|
RED: Lesser known films. PURPLE: Lee's comments |
Gangs of New York (2002) Beautifully composed, nicely written ... and a big yawn, as far as I was concerned. Too bad. IMDb.com
Garden State (2004) I was reminded of The Graduate, and wasn’t surprised to see several reviewers mention it. It’s not that good, but it’s not bad. The first scene is totally off the wall: Our hero is in an airliner which seems to be crashing, everyone is screaming and running about, and he sits there calmly, almost asleep, even adjusts the air blower overhead. Turns out this is metaphorical. He is so deeply medicated that he is barely alive. An awful thing happened to him when he was 8, and his shrink father tried to cure it with drugs. Now he’s going home for his mother’s funeral and gradually coming out of his trance. The filmmaking technique is very good, people are more complex and interesting than you expect them to be. Quirky is the right word, I guess. I love Natalie Portman, and she makes a lot out of a part that isn’t very well written. I liked it, but not enough to see it again. I was astonished to find that it is listed at #240 on the IMDb’s Top 250 film list, so it must have struck a chord in 20-somethings. IMDb.com
Garfield, The Movie (2004) No, I didn’t see this. I don’t like the strip, I don’t like cats, and just seeing the trailer was enough to make me cough up a giant hairball. I envision that watching this movie would be like sucking shit out of the Cat in the Hat’s ass. I’d rather empty a litter box with my tongue than go see it. I’m thinking of spraying all over my home, marking my territory, to be sure this raggedy-ass puss knows better than to come in and claw up my furniture. Is that enough cat jokes? Okay. What about your pal Jelli, the tomcat that sleeps next to you on the patio in a bed YOU made for him? IMDb.com
Gates of Heaven (1980) I've been hearing about this one for a long time, and was finally inspired to rent it after seeing Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. Errol Morris is a great documentarian. In The Thin Blue Line he actually made a difference, getting a man wrongly convicted of murder freed from prison and exposing the real killer. In Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control he profiles four men obsessed with completely different things, and makes it work. In The Fog of War he shows Robert McNamara as a man eaten up with guilt over his mistakes in running the war in Vietnam.
But I'm afraid that this, his first film, an examination of pet cemeteries and the people who run them, left me cold. I found the people boring. I mean, you can set your camera up and let it run and even the blandest man will eventually say something that is worth consideration, and will reveal himself in ways he didn't intend, but I found these interviews (though Morris never says a word nor is heard to ask a question) a little too naked, a little too ... well, I'm not sure what the right word is, but it's sort of "let's gawk at this poor pathetic guy." I didn't feel there was a sympathetic outlook on the part of the filmmaker. At one point he lets an old woman ramble about her ungrateful son, and you either have to laugh at her, or cringe. I cringed.
The guy I liked the best in the movie was the man who ran the rendering plant. He gets a kick out of how weirdly some people see his profession, which, after all, is simply returning to nature those beings who came from nature. Burial has always struck me as a terrible waste, and a monumental (so to speak) act of egotism. What is this obsession with cadavers, human or pet? I remember when they were building the MAX train tunnel in Portland. It was going to run beneath a cemetery. Deep beneath, but a lot of people were up in arms. The rumble of the trains is going to disturb the sleep of my dear old dad. He's not sleeping, he's dead, you idiot! If it mattered to me at all (which it doesn't) I'd like my corpse to go to the rendering plant after any useful pieces had been harvested. But who expects rationality? Ask Khufu, aka Cheops. His ka is sleeping out there in the desert outside Cairo, under the most massive monument to egotism ever built. IMDb.com
The General (1927) See Top 25 Favorite Movies. IMDb.com
Genghis Blues (1999) I sat down to write about this highly-acclaimed (and Oscar-nominated) documentary, and remembered that it was Spider Robinson who originally recommended it to me, back in 2005. I finally got around to watching it. I’m going to let his words speak for the movie. Don’t wait two years to see it.
GUEST REVIEW BY SPIDER ROBINSON:
Richard Feynman for some reason got a bug up his ass about Tuva. I believe he heard a recording of Tuvan throat singing—totally awesome, unlike anything you've ever heard—and looked on a globe for the place and found it was almost literally the most remote point possible—then smack dab in the middle of the deepest darkest USSR. More or less just because everyone told him it was impossible, he set his heart on going there. He and friends and students moved heaven and earth, lobbied governments, did everything imaginable to get him there, as his dying wish...and failed. PBS did a documentary about it called Tuva or Bust, and Ralph Leighton wrote a book of the same name.
