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Movies Seen in 2010

To be honest, when I was watching it, I knew he was in it from the outset and still I didn't notice him. But he's got to be there somewhere.

Up next I'm watching the David Duchovny "masterpiece" Playing God. Why? Because I decided, for no particularly good reason, to watch every David Duchovny film ever made a couple of years ago. You can see why this one has taken so long to rise to the top of my Blockbuster queue...
 
1. Sherlock Holmes [B-]
2. Men in Black [A]
3. Up in the Air [A]
4. Star Trek: The Motion Picture [D+]
5. I'm Not There [A]
6. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (2009) [D-]
7. American Violet [B ]
8. Inglourious Basterds [A]
9. Death at a Funeral [B ]
10. A Serious Man [A]
11. The Hurt Locker [A-]
12. Mad Max 2 (AKA The Road Warrior) [C]
13. The Book of Eli [C-]
14. Elegy [B+]
15. Close Encounters of the Third Kind [A]
16. The Invention of Lying [B-]
17. Gamer [C]
18. Timecrimes [A]
19. Metropolis [A]
20. Pandorum [B ]
21. Raiders of the Lost Ark [A]
22. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade [A]
23. Moon [A]
24. Fun with Dick and Jane [C]
25. Sunshine [C]
26. Stanley Kubrick's The Killing [B+]
27. Ernest Hemingway's The Killers (1964) [A-]
28. Ernest Hemingway's The Killers (1946) [B+]
29. Glengarry Glen Ross [B-]
30. Gattaca [A]
31. The Big Chill [ B]
32. The Producers [A]
33. Rent [C+]
34. Blade Runner [A]
35. My Cousin Vinny [B-]
36. Zombieland [ B]
37. Infernal Affairs [A]
38. The Walker [F]
39. Starship Troopers [A]
40. Mrs. Washington Goes to Smith [F]
41. Altered States [A]
42. Devil in a Blue Dress [ B]
43. Renaissance [ B]
44. District 9 [ B]
45. The Shawshank Redemption [B+]
46. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story [ B]
47. Memento [A]
48. Powaqqatsi [C+]
49. The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard [D-]
50. The Box [ B]
51. Beverly Hills Cop [B-]
52. Notorious [B+]
53. Apocalypse Now Redux [A]
54. Death to Smoochy [C+]
55. Double Jeopardy [D-]
56. The Maltese Falcon [A-]
57. Starship Troopers [A]
58. Green Zone [ B]
59. Roving Mars [ B]
60. Star Trek [B+]
61. Beverly Hills Cop 2 [B-]
62. Playing God [D-]

Playing God is as terrible as its reputation suggests, and perhaps worse. The entire cast delivers performances that are hammy, awful, or both. David Duchovny has a few amusing lines where his sense of humor is able to come through, but not many. Mostly, were subjected to some poorly written narration delivered with all the enthusiasm it deserves. Michael Massee is really over the top (to manic levels, really) as an FBI agent. Timothy Hutton isn't much better. There's an amusing scene where Duchovny's character goes to treat a man in the company of a couple of rednecks, but of course the man has been dead for hours. The only other amusing thing I can think of is when the credits came up and I was able to shut the movie off, check it off my list, and never have to watch it again.

Hopefully I'll do better tonight. Shouldn't be hard...
 
The Incredible Hulk (2008) [B-] Much much better than the piece of crap that was Hulk (2003) but it could've been so much better. I liked Norton as Banner, but the lack of character development is disappointing. I would have liked to see the characters fleshed out a little more.

Watchmen (2009) I've been meaning to get around to this for a while now and having just finished the novel recently, I thought it'd be a good time to watch it. For the most part I liked it, but there were a few scenes in the novel that really enriched the story that were either not in the film or done poorly, so that was a big letdown for me.

The Illusionist (2006) [A] This one was a lot of fun, I was highly entertained. Ed Norton and Paul Giamatti are fantastic.
 
Shutter Island

The film plays its hand rather heavily; I suspecting the ending pretty much from the first scene. Still, it's a stylish melodrama, with lots of nice musical and visual cues (a favourite of mine would be when discussing the war, one of the marshalls drolly remarks they could have been paper-pushers - and we cut to an image of paper floating dreamlike in the office of a Nazi commandant.)

