“If I were God, I would have made the world just so and no different. And so I have you . . . I have you.” — Viggo Mortensen as The Man in The Road (2009).
Yes, I’m still trying to catch up with my backlogged cache of rental DVD reviews. The good news is, I really am catching up. The following ten reviews are of movies I’ve actually watched during the last four months. The even better news is, there are many more reviews to come!
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Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans (2008) What an apt title, Bad Lieutenant. Because it’s about a police lieutenant, see, and he’s really really bad! Comic book bad! And I mean that literally . . . as Nicolas Cage’s character sinks deeper into evil, his back becomes progressively more hunched, his hair gets reddish, and his face turns into this distorted Joker-like mask. And just when everything turns to shit and the lieutenant’s about to reap what he has sown, all his enemies are vanquished, his life and career take a 180-degree turn, and he’s the golden boy of the New Orleans Police Department! But he’s still bad, see? I truly didn’t get it until the credits rolled at the end and I saw that it was a Werner Herzog film. It’s a German joke. Or a joke told by a German: dunkle und grau, sehr metaphysische. I can almost hear Werner saying “Ja, you may now touch my monkey.” |
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Inglourious Basterds (2009) First, I have to say this movie was much better than I thought it would be. I expected something on the order of the Grindhouse movies — good but crude — but Inglourious Basterds turned out to be a highly polished, well plotted, even stylish production. But there’s something wrong with Tarantino’s moral compass. To present Hitler and the Nazis as mere movie monsters, and to treat the Holocaust as if it were a fairytale evil like zombie wars or the giant scorpions of Clash of the Titans . . . as Aldo Raine would say, it ain’t right. It just ain’t right. Nazism isn’t Pulp Fiction, and the attempted extermination of the Jews isn’t Kill Bill. Inglourious Basterds trivializes one of the greatest evils committed by mankind, and yes, I am offended. |
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Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) I’ve read only one Roald Dahl book, James and the Giant Peach, so I don’t have a feel for his work and can’t say whether this movie captures Dahl’s story. I have, on the other hand, watched all of Wes Anderson’s movies, and can absolutely say Fantastic Mr. Fox is unmistakenly a Wes Anderson movie. It’s clever, wry, sophisticated, and innocently charming, and you can’t help falling in love with the stop-action characters. How I wish Wes Anderson would tackle The Wind in the Willows. What an epic that would be! |
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Moscow, Belgium (2008) What a refreshing change. An adult romance, as opposed to the typically childish Hollywood product we’ve all come to expect. The script is minimal, as is the action, but the actors deliver and you’re quickly drawn into the story. I was reminded a bit of Vicky Christina Barcelona, and Woody Allen’s famous observation that “the heart wants what it wants.” Indeed. |
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The Burning Plain (2008) Slightly confusing at first because the movie jumps from locale to locale and from present to past and back again. Plus I was all like, what’s with all the sex — is everybody screwing everybody in this damn movie? After I figured out what was going on with the flashbacks and flash-forwards, I realized it was really only a few people doing all the screwing . . . but they sure do a lot of it. Once that clicked, the movie came into focus as a story about a messed up woman, a role Charlize Theron plays often. She’s also a woman with a deep dark secret, which you see coming maybe not a mile but certainly several hundred yards away, and frankly, it’s kinda hard to have much sympathy for her after that. It isn’t that great a story, but it’s interestingly told. |
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The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009) At first I had a hell of a time physically telling the difference between two main female characters, Pippa in the present and Pippa’s mother in the past, with the result that I couldn’t easily follow jumps from present to past and back again. Then, an hour into the film, I realized I no longer cared about Pippa, an overindulged drug-addled woman of privilege with the kinds of problems your average working mother would kill to have. And you know what was really interesting? My wife had the same reaction, and actually gave up on this silly movie five minutes before I did. |
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Pirate Radio (2009) I give it three stars because my wife and I took pleasure from watching it. It’s an exuberant movie with good actors and great music. But there’s not much of a story here, more of a five-minute idea booted around for two hours, like those Saturday Night Live skits they keep insisting on turning into movies. Still. We were young Americans living in Germany from 1965 to 1967, devoted listeners of Radio Luxemborg and Radio Caroline (along with everyone else in Europe and the UK). As a nostalgia-fest for aging hippies, Pirate Radio rocks! As a movie with anything important to say, meh. Oh (and I hope this isn’t a spoiler), the ship didn’t sink until 1980, not 1967 as depicted in the movie. |
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Rain Fall (2009) We tried to get through Rain Fall but failed. We could not endure the suck. From Rain’s one-expression face (a sort of Clint Eastwood stink-eye squint) to Gary Oldman’s second-rate Tommy Lee Jones impression (standing around in a command post screaming at everybody) to the remaining cast of Japanese actors who clearly don’t give a shit and are merely going through the motions, this movie imploded so quickly it generated a miniature black hole in our living room. A thoroughly unpleasant experience. When it comes back as a midnight feature on a future version of Mystery Science Theater 3000, with Joel, Crow, and Tom Servo cracking wise in the foreground, it’ll probably become a cult classic. |
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Peacock (2010) A Psycho-esque drama set in a small Nebraska town in the 70s. Apparently this film had a very limited theatrical release; I certainly had never heard of it. There are some surprising actors here, including Bill Pullman, Ellen Page, and Susan Sarandon, but Cillian Murphy steals the show as John and Emma. I really liked it that John didn’t seem to know he was also Emma, but loved it that Emma came to realize what was really going on and got a sort of crazy grip on the whole situation. And if you’re like me, you’re going to spend most of the movie sitting on the edge of your seat, waiting for John or Emma to open a door and reveal the corpse of John’s mother. Oh, and look for the crazy clown. I just know it’s all because of the crazy clown! Well worth watching — there are some subtle surprises here. |
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The Road (2009) Well, this is one stripped-to-the-basics story. Quite faithful to Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name, the film follows a father and son as they trek south through a devastated country in which nothing lives, save predatory humans and their human prey. Why would anyone want to read or watch such depressing, hopeless stuff? Because we are fascinated by what may come, and take some delight in imagining the worst, I guess. And I’m being slightly unfair . . . there’s a faint glimmer of hope at the end. No, I don’t mean the “good ones” who find the boy after his father dies . . . I mean the dog. There’s at least one living dog. That is the only smile in the whole movie. Sorry about the spoilers, but you probably already read the book, and I know you’ll want to see the movie too. |