No Country For Old Men

I just got back from seeing the new Coen brothers movie No Country For Old Men.

Josh Brolin plays a macho cowboy type dude who comes across these bodies while out hunting. He finds a suitcase full of money and takes off with it. A total psycho played by Javier Bardem (with an excellent hairstyle, I must say) spends most of the movie trying to track him down. Bardem's character has a rather unusual weapon - a gas-powered bolt type thing that he uses not only to kill people, but also to blast locks out of doorknobs. Tommy Lee Jones plays the sheriff trying to solve this messy crime, and catch up to Llewellyn (Brolin) before Bardem puts a gas-powered bolt into his skull.

The movie is enthralling from start to finish, often violent, very funny, it looks amazing, sounds amazing, the desert location is great, and I can't think of any negatives at all.

It was also cool to see Barry Corbin, who played mayor Maurice Minnifield in Northern Exposure.

Since this movie was actually released here on Boxing Day, it screws up my 2007 Top Ten a bit, since if I had've seen it last year it would have been in there for sure. Oh well. This shit always happens, since so many good movies are released on Boxing Day, and it's not a good time to go to the movies because everybody else has the same damned idea around this time, being the school holidays and all.

The Number 23

Number 23.
A fascinating number.
Terrible movie.

Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman dead.
I never saw his movies.
But now I want to.

Sickly child Ingmar.
Hit and humiliated.
By his priest father.

A Scanner Darkly

I just got back from the movie palace. I went and saw A Scanner Darkly, the film version of the Phillip K Dick novel about a young narcotics officer who infiltrates a ‘drug household’ and ends up getting hooked himself.
The movie was shot live action then animated, a very time-consuming process no doubt, but the result was awesome, in particular the scenes where the narcs are wearing their scramble suits. The scene near the end in the cornfield was pretty cool too.
The cast was terrific – Keanu Reeves, Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey Jr and Winona Ryder.
I can’t say how faithful the film was to the novel because I read that novel many years ago, way back when I had only just begun to bake my own brain. (What is that sizzling sound? Is there a barbecue next door?) The feeling I got however was that Linklater had been faithful to the spirit of the book.
This one will make it into my Top Ten for sure.

Metal: A Headbanger's Journey

I went and saw this excellent documentary today. (Rest of review sucked so I trashed it. Time to slash the wrists, ha ha.)

Wordplay

Last week I saw a doco that I neglected to write about, and that was an oversight I intend to rectify at once!

Wordplay is a documentary about crossword puzzles, and in particular the New York Times crossword puzzle, and in even more particular, the annual New York Times crossword puzzle competition.

As somebody who enjoys crossword puzzles, this doc was a must-see. I don't do crossword puzzles every day, but last summer I did the Sydney Morning Herald Quick Crossword every day for about a month.

That's pretty lame when you compare it to how dedicated some of the people are here.

One guy admits something he never told anybody before, that every day he writes down his time. He then flips through an exercise book with pages and pages of tightly packed columns of figures. He must have been doing it for years. He confessed that part of the reason he did it was to monitor the health of his brain. A pretty good idea, I think!

One of the most interesting parts of Wordplay was the insight into the construction of a crossword puzzle. Maybe it's just me, but I've never thought about these things as being created by somebody, they're just there in the paper, so it was fascinating to watch the scene where the guy starts with a blank grid and proceeds to put down a word, then colour some squares black, and so on. As to the black squares, they must be filled in so that when you turn the puzzle upside down, they are in the same position. I didn't know that, either, so I wondered if this was a general thing or unique to the NYT crossword, so I checked the SMH crossword, and yep, you flip it upside down and the black squares are in the same position!

Celebrity crossword puzzle fans are interviewed here too, like Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, Jon Stewart, Ken Burns, Mike Mussina and the Indigo Girls.

The doco builds up to the the main event, which is the previously mentioned annual crossword puzzle competition, held in a hotel on Manhattan Island. The contenders here are regular people, outwardly, ha! ha!, but really they are absolute crossword puzzle wizards!

This was a really great documentary. You may think it would be tough to make a crossword puzzle competition exciting, but they succeeded here. It was real edge-of-the-seat stuff!

The Grudge 2

One of the year’s most anticipated movies, for me, has been The Grudge 2. The Grudge (2004) was a remake of a Japanese horror movie, Ju-on: The Grudge (2003). Remakes, at best, can be ill-advised, and at worst, a really dumb stupid idiotic idea, but in this case the remake was ‘remade’ by the original Japanese director (Takashi Shimizu), and the result was one of the most chilling movies I’ve ever seen.

It was the awesome use of sound that was chiefly responsible for conveying terror in The Grudge. When I walked out of the cinema after watching that first movie, I had that ghastly ‘creaking’ sound stuck in my head, and over many subsequent weeks the sound remained there. It made me feel sick and disturbed, but I loved it!

