A Gilded Planet

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans 2009.  122 minutes. USA. Directed by Werner Herzog. Watchdate: 3/27/2011. An odd duck of a movie that novelly spoofs the police detective story by roiling up such an absurd concoction of unhinged wildness that it skewers conventions and upsets expectations seemingly without any effort expended whatsoever. This is exactly the kind of movie I love - contemptuous of genre, hilariously impulsive, aware of its self-indulgence but unwilling to apologize for it. In fact, it fulfilled my desires too much - at a certain point it was so enjoyable that it ceased being at all challenging. Therefore it can't quite rise to the top of the pile. Or can it? On first viewing it felt too good to be true, but in retrospect I can't stop loving its drunken audacity and hallucinatory liveliness. In any case, this is exactly the way Nicolas Cage can be utilized effectively for high entertainment - waving a huge gun around in order to threaten old ladies,...

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 232 movies in the 365 Days of 2010 . Here are the 228th and 229th movies that I watched. 127 Hours 2010. 94 min. USA/UK. Directed by Danny Boyle. Watchdate: 12/21/2010 So first, a realization. James Franco is almost always as good or better than the movies he appears in. This holds true both in good movies (he's pretty much the best thing in Pineapple Express ) and in terrible ones (he's practically the only good thing in Howl ). This is definitely true here too, as he is terrific while the movie itself has problems. It's not bad by any means, but it does begin like a television commercial and too often has the feeling of being that sort of slick contraption. There's also one moment near the end that smacked of sentimentalism partly because of the brief and thankfully abortive deployment of one of those Feist/Spektor/Enya type sirens in the musical score. Other than the those two noisome flaws, the movie works fairly well. It does not rely too much at all on...