Filed under: heterosexuals, movies | Tags: carey mulligan, michael fassbender, movies, sex addiction, shame
Shame was basically made for me. It’s intensely slow-moving, there’s full-frontal male nudity within the first two minutes, there aren’t very many characters, and more attention is made to arty cinematography than to keeping the audience happy. I like all of those things. We also get to watch the man who played both Magneto and Mr. Rochester this year fucks a bunch of people, which is not a small thing, either. As with the Marvel antagonist and the Bronte character, we are attracted to his charms even though we’re constantly reminded that he’s kind of a dickbag.
Or is he?
The beautiful Michael Fassbender plays Brandon, a successful New York businessman. Society and economics and Michael Douglas movies have all trained me to understand that New York businessmen are all kind of jerks. But Brandon’s not a bad guy, or at least he’s better than his young boss, a married lecher who wears expensive hoodies under his sportcoats and hits on women like a tenth-grader would. Just because Brandon has a fancy apartment and a delightfully long penis and a suave ability to nail roughly 50% of the women he sets his eyes on doesn’t make him evil, or even particularly troubled. He’s single, happy that way, and consensually doing what he wants to do with women who also seem to like what he’s doing.
Filed under: movies | Tags: anniversaries, the royal tenenbaums, wes anderson
Last night Wes Anderson reunited with (some of) the cast of The Royal Tenenbaums, to mark the tenth anniversary of its 2001 premiere at the New York Film Festival.
For me, The Royal Tenenbaums is probably the most important movie of the past ten years. I could go back and forth about whether it’s actually the best movie, but tempting though it may be it’s probably counterproductive to spend the rest of my day debating the pros and cons of whether it’s a “better” movie than, say, Morvern Callar.
What makes certain movies really great, I think, is their ability to elicit different emotions at different times. I first saw The Royal Tenenbaums in a movie theater with a good friend, and we both laughed a lot. The second time, I watched it at home with my mother; she fell asleep after five minutes and I cried for an hour and a half.
Filed under: hookers, movies | Tags: greece, melina mercouri, movies, never on sunday, prostitution
I first encountered the melody to “Never On Sunday,” without realizing it, as the base for late-nineties cheesefest “No Tengo Dinero,” a tinny sort of mariachi-inspired Shaggy-lite number that hit pop radio around my junior year of high school. Years later, I’d encounter the song again as the lead track on Petula Clark’s truly fabulous 1965 album The World’s Greatest International Hits! In the song, Clark tells a man how he can kiss her on any day of the week except Sunday, because by that point of the week she’s worn out from all the kissing.
I didn’t realize until much, much later that the song (which was originally performed in Greek with completely different lyrics) was the theme to Never On Sunday, an Oscar-nominated film from 1960 that’s part light-hearted Mediterranean comedy and part social drama about a prostitutes’ rebellion in Greece’s largest port city.
Filed under: hot, movies | Tags: hats, matt damon, philip k dick, suits, the adjustment bureau
In one early episode of the unappreciated 1968 season of The Avengers, Steed and Tara King (the oft-forgotten Mrs. Peel replacement) stumble upon a nefarious gang of window-washers who freeze time and brainwash an entire office. It’s a really good episode, and one I saw very recently. Probably why I kept thinking about it during The Adjustment Bureau, the movie in which Matt Damon stumbles upon a group of well-dressed indivuduals who are, uh, freezing time and brainwashing his office.
I like this movie. I like it because it’s pretty stylish, and because it’s going in about fifty different directions at any given moment. If you’ve seen the trailers, some of which emphasize the love story and some of which emphasize that it’s a thriller about a gang of old men in hats, then maybe you get the idea.
Filed under: hookers, movies | Tags: call girls, movies, sasha grey, steven soderbergh, the girlfriend experience, two years late to the party
Way back in early 2009, it seemed like every single person on the internet was talking about The Girlfriend Experience, porn star Sasha Grey’s entry into the world of mainstream film. The movie had a really great poster, and it was made by popular director Steven Soderbergh, but it didn’t get a whole lot of distribution and disappeared rather quickly, earning (according to iMDB) less than a million dollars total.
Yesterday, lazing my way through a combination sick day/snow day, I finally saw the film, which is currently streaming on Netflix. It’s interesting, for a Hollywood movie about prostitution. But also it’s pretty frustrating, particularly if you like movies where anything actually happens.
Grey plays Chelsea, a Manhattan call girl whose clients are mainly sad-sack hotshots who spend most of their sessions dispensing unasked for financial advice. (Invest in gold. Vote for McCain. Invest in gold.) Meanwhile, Chelsea’s also talking to a reporter who wants to profile her, chronicling her day-to-day life (and wardrobe) in a diary, and trying to update her website. She agrees to meet a man who runs an escort review site when she knows full well that he’s probably full of shit. She is mostly if not all business.
