My Favorite Films of 2005: Not Quite a "Best of"...

I don't watch films the way everyone else does. No two people watch films the same way. Everyone brings to the theatre all of the knowledge and pain and memories and weightiness of their lives, and when they view a film, all of this baggage ricochets around the cargo holds in their brains as they process the imagery before them. Their opinion will depend entirely on their previous life experiences. Some people don't like to think at all when they go to the movies, and would like to deny this behavior, but they are wrong. All forms of art, including film, are dependent upon the understanding and opinion of the observer, and that opinion is formed by the individual's personality, which, in turn, is forged by their life experience. Because of this, no two people agree about everything.

Jen and I don't agree on every film. We agree on a lot of them, but not all, and we sometimes agree but for entirely different reasons. I know that some of my favorite films of the year are hers, too; but not all of them. Since we are unlikely to get her to post a list of her favorite films of the year, this means that you, dear reader, are left with my humble list. You may not agree with all of them, and if you don't, feel free to comment. I will listen to your opinion, as long as it is reasonable, but my list is not changing. Unless I forgot something...

In alphabetical order, since I don't like numbered lists, are my choices:

BATMAN BEGINS - Christian Bale and Christopher Doyle give me renewed hope for the franchise containing my favorite comic book character of all time. And by this, I mean Bat-Mite... Great villains, gloomy and sometimes scary atmospherics, the right Bruce/Batman (finally), and Michael Caine's perfect Alfred sum up the experience: sublime. Still can't buy Katie Holmes as a D.A., unless it means "Dumb Ass," but you can't have everything and she's cute. Comic book movies are supposed to leave you wanting more, but this is a case where it is completely warranted. I am almost literally drooling over the possibilities that this series could yield up on the screen; unfortunately, wrongheaded rumors are driving me crazy almost daily, and I have had to cut off my pipeline of these mumblings. I will simply wait, be patient, and watch this film endlessly for the next three years. Hope the disc holds up...

CAPOTE - Read many of Capote's works growing up; seen Capote in a lot of interviews and a couple of movies, too. Still not prepared for the voice that Phillip Seymour Hoffman brought to the role. (I don't mean his literal "voice", but that is terrific, too; it is far more than mere impersonation.) A mind-blowing, painful performance, but everyone in this film gives one, including Catherine Keener, justly nominated for playing Capote peer and assistant Harper Lee. But Hoffman is the real show, and he proves this throughout, especially in the later prison scenes where his guilt slowly eats away at him.

THE 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN - The funniest film of the year, and the second most romantic on my list ( has that title, but only by the narrowest of margins. (Brokeback Mountain is probably the deepest and most painful romance story, and it is very good, but it is not on my list because it has little second viewing power over me.) It seems at first, like the similarly wacky Wedding Crashers, to be just a gross-out guy's movie, but like that other swell comedy, this one is really a romantic comedy in disguise. I just liked this one a bit more than Crashers. Virgin never downplays Steve Carell's geekiness, but neither does it allow him to become the butt of the joke, either. His geek is an engaging, cheer-worthy hero; likewise, a very sexy Catherine Keener plays the hell out of her MILF role. This is the sort of film that could make the world safe for R-rated comedies again.

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK - Would have been my favorite film of the year if I hadn't already been entranced by the Cronenberg flick below. I grew up with a tape of Edward R. Murrow's London recordings, and they fascinated me as I listened to them at night before bedtime on countless occasions. (The cadences of his voice still ring as very fresh in my mind.) Having read a couple biographies of the man, and being ashamed of our government's behavior in not just the McCarthy era, and fully agreeing with the ties that director George Clooney is making to our current corrupt administration and gutless news media, I might seem like I am a ready-made target audience for this film. And you would be right on all counts, but you can also throw in that I am a sucker for black-and-white films, too. Guilty as charged.

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE - David Cronenberg knocks one of the park, and it's a tape measure shot. That this film is not up for Best Picture, and that D.C. won't be riding home with the Best Director award under his arm are vicious slaps in his face from the Academy. As much as Capote begins with Murder in the Heartland, this film internalizes that concept to the point that the protagonist, played with surface-bubbling intensity by a stellar Viggo Mortensen in the best role he will ever get, doesn't either know, remember or wish to remember that he was once Murder's most adept spokesman. Cronenberg has always been about mankind's evolution into a sleeker, crueler beast; here the New Flesh is grown on the inside, and growling and waiting for its call back to action.

KING KONG - No surprise here. Peter Jackson pulled off the impossible: impossible for anyone else but him, that is... His new Kong will now live happily in my mind next to the 1933 original, not so much as a remake as much as it is a re-visioning. It is not designed to wipe out the memory of its older cousin, but merely to complement it (except for that stupid running down the mountain with the dinosaurs scene). And Naomi Watts? Yet again, robbed of Oscar glory...

