Girl Detective

Holy Cats! I knew I fell behind on blogging over the summer, what with the different schedule and the big reading project, but had no idea how long it had been since I wrote about movies. This will be the catch-up post.

As most of you long-time readers know, I review books and movies as I go along. Since I started keeping track, my movies far outpaced the books. It makes sense that I’d watch more movies; a film can be consumed in about 2 hours, while a book takes longer. But reading is more important to me than watching movies. This year I made a conscious decision to read more, and I like the new ratio. I weeded down the requests at the library and stopped browsing the DVD shelves in Target. I don’t have Netflix on purpose. On a night when I might have previously opted for a movie, I chose to read instead. Some of this was so I could finish three honkin’ books over the summer. But now that I have the new habit of reading as evening activity, I hope to keep it up.

Toy Story 3 (2010) I loved this more than my kids did. They were (justifiably) frightened a few times. I think they preferred How to Train Your Dragon. But this one was a gem. Funny, scary, sad and fulfilling.

Tron (1982) This was humoring my husband, G. Grod. I gave it to him for a gift a while back and he wanted to watch again in preparation for the upcoming sequel. I can see how the tech was groundbreaking at the time, but that doesn’t make the bad acting and thin plot any better since I didn’t have any nostalgia factor going for me. Jeff Bridges has come a long way.

In the Loop (2009) Lighting fast, super dark, and at times blisteringly funny in its spot-on satire. Uneven, but worth seeing.

Inception (2010) I enjoyed it, was entertained while I watched it, and thought about it after it was over. I was not impressed enough, though, to try very hard to puzzle out exactly what happened and didn’t feel the need to see it again.

The Awful Truth (1937) Cary Grant in an early film that shows why he became a star. Hilarious, and a perfect example of what a good rom-com is, even decades later. If you haven’t seen it, you’re missing out.

Bedtime Stories (2008) Watched this with the kids. They could not understand it and asked a constant barrage of questions, which didn’t help my experience. Eminently skippable.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) Geek fest. Loved it, even the slow bits. Did you like Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz? That’s the director. Don’t be scared off by whatever might scare you off. It’s hilarious and very true to the wacky comic books it’s based on.

Stagecoach (1939) A recent Criterion Collection reissue. The first John Wayne/John Ford western. Classic and important.

The Incredibles (2004) Again. the parents liked it more than the kids.

In the Heat of the Night (1967) Recently mentioned in Entertainment Weekly as one of the classic cop-partner movies. I’d never seen it. Worth it, not only for Poitier’s delivery of the famous line. Don’t know what I mean? Then rent this.

The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009) The Swedish film, #2 in the trilogy. Has the same problem as #1, and the books: too much horrible violence against women, shown far too graphically. But it also has the trump shared by those others, too. Lisbeth Salander is COOL, and Noomi Rapace brings her to life. But this film (as well #3, and as did books 2 and 3) lacks the interaction between Blomkvist and Salander that made #1 so good.

I was on the fence about seeing the Swedish adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s book, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But I’m glad I did. In short, it replicates some of the big problems with the book, such as dwelling far too much on particulars of crimes against women. There MUST be better ways to shed light on and criticize something without potentially fetishizing it, right? I wonder what a woman director might make of this.

But it also was a mostly faithful adaptation of the book parts of the book, such as Lisbeth. The character looks and feels true to the book, and it’s much of why I enjoyed these books in spite of their problems, and thus enjoyed the adaptation, too. I was surprised and pleased at the casting of the actor who played Blomkvist–not only is he not conventionally good looking, but he’s often kind of funny looking, and it’s a pleasant contrast to what will be done in Hollywood, I’m sure. But it helped with one of the film’s other departures from the book–Blomkvist doesn’t have women falling into bed with him as much, though it is, unfortunately, still there. I see the point Larsson was probably trying to make: Blomkvist loves women in all their shapes, sizes, abilities, etc. and is in contrast to the many men in this book/film who pathologically hate women. Yet he’s still such a Mary Sue character that his bedroom escapades feel ridiculous. And why is it that only the deviant sex is described/shown, not the healthy stuff?

In any case, as with the book, a qualified recommendation. Not for the squeamish, but definitely for those who love Lisbeth.

TV critic Alan Sepinwall, who blogs at Hitfix now, revisits TV shows on DVD during the summer. This years he’s doing Joss Whedon’s Firefly and The Wire Season 3. My husband and I were fans of Firefly during its short-lived time on the air, and thought it would be fun to watch it again in one swell foop and read Sepinwall’s recaps. And it was, indeed, mostly swell.

