Beauty and the Beast (1946)

  Well this was interesting.  In case I've never mentioned it before (which is entirely possible.  I forget to mention stuff all the time), I have never had any sort of film education.  I like watching films and I like reading about them but that's as far as I've gone.  I've never taken any sort of film class where you would learn about things like German Expressionism and French New Wave.  I just read websites run by people way more knowledgeable than me and then load up my Netflix queue.

Lots of movie-smart people raved about this one.  It's on TCM all the time and was accepted by the Criterion Collection, which distributes "important classic and contemporary films".  So I figured what the hell, I'll see what all the fuss was about.

Story-wise, it's pretty much spot on the original fairy tale.  Man loses his way in the forest and winds up in a mysterious manor.  He takes a rose from the garden for his daughter (Josette Day) and is accosted by a horrible beast (Jean Marais) who tells him that he is going to die unless he can get his daughter to take his place.  The girl moves ino the castle and eventually overcomes her fear of the Beast's ugliness to fall in love with him but not until he's almost dead.  Then he's transformed into a handsome prince.

This version manages to go a little nutty with the visuals.  First off, the Beast's make-up is remarkably thorough, even if he looks a little like a felt lion.  The costumes are yards and yards of sumptuous fabrics, so much that people look like they're swimming in wool and satin.  Then there are the sets. 

  Those are actual arms stuck through the walls.  The overall effect is very trippy and surreal, accentuated by some random slo-mo to make Belle look like she's gliding dream-like up the stairs. 

I was hesitant to watch this initally because the words "Art House" make me nervous that I'm not pretentious or snobby enough but this was so fascinating to watch that I forgot to pretend I didn't like it. 

Diamonds Are Forever (1971)

  This is the silliest adventure yet for Bond.  

Ok, so Sean Connery is back.  Apparently, he decided not to do another one after You Only Live Twice because he kept having fights on set with the producers.  Hence why they then hired Australian model George Lazenby for the next one.  But George didn't have a good time making the film either and refused to come back.  So they paid Connery a boatload of cash to come and make this one. 

Things got a little confused because I watched them out of order but this is supposed to be right after his wife died at the end of On Her Majesty's Secret Service.  Maybe because it happened to George Lazenby, Connery doesn't seem to give two fucks about canon.  Character development?  Psh!  What's that?

Anyway, Bond manages to kill Blofeld (this time he's Charles Gray) in the first third of the movie and then spends the rest of the time chasing after smuggled diamonds.  He picks up the trail in Amsterdam, hooking up with red-headed hottie smuggler Tiffany Case (Jill St. John).  Get it?  Tiffany as in little blue boxes full of sparklies.  Bond gets the diamond shipment over to L.A. in a coffin and gets driven to Vegas with them by a bunch of wise guys.  Because it's Vegas in the 70's.  Bond notices that everything seems connected to reclusive kingpin Willard Whyte, and begins snooping around.  He discovers that SURPRISE! Willard Whyte is Blofeld who is alive and has a perfect duplicate, even down to the signature white cat.  Blofeld is using the diamonds in a satellite array in order to focus a laser so powerful that it can blow up submarines.  Because that's how lasers work.  Bond and Tiffany work together to try and switch the master control tape to disable the satellite.

It's very silly, as I said before, but not horrible.  At least it's not trying to take itself so seriously. 

Also, Rob and I had the theory that since Blofeld has changed into at least four different people, he's just a smokescreen and the cat is actually the mastermind.  That's why it doesn't matter how many times Bond kills him, he always comes back.

You Only Live Twice (1967)

  Bond!  In Japan!  With ninjas!

Apparently, this was supposed to have been watched before On Her Majesty's Secret Service but I didn't get the disc until way late.  It doesn't really matter, since there isn't a lot of continuity but it still irks me that they were out of order.

