2008 Lists and the Mommy Matinee
With the arrival of Milo into our home has come the inevitable narrowing of our cultural window into the rest of the world, which I guess in retrospect is no big deal.
I did see some good concerts ahead of his July arrival, the best of which were: 1) Stars of the Lid at the Lakeshore Theatre; 2) Los Campesinos at the Empty Bottle; 3) Klapa Groelin at the Chicago Cultural Center. We also caught a pretty cool interpretation of The Brothers Karamazov, my favorite novel, at the Lookingglass Theatre earlier this month. My favorite CD’s of the year are: 1) Sigur Ros: “Med Sud Iegrum Vid Spilum Endalausf (I think I got that right); 2) Los Campesinos: “Hold On Now Youngster” (that’s the first CD and not the new one); and 3) Bark Psychosis: “Codename: Dustsucker”.
My reading has been dominated by a lot of investment books, which I felt somewhat compelled to peruse in light of the fact that I’ve been rapidly frittering away our small family fortune with nothing to show for it other than fret and tears. One thing that I’ve found about investment writers is that even the good ones are much better at the investing than they are at the writing. These guys are the kings of turgid, paint-by-numbers prose. They almost make academics look interesting by comparison. That said, I also did a little reading for my own enjoyment, and my favorite reads this year were 1) Janna Levin: “A Madman Dreams of Touring Machines”; 2) Tim Flannery: “The Eternal Frontier”; and 3) Seneca: “On the Shortness of Life”.
I’ve never been much of a movie guy. I just don’t relate to most visual media; I prefer music and literature, and most movies make me feel like I’m being manipulated. However, the movie theatre, in particular the mommy matinee being offered at some theatres on Tuesday mornings, has now become one of my few cultural lifelines, and I look forward to our treks to the cinema each week, Milo and I rolling into the theatre, hot dog, large cup of cherry Coke, and milk bottle in hand. I’ve actually been surprised at how much I’ve enjoyed many of these films. Here then is a complete list of all the movies that I’ve seen over this past year, rated in approximate order, from first to worst:
Three Brilliant Ones:
1) Heima: Chronicles Sigur Ros’ summer concert tour across Iceland, where they play everywhere from open fields and the bowels of an abandoned fish cleaning factory to a large festival in Reykjavik. The music, the countryside, the people, everything about this film is beautiful, in that gnarled, Icelandic kind of way. Seriously, by all rights this band should be bigger than Coldplay or the Beatles.
2) A Winter’s Tale: Ingmar Bergman’s tale of doubt, centered on the pastor of a dying church and his crisis of faith. The spider God makes his return (see “Through A Glass Darkly” below), but the movie concludes with possibly the most moving apologia for the passion of Christ that I have ever heard, touching on Jesus’ own torment and doubt as he cries out “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani” - My God, my God, why have you forsaken me - on the cross.
3) Juno: As an adopted child who recently adopted a child myself, I’m probably a bit biased here, but I think this is a great film. The best aspects are its humor and its small triumphs, capturing with simple brushstrokes the intensity and idiosyncrasy of Juno, a pregnant teen in small town Minnesota. Having recently hung out with some of the teenagers of McHenry, Illinois as part of the adoption process, I can vouch for their enthusiasm, their passion, their ability to make a joke out of just about anything. That enthusiasm was something that, as I creep into middle age, I had almost forgotten about. This movie helped me experience both the feelings of betrayal and the wide-eyed excitement that go along with being young.
Twelve Good Ones:
4) What We Do Is Secret: Hey, I was there, or at least on the periphery, and I can say that this movie does a better job encapsulating the appeal of the Germs, warts and all, than I could have imagined. In fact, I’m surprised that the movie even got made, because it lays out the scene just like it was, portraying Darby Crash as a nihilist, and a bit of a fascist wannabe if the truth be told, who through the sheer force of his persona created a musical cult around himself, with the best evidence of his cultural divinity lying in the riots that accompanied almost every Germs show, blood and broken glass the bread and wine of his punk rock sacrament. See my Aug 26 entry for more detail about the film.
5) Sunshine: A beautiful film, both visually and sonically, about a manned space probe loaded with a large nuclear weapon that has been sent to reignite the heart of our dying sun.
6) Lars and the Real Girl: A sweet, funny story of a loner, his love for a blow up sex doll, and the small Wisconsin town that comes together to support him. I’d like to believe that small Midwestern towns are both this kind and understanding, so I guess this is my type of feel good movie, where I suspend any feelings of disbelief to live vicariously through the world being portrayed on film. Actually, I think most of my neighbors here on the Northwest side would pretend that a blow up doll was my fiancé if they were told beforehand that I needed their support, and I know our church collectively shrugged its shoulders and then welcomed the gay threesome that joined us a few years ago, so I guess things are changing, and maybe we just need to expand our standard Middle American kindnesses and courtesies to everyone, that it’s really that simple.
