“All you lazy people out there who want to get maximum effect from minimum work, I want you to meet the arch-idler of all time, Terry “Python” Gilliam!” Via the Twitter machine, Terry Gilliam, circa 1974, explains the craft of cut-out animation. “The problem when you’re doing cutouts is to be totally aware of the limitations…I’m always accused of doing violent things, well, it’s because of the nature of cut-outs.“
Hello all. So, yes, it’s been quiet again, and the movie reviews I’m behind on are piling up (I’m three back now, going on five.) In the excuse department, work has been even busier than usual, of late, and, obviously, the political scene has been depressing. So there’s that.
Anyway, in partial recompense, here’s my first entry of a fun meme I saw at Cryptonaut-in-Exile a few weeks ago: “100 Things I Love About My Favorite Movies. The rest will follow in a leisurely fashion at some future point.
Here’s the rules: “Rather than posting your 100 favorite films (which has been done and overdone), you simply post your favorite things about movies…[I]nstead of obsessing over whether the films you put on a list are ‘objectively good enough’ to put on said list, you simply jot down 100 moments/lines/visuals that have made a lasting impression on you or sneak their way into running gags between you and your friends.“
And, so, without further ado and in no particular order:
1. Sam Rockwell in Galaxy Quest: I’m starting off with this one because I’m borrowing it from Jonathan Hardesty, from where cdogzilla saw this meme. Sam Rockwell is pretty consistently the best thing about a lot of so-so movies (most recent case-in-point, Cowboys and Aliens), but here he has the distinction of shining bright in a very funny movie regardless.
2. Out of Sight — Timeout at the Bar: “By that time I had been thinking about you a lot, and just wondering what it would be like if we met, if we could take a time-out.” This was on Cryptonaut‘s list, and for good reason. One of the sultriest seduction scenes ever filmed.
3. He Got Game — Opening Homage to Basketball: The last scene of The 25th Hour might well make it into one of the other 80 slots. But for now, I really love this Aaron Copeland-scored opening montage to He Got Game, which makes the case for basketball being the real Great American Pastime.
4. Citizen Kane — News on the March! — “Then, suddenly, less than one week before election, defeat. Shameful, ignominious. Defeat that set back for 20 years the cause of reform in the US!” Like Casablanca, Citizen Kane is one of those movies I originally put in to study up on film history, and left amazed at how powerful it remained. This movie still feels like it could’ve been made yesterday.
5. Big Trouble in Little China – Elevator Scene: “‘I feel pretty good! I’m not scared at all! I feel kind of invincible.’ ‘Me too! I’ve got a very positive attitude about all this!‘” Sure, this is a goofy movie regardless. But I dig how Big Trouble just takes a break for a few moments here to lets its characters get their chill on.
6. Annie Hall — Final scene: “After that it got pretty late, and we both had to go, but it was great seeing Annie again. I realized what a terrific person she was, and how much fun it was just knowing her; and I thought of that old joke, y’know…” The Marshall McLuhan scene is a keeper too, obviously, but this funny and poignant close is Woody’s relationship movies condensed into 30 seconds. (Fun film fact: The scene right before this, where Alvy runs into Annie at The Sorrow and the Pity is Sigourney Weaver’s first movie appearance.)
7. The Shining — The Twins: “Come play with us, Danny. Forever and ever and ever.” I talked about this scene here. Nowadays, when I watch The Shining, I’m frightened by the Gods-eye-view in the opening moments, the shower scene, and Jack Torrance’s insanity-inducing writer’s block. But, when I was a kid, it was the twins. Definitely the twins.
8. In the Loop — Malcom visits the White House: “I’m sorry, I don’t… This situation here is… Is this it? No offence, son, but you look like you should still be at school with your head down a f**ing toilet…Don’t get sarcastic with me, son. We burned this tight-arsed city to the ground in 1814. And I’m all for doing it again, starting with you, you frat f**k.” Arguably the funniest scene in a very funny film, although it’s always hard to pick a favorite moment from this comedy classic. And doesn’t it seem like the WH is really like this these days?
