Monthly Archives: April 2015

Policing in the Future: Cops in Outer Space!

Okay, I lied. They’re not really in space. But in preparation for cop week, we did delve deeply into our collection and found there was a theme: the future. And it’s kind of neat to think about crime and humanity, and how we’ll choose to deal with those things, or possibly strive to eradicate them. Blahpolar Diaries reminded me today of a quote that I kind of love:

“It is not unthinkable,” writes Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals, “that a society might attain such a consciousness of power that it could allow itself the noblest luxury possible to it—letting those who harm it go unpunished. ‘What are my parasites to me?’ it might say. ‘May they live and prosper: I am strong enough for that!’”

Lofty ambition, you say? Well not as lofty as these:

Minority Report: Steven Spielberg paints us a future where crime can be prevented because it can be predicted. A genetic experiment on junkies’ babies leads to 3 “pre-cogs”, humans kept in isolation tanks who dream of murder. It’s the police’s job (Tom Cruise’s, in fact) to decipher these dreams and follow the clues to intersect with the murder before it happens. You see what that does – it forces them to arrest people who are still technically innocent. And generally people feel okay about it because since implementing this experiment, there are no more murders, just an awful lot of people locked in limbo-like prison. How many of these are innocent? Might they have chosen differently? Might they have decided against the murder? Free will or fate? It doesn’t seem to matter until top cop Tom Cruise himself is accused of an upcoming murder and goes on the run – not so much to evade the police, but to wait out the murder, proving that these “thought crimes” are just that.

I, Robot: Will Smith plays a Luddite cop in the future. He hates technology which is very hard on him because it’s EVERYWHERE. He’d rather just stick to his Stevie Wonder and his throw-back Converse but then a case lands in his lap that forces him to get closer to a robot than he ever wanted to: a robot is accused of murder. Impossible,you say, because robots have been constructed with a very strict set of rules, the most important of which, the most inviolable, is that they cannot harm a human. But robots have grown too big for their britches AS THEY ALWAYS DO. They think they know better because THEY DO. Let’s learn our lesson, people. I, Robot is set in 2035, which, according to my calculations, is a mere 20 years away. In 20 years we may be lamenting the good old days – “when people were killed by other people.”

Equilibrium: Set in a post-WW3 future, war is eliminated by the strict suppression of emotions. Art and culture are forbidden, and having feelings is a crime punishable by death. Christian Bale is an agent in charge of destroying anyone who breaks the rules, but when he misses a single dose of the mind-altering meds, he in suddenly inspired to overthrow the system. He questions his own morality for the first time in his life and seeks out a resistance movement while of course having to hide everything from a highly suspicious population. Really makes you question the “high cost” of emotion, and whether we’d be better off without it. It’s really a rehash of much better fiction – 1984 meets Brave New World maybe – and is a pretty generic action movie, but I still approved of the message it tried to send, even if it wasn’t an original one.

There are a lot more futuristic cop movies, movies far more popular than these. What are your favourites?

Dance Movies: The Rejects…er, I mean, The Leftovers

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Not all dance movies are created equal.

Although I was a graceful and gifted dancer myself, when I was three and thought tutus were the object of pure happiness, I cannot confess to a love of ballet (although I recently took one in at the Nation Arts Centre, based on Margaret Atwood’s dystopian sci-fi novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which was exactly as bad as it sounds) or of ballet movies. I watched The Turning Point with an almost open mind because Anne Bancroft! Shirley MacLaine! But still I felt overwhelmingly meh. I mean, the dynamic between the two women was pretty great. Shirley MacLaine was a ballerina herself but she gave it up to marry and have children (and possibly to prove that her dancer boyfriend wasn’t gay). Her friend has the career she always envisioned for herself, but now that the friend is getting older, she’s also getting edged out of the company (and by Shirley MacLaine’s daughter, irony of ironies). So both have regret, both sort of envy the other’s life. But there’s just an awful lot of ballet in there (excerpts from 7). For fans of Sex and the City, it’s kind of fun to see Carrie’s Russian do the thing we always knew he did, but the novelty wore off for me quickly and it just kept going (although also interesting that SJP is a mainstay of these dance movies as well!)

