October 2009

All you have to do to get me to watch a movie is to throw these two words at me: Tim Burton.(Or puppets. Or stop motion. Or claymation. OK, there are a few things you could say.) You do that and I’m already sold. I’ve only been disappointed by something with his name on it maybe 5% of the time, if that, and am totally on board to see anything and everything he’s involved with.

When I first saw the trailers for 9, however, I wasn’t all that thrilled about it. I figured we’d wait to see it on DVD. The animation was interesting, sure, but it just felt like something was missing. My husband was more excited to see it than I was, and per our agreement for our recent date day, since we saw my pick—Where the Wild Things Are—we had to see his pick, too, which was, of course, 9.

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I'm happy to admit that I have a lifelong love for strange movies. I would rather watch something that can better be described as "disturbing" rather than "gory" and there's something much more entertaining about an incoherent train wreck of a film than one that tries to be traditionally funny. The following movies really ought to be watched in one, long marathon for anyone interested in pushing the limits of what a single person can take over the course of a day.

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Firstly, let me explain why I watched this flick – Lars and the Real Girl – at all. I had initially steered clear of the movie seeing as it appeared to be a something not detached from chick-flicks, with just an added aura of slackerdom to it all. I suppose that wasn’t a tremendous mis-reading of the whole thing, although it was a bit surprising to see where the narrative went. But Ryan Gossling is the film’s star. He’s a dude who I can’t really claim to know or care too much about. The actor did, however, recently release a self titled album as one half of the L.A. based Dead Man’s Bones. So, after hearing the disc, watching the film that (almost) made him famous seemed appropriate.

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I purposefully avoided watching Whatever Works for months. It’s been out of the theaters for a while and the hype has abated. So because of this I felt that it was time for a viewing. Going in, I didn’t look into the plot, see who appeared alongside Larry David. Nothing. I went in as a blank slate – well, one that has an unyielding affection for the principal actor as well as the director.

Of late, though, Woody Allen hasn’t quenched my need for twitchy Jews. It’s somehow comforting to see a version of me plastered up there, being accepted and even rooted for. But Allen’s last few films had little to do with the American Jew instead featuring European extravaganzas with writers and the like. That doesn’t mean that those films were bad, just different. None of them failed, but I wasn’t in them.

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It’s just short of shocking that Sacha Baron Cohen was able to fool as many people as he did in Brüno. The only thing keeping it all from going over the edge is the fact that for the most part, Baron Cohen is in the presence of a whole buncha morons.

Brüno finds the actor inhabiting the role of a gay, Austrian fashion freak who has a bit of a distorted self image. The onset of the film finds the Brüno character at the heights of his relative powers. He’s backstage at fashion shows in the company of what one should assume to be some famous industry folks, but seeing as fashion seems pretty vacuous, it kinda doesn’t matter – well, alright, the models, not the whole thing. How’s that?

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I've seen a lot of bad movies in my short time on planet Earth. I know the unique purgatory of humoring my young niece as she demands to watch the likes of 2007's Underdog and I, like you, have spent lazy Sunday afternoons indulging in the indistinguishable works of Steven Segal. But while these are all truly terrible movies, I can walk away from them with an understanding that they serve some sort of purpose outside of being good cinema. Kid's movies are designed to distract, action movies to indulge the part of the brain that likes watching people get kicked in the head without triggering the part that abhors real-life violence. In fact, most bad movies can be dismissed for one reason or another. That's why watching Percy Adlon's 1987 film Bagdad Cafe was such a unique experience. It was a bad movie in every sense of the word with absolutely no other purpose that might excuse its badness.

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Four Rooms was released around the time that Quentin Tarantino and Roberto Rodriquez were being lauded from every angle for anything. Even sneezing. The film, split into four distinct sections was written and helmed by individual directors (Allison Anders and Alexandre Rockwell and in addition to the aforementioned gentleman). There’s not an over arching narrative, just Tim Roth as the bellboy to hold it all together.

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As long as there have been movies, there have been vampire movies, and as long as there have been vampire movies, there have been bad vampire movies. Finding a decent blood-sucking flick usually requires a dedicated slog through the dozens of cheap, poorly-written, badly-acted and negligently-directed movies in the subgenre produced every year. We in the United States have a nice shortcut to good movies, though. Generally, if a foreign language film gets wide distribution in America, it's probably good enough to stand on its own merits. This is definitely the case with Tomas Alfredson's 2008 romantic thriller Let The Right One In.

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