9. Batman Begins — Batman gets the drop: “WHERE ARE YOU?!” “Here.”” The bat-man that preys on the wicked — This is the Dark Knight in a nutshell.
10. Tom Reagan in Miller’s Crossing: This along, with Brazil and the next film in this list, have been my three favorite movies for awhile now. I was looking for the scene where Tom drunkenly crashes the powder room at Leo’s club (“Close your eyes, ladies! I’m coming through!“) to chat with Verna. (“I bet you think you raised Hell.” “When I’ve raised Hell, sister, you’ll know it.“) But it’s not online, and since I love the whole film anyway, here’s the trailer instead.
11. Amadeus — Don Giovanni. “And now…the madness began in me. The madness of the man splitting in half…As I stood there understanding how that bitter old man was still possessing his poor son even from beyond the grave. I began to see a way, a terrible way, I could finally triumph…over God.” A lot of great scenes here too. Here, the patron saint of mediocrity conjures up his master plan.
12. The Fellowship of the Ring — Frodo and Sam first look upon Mordor: “Mordor…I hope the others find a safer route…I don’t suppose we’ll ever see them again.” “We may yet, Mr. Frodo. We may.” Obviously, it’s hard to pick one scene from the trilogy, but the closing seconds of FotR, when Frodo and Sam look out at Mordor from afar just before entering the Emyn Muil, is high up there. It’s the entire journey, distilled in one perfect moment.
13. Menace II Society — Interrogation Scene: “So you bought the bottle of beer — definitely at 12:15? Now you see something, you done f**ked up, you know that, right?” The Hughes brothers’ breakout movie is underappreciated, imho, and also eminently quotable. (“Snaps for the petrol!“) This is where it seems like the jaws are snapping shut on Caine — They should use this technique on Take the Money and Run…then it might be watchable.
14. Blade — Opening Rave With all due respect to Guillermo del Toro’s Aliens-style Blade 2, the Blade franchise peaked in the first ten minutes of the first film, when a fratty B&T’er finds himself in the wrong club in the meat-packing district. Special bonus for the pulse-pounding Pump Panel remix of New Order’s “Confusion.”
15. I’m Not There — Riddle and “Going to Acapulco”: Another film that’s hard to pick one scene from, but this is one of the loveliest musical numbers in the movie, in a town that literally recreates, per Greil Marcus, Dylan’s “Invisible Republic.”
16. The Charlie story in High Fidelity: “Charlie, you f**king b**ch! Let’s work it out!” A lot of funny, painfully-on-point scenes in this movie, and Rob’s scenes with ex-girlfriends #2 and #4 (Lili Taylor) are equally memorable. Still, great self-deprecating cameo by Catherine Zeta-Jones here, and this film is definitely Cusack’s post-teenage peak.
17. X2 — Nightcrawler at the White House: Bamf! As I said in my original review, it’s really a toss-up between this and Magneto’s escape for the best scene in Bryan Singer’s second X-flick. But this moment, kicking off the movie as it does, illustrates how much more fun the second film in comic-book franchises can be, once all the origin-story throat-clearing is out of the way.
18. Carter Burwell’s score for Being John Malkovich: Burwell has done a lot of great work for the Coen brothers over the years, but this is one of his best. It’s hard to imagine the film’s out-of-left-field conceit working as well without the low-key, yearning sadness of the score.
19. Hudson in Aliens: “Maybe you haven’t been keeping up on current events, but we just got our asses kicked, man!” Ah, Hudson. This all-time action film, with a great slow-burn first act, is obviously another very quotable movie, and Bill Paxton has more gems than anybody. “Maybe we’ve got ’em demoralized!“
20. 28 Weeks Later: Robert Carlyle runs like hell: Another great and memorable opening scene that quickly establishes the grim moral economy at work in this surprisingly good sequel. Some folks think of Trainspotting‘s Begbie when they see Carlyle — I always think of this.
