February films

Never mind that NX35 is the most pressing event requiring blogging, here are the movies I watched last month. (Some NX35 content will come once I have Internet at home or go to Starbucks long enough to upload video.)

Moving Pictures:

2/5 - Public Enemies | Stander
2/6 - Running Scared
2/7 - From Paris with Love | The Fourth Kind
2/9 - Stuck | Foul Play
2/10 - The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
2/12 - Edge of Darkness
2/14 - The Wolfman (2010) | Spider Baby
2/19 - Boondock Saints
2/21 - Shutter Island
2/26 - Valentine’s Day

Selected Commentary

• Extreme close ups, overpowering music, and lingering shots made for a very strange movie about Dillinger. Public Enemies started to feel more like a mood piece than a narrative.
• You can’t ask for a better free-pass for criminality than resistance to apartheid. (Stander)
• John Rhys-Meyers’ complete lack of charisma was the perfect match for John Travolta’s stilted, forced charisma. But at least there were explosions. (From Paris with Love)
• Never, ever see a movie at a dollar theater in Garland, Texas. (The Fourth Kind)
• Hahahahahahah (Stuck)
• A lot of the humor in Foul Play just didn’t work, even for the time, but there were some pretty great Hitchcock homages and other great noir-ish flourishes.
• Warren Beatty as an Italian gigolo was kind of gross. The whole performance seemed masturbatory and unappealing, which I don’t think was the point. It didn’t help that the whole film was plodding and heavy-handed. (The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone)
• Mel Gibson being mean is still fun to watch. (Edge of Darkness)
• The Wolfman was a passable homage to the original Universal film, and not much more.
• Spider Baby (a.k.a. Cannibal Orgy) plays like parody of movies that hadn’t been made at the time of its filming. Jack Hill had to have some genuine off-kilter creativity to come up with it, and the involvement of Lon Chaney gives the thing a wholesome veneer that makes the final product all the ickier.
• I already used my non-verbal reaction for this month, so all I’ll say about Boondock Saints is that I bet the incidents of date rape and violence caused by “homosexual panic” are high among this film’s serious fans. Count me, however, among this film’s ironic fans.
• If Shutter Island is Scorcese’s tribute to Hitchcock, Marty was also paying homage to Alfy’s insistence (used as justification for The Birds) that a poor script doesn’t matter to a director.
• Relationships aren’t worth it if they’re going to force me to see things like Valentine’s Day.