Uncovered is an utterly pointless movie, a complete waste of time, unless you want to get a good long look at kate beckinsale's boobs. I can't remember what inspired me to netflix it, but it really just was not very good. it wasn't so much awful as just.. what's the point. kate looks very very young, and wears weird unflattering clothes, and everything looks and sounds very early 90s. lots of things in the movie just seem odd and out of place, from the irish chess-playing hippie, to the peculiar bug-eyed inspector, to john wood's creepy turn as kate's guardian. spoiler: and honestly, that john wood ends up being the murderer was both a complete non surprise and completely unexplained. yes, he has a creepy fatherish obsession with kate, but why? it just makes no real sense, and the ending completely fails to surprise, grip, or satisfy. seriously, skip it (not, I'm sure, that you were considering seeing it or had even heard of it); if you're that mad to see kate's boobs, try the internet.

Planet B-boy was awesome. Maybe not a great film or whatever, but A and I saw it this week and could not stop grinning and toe-tapping the whole way through. I basically cannot think of anyone I know I wouldn't recommend this to, so just go see it -- especially since it might go away soon (it's still playing at the Varsity here in Seattle).

It follows five crews going to the annual breakdancing battle of the year in Germany -- one American, one French, one Japanese, and two Korean (one the defending champs from the previous year). We see each team training, here some about their personal stories, and learn a bit about b-boying like the different national styles. But mostly we just see a lot of really good dancers doing awesome moves. at the battle of the year, each crew (18 from various countries, plus the defending champs) does a six-minute show, where they're judged on things like creativity, skill, and synchronization (and yes, there can be a fine line between b-boying and boy band moves). Then the top four teams are chosen and they battle -- dancers from each team alternating in showing off their moves and responding to each other.

If I have one complaint about the movie it's that they didn't let the dancing speak for itself as much as they could have. Both the shows and the battles were sliced up, edited, when they could have just let us see the entire flow. Like, it was hard sometimes to figure out what a battle was really like, and how the back-and-forth went. That's not to say that the background stories weren't worthwhile too; we really enjoyed seeing some of the parents, especially the skeptical ones who came around to being totally proud of their kids' b-boying.

here's some show videos, from the japanese team, ichigeki, korean team, last for one, and defending champs, gamblers.

Somehow I managed to miss hearing about Renaissance (2006) until I came across it somewhere last week and immediately put it on top of my netflix queue. It's set in the Paris of 50 years in the future, animated, in a beautifully stark black/white (almost no gray) style. The story is the sort of futuristic noir you see in Bladerunner and that sort of thing. It's absolutely beautiful, and the imagined future Paris is terrific. Some of the details of the future are terrific too, though there are clear influences from Bladerunner (large speaking billboards, for example), the Matrix (some of the sound design, and one particular action scene), and other classics.

The story is good enough to carry you along, but not great in itself. I won't bother to tell you too much about it, and it's better if you watch the movie without learning too much more (check out the still images on the IMDB page though).

Oh, and by the way, Daniel Craig does one of the main voices in the english-language version (along with Catherine McCormack, Jonathon Pryce, and Ian Holm).

I've been meaning to see The Naked City (famous line: "there are eight million stories in the naked city") for a while, but Jules Dassin's recent death inspired me to seek out some of his movies. The great thing about this movie is its realism -- it's all filmed, as they say, on the streets and in the apartments and offices of new york city. And the story itself is fairly realistic, the police investigation of a murder that involves theft, lies, and various petty crimes. The investigation itself ranges from exciting to plodding and repetitive just like, as they say, real police work. And there aren't any crazy explosions or car chases or kung fu fight scenes.

All that was good. What I did not like, at all, was the incredibly superfluous and cheesy voiceover narration (or, in the same vein, the producer's voiceover introduction where he explains that the movie you're about to see is unlike any other! filmed on location!). It was embarassing to listen to, and made a point of spelling out things that were completely obvious from the action. What's more, it was sort of cheesy and jokey and condescending to the characters in a way that completely broke the realist illusion that the movie otherwise works so hard to achieve (and mostly succeeds at). I read somewhere that the narration was their solution to the fact that recording technology still wasn't good enough for a lot of on-site work; that's fine, but really, you could have done it without the narration at all (or with much less anyway, and more to-the-point, less jokey). We can tell what's going on just by watching sometimes.

