The Filmcake

May 24th – May 31st

The Blind Side — The last of the 10 Oscar Best Picture nominees for me to see. I didn’t really want to watch it. But as a matter of wholeness, I felt compelled. It was pretty much what I expected. Sandra Bullock was fine. She’s a fine actress. But I don’t think this performance was award worthy and I don’t think her career has been strong enough to merit a “body-of-work” Oscar win.

But the story is really weak here. Some people think of this as inspirational? Really!? In that it inspires ridiculously rich people to treat black people with a modicum of decency!? Too bad the filmmaker’s couldn’t bother to do even that.

Michael Oher, the football player at the center of this story, is basically a MacGuffin. He’s there to give something for the rich white lady to do so everybody can think she’s a sassy angelic figure. But the film ultimately cares very little for Oher. He is not given any sort of personality or character. He’s the poor, black guy who just needs a savior in white. Beyond that, Oher’s neighborhood and the people who live there are treated in the most stereotypical of ways.

If this movie would have been about the game of football (the opening scenes explaining the importance of a left tackle were promising) or about all the hard work Oher himself put in to get where he is today, it may have been of some interest. As it exists, however, it kind of disgusts me.

The Road — I really liked the book. I remember tearing through it on a plane ride back from Minneapolis. It was dark and hopeful but without a lot of unnecessary clarity.

I didn’t really like movie. Of course, Viggo Mortensen was excellent. He never seems to miss. And Kodi Smit-McPhee was a welcome surprise. But there was too much heavy-handedness to the film version. There were too many flashbacks of the wife. There seemed to be some too obvious Christian references. The score was way too indiscreet. And the ending seemed too clean.

Reading the book that first time, I felt like I wasn’t sure what happened to bring about the destruction, I wasn’t sure about what was really going on along the road, and I wasn’t sure what would happen on into the future. I liked that confusion. I thought there was hope in there somewhere, but I wasn’t sure. Hell, I remember not even being entirely certain if the boy and the man were actually father and son. Perhaps its obvious now, but that uncertainty added to the book’s intrigue. I might just have to read it again and see how it holds up. Maybe I just got it wrong when I read it that first time.

The Thin Blue Line — A great, great, great documentary. Beautifully shot and scored. The re-enactment scenes are beautiful. The Phillip Glass score brings in some nice tension. And while Errol Morris hadn’t yet come up with the Interrotron, many of the interviews still have a very one-on-one conversational feel to them. As the interviewees get comfortable with the director, they begin to reveal things which seem more and more disturbing. Eventually, they each begin to do their own hanging.

And that all leads to the investigation work that the film undertakes. This is a documentary that trumps not only many cop movies but even actual police work. As a result of this documentary, in which Morris demonstrated that five key witnesses committed perjury, Randall Dale Adams was released from prison. This was a man on death row. An innocent man ready to be put to death. And a movie saved his life. If there’s any stronger evidence for the power of film, I don’t know any.

Waiting for Armageddon — Another documentary about those crazy fundamental Christianists. I know not all evangelicals or even fundamentalists are as off their rockers as these, and it’s unfair to paint them all with a broad brush, but that they do exist is maddening (if not also somewhat entertaining). I just wish the damn rapture would happen already so the rest of us could have the Earth to ourselves. The truly scary part of this mindset is the possibility that it has penetrated into the upper echelons of American government. Could we ever really tacitly support terrorism, if it meant the fulfillment of some Biblical prophecy? I sure hope we’re not that insane. Oh, and of course there is a family from McAlester, Oklahoma featured in the documentary. We’re not all like that. I promise.

Paper Heart — A surprising and sweet little film. A movie starring both Charlyne Yi and Michael Cera could seem a little too cute. And it is. But after initially balking at Yi’s awkward behavior, I began to understand it. I could see where she was coming from. The same has always gone for Cera. Leading man action hero, he is not. But smart, soft-spoken, somewhat shy guys need to be represented on film too, right?

And you’ve got to give it up to the second film in a row to feature people from Oklahoma! Well, maybe not. The last one had a crazy family eagerly waiting for Armageddon while this one featured some bikers from Oklahoma City (at Charley’s Last Stand) whose ideas about love, uh, differed from mine. Keep it classy Oklahoma.

This film could have been better. There is no doubt about that. Perhaps it would’ve worked better just as a documentary, or just as a narrative feature, instead of as a mixture of the two. But it showed a lot of promise. It showed some real insight and honesty, I think.

