Cultural Learnings of America
Your honor, it was the beer talking. Not me. It’s a lame excuse coming from Mel Gibson when he’s caught being himself (a sexist, anti-Semite yob), but even lamer when coming from drunken frat boys being drunken frat boys, on camera no less! The unnamed frat boys in question were the ignominious stars of “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” I don’t need to tell you that Borat is the brainchild of comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, a fake TV journalist from a former Soviet republic who baits Americans to say outrageous things (that they likely believe) with his seeming innocence. On his TV show, he famously got a bar room full of country-western fans to sing along with a song called “Throw the Jew Down the Well.” The movie is savagely funny. It has a fair amount of poop jokes and Jackass-style gross-out humor, […]
Scoop
Like all of Woody Allen’s movies since his “early, funny ones,””Scoop” has received pretty uneven reviews. One camp considers it a loose, freewheeling trifle. The other, a plodding, boring mess. Count me in the former camp. “Scoop” is silly fun. It’s got Woody being Woody – stammering, neuroses, card tricks and Vaudeville humor – minus the distasteful groping of young ladies (a Herculean feat for any man when you are the Director and the delectable Scarlett Johansen is your star). Ms. Johansen, herself, works better here than in “Match Point.” While she’s got the figure and sultry good looks to be a femme fatale, she may take a couple of decades to grow into that role. In the meantime, she is better suited to play awkward, unsure girls who happen – purely by accident – to be sexy. Building on a few borrowed plot points from “Match Point,” that movie […]
Six Dollar Movie Review: Capote
Phillip Seymour Hoffman perfectly impersonates the late author (as far as I can tell, based upon the clips I have seen of his later TeeVee appearances as a professional celebrity), and brings a subtle complexity to the role of Truman Capote as he uses (and abuses) everyone around him while researching and writing “In Cold Blood.” Capote traveled to a sleepy Kansas town that was the site of a grisly quadruple murder in 1959 to write a story for “The New Yorker” but worked instead for five years on the first “non-fiction novel.” He traded on his celebrity to gain the confidence of the wives of the town’s lawmen and used his money to fund the legal appeals of the murderers in order to win their trust and keep them alive long enough to get their side of the story. Of course, he needed to have them swinging from the […]
The Aristocrats
“The Aristocrats” is a disappointment. For all the talk of how the World’s Dirtiest Joke is like some great jazz improv, which improves with each new teller’s unique voice, mostly, it’s the same joke. There’s diarrhea, there’s incest, there’s Joe Franklin and the same lame punchline. I always thought the joke was that aristocrats (like England’s royal family) actually engage in some of the child-fucking, shit-eating acts described in the joke’s set-up. In fact, the punchline is meant to contrast the genteel evocation of the “aristocracy” with the foul deeds detailed in the joke itself. For that reason, the montage of interviews with comedians laughing at the existence of a better punchline (“the sophisticates!”) around the middle of the film is one of its funniest bits. Likewise, when comedians digress from the established joke into hilariously ribald tangents, the film finally hits its stride. George Carlin riffs on the consistency […]
Mysterious Skin
Though I’ve long been intrigued by trailers and reviews, I’ve failed to see any of Gregg Araki’s movies until “Mysterious Skin.” What I’ve missed in the past is not likely to be as remarkable and utterly affecting as “Skin,” which is easily the best movie I’ve seen so far this year. Centered around troubled Kansas teens Brian and Neil, who shared a life-changing experience in the summer of 1981, the film leads inevitably towards their devastating reunion ten years later. As an eight-year-old Little Leaguer, Neil (boldly played by “Third Rock From the Sun’s” Joseph Gordon-Levitt) was lured into a sexual relationship with his coach when he was eight years old. His voiceover narration makes clear that he was always attracted to men and was happy and proud to be so liked by “Coach,” who, remembered purely in flashbacks (it seems the movie was set in the 1980’s purely to […]
Five and a Half Dollar Movie Round-up
“Palindromes” is unremittingly bleak and cynical. Todd Solondz’ latest begins with the funeral of Dawn Weiner, the heroine of his earlier, funnier “Welcome to the Dollhouse.” The alluded-to date rape and suicide of his beloved character signals the film’s non-stop assault on hopefulness. His next victim is a cousin of Dawn’s, 13-year-old Aviva, who wants nothing more than to have “lots and lots of babies.” That innocent desire takes her from dispassionate, cringe-inducing underage sex to a botched abortion (at her liberal mother’s insistence) to hitchhiking and even more cringe-worthy sex with a trucker. From there, Aviva finds herself in the care of Mama Sunshine, a kind and mostly harmless christian who cares for a dozen or so disabled children who live and laugh together and sing and dance boy-band style peans to Jesus and the unborn children, while local yahoos in the basement plan the assassination of an abortion […]
Springtime for Hitler
“Downfall” is a genocide movie with an ostensibly happy ending: Hitler offs himself and the Nazi regime falls to the advancing Soviets. Made in Germany, the film provoked some controversy there for its humanizing portrait of Adolf Hitler. Swiss actor Bruno Ganz is mesmerizing and utterly convincing as Hitler as he slowly comes to grips with the end of his regime and his life. Still the film does not make him out to be a warm or attractive character, although Ganz does evoke some of the (waning) charisma of a man who convinced a nation to follow him into mass murder and world war and who inspired such insane loyalty from his top lieutenants that they follow him into the abyss and take their kids with them. Rather, the film portrays a more personal monster who sends children into hopeless battle against Soviet tanks and demands that his generals never […]
The Music: The Movie!
“Ray” is not a very good movie, but, as it is essentially a string of re-enacted musical performances, on the chitlins circuit, in the studio and in “mixed-race” concert halls, you won’t really notice until the end of the movie. When the last three minutes of the movie are narrated by on-screen captions that begin “For the next 40 years…,” it feels like the shortcut of lazy screenwriters (which it is), but the truth is that this is a jukebox movie, and, by 1965, Ray Charles had recorded his most legendary work. What was left to re-enact? The Pepsi commercials? The movie is compelling, but it is entirely because of Ray Charles’ brilliant body of work. A documentary might have better suited the material (certainly a talking head interview with Quincy Jones now would have been more impressive than Larenz Tate’s ill-suited pipsqueak impersonation of “Q”), but, the songs would […]
That’s Entertainment: Child Molestation, Genocide and Abortion
As if unemployment isn’t depressing enough, try ducking into a movie theater for a matinee to escape your problems for a couple hours. It’s awards season, so Hollywood and Indiewood trot out their “issues” pictures and tearjerkers. A few weeks ago, Alan Amalgamated and I had to walk clear across town to avoid cinematic child molestation, genocide, abortion and assisted suicide in search of a few laughs. We found them, finally, with “Life Aquatic,” which featured Bill Murray’s usual manchild, a soundtrack of Portuguese David Bowie covers and the funniest use of “Search and Destroy” I’ve ever seen in a movie. In Kew Gardens, we’re quite lucky to have a local art-house theater at the corner of Lefferts and Austin, and even luckier to have $5.50 tickets on Tuesdays and Thursdays. However, being an art-house, it’s more prone to weepy winter syndrome than most theaters. The other customers must love […]