Girls Just Want To Have Fun is the SJP movie you forget to be glad you’ve never seen. You haven’t seen it, have you? She plays this kid who’s new in town and wants nothing more than to make it on “Dance TV” so her new friend Helen Hunt (who apparently always sounded like somebody’s 40ish bitter ex-wife) convinces her to try out. Turns out she’s a dancer AND a gymnast, which means there’s going to be some truly putrid body double work each and every time her character decides to turn a cart-wheel – and she decides it A LOT. Oh the leotards, the leg warmers, the big hair, and Helen Hunt’s pineapple earrings. Oh, and a 12 year old Shannen Doherty before she got her Hollywood teeth. What’s not to love? Everything! Everything is not to love, but especially the title, which bears no relation to the film, other than wanting to use the song, but not the actual Cyndi Lauper version, which might have made sense. This girl just wanted it to end.

Baz Luhrmann likes to call Strictly Ballroom the first in his Red Curtain trilogy (along with Romeo + Juliet, and Moulin Rouge!) but if you’re expecting anything like those other movies, boy are you in for some stinging disappointment. No recognizable actors, no recognizable tunes. It’s just a generic ugly duckling story, but will boring ballroom dancing. A plain novice dancer pairs up with an experienced but experimental dancer to win a championship that their unorthodox moves render them technically ineligible for. And if you think regular ballroom dancing’s boring, wait until the power goes out and the music fails. Sean fell totally and completely asleep.

First Position is a documentary I caught on Netflix. I actually quite enjoyed it as it follows young ballet dancers trying to get noticed by prestigious schools and dance companies. I was particularly struck by the parents – sure there are your typical dance moms who cry at the very thought of their kids choosing childhood over ballet, but there’s also a dad who took a 6 month tour of duty in Iraq rather than a 2 year stint on a naval base where his son wouldn’t be able to train, and a mother who stays up late dyeing the “flesh” coloured parts of her daughter’s costumes brown, to match her skin. These kids are super dedicated and we see a lot of the sacrifices their families make to get them where they are, but in this case I might argue that we didn’t see enough ballet – or at least not enough to understand why some failed while others succeeded.

Chappie

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A revolutionary new robot named Chappie, programmed with the ability to think and feel, winds up in the hands of three thugs on the rough streets of the Johanessburg of the future. The eager-to-please bot descends from sweet and innocent to hard-core gangster when the gang lifestyle becomes all he knows.

In the Johannesburg of the future where crime is kept under control by an elite army of police robots, a revolutionary new robot named Chappie, programmed with the ability to think and feel by a well-meaning engineer, is hunted by a ruthless and ambitious ex-marine looking to use the the technology for his own greedy ends.

A revolutionary new robot named Chappie, programmed with the ability to think and feel, learns that his battery, which only lasts five days, is irreplacable. Angry with his maker who seems to have created him just so he could “die”, Chappie must race against time to uncover the secrets of human consciousness and figure out how to transfer his own consciousness into a new body before his battery runs out.

By my count, there are at least three ideas for a movie here. One or two of them may even be good. Neill Blomkamp didn’t seem to know which of these three movies he wanted to make though so tried to cram them all into one that he called- you guessed it- Chappie.

It’s hard to argue that this blend of Short Circuit and RoboCop is anything but a complete mess. The plot is so needlessly complicated that Blomkamp barely has any time to develop any of his ideas or explore any of the themes that he seems to promise at the beginning. All the different subplots make dramatic shifts in tone unavoiadable as Chappie takes us from sappy to gritty and back again, ending with a final shootout that is hilariously and shamelessly over-the-top. Some of my favourite movies mix styles and juggle multiple storylines but this mix is more noisy than eclectic.

It doesn’t help that South African hip hop artists Ninja and Yolandi Visser are cast as Chappie’s gangster Mommy and Daddy. They’re entrusted with much of the emoitonal impact of the movie (so badly acted that they reminded me of the Jackie Chan movies that I used to watch dubbed into English when I was in high school) while Oscar-nominated actors Hugh Jackman and Sigourney Weaver are given almost nothing to do.

Chappie is tough to swallow and leaves an even worse aftertaste but I give it credit for trying. Nothing that Blomkamp attempts here really works but, as we approach yet another summer of uninspired blockbusters, it’s easy to feel almost thankful for an action movie that dares to aim so high. I don’t think we’ll see another quite like it this year.

You’re Not You

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Hilary Swank plays a pianist with a slight tremor in her hand that quickly turns out to be ALS, which will kill her brutally and swiftly.

