Movies and TV

Mary's recuperating from knee replacement surgery, so we've been watching a massload of movies and TV.

Hot Tub Time Machine

Rob Corddry consistently keeps the humor level up, playing a profane, hard-drinking, drug-abusing washout with a Motley Crue fixation. In one scene, he tries to shake down his friend's teenage son for Ritalin, "they're all on Ritalin!" he shouts before ranting about how best to turn the pills into suppositories. Finding themselves back in 1986, he and his friends are alternately struggling ineptly to prevent their destinies and trying outrageously to preserve the future. While very funny, it's basically all crude low-brow humor, failing to make much of a commentary on the 80's, or make clever use of John Cusack and Crispen Glover. Chevy Chase has a small role that could have been used to parody the nutty professor role (like those of Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future or Christopher Walken in Click) but instead falls flat.

Arrested Development: Seasons 1,2, and 3

I never watched this while on the air, and the comparisons to ABC's (very funny) Modern Family got me interested. It's just as funny, but the humor is more clever and witty. Now I can't stop saying "Bob Loblaw Law Blog" and other phrases from the show. According to IMDB, a movie is in the works.

The Hurt Locker

Very intense. First shakey-cam movie to win Best Picture? I like how it tries to present the reality of war in Iraq, completely devoid of politics. Requires you to suspend your disbelief that there could be a guy whose passion is defusing IED's, and who has disarmed nearly a thousand of them!

Precious

Certainly one of the most powerful films I have ever seen. Gabby Sidibe is incredible in the lead role. I can't believe that Howard Stern would say ugly things about her, thus subjecting her in real life to some of the insults her character endures. Mo'nique earns her Oscar several times over, and I'd even go so far as to say that Mariah Carey is perfect in a small but important role as a social worker. Somehow, a film about the worst degradations of humanity, and the most monstrous characters who have lost their humanity, manages to end up giving you faith in our damned species.

Where the Wild Things Are

The plot starts out great, fully realizing the depths hidden in the popular children's book (which was one of my favorites). But, like the character, it gets lost, in a long, aimlessly meandering Act II, that had me all but giving up on the movie. It does so much right: the characters, the costumes, the setting, the creatures. But then it gets boring, really boring, and stays there until the final scenes. I'd read some reviews, so didn't have high expectations, but it failed to meet them (and I'm a fan of everything else Spike Jonze has done).

Shakes the Clown

I'd love to be able to say this (Bobcat Goldthwait's 1990's movie about an alcoholic clown) is an unheralded work of genius, but the truth is, it's little more than average. Rival gangs of clowns (party clowns vs. rodeo clowns vs. mimes) struggle for supremacy in a clown-town (Padookaville) while Goldthwait's clown struggles to stay sober... it does have some funny moments , including Robin Williams as an impatient mime instructor.

Big Fan

Patton Oswald is a lowly Staten Island toll booth worker by day, an obsessed Giants-fan who lives for his nightly sports-talk-radio call-in. It's very, very dark. It reminds me of some classic New York movies like those by Abel Ferrrara, or the early films of Scorcese. Worth watching for the character portrayals.

Whip It

Drew Barrymore's directing debut worked on every level for me. It was original, avoided cliché, had good characters, an entertaining and believable story, and didn't try too hard to be funny or heart-warming.

The Invention of Lying

You probably know the premise: in a world where no one can even conceive of telling the smallest fib, where even fiction does not exist, Randy Gervais plays a guy who discovers lying. Small lies lead to bigger lies, and pretty soon, he has invented religion! Sadly, despite that refreshingly honest take on things, the rest of the movie was pretty standard Hollywood stuff: unrequited love that, through persistence, succeeds in the end (Jennifer Garner plays the love interest, in a slight twist of her 13 Going On 30 character--that was a much better movie).

Hachi: A Dog's Tale

Loosely based on the true story of a dog who became a folk-hero in Japan nearly a century ago, this one is much better than the standard Hollywood pet movie. This is due largely to the great acting (Richard Gere as the man, other fine actors in supporting roles, watch the extras to see how much work they put in with the dogs, one of them is "the Meryl Streep of Akitas"). But it helps that the story is not too contrived; they take the basic story and set in present-day New England. G-rated, kid-friendly, though (as you might expect) quite sad in the end.

Inglorious Bastards

Way too slow; very disappointing. I ended up fast-forwarding through all the pointless dialogue to the few scenes where Nazi's get their violent comeuppance.

Whiteout

A suspenseful mystery set amid the scientific research crews on the Antarctic... sounds great, huh? It starts out (incongruously enough) with a nice Kate Beckinsale undressing/shower scene, and it all goes south (so to speak) from that point onward. Whiteout? They should have called it Blackout... because I wish I had no memory of the rest of this movie! I'm pretty sure the young researchers don't cut loose like drunken frat/soho people at the nd of their tour (but maybe I'm wrong about that, will have to ask some friends who've been down there)!