If Contagion wasn’t enough for 2011, Steven Soderbergh has assembled an impressive cast for some straight-to-video-ish action in the new trailer for Haywire, with Gina Carano, Ewan MacGregor, Michael Fassbender, Bill Paxton, Channing Tatum, Antonio Banderas, and Michael Douglas. It doesn’t look all that great, but with Soderbergh and that cast, you never know.
Speaking of A-list casts down for some B-movie action, Ryan Gosling is a stunt driver by day and wheelman by nightin the red band trailer for Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive, also with Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Christina Hendricks, Oscar Isaac, Ron Perlman, and Albert Brooks. This got great reviews at Cannes, and, like Haywire, I’m intrigued by the personnel involved. But Oldboy has already cornered the market on hammer shenanigans.
In the not-too-distant future, Justin Timberlake has time on his side — or does he? — in the Comic-con trailer of Andrew Niccol’s In Time, also with Cillian Murphy, Amanda Seyfriend, Olivia Wilde, and Vincent Kartheiser. The timestamp thing is rather goofy, but Niccol (Gattaca, The Truman Show) is usually good for a smart sci-fi premise. I’m in.
Luke constructs a lightsaber, Han shoots up a shield generator, and wampas and sandstorms attack in this preview of the Star Wars Original Trilogy deleted scenes, coming soon to a Blu-Ray player near you. Sorry, I think you have to buy the prequels as well to get these.
And, not a movie trailer per se, but Rick Grimes and the gang are as ready as they’ll ever be for another round of the zombie apocalypse in the new trailer for Season 2 of The Walking Dead. I’m more excited about S2 of Game of Thrones personally, but this’ll do until the trouble gets here.
Next up on the review docket: Mike Mills’ indie slice-of-life Beginners, about a Los Angeles man (Ewan MacGregor) grappling with both the recent death of his father (Christopher Plummer) and a budding romance with a free-spirited but damaged French actress (Melanie Laurent of Inglourious Basterds.) In short, Beginners is well-made and moderately diverting for most of its run, but it was also a little too self-consciously quirky for my taste. If you wait for IFC or Netflix on this one, no harm, no foul.
Walking out of the theater after Beginners, the film that most sprung to mind was Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know. So I was surprised to discover soon thereafter that July and Mills are actually married. (It’s a good match — they definitely share a worldview.) Here, as in Me and You, Beginners is occasionally charming and soulful in its off-kilter way. But it also too often flirts dangerously with twee to feel really resonant. At least for me, the story would have more power if the characers — particularly its two lovebirds — were less affected.
The more interesting and successful part of Beginners involves the main character — Oliver — remembering his recently deceased father Hal, and the way Hal, after the death of his wife, consciously reinvented his life to be happy. After forty-four years of marriage, he comes out, finds a boyfriend (ER’s Goran Visnjic) and a new social circle, gets active in politics and gay liberation, and takes on new hobbies like house music, movie nights and lighting fireworks. And even when Hal is ultimately diagnosed with terminal cancer, he chooses to maintain his late-in-life joie de vivre. Because for Hal, quite frankly, life’s too short not to be happy.
By contrast, Oliver-in-the-present is paralyzed — with loneliness and self-doubt, with the weight of carrying other people’s problems, with the burden of, as he puts it, historical consciousness, and, with well, general sadness. He can’t break out of his funk and be happy, even when happiness — in the form of Melanie Laurent’s Anna — is staring him in the face. The grief over Hal’s demise is debilitating enough, but in fact Oliver’s such a sensitive soul that he can’t even bring himself to leave his dad’s Jack Russell, Arthur (who “speaks” in subtitles and more often then not steals his scenes), alone at home. Can Oliver find a way to overcome his emotional obstacles, take a page from his father (and free-wheeling mom (Mary Page Keller), whom we meet in flashback), and grab the reins of his life? Let’s hope so. Neither love nor pixieish yet similarly depressive significant others tend to come round every day.