Crazy Heart — Jeff Bridges was good. Not his strongest performance. But, unlike Sandra Bullock, I think his entire body of work is deserving of the Oscar win. I like the music. I’ve been enjoying the soundtrack for quite a while now. If they would’ve kept it about the music, the road, the booze, and the smokey clubs, it would have been a nice film. But I just couldn’t buy the Jean character at all. Maggie Gyllenhaal was fine in the role. But she was such an empty character, and her relationship with Bad Blake (Bridges) was not believable in the least. She basically just existed to be able to offer up her own son so that Bad could discover he’d finally hit rock bottom. And apparently after a lifetime of drinking and rambling, all it takes is a pretty girl to instantaneously change your ways.

May 17th – May 23rd

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans — Oh, Werner Herzog. You strange and brilliant man. This movie plays like some drug-induced dream. If things don’t always seem to add up, they seem to be perfectly placed within a tripped-out alternate version of reality. Perhaps this cop story is really science fiction. Maybe the lizards brought about Hurricane Katrina as the first step in their attempt at world domination.

Nicolas Cage is brilliant. I think. I certainly don’t think I’ve ever seen drug-induced insanity look so fun. The entire cast from Eva Mendes to Brad Dourif seem to be having a blast. And I never thought I’d see Fairuza Balk as a state trooper. But there she was. At once in breeches and boots and then just boots.

I just bought a Werner Herzon-Klaus Kinski box set that I have yet to delve into. I very well might need to add this one to my collection. It was a hell of a lot of fun.

The Informant! — Matt Damon can go from action hero Jason Bourne one minute to schlubby bio-tech engineer Mark Whitacre the next minute. And he makes it look so effortless. Working with frequent collaborator Steven Soderbergh, Damon makes this compulsive liar actually teeter towards the sympathetic. Whitacre doesn’t seem so much diabolical as mentally unbalanced. I also liked all the stand-up comedians in small roles…from Joel McHale to The Smothers Brothers to Patton Oswalt. As if the farcical nature of these real-life events could be doubted. I first heard about this story from a This American Life episode, which I would recommend along with this film.

May 10th – May 16th

Harlan Ellison: Dreams With Sharp Teeth — When evaluating documentary film, it is sometimes difficult to separate the subject matter from the filmmaking. If you have an affinity for the subject matter, it can sometimes cloud the evaluation of the filmmaking. Of course, you cannot separate the subject from the filmmaker. A great documentary film will often be able to draw the viewer in to the subject, even if they were initially indifferent.

This documentary left me frustrated. Harlan Ellison, the writer, provides an interesting subject. But ultimately, I thought that this film failed in drawing in a general audience. Sure, Ellison fans or a general science fiction literature fans would eat it up. But I didn’t feel like a general audience is going to get a lot from it.

Aside from several obtuse readings by Ellison himself along with the adoration of a younger generation of peers, I didn’t really get a sense of why his writing was so important and adored.

On several occasions, the filmmakers present an idea before abruptly dropping it. There are titles that inform the audience that Ellison stopped talking to his sister after the death of their parents, a title that suggests his stint in the Army was fraught with difficulty, and a title that suggests that he was quite the ladies man in the 70′s. But then those ideas are abruptly dropped. What happened with his sister? Why was his stint in the Army a difficult one? Who says he was a ladies man, besides himself? Then later on, we get a reading from a Star Trek episode that he wrote. But any footage of the actual episode is not to be seen. Towards the end, his wife is described as the person who makes his demons disappear. The notion that behind every great man is a great woman is introduced. This is just demeaning. All we see of her, in a very brief appearance, is someone who appears to a timid handmaiden. I don’t get that she is a hero for putting up with him–she just seems broken.

Ellison comes off as a self-consciously exhausting curmudgeon. He is like a precocious child performing for the camera. And, at this point, like a precocious child who has grown up, lost much of his youthful adorability, but still demands the attention. He is predictably contrarian…which isn’t all that contrarian at all. He even comes off as a bit of a Luddite–taking incongruous stances against special effects and television.

At least Neil Gaiman, who appears throughout and who turns out to be a more interesting figure in the doc, recognizes it for what it is. It’s a performance. It’s shtick. And that’s fine. The artist can be evaluated apart from his personality. But this documentary, which amounts to little more than a masturbatorial appraisal of the man, did nothing to draw me in to its subject.

