‘Aeon Flux’ is not as much fun as it should be. The action sequences are OK, but it takes itself far too seriously, and I’m getting tired of these “dangers of cloning” movies. ‘The Island’ was bad enough, but this one also tries to sell the joys of nature, in all its wildness and unpredictability. It ends with the leads turning their backs on eternal life and heading out into the forbidden forest to live “only once, but for real.” Didn’t these people watch the Harry Potter movies? Anyway, this movie is a waste of CGI and real actors. Frances McDormand has a thankless part. And Pete Postlethwaite has an absolutely horrible cameo. He must be desperate for ‘Usual Suspects II.’
The preview for ‘Underworld II: The Evolution’ on the other hand, looks super. Kate Beckinsale wears skin-tight leather far better than Charlize Theron. And Derek Jacobi is in it. ‘I, Claudius II’ must also be in production.
i’m so glad i don’t have to start a new topic for the fantastic four. watched it last night, and it is terrible. not quite catwoman terrible, but pretty bad. joan griffith, or whatever his name is, should stick to glowering at people from under helmet and armour. however, he was not as bad as the guy playing the human torch (who, like poochy the dog, was hip, edgy and totally in my face). on the other hand, jessica alba as a genetic scientist, or something like that, is completely believable (though i was not clear on why she spends all her time after their irradiation moaning about joan not paying attention to her, rather than examining their dna etc.). i’m not sure, but it is possible this movie was trying to be campy. however, the amount of money spent on completely unnecessary explosions and crashes is depressing (john sayles could probably have made another 5 movies just on that budget alone); as is the thought that the ending suggests that someone clearly thought that there was a sequel to be made. i don’t know what the box-office was but i hope i will be spared.
the film does raise one important question though: how does a blind woman do her eyebrows and makeup so perfectly?
I recall it made enough money and had a big opening weekend so I’m pretty certain there will be sequal. I also remember critics responding to the camp element. I’m throwing this disc into the machine tonight and can’t guarantee I will finish the movie, but I do recall critical response praising the film’s cartoony simplicity (i.e. it didn’t feel the need to address the world”s woes as much as it wanted to kick a little ass). More tomorrow.
Sequel’s greenlit w/ the same writer/director. So it made money and he’s getting another go.
If it kicked a little ass, maybe it could escape addressing the world’s woes. But little ass was kicked.
just watched the island. apparently in the future there will be amazing advances–flying buses, hover-trains, jet buses–but people will still drink budweiser. on the plus side, there will be two scarlett johannsens (and two ewan mcgregors, if you prefer).
Just saw a “tricky” thriller called 11:14, with a somewhat-indie cast (Hilary Swank, Henry Thomas, that kid from Roger Dodger), a somewhat b-list cast (Patrick Swayze, Colin Hanks), and the harder-to-categorize (Barbara Hershey). It’s entertaining enough.
The trickiness is the narrative conceit: all of 5 separate plots hinge on the eponymous time, with events only cohering or connecting over the course of the film. The thing is tightly-written and tightly-shot/edited — it’s got a nice look, it builds suspense well. There’s a very nice example of the director’s good eye later in the film: we get a handheld p.o.v. from the back of a police-car, as a cop outside (the very fine Clark Gregg) examines a female hit-and-run victim before coming across a severed penis off to the side. The shot shows off the director’s attention to composition, his ability to build a surprising scene, and his facility with actors–it is a fantastic double-take, equal parts terror and confusion.
But the film itself doesn’t add up to much. Its technical bravura is undone by the thinness of dialogue; he captures the rhythms of small-town often low-life chatter, he gets the collisions of mordant absurdity with violence, but unlike Tarantino or the grand Elmore Leonard, the rhythms and tone are all he captures–there’s not much oomph to the chatter (it’s almost instantly forgettable), so it plays like an actor’s exercise as well. Just a quick recollection of Jackie Brown makes this film fade very quickly from memory. But it did hold my attention, and I bet a buck it’s better than The Island.
