(July 24)

——My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006)——

This movie isn’t as bad as some would have you believe, but it doesn’t really hit any high marks at the same time. It’s merely a decent, standard romantic comedy with one key thing that makes it different. The girl has super powers. That fact inspires a few funny scenes, most notably the one where Uma Thurman throws a Great White Shark into her ex-boyfriend’s (Luke Wilson) bedroom after finding him with another woman. But the idea is never really taken to the heights of what it could have been. Why does Uma’s G-Girl have to be so crazy? Can’t she be a normal girl with a few odd aspects to her personality? Why does Luke Wilson have to be so milquetoast about everything? Why can’t they play up the superhero thing to a higher level? The writing here just doesn’t feel like it went through enough drafts before being filmed.

For a much more realistic and better depiction of a superheroine in the dating world, look no further than the Luna Brothers’ graphic novel, Ultra: Seven Days. I hear that they are making it into a movie. Let’s hope so, and let’s hope they do it right, so that Ultra can be what My Super Ex-Girlfriend should have been.

(MISS)

——Clerks 2 (2006)——

Kevin Smith’s movies haven’t been all that great lately. He’s really only made two great movies (Clerks and Chasing Amy) and a few interesting ones, but otherwise he’s still not known as a great director. A great writer, maybe, but only when he gives his characters plenty of time to chat without much actual plot getting in the way. I wasn’t quite sure what to think when I heard that they were making a sequel to Clerks. I of course had to see it, because I love the original so much, but would it be as good? Thankfully, Clerks 2 brings back all of the sweet, sweet magic of the original that was sorely missing from the cartoon show (sorry fans of the cartoon, but yeah, it sucks).

Clerks 2 barely has a plot. Dante is getting married and moving to Florida to work in his fiancee’s father’s car wash, so that he can finally get one of those real lives he’s been hearing so much about. Randall, his lifelong buddy, of course doesn’t want him to go. Nor does Rosario Dawson’s character, a rather improbable hottie working in a fast food restaurant, even more improbably intelligent and in love with Dante. The movie only pretends to be about growing up though. Really this is just a good excuse for Kevin Smith to let out his inner dirrrty geekboy. There are many debates. Do the Transformers suck? Is it OK to go ass to mouth? Lord of the Rings or Star Wars: which is the true trilogy? All of these are started with hilarious results by Randall. There are SO many funny parts. I’m not even going to tell you what a mouth troll is. You’ll just have to see the movie for yourself. Trust me. It’s worth every minute.

(MUST SEE)

(July 25)

——Track of the Cat (1954)——

This is an interesting little semi-Western from John Wayne’s Batjac production company. Interesting in that at times it feels more like an Ibsen play than anything else. The plot is as follows: A panther has come down off the mountain to kill some of the Bridge’s family’s cattle stock. The three sons of the family have to go out and kill it, but the panther is really more than a panther. It’s a metaphor for the strained familiar relations in this house. The stern matriarch dotes on the middle son, played by Robert Mitchum who is a great hunter and tracker, but is otherwise a giant pain in the ass. His skills helped save the ranch from falling out of the family’s hands and with his mother’s blessing he thinks that he should keep a hold of it. The older brother speaks out for the more subservient members of the family, like his quiet reserved younger brother, but his words usually fall on deaf ears since he never follows those words up by taking any action. The younger brother just lets the others fight his battles for him. There is a girl living with them that they hope he will propose to, but he is too weak to take anything for himself. He’s always doing things for the family. The movie is about him overcoming that demon, and in turn, the panther.

(SEE)

(July 26)

——Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1998)——

This is another one of those amazing Werner Herzog documentaries that just blows away in your mind what you thought a documentary could be. There is just something about how Herzog directs these films, where he seems to take you deeper into his subject material than you ever thought possible. It helps that he is great at picking his subjects, and Dieter Dengler is one of those amazing people.

Dieter grew up in World War II Germany. One day he saw an Allied plane dive bombing his house. Instead of terrifying him though, it created a lifelong obsession with flying. Little Dieter really did need to fly. Constantly throughout the documentary you see how flying is the only one true necessity for Dieter’s life. It’s all he needs.

Anyway, at the end of World War II German had no airforce, no commercial airlines. So when he became 18 he took everything he owned and moved to the US. Almost immediately he enlisted into the Navy so that he could fly planes. As soon as he finally became a pilot he was shipped to Vietnam in the opening conflict of the war, before it really was a war. On his first mission he was shot down and taken prisoner by the Viet Cong. The movie is primarily about that experience and how he survived it. It’s infinitely fascinating stuff, made even more interesting by how Dieter presents it, with a bit of excitement and humor in his voice despite how the experience obviously took its toll on him. There was just something in him though that isn’t in many of the rest of us. Nothing else mattered to him, except for flying.

You’ve really got to see this movie. It’ll knock your socks off.

(DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH)

——-Turkish Delight (1973)——

This is an interesting little film Paul Verhoeven made in his native Holland that first put him on the map as a director. It’s pretty good too. Turkish Delight is a love story that will surprise you, especially if you compare the first scene and the final shots. It’s about a crazy love between two sex-crazed youths. They meet at random, have sex at random, get into a car crash. They move in together and have fun being young and having sex. And then she gets bored with him. All they do is have sex. It doesn’t really matter that she leaves him to go have sex with someone else. He’s destroyed. But was he really in love with her? That’s what the movie is really all about. It seems throughout the whole movie that all he really wants her for is sex, but when the opportunity comes for him to be something more, what is he going to do?

The movie is very well made, with some great acting from the two leads and great direction from Verhoeven. There is lots of nudity, just so you know. Verhoeven even in the beginning wasn’t shy with both his sex and violence. Still, the movie may seem one note, but give it a chance. It will probably surprise you.

