by ·Comments Off on Mission: Impossible 4 (2011, Brad Bird)

Another installment of the consistently high-quality series, the best thing Tom Cruise has ever gotten himself involved with. He escapes from prison, climbs the highest building in the world with malfunctioning suction gloves (a much better use of Dubai than in Sex & The City 2), gets into so many car accidents, sneaks into the Kremlin (all you need is a fake mustache) and stops a nuclear missile from destroying San Francisco.

Jeremy Renner is a spy-turned-accountant-turned-spy with a dark past (he failed to protect Ethan’s wife from getting killed by foreign agents), Simon Pegg is the comic-relief tech spy with an awesome rear-projection screen used to fool a Kremlin guard into thinking a spy-infested hallway is empty, and Paula Patton is the sex-appeal spy who gets to kick the enemy spy (Lea Seydoux, Mysteries of Lisbon) who murdered her boyfriend (Josh Holloway) out of a 300-story window.

Ving Rhames gets a cameo at the end, and Tom Cruise’s wife is still alive if anyone gives a shit about that. Brad Bird knows how to plan an action scene and shoot it coherently, and that’s really all we wanted.

2023: Rewatched on new year’s eve. RIP Tom Wilkinson. Come back, Paula Patton.

by ·Comments Off on Three Ages (1923, Buster Keaton)

I watched this again after seeing Intolerance and realizing this was a parody. I didn’t love it the first time – maybe my least-loved of all Keaton’s features, so thought I need to give it another shot. Well, I still don’t love it but it’s got some good scenes.

Love triangle:

Three time periods – modern, roman and caveman (with stop-motion dinosaurs) – featuring the same cast: Buster wants The Girl (Margaret Leahy, who won the role in a beauty contest), but she’s grabbed away by Wallace Beery (best known as the star of Barton Fink‘s unfilmed wrestling picture). The Girl’s parents (Lillian Lawrence and Keaton’s longtime anatagonist Joe Roberts) prefer Beery, but Keaton’s tenacity and stunt-survival skills win the girl’s hand in the end.

Her parents:

Best bits: Keaton jumping from one building to another and missing (an actual stunt-gone-wrong), his car falls apart while he’s driving it, Buster’s rival plans to pummel him during a football game – come to think of it, all my favorite parts are from the modern segment. The cave era is all downhill after the animated dinosaur. Roman spends too much time with a man in a lion costume, and has a classic bit of racism when all the negro servants come running when they see Buster throwing dice.

by ·Comments Off on Favorite New Movies of 2011

1. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
Sorry so obvious.

2. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)
The only one on the list that I watched twice.

3. Finisterrae (Sergio Caballero)
4. Essential Killing (Jerzy Skolimowski)
5. The Four Times (Michelangelo Frammartino)
I was glad to see these last two on so many year-end lists, because at the time I watched them they felt like secrets – in Atlanta, at least. Finisterrae is still a secret.

6. The Turin Horse (Bela Tarr)
7. Tabloid (Errol Morris)
8. Mysteries of Lisbon (Raoul Ruiz)
9. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (Bromberg, Medrea & Clouzot)
10. And Everything Is Going Fine (Steven Soderbergh)
11. Attack the Block (Joe Cornish)
12. Melancholia (Lars Von Trier)

Runners-up:
The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodovar)
Hugo (Martin Scorsese)
The Muppets (James Bobin)
True Grit (Coens)
Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)

Best Local Film: The Little Death (Bret Wood)

Best New Horror: Red State (Kevin Smith)

The Hobo With a Shotgun Award
for the most entertaining fake-grindhouse feature of the year goes to:
Machete by Robert Rodriguez
Runner-up: Hobo With a Shotgun

by ·Comments Off on Favorite Movies watched on video in 2011

1. Three by Raoul Ruiz: City of Pirates (1984), Manuel on the Island of Wonders (1985), and That Day (2003)
City of Pirates has been the one to beat since I watched it this summer. I can’t say Manuel beats it exactly, but they are highly complimentary (both concern islands, pirates, children with identity issues, etc). The other (and of course Mysteries of Lisbon) is happy proof that Ruiz never stopped making brilliant work to the end of his life. I look forward to catching up with all the rest.

2. Three by Bergman: Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), The Magician (1958) and The Virgin Spring (1960)
I didn’t even think I liked Bergman very much until I saw Monika at Emory early this year. Then I watched each of these expecting to be let down, but I never was. So I’m grudgingly redefining myself as a huge Bergman fan.

