Twist Street

Marvel Entertainment Group, Inc.’s Avengers (2012): I saw the other one; the one I had to wear pants for, according to the Man’s laws.  (And then I made a donation to the Kirby Museum because that’s apparently a thing I have to do to not feel dirty). These aren’t really my kind of movies— they don’t really speak to what I ever dug about those characters or that universe, or any of that.  Maybe I’m weird about it,but I have very specific triggers with that stuff that these movies don’t hit.  

Plus, it’s kind of like Avatar where you have to sit through a bunch of stuff you don’t give a shit about to get to the fighting in the commercials— in Avatar, it was 7 foot tall playstation smurfs talking about Earth Day; here, for the first two hours they’re like, “An alien army is going to attack the Earth” and the commercials are like an alien army attacking Earth but to get there you have to sit through, like… There’s at least 4 soliloqueys from Loki about how evil he is— at least 30 minutes are just Loki going “Freedom is BAD.  I’m the bad guy— get it?  I don’t like freedom, and I’m going to murder a Holocaust survivor and then take a shit on a box of puppies.  Get it?”  Just on and on.  They were really worried that audiences would accidentally root for the guy leading the alien army that was going to destroy the Earth so they came up with the whole “freedom bad” motivation to really add a layer of moral complexity to the proceedings, I guess.  Then, Iron Man fights Thor, but instead of punching one another, they just keep knocking down trees.  It’s like a knock-down-tree contest.  I didn’t see the Thor movie but I’m hoping there’s at least 30 minutes in there of Natalie Portman convincing Thor that trees are evil.  He really hates the trees, you guys.  Then, there’s some action which devolves into, like, one of the major set pieces is Iron Man pushing a turbine…?  He just pushes and pushes a turbine and then it’s like, “I did it!  I pushed the turbine! We are saved!”  That movie just had a lot more turbine-pushing than I was expecting.  And the entire time, it’s like… Where are the aliens?  I thought someone was going to punch aliens??  When do we get to the dynamite factory?

I thought the cool part was going to be a big “we’re getting the band together” character intro stretch but instead they just skip all that, and have Samuel Jackson mutter in front of giant dimly lit photos of Jenny Agutter(???) instead. They sort of assume you saw the other movies.  Anyways, the alien fight’s okay to look at.  But until the big action scene, the rest is directed by Joss Whedon who as directors go, is a screenwriter.  When a special effect isn’t happening, there’s nothing much to look at— they try to throw T&A on the screen with Scarlet Johansen in these leather costumes, but then they also put Gwyneth Paltrow’s skeleton in jean-shorts which is just … Skeletor says Thank You…?  Anyways, but then sometimes Mark Ruffalo is in the movie, and it’s like, okay, okay, i get it.  I get what the big deal is.  Except it’s Mark Ruffalo acting opposite … some hair-metal dude they found to be Thor.  They put him with Downey Jr. as much as possible, but the difference in quality of actors…

Scarlet Johansssen’s character just says “I got a red on my ledger” over and over and over because her character is the token girl, and Marvel Comics don’t really have any halfway-decent girl characters, on account of comic culture or whatever, so instead it’s like… instead you’re listening to Lost in Translation talk about her ledger forever.  Why was there so much about ledgers in it???  But yeah, there’s like a minute of Hulk fighting Thor where I had to stop and be like, “Okay, I’m delighted.”  (Except the movie takes the “depends on if Thor has his hammer” route which is FUCKING BULLSHIT, but)(that’s like saying I’d win in a fight with Mike Tyson, provided that I had a gun— that’s not what’s at issue!!!).  I enjoyed the Hulk, and also Harry Dean Stanton talks to the Hulk at one point, and so, I can see how that’s maybe worth a half-billion U.S. dollars.  

