The Karatiest Kid

I'd heard they were making a new Karate Kid movie. It's true; I just saw it. Only this time they've switched the roles around where it's an old white guy teaching an Asian kid by means of menial housework including the washing of a car.
Ok. So Gran Torino is not Karate Kid V. But it might as well be.
Even though Clint Eastwood is like 104 he still kicks ass. And the coolest thing about this movie is all the racial epithets.
Clint Eastwood is a widower living in a bad neighborhood and he is pretty much your typical grumpy old man neighbor. Like if Walter Matthau had shot 13 gooks in Korea and returned to make a hash out of his own family (no -- he doesnt kill them, he's just emotionally distant). And also if Matthau could have feasibly been in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
The neighbors turn out to be involved in some gang shit and Eastwood finds himself embroiled in their garbage.
Because gangs don't take well to being humiliated, they retaliate and it's bad and Eastwood has to finish things. Because that is what he does.
It gets a little Messianic at the end but, hey, when God fails to give us role models we have to invent them in ourselves and in our movies.
This movie seemed to be tailor-made for the actor/director. It is basically a modern day Western and echoes an earlier Eastwood movie, High Plains Drifter, when he says: "The thing that haunts a man most is the thing he is not ordered to do."
I think I got a little bored in the middle just waiting for things to happen. But it left me feeling that, in the end, something did happen.

Milking It

Milk is a biopic of Harvey Milk, America’s first openly gay person to hold a political office. Gus Van Sant is the mainstream gay director, and as such he’s sort of preaching to the choir. I mean, I don’t expect any hardcore Republicans (for example) to go into this movie and be changed by anything they see there. It is not so much eye-opening as celebratory. Shot in a quasi-documentary style with stock footage, it shows a man who stood up for what he believed in. He just happened to be gay. At the age of forty he said “I haven’t done anything I’m proud of.” And then over the next eight years he did something.
Milk is the movie that everyone tried to make Brokeback Mountain into. No offense to Ang Lee, the other gay director. He made a beautiful film. And what Milk is lacking is that cinematic flare. But as far as making an important film that stands for homosexual issues and has a solid message, Milk is the real deal.
Brokeback garnered a lot of attention for bringing the gay issue into the spotlight. But it wasn’t the milestone people tried to make out it out to be. Milk actually deals with the issues of gay rights straightforwardly.
I guess I’m a choir member.

What Just Happened?

I have no idea but it was bad.
Ok, so I shouldn’t be reviewing this movie because I didn’t actually watch all of it. For someone who can sit through seven-hour-long movies, that’s saying something.
When you decide to make a movie about making a bad movie, you’re flirting with disaster. It’s really hard not to end up with a horrible movie. But that’s what Barry Levinson has done and what he has ended up with.
I’ve also always had a hard time with movies in which some actors play themselves and other actors play fictional characters. Robert De Niro is a movie producer who is not Robert De Niro but is trying to get an awful movie released starring Sean Penn who plays himself playing the starring role of the movie within the movie, Fiercely. And then there is also another movie being made starring Bruce Willis as Bruce Willis in the leading role. It could be funny. It could almost be a Charlie Kaufman movie. But it is not. It’s just painful. To spice it up there are interstitial shots that look inspired by Godard and do nothing to make the movie any more interesting or tolerable.
I don’t think I’ve seen a worse half of a movie about movies since Robert Altman’s The Player.

