Category: Movies

"No drums! No drums! Jack Black said no drums!"

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Being sick and having little energy usually results in me watching a lot of movies. To wit:

  • I actually watched Margin Call (imdb | rotten tomatoes) on the flight to New Orleans, pre-sickness. It tells the story of a thinly-veiled amalgam of a few financial institutions (especially Lehman) involved in the 2008 meltdown. Where I found Too Big To Fail interesting because it’s what was actually happening at the highest levels of government, Margin Call was interesting because it portrayed a single company’s take on it. From a low-level analyst to the Chairman, and every position in between, all the maneuvering taking place once people realize their ass is on the line, and the frustration of those who just don’t want to play the game. Judging by the box office numbers this film was heartily ignored, but I’d say the acting talent involved makes it profoundly overlooked.
  • The Muppets (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was, admittedly, something Nellie wanted to watch more than me. OK, OK, I get it already…you have a crush on Jason Segel. Anyway, the movie seemed sweet and well-paced and funny in parts, but I suspect there was more than a little nostalgia at work for it to have a 96% rating.
  • The Descendants (imdb | rotten tomatoes) is another one for which I didn’t quite understand the rating. It was good and all, but…89%? Really? George Clooney seemed woefully underused to me, not the kind of classic character and performance that we saw in other Alexander Payne films like Sideways or About Schmidt. Maybe Payne deliberately toned it down, or maybe it was that he offset the bitter or moving with something saccharine once too often. Like I said, good film…but I think I was a victim of inflated expectations on this one, given all the Oscar buzz.
  • Game Change (imdb) was made for TV, so no RT rating, but I give it a Dickinson thumbs-up. It’s hard to know whether this behind-the-scenes-of-power look at how Sarah Palin entered the public consciousness in 2008 is accurate, but it’s certainly damning to Sarah Palin. Watch it for yourself, and Marvel at Julianne Moore, and decide whether you think it felt slanted or not. To me, the most interesting undercurrent in the film is the notion that only a celebrity can win an American presidential election now…whether it’s Palin’s camera appeal resurrecting McCain’s campaign (at first, anyway) or Obama leading from post to post because of his popularity and media savvy. I find the idea depressing, but impossible to refute. Also, there’s a great moment where we watch Julianne Moore pretending to be Sarah Palin watching Tina Fey pretending to be Sarah Palin. I was picturing the real Sarah Palin watching that scene at home and wondering if somewhere there was another Sarah Palin watching her.

Panem et circenses

Dan Dickinson2 Comments

I’m going to see The Hunger Games (imdb | rotten tomatoes) tomorrow. Yeah, that’s right. Those Hunger Games. I read the books (hey, a fella’s gotta kill the 15-hour flight to Sydney somehow) and I want to see the movie. Let’s be clear: I don’t want to see it even one-tenth as much as Nellie, who bought her tickets last weekend. But if a movie looks entertaining, and stars Jennifer Lawrence, and rates an 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, then I’m going whether or not I’ve read the books.

While the media seems intent on comparing it to Twilight (all the squealing teens don’t help) anyone who’s so much as glanced at the books knows they’re nothing alike. Granted, I didn’t read Twilight, but the brief snippets I’ve caught on TMN suggest that I’d hate the movies (and would probably therefore hate the books) because the characters seemed spectacularly annoying. I was hopeful The Hunger Games screenwriters wouldn’t do that to their central characters and, judging by early reports, they did not. I think Matt Brown summed it up nicely:

“Katniss never swoons for a boy or falls into suicidal fantasies in an effort to annihilate her self for the good of the establishment. I could do with five or ten minutes of her punching Bella Swan in the face.”

Right, then. Let the odds be ever in our favour of not being stuck next to too many spastic teenagers tomorrow.

*** UPDATE ***

So we saw it on Saturday. I thought it was pretty good. Didn’t melt my brain or anything, but I knew what I was going in to, and they did what they were set up to do: make an interesting, entertaining movie without ballsing it up as I’m sure the studio tried to make them do. The actors did very well and made us care. They made me want to see the next…I dunno, seven movies, or whatever they split the final two books into.

Side note: the theatre was the new AVX at the Scotiabank, which had comfier seats which you could reserve online so there was no standing in a queue to fight for a not-shit vantage point. Well worth the extra 3 quid. Oh, and the crowd wasn’t annoying at all…no squealing, no talking, and only one teenage girl on her phone during the movie, which I’ll take as a win.

Side technical note: they did a good job of portraying the violence without making it overly graphic; I still wouldn’t recommend bringing your nine year old (as some people in that theatre did) but if a kid read the book and has played a FPS or too then I don’t think the movie will freak them out.

Side asshole note: apparently some people are upset that they made the black characters, you know, black.

"You can lie, you can cheat, you can start a war, you can bankrupt the country, but you can't fuck the interns. They get you for that."

