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Sat Jan 03 2015 08:03 December Film Roundup:
- The Big Kahuna (1994): Saw this in November with Sumana but forgot to review it. Now it's December and I don't have much to say about it. I liked it fine, good performances, just not much to say.
- Pom Poko (1994): You know I like a movie like Godzilla that takes a really silly idea and treats it with the seriousness it would deserve if that stuff was really happening. This movie is the opposite: it treats a deadly serious topic (anti-colonial resistance) in the silliest way imaginable. I can't think of another movie like this. It's not a "dark comedy" because in a "dark comedy" a lot of the humor is awkward, derived from situational irony and the audience's distance from the suffering characters. In Pom Poko you totally empathize with the tanuki, all their arguments and compromises and weaknesses; but the whole movie they're goofing off, all their plans are slapstick, etc. There's even a little chibi-meter on each character that tells you how silly that character is being right now. (A Pynchon-esque touch, if I may say so.) I love it. Crummy.com Film of the Year.
IMDB says: "The English dubbed version censors all references to testicles." That explains why the English dubbed version is only twelve minutes long.
- A Town Called Panic (2009): a.k.a. "Panique au Village". It was like living in a town of panic... I just wanted out of that town. This movie goes into the other quadrant that I like: it treats a really silly idea (Gumby, basically) in a really silly way. It's old-timey injected-plastic childrens' toys in a ridiculous stop-motion comedy that has enough Belgian surrealism cred to be a hit with the festival crowd. It's the feature-film extension of a bunch of Belgian TV shorts, and you can watch the shorts online. High-school French is enough to understand them. Or even no French, it's almost all sight gags.
Anyway, love this movie. Total rave. Except I'm a little uncomfortable with the cowboy-and-Indian thing. (The main character-toys are Horse, Cowboy, and Indian.) I wouldn't say there's any offensive content or even any subtext here. The relationship between Cowboy and Indian is basically the relationship between Crow and Tom Servo, and the connotations of these particular roles are completely ignored except that Cowboy has a rifle and Indian has a bow-and-arrow and Horse is a horse. And they're childrens' toys and this isn't even an American film so it's doubly removed from real-world history. But I gotta judge this movie by 2009 standards, and I think there's a reason why Toy Story has Cowboy and Horse but not Indian. They didn't want to go there. And that's not really honest either, so I guess I'm saying it's... problematic.
- The Love of a Woman (1953): a.k.a. "L'amour d'une femme," speaking of high-school French. Sort of like Lady Oyu in that everyone would be a lot happier if they could just let go of their culturally-constructed hangups. But Lady Oyu felt like nothing changed the whole way through whereas the stasis in this movie is achieved by a shifting equilibrium.
I feel like this movie was filmed in the same seaside town as Lola, but I wouldn't place a big bet on that assertion.
- Hot Fuzz (2007): Feel-good rewatch with Sumana. It's still great, but upon rewatching it I want to take back what I said in 2013 and say that I think The World's End is the best of the Cornetto Trilogy. There are a lot of confounding variables: maybe these movies play much better on the big screen or maybe they're always a little worse the second time through. But the reason I say this now is that The World's End does a better job introducing the fantastic element. You expect people to die in a cop action movie, so the fact that there's something really weird about the deaths in Hot Fuzz doesn't become clear until pretty late in the movie. Whereas the first time The World's End gets violent you know something's going on.
- The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014) I hoped against hope that my ticket stub would say "HOBBIT 3", but it just said "Hobbit". I did however take this picture of a motto suitable for putting on mugs and selling throughout Middle-Earth:
This movie was 100% adequate and satisfied my desire for a Hobbit movie to watch with Susanna. My main complaint (and I think this can apply to the second movie as well) is there's way too much of a focus on hand-to-hand combat. The hand-to-hand set pieces in LoTR worked and were true to the book, but The Hobbit is all about the triumph of cunning over brute force, and although there was a lot of cunning on display, it wasn't 150 minutes worth or however long this movie was. Cut the hand-to-hand combat from all three movies and you've got two super fun movies, which (my final verdict) was what they should have made in the first place.
One advantage of the Hobbit series over LoTR is, the ending was properly dramatized. The only time I was really happy to be watching Five Armies (as opposed to satisfied) was when Lobelia Sackville-Baggins showed up. And that made me realize that what I want from Tolkien dramatizations isn't big battles, it's, like, Real Housewives of the Shire. I love Bilbo's goodbye party in LoTR, how it's his one passive-aggressive opportunity to strike back against a community that still resents him for having gone off on an adventure and come back.
- I saw a ton of animated movies over Christmas with my niblings, but I don't want to give them full reviews since I saw little snippets of the movies as I dashed around helping my sister make dinner and dealing with household emergencies, rather than my admittedly snooty technique of sitting down and watching the whole movie. So I'll just rank them from "really good" to "awful":
- Frozen (2013)
- The Little Mermaid (1989)
- The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
- Tangled (2010)
- The Sword in the Stone (1963)
- Despicable Me 2 (2013)
- It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown (1992)
- Santa Claus is Comin' to Town (1970)
- These aren't movies at all, but as long as I'm ranking Disney things, over Christmas we also went to Disney California Adventure ("It's everything Walt Disney hated, turned into a Disney theme park."—Susanna), so I thought I'd rank the rides we went on, on the same "really good" to "awful" scale:
- California Screamin' (also my niece's favorite)
- Toy Story Midway Mania!
- Animation Academy (would be higher, but I wasn't a big fan of the way Disney sued us all for copyright infringement as we left)
- Soarin' Over California
- Radiator Springs Racers
- Mickey's Fun Wheel
- Goofy's Sky School
- Ariel's Undersea Adventure
The last time I went to Disney-anything was in high school, and I could do a whole post about how weird it is to be in one of these things with a general knowledge of design and semiotics and the ability to see how it works, but I believe this ground has been well-covered elsewhere. So I'll just mention that during Ariel's Undersea Adventure I found myself thinking "Man, this must be the worst job in the park, sitting there in a Prince Eric outfit all day waving... wait, they're not sentient."
And I'll close this section with words of wisdom from a random kid my nephew instantly made friends with while in line for a rope swing, and then immediately forgot about post-rope swing: "Do you know why they call it Disneyland? Because it's Disney, and you're in a LAND!"
- The Ref (1994): Fun Christmas-noir movie seen with Sumana on her recommendation. Sumana is a big Kevin Spacey fan from way back and I'm pretty sure the first time I ever saw him was on Broadway in 2007, but I've come around. (See The Big Kahuna passim.) More personal than The Ice Harvest and really getting into the mechanics of dysfunctional relationships. I really liked the main plotline, was indifferent to the bumbling-cops B-plot and the Santa C-plot, didn't like the third act's abrupt twist into "heartwarming" territory. Overall, a good movie with a great title.
- Paprika (2006): Probably would have blown me away, except I was already away from Pom Poko, a much better movie with over-the-top visuals that are nearly as wild. It's still good, it's got a decent critique going, at its best its spectable is superb and totally original where Pom Poko takes everything from folklore. But it's literally got a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (part of the critique?) and if it has any guerilla tanuki they're way in the back. So, just "good".