Silly us, here CCC thought Omar Sharif was dead (something we meditate on bi-monthly), when, in fact, he's starring in Seabiscuit 2: Seabiscuit's Revenge.
Cinecultist has seen some really bad movies in her day. Terrible insults to celluloid. Travesties in cinematic history. Puke on screen. Three to Tango. Resident Evil. Kalifornia (okay, so we turned that one off before watching the end, but we got the drift). Children of the Corn. After yesterday, CC has a new one to add to the pantheon, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Although to call it bad, is not really to mine the depths of the pain this movie induced in us, it is more about severe mediocrity.
We hear that LXG is a kickass comic book and let's hope that's why our friend, G, who usually has such good taste, suggested we attend. Always up for a little schlocky action amidst the a/c on a summer evening, CC agreed. But as the film wore on and on, we found ourselves bogged down in some serious plot issues and lost in holes in the characters. Here's a few questions CC contemplated during this movie:
Isn't Dorian Gray supposed to be queer? (Stuart Townsend should have been giving the look to Shane West, not Peta Wilson his "lov-ah.")
Wasn't Tom Sawyer set in pre-Civil War times? What's he doing cherubic in 1899?
Was Kenya called Kenya in 1899?
Did they have tanks then?
Or automatic machine guns?
How does Captain Nemo's giant ship fit through the canals of Venice?
Isn't Carnivale held in February, not July?
If Mina Harker's a vampire, how can she go out in the sunlight?
When stabbing her, was it really necessary to make a joke about getting to "nail her one more time"?
And the list goes on, but CC won't belabor the point that for all the fancy shooting, literary characters, growling Sean Connery who's always good for a campy laugh and whatnot, LXG is perhaps the worst thing we've seen in a long time. We never thought we'd say this but, your better bet this weekend is to go with a, *gasp* Jerry Bruckheimer produced movie like Pirates or Bad Boys II. (Excuse us while we go splash some ice water on our face to try to snap out of this.)
Terrence Malick, acclaimed director of the wonderful, though widely spaced apart, films Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998) is considering helming the Benecio del Toro vehicle, Che, chronicling the life and death of Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevara. Originally thought to be directed by Steven Soderbergh, it seems as if Mr. S and his Section Eight Films will produce instead. PCC, for one, is excited at the possibility of not having to wait until she's 40 to see a new Malick film!
CC supposes we might have seemed as though we were trapped under something heavy by not posting yesterday about the Big Movie News: That Quentin Tarantino's new film, Kill Bill will be released in two parts according to Miramax the film's distribution company. For the record, we knew, we thought about it and frankly we couldn't give a care.
We weighed in with the twittering masses at Gothamist but as Mark on whatevs.org points out, this has to be all about the lucre. First it's the unsubstatiated reports last winter that Harvey edited Scorses's Gangs of New York to fit his tastes and now this, it must be serious Svengali time over at the house of ben Miriam & Max. But allinall, that's neither here nor there. Tarantino's film is still going to be the same revisionist low-brow Uma vehicle it always meant to be two-parter or no. CC's saw Tarantino speak two years ago at the Seattle Film Festival and while he knows his stuff when it comes to obscure B releases and many find his pictures entertaining, he still bugs. Thus, the not giving a care.
Last night, Cinecultist dragged her tired toochas uptown for one of the Alain Delon (aka the Delon-athon) screenings at Walter Reade, Jean-Luc Godard's Nouvelle Vague. Just as we suspected, a few of our favorite pretentious film types were in the house for this 1990 feature considered one of the best unreleased gems of the '90s according to Film Comment.
People who go to see Godard films, in our experience, tend to fall into two camps: those who earnestly LOVE Godard and those who are so over Godard yet attend nonetheless. Our seat mates included one from each side of the fence, A who likes to sit deadcenter three or four rows back from the screen, so at to be close enough to practically lick the screen and O, who declared he hated it as soon as the final credit flashed across the screen.
Where exactly does CC fall on this continuum? Somewhere probably in the middle, able to appreciate JLG's deft editing of sound and image together into something entirely unique yet still walking out of the theater knowing we didn't really "get" it. Whatever it might be. Godard lives for quotation, and Nouvelle Vague is positively peppered in allusion, although there's more of a sense that a line or shot might be an allusion without really being able to pin down its source. Like reading certain modernist writers such as Borges, Godard makes you realize how little you know and how much you have to learn. As a practice, CC tends to like it when he uses this power to make us laugh (like in A Woman Is A Woman) rather than feel guilty for our decadent bourgeois ways (as in any of his Maoist pictures).
Also, in case you were wondering, old Alain Delon, age 55 in this with Harrison Ford-esque folds in his face but lithe enough for shorts on the yacht -- still totally hot.
Last night, Cinecultist met her two musical mad friends at the Film Forum for a Freed double feature. J had promised some tempting things to lure CC to the cinema -- technicolor, MGM, Vincente Minnelli directs, Fred Astaire dances. It all sounds like Yolanda and the Thief could be a light, magical feature and a nostalgic evening at the theater. Instead, it was seriously painful.
