FilmFemme

A while back I wrote a serious review of Last Chance Harvey that may as well have been “Last Chance Gillian” because I sent it to this website (which will remain nameless) for a chance to write movie reviews for them, but I never got to.  There was no money in it, so I’m only bitter that they didn’t even bother getting back to me.  I never got around to posting the review here probably because I secretly hoped I would still hear from them.  This was in January.  Anyway, I’m not going to bother with the links as this backstory has already annoyed me enough.  But here’s the review.  It’s pretty fucking insightful and totally deserving of no money, I think:

The 2008 awards season is now in its death throes, being as it’s 2009, but it still seems prudent to make some generalizations about what seems to be the most compelling fodder for “good” films last year.  One central theme that doesn’t seem to be getting old is the single, aging man, searching for something to bring meaning to his life as he starts to see his own mortality on the horizon.  The most obvious instance this year, of course, is Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, but the same elements weave themselves through Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and even arguably both of Kate Winslet’sshowcase pieces The Reader and Revolutionary Road.  Though it has garnered fewer accolades than most of these films, Joel Hopkins’ Last Chance Harvey, which went into wide release January 16th, is deserving of a spot on this landscape.

Dustin Hoffman, an actor that is probably no longer concerned about his own legacy (though  he may cringe a little at Mr. Magorium’sWonder Emporium), plays Harvey Shine, a failed jazz pianist and commercial jingle writer who travels to London for his daughter’s wedding.  Struggling to find meaning in his work and out of place in the wedding party, things are bad enough when his daughter, Suzy (Liane Balaban), tells him that she wants her stepfather, the improbably tan and impossibly charming Brian (an improbably tan and perfectly charming James Brolin) to give her away.  Harvey attends the wedding, smile pasted on, then dashes off to Heathrow to get back to New York in time for a meeting.  Meanwhile, Emma Thompson as single and cynical but charming Kate Walker is caring for her neurotic mother, being set up on blind dates by her co-workers and dreaming of a career as a novelist.  Naturally, they meet at the airport and despite Kate’s reluctance, the pair strike up the only kind of friendship that movies need: unlikely.  Immediately, there is a palpable realism about their interactions.  It isn’t the electric but ultimately fleeting sparks of a storybook romance.  Instead it is an understanding, laced with skepticism.  An instant trust underlined with pragmatism.  In short, something akin to real life.

Hopkins, whose only credits are a short entitled Jorge and a lauded but little seen feature called Jump Tomorrow (which appears to be based on Jorge), ambitiously wrote Last Chance Harvey with Hoffman and Thompson in mind.  The fact that they both agreed to be a part of the project speaks volumes about the strength of the script.  Both Harvey and Kate are the kind of sympathetic and well-developed characters that any actor surely longs to play.  Hopkins’ choices as a director are simple and effective.  As the pair stroll the streets of London, he lets the scenery and his impeccable actors tell his poignant story without interference. Hoffman especially makes easy work of defining himself as Harvey.  It takes only a few words and movements to establish the complex relationships that exist between himself and his daughter and his ex-wife (Kathy Baker).  As much as any of this year’s awards fodder, Last Chance Harvey is a simple story of redemption.  Admittedly, significant portions of the film are not comfortable to watch because Harvey is enduring an awkward struggle, but like his character, the film redeems itself with the one thing that no one seems to be able to resist right now: hope.

Raise your hand if you kind of have a big ol’ crush on Sam Rockwell!  Me!  Me!  I do!  Looking back over his filmography it was probably the underrated Matchstick Men where I first really saw him and it was definitely last year’s Choke that sent me over the edge to full-fleged crush status.  He was even a charming relief in the mostly mediocre Frost/Nixon.  He manages to convey an attitude that straddles a line between self-deprecating and entierly arrogant.  He frequently seems tired and overwhelmed, like it’s just been so much work getting to where he is that maybe he needs to sit down for a minute.  He’s always  little bit dirty.  And his new vehicle Moon let me in on another secret: he has a hot ass.  I’m not one of those girls that’s always like “Ooh, look at that guy’s ass!”  For the most part, I could give a shit.  But I’ll be damned if his ass didn’t look really good in those space jumpsuits.

