Time for another round-up

So what happens when I watch a bunch of movies that I like well enough but don't have a hell of a lot to say about them? I write pointless capsule reviews so that I have an excuse to post something... anything... Seems the only way I can keep the writerly water running is to leave the faucet constantly dripping. Otherwise, we return to the desert... which is good for alleviating the frizz in my hair, but not so good in terms of its metaphoric repercussions on my creative drive. *sigh.*


A few weeks ago, I watched A Guide for Recognizing your Saints and liked it quite a lot. It really has quite a heart and Rosario Dawson's brief little performance pretty much steels the whole movie. And I really couldn't accurately opine on how Robert Downey, Jr. has become the actor that he is, but there's some real ache he put into this character that I've only ever seen in glimpses from him before now. And, Jesus, he is aging well. Those new lines in his face lend him a particular sex appeal that he lacked as a preternaturally red-mouthed youth. Wow, I'm not saying anything at all about this movie, am I? Well, no matter. See it for RD, Jr, Rosario Dawson and Chaz Palminteri. Oh, and the final credits run to that old Kiss song "New York Groove" and somehow, it totally works. It's worth it.

I also saw two movies about folks who seem to have trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality, back to back. I was hoping the comparison would lead to a blog post unto itself, but I wasn't overwhelmed one way or the other by either of them. The first was Gondry's The Science of Sleep. I felt like this movie was a very stylishly executed romantic comedy. At it's heart, it's a chick-flick all the way. It's just that there are several good bits with animated corrugated cardboard and a felt horse-- and Gael Garcia Bernal's typical pathos-- that at least give you more to look at that more average fare for this genre. Though, I wonder if Bernal's character had just a smidgen of Asberger's Syndrome or something... he's like a sexy retard. Could that be a thing that exists?

Well, anyway, my intended counterpoint to The Science of Sleep was Terry Gilliam's thing, Tideland. And I'm not sure where exactly this movie took a wrong turn... but perhaps it was Gilliam's totally patronizing introduction in which he claimed some people would love this movie while some would hate it, that children are resilient and that the movie might be disturbing but it was "innocent" because it was from a child's perspective. Come. On! Children are both resilient and innocent? This is something we MUST be told in order to understand his deeply artistic vision for this movie? Whatever. But moving on, I had a hell of a time staying awake for the duration. I mean, there's a kid crawling all over the corpse of her father, some blinky Barbie doll heads and and a tweaky dreadlocked chick fucking the grocery delivery boy and some hyper-colored cinematography... and even with all that,-- all those images that ostensibly should evoke the goldmine of the subconscious-- this movie just bored me. Though, I would like to offer that Jennifer Tilly is friggin' great for the 5 minutes in which she's in it and Jeff Bridges' character seems to be something like Brad Pitt's character in 12 Monkeys, though 20 years aged. I think Gilliam just likes that guy and wants to put him where ever he can.

And then there's La Mujer De Mi Hermano. It's a well-dressed little Mexican sex drama about a gay guy, his wife and his brother. Or rather, it's about a woman, her gay husband and his virile but assholic brother. And, boy, those folks sure are pretty. However, in the course of the story, during the part when we're not supposed to know that the husband is gay, I kept getting uncomfortable as he adopted more and more tritely effeminate gestures. He insists on wearing two pairs of socks because he doesn't like his dainty little tootsies to get cold. There's more than one reference to back-waxing... that sort of thing. And so, OK, I get it. Obsessing over one's appearance and bodily comfort = gay. Being a slovenly womanizer = stud. Got it! I'm so glad someone clued me in regarding these social cues. And the ending sat somewhat uncomfortably with me as well-- or maybe I just felt it was unsatisfying. She, of course, gets pregnant via the brother, tells the brother (who tries to convince her to abort it), tells the husband (who says he'll raise it so long as he can have sex with men every now and again without her complaining), and thusly, the couple appeases the husband's grandbaby-hungry mom and the brother goes on thinking the husband has no idea the baby isn't his and they all live deceptively but quasi-happily ever after. Oh, and there's this totally unnecessary subtext between the two brothers that the gay one molested the straight one when they were kids---because OF COURSE it's only logical that any old queer would also be inclined to engage in incestuous pederasty. Of course! So, while this movie appears to be trying really hard to "be sensitive to the plight of The Gays," it just somehow missed its mark. Though Barbara Mori is one hot chick.

