CHEATER #2: Special Preview Edition!

I saw a preview screening of Butter, an indie-but-not-really-indie comedy that's coming out next year. My friend and Butter date Josh says I'm not supposed to talk about it online, but whatever. That ship has sailed.

Butter is about two ladies who enter a butter-carving competition. I liked it (mostly, ish) while I was watching it, but in retrospect, my impressions are kind of negative? This definitely says more about me than about Butter. Below I will rank stuff I remember about it from best to worst:

1. Olivia Wilde as an angry stripper. The characterization of "stripper" is pretty lazy, but she's still hilarious.

2. There are very sweet scenes between Yara Shahidi, who plays the hero of the movie, and Rob Corddry, who plays her Cool Foster Dad. He was so cool that he made me wish I'd been in foster care! (No, not really. But he was very cool.)

3. I definitely remember that there were some funny lines of dialogue. So.

4. Ashley Greene was not bad, but she didn't have enough screen time. But she definitely makes out with Olivia Wilde during her limited screen time, and that is pretty great.

5. Hugh Jackman plays this weird superfluous character who has weird superfluous scenes. Like in one he sits in his car showroom and thanks God for letting him fuck Jennifer Garner. I don't even know.

6. The movie relies pretty heavily on tired Hollywood nonsense. FOR EXAMPLE: the movie opens with a boring voiceover over headless footage of fat people! Yay! Are these fat people relevant to the movie? Does the movie criticize overconsumption? Should writers be forced to prove to some centralized body that they actually deserve to use voiceover? No, no, and yes, respectively.

7. Jennifer Garner's character suuuuuuuuuuuucks. Basically a Sarah Palin type, but more two-dimensional and more neurotic.

8. Heard recently that the movie's supposed to parallel the Clinton/Obama primary. If that is true, that blows. "Oh, Hillary Clinton, what a bitch." -the filmmakers, right before they ATE ME

Män som hatar kvinnor (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) (2009)

Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace, in an awesome performance), a researcher/hacker with a criminal past, works for a large security firm. She's been assigned to spy on Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a journalist recently convicted of libel. After she gives the information she's gathered on Blomkvist to a lawyer named Frode, Frode approaches Blomkvist on behalf of his client, Henrik Vanger. The ultra-wealthy Vanger hires Blomkvist to spend the months leading up to his prison sentence investigating the murder of Harriet Vanger--Henrik's niece. Blomkvist moves to the island of Hedebey, home of Henrik and family, and begins to dig.

He doesn't find much on his own, but Lisbeth, still hacking his computer, figures out a clue and e-mails him. Blomkvist, annoyed but intrigued, shows up at Lisbeth's door and gets her to join his investigation. Together, they are the best crime-solving team ever, uncovering a series of gruesome murders on their way to solving the Harriet mystery.

Before Lisbeth joins up with Blomkvist, there's a subplot where she has to deal with a new probationary guardian. From his first appearance, it is clear that this man--Bjurman--is controlling, sadistic, and an all-around winner. Lisbeth's interactions with him felt like the scariest, highest-stakes part of the movie. He's not central to the plot, but he is the clearest and earliest indication of the movie's big theme: misogyny. The Swedish title of the movie (and of the original book) means "Men Who Hate Women." I think this is pretty funny; I can imagine the English-language publisher saying, "Nope! Nope! No! Call it something else; call it anything else. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? Great. Print."

Men Who Hate Women Including the One with the Dragon Tattoo does an exceptionally good job of using vagueness to build suspense. The Vanger Group's business looms over the entire movie, yet I don't remember what kind of business it was. Are we ever told? Similarly, the infrequency of Blomkvist's contact with Vanger family members added to the unease I felt about them. It's really unnerving when Blomkvist is summoned to a meeting with the assembled Vangers, severe middle-aged and elderly strangers staring him down in an underlit living room. Henrik's brother Harald is the only Vanger on Hedebey who doesn't go to that creepy meeting--which makes him even creepier. Harald is the movie's bogeyman. He's mentioned often, and his house is an imposing presence on the island. He can't be overlooked, but he can't be seen, either. It's a really typical way of building up fear of a character, so I feel weird making a thing of it, but I thought this movie carried it off particularly well.

In general, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo uses familiar tricks but makes them feel compelling, not worn. Some of the plot developments were predictable--who was sending the pressed flowers, Lisbeth's violent crime--but that didn't bother me or make me enjoy the movie less. Plus, let's be real: it is incredibly refreshing to see a thriller about misogyny rather than a thriller filled with misogyny.

- Really Liked It

The Castle of Cagliostro (1979)

During the getaway from their latest heist, master thief Lupin III and his sidekick Jigen realize that the cash they've stolen is fake. They set off to the tiny principality of Cagliostro to search for the source of the superb counterfeits. On the way, they see a beautiful young woman in a convertible trying to elude a car full of thugs. She is Princess Clarisse of Cagliostro. Lupin tries to rescue her, but the thugs win, and Lupin and Jigen travel to the eponymous castle, determined to recover both Clarisse and the counterfeiting plates. Oh, and Clarisse is engaged to marry Count Cagliostro--an evil dude who tries really hard to kill Lupin.

I'd been told (by the Internet) that this movie works without any background in the Lupin III series, and it does, but not that well. There are two characters--the samurai Goemon and con artist Fujiko--who seemed totally superfluous to me. I can only imagine they're in the movie because they're established characters in the series, and fans would expect them. Even Jigen (Lupin's sidekick) and Zenigata (a Japanese cop who pursues Lupin) seemed to be treated as more significant characters than they were in this particular story. The Castle of Cagliostro works as a stand-alone movie, but I think I'd probably have liked it better if I had read the manga or seen the TV series, and I think I've enjoyed other Miyazaki films more in part because they felt more self-contained.

The Castle of Cagliostro's main characters--Lupin, Clarisse, and the Count--bear a strange resemblance to the main characters of The Princess Bride. Count Cagliostro is a carbon copy of Prince Humperdinck. Lupin must cleverly work around an injury in his assault on the castle. He and his two sidekicks even set up a "terrifying apparition" routine to interrupt the wedding--a routine very much in the spirit of the Dread Pirate Roberts. In the same scene, I was honestly surprised when the officiating clergyman didn't say, "Mawwidge is what bwings us togevah today." (Instead he tells Clarisse, "You must speak now. Otherwise, silence will be accepted as consent to this union." GOOD. That is a good policy.)

Clarisse cannot object to the union because the villainous Count has sedated her. Even without the drugs, though, Clarisse is pretty passive. She has the opening car chase going for her, but after that, she turns into a garden-variety damsel-in-distress. At one point, there's a wide shot of her standing still as the lights are switched off in her well-appointed tower prison.


I thought it would be funny if she just stayed that way, perfectly still--if she switched to a state of suspended animation whenever there were no men around to talk to her. Alas, she does not; instead, she occupies herself with staring rapturously at a fuckin' flower Lupin gave her or whatever. The movie's other female character, Fujiko, seems to have much more potential. I presume she's a regular in the Lupin series; it's too bad she's such a minor character here.