The series, which ran for only 14 episodes, was a space opera western. Mal Reynolds was a rebel war veteran who used his spaceship to run dodgy business throughout the galaxy. He has a crew of four: his right-hand woman, Zoe; her husband, the pilot Wash; mechanic Kaylee; and hired muscle Jayne. There are also a few passengers: Inara, a Companion (i.e. space prostitute); Shepherd Book, a preacher with a murky past; and another couple of guys.

I’ll get my big problems out of the way first. One, this is another example of how supposed feminist Joss Whedon maybe isn’t such a paragon. Space prostitute? Really? It might have worked if he’d followed up on what’s stated in the show–Companions are celebrated and revered, almost worshipped. Instead, they go for cheap shots from both Mal and customers about hookers, which make it more akin to 50’s westerns than millenial sci-fi. Further, the series and movie fails the Bechdel test–none of the women characters ever talk together about anything other than men.

Second, it was recently brought to my attention that while Whedon posited a future cultural mishmash of US and Chinese cultures, the series and the movie have almost no Chinese or even Asian characters, EVEN AS EXTRAS.

And yet, I still found this a darn entertaining show. Nathan Fillion is charming as Mal, a knight in sour armor. Zoe and Kaylee are smart and strong female characters, even if they could have been developed more as individuals than in relation to the men. The mystery is involving. My favorite element, though, was Adam Baldwin (now on Chuck) as Jayne Cobb. He is hilarious and steals many of his scenes.

In perhaps the oddest turn of events, Firefly, though canceled by Fox, had such a strong and dedicated fan following that Whedon was able to find a producer who liked the series and was willing to gamble on a feature film. Whedon’s challenge, then, was to make a film that would appeal to both fans of the series and newcomers and further, answer a bunch of the questions left open when the series ended. Seeing Serenity again confirmed and enhanced my opinion from when I saw it in theater: mission accomplished, Joss and crew. Well done.

Serenity is fast-paced entertainment, with impressive effects given its small budget, and a remarkably tight plot given the many things it had to accomplish. Also, probably not coincidentally, there’s hardly anything about Inara as a space prostitute. What it does best, though, is highlight one of the strengths of the series: its diverse, engaging and charming cast.

I recommend both the series and the movie, as well as the recaps Sepinwall is doing this summer. After Whedon’s most recent series, the to-me disappointing Dollhouse, rewatching this made me wish he could get another series that might last. It’s been a long time since Buffy.

As part of the same Spielberg series in which I saw Jaws, I finally also saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Unike Jaws, it prefigures a lot of the touchy-feely stuff that Spielberg did later, most notably E.T. (of which I’m not a fan.)

Richard Dreyfuss is one of many civilians who see a UFO one night. They’re brought together by the govenment, and questioned, but mostly dismissed and ridiculed. Teri Garr is Dreyfuss’ wife, and when he begins to behave strangely (painting and sculpting things over and over based on images in his mind) she grabs the kids and leaves. He befriends the mother of the little boy from the ads, who has disappeared after a subsequent UFO sighting. The government begins tracking down leads, as does a French scientist played by Francois Truffaut, who should not have quit his day job as a director for acting. Dreyfuss and the mother try to figure out what’s going on, and eventually stumble into the finale.

Unlike Jaws, this is more interesting as a relic of film history and pop culture than as an enduring film, I think. It’s well made, the music is good (the film was edited to go with the music, not the reverse, as is usual), and it’s engaging. I can see the large shadow it cast both in alien and government conspiracy tales, like the X-Files. In the end, I found Dreyfuss a little forced in his kookiness, and the ending made my teeth ache a little, even if it avoided the gag-inducing treacle of E.T.

As part of Take-Up Productions‘ Spielberg series at the Trylon Microcinema, I got to see Jaws for the first time in a theater. It’s one of those weird gaps in my movie-watching history, but I feel very luck to have been able to see it on a big(ger) screen. I found it truly scary, and had I seen it as a child I would have had nightmares. At one scene, the entire audience gasped and jumped. Best of all, though, was how scary it was with implied action and with the momentum from John Williams’ famous music. This wasn’t a sappy movie that pandered to an all-ages audience–this felt very much like a horror movie for grown-ups. Dreyfuss and Scheider are a good buddy team, and Quint’s speech about the USS Indianapolis was mesmerizing.

This is going to be quick, quick, quick because somehow the hour between 2 and 3 evaporated as it always does, and I need to meet the school bus in 10 minutes.