The Guard (2011): I really enjoyed this movie, quite a bit. It’s advertised as a comedic buddy cop film with Don Cheadle in Ireland, but it’s actually more about Brendan Gleeson’s character, a police sargent in a small town in Ireland who’s long past giving a shit what anyone thinks of him, to a heroic degree, with the buddy cop material as a sort of… It feels like there’s a second layer to the movie which is about America’s cultural influence, maybe, but that’s secondary to the pleasure of the thing which is Gleeson and this very large character he gets to play. Gleeson’s usually a good bet— In Bruges or The General or… I remember liking I Went Down, eons ago (and probably I sometimes get him confused with Ray Winstone and like him more for that reason). In Bruges is a helpful reference as this was written-directed by John McDonagh who is apparently the brother of Martin what did Bruges and is the famous playwright. Martin’s play The Lieutenant of Innishmore was a thing for me and this had that same thing I find so fun of …. just being built out of dialogue in a way that I quite like, rather than insisting on a story so much. Just fun dialogue, at least I thought— I thought it was funny and pleasant, for a Saturday afternoon movie chosen at random off Starz On Demand. And I like Don Cheadle so he’s welcome; plus Mark Strong as the bad guy because all movies now have Mark Strong play the villain we’ve run out of villains besides Mark Strong America fears you most of all, Mark Strong.

Cabin in the Woods (2012): So then, yadda yadda yadda, I ended up at a horror convention…? Which is a thing that’s going on this weekend— I’d never been to a horror convention before because I’m not really a horror guy, at heart— or at least I don’t think of myself that way.  But anyways, I got curious, so I’ve gone to one now.  But it was mostly makeup.  Like, people can pretend they’re really into the creatures of the night, or the dark side of humanity or whatever, but get a big crowd of them together and it’s just a bunch of dudes who are super-into makeup.  90% of it was people trying to use makeup to make themselves look like boogens.  You can call it  a horror convention all you want— I think I just spent the day at a male-makeup festival… 

Anyways, after all that, I wanted to see a monster movie so I went to this one; got good reviews.  This was more a joke-y movie-about-movies thing, than a horror thing— I think as a horror movie, and by horror movie criteria… I didn’t think the “horror parts” worked much. It felt like the Haunted House at Universal Studios around Halloween, when it was trying to be scary. It’s not much in the scare department. But the good part is it turns out Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford are in the movie…!  I like those guys, and their scenes, with whatshername, Amy something, those parts are pretty entertaining, I thought.  Plus, that guy from The TV Set is in it— I liked him from The TV Set, though not enough to learn his name. 

For what it turned out to be (which is a let’s-show-off-how-clever-we-are kinda movie), I did enjoy the cleverness of it.  There’s some fun visual jokes near the end.  It gets more entertaining as it goes along.  It’s hard not to second guess, and imagine a version where they cared about the scares during the parts that should’ve been scary— I think it’d have been more interesting if it were scary… but the non-scary version still had Richard Jenkins in it, and I’m more of a comedy guy than a horror guy, so.

Hunger Games (2012): I saw Battle Royale, oh gosh, nine years ago?  I don’t really remember it much.  So I don’t think my opinion of Hunger Games was too tainted by that, except just to the extent of… If you want to see little kids kill each other, I remember that being much better.  They made a big deal what a bold marketing choice it is that they don’t show any of the action in the commercials but that’s because the action is all fucking terrible.  The camera never stops shaking, and Winter’s Bone has a ringing in her ear in every other scene.

Anyways, this movie’s set in a bizarre future where humanity spectacularly lost some kind of fashion war and everyone has to dress like an idiot.  The parts of the country where the working class lives have to send their kids off to hunger game against each other— except in the future, the working class no longer has any Hispanic people in it.  In the future, super-attractive white people persecute each other instead of minorities or the Third World because … man invented rocketships but apparently, people still need coal(?).  (The bad guy’s a blond-haired Aryan prettyboy but even the movie’s kind of not buying that blond-haired Aryans are getting persecuted because I think at one point Woody Harrelson goes, “Yeah, uh, he … he volunteered.”)  It’s coal-driven rocket technology. Oh and they have Hunger Games for no reason that’s ever given any kind of satisfactory explanation whatsoever, but who cares. 

