Mad Times

Our year in movies

I stopped writing movie reviews here in 2004. Didn't stop watching them though. According to my calculations, Becky and/or I watched 58 movies in 2005. I'm including a table of all of them with our ratings in the extended entry.

The rating is our idiosyncratic four-star system. We don't actually talk about them as stars. What shows up here as one star we call "don't bother", two stars is "okay", three is "pretty good", four is "don't miss". We added half-star indications as a synonym for "a little better than". "Don't miss" is our highest rating.

The notes are about where we saw the movie and who saw it. "T" indicates we saw it in the theatre. Other letters indicate who attended. The default is Becky and me. If only R appears then Rachel saw it with us. If just "J" or "B" appear then only the one of us saw it. "B, R" means I skipped that one, etc.

Please feel free to comment if you have questions or want to argue about something.

The table's sorted by rating and title in case that isn't obvious ;-)

March of the Penguins

I wouldn't have even known about this movie except that Julie posted about the trailer a couple weeks ago. Some friends had tickets for today's SIFF showing at the Harvard Exit that they couldn't use so they gave them to us. Thanks, friends!

So last night we were trying to figure out how to get there for the 11:30am showing. We wanted to get there in time to stand in line for decent seats so that meant getting to the theatre no later than 11. I used Metro's extremely frustrating trip planner to figure out the times for an 11am arrival and came up with these three options:

1. 9:00 Leave Issaquah P&R on ST 554
   9:23 Arrive Rainier Avenue I-90 freeway stop
   10:20 (yes, 57 minutes later) Leave on the 7 for downtown which turns into the 49
   10:49 Arrive at Broadway and Mercer
   Elapsed time: 1:49
2. 8:41 Leave Issaquah P&R on MT 271 (University District)
   9:42 Arrive 15th and 42nd
   10:33 Leave on 49 for downtown
   10:43 Arrive at Broadway and Roy
   Elapsed time: 2:02
3. 8:00 Leave Issaquah P&R on ST 554
   8:09 Arrive Eastgate P&R
   8:58 Leave on the exact same 271 bus as option 2 and the rest is the same as option 2 Elapsed time: 2:43

None of that counts the fact that we live a 15-minute bike ride from the Park & Ride.

This is a pretty daunting prospect (especially when you had the Saturday we had: B biked to the P&R, bussed downtown, met a friend who drove them to Ballard for an art studio open house, then dropped B off back downtown where she bussed and rode through the rain home. I had a computer crash at work so I had to ride in and I was so mad when I left that I forgot to take my key card and when I got there and realized my mistake I spent half an hour cursing and pushing the various doorbells around the building trying to get the attention of the 24x7 security guard who seemed to have taken the day off. So I ended up riding all the way back home to get my damn card and all the way back before I could fix the stupid computer and ride back home. Biometric authentication now!)

So when Rachel called at about 11pm and offered to come spend the night and let us take her car to the movie in the morning, we couldn't quite bring ourselves to turn her down.

So this morning we got up, hopped in Rachel's car, drove to Capitol Hill, parked the car, and got in line for the movie. Elapsed time: 30 minutes.

Of course the irony of our transportational shortcut was not lost on us when we watched the movie, which depicts the rather bizarre reproductive cycle of the emperor penguin. When winter starts closing in on Antarctica, the penguins get out of the ocean where they've been fattening themselves up through the short summer. They walk 70 miles across the ice to their mating grounds. They pair off and consummate their relationships. Mom lays an egg. Mom hands the egg off to Dad, then she hikes 70 miles back to the ocean to eat some more. Dad hatches the egg (if he manages to keep it alive through 100 mile-per-hour winds and 80 degrees-below-zero temperatures), and tends the chick until Mom gets back with a full belly to take over. Now Dad trudges 70 miles to the sea for his first meal in 4 months. By the time he gets back, junior is big enough to boot out of the nest (if they had a nest), so Mom and Dad both take off and leave the kid to fend for herself. (Actually I think Mom and Dad take a few more trips for groceries before this; it wasn't quite clear in the movie.) Fortunately by this point the ice has melted back far enough that the mating ground is less than a mile from the open water so the kid can find her way to the water where she gets to live relatively care-free for 4 years before she has to go on the crazy march herself.

Nature is truly stranger than fiction. Made us feel kind of bad for quibbling over an extra hour and a half of travel time to see the movie by bus. ;-)

We enjoyed the movie. It seemed like it was pretty realistic, portraying some of the ways that the process can fail in addition to all the adorable footage of baby penguins and their almost equally adorable parents. Some of the failure scenes are truly heart-wrenching, so be prepared to talk to the kids about death and loss after the movie. The antarctic icescapes are stunning and make it worth catching this one on the big screen. Even if you have to take the bus.

The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)

The IMDB lists over a dozen adaptations of this Dumas classic. Not having seen any of the others in recent memory, I can't be sure, but I don't really think this one has much to commend it over past versions. (It would be, perhaps, an amusing exercise to view as many versions as might be available in search of a favorite.) The principal cast members (James Caviezel as the titular Count, Guy Pearce as the friend who betrays him into prison, Richard Harris as the fellow prisoner who teaches him the skills he needs for his revenge, and Luis Guzmán as the Count's pirate turned valet) all give energetic and earnest performances, but they're not enough to elevate the film. It's been a month or so since I watched it, but I recall the script as being lackluster. The sets, costuming, and makeup look like sets, costuming, and makeup despite (or perhaps because of) the lavish sums of money obviously thrown at them. Overall there's just no magic here.

Neverwhere

Neil Gaiman wrote the teleplay for this BBC miniseries. Richard Mayhew is an everyman Londoner with a psycho fiancee. On his way to dinner with the aforementioned shrew, an injured girl stumbles across their path. Richard defies his date and takes the girl home. And his life is never the same. The girl, Door, gets him mixed up in a strange political battle going on in a supernatural underworld existing beneath and alongside the mundane London. Many of the characters and locations are puns on different stops on the London Underground (when the stops aren't actual locations).

The story is your basic plot coupon adventure (the characters have to find some thingamabob so they can get through the next trial where they learn that they need another thingummy to survive the next one). This works because Gaiman writes great characters and the actors are clearly having all kinds of fun bringing them to life. Especially entertaining are Mr. Vandemaar and Mr. Croup, the creepy sadistic villains of the piece.

The production has BBC written all over it. It's actually kind of refreshing seeing these shows where the producers didn't let a lack of state-of-the-art visual effects keep them from telling a good story. (Mists of Avalon was another one.) I get spoiled by reality-bending special-effects blowouts like The Lord of the Rings and The Matrix and forget that enjoying a fantasy is about suspension of disbelief, and some of the pleasure comes from engaging your imagination rather than having everything made to seem objectively real by effects wizards.

The overall running length is three hours split into six episodes. This is actually a good thing because it gives you ample opportunity to enjoy the trippy title sequence created by Dave McKean with music by Brian Eno.

l'auberge espagnole

This movie opens with Xavier, a French college student, visiting a large corporation's maze-like offices to seek the advice of a family friend on how to complete his schooling to best position himself to attain a similar job after graduation. The advice he receives leads him to apply to an international exchange program called Erasmus. He is eventually accepted into the program and leaves France to spend a term (or a year, it's not clear) at a Spanish university. The movie from here is predominantly about Xavier's adventures in housing, culminating in his moving in with a wildly international group all sharing an apartment.

The movie is a wonderful portrayal of how a college experience can be almost utopian with shared adversity and purpose forging intense bonds of friendship. The residents of the apartment represent different countries of the European Union in microcosm, with all of them dashing the stereotypes about their nations of origin. They struggle to communicate through the imperfect overlap of their various languages. The plot is comfortably mundane. People fall in love and out of it. People argue about who is supposed to clean the bathroom.

The actors are all lovely to look at, as are the shots of Barcelona, but even setting the eye-candy aspects aside, the movie is still a kick to watch for its snappy dialogue, endearing characters, and interesting (if uneven) shooting style.

The movie poster up at the beginning of this review gives an accurate impression of the film as an ensemble cast piece. That's not the picture that was on the cover of the DVD we got from the library, though. The one we (and I have to assume most US audiences) got has Audrey Tautou front and center capitalizing on her recognizability following Amélie. Never mind the fact that Tautou's role as Xavier's girlfriend is a fairly minor one. That's the cover we saw at right.

Freaky Friday

Cute, energetic Disney remake of their own movie (ala their 1998 remake of The Parent Trap). Stars Jamie Lee Curtis as the tightly-wound mother and Lindsay Lohan (who also starred in the new Parent Trap) as the rock-and-roll daughter who wake up one fateful Friday in each other's bodies. The plot is thickened by the fact that the Friday in question is the day before the mother's wedding. It's a pretty slight piece made entertaining by the gutsy performances of Curtis and Lohan.