SERENITY - This one saddens me, because no one went to it, even with all of the publicity surrounding its revival and release. This is exactly the sort of film that all of the Star Wars geeks have been wanting out of Lucas for the last 20-some years, and the critics loved it almost to unanimous acclaim, and then it shows up... and NO ONE FUCKING GOES TO IT!!! Screw you, American audiences!!! Hope you enjoyed Flightplan in its second week, assholes, because you certainly helped that far lesser movie beat out Serenity on its premiere weekend. I still haven't seen if Serenity has been released in the Pacific Rim areas, because I suspect it will do pretty well there, but the damage is done. The franchise has probably been killed off for good, and if there were a couple of other films to come, they are most likely over now. Serenity is what the original Star Wars would have been if it had made now. So, go ahead and cry that no one makes great sci-fi anymore, because you freakin' missed it...

SIN CITY - Brilliant. Savage. Disgusting. Hilarious. Heartbreaking. Gorgeous. I haven't bought the DVD yet (much like Kill Bill, because I was waiting for a Special Edition, which has now come out for this film but not the Tarantino epic), but when I soon do, I know I am going to watch it about a trillion times over. The acting by the cast is nervy and fun, even Jessica Alba (who is proving to at least be a special effect of her own), and is even better considering just how little the actors had to interact with in filming it. More so than any of the latter Star Wars flicks, this is the film that proves that digital filmmaking can push films in general into exciting new directions. It's not the tools, George, it's how you use them... Robert Rodriguez can make great films, not just fun action films; this film is the proof. And welcome back to Mickey Rourke, whose role of Marv (thanks, Mr. Lowe -- see comments box for proof of my idiocy) went unrewarded by Academic mention. Just another place where they are dead wrong... Kill 'em all, Marv...

WALLACE AND GROMIT IN THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT - I called The 40 Year Old Virgin the funniest film of the year, which I stand by, but this one sent me into equally dangerous fits of laughter, as well. I haven't seen Howl's Moving Castle yet (a horrible error in timing on my part), but I would give this film the Oscar for Animated Feature simply because Miyazaki already has one (though he should get an Honorary one for each and every film he has ever made). Of course, Nick Park already has three Oscars for animated shorts, so call it a toss-up... just like the bunnies flying about inside the vacuum tube in this film. The film is just too much fun to believe. It's a shame that it will always be labeled a "children's" film... most of the children that I know don't deserve the honor.

That's the list, folks. There are many stragglers that I haven't seen yet, like Broken Flowers, North Country and The Aristocrats, so my list is always up for revision. If there is, you know where to find it. It is only an accident that there are ten films on the list; it could easily hold twenty or more if I felt like sitting here and making it that long. And also if more films deserved it. It's called "The Best Films of the Year 2005" not "All of the Films of the Year 2005". You gotta stop somewhere, but I could add a couple more when all is said and done.

See you at the Oscars...

RECENTLY RATED MOVIES #14 (PRE-OSCAR CATCH-UP)

We are trying desperately to catch up on the Oscar-nominated films still in theatres at this time. Why? I guess it's mainly because we want to have seen most of them before the ceremony comes on television. You know, that time of the year that the news media spins crazily overboard reporting on the nonsense (and also overprojecting the amount of people actually watching it); Barbara Walters grunts out another log of half-bakedly "sincere and probing" questions to another quartet of people, three of whom we likely won't give a nod to in five years time; and idiot runway reporters, most of them D-list celebs or most likely models who would never get work except for the fact that they are supposedly "perty" even though most of them wear waaaaaaayyyyyyyy too much makeup and are probably troll-like underneath (unlike Mena Suvari, who is troll-like both with and without makeup), stalk the red carpet at the ceremony drooling over anything that anyone is wearing, no matter how much of a schlub their target actually looks to the rest of the audience. Oh, yes... they will dish on the crappy clothes once the target has walked off. And, oh yes, many of the wrong films will win in many of the categories.

That said, I love the Oscars. It is my Super Bowl (especially now that the Super Bowl, and the sport that it represents, are now basically unwatchable, and unwatched by me. Even the commercials, an excuse that even non-football shooting junkies could tout as the reason that they go to the overrated parties, have become unwatchable, though this is due mainly to the declining talent pool and shrinking imagination of the marketing industry.) I don't necessarily need a Super Bowl, but this is the one that I have got, and I'll stick with it. People say that it is overlong, and I disagree with this; it is Hollywood's annual tantric orgasm, so sit back and enjoy it with the rest of the hoi polloi. And, you never know... Sting might come out on stage and tell you exactly where to place that finger to prolong it even further.

