Blogorium Review: Your Highness

  Sucks is a strong word. It's the kind of word that describes a movie that you loathe, that you actively hate beyond the point you'd forget other movies. Roger Ebert devoted an entire book to it, based on his disgust for Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, when he told Rob Schneider that "your movie sucks." There are very few movies for which I have so much venom for that I'd say they sucked. To no one's surprise, Your Highness doesn't really suck.

 (It's okay, you read that right.)

  Your Highness is one of those movies that people sure think sucks. It'll probably win some Razzies if it's an easy enough target, and it was one of two black eyes for David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls): he took it hard for the first film and then was summarily dismissed for (presumably) ripping off Adventures in Babysitting with The Sitter. I wouldn't know, because I didn't see it. In my defense, I'd just watched Adventures in Babysitting two weeks prior. It seemed redundant. But I did see Your Highness.

 Before we jump into the review proper, it's probably important to mention that I'm not exactly a devotee of the "sword and sorcery" films that Your Highness is paying homage to (or making fun of). I've never seen Krull or The Barbarian and the Sorceress or the dozen of other movies that dominated the "Sci-Fi / Fantasy" section of Video Bar. I saw the covers and shrugged. Eventually I saw (and enjoyed) Conan the Barbarian, but Your Highness is paying tribute to a cinematic subgenre I'm not that versed on. Take that for what it's worth.

 Thadeous (Danny McBride) and Fabious (James Franco) are the sons of King Tallious (Charles Dance) in the kingdom of... well, I'm sure they mentioned it somewhere. Fabious is always on quests and Thadeous is at home picking on Courtney (Rasmus Hardiker), his squire or slave or something. When Fabious brings home Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel), a prisoner of the evil wizard Leezar (Justin Theroux), to be his bride, the sorcerer doesn't take it lying down. He captures Belladonna and Fabious, Thadeous, Courtney, Julie (Toby Jones) and brave knights head out to rescue her. With the help of the mysterious warrior Isabel (Natalie Portman), they race to find the Unicorn Blade and slay the wizard before the moons eclipse and Leezar's "Fuckening" begins.

 Your Highness is a film of unmitigated vulgarity. To what end, I'm not sure - profanity seems to exist for the sake of punctuating sentences. There's also some marijuana-based comedy, but nowhere to the degree of Green's Pineapple Express, which I would think people would make a connection to based on Franco and McBride. Beyond that, I'm not really sure what's supposed to be funny in Your Highness, which is unmistakably a comedy. If the mere image of Danny McBride in a suit of armor falling down stairs is the kind of thing that tickles your funnybone, get ready for yuks! There's also a pot smoking puppet that molested Fabious as a child and requires our heroes to, well, give him a "hand" before continuing on their quest. The best joke is an arguably clever bit of misdirection involving Thadeous' punishment for violating the Queen of the Dwarf People.

 I get that there might be some audience out there for people who want to see a minotaur sodomize Courtney before Danny McBride chops its johnson off and wears it around his neck. It's not a large audience, apparently, but I get that McBride and Ben Best (The Foot Fist Way) wrote this in the way a thirteen year old watching this film would re-enact it with his buddies. It's a hard R movie on a large scale (or it looks it, anyway - at 49 million I guess that's pretty moderate) that didn't seem to find its target market. I'm not saying that there isn't one; I'm just not sure how many hardcore Krull fans wanted to see a movie where the evil wizard promises to defeat Fabious with "magic, motherfucker" (actual line).

 So I get why there's so much animosity towards Your Highness. I don't see how it's the worst movie of last year, or even close to it, but the movie never "clicks." That said, I didn't really HATE Your Highness. It's not a "good" movie, but it's not unwatchable. I have no idea who thought this would be funny (well, my pet theory is the people who made it) but it's sporadically funny, there are some decent action scenes, and the relentless profanity can catch you off guard and induce a chuckle. It's also extremely violent at points, which works in its favor. I'm not saying you SHOULD watch Your Highness, even if you are, shall we say, stoned out of your gourd, but if it was on Showtime one afternoon and you were, shall we say, stoned out of your gourd, it's not going to kill your buzz. The cast is clearly having fun (especially Justin Theroux) and the stupid is kind of infectious after you give up trying to figure out why this movie exists.

