Movie Review: Up In The Air

"It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the phrase, 'as pretty as an airport.' Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort."*

It’s not often when an actor's third film of the season turns out to be a perfect culmination of personae and character, as it is for George Clooney in Jason Reitman's smart and slick “Up In The Air,” now in limited release, opening nationwide Christmas day.  “Up In The Air” is the Clooney vehicle and it's also a film that nearly everyone will like. But don't worry is has more than just Clooney’s charm and soothing car commercial voice.  This story of a middle aged traveling corporate downsizer (AKA “terminator”) and part-time motivational speaker is a crowd-pleasing feel good movie that still manages to address the current job crisis, a mid-life crisis and plenty of relationship drama.  But these doses of reality never ground “Up In The Air” and it beautifully balances the heavy issues with clever lessons on air travel and some very witty yet natural banter.  It also features two supporting female characters that are just as appealing and developed as Clooney's.  Really.

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Friday Fun!

OMG, it's here...The Weekend.  I couldn't be happier. This week blew for no reason in particular at all. I just didn't like the cut of its jib, you know?

So, here are some things you might have missed. You can thank me later for enlightening you.  Maybe get me something nice for Christmas, like alcohol.

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Movie Review - Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Whatever you do, don't call this a remake. Herzog will kick your ass.

To call Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans a remake of the 1992 Harvey Keitel vehicle is misleading, especially since Herzog has never seen the it.  Herzog’s version is flat out trippy, almost goofy, and at times a work of genius that uses genre as seduction before crushing audience expectation. Morbidly funny with performances ranging from raw and unrehearsed to maniacally crafted and hypnotizing, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is brilliant and only faintly resembles the more dramatic “original.” 

For over 40 years Herzog has challenged traditional narrative filmmaking and more recently he has ventured into Hollywood territory.  From Grizzly Man, his award winning and fascinating documentary of the life and death of amateur bear expert Timothy Treadwell to 2006’s Vietnam era prisoner of war story Rescue Dawn starring Christian Bale, Herzog has continued to push when it comes to audience expectations and the constraints of genre.  Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans stars Nicolas Cage as a good cop turned drug addict who’s still trying to get the job done (and get his next fix) and is a provocative antidote to the standard dirty cop flick. 

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Movie Review: The Road

The Man, The Boy and their cart.

Adaptation is so commonplace that it has recently become a challenge to find originally scripted mainstream movies.  Among the 50 highest grossing films of this decade, only 9 were based on original screenplays, and 7 of those movies are animated features.  It is no mystery that familiarity fills the theaters and means bigger DVD sales, but it rarely leads to a great movie. 

John Hillcoat, who directed 2006’s critically acclaimed The Proposition, was tapped to direct the film version of Cormac McCarthy’s Oprah approved novel, "The Road", way back in 2006, before the success of the Coen brothers’ film version of No Country for Old Men.  After an intensive post production period and multiple release delays, The Road will finally be revealed to all today.  Will this adaptation fit on the shelf with all the others that have missed the mark (shelf includes The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Revolutionary Road and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil)?  Better slide over the first two Harry Potter movies to make some room for The Road.

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Movie Review: Fantastic Mr. Fox

 I'm not sure how cool it was to have this song playing during this scene. Seems a little dark. (Yes, I'm joking.)

Wes Anderson’s (Rushmore, The Life Aquatic) long awaited adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s novel, Fantastic Mr. Fox, opens in wide release next week.  With witty dialogue mixed with the charm and nostalgia of classic stop-animation, Fantastic Mr. Fox is a silly, smart, sweet and truly fantastic tale of existential angst.  Slightly irreverent and touching on some adult themes, it still retains oodles of kid's appeal, though it’s probably the adults who will have the most fun.  Beautifully understated, muted, even drab landscapes are inhabited by exceptionally voiced and meticulously crafted characters. As Mr. Fox struggles between his wild animal urges and the demands of being a "domesticated" family man, the film maintains a loose and whimsical tone despite the years of planning and production that went into it.  Music, composition and tone keep it firmly in Anderson's oeuvre, but stop-animation combined with a sophisticated contemporary script elevate it from retro homage to something very special.  Fantastic Mr. Fox is simply wonderful.  And the animals wear clothes and have cell phones, and that is always fun.

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Post-Henson World: I hope that something better comes along...

From 1965 to 1969, Henson's LaChoy commercials featured both full bodied and hand puppets of a lumbering dragon named Delbert.  This beats any Geico commercial any day.

You still have 2 more weekends to catch Jim Henson's Fantastic World (JHFW) at the James Michener Museum, all the way out there in Doylestown, PA, on view through November 29th.  A traveling exhibition brought to us b by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Services and The Jim Henson Legacy, JHFW features original Henson character drawings (Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Barkley), screen prints, storyboards, as well as videos of his life's work and of course, some classic Muppets in vitrines.  The exhibit itself seems crammed into too small a space and the flow is just awful, but the contents are proof of the genius that was Jim Henson.

