We will miss you very, very, very much. Heaven doesn't know the kind of trouble they're in for.
Friday, June 26, 2009
R.I.P. Daisy Miller Buchanan Feneck Kamper
We will miss you very, very, very much. Heaven doesn't know the kind of trouble they're in for.
Friday, June 19, 2009
My Top 10 Favorite Movies of All Time
On the eve of my family's annual vacation to California (which I'm sorry to say I am not able to attend this year), I thought I'd join in on their project of ranking everyone's Top 10 movies of all time. Here is my personal, subjective list. The list is submitted for entertainment purposes only and should not be used as a guide for what are or are not "good movies." You're reading a guy who in all likelihood is going to be seeing Year One this weekend, non-ironically.
Looking at my list, a couple of things occur to me. One is that apparently it's true that things are never as good as they were when the individual was growing up. Seven of the ten movies on my list were released between my seventh and fifteenth birthdays. I want to say that this is because the years of 1987 and 1995 were a Second Golden Age for films, but I think that this is because these are movies that I associate with a certain time in my life. They were movies that really taught me how to love movies, and they happen to be ones I return to.
I also think that I'm especially attacted to movies with excellent pop soundtracks. I'm one of the few people I know who regularly buy movie soundtracks, and Goodfells and Pulp Fiction especially are movies that take advantage of their soundtracks, making certain songs impossible to hear without imagining their associated scenes. The two Cameron Crowe movies are very similar for me.
Finally, I'm going to admit that I'm a blatant apologist for Cameron Crowe. While I haven't seen Singles (and can't get anyone to watch it with me), I will make excuses for every single one of his films and how they're underappreciated. Yes, even Vanilla Sky and Elizabethtown.
- Pulp Fiction (1994) Quentin Tarantino's breakthrough film entered the pop cultural mainstream quickly, and its images remain indelible fifteen years later. While in memory this movie seems schizophrenic in its execution, the real mastery of the film is how well it fits together in practice. There are few cooler characters in cinema than Samuel L. Jackson's Jules Winnfield. Also one of the best soundtracks from any movie ever.
- Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) Of all of Stanley Kubrick's fantastic movies, I think that Strangelove remains the most approachable. One hundred and fifty years from now, when students wonder what the Cold War was like, I hope that they turn to this movie. It's incredible that this movie was made in 1964, when the Cold War was still thirty-five years from coming to an end. Deeply, darkly funny, with a fantastic early appearance by James Earl Jones.
- Almost Famous (2000) I saw this movie with a good friend when he was going through a troubled weekend. This was one of the first movies where I felt that the filmmaker was really speaking to my own experience. In Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe made a movie that I think perfectly described the experience of being a bright young man. This is a special, special movie to me. Another film with a remarkable soundtrack.
- Aliens (1986) There are great science fiction movies, and great action movies, but James Cameron here made a great science fiction action movie. Ridley Scott's Alien feels a little slow and dated today, but this sequel holds up excellently. Heroine Ellen Ripley remains one of the most powerful female figures in cinema, and it's a shame that there haven't been more characters to carry her tradition forward into the 21st Century.
- Jaws (1975) Another nearly perfect film. I've seen this movie maybe fifteen times in the past five years, and I find more things to enjoy about it every year. Spielberg brought a television aesthetic to the big screen, and the techniques he brought remain salient nearly thirty-five years later. Robert Shaw's Quint is a fantastic character that has few peers.
- Goodfellas (1990) Few movies are as quotable as this Martin Scorcese classic. Another movie with a fantastic soundtrack, Goodfellas presents an apotheosis of the Scorcese method that combines the best parts of his earlier work in The Color of Money (a lost classic) and Raging Bull (which is better in memory perhaps than it is in fact).
- Silence of the Lambs (1991) This is a film that constant re-airing on cable has not ruined. Every time it comes on, no matter how recently I've seen it, this Jonathan Demme film is riveting. Too much credit is perhaps given today to the admittedly great performance by Anthony Hopkins, when the script is excellently put together and the rest of the cast is well-utilized.
