Beowulf: movie of the century? I think so. It’s like a parade of fun and adventure and an incredibly ugly monster, coupled with an incredibly Angelina Jolie-like Angelina Jolie in gold body paint. Then there’s a dragon. It’s kind of like how 300 might have been if 300 was any good. It’s the sort of movie that you despair of people thinking that Beowulf himself is legitimately “badass”. It’s essentially a movie that doesn’t want you to take it too seriously, because that’s not the great oral tradition: the great oral tradition is heart ripping, arbitrary stone falling action!
That’s right, folks, it’s my fifth Japanese Film Festival! Why, it seems like only a year ago that I was seeing a similar amount of Japanese films, many of which had exactly the same actors as those on display this year! Seriously, this opening movie showcased several of the stars of last year’s festival. I’m coming to see the Japanese Film Festival as a means of seeing friends I haven’t seen for a year.
Maiko Haaaan! is one of those very strange movies that jumps all over the place and at the end you’ve got no idea what’s just happened, except you’ve seen people from Go, A Cheerful Gang Turns the Earth and La Maison De Himiko, so it surely can’t all be bad. And it’s far from all bad, but it’s nowhere near all good. The changes in tone and story are so frequent that, despite being only about two hours, the movie is interminable.
Onizuka Kimihiko, after a traumatic experience in his childhood, is obsessed with maiko, apprentice geisha. He gets demoted to the Kyoto branch of his cup ramen company, but sees it as a blessing because he gets to live in the land of geisha! After managing to worm his way into the okiya, Onizuka enters a fierce competition with Naito Kiichiro – who used to flame Onizuka on his maiko blog.
Yeah, uh … what? I really don’t know what to say to you, because Onizuka goes on a long and winding journey to … nowhere? There’s a lot of funny jokes, and the characters are nice – and the inevitably happy ending and redemptions are indeed happy and redeeming – but it’s too scattershot. Onizuka realises an insane amount of latent potential and develops relationships and … I don’t know. Basically you end up siding with Naito because he doesn’t look as weird and, come on, he’s Tstusumi Shinichi.
So am I recommending this movie? Well, I’m not exactly rejecting it. The beauty of film festival movies is that, unless you go to this particular movie next Saturday, you’re not really in any danger of seeing it. Were it not for featuring all of my old friends, I doubt I’d remember Maiko Haaaan! next year.
The movie that you love, now with extra unicorn. Still the same number of attack ships on fire.
Watching Blade Runner is like coming home, except I don’t live there and that analogy makes absolutely no sense. What it is is one of my favourite movies, and tonight I got to see it in its final incarnation, and digitally projected at that. This cut is slightly tweaked, but it’s also something that’s entirely, you know … visible. It makes one realise that all of the dustiness is intentional, an unexplained holdover from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. While there is something a little bit off in the exposition – Deckard seriously should not have to have the concept of incept dates and replicant life expectancy explained to him, because it’s his freaking job – the rest of the movie is something of a marvel.
It’s like Ridley Scott took something that was marvellous, and polished it into the finest diamond the world has ever known. I don’t know precisely why I love Blade Runner, because it’s not without its flaws, but I find that with love, I can look beyond any imperfections to see the core, or essence, of the cinematic experience. Hence my love of the Super Mario Bros. movie, which I love unequivocally but have next to nothing good to say about.
Spoilers beyond this point … I spoil the grandest movie ever made!
On the weekend, I had the finest piece of beef ever to walk on the Earth. If the Two Johns weren’t lying to me, and there is indeed a Cow Town, I just ate its Mayor, and still have some of it left in the fridge.
Tonight, I’m seeing Blade Runner: Final Cut. It is going to be the best thing in the world. Regardless of the changes to the film (and I’ve no idea what they are), I’m really looking forward to watching it without grain. It’s going to be supremely weird to watch the movie and to actually be able to see it.
“Goooood evening, JF!”
Yes, after tonight, my life will be complete. No further discussion will need to be entered into, and the next sixty or so years … who cares what happens? For on November 12th, 2007, I saw Blade Runner in HD.
I’m going to have to adjust my standards, but I’m not sure in which direction. And, for now, I’m spent.
(PS. Going to see The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Gerald Robert Ford to kill the time in between. I wonder what the spin on that movie’s going to be, and what I’m supposed to think of the characters? Thank you, Brad Pitt, for doing my job for me).
I watched the original Hairspray tonight, having snapped it up on the cheap just the other day (in fact, the movie itself was cheaper than its soundtrack). What was a fairly straightforward movie, rather like the musical but with teeth, slowly degenerated into something approaching insanity. Pia Zadora came on screen, talking about ironing your hair and smoking the reefer, and all bets were off.
This was plainly evidenced by John Waters showing up as soon as they left Zadora’s house (which I assure you was swellegant) and stealing the movie. “Look at the disc!” he implored, and Penny had no choice but to listen. I was so disoriented I almost managed to miss Sonny Bono putting together a bomb and hiding it in Debbie Harry’s hair. There was actual evidence of racial tension featured in the movie, the romance on offer was the traditional “taken for granted instant going steady” variety, and altogether it felt more gritty. It came completely unstuck before the curtain fell (“Tracy! Tracy!!!!”), but was mightily entertaining for all of that.
Waters apparently told Adam Shankman that, in making the musical movie, to make it unlike Waters’ own, or like the stage version. I’m convinced that this was a successful approach to take. Shankman’s musical is more polished, but Waters’ movie is rather more bizarre. Different movies to fit different moods; it’s the new frontier.