Anyways, the first half of the movie is a mix of Winter’s Bone meets the Princess Diaries, which is fun.  But then when it’s time to hunger game, besides the action being shitty, the movie keeps cutting to this Starburns guy who like… is launching fireballs at her and CGI jaguars and shit-??? WTF was that about?  There’s all these scenes of Starburns talking to Donald Sutherland, or Jennifer Lawrence throwing up gang signs at a camera somehow causes random people we’ve never seen before to riot (why did they riot???  Did they not realize they were watching Hunger Games?  Why did they not understand the premise of the game?) or… Starburns keeps randomly changing the stakes.  Which— why?  You don’t need to raise the stakes on a movie about children murdering each other.  I think the stakes were  pretty sufficiently high once the kid with the Jewfro got gutted with a knife.  (I was pulling for the kid with the Jewfro to win; everybody loves an underdog, except Donald Sutherland which is relevant information for… reasons…?).  

Woody Harrelson plays a drunk, but he’s never even cantankerous— he’s just sad, and then in order to reduce the stakes more, he sends Winter’s Bone these robotic singing telegrams that only she gets and no other character seems to.  I don’t know— Woody Harrelson was upstaged by his haircut, but I just fucking like seeing that dude in movies. And I’ll love Donald Sutherland forever for the wedding scene in Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders.  But after this long, drawn out ending where they set up a sequel,  the final shot is like, Donald Sutherland’s ass while he wanders around some set.  Why did they end it with a shot of Donald Sutherland’s ass??  It’s not a great ass— I mean, at least, not currently.    

I don’t know.  Whole thing just felt like a coke that’d gone flat, but apparently people dig it.  Good for them.  

Tiny Furniture (2010): I wasn’t in a hurry to see this— I haven’t been in a mood for this kind of mumblecore thing lately, but I overheard people last night who were raving as enthusiastically as I’ve heard anyone rave about anything lately, about Girls, the HBO show that Lena Dunham did after this (apparently, the episode Apatow co-wrote is something…?).  I was also curious about this because I knew of Dunham from the pieces she’d written for This Recording— I think she wrote one about a trip to Japan (? might have her confused with someone else), and I think she wrote some others, too.  (The credits had at least one name I recognized from that site…)  

So yeah, this was harmless— good parts and bad parts. I liked Funny Ha Ha a lot when that first came out, so (a) I thought that was much better, truer, with fewer class issues, and (b) I feel like I’ve seen enough of these movies where the subject matter or style isn’t as exciting anymore.  But she went for it with the movie’s sex scene, certainly, and there are at least 3 other scenes where I thought, you know, okay, she had a voice— that first party scene, in particular. It all really reminded me of a girl I knew for 5 minutes years ago, so I guess I liked it for that more than anything— I can see how other people would find it insufferable if they didn’t have that or didn’t like mumblecore type movies generally… 

The Sitter (2011):  Why doesn’t Sam Rockwell star in more movies?  That guy’s great even in terrible movies.  Besides being bad, though, this movie’s kind of racially messed-up though, which doesn’t help.  I don’t know.  I’m okay with admitting that Jonah Hill makes me laugh, but.. his scenes with African American characters made me kind of uncomfortable.  Granted, I love Adventures in Babysitting, like love it the way a child loves their mom, and that had some racial stuff going on it too but… they just amped that aspect of AiB up a notch for this, I guess.  Still, Sam Rockwell is really just great in anything. Plus the only part where you’re like, “Oh yeah, I forgot that David Gordon Green used to be a real director” is this long introduction sequence to Rockwell’s character, where Jonah Hill wanders through Sam Rockwell’s drug headquarters— that sequence is really actually great, just in the middle of this otherwise regrettable piece of shit.  

“This movie was so much about chance and restraint. We have every opportunity to make it jokey, but we just didn’t want any of that desperate sweatiness there, so we kept pulling back. To people like us, who have been around comedy for a long time, there’s a kind of comedy just in that.” — screenwriter Andrew Steele

“Jay and I will often sit in the airport while we’re traveling around and we’ll see someone do something that at first makes you laugh. And then you watch them a little bit longer. You see them make a phone call home to their kids and you realize there’s deeper stuff going on there.” — Mark Duplass