- Say Anything (1989) I first saw this film when I was a very young man trying to figure out how I should operate in the world I was growing into. John Cusack's Lloyd Dobler gave me a kind of framework for the man that I wanted to become. Yes, he's a little bit of a doormat, and yes, Cusack's Dobler has ruined a generation of women on what a man should be like (if you haven't ever read Chuck Klosterman's "This Is Emo" on the subject, you really should). But anyone who says that this movie isn't good needs to re-watch the dinner scene with John Mahoney, Ione Skye, and Cusack.
- Heat (1995) A great thriller from Michael Mann. A movie with one of the all-time great ensemble casts (Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Val Kilmer, Jon Voight, Amy Brenneman, Ashley Judd, Natalie Portman, etc., etc), it really described "cool" to me for a really long time. The dialogue crackles, even if Pacino's Detective Hanna hasn't aged as well as maybe we could have hoped.
- The Princess Bride (1987) Not loving The Princess Bride says more about the person who doesn't love it than it does about the film. This is a movie that any person, of any age, should find something to love inside. The William Goldman novel is a pleasure to read, but the addition of the framing device of a grandfather reading to his sick, fiesty grandson really takes this film over the top. I've never really been able to understand why Carey Elwes and Robin Wright never became bigger movie stars.
Looking at my list, a couple of things occur to me. One is that apparently it's true that things are never as good as they were when the individual was growing up. Seven of the ten movies on my list were released between my seventh and fifteenth birthdays. I want to say that this is because the years of 1987 and 1995 were a Second Golden Age for films, but I think that this is because these are movies that I associate with a certain time in my life. They were movies that really taught me how to love movies, and they happen to be ones I return to.
I also think that I'm especially attacted to movies with excellent pop soundtracks. I'm one of the few people I know who regularly buy movie soundtracks, and Goodfells and Pulp Fiction especially are movies that take advantage of their soundtracks, making certain songs impossible to hear without imagining their associated scenes. The two Cameron Crowe movies are very similar for me.
Finally, I'm going to admit that I'm a blatant apologist for Cameron Crowe. While I haven't seen Singles (and can't get anyone to watch it with me), I will make excuses for every single one of his films and how they're underappreciated. Yes, even Vanilla Sky and Elizabethtown.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Super Summer Movie Reviews: Up, Land of the Lost, Drag Me To Hell
Let me begin by saying that afternoon television during the summer is some dire, dire straits. Terrible. And the prime-time viewing isn't much better. Surprisingly, it's better at the end of the week (with Top Chef Masters, Burn Notice, and Harper's Island on Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday), which means that we can skip the cinema during the weekend and pick up with the much lighter crowds during the week, when I should really be working, but Leah gets bored.
Leah and I did make it out to the AMC Mesa Grand Cinemas on opening weekend to see the new Pixar outing Up. We are running out of superlatives to lay on Pixar movies. It would be hard to surpass a movie that was as excellent as last summer's masterpiece, WallE. So Pixar didn't really bother to try. Instead of a cosmic love story, Pixar brings us an intimate portrait of a man dealing with his grief.
The movie begins with 10 of the most affecting minutes in recent memory. A young man who fancies himself an adventurer runs into a young woman named Ellie, who immediately forge a friendship that, we discover in montage, develops into a romance, then a thirty-plus year marraige. And then the Carl Fredrickson, now old and voiced by Ed Asner, is left a widower. He becomes largely a shut-in in his own home, mourning his life partner and the great adventure they never took: to an unexpored South American wilderness.
The crotchety man eventually finds his home surrounded by the encroaching city, in images that evoke the children's story The Little Red House. When Carl assaults a worker on a neighboring construction site (the sight of blood in a cartoon is striking), he is compelled to abandon his home (to whom he speaks as an avatar for his lost wife) and is moved into an assistated living facility. But before the sentence can be carried out, Fredrickson tethers several thousand balloons to his house and releases them, sending him and a certain stowaway on their adventure, which features a pack of talking dogs, an eight-foot tropical bird, and an eighty-foot dirigible.
