Economy Size Geek

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)

This is a classic. In more ways that one. First, it is based on “The Odyssey”. It’s nice to see elements from the classic sprinkled through out. John Goodman plays the cyclops for example - a man with an eye patch. Or a scene with women washing their closes referred to as Sirens.

Second, the music is awesome. They manage to really capture the feeling of a time and place with the music. Music that is good enough I listen to it on my iPod. Some times you just need some of that Old Timey music.

Third, the film itself is well written and beautiful to look at. I’m may ruin a part of that last part. When they went to film it the south was in full summer. It wouldn’t do to have the trees be green in what is supposed to be the era of the dust bowl. So if you see the film - realize that every plant that you see in the film that is brown - has actually be digitally recolored. I believe this was really cutting edge at the time. It is great when someone finds a way to work in a new technique in a way that instead of taking over the film really helps you get into the story.

A fine example of how great the movie is the fact that even though I’ve seen it a number of times - I noticed a joke in the film this time that I don’t remember from any time previous. (my wife R-U-N-N-O-F-T)

Bottom Line: This film is the perfect blend of story, music, and acting - it is two hours well spent!

300 (2006)

Ok let’s get some stuff out there straight away.

Frank Miller wrote this in 1999. I don’t think it has anything to do with our current conflict in Iraq.

The original graphic novel is 88 pages. That’s not a lot of room for story or plot.

Iran is mad because the movie portrays Persians in a bad light. The sad reality is most Americans don’t know that Persia and Iran are connected in any way.

This film isn’t historical. Yes stuff happened. Yes the names in the film are right. If you dig into it, you’ll quickly realize that may be the only thing they actually got right - as far as historical accuracy goes.

If you want to read into the film a East vs West battle or maybe you want to say that it was Whitey whooping up on a rainbow of other people. You may be able to make that statement and still stand. Of course given where it occurred and the history they’re talking about it’s hard not to have that happen.

All that being said, I saw it on the IMAX. It was great! It was the sort of over the top violence I can get into.

in the words of Kenneth Turan of the La Times

unless you love violence as much as a Spartan, Quentin Tarantino or a video-game-playing teenage boy, you will not be endlessly fascinated.

That’s pretty fair. I don’t think he meant it as a compliment. Not that it bothers me much. It was over the top - but that is why having it as such a spectacle on the IMAX just made it that much better.

I was actually surprised they let any of the 300 die. I suppose that is the benefit of having 300 - you can let some die and still keep some main characters.

I think the work had a statement. One rooted in the original graphic novel. That had nothing to do with East vs West or all the rest of the controversy. The message appears to be that a few determined men can stand their ground even when vastly out numbered and earn a victory.

This seems to be an ode to the under dog - the people with a code of honor instead of the ones who are enslaved and forced to fight.

That’s probably giving it a little more depth than it deserves (I suppose it is what happens when you start calling them graphic novels instead of comic books). Maybe it is really All about the abs

Bottom Line: It is puerile battle at its finest. It is a summer movie 6 months early.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)

Where to start - it is a musical (I hate musicals) about a boy who becomes a woman but the operation is botched (I hate it when that happens) and becomes a glam rock super star only to be sold out by the one person she thinks she loves.

The plot is complicated and involved. The music goes from ballad to full punk. And I first saw this a few years ago when I met the woman who later became my wife. She loves this film. I’m willing to bet it is in her top ten favorites of all time. Back then I watched out of a sense of duty. You know, you start dating someone and they show you something they really really like. The correct response is never - “oh my god how the hell could you like this”. It wasn’t so much that it was bad - it isn’t, more that it is a lot to take in - and it is a musical (did I mention how much I hate musicals).

All that behind me, I’ve since heard the music on more than a few occasions over the intervening years. I’ve even managed to learn to really like one of the songs - namely the one that explains the Angry Inch.

So not too long an old friend was in town. He likes musicals. Hell he has been in more than a couple! As you might imagine, the beer flowed and out came Hedwig.

I have to say it got a much better viewing this time. Since this time I actually understood what was happening in the film I actually got to spend more time enjoying it. Which in my mind is a good thing. Since this time I thought it got a fair shake.

The story moves along. It bounces around with character. Looking at it more closely I love the amazingly drab restaurants and buffets they make Hedwig perform in.

