The White Ribbon

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A brutal black and white film by Michael Haneke about the shame of masturbation, animal mutilation, incest and the symbolism of pierced ears, torturing the retarded, bleak and swift suicide, a meditation on sin,ritualized punishment, cruelty and the hardness of hearts, guilt and innocence, apathy and revenge. So many crazy events occur in this little German village on the eve of WWI that pretty soon the villagers are looking around at each other with very suspicious eyes – and so are we. The children seem to be at the heart of this mystery and I can’t help but think that they’re exactly the generation who would become Nazis. The children, whether or not they’re responsible for the mysterious atrocities, have no escape from their relentlessly punitive lives, and for nearly two and a half hours, neither do we.

Whose job is it to prevent evil? Why do we strive to puzzle out random acts? Are we willing to surrender freedom to mitigate danger? Heneke hints at a lot of uncomfortable questions and if you dare to watch, you’ll find it’s not just a question of whodunnit, and even if you ask the right questions, there’s no telling if you’ll ever find the answers.

Laurence Anyways

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I don’t have much to say about the whole Caitlyn Jenner-break the internet thing. I hope she’s happy and getting happier with her transition. I’m not a fan of the Jenner-Kardashian machine, and it feels weird to me to take something so intimate and personal and seek to profit from it, but I guess she’s only following the family business model. I just hope it doesn’t cheapen the real struggle that less privileged people go through with their own transitions every day, out here in the real world.

Laurence Anyways is a 2012 movie by talented Canadian director Xavier Dolan. It’s about a man, Laurence (Melvil Poupaud) who, in the late 80s and his early 30s, decides he must live as the woman he’s always known himself to be. Hurdle number one: breaking the news to his girlfriend Fred (Suzanne Clement), who goes through the predictable knee-jerk reactions – are you gay, have you ever worn my panties, I’m leaving you. But she can’t really leave him. Leave her, I should say, and soon becomes his biggest supporter.

Dolan is a young director who’s still finding his way with this film. There are some crazy set pieces that don’t always work, but are still admirable and some quite memorable. He’s clearly got a visual talent beyond your average director. But he brings this movie in at nearly three hours, and it just doesn’t need to be that long. In fact, the film’s first 20 minutes are probably the most editable. And the interview framework feels forced and unnecessary.

Poupaud and particularly Clement are masterful here. I really enjoyed scenes between Laurence and his ice-bitch mother, played wonderfully by Nathalie Baye. There’s a lot this film is telling us in sideways glances and throwaway remarks. Poupaud’s quiet moments work like magic. The first day Laurence wears a dress to his job (as a college professor) is a minute in film that needs to be studied. The silence is crafted beautifully. Clement, meanwhile, gets to be the explosive one, her red hair accenting her passionate missives like fireworks.

There are some mis-steps here but Dolan presents his flamboyant film with confidence, if a little too much music, a little too stylized. But it’s something to behold, and this kid just keeps getting better and better.

Movies for Kids That Adults Would Enjoy (Non-Animated)

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Wandering Through the Shelves’ caveat at the end made this a tricky one. There are so many G-rated animated films taht I adore. I really had to dig deep for liv action family movies for me to endorse, especially since I already used up Babe in Live Action Fairy Tale Adaptations.

Home Alone (1990)- It makes it easier when the movie for kids came out when I was a kid. All I needed to do when rewatching it for the first time in twenty years was remember what it was like to be a ten year-old ewatching this for the first time. When I was a kid, I watched it for the sadistic finale. As an adult, I love Catherine O’Hara’s quest to get home to her son and got a kick out of how resourceful Kevin becomes. The casting is perfect from Pesci and Stern to Hope Davis as a French ticket agent.

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004)– If my calculations are correct, this may be the last time that the once great Jim Carrey was actually fun to watch. His homicidal master of disguise dominated the previews but the three kids- an inventor, a reader, and a biter- are the real stars. When all the adults are either despicable or clueless, these three take care of each other without ever having to set traps. Although not nearly as dark and unfortunate as Jude Law’s narrator keeps warning us (the parents die in every movie, bud. This isn’t that unusual), SOUE has a wicked sense of humour and genuinely touching moments.

