-Once upon a time, this was called Rogue's Gallery, and sounded awesome, and I wanted to see it. But, eventually, news slowed to a halt of production, and I forgot about it. Until Filmjunk announced the trailer of some DTD action-comedy starring Zach Galifinakis and Rob Corddry. I was like, wha?, but then I was like, oh..., and then I called bullshit.
-Joe Anderson--who's British, apparently, but here I was thinking he was American--is a new recruit of the sub-government team, the Factory, which is split into two opposing sides, Alpha and Omega, both equally crazy, there to make sure the other doesn't disrupt the balance of shit or whatever. Alpha team is each in their own special ways fucking psychotic, while Omega is Maggie Q and Ving Rhames and Rob Corddry and some guy named The Emperor. But Odette Yustman, so fuck that noise.
-Emilie de Ravin has the worst Southern accent in the history of the practice, and plays the atypical 'cute-as-a-button-crazy-as-your-mom-that's-who' type. Brandon T Jackson has a prosthetic noise which promptly gets torn apart by the business end of a paper shredder. Zach Galifinakis is the Hermit, who is on neither team, does not show up until near the end, goes batshit crazy (I wasn't sure if I was supposed to be amused, saddened, and freaked out). Rob Corddry's character is, for some reason, the most developed of anyone, a burnt-out former golden boy in the company.
-Here's the problem with the kind of twist this movie has: in order for it to be done a tiny bit, you need to keep the protaganist at arm's length, thinly drawn and whatnot. The paradox of this is that you can, consequently, see it coming a mile away.
-It's kind of a funny way to pass the time.
Well, movie. All you gotta do is take the Movie Blogger Survey, head on over to PriceMinister, which is British, so you know it's classy.
Tip: If anyone thinks Takeshia Kitano is a sumo wrestler, leave and never come back.
So today I was browsing about the Interwebzzzz!!1 when I suddenly, and with gusto, remembered that I use to have a blog. Much like this one. Except stupider, with more stock book reviews and cultural 'commentary' and some fair bits of me being stupid. So I went back and found that damn thing, and look! I wrote something about my favorite book EVA!
Alfie's Home!
Yes, the saga of young boy who thinks he's gay but it turns out he was just getting molested. Classy!
-Erik (Jonas Rimeika) returns to his small town after three years to investigate the disappearance of his little sister, Smala Sussie (Slim Susie) (Tuva Novotny). Both helping and hindering him is the odd array of residents, who tell him of all the ways his sister had changed since he left, and who all seem to be in on something.
-Characterization can be fuzzy at times, but this is a comedy, and something might've been lost in translation.
-Clockwork Orange reference WOO!
-I especially liked Tuva Novotny, who's somewhat tragic portrayal of the eponymous character in flashback is kind of heartbreaking.
-The guy from the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is in it, in some weird role that's half plot device, half awesome.
-But, really, the star is the soundtrack. God, Swedes are weird.
-Anna (Melonie Diaz), recently dumped lesbian who works at a plastic surgeon's office, by some turn of events, joins a group of radical feminists, and falls in love with their leader (Nicole Vicius). And they spraypaint stuff and shit.
-Okay, pros: Anna is out, and her family isn't all pissy about it, in fact, they're all very nonchalent, which is always refreshing. When they aren't arguing about their love lives, the group (calling themselves the C(I)A, Clits in Action) is pretty entertaining, while they figure out new ways to stick it up the Man's ass. Melonie Diaz doesn't get nearly enough credit, always a secondary character or love interest, so it's nice to see her get a starring role. There's some funny lines. Enjoyable. Excellent soundtrack.
-Cons: When Anna starts going off on her new-found feminist rants, it's all so painfully obvious. There's nothing new, nothing daring, all radical feminist cliches with nothing to back it up. The group has no specific goal but to put up paper-mache Angela Davis statues, spray paint plastic surgeon's offices, deface advertisements, and rally against marriage (at a gay marriage rally, which was never going to go well). It's weak and the romantic plots are fucking boring, because honestly, the person everyone's falling around over is pretty bland. The C(I)A's version of satire is lame. Juvenile humor, which I guess is fine, since it's mostly aimed at teenaged girls.