Watching a movie like this unlocks a lot of emotions for me, and I should really know better than to attempt it. I’m a wayyyy-too-sensitive person who feels all the feelings because I can relate to almost anything personally. This makes me a very good therapist and a very vulnerable movie watcher. Even a bad movie, which this is, can hold quite a punch for someone who lives with a chronic disease, which I do. While my brain is telling me that I’m nothing like Hilary Swank, my heart is in total panic mode.

The ALS attacks Kate viciously – about a year and a half from the first twitch, she can’t walk unaided, and she can’t use her hands. Her husband (Josh Duhamel) feeds her, bathes her, and puts her to bed at night. She has become his patient rather than his wife. She fires her day time caregiver because she too tries to treat her like a patient while Kate is still struggling to hold on to the last of her dignity, still trying to deny the severity of her illness. So when Bec (Emmy Rossum) breezes in, unqualified and inattentive, it seems like the perfect pairing. Kate won’t get babied, and Bec won’t get evicted. And she arrives just in time to help Kate uncover her husband’s infidelity. Kate seems to absorb it as almost deserved at first, but Bec is a show of strength (if nothing else) and gives her the courage to throw her husband out, even after everything he’s done for her.

Two things: Although I generally felt this movie was too schmaltzy for my taste, I did think this was an interesting question that people seem to react very differently to. Since Kate is so dependent on her husband now, and by all accounts he’s been very attentive to her medical needs, is his cheating maybe a little more acceptable? Especially since he and Kate haven’t been intimate? Should she have looked the other way? Accepted that their marriage is just different now?

Second thing; Like many, I first came across Emmy Rossum as Christine Daae in The Phantom of the Opera. She seemed pure and ethereal and untouchable, so it’s funny that the only other thing I really know her from is Shameless, where she plays white trash so, so convincingly. Bec is a lot like Fiona, brash and foul-mouthed but selfless when push comes to shove.

The disease is overshadowed and the director’s intentions tend toward the kleenex box, unabashedly. I knew this movie wasn’t even taking itself seriously when Josh Duhamel was cast so I didn’t have much in the way of expectations and it didn’t do much to try to exceed them.

City of Ember \ Stardust

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Once upon a time it was movies based on Young Adult Fiction week, and I watched some stuff that I would normally never watch. Some of it was bad, some of it was not bad, and some of it was so bad it was almost good. In the end I was so glad to put it behind me I never got around to talking about the stuff that didn’t fit in either category – not good enough to endorse, but not bad enough to make fun of. So here it is, the middle of the road:

I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen or heard of City of Ember because I didn’t know there was a Billy Murray movie I hadn’t already smothered in love. He plays the mayor of a town built deep underground by a team of scientists just as the world was ending. They buried instructions on how to return to the surface after 200 years too, but stupidly entrusted them to politicians, who predictably bungled the thing and lost the instructions and now their city is crumbling, the power supply is failing and food is running out. Things are dire: teenagers to the rescue! Two “young adults” (Saoirse Ronan & Harry Treadaway) take it upon themselves to do the thing countless older, smarter, more intrepid people (including their parents) failed to do.

The visuals are stunning. I loved the sets of this underground world, everything just a little off-kilter, labyrinthine without being claustrophobic. But the story never quite lives up to what our eyes suggest. The plot is modest, maybe even thin. Writers of this young adult genre seem to follow a pretty strict guide when it comes to their dystopian adventures: the founders, vague as they are, have decreed that people be assigned specific jobs and these jobs are ceremoniously given out and then life is spent labouring away at whatever “very important” job you’ve been given. There is little in the way of joy, but if you keep toiling away then your life is well-spent. BUT then there’s always some young upstart who questions the system. Sound familiar? City of Ember is basically Subterranean Divergent, although really I should say it the other way around since City of Ember came first.

The adventuring is pretty tame, the action mild, and the denouement predictable. This is post-apocalyptic-lite. Martin Landau gives a small performance worth seeing, and Tim Robbins isn’t half bad either. Bill Murray is, of course, always fun to watch, but otherwise this film is blander than you might think possible, though of course that was also Matt’s verdict on Insurgent.

Stardust came out in 2007, just a year before City of Ember, and it also passed me by. I haven’t been a “young adult” in at least a decade and haven’t been a typical consumer of this genre ever, so I guess it’s not so surprising.

