Tag: movies

Two films that couldn’t be farther apart.

A Lion in the House (Steven Bognar & Julia Reichert, 2006)

A Lion in the House is a two part documentary aired on PBS’ Independent Lens that follows the lives of five families whose children are diagnosed with cancer. The filmmakers trace the familys’ journeys through all of the painful decisions including when to stop treatment and let go. It’s pretty hard to watch at times, but it’s not maudlin or depressing either. In fact some of the kids are so full of life, so funny, that you can’t help but laugh.

I’ve been waiting for this to air for a few years since a close friend of mine, a pediatric oncologist, was one of the doctors who treated one of the kids. It was fascinating to watch my friend at work, being Mr. Serious Doctor, a side that’s a bit different from the rockin’ out at ACL Fest side that I see every year.

Mainly it was a good reminder of why I’m so involved with The Periwinkle Foundation. I’ve been working with childhood cancer patients for seventeen years at Camp Periwinkle and it was interesting to see the other side, the hospital side, of treatment that camps like Periwinkle work so hard to counterbalance.

Whether you’re involved with childhood cancer or just want to see a documentary about people who display unbelievable courage in the face under the most awful of circumstances, this is one that everyone should check out.

Shoot or Be Shot (Randy Argue, 2002)

Shoot of Be Shot is a fun, fun movie. Harry Hamlin plays a sleazy producer of B films who wants to go arty. He hires a film school geek with big ideas and they set out to the desert to create art. Then an escaped mental patient, played by William Shatner who chews the scenery up oh so deliciously, comes along and hijacks the production forcing them to make his movie instead. Lots of fun.

Monday? Tuesday? What’s the difference, really?

U Turn (Oliver Stone, 1997)

I’ve never been a huge fan of Oliver Stone. Watching his film is too much like getting beaten over the head with a blunt object. The exception being The Doors, though that film did open the door to an era of Stone(d) filmmaking in which the style became the message as seen in such movies as the tedious Natural Born Killers (memorable only for the use of the Cowboy Junkies’ version of “Sweet Jane”) and U Turn, which I only just saw. Now all things considered, U Turn wasn’t bad. It just felt like a stylistic exercise rather than a movie.

The story concerns a guy (Sean Penn) who owes a bunch of money to a dangerous man. He’s bringing the cash when his car breaks down in a small desert town where everyone wants to take him for a ride including a young woman (Jennifer Lopez). The woman’s husband (Nick Nolte) wants her dead, she wants him dead, Penn loses his money but can get it back by doing a bit of murder, but who to kill and for whom. Botched crime ensues.

It’s a good story, vaguely reminiscent of the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple, but in execution becomes more a vehicle for Stone’s stylistic obsessions of the late ’90s: grainy spaghetti western shots interspersed with more standard footage, switches to black and white, unmotivated slo-mo, weird/wise old Indian men, attempted Tarantino dialogue. In the end, U Turn was entertaining and I’m glad I watched it, but as with most Oliver Stone films I finished feeling a bit unfulfilled.

How’s Your News? (Arthur Bradford, 1999)

How’s Your News is a documentary about five peope who travel the United States from Maine to California in order tro create their own documentary about the US comprised of man-on-the-street interviews. The thing is all five members of the How’s Your News? team suffer from severe mental and/or physical disabilities. The most remarkable thing about this movie is the way in which it succeeds at being funny and sweet without ever once becoming exploitive or mean. The earnestness with which each team member approaches his interview subjects is touching, and the reactions of the interviewees are wonderful, most of whom don’t have a clue as to why they are being filmed and interviewed. Amazingly most of the people who are interviewed are patient and kind and willing to work with the interviewers after they recognize that they aren’t being played and that the How’s Your News interviewers are serious in their efforts.

This film was made by a guy who was in one of my writing classes at UT. He often seemed not to have much to write about, but clearly he didn’t need to make anything up as his quirky, original and fun documentary shows. Check it out.

Yeah, yeah, a Monday Movie Roundup on Tuesday, but it was a long weekend so in a way this is kind of like Monday besides I’m a teacher so it’s actually kind of like Saturday for the next two months. So there.

To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962)

I showed To Kill a Mockingbird to my classes during the last week of school. One class had read the book and I figured the rest of my classes would enjoy it as well. Many of the kids had already seen it in their regular schools, but all who had seen it were thrilled to see it again. Some even told me that it’s “pretty good for a black and white movie.” I didn’t mind watching it five times in one week either. The performances are great, especially Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch.