The idea behind The Grudge is borrowed from ancient Japanese mythology, and can be summed up thus - “when somebody dies in the grip of intense rage, a curse is left behind”. In this case the curse was borne of a double murder/suicide in a suburban family home. (It still amazes me how the filmmakers managed to turn such a normal, plain-looking house into such a creepy location.)

Anyway, the first Grudge was excellent and I’ve watched it many times, so when I heard there was going to be a sequel, you can bet I was hyped for it.

Only one character from the original makes it into the sequel – Sarah Michelle Geller’s character. Everybody else is new. The movie begins when two mean schoolgirls take a third schoolgirl (who they take great pleasure in making fun of) to the original Grudge house, which was not quite successully burnt down by 'Buffy'. When the two play a cruel trick on the third by making her stand in The Closet and close her eyes, that’s where the frights and blue faces and long black hair and everything else get started.

You know ‘jump scenes’ in movies, where you know there is a big scare coming, but not exactly when - the director is laughing his ass off as he aims to shred your nerves, and make you jump out of your seat and straight up through the roof? In most horror movies there may be a dozen of those, tops. Well, in The Grudge 2, almost the entire movie is made up of those jump scenes. And in the theatre where I saw it, they really had the sound cranked up, so these were rather effective.

That ‘creaking’ sound is back again, of course, but this time, along with the original sound, there are some new variations. The audio department really had some fun with this one. Ha! Ha! Hats off to them! They did a superb job!

This sequel has been mercilessly trashed by critics, from what I gather, and I could see why. The story seems to take a back seat, and what takes over are scenes every five minutes where either the scary small blue boy peeks out from under a table (or from behind a door), or the scary tall thin blue woman with long black hair pops out of somebody’s collar (or their coffee cup) - either option accompanied by a bowel-loosening one million decibel creaking sound blasting out of the theatre speakers, absolutely guaranteed to make you achieve lift-off from your theatre seat.

Be that as it may, I enjoyed the movie, although not quite as much as the original. (By that I mean the American original – the Japanese is the original original, and shamefully enough, I still have not seen that one. ... *falls on sword*)

Little Miss Sunshine

I tried to start a review of this movie, but I can't write anything. (Correction: I can write plenty of things, but I hate every single one.)
The movie was excellent. It has zoomed into my Top Ten for the year.

Lady In The Water

After work I went and saw Lady In The Water. I know the movie has been really bashed by critics, but I've enjoyed other movies that took such a beating (like The Rules Of Attraction), plus I saw the preview and was hooked. Also, Paul Giamatti stars in the movie and he is one of my favourite actors, so in the end it was a no-brainer.
Shall we have a brief overview of the plot here? By all means!
Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) is the caretaker, or handyman, or whatever you call it, of an apartment building. The place has a swimming pool and Cleveland suspects somebody of swimming in it against the rules, that is, late at night - there is a rule that residents must not use the pool after 7:00pm. One night he hears splashing in the pool and discovers a strange, naked young woman. The woman tells him that she is from a place called the Blue World. She is being chased by monsters that look like large demonic dogs covered with grass and sticks and leaves. According to some legend (actually a bedtime story), if a human makes contact with one of these people (I mean like the girl he found in the pool), then humanity can be saved, or something. (How am I doing with the plot? It's not easy, this one!)
Cleveland, being the apartment building's handyman, knows a lot of the residents and there are some real characters there. One of them, a young man, works out with weights but only building up one side of his body - his right arm and leg are huge, while his left are normal size. Another apartment is host to a group of, I suppose what you might call "slackers", who sit around smoking and drinking and talking about whatever comes to mind.
Cleveland is a man with a tragic past, and the young woman learns about this by reading his diary. I won't commit any spoilers, only say that this element of the story was affecting and well-handled.
This story in fact is a modern fairytale. It's difficult to make a definitive criticism of it, because I'm not sure I understood everything in it, and it seemed very ambitious, even experimental - a combination of fairytale, modern drama, and horror. It seemed to be alternatingly enjoyable and fascinating, then embarassing and self-indulgent. I feel that I need to see it again at some later time to resolve my opinion of it.
Anyway, if you are a fan of Paul Giamatti, you will see it and at least enjoy his performance, which is strong. And it's an M. Night Shyamalan movie. He might have made some misfires, but his movies are required viewing, in my opinion (in particular for his dealing with supernatural themes).

After I found an almost-perfect seat in the theatre, an odd fellow came and sat two seats away from me. He had wild, straw-like hair and sat perfectly motionless, intently watching the screen. I estimated his age to be around early 30s. He arrived with a distinctively peculiar smell, yet not so disagreeable that would call for a seat change, rather a smell of clothing piled up for months in a closed room. But within 20 minutes I was accustomed to it and forgot about it. I didn't notice him again until the movie ended and the lights went up. I looked across and he was holding his hands up in front of his face, but still looking intently at the screen as the credits rolled, looking through his fingers. It seemed to me that he was greatly moved by the movie, which moved me in turn. I wanted to talk to him, to ask him about his impressions of the movie. I didn't though. I got up and walked out before the credits finished. It was too intense sitting there near him with his hands up and his powerful emotions.

