A Dangerous Method (2011)

  The only real danger is dying of boredom.

When I was young, I was very interested in psychiatry.  I read everything I could get my hands on about the diseases of the mind.  Then I realized that, for all of the advances that have been made, there are very few cures for any mental illness.  This quickly curbed my interest, as puzzles with no solutions frustrate me.  I still think it is a very valuable profession and that more people could use a little introspection. 

In 1904, a young Russian woman named Sabina (Keira Knightley) is taken as a patient by Dr. Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) who attempts the radical new procedure of psychoanalysis, developed by Dr. Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen).  The therapy proves beneficial, as Sabina recovers enough to not only be in society but to also take a medical degree.  Along the way, Jung and his patient become lovers.  Meanwhile, Freud sees Jung as a potential successor but the two eventually grow apart over fundamental differences.

Are you asleep at your keyboard yet?

This is a straight character drama elevated only by Cronenberg's meticulous direction.  The film isn't my cup of tea in the slightest but I was still drawn in by the performances of the three leads.  I don't think you could put three more charismatic individuals in those roles.  I don't think Viggo Mortensen gets half the credit he deserves as an actor, Fassbender is a star on the rise and Knightley has always been more than just a pretty face.  If you're a fan of character studies or of the men in general, it's a decent film.  I just won't be adding it to my collection.

Da Vinci's Demons (2013)/Death on the Nile (1978)

I just finished watching the first season of Da Vinci's Demons and it was very entertaining.  The premise is basically Sherlock Holmes in the 15th Century, but that shouldn't discourage you from watching it.

Leonardo Da Vinci (Tom Riley) is an extraordinary genius working for Lorenzo "the Magnificent" de Medici (Elliot Cowan).  He must help defend his beloved Florence from the incursions of Rome, keep Medici from finding out that he's having an affair with the man's mistress, Lucrezia (Laura Haddock), and also uncover the mystery surrounding the mysterious Sons of Mithras. 

He is a very busy man.

There are only 8 episodes with a huge cliffhanger at the end and season two doesn't start until 2014, so if you haven't started this one, you may want to wait until later in the year.

  I had previously seen Murder on the Orient Express from Netflix, so it recommended that I watch Death on the Nile.  It's just as star-studded and Peter Ustinov does a much better job as Poirot than Albert Finney.  He just nailed it.

Detective Poirot (Peter Ustinov) is taking a vacation through Egypt with a motley crew that includes heiress Linnet (Lois Chiles) who is on her honeymoon with her estate manager Simon (Simon MacCorkindale).  Unfortunately, no matter where the young couple go, they are followed by Simon's jilted lover Jackie (Mia Farrow).  There's also a crooked lawyer, a defamed doctor, and a libelous novelist to contend with, ensuring that everyone on the boat had a motive when Linnet ends up dead.  Poirot must use his considerable wit to discover the identity of the killer.

The real standouts here were Bette Davis and Maggie Smith as a contentious old lady and her bitter nurse.  Every exchange they had was comedy gold.  They had to have aged Angela Lansbury for this role because she looks ancient compared to Maggie Smith, even though they're less than a decade apart. 

Being There (1979)

I am back from the Bahamas relaxed, refreshed, and tanned.  Or I will be as soon as this sunburn fades.  It was an excellent trip and if this were a travel blog, I'd tell you all about it.  But it's not.

  I watched this before I left but I didn't get a chance to draft it.

Chase (Peter Sellers) is a gardener in a Washington DC mansion. He is, politely, slow-witted. He takes care of the garden and Louise the maid (Ruth Attaway) takes care of him and the Old Man. But when the Old Man dies, the lawyers descend, and Chase is suddenly an anomaly. He has no records of any kind and seems to have never been out of the house before. Seeing as he has no legal claim to the house and is therefore not their problem, they boot him out onto the street. He wanders DC for a while before managing to get hit by a limo belonging to socialite Eve Rand (Shirley MacLaine). Rather than take him to a hospital, Eve decides to take him home to the team of private physicians working for her ailing, and much older, husband Benjamin Rand (Melvyn Douglas). She mistakes "Chance the gardener" for Chauncey Gardner, and suddenly, Chance is transformed into a businessman down on his luck.  Everything out of his mouth is either the advice of a sage or a sparkling witticism. It's like Forrest Gump for the 70's.

This is one of those movies where you watch it and it's not terribly funny, but then when you try and explain it to a friend, it sounds hilarious. Droll is probably the best way to describe it.

Batman (1989)

I am here in the sunny Bahamas!  Today I swam with dolphins and tomorrow I am going to snorkel off a tropical reef.  But I still made time for you, internet people.  Because I love you.    Before there was dark, gritty Batman Begins, there was kinda-dark, almost-gritty Batman!  Tim Burton wanted to take the film in a different direction from the campy Adam West 60's Batman and succeeded admirably.

