by ·Comments Off on Human Giant season 1 (2007)

“They say the hardest part of rollerblading is telling your parents you’re gay.”

Finally, a post-Mr. Show sketch comedy show that I love. Did Paul recommend this one? I think he did. Thanks, Paul.

Ringer guests include Brian Posehn, Jon Benjamin (as Bruce Willis), Patton Oswalt, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Kristen Schaal (of Valentine’s Day fame) and Jay Johnston.

Written by the main dudes plus Jon Glaser (not Jon Glazer) and some Funny or Die / Drunk History.

Maybe I should also check out: Parks & Recreation, Childrens’ Hospital, Players, and possibly The League though that one may rely on over-my-head football jokes.

Is it just me, or did a late episode repeat entire sketches from an earlier episode?

by ·Comments Off on Capitalism: A Love Story (2009, Michael Moore)

Finally caught up with this. Katy and I both liked. Moore has returned to the concerns of Roger & Me, watches the problems of Flint spread to the entire country, but as usual with him (and unusual for political documentaries in general), does it in a way that makes me interested and excited, not depressed. A couple token scenes of Moore trying to talk his way into corporate offices and an ending where he wraps Wall Street in crime scene tape aside, he seems to have listened to criticism and kept himself mostly off-camera. We noticed he was awfully polite and attentive to religion, trying to expand his support base out of the godless-liberal camp. Winning coverage of a factory sit-in and an evicted family that refused to leave balance out the bummers of underpaid airline pilots, life insurance policies on corporate employees and bullying bank bailouts… well, not really, but he makes it feel that way.

Predictably, critical response was off the charts… some raves, many attacks, and still more highly-qualified minor praises – mostly accusing him of simplifying the issues. But they’re issues that needed simplifying, and the accusation is an easy way for a film reviewer to imply their superior knowledge and understanding to Moore without having to defend themselves with examples. Anyway, Cine File put my thoughts succinctly: “Basically the achievement of Capitalism is to spell out the facts in such a way that they’re impossible to ignore. Nobody does it better than Moore.”

Best of all, I found out that in my lifetime, U.S. Presidents used to say things like this:

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

– Jimmy Carter, 1979-07-15

by ·Comments Off on My Favorite Wife (1940, Garson Kanin)

Garson Kanin would quit directing during WWII, went on to write Adam’s Rib and Born Yesterday. Written by the Spewack family (Kiss Me Kate) with help from producer Leo McCarey (Ruggles of Red Gap, The Awful Truth). Shot by Rudolph Maté (who’d later direct D.O.A.) and edited by Robert Wise (who’d direct Day The Earth Stood Still, The Haunting and West Side Story). That’s altogether too much talent for one light comedy to stand! It holds up just fine, though

Three years after The Awful Truth, Cary Grant and Irene Dunne again play a couple in trouble. This time it’s not simple divorce proceedings – she has been missing for years, stranded on an island with hunky Randolph Scott (a year before Western Union), and Grant has just declared her legally dead so he can marry young Gail Patrick (the bad sister in My Man Godfrey). But it’s clear from the beginning that Dunne and Grant need to end up back together since, first of all they have kids and this is the 40’s, and secondly Randolph and Gail are never taken seriously by the movie, as romantic mates or anything else. And so that’s what happens, and I suppose Randolph and Gail end up together but I can’t remember for sure. Ends with a bonkers scene, Grant trying to sleep on a broken cot in the attic before he gives up and comes down to join his wife. Something about male stubbornness I guess.

Wikipedia calls it screwball but I think that word is tossed around too much. Bosley Crowther at the Times was in a weird mood, calling it “a frankly fanciful farce, a rondo of refined ribaldries,” also giving thumbs-up to Granville Bates as the judge in two major scenes. Remade with Doris Day and James Garner in the 60’s.

by ·Comments Off on Birth (2004, Jonathan Glazer)

“I thought you were my dead husband, but you’re just a little boy in my bathtub.”