The Island . . . twenty minutes too long but not so bad. Fantastic Four . . . did I see this movie . . . yes I did, yet I have no recollection of it whatsover. Roll Bounce is a sweet, nostalgia trip into the wonderful world of middle-class African-Americans who like to roller skate.
the island is actually about 2 hours and 16 minutes too long. 2 hours and 25 if you include the time it took me to place it in my netflix queue, fetch it from the mailbox, place it in the player, and then deposit it again in the mailbox.
courtesy hbo ondemand, i recently watched in good company. contrary to things you might hear from the other member of this household this choice had nothing to do with scarlett johannson’s presence in the film (though i do have a completely non-creepy, platonic regard for her abilities); rather, it was driven by my interest in films in which malcolm mcdowell plays a small role.
anyway.
this film is by one of those weitz brothers (and their buddy miguel arteta pops up in a cameo). i seem to remember this being marketed as a goofy comedy, but that’s not what it is. it is an engaging enough film with unpredictable rhythms and characterizations (though the last 15 minutes have “hollywood ending” written all over them). dennis quaid plays dennis quaid (not clear where his new york salesman got that deep california tan), topher grace is quite good, as is scarlett johannson; selma blair and john cho are wasted. some of the bigger small roles (david paymer) are better than others (the sleazy vp type).
small charms aside, the film’s narrative of masculinity in crisis is as nostalgic as its critique of contemporary mega-capitalism. the old ways of doing things as well as the old(er) fathers must be reinstated in their proper places, and women have little to do other than have babies and be scarlett johannson (not that there’s anything wrong with having babies or being scarlett johannson). the film does have a decent soundtrack but there’s too much of it–the david byrne song that opens the film does, however, set the mood and tone perfectly.
Well….I said this a while back–I agree with everything you say, having mostly enjoyed the film, despite its nostalgia and its ending:
““In Good Company†was a fine exemplum of the contradictory embodiment of ideology in popular film. Even as they satirize “synergy,†the characters drink absurdly large cans of Diet Pepsi; the critique of globalization and the conglomeration of industry stems from a nostalgia for the good old days when old white guys shook hands in back rooms. And Topher Grace is a hottie. He reminds me of John Bruns, if John were taller and more anorexic.”
whoops–don’t know how i missed your post, given how i usually memorize all things mike. will move these comments over in a bit.
I thought In Good Company was soft and paunchy veering into the ridiculous. Reynolds is smarter than the movie as is his pithy commentary.
But The Island. This was perhaps the most entertaining Michael Bay movie I’ve ever seen (faint, faint praise indeed). I liked the look of it and there were some very fun set pieces and I like the idea of these adult bodies being inhabited by three and four-year-old minds (and Johannson and McGregor pulled that innocence off pretty well). And Scarlet has never looked so good on screen (at least to me). But I would say I liked this film more than most because I filtered it through my reading (this past summer) of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which was one of my favorite novels of the year. Imagine reconfiguring the central ideas of The Island through a Victorian lens (Henry James, for example) and you get a sense of Ishiguro’s haunting and extrememly frightening novel of science gone awry.
Bad News Bears. Why’d I bother? Why’d they? It isn’t terrible, but it mostly reminds you how wonderful the first one was. (The best parts of this one are the kid Tanner, yet they hire an almost-lookalike to the ’70s predecessor and then steal most of the best bits from that version, too.) It also is sending me back to Bad Santa, which is perfection. ‘Tis the season.
Very quickly: I loved Bad Santa, but was (initially) disappointed with the ending. I came around a bit after talkoiong about the film with my students. I had watched it around the time that we were reading a portion of Robert B. Ray’s A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema. I suggested that we try to apply Ray’s argument to Bad Santa, and it worked surprisingly well. Willie is the Classic outlaw hero. He’s the interest center of the film, and he consistently overshadows the moral center (The Kid). It’s the job of the film to displace the audience’s need for choosing between one set of values (outlaw) over another (official)–a need that the film (paradoxically) creates. At the end of the film, Willie does the right thing–he moves, as Ray would put it, “from moral detachment to physical involvement.” He chooses to marry (or settle down in some capacity), and so avoids (as do we) the final choice between the two sets of vaules.
A pretty good lesson on schematics.
I liked your reading of Santa.
