But last night’s double feature, followed by a Q&A with Tarantino himself, was by far the most anticipated.  Not to sound completely lame and sooo cliche (I am completely lame and sooo cliche but shh) but Pulp Fiction is the reason I went to film school.  I don’t like writing it down or sharing it.  I feel pretty fucking lame about it, but that shit blew my mind when I was finally allowed to see it — I must have been, I dunno, 13 or 14? To this day (that is, to yesterday), despite all my viewings of it on DVD in various stages of stupor, I had never seen it on film, in a theatre full of people.  So the prospect of that was very exciting.

I’m not going to review Pulp Fiction.  I have no desire to and I never have.  I’m sure it has flaws but I don’t see them.  I just like it.

Inglourious Basterds was easily one of the best — if not the best — movies that I saw last year.  It’s epic and funny and creative and beautiful.  I don’t just mean, technically beautiful (which it is) but Diane Kruger and Melanie Laurent are possibly two of the most classically, not quirkily gorgeous women, like, ever.  Maybe that’s not true, but both of them are captivating.

So, between the two screenings (well, actually right after Inglourious Basterds started — I don’t understand how so many people showed up at 6PM and stayed straight through until it ended after 1AM — don’t they have jobs?), a friend and I snuck out to grab a bite at the Pig & Whistle next door to the Egyptian.  No sooner had we ordered a drink from the bitchiest of waitresses (seriously, everyone that works at that place is a cunt, sorry, but it’s true) than Quentin himself walked in, looking lost.  He doesn’t wander though, he walks with purpose.  He was wearing weird dark blue pants, a hoodie with a bright green hood and greed Adidas with no socks.  Basically he looked like a homeless person.  He found the woman he was meeting, a thin blonde with wavy hair and proceeded to drink what looked like a Greyhound (good choice) while she interviewed him.  Maybe 10 minutes later, in walked another familiar looking face who walked over and shook his hand.  It was none other than Max Cherry himself.  It was a surreal Hollywood moment.  Then Max and his wife(?) sat down across from us, my friend grabbed a couple of snapshots and we left to watch the end of the movie.

Max Cherry Decides What To Eat

A Q&A followed at which I think Tarantino was kind of drunk.  I don’t know, it was interesting hearing him talk but I was so fucking exhausted by that point it was kind of like “ummm…ok, I need to go to bed.”  Still, it was slightly more interesting than the other time I had seen him when I just stared at him from across the room at Good Luck Bar.

God, the wheels really fell off of this post at some point didn’t they?  Oh well, at least I wrote.

Anyway, I saw it.  Naturally.  Me and my $18.50 saw in the Cinerama dome, actually.  Before I went to a Christmas party with Kevin Sorbo but that is a totally different story.  My opinion on it?  Meh.  Yawn.  Oh, that was pretty but man was that story lame and isn’t it time to start drinking yet?

Over at iO9, they’re asking “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like “Avatar”?” where “like Avatar” means “white guilt fantasies.”  It’s a rhetorical question (hopefully) since the answer is obviously never.  And after $1,000,000,000, it really wouldn’t make sense to stop.  Though the racial aspects of Avatar were certainly…weird (are these Na’vi people analogies for Native Americans?  are they African?  They seem kind of African…) the gender implications are also necessarily complex.

Our protagonist (“hero” if you must) is Jake Sully, a former Marine who is paralyzed from the waist down.  When his goody two shoes twin brother is killed, he takes his place solely on the virtue of his DNA, on a highly skilled mission to the remote planet of Pandora with the hopes of using avatar surrogate body technology to infiltrate and study the native people there: the Na’vi.  All of this takes place within probably the first 3 minutes of the movie.