All of this is to say that if you swoon at the sight of quirky indie bad boy Sam Rockwell like I do, you will probably find Moon to be wholly watchable.  If you are ambivalent or hold any negative feelings towards him, well, you might not.

The year is…sometime in the not so distant future.  Sam Bell (Rockwell) is working alone on the Moon, seemingly mining resources for use as energy back on earth.  He spends his days in the station with no companionship besides intermittent video messages from the company for whom he works and his wife and daughter and a space computer voiced by Kevin Spacey.  As the film begins he is nearing the end of his 3 year contract and preparing to return home to earth.  Unfortunately, something goes awry and when he returns to the ship after crashing his moon-mobile (I’m certain there is a more technical term for this) he finds himself face to face with a hotter, meaner, better groomed version of himself.  At first it’s impossible to tell if this is real or if so much time alone in space with KevinSpaceyComputer has caused him to go insane.  We quickly realize that the former is true and the two Sam Bell’s have to both figure out why there are two of them and how they will get back to earth unharmed.

The premise of Moon treads familiar science fiction ground and while it is an intrinsically interesting idea, something is missing in its execution.  The pacing of the film is uneven: it’s slow to get started then throws a lot of information at you, rapid fire.  Combined with direction that is passable at best and characterization that never goes quite as deep as I wanted it to left Moon without the stakes that it needed to be a really good movie.  By the end, I was still interested but the amount that I actually cared about the outcome was slim to none.  It also suffered from overscoring which is admittedly a pet peeve of mine but makes it that much easier to dismiss dramatic events with a frustrated eye-roll. 

I enjoyed watching Moon, but it’s the kind of movie that you’re not going to keep thinking about when it’s over…unless you see it on Netflix and wonder “why wasn’t that movie better”*

*or, “Sam Rockwell has a hot ass”

I was just lamenting the other day that I really don’t get to do enough drunk blogging anymore because I don’t really have the internet at my house.  But really that just stops me from drunk *posting* not drunk blogging.  So, the original intent of the Drunk Reviews tag was to both watch and review the movie while I was drunk I am going to make an exception tonight.  Because I am drunk and I already have 3 movies that I watched and need to blog about.  So at least one of them will be a drunk blog.  Holy shit that was wayyyy too much explanation.

On Sunday I was supposed to see that movie about Nazi zombies (does anyone else have trouble reaching the “z” on the keyboard?  It’s very uncomfortable) but instead I saw Up.  I really don’t like the title of this movie.  I want it to have an exclamation point or, something.  Another word, I guess.  The Fantastic Adventures of a Clinically Depressed Elderly Man and a Racially Ambiguous Child who Lacks a Father Figure might be good.  A little wordy, though.

I wasn’t head over heels for Up, but it is recognizably well done.  The animation specifically is very impressive.  Sure, the story (is it an allegory?  I’m going to have to google that) is charming in a Pixar-y way.  It’s impossible not to cheer on the protagonists, Carl and Russel, who are both adorable and earnest in their own ways.  The thing about the absent father I feel like has been Done to Death.  Sure it’s a problem that plagues America (I don’t even know if this is true, but I’m sure it must suck when this happens) but you can bet your sweet ass (WTF, why did I just say that?) that someone would have been up in arms if the kid (Russell) with an absent father had been African-American.  I mean, right?  Because then it would have been saying something about the irresponsibility of black men towards their children like that one time that Bill Cosby told black people to stop spending their money on sneakers.  Did my blog just suddenly get controversial?  Anyway, that just kind of annoyed me.  The missing dad part, not black people.  I actually don’t remember seeing any black characters in this movie, except at the very end.

What I did like was the really dumb talking Golden Retriever named Doug.  He was funny, even if his schtick got a little old.  I used to have a Golden Retriever.  She was really sweet but dumber than a brick.  Poor Claudia.

