For Crying Out Loud

Posted on January 6, 2012 by

I’m glad I can still be surprised and grossed-out by this sort of thing, even though it’s completely unsurprising:

Kansas House Speaker Mike O’Neal on Thursday apologized for an email that made fun of first lady Michelle Obama’s hair style and mockingly called her “Mrs. YoMama.”

According to the Lawrence Journal World, O’Neal forwarded from his personal computer the email that said, “I’m sure you’ll join me in wishing Mrs. YoMama a wonderful, long Hawaii Christmas vacation — at our expense, of course.”

I know I hold my share of irrational beliefs, but lately I’m inclined to think the most egregious of those is my love of this state.

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Agenda Movie Club: Moneyball

Posted on January 2, 2012 by

Moneyball

Bennett Miller

2011

Did I not love this like everyone else did because I know too much about the situation already? Is it because I know that it wasn’t really that big a deal what Beane did, and that you can actually do pretty well when you ride three fantastic pitchers to the playoffs a couple years in a row? And that when you get dropped in the first round AGAIN, everyone pats you on the head and says, “good work, with your numbers and stuff!” because your team doesn’t have any money?

I loved the tag at the end of the movie about how Theo Epstein won a World Series with the Red Sox just a year or two later using the exact same techniques Beane did. (Yeah, the exact same techniques, plus about a billion more dollars. It does make a difference. You can spend a lot of money really poorly, but you can also spend it intelligently, which Epstein did.)

Oh, the movie? It’s actually a lot of fun. C’mon, it’s baseball. And it’s Jonah Hill, who’s quite solid here. I just don’t think it’s this amazing movie that a whole bunch of other people think it is. It’s very good, and it’s worth seeing, but it’s not exactly special.

Here’s a very real possibility: I’m still pissed off that this is not Steven Soderbergh’s Moneyball. I completely admit that this could be why I’m feeling bitter about it.

But I also feel like movie geeks are overreacting a little bit here, and probably because the story sort of boils down to, “hey, the nerds beat the jocks!” That’s a time-honored storyline, and that’s fine. But I think that’s what’s really going on here.

You know whose team sucks now, and has for a good number of years? Billy Beane’s. It’s true. Is that because everyone started playing the same game as him, and the undervalued players were no longer undervalued? Or is it because he caught fire for a couple years (remember, according to this very movie, they went to the playoffs the year before he started this stuff) because his scouts built him a good farm system?

I understand the attraction of the storyline. It’s like playing the Warren Buffett investing strategy with baseball players. It’s nice to think things might work that way. And it’s not even that I think it’s bullshit, I just don’t think I’ve seen the evidence that tells me this approach is what worked.

Yes, I’m having a hard time separating my skepticism from the movie. I am. Also from the Steven Soderbergh thing.

What’s funny is that I liked the movie when I watched it, I think it’s just that all the praise is rubbing me the wrong way.

I really enjoyed the Art Howe stuff, especially knowing how he crashed and burned when he went to the Mets. At least he got paid, I guess.

The movie is good, but it could have been a lot better.


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Agenda Movie Club: The Guard

Posted on January 1, 2012 by

The Guard

John Michael McDonagh

2011

“Go back to America with yer fookin appropriate Barack Obama!”

I haven’t read any reviews of The Guard, but I’m willing to bet most of them go something like this:

(ahem)

“Brendan Gleeson. Brendan Gleeson Brendan Gleeson Brendan Gleeson Brendan Gleeson Brendan Gleeson Brendan Gleeson Brendan Gleeson Brendan Gleeson. Brendan Gleeson. Don Cheadle. Brendan Gleeson Brendan Gleeson.”

I have a feeling he’ll be overlooked when it comes to be Oscar time (hey, that’s right now!), but that’s a major shame.

There’s a point where Don Cheadle’s character, an FBI agent who is working with Gleeson’s rural Irish police officer, says to Gleeson, “I can’t tell if you’re really fucking smart or really fucking dumb.” And Gleeson just kind of smiles to himself. The answer is “really fucking smart,” of course, but he’s just got things the way he likes them, and sometimes that involves stealing a hit of acid from some kids dying in a car wreck? What’s so wrong with that?

But when the time comes to deal with the corruption in his department? He delivers. Actually, what I should say is, when the time comes that the corruption in his department starts to cause him some hassle, that’s when he gets going. Not gonna be having that.

Gleeson’s character here is so awful and so delicious at the same time, and I feel like it probably takes an actor of Gleeson’s stature to pull something like this off. I found myself wishing I could plop him down in the Yorkshire of the Red Riding movies. He’d sort that right out.

I learn that John Michael McDonagh is the brother of Martin McDonagh, who directed In Bruges, which has another fantastic Gleeson role.


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Agenda Movie Club: Johnny English Reborn

Posted on January 1, 2012 by

Johnny English Reborn

Oliver Parker

2011

Best parkour ever. Ari Shapiro ain’t got a damn thing on Johnny English.

OK, so, yeah, this is obviously not the best thing Rowan Atkinson has ever done. That would probably be season three of Black Adder (also maybe the best thing Hugh Laurie has done, though that’s more debatable), although some of his standup is pretty fantastic. Still, I laughed, loudly, more than once during this. I was also the only one in the theater, but whatever.

I never saw the first Johnny English, I’m not sure why. Obviously I didn’t feel like that was necessary in order for me to understand this one. I was right.

One thing really bugged me– they didn’t seem to know whether to make English a bumbling fool or a cunning agent. So they made him both. So it was hard to tell from one scene to another whether we were going to get dumb Johnny or crafty Johnny, or even dumb Johnny who wins the day despite himself.

