The Runaways (2010)

Based on a memoir by Cherie Currie, lead singer of the Runaways (an all-girl rock band in the late 1970s), this entertaining movie is not about Joan Jett (the leader of that group and others afterwards), though she acted as Executive Producer. Jett is a sympathetic character who is all about the music, while Currie is all about being a star (Jack said that). Dakota Fanning (now 16, she was adorable in I Am Sam (2001) and The War of the Worlds (2005), and did a great job in The Secret Life of Bees) is painfully thin and full of the teen angst needed for this starring role. Kristin Stewart (20, and no, I haven't seen any Twilight movies, but I really liked The Safety of Objects (2001), Panic Room (2002), Fierce People (2005), Into the Wild (2007), and What Just Happened) plays Jett quiet, cool, smart, and not concerned with what other people think. And she does some of her own singing in the movie. According to imdb (possible spoiler alert for that link if you don't already know Currie's history), Jett heard a recording of Stewart's voice and thought it was Jett's own. As producer Kim Fowley, Michael Shannon (best known for his Oscar-nominated turn as the crazy guy in Revolutionary Road, he was a part of the ensemble in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007), and many more) is anything but cool; in his eyeliner and lipstick, he is in-your-face, profane, and pushy. There's a great scene in which Fowley coaches Currie to stop singing and start growling. Plenty of fine supporting actors round out the cast, including Alia Shawkat (Maeby Fünke in Arrested Development, and sidekick in Whip It) as fictitious band member Robin (because Jackie Fox would not grant the rights to her story to the filmmakers), Tatum O'Neal (my favorites are Paper Moon (1973) and a recurring role on FX Network's Rescue Me, as a foul-mouthed alcoholic from a family of alcoholics) as the mother of Cherie and twin sister Marie, and a cameo by Rob Romanus (Mike Damone, the drug dealer in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)) as the high school guitar teacher. Each of the female actresses above has been working steadily since childhood, with plenty ahead. Music video director/photographer Floria Sigismondi makes her feature directing debut here.

Despite rottentomatoes' 63% rating, we had a good time with this. It has its fair share of drama, but basically, like Jack says, it's about the music. Here's a link to a list of all the songs used in it, beyond the soundtrack. If you're a fan of the music, I think you will like it too.

Oceans (2010)

Fabulous micro-closeups, unbelievable lighting above and below the surface and even at night, and beautiful music make up only part of the experience that the great and powerful Disney has brought to this sequel to Earth. This time the narrator is Pierce Brosnan, who blends just the right proportions of gravity and casualness; the directors are Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud (co-directors of the magnificent Winged Migration (Le peuple migrateur -2001), while Perrin produced The Chorus (Les choristes - 2004), a wonderful movie about a boys' choir, Microcosmos (1996), about insects, which has been on my to-see list for a long time, and has a huge and varied resumé, starting with an acting gig at age 5); and the music is by Bruno Coulais (composer for The Chorus, Winged Migration, and more). Disneynature does it again (they have more to come: we saw a trailer for one called African Cats), opening this one on Earth Day 2010, as Earth opened about a year ago. Unlike Earth, Oceans doesn't return to specific families of creatures, but instead moves from school to pod, ocean to ocean. 

Jack's favorite scene was the reveal of the sphere of fish whirling about each other. Mine was the air and water ballet of the dolphins and sardines racing along, with the seagulls diving into the sardines to feed, but it won only by a nose, er, beak over one with other gulls (or were they cormorants?) picking off the baby tortoises on the beach. These sequences were like fine athletes excelling at their sport. Only one walrus scene, but that gives me license to say koo-koo-ka-choo. The red "silk scarf" creature won the beauty contest over many worthy competitors, some of whose relatives Jack, Amy, and I saw just a few months ago at the Georgia Aquarium. 

 Here's an NPR segment about the movie and you will find clips, photos, and more available at this Disney link. If you liked any of the movies referenced above, as well as The March of the Penguins (La marche de l'empereur - 2005), you will love this as well. G rated other than the violence against some crabs getting their claws pulled off ("It's just a flesh wound!") and the poor baby tortoises.

Greenberg (2010)

Nobody does awkward like Ben Stiller, unless you count director Noah Baumbach, and they have met their match in co-star Greta Gerwig. Jack and I found this movie painful but brilliant. Baumbach (writer/director of, among others, The Squid and the Whale (2005) and Margot at the Wedding (2007), both cringe-fests featuring people behaving badly; and writer of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), which is full of outcasts, and Fantastic Mr. Fox) made us laugh and squirm uncomfortably throughout this tale of Roger Greenberg's house-sitting for his brother's family, meeting the family's quirky personal assistant, played to perfection by Gerwig (new to me, she has worked as a writer and co-director as well as a few other acting gigs), and getting together with his old band mates, most notably Rhys Ifans (so talented, he can portray the sublime, as the crazy stalker in Enduring Love (2004), to the ridiculous, as the guy in his underwear in Notting Hill (1999), and the full-of-himself rock star in Pirate Radio, and much more). Stiller (as I said in a previous post of a movie I disliked, my Stiller favorites are 1996's Flirting with Disaster and Your Friends and Neighbors) is the perfect neurotic and conflicted Greenberg. Baumbach's wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, also known for playing awkward characters (some of my faves: Dorothy Parker in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994), Georgia (1995), Robert Altman's Kansas City (1996), and The Anniversary Party (2001), which she co wrote and co-directed with co-star Alan Cumming), though in Margot at the Wedding she was the saner sister, acted as producer and has a small part here as Beth.