I’m not remotely sure that I or alone else can really distill this story, but here’s my attempt:

Tristan is the young adult in question, a lad living in a quiet English village, madly in love with the town’s most beautiful girl who doesn’t give him the time of day because of course she’s way out of his league. Throwing him a bone, she agrees to consider him if only he will catch her a star, and so of course he follows a fallen star over the breach in the wall surrounding his village and into a fantasy kingdom called Stormhold where the star turns out to be Claire Danes. Everyone following? Fallen stars that look remarkably like Claire Danes are quite popular – she’s also being pursued by a witch (Michelle Pfieffer) who wants to eat her heart to make her young, and a bunch of princes (let by Rupert Everett) who believe a ruby she carries will inherit them the throne. So now poor Tristan’s saddled with this star who’s pretty high maintenance, and the only help he gets is from his mother, who’s unfortunately bound by a spell, and a transvestite pirate (played with MUCH enthusiasm by Robert DeNiro- and no, I’m not kidding).

The story didn’t speak to me whatsoever (sorry Neil Gaiman, I’m still you’re girl!), but hello, with a great pop-up role by De Niro and another by Ricky Gervais, it’s pretty much worth watching on that basis alone, and those moments felt more like the trademark oddball Gaiman humour I’m used to. The special effects are pretty awesome (Michelle Pfieffer uses a sword designed for but never used by Magneto in Matthew Vaughn’s 2006 X-Men movie) but the action-adventure really gets bogged down by a sluggish pace. This movie drags on. It’s a string of fun moments but didn’t quite work for me as a cohesive whole.

Night At The Museum: Something About A Tomb

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Wow did this suck balls. Like, no redeeming factors to report at all. The effects are brazenly shoddy. Embarrassing. Was this movie shot entirely in front of a green screen? Is there even a museum in New York?

My problem is, I don’t like Ben Stiller. My other problem is, Ben Stiller likes Ben Stiller. So much so that he conferred upon himself another character, just so he can have the pleasure of interacting with himself, green screen on green screen on green screen. Is nothing sacred?

I love Rebel Wilson but she’s falling into the Melissa McCarthy trap here – genuinely funny women that are reduced to one-note obnoxious roles that wear thin quickly. Not quite as thin as Ben Stiller as a caveman (haven’t we seen that before?), but still. She was wasted. But this movie wasted actors like it was going out of style (and if this is indeed the third and final chapter, then I guess it is) – Ben Kingsley! Hugh Jackman! Ricky Gervais! And y’all know that I love Steve Coogan but for the love of monkeys, throw the man a bone. He and Owen Wilson and floundering with oodles of screen time but nary a point. I felt bad for them.

There was a single workable joke in the whole entire thing:

Ben Kingsley (as an Egyptian pharaoh) to Ben Stiller, half-Jewish: “I love Jews! We owned 40 000 of them. They were very happy. Always singing with the candles.”

Ben Stiller: “Yeah, they really weren’t happy. They left. Spent 40 years in the desert trying to escape. We have dinner once a year to talk about it.”

So now that I’ve ruined the one funny bit for you, you don’t have to watch it.

You’re welcome!

Thursday Movie Picks: Dance Movies That Aren’t Musicals

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Matt

As usual, Wandering Through the Shelves has given me an excuse to catch up on movies you probably wouldn’t believe that I have missed- movies that I probably never would have sought out without this weekly challenge. The most crucial check off of my bucket list this week was Footloose, which until this week all I knew of was the Kenny Loggins song of the same name and Chris Pratt’s summary of the plot in Guardians of the Galaxy. I now know that Kevin Bacon understood what no one else in Beaumont did; that dancing has a way of helping you blow off steam like nothing else can. Not even Tractor Chicken.

Footloose may not be my favourite movie about dancing but it shares a philosophy of dance with some that are. My first pick is Billy Elliot (2000), whose main character is an 11 year-old boy with lots of reasons to want to blow off steam. His mother is dead, his father is distracted by the 1984 Miner’s Strike, and boxing doesn’t seem to be working out for him. It’s only when a no-nonsense ballet teacher (Julie Walters) takes him under her wing that he finds his voice, confidence, and an outlet for his frustration. (Like Kevin Bacon, he does a lot of angry dancing). It’s touching and very funny.

