(January 8)

——Little Children (2006)——

The first six films on this list constitute Moviepalooza 2007, where I actually went to see six movies at four different theaters over two days. Why’d I do it? Why the hell not? When you break as many crazy personal records as I have the last couple years, you need to find new (read: easier) records to break. So I spent my two days off either in a theater, or in my car, ferrying me to a theater. Little Children was the first film I saw and it started Moviepalooza 2007 off with a bang. It was probably my favorite of the six, although another movie with the word “Children” comes awfully close in my mind.

Little Children is one of those strange indie movies that I come across every six months or so that just so completely blows my mind that I can’t help talking about it enthusiastically. The story on its own doesn’t sound all that spectacular. Two bored and lonely stay at home parents meet after taking their little children to the park and have adulterous affair, while there is a parallel story involving a recently released child molester moving into the neighborhood. On the surface it is nothing you haven’t seen in numerous other indie films. What really sold the movie for me though was Todd Field’s tone. I can’t think of another film that uses an abstract, omnipresent narrator like this film does, one who tells us what the main characters are thinking in a rather detached, godlike manner, very novel-like. It feels like you are reading a good book instead of watching a film, one that pulls no punches and plays out just the way you would picture it in your head. The acting, writing, directing is all fantastic, rich, detailed and exciting. The sex in it is raw and surprising. All and all, I’d say that you’d have to work really hard to find filmmaking this good in many other places.

(MUST SEE)

——Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006)——

Chance or fate made me see this movie, because The Queen was originally supposed to be seen in its place (a film I STILL have yet to drag myself to see). Despite the fact that I had six movies on my list of things I wanted to see this week, Perfume was not on it. Mainly because I had never heard of it, nor knew anything about it. Harry really wanted to see it though because he’s a huge fan of the director (most famous for having done Run, Lola, Run) but didn’t want to see it directly after Children of Men (he’s not into the marathon thing, like I am.) So as I got ready to see Little Children and saw that they were also playing Perfume at that same theater, sooner than The Queen, I called him and asked him if he’d like to see it Monday instead of Tuesday after Children of Men. He had been looking for someone to see it with, so everybody won.

Boy am I glad he convinced me to see it, because this is a wonderful, if extremely weird (read: wonderful) film. The story is of a boy born in Paris and left for dead many times in his pathetic life. He resists death though, because he has an amazing gift that he knows will make him special. He has a perfect sense of smell. Perfect. Unfortunately he goes from the crumbling orphanage to a skin tanner and never really gets to use that superior sense of smell, that is until one day when he gets to take a trip into Paris. Suddenly he smells all the various lovely scents there is to smell, from fresh food to perfume to a woman, a woman with a seemingly perfect scent. He follows her, trying to scoop up her scent, but he scares her and ends up killing her trying to keep her from screaming. As she dies and her soul escapes her body, he finds that her scent goes with her. He’s lost perfection. He spends most of the rest of the movie trying to learn how to keep a scent forever, and in doing so takes up the profession of perfume maker.

He’s a tad obsessed with this task at hand. Once he actually does figure out how to harvest scent he goes on a killing spree in order to combine all of these scents to make the perfect perfume. And then THAT is when things get really interesting. Without spoiling anything for you, I will say that this movie has one of the most bizarre (in a good way) endings that I’ve ever seen.

(SEE)

——Rocky Balboa (2006)——

Rocky Balboa is a proper ending to the Rocky saga. It’s not perfect, but neither is any of the films after the first, but like Rocky, this movie’s got heart. For the first time in a long while the story is actually about something. The dialogue, especially that of the first half of the film, is the best of the series behind the original Rocky, in that it finally gets back to the spirit and freshness of the first film. It’s just Rocky being Rocky, wandering around Philly, showing us why we liked him in the first place. The film only starts to fall apart a little in the climatic fight, which feels bland and slapped together. The editing and the choice to make the POV that of the pay-per-view broadcast does the movie no favors. But that is a minor complaint. Otherwise Rocky has yet again come from behind to be a winner. Believe it or not, Stallone has gone the distance with this series. Now let’s see if he can do the same with Rambo IV.