People (idiots I might add), like to get all up in the grill of any host that isn't Billy Crystal, and I disagree with this, too. Billy was fine, and even excellent the first few times, but even Billy knows that it has run its course. He is a seasoned performer, and he knows when to cut off the encores, and also when it is time to make another entrance. (By the way, Jen just saw him live onstage in 700 Sundays, and she was highly underwhelmed by him in person.) He needs some time off of the chore, because that is what it is, for the most part: another job, albeit an amazingly high-profile one. Steve Martin, Whoopi Goldberg, even the much put-upon David Letterman did just fine (Martin is actually my personal favorite); and Chris Rock did exactly what Chris Rock does: call it like he sees it. You should know what you are getting when you hire the man to do the job. The fact that he got a rise out of the usually staid, politely-clapping audience was a bravura moment for the Oscar telecasts. On a night when every celebrity dreams of being coddled, it was great that a few of these pampered nimrods were kicked in the pants.

As for Jon Stewart, his Daily Show is the brightest thing on television night in and night out, and it is no surprise that The Road to the Sublimely Funny currently leads right to his door, with both The Office and The Colbert Show (one featuring TDSw/JS alum Steve Carell (more on him in a bit), and the other produced and co-conspirated with Stewart and crew) racking up the yuks with pinpoint precision each and every show. I have nothing but absolute certainty that he is going to do a fun and witty job. Even if most of the Hollywood goons won't get a lot of it.

However, I keep thinking (as with Rock) that this is exactly what the Oscars need to shake things up and loosen the ol' necktie of the boring ol' ceremony. I don't understand why a group of people notorious for partying like mad whenever they are not on the set (and some of them that do on the set) get into the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion or the Kodak Theatre or wherever the thing is being held this year and practically sit on their hands and glower at the cameras as if they are being forced to watch their own young being fed through a meat grinder. I know that there is an attempt to make this a high-class event; after all, they call it The Academy, so naturally they would like to imply a more hoity-toity professorial tone to the proceedings, but come on! Loosen it up a little! Have some fun! Don't just put on your fake smile and laugh after the host cold-cocked you with a reference to a film that you probably have a very fuzzy memory of making, if you remember making it at all through all of the booze and painkillers. That said, here are a couple changes that they should make to the Oscars right now, though only a one of them is actually an atmosphere-changer:

• ADD ALCOHOL: Steal some of the fun from the Golden Globes. There, people whoop it up, pull all kinds of wackiness with their speeches, stumble from their tables, run off to the bathrooms at inappropriate moments, and, if you are Ryan Phillippe, practically knock your wife (Reese Witherspoon) across the room when slapping her on the back in congratulations for winning Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy. (I remember I laughed my ass off all the way through Walk the Line.)
• ADD A "BEST CAST ENSEMBLE ACTING" AWARD: There are some people who think this will cheapen the main acting awards by allowing a full cast from a film to rake in a boatload of Oscars, and then "3rd Officer Worker" in scene 27 will be able to put on their resume that they won an Oscar for their work. Bullshit. The Academy can determine which actors in a cast should be up for the honor (the number can vary from film to film), and the cast can be given smaller versions of the Oscar, just like they used to give to the 7 Dwarves back in the 30's or to Shirley Temple. It's not like the Oscars have always been immune to evolution. The ceremony has changed in countless, small ways over the 75-plus years of its existence. Why not try something new?
• ADD "STUNTWORK" TO THE AWARDS: Absolutely, since most of the dreck coming from Hollywood these days involves crazed and outrageously dangerous stuntwork, why shouldn't they get an Oscar? Why is Oscar hiding from these people? Here's how you solve this problem: tell the stunt coordinator that they have won an Oscar, but have another award, perhaps called the Yakima (after Mr. Canutt), that sort of looks almost like the Oscar but has the wrong haircut, and perhaps a cast on its leg, and have it stand in (on a crutch) for the Oscar. That way, the stuntguy gets to hang with his people, and Oscar didn't give out a precious Oscar to "the wrong people". These people are putting their lives on the line for Hollywood, something real "actors" rarely do... unless they are named Vic Morrow.
• ADD "MOST SHOCKING CAMEO" AS A CATEGORY: This is only on here so I can talk about Anne Hathaway's breasts. Of all the "shocking" things that I have heard bandied about regarding Brokeback Mountain, no one told me that Anne Hathaway's took her titties out in the film, let alone informed me she was even in the film. Maybe then, I could have at least thought maybe she would get nekkid. Michelle Williams was in the film, and I was pretty damn certain that she would bare 'em at some point... BUT ANNE HATHAWAY? The Disney-appearing, Princess-Diaries-1 AND 2-acting goodie-two-shoes-seeming girl? She's in a car with Jake G. and they are making out, and I am expecting only some PG-rated necking and then a jump-cut to their wedding day, but then PAH-WANG!!! Off comes the bra, and there they are, poking your eyes out: ANNE... HATHAWAY'S... TITS! I'm not judging on quality, though they are fine; I'm going for shock value. I knew that going in to Brokeback Mountain that there was going to naked man-ass and various other male body parts flappin' about in the breeze; I was prepared for that... BUT NO ONE EXPECTS ANNE HATHAWAY'S TITTIES!!!
  
