A Year of Movies

Medicine For Melancholy
Started & Finished: 12/19/09

I’m embarrassed to admit I just watched this for the first time, but it was well worth the wait.  I normally shy away from talkative, character-driven films, but Medicine doesn’t fall into the traps that many others do: It has great acting, beautiful imagery, purposeful camerawork, efficient editing, a great soundtrack, and most importantly, it addresses real issues.

Were it simply a boy-meets-girl/morning-after story, it might not have been as successful.  But by grounding a universal story within the context of urban living brings the story to a new level.  The uncertainty of Micah and Jo’s budding relationship beautifully reflects the ambiguity that surrounds issues of race and class.  It ultimately putting the viewer right in the middle of the conflict, forcing them to negotiate their own feelings both toward the couple and toward the issues raised.

I’m obviously a bit biased in that I love seeing my city on screen, but Medicine is absolutely one of the best representations of San Francisco put to film in quite some time, from the muted images to the local issues at stake.  Sorry I’m so late to this party, Barry.

Rudo y Cursi
Started: 12/2/09 | Finished: 12/5/09

Basically: The best part of the movie was the “Please turn off your cellphone” ad featuring Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna in character. Everything else is an unfortunate low point in the careers of all involved. Light fun but ultimately, even the dream team of producers Alfonso Caurón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Guillermo del Toro can’t save this formulaic story.

That’s all.

Observe and Report
Started & Finished: 11/29/09

I’ll admit it: Mallrats was one of my favorite movies as an adolescent boy.  Not surprisingly, the jokes don’t hold up well once you… grow up.  Luckily, Jody Hill has filled the void in my heart especially reserved for mall-based humor with Observe and Report.

Though stories that meander with little direction often get on my nerves, Observe and Report managed to wander through a particular segment of our protagonist’s life while maintaining course.  Just when I was anticipating a predictable comedy plot point, Hill blindsided me with the unexpected, and on multiple occasions.  This is why the best comedy (at least for me) is so funny— it shows us the absurd actually happening before our eyes.  What is most surprising about this movie though is that those unanticipated moments have more dramatic than comedic resonance.

Observe and Report shows another side of Seth Rogen’s comedic chops, but it’s really the dramatic elements that set the film apart from the Apatow/Frat Pack comedies of the 00s.  While the execution is a bit rocky, Hill has successfully tapped into what makes the best dark comedies successful: a delicate balance of the absurd coexisting with matters that hit a bit too close to home.

Pet Sematary
Started & Finished: 10/23/09

One lesson I was taught in screenwriting regarding choosing your protagonist:  Who is the person least likely to be caught up in your plot?  For example, if you were writing Pet Sematary, you might ask: Who is least likely to believe in an ancient Indian burial ground that brings dead animals back to life?  Your answer might be “someone who knows reanimation is impossible.”  Like a doctor.

But the trick is to draw that disbelief out— if your character becomes a believer right away, you risk letting the air out of your story.  And if your story has no air, then I’m left watching an hour’s worth of a gullible, possibly mentally disturbed M.D. whose undead cat keeps popping out of cabinets.

It is important to remember that this is Stephen King’s Pet Sematary after all.  The last third of the movie almost redeemed the bulk of his famous (read: generally slow and cliched) exposition that leads up to the finale.  But I was expecting more zombie animals, so I was a bit disappointed.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the childhood nostalgia of this film to find it very frightening.  But I can’t really knock a horror film with Fred Gwynne (The Munsters), Blaze Berdahl (Ghostwriter) and a bunch of crazy cats.

Trick ‘r Treat
Started & Finished: 10/19/09

I always forget how much I enjoy scary movie season.  Not for the (usually horrific) horror films that have frequented theaters in the last decade or so, but for the openness the rest of the world shows toward a genre that has been relegated to the bargain bin at your local Walmart.  And for good reason: The market is saturated with remakes and reboots that rely more on surprising you with loud, nondiagetic sounds than manifesting actual fear.  But while I will watch The Shining any day, October provides a once-a-year opportunity to indulge in the crap that is Halloween-themed-horror.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some quality films centered around this holiday.  And I hardly consider myself a horror aficionado.  But the recession-proof nature of the genre only spurs Hollywood’s goals of quantity over quality.  So it should be no surprise that a film like Trick ‘r Treat was released straight to video.  What is surprising is that it’s actually a quality Halloween-themed flick that might have found a following in theaters had it been marketed properly.

The concept is simple: Several Halloween myths converge over the course of one night in Sleepytown, Ohio.  Add a bit of Tales From The Crypt and a splash of Pulp Fiction-style storytelling for an added gimmick, and you’ve got Trick ‘r Treat.  There’s the requisite gore, comedy and nudity in this 82 minute feature, and even several history lessons on the origins of the holiday.  And while it fails to drum up much fear in the audience, it certainly succeeds as a fun, Halloween-themed romp that recent horror has failed to provide.

Trick ‘r Treat was supposed to be released in 2007, but because it didn’t fit the Hollywood model, it was tossed away and only released a few weeks ago.  The film is certainly no replacement for the classics, but it could have been a step in the right direction for a tired genre if it had been given the chance.  Perhaps one day, the world will produce tweens that find the Saw series boring and demand something original.  But until that day, I’m afraid we’re stuck wading through the tripe that is modern-day horror.  And that is a scary thought.  Bwa-ha-ha-h… shut up.

