Brandon’s movie memory

Benny spends a lot of time in his room, given money but not attention by his parents, watching rental movies, news reports and homemade movies of his sister’s pyramid-scheme and a family-vacation pig-slaughter. Eventually, inevitably, he invites another girl home and kills her with the pig gun. Parents find out and help Benny hide the evidence. And Benny turns them in!

So apparently Haneke has been making this movie for years. Comfy rich family meets unexpected bursts of violence, shocking them our of their complacency. And we, the audience, who attend Austrian art movies… we are they! Their violence is ours! Or something, I dunno… Senses of Cinema is smarter than me, and has actual Haneke quotes:

Says the three movies just out on video are a trilogy, “reports of the progression of the emotional glaciation of my country”. “My films are intended as polemical statements against the American ‘barrel down’ cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.” Mattias Frey points out echoes of Benny in Wes Bentley’s American Beauty character, which I should’ve thought of myself.

Same ol’ good ol’ movie. Gets better every time. This time paid close attention to: Halle Berry’s acting (not great), Rogue’s hair (you can kinda see it turn white if you pause on the statue of liberty scene), overall pacing, Magneto’s costume. Waffling on seeing X-Men 3 in theaters or at all.

Watched on the night Imamura died. Thought it was the right time to expose myself to a great new filmmaker. Imagine my surprise when I didn’t like the movie.

Dude kills wife. Eight years later, out of prison, opens barber shop. Has pet eel. Girl works for him. Bunch of obvious stuff happens, but not so obvious that I can remember the details two weeks later. That’s why I write in this thing… to write about movies I didn’t like right after I see them, so later I’ll remember why I didn’t like them. Too late now. Oh wait, I remember complaining about a dream sequence when someone jumps out of the water and grabs the dude’s boat and says… something…

Cute fable about a crippled girl (with blind mom) who wants to sell newspapers. Gang of boys makes throat-slitting gestures at her, shoves her off pier and steals her crutch, but never sells any papers themselves. Very good looking movie. Katy had seen it before.

Watched on porch with passing traffic and marauding cockroaches and j0sh0rZ. Still great, though cluttered. Was thinking that it might be better if the whole underground rice-eater group from the sewers wasn’t in the movie at all. Useless to try comparing the Jeunet movies… is this “better” than City of Lost Children? Are the new ones “better” than the old ones? Why does nobody like Alien Resurrection except me? Katy liked this pretty well, I think.

I still enjoy watching the whole journey, but still not quite sure about myself afterwards. So Julie Delpy might’ve written the letter? But probably not? Is that completely beside the point? I again failed to recognize actresses. Julie Delpy leaves, Sharon Stone sleeps with him, Frances Conroy lives in a model home, Jessica Lange talks to animals and Tilda Swinton has him beaten up. Got it. Hmm, the guy who directed Habit and Wendigo might’ve punched him out. And Sun Green gets him a bandage, which makes me wonder why I haven’t watched Greendale yet.

Still my favorite movie.

Don’t think Katy loved it, but she says she didn’t hate it.

The extended director’s cut! I didn’t start out paying too much attention, and I ended up paying even less attention, after less than halfway through I decided the movie definitely sucked. Performances fine, cinematography fine, story even fine, but screenplay silly and overall kinda crappy. Full of those gangs of new york “blood stays on the blade” recurring moments of extreme character poignancy that mean very little to us, the audience.

So I’m not sure that it even matters, but Orlando Bloom is a blacksmith whose wife killed herself after their kid… died… somehow. Liam Neeson rides by, claiming to be Orlando’s dad I think. Orlando doesn’t want to go with him on a crusade to redeem his wife’s unholy death, but after killing his assistant and burning down his own shop, he decides maybe he’d better. Neeson dies soon, I’d venture. Orlando hits Jerusalem, where mighty king Ed Norton in a fancy leper-mask is always being betrayed by evil & scarred Jeremy Irons. Orlando is maybe in love with Norton’s sister, then I stopped caring at all and a whole lotta shit I already don’t remember happens.

