Movies in January

Apparently I watched a lot of movies in January. Well, that’s my usual antidote to post-holiday burnout.

First up, the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading. Not as good as Fargo, but much more watchable than No Country For Old Men. Brad Pitt as the gym employee was fun, but George Clooney was the highlight for me (particularly the look he gives Tilda Swinton when he decides to take his big purple wedge and go; it was perfection).

Quin had a hankerin’ to see some westerns, a genre he’s not really familiar with. So for Christmas the boys and I loaded him up with western DVDs, mostly things I’ve already seen (namely, the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns – how had he never seen any of those?) I did get one that I had never seen before either: How The West Was Won. Apparently when this ran in theaters it was projected on three screens for a wrap-around effect, which I bet was really cool, particularly the scenes on the river or flying through the mountains. I didn’t like it quite as well as those spaghetti westerns but I liked the epic scope of the story. And seeing all the old stars when they were young, young, young was a treat.

The trailers for Wanted looked awesome, didn’t they? Sadly the movie was complete crap. Honestly, the depth of my disdain for this film can scarcely be measured. Partly it was the Mary Sue quality – the guy who works in a cubicle whose boss is a fat bitch and girlfriend is an unfaithful nag is secretly the son of an assassin and once he gets tapped for the family business he’s going to run around killing people and making out with Angelina Jolie. It felt like it was written in that cubicle. (Ironically, his boss has good reason to be a bitch – his work is pushed off to one side so he can spend all day Googling himself - and in his scenes with his girlfriend you wonder why she’s even still there since he couldn’t be more emotionally detached. Must be his rock-hard abs). I probably could have handled all that (maybe) if it weren’t for the nonsense about the tapestry woven with names in it by “Fate”. No one ever questions this; it’s just accepted that the names it spits out are people that have to be killed. No one questions the possibility that someone could cause these patterns to happen by programming or just fiddling with the machine. And in the end Morgan Freeman reveals that all of the agents were on the kill list by handing them paperwork – not even the pieces of tapestry (which he could easily fabricate if he wanted to, but never mind) and that’s proof enough for a massive murder/suicide. I will believe that bullets can travel in arcs, but I can’t buy people so incapable of asking completely obvious and necessary questions. And yeah, that was a spoiler there about how they all die in the end except the awesome MC, but believe me, you don’t want to see this movie. One last gripe: if you’re going to talk about God, talk about God, don’t rename it “Fate” but treat it the same way (to the extent of even saying “Kill them all and let Fate sort them out”). Fate doesn’t want things.

So OK, here’s a movie I was expecting to hate but really enjoyed: Mamma Mia, the musical of Abba songs. After Across the Universe I was reluctant to watch this one. I bought it but left it sitting on the bookshelf for quite some time until one night we were looking to kill some time before a west coast basketball game started and Quin had Aidan put it in. We ended up missing the first half of the game; this movie entranced all four of us. This movie isn’t an attempt to interpret the Abba canon; it’s basically an old-school Greek comedy about mixups and marriages that happens to use Abba songs in the telling (it even has a Greek chorus). And the cast clearly was having a lot of fun with it. I particularly liked Meryl Streep, who looks very good for her age in a natural, non-Hollywood botox etc. kind of way. You believe her as a woman who’s been running a hotel on her own for twenty years (actresses almost never look like they do the jobs they are meant to be performing; as much as I liked The Lake House, I did not buy Sandra Bullock as an overworked inner city doctor).

The Holiday was good as well; in the Nancy Meyer’s canon I’d rate this better than What Women Want although not as good as Something’s Gotta Give. I liked Eli Wallach’s character, the old screenwriter. Since seeing The Good, The Bad and the Ugly for the first time, Quin has been seeing Eli Wallach everywhere (he was the Ugly). He was also in How the West Was Won and kept popping up in movies Quin was surfing through on TV; just one of those journeyman actors you never really notice, until you do and then they’re everywhere.

TV on DVD: The Boondocks Season 2, even better than Season 1. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the comic strip that was simply the best drawn set of panels on the funny pages becomes one of the most gorgeously animated shows on TV. Honestly, the attention to detail on this show is sublime: the trees, the sunsets, the people’s faces. Plus, it’s funny as hell. I particularly like Katt William’s character, A Pimp Named Slickback, whom the family calls on for marriage counseling or to help Riley sort out his sexuality, because wouldn't those sort of things fall under his realm of expertise as a pimp? The songs are well done as well; I suspect the rappers that do voices also contribute there. The downside: this show will encourage a mode of speaking not considered appropriate to use in front of your children. Just sayin’.

The Complete BlackAdder we watched with the boys. In an attempt to work down my To Be Read pile I used my gift certificates on British comedy shows rather than books. Most of what I bought I’d already seen; Fawlty Towers and the complete Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but Blackadder I’d only ever seen bits and pieces of. The boys loved it, and it was a nice roundabout way of using what they’ve been learning in history (they got the context the stories were set in without having to have it explained, which was nice). My favorite episode is definitely the one with Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, although the scene where Blackadder is being tortured by an inquisitor who only speaks Spanish and the two have to converse in pantomime was brilliant.

Two Cinematic Titanics: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians and Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks. The first was originally an MST3K episode, but here it is again with all new jokes. I think this version is even funnier than their original take, but then again things just seem funnier when I enjoy them with my boys. Castle of Freaks was good as well; the boys were particularly taken with the boob blimp that floated into the screen to cover the film’s gratuitous T&A, always getting there just...in....time.