• Biggest of all, ADD "COMEDY" AS A CATEGORY, OR START VOTING FOR COMEDIES AND COMIC ACTORS: I know that the Academy is afraid of marginalizing their awards ceremony, but since they generally refuse to vote for comic actors or take the genre of comedy "seriously", perhaps it is time for them to take the plunge that other awards shows have and break the awards up into categories for dramas and comedies, at least for the acting awards. Nothing is more egregious than the Academy's snubbing of Steve Carell in The 40-Year Old Virgin, a smart, moving and funny performance in a smart, moving and funny film. It happens time and again that comic brilliance goes unrewarded in Hollywood, at least at the Oscars; this year, they even snubbed Virgin in the Screenplay category, where I felt for sure its creators (including the multi-tasking Carell) would be honored with at least a nomination. Whatever you do though Academy, don't make it "Comedy or Musical", because not all musicals are comedies, as I previously mentioned about Walk the Line (which isn't even really a musical) or as you should take from the examples of say, oh, Cabaret, Chicago or Rent.
  

None of this means that I will ever stop watching the Oscars; it just means that I will badmouth and personally marginalize the awards as much as possible until the Academy has its walkers kicked out of its liver-spotted hands.

Tomorrow night, we are going to go see Munich, the last of the Best Picture nominees that we need to see before the ceremony. Most people go hoping they will see a dynamic, thought-provoking well-directed Steven Spielberg picture; I'm going to see if Eric Bana has more than the one dopey "I'm serious" expression that he wears on his face in every scene in which he has ever acted. Even the "romantic comedy" that I saw recently in a test screening that I swore I would not talk about until it was properly released. And I'm still not talking about it; I am only talking about his face and its one expression. I swear, if he ever won an Oscar, I'm going to think that there is a Comedy category, because, just like Keanu Reeves, I can't take his "I'm serious" face seriously...

THE LIST:
Winchester '73 (1950) (TCM) - 8; Capote (2005) - 8; How to Draw A Bunny (2002) (IFC) - 7; After the Sunset (2004) (DVD) - 5; The Constant Gardener (2005) (DVD) - 7; Shura-yuki-hime: Urami Renga [Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance] (1974) (DVD) - 6; Koroshiya 1 [Ichi the Killer] (2001) (DVD) - 6; Sahara (2005) (DVD) - 5; Wonder Man (1945) (TCM) - 6; Brokeback Mountain (2005) - 7; The Filth and the Fury: A Sex Pistols Film (2000) (DVD) - 6; Cinderella Man (2005) (DVD) - 6; Hustle and Flow (2005) (DVD) - 7.

All Apologies... and Corrections

Pickings have been a little scarce here at the Cinema 4 Pylon, I know... but that is precisely why the Pylon exists. It is a portal through which everything else that I am currently involved in,or will be working on in the future, may filter. While it seems that not much is getting done here, the bulk of my writing is occurring over at my second blogsite, the Cinema 4: Cel Bloc, where there are, I'm not kidding, updates every single day! Each day, I present a review of some classic or not-so-classic cartoon from the mists of animation history; some films that are easy to find and some that are not so. The entire thing is designed as a titanic daily writing exercise to help keep my instrument tuned and supple (not that instrument! That's why we have the rest of the internet...), and my intent is to keep it going through the entire year, and perhaps even longer after that point. I am assuming that no one is reading the animation blog at all, because the number of comments on that page has reached a grand total of... (drumroll, please)... 1!

I have been involved time-wise and brain-wise in helping to coordinate a huge convention that my company holds annually, and to say that I have little left in the energy department each night is an immense understatement. Most nights I have barely had the voltage to throw up the next post on the Cel Bloc, let alone write the damn thing. But the convention is now over, and was a huge success, with almost 10,000 attendees. (This is more than a significant increase over the previous year. I attribute this rise in popularity, of course, to my arrival and participation. Ahem...) I can now get back to my regularly scheduled workload (which never actually stopped), and still have the brainpower left to spend most of my spare time pounding mash notes and diatribes to all manner of films and cartoons.

I will now reply to a handful of comments (although I may also have when they were first made), and also clear up a couple of common misconceptions:

1) "Never had a dinner...", which was inquired about by more than one person, was part of a routine that the comedian Red Buttons used to do on the old Dean Martin Roasts in the '70s. He would take the lectern and try to shame Dean and the rest of the panel by pointing out that there were far more worthy recipients of the honor of being roasted that night than the actual roastee in attendance. For instance (and this is by no means necessarily an accurate retelling of the joke; it is clouded by twenty years of distance), he would shout out the sad case of Moses: "Moses! Moses, who when he came down from the mountain, told his people, "God said "take these two tablets and call me in the morning'"... Never! Never had a dinner!" Again, I have never had a dinner...