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In our continuing efforts to see Oscar-nominated films, we watched two one* this past weekend:

  • The Ides Of March (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was really, really good. It would have been pretty depressing to anyone who wasn’t already cynical about politics, too. And man, what a cast…Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Evan Rachel Wood, George Clooney (barely in it, by the way; busy directing), Geoffrey Wright, Marisa Tomei…it’s worth it just to watch them work.
  • I’d always wondered someone could turn a book like Moneyball (imdb | rotten tomatoes) into a movie, let alone a good movie, let alone an Oscar-nominated movie. Turns out you give it to screenwriters like Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin. Despite all the hype I was kind of expecting something clunky and forced about baseball statistics, but it really worked. It worked because of the script, it worked because Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill (and others, especially — again — Philip Seymour Hoffman) sold it and it worked because they really highlighted the underdog angle. I’d also like to think that at least a tiny part of why it worked was the excellent score selection: strains of “The Mighty Rio Grande” by This Will Destroy You recur throughout the film to great effect. Filmmakers, take note: using Austin(ish)-based instrumental rock bands to score your sports-related films is never a bad idea.

* Yeah, so right after I wrote this I double-checked the Oscar best-picture nominee list and somehow The Ides Of March isn’t on it. War Horse (77%) is on it.  The Help (76%) is on it. Even Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (46%) is on it. What the balls, academy?

"Rommel, you magnificent bastard…I read your book!"

Dan Dickinson3 Comments

Last week I did a 36-hour trip to San Francisco, one of my very favourite cities. It was for work, alas, and I didn’t get to see or do all — or anything, really —  that I would have liked, but it was still quite nice. Here’s how it went:

  • 5+ hour flight to SFO, during which I watched Se7en (for the quillionth time) and several episodes of Portlandia (for the first time)
  • 6+ hour vendor meeting, which actually went better than you would normally expect with a 6+ hour vendor meeting
  • Dinner at L’Appart, a fantastic French restaurant up in San Anselmo. I had Shrimp Napoleon and cassoulet and crème brûlée, and shared in the flowing bottles of Bordeaux and Cotes du Rhone. It was like being back in Juilley.
  • Heavy, zonked, lights-out sleep at the Intercontinental Mark Hopkins in Nob Hill
  • Relaxing morning, including a walk around the city (and by ‘a walk’ I mean ‘climbing up and down a million hills’), a Starbucks stop and returning to my room to sit in the window, drink my coffee and read the New York Times
  • 5+ hour flight to YYZ, during which I watched Patton (imdb | rotten tomatoes) for the first time. I’ve always put off watching it because it’s so long, but when you have five hours to kill a 182-minute movie comes in handy.

I would have loved to spend more time in the city, or take a side trip up to Napa, but it just wasn’t happening. Still, 24 hours in northern California in February is better than no hours at all.

"You shouldn't think of her as being a woman. That would be a mistake."

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Given the discrepancy between the general critical review of Haywire (imdb | rotten tomatoes) vs. audiences — 80% of critics liked it vs. 46% of audience members — I’m guessing that a lot of people went into the film thinking it would be a generic, rote action movie. It’s not, thank god.

To me, it felt like Stephen Soderbergh was echoing his own film The Limey, except instead of Terence Stamp the main protagonist was MMA fighter and first-time actor Gina Carano. What she lacked in acting skills she made up for in fighting ability, and so the numerous fights felt more like real brawls than set-pieces…combatants were awkward and knocked into things, not whirling dervishes of perfectly timed punches and blocks. They felt like struggles, not like highlight reels.

The movie itself wasn’t anything terribly new, and the plot was a little thin, but Soderbergh’s style and Carano’s charisma* gave it enough to make it a very good film overall. And probably not at all what 54% of people were expecting when they want to the theatre.

* and by “charisma” I mean that she’s unbelievably fucking hot. Just saying.

"It's a bad day to be a rhesus monkey."

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The movie-watching marathon continued well into the long weekend, though it seems to have stalled in the face of season 4 of Sons Of Anarchy. Here’s what the last few days hath wrought:

  • Martha Marcy May Marlene (imdb | rotten tomatoes)was an excellent film. And while it’s too dark and off-kilter to be considered for best picture at the Oscars, Elizabeth Olsen should be nominated for best actress. How the sister of the dreaded Olsen twins could pull off such a staggering performance, in what was only her second real movie, is mind-boggling. The movie is one of the best of the year and deserves to be watched on its own merits, but watching Olsen made it even better.
  • Buried (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was our only break from the best-of-2011 list. I know it got a lot of hype, but I think it didn’t have much going for it beyond the gimmick of being filmed in a box. I know we were meant to be rooting for the protagonist, but really…I didn’t care whether Ryan Reynolds got out or not. And that’s poison for a movie that only has a protagonist to work with.
  • I didn’t know what to expect from Drive (imdb | rotten tomatoes)since the last Nicolas Winding Refn film we saw was the savage, ploddingValhalla Rising. How that would translate to Ryan Gosling in a car we weren’t sure. But, uh…it was pretty goddamn awesome. There were brief flashes of pretty severe violence (though, nothing quite like One-Eye’s output in Valhalla) but a great story and just so much frigging style from Refn. The cars, the city (Los Angeles), the pseudo-80s credits, the scorpion jacket, the five-minute window…it all formed this fantastic portrait that seemed like it should have been old and worn out, but wasn’t.
  • Contagion (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was good, but couldn’t quite get over the hump to being great. Which is pretty much how I’ve felt about every Soderbergh movie since 2001. It did a very good job of setting me up for the big emotional kick that I should have felt with this kind of outbreak, but the kick never quite came. I wasn’t looking for something formulaic; I was looking for something that made me understand the fear that would have gripped the planet in this case. But it never came. It just danced around the edge of it.
  • I was surprised when I saw the rating Warrior (imdb | rotten tomatoes) had earned on rotten tomatoes. It seemed like a predictable, by-the-numbers movie about underdog fighters, boozy dads, estranged siblings, blah blah etc., and those movies don’t have 80%+ ratings. But it was just really well done. The fight sequences were really well done, and Tom Hardy was…I was going to say unrecognizable, but he seems to relish taking on parts in which he is unrecognizable. Either way, he was outstanding. While everyone fawned over The Fighter, I was underwhelmed…it just seemed like a showcase for Melissa Leo and Christian Bale to chew the scenery. Given a choice between the two I would take Warrior and its pained, understated performances every time.