Sugar
Started & Finished: 10/6/09

Good baseball movies are few and far between (Field of Dreams, The Natural, and The Sandlot being some of the most obvious) for a reason: There are only so many baseball-centric stories that can be told and interest an audience outside of the sport’s core fan base.  Sugar had a chance to break into that upper echelon with a relatively untold story of Dominican transplants in the American minor leagues.  But unfortunately, it gets tangled up in the various themes it attempts to touch on (baseball, immigration, fish-out-of-water, coming-of-age), unable to leave a resounding impact with any single one.

Sugar’s first half is arguably its most powerful: Watching the young ballplayer work his way to spring training and then the minor leagues from his small town in the Dominican Republic is thrilling and compelling.  Because Sugar doesn’t speak any English, there is little dialogue when he arrives in the U.S.  This forces the story to move forward visually, and reveals so much more about the character than any conversation could.  The directorial styles of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson) shine on the diamond, showing the game in some of its most cinematic and realistic forms put to film.  (Actor Algenis Perez Soto’s experience playing ball was a pivotal casting choice that really lends well to the film’s authenticity.)

But it is that authenticity which Boden and Fleck try so hard to recreate that ultimately leads to the film’s fizzling out toward the second half.  Almost as if it was just too hard to keep telling the story with a language barrier, the writers move Sugar to a setting in which it is easy for him to find fellow Spanish-speakers.  While the motivation behind the relocation may be common among Dominican baseball prospects, it basically negates the biggest part of Sugar’s struggle in the United States, and makes him a less sympathetic character.  Because this massive hurdle has been conquered, and all other problems have been (literally) left behind, the audience is left following a character whose next moves seem irrelevant to the story that the directors started to tell in the first half of the film.

Despite its shortcomings in story structure, it’s refreshing to hear a new story told, especially one with a twist on the common “unlucky kid gets lucky in sports” theme.  Boden and Fleck’s direction is always interesting— their unique blend of gritty realism with the surreal is a fascinating lens for watching baseball through.  It could have been about 20 minutes shorter, but Sugar is still one of the best baseball-related films of the last decade.

JCVD
Started: 12/2008
Rented from Netflix: 7/7/09
Re-started & Finished: 9/27/09

Just as I barely found the energy to finish this movie, I barely have the energy to write about it.  Everyone was right: Great monologue, the rest, forgettable and gimmicky.  I would’ve turned it off if it wasn’t for this stupid blog.

Tyson
Started & Finished: 9/7/09

There’s a great Radiolab episode in which several scientists explain that memory is less like information retrieval and more like an act of creation— each time we recall an experience from our past, we are recreating that event completely from scratch on a cellular level, and any number of external variables can shape that so-called memory.  By mashing together the historical record (archival fight footage, news reels, interviews) with personal accounts from Mike Tyson himself, director James Toback creates a fascinating profile of a conflicted individual that gets closer to the truth than the vast majority of docs has ever been able.

In a behind-the-scenes interview, Toback states that he wasn’t trying to make a documentary, rather find a style closer to a self-portrait.  This approach turns an otherwise typical talking-heads doc into a much more intimate experience: by using only interviews with Tyson and no other involved parties, it’s difficult to deny the authenticity of the subject matter.

And that is the most powerful part of the movie: Toback makes me believe Tyson, and everything he says.  At times it makes for a very unlikable subject, but I never doubted once that Tyson believed every word he said.  While time may show a different version of events, Toback has done what science says is impossible: he has created a static version of Tyson’s memories and life.  And that is an impressive feat.

Tron
Started: 8/9/09 | Finished: 8/10/09

Someone recently told me that I need to watch more old movies (i.e. pre-1970). I don’t disagree that my tastes are skewed toward the latter third of the past century, but Tron helped me realize exactly why I’m so top-heavy: I want to be moved by the movies, to have an experience, to be told a story in the span of 2 hours. Shouldn’t the best films be able to accomplish this without historical context?  Is it too much to ask that they be timeless?

Maybe I’ve set the bar too high. I’ve certainly set it too high for Tron, which is a mess of a story. It has extensive set-up for minimal pay off, low stakes, and primarily features a world with dozens of arbitrary rules. But any good film aficionado knows the benchmark Tron set with its then-cutting-edge graphics and animation. Now that the technology is severely outdated, the movie loses its only asset. I wasn’t fortunate enough to see the film when it first came out, and I suspect my outlook would be skewed if it were a beloved childhood favorite.

Throughout the movie I kept wondering— has our understanding of cinematic language changed so drastically since the 80s? Consider the recently released test footage from the upcoming Tron: Legacy. Sure, it gives the computer world a complete makeover, but it also updates the story, even in a test sequence. The lightcycles’ rules are defined right off the bat: how they are manifested, how fast they drive (see speedometer), what happens when one crosses paths with the light. None of this was sufficiently addressed in the original Tron, because it was an animation showcase, not a story.

Was our understanding of fulfilling storytelling so relaxed that it allowed for such a convoluted mess? Or is this just the eighties’ version of today’s summer blockbuster spectacle? I suspect the answer lies somewhere in the middle. In any case, Tron was one of the nerdiest movies I’ve ever seen, and I don’t think I’ll be watching it again anytime soon.

End of line.