-Camera work is nice. I haven't seen any of the other movies from Jamie Babbit (But I'm a Cheerleader has been on my list forever), so I can't speak on improvement either way, but much of the fault can go towards the screenplay.
-Also, lot of lesbians making-out, if you're into that.
Ah, yes. If ever there was a time I'd end up with spammers/trolls, it'd be now.
1) Because everytime one of them starts singing some watered-down radio song under contrived circumstances and smugly feel-good smirks on their faces, I feel the compulsion to tape my middle finger to the TV screen until the end of the next week's promo.
2) Since I'm too late for the Modern Family bandwagon (I don't start shows in the middle. What am I, a barbarian?), this is the only non-reality show on Tuesdays.
3) The characters are poorly-written Anvil vehicles. The black, sassy fat girl who's super-sassy and has a big voice and a gay best friend and is sassy and has to learn to love and accept her self while sassy. The guy who (as of late) has rejected any negative/humanizing qualities to become the Magical Homosexual who's bullied a lot by a closeted football player (how original). Bitchy cheerleaders who never take off their damn uniforms. Brittney, who's admittedly awesome.
4) Bad covers of songs I like.
5) Bad covers of songs I hate.
6) Bad covers of songs I'm amiable towards, but done in contrived situations to somehow further the plot.
7) This Will Shuester dude is a flaming douchebag.
8) Drops voiceover whenever it damn well pleases.
9) You call it homage, I call it shot-for-shot remake of the entire fucking video.
10) It's fucking addicting, that shit. Shut up.
-Cocky middle-aged businessman Leopold (Bernard Giraudeau) seduces carrot-topped 19-year-old Franz (Malik Zidi) into leaving his fiancee and living with him in 70s Germany (though everybody speaks French).
-Based off the play by (who else?) Rainer Werner Fassbinder, seperated into 4 acts. Now, they seperately could be categorized as different genres: the first, a prolonged seduction/romance, the second, a tense relationship drama, the third, still a RD, but quieter, sadder, a bit stupider, and the fourth, a thoroughly bizarre sex comedy that morphs into a tragedy, all within the confines of Leopold's apartment. The first three end with scenes that echo each other, a fantasy that began with Franz and rounded out to his fiancee (who costars in the third act, but was such a poorly-drawn character. Played by Ludivine Sagnier), that I expected it to round out the movie as well, but no, it was instead a rather tortured shot of a character who I consider vaguely spoilerish to talk about, but played by Anne Levine.
-So well shot as a seventies film, I was surprised to see it was made only in 2000.
-Weird, darkly funny, not for those easily offended by masochistic relationships.
That is, which ones are both self-sufficient and closed-off enough that they could shut down any travel and bunker down?
This, of course, excludes Samuel L. Jackson. And pygmies. They are, respectively, badass, and badass motherfuckers. Seriously. Zombies are probably allergic to them. If one came waddling over, either/or would rip them apart, burp "What up, n00b?" and carry on their business. Or whatever.
Discuss.
-Derrick Comedy group--Community's Donald Glover, DC Pierson, and Dominic Dierkes star (and write/produce/score with Dan Eckman and Meggie McFadden) as the Mystery Team, a suburban detective agency that must've been cute when they were seven, but now, eighteen and graduating from high school, is naive and creepy. When a little girl approaches them about solving her parents' recent murder, they decide to take it, to prove themselves as legitimate detectives.
-Funniest movie of 2009, probably. Fuck The Hangover (which is 2009, right?). While the last two acts, plot-heavy, can't possibly touch the first act in general awesomeness, it helps that the GIC care for the characters as more than jokes, and take great care in keeping with the mystery genre, both murders and the Enyclopedia Brown genre.
-Seriously, why didn't this get more attention?
-A man (Karra Elejalde) sees a woman lifting her shirt in the woods from his lawn, and, going to investigate, finds himself amid a time-travel loop which leads to a causeless crime.
-This. Movie. Is. The. Shit.
-It's so fucking cool. Best time travel movie ever (better than Donnie Darko, better than 'Looper' probably will be, better than all of them).
-Touches on paradoxes (several, in fact, though only one is addressed), the event of a crime without a cause, government conspiracies, all from one man's point of view (that he only cares to go home to his wife)...fascinating stuff.