Ok, let's get straight to it.  Bond (Sean Connery) fakes his own death in Hong Kong and is buried at sea, only to be picked up by a submarine.  M (Bernard Lee) tells him that the Russians and the Americans are about a bikini strap away from going to war over their astronauts being abducted...from space.  The British traced the signal of the unknown kidnapping craft to somewhere near Japan, so that's where Bond goes.  After his first contact is killed, 007 tracks the attackers back to the Osato Factory, a chemical manufacturing company.  He also links up with M's Japanese contemporary, "Tiger" Tanaka (Tetsuro Tanba) to make use of local resources, especially the lovely Aki (Akiko Wakabayashi).  They learn that an Osato ship made an overnight stop at a nearby island so Bond decides to infiltrate it.  To do this, he must attempt to be as Japanese as possible, which isn't very. 

No shit you guys Sean Connery makes a terrible Japanese person. 

After applying some prosthetics and a wig, Bond-san acquires a fake wife named Kissy (Mie Hama) and goes to the island.  What happened to Aki, you ask?  Well, it's over an hour into the movie so she had sex with Bond and then died.  I think his dick has killed more women than the Hanta Virus.

Back to the island.  Inside a hollowed out volcano, SPECTRE's leading man Blofeld (Donald Pleasance, who gets a major upgrade to Telly Savalas in the next movie) is holding the astronauts captive until war is declared.  Somehow the end game is $100M but I'm not really sure how that was supposed to work out.  Doesn't really matter though because Bond.  And ninjas. 

I have to say, the most unintentionally hilarious moment of this movie was when Donald Pleasance is trying to flee.  He's still holding his signature white cat when an explosion goes off.  The cat was clearly not prepared for the stunt and you can see it trying like hell to bolt free from Pleasance's grasp. 

  Look at its little face!  I laughed my balls off. 

Overall, this was a very weak effort with some utterly baffling moments. I would give this a pass.

Rise of the Guardians (2012)

  Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving and you didn't kill too many of your relatives.  Rob, Christy and I went over to her friend Christina's house for a veritable feast of turkey, ham, and sides made even more amzaing by the fact that they were cooked (perfectly!) by a vegetarian.  That kind of blows my mind.  I took over some cinnamon-chocolate cigarette cookies as a chaser and then the five of us (me, Rob, Christy, Christina, and Christina's husband Frank) went to see Rise of the Guardians.

This has been a great year for animated movies.  I don't know about for regular ones but for animation, it's definitely been a "more is more" kind of year.  Dreamworks Animation has been getting considerably more polished since Kung Fu Panda and are really emerging as a quality alternative to Disney.

Jack Frost (Chris Pine) is a fun, happy-go-lucky spirit of winter until he is captured by Santa's (Alec Baldwin) yeti and told he is being made a Guardian in order to fight the Boogeyman, Pitch (Jude Law).  Jack is not enthused by the idea but when the Tooth Fairy's (Isla Fisher) realm is attacked, he bands together with Tooth, Santa, the irascible Easter Bunny (Hugh Jackman) and the surprisingly powerful Sandman to stop Pitch's Nightmares from robbing all the children of their belief.

This was an incredibly fun holiday movie and my only criticism (and it's a minor one at that) is that I felt like it skewed to a younger demographic than I would have liked.  It was beautifully done, visually, and the voicework was top-notch (especially from Hugh Jackman and Alec Baldwin) but I would have liked to have seen a bit more wit and a bit more bite to the script.  I have no doubts that it will be beloved by many families on its home release, I just don't know if it'll have the staying power of some of the more age-inclusive holiday classics.

Addicted to Love (1997)

  Add this to the category of Romantic Comedies I Don't Hate. 

Remember when Meg Ryan was adorable?  I've never found Matthew Broderick to be handsome, he's always had a very forgettable face to me, but I remember Meg Ryan's heyday like it wasn't 15 years ago.

She's super-adorable in this.