This relationship side is where Beginners started to rankle. MacGregor and Laurent make for a cute couple (and Ewan’s been working on his American accent — he sounds much better than usual.) But, even allowing for the traditional meet-cute (in this case, at a costume party — he’s Sigmund Freud, she’s a mute Charlie Chaplin), far too many of their interactions together are based on outright quirkiness. When they get in the car, she points, and he drives wherever she has bidden. When they get back to her place, they keep up the “she’s a mute” pretense long after it would have gotten annoying. When the phone rings, they pretend to be each other so we can have portentous revelations about her father (a suicidal depressive, in keeping with the happy/sad theme here.)
Perhaps we’re supposed to take from all this that these are two rare and beautiful flowers who are lucky to have found each other, or that they are both such damaged souls that they can only relate to each other through these distancing mechanisms. But, to me, all of this self-conscious artifice in their dealings just made these two characters seem overdrawn and fake. (At the very least, being these two seems like it’d be exhausting.) The same goes for Oliver’s occasional voice-overs, when, like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, he notes the different times he’s discussing with establishing pictures of ex-presidents and shots from LIFE magazine and such. It’s all very pretty, but what do these vignettes have to do with the rest of the tale being told? They feel like an art exercise rather than something emerging organically from the film.
In short, when dwelling on the father-son story, Beginners occasionally finds a few moments of quiet emotional truth. But I found the love story and framing devices here too crufted over with bric-a-brac to be as engaging. So, one part good, one part not-so-good — Fortunately, for Beginners, tie goes to the talking dog.
Much like Manhattan, this film begins with a love letter, in the form of a languid montage, to its setting. While (naturally) a jazz ditty plays, we spend the first five minutes or so of the film ambling through the streets, parks, and cafes of the City of Lights, soaking up the Parisian ambience. (This is one of the many reasons I could see Midnight In Paris making a great double bill with Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, which opened similarly.) As it happens, wandering aimlessly around this city is a favorite hobby of our protagonist, Gil (Owen Wilson), a successful Hollywood screenwriter looking to find inspiration for his first novel in the old corners of gay Paree. Unfortunately, his fiancee Inez (Rachel McAdams) doesn’t share this proclivity: She prefers cabs, shopping, and expensive jewelry. (If that doesn’t tell you what to expect from her character, her tea party parents — Kurt Fuller and In the Loop‘s Mimi Kennedy — should close the deal.)
And so it is that one night, while Inez is out dancing with a know-it-all acquaintance (Michael Sheen), Gil happens to hitch a ride in a vintage automobile and finds himself at what appears to be a costume party. The thing is, the guy on the piano (Yyves Heck) looks exactly like Cole Porter, the couple he falls in with — the Fitzgeralds of New York — just happen to be called Scott (Tom “Loki” Hiddleston) and Zelda (Allison Pill), and the gruff guy at the coffee shop (Corey Stoll) they take him to is the spitting image, in word and deed, of Ernest Hemingway. Apparently in Paris, the past isn’t even past… or at least once it’s past midnight.