Visually, Up reminds me of The Incredibles, which was anoter fantastic Pixar film, but I think that this is a movie that makes fewer compromises than any of the Pixar movies other than WallE. It would have been easy for a lesser studio to allow the house to become the emotional stand-in for Ellie, but the filmmakers here resist that urge. When Carl speaks to the house, it remains simply a house to us, which makes his loneliness that much more effecting for the audience.
Up leads to a fairly predictible final act, but, as with most of the best Pixar movies, the first two acts are well-observed enough to redeem the ultimate sop thrown to the kids, who are (ostensibly) the target audience for the film.
Final Verdict: Better than Iron Man, not quite as good as The Dark Knight.
I have no memory of the (un?)intentionally cheesy television series Land of the Lost. To the best of my knowledge, I've never seen it. But I've heard enough from others to have some idea what a "Sleestak" was before I walked into the theatre. I'd also seen enough Will Farrell comedies to understand that Farrell is very much like pizza: even when he's bad, he's still pretty good.
The plot of the film is largely beside the point. It's kind of a shaggy dog, but here it is: Farrell is Dr. Rick Marshall, who has an outre theory about alternate universes. After he shares his theory on the Today show with Matt Lauer, his career goes down in flames (although he gains YouTube immortality). Marshall ends up performing science demonstrations for children at the museum at the LaBrea Tar Pits, until a comely PhD student (Anna Friel) convinces him that there is evidence supporting his theory. They travel to a roadside attraction, where they accidentially bring the attraction huckster (Danny McBride) to the titular Land of the Lost. Hijinks ensue.
The issue with Will Farrell movies is that it's difficult to ascertain whether the preview represents merely the hilarity that isn't seen (such as in Anchorman or Talledega Nights) or whether there is very little there there after the ten good minutes that you get from assembling the different clips from the preivews together (Stepbrothers, Semi-Pro, Blades of Glory, etc., etc.). Land of the Lost falls firmly into this latter camp. The previews suckered our $14 out of our pockets, but we left feeling rather empty and disappointed. Not a terrible way to spend a Monday mid-day, but probably not the best way, either.
Final Verdict: Not as good as The Incredible Hulk, and maybe slightly better than Stepbrothers.
The Sam Raimi cult has escaped me for nearly 30 years now. I've seen Army of Darkness, and thought it was pretty funny and interestingly chaotic. The Spiderman movies were fun for what they were and kind of went off the rails with the third entry. 2000's The Gift, with Cate Blanchett, is a really quality movie. But I've never really understood the hipster obsession with the guy. Maybe I need to break down an evenually rent the Evil Dead movies. I'll do that... next weekend. Are people so forgiving of the guy who brought America The Quick and the Dead and For the Love of the Game?
Raimi's latest effort returns him to the horror genre. Drag Me To Hell stars Alison Lohman (who has one of those faces that constantly tickles the back of my mind and makes me wonder where I've seen her before. She's appeared as the younger princess [I think] in Beowulf, but I may instead remember her as the young love interest in Big Fish. I have no idea.) as Christine Brown. Christine is an ambitious bank clerk whose boss believes that she might not be quite tough enough to take over as Assistant Manager. To prove her backbone, she denies a mortgage extension to a pathetic Gypsy woman. In revenge, the Gypsy woman places a curse on Brown that will last three days before she is... well, the title will give you the idea.
Raimi seems at his best when he's daring his audience to believe what is actually happening on screen. I am not a horror movie afficionado, but this film seems to occupy a different space than more traditional horror movies like the Halloween series or the torture porn series like Saw. I'm told that Raimi is the master of horror comedy, but this movie doesn't offer a lot of scares, or a lot of laughs. There are moments (like when characters refer to Christine's past as a heavy farm girl) that seem undeveloped and make me wonder whether a director's cut of this movie might be more successful. Lohman is an appealing presence as far as she goes, as is her professor boyfriend Justin Long.
