Pitch Perfect

Stub Hubby On Demand Presents: Pitch Perfect

A fun and brisk "teenagers win a championship" movie, set in the very silly and melodramatic world of collegiate competitive a capella.
The music was terrific, the cast was colorful and fun. Anna Kendrick is solid in the Winona Ryder role, Rebel Wilson steals the movie with her moments of brilliance. Skylar Astin, Kendrick's love interest in the rival a capella group, distracted me with his similarity to Dane Cook. He looked like a teenage Dane Clone, seriously.
Anna Camp (The Mindy Project) is stuck in a thankless role as the antagonist- the new leader of the group who is obsessed with repairing the mistakes of the past. She has nice skin and she's a terrific actress, but Camp does not look like a 21-year-old college senior. Indeed, Camp was born in 1982, not 1992.
My wife co-founded the coed a capella group "SQ" at Tufts University (as an alternative to the single-sex groups on campus) so I was eager to hear her perspective. She felt the movie really captured the unique personalities and overblown melodrama of the a capella world.
I enjoyed the movie very much, but I also felt that it was pitched to a teenage audience. This is NOT a criticism, but I am certain that the evolution of Kendrick and Camp's characters resonates much more strongly with teenagers. I also appreciated that the movie acknowledged collegiate drinking and marijuana use without glamorizing it, or showing drug abuse or binge drinking.

At times Anna Kendrick's Beca talks like a young Liz Lemon (she even dresses like Lemon.) While watching I had forgotten that the movie was written by veteran 30 Rock writer Kay Cannon. Kudos for her tight screenplay with a fresh, youthful perspective.

Star Trek Into Darkness

Another exciting, dramatic, and funny Star Trek movie that plays it safe.
Is it ironic that the first new Trek movie in 2009 took a big chance by hitting the reset button on the history of Trek, and now its sequel is playing it safe by doing more of the same?
At the end of Star Trek 2009, I was expecting the Enterprise to embark on a new five-year mission: now that the characters were reestablished, they could then tell new stories in subsequent movies.
Instead, Star Trek Into Darkness is essentially a remake of the Khan stories from the original TV series episode The Space Seed, and the Wrath Of Khan feature film.

He maybe ruthless and determined, but Benedict Cumberbatch is also
stored fresh in his Starfleet Tupperware!

I am not sure what the reasoning is behind reusing old Trek stories in the new franchise. I enjoyed the 2009 movie so much I don't feel that the franchise needs to lean on proven commodities. Do the producers feel that first-gen Trek fans like me won't remain loyal to this millennial crew without a connection to our sense of nostalgia?

Two Trek movies, two totally
gratuitous bra-and-panty scenes?

Do I have a totally warped perspective on the Khan character? The Wrath of Khan was released 31 years ago next month, but it feels fresh as a daisy on the Genesis planet. Unlike most of the other Trek films, Khan has remained in the public consciousness ever since.
The only other Trek movie that everyone and their mother knows is "the one with the whales", aka Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986). Maybe the Millennials only know Khan from animated GIFs on Reddit and Khan jokes on The Big Bang Theory?

Regardless, this Khan movie is good, the characterizations are solid, the relationships feel real and organic, but it's lacking the searing power of Khan's vengeance on Kirk. In this movie, Khan and Kirk are only linked incidentally, where some trivial plot machinations place them at odds.

Somerville Theater (Main Screen), with Vinnie Pucci


Also on Stub Hubby
 To Boldly Go To The Theater To See Star Trek...Twelve Movies and Counting (1979-Present)

Oblivion

Snap judgement in a text to my wife:

"Movie was suprisingly thoughtful, but too long. Amazing music, sound effects, and cinematography." 

Based on the trailers, thought I had the movie figured out before I set foot in the theater, and I was half right. By the end of the movie, the twists turned into knots. I am all in favor of fantastical science fiction concepts which bend the rules of our reality for an exciting story, but I found myself frustrated by inconsistencies, plot holes, and structural problems...some of which were explained in the last 30 minutes of the movie.
Total Recall, The Matrix, and Mad Max have all covered this wasteland turf before. OBLIVION takes these ideas and adds...atmosphere. Tons of atmosphere. When a critic describes a movie as "atmospheric" the movie is usually beautiful but too long, with long dialog-free passages. Bingo!

To its credit, I would have no problem with OBLIVION winning awards for cinematography and production design. Cruise lives and works out of a glass box perched high above the clouds. The scenes shot in this glass box at dusk, with the "magic hour" lighting, are completely realistic. I've read this was all accomplished "in camera" with a 500-foot muslin screen staged outside the set windows. Footage of Hawaiian clouds were projected outside the glass cube set, and the effect is complete verisimilitude.

I have a terribly conflicted relationship with Tom Cruise. On one hand, he has a terrific track record for choosing projects. He's starred in 20 films in the last 20 years, and I've seen 16 of them (13 in the theater.)
On the other hand, I find him less emotionally convincing with every passing film. In the Mission Impossible movies, that doesn't matter so much. In a action-comedy like Knight & Day, who cares? But I think Cruise is supposed to be in love in this movie.

NOTE: Cruise is a well-preserved fifty years old in this movie; his two lady costars (Olga Kurylenko and Andrea Riseborough) are 17 and 19 years younger than him.

DISTRACTING: We don't know why, but Andrea Riseborough's Victoria character has watery and dilated pupils throughout the film. I Googled "Victoria's eyes dilated oblivion" and it turns out lots of other bloggers noticed too. The effect was to make me continually suspicious, wary, and uncertain of her character.
Somerville Theater, Upstairs, with Adam and George.

Iron Man 3

Iron Man 3 has some quality moments, a few memorable characters, and a new dimension for Tony Stark. None of that helped sustain me through a long, boring, soggy middle act.

I am truly tired of Gwyneth Paltrow. Yes, she and Downey have wonderful chemistry, but this movie suffers from the bane of threequels - Paltrow insisted that Pepper Potts be given more to do! Why does she have to have more to do? Someday I dream of a sequel that only offers more of the same. Why can't I just have more of what I liked in the first place. Gwyneth Paltrow kicking ass is not on my list. While I like watching Paltrow suffer (I almost paid to see CONTAGION because her character dies horribly), in Iron Man 3 she is tortured...while wearing a belly-baring sports bra. Is her flat and toned belly a perverse product placement for her personal trainer?

Jon Favreau appears again as Stark's comic relief/bodyguard Happy, but he has recused himself from directing #3 in favor of Shane Black. Black is famous for writing the first Lethal Weapon, Last Action Hero, Long Kiss Goodnight...then a nine-year career gap before he wrote and directed the underseen old-fashioned buddy action comedy Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (starring Downey with Val Kilmer.) Some Iron Man 3 details are reminiscent of Black's late 1980s heyday (and Lethal Weapon in particular):

• Action movie set at Christmastime
• Hero runs through a lot full of Christmas trees for sale
• Heroes in oceanside mansion, ambushed by surprise helicopter attack
• Final standoff aboard a transport tanker ship
• ...the President and Vice President are played by legendary character actors William Sadler (Hard to Kill, Die Hard 2) and Miguel Ferrer (Robocop, Miami Vice)!

In the end, there were some good ideas, and a couple of exciting action sequences, but watching Iron Man battle nearly indestructible villains is not very satisfying. I also find it tiresome that the Iron Man suit has a set of arbitrary rules for when the Jarvis OS will work properly, and more arbitrary rules for the power supply. The suit works or doesn't work when it's convenient to the plot.

My Grade: B minus

THEATER NOTES: Emily and I have already lamented that the extremely violent Iron Man movies are shamelessly marketed to children- the childrens' toys are everywhere - so I should not be surprised that this rated PG-13 movie (for sequences of intense sci-fi action and violence throughout, and brief suggestive content) screening was full of young children. At least three sets of parents brought their 8-11-year-old kids to see Iron Man 3, which features many evil demonic villains who burn from the inside like demons, and sometimes explode- early in the movie, one bad guy blows up on the street kind of like a suicide bomber...or a certain pair of terrorist brothers.

(With Emily, Arlington Capitol (big screen), in glorious 2D, between our third annual Yard Sale and my 10th annual Walk for Hunger.)

Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid

Stub Hubby on VHS presents: Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid

So we're purging our house.
We're holding our third annual Yard Sale this weekend, and this time, we mean business. We're feeling zero nostalgia for the junk that's filling up our basement, and bookshelves, and...video collection.
Amongst the DVDs I haven't watched in years (Boogie Nights), or only needed to watch one more time (Kiss Of Death) I found a VHS copy of Butch Cassidy with the shrink wrap still on. I bought it at a yard sale (I think I paid 25¢) So I peeled off the cellophane, stuck the tape into my still-connected VCR and hit PLAY.
The movie is very clever, with great dialog, wonderful chemistry, and lots of surprises, but wow is it boring.

Burt Bachrach's music is used in two overlong montages (the trip to New York & Bolivia montage, and the life in Bolivia/becoming notorious bankrobber montage) which I literally could not sit through. The bicycling montage set to "Raindrops Keep Fallin On My Head" is bizarre. The second montage is set to a Swingle Sisters-style chorus (The Ron Hicklin Singers) singing jazzy, uptempo harmony scatting "la-de-la-di-da" which instantly dates the movie as a flower-power relic. Any contemporary audience would laugh.
Ninety minutes in, I finally turned it off and went to bed.

Released in 1969, it feels like a counter-cultural reactionary response to conservative-values cowboy movies.
I've read William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade cover-to-cover, and his authorial intent is all well and good, but, as Bruce Springsteen once said "what do YOU think this song is about?"
For me, Butch is all about two men who don't know how to conform to society's expectations of them. They can't play by the Establishment's rules. They're just trying to get along, and yet they're persecuted.
The authority that wants to stop them has no face or personality. The "super-posse" chases them from a great distance. Butch and Sundance seem like reasonable guys- they treat the railroad employee Woodcock with respect, they're genuinely concerned for his welfare.
The disaffection for authority continues in a very humourous scene where the local sheriff (Kenneth Mars) tries ro rouse a posse - a common Western trope - but none of the townsfolk are interested in chasing Butch and Sundance. Their sympathy for the Hole In The Wall Gang (or at least indifference) is a deliberate reflection of contemporary suspicion of the police.
It's telling that Butch and Sundance are completely out of touch with the Spanish-American war - Vietnam parallel, anyone? Butch jokes about enlisting in the Army to avoid prosecution for their bankrobbing.
When they finally shoot *at* someone, it's after they're hired as payroll guards. They're forced to gun down a whole passel of Bolivian bandits in a sobering moment where their good times finally grind to a halt. They've become the Establishment machine they rebelled against for so long.
The movie feels more contemporary, and less timeless than I remember. In 1970 it was nominated for seven Oscars including Best Director and Best Picture. It won for Cinematography, William Goldman's original screenplay, Burt Bachrach's score, and "Raindrops" won Best Song.

NOTES:

• The picture quality was surprisingly good! A mint VHS tape, in a VCR I bought in 2001, on a 32-inch LCD television wasn't half bad.
• Paul Newman is a very handsome man. Robert Redford has amazing hair. Amazing. But Newman is 1,000 times better-looking.

Crazy, Stupid, Love.

A thoughtful, nuanced, intelligent comedy (with a wacky streak) with plenty of surprises.
Steve Carell is just fine as the cuckolded dad, who's never had to romance a woman in his life. He wears baggy khakis and New Balance sneakers to dinner- I normally would call this "I surrender", but marrying your high school sweetheart means you never had to try in the first place.
Julianne Moore is his wife, who's having a much-deserved midlife crisis after 25 years with her high school sweetheart. Her part is a bit underwritten- there's one scene missing that justifies why she point-blank wants a divorce. She has a fling/affair with colleague Kevin Bacon, just slick and smarmy enough to gross us out.
Ryan Gosling is funny as the charming Lothario who respects all the beautiful women too much to play games with them. Emma Stone is a perfect foil for him, they work very well together. The culmination of their romance is both surprising and organic.
I simply loved Marisa Tomei as a single lady out for a good time. When Carell completely botches his sloppy attempt at picking her up, some kind of reverse-lock takes effect- the same kind of surprising but organic relationship. Also, when her character finally goes off the rails, it's electric- I remember why she won that Oscar for comedy way back when.

Analeigh Tipton is perfect as the gawky, overdressed teenage girl who has a crush on Carell, but is pursued by Carell's son (Jonah Bobo, perfectly cast as Carell and Moore's offspring)
My wife thought this was based on a French comedy-- the slapstick third act certainly feels like it-- but it's credited to Dan Fogelman, who wrote three animated movies before this (Cars, Bolt, and Tangled) and has since created the aliens-in-my-subdivision TV comedy The Neighbors.

Steve Carell is a comedy genius - under-appreciated for his work on The Office - but his movie choices have been uneven. The Forty-Year-Old Virgin is brilliant, Little Miss Sunshine is very pleasant, but Get Smart, Dan In Real Life, Evan Almighty, Date Night, and Dinner For Schmucks are all lukewarm at best. I also believe that audiences are more reluctant to spend money to see a TV star in a feature film. The thinking goes- "I have seen Carell on The Office for free for six years- why should I pay $12 to see him act goofy in a movie?" This is why I have yet to see a Tina Fey movie in a theater, while I have seen every episode of 30 Rock, many of them twice. The good news for Carell and Fey: our standards our lower for movie night.

My wife saw CSL with her lady friends in the summer of 2011. In the summer of 2011, the TV commericals made CSL look like another formulaic rom-com, much like the other two rom coms that year, No Strings Attached and Friends With Benefits. Turns out CSL is a thoughtful, nuanced, intelligent comedy (with a wacky streak) that happily surprised me 18 months later, watching my mother-in-law's Netflix DVD with my wife and sister-in-law.

NOTE: both of those rom-coms co-starred That 70s Show alumni -- Ashton Kutcher in one, and Mila Kunis in the other. At the time, I tweeted:

Every cast member from That 70s Show is doing one.  Next up is Topher Grace & Jessica Alba in "Fuckbuddies!"

Room 237

Stub Hubby On Demand Presents: Room 237

A documentary about people who have developed elaborate theories of the true meaning of The Shining:

• The Shining is about the slaughter of the Native Americans
• Kubrick was hired by NASA to fake footage of the Apollo moon landing; Kubrick made The Shining to deal with his guilt over the conspiracy
• The Shining is about the Holocaust
• The Overlook Hotel is a labyrinth with a minotaur at the center

All those people are raving obsessive lunatics (ROLs)...except the one I completely agree with.
These ROLs speak on voice-over (we never see them) and their thoughtful, calm theories are illustrated with detailed, annotated footage from the movie. No judgements are made by the documentarians- none is needed. The theories speak for themselves. ROLs can attach to any piece of art. The Shining is a particularly strong draw to ROLs because:

• The film is rich in detail. There are dozens of elaborate, sprawling sets.
• Kubrick is involved with every detail of the production, and he's famous for it, so ROLs can assume that every prop, costume, camera move, and blocking was a deliberate, meaningful choice.
• There's many long scenes with no dialog. I think this literally gives ROLs time to disassemble the movie at the molecular level. I was surprised at how little of the ROLs theories centered on dialog. Perhaps because dialog is text, and true meaning is in the subtext? (Am I getting to film-school-ish?)

In the defense of the ROLs, Kubrick does include plenty of strong imagery and subtext. He is trying to push our emotional buttons. I think the labyrinth theme is intentional: Kubrick chose to replace the "hedge animals come to life" section of Stephen King's book with a massive hedge maze. Danny uses the maze to escape Jack at the end of the movie, but Kubrick extends the labyrinth theme into the hotel. From the very beginning, when Jack interviews for the job, the Steadicam-mounted camera follows Jack around corners, confusing our sense of direction, chasing the characters, and revealing each new room and hall as the character discovers them.

This technique is effective. After the Torrance family settles in for the winter, the camera chases Danny around an endless series of left and right turns as he benignly rides his Big Wheel trike around the hotel. We lose all sense of direction. Later, he rides again, but this time he encounters the ghost twins. What's cruelly effective about this technique is, we feel totally lost when confronted with the twins, at the end of a dead-end hallway. There's no escape on the trike. Compounding this, the scare works equally well on repeat viewings of the film. It's all too easy to lose track: Behind which corner are the twins waiting? In most horror movies, if you've seen the movie twice, you remember which closet door, rotten tree, or moldy coffin the monster is going to jump out of. When Danny is riding his trike, you might remember "the twins are coming" but you'll never know when they appear.

