two movies i hate myself for not hating and one from asia.

and i was on such a roll! dismissing films as self-righteous, embarrassments to cinema, etc. now don't get me wrong, there's some pretty awful stuff going on in the following movies, but at the same time, it seems like they're blessings from the same studios responsible for Fever Pitch and the Bad News Bears remake. now let me lament my dilemma more specifically...


STAY: so first of all, the movie ends and pfeiffer has NO idea what the twist ending means. i take this immediately as a good sign, because whether you think so or not, pfeiffer is a decently intelligent fellow. at least way more intelligent than the majority of the KQRS listeners who won tickets to the screening we atended. therefore, my initial reaction is either this movie did a craptastic job communicating to its audience or its audience didn't bother trying to put the clues together because they thought they were in for your standard big budget murder mystery. i have ultimately decided it was definitely a little bit of both. i mean, if you watch 90 minutes of an emo-looking christian bale wannabe (ryan gosling) expressing his desire to kill himself while a more-dapper-than-usual americanized ewan mcgregor acts as his half-assed psychologist and the movie goes absolutely NOWHERE until the twist ending, then of course you're not going to really invest your time in it. ESPECIALLY when the jackass director marc forster (finding never-gonna-see-it, monster's lull) keeps using obnoxiously expensive computer gimmickry to enhance the please-call-me-film-noir-i'll-give-you-a-dollar tone of it all. and ESPECIALLY when naomi hotts is too pretty to ever kick any ass or you know, actually be a character that anyone should care about at all (I LOVE YA BABE!). but still, when it all came together at the end and i pretended like the actual process of watching the movie was enjoyable and thought, wow i actually used a brain cell during that last five minutes. was the film's intentions actually intelligent and bending the line of major studio cinema? that's...actually...commendable? no. respectable? no. mildly fascinating? yes. okay so i guess didn't NOT hate this movie as much as i had originally thought. phew. polley still comes out ahead.


THE WEATHER MAN: i'm pretty sure i'm effed here though. my dumbass brain likes this self-depricating humor not-so-elegantly blended with STONE COLD SERIOUS SHIT drama way too much for its own good. i'm pretty sure it will be elemental in my inevitable slightly ironic death of some sort. maybe the funeral home my family goes with will be called "flisher and sons" or something. so i'm going to go ahead and blame my liking of this movie on the fact that i am cursed. i loved american cruelty when it came out and was pleased when it won all those golden men. i try to watch it now and i go into spasms and froth at the mouth (in a negative way). thank criminy i bought that used (THAT'S WHY YOU BUY USED DVDs, the drax). if i bought the weather man a couple years from now as a used DVD, would i feel the same way? very possible. however, this cannot escape me from the fact that i was effing INSPIRED while watching this movie. quotable as fuck and exquisitely entertaining. DAMMIT I HATE MYSELF. it's GORE VERBINSKI! since when did the director of THE RING decide he had the right to make movies centered around multi-dimensional characters?!? oh wait, he didn't, it just tricked me into thinking that it did because it was a tinge more character-based than most of the schlock in the theatres today. FUCK. wait no, nicolas cage's dave spritz is a great character, playing both the hero AND the loser, that's exactly the kind of protagonist i want in my movies. haha he had witty inner monologues like this in adaptation! i GENUINELY love THAT movie, so it's okay for me to like the weather man, right? SON OF A BITCH. ok, i know a way to settle this. what else did this writer write? wrestling ernest hemingway?! that's it?! my MOM likes that movie! (much love, momz). i am too flustered to blog my way out of this one. go see the weather man and then yell at me for being stupid so i can start hating things again.


THREE...EXTREMES: enter asia. if there's any continent that knows how to rock the hizouse without causing me to hate myself, it's the one full of jackie chans. 3 short horror films from some of korea, japan and china's most respected independent directors? how could i go wrong? i can't, mostly. korea definitely has the leg up, as you can tell by the photo i've included. this is some serious skin-crawly stuff we're dealing with. not haha paris hilton is finally getting murdered on-screen! though throughout the first 2 shorties (that's what i call short films) i did chuckle because they tended to either go over-the-top in a "i'm a 12-year-old watching tales from the crypt!" kind of way or sporadically splice sheer terror with unexpected and uncomforting comic relief (the latter of which appeared the korean entry "Cut"). these first two films' use of comedy screamed old-school david lynch and modern-day master eli roth at the same time, yet still locked my eyeballs in a freaked-out position for their entire duration. they're so jampacked and fast-paced i don't even think i can recount what goes on in these films, except by using keywords...

china's "Dumplings": eating, babies.
korea's "Cut": hatchet, self-deactualization.
japan's "Box": carnies, fire.

what a ride. the last film "Box" doesn't fit with the others WHATSOEVER but it's a beautiful avant-garde pastiche of guilt and silence that is probably the most experimentally gorgeous horror film i've ever seen. absolutely breathtaking in the category of "horror filmmaking," asians have once again made americans look like idiot assholes in yet another field. good work, land of the slanty eyes.

This entry was posted by chris, on Saturday, October 29, 2005. You can leave your response.