The director is a different person from Jon Glaser, the stand-up comic I’ve seen a few times performing with Jon Benjamin. IMDB says Glazer directed Sexy Beast, which I rather liked even if I don’t understand its cult reputation, and Glaser cowrote Human Giant and performed in Baby Mama, The Toe Tactic and Pootie Tang. I’m gonna say Glaser is my favorite Jon(athan) Gla(s/z)er at the moment, but Glazer could definitely catch up.

Impossible to watch without thinking of Ruiz’s Comedy of Innocence, also dealing with a kid renouncing his parents and deciding he is someone else, inexplicably and with full conviction, leaving the adults wondering how to react. Very different styles and stories, though. This time the kid (Sean) thinks he is Nicole Kidman’s husband reincarnated, leading to serious problems since they both wish for this to be true but she can’t have a love affair with a ten-year-old.

Also unlike the Ruiz, this kid has an explanation. Anne Heche (electrifying in this – high-strung, cruel and beautiful) and Peter Stormare (kind of a lump) are old friends (I think Stormare might be the dead husband’s brother, and Heche his wife, but don’t hold me to that) coming to a party at which Heche is gonna give Kidman a box of love letters Kidman had sent her late husband, but Heche panics, runs outside and buries the box, which is found by the kid. The rest doesn’t exactly follow logically – movie still has an air of mystery, of spiritual possession – but it’s a partial explanation.

Hot-tempered rich guy Joseph (Danny “son of John” Huston) is to marry Kidman soon, so he doesn’t take well to the kid’s claims. He and gentle, logical Bob (must be someone’s brother, played by Arliss Howard: Cowboy in Full Metal Jacket) and Kidman’s pregnant sister Laura (Alison Elliott of Wings of the Dove) help her work with the kid (whose parents, completely at a loss, allow him to stay over unsupervised), trying to find holes in his story or understand his motives. I liked the movie very much, but the main problem I had was with its attempt to have it’s realism with its mysticism, sending first Nicole then Bob into a room to disprove the kid for two hours then show them bowled over by a couple correct anwers and elide whatever happens for the next hour and fifty-eight minutes, or making his parents total pushovers who stay away from Kidman’s house – always conveniently cutting to prolong the confusion, which contradicts the reality of all these suspicious adults who are supposed to be searching for the truth. If the movie isn’t going to take the approach of an airtight psychological mystery with a twist ending a la Shutter Island, I’d have preferred it head more towards the inexplicable Comedy of Innocence than straddle the line between them. But no matter, it’s an utterly enjoyable movie with awesome acting and unique enough filmmaking (shimmering, closeup-happy cinematography by Harris Savides: Zodiac, Elephant) to get me all excited.

The whole happy family – that’s Lauren Bacall in front of the cake:

I admit I was looking for the twist ending. Even though we know Heche buried something while the kid watched, I’m wondering which adult would have convinced the kid to concoct this lie. Not his parents, who seem very upset. Nicole’s mom Lauren Bacall doesn’t seem diabolical. Jimmy the doorman (played by cowriter Milo Addica) is friendly with the kid but would seem to lack enough information to plot this out convincingly. I stopped guessing when the kid strips and slides into the bath with Kidman – no adult could brainwash a 10-year-old into being so unlike a 10-year-old. Finally, in the weirdest scene of any movie I’ve seen this year, Sean is tested by a creepy Anne Heche, who it turns out had a long, intense affair with the dead man, unbeknownst to Sean since it wasn’t mentioned in the letters. She then confronts him, hissing, shattering his illusions of true love reborn. Mercifully, Kidman never learns of the affair and goes on to marry Joseph. In an otherwise unreal movie, Kidman spectacularly creates a very real sense of loss, and Glazer and his cowriters (Addica who wrote Monster’s Ball and Jean-Claude Carrière, a lead collaborator of Luis Buñuel, which makes perfect sense) must have realized it’d be too cruel to push her any further at the end.

Anne Heche:

Peter Stormare:

Birth was shat upon critically and commercially, which is how it landed at number eight on The Guardian’s list of the ten most underrated films of the decade (between Inland Empire and Songs from the Second Floor). Coincidentally at number eight of their outright best-of-decade list is Dogville, another Kidman/Bacall movie by a filmmaker who gleefully pushes everything over the edge, who would have had Heche gleefully destroy Kidman, the bastard.