Hidalgo

The movie named for a horse and marketed for a movie star. Viggo Mortensen stars as Frank Hopkins, a cowboy and US Army courier in the 1890s. While the movie claims to be based on a true story, more reliable sources indicate that while Frank Hopkins was a real person, there's a good chance his skills leaned more towards the telling of tall tales than long-distance horse racing. But we're talking about a movie here.

Hopkins is challenged out of a mid-life complacency into travelling to Saudi Arabia to compete in a (fictional) 3,000 mile race across the Arabian desert. He faces ridicule for the parentage of his wild Mustang from the owners and riders of the thoroughbred competitors. He makes friends with the Sheik (played disarmingly by the great Omar Sharif) and his daughter (the striking Zuleikha Robinson). Competes with the aggressive Lady Anne Davenport (Louise Lombard) and the evil Prince Bin Al Reeh (Saïd Taghmaoui). The plot is pure Saturday movie serial. The execution does justice to the genre with lots of characters to cheer and boo, and seldom a question of which is the appropriate response.

I suspect that had Mr. Mortensen not just come off the biggest movie event of all time with his starring role in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the movie might be a bit different. The character of Frank Hopkins is most interesting when he's interacting with his horse, Hidalgo, but it feels like the perspective of the film got dragged towards its popular star and away from its title character. Still, Mortensen is good enough to stand the scrutiny, and the horse is good enough to steal the occasional scene.

Romeo + Juliet

Second in Baz Luhrmann's "red curtain" trilogy (after Strictly Ballroom and before Moulin Rouge!). He does the "update the Bard" thing with Romeo and Juliet changing the setting to Verona Beach and the swords to guns.

In the documentary features on the DVD, Luhrmann states his intent of reproducing the kind of popular entertainment Shakespeare was aiming for that would put butts of all persuasions in seats. The movie feels like that, but the language is a great distancer to modern audiences. I would have needed the play in front of me to figure out what the heck they were talking about a lot of the time. Actually, that's not true; Luhrmann's far too good a visual storyteller to let you get too lost even without subtitles for the Elizabethan English (it occurs to me that you could make this into an extremely funny movie by providing (un)suitable subtitles ;-)

While it might not have been successful as a broadly popular blockbuster, it is a lot of fun to watch these actors strut and sail through the hyper-stylized sets and settings Luhrmann and his team dreamed up.

Leonardo DiCaprio is the perfect mix of innocence and passion as Romeo. Claire Danes manages to combine girlish obsession with an open-eyed intelligence that brings Juliet to life. John Leguizamo's Tybalt is over the top but manages to avoid crossing the line into parody. Harold Perrineau Jr. plays the doomed Mercutio with verve. Also notable are Miriam Margolyes as Juliet's Nurse, and Pete Postlethwaite as a tattooed Father Laurence.

The DVD is chock full of extras including an early video version of some of the scenes put together to convince the studio that Luhrmann's vision would work on screen.

Seabiscuit

It's an uplifting sports movie (sure are a lot of those) about a race horse and his human collaborators set during the Great Depression. Red Pollard (played by Tobey Maguire) is a young man abandoned by his parents. Tom Smith (played by the awesome Chris Cooper) is a down-on-his-luck horse trainer. Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges) is an automobile millionaire tortured by the death of his young son. All these damaged people are joined by a horse with similar defects, both physical and psychological. Together they win races. Cue the inspirational music.

The performances are all as good as you'd expect from these actors (very good, indeed). The production design is impressive. The cinematography is lovely. The documentary-style interludes narrated by historian David McCullough resonate interestingly with current events (even if they don't fit into the film very well). William H. Macy is a hoot as the excitable radio announcer.

So why don't I like the movie very much? Mostly it's because I felt manipulated for practically the entire film. I don't know much about the psychological language of film, but somehow the folks making this movie caused me to react in a way that felt completely disconnected from my conscious perceptions. I'd be rolling my eyes at the swelling music and the sepia-toned imagery at the same time that tears were running down my face. Maybe it wasn't overt manipulation. Maybe the emotional reaction was to a genuinely touching subject while the eye rolling was a reaction to some ham-handed directing. Either way, that facet of the film was bad.

Extras on the DVD were pretty typical with the exception of a gallery of pictures taken by Bridges during the production with a cool panoramic camera I didn't catch the name of.

The Mists of Avalon

Marion Zimmer Bradley's tome, The Mists of Avalon, is one of the original doorstop fantasy novels. It's a retelling of the Arthurian legends slanted towards the female characters. It's been a while since I read it (11/20/92 according to my list), but I recall that it was largely about the collision between Christian culture and the Pagan Earth-mother faiths that prevailed in Britain in the time period. Or maybe I'm confusing it with Jo Walton's The King's Peace and The King's Name which have a different take on the whole Arthur thing...

In any event, the movie, which was produced as a mini-series for TV on TNT, concentrates mostly on the human part of the story in order to fit it into only 3 hours of screen time. Leaving out most of the Christian vs. Pagan stuff also probably helped keep the volume of appalled phonecalls down at TNT headquarters.

The characters and relationships are plenty interesting to carry the film and the actors who play them do a fine job. Julianna Margulies is wonderful as Morgaine, Arthur's sister. She convincingly takes the character from girlish playfulness to righteous anger to consuming lust to steel-eyed competence. She makes the character one of the most rich female parts I've seen on the screen. Anjelica Huston is fine as the lady of the lake, Viviane, playing the part with loving ruthlessness. Samantha Mathis was sort of an odd choice for Gwenwyfar, but she had good chemistry with both her true love Lancelot (played by Michael Vartan) and husband Arthur (Edward Atterton) and did a fine job going off her rocker as she continued to fail to deliver her king an heir. Joan Allen is good as the scheming, power-hungry Morgause. The male casting was less distinctive (as is only fair for this particular story) with the exception of Hans Matheson as a slimily psychotic Mordred.

The film is harmed by our having spent entirely too much time watching Peter Jackson's meticulously produced Lord of the Rings movies. Mists' visual effects are strictly video-game quality and the sets and costumes are merely "good". It's really unfair to compare the two, but it was a factor in my enjoyment that I kept being pulled out of the story by production details. I bring it up more to point out how much Jackson has spoiled me than to cast any aspersions towards the Mists production team who did a fine job with the resources they were working with.

Serendipity

Dreadful movie. We pretty much knew it would be because it looked dreadful in the preview, but we held out hopes that John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale could make it watchable. The premise is your basic meet-cute romantic comedy. Kate and John both grab the same pair of gloves in Bloomingdale's right before Christmas. They each are with other people but there's some attraction between them that they investigate over coffee and ice skating. Kate's character refuses to give her name to John's character because in her opinion, if they're destined to be together they will be. They play little games with fate that all point to their eventual connection (though some aren't obvious to them). Years pass. They're both engaged to other people. They can't forget their brief fling and each tries to hunt down the other. Surprise, surprise, after many trials they meet and kiss, the end.

Throughout the plot the hand of the writer is palpable in the movement of the characters. There is some chemistry between John and Kate, but their actions in the face of it feel false (mostly Kate's—her fate obsession is inconsistent and dippy). It was interesting watching the deleted scenes on the DVD (yes, we're insane) because they were all actually better than the ones that made it into the movie. This probably points to some of the blame for the mess belonging to the director.

What makes it possible to sit through the whole movie are the supporting characters and the cinematography. Jeremy Piven gets to stretch out a bit beyond his usual best-friend-to-John-Cusack's-character role. John Corbett is amusing as Kate's new-age musician fiance, Lars. And Eugene Levy goes goofball over-the-top as a strange but helpful Bloomingdale's clerk. The cinematography part is the series of stunning time-lapse passages of the New York skyline.

Full Frontal

I suspected while watching this that it was a lot more fun to make than it was to watch. The movie doesn't really have a plot as such. There are a bunch of loosely connected characters. There are several layers of films within the film (I think I counted four at one point). So as an entertainment, the casual viewer must content herself with appreciation of some interesting performances (especially David Hyde Pierce, Catherine Keener, Mary McCormack, Nicky Katt, and Julia Roberts), and some Steven Soderbergh in-jokes (e.g., Terence Stamp appears as his character from Soderbergh's The Limey).

But there are subtextual pleasures to be had as well. Soderbergh is using the coarse digital video style and semi-documentary appearance to draw attention to the Fiction of movie making. If you're like me, you might not pick up on all that with one watching of the movie, but this DVD release has some great extras that illuminate the background of the film without ever making you feel like a doofus for missing it all the first time.

One thing that explains a lot about the movie is the set of rules that Soderbergh gave his actors. You can read them here, but the gist is that the actors were expected to leave behind all trappings of Hollywood and come to the film as actors, not movie stars. Things like the actors having to do their own makeup and hair and wardrobe. These restrictions effectively remove a layer of glitz and insulation between the stars and the audience. The rest of the DVD extras further this process. The section where Soderbergh is interviewing the actors in character is especially fun. You get to see them improvising answers that fit with their characters' personalities. Julia Roberts's interview is delightful in this respect when one of Soderbergh's questions dips so far into the layers of her character that you can see her completely lose her grip on where reality is. The commentary track with director Soderbergh and writer Coleman Hough provides more insight into how the normal movie making conventions were subverted for Full Frontal. The commentary also provides more consolation to those confused by the nested storylines as writer Hough completely loses her place at one point too.