Bottom Line: If you like musicals with an edge. If you like gay camp/sexual confusion/heart break and redemption with a healthy dose of punk - have I got a movie for you.

Billy Madison (1995)

Somewhere between Pan’s Labyrinth and Ultraviolet is this film. A fantasy comedy about an incredibly rich loser who has to go back to school and spend 2 weeks in each grade from 1st to 12th to earn his family fortune.

This isn’t a serious film. It is not a smart film. It is a funny film. Especially, if you want some incredibly guilty dumb comedy. This is Adam Sandler before he worried about his softer side and was happy to play a dofuss that you could enjoy watching.

It has given me one of my favorite quotes :

Mr. Madison, what you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

Plus you get an uncredited cameos from Chris Farely and Steve Buscemi.

I consider this a classic of Sandler’s (along with Happy Gilmore and Waterboy)

Bottom Line: It ain’t Shakespeare - but it is funny! Drink and enjoy!

Ultraviolet (2006)

I mentioned that Pan’s Labyrinth kept me from reviewing because I needed time to rally what I thought about it. This is the second film that kept me from typing up reviews.

I so wanted to like it. I didn’t know anything about it - other than it was sci-fi futuristic with Mila Jovovich. She isn’t a terribly good actress - actually she’s just plain terrible. But what can I saw - I really really loved The Fifth Element - so I keep watching to see if she ends up in anything half as good. This is not that movie.

This movie pretty much sums up why people hate sci-fi films. This movie is slick. I mean top of the line. Super high CGI production values. That, unfortunately, is the only thing going for it. The base plot is apparently stolen from Gloria (I haven’t seen it - I found this out reading the Wikipedia - only because I wanted to know if this film butchered a manga/comic book series I wasn’t aware of).

There is a lot of fighting in the movie. It could be so cool - except they make a classic Superman mistake. Superman can defeat pretty much anyone. To make the story interesting you have to find a way to make him weak so there is a challenge. In this film, Mila must polish off about 1,000 bad guys. In most cases they are kind of enough to either form a big circle or a big line so she can kill them in batches. Yawn….

In the 10 minutes they aren’t fighting someone or showing off their visual effects - they manage to cobble together the most convoluted plot of blood disease, fascist regime, blah blah blah. The film is basically 4 characters and a thousand red shirts

Bottom Line: I feel dumber for having watched this movie. Please avoid like the steaming pile it is.

Laberinto del fauno, El (2006)

Ok full disclosure - I’ve seen more than a few movies, and I’ve been remiss in reviewing them. I blame is split between this movie and one other (I’ll get to that later).

I didn’t review it right away because it took me a little while to soak in this film. I’m not sure what I thought I was getting into when I went to see it. I suppose I expected some kind of other worldly fantasy. It had that, but it had a lot more of the real world in it than I thought it would.

Keep in mind - that real world - isn’t the shiny happy real world you and I live in. Instead it is the fascist Spain of 1944 (Says so right in IMDB). What that means is you ride shotgun with a young girl who is trapped in a dark violent world of adults.

I don’t think I can really stress this enough - this is not some Harry Potter kiddie film. There are some very creepy monsters (hello guy with eyes in his hands) , but the “normal” people are much worse. If you don’t like violence, especially the brutally realistic kind - get some popcorn as soon as you see some hunters get caught - come back in about 10 minutes and you should be safe.

I wish the plot was simple to explain - the film operates in the harsh world of a war with an overlay of fantasy world that promises to grant the young girl the power to escape her fate.

I suppose I’ve been watching too much sweeps week television - I was a little thrown off by the end because I expected them to try some sort of gimmick - which they resisted. Instead you’re left with a moment were you get to decide what happened. Not in a gimmicky - twisty - way but more of a glass half empty/half full kind of way.

Bottom line: It is dark and beautiful, violent and hopeful - if you can handle the subtitles it is worth the effort!

Idiocracy (2006)

This movie was completely buried. It was actually made in 2004 but Fox refused to release it.

Given some of the crappy movies I’ve seen it seems strange that they would bother to smother this film. Unless of course you figure it was buried more because of the way it portrays big corporations (Carl’s Jr, Starbucks, Costco, etc) in the film.

