nicholas Carr would allege, a symptom of my personal overexposure to the Internet and its having conditioned me to expect lightning-quick gratification. Indeed, I felt less impatient with 2001 than I have during any previous viewing. But the slowness is one of the things that intensely stands out, and newcomers to this legendary film should account for it before idly sitting down to it.
This may be what I enjoy most about Kubrick movies: the space to imagine. That what we imagine should terrify the ever-loving fuck out of us is merely an added bonus.
Here's how little I knew about Ip Man going into The Grandmaster, the latest of many biopics about him: when I saw the Netflix Instant cover art for the film Ip Man, with the title in all caps, I guessed that it was a wry mockumentary about a superhero charged with enforcing copyrights by going after internet pirates around the world.
Of course, Ip Man was in fact a legendary Chinese martial artist (and Bruce Lee's teacher). And as The Grandmaster unfolded, I began to feel that it may be precisely the worst way to start learning about Ip Man. Partly, this is because the movie really should have been called The Grandmaster's Girlfriend.
As the title implies, the protagonist cop (Laurence Fishburne) goes deep undercover to try and bring down a chain of coke dealers. Along the way he partners up with a lawyer (Jeff Goldblum) working for one of his targets, and the lines between crime and justice begin to blur, as they are oft wont to do. Before long he's facing down Latin American druglords and corrupt senators, though sadly without any McBain-esque one-liners or defenestrations.
There must be some cosmic significance to the fact that Netflix sent me The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) just in time for me to watch it late yesterday, around the time that the latest, and gobsmackingest, NSA revelations came to light. It's just as well that I wasn't aware of the latter until this morning, otherwise I would've been curled up and sobbing midway through the movie.
The roughest of the many rough scenes in The Whistleblower takes place in the dungeon-like back room of a Bosnian sex traffickers' bar, where trafficked women are forced to watch as one of their number, who took the chance of talking to UN authorities and wound up recaptured, is viciously assaulted as an example to the others.
Like other fictionalized versions of true stories, I have to guess that The Whistleblower would seem less striking to viewers who know the ins and outs of the true story. I'd never even heard of Kathryn Bolkovac, though, which meant I was soon absorbed—wondering exactly how the titular whistle would be blown (and by the way, um, spoiler alert, movie?) and at what cost. Throughout, the plot points remain realistic enough that you come away from this movie feeling like Taken just never should have even been made. (Though Taken is, admittedly, more fun.)
I did like the music. Gotta say that right up front. There wasn't enough of it, but what was there, I liked. It contributed to the intermittently dreamlike mood.
But otherwise? Cosmopolis is a pretentious mess, a string of disjointed scenes whose purpose feel less like narrative advancement and more like "let's bring in this actor now." The thematic continuity, such as it is, tries to seem like it's got its "finger on the pulse" of contemporary American issues like class warfare, sexual politics, and crazed lone gunmen. But if educators in future generations decide this movie represents our time, then I feel bad for the students forced to watch it.
The other side of that view is just as valid: that effective movies with unusual structure get noticed for it. Pulp Fiction is an obvious example, and Side Effects is too, but not in the same way. Not only does Side Effects have structural weirdness of a different flavor (its chronology is linear), but the weirdness it has exists for a very good reason, as opposed to Pulp Fiction's showier, more indulgent structure.
I recently found myself in the mood for a "ninja movie," and while Shinobi: Heart Under Blade does have ninjas, and is a movie, it wasn't quite what I had in mind. Next time maybe I'll do more research.
Not that Heart Under Blade is bad or anything. But I'd hoped for more of a "ninjas doing badass shit to non-ninja mooks" kind of movie, rather than "ninja clan vs. ninja clan, but with lots of talking and romance-y moping, and also they're superhuman." That said, if you're in the mood for the latter, look no further.
The Netflix description nails it for once, describing this film as Romeo and Juliet meets the X-Men. The lead characters, Gennosuke and Oboro, are the star-crossed lovers (and yes, they use that phrase a couple of times, just in case the influence is unclear). They belong to rival ninja clans populated by a host of bizarre characters, including a Wolverine analogue with rapid healing, a male Mystique analogue, a poisonous Rogue analogue, and Sleeve Guy—whose power is telekinetic control over the fibers in his sleeves. (I'm not enough of a comic book nerd to know the relevant X-Man for Sleeve Guy.)
What fascinates us so much about Abe Lincoln? It can't just be the pivotal times he lived in—otherwise we'd be just as fascinated by Truman, and we're not. It can't just be his assassination, either, though its circumstances were certainly more dramatic than others.
