Talkin' Bout the Moving Pictures!

A momentous day here at the blog, as I have my very first heckler! Check the comments on the Studio 60 post, it's heating up bitches! IT'S HEATING UP!!!

Going to let things cool down a bit today and give you some movie reviews.

"Yeah Right," I have the ticket stubs if you need proof that I've seen these.

For Your Consideration (B+)

Christopher Guest has made some of the funniest movies of the past decade. Best In Show (A-) is hilarious, just a steady onslaught of laughs. A Mighty Wind (A) is even better and added an unexpectedly moving undercurrent. Waiting For Guffman (A+) is the best of the bunch, an all-time comedy classic ("Everybody dance!"). So maybe my expectations were too high. The casts he assembles for these movies are incredible, and it's gotten to the point where it's like getting together with family when you go see one of these. If you liked your family.

Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, Fred Willard, Parker Posey, on and on and on, these guys are pros. This movie is stuffed to the gills with the funniest character actors working today (And for some reason, Sandra Oh). So why is this one a little off? I'm not sure. It may have to do with abandoning the "mockumentary" format which has served Guest so well in the past, going all the way back to Rob Reiner's classic This Is Spinal Tap (A). This is a more straightforward film and I felt it was sorely lacking those insane monologues to the camera.

Another problem is the characters. These movies have given us some of the most memorable characters of all time! Corky St. Clair, for example, does not have one line in Guffman that can not be quoted ("I'll tell you why I can't put up with you people...because you're bastard people!") The gay couple in Best In Show, brilliant. Levy's character in A Mighty Wind walked a line of sad and hilarious that I've rarely seen equaled. These are characters and performances for the time capsule.

For Your Consideration gives us no one like that. These are pretty stock characters, performed pretty much as you'd expect. We've got Guest as a Jewish film director, Levy as a vaguely sleazy agent, Posey doing a watered down version of her Guffman role. Even the world's funniest man (?) Ricky Gervais isn't given enough to do, in a role that amounts to about two minutes of screen time. Catherine O'Hara goes the furthest toward making a lasting impression in her role as an Oscar-hungry actress. It may even earn her a real-life nomination. But her character arc is so cruel and hard to watch that it borders on off-putting.

Still, you notice I'm giving it a B+. This is funnier than 99% of "comedies" out there. Guest on a somewhat lazy day still towers above the rest of the pack, and this is a very funny movie. I laughed out loud consistently. I'm just saying with the standard these guys have set, it left me a little cold, and this is the first of their movies I didn't immediately want to watch again.

John Michael Higgins steals the movie, by the way.

Random thought I had while watching this, if John Candy were alive today, wouldn't he fit in PERFECTLY with these movies? Wouldn't he just have been an incredible addition? I've been watching a lot of SCTV and him rolling with Levy and O'Hara is really a wonder to behold.

Speaking of Candy...

Candy (C)

Apparently this is garnering real-life Oscar buzz for Heath Ledger, otherwise I probably never would have heard of it. I think actors do these movies for the awards. "Maybe if I play a drug-addled, mentally handicapped, homosexual school teacher, they'll throw me a bone! Look, I made myself look unattractive! I lost 12 pounds for this! Nothing?"

It's yet another in the subgenre of "Drugs Are Bad" movies. Hey Hollywood. I get it. I'm not going to do drugs. They make people do bad things. I know.

This isn't a story I need told again, unless it's going to break from the mold in some way, a la Trainspotting      (A-) or Requiem For A Dream (A-, though I'll NEVER watch it again). This was well-made, well-acted, contained a lot of nudity, but there's a better way to spend two hours than watching people take drugs and argue. I got enough of that when my parents were together.

Marie Antoinette (B)

An extremely interesting movie. I don't know that I loved it, I don't know that it was even very good, but it was something different and it might be the first ever historical epic I didn't get bored during. I say good for Sofia Coppola, making a movie like this however the hell she wants to. Why does every movie of this type have to be all Britishy, stodgy, and dull? (By the way, I use the term "Britishy" to describe every movie set before 1930, regardless of location). The use of modern music is going to put some people off, but really...is it that big a deal? Give me The Strokes any day, I don't need a jaunty madrigal score to tell me I'm watching something that took place a long time ago. The corsets and horse-drawn carriages tipped me off just fine. The anachronism certainly works better here than in A Knight's Tale.

(You like how I worked the word anachronism in there? You're reading, reading, then BAM! Oh shit, this guy's a genius!).

Anyway, the movie is essentially about Marie trying to get her (gay? impotent? scared?) new King husband, played by the always funny Jason Schwartzman, to have sex with her, so she can have a son and secure her place on the throne. 

Basically, it's a biopic where you learn just about nothing about anything. It's a big, pretty collection of scenes and feelings. If that doesn't interest you, don't see it, but it's an experience I enjoyed having. And I would really, really, really like to have sex with Kirsten Dunst, Jewel teeth and all.

Fast Food Nation (B-)

This was a weird one. I have not read the non-fiction book that this is based on, but I guess the goal here was to expose the hard truths about the fast food industry in a narrative format. And I think it's a choice that doesn't really pay off. A documentary presentation would have been much more effective. 

This was done by Richard Linklater, who is one of our best working directors (the hilarious School of Rock (A-), the underrated Bad News Bears remake (B+), the incredible and romantic Before Sunrise and Before Sunset (A's all around), his masterpiece, Dazed and Confused (A+)), but he doesn't seem to really know what he wants to do here.

Basically, we kind of follow Greg Kinnear, a marketing exec for a fast food chain called "Mickey's," as he checks out the plant where their hamburgers are made. We also kind of follow Wilmer Valderrama (doing a pretty good job here actually, although I kept waiting for him to bust out a "YO MOMMA!") and Hispanic friends as they cross the border and begin working at that plant, getting involved in drugs and other negative influences. And we also kind of follow a young girl who works at a Mickey's, her mother, (a GREAT and sexy Patricia Arquette that makes me wonder again what she's doing slumming in the aptly titled Medium), and her uncle (a solid Ethan Hawke). Bruce Willis is briefly in the mix, he's good, and Avril Lavigne is in it too. She is not good. She should have just drawn on the whole experience with that Sk8r boi, might have drummed up some more genuine feelings.

It's all a big mess, and in the end it's exposing the fact that...COWS ARE KILLED TO MAKE HAMBURGERS!!!

 I kind of knew that. I've never seen them gruesomly slaughtered as I did here, I've never seen their organs sent down an assembly line as I did here, but I understood that it happened. This didn't really blow the lid off anything. It did teach me that it sucks to be an illegal immigrant working at a factory, but again, I could have figured that out on my own.

If presented as a documentary, like the wonderful Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (A-), this could have been a powerful whistle-blower on fast food, but as it stands it makes for an extremely unfocused little flick.

I've also checked out a bunch of DVD's but my hand's cramping up and I'm gonna need it in about...oh...twenty seconds. So good day.

And I need a laugh, please share your favorite Guest movie quotes below...

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