A list of every movie I paid to see in a theatre this year and a few brief thoughts on each

In chronological order, based on the wad of ticket stubs I just pulled out of the right pocket of the sweat pants I bike to work in every day. The designation "(R)" after the title stands for "repertory", as in not a new release. Some films are a couple years old but not designated thusly as this is their first domestic distribution.

Das weiße bande (The White Ribbon)
Michael Haneke, 2009; German
Haneke's most mature film by a pretty wide margin, largely by dint of the fact that it's the first one in which he longer seems to be consciously trying to torture the audience. A dark, subtle and excellent film.

The Hurt Locker
Kathryn Bigelow, 2009; English
Terrific movie. Great lead performance, great cinematography. Actually made me think it's be kinda neat to do that job, which is probably the worst job possible.

El Secreto de Sus Ojos (The Secret In Their Eyes)
Juan José Campanella, 2009; Spanish
An intriguing mystery, a well told story, and just the sort of "quality entertainment" that comes out a few times a year and gives critics an excuse to complain that there aren't more like it. It helps to understand a little about Argentinian politics in the 1970s (which I didn't), but still quite enjoyable even if you don't.

Un Prophète (A Prophete)
Jacques Audiard, 2009; French, Corsican, Arabic
Did you know that in French prisons the inmates get fresh bread every day? My favourite detail from the film. Good solid crime drama, classic story of the kid who starts at the bottom and winds up in charge.

Madeo (Mother)
Bong Joon-ho, 2009; Korean
Excellent, one of the best films I saw this year. Bong reminds me of the early Cohen brothers, when each of their films was like a weird genre exercise. This one's a noir movie; he's also got a crime procedural, a quirky indie comedy and a monster movie to his credit.

Kasi Az Gorbehaye Irani Khabar Nadareh (No One Knows About Persian Cats)
Bahman Ghobadi, 2009; Persian
A bit thin as far as the story goes, the film is essentially an excuse to show a bunch of actual bands from around Tehran. No complaints here. My favourites: the angular math-rock band, the rappers and the stoner metal band. Despite my lack of emotional investment in the plot, I still found the ending ruinously unsatisfying.

Cremaster 1 (R)
Matthew Barney, 1995
The one with the blimps and the Boise State football stadium. Not the first one filmed, but a good start as far as viewing them goes.

Cremaster 2 (R)
Matthew Barney, 1999; English
Shown together with the first one, and a big improvement. Here's where the series gets really interesting. Also the only one with any dialogue, at least that I can remember. Also the one with Dave Lombardo from Slayer on drums.

Cremaster 3 (R)
Matthew Barney, 2002
The longest and best of the series, this one is awesome. It's the one with the Chrysler Building and the Guggenheim Museum in it. The demolition derby in the lobby is one of the most audacious things I've ever seen filmed.

Micmacs à tire-larigot (Micmacs)
Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2009; French
Overlooked this year, probably because it's not quite as substantive as Amelie or City, but I loved it. I wish I could think of a better word than whimsical, but for Jeunet's films I'm not sure there is one. A delight.

Please Give
Nicole Holofcener, 2010; English
Great performances, great script, a terrifically scathing indictment of white liberal guilt. I thoroughly enjoyed this one. I don't think I've ever seen Catherine Keener play a character this vulnerable. Nor Oliver Platt one this funny.

Cremaster 4 (R)
Matthew Barney, 1994
The one with the race cars. The whole enterprise starts getting a little old here, but still a lot of interesting imagery to keep one occupied.

Cremaster 5 (R)
Matthew Barney, 1997
I thought this one was pretty boring. But overall I'm glad I had a chance to see the whole series.

Breathless (R)
Jean-Luc Godard, 1960; French, English
I had never seen this one before. It's good, but I wasn't floored. I guess when soemthing's been so influential for so long it can't possibly seem so revolutionary anymore. I think my favourite moment was early on, when the main character suddenly break the fourth wall, saying something poetic and oh-so-French right to the camera before telling the audience, "You can go screw yourself."

Winter's Bone
Debra Granik, 2010; English
Again, good but not great. This is being hailed by many critics as the best film of the year. Maybe it is. I mean, it didn't blow me away, but I'm hard pressed to find any flaws with it. And the lead actress's performance really is as good as everyone's saying it is. Plus, hey, Laura Palmer.

Underground (R)
Emile de Antonio, Haskell Wexler, Mary Lampson, 1974; English
An obscure documentary about the Weather Underground, who were all fugitives being sought by the FBI when interviewed for the film. A bit meandering, but an important time capsule. It's hard to imagine this sort of extreme political activism happening today, schizophrenics in Arizona notwithstanding.

