The Bull Goose Looney

Where's Richard Donner when a kid from the 80s needs him?

noreply@blogger.com (Kizzle) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 23:54:00 +0000

One would think that the ability to have one actor play twins would have improved with technology. But Freddie Highmore seems pretty much incapable of playing anything believably, with or without technology. Where'd the boy from Finding Neverland go? Slap an American accent on a kid and boom, he's washed up. Sad really.

Seriously, I have to stop seeing these kind of movies. Most who know me know I have a weakness for kids movies of the sort that offer some adventurous plot, with the preteen outsiders being the only ones who can understand what's really going on (until the inevitable denouement where the adults can no longer deny the truth). I pine away hoping for a new Goonies, Explorers, D.A.R.Y.L., or Flight of the Navigator. While The Last Mimzy came pretty damn close to that implacable magic from the 1980s, most of the modern CGI-laden backpack sellers are way off the mark. Spiderwick Chronicles seems to be no exception. These movie-makers don't even know how to pace or get good performances, let alone get an audience to buy in to the fantasy adventure.

Even in the 21st century, people like Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro have set the bar pretty high. But movies like this or say, Stardust, don't even seem to be trying.

Rampage: The Movie

noreply@blogger.com (Kizzle) — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 02:54:00 +0000

I just got through this thing and I'm reeling like a roller coaster ride just blasted my skin off over the course of an hour. It's fitting because this ain't really a movie, it really is more like a glorified Star Tours (just like Lost?). No real beginning, no end, just steep terrifying drops. The way he pulls a story line that's relatively tradish in monster flicks is suprising, intelligent, and suprisingly intelligent.

They go to great lengths to match The Blair Witch Project's docu-realism, and though we've all had enough of it this decade, I can still be down. But while I can get over the fact that there's a monster tearing apart New York, it's really all the little unrealistic things that bug me. The running for hours in high heels the quick recoveries from injury and mourning, the convenient "plot" moves. But I'm all like "fine" because I can't wait for them to never stop tearing down the biggest sandcastle in the country just like I saw on TV in 2001. Should we feel a little violated that JJ Abrams squeezes lemon juice on our American scab for no good reason? Maybe so, but I can't help feeling like Cloverfield is still a thriller like they used ta make 'em.

Oh and if you're gonna see it, see it in a movie theater.

The Ten (Divided by The Two)

noreply@blogger.com (Kizzle) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 01:56:00 +0000

So 2007 has come and gone and nothing has floored me. I have a few left to catch, and maybe I truly just don't make the effort to find the many brilliant underdistributed foreign films that are always the unsung heroes. But I saw a lot of movies this year, and I only have one 5 star movie to show for it: David Wain's The Ten. Most people haven't heard of it.

I haven't seen anything ultra-pertinent since There Will be Bloodsport, but Netflix has just released The Ten through their Watch Instantly feature, and since it was a predictable bomb in the theater, I figured I'd commemorate the occasion with a nod.

It's Paul Rudd hosting 10 skits by my generation's comedic geniuses who refuse to let the Kentucky Fried Movie audience down. Are there hits and misses here? Yes, but the hits are some serious hits. It takes a special someone to like this movie. Did you like Wet Hot American Summer? Did you watch MTV's The State? Did you like Mr. Show? Did you like Stella? Do you like palpability of discomfort in the theater or your living room (vis. Curb Your Enthusiasm, Freaks and Geeks, BBC's The Office)? If the majority of your answers were yes, catch The Ten while you're waiting for the promised The State DVD collection.

Daniel Day-Lewis does Mr. Smith

noreply@blogger.com (Kizzle) — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 04:51:00 +0000

Robert has said that my commentaries have been too one-sided. My defense was that I try to limit what I write to only what might be original thoughts. I'm not a reviewer. But I'll start by saying that Daniel Day is definitely fantastic. He's the slickest chameleon out there - I've always said so, incidentally. Paul Dano sucked, but let's keep this positive. The production work is roundly great, and as a work, it's more than well-realized. But one thing is for sure: Upton Sinclair would have hated this.

