My blogging dedication has been severely lacking in the last month. I blame this on a plethora of things, most recently: the lack of internet at home, a herniated disc in my back, and the drugs that cloud my mind but block the pain. These things are not so bitchin’, but the following movies are. Even though it’s a little late, here’s my top ten list of 2008. Although the validity of this list is a little questionable since I haven’t yet had the opportunity to see movies like Revolutionary Road or Gran Torino. Damn you, Salt Lake City. Here they are, in no particular order:
David Fincher is the guy who directed Fight Club, The Game, Se7en, and Zodiac. So the fact the source material for his most recent endeavor comes from a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald about a man who’s born old and grow young a little confusing. Especially when you consider the PG-13 rating.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is one long-ass movie. Let’s break it down into three parts, each one hour long. The first act is where the movie shines (and it’s probably the only part the Academy voters will remember when awarding those little statues in February). Brad Pitt plays Benjamin, the new-born old man. He’s left on the steps of a retirement home, where he’s adopted under the guise of her nephew by a worker there named Queenie (Taraji P. Henson). Despite the fact he’s growing young, he fits right in among the oldies. The special effects are remarkable in this first act, this is where the film actually merits attention from Oscar. Well done on this count. Benjamin meets a kindred spirit in Daisy (Cate Blanchett), the granddaughter of one of Ben’s roommates. They start this on again off again thing that drags out over the following two hours, but really only manages to keep your attention for less than half that time.
Daisy gets seduced by New York life, and becomes one of those self-congratulatory Manhattanites, a very successful ballet dancer, and, well, kind of a ho. In the meantime, Ben is off experiencing the world by means of a tug boat, visiting ports all over the world. This travelogue teaches Benjamin a lot of important things. He has his first love affair (with a watered down Tilda Swenson), his ship and crew are commissioned into the Navy where he’s confronted with a lot of death, and finally, he returns home a man.
It’s here, when Benjamin and Daisy are coming close to the same physical age, that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button just gets dull. It’s not Blanchett’s fault, who shines bright. It’s not Swinton, or Henson who did what they could with Eric Roth’s script. It’s not the cinematographer’s fault, who made most scenes look like beautiful paintings. The problem is simply that the story just goes way to long, much longer than even Fincher can sustain, and way longer than Pitt can. Pitt seems to loose all gusto once the make-up and special effects go away. I don’t know (and I don’t really care) if it was big studio demands that made Fincher water this story down to a tame PG-13, but it definitely seemed to restrain some of his artistic capacity. What’s most frustrating is this film is leading the Oscar-buzz race for Best Picture. And it’s just not worthy. Benjamin Button is too long, rambles too much, and leaves you let down after months of promising hype. Even so, it has some shining moments and probably merits a viewing before Oscar night.
Variety released the official list of 2008 releases. I’ve been a bad blogger with finals, traveling for the holidays, sleeping a lot. So instead of a review, I’ve just listed the 104 of these I saw. That’s one every 3.5 days. Not to mention the non-new releases I watched. This explains why I don’t have a social life. Three movies I listed in red because while I haven’t seen them, I will most definitely check them out before New Year’s. Check out Variety’s full list here. I encourage you to make a similar list, I’m curious at how unbalanced my own involvement with film is compared to other cinephiles. Oh, and the best Sundance ticket buying time I got was January 8th at 3pm. If anyone is feeling charitable, got a better time and wants to share, let me know. Top ten list to follow soon.
Appaloosa
Australia
Baby Mama
Ballast
The Bank Job
Be Kind Rewind
Blindness
Body of Lies
Boy A
Brideshead Revisited
Burn After Reading
Cassandra’s Dream
Changeling
Charlie Bartlett
Choke
A Christmas Tale
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
City of Ember
The Counterfeiters The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Deception
Doomsday Doubt
Drillbit Taylor
The Duchess
Eagle Eye
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
The Fall
Fool’s Gold
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Funny Games
George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead
Ghost Town
A Girl Cut in Two
Hamlet 2
Hancock
The Happening
Happy-Go-Lucky
Hellboy II
The House Bunny
In Bruges
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Iron Man
I’ve Loved You So Long
Jumper
Let the Right One In
The Matador
Max Payne
Milk
Miracle at St. Anna
Mongol
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
My Blueberry Nights
Noise
The Other Boleyn Girl
Paranoid Park
Pathology
Penelope
Pineapple Express
Quantum of Solace
Quarantine
Rachel Getting Married
Redbelt
Reprise Revolutionary Road
RocknRolla
Role Models
Roman de Gare
The Ruins
Savage Grace
Semi-Pro
Sex and the City
Sex Drive
Slumdog Millionaire
Smart People
Snow Angels
Stop-Loss
The Strangers
Synecdoche, New York
Teeth
Tell No One
10,000 B.C.