But really, there’s no reason to nitpick. You’re probably not going to watch this unless you know what you’re getting yourself into, and if you know what you’re getting yourself into then you’ll probably like this, at least enough not to hate yourself for watching it.

Also nice to see Tim McInnerny.


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Agenda Movie Club: Doubt

Posted on January 1, 2012 by

Doubt

John Patrick Shanley

2008

This is either the second or third time I’ve seen this, and the thing that I really want to talk about each time I watch it is that scene on the street with Viola Davis and Meryl Streep. I mean, really: have you ever seen anyone kick Meryl Streep’s ass like that? It’s unreal. Viola Davis is such a talent. And it’s not like Streep was phoning it in, she’s excellent in this movie. But Davis– give her all the Oscars, all the time.

The movie’s good. It’s not amazing, but it’s good. The acting is amazing. All four leads (er, three leads and Davis)– Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams being the other two– are spot on. They were all nominated for Oscars for this, which was good to see. (Hoffman lost to Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight, which was absolutely correct, Streep lost to Kate Winslet for The Reader when she should have lost to Melissa Leo for Frozen River, and Davis and Adams both lost to Penelope Cruz for Vicky Cristina Barcelona– Cruz was good, but Davis should pretty much never lose to anyone, ever.)

The director, Shanley, generally does a pretty good job of not making this feel as confined as a stage play would, though it is still obvious that it’s a stage play (can’t get away from all that talky business). But he figures out ways to move the action so that it doesn’t feel like it’s taking place in one area most of the time. That’s good, and not easy to do. I will say that I kind of wish someone besides Shanley would have directed it, just to get a fresh take on the material (he also wrote the stage play and the screenplay). I wonder if that would have elevated it beyond what it ended up being.

Though it did end up being good. So maybe that’s enough.

Here’s something interesting: the only other movie John Patrick Shanley has directed? The seriously underappreciated 1990 Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks movie, Joe Versus The Volcano. How about that?


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Agenda Movie Club: Carlos

Posted on December 31, 2011 by

Carlos

Olivier Assayas

2010

I watched the 5 ½ hour version of this, and it’s worth every minute. I wasn’t sure about that after Part 1 (of 3), because at that point it seemed like a very good version of things I’d seen before, but by the end it had all come together very nicely and I was glad to have had all the setup early on.

Of course, this is not completely about Carlos the Jackal, even though he’s the focus of the entire movie and on screen nearly the entire time. It’s also about the birth of contemporary terrorism. It would make a good companion piece with The Battle of Algiers (if a 5 ½ hour movie needs a companion). I didn’t live through the 1970s, of course, so it was really fascinating to me to see how different things are now—Carlos and his cohorts simply walk into the OPEC building with bags full of machine guns. They waltz into an airport with a rocket launcher. Can’t really see those things happening now.

And I hadn’t considered how these guys are pretty much just a bunch of guys (and women) trying to do some heinous shit, and how they aren’t supervillians or anything like that. They aren’t really all that “good” at what they’re doing, except that they’re willing to do it and people don’t expect that. Their escape plans seem to consist of “run away,” and they screw up way more than they get things right. It’s just that they’ve got the balls to try it. Shoot a rocket at an airplane in the middle of an airport? Why not? (Of course, they miss and hit the wrong plane and then a completely unrelated terrorist group claims credit.)

Part 2 is mostly centered around Carlos’s raid on the OPEC building, and how much he screwed that one up, too. I love how shocked he was when he found out that the plane he asked for couldn’t actually get him where he wanted to go (“I asked for a DC-9!” “This is a DC-9, but it can’t take us that far!”) and he ends up sitting on a runway in Libya with nowhere to go because Libya won’t take him and Syria (or wherever it was) wants him to release his hostages before they’ll take him because of the leverage it will give them internationally. The moving political parts are incredible to see.

And that’s what’s really interesting here. Yeah, the whole study of this guy’s megalomania is something to behold, but all of the international political upheaval—and seeing that from a point of view that we rarely do (behind the Iron Curtain and in the Arab world) is a serious eye-opener.

There’s so much we could talk about. How Carlos and his organization plans for years to assassinate Anwar Sadat and then someone else does it shortly before he can. How he basically becomes irrelevant in a world where communism is crumbling and people like the Syrians simply can’t afford to be associated with him anymore. Please watch this so that we can talk about these things.

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Agenda Movie Club: Buck

Posted on December 31, 2011 by

Buck

Cindy Meehl

2011

This is the guy who inspired The Horse Whisperer. Now he has his own documentary.

He is quite amazing. And not just because of what he can do with horses, but because of his gentleness and serenity (despite his past as an abused child). I don’t really care about horses (not in a ‘fuck em, turn em to glue’ way, but just in a ‘whatever’ way), but this was still worth an hour and a half.

I do wish that we would have seen more about what he’s actually doing to get these horses to work so well with him. We hear a lot about the horses and their fear, and we see a few clips of him getting unruly horses to follow him around, but I would like to see the whole process. This isn’t something that would fit nicely into a 90-minute movie, I realize.

One thing that bugged me was how he says, “A person’s horse is window into their soul,” or something like that. That’s pretty much what anyone who does anything says about what they do. “A painting is a window to the soul.” “The way you throw a baseball is a window to the soul.” Whatever. If my horse sucks, it’s not because my soul is rotten, it’s because I don’t know what I’m doing with a horse. I understand how important horses are to Buck, but that seems like a really easy thing to say without it reflecting reality in any way.

Still, this is a very nice movie, and it’s good to know there are people in the world like Buck.


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