{"id":1665,"date":"2013-04-08T00:27:29","date_gmt":"2013-04-08T04:27:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/?p=1665"},"modified":"2013-04-08T00:50:45","modified_gmt":"2013-04-08T04:50:45","slug":"netflix-quickies-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/netflix-quickies-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Netflix Quickies #2 (The Imposter, Bully, Frankie & Johnny, Hiding Out, Antichrist)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alright so whenever I go on Netflix Instant I just sorta pick random movies from my queue, try them for a few minutes, and then if I\u2019m not feeling them moving on to another until I finally find one I don\u2019t hate, and then I watch that one. This \u2018Netflix Quickies\u2019 thing is basically a series where I just talk about movies I decided not to watch after some amount of minutes and explain exactly what turned me off about them. Here goes:<\/p>\n

\"imposter\"
\n

\nThe Imposter<\/a> (2012)
\n<\/strong>Directed by Bart Layton
\n<\/b>99 min. (Gave up after 7 min.)
\n
\nThis one really could\u2019ve been great. The story<\/i> is great. Instantly fascinating.\u00a0 However, the actual storytelling, and the presentation, is extremely grating, and shows no confidence in how fascinating the story is.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s really not hard to tell a compelling story if your story is naturally compelling. Really, all you have to do is get out of the way of it and let it do its thing. The best documentary filmmakers know this. Werner Herzog, Berlinger\/Sinofsky, Steve James, the list goes on. All of them take a very simple, straightforward approach that doesn\u2019t insult your intelligence, and doesn\u2019t insult or exploit its subjects.<\/p>\n

The Imposter an over-stylized mess of a docudrama. Its clear Bart Layton is a fan of Errol Morris, and it\u2019s also clear that he doesn\u2019t understand him, and doesn\u2019t understand what makes a movie like The Thin Blue Line<\/a> work. <\/i>Layton lacks the taste buds required to know when he\u2019s overcooked his dish.<\/p>\n

How did he overcook it? Well, first of all, the move is 2.35:1. That, already, is a mistake. No documentary should ever<\/i> be 2.35:1. They should be 1.85:1 or 16:9 or 4:3 or 1.66:1. 2.35:1 is just not the right aspect ratio for the genre. It\u2019s too movie-ish. It makes everything look fake. Add to that the fact that he\u2019s applied hack-y filters in post to all the footage. As a result, when you\u2019re seeing one of the documentary subjects just sitting in their home, talking about what happened, you can\u2019t connect to anything they\u2019re saying. There\u2019s no personality to their living space, due to the stupid filters. It\u2019s a slice of life with all the life removed.<\/p>\n

Even the audio is ruined. It’s over-processed and strange. Everyone\u2019s voice sounds weird. I guess they wanted to remove any and all noise or room tone, so they used noise reduction like crazy. The result is that nobody has any personality to their voice and everyone sounds same-y.<\/p>\n

Lastly, the dramatic reenactments are completely unnecessary. This did not need to be a docudrama. Most docudramas don\u2019t. Most docudramas suck. This should\u2019ve just been people talking, telling the story. It really<\/em> is a great story. Basically, just look up the story online, and skip the movie. Although, definitely watch the first 10 minutes or so of this if you want to learn how not <\/i>to make a doc.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"bully\"
\n

\nBully<\/a> (2011)
\n<\/b>Directed by Lee Hirsch
\nWritten by Lee Hirsch and Cynthia Lowen
\n<\/b>98 min. (Gave up after 15 min.)<\/p>\n

Another \u2018how not to make a doc\u2019 doc, full of unnecessary artifice. It tries so hard to be important and timely, and cover so much, that the focus is all over the place, and nothing is covered properly. In just the first 15 minutes, a dad tells a sad story of his son committing suicide, then he\u2019s cut off so that we can meet some unrelated dorky spectrum-y kid, then we get a title sequence where we hear a choir singing \u2018Teenage Dirtbag\u2019 over fly-on-the-wall footage of kids riding a bus and looking out the window all thoughtful-like, and then we follow an incompetent assistant principal hurrying around school. There\u2019s no flow whatsoever. It’s all just tiny tastes of things with no through line. It\u2019s ironic that a movie about people who don\u2019t respect other people does not at all respect its subjects or their stories enough to let them truly speak.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"frankie\"
\n

\nFrankie & Johnny<\/a> (1991)
\n<\/b>Directed by Garry Marshall
\nWritten by Terrence McNally
\n<\/b>118 min. (Gave up after 19 min.)<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a sucker for anything and everything Pacino. Such a guilty pleasure. I find him hilarious in everything. His overacting rules. Scent of a Woman<\/a> is one of my favorite comedies. The funny parts are funny and the unfunny parts are unintentionally funny. I watch it maybe once a year, around Thanksgiving.<\/p>\n

I can usually make it through any movie he\u2019s in, but man this one is grating.\u00a0 I hate movies that try so hard to be \u2018New York\u2019 that they are anything but. Nothing in this one rings true. It all feel so damn fake. Not just fake for now\u2014<\/em>fake for the 90\u2019s, too. I grew up in New York in the 90\u2019s, and it was nothing<\/em> like this. It\u2019s as though someone heard about a bunch of New York stereotypes, but had never actually visited the city, and decided to write a story set there.<\/p>\n

However, there\u2019s a funny part where Pacino is chopping celery and talking about Shakespeare and being all Pacino-y and wearing a crazy red bandana. That part is worth watching, if you like Pacino being all silly and overact-y. I might actually revisit this one sometime in the future to zip through and see if there\u2019s any more good Pacino parts. But I don\u2019t think I could ever watch it straight through. Everything else besides him is too grating.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"hiding\"
\n

