confessions of an amateur cineaste

As soon as I hit post on my last in-theater entry, I remembered that I had forgotten to include Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. It’s the first of three Miyazaki films that the Northwest Film Forum is showing this summer. I had intended to see them all (the other two are My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away, both of which I own), now I think probably not, as they appear to be showing them all dubbed.

Sigh.

The voice cast for Nausicaa included Edward James Olmos, which had the effect of compelling one to declare “so say we all” after half of his lines. Which is unfair to the movie. It was a bit slow-moving for me at times, but the character of Nausicaa herself is basically the most kick-ass heroine ever, so it didn’t matter.

This weekend Several weekends ago I finally caught up with the rest of the world and saw Iron Man. It was a huge amount of fun. I don’t know anything about the Iron Man mythology, but I do know that staying through the credits is worth it.

Next up, the highly anticipated My Winnipeg. It’s allegedly a documentary. It is definitely one of my favorite movies of the year. It did not actually teach me anything about Winnipeg. I am okay with this.

Then this week, like the rest of the world more or less, I saw The Dark Knight, which I have a whole laundry list of issues with, but I can say that the experience of seeing it in IMAX was pretty freakin’ amazing. (Dear lord. It’s currently ranked #1 on IMDb. That is such crap I don’t even know where to start.)

Finally, last night I went to a midnight of The X-Files: I Want to Believe. Because I am crazy. It was … not good. But I will admit that I was totally into it, even though the plot made absolutely no sense, and that I was utterly delighted by the sheer quantity of Callum Keith Rennie in it. Scruffy! Evil! Speaking Russian! He was pure win.

Aside from Callum, it’s strangely off. It has weird issues of sexuality & Catholicism. We’re supposed to believe it’s set in Virginia, but the BCness of it is overwhelming. And let’s not even talk about the final shot, FOR THE LOVE.

But, big-screen Callum. Yay.

* Lars and the Real Girl. I queued this mostly because Patricia Clarkson & Emily Mortimer are basically always worth watching, and I was curious what drew them to the project. I still don’t know. It required suspension of disbelief that eluded me, and I am, honestly, a pretty credulous viewer. In this case I was constantly irritated by the things I was supposed to believe and the questions I wasn’t supposed to ask… or at least the questions the filmmakers weren’t going to bother to answer. Skip it.

* Night on Earth was a surprise arrival when Netflix decided to pass up the five ‘available now’ discs ahead of it. Which is fine, because it’s a great movie that I should have seen a long time ago. It’s totally my sort of movie, being basically five vignettes of cab rides all starting at the same moment around the (Western) world. Stick with it past Winona Ryder’s overacted LA segment for New York & Helsinki in particular.

* When I was on the east coast, friends made me watch Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. And I laughed. A lot. I feel compelled to admit this to you, the Letterboxed reading audience. Judge me if you must.

* I missed Heavy Metal in Baghdad at the film festival, but that was okay because it just came out on DVD. It tracks Iraq’s only heavy metal band, Acrassicauda. (There’s a heavy metal scene, but holding a band together, as you’ll see in the doc, is nigh on impossible.) It’s about living in Iraq, about being a refugee, about wishing you were home and that home is what it used to be. And it’s about metal. Rock on.

* Grace Is Gone is, so far as I can tell, the first decent movie John Cusack’s been in since High Fidelity. He’s the husband of a soldier killed in Iraq, and the film follows his initial grief as he tries to figure out how to tell their daughters what has happened. It’s a little unavoidably sentimental, but I also bought it enough to tear up a bit, so there you go.

* In preparation for seeing Ann Savage in My Winnipeg next week, I picked up Detour. It was really a terrible transfer, but the movie itself is classic noir — an average Joe getting caught up in a web of troubles to put it lightly — and she’s the ultimate femme fatale, hard and manipulative. Good times!

* While I was at it, I got Maddin’s Cowards Bend the Knee, which is an essentially silent film. It’s funny and weird (v weird) and includes hockey and a wax museum, which is pretty much win so far as I am concerned. I have to get it out again at a later date so I can watch it with Maddin’s commentary. Delicious!