In a way this film reminded me, oddly enough, of Francois Truffaut’s Love on the Run, the final part of his series of films about Antoine Doinel, known to most as the child in The 400 Blows. In both films, clips from the rest of the series are used to reminisce about past events in order to offer some sort of closure to the series. Here Rocky is trying to get over the death of Adrienne, which has left an empty hole in his life that’s not helped out by the fact that he no longer has a boxing career and his son pretends like he’s not even related. He now tells the same fight stories of his career over and over again at his restaurant, with little to look forward to other than the next anniversary of Adrienne’s death. He needs to move forward and he does so by getting back in the ring again for one more fight, just to prove that he can still do it and his life is still worth something. And because he’s Rocky, he helps everyone else around him move forward too. Because what would Rocky be to us, if he weren’t such an inspiration, that anything worth doing is worth fighting for with every ounce of energy you have.

(SEE)

(January 9)

——Children of Men (2006)——

Alfonso Cuaron is quickly becoming a Must See director, having broke out with his great Mexican film, Y Tu Mama Tambien, and then following that up with the best Harry Potter film so far, The Prisoner of Azkaban, which brought some real artistry to a series plagued by Chris Columbus’ soulless direction. Anyone would be pleased having those two films on their resume, but Alfonso had to push the bar even higher with this film, Children of Men, which like any magnificent film, will stay with you long after you watch it. From start to finish this film is a slam-dunk, not just any slam-dunk, but a Michael Jordan slam dunk. It’s been a while since Sci-Fi has been done right, so long that you forget why the genre is even worth having around. This movie shows you why.

In the near future, women have stopped having babies. It’s been over eighteen years since the last baby was born and in the meantime the world has gone to hell in a hand basket. The rest of the world is in ruins from rioting and war, and England stands alone as a sanctuary for civilization. But just barely. Suicide bombings are commonplace. The city looks less like London and more like Baghdad, if designed by George Orwell. Illegal immigrants stream over the borders but are quickly captured and detained before being deported from a horrible prison city that will remind you very much of a certain Iraqi prison.

Theo (the always amazing Clive Owen) has had it with this existence. The only thing that keeps him going is his visits to his pot smoking, activist friend Jasper (the always amazing Michael Caine). Then his ex-wife (Julianne Moore) comes out of nowhere to give him a very important task. Transport a girl to the coast. It just happens to turn out that that girl is the first pregnant woman the world has seen in a very, very long time.

Cuaron makes magic with this premise. His camerawork is breathtaking. There are several very long tracking shots that measure up with the very best in cinema history, shots so long but transparently so that you suddenly have this moment where you stop and ask yourself, “Wait, when is the last time the camera actually cut?” It’s filmmaking at its best, totally transporting you into this world full throttle. It brings a gritty realism to the film that will haunt you for days. I loved it. Do yourself a favor and find this movie at the nearest theater to you, so that you can immediately watch it. It’s a shame that this film will probably be overlooked for Best Picture in the coming Oscar race, because it deserves a top spot way more than a lot of other lesser films out there.

(DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH)

——Deliver Us From Evil (2006)——

Moviepalooza 2007 ended at Images Cinema in Williamstown, where I saw possibly the cheapest double header ever. Two movies. Five bucks. That’s right kids, that was $2.50 EACH. What a bargain for two excellent documentaries. Deliver Us From Evil was by far the better of the two. This film is about child molestation by Catholic priests, the impact it makes on the faithful who feel betrayed by their clergy, and the Roman Catholic institution that shelters these men from prosecution instead of protecting the innocent children. The film does so by telling the story of one such priest in California who molested hundreds of children. You ask yourself, How could they not know this was happening? Well, they did know. Eventually someone would come forward and accuse him, but instead of doing something about it, his bishop just sent him to one parish after another, where he continued to victimize children and the Church continued to look away.

How could this happen? Well, when you have an organization based on power and its members are considered closest to God, it doesn’t really help if some of your members punch a giant hole in that theory. What’s bizarre is that this problem has been a problem in the Catholic Church for quite some time now and yet they still refused to do anything about it. It boggles the mind that an institution that prides itself as the shepherd tending the flock would so willingly let the wolves in, dressed as their own.

What a powerful, emotional, moving documentary. Be prepared, because it is going to knock you for a loop. The emotions captured in this film are real and quite raw and amazingly enough, the film remains focused enough to present the facts without preaching from the pulpit. Because God knows, there has been enough of that lately.