Moon is a moody, small sci-fi pic from last year that was praised highly somewhere to put it on my radar. In preparation for my upcoming folly, Baroque Summer, I’ve recently cut my library queue to the bare bones for dvds (taking off all those that I feel I “should” watch, like Sugar and Man Push Cart, and leaving on ones I really want to watch, like In the Loop and The September Issue.), and removed ALL books. But my husband G. Grod really wanted to see Moon, so not only did it stay in the queue but I watched it too. And, as so often happens, I’m glad I did.

Sam Rockwell is Sam Bell, the lone human inhabitant of a dark-side-of-the-moon mining station. He’s kept company by an A.I. machine named Gertie, voiced by Kevin Spacey. Sam is nearing the end of his 3-year contract and looks forward to his return to Earth to see his wife and young daughter. But Sam seems to be unraveling–seeing things that aren’t there. And when he goes out of the station, things start to get really weird. But good.

Rockwell, as usual, is fabulous in a challenging role. This is reminiscent of 2001, Solaris, and other sci fi films that are more about the psychology and mystery than they are about the effects. Intriguing and thought provoking.

Goodbye, Solo is another film I borrowed from the library based on A.O. Scott’s recommendation. It’s directed by Rahmin Bahrani, who also did Chop Shop, which I watched earlier this year. This movie, like that one, is not a crowd pleaser. It’s a small, intense, unflinching laser-focused portrait of a growing relationship between Solo, an upbeat Senegalese cab driver, and William, a taciturn old man with an intriguing request. Set in Winston-Salem NC, it takes place mostly at night. The dark edges of the film add to its moody ambience. There is violence, sadness, but also joy and celebration, too.

This reminded me of Wendy and Lucy, another film that went deep into one individual’s life. It doesn’t move quickly, but it moves deliberately and though-provokingly. It’s lovely, human, true, and moving.

For more on these moody, intense, character-driven movies, see A.O. Scott’s NYT piece on the New New Reality in film, which I linked to here.

Renting 25th Hour, a Spike Lee film from 2002, was harder than I thought it would be. One of my favorite film critics, A.O. Scott of The New York Times and At the Movies, picked it as one of the top ten of last decade. (His original review is here.) Our library had only one copy and it took months to reach me. When it did, the dvd was so mauled that it was unplayable. When I returned it and reported its condition, the librarian hooked me up with an interlibrary loan, so I did finally get a copy last week.

Edward Norton is a drug dealer busted by the DEA, and this film takes place on the last day before he goes to prison. He has to find a home for his dog, meet up with his two childhood friends, played by Barry Pepper and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, say goodbye to his father, and continue to try and ignore the nagging question of whether it was his girlfriend, played by Rosario Dawson, who sold him out.

Filmed in 2002 NYC’s still-raw aftermath of 9/11, the city plays an important role. But the film centers on Norton, and though he’s an excellent actor, I never quite felt him in this role. I loved the music of the movie, the shots of the city, and many of the scenes, but the film never came together for me as a whole.

After I read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, I looked up reviews. I sometimes do this after I finish a book to try to better understand it. Nearly every review of Wolf Hall mentioned the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons. Wolf Hall’s main character and Renaissance man was Thomas Cromwell, while Thomas More was something of a narrow-minded nuisance. The film, in contrast, presents More as the upstanding Renaissance man, and Cromwell as a grasping, ugly little man.

A Man for All Seasons won 6 Academy awards, including Best Picture, and Best Actor for Paul Scofield who played More. But it was the too-brief screen time of Orson Welles as the ailing Cardinal Wolsey and a silent Lynn Redgrave as the lovely Anne Boleyn, that made the bigger impression on me. The film was good, skillfully made and acted. But I wish it had been less earnest, and a little more fun.

As part of our pre-long-car-trip buying frenzy, I got Ice Age, since the boys have watched and loved Ice Age 3 several times, Ice Age 2: The Meltdown once, but never the original. Then I forgot to take it on the trip. So on a recent dad-night-out, I made popcorn and snuggled down with the boys to watch it.

Like its sequels, they loved it, especially the action sequences. A mammoth, a sloth, and a saber-tooth tiger reluctantly team up to return a baby to its human tribe, with some wrinkles along the way. There are a few sad moments that aren’t spelled out that my kids didn’t get. Nearing the end, my 6yo exclaimed, “There are only 10 more minutes. When’s the mother coming back?”

“Sorry, honey,” I told him. “She’s not coming back.” He returned to the movie, though, and didn’t ask why. There was also a wordless scene in the middle that told the mammoth’s tragic backstory, but when I asked the boys what had happened, they couldn’t tell me. Probably for the best, for now.

