Category: Movies

"I wish monkeys could Skype."

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Toronto seems to have awakened from a long, dark winter. Not a hard winter, mind you, just one that seemed never to end. But yesterday the sun came out, and today it’s scorching (41 with the humidex) so I’d like to think this past weekend signaled the final curtain on spring.

Friday we both worked late. When we got home we decided it was a good idea to disassemble the old home theatre (the new receiver and tv stand had arrived) and rebuild it. Somewhere between “disassemble” and “the rest” I got tired of that idea, and we went out for dinner instead. Thinking the Wine Bar would offer a quick, simple meal we went there. We ended up with frites and flat breads and Miami ribs and giant scallops and pork medallions, not to mention pretty much every red by the glass (and a few whites) that they serve. We ended with five cheeses, paired with five wines. We also ended up chatting quite a bit with Carlos, the manager, who was from Spain. We mentioned that we were considering a trip to Spain in the next couple of years. He came back later with a few bits of advice:

On Saturday we stepped gingerly around the pile of cords and equipment in our living room on our way to the market for the week’s supplies, before doing a few errands. Those errands included me picking up a much-needed HDMI cable, which meant we walked past Future Shop’s collection of LED TVs. Nellie pretty much decided on the spot that we needed one; alas, who am I to disagree?

Really, we were up around Yonge & Dundas to see The Hangover Part II (imdb | rotten tomatoes) which was rubbish. Nellie described it well: take the first Hangover, pretend it’s a Mad Lib and just replace all the major plot points with something new…Vegas = Bangkok, tiger = some other exotic animal, and so on. The best part of the movie was being surprised beforehand with the new red band trailer for David Fincher’s remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

We came home and, as best we could, set up the new receiver. Still a couple of kinks to be worked out, but it’s getting there. I hear a new LED TV should really pull it together. Anyway, we couldn’t enjoy it too long as we were off to GB’s surprise birthday party. Again, we mistakenly thought this would be an early and easy night. Later, as we drove home in a cab at 2:15AM, we wondered exactly what had happened. I think Nellie kept wondering that the whole next day, which she spent on the couch.

Sunday was unremarkable, save the last-night lightning storm that crashed around the city.

 

"But what is so outrageous is that this isn't about Pat. This is about what they did to a nation."

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I don’t know why, exactly, but I’ve/we’ve watched a lot of movies this month. Being on a plane for ten hours doesn’t hurt, and I did just get a new digital media player, but given how busy we’ve been at work (and how much good TV is on right now) I was surprised to see that I’ve gone through 14 movies this month. One more and it’ll be the busiest movie month for me since September 2008, when I took a week of vacation and watched 30 movies in 10 days at TIFF.

The five most recent have been:

Restrepo (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was the companion documentary to a book I just read (War by Sebastien Junger) about soldiers deep in Pakistan’s Korengal valley. While I appreciate putting faces to names and seeing the actual ground described in the book, the book was far more compelling. However, it was difficult to watch the documentary knowing that photographer and cameraman Tim Hetherington died last month in Libya.

The Tillman Story (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was another documentary about war, but with a very different twist. Many people knew about Pat Tillman, who played football for the Arizona Cardinals and turned down a multi-million dollar contract so that he could enlist and go to Afghanistan, along with his brother, following the attacks of September 11 2001. Tillman was killed in Afghanistan and immediately celebrated as a war hero — even being awarded a posthumous Silver Star — but his family wanted to understand more about how Tillman was killed. The star of the documentary is kind of Pat Tillman, and kind of his mother, but really is just this entire extraordinary family who display more character than most of us would be capable of.

The Last Exorcism (imdb | rotten tomatoes) had all kinds of promise, and despite being a Blair Witch knockoff in a lot of ways was actually an effectively creepy little genre film, but just lost it badly in the final act. Like, BADLY badly.

Manhunter (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was weird for me. It was the first Hannibal Lecter movie (it was actually spelled “Lecktor” in this movie) before Anthony Hopkins was Lecter and before Scott Glenn was Jack Crawford and when Will Graham was the protagonist, not Clarice Starling. It was, of course, remade with the proper title Red Dragon (imdb | rotten tomatoes) years later, but that remake wasn’t very good. So when I saw that Manhunter had a historical rating of 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, I thought it would be better. And it might have been…it was, after all, directed by Michael Mann, one of my all-time favourites. But it’s hard to get past the fact that it was made in 1986, with all the cheesiness you’d expect from a director who was also producer of Miami Vice at the time. The bad music, the absurd clothes, the bad slo-mo…it’s hard to believe Silence Of The Lambs came just five years later. I guess it played better in 1986.