A couple of years after Feynman died, the USSR folded and anybody with the price of a ticket could go there.
A blind black American blues singer, Paul "Earthquake" Pena, subsequently did … and entered, and to the astonishment of the entire world, WON the annual Tuvan throat-singing competition. Another documentary resulted, this one award-winning, called Genghis Blues, available on DVD. Highly recommended. IMDb.com
Gerry (2002) This movie immediately sank into the mire of my Bottom Ten Worst Films of All Time list, a list I don’t actually keep and which probably holds a lot more than ten awful films. It’s an honor I don’t bestow lightly. The first five minutes is shots of a car. Driving through the desert. Driving and driving and driving. Then two assholes, both named Gerry, get out and start walking. They walk. They walk and walk and walk. They walk some more. They manage, idiotically, to get lost. They walk some more. They talk about nothing. They make a few stupid plans. One Gerry climbs a rock and is too stupid to get back down. He jumps. He doesn’t break his stupid neck. Too bad. By now we are 50 minutes into a 103 minute film. Lee and I decide to use the blessed fast forward on the DVD. At 1.5X you can still hear dialogue, if there is any. For long, long minutes, there isn’t any. We turn on the subtitles for the hearing impaired and switch to 5X FF. We switch to 20X, then 60X, as fast as our DVD will skim. They sit down. The camera pans around them. Lee says, “It looks like slo-mo. Are you sure we’re fast-forwarding?” We are. This movie is so dull that even at 60X FF, it is mind-numbing!!! Then one Gerry rolls over on top of the other one. I slow the DVD down; this is directed by Gus van Sant, maybe they’re fucking. No, one Gerry is strangling the other one. I smile, but the scene, for once, doesn’t last nearly long enough. Maybe a coyote will kill the other one, and we can watch it eat both corpses. No such luck. Final shot is the surviving Gerry sitting in the back seat of an SUV. I guess he’s been rescued. He sits. He sits and sits and sits. The guy driving looks back at him. Roll credits.
This is the sort of artsy-fartsy shit that gives independent films a bad name. It’s why people rent Johnson Family Vacation instead of some obscure little thing they’ve never heard of. They’ve been burned like this before. In JFV something at least happens, even if it’s not funny. And guess what? It scored an unbelievable 60% on the Tomatometer at Rotten Tomatoes. Six out of ten critics liked it! Two gave it 100%, five stars, whatever. One put it on his 10 Best of the Year list. Roger Ebert said it was awful, 50% of the audience walked out at Sundance ... and yet he liked it. (“What’s that?” “Some new movie. They say it’s good for you.” “Eat it.” “You eat it.” “I’m not gonna eat it!” “Give it to Roger, he’ll eat anything!” “Look, he’s eating it. Hey, Roger!”) It’s a sad world when somebody like van Sant, who has made some films that were actually good, can get somebody to finance an abysmal piece of crap like this. He has disgraced his profession. It’s as simple as that. He should be fined for wasting valuable celluloid. Somebody from the Director’s Guild should be assigned to follow him around at all times to make sure he never commits a film like this again. Tie him up and beat the crap out of him if necessary. Sorry, but a film like this calls for Xtreme measures. IMDb.com
Ghost Rider (2007) Second feature at the drive in. IMDb.com
The Girl in the Café (2005) Bill Nighy is really a wonderful actor. If you saw Love, Actually, he’s the guy who stole the movie from the bigger names as a has-been rock star who reluctantly recorded a piece-of-shit Christmas song and is just indecently amazed and happy when it becomes a big hit. He was also the best thing about that big clunker, A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Apparently Hugh Grant was going to be in this, but I’m very glad Bill Nighy was cast instead. Grant could have done it: Nighy plays an awkward, stammering, clueless and somehow still likeable guy, just like Grant does, but he brings a gravity to the role that Grant couldn’t have managed. Lawrence is a mid-level boffin at the Ministry of the Exchequer. He has no life at all, but is a dogged fellow, trying to do good while endlessly compromising. His posture, is defeated, every step he takes is as if he expects the ground to give out under him. When he approaches a single woman in a crowded cafe, you get the impression this is the wildest, craziest thing he’s ever done. The woman is the terrific Kelly Macdonald, who couldn’t be more different. She is half his age, but calm and centered and a bit mysterious. An odd and very quick relationship develops, and she ends up accompanying him to the G8 Summit in Iceland ... where things sort of come apart. It doesn’t get bad, I enjoyed the movie thoroughly, but it’s quite a bit short of believable. The director, Richard Curtis, who was one of the chief writers for both Blackadder and Mr. Bean, two of the funniest Brit TV comedies ever, has an agenda, and it’s one I totally agree with ... but still, it gets in the way of the human story. But I recommend it, nonetheless. Just watching the two characters interact is worth your time. IMDb.com