Overall, I felt like The Castle of Cagliostro was not a particularly compelling movie, but it had some very compelling sequences. The car chase with Clarisse, Lupin, and the baddies is a lot of fun, and I loved Lupin's heist antics on the castle rooftops and in the aqueduct. But I didn't love the movie, partly because I didn't know enough about the characters, and partly because my expectations were too high. I was hoping Cagliostro would be as magical as later Miyazaki movies like Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, or even Porco Rosso. It's not.

- Liked It

Doctor Who: Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks (2007)

"That motherfucker had, like, 30 goddamn dicks."

Doctor Who is this great show about a dude named the Doctor who is an alien and is awesome and zips around space and time in his space-and-time machine, which looks like a blue box and is called the TARDIS and is also awesome. One caveat to the show's awesomeness, though: sometimes it sucks.

In this two-part episode, the Doctor (David Tennant, at this point) and his companion Martha (Freema Agyeman) visit New York during the Great Depression, because, you know, they figured that would be fun. Alas! Their quaint excursion to the breadlines is foiled by--who else?--the genocidal Daleks. The Doctor's mortal enemies are kidnapping people and dragging them to the Empire State Building in service of some evil plan.

Okay. Pretty straightforward. Also pretty boring. Neither the Doctor nor Martha does or says anything particularly interesting, and most of the guest characters are similarly flat. I do like the relationship between stagehand Laszlo and Adelaide-clone Tallulah. It's sweet and sad. Everything else about this two-parter, though--the tedious plot, the awful American accents, the idea of Human Daleks--is best forgotten.

For some reason, in new Who*, the presence of Daleks (or Cybermen, another classic enemy of the Doctor) tends to indicate crappy episodes. The big exception is the Ninth Doctor episode "Dalek," which is heart-wrenching and pretty dope. But while "Dalek" pulsed with an emotional core, most Dalek-centric episodes have been heavy on the "EXTERMINATE!" catch phrase (which--don't get me wrong--I love) and light on real feeling. The most recent season of Doctor Who was superb; to my mind, its only truly lackluster episode was the third one: "Victory of the Daleks." I'm going to idly speculate that Dalek episodes disappoint because 1) they're probably commissioned in an unimaginative way ("Give us Daleks in the thirties!" "Give us Daleks in WWII!") and 2) Daleks bring down the whimsy level, which means that the episode must compensate by being really dark or really scary. Otherwise, it's just really dull.

Looking back on season 3 of new Who, I'm sad for Martha Jones. She was a one-season-only companion, and she got shortchanged. First, her pining after the Doctor was not a particularly meaty arc. Second, she was in a lot of mediocre-to-bad episodes. In spite of those substantial handicaps, I find Freema Agyeman's performance completely winning. I love Martha and want only the best for her. But she did not usually get the best. She usually got "Daleks in Manhattan."

*There is "old Who," which ran from 1963-1989, and "new Who," which began in 2005. New Who is not a true reboot; it continued from where the old series left off. (More or less.)

- Didn't Like It (but if I were rating new Who as a whole, I'd give it 4 stars, and if I was rating the newest season of new Who, I'd give it 6 or 7)

The Commitments (1991)

Note, in the front row: baby Glen Hansard!

Jimmy Rabbitte (Robert Arkins) is obsessed with music. Two of his friends ask him to whip their band into shape, and he responds by taking it apart and putting together a new one: The Commitments. This soul cover band has a wise old veteran trumpeter, an egotistical dick of a lead singer, three talented female backups (who could easily have replaced insufferable frontman Deco), and five young nerds on guitar, bass, sax, piano, and drums. Will the band succeed, or will it be destroyed by too much infighting and not enough money?

Early on, one bandmember suggests that they may be too white to play soul music. Jimmy responds that the music fits them because "the Irish are the blacks of Europe. And Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. And the Northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin. So say it once, say it loud: I'm black and I'm proud." This sort of sentiment, well-intentioned though it may be, makes me really uncomfortable. First of all, it seems to render actual black people invisible? There are black people in Europe--and, indeed, Ireland--and if white Irish are "the blacks," then who are black Europeans? Also the blacks? Different blacks? Now, Jimmy's trying to draw a parallel between Britain's historical treatment of the Irish and America's historical treatment of black people. I get that. But that is itself problematic: you can't reduce "blackness" to just the experience of oppression or to a romanticized picture of musical "character" born of suffering. Not to be (even more) obvious (than usual), but it's a bit dehumanizing to treat people as metaphors instead of as, um, people.

This same sort of presumption manifests later in the movie, when club walls are papered with the band's posters proclaiming them the "Saviours of Soul." I'm sure Roddy Doyle, Alan Parker, et al. didn't mean anything by it, but saviors from what? I don't know. Maybe this isn't as bad as it seemed to me. I do this; I make a big deal over practically nothing. What do you guys think?

Race stuff aside, the movie seemed to me to have some structural weaknesses. The Commitments is based on a novel, and it felt like it would work better as a book. I haven't read the book, but I'm going to speculate wildly that there's probably more substantial character development there than in the movie. Plus, I think novels can get away with having less conflict than films.* There's a lot of conflict in the movie, but it isn't explored in a plottish way; it just erupts and subsides and erupts again, unhandled and probably unhandleable. (These are all official critical terms. Pauline Kael will back me up.) Anyway, to me, the movie felt a little thin on plot and on character.

Still, it's not thin on charm. I enjoyed watching it. I rooted for the band. I loved the dialogue between Jimmy and Joey "The Lips" Fagan at the end. Couldn't ask for a line much better than "That would have been predictable. This way it's poetry." Overall, though, I expected to like the movie more than I did, and I expected there to be more there there. (Not unlike my feelings on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.)

Maybe I should just be happy I got through it. In the last couple days, I have tried to watch Diabolique and Return of the Secaucus 7 and gotten bored with both. I think I'll go back to them. They're probably very good. Maybe my attention span is just shot. Maybe I'm having post-Moon malaise, as I predicted I would. Maybe, right now, I only have eyes for The Wire.

*It is possible that I'm full of shit.

- Liked It

NOPE.

Netflix appears to be under the impression that "romantic" means "has sex in it." That is not what it means.

Actual review up tonight.

Moon (2009)

This is a great week for everyone but me being right. For years, my friends, colleagues, and frenemies have been telling me I should watch The Wire, and I have said, "I will watch The Wire when I watch The Wire." Now I am watching The Wire, and you all were right, and I was stupid. Similarly, last year, while everyone I knew flipped out about Moon, I said, "Yeah, I'll get around to it." WELL, I HAVE GOTTEN AROUND TO IT, AND IT IS GREAT.

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) works for a company called Lunar Industries, mining helium-3, which humanity has adopted as its primary energy source. Sam is the only human part of the operation, there to inspect and maintain the automated harvesters. He's been alone on the moon for almost three years. When the movie opens, he's two weeks away from returning home, which is good, because the isolation is driving him crazy. He's started hallucinating, and one vision distracts him as he's driving out to a harvester, leading to a nasty collision. In the aftermath of the accident, he starts uncovering his employer's sinister secrets. (Ooh! Sinister! [Very sinister.])