200 Motels (Frank Zappa, Tony Palmer, Charles Swenson, 1971)

I like Frank Zappa’s music, and the blurb for 200 Motels made it sound like a documentary about the Mothers of Invention. Sometimes a movie sounds good, but then you find that it’s really just an opportunity for someone to expose some film and try to capture all kinds of weirdness. I think the Mothers were trapped in a fake nightclub. I think it was weirdness for the sake of weirdness. Sometimes that can be okay. This time it wasn’t. I suppose some people liked Zappa for his bizarre sense of humor, but I’ve always been very impressed with his musicianship as well as that of the Mothers. Unfortunately that’s not what this movie was about. Made dinner and turned it off after fifteen minutes to watch something on the science channel about the ion engines on NASA’s Deep Space One.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (George Lucas, 2005)

If I were to be a Star Wars character, I would – like everyone else – be Han Solo, but apparently if I were to be a Jedi Knight, here’s who I would be…

how jedi are you? :: by lawrie malen

Revenge of the Sith was the best of the three Star Wars prequels. Honestly, I think it might be a bit better than Return of the Jedi. The thing that is so frustrating about the prequels is that the ideas are great. The story is great. There’s a lot to sit around and talk about as my sister-in-law and I do on many occasions. Unfortunately, George Lucas did it all himself and I think that’s part of why these three movies don’t live up to their potential. Still, I do enjoy watching them from time to time and I like the way everything comes together in this final installment. I don’t buy everything about the story (Padme dies of a broken heart ?!?) but then this is a series of movies in which space ships make noise in the vaccuum of space so I guess I can suspend disbelief a bit here. Technically well made, but flawed in writing and direction.

X-Men: The Last Stand (Brett Ratner, 2006)

We saw X-Men: The Last Stand yesterday. Despite the lousy reviews it’s gotten, I enjoyed it. It focused on the resurrection of Jean Grey aka Phoenix, a classic story in the X-Men mythology. Once again mutants are being oppressed by normal humans who have now developed a “cure” for mutation. Magneto, the best super villian ever, builds an army of mutants to take over the world and make it safe for mutant kind. The movie is a perfect example of a smart summer blockbuster filled with interesting characters (where was Nightcrawler, though?) and dynamic action sequences. It’s a solid end to the X-Men trilogy, but leaves plenty of room to expand the franchise. Probably indefinitely. Well made, fun, entertaining.

The Endless Summer 2 (Bruce Brown, 1992)

The Endless Summer 2 follows the trajectory of Bruce Brown’s brilliant 1966 surf documentray The Endless Summer but adds modern cinematic technology as it follows the adventures of Pat and Wingnut who retrace the path of their heroes from the original Endless Summer. The two look for the best waves and surf spots in Costa Rica, South Africa, Indonesia, Fiji, Australia, and Hawaii.

There are a few changes from the original itinerary and the movie isn’t quite as a innocent as the 1966 film, but it’s still a great diversion and the cinematography is truly stunning. As with the original Endless Summer, my favorite parts are when the surfers explore South Africa. They return to the “perfect wave” from the original film, though because of development it’s not quite as perfect, and they have plenty of run-ins with the local wildlife. Apparently, lions really like to eat wetsuits.

If you like surf guitar, beautiful ocean photography, gnarly surf sequences, and a sweetly dorky sense of humor you can’t go wrong with either of the Endless Summer films.

It’s been awhile since I watched any movies to round up.

The Count of Monte Cristo (Kevin Reynolds, 2002)

I Showed The Count of Monte Cristo at school. It was in the lesson plans for one of the classes I had to take over, and the kids had been looking forward to it. It was a solid action-adventure with a little bit of romance and humor. Everything was well done. Works nicely as a school film because it gives a lot to discuss in terms of revenge, forgiveness, and perseverance. Big Hollywood action that gets you cheering for the good guys. Three and half stars.

My Side of the Mountain (James B Clark, 1969)

My Side of the Mountain is another movie that the kids in one class were looking forward to watching after finishing the book. The book, which I recently read and really liked, tells the story of young Sam Gribley who runs away from home in New York City to live off the land in the Catskills. He spends a little over a year living off the land by gathering plants, hunting (often with the help of his falcon, Frightful), trapping, and fishing. It’s a neat tale about learning to live with nature. I wish I could say the same for the movie.