2) Were I to have dinner, it would not involve the rending and devouring of human flesh, as I consider humans to be a pestilent species and unworthy of my attention. Nor, if I were to accept human flesh into my diet, would it be true that Rik "dines on the flesh of the living," as one of my dear responders described me. I, despite my reputation (largely earned) of being able to eat many weird combinations and mixups of various comestibles, am also squeamish in regards to things dying in front of my eyes for eventual devouring. More than a dozen times I have had to turn the station during Iron Chef, until the point when the squirming squid or lobsters or crawdads have been dispatched and it is safe for me to watch the rest of the show. And despite my Wimpy-like adoration of hamburgers, I am also always one piece of bone or gristle away from leaping headlong into devout vegetarianism. (Weirdly, though, since I moved to Anaheim, I have developed a taste for shrimp. My mother, who had to endure my childhood of kicking and screaming rants about eating the stuff, will be shocked...) So... no people. If I were a zombie, I would starve.

3) To a respondent on the Cel Bloc, I will be getting to some Sam the Sheepdog and Ralph the Wolf cartoons in the very near future. There are several, they are all hilarious, and there are some interesting themes at play in them that you may not have picked up on in your childhood. It is only when you hit the adult workforce that they become more than simple, funny cartoons.

4) I have not been sending out e-mail reminders to anyone about anything. This is due mainly to it being one more annoying step that I have to remember to do after I post on this site. However, since I have not been posting on this site, it has been even more easy a task to avoid. Soon, perhaps with this post, perhaps not, I will get it up and running. (I did promise not to send out reminders for the Cel Bloc, though I might start doing a weekly update, if only to get you jokers reading it.)

5) A couple of friends, both named Matt (though I actually refer to them as Squeak and Mattman), have started their own, uh, b-words recently. They are listed on the side of this page under Friends; so, check them out. (My reticence over the word "blog" is because one of them is insanely obstinate over the use of the word "blog"; in fact, he refuses to use it. This would be Squeak. To those of us who know and love him, this comes as no surprise. He is consistently stubborn in his stands.) Another friend, Aaron, has started his own b-word called Working Dead Productions. Check it out, too... Aaron, I still hope we get to work on one of those projects in the future. The minimal amount of prep work that we did last year was a lot of fun...

6) I will post my actual full George Romero tribute in a few days. It was what I meant to put up on his birthday, but have not found the time to finish it until this week. I will also get up some pre-Oscar musings, my picks for the best movies and performances of 2005 (which run about 50% counter to what the Academy whipped out); also, sometime in the next couple weeks, I will have a screed about misplaced priorities in moviegoing, as well as an update post about my newly found life as an Advance Movie Screener.

All this and more! Coming up onnnnnnnnnn... THE CINEMA 4 PYLON!

RECENTLY RATED MOVIES #13 (MIYAZAKI EDITION)

You might notice, after finishing the reading of this post, a trio of Hayao Miyazaki films beginning the listing of Recently Rated Movies; likewise, you will also find a pair of his films in the last posting of this regular feature (#12). I know it sometimes sounds as if I were some sort of publicist for Turner Classic (and it would be nice if I were, for I hear sometimes people get recompense for such activities), but clearly I am just some sort of unhinged movie nut who simply uses Turner as the default station on his cable box (if such things were possible, it would be so). As such, I have spent the last couple of weeks immersing myself in TCM's Miyazaki festival, a compilation of nine films either directed, written or produced by the Master Animator, and hosted by both Ben Mankiewicz and John Lasseter, of PIXAR and Toy Story fame.

The first time that I saw a Miyazaki film happened long before he became a known entity to me. This would be , known here in the colonies as My Neighbor Totoro, and while I enjoyed the film immensely, believing it to be one of the most pastorally charming movies that I have ever encountered, because I did not possess a proper pipeline for anime at the time, the film wandered off in my memory. And so did Miyazaki... until I met Tatsuya.

A friend that I met through the social circles of the theatre department at the local university, Tatsuya, due to a variety of circumstances, ended up needing a place to crash for a month. As I had just recently lost a roommate, and was still undecided as to whether I would pursue another boarder, I let my still rather recently acquired friend stay with me. And with him, he brought Hayao Miyazaki back into my life. Tatsuya, as I recall it, had a copy of Mononoke-hime, which I and a relative handful in America would come to know as Princess Mononoke, sent to him from back home in Japan. For several months up to that point, I had eyed with great interest a figurine that hung from the rearview mirror of Tatsuya's car. It was of a kodoma, one of the spirit folk that populates the deep forests in Mononoke-hime with a head that looks like a melted bowling ball, and set slightly tilted to one side. I would ask him on occasion the name of the film from whence it came, and he would tell me, but as I never thought that I would actually see the damn thing, so the name just passed ghost-like through me.