It seems to have elicited extremely mixed reactions, but I'd mostly place this as a return to form for Scorsese. But then, insanity, imbalance, worlds shifting out of order - this stuff I always find fun.

I can't help but think of Caligari when watching the film, and specifically, Siegfried Kracauer's take on it: In that film too a man menaced by a supposedly respectable but secretly villainous governor of a mental ward; but it turns out he is indeed a decent clinician and the hero is insane. The twist ending was not one the original scenarists wanted, and they resented it, and to Kracauer this undermined the anti-authortarian message of that film to make it more of a valorization of that authority... which led to the Nazis, and so on.

With a similar plot, and a similar connection to the Nazis; well. And yet the film may give us the same twist - he is a madman and the psychatrist is a reasonable man - but it still sides with the madman rather than the reasonable man. It has more sympathy for him, given the detached paternalism (with a hint of chiding cruelty), and in a world of Dachau and the A-bomb and a God who loves violence, as the film puts it, becoming a monster seems all to terribly real. Better then to die, as DiCaprio's character figures.
 
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Sherlock Holmes (B)

Book of Eli (B+)

She's Out Of My League (B-)

Daybreakers (D)

Copout (D-)

From Paris With Love (B)

Alice in Wonderland (B)

Inglorious Basterds (A)
 
45. Adam's Rib (C)

Continuing our Old Black-and-White Films series, I jump back further in time to 1949's Adam's Rib, one of the many cinematic collaborations between Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, directed by George Cukor (who also directed The Philadelphia Story, which I watched/reviewed earlier in the year). Reading up, this is a film with a pretty good reputation (they even tried to base a TV series on it in the 1970s), but I didn't like it. It's supposedly a screwball comedy, but it's not particularly funny (the candy gun at the end made me laugh, though). Some of the subject-matter really seems strange for a comedy, and I'm not clear whether the way Amanda's feminism is presented is supposed to make us sympathize (in which case, her argument is preposterous) or not (given the female co-writer and Hepburn's general presence, I'm guessing this isn't just an anti-feminist screed, which just makes it weirder). There's also the most effeminate would-be wife-stealer I've ever seen in a movie. Hepburn and Tracy are both giving their all, and you can see whey people still speak of the pairing fondly, but overall I really didn't enjoy this one.
 
District 9 - A
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince - B+
The Wrestler - B
V for Vendetta - C+
Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone - C
Corpse Bride - C
Battlefield Earth - F
There Will Be Blood - A
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - B
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - B
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - A
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - B-
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - B
Faust (1994) - A
Night on Earth - B
Schizopolis - B-
The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes - B
Primer - B
Ryan (2005) - B
Lost Highway - C+
The Seventh Seal (1957) - A
Metropolis (1927) - A
Kagemusha - A
Following - B+
Masters of Russian Animation 1, 2 - A
The Old Man and the Sea (animated) - A
The Man Who Planted Trees - A
Miller's Crossing - B+
Ocean's Eleven - B-
Moon - A
Inglorious Basterds - B+
"Unnamed Bitorrent Animation Collection" - A
The Third Man - A-
Memento - A
Thirst - B

I'd somehow never gotten around to seeing Memento until recently. It's very good. Might have the most important last 5 minutes of any movie I can recall. Every time you think that you've got the motivations of the various characters figured out, the movie turns that on it's head. Excellent movie and an excellent use of it's premise. A

Thirst is a solid vampire love story movie hailing from South Korea. There's a bit of depth to the characters, the cinematography is good, and the writing is pretty smart. Seems to channel MacBeth a bit during it's third act, and really, that's the most interesting thing about these kinds of movies. B
 
