Hi to all seven of you. I have been lazy about my blogging of late but this is because I have been thinking. Really, I've been working on my novel and other fun stuff like watching the fucking Republicans lie their way through the American media. Since I am a thoughtful person I thought up something that will ensure that will get Republicans to quit lying.
This idea is so solid that there is no way they would ever go for it.
What we need to do is amend the constitution that would add a provision where when you're elected to the House, Senate and Presidency and you're sworn in, you are automatically put under oath.
It's brilliant. Don't you think?
That way whenever a politician opens their mouth, they cannot tell a lie because if they do, they can be automatically tried for perjury.
That's right ... perjury.
That means that every time Eric Cantor opens his mouth and he doesn't tell the truth, he's off to jail. Or at least he has to pay a big fine.
Every time Michelle Bachmann says something ... anything. She will be tossed in the clink.
Mitch McConnell. We could probably put something in there for being an asshole.
I think it's brilliant. Maybe it's just me.
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I will try to be better about updating.
Have a great weekend,
Les
Friday, July 15, 2011
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Movie Review - Super
Super
2010
Starring: Rain Wilson, Ellen Page, Kevin Bacon, Liv Tyler, Nathan Fillion and Michael Rooker
Written and Directed by: James Gunn
Super, the latest film by director James Gunn, has some interesting ideas and goes to some dark places but on the whole misses the mark.
It is the story of a short-order cook named Frank, played by Rain Wilson, whose wife (Liv Tyler) leaves him for a local drug dealer played by Kevin Bacon. Distraught, Frank confronts his wife and Kevin Bacon and this leads to him getting his ass kicked by Kevin Bacon's thugs. While recovering, Frank watches a Christian superhero show on television and decides that he must become a super hero to correct the injustices in the world and the Crimson Bolt is born. He has no superpowers and instead decides that he must use a pipe wrench to beat people over the heads. He spends his nights prowling the streets and begins kicking the asses of drug dealers, child molesters and muggers. He decides that he must get his wife back and turns his focus on the Kevin Bacon character.
Along the way he teams up with Ellen Page, who is wildly fun as his sidekick Bolty. She is playing against her usual witty type and steals the movie as the not too smart, violence obsessed friend. Whenever she is on screen the film is actually fun and where I laughed the most. I wish I could have seen a movie about Bolty instead.
Super is an odd little film. I wanted to like it. The performances, other than the excellent Ellen Page, are fine. Kevin Bacon is good and there are some great scenes with Liv Tyler and Rain Wilson, but they seem like they all belong in different films. The dependency of their relationship is compelling and we see hints of something deeper in the scene where Liv tells Rain about her life and they kiss. This scene was made better because of the writing as well as the use of the great Cheap Trick.
But then the film tonally changes. It is this inconsistency in tone, not the over the top violence, that really sinks the film. In fact, I think this is a good study of how important a consistant tone is to your story. It is really all over the place, from the sweet and interesting scenes with Liv Tyler, to the dark realism of her getting injected with heroin and almost raped by a drug dealer, to the cartoonish violence that follows. Gunn needs to pick one or the other because both don't work.
I really enjoyed Slither so we know Gunn can do good work, but the film missed on not just the tone but the look. I think he was going for a lo-fi look to the film that comments on the character and the situation, but it was not nice to look at. There was nothing interesting in the images he put on the screen and at times they were almost gross. And I'm not talking about all the blood. That didn't really bother me. It just wasn't nice to look at, which wouldn't have been a problem if he would have picked a tone and matched the look of the film to what he was going for. The grittiness of the images just add to the confusion of what I was watching.
Super had potential and if it wasn't for the amazing Ellen Page, my grade would have been lower. I give it a C+.
Les
Here is the trailer:
Movie Review - Source Code
Source Code
2011
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga and Jeffrey Wright
Written by: Ben Ripley
Directed by: Duncan Jones
2009's Moon was in my top ten for that year. It was a brilliant little movie about a man who was sent to the moon, by himself, to oversee the mining operation. It was engaging and thoughtful and when I saw that Duncan Jones was attached to direct Source Code, I was intrigued. I had read the script on one of those script review sites, thought it was great and, although, I'm never excited about seeing Jake Gyllenhaal in a movie, this was one to mark the calendar for. And I wasn't wrong.