Here's where ROLs take "effective cinematic storytelling" and "meticulous production design" and turn it into "Kubrick helped fake the moon landing": If some things mean something, then anything can mean ANYTHING YOU WANT IT TO.

• Jack briefly reads a magazine while waiting for his interview. The cover is illegible onscreen. A ROL discovers it's a Playgirl magazine. THIS MEANS SOMETHING!
• Jack's typewriter was manufactured in Germany- not that you can tell onscreen. THIS MEANS SOMETHING!
• A character's pants change color between shots. THIS MEANS SOMETHING!

And, best of all, the hotel rec room includes a poster of a man in silhouette schussing downhill. It's literally a black silhouette of a skier. This particular ROL doesn't see a skier. She sees a minotaur. Completely oblivious to the fact that she's become a mental patient reading into an inkblot what she wants to see, she uses this poster to tie together her labyrinth theory. The good news for this lady is, I think the labyrinth theory has merit, but a ROL will seek out meaning in everything. Every continuity error, or meaningless choice of blocking or props can be used to bolster a ROLs case.

Sometimes Kubrick doesn't play fair. I don't think the Apollo moon landing footage was faked. I don't think The Shining has any subtext about space or the moon at all. This particular ROL is mostly reaching a long way for some very thin straws. HOWEVER, in one scene, Danny wears a sweater with the Apollo 11 rocket on the front. When a movie is filled with meticulous attention to detail, it's hard for a non-raving, non-obsessive, non-lunatic like me to understand WHY Danny would be wearing that image on his chest?

After discovering the Apollo sweater, a ROL has been given carte blanche to reading into every detail. A keytag says ROOM ^NO237. The letters R-O-O-M-N-O can be rearranged into MOON ROOM? This is only slightly less pitiful than the ROL who sees the number "42" everywhere. "42", plus the German typewriter, means the movie is about the Holocaust, obviously.

As a Shining fanatic, I loved the movie. Some of what I learned I am glad to know. A lot of it is bullshit, but other details help me enjoy the movie more. At the beginning of the movie, Hallorann gives Wendy a tour of the kitchen, dry pantry, and the freezer. The freezer is stocked with hundreds of pounds of meat. On a logical level, it looks like far more meat than a family of three could eat during their 6 ½ month residency, but the truth is, I am certain Kubrick loved the meat piled up on the shelves of the giant walk-in freezer, like corpses in a morgue.

FUN FACT: If the Torrances each ate ¼ lb of meat at every meal, that freezer should be stocked with over 440 pounds of meat for their 6 ½ month residency! Of course, they don't make it until spring, do they?

I strongly recommend Room 237 for anyone who appreciates film theory, Kubrick movies in general, and The Shining specifically. A fun perspective on the fuel that makes crazy people run. My Stub Hubby grade: A!

Basic Cable Weekend Notes

Random observations, viewed blurrily through a fog of DayQuil while convalescing in front of basic cable and Amazon Prime Instant Video:

• A series of cold war movies: (The Living Daylights, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, and Spies Like Us)
• Good-guy turned bad guy Jeroen Krabbé playing a Soviet double agent (Living Daylights) and a murderous doctor (The Fugitive)
• Four James Bonds (Connery, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan).
• Lots of amazing and expensive stunts, with planes, trains, cars, trucks, and boats
• Oscar winner Helen Mirren and her impeccable Russian accent (2010)
• Alan Cumming as an adorable computer "hacker" and his adequate Russian accent (Goldeneye)

Somehow Spies Like Us, a Hope/Crosby-style road movie starring Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd, was filmed at Pinewood Studios in England, and on location in Norway and Morocco? The locations look terrific, but isn't that expensive for a comedy filled with fart and boob jokes?

• Sean Bean with a very believable scar (Goldeneye)
• Brent Spiner with a very unbelievable android skull (Star Trek: First Contact)
• Joe Don Baker playing a CIA operative who is NOT Felix Leiter (Goldeneye) and a insane weapons tycoon (Living Daylights)
• In Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), Q lists the features of Bond's new BMW 7-series "Machine guns, rockets...and a GPS tracking system." But does it have Bluetooth? Backup camera?

Roy Scheider is terrific in 2010. The movie is full of hard sci-fi, Scheider brings a touch of humanity, helps ground the movie, and makes it believable, all at once.
It must have been a nice change of pace, especially for Helen Mirren, to make a movie like 2010, where she wore the same loose-fitting jumpsuit every single day of the production. She's the captain of the spaceship and she never even puts a space suit on!

• A completely useless Bond Girl (Maryam d'Abo, Living Daylights)
• A useful and competent Bond Girl (Izabella Scorupco, Goldeneye)
• A Bond Girl more useful than Bond himself (Michelle Yeoh, Tomorrow Never Dies)

Two mid-1980s movies featuring Afghan "freedom fighters":

• In The Living Daylights, Bond uses the Afghans to overrun a Soviet airbase
• In Spies Like Us, Chase and Aykroyd try to fool some CIA spies posing as UN doctors in an Afghan encampment...I think they became the Taliban?

And who is that serving at the radar console in the Royal Navy in 1997? It's Lord Grantham in Tomorrow Never Dies!

The Lord does not know how to dress himself, but he can operate a radar console?

I saw 2010 in the theater - at the old Liberty Tree Mall two-plex, across from the Ground Round - or was it the Northshore Mall? I was very pleased to find the futurism was not embarrassing. Some of the computer graphics on the bridge of the Leonov were a little crude-looking, but the hardware all looked good. The props are good too- in one scene, Roy Scheider's character works on a laptop computer with a flat-panel screen. They used a Apple IIc with an LCD screen. Of course, the actual Apple IIc had to plug into an outlet, but it sure looks great as a "future computer"!

A lot of the plot hinges on orbits, and flight trajectories, and fuel supplies, air braking...the kind of celestial physics that every other sci fi movie ignores completely. In 2010, this stuff is the dramatic action!

Stub Hubby At Home: The Bourne Legacy

After three Matt Damon-starred Bourne movies, the franchise has evolved into something new, at the hands of the series screenwriter Tony Gilroy.
Part reboot, part reimagining, and no Matt Damon, The Bourne Legacy is a million-dollar retcon of the Bourne backstory.

It's not a leap to imagine that Bourne was not the only super-spy the CIA spooks were cooking in their labs. We've encountered a parade of dead-eyed killing machines over the course of the trilogy: the Paris guy who pulls a pen out of his hand, then throws himself out a window; that German guy in the IKEA condo that Bourne attacks with a magazine; and most memorably, relentless Karl Urban (he'll always be Eomer to me.)

TBL's protagonist is another Bourne - style super - assassin: skeptical killer Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) seems to be troubled as much by his permanent servitude as he is by the immorality of his work. Unfortunately for Cross, Jason Bourne has already gone rogue and ruined the party for everyone else. Cross comes to grips with his moral dilemma at the exact moment that Edward Norton has been charged with burning the whole program to the ground.
Cross goes on the run, and much like Matt Damon & Franka Potente, he forms a fragile alliance with Marta (Rachel Weisz), a doctor from the shady biotech agency that designed and maintains the viral gene therapy that makes the superspies so super.

The events of Bourne Legacy take place concurrently with the previous Bourne film (The Bourne Ultimatum); much effort is made to stitch together the events in the two movies. I wondered if the cast of TBU were paid again when their scenes were re-used in TBL? I think only two or three actors were brought back from TBU to help patch some narrative holes in TBL.

The action sequences feel very familiar to the Bourne franchise. There's running across rooftops, stealing motorcycles, evading capture in large crowds. The scenes with Renner and Weisz on a motorcycle looked really real. There's some tense and thrilling scenes in a log cabin that had me on the edge of my seat. Then there's the just plain ridiculous. It's not a spoiler to reveal that at one point, Cross wrestles a wolf! There's also a preposterous MacGyver trick with a fire extinguisher.

I admired some fine camera work, especially a couple shots of Norton and Renner in low light, with just a little glint of light off their eyes. Also, the snowfall looked really good. If it was fake snow, they deserve an Oscar.