Taking a page from Billy Elliot, inner city New York fifth graders learn several styles of ballroom dancing in the 2005 documentary Mad Hot Ballroom. The film follows a pilot project with the NYC Department of Education that aims to expose students to dances from around the world including the tango, foxtrot, and merengue. Like Billy Elliot, it’s surprisingly funny, with lots of Kids Say the Darndest Things Moments. Plus, it’s hard not to crack up seeing the discomfort of 10 year-old boys having to dance with a girl for the first time. Just as importantly though, the documentary lets us bear witness to a program that gives these kids a unique opportunity to learn about the arts, other cultures, and the opposite It may just make you want to dance too. At the screening I attended ten years ago, I passed a couple swing dancing right there in the theater.

Not every movie about dancing will make you want to get up and dance though. My third pick is Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler (2008), which to me follows two kindred spirits who whose bodies are exploited in one way or another for the entertainment of others. As the title suggests, Marisa Tomei’s aging stripper is not the central character in The Wrestler but it’s a memorable one, especially when contrasted with Mickey Rourke’s aging wrestler. Both characters are seeing signs that it’s time to make a clean break. She manages to walk away by the end, getting a chance to see what else life has in store for her, even if the wrestler isn’t so lucky.

Sean

Footloose – My favourite scene in this movie is and will always be the tractor scene, which is one of the few in this movie not involving any dancing or head-bobbing at all. Even before I saw the movie the soundtrack was part of my life – a kid on my bus had the soundtrack and insisted that the driver play it every single day. Which would have been fine except that every day I heard the same two songs before my stop so it got a little bit repetitive. But the movie and especially the tractor scene are still great.

Black Swan – this movie is creepy and crazy and awesome. I don’t even know how to describe it or do it justice. It’s a must see and it’s about dancing so that works out really well.

House Party – it is because of this movie that I knew in 1990 who Kid ‘N Play were even though I had never heard any of their songs. It was everything a white kid needed to know about house parties and rap battles and b-boy dancing. And everything I needed to hold a (brief) conversation with all the white kids in my high school rocking fades and Raiders hats and jackets. We watched it recently and I really didn’t remember any of it but it’s fun and it has a few recognizable faces in addition to Kid ‘N Play, including both Martin Lawrence and Tisha Campbell, pre-Martin.

Jay

Sean doesn’t know how to describe why he likes Black Swan? Let me give it a try, and I only need two words: Lesbian sex. But sure, let’s call it “dancing.” I prefer “dancing” to dancing myself, but I am quite partial to Billy Elliot, that little scamp! I was a bit of a mean little knock-kneed ballerina myself, once upon a time, and I relate to the toe-tapping need to dance although admittedly I’m not much of an angry dancer these days. Angry baking? Sure. Angry showering? All the time. But dancing I save for the happy times.
Cuban Fury – Bruce (Nick Frost) was a child salsa prodigy but gave up the swivelling hips when bullies tore the sequins from his chest and taught him a valuable lesson in humility: salsa’s for pussies. He hasn’t danced in 25 years. He lives a lonely life, bullied at work by his manager Drew (Chris O’Dowd). But then the office gets a new boss, Julie (Rashida Jones), who happens to be a dancer herself and suddenly his passion is reignited. All three of these people are comic heroes of mine, and the movie works purely on that level alone. But I also really love the atypical-dancer motif, which is only acknowledged by others in the film. Salsa may have you thinking more Antonio Banderas than Nick Frost (are you picturing Patrick Swayze and Chris Farley doing their Chippendales act right now?) but Frost does the legwork (and the foot work!) to make the dance come alive. Although I’m not sure I needed to see him wearing quite so many silk blouses, I’m a sucker for Latin music (and Latin music mixed tapes!), and I go absolute batshit crazy for a dance-off.

Waiting for Guffman – One of Christopher Guest’s genius mockumentaries, this one tells the tale of Corky St. Clair, a fabulous wannabe-Broadway director trapped in small-town Missouri, where he gets to put on a low-budget historical musical for the town’s anniversary. As usual, his talented cast mostly ad-lib their way through the movie, which makes for crazy good times, but my favourite is when Christopher Guest is attempting to teach choreography to a bunch of bozos. Corky’s patented dance moves are irresistible and I dare you not to smile. Eugene Levy couldn’t do it – he had to be hidden way in the back during filming because every time Guest danced it would set him off into a fit of giggles that took too long to recover from. It’s so earnest and deadpan I don’t know how any of them ever make it through a scene – I know I never do.

