Film Fatale

Flashback: 'Shrek'

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 18:39:23 -0500

Gonna be totally honest here: I really didn’t expect “Shrek” to hold up eleven years after its release. I was just about the right age when I did see it - grade school. See, lots of the glue holding “Shrek” together is totally inappropriate humor. The gross-out jokes work all the better considering the slime, maggots, and whatnot look almost photorealistic in this animated style. Even more than that, “Shrek” came out just post-Disney Renaissance - in other words, after a long era of very successful traditional Disney animation. The idea of poking fun at them was topical; Disney’s submission to theaters that year was “Atlantis: The Lost Empire”. You know - that old classic. Today, though, the deconstruction/reconstruction double-whammy is right at home in the box office.

As the first sentence of this review may imply, I was quite surprised to find myself so entertained by it. The story is pretty standard stuff, to be fair. Really, Shrek, are you saying that people have layers? I don’t think you hammered that point home quite enough. But a lot of the jokes are still funny (turns out making fun of Disney World and ye olde fantasie never gets old), or even more so (good thing I never noticed how many penis jokes there are in this movie). And the gross-out gags are still pretty great. I don’t think they’ve even been equaled in further “Shrek” films; I seem to remember the sequels going for the throat of fantasy, but… well, “Shrek” is a gross-sounding name, Shrek himself looks pretty ugly (in a shiny CGI way), and much of the film’s first half hour wallows in its repulsiveness. There’s a charm to that. The swamp is Shrek’s native land.

And about that Shrek… well, he’s the main reason the film holds up at all. It may be a well-worn moral, but the characters’ layers give the film heart. Yes, “Shrek” may bounce between the comedic and the dramatic as its whims desire, but the dramatic stuff is necessary because these aren’t caricatures, and thus need the emotional payoff. The rocky friendship between Shrek and Donkey takes hold in their very first scene together (“I’m an ogre! Doesn’t that bother you?” “No.” “…No?”). Even Fiona is a character worth rooting for, looking for some sort of validation in a life gone horribly wrong. If nothing else, it is fun watching these characters bounce off of each other.

—Paul Anderson

Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 Review

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 17:34:15 -0500

This is going to be fun.

So, it is the wonderful conclusion to this blockbuster franchise that has been in the public sphere for almost five years. Now it seems that our lives will be “forever alone” without seeing Bella, Edward and Jacob on our movie screens.

Bella (Kristen Stewart) is finally a vampire and after having Renesmee (Mackenzie Foy) the Volturi think that Bella had a vampire baby, which is dangerous to the state of the vampire world. So Bella, Edward (Robert Pattinson) and the gang try to find “witnesses” in order for the Cullen family to live.

I had the most fun with this movie, honestly. I think for pure entertainment factor, this movie brings it one hundred percent, and the comedic effect was just great (when or when it wasn’t being serious).

I know, I know, I’m supposed to hate these movies with a fiery passion. Supposedly, these are shit movies based on shit books from a woman who was having a wet dream. Honestly, I never understood the hate against Twilight.

The message? Maybe. It does deal with a teenage girl whose only reason to live is because of guy (not very Oberlin of her), but the complaints because the product wasn’t all that great? I mean seriously, this movie is better than many films that come out (see: Adam Sandler), and we all know it.

These films are the guiltiest of pleasures and I think many people who see these films also think they are not that great, but they love the characters, well mostly the hot men, and that my folks, is what really matters.

One thing that I found very laughable and creepy simultaneously was the damn CGI in this film. Not from the Bella running scenes, when she was trying out her powers, that was obviously green screen, but damn Renesmee and the most horrid CGI face in the world. The face was Mackenzie Foy (who portrayed great emotion like her counterpart, Kristen Stewart) and the baby was robotic.

For a film that gets almost half a billion dollars in revenue, and has a budget of, I don’t know, $120 million dollars, you would think that they would actually hire actors, that they can afford, to play the baby Renesmee and even older teenage Renesmee (and they CGI this face too! Seriously! WHAT THE HELL).

Anyway, there are also new vampires in this film. A couple of Arabs, blonde bombshells, some rugged dudes with more moodiness than Edward and my favorite, the stereotypical looking Irish Vampires, Amazon women (who just HAD to black!) and the Romanian vampires with the cheesiest of accents.

They all had special powers too. One was the Avatar, another had electricity in her hands, and Tyra Banks (one of the Amazon women) controlled minds.

So it was the X-men with a high attractiveness meter.

Oh and the Volturi were hilarious especially the great acting chops of Michael Sheen (Aro), who has one of the greatest squeals in movie history.

I don’t want to spoil anything (because the fun is all in the spoilers!) but there is a huge twist and basically everyone cried out because it was so horrible.

By the end of this movie, I was actually sad, they played a slight montage and ended with showing every single one of the actors who were apart of all five movies in the end credits and I was just overwhelmed by sadness, I mean it’s over. The one thing that has plagued many a people is over and now where can I find my source of pure cheesy romance?

Oh well, at least we all know that they will stop dominating the MTV Movie Awards!

Who should I recommend this to, really? I guess to the teenage girls who will see this no matter what I say, or maybe to the rest of the population who already wrote this movie off as junk….

I guess I’ll recommend to the person who is bored during Thanksgiving break and wants to run away from their awkward relative moments.

See this film if you want to have a good time. You don’t even need to see the other films before you see this. If you want to see comedy gold, I have found your movie. I bet this movie in about ten years will become a cult favorite, just wait and see!

<3 Twilight Forever <3

—Maya Mariner

Flight Movie Review

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 20:23:28 -0500

So when I saw this trailer back during the summer, I was very intrigued. First, Denzel is back with something that seems worth paying to see in the movie theater and second, this movie looks intense in the material that is being presented: Not only with the plane crash but also with this man’s struggle with addiction.

Overall, I thought this movie was a solid movie, but not something to run to go see.

Denzel Washington plays Captain Whip Whitaker, a pilot that has an alcohol and drug addiction. While he is flying a plane, it malfunctions and begins to nosedive. Whip miraculously saves 96 out of the 102 lives, but there is an investigation because there was alcohol and drugs in his system.

The plane crash is probably the most intense scene that happens in this film. I was covering my eyes most of the time, and moving around because I was having a slight panic attack; I mean imagine a plane you are in, crashing…

Denzel Washington definitely was the highlight of the film. Of course, in every film, he brings his magic, but his skills brought this character’s constant struggle and hardship with drugs and alcohol to light, in a way that I have not seen before. Usually when people play drunks, they are over dramatic, like a sloppy 20 year old after a keg stand, but his depiction of an alcoholic is much more specific and personal.

After this man drinks, he thinks he’s totally fine; totally fine to interact with others, to drive, to fly a plane. He tries to come back into people’s lives as if he is okay, but he isn’t. He knows he has a problem and in the movie he kept repeatedly saying during a drunken scene (my words are paraphrasing) “I choose to be drunk. I choose it. It’s my life.”

One thing I did not like in this movie was this one woman named Nicole (played by Kelly Reilly) who was this heroin addict that overdosed and Whip met in the hospital when he went there for treatment. I just never really liked where it was going for the start. They developed a relationship and she is there to supposedly “help him”, and I just thought her whole character shouldn’t have been there. It felt forced, even though she was good, but it all felt off for me, considering she never appeared in the trailers.

Personally, I think the movie should have stayed focused with Denzel’s character and explored his addiction more, like when did it start? Why did he get a divorce? What is his relationship to his friend Charlie Anderson (Bruce Greenwood)? I think this movie just wanted to have the Nicole character as a friend to help him, but she doesn’t stay long in the movie to be his coach or support system.

Towards the second half of the movie is when the movie actually starts to get good because now he is dealing with trying to stay sober to lie to the NTSB for being under the influence or succumbing to his addiction. Some great scenes really hit close to home. I just wish it were consistent throughout the movie.

I also really liked Don Cheadle in this film. He is in for a few parts (even though I wished his character was explored more with Denzel’s character) he was a very convincing lawyer and I was definitely sympathetic to him especially dealing with this person. John Goodman’s cameos were good but overall I felt like they were a bit unnecessary, and could have been played by a lesser-known actor, especially because he has two scenes.

If you are really itching to get your Denzel fix for the holiday season, I would recommend you see this in the theaters otherwise I think saving your money and waiting for this movie on rental would be better.

—Maya Mariner

SPY VS SPY

Sat, 17 Nov 2012 02:44:31 -0500

Let’s start with what Skyfall is not. It is not a systematic reworking of the character as portrayed by a new actor. It is not taking the franchise in a radically new direction. It is not even an entirely traditional Bond film.

I’m okay with that. There’s already a place for those in the franchise, now 23 films strong. Skyfall is something different. I’m reminded of The Dark Knight Rises. The success of Nolan’s Batman story established, the Nolan brothers went to town in that film with characterization. Selina Kyle, Bane, Jonathan Blake, and Talia Al’Ghul were interesting and complex additions to the mythology, and Batman and Alfred had never been more interesting.

Here, Craig’s been established as Bond. There are new faces—a young Q, a bureaucrat played by Ralph Fiennes, and a Bond woman or two—but the main focus is on himself and M. Judi Dench lends the most weight I’ve yet seen to the role. She’s more than just Mission Control; when Bond is taken out of commission early on, you want to see her succeed as much as Bond. Since the villain’s motivation has much to do with M and her long reign as head of MI6, this is pretty important to nail, and Dench and the scriptwriters do it extremely well. I can’t decide if the highlight is her speech at a later hearing, or her resourcefulness in the climax.

Wait, I mentioned a villain. There must be one; it’s a Bond film. Here it’s Silva, played by the oh-so-smooth Javier Bardem. He plays the antithesis to Bond: it’s a white spy vs black spy story, about the man Bond could have been and didn’t become. This is more effective because we hear snatches of Bond’s earliest days throughout, and his troubled past. That past in turn becomes the reason for the film’s title; it is the source of Bond’s birth, and of another ending that later leads to a new rebirth. The film circles itself, and plays constantly with the idea of resurrection.

And without spoiling things, the stakes of this film are set high from the beginning. Bond has a reason to fight his hardest in this film, making this one of the darkest Bonds I’ve seen. That’s even true literally. Big action set pieces take place in the dark; the climax is shot at nightfall. It often provides a chiaroscuro effect, or just a sense that the filmmakers aren’t afraid of shooting in low light. It’s refreshing to see an action film that’s not worried we’ll miss some key moment.

There aren’t even that many set pieces. Most of the fights are standard gunfights or hand-to-hand combat, which just happen to have a ton of emotion behind them. The best parts are the climax, and a couple of sequences involving trains. The physical effects man is Chris Corbould, who also worked on Nolan’s films (Inception, the Dark Knight trilogy), and he must be something of a star in Hollywood by now. The theater actually rumbled during some of the more impressive effects, which appeared to have been done all in camera.

It’s interesting to me that James Bond, the longest-running film franchise of all time, is now aping from comic book movies. A late twist is reminiscent of The Avengers, and MI6’s temporary headquarters is similar to Batman’s Dark Knight hideout. The result is a darker, more emotional Bond, which doesn’t quite fit with the formula of the franchise but pays homage to it all the same, and frequently—see the film’s vintage cars and referential one-liners for that. It’s not quite as all-out fun as Casino Royale, but it’s a solid movie, and a compelling emotional journey. Here’s hoping that future installments have the same sort of self-awareness and intelligence that director Sam Mendes brings to this one.

—Paul Anderson

Wreck It Ralph

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 23:03:58 -0500

I think this was one of my most anticipated animated features this year (even more than Brave), and now that I have seen it and processed it….I really loved this movie.

This movie could have gone gimmicky and very kiddy, but it didn’t. It had so much respect for the video gaming world and brought the old school video games of the 80s and 90s along with the contemporary ones together and created this mishmash of just, plain, AWESOME.

Wreck-It Ralph is the villain in the arcade game, Fix-It Felix Jr.; Ralph doesn’t want to be the bad guy anymore, and so, while trying to prove his hero status to the people in his video game he decides to game jump, and havoc ensues.

First off, the animation for this movie is stunning. I didn’t see this movie in 3-D, but I wonder what the experience would have been because it was just so gorgeous and I couldn’t get enough. It was eye candy, especially during the Sugar Rush scenes, which was like Candy-land in high-definition, and I almost died. Make sure you bring some candy with you because you will definitely be craving it!

I love the fact that this movie didn’t stay away from using 8-bit animation and also having the characters walk and react as if they were still in their video game. They really took care of this movie, and I felt many similarities to Scott Pilgrim versus the World because of the lightheartedness of the characters and the production.

One of my favorite parts of this movie is the voice acting. It was so well done, and not to mention that the characters look like the actors that portray them. John C. Reily voices wreck-it Ralph and I can’t think anybody else who would be good to play his part. He has such a man boyish quality that fits Ralph and you really felt sympathetic to the character. Fix-it Felix Jr. is Jack McBrayer and that was just an excellent choice, a pure opposite of Wreck-it Ralph and everytime Felix Jr. talked, I burst into giggles. Jane Lynch was Calhoun, and if you have seen even a tiny bit of Lynch’s Sue Sylvester on Glee, you would know she was perfect for the part.

One of my favorites in this film was Sarah Silverman’s Vanellope. Silverman was the highlight in this movie. Her character could have been really annoying, but Silverman was able to use her comedic chops to create a sugar and spice character to bring her not only as this hyper little girl but make her this whole character that has feelings and makes her sympathetic.