Rachel Weisz was a consummate pro in her "resourceful but panicked accomplice" role. Her accent was solid but not invisible.
Jeremy Renner was very good. He's made some odd choices besides his quality work in The Hurt Locker and The Town. In TV commercials, this movie smelled like another poor choice, a sad overextension of a trilogy. If Damon says he's done, shouldn't the franchise close up shop too? TBL turns out to be as good a four-quel as we could ask for = exact level of quality worth an on demand rental. B-minus.

Gangster Squad

I saw five movies less than a month- four of them in two weeks - so I've fallen behind in my movie reviewing. Now that I've tapped out the Oscar nominees, I have time to write a little...

It's quite a feat to make a genre film that contributes almost nothing to the genre. An amazing composite of existing characters and tropes (LA Confidential, The Untouchables, Chinatown: call your attorneys), Gangster Squad barely registered on my consciousness. Josh Brolin grimly trudges along, gritting his teeth every step of the way. Ryan Gosling floats along, charming every woman in the theater (so THAT's what I've been hearing about) with an long face, walleyed expression, and odd high voice. Emma Stone does an okay job, clearly out of her comfort zone as a doomed moll - the Kim Basinger role from LA Confidential. What Sean Penn was thinking when he agreed to make this movie is beyond me. His sociopathic goblin is a sad shadow of Pacino and DeNiro's Scarfaces. My Grade: C-plus

Hat Squad?

This movie is based on the true story of the police squad that fought organized crime in Los Angeles in the 1940s and 50s. This story has been told at least twice before- in a 1992-93 TV show (produced by Stephen J. Cannell) called  Hat Squad ...that lasted for 13 episodes.

Then there's the 1996 movie  Mulholland Falls- not to be confused with Mulholland Dr - that also stars Nick Nolte. I remember Mulholland Falls for the wonderful cast, and Jennifer Connelly!

Spoiler Alert

What's the point of a gangster movie where no one dies? Only Giovanni Ribisi's electronics geek dies. I would have bumped this up a full letter grade if Brolin, Gosling, or Stone had died. Gangster Squad includes the scene from The Untouchables where the bad guys show up at the hero's house and threaten his family. In this remake, the gangsters shoot up his house into Swiss cheese, but Brolin's pregnant wife -- she even resembles Eliot Ness's wife -- not only does she survive the shooting, she successfully delivers her own baby in the bathtub. Aren't BAD things supposed to happen in gangster movies?

Theater Notes

The ladies in the Somerville Theater audience truly adored Ryan Gosling. I don't remember another movie where the ladies were completely enthralled.

Zero Dark Thirty

I saw five movies less than a month- four of them in two weeks - so I've fallen behind in my movie reviewing. Now that I've tapped out the Oscar nominees, I have time to write a little...

Gripping and fascinating thriller, which happens to be based on the true story of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. The film built so much credibility with its unflinching and unpretentious depiction of the torture and spy game.
The first third of the movie explicitly depicts waterboarding and other advanced interrogation techniques used on Al Qaeda. There's no fingernails torn out, as in Syriana, but it still evokes strong emotional responses in everyone who sees it. I personally felt obliged to see this movie. The violence was the opposite of gratuitous, it was necessary and almost clinical in its presentation.
The ultimate raid on the Abbotobad compound felt completely real. I felt like I was watching a complete and honest recreation of the events of May 2, 2011. For the last half-hour, you could have heard a pin drop in the theater.
My Grade: A
Regal Fenway

This Is 40

I saw five movies less than a month- four of them in two weeks - so I've fallen behind in my movie reviewing. Now that I've tapped out the Oscar nominees, I have time to write a little...

This is 40 is a brutally honest and funny portrait of a typical couple burdened with running a family household with two jobs, and the "golden handcuffs" of unrealistic social expectations. I had a hard time sympathizing with a couple on the brink of bankruptcy...who live in a million-dollar house and drive a Lexus and a BMW. I'm all for following your dreams, but it's the height of narcissism for a music lover who can't keep a job in the dying music industry (Paul Rudd) to start his own boutique record label? He had two kids to feed! The core issues for their marriage struck hard, but I had to laugh at Paul Rudd in the parking lot, crying in his BMW 5 series. Leslie Mann, meanwhile, at age 40 and 1% body fat, lies about her age, smokes on the DL, and may exercise compulsively. To conclude, I have to ask the same question I asked about the Nancy Meyers movies Something's Gotta Give and It's Complicated: wouldn't this movie be equally good if the characters weren't millionaires?
THEATER NOTES: Kinda weird for a single 40-year-old man to see This Is 40 alone. I didn't plan it- I arrived too late for Zero Dark Thirty, bought a ticket for This Is 40 instead. Is "40" ten better than "30"?
Regal Fenway

Django Unchained

I saw five movies less than a month- four of them in two weeks - so I've fallen behind in my movie reviewing. Now that I've tapped out the Oscar nominees, I have time to write a little...


Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz are terrific in this explosive, sly, funny, but overlong and over-gruesome epic revenge thriller. I read somewhere that Waltz not only is ideally suited for Tarantino dialog, but he truly makes the character his own. I couldn't agree more.
Jamie Foxx is solid and unshowy as the liberated slave on the revenge warpath, very much in the quiet, Eastwood model of cowboy.
Leonardo DiCaprio is having fun but never truly menaces as Calvin Candie. Kerry Washington is a shockingly passive and silent "madonna" figure. I admit I have a pretty high tolerance for movie violence, but I had no stomach for some of the explicit violence; specifically the "mandingo fighting", where two men fight to the death, and watching a slave ripped apart by dogs isn't exactly on my bucket list.

THEATER NOTES: The theater was mostly full and at least half minorities. The crowd laughed hard at the (many) funny parts, and Samuel L. Jackson held the audience in the palm of his hand. He completely enthralled them.
AMC Aviation Plaza, Linden NJ, while my wife saw Les Miserables in a theater down the hall...

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Guys Movie Night)

A very good Peter Jackson Hobbit movie, although, after 11 hours of Lord Of The Rings in the last decade, I don't really feel the burning desire to see more Tolkien stories on the big screen. I have already seen enough endless caverns, rickety bridges, hordes of orcs, and swordplay for one lifetime. The plot definitely felt flabby. Peter Jackson stands by the decision to release three Hobbit movies instead of two, but this definitely felt like a Director's Cut-style "leave everything in" edit.
Martin Freeman was excellent as Bilbo Baggins, the Gollum 2.0 is a jaw-dropping improvement on an already terrific CGI character. Richard Armitage makes a star-making turn as short, dark and handsome lead dwarf Thorin Oakenshield. He exudes quiet power and authority.
I have only read the novel once, so maybe I'm in the minority, but this movie feels much less crucial than the Lord of the Rings movies did. Jackson works hard to give the restoration of the dwarves homeland moral and emotional heft, but I remember The Hobbit being much more inconsequential than this. B-plus. With Marc and Jeff at Regal Fenway.
TRAILER NOTES:
The End Of The World is big business in Hollywood this year; We saw six trailers before The Hobbit, and five of them were about the end of the world in one flavor or another:

• Pacific Rim (Godzilla vs Transformers)
• The Host (Stephenie Meyer's aliens take over Earth by possessing human bodies thriller)
• Warm Bodies (A Rom-Zom-Com in the spirit of Shaun of The Dead)
• Oblivion (Tom Cruise Beyond Thunderdome, with Morgan Freeman in the Tina Turner part)
• After Earth (Will & Jaden Smith's Avatar remake, directed by M. Night Shyamalan)
• and Beautiful Creatures (Twilight with witches)

We didn't even see the trailers for the upcoming comedy This Is The End (from the Pineapple Express team), World War Z (Brad Pitt remakes I Am Legend with more action), or The World's End (the latest collaboration between Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Edgar Wright.)

Killing Them Softly

A self-indulgent, smug, talky gangster movie. Think Tarantino minus the humor, but keep the brutal, gruesome violence intact.

Kiwi director Andrew Dominik must feel damn lucky that Brad Pitt likes making arty movies- Dominik wouldn't have a career if Pitt didn't agree to star in this movie, and his previous feature, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007). As it is, Dominik treats Pitt's character lovingly, giving him all the great music cues, all the best lines, and his character, self-confident hitman Jackie, seemingly all-knowing and perfect.