It was a Monday morning near the end of the 7th grade and my friend who proceeded not be friends with me in high school told me that Jim Henson died earlier that morning.  This May will mark the 20th anniversary of his death.  Children's television would not be in the sad state it's in if Jim had lived past the tender age of 53, no doubt about that.  Where we had old skool Sesame Street with trippy shorts and trippier monsters (and aliens!), kid's today have cheesy digital animation and rapping guest stars.  But, you've heard this from me before.  But fear not, fair readers. Hope is out there.  It's just at the movies.

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TV: What You Might Have Missed - Catching Great Whites and Big Boners

I loves me some Amazing Race. This season (which is the 15th of the always Emmy winning reality series) is pretty good. All the terrible people left pretty early on and we're left with an OK crew of competitors. The interracial couple, reconnecting father and son combo, some Harlem Globetrotters, Ken and Barbie types and the brothers. The not so ambiguously gay duo, Sam and Dan. And Sunday night, Sam and Dan had giant erections. Well, I don't know if they were actually giant, but any erection during prime time is big news.  Of course, CBS blurred them out.  But there they were...boners...on network TV.  I was online a bit yesterday - how the hell did I not see anything about this groundbreaking TV event?  CBS sure likes the wang. Remember that Survivor ep when America was flashed with full frontal?  I do, but only because InfoMania told me about it.  (Can't seem to locate link to that.)

But inappropriate chubbies weren't the most excited thing on TV during this very young week.  The National Geographic Channel ran a pseudo-scientific special just last night about a crew of extreme fisherman and their nerdy science buddy on a quest to catch, tag, release and track Great White Sharks.  Really.

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Sesame Street Season 40: Can you tell me how to get the heck out of here?

A "new school" resident of Sesame Street, Murray is pretty cool. He does the Word on the Street segment. I always loved it when monsters or Barkley went out into the real streets.

If I started singing "1-2-3-4-5, 6-7-8-9-10, 11 - 12. Dooo, do-do, do-do-do-do, dooo-dooo...." You would totally know what I was talking about, right?

Sesame Street premiered its 40th season yesterday morning at 6am in the Philadelphia area.  At least I think I was watching Sesame Street.  Maria, Luis, Gordon, Bob, Barkley and Big Bird were there, but so was some monster named Murray, some CGI fairies at a CGI daycare and a whole lot of generically arranged "hip-hop".  Absent were trippy animation shorts about aliens, farm animals with names or ladybugs jumping rope that featured scores of every musical genre.  Sesame Street is a weird place now.  Hooper's has an outdoor cafe and a one episode character like yesterday's sleazy real estate agent for birds that tries to sell Big Bird a new habitat was played by a human instead of a Muppet.  Creepy Muppets = funny, creepy humans = creepy.  Sesame Street feels off in its present form, which is odd since you'd think a lot of people responsible for making it also grew up on the original.  Am I saying that watching classic episodes doesn't leave me compulsively counting in my sleep?  Actually no, I'm not, but I don't think the DVD of "old school" Sesame Street should come with a warning that it is not intended for children.  Old school Sesame Street simply no longer reflects the accepted sterilized and imagination free practices of today's preschool education programs. Sure, it wasn't perfect the first 4 years or so, but today's version is simply lacking innovation.

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Movie Review (sort of): The Box

The gist:

Norma and Arthur Lewis, a suburban couple with a young child, receive a simple wooden box as a gift, which bears fatal and irrevocable consequences. A mysterious stranger, delivers the message that the box promises to bestow upon its owner $1 million with the press of a button. But, pressing this button will simultaneously cause the death of another human being somewhere in the world; someone they don't know. With just 24 hours to have the box in their possession, Norma and Arthur find themselves in the cross-hairs of a startling moral dilemma and must face the true nature of their humanity. (Written by Warner Bros. Pictures)

 

Hello, there, young lady. Would you like to check out my button unit?

It's not that I don't like writing negative reviews.  Oh, hell yes, I do. It's just that I tend to write a lot of them. Does this mean that most movies are bad?  Sort of.

So, why did Richard Kelly's new riddle, The Box, which opens tonight, make me think of this?  I guess it's that with Kelly's films (Donnie Darko, Southland Tales) his presence is so obvious you can almost see him thinking through the next steps of his films, which is usually a bad thing.  But The Box is in "so bad it's actually good" territory.  With Kelly, weirdness turns to mystery and then back to just plain hollow oddity and back around to well-lit weirdness again with no clear drawn conclusions. His plot choices seem random and self-indulgent on top of just plain confusing or silly.  Even though The Box is his first foray into the blatantly commercial, it's a crazy-ass art movie and for that, Kelly gets mad props.  The crazy-ass artist in me that once made many terrible and personal short films loves that Kelly awkwardly jammed bits from his own childhood as well as those bizarre water-time-portal-tube-things from Donnie Darko into an already uber-wacko The Box.  I would just really like to get a beer with this dude.

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