And now…back to Jax and SAMCRO.

Best movies of 2011

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As of today — and keep in mind that we haven’t yet watched A Separation, The Interrupters, Le Havre, The Muppets, The Guard, Knuckle, Moneyball, 50/50, Coriolanus, Midnight In Paris, Take Shelter, The Descendants, The Trip, Certified Copy, Rango, If a Tree Falls, The Ides Of March, Margin Call, Meek’s Cutoff, Beginners, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Tree Of Life, Warrior, We Need To Talk About Kevin, Young Adult or Shame — these are what I considered the best movies of 2011, in alphabetical order.

  • Attack The Block
  • Drive
  • The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
  • Hot Coffee
  • Into The Abyss
  • The Loneliest Planet
  • Martha Marcy May Marlene
  • Snowtown
  • Submarine
  • Win Win

We’re still plowing through movies at a serious clip during the upcoming long weekend, so that list might change by the time I go back to work next week. But for now, that’s it.

And geez, apart from the last two (which could still be easily described as dark comedies) is that ever a dark list of films.

"This is too much madness to explain in one text!"

Dan Dickinson1 Comment

Our year-end movie tear continues, and over the last couple of nights we’ve watched two of my favourites so far:

Attack The Block (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was unlike anything else I’ve seen this year. Ostensibly a silly alien-invasion movie, but made much more interesting by the fact that it’s set in a south London council estate. It took my ears about ten minutes to adjust to where I could understand a damn thing they said, but once I did it was actually quite funny. Think Shaun Of The Dead with kids in a council flat rather than mid-30s suburban slackers (especially since Nick Frost is also in this one).

Submarine (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was about as far from Attack The Block as you could get. I must have watched a hundred coming-of-age / high-school-romance / parents-are-weird films in my life, but few as clever as this. Lots of Wes Anderson influence, though with the weird ramped down a little bit in favour of truly likeable characters. The actors were all great, including a barely-recognizable Paddy Considine, but especially leads Craig Roberts (our protagonist) and Yasmin Paige (with whom teenager-me would probably have been madly in love).

"I'm gonna peace you in the side of the fuckin' head if you don't give us the dog."

Dan Dickinson1 Comment

After having been negligent in the movie-watching department for the last several months, we’ve been on a tear the past week:

  • The Lincoln Lawyer wasn’t quite as rubbish as the preview suggested, but it wasn’t anything to write home about either. Strong supporting cast though.
  • Red State was disappointing. It just never seemed to get anywhere with what it was trying to say, despite having scads of material to work with given its Sex/Religion/Politics themes. A miss for Kevin Smith.
  • Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol was surprisingly impressive. From the second it began it never let up with all the action, gadgetry and crazy ass stunts you’d imagine. See it in IMAX if you have the option. Paula Patton: new girlfriend du jour. Oh, and a six-minute Batman preview!
  • The American remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was excellent. David Fincher made the story even darker, Trent Reznor’s score was all technology and foreboding, Daniel Craig played Blomqvist more like a real reporter and (ironically) less like James Bond, and Rooney Mara might have even been a better Lisbeth Salander than Noomi Rapace. Definitely worth seeing.
  • The Debt was one we hadn’t heard much about but decided to see based on the cast. Not mind-blowing, but a solid enough movie about spycraft and revenge.
  • Your Highness was one of the shittiest movies I’ve seen in yonks. What in the blazing Hibernian Jesus has happened to David Gordon Green?!?
  • Last Night (surely the most common movie title ever) was something Nellie watched and I kind of paid attention to for all the Keira Knightley. It didn’t seem terrible, but I’ve already forgotten pretty much the whole movie except how great it (the cast, the shots, New York) looked.
  • If you’ve seen the preview for Our Idiot Brother you’ve seen most of the funniest parts, but it was still amusing enough. Paul Rudd’s Paul Rudd, and the supporting cast is good, but it choked a little on its own adorableness. Interesting trivia: director Jesse Peretz was the original bass player for The Lemonheads. OK, well, interesting to me anyway.