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1. Sherlock Holmes [B-]
2. Men in Black [A]
3. Up in the Air [A]
4. Star Trek: The Motion Picture [D+]
5. I'm Not There [A]
6. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (2009) [D-]
7. American Violet [B ]
8. Inglourious Basterds [A]
9. Death at a Funeral [B ]
10. A Serious Man [A]
11. The Hurt Locker [A-]
12. Mad Max 2 (AKA The Road Warrior) [C]
13. The Book of Eli [C-]
14. Elegy [B+]
15. Close Encounters of the Third Kind [A]
16. The Invention of Lying [B-]
17. Gamer [C]
18. Timecrimes [A]
19. Metropolis [A]
20. Pandorum [B ]
21. Raiders of the Lost Ark [A]
22. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade [A]
23. Moon [A]
24. Fun with Dick and Jane [C]
25. Sunshine [C]
26. Stanley Kubrick's The Killing [B+]
27. Ernest Hemingway's The Killers (1964) [A-]
28. Ernest Hemingway's The Killers (1946) [B+]
29. Glengarry Glen Ross [B-]
30. Gattaca [A]
31. The Big Chill [ B]
32. The Producers [A]
33. Rent [C+]
34. Blade Runner [A]
35. My Cousin Vinny [B-]
36. Zombieland [ B]
37. Infernal Affairs [A]
38. The Walker [F]
39. Starship Troopers [A]
40. Mrs. Washington Goes to Smith [F]
41. Altered States [A]
42. Devil in a Blue Dress [ B]
43. Renaissance [ B]
44. District 9 [ B]
45. The Shawshank Redemption [B+]
46. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story [ B]
47. Memento [A]
48. Powaqqatsi [C+]
49. The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard [D-]
50. The Box [ B]
51. Beverly Hills Cop [B-]
52. Notorious [B+]
53. Apocalypse Now Redux [A]
54. Death to Smoochy [C+]
55. Double Jeopardy [D-]
56. The Maltese Falcon [A-]
57. Starship Troopers [A]
58. Green Zone [ B]
59. Roving Mars [ B]
60. Star Trek [B+]
61. Beverly Hills Cop 2 [B-]
62. Playing God [D-]
63. Hook [C-]

There wasn't much on television last night, so I settled for Steven Spielberg's Hook. I remember, when the film came out, the reviews were poor and I, being six (saw it on VHS I think) loved it. Nostalgia only goes so far, though. At times, Robin Williams seems to be enjoying his role, and at times, he seems woefully miscast. The music by John Williams is wonderful, but it only makes me wish the design of Neverland could match it. It's just so drab.

Planning on watching 2012 tonight and Shutter Island the day after. Don't have grand expectations for either, but we'll see. I've had Wings of Desire rented for ages on Blu-Ray. I should probably get around to watching that soon...
 
The alphabetical pattern is broken.

Avatar
Amreeka
Just Married
2012
CSA: The Confederate States of America (a mockumentary that's disturbing, horrific, and ridiculous all at the same time)

I've been purposely avoiding anything released before 2000.
 
"Bullitt" - The much hyped car chase lived up to its reputation (one of the best car chases I've ever seen) and the shooting/chasing on foot scenes were terrific as well. Couldn't get into the characters or story, though. I was surprised by how bland Bullitt himself was. Just a typical, generic, straight arrow, smart, professional, intelligent cop. Didn't really help me understand why Steve McQueen is considered iconic. His meticulous, man-of-few words no-nonsense attitude was realistic, but made the character boring to watch.

The relationship with his woman in the movie was weak too. Same kind of thing as "Heat" where the woman worries about all the violence her man has to deal with in his line of work and how it makes him aloof and desensitized to violence. It was done so much better in "Heat", I think mostly because Al Pacino had great dialogue to work with and brought humour and intensity to the role. The chase at the airport in the end reminded me of "Heat" too. I wonder if Michael Mann was thinking of this movie when he made that. I'm glad I saw it because of the chase scenes, but overall I was disappointed by this so-called action classic.
 
64. Notes on a Scandal [A-]

I bought this film at Blockbuster over a year ago for 3 dollars, but for some reason only got around to watching it this afternoon. I thought it was marvelous, for the most part. Barbara's sexual longing for Sheba is very palpable, but never overplayed. Glass' score is wonderful--at times, it plays to the composer's strengths and at times, it was much more dramatic and thematic than I would have expected from the composer. At times, I thought that the film, visually, relied on a cliche or two, but listening to the film was a joy--the interplay between music, sound effects, and dialogue (including Barbara's wonderful, unreliable narration) was quite well-done.