21 Jump Street (2012):  Shit, this mostly worked.  Well, I really like action comedies, though— in general, if I go see a movie, and there’s guns or jokes or robots or con-men or the President’s going to be assassinated or Amy Adams is crying while making pottery, I’m going to be on the movie’s side, pretty hard.  Plus, I guess it’d been a long time since anyone made an “adult goes back to high school” comedy— I remember liking the one with John Cryer, Hiding Out?  Those usually work, I guess. Still, damn did this ever sound like a terrible, terrible idea, but … it’s not anything amazing, but they pulled it off, I think.  A lot of things just went right for them on this one— definitely, a huge win for whoever was in charge of casting. (I didn’t even realize Rye Rye was in the movie till after… Somebody put Dominique Young Unique in a Quantum Leap movie already…)  (Also:  I wish there could just be a Chris Parnell movie— Parnell always kills it for me…)

The Raid: Redemption (2012):  This pretty much lived up to whatever I was hoping for.  I had purposefully avoided rewatching the trailer since it first came out, and avoided any subsequent trailers, so I got to experience this as fresh as I could.  I get the feeling other people haven’t gone that route, but I still would have to think it’d be equally satisfying for them, too, based on the Cinefamily audience’s reaction.  The only thing going in that was worrying me was I heard it was directed by some Welsh guy, but he turned out to be a guy who actually lives in Indonesia— it wasn’t some weird pastiche product, which was the only thing nagging at me about what I’d heard, that it was going to be a faux-Asian-action movie somehow.  Which is totally isn’t, though I think thankfully he maybe dialed down the melodrama at least comparatively— the melodrama can sometimes be a chore with those movies.  He was there for the Q&A.

Anyways, the action was pretty much what I hoped it’d be— if that’s not the most fun audience experience I have this year, I’ll be pretty surprised. A room full of people cackling at violence is just better than anything. Plus, I’d say the story worked— it’s interesting how influential The Warriors keeps turning out to be lately, plus I think they mixed in enough other influences to keep things pretty varied.  I think the pivotal thing for me was because there was more than one cop and I wasn’t sure who the hero or lead actor was (maybe out of my own stupidity more than on purpose), there was a decent stretch where I’d watch fight scenes and not be entirely sure who would survive…? 

The weirdest part for me was someone in the Q&A talked about how it beat Oldboy for them, which is not a movie I rank at all.  That made me feel old just because I guess Oldboy is for younger folks what Hard Boiled and the Killer and Drunken Master 2 were for me…? Where… you know, I had a phase where I was the guy at Asian grocery stores renting weird shit, back when Hong Kong was going full-blast. I guess this movie’ll be that for kids.  Mostly I’m just looking forward to showing this to my dad because this is pretty much exactly his kind of movie so. The Raid made me homesick…!

It unfortunately doesn’t have any active-duty Navy Seals in it, but I thought Wanderlust (2012) was funny.  It’s not Role Models or Wet Hot— it’s not an audience killer by any means.  My audience seemed to like it, but only a few scenes really got big laughs; most of the movie felt more oriented towards smaller giggles.  But I thought there was a lot to like— especially the first shot of Justin Theroux, Keri Kenney’s expressions the entire movie, Ken Marino, whoever Ken Marino’s kid was— I thought that kid was awesome, even though he only had like one line.  Paul Rudd had a handful of great moments— he was better than anything I’ve seen him in since Role Models. Really, the only person I disliked was Aniston, who I dislike in general— she was as useless as ever as a performer, and it sounds like she actively hurt the movie with diva shit.

I’m an extremely easy audience for a comedy, though— it’s pretty rare I don’t find something in a comedy to like.  I doubt it’s big enough to find a huge audience in theaters— the ads were pretty shitty, the story is a shaggy mess, and the jokes are hippie-square jokes that aren’t really cutting edge.  But I felt like it was one of those movies that I’d be happy if it came on Comedy Central on a Sunday morning.  One of those movies that’ll be better the 4th time you see it by accident…

They showed the trailer to Rock of Ages beforehand.  It made me want to vote for Rick Santorum.  I don’t really like Rick Santorum, but if embracing theocracy is what it takes to prevent me ever having to see the trailer for Rock of Ages, again, then I embrace theocracy…

