Mud Songs

I’m talking about the original 1933 version of King Kong. It is a great movie and a hell of lot more violent and gruesome than I ever thought. It must have shocked and scared the crap out of audiences in 1933. I never realized what an incredible movie it is. There isn’t much of a story until Kong comes into the picture — and then you can watch the movie with the sound down if you feel like it because everything unfolds in broad strokes: 1) Island natives capture Fay Wray for sacrifice to Kong; 2) Kong runs into the jungle with Ms. Wray, protecting her instead of eating her; 3) A rescue party runs into the jungle and are killed off one at a time by Kong; 4) Kong is captured and brought back to the US… and so on. Although King Kong is sometimes considered a B-quality monster movie, it’s operatic and poignant as well. I’d love to see it in a theatre someday.

The X-Files: I Want To Believe is a made-for-TV special given a theatrical release. That’s my guess, anyway. It’s not entirely unwatchable, but the writing is silly, ridiculous and lazy, especially the ending which just sort of happens and then disappears without much explanation. There’s a short epilogue about the main characters, but does anyone care? I don’t think so. Perhaps most of the original fans of the show, having grown up over the years, will see this movie and realize that the TV show was never really that good anyway.

Journey to the Center of the Earth (3-D) is a theme park ride for kids. The 3-D effects are disorienting. It’s difficult to focus on objects in the foreground when objects in the background are flying all over the place. Great for kids. I love Jules Verne’s original novel. It was fun to see certain scenes from the book come to life — the movie is faithful to the geography of some of the main scenes from the book. But otherwise, for adults, this is a lame night at the movies.

Hellboy II has Ron Pearlman wasting his talent in a lifeless pay-cheque comic book movie.

A big ominous ugly truck comes barrelling down the highway and makes life difficult for a lonely businessman in a car on his way to a meeting. Duel is like Jaws on wheels. Directed for TV by Steven Speilberg in 1971, this 90-minute theatrical cut is nothing but entertainment. There’s no moral to the story. It’s just one long chase scene that keeps you wondering, “How the hell is he going to get away from that truck?” Speilberg takes that simple concept and milks it to the hilt. Well done.

The Stone Angel is based on the novel by Margaret Lawrence, another sad and depressing Canadian novel where nothing good happens to anyone or anyone’s children, and then they die. (That’s an accurate summary of more than a few Canadian classics.) The film adaptation isn’t much more uplifting or hopeful. The movie tries to encompass too much of the novel instead of taking its time to develop the characters. It has its moments, but I lost interest well before the closing credits.

Skip it. The first Narnia movie is excellent, one of the best family-friendly movies of 2005. The best thing I can say about The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian is they’ve improved on the special effects. Not much happens for the first hour (which will bore most kids), and when the action does pick up, it’s just eye candy. Too much emphasis on meaningless battles sequences and not enough on character and story.

Brief Encounter is a 1945 film about two people who meet, have strong feelings for one another, toy with the idea of taking their brief encounter to another level and then… I won’t tell you want happens. My initial feelings were, “I’m not in the mood to watch some stiff British actors sit around a table with their cups of tea and say la-dee-da back and forth for an hour and a half,” but I’m glad I stuck it out. Over looking the film’s dated qualities is a small price to pay for a love story that rivals anything out of Casablanca. And what an ending!

Scarface is a silly, over-rated 1980s gangster movie that is so melodramatic and dated, it’s a joke. Cubans who hear Al Pacino’s Cuban accent must laugh the way Newfoundlanders laugh at the accents in The Shipping News. It may be fun to watch as a cheesy, over-the-top, violent, blood and guts B-movie, but an animé cartoon with the same two-dimensional characters would have been just as dramatic.

Once is a unique film about a singer-songerwriter in Dubln who works at his dad’s vacuum repair shop and spends the rest of his time busking on a street corner with his guitar. He eventually meets a girl and tries to make more of his music, and that’s pretty much the whole story. The film has been described as a musical because whenever the guy sings a song, we hear the whole thing. If you like the music, the full songs will work for you. I’m not going to go out and buy the soundtrack, but I still got into everything about this movie because it looks and feels like a documentary with characters who seem like real people. The plot (if you want to call it that) doesn’t feel contrived. You meet these people, you like them and you want find out what happens to them. It’s a simple equation that works on a nice, quiet, genuine level. It’s not a visually spectacular movie, but it doesn’t need to be. Once — once it gets noticed — is likely to become a favourite of independent singer-songwriters everywhere.

The Forbidden Kingdom is a forgettable martial arts film with Jet Li and Jackie Chan. It’s not unwatchable but it ain’t worth watching.

