Someone who can articulate it

All those times people try to get me to watch Quentin Tarantino movies, I find myself defending the absolutely inarticulable reason why I just don't like them. Because I just don't. I mean, sure, there's that thing where I pretty much don't like him either, but I don't connect with anything in his movies.

So, when it came to the two hour, Tarantino-helmed season finale of CSI, I can't say I was particularly excited. It had things I thorough expect from him, and it had things I thoroughly expect from the show.

Much to my glee, Sobell's recap had a little something more. It seems she's none to keen on the overly lauded director either, and she was able to even put it into a few words (click here to view text in original source):

And this is my big problem with Mr. Tarantino. I can handle that he's made a career basically ripping off -- excuse me, being inspired by -- other directors' distinctive visual and narrative styles. I can handle that many of his movies are essentially collections of sets pieces. I can handle that he's over-reliant on using pop culture references as a way to infuse his work with meaning, since he's unwilling or unable to do the hard work and create that on his own. But what really makes me run cold is how Tarantino's depictions of man's inhumanity to man rarely transcend voyeurism. As depicted by him, acts of violence are just some cool shit to show because they make audience members react, and sparking any response is apparently better than striving to make a point that your audience may or may not respond to. Screw that -- if you're going to show something extreme, it should be in the service of a larger point than "I do it because I can."

I feel so relieved now.

Glam rock!

Velvet Goldmine (1998)

Short: In 1984, journalist Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) is assigned a story about the rise and fall of British glam rock icon Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), marking the 10 year anniversary of the concert where Slade faked his own death. Coincidence of coincidences, the only British man in New York happened to be at that concert, and he knows a lot more about Slade, Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), and Mandy Slade (Toni Collette) than his editor could even guess.

Once upon a time, April was attacked by the HoYay. See, I so excited to see my long-term and original movie boyfriend in a movie that I started watching it in the middle, and I saw things that made me immediately snap off the movie. In fact, I pretty much broke up with Christian Bale after that.

Many a moon has passed, and I can handle the HoYay now. If you don't know what HoYay means, you aren't reading enough TWoP. And if you don't know what TWoP stands for, you aren't checking out my links. That's too bad for you, ma'am (or sir).

So, consider yourself warned about the HoYay. Apparently it arrives via spaceship with Oscar Wilde and a green pin.

Any way, you know that part in The Boondock Saints were Rocco accidentally shoots that cat, and Norman Reedus yells, (in an entirely Southern US and not at all Irish way) "Did that just happen?" Well, that's how I feel about this movie. There are only a handful of movies that I could toss in this category, but you know them when you watch them. As soon as the credits start rolling, I look around and ask no one in particular, "What did I just watch?" Not because I've instantly forgotten, you see, but because I have yet to process any of the information.

Now, with luck, some of those movies improve with repeated viewing. Others, however, are thrown into what I now refer to as the "take it or leave it" pile. I wouldn't want anyone to see it without being warned, but I wouldn't stop anyone from seeing it. Unless they didn't want to be neck deep in the HoYay.

I seem to be doing a lot of explaining for this movie, which is either a bad or a good sign. At this point, I'm not entirely sure.

I've been thinking about it, and, while many actors are well suited to their roles, there are few perfect role/actor combinations. I mean the ones where you couldn't imagine anyone else playing the role half as well, as though the actor were born to be [blank]. For me, Russell Crowe as Maximus and Renee Zellweger as Bridget spring to mind. She's the very embodiment of Bridget Jones.

To that list I add Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Slade. If any one else could look like, sing like, or be a better sociopathic (tm, Sobell!), androgynous, bisexual glam rock star, you let me know who it is. Because it's no one. Meyers, frustrating and useless as anyone normal, is bloody charismatic, and he knows it. You just sit back and wait for those pouty lips to curl and those expressionless eyes to start to gleam. Good for him.

Todd Haynes, who wrote and directed this bizarre little offering, also gave us the glorious and understated Far From Heaven, which also involved the HoYay. I'm thinking that Haynes wants to be a modern day Tennessee Williams. Good luck with that. Williams had the kind of characterization that speaks volumes decades after writing, unlike Haynes here. Far From Heaven, though, was the kind of film that requires multiple viewings to see past its muted tones and into its core. I'm undecided about Haynes.

Shades of Citizen Kane and David Bowie aside, I still don't know how to grade this one. If I give it a C, I worry that you'll interpret it as "average" or "middle of the road," but it's not middle of the road. It's on another street entirely. Still, C.

Kochi, 10 "Up the Stairs"

Born into Brothels (2004)

Subject: Zana Briski moves in with sex workers in Calcutta's red light district (to document them, perhaps) and is immediately drawn to the kids. She starts a photography class with them, all the while becoming more and more attached.

