Day 4: Greenberg (2010)

Greenberg
Director: Noah Baumbach
Starring: Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig, Rhys Ifans

I kind of like movies with unlikeable protagonists...sometimes.  I guess I'm saying that it doesn't bother me if the movie is interesting enough.  Sometimes it just makes things unbearable.  Movies like Young Adult or even Rushmore are able to grab me as a viewer despite the fact that the main characters are constantly making terrible decisions that hurt themselves and others.  These movies succeed because you find yourself rooting for the main character to overcome their personal issues and take a step towards putting their lives in a better place.

Greenberg, like Baumbach's other films, doesn't really give the audience anybody to love.  We're presented with real people.  Damaged people.  The movie really could be called "Greenberg and Florence".  These are the two characters with serious issues with self-image and relationships.  This isn't really a fun movie at all because Florence and Roger are unable to develop any sort of conventional rapport to comfort the audience.

This movie wallows in awkwardness.  I'd call it a cringe comedy, except it really isn't all that funny.  I still prefer The Squid and the Whale to this film.  While this movie is about two lost people who are too insecure in themselves to reach out to anyone else in a substantial way, Squid was more grounded in the idea of a broken family.  This gave that film more room for comedy to fill the gaps between the messed up psychology.

I think I like Noah Baumbach as a director more than I should.  Aside from Squid (which is one of my favorite movies), I haven't really fallen in love with any of his films.  I'm pretty sure I love him so much because he reminds me of Wes Anderson, someone who has yet to make a film I don't like.  Both tackle the psychology of broken characters hurting each other, unable to express their honest feelings to others or themselves.  However, while Baumbach presents his character studies in sparse, quiet reality; Anderson coddles the viewer with a slightly fantastical setting, meticulous visuals, and whimsical soundtracks.  While Anderson's style is certainly more up my alley, Baumbach manages to keep me thinking about my own relationships and the odd characters in my own life.

Anyway, Greta Gerwig's performance was probably the best part of the movie.  This makes me excited to see Baumbach's new film Frances Ha in a few days (she stars and co-writes).

Lesson learned: Duran Duran is good heroin music.

Day 3: Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

Star Trek Into Darkness
Director: JJ Abrams
Starring: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Benedict Cumberbatch

Confession time: I'm not much of a Star Trek fan.  I know, as a self proclaimed geek, this is shameful.  I chose Star Wars early in my life instead.  Aside from a few of the classic episodes of the original series and the occasional episode of Next Gen caught on cable as a kid, my experience with the Enterprise is limited.  However, I did watch Wrath of Khan as part of my original Daily Cinema project.

I loved JJ's first Star Trek movie.  It was fun, the characters were great, and the action effects were impressive.  I wasn't a major Star Trek fan, so the overall changes in tone didn't bug me at all.  This second foray into space is even better than the first.  The villain is better, the plot is more coherent, and the action DOES NOT STOP.  Seriously, this film doesn't take a breather or check in on side plots.  Instead, this is two hours of solid action propelling the entire film towards a single climax.  It worked beautifully.  The action was absolutely awesome.

The performances, though, grounded this space opera for the audience.  The main cast from the first film seemed to take a firmer grasp of their roles (especially my favorites, Karl Urban and Simon Pegg).  The addition of Benedict Cumberbatch was welcome.  My wife is obsessed with him and we both love Sherlock.  He crafted a villainous role here that stole every scene he was in.  He managed to by a psychologically complex antagonist, something totally missing from film one.  The movie managed to tackle moral and intellectual quandaries while blowing apart space ships.  Fun.  That's what it was.

I did have some gripes here, though.  Firstly, there was a major plot hole during the climax in which they supposedly needed to keep Khamberbatch alive despite having a room full of people with the same super blood on the ship.  Also, the callbacks to the old Star Trek II were a little heavy handed.  I would have liked to see them do some more original dramatic/emotional stuff rather than rehashing the thing that was so iconic before.  Yes, I understand that this is a tribute, but it sort of felt cheap playing on what worked in the past so directly.  Also, the major death was resolved too quickly without giving the audience time to grieve.

MAJOR WHINE TIME: I'm sick of big action movies being forced into 3D film making.  It is ruining cinematography.  I always choose to see the movies in 2D because I refuse to pay extra for a distracting gimmick, but these days it remains distracting even without the 3D.  Everything is unnecessarily zooming towards the camera for a sort of shocking 3D effect.  In the future, when the 3D fad is over and we're watching these movies at home later, we'll see this era as an odd time for wacky superfluous camera work.

Lesson learned: It's handy to have an older, alternate version of oneself around for advice in tough situations.

Day 2: Tampopo (1985)

Tampopo
Director: Juzo Itami
Starring: Tsutomu Yamazaki, Nobuko Miyamoto, Ken Watanabe

I'm obsessed with ramen.  No, I'm not referring to the cheap instant noodles that college students "survive" on, I mean real ramen.  The noodle soup that is an obsession in Japan.  I didn't know much about it until Kay and I went to the Slurping Turtle in Chicago and had my first bowl of authentic ramen.  Since then I've become totally consumed by my quest to make the perfect bowl of ramen (something I'll likely be discussing in non-movie posts here this summer).  