Here are some things that Moon has:
-Sam Rockwell
-A robot
-Outer space
-Feelings
-Great production design/art direction


Moon looks better and is better (smarter, more interesting, more emotionally compelling, etc.) than almost everything that was nominated for an Oscar last year, blah blah, arts awards are bunk. And it is more original than everything else I saw last year, with the possible exception of Logorama. People who know how fond I am of In the Loop and A Serious Man will understand how much it pains me to say that any movie exceeded them at anything, but it's true.

Watching movies like Moon is wonderful, of course, but it's also a little bit awful: it makes average movies look really bad. For a few weeks after I saw Hunger, other movies and TV shows felt mechanical and unchallenging. I'm sure that Moon will also make me bridle at the next movie I try to watch.

Moon is energetic. That's what it is. It has the scrappy intensity of a very ambitious movie made on a small budget, a fuck-you-itiveness. It says, We will show you humanity and corruption and sadness and hope. We will do it on the moon. For $5 million. And it will look goddamned fantastic.

- Loved It

Murder on the Orient Express (1974)

"Bitterness is a paralytic. Love is a much more vicious motivator."

Okay, so Poirot doesn't actually say that. That's Sherlock Holmes in the new miniseries Sherlock, which everyone should be watching. (More generally, everyone should be watching everything Steven Moffat touches right now. He is at the top of his game.) My original point: Poirot easily could say that thing about bitterness and love. It's true of the criminal motive in Murder on the Orient Express.

Fifteen people board a sleeping car of the Orient Express in Istanbul. One of them is murdered, one of them is famous detective Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney), and the remaining baker's dozen are suspects. Over the rest of the movie, Poirot collects clues and talks to the passengers, then assembles them all in the dining car to expose the guilty.

The big reveal scene follows that age-old screenwriting adage: "Show, and also tell." This scene is so long! Lumet is a brilliant director, but I don't understand some of the choices he made in this movie--for example, why he chose to include Poirot's detailed description of the crime and lengthy flashbacks. There might have been room for both of those things, but not for so much of each of them.

One of the film's strong points, on the other hand, is its music. This movie has an honest-to-God overture! I love overtures, I love when movies have them, and this is a great one. Listen to this fucking overture:



Now are you stoked to see a movie, or WHAT? The whole score of Murder on the Orient Express (composed by Richard Rodney Bennett) is fantastic--the best thing about the movie, no question.

Overall, I thought the film's pedigree outshone the film itself. I imagined that Lumet, Finney, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, and John Gielgud would, together, make a great movie, but Murder on the Orient Express is just pretty good. It's fun. And strangely heartwarming.

- Liked It

Banlieue 13 (District B13) (2004)

"This is actually the best part of my day so far."

In the near future, violence has skyrocketed in the impoverished outskirts of Paris, which are now ruled by sadistic drug lords and their private armies. The French government has either responded to this phenomenon or caused it by walling off the most dangerous "districts," like the eponymous B13. Leïto (David Belle) lives inside B13. He is a vigilante (?) and landlord (??) who has stolen a lot of heroin, in a public service kind of way. When enforcers come to recover the drugs, Leïto destroys the stash and leads them on a merry chase across the rooftops. B13's kingpin, Taha (Bibi Naceri), retaliates by kidnapping Leïto's little sister, Lola (Dany Verissimo). Leïto almost rescues her, but the cops double-cross him, he goes to jail, and Lola is enslaved by Taha. (We'll come back to that.)

Meanwhile, in a more respectable part of Paris, we meet Capt. Damien Tomasso (Cyril Raffaelli), a cop who's infiltrated a criminal Spanish roulette operation? I don't know; something like that. Something gambling-related. Damien arrests the head Spaniard and, um, kills like twenty guys? Because that is a correct end to an undercover operation. Once Damien's bad-ass cred is established, the movie partners him with Leïto; the two of them are sent to B13 to disarm a bomb that Taha has stolen from the French government.

This movie is not that great. The plot is generally thin and yet still sometimes confusing. The characters and stakes are established in ways that ensured I would not care about them. The acting ranges from workmanlike to atrocious (I'm looking at you, Marc Andréoni). But--and this is a big "but"--there is PARKOUR. If, somehow, in this day and age, you do not know what parkour is, look it up on YouTube. You're welcome. Also, cancel all your plans; you will be watching parkour videos for the next week or so.

Raffaelli's stuntwork as Damien is good, and I enjoyed the set piece that introduces his character, but the real star of the action (and thus of the movie) is Belle. His chase scene at the beginning of the movie is so great. Sorry to wimp out on describing it, but if I say, "He leaps out a high-rise window onto a rope," it is not nearly as cool as when you see him leaping out a high-rise window onto a rope. I wish B13 were all parkour chase scenes, strung together with the bare minimum of dialogue. Parkour porn, in short.

But it is not that. Instead, it tries to be a real movie with, among other things, a real lady storyline. Bad decision. Listen: you cannot have your one and only female character spend the majority of the film being drugged and raped. I don't mean the only female character of note. I mean, truly, the only female non-extra onscreen. This movie is very much like Tennessee Williams, in that it hates women and is totally gay. Leïto and Damien spend their acquaintance 1) fighting in order to form an emotional bond, 2) handcuffing each other to things, and 3) basically doing it. I approve of all of that, but I wish action movies could be super gay without driving women into the cave of rape and irrelevance. If you will it, Luc Besson, it is no dream.

While we're on the subject of "me complaining about this movie's problems," B13 also has a slight case of Iron Man-itis. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I do not want action movies preaching to me about nonviolence or the democratic process. It draws me out of the world of flying people and whizzing bullets and back into the world where high body counts are horrifying, not entertaining. The scene in which Damien speechifies at the defense minister is B13's equivalent of the press conference where Tony Stark declares he has "more to offer this world than just making things that blow up." First of all, no, you don't. Second, shut up. Don't burden me with an excursus on your highly selective morality; it ruins the amoral fun of the movie.

My "liked it" rating may be confusing in light of the preceding paragraphs, but, in the wise words of my roommate Mary, "Parkour always deserves seven stars."

- 3 stars

Sè, Jiè (Lust, Caution) (2007)

I keep seeing movies about women enduring unimaginable pain--Frozen River, Winter's Bone, and now Lust, Caution. Next up: Lars Von Trier's entire catalogue! (Haha, just kidding. I will never watch Antichrist. Just so we're clear, if you would like coverage of Antichrist, this blog will disappoint you. May I recommend the MDCC Media Center instead?)

Okay, well, that turned into a pretty weird lars von tangent. Back to the movie at hand.

Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei) is a college student in Hong Kong in 1938. A hunky dude named Kuang (Wang Leehom) recruits her and four other students to perform a patriotic play (in order to drum up pro-China, anti-Japan feelings). The audience eats it up, and the six students, giddy with success, decide to take the logical next step: assassinating a collaborator. Chia Chi poses as Mrs. Mak, wife to a conveniently rich and even more conveniently absent businessman; her job is to act sexy and draw the target, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), into the students' house, where her co-conspirators will kill him. She almost pulls it off, but Yee is too cautious and insufficiently lustful, and he leaves.