So, not a bad movie. I feel bad that Jules Dassin is coming off bad this week in my reviews. So I'll just reiterate here what I told E: forget these and just watch Rififi, which is brilliant. At least Dassin had figured out by this time that silence can work: the central heist scene is 30+ minutes long, with zero dialogue and not much noise.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day was what I usually call a perfect little movie. It was not (and wasn't meant to be) especially deep or profound, but was a pitch-perfect execution of what it was trying to be: some fun, some romance, and a good time. The sets and clothes (for glamorous nightlife in prewar London) were beautiful, and just about all the performances were great. Frances McDormand was perfect as Miss Pettigrew, and Shirley Henderson was terrific as the manipulative fashion designer Edythe. Ciaran Hinds has been a favorite of mine since Persuasion and here he's another understated but ultimately wonderful male character. The movie had enough touching romantic moments and hints of tragedy (the looming war) to give it some depth, but was overall just a good time in every way.

Never on Sunday, despite all its awards and what-not, was so horrible we couldn't finish it. The story is basically "my fair lady" (or pygmalion, if you prefer), with henry higgins being a dumb american who thinks he's a philosopher (and is visiting greece to figure out how the world went wrong), and eliza doolittle being a good-natured greek prostitute. jules dassin as the american is unwatchably wretched (I'm sorry jules, I love you for Rififi but I must speak the truth). part of that is deliberate, since his character seems intended to be a bore and a moron, but even so, he's unwatchable. melina mercouri (dassin's wife) got awards for her performance as the prostitute, but honestly she was pretty bad too. it wasn't really her fault as much as the writer/director's (sorry, jules again), who insisted on making sure every gesture and word out of her mouth said "HAY LOOK AT ME I'M A FREE SPIRIT JUST ENJOYING LIFE AND I CARE NOTHING FOR YOUR CRAZY UPTIGHT RULES!" she is always good naturedly laughing with everyone around her, flirting in a friendly way, spontaneously throwing off her clothes for a swim, etc etc. It's hard to explain exactly why, but I thought it was incredibly grating and cliched. I must be the only one though, since she won all kinds of awards and most commenters on IMDB loved her.

The worst thing about this movie though is that after seeing it (and dassin's "the naked city" which was good but also had its share of goofy sentimentalism), I'm now feeling like I have to watch "rififi" again and look for signs of this awful side of dassin. I will be pissed if I find them.

Cashback is about a young artsy guy who gets a nighttime shift at a supermarket and fantasizes about being able to stop time, mostly so he can avoid work and instead undress women and draw them. It's like The Fermata except pretentious and arty rather than prurient. oh and it's a movie instead of a book, so you get to see the naked boobs rather than just imagine them. anyway, here's my mildly approving review.

optic: oh hey i didnt think cashback was that bad
optic: and im not saying that because of boobs
dgirl: really? it was kind of sweet at the end
optic: i thought the goofy employees were entertaining
dgirl: yeah i liked them
optic: i thought you said it was terrible
dgirl: but did you see what i mean about the unrealistic super perfect boobs everywhere?
dgirl: the premise was totally stupid
optic: yeah
optic: the gimmick about stopping time was dumb
optic: it was a basic young person romance movie
dgirl: it was
dgirl: and the lead was engaging sort of
optic: there was a lot of pretentious gabble at the begnning that was offputting but after that it was okay
optic: and the excuse for showing lots of bare boobs and bush was appreciated but sort of pointless
dgirl: exactly
optic: and making it an expression of his artsiness rather than normal teenage lust was silly
dgirl: and the stripper stuff was dumb
optic: i was pleasantly surprised the stripper thing didn't lead to a tv sitcom esque misunderstanding/argument
optic: wherein the girl gets upset that the guy has done something wrong by getting the stripper etc
optic: or where the stripper is comically inappropriate in some stupid tv sitcom esque way
dgirl: true - i was more annoyed by the stripper fantasy of the office girl
optic: the who what of the what
optic: you mean her outfit?
dgirl: no how he had that fantasy of the blonde girl from the supermarket
optic: ok

