Movies - #1605 - The Day The Earth Stood Still

Good lord, I do enjoy 1950s sci-fi and monster movies. This is an outstanding example of the genre. It's immensely entertaining, and a lot smarter than some others (IE. Them). It's actually unusual in some ways.

Actually, the poster above makes it look like a different movie than it is. There are no half nude screaming blondes (much as we would like there to be.) Sure, that big robot is pretty intimidating, but it doesn't really do any rampaging, and it's under the control of the alien, who is actually the hero of the piece. The bad guys are the military and government bureaucrats.

Michel Rennie is excellent as the alien. He doesn't over-act it as you might expect from the cast of a 50s sci-fi movie. There are even a few very impressive, very subtle choices. There is one particularly good scene where he comes across a music box in another character's home. Him looking and the music box is incidental to what is taking place in the scene, but his momentary reaction to the discovery of this cute device, a thing of beauty in a world that has thus far seemed mostly ignorant and warlike, is the sort of moment I love to see an actor put into a performance.

I thought Leslie Nielsen was in this movie. I don't know why I thought Leslie Nielsen was in this movie. Leslie Nielsen is not in this movie. The whole movie happened and no Leslie Nielsen. Leslie Nielsen is in Forbidden Planet, though. That's probably what I was thinking of. You know, because they're both mentioned in that song in Rocky Horror. Yeah. That's probably it. Yup.

And then there's the monologue at the end. This was back in that period where, if a movie had an important political message, a character had to give a big monologue at the end. It's a pretty damn good monologue. It sure made me want to stop having a cold war. And nuclear weapons.

Also, as somebody who's into some fairly nerdy things (video games and Army of Darkness) it's nice to see the movie from whence originally came the phrase "Klaatu Barada Nikto". If you've seen Army of Darkness, you totally get where I'm coming from on this.

A lot of Movies

Since my last post, I've seen six movies, and broken the 1600 mark. Here are what the movies were, and mini-entries on them.



#1599 - The Last Emperor (1987). Which was very good. An enjoyable, huge, sprawling epic. A compelling portrait of a man who never actually has any power, over a country or even his own life, ever. Great performances. Peter O'Toole, of course, is always great.



#1600 - Toy Story 3 (2010). Why is it that i can see the most depressing, heartwrenching adult movie and never cry, but once per Pixar Movie, I start to tear up a little? A lot of fun. It feels genuinely in the spirit of the series and not like an attempt to cash in on old successes, so many sequels and remakes lately do. It's also surprisingly dark for a kids movie.



#1601 - House of Games (1987). A good psychological thriller, and David Mamet's directorial debut. It's one of those classic "An innocent person gets drawn into the criminal underworld" stories. And of course it's David Mamet, so thirty seconds in I said "Okay, who's conning who?" You know it's coming, but it's fun to watch the twists and turns that lead there.



#1602 - Zombieland (2009). Very entertaining, if not a great movie. I love the part with Bill Murray. I... don't really have much else to say about this one.



#1603 - Slacker (1991). This movie is so odd, but very interesting. It doesn't have a plot, or even a story. No character is in it for more than five minutes. It's just a series of conversations connected only by physical proximity. The participants in one will briefly interact with those having the next. Or even just pass them on the street. What really ties them together is that the vast majority of these people don't do anything except talk. No jobs. They just hang around and try to impress each other with their intelligence and original (read: pretentious) ideas. I say "conversations", but a lot of the time it's just one person monologuing at another. Frequently the second person tells them how full of shit they are. Like Linklater's next movie after it, Dazed and Confused (1993), which I love, this film captures a state of mind and a point in one's life.



#1604 - Le Corbeau (1943) A thriller from the French director Henri-Georges Clouzot. I tend to enjoy his work, and this is no exception. It's about a town being terrorized by a mysterious person calling themself "Le Corbeau"(The Raven), who is sending everyone slanderous letters about each other. It has a fun whodunit feel and has some fairly exciting bits, including a particularly tence sequence featuring a suspect fleeing an angry mob of townspeople.

Movies - #1598 - Red Rock West

Red Rock West(1993) tells the story of a drifter (Nicholas Cage) looking for work who is mistaken by a bartender (JT Walsh) for "Lyle From Dallas" and offered a job. He accepts the job and payment before finding out that the job is murdering the bartender's wife (Lara Flynn Boyle). Then the real Lyle (Dennis Hopper) shows up. Then everybody double crosses each other a lot.

It seemed promising, early on. It had a good premise, the tone of it, early on, was good, and it's hard to go wrong with Dennis Hopper as a creepy, violent, insane guy.

But that early promise just did not last. After a while, it all just started to feel generic. I don't think I really needed to see one more movie where a villain said to a hero "I know guys like you! You think you're better than everybody else!" Actually, "said" doesn't cover it. He sort of monologued on the topic.

Also, buried treasure in a graveyard? I've seen way better movies use that one.

That said, it is sort of refreshing to see a movie with a good McGuffin. Hell yeah. A McGuffin.

