Tree of Life

Tree of Life

Terrance Mallick directed my favorite movie of all time, Badlands.  In many ways, it's been downhill since then.  Days of Heaven isn't as good as Badlands, The Thin Red Line isn't as good as Days of Heaven and even though it has its moments, I tend to forget that The New World even exists.  That's all four of his previous movies in both descending and chronological order so, unfortunately,  Terrance Mallick does have something in common with Kevin Smith besides a beard.
Except I think I really liked Tree of Life.  I think.  I knew what it was before I went to see it.  I can't imagine going into that movie having no clue what was going to happen.  There's sort of two movies going on, it struck me as very literary.  There's the emergence of life happening from the big bang to the birth and dominance of dinosaurs and there's the emergence of the main character within himself and in his family.  A lot of the movie is extremely vague, Sean Penn's parts in particular.  He has almost no lines in the entire movie and spends most of the movie existentially grimacing in an office building.  Awesome, right?  Kind of.
The portion of the movie that deals with Sean Penn's memories of his childhood are supremely done and are perhaps the single best collected depictions of childhood captured on film.  There are other great ones. I really like the movie George Washington for the same reason and David Gordon Green is pretty unabashed about his love for Mallick.  The weight of these scenes permeate the film.  The movie has the feeling of a memory that's so vivid, you aren't sure if you read it, remembered it or watched it. 
But at the same time I was fairly bored by the ending of the movie and some of the sort of galactic commentary that it was providing.  I'm not sure why Mallick felt the need to completely construct and deconstruct something right in front of me.  I'd rather do the deconstructing myself.  I'm not so base a film goer that I can't handle severely non linear films but I have to admit that they often feel like tricks designed to infer weight and heft to a film that perhaps lack real strength.  That isn't the case with Tree of Life but I just found it all a little distracting.  I know Terrance Mallick has made some real art but he just didn't completely convince me he can still do it today.

Rocky IV

Rocky IV

I'm back, now that my class is over, the blog is coming back full force, or half force, I don't know, we'll see what kind of force I can muster when it's 115 degrees outside.  Anyway, today is the 4th of July and I'm watching the most American of movies, Rocky IV.
Some people might say there are more representative examples of American movies.  It's obviously not the best or even a relatively good film.  Even among the Rocky movies it isn't the best, it isn't even one of the two best.  But it is so intensely Pro American that it is a perfect movie for the 4th.
Rocky IV came out in 1985, firmly rooted in the Cold War and Reagan-y Russkie shit.  The plot is as inane as you might imagine.  At the beginning Rocky is living high on the hog, after defeating Clubber Lang at the end of Rocky III, he has parlayed his successful boxing career into a huge mansion and comfortable life style.  He's so fucking rich he buys Pauly a robot for his birthday.  Does Pauly want or need a robot for his birthday? No and no.  Do we want to see Pauly get a robot for his birthday? No, no one cares.  Soon the existence of a Russian super boxing freak becomes known to our friends, Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed.  The now retired Creed feels compelled to challenge Ivan Drago, played with resounding aplomb by Dolph Lundgren.  Rocky counsels against it but, like most of us after receiving counsel from Sylvester Stallone, he decides to do the opposite.  Appollo sets up an exhibition match against the Red Manimal (my own better nickname for him) because he feels a dire need to represent America.
The exhibition match is one of the most ridiculous depictions of a sporting event ever captured on film.  First of all, it's an exhibition match which means, what?  It means it doesn't fucking count.  So why is Apollo arriving on some sort of floating stage dancing around with James Brown singing Living In America.  The only thing good about that song is what Weird Al Yankovic did to it, Living with a Hernia is one of his serious Jams.  Drago just stands in the ring while Apollo makes a fool of himself.  Then he kills him in the second round.  Literally.  Drago rains blows upon his head and face unchecked by any defense whatsoever.  In between rounds, Apollo implores Rocky to not throw the towel in no matter what.  So he doesn't and the only friend he's ever had dies because Rocky is stupid.  I'd like to take a second here and point out that just before Apollo takes the last of the beating that ends his weird life, the referee tries to intervene and stop the fight.  Drago flings him aside callously and returns to pummeling Apollo's life force from his body.  First, how is that not a criminal act? And second, how was he ever allowed to box again?  Who sanctioned the next fight?  No boxing organization would ever let that happen.
Well, Rocky decides to fight him instead of trying to have him arrested and sent to prison.  But he has to fight him in Russia for some reason, probably because Drago is a murderer and there's obviously no extradition in Russia.  Rocky takes his team to Russia and, in one of the all time greatest montages, he begins to train by running in the snow and lifting rocks in a net.  Drago, of course, is using all of the hyper modern secret science techniques that we were all afraid of in the 80's.  It's supposed to demonstrate America's gumption, no nonsense determination, and ingenuity that got us to the top.  Really he just looks like an idiot chopping down an old growth tree in the middle of someone else's country.  How American.  During the montage, Drago repeatedly hang cleans around 500 pounds which would put him in the Olympics every year and he punches a machine that says the power of his punches is 2150 pounds per sq inch.  So, you know, twice as hard as Mike Tyson.
Just before the fight starts, Drago delivers my favorite line in all of the Rocky movies, "I will break you."  I cheered when he said it this time.  By cheered, I mean said, "Awesome," quietly to myself.  So the fight is basically exactly what you expect.  Rocky takes about seventy blows straight to the dead, meat filled dome and then starts fighting back.  At one point, Drago claims he isn't human and that he is, in fact, "a piece of iron."  I think what he probably meant was that he had the personality of a piece of iron but something might have been dropped in translation.  At some point towards the end of the fight, the Russian crowd begins chanting for Rocky.  That's probably the most unbelievable part of the whole movie.  Obviously, America, I mean Rocky, wins the fight and American dominance is restored to the fictitious boxing world.  Then he gives a speech where he claims to have been "thinking" during the fight.  That's a laugh.  Then the movie ends.
This viewing of Rocky IV was enhanced by Lauren's insistence that, in this installment of the Rocky saga, Dustin Hoffman should have been cast as Rocky.  She offered no reasoning but I had to concur that I would have enjoyed watching Dustin Hoffman cut a giant tree down.

