confessions of an amateur cineaste

I snagged a pass to Youth In Revolt after hearing a rumor that Michael Cera actually bothers to act in it. I am more than a little appalled that it was my first movie of 2010.

Cera basically blew all the affection I had for him from “Arrested Development” and Superbad by hitting me with the one-two suckerpunch that was the god-awful adaptation of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist & the dull, self-indulgent mockumentary Paper Heart.

I haven’t read Youth in Revolt, so I can’t speak to it as an adaptation, but the film certainly felt like a YA novel, hormonal and hyper-real. If I were still in a position to do reader’s advisory, I’d hand it to someone who liked Rats Saw God.

Does it work? Sure. I particularly liked the animated sequences (very Better Off Dead). Does Cera act? Yes. Nick Twisp is definitely in the Cera mold, but his alter-ego, Francois, is great smarmy fun. (Though not as much fun as Justin Long as The Love Interest’s older brother, who was probably the best part of the movie.) And you gotta respect a film that has the guts to be an R rated teen movie.

All that said… eh. It took me this long to bother to post about it, holding up four many other films. Clearly I’m not excited.

I can’t bear to let Legion sit at the top of that page, great fun though it is, so let’s finish this post up.

A week ago Friday, for all of 6 bucks, I got to see Rebel Without a Cause in a sold-out theater, bookended with remarks by screenwriter Stewart Stern, and shown with a short film cut together from the production reunion ten years ago.

God, I love Seattle.

Stern spoke of course about James Dean (improvements he brought to the film, the impact of his death, their utterly charming first meeting) and just when I was thinking I would have loved to see the film with a predominantly queer crowd, he took what turned out to be his only audience question, one regarding the development of the character of Plato.

The answer turned into a meditation not only on Plato and Jimmy (including autobiographical elements), but on masculinity in general, male intimacy in particular, and his experience at the Battle of the Bulge specifically. Such a gift!

(And people wonder why I can’t get interested in spending $15 on Avatar. I have 9 bucks left! I’ll get a coffee and see Truffaut’s Small Change for my birthday. It’s not a difficult decision. Except for being a little concerned for myself, going to a children’s film festival without an actual child.)

…wait, I suppose I should say something about Rebel itself. Maybe. But we all know it’s great & influential, and if you haven’t seen it, you probably should. It’s certainly a weirder movie than expected, a teen melodrama where, watching it over 50 years later, you really wish everyone would get some intense family therapy.

Now we know why Tyra is not rocking Dillon TX these days. She found herself pregnant, fled town, got a job working for Dennis Quaid, of all people, as a waitress in a last-stop diner in the middle of the desert. What desert? Who cares? She’s hooked up with Quaid’s son, a dude named after a car, not because she loves him or anything, but he’s willing to take care of the baby. Whatta guy.

At the same time, an inexplicably tattooed Paul Bettany has crashed to earth in LA (of all places), where he chops off his own wings & stitches up the wounds. Hard core, one might think, but still no Stephen Maturin. He loads himself up with weaponry (just like a good Boondock Saint), has a brief spat with another angel (who has the Master’s Excorcist-like knack for taking over other people’s heads), and speeds off for same diner.

Is he desperate for pancakes? No. No he is not, and more’s the pity, because they have a short stack for a mere $3.75. He is there to protect the baby! (This is not a spoiler. In fact, I could summarize THE ENTIRE FILM and still not spoil anything.) Protect the baby from what, you might ask?

God’s army. Which is? Zombies. Yes, essentially. Zombies sent as a second flood to eradicate mankind. Zombies! Zombies driving cars! Zombies carrying balloons! One zombie with a paper bag over its head for no apparent reason! And my favorite zombie, which I will not give away. You’ll have to go and make a guess.

Legion might be my new favorite movie. It’s so hilariously bad, I think everyone should see it. It’s essentially a Sci-Fi film, with (maybe) a slightly larger budget. More explosions. About the same level of script, which is to say, essentially no script at all. Acting ranging from a game effort all things considered to straight up camp. Cinematography that must have cost a whole buck and a half.

I want the soundtrack, so every time I give a nearly touching speech, angels will sing, and every time I walk down the hall at work there will be Chanting of Doom.

It’ll be amazing. But do you know what is even more amazing? That my beloved Mr Bettany has done a second feature with this director. It’s called Priest, and comes out in August. Want to know what it’s about? Of course you do! Per the IMDb: “A priest disobeys church law to track down the vampires who kidnapped his niece.”

PAUL BETTANY IS A PRIEST. THERE ARE VAMPIRES. WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT?

Plot? Well. Better luck next time.

(No, you didn’t miss it, I *am* five movies behind. I lack patience.)

Roger Ebert twittered/tweeted/whatever this addictive Netflix interactive map over the weekend.

It’s kind of fantastic, in the way anything that validates your choices is fantastic.

Because I know you all are fascinated, the top ten in my zip code, and more, after the jump: (more…)

Total: 108 (it would have been 110, but I was v sick during SIFF and missed two films I had tickets for. Boo.)
69 series: 21
Other revival: 13
Other festivals: 29
Free: 15
What remains: 30 (though even those 30 are a largely esoteric lot, including things like the Oscar shorts & the 4+ hour roadshow edition of Che. And some of them were free via volunteer vouchers.)

So, what we see from this is that the weird thing about this year is clearly that, even though I saw a lot of film, not much of it was actually released in 2009. But, onward! Totally random categories after the jump!

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Guys, the 69 Series at the Northwest Film Forum was basically the cheapest intro to film class ever. I bought the series pass thinking, well. $69 is about seven movies. There would definitely be that many I wanted to see, and there would probably be more I would see if they were already paid for. Since that’s how my mind works. I saw 21, which works out to a little over $3 a film. Most worth it, in my opinion, and I finally joined the Film Forum while I was at it.