Whip It — I really hate when I watch a movie and it starts skipping or freezing up. It’s one thing when it just won’t play. Then you can just move onto something else. It’s another thing when it plays, but only very roughly. I ended up missing only about 5 minutes of this one. Not the end of the world and probably not the most crucial 5 minutes of the film either, but still enough to really bring me out of it on a couple of occasions.

That being said, I still quite liked Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut. A film like this really demonstrates the dearth of decent female-centric movies. It doesn’t come off as a feminist tract. But it also doesn’t try to elevate women to the level of angels. It presents its women as interesting people. It respects both a “girly” notion of femininity and a version that isn’t afraid to let the elbows fly. While it does make roller derby look pretty cool, it also doesn’t fall into the trap of hateful mockery in the beauty pageant segments. As Bliss Cavendar/Babe Ruthless, Ellen Page sincerely embodies this dichotomy.

I love the matter-of-fact way in which we learn that Bliss’s best friend is smart and headed to an Ivy League school. She’s not some brainy pariah. I love that Bliss’s mom (Marcia Gay Harden) enjoys beauty pageants but works as a mail carrier. And while it may be a little on the nose, I like that the roller derby team doesn’t care about winning nearly as much as having fun.

May 3rd – May 9th

The Human Centipede (First Sequence) — Two ditsy American girls on their way to a club in a foreign country get a flat tire on their rental car. It begins to rain. They stumble towards the nearest house to make a phone call. A deranged German scientist answers the door. Things will not turn out okay.

That’s the beginning of a standard horror/slasher plot. When things start getting surgical–when Dr. Heiter creates his monster–is where the movie veers off into new territory. Given the subject matter, the movie is surprisingly restrained and nice to look at.

The film is certainly better than I had expected. It was more than just a shocking, gross-out cinematic challenge. But what it was exactly, I still don’t know. After seeing it, I can totally see where Ebert was coming from when he said in his review:

I am required to award stars to movies I review. This time, I refuse to do it. The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don’t shine.

The Room — Another go at this one. This time for something much lighter than the previous film. While this still continues to be hilariously bad and eminently quotable, I must admit that I’m getting a little sick of it. It’s about time for another movie to make me laugh.

April 19th – April 25th

Good Hair — Chris Rock’s documentary about the hair of African American women. Certainly more compelling than I had expected. I had no idea of the lengths some women go to in order to achieve a particular look with their hair. From relaxer to weaves, black women (and some men) undergo painful and costly treatments to get rid of the kink–to achieve good hair. The documentary only takes a precursory look at the cultural implications of the desire for straighter (“whiter” or “more natural”) hair. I would have liked Rock to delve a little deeper. Instead, we get a little of this and a little of that. Another story arc that doesn’t quite get fleshed out is the Hair Battle Royale performance competition at the Bronner Brothers Hair Show. We are introduced to the contestants who all seem like interesting characters. We see some pre-competition preparation leading up to the Battle Royale itself. It feels like the featured competitors and the competition itself would have made for an interesting documentary all by themselves instead of being clumsily inserted into this one. While it lacks a real focus, I would still certainly recommend this documentary.

Gleaners and I — This is one that I decided to revisit upon last year’s release and critical acclaim surrounding Beaches of Agnes (which I still haven’t seen). This is actually the first and only Agnes Varda film that I’ve seen. On the surface it is a documentary about gleaners (ostensibly those who gather leftover crops), but at its core it is visual poetry. It’s about eking out an existence, about a respect for the land, about coming to terms with aging, and about the importance of art. That a 72-year-old woman can take a DV camera and make something that resonates with such truth and beauty makes my universe so much brighter.

Got another deadCENTER post up. This time revisiting the 2004 festival with Banned in Oklahoma (about the OK ban of The Tin Drum), Farmingville (about a NY town’s experience with day laborers), and Flip (a nostalgic short film).

Check ‘em out over at FilmCentral over at deadCENTER.

Starting today over at the deadCENTER Film site, I’m doing a series of weekly posts in anticipation of the 10th Annual deadCENTER Film Festival. I’m going back and rewatching some of the movies that screened at previous festivals. Some I recall fondly, some I barely got through the first time, and some I just plain missed. Today’s post begins with a look at Sam & Janet, One Thousand Years, and Side Effects from the first deadCENTER I attended back in 2002.

You can find the initial post here.

The 10th Annual deadCENTER Film Festival runs June 9th to June 13th.