Blogorium Review: Moon

So tonight we saw Moon, the first of hopefully many joints from Duncan Jones. While we saw it at the Carmike, Moon opens at The Carousel tomorrow and I highly recommend you go see it. I may need to see it again at The Carousel because the experience of watching the movie was a bit tainted, even if Moon more than made up for the technical deficiencies.

Normally I try not to talk about the nitty gritty theatrical experience. In theory, the review should almost always be about the movie, but the Carmike had seriously damaged this print, to the point that vertical scratches ran the entire length of the movie and the sound cut out, became muddy, or was distorted throughout the running time. For a movie like Moon, the sound is very important, which is why I feel like seeing this again might be necessary beyond simply enjoying the movie.

After the movie, Andy commented that he was happy to be able to see Moon without any preconceived notions or too much knowledge of what the plot was about. "I was able to let the experience take me along for the ride", which is exactly what a movie like this does. I could tell you some of the plot sketches involving Sam Rockwell (playing a character named Sam Bell) but the truth is that you're better off not knowing. If all you know about Moon comes from the trailers or the frequent comparisons to 2001 and Silent Running, good. That's all you need.

I'll add one more note, which is to say that Moon fulfills the promise abandoned two thirds of the way into Sunshine: a science fiction film for adults that takes the premise seriously and is actually thought provoking. Aside from a few chuckles at the "face" GERTY, the base's computer (voiced by Kevin Spacey) makes, Moon never winks at the audience and says "we know, it's just science fiction."

The film takes a few left turns when you'd expect more conventional story twists, and finally breaks with the "Evil Robot" motif so prevalent in the genre. I won't say how or why, but GERTY is much more important to the film than merely an obstacle for Sam when things get weird. I also found the references to Jesus' disciples interesting; Sam works alone on a Moon base for 3 year jobs, running harvesters named Mark, Matthew, John (although John is crossed out and replaced by a handwritten "Judas"). The recurring motif of 3's is also worth revisiting next time I sit down and watch it.

Sam Rockwell does some of the best work I've seen from him in years, although he frequently reminded me of Edward Norton for some reason. *MILD SPOILER ALERT* It may have had something to do with the persistent bruising and bloodying after the accident being vaguely Fight Club-esque, but even the "other" Sam was vaguely reminiscent of Norton.

The "twist", if you want to call it that, is handled quickly and in a rational manner. Almost as soon as you realize what's actually going on, one of the characters identifies the development and instead of trying to dupe viewers, Jones is smart enough to let the film play out. I admire both the story and Jones' direction, which lingers frequently, allowing you to soak in the details of the moon base and the minutiae of Sam Bell's world. There's some very impressive camera trickery to boot, which I won't risk spoiling.

I realize this review is probably quite useless, but I feel it fair to both recommend you see Moon but also not to tell you too much going in. Moon is the sort of film that works best when it happens to you, not one you should be trying to work out right away.

From the Vault: Numbers can lie too.

editor's note: it's up to you to figure out whether this piece reflects the actual opinion of the Cap'n on box office numbers, or whether pieces from earlier this summer do. I can't tell you what to think...

It occurs to me that sometime tomorrow or Monday the box office figures will either tell the world what movies succeeded and failed in the open market. I used to really follow that kind of thing, because it seemed like some kind of pseudo-scientific system to give you an idea of how people responded to movies. But while watching A Decade Under the Influence and getting some idea of just how much box office changed the way movies are perceived, I decided not to pay attention to them anymore.

The "Blockbuster" had a lot to do with the change from letting a movie happen to turning filmmaking into calculated gambling. If a movie could open on as many screens as humanly possible, making a ton of money on the first weekend of its release, the studio could recoup their investment quickly. Somewhere along the way, every successive weekend became less and less relevant. The race was to get the big money up front and minimize the "in theatre" time. DVD's been compounding this, and if you've listened to many commentary tracks, you'll notice that more often or not they're being recorded BEFORE the film is in theatres. That's how quick turn around is now.

I worked as a projectionist in a movie theatre for a few summers, and it was explained to me that we could expect a movie to play AT MAX for four weeks, and only if it did really well the first two weeks. After that it got split billing or was packed up and sent back to the studio or the bargain theatre. It wasn't merely the influx of new releases, but the mentality that people weren't interested in seeing a movie two weeks into its run, as though we suffered from cinematic ADD.

There was a movie that proved this wrong, and not surprisingly, that's because it operated on the old system. In 2000, God's Army, the first film financed, written, directed, and starring Mormons got a "premium" slot in our theatre (one of the big screens) and no one was concerned about first weekend numbers.