Gotham City on the edge of the 90's is kind of a hellhole.  Crime is rampant, thanks to kingpin Carl Grissom (Jack Palance) and his number-one guy Jack Napier (Jack Nicholson).  But there is hope in the form of masked vigilante Batman.  Reporter Alex Knox (Robert Wuhl) and photographer Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger) team up to try and find out if he actually exists.  That is, until billionaire Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton) shows up to sweep her off her feet.

Grissom sends Jack out to Axis Chemicals to stage a break-in because the cops are sniffing around and then calls in an anonymous tip.  Batman and the cops storm the building and Jack falls into a vat of toxic chemicals.  A back-alley plastic surgery later and he is reborn as the Clown Prince of Crime, the Joker.  He, too, becomes entranced by the lovely Miss Vale but still has time to plot the mass murder of Gotham City's inhabitants while listening to Prince.  Now there's a man who knows how to prioritize.

I remember this movie being the coolest thing my 8-year-old eyes had ever seen when my mom brought it home on VHS.  All the special effects were amazing and, having watched every rerun of the old TV show, Batman had never been so badass.

Now, of course, this movie is so dated as to be laughable.  The matte backgrounds, the dodgy CGI, Nicholson's over the top performance, the costumes, Kim Basinger's screaming every three seconds and oh dear Lord, the Prince soundtrack.  Everything is as campy as Cesar Romero putting white paint over his mustache because he didn't want to shave.

I still have a lot of nostalgic love for this movie, though.  This was Tim Burton before he decided he would only work with Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter.  This catapulted Batman back into the spotlight and paved the way for other, admittedly shitty, comic book movies in the 90's.

This was supposed to be a post about Basic Instinct 2 but I just couldn't do it.  I turned it off about half an hour in, and I do not regret that decision.  It deserves every piece of negative criticism it got and then some.

Moulin Rouge (1952)

  No, not the Baz Lurhman one.  This is more like a biopic of artist Henri Toulouse-Latrec than it is about the venerable Montmarte establishment.

Toulouse-Latrec (played by Jose Ferrer) was the son of an extremely wealthy count (also Jose Ferrer) whose legs didn't heal correctly after a childhood accident.  The Comte leaves his family rather than suffer the shame of a deformed heir, and Henri moves to Paris to paint.  He is a frequent guest at the Moulin Rouge, a favorite of all the staff, especially singer Avril (Zsa Zsa Gabor) but he's really searching for love.  After giving his heart to prostitute Marie Charlet (Colette Marchand) and being rejected, he attempts suicide, but is saved by his love of painting.  He achieves some success with a poster for the eponymous dance hall, raising the ire of his father, who believes Henri is bringing down the family name.  Later, he meets Myriamme (Suzanne Flon), a model, but finds himself unable to believe she could love him.

Ok, I know it's not cool to admit it but I seriously did not know that Jose Ferrer played two characters in this movie.  When I saw it on IMDb, I seriously had to replay the entire movie in my head to see if it could be true.  The two characters are never in the same shot.  It didn't even occur to me that they were the same dude.  That's how in-character Ferrer was to me.

Latrec was a prolific artist and a number of his works are featured in the film itself, and also in a more general set direction kind of way, lending a hyper-colorful feel.  Zsa Zsa Gabor is effervescent and steals every scene she's in, although her singing was obviously dubbed in afterwards.  You'll also recognize a young, but still creepy, Peter Cushing in a small role.

And with this, I am off to the Bahamas!  I will try and update tomorrow but no guarantees.  See you next week!

Bullitt (1968)

  It's kind of amazing that Bullitt came out the same year as Barbarella.

San Francisco cop Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen) is given the high-profile case of baby-sitting a mob witness.  But when the witness ends up dead, Bullitt uncovers a much deeper mystery.  One that will have his Captain (Simon Oakland) coming up against an ambitious politician (Robert Vaughn), because Frank has no intention of playing by the book.

This movie is famous for the 100 mph car chase through the streets of San Francisco, but don't just fast forward to get there.  It's a decent cop movie that's only dated by the technology in play (pay phones, teletype machines, etc.).  Steve McQueen is incredibly charismatic, even as the taciturn Frank Bullitt.

I think my favorite part was how polite he remained, even while being threatened by Robert Vaughn's slimy politician.  He never raised his voice, didn't fire back with a witty comeback, just stood his ground and did his job the way he saw fit.  It was such a contrast to me from the way "cops who don't play by the rules" are portrayed today.  Now it's like you can't have a cop disagree with his boss without a screaming argument and somebody slamming their badge on a desk and storming off.  Frank kept it classy, though.  We need to bring that back.

Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011)

  After 25 years of marriage, Emily (Julianne Moore) informs Cal (Steve Carell) that she wants a divorce and that she has had an affair with her co-worker, David Lindhagen (Kevin Bacon).  Adrift and on the scene for the first time in his life, Cal is having trouble moving on until playboy Jacob (Ryan Gosling) takes pity on him and shows him how to get women.  Meanwhile, Cal's son Robbie (Jonah Bobo) is pining over his baby-sitter Jessica (Analeigh Tipton), who has her own crush on Cal.  Still, things are going fairly well until Jacob meets Hannah (Emma Stone).

The movie is serviceable.  I'm not a huge Steve Carell or Ryan Gosling fan, so I can't really gush about how awesome they were.  The only really funny parts are due to Emma Stone being Emma Stone.  She is hilarious and I have not seen her give a bad performance yet. 

Man of Steel (2013)

  Rob dragged Christy and me to see this on Saturday night.  It's not terrible.  I found it to be smugly pretentious, but not insufferably so.  

I don't like Superman.  Never have.  He's too much of a goody-goody with a secret core of self-righteousness that just rubs me the wrong way.  Seriously, fuck that guy. 

The planet Krypton has exhausted all its natural resources and is on the verge of imploding.  Jor-El (Russell Crowe) steals the collected DNA of his people and zaps it into the DNA of his newly-birthed son before shooting him in a rocket to the furthest edge of space.  General Zod (Michael Shannon) is seriously pissed about this and vows revenge before being stuck with his followers in the Phantom Zone for space time-out.  The alien lands on Earth and is raised by a farming family in Kansas.  Pa Kent (Kevin Costner) teaches the boy that he needs to do everything he can to hide his otherworldliness from the Podunk hicks surrounding them, even if it means condemning a busload of children to a watery grave.  Clark (Henry Cavill) grows up to be a drifter, never staying in one place very long because of his obsessive need to help people coupled with the paranoia of being recognized as "different".  Ah, small town values.  However, when the news hits that a spaceship has been discovered in the polar ice cap, he can't resist heading up there.  Neither can nosy reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams).  After accidentally setting off a security feature and almost getting killed, Lois decides to track down her mysterious rescuer.  Right about then, Zod shows up and spills the frijoles to the entire planet.  He demands that the Kryptonian be turned over to him or else.

Christy and I couldn't stop giggling every time we saw his cape.  Mostly because of this.



If you're a Superman fan, good luck with that inferiority complex, and you already know you'll enjoy it.  Everyone else, it's a decent summer film so knock yourself out.

Barbarella (1968)

  Christy asked me why I owned this move since she found it to have no redeeming qualities other than the costumes.  It's practically chauvinism in its purest state, crystallized from the bitter tears of feminists.  Barbarella isn't a heroine, she's a sex doll in space. 

That's why this movie is amazing.  It's a spaghetti western, sci-fi, free love extravaganza and it is completely unapologetic about it. 

Barbarella (Jane Fonda) is sent on a mission to find scientist Durand Durand (Milo O'Shea) who has disappeared after developing a positronic ray.  In the 41st Century, war, disease, and sexual inhibitions have been abolished for millennia and the thought that someone would willingly invent a weapon of mass destruction is abhorrent.  She tracks him down to the planet Lythion where she promptly crashes when her on-board computer goes haywire.  (Because women can't drive, obviously.)  Once on the planet, she finds herself getting rescued constantly by various manly men, whom she thanks in the only way she knows how.  With her vagina. 

I heard they were going to remake this as a TV series, which I can only pray will be on HBO or Showtime.  Otherwise, you'll lose out all the nudity and all you'll have left is a story of a female astronaut flying around and solving people's problems.  If you want that, you might as well watch reruns of Star Trek:  Voyager. 

Miller's Crossing (1990)

  I added Miller's Crossing to my queue after reading a list of the 10 best crime movies, I think.  I don't think I had ever heard of it or known anyone who had seen it.  It's a shame, really, as it's a very good movie.

Tommy Regan (Gabriel Byrne) is the right-hand man for Leo (Albert Finney), an Irish mobster in the 20's.  Tom warns against starting a schism with Johnny Caspar (Joe Polito), the rising Italian power in town, but Leo won't hear anything about it.  Caspar wants Leo to whack a bookie named Bernie (John Tuturro) who has been chiseling him but Leo is sleeping with Bernie's sister Verna (Marcia Gay Harden) and refuses.  This sparks an all-out war between him and Caspar.  Tom, who is also sleeping with Verna, tries to reason with him while fending off offers of employment from Caspar and Bernie.  But when Leo kicks him out, all bets are off.

