Thanks for the free market research, asshole.: February 2011

Monday, February 28, 2011

Culture

is the ability to describe Jane Russell without moving your hands.

Who taught you to hate yourself,

from the top of your head to the soles of your feet?

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Pandorum - 6/10. It is a combination of every successful sci-fi movie I've ever seen. The Reavers from 'Serenity' + the aliens from 'Aliens' + 'Cube' + the ending of 'The Planet of the Apes' + 'Event Horizon' + 'Sunshine' + 'Ink.' The first twenty minutes are actually great, a good mystery and bad lighting, but as soon as kung-fu space woman shows up, it becomes everything else. So it manages to be fun, but the only place it's going to stand in the history of things is being confused for something else.

What matters is the fight, more than the outcome.

Milk - 6.5/10. The same problem I've got with the documentary in that I've now seen about four hours worth of footage about this one guy, and I really don't have a good sense of who he is. I hate to keep saying this, but Dan White comes off as the most interesting person.

I have to sing stupid.

Blue Valentine - 8/10. You like a person for who they are and then you get mad at them when they don't change. The opposite spectrum of 'The Kids Are All Right.' There's a connective tissue missing between Ryan Gosling being a decent person to becoming an asshole, but it's probably found in each of them allowing the other to be who they were, even as they were becoming something different. The point is to grow in the same direction, I guess.

Oscar-Nominated Live-Action Shorts.

The Confession - 6/10. Not unexpected, but that last little scene has a great deal of heart.
Wish 143 - 4/10. Entirely expected.
Na Wewe - 7/10. Swift-ian. The final joke about U2/Hutu is vomit-inducing, but it doesn't mar an otherwise effective satire.
The Crush - 5/10. Fine, but if this is one of the year's best, then the state of live-action shorts is poor.
God of Love - 7/10. A great deal of fun.

And terrorism.

Gasland - 5.5/10. The guy making the movie sounds like the guy making fun of the Star Wars movies. He doesn't help its legitimacy. Somehow, by bringing the story back to himself, he makes the movie seem smaller. I don't dislike Michael Moore, but people shouldn't take his lead.

This is the kind of box Jesus would have taken parking fees from.

The Parking Lot Movie - 7/10. A parking lot as a microcosm of everything right and wrong with the world.

You want what I won't give you. It's not me you want.

That Obscure Object of Desire - 6/10. I get this one, I just don't like it very much. Light-hearted, but it wasn't fun. The French.

That's mighty white of you.

The Enforcer - 6/10. I really do love Harry Callahan, but his lack of awareness in seeing that he's helping to create these dangerous scenarios where people he cares for are dying is just, you know, a lack of growth.

A man's got to know his limitations.

Magnum Force - 6.5/10. A clever sequel – the inevitable result of Dirty Harry's policing politics on a new police force. But it takes the admirable simplicity of the first movie's plot and just complicates it, leading to a fairly odd (re: stupid) final set-piece. And a lot of potential drama is missing from trying to find out exactly what separates these guys from Harry. And he's such an unsexual creature.

It was one of the most eloquent expressions of a community's response to violence that I've ever seen

The Times of Harvey Milk - 6/10. Paper-thin. Very little cultural context, and very little insight into the man himself. It may just be that the bad guy is that much more interesting than Harvey Milk, but he manages to steal the show away from its star. What a guy.

You had a hard enough time being yourself.

The Fighter - 6.5/10. Christian Bale and Melissa Leo are showy actors, but at least they're having fun.
So it's unfortunate that the rest of the movie rests itself on the shoulders of such a gumpy fucking gus. If Mark Wahlberg's character's story is to remove himself from the shadow of his brother, he certainly doesn't do it by being interesting.

Soon your mother will give birth to two children and a dog.

Dogtooth - 8/10. If Harmony Korine made The Royal Tenenbaums. I forget the quote, but it's something about how great books teach you how to read it as you read it. Same here.

Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself.

Dirty Harry - 7.5/10. Impossibly cool.

Whore youth.

The Kids Are All Right - 4/10. Men are stupid and women are evil. I get to hate one movie a year, and this misogynistic shit is it. There seems to be a terrible trend in movies lately where a terrible character doesn't change, doesn't *want* to change, and the movie asks us to accept them for all their flaws. So while Annette Bening does a nice acting job, her character never seems to admit to any sort of fault, so when the point of the movie ends up being 'love is hard, you know?,' then no, it isn't hard, you're just an asshole and you should break the fuck up. Placing that kind of message on a character like hers makes this a Harmful Movie, because it passes off a Very Bad Idea as a good one. Mark Ruffalo comes off as a decent, if sleazy guy whose character gets shuffled away because facing him would be facing a much larger truth that no one seems to want to have to face. Pussy shit.

Great actors undermine their own credibility by their very presence.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work - 7/10. Joan Rivers talks shit about everyone, but she doesn't have a bad thing to say about anyone. A shining example of an actress becoming her part to the point of it being indistinguishable, but her career's failure is the movie's failure – she's a character, but she doesn't know how to tell her own story.

The wicked flee when none pursueth.

True Grit - 8/10. Just a fun movie. The whole thing threatens to disappoint when they finally catch up to ol' Tom Chaney, because they've set him up as some sort of evil, and he ain't half that but, as they tend to do, that's not what the movie's really about anyway. I admire the Coen brothers' ability to 'round the corner' and pull a greater point out of a simpler plot. They are magic men.