Silent Hill

Well, tonight I finally got to see the Silent Hill movie. As a fan of the video games, it was a very mixed experience. On the one hand, the movie was way too long, the story was weak when compared to the source material (particularly the excellent premise of the second game), scenes ran on too long with very little happening, and much of the dialogue was embarassing. On the upside, fans of the games will enjoy many scenes that simulate moving through the nightmarish locations wtihin the games, and the accurate recreations of monsters like Pyramid Head and the Dark Nurses (although the nurses seemed to be handled badly, in that they were comical and many audience members laughed at their actions - surely not the intended effect). However, the horror/gore scenes were a highlight, and horror fans (not to mention Clive Barker fans) who haven't played the games will find a lot to enjoy here, with a couple of scenes standing out in particular: the Pyramid Head woman-skinning scene, and the big barbed wire gore finale.
While by no means what a Silent Hill fan would ever call a triumphant film version of the series, the movie did manage to faithfully recreate many elements of the games, and could also be heartily recommended to horror movie fans.

As a side note, I really like Sean Bean but, sad to say, he didn't have much to work with in his limited role here. A shame. The movie would have been so much better if they used the Silent Hill 2 premise where James Sunderland receives a letter from his wife - dead three years - inviting him to join her in Silent Hill, the small holiday town where they spent some of their happiest times, with Sean Bean playing James Sunderland.
Also very welcome in the movie was the use of songs and music from the games. Akira Yamaoka rocks.
As another side note, it was cool to see the actress who played the Borg Queen from that Star Trek movie.
The audience report is a shameful one on this occasion - a group of teen jerks and jerkettes sat right in front of me, all loudly jamming chip and lolly packets in each others' faces. It was deafening. Only halfway through the movie did they shut the fuck up (although that was most likely the point where their stash of sugary and salty crap had been exhausted).

Thank You For Smoking

Two days ago I went and saw Thank You For Smoking. It was pretty good, but I wonder if anybody else noticed that not one person could be seen actually smoking a cigarette in the movie. Ha ha. That's amusing isn't it? A movie about cigarettes and no cigarettes in the movie? Eh? Eh? (Although you do get a scene where the main character is staring at his empty cigarette pack.)
William H. Macy was in the movie. (I have to see every movie he appears in... one of my life goals, you might say.) Robert Duvall was in the movie, and some trivia here for you: Did you know that the band Smoking Popes broke up when lead singer and songwriter Josh Caterer had a Born Again experience, but he later reformed the band as Duvall? Named after Robert Duvall's performance in the movie The Apostle.
Sam Elliott was also in the movie. I remember him mainly for his part as The Stranger in The Big Lebowski. Elliott plays the Marlboro Man who got cancer and was screwed over by the tobacco company.
The movie had some very funny moments, and got big laughs from many in the theatre. It seems that it was about time such a movie was made, especially for people like me who are sick of the anti-smoking lobby.
The movie will also appeal to enemies of the 'Nanny State'.
Thank You For Smoking is thus wholeheartedly recommended to my dear readers.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston

I managed, at last, to see The Devil and Daniel Johnston after work today. There was no nightclub-type party at the cinema, nor was there a mighty hailstorm/rainstorm to send water pouring through the roof. Everything was fine. The place was almost empty and dry. There were about a dozen of us in the theatre. A man and woman came in after me and sat in front of me and to the right. They looked to be interesting characters, with wild hay-like hair, and appeared to be in their fifties. The woman pointed at me and suggested they not sit right in front beacuse it might obstruct my view. I assured them they could by all means sit right in front since I could see the screen clearly, but they smiled and said they would be fine over to the right a little.
Anyway, to the feature presentation!
Daniel Johnston grew up in West Virginia (that must be in the Bible Belt because his mother often argued with him about his art, saying that he was serving the Devil since he drew cartoons of disembodied eyeballs). His best friend at that time, David Thornberry, admitted that he was persecuted by his mother during those teenage years but he often fueled the fire in that regard, so that he could tape record his mother's rants. He made thousands of audiotape recordings, as audio diaries. He also drew cartoons of such things as eyeballs and men with the tops of their heads sliced off. His main passion was music and he played the piano and sang and made tape recordings of his songs. Later he switched to acoustic guitar in emulation of his heroes. Problem was, he couldn't play guitar. Even in later times he appeared to play one chord with only minor variations, but his voice tone made up for it. Hearing Daniel Johnston sing, it was suddenly obvious to me where the Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev got their vocal style.
The documentary examines Johnston's psychological problems and raises the fascinating connection between genius and madness, and the corresponding obsession that people have with such characters all the way through history. David Stratton on At The Movies a few weeks ago was saying that even after watching this documentary he had no evidence of Daniel Johnston's 'genius' or whatever you want to call it. It was certainly clear to me. Sure he can't play guitar very well, and sure you could say his voice isn't technically great - he's no Russell Watson that's for sure (ha ha) yet the evidence was plain to me (and obviously to many others, not least of which was the guy who made the documentary, Jeff Fuerzeig, who was inspired to make it after listening to a radio show where Johnston phoned in from the mental hospital where he was confined at the time to do an hour-long monologue, in different voices and characters.)
'The Devil' in the title refers to Johnston's obsession with fighting the Devil. It's unsurprising when you consider his childhood environment and battles with mental illness, which can easily feel like battles with demons or the Devil at times.
The Devil and Daniel Johnston was excellent and I recommend it wholeheartedly.
.....
Strangely enough, that couple I mentioned at the beginning got up and left halfway through, which really surprised me. Why the hell did they get up and walk out? I'll be wondering about that for a week!

