31 movies in 31 days

So that's it, 31 movies in 31 days. I had a lot of fun with it, I hope anyone reading it got a few laughs. I learned a bit about film and enjoyed a lot of movies I wouldn't normally have made the time to see. All with the help of my local library. Happy New Year!

Day 31: The Bicycle Thief

Pee-Wee's bike is stolen and he goes on a quest to find it. It seems like everyone has a bike now that his is gone. He follows clues and even consults a psychic looking for answers. He hurls accusations at a young man without evidence. Ultimately he's forced to become a bicycle thief himself.

That's pretty much it, except his name's not really Pee-Wee. He doesn't look for his bike in the basement of the Alamo (since they're in Rome), and it doesn't end with an exciting chase through Universal Studios. Had it had those things, maybe Vittorio De Sica's film would be thought of as a masterpiece. We'll never know.

Day 30: The Handmaid's Tale

I felt obligated to watch something written by Harold Pinter after his recent death. I think I could have made a better choice. In theory this kind of movie works for me, future dystopias are some of my favorites. Be it nuclear war, fascism, plague, zombie advent, or robot holocaust, I'm all over it. This one however, fell short.

I think it's amusing how often future dystopias have their citizens dressing in uniforms, like it's some private school gone horribly wrong. The security forces all wear black, head to toe, and drive black cars with black trim and black wheelcovers, just in case you didn't get the point. The "handmaids" wear red, and the wealthy wives who are to receive their infants all wear blue - some sort of modified futuristic Jackie O number with a white pearl necklace and pillbox hat. Why you'd make even the ruling elite dress in uniforms is beyond me. Perhaps to show how misogynistic the regime was, that even the rich wives were reduced to wearing standard issue fashions?

Anyway, for a better futuristic dystopia about human sterility, see "Children of Men". Also, if you haven't seen Children of Men, see Children of Men. It's pretty great.

Day 29: Igby Goes Down

Sadly I was working while watching this movie, which I think is kind of a shame, because I think it has more laughs and more sadness than I could experience glancing back and forth from emails and remote desktop sessions, work for an office that's supposed to closed today. (Am I Dante from Clerks?)

Anyway, I thought I'd never make a "Holden Caulfield" reference, but this movie just screams it. Compared to Igby, Holden gets off easy. It's fun when a bunch of well-known actors get together and make a movie with a real script and everything. Goldblum is, well, Goldblum, which happens to be perfect for the role he's playing. Sarandon plays well as yet another overbearing mother, this one addicted to various pharmaceuticals.

Day 28: Dot the I

A love-triangle movie with several twists. The acting is pretty good, the male lead is Gael Garcia Bernal, who played Ernesto (Che) Guevara in "The Motorcycle Diaries". I don't want to give anything away, but I will say that it's kind of a chuckle that the film won an award at an indie film festival. Sort of the dot on the i, if you will.

Day 27: Internal Affairs

Ok, so this wasn't supposed to be the movie today. I watched it this morning while I was eating breakfast and trying to decide which of the three interesting movies playing at the theater I'd go see today. I ended up passing on all three and watching hours and hours of hockey instead. So you get Internal Affairs.

Andy Garcia is from said same police unit. Richard Gere is the crooked cop he's investigating. Garcia and partner investigate, Gere has sex with women and kills people. They investigate more, Gere has more sex and kills more people. Et cetera.

Day 26: Patton

Ok so, have you ever seen a movie where the something ruined it for you because it was later parodied or by the time you saw it, it had become such a cliché that it was hard to get past it and just enjoy it? I've known folks who didn't like "The Godfather" because it was full of Italian mob movie clichés. Yeah. Well this movie features a theme song that was apparently shamelessly ripped off in "Police Academy". Having seen more of the Police Academy movies than I care to remember or admit, I can't dissociate the theme song from the nyuk-nyuk laughs of the movies, such as they were.

Good film though, won a bunch of statues. The combat violence is tame by today's "Saving Private Ryan" standards and the horrors of war in general are whitewashed pretty thoroughly.

Day 25: Hana-bi

"Fireworks" in English, directed and starring Takeshi Kitano. I had to see a movie with Kitano in it since learning that he was the man behind "Fûun! Takeshi Jô" a.k.a. "Takeshi's Castle", the Japanese game show on which "Most Extreme Elimination Challenge" or "MXC" was based. You might know him as "Vic Romano" from the series.