Sam (Matthew Broderick) is a small-town astronomer who gets dumped by his girlfriend Linda (Kelly Preston).  Devastated, he drops everything to move to New York City.  His plan is to change her mind but that gets scrapped when he sees that she's moved in with French chef Anton (Tcheky Karyo).  He decides to start keeping tabs on the happy couple by moving in to the condemned building opposite and building a camera obscura in order to spy on them better.  He would probably be there forever, if Anton's jilted love Maggie (Meg Ryan) hadn't decided to set up her own base of operations in the same building.  Where Sam just wants Linda back, Maggie is out for blood.  Together, they conspire to destroy the couple's relationship.

Doesn't that just give you the warm and fuzzies?  I love it when two people can bond over their mutual hatred. 

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Vamps (2012)

  Do not let anyone sucker you into seeing this movie.  It is candy-coated poison.

Goody (Alicia Silverstone) and Stacey (Krysten Ritter) are vampires living in the modern world.  They're too soft-hearted to live off people, so they eat rats caught doing their exterminator jobs and take night school to appear normal.  Goody was made back in 1841 but pretends to have only been a vampire as long as Stacey has (since the 1980s), even though she finds the technology of today to be absolutely incomprehensible.  Still, she muddles through until Stacey starts dating Joey Van Helsing (Dan Stevens), whose father (Wallace Shawn) is a noted vampire hunter.  When Stacey gets pregnant --because that's a thing that happens-- Goody realizes that the only way for her to keep the baby is to kill their Stem, the vampire that sired them, because then they'll turn human again.

I can't even begin to number the ways this movie tried too hard.  It crammed in pretty much every single vampire trope, too many guest stars, and random clips from far better movies like The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Metropolis, and the original Nosferatu. I thought Sigourney Weaver was the one shining stand-out in this whole gloopy mess.  She doesn't get the opportunity to do comedy very often and she went for it here, as the campy scenery-chewing Cisserus. 

If this movie had come out in 1999, when Alicia Silverstone was still relevant, it might have been more palatable but as is, it's too syrupy, too haphazard, and too whiny.  Half the movie is spent complaining about how the character doesn't feel connected to the world anymore because of the prevalence of social media.  This is not news.  It's not timely and it's not funny.  The movie's tagline might as well have been "Wah!  I'm old!"

Twilight: Breaking Dawn (2011) (2012)

 I couldn't find a single poster for this movie that didn't make me want to gag so here's a picture of a kitten instead.

You're welcome.

I have now been forced to watch the entirety of the Twilight series (at least until October) and I have to say, this is the worst of the lot.  They stopped even trying to pretend anyone who wasn't already a Twilight fan would be interested in these movies.  Nobody is introduced, random people speak lines and then are never seen again (Maggie Grace?  Really?) and it's supposed to create some sort of dramatic tension.

In a word, baffling.

It starts with the wedding of Sparkles McFangface to Stick Girl.  Chief No-Peeing-on-the-Carpet is very upset by his invitation, presumably because he wanted to be the flower girl and not an usher.  He turns into an orange marshmallow wolf and runs away to lick his own genitals since it's clear now (like it hasn't been for the last three movies) that Stick Girl is never going to do it for him.  Tough break, kid.  Next time, be a director.

Yeah, I went there.

Little Wooden Doll is very happy because she's finally going to get to be a vegetarian vampire (ugh) like her sparkly smooshy-bear.  For his part, Fangface whisks her away to a private island so they can have some alone time...to play chess and engage in the most awkward wedding night since Liza Minnelli's.  I will say that, when she is not doing her flycatcher impersonation, Kristen Stewart is actually quite pretty.  Unfortunately, those moments are few and far between. 

