Category: movies

We’ve arranged for a babysitter and got tickets to go see X-Men tonight. I’ve liked the X-Men characters since I was a little kid: I would rush home after school to watch the cartoons and I read through a few huge trade paperbacks of the comics someone gave us one summer. (I also read a big collection of the Silver Surfer comics that summer but that is neither here nor there.)

I didn’t really like the last X-Men movie but this one has a different director and I’m hoping it will be better. From what I know this movie already has a few things in its favor:

Have a great weekend, everyone!

As a teenager and while in college I flirted with learning taekwondo but never got serious about it. But I enjoy martial arts movies and over the weekend we watched a great one we got from Netflix.

Chocolate is a Thai action movie directed Prachya Pinkaew. Pinkaew also directed Ong-bak and Tom yum goong, both of which I’ve seen and like.

The plot in Chocolate is kind of hokey (autistic girl learns martial arts from Bruce Lee movies and collects mob money to pay for her mother’s medicine) but the movie succeeds because of its star, Jeeja Yanin.

Chocolate rests squarely on Yanin’s tiny shoulders. She trained for the movie for two years and it shows. Her skills are really impressive and the fight choreography makes the most of them. While we were watching the movie I kept gasping in amazement during the fight scenes. It’s really fun to watch this tiny little girl kick butt. I’m looking forward to seeing what she does next.

On Saturday N and I drove to downtown Salt Lake City to grab a quick bite to eat and to watch two shows at the Rose Wagner Center. We were short on time so we gulped down sandwiches at Caputo’s, paused to drool over their amazing cheese selection, and headed to the theater.

The first show we saw was Dare, a coming-of-age story about three rich high school seniors trying to break out into adulthood and explore their sexuality. It was my least favorite film out of the six we saw and I’m having trouble mustering up the enthusiasm to give it a full review.

The best thing about it was Zach Gilford’s performance. We got tickets to Dare mostly because it had Gilford in it (He plays Matt Saracen on Friday Night Lights which I think is one of the best shows on TV.) and it was playing at the same theater as Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

I liked Brief Interviews with Hideous Men a lot more. Based on the collection by David Foster Wallace, the film was written and directed by John Krasinski (aka Jim from The Office).

The framing sequence for the film is this (from the festival description): A doctoral candidate in anthropology at a prestigious East Coast university, Sara Quinn thinks she can remedy both her heartache and her academic challenges with a new research project and begins conducting a series of interviews with men. As she records the astonishing and disquieting experiences of various subjects, Sara discovers much more about men—and herself—than she bargained for.

The real stars of the film are the interviews and the monologues taken from the book. Sara doesn’t have much to do except to react to the words and actions of the men around her and so it’s pretty obvious that she’s a framing device and not a full-fledged character. At times I found myself eager for her to quit moping about and get off the screen so the next interview would start. It’s a difficult book to adapt for a movie but I think Krasinski did a pretty good job overall.

Whew! And that, my friends, is that. No more droning on about Sundance movies from me. I was kind of running out of steam at the end, as I’m sure you could tell. Tomorrow we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming.

On Friday N and I drove up to Odgen to see two films at Peery’s Egyptian Theater. It’s a wonderful old theater complete with an octogenarian organist who plays flamboyant renditions of show tunes before the movie starts.

We saw An Education and 500 Days of Summer. An Education was written by Nick Hornby and has a great cast including Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, and Emma Thompson. The film takes place in 1960s London and centers around Jenny, a 16 year-old school girl. She’s pretty and bright and studying to get into Oxford but she’s also rather bored with her life and longing to be a sophisticate. And so when she meets, David, a dashing older man who starts taking her around to glamorous restaurants, concerts and art auctions her head gets turned by the excitement. Predictably, not everything is as it seems in David’s world and Jenny has to make some choices.

This predictability was for me, the main flaw in the movie. Many points of the plot played out according to convention or even cliché. But the cast was great (Carey Mulligan, who plays Jenny, was superb) and much of the script, plot aside, was very good. Alfred Molina has a monologue towards the end that just made my heart ache.

Over all, I enjoyed watching it. Others apparently also liked it; I just saw that it won the Dramatic World Cinema Audience Award.

While An Education flirted with cliché, 500 days of Summer got it loaded on Mai Tais and took it home on the first date.

There was a veritable list of post-Garden State hipster clichés: a arty fickle girl with guarded angst in her heart, characters professing their love for The Smiths to each other, zany escapades at IKEA, karaoke scenes (yes, more than one!) in which the songs the characters sing reveal the state of their souls, an elaborate dance number, and so on.

I think N said it best when he said that 500 Days needed to have come out in 2005. In a post-Juno world it just feels too precious. The quirky freshness it strives so earnestly for often falls flat. It sometimes felt like the filmmakers sat down and made a list of things they thought my generation would relate to and then ticked them off, one by one, when they made the movie.