Chronicle (2012): The last found footage movie I saw was that Blair Witch piece of shit, years ago.  I’m not really super into horror, let alone purposeful shittiness, so I missed that whole genre. That was my least favorite thing about this— it feels like that thing where every sitcom now is pretending to be some weird kind of documentary.  I’d rather see a movie where things look good on purpose thanks to craft..?  (Plus, found footage or not, the main characters, Hand Man or whoever, still look to me like they’re in their mid-20’s while the teenage extras all look like actual teenagers— so the main characters kind of come off like creepy creep creeps when they talk about the girls in their school… Found footage didn’t quite cure that for me…)

Besides that, it’s a cute movie— I’m not really into superhero movies, not when there are movies where Amy Adams cries while baking cakes and then pulls her shit together and lets herself fall in love, that we could watch instead. But at least there was a story there that at least tried to move the audience through some feelings, for a change. Basically, they just totally made Akira. That’s cool; I dig Akira— and better this than something with Channing Tatum yelling “Tetsuo” in front of a green screen or whatever, I figure. 

Still: another origin story; bored by those.  I was also kind of bored watching a movie about over-articulate high school aged characters.  I guess without the found footage schtick it’d have just felt like some WB show— I guess I’m old if I still think of that kind of show as a WB show, but. I don’t know— I’m just feeling too old to care about teenage shit, Teenage FBI or Teenage Riot aside. Like, I didn’t like the found footage thing but I’m not really sure if there’d be anything to it without it. 

I did get to see it next to some lady who talked through the entire movie, in a way I enjoyed, in a way that totally enhanced the movie for a change because she would go, “Oh, why is he doing that?  Oh, oh no, why is that happening?” very quietly to herself. So when I wasn’t that interested by what was going on myself, I was at least entertained by that.  If you can, I recommend Random Lady for this one.

Haywire (2012):  I liked this, but never ask me to explain what in pluperfect hell  the plot of this movie was.  I will stare off into space; then, start making ringing noises with my mouth— “Deeitly-dootily-deetily.  Oh, is that my phone?  I need to take this call— it’s urgent.”  I leave to take the call, and you never see me again.  Where am I? A beach near Barbados?  An oil rig in Alaska?  I’m somewhere you’ll never find me, where those kinds of questions will never be asked, where I can live out the rest of my days in blessed silence.  Anyways, Jog wrote about this movie better than I ever could— he pretty much thought everything a reasonable person could thunk on this one.  I liked it because it was the most Ocean’s 12-ish of Soderbergh’s movies lately, though I get why for most of the audience that’s a disaster scenario— most people didn’t like Ocean’s 12, from what I remember.  But I like that one…  

Stylishness though— I didn’t know the movie started with Soderbergh doing a heist scene, and I’m never going to be too put out by a movie with a heist scene in it.  Heist scenes, little kid birthday parties getting ruined by adults, political assassinations needing to be averted, awkward dinner scenes in black comedies, anything with con men (except for that Brothers Bloom crap), puppets being legit sad, Amy Adams crying about something innocuous and cute— there’s just all this stuff I’m a super-easy mark for.

Our Idiot Brother (2011):  Blech.  It was big at Sundance, and that’s usually not a good sign for comedies— this is very archetypal in that way of just being… just super-vanilla while pretending to be a dark comedy. Like, it’s got a pothead main character, but it’s not a stoner movie (or it’s a stoner movie that no stoner would ever enjoy watching?  ”Let’s get baked and watch a movie about Paul Rudd struggling with his family’s fake indie-movie dilemmas.”  HUHHH?).  It felt like it was made for old, California rich people who enjoy spending their weekend on wine-tasting expeditions and laughing at how weed makes hippies be mellow as compared to young urban people, with all their lesbian stand-up comedy antics(??).  It’s just hard not to imagine the audience for this not being, like, the extras from that movie Sideways.  I felt 20 years too young for this, and I’m not even all that young.  I just couldn’t relate to anything in this thing— it all felt phony, but maybe other people could relate.  TJ Miller’s pretty fucking good in this though on a holds-the-screen level, even if his character sucks, at least— not as great as Successful Alcoholics or anything, but in a movie filled with people I like fine (Steve Coogan, Rashida Jones, Elizabeth Banks, whoever), he was the only person I was remotely happy to see by the end.