In 2006 I went to a pre-release screening of Clerks II (and Q&A session with its writer/director Kevin Smith) at the Astor. The cinema was packed with over one thousand of Smith's most hardcore Australian fans, and every joke in the movie killed. Seeing a film amongst a full house of fans makes it far more enjoyable, and seeing The Room at Nova last night was one of the most enjoyable film experiences I've ever had.
The screening was a chaotic scene with people throwing spoons, pre-empting dialogue and losing their shit whenever Denny was on screen. I went with Carmen and two friends who hadn't seen it before, and I can only imagine how perplexing it must have been for them to see three grown men in tuxedos throwing a football to each other before the film began.
I never really understood the appeal of, say, seeing The Rocky Horror Picture Show at a midnight screening, but now that I've experienced being in a theatre with hundreds of people who love the film on screen enough to make complete asshats of themselves, it makes perfect sense to me.
We're hoping to go back and see it again in a couple of weeks, so if anyone is interested let me know and we'll get another group together. But my advice is to see the movie before you go to a screening, because you won't hear half the dialogue in the theatre.
Darker and bleaker than an Opeth album cover. (Or an Opeth song, such as the song "Bleak".)
I've never liked Viggo Mortensen in anything, but I enjoyed The Road in spite of his presence.
Little things about it niggled me, such as the fact that a child who has grown up in a world of complete desolation and cannibalism is nonetheless whimpering with fear all the fucking time. But such niggles do not get in the way of what I liked about the film: its depressive mood, stark cinematography and fantastic supporting performances (especially by Robert Duvall).
Tommy Wiseau wrote, directed, produced, executive produced and starred in this, the most piss-poor, amateurish, laughably bad film of the past decade. I heard about it due to its cult following on the internet, and all you need to know about it is contained in this YouTube clip:
By some incredible miracle Wiseau managed to raise $7 million of his own money to finance what is essentially a how-to guide in horrible filmmaking. He shot the film on 35mm and high-definition video simultaneously because he was confused about the differences between the two formats, but ignorance of the technical aspects of making a film were the least of his troubles.
The script is full of the most unnatural, stilted dialogue ever written, with characters matter-of-factly stating their thoughts, emotions and actions in every scene. On multiple occasions the two main male characters, Johnny (played by Tommy Wiseau) and Mark, re-affirm their status as best friends by literally saying "You're my best friend" to one another. Lisa, the main female character (who is engaged to Johnny and sleeping with Mark), succinctly recounts her situation daily to her mother, who inexplicably turns up at Lisa and Johnny's house every day and only stays for exactly the amount of time it takes to listen to her daughter explain her feelings. Lisa also at one point says to Mark, about Johnny: "he's your best friend".
Almost every line sounds like it was looped in post-production, and there are several occasions where a character will deliver a line without their mouth moving. Wiseau has some kind of vaguely eastern European accent which makes his lines almost unintelligible, and he has a habit of bursting into laughter at the most inappropriate times. His poor English probably explains the script's ridiculous dialogue:
Mark: How was work today?
Johnny: Oh, pretty good. We got a new client… at the bank. We make a lot of money.
Mark: What client?
Johnny: I can not tell you, it's confidential.
Mark: Oh come on. Why not?
Johnny: No I can't. Anyway, how is your sex life?
The most confusing aspect of the film is that plot points are introduced and then never re-visited, making it extremely difficult to follow what's actually happening. One line in the film is – and I'm not making this up – "I got the results from the test back; I definitely have breast cancer". That line, uttered non-chalantly by Lisa's mother, is the first, last and only mention of this seemingly life-changing revelation in the film and it is never addressed again. There's another scene with a tense showdown on the roof of their apartment building with a drug dealer (again, mostly unexplained and given no background at all) which is never mentioned again after its resolution.