Scoot McNairy wins my Breakout Performer award for his terrific performance in this movie, plus his role as one of the American Embassy workers hiding out in Argo. His three-time clueless loser crook is pathetic, but he has one powerful scene where Brad Pitt's hitman talks him into betraying his fellow thieves with the illusion of sparing his own life.
Between the too-cool songs on the soundtrack, the endless monologues which lead nowhere, and the pointless slow-motion murder sequence, I was rolling my eyes when I wasn't dozing off. C-minus. West Newton Cinema, with a very well-behaved crowd (for a change.)

141 The Song Is Over

1. "Pass The Peas" The J.B.'s
   
2. "No Love Lost" Pat DiNizio has a wonderful, distinctive voice.  I love the Smithereens as a power-pop band, but DiNizio sounds great singing standards too. This track is from his debut solo album Songs & Sounds [1997], featuring a wonderful and non-ironic saxophone solo.
   
3. "Game Of Pricks" This is my first Guided By Voices song, a band I have heard about secondhand for years and years.
   
4. "Driver 8" Maybe my favorite R.E.M. song? Bold statement, but it feels true.
   
5. "Jailbreak" AC/DC were a longtime holdout from the iTunes and Amazon's MP3 stores. Back in my high school DJ days, I played this song all the time, from their 1984 EP '74 Jailbreak.
   

6. "Trampled Under Foot" [live 12/10/07] Led Zeppelin, from their reunion album Celebration Day. The concert movie really made me appreciate how Zeppelin invented the blues-rock band template which so many bands exploited throughout the 70s and 80s. For example, "Trampled Under Foot" [released April 1975] sounds like the direct inspiration for the next song on this mix...
   
7. "Long Train Runnin'" ...wait a minute, I think I owe The Doobie Brothers an apology! "Long Train Runnin'" came out in March 1973! Regardless, tracks 6 and 7 sound like brothers.
   

8. "The Song Is Over" Maybe there's a little too much Moog noodling on this Who song, and the song lingers around for over six minutes, but it was 1971, they can be forgiven.
   
9. "Dear Prudence" The Beatles
   
10. "Found Out About You" Gin Blossoms
    
11. "Tearing Us Apart" Eric Clapton duets with Tina Turner from Clapton's 1986 album August (The Phil Collins Era). Amidst Turner's comeback- her Private Dancer album became a sensation in 1984-85 - she collaborated with Clapton, Bryan Adams, Phil Collins, Steve Winwood, and Mick Jagger.
    
12. "We Are Young" Fun., feat/Janelle Monae
    
13. "Emmylou" First Aid Kit; terrible band name, very nice song. I think my wife discovered this band before this song was on the TV show Nashville?
    
14. "A1 On The Jukebox" from Dave Edmunds album Tracks on Wax 4 [1978].
    
15. "Heroes Are Hard to Find" Fleetwood Mac; a great Christine McVie song from the pre-Buckingham/Nicks era [1974]. The Mac is on tour again this year. Would I be interested in attending? As I said to my wife, "No McVie, no me!"
    
16. "One Step Beyond" Madness

Lincoln

A riveting political and legislative adventure, and a biopic of Abraham Lincoln, all rolled into one. Daniel Day-Lewis does a perfect job. We know Lincoln (and Day-Lewis) too well to ever forget this is a movie, but he does a perfect job of what we can realistically expect from a man playing such an icon. This feels like a perspective of what the man was really like.
I really appreciate biopics that use one pivotal event to describe a man. My main problem with A Beautiful Mind is that it covered decades of the man's life. Most of Lincoln covers a few weeks only, the leadup to the House vote on the 13th Amendment. Spielberg (with writer Tony Kushner) create a West Wing-style political thriller that feels completely contemporary, while simultaneously depicting Capitol Hill, 1865 in all its colorful differences.I especially loved the hallways of the White House and the Capitol Building clogged with office-seekers and constituents petitioning their government.

What a wonderful cast. One critic wrote "If Day-Lewis weren't in the movie, then Tommy Lee Jones would have stolen the whole thing" and I agree. I especially liked the lobbyists Seward hires to sway Democratic votes: James Spader, John Hawkes, and Tim Blake Nelson? What a trio! Spader is especially colorful - clearly he and Spielberg felt the movie needed to be leavened with levity.

It must be nice to be Spielberg and cast whoever you want in your films: I count SEVEN Academy Award winners or nominees in the cast:

1. Daniel Day-Lewis
2. Sally Field
3. David Strathairn
4. Hal Holbrook
5. Tommy Lee Jones
6. John Hawkes
7. Jackie Earl Haley

Fun Fact: Hal Holbrook and Joseph Gordon-Levitt share a birthday, February 17 (56 years apart)
Theater Note: Before I had a child (and babysitters) I didn't care when a movie started. Now I am pissed off when they start showing 20 minutes of trailers at the time the movie is scheduled to start.
(With Emily, Black Friday 2012, Aviation Plaza Linden, NJ)

Guys Movie Night: Skyfall

Bond has cut closer to the heart than ever before in SKYFALL.
In the Daniel Craig Era, Casino Royale presented Bond as a impulsive, not-quite-ready-for-double-O-status killer, and Quantum of Solace was a underbaked, implausible mess (thank you writers' strike), this third 21st century Bond film tests Bond's body and soul. His body is tested with a shaky rehabilitation from a gunshot wound; his soul is tested with questions of his purpose, his mortality, and his roots.

Bond never actually hits a target
with his gun in this movie.

Javier Bardem is compelling as the villain. His introductory scene is a single, motionless, shot: Bardem approaches us across a great room, growing slowly in size onscreen until he's literally in Bond's lap. He tells one of those folksy stories which become more and more creepy as they go along. By the time he's done, he has the audience in the palm of his hand.

Bardem's blond hair, and especially his fake blond eyelashes, were terribly distracting.

The major flaw in the movie is the plot. The machinations of the story are cobbled together from spare parts of other movies. I am not asking a James Bond story to reinvent the wheel, but when Bond hides out on a tropical beach, I expected him to pass Jason Bourne jogging by. When the villain escapes, I expected the Joker to be riding shotgun, or perhaps Loki?
It's still gripping, high-quality entertainment: (My grade = B plus), but the Bourne trilogy has raised the bar on spy movies, and I can sense the Bond franchise is playing catchup.

BOND & BOURNE MOVIES on Stub Hubby

• Roger Moore Era: I think I saw A View To A Kill (1985) in the theater.
• Goldeneye (1995) is the only Brosnan Bond film I saw in the theater.
• The Bourne Identity (2002)
• Moonraker and From Russia With Love double feature
• Casino Royale (2006)
• The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
• Quantum of Solace (2008)
• Dr. No
• Just How Old Is James Bond, Anyway?

Guys Movie Night: Seven Psychopaths

A sloppy and passe Tarantino-style shaggy-dog murder comedy. C-minus. Too gratuitously and graphically violent for even my calloused sensibility, and nowhere near sharp enough to hold my interest.
The opening scene is two hitmen, one dumb and one smart, dressed in black, casually discussing their next hit, John Dillinger, and the movies. Is writer-director Martin McDonagh (In Bruges) deliberately honoring or parodying Pulp Fiction? It's too obvious to be a tribute and to on-the-nose to be a parody. There's plenty of late '90s style casual murder, colorful characters, tall tales, stories told in flashback, sex, nudity, and intense violence. This flavor of film was very fashionable in 1996 (see The Usual Suspects, Three Days In The Valley, Way of the Gun, and Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead), but it really rubbed me the wrong way.
The cast is all-star: Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken, Woody Harrelson, and Tom Waits are good, although they seem to wander around the script with their dialog.
McDonagh was lucky to cast Harry Dean Stanton, Kevin Corrgian, and Gabourey Sidibe in bit parts.
I am fond of Slovenian native Zeljko Ivanek, with his grey complexion and dead blue eyes, he's a terrific character actor.
McDonagh's previous writing-directing effort, In Bruges, is also a darkly comic and surprisingly violent movie-- which I can recommend if you don't mind wholesale death of all the characters --but Seven Psychopaths fudges the tone out of whack. Also, the pacing in the last third grinds to a halt.
At the Belmont Studio Cinema with Adam, George, and Kevin

