A Funny Meme Happened on the Way to the Blogorium...

 Okay, so when I mentioned a handful of directors that didn't make the cut in Thursday's post about the director meme? Where I also mentioned that someone would be providing me with more directors? Yeah, funny how that worked out...

 I believe that I mentioned Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman didn't make the initial run, along with a host of others I gave to other people. For reasons known only to me, I decided to pass on John Huston, David Lynch, Ridley Scott, and Terrence Malick. Silly Cap'n... The results came in for my next challenge, and here's the text verbatim:

Alright here we go. Ingmar Bergman, Terrence Malick, Ridley Scott, John Huston, Jean-Luc Godard, David Lynch, Charlie Kaufman, Bernardo Bertolucci, Roman Polanski, Jacques Tati. Some are personal favorites, some...not so much. All pique my interest, however.

Well, looks like I'm doing them anyway, so here comes the part where I admit that some of them I left out because there aren't really any movies I "hate" by several of these directors, which makes this tricky. But oh well, let's give it a shot anyway...

 Ingmar Bergman
 A Movie I Like: Hour of the Wolf.
 A Movie I Love: The Virgin Spring.
 A Movie I Hate: I guess The Magic Flute? I don't really love or like it... The Serpent's Egg isn't one of my favorites, either.

 Terrence Malick
 A Movie I Like: The New World.
 A Movie I Love: Days of Heaven.
 A Movie I Hate: See, here's the problem. I guess maybe it was assumed I'd put The Thin Red Line or The New World here, but I don't hate either of them. In fact, I really like both of them. And I love Badlands almost as much as Days of Heaven. I haven't seen The Tree of Life yet so I can't really say anything in that regard, and that's it. That's all there is.


  Ridley Scott
 I'm giving myself the caveat that I'm not allowed to use Alien, Blade Runner, or Thelma & Louise.
 A Movie I Like: The Duellists, or Matchstick Men.
 A Movie I Love: Believe it or not, I love the director's cut of Kingdom of Heaven.
 A Movie I Hate: Hannibal. Yeah, Legend would be an easy choice, but it's at least an interesting failure. Hannibal is just terrible, and I didn't see Robin Hood or A Good Year.

  John Huston
 A Movie I Like: The African Queen, or Wise Blood. You know what? Wise Blood.
 A Movie I Love: The Man Who Would Be King.
 A Movie I Hate: This is a cop out, especially since I don't really love The Asphalt Jungle, but since Huston directed parts of Casino Royale, and since I HATE Casino Royale, there's your winner.

 Jean-Luc Godard
 A Movie I Like: Pierrot le Fou.
 A Movie I Love: Vivre Sa Vie.
 A Movie I Hate: I don't really enjoy Made in U.S.A., if only because I am a fan of the Richard Stark "Parker" novels and their adaptations (Point Blank, The Outfit, Payback), and since this one is kinda based on The Jugger but is also making fun of it, I'm not such a huge fan.

 David Lynch
 A Movie I Like: The Elephant Man. Or Lost Highway.
 A Movie I Love: Wild at Heart.
 A Movie I Hate: The easy answer would be Dune, I guess, which is kind of a mess, but in all honesty I have a hard time sitting through all of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me when I put it on. It's not a bad movie, but thoroughly unpleasant, unseemly in a way that makes Blue Velvet seem family friendly.


 Charlie Kaufman
 He only directed one movie, so this is kinda tricky. If we're expanding it to films he wrote, then that's a different story, but not by much.
 A Movie I Like: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.
 A Movie I Love: Synechdoce, New York.
 A Movie I Hate: I don't hate any of them, by either measure (writer or director). If we're just going "weakest link," then it's Human Nature by process of elimination. Nothing personal, Human Nature; I like you all right.


 Bernardo Bertolucci
 A Movie I Like: 1900. Or The Dreamers.
 A Movie I Love: The Last Emperor.
 A Movie I Hate: Is Little Buddha too obvious? Because if it is, I'm not really a Last Tango in Paris fan either.

 Roman Polanski 
 Like Ridley Scott, I am purposefully removing the best known, i.e. Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, Repulsion, and The Tenant.
 A Movie I Like: I am alone on this island, but The Fearless Vampire Killers.
 A Movie I Love: Knife in the Water, since I left out all of my other favorites.
 A Movie I Hate: I have more "meh's" than "hate's" here - I'm not a huge fan of Frantic, Pirates, or Bitter Moon. I have a love / hate relationship with The Ninth Gate, because it's such a great movie as it builds and builds and then just kind of peters out. There's not so much an ending as an "okay, we're done here; movie's over," which ruins the film every time I watch it.

 Jacques Tati
 A Movie I Like: Trafic.
 A Movie I Love: Play Time.
 A Movie I Hate: Again, I don't really hate any of the Monsieur Hulot films, which is the bulk of Tati's filmography. I guess of them, Mon Oncle is my least favorite, but that shouldn't reflect poorly on the film. It's like asking me which Buster Keaton film I like the least.

 Okay, so Monday we'll get back to reviews. I did see a movie about some super powered kids that wasn't "second class," per se, but could have been better than everybody seems to think it is. Not that I didn't like it, but I mean it wasn't all that, even with a cameo from the star of Baz Luhrmann's Australia (aw, who am I kidding, nobody saw that movie. I mean Australian Broadway's Oklahoma!). But I don't know if I'm going to review that yet. Nah, I don't feel like piling on the "January Jones is a terrible actress" critiques just yet. That can wait for some other time. Hrm... that means I have to find something else to review.... damn.