All told, it's a two-star movie with a three-star DVD.

The Banger Sisters

Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon play long-separated friends who were LA rock and roll groupies in the 1960s. Hawn's character is still the free spirit she was back then, but when she loses her bartending job, she drives to Phoenix and discovers that Sarandon's character has become an uptight beige yuppie mom. On the way to Phoenix, Hawn picks up another uptight character, this one a down-on-his-luck screenwriter played with scene-stealing quirkiness by Geoffrey Rush. From this setup the movie becomes a kind of mid-life crisis version of Mary Poppins with Hawn's character cracking Sarandon and Rush each out of their self-made shells. I enjoyed the movie more than I expected to with the exception of the exceedingly ham-handed announcement of the Moral Of The Story in a graduation speech given by one of Sarandon's daughters.

Hulk

I was never a reader of the Hulk comic books in the few years that I was into comics. I was a Marvel fan, though. I read Thor and Captain America and Daredevil and some of the short-lived 80s series like Dazzler (the roller-skating crime-fighting mutant disco queen. Really.) and Moon Knight. But Hulk, no.

So coming into this movie I didn't know anything about the character except that he turned into a big green guy when he got mad.

I loved this movie.

For my money, director Ang Lee has done the best job yet of taking the experience of reading a super hero-style comic and translating it into the language of film. I'm not saying it's going to have this effect on everyone--it obviously isn't since the movie didn't exactly rake in the bucks in the theatre.

There are three things that I think made it work this well for me.

First and foremost, Lee and his actors show nothing but respect for these characters. I think the scene that brought this home to me was the introduction of Betty Ross (played by Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Connelly) where Bruce Banner (Australian (though you'd never guess until you watch the documentaries, his American is that good) Eric Bana) rides his bicycle to the lab at UC Berkeley and walks through the building with his helmet on. He talks to a colleague and then talks to Betty, and these characters are capital-G Geeks! They're all totally gorgeous, they speak intelligently to each other, and yet they have the geek nature in spades. This is not something you see every day in a movie. Most movies can't resist falling into the lame stereotypes of pocket protectors and clumsily-repaired eyeglasses and mis-matched socks and verbal tics. Here in this movie, that little scene convinced me that these were real people, and nothing else they ever did made me lose that conviction even when they were turning green and being attacked by mutant poodles. Nick Nolte and Sam Elliott are both great as non-cliche father figures, too. Nolte especially managed to portray an over-the-top wacko without ever sinking into caricature.

Second, I loved the visual style of the movie. Lee makes copious use of crazy angles and multiply-split frames and simultaneous views of scenes from different angles that is straight out of the comic book vocabulary and, for me, he made it work on the screen. It bugged Becky and Rachel, but I thought it was great.

Finally, the movie is chock full of effects shots and they never once felt like effects shots. Partly this goes back to the fact that Lee and the actors made the characters so real to me that my suspension-of-disbelief system was charged up to eleven, but it's also a tribute to the artists who made a big strong green guy who can jump half a mile look totally real. We watched some of the documentary features on the DVD that show how they did some of that, and it just makes it more impressive to me. They got it right.

We watched it from the library but I need to go buy a copy so I can watch it again.

X2

Second in the new X-Men franchise. The first one had to spend half the movie introducing all the characters, so this one had a little more screen time to devote to storytelling. In retrospect (it's been over a week since we watched it), I don't recall that they actually took advantage of the opportunity. There was a little bit of motion along a larger character arc for a bunch of the characters, but it seems like each one only got a few minutes of screen time for their story. If this were a weekly series that would be okay, but with years between installments it's going to take awhile to get to know these characters.

Actually, it'd make a great weekly series. It's got just enough of the soap opera thing going, and the overall comic book reality gives you plenty of opportunity for introducing outlandish events to keep the story hopping along. Probably wouldn't be able to get all these great actors in on a regular gig like that, though. Then there's the whole budget issue.

Still, it's a fun popcorn movie and left me looking forward to the next one.

Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde

It would be hard not to like this movie.

The character of Elle Woods as depicted by Reese Witherspoon nearly defies description. She is a cheerful ditzy blonde fashion plate. She's also an over-achieving lawyer career woman. But her defining characteristic is that she is unfailingly kind. Somehow Witherspoon manages to make all these alternate Elles work well enough that I completely accepted her as a real person.

The movie has her leaving her law practice after discovering that her chihuahua's mother is a cosmetics test animal. She takes her outrage to Washington D. C. where she goes to work for a senator played by Sally Field. Elle uses all her skills and resources to get her animal test ban bill passed in the face of resistance from various other cogs in the political machine.

It's a fantasy, sure, but a fantasy with a vital message: in a democracy, politics should not be a spectator sport.

Movies caught up

That's it for movie reviews from 2003. Between us, Becky and I saw about 100 movies last year that we hadn't seen before (we don't record repeat viewings). That's down from about 180 in 2002. Here's hoping we manage to squeeze in at least as many in '04!

Now on to the book review backlog...

The Return of the King

I went and saw volume 3 of The Lord of the Rings at our local multiplex with a group from work, but Becky decided to join me so we could see it together. Multiplexes suck! We got spoiled very quickly with the level of respect that the Cinerama gives to the films they show and the people they host to view them.

But the movie is as good as I could have hoped. Peter Jackson and his enormous team of craftspeople have built a film in three volumes the likes of which has never been seen. And amazingly he has done it while staying faithful in large part to both the letter and the spirit of Tolkein's book.

The movie starts with a brief spurt of Gollum backstory that lets Andy Serkis actually show his face on the screen—exposure that he richly deserves.

But following that brief aside, Return picks up right where Two Towers left off and delivers more epic excitement than you can shake a gold ring at. Shelob is terrifying. Minas Tirith is awesome. The big battles are jaw dropping.

Don't get me wrong. I could pick nits all day, but they got so much right that I'll let them all go (or at least wait to see if they fix them in the extended version!)

Now what will we do next Christmas?

The Two Towers (extended version)

On the Monday following our viewing of the extended Fellowship, we went to see the extended Two Towers. Unlike with the previous movie, we hadn't actually seen the extended cut of this movie before we went to catch it on the big beautiful screen at the Cinerama. Also unlike with Fellowship, there was a pretty good crowd there for this one. We decided to try out the balcony and sat in the third row up there where the entire screen is in your field of view.

Watching these extended cuts, it's hard to remember what the original cut was like.

Since we saw the two extended cuts in the theatre, Becky and I have been watching them at home again with the writer/director commentary. It's very interesting to hear Fran, Peter, and Philippa talk about how they agonized over what to cut to bring the films down to reasonable lengths for a theatrical release. Frankly, I would have made different decisions, erring on the side of reducing action in preference to increasing character moments. But I can't complain about what they've done too much. I couldn't have done as well as they have overall. But the stuff that's coming back in the extended versions is largely small character moments and a few canonical moments from the books that didn't sufficiently contribute to the narrative flow for the short cuts. With full post production behind them, the new versions look just as good as the originals.

I think my favorite restoration in The Two Towers is the scene where Sam and Frodo are using the Elven rope gifted to Sam by Galadriel. They descend a sheer wall and are lamenting the necessity to leave the rope behind since they know there's no way Sam's knot will let loose. Sam shakes the rope to demonstrate how secure it is and it immediately falls to the ground in front of them.

There's a little bit of a scene that explains where the mysterious horse that rescues Aragorn following his little float down the river (carrying a sheathed longsword and a bunch of other knives and such. That Aragorn is one buoyant dude. Must be a little known property of his Numenorian blood ;-). I would have been happier if the whole float down the river thing had been scrapped altogether, it's really the clumsiest bit in these movies as far as I'm concerned.

On midnight the day after we saw Two Towers at the Cinerama, The Return of the King was going to be opening. For the truly dedicated they were showing Fellowship and Two Towers back-to-back before Return started. The reason I mention it is that there was a small group of people already in line for the marathon when we went in. It'd been sold out for ages, so they presumably had tickets and were in line strictly to ensure they would get good seats. We're not that obsessed. Quite.

Picnic At Hanging Rock

This movie is set in the late 1800s, but from the first frame it's sadly obvious that it was filmed in the 1970s. It tells the true story of a picnic trip to the titular Hanging Rock, a volcanic formation in Australia. The picnickers are a group of boarding school girls. It's hard to tell how old they're supposed to be. The actresses all look to be in their 20s, but they act somewhat like teenagers and somewhat like pre-teens. During the picnic, a few of the girls wander off and are never seen again. The remainder of the film follows the community's attempts to find them and come to terms with their disappearance. Directed by Peter Weir, the story almost seems to suggest that something occult or extraterrestrial was going on with lots of shots of the girls wandering off zombie-like accompanied by strange humming spooky music. The overall effect seems to have been intended to be artsy, and you can still watch it that way if you are very careful to maintain a straight face and elevated nose throughout. But if at any point you allow yourself to subside into giggles, you'll be as lost as those schoolgirls.