Good lord, it was bad. Almost everything that made the book so charming was stripped from the movie which attempts to sanitize Sam’s experiences living off the land. Sam doesn’t hunt or trap; he only steals a deer that some poachers had already killed so that it won’t go to waste. In a particularly stupid break from the book, Frightful gets killed by a hunter who accidentally shoots her while trying to kill a game bird that Frightful was attacking. Sam calls the hunter a murderer and the hunter tells him that Frightful was a killer too. Sam is sad, but the point is made that killing animals is supposed to be wrong. Now, I’ll go with the idea that trophy hunting is repugnant, but if you’re living off the land, you’re probably going to have to hunt. And if you’re an animal, such as a falcon, hunting is probably okay. I mean, those talons and razor sharp beak aren’t there for giving hugs and kisses to smaller birds.

The movie descends further into idiocy when Sam packs it in after getting snowed in (he lives in a sort of hollowed out tree/cave) one day around Christmas. This happens in the book as well, but Sam manages to survive and learns to avoid that predicament in the future. He makes it through the winter and is able to see the mountain blossom into new life with the coming of spring. Not in the movie. Sam gets rescued by two adults and he happily goes home, thus giving up on his dream of living in nature at the moment when he finally starts to see that nature is for real.

The last thing that bugged me, though my students didn’t notice, is that the whole story had been moved north. No longer did Sam run away from New York, now it was Toronto. Instead of the Catskills, he ran away to Quebec. Oddly enough, it was a Quebec in which no one spoke French, and Sam had no problem communicating with the few people he ran into because they all – every one of them – spoke flawless English. Stupid, stupid, stupid movie. No stars.

Scotland, PA (Billy Morrissette, 2001)

Dimwitted Joe and his ambitious wife Pat McBeth work at Duncan’s, a small fast food joint in Scotland, PA sometime in the late 60s or early 70s. Joe dreams up the concept of the drive through window but he’ll never profit on it as long as he works for Duncan. Three witchy carnys and Pat all convince him that Duncan’s could be his. Pat and Joe kill Duncan and create their own fast food kingdom: McBeth’s. Everything looks good until Lieutenant McDuff (Christopher Walken) shows up and starts asking questions.

Scotland, PA is a witty and dark comedy based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Despite the comic tone, though, the film is not a parody. It’s a retelling in a modern context. If you know the story of Macbeth, you know this is a tragedy, and it doesn’t end well for the McBeths or for a number of the other characters. It’s funny, sad, at times grisly (interesting deaths can occur in a fast food joint), but always witty and clever. Four stars.

Only two this week…

11:14 (Greg Marks, 2003)

At 11:14 pm a car accident takes place near an overpass. It all happens very quickly, and it takes a little while to get into the groove of this fast-paced thriller, which is as much a dark comedy as a meditation on the seemingly random nature of connected events. Director Marks presents a sequence of events out of sequence so that the puzzle for the audience becomes finding the connections in this mystery rather than figuring out whodunit.

It reminded me of several other films such as Outside Ozona, Memento, and Three Days in the Valley that play with the flow of time and seeming random characters as fate veers towards some connecting calamity, but this film keeps within its limits and pushes those tenuous connections to the forefront. Worth watching, but will probably be forgotten in a few months. Three stars.

Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney, 2005)

I meant to see Good Night, and Good Luck when it came out, but then it’s one that I figured would play just as well at home. I was right, and that’s no slam on the movie; besides, it seemed especially appropriate to see Good Night, and Good Luck on a television since the film so eloquently takes us back to a time in which television was new and seemed to hold so much promise for those who believed in its power.

Clooney does a masterful job capturing a specific moment in history, that moment when the media still did its job. Shot in black-and-white and set to a bluesy/jazz soundtrack the film immediately evokes the 1950s as I imagine that time to have been. The photography is beautiful (of course there’s nothing cooler looking than people smoking in a well-lit black-and-white movie) and makes this film as enjoyable for its aesthetic value as for its content.

The content, of course, is what makes this movie so important. The viewer must have at least a basic knowledge of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attacks on America and an awareness of who Edward R Murrow was because it jumps in at the moment when Murrow decides to go after McCarthy at great professional risk to himself and the entire CBS network.

Anyone aware of US history knows how this ends, but it’s interesting to see the role the media played in exposing McCarthy’s corruption and anti-American agenda. Mostly, though, Good Night, and Good Luck is saddening because at its heart is the implicit reminder that the media that once kept a watch on government is gone, now having been replaced by a media establishment whose idea of reporting is nothing more than ‘He said’-‘She said’ without analysis, without questioning, and without seriously taking to task those in power.

Good Night, and Good Luck attempts to remind us that part of the price of freedom is to vigorously question those in power, and that that is why we have a free press.

The saddest truth, though, is that the media gives us exactly what we want. Four and a half stars.

