10.25.07
Posted in drama, reviews at 5:11 pm by FilmFemme
I feel like it’s my duty to review Rails & Ties as soon as possible so that no one sees a poster or trailer and thinks to themselves “Oh, I bet that Clint Eastwood’s daughter can make a decent movie with Kevin Bacon and Marcia Gay Harden. Besides, she seemed so charming and talented in that L.A. Times puff piece that was obviously done because someone lost a bet to her dad.” I should have noticed the most telling part of the profile wherein Clint Eastwood divorces himself from any responsibility for the movie, saying: ”The only thing I’m responsible for is the siring.” Let’s hope so, Clint, because this movie was awful.
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10.24.07
Posted in drama, reviews at 5:16 pm by FilmFemme
I’ve been meaning to see Proof for a while because way back in the day I saw the play on Broadway (starring Jennifer Jason Leigh) and I remember liking it. Of course I could have been blinded by the glamour of seeing a play/celebrity on Broadway since I was like 17 at the time. Anyway.
Anthony Hopkins is a superfamous mathematician who just died of an aneurysm, though he had been battling severe mental illness (they don’t give the DSM-IVTR code, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it was schizophrenia) for the last 5 years. Gwyneth Paltrow is his youngest daughter who is also into math but dropped out of school to take care of her dad when his illness got worse. Now he’s dead and she’s worried that she is going crazy and to top it all off, Jake Gyllenhaal is in her house (he’s a former student of her dad’s) going through her dad’s old stuff and totally trying to get with her!
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10.22.07
Posted in foreign, double feature, classic, reviews at 2:07 pm by FilmFemme
La Piscine: En francais. Nudité. Sexe. Meurtre. Alain Delon. Amusement pour la famille entière.
Joy House: In English. More Alain Delon. Jane Fonda is crazy and super horny. Some seriously funny parts.
Jane Fonda to Alain Delon: I like you cause you’re poor! I’m poor too!
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Posted in misogyny, opinion, comedy, drama, reviews at 11:39 am by FilmFemme
So, it might be a tiny bit of a stretch to connect this LA Times article by my new favorite person Carina Chocano to my recent viewing of Shopgirl, since it’s not a comedy and does center around a woman, but the article really forced me to reconsider my feelings about the movie. I watched Shopgirl yesterday and I thought it was so charming. And it made me feel really lonely and almost desperate. You know, in a good way.
Then I read this article, which (READ IT!) articulates in a public forum what I’ve been talking about for a long time (oh yeah, I’m totally OG on the oppression of women and how Hollywood perpetuates it…um, not so much). Chocano’s driving question (thesis? no thanks) is basically: WTF happened to good female comedic characters? Shopgirl isn’t a comedy (though there are some really funny parts [”It’s a mint.”]) but there is still this undercurrent, when I look back on it, of Claire Dane’s Mirabelle (something about that name is so fake - and not in a whimsical way, in a way that it was so clearly invented by a man…) being kind of worthless. She is the titular ’shopgirl’ who literally stands at a counter waiting for life to happen to her. It does, in the form of Jason Schwartzman’s Jeremy who she meets at a laundromat (I’m clearly going to the wrong laundromats, because there are never cute hipster boys when I go - just fat women washing sheets and little kids running around screaming) and later Steve Martin’s Ray. Sure, she’s ‘an artist’ and she’s ‘depressed’ and she ‘has a cat’ and I guess the point is that at the end she *does* do something, but it happens so easily that it’s hard to connect her invisible struggle (her depression manifests itself only in laying in bed for a few days when she goes off her meds) with her ultimate success. It doesn’t feel triumphant, it feels just like her chance encounters with either of the guys that form a tenuous ‘love triangle’ with her - lucky. In retrospect (I will heartily admit that I am still smitten with this movie) it is so obvious that this story was written by a man.
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Posted in comedy, drama, action, reviews at 10:16 am by FilmFemme
My favorite parts of The Matador were the intertitles. That’s not to say that it wasn’t a totally decent movie, but I just really liked the titles! They were just big block letters in bright colors over dim cityscapes that said MANILA or MEXICO CITY and I thought they were really hot. I like the poster too. So slick!
Basically this movie is about how Pierce Brosnan is awesome and hot. He’s a hitman who meets the down on his luck Greg Kinnear at a hotel bar in Mexico City where the pair become unlikely friends. Brosnan’s guarded and sociopathic Julian decides to reveal himself and his secrets to the depressed, broke-with-a-dead-kid Danny (Kinnear) and they bond at a bullfight. Months or a year later, they meet again when Julian shows up at Danny’s home in Colorado asking for help with one last hit.
The movie is a little uneven - I felt like it took a while to get started and I wished I had seen more of Julian as a successful, calculating, sexcrazed hitman and less of him ‘losing his touch.’ Stylisitically, I really liked it. I thought PB was sort of brilliant and incredibly sexy. Kinnear reminded me way too much of my old roommate but was generally good at being kind of sniveling and desperate and sad (much like his character in Feast of Love - please take my word on this and don’t see Feast of Love to compare for yourself).
And I always love Hope Davis, who played the underdeveloped wife of Danny, though I’m starting to wonder why. She never seems really brilliant and amazing, but she is still somehow charming and compelling. Maybe it’s just because I wish I were friends with her and she seems to make really good choices creatively, if not career-wise (Did you watch Six Degrees? Yeah, I didn’t think so.)
