Death to Smoochy film posterI try my best not to speak in hyperbolic run-ons. When I get excited for a film I have recently watched, I have been known to say things like, “that was one of the best films I have ever seen” or “this has the greatest script of any film of the last 30-years!” Well, I am going to have the same trouble limiting my excitement for this film… kind of. You see, I want to say things like, “Death to Smoochy is the worst film I have ever seen” or “this has the worst script of any film of the last 100-years!” This movie pushed me to my near breaking point. The story, basically about to different children-entertainers competing for a television time slot, does its best to define the word “inane.” The two entertainers, played by Robin Williams and Edward Norton, have been written to be such polar opposites that their extreme personalities leave little for the audience to empathize with. There are uninteresting subplots and guileless relationships, but this film’s greatest feat was its complete lack of charm. Avoid this film at all costs.
Saw VI film posterOk, so I watched Saw VI (2009), without having seen Saw III, IV, or V. I was a giant fan of the original Saw, but after the first sequel was a complete let down I just stopped following the franchise. I honestly don’t really remember what happened in the second film, but I am pretty sure the series’ main antagonist Jigsaw either died or was going to die, and that chick from the first flick was going to take over the family business. So now I jump right into VI and low and behold, nothing makes sense. I know what your thinking and I will be the first to say it; even if I had seen every film leading up to VI it still wouldn’t make any sense. In all honestly, I think I enjoyed the sixth entry into the Saw saga more because I had missed three of the five films that came before it. The kills are still pretty inventive, and their extreme dedication to stay clear from both humor and camp entertainment all but guarantees Jigsaw will not evolve into the wisecracking prankster that was Freddy Krueger. All in all if you have put yourself through Saw-Saw V then you practically have to watch this film. From what I can tell the creators have no interest in anything other than the further convoluting of an already incomprehensible plotline. It’s on Netflix Watch Instantly, so have fun?
Shutter Island will be in my top 10 of the year. I have watched it at least four or five times, and with every viewing I find another reason why Martin Scorsese is considered a master. He was one of the few rock-n-roll directors that survived the 80’s and he continues to prove himself with one fantastic film after another. Shutter Island is a film that is very similar to tone as the director’s 1991 remake Cape Fear, but you can definitely see a tighter, more focused feature with Shutter Island. His adaption of Dennis Lehane’s novel I feel only enhances the morbid dread that permeated the book, while enhancing the medical facility and its inhabitants with a life few filmmakers could.
Not a masterpiece, but I do think the film’s plot is as gracefully portrayed, as the source material would allow. I will not get into plot or spoilers, but I will say I was completely intrigued until the end, comfortable with the films respective twists and turns, and was never confused or felt something did not make sense. I would love to discuss certain aspects of the film that would contain spoilers (which is basically everything) so if anyone wants to, leave your opinions or questions in the comments section below.
Shutter Island film poster
I am surprised how completely divisive Leonardo DiCaprio seems to be for so many people. I rarely hear someone say they just like the actor, its either an extreme love or a deep seeded hatred for the star. I am not ashamed to admit that I am totally in love with the guy. Other than that damn accent in Blood Diamond (2006), there are very few movies with DiCaprio that I don’t absolutely love. I have enjoyed everything he has made with Scorsese, and I have no problem confessing he is one of my favorite-working actors. His Boston accent is not perfect in Shutter Island, but it has gotten a lot better since The Departed (2006). Very few performers can emote like DiCaprio can, and I can always feel the palpable ferociousness he brings to each film.
I know I have dodged the film, but I really don’t want to get into the plot. I hope anyone who hasn’t seen this film does seek it out, and I urge him or her to avoid watching the trailer. Just know that you will be taken for a ride like only the director of Taxi Driver (1972) and Bringing Out the Dead (1999) could, and it is obvious he is having a blast. The camera never stops moving. It sporadically scans the asylum like a nervous patient, unable to trust what is right in front of the lens. Scorsese takes cues from classic thrillers, specifically Hitchcock and his Vertigo (1958), and its with these traditional tricks and MacGuffins he is able to maintain both interest and enjoyment. This flick is everything it wants to be, a skittish B-movie with a plot as brittle and sensitive as a true schizophrenic. Let me know what you think of the flick.
It seems logical enough. You have only 14 days to save the world from total annihilation when a runaway asteroid the size of Texas is making a beeline for Earth, so what do you do? You decide to send both super sophisticated spaceships that you just happen to have already to go, and both of the super sophisticated Armadillo drilling rigs you just happened to have lying around. Sounds like a solid plan. Thank God Harry Stamper and his crew of silly sex offenders are more than willing to trade in their grease stained coveralls for a shiny astronaut getup. This movie is ridiculous I challenge anyone not to totally love it. The actions scenes just barely hold up, the dialogue is borderline seizure inducing (do I need to quote the famous “animal cracker” scene?), and the premise is so stupid as to not be believed. But in the end it doesn’t matter. The cheesy Aerosmith ballad aside, Armaggedon is a flick I have no problem revisiting… unlike the other asteroid film to come out that summer. I don’t care if Morgan Freeman was the president or Frodo knows how to ride a motorcycle, Deep Impact sucked.