Jindabyne

Tonight I went and saw a movie called Jindabyne. It was an Aussie movie but for a while it was hard to tell because I saw Gabriel Byrne, I shouted, "What! An Irish movie! I thought this was an Aussie movie!" Audience members told me to pipe down. Then Laura Linney comes on so I yelled, "What! Is it Irish, Aussie, or American this movie?! What what what?!" Audience members threw their Jaffas at my head and it stung. But anyway, those are the only two foreigners, the rest are a solid true blue fair dinkum Aussie cast, mate.
In the movie, Gabriel Byrne and his three mates go on a fishing trip into a hard-to-reach river in the Snowy Mountains. Before they even really get down to business Gabriel comes across the almost-naked body of a girl in the water. After Gabriel freaks out and calls his mates, they have a meeting and decide to fish on, the logic being that the girl is dead, they can't do anything for her anyway. They hiked a long way from their jeep to go fishing, plus one of the mates twisted his ankle. So what they do is just tie her ankle to a log so she won't get carried away by the river then they have a fun two days fishing. But when their fishing trip is over and they at last call the police to report the body, the policeman tells them they oughtta be ashamed of themselves. To complicate matters, the girl was Aboriginal so that turns it into a race issue.
But what about the girl? How did she die? Who killed her? It's no mystery because that is shown right at the beginning, at least who killed her. But the focus of the movie is not who killed her but that these selfish fishermen didn't want to let a dead body ruin their fishing fun.
With a (semi) naked girl's body lying around the whole movie while people go about their lives, it reminded me of the 1986 movie River's Edge, but Jindabyne is actually based on a Raymond Carver short story So Much Water, So Close To Home.
Another problem is that when Gabriel gets home to his wife Laura he doesn't say anything straight away about the body, but wakes her up and seems hotter than usual for her, so when she later finds out about the body they found, and that it was a semi-naked girl, she accuses him of being turned on by it. Woah. Heavy, man. Yet one of the scenes where Gabriel pays a midnight visit to the girl in the river seems to lend weight to this theory. Well, you watch the movie and you decide.

[For some reason Blogger is not letting me upload a frigging picture to this review.]

The Libertine

After work today I went and saw The Libertine. You know that big cliche that you watch a particularly sordid or squalid movie and immediately afterwards feel like you must take a shower? Well, I could use that one here. It would be appropriate. The movie is about the Earl of Rochester, John Wilmot, an actual historical figure from the 17th Century. He's played by Johnny Depp. Depp has a lot of fun with this character, a cross between his Pirates of the Caribbean character Jack Sparrow, Oscar Wilde and Bob Crane. At the beginning he looks at the camera and tries to rev us up by saying, "You will not like me!" Why would we not like him? Because he's an alcoholic and can't keep his pecker in his pants when a woman is around? Who cares. Many people have those problems. And he's a witty guy, very funny at times, coming up with some cracking one-liners. There he reminded me of Oscar Wilde.
Anyway, the reason I wanted to use that shower cliche was that the movie is set in London, and that was back when there were open sewers, so the streets were awash with mud and shit. The people all looked pale and sick, red-rimmed eyes, greasy skin, so when one of the frequent porky scenes pop up you want to scream, "Don't touch that!". Then because the Earl goes out whoring so much, he gets syphilis. There was no treatment for that back then so he starts rotting, and at one point when he is forced to make a public appearance, he is wearing a metallic nose cover because his nose is either about to fall off, or it's simply so damn hideous and would make everybody throw up.
The plot of the movie is simple: the Earl disgraces himself in front of King Charles (by telling a porno story in front of some important visitors), he is subsequently banished to some big boring country house but then three months later gets called back to the exciting, sleazy, filthy city. He loves going to the theatre and one time sees a new actress who gets fruit thrown at her by the jeering crowd, however the Earl sees some talent in her and tells her he wants to train her to be the best actress in London. See? He's not a bad guy at all. Anyway, she says, "OK! That would be, like, totally cool!" He coaches her and she becomes the hottest thing in London.
Did I mention that King Charles is played by John Malkovich? Well he is, and he is very good. Some very nice, dry delivery of lines right there. King Charles commissions the Earl to write a play to entertain some visiting French aristocrats, but the cheeky Earl instead writes a porno show which embarasses the King so he sends him off to go and rot with his syphilis. But the Earl stumbles in and redeems himself in the end by standing up for a vote in parliament that was going to go against the King, so he gives an awesome and persuasive speech, and everybody cheers. So he did the right thing by the King in the end, after all. See! He's not such a bad guy. He just forgot to read the part about the Seven Deadly Sins.