It's very well-done with solid performances all around.  The Coen Brothers rarely make a misstep with film-making.  Even when I don't particularly care for the work (No Country for Old Men, O Brother Where Art Thou?), I can still recognize that it is good work. 

The Crazies (2010)

  Ogden Marsh, Iowa is a sleeping little farming town of 1260 people.  The community is shocked, therefore, when the Sheriff (Timothy Olyphant) has to shoot a man for walking onto the baseball field with a loaded shotgun.  This is only the beginning as the madness spreads through the town, turning ordinary citizens into murdering psychopaths.  Then the military swoops in to contain the threat, separating the healthy civilians from those with elevated temperatures.  When the Sheriff's wife (Radha Mitchell) is taken, however, he has to break back into the infected zone in order to save her.

I liked this more than I expected to which is always a nice surprise.  It's not outright horror, just a run-of-the-mill pandemic, so it's safe for all you squeamish types.  Worth a rental if you're in the mood.



In completely different news, I also finished watching season one of Coupling, the British show Friends is based off of, and it was hilarious.  Only six half-hour episodes so you could conceivably knock it out in an afternoon. 

The Band Wagon (1953)

  Tony Hunter (Fred Astaire) was a famous Hollywood song and dance man during the 30's and 40's but in 1953, he's kind of a has-been.  He travels to New York City to be in a small Broadway show written by his friends Lily (Nanette Fabrey) and Lester Marton (Oscar Levant).  Lily and Lester have managed to get producer/director/leading man Jeffrey Cordova (Jack Buchanan) interested, but what starts as a light musical about a children's book writer turns into a modern retelling of Faust.  Cordova hires prima ballerina Gabrielle Girard (Cyd Charisse) to star opposite Tony and the two leads immediately hate each other.

Since this is a 50's musical, everything turns out all right by the end and everyone goes home happy.  The musical numbers are great, especially the Murder Mystery in Jazz set piece at the end.  The romance feels a little tacked on but it's mostly extraneous to the plot, which is about retaining creative control over a product. 

It makes me want to go out and watch ten of these old musicals in a row.  I love movies for a lot of reasons.  These are all about the fantasy, an escape into a bright Technicolor world where everyone can sing and dance and all problems are solved within an hour and a half. 

Tron (1982)

  Movies have come a long way since 1982.  Holy shit.  Christy and I watched the original Tron the other night.  She hated it but she's not really into sci-fi or techno-geekery.  I could enjoy the idea behind it, even as I cringed at the execution.

Disgraced employee Flynn (Jeff Bridges) keeps hacking into his old employer ENCOM looking for proof that his boss, Dillinger (David Warner), has stolen Flynn's ideas for the last five popular video games the company produced.  He enlists his old co-worker Allen (Bruce Boxleitner) and his ex-girlfriend Lora (Cindy Morgan) who is now dating Allen, to help him break in to ENCOM to find the evidence.  What they don't know is that ENCOM's Master Control Program is actually self-aware and kind of a dick.  MCP shoots Flynn with a laser and sucks him into the computer system.  (Because that's what lasers do.)  Once on the Grid, Flynn has to partner with security program Tron (Bruce Boxleitner) in order to survive gladiatorial-style games long enough to reach an input-output tower to notify Allen of....something?

Frankly, the movie kind of lost me at that point because I was busy with my melting retinas.  The computer world is insanely bright and colored mostly with neon.  I thought I would be prepared for it after seeing TRON:  Legacy but the low-quality added an extra layer of harshness. 

This was a huge flop when it was first released but, thanks to a patina of nostalgia, it's made somewhat of a resurgence.  Blu-ray is a tremendous help to it, removing any muddiness or fuzziness from the graphics, allowing you to see Steve Jobs' fever dream in all its cyan and magenta glory. 

Bambi (1942)

  I thought it was time to bring some wholesomeness to this blog.

Just kidding, I'm up to B in my collection.

Bambi is a fawn born in the forest.  He frolics with his mother on the meadow and plays with his friends Thumper, a rabbit, and Flower, a skunk.  Just past his first winter, he learns what tragedy is when his mother is killed by hunters.  Afterwards, he is raised by the Great Prince, a wise but aloof stag, until his antlers come in and he goes forth to seek a mate.  It's not all dancing on puffy clouds, though, as hunting season comes around again.

Watching this makes me want to go back and re-read the book.  I don't think I have ever noticed that Bambi makes a miraculous recovery after being shot and forced to run from the fire.  In the book it's not as abrupt.

