Movie Recommendations, Rants and Ruminations
Given the Cowboys & Aliens hubbub and my post on 1994’s Oblivion, I’ve been thinking about phony looking movie monsters. So here’s my list of the Least Convincing Movie Monsters. These monsters are so bad that Godzilla doesn’t even make this list. And the dogs wearing fright masks in The Killer Shrews (above) are only #3. Enjoy.
Crazy Stupid Love is an altogether very satisfying romantic comedy starring Steve Carell as the middle-aged sad sack who has been dumped by his longtime wife (Julianne Moore) and comes under the tutelage of uber lounge lizard Ryan Gosling, who in turn is falling for Emma Stone. Lots of laughs ensue, leading up to a madcap climax in Moore’s back yard, before the film slows down for the last 20 minutes. But, it’s plenty funny (and not many romcoms are these days).
Gosling, who earned indie favorite status playing tortured/damaged characters, is great here as the guy who can melt any gal in a bar with stunning ease and speed. Emma Stone is always good in comedies. Lisa Lapira shines as Stone’s wingman, and Analeigh Tipton is excellent as Carrel’s babysitter.
I really enjoyed the first cowboys and & aliens movie, the sci fi spoof 1994 Oblivion, now available on DVD. It is set in the year 3030 on the planet Oblivion, which strongly resembles a frontier town from a spaghetti Western, peppered with the occasional cyborg, ray gun and ATM machine.
Oblivion is intentionally campy, has a silly plot and lots of tongue-in-cheek dialogue. The scene where the funeral is interrupted by the weekly bingo game upstairs is especially funny. The cast seems to be having lots of fun with the material. Musetta Vander as the rawhide whip-wielding dominatrix Lash and Carel Struycken as the death-forboding undertaker Gaunt are especially over-the-top good. In addition, Julie Newmar plays a cougarish saloon proprietor, and Star Trek’s George Takei is the Jim Beam-swilling town doc. Amazingly, Oblivion rated a 1996 sequel, Oblivion 2: Backlash, in which most of the cast returned.
I haven’t yet seen the $100 million summer blockbuster Cowboys & Aliens, which opens this weekend. Cowboys & Aliens is set on the planet Earth, where Daniel Craig, playing a Clint Eastwoodesque Man With No Name, awakes with his memory erased by aliens and a futuristic bracelet. Harrison Ford’s torch-bearing mounted lynch mob is interrupted by laser attack from an alien spaceship. Saloon gal Olivia Wilde (House, The OC) is pulled into the sky by alien forces. It takes itself much more seriously than does Oblivion, and I only hope that it’s half as entertaining as Oblivion.
A Little Help is a Jenna Fischer vehicle that illustrates the depth that Fischer can bring to even a shallow character. In this dramedy, Fischer is suddenly widowed and must reassemble her life and support her quirky 12-year-old son despite the intrusions of her shrill, micro-controlling sister (Brooke Smith) and their chilly mother (Leslie Anne Warren). Fischer’s biggest challenge is helping her son navigate social life at his new school, where he has told a preposterous lie on his first day.
Kim Coates steals every scene as a medical malpractice attorney. Ron Liebman sparkles as the blowhard father.
Writer/Director Michael J. Weithorn made the very smart decision to hold Fischer’s character accountable for the bad choices she has made in her life. If she were instead written as a completely innocent victim, the story would have lapsed into cliche. Instead, it’s a pretty good movie and a fine showcase for Jenna Fischer.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI2qIul29Iw]
Watch for the original and heartfelt teen misfit movie Terri – it won’t remain in theaters very long.
Errol Morris’ documentary Tabloid delivers the hilarious story of Joyce McKinney, a beauty queen jailed for manacling a Mormon missionary as her sex slave.
Four movies on my list of Best Movies of 2011 – So Far are still playing. The best movies are still the sweet, funny and thoughtful comedies Beginners and Midnight in Paris, along with the riveting documentary Project Nim. Buck is a wonderful documentary about a real-life horse whisperer with a compelling human story.
If you have kids, Pixar’s Cars 2 is an excellent choice (adults will especially enjoy the James Bond spoof thread). So is Super 8, a wonderful coming of age story embedded in a sci fi action thriller. A Little Help is a funny Jenna Fischer vehicle about a sad sack mom. Turkey Bowl is a delightful indie comedy available from iTunes.
In Bridesmaids, Kristen Wiig plays a woman whose insecurities keep her from seeing the good and the possible in her life; it’s funny, but not one of the year’s best. The Hangover Part 2 is just not original enough, and, consequently, not funny enough. Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life contains a good 90-minute family drama that is completely derailed by an additional hour of mind-numbingly self-important claptrap.