-The protaganist is the stupidest dick on the face of the planet, though. To really highlight his idiocracy, I'd have to spoil the movie, which I feel is a terrible, terrible thing to do, but if you found his raging assholery so offensive you have to scream about it, the comments are always open.
-With prom around the corner, a teenager struggles to find a date, doing everything to avoid going with his best friend (Alia Shawkat), on top of dealing with his parents' respective love lives (Cheryl Hines and William H. Macy's pubic-hair wig). Making his increasingly desperate measures more painful is the knowledge that the biggest nerd/loser/asshole/whatever in school, Bart, uh, got a room. Nothing is better than William H. Macy's horrified look upon discovering this.
-A low-key mix of Napolean Dynamite, various teenage coming-of-age movies, and that thing with that guy.
-Fucking Florida.
-When did it suddenly become okay to refer to Chistina Aguilera as 'Xtina'? Are we on a first name basis now?
-At least the marketers know to list Cher first. She's awesome in this. Aguilera is fine. Not terrible. Mediocre. Utterly. Everyone else suffices.
-This isn't the next Showgirls. It doesn't take itself seriously. It knows it's guilty pleasure fodder, with groan-inducing lines, caricatures, the whole bit. It wallows in its corniness, basically.
-The reveal was off.
-Not enough Alan Cumming, not enough Stanley Tucci (basically being his characters in The Devil Wears Prada), not enough Kirsten Bell. Guys. Pull your shit together.
-Three renowned Asian directors--South Korea's Park Chan-wook, Hong Kong's Fruit Chan, and Japan's Takashi Miike--direct three seperate segments of this international anthology. Warning: fucking gruesome.
-Fruit Chan directs 'Dumplings', about the disturbing secret to eternal youth. Park Chan-wook directs 'Cut', about a successful director and his wife kidnapped by an obsessive extra. Takashi Miike directs 'Box', about a young woman with diturbing dreams of being buried alive that may blend with reality.
-'Box' is confusing, scary, but makes no goddamn sense in any way that's not metaphorical. 'Cut' is darkly humorous, graphically violent (duh), and so like Park. 'Dumplings' is perhaps the most famous of three, later expanded into a 90 minute feature with the same cast (among others, Bai Ling), is about an aging actress who goes to desperate measures to regain her husband's attentions.
-Some freaky-ass shit.
-Louise Brooks gets all iconic as Lulu, an uninhibited, seductive young woman who's thoughtless nature ruin herself and those around her.
-A surprisingly subtle silent performance from Brooks, all cheeky grins and mischevious glances. Also pretty frank about sexuality, considering the day (especially of lesbianism).
-Still, you can't help but see this movie as condemning the things it so blatantly shows, preaching that sexually forward women are doomed to destroy themselves.
-And...yeah. That's about it.
-In an unspecified apocalyptic future, people have turned to cannibalism to eat, and grain for currency. A circus performer (Dominique Pinon) rents a room from a sinister butcher/landlord (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), amid a variety of quirky tenants (what else?), and develops a friendship with his daughter (Marie-Laure Dougnac).
-Surprisingly light for such dark material.
-This is the kickass trailer:
So, uh, do you, with your absolute disinterest in this abode long-lasting, recall a post I did a few days ago? In which I kinda-lamented the doom of today's youth? That one?
I also talked of iCarly, an immensely popular Nickelodean sitcom that should totally get a gritty reboot wherein the title character goes crazy? My sister rolled with it:
And she used the proper 'they're'! I'm so proud of her.
-Park Chan-wook. If you are a movie lover worth your shit, you need no more reason.
-Fine. A priest (Song Kang-ho, who was the dad in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, if you care, which of course you do), grieved by the tragedies of the world, volunteers himself for a potential vaccine of a deadly, mysterious disease (where he goes is French speaking, possibly African, as they make a point of noting that only Caucasians and Asians are being affected by the disease, but as always/probably, I could be wrong). He contracts it, and gets a blood transfusion that, yeah, makes him all vampire-y (as in, all the cool traits of vampires, but none of that glittery shit). Upon returning, he falls in love with the wife (Kim Ok-bin) of a childhood friend (Shin Ha-kyun, or, uh, Ryu, as anyone listening to the beginning of the paragraph will know). And then some nasty shit happens, obviously.