Source Code is a story about a former Afghanistan helicopter pilot who wakes up on a commuter train bound for downtown Chicago. His last images where on a mission in Afghanistan and suddenly he's sitting across from a beautiful woman, a friend from their daily meetings on the train. He is not who she thinks he is and it freaks him out. Then the train blows up. We find that the former pilot is in the Source Code, a program created by a physicist played by Jeffrey Wright where someone can go back and insert themselves into the echos of the past. In this case, right before a train is supposed to explode in order to find out who is blowing up the train. Jake finds himself going back and re-living the 8 minutes over and over until he can put together the clues he needs to find out who the guilty party is. This film is basically the action equivalent of the classic Groundhog Day. And it is pretty successful at fulfilling its premise.
As I already stated, I loved Duncan Jones' previous film Moon and while Source Code isn't as good, it still is pretty strong and solidly directed. When a film's gimmick is that it repeats itself over and over, it can be a challenge to keep that fresh. See the crappy Vantage Point for how not do tell that story. Duncan Jones does a great job at keeping us tied into the story. Visually, it is pretty standard fare for an action movie, which I guess is a good thing because he doesn't get in the way of the story, but there was never a shot that blew me away. Although, Chicago has never looked so bright and shiny.
The supporting performances were good, especially Jeffrey Wright. He added a mad scientist intensity to his role that wasn't over the top as it could have been. Vera Farmiga is once again fine and Michelle Monaghan is solid. My only problem was with Gyllenhaal. He was serviceable but I never get the feeling that he has the gravitas of someone like a DiCaprio, a Pitt or a Clooney to be able to sell a role of this type. If you would have plugged John Cusack in this role he would have made it more interesting.
Overall, I thought Source Code was solidly entertaining. Many have spoken about the confusing ending. It was a bit different than the ending of the script but I didn't find it confusing whatsoever. I credit this to my understanding of the Quantum Multiverse, which I learned about thanks to the classic Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Parallels. If you watch that episode, the whole ending makes sense.
Source Code is a solid A-. You should check it out today.
Les
Here is the trailer:
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Rachel Maddow - What Kind of Conservative are You?
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Monday, March 28, 2011
Movie Review: Mildred Pierce 1945
Mildred Pierce
1945
Starring: Joan Crawford, Jack Carson, Zachary Scott, Eve Arden, Anny Blyth, Bruce Bennett, George Tobias, Lee Patrick, Moroni Olsen, Jo Ann Marlow and Barbara Brown
Written by: Ranald MacDougall. Based on the novel by James M. Cain
Directed by: Michael Curtiz
The first thing I noticed about one of the great film-noirs in American Cinema is that it's kind of light on the film noir part. The film-noir in the film seems to be only part of the framing device. I've never read the novel so I don't know if that same device was used there.
I've been wanting to see Mildred Pierce for years and like many aspiring cinefiles there are holes in your viewing because, let's face it, it's hard to see all the great films. Especially since the advent of Skinamax. It's kind of hard to believe that I've never actually seen The Deer Hunter, but I have seen The Dean Humper somewhat by accident, I swear. Because TCM runs this film all the time I would put it off because it's sure to appear again in another month or so. When I heard that HBO was going to to a mini-series based on the book I decided that I really needed to sit down and watch this film.
Mildred Pierce is about a hardworking woman whose husband is having an affair. She's had enough and decides that she wants a divorce. He leaves and she's forced to raise her two daughters, Vida and Kay, by herself. Vida, the eldest, is spoiled and embarrassed by her place in the world, and her mother tries to give her only the best. The youngest, Kay, is a tomboy who Mildred is trying to reform of her tomboy ways with ballet lessons and such. Mildred bakes pies and cakes to sell to the neighbors to make extra money to afford the piano lessons and ballet classes. Like many parents, Mildred wants to give her children everything she never had.
After struggling to find a job she finally gets one waitressing and being smart and resourceful, works hard until she's the best waitress and knows the restaurant business inside and out. Soon she takes whatever savings she has, and along with the help of a lazy millionaire, opens her own restaurant. It is a wild success and within a few years she has franchised Mildred's around the Los Angeles area and now has four locations. She is a huge success but she still cannot get the respect of her daughter. Throughout the film that is the only thing she really wants.
The film opens with the murder of a dapper man at a Malibu beach house and then is told in flashback as Mildred recounts the story to the police. The film almost feels like it comes from two different genres. film-noir in the framing and a Douglas Sirk melodrama in the flashbacks. This is not a dig because I think the film does a great job of balancing both.
