Movie - "Magic Trip" (2011)
Movie - "Red State" (2011) Friday, Sept. 16
Movie - "Drive" (2011) - The European aesthetic of Michael Mann's 1981 debut, "Thief" gets filtered whole-hog through the lens of a bona fide European, Nicolas Winding Refn, the tooth-grinding auteur behind "Bronson" and "Valhalla Rising." It's a whack-job movie, with a pulsing 80s-centric synth soundtrack, some truly syrupy drama, a Melville-ian procedural approach to the underworld and a jaw-dropping collection of violence. Are we supposed to laugh when Ryan Gosling's cheesy satin jacket gets blood-spattered and he continues to wear it? Or when he literally stomps the head off a minor thug? Or when Albert Brooks' homicidal mogul mobster returns a murder weapon to its burnished box full of knives?I see through the movie's pretense, I anticipated its inspirations, I seriously questioned the logic of the denouement ... and yet I have to say I'll probably pay to see "Drive" again on the big screen within the next week.
Thursday, Sept. 15
TV - "Archer" - Season 3, Episode 1 - "Heart of Archness, Part 1" - Hilariousness.
TV - "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" - Season 7, Episode 1 - "Frank's Pretty Woman" - More hilariousness.
TV - "102 Minutes That Changed America" - Awkward, sensationalistic title aside, this is an absolutely amazing documentary about Sept. 11. Way more nuanced and subtle than standard "History Channel" fare (although that's where it appeared).
The film consists entirely of amateur video shot on 9/11, in New York, from 8:48 to about 10:30 a.m., synched chronologically by timecoding. There's no narration, no interviews, no talking heads and minimal captioning -- you know what happened, anyway.
Even so, the film is harrowing, repulsive, mesmerizing and at times beautiful in a terrible, fiery way.
The tension that grows between the two plane crashes is almost unbearable (all the spectators are aghast ... but you always know that there is so much more awfulness to come). And yet the footage is so captivating and so carefully edited that I actually was surprised when the second attack hit. Then again, we are seeing people fall to their death when that happens....
Wednesday, Sept. 14
Movie - "Meek's Cutoff" (2010) Tuesday, Sept. 13
Movie - "Our Idiot Brother" (2011)
Monday, Sept. 12
Movie - "Valhalla Rising" (2009) - Second viewing. It was slightly more coherent this time -- not sure if that comes from seeing it again or from watching it at a reasonable hour on a school night.Sunday, Sept. 11, 2011
An unintentional triple-feature of films that have just one thing at all in common -- they're about extremely angry dudes.
Movie - "Super" (2010) - Wants to stick our noses right up in the mess, the better for us to appreciate the extreme reality of the carnage, but it also wants to say, "Hey, where's your sense of humor?" This is a deeply confused movie, both in its tone and its ideas.
Movie - "Comedian" (2002) - A decent documentary, but eight years after my first viewing the center strikes me as smug rather than breezy. It alternates between super-successful grizzled vet Seinfeld (who talks constantly about how crazy it is that he's back working as a road comic rather than relaxing on the beach) and up-and-coming comic Orny Adams who is never once shown having any kind of fun at all. He would've eventually killed his own career, but this movie did him the favor. Watching somebody with this many self-esteem issues get this kind of hatchet job is like watching someone who's petrified of firearms get shot in the face with a cannon. The resulting movie would be unbearable if Adams wasn't already thoroughly hate-able.
Movie - "Valhalla Rising" (2009) - Apocalypse Now meets ... Medieval Times! Which is not to say it isn't kind of beautiful.
***
TV - "Breaking Bad" - Season 4, Episode 9 - "Bug"
TV - "Curb Your Enthusiasm" - Season 8, Episode 10 - "Larry vs. Michael J. Fox"
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