No Twihard

Okay, I guess the secret is out:  I’m not a Twihard.

http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2010/jun/29/mooning-away-twilight-saga-enchants-more-than-twee/

You know, I’m not even sure I’m going to see the new movie.  Sure, it’s a cultural phenomenon, but…

TOY STORY 3

The reviews are great, and I won’t disagree with them.  I’ve enjoyed and appreciated all of the Toy Story movies.  This one is as good as its predecessors (as well as I can remember!), and it brought tears to my eyes when Andy finally went off to college.  Could that emotional response to the film be attributed to the fact that my own son is about to substitute our family residence for a residence hall in August?

GASLAND and FOR NEDA

Two more films have premiered in HBO’s Documentary Summer Series.  The series offers a lot of diversity in topic and – so far – some in style.

Of these two, Gasland is the one that will probably have the most widespread appeal and is a bit more effective in terms of structure.

This film feels like a cross between a “typical” environmental film and a personal documentary.  Filmmaker Josh Fox gets an offer from a company to sell them the rights to drill for natural gas on his 100 acres in Pennsylvania.  This makes him curious about how others have fared in areas where drilling has been going on for some time.

A little sluggish at the beginning but better and better as Fox moves beyond his own back yard, Gasland is scary.  To tackle such a big topic — the dangers of extracting natural gas and the special exemptions to Clean Air and Clean Water Acts that Cheney got for industry types (yes, Halliburton is a player) — the film is actually fairly small in scope, which may be why feels pretty engaging to me.   I became more and more interested as the narrative unfolded.

The same is true in terms of pacing in For Neda.  The story centers on Neda Agha-Soltan, whose death was captured on video and became a symbol of the protests in Iran after the last election.  The first part of the film tries to evoke the dynamic young woman, but this section is only partially successful and feels a bit contrived and repetitive.  The more engrossing segments of the film come later and address the way technology and social networking played a role in the political struggle.

BOSTON MED

Caught the first episode of the ABC series Boston Med (Thursdays 10 p.m.) and mainly it reminded me how much I miss ER.

Nice to be Quoted

I haven’t seen Knight and Day, but it’s nice to be quoted:

http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2010-06-23-greatfilms23_CV_N.htm

THE NEISTAT BROTHERS

Okay.  I’ve given this series a fair shake.  I’ve seen three of the six episodes running this summer on HBO.  My opinion hasn’t changed since the first episode, but in hopes of being able to support an innovative, indie style TV show, I didn’t comment on the show for awhile.

I was hoping for something more organic and authentic.  The episodes feature a series of short films made by two brothers (Casey and Van Neistat) about events in their daily lives capitalizing on a consciously low-tech style and employing a postmodern pastiche that feels forced to me.  I think that’s the bottom line – too contrived and ultimately superficial rather than insightful.  I wanted to like it…

SMASH HIS CAMERA

HBO’s summer documentary series features some exciting films including one that is both particularly entertaining and illuminating in terms of celebrity culture.  Smash His Camera surveys the career of the “paparazzi superstar” Ron Galella with particular attention to the legal actions related to his pursuit of photos of Jackie Kennedy Onassis.  The photos, of course, are incredible in terms how they engage the viewer in this narrative and convey a sense of Galella’s work over time but equally effective are archival interviews with Galella and his subjects and news coverage of his work and his legal entanglements.

Lots of documentation in different forms here, and director Leon Gast weaves the archival elements beautifully with sequences following Galella as he continues his work, shows off the basement archive with literally millions of photographs taken over his career, and reveals bits of his domestic life with his wife in their New Jersey home.  As several interviewees note, Galella maintains his sense of humor and a lack of cynicism that separates him from many other celebrity photographers who are motivated solely by the buck.

