A Gilded Planet

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...

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...

In 2010, I watched roughly 232 movies. I did this for various reasons, of which I will list a few of the most sensible ones below: There were a ton of movies I had always meant to watch but never got around to and I decided to just make time to actually watch them. It seemed to be a more stimulating way to procrastinate and waste time than farting around on the Internet or watching television. (If you don't see much of a difference between movies and television, you're either much less of an intellectual than I am or much more of an intellectual than I am. Don't worry though, the difference is probably at my expense either way.) I got Netflix towards the end of 2009. It has a massive back catalogue of movies from nearly every decade and country that has produced movies. As you might imagine, once you fall down such a rabbit hole, it can be very difficult to return to your waking life. Perhaps someday I will reflect seriously on the nature of what might be a metastasizin...