This was decent for me, and great fun for them. Definitely a good family DVD.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time defending Hot Tub Time Machine. It’s cheaply made, sexist, homophobic, and rude. It has a preposterous ending. Yet I enjoyed it anyway. The key was to go in with low expectations; that way, they were all exceeded. This is like the 20 year class reunion of the 80’s, where Grosse Point Blank was the 10 year.

Choosing John Cusack as the lead was key. He made his bread and butter on the 80’s teen flicks this movie both lampoons and celebrates, such as Better Off Dead, 16 Candles, The Sure Thing, Eight Men Out, Stand by Me, and most famously, Say Anything where he became the go-to everyman heartthrob, Lloyd Dobler, for a generation. (I recommend all the previous films. He was in tons of others, like Class, Grandview USA and One Crazy Summer, that sucked.) That Cusack plays a washed-up guy whose best days were in the 80’s is a nice use of deliberate irony, or art imitating life.

His buddies are Craig Thompson, Darryl from The Office, and Rob Corddry, from the Daily Show. Clark Duke plays his nephew, and is a chubbier, dweebier basket of Michael Cera mannerisms; the two collaborated on a web site comedy series, Clark and Michael. Thompson is especially hilarious in the dry, quietly reactive style of The Office.

Don’t go if you’re easily offended, or if you don’t have nostalgia for the 80’s. But if kooky cameos by 80’s faces like Chevy Chase, Crispin Glover, and the mean kid from Karate Kid make you smile, then lower your expectations and go for it.

Watching the Olympics with the kids this year was both fun and tiresome, as they insisted we watch every single commercial that featured How to Train Your Dragon. Since the interest was clearly there, and early reviews were good, we took the kids to see it opening weekend. The theater near my hometown doesn’t have 3D, so we saw it in 2D, but enjoyed it immensely just the same.

There aren’t a lot of surprises: skinny Hiccup is a disappointment to his he-man father, and no good at fighting dragons, a sign of Viking prowess. Does he befriend a dragon? Make nice with his dad? Get the girl?

Well, what do you think?

The dragons are what make this movie, and the charm of imagining a dragon of one’s own is infectious. The flying scenes are spectacular, (perhaps more so than the ones in Avatar, I dare say) and the main dragon, Toothless, is so great I may make a trip to Wal Mart to buy a toy. For the boys, of course. Ahem.

For our recent family car trip, my husband G. Grod and I rationalized the purchase of some new DVDs, since we were borrowing a DVD player from friends, and wanted some new things to distract 6yo Drake and 4yo Guppy. We also got a few from the library. For a few, I was surprised to see what worked and what didn’t for the kids and grownups.

Both kids and grownups:

Fantastic Mr. Fox
Kung-Fu Panda
Toy Story 2
Pinocchio
Wall E
Schoolhouse Rock

Grownups, not so much the kids:

Up

Kids, not so much the grownups:

Cars
Tom & Jerry
Scooby Doo
Yo Gabba Gabba

DVDs the kids refused to watch:

Free to Be You and Me
Mary Poppins (6yo Drake is afraid of the cannon)
Ralph’s World
Fraggle Rock

DVDs the kids watched that G. Grod and I want to, but haven’t watched yet:

Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death (even if it’s only full screen)
Shaun the Sheep: A Wooly Good Time

After refusing to helm Spider Man 4 (a good choice, given Spidey 3’s current status as most recent really bad 3 movie, replacing Godfather III), Sam Raimi returned to his horror roots, but with a bigger budget, and the result was Drag Me To Hell, a solidly entertaining B movie. It’s a little bit funny, scary, campy and silly by turns, and full of gross-out effects. It does what it sets out to do, which isn’t high art. If you liked the Evil Dead movies, you’ll likely enjoy this, and appreciate seeing the Big Yellow Car again.

I’m not a Tarantino fan. I liked Pulp Fiction. Didn’t like Reservoir Dogs. Didn’t bother with the Kill Bills or Grindhouse because I didn’t want to deal with the OTT violence. So when Inglourious Basterds came out, I skipped it.

But the good reviews kept coming in. And the superlatives rained down on Christoph Waltz for his supporting role. And then Linda at NPR said that even though SHE didn’t like Tarantino either, she’d really liked Inglourious Basterds. So we bought it on DVD, and watched it.

I loved it. Thought it was great, and a far better Best Picture contender than Avatar was. More ambitious than Hurt Locker, yet still perfectly executed. Like Hurt Locker, too, it maintains tremendous suspense for long periods of time. The opening scene is astonishingly good and lasts about 20 minutes. And when the tension is resolved, it’s never in the way I thought it would be. The movie constantly surprised me.