Argo

A sharp and gripping thriller, expertly tailored by director-producer-star Ben Affleck. Sustaining suspense in a movie where some of the audience know the ending (of the true-life story) is a challenge; Affleck keeps stirring the pot all the way through, and keeps the suspense high until the end. My grade: A-minus.
The opening sequence- a reenactment of the storming of the US Embassy in Tehran (November 1979) is terrifying. I don't know any of the history of these events, but it's shocking that the embassy remained open at the time. Why didn't the State Department pull their servicemen out sooner? The scenes of mob violence, and the capture of the diplomats, all hit home hard after the events in Benghazi on 9/11/2012.
In the wake of the capture and the beginning of the hostage crisis, CIA "exfil" expert Tony Mendez (Affleck with bad 70s hair) is called in to consult with State. Bryan Cranston is Mendez' boss, and he deserves a medal for his flawless and entertaining exposition. He briefs Mendez during a walk-and-talk through Langley, and he manages to explain for us the complete political-diplomatic-bureaucratic landscape in a fast-paced monologue, in a perfect balance of clarity, in-house jargon, and humor. "(President) Carter's shitting enough bricks to build the pyramids" is one memorable line.
I don't think anyone says the words "this plan is so crazy, it just might work" but that's essentially the idea. The only way to extract six Americans from Iran during the revolution is to cook up a crazy plan, develop a deep background, and rely on sloppy Iranian bookkeeping to bluff your way through.
Mendez goes to Hollywood to set up a complete fake movie production company, where John Goodman, Alan Arkin, and Richard Kind provide terrific comic relief. As much as I like Goodman, I feel like he's overused-- until I saw a photo of the real Oscar-winning makeup artist he's playing.
I appreciated that Argo shines a light on Americans who are rarely recognized for their hard work- foreign service workers toiling for the US in some of the most dangerous places on Earth; and the unknown officers of the intelligence services, choosing to fly into Iran to save the lives of strangers, with little hope of success. It's a thankless, heroic occupation, far from the land of spies or assassins, these men and women are acting covertly to save lives.
CASTING NOTES: Set in 1979, the hairstyles, grooming choices, and eyeglasses of the Americans in Iran are regrettable. It's easy to doubt that any man would ever choose to comb his hair that way, or that any woman ever thought those eyeglasses would work for her. Color me surprised during the closing credits, when photos of the characters were matched with the real-life passport photos of the six Americans-- those combovers and the walrus mustache are all authentic. Plus, the actors closely resemble the real people- when you're casting actors to play obscure historical figures, the only reason to cast the parts so well is out of respect.
Both Kyle Chandler and Chris Messina are having their "moments" these days; I see these two everywhere! Since Friday Night Lights went off the air, Chandler made Super 8, Argo, and four more features either in the can or filming now, two directed by Oscar winners Martin Scorsese (The Wolf Of Wall Street) and Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty).
Since I saw Chris Messina in Julie & Julia in 2008, he's appeared in 11 movies, plus he's a regular on The Newsroom, Damages, and The Mindy Project.

The Robot Arm Was Early Today

8:10am, my son sounded the alarm.
"I hear the robot arm! The robot arm is coming!"
This is not the opening scene to a sci-fi movie. The "robot arm" is mounted on our new town garbage truck. Two minimum-wage jumpsuit-jockeys have been replaced with a giant robotic arm: the robot arm can collect all the garbage, and the driver never has to get out of the truck. Needless to say this is the coolest thing a two-year-old has ever seen, and I think it's pretty neat too.
Unfortunately, the robot arm was early this week, and I hadn't rolled our toter to the curb yet. I literally had this week's kitchen garbage bag in my hand when I heard the diesel engine. I ran downstairs in my shorts and tee shirt, and just barely caught the guy before he passed us by.
All this got me thinking about COMMANDO.

At the opening of the movie, Arnold is a retired black ops soldier, and his fellow squad members are being assassinated. One of his men is asleep at dawn when he and his wife hear the diesel truck engine down the street. They belatedly realize that they haven't taken the trash out yet. The guy dumps the kitty litter in the bag, and hustles down the driveway in his bathrobe and slippers to catch the truck before it passes them by.
The truck is backing up to the end of the guy's driveway. Two garbage men are hanging off the back.
"I thought you'd miss me." the man says.
One garbageman pulls the bandana off his face.
"We won't."

 The two garbage men (actually villainous ex-soldiers / hitmen- that's Bill Duke [right]) shoot the guy to death, then dump their weapons into the back of the truck and drive away.
What was their plan to murder this guy exactly?

• Steal a garbage truck
• Drive to the target's house
• Hope that the truck's engine noise wakes him up
• Hope that he realizes that he's hearing the garbage truck
• Hope that he forgot to take out the garbage the night before
• Hope that he decides to race out to the curb with his trash?

I guess it's possible that their plan was to park the garbage truck in front of his house, trudge up the driveway, break in, murder the guy, then walk back to the truck and drive away?
They must have been thrilled when the guy ran down to meet them out front. Saves them all that walking.
NOTE: Thanks to Legion's Fate blog for the screen caps. His weapon-centric plot synopsis is terrific, and funny too.

Looper

A smart and thoughtful vision, and a clever exploration of time travel, but Looper's overcomplicated time-travel Möbius strip muddles the motivations and heart of the movie. Emily Blunt and her young son provide some emotional heft, but the movie (and my brain) spent too much energy placing the puzzle pieces together to appreciate the journey the characters were taking. B-minus.

The year is 2044. Joe is a Mob hitman whose 30 - years - older self comes back in time to change the course of "history". Problem is, the Mob wants Old Joe dead, and Young Joe has no future as long as Old Joe defies his fate.
After 30 years of crime and loneliness, Old Joe finally found peace and true love. This is all ripped away by the new boss of his old Mob, so Old Joe's motivations are clear- go back 30 years and prevent the ascent of the mysterious "Rainmaker" who would someday rule the Mob and destroy all he had to live for. Yes, this is the plot of the second "Terminator" movie, except the "John Connor" in Looper is 10 years old and destined to be an evil kingpin, not the leader of the resistance.
Young Joe doesn't appreciate Old Joe's struggle against destiny. Young Joe is thinking short-term: he cannot escape the wrath of the Mob in the here-and-now, as long as his older self defies his fate and muddles in his own history, so Young Joe must kill Old Joe before the Mob catches up to them both.

 Young Joe is the protagonist of the film, and I am puzzled by his motivation. He begins the film as a cold-blooded assassin who is struggling against his destiny: doomed to be executed when the Mob can no longer use him. He hoards his treasure, in the hopes that he can escape his fate someday. So when his older self arrives and explains what will become of him, Young Joe does not join forces with Old Joe to change the course of his life. Instead, he refuses to be told what will become of him. It seems unrealistic, even in the hopeless near-future where this movie is set, to imagine any 30 year old trying to kill themselves at age 60 instead of taking a chance at extending that deadline. Doesn't there need to be an emotional arc for the protagonist to travel?
At the halfway mark, the movie transforms in to the standard Western "standoff at the isolated farmhouse" template- screen doors, pickup trucks, vagrants sleeping in the barn, creaky floorboards, you name it. Emily Blunt (flawless American accent) is Sara, the tough single mother with a shotgun, defending her young son (Pierce Gagnon). Young Joe is the dangerous stranger whom Sara slowly begins to trust; she literally helps clean out his wounds while talking all folksy. All we needed was a cowboy hat.
The sci-fi fan in me appreciated the cleverness of the time travelling: Young Joe cannot keep anything from Old Joe- as soon as Young Joe does something, Old Joe "remembers" it.  Remember Marty McFly's family photo, with the disappearing siblings? In Looper, a retired hitman's fingers begin to disappear as his younger self is tortured to death.
The aspect of Looper that I thought would be the biggest problem: Joseph Gordon-Levitt's prosthetic appliances, combined with his Bruce Willis impression, turned out to be surprisingly good. It doesn't change the fact that we all remember what Bruce Willis really looked like 30 years ago. If I were the director, I probably would have just ignored the issue and left off the prosthetics, but they probably helped more than they hurt.

