Bees Love Truth

Well, last year we started out strong, but soon slipped from our proper moviewatching ways onto the HBO series path. You can tell when this happened: September and October. I may have to make a bar graph, if only because it's almost the exact opposite of 2007's pattern. Overall the count is 89 movies for 2008, which is somewhat better than the 50-something we managed last year. Hooray!


January: 12 movies
Solaris (2002) Jan 1 and 2
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007) Jan 1
Blade Runner, Final Cut (2007, originally 1982) Jan 6
The Fisher King (1991) Jan 12
Ratatouille (2007) Jan 13
Marriage Is a Crazy Thing (2002) Jan 18
Persepolis (2007) Jan 20
Death Note (2006) Jan 21
Cloverfield (2008) Jan 24
There Will Be Blood (2007) Jan 26
El Espinazo del diablo (2001) Jan 27

February: 7 movies
Cabaret (1972) Feb 1
Helvetica (2007) Feb 3
Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) Feb 5
Cracked Actor (1975) Feb 6
Solyaris (1972) Feb 22
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) Feb 23
The Fountain (2006) Feb 24

March: 14 movies
Beetle Juice (1988) Mar 2
The 400 Blows (1959) Mar 8
Stalker (1979) Mar 9
Brick (2005) Mar 15
Touch of Evil (1958) Mar 16
Paranoid Park (2007) Mar 17
In a Lonely Place (1950) Mar 19
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) Mar 20
Sunset Blvd. (1950) Mar 21
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) Mar 22
Kiss Me Deadly (1955) Mar 23
The Big Heat (1953) Mar 25
Ido zero daisakusen (aka Latitude Zero) (1969) Mar 27
The Blue Dahlia (1946) Mar 30

April: 7 movies
The Butterfly Effect (2004) Apr 4
The Big Sleep (1946) Apr 7
Wilde (1997) Apr 18
The Asphalt Jungle (1950) Apr 20
The Nomi Song (2004) Apr 26
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) Apr 27
Tôkyô nagaremono (1966) (aka Tokyo Drifter) Apr 29

May: 10 movies
Dai-Nipponjin (AKA 'Big Man Japan') (2007) May 2
Rope (1948) May 4
Mildred Pierce (1945) May 9
Murder, My Sweet (1944) May 11
The Third Man (1949) May 12
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) May 14
Soy Cuba (aka I Am Cuba)(1964) May 17
Justice League: The New Frontier (2008) May 23
Hard Target (1993) May 26
TekWar (1994) May 30

June: 16 movies
TekWar: TekLords (1994) Jun 1
The Killing (1956) Jun 1
Death and the Compass (1992) Jun 4
RoboCop (1987) Jun 6
Iron Man (2008) Jun 13
Hellraiser (1987) Jun 14
Hellraiser II: Hellbound (1988)" Jun 15
Kyo Kii... Main Jhuth Nahin Bolta (2001) Jun 17
Dead Man (1995) Jun 18
Stranger Than Paradise (1984) Jun 18
Ghost Dog (1999) Jun 18
Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) Jun 19
Permanent Vacation (1980) Jun 20
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992) Jun 20
Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996) Jun 21
Wall-E (2008) Jun 29

July: 3 movies
Hellboy II (2008) Jul 12
The Dark Knight (2008) Jul 21, 27

August: 5 movies
S.P.L. (2005) Aug 2
The Killer (1989) Aug 3
Beetle Juice (1988) Aug 8
Labyrinth (1986) Aug 10
Runaway (1984) Aug 16

September: 1 movie
Day Watch (aka Dnevnoy dozor) (2006) Sep 13

October: 2 movies
Odd Couple (aka Bo ming chan dao duo ming qiang) (1979) Oct 4
Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) Oct 18

November: 6 movies
This Filthy World (2006) Nov 11
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! (1978) Nov 11
Futurama: Bender's Game (2008) Nov 12
Låt den rätte komma in (AKA Let The Right One In) (2008) Nov 16
Muthu (1995) Nov 22
Mitchell(MST3K version, of course) (1975) Nov 27

December: 6 movies
Django (1966) Dec 6
Inland Empire (2006) Dec 9
Muthu (1995) Dec 24
Aankhen (2002) Dec 25
The Muppet Movie (1979) Dec 25
RoboCop (1987) Dec 31

Muthu (1995), K.S. Ravikumar. Dec. 24, 7pm. View count: Two.
Aankhen (2002), Vipul Amrutlal Shah. Dec. 25, 2pm. View count: Three.
The Muppet Movie (1979), James Frawley. Dec. 25, 8pm. View count: Four?