April 5th – April 11th

Extract – Mostly underwhelmed with this one. I love, love, love Office Space. It probably gets quoted or referenced at least once a week in our house. And, as they say, Idiocracy is flawed but does have its moments. So, I was looking forward to Mike Judge’s latest. Despite an excellent cast, the film just flops around the factory floor like some gasping fish. There are some moments. David Koechner is annoyingly funny as the persistent neighbor. Ben Affleck’s druggie bartender was a pleasant respite. And Mila Kunis’ con-woman story had some potential. But in the end, a few laughs here and there don’t add up to a whole hell of a lot.

The Thing From Another World – The sixth and final installment of our Sci-Fi Horror Marathon. This one from 1951. A familiar premise that can be seen throughout the horror genre. A group of people take refuge from a monster-creature in an outpost of some type. In this case, a group of military men, scientists, and a newspaper man take refuge in an arctic outpost from an extraterrestrial “carrot-like” monster. The horror is less about the monster and more about the fear of being trapped and of the unknown intruder and the dark and mysterious outside.

While working my way through the first season of The X-Files which just showed up on Netflix Instant Viewing, I ended up watching the “Ice” episode right after The Thing From Another World. That episode featured Mulder and Scully (along with a couple of scientists and a pilot) trapped in an outpost in Alaska desperately trying to survive a potentially extraterrestrial intruder. The Thing certainly lives on.

March 22nd – March 28th

The Tin Drum — My expectations about this movie were way off. Or course I was aware that there were certain scenes which had been determined obscene my some. But it wasn’t those scenes, or any sort of unanticipated moral shock, that contradicted my expectations. I was simply anticipating both an older and duller film. Grainy black & white images out of some boring old war movie occupied the space in my brain reserved for The Tin Drum.

So I was genuinely surprised to see that it was made in 1979 and in color. And watching it, I was further surprised by how much humor it contained. Still, I thought of both Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke while watching this. The former for the loads of potential symbolism that maybe don’t add up to too much and the latter for the notion that evil clearly resides in children. But those are unfair parallels. I haven’t seen nearly enough of either to be able to say anything definitive about their work, nor have I read the Gunter Grass novel upon which this movie is based.

I’m not sure what I think. Better than expected, to be sure. Not worth banning, of course. And I can certainly say that it has piqued my interest in reading the original novel.

Whatever Works – Woody Allen’s most recent film, starring Larry David but originally written in the 1970s for Zero Mostel. This first half is a bit Curb-y, with David doing that misanthropic thing he does so well. It’s okay but you wonder why not just watch Curb Your Enthusiasm instead. And the radiant Evan Rachel Wood is just annoying as the stupid girl from Mississippi. But as the rest of the cast comes into the film–Patricia Clarkson, Ed Begley Jr., Jessica Hecht–it turns into something stronger. Unfortunately, it’s too little too late. Not enough to save the clunky beginning.

The Brother From Another Planet – Now this was a gem of a find–a movie I had frankly never heard of. It ended up on our Netflix Instant Viewing queue based on the title and cover art and the desire for a silly 80′s sci-fi movie. Turns out, this movie from 1984 was written and directed by John Sayles. And to further demonstrate my cinematic ignorance of the Godfather of Bootstrap Cinema, I had no idea the lengths Sayles has gone to finance his own movies. I had no idea that he wrote the 1978 film Piranha nor that his pen played a part in the scripts for Mimic, Apollo 13, and even an apparently ditched take on Jurassic Park IV.

Funded by a MacArthur Fellowship genius grant, The Brother From Another Planet stars Joe Morton (who would later go on to invent the neural net processor in Terminator 2 that led to Skynet) as a mute alien slave who appears on Earth as a black man. He is chased around Harlem by two alien Men in Black, played by Sayles and David Strathairn. This is not big budget sci-fi extravaganza. Instead, it is a more restrained take on the stranger in a strange land trope. An alien creature, who mostly looks like a black human, crash lands near Ellis Island and must navigate the streets of Harlem. It pretty much writes itself. Good stuff.

Zombieland — While not nearly as good as Shaun of the Dead, I still had a lot of fun with this zombie comedy. The integration of The Rules into the movie’s world was a clever touch. Sure, the movie plays a little video game-y. Perhaps an emotional attachment to the characters is lacking, but video games don’t need emotional ties to still be fun.

March 15th – March 21st

Coraline — The special effects were good, but they didn’t blow my mind. The stop-motion stuff wasn’t nearly as delicious as what Wes Anderson did with it in Fantastic Mr. Fox. It wasn’t as loved and lived in. And some of the CG effects just didn’t seem to mesh naturally with the more tactile stop-mo stuff. Good, but not special. The story was creepier than I expected. I think it would be scary for young children. And despite getting a little muddled at times and turning towards video game territory in the latter parts, it was still a refreshingly smart and interesting tale.

