The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (2009)

Writer: Terry Gilliam, Charles McKeown
Director: Terry Gilliam
Starring: Christopher Plummer, Lily Cole, Heath Ledger, Andrew Garfield, Verne Troyer

Synopsis
uhhhhhhhhh. good vs. evil in the form of a monk with an imaginarium and the devil influencing and making pacts.

MOster
This is definitely a better example of Gilliam than his last movie with so many stars (which actually also included Heath Ledger, interestingly).  That means that it's quite specific about its approach, and go fuck yourself.  I appreciate that sentiment, and I appreciated this movie at that meta level.

Beyond that, it's a little tenuous for me.  I didn't really get myself too invested in the characters or their situations, not least because it seems to me that the Doctor could have had a much easier time--and saved more people from the devil (and may I just say that Tom Waits' hit-to-miss ratio is far above average)--if he had modernized his approach just a little bit.  There were too many little pieces moving around, both in backstory and in actual characters, and not enough clinking.


The Woman
this was way too manic for me. it was like watching an entire movie of robin williams in the fisher king in his most ranty, excited self, playing all the parts at once. i also didn't really understand the ending. i get it in the big picture, but i don't understand the details. the imaginarium was very gilliam. with the giant plummer heads and such. i kind of wish he stuck to animating them instead of using new fangled technology. it was very reminiscent of the monty python animations so why not embrace it as such and do it full retro. we're all making the connection anyway. yet another meh.

Ninja Assassin

Ninja Assassin (2009)


Writer: Matthew Sand, J. Michael Straczynski
Director: James McTeigue
Starring: Rain, Naomi Harris

Synopsis
Ninja schools take babies and abuse them until they become ninjas.  One such ninja takes issue with something that happens in his house and bucks the system.

The Woman
it was like they blew all the budget for the whole movie on the CG blood. it's kind of a cop out. i might have enjoyed this a little more if there was a little more creative effort put into the gore. the story was eh. the acting was eh. the fight scenes were a little cooler. i can be down with exaggerated gore. it works for this type of shaw brothers homage, but see 2nd sentence. disappointed. the quality reminded me of "the ministers" which is not a good thing. this had potential, but it seemed to miss its intended mark. i was disappointed.

MOster
That synopsis is not vague because I'm trying to hide spoilers.  It's vague because the movie gave me nothing in the plot on which to latch my attention.  Some of the fights were pretty cool--one of them is even in the rain!--and some of the reveals were alright.

There's nothing here that you couldn't find in an older movie.  But you'd likely have to dig through that older movie's story and character development to find what you seek.

Also, isn't "Ninja Assassin" redundant?

PAUL

Paul (2011)

Writer: Simon Pegg & Nick Frost
Director: Greg Mottola
Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig

Synopsis
some dorky guys from the UK. after going to comic-con, go on an rv road trip through america. they run into (literally?) an alien named paul. then they run into jesus loving kristen wiig. all while being chased by some government agents.

MOster
I was let down by this movie.  It kind of felt like our Simon just didn't try very hard.  He knew the beats he had to hit and he hit them exactly according to the metronome.  Everything fits together nicely.  Everyone knows what they have to do and does it.  It's a well-oiled machine.

There was just no spark here; it isn't Shaun of the Dead, and it's nowhere near "Spaced."  Will anything ever be anywhere near "Spaced," though? Not from these guys, because most good art comes from hunger and Pegg and Frost are well beyond thinking about the origin of their next meals.

The Woman

grrr. i hate to be disappointed in pegg/frost movies, but it keeps happening! i hold 'spaced' and 'shaun of the dead' so high that i keep comparing. i should stop. i guess this had moments, but i maybe am being kind because i can't let go of my positive attitude toward pegg & frost.  dammit! i feel like they're just trying to recreate the past successes, but these more current movies are like bad photocopies. i can't go on. i'm almost rendered speechless in my disappointment. grrr. it's unfortunate.

Drive

Drive (2011)

Writer: Hossein Amini (screenplay), James Sallis (book)
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Carrie Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Al Brooks

Synopsis
a stunt driver who hires himself out as a getaway driver, gets in over his head when he breaks his rules about socializing.

