Hollywoodland

Movie: Hollywoodland (2006)
Watched with: My mom and stepdad

This movie does a terrific job of evoking its period in a way that's continually interesting, but never pulls you away from the characters or action (maybe these people should've made The Great Gatsby...).

I wasn't too keen on either of the leads before, but Ben Afflech makes a surprisingly good George Reeves and Adrien Brody does a good job of keeping his fictional detective likable even when he's being a jerk.

I left the theater kind of unsatisfied. The movie seemed much longer than it needed to be and the ending felt unsatisfying. But now, I'm still thinking about it, and in an increasingly positive light.

Not great, but all around pretty compelling. Worth seeing.

PS: What's up with the title? The "Hollwood" sign lost it's "-land" in the late 40s and the movie's set a decade later.

Heavenly Creatures

Movie: Heavenly Creatures (1994)
Watched with: Maggie

The only part of this I'd seen before was the part where the girls imagine they're being chased around by a CGI Orson Welles and then end up making out while her creepy journal voiceovers, so my expectations were kind of high.

The movie wasn't bad, but that was basically the best part.

My problem with it was that I never understood why they want to kill Pauline's mother. Juliet's mother betrayed the family and is forcing them to be separated; Pauline's just questions whether a publisher would accept their crazy novel and won't let her daughter take off to South Africa.

Obviously they're kinda nuts, but this whole thing must have made sense to them, and by the same token it seems like it should be made to make sense to us.

Weird fact: Kate Winslet's character is now a successful mystery writer. A convicted murderer writing murder stories!

The Great Gatsby

Movie: The Great Gatsby (1974)
Watched with: Nobody again!

I think that in order to make a really good movie out of The Great Gatsby, you'd have to downplay the period elements. It would be bizarre to set it in the present, but by devoting most of the attention to period costumes and cars and blah blah blah, it feels more like watching a particularly tiresome Jane Austen movie than Fitzgerald's powerful novel.

The movie is faithful in a really bland way. They don't take any real liberties with the source material, but they bury it under obnoxious glitz. I like Robert Redford a lot, but he's too suave to make a good Gatsby and everyone else is pretty much forgettable.

I found out later that my mom saw this in the 70s and considers it one of the worst movies she's seen.
My mom grew up in a world without Dracula 3000 and Kaena: The Prophecy, so I can't really say the same, but it certainly is far worse than it should be.

Gods and Monsters

Movie: Gods and Monsters (1998)
Watched with: Nobody

I've been thinking about old people a lot, so the story of the senile and lonely James Wale (played by Ian McKellen) and his relationship with a ficticious gardener played by Brenden Frasier really grabbed me.

I also like the way it freely admits that movies like Bride of Frankenstein are thoroughly ridiculous, while still finding something poignant in them.

This story could have been really corny and tedious, but it's done very well and makes for a good little movie.

Weird side note: I was struck by the parallels with Sunset Blvd (faded Hollywood figure who lives alone with weird housekeeper developes a strange relationship with a much younger person) and then it ended in an eerily similar way!

The Illusionist

Movie: The Illusionist (2006)
Watched with: My mom

Even setting aside the magical elements, this is more of a fantasy than any kind of real historical thing, but it has everything that a movie like it should.

It's just a big fun romantic (in the Percy Shelley sense, not the Fabio/Harlequin sense) tale.

I don't know what to call stories like this, with larger than life characters and exotic-but-vague historical settings, but when done right, it's really cool. Aside from also being about magicians, it's tone (if not the actual story) reminded me a lot of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which is one of my favorite books.

It's not a perfect movie--the pacing's weird and the ending's kind of cheap (a twist that only works because of information that was concealed from us...though that's arguably appropriate for a story about a magician).

But it's still probably the best time I've had at the movie theater this year.

Wag the Dog

Movie: Wag the Dog (1997)
Watched with: Angelo

Bah.

You can tell that the people who made this thought they were so damn smart for their "biting satire" of the Clinton administration (and, to a lesser degree, the first Bush administration).

I guess it does a competent job of skewering its subjects, and the dialogue has a good clip (and is well-delivered), but once the premise is established, the plot goes nowhere that isn't obvious, and nothing creative or insightful happens.

The best political satires (say, The Manchurian Canidate) work long after the specific situation which bore them has faded away.

The worst ones generate a lot of buzz when they come out, and are tedious and useless a decade later.

The Man Who Fell to Earth

Movie: The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
Watched with: Angelo

The girl at the video store recommended this, and we kind of just rented it to be nice to her, but I always vaguely intended to see it.