Everything Must Go

Everything Must Go

I've always been pretty big fan of Raymond Carver but I've never felt like his stuff translates to the screen very well.  He is sort of John Cassevetes in short story form already and it just doesn't seem like it can come back onto the screen.  Short Cuts is pretty great but I give the majority of the credit to Robert Altman and Julianne Moore's bottomless scene.
Everything Must Go is based on one of the Carver stories that I, actually, have not read.  He's, Carver that is, frequently funny so I didn't rule out Will Ferrell as a possible stand out in this role.  I find Ferrell funniest at his most subtle.  I had to assume that he was going to pull it way back for this role and he did.  But I'm not sure he completely pulled it off.  The movie is pretty slow and Ferrell is in pretty much in every single frame so it's a lot to carry.  I give him a lot of credit for putting himself out there.
Ferrell plays basically the same guy who is in every Raymond Carver story.  A slightly too smart for his own good drunk with both lady and work troubles.  In this case, he gets fired from his job by one of the guys from It's Always Sunny (that's got to sting) only to arrive home to find all of his belongings on his front lawn and his wife absent from their home.  He then decides to live on the lawn for as long as the police will let him.  I won't give to much of the plot away because not all that much happens.
The best scenes are with a little kid from the neighborhood who happens to be played by Notorious B.I.G.'s son.  They play off each other well as Ferrell teaches him theories on sales while hocking all of his junk off the lawn.  Ferrell isn't as sure of himself in scenes with his new neighbor, played by one of my favorite actresses Rebecca Hall.  Ferrell is pretty convincing when playing drunk but he isn't as able at playing a drunk.  His performance is good but I was left wanting a little bit more from him.  I guess that's the most you can hope for with Will Ferrell though.  It's a better performance than the one he delivered in Stranger Than Fiction. 
Everything Must Go sort of solidifies his position near the top of the list of contenders as "The New Tom Hanks."  Why everyone is yearning for this I'm not sure but people sure seem to be.  He's got to be ahead of Adam Sandler whose jaunts into drama have been choppy at best.  Is he a better dramatic actor than Jack Black?  I don't know.  He's certainly no Steve Martin or Bill Murray though.  Of course, the best performance by a comedian in a dramatic role is Richard Pryor in Blue Collar.

