A Gilded Planet

Heavenly Creatures  1994. 109 minutes. New Zealand. Directed by Peter Jackson. I loved nearly every minute of this movie. Kate Winslet is always very good, but in her feature film debut she is beyond efflorescent. Peter Jackson constructed a movie as manic and mad as its subject matter. The movie is based on the true story of two young girls who one day decided to kill. The many scenes of the two girls playing outside are frightening for being simultaneously familiar and completely foreign. I was impressed the scenes where their rich fantasy world came to life because they could have screwed up so easily there. But instead it works seamlessly and ably predicts Jackson's later facility with the fantasy worlds of Middle Earth. Movies about madness tend to work best when they glide between unsettling and hilarious without missing a beat, and this movie does that better than nearly any other of its type. The unstinting look at forbidden sexuality and how it affects consciousness more b...

Institute Benjamenta  or This Dream One Calls Human Life 1995. 104 minutes. UK. Directed by Stephen and Timothy Quay. Watchdate: 10/20/2010. Institute Benjamenta is an exquisitely surreal diversion that reminded me a lot of Guy Maddin's Careful in a very good way. They both have lots of great imagery and are about men training to become servants who get involved in odd, Freudian love triangles.  In Benjamenta , I was especially struck by the bizarre choreography of all the men training to become servants. They move with an eery synchronization, and hit each other with dusty towels and things. I was also surprised and delighted to realize that Herr Benjamenta was played by none other than Gottfried John, who I haven't seen in anything other than the James Bond movie of the same year. In Goldeneye , G-John takes a completely one-dimensional villain character (he's the underwritten part of a nefarious trio that includes Famke Janssen and Sean Bean) and actually made it a bi...

High Fidelity 2000. 113 minutes. USA. Directed by Stephen Frears. Watchdate: 11/5/2010. My umpteenth viewing of John Cusack's last great movie (hopefully not for all time). What can I say, it's a great date movie. Cusack is great, Jack Black and Todd Louiso are revelatory, Tim Robbins' hair is horrifying and hilarious. Great soundtrack, strong structure, enough said. Becket 1964. 150 minutes. UK. Directed by Peter Glenville. Watchdate: 10/25/2010. Nothing more or less than a splendid showcase of the talents of Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton. John Gielgud does great things with his small scene as well. This is definitely an actor's movie, although the occasionally gorgeous production design gets time to shine as well. The scene where Becket becomes chancellor, the scene at the peasant hovel, the scenes in Rome, the beach scene and Becket's death scene were all standouts. Shaun of the Dead 2004. 100 minutes. UK. Directed by Edgar Wright. Watchdate: 10/21/2...

Wolfen 1981. 115 minutes. USA. Directed by Michael Wadleigh. Watchdate: 11/7/2010. Tom Noonan is my new favorite supporting player. After seeing his haunting guest turn as a soothsaying doctor on an episode of Louie and his performance as the looming, suicidal anti-ego of Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Synecdoche, New York , I encountered him as a lonerish animal expert in Wolfen . I will now proceed to start to compulsively watch everything he has been in. Probably. What an awesome guy. Other than Noonan, this movie was pretty uneven. Though it did include one of the more sublimely ridiculous things I've seen in a while: a scene where Edward James Olmos strips naked, runs around like a wolf on a beach at night and then screams "It's all in your mind"at a bewildered Albert Finney. Actually, the movie reminded me a lot of Caroll Ballard's 1983 adaptation of Never Cry Wolf  by Farley Mowat. That's another wolf movie that I have mixed feelings about that features ...

I watched  232 movies in the 365 Days of 2010 . Here's some more: Me and You and Everyone We Know 2005. 91 minutes. USA. Directed by Miranda July. Watchdate: 11/11/2010 I had seen this several times, but some of my friends hadn't and it has been a couple years at least since I last viewed it. I noticed some rather obvious things in the movie that I hadn't before, which I think speaks to the fact that the movie throws a lot at you without you entirely realizing it. I'm also quite in love with this deathless line: "Email wouldn't even exist if it weren't for AIDS." John Hawkes is great and I also enjoy Hector Elias but Brandon Ratcliff still walks away with the movie in his back pocket. I hope Miranda July gets around to making another feature one of these days. Actually I'm looking at IMDB's page for the movie right now and on the Related News sidebar there's a headline that says she's bringing a new movie to Sundance this winter. So, ...