Dumb & Dumber posterMan, Dumb & Dumber was a perfect way to cap off a week of finals! I cannot believe how well this movie holds up. Seabass, Mary Swanson, Gas-man… there are so many great characters in this flick. This was a must own VHS for anyone my age when it was released 1995, and I can remember watching it three or four times a day during the summer. It only took 27 viewings to notice all of the misspellings during the opening credits, and about 140 viewings before I had every single line memorized. It is a shame both Jim Carrey’s and the Farrelly Bros. career post Me, Myself and Irene hasn’t been more stellar. All three of those guys have a real talent to push a simple premise to its hilarious extreme. Hopefully I Love You Phillip Morris well help win me back over onto team Carrey, but until then I will just have to stick to the classics. Next up, Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls.
Ang Lee’s 2005 film Brokeback Mountain tells a simple, and tragic, love story. Two men, Ennis Delmar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), meet as cowboys on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming, and leave as closeted homosexual lovers. Starting in the outspoken homophobic Midwest of the 1960’s, Ennis and Jack must try their best at masquerading throughout their daily lives as heterosexual family men. It is only during their annual “fishing trips” the lovers are able to come together and openly experience the fleeting seconds of true love their weekend escapes afford them.
Sadly, after nearly 20-years of living a lie, both within and without, Ennis regrettably concedes to the social and emotional turmoil his double life has caused him and declares to Jack that he no longer wants to see him. When Jack is accidently killed on the side of the road in his home state of Texas, Ennis is left with only the shirt and denim jacket Jack wore during their first summer up on Brokeback Mountain. The film closes with Ennis delicately and symbolically hanging up Jacks’ denim garb in his closet, along with a lifetime’s memories filled with love and regret and grief, slowly closing the closet door and walking away.Brokeback Mountain film poster
BrokebackMountain is a beautiful film that refreshingly serves no agenda other than supporting solid filmmaking. Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography is stunning, and along with Lee finds a way to silently capture all of the power and heartbreak in Ledger’s performance without becoming distracting. I had watched this film once before during its theatrical release in 2005, but it was only during my second viewing that I really appreciated what Lee had achieved. His lovers are gay, but Lee is not so much concerned with their sexual tendencies. No, Lee wanted to explore what affects living a lie would have on a man. The director’s 1993 film The Wedding Banquet told the story of a gay couple having to pretend they were straight for a week so one of the men did not have to come out to his Taiwanese parents. In this first film Lee loosely probed the effects of living a lie, but Brokeback pushes it even further and explores Ennis Delmar, whose entire life is a lie.
Besides both being about closeted gay relationships, Brokeback Mountain and The Wedding Banquet could not be more different as far as tone and themes. The Wedding Banquet offers a somewhat humorous comparison between homosexuality in the apparently progressive 1990’s America and the opposing conservative Taiwan. Fitting nicely into Ruby Rich’s list of “new queer cinema” in the early 1990’s, The Wedding Banquet’s story is surprisingly innocuous. Lee is far more interested in the cultural conflicts the homosexual relationship forces than the actual relationship itself. In William Leung’s essay So Queer Yet So Straight the author explains, “At its core, the film is an old-fashioned comedy of errors made queer.” (29) Lee does not make gay films, just films that have gay characters. What I find most interesting is Lee’s ability to employ queer relationships, and all the social and cultural baggage that may come with it, and create two films that are both completely different and both are not necessarily about homosexuality. Where The Wedding Banquet uses its gay relationship to explore a Taiwanese son’s desperation for parental acceptance, Brokeback Mountain examines the lives of two lovers who cannot be together. When I said Brokeback served no agenda I meant it. This is a tragic love story, not a liberal propaganda film trying to push a message. Ennis Delmar is lost in a world he was raised to hate, stuck in-between a loveless socially accepted marriage and the passion he feels for a man he cannot have. “The protagonist is not a melancholy prince or an overachieving king, but a queer cowboy with a passionate need to love.” (Leung, 33) Delmar, unlike The Wedding Banquet’s Wai-Tung Gao (Winston Chao), is not just hiding his gay-lover from his family. I would theorize that Delmar went on to marry and have children with his wife Alma (Michelle Williams) to create barriers to help him hide from his homosexual tendencies.The Wedding Banquet film poster
It may seem odd at first that Lee, a Taiwan born, American educated, heterosexual director would be capable of making such politically vacant films about a topic that is so very controversial. With The Wedding Banquet it could at least be argued that Lee had an agenda to bear down on the strict cultural limitations found within his own personal Taiwanese background. But how does a Taiwanese-American family man so perfectly tell Ennis Delmar’s story? Leung answers, “…there could not have been a more suitable director for Brokeback than Ang Lee, for the simple reason that only a director with no agenda to push and no ax to grind could have maintained this tragic balance. From their animalistic sexual encounters… to their painful separations and joyous reunions… Ennis and Jack demonstrate that love is reducible to no single political, ethical, philosophical, or theological position.” (33) It is by Lee’s uncomplicated proposal of the lovers that the film successfully achieves its greatest feat. Where The Wedding Banquet showed the comedy that may occur when you try to be someone your not, Brokeback Mountain dared to show the tragedy that most definitely will occur when you spend your whole life fighting against who you really are.
Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 film Yojimbo was the precursor to the great Italian westerns made famous by Sergio Leone in the 1960’s. Himself inspired by the American director John Ford, Kurosawa transformed a single village from feudal Japan into a dusty war zone. Similar to many of his earlier works, Kurosawa succeeds with Yojimbo by creating complex, sympathetic characters and setting them in locations full of rich, palpable atmosphere. Be it a confused tale of mixed-up agendas and memories like in Rashomon, a re-imagining of Shakespeare’s Macbeth again set in feudal Japan like Throne of Blood, or an American western told with samurai swords instead of pistols like Yojimbo; Kurosawa was a master of ambience and tenor.
Yojimbo stars Kurosawa regular Toshiro Mifune as the “man with no name,” a master-less samurai (ronin) who one day wanders into a small village in the middle of a bloody civil war. Mifune uses his wits and his superior sword fighting skills to manipulate both of the town’s gang lords currently at war with each other. By playing both sides, double dealing, double crossing, and never hesitating to use his lethal blade, Mifune cleans up the streets by being both an amoral conman and a loyal samurai.
Toshiro Mifune in Throne of Blood
Although not as haunting as Throne of Blood or as humorous as Yojimbo’s quasi-sequel Sonjuro, this film is a perfect example of Kurosawa’s ability to create a completely believable environment. The director is capable of pure occidentalism, borrowing themes and motifs from American western pictures and then believably engaging these western techniques in his oriental setting. In Rachel Hutchinson’s essay Orientalism or Occidentalism? Dynamics of Appropriation in Akira Kurosawa the author explains that Japanese cinema is, “… set up as confined, limited and in need of techniques and ideas from the West, achieving success when it assimilates or incorporates Western Cinema.” (174) Yojimbo is a classic American genre film, but at the same time Kurosawa is able to assimilate, embracing its “japaneseness.”
Yojimbo film posterWhile Throne of Blood was an adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic play, many of his other films deal with the samurai, and his code of honor called bushido. Kurosawa seems fascinated by Japan’s ancient warrior, and never hesitates to put him and his ethical code to the test. In Rashomon the only truth the audience knows for sure is that a samurai has died. Between the disheveled remembrances of all concerned, it is just as easy to accept the samurai’s version of the story as the bandit’s or the wife. In Yojimbo, Mifune’s samurai is a ronin, left master-less assumedly during the Tokugawa Shogun’s era of peace. Although a time is never given in the film, I would speculate that Kurosawa might be making a comment about the samurai’s transition from noble warrior to bureaucratic paper pusher during the Meiji restoration of the 19th century. During the years leading up to the end of the Shogun’s reign and Emperor Mutsuhito’s goal of unifying Japan, the samurai class and way of life was slowly becoming extinct. During the feudal era of Japan a samurai served only his lord, dedicating his life to his master. The ronin in Yojimbo has no lord, and instead takes advantage of the two bosses’ own belief that the samurai would serve whomever he chose wholeheartedly. Like the warriors of the Meiji restoration, men were expected to honor not their lord, but their boss. In the heavily bureaucratic restructuring of Japan’s government during the last half of the 19th century, the samurai/master relationship evolved into a subordinate/superior relationship. Where there once was love and honor between two men was now just a respect, easily transferred to the next man brought in to replace the last boss. Even though the ronin in Yojimbo does commit honorable actions throughout the film, I would argue he purposefully manipulates everyone involved by his actions and their own assumptions of the bushido code.
Be it a commentary on the lost way of the samurai, or just another example of Kurosawa’s “appropriation of the western genre in the 1960s,” (176) Yojimbo is an incredible film. Its village and characters serve the story and the ronin, while Kurosawa’s ability at producing the perfect ambience for his films is no different in this samurai-western. Perhaps not as accessible as Leone’s own A Fistful of Dollars, Toshiro Mifune as the wondering warrior with no name is far more enjoyable than Eastwood’s cigar chomping cowboy.
Monday, December 20, 2010 at 12:10PM 
Death to Smoochy film posterI try my best not to speak in hyperbolic run-ons. When I get excited for a film I have recently watched, I have been known to say things like, “that was one of the best films I have ever seen” or “this has the greatest script of any film of the last 30-years!” Well, I am going to have the same trouble limiting my excitement for this film… kind of. You see, I want to say things like, “Death to Smoochy is the worst film I have ever seen” or “this has the worst script of any film of the last 100-years!” This movie pushed me to my near breaking point. The story, basically about to different children-entertainers competing for a television time slot, does its best to define the word “inane.” The two entertainers, played by Robin Williams and Edward Norton, have been written to be such polar opposites that their extreme personalities leave little for the audience to empathize with. There are uninteresting subplots and guileless relationships, but this film’s greatest feat was its complete lack of charm. Avoid this film at all costs. 