Mrs. Mak doesn't get another chance to seduce Mr. Yee; he moves back to Shanghai. The students are demoralized, but wait--it gets worse! Yee's bodyguard shows up, catches the defeated would-be assassins packing up “Mr. and Mrs. Mak’s house,” and threatens to expose them. They murder him. How do they murder him? Why, very slowly and brutally and inexpertly. Chia Chi runs away, horrified, and that's the end of the first half of the movie.

Three years later, Kuang finds her in Shanghai. He is now a member of the grown-up resistance, and he asks Chia Chi to reprise her role--Yee is now head of the secret police, and the resistance does not like him at all. Mrs. Mak and Mr. Yee start fucking. I found the sex scenes disturbing, stressful, and fraught with uncertainty. That's how one is supposed to react, I think, so great job, Ang Lee et al., but YEESH. Anyway, the uncertainty: the uncertainty is key. Does Yee love Mrs. Mak? How does she feel about him? Will he get assassinated? Will she get caught?

I refer to the main character alternately as Wong Chia Chi and as Mrs. Mak because, over the course of the movie, I found myself forgetting that there was ever a Chia Chi. She's completely divorced from her life, transformed from college student into high society wife. On a bus in Hong Kong, Chia Chi tries her first cigarette because her friend tells her "Artists have to smoke." A few years later, in Shanghai, she stares longingly at every cigarette she sees. She becomes a smoker, because that's how smoking works. Likewise, Wong Chia Chi becomes--to what extent is debatable--Mrs. Mak, because that’s what happens (or can happen) if you pretend to be someone every day. I’m hedging because the character of Wong Chia Chi/Mrs. Mak is pretty opaque. I'm not sure who she ends up being or what she ends up feeling.

When does she enjoy having sex with Yee? Never? Always? Sometimes? It's necessary for Mrs. Mak to want him, but Chia Chi really seems to, too. And that may be why sex is such a powerful centerpiece for this dangerous relationship. Everything else is a lie, but their feral sex seems like it must be honest. It is the most compelling, most emotional thing we see Wong and Yee doing together, so my interpretation of their relationship is largely an interpretation of their sex.

Also, side issue: Chia Chi loses her virginity in a singularly unsentimental fashion. During the Hong Kong plot, the students decide she needs sexual experience before seducing Mr. Yee, so one of her friends, an awkward, sexually bland young man, helps her practice. The tediousness of Chia Chi's first sexual experiences were, for me, a silent specter over her relationship with Yee--whatever he is, he's not boring in bed. I wondered if she would have been as deeply affected if she'd had intense sex before. "With whom?" you ask? (Thank you for asking.) With Kuang! They totally crush on each other. I really wanted those crazy kids to make it work.

It’s funny: I thought the strongest and weakest elements of Lust, Caution were the same as in another Ang Lee movie: Brokeback Mountain. In both, I loved the characters. I loved seeing superb actors create these absorbing (and super sad) relationships. But in both movies, I was less enamored than I would have been, had the pacing been quicker. Sorry for being a dumb clod or whatever, but I think these movies are TOO SLOW.

This might be a weird comparison, but watching Lust, Caution was sort of like reading Perdido Street Station: I read Perdido in little 2-5 page bites for a WHILE, but at a certain point, I felt a kick (no incepto), and I read the rest in one sitting. The second half of Lust, Caution has what I wanted from all of Lust, Caution: a slow pace that's tense and engrossing. That's a different sort of slowness than in the first half, which felt a little lethargic. I think I would have loved the movie if it had been more ruthlessly edited. (Like this blog post, am I right, fellas?)

Okay, now there are things I need to make sense of in this movie, and so I have created some DISCUSSION TOPICS. They are posted after the break, and they contain spoilers. Please do comment on these Very Important Issues if you've 1) made it this far and 2) seen the movie.

We interrupt your test pattern to bring you the following:

Sorry for not posting for a while. I am working on a review but have been unusually (for homebody me) busy. Also, Google Docs failed to save the paragraph in which I summarized the second half of the film. Fair enough, Google Docs. It was not a very good paragraph.

Review up tomorrow!*

*Barring acts of God, aliens, Google, or my personal life

CHEATER #1: Seen In Theaters, January-July 2010

"Cheater" is a new feature wherein I will discuss things that do not fall under the purview of this blog. This first entry is admittedly derivative of Raphael's movie rankings; when I told my roommate Muffin I was going to do this, he laughed and said, "Raphael's whole point is that he joylessly ranks things. Now you're doing the same thing and condemning yourself for unoriginality. It's like the two of you are in a contest for who can enjoy things the least." Yes, we are, and I am winning.

Five stars - Loved It


Io sono l'amore (I Am Love) - Gorgeous melodrama about a rich Milanese family. Tilda Swinton plays the matriarch, a Russian immigrant who “stopped being Russian when she came to Italy” (or [Italian] words to that effect). The movie tracks various upheavals in the Recchi family: daughter Betta’s coming out, the family company’s transfer of power and possible sale, and, foremost, Emma’s affair with her son’s friend Antonio. More than plot, though, Io sono l’amore hinges on atmosphere and feeling. I adored this movie. Near the end I thought, This is probably almost over why why why I would watch this for six hours. It’s beautiful. It’s about love (surprise!) and sex and food, and it’s stylish and thematically rich and ambiguous. It’s brilliantly conceived and brilliantly executed. The score is all John Adams, who has never allowed his music to be used in a movie before. But of course he gave permission for this movie, because this movie is a dream.


Inception - Speaking of dreams! Inception is really fucking well done. I appreciated the restraint when it came to dreamlike images; the premise of the movie is so trippy that piling more surreal visuals onto it would have felt like, well, piling on. I also appreciated Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who is talented, oh-so-fine, and apparently fixing to show the world that he can be an action hero because he can be anything. Seriously, has any young actor, past or present, controlled his/her career as deliberately and cleverly and with such simmering ambition? I have only good things to say about Joseph Gordon-Levitt. I appreciated the different levels of dreaming and the effects they had on each other.

If I were to make one criticism (and I am), it would be that DiCaprio and Cotillard's roles should have been reversed. I got uncomfortable and bummed out by the portrayal of a Strong-Willed Dude and his Lovely, Doomed Wife. Also, the love interest/antagonist character has a ball-and-chain implication that I could do with movies not attaching to women for once, especially when the love interest/antagonist gets no character development beyond that. Also also, could’ve been a lady action hero! Also also also, nothing about the characters--not even their names--would have needed to change if their genders had been flipped. But whatever. Christopher Nolan, despite being a very good director, uses female characters as obstacles, traumas, or exposition in service of his movies’ men (see: Memento, The Prestige, Inception, and especially The Dark Knight). He should work on that.