Catch Me If You Can

Spielberg's movie treatment of the true story of Frank Abagnale Jr. (played with aplomb by Leonardo di Caprio), who as a young man became the most successful check forger in US history. In his spare time he impersonated airline pilots so he could get free air travel deadheading. Later he impersonated a doctor and later still a lawyer. The character who provides the plot is the FBI agent who is trying to catch Abagnale with little success (played by Tom Hanks in full dork mode).

As you'd expect from Spielberg and this team of actors (Christopher Walken does an unusually subtle turn as Abagnale's under-achieving father), the movie is technically brilliant. But there's just not enough of a story to really hold my interest, and it suffers also from characters none of whom really inspire a lot of sympathy except for some of Abagnale's victims. Looking back on it, I think my favorite part of the movie is the cool 1960s-style animated opening title sequence.

The Fellowship of the Ring (extended version)

We've seen this movie in the original theatrical version at least half a dozen times. We have watched the extended version of the movie off DVD repeatedly with and without commentary. We pretty much have it memorized.

So why a review now?

What are you? Living under a rock?!

In preparation for the theatrical release of volume 3 (The Return of the King in case you're living under two rocks), New Line released the extended versions of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers to theatres so legions of rabid fans (like us) could get all charged up for the release of Return.

Here in Seattle, this feeding frenzy of Jackson's epic was taking place at the Cinerama a fine old big-screen theatre that has been restored by Microsoft gajillionaire Paul Allen. Becky and I had never been there before. We went to see Fellowship on a Tuesday night two weeks before the release of Return. We weren't quite sure what to expect in the way of crowds so we got there pretty early to get a good spot in line, but we needn't have worried as there were only a few score people there when the doors finally opened at 8pm.

We took seats in something like the 8th row of the center section. It's a beautiful theatre with red velvet seats, a real curtain, and a screen thiiiiiiiis wide. I moved up a row when it turned out that the guy sitting behind me was unable to sit still without kicking the back of my seat for two minutes let alone 3-1/2 hours, but other than that, the Cinerama provided a near-optimal environment for appreciating the spectacle of film one.

Oh, you thought this was going to be about the movie itself?

Just go read the book. Skip the Tom Bombadil section and you pretty-much get Jackson's movie of Fellowship. About as much fun as you can have in a theatre these days.

Bend It Like Beckham

More multi-cultural girl power. Jesminder 'Jess' Bhamra (played by the very cute Parminder K. Nagra) is the daughter of Indian immigrants to England. Her parents' expectations for her center exclusively on college and marriage. Her hopes for herself are all about football. She meets Juliette 'Jules' Paxton (played by the very cute Kiera Knightley) who invites her to join a women's football team coached by Joe (played by the very cute Jonathan Rhys-Meyers). The story and characters are funny and fun (and cute) and the direction is energetic and respectful of the people and cultures involved. The soccer scenes are especially notable for being a blast to watch (and I'm no sports fan).

The DVD has a bunch of fun extras including a session of director Gurinder Chadha cooking Aloo Gobi while supervised by her mother and aunt.

Pieces of April

Hosting your family for Thanksgiving dinner has got to be one of life's most stressful moments. Add in a complete ignorance of cooking, a family that has written you off as an anti-social deviant, and an oven that doesn't work in a tiny New York apartment and you have the makings of a complete disaster. Katie Holmes's April somehow manages to summon the determination and ingenuity to fight her way back from an impossible beginning into something that while far from strictly traditional is an affirmation of the value of family and community in adversity. Patricia Clarkson is marvelous as April's mother who is dying of cancer (though she and April are the only ones who have accepted that fact (pretty much the only thing they have in common)). Oliver Platt has a fine understated performance as the father who still thinks that if he believes it hard enough, his family will not be falling apart.

The film is shot in a coarse indy style (and I bet they were wishing desperately that they'd been able to write it in a way that didn't involve having 5 people driving around in a car for much of the film) but since it's depicting a family with so many raw bleeding edges, the almost documentary shooting style fits perfectly. It's written and directed by Peter Hedges who wrote What's Eating Gilbert Grape and the screenplay of About a Boy.

I liked it a lot more than I expected to. The trailer makes it look like it's going to be a holiday disaster movie, and that kind of thing just makes me cringe and squirm. The actual film is far more subtle and human, managing to avoid nearly all of the cliches of the holiday film genre. The plot kept surprising me, and the surprises were always perfectly in character. Good stuff, and if you can watch the final scene of the movie with dry eyes, then you're more stoic than I am.

Whale Rider

In every generation there is a Chosen One... Oops, wait, wrong story. In a Maori tribe in New Zealand, there's a patriarchal transferrence of power, but as the tribe's traditional culture collides with the modern world, the sons of the chief choose other paths than those of tradition. The chief tries to train the other young boys of the tribe into the position. He can't accept that his granddaughter is his clear successor. She trains behind his back and everything ends about like you'd expect. It's really a fairy tale story so you can excuse the fact that the plot seems derivative. It's derivative because it tells one of the stories that all the others derive from. What really makes the movie wonderful, though is the performance of first-time actress Keisha Castle-Hughes as the granddaughter. She's wonderfully natural as a girl called to lead her people. Beautiful magical movie.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

I haven't read any of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels which is a good position to be in when viewing a Hollywood adaptation of a literary work. Peter Weir's bracing flick passes my test for such occasions in that seeing the movie made me want to go grab the first book and dig in. There's really not all that much to the movie that you haven't seen in a million other high seas adventure films, at least in outline, but Weir's flick goes for a level of verisimilitude that will have you ducking and cringing as cannon balls rip through the wood work of the HMS Surprise (and it warmed the cockles of my galoot heart to see that same woodwork all being repaired without resort to skilsaws, electric screwdrivers, and three trips to Home Despot ;-) Russell Crowe manages to play a part that strays dangerously close to Ahab without making you think of the mad sea captain more than once or twice which is quite an accomplishment.

The Castle

The folks down under make some pretty odd movies and The Castle poses no threat to that stereotype. The Kerrigan family is helmed by eternally optimistic and cheerful patriarch Darryl. They live in a house right off the end of the runway of the local airport. And they love that house like it's the castle of the title. Along comes an evil developer who wants to extend a runway through their neighborhood. The Kerrigans don't know anything about the law, but they know this is their house being stolen from them and they fight. Not very traditionally, but they fight and lose and lose and lose and... guess. The fun of the movie is in the characters of the family for whom nothing is more important than their love for each other and the house that is their home. They're goofballs, but loveable ones.

Two Weeks Notice

There are only two reasons to watch this movie. Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant. They're doing their usual schtick with their usual aplomb. If that doesn't appeal to you, then give it a pass. If you start giggling just thinking about it, here's a way to kill an evening. I'd love to see this pair in a good movie, but for now, this will have to do.

Dancer in the Dark

From the Danish director Lars von Trier and starring Icelandic singer Björk as a Czech woman who escaped to the Pacific Northwest with her young son in the 1960s. Björk's character is going blind, and as she loses her visual link to the real world she is more and more absorbed in her internal fantasy that she is living in a musical extravaganza. The musical numbers that result are surreal but sweet in a Bergmanesque sort of way. Their dreamlike quality is enhanced by von Trier's use of 100 fixed digital video cameras throughout the set to catch the action simultaneously from as many angles in a single (or a couple) takes. The scenes have a strange omniscient (or polyniscient) feel that is unique in my cinematic experience. Not sure I like it, but it's definitely interesting and von Trier does a good job of making it work within the sense of the movie. Despite the peppy musical numbers, this is a very dark movie with nothing even vaguely resembling a happy ending. I found that the immediacy of the digital video approach worked well to immerse me in the world of the film such that I found myself having personal emotional responses to the events depicted much more than I have from other films. It made me feel stuff vs. feeling that the people in the movies were feeling stuff, if you see what I mean. Weird. Dark. Good.

The DVD has a very interesting featurette showing how the 100 camera setup was used to film the musical numbers. There's also a couple of commentary tracks which we did not view.

What a Girl Wants

Amanda Bynes plays a young woman who's grown up with her mother, a singer in a rock band. Her father (Colin Firth) is nothing more than a picture from her Mom's time in Morocco and a story of how they met and fell in love.

Bynes goes to England to find her pa. He's a minor noble running for public office. He has a social-climber fiance with a similarly aged snooty daughter. Long lost American daughter doesn't fit with fiancee's plans. Cute plucky American girl wins over now-stodgy dad and reminds him of how much more fun his life was before he gave up his bohemian youth in exchange for a mundane adulthood.