Black Book tells the story of a Jewish woman who, as an undercover operative for the Resistance, develops an intimate relationship with a high-ranking SS officer and falls in love with him. I took a look at this film because James Berardinelli selected it as one of his top 10 of 2007. He called it “a powerful and compelling World War II thriller that features note-perfect performances and an almost flawless screenplay.” But mostly it’s an excuse for director, Paul Verhoeven, to show off Carice van Houten’s breasts whenever possible (fess up Berardinelli). For me, Black Book felt like a CBC mini-series: exactly the same sharp and clean cinematography, the same self-consciously emotional style of acting — TV, not cinema. I just got an email from someone who watched the movie with me: “The more I think about the movie we watched last night, the less I like it. It seems like manipulative and slick schlop.” I can’t argue with that.

The Lives of Others is one of the most compelling, intriguing and eye-opening films I’ve seen in years — and sadly, it’s relevant too. I can’t add much to the linked review, so here are some quotes: “The Lives of Others is an excellent German film about life in the East German GDR before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the population lived in constant fear of the secret police known as the Stasi. Writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s story of artists under surveillance by merciless, corrupt officials is gripping from beginning to end… [We learn] something about the arrogance, corruption and twisted psychology that result when “security” bureaucracies are given special powers.” It’s difficult to shake the impression that Stephen Harper, the current Prime Minister of Canada, would love to have this kind of power in his government. The amendment to Bill C-10 is just the beginning. This guy has got to go!

I’ll probably watch Michel Gondry’s next movie without reading any reviews first, because even when he’s made a ho-hum movie like Be Kind Rewind, it’s still more interesting than 90% of the movies that play at my local multiplex throughout the year. That said, I’m disappointed to say I wasn’t too engaged by this one. Jack Black’s magnetized brain erases all the tapes in a video store. He and his buddy set out to re-shoot all the movies onto the original VHS tapes, which are then rented out to customers. The tapes are a big hit and business starts to boom. It’s good-natured wackiness — and I love the idea of it — but it’s more suited for a short film, not a feature. (The Be Kind Rewind website looks like fun.)

Crimes and Misdemeanors is one of several Woody Allen films that’s pretty damn close to a masterpiece. From Roger Ebert’s original review: Crimes and Misdemeanors “is a thriller about the dark nights of the soul. It shockingly answers the question most of us have asked ourselves from time to time: Could I live with the knowledge that I had murdered someone? Could I still get through the day and be close to my family and warm to my friends, knowing that because of my own cruel selfishness, someone who had loved me was lying dead in the grave? This is one of the central questions of human existence, and society is based on the fact that most of us are not willing to see ourselves as murderers. But in the world of this film, conventional piety is overturned and we see into the soul of a human monster… Actually, he seems like a pretty nice guy.”

In The Invasion of the Body Snatchers #4, Nicole Kidman does her best not to fall asleep and become one of the Pod People in this science fiction thriller that adds nothing new to a story that’s been done too many times already. However, it does work as a contemporary B-movie. It’s so bad that it’s good.

Picnic at Hanging Rock is a highly-regarded film about some girls from a private school who disappear without a trace while on a class picnic. Plenty of back-lit, soft-focus, slow-motion shots of pretty girls floating around in white dresses like they’re in a dream or heavily sedated. The pan flute throughout the score is lovely too. There’s more to it than that, but if you’re not in the mood for it (and I wasn’t), it’s boring.

Movies like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly are why I love movies. It’s a motion picture that takes hold of you from the first frame and doesn’t let go until the end credits are rolling. It’s a true story of a guy who has a stroke that leaves him unable to do anything except blink one eye, and from that one blinking eye he writes a book and communicates with people. In the opening shot (and for the first half hour of the film), we see what he sees after the stroke. His waking up. His distorted vision. We hear his voice — but no one else does because he’s unable to speak his thoughts. We hear his thoughts as he reacts to seeing his reflection for the first time, as orderlies clean his body that he can’t feel, as his children come to visit him, all of it. The experience of seeing what he sees is immediate and affective. (It’s also funny because he has a better sense of humour than most of the people around him.) I’ve never seen anything like it. I sat in my seat until the theatre lights came back on. It’s an extraordinary film.

I saw Casablanca in a theatre tonight for the first time. It was amazing. Seeing it on a giant screen in a theatre with a good audience, I noticed details in the acting and the storyline that passed me by in all my previous viewings. It opened the movie up to me in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible. Casablanca is a classic that deserves its reputation.

In Primer, some computer geeks create what turns out to be — I’m only guessing here — a time machine. They start messing with the space-time continuum and things go awry. It’s a science fiction movie with no special effects that begins with promise but quickly becomes frustrating by burying the essential drama of the story in unnecessary techno-babble.