(many, many) recent movies
Sep. 25th, 2009 02:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksB. has been around, and that means movies. It is an odd day with B. in which I do not see a film. Sometimes two. It is one of those things. So, recent movies, and by that I mean within the last three weeks:
M, dir. Fritz Lang. The Goethe-Institut in D.C. was showing this bigscreen and cheap and neither of us had seen it (following my usual Principle of Obscurity, which states that I will see the least famous thing associated with a person first, by mistake: so I had not seen M, have not seen Metropolis, but by God I have seen Things to Come). It's good. You can watch him invent the gangster movie as he goes, just as a thing in passing. And I see why it made Peter Lorre famous, although it's remarkable how little screentime he has.
The Hurt Locker. This film is about a U.S. military team dealing with IEDs in Iraq, Improvised Explosive Devices, set circa 2004. Very wisely it has no particular plot; it has labyrinthine streets, the total inability to get people out of the way of a bomb-disposal operation when a bunch of guys with heavy weaponry is not a big deal but rather something one sees every other corner, dust in the wind, inability to tell where the bullets are coming from, beautifully designed and highly intelligent nasty devices to kill people. Goes off the rails slightly whenever it departs from the basics of its characters doing their job. I still have no idea what the title means.
Julie and Julia. Oh my God Meryl Streep hasn't had this much fun in years. She makes a spectacular Julia Child, all towering frame and ridiculous swoopy voice and glowing appreciation for everything. And Stanley Tucci is very good as her husband, and it is so nice to see a marriage portrayed between two middle-aged people that is never once anything other than kind, understanding, loving, and smokingly sexual. I think there may have been some other characters in this movie too. (Okay, that's not fair to Julie Powell-- I did read the blog-- or to Amy Adams, who is also adorable. Honestly, though, Meryl Streep having the time of her life is the point of this movie, and now you know whether you want to see it.)
The Informant! So this is going to be nominated for like everything in the universe. And probably win most of it. I hate Matt Damon. He is brilliant here. This is based on a true story, the story of a man who helped the FBI bug the huge food conglomerate Archer-Daniels-Midland for years and bring them to court for one of the biggest price-fixing cases in history, but who fucked up so profoundly along the way in so many ways that it has to be seen to be believed. The film dances from wannabe corporate thriller to serious business movie to black comedy and back again with ease, speed, and grace, finally plunging into farce at just about the point the audience would start throwing popcorn if it didn't. Achieves the remarkable feat of having a consistently entertaining, erudite, and witty voiceover that does not assist you for one second in figuring out the motivations of the person giving it. I was less emotionally enthralled than I was intellectually dazzled, but I was really very dazzled.
Tulpan. This is the greatest comedy ever to be made about Kazakhstan, and that Baron Cohen guy can bite me. That said, I wish this were a better movie. It's structured around the Absence Of A Girl, and falls into many of the traps associated with that; the protagonist is so young and so dumb that I have less than no patience for him. On the other hand, this is a movie they really made in Kazakhstan, on the Hungersteppe, with Kazakh actors, and it's worth seeing just for the dust storms, the unbelievable violence of the wind, which breaks around a yurt like a pillar in the sea. This is a place where people don't even look at dust devils anymore, because there's always one there somewhere. Warning: contains many, many sheep.
Aliens (on DVD). No, I hadn't seen it. I liked it. It's actually a military SF movie, and a good one, and how many of those are there? Not damn many.
The Apple (on DVD).
Okay. So, some movies are bad. Some bad movies are boring, and therefore they fall out of history, for no one cares. Some movies are bad by virtue of sheer incompetence, such as Manos: The Hands of Fate, and they become revered, because no one can believe that anyone is quite as bad at making movies as these movies seem to indicate that people can be. And some movies are bad and endlessly entertaining, not because they are necessarily incompetently made, but because they come from some sphere that is not our own, some logic that is not human logic. You will follow them anywhere, out of sheer morbid curiosity, because they have clearly been made as an advance weapon by invading Zygonians, or something.