I did not like–not one whit,not even for the occasional stray glimpse of a beautiful image–Gilliam’s Brothers Grimm. Honestly, avoid this one entirely; it is without redeeming features, even for the Gilliam fanatics (like myself).
yes, we watched it last night. it is better than van helsing but just barely. there is some fun visual stuff but the film is pretty much summed up in the first few lines of the commentary (of which i listened to three minutes) in which gilliam says that when the script came to him he didn’t like it but was out of work. matt damon is particularly horrible; ledger is fine. jonathon pryce has one brief funny scene in which he attempts to eat german cuisine but this is followed by many, many unfunny scenes.
still better than magnolia though.
brothers grimm better than van helsing?? van helsing at least has a wacky frankenstein and kate beckinsale. the brothers grimm felt like it lasted forever and damon, jonathan pryce and the guy who played the assassin should have their SAG cards revoked, though at least the last guy camped it up for fun. and, magnolia, I’m putting at the top of my que–how can one film inspire such different reactions?
The Brothers Grimm is on my worst of the year list. It was just so dull. I tried to watch it but mostly moved in and out of the room until I forwarded my way to freedom.
The Bad News Bears was fun but, yeah, why’d they do it?
well, maybe not. but that gingerbread man sequence was cooler than anything in van helsing. the italian guy was played by peter stormare; i enjoyed his performance, but probably because it reminded me of hanging out with gio. speaking of beckinsale, i am looking forward to the second underworld movie, though i fear that it will not be as much fun without bill nighy as an arch super-vampire.
que?
ahh, it isn’t that bad–i just like to annoy mike and john (and jeff too, i suppose) by constantly making fun of it. i have a theory, however, that your response will be closer to mine.
cue queieu quiieu queueue
Check out Peter Stormare in the otherwise dreadful 13 Moons, with Steve Buscemi–he at least, playing a drunken schizo, makes the movie watchable; he seems to have a tendency to chew the scenery when he knows the movie around him is collapsing.
as for Magnolia, we’ll see. I missed Punch-Drunk Love, fearing its preciousness a bit. but what happened to this guy Paul Thomas Anderson–his career has taken a straight to video path. one year he’s the next Altman, next he’s gone. perhaps being confused with P.T. Anderson, director of the godawful Aliens vs. Predator, destroyed him?
Paul W.S. Anderson, you mean. And what is this straight-to-video path? Is there something he did that I’m not aware of?
Actually, right now he’s working on an adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s Oil, starring Daniel Day Lewis. He’s also helping Robert Altman finish shooting A Prarie Home Companion because, I think, Altman has been ill.
Michael will like Magnolia. He’s one of us. One of us. One of us. Michael, Sarah Silverman said she loves P.T. Anderson. Michael, one of us. One of us.
well, if Sarah likes it, I like it. Magnolia rules!
Wait a minute: Frisoli has never seen Magnolia?!
I think the film is a little easier not to hate (and I absolutely loathe it) on DVD. Anderson’s use of sound as a weapon against his audience is well-known. At its best with Alfred Molina in Boogie Nights. At its worst… Every other Anderson movie – esp. Punch-Drunk Love.
You don’t get that audio pummeling from your TV set the way you do at the Vista or Laemmle.
Also, it’s very easy to take a break from Magnolia on DVD – even watch it over the course of 2 days. And most of the people I know who like it (present company excluded) admit that thats how they saw it, with at least a couple of breaks.
So Michael, try this: Turn up the volume to a reasonable level, and don’t allow yourself to turn it down throughout the film. And watch it straight through like Malcolm McDowell in Clockwork Orange. Have someone come and give you eyedrops every hour. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more trapped in a theater than seeing Magnolia.
i loved magnolia so much. julianne moore. hmmmmm.
more trapped even than, say, Dogville? I’ll prepare myself for the punishment. afterwards I guess I’ll puke everytime I think of an ensemble melodrama with Tom Cruise.
chris, have you got to underworld: evolution yet? the reviews are scathing, yet seem also indifferent to the first film (which i enjoyed) and so i don’t know what to make of them.
I would make of the scathing reviews that its a bad movie.
well, the reviews of the first movie were pretty scathing too–this one’s metacritic average is 37, the first one’s was 42 or something like that). and i enjoyed the first one. so i’m looking for a first-hand review from a fellow connoisseur of trash (which is how i think of chris).
edit: i’ve turned chris’s comment about the movie into its own top-level post. chris, you should edit the title to something better than “hairy, bitey things”.
