John Rabe

John Rabe (2009)

Director: Florian Gallenberger
Writer: Florian Gallenberger
Starring: Ulrich Tukur, Daniel Brühl, Steve Buscemi

Synopsis
a german man working for a german company manages a factory in nanking, china in 1937. the japanese attack and he leads an area that becomes a safe zone for the chinese, and ultimately saves 200,00ish chinese lives. true story on a real german named john rabe.

The Woman
this was pretty exceptional. it was a little under 2 and a half hours and i didn't notice. i really appreciate when movie makers make the germans speak german, and the japanese speak japanese, and the chinese speak chinese, and the americans speak english. this was classified as a foreign movie, but you can't really tell because there are so many different languages represented it blurs the country of origin. i can dig that. it's also fascinating to me when i watch stories of WWII that i haven't seen represented before. the man was a nazi by name, but had been out of germany for twenty plus years, so didn't really comprehend what the nazi movement was about. they drove this fact home by the man who came to replace rabe in the beginning, who had just come from germany, and was appalled at how lackluster, and easygoing the men who claimed to be nazis ran their meeting. he was outraged that they would meet in the same room as the english, who had a photo of the king of england  that they would take down during their meetings (sometimes) to reveal a painting of hitler. he had this idealistic vision of hitler and the nazis, which, apparently, never went away. he even went as far as to write hitler a letter about the japanese treatment of the chinese, asking for help to stop the executions and rapes of the people of nanking. who knew? a likable nazi who stuck up for other human beings, because they were human beings.

they really did a good job at showing the terrible things the japanese did during the occupation(?) of nanking. and looking at imdb, apparently, alot of japanese actors when approached about doing this film wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole because the japanese are still, rightfully so, a little touchy about their actions in nanking. interesting facts i did not know about history. excellent.

really good. ulrich tukur did an amazing job (and really looks like john rabe to boot) would recommend.

The Ninth Configuration

The Ninth Configuration (1980)


Director: William Peter Blatty
Writer: William Peter Blatty (screenplay and novel)
Starring: Stacy Keach, Scott Wilson

Synopsis
So, there's this mental hospital for Marines (? - it might be more than just marines); and it's in a castle somewhere because this family decided to lend it to the Marines to use as they saw fit.  But the person running it isn't an MD (or something) so this other dude who's the best psychiatrist in the service comes along to take over.  He interacts with patients and forms some bonds and then the shit hits the fan.




The Woman
booooring. i thought this was going to be a thriller about a mental institution. instead it turned out to be a philosophical conversation about religion and science. i know these two plots are very similar, but one appeals to me slightly more. have i said this was boring yet, because it totally was. moster dozed and i got work done on the table runner i'm making, but jesus, i feel i could have listened to a much better movie while accomplishing things.


MOster
On a high level, this movie makes no sense at all.  The way the place is organized and how the fuck this other doctor would let super-psycho-patient let so many other minor-psycho-patients do all sorts of crazy shit doesn't even come close to the notion of "suspended disbelief." But, if you can get past that (which isn't really difficult because you don't learn about that stuff until the last ten minutes or so (though you might actually figure it out a little (or a lot) sooner.)) then there's actually something in this move that might be worth experiencing.

I'm not really a huge fan of The Exorcist; it all seemed way too convoluted and over the top.  But this is the opposite.  It's dark and "atmospheric" and often too close to boring.  Low lighting even in the scenes which don't take place within the castle keeps the suspense at a low simmer for a long time, but this could be because of the production rather than the plotting (i.e. you can tell that the director is doing things to amp the tension but you don't necessarily carry any pathos for the characters).  This is supplemented by excruciatingly reserved performances--Stacy Keach reminded me of HAL--which may very well have been directed by a narcoleptic crossing guard.

I don't know if I recommend this, but you could do a lot worse.  It might be worth studying.  There's probably a paper in the difference between this film and the more famous one.

ETA: Yes I dozed, but shmeh.

The Young Victoria

The Young Victoria (2009)

Director: Jean-Marc Valee
Writer: Julian Fellowes
Starring: Emily Blunt, Rupert Friend, Paul Bettany

Synopsis
a small section of queen victoria's life when she was younger. slightly before she was queen, and slightly after her coronation.