Muthu! Still hilarious.

Aankhen! Also still hilarious. Amitabh Bachchan speaks english really well and likes to say 'A dangerous game is about to begin.'

The Muppet Movie! It had been a while, but I still remembered that 'fork in the road' gag. Also, SO MANY CAMEOS.

Muthu (1995), K.S. Ravikumar. Nov 22, 6pm. View count: One.

Mitchell(MST3K version, of course) (1975), Andrew V. McLaglen. Nov 27, 7pm. View count: four?

Muthu is a terrific Bollywood movie, with everyone's favorite cliches. Muthu is sort of the Pootie Tang of this movie's universe, endowed with semi-explained, heavily SFXed powers. The whole thing goes on a little long, but it's mostly harmless (wander off for a cup of tea, everything's fine), and it does include the only hiccup-based dance number I'm currently aware of.

Mitchell is a fine old MST3K classic, but that doesn't really make the movie itself okay. Even through the MSTing it's still pretty bad. Mitchell is a crummy cop, who isn't really all that competent, but he seems to try to make up for this with persistence. It's not very appealing. The movie also doesn't seem to care about following its own plot, which is probably for the best, since it seems to involve guys being shot from behind a wooden screen thing of some sort, and... drug trade? Somehow? And a hooker who likes pot.

Sukiyaki Western Django, Takashi Miike. October 18, 7pm. View count: One.

Well, to be right up front, I hated this movie a little. It had a cameo by Quentin Tarantino, and the whole movie felt in a way like his presence twisted the movie into a Tarantino Thing, all pastiche (in both senses of the word) and collage-like elements from other movies, with not much there underneath.

[Later] Now that it's a couple of days later, I feel like it's grown on me a little, and I'm pretty sure that it was specifically Tarantino's presence that soured me on the film. Conceptually, Miike's weirdness is really only separated from Tarantino's by their opposite cultural vectors, and maybe it's wrong of me, but my own cultural perspective makes me strongly predisposed to hate this wanna-be thing that Tarantino does. Also, I've never seen the original 'Django' (1966), so this may have been a big portion of the problem.

The western/japanese thing has pre-existing referents in, for example, Trigun, so it's not quite the surprising iconography-soup-pot that some people seem to be calling it. I also had problems with the tonal normalizing; maybe it's just me as A Lady, but I find a large gap between what amounts to 'cartoon-like violence' and very straight-faced things like rape. Dark humor is one thing, but just plain darkness with no leavening aspect is difficult to reconcile with the otherwise lighter tone. Again, had there been no Tarantino, I would have accepted this better, but his presence made me apply the template of his work, which is often all about dark violence and stupid humor.

Twitchfilm's review makes much of the many elements, but none of these is developed well or interestingly. Seriously, for real, who cares if one of the heads-of-clans is really into Shakespeare, when it's barely relevant? It's a possibility that this fixation could be a reference to another film where it is relevant, but lacking that putative context, it washes out into nothing. The many references were cute when I recognized them, but not really interesting. Wow, you're dressed up like Clint Eastwood. Wow, you worked in elements from other westerns. Wow, Quentin Tarantino does a good Brent Spiner impression (okay, not really, but he may as well have been trying to. I will try to refer to him as Old Often-Wrong from now on).

Oh man, and I forgot about the biggest drag: the phonetic spoken english. So intensive to parse, and so goofy. This is my largest indicator that the overall tone was supposed to be light, but to me it felt clashy and drew far too much attention to itself.

I'm willing to assume that had I been better versed in the relevant westerns, that I would have enjoyed this a lot more.

Day Watch (aka Dnevnoy dozor) (2006), Timur Bekmambetov. September 13, 11pm. View count: two.