Cyrus
Jay and Mark Duplass, 2010; English
Hilarious. Jonah Hill's performance is staggeringly weird; I really hope he gets a Best Supporting nomination. A positive indicator of the possibilities when the mumblecore generation get real budgets and actors.

Mother and Child
Rodrigo García, 2009; English
A great movie trapped inside of an OK movie, struggling to get out. There's some good storylines, writing and acting here, but the whole thing is way too heavy-handed. Really, couldn't Garcia have just let Annette Bening's performance breathe a little?

Kynodontas (Dogtooth)
Giorgos Lanthimos, 2009; Greek
The most freakishly weird movie of the year. In a way, it's the kind of Michael Haneke movie that Haneke himself may have finally outgrown.

The Kids Are All Right
Lisa Cholodenko, 2010; English
Revolutionary because it's so middle of the road. It's about a gay couple, but their sexuality is never even addressed as any sort of political or social issue. With all that stripped away, we're left with a straightforward family comedy about a slightly non-traditional family.

Inception
Christopher Nolan, 2010; English
This is one of those movies that's really good until you start thinking about it later, at which point it all sort of falls apart. For one thing, they cross the streams one too many times, so to speak. First if you get shot in a dream you wake up, but in this dream you go into a coma. First you should never use actual locations as dream locations, but in this dream you have to. I'm willing to accept just about any premise in a sci-fi story as long as it's kept consistent. Also, the climactic action sequence was too long, the build-up not long enough. Seriously, I wanted more investigation, less action. The set-up felt a bit rushed, whereas the actual mission was just endless.

Life During Wartime
Todd Solondz, 2010; English
I watched Happiness for the first time just a few days before watching this sequel, so I was able to recognise all of the characters and references pretty easily. An enjoyable film, but without a character as singularly challenging to the audience as Dylan Baker's in Happiness. Still, the little kid was pretty intriguing.

Pauline à la Plage (Pauline At the Beach) (R)
Eric Rohmer, 1983; French
They showed a whole pile of Eric Rohmer movies at Lincoln Centre for like a month, but this was the only one I caught. I'd never seen any of his movies before, and was pleased with this one. It's pretty light as subject matter goes, but the way he draws relationships between characters is effortless and masterful.

Nadja (R)
Michael Almereyda, 1994; English
A New York 90s indie time capsule, from the cast to the music to the jokes about Brooklyn. Drags a bit in the third act, but worth seeing just for the use of Pixel Vision.

Mesrine: L'instinct De Mort (Mesrine: Killer Instinct)
Jean-François Richet, 2007; French, Spanish, English
A good solid crime drama with a fantastic performance at its centre. Vincent Cassel is at once terrifying and irresistable.

Mesrine: L'Énnemi Public No. 1 (Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1)
Jean-François Richet, 2008; French
At some point here the story starts to drag a little, as it devolves into little more than one lurid crime setpiece after another. Worth seeing if only for the presence of Ludivine Sagnier, my favourite holy-shit-she's-hott actress of the year.

Catfish
Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman, 2010; English
I liked this movie, and for the most part I believe that it's true. The only part I think they might have fudged is when they sudfdenly discover all of her lies over the course of one night in Colorado. I'm guessing they knew some of that stuff already and decided to shoot a scene for the sake of the story. Other than that, I have no trouble believing it.
The problem I had with it was their decision, when editing the film, to focus on their own experience, rather than use the footage as an opportunity to paint a portrait of the film's true heart and soul, Angela. She strikes me as a genuine outsider artist in the most fascinating sense, as in like Henry Darger-level, and I don't mean her paintings. I think the community of characters she has created (and is probably still creating) online is an immersive installation piece in a medium we have yet to even name. The filmmakers were not her victims, as they seem to be trying to make themselves out to be; they were her audience.

Never Let Me Go
Mark Romanek, 2010; English
While the sci-fi elements of the story present an intriguing premise that could have been explored further, the film instead focused on a somewhat dreary love triangle. But the idea of making a sci-fi film with almost no visual effects is an interesting challenge. Beautifully shot, by the way, as anyone familiar with Romanek's music videos would expect.

Enter the Void
Gaspar Noé, 2009; English
One of the most self-indulgent films I've ever seen, and I mean that in the best possible way. After the seizure-inducing opening credits, the opening scene in which the protagonist smokes DMT and just trips out on spacey visuals for about ten minutes sets the pace of the film so well that I was actually a little disappointed when the story was finally introduced. Love it or hate it (and I don't think anyone was on the fence about this one), you can't tell me you've ever seen anything like it before.

demonlover (R)
Olivier Assayas, 2002; French, Japanese, English
I loved this movie, absurd premise and all. Complex plot, characters whose motives and allegiances keep shifting, everything you want in a smart thriller. I also liked the global aspects of the film, a common thread of Assayas's more recent work. Besides the location shoots in both Tokyo and Paris, the film contained enough spoken English and French that neither can really be called the film's primary language.