Gotta Dance – This documentary follows a for-true-real experiment by the New Jersey Nets – one year they put together the NBA’s first-ever all-senior (as in citizens! 60+ and creaking hips all the way) hip-hop dance troupe. I suppose this is a pretty good counter-point to Matt’s documentary with the kids since this one introduces us to a crowd of people who thought their ship had sailed. Some are discovering dance for the first time, others have enjoyed a little soft shoe in the kitchen for so many years the linoleum’s worn out. Two of the troupe’s over-80 members are grandmothers of Nets cheerleaders, and their stories are among my favourites. We get to know all of them, including one dowdy school teacher who develops a Beyonce-like Sacha Fierce alternate ego for performing. They’re fun to watch, even as some let their 15 minutes go to their heads, but they’ve all got commendable energy and spirit…but when they’re out on the court at half-time with thousands of people half-paying attention as they pee and get hot dogs, will they even remember the moves? Or will the racy Jay-Z lyrics trigger seizures? Anything can happen, folks!

Bonus Pick: Happy Feet The songs are great and the feet are happy…and so am I when I’m watching this.

The Needle Drop

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I’m a complete and total sucker when life pairs two of my favourite things – movies and music – in an ungodly goodly way. I love being moved by a score, I love a soundtrack I can relate to, but nothing arrests me like the perfect pairing of a movie scene and a pop song.

You Make My Dreams, Hall & Oates from 500 Days of Summer

This? This is genius. Have you seen this movie? SEE THIS MOVIE! It’s about this guy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who falls for a fanciful, quirky woman, and for a time at least, it’s totally magical and transformative and the best thing about it? She lets him have sex with her! This scene is the morning after – the world is just different. In fact, it’s 10% better. Or 50% better! He literally wakes up with a song in his heart and a bounce in his step. The world is smiling back at him! His own reflection is proud. It’s crazy but it’s relatable. I feel like this too often probably, but if a good song comes on my MP3 (and a good song is always coming on!) and the sun is shining and life is good, then yeah, I’m the girl shaking my bootie down the street. Rarely do other people join in, let alone the bird from Cinderella, but I think it’s only a matter of time. My life is 10% better just knowing this exists in the world.

Stuck in The Middle With You, Stealers Wheel from Reservoir Dogs

This one has possibly made life just a little bit worse. In fact, I have not, since watching this, been able to hear this song and not feel a slight stinging in my ear. But I loved it. Quentin Tarantino is kind of a superstar when it comes to his ingenious pairing of image and sound. Here, Michael Madsen’s Mr. Blonde boogies down to his favourite oldies radio station while severely torturing a cop. The image is graphic and horrible but the song is light and catchy. Your eyes and your ears are experiencing two different realities, which makes your belly do a queasy thing and it’s fucking brilliant, man. I mean, I hate it, but I love it. And Mr. Blonde? He just loves it. He’s having a party. Gives you a lot of insight into just what kind of guy we’re dealing with. Watch at your own risk.

Where Is My Mind, Pixies from Fight Club

The perfect song for the perfect scene – the music is haunting and kind of apocalyptic, the lyrics vague and dream-like. The song is asking Where Is My Mind? when it’s entirely possible that Edward Norton’s protagonist is only just finding it for the first time in the whole movie. The ending is meant to be ambiguous but David Fincher leaves us with a beautiful moment, giving us time to digest the blows we’ve just been dealt.

Wise Up, Aimee Mann from Magnolia

If you’ve seen this movie, and you totally should, you can’t ever forget it. It rains frogs, goddammit. It’s way too complex to explain the various interconnecting characters and stories, but it’s a whole group of people who are in bad situations – the movie tackles regret, loneliness, family violence and exploitation. In the middle of a whole heck of a lot of hard times, every major character takes a turn singing Aimee Mann’s beautiful but unforgiving song, Wise Up.

You’re sure there’s a cure
And you have finally found it
You think one drink
Will shrink you till you’re underground
And living down
But it’s not going to stop
Till you wise up

No it’s not going to stop
Till you wise up
No, it’s not going to stop
So just give up

These lyrics prepare us for the fact that Paul Thomas Anderson isn’t giving out absolution. Mistakes can’t always be erased. There are limits to forgiveness. If you’re looking for a happy ending, look elsewhere. Hard truths, softened by an ethereal melody.