7) Through A Glass Darkly: Back in the 1950’s, Bergman won an academy award for this movie, but it is such a prototypical European art film that it was hard not to laugh at times, like when the family ran out back and performed some overly stylized play as a birthday present for their recently-returned father. The movie tells the story of a self-absorbed middle-aged writer, his insecure teenage son, his crazy older daughter, and the daughter’s husband. Like a lot of Bergman, it dives right into deep subjects, such as the nature of human creativity, our purpose in this life, and whether there is a God. In the end, God does make an appearance, but the certifiably loony daughter is the only one who sees him, and he is actually a Spider God, with a fearful maw, a ruthless Shiva of a god that offers little consolation for our tarnished lot in life.
8) Mama Mia: I typically hate musicals, but you gotta love Abba, and it was fun to hum along to all those great tunes.
9) Flash of Genius: “Flash” is an appropriate part of the title, because this underrated little gem was in and out of theatres before anyone noticed, and the fact that I saw it at all was kind of an accident, as I decided in the ticket line that day that I didn’t want to subject Milo to the sonic bombast of “The Dark Knight” and opted instead for a quieter alternative. “Flash of Genius” is about the guy who invented the intermittent windshield wiper and his decades-long lawsuit against the Ford Motor Company for stealing his invention. I liked the characters, and I liked its evocation of Stooges-era Detroit. Perhaps most meaningful for me was the film’s contemplation of the tension between the inventive mind and the joys and obligations of family life.
10) Nick & Nora’s Infinite Playlist: Kind of a guilty pleasure. It’s really just a harmless little romp through teen flirtation, circa 2008. But I guess I’m a pushover when it comes to watching attractive young folks running around the city, club hopping, drawn to the music underground, whose flame seems to burn eternal, even when I no longer recognize either the bands nor their appeal.
11) Grant Gee’s Joy Division documentary: A solid retrospective about one of my favorite bands, one that honors the music without delving too deeply into bathos. But my most lasting memory of the film can be summed up with the question: Can Genesis P Orridge get any weirder? (here’s a YouTube link to an unrelated GPO message if you don’t know what I mean by this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qFq03QAn3w)
12) Rachel Getting Married: The fact that Jonathan Demme got me to care about these folks is a testament to the strengths of this film, as movies about the joys and tribulations of the rich and pampered on the Eastern Seaboard are not really my cup of tea. Of course, it helps if your lead is the eminently watchable Anne Hathaway. I guess my biggest issue with the movie is the self-congratulatory way Demme presents the marriage ceremony to his audience, as if to say, “Isn’t it great that I’m letting you in to such a cool party?” I like to hear a Middle Eastern folk jam as much as the next guy, but at a certain point it got to be a little cloying.
13) Encounters at the End of the World: Warner Herzog’s view of life at a scientific station in Antarctica. There are some cool images of sea life underneath the ice, but this is a decidedly little film, one of subtle pleasures, and I think Herzog goes overboard at times with the “spiritual” music as a soundtrack for these images. Hey, I love Medieval Russian hymns, but we get your point already.
14) The Duchess: I’m a sucker for well done period pieces like this one. The movie tells the story of the Duchess of Devonshire, an 18th Century English bonne vivante, who marries into power at an early age. This kind of movie depends a lot on the actors, who must convey drama and meaning as the camera slowly pans across their powdered faces, and the leads were all quite good. Ralph Fiennes in particular does a good job bringing some emotional complexity as the Duke of Devonshire in what could have been a one-dimensional role.
15) Appaloosa: A relatively straight-forward Western that has three things going for it: 1) I loved the New Mexican scenery; 2) I could probably watch Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen play tiddlywinks for two hours and be entertained; and 3) if I’ve got to see Renee Zellweger’s cartoon-like face beam larger-than-life across the screen, she might as well be playing a real bitch.
Eight Mediocre Ones:
16) Ghosttown: A comedy with a relatively light touch, about a grumpy, sarcastic, self-absorbed English guy who has a near-death experience and can now talk to dead people. It is a film of small chuckles rather than big laughs, which I appreciated, and there was this one scene where the dead are one-by-one redeemed and allowed to let go, that out of the blue brought me to tears right there in the movie theatre and alone justifies the existence of this film. But tell me this: Why do all the ugly English guys in the movies always get the girl?
17) Twilight: A simple tale, almost to the point of being simple-minded, with vampire fangs a (very) thinly disguised metaphor for a young man’s penis, this had HIT written all over it from day one. The young stars are all very pale and easy to look at (other than the black guy, who is very dark and easy to look at), and the panoramic scenes of the rain forests of the Pacific Northwest are equally beautiful. So I was adequately entertained.