Punching the Clown
Gregori Viens, 2008; English
A no-budget comedy about a struggling novelty songwriter starring a struggling novelty songwriter playing himself. I don't care for the musical genre, and had a lukewarm response to the film for pretty much the same reason: like most novelty songs, it's good for a few chuckles but not funny enough.

Fin août, début septembre (Late August, Early September) (R)
Olivier Assayas, 1998; French
Earlier Assayas in a more conventional French mode. A circle of friends lives, loves and copes with one of the group's terminal illness. A well-written and well-acted drama that dragged just slightly.

Four Lions
Chris Morris, 2010; English
If you're not familiar with Morris's previous work, go to a bootleg website and find some torrents of his British TV shows, specifically Brass Eye and Nathan Barley. As a brilliant and fearless satirist, a quirky comedy about a group of bumbling, slapstick English Muslims looking for a way to become martyrs by blowing up some infidels seems like a natural fit for him. Works in a lot of ways you wouldn't have expected.

Fair Game
Doug Liman, 2010; English
What seems on the surface a good, solid Hollywood political drama is actually a rather angry film, with Joe Wilson painted as a crusading hero, Valerie Plame the unfortunate victim of his tireless efforts to expose the truth. Highlights the underlying tragedy of our ongoing war in Iraq, in case we'd forgotten.

Tiny Furniture
Lena Dunham, 2010; English
A charming debut in the quirky-indie-comedy genre. Dunham is certainly a talent to be watched, but what subject matter will she turn to when she's exhausted the possibilities of talking about herself?

Raging Bull (R)
Martin Scorsese, 1980; English
Bill Simmons, who's seen a lot of them, believes that rewatchability is one of the primary criteria for a great sports movie. For this reason he says that Raging Bull doesn't cut it: certainly it's an admirable cinematic achievement, but too painful an experience to watch over and over. I disagree. I went through a phase when I watched this movie several times a week. Granted, this was a particularly dark period of my life, when I was subsisting largely on White Castles and cheap Scotch, but Raging Bull was there for me, and that's what counts.

The Agony and the Ecstacy of Phil Spector
Vikram Jayanti, 2008; English
The fascinating subject matter overcomes the poor documentary construction and leaves a film that is riveting in spite of itself.

Love and Other Drugs
Edward Zwick, 2010; English
For some reason the reviews led me to believe this was a smart indie comedy, but it's really a pretty generic Hollywood rom-com. A few bonus points for some smart criticism of America's pharmaceutical-industrial complex, but neither that nor the repeated exposure of Anne Hathaway's breasts (not to mention Jake Gyllenhall's buttocks) is enough to save the film.

Waste Land
Lucy Walker, 2010; English, Portuguese
This documentary about an artist making portraits out of trash from the world's largest landfill is surprisingly heartwarming, but also a bit unchallenging. There's very little conflict here, which is certainly not the fault of the filmmakers. It's a documentary; some things in life go off without a hitch.

True Grit
Joel and Ethan Cohen, 2010; English
After the delightfully weird and sadistic A Serious Man, the Cohens have swung back to mainstream entertainment mode, and done a fine job of it. The real star of the film is the idiosyncratic language, rescued from the original novel after having been watered down by the earlier adaptation starrting John Wayne. The cast clearly relishes chewing on some of the more convoluted turns of phrase, and it imparts a unique tone to what might have otherwise been a fairtly straightforward Western.

Favourites (new releases only):
Top five of the year in no particular order
Mother, Please Give, Cyrus, Dogtooth, Enter the Void, Four Lions
(I know that's six, I couldn't choose one to leave out.)

Lead performances:
Kim Hye-ja in Mother, Catherine Keener in Please Give, Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone, Vincent Cassel in both Mesrine movies, Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit

Supporting performances:
Niels Arestrup in A Prophet, Amanda Peet in Please Give, John Hawkes in Winter's Bone, Jonah Hill in Cyrus, Nigel Lindsay in Four Lions

Ensemble performances:
Everybody in The Kids Are Alright and Life During Wartime was really good.

Cinematography:
Micmacs, Never Let Me Go, Enter the Void

Editing:
Inception, Enter the Void
And by the way, regardless of whatever complaints I had about Inception overall, I had no trouble following the five simultaneous storylines, in which time itself is moving at a different pace in each, during the climactic sequence. If that doesn't win the Oscar for editing, then I have no idea what an editor does.

One more interesting note: six of the new releases listed above were directed by women. Other than one co-director on a documentary, none of the repertory films were. This could mean that the selection process for the canon is heavily phallocentric, but I doubt it; I think there are just far more female directors nowadays. A good trend.