That's not necessarily the film's sentencing since, after all, PTA has said that it's not an adaptation. Then again, the fact that narrative has strayed so far from works like those of Mr. Sinclair might give us pause. Leaving out the studios for a moment, why does a screenwriter and director make a movie like this, and why do we as an audience enjoy it? Like The Aviator, There Will Be Blood is about a tough-as-nails robber-baron who stops at nothing to demolish his enemies and achieve success of American mythic proportions. But respected filmmakers can't get away with transparent bourgeois propaganda, not that I think they would ever consciously intend to. So we get the inevitable moral ambiguities and ultimately even condemnation of the central character - by the end of the film, we hate Plainview for his cruelty. In other words, we're not permitted to identify.

But here's the thing. Despite all that, can't we still see a kind of reverence for Plainview, for Howard Hughes, for William Randolph Hearst? A sense that now there's a real man! That's the part of these movies that makes me a little ill: the capitalist master as anti-hero. In the case of both The Aviator and this movie, the introspective is at the expense of even the briefest glimpse of class struggle. So despite the films internal strengths, for which there are many, for me it fails the test of greatness for everything it chooses not to see.

How many soundtracks will this film sell?

noreply@blogger.com (Kizzle) — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 23:47:00 +0000

Hitting the ground running, Juno, seems a dark yet screwball comedy. With the sort of ambiguous humor and extra-teen sensibility of Election or Ghost World. There's some uneasiness to confronting something like teen pregnancy with the callous laugh and a shrug the writing seems to call for. The script could easily slide by as jaded and/or irresponsible. Much like the main character.

Instead what happens is a kind of unraveling: Juno, expertly played by this new Ellen Page person, is continuously forced to take her situation more and more seriously. To match this development, the whole tone of the movie sheds its surreality, and suddenly we're not laughing from the outside at a farce. By unorthodox means we've come to care deeply about the characters and the world they inhabit.

Many movies try to snatch a serious message from the jaws of comedy. Few can do it without tacking it on or oblivious melodrama. Juno does it with care and grace. And from today's all-stars of comedy, who woulda thunk it?

The Fresh Prince of Legend

noreply@blogger.com (Kizzle) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 04:53:00 +0000

I left the theater with three letters in my head: W-T-F.

Here's the new idea to solve the third act dilemma: Don't have one. Just as the plot got problematized the movie was wrapped and handed to you like a Christmas gift as thoughtless as it was last-minute. Will Smith never uttered any catch phrases such as "don't make me put my foot up yo' zombie ass!" so I was wrong about that, and some credit is due, but in the instances where he doesn't get the luxury of having no other actors present (he is, after all, the last man on earth), his middle-aged pleas to be taken seriously are pretty pathetic. Let's see what else sucked...oh yeah, how about the cookie-cutter Gumby-looking zombie cartoons who all looked 100% identical? I know what happened, something like this. Director: "Well, I'm two thirds done, fellas. Now I need just $70M to do the last bit." Producers: "Are you kidding, that money is all gone. We used it in our hemmorage-assests-into-billboard-splashes-to-saturate-lowest-possible-
denominator-public-consciousness campaign!" Writers: "Well what little integrity we may have once had is long gone, so we could finish it up right now by shitting all over the original novel's intricate twist finale, which was way too much of a frown fest anyway. In the post-post 9/11 cinema, we need let America smile again, right? We'll have the rewrites for you in the morning."

Even brown-bagging this movie, I came out sober. And I resent that.

...

In the TV Realm, I'm deep into Heroes: Season 1. My first thought was "stooooopid" after I'd gotten through the first episode. We decided to give it a couple more and now I'm hooked. Good lord the writing/directing is bad, it's politically vapid, and totally escapist, but sucks, it's neat, and TV like this is a better alternative than opium, right?

My theory goes like this: some comic fans were so let down by the third X-Men movie that they decided to just reimagine the X-Men (yet again), therby keeping Bryan Singer's dream of X-perfection alive. I mean, it's hardly even concealed: Wolverine, Rogue, Sabertooth, Prof. X, the boy who cancels the mutant gene, The Human Torch and Invisible Woman (oops), Kitty Pride/Shadowcat, plus a few other bonuses from Back to the Future and The Incredibles - they're all there in different forms. Season 1 reads like an extended narrative of the first X-Men film's opening 30 minutes. It's just as dumb as Lost (and it has to be the same producers, right??? I mean the non-credits opening splash gimmick...), but it doesn't take itself quite so seriously, and we don't have to deal with the onion-peeling narration that never ends. In Heroes answers come quick. The question is: will they be able to keep it interesting after the first arc? I doubt it, but here's to the ride.