Two Mira Nair films: Salaam Bombay, in Hindi but not remotely a Bollywood film. I’ve been digging into the slums of Mumbai for novel research, mostly online things (like this or even Google Earth). This movie is set there and is quite a heartbreaker. The last five minutes of just the boy alone, how you can see what he is thinking as it passes over his face, is genius. How she got such a performance out of such a young actor I can’t imagine. An excellent film. Vanity Fair I enjoyed as well; gorgeously shot with a nice little nautch girl number near the end (choreographed by Farah Khan, but then you already knew I adored her work). You know I didn’t think I liked Reese Witherspoon, but after this and the Johnny Cash biopic I might have to reevaluate that assessment.

I recently picked up a Bruce Lee box set on DVD. I had them on video but I haven’t had a working VCR in years so they were really just paperweights. The set included Game of Death II, which I didn’t even know existed. Game of Death was always a really lame movie with a terrific ending (the bits that actually had Bruce Lee, natch, but just the idea of fighting you way up a pagoda is very cool). A sequel is pure exploitation of the Lee name, but honestly I found it more watchable than the first. The story was better (particularly after they killed off the actor that was supposed to be Bruce Lee; their technique of working in his reaction shots from other movies was far from seamless). Not a great film, but no where near as bad as it could have been. Plus the movie clips from Bruce when he was 6 were cute.

And I’ll admit I only picked up Nomad: The Warrior because it had Jason Scott Lee in it. That man just doesn’t get enough work. I can argue that Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story is more of a Bruce Lee movie than anything that actually had Bruce Lee in it, if you want to listen to me wax rhapsodic on the philosophy of kung fu, but you probably don’t. At any rate, I fell in love with Jason Scott Lee when he played an Inuit in Map of the Human Heart, a very fine film. Nomad isn’t exactly great, there were story problems I longed to fix because with just a few nudges this could have been great. It was very interesting, though; set in Kazakhstan, a country I know next to nothing about but is absolutely gorgeous. The costumes and cinematography were so lush, it’s a shame they didn’t bring the same attention to detail to the script.

Wrapping up with Bollywood: Yaadon Ki Baaraat and Haathi Mere Saathi are both early Salim-Javed films. Yaadon had a very young (8ish?) Aamir Khan in it. Thankfully he grew into those ears. I liked the music in this one, sort of surf guitar/spaghetti western/girls in go-go boots mash-up I could see Quentin Tarantino really digging. The story was good (three brothers are separated as children when gangsters kill their parents and eventually find each other as adults with very different lives), but could have used a stronger sense of structure; it kept wandering a bit and I think it would have worked better rotating through the three brothers more rather than sticking with one at a time (I kept wondering what the other two were up to). Haathi Mere Saathi was the first Salim-Javed collaboration, a story of a boy who is saved by a herd of elephants who then become his lifelong companions. I think this is a story that would actually work better as a novel. The story of a man wandering penniless, followed around by his four elephant companions, is quite charming, but a lot of things in it were quite disturbing specifically because you knew it was really being done. I mean like having an elephant grab a tiger by the tail with his trunk and bash him on the ground repeatedly. And if that’s not disturbing enough for you: a baby is allowed to crawl face-first into a pool of water. Sure the elephant pulled him right back out again, but still. How horrifying for that baby.

Bichhoo was one that Quin’s coworker had specifically recommended that he watch. It soon became clear why: it was a remake of The Professional/Leon, one of Quin’s favorite movies. It starred Bobby Deol, who balances the hitman plot/goofy love back story here as handily as he did in Soldier, and had a dance number with Malaika Arora (which is really all Quin needs in a Bollywood movie anyway). Rani Mukerji had the Natalie Portman part, which was odd. She’s clearly late 20s, but she acts like she’s a tweener; I’m not sure how old we were meant to see her as. The guy who took on the Gary Oldman part was fantastic, genuinely creepy. He was a big guy, though, and part of what made Gary Oldman so intimidating in The Professional (or anything else he plays a bad guy in, actually) is his lack of size. His personality overwhelms you. So, Bichhoo, an interesting albeit not successful experiment.

Which leaves only Jodhaa Akbar, the latest epic from Ashutosh Gowariker, who also wrote and directed Lagaan (that being the movie where I got my working title MITWA from). This is not quite as good as Lagaan, but is still just the sort of sweeping epic I tend to really go for. It’s the story of the Mughal emperor Akbar and his Hindu wife Jodhaa whom he allows to remain Hindu (not a popular decision with his Muslim family and advisors). There is some history here although the story itself is largely fictional; rather like Shakespeare used to do. Hrithik Roshan is wonderful; he communicates so much without words (watch the moment in the clip below when the people confer the title “Akbar” on him and he is so overwhelmed and grateful and humbled all at once. Wonderful.) Aishwarya Rai Bachchan is also good as the wife who is equally comfortable storming into the kitchen to make dinner for her husband herself (not an empress-like activity) or sparring with him with swords (again, not your usual empress way to spend the day).

The music for this one is by A.R. Rahman, who is up for a couple of Academy Awards this year for Slumdog Millionaires (a movie I long to see but will have to wait for the DVD). There is a song done by a troupe of Sufis that slowly evolves into spinning dervishs I quite liked, but this one has to be the highlight: the party the people of India throw for their emperor when he repeals a tax that targeted Hindus but not Muslims. They really like their emperor a lot (except the guy with the bow; he's clearly not a fan):