Bruce Willis 30 years ago and today; JGL playing Bruce at that age (center)

140 Trippin, Throwin, Rollin, & Tumblin

1. "Cleo's Mood" Jr. Walker & The All-Stars
2. "Tripping Billies" [live at Luther College 2-6-96] Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds
3. "Throwing It All Away" Genesis
4. "Hate To See You Like This" Fountains of Wayne
5. "Hang Loose" Alabama Shakes
6. "Sway" Rolling Stones
7. "Feels Like The First Time" Foreigner; when he recorded it, did Lou Gramm know he was singing a future staple of strip clubs for decades to come?
8. "Airstream Driver" Gomez
9. "Gold On The Ceiling" The Black Keys
10. "Miracle Man" [live] Elvis Costello & The Attractions; from a Stiff Records sampler Stiffs Live
11. "We're Going To Be Friends" The White Stripes
12. "Age of Consent" New Order
13. "Ho Hey" The Lumineers
14. "If I Wanted Someone" Dawes sounds like Daryl Hall & Crazy Horse, and that's okay with me.
15. "Hello Hello" Missy Higgins
16. "Everybody Loves You Now" [live July 1980, Bayou, Washington DC] In 1981, Billy Joel released Songs In The Attic:
    

    "At the time of its release, it was unique as being the first widely available appearance of music from his first album, Cold Spring Harbor [1971].
    Songs in the Attic introduced Billy Joel's early work to fans who had only come to know his work after The Stranger [1977]. In his earlier work, most of the instruments were played by session musicians, but by the late 1970s, Joel had a fairly consistent touring group, and so he wanted to showcase the songs with this band."

    Growing up as a Billy Joel fan, with Billy Joel as a musical cultural constant throughout the 1980s, I never ever heard this song. Two other live recordings from this album appeared on his 1985 two-disc Greatest Hits collection: "Say Goodbye To Hollywood" (June 1980, Milwaukee Arena) and "She's Got A Way", (June 1980, solo piano, The Paradise Rock Club!) It was almost as if his Greatest Hits collection was the limit of his catalog. I discovered this song in 2012, while listening to Alec Baldwin interview Joel on his podcast Here's The Thing.
17. "Any Little Town" The Push Stars
18. "Rollin' and Tumblin'" Bob Dylan
19. "Smile Big" Leftover Cuties; as heard in a hurdles-themed running commercial during the London Summer Olympics
20. "Must of Got Lost" J. Geils Band
21. "Bad Girls" M.I.A.; as heard in The Mindy Project pilot.

The Master

THE MASTER was really terrific. I have grown very fond of PT Anderson's show-don't-tell, anything can and will happen style. This was not as good as There Will Be Blood, but it's a brilliant, riveting, and unsettling character study. A-minus.
Philip Seymour Hoffman is The Master, a spiritual leader in post-war America, a genius at drawing desperate souls into his cult of personality. His brand of path-finding gibberish is brilliant. The parallels to L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology are obvious. Joaquin Phoenix is a psychotic, alcoholic drifter whom Hoffman draws into his inner circle. Don't expect much more story than that. There's no a-b-c character arc. The minimal plot makes it tough to keep the pace moving, there's an almost inevitable soggy slow portion three-quarters of the way through.
Ace performances from Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams (who previously played Father and Sister together in Doubt; they were both in Charlie Wilson's War too). Adams is not just a pretty face. She's downright scary in this film. If she's deliberately walking away from girl-girl roles, I don't care, the results are terrific. Must have been a change of pace from The Muppets? Joaquin Phoenix went a little too Method for me, with his contorted face and lockjaw dialog. His self-destructive jail cell scene was wayyyy too Raging Bull.
Sometimes I feel Jonny Greenwood's musical scores in PTA's movies are Anderson reflexively avoiding traditional Hollywood scoring. I watched the full trailer for LINCOLN this week, featuring another John Williams score, and I imagine Anderson repulsed and sneering at its lyrical beauty.
Also worth noting: the movie was shot in 65mm, and the fine grain and gorgeous detail was worth it. THE MASTER is the first fictional film shot in 65mm (not IMAX) since Ken Branagh's HAMLET in 1996 (which I saw projected in 65mm at the Kendall.)
"Sixty-five millimeter" can mean several things; check out the examples (below):

Most movies that are still shot on film, are 4p 35mm (far right.) Which of those three other formats was THE MASTER shot in? I did some digging. Cigarettes & Red Vines posted these photos of the negative cutting:

Red Vines rotated and reversed that photo to show us a positive image (see right)- THE MASTER is shot in "five perf" 65mm, meaning there's five perforations (sprocket holes) per frame. According to Pro Video Coalition, nearly 75% of the 137 minute movie was shot in 65mm.

ALSO BY Paul Thomas Anderson on Stub Hubby:  There Will Be Blood and Punch-Drunk Love. By Phillip Seymour Hoffman: Moneyball, The Invention of Lying, Capote, Cold Mountain, Almost Famous, The Talented Mister Ripley, Twister, and Nobody's Fool. By Amy Adams: Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, and Catch Me If You Can. By Joaquin Phoenix: Walk The Line, The Village, Signs, Gladiator, and To Die For. (I saw Parenthood [1989] in the theater when I was 17, but I don't have a post for it)
THEATER NOTES: I saw THE MASTER at the Landmark Embassy in Waltham with my lovely wife (thanks to the in-laws for babysitting) and kudos as well to the aging boomer audience who remained completely SILENT throughout the film. I would have lost money betting on couples chatter. I assumed the plot was opaque enough to cause folks to narrate for their spouses, but perhaps the movie was so gripping they kept quiet?
Here's one more image of the five perf 65mm film I found on Tumblr:

Genetics and The Weasley Family

You can't see everyone's hair in this photo,
but trust me, they're all redheads.

It's always frustrated me that the entire Weasley family are redheads.
Yes, I will give a pass to all the magical happenings in the Harry Potter stories, but it's annoying (and genetically unlikely) that two redheads will meet, and that all seven of their kids will have red hair!
This article on Boing Boing, debunking the myth that redheads are being bred out of existence, points out:

"Only 1% of humans are redheads, but 4% of humans carry a copy of the gene that makes redheads. You could be a carrier and not even know it. So could your spouse. Two redheads are unlikely to make a brunette, but two brunettes can make a redhead."

I am assuming that Muggle genetics and Magical genetics work the same way!
It's easy to assume there are more redheads in England than the worldwide average of 1%, so it's not extrordinary for Arthur and Molly Weasley (the parents) to find each other. But what are the odds of all seven offspring having red hair? Anyone know?
Related:

• The Weasley Family page on the Harry Potter wiki
• My reviews of the Harry Potter movies

139 Cheap Sunglasses

1. "Go Your Own Way" A powerful cover of the Fleetwood Mac song, by The Cranberries. The hardest rocking, fastest paced Cranberries performance I've ever heard? From Legacy, a Tribute to Rumours
2. "Something Happened on the Way to Heaven" Full Phil Collins disclosure: I already owned No Jacket Required and Face Value on CD, plus a CD collection of all the remixes from No Jacket Required, plus some Genesis 12 inch singles from Invisible Touch. I also love "Easy Lover". This summer I picked up the entire Phil Collins Hits collection on the Amazon MP3 store for 99 cents. Who can argue with prices like this?
3. "Give It Away" Red Hot Chili Peppers; after seeing Matthew Sweet and O Positive perform this summer, I am feeling a little early 90s nostalgia.
4. "Runaway Baby" A real mixed message from Bruno Mars- I also bought Doo-Wops & Hooligans for 99 cents.
5. "Cheap Sunglasses" Fun ZZ Top blues that takes it sweet time to wander around and finally come to a halt.I already owned a lot of ZZ Top when I picked up their 38-track "Best Of" collection Rancho Texicano for $2.99



Love this cover. The band manages to
look cool while goofing off. Look at
Paul Carrack's face!

6. "Money's Too Tight (To Mention)" I was obsessed with this Simply Red song as a teenager, but listening to it now, the personalized verses and anti-Reagan lyrics don't jibe with an English singer. Turns out it's a cover of The Valentine Brothers, which explains the distinct American perspective in a song sung by an English band.
7. "Pink Bedroom" A John Hiatt song, later covered by Roseanna Cash, from his 1980 album Two-Bit Monsters.
8. "Labelled With Love" A country ballad from Squeeze East Side Story
9. "All That Heaven Will Allow" A cover of the Springsteen song by The Mavericks. Am I the only Springsteen fan who loves Tunnel Of Love? Does Bruce hate it? I feel like the only one.
10. "Just A Boy" I used SoundHound to find the name of this Angus & Julia Stone song (heard in a store)
11. "Suppose" Buffalo Tom



Love this cover!