If.... features malcolm mcdowell as a rebellious senior at a sadistic british boarding school. that was pretty much enough to sell me on seeing it, and I wasn't disappointed. his character shares an attitude with his clockwork orange character, and he's a pleasure to watch. the loud and violent conclusion is entertaining. the basic theme of rebellion against authority is familiar enough (especially for a movie made in 1968), and it's well done here. the conclusion goes a little nuts (which may be deliberate -- it may be all in mick's head), but sort of fits. of course, in a way it's even more resonant now, with all the school violence we've seen in recent years. anyway, it's worth seeing, especially if you like malcolm.

Watching Elizabeth again earlier this year (as well as enjoying various kinds of historical fiction lately) inspired me to seek out some books about her era. I've already read books about Walsingham and the armada, so I decided to find a good biography of Elizabeth herself: Allison Weir's The Life of Elizabeth I.

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I think I put Enduring Love on my netflix queue on the strength of my current fascination with Daniel Craig (a fascination that mostly hasn't let me down, movie-wise). But this movie was a mess. I get the feeling from E, who's read the book, that the book kind of has a point (and she sorta said what it was), but I didn't really get much out of the movie. The problem for me was that this is one of those stories where you just want to grab one or more characters by the lapels and yell "HAY STOP ACTING LIKE AN IDIOT" -- basically things are swept along on crazy situations that would never arise if one or two people would just stop and think, or calmly explain things to each other. Hey, you have a nutjob stalker! Why not call the police and/or explain this to your girlfriend?! Rhys Ifans does a good (very) creepy stalker, but he was so creepy and repulsive, it's unbelievable than Daniel Craig wouldn't just run far far away.

Apparently the point of the thing is supposed to be that Craig has these theories about how love is meaningless, isn't real, etc. and is confronted with obsessive love as well as normal romantic and family love (his girlfriend and friends) and must come to understand that, evolution or not, love is real. The thing is, if we're supposed to accept Craig as some kind of smarty philosophy guy, it's ridiculous that he would think that the biological basis of love precludes the intensity of its feeling; his whole theory is the kind of thing college kids come up with at 2am while smoking weed. It doesn't stand up to the light of day or adulthood, and it seems fairly silly that the manifestly adult Daniel Craig has to learn some lesson at the hands of crazy Rhys Ifans. Alternately boring, annoying, painful to watch, and briefly moving, this is not a movie I could possibly recommend. Some good actors doing good jobs but in the service of a mess.

I think I've been trying too hard to have something profound to say in reviews, and as a result I've been not saying anything at all. So back to the simple "pretty darn good" standard of reviewing. I thought No Country for Old Men was pretty darn good. Entertaining, action-packed. There were some great trucks. Javier Bardem was creepy. One complaint though is I thought it was kind of confused, story-wise. It went here and there; I know the plot isn't really supposed to be important, but I couldn't help but wondering who all these people with guns were and what they thought they were trying to do. And how the other gang guys found him before Javier (did they also have a transponder thingy? how?). And what was the point of Stephen Root and Woody Harrelson, really?

Also, is it just me or is the "creepy psycho guy with weird mannerisms" thing pretty much played out? Every time I see one of these characters, it just makes me think of Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, sniffing gas. Javier even carried around an air tank. The worst might be Gary Oldman's double whammy in The Professional and The Fifth Element -- both manifestly "hay let's try it a little creepier!" attempts that didn't work that well for me. Javier has his own thing going here, I guess, but still -- I'd kind of like to see a psychotic villain who doesn't play dumb games with people or sniff/inhale/ingest things or carry around some weird implement whose mere ridiculousness thereby makes him creepier. Have we come to a point in our culture where going around just killing people with a gun isn't creepy enough? You have to have a "thing" too? Kids these days.

