Failure to Launch

Sometimes I like chick flicks. They can be relaxing, light, funny, charming… like some of Hugh Grant’s better ones: Love Actually, or that one with Julia Roberts in it. Notting Hill.

But I made the awful mistake of putting on Failure to Launch, a gruesome piece of crap starring Matthew McConaughey and Sarah Jessica Parker.

McConaughey is a 35-year-old nobody who still lives with his parents because he’s too lazy and stupid to think of doing anything else. Parker has forged a career for herself prying mama’s boys like McConaughey out of the basement. She does it by making them fall in love with her, and then she dumps them. She does this for money.

These two pathetic losers naturally fall in love with each other. I can’t even stand to tell you about it, it’s just too horrible. I watched the whole thing and it made me feel like I was a loser too.

The only thing good in this movie is the performance of Zooey Deschanel (Elf) as Parker’s neurotic roommate. She’s funny and likeable, and she steals every scene she’s in. But she can’t make this movie worth watching.

The Virgin Spring

To cleanse myself I needed a strong dose of existential angst, a bracing dash of black-and-white gloom from the Swedish master himself, Ingmar Bergman. Here there would be no smarmy muscle boys, no sinewy cougars, no boy-men bitten by chipmunks, and for the love of God, no paintball.

The Virgin Spring slaps you like a cold north wind. Two young women live as sisters on a 13th-century Swedish farm. They are the golden Karin, blonde and virginal, and the dark, slovenly Ingeri, who is unmarried and pregnant. Karin rides to take candles to church, and on the way she is raped and murdered by two goatherds. Ingeri hides in the forest and watches and a third goatherd, a young boy, also watches. By chance the men try to sell Karin’s beautiful gown to her parents, and her father Töre takes his revenge.

That’s it. A lot of the time there isn’t even any talking. Much of the tale is told by the expressions on the faces of the actors, the way they stand in the shadows and the light. It is a profound and moving document of love and grief and the human heart.

It worked for me. I loved this movie, and I am cleansed of the stain of watching Failure to Launch. Pardon me while I whip myself with these birch twigs.

Why?
- It’s the highest-grossing Canadian-produced movie of all time.
- It created a genre, the teenage boy sex comedy.
- I hadn’t seen it before.

Did you finish it?
- God no.

The verdict?
- It gives pigs a bad name.

The movie is episodic, clearly cobbled together from anecdotes in Guthrie’s autobiography of the same name. The man appears as a whimsical drifter through life, befriending the common people and defying the powerful. We see him apparently able to cure a woman of what seems to be depression, stubbornly insisting on painting a sign in red instead of black, giving his last few coins to help out an Okie family, singing and brawling at union rallies, and seducing all the women in his path. (He tells them he wrote this song ‘just for them’. It works every time. He is the Tiger Woods of folk singers, and in the end his wife Mary takes the kids and leaves him to his wanderings.)

This movie is long, 2 1/2 hours, but I liked it so much that I didn’t notice. It makes a good companion piece with The Grapes of Wrath, which co-stars Carradine’s father John. You should see them both.

I love how one movie always leads to another. I’m a movie surfer. Next I think I’ll revisit the Bob Dylan biopic I’m not there.

From John Steinbeck’s great novel about families on the move in the Great Depression. Directed by John Ford; stars Henry Fonda and John Carradine. This is a classic of American cinema that I had not seen before.

Oklahoma is devastated by drought and economic collapse. The banks, which own all the land, are bulldozing houses to force out the tenant farmers, who then load up their rickety jalopies with all their belongings and set out for California. The movie follows the Joad family, with convicted killer Tom Joad (Fonda) as our eyes and ears and lapsed preacher Casey (Carradine) along for the ride.

It’s a harrowing journey. The eldest member of the family dies soon after setting out and is buried by the roadside, with a note penned by Tom: “This man just died and was buried here. Nobody kilt him.” By the end the family is pushing their truck through the desert with another corpse on board.

In California there is little work and plenty of labour strife. Armed men keep the strikers at bay and Tom, the reluctant moral enforcer, kills again and has to go on the run. In the America of this movie the “Reds” are always the unseen enemy and the government, with its clean, well-run labour camps (nothing socialist about that, hee-hee) is the hero.