Oh, also, Nicholas Cage's character is inconsistent. At the beginning, he is to honest to lie about a leg injury to get a job. Ten minutes later, He lies about HIS ENTIRE IDENTITY to get SOMEBODY ELSE'S JOB. What the hell?

Philip Kaufman and Jim Jarmusch

I really need to be better about updating this right after I watch things so i don't have so many to do all at once.

So, my Netflix for Wii thing got its act together, and I did get around to
watching The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988).



The subtitle of this movie should probably be "Daniel Day Lewis Sleeps with Everybody". Because he does. But, y'know, Daniel Day Lewis is a pretty cool guy, so that's okay.

The description of this movie on the Criterion website describes it as the "screen version of Milan Kundera’s 'unfilmable' novel." I'd really like to read the book now, to see what makes it "unfilmable". The story, long and broad in focus though it is, seems fairly straightforward.

Whatever unfilmable complexity is in the book, the movie turns it into a fairly compelling character piece. Its three leads all do great work (Juliette Binoche is adorable). It's one major downside is that, interesting though it is, after a while you do start to feel its length, which is considerable.


After that came two Jim Jarmusch movies from my Netflix queue.

The first was Dead Man (1995).



Johnny Depp is always a good sign, and a little vaguely pretentious, indie film weirdness can be fun. This movie has an abundance of both qualities.

It's cast is big and good, and famous actors flow in and out of it, showing up suddenly and gone just as quickly. It creates a very intriguing, nightmare version of the West that really helps further the Depp character's evolution through the story.

Depp's character's native American companion, named Nobody, stands out very strongly in the cast. He's one of those characters you find yourself getting excited when you haven't seen him for a while and he shows up again.

A lot of characters die in this movie. There is one black character. Surprisingly, he does not die first. However, he's one of a group of bounty hunters who feature prominently in it. And of them, the black guy does die first. So there. If you look at it a certain way, Hollywood's streak is preserved.


The second Jarmusch movie was Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (2000).



Of all Jarmusch's movies that I've seen, I probably enjoyed this the most. It left me with the feeling that I should take a while to think about what I just saw and figure out what it meant. Even that I should rewatch it to pick up on some of the details. I love having that feeling after a movie. Also, Forest Whitaker is great in it.

The pairing of Samurai and the mafia is an interesting one. But it works, if you think about it. Both are types of people who follow a code. They live by a very old set of rules, handed down. Both have a certain way of viewing honor, as a concept, and living by it.

There's a lot of animal imagery in this movie. The bears work very well as a metaphor for the protagonist. Birds, I think, sort of work as a comment on being at peace with the world around you. I'm still not totally sure about the dog that's always staring at him. That is one awesome dog, though. I kind of want to play with it.

There's also interesting use of books. The most notable is Rashamon. If you know Rashamon well (it deals with different peoples perspectives on the same event) keep it in mind as you watch the flashback that is repeated several times to how Ghost Dog and his Master met.

Also, it should be noted that the French ice cream man is the coolest.

Two new movies

So, I was browsing in Barnes and Noble the other day, and, as I am wont to do, I gravitated towards the Criterion Collection shelf. It occurred to me, looking at those DVDs, that they are adding movies to that thing much faster than I'm seeing them. There are a lot of good movies in the collection, and I've been introduced to a number of movies that I absolutely love by it. I figure I should try to catch up a bit.

So, I went home and decided I would watch the first movie I hadn't seen in the collection (by spine number) that was available on Netflix instant view. That movie turned out to be Flesh for Frankenstein (1973).



The Criterion Collection, if you're unfamiliar, is full of very artsy movies. This movie is not remotely artsy. It's a schlocky B-horror movie. But then again, it was produced by Andy Warhol and, with his name attached, a Campbell's soup can is considered art. So there you go.

There is of course, great fun to be had in cheesy horror movies, and this movie has some great cheesy gore. The highlight: one of my favorite decapitations to date (hmm, that feels like a vaguely creepy thing to be saying). The head is incredibly fake, and doesn't really look like the actor. And it seems to contain more blood than could reasonably fit in several entire human bodies.

The movie also contains one of the most poorly cast actors I've ever seen. His name is Joe Dallesandro. Researching it online after the fact, I found that the director (Paul Morrisey) cast him in a lot of his movies; I'm not sure how he was in those. As for this movie: The rest of the cast (while none of them are Oscar bound) seem pretty, well, German. And they could believably be in the nineteenth century. Dallesandro appears to have walked into a Gothic castle out of 1973 Brooklyn. I giggled whenever he talked.

There is a lot of sex in this movie. It's largely about sex. It has one of the most awkward sex scenes I've ever witnessed (It could give the nitrous-oxide rape scene in Blue Velvet a run for its money). I'll say this much: it taught me an important lesson about life, death, and gallbladders.



After that movie, I decided to continue with my Netflix instant queue strategy. The next criterion movie that fit was another Paul Morrisey horror movie, but, wanting a change of pace, I moved on to the next. That Was The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988). But, due to uncooperative "Netflix for the Wii" software, I was unable to watch that one. Then Netflix recommended Stagecoach (1939) to me, and I watched that instead.



