Things picked up a bit on this front in October. Here are 11 more movies from the likes of movie theaters, Netflix, and questionable websites.
The Martian
Blog readers know I read this book back in January and looked forward to the movie - and the movie delivered! One of the best blockbusters I've seen in theaters in years. It's endearing NASA fanfiction. Check it out.
The Double
Apparently this was based on a Dostoyevsky short story, which is something I did not know when I saw it. Jesse Eisenberg plays a sad sack pushover who one day runs into his own doppelgänger - also played by Eisenberg, of course. The doppelgänger gets a job in his office and even shows interest in the same woman, and he's also got way more charisma and charm and social aptitude. Weirder still, no one seems to notice that he looks anything like the first guy, even though they're visually identical. I dug this one, and thought it was definitely worth the hour and a half or so on Netflix.
Upstream Color
Holy hell, I've got nothing. Ostensibly this was about some sort of pig-bacteria-human circle of life and the way two people are connected and something or other. It's from the guy who made Primer, and to me it was both way harder to follow and also less interesting. I'm sure there are smart analyses of this movie floating around on the Internet but I just didn't care about it at all.
Antichrist
So, Lars von Trier is all kinds of fucked up and so are his movies. But those movies are also absurdly beautiful. This one was full of some real grotesque shit, and to even begin to describe it would feel fruitless. Like, don't watch it - but if you do, get ready to marvel at something that looks like a Terrence Malick flick.
The Duke of Burgundy
I liked this way more than I expected to. Two women are engaged in a lesbian relationship in some sort of vaguely old-fashioned European area. There isn't a man in the entire movie. The women study butterflies together at a university. They do a lot of role play, particularly of the dominance and submission varieties. But the one who gets off on it most is the submissive; the dominant is quickly shown to be kind of tired and weary about the whole ordeal they go through. But she fears that her younger girlfriend will leave her if she stops acting so demeaning and demanding. It was actually pretty interesting, I thought. And funny, too! Your mileage may vary.
Extract
Mila Kunis, Jason Bateman, and a handful of other recognizable faces turned out for Mike Judge's follow-up to Office Space. It was funny enough, and felt a whole lot like a poorer man's Office Space. An idiot, down on his luck and upset with the way his life is going, concocts a pretty bad scheme that goes very poorly for him and a few other people. It's not Office Space by a long shot - not nearly as quotable or memorable or funny - but it's well worth a watch.
Ex Machina
Here's that British indie sci-fi movie that got some buzz last summer. It's about a reclusive billionaire designer who's trying to administer the Turing test to an android he has created. To do this, he hires an employee and observes that man's interactions with his robot. There was nothing too complicated about the way this one unfolded, but it was still an interesting movie with a few memorable scenes. The setting - a "smart cabin" of sorts alone in the middle of the woods - was absolutely perfect, and added a weird sense of unease to everything.
Glengarry Glen Ross
A year or two ago, Trevor made a post about this movie. I was glad to finally check it out. It's a stage play adapted for film, which meant it was heavy on dialogue and light on the setting, but that's fine - it was an enjoyable and entertaining movie. Perhaps the best part of it was Alec Baldwin's angry monologue at the beginning - his only scene - which gave us the phrase "always be closing." It's an easy watch at ninety minutes, and it really only has a handful of scenes.
Cleopatra (1963)
I'll generally bemoan the length of some three-hour contemporary movies, but this one - 52 years old now - exceeds four hours. I'm pretty sure I was on my laptop or phone for the entirety of the film, which is really the only way I could get through it. I only watched it because Netflix is losing it in November - which is weird, since if it had stayed on Netflix in perpetuity I'm not sure I'd have ever felt the urge to sit through it. Anyway, this one's a classic, more so for the stories surrounding the movie than for the movie itself. Elizabeth Taylor almost died from an illness early on, causing them to relocate filming from London to Rome - scrapping all kinds of sets and footage and castings in the process. Then she had an affair with Richard Burton, the guy who played Marc Antony, and suddenly roughly every other day of shooting was canceled or rescheduled because of some fight the two had gotten into the night before. Apparently 20th Century Fox wanted this to be two movies, initially - Caesar and Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra - which would have made so much more sense, but then the studio wanted to capitalize on the Taylor-Burton affair while it was hot. The movie had a budget of $2 million that eventually ballooned to $44 million - which is like $350 million in today's dollars. Fox nearly went bankrupt. The movie was the top-grossing title of 1963 but was still an enormous money-losing bomb. The whole thing just fascinates me. The movie itself was a bit bland and slow by todays standards, the way 1960s sword-and-sandal epics were, but I can't deny that it was stunning, epic, and sprawling. There weren't any special effects back then, so virtually everything on screen from the costumes to the sets to the crowds of thousands of people were, you know, real. I dunno, there was something to appreciate here, is all I'm saying.
Scream
I really liked this. It wasn't nearly as scary as I'd been led to believe it was back in the '90s, but it was bloodier and gorier - and also much funnier. Joss Whedon earned all kinds of accolades for Cabin in the Woods and the way it played with horror tropes and flipped conventions on their heads, but that's kind of what Wes Craven was doing with Scream, where characters explicitly discuss horror movies and "wanting to live long enough to be in the sequel." Hell, the killer ends up being - spoiler alert - two teenagers obsessed with slasher flicks. But yeah, I really dug this, and I bet I check out the sequels soon enough.
Three Kings
Dang, how hadn't I seen this one yet? It started out stronger and funnier than it ended, but that was a hell of a war satire movie. Think "Desert Storm heist" and you've got the gist. Clooney and Wahlberg and Ice Cube are in it, but the guy who stole every scene for me was Spike Jonze in his first major acting role.
That's 65 movies on the year now in these dump posts - no wonder I don't blog about other things anymore!
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