12. "Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I'll Go Mine)" This summer I read some insightful rock criticism on Bob Dylan in the Ellen Willis collection Out of The Vinyl Deeps. Recommended for some honest, well-described, contemporaneous perspective on Dylan.
    
13. "Girl Of My Dreams" I found this one-hit power pop wonder from Bram Tchaikovsky on the three-disc Poptopia collection circa 2000; I bought the LP Strange Man Changed Man at John Doe Records in Hudson NY this summer. Did I buy it for the cool cover art? A little bit.
14. "Young Blood" The Naked And Famous
15. "(You're So Square) Baby, I Don't Care" Cee Lo Green; from a Buddy Holly tribute
16. "Honey Love" I recently backfilled my golden oldies collection with a ridiculous MP3 deal on Amazon.com-- 111 Rock 'N' Roll Superhits for $2.99? That's 2 cents per song! Amongst the "super" hits is this ska-ish tune from Bunny Paul, a cover of a Clyde McPhatter song.
17. "My Old School" My CD copy of A Decade Of Steely Dan was mastered nearly 30 years ago, at a tiny fraction of the volume level you can expect from today's CDs and MP3s mastered in the 21st century

    

    Most indifferent album cover ever, or
    quintessential triumph of slick 80s
    graphic design over substance?

18. "The Battle of Evermore"; Led Zeppelin featuring Sandy Denny - I never realized that Robert Plant does not sing this entire song- I assumed he double-tracked the parts that overlap. Turns out Plant shares the mic with Fairport Convention singer Sandy Denny (1947-1978), the pre-eminent British folk-rock singer.  My friend George (mandolin) and me (guitar) took a shot at playing this song this summer. George did a respectable job imitating Denny's soprano vocals!
19. "Cemetery Guns" Fountains of Wayne
20. "Winter Winds" Mumford & Sons; both of these last two songs were on my list of artists to catch up with in my August post Falling Behind.

Total Recall (2012)

I saw the remake of Total Recall, but I don't remember it. OR DO I? DUM Dum Dummmmmmm...

I think I was with Adam, at the Somerville Theater, but that may be a memory implant.
ALSO: Here's my review of the 1990 movie

Falling Behind

On my 45-min commute, I've been listening to podcasts almost exclusively for ages. I've totally fallen behind listening to music! In the past year, I've bought albums by The Jayhawks, White Stripes, Black Keys (El Camino and Brothers), Mumford & Sons, Alabama Shakes, Wilco, and Bruce Springsteen, but only listened to them once or not at all! I'm remedying this starting today. Right now I'm listening to Fountains Of Wayne Sky Full of Holes, an album I bought a year ago this week but only listened to once. If you see more of these bands in upcoming music mixes, this is why.

The Dark Knight Rises

Brutal, overlong, redundant, needlessly complex, and mostly Batman-free. My grade: C-plus.
My feeling walking out of the theater was that Christopher Nolan did not have a strong need to make a third movie. DKR retreads many of the same ideas explored in Batman Begins, but with a scarier villain than Ras Al Guhl.

Stub Hubby Review: Batman Begins & The Dark Knight

Ann Hathaway nailed it,
and the costume looks
less fake than this too.

What did I like about DKR? Bane is menacing, Anne Hathaway's Catwoman is just as I remember her from Frank Miller's Batman: Year One, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt is strong as a passionate, hotheaded cop. Burn Gorman (Torchwood, Bleak House, Layer Cake) is a creepy-looking minion. I liked the imagery of the prison pit, even if this Jungian metaphor was covered already in Batman Begins. There's only so much "freshman year philosophy" (as my wife calls it) I can take before it becomes meaningless. Bruce Wayne is strong because he doesn't fear death. No wait, fearing death makes you strong? Either way, I don't think you can repair a compound fracture of a back vertebrae by hanging the patient from a rope and punching them in the back, no matter how many push-ups you do afterwards. What's the co-pay for that? The last act takes place in wintertime, and the snow was very realistic, and I loved the drifting, floating snowflakes a lot. Very convincing.
I have not read Bane-Batman comics before, and neither have millions of moviegoers, so what he's like on the page isn't relevant. Bane is a force of nature. He is an implacable pile of deadly muscles. He moves slowly but with complete economy of motion. Each death by his hand (or boot, or knee) is a model of efficiency. Bane wears a gas mask and speaks through it like Darth Vader. I know secondhand that in the comics Bane's strength comes from the gas, but I think we're told in DKR that, also like Vader, the gas mask merely keeps movie Bane alive. I repeat this Vader comparison because no one has ever complained about comprehending Vader's dialog in the Star Wars movies. I could only make out about half of what Bane said in DKR. At first, I just wrote it off- as long as I got the gist of his dialog, I could keep up, right? This turned out to be not good enough. Bane's worldview is the engine for all the action in the movie. It was impossible for me to get behind the purpose of the chaos if I barely understood why it was happening in the first place.
In a pivotal scene -- a scene that sets in motion the last 45 minutes of the movie -- Bane addresses a football stadium via a referee's radio headset. I literally thought to myself- how is anyone going to be able to make out what he's saying? This is like talking at the McDonald's drive-thru intercom, with a walkie-talkie!

Also, the tenor and accent of Bane's dialog was completely inconsistent. Sometimes the rich aristocratic melodic tone was there, sometimes not. Sometimes it sounded like he was talking into a red Solo cup, sometimes a tin can. I was baffled by this. Looking at Darth Vader as a model, I'm stunned that this essential component to the success of the film was botched so badly. Tom Hardy is so compelling in Nolan's previous movie, Inception, it's a shame his portrayal, while magnetic in the physicality and sheer terror, was ultimately flawed.

Stub Hubby Review: Inception

I like surprises. I like twists. I just complained in my Brave review last week that the whole second half of Brave was a pedestrian "let's get it over with" slog. So how did DKR surprise me in a bad way? This might be hard to explain without giving it all away, but I'll try. I am all in favor of twists and reveals. You can have twists where characters are keeping secrets, and when they're revealed, what came before becomes more powerful. Unfortunately, the big reveal in DKR undermines what came before, and serves only as a clever misdirection on the part of the screenwriter. The big secret, revealed in the last half hour, makes the main conflict at the heart of the movie hollow and irrelevant.

Just as Nolan avoided sequel-itis with The Dark Knight, DKR has all the symptoms of the dreaded affliction in this third installment:

• Characters from the last movie return for no good reason • Actually, Dr. Crane coming back for no good reason isn't a bad thing- it's a brief dose of levity in a relentlessly grim third act.
• The protagonist gets less screen time than the antagonist • Worst case ever- Batman is barely in the first act of the movie, Bruce Wayne is literally absent for the entire second act of the movie too.
• The superhero gets new gadgets or vehicles • Batman gives the Bat-cycle to Catwoman, and Lucius Fox gives Wayne a new Bat-plane. It's too bad, because the arrival of the Bat-plane explains how the movie is going to end for us.
• Too many opponents • Too many everyone in this movie- Nolan has to keep the following major characters moving:
1. Batman - kept on ice for whole middle of the movie
2. Bane - the real star of the movie
3. Catwoman
4. Comissioner Gordon - he's missing in the hospital for the whole first half of the action
5. Alfred - He retires halfway through. What was the point of Alfred leaving if he doesn't reappear at the most opportune moment to rescue Bruce when he needs helping the most?
6. Lucius Fox - Explaining plot details real folksy-like
7. Marion Cotillard - Her part of the movie is boring yet essential to moving the plot along.
8. Joseph Gordon Levitt - A hotheaded GPD cop, no surprise here, he's the Robin character, even if Nolan thinks we're supposed to be surprised.

Really terrific.

 Setting: Batman Begins and TDK looked like they were filmed in Chicago- aerial shots looked like a more intricate New York City-ish coastline. DKR looks and feels exactly like New York City. The aerial shots look like NYC, the Empire State Building is featured, I think I saw One World Trade Center too. Uninventing a fictional Gotham is weird when Wayne Manor in Batman Begins looks like the pastoral countryside of England, transplanted to New Jersey's Palisades in DKR. It was completely disconcerting to watch all the bridges to Manhattan blown up. It crossed a line between comic book Gotham City and a world where 9-11 happened.