Thor

Thor

I have one vivid comic book related memory.  When I was a kid, maybe eight or nine, there was a horrible, violent ice storm in my home town.  The power was out for, I think, a week.  We had to sleep in my dad's shop for most of the time.  My dad took me and my brother to the Town Crier (Later, after I grew up a bit, my dad and I used to go to the very same Town Crier and laugh at all of the off brand porn magazine titles.  My favorite:  Shaved Snizz) to get some comic books to see us through the long power outage.  I wish I could remember what the comic was that because I was pretty entranced by it.  It was a sort of Conan the Barbarian type thing.  It may have, in fact, actually been a Conan comic.  I don't know.  What I do know is that it had a whole bunch of cuss words and exposed boobs in it.  And we had to eat all of the ice cream, nine year old awesome.
Fast forward through periodic bouts with X-Men comics until Marvel started putting movies out.  I've seen all of them.  And they've been almost all terrible.  I suppose the X-Men movies are the best of the lot, perhaps if I didn't think Spider-Man was a complete wiener, then I might have liked those but I do so I didn't.  I'm also not a huge fan of the Batman movies but I have to say that they are definitely raising the bar for future endeavors in the genre.  Most are half good at best and that's where I was with Thor.
Thor was never, even in my amateur forays into comics, that intriguing to me.  He's a Norse god with a big hammer that can fly around and nobody else can pick up?  Um, OK, but why does he hang around with those lame Avengers?  I could take or leave him.   But I have to say, Chris Hemsworth, the actor playing Thor, is great in this one.  It's one of the most likeable performances in a superhero movie to date.  Unfortunately, he's playing opposite a completely flat, over matched, lost appearing, Oscar winning actress.  What the fuck, Natalie Portman?  Seriously, that was garbage, no it was worse, it was rubbish. 
The best parts of the movie feature Thor and Odin yelling at each other.  Odin is played by Anthony Hopkins and, as usual he's great but you're kind of left wondering what the hell he was doing in the movie.  I can't remember the last role he was in where I though, yeah, this is perfect for Anthony Hopkins.  The combination of Hemsworth and Hopkins make the movie worth seeing for simple summer fare.  But the rest was pretty much in shambles.  Asgard looked like the set of an 80's space porno and Thor's buddies are all pretty hammy.  The plot is spotty and barely functional and I'm not sure why they went with all the comedy in the middle of the movie.  Not that it was completely unfunny.  Kat Dennings proved able in the wisecracking side kick role and Hemsworth got tons of laughs from me immediately after waking up in the hospital after crash landing on Earth.
Obviously, Thor has it's issues but I think it's a successful Marvel movie.  I'd put it just above the Spider-Man and Hulk movies but below the X-Men (Not including Wolverine, gerf) films.

Incendies

I saw INCENDIES at two in the afternoon on a Friday. The theater in which I saw it has five hundred seats in it. I counted fourteen people at my particular showing. Why is it then that two people should walk in and sit right next to me? I mean, they didn't even leave the customary one-seat gap that is common courtesy in a theater not filled to capacity. They sat right next to me. I sighed, stood up, and walked about seven seats farther down and sat again, furious. What kind of sick human being does that kind of thing? I had to take a second look at them just to make sure it wasn't somebody I knew playing a joke on me. Nope, no one I know, just a couple of middle-aged ladies. I was wondering if this was going to affect my enjoyment of the move or even color my review when, would you believe it, the same two women got up from their seats and moved closer to the center. They sat only one seat away from me! Did I mention that there are literally five hundred seats in the theater and fourteen people? I'm sure I did because there is no reason to sit anywhere near another human being in such conditions. The one-seat courtesy gap is not courtesy at all--it's a downright invasion of personal space. "Jesus Christ," I hissed. I stood up again and moved way the hell down the row of seats, to the opposite side of the theater from where I had originally sat. What kind of monsters behave this way? I wished I had a large coke to dump on their heads. I do not want to smell you, or hear you whisper, or listen to the bovine way you chew your popcorn. I still would rather see a movie in the theater than watch it at home, but it seems that every time I leave the house something like this happens. This is at the locally run, independent art house theater, mind you. It's a foreign film with subtitles. I guess the clientele there is a much a bunch of apes as they are anywhere else. I may as well go out and see the new PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN movie for the experience I had.