Characters, too, walk into scenes out of nowhere, with no introduction or explanation for their presence in the scene, and deliver their hilariously ham-fisted lines of dialogue before completely disappearing from the movie. A psychologist friend of Johnny's (we know he's a psychologist because Johnny says "You're a psychologist") disappears after engaging in a game of football with the other main male characters. It's not explained why they happen to be wearing tuxedos at the time, and they stand about three metres from each other while throwing the football, but the psychologist somehow manages to trip over and is never heard from again.
(This particular disappearance is because that particular actor quit halfway through the production due to creative differences with Wiseau. The psychologist character is supposed to have some lines later in the film but they are instead given to another character, who walks into a scene with no introduction to speak the psychologist's lines before completely disappearing.)
Tommy Wiseau appears to have made an earnest attempt at high drama, but he's such an incompetent auteur that his message is completely lost amongst the woeful dialogue. That message, I think, is that women are evil witches.
Everything about the film is embarrassingly low-quality, but I have to say I had heaps of fun mocking it with Carmen. If I were to score it purely on its merits as a film, say in comparison to The Godfather or The Shawshank Redemption, I'd obviously have to give it a zero, but I can't deny that I genuinely enjoyed watching it and have been quoting it to my girlfriend ever since we saw it.
So I'll give it no stars, but strongly recommend that you watch it.
If you want to have a raucously fun evening, get some friends together for a screening. There are apparently midnight screenings happening all over the U.S. to cater to its growing cult following, and I've heard that Melbourne's own Cinema Nova is screening it soon as well.
I've been watching Band of Brothers for the past couple of days and continue to be amazed by the good humour and matter-of-fact style of wartime soldiers in recollecting their almost superhuman tales of survival.
Yesterday I came across this fascinating piece in the words of one of the main characters in Band of Brothers, Major Dick Winters:
On the way to the camp I was pretty unsettled. I took Highway 13, passed a casket factory and reported in at Camp Toombs.
An allusion to Pink Floyd's Animals.
I've never really been one for big sci-fi action flicks with big special effects, but I really enjoyed Children of Men. The minutes-long single-take action shots were just mind-blowing, and the understated vision of gritty, impoverished London in 2027 was beautifully realised. And featuring King Crimson's "In the Court of the Crimson King" was definitely a great addition to the film.
But right before one of the completely amazing and expensive special effects shots was the most unrealistic, stupid looking ping pong ball I've ever seen (spoilers, and really bad quality video). It was laughable; the lighting was completely different to the atmospheric lighting and I'm sure every person who saw the movie would have picked it up straight away. How can that happen in a movie that has a single-take sequence set in the middle of a gun battle which lasts over three minutes and is completely flawless?
But nit-picks aside it was quite good.
It's hard to really find much to say about Up in the Air. It was enjoyable, but not great. Eric Steelberg's cold, steely cinematography gives the film a beautiful visual style to match the personality of its main character, and George Clooney, Anna Kendrick and Vera Farmiga all gave performances of great depth.
But nothing really stood out as pushing it into "great" territory.
It wasn't nearly as funny as Jason Reitman's other films (Thank You For Smoking and Juno, both favourites of mine), but then again it wasn't really meant to be just a comedy.
(Incidentally, I was disappointed that Up in the Air's opening titles weren't nearly as fantastic as either of those two films', both of which have gorgeous titles.)
It was quite touching, but about two thirds of the way through while I was noting to myself that it was nice to see a simple, romantic story between two characters without the cliche of some kind of trouble occurring in the second act, that's exactly what happened next. That was redeemed somewhat by the rather unconventional ending, but I think that's where I came to realise it wasn't as good as I was hoping it would be.
One really brilliant touch was to cast the recently unemployed as people Ryan Bingham (Clooney's character) sacks. Their responses to the question "if you could say anything to the person who fired you, what would you say?", which were edited to form part of the movie, were really quite moving.
I watched another Kevin Macdonald production last week (The Last King of Scotland), and in the making-of featurette of that movie Macdonald was interviewed in front of a poster for Touching the Void, which I had heard of but hadn't seen. So I decided to give it a go, even though I didn't particularly like Macdonald's direction on The Last King of Scotland.