Movie review: The Agony and the Ecstacy of Phil Spector

Phil Spector is the most important record producer in the history of Western popular music. And he would be more than happy to elaborate on that importance for you. Spector agreed to be interviewed extensively for this documentary during his first trial for the murder of Lana Clarkson (the trial ended in a mistrial; Spector was tried two years later and convicted). During this time, he explains why Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson are overrated, why Martin Scorsece and Robert DeNiro owe him their careers, and compares himself to Miles Davis, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Johann Sebastian Bach. All while protesting the various injustices of his concurrent trial.

Director Vikram Jayanti has stitched together these and some archival interviews, footage from the trial and vintage perormances of Spector's best-known hits into an oddly directionless film that seems to be trying to be several different movies at once, but never tries very hard. He presents some of the details of the murder case and sort of explains most of them. He plays a bunch of Spector's songs while running quotes of critical praise on the screen.

So what is this movie? Is it the story of the trial? Yes and no. Jayanti shows lawyers and witnesses testifying about just enough contradictory evidence to sow doubt in the viewer's mind as to Spector's guilt or innocence, but never makes any attempt to build a story out of the footage. So, OK, no. There's an occasional subtle parallel between the trial footage and the song being discussed, like when John Lennon's "Woman Is the N----r Of the World" plays under testimony about Clarkson's flagging career and struggles with depression and substance abuse, but it hardly qualifies as a running theme. Likewise, the critical appraisal of Spector's music feels underdeveloped. The quotes shown on screen are all from the same critic, and no one other than Spector is interviewed.

Still, the film remains compelling and often riveting due to the presence of Spector himself, surely one of the 20th century's great weirdos. At one point the interviewer(s? I can't tell if there are one or two voices from offscreen) takes what seems like a pretty big risk by asking Spector if his notorious afro hairdo was intentionally funny. Spector, surprisingly, concurs, and explains that the coiffure was intended as a tribute to Ludwig van Beethover, Albert Einstein and Detroit Pistons power forward Ben Wallace. And that hardly stands out as the most ridiculous statement to leave his mouth.

Spector is currently in jail, serving a 19 year sentence for the murder of Lana Clarkson. We can't mourn the loss of his continued musical output, as the last album he produced was released in 1980; he has been little more than an eccentric recluse ever since. But as Hunter Thompson once defiantly assured himself before an impending arrest, "Many great books have been written in prison." Please, Phil, if you're reading this (and I know you're not), use this time to crank out your memoirs. I'd read 'em.

Movie review: Tiny Furniture

If you met Lena Dunham for the first time without knowing who she is, you might be surprised to find that she's best known for her body. This is because a video Dunham posted of herself in a bikini, bathing and brushing her teeth in a fountain on the campus of Oberlin College, received well over a million hits on YouTube, and inspired a litany of somewhat mean-spirited comments questioning Dunham's qualifications for a career in lingerie modeling.

What's great about Dunham is that she doesn't seem to give a shit. In Tiny Furniture, which she wrote and directed, Dunham appears, at various points throughout the film, wearing only a shirt and underpants, wearing only a sheer body stocking, and even nude in the shower (from a tasteful distance). And yet it never seems as though she is rubbing her delightfully rotund¹ and imperfect form in the viewer's face á la, say, Beth Ditto. Instead she seems not to even notice her own body. Whereas some women choose to proudly rebel against a society that teaches them to hate their bodies and to starve, wax, nip, tuck, bleach them to perfection, Dunham has chosen to simply ignore the whole thing and worry about something else.

Like what to do with life after college. Tiny Furniture may be one of the most openly autobiographical "fictional" films ever made, and Dunham lays out the excrutiating details of what I assume is her life with a verve that would make Ross McElwee blush. Dunham plays Aura, who, like Dunham herself, has recently graduated from Oberlin College and moved back in with her mother in Tribeca. Her mother, an artist of some renown best known for her photographs of miniature furniture, is played not by a professional actress but by Dunham's own mother, an artist of some renown best known for her photographs of miniature furniture. Aura's sister is similarly played by Dunham's sister.

Beyond the film's verisimilitude, it is essentially a straightforward coming-of-age indie comedy. Aura reunites with Charlotte, her New York party-girl best friend, becomes estranged from Frankie, her bookish college best friend, gets a shitty job, quits her shitty job, and romantically pursues shitty men.

And while no one goes out of their way to make things any easier, the men in Aura's life are particularly awful. Jed is a freeloading ingrate who stays at Aura's (mother's) apartment, eats her (mother's) food, drinks her (mother's) wine and complains of having no money, all while sharing Aura's own bed without a hint of sexual reimbursement. Keith, on the other hand, is a manipulative sleaze who tries to get Aura to get him Vicodin from Charlotte, talks constantly of his problems with his girlfriend, then finally screws Aura in an abandoned parking lot. And no, not in a car. The scene is very cruelly and deftly presented as rock bottom for the main character. All this while Aura pines for her college boyfirend, a shallow hippie who moved out west after graduation to find himself. One hopes that Dunham has had better luck in the time since making the film. Lord knows Aura deserves better.