Turns out, it's pretty amazing. It's really long and by the end I pretty much had no idea what was going on, but I really enjoyed it all the way through.

Like Ziggy Stardust, it's an effective combination of the raw artsiness of the proceding years and the poppy glitz of the following. It's not as great a movie as that is an album, but it disserves its reputation as a classic.

I'd say The Man Who Fell to Earth would make a good double feature with 2001: A Space Odyssey, though I don't know if even the most mind-blown among us have that kind of attention span.

Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman

Movie: Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman (2003)
Watched with: Angelo

The thing that was great about the 90s Batman cartoon was that it was filled with goofy superhero fights, but they were done in a really artistically appealing way. It was simultaneously dopey and a little bit classy.



This movie manages to recapture that pretty well. I liked looking at it, and I enjoyed the story in a Batman sort of way. The twist ending was something that I had guessed as a joke, but that's okay by me.

I could never get into that Justice League show they made, but I still do like this one. I hope they do more little movies like this.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

Movie: Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)
Watched with: Erika

I feel like I should've been really shocked by this, but I kind of wasn't. It all seemed about what I expeceted, except the part that implied that Enron planned for Arnold to be elected governor of California, which I felt like they needed more evidence to justify. But then, I guess it made sense for them to mention what they had...

Anyway.

Stylistically, I appreciated that this movie didn't copy the Michael Moore style (which is done pretty well sometimes, but sometimes is pretty abysmal--like in that fucking Wallmart movie), though the style it did have was kind of bizarre.

The archival footage from the company and from the news was mixed to pretty good effect, but the metaphor-heavy voiceover, pop music soundtrack (hi, Marylin Manson...) and recreations (hi, naked strippers with operatic music) were, needless to say, bizarre.

This is probably one of the better movies in this genre, but it's still a bit wonky.

Dune

Movie: Dune (2000)
Watched with: Angelo, Cameron, Cameron's girlfriend's brother

I'll say this about "Dune"--it's better than the David Lynch version.
However, I consider the David Lynch version to be one of the worst movies I've ever seen, so that's not saying much.

This one replaces the original's arbitrary goofiness and too-dense exposition with relentless tedium and terrible CGI.

It was two discs. When we went to switch them, we found out the second one was scratched and unplayable. We took it as a sign.

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires

Movie: The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)
Watched with: Angelo

This was a kung fu movie but with Dracula in it.

It was pretty good except that the ending was pretty anti-climatic, and the presence of Christopher Lee was sorely missed.

But it's still real good and you should see it.

They couldn't make a movie like this now without it being all self-conscious and kitschy.

The Postman

Movie: The Postman (1997--year of Contact and Gattaca and Starship Troopers!)

Watched with: Nobody

Yesterday I was at my friend Erika's house and when I got there she wasn't ready and I ended up watching like 15 minutes of The Royal Tenenbaums with her mom and her sister.

It's a movie I feel pretty ambivalent about, because it's very nicely made and it's funny and well-acted and artistically interesting and everything, but it's also kind of stiff and pretentious.

The Postman is basically the exactly the opposite movie.
It's tacky and obvious and incredibly long and largely artless, but it's also ambling and lovable.

I'm not going to tell you that 3 hours of Kevin Costner wearing a postal outfit and dirty rags in the Pacific Northwest makes for a good movie, because it absolutely doesn't. It lost a bunch of money, and it's hard to imagine how it could have done otherwise.

But it just seems so...genuine. Kevin Costner and friends decided to make the best darn 3-hour post-apocalyptic heartwarming movie they could and while the result is barely watchable, you can't help but love it a little bit.

In an essay I had inexplicably already read and just found again, the author of the book upon which it was based described the movie like so--
My best analogy is this: watching Kevin Costner's three hour epic is a bit like having a great big Golden Retriever jump on your lap and lick your face, while waving a flag tied to its tail. It's big, floppy, uncoordinated, overeager, sometimes gorgeous -- occasionally a bit goofy -- and so big-hearted that something inside of you has to give... that is, if you like that sort of thing.

I'd say it's more like having that golden retriever sit on your lap for a three hour car ride with the windows up, but that's alright.

They could have easily cut out half of this movie without it affecting anything majorly, but I guess that'd be like cutting a golden retriever in half, and we don't do that shit here in America.

This isn't really a movie I'd recommend to anyone (or buy and loan out, as my boss did to me!) but I kind of enjoyed it. And unlike a big smelly dog, the end is probably the coolest part.