The Girl of Your Dreams (La niña de tus ojos) (Spanish, 1998) Sometime in the ‘30s, a film company from Spain goes to Germany to make a film. Joseph Goebbels becomes infatuated with the star (Penelope Cruz, she falls in love with a Jewish prisoner being used as an extra. It’s played mostly as a comedy, but often doesn’t seem to know what it’s going to be. It looks good, but that’s about all. I was reminded of To Be or Not to Be, either the Jack Benny or Mel Brooks versions, trying to set a comedy against the background of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Ernst Lubitsch; Mel Brooks did okay. This one didn’t. IMDb.com
Girl With a Pearl Earring (2003) Every frame looks like a wonderful painting, I’ve seldom seen such beautiful use of light ... but the story lacks something. It’s tough to make an entire movie about the creation of a single painting, in this case a famous one by Vermeer. Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George was much better. IMDb.com
Giuliani Time (2005) The officers who thrust a toilet plunger up Abner Louima's ass, puncturing his colon and bladder (and costing the city of New York $8,750,000) are said to have shouted "It's Giuliani Time!" as they sodomized him. Well, bend over, America, he's after your ass this time. This is not a particularly good documentary, it seemed to slant some of the data, but who cares? This shithead needs to be exposed. On September 10, 2001, he was a worthless schmuck with virtually zero prospects in politics. Two days later he was America's Hero. And I'll admit, it was a shining moment. But it's 2007, asshole. Go crawl back under your rock. IMDb.com
God is Great and I’m Not (Dieu est grand, je suis sout petite) (French, 2001) Audrey Tautou is one of my all-time favorite actresses, but not even she can rescue a hopeless mess like this. It seemed to be almost randomly assembled, and we bailed out at the 30-minute mark when we realized we were bored and uninvolved. Avoid this. IMDb.com
The Godfather Saga (1972/1974/1990) See Top 25 Favorite Movies. IMDb.com
Godsend (2004) One of the dumbest movies of the year. Nothing makes sense. The DVD includes no less than four alternate endings, none of which make any more sense than the idiotic one they went with. When a DVD offers alternate endings, beware. It means they didn’t have a clue as to what they were doing in the first place. IMDb.com
The Golden Compass (2007) First feature At the Drive In with Beowulf. IMDb.com
Gone Baby Gone (2007) Dennis Lehane is much more than just a genre writer, he’s simply one of the best writers working today. There are no easy situations in a Lehane novel, and no easy answers. In Mystic River, the father of the murdered daughter kills the wrong man … which is tough enough, but then Lehane makes it clear that the guy can live with it. Whoa! His series of Boston PI novels featuring Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro are as tough-minded and brutal as any books I’ve ever read. And Ben Affleck does a damn good job with this book his first time out of the box as a director, starring his little brother Casey as Patrick. In the course of the story this man is twice presented with a chance to step outside the law and do what many of us would consider to be “the right thing.” The first time, he does what I believe 99% of us would … well, maybe not do, but not have any big moral objections to. But it doesn’t seem to sit easy with him. And I wonder if it would sit easy with me? For whatever reason, the next time he makes such a choice, he does what I suspect 99% of us would not approve of … but I can’t find it in my heart to condemn him for it. I don’t know what it’s like to murder a man—even a completely loathsome man—in cold blood, and he does. I don’t want to get into too much detail for those of you who don’t know the story, because I think it will rock you, and make you think for a long time. Is kidnapping ever okay? Even for the best of reasons? Before you answer, remember that the huge majority of spousal kidnappers truly believe they are doing the right thing for their children … and, of course, some of them are. But who am I to set myself up as the decider?
Two observations, one good, one bad.
