FOUR FILMS - ADULT WORLD, THE ACT OF KILLING, 7 CASES, BUCK WILD

ADULT WORLD

Charming, quirky, at times very funny coming of age tale about an insufferable 22 year old poet recently graduated from college.  The tone is gentle and the humor is clever despite one of the major plot elements being our heroine’s employment in an adult bookstore (hence the title).  John Cusack as a famous poet now a barely getting by burnout has a number of good lines including the central theme – to be an artist you must know something of life.  A nice film, perhaps a future cult movie.

THE ACT OF KILLING

This documentary’s slow lazy pace at times undercuts the powerful imagery and even more powerful words of the Indonesian paramilitary members (actually they’re just gangsters) who participated in atrocities against communists or really anybody they didn’t like in the 1960’s.  The film uses the fantasy re-enactments the former killers are participating in to get them to open up.  The end result is enlightening.  I can forgive the limited amount of blame assigned to the US (even though the CIA was very complicit in these murders) as that would have made the film not so focused.  The conversation about how only losers go on trial for war crimes is a great scene and very true.

7 CASES

The novelty of a thriller from Panama is perhaps what drives this.  I’m not sure we’d be talking about this movie if it came from the USA.  Of course, central to the plot here are certain unique features of Panama, in particular the porters of the big outdoor markets.  There is some tension in the story of a young man hired to transport seven boxes by wheelbarrow across the market while being chased by a host of others including the police and other porters who want the money they think is inside the boxes.  However, strip away these exotic elements though and it’s a pretty ordinary thriller.

BUCK WILD

Another example of what happens when a director gets a chance to make a film and chooses to fill it with as much random nonsense as possible instead of focusing on one story.  Ostensibly a zombie flick, there is so much attempted wacky humor and drawn out characters then it takes quite awhile to get to the zombie scenes.  A forgettable mess.  

MY DOUBTS ABOUT GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY AND CAPTAIN AMERICA:WINTER SOLDIER

This post might be more for comic book fans but it does involve movies so I’ll post here.  I have some doubts about The Guardians of the Galaxy film and the Captain America sequel Winter Soldier based on the trailers and what I’ve read.  Hate to be a comic book purist but both these films look like crap.

1) The original Guardians of the Galaxy were so much more original and bad ass and interesting. More about them here  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardians_of_the_Galaxy_(1969_team) The New Guardians of the Galaxy is one of the worst reboots in comic book history.  Rocket Racoon really???? Too bad they are the focus of this film and not Vance Astro, Martinex, Charlie 27, etc. Only thing that interests me about the GoG movie is if they discuss Gamora’s relationship with Thanos (adopted daughter).

2.) The problem with the Captain America sequel is the Winter Soldier character itself.  Bucky Barnes was Captain America’s sidekick in the comic and a major part of CA mythology.  In the first Captain America film, Bucky was a minor character whose presumed death was not that meaningful therefore I see the movie losing a lot of emotional depth if it tries to recreate the comic book.  Basically, the Winter Soldier has no extra meaning, just a run of the mill villain without Bucky's back history

Movies made by people who don’t know comic books UGH!   

FIVE FILMS - INEQUALITY FOR ALL, KNIGHTS OF BADASSDOM, NURSE, THE MONUMENTS MEN, MITT

INEQUALITY FOR ALL

This excellent documentary gets its strength from detailed statistics and a through explanation of all the different reasons for income equality in the United States (Globalization, too low taxes on the wealthy etc.).  It also does a very good job explaining the danger to the future stability of the United States caused by income equality.  It all works because of INEQUALITY FOR ALL’s narrator/subject/chief explainer former Clinton Labor Secretary and college professor Robert Reich.  He is an engaging, self-deprecating figure who explains complex economic ideas in a way that a layman can understand.  Wish he’d been a teacher of mine.

KNIGHTS OF BADASSDOM

LARP (Live Action Role Playing) gamer nerds square off against a demon they mistakenly summon.  Good enough premise for a film and this is an amiable slacker comedy with a fair amount of blood and guts as well.  I did laugh a number of times and the writer knew enough to develop his characters beyond clichés – Some effort was put into this film which I appreciate.  An okay film for watching while drinking beer with a bunch of fellow slackers.

NURSE

Paz De La Huerta fills a movie like a sexier, female Bela Lugosi all bad acting and overacting presence.  In Lugosi’s case, it was accent.  With Huerta, it’s an an odd cadence not dissimilar from a female Christopher Walken but without his understanding of what he’s saying.  The sex here is rushed and cosmetic, the nudity weirdly prioritized (tons of butts but hardly any boobs), and the violence is bloody but more animated Japanese style than slasher movies.  This is a good bad movie – stupid, ridiculous but fun due to all the putrid acting and silly plot twists and hackneyed narration.  Also I have no idea why this movie is in 3D.

THE MONUMENTS MEN

A huge disappointment.  A great real life story combined with an excellent cast (Clooney. Murray, Goodman etc.) equals a dull TV movie of the week with action scenes stolen from a 100 other films and no real chemistry between all the different characters.  I’m not sure what went wrong here but I’m going to guess it started with the script.  The people who made this movie just don’t know how to tell a story.

MITT

The biggest question I had after watching this movie was what was the point?  If the mission here was to humanize Mitt Romney and family then it fails miserably.  The Romney family comes across as completely scripted and very unlikable.  There’s no insight here into Romney(s) and without that, this film is a total failure.  Only two good parts – Mitts presidential debate prep scenes and him talking about his father George Romney (that part felt real – only time I felt that while watching this movie).