The writing was great in this movie and the references were definitely spot on. I was sitting amongst a group of Oberlin students and I think we were laughing the most in this film because the mixture of nostalgia and the aspect of growing up in this video game culture is really resonating, and I know that adults that have experience with these games will absolutely adore this film.

I HIGHLY recommend you see this movie and make sure you get there early for the short, Paperman. My favorite animated film so far of 2012 (I’m still waiting, Rise of the Guardians).

Now go get your feels on.

—Maya Mariner

The Perks of Being a Wallflower Review

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 18:28:42 -0500

I heard the great buzz this movie was getting after reading some reviews from the Toronto Film Festival, and after learning that Stephen Chobsky, the author of the novel, wrote the screenplay AND directed it, I had to see this movie.

This movie was probably one of the best movies I have seen all year.

Logan Lerman plays Charlie, a freshman in high school who befriends these two seniors, Patrick and Sam, played by Ezra Miller and Emma Watson, respectively and as IMDB said, “welcome him into the real world.”

The writing was great and kept the characters real and down to earth, which I thought was nice, considering how dramatic writers and directors now make teenagers out to be (looking at you, Glee). This movie went through some major situations like an after school special: abuse, sexuality, first love, SATS (ugh), but it was done in a refreshing way, that didn’t seem to carry too much on the dramatics as it did focusing on the characters. As one woman at the movie theater said to the cashier on my way out, “I thought it was gonna be the typical teen movie, but it was really surprising, and refreshing and enjoyable.”

You knew that this movie was greatly influenced by John Hughes.

It’s interesting that the novel takes place in the early 1990s, but in the movie, the year was never mentioned, only in small nuances with technology, clothing, and music (mix tapes, yep). The movie felt relevant in today’s world.

Other highlights: The music in Perks was really strong. It captured the teen spirit and complemented the character’s personalities well. Even though, I don’t listen to most of the bands or even know the name of the songs, I really enjoyed it and might dive deeper into some of the music highlighted.

BUT NOW, Let’s go to the acting.

One of my mom’s friends summarized what everyone thoughts about Emma Watson: HERMONIE WHO? She was excellent in this film as the sweet, genuine, beautiful friend with a past, and even though her American accent was a little shady in some parts, I felt that for her first major role since Harry Potter, she was great. She also had great chemistry with both Ezra and Logan.

Logan definitely has grown up since his Percy Jackson days and he definitely stepped up to the plate in Perks as the insecure and sometimes mentally unstable Charlie. Even though he is 20 years old, he definitely captured the innocence of being a freshman in high school and I he was very believable.

But honestly, if I saw a kid as cute as Logan Lerman walking around looking lonely, I would befriend him IMMEDIATLEY, no questions asked.

Now, let me talk about Ezra Miller. This boy is fantastic. He was the stand out in this film. He made me laugh and cry and have funny feelings inside, and just did a wonderful job as gay Patrick. It’s so interesting that he goes from the thriller Let’s Talk about Kevin and then to sweet Perks and you know this kid will become one of our generation’s most talented actors. Overall, He also had great chemistry with the others, especially with Emma (no wonder she came and saw him perform at the ‘Sco!).

Other great highlights include the lovely Mae Whitman (as my friend said, “I don’t know if I want to be her, or be on top of her”) and Mr. Paul Rudd, who I adored as the English teacher and mentor of Charlie. He also said the best quote in the film (made famous by Charlie),“We accept the love we think we deserve.” Ahh, my heart. Ahh how true.

It’s only out in a couple of theaters now, but I highly recommend you check out this movie. Make sure you bring your feels.

—Maya Mariner

Spineless: Secrets of the Lost Summer by Carla Neggers

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 14:13:07 -0400

Spineless: Secrets of the Lost Summer by Carla Neggers:

spinelessreviews:

Generally, I don’t like romance novels. They always end too happily (I’m very much a realist) and the characters’ names are usually exceedingly quaint. That being said, I really liked Secrets of the Lost Summer by Carla Neggers, which surprised me. It was everything that I could want in…

Some of the Best and Worst of the Summer Movie Season

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 18:34:40 -0400

-art my Maya Mariner

Well, summer vacation has been over for over a month, and that means cuddly sweaters, bonfires and dorm room fleece blanket snuggle parties are on their way! But let’s reflect back to the summer for a minute: While most responsible college students interned, got a job, or volunteered over the summer, I stayed at home being a blob, sinking my couch into the floor, and Keeping up with the Kardashians. I also saw a lot of movies…28 of them in fact. Yes, you read that correctly, I spent over a hundred dollars of my mom’s money (more if I count the popcorn and peanut M&Ms) and endless hours of my life to go to the movies. Therefore, I feel it is my duty to share the best and worst of the summer with you all…at the very least so I have something to show for all my trouble, and the fact that summer movies are getting me excited for some fall movie magic!

The Best:

The Dark Knight Rises: Nolan did not disappoint. Whether you liked it more or less than the Dark Knight, this movie was a great ending to an amazing franchise that took the superhero genre into a new realm. The stunts were epic: Bane took a plane apart, a football field collapsed, bridges blew up, and as much as possible was done without CGI. Also, Anne Hathaway was smokin’ as Catwoman. Finally, congratulations Joseph Gordon-Levitt for hitting out of the park in this one, four for you.

The Avengers: I had high expectations for this baby and BOY WERE THEY MET. The best part was watching the whole super crew fight together after watching them in separate movies for about 4 years, especially in a super-summer, popcorn-eating epic. Joss Whedon, I bow down to you.

Moonrise Kingdom: I had never seen a Wes Anderson film (or a P.T. Anderson film, ‘cause I keep confusing the two), but once the movie started, everything fell into place. The pacing was great, the dialogue was snappy, the music was a perfect fit, the cast was so on top of everything, and the tween couple (played by Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward) stole the show. I get the Wes craze now!

The Beasts of the Southern Wild: This film won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance, and from that moment I knew I had to see it. Everything was so light, gorgeous, and moving; the scenery, the cinematography, the music, the acting…everything! I never felt like I was watching a film, but watching an almost-documentary on the life of a six-year-old living on the edges of the bayou. Quvenzhané Wallis was such a dynamic force in this movie, and I will not be surprised if she grabs some award nods this season.

Honorable Mentions: Bernie, The Intouchables, Queen of Versailles, Ruby Sparks

The Worst

To Rome with Love: This movie wasn’t as bad as it was disappointing. Woody Allen was coming off a great ride with Midnight in Paris, so my expectations for To Rome with Love were high. I loved the display of the city and the abundant use of the Italian actors, but it was choppy. Even though it was Allen-esque, it seemed more like Allen was driving and kept running through streetlights.

Dark Shadows: Dear Johnny Depp, WE GET IT. YOU CAN DO CHARACTER WORK. STOP DOING MOVIES THAT SEEM “INTERESTING” JUST BECAUSE YOU GET TO HAVE YOUR BROMANCE WITH TIM BURTON.

Take this Waltz: This film was about 90 minutes long, but I swear on all that is good, it could have been over at least three different times. Three times during a 90 minute movie, I thought the credits were going to roll so I could leave immediately, but it still went on and on while I pathetically watched/slept. Seth Rogen was good though.

Honorable Mentions: The Dictator, Snow White and the Huntsman, Men in Black III

-Maya Mariner

Summer Movie Review

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 15:06:52 -0400

(From L-R: Brave, The Amazing Spiderman, 21 Jump Street, The Dark Knight Rises, Moonrise Kingdom, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, The Lorax, The Hunger Games, The Avengers.) -Artwork by Jenna Bergstraesser

Rejoice, all ye merry Oberlin culture junkies - the Apollo is coming back, and just in time for the fall movie season! This is always an exciting time of year for me because many of the year’s best films come in these next few months. Certainly most of the Oscar nominees will. All the kids are back in school; time for the grown-ups to go back out to the theater.

And what better way to celebrate this time of year than by looking back at the last time? For all the problems summer film seasons have had recently (I think the strongest one in recent memory was 2008, and even that’s a stretch), this year had a lot of headliners, mostly thanks to big names. Ridley Scott returned to science fiction, Joss Whedon brought the superheroes of Marvel Comics together in one super-blockbuster, and Christopher Nolan bade farewell to his interpretation of the Man Dressed as a Bat. And what do you know - a lot of this summer was good. In the end, I think it did give 2008 (that memorable year of WALL-E, Iron Man, and The Dark Knight) a run for its money.

So if you’re headed towards the still-distant Christmas season with no idea what movies to buy, rent, or skip from the last few months - well, you’re in luck. Here’s a handy guide to various cinematic categories, with as many movies as I could see crammed in there. I stuck in a few from earlier months, too, but really, when March has releases like John Carter and The Hunger Games, I can’t entirely ignore it.

QUIRKY COMEDIES

BUY: Moonrise Kingdom

I might as well start out with my pick for the best film of the year so far - Wes Anderson’s newest picture, Moonrise Kingdom. On the eve of a hurricane, an island-dwelling young boy and girl run away from their respective families to be together, prompting a star-studded search for the children before the storm hits. Oh, yes, there are stars - Bruce Willis, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, and Jason Schwartzman are all here, though the film’s real heart may be found in Edward Norton, a hard-on-his-luck scout leader. The film’s definitely a little odd - the two children are somehow wise beyond their years, thanks in part to their vast imaginations. Yet it’s sweet, too, a chuckle-inducing parody and love letter to storytelling, childhood, and most resonating, for me, boy scouting. The mini military camps are a sight to behold. It’s an adorable little picture, and it’s made with such a love of cinema that I would be surprised if it wasn’t nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. This is this year’s Hugo, released in the slot Midnight in Paris got last year.

RENT: Safety Not Guaranteed

Having seen select episodes of Parks and Recreation, I was familiar with Aubrey Plaza’s portrayal of a deeply snarky, somewhat pessimistic young woman. The character type seemed like it could become easily static, but Safety Not Guaranteed disproved that idea in my mind. This is a story where sarcasm and fun give way gradually to something very sincere, whereas the characters that appear to be taking their jobs seriously are, in fact, not working hard at all. At heart this is a vehicle for Ms. Plaza, but the performances by Jeff Schwensen and Mark Duplass bring the story home. It’s a very small-scale picture, which you might not expect from the time travel premise, but it’s absolutely worth seeing.

SKIP: Seeking a Friend at the End of the World

Steve Carell is fantastic in The Office, but I haven’t seen him do quite so well in dramatic roles. (Well, there’s one exception. He’s pretty good in Little Miss Sunshine, but that’s more or less a comedy anyway.) The problem lies in his brilliant comedic delivery. Michael Scott has a facade of seriousness that seems ready to break out into laughter at a moment’s notice. When Carell holds a poker face through an entire film, it seems to me as if he’s stifling laughter, as if he’s not quite taking the world seriously. He’s so removed from the world that he has a very small emotional presence. The premise of this film is pretty good - apocalyptic romantic black comedy - and I deeply respect it for seeing the promise of doom all the way to the end. Some scenes early on have a great black humor that I missed in the rest of the film. The lead performances, and lack of laughs towards the end, turned me off of this promising film.

ANIMATED FILMS

BUY: The Secret World of Arrietty

Those familiar with Studio Ghibli and recent hits such as Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle will recognize the animation style of this film immediately. Miyazaki himself, the genius behind those two films, takes over co-scripting duties here, and it’s by no means his best film. Still, it is lovely. Arrietty is based off of the popular Borrowers children’s book series. The melancholic theme that ended Spirited Away, of the impermanence of human relationships, takes over the entire film here, and it makes for some genuinely heartbreaking scenes. The enlarged house and garden are beautiful onscreen - the animators really nailed the look of individual leaves and blades of grass moving in the wind, not to mention magnified water droplets. Arrietty surprises with its presence of an unambiguous villain, unusual for Ghibli, but that doesn’t distract greatly from the obvious craft and love poured into the movie.

RENT: The Pirates! Band of Misfits

If you like Aardman Studios’ traditional brand of humor - that which shows up in Chicken Run, Flushed Away, and the Wallace and Gromit shorts - you’ll like Band of Misfits, which has those films’ same subversive, dry British tone. As with Arrietty, Pirates is not the studio’s strongest film, only a little unfortunate due to the hilarious source material. Yet it is refreshing to see a pirate movie that doesn’t involved Indiana Jones-style mystical cults and magical artifacts. To those not disturbed by the handmade look of Pirates, the film is definitely worth a watch.

SKIP: Brave

Oh, how it pains me to put a Pixar film here. But for the second year in a row, Pixar’s yearly film is unlikely to be nominated for Best Picture Oscar, or even win the Best Animated Feature category. Brave is not a princess story, but it is quite reminiscent of another recent Disney feature, which if named would present significant spoilers to the plot. It goes without saying that the film is beautiful, and Merida’s hair - so touted in publicity - does look great. But Brave stumbles again and again. The relationship between Merida and her mother is one-dimensional and doesn’t seem to be easily salvaged; the priority of comedy over dramatic integrity, which also presented problems in Ratatouille, undermines the film’s seriousness instead of merely poking fun at it like Shrek did; and only a couple of characters are really developed at all. The directors and writers behind the film aren’t the regular Pixar talent (John Lasseter, Pete Doctor, Brad Bird, Andrew Stanton, etc.), which I hopefully blame as part of the film’s problem. Anyway, the best animated Disney heroine picture of the decade has already been made; your time would be better spent rewatching Tangled.