What happened instead was that over the next two months, every day or so another bus would come from somewhere in the South East United States (we were the only theatre playing God's Army in the South) and the screen would sell out. It wasn't making $100 million dollar weekends, but God's Army did it the old fashioned way: word of mouth and a dedicated audience.

That's the same way films like Easy Rider and Halloween did it: week by week, person by person. In fact, that's also how something like Deep Throat became the cult legend it is. Most modern horror classics, including The Evil Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Night of the Living Dead also played the slow way, moving from drive in to drive in and building an audience by word of mouth. None of them were "failures" because they didn't recoup their budgets in three days.

Nowadays, if you hear any kind of word of mouth about a movie, you're usually going to be waiting for the dvd to come out. Odds are by the time it gets to you, there's no chance of seeing something on the big screen. Grindhouse was a "bomb", so before I could even get anyone to come see it at Mission Valley again (and you have to see that movie on the big screen to really get what Tarantino and Rodriguez are after) it had been pulled by the panicking Weinstein brothers.

Well before my time, a movie would play in theatres for at least a month, allowing people to see it over and over again before the next film came in. This, at least, is what professors and family tell me, because that's the exception and not the rule these days. Nowadays Speed Racer and The Golden Compass are judged by their opening numbers, and both, regardless of the actual movie, were failures based on opening weekend.

Of course, Donnie Darko was a "failure", and Freddy Vs. Jason was a "success", strictly by the numbers. The remake of The Grudge was a huge "success", while The Assassination of Jesse James was a "failure". Why I bring this up is because somehow the stigma of box office numbers now bleeds over into the perceived "quality" of a film. Since anyone can open up their newspaper and see the Box Office results, they can now say "oh, well movie X didn't do so well, so it must not be good". This leap doesn't always hold up, and if I did some more digging, it wouldn't surprise me at all to find out some of my favorite movies were "bad" because of the arbitrary Box Office figures.

Remember that a movie like Trainspotting is never going to open on as many screens as The Phantom Menace, or get the kind of advertising blitz that we're seeing for Indiana Jones right now. I've seen probably fifty ads for Crystal Skull in the last five days, and only two for David Mamet's Redbelt. Does this make one movie better than the other? Will Crystal Skull be better than Iron Man if it does better numbers? Will it be worse if it doesn't?

All I'm saying is that maybe we should step back from the numbers game and not let it stand in for actual opinion on a movie. Good and Bad alike can do good numbers, and the same goes for low performers. Give a movie some more time than "right now" to see if it has legs, and remember that almost every film has drop off from one week to the next, so that doesn't mean that everyone was duped and it actually sucks. Audiences are a fickle lot, like pretty much everything else in the market.

Dispatches from the A.O.S.

I could actually do several more movie reviews right now, but the Cap'n would rather break up that string of entries with something else. Instead of full on reviews or quick reviews that end up being longer than actual reviews, let's just keep things short tonight. Not twitter short, because the whole concept of half-assed typing bothers me.

Really, why do I care that you "just got on the plane and they're making me turn this off"? Really? That's insightful in any way? Twitter reminds me of text messaging on a much larger scale, and just about as interesting.

Okay, I really didn't mean to get on my twitter soapbox there, so let's just move on for the sake of keeping things movie-centric.

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Frost/Nixon was a mildly entertaining film that dramatized an event where some of the actual people are still alive. What's kind of frustrating is that Ron Howard stages these mock interviews with the participants "today" or some time after the actual David Frost / Richard Nixon conversations, but he uses the same actors. The only thing different is a heavily blown out image and the actors (Oliver Platt, Sam Rockwell, and Kevin Bacon spring to mind immediately) have different haircuts. It's not that Howard shouldn't have done this or should have used the actual living participants; the problem is that these "interviews" don't serve much of a purpose in the film. Instead, they continually point out the "importance" of what we're seeing.

I'm making this out like I don't like the movie, and I did enjoy it on some levels. The cast is very good and the dramatization is compelling. What I find so strange is not the movie itself but Michael Sheen. For some strange reason, I can never make the mental connection that the man in The Queen, Kingdom of Heaven and Frost/Nixon is the same actor that plays Lucian, leader of all Werewolves in the Underworld films. All three of them.