A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)

  Why are foreign horror movies so much creepier than American ones?  I had previously seen the American remake The Uninvited (which is okay, but not great) so I thought I was prepared for the "twist".  Turns out there's a twist and then a TWIST.

Soo-mi (Su-jeong Lim) and her quiet, shy sister Soo-yeon (Geun-Young Moon) go to their family's vacation home out in the country with their dad (Kap-su Kim) and new stepmother (Jung-ah Yum).  Their mother had died and the girls weren't dealing with it very well.  To make matters worse, the stepmother seems to be having a nervous breakdown.  Soo-mi is incredibly resentful of the stepmother and does everything she can to show her displeasure.  But when weird things start to happen, the family's darkest secrets will come to light.

There are a few jump scares but most of the real horror is the sadness it evokes.  There's a deep, crushing sense of dread at the terrible unintended consequences we create for ourselves and for those around us.  That's the kind of thing that lingers long after the credits stop rolling.

The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)

  Based on the classic Dumas revenge tale, Edmond Dantes (Jim Caviezel) is just a sailor with the world laid out ahead of him until his childhood friend Fernand, Count Mondego (Guy Pearce) has him arrested for treason and then steals his woman (Dagmara Dominczyk).  Inside the hellish prison Isle d'If, Dantes meets Abbe Faria (Richard Harris), a priest who gives him a decent education as they dig a tunnel to freedom.  The priest even reveals the location of a secret treasure.  Dantes plans to use the treasure to mete his revenge but gets press-ganged into a pirate crew just after escaping.  After sixteen years total of being away, Dantes enters Parisian society as the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo in order to bring ruin to his enemies.  But, of course, time never stands still and he discovers the Count Mondego and his wife have had a son (Henry Cavill).  

I found this to be much more enjoyable this time around.  I remember not liking it very much when I first saw it because I didn't think Jim Caviezel had any charisma.  After two seasons of Person of Interest, he's grown on me.  And this time I actually recognize Henry Cavill.  Overall, it's a solid effort and one I'm glad was redeemed by time.

White Ribbon (2009)

  I used to hate open-ended movies.  Now, I'm more mellow about it because I know that sometimes that air of mystery and wonder should be preserved.

Not this time.  I really wanted to see some resolution here, if only to justify the two and a half hour runtime.  But I didn't get what I wanted.  Instead I got Village of the Damned in German.

It's just before WWI and the kids in this provincial town are evil little bastards.  You can almost feel bad for them, though, because every adult is also an evil bastard.  They abuse their children physically, psychologically, and sexually and then wonder how things get so out of hand.  Jesus.  The only good one is the school teacher/narrator who is just trying to marry the Baron's nanny.

It starts when someone ties a tripwire across a riding path and nearly kills the town doctor.  Then, the baron's son is found caned bloody, someone burns down a barn, and the local mentally disabled child is beaten so badly he might be permanently blinded.  The teacher thinks the preacher's kids are the ringleaders but has no power to do anything.

I'm sure this whole movie was some big veiled Comment on the state of Europe or some such, but I didn't get it at all.  I thought it was awful.

Bad Girls (1994)

  I remember watching this movie for the first time during a sleepover.  I think I was about 13.  I don't remember the nudity, so it may have been on TV and edited for content.  Or I could just not remember it.  Whatever.  I have a strong memory of this film because it was the first time an ending surprised me.  This one just didn't go the way I thought it should have.  

Watching it again now, I realize that in truth it's not a very good movie.  It's one of those quintessentially 90's movies that pretended it was about empowerment for women while really being completely geared toward men.  Still, if you own it as a guilty pleasure, I'm not going to judge you too badly.

When Wild West hooker Cody Zamora (Madeleine Stowe) kills a respected member of the town, she is dragged off by a lynch mob.  Her three prostitute friends rescue her and they flee.  Anita, the good girl, (Mary Stuart Masterson) reveals that her dead husband left her a land claim in the Oregon territory and Cody admits that she's rich.  However, while withdrawing their funds, the girls run afoul of Cody's ex, Kid Jarrett (James Russo) and Eileen, the manipulative one, (Andie McDowell) gets arrested.  Lily, the young hothead, (Drew Barrymore) wants to rescue her friend but Cody wants to go after the money.  Then Dermot Mulroney and some Pinkertons show up and things just head downhill in a hurry.

Again, no one in this movie has good decision-making skills.  They are ruled by impulse, have bad relationships, and barely scrape by using their feminine charms.  They are bare caricatures of "independent women" who giggle and shimmy and still need to be rescued by a big, strong man.  But they can change their own wagon wheel, so I guess that means you don't have to call them after.