In case you weren't sure, or time has clouded your memory, Buckaroo Banzai is not a very good movie. It's a tossup which is worse, the music or the acting (the acting of the good guys anyway). The story is absurd, but it's supposed to be, so that's fine. Overall the movie is passably entertaining, and that's pretty much thanks to the bad guys, especially John Lithgow's mad professor/power-mad alien overlord. He comes up with a lot of weird mannerisms and physical tics for his character that are good fun, and he's backed up by some good bumbling-alien-baddie work from Christopher Lloyd, Vincent Schievelli, and Dan Hedaya. One of the things I like best about their alien renditions is you can somehow tell who is who even when they're in crazy alien makeup; something in the posture and goofy mannerisms each uses. The other awesome thing about this movie is the names. I know it's sophomoric to laugh at names like John Bigboote, John Smallberries, and (my pythonesque favorite), John Manyjars, but if you didn't want sophomoric, you wouldn't be watching Buckaroo Banzai in the first place. So uh yeah. I'm not going to tell you to see it, but I'm not going to tell you not to see it either.

In the week or so since I saw and reviewed The Long Good Friday, I keep thinking about it. This may be due to the music, which is awesome (and listening to the soundtrack cd doesn't satisfy, since it contains relatively little of the movie's awesomeness), but I just keep thinking about certain scenes and wanting to see them again. So if I wasn't clear before, I'll say it now; you should see it if you are interested in any of the following: brits, gangsters, bob hoskins, helen mirren, snazzy music, 1980 london.

The Good German sure looked terrific, and Cate Blanchett did a great job channeling Dietrich and Bergman... but it was all in service of not very much. The story just somehow didn't gel, and there was just not much chemistry among the actors, or between the actors and their beautifully reconstructed postwar black-and-white berlin. Soderbergh was trying his hardest to evoke The Third Man but he succeeded only in reminding me of it and making me really want to watch it again (ditto with the Casablanca-suggestive ending). The successive revelations of war crime horror were supposed to be shocking and distressing, I suppose, but somehow they weren't; I'm not sure if it's because we've seen it too many times by now, or just because I didn't feel enough invested in any of the characters to be surprised or distressed when they turn out to have Done Horrible Things During The War. Tobey Maguire, by the way, was horrible. He apparently can't act and while I see what Soderbergh was trying to do with the sort of boyishly-innocent-slash-obliviously-sadistic american, it was just jarring. Clooney and Blanchett are a pleasure anyway though, and the movie really does look really, really good.

I took a break from going through travel photos and watched The Long Good Friday, which is a 1980 british gangster-type movie featuring Bob Hoskins as the gangster/businessman/developer and Helen Mirren as his wife. Lots of other good actors (nice sinister cameo by Pierce Brosnan) and some great great cars. There is also some pretty great music (check this). Hoskins is amazing; he's done a lot of goofy movies, but forget all that and see this. There's a beautiful closing shot too, that reminds me of the ending of The Third Man, or Glenn Close's bit in the mirror in Dangerous Liaisons.

Shane gets a lot of praise, and there was a lot of good stuff in it. But that kid all but ruined it for me. Look at this face, the stuff of nightmares. I understand his dramatic role in the movie, to be the innocent and represent the future, and to give explicit voice to Marian Starrett's conflicted feelings for Shane. etc. But honestly, he's like a flashing neon sign. A flashing, yapping, whining, cross-eyed neon sign. What's good about this movie is the way Shane is sort of understated, and goes through a mildly tragic arc (sort of spoiler, but not much of a surprise here) of trying to escape his history and finally accepting it. The values of the movie are family, friendship, and hard work. Unlike in most westerns, the expert gunmen aren't particularly admirable, and the farmers do not admire Shane's skill. All of which makes for a fairly effective movie, that quietly shows its point. Except for that damn child.