Bob comforts Sean after Joseph goes on a rampage:

J. Anderson:

A brilliant score by Alexandre Desplat underlines Birth and completes it, causing it to slide slightly off-kilter with a tinkly music-box jingle and an ominous, nervous thumping heartbeat backdrop. This musical duality meshes perfectly with the fabric of Birth, in which Anna must choose between an impossible true love and a possible false one. It’s a brilliant film, but not a happy one. The filmmakers seem to have begun at the point in which love lives “happily ever after,” discovering only bitter disappointment and misled hope instead.

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WonderRoot’s Generally Local, Mostly Independent Filmmakers’ Night

Atlanta, Day One (John Duke and Kris Valeriano)
I liked. KV wears a three-dollar suit, tours picturesque ruins of Atlanta before he starts breaking down. I dig the editing at the end, as it cuts between scenes where he’s in the same physical pose, giving the impression of one movement transporting across locations.

Mouth 2 Mouth (Patrick Coll and Chris Chambers)
Hilarious, very short animation.

Until Dust (Nathan Honnold)
I remember saying to Jimmy afterwards that it’s good to know I’m not the only Guy Maddin fan in Atlanta, but I don’t remember much else. Oh wait, here it is on Vimeo! Blurry-focus titles, one of which says “hairdressing school,” yep, I stand by my Maddin comparison. Too bad it’s one of the only pieces projected interlaced, since it was shot originally on super8 film.

Rex (Jackson McDonald)
A guy picks up girls to feed to his hungry dragon. Shot decently and colorfully, complete with flashbacks.

Breathe (Fletcher Holmes)
Clever special-effects demo, shot underwater and somehow keyed, breathing SFX added later prompting a “how’d you DO that?” from the crowd.

17 Degrees Ain’t Nothing (Carlton Mackey and Dane Jefferson)
Two dudes got a camera, but what to film? They chose to interview some homeless people for an hour – and that hour changed their lives (the lives of the two dudes, not of the homeless people). A year later, footage is edited, theme songs are written, still photos are panned and zoomed, and lessons are learned.

The Charm and Rant of Charlotte Pomerate (Beth Malone)
The filmmaker has, what was it, a grandfather involved in “very far left” politics? And his wife wrote children’s books. And she was interviewed by her granddaughter, then the interview was turned into a claymation video… but it’s more “clay” than “mation”. Clay-still-life. Combines two styles I don’t like (documentaries about one’s relatives + animating audio conversations) but it was cute so I couldn’t stay mad.

Passion Seeker (Chris Chamber)
Video for a song by Little Tybee and Adron edited from 1930’s-90’s film clips. Played at around 2fps, and it’d be important to know whether that was intentional. If so, I’m not a big fan. If not, hey WonderRoot, I can give you advice on how to fix that. The song was nice.

Christmas and Hanukkah (Garry Bowden)
“Love is coming for us all,” says the description. A straight-faced romance soap-opera that inspired derisive laughter from the audience. Could Bowden be the Tommy Wiseau of Atlanta? Could he even be of Atlanta? I didn’t recognize any of the scenery, and it’s mostly shot outdoors. Story follows two people who find each other after sour breakups, shot by a man with a handicam but without a plan.

Heaven (Chris Sailor)
Heaven is a parking lot where echoes both precede and follow your words. You should be quiet, according to the man behind you in a creepy mask, but you are not. Also, you’d like a cigarette.

One Minute Fluid Toons on Paper (Brett W. Thompson)
Finally, the long-awaited return of Fluid Toons! Less narrative (and without the awesome sound effects) than the last installment, but any Fluid Toons is good Fluid Toons.