Hugo (2011)- Does this really count as a kids movie? One of Scorsese’s better post-Goodfellas films, Hugo is pure magic for any age. The scenes in the train station- where people get on and off trains and work in various shops-were especially spectacular in IMAX 3D and scorsese’s love of movies has never been more apparent. Not sure I can picture Hugo as the next Spiderman though.

Movie Malarkey!

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Welcome, one and all, to our first ever round of Movie Malarkey!

The aim of the game is thusly: an obscure and vague movie title will be selected. Without looking it up, two of us will attempt to guess what the movie is, based solely on the title, and the third will write up a synopsis of the actual movie. Your job, dear reader, is to guess which one is the REAL movie, and you shouldn’t be looking it up either. You can vote via poll or by comment. Anyone who wants to participate in the coming weeks can leave a comment. Same goes for anyone who’s go the perfect vague title.

This week the movie title is: Phffft! Our entries are:

a) When a washed-up Broadway actor’s girlfriend is kidnapped, her captors demand $3 million dollars in ransom. To raise the money, he must reassemble the cast of his hit musical Phffft!, including his volatile ex-wife and two men sharing a horse costume, in order to raise the money.

b) An acrimoniously divorced couple can’t seem to stop running into each other in various surprising ways while being counselled by their confidantes to keep their distance, until one night they find themselves in a nightclub doing the mambo together. Can a rekindling be far behind?

c) Roslyn and Kara were the two most popular girls in school, until the bus crash. Now Kara is in a coma, trapped in limbo, with the ability to move things with her mind and only helping her friend from beyond will wake her up. But what will Kara do when Roslyn starts crushing on Kara’s boyfriend? Find out in the latest teen comedy from the writers of She’s All That.

ANSWER:

As many of you guessed, the answer is b) – the divorced couple who end up “doing the mambo.” Although I’d venture to say that if you guessed a) you are even more correct since that is clearly the superior movie synopsis, and one I wish existed. Phffft is a 1954 film starring Jack Lemmon. It gets its title, rather randomly I think, from Walter Winchell’s gossip column of the times. When a celebrity couple split, he called it a phffft. So there you have it.

Entourage

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Sean

Matt and I took in a screening of Entourage on Monday. Full disclosure: I’ve never watched the show, not even once. So I went in basically cold, knowing just the basic premise. Fortunately, the writers had anticipated people like me (or possibly the premise was also the entire plot for the eight seasons the show ran). Either way, the movie jumped right into things and didn’t leave me behind.

it seems very fun to be a celebrity, and possibly even more fun to be in a celebrity’s inner circle. The four guys are inseparable and each of them gets about equal screen time as far as I can figure it. Vince, the actual star, certainly doesn’t get more screen time than his bros, both semi-biological and adopted, which is surprising in a way since the plot revolves around a movie that Vince is both starring in and directing. But it makes sense after I realized that the whole point of the movie, and presumably the show, is the relationship between these guys. That they are on this ride together even though only one is driving the car (which is a poor metaphor because apparently Turtle started out as Vince’s driver and seems to still fill that role despite also being a tequila baron).

By the looks of things, the boys had a fun time making this movie. It may just have been a good excuse to drive expensive cars and rent expensive houses and party with naked women on expensive boats, but isn’t that what being a celebrity is all about? Fortunately, their fun is infectious and I enjoyed tagging along. Entourage is a very entertaining movie and is the next best thing to having a famous friend. It gets a rating of eight extremely brief celebrity cameos out of ten.

Matt

This being his introduction to the glamorous world of Entourage, I was looking forward to hearing Sean’s take on the movie. It mostly hit the ground running but worked in a Piers Morgan segment early on that cleverly brought new recruits up to speed while dropping in-jokes for the fans.

This may not have been my initiation but I can hardly call myself a fan. I only binge-watched until the end of the third season. Lucky for me, not much seems to have changed in the last five seasons except that Ari is now somehow the head of a major studio and Turtle has lost a lot of weight.