I found this moving to watch; Fonda and Carradine are both terrific. But I couldn’t help thinking that the story of populations on the move is a commonplace in the world today. The special interest of this story is that it happened in the United States, but it is happening every day in Africa and the Middle East, mostly on foot. Furthermore, I am of the opinion that there is going to be plenty more of it in North America in coming decades as a result of global warming.

But never mind that! This is a great movie, well written and finely acted. You should watch it if you haven’t. Rotten Tomatoes gives it 100%, and Woody Guthrie is on record as calling it “the best cussed pitcher I ever seen.”

That’s good enough for me! Next I’m going to watch Bound for Glory, Guthrie’s biography, which stars John Carradine’s son David Carradine (The Kung Fu TV series, Kill Bill).

A kid is starting to not believe in Santa Claus. On Christmas Eve a train turns up to take him and other kids in his condition to the North Pole, where they can see for themselves. It’s a thrilling ride, from the waiters serving hot chocolate to the runaway train on a frozen lake to the unexpected gift from Santa himself. It must be fantastic to see it in 3D at an Imax. I saw it in my living room and it was pretty good there too.

This only gets 56% at Rotten Tomatoes, but I think it’s a lot better than that. If I’d looked at Tomatoes first I might not have watched it at all.

Reviewers tend to hate the animation, which they say is stiff, but I’m used to that — it’s animation! It’s not real life! And aside from the stiffness there is a shimmering, hyper-real quality to the images, which I like a lot. Besides, animation can go places a camera can’t, like down with the wolves or underneath a train screaming across a frozen lake.

It’s true that for the first few minutes I was wondering why it had to be animated at all, since nothing looked that much different from real life. (OK, stiffer.) But I got over that when the distinctly not-stiff waiters came in with the hot chocolate.

Critics are also critical of what they term the lack of emotional richness, but I was moved by it, especially by the lonely kid on the train who says that Christmas never quite works out for him. (That’s how I feel too.) I think you have to watch it pretty close to Christmas, when you might have been softened up enough to let in its soppy message about hope and belief.

I find myself comparing it to other fantasy movies I’ve seen, like The Golden Compass, which careens all over the place on its way to wherever it’s going. (I never quite figured out where it was going.) This one, in contrast, is only going one place — North Pole — and then it’s coming back again. Its intention is simple and direct, and it succeeds very well. I loved it.

Most recently I watched a couple of Paul Newman classics, Hud (1963) and Hombre (1967), from his early “Movies beginning with an H” period. They’re both well worth watching, especially Hud.

Until I watched it, I had the impression that Hud was a Western. Ha! Some Western. Based on Larry McMurtry’s first novel, Horseman, Pass By, it’s one of the first in the genre of the modern Western, whose unvarying theme is sadness at the passing of the American west. It’s like a predecessor to The Last Picture Show, a movie I love, and which is also based on a novel by McMurtry.

Newman is smoking hot in this film.

Hombre really is a Western, although Newman plays a character who was raised by Indians. In this one he is deeply cool.

Hombre contains the following classic line, uttered by the sheriff when he is found holding up the stagecoach with a bunch of outlaws.

“What are you doing?” his former girlfriend gasps.
“Goin’ bad, honey,” the sheriff replies.

But I’m still not going to review those movies. Maybe I’ll get back to it a little later, in the depths of the winter.

In the meantime there are a lot of reviews on here already. They’re all listed lower down on the page. Happy reading, and bye for now!

I don’t get it. I read one reviewer who said this is the best animated film of the year, and then I read another one who said this is the best movie of the year. And it’s holding at 97% on Rotten tomatoes.

It’s not that good. Nowhere near as good as Finding Nemo, Pixar’s masterpiece. It has a few gorgeous moments, such as WALL-E and Eva’s celestial dance, but not enough of them.

In the first half, which has no dialogue at all and is quite hard to understand, I was wondering how kids could possibly follow it. Then in the second half, I was wondering how adults could possibly stand it.