Ultimately, Drag Me To Hell is the kind of likeable, forgettable movie that you probably won't regret seeing, but won't stay with you in any meaningful way. It seems like the kind of movie that was really, really difficult to market. This will make a fine rental for millions of Americans in six months.
Final Verdict: Better than Pineapple Express, but not as good as Hellboy 2: The Golden Army.
Leah and I did make it out to the AMC Mesa Grand Cinemas on opening weekend to see the new Pixar outing Up. We are running out of superlatives to lay on Pixar movies. It would be hard to surpass a movie that was as excellent as last summer's masterpiece, WallE. So Pixar didn't really bother to try. Instead of a cosmic love story, Pixar brings us an intimate portrait of a man dealing with his grief.The movie begins with 10 of the most affecting minutes in recent memory. A young man who fancies himself an adventurer runs into a young woman named Ellie, who immediately forge a friendship that, we discover in montage, develops into a romance, then a thirty-plus year marraige. And then the Carl Fredrickson, now old and voiced by Ed Asner, is left a widower. He becomes largely a shut-in in his own home, mourning his life partner and the great adventure they never took: to an unexpored South American wilderness.
The crotchety man eventually finds his home surrounded by the encroaching city, in images that evoke the children's story The Little Red House. When Carl assaults a worker on a neighboring construction site (the sight of blood in a cartoon is striking), he is compelled to abandon his home (to whom he speaks as an avatar for his lost wife) and is moved into an assistated living facility. But before the sentence can be carried out, Fredrickson tethers several thousand balloons to his house and releases them, sending him and a certain stowaway on their adventure, which features a pack of talking dogs, an eight-foot tropical bird, and an eighty-foot dirigible.
Visually, Up reminds me of The Incredibles, which was anoter fantastic Pixar film, but I think that this is a movie that makes fewer compromises than any of the Pixar movies other than WallE. It would have been easy for a lesser studio to allow the house to become the emotional stand-in for Ellie, but the filmmakers here resist that urge. When Carl speaks to the house, it remains simply a house to us, which makes his loneliness that much more effecting for the audience.
Up leads to a fairly predictible final act, but, as with most of the best Pixar movies, the first two acts are well-observed enough to redeem the ultimate sop thrown to the kids, who are (ostensibly) the target audience for the film.
Final Verdict: Better than Iron Man, not quite as good as The Dark Knight.
I have no memory of the (un?)intentionally cheesy television series Land of the Lost. To the best of my knowledge, I've never seen it. But I've heard enough from others to have some idea what a "Sleestak" was before I walked into the theatre. I'd also seen enough Will Farrell comedies to understand that Farrell is very much like pizza: even when he's bad, he's still pretty good.
The plot of the film is largely beside the point. It's kind of a shaggy dog, but here it is: Farrell is Dr. Rick Marshall, who has an outre theory about alternate universes. After he shares his theory on the Today show with Matt Lauer, his career goes down in flames (although he gains YouTube immortality). Marshall ends up performing science demonstrations for children at the museum at the LaBrea Tar Pits, until a comely PhD student (Anna Friel) convinces him that there is evidence supporting his theory. They travel to a roadside attraction, where they accidentially bring the attraction huckster (Danny McBride) to the titular Land of the Lost. Hijinks ensue.
The issue with Will Farrell movies is that it's difficult to ascertain whether the preview represents merely the hilarity that isn't seen (such as in Anchorman or Talledega Nights) or whether there is very little there there after the ten good minutes that you get from assembling the different clips from the preivews together (Stepbrothers, Semi-Pro, Blades of Glory, etc., etc.). Land of the Lost falls firmly into this latter camp. The previews suckered our $14 out of our pockets, but we left feeling rather empty and disappointed. Not a terrible way to spend a Monday mid-day, but probably not the best way, either.
Final Verdict: Not as good as The Incredible Hulk, and maybe slightly better than Stepbrothers.