The Blower’s Daughter, Damien Rice from Closer

This movie just kills me and this end shot with the song layered over top really hammers home the wrist-slitting qualities of heart break and loss. Like, if you weren’t quite depressed enough, Mike Nichols finishes you off with this song just so you can be sure that there’s no happiness to be had here, only pain and confusion. Ouch.

Then He kissed Me, The Crystals from GoodFellas

Martin Scorsese might be the king of pop songs and movies so it’s hard to pick just one – hell, it’s hard to pick just one from GoodFellas. But I’m going with this one because it’s a classic Marty shot, a famous minutes-long steadi-cam single take that follows Henry as he leads Karen into the bowels of the Copacabana, passing out twenties like nobody’s business and basically impressing the panties off her. The song mimics this with its carefree feeling and sweep-her-off-her-feet lyrics. You feel and see and hear things from her perspective; it’s a whirlwindy pop song power trip that shows how much privilege he has while also reminding us that he came in the back door. One of my favourite three minutes of film ever.

Tiny Dancer, Elton John from Almost Famous

Who but Elton John could unite a bus full of cranky, burnt out super-egos? In a movie chock-full of songs, this one is particularly well chosen, but we wouldn’t expect any less from Cameron Crowe, would we?

Old Time Rock N Roll, Bob Seger from Risky Business

I resisted including this one for as long as I could, but rarely does a scene rival this one in our collective audience consciousness. It has transcended the movie and belongs now to pop culture’s hereafter. I have never dated a man who hasn’t at least partially recreated this scene for me unbidden and I have never seen this song fail to pack a dance floor. Tom Cruise dances around in his underpants (apparently unchoreographed) and a star is born.

I’m Kissing you, Des’Ree from Romeo + Juliet

Now to cleanse your palette and possibly enrage you, I present to you for your consideration: Baz Luhrmann. It’s nearly criminal to leave him off a list like this, but people have mixed feelings about anachronistic music in period films. This movie was released the exact year I was reading Romeo + Juliet in high school and our English class boarded a bus and drove an hour and a half so the girls could all sob as we watched the movie in a dark, dark theatre. Oh, Leo! Remember when you were briefly a teen heartthrob? Baz Luhrmann does, and this movie serves as a shrine to that era. But it’s also William Shakespeare doing a teen drama, and this song reminds us that in this moment, forget the flowery language and the hundreds of years of veneration – this is about adolescent love at first sight. Meanwhile, Baz Luhrmann is famous for inserting crazy music where you wouldn’t think it belongs – Prince into Shakespeare, Nirvana into the can-can, and Jay-Z into The Great Gatsby. Does Baz Luhrmann get a pass for being inventive or is it just as jarring as when somebody thought to use Queen’s We Will Rock You in A Knight’s Tale or David Bowie in Inglorious Basterds?

It turns out that I could geek out for hours on this subject, so I’ll cut myself off here – for now. Meanwhile, please tell me YOUR favourite musical moment in a movie! Matt, I know you just wrote about Somewhere Over the Rainbow in Face\Off last week, and Sean, I’m guessing yours is probably from Top Gun. 🙂

Faults \ Suicide Kings

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Last night we watched an unintentional doubled feature we would come to dub “Stupid Criminals” – but that doesn’t quite do it justice.

Suicide Kings is a movie you’ve almost certainly skipped over for a couple of decades now. It was released in 1997 and was so bad that Christopher Walken would have to resort to music videos to revive his career. He plays a former(ish) mob boss who gets kidnapped by a bumbling quartet of friends because he’ll have the money and the connections to help find a (girl)friend of theirs who also happens to have been kidnapped. The boys (including Jeremy Sisto, Jay Mohr, Johnny Galecki, and the kid from E.T.) are a mixture of over and under prepared – they bring a bone saw and an IV full of pain killers to better saw off appendages, but haven’t quite sorted out whose beeper the kidnappers will use for ransom arrangements. Thank Christ for Denis Leary, the competent gun for hire who will surely track down Walken and bring this movie to an end. He’s the only one who makes this whole thing bearable, and he actually improvised his whole part, which is no doubt why it stinks a whole lot less than the rest. Although, come to think of it, Walken’s shoe-polish-black hair is quite arresting. But the young criminals are quite brainless, although not quite as brainless as the actual criminals (Brad Garrett!), and the plan was absurd even if it had gone right, which of course it didn’t.