The Woman
good, but not great. the costumes were amazing, and the directing was really good. (i find it amusing it was directed by a frenchman considering the love affair between england and france) but i feel once it found itself, it ended. once prince albert and queen victoria's wedded bliss was over, just when they started having issues with the proper roles between man and wife and queen and country...the end. when i watch movies of england in the mid to late 1800's i always think of eddie izzard's bit about english drawing room drama. the subtlety in the acting and the extreme drama, drama, drama, right under the surface. that is exactly what this was. and i enjoyed it in this representation, but i wish there was just a little more of the story. some of the in-betweens, if that makes any sense.

Australia

Australia (2008)
Written by Baz Luhrmann, Stuart Beattie, Ronald Harwood, Richard Flanagan
Starring Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman, Brandon Walters, David Wenham

Synopsis
chicky lady poo comes from england to bring her husband home from australia and the failing ranch they have there. he dies. she falls for hefty thick neck huge ackman otherwise known as "the drover". they also take an aboriginal boy under their whitey mcwhiteface wing. and all the while escaping the dastardly plans of faramir. failing ranch, cattle drive, success, rain, the japanese.


MOster
This is an interesting thing.  I don't think that the movie was nearly as bad as what I remember reading and hearing about it, but it was the wrong movie.  It was either a bloated 110 minute stock drama or an undersold, four-hour, true epic.  Everything outside of the script points to the latter, so I'm going with that.

I joked before we began that I put the disc in the player unilaterally (rather than passive-aggressively, which is much more common in our house) so that Leila would have to write the synopsis.  It borders on true irony that I now can't imagine that she'll have any real difficulty in writing it.  We should have had more to work with.  There should have been 10 or 15 minutes of backstory for each of the main characters (other than the kid, of course). Rather than being relegated to the role of paper-thin mustache twirler Faramir should have been upgraded to a main character with real pathos and at least somewhat-understandable motivations; and we needed more secondary characters with stories.  That way, when everybody converged at the end the convergence would have meant more than "inevitable." 

The production here was interesting, if not to my tastes.  Direction and cameras were really good, as can be expected of a technician the likes of Baz, and everything was of a piece.  While I disagree with the idea that the aesthetic should appear so soundstage-y, I appreciate it as a point of view and that point of view was executed well.  Similarly, I found Kidman's performance and affectation to be off-putting, especially next to the naturalistic work of Jackman, the kid--who was actually pretty great--and Faramir; but again I see how reinforcing the wide gap between the aristocrat and commoners serves the story.

And the main thread of that story is engaging once you get past the jejune nature of the introductions.  The motivations of the principal ("good") characters were quite clear.  Sarah has a need to prove her worth in the man's world of the late 1930s while, due to some unexplained course of events, also improving her family's financial solvency; and some of the fleeting backstory defines The Drover well as a loner who really doesn't want the responsibility of a family.  To see them come together around Nullah in their vastly different ways feels true to them and allows us to become invested in at least that part of the picture.  It's easy to root for Nullah, and not only because he's the narrator.  He's got the most to lose, he's the most sympathetic, and in Leila's words he's an "extremely beautiful kid."  Just like a painted backdrop or a set, a story's backdrop must have enough detail to keep the viewer looking at the screen.  Look much beyond Nullah's story and you're squinting into the sunlight. 

The title "Austrailia," evokes scale, grandeur, Michner.  The film does a good job of showing us a small piece of the island, which makes it all the more disappointing to know that there's so much more just outside of our grasp.

The Woman
i might get shot in the face for saying what i'm about to say, but i didn't think this was as terrible as people lead me to believe. i don't really see a big difference between this and other epic old westerns. it was a bit slow moving and i do think it could have been edited down, and it may have been two separate movies, but i just wasn't as bored as i thought i would be. keep in mind we did watch this in two different sessions, so we had an intermission that lasted for about 6 hours.

the directing was beautiful, and i enjoyed the sound stage quality. i don't enjoy nicole kidman very much, and i think faramir is far better looking than huge ackman, but i was distracted most of the time by the most beautiful child to ever grace a movie screen. there could have been more character development, instead of weird empty plot movement too. i'm glad i've watched it and now that i have, i won't ever have to again.

Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974

Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974 (2009)

Director: Julian Jerrold
Writer: David Peace (novel) Tony Grisoni (screenplay)
Starring: Andrew Garfield, Jennifer Hennessey, Previously-Viewed Legume



Synopsis
a young journalist going through several deaths around him investigates the disappearance of a couple of little girls throughout the years. gets sucked into some major smallish town conspiracy and corruption. things. this is the first in a trilogy of movies about the different years of the yorkshire ripper case.