All ends happily (unless you're the fiancee). It's a confection, but it has some cute moments.

A Mighty Wind

Christopher Guest has somehow managed to thrive as a one-man genre. First This is Spinal Tap, then Best In Show, and now A Mighty Wind, all "mockumentaries", movies about made up stuff in the documentary style. In a lot of ways, Wind is the best of the bunch. It's about a loosely connected group of folk-pop bands from the 1970s. What makes it work so well is that the cast wrote and performed all of the songs in the movie. The conceit of the film is that a reunion concert is staged following the death of the producer that gave them all their start back in the day. The movie shows what they've been up to since their heyday, how they get back in form for the reunion, and then the performance of the live show itself. The documentary bits are hilarious and filled with ad-libbed dialogue. The music is catchy and insanely silly. What's not to like?

Love Actually

If you've seen any of the romantic comedy blockbusters Richard Curtis has written, (like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill), you should know just what to expect from this, his first outing as writer/director. And your expectations will be fulfilled. Lots of charming attractive people and some quirky attractive people have various romantic entanglements and some life-changing events while being cute, witty, and all British-like. The casting makes it watchable. You can't lose with Emma Thompson or Alan Rickman or Liam Neeson or Colin Firth or Laura Linney. And Hugh Grant somehow even manages to make his rumpled charmer thing watchable for the 17th time. Add in more excellent casting and performances in the more minor parts and you get a movie that while predictable to an absurd degree is still somehow fun to watch.

The Matrix: Revolutions

Third volume in the Wachowski brothers' existential action trilogy. There was a lot of carping and moaning about last summer's Reloaded and about this finale. I understand what people are kvetching about, but really, if it bothers you that much you're taking these movies way too seriously.

There really aren't too many surprises here, but what is here is presented with the same eye for over-the-top visuals and action. The main problem in the movie is that after two other over-the-top movies there's not much space at the top for this one to move into. Billions and billions of Agent Smiths, billions and billions of squids.

The highlights of this movie are all character pieces, though. The little bit acknowledging the new face of the Oracle (Gloria Foster, the actress who played her in the first two films, died and was replaced by Mary Alice). Trinity's part in the standoff in the Merovingian's night club. The awesome job Ian Bliss did playing Bane while posessed by Agent Smith. The very end of the Neo vs. Agent Smith battle. Jada Pinkett Smith's Millenium Falcon chase scene. Colonel Mifune's death scene. I swear I even saw Keanu emote a couple of times as Neo.

Anyway, it's not a masterpiece of the cinematic art, but it was sure fun to watch (2.1 times. I went to the show that started 10 minutes before the one I had a ticket for. I realized this before the previews ended and decided that I could use this like the Omega 13 in Galaxy Quest, so that I could rewind the film by 10 minutes at any one point. I never had occasion to use it, so I just left as the credits rolled and caught the Smith vs. Neo battle again. My second full viewing was on the 6-story-high Boeing IMAX screen at Pacific Science Center. That was fun, but about half-way through the movie I stopped noticing how big the screen was and was just watching the film.)

Laurel Canyon

Christian Bale and Kate Beckinsale play Sam and Alex, a young engaged couple. Sam is doing his psychiatric internship in LA and Alex is joining him while she works on finishing her doctoral thesis in genomics. We meet Alex's parents who are sheltered high society suburbanites on the East Coast. Alex seems like she's on course to follow them. The plan while the young lovers are in LA is that they will stay at the home of Sam's mother while she is away.

When they arrive, they find that Mom's plans have changed because the album she's producing isn't finished yet and the band is staying at the house, too (the lead singer in her bed). Hearing just that much, this sounds like pure farce, but with Frances McDormand playing the mother, the film proceeds in much more interesting directions. McDormand plays an unapologetic sex, drugs, and rock & roll record producer. She's very good at what she does and she doesn't take any shit about who she is. Sam is appalled at his mother's lifestyle. Alex, though, is attracted to the danger and otherness of McDormand's world. While Alex is being seduced by hedonism, Sam is similarly distracted by a fellow intern played by Natascha McElhone.

The movie that results from this setup is a test of Alex's and Sam's commitment both to each other and to their chosen images of themselves. Good meaty performances by the principals captured with intimate direction by Lisa Cholodenko make it a sexy and thought-provoking film.

Door To Door

William H. Macy wrote, directed, and starred in this made-for-tv film depicting the life of Bill Porter. The story starts as Porter's mother helps him prepare to go interview for a job as a door-to-door salesman. From the beginning it's clear Porter has some condition that makes him talk funny (later we find out it's cerebral palsy). Through sheer determination, he gets the job and the rest of the story is how he kept it and how he affected his customers and how they affected him. It's got sort of a Hallmark feel to it, but that doesn't reduce the impact of Macy's depiction of a life well and usefully lived. And almost incidentally, the film shines light on another of the careers of old that no longer exists in the US.

Lost In Translation

We've enjoyed Scarlett Johansson's work since we first saw her in Manny & Lo as a precocious young girl. Her portrayal of Rebecca in Terry Zwigoff's great Ghost World moviefication just confirmed Manny & Lo wasn't a fluke and she jumped to our list of young actresses to keep an eye on. Second-time director Sophia Coppola puts Johansson's talents to good use in this understated film which deserves all the critical attention it's gotten. Johansson plays the bored, over-educated wife of a distracted pop-culture photographer (played with forgettably cipher-like blandness and distraction by Giovanni Ribisi). She has come along with him on a work trip to Tokyo and is mostly left to herself in the elegantly insulated hotel. In the bar she encounters the other character in the movie: Bill Murray. Murray plays a past-his-prime adventure movie actor in town to film a commercial for Suntory Scotch.

The movie is a series of simple interactions between these two people at very different places in their lives. The plot is minimal, and what there is of it is kind of klunky. But while the movie doesn't say very much, it shows quite a lot in its depiction of a bit of authentic human connection in an environment that makes such a thing virtually impossible.

Punch-Drunk Love

Paul Thomas Anderson wrote and directed this movie. If you've seen any of his other work (Magnolia especially), just knowing that tells you that the movie is going to be an experience.

Adam Sandler plays Barry Egan. He's got his own business (novelty toilet plungers, but there's only one gag having to do with that (and it's in the preview)). He's got a whole raft of older sisters who are nearly indistinguishable from one another.

The events of the film are more or less mundane, but they paint a picture of Sandler's character. He starts off the movie afraid and confused, but as he begins to fall in love with Emily Watson's character, he starts pushing through the fear and acting out of love. This is complicated by the fact that having grown up with a raft of sisters who express their love for him by teasing him incessantly, his reactions to his feelings of love are all tied up with the feelings of angry frustration that his sisters have always inspired in him.

The DVD has some surreal extra features including some deleted scenes that further illuminate this contradictory array of feelings that Sandler operates under. Emily Watson is an interesting choice as his love interest, playing the part as both clumsily seductive and strangely maternal. It's a weird little movie. Good, though.

Daredevil

I knew this would be awful, but I had to watch it. I was never a rabid comic book fan as a kid, but for several years I was an avid reader of Daredevil. He's a blind superhero whose other senses were augmented by the toxic waste that blinded him. By day he's a lawyer, by night he takes care of the cases he loses by hunting down the baddies and taking them out. He's a pretty dark character.

The movie is a mess. It's trying to be edgy and rock-and-roll, and just comes off as over-calculated and vapid. Jennifer Garner plays Electra. Daredevil and Electra have a little wire-work courting fight, but it just looks fake (never mind the fact that he has this fight as his lawyer self which sort of blows the whole blind guy cover you'd think...) Ben Affleck as Daredevil is stiff and smarmy. Part of it is the costume, but this is really the worst thing I've seen him in.

Alex and Emma

I would have dearly loved to have walked out of this movie, but since we were watching it on an airplane it wasn't really an option.

Luke Wilson plays Alex, a writer with writer's block. He borrowed money from some gangsters and lost it gambling so they're going to kill him unless he comes up with the bucks. He can only pay them back if he finishes his new book and collects the money for it. But he has writer's block so he hires a court stenographer to take dictation of the book. The usually delightful Kate Hudson plays the stenographer.

As they begin to work on the book, the movie splits and shows the action of the book as it is written and revised intermixed with the "real" world of Alex and Emma who start off being prickly toward each other and then lighten up and fall in love. Oops, told you the end. Rob Reiner directed this disaster. I can see how the pitch might have sounded good, but when you've got a writer writing a really stupid book, you've got to balance it with a real-world story that is solid and meaningful. Instead, the movie story is exactly the same story as that in the book, and they're both unspeakably idiotic. Don't waste your time.