Surrogates

Good, though predictable, sci-fi set in a near future where people interact entirely through robotic avatars.

2012

I'm trying to think of the few positive things this movie had going for it, and about all I can come up with is the nightmarish level of CGI realism it brings to LA sliding into the ocean, or Woody Harrelson's apocolyptic DJ being consumed by the Yellowstone supervolcano while broadcasting live.

The Lucky Ones

Tim Robbins, Rachel McAdams, and Michael Peña as a trio of Iraq vets thrown together in a cross-country trek. Another movie that wisely leaves politics aside and instead focuses on realistic characters and the conflicts they face coming back home plus the reactions they get from people they meet (both positive and negative). Great acting and a number of funny scenes.

Couples Retreat

Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau have played some great character duos (Swingers, Made) but this time around they mostly stick to a script that doesn't give them a lot of chances.

St. Trinians

Brit comedy about boarding school girls run amok that, while funny, falls into a formulaic plot (they have to pull off a heist to save their school).

Moon

Stellar sci-fi that recalls classic stories by Arthur C. Clarke and others, while being completely new. An indie movie that mostly eschews CGI and uses model miniatures like many of the great s-f movies of the 70's and 80's (which was one of the goals of the director, revealed in fascinating Q+A on the DVD extras).

Pandorum

The haunted/infested spaceship has been a plot fixture in so many movies that it practically deserves its own genre. This one seems derivative of all of them.

The Informant!

A compulsive liar leads the FBI on a series of fraud investigations into food giant ADM (based on a true story). Matt Damon has played such a wide range of characters, and done them all so well, that it's almost unremarkable by now.

I enjoyed director Richard Kelly's (Donnie Darko, Southland Tales) film The Box, despite a poor ending that was a let-down and a little inconclusive. It reminded me a lot of a certain class of science-fiction short story that blends elements of horror and mystery and leaves out the futuristic and technical.

Without giving away too much, I will say that it's partly set at a NASA's Langley research center and the story involves an alien response to the Viking 1 Mars lander. And that it shares some things in common with Donnie Darko such as references to philosophy, a sense of nostalgia (to the 70's this time), and the prominent east coast setting, while having stronger sci-fi elements.

It does take time to get to the sci-fi parts, descending slowly and creepily. But ultimately, it felt like the story abruptly ran out. It could have been a great movie, as opposed to a merely good one.

There's a certain mid-70's zeitgeist that writer/director Jared Hess manages to capture in Gentlemen Broncos. These were times when awesomely bad sci-fi/fantasy merged with gender-bending glam rock in the morass of Aquarian idealism and indulgance. Though set in a later time, the story takes place in a small Utah backwater town where eddies of that era remain. The opening credits are artfully rendered using sci-fi paperback covers of this era, both fantastic and gauche.

His earlier film Napolean Dynamite didn't hold a lot of appeal for me. Yet I found this one quite awesomely extraordinary. Maybe that's because it's a story of smart dorks and science fiction instead of dumb dorks and high school. Michael Angarano, the kid from Sky High, plays a teen named Benjamin Purvis writing these absurdly bad sci-fi/fantasy stories, which are brought to life in amazing sequences with Sam Rockwell and others. Ben lives with his mom in a geodesic dome house. His dad died when he was young, and they struggle to make ends meet. Everybody is taking advantage of them; the story revolves around his winning back their honor and getting what he is due.

A smug, egotistical, established crappy sci-fi author, Ronald Chevalier (played with hilarity by Jemaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords), steals a manuscript called 'The Yeast Lords' from Benjamin and gets it published as his own work. Chevalier provides some great comic moments; his douchebaggery goes far beyond plagarism. In one, he ridicules a workshop of teen authors, expounding his formulaic method of inventing character names.

There's a couple of gross-out moments. In one, Mike White (from Chuck and Buck) plays a "guardian angel", sent from their church to be a big brother to Benjamin. He's got ridiculous hair, and arrives wearing all white, with a giant Burmese python on his shoulders. The python takes a huge dump all over his clothes.

The movie has many clever touches, like how the department store Benjamin works part-time in has one-half women's clothing, the other half semi-automatic weapons.

Michael Angarano plays the character of Benjamin perfectly. Initially quiet and withdrawn, as things don't go his way he becomes downbeat. Finally tired of being stepped on, he becomes assertive and takes action. Finally, in the end, when he realizes a victory against Chevalier is at hand, he smiles for the first time, breaking into a wide grin.