The Woman
this thing was everything i wanted it to be. it lived up to expectation...in a good way! when does that happen?! i am not one to get squirmy about hardcore violence, but jesus, i have to admit i squirmed at least twice in my seat with the raw unadulterated violence and gore. it was just enough too. it wasn't excessive in any aspect, it was baby bear's "just right". me likey. i don't quite understand the explosion of romanticness thrown ryan gosling's way by the ladies after this movie. he is kind of a total sociopath in this....maybe that's what ladies like? a good lookin' guy with a murderous, violent rage just under the surface. he'll always be "young hercules" to me. ha. that show was hilarious.

i WILL make the MOster watch this one. mark my words.

The Change-Up

The Change-Up (2011)


Writer: Jon Lucas, Scott Moore
Director:  David Dobkin
Starring: Jason Bateman, Ryan Reynolds, Leslie Mann, Olivia Wilde

Synopsis
judge reinhold is played by jason bateman. fred savage is played by ryan reynolds. instead of a skull, it's a fountain. instead of realizing and accepting how difficult each others respective life is, they realize and accept how happy they both actually were in their respective lives. just when you thought the switching movies were all played out...

The Woman
i watched this awhile ago and forgot to write about it. the biggest impression made on me were the perfect titties that leslie mann possesses. there was a whole discussion over dinner that night about their picture perfectness and whether they were augmented or not. we decided they were because her nipples were aimed at the sky and that is simply not the case in nature of women her age. but i'll be damned that is a good boob job.

i don't know when this guys coming to grips with being a grown up became a genre, but man, it is. it's like the chick flick for guys. you do have a family and you do actually love them. amazing! you can make all the blow job/dick/ fart jokes all you want as long as you have that happy, coming to accept life moment. oh, and it must also star jason bateman or paul rudd. thirty-somethings and early forty-something guys will come a flockin'. their wives may even be in attendance. as long as their not busy watching the wacky children or working late in their successful career.

i judged this movie by it's opening sequence of CG baby butt hole squirting one out on dad's face. yup. i was pretty right. i will admit i laughed at the misunderstood wife seduction that turned into the poop joke. even though it was in the trailer, poop is still funny. unless it's chocolate pudding baby poop coming from a CG baby butt hole.

Pirate Radio

Pirate Radio (2009)


Writer: Richard Curtis
Director: Richard Curtis
Starring: Nobody, really.
Featureing Bill Nighy, Phillip Seymour Hoffman (who I forgot until I saw the poster, and this is the second most recent movie for me to watch, so I don't know if you actually need to read the review), Tom Suttridge, Rhys Darby, etc., some hot, older woman who I've forgotten and whom I don't care to look up.  Oh!  and Kenneth Branagh


Synopsis
I'm ahead of Leila!  Hooray!

OK.  In the 60s the British government didn't want people to listen to rock music on the radio, so there were some people who got ships and anchored them in international waters and just blasted music at the people all the time; and the people loved it.  This is one piece of the story of one of those ships.

The Woman
shme. it had a really good soundtrack, but that's the only memorable thing about this movie. the antics were fun, but the plot seemed a little fastened on. we were both disappointed with the ending too. we wanted some type of blurb of epilogue pertaining to the story of the characters and all we got was a sentence about the pirate radio stations or some such nonsense. something that we, as the viewers, could really care less about since the legal part of the plot seemed so thrown in. disappointed.


MOster
"This is one piece of the story of one of those ships."  It's a very uneven piece which can't decide how much of an ensemble picture it is and how much it should focus on the one guy who may or may not be the kid of Bill Nighy.  (Bill Nighy, as always, is fun to watch.)

The movie isn't bad.  You grow to care about some of the characters and you are actually worried when all of a sudden (on the SAME DAY THAT THEY PULL UP ANCHOR) they inexplicably hit some kind of rock with the boat.  Since you have to do real research to understand that the movie isn't nearly as "based on true events" as the opening title cards make it seem, you don't realize that these people are characters and therefore not subject to wholesale death.  I just did that favor for you, and you are eternally welcome.

Aside from the film's lack of focus--are we supposed to care about Branagh and his goings on on shore?  It's a long way to go to set up a mediocre coda--its biggest problem is that its ends aren't even.  We open with a minute or so of title cards giving us the historical context (and implying that the ship in this movie is an actual ship); but we don't close with a similar minute. Fictional or not, there should be some closure here.  The movie is framed in such a way as to make you expect that closure.