It reminded me quite a bit of Jerry Seinfeld’s horrible Bee Movie. Enough said!

Unless you are a very bright kid of about, oh, 11, I think you should skip this movie.

Continuing my endless film education, I finally caught the classic western High Noon, starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly.

Cooper plays Will Kane, the marshal of a small western town. It’s his wedding day — he’s marrying a Quaker woman played by Grace Kelly — and his last day as marshal. He wants a peaceful life from now on, but…

Oh-oh! Bad guy Frank Miller has been released from jail! Those lenient northern judges let him out on a technicality, he’s arriving on the noon train, and he’s out to kill the marshal.

Some of the townspeople — mostly the guys down at the saloon — think life was more fun when Frank Miller was around. They’re betting that Marshal Kane gets killed in about two minutes, and then life will be good again. But the consensus among most of the townspeople is that even though they love the marshal and hate Frank Miller, it isn’t their problem. If Kane would just get out of town everything would be all right.

Even Kane’s new bride thinks that, and she buys herself a train ticket to prove it. Then the marshal has to spend his wedding day not only worrying about being killed by Frank Miller, but also grieving his broken marriage.

In the end Kane has to stand alone, but there isn’t any showdown on main street. It’s a series of guerilla skirmishes as he manages to pick off Miller and his three henchmen, one by one. Shockingly, it is his Quaker wife — not on the train after all — who blows away one of the bad guys. In the end Kane tosses his badge disdainfully in the dirt and rides out of town, leaving the cowardly townsfolk to their own devices.

I loved this movie, right from the first frame. I loved the rich, creamy black-and-white cinematography and the immaculate, square-framed compositions. I loved it for its suspense, its world-weariness, and its cynicism about humanity. Cooper is perfect as the disheartened marshal who can’t get even a single deputy to help him fight Frank Miller.

I think it rings true. I relate completely to the theme of one good man standing up for what’s right, although I expect in real life I would have been one of those urging Kane to get out of town and take his quarrel with Frank Miller with him.

The politics of the film are trickier. When it was first made, High Noon was usually seen as a parable about the McCarthy anti-communist witch hunt, when (in the eyes of the liberal filmmakers) only a few brave men like Will Kane would stand up for what was right.

Nowadays it’s easy to see why US presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush cite it as one of their favourite films. One imagines that to them, Kane is America herself, standing alone against Frank Miller and the forces of tyranny (Saddam Hussein, al-Qaeda, the Taliban), abandoned by those effete northern wimps from the UN and the rest of the world.

Yikes! Those politics don’t work for me. But I still loved the movie. Sometimes classic films really are as good as everyone says they are. I think you should watch it if you haven’t, and if you’ve already seen it, watch it again and pay attention this time

If you watched this without knowing anything about it, you might be struck by how similar Samurai movies are to Westerns. But it doesn’t take much research to learn that Kurosawa was a fan of Westerns, and thet he probably intentionally made this movie seem like it might just as well be a Western.

Mifune’s character, a man with no name, walks into a town that has been overtaken by violence. Nobody’s getting rich except the coffin-maker. The man with no name, an accomplished sword-fighter, is a wandering Samurai looking for money and something to do.

Sound familiar? I do have the Italian spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars, but I haven’t watched it yet. I’ll let you know how similar Sergio Leone’s remake of Yojimbo, starring Clint Eastwood as the man with no name, really is to the Japanese original.

In my research I learned that Leone didn’t credit Kurosawa’s film as his inspiration. He was subsequently sued and forced to make a financial settlement. Modern copies of Fistful explicitly call it a remake of Yojimbo.

(continued sometime… I hope…)

This is another all-time classic of international film. It’s become an adjective in its own right, used to describe every movie that tells the same story from more than one point of view. Those movies are ‘rashomon-like’.

I thought it was pretty good. Toshiro Mifune is interesting as a barbaric yahoo. His part is quite different from the last time I saw him, in Yojimbo.

In the end it wasn’t particularly satisfying, which I guess is the point — there is no absolute truth. (But I think I already knew that.)

I didn’t love it, but I’m glad I finally saw it. At least now I know what they mean when say a movie is rashomon-like!