WALL STREET

I just watched Wall Street again for the first time in many years.  It holds up.  Despite the dated technology (it seemed so cutting edge at the time!), the story is as topical as ever.  Oliver Stone sure knew how to tell stories back in the day.  This has me looking forward to the sequel to Wall Street slated for release this fall, Money Never Sleeps.  It also makes me want to go back and revisit my favorite Oliver Stone film (also starring Charlie Sheen before his bad boy antics were splattered with regularity on the tabloids), Platoon.  It’s a classic in my book.

GLEE

Wow.  The season progressed in fits and starts, but the series hit its stride with the finale, which was a solid episode.  The highlight for me was “To Sir, With Love.”

A TALE OF TWO WEEKENDS

What a difference a week makes.

Memorial Day weekend, I hunkered down and watched a bunch of movies on television.  I didn’t plan ahead very much, just sampled what was available on TV from old favorites like From Here To Eternity to The Best Years Of Our Lives along with a couple of new (to me) films.

In that category, I saw In Harm’s Way (the predictability and melodrama don’t make it less watchable, especially the brutal scene with Kirk Douglas’ character assaulting a young nurse on the beach), The Battle of the Bulge (I had not stopped to think before how many war films starred Henry Fonda starred – a lot), and the HBO film Taking Chance.

In Taking Chance, Kevin Bacon plays a volunteer military escort officer bringing a young marine’s body back to his hometown in Wyoming – the solder’s name is Chance Phelps – and this film really makes the viewer feel the weight of this fallen soldier more personally than you might expect.  In the last few years, people have stayed away from war films in droves, but some of them are worth watching.  We can all use a reminder of the human consequences of war, and this film is powerful.

What would I do without Turner Classic Movies?  HBO is proving useful, too.

This past weekend, my son was recovering from oral surgery (four wisdom teeth removed – ouch!), and in between trips to refill the ice packs, deliver snacks of applesauce and Jello, and mix up glasses of warm salt water for rinsing, I watched a bunch of modestly entertaining films that I had recorded off HBO for such occasions.  These are mostly films that didn’t make my top tier when they hit the local cinemas, but for one reason or another I decided to take a look over the last few days.

In the order I watched them:

Run Fatboy Run is a predictable romantic comedy but made a bit more pleasant, perhaps, because of the British accents and a bit less overdone because the narrative is told from a male perspective.  This 2007 films marks the directorial motion picture debut of David Schwimmer (yes, Ross on Friends) and precedes two other, recent romantic comedies told from male perspectives, 500 Days of Summer and Away We Go.

Yes Man is the Jim Carrey vehicle about the man who says no to everything until an outrageous plot point forces him to say yes.  Of course, it’s unlikely many people would say no to his co-star Zooey Deschanel (the Summer of 500 Days of Summer), but all’s well that ends well, right?

State of Play is a political thriller – sort of – that asks us to imagine that slick Senator Ben Affleck and scruffy journalist Russell Crowe were once college roommates and have remained friends.  It’s okay, I suppose, up until the last half-hour or so of the film when the story actually picks up steam.  This is surprising, really, because films more often have the opposite problem and fall apart in the second or third act.

Okay, I thought the preview trailers for Baby Mama looked really lame, but the film is a little better than that largely because of a polished (still predictable) screenplay and the generous charms of Tina Fey as a successful business woman who can’t seem to get pregnant even with the help of a fertility specialist and Amy Poehler as the rough-edged woman Fey’s character hires as a surrogate to carry her fertilized eggs.  I’m not arguing that the film is great, just that it is a little better than I had expected.

A totally different film in the “wisdom tooth series” over the weekend is Notorious, the story of Notorious B.I.G., also known as Biggie Smalls, a rapper who came from the streets to find fame and money under the management of Sean Combs (who knows what to call him now?  He was Puffy back then).  This is as close to the thug life as I hope to come.  The film doesn’t work as well for me as Eight Mile or the fictive Hustle and Flow, but it does capture a moment in time.

Of course, I also did some reading over the weekend.  Old Jane Smiley, in case you’re wondering…now it’s back to work.