mooooovies (#6)

Dude, Where's My Car? (dir. Danny Leiner, 2000)
Watched this on Saturday night with roommate Sarah and friend Petey, trying to take a drink every time they said "dude", "shibby", or "continuum transfunctioner", which I would imagine is, at worst, the second best way to watch this movie. One thing that seemed drunkenly apparent was that Ashton Kutcher was like ten times more entertaining than Sean William Scott (this might be because of the screenplay, I noticed Kutcher once in a while getting to say something that sounds like it makes sense, and then undo it with something incredibly stupid, whereas SWS just has to be dumb right off the bat). Either way, a Saturday night well spent. And Pete passed out before the movie ended.


The Time Traveller's Wife (dir. Robert Schwentke, 2009)
We decided that this was going to be better than the Emmys, and in the end that was probably the right choice (of a set we limited to two for no real reason). It gets a bit repetitive after a while, but it's not that bad, and the melodrama is at least focused on two very likable people. Bana's affability almost became a joke around the hour mark, actually, but what can I say, I like the dude. Honestly, the fact that it's a sci-fi movie very clearly targeted at the Nicholas Sparks audience is almost enough to make me like it on principle, and while it could be a little clearer on some of the details, it's still not a bad little movie.

mooooovies (#4)

The Expendables (dir. Sylvester Stallone, 2010)
It's not fair, really, from a critical standpoint. How could I not like this? Jet Li fights Ivan Drago here. Many modern action movies aim for intertextuality by referencing shots, quips, and cliches, but bringing together so many iconic actors (of so many iconic characters) to do an action movie is a whole different thing altogether.

There are things here that are not so good, the foremost of which is the CGI blood. I wonder what the price point difference is between CGI blood and physical fake blood, and whether it gets bigger for something that necessitates as much blood as this movie does, because this shit looks terrible (the fire isn't so good either).

For the most part, though, Stallone knows how to direct this kind of movie. He spends a lot of time on faces, which is awesome when the faces are so iconic. A speech delivered by Mickey Rourke, for example, is a-ok in its content, but the tight (blue-lit) close-up on his face is fascinating. I would imagine that if this movie sounds like a good idea to you, there is no reason you won't enjoy it (do I even need to say that Statham is great?).

Symbol (dir. Hitoshi Matsumoto, 2009, no US release yet scheduled)
Symbol is partly about a man that wakes up in a mysterious all-white room but it's not a horror movie. Instead, it's a (seemingly) absurdist existential comedy. The story of the man (played in kiddie pajamas by Matsumoto) is cross-cut with the (seemingly) unrelated story of an aging Mexican Wrestler getting ready for a match he is not expected to win (pro wrestling is competitive here). It's kind of hard to describe what happens without spoiling a major development that is presented with awesome cross-cutting about 3/4ths of the way into the movie, but let's just say that the scope of Matsumoto's story expands greatly towards the end.

Even before that revelation, however, I was having a lot of fun. The parts with the man stuck in the room, flicking little switches (which are actually little cherub penises) that make seemingly random objects appear and disappear are a great send-up of a style of video-gamey logic in which completely unrelated tasks eventually lead to a reasonable goal. Symbol really strikes me as quite a brilliant, original work and it's really worth going out of your way (internets) to see.

mooooovies (#3)

The Invention of Lying (dir. Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson, 2009)
This was on HBO On Demand so I watched it on a Sunday night not expecting much, and I don't regret it. It certainly has many funny moments and Jennifer Garner does a very admirable job playing a character who is required by the plot to speak almost entirely in dialogue that would normally be obvious subtext (that's a way to look at this movie, I guess: a society without lies is a society without subtext?). The tone here sometimes edges from surprisingly sad to boringly sad though and, well, is it wrong to ask a comedy to be slightly, I don't know, nerdier? That is to say, if you're creating an alternate reality, shouldn't it be a little more detailed? Everything we know about this reality in which lying hasn't been invented seems to suggest that history for the most part has played out exactly the same as it did in our reality (except for/despite the absence of religion). This might be too much to ask, I dunno.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (dir. Edgar Wright, 2010)
Not being nerdy enough is certainly not a problem for this one and it totally exceeded my expectations, which were basically that I would enjoy some of the form but would be super-turned off by the story. I was happily only half right. From the initial 16-bitty Universal logo, Wright's synthesis of video game and comic imagery is totally fun, full of witty sight gags and useful transitions and characterizations (PS though, with regards to using video game stuff in movies, let's not forget Crank: High Voltage, which does it in a completely different spirit but just as successfully). And my fear that I would find Scott Pilgrim himself to be somewhat of a turd wasn't off, but with pretty much every other character calling him a turd at some point it totally didn't bother me like I thought it would. Basically, the Seven Evil Exes thing was a much more complex metaphor for relationships than I expected it to be (haven't read the books obvi) and this was really fun. (Also there's a scene of Scott Pilgrim talking to himself that made me wonder, who's gonna have the balls to pull the trigger on the Michael Cera/Jesse Eisenberg buddy movie?).

I should probably be spreading these out better.

(adapted) WORD UP

It was much easier narrowing Adapted Screenplay down to 5 this year than it was narrowing down its Original counterpart category. Nevertheless, these 5 are awesome. Speaking of awesome, here's Gene Hackman to tell you about them.


-I NOMIT8 U
- Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Ianucci, and Tony Roche for In the Loop, spun-off from the TV show The Thick of It
Some characters in In the Loop are written so that you're almost scared for them to come on the screen, because they're gonna say something so darkly and angrily hilarious you might not be able to take it. That's a fucking comedy script.

- Neil Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell for District 9, expanded from Neil Blomkamp's short film Alive in Joburg
It's an excitingly plotted, politically interesting movie. The trope of a character who works for a giant organization or government and slowly discovers its evils is not an uncommon one, especially in movies about the future or alternate timelines, but Wikus totally works as a naive little prick who is in way over his head.

- Tony Burgess for Pontypool, adapted from his own novel Pontypool Changes Everything
Semiotic Zombie Flick is a great hook (if your target audience is me), and Pontypool delivers, even (maybe especially) when the characters have to talk their way through figuring out how they're gonna get out of their besieged radio station.

- Scott Z. Burns for The Informant!, adapted from the Kurt Eichenwald book of the same name
It's not saying too much that The Informant! had the most entertaining inner monologues of the year, but their progression from slightly unhinged and obsessive to completely out there is an achievement in both character development and comedy.

- Henry Selick for Coraline, adapted from the Neil Gaiman novel of the same name
I'm a sucker for kids stories that are both very dark and very gorgeous, what can I say? The differences between the "real world" and "other world" characters are wonderfully written.

- W1NN3RS:
All those In the Loop guys. It was the funniest movie of the year and it's not even close. To reduce it to a lot of cursing doesn't give it nearly enough credit, (though the cursing is really great). There's a wealth of great characters here, and about a billion great lines.