(MUST SEE)

——Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing (2006)——

When the Dixie Chicks made an offhand comment in a British concert hall on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, they didn’t think anyone in America would ever hear it. But amazingly enough, some right wing nutjob took a hold of the phrase “I’m ashamed that our President is from Texas” and used it to damn what were the highest selling female artists ever in music history. Over night radio stations stopped playing their songs and concerts became picket lines peppered with death threats. This documentary is about that time after the comment was made intercut with footage of the Chicks making their new album, which ironically enough is their most political and yet also is probably their best album yet. The film is about how they refused to compromise their values just to stay true to their core audience and how they decided to strike it out on their own. Unfortunately they will probably never reach their former glory again, but one gets the feeling that they wouldn’t have it any other way. What’s horrible is that history has proved them right. The Iraq War is by almost all accounts a disaster and Bush’s approval rating is at a record low. Even though I don’t listen to their music, I wish them all the luck in the future with what they are doing. The Red States should take a cue from these girls to see what a real American actually looks like, one that actually believes that Free Speech should be free no matter what you have to say.

(SEE)

(January 10/14)

——When the Levees Broke (Acts I & II/III IV)——

After watching Spike Lee’s heartbreaking four-hour HBO documentary about Hurricane Katrina and its aftereffects on New Orleans, I hate to say it, but I think I agree with Kanye West. George Bush does hate black people. How else to explain what happened here? How is it that we can get aid to Tsunami victims in less than 48 hours but it takes weeks to get aid to our fellow Americans? These poor people had to survive hellish conditions and are still suffering. No one gives a shit about them. FEMA and the insurance companies have fucked them over hard. It’s enough to make you want to shout out in rage.

This is a great documentary, told mainly straight from the horse’s mouth of those people who were there and what they saw first hand. It is an extremely comprehensive documentary, fair and yet angry, not from Lee himself but from those who are victims of it. Lee does an amazing job of letting the events and the people speak for themselves and keeps himself out of it. What follows will just blow your mind.

The film was broke into four parts. The first two are mainly about the hurricane and the flood, while the second two are about what happened after FEMA and the military finally rode in, but still failed to help these poor unfortunate people.

(MUST SEE)

(January 12)

——The Black Dahlia (2006)——

The problem with this film (which I reviewed last year) is that it just breezes by too quickly. It feels like Brian De Palma wanted to hit every major plot point in the book, and did it, but neglected everything else in doing so. The characters never get the depth they really deserve. If anything, I think this movie should be longer. It needs some time to slow burn, to let the mystery slowly unravel before our eyes. You don’t get that here. Everything happens so quickly that once the mystery is revealed at the end, you’ll need a scorecard to keep track of what the hell just happened. It’s one reveal after another, without any dramatic impact.

(MISS)

(January 13)

——Crank (2006)——

Crank is so fucked up, it’s awesome. It’s a non-stop video game thrill ride, trashy as hell, but unapologeticly so. You’ve got to commend the filmmakers for taking an extreme idea and just running with it. So many movies would have held back, played it safe, but not Crank. Oh, not Crank. There is a definite reason that I named it one of the Must See films of September (see previous review).

(MUST SEE)

——Alfie (1965)——

Jesus, this movie is depressing. I wasn’t prepared for that at all, and I’ve seen the remake with Jude Law already. Alfie has to be the world’s biggest misogynistic asshole, tearing through women as if they just don’t matter. On more than a few occasions he even refers to these birds he sleeps with as “it,” showing us he doesn’t even see them as fellow human beings. Their feelings just don’t matter. It’s hard stuff to watch.

It’s a good thing that the movie is still pretty good, or else it wouldn’t even be worth mentioning. A lot of credit, of course, is due to Michael Caine, who makes you understand why a woman would love him even if they hate him. He’s a suave little bastard and it will surprise you how much you like him even when you’re appalled at his behavior. Alfie as a character takes his good time learning how to grow as a person. It happens, but it is very slow and gradual, as everything he’s taught himself as the proper way to live life proves itself to be but hollow promises. Things start changing for him when he has a kid, who he grows attached to, but is then taken away from him by his under-appreciated mother. Alfie pretends that the kid really doesn’t mean much to him, but he does, and while he could really care less about the child’s mother, the loss of his own flesh and blood has an effect on Alfie that he never though possible. Not that it changes his behavior any, at least not at first. He still womanizes and cheats. But as he yearns for another human relationship like that between he and his child and doesn’t find it, things start to pull a little more in focus for him. Maybe there is a little bit of humanity in Alfie after all.

(SEE)