TESTOSTERONE FLICKS

BUY: 21 Jump Street

Where the heck did this film come from? Two of my least favorite genres - buddy comedy and explosion-fueled brainless action movie - mash together to create 21 Jump Street, a buddy cop film wherein two undercover cops infiltrate a high school. Problem is, they get their cards mixed up, and the jock has to play the science kid while the nerd has to pretend to be popular. And this works really well. The high school films and shows most people grew up on - that is, those made in the 80s and early 90s, like for example the original 21 Jump Street - are now outdated. Tolerance is cool and the nerds run the universe, if behind the scenes. It’s a funny and subversive take on high school films, not to mention the basic subversive action movie tropes you might see in (say) The Other Guys are really well done here. (“I really thought that [propane-filled] truck was gonna blow up.”) If this film could win me over, it can win over anybody.

RENT: Rock of Ages

Every summer has its bad movie (usually multiple), and every summer has its musical. Only about half the time are they combined, but this time it worked spectacularly. Because Rock of Ages is wonderfully, gloriously bad. In an age of Glee, the jukebox musical is nothing new, though such a star-studded one might be. It’s all wholly uninspired casting - Paul Giamiatti plays the slimy assistant, Malin Akerman is the sex object, Catherine Zeta-Jones is the feminist, Tom Cruise is the washed-up superstar, and the two leads are adorable and half-decent at singing. The real surprise is Alec Baldwin and Russell Brand as co-owners of a club, who eventually start a romance in the film’s most hilarious number. They milk it for all its worth, as does everyone else. The sense of energy lifts the film (this saved Newsies), while the horrible acting and writing bring it crashing to the ground. That combination makes something very watchable. Recommended viewing with other people, though, so you can make snide comments at it.

SKIP: Battleship

If you thought you’d seen the most boring action film of the decade with last year’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon, you thought wrong. Battleship is near constant explosions - and when nothing’s exploding, a sickeningly sweet attitude towards American patriotism overruns the film. The rampant destruction is a little unsettling, particularly in the glee these people find in it. And again, nobody is interesting in this, and none of the writing holds any spark. At least Transformers tried for a funny line every now and again!

LITERARY ADAPTATIONS

BUY: The Hunger Games

Let me very clearly establish my position on this one: I thought the book was… okay. It’s kind of an odd premise - killing children seems like sort of like a strategy for keeping people in line that would backfire. The Battle Royale-lite setting held promise, but was overrun with mildly repetitive prose from the mind of Katniss Everdeen. And as it must, the survival story eventually gave way to a love story, which wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. It was mildly promising but very uneven, and I wasn’t really motivated to pick up book two.

The filmic version, though, makes me want to see the sequel immediately. Maybe this is due to their excellent foreshadowing of future events - riots begin in one district before the movie’s two-thirds over. Maybe it’s due to the sense of a larger story that begins to emerge, helped via scenes with the leader of Panem. But I think overall the story is told more smoothly than the book, even though the premise remains perplexing. Jennifer Lawrence is perfect as Katniss, of course, but she doesn’t just reprise her role from Winter’s Bone, which she very well could have done - there’s a darkness to Katniss that Ru didn’t quite have. Meanwhile, the film integrates the audience very well into the reality show of the Games, allowing commentators to speak directly to us as events progress. Impressively, for a PG-13 film the gore is not downplayed; the opening seconds of the Games are some of the film’s most chilling. It’s a very strong film on its own, and certainly a good adaptation as well, which is a line many adaptations struggle to stride. Definitely looking forward to the next one.

RENT: John Carter

This film was undeserved of its critical panning and box office failures. That said, nor was it worthy of Avatar-level revenues (though to be fair, I’m unconvinced Avatar itself was worthy of Avatar-level revenues), and with a budget of this size that might have been what they were going for. I see the film as quite an interesting experiment: a clearly pulp fiction tale, tweaked a little to tone down the sexism and racism (but not eliminate either completely), and then told with a large modern-day visual effects budget. It’s not great, but it’s sincere and silly. And I had more fun with this than I did with Avatar, when I think about it. Too bad Andrew Stanton’s live-action debut didn’t match Brad Bird’s incomparable Mission Impossible outing, though.

SKIP: Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax

I’m going to cheat on this one - I haven’t seen this film, but I needed to fill out the literary adaptations category. Still, the review at the link below is a very perceptive piece of criticism, whatever its accuracy. http://blip.tv/nostalgia-chick/nostalgia-chick-the-lorax-6016490

SCI-FI SUMMER TENTPOLES

BUY: The Avengers

For a movie Marvel sank millions of dollars and five prequels into (after all, a huge reason films like Iron Man and Thor even exist was for this one movie), this one damn well better have worked, cause Marvel was betting a lot on it. And work it did. It always would have, really, because a live-action version of the Marvel Universe, where heroes cross over into each other’s titles on a weekly basis, is something many comic nerds would chop off their limbs for. Myself included. And since this film had so much hype (and five prequels) going into it, many people would have turned out just to see if it could be done. (This is why a Justice League movie would probably not be quite so successful - the novelty was a big factor in the huge box office for The Avengers.)

But not only did this film work, it worked brilliantly. I mean that as a fan and as a moviegoer. The film is action-packed from the beginning, but unlike (say) Battleship, the point of everything is always obvious. There are great and funny characters bouncing off of each other, and to the loyal Marvel viewer, The Avengers is the logical next step in the characterization of every single hero here. That’s a very difficult thing to do.

And not that this should make or break a film, but the effects really are spectacular. Early trailers had very few of them, and the shots looked barren, but the power of these heroes and their villains is brought to life, and the threat seems real - like something only six super-powered heroes could take down together. It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s pretty great.

RENT: Prometheus

For me, this was unambiguously the best science fiction film of the summer. It presents a weird premise - humans share the genetic material of an alien Engineer race - along with some hefty theological questions. Where do we come from, and what is our purpose? Against this backdrop, Prometheus is action, horror, and intellectual sci-fi; the best of the first two Alien films, with 2001 and the musical feel of Blade Runner sprinkled in for good measure. Most intriguingly, many of those questions it asks are left unanswered, though the film expands upon those ideas through thematic and human connections that grow in the story. I liked it because you left the theater thinking about those ideas. Oh, and it’s pretty, too.

So, I enjoyed it. But the response from most people has been more measured, and on reflection I see some of their points. For all its ambition, Prometheus spreads itself just a little too thin. Some developments don’t further the plot, but the themes, leading to many scenes that appear to have no purpose. And while the movie may feature homages to previous science fiction films, its basic plot beats are largely copied from the original Alien film. In my mind, this makes sense; between the two films, director Ridley Scott establishes a vocabulary of events, and links the two inexorably. History repeats itself. But to a fan of the original, Prometheus may be a bit too repetitive. Still, the film sparked discussion, and the degree to which people like this vary wildly, so check it out - I can’t honestly predict what side of the spectrum you might be on.

RENT: The Amazing Spider-Man

None of the four big summer tentpoles were by any means bad, so I’m eschewing a “Skip” category here. (The fourth is relegated to the next category.) The Amazing Spider-Man does perplex me the most of them all, though. Here is a film, which, only five years after the last one in the franchise, reboots the Spider-Man story with an entirely new creative team, and pulls off most of the important elements better than the original trilogy. The writing is more believable, the cast is filled with better and more charismatic actors, Spider-Man’s fights feel less like two rubber CGI models punching each other, and the origin story is more nuanced than any other one so far, including the comic universe canon origin. But even with all of those qualities, Spider-Man 2 remains my favorite Spidey movie. I think that’s because Amazing takes itself very seriously. There are plenty of funny moments, and the Peter Parker / Gwen Stacy dynamic is a superb touch of lightness, but both are contrasted with a constantly brooding teenager. Think of the first Harry Potter film. It may have been inferior to its sequels, but there was a sense of wonder not quite matched by further installments. The story of The Amazing Spider-Man is pretty good, but the elements don’t come together as smoothly as I’d hoped. Not to say it’s bad - I do think it’s the second-best Spider-Man, and is worth a watch.

POLITICAL FILMS

BUY: The Dark Knight Rises

And so Nolan’s Batman trilogy comes to an end. That sentence is a bit deceiving, though; The Dark Knight Rises is the only film of Nolan’s movies that is intended as a moment within a larger story. Batman Begins is a revamped origin story; The Dark Knight is a logical progression involving the Joker and Two-Face, but as a middle installment it hardly forwards a three-movie plot. There’s another way to consider Rises: a sequel to both Begins and Dark Knight, since plot threads from both (the League of Shadows and Batman’s ostracization from Gotham among them) are continued and concluded here.

This is bigger in scope than the other two films, which is just a little reminiscent of the planet apocalypse-centric The Avengers. It is longer, as well. After the success of Batman Begins, my theory is that the Nolan brothers had less and less editorial influence. Begins is often quite funny in a way that its two sequels aren’t. So this film takes itself pretty seriously. But there is plenty of good here. Catwoman, Bane, and particularly Gotham cop Jonathan Blake are fun and well-realized characters, very worthy additions to the Nolan mythos. Of the previously established cast, Batman and Alfred have the most interesting character development, with Alfred having grown weary of Wayne’s daredevil stunts, and Batman attempting a comeback after eight years away from the job.

As for the politics, they’re complicated, which is why this film is a must-see of this category. There is an Occupy Wall Street-like movement led by Gotham prisoners and lower-class, or perhaps it’s closer to the French Revolution. And the fat cats of Gotham aren’t helping much either. It’s all quite muddled, but like Prometheus, untangling the problems seems to be part of the point; that’s how it is in real life, after all. If you want an intellectual blockbuster, as usual, Nolan isn’t a bad place to look.

RENT: The Campaign

Again, this film surprised me, because raunchy comedies and I don’t mix. But this one had the added benefit of being politically timely, thanks to the theater of the 2012 campaigns being in full swing when it was released. If you like The Daily Show, there’s a good chance you’ll like this, because some of the gags are familiar. That the campaigns are worried more about presentation than about substance, that the political system is driven by money rather than ideals. But Zach Galifianakis provides heart. He is weird, but there’s a warm squishy center to him that surfaces every so often, unlike some of his other roles where he never seems to exist on the same plane of existence. Will Ferrell tones down his usual shtick (see Talladega Nights or Blades of Glory) to become an outrageous candidate with no respect for personal space. The film may be depressing to some, but it looks closely at current campaign problems and laughs at them, which I believe to be a very healthy response.

SKIP: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

This isn’t actually politics. Never mind.

THE TOP 5 FILMS I MISSED BUT INTEND TO SEE LATER

Beasts of the Southern Wild

To Rome with Love

Premium Rush

The Cabin in the Woods

Men in Black 3

-Paul Anderson

Akeelah & The Bee: The Most Inspirational Movie of all Time

Mon, 07 May 2012 14:49:00 -0400

I’ve been feeling super Black lately, so I started watching Black films. Most of them are about sad, Black men in the inner city who watch all their friends die from gunshots before escaping the hood through either sports or music. Others are about fat, sixteen-year-old Black girls who are still in middle school, pregnant for the second time, raped, abused, have a child with downs syndrome, and are HIV positive.
Akeelah and The Bee, though is, to date, the only happy Black movie known to man. Unless you count Good Burger. Then there are two.

Akeelah and The Bee is about a young, Black girl growing up in a bad neighborhood somewhere in LA near and/or around where Ice Cube’s brother Ricky was shot in front of Cuba Gooding Jr. She goes to a shit school with no budget and a ton of bullies. Two bullies pick on Akeelah specifically because they, like most people, hate smart children. They hate Akeelah so much that they go out of their way to go to her special events and make fun of her. Say what you will about bullies, but they have a dedication that the kids they convince to kill themselves are obviously lacking.

No H8.

It gets better.

Aside from school life, Akeelah has an interesting family dynamic (and that was the worst transitional sentence ever written). She has four siblings. Her sister is never really seen but has what seems to be an illegitimate baby. Her mildly older brother is in a gang. Her way older brother is in the military in hopes of getting a college degree; he is also Malcolm in the Middle’s older brother’s Black friend in military school and the alien genius from the short lived but utterly brilliant Nickelodeon show Allen Strange. Akeelah’s mom works long hours at the hospital to provide for her family and her father died during a shooting in the hood; because no Black child in cinema ever has both parents. Not even in Goodburger.

Right off the bat the film starts building Akeelah’s character through scene. She gets A’s on her spelling tests, she plays scrabble for fun, and she’s excited about learning. This, of course, get’s her bullied because the urban community hates education almost as much as they hate college (this, of course, is not their fault and reflects the internalized socialization forced on to them by a continually oppressive system, but because the foundlings of said system are in the past and we do not have a delorean, I have no choice but to move forward and insult it—Besides, you probably don’t care).
Akeelah gets offered to do the spelling bee and decides she doesn’t want to. But then someone tells her to do it for her dead father, which is exactly what you say to a child at a key developmental milestone. You say to them, “Hey, do this thing you don’t want to do for your dead parent.” There’s no way that kind of a thing could have dire consequences on a child’s mental health.