But here, in my own household, was a copy of that film, with tiny cute kodoma set all about the cover, though from the copy, entirely in Japanese without a word of English in sight, I knew that the film was solely in the language of his birth, and that I would be viewing it sans subtitled translation. But view it I did, and from the opening scene with the giant forest boar-god tearing through the farmland, with his flesh being devoured from whatever had taken purchase inside of him, and Prince Ashitaka being infected with a curse set loose and named by the boar-god, I was captivated. I would occasionally turn to Tats and ask him what was being said, to which he replied, "It's...it's complicated."

It is a point of great humor amongst my friends, and Tatsuya is aware of this, that in moments of needed translation, he responds with "It's... complicated." (It often gets shortened to simply, "Complicated.") The truth of the matter is, it was complicated. The tremendous of translating subtle emotional or metaphysical concepts that have been captured in language via the process of a sort of cultural shorthand is complicated business, no matter how well you translate. Tatsuya tried very hard to outline some of what was happening, but some concepts just don't travel, and need to be felt more than explained. This is what I derived from that first viewing of Mononoke-hime, and after that initial half-hour, I simply settled into watching the gorgeous film, and picked up on the bulk of the meaning merely from the feel of the piece.

I watched the film once more that night on my own, and about ten more times the rest of that too short month. (I greatly enjoyed having Tatsuya as a roommate.) I didn't see Mononoke-hime again until it was released in late 1999 to American theatres. It wasn't the same. Most of the voices were fine, but, while I am a great admirer of Billy Bob Thornton's acting, he was clearly the wrong choice for the voice of Jigo, his Southern accent not quite jibing with the obvious and overwhelmingly Japanese background and setting. (A friend of mine joked that he "was from the South of Japan.") The film was still great, and it was a sublime pleasure to see the incredibly intricate animation set loose on a movie screen. I did see the film three times more that month, so, American dubbing or not, I was clearly hooked on it. but it wasn't until the DVD came out that I got what I truly craved: subtitles. Hearing the film in Japanese just seemed so right, and I could read the story as I watched the film; though, more often than not, I don't even run the subtitles.

After all, I had already felt the movie. Who needs subtitles?

The List of Doom:
Mimi wo sumaseba [Whisper of the Heart] (1995) (TCM) - 7; Kurenai no buta [Porco Rosso] (1992) (TCM) - 7; Tonari no Totoro [My Neighbor Totoro] (1988) (TCM) - 8; Il Conformista [The Conformist] (1970) (TCM) - 7; Genevieve (1953) (TCM) - 7; The Most Dangerous Game (1932) (DVD) - 6; Shura-yuki-hime [Lady Snowblood] (1973) (DVD) - 7; Oliver Twist (1948) (TCM) - 9; Dig! (2004) (DVD) - 7; Amazon Women On the Moon (1987) (Sundance) - 6; Solaris (2002) (IFC) - 6; El Espinazo del Diablo [The Devil's Backbone] (2001) (IFC) - 8.

Recently Rated Movies #12: Drowning Open Water

Those of you who know me well out there will be shocked by this news, but I disliked Open Water. 

It is widely known that I am a shark enthusiast. Not to the point where I want to make out with one of the fearsome but lovely creatures, but I do love them. Shark Week is much anticipated every season in my household ( I, and I only, am the target audience of Shark Week); if I am cruising with the remote and I happen upon some random show with a shark in it, no matter how horrid, even if it starred the Olsen Twins in all their troll-like pre-pubescent horror, I would stop and watch the damnable thing; and the only person that I know that has seen Jaws more than I have is my buddy Tony. If I see that Shark Attack, Shark Attack 2 or Shark Attack 3: Megalodon (where a 60-foot shark swallows an entire boat!) are showing on the Sci-Fi Channel, especially all in a row, then I am staying on that station for the duration, no matter how truly terrible all three films actually happen to be. The execrable Jaws: The Revenge? A mere walk in the park for me.

So, you would think that Open Water, a film about an annoying couple who get left behind in the Caribbean by their dive boat and then are left in the open water for hours facing the dangers posed by sharks, jellyfish, hypothermic exposure and dehydration, would be a natural film for me to love. The problem is that, while this is based on a true incident that happened off Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the story behind the making of the film is far more intriguing than what actually ends up on the screen. My favorite part of the DVD was the behind-the-scenes documentary, and I kept watching the film thinking about what Hitchcock could have done with such a scenario.

This is actually pretty unfair to think regarding a filmmaker making only his second film; really, its unfair to compare any young director to the Master. And I do think that Chris Kentis has some legitimate talent and certainly a lot of chutzpah (I will be interested to see what he comes up with next), but his film never really got me caught up in the two main characters (which is bad because, outside of the sharks that torment them, they are the only two actual characters in it). If you are going to be stuck watching two people for eighty-odd minutes, and pretty much two people only, you have got to be engaged by at least one of those people. Surprisingly for me, the male is the more sympathetic of the two (I tend to take the side of women in most films, because men really are, as a gender, assholes), but he is whiny, and I didn't like him even if he is the only person who seems to watch Shark Week as much as me. And his female counterpart? Well, she's a movie producer, so she is a lost cause from the start.