How to Train Your Dragon - Funnnnnnn. The Viking village of Berk is routinely beset by dragons. The hulking townsmen fend them off or kill them, but teenager Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) is small and nerdy. Like geeks of yore, he tries to make up for his physical weakness with technological superiority, building a catapult. During a dragon attack, Hiccup fells a Black Fury--the most elusive and powerful species of dragon. He finds the dragon the next day, injured in a nearby canyon, and they bond, much to the (eventual) chagrin of the anti-dragon residents of Berk. From there, it unfolds basically how you’d expect, and it is charming and such a pleasure to watch. All in all, a wonderful children's movie in which characters eventually recognize the oppression besetting their enemies, aid them in their revolution, and then everyone is friends and the aristocracy is dead! No? Maybe?

Four stars - Really Liked It


Winter's Bone - Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is a seventeen-year old raising her two younger siblings and taking care of their catatonic mother. Her father, a meth cook who disappears for long stretches, has skipped bail--a bail he paid by putting his family's house up for security. Ree sets out to find him and save her family from homelessness. Few people help Ree, many try to wreck her investigation, and through all this she is a model of sympathetic strength. She's smart and kind and brave and dogged and… you know what? It is kind of weird to see a character with no discernable flaws whose every problem arises from circumstance. All the conflict in the movie happens because she refuses to give in to an impossibly cruel world. There is nothing wrong with her. And something about that just felt flat to me. I would have felt more engaged if this hadn't seemed to me the story of a saint’s martyring.

That said, I was still very engaged! I leaned forward in my seat for much or most of the movie. I cringed during the scene in the pond. I am not a robot. Jennifer Lawrence’s performance is great, as are the performances of John Hawkes as Teardrop and Dale Dickey as Merab. The script was lean, Debra Granik’s direction beautiful and stark, and overall it seemed like a great portrayal of desolation in the Ozarks, although what do I know from the Ozarks? In any case, an excellent movie that didn’t suck me in as much as I thought it should have.


Micmacs à tire-larigot (Micmacs) - Jean-Pierre Jeunet + Rube Goldbergian schemes + antipathy to the arms industry = my movie, for me. Thank you for making a movie for me, world! The sweetly awkward Bazil (Dany Boon) goes to live with a merry band of marginals in a scrap dump after his life is upended by a stray bullet in the head. They have a grand old time salvaging trash and turning it into exciting stuff, and they agree to join Bazil on a quest he happens upon: revenge against the weapons manufacturers whose products injured Bazil and killed his father (who died defusing a landmine when Bazil was a child). Micmacs is a lot of fun. The resolution is weaker than the rest of the movie, but I still came out of the theater delighted.


Please Give - Kate (Catherine Keener) and Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) are two women who are guiltily preoccupied with being good. Kate worries her wealth is parasitic: she buys dead people's furniture cheap and sells it in her fancy vintage shop; she's also waiting for her next-door neighbor to die so she can break through the wall and expand her apartment. Rebecca feels obligated to care for her sour, mean grandmother--the aforementioned dying neighbor. The main cast is filled out by their family members, none of whom have Kate or Rebecca’s “goodness” impulse. Please Give questions the usefulness of that impulse, but it also explores what it is to live without it, to be a mean grandmother, a vain sister, or an amoral husband. It’s a quotidian-lives-of-upper-middle-class-New-Yorkers kind of movie, which is not a lot of people’s bag, but I guess it is my bag? I liked this movie. The performances are strong, and the characterization is great.

Three stars - Liked It


Greenberg - Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) is a sad guy who is mean to everyone, including his lovely romantic interest Florence (Greta Gerwig) and his lovely friend Ivan (Rhys Ifans). I enjoyed this movie most when it was being very, very awkward but not very, very cruel. Examples: the first, abrupt sex scene and the scene in the hospital when Florence is recuperating. (The burger-on-belly bit was one of my favorite jokes ever. Fucking gold.) The movie overall, however, did not do that much for me. I really enjoyed Gerwig and Ifans’ performances, though.


Breaking Upwards - I remember liking this independent rom-com, but I’m finding it surprisingly difficult to remember anything about it! Um, it’s about a couple (Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein) attempting an open relationship and doing so messily and often thoughtlessly. It features Pablo Schreiber as a very creepy dude and Andrea Martin as a super awesome mom. It was made for something like $15,000. I thought it was good.


Predators - I am not alone when I say that the opening of this movie is the best part. Still, I had a good time watching the whole thing. The downside: Predators has a weak script. The characters are so unlikable and the challenges so insurmountable that I disengaged, the "run-get killed-run" pattern gets repetitive, and the plot twist was telegraphed by the movie's premise itself ("prey" humans are chosen for their ruthlessness, so the one gentle human will turn out to be ruthless). The upside: a strong cast. Adrien Brody makes for a really interesting action hero. Alice Braga made me sympathetic to her slight character, though not to the writers who assigned all the feelings to The Woman because of course they did. I am Walton Goggins' #1 Fan, so of course I loved him. I did not love Louis Ozawa Changchien's role, but I don't think that was his fault; his character, a Yakuza enforcer named Hanzo, was a parade of stereotypes. Laurence Fishburne makes a welcome appearance as a crazy person. Another upside to Predators is its direction. I'm not commenting on anything technical because I don't understand anything technical. What I'm saying is, "I had a good time, it looked okay, and I could tell what the fuck was going on." The trend of shooting action movies all close up and shaky irritates and confuses me, because I am 85 years old.

Two stars - Didn't Like It


Iron Man 2 - I liked this better than Iron Man, because this was shittier. I know everybody else liked Iron Man, but I didn't--perhaps because I saw it on a 13-inch computer screen with an ex-boyfriend who liked almost no movies or perhaps because its "violence is wrong; take a look at this Taliban dude on FIRE!" ethos pissed me off. Anyway, Iron Man 2 has plenty of objectionable shit--privatizing world peace? Ugh go die--but it didn't bother me, because I could not take anything seriously in the movie that featured Mickey Rourke as Angry Russian Fusion Whip Man. One might say, "Why did you take anything seriously in the first movie? It is a superhero movie!" and to that I would say, "Because, though Iron Man had a lot of explosions, it did not have enough explosions to keep the political anxiety section of my brain at bay." Did Iron Man 2 have more explosions than its predecessor? I felt like it did. It's possible that the two movies were similar but my reactions were vastly different: during Iron Man, I thought: what a waste of Jeff Bridges; during this movie, I thought, Hi, Don Cheadle and Sam Rockwell! It is nice to see you! Robert Downey, Jr. was charming in the first movie and is charming in this one. The only thing I can think to say about either the characters of Pepper Potts and Natasha Whatever or the performances of Gwyneth Paltrow and Scarlett Johansson is: how aggressively boring.


Leap Year - I did not see this in theaters, per se. I saw it on my bed, while it was in theaters (don't tell the IP police). My roommate Alice and I lay on our stomachs and played the "regressive gender politics" drinking game. Basically that means we consumed beer steadily as we watched this movie. We howled and mocked our way through it, and we had a grand old time, which puts this movie in the uncomfortable category of "this is shit, I know this is shit, I don't want Netflix to think I want to watch as many movies like this as possible, and yet I undeniably enjoyed it, though that probably just means I enjoy Alice's company." What's the star rating for that?

