Sweeter Lemon

While the fate of Pushing Daisies still isn’t clear, I figured this is a good time to recommend another Lee Pace vehicle: The Fall.

The Fall suffers from what I call GESWBN disease: Great Entertainment Saddled With Bad Name (see also: So You Think You Can Dance? and Life on NBC). Because while “The Fall” sounds like it might be about Adam & Eve, or fallen angels, or even something demonic, in reality it’s nothing of the sort. It’s a fairy tale.

Here’s a synopsis I pulled from IMDB:

In a hospital on the outskirts of 1920s Los Angeles, an injured stuntman begins to tell a fellow patient, a little girl with a broken arm, a fantastical story about 5 mythical heroes. Thanks to his fractured state of mind and her vivid imagination, the line between fiction and reality starts to blur as the tale advances.

They aren’t kidding when they say “vivid imagination.” The movie was filmed in about a dozen different countries, and boasts having no computer-generated special effects. Each location shot is absolutely stunning. We watched this in Blu-Ray, and I can’t express how beautiful the composition of this film was. I envied the characters as they got to globe-trot during the course of the story.

The fairy-tale itself reminds me of Pan’s Labryinth, without being quite as heavy, and many may find it trite and shallow, but I loved it. The young lead is a treat, and is so completely natural in front of the camera without a hint of saccharine that mars many child performances. Lee Pace gives a great performance as a man who knows what he wants, and will do what he has to do to get it. The two of them play off each other remarkably.

Movie reviews aren’t my strong point – thousands of other folks out there are much better at it than I am. I liked it, and you might too.

I watched Hoosiers this weekend for the first time. Only I would write a blog post about a movie more than 20 years old, but there you go. It was exactly the kind of movie I thought it would be – small town hires new coach, works with an underdog team in the years before bodybuilding supplements and ESPN. Team goes through bumps and overcomes hurdles and eventually makes it to the State Finals, where it would seem they should be crushed by the taller, faster, stronger team, but LO! the underdogs win, and there is much rejoicing.

Here’s the thing: I love an underdog story. I’m not a sports nut, but I’ll watch a sports movie about an underdog any day. So this was a perfect movie for a lazy Sunday morning. Glad I finally had a chance to see it, after all of these years.

I recorded Marie Antoinette about a week ago, and I’ve been watching it this week in stops and starts as I eat my breakfast. It’s definitely full of eye-candy: gorgeous costumes, magnificent set desgin, and some of the most mouth-watering pastry on film that I’ve every seen. Plus, you can’t beat the early-80s new wave soundtrack.

The film made me curious about the life of Marie Antoinette, so I figured I’d check the Wikipedia entry on her. I almost cracked up from reading it, because either Sofia Coppola lifted the script from the Wiki, or someone took the film and created the Wiki entry from it. Because usually, you’ll find some artistic license with the movie, or a more neutral viewpoint in the Wiki, but these were so in sync that reading the entry was like watching the movie, right down to the characters motivations. I’m sure there was more to this woman’s life than what both of these sources could encapsulate, but it was hysterical to see how much they mirrored each other.

That’s what I get for going to a publicly edited “fact” source. At least the movie was good.

Just by chance, as we were flipping through the channels a couple of weeks ago, Mr. Martini and I stumbled on “Elizabeth” on one of the HD movie channels. I had never seen it, and Mr. Martini hadn’t seen it in years, and we ended up watching the entire movie. I even stayed up past 10:30 to watch the whole thing – that says a lot. It was gorgeous, the costumes and sets were beautiful, and Christopher Eccleston managed to look both menacing and badass in pantaloons.

We rented “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” from Netflix, and watched it this weekend. While not quite as good as the first film, it was just as lush and gorgeous to watch. The title was misleading, as it wasn’t so much about the Golden Age but more about the events leading up to it.

If nothing else, the films made me want to travel to England and tour some historic castles. Especially if I can go back to a nice, heated hotel with indoor plumbing afterwards.

I’m going to say this right at the start:

This movie isn’t for everyone.

A few years ago, a friend introduced me and Mr. Martini to the Canadian TV show, “Trailer Park Boys.” It is, in a word, hilarious. However, it’s hard to describe in a way that makes it sound as hilarious as it actually is:

“OK, so, like, it’s about these guys who live at a trailer park in Canada. They’re both petty criminals. Julian constantly has a glass of rum and coke in his hand – I mean, like, constantly. Ricky is always trying to find new and better ways to grow and sell weed. They also have this friend, Bubbles – yes, Bubbles – who has an underbite and wears coke-bottle glasses and loves kittycats, but can be a badass when he needs to be. The three of them are constantly trying to pull-off heists and robberies, and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t – OK, mostly they don’t, and sometimes they end up in prison. There’s also a bunch of other characters at the park that are always messing with them, and stuff. Plus, it’s shot documentary style, kind of like The Office. Also, they swear a lot.”

See? It doesn’t sound all that funny. But it really, really is.

As an end to the series, they produced a movie to kind of tie everything up, like a series finale. We hadn’t watched any of the shows for awhile, so I was hesitant – I mean, I have Juno just waiting to be watched. So I wasn’t expecting to enjoy myself as much as I did.

It could probably be watched as a stand-alone movie, without having seen any of the TV shows. But for me it was more fun to see it with a little bit of background about each of the characters, especially Julian since he took a more of a backseat in the movie’s plot.