In short, the film is enjoyable if not earth-shattering, and makes the most of its genre's conventions without ever transcending them. It's in many ways the very definition of a promising first film. Based on this, I'd probably go see her next one.

Tangents & Clarifications

1. Full disclosure: I'm a sucker for big thighs, and think Dunham's kinda hott.[Return]

Brief Review Of Hideous Movie

KIDDING! I just liked the way the joke worked. I just saw Jahn Krasinsky (main guy on American The Office)'s adaptation of David Foster Wallace's short story collection Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. Get it? My joke, I mean.

The flick's not bad. It's not great. It's OK. Only a few days left at the IFC on 6th so I figured I'd better see it.

The "plot" concerns a grad student interviewing men about relationships (and a few other topics) for a nebulous research project about feminism. There's a few scenes about her own relationship ending and a few more about an overzealous student of hers and his shocking paper, but there's really not much of a story per se.

You can kind of tell that it's a first-time film written and directed by an actor. It's got a great cast of indie film (and rock! Duder from Death Cab!) vets; they each take turns addressing a juicy monologue to someone just to the left of the camera; and there's some clumsy "arty" editing with a few heavy-handedly ironic cuts.

So overall it's a little insubstantial as a movie, and I probably wouldn't recommend it too highly to a non-Wallace fan. But as a fan letter-slash-loving tribute to Wallace I think it's worth seeing. Krasinsky certainly doesn't desecrate the man's work, and is reportedly a big fan. He shows up at all the conventions, and has spent several years making it his own pet project to get Wallace's work to the screen (big or small). The closing credits start with a great Wallace quote. There's a copy of Infinite Jest on a table behind the desk in Tim Hutton's office (look for it). Details a fan would insert for other fans to recognise. As a fan, it made me happy. Definitely puts Krasinsky in the upper tier of the list of people I'd like to see develop the Jest as a 30-hour HBO miniseries.

Movie review: The Wrestler

We all have great moments in our lives. You have your first kiss, you lose your virginity. You get married, you have your first kid. You get into the college you really want, you land your dream job. If you're an athlete, maybe you make the varsity team or maybe you hit a home run in the World Series. If you're an actor, maybe you get the lead in the school play or maybe you win an Oscar. They can even arise from bad things. You finally take that last drink, you reconcile with an estranged relative, you save a baby from a burning building. If you're lucky, you have a lot of them and they're not too front-loaded.

Robin Ramzinski, aka Randy "the Ram" Robinson, had all his great moments many years ago, and now he's just running out the clock. He used to wrestle in arenas, now he's stuck in VFW halls. I saw The Wrestler a week ago, and it's stuck with me since then, and I think I've finally figured out why.

A lot of what I've read cites the scene at the autograph signing as the saddest scene. Randy, surrounded by fellow washed up wrestlers, signs Polaroids for petty cash and hawks his videocassettes. He looks around at the guy in the wheelchair, the guy with the fluid bags taped to his ankles, the guy taking a nap because he doesn't have any fans, and realises where all that glory has left him. But to me the scene that follows is the saddest: Randy's love interest, an aging stripper, makes the rounds of the club, offering private dances to guys who turn her down without taking their eyes off the younger, firmer talent on the stage before them.

I liked all the parallels director Darren Aronofsky draws throughout the film between wrestlers and strippers. They sell their bodies for mind-blowing amounts when they're young, naively believing the good times will never end, then suddenly have nothing left when they wake up old one cruel day. And no one cares. I liked the contrast between the relationship each has to their name: Randy clings to his, complaining when the supermarket where he toils during the week issues him a name tag that says "Robin"; while stripper Cassidy yearns to have someone just know her as Pam.

If you haven't seen the movie yet and want to, stop reading now.

Later that day after we saw the movie, my wife asked me what I thought happened after the ambiguous ending. Does he mount a triumphant comeback? Does he die in the ring? I told her I thought nothing special happened. He gets hurt again, maybe suffers another minor heart attack, decides to hang it up for good, spends the next few years drifting in and out of wrestling, partly because he can't stay away and partly because he needs the money, tries a few more times to reconcile with his daughter and keeps screwing it up, tries to make a go of it with Pam but it doesn't work out, and dies anywhere from five to thirty years later, depending on how cruel the fates are, lonely and broke.

What happens after isn't the point. The point is that when he leaps off that turnbuckle, when he flies through the air, when he delivers his final Ram Jam to the hated Ayatollah in the climactic moment of their long-awaited rematch, that's the last great moment in Robin Ramzinski's life.