MOster
This was engaging on every level.  From the first frame, this picture feels like (what one has been led to believe is) Yorkshire in the 1970s.  The foundation of this atmosphere is art direction.  Plenty of low lighting and earthy colors drop us right in the thick of it.  Merging costuming, hair, settings, and sundries this film parallels the likes of Mad Men and Lord of the Rings in its trueness to setting and character alike. Building upon this foundation, direction and camera work are generally very good.  Full of artful yet unobtrusive shots and direction which (if nothing else) matches the line reads and the personalities built by the actors.

And the actors all do a great job with their personalities.  Garfield really sells it as the young idealogue, and his girlfriend (who I'm unable to find on IMDB) also comes off really well.  Sean Bean is in one of the roles for which it seems his face was made, full of sneering and arrogance; and the other cops come off as appropriately apathetic or genuinely concerned even as they're abetting (or being subjected to) some pretty shitty things.

I could have done without the last 30 seconds or so, but that's a MOster-level quibble.  This gets a strong recommendation.

The Woman
done well. direction, and acting, and all that. i originally thought this was supposed to be about the case of the yorkshire ripper, but that is actually kind of the subplot. the main focus is on this young journalist and his life at that time. i think that is a very clever way of doing it. it's a shame i liked it because i don't have too much to say when that happens, but c'est la vie. good job guy. i am interested to see where this takes us.

Mirrors

Mirrors (2008)


Director: Alexadre Aja
Writer:Alexadre Aja, Gregory Levasseur (screenplay) based on Korean movie
Starring: Kiefer Sutherland, Paula Patton

Synopsis
Um, this suspended cop dude starts working as a security guard at an abandoned department store.  He starts to see things in mirrors.  Then everybody else who he knows who also has a mirror starts seeing things. Then they start mutilating and killing themselves and every single reflective surface becomes dangerous.  Then, through a practically infinite string of idiotic coincidences he figures out what's going on.  Then he goes to the sticks.  Then he goes to this other place.  Then he goes back to New York.  Then he may or may not have stopped this from happening again.  If you want to know that last part you'll have to either think a little or watch the fucking thing.

The Woman
this movie.......man. it was totally supposed to be scary, but  i laughed through a good percentage of it. it was way hardcore ridiculous. kiefer sutherland was so intense and yelling all the time. the wife/ ex wife who thought he was delusional (rightfully so) when proven wrong, that this demony thing with the mirrors was actually true, said "i should have believed you". when this lunatic is raving about how the mirrors are making people do things, i think she should have called the looney bin, personally. i know i would lock my dearly beloved husband up. i mean i would totally believe him and fight the mirrors by his side.

not only was the acting outrageous, but the plot didn't make sense at all. why would this guy stay at a shitty night time security job when he's so creeped out by the things he sees in the mirrors. when things go south most of humanity would say they were outta there. the whole movie takes place in a week maybe ten days. i know i'm a hard worker, but jeebus, when i see burning people and reflections that aren't there, you could bet your ass i'd be at burger king watching a training video the next day. supposedly this dude, kiefer, he's been through some shit as a cop. we don't know what, and we never find out. but the man loves to rant and rave and take some mystery pill that treats his mystery emotional problem, stemming from this mystery shit that went down.

just when you think this movie can't possibly achieve any more crap content, the courics go off the chart. (that's a south park reference for those who didn't catch it) and listen closely because i'm totally going to give away the movie.... supposedly this thing that's happening in the mirrors is a demon that leaped from a possessed little girl in the 50's, when the burnt out department store building was an insane asylum, into the mirrors of this treatment room. see dr. whocares thought that schizophrenia could be cured if the affected were strapped to a chair in a room full of mirrors and hallucinate to themselves. demon girl gets strapped in, and the demon can't take it for some who knows reason. after a massacre in the asylum shortly after demon inhabits mirrors, the walls of the vanity schizo treatment room get sealed. asylum becomes department store. somehow demon starts to show up in all the mirrors of the department store. then demon starts showing up at kiefer's home. how does demon travel? we don't know. now that i write this down i can see that maybe in the original, the one with more thought put into it, that it maybe is a metaphor for the evil in us all, and once we see evil in that particular mirror, we see it everywhere? i don't know. but if that was the point it was done terribly. there's also this whole issue that happens where the demon repossesses girl, who is now a dead nun. isn't the whole point of possession the fact that the person is living? if the demon could possess dead people why did it need dead nun, who is alive at this point, to come back, it's killed tons of people. why not possess one of their dead bodies? could that just be me thinking that somebody should give a poop when writing terrible scripts, and casting terrible acting, and funding terrible remakes? ooh, ooh, i forgot to mention the ending...okay somehow kiefer gets crushed by a falling burned out department store while fighting of a possessed dead nun, and he thinks he's still alive until.....all the words everywhere are backwards!!!!! he's been collected by the demon and is now trapped forever inside mirrors. at least that's what i think, because it wasn't really explained.