The Denzel you know is at least as bad as the Denzel you don't.

noreply@blogger.com (Kizzle) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 00:08:00 +0000

I suppose that's a few too few posts and a few to many years to even call this a revival. But here goes.

What kind of deal with the devil did Denzel Washington make in order to get the rights to play every famous black man in history?

Shall we verify this?

Steve Biko
Malcolm X
The Hurricane
Mel Tolson (coming soon)

and here, the infamous Frank Lucas, who had the dubious honor of being the first American black man to rise to the level of the Cosa Nostra.

I swear to dog if I hear the words "based on a true story..." and "starring Denzel Washington" in the same trailer again, it will be reason enough to never see another one of his movies again. Don't get me wrong, he's pretty good (not great), but I can't help hating him, since he falls into that ever expanding sphere of actors who whose narcissism infects their entire performance, home to such critical darlings as Pierce Brosnan, George Clooney, and as luck would have it Russel Crowe.

So yeah I'm stuck with the latter and big D for this ridiculously overlong death rattle from the once-great Ridley Scott. The movie goes several different directions in the first act, and confuses the audience by leaving all kinds of loose threads, but it's not even good enough to care much. We get the exceedingly tiresome Russel Crowe droopy-dog-eyed-I'm-just-a-big-lovably-lumbering-benevolent-man routine beside the main character who's about as one-dimensional as they come. Ooh wow, how ruthless! As an audience we can't help coming away with nothing except that lingering feeling of: gee whiz the 1970s really did blow, no pun intended.

If you're a fan of HBO, this is like The Wire lite, a show that not only tops this film weekly, but also could have lent even more talented black actors to play the lead roles instead of merely the sacrificial pimp.

...

Elsewhere I am destined for a late showing of I, Legend, err, I am Robot, or whatever it's called, this weekend. I heard it's not a zombie movie, but a zombie-vampires movie. Maybe there's hope after all, but how can Will Smith not ruin it? If you were wondering, yes, I do consider him in the above category as well. Squarely.

Via Sam I have just heard that we can expect a Ghostbusters 3, with the entire original cast and helmed by the original director, Ivan Reitman. Not enough to excite you? Ghostbusters 3 is a video game!

On the 'Flix front: thumbs down for:

The Island (I'm starting to feel sorry for Sean Bean, whose talent now seems to always be wasted.)
The Da Vinci Code

Thumbs up for:

The Lives of Others
Transformers (Michael Bay straddles the fence today, this shit was awesome.)
The Last Mimzy (We are closer to the spirit of the 80s kids films, but not there yet)

The Gun of Rambo: The Hopeless Film for our Terminal Phase of Terrestrial Life

noreply@blogger.com (Kizzle) — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 04:38:00 +0000

When my buddy first handed me a DVD copy of this movie, I was already trying to map out how I was going to have to pretend I liked it just to be polite and not snobby. Half an hour into the movie, my suspicions of crappiness were confirmed, as it seemed like I was watching a badly written, badly acted movie that was making the sale of munitions look, well, kinda sexy. The offensivest of the offensive. I was, at this time, enjoying my moments with Ethan Hawke - who I still think should have been cast lead - but that was about all the enjoyment there was, I felt I was near stopping the movie midway through to watch an episode of The Prisoner from my new complete box set (thanks Marshall!).

Fortunately, the film kept me just barely interested enough to keep going, and then - bait and switch! It wasn't what we'd thought. The film, underneath some dark (very dark) comedy (very comedic) moments, started to exude a sense of deep sorrow. By the end, this is overt, and Cage, lo and behold, is not the hero, in what turns out to be a scathing and impressively thorough examination of the arms trade. Though it sometimes hits us over the head, the politics are, at worst, sound, and the whole Goodfellas-esque set-up at the beginning was an intentional test. It sets up certain expectations that somehow force us to look frankly at real world issues, because we weren't expecting them.