I think it's his weirdness. You look at this guy, you learn about what sort of life and attitude he had, and to think of him as "Savior of the Union" inspires a certain cognitive dissonance. Had the Civil War been further delayed, he might have ended up as merely an oddball presidential footnote. Instead, America's favorite president is this cadaverously gaunt hillbilly who—in an illustrative early scene in Spielberg's Lincoln—tells depressing jokes to citizens visiting his office.
I was surprised by how affecting Daniel Day-Lewis's performance here was. I went in figuring it was going to be stellar, and as so rarely happens, my heightened expectations were met. Lincoln tells some four or five stories during the movie and they're among the best moments. His "now, now, now" speech (glimpsed in the trailer) really hammers home the stakes of the plot. He's the kind of Lincoln that makes you think, "I don't really even care anymore how historically accurate this is; he's just awesome to watch," like the audio-animatronic Lincoln from Disneyland, only less terrifying.
I haven't yet seen any of the other Best Picture nominees for the recent Oscars, so maybe they're all kind of lackluster, but I find it slightly strange that Argo won.
I say "slightly" because it does relive a tense historical moment that would be well-remembered by Academy voters, and it does celebrate the power of Hollywood to make a difference in the real world. So maybe it's not so strange.
Yet Argo feels dry and workmanlike compared with other films of its type. I may have been spoiled in a sense, because years ago I read the article on which the screenplay was based. But considering the setting, it should've felt more thrilling than it did.
Not that it was entirely free of thrills. A lot of credit goes to the actors playing Argo's "house guests," escapees from the stormed U.S. embassy; their edginess is continually palpable, and to the script's credit, Ben Affleck's stoic CIA character handles their anxiety with a minimum of cliché.
Affleck deserves credit too. The excellent cast manages to make their characters feel real, as historical dramas require, and Affleck does it as well as the more seasoned screen standbys here (Bryan Cranston, John Goodman, and the indispensable Alan Arkin).
Ah, '90s ensemble dramedies. I've seen so many of you, and you are all so similar, that it takes getting through half of one of you before I can tell whether or not I've already seen you specifically. The only way I could have been more confused on this point while watching Ron Howard's The Paper would have been if one of the Three-Name Marys was in it (e.g. Mary Stuart Masterson, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Mary-Louise Parker, etc., and if you're planning to start a '90s-style alt-rock band, yes, you may call it Three-Name Marys.)
Indeed, I wasn't completely certain I'd seen The Paper before watching it the other day until I got to the Jason Robards scene, close to the end. That probably doesn't reflect too well on the story.
1973's The Paper Chase is a drama set at Harvard Law School, and despite its setting (and age), the film is relatable if you have ever:
While I never had aspirations to go to law school, I've been in both of those situations a few times (and once, both at the same time, and why yes, it did suck), and I did enjoy the one law class I took; thus, I was more engaged by The Paper Chase than I expected. (I also kept myself amused by imagining a friend of mine in the protagonist's place who has identical hair, often identical attire, a similar smile, and even had that 'stache for a time.) I have to guess that actual law students would find it scarily accurate, even if their study time is now dominated more by computers than giant stacks of identical-looking books. (Do they still even have those? Are they just props for commercials now?)
Have you ever wondered—and I mean really sat and pondered and extrapolated the consequences—about what your life would be like if you had an effectively limitless amount of money?
While watching The Comedy, I thought about this, and found myself thinking of sandbox-style video games in which you can use cheat codes, like Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto. Whenever I cheat at those games, the normally immersive and addictive experience suddenly becomes much emptier, and I find myself fucking around with NPCs in much the same way The Comedy's protagonist fucks around with everyone he encounters. He's totally the kind of guy who would pick a house's front door lock, wander into the dining room, ignore the occupants' demands that he leave, and shout "FUS-ROH!" at the dining table just to watch all their shit go flying everywhere.
So last night I theorized that the best way to dull the inevitably depressing impact of another election night would be to watch a movie sure to be more depressing than any exercise of democratic rights, no matter how empty. I watched The Killing Fields :D
In retrospect I think this may have been a kind of brilliant ploy to combat election fatigue, and to put all the breathless coverage into perspective. This is one of those movies that's full of unrelenting, historically-accurate brutality arising from the rapid breakdown of a society. So completely did it inoculate me against overreacting to every little announcement last night that I'm now thinking, in four years, I'll want to make sure I have Hotel Rwanda handy.