And I'm not talking about an explanation of how rowboats and large fishing vessels arrive at the site of the sinking simultaneously.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)

Writer: William M. Finkelstein
Director: Werner Herzog
Starring: The Nic Cage

Synopsis
an addict of a police lieutenant bumbles his way through covering his desperate addict behavior. this gets him into some trouble in the underworld. sort of.

MOster 
This movie annoyed the shit out of me.  The first movie was powerful for all the reasons that this one isn't.  The Nic's Lieutenant is just a lucky motherfucker.  He's bad, but he's not BAD.  There's one scene where he fucks a girl as payment for escaping a trumped-up drug charge.  It's pretty cool that he makes the boyfriend watch, but it's also no big deal.  He has a family.  He works to make their lives better.  That's not bad.  He dabbles in police corruption, but in general he's just a shitty cop who keeps getting promoted.  Is it "bad" that he double-crosses the drug dealer he convinced to employ him?  No.

I don't care if the end of the movie was his version of heaven or hell; or if it was some coma dream; or any other interpretation.  I do care about the whole reptile's eye view thing but not in a good way.  The movie wouldn't have earned him standing, nude in full frontal, and crying at the top of his lungs.  But such a shot would have earned a laugh that might have made the time feel less wasted.

The Woman
christ on a taco, werner. seriously? harvey keitel was a bad lieutenant. nic cage was a pussy addict getting himself into situations because of his addiction. he was not the keitel badass. he was a pussy. we joked on the couch while watching this that it should have been called the bumbling addict lieutenant, or the fucked up on drugs lieutenant, because he certainly was not the corrupt, ass kicking, guns a blazing, horrible, bad lieutenant from the first one.we kept shouting keitel would have shot those guys!!!! he's walking away? what?!

don't watch this. it's kinda dumb and bad. but not the right kind of bad.

Female Trouble

Female Trouble (1974)


Writer: John Waters
Director: John Waters
Starring: Divine

Synopsis
Divine goes through some crappy circumstances and comes out like a champ?  Something like that.  It's difficult to come up with a good synopsis of a Waters movie.

I don't know.  How about, "There's no poo eating in this one."

The Woman
i slept through most of this and i'm really kind of sad i did. it wasn't because it was boring or anything, i have been under the weather and really exhausted lately. i almost didn't package it up so i could watch it, but in the attempt to move forward on our ridiculous queue, i made the choice to seal it up and send it back. what i saw i enjoyed even more than "pink flamingo" i love me some john waters and when divine is involved it furthers the awesomeness to his style. this was quintessential waters, in all it seediness and humor.

MOster
Again with the needlessly-flippant synopsis.  This was better than Pink Flamingos.  The story was more coherent and there were some characters who were less than completely despicable.  And when those slightly-more-pure people did shitty things, you got a better sense of what drove them there.

Waters is a man apart.  Even today.  (Especially today?)  Nobody does or did things like his product.  Even his more-mainstream stuff is completely whacked-out and ridiculous.  This one is not mainstream.  It has all of his signatures--you're not watching Divine or Edith Massey because they're good actors--and it doesn't overplay the shock value hand.  That's probably the best thing about this, and about him in general.  When things actually happen, they hit you because you haven't been inundated through the course of the film.  They're noticeable spikes along the line of the movie's "ness-ness."

I Sell the Dead

I Sell the Dead (2008)


Writer: Glenn McQuaid
Director: Glenn McQuaid
Starring: Dominic Monaghan, Larry Fessenden

Synopsis
a guy tells the tale of his exploits as a grave robber. they turn out to cover the whole spectrum of horror movie supernatural "monsters"

MOster
Yeah, I've got nothing on this one.  I guess it was good technically, but I didn't care about anybody in front of or behind the camera.  This will be my simple, "meh" of the seven reviews I'm trying to do this morning.

It's nice to see Dominic Monaghan's name above the title--fuck, that's probably what got this made because it certainly wasn't Ron Pearlman--but he could do better than this shit.

The Woman
boring as well. i drifted in and out of paying attention. there was just something missing about this one. it had great elements to it, but it became predictable in it's humor and not i a funny way. boo.