And here I was thinking Nicholas Cage (excepting certain Spike Jonze forays) demanded that a movie not be intelligent before signing the contract!

In any case, the acting is bad, and the writing is, let's say, mediocre. Worse still, the movie is as close to anti-hope as you can get. But what can you expect in 2006 right? When you really think about it, there are probably only a few organisms that have much chance of being able to survive on the earth in 200 years, and we should be trying to expand that number rather than trying to save ourselves, a hopeless goal at this point. In it's own way, Lord of War reminds us of this. So I guess what I'm saying is it's a great date movie to cuddle up to on Valentine's Day, with some cocoa and some nice warm Ugg boots on your feet.

...it was like the sky was the limit!

noreply@blogger.com (Kizzle) — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 19:36:00 +0000

It's IFCs labor of love: three hours just to talk about the 1970s and its films. Extrememly Special Interest no doubt. If I had to hear another interviewee say "all of a sudden we could do anything" or "there was no limit to what we could do anymore" or some other such quote I would have turned the DVD played off right in the middle of another close up on Bruce Dern's face (star of such greats as The Burbs and apparently one hundred other movies in the seventies I've never seen).

I made notes to see MASH, The King of Marvin Gardens, Last Detail (and all Hal Ashby), and Roger Corman movies. My question is why directors were so obsessed in the 70s with two-lane asphalt who-knows-where America. That stuff bores the crap out of me. Then I started to think just how many movies in this decade fall victim to this weird obsession. Easy Rider, Fat City, Scarecrow, Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, Five Easy Peices, Deliverence, all those Westerns! The list goes on and on. I mean those are good movies, but I don't care who you are, you have to be able to endure some intense boredom to enjoy them. Maybe that's the nineties talking, but I don't feel the struggle with the American Dream so much. Did it take these movies to allows us to live in the ruins?

I conclude that everyone interviewed is pretty smart and worth listening to (except Bogdanovich - I mean seriously who is that guy kidding?!), but especially so with Altman and Lumet. Those guys are giants. Coppola is pretty excellent as well, like how he ADMITS he hasn't made a good movie since The Conversation(!). Did I hear him right?

Nine one-liners for December/January Movies

noreply@blogger.com (Kizzle) — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 04:05:00 +0000

Days of Heaven - Malick takes a simple tragedy and undermines the story in favor of outstanding atmosphere through silence and a non-beginning non-ending series of innumerable shots.

Brokeback Mountain - Huzzah for enriching our definitions of human relationships and when people are walking out of the theater you know that shit is tight.

Forty Year Old Virgin - I think half this movie is improvised - by sleeper comics who do it better than any.

Melinda and Melinda - Will Farrell as Woody Allen is friggin' hilarious, but I start to wonder if Woody is contantly asking all his male actors to get a little woodier with it.

The Return - Incredible performances with haunting moments, but the pacing was a little sluggish.

Match Point - Not bad, but Woody often drags in non-comedies, and this is not exception, especially when he can't get away from the countless and mundane bourgeioise

Happy Endings - The "smart" movie of the 2000's: eschewed plot and the characters are supposed to have enough depth to carry us along for over an hour and a half ie. the inverse of Harry Potter "films."

Fitzcarraldo - Epic, hilarious, and somehow feeling like it's all teetering on disaster - I'm sensing a theme in Herzog.

King Kong - Stupider and stupider the more I think about it, but Andy Sirkus' death still burns my eyes and the scenes of Kong sliding on ice and killing stuff are almost redeeming - make me an editor!