16 Blocks

After work I went and saw 16 Blocks. Bruce Willis plays broken down alcoholic detective Jack Mosley who after pulling an all-night shift and just wants to go home and get drunk (or drunker) and pass out, his chief hands him some papers and tells him he's gotta go pick up a witness from another police station and drive him to testify at court sixteen blocks away. Sounds easy, but if it was easy we wouldn't be there watching it. Well, the dude he has to take to court is Eddie Bunker, played by Mos Def. Eddie is a motormouth - he won't stop talking, but he's likeable so that's OK. At least I found him likeable. Jack just wanted him to shut up because his head hurts.
They soon find out that the trip to the courthouse isn't going to be easy when people start trying to kill Eddie. He's off to testify in a case which will remove a bunch of dirty cops from the streets. These dirty cops intend to make sure he doesn't get there. The bad cops are headed by Frank Nugent (David Morse). On the way, Frank corners the pair in a bar and tries to get Jack to hand over Eddie and go home with his bottle, being all buddy-buddy (they are ex-partners). Jack does the right thing and says fuck you and they get out of there in the middle of a big Mexican standoff.
The movie is a redemption tale, where Jack has a chance to make amends for a failed personal and professional life, and Eddie has a chance to quit a life of petty crime and move to Seattle to start a bakery with his long-lost sister (he was a foster kid). This kind of stuff is often done in a heavy-handed, clumsy and sacharine way, but not here. We genuinely care what happens to these characters, and want them to get out of this mess alive so they can get on with a better life.
16 Blocks also has an 'old school' cop show feel about it, which I really appreciated. It's unsurprising considering that director Richard Donner worked on shows like The Streets of San Francisco and Kojak, not to mention the Lethal Weapon movies, so it's fun to follow the developing relationship between the white guy and black guy here.
Bruce Willis never looked so beat down and ragged as he does here. He's a wreck. A man staggering, red-eyed and hopeless at the edge of the pit. Great stuff.
Mos Def was excellent as the Flavor Flav-like motormouth. What a funny voice! I couldn't help wondering if that was how his natural voice sounded - could it be?
Well, I really enjoyed this movie, and so did the Asian kids sitting in the row behind me. I want to include what they yelled at the end: a cheering sentiment that gave me a big grin, but it would constitute a spoiler, so I had better not.

Note: If I'm not mistaken, this movie seems to follow 'real time', since at the beginning of the movie the time is around 8:30am and Jack has to get Eddie to the courthouse by 10:00am, and the movie is around an hour and a half long.

Postscript: I just checked IMDB for Mos Def and it says he is in another 2006 movie Journey To The End of the Night. What! Has a movie really been made of this excellent novel?!

Hard Candy

I had a halfday today and went to the movies. I saw a film called Hard Candy.
It starts with two people chatting online, all you see is the computer screen and the conversation. We quickly realise it's between a man and a young girl. It turns out that the man is in his thirties and the girl is fourteen. They have been chatting this way for three weeks and now they are flirting back and forth until it makes you wanna puke. The girl suggests that the man meet him at a local diner. What! Are they idiots?! Is she an idiot? She's fourteen, she's allowed to be an idiot, but this guy is thirty-something, he's not allowed to be that much of an idiot.
Oh well, naturally nothing good is gonna come of this misguided tryst...
They meet up and he (Jeff) is impressed by how smart she (Hayley) is. She's really smart for a fourteen-year-old! That makes it OK, right? They get along well, and before you know it she wants to go back to his place. Sure, why not?
We learn that Jeff is a successful fashion photographer. He has a new Mini and Hayley thinks it's really cool. Haw! These young chicks are easily impressed eh?
Back at Jeff's trendy mountainside pad (looks like the Hollywood hills) they get stuck into the vodka but when Jeff offers Hayley one she says 'Wait a minute! I was warned not to take drinks that I didn't see mixed!' 'Smart girl!' he says. 'We'll pour this one out and you can come and watch me make another.' See! He's a good guy really. Plus he's too young and handsome-looking to be a baddie. He doesn't have a pot belly and a big greasy combover like those real nasty men.
I should probably quit with the plot revelations about here since I don't want to fart out any spoilers, so I'll just make some spoiler-free comments and observations:
Hayley looks like Australian popsinger Missy Higgins.
Jeff looks like Kevin Bacon. (The casting agent probably tried to get Kevin Bacon but he probably said 'Look dude, I already played a nasty kiddie-goosing man in The Woodsman. Count me out.')
The movie is based on reports of Japanese schoolgirls luring pedophiles into traps where they attack them.
...
Maybe it's just because I'm a guy and a 'potential rapist' (hello Andrea Dworkin!) but for the entire movie I was convinced that Jeff wasn't such a bad guy at all, that it was Hayley who was the monster. For any thirty-something guy considering messing around with teen girls, this movie is the perfect antidote to such folly.
The movie is intense, and there's no way you will walk out and go "ho-hum", or "whatever". You will talk your head off to your friends about it, and if you walk out of the cinema alone you will collar people in the street and begin tormenting them with your theories. Hard Candy will probably end up being the most talked-about movie of the year. ("Woah! What a bold statement! He sounds like a real movie reviewer!") It's an uncomfortable movie to sit through too, especially for men with testicles.
I would say don't miss this one. It's no walk in the park, that's for sure. It's no picnic, to continue the analogy. It's not a Farrelly brothers movie, there's no doubt about it. But I watched Anatomy For Beginners Pt 2. last night, with Gunther von Hagens chopping up a real human body, so after that it was like Play School. Ugh!
One final word! There's a big revelation right near the end so pay attention.