At this point Laurence Fishburne shows up as a positive Black role model (as seen in his roles in Boyz n’ The Hood and kind of a little bit in The Matrix) and is way to harsh on an 11 year-old girl. He almost makes her cry. But, he also lends a tender moment to the film by showing Akeelah the most bad ass Nelson Mandela quote of all time.
Akeelah wins the spelling bee shit and becomes friends with a nice Latino/Hispanic kid named Javier with really supportive parents (and a huge eleven-year-old crush on Akeelah) and a nice Asian boy, Dylan, with a father who hates him (and is also a little racist). That could be seen as a stereotypical comment on Asians, but it’s my understanding that all fathers hate their children, so I think it’s less racial and more completely and unfortunately true.

Her new friendships, though, strain her old ones because it’s hard to manage wealthy friends who play Scrabble and poor friends who like to actually do fun things. Shit’s rough, man. Social mobility is a bitch.

On top of that, her mom also hates that she wants to do the bee, which sounds cruel and unfair; but if you work full time, have four kids, your husband dies from gang violence, your oldest daughter has a bastard baby and lives at home, your older son joins the army, and your younger son is in a gang, then I think you’ve earned the right to be overprotective of your youngest child; especially when she is in summer school for cutting classes. I’m going to go out on a limb and say Mom was in the right on that one.

As the conflict rises you discover Laurence Fishburne has had to bury his daughter and be left by his wife. Through coaching her, Akeelah brings back a lot of feelings of fatherhood, and the relationship between the two strains. By the end of it, Akeelah teaches him he can move on and be there for others as he would be there for his daughter.

It’s touching in a way only children’s movies can be.

The sentence seems problematic.

For a time, however, Laurence Fishburne’s character excuses himself from coaching her in an attempt to stay professional. No worries, though. Shit start’s looking up for Akeelah. Her bee moves the community. Her mom coaches her, her brothers coach her, her teachers coach her, the gang leader (as played by the guy who does Crab Man on My Name is Earl or The Rubber Band Man in the Office Max commercials depending on how dated you want your references to be) coaches her, the Korean shop owner coaches her. Even the local wino helps her.

You know how many other Black movies show communal love towards the education of children? Approximately none.

Exactly none.

Fuck.

By the end, Javier loses but is okay with that. He knows he’ll have a chance to win the next year. Akeelah and Dylan Bonnie-and-Clyde their way to a co-victory, thus overcoming their differences in a most triumphant victory. Everyone wins and Akeelah’s bee singlehandedly saves the ghetto.

Is it ridiculous? Yes.

Is it heart warming as fuck? You bet your ass.

I’ll be honest with you, tumblr: I was high when I watched this movie. I was high and incredibly emotional. I cried several different times; twice out of sorrow and twice out of how fucking happy I was for Akeelah. Then I called my mom and made her validate my existence. Then I wrote this post.

Technical Stuff:

Cinematically the film makes great use of montage (particularly when showing Akeelah study). The use of POV shots work out well too, adding to the emotional resonance of the film. It’s a kid’s movie, though, so it can be heavy-handed or overly expositional at times; but you have to do that because kids are stupid (as, oddly enough, are most adults). Because of that, the movie is directed in a way that can, to an adult, seem tired or cliché, but to a child makes the emotional flow of the film clear and easy to follow. Certain actions or segments of dialogue seem overemphasized to show their importance.

That being said, Akeelah and The Bee does a good enough job of being something any age can enjoy; and while it stoops to a child’s level, thus allowing them a chance to understand, it does not pander to a child audience or force itself to be terribly over simplistic. It’s also, in part, the fact that this is a children’s movie that allows it to be so unrealistic. In some kid’s movies, a child is accidently left at home for Christmas and fights off burglars with gadgets and gizmos. In others, children walk along a set of railroad tracks, discovering themselves as they look for a dead body. Most plots are stupid; it’s the journey that matters.

I mean, look at Up for Christ’s sake. If someone walked up to you and said, “Hey, I want to make a movie about an old man, a boy, and some animals flying in a house filled with balloons,” you would say, “You are an idiot.” But then it happens and you and everyone else in the theater cries after the first five minutes. Five god-damned minutes!

Fuck you, Pixar. You broke my fucking heart.

Also, for a film targeting a younger demographic, Akeela and The Bee has a sick soundtrack. Bootsy Collins? Fuck yeah.

Quotes:
• “What do you want to be when you grow up? A doctor? A lawyer? A stand up comic?” –Laurence Fishburne (upon meeting Akeelah)
• “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be?” –Nelson Mandela (reoccurring theme of the film)

REVIEW: The Artist

Fri, 04 May 2012 09:29:10 -0400

It’s not actually that difficult to make a silent movie. Pop anything into a DVD player and watch it with the sound off for a while, and you might be surprised by how much you can understand. Pixar has experimented with the format for such recent features as WALL-E and Up, earning them high praise. In reality, much of the language of cinema is visual. That’s why it’s a projected image accompanied by sound, and not a radio show or CD.

Utter silence for an entire film remains, however, a pretty archaic idea, as is the completely black-and-white picture. It makes sense that any film with both qualities should, thematically, embrace the idea of nostalgia. The Artist does this two-fold, its content firmly embracing the implications of its form. Its setting is during the Golden Age of Hollywood, as movies turned into talking pictures; its protagonist, George, is a man who is having trouble adjusting to the new. It’s no wonder this picture is a critical darling; film critics and makers tend to love old movies, and this film is not only in the format of one, but looks nostalgically back at them.

It’s remarkably effective, too, because the format is done quite well. Intertitles take the place of dialogue (though not, as was also common in some silent pictures, description), but you might be surprised at how infrequently they are used. The score takes the place of ambient sound; its range is dynamic and its sound full. As the years pass, the score takes frequent turns towards swing and other popular music of the time. The score is nearly constant - all the more effective when it drops out entirely. And once or twice, the sound editors break all the rules, events which I found to be quite thrilling and disorienting.

The cast is small, but talented. Notably, everybody is always smiling. Jean DuJardin has the ruggedly handsome charm of old-style movie actors, oh yes, but he also delivers a subtle performance as a kind and talented person, if somewhat vain and brooding. Berenice Bejo is his protege and a rising talkie star; she is charming and nearly as funny as DuJardin, and her chemistry with him provides for a believable love epic. John Goodman and James Crowell are familiar faces, one of the film’s only faults - Bejo and DuJardin are unknown enough to American viewers that their story may be timelessly oriented in the past, but Cromwell and Goodman have shown up in many American pictures, dating the film farther in the future. Around the leads, the producers fill the screen with tons of extras, another callback to an era where digitally expanding a crowd was impossible and studios pushed as many people into the frame as possible.

The Artist lays bare what goes on behind the camera - one of its first scenes takes place behind the screen of a movie theater. The industry of it, and the drama of hiring and firing, is presented, if broadly. The Golden Age may be partly defined as years of assembly-line films: actors, screenwriters, and directors exclusively on contract with different studios to give each studio a different unique look. But The Artist is simultaneously presented with a very human center in the character of George and his struggles, such that the audience has a real stake in the industry’s shift. The result is a funny, dark, and sweet picture, worthy of the classics but retaining a slightly modern feel in its nostalgia.

-Paul Anderson

Review: Tron: Legacy

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 11:30:24 -0400

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but we’re in an age of escapists. I mean more so than usual. Popular film has nearly always been about the art of creating and subsequently enjoying fiction. But in recent years especially, the fantasy action blockbuster has taken hold. There’s plenty of source material for it. Film producers have used comic books, fantasy epics, science-fiction yarns, and video games as some of the inspiration for their recent blockbuster extravaganzas. But in an age where computers are pushing the limits of visual effects, audiences are most interested in going to the movies to lose themselves in other worlds - sometimes, as with 3-D flicks, almost completely.

There’s a danger to that. A recent article in The Washington Post unearthed an inherent problem in the Indiana Jones movies. What are they about, besides having fun? The author found nothing. Films about other worlds can be dangerously self-contained: aesthetically extraordinary while substantially inconsequential.

Enter Tron: Legacy. Its inspiration is another film with half of the same title: Tron, a cult classic of the early 1980s. Lite science fiction camp, mixed with the “serious business” attitude that many films of the 1970s seem to take. (Can you imagine the characters of The Godfather talking about video games? It’s a little like that, sometimes.) Tron is about Flynn, a disgruntled former computer employee who happens to be a hacker genius. Thanks to Science (here code for “magic” or “plot-relevant shenanigans”), a laser transports him into a cyberworld that is connected both to video games he developed and the corporate structure of his old software employers (both headed under the same corporation). His mission is to find a file that will implicate his old bosses as plagiarists … ah, I think. At this point the plot starts getting hard to follow. The plot is not the point, the visuals are the point.

It’s kind of Dune-lite, once you get into the world. Some programs (which have a few witty one-liners - “I’ve been in here for a whole twenty milliseconds!” groans one prisoner) harbor a belief in the Users that created them, and are subsequently punished for it by the omniscient Master Control Program. Flynn infiltrates the Grid, as it’s known, and uses his User Powers (more Science) to mess with the rules.

Much of the first half is Flynn playing the arcade-meets-gladiator games the prisoners are required to play, and it’s those visuals that make the movie. Those arcade games where two players draw continuous lines and try to box each other in? Immortalized with “light-cycles”. Breakout, too, becomes much more deadly. And beyond the games, there’s a whole CGI world, which all the characters are integrated into. It was groundbreaking for the time, and it looks pretty neat now.

Now compare that to Tron: Legacy. Token troubled teenage (well, late-20s) hero loses his father, goes into the grid to try to find him. The overarching idea, then, is to get out of the grid. The portal to leave is open for a few hours only because of Science, but his dad (aged up due to Science, found in a faraway house, unreachable by Science) has found some Science-delivered programs that created themselves, and Science Science magic magic whacky doodle.

At least the franchise has continued the proud tradition of Not Making a Lot of Sense. And even more so, because here the visuals, action scenes, and especially the score by Daft Punk are breathtaking. But I believe there’s a core difference between Tron and Tron: Legacy, and it comes in the establishment of the rules.

Tron establishes its world fairly well a few minutes into Flynn’s entrance into the Grid. There’s a big bad Master Control Program, who enslaves the programs that believe in Users. Flynn’s goal is first to play the games, and then to progress through the world in a fairly linear fashion, overcoming obstacles due to his prowess at video games, hacking abilities, and status as a user. Then we get Tron: Legacy. Sam Flynn, the son, enters the Grid because … I dunno, he was bored? The games are established as we get to them; then we find the elder Flynn, who tells him he has to go find head honcho Zeus; and also Clu, baddie program, is around, pulling more and more complicated toys out of his arsenal…

The point is, the rules are more or less made up on the fly. And thus do I reach the conclusion that Tron: Legacy is squarely in the middle of the spectrum of science fiction / fantasy films. It’s a genre that would be better titled Science Fantasy. Oh, there’s a science focus and feel - this isn’t dragons or elves, but programs and circuitry embodied that we’re learning about. However, the point of the film is less about a solid premise that is expounded upon and pondered, but the creation of an arc that the story beats serve. We want to see our hero grow, and the story will adjust itself to let that happen. Moreover, Tron is about retrieving something within the Grid that will affect the outside world substantially. Tron: Legacy contains its plot within the Grid; when he leaves it, the story is over.

Which isn’t to say the movie isn’t fun. I think it’s a very well-made fantasy action blockbuster. The dystopian aesthetic is beautifully realized, and a lot of the design choices are excellent. The action is even more high-stakes than the first film, and of course it all looks better; the technology’s aged almost thirty years, dontcha know. I can’t help but be charmed by the wonder of it all. I just prefer the ultimate motivations of the first film; it’s more grounded than the second film. Though in a generation with our head in the clouds, I don’t know what else I’d expect from a modern movie.

-Paul Anderson

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close: Thoughts on an Adaptation

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 08:00:05 -0400

The term “unfilmable” is tossed around a fair amount these days, in reference to stories told in other mediums (books, comics, video games, real life) that could not be adequately translated to the screen, and yet Hollywood keeps pushing the boundaries. Watchmen was unfilmable because of its meticulous detail and the flood of iconic images associated with it - but Zack Snyder went ahead and tried it anyway. But then you encounter stories that are designed for the heavily prose-based narrative format of a book, or stories that feature characters that are enriched with an interior monologue. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is both of those.

So from the get-go, not only have the writers shot themselves in the foot, but I have to re-examine how I evaluate this movie. In what it aims to adapt, it is ambitious. Oskar (appropriately named, since this film was nominated for two of them) is a kid living in New York. From his obsessiveness and speech, he probably has some sort of mental disability (Asperger’s is brought up, but there’s a good chance he has autism, too.) As the film begins, his father has recently died in the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. The film is told out of chronological order: the main narrative begins on the day of Oskar’s father’s funeral, one significant and extended flashback takes place on the day of the attacks, and several other flashbacks have no apparent anchor in time.

Not a single one of these things is easy to pull off; that the film is coherent at all is cause for celebration. But it’s competent, not exciting, and a few of those items fall flat even if they’re done well.

Let’s start with the kid. Child actors are put under the microscope in Hollywood, and rightly so. They’re hard to write for; it’s easy to write a kid to sound too old, too pretentious, or both. And don’t forget that we’re talking about a kid with a mental disability. So Oskar is thorough, easy to anger, and brutally honest. Unfortunately, knowing he has a disability doesn’t make me like him more.

