Month: February 2013

Eventually, This Will Be a Review of the Movie ‘Husbands’ by John Cassavetes

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Rob Fortucci, one of my best friends, commissioned this review.  I met him in tenth grade—in film class, no less.  First hour at Dwight D. Eisenhower High School, in affluent/middle class Shelby Township, Michigan.

By the time we met we had each already cultivated our respective cinephile statuses.  Mine was completely traditional—my parents and grandparents are movie buffs and introduced me to all the kid-friendly classics, everything from Spielberg to Chaplin.  At around 12, I started venturing out on my own into more ‘subversive’ territory, as one does.  By the time I met Rob at 14, I was already a Kubrick, Scorsese, and Allen fanatic, and a true student of the 70’s and ‘golden age cinema’.
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Argo: I Barely Watched It (So You Don’t Have To)

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Yes, this is really from the god damn movie.

Argo
Directed by Ben Affleck
Screenplay by Chris Terrio
121 min.

I tapped out after about 15 minutes on this one, and normally, I’d just not review the thing on here, and tweet “argo sucks ass” and call it a day, but I gotta talk about this fucking thing. Because I look at a movie like this and I can’t understand the world I live in. This movie is so the antithesis of everything I value as far as movies are concerned (and what you, ideally, should value too) and it’s times like these I feel like the great Roddy Piper in They Live, staring at the plain-to-see ugliness in front of me, and I just wanna force glasses onto everyone around me with my words. So here goes.
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A Smug Film Bonus Post About the 2013 Oscars

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Cody’s Oscar Thoughts:

I hate the god damn Oscars. Basically, for all the same reasons everyone hates the Oscars, so I don’t need to get into all that here. However, I still watch every year, because the tree of disgust for Hollywood must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of patriots. (I think Thomas Jefferson said that.)

Of what’s nominated, basically, Joaquin should win Best Actor (his acting in The Master is as good as acting can possibly get) Michael Haneke should win Best Director (I haven’t seen Amour yet, but the man can do no wrong, and fuck the Academy for snubbing The White Ribbon for Best Foreign Film a few years back) Amour should win Best Picture (because fuck you again) and Emmanuelle Riva should win best actress. (I’m sure she’s great in Amour. She’s a great actress. Léon Morin, Priest is like the greatest thing ever.)
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I Do Declare ‘Compliance’ To Be The Worst Movie of 2012

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Compliance (2012)
Written and Directed by Craig Zobel
90 min.

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, I know, but when I see a title like Compliance, a red flag goes up in my head. It’s one thing to make a title short (Jaws is brilliant) but it’s another to give away the entire movie’s theme right off the bat. (Gee, I wonder what Shame is about. Perhaps it’s about doubt? No, that’s probably Doubt. What do you think the characters achieve in the movie Atonement? And so on.) When a writer/director/producer/studio chooses a title like Compliance, they’re announcing to the world that their movie is About Something That Should Be Taken Seriously, unlike those plebeian popcorn flicks with actually-great titles such as Drag Me To Hell or The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. As a result, I tend to avoid such seemingly one-note movies. But, I am also ever critical of my arbitrary biases, so I recently decided to test my hypothesis by Netflix-ing this one.
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‘Wanna Hang Out?’, or, Airheads is Better Than Dog Day Afternoon

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There’s an odd video on YouTube where Quentin Tarantino lists his 20 favorite movies that have come out since he became a director in 1992.  The video was made in 2009—making it a 17th year anniversary celebration of him being a director.  The arbitrariness of this echoes The Simpsons’ 138th episode spectacular (although that was a joke).

His list is surprising—in good ways and bad.  I love that he lists The Matrix and also makes a point to disregard the sequels “that serve only to tarnish the mythology of a badass movie”.  And with Jan de Bont’s Speed, he adds a clever caveat that we “forget everything that happens after the bus stops.”  But then, for some reason, he names Woody Allen’s Anything Else—one of his least significant movies.  (It’s also kind of a bummer since Allen’s best movie, Deconstructing Harry, came out in ’97—well within Tarantino’s arbitrary 17-year timespan.)
Continue reading ‘Wanna Hang Out?’, or, Airheads is Better Than Dog Day Afternoon