Godamsterdam: Yellow Fever (Ben Cohen)
Part of a web series celebrating political incorrectness. It’s no Sarah Silverman Program but it made me chuckle. Probably the most ambitious project here, setting up a regular cast of characters and a whole series of shorts, with higher than usual production values.

by ·Comments Off on A Night in Casablanca (1946, Archie Mayo)

Weirdly slow, clunky and unfunny Marx brothers movie. It kinda stars Harpo, or at least he’s onscreen more than the others. No Zeppo at all. I’d think that would be a good thing, but he’s replaced by generic heroic-type Charles Drake (No Name on the Bullet, It Came From Outer Space) with bland girlfriend Lois Collier (Cobra Woman, Flying Disc Man from Mars).

Managers at a certain hotel keep turning up dead, so Groucho is hired to run the place as a last resort. But a disguised nazi count (silly-toupeed, funny-voiced Sig Ruman of A Night at the Opera, Ninotchka, To Be or Not To Be) has stashed stolen treasure in the hotel and has been scheming to escape with the goods while our gallant hero tries to stop him. Sig’s vamp nazi chick Lisette Verea and his overeager soldier Fred Giermann (who has a long, painful swordfight scene with Harpo) try not-so-hard to thwart the Marxes instead of focusing on the do-gooder and leaving the harmless clowns alone. Groucho gets to use his funny walk more than his funny dialogue, and the movie slows to a crawl a couple times establishing that Chico can play piano and Harpo can play the harp.

The Brothers’ second-to-last film, and also the second-to-last by Archie Mayo (who replaced Fritz Lang on Moontide and adapted Sam Fuller on Confirm or Deny). Two writers plus (allegedly) an uncredited Frank Tashlin, and the Marxes went on tour before the filming “hoping to sharpen the script’s comedy” – so why does it feel like the jokes were so few and inadequate? It was meant to be a spoof of Casablanca, but they chickened out under legal scrutiny, so maybe all the best material got jettisoned in a last-minute rewrite. I don’t mean to be so hard on the movie – it was lightly amusing, a nice waste of 80 minutes – I was just expecting something more.

by ·Comments Off on Frontier of Dawn (2008, Philippe Garrel)

“The day the last concentration camp survivor dies, World War III will start.”

I like Louis Garrel, though I’ve only seen him in movies I like less than him (Love Songs, The Dreamers). Loved this one, though – finally everything coming together for both Garrels. Louis is a photographer here, comes to the house of Carole (Laura Smet of Chabrol’s The Bridesmaid) to take pictures, but starts an affair with her instead, while her husband Ed is off making a Hollywood film. They talk more about breaking up than being together, a strange, somewhat obsessive couple.

Louis with Carole:

“Carole’s been institutionalized!”
She turns out to be more than somewhat obsessive, and when she’s getting electroshock therapy I felt stupid for not realizing before that it’s a period piece… after all, it’s in black and white, there are iris-out transitions and film grain galore. But then she dies and her headstone reads 2007 and I feel stupid again.

Louis takes up with a nice new girl named Eve (Clémentine Poidatz of nothing I’ve heard of, but the guy who plays her dad cowrote Wild Reeds). But he’s still haunted by his old girlfriend, and it turns into a bit of a ghost story with great, mournful string and piano music. Awesome cinematography by William Lubtchansky, unexpected camera moves and story twists kept me on edge.

Louis with Eve:

D. Kasman:

Garrel’s smaller love tale following the epic-intimate May ’68 opus Regular Lovers, asks the filmmaker’s perennial question: how do you reconcile the unchangeable fate of the past with the quotidian sorrows and joy of the present? The answer is impossible, but the way Frontier of Dawn poses the question is frustrating but utterly effective. … Whether the choice of death is the ultimate kind of faith or the weakest of all is not something Frontier of Dawn is powerful enough to answer, but it asks vital, terrifying questions, transposed to a forlorn, gloriously star-crossed romanticism.

D. Phelps:

Frontier mostly takes place in white-walled limbo, anonymous chic, in which ageless youths spend their days writing love letters, while a gravestone reads 2007 (the ultimate joke) … Frontier is more a psychic porno, a love fantasy one step-up from a sex fantasy, about a relationship that only really works when the lovers are apart and thinking about each other (but works, as it never would in Hitchcock). … neither a visionary nor a realist, he’s no Romantic either: the Romantics locate themselves in what they see around them. Garrel’s characters look inward; nothing goes on around them. That love is the only reason to live is reasonable: Dreyer concluded the same. But Dreyer never said it was a good reason to die.