Shutter Island tonight, and then 2012 if I'm feeling self-destructive. :p
 
Loved Notes on a Scandal. I saw it basically for the Glass score (big fan) but it had solid performances and excellent writing. Judi Dench's incredibly cynical bitterness is a joy to listen to.
 
Went out and saw The Runaways. As far as rock band biopics go, it's well-made and watchable, but if you're looking for something deep and insightful, you may be disappointed. To go with a musical analogy, the film hits all the appropriate notes, but it doesn't really do anything terribly unique or unexpected with them.

It's worth a viewing, though. I'll give it a B... maybe a B-, but I'm feeling generous, so I'll stick with the original grade.
 
64. Notes on a Scandal [A-]
65. Shutter Island [B-]

Scorsese certainly comes across several wonderful visuals in this film, especially in the flashbacks, and he certainly succeeds in creating an atmosphere for his protagonist to lose all confidence in the world and himself. But at times it's all a little heavy. The use of music I found to be especially overbearing. And the twist...well, I saw it coming. Not because it's extremely obvious, but because every review I read emphasized that there was a twist and it seemed like the most obvious resolution. Actually, the whole scheme gets more crazy the more you think about it, but it's only a movie.

I loved the last line by DiCaprio, suggesting...well, I won't say in fear of spoilers and because I am too lazy to use spoiler tags.

This is probably Scorsese's best film since The Aviator, the only other recent film of his that I've rather liked.
 
Harvey said:
64. Notes on a Scandal [A-]

I bought this film at Blockbuster over a year ago for 3 dollars, but for some reason only got around to watching it this afternoon. I thought it was marvelous, for the most part. Barbara's sexual longing for Sheba is very palpable, but never overplayed. Glass' score is wonderful--at times, it plays to the composer's strengths and at times, it was much more dramatic and thematic than I would have expected from the composer. At times, I thought that the film, visually, relied on a cliche or two, but listening to the film was a joy--the interplay between music, sound effects, and dialogue (including Barbara's wonderful, unreliable narration) was quite well-done.

Shutter Island tonight, and then 2012 if I'm feeling self-destructive. :p
Click to expand...

Kegg said:
Loved Notes on a Scandal. I saw it basically for the Glass score (big fan) but it had solid performances and excellent writing. Judi Dench's incredibly cynical bitterness is a joy to listen to.
Click to expand...

I agree with both of you. I really loved Notes on a Scandal, and I loved Philip Glass's score just as much. In fact, reading these posts has made me listen to the score once more on my iTunes.
 
Harvey said:
I loved the last line by DiCaprio, suggesting...well, I won't say in fear of spoilers and because I am too lazy to use spoiler tags.
Click to expand...

I think Kegg best summarized this, but I was so-so on the film until that last line. It was weird, because I was enjoying the film up until that point, but that line really encapsulated everything for me, which is just stunning how one single line can affect someone's viewership on such a drastic level.

Even the overbearing music seemed to make sense given the context that I was able to view everything after the ending. Yes, it was melodramatic (and not just the music), but I feel like unlike a lot of recent twists, this one actually made sense and actually gave the film an entirely different meaning, whereas twists in the past have gone out of their way to either detract from a certain film, I felt like after watching the ending I was able to get something away from Shutter Island I didn't know I was getting.

Without that ending, Shutter Island is a completely different film.
 
The whole movie was drolly melodramatic. The dream and flashback sequences especially.

I loved that.

But yes, the ending does change everything (and from what I've read, is different from the book's ending too.)
 
Also, I wouldn't say Shutter Island is a return to form for Martin Scorsese, since that would imply his recent works have been lackluster. Gangs of New York and The Departed were both vintage Scorsese, showcasing his virtuoso talent at crafting complicated, dense stories that are ultra-violent. The Aviator was more in line with some of Scorsese's films that deviate from "classic Scorsese", such as The Last Temptation of Christ or The Age of Innocence.

In fact, I think Shutter Island is if anything more in line with Cape Fear, but on a slightly more psychological level. Shutter Island feels like a Hitchcock or Polanski picture, drenching the film with atmospheric dread and putting the character in a situation where everyone knows something he doesn't, creating (in this case) a (false) sense of paranoia. It's probably the most Hitchcockian of all the films he's ever done.
 
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