- Black Snake Moan
Samuel L Jackson tries to rehabilitate a half naked Christina Ricci from her nymphomania by chaining her to his radiator and playing the blues. Some interesting moments, but I found it to be weaker and sillier than the directors first film, Hustle and Flow. - Dreamgirls
Musical story of a Surpremes-style band's rise to fame in an alternate 70's. I couldn't get into it but I'm sure it will have a huge audience in middle-aged black women and drag queens. I wish they had pushed it even further into camp- "Trapped in a Closet" style. - Once upon a girl
Unwatchably shitty pornographic cartoon from the 70's made by Hanna Barbera animators who were slumming for coke money or something. Lots of bizarre infantileism and fantasy breast-feeding rendered all the more disturbing by the sweat-shop animation. Think Wacky Races if they just looped the same footage of the characters getting hard-ons through their pants. In my fascist dictatorship everyone involved in making this film would be up against the wall blindfolded waiting for bullets in the name of cultural purification. - Inherit the Wind
Flm adaptation of the play, starring Spencer Tracy and Gene Kelley. Plenty has been written already about this film over the years, and I didn't gain any new readings of it in the context of this festival, but I did enjoy seeing it on the screen. 46 years later we're still on the edge of devolving into a horde of pitchforked villagers worshipping Santa Claus and the sound of their own voices, so this movie is just as relevant now as ever. - Rocky Balboa
Inoffensive as velveeta singles slices. The film was much more competently made than I ever would have imagined, but Rocky movies just aren't my thing. The audience loved it. - Knocked up
Nicely penned and acted Judd Apatow comedy about an unplanned pregnancy. - Black Book (Zwartboek)
Probably my favorite of the new films in the festival. Black Book is the story of a Netherlands resistance agent who seduces a Gestapo officer but winds up falling in love with him herself.
Lars Nilsen, Curator of the Alamo Drafthouse's Weird Wednesday Midnight movies summed the film up better than I could in my current groggy state:Next up was Paul Verhoeven's new film THE BLACK BOOK. I kind of thought Verhoeven was a little washed up. Wrong. Holy shit, this is an intense movie. Though at this point in the night everyone was weary and less receptive than maybe they should have been. And I had to strain to pay attention myself but when I woke up this afternoon this was the movie I was still thinking about. The other movies were pretty much digested in the theater but this one was still haunting me. Verhoeven is one of the all-time masters and he's at peak form here. It's a story of a young Jewish cabaret singer (Carice Van Houten) who flees the Nazis during the last few months of WW2 and ends up in a Dutch resistance cell. She goes undercover among the SS and her cover is always in danger of being blown amid a shifting pattern of double-crosses and betrayals. The theme of the movie is "everyone who survives a war is guilty in some way". When Verhoeven goes to work on an audience in the action and suspense scenes it's like being punched in the face and feeling the adrenaline well up inside. I felt alternating respect (a whole lot of it), and pity for Carice Van Houten, who is in practically every scene. She gives the best performance I've seen in a long time, and it's a ridiculously demanding part that calls for her to do everything from singing a naughty German dancehall song with the SS Monster who slaughtered her entire family to dying her pubic hair blonde for the resistance to being covered in buckets of shit by the liberated Dutch who believe she is a collaborator. It's a performance of heroic depth and breadth. And in addition to being a brilliant actress she's a gorgeous, luminous, magical Star. So yes I was impressed. If she doesn't win every award out there I demand a recount.
(Link: Weird Wednesday's Lars on BNUT 8) - The Informer
John Ford's story of an IRA member who judases his friend for the reward money went over like a lead balloon with the audience, but I enjoyed my first viewing of a classic flick. - Raw Force
I already saw this one at Terror Thursday, but I was happy to see it again. Schlocky and hilarious 70's American kung fu movie about a cruise ship that happens to be carrying the Burbank Karate club sinking off the coast of an island full of zombie black-belt magazine readers.. I mean 'ancient warriors'... and some cannibal monks. If you've seen the trailer you've seen all the good parts, but it's still funny. I would have rather watched last Thursday's jaw droppingly bizarre Devil Fetus again rather than this one though. - Smokin' Aces
This was another crowd favorite that I totally detested and therefore will refrain from writing about here. Guy Ritchie style hyperkinetic action movie that was about a millimeter deep. My neighbor leaned over to me at one point and asked, "does this game have multiplayer mode?" - 300
This adaptation of Frank Miller's historically dubious, nationalistic, bloodbath-comic consists of pretty much one big slow motion battle scene. I think the title is the number of slowed-down spear impalings in the movie. You may not have known this, but the Persian king Xerxes I was evidently an 8 foot tall effeminate bald man of indeterminate, dusky ethnicity who was really into facial piercings. Also, the Persian army filled its ranks with giant troll-monsters and partied with anthropomorphic goats. To be fair, the director (who was on hand for an early morning Q&A) explained the deviation from historical fact by saying the film was like a 'Spartan fever dream'- that it was a mythologized version of the battle that might be retold to children to rouse them to fight themselves, and in fact the movie closes with the narration wrapping up as the end of a pre-battle speech. But this is really side stepping the truth, that the story is really Frank Miller's fever dream. One that exalts a completely militarized culture that practices eugenics, condescends neighboring Athenians as 'philosophers and boy lovers' and demonizes an enemy so alien and 'other' that some of them seem to actually be devolving into half-human half-animal bogeymen (and ninjas!). While I thought Gerard Butler has a very screen worthy presence in the film, no one is given much to say other than he-man posturing and cliche platitudes. The Spartan queen actually challenges us with the line "Freedom isn't Free" at one point, and you would have to be pretty dim not to see what Miller is getting at, especially with Persians as the enemy. I'll be interested to see how much director Snyder has internalized the politics of this movie when he starts filming Watchmen, the landmark Alan Moore comic from the 80's that couldn't be more polar opposite in either its politics or in the sublety of its execution. It's hard to predict, because what I remember of the comic version of 300 didn't go so far as to present the Persians as actual monsters, but I may have to re-read it.
The audience whooped and cried for joy at this movie. Maybe it will convince them to join the army. The only thing I liked about the film was its color palette. Oh, and the fact that the Toxic Avenger has a role as the genetically inferior Spartan who escaped from being thrown off a cliff at birth to betray the king. They should have given him his mop though, instead of a spear.
(Link: Wikipedia, Battle of Thermopylae)
Interspersed between the films were a curation of amazing vintage movie trailers that were actually the real highlight for me. I hope that someone at the Alamo gets hold of Cursed for Terror Thursday. The trailer looks amazing.
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