The Hills Have Eyes

I was totally revved up to see this movie, but from what I had read here and there it seemed like I was in for another sickening experience, similar to other recent horror movies like Wolf Creek and Hostel. I've always loved horror movies, but there were scenes in those that made even me feel sick. I guess that's what horror is all about, but it seems that the latest wave of horror on film is really pushing torture elements to a degree never before seen, and to a level of realism that can be hard to take, even for seasoned horror fans. But this one wasn't nearly as 'bad' as some people made out.
The movie starts off with quotes that during the fifties (or whenever it was) the government conducted nuclear tests in the New Mexico desert. Footage of nuclear blasts are intercut with photographs of horribly deformed babies and small children.
In the present day, a family are travelling through this desert, it's Bob and Ethel's wedding anniversary and Bob wants to drive through the nice picturesque desert, but none of the family seems to think it's a very good idea and they won't stop grumbling about it. Not only that but the eldest daughter Lynne has brought her husband Doug along, and there is some tension between Bob and Doug because Bob is a gun-lovin' Republican while Doug is a gun-hatin' Democrat. There are two other teenage kids, Brenda and Bobby.
They stop at a gas station and the filthy, surly, cigar-chomping attendant tells them about a shortcut that will take two hours off their trip. Ho ho! A shortcut, eh? A shortcut to HORROR, no doubt!
The shortcut through the hills turns out to pass right through the area where the mutants live. They were miners during the nuclear testing and refused to leave like the governemnt advised them to, instead they went down their mines and still ended up mutated anyway by the radiation.
Pretty soon one of the mutants throws onto the road one of those spiked things that cops use to stop car chases, and the family crashes into a big rock. The axle is broken and they can't go anywhere. Pretty soon after that the mutants begin tormenting them. They are a nasty bunch, and it seems that they have been doing nasty things to non-mutated folk for a long time, as we learn when Doug comes across a crater while he is going for help. There are dozens of abandoned cars in the crater.
The mutants terrorise the family, really making their lives a living hell. At one point we hear the classic line, You made us what we are! Boo hoo! You idiots should have got out of there when you were told about the nuclear bomb testing. Everybody else did. Why the hell didn't you, ya dumb retards? Plus they got superpowers anyway. When Doug shoves a baseball bat in the stomach of one of them, he pulls it out like it was nothing and continues beating Doug senseless.
But the cool thing about this movie that is different to a lot of other recent horror movies is that the victims fight back, and turn the tables. The transformation of Doug from a gun-hating hippy into a pickaxe-wielding, blood-soaked Viking of violent retribution was celebrated with loud cheering from the audience, and one of the highlights of the movie. OK, it's not very realistic. Wolf Creek was realistic, but Wolf Creek was also very depressing.
In conclusion, I really enjoyed the movie. It was much better than the lame original. The acting was fine, the soundtrack was very good, there was real tension created, and most of all the bad mutants really got what they deserved after killing so many nice people who were only driving through the desert trying to look at the nice scenery.
I had a 'first time' audience experience: There were two goth girls sitting behind me and to one side and they must have brought something in to eat which had a strong smell. At first the smell repulsed me, but by the end of the movie I liked that smell, and even when I got home and was lying down reading my book I could still smell it. Even now I'm still wondering what it was they were eating.