I am, for the most part, not huge on westerns, and I don't like John Wayne very much. But this seemed like one of those classic, really important movies on the canon list of "movies everybody should see". I feel like that sort of thing is particularly important for somebody with a stated goal of seeing every movie ever made (I like to believe six impossible things before breakfast, and then write a blog about one of them). Anyway, as it turns out, I really enjoyed it.

High art? Of course not. It's a western. It's cowboys and Indians. Fun with guns and horses. But it has high entertainment value. The cast of characters is good, And it's very well directed. I actually particularly like the character of Doc Boone, which is played by Thomas Mitchell as much less of a single note character than you'd expect the bumbling town drunk in a western to be.

So, to some up: You should definitely see Stagecoach. You should see Flesh for Frankenstein if you want to have some good cheesy fun, but also be slightly uncomfortable.

Movies - #1592 - Shutter Island

Are we, as human beings, intrinsically violent? To what lengths will we go to deny the violence and ugly truths within ourselves? These are ideas played with in Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island (2010).



The movie toys with these ideas. It, however, winds up being more wrapped up in its own paranoid maze of a plot. That may sound negative, but I don't necessarily mean it that way. I frequently enjoy convoluted, maze-like plots (I believe I've already made it clear in this blog that I love Lost). I love to unravel flaky layers of mystery and try and race the movie to its chewy, delicious, truth filled center. I love when the truth that's in there surprises me, and completely redefines the reality I just watched.

Here comes the negativity. It doesn't. The movie builds itself around a surprise ending that I was waiting for for literally the entire movie (in the first scene, my roommate and I paused the DVD and correctly predicted the ending to each other).

Ultimately, the problem is this: In a movie built around a twist ending, the filmmaker has to mold the story to two realities, the real one, and the one the audience is meant to think they're watching. Incorrect expectations have to be set early on, and everything must serve as proof of both realities. As long as the lie is all you know, it seems perfectly straightforward, but once you know the truth, the meaning of every scene changes. Shutter Island doesn't effectively set up those initial expectations.

From the beginning, the world seems strange and mysterious. The movie seems like it will have a twist ending. From there, it isn't a big intuitive leap to what that twist will be. Really, the film is a mood piece. And the mood is crafted tremendously; Martin Scorsese is good at that. But the mood gives everything away.

The cast is excellent. It's hard to go wrong with Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Kingsley, and Max Von Sydow, and they all turn in good performances. Mark Ruffalo is fine, but the role requires little enough of him that it's hard to comment very strongly on the performance.

The film's real triumph is in the photography and the art direction, both of which are great. They give the proceedings a dark, surreal, nightmarish feel. And Scorsese throws in very subtle details that enhance it. Things you'll miss if you're not paying strict attention. There is an interesting moment with a glass of water that I had to rewind and watch again to make sure i had seen it correctly.

All in all, the film, if not great, was enjoyable. Had another director made it, I'd have quite liked it. But I expect so much better from Scorsese.

Movies - #1591 - The Lion in Winter

Continuing my kick of "actually using my Netflix", I sat down to watch The Lion in Winter (1968).



For those of you who are unfamiliar, it tells the story of King Henry II and his family gathering for Christmas and debating who will succeed him when he dies. What proceeds is two and a quarter hours of him, his wife, his three sons, his mistress, and the King of France, all plotting, backstabbing, and manipulating each other.

The film has a great script and is remarkably well acted. It, of course, doesn't hurt to have Peter O'Toole in it. I'm not sure I've ever seen a performance by him that I didn't love. And it speaks volumes about this cast that Katherine Hepburn is in it, and I'm saying this stuff about somebody else.

On the subject of Peter O'Toole: For those of you keeping score, this movie earned him Oscar nomination #3 of 8 (none of which he won). It's also the second of those in which he played King Henry II (the first being Becket). Now, I know what you're thinking: "This must be a sequel." You're wrong. The two movies were made by different directors, with different screenwriters adapting plays by different playwrights, and they were produced by different studios. They have nothing to do with each other, aside from the fact that Peter O'Toole plays the same historical figure in both. I think if you made a movie about Henry ii you were legally obligated to have O'Toole play him. Or maybe Peter O'Toole just sent out ads to casting directors informing them of his unique gift for playing that particular English King. "Making a movie about Henry II? Try O'Toole!"

It's also fun to see famous actors before they were really famous. This has two: Anthony Hopkins and Timothy Dalton. They're both pretty well known now. When this came out, they were not. It was the first feature film for both. Aw, Lil' Anthony Hopkins! (and/or enormous, bearded Anthony Hopkins)



I love movies and plays about old English Kings. One thinks of Kings and thinks they should be stately, regal, and dignified. But in movies like this, they never are. There's always devious plotting and political intrigue. It sort of seems like most of English royal history has been composed of trying to figure out who to murder, blackmail, or discredit so that you can become/stay king. Oh, and, in their downtime, they might govern the country.