The movie is basically a spoof sci movie about an incredibly average person who is put in suspended animation for 500 years.

If this plot line sounds a little familiar - it means you’re also a fan of Futurama. (fine so Fry is frozen for 1000 years but it’s the same thing) The difference between Groening’s view of the future and Judge’s is displayed by the nature of the main character and the world around them.

In Futurama, Fry is an idiot. A likable idiot - but an idiot none the less. In the future, there are flying cars , talking robots, and space travel. Pretty standard stuff by sci fi standards.

In Idiocracy, that equation is flipped upside down. The main character is absolutely average (thanks for that exposition). In the future, everyone is an inbred idiot. This average man from our time is the smartest man in the world in the future. There aren’t robots or space travel. Instead, there are combo lazy boy-toliets. Starbucks is a place for coffee and sex. (Before I found out that the film was made in 2004 I thought this was a reference to Hot Coffee) They have a Museum of Fart - instead of Art. Judge hurtles criticism at the science of the future since it spent more time working on hair replacement and elongating erections than anything useful.

I pretty much lost all right to criticize the film in the first 2 minutes of the DVD. It came up with a short narration about a garbage avalance. Then it goes to a guy watching a monster TV. On the TV is a show called - “Ow, My Balls!”. You probably already saw this coming - the show consists of a man being hit in the balls by a variety of people and situations. The show lasts about 30 seconds. Then it started over. Half way into the third loop I realized we weren’t watching the movie - we were watching the menu to decide to watch the movie. Yeah - I felt like I would fit into 2505 just fine.

The jokes in the movie aren’t sophisticated. They’re crude, base, and completely over the top. I found them funny in some places and boring in others. Just be prepared for a lot of farting and such.

The thing that really strikes me about this movie is that some of the reviews I’ve read seem to have a fear that Judge’s theory that dumb people breed more than smart people thus insuring that over time the world will be populated with idiots is a fact.

The sad thing is that the people who think that are more likely to be the ones utterly disgusted by the film. If you’re worried that the world is getting dumber because people spend hours on MySpace or have utral violent games - check out Everything Bad is Good For You - since he does a pretty good job of showing how all this “junk” culture is actually making everyone a little bit twitchy - but also a lot smarter.

Bottom Line: If you love Beavis and Butthead - you gotta see it - it’s Mike Judge! If you are looking for Office Space - move along - nothing to see here.

The Chumscrubber (2005)

First the title really threw me off.. I can think of two definitions of Chum - 1 being a friend - the other being a soup of blood and fish parts used to attract sharks. Neither fits with the word scrubber or this film.

In the movie, it is the name of a super hero who survived radiation.

This movie is hard to fully describe. The 1 sentence plot line summary doesn’t do the film justice - a guy’s friend commits suicide. He tries to figure out why.

Doesn’t sound very good does it? It didn’t get better when I started watching the film either. Much like Napoleon Dynamite - the acting starts off very stiff and disaffected. It was so much so I was beginning to think the cast couldn’t act. As the movie goes on, I realized that they were doing it on purpose.

The whole movie is about the life kids live right in front of their parents. Parents who are all too busy with their own lives to actually know what is happening with their kids.For example in the film includes a parent who doesn’t even realize that her son has been kidnapped.

There are all these surreal moments in the movie that still stick with me. Glenn Close is the mother of the boy who committed suicide. She calls everyone in the neighborhood to invite them to the wake (normal) and tells them that she doesn’t blame them for his death (not so normal). Another example is that any time a kid is stopped from doing something by a parent, they are able to continue on by saying - “It’s for school”. Even when that doesn’t make any sense - it is the pass phrase to access.

This is one of those films that has suburbia as the monster behind every door. I’m not sure if I would have watched if it I had known that. All too often, the suburbia as the enemy film ends up sounding like the complaints of a grown up misfit who is using film to get back at society for the injustices they suffered in high school. The thing that makes this movie so much different, is that it does a great job of alternating between comedy and tragedy in a way that make you want to know where it is all going.

The whole movie works from a very simple idea - this is what happens when everyone is trying to figure out their own wants and dreams and is too busy to acknowledge any one else. It is that obliviousness that makes the film hilarious in some places, and depressing in others.

Bottom Line: Prepare for a ride through the perfect neighborhood - turns out the reality is both funnier and sadder than you thought.