As for the shark scenes, they are well-staged, and are the strongest element of the actual film (apart from the short running time); but because of the organic nature of the film (no CG effects; live sharks baited or fed to react in certain ways), one expects the suspense level of the shark attacks to be amped up a little more due to the rule of "less is more," that being a way of expressing that the more that is left to the viewer's imagination, the more effective the thrill delivery level. Perhaps it is the somewhat amateurish acting, perhaps the overall staging of certain scenes, but I never really bought into much of what occurred in the story, even with live actors splashing about in the ocean with a bunch of actual sharks. It is entirely possible that because I had heard so much about how the scenes were made, that it sunk the picture for me. Perhaps I would have liked it more if I had seen it in the theatres as soon as I heard about it. (I did have plans to see it at one point, but they were quashed at the last minute.) Consider it a lost opportunity...

Numerous people have asked me for my opinion of Syriana. This is all you need to know, and you will have my answer in a nutshell: I hate cars. I hate car culture. I believe that anyone who even thinks about buying a Hummer should be castrated to prevent their further propagation. I believe our country would be better off with monorails and increased bus systems. I believe in the immediate and focused development of any cleaner burning and more eco-friendly energy sources. And I despise all oil companies, and those individuals and institutions who line their wallets with "soft monies" and political "contributions" gained from their time spent making out with these companies in the backs of air-polluting, gas-guzzling automobiles. Too extreme? Too bad.

Now, ask me again what I thought of Syriana.

The Ratings:

Syriana (2005) - 7; The Matador (2005) - 7; Kaze no tani no Naushika [Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds] (1984) (TCM) - 8; Open Water (2003) (DVD) - 5; The Machinist (2004) (DVD) - 6; Cat People (1982) (DVD) - 6; Tenku no shiro rapyuta [Laputa: Castle in the Sky] (1986) (TCM) - 8.

The Kollege of Musical Knowledge

I highly recommend that if you have a mother that can't sing, and she insists on singing to you constantly throughout your childhood, that you get rid of her immediately and trade her in for one that can vocalize to a sufficiently able degree.

My mother sang to us often as we were growing up, and, luckily for us, she could sing. It's not as if she walked around the house regaling us with song after song at all hours of the day. She certainly did not do such a thing. But she would pick her moments, and when the mood was right or the song had some sort of topical relevance to whatever mischief was going on at that particular moment, she would start in on some song from her childhood and sing a few bars (or sometimes more). I always found this pleasant, for frankly, she never sang enough.

One of the songs she would do a little of now and then was "Three Little Fishies (Itty Bitty Poo)", and was especially fond of saying the line "...and they twam and they twam all over the dam." Because we never had a recording of this song, I only knew it from my mother's singing it to us, and it would be several years before I actually heard the song on the radio (KHAR Easy Listening in Anchorage) and learned the name of the man who made it a #1 hit back in 1939: Kay Kyser.

From what I understand, he was a bandleader who didn't really lead his band, except as a figurehead, and had little to do with the arranging or producing of the records on which his name appeared as the artist. That's fine: Walt Disney could barely draw, didn't actually create most of his characters, or even write his name in the scrawl in which it famously appears, but Disney was still a genius. I'm not saying that Kyser was a genius, far from it, but he was an able comedian, was exceedingly popular in the 30's and 40's, had 11 Number One hits and over 35 hits in a span of 15 years, and had one of the most popular radio shows in the world: The College of Musical Knowledge. Kay Kyser was actually an academic, and he carried this posture over into the character that he used to portray himself to the world: the grand professor of all things musical, he spoke in a weird mix of Southern politeness and hipster lingo that were an especially odd combination coming out the mouth of a man that you swore never took his nose out a book.

But this professor was so popular that Hollywood just had to come calling, and Kyser and his orchestra made seven starring features (and were featured in two cameos in other films) throughout the 40's. None of them were ever going to win any awards, at least not for quality, but that really wasn't supposed to be the focus anyway. (Most would say they were made to be fun entertainments, but a cynic would say they were simply made to make money. Though I normally side with the cynics on these lines, I will walk this particular line and say that they were made to be fun entertainments and to make money, like most Hollywood pictures of any generation. Now, is everybody happy?)

I first encountered a Kyser film when I tuned in to what I presumed would be a horror film, since I knew very little about the film called You'll Find Out (1940) beyond the fact that it starred Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Peter Lorre. That combination alone was enough to send me to the station for a viewing, but when I looked the film up in my Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, it said that the real star was Kay Kyser, and referred to the horrific trio as being "wasted". I took this to mean that were underused, but you never know with the Psychotronic.

