by ·Comments Off on Recent Television

Futurama season 7 (2010)

The first season on Cartoon Network (after the four movies) feels like the show never left. Particularly excellent episodes were the first one (explaining the few years’ absence and the crew’s sorta-survival from a massive crash) and a time-travel story.

The Thick of It season 2 (2007)

A weird “season” in two hour-long chunks, showing our government goons from season one and their opposition group (“the nutters”) who think they’ll be taking power when the prime minister resigns. Fewer jokes, insults and comprehensible situations to someone as dumb about British politics as I am. Season four just aired, exciting.

Screenwipe season 5 (2008)

I can’t seem to stop watching this, even though it’s irrelevant to my life and I don’t get most of the jokes. I just like Charlie Brooker. Best was the episode on children’s programming, less good was the humor-free double-length one on TV writing. Also checked out the special Gameswipe, an unhelpful hour introducing video games to people who are afraid of them.

Patterns (Jan 12, 1955)

A workplace drama that put writer Rod Serling on the map. It was a huge hit, re-broadcast (re-performed, since it’s done live) the next month and turned into a film the following year with the same director, Fielder Cook (from Atlanta).

New executive Staples arrives at the office, gets introduced to big boss Everett Sloane (Welles’s scheming employer in The Lady From Shanghai) and nervous coworker Ed Begley. The boss intends for Staples to take Begley’s place, but has to get rid of Begley first – can’t just fire him, so he tries to force the guy out, finally succeeding when Begley has a heart attack after a ruthless attack at a board meeting. Staples protests, thinks of himself as a good man recognizing corruption in the system, but he and his wife want this position and promotion too badly so he goes along with it. Nicely mobile camera, with bigger sets than Marty.

Ghost Train, the first episode of Amazing Stories, directed by Spielberg in 1985 – which I watched when it premiered. Lukas Haas, the main kid in Mars Attacks! is the boy whose grandpa (Roberts Blossom: scary neighbor in Home Alone) awaits the train that he derailed 75 years ago, killing everyone aboard. The train coming through the family’s house is impressive – the rest is a bit too Spielbergian-lite, but an improvement on his Twilight Zone episode.

Also watched an (cr)apocalyptic double-feature of Cloverfield and The Day After Tomorrow with Rifftrax.

by ·Comments Off on World’s Greatest Dad (2009, Bobcat Goldthwait)

Robin Williams is an unpublished author and a disrespected high-school poetry teacher. He’s got a beautiful young girlfriend and a shitty, hateful, porn-obsessed son Kyle (Daryl Sabara, one of the Spy Kids), who dies during an autoerotic asphyxiation session staring at cellphone photos up his dad’s girlfriend’s dress – so Robin stages it as a suicide and writes a note.

Upon reading the suicide note, everyone suddenly sees the “real” Kyle:

Except friend Andrew, who sees some kinda weirdo poet:

The note becomes huge news on campus and soon everyone is acting like Kyle and his dad are heroes. Kyle’s “journal” (hastily written by Robin) is locally published, and his story inspires everyone: a closeted homosexual athlete, the goth girl considering suicide, the guidance counselor nobody talks to… everyone except Kyle’s best (only) friend, who sees through the ruse and tries to talk to Robin, who’s too busy dealing with his new celebrity.

Bobcat plays the chauffeur who takes Robin (and his self-obsessed girl) to a TV studio to discuss the inspirational journal (Tom Kenny and Jill Talley cameos), and national publishers express interest in the journal and in Robin’s novels, but he finally confesses the lie and goes home to watch Night of the Living Dead with his group of misfits: the lonely next-door neighbor and Kyle’s one friend. Amazing blend of humor and pathos, like when Robin starts crying in front of a porno-mag street vendor.

Girlfriend Alexie Gilmore and coworker Henry Simmons (of NYPD Blue)

by ·Comments Off on Blissfully Yours (2002, Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

After Syndromes and Uncle Boonmee I thought okay, now I’ve got a handle on this Weerasethakul fellow, got a general idea what his movies are like. This one proved me wrong. It’s got the long static shots, and scenes where characters don’t seem to be doing or thinking much, but it has more of these than the others (maybe not more than Tropical Malady, which I haven’t seen since it came out). One of those movies with a slow, slow build-up to a transcendent finale, though it doesn’t feel that way while you’re watching it.

Orn’s hands:

Orn (an older woman), Roong (younger woman) and Min (illegal immigrant pretending to be mute) are the leads. No exposition, so it takes me the first 45 minutes to figure out their names and what they do and how they know each other, more or less. Min and Roong go on a trip into the forest then suddenly, a pop song and the opening titles – halfway through the movie. And now we can hear his thoughts.

Min and Roong:

Orn and some man (not her husband?) also escape into the forest, and much explicit sex follows. Orn seems to be in trouble then – her man chases motorbike thieves off-camera and we hear a gunshot, which she does not investigate. She stumbles across the other couple and they manage to have a damned nice time splashing in the river, before drying their clothes, dumping their litter (Orn chucks it right into the river) and heading home. Weirdly peaceful/happy film.