Turns out Takeshi Kitano has been a serious actor, writer, and director for many years and is something of a legend in Japan. Fireworks has some great dialogue, punctuated by pauses that made me think of playwright Harold Pinter (whose work I've yet to see except for clips on PBS yesterday played because of his recent death). Kitano plays a retired cop whose wife is ill with terminal cancer, owes money to Yakuza mobsters, and whose former partner is paralyzed from being shot on the job and is now suicidal.

Day 24: Wetback: The Undocumented Documentary

This film follows the lives of several Central Americans who try to migrate to the U.S. through Mexico, as well as civilian and federal border patrol officers. To those emigrating from Honduras or Guatemala, Mexico represents the worst part of the journey. They risk being robbed, raped, or murdered by the police or other organized anti-immigration gangs. There's a rail system that speeds travel across Mexico, but it moves fast and many have lost their legs or lives trying to get on it or being thrown off it. It's sad to think that the way they're treated by U.S. representatives once they've crossed the border is actually an improvement from how they're treated in Mexico.

Day 23: Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

Ben Stein's Intelligent Design propaganda movie, a series of clips from various interviews designed (ha!) to make you think that academics who "use" ID in their research are being unfairly singled out and punished in academia.

Stein fails to show an example of "research" that scientifically tests the tenets of ID. Probably because there's no such thing. Imagine what that would look like: "Ok, trial 239, when I put this drop of acid in the beaker, you'll see that the intelligent designer turns the solution pink. Success again!" (Comments are turned on, so if you can describe a way to use ID in a *testable* hypothesis, please let me know it.)

Stein later decides to abandon his attempts to make ID appear scientific and raises the specter of Nazism, linked of course with Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Because Hitler used eugenics to exterminate people he and his "scientists" felt were inferior and bad for the survival of the species, he was a believer of Darwin's principles. One of Ben's interviewees says Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for Nazism, but it is a necessary condition. Right, just like breathing is a necessary condition for murdering someone. Even if you believe that nonsense, so what? So in the brain of the mush-minded viewer, Darwinism = Nazism. Way to go Ben, you've just self-Godwined.

Day 22: Star Wars

Last night I watched Star Wars and Empire back to back in probably the best way possible, with a group of friends who are also by and large big Star Wars nerds. Tossing out our favorite lines at semi-appropriate times, looking up SNL, Robot Chicken, and Family Guy parodies in between movies, that's the way to watch these films nowadays. This is the first night of the 31 in which I watched a movie I'd already seen, but it was well worth it for these classics. Oh, and in case you're wondering, we watched the original theatrical release versions, not the new Michael Bay(splosions) versions.

Day 21: Schindler's List

Not much I have to add about this one that hasn't already been said. Superb film making and an amazing story. It took 15 years for me to see it, mostly because I missed the theater release, and it's not the kind of movie people just want to sit down and watch in their spare time. Usually I got comments like "You haven't seen it? Really? It's amazing!" followed by "No I won't watch it again with you." Great. So here's my advice: If somebody you know hasn't seen it and seems to want to, watch it with them. Then remind them that they need to watch it again with someone who hasn't.

Day 20: Prozac Nation

Meh.

Day 19: The Last of the High Kings

This movie must have been marketed poorly when it was made. I'd never heard of it and it came out in 1996. On the IMDB page there are promo photos that show the title as "Summer Fling" and make it look like a really cheesy teen sex comedy. They put Christina Ricci and Gabriel Byrne on the cover even though their roles were very minor. The story is pretty good and stands on its own merits without the packaging. Jared Leto plays the oldest of 4 (or so) children of an absent father and overbearing mother (Catherine O'Hara). Leto's character angers his mother by consorting with Protestant girls, betraying her strict Catholic rules. O'Hara is great as a religious and political zealot, and has most of the memorable scenes.

Day 18: The Vagina Monologues

Eve Ensler turned her stage show into a movie for HBO that adds off-stage interviews with herself and some of the women she's talked to over the years. I was struck by how much it reminded me of "Kinsey", many of the women she described had little or no knowledge of their bodies and/or held a lot of shame about them, and a shocking number had been victims of sexual abuse in their lives. Ensler's delivery comes off a bit like she's teaching a staff development class, but the material outweighs the melodrama. Oh, and if you like hearing the word "vagina", you'll be in for a real treat.