Corky Romano (2001)

  So this is one of Christy's favorite movies.  Surprisingly, it didn't make me want to claw my eyes out.  It's pretty dumb but entertaining enough in its own way.

Facing a strong FBI case, the Romano crime family knows they need to come up with a plan to infiltrate and destroy the evidence files against them.  To do this, they turn to the ostracized Romano sibling, Corky (Chris Kattan), who just wants to be a veterinarian.  They gin up a fake resume and have him join the FBI task force under Special Agent Brick Davis (Matthew Glave).  Davis is immediately suspicious of Corky, especially after his idiotic antics lead to a number of high-profile arrests.  Corky just wants to get into the evidence locker and get the file on his family and get out.  Oh, and maybe impress stony Agent Russo (Vinessa Shaw) along the way.

You already know if you're going to like this based on your reaction to the title character.  If you thought "oh, another failed SNL skit" you probably won't like it.  If you thought "ooh, I hope it's as good as Night at the Roxbury" then you probably will.

Back to the Future (1985)

  Here's a movie that's gotten a resurge of popularity.  It seems like you can't go anywhere on the internet without someone saying what a classic this film is.  Personally, I don't have much of stake in this one.  The third one was more of my speed.  It came out when I was eight-years-old, which is probably the most appropriate age to see it, before you hit your teens and everything becomes lame.

Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is a typical high school nobody who happens to be friends with the local scientific kook, Dr. Emmet Brown (Christopher Lloyd).  When Dr. Brown builds a time machine, Marty is on hand to film the testing.  But then Libyan terrorists show up and Marty ends up traveling to 1955 to try and escape them.  Stranded in the past with no juice to get back home, he looks up the Doc Brown of this time and enlists his help.  Unfortunately, Marty also manages to disrupt the first meeting between his parents, jeopardizing his future.  He has to find a way to make them interested in each other while also fending off the local bully. 

Watching it now, all I can see is the horrible age makeup.  They did their level best, but technology has not been kind.  I know that's a minor thing to get hung up on but there you go.  Otherwise, it's exactly as I remember it.

Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story (2009)

  Eddie Izzard, for those who don't know, is a wonderful comedienne and actress.  She's one of my favorite stand-up comics of all time.  I didn't know this (because I don't live in England) but apparently, Eddie got called out by a tabloid TV show for having "recycled" stand-up material in her acts. So, in 2009, she went on a workshop tour of England and basically built a new act from scratch.  In between working in various tiny venues, the documentary talks about her childhood (born in Yemen!), the early loss of her mother, her time as a street performer, coming out as a transvestite, and finding success all around the world.

I already own Glorious, Circle, Unrepeatable, and Definite Article, so most of the material shown was old hat for me.  Still, if you're interested in the woman behind the jokes, it's a decent primer. 

Coriolanus (2011)

  Your tolerance of this movie will greatly depend on your love of Shakespeare.  There's a reason this one doesn't get performed a lot.  Yeesh.

Caius Martius (Ralph Fiennes) wins the soubriquet Coriolanus after the battle of Corioles.  He fought his mortal enemy Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler) there and, while neither man managed to kill the other, Martius and Rome carried the day.  He comes home a hero and is nominated for Consul but a couple of Tribunes (James Nesbitt and Paul Jesson) think that he's too proud a man to be given such a position.  They inflame the people to deny the Consulship and move to have Coriolanus banished from the city.  This displeases our hero and he immediately goes to Antium to seek out Aufidius.  Together, they will destroy Rome and no one, not his friend Senator Menenius (Brian Cox), not his wife (Jessica Chastain), and not his mother (Vanessa Redgrave), will stand in the way of revenge.

This is Ralph Fiennes' first directorial effort and it's a good one.  I may not have liked the play but I can recognize that it was done well.  Hopefully, next time he'll pick something a little more accessible and a little less bombastic.  I do think the sound editor should have been shot in the foot, though.  It would go from extremely quiet, when I had to turn the volume all the way up on the TV, to machine gun fire and explosion.  Very annoying.

Also, in happier news, I watched the first season of Copper, a BBC America original.    It's like Gangs of New York meets The Wire.  Everybody in it is dirty and violent and you can't trust any of them as far as you can throw them.  It's awesome.  The second season should be starting here in a couple of weeks.  Of course, I probably won't end up seeing it for another three years but see it I shall.

District B-13 (2004)

I had forgotten I already reviewed this one back in July of 2011.  I was trying to buy B-13:  Ultimatum when I saw they had a double-feature Blu-ray of both.  Did I really need it in Blu-ray?  Probably not.  The quality isn't that much better than the DVD, frankly, but I couldn't pass up a two-fer.  So I thought "Fuck it, I'll just repost the original."  So here you go.    I had the honor and privilege of forcing this one on New Boyfriend.  God, I love this movie.  The plot is a little too heavy-handed with the "Can't we all just get along?" kind of message but Holy Hot-rodding Christ does this movie kick ass.