One star - Hated It


Clash of the Titans - Boy, did this make me feel vindicated about Sam Worthington! He is every bit as boring as I always expected but could never prove, having avoided seeing Avatar, Terminator Salvation, etc., barf. (Tangent: in February, NYT Magazine asked actors what their favorite performances of the aughts were. Answers ranged from awesome--Vera Farmiga said Michael Fassbender in Hunger--to regular--Clooney said Marion Cotillard in La Môme--to INSANE: Sam Worthington's favorite performance of the last decade was apparently Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor. And what's weird about that choice, apart from everything, is that The Nutty Professor was released in 1996. Perhaps he meant 2000's Nutty Professor II: the Klumps? I hope not! Sam Worthington, you are so weird.) Anyway, this movie is a ludicrous assembly of trashy special effects, terrible makeup and costumes, and a nonsensical script. I don’t think director Louis Leterrier was necessarily aiming for coherence, to be fair, but what he was aiming for, I do not know. This movie has Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes playing opposite each other, and even they cannot do anything to make it less of a piece of shit.

Avatar: the Last Airbender, Book 1: Water (2005)

This show's okay, but I did feel like it had too few white people? You know how that is, when you're watching some mainstream Hollywood entertainment and you're just like, "Damn. So many people of color." It's not that big a deal, but if they were to adapt this into a movie, my one recommendation would be "more white people." If I were permitted to elaborate, my recommendation would be "more white people except make the Fire Nation genero-brown. A sort of South Asian/Middle Eastern/Latino group. I would find those racial politics more palatable--and current!" That would be my recommendation.

Just kidding, everybody! I am simply making a timely (nope) joke about The Last Airbender, a movie so nice that it has a lower RottenTomatoes score than Jonah Hex. Terrible though the movie may be (going off of conventional wisdom here; I haven't seen it), the Nickelodeon cartoon on which it's based, Avatar: the Last Airbender, is really good.

Avatar: The Last Airbender is about a kid named Aang (Zach Tyler Eisen) who's supposed to save the world. His world is made up of four countries: the Water Tribes, the Earth Kingdom, the Fire Nation, and the Air Nomads. (I question the structure of these nation-states: while the Earth and Fire countries are contiguous, the Water and Air territories are far-flung, at opposite ends of the map and separated by Fire and Earth lands. How, exactly, did the widespread Water and Air cultures develop similarly? Did they start in one area, then colonize the others? Also, while the Earth Kingdom is multiethnic, the other three populations seem to be homogenous. Maybe?) ANYWAY: a small minority of each country's populations are "benders"--people who can "bend" one element to their will, using Chinese martial arts. The Avatar is the one person who can learn to bend all four elements.

At the beginning of the series, Aang has been frozen for 100 years (along with his giant six-legged flying bison Appa) in a huge ball o' ice at the South Pole. He's discovered by Katara (Mae Whitman) and Sokka (Jack DeSena), two teenage members of the Southern Water Tribe. Katara is a Waterbender. Sokka is a Xander--sometimes heroic, but lacking in superpowers and typically used for comic relief. The 100 years that Aang missed were pretty important, on account of the Fire Nation went genocidal and exterminated his Air diaspora peoples. The Fire Nation has also been waging war on the Water Tribe and Earth Kingdom for a century, but the Water and Earth people aren't as bad off as the Air people (i.e. they still exist).

The show follows Aang's quest to master all four bending disciplines and defeat the evil Fire Lord. He is accompanied by Katara and Sokka and pursued by the Javert-ian Prince Zuko (Dante Basco), heir to the Fire Nation throne. Zuko has been banished by his dick Fire Lord father, and he can only regain his honor and return home if he captures the Avatar.

This is a really fun show, and the second half of the season is especially impressive. I tried to make a list of my favorite episodes of the season but quickly realized that my favorites were pretty much "episode 10 through 18," which is too many favorites. Oddly, some of my favorite episodes are allegorical: "The Great Divide" explores conflict and subjectivity; it follows two feuding tribes as they are forced to cross a treacherous canyon together. That kind of story (especially in kids' TV) usually feels heavy-handed to me, but this one is thoughtful and interesting. Likewise "Jet" and "Bato of the Water Tribe"--two episodes that examine trust from different angles. These episodes could easily have descended into preachiness but don't. Avatar is notable for its strong plots and lack of condescension.

This show also has badass gadgets! In "The Northern Air Temple," the Fire Nation has these tanks where if you flip them over, the center bit where the humans hang out flips over, too. I'm explaining this poorly, but the way this goes down is the good guys manage to flip over a tank, and they're like YES but then the middle of the tank flips itself, the tracks keep on rolling, and the good guys are like OH SHIT. It is very cool! That whole episode is replete with steampunk insanity and delightful designs.

The one other thing I want to talk about in Avatar: the Last Airbender is FEMINISM. (Sorry this is so haphazard, by the way, but it is pretty hard to review a whole season at once, especially when you are not putting in the time and effort to write something well [see: me, right now].) FEMINISM is important in this cartoon, as exemplified by episode 18, which I think is called "The Waterbending Master," but I'm not going to double-check, and I don't know for sure because while I wrote down other episode titles in my notes, here I only wrote "118 - fuck you patriarchy."

The main conflict in "The Waterbending Master" is that Aang and Katara have traveled no joke across the fucking EARTH to study with this dude named Master Paku, but when they get to the Northern Water Tribe (which, incidentally, is Polar Venice--bridges and canals carved out of ice; it's great), Paku says he'll only teach Aang. "In my culture ladies are not allowed to learn to water-fight. Go learn how to water-heal, you vagina." Katara and Aang's shared position on this is "are you a fucking joke," which makes sense, because they traveled the entire distance of the world for this purpose and now sexism what the shit.

Katara gets mad, Aang says that he's not going to study with an asshole who won't teach ladies, and Katara says, "wait, no, that's a bad idea because the world will end if you don't learn waterbending." She resigns herself to not learning for all of 6 hours or something, but then she and Aang decide that, every night, he'll just teach her what he learned that day. Master Paku catches them immediately, gets super angry, and kicks Aang out of his class. Katara and Aang go before a tribunal or some shit to appeal this, and the chief says that maybe Paku would take Aang back if "you [i.e. Katara] swallow your pride and apologize." Through his shit-eating grin, Paku says, "I'm waiting, little girl." And a vein bursts in Katara's temple and instead of "I'm sorry," she is more like "FUCK YOU; P.S. PISTOLS AT DAWN." So then she fights this incredible master, right, even though she only knows a little waterbending. And she does such a good job! He still hands her her ass, but first she bends like she's never bent before.

The fight doesn't convince Paku that he's an ass, but his discovery that Katara's grandmother is his long-lost betrothed what ran away to the Southern Water Tribe does convince him because Katara seizes on the opportunity to say, "CLEARLY SHE LEFT YOU BECAUSE OF PATRIARCHY." Harsh? Yes, but Paku immediately shapes the fuck up and teaches her waterbending. Result! Now, what's interesting about all this is that before fighting Paku, Katara is a less capable waterbender than Aang. She starts the series knowing more, but his learning curve is much steeper. Post-Paku-conflict, Katara becomes the bomb. She is better at waterbending than Aang. She is the best. One could interpret this as an inconsistency, but I see it this way instead: her "come to Jesus" moment ("come to Jesus" = "feminist epiphany") has opened the floodgates and revealed her amazing latent power. POTENT METAPHOR YOU GUYS.