But that's okay, because once she finds out she's spawning a miniature fake-bacon vampire, the focus shifts from her "how do I get my obviously gay husband to look at me now that he's performed his nuptial duties?" dilemma to Chief Barks-at-Passing-Cars.  He is shocked that two people who went on a honeymoon would come back when one of them gets pregnant.  Shocked and appalled, because ew!  She's huge now.  Due to the length of the average Twihard's attention span, the development of the fetus is sped up to ludicrous levels and Stick Girl turns into Lumpy Spawn-Carrier in about ten minutes.  Puppy Breath runs and tells all his doggie friends that Stick Girl is expecting and they lose their collective doggie minds, declaring war on the vampires.  Seriously, one of these two groups needs to just move.  They are the worst neighbors.

Anyway, Stick Girl is being eaten alive by her stupid progeny and gets almost skinny enough for the cover of Vogue before the fetus karate chops her spine in half and Fangface has to do an emergency C-section...with his teeth.  I had heard that part in the book was incredibly graphic and I was curious how they were going to handle it in a PG-13 manner.  It was very tastefully done, with lots of blurring and seizure-inducing flashes of darkness.  The creature is born and from the first moment Dogboy sees her, he knows his red rocket won't fly for anyone else.  Which is gross because she's like a minute old.  Stick Girl dies despite being shot with Fangface's "venom" in pretty much every limb.  But she's not really dead because there's a part two of this movie coming in October.  "But what about that whole 'war against the vampires' the werewolves declared?" you ask.  Well, kiddies, since Dogboy chose Baby Vamp as his soulmate, the werewolves can't harm her or they risk breaking their most sacred law that no one had ever heard of or mentioned prior to this movie.  And that's what we in the writing biz call "Getting Out of a Corner You Painted Yourself Into". 

I'm sure Christy thought I was just being a hateful bitch (which I usually am) when I asked if this movie had a plot, but I was genuinely curious.  The wedding and the honeymoon bits lasted fucking forever and served absolutely no purpose as far as I could tell.  Rob called it fan service.  I call it two hours of my life I'll never get back. 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm just going to roll up my review of the second part like I did with Deathly Hallows.  Christy dragged me to the theater to see the final half of this final movie.  I was not pleased.  Consider this your SPOILER warning.

When we last left Little Wooden Doll, she was being turned into a vampire.  Yay for her.  She adjusts to her new abilities a lot better than she adjusts to the news that her faithful doggie companion Jacob has claimed her offspring.  Guess she was really hoping to get rid of him after he realized she was actually married to the other guy. Personally, I would have just waved a stick for him then thrown it off a cliff.  Fetch!  Because Stephanie Meyers is lazy, the baby grows at an exponential rate and within 15 minutes of the movie, she's an actual child.  A different vampire named Irina (Maggie Grace) sees the little abomination and thinks the worst:  that the Cullens have turned a child into a vampire like Kirsten Dunst in Interview with a Vampire.  Clearly, Irina is worried about what the exposure to Tom Cruise in a blond wig will do to this fledgling, so she runs off to Italy to tell the real vampires all about it.  Plot-hole-filler Alice (Ashley Greene) tells the Cullens that the Volturi are coming to massacre them so they put out the word to their tastefully ethnically diverse friends around the world.  Not to finally show those uppity Dracula wannabes what-for, no, it's so they can talk it out.  Diplomacy!  That's what's going to work here.  The two sides face off over a convenient snow-covered field.

Here's where it gets awesome.  That's right, awesome.  Psychic plot-hole filler shows up and goes to reason with Aro (Michael Sheen), the main Volturi dude, but she can see that no matter what she tells him, he came there for a fight and he's not leaving without one.  Big ass battle happens.  The super-blonde father figure Cullen (Peter Facinelli) gets his head ripped off.  I was not expecting it since Christy told me none of the main characters die in the book.  I laughed so hard when that happened I thought I was going to get stabbed by some Twi-hard.  It was amazing.  Then some shitty CGI werewolves die and Christy gasps next to me like they were her flesh and blood.  I'll be honest, until I saw her react I didn't even know I was supposed to recognize them as real characters.  The actual actors got no face time.  None.  It was CGI werewolves all the way.  Still, the more dead characters the better.  Sparkly Wooden Doll uses her newfound powers to defend her weak-ass husband and together they manage to defeat Aro, popping his head off his shoulders like a gothy Ken doll. 