How you feel about Entourage the movie probably depends on how you feel about Entourage the series. Watching the film at the screening last night was a lot like watching three back-to-back episodes of the show with a roomful of fans and Sean. They didn’t even skip the theme song. I will say that I laughed more consistently last night than I did watching the first three seasons of the show and that I can’t imagine a fan being disappointed. They’ll definitely get their money’s worth with a couple dozen or more celebrity cameos, even if only about half of them are used as effectively as they could be.

Mostly though, i couldn’t have said it any better than Sean. It’s the bond between these four guys and the agent that bet everything on them that makes this franchise work. It ties together all the otherwise seemingly random gags, cameos, and subplots into a coherent story and a very enjoyable movie.

Weekend Round-Up

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Project Almanac – I have mixed feelings about this one. I wasn’t bored by it, but the story is thin. I like the championing of the inventor, but I disliked the very trite time-travel routine, where the same costs and benefits are explored here as have been elsewhere a thousand times before. The kids are likeable enough but you know what? Enough with the “found footage” thing. It’s done. Let’s drop it.

Gambit – A movie with Colin Firth and Alan Rickman AND Stanley Tucci you want to like. But can you? It’s a remake, written by the Coen brothers, about an art thief who recruits ditzy Cameron Diaz to pull a fast one on his boss – and then dares to be surprised when it doesn’t quite get pulled off as planned. Firth is solid and has great comic timing but Diaz exists on a level so far beneath him it’s not fair to either. I have the feeling Firth was hoping for The Big Lebowski but ended up in The Ladykillers. Better luck next time, y’all.

San Andreas – The three Assholes who went to see this together are also the same three Assholes planning a trip to shitty, shaky San Francisco next month. Oh sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. Lots of wine, we heard, those weird, slopy streets, and just a beautiful coastal drive away from LA. San Andreas is not exactly a boon to tourism. Made it seem a little reckless to travel there (let alone live there), in fact. But we survived the movie and as of this time have not cancelled our plane tickets, mostly because Sean couldn’t find the number. I watched this movie totally stressed out, from start to finish. Is there a plot to this thing? I have no idea. WATCH OUT FOR THAT FIRE! Is there good acting in this thing? I don’t know, does dodging debris count? WATCH OUT FOR THAT FLYING CRUISE SHIP! It was a disaster movie so jam-packed with disaster that some leaked out the sides. It keeps you so busy racing from one near-death experience to another that you never have time to question the holes in the movie, because every hole is filled with exploding glass – in 3D!

Dear Zachary: A Letter to his Son About his Father – In 2001, Andrew Bagby was brutally murdered. Soon after, his girlfriend, the prime suspect, announces she’s pregnant and Bagby’s bereaved parents have to interact with their son’s killer in order to gain any visitation with the grandson who looks just like him. This is a documentary Kurt Kuenne who isn’t a particularly talented documentarian, but who was Bagby’s best friend. This is a tribute to his friend, and also to the parents who went to great lengths to make a life for a grandchild born out of tragedy. I was prepared for this one to hurt my heart, but I wasn’t quite as prepared as I needed to be. Check it out on Netflix.

Aloha – Cameron Crowe’s greatest offense is being too successful too early in his career. Does this stand up to Almost Famous? No, it doesn’t. And not many movies would. But would people be giving Aloha as hard a time if it were written and directed by anyone else? This film is imperfect. It drags in places (but has flashes of brilliance to prop things up) and it tries to involve too many, which takes away from the central story, which is the one we’ve put our butts in the seats to see. Emma Stone plays Jennifer Lawrence opposite Bradley Cooper (what is it about Bradley Cooper, by the way, that his characters are constantly romancing women he could have fathered?). Anyway, he plays this deeply flawed individual and she plays so pert and perfect you want to punch her right in the googly eyes. But you’re supposed to root for them I think, even though Rachel McAdams makes a tantalizing (and age appropriate, while still being younger) alternative. They exchange some witty banter, some banal banter, look at an atrocious toe, and induce Billy Murray into a dance scene. It’s not a cohesive movie by a long shot, but nor is it as bad as the critics will tell you. The story wants to be more than it is. The movie is beautiful but straight-forward. There’s very little art here. What we have in abundance is white people, puzzlingly, since it’s set in Hawaii, where the census tells us they’re relatively rare and Hollywood tells if you squint hard enough, George Clooney passes for Hawaiian.