Day 17: Romper Stomper

Halfway done, and movie fatigue is starting to set in. I'd been curious about this Australian-made neo-nazi pic for a while and it popped up on one of the movie channels last night. The film is reminiscent of "A Clockwork Orange" in a way, as it asks you to empathize with a group of unsympathetic street thugs. It didn't work very well for me, I still found it really hard to care for the characters as they got beat up by Vietnamese immigrants in retaliation for their bullying. Russell Crowe is the alpha male of the group and does a good job portraying the conflict between his cool headed leadership and the stark-raving madness of his neo-nazi paranoia.

The soundtrack features a lot of punk songs with neo-nazi lyrics. I'm curious if the songs are authentic or if they were written for the movie. Either way it's effective at setting the tone. Unsettling: yes. Watchable: yes. Miss-able: yes.

Day 16: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei, and some moderately heavy-set white guy star in a Fargo-esque suspense flick where two struggling brothers try to pull off an "easy" jewelry heist. The actors do a great job looking stressed out and anguished. Tomei appears nude several times, in fact you don't see her with clothes on until about 40 minutes into the movie. She's got a gorgeous body, even without factoring in her age (43).

So as a fun coincidence for me, this film was directed by Sidney Lumet, who directed "Serpico", in addition to having Hawke ("Gattaca") and the afformentioned white guy ("Buffalo Bills at New York Jets, 12/14/2008).

Day 15: Diner

This one grabbed my eye at the library. It's an ensemble cast made up of everyone who wasn't part of the Brat Pack in 1982. Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon, Tim Daly and Paul Reiser hang out at their favorite diner in Baltimore eating fries with gravy (no cheese curds) and learn lessons about life and love and whathaveyou. Shades of "Swingers" and "The Outsiders", just not quite as good. The high point and really the only great part of the movie is when Guttenberg makes his fiancée take a 140 question test on football trivia before he'll agree to marry her. Nobody says anything as cool as, "Stay gold, Ponyboy. Stay gold."

Day 14: Run Lola Run

Lighthearted and fast paced with a simple plot. And lots of running. In fact, if you like watching Franke Potente run, I'm not sure there's a better movie you could choose. She runs and runs and runs, and every so often she screams. It's fun, and at 81 minutes it's nearly impossible to feel like it's a waste of your time.

Day 13: Kinsey

More Peter Sarsgaard and more Laura Linney! How I got sucked into the PSH/Laura Linney/Sarsgaard continuum I'll never know, but I'm enjoying it thoroughly. This morning while watching the Bills/Jets game they cut away to famous people at the game. Philip Seymour Hoffman was there! I think he's stalking me. How he could be stalking me through the tv I'm not sure, but it's too much of a coincidence.

Kinsey is pretty delightful for a biopic, full of awkward moments and amusing sex talk. It's hard to believe how little people knew about their bodies during that era. It was fun to see John Lithgow reprise his role from "Footloose."

Day 12: Rated X

More boring than you'd expect from a movie about doing coke and making porn. Directed by Emilio Estevez. One thinks a more seasoned director could have gotten more from this story. Clarity, emotion, context. What it has instead are fake-looking bald skull caps for Estevez and his brother. It's hard to take them seriously in those things, and you have to think they'd just go ahead and shave their heads if they were serious about the movie. My best guess is that Sheen's hair is worth more than the box office receipts of this film, making it a wash if he were to cut it.

The Mitchell Brothers are a fairly interesting story of course. But you'd do as well to just read the wikipedia page.

My roommate shared a nugget of joy with me yesterday. He said while visiting Steamboat Springs, Colorado on a ski trip he and friends were drinking in a bar and spotted Estevez. They went over, bought him a beer, and thanked him for making the movie "Men at Work."

Day 11: Boys Don't Cry

Trans man Brandon Teena is raped and murdered by intolerant Nebraskans who were initially convinced that Teena was anatomically male. Spoiler Alert! Oops. One hopes that those not so tolerant of LGBT lifestyles who see this movie may have their eyes opened a bit. Swank seems to have a habit of taking on these "wedge" issues, like in Million Dollar Baby (no spoiler here). Kudos to her in her efforts.

Wikipedia tidbit: Teena’s headstone is inscribed with the name "Teena R. Brandon" and the epitaph "daughter, sister, & friend"

Way to miss the point entirely.

Day 10: Serpico

Al Pacino in the true story of a New York cop who gets himself in trouble for not taking shakedown money, kickbacks and bribes like his fellow officers. Apparently there was no such thing as "Internal Affairs" before Frank Serpico. Great acting all around and a wicked cool 60s party scene with Pacino getting freaky on the dance floor.