By sheer force of happenstance (okay, that’s probably not really a force and if it is it’s certainly one of the weaker interactions) our movies for the past week related the stories of screwed up kids, misfits trying to find their way through this mystery called life…

The Goonies (Richard Donner, 1985)

This was actually the first time I’d ever seen The Goonies. I think that if I’d seen it when it came out (and if it had come out a few years earlier) I would have loved it. A group of misfit kids, led by the shy Mikey Walsh search for pirate treasure so they can help their parents buy their homes, which are about to be demolished to make room for a golf course. It’s a sweet, mostly innocent tale of kids caught up in a caper being run by bumbling adult criminals. The kids aren’t too screwed up in this one, but they don’t really fit in either. Finding buried treasure makes up for a lot, though. Three stars.

Thumbsucker (Mike Mills, 2005)

Thumbsucker is so named because Justin sucks his thumb, which is a problem when you’re seventeen. This makes him a screwed-up kid. Justin is smart, but lacks confidence and over the course of this bizarre comedy/drama he tries several solutions including spiritual ones under the guidance of a weird zen dentist dude played by Keanu Reeves. He experiments with ADHD meds and self-medication, trying out different personas on his journey to discover who he is. Justin’s battle to stand free of his thumb is an interesting, at times funny, sometimes flat movie that seemed longer than it was, but ultimately worth the watch. Three and a half stars.

Back to the Future III (Robert Zemeckis, 1990)

Last week we saw Back to the Future II, so this week we had to wrap it up. Back to the Future III is the least interesting of the trilogy, probably because it doesn’t really explore the time travel paradoxes that make the first two so much fun. It’s mainly a western, and in this one Marty finally gets his life in order. Nothing special, but a fun diversion and a fair ending to the series. Two and a half.

Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (George Lucas, 2002)

Now if ever there was a screwed up kid, it’s Anakin Skywalker. This punk gives in to hate, seeks revenge, loses control of his feelings, helps brutal Sith lords, defies his Jedi master, shows off and acts arrogant at every turn. He even slaughters a whole village of Tuskin Raiders. Is it any wonder he grew up to be the most evil man in that distant galaxy?

I loved Star Wars when I was a kid, but I wasn’t as disappointed with these new installments as everyone else I know. For one thing, I didn’t expect much and for another I probably would have skipped the original trilogy if I was the age I am now back in 1977. Unless I had kids, of course. So no, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones isn’t great, but it’s fun and it works if you’re not looking for more than that. Three stars.

The United States of Leland (Matthew Ryan Hoge, 2003)

The United States of Leland is about a teacher named Pearl Madison (Don Cheadle) who works in a correctional facility. There are plenty of screwed up kids in a place like that and one of them, Leland Fitzgerald (played by Ryan Gosling), is there for murdering a retarded boy. Pearl is an aspiring writer in search of a novel and as he gets to know Leland he thinks he may have it. Following the conversations between Pearl and Leland, the film focuses on the effects of the killing on both the family of the killer and that of his victim.

Sometimes it’s hard to enjoy a movie that mirrors one’s own circumstances (I’m a teacher/writer working in a correctional facility) because it’s so easy to get lost in the that’s-not-really-how-it-is details. This movie gets it right, and with excellent performances by Gosling and Cheadle, as well as Kevin Spacey who plays Leland’s out-of touch novelist father, it’s definitely worth seeing. Four stars.

Jarhead (Sam Mendes, 2005)

Dark, sarcastic military movies almost always go over well with me, and Jarhead is no exception. It follows the basic trajectory of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket from basic training to meaningless war, but where that film lacks a real third act and is overly bitter, Jarhead feels like a complete movie that actually engenders sympathy for its characters as it follows them through 1991’s Operation Desert Shield and into Desert Storm. At times the film is downright funny and other times it’s scary and often sad.

The cinematography in Jarhead is stunning. The empty deserts of Saudi Arabia become a spooky wilderness in which everything including hope seems only a mirage. The most amazing scenes, though, come after the oil fields are set afire providing hellish lighting for the battlefield scenes in which no battles occur. Jarhead is a sort of Apocalypse Now for a new generation and includes several references to that film, most amusingly when a Marine hears The Doors and complains, “that’s Vietnam music, man” and then wonders why they can’t have their own.

At one point, Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal), the film’s narrator states “all wars are different, all wars are the same,” and so it is with war movies. This one is particularly good though and a powerful reminder of what happens when we send our kids, screwed up and otherwise, off to war. It’s based on Swoford’s memoir of the same name, which I suspect is probably also worth checking out. Four and a half stars.