I was also kind of offput by how much littering happened in this movie, especially considering that WALL-E, Pixar’s last offering, was basically 90 minutes of “Don’t Litter” propaganda.  Russell and Carl go to the remote jungle, the whole point of it being that it is remote and secluded and “a land lost to time” and they just leave all kinds of shit everywhere.  They unload a whole house full of furniture right there on the jungle floor, they release all kinds of balloons into the atmosphere (also, come on guys, BALLOONS CAN’T LIFT A HOUSE!) and eventually (SPOILER!) they just leave a whole fucking house!  Right there at the top of a waterfall!  Maybe most kids aren’t going to take away any messages about littering in the rainforest from this movie, but it just seemed kind of weird to me.  Yes, this is actually something I thought about while watching Up.  No, I am not a dirty hippy.  It’s just weird, right?

Hola, amigos. What up? I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya, but I got real busy re-reading all the Jim Anchower columns over at the Onion.  Then I smoked a huge bowl and two weeks later, here we are with a much delayed review of Star Trek.  I might catch a lot of flack for never having seen any other Star Trek movie (including Wrath of Khan) but I did spend quite a few of my precious childhood hours watching Next Generation reruns with my dad.  I had a huge crush on Data.  I guess not that much has changed since I’m still mainly attracted to guys who are completely emotionally unavailable. 

But regardless of my lack of Trek-exposure, I really enjoyed JJ Abrams’ reworking of the original characters.  Firstly I’d like to go on record saying that “Star Trek is a sexy Sci Fi romp through space and time!” you know, in case anyone wants to quote me on that.  Because damn, there was a lot of hotness in this cast.  I know that Chris Pine’s Kirk was probably meant to take the sexy cake (mm, sexy cake) but I’ll be damned if I didn’t think Spock (Zachary Quinto, who is apparently on some TV show about heros or something, whatever, who watches TV anyway?) was way hotter.  Sure, Kirk’s bad boy, devil-may-care attitude is certainly attractive, but something about the vaguely adrongynous, definitively logical and very well groomed Spock was just HOT.

The plot of the movie doesn’t reinvent any SciFi standards: there are black holes and some time travel and some evil alien race is out to destroy earth.  Kirk & co are brand new recruits and have to band together and overcome their differences (which are many!) and tangled romances (Vulcans make out?  That’s weird) and language barriers (Ok, Charlie Bartlett, we get it, you practiced really hard with a dialect coach) and bumblingness (aw, there you are Shaun of the Dead!) in order to defeat The Hulk.  Yeah, I think I summed it up OK.

I liked all the parts where Kirk was being charming and Spock was being logical and Harold was being kind of chivalrous and cute.  I didn’t like Bones…he seemed like he was trying too hard to be deadpan and it left me uncomfortable (though he was also extremely attractive, so, um, wasn’t so bad).  I also wasn’t a huge fan of Uhura (Zoe Saldana) but I think that probably had more to do with her character who was kind of that stock goody two-shoes chick who refuses to be seduced which is something I don’t really identify with than it did with the actress.

There was also a part where Kirk ends up on a snow planet where I kind of fell asleep for a few minutes.  All that white, I don’t know.  But in general I thought that Star Trek was a really swell summer movie that was fast paced, funny at times and just all around fun, you know?  I like that in a movie.

If you’ve been to the movies in the past year, I can almost guarantee that you saw this trailer at least once. I happened to see it about 12 times (I wish I were exaggerating) and it got to the point where if I heard Jamie Foxx say “I’ve had a few setbacks” and cue the sad cello chord one more time I was seriously going to flip.  But, The Soloist was finally released and after indulging in The Informers (RIP Brad Renfro) and Earth (RIP Elephant) I went to see it.  And it sucked.  I’m going to go out on a limb and guess this is why the release date was pushed back a thousand times and the studio decided not to use it as the Oscar bait that it was so clearly intended to be.