MJ Rowin:

There are a million conceivable ways to render this material trite, melodramatic, and laughable, but Garrel perfectly brings forth its eerie fatalism and its testament to love’s inextricably deceptive power to destroy. Just as his unshowy camerawork goes unnoticed until a simple pan or zoom calls attention to the carefulness of his compositions and the purpose of any deviations from pragmatic long-take coverage, so do Garrel’s narratives steadily, patiently build on gloom-drenched, picaresque rhythms, revealing an overall design only at the end.

by ·Comments Off on Hearts and Minds (1974, Peter Davis)

An early blast against the Vietnam war. Well, not TOO early – made at a time when the war had dragged on and people were already enraged about it, but when the mass media hadn’t yet jumped on the anti-war bandwagon. Uses all the stock footage we’ve been seeing for years – guy shot in the head, napalm-burned children running down the street, aerial footage of beautifully-colored bombs destroying the lives of people below – and adds incriminating interviews with soldiers (inside a brothel!), politicians (a general is quoted as saying that “orientals” value human life less than we do) and disillusioned veterans, many of whom are gradually revealed to be amputees.

My favorite bit is when a government source (I can’t remember who, actually) speaks about the origin of the war. North Vietnam was being occupied by France, and shortly after WWII, Ho Chi Minh wrote letters to the U.S. asking for its support in his fight against the evil colonialist French, little guessing that we’d replace the French as his country’s main oppressor twenty years later. Not that I’m taking his side – he sounds like a really crappy guy. Movie won the oscar for best documentary, but the golden globe went to the far safer choice Animals Are Beautiful People.

RK Brigham:

When the film first appeared in 1974, its sympathetic and complicated treatment of average Vietnamese created a sensation. For years, the news media and policymakers had given Americans their only view into the lives of Vietnamese peasants, and that presentation was crude. … Few stories of the war had included such moral statements about the impact of high altitude bombing on civilians. Fewer still had shown that U.S. aerial assaults targeted both North and South Vietnam, that all Vietnamese citizens lived in fear of attacks.

The energy crisis, inflation, rising unemployment, and Watergate led to an almost narcissistic obsession with what the war had done to us. Hearts and Minds challenged that predilection by forcing viewers to consider what the war had done to the Vietnamese. As uncomfortable as it may have been for many Americans, it now seems clear that Hearts and Minds was the first step in coming to terms with a conflict that threatened to destroy the social fabric of the country.

by ·Comments Off on Food, Inc. (2008, Robert Kenner)

Touches on food problems I’ve heard (and read) before in Fast Food Nation and The Future of Food, then adds more. Food seems terribly dangerous! We celebrating by eating at Farm Burger afterwards.

Eric Schlosser steals the movie – he’s an impressively engaging speaker – although depressed farmers get more screen time. If only Farmer John had been invited to lighten things up. High production values and well paced, a good documentary all around. No oscar though, thanks to The Cove. Featured speaker Michael Pollan supposedly showed the movie to secretary of agriculture Tom Vilsack, “a screening that Mr. Pollan described as uncomfortable” (NY Times) – wish there were more details on that.

The Times:

Because Food, Inc. was produced by Participant Media (among others), the company that backed An Inconvenient Truth, comparisons are inevitable. But there’s a big difference. After watching Al Gore explain the horrors of climate change, moviegoers can turn off a few lights, think about a Prius and call it a day. People who leave Food, Inc. still have to eat.

Indiewire:

Food Inc. is important in scope if not discovery, and the large territory it surveys allows it to make crucial connections between the act of buying groceries and illegal immigration, corporate patented seed, and tainted food.

The party poopers at Bright Lights call it “political pornography for environmentalists, vegans, socialists, and others already predisposed to agreeing with its argument and following its advice, while others are likely to interpret it as patronizing propaganda and get mad at the filmmakers instead of the corporations that are ruining the food supply.”