Thursday, September 12, 2013

Mostly Rambling, Some Reviewing

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Pain & Gain -- You know that saying about how even a broken clock is right twice a day? I swear I never got that saying until just this second - I realized I'd been thinking of a "broken clock" as a clock that was still telling time, only the wrong time, and that's what was broken about it. And so I kept trying to picture how the rotating arms, spinning by their own logic, would somehow nevertheless sweep past the correct spot every day two times anyway. And my brain would start to hurt, since that is impossible, and then I'd think "Ehh, fuck it," and move on with my life. But I just had this eureka in the bathtub moment while thinking about how to write about Michael Bay's Pain and Gain, which I've been trying to find an in to a review for a couple of weeks now - I realized that a "broken clock" is a clock that has stopped working altogether, and its arms are fully static, and so it always says the same time - for example 3:38, when I am writing this. The broken clock always says 3:38, and so when 3:38 in the morning and 3:38 in the afternoon roll around, the broken clock is right, twice. That is to say, I still hate you, Michael Bay. I don't care if you made an entertaining movie this time! I don't care! Fuck you and the broken clock you rode in on.

The East -- Brit Marling hasn't quite stolen as much as my life away and pissed upon my soul the way that Michael Bay has, but I've generally found her, uh, not to my liking over the past couple of years as she's become An Indie Thing. And so color me surprised again that she didn't really get on my nerves a bit in The East. Indeed I found the film engrossing as a whole, although it is fairly by-the-numbers as far as thrillers go. It hits all the notes in pretty much the precise order you anticipate. But it wants to be old-fashioned, it wants to be a China Syndrome for the Occupy Wall Street set or whatever, and so it gooses its fill-in-the-blank plot with current events that a bigger budgeted movie wouldn't go near, which gets you over the bumps by knotting up genuine moral outrage, of the topical sort, inside the viewer. I can boo and hiss these bad guys just fine, thank you. And it manages to simultaneously gin up a fantasy world where Alexander Skarsgard and Shiloh Fernandez make out with each other and then cradle you naked in a pond, which is totally an acceptable use of celluloid.

Trance -- Obviously I'm playing some catch up here with titles that I haven't gotten around to reviewing - it's a good idea I do this now before the New York Film Festival starts screening next week and I become completely overwhelmed with new newer newest. That said it's been like three weeks at least since I watched Trance and here's what I remember - the sound of Rosario Dawson shaving her vagina, James McAvoy's ass, and Vincent Cassel talking from half a head. Two out of three of those things were in the trailer; the other one was, well, both unexpected and unwelcome. I am guessing you know which one I mean. Anyway sorry I can't do a better job of reviewing your movie, Danny Boyle, but you did scar my brain, so there's that.

Simon Killer - Alright listen Brady Corbet is very good in this movie I guess, and it's got a really fine askew rhythm to it that keeps you off balance and unnerved, but a lot of that gets fumbled by a camera that refuses to stop literally navel-gazing. The frame is pretty much always at gut-height, often chopping the actors heads right off in a scene - I seriously started to wonder if the entire movie were shot by little people. It was really really distracting to me. My mind started to wander off mid-film, imagining the director at a Q&A defending his decision to shoot the film like this, what he was saying with it, how meaningful it was, and then I wanted to throw a tomato or a head of lettuce at him, and I couldn't, and so I was sad and frustrated and so was SImon Killer so hooray, movie, hoo-fucking-ray.
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