Hunger (2008)

Well, here we go, everybody. Hunger opens with three intertitles, which say:

Not a lot of context, especially since the movie is so stingy on dialogue. I don't know much about the Troubles, generally, or about the Maze prison, specifically, so I was a little lost at first. That turned out to be completely okay. If anything, my ignorance heightened the feelings of desperation and immediacy that Hunger works to build. The movie's not apolitical, but it's also not primarily political. It's more about specific conditions and individual reactions to them. It's a microscopic examination of pain as a way of life--for prisoners and officers alike.

I just said there wasn't much dialogue in Hunger, but that's not quite true. For about 25 minutes in the middle, Hunger is all talking. But the movie before that long scene and the movie after it is light on speech and heavy on physical degradation: excretions, beatings, death. It's slow but riveting, unfolding at an oozing pace.

Basically it's a date movie.

In the first section of Hunger, we see the routines of two Republican prisoners and a guard. Their daily lives are tedious, violent, and dominated by bodily fluids. The guard often looks, rapt, at his bloody knuckles. He examines them when he smokes; he soaks them in hot water before and after his shifts. For the prisoners, their excretions are their last resort. They are years into the no wash protest, and their cell walls are thick with shit and blood. At a yelled signal, they all pour their collected urine under their doors into the H-Block hallways.

The genius of this painfully long, lovingly filmed portrayal of seeping misery is the contrast it creates with the second part of the movie: the 25-minute conversation between Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and Father Dominic Moran (Liam Cunningham). Without realizing it, I had adjusted to watching violence and putrefaction, and I felt the thrill you're supposed to have during the actiony bits of movies in the one scene where no one is hitting anyone else, where there are just two people talking in a room without sticky sights or sounds.

Sands has called the priest to the prison to talk about the impending hunger strike. They banter for a while, but then they get down to the business of arguing. Father Dom thinks Bobby is being crazy and destructive; Bobby thinks Dom doesn't get it on account of living a cushy life without shit on his walls. Although the scene's between a priest and a man about to embark on an act of pseudo-Christian martyrdom, the conversation's aggressively secular. They talk about the propaganda value of the hunger strike. They talk about attempting negotiations with the British government. When Sands asks, detached and skeptical, "God's gonna punish me?" Father Dom responds, "Well, if not just for the suicide, then he'd have to punish you for stupidity." It is a really good scene, you guys.

The talk ends, and the last section of the movie begins with a doctor describing how a hungry body shuts down. Then we see Sands starve. It's really, really brutal, and it feels really, really long (it's actually just under 20 minutes--shorter than the Father Dom scene). As Sands flickers out, we see his memory/vision of himself as a child in the countryside. I could have done without that. It's a callback to the end of his conversation with the priest, and it's not that sentimental, but it's still too sentimental for me. This movie's so tough to watch; I didn't want anything that felt like a relief from that. Little Bobby in the field felt to me like a lone distraction in an otherwise single-minded movie. Steve McQueen, the director, said in an interview that he "wanted to get out of that prison cell" and give "people a chance to breathe," but I didn't want a chance to breathe at minute 123 of this 125-minute beast.

Sands' exchange with the priest is definitely my favorite part of the movie. Not just because it is mercifully free of fecal sculpture and running sores, but because DAMN is that some acting and DAMN is that some writing. Fassbender and Cunningham perform this smart, emotional scene with passion and nuance. The intensity is amplified by the famous seventeen-minute take; for most of the scene, the two actors share the frame, the camera fixed, their profiles in shadow (see below). They're so expressive, but you don't see their faces very clearly. You feel the urgency and conviction in the words, their voices, and the tilt of their bodies.

(Look, I feel really weird about the tags for this: I don't want to rate it. Five stars, I guess? It is superbly put-together and made me have a lot of feelings, so I'm not sure what more I could ask. And while it fails the Bechdel test, so what, you know? Almost no one talks in this movie. There's one long conversation. Apart from that, you could count the intelligible lines on two hands--one hand if you don't count the audio clips of Margaret Thatcher.)

We are fighting, Netflix.

Look, maybe I want to watch Oldboy. And maybe it is on Netflix Instant. Sounds good? No, it sounds TERRIBLE, because it is DUBBED. What the fuck.

Also a little while ago I tried to watch Hunger (the one where Michael Fassbender plays Bobby Sands, not any number of other movies called Hunger or The Hunger), and there was no sound? None? And I don't know about you, but I like to hear the feces being slapped onto walls by political prisoners. I don't want that to be silent.

Just tried it again, though, and Hunger now includes the luxury of audio. So maybe I'll review that instead of a foreign language movie. Netflix, you xenophobe.

The Lady Eve (1941)

I have always dreaded old movies. When I was little, I didn't like black-and-white. No idea why. Then I grew up (relatively speaking), and suddenly I loved black-and-white movies but whoops also feminism. Movies made now are bad enough in the way they treat ladies, but most of the pre-1960 stuff I've seen is nightmarish. (This may be because I haven't seen that many old movies. Because I avoid them.) Anyway, I went into The Lady Eve assuming that the gender politics would make me miserable, but they didn't! They were decent enough that I could just pay attention to whether I liked the movie or not, and I did because it's awesome.

Charlie Pike (Henry Fonda) is the heir to an ale (not beer) fortune. Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck) and her dad are card-sharps: she reels rich men in, and her father takes them at poker for large sums of money. Charlie is their mark on a cruise from South America to… North America. But OH NO Jean falls in love with this sucker, and she insists that they not steal his money, and she's going to marry him but OH NO he finds out the truth (minus the she-loves-him part) and wants nothing to do with her. Then she goes after him--for revenge? Or to win him back? THE LADY EVE coming soon to computers near you.

The timeline of their romance is insane, but I assume they don't call the genre "screwball" because of its realism. Speaking of screwball, Henry Fonda delivers some pretty decent physical comedy in this movie, you guys! I didn't know Juror #8 had it in him. He's always tripping over stuff (get it? The Lady Eve. The fall. Get it? Get it?), and there's one scene where he keeps getting food all over his nice jackets. Haha! Fonda also manages the impressive trick of making his character seem likable and reasonably intelligent. Pause for a moment and consider: that is an amazing feat. The most casual examination reveals that Charlie Pike is a bland, credulous boob. Have you seen the Branagh Much Ado About Nothing? It's like that: Claudio's a piece of shit, but Robert Sean Leonard's performance makes the character seem more decent than really makes sense. Charlie (Fonda) is a less-horrible Claudio figure--gullible, boring, jealous (but not so jealous and angry that he publicly humiliates his fiancée and doesn't mind causing her apparent death SPOILER ALERT). I've digressed. What I was trying to say is that, in defiance of reason, Henry Fonda sells this character as a cool guy who maybe even deserves Barbara Stanwyck, which he doesn't because no one deserves Barbara Stanwyck.