The Bollywood Drinking Game

Crack a brewski and fire up the DVD, yaar!

This is version 1.0. When I think of anything else I'll revise it. Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments.

Preliminary
Navigate to the subtitles menu. Take one drink for each language the disc offers.

Boy Meets Girl
Drink if she's engaged. Twice if it's arranged.

Drink if he's got some hyper-masculine life-threatening job, like helicopter pilot or racecar driver.

Drink if she puts him in his place via unexpected athletic superiority. Twice if both actors visibly suck at the sport in question.

Drink if he pulls a bafflingly insensitive practical joke. Do a shot if it involves faked death.

The Musical Numbers
Drink for each costume change. All of them.

Drink for each gratuitous panoramic shot of the beautiful Indian countryside. Twice if they were nowhere near this mysterious lush valley when the song started.

Drink if someone picks up an instrument and pretends to play it. Twice if they're not even close to being in synch. Thrice if they look like they're not even sure how to hold it. Jäger shot if the instrument in question isn't audible on the soundtrack.

The Language Barrier
Drink whenever there's a grammatical error in the subtitles.

Drink if you hear an English phrase amidst the dialogue, like "How's it going" or "Excuse me" (doesn't count if the whole scene's in English).

Waterfall (see def. 2; def. 1 might come in handy as well)
Start drinking when the comic relief character's one joke gets really old. Stop drinking when the scene ends or you finish your beer, whichever comes first.

Group Activities
If anyone laughs during a serious scene, they have to drink.

Drink if you recognise an actor from another movie. Everyone else drinks if you can remember the title. (NOTE: This counts for the stars, too, so as soon as someone shouts out the name of another Shahrukh Khan movie the first time he appears on screen, everyone else has to drink.)

And Finally...
Chug one at the intermission.

And do a shot when you break the three-hour mark.

Movie review: Gone in 60 Seconds

So did you know that shitty Nicolas Cage movie from a few years back was a re-make? Me neither till P— told me about the original. As I was logging on to Netflix without taking the time to blink, he backpedalled a little: "Dude, I mean, it's not a good movie. I don't want you to rent it and get pissed at me. It sucks."

He's right. Sort of. The first hour is bad, and not so-bad-it's-good bad, just flat-out bad. It's a 70s B-movie and an self-produced vanity film. Now imagine the problems of both compounded. The last forty minutes are good, and not just so-bad-it's-good good, but fucking awesome. It's just one long car chase, but it flies by. The driving is terrific and the editing is well-paced.

H.B. "Toby" Halicki¹ was an outsider auteur of the best kind. After making his fortune in the tow yard business, he decided he needed – needed – to make a movie in which to crash a few of his 400 cars. This is what separates the few Toby Halickis of the world from ordinary folks like you and me.

Halicki wrote, produced, directed and starred in Gone, did all the stunt driving himself and distributed the film himself once it was complete. Tragically, this proto-Jackie Chan self-reliance eventually cost him his life. After making two more films of a similar ilk, Halicki was killed in a stunt accident on the set of Gone in 60 Seconds 2.² The sequel was never finished.

For a movie made explicitly as an excuse to wreck shit, there is surprisingly little action in Gone's first hour. Maindrian Pace (Halicki) and his cronies are established as bounty-hunter-type car theives who steal specific models to replace wrecks.³ They go out "disguised" in bad wigs and ridiculous fake moustaches that make them look sort of like the Beastie Boys in that "Sabotage" video.⁴ Early in the film Pace makes a deal with some South American gangsters to steal 48 high-end cars in a week for $200,000. The rest of the films revolves around the gang trying to fill this seemingly-impossible contract.

The acting is painful, the script worse. The cast are all non-actors essentially portraying themselves, presumably so that the roles wouldn't seem too challenging. Pace's brother is played by Halicki's brother, most of the cops are played by local poice officers.⁵ A cute idea, but it doesn't help. Unlike, say, Clerks, in which the amateurism is buoyed by a clever, precocious script, Gone features a solid hour of non-actors woodenly reading dialogue penned by a non-writer.

The turning point occurs when Pace must steal one last car (Eleanor, q.v. note 5 sub) only to be spotted by the cops, who were tipped off for reasons not worth explaining. He leads them on a high-speed orgy of destruction through seven counties of southern California.