WHY I DONT LIKE THE FILMS OF WOODY ALLEN

I’ve never been a fan of Woody Allen’s movies.  They are prissy elitist crap with forced, pretentious dialogue, unlikeable self-centred characters, and a pronounced New York snobbery.  I don’t find them particularly intellectual unless the audience itself has never read any great books or seen any European films.  It’s intellectualism for dummies.

His early films, pre- Annie Hall, are mildly funny.  The framing device is okay in SLEEPER and BANANAS and TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN but the jokes are strictly on the level of Catskills Borsht Belt humor – Allen’s nebbish character wears thin quickly.  His later films, post-Annie Hall, are what are really awful and what I described above.

It is absolutely painful to have to listen to his shallow Bergman fan creatures deliver their self-conscious, rudimentary pronouncements on life.  These are the type of people who carry around great works of literature so they can be viewed by others doing this.

ANNIE HALL is the start .  It is ground zero for the excruciatingly precocious world of the modern self-absorbed intellectual who has neither depth of thought nor range of feeling to justify his preciousness.  Diane Keaton, a good actress whose greatest role was in LOOKING FOR MR GOODBAR, is genuinely annoying as she is in all of Allen’s films.

MANHATTAN, the follow-up to ANNIE HALL, is full of the usual cheerful immorality as the norm for all its characters.  Infidelity galore and Allen has a relationship with a 17 year old girl supposedly based on his own relationship with actress Stacey Nelkin around the same time.  I believe Ronan’s Farrow’s accusations for several reasons and Allen’s views on underage sexual matters as shown in MANHATTAN are one reason why.  Hollywood in the 70’s was an evil place (it’s still an evil place) where pederasty was the pastime for such criminal deviants as Allen, Roman Polanski etc.

Since then, he has fallen into a formula – the same old tired tropes with occasional changes in setting and time of the action. 

Allen’s films for me represent the overreliance by many creative people on therapy and seeing a psychiatrist or therapist.  This inward looking focus creates a world that when rendered on film or TV or in a book is far too insular too engage the living, those who don’t have time to dwell on oversensitivity, those who actually live their lives.

And that’s what the big problem with Woody Allen is for me.  Not every film has to feel like real life.  One can go to outer space.  One can fight monsters.  But when they come back to Earth, I want to see that they know life not a musty collection of stale, canned substitute for witty.  I don’t want the world of the shallow pseudo intellectual with mundane dialogue and practiced amorality, I don’t want to see the world of the obvious and dull filmmaker, the world of Woody Allen.  

  

FEAR IN THE NIGHT AND THE QUIET AUTHORITY OF PETER CUSHING

Recently saw FEAR IN THE NIGHT an overlooked Hammer Horror movie from the early 1970’s with an exquisitely creepy Peter Cushing and a malevolently bitchy Joan Collins.  A variation on DIABOLIQUE, I enjoyed this movie’s twists and turns and its neat ending.

Peter Cushing was the flip side of Christopher Lee, his co-star in many films (I wrote about Lee here http://rgdinmalaysia4film.blogspot.com/2013/05/why-christopher-lee-is-best-count.html .  As threatening as Lee was, Cushing was grandfatherly and reassuring and never openly evil even when he played bad men such as Dr Frankenstein (The best performance of his career IMO was in CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN).

His power in these roles came from a quiet authority.  It could be cold like any number of mad scientist he played, not just in FRANKENSTEIN but also in CORRUPTION and a number of other roles or it could be adversarial like the many times he went against Christopher Lee as Van Helsing in the DRACULA films or the rival scientist in HORROR EXPRESS or it could be the quiet elderly victim like Grimsby in TALES FROM THE CRYPT.

In FEAR IN THE NIGHT, he is pervy and creepy at first then crazy and harmless then sharper and more dangerous than we realize.  It’s a multifaceted role and it is to his credit as an actor that he is able to pull it off.

He was also a dynamic Sherlock Holmes and seemed to get the analytical side of the character down without turning the production into a hamfest unlike many of the other actors who have attempted Holmes.

Peter Cushing – What a great actor from a time of great actors.  I hope we see his kind of actor again one day especially in horror films.

NEBRASKA

Alexander Payne is either hit or miss with me.  Either his films are great – Perfect little character driven films with plenty of messiness that  still somehow lead to a satisfying conclusion or they are not – Long on look and atmosphere and great locations but without much of a plot or anything to say.

I consider ABOUT SCHMIDT (My favourite Payne film) and ELECTION to be the former while THE DESCENDANTS and SIDEWAYS (an awful film) to be the latter.

NEBRASKA falls in the middle not as consistent or interesting as AS or ELECT. but certainly much better than the other two.

What makes this a good film or better than a good film is the performances, the acting.  Bruce Dern is superb.  He understands the character he is playing not just what he thinks but how he would communicate (or not) with other people and that really makes this all character and no Dern.

I sincerely hope he wins the Oscar for best actor this year.  He deserves it not just for this but for all the great pictures he’s made.

However, there are a number of other great performances here as well.  June Squibb (who played Jack Nicholson’s wife in ABOUT SCHMIDT) plays an even louder version of that elderly nagging wife who is actually the one who kept the family together. Bob Odenkirk does an ensemble turn as the older newscaster brother.

Every Payne film has at least one totally villainous character.  Here it’s Stacy Keach and he is excellent almost stealing the film away from Dern and others.  What a solid acting career Stacy Keach has had.

If there is a weakness here, it is Will Forte.  He has no screen presence whatsoever.  I didn’t like him on SNL and I don’t like him here.  He is an absolute zero.

I am focusing on the acting because the script while working very hard to make us believe this is all real, can’t seem to shake off the Hollywood flaws of coincidence and neatness that rob real life of the “real” part.

But hey I liked the ending of this film a lot. I like the father/son relationship as it played out and I liked all the other characters.  A good film.