And then pan out, everybody is exactly where they were and Alice is saying "...and that's what will happen if you don't leave." 

Yep, all of that was her bullshit vision.

And that perfectly encapsulates everything I hate about this series.  It is sophmoric and lazy, set in a world with zero consequences.  You're a teenage girl in a dangerous situation?  Don't worry, a man will save you.  You almost die from a risky pregnancy?  Don't worry, you'll just become a vampire and never have to worry about age or disease ever again.  Your werewolf buddies find your child to be an abomination?  Don't worry, one of them will have been destined to be her soulmate and all is forgiven.  Other vampires hate you?  Don't worry, some psychic will show them a vision of their future so terrible they'll just give up and go home.  That's not life, that's suspended animation.  It's a child's wish for the world.  They might as well have coated every character in plastic or pinned them to the walls like a collection of butterflies.  Beautiful, but frozen and lifeless. 

Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

Nominated for:  Best Animated Feature (Wreck-It Ralph), Best Short Animated Feature (Paperman)    This was the cutest fucking movie I have seen in a long time.  It was almost unbearably adorable.

First, it started with this beautiful short called Paperman, about a guy who meets a girl on a train platform when the wind blows one of his papers into her face, leaving a perfect lipstick impression on it.  They share a giggle, but then she boards a train before he can talk to her.  At his boring office job, he sees the same girl in a building across the street but he can't call out to her without drawing attention from his boss.  So he makes dozens of paper airplanes, launching them across the way to try and get her attention. 

Super super cute.  The whole thing is black and white in that gorgeous hand-drawn style with red lipstick as the only point of color.  It's already qualified to be on the shortlist for the Best Animated Short Oscar category, which isn't a guaranteed nomination but it's a step in the right direction.

On to the feature.  Ralph (John C. Reilly) is the antagonist of an arcade game called Fix It, Felix, Jr.!  Every time a quarter is put in, he runs out and starts wrecking the apartment building while Felix Jr. (Jack McBrayer) fixes it with his magic hammer.  When the player wins, Ralph is thrown from the top of the building into the mud.  But this callous treatment doesn't just end when the game is over.  Reviled by the people of Niceland, Ralph lives in the dump while Felix gets the penthouse.  At their 30th anniversary, Ralph tries to make nice but is told in no uncertain terms that he is unwanted.  He decides to give up being the bad guy and see if he can win a medal as a hero in another game.  He joins Hero's Duty as a space marine under the command of super-tough chick Calhoun (Jane Lynch) battling space bugs that morph into whatever they eat.  He manages to score a medal but winds up with one of the newly hatched psy-bugs in his escape pod.  He crashes into Sugar Rush, a game that's kind of like Candyland with Go-Karts.  The bug disappears into the taffy swamp.  But Ralph has a new problem:  precocious Vanellope von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman), a glitch who desperately wants to be a racer.  She steals Ralph's medal to buy her way into the line-up race.  Initially furious, Ralph starts to feel bad when he realizes that Vanellope is treated pretty much the same way by the other racers as he was by the Nicelanders.  They band together to try and win the race.  Meanwhile, Felix Jr. is frantically trying to find Ralph before their game is declared unplayable.  He runs into Calhoun who tells him that the psy-bug will multiply and destroy whatever game its in if it isn't stopped. 

This was seriously one of the best movie experiences I've had in a long time.  It was fun for pretty much any age, whether you play video games or not.  There are a ton of appearances from famous arcade characters and games that even I recognized.  The animation is beautiful, especially in Sugar Rush, and all of the voice actors are fantastic.  This is almost a shoe-in to get a Best Animated feature nod and I would say that it's even better than Brave.  It's one of the best films of the year that I've seen so far.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)

  Bond is back, except now he's George Lazenby instead of Sean Connery.  This is not a good trade.  It's especially worse since this is one of the best scripts I've seen from the Bond movies so far.  There was a lot of room here for genuine pathos but it's mostly squandered by Lazenby.