Filed under: movies | Tags: bad movies, cry of the owl, julia stiles, patricia highsmith
Yesterday morning I finally watched The Cry Of The Owl, the film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s wonderful, wonderful thriller, which I read back in January and which ended up being my favorite thing I read all year. As I feared, the movie’s pretty terrible; it remains pretty faithful to the plot of the novel, but goes out of its way to confuse every character’s motivations, and not in a good way. Also, Julia Stiles portrays the depressed, romantic Jenny with such vocal and facial blankness that the viewer need never wonder what it would be like to see Taylor Swift cast as the Log Lady. It’s impossible for the audience to believe that peeping tom Robert Forrester–played by Paddy Considine as some sort of B-grade Steve Carrell character–would ever be attracted to Jenny’s happy smile; that would require her to actually move her facial muscles.
The film also has some pacing issues. When the Highsmith reader meets Forrester, he’s turning down a dinner offer from a possibly swinger-y co-worker to spy on a girl living alone in a secluded house in the woods. While the readers sympathies eventually align Robert, it’s not at all taken for granted that he’s not a total creep. In the movie, the first scene is the same. The co-worker is inexplicably a lot more annoying–jokingly telling Robert he wants to fuck him (but not in a gay way!) for no reason related to the rest of the film–but Forrester’s creepy shenanigans are presented as a pretty run-of-the-mill quirk, like it’s not really that unusual for a grown man to hide in the woods watching a vacantly pretty blonde do dishes.
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I don’t normally care much for action movies, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Bruce Willis, going all the way back to the first Die Hard. He’s got charisma, he’s got nice arms, he can actually act, and I can take him seriously.
He’s also really hot. Actually, he looks a lot better now than he did a quarter-century ago, when he first appeared on Moonlighting, the mystery-comedy series he starred in opposite Cybill Shepard. Maybe it’s just because I’ve got an autoboner for baldness-disguising head shaving; I don’t know. Peter Keough, writing for the Boston Phoenix, made it a point in his review of new action comedy Red to accuse the actor of looking more like Mr. Clean with each passing film. Whatever, dude.
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Filed under: gay, movies | Tags: a single man, julianne moore, pandering to the gays, the gays, tom ford
(Or, Matthew watched another movie.)
In theory, I hate A Single Man. I hate it because it’s just further proof Hollywood won’t make a movie about gay people unless it’s completely fucking costumey. The film is set in 1962, which we know because it looks like 1962 and has cars from 1962 and people dress like it’s 1962 and read Aldous Huxley and Truman Capote like it’s 1962 and talk to each other with the formality of 1962 and also the perfect American family lives next door like it’s 1962. (Of course, even though we only see them very briefly, we learn that the marriage next door is completely loveless, because that is the secret behind all married couples in movies set in 1962.) When a voice on the radio starts talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis, you kind of want to start yelling at the screen. “What kind of movie are you trying to make here, Tom Ford? Forrest Gump 2?” That is what you want to yell.
Maybe it pisses me off because movies about gay people that aren’t treated as period dramas–this one, say–end up in distribution limbo for years while studios fight about whether or not people can stomach well-known Hollywood actors kissing on-screen. And maybe it pisses me off because when A Single Man came out, Julianne Moore’s character was pushed in previews as a lead who shares a bedpillow with Colin Firth’s homo English professor, when in the film they’re on separate throw pillows in the living room and actually she’s not even in the movie a whole lot.
But.
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Last night, on a whim, I rented Terribly Happy, the new-to-DVD Danish thriller starring Jakob Cedergren as Robert, a Copenhagen cop who suddenly finds himself in a creepy rural town where the locals don’t take kindly to strangers. People in the (I think) unnamed town vanish a lot, but folks don’t seem to think that mysterious disappearances are the business of outsiders. In fact, the only person who warms up to Robert is Ingelise, a pretty blonde loner who probably has the most secrets of anybody. If the premise sounds a little bit like The Wicker Man, that’s because it is, sort of. But it’s also a dark thriller about small towns, and about the consequences of female sexuality in a backwoods town.
Director Henrik Ruben Genz takes most of his thematic cues from David Lynch and the Coen Brothers. Leading man Robert is, like all Coen Brothers anti-heroes, a little dopey, a little over his head and a little too eager to resort to violence. Ingelise is reminiscent of Isabella Rosselini’s character in Blue Velvet, and her roughneck cowboy husband could have stepped out of Wild At Heart or Mulholland Drive. (Obviously not everyone makes it through the film alive.)
