I don’t care who you are, when you think “the five best pictures of 2008″ you will not think THE READER. Do you know what this movie is about? Holy shit. I’m gonna tell you. (warning: first sentence gives away every last thing that happens in the movie. This is not a test.)
Archive for January, 2009
1/29/09
Thursday, January 29th, 2009
LikeThe Reader
Thursday, January 29th, 2009THE READER
or
I WAS A TEENAGE NAZI-FUCKER (spoilers)
THE READER is the story of Michael Berg, a rich and successful German lawyer who is tormented that he cannot be emotionally open with the beautiful women he has sex with because when he was a kid he got sick and puked and a lady took him home and later he went to thank her but he accidentally saw her bush so he started to spy on her and then he helped her shovel coal and she gave him a bath but he got a boner so she got naked and they started to have sex every day and she liked him to read books to her but then she abandoned him and later when he was a law student he saw her in a war crimes trial and it turned out she had been a Nazi concentration camp guard who locked 300 people in a church and let them burn to death because she didn’t want them to escape and she took the blame for writing the report on it but he realized she didn’t know how to read but he was too afraid to speak up about it and she got a life sentence which made him feel guilty so decades later he started to send her tapes of himself reading books and she used those to learn how to read and then they were gonna let her out early anyway and he was gonna help her get a job but she hung herself so he took his daughter to her grave and started to tell her about it. the end. Best picture nominee, too.
This movie has many things to signal that it is important: the Holocaust, based on a book, multiple time periods, a trial, Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, the Weinstein Company logo, male nudity, female armpit hair, and about 45 minutes worth of tedious and gloomily shot scenes of an adult woman laying around naked with an actor portraying a 15 year old boy (David Kross – the German David Cross, I guess). But I have to admit, I could not figure out on my own what the movie was supposed to be saying or why somebody thought it was a story worth telling or watching. (more…)
1/27/09
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009For my first set of reviews in the Obama era I carefully (okay – accidentally) chose three genre movies that show different aspects of where President Obama is coming from and what he’s up against:
SHAFT IN AFRICA represents the young Barry Obama who, while protesting South African apartheid, learned to respect his heritage and restore his given name.
APPALOOSA depicts the perverted justice system that Obama has set out to repair because “we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”
SOLDIER shows a futuristic example of a military force (in this case Kurt Russell) beginning to be used more wisely and ethically.
Shaft in Africa
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009The third and final episode of the original Shaft trilogy is a little less classy without the direction of Gordon Parks, but it’s a hell of a fun sequel. After you’ve done one chapter that’s a good variation on the first one, might as well get crazy and fly off to another continent for part 3. You know Shaft has really earned his black James Bond stripes when he gets to go on an international adventure.
Early in the movie Shaft comes home to his building and somebody tells him some Africans are looking for him. He sees a guy in an African robe and ducks out of the elevator and seems proud of himself as he goes unmolested into his apartment. He hits his punching bag once and struts in but before he can relax the door is kicked down and there’s that huge African dude ready to beat his ass.
Next thing you know Shaft has been imprisoned, tormented, tested, and forced to go on a mission to Africa to uncover a modern day slavery ring. I would kind of expect Shaft to be a righteous, Afrocentric type of dude, but their plan to guilt him with America’s heritage of slavery doesn’t work. He doesn’t give a shit. (But he’ll learn.) Shaft learns some language, an accent, customs and fighting style and goes undercover so he can get inside the slavery ring and bust that fucker open. (more…)
Appaloosa
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009APPALOOSA does have a little post 9-11 political relevance, but for the most part it’s a straight ahead western. I’ve talked to some people who thought it was too slow or needed more gunfights, so if that’s what you’re looking for, beware. It’s a character piece about two gunmen who’ve gotten real good at dealing with assholes and cleaning up small towns overrun with bandits and bullies.
If the cast was just nobodies it might not work, instead we got Ed Harris (also director) as Virgil Cole, Viggo Mortensen (not director) as trusty sidekick Everett Hitch. Virgil has aspirations to become a legitimate lawman, Hitch has an 8-gauge shotgun. They come into the town of Appaloosa to work for the elected officials who’ve been shoved aside by Jeremy Irons, a tyrant whose big shot status comes from claims he’s friends with Chester A. Arthur (come on, everybody uses that one). Him and his gang run the town, everybody’s afraid of them, the usual. So our boys become marshals and to everybody’s shock they have the balls to start arresting people, and the shit and fan quickly become intimates.
Now here’s the problem: Renee Zelweger. I don’t get it. I know she must’ve done some good performances at one time, but she’s usually not appealing. She has a pinched little face and an evil vibe, but tends to play characters who are supposed to be lovable beneath their cold, bitchy shells. To me this is not believable. I thought it was just me since she keeps getting cast in movie after movie and winning all kinds of awards, but an informal poll found that 100% of males hate Renee Zelweger in their movies. Because of this you lose respect for Virgil when he immediately becomes smitten with supposedly-innocent-seeming piano player Allison French. (more…)
Soldier
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009After seeing Paul Not Thomas Anderson’s remake of DEATH RACE 2000 and finding it surprisingly enjoyable, I decided to finally go back and see that Kurt Russell movie he made more than ten years ago that I wanted to see but didn’t because everyone said was garbage. And maybe the lowered expectations helped, but I thought SOLDIER was a good one.
The movie begins in the ’90s with a group of babies being taken out of a hospital into military custody (wonder if the parents noticed?) where they will be raised to be super soldiers. The opening is a montage of these soldiers from infancy to their 40s, being indoctrinated, training and participating in various intergalactic conflicts. I was impressed that I could immediately tell which kid was supposed to be Kurt Russell. I thought they did an amazing job of finding a kid who looked like him, but then I found out they just cast his son, which is kind of cheating. Anyway this character’s name is Todd, but don’t worry, if you forget that it’s tattooed on his face, they all have their names and numbers tattooed on their faces. (I honestly think it would be cool if the movie was called TODD.)
Of course, they get the usual kind of training – running, shooting practice, etc. – but also they have to watch three dobermans fight a boar without looking away. So you can understand how this kid grows up into a stoic, glassy-eyed Kurt Russell, sort of channeling Michael Dudikoff in AMERICAN NINJA. I don’t mean that as mockery either, I thought Kurt Russell was great in this role. He is credible as a great soldier and also as a sort of Frankenstein monster who doesn’t know how to relate to normal humans.
The real story begins when the soldiers are in peace time (”in between wars”), pretty much just sitting there motionless. (That’s what they do.) Todd is the best of the bunch, so he gets to sit at the front. Then Jason Isaacs (with sinister mustache) shows up to brag about his new model of super soldiers, distinguished by their tank tops and led by Caine (Jason Scott Lee, now bald and looking about twice as big as he was when he played Bruce Lee.) (more…)
1/20/09
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009You know I had to jot down some thoughts for my first Obama-era VERN TELLS IT LIKE IT IS column. Hopefully it’s not gibberish.
Obama
Tuesday, January 20th, 20091/19/09
I stand writing this on a foggy street Monday night, wondering if Bush already left the White House forever, or if he’s staying the night. I heard he already had all his shit moved out – I usually stay up all night the night before moving, still packing. I guess he was in a hurry.
Not too long ago it was hard to picture this day. Remember, some people even worried there would be a terrorist attack and they’d declare martial law and the Bush reign of terra would continue. Ha ha, now we can save our paranoia for other things. God damn, I should’ve sold all those political expose books I got for Christmases. Nobody’s gonna take that shit off my hands now. I’d feel like an asshole even bringing them into Half Price Books. No more Bush documentaries either. We’re moving on.
The grocery store is draped with American flags – I don’t remember the inauguration being an event to celebrate at home before, but this year everybody’s taking the day off and getting up early. A local bakery is distributing cookies emblazoned with portraits of the Obamas, including the silhouette of a dog with a question mark over it. I drank the Obama Jones Soda but I’m not comfortable with the idea of crunching on the first family.
You know what, it doesn’t make me sad to picture Bush walking out of that White House the last time, his shoulders hunched like Charlie Brown. Did the door indeed hit him where the good Lord split him? It would only be right. And deep down I bet he knows he fucked up. He still says history will judge him. It’s a good point. We can’t be sure he fucked up until we’re all dead. Just like we can’t be sure whether or not Seagalogy will be the #1 book taught to future generations of students to understand America in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Only time will tell. (more…)
1/18/09
Sunday, January 18th, 2009I finally got a review of THE WRESTLER. Long overdue. In the less noteworthy department I also have a review of MAX PAYNE, which comes to DVD and Blue-DVD this week. Also I just added my take on MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3-D.
The Wrestler
Sunday, January 18th, 2009Wrestling is so weird. It’s boxing, circus sideshow, cheesy stage play and soap opera all in one. The big time wrestling leagues try to drown the show in pyrotechnics and flashy computer animation on giant screens but alot of the appeal is still very old fashioned. It’s the circus. I went to a match one time and saw Andre the Giant. It wasn’t so much like seeing a star as like seeing a Greek god. Or maybe a sasquatch. There was a reason they called him “The 8th Wonder of the World.” These guys are not human, they’re super heroes.
Or it seems that way when you see them up close. But actually they are human. Greek gods might be able to toss lightning around all day without spraining anything, but not humans. God or evolution did not equip humans to break metal chairs over their heads every night, or break tables with their ribs. Wrestlers make their living by not following the proper care and maintenance instructions for the human body, and they always pay the price.
Although I’ve been talking up wrestling documentaries like BEYOND THE MAT and HITMAN HART: WRESTLING WITH SHADOWS for years now I’ve barely watched any wrestling since the commercial heyday of the WWF in the ’80s. I guess I’m not that into watching it but I’m obsessed with the idea of it. It’s just such a fascinating world, larger than life entertainment, kind of surreal in its contradictory fakeness and realness (we know it’s an act, but also that it takes a serious physical and mental toll on those poor sonofabitches). And both of those movies showed the sad side of it. Many professional wrestlers struggle with what Roddy Piper calls “The Sickness” in his autobiography. Using painkillers and steroids as part of their daily regimen, drinking and partying almost as often, damaging their bodies every time they work and being away from their families while on the road, living up to an exaggerated persona – this is not a lifestyle that is likely to lead to a happy ending. Online there are lists of professional wrestlers who died young and they are long and heartbreaking. (more…)