We've been contenting ourselves with television series lately (we just finished Deadwood and have gone on to The Wire, long after probably everyone has stopped caring), but I found this DVD used at Rasputin a couple of weeks ago, and we decided to check it out again, with commentary. Sadly, the commentary is kinda sporadic, although interesting when present. The language barrier is not a problem, it just seems that the director does not wish to talk much unless prompted by an interviewer. Much lamer is the exclusion of the beautiful animated subtitles, which were a large part of the fun of the movie. Thanks, FOX. Admittedly, they probably couldn't print the subtitles as-is directly to DVD, since their size is a little different relative to the frame size on the big screen vs the small one. But... it should have been an option. The region 2 special edition of Night Watch apparently had two sides, one with animated subtitles and one with plain normal ones, and that would seem to be a decent compromise.

Among the things learned from the commentary (which would only play over the english dub, more's the pity) were: the cast was crammed full of famous russian actors. The boy who played Yegor was adversely affected by his brief time in The Movies, and became a more arrogant jerk between the two he appeared in ('not good for his personality' was how the director put it). The foil yo-yo is made from the foil that packages a famous brand of cheese. The apartment decor (all sets, no real locations indoors) is exemplary high soviet kitsch. The girlfriend of Zavulon who looks like I-no is actually a pop star. The in-jokes are many. Oh, also it was 30 below during the shooting of several of the outdoor scenes.

Anyhow, I still enjoyed this, even though the subtitles were bare-minimum (no environmental signage, etc; maybe what we really need is a full-on fansub, complete with explanations of what products' advertising is being parodied in the intro sequence). What rankled the most was having to listen to the dub, which, while not terrible, was still kind of off-putting in that particular way that russian accents can have.

I'm going to do a little research and imdb-surfing so as to find some more interesting russian movies, I think.

Beetle Juice (1988), Tim Burton. August 8, 9:45pm. View count: One more than last time. Shall we say seventeen?

Labyrinth (1986), Jim Henson. August 10, 8pm. View count: Probably around seven or eight?

We had the beautiful and ephemeral chance to see Beetlejuice at the Castro on friday, so we seized upon it and wrestled it to the ground and stepped on its windpipe. This was a thing I had to do. Hell, man, I could see the arm of Adam's LL Bean-plaid shirt through his sheet. I could see that Delia's hairdo in the dinner scene involved three weird little ponytails in the back, one on top of the other. I could read the headlines of the papers that the hanged functionary was carrying around in the netherworld. I could make out the carousel-creatures on Beetlejuice's hat better than I'd ever been able to. It was good.

Also showing at the Castro this weekend was Labyrinth, but we felt less like slogging back out, so we watched it at home. Todd Alcott recently thoroughly slagged this, which I think is fair to some extent, but I don't agree with the whole of it. Part of the reason for this is that I grew up on the Muppets, so I'm pretty completely familiar with the whole human/puppet dynamic. Secondly, though, and this is more important, Labyrinth is A Child's Garden of Movie. Its plot is comprehensible and straightforward. Intent lies behind everything, and all obstacles can be surmounted. The script is dull and clunky to the point of tears (even though Terry Jones worked on it?), but all the talking is just to get across simple ideas about attitude and intention. The beautiful, imaginative visuals (RON MUECK worked on and puppeteered Ludo!) are there to give the viewer something to think about, not the script. (Admittedly, though, as chmmr noted, Dark Crystal does each of these better, but it's tonally so different as to be meant for entirely another age group; Labyrinth wouldn't even think of including the concept of death, and makes a goofy song about dismemberment. All punches are pulled.) It's like a safe little world with small challenges and beautiful scenery. I think that this is an okay thing to have. I would have preferred to have it work on multiple levels, but muppety straightforwardness has its place as well.

The Dark Knight (2008), Christopher Nolan. July 27, 9:50 pm. View count: Two.

So! We saw this again, to see if it cleared up any of the issues we had with it, and it did make some of the plot machinations and such clearer. Gary Oldman's performance stood out better as excellent, as did his part in the proceedings. He seemed similarly important to Batman this time around, and certainly easier to understand. Heath Ledger also was improved; his rendition of his part was really quite clever and unusual.
Some plot stuff didn't make sense still, though, and I had to be told why Harvey's nickname made sense pre-transformation. Ah well.

Hellboy II (2008), Guillermo del Toro. July 12, 8:15pm. View count: One.

Instant review version: Beautiful monsters, obnoxious most other things.