Oh, Barbara Stanwyck, you electric being. I am in love now. Stanwyck's character is so quick, so sexy, and so confident, and watching her, I could only imagine that Stanwyck was more Jean than Jean. Which she might not have been because acting is not the same as living, but the performance was good enough to make me think stupid thoughts.

Circling back to the gender shit at the beginning of this post, I really want to express my gratitude to this movie/Preston Sturges/everyone involved for not being awful. Charlie Pike does not spend the movie talking down to Jean--you know, the "listen, little lady" bullshit. Also, he gets really mad at her at several points in the movie, but he never threatens to hit her. Holy fucking Moses. How incredible is that? Thanks, It Happened One Night, for making me astonished by basic humane behavior in olde tyme pictures.

Party Down, S2E9: Cole Landry's Draft Day Party (2010)

Hello, America! I have not written in a while because I was very busy being sick and going to work and watching all of Sons of Anarchy (not available on Netflix Instant, I am sad to say). While I haven't watched a Netflix Instant movie in far too long, I did watch an episode of Party Down, so I'm going to write about that. Here we go.

Party Down is a very funny show, and if you are not watching it, you should start. It's about a group of cater waiters in Los Angeles. It being L.A., most of them aspire to be Hollywood somebodies (actors, writers, etc.). It being a darkish show, none of them ever get anywhere. It's fun, it's easy to get into, it's all available on Netflix Instant. Go forth and watch it.

That being said, I thought "Cole Landry's Draft Day Party" was a little weak (relative to the rest of the very good season). It lacked in three areas that make Party Down one of my favorite comedies on the air:

1) The crazy guest spots. Party Down has the most consistently delightful guest roles of any show I've ever seen. J.K. Simmons pops up twice as a foulmouthed studio exec who runs on rage. Veronica Mars' Jason Dohring and Alona Tal knock it out of the park as College Republicans. Kristen Bell plays Uda, an ice queen who works for our heroes' competition, Valhalla Catering. I thought I was going to injure myself laughing at Rob Huebel and Kerri Kenney-Silver's hedonistic community theater actors. Thomas Lennon plays a man desperately trying to organize an orgy... and I haven't even mentioned what were, for me, the two best performances on Party Down (and two of my favorite comedic TV performances in memory): Steven Weber as mobster Rick Sargulesh and Jimmi Simpson as a Marilyn Manson-esque rock star collapsing under the weight of his ennui.

2) The twists. That might be a weird thing to say; this show is no LOST, you know what I mean? (What I mean is that Party Down is not a portentous, frustrating drama that I gave up on in season 2.) What I really mean is that Party Down is a fun-times sitcom that is not about suspenseful plots. Still, episodes of Party Down frequently surprise me with some reveal--e.g. the end of "James Ellison Funeral." But the unexpected bit of "Cole Landry's Draft Day Party" was completely expected. Whenever I see "secret relationship" in a TV show or movie, I go, "Okay, gay." Maybe I wasn't supposed to be surprised? I don't know; that was a letdown for me.

3) The main characters' big emotional moments. Usually this manifests as acute disappointment in themselves (Roman in "Steve Guttenberg's Birthday") or in the world (Roman in "Joel Munt's Big Deal Party"). Very occasionally, the emotional moment is a happy one. I loved "Not On Your Wife Opening Night," in which Roman ditches his scorn for a night; at the end of the episode, he emerges from a van with a goofy grin and drunkenly exclaims, "Magnicifent!"* There wasn't a moment as blissful as "Magnicifent!" in "Cole Landry," nor was there anything as hopeless as, for example, Henry's response in "Precious Lights Pre-School Auction" to "you'll never work in this town again!": "I know."

Still, "Cole Landry" had its moments. It was a good episode for Lydia (Megan Mullally). For once, she knew more about the event than her coworkers did. Who's savvy now? Plus, one of the funniest lines of the episode had to be "You don't think I have to bite my tongue every time I carry a tray with Santa Barbara grilled eel beaks in a baby pinecone sauce?" (Sorry for the quotations, everyone. As Genevieve Koski has pointed out, the hilarity of Party Down's lines lies largely in the actors' excellent delivery.)

I loved Roman (Martin Starr) underestimating a pre-med football player's intelligence. This reaches its apotheosis when Roman starts--and persists--in explaining the concept of irony:

ROMAN: Irony is when you say one thing, but you mean the opposite. For example--
ZIGGY (the football player): I could stand here all night and soak up this knowledge.

The only character allowed to be really wacky in this episode was Ron. As per always, Ken Marino played it to the hilt. Ron's worried that he doesn't produce enough ejaculate, and the episode opens with him unloading (yeesh) his concerns on an unwilling Henry. Adam Scott's reactions are spot-on because of course. Adam Scott is always spot-on in Party Down. Everybody watch Party Down, dammit! Anyway, Ron's preoccupation lasts all episode, and it's pretty funny.

The Cum of All Fears

TO SUM UP: "Cole Landry" is good but not good enough for me because Party Down has spoiled me because it is a great show that you should be watching so it doesn't get canceled. If you are not watching Party Down, you are part of the problem.

*I guess all my examples of feelings come from Roman? Don't know what that's about. Maybe it's about how Martin Starr has gotten a lot of excellent material this season.

Frozen River (2008)

I'm going to make this one brief because I want to stop thinking about this movie as soon as possible. Look: it is a good movie. I am not criticizing its movieness. But it is just so sad.

It is too sad.

Okay, so here's this very sad movie, quickly: Ray (Melissa Leo) is fraying from her efforts to support herself and her two sons. Out of desperation (which desperation is painstakingly, lovingly depicted on screen), Ray resorts to smuggling Asian immigrants through an Indian reservation across the Canada-U.S. border. Her, um, partner in crime, I guess, is Lila (Misty Upham), a similarly miserable, trapped woman.

This is a feature-length trek through grinding poverty. It is not pleasant to watch. It is unremittingly bleak. Well, not quite unremittingly. There is a little bit of remitting. At the very end.

I mean, good job everyone involved. The acting's great: Leo is fucking ridiculous. It is such a good performance. If you know me, you know that I am deeply in love with Kate Winslet and was thrilled when she finally won her Oscar, but 1) she won it in the incorrect category (her role in The Reader was supporting) and 2) if she was gonna get stuck in Best Actress, she deserved to lose. Sorry, Kate Winslet; I still love you. But Melissa Leo breaks my heart as Ray.

Courtney Hunt, the writer-director, also deserves massive, massive credit, for, among other things, writing the character of Ray--one of the more richly developed roles I've seen in a long time. And if we're talking specifically about roles for women... shit, this is leaps and bounds ahead of everything else.

Okay, before I end this, I also want to mention the wonderful performances of Misty Upham as Lila and Charlie McDermott as Ray's teenage son T.J. When I finished watching this movie, I wondered what else McDermott had been in. Is he great in other things? Is he in other great things? Well, apparently he is a regular on The Middle, a show whose existence and success are as depressing as the plot of Frozen River.