Good: Amy Ryan is nominated for Best Supporting Actress as I write this, and boy, does she ever deserve it. She plays one of the most loathsome, irredeemable, needs-killing … and yet perfectly ordinary characters I’ve ever seen on the screen. That was the assignment, and she sure delivered. I haven’t seen Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan in I’m Not There, but I think Ryan may be even better than Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton, who was my choice until I saw this movie. She’s definitely better than Saoirse Ronan in Atonement. (Ruby Dee will probably get it, though, in a sentimental vote. She wasn’t that good, actually.)
Bad: Angie Gennaro is hardly in this movie. Mostly she just sits around and listens. My memories of the books is that she was a hell of a lot feistier than that. Shame on you, Ben, as co-screenwriter, for cutting all of Angie’s lines! IMDb.com
The Good German (2006) This should have been a real crackerjack, and part of it is. Steven Soderbergh is a hell of a good director, and I understand the book this was based on was a good one. It attempts to look like it was actually made in 1945, and except for a very few camera moves that seem a bit slick, it is amazing. And no wonder, since they used all period equipment and techniques, such as incandescent lighting and old lenses and camera. (I was pissed off at first when the card came up saying “This movie has been formatted to fit your screen,”—I hate that!—but then I realized it had to be TV-screen sized because that was how all films were made in 1945, and in fact when it was shown in theaters it was vertically letterboxed because modern projectors can’t handle square film frames.) The scenes in cars are clunky and back-projected: perfect! The B&W film is often overexposed when in sunlight—exactly right!—and the indoor lighting is perfect for the shadowy noir effects. It evokes those classic neo-realist post-war films from Fellini and De Sica. There is a fine sequence during a parade that is pure Hitchcock. Secret Agent, or maybe Foreign Correspondent. The ending is pure Casablanca, some of the shots of the airplane on the tarmac are virtual replicas. I liked that. The music is perfect.
So where did it go wrong? Cate Blanchett is her usual wonderful self, and I barely recognized her at first. She is lit gorgeously. If her cheekbones were any sharper you could cut paper with them. Her voice is sultry. But there is very little chemistry between her and George Clooney, and I’m not sure why. It’s just something you know when you see it, and it wasn’t there. The plot was confusing and the ending abrupt. (That’s all? That was her big secret?) It also concerns a Big Secret about how the V-2 rockets were made with starving slave labor, just at the point when we were smuggling German scientists to the US to work on rockets for us. It took a lot of the tension out of it for me to know that we just didn’t care if Werner von Braun, or whatever his phony name was here, knew that, or even participated in it. (I believe he did, and isn’t it ironic that man’s greatest achievement, landing on the moon, was jump-started by one of our worst nightmares, the Nazi extermination of social undesirables?)
I really wanted to like this and I gave it every possible chance, but it finally foundered on poor storytelling. No technical gimmick can rescue a movie from that. IMDb.com
Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) I'll have to start out by admitting to a little inconsistency. Elsewhere in these reviews I have railed against movies that play fast and loose with the facts (Cinderella Man springs to mind). I also have a distaste for movies that unnecessarily hype up the action in what is essentially a cerebral story. Now here is a movie that is rigorous and thoughtful and has no superfluous car chases or even people running down hallways to deliver dire news ... and I found it just a trifle boring.
Part of it is that I am very familiar with the material, it has been covered many times in every medium. It is also very modest in its goals—again, not a bad thing in itself—but it was amazingly short, and I kept feeling it might have covered more ground. I learned that it was originally written to be a live performance on CBS, and perhaps they should have expanded it just a trifle for a theatrical release.
But enough of picking on it. It was very well-staged and well-acted, particularly by David Strathairn, who was unlucky enough to turn in what may be his masterpiece in the year of Capote. I think the most valuable thing about it wasn't so much the depiction of how that monster McCarthy was brought to his knees as in recalling for me how intimate television used to be, before flashy computer graphics, shakycams, microsecond cutting and editing, and the general helter-skelter pacing the public now seems to demand. Ed Murrow, speaking at the beginning and end of this film about how awful TV was becoming, how it was squandering its potential, could never have envisioned the depressing depths to which public taste and superfluous technology could actually push it. McLuhan called TV a "hot" medium, meaning that it required viewer participation to fill in between the raster-scan lines. Events have proven him totally wrong, I believe, now that we have perfect color, computer editing, tiny mobile cameras, and high definition coming over the horizon. Now we sit, zombified, while the meaningless or actually mind-rotting content is poured into our eyes with no connection at all to our brains. IMDb.com
The Good Shepherd (2006) Robert De Niro wanted this to be a sort of Godfather of the CIA, an epic covering a lot of time about a mysterious organization. And there are a lot of similarities between the Company and the Cosa Nostra, except the Mob whacks mostly people who the world is better off without, and the CIA whacks elected heads of state and entire countries. You tell me who is worse.