I thought this Slate article about whether our food supply is too clean was interesting. It confirms one of my personal biases -- that we spend too much effort trying to make the world safer from every possibility rather than just living with it the way people always have. In this case, the author suggests that part of the reason recent outbreaks of e. coli, salmonella and other food-borne infections have been so damaging (especially to children) is that, because our food is so clean, we no longer inherit/develop any protections against occasional illness. And the thing is, occasional illness is going to happen. we might be able to make our food cleaner, but we can never make it 100% pure -- and as we continue to try, we may just find ourselves becoming more and more vulnerable to that 0.000001% that slips through.

I think The Stranger was supposed to be a shocking exploration of the mind of evil, and of the power of self-delusion in the face of unimaginable blah blah blah blah. the basic story is: evil evil nazi (orson welles) escapes detection, settles down in small town as a schoolteacher, but is tracked down by a war crimes investigator (edward g. robinson). his new wife (loretta young) refuses to believe the truth as she learns it and tries to protect him until she has some big breakdown etc. I think it was striving for hitchcockian psycho-thriller, but it just didn't really work for me. the story was melodramatic and improbable, her behavior was melodramatic and improbable, and the "evil nazi war criminal" thing was not very compelling and seemed undeserved. I mean, making someone a nazi is kind of a cheap shortcut to making him Evil -- it'd be better to show it a little more and leave less of the weight on OMG NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMPS. surprisingly, to me anyway, there are a lot of really glowing reviews on imdb. don't get me wrong, it wasn't bad or anything, but it's no surprise it's not exactly top of the orson welles canon.

I think one major difference between some Japanese film (particularly anime and films in that style/tradition) and western "hollywood" film is that many Japanese films are intuitive, whereas most of ours (at least in the adventure/science fiction genres) tend to be more linear and logical. This type of Japanese movie will take some fantastic idea or situation and spin it out to see where it goes, in the fine science fiction tradition (think the future Tokyo of Akira, or this movie's concept that spiritual ailments and perhaps evil itself are caused by supernatural "bugs" only visible to certain people). But whereas western science fiction will tend to want to work out the logical implications of the situation, and then place some kind of fairly linear story in that situation, Japanese SF will use the situation to set up some kind of clash of people or cultures which climaxes in something intuitively weird and exciting that may not have a clear explanation, even in the logic of imagined universe. Intuitively and emotionally, it makes some kind of sense, but trying to figure out "what happened" may not really lead anywhere. That's the experience I sometimes have, anyway.

So, Mushishi. It's live action, by the way, though it's based on a manga, and the director and writers have been involved in much anime. The setup here is the above-mentioned concept that supernatural bugs can cause various kinds of spiritual sickness. Certain people, by birth or due to experiences, can sense these bugs, even interact with them or control them. The main character is a bugmaster by the name of Ginko, who wanders the countryside curing people of their bug-related ailments. We also follow a few other threads, including a young woman who records bug stories, and an old bugmaster woman who raises an orphaned boy. Of course, these threads begin to intertwine and we learn more about Ginko's history and what the bugs really are.

It's not always really clear what's going on, or what everything means. The story flows intuitively, with a feeling of balance even though I wasn't sure what was happening. There are some incredible moments of beauty in the film. And seeing this a couple of weeks after The Aerial, I especially enjoyed a scene where a bug infects the library of bug stories, and they must wrangle the stories back onto the pages, while words crawl all over the walls and ceiling like living things. So Mushishi gets a thumbs up with kind of a puzzled look.

I saw Running on Empty at SIFF, on the strength of this description: "An insurance salesman endlessly cruises the Autobahn, with a pay phone and the occasional unsuspecting customer as his only companions. Can a beautiful motel clerk release him from his spell?" The description also alludes to "Lynchian creepiness". But what it doesn't mention is how unrelentingly grim this movie is. It wasn't bad, actually pretty good, but was just really grim and depressing. These people live in a twilight world of making debasing sales visits, leaving messages for unseen and unheard families, and late night coffee in diners. There was some creepiness, but I wouldn't go expecting Lynchianism. I would expect it to be grim, is what I'd expect.