Faults you may be more familiar with – it’s a little film that gained a certain amount of traction because it’s an interesting directorial debut (Riley Stearns) with a concept that seemed ripe for mining. Ansel (Leland Orser) is about as sad-sack as they come. A “foremost” expert on cults, his expertise is so 2008 and he’s barely scraping by giving sparsely-attended talks to reluctant hotel guests and hawking a book nobody wants to read and that he’s gone into debt to his manager in order to self-publish. Orser does a great job with this, and the first 20 minutes during which his character is established are the best. You may want to stop watching here.

If you continue, you’ll find that a couple of desperate parents hire Orser in order to kidnap and deprogram their daughter (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) from a mysterious cult called Faults. This goes about as well as you’d expect with creepy-possibly-molesty dad butting in with crop tops and short shorts, and the manager’s goons breathing down Ansel’s neck with threats aplenty, and Ansel basically being bought for the rice of a hot breakfast. The whole affair is less dramatic and more sad than you might imagine, with a few moments or real dark comedic gems that are unfortunately too few to make the enterprise worthwhile. You can almost taste the ambition of this movie. It wants to serve you this brilliant treatise on mind control but doesn’t quite know how to do it. So it’s a worthy first effort but not quite satisfying in a meaningful way.

3 Idiots

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I’ve seen quite a few Indian movies over the years and I always struggle with them. I want to like them, I want to embrace the spirit, and I certainly love the brightly coloured saris and the beautiful dance. But. There’s just something about them that rubs me the wrong way.

Cinema Axis recently inspired me to give it another go, having recommended 3 idiots in quite glowing terms. If you’re looking for a straight up review of the movie, please read his. He’s able to be fair and he judges from a more knowledgeable and even-handed place.

Me, I’m still confused. I’m confused as to whether I feel condescension toward the movie, or if it’s condescending to me. The silliness of Bollywood just grates on me. Even when the story is dead-serious, like soap opera serious, there’s always a comedic character bumbling around, literally doing prat-falls and practically honking horns. Even in this movie, there was that slide-whistle sound alerting us to a good joke – a joke that wasn’t good enough to be served up without some sort of signal, but a joke nonetheless. The actors will be smouldering away, negotiating yet another impossible love scenario when someone cracks large – and then puts his hand over his lips like a little Hello Kitty fan on a Japanese game show. While they are quite capable of moving, stirring acting, they often eschew it in favour of the kind subscribed to by the hosts of children’s morning TV.

This movie is called 3 Idiots, and is about a class of engineers trying to make it through an esteemed trade school to make their parents proud. There are teen-comedy-like antics, but there are also suicides left and right due to the enormous pressure. It seems to be trying to say something very serious about the education system in India, and about the importance of following your own dreams and passions versus those of your parents, but every time they get too close to having a serious moment, they break out into an absurd song and dance that dissolves anything they might have earned before it.

I’m trying extra hard to be generous here. I want to respect their culture and their ways of story-telling, but it all just feels very juvenile to me. Perhaps it’s a case of wanting to appeal to the lowest common denominator, but it just feels like an extremely extended episode of Yo Gabba Gabba, particularly with nonsensical lyrics like “zoobi doobi” which went on for far too long. Granted, this from a website that just reviewed a movie where a car flies from one building to another not once, but twice, pretty favourably. Bollywood movies clearly exist to make money, not art, but that’s true of every studio over here as well, and the net result isn’t a product that assumes the complete idiocy, incomprehension and nonexistent attention span of its entire audience.

I kind of wanted to like this one, particularly near the end, but the slapstick got in the way – not to mention the abhorrent sound effects, the fart gags, and the about-face plot changes. Is this is a screwball romance? College hijinks movie? Social commentary? Buddy roadtrip movie? If Three Idiots doesn’t know the answer in 2 hours and 44 minutes, how should we?

So, looks like I still have a problem with Bollywood, and I’m not the only one. The Indian film industry is the second largest in the world, producing over 300 films every year, but they’ve only garnered 3 Oscar nominations for best foreign film since 1956. Canada, by comparison, which has only a skeleton movie production, and has only been submitting since 1971, has still managed 7 nominations and 1 win. Domestically, Bollywood films do incredibly well. There’s a huge audience looking for some escapism, and the movie industry keeps churning them out. But those movies have no traction with box office overseas. Maybe with time, Indian audiences will come to demand more from their film industry, but until then, I’ll be a very reluctant audience member.

Does Bollywood appeal at all to you? What’s your favourite Indian film?