18) No Country For Old Men: This one was a big disappointment, although I guess that I shouldn’t have been surprised, as I don’t generally drink from the cup of Coen worship. “Fargo”, “The Big Lebowski”, and maybe “Raising Arizona” are all classics, of course, but I can pretty much give or take the rest of their films. “No Country” had just won Best Picture at the Oscars when we rented the DVD, which should have signaled that it was a mediocre piece of Hollywood crap, but I had bought into the hype, especially on the hope that Cormac McCarthy’s translucent prose would rule the day. I have an ambivalent reaction to Mr. McCarthy’s writing, one that alternates between a revelatory shout and a shrug, and while I’ve never read this particular novel, I can see how both the strengths and limitations of the film had first been established in the book. Strong dialogue, interesting characters, the grasping at universal themes, such as what it means to lead an honorable and a moral life: All are hallmarks of both the film and of classic McCarthy. But there are also the dead ends where major characters wind up, unable to engage meaningfully with anyone but themselves, this odd post-modern frustration of expectation into which McCarthy sometimes devolves, deforming the story to the point where it just kind of wanders into a shrugged denouement and then a weak, whimpered close. And then there is both McCarthy’s and the Coen’s languorous, unflinching gaze at the physical manifestations of human bloodlust, which is also cloyingly postmodern, not to mention a cheap stunt and generally a cop out. At the end of this movie, I just sat there, shrugged my shoulders, and wondered why. Why do we need to know this story? Why did the filmmakers think we’d enjoy watching it? And why did so many folks think this is such a good movie?
19) Slumdog Millionaire: Breezy and generally enjoyable, with a very likeable lead, Dev Patel from Skins, as the slum kid from Mumbai who is on the verge of winning the grand prize competing on a nationally televised quiz show. But I was disappointed with this one, which is edited like a shoe ad or a music video. The directorial use of all the temporal tricks of the trade, jumping around from the present to the distant past and many points between, couldn’t hide the hackneyed storyline: Can this good kid, an orphan from the slums, through personal pluck and destiny, win both the money and the girl? Did I mention that this was a “feel good” movie? Then you probably know the answer.
20) Ironman: I have a bit of a soft spot for Robert Downey Jr., and he does a fine job in this role. And for what it’s worth, I bought into his rich-guy-inventor-turned-vigilante character. And any movie that incorporates a Black Sabbath song into its theme can’t be all bad. But, as with most action films, the last reel was pretty lame.
21) Role Models: I thought this comedy about two 30-ish California party dudes forced to work with a couple wayward kids as a form of community service had a lot of laughs. But the finale, in which all the major characters meet at a Medieval role playing competition, was embarrassingly lame, even by contemporary comedic standards.
22) I Robot: I really don’t remember much about this movie, other than that the computer-generated robot was probably the best actor in the film.
23) The 40-Year Old Virgin: I think part of my problem with this movie is that I don’t like Steve Carell’s face, and I had a hard time looking at him for two hours. There were a couple of funny scenes involving a horny boss and a middle aged Indian dude acting like a hip hop pimp, but you’ve probably already seen them on the promo. I didn’t really laugh that much at this movie, and I find its underlying Puritan attitude (the guys that obsess about sex are kind of lame at it, while the 40-year virgin, who is so tight that he doesn’t even like to masturbate, expending all that excess energy on the stair master, actually turns out to be a wonderful lover) almost as annoying as Carell himself. Also, like a lot of comedies, I hate the ending, when they feel a need to humanize everyone (hey, isn’t the point of comedy to break us down into our constituent parts, to dehumanize us… why do we have to be so relentlessly “humanized”?), and I hold a particular grudge against the kind of cutesy dance montage that they played over the closing credits.
Two Disasters:
24) National Treasure II: OK, let’s see if I’ve got this straight: Nicolas Cage needs to talk to the President because there is this secret document that only Presidents know about, and it is the only thing that can save Cage’s family’s reputation. So he kidnaps the President in a storm drain, gains access to the top secret document, and then high-tails it to Mount Rushmore, where he uncovers an ancient Aztec treasure in a cave below the four Presidents’ granite heads. Alright, I’ll buy it. Oh, and the current resident of the Oval Office is actually a kind, intelligent, misunderstood man? Now that’s ridiculous.
25) Australia: This movie is a monstrosity. Everything bad they say about Kevin Costner or Michael Cimino would more be appropriately pinned to the makers of this celluloid deformity. I seriously think it might be the worst movie ever made, when you consider its pretension and expense. Start with the tepid chemistry between Nicole (Chicken Bone) Kidman and Hugh Jackman, the underwhelming scenery shots (it made the Outback look like an ugly stretch of central Nevada), the insipid dialogue, and the cardboard characterizations, then throw in a meandering plot that seemed to never end (I’m sorry, but I didn’t care if Kidman and Co. would get their cattle to town in time, and the Australians didn’t so much fight the Japs as stand around and get the living crap bombed out of them), and top it off with some heavy-handed symbolism that bordered on absurdity (for instance, the half-breed kid tapping into his Aboriginal roots, racing ahead of 20,000 head of stampeding cattle and then, just before the cattle race off a cliff, getting them to all stop on a dime with a wave of his dark, tiny hands – hey, if the Aborigines were that good, a baker’s dozen of them could have kicked the entire English army all the way back to the Northern Hemisphere). I think my favorite scene, in that laugh-out-loud, this-is-so-stupid kind of way, was the Aboriginal medicine man wandering through Darwin, made up in face paint and doing some kooky dance, while the Japanese were dropping bombs and blowing shit up all around him. This was the only movie in all my visits to the mommy matinee that, when I left the theatre to change Milo’s diaper, I almost didn’t return. But it is only on reflection that I realize how truly awful this film is.
posted by hundeschlitten @ 10:05 PM
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