Timecrimes
Towelhead
The Tracey Fragments
Transporter 3
Transsiberian
Tropic Thunder
Twilight
21
27 Dresses
Untraceable
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
The Visitor
W.
WALL-E
Wanted
War, Inc.
What Happens in Vegas
What Just Happened?
The X-Files; I Want To Believe
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
Oh boy, Baz. You may have got Nicole Kidman to jump on your train, but you’ll never get me. I must believe that somehow Hugh Jackman got shanghai-ed into this too, and it’s a shame. This sort of manipulative emotionalism is what gives film (and most likely Oscar) a bad name.
Australia is directed by Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge, Romeo + Juliet), who co-penned the script with a slew of other people. Based on his past few films, you’d think Kidman would play a fairy off a bottle of Absinthe, and Jackman might be play a midget on acid. But this isn’t the spaztastic Luhrmann of old, this is a straight up attempt at an epic. Kidman plays Sarah, an English aristocrat that goes to Oz to convince her husband to sell a cattle station they own in northern Australia and to come home. But when she gets there, she meets hunky Dover (jackman) who rattles the lady right out of Sarah, and gets her swooning over his soaped up, rippled body in the moonlight. Sarah’s husband is killed by aboriginal savages, and she quasi-adopts a ‘creamy’ (what the love children between white men and aboriginal women are named), this is the catalyst for a whole bunch of adventure! Then it’s up to Sarah to rattle the cowboy right out of Dover so they can all, hopefully, end up a happy family. But then WWII stands in their way. And the Catholics.
I dry heaved a little writing that. It sounds like a soap opera, even though it’s slightly better than one. Remember how Michael Bay thought Pearl Harbor was his ticket to the Academy’s…? I don’t want to be too dramatic, but Baz completely missed the boat on this one. It’s not like he didn’t have time to develop the story either, Australia runs a lengthy two hours and forty five minutes. Most of this time is spent focusing on dusty, tear-streamed faces with a dramatic original score explaining to me how I’m supposed to feel the pain of love lost, or the pain of a mother losing a child, or how sad it is to shoot kangaroos. The whole movie wasn’t a lost, the surreal sets and cinematography were quite impressive, and pleasant to look at. Although I didn’t really care about the characters (most likely due to the overly cliched scripted), Kidman and Jackman performed sufficiently. Mostly though, Luhrmann loses points on difficulty. If he had even attempted a better film, I might respect it more, but he went the low road on this one, hoping to inspire a tear here and there. I hope Oscar doesn’t get fooled. You’ll probably be entertained watching Australia, but you’ll feel gross about it when you leave the theater.
Get this: apparently we (the human race) aren’t taking care of the planet, and should really get our act together. A big thank you to all those involved with The Day the Earth Stood Still for bringing this to our attention. Who would have realized this without such a poignant and relevant movie to tell us?
The Day the Earth Stood Still follows brilliant Princeton scientist Helen (Jennifer Connelly) who gets roped into one crazy ass situation: a big colorful sphere landed in Central Park! She’s got a step-son (a weak Jaden Smith) who is a remnant of a short but meaningful marriage that ended in the death of him, not her (not only has this film gone green, but it clearly supports interracial relationships!). She’s part of a team that’s thrown together (by John Hamm no less) to solve the problem of an unidentified object traveling a bajillion miles an hour through space, straight towards Manhattan. It turns out that the UFO contains Keanu Reeves in the role of Klaatu, the human–err–thing that will decide the fate of planet Earth, one of only a few planets in the universe capable of supporting complex organisms. It’s up to Helen to use her wit to (and a Nobel Prize-winning friend played by John Cleese) convince Klaatu that there’s a good side to being human.
