Category: Film

Preface: This was mostly written in December, but it proves a point to someone and it’s still relevant as the movie just saw release.

What do you put as a trailer before a movie like Vicky Christina Barcelona, if you’re more of a mainstream cinema? Well, there’s understandable quirky semi-mainstream like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (which is required by law to be great, even though Zodiac sucked, David Fincher [date showing here … it turned out to be okay but not as good as the Academy would have you believe!]), and legitimate left-of-centre stuff like Frost/Nixon. With no ads to fill the gap, you’re left with only one option: a vehicle for the featured movie’s star.
What I’m talking about here is He’s Just Not That Into You, featuring Scarlett Johansson, which looks to have just about everything wrong with it:

In gender politics, society is always talking in stupid, meaningless absolutes that are clearly destroyed by the blatantly obvious fact that they simply aren’t true. What movies and TV have taught me, and what some people will distressingly back up, includes the following:

• Men and women can’t be friends.
• Women can’t be friends.
• Gay men can’t be friends.

So I don’t know, apparently if you’re a woman you can’t be friendly with anyone (although maybe gay men don’t “count” as men, but then, all gay men are rampant misogynists and gynophobes), and if you’re a man you can only be friends with people in your fraternity who aren’t gay. I’m getting the impression that He’s Just Not That Into You reinforces a lot of this.

In real life, I was quite distressed when one of my American friends informed me that men and women really cannot be friends. Obviously I’m a little removed from that world … America and heterosexuality … but is this really the world that we want to live in? Where a man can’t get along with a woman because of the rampant sexual tension that exists between every single one of them, regardless of any individual’s actual feelings? Where an alleged biological imperative is driving us towards being terrible people who avoid one another at every turn? A world where we’re supposed to believe that women aren’t funny?

Pardon me, sirs, but eff that ess.

I’m frequently too lazy for words, but very rarely am I lost for them. I promised Clara I would try, but I must warn you in advance that I’m unable to do justice to what I’ve seen tonight. That doesn’t indicate the quality of Revolutionary Road in any form. I’m not sure what qualities it has, in which direction. I suppose I can say that it’s well made and well acted.

The strangest thing about the Madagascar franchise, I feel, is that the funniest jokes in both of them are Twilight Zone references … and they both happened on planes – the other strange thing is how anyone can think that the character designs of the four leads are anything approaching pleasant.

Madagascar: Back 2 Africa is not only an example of obnoxious number substituting for a word (at least Step Up 2 The Streets did it with class), it’s also a prime example of franchising a property whose title is thematically incompatible with any sequels. Even if there are more Kung Fu Panda films (freakin’ five of them), they could either make sense due to the continued presence of Po or present a series of films named for separate members of the Furious Five.

Escape 2 Africa, however, is a vaguely racist, all-over-the-place movie that once and for all proves that black people zebras all look the same and share a uniculture, and once again showcases a theatrical son whose father is disappointed he isn’t a “real lion”. Hmm indeed.
I guess it’s not terrible, though, so that’s probably something.

Today I found myself wondering “am I right to criticise these godawful children’s movies, given that I’m not in the demographic, and the children seem to enjoy them?” Then I realised that the children of this world deserve better, and I am within my rights to a tear a new one for whatever property I see fit.

Bedtime Stories is one such property: with improbably dull eyed kids who teeter between brilliance and mental incompetence, drama so manufactured that no level of suspension can contain the disbelief, a cast slumming it to the extent that they may as well have gone to work in a city of mole people, and comedy such that, were it not for the inclusion of Russell Brand, Rob Schneider would be the funniest thing in the movie, it’s simply unacceptable.

Last year, I didn’t get farther than writing about the First Day of the 11th Japanese Film Festival. With the 12th Japanese Film Festival starting tomorrow, this situation should be remedied at once, upon my honour as a Japanese Film Festival attender.

Rest assured! I will be brought to justice! And keep in mind that this is based on a few potted sentences I wrote at the time and my vague recollections of each film. I will try with all my might not to be a revisionist historian, because I hate when people do that with movies.

This is the list of the films for last year, for reference.

In one presidential term’s time, the economy has failed completely. With massive inflation, many have turned to lives of crime, and the prison system is now an overloaded and privatised industry where the inmates are forced to race each other to the death for their freedom. Man, that’s one angry homo.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever left a movie quite so depressed as when I left Rocknrolla. I’m well aware that Eagle Eye made me hate movies, but for Rocknrolla I found myself bereft of words. When I see movies, even as I’m watching them I think what to write about them. Most of it never gets written or published, but I edit and revise in my head as I go along nonetheless. On Rocknrolla I drew a blank. The movie itself is like an oyster interrupted: an almost imperceptible gleam of a pearl surrounded by excrement. Some o fit doesn’t make sense, even if you’re paying attention. Some of it is obvious to the point of insulting. Most notably, the macguffin is the fucking briefcase from Pulp Fiction (so, too, is the gay S&M torture rape scene, this time in Russian!).
It may be a waste, but hey!, at least it’s a long and tedious one.