Roong (actress/character) also appeared in Uncle Boonmee – I don’t remember her, but it’s sometime after the funeral – and Orn appeared in Luminous People.

Min’s drawing:

NY Times with more specific insight: “There’s a suggestion that Roong is a member of the Karen ethnic group, a hill tribe people who live in northern Thailand and eastern Burma and have been involved in human-rights struggles with both countries. Like Min, whose skin rash probably developed after he hid from the police in a septic tank, she enters the forest like a refugee.”

by ·Comments Off on Tetro (2009, Francis Ford Coppola)

“There’s only room for one genius in this family.”

Were I not charmed by the excellent black-and-white cinematography, the performances of Vincent Gallo (year before Essential Killing) and his girl Maribel Verdu (lead actress in Y Tu Mama Tambien) and the movie’s quick bursts of entertaining craziness, I might’ve found more time to be annoyed by the story of family rivalry and Alden Ehrenreich’s lead character of Bennie. And it’s a very annoying story, taking inspiration from Coppola’s own family and a million boring novels, of a family of rich geniuses and how they each deal with their gifts and emotional problems. Talented Uncle Alfie wastes away from regret while his brother Carlo (both of them Klaus Maria Brandauer, star of István Szabó’s Mephisto) becomes a famous composer/conductor and steals his own son’s pregnant girlfriend. Son Angelo (Tetro) escapes to Argentina, hiding the fact that young Bennie is his son and not his younger brother.

That at least explains why Tetro doesn’t kick out Bennie, who pretty much ruins everything while visiting for a few days, giving away Tetro’s true identity and stealing his life story then producing it as a play for a festival run by celebrity artist Alone (Carmen Maura, Cruz’s dead mother in Volver). It’s nice how artistic talent runs in the family, and with no training or practice, Tetro’s cruise-ship-waiter brother/son can adapt someone else’s writings into an award-winning play.

Maribel dances for Alden:

I appreciated the ending. Early in the movie Bennie finds Tetro’s gun in a desk drawer and, having seen movies before, I know it’ll reappear. But it doesn’t, and the expected blow-up fight between the “brothers” at Alone’s festival turns into a quick reconciliation, telling her to piss off so they can have some family time.

The movie is widescreen B&W and flashbacks (plus clips from Tales of Hoffmann) are cropped (or shrunk) in full-color. Supposedly a near-remake of Rumble Fish, which I also rented but didn’t find time to watch.

Tetro is a spotlight operator for the play Fausta:

A. Nayman in Cinema Scope: “Tetro is also Italian for ‘gloomy,’ and Gallo glowers accordingly. … If this sounds like an unlikely series of events (and I haven’t even mentioned Bennie’s hotel room hot tub deflowering at the hands of a gorgeous local girl and her aunt) that’s because Tetro doesn’t have any pretenses to verisimilitude: it’s more obviously an operatic fable, with Malaimare’s exquisitely shadowed cinematography sealing the characters within a hermetic, slightly unreal screen space.”

by ·Comments Off on Death Race (2008, Paul WS Anderson)

A stupid, jittery, high-energy action remake by Anderson, one of Cinema Scope’s 50 Under 50, highlighting what is for me the biggest problem with auteurism these days. In the 1960’s, movies were made on a factory line, some better than others, mostly credited to studios and producers, until observant critics realized that certain directors put out work of consistently high quality – no huge surprise there – but that they also had thematic and structural consistencies throughout a body of films from varied writers and studios. Heroes were belatedly made of Hawks, Ford and Hitchcock, and their films from critically-unloved genres (comedy, western, thriller) were reassessed. Today the studio system is totally different and every director thinks of himself as an auteur. Since the hardcore auteurists have nothing to discover, instead of enjoying the new world of supposedly personal cinema, they stare at the studio genre movies that still get made, searching for new names they can take credit for discovering. My pick was Hong Kong-turned-Hollywood Ronny Yu (Bride of Chucky, Freddy vs. Jason), but I lost interest after Fearless. Mubi latched onto the late Tony Scott, and Cinema Scope loves Paul W.S. Anderson, responsible for three of the worst video-game adaptations I’ve seen in theaters (Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, Alien vs. Predator) and the underrated Event Horizon.

In a dystopian future, racing legend Jason Statham is set up for killing his perfect wife, and sent to a post-reality-TV prison, where he can earn his freedom by winning a few weapon-equipped car races which are, of course, rigged by the authorities (Joan Allen). He takes the place of a masked driver called Frankenstein (role reprised from the original by David Carradine), gets a mechanic (Ian McShane), a saboteur-spy sidekick (Natalie Martinez) and a rival (Tyrese Gibson, in the Sylvester Stallone role). After some ‘splosiony car races, Statham avenges his wife by killing mohawked driver Max Ryan and Pryzbylewski-looking guard Jason Clarke, then secretly teams up with Tyrese, easily breaking out of prison by shooting the walls with their missile-equipped cars, driving away to a Shawshank-esque incognito freedom.

Also, Ian McShane blows up Joan Allen:

Set in the dystopian future world of 2012. Will someone tell me again why future-movies always take place in the extremely near future? Followed by two sequels starring Ving Rhames and Danny Trejo. Produced by the great Roger Corman, in between Supergator and Sharktopus.