We’re not supposed to read stories to like characters. Here, though, I think we are, because we’re supposed to be taking this journey alongside Oskar. Failing that, we should at least understand where he’s coming from. I would have better understood Oskar’s struggle if I could have witnessed Oskar’s pain. There’s an early sequence where he sees, hears, and smells every little detail around him and feels overwhelmed by it, but it’s accompanied by an unnecessary and rather jarring narration that brought me out of the scene completely. His temper tantrums and cruelty to those around him aren’t offset enough by that. Logically, I understand that Oskar needs to have a system to function (leading to his climactic outburst around the end of the first act), but this is shown neither consistently nor effectively.

You could lay the blame at the feet of many people for this. One could blame the actor, Thomas Horn, whose emotions are stagnant and whose aggression lacks direction. One could point the finger at the director, who gets mixed results from most of his actors; for instance, I have seen Tom Hanks do better with worse material. Or one could implicate the writers for the risky structure of the story. The Help essentially revolved around the performances of two experienced black actresses, and the film is better for it despite its rampant clichés. Meanwhile, ELIAC is almost exclusively under the reins of young Horn. It is risky to center a film around several child actors; riskier still to center it around only one; and riskiest of all to make his the voice and face the only one almost constantly heard and seen. Since, as I mentioned, his performance is only mediocre, the film falls flat.

It is almost saved by the presence of Max Von Sydow, here playing a mute war victim known only as The Renter. Here is a lesson in subtlety, next to a child actor who could use it. Von Sydow never says a word, speaking only via messages scribbled in his notebook. But he never fully reveals himself, and so we are curious to know more about him. In addition, he puts the young Oskar in his place, dismissing or challenging Oskar’s fears because, we can only assume, the Renter has seen greater ones. This grounding is sorely needed in a story narrated by an overdramatic child, and whether the problem, again, is from the writers or the kid, the Renter’s jokes and frankness are a welcome relief.

I don’t envy Sandra Bullock, who is given an almost non-part, but while her role as an independent person is shabby (she is extremely emotional, and not well fleshed-out), she is a very effective mother figure, and an appreciably calming influence on Oskar. Other actors (Jeffrey Wright and Viola Davis as an estranged couple; Zoe Caldwell as Oskar’s grandmother) are sometimes very good. The film was marketed as a panoply of stories and encounters from the perspective of Oskar, but in reality there are really very few. A couple of montages are presented well. I thought this might drive the film away from the narrative of “charming determined boy brings people together from his quest,” and it almost does. Wright and Davis start to make up after meeting Oskar, but this makes decently logical sense, as Oskar’s MacGuffin was a large reason for their divorce in the first place. When the Renter reconciles with his wife and Oskar reconciles with his mother, things start to become a little more statistically improbable. I was happy to see the mother and son find solace in each other, but her methods seem extreme, and von Sydow’s ending is hastily tacked on. I assume this narrative was conceived as the beginnings of healing after the terrorist attacks, which is unnecessary, and less satisfying than the simple joy of one pair of characters wherein each realizes the other’s worth. As a piece incorporating 9/11 elements, it is far better than the despicable Remember Me, but not as grippingly imagined as United 93 or imaginatively reconceived as the season one finale of Fringe.

As a film, it is adequate. The soundtrack by Alexandre Desplat is a blend of quirky piano and unassuming strings; the film is cleanly produced, and topped off with a final message from the dead. It’s neat and tidy without presuming to completely heal the wounds of 9/11, and that may be why it was nominated for the Academy’s premiere award. Unfortunately, I think it’s part of a group of movies this year nominated for the award that satisfy, rather than transcend, the thirst for a good picture (The Help, War Horse), which is a deep contrast from last year’s selections (Black Swan, The Social Network). This is satisfying enough, non-summer blockbuster fare, but no better. Hollywood can challenge itself more.

By: Paul Anderson

Miniature Furnishings and People of the Female Persuasion: An Ode to the Creation Story of Lena Dunham

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:08:00 -0500

This is Lena Dunham:

Look at her, all searching and wise.

Lena Dunham graduated from Oberlin in 2008.

(Still from her 2007 short “Hooker on Campus”)

(This is from her Twitter profile picture, circa recently. If you have a twitter but don’t follow her we can’t be friends)

She is my new hero. I will be talking about her and her projects non-stop until at least April 15th. I’m sorry, friends, there is no escaping it. So why not jump on the bandwagon?

Here are some reasons why.

First of all, I am a big believer in hero-worship. Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m not talking about Misery-style kidnappings and holding her hostage until she agrees to be the Jack Donaghy to my Liz Lemon (or even the Carrie Fisher to my Liz Lemon). I’m only mildly a stalker, everyone knows that. I am also not talking about those incredibly unfortunate scenes in 90s after-school specials (here’s looking at you, Full House) where the young innocent daydreams about meeting their favorite rock star but then is just shocked to find out that said musician is in fact a huge jackass who may or may not be casting inappropriate glances in the general direction of that gathered group of groupie tweens.

No, I’ve seen Almost Famous; if your heroes hurt you IRL, just treat it as a coming of age story with a really great soundtrack and you’ll be fine. The kind of hero worship I’m more interested in has a lot less to do with the inkling that if I ever met this Lena Dunham person we’d get along like gangbusters (But we would, just so you know) and a lot more to do with the fact as a writer struggling under very similar ethos I want her to teach me everything she knows.

…So far this post isn’t coming off as not-creepy. Don’t be scared, Lena! I won’t hurt you!

If you are not as pre-invested in The Lena Dunham Story as I am, here is some background:

Lena Dunham graduated Oberlin in 2008 with a Creative Writing degree. The following year, in 2009, she wrote, directed, and starred in the SXSW hit Tiny Furniture:

(Side note: Tiny Furniture is now out on DVD by the Criterion Collection, so you should all go buy that immediately. It’s also on Netflix Instant Play so if, on the other hand, you are a shit-broke college student, you can also watch it there.)

Now, a lot of people have a lot of opinions and questions about Tiny Furniture. The one I come across most often is a simple “So why did they have sex in a pipe?” My answer, to this and all inquiries about Lena Dunham’s decision-making in the process of this film? “Because it’s great.”

Anyway, after winning ALL OF THE AWARDS (or at least the ones that matter) at SXSW, Dunham attracted the attention of none other than Judd Fucking Apatow. He was like “Hey, I think you’re pretty cool,” and she was probably like “I find some of the fringe characters in your bigger movies a little feministicly troubling, but on the whole I still totally respect you and you’re kind of brilliant and hilarious and I don’t actually think you hate women and you’re JUDD FUCKING APATOW so that’s pretty cool.” He probably responded to that with an “Awesome. Wanna make a show together?” and so the show Girls was (allegedly) born.

I have done a lot of reading up on this show. Definitely more than you have, unless you happen to literally be Lena Dunham reading this post (Hi, Lena! Hire me/mentor me/be my friend! We can go to spin class together and shoot each other disappointed looks whenever the instructor starts playing a Chris Brown song.) From what I have gathered from my extensive research on the subject is this:

This show is going to be cramazing. (That means crazy + amazing, for those of you who do not have the vocabulary of a twelve year old)
It is going to be “like” Sex and the City in that it is going to focus around a group of tight-knit female friends in New York City who talk frankly about sex and probably have shoes.
It is NOT going to be like Sex and the City in most other ways.
Andrew Rannells, of Book of Mormon fame, is going to guest star as Lena’s character’s ex-boyfriend who may or may not give her an STI.
Lena Dunham tweeted something cryptic to Donald Glover a few months ago that lead me to believe that there would be an awkward sex scene between Donald Glover and at least one character on Girls. This enthuses me in way that kind of leads me to believe I should get a therapist.
This show is worth watching.

Lena Dunham deals a lot in her work with themes of post-college pathos. This is something that is greatly important to me. I’ve had post-college pathos since my second semester at Oberlin. As one friend told me the other day, “Alanna, you ARE that show.” Which I took as a sign that she should hire me after I graduate, but which probably just meant that I should whine less to my friends about wanting to move to New York and have post-college shenanigans.

What I am saying is this: Oberlin, I feel Lena Dunham understands us. At least some of us. At least, like, five of us. Probably more than that. So you should watch her show, and cheer her on, so that when she becomes the next Woody Allen you can get pop culture street cred by claiming that you were a fan before the lifetime achievement award.

Alanna Bennett is the co-online editor of The Oberlin Review. She has written for such websites as The Mary Sue and Give Me My Remote. You can follow her on twitter @AlannaBennett, but she has no guarantee that you won’t wish her ill after being subjected to it for a couple of weeks.

The OH in Ohio: Because Nothing Makes You Cum like Cleveland

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:33:07 -0500

The major complaint that I get about these review posts, other than that they are
boisterously opinionated, lack sincerity, are void of technical critique, and generally
suck is that they are too long. So I’m going to make this one as short as possible.

Let us begin.

This movie is set, and at least partially filmed, in Cleveland, Ohio. That means two
things: 1) it will somehow find a way to secrete a pungent scent of poverty and
disappointment and 2) no matter what, I have to support it.

This film is, at its core, a picture about a woman who can’t cum, which is becoming
an increasingly popular plot line as conversations regarding female sexuality become socially acceptable. It’s also sad. I took three whole psychology classes once, and I realize that a myriad of problems affect an unfortunate amount of women, preventing them from Orgasm; and I cannot say in words how badly I feel for them. I cum on the daily. Sometimes it’s because I want to. At other times, I’m just a little bored. Maybe I’m by myself. Maybe I’m with a partner. On a train in the rain on a boat when I float of yes, Sam I Am, how I do love my orgasms. I love giving orgasms, though, to be candid, my know-how in that department could always use work (winky-text-face too all you single tumblr ladies and some of you less-single
tumblr ladies, because infidelity does not apply on the internet); and the inability for someone to reach what is naturally the greatest sensation a human being can fill pains me to think about. Everyone should get to cum. Unless you’re into orgasm denial in which case fuck you, get back in your restraints, and beg like the slut you are.

Paul Rudd, Danny DeVito, The cute girl from One Tree Hill (Ed Note: The show it The O.C. Don’t judge me for knowing that) or one of those shows (Misha something. I don’t know), and that Black guy who always plays the villain or some scary guy who’s name I can’t think of because he’s not Will Smith or Denzel Washington all star in this movie. You know the guy I’m talking about? He was the lead gargoyle in Gargoyles, the vindictive drug dealer in Requiem for a Dream that gets blown by the pretty white girl who’s desperate to shoot up, the magic villain from The Princess & The Frog, and the angry, billionaire father from that ATL movie where rappers dance on skates in the hood, etc.

Paul Rudd is a nice guy and a decent husband. He is also a public school teacher
in Cleveland, which allows for a bit of well deserved commentary as well as a
much better take on a failing system than Cameron Diaz’s Bad Teacher could have
ever dreamed of. Unfortunately, he can’t get his wife to cum. This forces him into
a state of self-loathing as he questions not only his worth as a man, but also his
sexual prowess. This thus causes him to sleep with a really hot high school student
of his, which develops into an affair. Then, as he catches his wife finally having
an orgasm with a vibrator (which is followed by a brilliant montage of flowers
blooming, bridges opening, and dolphins flipping. She then, of course, proceeds
to masturbate as often as possible with anything available – which, as many of you may remember, is exactly what it’s like once you find out you can do that), his fear or sexual disappointment and her confusion as to the disconnect between her emotions and physical desire cause the couple to split. Rudd keeps fucking the hot high school girl, and his wife bangs as many people as she can in hopes of finally cumming. Alas, time after time, she has no luck. That is, of course, until she meets Danny DeVito, who plays a successful in-ground pool salesman in Cleveland.

1.) No one in Cleveland has a pool.
2.) In-ground pools imply financial success. Financial success implies a job. No
one in Cleveland has a job.
3.) Assuming that, hypothetically, anyone in Cleveland had a job to buy a pool
with, the sky snows with the sorrow of broken dreams and misplaced
promises eight months out of the year.
4.) Never end a list on an odd umber.

Devito plays a nice guy in this movie, which will jar the fuck out of you if you’re a
Sunny fan. Devito also gives this woman the orgasm of her life while fucking her in
a pool in Cleveland. Are there a lot of problems with that? Yes. Along with the in-
ground pool and the Cleveland, there is that whole cumming on DeVito thing. But
fuck it. That woman deserves to be fucked into an orgasm. As do most women. Not
all, though. Some of you are cold, worthless, soul sucking bitches who don’t deserve
to have even the slightest inkling as to the experience of sexual gratification.

You know who you are. You know what you’ve done.

This is a surprisingly charming movie, especially considering that the last film I
saw about a woman’s inability to cum was Short Bus, which was, I will admit, also
a pretty good movie assuming you can tolerate images of intensely graphic straight
sex, gay sex, and auto-fellatio. And, as I assume you all have the internet, a healthy
curiosity, and hormones, I presume many of you have already seen such images.
So why not add a little bit of a plot line and spice it up with a dose of Canadian
film-making? It has a loveable cast all playing lovable characters, and while the film
shows a marriage being destroyed and characters losing themselves to sex and
sexuality, it ends on a feel-good note. I recommend it, and I mean that sincerely. Are
there some throw-away scenes? Yes. But, overall, it’s a perfectly enjoyable film.

