News You Can Bruise for 2016 December 1 (entry 0)

Thu Dec 01 2016 22:37 November Film Roundup: A few movies seen in a miserable month. Really high success rate though! Plus, this is the first month since the beginning of Film Roundup where every feature I saw is a new release. Maybe that counts for something in this messed-up world. Naw, who am I kidding? Update: turns out that's not even true, I forgot about Avanti! when I was writing this. When I was writing this I knew there was probably a movie I'd forgotten and I'd have to write an update like this one, and now it's happened.

• I saw a long series of Kieslowski shorts and the standout was Hospital (1977), a slice-of-life documentary shot in a Warsaw trauma center where everything is super Communist and falling apart. Even the hammers don't work properly! Unglamorous gore and unsexy nudity abound. For half these people it's the worst day of their lives; for the other half it's just a normal day of improvising.
• The Target Shoots First (2000): Watch it on Vimeo! A thought-provoking documentary about managing creative people in an anticreative environment/being creative with the disappointing materials on hand/being uncertain about the moral valence of your creative work. This film has a fun Office Space vibe, I think because of the editing. It was filmed at the last moment your boss might think "it's just home video, not like this could end up in a movie or anything."

  I loved the Aerosmith cameo. Steven Tyler saying "such a deal!" has become a catchphrase in our household. I'm pretty sure it's Steven Tyler who says that, but I admit I would fail any "Aerosmith member or random old dude of equivalent age?" test.

• The Age of Shadows (2016): Man, Korean movies, huh? This was much more violent than the corresponding American R movie would have been. You think you're out for a classy espionage movie and it's just people getting murdered from the first scene to the last. In between the murders there were some cool fights, some good espionage, lots of nice looking period sets and costumes. I do not recommend overall because the amount of gore takes it past Robocop territory, but Sumana liked it.

  There's a suspenseful scene where you don't know whodunit, but the real question is, whocares? There are maybe six characters here, we're near the end of their movie, and I'm not so attached to any one of them that I'm going to be shocked by a revelation that this one is the Cylon. And... I was right not to get attached to any of these characters. Whew.

• Avanti! (1972): Pulling out a new Billy Wilder DVD is like uncorking a vintage bottle of wine--an unrepeatable experience. At least I assume that's what it's like, from the way wine snobs talk about wine. We opened Avanti! uncertain as to the precise mixture of dark and funny in its bouquet, and... it's about 70-30. Laughs and callbacks all the way through, but it's a rom-com about a guy having an affair, handled with the attitude you'd expect from the director of The Apartment and Double Indemity.

  Caution: includes fat jokes. They don't even land anymore because Juliet Mills is not fat by 2016 standards, and probably not even by 1972 non-movie-star standards.

• Arrival (2016): Sometimes I'll tear up during a movie and I resent it. It feels cheap, like I'm just having a physiological reaction to the soundtrack. This happens a lot during trailers. Sometimes it's a good movie and the content legitimately makes me tear up. This happens pretty reliably when someone's spouse or kid dies and you have to see the effect of that death on the surviving spouse or parent. (Parent death, not so much, maybe because that's actually happened to me.) Three Colors: Blue and Waiting both did this to me.

  Because of its narrative structure, Arrival made me not just 'tear up' but full-on cry in the theater. There are things about this adaptation that I am iffy on, but the one thing at the core of "Story of Your Life" is done incredibly well, it perfectly hits my pain points, and kablooie.

  I think this is not most peoples' reaction to Arrival, so here's a review for normal people. I'd have cut some stuff at the beginning but it's a good movie overall. It does a good job showing big-idea space opera on a small budget.

  Pictured to right: the Heptapod B sentence I wrote by accident while baking Thanksgiving cheesecake.

• Moana (2016): In Albany for Thanksgiving, the family divided into two warring camps: the camp that was seeing Doctor Strange and the camp that was seeing Moana. I was in the Moana camp and even though the theater was filled with noisy children, I don't regret it. Great movie. Good songs, silly and heartwarming in the right ways. Tons of sea life, no central villain... could this be the Star Trek IV of Disney animation? There was a moment during one of the songs where I thought "Cool, they're combining animation with live action like in Mary Poppins WAIT A MINUTE THIS IS ALL ANIMATION."

  Sumana braved the 2.5-hour running time of Doctor Strange and came back with a tale of... distracted driving? Doesn't sound very 'strange' to me. I thought these Marvel movies were supposed to have Iron Man punching things. Anyway, later that week Sumana saw Moana and also loved it. I'm not wild in general about Disney animated features but I must admit they've been on a roll lately.