In which Zack Galifianakis goes anti-Between Two Ferns and plays the straight man to Rawkblog comedy hero Showalter’s character, an indie-rocker who doesn’t play instruments (nor shows). “Do you get it?”
Editor’s note: I watched (500) Days of Summer again recently and felt compelled to gush about it on Twitter, where I found that not everybody loves quite as much as I do — especially Rawkblog pal Sarah Spy. 1,000 words later, I’m still not sure who’s right. Get yr debate on with us after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
In bullet points:
* This movie wants so badly to be really good! It makes pop culture references and notes movie cliches and tries to self-awarely transcend them (but does not). It clearly invokes Mean Girls and the John Hughes filmography (also films starring charming redheads) and, especially, Saved, and features a sharp-tongued, wiser-than-her-years heroine who you root for from the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
Inception is, in many ways, the anti-Matrix. Its protagonists are not reality-warping superheroes; it offers no tangled web of religious ideologies to make sense of. Its characters are not grappling with fate, but serving their own purposes. And yet, it gives us worlds within worlds, real and unreal, dreams and waking life and what lies beneath both. In some ways, The Matrix is its better: Inception‘s action, a barrage of anonymous gunshots and punches, lacks the visual invention of the Wachowskis’ bullet-time or even the balletic choreography of the Bourne trilogy. But Inception, full of it as it may be, is not an action movie. It is a heist movie, a suspenseful one, and also a love story, set against the backdrop of complex hard science-fiction that requires one’s full mental energy. Inception is a thinking person’s summer blockbuster, if only because it requires you to pay attention: do so, and the dots will connect themselves.
The story tells itself better than I could, so I’ll spare you the details. But Inception, while not quite the masterwork of director Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, finds the writer-creator delivering his most direct, emotionally resonant statement. In The Dark Knight and its directorial predecessor, The Prestige, the characters concluded the films by spitting out terse proclamations of their motives, gruffly outlining Nolan’s themes — not the screenwriter cardinal sin of talking the plot, but perhaps a worse one: unearthing the subtext. His reliance on such oral deliveries reappears here, but in Inception‘s world, the key lines are evocative, almost poetic — they feel revelatory instead of the opposite. This is largely the product of the love story, a complicated, beautifully visualized relationship that finds Leonardo DiCaprio’s troubled Cobb examining who, exactly, Marion Cottilard’s Mal is to him through the lens of his own subconscious.
In its third act, Inception stretches the suspense’s elasticity almost to the breaking point, but the film’s brilliant last shot is well worth the effort. The film makes necessary compromises: it builds a world (a half-dozen of them, really) without an origin story and lets it run wild, which leaves much of it still mysterious (though vastly more believable than anything from Lost). It is, for better (mostly, this) or worse, a Christopher Nolan movie, one both as visionary and limited as his imagination. One can only wonder if he dreams of electric sheep.
As previously noted, I’m making my way through the Stanley Kubrick filmography; the time has come for A Clockwork Orange. Some really good moments, though not quite the cinematic mind-blower that The Shining or 2001 was, visually or pacing-wise. It felt a little grungy and less deliberate, which is in keeping with the material, to be sure, and the shocking violence stands in for the visual expanse of a film such as 2001 — still, I missed seeing the limits of Kubrick’s imagination at play.
It’s meant to be an allegorical film, but I’m not sure exactly what it meant to accomplish with its moral: essentially, it places anarchy against fascism, with neither an acceptable option for Man, caught in the middle with his primal urges toward sex, violence, fear. The film seems to present alternatives twice in the form of the prison’s free will-embracing priest (who arguably merely offers another form of indoctrination) and in our anti-hero, Alex’s, single act of selfless goodness, when he gives spare change to the beggar in street. This act is rewarded, of course, with a beating followed by a near-drowning. Does Kubrick mean this to say people can’t change? Or the equally cynical view that while evil begets more evil, in an evil world, so does good? Read the rest of this entry »
ABC
Few things in life sting more than a sour end to a long relationship, pulling inside the curtain to reveal your lover as a wizard of lies, cheating, heartbreak. I’m talking, of course, about myself and Lost. I’ll admit, I’ve changed, too. Our first time together was in December 2004, a few short months after the show’s September premiere. Over two days of sweaty marathon sessions, I watched 11 episodes and fell passionately in love. I watched them, I should note, on a DVD-R burned from ripped episodes gleaned from Bittorent. Hulu – and YouTube! – was then about as realistic a possibility as a flying car.
I was in college then, a sophomore months removed from the loss of my virginity and still yet to discover “blogging.” I was optimistic; I was listening to a lot of Wilco. In the 5-and-a-half years since, I dumped one girlfriend and moved in with a new one; watched journalism, my chosen profession, suffer one subarachnoid hemorrhage after another (get well soon, Bret); saw indie rock, my chosen musical genre, explode into something suddenly popular and exciting but increasingly unwelcoming; and after two years in the working world observing the inner corridors of entertainment news, turned what most would call cynical. (I prefer “pragmatic.”) But a lifetime of comic book reading, thank God, has let me retain some semblance of a sense of wonder, and I’m still amazed by a great album or a vividly imagined film or, to return to our subject, an endlessly intricate television show. I’m no angel, but Iet me be perfectly clear: it’s Lost that’s done me wrong. Read the rest of this entry »
For once, I’d like to put aside my critic’s cap and address this one as a fan. Iron Man 2 was fucking awesome. Worried by the raft of middling reviews (“Too much action! Too many villains! Too much everything!”), I waited until yesterday to see it; a mistake on par with picking Sarah Palin as a Veep candidate. Should’ve had more faith in Jon Favreau and Co., because there wasn’t a moment where I wasn’t completely pleased with what I was seeing on screen.
There’s more going on, yes, but the film kept the plot simple and linear, with Mickey Rourke’s Whiplash always clearly the main villain. The script was as sharp as one would want, with scattered laughs coming all the way through (Black Widow pepper-spraying a guard was a perfect sight gag) and Robert Downey Jr. still electric in the title role. I personally thought Iron Man could’ve done with more action; Iron Man 2 delivered. If it was too much for some, it bears remembering that this is a comic book movie and some of us would like to see things explode and robots punching each other. I thought it was better than Iron Man, believe or not, and am now trembling with tumescent glee at the thought of Thor. In short: Favreau for President.
(Jake astutely pointed out in the comments that an earlier draft of this post had a historically inaccurate analogy. Now, it does not.)