\nHiding Out<\/a> (1987)
\n<\/b>Directed by Bob Giraldi
\nWritten by Joe Menosky and Jeff Rothberg
\n98 min. (Gave up after 28 min.)<\/p>\n

I really wanted this one to be good. The premise is so wacky and 80\u2019s. Basically, it\u2019s Jon Cryer playing a stock trader who mob guys are trying to kill, so he escapes and decides to pose as a High Schooler in a small town. And while he\u2019s a High Schooler, he crushes on a girl who goes to the school. Sounds fun, right? Wrong.<\/p>\n

This movie is a damn boring mess. It takes way<\/i> too long to get going, and then when it does, it\u2019s still boring as shit. And not at all funny or entertaining. Nothing happens in this damn movie. The only fun thing is that Cryer, to blend in as a High Schooler, basically makes himself look like his character Duckie from Pretty in Pink<\/a>. But his character in this one lacks all the zest of Duckie. Here, he\u2019s basically a poor man\u2019s Adam Goldberg. I don\u2019t even like<\/i> Adam Goldberg, but I woulda preferred him in this movie to Cryer, because it would’ve fit.<\/p>\n

Give this one a shot if you have an extremely<\/em> high tolerance for terrible 80\u2019s High School movies. I couldn\u2019t make it through it, but if you\u2019re a nut for the sub-genre, you might dig it. Personally, I\u2019d much rather just re-watch Three O\u2019Clock High<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"anti\"
\n

\nAntichrist<\/a> (2009)<\/strong>
\nWritten and Directed by Lars von Trier
\n108 min. (Gave up after 7 min.)<\/p>\n

I avoided this one for a really long time. Lars von Trier is very hit or miss for me. I adore Dogville<\/a> and Manderlay<\/a> and Breaking the Waves<\/a>, but I haven\u2019t been able to get down with his other stuff. Most recently, Melancholia<\/a>, which really, really rubbed me the wrong way, and I gave up on not too far in. I hear that it changes and gets a lot better as it goes on but whatever. Maybe I\u2019ll try it again one day. But a movie like Antichrist makes me really not wanna, and basically just steer clear of Trier for good.<\/p>\n

The fucking opening of this, with the black and white, and the slow motion, and the snow and everything, feels like what a jock might assume all art films are like. It plays damn-near like parody. Is that the point? Parody? Satire? Is that the point of Melancholia too? I have no idea. I doubt it. Ultimately, I don\u2019t care though. It\u2019s all just so damn grating and unbeautiful to me that even if it were parody, I probably couldn’t enjoy it.<\/p>\n

The problem with art films is that if you don\u2019t like the art of it, you\u2019re fucked. And I don\u2019t mean that as a bad thing, necessarily. Hell, I\u2019m an \u2018art filmmaker\u2019, I guess. My films are divisive and love-it-or-hate-it or whatever. So I\u2019m definitely not dogging art films. But basically, art films, you can look at them for 5 minutes and they either grab you or they don\u2019t, and that’s it. Sure, you can muscle through any movie you want and maybe like a thing after it\u2019s done\u2014the art can ‘win you over’ so to speak\u2014but is it really<\/em> the art winning you over? Usually it\u2019s just that you like the story told, so you forgive the art aspects that you don\u2019t like, and trudge through the art each time you rewatch it, because you love the story. I think liking or not liking the art of a film is very intuitive. You can\u2019t force yourself to like it. Either it taps into some unexplainable part of you or it doesn\u2019t. Antichrist just doesn\u2019t do it for me, man. And I don\u2019t wanna have to trudge through the whole damn thing just to somewhat like a story and temporarily forget that I hated the flourishes. There are so many movies out there that I\u2019d love start to finish, that I still haven\u2019t seen. My time is worth my time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alright so whenever I go on Netflix Instant I just sorta pick random movies from my queue, try them for a few minutes, and then if I\u2019m not feeling them moving on to another until I finally find one I don\u2019t hate, and then I watch that one. This \u2018Netflix Quickies\u2019 thing is basically a series where I just talk about movies I decided not to watch after some amount of minutes and explain exactly what turned me off about them. Here goes:<\/p>\n

\"imposter\"<\/p>\n

The Imposter (2012)
\n<\/b>Directed by Bart Layton
\n<\/b>99 min. (Gave up after 7 min.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,1],"tags":[957,948,958,935,937,953,961,942,946,32,944,963,955,941,947,950,933,952,951,956,959,943,962,960,175,954,949,938,104,185,945,934,940,939,754,706,936],"class_list":["post-1665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts","category-codysreviews","tag-adam-goldberg","tag-al-pacino","tag-antichrist","tag-bart-layton","tag-berlinger","tag-bob-giraldi","tag-breaking-the-waves","tag-bully","tag-bully-documentary","tag-cody-clarke","tag-cynthia-lowen","tag-dogville","tag-duckie","tag-errol-morris","tag-frankie-and-johnny","tag-hiding-out","tag-imposter","tag-jeff-rothberg","tag-joe-menosky","tag-jon-cryer","tag-lars-von-trier","tag-lee-hirsch","tag-manderlay","tag-melancholia","tag-netflix-quickies","tag-pretty-in-pink","tag-scent-of-a-woman","tag-sinofsky","tag-smug-film-2","tag-smugfilm","tag-teenage-dirtbag","tag-the-imposter","tag-the-thin-blue-line","tag-thin-blue-line","tag-three-o-clock-high","tag-three-oclock-high","tag-werner-herzog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1665"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1665\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1697,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1665\/revisions\/1697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}