In brief – a fun movie for a Saturday night, especially after a couple of rum & cokes.

Last weekend, I watched not one, but two scary movies. This may not seem that strange for someone who likes scary movies.

I, however, do not like scary movies. But I did enjoy these. For the most part. I kind of ducked out of one of them for awhile.

The first – “The Mist,” based on the Stephen King novel (short story? novella? whatever). Basic plot outline – a strange mist envelopes a small town in Maine, cutting off a group of people in a grocery store. Complicating matters, “There’s something in the mist!” Yes, my friends, things are popping in and out of the mist, killing the grocery store folks one at a time in various and sundry ways. Add to the mix a religious fanatic, suggesting ritual sacrifices to appease an angry G-d, and you’ve got human drama to add to the other scary monsters.

I have to admit, I didn’t watch all of this movie. I have a low threshold for scary monsters jumping out of nowhere, and an even lower tolerance for suspense, so I had to walk awhile for a while in the middle. I did catch the ending, which I won’t spoil, except to say: “Whoa.” But from what I did see – great performances all around, especially by Thomas Jane and Marcia Gay Harden.

The other scary movie we watched was Cloverfield, and I LOVED it. I loved the conceit of just a random schmoe documenting the monster invasion with his digicam because “people will want to know.” It had a lot of truly unbelievable moments (the roof cross comes to mind), sure, but it also had a lot of moments that seemed freakily realistic (one character’s almost catatonic freakout after seeing a monster attack). While I really wished that the girls, dressed in their finery since the monster crashed (ha!) a party, would grab a pair of sneakers or even slippers from one of the many abandoned stores so they didn’t have to run all over Manhattan in their HEELS, for the most part I could understand each character’s motivation throughout the movie.

Also, the special effects, in my opinion, were fabulous. The destruction of the city was freakily realistic, and the Statue of Liberty head rolling down the street didn’t lose any effectiveness despite being shown in every trailer. It was really more of an action movie than a scary movie, but it had my heart beating pretty fast. A great Saturday night movie.

Speaking of which – I don’t feel we missed anything by waiting to see these movies at home. I know there are a lot of movie purists out there who must see movies on the big screen, but… I’m OK with DVD at home. It’s so rare for us to have good movie-going experiences, plus bad seats and noisy audiences make the high prices that much harder to swallow.

So there you have it – two scary movies as seen by a girl who doesn’t like scary movies. Next in the Netflix queue – Juno. Which I suspect is a scary movie antidote.

Last year, everyone was raving about the movie Once. I missed it in the theaters, but figured I’d watch it when it came out on DVD.

Then I promptly forgot all about it.

Until the Oscars, that is, when it won the award for Best Original Song, and then Jon Stewart brought the girl back onstage to finish her speech that got cut off by the orchestra and I thought – oh, yeah, I need to see this movie.

Cut to a week later, it’s a Sunday afternoon, my latest knitting project is crumpled in my lap, forgotten, and I’m blubbering while the credits roll.

The story is simple and sweet, and the characters express themselves mostly through the songs they write and play throughout the movie. But it’s not your typical musical a la Chicago or Sweeney Todd – the characters are musicians, the music they write and perform is their form of expression, and the film documents the songs as they would appear in the musicians’ natural setting – on street corners and in music stores, not as a narrative device to drive the story.

Some folks have compared Once to Before Sunrise – the mid-90s Ethan Hawke/Julie Delpy romance, and I can sort of see why – simple stories, no flashy effects, the focus on the characters. But Once feels more adult (due, no doubt, to the leads in Once being adults and not college-age students), and the music adds so much to the tale.

I won’t say that this movie will have everyone blubbering in their living rooms after watching it. But if you’re looking for a sweet, simple romance to wile away a Sunday afternoon, I definitely recommend this movie.

I may get tarred and feathered (or shot with a very large and impressively silenced fiream) but, well, I really didn’t like this movie.

I didn’t hate it. But I didn’t love it, either. I think Josh Brolin has been incredibly overlooked, as he played a really engaging character with almost no dialogue. Javier Bardem played a baddie with gusto, but… meh. Whatever. He was “scary.” Big deal.

Basically, what starts out as a really interesting cat-and-mouse chase ends as a(nother) commentary on how violent our nation is becoming. Le yawn. I’d say more, but I kind of stopped paying attention when everyone in the movie just kept telling me over and over how violent we are becoming as a nation. It was a bait-and-switch I didn’t think was fair: don’t get me to start enjoying a violent movie only to tell me that my enjoyment of said movie is leading to the downfall of a country. I cry foul.

The scenery was pretty, there were some nice touches with period details. But was it worth the $10 price of admission? I could have waited for the DVD.

Friday night, Mr. Martini and I saw this movie:

And had a blast watching it. The title says it all – it was an hour and a half of gunfights and car chases and your basic videogame fight scenes come to life.

As long as you weren’t expecting any sort of deep, meaningful movie, weren’t afraid of a little (OK, a lot) of violence, and were willing to suspend belief and let some HUGE plot twists happen that just shouldn’t have happened, then this is one enjoyable little flick.

I had a flashback to Clive Owen in Children of Men at one point (if you’ve seen both movies, you’ll know why). I gotta say – I like Clive Owen more the older and grizzlier he gets, rather than all dapper and Pierce Brosnan-y.

So – Shoot Em Up. Fun popcorn movie with lots of firepower and bloodshed. You’ve been warned.