I've been trying to figure out what to write about this movie for weeks now, but it never seems to come out right. Unlike so many of the subjective documentaries I normally see, this one didn't have anything to prove. Nothing to prove and a hundred silent, eloquent points.

As you watch the kids start to see their world in a different way through photography, you also so the hope that comes alive in their education and the inevitability the girls feel about their future. Suddenly, one of them isn't in the film. No one mentions where she went or what happened, yet we all know that she joined the line. Scores of women packed together in a sea of flesh, waiting for the next customer.

As Briski's relationship with the children grows, so does her desire to save them from their fate. Briski struggles to find them places in school, knowing full well that very few schools will take the children of sex workers. Briski and partner Ross Kauffman manage to fill the film with a quiet urgency, a knowledge that perhaps the sex trade is inevitable for many of these young girls.

Oh, check it out! I didn't want you to think I was just going to steal their work.

Utterly depressing; utterly uplifting. A+

It's nicer than the other poster

It really is. The other poster's depressing.

Crash (2005)

iMDB would have me believe 2004, but I disagree.

Sum: Although much of what you may have read suggests that this film revolves around differing lives in Los Angeles intersecting at a car crash, that's misleading. There are, in fact, numerous car crashes, and many of lives never intersect or involve car crashes. Instead, it sort of goes like this: The young DA (Brendan Fraser) and his wife, Jean (Sandra Bullock), are car-jacked by Anthony (Ludacris) and Peter (Larenz Tate), right after Anthony finishes a diatribe about how whites are unjustly afraid of blacks. Jean takes out her anger on her non-white maid, Maria (Yomi Perry), and the locksmith, Daniel (Michael Pena), the film's sole saint. Meanwhile, Officer Ryan (Matt Dillon) pulls over an affluent black couple and molests the wife, Christine (Thandie Newton), while is partner, Officer Hanson (Ryan Phillippe), and her husband, Cameron (Terrence Howard), do nothing but look on in horror. Also, Farhad (Shaun Toub) takes his daughter, Dorri (Bahar Soomekh), to buy a gun to protect their store with a faulty back door/lock. And Graham (Don Cheadle) and his partner, Ria (Jennifer Esposito), investigate a corrupt cop while Graham deals with his smack addict mom.

It's difficult to say what I have to say about this movie. See, there is all this praise out there for the characters saying that which is never said in American movies. True enough. Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco's screenplay has people saying things you've quite likely never heard in a movie before.

But do you really need to hear such things?

I'd like to like this movie. I'd like to say that it was powerful and moving and unlike anything I've ever seen before. And it was. It was all those things. It was also something so much worse.

Apparently, Los Angeles is the city where everyone goes to no longer conceal their racism. I believe that everyone is, in one way or another, racist. People who care about their racism, who recognize it as a problem, identify certain feelings, sayings, ideas as racist and work to stop their minds from going in that direction. In Haggis' Los Angeles (he also directed), though, everyone just says exactly what's on their minds about race relations, beshrew the consequences! Of course, this does not include Pena, what with him being Crash's patron saint and all.

And that's the problem. What is this movie about? RACISM. What is everyone? RACIST. In fact, Haggis wants us to know that we are all mean, hating racists out to destroy each other, and nothing can stop us. That's why this movie isn't powerful and moving and unlike anything else I've ever seen. Unfortunately, I've seen plenty of manipulative, melodramatic, and moralizing movies. As much as each and every player tries to rise above the material, there really is no escaping Haggis' vision.

So, Haggis, what shall we do with you? Here's what I want you to do. Grab your Oscar of its shelf, dust it off, and give it a long hard look in the face. Then, rent Million Dollar Baby, and consider your elegant, delicate treatment of an equally sensitive issue. Maybe Clint Eastwood's gentle touch helped more than your hamfists, but you may have something to you yet.

Even so, a movie seeking to bludgeon its audience with their own RACISM isn't worth your $9.95. Wait for the DVD. It is worth that much. C+

The Spanish Prisoner

The Spanish Prisoner (1997)

Perhaps it's a bit redundant to see the title three times before you see the plot description. I'm still working out these photoblogging kinks. Just wait 'til the day I attempt vlogging. Anyway . . .

Brief: Joe Ross (Campbell Scott) is flown, along with George Lang (Ricky Jay) and Susan Ricci (Rebecca Pidgeon), to the Caribbean island of St. Estephe in order to attend a meeting about the top-secret "process" he invented. While there, he is befriended by Jimmy Dell (Steve Martin), a wealthy business man who asks for a favour. Joe complies and quickly finds himself further and further alienated from his colleagues and drawn to Jimmy, a man whose own dubious nature Joe begins to suspect.