One reviewer asked a question something like "Where is James Bond when we need him?" Well, he's in the funny pages, where he belongs. There never has been and never will be a secret agent like Bond, thankfully, but the real spies are much, much worse than our Jimmie. Spying is the dirtiest business on the planet. Nobody comes away unsoiled. Nobody retires with his soul intact. You are in the business of lying, betrayal, treason, and blackmail. Those are the tools of the trade, and a sense of humanity doesn't enter into it. You may say you are doing it for your country—and in time of war, I have to swallow hard and say that, yes, it's necessary—but nobody ever disbanded a spy organization (we have at least 16 of them in the US, and none of them like any of the others), and they will always find work to do, and justify it in the "national interest."
This movie follows a man played by Matt Damon from his days at Yale to his involvement in the Bay of Pigs. At Yale he joins the most despicable group of power-mad frat boys ever conceived for the sons of rich folks: Skull and Bones (once known as The Brotherhood of Death, did you know that?). From there he joins the wartime OSS, then into the infant CIA. He has no home life and very little emotion.
The movie makes a lot of good points about the filth these people swim in every day, and the godlike powers they assume over the lives of others. But it makes them slooooowly. The pacing is way off; even I was beginning to wish for Mr. Bond to come bursting through a window with one of his outlandish gadgets and start kicking some ass. Tense, engrossing movies can be made about complicated stories that involve no violence at all (such as All the President's Men), but this isn't one of them. The sound is so congealed with other noise—and I know, a point was being made about how much of spying is about filtering out the noise, the lies, to get to the bottom of things, but really!—that I had to go to Wiki after I'd seen the movie to find out what I'd seen. IMDb.com
Goodnight Mister Tom (1998) (TV) An abused boy is sent to the country during the London Blitz. He stays with a crusty old goat who lost his wife 20 years ago. Guess what happens? You want to see the home front during the Big War, take a look at the classic Mrs. Miniver, which will make you cry if you have a heart, or the devilish Hope and Glory, which will make you laugh and cry at the same time. IMDb.com
Gothika (2003) Five minutes into this movie Lee said “Another blue movie.” No, not porn, not smut. We’ve seen a lot of blue movies recently. What it means is, they are shot almost entirely in the dark, in shades of blue. Things are obscured by shadows and intervening objects. There’s a lot of lightning and rain. This is a pretty good sign that the script is a mess. People blunder around without any good reason. It’s also a whispering movie. Half the dialogue is whispered, and what with the moody music and eerie sound effects you can’t understand a good deal of it. With a DVD you can turn on the titles for the hearing-impaired, if you care enough to think you’re really missing something. We didn’t bother. That’s because it was also a “Huh?” movie. That means that when the credits start to roll, you turn to each other and say, in unison, “Huh?” IMDb.com
The Grapes of Wrath (1940) See Top 25 Favorite Movies. IMDb.com
The Green Butchers (De Grønne slagtere) (2003, Danish) Two apprentice butchers, both big-time losers, open their own shop. Nobody comes, until they accidentally lock a guy in the meat locker and he dies. Naturally they are well-equipped to dispose of a body, but they take the extra step of selling the meat as “Chicky-wicky.” It proves so popular they have to get more ... (There are two schools of thought as to the taste of human meat. One is the old “tastes like chicken.” The other is that it tastes like Spam, but maybe the Danes haven’t heard of this, or maybe there’s no word in Danish for Spam. Which would make them lucky, in my opinion.) It is handled as black humor, like Sweeney Todd or Eating Raoul. But in the middle it turns serious and loses its way, ends up going nowhere. I have to say, though, that the trip to nowhere is pretty amusing. IMDb.com
Grindhouse (2007) First feature at the drive in; second feature, The Hills Have Eyes. IMDb.com
Grizzly Man (2005) I can't really review this as a film, because I am too emotionally tied up in the subject of it and I didn't watch it all. So discount my opinion by that factor.
