VHS 2 (2013)

  I finally got around to watching the sequel and it's about on par with the original VHS in that it's very much a grab bag.

A pair of private investigators (Lawrence Michael Levine and Kelsy Abbott) are looking for a missing college student (L.C. Holt).  In his house, they find a bunch of VHS tapes and decide to watch them for clues as to what happened to the kid.  They see a guy (Adam Wingard) undergoing one of the worst clinical trial runs for a cybernetic eye implant ("Phase 1 Clinical Trials"), a guy (Jay Saunders) having a terrible bike riding experience ("A Ride in the Park"), a documentary team uncovering the truth behind a Thai cult ("Safe Haven"), and the worst slumber party ever ("Slumber Party Alien Abduction").

In the first installment, the frame story was horrible and the short films were worth watching.  In this, the frame is handled pretty decently (if predictably) and the mini-movies left me a little cold.  "Phase 1 Clinical Trials" had some great imagery but the central conceit has been done to death, I think.  "A Ride in the Park" was probably the best out of the four and it was still pretty anemic.  It did have a zombie with a GoPro, though, so that's worth something.  "Safe Haven" had some lousy CGI and was a little overwrought for my tastes.  Like, real cults are horrifying enough on their own.  Do you really even need to add in a supernatural element?  And "Slumber Party Alien Abduction" was just really annoying.  They used that BWAAAAAMMM sound effect every time they showed the aliens for a cheap jump scare that didn't even work and rapidly became obnoxious.  Plus, they killed a dog for no narrative purpose.  That's just lazy screenwriting.

There's a third installment to this series but I'm seriously debating whether or not I want to put myself through that.

Christy suggested that I do 31 days of horror for October where I watch a different horror movie that I've never seen before every day for the whole month.  Obviously, this year it's probably not going to happen because of school but next year I will have graduated and there's nothing to stop me.  I know a lot of different sites do something similar so if you readers are tired of that sort of thing, let me know in the comments.  Otherwise, I will assume that silence equals your unreserved enthusiasm and proceed accordingly.

Don Jon (2013)

  This is the Christy selection for March.  They got a little out of order around the time the Oscar nominations came out and I haven't had a chance to really catch up until recently.  I've now added her picks from June through September to my queue so I should be getting to those relatively soon and in order.

Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a young Brooklynite who is really only concerned with how he looks.  All other joys serve as a reflection of this most important thing.  He goes out with his buddies (Rob Brown and Jeremy Luke) to the club and picks up girl after girl to take home, but confesses that he gets more enjoyment out of looking at online porn.  Then he meets Barbara (Scarlett Johansson), a solid 10 who knows exactly how to string him along.  Because of her, he starts going to night school and quits watching porn.  For a while.  At school, he meets Esther (Julianne Moore), an older lady who pushes him to question why he's so unsatisfied with his sexual encounters.  This introspection prompts the disruption of his comfortable facade.

As a directorial debut, this is not as bad as it could have been.  It's competently done with respect to all the filmmaking aspects.  The casting is excellent, especially the supporting roles and the cameos.  Gordon-Levitt has a lot of famous friends and is not shy about bringing them in.  If this were just a lighthearted comedy, it would be enough.  The Achilles heel of this film is its unwillingness to truly dive in to the issues it raises.  Instead, it skirts them, bringing up the oversexualization of advertising and the increased objectification of women in pornography but not saying anything about them.  It tries to defend Jon's internet addiction by saying that porn as a fantasy is no different than the romantic comedy tropes Barbara adores and while that is true, it rings hollow because it's just thrown away in the film.  It could have dived into the toxic masculinity perpetuated in the relationship between Jon and his father (an excellent against-type Tony Danza) but is content just to leave them as stereotypes.

All in all, it's not a bad movie.  I just found it disappointing because I really like Joseph Gordon-Levitt.  He's never really been afraid to take risks in his acting and this felt very much like he was playing it safe.

Anastasia (1997)

  Okay, I still have a lot of love for this movie especially the soundtrack but it has not held up as well as I would have liked.  It's killing me to admit that but it's true.

In 1917, the evil monk Rasputin (Christopher Lloyd) curses the Romanov family with death.  Only the Dowager Empress (Angela Lansbury) and 10-year-old Princess Anastasia (Kirsten Dunst) escape the revolution but are separated at the train station.  Anastasia is lost.  Ten years later, with the promise of a huge reward from the grieving grandmother in Paris, con men Dimitri (John Cusack) and Vlad (Kelsey Grammar) have come up with a foolproof plan to hire a girl, teach her the right things to say, and fool the empress.  Finding the right girl for the part proves daunting until Anya (Meg Ryan), an orphan with no memories of her childhood, falls into their laps.  Of course, she's the actual Romanov heir, which causes Rasputin's curse to reactivate, returning him to the land of the living in order to complete his vengeance.

Most of this movie is wonderful.  The music, the voice cast, the animation...all great.  Here are the problems:

1)  The voice cast does not match up with the singing cast.  I get it.  Bluth wanted star power.  They had to compete with Disney's yearly masterpiece any way they could.  I just wish there wasn't such a huge discrepancy between the main actors' voices and the singers.  It's even more glaring because you have Angela Lansbury, Bernadette Peters, and Kelsey Grammar doing all their own singing.  Was it really so impossible to find leading actors with Broadway training?  You have Lacey Chabert, another young up-and-coming actress, doing the singing voice of Young Anastasia.  Did you honestly need to also have Kirsten Dunst to speak the four lines of dialogue for that character?