I'd tell you to watch the preview to make that clearer, but I watched the preview and thought it was about money laundering, which it is very much not. As usual, I was trying to give you a description without giving too much away. The movie has a fairly long set up, so that made it a bit trickier.

What I love about this film, what I love about all of David Mamet's films, is the innate lyricism to his scripts. There's a rhythm to them that draws you in, lulling and jarring you at appropriate moments. I think that's what makes Pidgeon so well suited to his work. She's the only one who could endear the audience while delivering the odd lines Mamet throws at her.

As much as I always enjoy that work, I didn't find Mamet's story thrilling so much as confusing. Mind you, I was thrown a bit by the lack of money laundering, and I believe I recovered enough to simply not understand. I like that you never find out what the process is, but I don't like that you have absolutely no sense at all of anything that goes on in that secure building. Oh, well.

As for Scott, well, I don't know what to think about him. There's nothing wrong with his acting, and I found his Joe to be over-the-top most of the time in his sense of self-possession. Maybe that's just the way he was written. In any case, as he is the so-called patron saint of the indie film, I suppose I should lay off him.

I saw this movie more than a week ago, and I've been struggling with reviewing it ever since. The truth is, I have nothing in particular to say about it. I didn't really strike me one way or the other except for how confusing it was with all the crossing, double, and triple crossing in the second act. By the third it's all pretty much sorted, so there's less to worry about it.

All in all, I've come to expect a little bit more from Mamet. B-

Sideways

Sideways (2004)

It's RE-view time! To remind you of the rules: I see the movie in the theatre; I see it again on DVD. No plot description and no holds barred on what I may mention for that movie's plot.

While no movie is ever perfect, this movie is the closest offering from last year. Last year, unlike the others between it and my beloved 2000, was an amazing year for movies. Movies were wonderful to watch last year.

As I was watching it this time, I kept trying to put my finger on what makes it so good besides the obvious. Outside of the quality of the actors, the direction, the script, the setting.

The scene that kills me, the scene that breaks my heart and sends it soaring, occurs when Miles and Maya discuss what got them into wine. When he starts to describe the pinot grape as "thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early," it's as "haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle" as the wine he so loves. And then, with the same question, Maya pushes the bounds with how "a bottle of wine is actually alive. And it's constantly evolving and gaining complexity. That is, until it peaks, like your '61. And then it begins its steady, inevitable decline." Chilling and uplifting.

The true triumph of Alexander Payne's latest offering, that which sets it apart from Election and About Schimdt, is that is isn't a mood piece. You need to be in the right frame of mind to find Election hilarious. If you're not there, the movie seems tedious.

With this film, though, you don't have to been in the mood to be amused. You just to watch. The movie will get to you. It's inevitable. It is haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle and alive and constantly evolving and gaining complexity as any one piece of time (thanks, JS!) can be.

Plus, I like that it makes me compare Miles' wine snobbery to my alleged movie snobbery. It's not as though I refer to myself as a cineast. I can't even spell cineast.

Although Miles is clearly an alcoholic, the oenophile in him is drawn not to the bottle but to the single mouthful - he's seduced by its colour, clarity, viscosity, and scent long before the wine hits his lips. I'm a junkie for film, but the cineaphile (if I may be so bold as to use that word) in me is drawn to the single scene, the perfect line reading.

Towards the end of the movie, as Miles is bidding Jack so long until the rehearsal dinner, Miles turns back to Jack to get their stories straight.

Miles: Uh, wait a minute, wait a minute. How come I wasn't hurt?
Jack: (throws arm up casually) You were wearing your seat belt.

Perfect, perfect scene. Jack doesn't even pause in his reply, and Miles starts to chuckle softly at the simplicity of Jack's scheme as he heads back to his car. It's the briefest of moments, and it is in those brief moments that the audience gets to feel like they are on the inside. Not because they've just watched this whole movie but because there's an undeniably familiar quality to this one tiny moment.

That's why I'm into movies. And they just taste so good.

What is ePIC?

First, click here. It's pretty self explanatory what to do once you get there. Then, come back here, and we can talk.

So, assuming you don't possess the same level of idiot as the girl behind me today in class ("Is this what's really going to happen?"), what do you think? Does Google want to own my ass?

More importantly, how much of this pessimistic view is realistic? Is the day coming when there will be no discussion of journalistic ethics? No more New York Times?

I have my opinions, and I believe this link will help you generate yours. I'd like to hear yours first.