James Bond is driving around when he sees a woman trying to drown herself in the ocean.  Not wanting the world to be bereft of hot women, he jumps in and saves her.  For this he is attacked by random dudes and the girl runs off.  He sees her again at a casino and is again set upon by these henchmen.  They take him down to the basement and he meets with mob boss Draco (Gabriele Ferzetti) who explains that the hot chick is his daughter Tracy (Diana Rigg) who has been super-depressed.  Draco wants Bond to woo Tracy out of her funk and give her something else to focus on.  He offers Bond a million dollars but Bond wants information.  Specifically, the location of Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Telly Savalas), the head of SPECTRE.  Tracy insists on not being used as a prize and forces her daddy to just give Bond the information without any strings.  Blofeld is holed up in the Swiss Alps at a super-private allergy research center.  Bond starts dating Tracy anyway, because why not?  He also travels to Switzerland under the ruse of validating Blofeld's hereditary title.  He finds the allergy center populated exclusively by hot women from around the globe.  Once again, his wandering dick gets him into trouble and his cover is blown.  From that point, it's pretty much non-stop action.

This is where it gets spoilery so be ye forewarned.

Bond marries Tracy at the end of the movie, but just as they are driving away, Blofeld and his sidekick Irma Bunt (Ilsa Steppat) fire on the car.  Bond is fine but Tracy dies.  Out of all the previous Bond films, this is the most punch that's been produced from the death of a female character, because it feels tragic and random and thus more like real life.  It speaks to a deep fear in all of us that happiness is fleeting and death is always waiting just around the corner.

Adam and Eve (2005)

    This was one of the worst movies I've ever seen.  It's completely devoid of humor.  Not even frat-boy dick and fart jokes humor.  It has nothing.  It is poorly written, terribly acted, and an utter waste of a DVD.  Of course it's Christy's, but here's the thing:  she doesn't even like this movie.  In fact, she called it the worst movie she's ever seen (and that's saying something).  Why does she own it?  Who the hell knows.

Adam (Cameron Douglas) wants to have sex with his girlfriend Eve (Emmanuelle Chriqui) but she's waiting for the "perfect" moment.  His retarded frat-brothers make fun of him for holding out.  That's all there is.

They drag this out over a year.  A year.  I'd have dumped her frigid ass within a month.  Not that I'm saying you should get your V-card punched by the first person who asks, but if you're still on the fence about sleeping with a dude after a year, cut him loose.  You're not doing anyone any favors.  His friends are sick of hearing about it.  Your friends are sick of hearing about it.  Mount him on your wall or release him back to the wild. 

The End.

Thunderball (1965)

  I really don't have an intro for this one.

James Bond (Sean Connery) is always on the job, no matter what he's actually doing.  Whether it's escaping from a manor house by jet pack or relaxing at a spa, he's always got an eye out for danger.  And easily coerced female spa employees.  This serves him well when M (Bernard Lee) puts him on the case of two missing nuclear warheads.  Their old nemesis SPECTRE is back up to nasty little tricks, demanding millions of dollars in diamonds for the return of the warheads.  Henchman #2, Emil Largo (Adolfo Celi), has the warheads safely hidden in the Caribbean, he thinks, but he also has a hot mistress named Domino (Claudine Auger) and as everyone knows, Bond can sniff out beautiful women like a shark can sniff out a wounded fish.  It's this weakness that fiery assassin Fiona (Luciana Paluzzi) is counting on.

This movie spent about half its running time underwater and there are some great shots of wildlife and reefs interspersed amongst the scuba fighting.  Plotwise, there are a number of elements I could have done without but it's not too bad.  I just think a "less is more" approach would have been better here.  I will say it was nice to see where exactly Mike Meyers got the inspiration for Robert Wagner's character in The Spy Who Shagged Me.  As soon as I saw the eyepatch, I was sold.