School of Rock

We watched this on a Sunday night in Hershey, Pennsylvania with a theatre full of teenagers. Jack Black plays an aspiring rock-and-roll guitar god. Now, you have to understand that this is a very specific flavor of rock-and-roll we're talking about in this movie. Think Cheap Trick and that kind of theatrical, epic guitar-heavy, make-your-ears-bleed power rock. Black's character is into this stuff, but the band he's in takes themselves seriously in a completely different way than Black does and find his antics embarassing at best, so they fire him. Naturally Black tries to form his own band, but gets no takers.

Meanwhile his roommate, a substitute teacher played by screenwriter Mike White, is trying to keep a relationship alive with his shrewish girlfriend, and delivers an ultimatum to Black: get a job and pay the rent, or get out.

This all sets the stage for Black to accept a substitute teaching job in White's name. And this is where you have to turn your suspension-of-disbelief knob up to eleven. Black manages to snow the extremely tightly-wound headmistress (played with wonderful depth and feeling by the inimitable Joan Cusack) and the rest of the teachers into thinking he knows what he's doing. And then when he turns his class of fourth-graders into a power rock band (and roadies and stage crew and costume designers and lighting designers and...), somehow no one in the school hears them or in any other way hears about the fact that the class isn't learning anything except rock history and practice.

The kids are adorable. Black takes a role that could easily be either brashly repulsive or sickeningly sweet and somehow manages to be neither. His character's love of the music is pure and complete and his dealings with the kids are always respectful and encouraging.

The movie has a slightly schmaltzy vibe to it, but somehow director Richard Linklater never lets it descend into formula. It's no masterpiece of the cinema, but it's a perfectly watchable feel-good movie.

Shanghai Knights

Watch this for Jackie Chan's riotous fight choreography. Or for Owen Wilson's shameless goofball acting. But whatever you do, don't expect historical accuracy. The movie is fun to watch, but it doesn't have a serious bone in its body.

To expect otherwise is to set yourself up for disappointment. Chon and Roy go to England to rescue the Chinese imperial seal stolen from Chon's father. They're helped in their quest by Chon's adorable sister (who Roy predictably falls for) and Arthur Conan Doyle (who has somehow become a Scotland Yard inspector, but remember what I said about accuracy). Cool fight sequences ensue.

The DVD has an interesting interview with Chan about the fights. There's also a couple of commentary tracks and the other customary fill.

Bowling for Columbine

I sympathize with anyone who can't take Michael Moore seriously. His work in Roger and Me had the feeling of a personal vendetta against General Motors, and that lack of objectivity permeated the film.

In Bowling for Columbine (a title I still don't really get), though, he does a much better job of making a documentary. He still does the in-their-face confrontation thing where he confronts people with issues they don't want to face and then acts surprised when they ask him to go away. But I had a hard time feeling much sympathy for any of the people thus confronted in this movie. I felt some sympathetic discomfort as I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of one of Moore's interviews, but everyone he confronted was a public personality who has to expect to encounter some opposition.

The movie is surprisingly even-handed about the issue of firearms. Moore doesn't take a stand on whether guns in and of themselves are a cause of the high homicide rates in the US. In fact, he points to strong evidence that the presence of guns doesn't have anything to do with it (Canada has 7 million guns for 10 million households, and a tiny fraction of our gun-related homicide numbers).

So what is the reason that Americans shoot each other so much more frequently than residents of other first world nations? There's no one answer. But two of the biggest factors, according to Moore, are our economy, and our fear.

Mainstream media reports violent crime first and foremost. This leads us to feel that we could be attacked at any moment. We buy alarms for our houses and our cars. We buy tazers and mace. We buy guns. We move to suburbs where we think we'll be safe. We avoid parts of town that we think are dangerous. We avoid certain people who we think are dangerous. This isolation leads to more ignorance of who our neighbors are, which leads to more fear. Fear translates to anger when we're confronted, and neither fear nor anger are conducive to rational thought. Shit happens.

I was talking to a friend about the movie today. He hadn't seen it, which didn't surprise me since he's a politically conservative guy and a gun enthusiast. I asked him the central question of why so many more gun deaths in the US than Canada. He opined that the high numbers were caused by ethnic minorities killing each other just like they do in the old country. I didn't follow up on that partly because I didn't feel like I had the facts I needed at hand, and partly because I'm not comfortable with Moore-like confrontation. But I've been thinking about it. The Canada counter-example works again for his argument. Canada has similar racial diversity to the US.

But the racial argument points to the other half of Moore's theory, the economic. Ethnic minorities are typically in the lower economic classes. They work for long hours at low-paying jobs that can't cover reasonable living expenses. They don't have health insurance. They can't afford daycare for their kids. In the movie, Moore gives an example of a situation where this recipe led to an unsupervised child discovering a gun which he took to school and killed a classmate. Both children were first graders. (One of my beefs with the movie is that Moore never chased the question of what the hell the child's uncle was doing with a gun lying around where a first grader could find it.) That's one way that poverty can lead to gun violence, but the other is the more direct route of hopelessness. When you work two full-time jobs and can't make enough money to provide for your child, how much does it take to drive you to violent means of attaining security?

Then there's that special case of gun violence: war. Is the argument that we should take military action against countries that we don't agree with a cause of Americans' tendency to violence or an effect?

Now, it's hard to make conclusions from the data that Moore presents, mostly because he doesn't present data, he presents blanket statements. There were several times in the film where he would present one side of the argument, then present facts that didn't quite refute them, but seemed to paint a picture with a different overall hue. It's hard to draw any strong conclusions based on this. What the movie is good for is providing a jumping-off point for discussion of the issues and suggestion of some theories about causes. The hard work of figuring out how the numbers shake out is left to the viewer.

Duct Tape Forever

The Red Green Show comes to the big screen. Unfortunately the movie suffers from the usual problems with translating variety show comedy programs for full-length features. What's funny when you're watching it for a half-dozen five-minute skits over the course of a half-hour becomes tiresome when stretched out to 90 minutes. There are bits that are amusing, but there's too much other stuff in between to make it worthwhile. Better to watch reruns of the show. The video tape we got from the library included a making-of mockumentary (all the actors stay in character) that was even more boring than the movie. It was fun hearing from some of the fans who got to be extras in the movie, but it went on so long I thought it would never end, and I finally rewound the tape without finishing it.

The Hours

It's been a week or so since we watched this. It's a good movie. The casting is incredible (Streep, Moore, Kidman as the female leads, of course, but the supporting cast is impressive, too, with Miranda Richardson, John C. Reilly, Ed Harris, Toni Collette, Allison Janney, Claire Danes, and Jeff Daniels). The story weaves back and forth between Woolf writing Mrs. Dalloway in 1923, a housewife in 1951 reading the book, and a 2001 editor who personifies the title character. Phillip Glass provides a score that sets tone and eases the transitions.

But while I enjoyed the experience of the film as I was watching it, looking back I feel like it could have been better. The cuts between the various timelines were rapidfire and frenetic, but when it stayed with a particular story for a while it felt draggy. The dragginess works for all the individual women's lives saturated with depression and despair as they were, but the contrast between the two speeds of the film didn't fit with the story for me.

I was also distracted by the makeup, not only the infamous nose they slapped on Nicole Kidman's mug, but also Ed Harris's AIDS makeup and Julianne Moore's old face at the end. They were all impressive, but they all looked like makeup to me.

But again, this is post-viewing analysis. The active presence of the film is engrossing. The emotions of the leads are a palpable experience. It makes Woolf's choice of suicide seem completely reasonable.

Interestingly, I ran across a discussion of depression and suicide just a couple of days after watching the movie. In a comment to her LiveJournal, Lydy wrote:

Did I ever tell you that I figured out a good answer to the question, "Why don't I just kill myself?" It's a perfectly valid question, and there are days when it's very hard to think of a good reason not to. My answer, though, is, "Next year, the medtech will be better." Life may not mean anything, but eventually it might stop hurting, and that would be an awfully nice thing.

The rate at which medtech improves can be cause for despair on its own, but certainly compared to 1923 or 1951, now is a better time to have screwed-up brain chemistry if you can afford to treat it.

The DVD has some interesting documentary material about Woolf, and a bunch of other stuff we didn't have time to watch since we had to return it to the library.

American Splendor

Harvey Pekar is a file clerk from Cleveland, Ohio. For many years he has been writing a comic book about his life called American Splendor (originally illustrated by his friend R. Crumb). At first glance, the title seems ironic. The comic is full of frames of Harvey walking down streets of urban decay, his hands in the pockets of his jacket, his back humped, his head down. The stories center around the simple activities of his life like puttering around the house, going to the grocery store, or pondering the futility of his existence.

It seems a strange thing to turn into a movie.

The film blends scenes with the real people involved, actors playing the same characters, and finally animated versions of the characters as drawn by the artists of the comics. All these layers are blended so seamlessly that watching the film feels almost like reading a comic and having the pictures come alive in your head.

Like the comic, the story is just about Harvey's life. How he met his third wife, how he came to be a regular on David Letterman's show (I actually remember seeing some of these back in the 80s when I was watching Letterman avidly), how he survived a fight with cancer.