-There are some great scenes in this. Like, how when the priest demonstrates to the wife (I'll name them eventually) how he can jump across rooftops, the camera focuses on her giddy face rather than the actually jumping. And how (SPOILERS) at the very end (SPOILERS) the priest and the wife are silently wrestling (LAST FUCKING CHANCE) for the car keys, then the car trunk, then the car itself, as sunrise comes soon and, while the priest, tired of the dark road he's taken, and the monster he's created, wants them both to die, and she, uh, doesn't.
-And then there's the screeching violins.
-Um.
-Laura Dern is gloriously confused. Justin Theroux is saucy. Rabbit heads about. William H. Macy for five seconds. Jeremy Irons. Other things, I'm sure.
-So...if Mullholland Drive was on stronger medication? Blonde actresses and turning points from the sensical to the decidedly non? Brutal fucking murder?
-Funny and terrifying. Batshit insane. Don't try to figure out how scenes play together, settle for figuring out what is going on in the scenes themselves (a much more reasonable goal...each one has a story that you can fill in yourself).
-The moral of the story: don't go through any strange doors.
Is it wrong that Amanda Seyfried looks a smidge-bit-tad like Anna Karina in Vivre sa vie?
Yes. Yes it is.
-Jan Jung-hwa directs Shin Ha-kyun (Ryu!) as Byeong-gu, a mentally ill young serial killer who regularly kidnaps people who he suspects are aliens trying to destroy the planet, with the help of his childlike circus performer girlfriend Su-ni (Hwang Jeong-min). They next kidnap a factory executive (Baek Yoon-sik), and as police rush to find him, revelations of Byeong-gu's true intentions are revealed.
-Hazzah for weirdass Korean movies! HAZZAH, I SAYS!
-A dark comedy/thriller/horror/sci-fi/romance, beautifully done, acted fantastically (especially an insane Shin), anywhere from sweet to disturbing to heartbreaking, all done with an enthusiastic zeal.
-My only complaint would be the third act, which veers off into such off territory from the tone the first two established.
-La Strada reference!
-If you know someone who doesn't cry during the end credits (I trust you, guy, don't worry), lock up your children and load your canons, because robots have gone AI and they know you're onto them.
Because I care deeply about all my audience (that's right, all twenty of you), I feel it's time I start sharing some sure-to-be-invaluable insights into the tween stars of today.
-Taylor Momsen and Miley Cyrus are two seperate spectrums of what happens when you let teenagers go through phases in public.
Momsen, that chick from Gossip Girl with the black lipstick and whatnot, is in that holy-shit-I'm-so-hardcore-and-badass-because-look-I-have-fishnets, who actually makes videos that look like this:
I mean, for fuck's sake. I've seen MySpace pages with less corsets.
Meanwhile, Miley Cyrus is the type that thinks she's sexy because she now has boobs, so she walks around in as little clothing as possible, mugging for cameras with bunny ears and mouth perennially agape (what up, TWO vocab words), the kind that'll pierce something, go to a downtown bar, talk about how 'frigging hawt' they look, and then go home to watch, I don't know, Grey's Anatomy (I still hold out faith that my generation isn't so as-a-whole stupid that their default programming is The Jersey Shore). So, y'see, neither should criticize the other, because in a few years, at least one of them will be really embarassed.
-iCarly should get an epic/gritty revamp called I, Carly
A young web celebrity is haunted by her audience, who she thinks have followed her home and who's laughter only she can hear, as she decends into madness (aided by her negligent guardian, abusive friend, and obsessive neighbor).
-We get it. Disney sucks. Please find something more original to whine about.
-Are they Nazi zombies? Zombie Nazis? Nazis who happen to be zombies? Zombies that happen to be Nazis? These are the questions that haunt me.
-Brilliant horror comedy, occasionally missing notes, but redeemed by clever dialogue, if the characters are anywhere from flat to annoying to asshole(ing?).
-If you're going to ripoff The Evil Dead scenes, don't reference it extensively, thereby drawing everyone's attention to it. Guys. You should know this.
-Ew-outhouse-sex-ew.
-I don't know if you know this about me, gentle readers, but I am not averse to the temptations of free swag. Is it because I'm cheap? Yes. Is it because I'm one of those borderline-hoarders? No (it's the cause, not the symptom, kay?). But it's also because in freebies you sometimes find something, like, half-valuable. Like crappy off-brand hard candy can be worth 5000 bucks in twenty years.