C. Huber in Cinema Scope calls him “the elder, least pretentious, and most consistently amusing Anderson of the current director trifecta: its termite artisan.”

by ·Comments Off on Dr. Plonk (2007, Rolf de Heer)

A silent film in the style of 1907 and shot using a hand-crank camera, with lots (oh, lots) of start-stop disappearance effects, not at all like The Artist or the films of Guy Maddin – more of an anarchic keystone homage.

Bald Dr. Plonk has a bearded deaf/dumb assistant Paulus, a “winsome” wife, and a trick-performing dog (appropriately credited with the others in the opening titles).

Tragic calculations! Triple-checked!

Plonk tells the Prime Minister’s advisors (with hilariously fake facial hair) of his discovery, but they don’t believe him – so he invents a time machine (in about five minutes) to travel into our present and find proof of his theory. Meanwhile, Paulus pads the film by taking the dog for walks as a pretense for hitting on married women in the park. Paulus, deaf and not too smart, is put in charge of time machine operation as Plonk mistakenly travels backwards and is set alight by natives.

Paulus is then sent as a test subject and lands a hippie chick, then Plonk continues his experiments, photographing present-day industrial sites, “so this is what the end looks like.” Train gags, era-specific misunderstandings, a slight bit of stop-motion, and an anti-television joke that would make Tashlin proud.

Plonk’s wife keeps an eye on Paulus:

Plonk can’t seem to bring home his evidence that the future is a wasteland, so he brings the game Prime Minister along to 2007, where they find the present-day PM less approachable. It all ends with a madcap chase in a warehouse between plenty of cops and the surprisingly athletic main cast. The former PM gets to sit in a straightjacket entranced by television, while Plonk…

At first glimpse I thought De Heer made this before Ten Canoes, but no, he made it before TWELVE Canoes, the documentary follow-up.

by ·Comments Off on Double Take (2009, Johan Grimonprez)

“Time edits out as much as it records.”

There’s a story in here about the inevitability of fate, but it takes a long time to get started, then crawls in brief segments towards the end of the film – a story about Hitchcock in 1962 getting summoned to a meeting while filming The Birds and confronting himself in 1980, a few weeks before his death.

But woe unto the viewer who reads that story as the movie’s plot summary, and waits for it to finish unfolding, because all the fun is in the constant interruptions: footage of a Hitchcock body double and a separate voice actor recording their parts for the main story and just goofing around at being Alfred, semi-informative sidetracks about Hitchcock’s films (The Birds, especially), plenty of footage of the Great Man himself taken from trailers, cameos and A.H. Presents episode intros, and Craig Baldwinesque recontextualizations of cold-war stock footage and coffee commercials.

Hichcock: “Television is like the American toaster. You push the button and the same thing pops up every time.”

Inspired by a Borges story and dedicated to body double Ron Burrage, who also played Hitchcock in a mid-90’s Robert Lepage movie. Bonus: always nice to find the source material that a favorite song had sampled – the Books song with the guy saying “there it is, there it is – it’s a man’s face” is from the first live TV broadcast across the Atlantic.

Grimonprez is one of Cinema Scope’s 50 Under 50. B. Steinbruegge: “Double Take gleefully plays with the subconscious, which is fooled by impressionistic scenes that mix deep significance with sensationalism and humor.”

At Powell’s Books in Portland I came across a bunch of reasonably-priced copies of Grimonprez’s companion book Looking For Alfred, but left it behind, figuring it too heavy to carry around in luggage, then forgot to grab it when we decided to ship our books home instead.

M. Peranson in Cinema Scope:

[Grimonprez] uses Hitchcock as a mirror, for both himself and for a period of history. For what was the Cold War if not one long, painful MacGuffin? . . . Grimonprez’s enthusiasm keeps trying to break through the frame: Double Take zips and zaps like the most addictive of television shows. The film is anchored by a chronological recap of the US-USSR Cold War relationship, the time when catastrophic culture was at the point of formation.

by ·Comments Off on Aqua Teen Hunger Force (2007, Dave Willis & Matt Maiellaro)

Rented this and Haywire for some mindless comedy and action downtime between complex euro-art films. Haywire brought the action, but Aqua Teen sputtered on the comedy. Should I blame myself for losing my sense of humor, since I always liked the show in the first couple seasons, or did the movie’s need to cram in familiar characters and plot points and locations, concoct an origin/creation story, and yet waste enough time on total nonsense to keep from violating the who-gives-a-shit spirit of the show, what was I talking about?

Jon Benjamin played a cop.

A. Nayman at Cinema Scope compares the summer’s animated films:

“What moron would pay to see something they can see at home for free?” asks Homer early in The Simpsons Movie. Besides reflecting the affectionate disdain (or is it just disdain?) the series’ writers developed for their ever-more-obsessive fanbase, this query is funny because it’s essentially true. “Your money is now our money, and we will spend it on drugs,” shriek the nasty snacks at the beginning of Aqua Teen. Equally true, considerably funnier, and fair enough.