3. Four by Josef von Sternberg: Underworld (1927), The Last Command (1928), Docks of New York (1928) and Dishonored (1931)

4. Russian Silents: Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein), By the Law (Kuleshov), Mother (Pudovkin) and Arsenal (Dovzhenko)

5. A Tale of the Wind (1988, Ivens & Loridan)
6. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, William Wyler)

7. Victor Sjostrom: The Phantom Carriage (1921) and He Who Gets Slapped (1924)

8. The Wind Will Carry Us (1999, Abbas Kiarostami)

9. Renoir in the 1930’s: La Chienne, Night at the Crossroads, Boudu Saved From Drowning and Toni
I didn’t get to Grand Illusion in time.

10. Kaneto Shindo horrors: Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968)

I don’t care if it’s cheating to put 25 titles in my top-10.

11. Finis Terrae (1929, Jean Epstein)
12. Nostalghia (1983, Andrei Tarkovsky)
13. I Was a Male War Bride (1949, Howard Hawks)

14. Two by Alain Resnais: Love Unto Death (1984) and Melo (1986)
Too bad about I Want To Go Home.

15. Century of the Self (2002, Adam Curtis)
16. For All Mankind (1989, Al Reinert)
Two extremely different documentaries.

17. Bigger Than Life (1956, Nicholas Ray)
18. The Apartment (1960, Billy Wilder)
19. La Pointe-courte (1956, Agnes Varda)
20. Withnail & I (1986, Bruce Robinson)

21. Make Way For Tomorrow (1937, Leo McCarey)
22. Center Stage (1991, Stanley Kwan)
23. Powell & Pressburger: A Canterbury Tale and Gone to Earth
24. Hail the Conquering Hero (1944, Preston Sturges)
25. Gothic (1986, Ken Russell)
26. The Crowd (1928, King Vidor)

Runners-up:
My Life to Live (1962, Jean-Luc Godard)
The Last Bolshevik (1992, Chris Marker)
L’Assassinat du Père Noël (1941, Christian-Jaque)
The Marquise of O (1976, Eric Rohmer)
Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970, Werner Herzog)
The Last Mistress (2007, Catherine Breillat)

Finally, because his films don’t like to mingle with the others,
Jacques Rivette of the year: L’Amour Fou (1969)

by ·Comments Off on Favorite Classic Movies watched in theaters in 2011

1. Monika (1953, Ingmar Bergman)
Didn’t used to think I was a Bergman fan.

2. Chinatown (1974, Roman Polanski)
Didn’t used to think I was a big Polanski fan either, until watching this on the big screen at Emory.

3. Out of the Past (1947, Jacques Tourneur)
Cheating: I had this same movie on the same list six years ago.

4. The Dead (1987, John Huston)
5. Knife in the Water (1962, Roman Polanski)
6. Bound (1996, Wachowskis)
7. The Lady from Shanghai (1947, Orson Welles)
8. Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder)
The previous eight films were all shown at Emory on 35mm, for which I am grateful.

9. The Gate (1987, Tibor Takacs)
One of these things is not like the others… a low-profile 80’s horror flick at the Plaza, an old fave from childhood HBO screenings seen for the first time on the big screen.

10. The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976, Nicolas Roeg)

Bonus mentions to The Mark of Zorro (1920, Fred Niblo) for the nice presentation (including a live organ score) at the Fox, and to The Lion King (1994) for looking pretty sweet in 3-D and making my wife so happy.

by ·Comments Off on Favorite Shorts in 2011

I didn’t watch a ton of shorts, not like I did a couple years ago.
But these were all excellent.

1. The Old Lady and the Pigeons (1998, Sylvain Chomet)
This totally made up for The Illusionist.

2. The Chorus (1982, Abbas Kiarostami)
3. Toby Dammit (1968, Federico Fellini)
4. The House Is Black (1963, Forugh Farrokhzad)
5. The Way to Shadow Garden (1954, Stan Brakhage)
The only Brakhage I watched this year. I rented the second Criterion set but wasn’t sure if I should watch it or hold out for the blu-ray. Of course there’s no reason to delay ’cause I can always watch the films a second time…

6. Plastic Bag (2009, Ramin Bahrani)
7. Land Without Bread (1933, Luis Buñuel)
After reading about this for years, I felt like I’d seen it before I saw it.