There are several elements that make the chase great:

• The driving is excellent. Halicki really could have made a living as a professional stunt driver (as opposed to say, writer or actor), and his skills are clearly on display in some of the wider shots. Some of the wrecks are pretty spectacular too.
• The pacing varies quite a bit, which keeps it interesting. Rather than barrelling forward for forty straight minutes, the cars come to a full stop a few times as the drivers stare one another down for a few moments of who-blinks-first tension.
• As the action drags on, the film cuts away to a few shots of the chase's aftermath: innocent by-drivers being bandaged up and hoisted on stretchers by paramedics. It's rare that a filmmaker makes a point of showing the human cost of an extended action sequence, and the shots somehow work as a counterpoint to the thrills and spills on display further up the road.
• A shitload of cop cars get wrecked, always a welcome sight in any film. Apparently Halicki bought a bunch of them at an auction for $200 a pop for the express purpose of destroying them in his movie.⁶ Looks like he picked up a firetruck or two as well.

The ending, which I won't spoil, is a bit of a letdown. It's clever, but feels anticlimactic after what led up to it. But who cares? You don't watch a movie like this for the ending.

Tangents & Clarifications
1. For a more in-depth biography, check-out Halicki's Wikipedia page, but consider yourself warned: the text, a painful object lesson in the downside of Wikipedia's by-the-people-for-the-people ethos, reads like a desperate plea for the benevolent intervention of a sympathetic copy editor. [Return]
2. The re-make, directed by the DP on Halicki's second film (The Junkman, 150 cars destroyed) and produced by the inimitable Jerry Bruckheimer, is referred to in all of Halicki's promotional materials as Gone in 60 Seconds 2000, though I don't recall it being marketed as such during its theatrical run. [Return]
3. It doesn't make much sense in the movie either. [Return]
4. Odds that this is merely a coincidence, and the Beasties have in fact never seen Gone: 13.2 million to 1. It took me a little while to figure out the whole disguise gimmick, by the way, because sometimes the thieves wear their wigs and appear to have awful 70s haircuts, whereas other times they remove their wigs and reveal awful 70s haircuts. [Return]
5. It's telling that the only acting credit in the film's opening sequence is "Starring: Eleanor"; Eleanor is the nickname of the yellow Ford Mustang Halicki drives in the climactic chase sequence. And lemme tell you somethin', next to the rest of the cast, that car can act. [Return]
6. Who knew you could just go buy old cop cars? Do they let just anybody do this or do you need to cook up a story as to why you need them? I want one. [Return]

Movie review: American Hardcore

I read Steven Blush's American Hardcore a few years back and loved it. It's comprehensive, stuffed with great quotes and stories, a little bit disorganised and bluntly opinionated. Just a terrific object lesson in writing an entertaining and enlightening oral history by a guy who was there for a lot of it. On top of that, I'm always biased in favour of books about American independent music in the 80s. I find the stories of these bands more inspiring than any others in rock history. It's partly a personal thing; I toured in a van with my own unknown band for a few years, so I know how hard it is.

But I think what I admire most about these bands is that, prior to 1984, none of them ever caught a break. The biographies and histories of all worthy artists, scenes, genres in rock all have a "big break" moment that functions as an early turning point in the story. Sam Philips discovered Elvis. Brian Epstein found the Beatles. All the San Francisco bands were signed by major labels. Same with the British class-of-'77 punks and the CBGB denizens just before them. Same again with Seattle's finest in the early '90s. Let the glory years begin. A few years later comes a second turning point and the glory years come to close. A key member dies, a key member quits in a huff, the drugs result in shitty records, the fans lose interest.

Hardcore never had that first turning point. The second one, the end of the line, came in 1984. Blush posits the disillusion resulting from Reagan's re-election as the death blow, but ignores the equally damning effects of success. Following the critical success of R.E.M.'s Murmur, indie rock was suddenly a viable commodity in all its forms. This led to 1984's critical landslide (q.v. #'s 4, 6, 8, 14, 20) and within two years Husker Du and the Replacements had deals with majors.¹ What made hardcore unique for the first few years was the complete lack of commercial expectations. None of those bands, in their wildest dreams, ever believed they could wind up on MTV someday. No one thought they'd ever make a dime. Once the very possibility of success was introduced, the scene was never the same.

But back to the big break, or lack thereof. For the bands whose greatest years passed before 1984, there is no moment in their story when their popularity suddenly began snowballing, took on a life of its own. All of these bands, particularly the big four (Bad Brains, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat) slogged it out on the road month after month, built their fanbases one kid at a time, built their legacies one show at a time. Oftentimes interviews with has-been bands for rock retrospectives are suffused with a sense of loss. We had it all, man. When I look back? We thought it would never end. But hardcore bands? They never had anything to lose.

So last night I watched Paul Rachman's companion film and... not the same. For one thing, the movie suffers from the same shortcoming as any narrative film adapted from a novel: you can fit more detail in a book. In the case of a documentary history, this detail can be crucial.

Biggest problem, right off the bat: the Dead Kennedys are barely mentioned.² It's a glaring enough omission to make me think there must be a reason behind it, most likely a refusal of the band members to be interviewed for the project.³ But Blush's book has pages of quotes from Jello Biafra, so why sit out the film? Because Feral House is an independent press but Sony is a big corporate film studio? Who knows?