oh man. this movie was poor.

MOster
This movie is like someone keeps trying to hack away at trees on their way out of the jungle, but the machete is so dull that each tree they hit only gets cut partway and they get hit on the head as the tree falls in the wrong direction.  When they wake up, they forgot that they tried this already and they get hit on the head again. Rinse and repeat. Eventually they bleed out and die.  It might be more pleasing to believe that they would have been eaten slowly by a large feline, but even that notion is too entertaining for this movie.

Through the first half-hour of this I was trying to figure out from where the main theme was lifted.  Turns out it was Lord of the Rings, note for note and instrument for instrument, to the point where I wonder if it's legal.  The premise here stems from the worst pieces of every important mirror story ever told (and surely some silly ones), from Lewis Carroll (thanks to my woman) to Neil Gaiman with any number of stops in between.  However, in creating the outline the writers didn't even bother to edit what they pasted in from these other sources, and in some cases when they copied from those sources they missed modifiers such as, "not."  Seriously, if the solution was so simple it would have happened immediately after it was the problem.

The single most egregiously stupid thing that anybody does in this movie is to stop the windows from being reflective by putting newspaper on the insides (while painting mirrors that could just as easily have been covered... or removed) and then IMMEDIATELY GOING OUTSIDE AND STANDING IN FRONT OF THE GLASS.

Production design and production value were the only elements of this piece that warrant any sort of praise, and the highest I'm willing to go here is, "adequate."  Everything else is just garbage.  Keifer can't even act, let alone overact, and the only other elements of the cast worth mentioning are Amy Smart's ass and sideboob.  So, casting gets an F.  The camera moved around a lot in an attempt to show how everybody and every thing were at least a little fucked up.  It sure did move, but it lingered on almost nothing that would explicate anything.  So, cinematography gets an F.  The director told the camera people what to do and whatever he said to the actors caused them to act like they were marionettes being controlled by a drink. [That's not a typo. They were being controlled by a container of potable liquid, not an inebriated human.]  So the director gets an F.  The executive producers and producers gave people money to make this movie and continued to pay salaries after they saw the dailies.  So they get expelled.

The worst thing about this movie is that it doesn't even really qualify as awesomely bad.  We laughed at it a few times, but we didn't have fun.

New in Town

New in Town (2009)


Director: Jonas Elmer
Writer: Ken Rance, C. Jay Cox
Starring: Fishlips McPoutypants, Harry Connick Jr., Siobhan Fallon, J.K. Simmons

Synopsis
corporate lady from miami gets assigned to a factory in minnesota to "upgrade" the factory. aka let people go. she falls for bearded harry connick jr (gasp) who is the union rep.

The Woman
i laughed exactly once, perhaps fifteen minutes in. it was a nipple joke, okay, you would laugh too. with this i thought perhaps i was wrong to condemn pretty much anything with zellweger in it. unfortunately, that was the climax of the humor, and i reverted to my natural state of displeasure watching a twig shiver in the minnesota cold. damn yous harry connick. i like you. i feel deja vu complaining about the fish out of water romantic comedy plot... so just insert whatever i said about did you hear about the morgans  in here.

this had potential. the details were great but the jokes weren't. scrapbooking clubs are hysterical to me, and yet they went nowhere with it. the subject of jesus pushing is also funny to me, and it only got two jokes.  J.K. Simmons was also great as a curmudgeony minnesotese man, he too, did not get enough screen time. eh. i'll continue to watch these cookie cutter romantic comedies because they require no braincells to view, and are good for knitting or crocheting, like any lifetime movie....i guess that's why they keep making them, but be very surprised if i have something good to say about them.