Smokin’ Aces (2006)

I don’t know if I should be more amazed at how much this movie sucked - or how much I liked the parts that didn’t.

Basic plot - There’s a guy named Buddy “Aces” Israel. He’s on the mob’s hit list. The movie is about a bunch of different people who want to kill him and how they all collide.

Let’s start with the good parts. The writer did a good job of painting characters with big bright colors. Basically, there are a bunch of characters all dumped on you at once. The good news is that they all end up being memorable enough that you actually think you know them even though you don’t learn that much about them. Character side - pretty good.

The action is fun. I’m always a fan of seeing people pinned down by a .50 caliber rifle. There is a ton of weaponry and action. A man kills himself on his own chainsaw. Action side - very enjoyable

So if you are looking for a fun action movie with out a lot of plot - I can kind of recommend this movie.

This brings us to the bad side. I mentioned that they drop a bunch of characters on you. The assassins are great. Jason Bateman as a stoned out lawyer is great. But they ended up casting some people in the wrong places. Andy Garcia as the top man at the FBI is doing the exact same character he did in Ocean’s 11 with even less emotion.

They put Ryan Reynolds as a dramatic lead. This is the guy from Van Wilder for god’s sake! Comedy he can sort of do - but drama - are you kidding me…

Which leads into the real problem with the movie. The writer/director (Joe Carnahan) thought he was being so smart by making up this incredibly convoluted story to get all these people to go to the same place at the same time and try to kill Buddy. If he had left it at that, I would have been ok with this movie. I mean in the end Buddy lives or dies - but really he’s just as aMacGuffin. You should really care about him - you should care about how th other character maneuver to kill him - and each other in the process.

Instead - he does it just the opposite. The movie is all about Buddy and his connection to the mob. The assassins are a distraction from the actual plot line.

I’m not going to bother blowing the story since the only thing this movie probably has going for it is a “twist ending” that is so bad you will want to hurt someone.

This is only the second movie in my life (Hello AI) that I thought would be remarkably improved if you walked out early. So let me say this near the end of the film there is a scene where Ryan Reynolds is in a penthouse. He starts asking Andy Garcia for answers. They are going to fade to black. The movie will come back. At that moment pick up all your belongings, and get the hell out of the theater. I mean it. What they are going to say in the last 10 minutes of the film is going to be stupid, very stupid. In fact, I think I’m a little bit dumber for having watched the film.On top of that, if you stay you are going to watch Ryan Reynolds try to his impersonation of an actor trying to win an Academy Award for most over acted ending in 2006.

Bottom Line: Want something stupid and fun - fine - just leave 10 minutes early and no one will get hurt.

Cars (2006)

This movie threw me off a little. I’ve always been a big fan of Pixar. For some reason, I just didn’t feel the urge to go out and see this movie. Which is strange since I’ve liked all the others.

Just so the rest makes sense - a little explanation. All the characters in the movie are cars. Literally! There are no people in this world. Even the insects are ….wait for it…. tiny VW beetles.

The movie does two things well - First, the rendering is even more beautiful. It is amazing to see all the reflections in the paint on the cars. Racing on the track they even introduce little bits of pavement that make it seem like you really are up close.

The second thing is the story. Look you know going in it is going to have some sort of message. At this point you probably realize in the first 5 minutes that the message is going to be along the lines of - “Don’t just think about yourself”. In the hands of less gifted story tellers, I would end up being turned off by that. I want entertainment not a sermon. That is where the Pixar team really shines. Even though I know where the story will end, the journey itself is fun! It is really amazing how much character they are able to cram into the collection of polygons.

They also make incredibly smart choices. I watched the bonus material on the DVD. It included scenes that they ended up cutting out. Truth be told they made all the right choices. The versions they went with in the film made the story move along better. For example, one of the scenes has the main character’s engine transplanted into a bulldozer. There is a horrible moment where another character takes the main characters body and goes off to the races. It turns out to be a dream. They cut this whole sequence. Which is a good thing - both because it would have been confusing as well as making Mater (who is a simple and sweet character) seem like any but nice.

Bottom Line: It is fun, pretty, and a lot of why you go to the movies on a rainy day - pull over at the rest stop and watch Cars.