Phase IV – Last summer, we caught Brian Hearn’s live remix of this Saul Bass sci-fi film. That one was called Phase V and featured live actors dubbing new lines over an edited version of the film. I hadn’t seen the original work to that point. But I really enjoyed the remix. Well, now I’ve finally seen the inspiration which features some nicely filmed close-ups of ants. Unlike Them!, the other ant movie which I saw last week, these are real ants and aren’t shot to look bigger. Their size isn’t what is scary, it’s the evolving hive mentality that they develop which turns homicidal. The movie is a bit slow and veers off into 70′s sci-fi trippyland too much. But it’s still worth watching, if only for the fact that it’s the only feature that Bass directed. It also features an image that appears to be a direct homage to the Luis Bunuel/Salvador Dali short Un Chien Andalou (see below).

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) — Number five in our Sci-Fi Horror Marathon. Before this one and Them! last week, I expected the sci-fi horror of the 1950s to be nothing more than drive-in fluff. I was expecting mindless creature features, but in both of these I’m finding something more profound. In Body Snatchers particularly, it is science fiction that entertains with rising tension and thrills but also comments on the concerns of the times. It does not spell anything out and can be read in different ways, but fear (intentional or not) clearly transcends. I’m curious about the 1978 and 1993 remakes, but also a little wary. I really liked this one a bunch.

Aguirre, Wrath of God – Okay, I’m now officially a card-carrying member of The Church of Werner Herzog. After hearing his voice work in Ramin Bahrani’s Plastic Bag short last week and reading up Herzog in the AV Club, I had a Herzog itch. Plus, I needed to see what this Klaus Kinski was all about. I was not disappointed. Herzog, in five minutes, shows more passion and competency in filmmaking than many directors will demonstrate in their entire careers. And a crazed Kinski is quite definitely compelling in his own right. Kinski’s performance, the location shooting in the Peruvian rainforests and rivers, and Herzog’s direction add up to a truly gritty and dirty production. Herzog brilliantly immerses the viewer in the location. Watching this movie practically invites swatting away Amazonian insects from the comfort of your own couch.

That this movie was made with a stolen camera and stolen monkeys; that the dialogue was delivered in English, dubbed in German, to stand in for Spanish; that it has inspired cinematic legend (namely Kinski acting at Herzog’s gunpoint) and influenced Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Malick’s The New World–these all demonstrate the true brilliance of its maker. Keeping on the Herzog/Kinski track, I’m going to attempt a Fitzcarraldo, Burden of Dreams, My Best Fiend triple-feature sometime very soon.

Un Chien Andalou – For some reason, it has taken me this long to get around to this one. It is, of course, the eye cutting scene that initially brought me to the movie. And having seen it, I’m just kind of shocked that it’s such a tiny piece of the film, albeit a very good shot. This Surrealist filmmaking is fun to watch, but admittedly leaves me a bit confused. I know that’s part of the point. But, I needs me some narrative, yo. Still, it was pretty damn cool noticing a shot in this one that was mimicked in Saul Bass’s Phase IV which we had just seen. The shots in question involved people with ants crawling out a hole in their hand. There is a shot in this one…and a roughly identical one in Phase IV. I assumed some Freudian connotation–of death or destruction, vaginal. But maybe Dali just really likes ants and Bass really likes Bunuel and Dali. Nevertheless, the unexpectedness of catching Bass quoting Bunuel and Dali quoting Dali was pretty cool.

Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist – Not a great teen comedy (very few are), but a pretty good one. For me, it was special for breaking out of the mold and introducing some new things to the genre, especially the gay guy friends (who aren’t there just to be made fun of) and the sex scene (which seemed to be all about getting her off). The fact that the leads are Michael Cera and Kat Dennings sort of instantly subverts the genre. Although at this point, neither Cera or Dennings can be described as weird or off-beat, they are the popular kids now.

Pineapple Express – James Franco is the man. We can all agree on that. Now I wonder if he can edit. Because that’s exactly what this movie needed. Like Apatow’s Funny People it was overly long. A tighter movie would have been better for everyone. In several sequences, I found myself wondering why I was getting bored in a movie full of gags and chase scenes. It’s time for this Apatow family of players to find someone who has the ability to reign them in on occasion.