Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Monday, January 23, 2012 M. Ovie Reviews: The Artist As a silent movie released in the twenty-first century, The Artist is an intentional anachronism. A gimmick. A stunt. A feature-length gag. I love it unreservedly and unironically. Appropriately, this silent film is about a silent-film star. As it opens in 1927, George Valentin is on top of the world. But of course the world moves out from under him when the talkies are invented. And thus commences his long, slow slide, made worse by the Great Depression and his own hubris. Of course it’s a familiar story. It’s a silent movie. You were expecting Tree of Life, maybe? Obviously it’s not really silent. It’s got a score like the old silent films did, but obviously my local art house doesn’t have an orchestra pit, let alone an orchestra, so there’s a soundtrack. And ambient sound isn’t entirely absent for the whole thing, although to say more would give too much away. I don’t want to try to come off as someone who knows much about silent cinema, because I really don’t. My dad checked some Super 8 Charlie Chaplin movies out of the library a couple of times and showed them on the basement wall when I was a kid, but that’s about the extent of my experience. Oh, and one Halloween in high school I saw Phantom of the Opera at what is now one of my former workplaces, the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul (known at that time as the World Theater), with Phillip Brunelle playing the organ. And I guess I should count Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike, which I saw in Film Studies class in college. So feel free to go ahead and kick me in my pretentious head. But seriously, that’s it. You don’t really need even that small amount of background to enjoy The Artist, though. Obviously the dialogue is pretty spare, and the subtitles (or "inbetweentitles," as the case may be) even more so. In the best silent film tradition, they're only used on thise rare occasions when you can't already guess what the actors are saying, and there are plenty of scenes with no talking at all, or almost none, and there are a lot of plot points communicated by characters silently showing each other newspaper headlines. So aside from a few of the talkier scenes, there's almost no interruption of the action. It also has some fun with the overall concept. After the old-school opening credits, the very first scene shows George in his latest movie playing a secret agent under torture, refusing to talk. Get it? He refuses to talk! The movie has plenty of other, equally unchallenging symbolism, like the shitcanned George encountering the young starlet on a staircase (she's on her way up, he's on his way down) and the timely moment in one of his films when he's sucked down by quicksand, and the various ways he's an uncommunicative dick to his wife. And of course there's the whole theme of a guy trapped in a world that no longer exists, embodied by the fact that we're watching a silent movie, half of which isn't even set in the time of silent movies any more. But we're in on these obvious tropes, and we expect silent movies to be broad, so it doesn't feel like we're being insulted. The cast is a bit more of a mixed bag. As George, Jean Dujardin is totally convincing as the dashing twenties-era movie star, with his pomaded hair, pencil mustache (which grows in as his fortunes decline), winning smile, and effortlessly physical acting style. John Goodman is at his rubber-faced best, constantly making me feel like he was born decades too late. However, the female lead, as good she is, has a 21st-century look that isn't quite de-Jessica Bieled by her chic bob; and oddly James Cromwell is the most inappropriately subtle actor in the film despite being the only one old enough to have been in silent movies (I exaggerate; he was born in 1940). I think in the end, the amount you enjoy The Artist is proportional not to your feelings about silent films, but your feelings about Singin' in the Rain. In many ways, this story is almost a mirror image of that one (and the score doesn't go out of its way to not remind you sometimes). If Singin' in the Rain is Hamlet, then The Artist is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. And I love Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Much as I love The Artist. posted by M. Giant 7:24 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:
Well, the wife and I weren't sure what to see this weekend and (I may be the only one in the world to make this connection), you've won me over with your Idol recaps so The Artist it is.