How To Train Your Dragon (imdb | rotten tomatoes) holds a 98% rating on RT, which I couldn’t quite figure out. Upon seeing the ads I had written it off as another animated kids movie, but…yeah, it’s not. It’s really quite good. The animation is ridiculously strong, the story is sweet (and has more meat to it than you might expect) and it doesn’t try too hard for laughs. Kids will obviously like it, but much to my surprise, so might mostly-jaded movie snobs.

***UPDATE!*** We watched Inside Job (imdb | rotten tomatoes) this afternoon — really good, highly recommended — which puts me at 15 for the month…like I said earlier, the most since TIFFapalooza ’08.

"When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. Unless you don't have any water or sugar. And then you just eat the lemons, and the rind will give you diarrhea."

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Aided by a pair of 5-hour flights and some rainy weather, I have watched seven movies in the last seven days.

The Hollywood Complex (imdb | hot docs) was our final Hot Docs screening. I expected a movie about the desperate lives of aspiring child actors and the parents who push them to evoke a little more emotion, but it felt flat to me. Not bad, but a let-down compared to others we’ve seen at Hot Docs, this year included. I gave it a 3 out of 5 in audience voting.

TRON: Legacy (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was an in-flight movie, watched somewhere between Toronto and San Francisco. I watched it mainly because I have vague memories of both the original TRON movie and the video game, because I will watch Jeff Bridges in anything and because I am mesmerized by Olivia Wilde. And light cycles. It was rubbish, but that’s what I expected, and it served its purpose — to kill two hours. But what was with Michael Sheen channeling David Bowie?

The Green Hornet (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was another in-flight movie, and not a good one. Maybe the worst one. It just felt scattered and random and several steps below what I’ve come to expect from comic/superhero revivals in recent years.

The Next Three Days (imdb | rotten tomatoes) seemed like a good way to kill some time on a plane, given that it was over two hours. That was about the best that could be said for it, unfortunately. I just have no time for Russell Crowe playing anyone other than Jeffrey Wigand, and they did a poor job making us care about the plight of the characters, rather just jumping right in to the action-y parts of the plot. Elizabeth Banks was, as she often us, the only good part of the film.

Dinner For Schmucks (imdb | rotten tomatoes) should have been so, SO much better. I mean, with a cast that included Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, Zach Galifianakis, Jemaine Clement, David Walliams, Ron Livingston, Larry Wilmore and Kristen Schaal, I expected something so much better than the bizarre, faux-zany mess that turned up. On the other hand, I suspect this movie would be HIIIIIII-LARIOUS if watched when stoned and/or not on a plane.

Bridesmaids (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was more like it. I was off the plane now, obviously, and seeing this one in the theatre. A very cramped theatre, by the way, full of people who would laugh at every single thing which happened in the movie. Which was kind of annoying. But still, it was a funny movie, and sweet too. That formula has worked for under-appreciated comedians before, and there’s no doubt this was Judd Apatow’s attempt to give Kristen Wiig her own 40-Year-Old Virgin. There were parts that made me laugh very hard, and parts that made me smile for other reasons entirely. Like I said, it’s just a funny, sweet movie…at least, as sweet as a prolonged scatological scene would let it be.

The Fighter (imdb | rotten tomatoes) accomplished the amazing feat of making me hate — not dislike, hate — several of the central characters. I suppose credit is due to the actors (especially Melissa Leo and Christian Bale) for that, but I fear it will have a halo effect and make me hate Toni tonight when I watch Treme. The movie itself was fine…typical Oscar bait where you know exactly what will happen, but the actors were all so good (especially Bale and Amy Adams) that you found yourself caring even if you weren’t emotionally invested.

Hot Docs: How To Die In Oregon

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Due to a short but bad-ass cold I wasn’t able to see either The Bully Project (hot docs) or If A Tree Falls: A Story Of The Earth Liberation Front (hot docs), but there was no way I was going to miss How To Die In Oregon (imdb | hot docs). It had won the jury grand prize at Sundance, and it was about what I consider one of the most interesting societal debates: doctor-assisted suicide.

The filmmaker interviews several people, but has the most access to one woman (and family) in particular, a cancer patient who has only months to live. She’s smart and funny and formidable and vulnerable and loving and utterly charming, and the audience knows from the second they see her that they will witness her decision to die. It’s an extraordinarily raw and honest bit of life put to video, and thoroughly gut-wrenching to watch, but was never exploitative or saccharine. It was simply — maybe perfectly — a snippet of the beauty and ugliness of life, and of death.