The Knack...and How to Get It 1965. 85 minutes. UK. Directed by Richard Lester. Watchdate: 11/11/2010 It's not often that I've encountered a movie that combines visual and verbal panache so deftly and cohesively. This was Richard Lester's follow up to A Hard Day's Night , and the superb direction he exhibited there was merely a warm up for the tour de force work he delivers here. The Knack  moves so quickly it's sometimes hard to keep up. It's almost painful. Yet I was almost constantly laughing or in awe of the incisive madness of this whirling contraption. It's one of the funniest movies I have ever seen.

The Social Network  2010. USA. Directed by David Fincher. Watchdate: 11/12/2011. The Social Network was very entertaining with a few great moments. The script was terrific, and Fincher's direction was workmanlike if not nearly as inspired as in his early movies. I think he tried to replicate his awesome Fight Club soundtrack trick where he perfectly synced up "Where Is My Mind?" by the Pixies with Tyler Durden exploding the credit industry. But unfortunately, as appropriate as The Beatles' "Baby You're a Rich Man" was to use in this movie, syncing it up with Mark Zuckerberg refreshing his browser somehow didn't come off as quite as dramatically. I guess clicking the keyboard on laptop is never going to be quite as cool as fiery conflagerations. Nothing Fincher could have done about that. I also really enjoy Jesse Eisenberg as an actor. He's not flashy but he really pulls you into the internal conflicts of his characters. A lot has been said about...

Run Lola Run   1998. 80 minutes. Germany. Directed by Tom Tykwer. Watchdate: 11/17/2010. Tom Tykwer seems to be a real maestro at merging form and content. That is to say, he not only successfully matches the story he's telling with a perfect style of telling it but he actually does so in a way that it's hard to tell the difference between the two. I didn't like this quite as much as Perfume , but it was a lot of fun nonetheless - a great cinematic exercise. The bank robbery scene in particular was excellent - bank robberies have been dramatized so many times by now that it's rare to see one crafted in a new way, but he pulled it off with flair. The Mirror   1975. 106 minutes. Russia. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Watchdate: 11/16/2010. Like Stalker , Tarkovsky's The Mirror is somewhat mystifying. With an even more glacial pace, it explores childhood, love and divorce in extremely personal terms. It was difficult for me to watch for various reasons, and I know I...

I watched  232 movies in the 365 Days of 2010 . On November 19th I went to a double feature at the beautiful Stanford Theatre : Mildred Pierce 1945. 111 minutes. USA. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Watchdate: 11/19/2010. So I missed the Pick Up on South Street / Where the Sidewalk Ends  double feature at the Stanford Theatre in October which was unfortunate but luckily I got to make up for it with another pairing of a movie I had heard was a must-watch with an Otto Preminger movie as the second feature. Mildred Pierce  is definitely worth seeing, whether or not you're a big noir fan as I'm fast becoming, because it's a Great Big American Movie that's more fearless than Curtiz's earlier Casablanca  if a bit less polished. The script is almost psychotically ambitious, and its plot holes seem like part of the madness rather than a real flaw. The movie moves really fast, with the dramatic beats dropping furiously in almost every scene. It's like you're watching ent...

I watched  232 movies in the 365 Days of 2010 . Here are more of them: The Simpsons Movie 2007. 87 minutes. USA. Directed by David Silverman. Watchdate: 11/25/2010. Given the legacy that this movie had to live up to, I was quite pleased with what was accomplished. There were actually many inspired moments, outnumbering my minor quibbles here and there by quite a few. A lot of the jokes were not only funny in that they elicited genuine laughter, but when you think back they were quite impressive in their craft. I was really happy with the story, which manages to incorporate all of Springfield as I would've hoped, while still keeping the focus squarely on the Simpson family. And it had the really top notch incisive/subversive satire one hopes to get from the show, but on a larger canvass allowing them to go after government, religion, big business, both sides of the environment issue, and movies themselves. I'd call it a really pleasant and occasionally rapturous viewing experi...

I watched  232 movies in the 365 Days of 2010 . Here are  movies 219-215 that I watched: The Party  1968. 99 minutes. USA. Directed by Blake Edwards. Watchdate: 12/7/2010. Aside from a few opening scenes setting up the fairly simple fish-out-of-water premise, I am convinced that the movie was mostly unscripted and Blake Edwards just had a camera crew follow Peter Sellers around the titular party, throwing comic set pieces in Sellers' way as he thought of them. At least that's how I like to think of it. It's a simple but effective technique. My personal favorite sequence starts with Sellers finally finding a toilet after a long search and then proceeding to break, clog and flood the entire bathroom to such an extent that he is forced to escape through a window. What follows is the best fall in the history of slapstick comedy. The movie eventually devolves into pure nonsense, with a vandalized elephant and mysteriously metastasizing foam. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul   1...