Harvey is a gruff, depressed character. He questions whether his life has any value. And yet he is not resigned to his existence. He changes things, and the changes are in the baby steps that all of us are able to make in real life. There's no magical breakthrough that transforms Harvey into a prom queen, but he is transformed through small personal changes and nudges from the people around him.

In the end, the title doesn't seem ironic at all.

While Harvey Pekar didn't originate the mundane autobiographical form (witness Pepys' Diary), the influence of American Splendor the comic on our popular culture is clear.

In a lot of ways, American Splendor is like a good blog, wresting beauty and meaning from the events of everyday life. And indeed, Harvey, his wife Joyce, and their daughter Danielle all have blogs! (Thanks to Jeff at Beans For Breakfast for that piece of info.)

Kate & Leopold

Liev Schreiber plays an inventor who finds a way to travel into the past. Hugh Jackman plays a 19th century duke who notices Liev's bumbling and chases him back to 2001. Meg Ryan is a market research executive and Liev's ex-girlfriend. Hugh and Meg meet and fall in love. Hugh has to go back to avoid temporal disaster.

The movie as a whole is cute and avoids some of the more annoying cliches of fish-out-of-water films. I like what writer/director James Mangold is doing with playing the integrity and manner of Jackman's character against the shamelessness of Ryan's 21st century marketing mentality.

The time travel aspects of the film are very sloppily handled. For instance, when Jackman returns to the past, Schreiber warns him that he will be returning before he left so he might have to re-live some of the day when logically what would happen would be that there would be two of him until the point where his original self went forward. Yes, time travel is theoretically impossible, but every other aspect of the time travel in this movie implies that your physical presence is what is transported, and this detail had Jackman's consciousness travelling back and replacing the one he had before. Consistency, please.

There are lots of anachronistic features. Most of them involve Jackman knowing about things that didn't happen until after he came forward, but one obvious one was the use of 50-star US flags in 1876 when it should have been the rather distinctive 37-star version. These kinds of blatant things are so easy to get right. I'm not going to quibble about historical inaccuracies like the economic conditions in Mangold's past, but if you're going to include flags, make sure they're the right flags. Sheesh.

But beyond these technical quibbles, there's still something just not quite right about the movie. I can't put my finger on it, but there's something about the pacing or the shooting style or something that just didn't let me sink into the film.

The DVD includes the theatrical version as well as an original director's cut with 4 extra minutes. The extra minutes consist of a brief glimpse of Ryan's character in the past at the beginning of the movie, a long scene with a cameo by Mangold playing a director having his film shown at a test screening, and a number of brief references that show that Schreiber's character is Jackman's (and hence (spoiler!) Ryan's) n-great grandson. Apparently the studio had a problem with the fact that Schreiber's character was in a romantic relationship with his n-great grandmother (before the action of the movie). Whatever.

There are also some deleted scenes and a commentary track plus two forgettable featurettes. The commentary is Mangold doing one of those "here's what I was trying to say with this film" kinds of things. I didn't listen to the whole thing, but it was mildly interesting.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

#92 on the IMDB bottom 100 films. We were going through some of our vinyl recently and listened to the Beatles albums that spawned this movie and I got a hankering to see it again (I saw it in the theatre when it came out!) The library had a copy (on tape) and Becky's off visiting Rosalind (and Steve & Hazel) so I feel like I can waste time watching really dumb movies ;-)

But it's weird because I think it's actually pretty good. (Not literally "pretty good" which is Becky's and my shorthand for 3 stars. Stars-wise it's more like "okay" or "okay plus" (2 or 2-1/2)). The deal is that they took all the songs on the Beatles albums Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road and a few other songs and used them as the score for a pop music opera. Even though all the Beatles were still alive when this was made (1978), none of them wanted to be in it so instead the producers enlisted the Bee Gees, fresh off their success with the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, and squared out the quartet with Peter Frampton. It's a testament to the surreality of the Lennon & McCartney lyrics that they form the only dialogue in the movie with the exception of some sparse narration spoken by George Burns (who sounds just like Peter Falk in The Princess Bride. Or Falk sounds like Burns, I guess.)

The bands involved all do acceptable covers of the Beatles tunes. The Earth Wind and Fire rendition of "Got To Get You Into My Life" is excellent. Aerosmith does nice work with "Come Together" and Alice Cooper contributes a creepy rendition of "Because". Steve Martin performs "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" in his late 70s pre-The Jerk persona.

There's an impressive number of music, tv, and movie personality cameos in the movie-ending number. Check out the list on the IMDB (click the poster as always) under "Our Guests at Heartland".

The movie makes about as much sense as any musical (there's even a brief hoedown scene ;-). As a historical document of the late seventies movie musical boom, it's really kind of fun. That boom was largely the work of producer Robert Stigwood who did this one as well as Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), Tommy (1975), Saturday Night Fever (1977), and Grease (1978)

If you can, see a letterboxed version (the DVD is) as there are quite a few scenes that suffer under pan and scan.

Demolition Man

I didn't much like this movie. Except when I did. Sylvester Stallone stars as cop, John "demolition man" Spartan, so called for his tendency to destroy buildings in the process of catching bad guys. Wesley Snipes plays Simon Phoenix, a wacky psychopath who wouldn't be out of place in a Batman story. Spartan catches Phoenix, but lets the hostages die, so both of them are sentenced to a long sentence of being frozen. Fast-forward forty years and the world has outgrown violence in exchange for a goofy disneyesque rated G culture. Every swear word occasions a fine, and everything that's bad for you is illegal, and yet somehow this has all resulted in a complete lack of crime. Sorry, I'm trying to make the nonsensical make sense. Phoenix escapes from prison and goes on a rampage. Spartan is thawed out in the hopes that he can catch the 20th century psycho. Additional complication comes from Sandra Bullock playing Lt. Lenina Huxley, a bored police officer who pines for the good old days when there was action and adventure. There's also Denis Leary playing a rebel forces leader kind of guy named Edgar Friendly who, it turns out the benevolent dictator has programmed Simon Phoenix to kill.

No, it doesn't make any more sense when you're watching it. The movie has about as much cohesion as a smashed piece of safety glass. There's all these bits, but none of them fit together. Some of the bits are pretty good. Bullock plays her saccharine-sweet character in a charmingly goofy way that makes you expect her to break into uncontrollable giggles at any moment. Leary gets a few good lines in. Snipes is so over the top that "over the top" doesn't even begin to describe it. Unfortunately his character is so nasty that it's hard to enjoy his performance. Sly is Sly. The script tries to poke fun at the action movie genre, but mostly just makes fun of itself. And not in a good way.

Roger Dodger

Campbell Scott stars as Roger, a single advertising copy writer with the gift of gab. He is self-assured to the point of cockiness. He thinks of himself as (and is perceived as) a ladies' man. Roger's teenage nephew, Nick, appears in Roger's office and begs his uncle to give him lessons in the art of wooing women. Roger is unable to resist this challenge and the remainder of the film follows the master and the apprentice through the prowling grounds of New York.

As the evening goes on, the level of Roger's mastery of the subject comes increasingly into question. Layers and layers of veneer are burned away both from the jaded Roger and from the innocent Nick.

The film is fundamentally an extended character study of Roger. Everything that happens gives us a clearer view of who this man is. Scott's performance lets us see that Roger himself is learning some of these lessons along with us, though they are much more painful and difficult to accept for him. Writer/Director Dylan Kidd manages to keep the story honest and very personal. Every time it could have gone for the easy laugh or the cozy resolution, this story instead takes a turn into even more authentic territory.

The DVD is a film techie's dream. All the extras are about how the film was made, and seem to have been produced by the same crew that made the film itself. There's none of the usual banality of production featurettes, instead you get interviews with the costume designer and the producer and the casting director. We didn't watch the movie until it was already overdue at the library so we didn't have time to view either of the commentary tracks, but they sound like they'd be fun (one with director and DP, the other with director and Scott). From the sound of some of the interviews, the film got lots of criticism for the use of "shaky cameras", but I for one didn't really find that distracting at all. It felt like you were just in the room watching these characters a couple of tables away.

Talk To Her

I always have a hard time with the really good movies. Almodóvar was nominated for an Oscar for his direction, and won for his writing, and rightfully so. The film tells the story of two men devoted to women in comas. One of the women is a bullfighter, the other a dancer.

The film stitches together music, dance, bull-fighting, care for the comatose, prison incarceration, and film. The dialogue is sparse, but perfectly builds all the characters, both major and minor, into believable people.

That's enough. It's a movie to be seen, not to be read about.

The DVD has a whole bunch of trailers which is a plus in my book. The only other extra is a commentary track by Almodóvar and actress Geraldine Chaplin who has a minor role in the film. We listened to (well, read the subtitles, anyway) the first 15 minutes of the commentary, and what we heard indicated that there's probably some interesting stuff to be learned from it, but you'd have to get through a bunch of Almodóvar narrating the action on the screen to get there. This seems to be a fairly common failing of director commentaries. But the lack of extras is not a failing at all. The movie stands nicely on its own.