-So, this is how I happened upon this. The LAMB has a press release for any takers on aforementioned swag (ahem, review copy). Again, I indiscriminately put in for anything of the like (it doesn't help that my book-reviewing sister gets free books in the mail, like, all the time, and it's pissing me off)...so, yeah. Anyway.
-Jeff and Scott Bushaw (brothers, as luck would have it) do every viable thing in creating this movie (I'm not listing every single one, but it's the whole 'writing, directing, etc' thing), and star as two brothers--one who's an idiot, the other an idiot to a different degree. While Scott, who's name is Skyler in this, but details, has turned to gay porn to make ends meet, Dempster, the other one, is an idiot. I can't say that enough. Biggest idiot ever committed to independent film making. I vouch for no Shia LaBiffle characters.
-So these hombres try to make it big in Hollywood, with middling success. And that is the plot. Of the movie.
-The acting is bad. Like, really bad. Anywhere from hammy to stiff to obnoxious. Dario Argento movies have better acting. I mean, there were times it plateaued into decent, but only when they weren't going for ridiculous gross-out/physical comedy. The verbal humor, it was okay. It survived.
-Silly montages to bad pop music. I won't speak of the cinematography, because I understand this was made for cheap, and not everything can be The Fall.
-It's dumb. It's a dumb comedy, sometimes is offensively so, sometimes not. There are moments it isn't, where it actual made me chuckle, here and there. Sometimes it was so-bad-it's-good territory. Sometimes it was just fine. Sometimes it bordered on witty.
-Okay. So I laughed at "Does he know he looks like this?"
-Can you buy STD pills at a pawn shop?
Rule 11: No Explosive Devices
We understand that you didn't like Bride Wars. We get it.
Here.
-Recently orphaned Corinne Burns (Diane Lane), her sister (who's name, neither character nor actress, I can find the bloody name of), and her cousin Jessica (Laura Dern) start a punk band called (uh) The Stains, and after three rehearsels, start a tour with The Looters (half the band members of The Sex Pistols, one from The Clash), who's lead singer (Ray Winstone) gets all up in her business, and blah blah fucking blah, you know that shit.
-Rousing and funny and weird and brilliant as a rise-and-fall biopic without the biopic, probably my favorite Diane Lane performance (ahem), and some awesome music (yeah, okay, one really good song, called 'The Professionals', which I suggest you download somewhere), commenting on the hypnotically groupie effect bands with gimmicks have on the youngins (which I don't think is fair. I mean, I've had Lady Gaga nailed into my head for the past three years, don't see me wearing metal beards and meat dresses)...
-Christine Lahti does not look old enough to be anyone's mother here, okay?
-The brilliant original, not the I-haven't-seen-it-but-it-probably-sucks-so-shut-up-let-me-live-my-life 2006 remake, which relied on a particular date (I remember because kids in my wee 4th-grade-or-so class were talking about how the school was going to burst into flames and we'd all die) to sell. Harumph.
-Anyways. Is it terribly wrong that I kept thinking at the movie, "Damn you, people, move aside and let Gregory Peck handle this!" I mean, sure, his character didn't do so hot either, but he's Atticus Finch. He's got this.
-What's up with that kid's voice? He sounded like someone was strangling him with his own undropped testicles. Did kids sound like that in the seventies?
-WHen Henry Darger, a seemingly innocuous old shut-in, died in the 1970s, he left behind a colossal collection of autobiography, weather reports, and most notably, a 15000-something page epic entitled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. Now considered the leading example of an outsider artist, this documentary follows not the artist (as he wasn't even known as an artist), but the man (interviews of which consist of landlords acquaintances, as anyone who had ever managed to get closer to him has long since died or was unable to be tracked down), who hated talking to people, dug through old newspapers for pictures, and had only a vague knowledge of sex (the opposite or the act). Among other things.
-No talking heads, no investigations, for the most part, it is a man reading Darger's journals, a girl (Dakota Fanning, I think) giving a little background on both him and the book, occasional interviews with said acquaintances, all to fancifully-animated segments of the story.
-A fascinating, if not very in-depth (forgiveable, under the circumstances) biography, from his rather miserable childhood to his beginning of the novel in 1907, to his death.
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