Retro What the Hell Week: Moulin Rouge

 Welcome to day two of What the Hell week, where the Cap'n is exploring movies he had otherwise planned to skip out on, but is instead saying "why not?" and giving them a shot. For more details, please take a look at yesterday's review of Saw 3D.

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 Today's trip to "What the Hell" land is a little bit different, in that Retro Reviews necessitate the Cap'n having already seen the film in question. Lucky for all of us, I've seen a number of films that would, at first, seem uncharacteristic of a "Cap'n Howdy kind of movie": America's Sweethearts, Bridget Jones's Diary, What Dreams May Come, Bring It On, Pay It Forward, The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps, and practically any Disney movie you can think of*.

 One component of my movie-viewing experience that I often under represent on the Blogorium is musicals. That's right, musicals: call it carryover from all the Disney films or a byproduct of being on and off stage during middle and high school, but I know my way around quite a few musicals and I enjoy even more than that. The Sound of Music? There's a copy of it behind me. Oklahoma? Oh, I know how many people hate the movie, but not me. The Music Man? Yep, fan. How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying? I used to have the DVD. Meet Me in St. Louis? West Side Story? South Pacific? For Me and My Gal? Singin' in the Rain? Oliver? Brigadoon? Annie? Chicago? Yes indeed. Don't even get me started on The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I even watched Paint Your Wagon**...

 From time to time I've reviewed one or two more recent musicals, like Repo! The Genetic Opera or Hedwig and the Angry Inch (appreciated, if disliked the former and am constantly impressed by the latter), but for the life of me I still can't really explain why I went to see Moulin Rouge in the theatre. I'm hoping a colleague of mine who reads this might help jog my memory in the comments, because I am not a Baz Luhrmann fan, and on the surface there is very little about the film that be very appealing, even in 2001.

 I've been trying to rationalize it to myself beyond the fact that we saw just about everything that came out, from Ghosts of Mars to Planet of the Apes to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back to Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. I was a big fan of Ewan MacGregor's going back to Trainspotting, and I had enjoyed Nicole Kidman in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (and would later that summer in The Others), but my brief love affair with Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet crashed and burned after trying to watch the spastic, ADD-edited cut and paste approach to Shakespeare on VHS. It's more apocryphal than anything, but the CD that Luhrmann released with "Everbody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)" that was falsely attributed to Kurt Vonnegut really irritated me.

 Maybe I bought into the idea that Moulin Rouge's use of existing pop songs as a musical foundation was okay because, well, Singin' in the Rain did it too. In fact, many of the studio musicals released in the 30s and 40s relied on songs people already knew, so I can see a younger version of the Cap'n drinking that Kool Aid, being lured in by the presence of David Bowie, Beck, Ozzy Osbourne, and Kylie Minogue in addition to lyrical mashups of songs from the 70s and 80s performed by actors I didn't really knew sang.

 But I also knew what Baz Luhrmann's style was: over-the-top, loud, rapid, and obnoxious. Nothing in the advertising for Moulin Rouge suggested anything different that an abrasive musical version of Romeo + Juliet. And guess what? It wasn't!

 To this day I still meet people who love Moulin Rouge, and I kind of understand why, because I almost caved in while watching the film. The first hour or so is such a sensory overload for your eyes and ears that eventually you just collapse and let the movie continue throttling along, bombarding you at every opportunity with noise and distracting editing. Had it not been for one song, I might have convinced myself that instead of being exhausted by Moulin Rouge, I actually liked it. But then "Like a Virgin" happened.



 It aims for high camp. but is so obvious in its execution that it pulled me out of the daze of Luhrmann's audiovisual assault and turned me against the film once and for all, never to return. The way that he appropriates the idea of a "drag show" performance of Madonna minus the drag, almost to say "Oh look at how clever I am! They're still dressed up and butchy but they're singing 'Like a Virgin!' What Juxtaposition!" just killed it for me, and the laziness behind appropriating existing songs was apparent.

My central problem with Moulin Rouge is not so much Luhrmann's style - something I already knew annoyed me - but that the fact that the musical doesn't do anything new with the songs. They use them in exactly the fashion you'd expect them to be used in and nothing more. There's a faux-camp quality to most of the songs, from "The Sound of Music" to "Lady Marmalade" that accentuates the hyper-aggressive editing, but in the end the film is all noise and no substance. There's nothing memorable to me about the film in a positive way. I remember plenty of moments I disliked, if not outright hated, but there's nothing Moulin Rouge does that dozens of other musicals don't do better. So what's the point?

 Which brings me back around to the question: why did I see Moulin Rouge? It's out of character for me, even in a time in my life when I happily went to see Hannibal and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. In the rare instance I tried to revisit the film, to understand why I or anyone else found something appealing, I end up turning Moulin Rouge off after ten minutes. Without fail. I never watched Luhrmann's Australia and have no interest in his The Great Gatsby in 3D. Maybe I had a "What the Hell" moment in the summer of 2001; the moment was fleeting, and I cannot say it was beneficial.




*Except Condorman. I have never seen Condorman, even though I kind of want to.
 ** That is, by the way, not an endorsement of Paint Your Wagon. If you don't believe me, see how far you can get into the three hour mess that is the film.