The Raven (2012)

Happy Veteran's Day!  Here's a completely unrelated movie!    When I first heard about this movie, I was very excited.  John Cusack playing Edgar Allen Poe in a murder mystery?  That's like Godiva truffles stuffed into Lo Mein and wrapped in a pepperoni pizza.  But like some favorite things, these elements were better off separate. 

Edgar Allen Poe (John Cusack) is on his way to being a complete alcoholic when he is picked up and questioned for a murder of two women in a locked room.  A situation eerily similar to a story Poe had published years ago.  Detective Fields (Luke Evans) enlists Poe's help as a consultant when it becomes clear that the murderer is using the various stories to strike ever closer within Poe's circle of acquaintances, until finally kidnapping Emily (Alice Eve), the poet's girlfriend. Using Emily as a hostage, the killer taunts police with clues on each subsequent victim, pitting his genius against Poe's. 

There was no reason why I should have disliked this movie.  It's competently acted, if a little shout-y, by good actors, dependable actors.  The mood, the cinematography, the set dressing, the music all came together.  It had an adequate number of thrills with a decently thought out plot.  It's not the greatest or most innovative but it told a story and told it thoroughly. 

I still didn't like it. 

But I can't put my finger on why I didn't like it.  That bothers me more than anything else.  It's one thing to say I didn't like Water for Elephants.  Sappy romances just don't do it for me.  That's acceptable.  What is not acceptable is to not know why you didn't like something.  How can I avoid these things in the future if I don't know what the warning signs are?  This movie looked like it had everything going for it.  Favorite actor?  Check.  Gory, gruesome deaths?  Check.  Cat and mouse game between the forces of good and evil?  Check.  Maybe it just really is like the favorite food abomination I described, a sum worth less than its parts.

Goldfinger (1964)

  I think this marks the point where the Bond movies started to slide into stupid puns and Swiss cheese plots. 

James Bond (Sean Connery) is back in action, on the trail of smuggler Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe).  Unfortunately, it seems all those shaken martinis have pickled James' brains since he pretty much blunders through the investigation, getting caught time and again by Goldfinger's goons Oddjob (Harold Sakota) and Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman).  First, there's his hamhanded antagonizing of Goldfinger when Bond catches him cheating at cards, using the lovely Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton) as a spotter.  When Jill is killed by the application of gold paint (instead of just saying she was smothered then covered in paint, they make a point of telling the audience that the paint caused "skin asphyxiation"), Bond puts his personal feelings aside and goes after Goldfinger again.  He manages to get Jill's sister Tilly (Tania Mallet) killed as well before falling directly into Goldfinger's pudgy hands.  The crime lord is all set to bisect Bond with his shiny new industrial laser but Bond successfully bluffs a man so bad at poker he has to hire an escort to help him cheat.  High bar there.  Afraid of what Bond might know, Goldfinger ships him off to his main headquarters in Kentucky.  There, in between trips back and forth to his cell, Bond discovers that Goldfinger plans to nuke the gold reserves of Ft. Knox, disrupting the world economy and making his private reserves invaluable. 

Honestly, if you needed the best example of how extraneous Bond is to the plot of his own movie, look at the bomb diffusion scene.  After being handcuffed to the device and killing bad guys for almost all of the 5 minute countdown, Bond manages to get the case of the bomb open.  He starts frantically grabbing bundles of wires and is about to just yank out a random handful when one of the American scientists walks in, calmly moves him out of the way, and turns off the device.  Radioactive disaster averted, no thanks at all to IQ 007. 

The roles for women in this film continue to be paper-thin.  I had some hopes for Honor Blackman as Goldfinger's personal pilot.  She seemed like a morally ambiguous to downright cold-blooded character but all it took to sway her was a sweaty roll in the hay with our hero.  Because women's minds are so weak, a good hard dicking is all you need to jar that moral compass in the right direction. 