Other than that, the raw material is there. There's some decent stuff in the interviews once you wade through the usual we were just like fuck you man and fuck your rules man nonsense that always pervades in conversations with aging punks. The archival footage is terrific, the kind of stuff that makes you say, "Thank God someone actually thought to film this." It's not that surprising to see good footage of, say, Bad Brains or Minor Threat, but the onstage brawl at an SS Decontrol show is an absolute treasure. It's one thing to hear grizzled dudes bragging about just how violent the scene was back then, it's quite another to confront the indisputable photographic evidence.

The film's biggest problem isn't the gaps in the source material, though, it's the editing. There's almost no attempt to really tell a story. Most of the interviews and live clips seem thrown together. There's an intro (Reagan-disco-yuppies-arena rock-blahblahblah) and an outro (the scene petering out in the wake of Reagan's re-election). About two-thirds of the way through, there's a half-assed attempt to cover each of the major scenes from a geographical standpoint (like the book's chapters). But other than that there's no narrative thread, just one visceral impression after another. This may have been an artistic choice by Rachman, but if it is it doesn't work. It comes off looking too haphazard, like an editor's early draft. For an audience already enamoured of the music and well-versed in its history, this isn't such a big deal. But if you're looking for a coherent introduction to the story of hardcore, you won't find it here.

The most surprising impression I took from the film, one I had never really read about or heard discussed before, isn't even mentioned explicitly in the film. Being straight, I don't have much of a gaydar, but as I watched one interview after another, it occurred to me that more than a few of the subjects seemed gay. It may have been the way they talked, the way they dressed, even the way some of their apartments were decorated. There were a few scattered bands with out members at the time (Husker Du, MDC, Big Boys), but nothing that's ever been addressed as a dominant theme of the era's history. I'd be curious to hear a gay man's take on the film, particularly one who doesn't know much about hardcore.

The more I think about it, the more it makes sense. Here was a subculture that attracted kids who felt like outcasts from a surburban world that offered little quarter to its non-conformists: a conservative environment in a conservative era. Both the bands and the crowds were composed of teenagers, the quintessential age of sexual confusion. There was male bonding all around, immediate emotional release in the music and (intense, shirtless) physical contact in the pit. There were very few females involved with the scene and even fewer songs written about them. The whole scene was a tailor-made refuge for the emotionally confused and disenfranchised seeking some sort of social connection. I wonder how many kids in those bands and in those pits grew up and came out. I really think this could be the great untold story of the hardcore scene.

Tangents & Clarifications
1. R.E.M. would take longer to follow, but keep in mind their records were already going gold on IRS; they didn't need a major yet. [Return]
2. The Misfits also go unmentioned in the film, despite getting an entire chapter of Blush's book. But while Danzig and the boys may have built one of the most resilient and bafflingly rabid followings of any of the era's bands, in a way they aren't really part of this story. Certainly their own story deserves to be told, but in the context of the national hardcore scene being discussed here they're really only a footnote. So here you are. [Return]
3. Blush, incidentally, is also not interviewed. He's credited as the film's screenwriter, but there's no voiceover narration either. I suppose he gets points for not wanting to stroke his own ego by preening before the camera, rattling aff a string of I-was-there tales, but considering how much of the book is told in first person, it seems a bit odd. [Return]

Movie review: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

I've never been that good at playing video games, but I admire the craft of the ones made in the last ten years or so, particularly the really cinematic ones. As a result, I actually enjoy watching people play them, sometimes more than playing them myself. I can remember watching someone play some samurai adventure game on a PS2 once with a buddy of mine and being riveted. My buddy and I kept wanting to watch all of the expository video sequences between each level, much to the frustration of the poor player, because they're all like nine minutes long.

Watching Final Fantasy is like watching somebody else play a video game. If that sounds apppealing, this movie is for you. It's also fun if you like playing spot-the-celebrity-voice-actor, but if you're any good at it you'll nail them all in the first fifteen minutes. The plot has a lot of mystical mumbo-jumbo about Earth spirits and the like, which I generally kind of like, but after a while it drags a little. Overall it leaves a similar impression to that of Team America (the puppet movie by the South Park guys): "Wow, what an amazing technical achievement! Bummer about the script."

It reminds me of a time I was in college, hanging out in somebody's dorm room and a this dude's roommate rented some anime spy thriller called Golgo 13 (a title with which I was familiar, coincidentally, from its tie-in Nintendo game). About two-thirds of the way through the movie as the plot was beginning to grow a bit tedious, my friend turns to his roommate and goes, "Hey, I just figured out how you can get your money's worth from this rental: if you squint at the screen just right, it sort of looks like a real movie."