Sheen is also going to be in the Twilight sequel, but this time playing a vampire. That just boggles my mind for some reason. Maybe it's that he takes all of it so seriously, whether he's Tony Blair or Lucian the Lycan. Too weird.

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Speaking of Werewolves, I saw Dog Soldiers on Blu Ray (which reminds me that I need to write an article about "do we really need that in high definition?"*) and while it's not the kind of movie you're going to say "Hey, let me show off my set up with this!", the rather low budget debut from Neil Marshall (The Descent, Doomsday) looks better than I'd seen it on dvd. The movie itself is still a lot of fun, even if the budgetary constraints show when it comes to the werewolves themselves. I do always find it weird that the movie stars Tommy from Trainspotting and Sean Pertwee, son of Jon "The Third Doctor" Pertwee.

Further inspection leads me to discover that in addition to being in Trainspotting, Kevin McKidd was also Lucius Veronus on Rome, has been on a season of Grey's Anatomy, he was the star of the short lived (but loved by my dad) Journeyman, he was in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and he appeared alongside Michael Sheen in Kingdom of Heaven. How very curious that it took Dog Soldiers for me to remember Kevin McKidd's voice from thirteen years ago.

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I have still not seen Star Trek. Until my financial aid refund arrives, I doubt it will. But like a true nerd, I suppose I can pore through the comic book several more times and parse out secret messages. Or watch the first season in HD, with or without the new effects shots. You hip kids can have your Chris Pine's and your Sylar with pointy-ears for now; I'll take my cheesy man-vs-lizard fight and Dr. McCoy chasing the White Rabbit.

Speaking of the White Rabbit, guess who's playing that role in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland?

If you guessed Michael Sheen, you've been paying attention to the secret thread of tonight's blogorium!

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Finally: I like my USA Up All Night piece too - that's why I brought it over from the old blogorium - but why is it suddenly popular with Google Search? Seriously, three hits in a week is a LOT for such an obscure blog as this one. I'm glad you're reading, but do feel free to comment any time.

Back tomorrow with Trailer Sunday.


* I'm not speaking about Dog Soldiers specifically, even though the placement of that digression implies they're connected.

Blogorium Quick Shots: Slumdog Millionaire and Synecdoche, NY

For once, with very little school related business in the way and only phone calls to make, the Cap'n has time to catch up on a backlog of movies. It's good too, because I've had two movies from Netflix for what feels like forever, always being put on the back burner. Now that I've finally finished watching Slumdog Millionaire and Synecdoche, NY, I'll share some brief thoughts on both films. Both come from indie favorites, but the difference is that one was the Academy Award Winner for Best Picture this year and the other was reviled at Cannes for being "indulgent". We'll see if they deserve their reputations.

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Slumdog Millionaire is a well made movie, I can't argue with that. The structure is interesting, the story unfolds in an interesting way, it's shot and edited impeccably, and I can totally understand why audiences went crazy for it. It has a feel good ending, a "love conquers all" meets "rags to riches" story, and cute kids. Against some stiff competition, I have no trouble seeing how and why it was the Best Picture of 2008, and it's nice to see Danny Boyle finally win an Oscar after a career I've enjoyed almost every part of*.

The question is: why didn't I enjoy Slumdog Millionaire? Despite all of these things which I'll readily acquiesce to, I found myself getting bored with about an hour left, and I had a nagging feeling the movie was doing exactly what I was worried it might.

Before I'd ever seen the film, I heard really faint criticism about Slumdog Millionaire about its representation of Indians as poverty ridden. Doing some simple searching, I found a page on the admittedly (at times) dubious Wikipedia about this, but my mind was already wandering somewhere else. I began to wonder if Slumdog Millionaire represented neo-Orientalism?

Having watched the movie, I have a hard time arguing against an Orientalist reading of Slumdog Millionaire. The film depicts the hard life of three homeless children who are subjected to miseries and rise out by resorting to petty and (finally) organized crime. Well, the "bad" brother does, because he works for a gangster who helps "Westernize" Bombay. The "good" brother, who wants the girl eternally torn between the two of them works for a call center for a European telecommunications firm and then becomes a folk hero in the Indian version of a British game show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. When he wins it all, he finally shows the girl that he's worthy of her true love and shows the authorities and conventional thinkers that Jamal the slumdog is more than the bottom of the barrel.

