It’s quite possible that, in my life, I had never seen Temple of Doom before tonight. I remember my parents happily buying Raiders and The Last Crusade from McDonalds back in 1993 (yes, they sold Indiana Jones videos at McDonalds), but refusing to buy Temple of Doom because they didn’t like it.
I can’t blame them. It really isn’t a very good movie.
Raiders of the Lost Ark, as a movie, never really “clicked” for me. Then, to mark the release of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on DVD, it was given a cinematic screening. Being minus four years of age at the time of its release I, of course, had never seen it that way. It was the right decision, because suddenly I realise that it is, in fact, a very good movie. It’s very different to the sorts of movies I’m used to (but what does that even mean? What sorts of movies am I “used to”?), but it hit the spot right on.
I’ll start by making the following perfectly clear: I do not recommend Burn After Reading. I found it hilarious practically from start to finish but I’m pretty sure that a lot of people will flat out hate it and, if you’re one of them, I don’t want you to pin it on me.
Of course, if you’re American, it’s done and dusted. In Australia, the fun is only beginning. My audience laughed a lot, and it was a pretty much sold out advance screening (seat E3, baby): but at the same time as the laughter was happening, some were heard to say “this is ridiculous!” And it is. It really is.
At dinner tonight, I was heard to remark “I regret this evening.” One of my biggest clichés, and the reason I never really write, is “this movie is the reason I watch movies” or “this movie is the reason I love movies”. Watching Eagle Eye this evening, I was struck with a terrible dread: this is the reason I hate movies. Yes, I watched a movie tonight that turned me against the whole medium.
I had the choice between seeing Wall-e again or Eagle Eye. The invisible hand of the free market pointed me in the direction of Eagle Eye, then it slowly choked me to death. When I say slowly, I mean slowly. This is one of a handful of terrible films I’ve seen this year that has caused me to turn to Ajay and say “there’s still an hour to go.”
Then, six hours later, “forty minutes.”
Please don’t see Eagle Eye. It was one of the least crowded Friday night opening weekend major movies I can recall seeing, and in the credits I said “I hope no one goes to see this”. Ajay said “but we already have”.
… I stand before you a broken man.
I was quite excited for In Bruges. I quite liked its outcome. Having seen it, though, I’m wondering how it’s going to get away with quite so wide a release in Australia: it’s sweary, it’s violent, it’s funny, but it’s also melancholy. It’s about a pair of hitmen, their hot-tempered boss, a drug dealer and a racist dwarf. It’s pretty good!
I didn’t think that the first Hellboy feature was all that great, but I was excited for Hellboy II – probably because it seemed to Guillermo Del Toro appeared, in all of the promo materials, to have taken a leaf from his Pan’s Labyrinth book. That’s not to say, in the final breakdown, that The Golden Army is anywhere near the level of Pan’s Labyrinth, but it’s a good enough time.
I think there’s some sort of unwritten rule that says “if you are a serious movie dude, you are not allowed to like Ben Stiller”. Which is fair enough if you consider some of his particularly excruciating catalogue, which I would say is merely one step above Adam Sandler but Adam Sandler had the good sense to stop churning out movies a little while back (possibly because the funding was no longer forthcoming, but that’s neither here nor there).
Thing is, Ben Stiller can sometimes have a rare comedic gift. He can be an oyster, distilling the excrement of the universe into a pearl of a movie, furnishing it with lashings of Robert Downey Jr. being a genius, and generally having a good time. There’s no room for a bad movie in here because it is, generally speaking, too fun: even if you hate Ben Stiller or Jack Black (although why you’d hate Jack Black for any reason other than his role in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, I’ll never know), this is pretty worthwhile! It’s not even stupid funny like Zoolander, which … oh God, is there any point in doing “comparative comedy”? Probably not. I was going to go into a massive detour into Will Ferrell there.
The point of the matter is that Tropic Thunder is a pretty dang funny meta-adventure into the world of film making, the vanity of “serious” actors, and the ruthlessness of studio executives. Some of it is too gross-out for my tastes, and there’s at least two nonsense dance scenes, but it’s ultimately worthwhile.
The biographical graphic novel has proven, over the last thirty years or so, to be an effective way to tell a life story. Craig Thompson’s Blankets and Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor are grand, and greatly different accounts of their author’s lives; Art Spiegelman’s Maus blends Spiegelman’s own relationship with his father with his father’s account of World War II – with the twist that everyone is represented as an animal. Name recognition may stretch to two of those three titles, if I’m being optimistic, but I’m pretty sure that most people had never heard of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis before it became a film – and even then, most people still haven’t heard of it.
I don’t have particularly fond memories of American Splendor as a film, possibly because it was not so much personal as it was blazingly meta, but Persepolis benefits from a presumably direct translation into the animated form and, like Frank Miller’s Sin City, is co-directed by Satrapi herself. In black and white, Satrapi captures not just her own childhood, but the spirit of an age: Iran going from one peril to another, and how Europe reacted as outsiders looking in. In a few words, it’s pretty dang good.
What you have to understand is that the idea of seeing a Pixar movie and then having a director Q&A afterwards – along with legendary sound designer Ben Burtt – is one of my ideas of Heaven. If I thought about it, Heaven would probably be an interconnecting series of cinema screens.
Wall-e, screening on August 25th, with special guests Andrew Stanton and Ben Burtt, reduced the pain of the three month release delay by a large margin. I just feel sorry for the poor saps who have to wait for the September 18 wide release.
Wall-e is a special movie: almost no dialogue, a pervading sense of duty in the face of loneliness, and characters who actually surprise us. It’s like I Am Legend if that movie had remained consistently good and was predominantly a love story. It’s also nice to know that the theme of “last robot on Earth” was a Science-Fiction conceit, rather than a damning indictment of humanity’s commitment to anti-environmentalism. This is not a movie about nature, but about human nature – and also the ways that it manifests in the limited AI of cute, beat up looking robots.
Not really spoilers within, but definite discussion of the “flavours of Wall-e“.
“Imagine one thousand!”
Put Angelina Jolie’s stunt arse in something, and you will make hundreds of millions of dollars. Place the gentle Scotsman James McAvoy in a movie as a pathetic and then ultra disgruntled American that you’re supposed to cheer and … I can’t speak for everyone else, but I know I was disturbed by the message of this piece: ultra macho posturing, and a meditation on what it means to be a man.
For those wondering what it means to be a man in today’s workaday world, it’s about bottling your rage and then letting it out in huge destructive bursts; it’s about not being a “pussy” and about “growing a pair”.
And they wonder why I despair of modern masculinity.
Some spoilers for this Godforsaken Hell hole!