Frisoli said: “The brothers grimm felt like it lasted forever ”
I found a way around this: I stopped watching after 45 minutes. I had to give it a try just b/c of Gilliam, but it felt like the entire thing was filmed by the second unit director. – well not the whole thing: just the first 45 minutes.
I hope Tideland is good.
On to better Gilliam-related stuff. PBS is running the six 1 hour Best of Python shows starting last night. It’s nice to see the stuff all mixed up, with some of the hollywood Bowl footage in, and some interviews. Terry Jones hasn’t aged. Palin looks 90. But then he’s been around the world 90 times. Idle of course looks like the old woman he used to play.
Watched most of the Graham Chapman epiosde which didn’t really seem to focus on Graham’s best bits. Like the Python book they talked about him being gay and how inappropriate he always acted at every chance. But they seemed to focus so much on his alcoholism that it seemed a litttle cruel. I know that his drinking did affect his ability to write, act and do live shows, but he also was fantastic on Flying Circus, and I really wish they’d focused more on that… Check your local PBS for info – they’re running Wed. nights here in L.A.
Also – Dayna got us tickets to see John Cleese doing his new (first) one man show sometime next month which I’m really looking forward to. Cleese has really been working hard: He’s performed the show in Australia, New Zealand, Santa Barbara, Carmel, Big Sur, Ventura… In other words, Mike Reynolds need not wait in the Minnesota snow for tickets.
What kind of a show is it? I’m curious what Cleese would be up to…
I saw Chapman when he was doing the college circuit in the ’80s, mostly just talking about Python and comedy and rambling for two hours. He was outstanding, and obviously still fond of all of his Python-mates, yet he was often quickly, almost brutally sharp about them, too. I remember him dismissing Brazil as nutty, too much Gilliam, not enough Palin. So I think when people knock his alcoholism they’re fitting into that group’s dynamics: tremendous respect tempered by fairly scathing demands on/of one another. (Except Palin, who seems pleasant and generous about everyone, almost all of the time. Maybe that’s why he looks 90.)
Austalia? New Zealand? Santa Barbara? Carmel? Working hard indeed.
sometimes people are too hard on alcoholism. It’s time to give it a break! without alcoholism, we wouldn’t have W.C. Fields or George Jones.
“What kind of a show is it?”
Will def. post on it afterwards. I’m trying not to know too mcuh about it going in.
Mike – I have Mutual Appreciation. Will send it to you shortly if you’re around.
Yeah! Send it on–was it good? I’ll pass it to Jeff, as well.
I just rewatched Suture, the witty little noir take on film and psychoanalytic theory–I’m teaching it next week, and …. damn, it really holds up. McGehee and Siegel went on to do The Deep End (very good) and Bee Season (beats me, haven’t seen it), but this first flick also deserves more attention. The plot: long-lost almost-identical half-brother Clay arrives in town, visiting his rich cruel possibly-patricidal rich half-brother Vincent. They look so much alike that Vincent sets up Clay, trying to off him to make it look like Vincent is dead. This backfires, Clay survives but with amnesia. So there’s this long cool shtick about identity, and the film riffs (with a plastic surgeon/love interest named Renee Descartes) with great style about how identity, memory, and cinema intersect.
The kicker: the actors playing the brothers look nothing alike, and have different racial make-ups. No one in the film sees a difference, so….
What sounds like grad school shenanigans is, but damn fine shenanigans. If you haven’t seen it, see it.
i’m so glad i don’t have to start a thread for aeon flux. however, i enjoyed it quite a bit for forty five minutes or so, and probably more on the whole than did chris. it was very good when it wasn’t making sense but then became very bad, very fast when it attempted to. one of the things i liked about the animated original (which i didn’t watch all of) is that i never really knew what the hell was going on–and i think this too would have been improved by going for all style and leaving the substance out completely.
i didn’t even realize that fran mcdormand and postlethwaite were in it till i saw the credits. judi dench is going to have her people go over and shoot mcdormand’s dog: those roles are usually reserved for her.
gio, jeff, you’ll be glad to hear though that by watching this film i supported a woman director. the same woman who directed girlfight–is that any good?
Girlfight is a lot better than the mess that is Aeon Flux which I started, grew bored, listened to the commentary track by the writers for a bit and then turned off. Hey what about that female Indian director of Water?