Day 9: The Squid and the Whale

Coming from divorced parents I could really identify with this movie. The issues of joint custody and the spread of anti-spouse propaganda were very familiar to me. The film has a certain painful comedic tone to it, if that makes any sense. Sort of like "The Office" or the first season of the U.S. version of same said program. You chuckle while you squirm in your seat as the teenage older brother ruins his awkward love life one gaff at a time. You laugh at a 10 year old drinking a glass of scotch and then stop to remember that the story is actually autobiographical. Ouch.

Directed by Noah Baumbach, who also did one of my favorites, Kicking and Screaming. Not the crappy Will Ferrell soccer movie which used the identical title for no apparent reason. It's like, "I know, I'll make a romantic comedy about how Vince Vaughn plays Joe Schindler, a swinging bachelor who's finally decide to settle down with Rachel McAdams (or Christine Taylor, whatever) and he has this 'list' of things to do before they wed. Let's see here, what could I call it?"

Day 8: Charlie Wilson's War

A farcical take on the planning and execution of the U.S. covert proxy war against the Soviet Union via Afghanistan. I liked the movie a lot, and I say farcical only because in order to show a whole war in two hours, all the actors have very pithy, smart lines they deliver with laser-guided accuracy. (Pithy was the word my roommate used, credit where credit is due.) Phillip Seymour Hoffman is great as a CIA agent. I'm not sure if his uber-phony mustache is supposed to be fake in the movie because he's a spy, or if it's just silly costuming. Either way it gives him a comical appearance that matches his quick black-ops punchlines. No mention is made of UBL in the movie but the message is pretty clear, PSH keeps repeating this mantra. When you wonder whether what's happened is good or bad, the zen master always says, "We'll see."

Day 7: The Kingdom

Much like "Delta Force", this film has an hour plus of taut drama about Islamic terrorists and cultural clashes in the middle east, followed by half an hour of shoot-em up Michael Bay style action and a lot of bloodshed. Unlike Delta Force, there's no Chuck Norris riding around on a motorcycle with handlebar-mounted rocket launchers. Is that a bad thing or a good thing? It's not mine to decide.

Day 6: The Savages

Laura Linney and Phillip Seymour Hoffman in a very human drama about the end-of-life care of their senile father. Good performances all around. Believable characters and conversations, well acted by a solid cast. It's a thinker, making you ponder the mortality of yourself and your parents.

Day 5: Zoolander

Oh Ben Stiller. Really? No, but... really? Besides that my only other question is, why does Owen Wilson hang out with you guys? Just for the money? Pity? Wes Anderson doesn't make movies fast enough?

Day 4: Gattaca

In the future, we'll no longer have a need for space suits. We'll go into space in regular suits. A good story, but the holes in the budget show through pretty clearly. Interesting to see Gore Vidal in a small role. I'd say it's a forgettable film overall, but a must-see for your next future-dystopia marathon.

Day 3: The Motorcycle Diaries

An artsy period piece about the young life of Cuban revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara. The film touches a little on Guevara's revolutionary spiritual awakening, but focuses more on his humanitarian side and his scrupulous and sometimes brutal honesty. It's slow paced like many a biopic, but never unpleasant. I always try to remember when I'm watching something historical that there's not necessarily going to be a moment when "something happens" per se. No twist endings or dramatic showdowns. Just some beautiful scenery and a lot of subtitles.

Day 2: Better Luck Tomorrow

A group of four academic decathletes luck their way into small-time organized crime in their high school. Interesting but not particularly believable. Made worse by the fact that my DVD player kept skipping and screwing up for some reason, making it hard to really stay in the flow of the story. Better luck tomorrow indeed.

Day 1: Born Rich

Born Rich is a documentary made by a young heir of the Johnson family, they of the "Johnson & Johnson" brand. He set out to examine what it's like to be a wealthy heir or heiress, and to talk to these people about a subject that's the last great taboo among the super-rich: money. Definitely worth a look at a slim hour and seven minutes, there are some classic moments where you hate these rich kids, and some where you actually feel sorry for them.

Two things really struck me about it. One was the basic underlying question, "If you didn't have to work for a living, would you work at all?" and the other, "Why didn't any of these kids mention anything about philanthropy or international aid work? Did it not occur to them?"

31 movies in 31 days

It's kind of cheesy, but I felt like doing something like this for fun and to pass what promises to be a fairly slow month to wrap up 2008. I'm going to watch 31 movies in 31 days in December and probably write a little bit about each. No real-deal reviews but maybe a few thoughts on each. Let's see where it goes...