Keanu actually excels in this role that requires showing absolutely no emotion. He’s found his pigeonhole. Jennifer Connelly is the reason I saw the film (those hips could drag me to anything), and she’s okay. But, like the film, her performance is unremarkable and overly done. This movie is a literal remake, and a repeat of scores of films made in the last twenty years. There’s not much to draw your attention here. Director Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) performed on par with the mediocrity of his past films. Perhaps it wasn’t his fault though, the cliched script by David Scarpa (an update on the 1951 script by Edmund H. North) didn’t allow much wiggle room for anything above average. It’s not that the film is terrible, you’ll probably consider yourself entertained for it’s one hour and fifty minute run time, but it’s just all been done before. The biggest issue I have with the film is this: why are movies like The Road and Deception getting pushed back til next spring, when half-assed pieces like The Day the Earth Stood Still could have taken a hit for the team?
I was in Nordstrom’s today, and while I was in a changing room, across the intercom came this message: Paging Beatrix Kiddo, Beatrix Kiddo, code 58. This had to be a joke, right? Then I thought about Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke, where he discusses the secret codes that stores use over their intercoms during emergency situations, to let employees know about terrorists, or spilled toxic chemicals. I got nervous, bought my shirts and left. I wonder what it was. I never found out.
Ugh. This movie is shit. I get that it’s just an action flick, that I shouldn’t expect very much, but does it have to be so bad, you cringe every time there’s any dialogue? There’s nothing new, or interesting in Olivier Megaton’s Transporter 3. Nothing.
While there’s not much of a plot, this is what I did manage to gather between the sloppy, lackluster fight scenes and car chases: There are a bunch of greedy Americans, they’re trying to manipulate the evil Russians, oops, Ukranians. There’s the suave British guy that looks good without his shirt on, who’s assisted in his attempts to stop all this crime by a clever French guy. And of course there’s a dark, troubled Ukranian girl to tag along (this seems to be the movie accessory of the year).
The script is laughable. Seriously, it’d be difficult not to giggle as poorly written lines are delivered even worse. Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen should be ashamed of writing something so vapid. Jason Statham is fine in a role that requires no more depth than an extra. Natalya Rudakova is ridiculously horrible, and should have her SAG card torn up for this performance. And the most blame lies with Megaton who seems to have put as much effort into this film as I put into brushing my teeth in the morning. The action sequences aren’t even exciting. Some of the fight scenes were well choreographed, but are short, and unbelievable. It’s just not something you should waste money on. Even those with the lowest expectations will be disappointed. Avoid this.
His name is Gus Van Sant, and he’s here to recruit you. Van Sant seems to be an auteur of the best kind: doing things only because it pleases him. Don’t believe this? Watch Gerry. While all his movies provide something interesting, his forays into mainstream narratives usually yield the greatest rewards. Milk falls into this category and will please everyone willing to give it a chance.
Milk follows the true life story of Harvey Milk (Sean Penn), the first openly gay man to be elected to major public office. It follows him from his days at an insurance company in New York where he meets the love of his life Scott (an perfectly even, warm and funny performance by James Franco). The two move to San Francisco, seeking a sort of asylum among other semi-closeted gays during a time when you could legally be fired, or kicked out of your apartment for being a homosexual. The film then focuses on his heroic campaign efforts finally resulting in a win, when Milk is elected as one of San Francisco’s City Supervisors.
This is the best ensemble cast of the year, without a doubt. Emile Hirsh, Josh Brolin (who plays the slightly homophobic fellow Supervisor Dan White), Diego Luna, Alison Pill, they all play their roles pitch perfectly. Penn is endearing and inspiring in his portrayal of this fallen American hero. The script deserves special recognition as well, penned by Dustin Lance Black (Big Love), as it brings a sense of realism often glossed over in political dramas.
The most credit however, goes to Van Sant who handled this piece remarkably well. If the Academy doesn’t throw him a bone with a nomination nod, I’m going to do something drastic. I didn’t want the movie to end, it was that good. A film celebrating this American hero and the fight for civil rights which he led, comes at a painfully relevant time, and perhaps it’ll bring a little more attention and humanity to the current unstable political atmosphere surround gay issues (get your shit together California). This is Van Sant’s best film to date, and without a doubt, one of the years best ten.
My blogging dedication has been severely lacking in the last month. I blame this on a plethora of things, most recently: the lack of internet at home, a herniated disc in my back, and the drugs that cloud my mind but block the pain. These things are not so bitchin’, but the following movies are. Even though it’s a little late, here’s my top ten list of 2008. Although the validity of this list is a little questionable since I haven’t yet had the opportunity to see movies like Revolutionary Road or Gran Torino. Damn you, Salt Lake City. Here they are, in no particular order:
