Archive for the ‘Romance’ Category

All the Real Girls

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

You probaly haven’t heard of it but ALL THE REAL GIRLS is the new one from the young man who made GEORGE WASHINGTON. Maybe you never saw that one either, it was kinda weird because it wasn’t about President George Washington or peanut innovator George Washington Carver, it was about some kid. Maybe he grows up to be George Washington, I don’t know, I don’t get it. But it’s a unique and effective movie made by a young dude nobody ever heard of and somehow it got its own Criterion Collection dvd and many nominations for Independent Spirit Awards. Now the kid got the job of directing a movie of the book CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES, which people have wanted to do for years and years. We’ll see how that turns out, I think the kid can pull it off but who knows I only read half of the book.

This one is a little more intimate than G-dub. It is basically about one short relationship and it is handled very realistically. Basically what this young man Gordon Green did, he took out all the movie bullshit and put in all the real life bullshit. So you don’t get no speeches about star wars or about how everybody feels deep down inside. You don’t get no oldies singalongs or elaborate romantic gestures. There are no cops or astronauts in this picture. The main dude is not a hitman. He just works on cars.

The people in the movie seem real because they talk real. They say things wrong and they don’t have clever quips. They don’t always know how to explain their feelings. That is why most people would hate this movie, but they would be in the other theater watching the one where Steve Martin dresses up as Bulworth. And the people in this theater will probaly love it. So it will all work out and afterwards they can meet in the lobby and still be friends. (more…)

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Vanilla Sky

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

Vanilla Sky is an american remake of OPEN YOUR EYES, the second picture by the young spanish gentleman Alejandro Amenabar, who also did THESIS and THE OTHERS. After the movie I was saying to a gal that the ending was kinda different on the original, and the guy next to me was saying the same thing to his friend. Except he was just getting out of OCEAN’S 11.

Everything is fucking remakes now, huh? The above took place in Seattle, Washington, where as we speak the Dreamworks company is hard at work on an unneccesary remake of (the) RING. History has not been kind to american remakes of foreign pictures. Even when you get the same guy to remake it – like with THE VANISHING or NIGHTWATCH – the movie will piss everybody off and the director will be forgotten forever.

Well I didn’t like VANILLA SKY as much as OPEN YOUR EYES (which, by the way, I didn’t like as much as THESIS) but it is surprisingly good for an americanization of a spanish picture. The director is Cameron Crowe, who always does the pictures about what music people listen to when they’re falling in love. It shows improvement in the filmatism in my opinion. It is a very good use of sound and music, and cinematographing. There are some subtle touches here and there and more emotion in the character that Cameron Diaz plays, the woman Tom Cruise casually dates who goes nuts on him and tries to kill him. In OPEN YOUR EYES she was more of a nut, here she makes a pretty good point about even if you make it clear you’re not serious about this woman, when you fuck her you gotta realize it means something to her. Come on, don’t be an asshole Tom Cruise. (more…)

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Drumline

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

I don’t know what the deal is with this movie but I gotta admit I kinda liked it. Basically it is your formula movie about young kids competing in something, like LOVE AND BASKETBALL or KARATE KID or WORLD’S BIGGEST GANG BANG or that kind of thing. But in this case instead of sports they are competing at marching band.

The main kid is Nick Cannon who I just looked up on IMDb. I guess he was on the “nickelodeon” kids channel and even had a show named after him. So basically he is an unknown. He is real good as a prodigy on the drum. Not the drums, just one drum that you carry around. This kid is real good, especially good at memorizing and picking things up fast, but you find out later that he can’t read music. Still, he gets a scholarship to this college and goes to this marching band and finds out it’s alot more strict than he expected. They got a curfew, they got a drum major that hates him, etc.

One thing I like is they don’t try to convince you that marching band is cool. They just kind of assume that you already think so. And you kind of feel like there must be some mistake, I guess I never knew marching band was cool. This kid is a superstar, like Ray Allen in HE GOT GAME, there is even an instructor from a rival marching band talking him up trying to get him to switch over.