(SEE)

(July 27)

——Atlantic City (1980)——

This is my first Louis Malle film outside of the Criterion boxset, also the first American film he’s done that I’ve seen. I like it. A young Susan Sarandon is in it, and she is mad hot. The story is about how she is trying to make it in Atlantic City, after her brother screwed up a job for her in Vegas. She wants to be a blackjack dealer and go to Monte Carlo. Her brother finds her in Atlantic City, though, dragging along her sister, who he left her for. He stole some cocaine that he is trying to unload. In the same apartment building is Lou, an old-time gangster who has lost his edge in old age. The brother thinks that he can take advantage of the old man in unloading the coke. Lou sees this as an opportunity to make it back into the big time. He’s fallen in love with Sarandon, having watched her every day after she gets home from shucking oysters clean the fish smell off. Lou gets the money for the drugs but things don’t go as plan for the brother, and suddenly Lou finds himself with a bit of money and a new life he thought he lost long ago. It’s a really well put together film, infinitely watchable, and very, very good.

(SEE)

(July 28)

——-Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999)——

I’m still relatively new to Jim Jarmusch. What I’ve seen of his so far (Coffee & Cigarettes, Broken Flowers) I didn’t really like too much. So I approached this one with some hesitation. Thankfully it wasn’t needed. This is an excellent film and probably the best I’ve seen of transposing samurai values faithfully to the West. Forest Whitaker as Ghost Dog just embodies the samurai figure I’ve seen so many times before in film and in the pages of Lone Wolf and Cub. A lot of the quirky details fit the genre perfectly too. Like, it just makes sense that Ghost Dog’s best friend would be someone who doesn’t even speak the same language, and yet they are always thinking the same things at the same time anyway.

The plot is actually fairly standard for a samurai film. Loyal samurai does job perfectly for his master. Master’s master thinks samurai fucked up and is so good that he has become a liability and wants him dead. Betrayed samurai then has to cut his way through backstabbing lords to stay alive, without breaking the warrior code that he lives by. Just like all of those Japanese samurai movies. Except for this one takes place in modern day New York City and the soundtrack is done by the RZA. This is an action movie for those more concerned with mood and tone than kinetic editing and crazy camera angles. Ghost Dog is constantly reading from different chapters from The Way of the Samurai, and these quiet little asides really help those in the West not familiar with these texts understand where Ghost Dog is coming from and why he does things the way he does. What an awesome movie. Definitely check this one out. It’s got heart and action. It’s a movie for everyone.

(MUST SEE)

(July 29)

——Super Troopers (2002)——

I was at a birthday party. This was on. I need say no more.

(MUST SEE)

(July 30)

——Date Movie (2005)——

Gawd, is this movie bad. Like, really, really bad. Like, I’d really love to like this movie, but I just can’t, bad. On the box it says the movie is from two of the five writers of Scary Movie. They must be the two that made those movies suck. Instead of spoofing horror movies, they spoof romantic comedies. The one problem with this is that in most cases their comedy is spoofing…a COMEDY. Trouble is, the original jokes were a lot better. It’s as if they think just referencing another movie in a slightly more absurd way is somehow funny. They aren’t even really trying. The smiles that do come across your face will be from the memories of better movies this film illicits, not actually anything from this. Ouch.

(AVOID!!!)

——Dogtown and Z-Boys (2002)——

The nice thing about that $1.99 rental card I got from Blockbuster was that it allowed me a chance to see a lot of stuff I wouldn’t have otherwise spent my hard-earned money on. Like documentaries. For some reason I just really don’t like paying to see documentaries, especially when there is good scripted fiction films to be seen. Which is a shame, since there are a lot of great documentaries out there, like this one.

Dogtown and Z-Boys is about the modern skateboarding movement. I actually learned quite a bit about skateboarding from this. Like, I didn’t know that skateboarding was originally a fad like yo-yos and hula-hoops in the ‘50s. As a sport it kind of dropped off the planet until the miraculous invention of plastic wheels. Then a group of badass surfers (which is where the whole punk aesthetic of skateboarding originated) in Dogtown started skateboarding all the time when the waves weren’t good, using the odd suburban landscape of LA as their playground. This small group of skaters basically invented pretty much everything we now take for granted in modern skateboarding. Probably the most startling section of the film is when the Z-Boys go to the first skateboarding competition since the 50’s and completely change the rules as to what skateboarding was in front of all of these competitors doing it the old way. It’s good stuff, and all of the interviews they get with the original Z-Boys are extremely animated and interesting.

If you like documentaries, or are just like me and want to see more of them, this one is

(MUST SEE)

——Take the Money and Run (1969)——

This is the earliest Woody Allen film that I’ve seen so far. The DVD is put out by MGM, so I’m not exactly sure why it wasn’t included in one of their three Woody Allen boxsets. Got me. This is funny, if still early in Allen’s creative development as a writer and director. Bananas would be much funnier. It’s very much like his later and greater Zelig, in that this is shot like a documentary about a small time loser crook (played by Allen) whose crappy childhood of everyone beating on him lead to his life as a really bad thief. There is definitely a pattern to his life, in that every once and a while he comes up for a really great idea for a big score and then promptly finds himself in jail. There are a lot of homages to other prison movies in this, most notably in a later sequence that rips off whole chunks of I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang. The movie is really just an excuse for nonstop silly gags. Nothing too brilliant, but when you compare this to say, Date Movie, this is Shakespeare in comparison. The best thing about the movie I think is the documentary angle, which I’m sure was pretty revolutionary and unusual when the movie first came out. I enjoyed it. Woody Allen has made a lot more much better films, but this one is no clunker either.

(SEE)