The year is 2010.  I know, I know, just go with it.  Paris has gotten fed up with its ghettos and turned them  into little self-contained prisons.  Leito (David Belle) lives in one of the few apartment buildings that isn't torn apart by gang violence.  He intercepts a load of heroin and destroys it, thus earning the enmity of Taha, the main drug lord and prompting one of the best parkour chase sequences EVER.  Taha tries to kidnap Leito's little sister, Lola, in retaliation only to be captured and handed over to the cops by Leito...and immediately gets released.  The cops are bailing and they don't need any complications.  As an added Fuck You, they let Taha take Lola with him.

Meanwhile, Damien (Cyril Raffaelli) is wrapping up an undercover investigation while utilizing some seriously badass martial arts skills.  His superiors come to him and tell him that  a new type of "clean" bomb has been stolen in B-13 by a drug dealer named Taha and they need him to infiltrate and put in a code to stop the explosion.  To expedite matters, they have a native guide with his own axe to grind against the villain.

Cue buddy cop music!

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:  Luc Besson knows how to make French movies for American audiences.  I was super-excited to hear that there was a sequel released.  I haven't seen it yet.  It's in my queue, though.

Chasing Ice (2012)

Nominated for: Best Original Song    This still hasn't been made available as a disc but Netflix is offering it via streaming. 

As a documentary, it's very pretty but depressing.  As an original song, it kind of sucks.

Let's talk about the movie first.  James Balog is a world-renowned photographer who set out in 2007 to chronicle the melting glaciers around the world with time-lapse photography.  Hiking through Iceland, Greenland, Montana,and Alaska, James and his team from Extreme Ice Survey (EIS) plant cameras set to shoot every hour of daylight for five years.  At the end of that time, they put the pictures together.  This is the most accessible representation of the effects of climate change the world has ever known.  The images themselves are breathtaking, especially the night time shots.

By contrast, the Oscar-nominated song is a complete slog.  Sung by Scarlett Johansson, it is sad but not emotional, and after the heartfelt nature of the film, it comes as a complete letdown.  I'm very surprised it got nominated and I'm glad they didn't perform it at the ceremony.  It would have been naptime for sure.

The Awful Truth (1937)

  This is an inoffensive little comedy about a married couple keeping secrets from one another.

Jerry (Cary Grant) and Lucy (Irene Dunne) Warriner decide to get divorced after they discover the other has been keeping secrets.  Jerry thinks Lucy is having an affair with her music teacher (Alexander D'arcy).  Meanwhile, Lucy catches him lying about spending two weeks in Florida when he really just stayed in town.  So they separate, waiting for their divorce to be declared final.  Lucy starts dating a terminally boring oil executive (Ralph Bellamy) and Jerry goes out with a society dame (Molly Lamont).  But they just can't resist sabotaging the other person's relationship.

It's a cute movie with absolutely no attention paid to any of the issues it raises.  This is the lightest of froths, with Jerry and Lucy's relationship woes solely played for laughs.  But I'm just going to go ahead and say it:  these are horrible people.  They don't even attempt to communicate, immediately filing for divorce and joint custody of the dog, over a spat.  They date during their separation period, with both getting engaged before the ink is dry.  Their new intendeds both seem to be very nice people, whose feelings are callously disregarded by the protagonists.  And we're supposed to be happy they get back together.

Cary Grant is always charming but I don't think I've seen many movies starring Irene Dune.  She didn't really have much of a personality for me and the whole effort was a bit too slight to really enjoy it.

Forbidden Planet (1956)

  I wish they would go back to making posters like this.  Isn't that outstanding? 

This has become a cult classic for sci-fi films, mostly because it's so dated it's camp, I think, but also because it stars an incredibly young Leslie Nielsen before he started doing comedy.  If you only remember him as the white-haired, deadpanned guy from the Naked Gun movies or Airplane, you owe it to yourself to check this out. 

An interstellar crew is dispatched to a planet as a rescue mission for a previously downed research ship.  Arriving twenty years after the crash, Commander Adams (Leslie Nielsen) and his crew land on Altair-IV only to find that all of the original researchers are dead, except for Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) and his daughter Alta (Anne Francis).  Morbius has created a virtual paradise for himself with the help of his robot, Robby.  Unfortunately, the crew soon learns that the planet harbors hidden dangers as well.