Did you ever meet someone who, from the first instant, you just knew you hated? Despised, loathed, abhorred everything about him? Timothy "Treadwell" is such a man for me. Or was, because he got eaten by a bear. I put his last name in quotes because it is one of the many lies he told about himself. Two minutes—two minutes!—into this film, I had him pegged as one of the most narcissistic, egotistic, self-aggrandizing and self-dramatizing, ecologically ignorant, anthropomorphizing, Steve Irwin-channeling assholes it has ever been my sorry lot to spend two minutes with.
He was also one of the luckiest assholes on the planet ... up until the bear ate him. (I like the sound of that so much I have to keep writing it: The bear ate him! The bear ate him! The bear ate him! Hurray for bears!) (Sorry to report that the bear ate his unfortunate girlfriend, too.) For 13 summers he begged them to eat him. He'd set up his camera and go out in front of it with the bears, spouting bullshit about how they were his friends, how he was interacting with them, how he was protecting them (even though no one was hunting or poaching the bears in the national park where he was frolicking with nature). How he was performing a valuable service studying bear behavior, as if he were an ursine Jane Goodall or Dian Fossey. Hey, you can study bears with a long lens; you won't bother them and they won't bother you. But no, our Tim had to get his hand into all his shots, touching the bears, romping with them, facing them off, and deluding himself into thinking he was dominating these animals rather than just failing to interest them as food.
The adult Alaskan grizzly bear is the most fearsome land animal on the planet, its only real competition being the polar bear. Lions and tigers? Fuhgeddaboudit! An angry griz would tear them apart like stuffed toys. But normally they don't mess with people. Tim T and his girlfriend were the first, and so far only, people ever killed by bears in Katmai National Park, which is vast and has a lot of bears in it. People, with proper care, are able to get in quite close to film their behavior or simply enjoy looking at them without being harmed or even challenged very often.
Tim finally got his wish with an old, hungry, desperate bear, trying to fatten up for the winter during a season of poor salmon runs. Suddenly, Tim looked a lot more interesting to the bear! All that was left of him after the bear ate him (The bear at him! The bear ate him!) was an arm, a head and a bit of backbone ... and a lot of well-chewed stuff taken out of the bear's stomach after they shot it. Too bad about that. I hope his last meal was enjoyable.
This man, and assholes like Steve Irwin, represent the worst side of the environmental movement, because they are such parodies of real wildlife experts. I mean, tree-huggers are easy enough to laugh at. How much more risible is a bear-hugger? Tim T. trespassed on bear territory. He was cited by park rangers for storing his food in his tent. Idiot! Even I, no fan of wilderness, know better than that. He brought an illegal generator into the park, presumably to re-charge his VCR batteries.
This is probably a pretty good movie, if you can hold out until the end. I couldn't, I bailed out at the 40-minute mark. Lee, who watched it all, says it's pretty good. It's by Werner Herzog, and the main reason for its existence is all the footage Tim T. shot, and the existence of a 6-minute videotape, sound but no picture because the lens cap was on, of him and his girlfriend being eaten alive. This sound is not played in the film, but Herzog listens to it, and says it should be destroyed. I am ambivalent about that. I guess I have to agree that it shouldn't be part of the movie, if only because it invades the privacy of the dead girlfriend and her grieving family (who would probably like to resurrect Tim T. just so they could butcher him and feed him to the bears again). But I'd like to have heard it. Not because I hate the man (though I do), not because I would expect to get any pleasure out of it. I'd expect it to be pretty harrowing. But I'm a big boy, I can take it, I've watched a video of a man getting his head cut off by degenerate, monstrous Arabs, listened to his screams, which were awful until his trachea was severed. I guess I'm just curious. I'm a writer, I want to know what things are like.
Before he began bothering bears, Tim T. was an actor. He auditioned for a part on "Cheers," and came in second to Woody Harrelson. Lee, who watched the whole thing, said it looked like this bear stuff had taken the place of acting in his life. He was the star (not the bears, it was always about me, me, me!), the director, the producer, the cameraman, the editor, the best boy, the gaffer, and the key grip. I thought about it, and said I figured he was also the caterer. For the bear. The bear ate him! IMDb.com
Grey Gardens (1975) An 80-year-old woman lives with her 58-year-old daughter in a few filthy rooms of a rotting 28-room mansion. They share it with a lot of mangy cats, raccoons and possums in the attic (which they feed), and, no doubt, rats and mice scrabbling in the walls. Both are named Edith Beale, Big Edie and Little Edie. Little Edie has been here for 20 years, but will be leaving soon (she tells us many, many times). So what the hell is this? The Misses Havisham, Jr. and Sr.? Some godforsaken backwater of the Yoknapatawpha River in Mississippi? Norma Desmond and Blanche DuBois living under assumed names?