Robert Downey, Jr. plays LATimes columnist Steve Lopez (Lopez? really?), an immature and self-involved guy who is divorced from his editor wife (Catherine Keener) and was recently in a sort of heinous bike crash.  Still scraped and bruised, he meets Nathanial Ayers (Jamie Foxx) in downtown LA, playing the violin.  He finds out that Nathanial studied at Julliard and makes it his mission to help him through a series of front page columns and, you know, hanging out.  Some heavy handed flashbacks provide us with Nathanial’s backstory — turns out the talented musician is schizophrenic and had a mental break down at Julliard, then ran away from home many years before due to his persecutory delusions. 

On the surface, this movie has all the elements of a tear/Academy-jerking drama: two powerhouse stars (who already have Oscars), based on a true story, deals with mental illness and the triumph of the fucking human spirit.  The problem is that it is all on the surface.  Sure, Foxx and Downey give strong performances, they’re good actors.  Robert Downey, Jr. could give a good performance as a bowl of shredded wheat (don’t steal that idea, I’m going to pitch it to Disney/Pixar).  But the whole story is so superficial.  The flashbacks are boring and obvious.  The snippets of Lopez’s failed relationship, including 2 or 3 instances where his ex begs him to call their son with no payoff, are flat and not compelling.  The scene where the unlikely friends go to see the LA Philharmonic at Disney Hall and Nathanial is so swept away by the music that the screen goes black and starts display flashes of color that seriously, literally, look exacty like my MacBook’s default screensaver is just…lame.  I never felt compelled to care about what happens to Nathanial or Steve.  Oh, are they going to learn lessons from each other?  Oh, weird.  Are they both going to be better people for having met?  Oh, wow, that’s great.  Is anything going to explode?  Am I going to care at all?  Oh, yeah, no.  The Soloist is the definition of formulaic and boring.  I will say with enthusiasm that your time is better spent listening to Jamie Foxx’s album.  Have you heard that song “Blame it on the A A A A A Alcohol”?  It’s way more compelling than this movie!

Well, it seems like I’ve been wasting my time. All along I should have been using The Dictionary Test to rate movies. Not sure how this translates to female anatomy, but I’m willing to run some tests.

I liked Jesse Eisenberg when I first saw him in Roger Dodger all those years ago — his pent up sexual energy oozing out among cougar sexpots Jennifer Beals and Elizabeth Berkeley.  I loved him in The Squid and the Whale – his arrogance hiding his pain and confusion, and still more pent up sexual energy.  Though he seems to have bulked up a little bit he doesn’t seem to have aged a day in the last 5 years and not surprisignly, I liked him in Adventureland, a quirky, romantic, angsty “quarterlife” drama that is at times riotously funny in its wacky antics and at times almost tragic in its realism.  Oh, and there is plenty of pent up sexual energy.

Eisenberg plays James Brennan who comes home to live with his parents after he graduates from Oberlin.  With a liberal arts degree (hey, I’ve got one of those!) he find himself either under or overqualified for anything that might resemble gainful employment and ends up getting a job at the local eponymous carnival.  Rather than zany, the cast of characters James encounters at Adventureland are for the most part morose and malcontent.  He quickly befriends his coworker, Joel (Martin Starr) who has a degree in Russian literature and develops an immediate crush on Em (Kristin Stewart), a beutiful, sharp and troubled NYU student who took a job at the carnival to escape a tumultuous home life. 

Upon reflection, these characters are easy to peg, but the way the story develops wasn’t what I expected and I found it moving in a way that the vast majority of movies, whether they are meant to target me as a demographic, are not.  The summer progresses typically, the carnys (sp?) falling in and out of love, drinking excessively, smoking a lot of marijuana and generally just trying to figure out life.  Oh god, I think I have been pandered to.

SNL’s Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig are hilarious as the couple that runs the carnival.  Their straightfaced enthusiasm and confusion is priceless.  Martin Starr, who was unknown to me before, was also notable in his performance as the geeky but sweet friend and Matt Bush as the asshole friend leftover from grade school was iconically funny.  If this movie were to see the same kind of success as something like Napoleon Dynamite (I’m sure it won’t, though I would be shocked to learn the comparison wasn’t tossed around at any point) then it would be Bush’s ball punching, sweatband wearing Tommy Frigo that people would undoubtedly latch on to.