The Apple is the best one of that last kind, ever. I promise. Every single frame of it is wildly entertaining, and not one second of it makes any damn sense.
It was made in 1980. It is set in 1994. Rock and roll... has taken over the world. Only, you know, by rock and roll I mean something more resembling disco. And by taking over the world, I mean that Satan himself has come to earth and founded a record company, on account of how he likes disco so much.
This is kind of like the Book of Revelations crossed with Adam and Eve, mixed with a touch of intergalactic Dionysian sex musical. Everyone dresses like Pat Benatar's worst nightmare, has more glitter paint than every David Bowie tour put together, and spouts lyrics so inane you have to stop the movie to laugh at them or you'll miss things. Except the film is much, much stranger than I'm making it sound.
I mean, this thing had a budget. Synchronized dancing nuns! Joss Ackland coming down from Heaven in a glowing white Studebaker! A song called 'I'm Coming', which as the Onion kindly points out is a single entendre. The Worldvision song contest! The dorkiest looking excuse for the Mark of the Beast ever! Extended allegorical sequences set in Hell disguised as a nightclub! Drug scenes where they put an extra green filter over the lens!
And the immortal, unforgettable, terrifying genuine lyric: "It is a natural, natural, natural desire/ to see an actual, actual, actual vampire..."
Don't get me started on the number about how the nation of America is on speed. I think they thought it was supposed to be profound.
I would travel truly ludicrous distances to go to a sing-along of this. I do not know why it did not become The Rocky Horror Picture Show and take over the universe. Possibly humanity cannot handle that much concentrated fabulous. I've heard that Mike from MST3K has been trying to get the money for years now to do a live musical version.
I said to B., you know they wouldn't let you into a sing-along of this if you weren't wearing silver lame? And he said he'd consider it. For anyone who knows B., let that inform you of the awesome powers of this movie.
I am seriously considering getting a tradition going in our household of watching this every Christmas. It was weirder by far than The Pirate, and that had Gene Kelly pole-dancing in hot pants.
M, dir. Fritz Lang. The Goethe-Institut in D.C. was showing this bigscreen and cheap and neither of us had seen it (following my usual Principle of Obscurity, which states that I will see the least famous thing associated with a person first, by mistake: so I had not seen M, have not seen Metropolis, but by God I have seen Things to Come). It's good. You can watch him invent the gangster movie as he goes, just as a thing in passing. And I see why it made Peter Lorre famous, although it's remarkable how little screentime he has.
The Hurt Locker. This film is about a U.S. military team dealing with IEDs in Iraq, Improvised Explosive Devices, set circa 2004. Very wisely it has no particular plot; it has labyrinthine streets, the total inability to get people out of the way of a bomb-disposal operation when a bunch of guys with heavy weaponry is not a big deal but rather something one sees every other corner, dust in the wind, inability to tell where the bullets are coming from, beautifully designed and highly intelligent nasty devices to kill people. Goes off the rails slightly whenever it departs from the basics of its characters doing their job. I still have no idea what the title means.
Julie and Julia. Oh my God Meryl Streep hasn't had this much fun in years. She makes a spectacular Julia Child, all towering frame and ridiculous swoopy voice and glowing appreciation for everything. And Stanley Tucci is very good as her husband, and it is so nice to see a marriage portrayed between two middle-aged people that is never once anything other than kind, understanding, loving, and smokingly sexual. I think there may have been some other characters in this movie too. (Okay, that's not fair to Julie Powell-- I did read the blog-- or to Amy Adams, who is also adorable. Honestly, though, Meryl Streep having the time of her life is the point of this movie, and now you know whether you want to see it.)