Just Burn

The Coen Brothers have always seemed like they have a multiple personality disorder to me. Maybe it’s because there are two of them.
Take their last two offerings. No Country for Old Men was a pitch-perfect novel treatment. It held the darkness in itself until it bursts its seams.
And then there is Burn After Reading, an example of the Bros.’ delve into humor. I’ve always found their funny stuff to be less satisfying than their dark stuff.
Blood Simple, Fargo, The Man Who Wasn’t There I loved. Raising Arizona, O Brother Where Art Thou, The Big Lebowski I struggled through. I don’t mind being the only guy in a movie theater who doesn’t laugh.
And that was the position I found myself in watching Burn After Reading. The first shot is a nice zoom-in of the entire Earth. From there it only gets complicated. The plot has enough twists and turns to satisfy Lady Winchester.
John Malkovich has still failed to find a suitable role after Being John Malkovich. He plays a fired CIA twit whose creepy-looking wife is cheating on him with the twitchy George Clooney who also has an affair with Frances McDormand. Brad Pitt is a surprise playing McDormand’s ambiguously gay gym coworker. And the plot hasn’t even gotten its sleeves wet yet.
There are guns, mistaken identities, Russians, a bicycle, and a dildo. Gee, when I put it like that, I don’t know why I didn’t like the movie.
Well, it’s not so much that I didn’t like it. It’s just that I didn’t find it as funny as everyone else in the theater seemed to. So I guess, if you go out and watch it, you will laugh too.

Religulocity

In Bill Maher’s movie, Religulous, he aims his agnostic skepticism, cutting humor and unwaveringly bad hairstyle at the subject of religion.
More precisely, Maher focuses his ire at the Judeo-Christian-Islam extraction of organized religion.
As a documentarian he makes the mistake that is so tempting to make: he uses extremists as indicative of the whole. It’s sort of like making a documentary about comedians and only interviewing Robin Williams and Steven Wright (actually, that sounds like a pretty good idea). Although it may be funny, it doesn’t represent the vast religious practitioners whose faith is simple and healthy.
Actually, as documentary, Religulous makes about the same statement as Supersize Me. They both show what happens when you do too much of a thing that should probably only be done once a week.
But that doesn’t make Religulous a bad movie. It’s funny and entertaining but it also poses an important question: why believe when belief seems to be so harmful? And: is it possible that we are beyond the usefulness of religion?
Maher offers the haven of doubt as a luxury to practice in opposition to faiths that seem only to lead to destruction. He plays fast and loose with his ability to question those who claim to have all the answers and his vision is refreshing.
It’s a totally post-modern thing to do: not to have answers.

Rachel Gets Married – Audience Gets Bored

Watching Rachel Getting Married is like being forced to watch the home movie of someone you barely know with the added irritation of also falling into the traditional language of film school.
As I was watching Rachel, I knew that film critics were going to just eat it up. Why is it that they love poorly-made movies? Like it is somehow the height of filmmaking to dispense with steady cam shots and original plot? I once heard a quote about foreign films that said that people only think they are interesting because they are boring. And the same can be said for this Indie film.
Anne Hathaway has gotten a day pass out of rehab to go to her sister’s wedding and while she is there what do you think might happen? Family dynamics are explored and old wounds have their band-aids ripped off.
Hathaway behaves like a drug addict and expects to be treated like a normal person. Her behavior makes everyone feel awkward and I don’t see how sitting and watching it won’t make you want to make some excuse to use the bathroom.
It isn’t so much that the acting is nonexistent and the script, if there was one, is unoriginal – it’s just so boring and mundane and pretends to be dealing with this deep and affecting pathos of family.

Synechdoche NY

Synecdoche NY is Charlie Kaufman’s new movie about puns, self-analysis, the homunculus, and what it means to be alive in the anguish of self-awareness. So although it is his first time in the director’s chair it’s no stretch.
Caden Cotard is a theater director who does lavish productions of "Death of a Salesman." He is besotted by an assortment of diseases and array of disenfranchised lovers.
He wants to express himself meaningfully and produce something real but in order to do so, he must capture all of life’s essence, reproducing every facet of reality. And so his art becomes self-reflexive. There are multiple expressions of himself and actors who understand him better than he understands himself.
The movie gets a little long and down on itself as it grinds to the innermost nesting doll of its existence.
I think, ultimately, this film will be relegated to being “smart,” which is unfortunate. Because although it is smart, it is not pretentious. It is only pretending to be pretentious.