Going Clear – The more I learn, the less I understand. I didn’t learn anything new (in fact, nothing that’s not on the Wikipedia page), and I think they went a little soft on the former members they interviewed. Has anyone else seen this?

Mary and Max

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I hardly have words for how much this movie charmed and delighted me.

It premiered on the opening night of the Sundance festival in 2009, the very first animated film to do so, but it’s taken me all this time to learn of it and watch it.

It’s beautifully animated in very nearly black and white stop-motion, rich in details. Truly, I could have watched this movie in slow motion just to appreciate all of the work that went into each and every piece. You can see the love and attention that went into this; artists laboured for over a year, building 133 separate sets, 212 puppets, and 475 miniature props, including a tiny but fully-functional Underwood typewriter that took 9 weeks to design and build.

Mary (Toni Colette) and Max (Philip Seymour Hoffman) are unlikely pen pals – one, a young and ostracized young girl from Australia who believes babies come from beer steins, and the other, a morbidly obese New Yorker who is autistic in a time before that diagnosis is really made or understood. They are each in desperate need of a friend, and somehow manage to find one in each other.

This movie very deftly and sensitively tackles all kinds of issues, from Max’s fragile mental health, to atheism, childhood neglect, even to Mary’s war vet neighbour who is agoraphobic (“He’s scared of going outside which is a disease called homophobia.”)

The film is tragic at times, but has this pervasive sweetness to it that makes everything bearable. The story is often told via letters exchanged between the two, which some may find a little quiet, but I’m a sucker for animated films made for adults, and this one I’m all over. The characters have this bold honesty that I couldn’t get enough of (In her first letter, Mary encloses a drawing of herself with the caveat “I can’t draw ears properly but I’m great at teeth”; in one of his responses, Max asks, in typical random fashion, “Have you ever been a communist? Have you ever been attacked by a crow or a similar large bird?”) Honestly, I watched this movie like it was my favourite book, or the greatest dessert – savouring it, delighting in it, racing toward the culmination but dreading the end.

Lots of the visuals are their own little jokes, but blink and you’ll miss them (keep your eyes peeled for clever epitaphs on the graves). One of my personal favourites was that some of the stamps used by Mary featured Dame Edna, whom I love, have loved since childhood, while it was Barry Humphries himself who narrates the film. So delicious.

Director Adam Elliot is also behind the Oscar-winning short Harvie Krumpet – worth a viewing all on its own, but also a good barometer for the tone of Mary and Max. It never got a theatrical release in North America but it’s available on Netflix right this minute, and if you check it out now, I guarantee it’s not a minute too soon.

San Andreas – not the Rock’s fault!

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I just liked the title, it’s not a knock on this movie. San Andreas was actually surprisingly enjoyable. I am biased because as you may know I like when things blow up. Well, the sheer amount of destruction on screen here probably tops 2012 (the movie not the year). Which of course was centred around the Mayan apocalypse. This is just two little states getting smashed, but my god, so much smash!

I go into these movies expecting cliches and this movie has all of them. Including one I could have done without, the scuzzy new boyfriend of the ex of the male lead. And he is super scuzzy, Mr. Fantastic he is not. I felt like he was included just so we could get behind some of the disaster, like maybe if he dies it will be easier to forget the thousands more that are swept away with him. You be the judge I guess. For me, I always just assume everyone else died at the end of these movies, even though they tell us in cliched news footage that most were okay. In San Andreas, it did not seem like anyone except the Rock and his family were walking away at the end. The other CG rag dolls just added to the triumph.

I liked it. Every ludicrous minute. Critics drive me nuts when they give a movie like this a one star review. You know what? This is not Oscar material. We came here to see some shit get torn up. And San Andreas delivers to a fault!!!!

I give it a score of 31,250 atom bombs out of 40,000.

Savage Grace

9 Replies

At this year’s Oscar ceremony, Julianne Moore took home the statuette for her work in Still Alice while Eddie Redmayne won best actor for The Theory of Everything – but did you know the two were once co-stars in a twisted little mother-son movie that didn’t quite make it to Matt’s list, or, I’m guessing to anyone else’s.