If you ever find the opportunity to watch it, I cannot recommend it enough. Be forewarned, though: when the credits rolled, dry eyes in the theatre were few and far between.

Hot Docs: Better This World

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Earlier tonight we kicked off our 2011 Hot Docs festival by seeing Better This World (imdb | hot docs) in our first visit to the TIFF Bell Lightbox. The story about two young Texas men arrested at the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minnesota, it reveals little-understood (by me, at least) nuances of the changes in certain laws since September 11 2001. I don’t want to say much more than that, as the film will go to wider release in September of this year. I’ll only suggest enthusiastically that you see it if you can.

Our string of harsh/depressing docs continues

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We have made our picks for the upcoming Hot Docs documentary festival:

  1. Better This World
  2. If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front
  3. The Bully Project
  4. How to Die in Oregon
  5. The Hollywood Complex

Just to recap, then, that’s:

  • domestic terrorism and government entrapment;
  • arson and (more) domestic terrorism;
  • bullying;
  • euthanasia;
  • fame-whoring of children.

La la la springtime happiness la la!

Better This World

"The KA program is a myth."

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Since Nellie’s sick and not able to get up to much we stayed in last night and watched a movie: Salt (imdb | rotten tomatoes). I’d never intended to see it, but it seemed like dumb Friday night sick-wife fun. It actually started off reasonably well, but got pretty dumb toward the end. I can’t say much without giving away key parts of the movie, but suffice it to say Angelina Jolie now looks like some kind of puffy-lipped upright dragon.

"I used to encourage everyone I knew to make art; I don't do that so much anymore."

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There’s virtually nothing I could say about the documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop (imdb | rotten tomatoes) that wouldn’t be too revealing. All I’ll say is: watch it. Soon. I feel like it should have won the best documentary Oscar last night; I haven’t seen Inside Job but I feel like it’s the same documentary that’s been made two or three times over the past couple of years.

Speaking of the Oscars: apparently The King’s Speech makes for some yummy bait. Obviously it was the favourite for best picture, and Colin Firth was all but a lock for best actor, but…best director? Really? Tom Hooper over Darren Aronofsky, David O. Russell, David Fincher and the Coen brothers? While Christopher Nolan and Danny Boyle didn’t even get nominated? Please. Shoot Colin Firth in a rotating hallway or pinned to a canyon wall and we’ll talk.

"Because if I were lying I wouldn't have used the words 'suicide mission.'"

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Apparently in the mood for dippy movies lately, we watched two that were completely different in our eyes, but surprisingly close in the great Rotten Tomatoes race.

The Expendables (imdb | rotten tomatoes) scored a 41% on RT, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how. It was atrocious, absurd, wooden, disjointed, aimless schlock, interested only in stunt-casting. We stopped watching about 2/3 of the way through.

The Losers (imdb | rotten tomatoes), on the other hand, was much better. Silly comic book nonsense to be sure, but at least clever at times and seemingly in possession of a plot to call its own. And yet it scored 48%, only marginally better than The Expendables and not at all in line with our level of enjoyment.

If you find yourself with a couple of hours to kill and the choice between these two poorly-rated films, I would strongly recommend the latter. The former will only make you dumber.

"This rock has been waiting for me my entire life."

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[BEWARE: INCREDIBLY OBVIOUS SPOILERS BELOW]

Because it was such a famous story I knew — just like everyone does — what I’d be seeing when we watched 127 Hours (imdb | rotten tomatoes) last night. The whole world heard about Aron Ralston seven years ago. Still, I couldn’t pass up the chance to see the story as told by Danny Boyle, especially when it’s been garnering such good reviews.

It was, not surprisingly, really good. I thought the film might get boring when it spent an hour in the canyon; it didn’t. I didn’t think Boyle could bring much flare to the proceedings; he did. The pivotal scene was, as advertised, very intense. So much so that I thought one of the guys in front of me (who wouldn’t shut up, by the way) was going to vom. But he didn’t, and kept talking. Like the douchecopter he is.

I could tell Boyle (and James Franco) were successful in telling the story when Ralston finally saw other hikers, and I realized he’d be safe. It wasn’t a surprise, obviously. The key was that they managed to make me feel a tiny, microscopic bit of his ordeal, and when I knew it was over I felt relieved.

Yet another win for Danny Boyle. Apart from The Beach and A Life Less Ordinary I’m not sure the guy’s ever taken a wrong step.