A Room With A View

Several weeks ago, I wrote that life is too short to re-see A ROOM WITH A VIEW. I was wrong.

The fact is, life is too short, so we should see A ROOM WITH A VIEW at every opportunity. As each minute of watching the walking bobble-head known as Helena Bonham Carter make a Baxter out of Daniel Day Lewis stretches into an eternity, the glacial passage of time makes us feel that life, rather than fleeting, is a long, tedious trudge of geologic proportions.

I want to see this movie on my deathbed. It'll make me feel like I'm living forever.

Little Miss Sunshine

We meat Greg Kinnear's character early in LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE. He's
giving a motivational speech to an offscreen group and, while the
subject matter is a bit thin, he's swinging away. Since I do a fair
bit of public speaking, I immediately identified with him.

Maybe that's why I found LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE to be so hard to watch.
The movie spends its running time punching Kinnnear's character, a
father trying to put a hopeful face on hard times, directly in the
nose so many times that he eventually gives up and gives in. Movie
people call that kind of behavior "letting go" and seem to think it a
good idea. I just found it sad.

I found nearly the entire movie sad, so much so that I don't know why
people think of LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE as a comedy. It's a movie about
flawed people enduring trying situations and relationships, and it
makes us feel more sad than entertained.

Eternity and a Day

You know what's worse than watching a terrible movie your child
adores? Watching a supposedly fabulous movie that your wife adores
and that you just don't get.

Martin Scorsese presented Theo Angelopolous with the Golden Palm for
ETERNITY AND A DAY in 1998, and a film prof introduces the movie with
a bunch of gushing praise that DB made me watch while I burped the
baby and tried to amuse the older boy, so I suppose it's pretty good.
Additionally, DB routinely stopped and rewound certain shots and
scenes, oohing and aahing over the film's craftsmanship, a move which
made me feel all the more disconnected. All I saw was a muddy print
of a film telling a story I didn't understand about characters I
couldn't keep straight. Was Bruno Ganz kissing his daughter in that
one scene, or was it his mother or his dead ex-wife? And what was he
doing on that boat? And is he alive, dead, or something in between?
And what was the story on those musicians on the bus?

I left ETERNITY AND A DAY bored, baffled, and feeling like a complete
dolt. Somebody, please, explain this movie to me and tell me why I'm
supposed to like it. Until someone does, this will be one of those
titles that'll leave me scratching my head.

Shall We Dance

Here are a few direct quotes from my recent viewing of SHALL WE DANCE on TCM:

"Oh, my God. Look at that. This is what human beings are capable of."

"The pyramids, the moon landing, and this. Thank God for the medium of film to preserve this ... this ... beauty."

"When the aliens come and ask why they shouldn't eliminate mankind, I'm going to show them the 'Let's Call the Whole Thing Off' sequence."

"OK, those masks are creepy. Nothing's perfect."

Now, that's a movie.

Madagascar

My 6yo has been dying to show me MADAGASCAR. Tonight, I made the time to sit down and watch it with him.

Here's the worst thing about watching a terrible movie that your child adores: there's no escape. You can't pick up a paper; you can't check your e-mail; you can't strike up a conversation with your significant other. Your child is monitoring your attention like Big Brother, and brother, you'd better be paying attention.

MADAGASCAR assumes that New York and New Yorkers are inherently interesting. They aren't. MADAGASCAR assumes that pop-culture parody is more interesting than character - based comedy. It isn't. MADAGASCAR thinks racial and cultural stereotypes make for great entertainment. They don't.

Here's the story: a lion, a zebra, a hippo, and a giraffe all live at a New York City zoo. They're happy. Their needs are met by the attentive and competent staff. They have everything they want. Except for the zebra. The zebra's pen sits opposite a frescoe of zebras frolicking in nature, and said zebra hatches a plan to escape and see the wilderness for himself. One thing leads to another and, before you know it, the friends wind up on the island of Madascar - an place which, though it holds a population of over 18 million and has a serious deforestation and desertification problem, looks like that island from "Lost" and doesn't appear to have a single human within its borders. Some of the animals want to go back to New York, some love it on the island, and everyone has to figure out a how carnivore is supposed to get along with his herbivorous friends without
zookeepers bringing him steaks every night.

The movie feels NYC-centric. Its animals are proud New Yorkers, and MADASCAR thinks that jokes about which train runs to Connecticut generate big laughs. The movie so thoroughly roots itself if NY culture that one wonders whether anyone involved in the financing or production of this film ever step foot outside of Mahattan. I've passed through and flown over New York a few times - I mean, I can find the Museum of Natural History - , but I'm not particularly vested in that city or its denizens (In the collective. Shari and Andy are both great.). I didn't empathize with the animals' love of their metropolis and I didn't find the NYC-centric gags (Look! The police horse has a Brooklyn accent!) particularly amusing.

The movie, a Dreamworks production, loves pop-culture parody and references. After the towering success of the SHREK films, they've probably written it into the corporate bible. Problem is, those kinds of jokes age extraordinarily quickly. Many of them already felt passe, and many of them would've made me grown had I been watching alone. (Which I wouldn't have. At least, not past the first twenty minutes.) MADAGASCAR is supposed to be a comedy. It made my child laugh, but the gags that they mixed in just for me simply did not work.

Finally, we have stereotypes. Oh, how I love 'em. But the fat hippo as sassy-black-Big-Momma? Who are these people?

I'll tell you, MADASCAR hurt. But a dad's gotta do what a dad's gotta do.

The Accountant

THE ACCOUNTANT won the Academy Award for best short film of 2001. Someone gave it to me for Christmas (so I opened it early – sue me) for reasons I don’t entirely understand.

THE ACCOUNTANT’s biggest revelation is the fact that the guy who played the preacher in “Deadwood”’s first season now owns an Academy Award, as does one of the guys who play sleazy cops in “The Shield.” They produced and acted in the picture, and the guy who played the preacher actually wrote it. Good for him!

Here’s the setup: a down-on-his-luck farmer calls asks a shady accountant, who may or may not be demonic, to come take a look at his books and try to figure out a way to save the family farm. The finance-man’s recommendations are unconventional. They may damn the farmer. But they may work.

THE ACCOUNTANT hooks us with the strangeness of its titular character, and it keeps us through its natural and empathetic feel for its characters and their lives. It’s the kind of movie that provides a few chuckles, a few revelations, and a number of things to discuss after the show. If you happen to catch it on IFC, give it 38 minutes. It’s worth a go.

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

If BEERFEST was mildly disappointing, TALLEDEGA NIGHTS was crushingly
bad. I sat through the entire excruciating affair with a stone face,
utterly unable to buy into the comedy on any level.

Ricky Bobby is a boring, one-dimensional character. His nemesis,
played by emerging favorite Sacha Baron Cohen, is a boring,
one-dimensional character. In fact, every character in this movie is
boring and one-dimensional.

TALLADEGA NIGHTS tries so hard to be wacky and over-the-top that turns
out a wild misfire. Not only that, but it's insulting: it's one thing
to make a little extra money through product placement; it's another
to stop the action for a full-blown commercial thinly disguised as a
"joke" I want my money back.