Moon (2009)

Still Walking (2009)

Strangers on a Train (1951)

I'd like to think this would cause a slight "comment-section" uproar if anyone actually read my blog besides me, but I actually didn't like this much.

I don't know if I was in the wrong mood, or I was having trouble concentrating or something, but I was just kind of bored. And I love boring things, so that's weird. And I love most Hitchcock. And I love a lot of obscure, silent Hitchcock, and also the weird, late-60's Hitchcock stuff people usually dismiss. But this is one of his all time greats, and I couldn't get into it. Robert Walker was amazingly creepy as the psycho, Bruno, however. Man, that guy was a mess.

My top 10 Films of 2008

I'm posting this a week after the 2008 Oscars (which, per usual, were pretty wack):

1)The Wrestler
2)WALL-E
3)Happy Go Lucky
4)Gran Torino
5)Wendy and Lucy
6)Rachel Getting Married
7)Cloverfield
8)Frost/Nixon
9)Synecdoche, NY
10)Milk

The Wind Will Carry Us (1999)

Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry has been, my favorite overall film at varying times over the past couple of years. I remember feeling like I hadn't seen anything like it. I'll have to put something up about Taste of Cherry at some point, but anyway, after watching that, I got really interested in Kiarostami's stuff, and watched Close-Up and Where Is The Friend's Home? soon after, the latter incidentally being one of the best "Engrish" movie titles in my opinion.

This film displayed the trademarks of his work: mostly improvised, philosophical dialogue, non-actors, long takes, and a plot that's less interested in moving characters from scene to scene, than it is in giving Kiarostami a platform to ask questions.

There are so many things going on in this film, it was hard to determine a common theme. Maybe there isn't one, just thoughts coming and going. An elderly resident of a small village is dying. A TV production crew arrives to cover the grieving rituals of the townsfolk, but...the woman doesn't die. The cynical, fast-paced crew is forced to slow down and experience a part of their world from which they've grown apart. The engineer's endless quest for cell phone reception, driving to the top of a hill over and over again, which is shown in painstakingly real time, showed how far apart these two cultures were, geographically and socially. The world outside of the village seems condescending, looking in at it like an antfarm, waiting for this woman to pass, so they can package it into an exotic little TV story. The men wait and wait...

Here's a scene:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k271xOFeqfs

There's also a scene that takes place in what is essentially a cave, where the engineer buys goat milk from a young girl, that's so haunting and speaks so beautifully to the two alien worlds colliding, the dialogue spoken hesitantly, as if each character is afraid of being who they really are with the other. We can barely see the two of them, the lighting is SO low...oh man, the whole scene is just so eerie and heavy.

Contempt (1963)

I'm not too familiar with Godard's stuff, but I really liked Band of Outsiders, and Breathless (I honestly can't remember if I've seen anything else by him). So I sort of had high hopes for this, especially after watching L'Avventura, which I loved, and which someone had compared to Contempt, at least stylistically. But I didn't like this much at all. The characters and dialogue were typical Godard, which was good, but the score by George Delarue was used WAY too often, and drowned out much of the banter between Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli. Was Godard being self-reflexive in his decision to use music this way? The rest of the film is extremely critical of the "industry" of art-films, so perhaps that's a reasonable explanation. In any case, it just didn't work for me. The music is undoubtedly beautiful, but here it just seemed heavy-handed and melodramatic.

And the 30 minute long-takes of characters just wandering around half naked, musing about life, etc...basically the stuff I loved about Breathless, just didn't seem to work in this. They seemed to be part of another film, and didn't seem to work against the more conventional scenes with Jack Palance and the whole "businessman vs. artist" dynamic. The parallels drawn between Javal's decision to sell out and his failing relationship with his wife were forced, maybe sort of preachy too.

And maybe I'm giving the music choice too much credit, but I really think it was like 50% of the reason I wasn't buying this movie.

But um, Brigitte Bardot is really really hot.

Iron Man (2008)

This was written back in July, but I'm just getting around to posting it. Oh well:

Pretty much as good as a superhero movie can be nowadays. Spiderman 3 kind of fizzled out that franchise. Fantastic 4, X-Men 3, The Punisher and Ghost Rider were all kind of duds in an oversaturated dud market, so it's good we have a couple of Iron Man movies to look forward to. That and Batman. And Hellboy also. Anyway, this was directed by co-Swinger Jon Favreau, which seems weird since his few directing credits (Elf, Zathura) wouldn't naturally lead to mega-budget action films. Maybe Zathura was mega-budget action. Who knows, I don't think anyone saw it.

Half of this movie was the set up for how Tony Stark becomes Iron Man, but not knowing anything about Iron Man, or comic books in general, I could have sworn the movie was thinking about ending right there in the middle of Afghanistan or wherever they were. But it takes a couple breaths and ratchets back up for an awesome 2nd half.

What made this movie so great for me is the mixture of special effects (there were over 300 animators) and droll humor. Robert Downey Jr. seems like he's almost improvising at times, just riffing and having fun being there, and the scenes between he and Jeff Bridges (especially the pizza scene) are loose and natural. And I mean, is there no actor looser than Jeff Bridges? Iron Man was kind of like Ghostbusters in this way for me, really effects heavy action paired with off the cuff, dry comedy (the line "It's like Operation!"). I'd imagine the atmosphere on the set was really conducive to that kind of stuff, with Favreau and game actors like these guys who just seems like they're having a blast. And during the final showdown between Bridges' Ironmonger (at this point very un-"dude" like) and Iron Man, I was having so much fun, I had forgotten about the plot contrivances that had got them into this battle in the first place: like, why does Obadiah Stane want to kill Iron Man anyway? It wasn't quite clear how much of a threat Stark's newfound pacifism was to his company, and the reason Obadiah hires the Ten Rings in the first place got lost in the whole reveal. Really. It seems obvious, but after thinking about it later, I realize it didn't make sense.

Thankfully the Black Sabbath song was never used in the film. Instead there was a slightly reminiscent, nu-metal-ly theme every time homeboy puts on the iron suit, which seemed more appropriate. And then only the guitar solo from the Sabbath song was used during end credits, also cool. AND per my friend Bill's advice, we stayed past the end credits to see Nick Fury set us up for The Avengers movie.