Sadly, sometimes the greatest film can only be as good as its audience. Superbad is the sort of film whose target audience is a group that I do not normally associate with. At the start of the film I made the conscious decision not to sit in front of some teenagers with their feet on the seats, who had somehow timed their conversation to include, just as I was walking past, one saying to another “you’re a homo” (although, with the state of the modern teenager, you could probably expect something to this degree from them in any given conversation). Unfortunately, I still ended up with the worst audience since the second time I saw Brick. Answering their mobiles during the movie, talking across several rows, coming in and out, complaining loudly that the movie was boring. Listen here, kids! You were the ones who bought tickets to different movies so that you could sneak into this one, so shut up and watch the movie. If I ever have children, I’m going to teach them how to watch movies in a cinema, and coach them in the arts of not being vapid bigots with stupid hair and loud mouths.
As to the movie itself, though: it was everything I dreamed of and more. I’m thoroughly convinced that Seth Rogen cannot write a movie without making it somehow ridiculously homoerotic. Superbad is the sort of movie so charged that an ending with the guys getting the girls is sad because they lose each other in the process. This made the audience distinctly uncomfortable. More than this, the credits end with a procession of drawings of penises done by Seth, including a team of penises raising the flag at Iwo Jima. The teenaged boys in the audience left in audible disgust. Remember, folks: it’s impossible to be morally outraged if you don’t have morals.
Movie watching should not come with caveats. I’m not going to say “Hairspray is great, but it’s a musical: be forewarned!”. Screw that; I love musicals, and Hairspray is a consistently and thoroughly awesome, heartwarming and well executed piece of musical cinema (and it says something for me that I didn’t even think until a week later, after confronting many people who don’t like the idea of the movie, that another caveat would be “John Travolta wears a dress”).
There’s no one set of things that I look for in movies, and this allows me to see a variety of films like Black Book, Ratatouille, Shortbus and C.R.A.Z.Y. and to be able to say of each of them that they are precisely why I watch movies. Hairspray, too, is why I watch movies.
To bankroll a movie, particularly in Australia, one needs stars. That’s how you end up with something like Irresistible, starring Susan Sarandon, and Jindabyne, starring Gabriel Byrne and Laura Linney. Of course, you also need promotion and distribution, which is why Jindabyne was the only one of those two that anyone had ever heard of.
December Boys has received a star: Daniel Radcliffe. He warrants a sort of blitz all of his own, so let’s see if December Boys has legs. To my mind it’s an enjoyable film, but not an easy sell. Australian cinema is weird like that.
Oh dear. I appear to have grown weary of “dopey showgirls in gooey gowns” and come out the other side. After months of the same trailers attacking me from all sides, I’ve been struck by a few new works that prove that the art of trailer sculpting.
First up is Juno, which I admittedly did not see in the cinema:
Until I realised the secret sentimentality of Thank You For Smoking which detracted only slightly from its total … “rockitude”, I was quite in love with Jason Reitman’s work. Juno looks like another one of those films that fit into the incredibly malleable list of “movies made for Alex”. It looks like the right sort of melanchomedy that I eat right up – and, of course, I love Michael Cera. And … well, pretty much the whole cast. Jennifer Garner ain’t quite Jennifer Connelly, but hey! She can have my love anyway.
Anticipation: high.
The next trailer up is something that I was a bit more dubious on, Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium:
Yeah, I saw this trailer and I could only really think “what?”. It was seen before Hairspray, and Ajay turned to me and said “Let’s go see Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium!” I was forced to reply “I think we already did.”
I’m assuming that this is a movie about a fellow lacking imagination (Jason Bateman – keep on working, friend!), who rediscovers the spirit of wonder through Dustin Hoffman, Natalie Portman and a magical toy store. If you watch the trailer very carefully, you can pinpoint Jason Bateman rediscovering the spirit of wonder!
So I don’t really know what to make of Magorium, save to say that I find no greater joy than in Natalie Portman in this mode, and that the reason Dustin Hoffman is looking as he did in Stranger than Fiction is because this is written by Zach Helm, who also wrote that fine film. So I’m going on talent, “Magic” (you know), and the fact that, yeah, Jason Bateman rediscovering the spirit of wonder warms my heart.
Also, in relation to Hollywood’s newfound passion for converting children’s fantasy novels into movies, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising is being made into The Seeker: The Dark is Rising. I had assumed it was some newfangled kid’s franchise, but my mother assures me that it’s from 1974. Apparently it’s been rewritten beyond recognition, so that’s a moot point, but I don’t think I can really fit in another “American kid surrounded by British actors” movie.
Will they never end?
I would complain that Robert Downey Jr. plays all of his roles in exactly the same fashion, but he does it so damned well. I’d say he was the best thing about Zodiac, but everyone in that movie played their parts well, they just couldn’t make them interesting.
Keeping in mind Downey Jr.’s quality (quite different to Faramir’s quality), I am pleased to see that the first Iron Man trailer is online. If you listen very carefully, it’s impossible to miss … that song.
I like the idea of Iron Man’s origin story: that, rather than creating a super weapon for a terrorist cell, he turns himself into a super weapon and beats up the terrorist cell. Now I understand that Iron Man has, in recent comics, turned into a kind of one man hero registry, ready to round up everyone and tell them what for. The film series (and, who knows, it might be a Hulk level disaster, although I think it takes a lot of effort to make a movie that incoherent) is not yet at that point. We don’t even see Samuel L. Jackson storming onto the scene as Nick Fury. But I’m excited, and I have virtually no knowledge of this franchise at all.
Strangely enough, it’s almost impossible to tell that this is a Marvel movie. Obviously they’ve got the title at the beginning, but it doesn’t have any of the “importance” of Spider-Man or the “high budget masquerading as low budget fake whimsy” of Fantastic Four behind it.
I’m quite looking forward to Iron Man now, and it gets extra bonus points for being directed by Jon Favreau, who was smote down by the mighty fists of karma wielded by Jason Lee. There’s hope for this world yet, my friends.