...and Treadwell is gone...

noreply@blogger.com (Kizzle) — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 16:28:00 +0000

I can't imagine how it could be beaten at the Oscars. As with Capturng the Friedmans, Werner Herzog's documentary relies heavily on the footage shot by the film's subject, and one thread of the film is that its subject becomes Timothy Treadwell the filmmaker, and eschews Treadwell the grizzly guardian/martyr. An interesting one, but only one of the documentary's several ideas that Herzog compelling develops. But the one I've found to be the biggest wealth of continually analyzable moments is the theme of love and disconnect. To add a few humble if not paltry remarks to Herzog's reading:

Treadwell, in several places, refers to his problems with women, but never specifies what exactly those problems are. Herzog does not comment directly on this, but he leaves us several clues, intentionally or not. Exhibit 1. The narrative builds towards an argument that Treadwell's "work" was a personal retreat from civilized life, which he feared. In contrast to what he may have viewed as a chaotic and unkind world (Treadwell makes understandably athiestic comments), the Grizzly "sanctuary" is some kind of immaculate realm where things make sense, and where Treadwell literally speaks to God at one point. Exhibit 2. Herzog shows us three women who had very close, if not intimate, relationships with Treadwell. Clearly, all the evidence points to the fact that these ladies were totally in love with him. One even stood by him to her own death.

And my still subconsciously sexist mind thought "Oh! So it wasn't the women who were the problem." Even though Timothy himself makes as much seem the case, I inferred that the real problem was that somewhere along the way Treadwell lost the ability to make any meaningful connection with other human beings, let alone a romantic partner. Thus his problems with women stemmed from his own inability to love. Meanwhile he professes his love for bears and foxes to an almost psychotic degree. It certainly would fit with Herzog's own conclusion. And if this supposition is right, it enriches our understanding of what then almost looks like Treadwell's ideal form of suicide. The ultimate martyrdom for the grizzlies is to turn oneself into food and thereby one hopes, extend their life. In any case, it makes even more sense to me that Anne would have hated and feared the bears.

So that's one thought, but I think there are several areas where the audience can draw new insights, something rarer for documentaries. That's what puts Grizzly Man in the category of greatness.

The Chronic WHAT?! ...cles of Narnia

noreply@blogger.com (Kizzle) — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 04:55:00 +0000

Bottom line/s on Narnia.

It is not as bad as most (of my) people say it is. People expecting the next LOTR are deluded.

I could watch talking animals for fucking hours.

The book wasn't that good anyway.

And check this!

The Second Most Important Trilogy of the 1980s pt. I

noreply@blogger.com (Kizzle) — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 02:31:00 +0000

So with my fifty dollar gift card to Barnes and Nobles(s) I got for Christmas I went straight to the DVDs and settled on a severely underrated box set. The Karate Kid Quadrilogy (K to the eighth). These movies are mildly remarkable for several reasons. Most importantly, unlike most eighties flicks centering on underdog adolescents - or adolescents period - it manages to hold up two decades or so later. For anyone who has indulged their nostalgia and mined the video rental store (or the 'Flix) for various remembered gems from the eighties, chances are they've been let down repeatedly. Not so with this movie, so 1. Karate Kid I (and arguably II) is improbably a solid movie by twenty-first century standards.

Without going into much explanation, the following further remarks:

2. Daniel-san gets his ass KICKED a lot. And I mean A LOT...just pummulled. The resilience of this guy through three films that all take place within 365 days is mesmerizing - yet not unrealistic - in a way that is difficult to describe.

3. The movie has subtle, albeit undeveloped, sentiments of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism. As I type that I realize that that is a huge stretch, so let me qualify that by saying not really. The first movie is anti-rich, but there's nothing special about that I know. In KKII however I am interested in the constant reminders of the US military presence in Okinawa, and its disruption of the "town that time forgot." Also notable is Sato's emergence as a neo-feudal capitalist overlord who in part represents a permeation of gloabalization, eg. selling off parts of an ancient castle and eliminating the ancient economic and cultural glue of the town - the small time fishing and cannery industry. Etcetera etcetera. My already weak argument falls the hell apart with the ending when Sato becomes the reahbilitated philanthropist.

4. Quotability. As juvenile as that is, any line from Johnny and his punks, Mr. Miyagi, Sato and others = instant laughs.

This time around I also noticed the theme of fatherhood throughout both films. Some of that is obvious, but the parallels between Johnny's relationship with his sensei and Daniel's with his are not - at least they weren't to me. The theme continues in KKII when Miyagi loses his own father. Sato's nephew and Daniel proceed to get caught up in the complex feud between their respective father figures.

Unfortunately I think this theme breaks down when we get to the third film. We'll see.