Once on Pandora, Sully meets up with Dr. Grace Augustine (Siguorney Weaver) who has spent years studying the Na’vi via avatar but whom they have never truly accepted.  Boy does Sully show her!  The first night he’s there he ends up trapped alone in the jungle and is saved by a hot Na’vi chick.  She’s tentative but he convinces herbto teach him the ways of the Na’vi.  Take that science!  Take that woman who has given up her best years to study this culture!  In your face!  Um, yeah.

So then, Sully goes on to accomplish everything that Grace never could.  She actually ends up dying for the cause, but he has his soul transferred to his avatar (a process that is much faster than backing up my work computer to the server) and lives happily ever after as a totally kickass member of of the Na’vi with the hottest wife around.  Which just goes to show, white men can do anything they set their minds to as long as they are not crippled!

I get that it’s a fantasy, a technological touchstone, visual spectacle at its finest.  But, like it or not, messages matter.  I don’t like to be that person, I really don’t.  That “I am woman” “male gaze” “otherness” spouting person.  But really?  We can’t do any better than this?  “Escapism” doesn’t mean that we forget or ignore the fact that words and stories and movies — especially movies that make a billion dollars — have MEANING that we pay attention to and learn from, whether we want to or not.

Then everything goes to shit, he takes the script somewhere else for less than half the budget, signs away his rights to DVD profits and makes The Boondock Saints, which I watched on Saturday.

Overnight is a pretty decent documentary. At the very least, it does a good job conveying Duffy’s brand of assholery which I have been in the vicinity of a few times in my life.  So after watching it, and considering I knew people who counted it among their favorites  (e.g., my old roommate who in retrospect I like well enough but whose opinion on film I never really respected in the first place) I figured I should maybe see The Boondock Saints, so I bumped it to the top of my queue.

IT IS FUCKING AWFUL.  It is corny.  It is cliche.  And the writing.  The By Troy Duffy script that Harvey Weinstein took an interest in at some point (probably while he was drunk) is the worst part of the whole mess.  This movie sucks.  It wants to be Pulp Fiction so badly, but it has none of the wit or attention to things like, you know, character or production design or, like, making sense.  Sources (the internet?) tell me that this movie reached some kind of cult status on DVD.  That is something I cannot understand AT ALL.  It’s not good.  It is NOT A GOOD MOVIE.  This is not a matter of opinion.  This is not because I was in a bad mood when I saw it.  I was eating cheese and getting high: I was in a great mood.  A wonderful popcorn action movie mood.  But this movie sucks.  It sucks so bad.  And it wasn’t bad because I had already seen Overnight, either.  Knowing the extent of Duffy’s jerkoffishness was the only thing that actually held my interest.  That and Willem Dafoe as a homophobic gay FBI agent.

Fuck you, Troy Duffy.  Seriously.  I hate you.

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.

“Man, that kid is SMART!”

Shooter

“I thought the dude was gonna die, but then he didn’t.”

Must Love Dogs

[insert sound of him leaving the room]

Quantum of Solace takes the Bond character that so many people were drawn to in Casino Royale and lets him keep being awesome without going soft.  He’s learned his lesson now, and even better — he’s out for revenge.  This time around, Bond wants the truth about his dead lover and will stop at nothing to get it!  YES!

Unfortunately, some bad guys get in the way.  The movie falls right in line with so many recent films and even albums that have been trying their best to cash in on the ubiquitous “greening” of everything.  Yes, in 2008, the bond villains are eco-terrorists with a head honcho, one Dominic Greene (Eco-terrorist named Greene?  No Comment.) played by the surprisingly short, but still somehow appealing Mathieu Amalric (who is also great at playing a guy who can only blink to communicate).  While Bond tracks down Greene, has a tryst with a tall redhead, tries to get to the bottom of what happened with Vesper and constantly runs afoul of M., he also keeps encountering the luscious and exotic Camille Montes (Olga Kurylenko, who had a scene stealing cameo in Max Payne, which I actually saw).  At first, he thinks he has rescued her from the grips of a deposed Bolivian dictator, but then he learns that she is on her own mission of revenge and doesn’t need rescuing at all (Ok, maybe a tiiiiiny bit of rescuing).  YES, YES, YES!