For trailers and other choices,see Movies to See Right Now.
I haven’t yet seen the stylish noir The Road to Nowhere by cult director Monte Hellman, which opens this weekend. You can see trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.
My DVD pick is the inventive thriller Source Code, one of my Best Movies of 2011 – So Far.
Movies on TV this week include two mockable films on TCM: the 60s melodrama The Chase, which has earned a place in my Bad Movie Festival. Juarez contains one of my 10 Least Convincing Mexicans.
In Tabloid, master documentarian Errol Morris delivers the hilarious story of Joyce McKinney, a beauty queen jailed for manacling a Mormon missionary as her sex slave. McKinney doesn’t like the film, but she has no complaint because two-thirds of the film is her telling her story in her own words. The humor derives from her being such a clearly unreliable narrator – “barking mad” in the colorfully accurate description of a British journalist. Morris came across her story decades after the kidnapping, when she had her dead dog Booger cloned from “Spirit Booger” into a litter of Korean-named Boogers.
Morris’ last two films (Standard Operating Procedure about the Abu Ghraib abuses and The Fog of War) were as funny as a heart attack. But remember that Morris’ earliest films (Gates of Heaven, Vernon Florida and Fast Cheap & Out of Control) also focused on eccentrics and were plenty funny. Just for fun, this time Morris even leaves in some of his snarky wisecracks to the interviewees.
This is one of the funniest movies of the year and the funniest documentary since The Aristocrats.
Source Code is a gripping thriller, and I admired both its intelligence and its heart. The key is a breakthrough screenplay by Ben Ripley. The scifi premise is that supersoldier Jake Gyllenhaal can inhabit the brain of a terrorism victim for the same 8 minutes – over and over again. Each time, he has 8 minutes to seek more clues. Can he build the clues into a solution and prevent the terrorist atrocity? Gyllenhaal is excellent. So is Vera Farmiga as his handler and Michelle Monaghan as a girl you could fall in love with in 8 minutes. Jeffrey Wright chews the scenery with his homage to Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove. Director Duncan Jones solidly brings Ripley’s screenplay home.
It’s on my list of Best Movies of 2011 – So Far.
Other recent DVD picks have been Potiche, Step Into Liquid and Riding Giants, and Another Year.
We’ve all seen the teen misfit movie. But Terri has some originality and lots of heart. Jacob Wysocki plays an overweight teen caring for his mentally ill uncle. He doesn’t have much going for him until John C. Reilly’s school counselor intervenes, sometimes clumsily (who knows what will make a teen respond?). Soon there’s a ripple effect among other troubled teens. Screenwriter Patrick Dewitt deserves some plaudits for the authenticity of the teen characters.
It’s going to hard to find Terri in theaters, but it’s well worth it.
On July 28, Turner Classic Movies will broadcast The Battle of Algiers, the story of 1950s French colonialists struggling to suppress the guerrilla uprising of Algerian independence fighters. Although it looks like a documentary, it is not. Instead, filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo recreated the actual events so realistically that we believe that we are watching strategy councils of each side. Urban insurgency and counter-insurgency are nasty, brutal and not very short – and we see some horrifically inhumane butchering by both sides.
Among the great war films, it may be the best film on counter-insurgency. In 2003, the Pentagon screened the film for its special operations commanders.
In addition, Criterion is about to release The Battle of Algiers in one of its magnificent DVDs.
It’s not often that I get accused of being too high brow, but my friend Steve has criticized my heretofore well-regarded list of 10 Best Prison Movies for not including Women in Chains (1972). Women in Chains is part of the subgenre of women-in-prison exploitation movies. A prison setting offers a filmmaker the possibility of violence, sex and S&M to exploit. With women’s prisons, nude shower scenes and catfights are added to the mix. Steve fondly remembers this aspect of Women in Chains. But, Steve, it was a made-for-TV movie, so it couldn’t have been THAT racy.
The absolute master of this genre is the website BigBustOut.com – The Original Encyclopedia of Women in Prison Films, which lists over 300 women-in-prison movies. BigBustOut.com also has an excellent history of the genre. I’ve included BigBustOut on my list of Other People’s Great Movie Lists. Here is BigBustOut’s take on Women in Chains.
My own guilty pleasure from 70s prison exploitation films is 1971’s 1,000 Convicts and a Woman, which I saw in a drive-in during a misspent evening of an otherwise upstanding youth. 1,000 Convicts and a Woman doesn’t make BigBustOut because it’s not about a women’s prison. Instead, the oversexed daughter of the warden returns from finishing school and moves into the men’s prison. Played by vamp-eyed blonde Alexandra Hay, she immediately begins to tease the incarcerated, with forseeable results.