Here's hoping the next one in the line-up tries a little harder.

The Man with the Iron Fists (2012)

  This movie was awesomely, gloriously, stupidly violent.  And I mean that in the best possible sense.

Saturday, Christy and I went to see Vamps but it wasn't actually playing at the theater we like.  Somewhat disappointed, we just decided to see whatever was playing next.  And, lo, the heavens did open up and a voice spake "Thou shalt see The Man with the Iron Fists".  And it was good.

I'm not sure what the other people in the theater thought this movie was going to be.  From the opening credits, which are freeze frames of battle scenes in the most cheesetastic 70's style font and colors, to the dialogue, which is exactly what you would expect from a movie written by Wu Tang Clan founder RZA, it is balls-out crazy.  And everybody knows that's my favorite kind of crazy.  It's not a particularly well-acted movie.  Jamie Chung in particular should have known better.  But it's an instant B-movie classic and, for that, I will own it.

Thaddeus the blacksmith (RZA) is trying to save up enough money to elope with Lady Silk (Jamie Chung) and buy her out of her contract at Madame Blossom's (Lucy Liu) brothel.  At the same time, the Lion Clan has had a change of leadership when Silver Lion (Byron Mann) conspires with assassin Poison Dagger (Daniel Wu) to kill Gold Lion (Kuan Tai Chen) so they can steal a shipment of gold headed north.  Gold Lion's son, the X Blade (Rick Yune) hears about the murder and comes to town to avenge his father.  Silver Lion hires Brass Body (Dave Bautista), a brawler with impenetrable skin, to kill the X Blade. 

This film really is a love story to the old style of low-quality Chinese and Japanese martial arts films from the 70s.  There's a whole Enter the Dragon sequence with a hall of mirrors, and some of the Hyena Clan reminded me of the bandits from Lady Snowblood, plus hosts of others I'm sure.  People spurt blood like firehoses and sport impractically beautiful clothing and weapons while zooming overhead on wires.

In short, it is absolutely amazeballs and you should go see it.

Burma VJ (2008)

  This documentary has been sitting in my queue for almost three years now.  It was from my very first Oscar batch.

Don't go to Burma.  And for God's sake, don't take a camera there.  It's really depressing.

This documentary is put together from footage collected by an intrepid group of video reporters inside the military-controlled country of Burma (or Myanmar, depending on who you ask) during the demonstrations in September 2007.  The opposition is led by Buddhist monks, protesting the treatment of the populace.  Hundreds of monks gather, rallying the citizens of Rangoon to join them.  The video reporters are on hand to document this as well as the violent government crack-down that follows.  Dozens of people are round up, beaten, and arrested every day.  A curfew is put in place and anyone caught with a camera receives equal punishment.  Still, the reporters risk their lives to smuggle the footage out of the country in the hopes that the world will pay attention.

Seriously, don't watch this movie if you're depressed.  It will do nothing for you.  Like The Cove, you should only watch it if you're really happy and you need to come down a few pegs.  Then you can watch this.

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)

  This is the original Swedish version, not the American remake with Daniel Craig.  It is miles and away better, becoming that rare property that is more than its source. 
Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is a disgraced journalist hired by an aging industrialist named Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) to investigate the 40-year-old disappearance of Vanger's niece Harriet, same as the American version.  But what this movie gets right is focusing less on Blomkvist and more on Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace).  It adds more detail about why she is the way she is, which is not in the first book, but was a welcome change. 

Overall, the pacing was much better and the cinematography was much less boring.  I particularly liked the fact that everything is gray and snow-covered in the beginning but moves to a delicately green spring as the mystery is revealed.  It's an almost literal breath of fresh air.

I hated the book.  It did not hold any joy for me and I found it a chore to read.  I would not read the second one.  I wouldn't watch the second American version.  But I have already added the second Swedish one to my Netflix queue.  That's how good it is.