With thrilling, well shot action sequences, steely, compelling performances and an interesting if not entirely awesome plot, Quantum of Solace won’t make you fall in love with James Bond all over again.  But it’s OK, because you’re already seduced from before.

And no, for the record, they never explain what the fuck the title is supposed to mean and yes, I think it’s a shitty title.

I saw this movie a while ago and I liked this movie.  Yeah, no, I really did.  I like Hellboy’s devil-may-care (I know, grooooaaaan) attitude.  I liked Selma Blair’s nearly inexplicable righteous indignation  at nonsuperhumans (not to mention her cute hair and the fact that she’s in panties for half of her screen time).  I even kind of like that blue guy and how he falls in love with the creepy princess who would have been played by Samantha Morton if it was 10 years ago.  I even liked the douchy, evil prince guy with the long hair whose only friend seemed to be a giant monster with detachable wrists.  I really liked the giant evil plant that bled moss, that thing was aweeeessssoomee.

But you know what I don’t like?  Tecate Light.*

*I haven’t tried Tecate Light.  But regular Tecate makes me barf. 

Me every time I see a billboard or bus poster for Wanted:

“Is this a poster for a movie? It looks like it wants to be a movie … but clearly isn’t. Maybe it’s an urban-crime miniseries on the CW, or the very-special Smallville two-part season finale, or … a breakfast cereal?

I liked The Strangers. I hated The Incredible Hulk. So I still don’t know how I feel about Liv Tyler on the ground.

I didn’t see Ang Lee’s last attempt at bringing this big green guy to the big silver screen, but I like Edward Norton, the aforementioned Ms. Tyler, William Hurt and Tim Roth, so I thought, “How could I go wrong with The Incredible Hulk? It must be at least half as entertaining as Iron Man.” Wrong again, FilmFemme, wrong again.

The movie opens with Bruce Banner (Norton) living a carefully calm and solitary life in the slums of Brazil, desperately seeking a cure for the Gamma poisoning that makes him into the Hulk. It’s been a long time since his last incident. But, one way or another (I actually forget which way it is), General Ross (Hurt) catches wind of his whereabouts and all hell breaks loose when the U.S. Army goes to take him in. Of course, he Hulks out and they don’t catch him.

God, I’m getting bored just writing this summary. It’s like, you can guess what happens, can’t you? He’s all Hulking. He runs into Betty Ross (Tyler) and they’re in love (only they can’t fuck or he will Hulk out…so, maybe someone can explain this to me: fucking gets his heart rate high enough for him to hulk out, so what about being scared? Like what if someone just jumps out of a closet at him [or a creepy girl in a mask shows up at his cabin!!] and his heart rate jumps up? Won’t he just Hulk out? Anyway.) and they try to find a cure and keep him away from General Ross who wants to turn him into a weapon. Meanwhile, General Ross is experimenting on Tim Roth, who is some badass army dude with the same kind of Hulk stuff so he’s getting even more badass and being all British and stuff. And there are like fights and explosions and helicopters and father/daughter conflict and all that shit.

So, whatever. The plot of The Incredible Hulk isn’t going to reinvent any genres or anything. But I swear to god it’s like no one read the script (by Zak “We are SPARTA!” Penn) to this thing before it went into production. It is AWFUL. The dialogue is cheesy and hacky, lovely Live is relegated to casting her eyes skyward and whispering “Bruce?” for half of the movie, Tim Roth is given nothing to do except look pissed off and the normally great William Hurt is stiff and unbelievable. Poorly directed by Louis Leterrier whose last movie was Transporter II, this movie brought my hopes for the rest of The Avengers movies way way down. WHY CAN’T EVERY MOVIE BE IRON MAN? Ultimately, I say “Hulk smash? More like Hulk suck.”