By Wednesday, January 11, 2012 M .Ovie Reviews: Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol Okay, here's how big a dork I am: the only reason I was remotely interested in seeing MI:GP at all was because I'm a fan of the director, Brad Bird, who previously directed The Iron Giant and The Incredibles. Both cartoons, yes. I was kind of expecting another one, to be honest, but it didn't turn out that way. This is actually one of the more exciting action movies I've seen in a while. There are a couple of interesting things about the way this movie is being marketed. First, there's no number in the title, which is usually a sign of a tired franchise with nothing left to say. Second, it's implied that this movie represents some kind of passing of the torch from Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt character to whomever Jeremy Renner is playing. Actually, neither could be further from the truth. I can understand why a studio might want to downplay the couch-jumper's role, given that he's had a few PR missteps in the past few years that have left him not quite as popular as he used to be. But no, it turns out that this is very much an Ethan Hunt joint, with his hair, moves, chronic acrophilia, and messiah complex on full display. Renner steals a moment or two (and at one point a gun) from him, but it's Cruise control all the way. Feel free to kick me in the face for writing that. As for the state of the franchise, I liked this movie a lot better than the second one (I can't speak to the third one, which I skipped). There's the obligatory globetrotting chase for an internationally vital McGuffin, but as always, what that is never seems as interesting as all the crap they go through to get it. Including that sequence with Ethan dangling from the ridiculously tall Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Even more shocking than that stunt is the scene immediately preceding, where Ethan expresses actual doubt that he can pull it off. That's almost a more impressive feat than jumping out a window a quarter-mile in the air. And then there's the sense that the world we live in is like a life-sized Disneyland, with spies able to go "backstage" at any given moment and use seemingly innocuous items like pay phones and train cars as vital resources that have been placed there for their express use. It's a little Get Smart at times, but you're having enough fun that you don't mind much. Simon Pegg was also a nice surprise. Not that I expected him to suck, but that I don't think I knew he was going to be in it. He gets all the good jokes, of course, including one great spy-tech-based sight gag inside the Kremlin. Some chick I've never heard of rounds out the IMF team, with the primary job of looking uptight and not towering over Ethan Hunt too much. Febrifuge and I saw it on an IMAX screen, which I would recommend for enjoying Bird's kinetic camera work to greatest effect. Because dude rocks it. Could have done without the eighty-foot close-ups of the dude with the broken nose, though. A success overall, but you should probably leave the movie when Ving Rhames does. After that it gets pretty irritating. posted by M. Giant 1:17 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:
So, I guess this livescore person had some kind of webcam to see the dress you were wearing while you typed this entry, which I gather was gorgeous. Let us know what Trash and M. Edium think of the London fabric shops when you get there.
By Thursday, January 05, 2012 M. Ovie Reviews: New Year's Eve You know how there are some movies you don't think you'll like at all, but then you see them and your low expectations make them seem so much better by comparison? New Year's Eve is not one of those movies. I hated it even more than I expected to, which I did not think was possible. In case you're blissfully unaware of the existence of this abomination, Garry Marshall has shat out another Love, Actually ripoff, with a sprawling cast of previously respectable stars phoning in mini-performances in a series of holiday-centered vignettes that all intersect at one point or another in the larger arc. It's one of those films where you can't help rolling your eyes every time the paths of characters from different story lines cross each other's, because it's all so contrived and forced and oh my God I'm actually making it sound better than it is. The good news is that in this over-blended dog's breakfast of a couple hundred other (and better) romantic comedies, no one storyline is inflicted upon us for very long. The bad news is that every bad storyline always seems to give way to a worse one. Don't ask me how this is possible. Trash (who sent Chao and me to see this turd, may she melt in Hell) didn't believe us when we got back and ran down the litany of familiar actors and even more familiar plots that were firehosed at us for two hours. You probably won't either, so let's just say that the cast of slumming thousands included not one Oscar winner, not two Oscar winners, not three Oscar winners, but FOUR FUCKING ACADEMY AWARD WINNERS. Revoke every last one of them, I don't care. Katherine Heigl was in it too, somehow quintessentially. She probably could have played every part and it would have been just as good. So to sum up, New Year's Eve is a terrible movie, full of terrible people acting the way nobody acts and doing things nobody does and talking the way nobody talks, in storylines that were on the whole less believable than anything that happened in the entirety of The Muppets. By the time the allegedly funny outtakes rolled, we were so starved for actual entertainment that we chuckled once. But I think the worst part is that the inspirational speech that one character gives, that completely transfixes the world for no damn reason, which you think signals that the movie is almost over and you can go home? You're only halfway done, my friend. That's just shitty. posted by M. Giant 9:48 PM 5 comments 5 Comments:
You had me convinced at "Katherine Heigl was in it too."