And on the tail of that sex drama, I watched Conversations with Other Women, yet another sex drama. What? As if any among you, my paltry yet loyal audience, have not yet ascertained my fixation on sexual politics, both intimate and social... don't look at me that way... But anyway, most of the interest in this movie surrounds this gimicky split-screen tactic that the director took. I think he filmed it that way for two reasons: 1) So that he could tell the flashback parts simultaneously with the present parts and 2) so that he didn't privilege the point of view of one character over the other. And while that's interesting in theory, after about 15 minutes of not knowing exactly where to look, I kinda started to ignore it. And because I was able to ignore it, I'm not sure it was all that successful. However, as always, I find Helena Bonham Carter fascinating to watch. She's so pretty and fragile and perpetually detached... and a little bit of a sour puss. Actually, she smiles more in this movie than in practically any other movie in which I've seen her... and her smile actually makes her face appear more pinched and anxious than ever. But the movie, overall, is modest and well-paced. And as a particularly careful disregard for resolution. The two characters were once married, lost touch, meet up again, have sex, he pleads for her to come back to him, she leaves to go back to her new family. It's not complicated but it's underplayed and resonant.

And so, I buckled and rented The Departed even though I wasn't all that excited about it. And basically, it's an entertaining movie. Entertaining. Nicholson played the same old smarmy, unctuous turd he's been playing for years, Whalberg played a tiny role exactly as it was written, and Vera Farmiga's police shrink was really the most luminous character there in. So, firstly, let me say what annoyed me in this movie, just to get it off my chest: rapid-fire murders were funny and video-game-like at the beginning Desperado. But as a method of resolution in a movie that won Best Picture? I just want MORE! I found them anticlimactic and very pat. By the time the movie got around to killing everyone off, well, yeah, of course, all those lousy SOBs had to die... and some not-so-lousy SOBS too, just for good measure. sure. Why not? And then there's that stupid rat crawling across the windowsill at the end? Why on earth would Scorcese put that absurd image there? I mean, everyone likes to pat themselves on the back for their own cleverness now and again, but, please, Marty, that was just self-indulgent.

Now, although I'm predisposed not really get as excited about primarily plot-driven movies, I do actually have some nice things to say about The Departed, too. I gotta say, DiCaprio did a better job than I would have anticipated with his role. His character didn't have a chip on his shoulder in the way I might have expected... he was legitimately petrified throughout. The way DiCaprio contains and judiciously releases that character's anxieties give a little glimpse of that of which he is capable of doing as an actor.

However, because DiCaprio seems to be one of those celebrities about which everyone has an opinion, well, it's difficult to judge his performances without having to negotiate his sometimes-questionable stature as a sex symbol-- and the fact that his public persona pretty much always supersedes whatever acting skill he may or may not have. As my friend Bob recently said, his face is actually a little "rodent-y." And really, I don't think he'll age well. He was pretty and smooth-skinned and sexually non-threatening when he first became famous-- all prerequisites for being the sort of fellow thirteen-year-old girls squeal about. But now he constantly sports patchy facial hair and squints a lot, and is a little twitchy. However, he has this really dynamic moment wherein he shows up at the shrink's house all rabbity, but, again trying to bottle the rush of it all... and he flips some switch and shifts almost imperceptibly. One second, he's like a caged puppy and the next, he quite purposefully re-channels all that animal energy into something sexual... and he approaches her.. and in his demonstration of this confusion of instinctual behaviors, I got it-- I finally understood why he's a sex symbol. And that's it, right? That conflation of intellectual intention and bodily experience-- well, that's where you find that flintspark every time. Of course, then he jumped back into himself pretty shortly thereafter. But the few moments of real humanity, like that one, that wrenched themselves through the scrim of genre fiction made The Departed interesting even for a tired movie cynic like me.

And on that note, I now have to completely undermine that very assertion of my own cynicism that I just made. Yesterday morning, I flipped on the TV and found an old childhood favorite on cable. The Last Unicorn was a movie I used to watch as though it were looped on the living room TV when I was little. It's an old anime that came out in the early 80s and the animation is just gorgeous. It's voiced by Alan Arkin, Jeff Bridges and Mia Farrow-- and I still adore this little movie, despite the fact that someone should have told Mia Farrow she can't sing for shit. Watching it now, I'm a little surprised that, even as a six-year-old, I was so enamored of such a sad story-- one without much in terms of a happy ending, even. And now, as a grown up, it would be so easy to interpret the story as a metaphor of trauma and recovery. But that's kinda beside the point. It's sad and smart and really very pretty... and sometimes, that's enough.