Except for its scenes of over the top violence, like bloody gunfights and scalping scenes. By the end, I wasn’t even closing my eyes, looking at the ceiling, or watching through diamond fingers. I don’t consider that desensitizing a good thing, though. The rest? Fabulously entertaining. This shoulda been a stronger contender for best pic.

again. My husband G. Grod didn’t get to see The Hurt Locker, so when Barnes and Noble sent us an email saying that Oscar winners were 40% off, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. We ordered Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds and Up. Watching Hurt Locker a second time is interesting, as I could observe HOW the director sustained tension without feeling it so acutely as I did watching the first time. I think this is a superbly crafted movie that takes a tight focus on one character, yet has far-reaching implications. There’s no way I can walk away from watching it and think, well, that’s over. It lingers, and makes me feel uncomfortable, in the way that really good fiction does.

I borrowed Hidden from the library when it was mentioned by A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips on At the Movies. They agreed it was a superior film to The White Ribbon, director Michael Haneke’s most recent film, an Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Film. Roger Ebert recently added Hidden to his list of Great Movies, so it moved to the top of my Must See list.

Daniel Auteuil is Georges, the host of a literary talk show. He’s married to Anne (Juliet Binoche) and has a twelve year old son, Pierrot. He receives anonymous videotapes showing surveillance of his home, and soon a series of violent childlike drawings. Who is sending them, why, and do they mean harm to Georges and his family? As the tension builds, it creates a widening gulf between the couple. Several times the director seems to be giving the viewers some part of answers, only to retract or call them into question later. In the end, the film is less about who sent the tapes than about how Georges falls apart while trying to hold things together. It’s also about the expectations viewers have from a film like this, and what our expectations say about what we want.

This is a film that deliberately frustrates and confuses the audience, hailed by many critics as great, but by others as a nasty mind game perpetrated on the audience by the director. There is a scene of brief, graphic violence that happens so quickly it’s probably not possible to cover your eyes from. The scene is meant to shock, and it does. Haneke is proud of his ambiguous film. He has said that he wanted a film that viewers would walk about and remember, not dismiss once their questions were answered.

With me, at least, he succeeded. I spent a good deal of time reading material on the movie after I saw it to better understand it. I do, or at least I think I do. Roger Ebert’s Great Movies entry and the BFI’s Sight and Sound article on it were the most comprehensive and helpful to me. And while I can’t say I enjoyed the film, I do admire it and appreciate its complexity. It’s not many films that prompt me to further study and investigation as this one did.

Was District 9 ever an Oscar best-picture contender? Probably not. But it’s a solid little sci-fi film, which evokes tension and fear in spite of its low-budget effects. They aren’t bad, but they’d certainly not in the same league as Star Trek’s or Avatar’s. Speaking of that latter blockbuster, NPR writer Linda Holmes wrote that District 9 did a better job telling a nuanced, provocative story about alien invasion and fear of the other than did Avatar.

District 9 advances the thesis — graphically and imaginatively, if with comparatively cheap-looking visuals — that violent mistreatment of entire populations is per se immoral. And it advances this idea without suggesting that the targeted population should prove itself first — prove that it is a superior society, better in tune with nature, less violent, prettier.

And I agree. Avatar looked great, but had a tired story about noble savages and greedy human invaders. Evocatively set in South Africa, District 9 turns that premise on its head. Aliens come to Earth, but they’re sick and starving, not invading.

In his first role ever, Sharlto Copley is tremendous as the bureaucrat in charge of relocating the aliens. He’s like Michael Scott from The Office, until things go horribly wrong. This film reminded me (pleasantly) of a grand story from Torchwood or Doctor Who, and of the low-budget high-thrill 28 Days.

Anvil the Canadian metal band was an inspiration for young metalheads who went on to bands like Guns N Roses, Antrax, and Metallica. Yet Anvil never made the big time. This documentary, Anvil: The Story of Anvil, follows the band, led by lead singer Lips and drummer Robb Reiner, both now in their 50s, as they continue to pursue their dream of heavy metal stardom.

Directed by a former fan, this is a surprisingly sweet homage to this little-known band, and the movie pays tribute to its fictional fore-runner, director Rob (no extra b) Reiner’s classic, This is Spinal Tap. It also reminded me more than a little of last year’s The Wrestler, though it’s much more affectionate and hopeful. Quite charming, actually.

Duplicity has Clive Owen, Julia Roberts, the director of Michael Clayton, and a heist-type caper. Yet it doesn’t quite come together; it’s not nearly as fun, sexy, cool, or clever as it thinks it is. I wish I could have that time back. I had better things to do with it. Like laundry.