Movie Stuff

I recently caught up on several movies that I should have watched years ago, along with a movie that vastly improved upon rewatch. Let's get to babblin':

Sunshine - 2007 was a helluva year for movies: No Country For Old Men, There Will be Blood, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, Breach, 300, Zodiac, Superbad, No End In Sight, Into The Wild, Gone Baby Gone, The King of Kong, Knocked Up, The Lives of Others, Hot Fuzz, Michael Clayton, Once, Juno, and several others that I'm still getting to, including this one, a science fiction film from Danny Boyle (127 Hours, Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire).

In Sunshine, a group of scientists in the not-so-distant future are on a mission to revive our dying sun by dropping a big ol' bomb in it. I'm not totally sure how that works, but whatever! That's the premise of the movie, and it's a premise no worse than, say, Juwanna Mann. Like all of Boyle's movies, it's a visual powerhouse, with the contrast between the heat of the sun and the darkness of space providing all sorts of eye candy. The first half of Sunshine is pretty fantastic, but then it goes off the rails with 20 minutes of crap about [SPOILER] some scientist being poisoned by the sun and becoming a space-time-demon or some crap[END SPOILER] and the movie totally goes off the rails. If it were possible to edit my own version of the movie, without that dumb stuff, it would be one of my favorite science fiction films of recent years.

But still, that part. ARGH. It's almost like the screenwriter said "This is too good, I'm bored!" and deliberately trashed it. Sunshine is still worth seeing, but that quarter-hour of dumbness nearly sinks it.

Bottle Rocket - Wes Anderson's first film. I hadn't seen it, and that was a mistake, because Bottle Rocket is one of the better indie films of the 90s. Anderson's style and Owen Wilson's schtick are apparent from the beginning, but if you can watch the movie minus those years of baggage, you'll appreciate what a fresh, unique film it is.

Something Wild - From one of the better indie films of the 90s to one of the better indie films of the 80s. Something Wild was the film that made Jonathan Demme a "name" director, and Jeff Daniels and Ray Liotta into "name" actors. A great, fun film that shifts into something darker and violent by the end, Something Wild, like Bottle Rocket, is alive, moving non-stop towards its inevitable end. Check it out on Netflix before Criterion moves to Hulu. What an odd sentence.

Also, if I may: Melanie Griffith may sound like she's brain-damaged, but in the 80's she was HOTTTTTTT, and she seemed to always be naked. Now THAT'S an actress! Something Wild features what is probably her best performance, but for sheer nakedness, by all means, check out Body Double.

Apparently, Melanie Griffith causes me to morph into Mr. Skin.

Detour - "This movie from Hollywood's poverty row, shot in six days, filled with technical errors and ham-handed narrative, starring a man who can only pout and a woman who can only sneer, should have faded from sight soon after it was released in 1945. And yet it lives on, haunting and creepy, an embodiment of the guilty soul of film noir. No one who has seen it has easily forgotten it." - Roger Ebert


I agree with that guy!  Detour features one of the great shmucks of cinema, Al Roberts, (played by Tom Neal), whose life slowly falls apart through a combination of dumb decisions and bad luck. Ann Savage plays the femme fatale that fatally femmes our hero. Only 68 minutes long, Detour is a film that will stay with you long after its short running time.

Blast of Silence - "You know the type. Second-string syndicate boss with too much ambition and a mustache to hide the fact he has lips like a woman. The kind of face you hate."

Another great low-budget noir, this film, told primarily in an amazing voiceover by Lionel Stander, this tells the story of "baby boy" Frankie Bono, played by the film's writer/director, Allan Baron. Stander's voiceover sounds like the world's toughest poetry, spitting out lines like "You don't have to know a man to live with him. But you have to know a man like a brother to kill him." I'm not totally clear on what that means, but it sure does sound good in the moment. This one, like Detour, is also short, only 77 minutes. In the amount of time you could waste watching Transformers 3, you could watch these two noir classics. So do it already.

Shuttle Island (rewatch) - I was torn on Shutter Island when I first saw it, with the quality of the filmmaking overshadowed by one of the more ludicrous twists in movie history. However, upon rewatch, I've softened on the film a lot. Yes, the exposition-o-thon with 40 minutes to go is a bit much, but Scorcese lays his cards out in the open. It's clear that DiCaprio is being observed by everybody, and even though the experiment is dependent on a massive storm and DiCaprio's ability to climb cliffs, there's still so much good in the movie that I can't write it off completely, and that's a tribute to the sheer awesomeness of Martin Scorcese's talent. Here's my newspaper blurb: "Shutter Island - It's really good, at least in comparison to Gangs of New York!"