As a final note, here are some memorable quotes you may appreciate (especially if
you’re from the area):

“[in regards to sex] Do you enjoy it?” – “I guess I never thought about it in those
terms.”
“Fuck the shit out of me.”
“Every night you go to bed with the magnificent woman of Cleveland [that isn’t saying a lot. That’s like saying, “every night you go to bed with a 6/10].”
“Why would I be depressed? I’m a biology teacher in the Cleveland public school system.”

You’re Welcome.

SURFER, DUDE: Matthew McConaughey Smokes Weed, Fucks Bitches, Makes a Movie, and Pretends it’s Not a Documentary

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 22:51:35 -0500

To be honest, my dear readers, I go out of my way to watch shitty movies. I go above and beyond the call of duty to watch bullshit films that no one would have any interest in seeing just to let you know that, in fact, you are justified in having no interest in seeing them. It is, without a doubt, the biggest waste of time that I attempt to make seem mildly pleasant in the face of realizing how much shit I am filled with. But that doesn’t mean that I can just go around sounding like any old asshole off of Rotten Tomatoes. Fuck those guys. Most of them are just lonely assholes who want you to know why they either liked or didn’t like a movie. I, however, have a degree (almost), which allows me to academically tell you why I did or didn’t like a movie. I am a professional. You are reading the blog post of a professional. I don’t want to say that you should feel honored, but if that is how you feel, it’s probably for the best.

Being that I am a professional, I went to a library sale that sold giant bags full of whatever you wanted for $1.00. So I went about and did what I always do at books sales: I bought a shit ton of books I will never read but that will make me look cultured as fuck if anyone ever comes in to the malice-infested quarters I call a bedroom. Among other things, I bought a book about Cinema, a book about some guy who used to make cinema; a couple low-budget, Mexican films (Pan’s Labyrinth is the only thing keeping “low-budget Mexican film” from being an oxymoron), and a VHS tape of a Hebrew version of the 80’s cult classic Alf which I hope will convince Israel to let me go on Birth Right. I may not be Jewish, but I also don’t give two shits about Palestine, so I may as well be.

That paragraph wasn’t as funny as I wanted it to be, but I am too apathetic to fix it.

I also bought Surfer, Dude, starring Matthew McConaughey. It was, by far, the best dollar I have ever spent. Unless you count that dollar I donated to Haiti. I like to think that one dollar really helped them rebuild a shithole of rubble and destruction it became after the disaster back into the shithole of rubble and destruction it was before the disaster. I hate feeling like I have to donate to lesser countries.

#FirstWorldProblems

Because of the book sale, this movie came out to cost on nickel. And dammit if it wasn’t the best nickel I have ever spent.

This is the plot: Steve Addington (McConaughey) is a surfer who likes weed and water and other stuff that your idea of an archetypal surfing character would enjoy. But he’s not just any surfer; he’s a surfer who is only in it for the fun, not the money or the fame. That has, in turn, made him really famous, but mostly poor. Then he’s offered a starring role in a reality series that would end his financial troubles but cost him his beliefs. So instead he’s all like, “nah, brah, I just want to surf.” And the audience is like, “What a crazy, cool, calm, and collected dude you must be!”

Okay, so this is a new thing I’m trying. This is going to be the part where I attempt to explore the finer, technical details of filmmaking that were utilized in the production of this film. But, just so I keep your attention, I am going to write them here as if I were a thirteen-year-old-girl who just became a freshman in high school and is dating a senior, Derrick, as she journeys through the entirety of their relationship together:

The lights were, like, cool or whatever I guess. There were some, like, harsh tones and ridged lines in scenes that were taking ‘bout corporate greed or whatever, I guess. But then, like, also, there were really warm tones with natural light and stuff in the scenes with the surfers. Oh my god, Derrick could so totes be a surfer proly. He has, like, these really strong arm muscles that he uses to pick me up sometimes in between class and that fucking bitch Molly always acts like she can’t see us but I know she’s just jealous that he took me to the winter formal, so I make out with him super hard in front of her so she can see. Anyways, the different lighting is cool but it also is a little bit heavy handed for my taste. Derrick’s hands are just right tho ;)

And, here’s the thing: I feel like a lot of other stuff happened to create a dichotomy between two contrasting points of view in the world created before us by the filmmakers. Like, oh my God, so Matthew was shirtless for almost the whole movie, which is kind of hot if you’re into older dudes. But all of his friends were super bohemian looking and so when dudes with suits came in you were like, “ew, not only are you to old, but you are also totes dressed winter suits during the summer and not even trying to hide it so its really obvs.” But it, like, is also shown by the fact that all the fancy suite guys drink alcohol but the surfer dudes smoke pot ‘cause one is like, from the earth and the other is like, maybe not I guess. You know, sometimes I think Derrick drinks too much. Like, it’s cool when he smokes ‘cause he’ll invite me and we’ll hang out and it makes me feel all cute like a Wiz Khalifa song because I know that he really loves me. ‘Cause it’s been almost three weeks at this point, so it’s pretty serious. But when he drinks I can never understand his texts and he sometimes doesn’t even text me back for hours and I get really worried that something could have happened to him. And then the next day there were pictures of him with a bunch of beer cups and Molly and when I asked him about it he said that he wouldn’t be dating me if he thought I was just going to act like a little girl all of the time, so I pretty much had to have sex with him because, like, that’s what you do when you’re in love and I want him to know that I’m as serious about this as he is.

So then, like, it’s fair to say that, I think, a lot of the stuff in the movie was, like, really beautiful. Totes beautiful. And, like, I guess that the thing is a lot of it was ‘cause they filmed stuff in nature. And nature is always beautiful. Or at least I think so, which is probably because I’m a Virgo. Grrrrrrr! But, like, even though they kind of just used the beauty that the earth had already made in a lot of their shots, there’s still a lot of technical elements that go into the proper nature shot, and they should get some credit for capturing the essence of the west coast and the ocean on film. Just like I should get some credit for putting everything I had into that relationship with Derrick. But instead the one time in the entire six weeks we dated that I say, “I don’t want to give you a blow-job today, I would much rather cuddle and watch Duck Tales” he goes and calls every girl in his phone and goes to have sex with some of them and then text me like, such hurtful things that I cry. So hurtful. And it’s not even like it’s a lot to ask to watch Duck Tales on Friday night just because it’s his friend’s birthday. He sees his friends all the time, but he never wants to come to see me unless I say that my parents are gone or something. It’s not even fair! And then he acts like he doesn’t even see me in the hallways anymore and I know he showed all his friends the pictures I texted him which he totally promised were just going to be for him, but whatever I guess ‘cause I can’t do anything about it and he was an asshole anyways!

….

Was that an accurate description of what it’s like to be a thirteen-year-old-girl? I’m not really sure the true essence showed through the page. Don’t they put random “grrr’s” into their sentences? I don’t know. I stopped taking to thirteen-year-old-girls when I stopped being a thirteen-year-old boy.

God dammit I hate teenagers. And adults. And children. And humanity.

I will, at this point, mention that were I ever to meet a girl of the proper age who asked if we could cuddle and watch Duck Tales, I would marry her. Also, she has to be pretty. Let’s not get idealistic here, you still have to be pretty. And not like, “I’m pretty, but in a rebellious atypical way,” but pretty in one of those objective, normative ways.

I fucking love normative things.

No H8.

I’ve heard rumors that this film was produced by Matthey McConaughey for no other reason than to allow him the opportunity to make out with girls of every race. Some of you may think this is problematic in the eyes of visionary feminists and racially progressive tendencies. But have you ever seen KD Aubert? Go Google search her. And then stare at her and then about what a good idea it is to fund a movie that will make you money and allow you to make out with anyone you wanted. I would produce ten movies for a chance to make out with KD Aubert. I would produce ten shitty movies to make out with her. would produce ten David Lynch movies, causing the entire world to suffer through long winded, masturbatory expressions of artistic vision for the sake of making out with her.

Despite being completely worth $0.05, this film did have its problems.

The first mistake: You do not put Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey in the same movie. Who the fuck is who? Are they talking to themselves? Do they realize how similar they look? Why is one a sex symbol and the other forced to be in movies like Kingpin? What kind of movie would Face/Off have been if it starred both of them?

The film also runs into a few problems in terms of representation and demographic. Because of the weed culture that surrounds surf culture, it’s no doubt fair that it be represented in a film about surfers. But, as with any form of intoxication, it’s difficult to properly capture what it’s like to use drugs without creating stereotypes that isolate any audience that has actually done drugs (which is anyone in your audience worth keeping around). Surfer, Dude does a decent job of representing heavy weed smoking (general confusion, apathy, and absolute paranoia at the site of a cop), and it sacrifices elements of realism for comic relief, which is a necessary evil; but it still has its problematic elements. Additionally, there are so many gratuitous breasts. I don’t even know what to do with that. I enjoy breasts, I like to look at breasts; when breasts are present, my mind is eased. But it just makes no fucking sense. Why are there just random titties everywhere for scenes at a time? I get that the film is trying to cement itself in the hearts of the teenaged-boy demographic that they are going for, but at a certain point, it’s bullshit. It’s one thing to say sex sells and include attractive actors—whether male or female—in a film. And it’s one thing to display sexual elements of the human anatomy for the sake of representing character or progressing he film (Fight Club, for example, shows giant throbbing cock multiple times throughout the film. And as much as I’m hesitant to support giant, throbbing cock in my David Fincher films, at least the cock here applies towards characterization and thematic context). But titties for the sake of titties is bullshit. If you want to turn me on a little bit during a movie, fine, touch my heart with an emotional sex scene If you want to make me stare at breasts in the middle of a story arch, go fuck yourself. I’m already probably loading London Keyes videos in at least three of my safari tabs. Get your shit together.

Dammit, Blow Up, you ruined everything with your fucking biddies and your fucking tits and your fucking Italian, pseudo-neo-realism, European sex-crazed nonsense!

(If that reference resonated with you and you want to watch Duck Tales and you want to cuddle and you are normatively attractive, please find a way to contact me. I love you. I have always loved you, I just didn’t know until right now).

The largest problem came about with the inclusion of an utterly superfluous love story— Alexie Gilmore, whose performance in this film can be described as little less than perfectly acceptable.

While the eventual love bond is tweaked into summing the film up in a tidy little bundle, it’s fucking stupid. It just randomly gets thrown in there. It was clearly placed in the film for no other reason than that it was expected to be in the film. There was no fire or passion behind it, nor an overarching story of romance. It was just there to complete the general formula of what is needed in a movie: conflict + character + resolution + boy falls in love with girl = movie. It’s like when you’re having sex with a girl and you start to pull her hair. You know she doesn’t like it, and you’re not really all that into it, but you do it anyways because that’s how all the people on the internet have sex, so maybe you might as well. And, at the end of it all, you probably just should have sit back and let the sex run its course without interfering with over popularized ideas of what it should be. After all, it only cost $0.05.

Are we picking up the mild metaphor that’s been chucked into a pile of smut? Are you picking up what I’m putting down? Are we on the same page?

The last little problems were that the Australian dude was characterized by always wearing shirts for Fosters Beer—which my roommate assures me no Australians actually drink—and that the introduction to the film was devastatingly expositional. It was so much exposition that it hurt me to see.

Anyways, the films ends and everyone is financially stable and high and surfing and there are some Willie Nelson cameos and a heard of goats and some general merriness. It’s a feel-good, throw away film that you may pop in every once in a while just to look at pretty shit with an easy plot to follow.

That’s a polite way of saying that’s this movie is for stoners. If it looks pretty and it requires no thought process, it is a weed movie. Do you know how weird, complex, artsy films get when you’re high? I tried watching Being John Malkovich high the first time I saw it, and it just ended with me crying.

I wouldn’t say this is the kind of movie you go out of your way to see, but if given the chance to pick up a cheap copy I’d say it’d be worth it for no other reason than KD Aubert. Although Googling her would be just as good. Or Mr. Skinning her. Is that the verb form of looking someone up on Mr. Skin? It sounds oddly violent for such a pleasant experience.

You’re welcome.

Curtis Cook is a senior at Oberlin College who enjoys problematic language, White women, and whiskey.

NETFLIX REVIEW: Blackthorn

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 15:24:52 -0500

This has to be the least adventurous adventure movie in recent memory, and it’s hard to really say why. All the right elements are in place—you’ve got cowboys, horse chases, gunfights in the desert, betrayal, plot twists, revenge, and mumbly southern drawls. But for some reason something about this movie isn’t working. Even though all the elements are in place, the excitement, the emotion, just isn’t there. This movie feels as dry as the desert most of it is set in.

It’s about Butch Cassidy, played for most of the movie by Sam Shepard, and in flashbacks by Jaime Lannister (boy does that sound more awesome that it actually was), now a tired old horse-seller living in Bolivia, who meets a Spaniard, who used to work in a mine, until he decided it would be a better idea to just steal the mine’s money and flee to…somewhere? I dunno, I got so sleepy I couldn’t really follow it all.

I think what Blackthorn is missing is its heart. It’s as though the people who made this movie just weren’t feeling it. Though there’s the potential for a great story here, and you can see the hole where a great movie should have been, the trouble is that Blackthorn just doesn’t seem to believe in itself. Things happen that would be dramatic, and you start to think you might finally be feelingsomething, but these moments are so downplayed that you have to wonder if you are supposed to care at all. Seriously, movie! How about a little, well, drama?