When we thought about it later, really it was a case of extenuating circumstances outside of the movie's or my friends' responsibility. Smashed next to an anonymous armrest hogger on one side, forced to turn self into a human pretzel to try to find a little space, rolling the eyes at the three obnoxious girls in front of us who kept giggling and cheering at random parts ("the Babysitters' Club," JH called them), CC could not help but be a bit perturbed. Then the plot of this movie -- wherein crook Astaire travels to imaginary Latin American country and wooes a naive heiress by pretending to be an angel -- just got odder and odder. And the music sort of sucked. If a musical has no real plot but a bunch of hummable tunes, and a few choice dance numbers, CC can forgive. This thing had an extended dream ballet that wanted to be Dali surrealism meets An American in Paris inventive but instead was hackney and lame. Ooh, the heiress wears garlands that look like gold coins, we get it, 'cause she's rich. Even Freud couldn't have interpreted this one. We took off after the first movie, unable to stand it any longer.
Enough snark for one day, but don't let this review dissuade you from attending some of the other Classics of the MGM titles, or even musicals in general. Like any genre, there's a few stinkers in with the gems. Singin' in the Rain (a personal favorite) plays this weekend, Gigi runs on Sunday and we're set to try again with the musical friends at a screening of Meet Me in St. Louis next week on Thursday. That one has Judy Garland in it, guaranteed to be a winner.
Excellent news for fans of historic movie theaters like Cinecultist, the Waverly on Sixth Avenue near Bleecker is set to reopen, now as an outpost of the Independent Film Channel. This may mean some homogenization and "brand-extension" according to the Times who details the theater's history as an independent film outlet in the Village, but c'est la vie kids, it's the sign of the times. We'll just happy to see the boarded up facade removed and that syntactically irksome sign "Clo ed for Reno ation" taken down (what exactly is Reno-ation? To be made like Reno, NV? Adding second rate slot machines and third-tier dancers?).
To add CC's own personal connection to the space, we attended a screening of American Pie 2 there the night we moved into our first New York apartment with our new roommate, S. A screenwriter in the Dramatic Writing program at Tisch, S and CC hit it off like gangbusters and wandered around the new nabe, eating some Thai before stopping in for a flick. We bonded over laughing at how terrible the movie was and how much the two people behind us seemed to be actually enjoying it. A friendship based on the snarky evaluation of other's substandard taste and Asian take-out was born.
[congrats to Cinecultist.com and its contributors, this is our 101st post. Who knew we had that much to say?]
Filmmaker magazine names their 25 new faces to watch in Indie Film, and surprise surprise a bunch of them are graduates of Tisch's film program. Besides the excitement of that alumni connection and the desire to memorize these faces so that when they're HUGE on the scene we can say, "oh yeah, I'd heard of that dude ages ago," we noticed a director who's film we've actually watched. We saw Steven Tsuchida's short, A Ninja Pays Half My Rent, before the screening of Infernal Affairs at the New Directors/New Films fest this year and thought it was very clever and charming. We posted the following comment on Gothamist before exploring all the links discovering that you can watch it streaming through Sundance's site. Rawk-star.
[via Gothamist]
Using as a jumping off point the recent boom in comic book character movies (how many has CC seen? That's right. All of them.), The Morning News's Matthew Baldwin takes a look at the weird wacky world of copyright law. A good read and very relevant for understanding the swirlings of public domain in movie rights.
In an article in this Sunday's Times, Emily Yoffe looks at the way young children will watch a video over and over again as a way to completely digest the plot, have satisfaction knowing the next story point and play at being the characters. Cinecultist realized we understand this desire to watch the same thing more than once all too well when we found ourselves (sort of) watching You've Got Mail and The Wedding Planner on TNT this afternoon. (See the humiliating things CC will reveal to our readers?)
Cinecultist knows there are people out there, perfectly cultured and engaging people mind you, who might only own 2 DVDs and one of them might be The Matrix. In this universe with a zillion on demand channels, Netflix and a packed cineplex, why would we want to own movies let alone watch the same ones repeatedly? Especially since we're not toddlers, unable to grasp the complexities of character or plot the first time we watch that Meg Ryan comedy. But those other responses elicited by a familiar story, the comfort of knowing what's next, laughing at familiar jokes or discovering a new aspect to a well-known character can be very soothing and pleasing even to jaded adults.
The first video tape Cinecultist bought was Cameron Crowe's Say Anything, purchased with a gift certificate the year we were 13, after having seen it in the theater with our Dad that spring. CC used to make little check marks on the back of the box to keep track of the number of times we watched it and also had quote contests with our friend, Sarah Stanek, to see who remembered the most dialogue. Thinking about it now, it's not surprising that CC needed a little comfort, a little repetition at this confusing time in our life, when we were starting to figure ourselves out. Lloyd Dobbler and his trench coat, Diane Court and her toothy grin, that Peter Gabriel track — these things still feel familiar like sheets washed more times than you can count.
Movies can thrill and take us to new places, or they can be old friends who come out once and awhile just to hold our hand.