This was a superb blu-ray transfer.  It looks like the pages of a pulp magazine come to life and that really separates it from your average MST3K fare.  The story, by contrast, is just kind of okay but it's so pretty you'll barely notice.  If you're a fan of the Atomic Age style in architecture and design, you'll also enjoy the look of this film. 

I don't know if it's worth a buy for me but I enjoyed watching it.

The Avengers (1998)

  This isn't the good Avengers.  Remember this movie?  It's the one based on a British TV show from the 60's featuring Patrick McNee and Diana Rigg.  I never watched it but it sounds a bit like the Torchwood of its day.  

The entire movie plays like a big inside joke and maybe that's the reason it sucks so hard.  Suave secret agent and impeccable dresser John Steed (Ralph Fiennes) is sent to investigate Dr. Emma Peel (Uma Thurman) after she is implicated in the dismantling of a weather protection system she helped design.  She joins forces with him to help clear her name and the two discover a plot to privatize weather, giant mechanical bugs, and evil clones. 

There's so much going on here from Sean Connery in a Beanie Baby mascot outfit to the Invisible Man to hot air balloons over Parliament.  To use a British expression, it's all a bit of a dog's dinner.  The writers borrowed heavily from Dickens, Carroll, and Shakespeare in an effort to seem clever, which never works.  There's shitloads of innuendo from the main two characters but no chemistry to back it up, and Uma Thurman's accent is just terrible.  And did I mention Sean Connery in a giant plush furry costume?  Because I think that bears repeating.  (Get it??  Bears?!  I kill me!)

The only one who comes out of this trainwreck unscathed is Eddie Izzard who has only one line in the entire film:  "Oh, fuck."  I'm pretty sure that encapsulates the entire experience.

Watcher in the Woods (1980)

  For all its cutesy characters, Disney has always understood the importance of horror in the lives of children.  This is not quite as overt as Something Wicked This Way Comes, but it makes up for it by ratcheting the suspense factor.  

An American family gets a great deal on a huge English estate but it's only moments before the oldest daughter, Jan (Lynn-Holly Johnson), starts experiencing strange phenomena.  She's convinced that there is something in the woods watching her and her sister Ellie (Kyle Richards).  The creepy old lady caretaker (Bette Davis) believes Jan might be the link she needs to find out what happened to her daughter Karen, who disappeared without a trace thirty years ago.  As the solar eclipse approaches, Jan and Ellie are drawn deeper into the mystery.

There are a couple of very obvious jump scares but otherwise, this is just a straight-up suspense story.  As an adult, it's too easy to pick it apart but it might be okay for children under 10.  Honestly, they might find Bette Davis to be the most terrifying thing in the film.  I thought the final resolution was pretty interesting.  I think it might be the first time I've ever seen that particular explanation used.  As always, your mileage may vary, but I thought it was a decent twist on the whole haunted house genre.

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013)

  Wow.  I mean, I knew it would be bad, but wow.    How was it ever going to be good?  Did you hear about it?  A hard-R retelling of Hansel and Gretel by the guy who directed Dead Snow?  Ok, never mind, that does sound kind of good on paper. In practice, however, it's a goddamn mess.

The town of Augsberg has a witch problem.  They know because 11 children have gone missing.  The mayor (Rainer Bock) hires witch hunters Hansel (Jeremy Renner) and Gretel (Gemma Arterton) to hunt down the witches and rescue the kids.  The heroes are still somewhat traumatized by being abandoned as children and almost eaten by a witch.  Hansel in particular developed diabetes because the witch force-fed him candy.

Seriously.  That's a plot point.

Anyway, the Augsberg witches are led by Muriel (Famke Jansson), a Grand Dark Witch who has the ability to not look like something from Clive Barker's childhood nightmares.  She is spearheading the rest of the witches in a spell to make them fireproof, which can only be done during a Blood Moon, using the blood of twelve children and the heart of a Grand White Witch.

This movie clocks in at 88 minutes.  I really think that if they could have bumped it out to a full two hours, they might have had time to flesh out the story a little bit more.  **SPOILERS FOLLOW IN WHITE.  HIGHLIGHT TO SEE**  Hansel and Gretel are originally from Augsberg, because of course they are.  Their mother was a Grand White Witch who blessed them before they were taken out to the forest and that's why they can't be harmed by witchcraft.  Of course it is.  And of course Gretel is also a White Witch because her mother was.  **END SPOILERS**  Whereas, if they had spent more time on world-building, some of that could have been made into a coherent storyline.  Instead, they spent the majority of the running time trying to find new ways to have people explode.

Also, it's weird to hear Gemma Arterton curse in an American accent. She sounds flat and nasal, instead of her usual high-pitched and nasal, and it's weird.