2)  The bits of CGI.  There are a couple of objects that were done in CGI instead of hand-drawn animation and boy, can you tell.  The music box that ends up being a plot point is so jarringly rendered that it practically leaps out at you which sucks because the rest of the film is so beautifully done.  It was just the limitations of the technology at the time but it dooms the film from being truly timeless.

3)  "Based on a true story."  Now that's just criminally misleading.  The film obviously couldn't have known at the time it was made but Anastasia Romanov's body was found and ID'd with DNA in 2007 in a mass grave along with the rest of her family.  The story of the film is very loosely based on a woman named Anna Anderson, a German mental patient who claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia in the late 1920s and capitalized on the notoriety, even though most of the real Anastasia's relatives denounced her as a fraud.  Saying this movie is "based on a true story" is like saying that JFK was killed by aliens because he was too close to discovering their secret base on the moon.  It might get the names right but that's about as close to truth as it gets.

And yet, like I said at the top, I love this movie.  I hadn't seen it in several years and I was disappointed, sure, but not enough to make me disown it.  You have to accept it warts and all but I promise it's worth it.

Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970)

  This was such a good movie.  I tend to avoid war films because I was in a war and I don't really need to be reminded of it, but this was so good I'm willing to grant it a permanent exception.

In late 1941, Japanese admiral Yamamoto (So Yamamura) begins to coordinate personnel for an attack on the American naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in response to American embargoes.  American intelligence is aware of the communications between Japanese high command discussing possible attack plans, but a series of small mistakes (the attack is believed to be coming on Nov 30 instead of Dec 7, the early warning radar is dismissed, the base commander orders all the planes brought to the center of the air field because he's concerned about sabotage instead of air strike, etc.) build to a cumulative disaster.

I was most struck by how much care was taken to show the Japanese perspective.  A lot of WWII films just demonize the Axis powers with no regard to subtleties to ensure that America and/or Britain is viewed in the most favorable light.  This film was at least half in Japanese (which was also nice) and tried very hard to put a historical, almost documentarian, feel on the events, sometimes at the expense of a story.  You can really tell this was made much later after the attack at a time when people were more willing to criticize their government's handling of intelligence.

This won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects in 1971 and they still hold up extremely well.  This is definitely a keeper.

Blue is the Warmest Color (2013)

  Happy Labor Day!  In keeping with the tradition of this blog, this movie has absolutely nothing to do with the holiday.

Adele (Adele Exarchopoulos) is a teenager desperate to be in love but her high school boyfriend is just not doing it for her.  Then she meets Emma (Lea Seydoux), a college senior studying painting, and realizes that love is a lot more complicated than she could have imagined.

I don't know what is happening lately, but every film I have picked up has been at least two and a half hours long.  This one is three.  That is a long time to watch teenage French lesbians.

That being said, this isn't not a bad coming-of-age/coming-out film.  Exarchopoulos is a charming, expressive actress and elevates the character, who could have just as easily been grating, to a sympathetic place.  Seydoux almost feels miscast because she's such a powerhouse of intensity.  I kept wanting more about her, not the main character.

The film has a very dreamy feel to it.  There's no real sense of time passing, but it follows Adele from high school through getting a job as a teacher so it must cover at least ten years.  That could be good or not, depending on your preference.  I found it slightly jarring.

You know how I feel about character dramas so I can't really say that I loved this film but I do recognize that some people would.  The French title translates as 'The Life of Adele, Chapters 1 and 2' so maybe a sequel is be along sooner or later.

Fences (2016)

  It's still technically Saturday for another 21 minutes as I write this so I'm going to say it counts.  Fall semester has started so I didn't have any time during the week to watch movies.  I can only assume that will be the usual pattern until December.  (Next year.  I just have to make it to next year.)

This was one of the big Oscar contenders of this most recent ceremony.  It was nominated for four and won Best Supporting Actress for Viola Davis.

Troy Maxson (Denzel Washington) is a garbage man in 1950s Pittsburgh.  He wants to make a better life for his children but is constantly hamstrung by his inability to connect emotionally with them.  He wants his two boys to be self-sufficient and not be scarred by their experiences as black men in a white-controlled world as he was but he doesn't know how to express his concerns without coming across as hard-hearted.  In particular, his youngest son, Cory (Jovan Adepo), is up for a football scholarship, but Troy is afraid that it will only lead to disappointment if Cory is denied opportunities to play because of his race.  He takes steps to secure what he believes is a sure future for Cory, despite the objections of both his son and his wife, Rose (Viola Davis).

This is based on a stage play and it shows.  There is a lot of monologuing going on and not a lot of acting.  Characters give huge chunks of exposition and story verbally instead of using the medium to show those scenes.  I understand that Washington was a huge fan of the play and felt very connected to the material but something seems lost in translation.

A lot of the awards buzz centered on Washington and Davis, who are both excellent as always, and some for breakout star Adepo, but no one even mentioned Mykelti Williamson who played Troy's damaged brother, Gabe.  He was absolutely perfect and I really think it's a shame that no one seemed to recognize the work he put in.  Playing a character with serious brain damage straight, not for laughs, is incredibly difficult because it's such a fine line to walk.  Too far and it's a parody, not enough and you lose the weight of it.  And Gabe is really the emotional heart of the film.  If that performance had been less compassionate, the movie would have felt brittle and cold with no sense of humanity.

Aside from my lobbying for a late nomination, there's nothing I can really recommend here.  It's two and a half hours of a family fighting.  If you saw August:  Osage County and thought "I like the dysfunction but could it just be more in one place?" then Fences is for you.