Another thing I like is that it takes itself seriously. It is basically a drama, there’s not alot of bad comic relief type crap. There is a little bit about one white guy who tries to compete in this all black band, but nothing embarassing. (more…)

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Full Frontal

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

First of all you gotta realize, this is one of them movies where a well known director decides to do a loose, low budget experimental quickie type picture. For example, while making his “real” movie, the chinese water torture of an animated feature that is WAKING LIFE, Richard Linklater also spent like a day or two doing a minimalistic three-character-play-on-digital-video called TAPE that was a little easier to stomach.

In this case the director is Steven Soderbergh, and in my book he’s earned the right to do whatever the fuck he wants with a digital camera and Julia Roberts on the weekends. Not because he made two movies in the same year and was nominated best director for both (although that’s probaly something worth bragging about) but because before that he was on even more of a roll, doing OUT OF SIGHT and the 1999 Outlaw Award winner THE LIMEY right in a row. This year Soderbergh is doing a remake of SOLARIS, that russian space movie that is famous for being really long, boring and good. But first to cleanse his pallet he whipped out this little fucker that is kind of an homage (french word) to the DOGMA of ‘95 movement and the new wave that the french had a while back.

The movie stars Catherine Keener and the gay dude from Frasier, but also has Julia Roberts in there and some other star cameos. A word of caution: you are in for the ol’ movie within a movie within a movie deal. There is the story of Julia Roberts, wearing an excellent Jane-Fonda-in-KLUTE wig, as a magazine reporter interviewing Blair Underwood (the guy from KRUSH GROOVE) who is playing a movie star who is more famous than Blair Underwood. But most of the movie is the story of various people tangentally connected to the making of the movie about Julia interviewing the movie star. This part is shot on the digital video with natural lighting and improvised acting. Don’t worry, there is no split screen garbage going on here and Catherine Zeta Jones is not involved. (more…)

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Frida

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

This is the story of Frida Kahlo, a famous Mexican modernist known for her great painting and sexy monobrow. This is a gal who means many things to many people. An important artist, but also a feminist, a revolutionary, an unashamed bisexual. And you could probaly guess, since there’s a biography movie made out of her, that the poor gal had to be either alcoholic or disabled. In this case she was disabled, unpleasantly impaled in a bus accident, sporadically confined to a full body cast. But since she’s an artist she paints pretty butterflies on it.

You know Salma Hayek will get an oscar nomination for this, mainly because of the bodycast. I gotta be honest though, ’cause that’s my job. I don’t think she’s necessarily doing great work here. She’s just doing pretty good in a role that she is good for, that happens to be real Important because it’s a real person, who was a brilliant artist, who was disabled, and had some kind of political context to her life that can be simplified into movie form. I’m not saying Salma is bad, especially not compared to her embarassing improv role in TIMECODE. And I can’t think of anyone better for the role. But she didn’t exactly blow my mind either, especially not during the scenes where she wears a schoolgirl uniform and tries to pass for a teen.

But who the fuck cares about that shit. The strong woman I saw this movie for wasn’t Salma or Frida. It was actually the director, Julie Taymor. This gal is so talented I’m scared of her. If you’ve seen TITUS you know what I’m talking about. Or if you’ve seen the making of TITUS on the dvd. They show her during rehearsals. She knows all the dialogue, and substitues for actors that aren’t there. Even sitting on the sidelines she gets so into it she looks like she’s about to cry, or she starts singing how the music is gonna go. (more…)

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Stealing Beauty

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

Well if you know what this movie is then I know what your thinking. How the fuck does a motherfucker like ol’ Vern end up watching a picture like Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty. Well the answer is the Bravo network. Ever since I saw The Getaway on Bravo a week or two ago I started watching this channel pretty regular. I think you know about inside the actors studio so I won’t mention it except to say, at the end, he always asks them what their favorite curse word is, and they either say fuck or more often motherfucker, and the audience always laughs like it was completely unexpected. Kind of like how everybody always laughed when arnold said “Whatyou talkin about Mr. Drummond?” even though for fuck’s sake we all knew the joke was coming, jesus let’s not pretend it snuck up behind us fer cryin out loud.

