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.

I can’t seem to get excited about writing up Invictus. On the way out, one of the fellows in front of me called it “brilliant”. “Best movie of the year”, another fellow concurred. Me, I think they should see more films. (Though perhaps not the two we got trailers for — The Book of Eli, where even in two minutes the slow motion shots of Denzel Washington got hilariously repetitive, and Edge of Darkness, where Mel Gibson’s daughter is killed in order to provide him with a motive.)

Anyway. Invictus is a solid but simplistic telling of a slice of history: the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa and Nelson Mandela’s efforts to use the sport to unite the country post apartheid. It’s basically another movie by white people to make them feel good about themselves. Mandela takes office, white people are suspicious, the rugby team does well, everyone is all hugs and smiles. And look, I am American, which means I barely know United States history, let alone history outside our borders, but I am pretty sure the situation in South Africa was and is a bit more complicated than that.

Sports-wise, I still don’t get rugby. Of course, I once saw a four hour movie about cricket & I don’t understand it either. You never even get really excited about the matches because you basically know how it’s going to go, and at the end of a slightly overlong movie, repeated slow motion takes are just not a good idea.

I read that Eastwood arrived in South Africa for the first time about two days before he started shooting, and finished the film ahead of schedule. It shows. If you want to see a film about South Africa, rent Tsotsi. It’s directed by a white guy too, but a South African one, not an American blowing into town for a few weeks and back out again. I respect that Eastwood understands he doesn’t have a lot of time left. I wish he’d spend it telling his own stories.

Things it does well: Morgan Freeman’s performance (as if there were any question), avoiding drawing parallels to Barack Obama, Damon fitting in on the pitch as another rough-and-tumble bulky rugby guy, the all-cgi stadium crowds, some of the security guys (Tony Kgoroge is great). But overall, it’s just too tame a telling.

I saw Where the Wild Things Are for the second time this weekend, and it seemed like a good excuse to throw some Rolling Stone links at y’all: Dave Eggers’ Monster Project: Behind “The Wild Things” (now I really want to read that, because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I am a sucker for that sort of multiple retelling thing) & Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things (a profile from 1976).

I still loved the movie, by the way. It’s beautiful & frightening, just as it should be. Of course, I was an angry & lonely kid too; I just directed it all inside instead.

(It’s only the second film I have seen twice this year. The first was Let the Right One In. If it had played for a full week at NWFF, though, I would have made it to Wings of Desire again, because that movie is *amazing*.)

Tonight, Invictus. Stay tuned.

Twitter was inevitable, I guess. It’s here. I’ve been using it for a few days, and so that’s pretty indicative of what it’ll be. Blah blah blah more movies.

I’m not following anyone I actually know yet, so don’t be all “omg why are you not following me”. Frankly, I figured, it’s a film Twitter. The appeal is pretty limited. But if you’re interested, there it is!

To be perfectly honest, the only reason I saw Me & Orson Welles in the cinema at all is because it was part of SIFF’s Awards Buzz series. I really wanted to see the other two titles (A Single Man & The Young Victoria), and I am a sucker for a laminated pass. So it goes. I mean, it’s basically a Zac Efron movie, and he can’t act his way out of a paper bag. I would have seen it on DVD however, because I had heard great things about Christian McKay’s performance as Welles, and right they were. He’s magnificent in a role that would have been so easy to tip into caricature or scenery-chewing.

Unfortunately, Efron is the center of the thing, and you can just see the thinking behind it, as if a certain demographic will, like, totally go see a movie about Orson fucking Welles if only it has a *dreamy* lead. Um. No. So what we’re stuck with is glimpses of what could have been a great movie about Welles’ famous modern dress production of Julius Caesar, teases of what a film about that huge personality might have been, and then we’re yanked back to Teen Beat 1937.

Two moments at the end encapsulate the ridiculousness: first, a needle drop of extreme obviousness where “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” plays over Efron looking through clippings about the show, and second, that of course Efron’s English class has been studying the entire works of William Shakespeare, and so Efron winds up reciting (badly) a speech from the play, to great acclaim from his fellow students. Whatever.

To be fair to my motives, I had also rather been looking forward to seeing Claire Danes again, which is a genetic requirement for anyone who grew up on “My So-Called Life”, but the awfulness of the Efron pulled her down. Plus, the relationship between their characters skeeved me the heck out. He’s 17! She’s my age! Ew. Just, ew.

I must also admit that I enjoyed Zoe Kazan as the more age-appropriate love interest, who seems to do nothing but hang out at museums and attempt writing for the New Yorker. She was charming. And Leo Bill as Norman Lloyd was great fun as well. They & McKay deserved a better film, and Linklater, who has done glorious things in the past, should have given it to them.

Finally, I spotted two obvious typing errors in the final credits, which seems just ridiculous. I don’t even read credits that closely! Fail.