Nightwatch

Movie: Nightwatch (2004)
Watched with: Angelo and Kyle

This movie's pretty much an exact cross between Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Underworld, in that it's filmed in a kind of a quirky fantastical way with striking color schemes, but then it's a dismal and boring story where a bunch of vampires do stupid shit there's no reason to care about.

I lost interest about 25 minutes in, but at the end I was still thinking about the first scene and what a cool movie it could've been the start of.

Sorry, Russia. Battleship Potemkin, this ain't.

Snakes on a Plane

Movie: Snakes on a Plane (2006)
Watched with: My dad

I was worried this would be, like, Internet: The Motion Picture, but the changes made in response to the fan clamor appear to consist principally of the addition of boobs and Samuel L. Jackson swearing, which are both very good things.*

My one real complaint is that it gets too...I don't want to call "Snakes on a Plane" disturbing, but when everyone's running around screaming and kittens are getting killed it's just...unpleasant. The movie doesn't stop being funny for long, but I wish it'd kept a lighter tone, maybe more like Slither. It's too dopey to be scary, so it may as well stay fun.

But it does, overall, and even the random B plot about Andiotes on a Helicopter holds its own reasonably well.

It doesn't dissapoint, though I wonder how long its fandom can subsist now that it has a reality to contend with instead of just a hilarious abstract.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

Movie: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
Watched with: John and Angelo

This is probably one of the better post apocalyptic movies I've seen, though I wasn't exactly blown away by it. The weird oasis town is pretty cool, and I like the way the barbaric kids have developed a mythology about the past world. And big mean post-Apocalyptic guys are always good fun.

But once everyone's driving around in cars and shit, it just kind of reminded me of why I found it difficult to care during Road Warrior.

There were a few really awesome moments, but still not enough to turn me into a Mad Max fan.

The Wicker Man

Movie: The Wicker Man (1973)
Watched with: Nobody

What an amazing little movie.

It's about a creepy island off the coast of Scotland where everybody celebrates a weird Pagan religion that's allegedly based on "the old gods" but also has a strong dose of hippie dancing and 1960s folk music.

It features Christopher Lee promintently, but it's not like a typical old Hammer horror movie.
For most of the time, it doesn't seem like a horror movie at all, more of a weird mystery. Most of it's in the daytime, and nothing really horrible happens until the memorable climax.

They're doing a remake with Nicolas Cage that's supposed to come out soonish, but I can't imagine they could possibly make it this ambiguous and incredible.

One Hour Photo

Movie: One Hour Photo (2002)
Watched with: nobody

This movie's kind of frustrating, because Robin Williams gives a really impressive performance, and it's really well shot (the scenes in the store have deep focus to make it look huge and neat while the parts of Sy's life out of the store are in shallow focus and cramped). You care about the characters and it's interesting the whole way through.

But the ending is a huge miscalculation.
What makes the character of Sy so compelling is that there's often a fine line between nice and creepy. Everyone crosses over that line somtimes, and Sy's tragedy is that he takes it too far.

At least, it should be.

At the end, we found out rather arbitrarily that all of Sy's problems are in fact caused by a childhood trauma that made him crazy.
This isn't implausible, neccessarily, but it does make it worse.
We should wonder if we could be Sy without realizing it, not just think, "There but the grace of God go I."

Being John Malkovich

Movie: Being John Malkovich (1999)
Watched with: Angelo and John

This might be one of my favorite movies. I kind of don't like the idea that the only thing keeping people from being evil to each other is being afraid of the consequences, but maybe that's true for some people.

Anyway, aside from that, it's really funny and weird and kind of pretty in its way.

Scifi writer Orson Scott Card (of Ender's Game fame) said about a year ago, "For the past few years I've been telling people that there are only a handful of truly brilliant sci-fi movies, and most of them are by Charlie Kaufman."

I like that this story could have easily been a Twilight Zone episode but they made it artful and weird instead of loud and stupid like too many scifi movies.

I'm sure a lot of people would deny that this is a scifi movie cause they're snoots. I guess other people might deny it because there's no science in it (unlike Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) but it definitely falls into the general category of speculative fiction and beyond that I, for one, don't care.

Corpse Bride

Movie: Corpse Bride (2005)
Watched with: Jessy and Lara

This movie isn't as good as Nightmare Before Christmas, but it's still pretty good. The story's interesting, it's got some good performances and it's sooooo pretty. I really like stop motion, and the fact that it's CG-enhanced means that they can do some really amazing stuff without having it look all awful and plasticky like an all CG movie.

It's not the best, but it's pretty cool.