I was planning on including a paragraph here about how the female characters were all somewhat detestable, but that really wasn’t the case, I think I just want it to be.  Actually, Em is probably the most complex character in the film and even though she does make poor choices and behave irrationally at moments, that is easily attributable to the fact that she is human, not that she is a woman.  This can often be a problem with feminist theorizing: it can backfire and have you (me) end up demonizing women instead of…you know, not doing that which is the whole point.

There were points where I felt like Adventureland was trying a little too hard and the peripheral characters were a little cliche, from Ryan Reynolds’ philandering maintenance man to Lisa P, the super-hot chick who is also super-Christian but there was something truthful and flawed about the way that James and Em negotiate their summer and each other that is touching and sweet.   The poster and the trailer are very misleading — this isn’t a zany summer stoner comedy, though there are moments of that.  It’s much more angsty and dark than that, but that’s a good thing.

AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!

I am so excited to see EARTH.  Yay!  Parade of cuteness!  Narrated by Patrick Stewart! Darth Vader! (more…)

This is a long delayed posting of a much underseen film that did not get the recognition I believe it deserved during awards season.  As a matter of fact, look back over its awards history, I am really saddened that writer /director Courtney Hunt went unrecognized in all of the big competitions.  But I am getting ahead of myself.

Frozen River is a dreary and cold movie (I feel like I’ve described this before…) about a middle-aged woman named Ray (Melissa Leo) who finds herself alone raising two sons in the unforgiving and desperate winter of upstate New York.  Her husband has abandoned them and taken the last of their savings that was supposed to go towards payment on their new doublewide.  With something that doesn’t so much qualify as inner strength as it does what any underemployed single mother must do to get through the day, Ray ventures out to find her husband, but all that’s left of him in town is his car.  In pursuit of the vehicle, Ray meets a young Native American woman named Lila (Misty Upham) who had taken the car to be abandoned and insists that she will buy it because she knows someone who is always looking for cars with button release trunks.  Though Ray flatly refuses to sell the car, she does agree to go on a smuggling mission with Lila across the Canadian border.  Though dangerous, the money is too good to pass up and Ray and Lila form a tentative partnership smuggling illegals, mostly of East-Asian descent across the Canadian border into New York.  They work together begrudgingly but the risks are outweighed by the rewards: for Ray, the new doublewide on the horizon and for Lila, money to give to her mother-in-law, who has forcibly taken her infant son to raise. (more…)

Michael Cera plays a lovably baffled and recently heartbroken indie rock aficionado who, along with band of merry very gay boys meets Kat Dennings while on an unsupervised jaunt to Manhattan to track down their favorite band, “Where’s Fluffy?” They fall in love while trying to find her drunk friend (a charming and adorable  Ari Graynor) who ran off.

They fall in love and he gives her  her first orgasm on a couch.

WTF?

Ok, but at the very least, surely this shockingly blunt,  poorly acted, practically humorless teenage rom/com had some lessons thrown in there somewhere.  Let’s have a look.

Lessons Learned

1. It is A-OK to get completely shitfaced in NYC, barf in the Port Authority bathroom, and make out with strangers.  As a matter of fact, it is completely necessary if you want your best friend to fall in love.
2. It is A-OK to just drive away while your slutty ex-girlfriend does a striptease for you by the East River, leaving her stranded.
3. It is unacceptable to not have had an orgasm by the age of 17 if you are a female.  Everyone will know about it and publicly (pubicly?) shame you.
4. It is really easy to get cameos from John Cho, Andy Samberg, Seth Myers, Devendra Banhart and Bishop Allen for your movie no matter how much it sucks.  Filmmakers take note.
5. “Finger bang” is the unanimously preferred parlance for what Michael Cera does to Kat Dennings at the end.
6. Teenagers today have no parents.