So anyway, Stealing Beauty is a picture about gorgeous 19 year old Lucy who comes to an equally gorgeous Italian villa where all the artists work and what not. This is like the prettiest god damn place you ever seen. The houses are huge and old fashioned, there are perfectly clean streams to swim in, plenty of nature and olive groves and beautiful wooden statues everywhere. I mean it’s like going camping, only in the garden of eden. Everyone there loves a laidback lifestyle, they appreciate the arts and the nature and beauty more than anything. It seems like none of them ever go to work, but they have huge houses and property and big parties with candles everywhere and yet they don’t come off like a bunch of soulless rich fucks. It takes place in the modern day but it wouldn’t have to. People ride bicycles and read books. Nobody watches TV and the only connection to the media or the outside world is an occasional call on the cell phone or a CD that Lucy plays. (more…)

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Slackers

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me. Here I am battling the IMDB for a prestigious award, I’m trying to prove myself worthy and this is all I have to offer you. Fucking Slackers.

I couldn’t tell you how it happens. Every time I set out to see a particular movie. I mean there are three movies in particular I want to see right now. There’s Little Otik, the Czechoslovakian cartoon about some folks raising a tree stump as their baby. There’s Brotherhood of the Wolf, where the frenchy who directed Crying Freeman mixes French history with kung fu and, I guess werewolves maybe. Who knows. And there’s also Storytelling from the pervert who made Happiness.

I mean how could I have not known. Even when “Slacker” came out, what, ten years ago or something the word musta been already played out. So I’m heading to the theater and what do I see, some shitty teen movie actually called “slackers”. I mean in some ways this is better than your average movie that is below average. For example the casting is pretty good. The four main actors are all good. But still. Slackers! Jesus.

You know how in a movie like say OCEAN’S 11, you got some dudes that are supposed to be so cool and good at what they do that anybody would fantasize about being them? I mean they are dressed so slick, and they walk around in slow motion and look cool smoking, and they have an elaborate bank heist planned and they use little gadgets to do it. This is the same exact crap except for losers in college. So instead of a bank heist they have an elaborate scheme to cheat on a test, but they still use gadgets, and have a camaraderie and consider themselves a team. And they have their own college loser way of dressing cool, which is to have giant sideburns and wear a t-shirt and a dog collar over a button up shirt. (more…)

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The Fifth Element

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

The Fifth Element is your usual Bruce Willis movie that starts out in Egypt in 1934 and ends up in some fancy space hotel in 2334 with this blue skinned space opera lady singing opera and then busting off dance moves. Bruce is introduced down on his luck, pretty much like in the Die Hards – his wife left him, he’s trying to quit smoking, his mom won’t stop hassling him and he’s “5 points away” from losing his job as a flying cab driver in space age New York.

In fact this is a lot like a Die Hard movie except in a cartoony comic book space world instead of a building. Instead of talking to a cop on a walkie talkie, he just talks to his mom on the phone, and instead of terrorists there’s this big ball of fire hurtling toward the earth that turns light to dark, life to death, sometimes has a giant skull for a face, eats missiles and sattelites, and calls himself Mr. Shadow during phone calls.

It’s a pretty simple plot. There are these four stones that combined with a perfect being called “the fifth element” can stop the ball of fire. These stones are in Egypt but then these fat robot guys come down from space and take them away for safe keeping. But then 300 years later they try to bring them back but their ship gets blown up by these muppet dog men. But the government finds a glove inside the ship and they use it to construct the perfect being, a hot orange headed gal named Leloo. So then she and a priest and Korben Dallas have to pretend they won this contest and go to the space hotel and the rocks are inside the belly of a singer so after she dies they take them out of the belly and there is a shoot out so they bring them to Egypt and do the whole ritual and whatnot.