The Sam Raimi cult has escaped me for nearly 30 years now. I've seen Army of Darkness, and thought it was pretty funny and interestingly chaotic. The Spiderman movies were fun for what they were and kind of went off the rails with the third entry. 2000's The Gift, with Cate Blanchett, is a really quality movie. But I've never really understood the hipster obsession with the guy. Maybe I need to break down an evenually rent the Evil Dead movies. I'll do that... next weekend. Are people so forgiving of the guy who brought America The Quick and the Dead and For the Love of the Game?Raimi's latest effort returns him to the horror genre. Drag Me To Hell stars Alison Lohman (who has one of those faces that constantly tickles the back of my mind and makes me wonder where I've seen her before. She's appeared as the younger princess [I think] in Beowulf, but I may instead remember her as the young love interest in Big Fish. I have no idea.) as Christine Brown. Christine is an ambitious bank clerk whose boss believes that she might not be quite tough enough to take over as Assistant Manager. To prove her backbone, she denies a mortgage extension to a pathetic Gypsy woman. In revenge, the Gypsy woman places a curse on Brown that will last three days before she is... well, the title will give you the idea.
Raimi seems at his best when he's daring his audience to believe what is actually happening on screen. I am not a horror movie afficionado, but this film seems to occupy a different space than more traditional horror movies like the Halloween series or the torture porn series like Saw. I'm told that Raimi is the master of horror comedy, but this movie doesn't offer a lot of scares, or a lot of laughs. There are moments (like when characters refer to Christine's past as a heavy farm girl) that seem undeveloped and make me wonder whether a director's cut of this movie might be more successful. Lohman is an appealing presence as far as she goes, as is her professor boyfriend Justin Long.
Ultimately, Drag Me To Hell is the kind of likeable, forgettable movie that you probably won't regret seeing, but won't stay with you in any meaningful way. It seems like the kind of movie that was really, really difficult to market. This will make a fine rental for millions of Americans in six months.
Final Verdict: Better than Pineapple Express, but not as good as Hellboy 2: The Golden Army.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Summer Movie Reviews: Terminator: Salvation
The new McG movie Terminator:Salvation doesn't really have a reason to exist. It suffers from the same irrelevance that Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines suffered from. Viewers who have seen the first two Terminators (which are among the best of the sci-fi action genre and directed by James Cameron) know that Skynet eventually becomes self-aware and brings about Judgement Day, pre-emtively launching nuclear strikes against humanity, or something.
Terminator: Salvation picks up some time after Judgement Day happens. The Resistance has been fromed, but John Connor (Christian Bale) is not the prophesied leader of the resistence. He leads only a band of freedom fighters somewhere in the American southwest (ostensibly), taking his orders from a submarine hiding beneath the Pacific and issuing orders across the world (apparently). The bulk of the movie follows Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), who wakes suddenly in the Los Angeles area after we had seen him executed by leathal injection sometime in the 1990s in the film's prologue.
If none of this makes sense, it is not for my lack of trying as much as the filmmaker's. Whether you'll like this movie really will depend on how much you liked Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. If you go to a Terminator movie looking to watch fighting robots and humans trying to fight largely indestructable robots, and to see the fighting humans/robots destroy block upon city block, you'll likely be entertained. If you're interested in caring about these characters, you're probably out of luck.
CHUD.com has a great write-up of what happened with the development of Terminator:Salvation and some theories about why the film ultimately went so far off the rails. What is really original and interesting about this film is this is the first glance we really get of Skynet. It's telling that Skynet, visiged in part by Helena Bonham Carter, is probably the most human presence in the movie's run-time. It definitely had the best screen presence and the most insightful ideas about how humanity functions.
The biggest failing of the film is that, ultimately, McG and his collaborators don't really make the argument for why the audience should cheer for John Connor & Co. over Skynet.
Final Verdict: Better than Stepbrothers, but not as good as The Incredible Hulk.
Man, I'm missing me some comic book movies.
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