No, it's The Hamptons, Long Island, and the women's middle name is Bouvier. They are Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis's aunt and cousin, and not long ago the county almost threw them out for health and safety violations until Jackie swept in and swept up and presumably gave them a good Bouvier talking-to. This gives the movie a special edge, I suppose. How did these children of fame and privilege get into such straits?
Basically, by being crazy as bedbugs (which I suspect flourish in Grey Gardens). Oh, not awful crazy, not insane; you can talk to them, they are quite rational most of the time, they aren't scary in any way. But crazy is as crazy does. One look at their house and you know. And they seem happy enough, so who cares, as long as they don't breed cholera and dysentery in the place?
But there's a fine line between cinéma vérité and voyeurism ... actually, maybe it's not so fine, maybe it's not a line at all. This is okay, most of the time, but this whole film made me queasy. It's like studying an ingrown toenail, or staring at a homeless man muttering to himself while sitting in his own filth. Never mind that the women invited the Maysles brothers in to make this movie. I felt like I was invading their privacy. I felt like they were too far gone, too infatuated with their endless repetitions of the same stories and arguments that had occupied them for 20 years to give informed consent.
Plus, in 30 minutes I knew all I wanted to know about them. Little Edie has a voice like a velvet chain saw, and her self-revelations and high-jinx grew tiresome very fast. I don't mind looking at the ruins of a building, but contemplating the ruins of lives is a bit too much for my stomach, at least in this case. IMDb.com
Guess Who (2005) This is sort of “inspired by” the 1967 groundbreaking Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a movie I never really liked much. Yeah, it was an important movie, it got people talking and thinking, and it probably did a lot of good, but it was sort of a stiff, dramatically. Hard to watch it now. Which is good. The fact that a “re-make” in 2005 could only work as a comedy is wonderful, when you think about it. Not that interracial marriage is common or easy today, far from it, but it’s something we’ve seen frequently in the movies, and in real life, not the unthinkable thing it still was in 1967.
I had zero expectations, which is a good way to go into a comedy these days, because you’ll usually come out with your laugh meter still set solidly at zero. But if you get more laughs than you expected, you’re ahead of the game! There were a few good laughs early on, and then some good scenes, and I found myself having a good time. Sure, the movie goes exactly where you expect it to go, and naturally there are some bad choices made, some cheap laughs, some that just go clunk! But the young couple is very appealing, and Ashton Kutcher even gets some laughs, once he’s allowed to stand up and fight back against the badgering he gets from her dad. And Bernie Mac is a very, very funny man. I hate to observe this, but looking at the way he can bug out his eyes, I realize that he could have made a good living back in the Stepin Fetchit days. Thank god he was born into a better age, so he can use that expressive face to get in the white man’s face, instead of being stuck with lines like “Feets, do yo’ stuff!”
And one more thing made it work. Minor characters, so often given short shrift, are all well written and acted. One of the best scenes was of eight or nine black women sitting around, getting a buzz on while they diss their men, and the male sex in general. There is a surprise at the end that added a half star to the review. IMDb.com
Gunner Palace (2004) Everybody should see this movie.
It is not the story of George W Bush’s war, and doesn’t set out to be. It is the story of one unit, stationed in one of Uday Hussein’s palace/whorehouses, partially bombed out but still looking like Jed Clampett’s idea of a really swanky hotel. Though the setting and the climate and the people couldn’t be more different from Southeast Asia, it was astonishing how much it all reminded me of the Vietnam War. (Okay, not the war itself, I wasn’t there, but films about the war. Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket come immediately to mind.) There is the same disconnect between the surreal and idiotic pronouncements coming over the radio (actually, over the TV and the Internet, in Iraq) as there was in Good Morning Vietnam. It makes you want to grab Don Rumsfeld by the scruff of his neck and jam him down into a poorly-armored humvee beside these boys and let him cruise the mean streets of Baghdad for a few months.
The film captures the life of a combat soldier as I understand it to be. Long periods of boredom, hanging out, showing off, keeping up your nerve. Playing the guitar for the white kids, rapping for the black ones. Then BOOM!