But with all that said, I still enjoyed watching it. The script is often clever and while the nonlinear structure might be another one of the movie’s try-hard attempts at being quirky and artsy it is fun to follow. And after all, the audience at our showing did really like the movie. But the main reason I feel so forgiving towards the film?

It’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt who is freaking adorable. He played the little kid on 3rd Rock from the Sun but has made the leap from child to adult actor with aplomb. Ever since I saw him in Brick I’ve kind of had a thing for him. He was great in the movie and AND he has adorable, delicious eye crinkles.

So to sum up, see An Education in the theater but go to 500 Days of Summer with the girls or catch it at a matinee or on DVD.

The Q&A after We Live in Public

Last night N and I dropped E off at a friend’s house and headed up the canyon to the Sundance Resort. I’ve lived in Utah full time for 8+ years but hadn’t been to the resort until then (I don’t ski.) It was quite lovely.

We first saw We Live in Public, which was directed by Ondi Timoner who won the grand jury prize in 2004 for her documentary, DiG! (N’s does a nice job of breaking down the movie here.)

We Live in Public was fascinating. It follows Josh Harris who was one of the leaders of the early dot-com days and a pioneer in internet broadcasting. The film makes a point of exploring how fending for himself as a child (due to an emotionally unavailable mother) and growing up raised by TV influenced Harris. As a side effect of his upbringing Harris related more to characters than real people. (e.g. He refuses to call or visit his mother on her deathbed and instead sends her a video message in which he wishes her “all the best.”)

But back in the 1990s Harris was ahead of his time back. He was one of the first dot-com millionaires and his special interest was how people would use technology to communicate with others. He foresaw that people would use the internet to broadcast the details of their lives and surrender privacy in exchange for popularity among strangers. Besides just having theories, Harris saw (and still sees) himself as a great artist. And so he built a weird underground hotel/compound (complete with lots of guns) and installs cameras and monitors everywhere and bills it as the art experiment of the millennium. A bunch of the New York City art crowd moves in and after a while, as you might predict, things do not go well.

The documentary doesn’t pull any punches about how it was largely Harris’ own flaws that brought about his professional, familial, and romantic failures. Because of that I felt kind of uncomfortable when I realized that Harris himself was there for the Q&A after the screening. We had just seen a lot of unflattering and embarrassingly intimate footage of his life and now here was the man himself on stage wearing khakis. (Understandably, Harris refuses to watch the film.)

The Q&A was great though. Ondi Timoner is whip-smart and super cute to boot. She actually stayed in the compound herself and there is footage of her in the film. To make the movie they had to sift through thousands of hours of footage. The way the film explores the questions of privacy and popularity and what they mean in the MySpace/Facebook era was intriguging.

The Q&A went on for a while and so we ended up missing our reservation at the Foundry Grill and just ate at the deli. We then went back to the screening room to see Manure.

Manure was a lot of fun. It’s a comedy about manure salesmen in 1960s heartland America. The writing was funny and there were several great running gags/ zany hijinks. The cast includes Billy Bob Thorton, Tea Leoni, Kyle MacLachlan, and Ed Helms (from the Daily Show). Visually, the movie was stunning; the art direction was fantastic. The cgi backdrops reminded me of 300. They were dreamy and at times epic. The highbrow visuals contrast interestingly with the lowbrow humor (as you can imagine, there are poop jokes galore).

I’m not sure why type of distribution the movie’s has set up. Even though it has a well-known cast it’s so quirky that I can’t see it playing at the local megaplex. But I would recommend watching it if you get the chance.

And that is all I have to say about last night’s films because E is now insisting (quite vehemently) on my undivided attention.

Tonight we’re going to An Education and 500 Days of summer. Bring on the coming-of-age stories and romances!

N and I are pretty good about getting babysitters every couple of weeks and going out to eat or to movies but we haven’t done anything especially fun for about, oh, 14 months or so.

We live just outside Salt Lake City and the Sundance Film Festival is a pretty big deal around here. In the pre-E days we would usually go see a few things at the festival. Last year we didn’t make it to any shows together (having a two month-old somehow got in the way) but this year we decided to be wild and crazy and bought a 12-ticket package.

We cobbled together a line-up of babysitters and next week we’re going to go see six things, two-a-night for three nights. It was hard to select what we wanted to see, but our choices were somewhat limited because we wanted to avoid Park City. Park City is where the celebrities and glitzy events are but N and I are old fuddyduddies and didn’t want to deal with the longer drive, the crowds, and having to finding parking and ride the shuttle. So we’re seeing these films in Odgen, downtown SLC, and at the Sundance resort.

• We Live in Public
• Manure
• An Education
• 500 Days of Summer
• Dare
• Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

I’m excited about going. Hopefully E will be over this super-cranky funk he’s been in for the last week and be good for his sitters. He started digging at his ears over the last few days and then this morning he was crying and slapping himself on the head/pulling on his hair. I have to admit, it was pretty alarming to see. Does anyone else’s kid do that? Just to be safe, I’m going to take him to the doctor later today to see if he has an ear infection.