Nearly all of the money Jamal and Salim make comes from western tourists or the game show, and there's a particularly interesting scene where Jamal takes two Americans on a "tour" while Salim and his friends strip their car clean. When a policeman sees Jamal with the Americans, he starts beating him, but the tourists ask the officer to stop and then give Jamal "American hospitality" in the form of a hundred dollar bill. At the end of the film, after winning 20 Million Rupees, Jamal is waiting at the train station for Latika (his true love) and is leaning against a statue of Frederick Stevens, a British architect who designed the train station during India's colonial period.

It doesn't help that this film about India which is partially in Hindi is written and directed by the former colonizers of India, Brits. This makes it very difficult to watch this film without that critical lense in place when you consider how Slumdog Millionaire presents India to the "west". The film is wildly popular and I do wonder how western audiences understand the film and its role in an ongoing struggle to break the cycle of "East" and "West" in a postcolonial discourse. I find many aspects of the movie troubling in ways which completely distract from the storyline and disrupt enjoyment of the film for its admittedly fine technical merits. I'm not trying to accuse Danny Boyle or Simon Purefoy or Channel 4 Films of intentionally perpetuating Orientalism, but you could certainly make the case that Slumdog Millionaire continues in the tradition of Gunga Din and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

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I'm afraid I'll have a difficult time talking at length about Synecdoche, NY. It's not because I didn't like the film; in fact, it moved me considerably. The problem is that I feel like I must watch it three or four more times to have a firm grasp on what I experienced.

What I can say is that this strange backlash against Charlie Kaufman that began with Cannes is totally undeserved. Claims that the film is "indulgent" or "intentionally obfuscating" are debatable, if I must concede that much, but I would have to guess that this reaction is tied to the fact that Synecdoche, NY is not "funny" in the same way Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are.

The film has whimsy, but it is frequently tainted by a downbeat perspective on life, one that likely turned people off but which I found to be the charm of the film. Despite how dour Caden Cotard's life seems, he finds a way to push through in his search for truth. The whimsical elements of the film tend to make Synecdoche, NY more confusing than endearing, particularly the way the film wraps around itself so many times and becomes difficult to navigate. Strangely, as the actual setting becomes more complicated, I found the film easier to follow.

If anything, the beginning of the film is the hardest to get used to. Philip Seymour Hoffman's Caden is a difficult character to latch onto, one whose sense of time and of emotional meaning is schizophrenic at best. However, if you can follow the disjointed period up until he receives the grant and begins working on a play that represents "truth", I really feel the heart of the film Charlie Kaufman is working with becomes apparent. Ironically, this is also the point where we meet characters who play characters we're already following often in the same scene.

For example, after Caden begins casting the play, he casts a man named Sammy to play "Caden", and then casts a woman named Tammy to play "Hazel", the assistant to Sammy's "Caden" so that it reflects the real Caden's relationship with the real Hazel. Therefore, we have scenes with Caden (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Hazel (Samantha Morton) interacting with "Caden" (Tom Noonan) and "Hazel" (Emily Watson). To confound this, periodically Sammy and Tammy break "character" and interact with their counterparts. It doesn't help that with the makeup Emily Watson can at times be a dead ringer for Samantha Morton.

And yet, by the time you've gotten to that point in the movie, it's really not that hard to follow. I admit that it sounds tough, but I had a harder time getting used to the "dream logic in real life" (as Kaufman puts it) that moves us through Caden's medical problems in the early parts of the film.

Synecdoche, NY is not an easy film to watch because it is so demanding of your attention, and there are layers I'm not even getting yet. Nevertheless, by the time it ended I was moved deeply and will make every effort to buy this film when I can. Charlie Kaufman has not "lost it", as some critics dismissed the film as. Instead, he strips away the easy levels of entry in order to dig deeper into the psyche, and what he finds as "emotional truth" in that labyrinth is something special indeed. I can't recommend all of you to see it because I think some of you will justifiably hate it, but some blogorium readers will connect with Synecdoche, NY in a personal way. I hope.

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Well, that covers two movies. I still need to watch Frost/Nixon in order to freshen up the queue, including the possibility of re-watching JCVD and Neil-favorite The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a movie I simultaneously dread watching and yet must see. The spine numbers demand it.

Oh, and chide me for it now, but I feel compelled to rubberneck at the oncoming trainwreck that will be s. Darko. Believe me, I know, but the Cap'n does it so others need not to.


* Sorry, but The Beach kind of sucks. I do love Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, A Life Less Ordinary, and 28 Days Later, although I have not seen Millions.