The Informant! So this is going to be nominated for like everything in the universe. And probably win most of it. I hate Matt Damon. He is brilliant here. This is based on a true story, the story of a man who helped the FBI bug the huge food conglomerate Archer-Daniels-Midland for years and bring them to court for one of the biggest price-fixing cases in history, but who fucked up so profoundly along the way in so many ways that it has to be seen to be believed. The film dances from wannabe corporate thriller to serious business movie to black comedy and back again with ease, speed, and grace, finally plunging into farce at just about the point the audience would start throwing popcorn if it didn't. Achieves the remarkable feat of having a consistently entertaining, erudite, and witty voiceover that does not assist you for one second in figuring out the motivations of the person giving it. I was less emotionally enthralled than I was intellectually dazzled, but I was really very dazzled.
Tulpan. This is the greatest comedy ever to be made about Kazakhstan, and that Baron Cohen guy can bite me. That said, I wish this were a better movie. It's structured around the Absence Of A Girl, and falls into many of the traps associated with that; the protagonist is so young and so dumb that I have less than no patience for him. On the other hand, this is a movie they really made in Kazakhstan, on the Hungersteppe, with Kazakh actors, and it's worth seeing just for the dust storms, the unbelievable violence of the wind, which breaks around a yurt like a pillar in the sea. This is a place where people don't even look at dust devils anymore, because there's always one there somewhere. Warning: contains many, many sheep.
Aliens (on DVD). No, I hadn't seen it. I liked it. It's actually a military SF movie, and a good one, and how many of those are there? Not damn many.
The Apple (on DVD).
Okay. So, some movies are bad. Some bad movies are boring, and therefore they fall out of history, for no one cares. Some movies are bad by virtue of sheer incompetence, such as Manos: The Hands of Fate, and they become revered, because no one can believe that anyone is quite as bad at making movies as these movies seem to indicate that people can be. And some movies are bad and endlessly entertaining, not because they are necessarily incompetently made, but because they come from some sphere that is not our own, some logic that is not human logic. You will follow them anywhere, out of sheer morbid curiosity, because they have clearly been made as an advance weapon by invading Zygonians, or something.
The Apple is the best one of that last kind, ever. I promise. Every single frame of it is wildly entertaining, and not one second of it makes any damn sense.
It was made in 1980. It is set in 1994. Rock and roll... has taken over the world. Only, you know, by rock and roll I mean something more resembling disco. And by taking over the world, I mean that Satan himself has come to earth and founded a record company, on account of how he likes disco so much.
This is kind of like the Book of Revelations crossed with Adam and Eve, mixed with a touch of intergalactic Dionysian sex musical. Everyone dresses like Pat Benatar's worst nightmare, has more glitter paint than every David Bowie tour put together, and spouts lyrics so inane you have to stop the movie to laugh at them or you'll miss things. Except the film is much, much stranger than I'm making it sound.
I mean, this thing had a budget. Synchronized dancing nuns! Joss Ackland coming down from Heaven in a glowing white Studebaker! A song called 'I'm Coming', which as the Onion kindly points out is a single entendre. The Worldvision song contest! The dorkiest looking excuse for the Mark of the Beast ever! Extended allegorical sequences set in Hell disguised as a nightclub! Drug scenes where they put an extra green filter over the lens!
And the immortal, unforgettable, terrifying genuine lyric: "It is a natural, natural, natural desire/ to see an actual, actual, actual vampire..."
Don't get me started on the number about how the nation of America is on speed. I think they thought it was supposed to be profound.
I would travel truly ludicrous distances to go to a sing-along of this. I do not know why it did not become The Rocky Horror Picture Show and take over the universe. Possibly humanity cannot handle that much concentrated fabulous. I've heard that Mike from MST3K has been trying to get the money for years now to do a live musical version.
I said to B., you know they wouldn't let you into a sing-along of this if you weren't wearing silver lame? And he said he'd consider it. For anyone who knows B., let that inform you of the awesome powers of this movie.
I am seriously considering getting a tradition going in our household of watching this every Christmas. It was weirder by far than The Pirate, and that had Gene Kelly pole-dancing in hot pants.