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I'm inspired to post a link to the blog I wrote about 'valentine's Day'; both movie and review feature similar themes. You might be interested to take a look... oh, who am I kidding, but I'd hate myself if I didn't take a shot.
By Was there at least slow clapping during the inspirational speech?
By I give up. I only know of 3 actor/actresses who are Oscar winners even after scanning IMDB for New Year's Eve.
By Did you lose a bet to Trash? Why else would she be THIS cruel?!
By Wednesday, January 04, 2012 M. Ovie Reviews: Late 2011 Yikes, I'm so far behind on my movie reviews for 2011 it's embarrassing. Now it's not even the year any more. I think I need to just give up on full reviews of the outstanding ones and just do the quick capsule write-ups like I used to do. Otherwise there's no way I'm ever going to catch up. At this point I just hope I can remember them all. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows See? What did I tell you? Puss in Boots I was not expecting to like this at all, and I didn't love it, but I have to give it props for the eye-popping action scenes. Even in 2-D it's quite the spectacle, and I enjoyed the Rodrigo y Gabriela music on the soundtrack as well. Not terribly faithful to the source material, however. M. Edium heard about a stage production of the play happening in our area and said he wanted to see it. "You need to know," I told him, "that the play will have absolutely nothing in common with the movie except a cat with boots and a hat." M. Edium asked, "Does he have a sword, too?" And thus I stood corrected. In Time Andrew Niccol seems to fancy himself some kind of clever social commentator by virtue of the fact he keeps creating these alternate-universe situations that would never happen. Like anyone would give a shit about The Truman Show unless he hung out with a lot of Real Housewives, or a computer-generated actress like S1mone would be interesting to anyone at all. Now he drops a hamfisted class-warfare allegory about haves and have-nots in which time has replaced currency. You have to use time to buy everything, even as it passes without you doing anything. After reaching age 25, at which point they stop aging, most people have a very limited amount, which ticks down on huge glowing clocks on their arms. Justin Timberlake and his social peers live in grinding poverty with only hours left in their lives at any given time (which seems like it would lead to a lot more tragedy than the fate of his mom, played by Olivia Wilde, which at least puts an end to their creepy sexual chemistry). That is, until a chance meeting with rich centenarian Matt Bomer triggers a chain of events that turns him into a temporal Robin Hood, with Amanda Seyfried in an inexplicable Velma Kelly wig as his partner in crime. And it is SO DUMB. I know my description makes it sound dumb, but it's even dumber. The leads are a lot less Bonnie and Clyde than Emilio Estevez and Demi Moore in Wisdom. The tragedy is that this movie was trying so hard to make a point about economic injustice and just ends up stabbing itself in the foot with it instead. I mean, what happens to Cillian Murphy alone is worth a Razzie. The Muppets I took M. Edium to see this the weekend it opened, and then again the next weekend. One goes to Muppets expecting jokes and songs and there are plenty of those, but there was also a lot of nostalgia. The movie takes place in a universe where Muppets live among us, which is hard enough to buy into, but then adds another layer of unlikelihood by making it a world where the Muppets as a pop-culture phenomenon have also been over for decades. As though they haven't been all over YouTube the last couple of years just in preparation for this very movie. From there, the movie seems to set out to deliberately shatter the viewer's suspension of disbelief, from the internal timeline where they mount an entire production in two days to the idea that Jack Black would turn down the chance to be in anything. But M. Edium, who hasn't yet inherited my irritating tendency to pick things apart while watching them, loved it both times. Although I must say he wiggled a lot less the second time. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows You can complain about Guy Ritchie's version of Holmes all you want, but you can no longer go into one of those movies saying it's not what you expected. There's even less mystery per se than there was in the first one, but I'm glad to say there's also less annoying steampunk scenes. I also appreciate how these films don't pretend to be the end-all-be-all of the Holmes canon, instead dropping us into the mythology late into Holmes and Watson's dysfunctional bromance. I also love how Holmes and Mrs. Hudson are shown to harbor an incandescent hatred of one another. RDJ may not exactly match Conan Doyle's description, but you can believe that those big round eyes of his take in everything so effectively that the only way to convey it all to us mere mortals is with all manner of wacky editing tricks. As for Moriarty, the near-omnipotent "Napoleon of crime," I've seen scarier-looking villains behind the counter at the DMV. Young Adult It's hard for me to be objective about this movie. As I may have mentioned before, my signature is on an official Certificate of Matrimony with that of Diablo Cody. Yes, we were witnessing the marriage of one of her best friends to one of mine, but still. Unlike that document, she wrote Young Adult without my collaboration, and I have to say the results were positive. It's not a rapid-fire, laff-a-minute screwball comedy like I was half-expecting, but something much darker. Charlize Theron plays Mavis Gary, a drunk asshole who lives in Minneapolis and refers to it as "The City," and returns to her small hometown to steal her high school boyfriend from the woman he married, not to mention his infant daughter. This is in a way a braver performance than Theron gave in Monster, because in that she was hideous throughout. Here, she looks like a walking "Stars Without Makeup!" section of Us Weekly for much of the movie, with occasional grooming montages showing how she gets herself turned out in full glamour mode for the losers she left behind (including, if we're being totally honest here, the ex-boyfriend). I was also expecting Patton Oswalt to totally steal the movie, because even if he's not conventionally handsome, he's a charismatic and magnetic performer, to the point where I thought he wouldn't be believable as an unpopular geek. But he solves that problem by not acting with his entire face for a lot of his scenes. The ending is very un-Hollywood, in a way that reminds me of the previous Jason Reitman film Up in the Air, in which George Clooney's character doesn't go through an arc so much as a circle, ending up much where he started. Still worth it, though. In fact the more I think about it the more I liked it. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy I keep meaning to read Trash's John Le Carre books and never getting around to it. Decades, now, this has been going on. I figured going to see the movie version of this was as close as I was ever going to get. If you're into watching Gary Oldman overact, this may be the movie for you, as he explores a new way to overact by underacting. It's such an understated, nearly motionless performance that it nearly cries out, "Look at me!" The movie as a whole is pretty understated, in terms of the action and what little shooting there is, but it's greatly overstated in once sense, and that's in the early 1970s décor, fashion, and hairstyles, many of which are quite distracting. At one point late in the movie, one character makes a reference to how ugly the West has gotten. In 1973, it's impossible not to see his point. I think I covered everything else earlier in the year, but if anything else comes to me I'll be sure and get back to it, unless I don't. And I still have to review Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, which I saw on New Year's Day, and rank all the movies I saw in 2011. Because I know you're all waiting anxiously for that. Especially the person whose name is on that marriage certificate. posted by M. Giant 10:49 AM 3 comments 3 Comments:"...what happens to Cillian Murphy alone is worth a Razzie.": Thank you. "In Time" almost makes "Sunshine" ("Hey, does anyone know how to do the math for a course change? Anyone? Oh, never mind.") seem smart by comparison, and that's quite a feat.
By Holmes was a fun way to spend a couple of hours. Also, I must say the addition of Steven Fry was a delightful and unexpected treat for me! :)
By The addition of Stephen Fry always seems that way. Like you'd bite into your Whitman Sampler and think, "Hey, i thought I got the caramel, but it's Stephen Fry! Even better."
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