The truth is that the scaremeisters are underused, though they do have some good moments, but the film really does belong to Kyser and his band, and most especially to the strange deadpan comic stylings of trumpeter Ish Kabbible (born Merwyn Bogue). I knew Ish's name from "Three Little Fishies", where it is mentioned at the beginning of the song, but I always thought he was the singer. It turns out that the voice actually belonged to Harry Babbitt, who figures prominently in the film, along with singer Ginny Simms and saxman Sully Mason. But Ish turned out to be my favorite part of the film, and because of this movie, I started hunting down any Kyser I could find on CD. But I didn't see another Kyser film until two weeks ago.

Home for New Year's vacation, I ventured onto TCM to find a pair of Kyser films showing back to back, and both from 1943: Swing Fever and Around the World. Swing Fever is an odd attempt to turn Kyser into a solo comedy star, with the band clearly relegated to the background, and used mainly in musical sequences. The film is rather unsuccessful, and would have been better as a Danny Kaye trifle in a couple of years. Kyser just doesn't quite fit in to this mold, though he is rather pleasant to watch. Around the World is a far more enjoyable effort, even if the film itself is rather slapdash and constitutes mainly of hijinks surrounding the Kyser Band's USO Tour during WWII. Stops all around the world (hence the title), numerous stage appearances in front of the troops, a lot of corndog jokes from Ish Kabibble, and some seriously haphazard slapstick involving Kay and fellow tour resident Mischa Auer (playing himself). My favorite parts of the film involve Auer sitting down at the piano and then playing his selection using a series of grapefruits, and any of the scenes utilizing the comic talents of the marvelous Joan Davis (a favorite of mine since seeing her in Sun Valley Serenade and Hold That Ghost).

As I said, these films are not Citizen Kane, nor were they meant to be. For a pleasant three hours, though, I was transported back in time to an era that I never knew, and only can know when I visit the entertainments or histories of that time. Personally, I'll check out the entertainments...

Paging Mr. Psychotronic... Paging Mr. Psychotronic...

A quick jaunt up the coast this past weekend to Santa Rosa for a Capricorn party has left me practically movie-less for the past week (with one awesome exception), but not without some unexpected gains to my film library. And by "film library," I mean my actual library about film, not DVDs or videotapes. I'm talking books, people!

An unplanned side trip into Treehorn Books, a used bookstore in Santa Rosa, left two dog-eared -- but in far better condition than my original edition -- copies of Michael Weldon's The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film in my happy little hands. Long out of print (to my knowledge), I cannot stress enough how important this 1983 book was in developing my love of outré cinema, and while I still have not seen every film mentioned in its interior, I have made a pretty good run at seeing most of the pictures contained within its covers. (One of these copies is getting shipped up to Anchorage immediately to my fellow movie nut Aaron, who will appreciate its lurid cover, wonderfully descriptive film entries and black and white reproductions of a host of crappy movie posters greatly.) Weldon also started The Psychotronic Film Guide Magazine, and he doesn't so much review a film, as he does give you a list of all the reasons that you should see a film, whether or not it is a bottom-of-the-barrel scraper. Horror, sci-fi, juvenile delinquent, rock n' roll, jungle, and gorilla pictures, beach and surf flicks...really, exploitation of any sort. If you like any of these genres, this book is a must-have for your collection and further cinematic edification.

I also discovered a gorgeous hardcover copy (with protective book cover) of Astaire Dancing by John Mueller from 1985, and also long out of print. I have yet to break into its text, but much of the book is devoted to frame-by-frame breakdowns of many of the dance sequences from the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical series, covers the majority of Astaire's career, and will be great fun to go through in conjunction with the DVD set that was recently released (and which Jen and I will naturally now have to purchase).

A not-unexpected gain, since I left the book behind on my trip to my brother's in November, was a hardcover copy of Cut! Hollywood Murders, Accidents and Other Tragedies that Mark and Marci passed on to me. I've already noticed that they left Marie Provost out of the book (nothing like being devoured by dachshunds!), so I am unsure as to how complete the research is in the book, but I will wade into it the next time I am in a particularly gory mood. Maybe it will keep me from cracking my ancient copy of Hollywood Babylon again.

A two-hour wait in the San Francisco Airport left me with time to wander about Compass Books, where I snagged a copy of Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy - The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy. I am about a third of the way through this very concise history of the boys, and even if the author (Simon Louvish) gets a little too lavish with his historical overview of comedy in the beginning, I am finding it a most intriguing read.

Didn't really have time to read on the flight, though... the flight is only an hour, and by the time the beverage service shows up and leaves, you are pretty much landing, so it is hard to really get into anything heavy on such a short zip. 

And don't get me started on that crappy little bag of pretzels that they term a "snack". Grrrrr...