We don’t actually see much of the boom part. The movie was made by just two people, embedded, as they say, and when they were on patrol with the unit they never captured any real combat. Lee mentioned that it seemed sanitized to her, but upon reflection I don’t think so. A fictional war movie would have been full of blood and gore, and the nightly news is filled with the “money shots,” meaning shooting and explosions and the wounded and dead being carried off. We knew this was happening, but it all happened off camera. You can’t be everywhere at once in real life, and in fact most patrols are just like this: uneventful and, except for the discovery of a few RPGs, unproductive. The GIs bust into a house, terrify a few people, say they’re sorry, and move on to act on the next batch of faulty information. And you never know if the next door you bust down is the one with the bomb behind it, or the next garbage pile you drive by is full of explosives.
These guys are artillery, for chrissake! They’re trained to rain shock and awe down on the heads of opposing armies, and here they are patrolling city streets where every robe might conceal an AK-47, every child might have a hand grenade.
It is Vietnam, dammit! When will enough people begin to see that? We see the Iraqi volunteers training, and hear the Americans voicing their opinion of how long these guys will stand and fight ... maybe five minutes, on a good day. They look pretty pathetic. (Can you say ARVN?)
I guess wars have always been fought by children, but it’s still shocking to see how young these guys are. They are uniformly proud to be in the Army, their morale seems okay, aside from the built-in cynicism of the combat soldier. But none of them seem to think it was worth it, going over there, and none of them seem to think much good is being done. IMDb.com
The Guys (2002) A pretty straightforward filming of a stage play that dealt with the experiences of an editor who volunteered to help a New York Fire Department captain write the eulogies for eight of his men who died on 9/11. Sigourney Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia do a good job. A small film, and a good one. IMDb.com
Gwoemul (Korean, 2006) The title means “Monster” in Korean, but instead of a literal translation the distributors decided to re-name it The Host, which pretty much sucks. I guess the idea, on the surface, is that the creature is supposed to be the host of a deadly virus. It’s not, that’s all a phony tactic cooked up to keep people more scared than they need to be. (Sound familiar?) The movie was a monster hit, so to speak, in Korea, and well-reviewed here as well, and I think the reason for its success in its home country was something that is always there in the sub-text: Americans, Go Home! This creature was created by Americans with callous disregard for Koreans, and the mission to find it and kill it is botched by Americans, while Korean authorities watch placidly.
It makes me sad. The Koreans have every reason to gripe, we’ve been there forever, and show no signs of leaving. In a sense, America has never stopped fighting since the end of WWII. There have been lulls, but once Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex (which the general was against) really got rolling, there was no stopping it. We moved seamlessly into the Cold War, and have been arming ourselves ever since. Now we have to look for excuses to fight, and we keep finding them, and we will keep finding them, as long as the Pentagon keeps its insatiable appetite for more contracts, more money, more things to keep the generals busy and living the lifestyle to which they’ve grown more than accustomed. So we stay on in Europe, we stay on in Okinawa, we have bases all over the world, and they gobble money and, from time to time, young men and women.
There used to be a day (still is, I guess) when if you needed an all-purpose villain, you just sewed a swastika to his sleeve. Nobody would protest (nor should they). Today, we’re depressingly close to the point where, for much of the world, the stars and stripes could replace the Nazi symbol and everybody would pretty much agree. Who appointed us the police force of the world? We did, I guess, in our overmastering fear, our cowardly refusal to take our proper place among nations, our unwavering determination to dominate the globe in a way no empire has done before.
Okay, enough political stuff. How was the movie? A bit of a let-down. The monster stuff was very good. It violates Varley’s Prime Rule of Horror, but gets away with it. That is, it shows the monster right up front, very early on, unlike the two scariest monster movies ever made: Alien, and Jaws. But it’s not really out to horrify in that way. It amazes by the casual way it shows the critter—an abomination from the depths, that seems to have been cobbled together from parts of various amphibians—more or less like a news camera or even a cell phone camera might capture it. A glimpse of a tail writhing here, the creature galumphing around in the distant background, tossing people left and right. It’s very effective.
The story is less so. A family of likeable losers is trying to get their little child back, after she was picked up by the creature and stored away in a sewer “for later.” But about halfway through it became hard to understand just what was happening, and by the end it had lost me. IMDb.com