Let me ask you a question, straight up: have you ever seen an incestuous threesome (with Hugh Dancy in the middle!), and if not, do you want to rectify that?

Answering yes to that question is probably the only reason you should ever watch Savage Grace.

I suppose the acting’s fine, or very fine, but the subject matter is stilted and nobody quite knows what to do with it. We’re talking about the real-life story of of Barbara Daly, who married above her station to Brooks Baekeland, the dashing heir to the Bakelite plastics fortune. They have exactly one child, a son, Tony, who becomes not just her son but also her replacement-husband. They become…close. Uncomfortably close, by anyon’e standards, ever. She tries to cure his homosexual tendencies by…unconventional means that are also illegal and immoral and explicitly forbidden in the Bible. Ahem.

This can’t possibly end well, can it?

Annoying As Fuck

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Some people just rub you the wrong way.

1. Anna Kendrick – You already know I can be a little mean about Anna Kendrick. I can’t seem to look past her terrible horse teeth. Like, I would lay my hand very, very flat when feeding her a sugar cube. And I’m pretty sure she paid for them! I haven’t found her good or even watchable in anything. I keep giving her chances and she keeps being so goddamned Anna Kendricky in everything, chattering away at top speed as if we’ll mistake hyperactivity for charm, following around her ginormous chompers like they’re the ones taking the direction. And maybe they are. Maybe she’s just a parasite attached to giant, sentient teeth. To be fair, that’s probably not the case, but you have to admit it’s a possibility.

2. Anne Hathaway – Anne Hathaway may be the Big-Toothed Dentition Dictator who recruited

“Woo. This is happening. Thank you very much for this lovely blunt object that I will forevermore use as a weapon against self doubt”

Anna Kendrick into the army of sentient horse teeth. I know it’s not their fault that they can’t fit their teeth in their mouths, but it is their fault that they keep pointing their gaping pieholes at us and flapping their gums in self-important ways. Anne Hathaway is insufferable. Hathaway’s so in love with her own performance in Les Miserables she actually described the filming as “I felt like I sprouted a pair of wings and lifted off of the ground.” So, you know, super humble.

3. Judy Greer – She’s awful and screechy and though she helpfully has remained not quite a leading lady, she does pop in everything. Every word she’s ever spoken has come out in a hissy whine and her face is as pinched and puckered as I imagine her asshole must be. I see from the trailers that she’s appearing briefly in the new Jurassic Park movie, and I can only hope that though she appears to get left out of the action, that somehow she manages to have her face ripped off by dinosaur who saw 27 Dresses and is still bitter about it.

4. Jennifer Lawrence – I know this one will likely get me in trouble. She’s kind of the ‘it’ girl right now but her “look-at-me, aren’t I an adorable goofball” antics just don’t seem genuine. I’m pretty sure she’s faked several of her on-camera falls. She’s saying all the right things, body-positive, girl power crap that’s meant to make her sound relatable even when she’s draped in Dior. But these sound bites have a habit of sounding very, very manufactured to me. Like her assistant is feeding her lines hand-crafted by a very clever and highly-paid publicist – just not clever enough to get by me. Every story she shares with media outlets sound perfectly designed to make her sound down to earth, while also humble-bragging about how many celebrities she knows and how cool she is. I’ve never liked her in anything, although to be fair, I’ve plain old not liked her movies, period. Hated American Hustle. Didn’t care for Silver Linings Playbook. Nobody on the planet liked Serena. And Hunger Games is meant for children, so it’s fine that I don’t like them, but if I ever hear that song of hers from her more recent HG movie on the radio again, Imma lose my shit (although come to think of it, do I hate it more or less than I hate Anna Kendricks’ Cups?). The very fact that Chris Martin seems to have replaced Gwyneth Paltrow with Jennifer Lawrence should probably tell us all we need to know. The dude tinkles around on the piano quite nicely, but he loves a self-congratulating, self-righteous dumb blonde who doesn’t have an authentic bone in her body.