8. Monsieur Fantomas (1937, Ernst Moerman)
9. Three by Agnes Varda: 7p., cuis., s. de b. (1984), Ydessa, The Bears and etc. (2004) and Le Lion volatil (2003)
10. Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers (2001, Simonsson & Nilsson)
The short – not the feature, which was overbaked.

by ·Comments Off on Some 2011 Movies To Watch

2011 Movies I Obviously Need To See:

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
The Artist
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
Carnage
Contagion and Haywire
Crazy Horse
A Dangerous Method
Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Remake
Harakiri
Into the Abyss
Insidious
Keyhole
Pina
The Rum Diary
Super 8
Take Shelter
This is Not a Film

2011 Movies I Need To See, according to many critics:

The Arbor
The Deep Blue Sea
Elena
Faust
The Guard
Le Havre
Kid with a Bike
Kill List
Margaret
Martha Marcy May Marlene
Nostalgia for the Light
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
Poetry
The Portuguese Nun
A Separation
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
To Die Like a Man
Two Years at Sea and Slow Action
Tyrannosaur
We Can’t Go Home Again
We Have a Pope
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Weekend

2011 Movies I Need To See, according to a single, highly convincing critic:

Attenberg (Cinema Scope)
The Catechism Cataclysm (Grady Hendrix)
Confessions (Pamela Jahn)
Coriolanus (Demetrios Matheou)
Disorder (Jonathan Rosenbaum)
Dreams of a Life (Peter Bradshaw)
The Forgotten Space (Sukhdev Sandhu)
The Future (AV Club)
Impardonnables (Jonathan Rosenbaum)
The Interrupters (A.A. Dowd & Ben Kenigsberg)
Kaboom (John Waters)
Kinyarwanda (Roger Ebert)
Margin Call (JR Jones)
My Joy (Nick Roddick)
Photographic Memory (David Jenkins)
Post Mortem (Frances Morgan)
Red White and Blue (Virginie Selavy)
El Sicario, Room 164 (Chuck Bowen)
Super (Grady Hendrix)
The Yellow Sea (Wendy Ide)

by ·Comments Off on 2011: The Movie Year in Review

Another good movie year. Lists to follow.

Progress on my massive must-see lists: I’ve now watched some 61% of the They Shoot Pictures list (up from 55 last year), approx. 50% of Rosenbaum’s list (46 last year), and about 57% of Criterion movies (was 54 and I watched a ton, but they just keep releasing ’em).

Normally I have a long list I’d made myself a year before of specific movies I intended to watch this year, and I can disappointedly point out how few of them I ended up watching, but I didn’t do that this year, so no disappointment!

Movies I only watched in part:
Late Spring – will surely try this again
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace – we’ll pick this up again, too
Uncle Meat – meant to watch a half hour at a time, but never returned.
The Prisoner – meant to watch on treadmill, but working out is hard
Bells of St. Mary’s – still plotting to finish, but I fell asleep a half hour before Katy turned it off, so our resume-points are out of sync.
A Christmas Carol – The Jim Carrey motion-capture version. Not planning to finish this ever, since its one of the worst movies we’ve ever (half) watched – a mishmash of visual styles, all of them ugly.

Anyway… on with the lists!

by ·Comments Off on Burke and Hare (2011, John Landis)

Perfect example of a movie that works in theory, but lacks something essential. Strong performances by good comic actors (I was happily surprised by Andy Serkis), funny situations and dialogue, strong historical interest, and good energy. So why is it such an average movie? Blame Landis?

Simon “Burke” Pegg tries to buy the favor of feminist actress Isla Fisher, while Hare is content with his wife Lucky (Spaced star Jessica Hynes). The intrigue revolves around head doctors at competing medical schools – old-school Tim Curry, who gets the law on his side, and Tom Wilkinson, who resorts to hiring our heroes to provide him bodies on which to experiment (leading to the undignified death of poor Christopher Lee). Bill Bailey plays a narrating executioner and David Hayman is a gangster who wants protection money but ends up dead in the operating theater. Movie closes on a present-day shot of Burke’s skeleton, still preserved in Edinburgh – perfect ending to a historical black comedy.

I haven’t much to say, so thought I’d end by stealing a native Edinburgh perspective from Shadowplay, but damn it, they haven’t watched this one yet.