Longer version: This movie had more sheer visual glee moments than any in recent memory (mostly monster-based, mostly Doug Jones in fact), but it also was sadly predictable and just kind of sloppy in a lot of ways. The fightin' team was poorly formed (having two or more team members stand around nervously while Hellboy fights is just a sad state of affairs), the dialog semi-humiliating, and the Big Bad Threat mostly unreadably messy and stupidly incomprehensible.
This is very sad, because, seriously, many of the monsters were primo. And I'd watch Doug Jones eat a sandwich, honestly. But... yes, a mixed bag.

Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996), Alan Smithee. June 21, 9pm. View count: Two.

Oh right, we sat through Hellraiser IV. Sigh. Well, it's not as awful as III, so there's that. It's not terribly interesting, though, even though some of it does in fact take place in space. There's a lot of junk going on, but somehow all of it manages to be pretty halfassed, which I'm sure contributed to the Alan Smithee credit choice.

I remember checking out the photos of the new cenobites in Fangoria while this was in production (I KNOW, I am a gigantic doofus) and being excited for them, but they get a surprisingly small amount of screen time. The rather sad terror-dog thing, which is usually a puppet, undeservedly gets a lot more. The protagonist's wigs get a lot of screen time too.

Doug Bradley is definitely starting to show his age in this one; ten years on (nearly) from Hellraiser I. It's time to start feeling sorry for the poor man, because he's going to appear in all of the remaining four Hellraisers. They are all straight to video. Probably for the best.

Verdict: Snoo-zers.

Kyo Kii... Main Jhuth Nahin Bolta (2001), David Dhawan. June 17, 3pm. View count: One.
Dead Man (1995), Jim Jarmusch. June 18, 11am. View count: four?
Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Jim Jarmusch. June 18, 4pm. View count: One.
Ghost Dog (1999), Jim Jarmusch. June 18, 7:30pm. View count: four?

Kyo Kii... is 'inspired by' that presumably horrible Jim Carrey movie Liar Liar. It's about a lawyer in Mumbai who lies on essentially every occasion, but eventually (like 3/4 through the movie) his child makes a wish that he should only speak truth, and for a day or so he must speak his mind. This mostly means that he insults everyone he knows, and they are sort of touchingly hurt by this, bursting into tears and running out of rooms. Then he learns the meaning of integrity or something, blah blah. Sushmita Sen is the only actor I knew; she was in Aankhen (the story of Amitabh Bachchan paying blind guys to rob a bank) and Biwi #1 (one of my favorites, and a very iconic bollywood example). This was probably better than the original movie, but it wasn't anywhere near the best bollywood remake I've seen.

I decided to hit the Jarmusch today because I am not feeling well, but I am equal to the task of lying semisensate on the couch and watching meandering character pieces with natural dialog and little bits of humor. I love Jim Jarmusch, my one avatar of his cameo in Straight to Hell notwithstanding (I will use it!). I just finished a book of interviews with him, and I learned that his process is a terrific one; invent characters first, and then build around them situations to be in and react to, and then a plot around that (if any). I relate to this pretty strongly, which is probably why I like his work so much. Sadly I had to return the book to the library, or I would quote the passage about him taking the idea of killers wearing white cotton editors' gloves from some older well-respected director, and using it in Ghost Dog.
His use of black leader between scenes is consistent through all three of these movies; it only makes sense. To have scenes butting right up against one another with no breathing room would be so inappropriate. Jarmusch's work always has such a calm pace, with lots of the process of getting from point A to point B; exciting things are all the more surprising in such a structure. His writing has always been a little more than is needed; although it seems as if he insists on realistic delivery, sometimes the lines walk the edge between believable and silly (f'rinstance, the Flava Flav afficionado was pushing it in Ghost Dog). This is usually okay. The man has a sense of humor, and while I like best the dry (Nobody flapping his mouth like a white guy while wearing Blake's hat in Dead Man) and absurd for no reason (Iggy pop wearing a bonnet), the more broad has its place as well.
Jarmusch doesn't move the camera around a lot, and prefers medium-long shots with multiple people in them. It's hard to get a feeling for characters reacting to one another and their environment in nothing but closeups. He's a fellow after my own heart. Not to mention that he's always careful to get private and overseas funding, so as not to be trapped in the american studio horror (and have editing approval and similar rights taken from him). The man does good work. I wish to be just like him when I grow up.