Broken Flowers

At the movie palace after work today I saw a movie called Broken Flowers.
The very likeable Bill Murray was in this one and he plays a guy called Don Johnston. Don made a lot of money in some computer business and now he sits around his nice house watching old black & white movies and cartoons on his big TV. He's doing exactly this when his current girlfriend comes down the stairs with her bags packed. Yes, you guessed it, she is leaving him. Why? Because he fools around with other women all the time. She calls him Don Juan, and she won't be the last one to call him that in the movie, either, but Don doesn't like being called Don Juan. Considering that he is a guy who fools around with a lot of women, maybe you might take a wild guess and say oh he must be pretty happy, with all those different women! Well sir, no he's not happy, in fact he looks miserable.
The mailman delivers some mail and one is a pink envelope. The letter in the envelope is from an ex-girlfriend from twenty years ago and she tells him that after they split, she had a baby and it's his, and that kid is now 19-years-old and is now travelling around the country trying to find his father. The mystery is the letter is unsigned and has no return address, so Don doesn't know which of his ex-girlfriends it is. Maybe it's even a practical joke, but even though he suggests this, it's obvious he doesn't believe it for a second.
Anyway, he takes it next door and shows it to his friend Winston (Jeffrey Wright). Winston is happily married and has a big family, lots of cute kids running around the place. Winston is also into mystery novels, in fact when Don arrives he is trying to connect to a website that reveals secrets to writing mystery novels, and when Don clicks the mouse a few times and gets the page to load, Winston is overjoyed. Very funny scene. Winston is a very funny, likeable character.
Of course this mystery is perfect for Winston - a real mystery to solve! - and he gets Don to write a list of his girlfriends from that time twenty years ago, then he finds out where they are all living now and makes arrangements for flights and hire cars so Don can go and visit them all.
Don doesn't want to do it, he would be happy to stay on his lounge watching old black & white movies and cartoons, but Winston has done all this legwork so really he has no choice, so off he goes.
One of his old girlfriends is Laura (Sharon Stone), but when he rolls up she isn't there and the door is answered by her daughter Lolita (Alexis Dziena). If you are a *Nabokov fan* you will enjoy these scenes for sure, and the expressions on Bill Murray's face are priceless.
Another girlfriend he visits is an *Animal Communicator*, people come to visit her with their pets and she tells them what the animals are saying. Another very funny scene.
Although there's a lot of humour in the movie, there are also some grim scenes like the one where he visits Dora, who is now married, and she and her husband Ron are in the real estate business. Don is asked to stay for dinner, and that scene was particularly grim and grotesque. People in the theatre were laughing, but I didn't find it funny, I thought it was terribly depressing.
This movie Broken Flowers was very good. The acting was of a high calibre, the dialogue was fine, the movie had a nice balance of humour and misery, and the music used on the soundtrack was very good. I'll gladly watch this one again, for sure.

The people in the theatre didn't make too much noise, only they seemed to laugh in a mean way at those grim scenes, like they felt above all that, as though nothing like that could ever happen to them. Oh well. Let's hope not, eh?

Top Ten Movies 2005

I've always wanted to do one of these, but every year when it got to the end I had forgotten most of the movies I saw, even the good ones. But this year I wrote about every movie I saw, so it was easy.
These are not in order of greatness, but the order in which I saw them. Click on the titles if you want to read my original reviews.

1. Sideways - This movie, along with American Splendor, made me jump up and down shouting to the four walls what a GREAT actor is Paul Giamatti. Don't forget to watch Duets, he's in that one too! He also has a small part in Saving Private Ryan, which I only discovered when I watched it again the other day.
2. The Aviator - Martin Scorsese's movie about Howard Hughes. I liked how he locked himself in the room with his piss bottles. I can see myself doing that somewhere in the future, for sure.
3. Ong-Bak - Tony Jaa is insane, man. I was reading some blog recently where somebody was complaining that there has been no martial arts hero since Bruce Lee. Well, please step forward Mr Jaa! Your eyes will pop right out of your head watching this guy and his AWESOME action scenes. A movie like this makes a laughing stock of movies by such *action stars* as Jean Claude Van Damme and Steven Segal (not that I've ever managed to watch an entire movie with either of those guys, they are so awful).
4. The Machinist - Christian Bale lost about every last atom of fat for this one. He looks like he just stumbled out of Dachau. The guy is hardcore. This movie was a very grim and grotesque thriller, and so great.
5. Crash - I think I only started blubbing once at the movies this year and it was when Matt Dillon pulled the girl out of the car in this one. But the whole movie was excellent. There is hope for humanity yet!
6. Batman Begins - Christian Bale again, this time playing Batman, and doing an excellent job. The best Batman movie since that first one with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson.
7. Grizzly Man - OK, this is not a movie at all, it's a documentary, but I saw it at the cinema, and it's one of the most amazing cinema experiences I've had in my whole life. I couldn't stop thinking about this guy and his beloved bears for weeks afterwards. And I'm still waiting for the DVD to be released!.It's taking a long time!
8. Howl's Moving Castle - Another wonderful animated fantasy from Hayao Miyazaki. This, and his Spirited Away, will delight you, guaranteed.
9. The Magician - Just about every other Australian movie in 2005 had much higher production values, but this was the one that grabbed my attention the most. A *documentary* following a Melbourne hitman and his regular day-to-day life. If your jaw doesn't develop an intimate relationship with the floor throughout this one, I'd be surprised.
10. The 40-Year Old Virgin - Before I saw this one, and if I saw the previews, and if I was Spiderman, I might have said, 'My Spider-sense is tingling! It's telling me that this will be another dumb-as-fuck gross-out movie!' But my Spider-sense would have been wrong because this was really good, and impossible not to like. How could you not like this movie, and these characters? Impossible!