So, yes, somehow the Lost Generation has been found, and soon enough Gil is relishing the movable feast: He’s getting book tips from Hemingway and Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), talking rhinos with Dali (Adrien Brody), running movie ideas by Bunuel (Adrien de Van), and falling in love with one of Picasso’s muses, the lovely Adrianna (Marion Cotillard). All the while, Gil begins to ignore his “real” life in the 21st century as too humdrum and mundane. After all, how you gonna keep Gil on the screenwriting farm after he’s seen Gay Paree? But, if the 21st century isn’t good enough for Gil, why should those madcap 1920’s be good enough for Adrianna? Nostalgia infects us no matter what our time, and so we beat on, borne back ceaselessly into the past…
As Allen’s fans have already figured out by the second reel, Woody is repeating himself here somewhat. (After a career as long and prolific as his, it’s to be expected!) Replace nostalgia with love of the cinema, and Gil’s time-traveling to the era he idolizes isn’t too far afield from Mia Farrow’s romance with matinee idol Jeff Daniels in The Purple Rose of Cairo. (For that matter, everything involving Michael Sheen’s pompous academic is set-up for another variation of the Marshall McLuhan joke from Annie Hall.) And Allen has always been one for high-culture namedropping in his writing and films. It’s just that this time, the likes of T.S. Eliot, Man Ray, Josephine Baker, and Alice B. Toklas are actual cameos rather than just allusions.
So, yes, Allen may have trod this ground before, but Midnight in Paris nonetheless works, for several reasons. For one, Owen Wilson — an actor I’ve never really felt one way or the other about — is one of the best Allen analogues to come down the pike in awhile. He manages to capture Woody’s usual collection of neuroses while coming across as more charming and self-effacing then Allen really can anymore. For another, the movie doesn’t aspire to deep philosophical truths about relationships and/or the meaning of life (like, say, the existentialism pervading Match Point and Crimes and Misdemeanors). It has some insightful things to say about the nature of nostalgia, and otherwise just aims to show us a good time. As they say in the closest thing we’ve got to Paris stateside, NYC notwithstanding, laissez les bons temps rouler.
Gwyneth Paltrow has more than just a few Coldplay albums to answer for in the scary-impressive trailer for Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, also with Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Marion Cotillard, Enrico Colantoni, Bryan Cranston, Sanaa Lathan, John Hawkes, and Elliot Gould. This goes right next to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy as one of my most-anticipated films of the fall.
Taylor Kitsch braves the deserts of Mars, Peter Gabriel by way of Arcade Fire, and some of the earliest fanboys going in the teaser for Andrew Stanton’s John Carter (formerly of Mars), with Lynn Collins, Samantha Morton, Mark Strong, Ciaran Hinds, Dominic West, James Purefoy, Daryl Sabara, Polly Walker, Bryan Cranston, with Thomas Haden Church and Willem Dafoe. That’s a great cast, and I like the period look on Earth, if nothing else.
Real-life couple Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz discover their new family home isn’t all it’s cracked up to be in the trailer for Jim Sheridan’s Dream House, also with Naomi Watts. With such an A-list director and cast, this film probably deserved a trailer that didn’t give away a key plot point — I suggest not clicking through here if you’re one to avoid spoilage.
Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law reunite for a second installment of Holmesian shenanigans in the trailer for Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, with Noomi Rapace tagging in for Rachel McAdams and Jared Harris as Professor Moriarty. This looks…pretty bad, but the first one turned out better than expected, so who knows?
Jude Law also takes time to disappear, and thus set up a grand adventure of magic and self-discovery for his son, in the the trailer for Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, with Asa Butterfield, Chloe Moretz, Sasha Baron Cohen, Ray Winstone, Ben Kingsley, Michael Stuhlbarg, Christopher Lee, Richard Griffiths, Frances De La Tour, Helen McCrory, and Emily Mortimer. Like Dream House, I’m more interested in the pedigree than this trailer. But we’ll see.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead really never should have gotten involved in this particular Norwegian research project in the trailer for Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s The Thing, also with Joel Edgerton, Jonathan Lloyd Walker, Ulrich Thomsen, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. Unlike most fan-folk, I’m perfectly fine with a prequel to the 1982 John Carpenter film, just because it’s one of the scarier horror premises going. Let’s hope van Heijningen makes the most of his shot.
As I said when the poster dropped, it’s hard to imagine this one topping TDK, and I could do without all the “every journey comes to an end” marketing pablum here. Still, the moment with Bats in trouble and backpedaling suggests Nolan may be maximizing Bane’s potential here.