The film is directed by Michael Curtiz. He does a fine job going between the two genres and the film-noir section of the film looks fantastic. Curtiz is one of those directors who made a number of great films that include The Adventures of Robin Hood, Yankee Doodle Dandy and Casablanca among others. Curtiz directed his fair share of classics but he isn't the legend of a Billy Wilder, Frank Capra or William Wyler. It seems to me that he's the victim of the Auteur Theory, as defined by François Truffaut. His direction is functional and competent but you can never see his fingerprint like you can Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford.
The performances are solid as reflected in the number of Acadamy Award nominations. Both Eve Arden and Ann Blyth were nominated for Best Supporting Actress with Joan Collins taking home the Best Actress statue.
Another thing I noticed about Mildred Pierce that we don't see enough of today: strong female characters. Sure, there are exceptions to the rule (most recent Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine) but for every Blue Valentine or The Kids Are All Right we get a dozen daffy Katherine Heigel movies about career women who usually work at fashion magazines and can't find the validation of a hot man. In Mildred Pierce and many film from the era, women were either on level playing fields with men or were far superior to them. It's the latter in this film. The men in Mildred Pierce are either conniving, lazy or buffoonish horn-dogs. I wonder if this has to do with women's place in the world of the 40s was mostly subservient to men. Now that things are leveling out, and based on the numbers of women in college versus men, women are sure to pass men in the future workforce, I wonder if the movies of the future will reflect this. In fifty years is some daring filmmaker going to show us his holographic take on Cain's novel in Melvin Pierce?
There's a reason Mildred Pierce is considered a classic, because it's an A.
Les
Here's the trailer:
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Movie Review: Let Me In
Let Me In
2010
Starring - Kodi Smit-McPhee, Chloe Moretz, Richard Jenkins and Cara Buono
Written by - Matt Reeves, Based on Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist
Directed by - Matt Reeves
After I watched Let the Right One In, the Swedish film and novel Let Me In is based on, I told everyone who would listen to check it out. I thought it was one of the best horror films I had seen in a long, long time and while I'm not exactly a fan of the genre, I thought the Swedish film was brilliant. I'm happy to say that Matt Reeves, the director of Let Me In, faithfully stuck to the original film.
Let Me In is about a young man named Owen whose parents are divorcing and is also the target of the bullies of the school. Set in Los Alomas, New Mexico in the winter, Owen spends his nights sitting in the middle of the courtyard of the low-income housing his mother now lives in, post break-up. Owen gets a new neighbor, an older man of about sixty played by Richard Jenkins and what appears to be his 12 year old daughter Abby, played by Chloe Moretz. Abby comes and hangs out in the courtyard with Owen. They bond over the Rubik's cube and soon are friends. She gives him advice about the bullies and he writes down Morse Code so they can communicate by tapping on the wall their bedrooms share. Her "dad" spends his nights trying to get nourishment for Abby. He does this by killing people and then draining their blood into a bottle for her to drink. It's been decided long ago that this is the easier than having Abby go out and kill and then they still have to get rid of the body, it's a simple solution. After the dad flubs a murder and is caught, Abby finds herself alone and her relationship with Owen starts to flower.
The great thing about the story is that while it is a vampire story with horror overtones, at it's core it's more about the struggles of adolescence and a metaphor for the struggles of love. It really is a story about the love between a immortal 12 year old vampire and Owen and that's where its beauty lies.
In watching the special features on the DVD I am kind of taken aback by the focus of the people behind the film and how they discuss the book being the inspiration for doing the movie. That may be so but the film was very similar, even to the shot, of the Swedish version. As much as I liked the American version, I basically had the feeling that they were just redoing the Swedish version because Americans don't like subtitles. Either the source material of the novel was so well drawn that two different directors in two different parts of the globe where inspired to pick the same shots. Sure, there are differences, but not that many.
The pacing and the atmosphere are exactly the same as the Swedish version and I probably shouldn't have watched the special features and their discussion about how this is their adaptation of the book. Like they never saw the film. I would have been nicer to Mr. Reeves in this review if I hadn't seen the special features and the original film. If I was going in cold this film might have made my top ten for 2010. I enjoyed Cloverfield, so Mr. Reeves has got that going for him, and it's nice.
The performances are strong. Kodi Smit-McPhee does a great job as Owen and Chloe Moretz does another great job. I first saw her in The 500 Days of Summer and then Kick-Ass and she's always been the strongest in each of those films.
I thought Let Me In was solid and I was going to give it a stronger grade until I saw the special features on the DVD. I think it is a B. Let the Right One In, on the other hand, is a solid A. If you have the choice and can read, I would watch the Swedish version first. I think you can still stream it on Netflix.
Les
Here is the trailer:
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