Hmmm… from the writer of Martin Scorsese’s very star-studded Infernal Affairs remake. And the director of Gladiator, I should’ve remembered. Katy didn’t like it either, to say the least.

Very, very pretty movie. More a motion photography exhibition than a movie. The music was pretty good but the Lawrence-Fishburne voice-over poetry was unnecessary.

Elephants, hyenas, kids, kids on elephants, women with hyenas, hawks, sand dunes, etc. Seemed more like something I can use to scavenge stills for my screen-saver than a movie I’ll want to sit down and watch again. Katy seemed to like it. Helped that it was so short.

Amelie and Magneto are in it! Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ wife! The church hates you.

Good ol’ Fargo.

I remembered reading a discussion about Marge’s Japanese classmate and what exactly he’s doing in the movie, but now I uselessly can’t remember any of it.

Generally enjoyable little Christmas movie. One of Katy’s faves, but I still thought I’d hate it… was surprised not to. Lost my notes, if I made any, so attempted story reconstruction:

Hugh Grant is the Prime Minister in love with his fired secretary. Liam Neeson lost his wife and his young son is crushing on a classmate. A young black guy marries Keira Knightley while his young white guy friend secretly loved her. An aging rocker wins the irony vote with his self-consciously awful xmas song. Laura Linney has a retarded brother and likes a co-worker. A writer likes his translator. Alan Rickman wants to cheat on Emma Thompson. A dude from the Office likes his co-star in a porn movie. A lame dude goes to rural US to get chicks. BB Thorton’s the president, R Atkinson’s some giftwrapping guy in a fancy store. That cover it?

Putting aside all the Tom Cruisey shenanigans and South Park sketches, he’s a really good actor for this type of movie. Fun fake faces, costumes, cars and brain bombs. The action scenes make my eyes hurt, and it’s all action scenes.

Billy Crudup, looking not so familiar, was the inside man and Phil Hoffman was an endearing psycho killer. Everyone else did whatever, and probably did a fine job of it. I was all caught up in the tension of the thing and the wild missions… thrilling. Took exception to the happy-sappy final scene, where all survivors (TC, wife, three teammates, commander L Fishburne and the comic-relief tech guy) laugh and cheer, the camera taking turns showing them smile in close-up. But later read a fine explanation of how Cruise maybe got brain-bombed or never woke up from eating a live electric cord, and the ending is a dying fantasy. Katy had a point in the action scenes having way too many cuts, but that’s nothing new.

Should this really be compared to Ghost World, which was a whole different kind of movie? Sure, why not. Both try to mix humor with failure and both have Steve Buscemi in ‘em.

Art Con is disillusioned with the art-school crowd and has nothing nice to say about the students, their teachers, rich successful artists, or lonely bitter failures. Pretty harsh outlook (but of course). A few interesting bits - our kid being more accepted as a famous serial killer (not “innocent” since he did burn down an apartment building, killing many) than he ever would’ve been as an artist, and the “outsider artist” cop being celebrated for making daringly crappy paintings. Kind of an easy-target comedy, like Best In Show, but meaner. Angelica Huston didn’t have much to do. Katy didn’t seem too enthused.

A social issues movie. Indians girls who are widowed (before even realizing they were married in some cases) are sent to live in widow-houses as beggars and whores. Our little protagonist and a free-spirited strong-willed young woman daren’t defy their fat tradition-bound elders, and so surrender to their fates till a young male idealist, too late to save the young woman, sacrifices the girl to the Gandhi Train. Before that, the y.w. drowns herself in the river, our girl brings holy water (too late) to a dying woman, and a parrot is murdered.

Full of pretty shots and good performances, but in retrospect a lightweight and obvious script. Seems the whole movie is meant to make us feel bad about these widows, being oppressed by their religion/culture, like Los Olvidados or Salaam Bombay. None seem quite as good, or quite as depressing as Germany Year Zero, but depressing poor-people movies are never my favorites. Nor are happy rich-people movies, for that matter. Katy seemed to like it, but didn’t say much.