Domino

I left work early this afternoon and went speedily to the movie house in order to catch the 3:45 session of King Kong, but as I was waiting in line to buy a ticket I looked up at the board and it said that session was FULL. Ah! Foiled was I! A decision had to be made: go home or see a different movie? I decided to see a different movie, and that movie was called Domino.
What a stinker! This movie was awful! Boo! Oh wait, I had better write something about what actually happened in the movie...
Domino is apparently BASED on a true story of a woman (Domino) who became a bounty hunter. Domino is played by Keira Knightley. It begins with a big shootout in a little cabin out in the desert then cuts to a scene of Lucy Lui (who plays a detective) interrogating Domino. Domino declares she will spill the beans and tell Lucy all about it. Yay! No need for torture! [There's enough of that just watching the movie.] Now we go back to the TRUE beginning, in England, when Domino was a little girl and her goldfish died. At that very moment she decides never again to invest her love in anything; from now on she will be a real BADASS! Then her mother falls in love with Beverly Hills 90210 and drags Domino to live there. Where? Beverly Hills, of course! But then she goes to college, ends up in a fraternity with a bunch of bimbos and when they start hazing her by calling her boobs "mosquito bites" and asking her how she feels "having the body of a ten-year-old boy" she asks that girl, "Have you had a nosejob?" and when the girl says "Duh! No!" Domino winds up and punches her real hard in the schnozz, busting it up real good. Hurrah!
[Hey, wait a minute! This movie sounds pretty good! What's going on here!]
Anyway, she gets expelled from college and becomes a model. We see her on a catwalk and some other model bumps into her so Domino gets mad and turns around and yanks that girl's hair so she falls down. Woah! She is badass, alright!
Then! Somehow she learns about a seminar on how to become a bounty hunter. She rolls up, pays her $99.00 and listens to a bit of the pitch but then the guy says 'OK break for lunch and see you after.' But it's a scam! The three guys wanna take the money and run but Domino sees one of them going out the bathroom window and gives chase. She confronts them and throws her knife through the windshield of their car and with her badass attitude convinces them to give her a go.
I won't go on with the story because it's too ridiculous and convoluted. Also, soon after that I gave up caring what the hell was going on because it was too stupid. The movie is cut so fast it looks like a really long music video, and every scene is filmed using a heavy yellow or green filter.
The music is awful, I didn't like any of it. One track they have the nerve to play TWICE is some loud obnoxious rap song with a chorus of "MOTHERFUCKER!" The soundtrack seems to be aimed at people who start giggling when they hear a cuss word in a song. Or maybe they use those tracks to reinforce the point that Domino is very ANGRY and BADASS. It could be one, or the other, or both.
Mickey Rourke is in the movie and he plays the main bounty hunter and Domino's mentor. It's a shame to see him in this after his recent AWESOME appearance in Sin City. Oh well, I hope he gets something good next time. Christopher Walken is also in it for a little while but hasn't got much to use. Oh well, he probably got paid a lot of money.
The dialogue is awful too, like in one scene near the end where Domino has just about finished her story, she notices that Lucy Lui has been staring at her goldfish tattoo and tells her so. Lucy Lui knows a lot about goldfish and tells her some facts about them. Then Domino says:
"I'll bet you are in a very unsatisfying marriage and you hate your job."
"Actually, I am not married, and I LOVE my job."
"Well, tonight I'll bet you will go home and fantasise about my pussy."
There's also many, many scenes where Domino is screaming at people, but she only sounds like a teenage girl jumping up and down on her bed throwing a fit at her mother for telling her to turn her Spice Girls record down a little.
People who hated (or even loved) Beverly Hills 90210 might want to see the movie because Ian Zeiring and Brian Austin Green are here playing themselves as washed-up actors, and Domino even punches Green in the face (breaking his nose) for suggesting that she's pretending to be badass when she's really only an angry daddy's girl.
Jerry Springer fans may also want to check it out because there's a big Jerry Springer Show scene where a black woman comes on ("America's Youngest Grandmother!") and shows a chart naming new racial varieties, like 'blacktino', and this of course starts an audience riot.
You know what? It suddenly occurs to me that this movie may actually end up with a cult following. Good grief, yes, it could happen! It certainly has many of those 'hey-what-about-the-scene-where...!' moments.
Yikes! Could I be wrong and this awful movie is, in fact, an accidental work of genius?! Please God don't let it be so! Or forgive me and only give me one more chance to watch it again and realise its great worth!
*falls to the floor, groaning in the Spirit*
[Dear readers, you are invited to comment on the movie if you have seen it. I'll welcome your opinion!]