The appeal of this picture is mainly visual. It’s a real spectacle like some artsy fartsy comic book some frenchy would do. Bruce doesn’t joke too much and he gets some corny lines like, “There are some very good words in V: valiant, vulnerable, very beautiful.” (more…)

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Far from Heaven

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

FAR FROM HEAVEN is the lovingly crafted new film from Todd Haynes (VELVET GOLDMINE), about an upper class socialite house wife (the great Julianne Moore from JURASSIC PARK PART 2 and ASSASSINS) dealing with the shameful prejudices and social pressures of the time. When she discovers that her husband (one of the Quaids, I think Randy) kissing a man, she tries to be loving and understanding about it. Her friends joke about her liberalism and call her “Red” but she naively deals with it as a medical problem, and brings him to a doctor to be “cured”. Soon she strikes up a friendship with her black gardener (the president from that stupid tv show 24) and again tests the limits of her liberalism when she finds that both whites and blacks scorn their innocent relationship.

Part of what makes it work is that the styles of acting, the dissolve-heavy editing, and the music by Elmer Bernstein are all taken directly from the films of that time period. It’s as if Haynes had travelled back in time and created a movie that he wishes they could’ve made back then, dealing with issues no one wanted to face, ones that are still embarassingly relevant today. It’s all a perfect re-creation of the melodramas of Douglas Sirk.

Oh, who am I fooling. I would never have known that if everybody else didn’t already say it. I don’t even know what that means. I’ve never seen a Douglas Sirk movie. Have you? I don’t even know which ones he directed. There is a scene where the Quaid goes to see THREE FACES OF EVE in a movie theater. Hey man, I’ve seen that and I can prove it, I reviewed it a long time ago. So I figured hey, maybe that’s a Sirk movie. But no luck, I looked it up. I haven’t seen any of those movies, and haven’t even heard of most of them, or remember what they were now that I am not on imdb anymore.

To be fair, I bet half of these other clowns don’t know who Douglas Sirk is either. They probaly just read it in the press kit and then wrote it like they knew what they were talking about. At least I had to read other reviews to find out, I don’t get the press kits. (more…)

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Out of Reach

Thursday, June 3rd, 2004

Hey boys, it’s Vern again, sitting out the film festival for a few days or weeks because something much more important came up. Today I managed to get my hands on the video screener I wanted more than any other. You guessed it: Steven Seagal’s new picture, OUT OF REACH.

So obviously, you know, FUCK the Seattle International Film Festival. As one of North America’s leading Seagalogists, I will be watching this many more times as part of my research. But I thought it would be good to share some of my initial thoughts with you and your readers.

Seagal may be at a crossroads in his career right now. As you have no doubt read, he is planning to do a comedy, parodying himself with the help of one of those Zucker brothers. I shoulda known that Mountain Dew commercial was a harbinger of doom. I’m sure this comedy will be one of the least funny pictures of his career, but still, the fact that he is trying to make fun of himself is probaly some kind of a landmark. Once he has acknowledged the ridiculousness of his persona, will that mean he can no longer make serious movies anymore? Because I don’t see Leslie Nielsen doing any movies where he doesn’t dress up like characters from other movies and then that’s supposed to be funny, I guess.

Well luckily Seagal has an assload of serious movies already in production that he’s gonna dump on us before the comedy. This could be the last stretch of true Seagalogy and I intend to enjoy it. This new one OUT OF REACH, you might think from the title that it could be a return to form, going back to his roots. After all, it is his first three word title since, well, since HALF PAST DEAD two years ago, but that was his first 3-worder since FIRE DOWN BELOW in 1997. And unlike either of those pictures, this one has the word ‘OUT’ in the title, like one of his best pictures, OUT FOR JUSTICE. This is his first picture with ‘OUT’ in the title since 2003’s OUT FOR A KILL. But that one’s four words I believe. (more…)

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