I saw a lot of great stuff, that I’ve talked about before, but the best surprises had to be The Rain People (very early Coppola) & Salesman (a documentary about door-to-door Bible salesmen).

Ones I’m kicking myself for missing: too many to list. Pretty much everything where I decided I was too busy or too sick or too tired or flat-out misread the calendar. I particularly regret missing Fellini’s Satyricon, thinking it was playing the full week. D’oh.

I hadn’t seen The Wizard of Oz since I was a little kid, and so I was most happy to trade in a volunteer voucher for it down at SIFF Cinema this month. And here’s the thing: We all know the story and the songs, and there are countless lines from it that have grown a bit moldy in the pop culture lexicon. But the damn thing still works, every bit of it.

The music’s still great, the effects are startlingly good considering their age, and the dream logic of it all was fantastic for me to revisit with my obsession with Where the Wild Things Are.

The day after I saw it, I threw Return to Oz and The Wiz into my Netflix queue. Return had given me nightmares as a child, where the Wheelers were racing after me, of course. Thankfully, that doesn’t hold up as an adult. And I’d never seen The Wiz before, so that was fun. I very much liked the concept of moving it to New York, since more Americans were living in cities (then and now). Take that, real America.

The last in SIFF’s audaciously named “Festival Buzz Series”, The Young Victoria is a beautiful historical love story which touched me in a way I had expected Bright Star to do. Bright Star is the greater technical achievement, but Victoria has the heart I was looking for.

Emily Blunt is Victoria, soon to ascend the throne and beset on all sides by people seeking to control her & thus the empire, including the difficult-to-resist Paul Bettany as Lord Melbourne. She’s introduced to Albert (Rupert Friend) as yet another step in her carefully-vetted world, but against all odds they turn out to be true partners and an epic romance.

It’s wonderfully directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (C.R.A.Z.Y), who doesn’t get bogged down in dresses & stately homes and instead puts us right at the center of the politics, and it’s from the script by Julian Fellowes (ofGosford Park, of course, but almost better known to me as Kilwillie on “Monarch of the Glen”). A peek at his IMDb shows a film titled Emma & Nelson in development. Lord Nelson! How exciting! (If you are a big Age of Sail nerd, which I am.)

Charming, full of intrigue, and definitely one of my favorites of the year.

I had not been in a hurry to see The Men Who Stare at Goats, because I had heard such mixed buzz, but after a pretty difficult day at work we decided that Ewan MacGregor and George Clooney being goofy was just what we needed. And we were right.

They have great chemistry, the story is bizarre enough (and convoluted a bit with flashback) that I didn’t know where it was going, and it was exactly what we needed: a ridiculous movie about the New Earth Army, claiming that more of it is true than we’d think.

::

The last movie I saw in the 69 Series, True Grit, was also pretty darn entertaining. Kim Darby is a 14 year old girl who hires (a drunken, eye-patched) John Wayne to hunt down the killer of her father. One of the original reviews described Darby’s performance thus: “the supposedly 14-year old heroine delivers her campy archaic lines with all the aplomb of an elephant playing hopscotch”. How great an image is that? All the more so because it’s true.

Also tagging along is Glen Campbell, who wants to bring the killer back to Texas. Robert Duvall is the killer in question. Great fun, though the ending was a bit overlong.

I am astonished that it was rated G, though. You can kill heaps of people and it’s appropriate for general audiences? Film ratings are total crap, with pretty much zero consistency.

Okay, kids. I am five movies behind*, but I know the only one anyone actually cares about is Sherlock Holmes. I am okay with this! For you, I will discuss Holmes!

Oh, Guy Ritchie. The night before I saw Holmes I rewatched Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and between the two I discovered that, like so many other people, Ritchie is better when he has less money to work with. One of my favorite things about it is that, even though many many people die (”They’re all dead, Dave”), it’s creatively presented, with a distinct lack of gore. Why? The gore would have been too expensive.

I famously first saw Lock Stock at a press screening shortly after it was starting to accrue some festival buzz, could not convince anyone to go with me, but went anyway of course and wound up meeting Ritchie and both of the Jasons: Statham and Flemyng**. Clearly there was some fail happening back in… whenever it came out.

But anyway, point being, Lock Stock is awesome, and Holmes, though fun, is not awesome. It is also not even pretending to be literary, which is totally fine! What it is, really, is a steampunk action movie. I, however, am not really an action movie person, the Bourne movies & Hong Kong films starring Tony Leung and/or Andy Lau excepted, so I am maybe a little harder to impress.

The way the workings of Holmes’ mind are presented is okay, but frequently just slows down the pacing. In spite of one of them having a visible fiancee, Holmes & Watson are totally in love, for those of you who are concerned about that sort of thing. (You know who you are.) Robert Downey Jr & Jude Law are clearly having a blast, which is nice for them.

However, I soured a little on the whole project at about a third of the way in, when we learn that Rachel McAdams’ character is working for (dun dun dun) a professor. Oh, what is that smell? Just eau de sequel, which we will pour over your head by the end, in case you were dumb enough to miss it the first time.

Also, the whole thing could have been about twenty minutes shorter. But the end credits are beautiful. All in all, it’s okay. But I find it depressing when a lot of money is spent on an okay movie that could have been an awesome movie. And as usual, I can’t help wonder if the fact that it had three writers had something to do with it. Two writers are fantastic, but at three I start to get concerned.

* The other four are The Men Who Stare At Goats, True Grit, The Young Victoria, and The Wizard of Oz; thanks for asking.

**Flemyng who later appeared in of one of the most memorable sex scenes of all time, featured in The Red Violin.