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Posted in action, reviews at 9:40 am by FilmFemme
In Walking Tall, The Rock kicks ass with a huge stick in order to rescue his hometown from corruption and crystal meth. And that fugly girl from Jericho shoots people while wearing just jeans and a bra. And Johnny Knoxville (I know, The Rock AND Johnny Knoxville in one movie…) I think I really missed out by watching this on TBS or something because it was just all right. Predictable and it took a while to get going. And how could I possibly believe that The Rock would get his ass kicked by a bunch of pussy sercurity guards?
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10.19.07
Posted in television, documentary, reviews at 11:51 am by FilmFemme
Top Ten Things that pissed me off about the screening of this I went to at Grauman’s
10. It started late.
9. The Netflix Original Content chick who introduced it and seemed like she had never held a microphone. Ok, I should cut her slack because she was probably really nervous. It was annoying though.
8. The girl who sat beside me and blackberry-d
7. The name “Dr. Sanjay Gupta”
6. The special looked slapped together - bad photography, bad utilization of HD, too much Anderson Cooper looking like a total prissy lameass. (My gay joke: “This is the only time you’ll ever see Anderson Cooper go on a search for beavers.”)
5. They didn’t update the CNN logo to be HD so it was all pixelized in the bottom corner of the screen.
4. The Executive Producer that attempted “banter” with Anderson Cooper et al who was such a total douchebag but thought himself to be hilarious when he WAS NOT AT ALL.
3. Anderson Cooper, Jeff Corwin and Sanjay Gupta are all the same height: short.
2. They spliced the special down to about 45 minutes and ended it right before Jeff Corwin is going to play with polar bears!!
and the number one thing that pissed me off about this screening was…
1. Anderson Cooper is so not that hot in person.
I take solace in this:
*Sigh*
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Posted in comedy, reviews at 11:36 am by FilmFemme
So, I love Johnny Knoxville and was completely excited to watch this movie called Daltry Calhoun on TV - starring JK himself alongside Elizabeth Banks (that funny slutty girl from The 40 Year Old Virgin, and the secretary in Spider Man) and Juliette “Licks Frontwoman” Lewis. I mean, if I had really had my wits about me, I probably would have realized that if this movie was any good I would have heard of it before. I get a little blinded to everything else when it comes to Johnny Knoxville, though. Johnny Knoxville is a no-good drunk who knocks up Elizabeth Banks when she’s like 15 and then gets kicked out of the house for being a no-good drunk. Fast forward 13 or 14 years. He’s made something of himself (read: rich!) selling sod to golf courses. Elizabeth Banks shows up with his daughter (the girl doesn’t know JK is her dad for a little while) and, you know, tenderness and conflict ensues. A big problem with the movie (besides the dumb dumb dumb story in which the girl is going to Julliard and Elizabeth Banks is dying of cancer and Juliette Lewis is total whore for JK [that part is not dumb, actually, Lewis is totally a bright spot here] and JK’s business is going under because his sod has started sprouting phallic cacti so he hires an Australian grass expert to fix it who his daughter has the hots for) is that the girl who plays the daughter (Sophie Traub) is bad and annoying as hell. About 45 minutes in, I started fast forwarding the parts that didn’t include Johnny Knoxville and that made it tolerable. Oh, there’s also a subplot about how that misogynist bald guy from *everything* that needs a misogynist bald guy, plays a dumb bald guy who waters JK’s grass and is illiterate. The daughter chick teaches him to read. No, really. Ugh. I’m going to spend this weekend looking for Johnny Knoxville. He did just get divorced, I’m sure that means I have a shot…
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10.15.07
Posted in drama, reviews at 2:35 pm by FilmFemme
Yay Cate Blanchett!
Yay pretty costumes! (textile porn?)
Yay Clive Owen!
Boo misogyny! (e.g., “I’m the queen of fucking England and I’m going to totally lose my shit if I don’t get laid! Pick me, Clive Owen! Choose me! Either fuck me or die in the Spanish Armada because even though I am totally awesome and hot and smart I’m really just a raging ball of hormones and a deafening biological clock because after all, I am a woman!”)
Boo nonsensical pseudo-historical plot! (Uh, Prince of Austria, Isabella of Spain, uh, Indians, The New World, Sir Walter Raleigh, um, Catholics, Cate Blanchett in the bath making vaguely lesbian overtures to the chick that might have banged Ryan Phillippe back when he was married to Reese Witherspoon, um, beheading, midget, um, who cares - here’s some big boats on fire)
Boo not enough Samantha Morton! (is there ever enough Samantha Morton?)
Meh, Elizabeth: The Golden Age!
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Posted in thriller, drama, action, reviews at 1:56 pm by FilmFemme
Here’s my suggestion if you want to see We Own the Night:
Pay for another movie but get there early and watch the first 90 seconds of this one. There’s a hot scene between Eva Mendes & Joaquin Phoenix. (Don’t worry, Eva Mendes doesn’t really talk during this part).
Then go see some other, better movie (Michael Clayton, maybe).
Then get this on DVD in 3 months and watch it where you can make snarky comments without getting dirty looks from people who paid $11 to see this ho-hum crime thriller. And you can watch the first 90 seconds a few times, you know, if you need to…
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