I was half entertaining the idea of leaving my review of INCENDIES as the above paragraph. I did cool down enough to enjoy the movie. I don't have a lot to say about it, actually, though I would recommend it with a couple words of caution. First of all, at two hours and ten minutes, it's too long. I found myself editing the movie as I was watching it. There's a lot of fat to trim. Twenty minutes could easily be cut. Second, and this is completely related to the first, I do not think that we need to cram music videos into movies, so that we are forced to listen to entire Radiohead songs over static camera shots of desolate landscape that does nothing to advance the story. This happened, I think, three times during INCENDIES. There's nine minutes that can be cut right there. Am I alone in that I don't go to the movies to listen to music?

The negative tone of this review might give some the impression that I didn't like INCENDIES. I liked it a great deal, actually. The sense of mystery is strong, the performances are good, and the resolution is surprising enough to justify what seems to be a weird structure. So, if you are made of tough enough stuff to withstand the thousands of depraved individuals that make up today's average moviegoer, I recommend you go to a theater and check it out.

Meek's Cutoff

MEEK'S CUTOFF has a way of keeping you at a distance. I thought at first that I wasn't going to like this movie. It seems nothing more than a series of shots of a wagon party wandering a desolate strip of the American landscape. There is no dialogue for the first several minutes of the film. This is something I usually applaud if it's handled well and the visual storytelling is compelling enough to hold my interest. Here, however, the pacing was so slow, the plot so difficult to extract (the only clue we are given is when one of the settlers etches the word "lost" into a fallen tree), and the dialogue so sparse that I was beginning to prepare myself for ninety minutes of art-house frustration.

But something happened along the way. The scraps of dialogue we are given--many of which are from a faraway vantage and difficult to hear--begin to take the shape of a story. Meek, the guide, is a pompous buffoon who has gotten the party lost. Their water supply is dwindling and the hope of finding water diminishes with each passing day. Complicating matters are sightings of a Native American who, according to Meek, is a member of a savage and bloodthirsty tribe.

Before you realize it, a story has taken shape and a compelling one at that. Meek takes a Native American prisoner and much of the dramatic tension comes from opposing viewpoints on what to do with him. Meek says he cannot be trusted and must be killed right away. Some in the party feel that he can be used to lead the party to water. The clashing over the prisoner becomes the bulk of the story. Emily Tetherow, played by Michelle Williams, is the least afraid of the Native American and, to Meek's frustration, treats him humanely. She brings him water and food and mends his broken moccasin.

The tension among the party seems that it will come to a violent end, but MEEK'S CUTOFF plays against many of the traditional Western tropes. The ending is ambiguous, the journey is slow, the landscape is arid to the point that I found myself wishing for a glass of water. This is a film that rewards the patient. So see it. And be patient.

Bridesmaids

Bridesmaids

I am unabashedly into Kristin Wiig.  So the fact that this movie was actually the funniest movie to come out so far this year is just sort of an added bonus.  Basically what's going on is this:  Maya Rudolph is getting married and wants her best friend, Kristin Wiig, to be her maid of honor.  Wiig, of course, can barely get her life together and the added pressure of planning the wedding spins her life out of control.  There's so many hijinks and shenanigans in this movie it's hard to keep track of all the hilarity!
The funniest stuff all involves Wiig who wastes none of her screen time.  There are a few others that really shine too.  John Hamm is real funny as Wiig's super handsome fuck buddy.  He doesn't have too many lines but he makes every one of them worth the price of admission.  Also, Chris O'Dowd, who plays Wiig's cop paramour, was particularly good.  I found the other bridesmaids to be average at best.  I just didn't find Rose Byrne that appealing as the woman who supposedly has everything Kristin Wiig doesn't.  But she was adequate.  The other three were kind of boring, one is a goody two shoes, one is a fat tomboy, and one is a mom who hates her kids and marriage.
What separates Bridesmaids from other recent comedies is the consistency and intelligence of the jokes.  They go for more than sight gags, which you might not think from the trailer.  There is time allowed for jokes that take longer than twelve seconds to tell which is shockingly rare in American comedies.  It does make the movie oddly long at just over two hours.
I highly recommend you catch Bridesmaids in the theater or at least the cheap theater.  You won't be disappointed and you'll find your self somehow laughing at a shit joke.  No kidding.  I couldn't believe it while it was happening (me laughing at the joke that is).