It’s not all bad. There are some scenes that perk you (by which I mean wake you) up, like a pretty cool chase across some salt flats, and a shootout in the mountains of Bolivia between our heroes and two very pissed-off women. But every time the movie looks like it might finally pull itself together, it sinks back down into the murky depths of its plodding inertia.

Putting your finger on what’s broken in Blackthorn is sort of like figuring out what’s wrong with the economy. There’s no easy answer, or rather, there are a lot of little bitty answers that sort of add up. First of all, there’s the the fact that everything is so sedate. No one seems to get riled up about anything.

In one scene, a major character is killed. This death should be tragic, both for the audience and the protagonist. But even though we get a few seconds of obligatory weeping over the fallen body, the movie then switches to a new scene and we’re back to the cowboy drawl. This death is rarely mentioned again, and it’s hard to tell just how much out protagonist even gives a ***. I feel like I cared more than he did, and I barely even knew the deceased.

Similarly, there’s a big plot twist at the end that should be shocking and horrifying. The music doesn’t even change its tempo. Same twangy, psuedo-westerney stuff we’ve been hearing the whole time. If theres a such thing as cowboy elevator music, well, here it is.

Now imagine this trailer with elevator music, and you begin to understand the movie.

And then we’ve got another big problem; the central relationship in the movie just isn’t working. You’ve got too main characters, the old, grizzled veteran bandit, and the Spanish thief. The friendship between these two forms the emotional core of the movie. Or it would, if we, the audience, got any sense that there actually was a friendship. Sadly, the relationship between these two characters never feels real. Part of the problem is Eduardo Noriega, the actor who portrays the Spanish thief. I’m sure he is capable of acting in his native language, but here everything he says comes off as forced. You can’t help but feel as though he is tiredly reading off lines from a script he’s got in his lap. Listen to him in that trailer up above:

“You’re a damn legend! Now here you are! Here you are!”

His character is supposed to be overcome with excitement in that scene, bursting with energy and enthusiasm. But instead he just sounds like someone who just got woken up while he was napping and is about to nod off trying to act as though he’s bursting with energy and enthusiasm.

Blackthorn is like the Cohen brothers’ True Grit without the snappy dialogue and brilliant acting that made True Grit good. It’s got a fine premise, but it just feels too damn sleepy. And in a self-proclaimed adventure movie, sleepy is probably not a good thing.

Written by Stefan Babich, a third year in the College.

(Photo via Barfutura)

NETFLIX REVIEW: Barely Legal: Gratuitous Tits & A Sad Grab At Progressing Feminism

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 10:00:00 -0500

I just want to point out that I used “tits,” “grab,” and “feminism” all in the same sentence, up in that title up there. Please allow the twelve-year-old boy inside of your soul to roll on the floor with laughter while the adult, female part of you sheds a silent tear for the disrespect I just displayed toward your movement.

I wasn’t going to watch this movie. I actively did not want to see this movie. I knew that it was going to suck. But then someone asked me why I had never reviewed a movie that I liked, and I realized that I don’t know how to enjoy things. I don’t know how to say positive shit about anything. I just saw Inception, and that was a great movie. But I don’t know how to say, “what an interesting concept! And it seems obvious that Christopher Nolan makes for both an excellent director and a fantastic writer, taking aspects of the fantastic and incorporating it with essential bits of action and suspense in order to create not only a compelling story, but a visually riveting film.” I don’t know how to be nice about things, and no one wants to read someone be nice about things. So instead, I learned how to say, “It’s this crazy fucking movie where the dead kid from The Titanic and the sad little orphan boy from Angels in the Outfield join forces to go wallow in dream land with the Scarecrow from Batman and some dead foreign bitch who likes trains.”

See how much easier that rolls off the tongue. Words like “critically acclaimed” and “visual mastery” are so harsh to the ear and eye. “Orphan kid” and “some dead foreign bitch” just sound so much cozier.

Alas, though, this post is not about a film I enjoyed, though. This post is about a film that has filled me with rage, horror, arousal, confusion, and boredom the likes of which I have not experienced since Lars & The Real Girl.

“Let’s be indie for the sake of being indie.” Fuck you, Ryan Gosling. Get back to your romantic comedies and heart-wrenching dramas. Leave the indie shit for Philip Seymour Hoffman. He’s not conventionally attractive enough for mainstream cinema, at least let him hold on to his talent.

So, I fucking watched Barely Legal, which I thought would at least pretend to be a movie the way that American Pie pretended it was a movie. I knew it would be nothing more than a string of sex jokes and a lot of soft-core pornography, but I didn’t know it would only be sex jokes and soft-core pornography— and a ton of jokes about the blind, but we’ll get to that. Because as I man who has met a blind person before, I feel like I have to pretend to find that incredibly problematic.

That, my dear readers, is how empathy works.

The film centers around three rich white girls who are either in high school or college (the vagueness is important because it makes the rest of the film confusing and incredibly less erotic/creepy/gross/an orgy of teenaged porn). They all, for whatever reason, live in an incredibly large mansion with no adults or other roommates, they spend their afternoons hooking up with their boyfriends and lounging by the pool, and were all born on the same day. Additionally, these three wealthy, unsupervised young women are all virgins.

I am not going to go on a tirade about how unbelievable it is that three wealthy, unsupervised, eighteen-year-old white women are still virgins. In my experience, that’s rare, but in no way impossible, nor is it anything which should be mocked or frowned upon. Some of the coolest people to write poorly spelled, cynical movie reviews on tumblr didn’t have sex until they were eighteen either. Or nineteen. Maybe they were nineteen. Maybe they were even nineteen and closer to twenty and a little ashamed of themselves. But details aren’t important.

Things happen, people make decisions, and that’s respectable enough to deserve portrayal in an American sex comedy. I’m not about to mock something that could be as personal as someone’s sexual decisions. What makes this so fucking unbelievable, though, is that these three girls who are not related and seem to come from different families are all living alone in a mansion without parents or, apparently, school to attend. Or jobs to go to. Or outside friends. And they were all born on the same day. It is also very vague about whether or not they are in high school. And they all just turned eighteen, and none of them seem smart enough to have just turned 18 in college, which means that when they show their breasts it can be assumed that it is meant to be taken as a high school girl who just turned 18 showing her chest. Which makes this more like creepy porn than comedy.

Here’s a rundown of the characters:

Cheryl has had a long-term boyfriend who looks like the bassist from Fall Out Boy. She plays, more or less, the ditsy blonde who has finally decided that she and her partner have grown closer enough together that they can have sex. At the same time, though, she has dreams of marrying him after school and continuing to live in a dream world of love, sex, and unsupervised mansions. If we’re to take this as an important thematic choice on the part of the writers (and we are meant to, because how else are we going to pretend that the study of film has any legitimacy?) then we can assume that this character represents the dreamy eyes of innocence and youth.

Sue is super religious, has never masturbated, goes to confession, thinks ill of everyone around her, and only submits to lose her virginity on her birthday to be a part of the group; making her character representative of thrice the problematic teaching of abstinence only sex-ed, the often sex-negative consequences of religious involvement in the bedroom, and the writer’s kooky attempt to get back at her parents for making her go to Sunday school by constructing an archetypical character that breathes no new voice into religious satire and merely meanders throughout the film using jokes that have been around for far too fucking long in the first place.

Our third character, my dear readers, is Lexy, who is at least remotely progressive throughout the film, if you kind of squint your eyes and cock your head to the side. She is the girl who has hooked up and goes after what she wants and 69’s and masturbates (for as much as I do it, I have had to spell check that word every single time) and is comfortable with her body and has been involved with group intimacy and has taken it up the ass, but still considers herself a virgin due to her lack of vaginal sex. If some of you think that’s unreasonable, Google search Nikki Blue. You will not be disappointed. If you are, we are not into the same things sexually, and fuck you for judging me.

No H8, though. Never any H8.

So these girls decide to lose it on their birthdays. Cheryl with her boyfriend, Lexy with some mystery person named JJ who apparently gave her five orgasms in a row, and Sue, who just just says she’s going to because everyone around her is doing it and that’s how Christians role.

Bam, making fun of Christianity on the internet. Does it get any more original than that?

Yes. Yes it does.

So, eventually, through a series of events, Sue discovers masturbation, feels super bad about it, but learns that pleasure is greater than sin. She then proceeds to masturbate with the following objects:

-A Dryer

-A Vacuum Cleaner

-A Vibrating Controller For A Remote Controlled Video Game

-A Removable Shower Head

-A Jacuzzi

-A Vibrating Toothbrush

-A Vibrator

None of these scenes are particularly funny. Like, it might sound funny to say, “Some girl got off on a toothbrush.” But it’s not quite the same as an apple pie. But at least she finally got it off. I was happy for her. After 18 years of not knowing what an orgasm felt like I could care less if she sat on her hands and scooted her ass across the lawn like a sick puppy, at least she came. And that should be an inalienable fucking right for everyone.

Cheryl discovers that random high school girls have been blowing her boyfriend (as they are want to do), so she does the adult thing and decides to have revenge sex. To which I say, good for you. There’s nothing quite like cold, shallow, remorseful sex to really show it to your ex.

She tries it with a nice kid who actually has feelings for her, but it doesn’t work out, so she goes for the blind guy.

“Oh, that’s right, I remember that a blind guy was mentioned in the overly opinionated and subjective introduction to this review.” That is what you should be thinking right now.

So she starts to hook up with this blind guy who insists in blindfolding her and having her listen to calming Bengali music, because that obviously is not fucking offensive or anything. Then he leaves her like that while in the middle of eating her out to go smoke pot with his bros, which is totally fair sometimes. It’s a good thing that he left his service dog in the room and covered Cheryl’s vagina with peanut butter.

No I am not fucking kidding you, that is how low the film went: an eighteen year old girl was abandoned mid-foreplay by a blind man who was blind for no other reason but to have an excuse to have a dog in the room so that a dog could eat her out. The peanut butter? No one can fucking explain the peanut butter. I assumed this was the writer’s, Naomi L. Selfman’s, first gig. But then I looked that shit up. Turns out she’s worked on such classics as Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus and Mega Python vs. Gatoroid. She is proof that no one checks your résumé.

By the end of the movie (Spoilers…If you care…Which you don’t…), neither Cheryl nor Sue has sex. Though Sue does discover how awesome cumming is and Cheryl find a nice boy who will treat her right. So I guess they both turn out all right, but Sue definitely won that round. If I had to choose between love and cumming, I would choose love. But that’s not funny, so let’s pretend I said that I would choose cumming.

Lexy ends up getting sexed. But, fun fact, it turns out that JJ was a woman the entire time and Lexy realizes that her life of passionless sexual disappointment has all secretly been her attempting to hide the truth from herself.

Cool story, bro.

No H8, but your movie still sucks.

In fact, this movie is so fucking terrible that Lisa Younger, the actress who plays Lexy, doesn’t include the film in her online résumé. She does, however, include Jack The Dumb-Ass 3 and Chlamydia. Somehow, in this girls mind, the third installment of a man named Jack acting like an asshole and a film about a sexually transmitted disease sound more legitimate than her role as co-star of Barely Legal. And that’s totally fair because she spent more time naked in that movie than I have ever seen anyone spend outside of pornos.

Now, my dear readers, it is time for a brief, fleeting moment of serious review time: This film had potential. It would have, no doubt, suffered from its low budget, inexperienced staff, and the reputation of the company behind the project (Asylum); but films with far less going for them have gone on to influence cinema in incredible ways (again, I will reference Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song). Any of the stories that focus on the three central characters could have made for a decent film (though not necessarily an original one). A girl coming to grips that, despite her upbringing and her faith, she too desires to submit to sin and enjoy the pleasures of the flesh. A young woman attempting to bounce back from a tragic relationship only to find that her efforts of revenge do little more than to push away those who care the most about her. A woman realizes that her sexual promiscuity was a self-imposed disguise for her underlying sexual urges and sheds the mask of her sexuality away to embrace who she truly is. Those could each be movies alone, and together they still could have stood tall. Add to the fact that this is about young women struggling to lose their virginity, which dismantles the idea that they can go out and have sex whenever they want to; the many scenes where they demand oral sex simply because it pleases them, which in the male-dominated media has become something women are expected to offer but never ask for; and the fact that they all come to their own, personal conclusions about sex, and you have a real movie.

But then Jose Montesinos had to come in and tells everyone to take out their tits and flash the camera and moan at the slightest indication of sexual arousal and flash their vaginas on the screen and it went from an empowering film written by a woman and intended for women to some sick fantasy film made for your least favorite uncle.

So listen, this movie fucking sucked. But we all knew it was going to suck. This review was nothing but a masturbatory attempt at humor on my part. I told you nothing you didn’t already know. But nonetheless:

You’re welcome.

Curtis Cook is a senior at Oberlin College who enjoys problematic language, White women, and whiskey.

NETFLIX REVIEW: Ironclad

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 10:05:06 -0400

Ironclad is the better 300. Which isn’t to say it’s great, because, let’s all face it, badass as it was, 300 had a shit ton of problems. And, unfortunately, a lot of those problems carry over to Ironclad. The dumbing down of real-world history into a good-vs.-evil type struggle over 21st century American values, for example, combined with dialogue cornier than an Iowa’s farmers’ festival. Still, if you’re looking for an epic action-movie about a bunch of outnumbered people trying to defend something against a giant army of baddies, and you had to choose between this or 300, this is the better choice. For one thing, at no point in time do the villains morph into orcs with saw hands, nor do they pull out grenades or samurai swords. Which means this is automatically less ridiculous than 300.