Man, what an amazing story. Macdonald did exactly the right thing: let the principles tell their own story, and get the fuck out of the way. While just hearing Joe Simpson tell his story to a black screen would have been just as captivating, the reenactments were useful in visually demonstrating the story without distracting from the most amazing part of the documentary: the talking heads.
I love Ricky Gervais. I love The Office, I love Extras, I love his podcasts, and I love his stand-up comedy. But The Invention of Lying is the steamiest pile of shite I've seen in a very long time.
They say it's better to show rather than tell, so if you have to have a voiceover explain the premise of your movie before it even begins, you probably haven't chosen the best subject for a movie. And even forgiving the contrived premise, I found very little to like in the film at all.
It started slowly but I really wanted to give it a chance, so I overlooked the boring first 20 minutes hoping things would get better. Things got worse. There were very few jokes in the entire film and by the half-way mark it had turned into a mean-spirited religious parody. I'm an atheist but the film's mockery of religion felt cheap and unnecessary, and I find being hammered over the head with atheist doctrine as offensive as being hammered over the head with Christian doctrine.
I think it took around 25 minutes before Carmen and I decided to concentrate on picking out the myriad plot holes and ridiculous assertions in the film, which turned out to be far more enjoyable an experience than watching the movie itself.
For example:
- The entire second half of the movie hangs on the idea that Ricky Gervais decides to come up with some "previously unknown" yet incredibly dramatic revelations of events which occurred in the 14th century. We learn pretty early in the movie that Ricky Gervais's company has extensively researched every century in history for their documentaries, so why did no one spot instantly that he was talking bollocks?
- Humans haven't evolved the ability to lie, but why does that mean that everyone just blurts out whatever they're thinking? If I hated my job, I wouldn't necessarily have to say that to my boss the minute he walks into the office in the morning. (Presumably Tina Fey's character had been saying that every day, if that scene is to be believed. And if everyone has no trouble blurting out what they're thinking, why didn't Ricky Gervais's boss fire him immediately instead of delaying it?)
- Why does the inability to lie mean there is no such thing as creativity? Commercials in The Invention of Lying are boring and completely factual: a commercial for Coke consists of a company spokesman standing against a white background explaining that "nothing has changed, so please continue to buy Coke". Why? Does Coke's real-life slogan of "Enjoy" somehow qualify as a lie?
- You know the saying "if a butterfly flaps its wings in New York, it can cause a tsunami in Japan"? Apparently, the complete inability of humankind to lie has had surprisingly little effect on the world. It looks almost identical to how it does in real life, including the invention of the aforementioned Coca-Cola. Amazing coincidence, isn't it?
- Of course, the major difference between our world and that of the movie is its complete lack of any kind of religion. And yet, after Ricky Gervais single-handedly concocts religious doctrine of unlikely similarity to the real world's, their "Man in the Sky" church (developed completely from scratch and independant from the real world) looks exactly like a modern-day Christian church. Another mystifying coincidence.
Literally the only thing I enjoyed about the whole movie was a one-minute sequence featuring Stephen Merchant and Shaun Williamson. The rest was pretty much torture. After Ghost Town and The Invention of Lying, Gervais has two strikes to his name as a leading actor in Hollywood films. I hope he redeems himself as a movie-maker with Cemetary Junction, and I expect the involvement of Stephen Merchant will help somewhat in that regard, but now I must greet a movie I would normally be excited about with nervous uncertainty.
No stars.
Cute.
Pretty clichéd and uninspired (there were at least three character-gives-an-agonised-middle-distance-stare-while-past-events-dissolve-over-the-screen sequences to demonstrate personal conflict), but Uganda under Idi Amin is such a compelling story that it would be pretty difficult to bollocks it up completely.
Forest Whitaker portrays the prototypical African dictator with charm and personality, showing a side of him completely different to the Western caricature. He's brilliant at playing characters who one would expect to be played as unflinchingly brutal in any other movie or TV show situation, such as a burglar whose conscience got the better of him (Panic Room) or an Internal Affairs investigator who swings from childlike friendliness to explosive rage (The Shield).