A Guy Thing

Please don't let anything I say in this review lead you to believe that you should make any effort whatsoever to see this movie. It's really bad.

We got the movie from the library since it features Jason Lee (from many Kevin Smith movies and the charming Mumford), Julia Stiles (10 Things I Hate About You, the cute teen-retelling of The Taming of the Shrew), and Selma Blair (most notably Cruel Intentions, the surprisingly good teen-retelling of Les liaisons dangereuses). And indeed, all three of them manage to be appealing as long as you don't pay any attention to their dialogue.

Here's the story: Jason is engaged to Selma. After his bachelor party he wakes up in bed with Julia who he later learns is Selma's cousin. From that you can almost guess where the movie goes. Jason falls for Julia. Selma ends up with Jason's buttoned-down brother. You've seen that movie a dozen times. Director Chris Koch (Snow Day, the universally panned Chris Elliott vehicle), and principal story/screenwriter Greg Glienna (Meet the Parents, another movie to avoid) try to make up for the hackneyed concept by borrowing other hackneyed concepts from other popular films. Jason catches pubic lice leading to much crotch scratching and embarassing moments at the pharmacists counter. Har har. Julia's ex-boyfriend is a psycho cop who uses his power to harrass Jason (who gets recruited by internal affairs to wear a wire so they can catch the guy). Jason claims to have diarrhea to explain why he's hiding in the bathroom to avoid Julia. The gravy at the rehearsal dinner gets dosed with marijuana.

Even with all that, there is a watchable movie trying desperately to escape from the layers of kitsch. The title reference is from several occasions where complete strangers back up Jason in his pointless lies. Some of these are actually kind of cute, and if they'd pulled that element of the movie more to the foreground they might have been able to get something more in the spirit of The Tao of Steve meets dorky wedding movie.

As it is, the only redeeming quality is the personal charisma of the principals.

The DVD has gobs of extra stuff including deleted scenes, and a gag reel with scene after scene of the actors laughing in a way that seems to me to mean "I can't believe I'm in this worthless movie, I have to laugh so I won't cry."

Die Another Day

It's a Bond movie. Cool gadgets, fabulous babes, over-the-top baddies, big explosions, absolute nonsense plot. Not as bad as The World Is Not Enough (Denise Richards as a physicist? Please.) or as good as Tomorrow Never Dies (Michelle Yeoh!)

This is the 20th (canonical) Bond film. If you look in the trivia section of the IMDB entry behind the poster picture at left you'll find a summary of all the homages to the other 19 films that are embedded in this one. This goes a long way towards explaining why this one feels over-long. First-time Bond director Lee Tamahori throws in a few Hong Kong-style bullet time and other quick-take effects, but they're so sparse within the whole picture that they're more distracting than fun.

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

Much is being made of Johnny Depp's performance in this big-budget pirate movie, and every word of praise he is getting is deserved. He just exudes the perfect combination of depravity, feral grace, and self-imposed honorability for a pirate captain.

The movie's fun to watch even apart from Depp's Jack Sparrow, but the plot is too plodding and the pacing too jerky to let the movie be the masterpiece of light action fare it could have been. Geoffrey Rush is fun in his scenery chewing mode (and his teeth look like he's chewed a lot in this one!), and Orlando Bloom cuts a fine figure as the young man (and blacksmith and expert swordsman) with a grudge against pirates.

Keira Knightley is acceptable as the pretty governor's daughter Bloom pines over. I have to give credit to the writers for giving Knightley's character a bit more brains than is usual for this sort of part. Many of the strategic maneuvers are instigated by this character, but Knightley plays them more as if the girl is a natural strategist with excellent instincts. It would be nice to have seen it played more as the result of hard study and calculation on her part.

But why quibble about details? This is a perfectly good summer movie with cool effects, pretty people, and, hell, yes, excellent pirates.

Cherish

Robin Tunney plays Zoe Adler, a misfit computer graphics designer who can't sit still. Early in the movie she is arrested for running down a police officer with her car while drunk. No one believes her when she explains that she didn't do it, that it was actually the scary stalker guy who had forced her to drive drunk and sent the car crashing into the poor cop. Her lawyer (played with flair by Nora Dunn) plans to stall the trial as long as possible and somehow gets her out of jail and into the "bracelet program" where she is under house arrest with a location tracking bracelet on her ankle to ensure she doesn't get away.

Whew! complicated setup.

This film mixes up a brew of events that range through horrifying, depressing, pathetic, hilarious, suspenseful, sexy, heart-warming, triumphant. The amazing thing is that in the process, writer/director Finn Taylor has managed to make a movie that isn't a big muddle. Watching it, I was completely transported into Zoe's world and was able to accept all that variety of experience as the normal course of her not-so-normal life. In short, it felt real. Examined intellectually, the story doesn't seem very realistic, but still, somehow the overall effect is believable.

A lot of that verisimilitude has to do with the performances turned in by Tunney and the always wonderful Tim Blake Nelson who plays the lonely police technician who services her tracking bracelet and falls in love with her.

The soundtrack of 70s/80s hits you haven't heard in awhile is integral to the plot (the songs are those played by Tunney's character and are the soundtrack of her fantasy life) and makes it all seem more real as well--not something you usually get from nostalgic soundtracks.

Finally, the movie is full of little visual quotes from other movies from Run Lola Run to The Shawshank Redemption.

The DVD has a couple of deleted scenes (the first of which is a quote from Tunney's role in Empire Records), there's also a making-of featurette and an audio commentary with Taylor, Tunney, and DP Barry Stone.

The only thing I don't like about the movie is that you run the risk of getting the title song stuck in your head in spite of its sparing use in the film. Small price to pay.

Zoolander

Very silly movie about a dim-bulb male model who is brainwashed and programmed by an evil fashion designer to kill the new Prime Minister of Malaysia whose progressive policies threaten to put an end to cheap sweatshop labor. The social commentary takes up about 2 minutes of screen time, with the rest dedicated to a series of campy modelling skits. Ben Stiller as Derek (he also directed and co-wrote) manages to maintain the spacey dim-wit aura throughout. Owen Wilson is his usual hilarious deadpan self as a rival model. Will Ferrell is completely over the top as the evil designer--a completely shameless and very funny performance. The movie is also distinctive for having dozens of fashion and movie personalities in cameo roles. Mindless fun.

The DVD has even more of it with deleted scenes, extended scenes and outtakes as well as a music video, photo gallery, commentary, etc. etc. etc.

What Dreams May Come

I'd wanted to see this ever since seeing the trailers in which the visual effects looked really cool. I expected the movie to be unbearably schmaltzy, and I wasn't disappointed. What I didn't expect was that it would also be pretty dull. Definitely could have used some major tightening up. The painterly effects were indeed very cool, but I'd have to say that it wasn't quite worth sitting through the whole movie to see them.

The Bank

It's an Australian thriller about banking and mathematical modelling. We picked this up from the library largely due to it starring David Wenham who has been seen more recently in The Two Towers. In The Bank, he plays a genius mathematician who is on the verge of perfecting an algorithm for predicting what the stock market will do. He is hired by a bank CEO played with relish by Anthony LaPaglia. LaPaglia's character gets to stand in for all that's evil about the banking industry in particular and big corporations in general.

The magic algorithm (for magic it would have to be to do what they show in the film, Clarke's Law be damned) is supposedly made possible by some aspect of chaos theory which is represented in the film by some spiffy rendering of the Mandelbrot bug and copious references to Benoit Mandelbrot himself. Gotta like that. The mathematical side of the film is also represented in some really cool cinematography.

The other part of the movie is a view of banking from the point of view of some hapless small business people who lose their business due to having taken a loan that was backed by some strange foreign currency arrangement that my decidedly non-bank-savvy brain can't quite parse. This being the case, I had quite a bit of sympathy for these characters even though their part of the story seems tacked on until you get close to the end and start figuring out what's really going on here.

There were other parts of the movie about which I had mixed feelings. Like their handling of computers which had all the usual movie problems of flashy graphical displays that don't seem to do anything except look cool. Then they turned around and had the most realistic looking super computer since Hal 9000: a big black box with a single line of 3 glowing LEDs and a small logo plate.

Despite the niggling annoyances, this is a smart, good-looking, suspenseful film.

Woman On Top

In this magical realist confection, Penélope Cruz plays a young chef with extreme vertigo unless she is piloting whether it's in the kitchen, in the car, or in the bedroom. Her husband cheats on her after becoming frustrated with this last, and when she catches him at it she leaves him and Brazil to go to San Francisco where she promptly lands her own TV show where she eventually loses control all over again (this time to the always enjoyable John de Lancie). It's a cute, dippy little story with pacing problems, but hey, it's got Penélope Cruz in it which makes up for a lot.

Treasure Planet