I watched these movies on my 21st birthday. Marwencol 2010. 83 minutes. USA. Directed by Jeff Malmberg. Watchdate: 12/9/2010 Happily, this was a exceedingly superb movie. I anticipate it will easily make my best of movies released in 2010 list, probably in the top 3. I suppose that it helps that I saw it at a matinee on my birthday, and drank bottles of my first legal beers as I watched. But anyway, obsessive world builders like the man in this movie always entrance me probably because I am something of one myself. But as compelling as the subject is, the Malmberg tells the story more cleverly than I would have imagined. He builds tension and unveils revelations in the same way that many great narrative directors do. A story about a man with brain damage from a bar fight learning how to live in the world by building his own world, the titular war torn Belgian town crafted out of wood and GI Joe and Barbie dolls world could make a great movie. That would have been enough. The man gai...

I watched 232 movies in the 365 Days of 2010 . Here is the 222nd movie I watched: Black Swan 2010. USA. Directed by Darren Aronofsky. Watchdate: 12/14/2010 It's as least as good as everyone says. It gripped my attention completely for its entire running time, and didn't let go for quite awhile after the credits had rolled. Aronofsky's direction is way over the top, to the point where even his subtleties are over the top. But that's okay because it's about ballet. With a subject matter as dramatic and theatrical as that, it's almost an obligation to go over the top as the Archers might tell you (if you haven't seen The Red Shoes , that shit's on Netflix Instant so hop to it). Between this and Requiem for a Dream , Aronofsky could fairly be called an expert at visualizing how compulsions torment and distort the mind. Describing any of the scenes I liked would do them a disservice because out of context they would sound fairly idiotic. But I will single...

I watched  232 movies in the 365 Days of 2010 . Here are the 223rd  and 222nd  movies I watched: Waiting for Armageddon 2009. 74 min. USA. Directed by Kate Davis, David Heilbroner and Franco Sacchi. Watchdate: 12/15/2010. My roommate put this on because he puts on random videos and movies off of Youtube and my Netflix account, and at first I thought he had put on some random proselytizing evangelist nonsense. So I started demanding he switch it off. To his credit, he didn't and as it proceeded I realized it was actually a very interesting documentary about Evangelical Christians and their belief in the rapture. And so then I demanded he plug his computer into the TV so we could watch it on the proper screen for movies and things. The movie's thesis is fairly simple. Essentially, Evangelical Christians believe that the rapture is coming due to their very literal interpretation of the Bible. They read it as prophecy, and so they see conflict and disaster as harbingers of e...

I watched  232 movies in the 365 Days of 2010 . Here are the 226th,  225th, and 224th  movies I watched: I Love You Phillip Morris 2010. 102 min. USA. Directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa. Watchdate: 12/17/2010. Glenn Ficarra and John Requa seem to specialize in fucked up criminal fairy tales like Bad Santa  and this movie, which was really a whole lot of fun. Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor are both at the top of their game, and the movie plays like a dark comedy version of Catch Me If You Can  with more complex political and psychosexual undertones. I'm a big fan of the con artist subgenre perhaps best defined by classic 70s movies like The Sting  and Paper Moon , and this is really quite an inventive entry into that tradition because it subverts the form nearly as much as it follows its well worn patterns. It's treatment of AIDS in particular really has to be seen to believed. But I think my favorite bit involves a scene in prison where McGregor pays ...

I watched  232 movies in the 365 Days of 2010 . Here is the 227th movie I watched. It was a doozy: The Firm  1993. 154 min. USA. Directed by Sydney Pollack. Watchdate: 12/19/2010 Being home over the Holidays meant watching a lot of TV because TV still exists there unlike in Berkeley where it has been subsumed into the cauldron of the Internet. The Firm was on HBO or somesuch channel, and I decided not to turn it off. I'm happy I didn't because boy, it is something else, I'll tell you. It's the sort of rumbling potboiler that almost seems like a parody of itself because it relies so much on convention while at the same time establishing conventions that have since been endlessly copied. It's also the quintessential Tom Cruise vehicle because it's a thriller where Cruise gets to swing between being the good guy and the bad boy as a function of the plot as well as of his own persona. And it's based on a book John Grisham so it has his fingerprints on it as w...