I read about this movie when it was mentioned in David Chang's Momofuku Cookbook (the beginning of my homemade ramen education).  He said that this movie really made ramen more popular outside of Japan.  I can see why.  This film about a young woman's quest to open the best ramen shop in Japan is basically food porn.  I kept finding myself craving every steamy bowl shown in the film.  I wanted to taste the broth they were slurping so bad.  It also managed to be quite educational about ramen techniques and how a ramen restaurant works (owning one here in St. Louis is a distant dream of mine).  

The movie itself is really more quirky than laugh out loud funny.  I laughed the most at a pseudo dream sequence in which a rival ramen shop attacks hers because she and her mentor dissed their soup the previous day.  The structure of the movie is really quite experimental.  There is a slow moving main plot about a trucker who helps this girl with her ramen.  It has a sort of western/cowboy feel to it.  Interspersed within this main story are random scenes of an attractive young couple with a really messed up food fetish.  The strangest scene between these two involved them passing a raw egg yolk back and fourth with their mouths (with some really unsettling close-up camera work).

While the main plot is cute, the best part of the movie is an extended series of vignettes about people and food.  The film will pick a random character, follow their mini story, then switch focus to a background character in that scene and follow them for a while, then switching again.  I love when movies do this.  This was a really creative way to form a sort of collage of individuals and their humorous adventures in food.  My favorite included an old con man who pleaded with the cops to allow him to have one more bite of duck before hauling him away to the slammer.

 While I can't quite say that this is a movie I would really recommend to anyone, it was definitely an interesting experimental comedy with a lot of nice footage of people eating tasty noodle soup.

Lesson learned: People in Japan take noodles very seriously. 

 

Day 1: Iron Man 3 (2013)

Iron Man 3
Director: Shane Black
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Guy Pearce, Ben Kingsley

Comic books have always been important to me.  I grew up collecting them before I ever really knew how to read.  To this day, they are a major passion of mine.  Aside from watching movies, reading comics is my favorite hobby.  When I was a kid, I always watched Batman and Spider-Man cartoons.  It was exciting to see my printed heroes break through the pages and make their way into actual moving pictures on my TV.  There were very few comic book movies that were worth watching, so animation was my destination for non-comic superhero media. This changed the summer after my 8th grade year when Bryan Singer's X-Men was released.  It was amazing to see superheroes taken seriously on the big screen.  Since then, the past 13 years have been jam packed with comic book movies that outdid anything attempted in superhero films before.  This all sort of built toward last summer's Avengers movie, arguably the grandest expression of comic book fandom ever shown at the cinema.

Iron Man 3 marks the first post-Avengers Marvel movie, part of their "phase three" building to an inevitable Avengers 2.  This movie, though, manages to transcend its connection with the wider Marvel universe to tell a solid story about Tony Stark the man rather than Iron Man the superhero.  It is better than the messy, over-packed Iron Man 2 (which was redeemed by Sam Rockwell) and is probably better than even the first Iron Man (which failed to present a compelling antagonist).

Iron Man 3 gets so much right.  It focuses on telling a human story while still delivering great action.  Robert Downey Jr. is so charismatic as Tony Stark that I think I'd watch a whole movie just about him running Stark Industries and hanging out around the house.  I feel like this movie really took advantage of its own continuity.  By having all the necessary back story already taken care of, this film was able to just jump into the action immediately.  This is the benefit of Marvel building its universe.  It will trust its fans to pay attention enough that each new generation of films will delve deeper and deeper into the Marvel mythos and tell more interesting non-origin stories.

Anyway, this is getting ramble-y (can you tell that I'm out of practice with movie criticism?)  Overall, this was an excellent action movie that kicked off what looks to be a pretty great summer movie season (which I much prefer to awards-y season later in the year).

Lesson learned: Fighting aliens can really mess a guy up mentally.

PS- I'm doing some backlogged posts for movies I've watched in the last week or so.  I get out of school next week so regular real time posting won't start really until then.

Round 2

So my life has been crazy the past 4 years since the summer that I watched 70-something movies.  I got married, moved twice, and my wife opened her own business.  I am working on a MA in medieval history, teach high school students full time, and spend the rest of my time helping out in my lady's bakery.  I have sacrificed much of my personal life and often feel like I spend the precious personal time I have doing nothing worthwhile, wasting away every precious minute in a pointless internet loop (damn you, Reddit!).

Summer is almost here and I'm not working or taking a class.  Sure, most of my time will be spent helping my Mrs. in the bakery.  However I'll need something to do in the evenings when I'm not reading comics or hanging out with friends. 

I have been feeling the need to take on a personal project for a while.  This fall I'll be taking a grad seminar on the crusades, teaching, AND doing bakery work.  If I'm going to have a project, it'll have to bee this summer. 

This summer, I will reignite my movie a day project.  I'll continue to fill in the gaps of my pop culture knowledge with missed classics, recent critical darlings, current summer blockbusters, and total geeky pleasures.  Not only do I get to enjoy the flicks, but I also get to work on my critical writing. 

Will I get as much reading done as I should?  Will I work on next year's lesson plans?  Probably not.

Anyway, feel free to read along!  I promise not to review as many kung fu movies this year...