Ironclad is about a baron, played by Mad-Eye Moody, who is trying to launch a rebellion against King John of England. King John has been murdering and terrorizing the barons because they made him sign that hateful magna carta. To aid him in his endeavor, he has gathered a bunch of Danish mercenaries, who are a bunch of evil-looking blokes with black armor, celtic war paint (??) and axes. Luckily for Baron Mad-Eye Moody, he’s got a badass Templar knight who is helping him guard an important castle against the king. He also has about twenty other people on his side, some of them women without weapons or armor, and the king’s army looks at least a thousand men strong. Maybe Baron Mad-Eye should have thought that one through a little more first.

So here we go. The good and the bad. Even though I liked the movie, the bad section is going to be longer than the good section. Just because I’m a negative person.

The Good:

This is an action movie about a bunch of people swinging at each other with swords. So needless to say, the one thing that’s really going to make or break this movie is the action scenes. Luckily (with the exception of one lackluster fight at the very beginning) the action scenes are exceptionally well done. Ironclad uses just the right amount of shaky cam—enough so that the fight scenes feel gripping and exciting, but not so much that you either want to throw up or turn to the person watching the movie next to you and ask who just stabbed who and what is going on. The choreography is more realistic than the usual sort of bullsh** we get from Hollywood; we get scenes of visceral, Braveheart-style combat rather than fancy, but ultimately fake-looking sword-ballet. The armor actually stops blows. Bad guys don’t always die in one hit. Unfortunately, more squeamish viewers may want to give this one a pass, because the gore in this movie tends to be excessive. I lost count of the number of arms and legs that got cut off throughout the length of this movie. The most obscenely, unapologetically gory moment has to be when one of our heroes grabs a severed arm off the ground and proceeds to bash another guy’s face in with it. There. You’ve been warned.

The production values are all excellent. There’s little to no uneccesary or gratuitous CGI, and costume and set design appear to be top notch, though it’s a little odd that all the bad guys wear black. I guess we need some sort of way to tell them apart, but did it have to be black? Really?

The bad:

Sadly, the movie tends to drag a bit when people aren’t bashing each other’s hands in with severed arms. The dialogue in this movie is corny, there’s no other way to describe it. Apparently Hollywood writers seem to think modern American audiences are not going to get behind a medieval war movie unless it’s crammed with good, old-fashioned, and horribly anachronistic American values.

The movie takes great pain to remind us (again and again and again) that King John is an evil tyrant, and that our heroes have to stop him for the sake of freedom. Because if there’s one thing Ameican audiences are bound to care about, it’s freedom.

At one point, the evil king yells up at Baron Mad-Eye Moody that he needs to get out of his castle. Mad-Eye responds that the king signed a charter (the Magna Carta) giving the people of England freedom. Freedom! It’s on, now.

The problem with this (and this is a mistake Hollywood loves to make) is that Ironclad is attempting to paint the central conflict as a classic struggle between a tyrannical king and his oppressed people. It is, in other words, trying to paint the central conflict of Ironclad as the Americna Revolutionary War. Because it’s something American audiences understand. Unfortuantely, what the movie fails to mention is that the ‘people’ the magna carta to weren’t the poor huddled masses.

The magna carta was not about freeing the oppressed peasants from the tyranny of the king. It was about freeing the oppressed rich lords from the tyranny of the king so they could then freely oppress the peasants themselves. So the ‘people’ whose rights our heroes are valiantly defending are actually a bunch of rich dudes who may or may not be just as tyrannical as the king they’re fighting against. Sort of absolutely ruins the whole freedom theme they’ve got going.

But hey, it’s a movie. Sometimes in movies, thingsh ave to be simplified for the sake of drama. I might be willing to overlook this magna carta=freedom bullshit if that was the only bullshit I was being forced to stomach. Unfortuantely, Ironclad also expects us to stomach a bullshit love story between a Templar knight and the lady of the castle. At one point ,the lady of the castle says this to our hero, who is agonizing over breaking his vows of celibacy: “stop hiding behind vows and commandments! Vows speak of loyalty and abstinence, but why never of love, Thomas?”

Well said, Generic Love Interest Woman! But this sounds like the sort of point that might come up in a 21st century religion and ethics university class. Not the sort of thing a brainwashed woman from medieval England would say. But, hey, we get it. Honoring religious vows is just not as important as having sex. Because, you know, that’s the modern attitude, and there’s no way we could ever root for medieval characters if they didn’t have values and beliefs identical to our own.

You know what? *** this shit. Game of Thrones didn’t feel the need to make every character a politically-correct demagogue who preached 21st century wisdom at us, and somehow it did all right. A character doesn’t have to believe in people’s rights, gender equality and democracy to be compelling, but apparently the people who keep churning out movies like 300, Gladiator, and Ironclad have yet to figure this out. Hopefully someday they will.

The ugly:

It’s violent. Very violent. There are hangings, and stabbings, and smashing. One guy gets his hands and feet chopped off and then tossed into a wall by a catapult. So, again, it’s not for everyone. But if you’re in the mood for a good last stand movie, and are willing to suspend your disbelief a bit, then Ironclad should prove entertaining.

Written by Stefan Babich, a third year in the College.

(Photo via Daily Postal)

NETFLIX REVIEW: Meet Joe Black: It’s $5 in Wal-Mart For A Reason

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 19:27:00 -0400

Recently a friend of mine gave me access to her Netflix account. This was generally awesome for a myriad of reasons: 1.) She was kind enough to allow me access to a word of unlimited movies for eight bucks a month, 2.) I don’t even have to pay the eight dollars a month, 3.) The friend who let me use her account is a fine, upstanding, educated Black woman, and those are hard to find. It’s like looking for a holographic Charzard card in a starter pack: it’ll happen every once in a while, but, essentially, you’re searching for a mythical creature that only exists on Television.

That was a joke, because there are no strong, upstanding Black women on television since Oprah left. Now let’s all get high, watch BET’s 106 and Park, and pretend that it’s half-decent.

I’ve learned two things about Netflix thus far. The first is that it’s the worst thing that could ever happen a college student. How do you get shit done when Doctor Who is so easily accessible? Answer: I just don’t. If my options are Time Lords in police boxes or essays, I choose the former. Second, I’ve learned that half the movies on Netflix should not exist in the first place. Do I really need to be bombarded with ads for National Lampoon’s Barely Legal? Why do you think I want to watch that? Why does that seem pertinent to my interests? I’ve done nothing but watch documentaries with this account, why are you trying to force this D-movie shit down my throat? Does National Lampoon still make decent movies? Is Chevy Chase in it? No? Then get the fuck off of my screen and show me something with artistic merit. Do you think just because the DVD cover features half naked women that I’m going to watch the movie? If I wanted to see half naked women I would log onto tumblr and scroll down my dashboard in hopes that some biddie posted self pics of her taken in front of her parent’s bathroom mirror with her camera phone. Nothing says sexy quite like young women allowing themselves to be objectified by strangers on the internet. I don’t need Netflix for my pseudo-porn so long as there are women with low self-esteem and untrustworthy boyfriends in this world.

So, instead of watching a film dedicated to high school virgins making a porno film in a misguided attempt to salvage their reputations, I decided to watch Meet Joe Black. I’d seen the DVD in the $5 buckets in Wal-Mart for years now, but I don’t trust those anymore. That’s exactly how Wal-Mart convinced me to buy Driving Miss Daisy, and after that, I will never accept rolledback cinema again. But it seemed that between Anthony Hopkins and Brad Pitt, maybe it wouldn’t be too fucking terrible.

Oh, how I was mistaken and, again, foiled by the prospects of an attractive white man on the cover. Damn you, Brad Pitt, for each decent film you have made there are at least twelve that you should be ashamed of. A River Runs Through It? Are you fucking kidding me? Who the fuck decided to make that? Who thought to themselves, “What’s that, you say? A subpar book about an academic with a deliberately homo-erotic crush on his alcoholic younger brother in a small town of Montana? Greenlight that shit as soon as possible.”

I am gong to kill you, Hollywood. That movie was a waist of my life.

I should have known that Brad Pitt wasn’t worth much until David Fincher pulled him aside and saved his career just like Scorsese did with DiCaprio.

For those of you who don’t know, and I hope to God that’s most of you, Meet Joe Black is a story about Death. Some rich dude played by Anthony Hopkins is old and shit, so he’s dying because that’s what happens when you get old. That’s about all that happens when you get old. Your friends die, you meander around the house in hopes that your children will visit you or that you’ll find a purpose for staying alive, and then you toil in misery until death finally comes for you. Look how much you have to look forward to. And no, your children never do visit in the end.

So this rich dude has two daughters and one of them meets some guy in a coffee shop (Pitt). Then they spend a good seven minutes turning to look at each other as they walk away before Brad Pitt gets hit by a series of cars and dies. Then he shows up as Death, because I guess Death needed to borrow a body and, let’s be honest, if you had a choice of any body in the world and Ryan Reynolds wasn’t famous yet, you would probably go with Brad Pitt’s, too. So props to Death.

Death shows up and acts like a child for a few minutes because he doesn’t understand social cues. Then he just walks around licking peanut butter off of a spoon and trying to fuck someone’s daughter for the next two hours.

Some movies are funny-bad. And some are just so terrible that it’s easy to make fun of them. Those are the movies I don’t mind. This movie, though, was so fucking boring that I spent half of it staring at the screen and praying it would all be over soon. But no, it had to be three hours long. Three fucking hours of my life dedicated to watching Death eat peanut butter and try to fuck some girl. I am so drastically disappointed with this film, that I do not even have the rage to bitch about it in a well-planned way. So here is a list of problems I have with this fucking movie.

Problem #1: If the main character in your movie is Death himself and the coolest thing he does for the entire movie is fuck some white girl after eating peanut butter, then your film has failed. At least in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey he plays games with stoners in Hell. At least that’s something besides peanut butter and white women. Anyone can eat peanut butter and fuck white women. Playing board games in Hell with Keanu Reeves, though, is a rare experience that only Death can have.

Problem #2: Anthony Hopkins is playing a loving father with the best of intentions throughout the film. The fuck is this shit? He doesn’t even try to kill one person. Everyone knows he can no longer play the good guy. He can be a cannibalistic serial killer or a demonically possessed child of God. That’s it. What the fuck were you thinking, Ellen Lewis and Juliet Taylor? Get your Shit straight. You fucking suck at casting. Tisk tisk, Clarice.

Problem #3: Death was the first entity of humanity and has wandered our world for millions of years, and you mean to tell me he fell for her? I will not suspend my disbelief for this shit. Death is definitely cooler than that. In real life he would’ve gotten some firey Latina with bodacious curves and blow-job lips to beat the band. Get your facts straight, Ron Osborn.

Problem #3: The only Black character in the entire movie is some old woman who speaks that weird, Caribbean half-English and is laid up dying in a hospital. Is that too much of a problem? No, that’s totally fair. Black people die when we get old too (assuming we live to get old), we just pull it off with more swag. And there truly are old Black woman who speak the language of The Islands. The problem is that all of a sudden Brad Pitt starts speaking like he’s some Creole from New Orleans. Really? There are a million ways to show that Death is multilingual, and you choose the one that makes a gorgeous blonde man sound like Boomhower from King Of The Hill? Suck my dick, that shit is preposterous.

Problem #4: This was way to similar to No Such Thing. Never seen it? Good, then may God bless you and the sun shine down on your face. Fuck that movie, that shit was atrocious.

Problem #5: It was so fucking boring. Aside from seven-minute scenes of people with big, wet, romantic eyes longingly looking at each other, there are trite shots of death by fireworks and arguably the worst sex scene I have ever seen (next to the one that I think was in Camp. Fuck Camp). The characters keep referring to it as “making love,” and no one does that anymore because it’s creepy as fuck.

So, in short, this movie fucking blows. If you want a brief, serious critique, then this was a poorly made recreation of a film from the early 1930’s titled Death Takes a Holiday, and though the general themes of death haven’t changed since then, the attempt to adapt the film for a modern audience falls flat. The writing relies on clichés that run so deep they reach the plot itself. The characterization of Death and all other characters in the film forces them to be little more than archetypes. Death himself is particularly problematic in this matter, varying between a childish character who’s new to the world (a theme that could have been a strong catalyst for themes of life, death and understanding, as well as a humorous play on old tropes), a love-struck puppy (which is just annoying), and a bellowing bully who holds his power above others (also annoying). Aside from the writing, the acting is also below par. Pitt and Hopkins are amazing actors who have done their part to earn their stay in the film industry, but the supporting cast seems to be what I can only suppose they are: a cheap group of actors put together in order to dedicate more of the budget to the two leading men. The directing, as well, is simply shot and bears with it little quality or swag to speak of, even going so far as to be boringly simplistic.

To be fair, all of this makes a lot more sense when you account for the fact that the second best feature the writers have to their name is something called Duckman and the director is the same man who created the fucking nonsense that is Gigli.

I think it was Tupac who best summarized my feelings towards the creatures of Gigli: “Alla y’all motherfuckers. Fuck you, die slow, motherfucker. My fo’-fo’ make sure all y’all kids don’t grow.”

That sounds about right.

You’re welcome.

Curtis Cook is a senior, Cinema Studies major, and stand-up comedian. He will very possibly offend you.

(Photo via Independent.Co.UK)