One cannot discuss this movie without referring to the great playlist of what I like to call "alternative" songs. The actual soundtrack listing is here. It's likely that more songs were actually in the movie, but I haven't been able to find a reference. If I do, I will edit this (though I don't know when--how did I turn my play into work??). Baumbach told a reporter from the L.A. Times that the movie was inspired by an LCD Soundsystem tune, All My Friends (I've discovered that if I google the artist name and the song title, I can listen right from the google page, but if I proceed to the sites, e.g. Lala or Rhapsody, they require signing in, and just googling the band name gives me a selection to play). Though Baumbach tapped LCD lead singer James Murphy for the soundtrack, All My Friends is not on the CD. Go figure.

I suspect people will not be on the fence after they see this; you will either love or hate it. Read some of these snippets on rottentomatoes for samples. If you do see it and love it, you'll want to watch this 52 minute Charlie Rose interview that Judy told us about.

Forgive me, faithful readers, for being on hiatus so long. Jack and I have been traveling, and, though we saw this and three others in the last 10 days, I have not had a minute to write until now. I'll be catching up slowly but surely.

Almost forgot! Musso & Frank's, the restaurant where Stiller and Ifans celebrate Greenberg's birthday, is a Hollywood Boulevard institution where the waiters are almost as old as the room, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were playing themselves in that scene.

Fish Tank (2009)

Judy loved and I liked this multi-award winning British movie about a 15 year old bad girl in Essex (a county northeast of London near the North Sea). Sadly, I get motion sickness watching jumpy handheld camera work, and there's a lot of that here (update, I now keep a running list of movies that cause MPMS or motion picture motion sickness).

Katie Jarvis delivers a powerful performance as the unhappy Mia and perhaps she knows something of the life she portrays: a high school dropout, Jarvis had a daughter in 2009, a bit before her 18th birthday. Having no previous acting experience, she was having an argument with a boyfriend on a train platform when she was spotted by a casting assistant (coincidentally, that same station, in Tilbury, which she pronounces TIL-bray, is in the movie). Mia loves to dance, works hard at it, and there's quite the hip hop soundtrack with a couple of ballads for balance. Co-star Michael Fassbender has an Irish accent, but is really half Irish and half German, and has used both languages in his film work (Eden Lake and Hunger (both 2008) won a bunch of awards and are on my to-see list, and he was in Inglourious Basterds, playing a Brit who goes undercover as a German). Fassbender's Connor has many layers; not so much Mia's mom (Kierston Wareing, who nonetheless has 6 more movies scheduled for release this or next year), who is predictably raising another bad girl in their council housing (the projects to us Yanks). Both Jarvis and Wareing are originally from Essex, as was Dudley Moore. Their accents can be pretty thick at times but you'll get most of it. I can't tell you Jack's opinion, because he was out of town, but I think he would have liked it, too.

Terribly Happy (Frygtelig lykkelig - 2008)

A doctor, a priest, and a shopkeeper are playing cards. That's not the beginning of a joke but a repeated scene in this dark and violent movie that is frequently compared to work of the Coen Brothers and David Lynch. It swept the Robert Festival (the Danish Oscars) last year, winning best film, director, screenplay, cinematography, actor, and actress, and was nominated for more there, and won elsewhere. Director/co-writer Henrik Ruben Genz (nominated by our Oscars for a short in 1998) is in negotiations to direct the English-language remake, which will have to be set in a location that has bogs, or maybe swamps will do. Jack said to the ticket seller, "We want to be terribly happy." She replied, "You won't be." But there are some laughs, mostly of the nervous kind. There's also a cop, his boss, a cowboy, his wife, and a cat that says "Mojn" (pronounced moyn, it means hello and goodbye). Not much else makes sense, either. But it's not a bad way to spend an hour and a half. And now I say "Mojn" to my cat to teach him Danish (he doesn't care what I say, as long as I feed him and touch him).

# 6 Rule for movies (and television)

When a character is watching a news item on TV that concerns him or her greatly, that character will almost always switch off the TV before the news item is finished. See all rules.

Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)

Jack had been eager to see this since the cardboard ad appeared in the lobby of one of our local cinemas. And we laughed many times at this raunchy, profane, stupid, rip-off of Back to the Future (part I, the only one!) where HTTM's past is BTTF's present. Star/producer John Cusack enlisted his co-writer of Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) and High Fidelity (2000) Steve Pink (director of Accepted (2006), another Peter Pan-ish comedy) to direct this, along with co-writers Sean Anders and John Morris (She's Out of My League (2010), which I haven't seen, but Mary Ellen couldn't remember which gags were in which movie after seeing both SOOML and HTTM in the same day with her son). Cusack (I listed my favorites in 2012) plays Adam, one of the three straight men to Rob Corddry's (probably best known for The Daily Show, he's been in plenty of movies including Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008) and W. as Ari Fleischer) manic Lou. The other two are Craig Robinson (best known as Darryl on The Office, but has been in movies, e.g. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007) and Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian) and 24 year old Clark Duke, who has been acting since he was 7. I was glad to note that we saw the actors mentioned above on the screen the whole time, with the young doppelgängers only seen in mirrors. Rife with errors (here's a short list with spoilers, especially first and last), the movie lets us put our brains on auto for an hour and a half, which was nice, considering some of the dour art films we've seen lately. We were wild 30-somethings in the 80s (OK, I was), and the characters are supposed to be late teenagers, but I listened to a lot of that music (here's a carefully compiled list by a fan) and wore big hair, shoulder pads, and popped collars, just like in the movie! The wardrobe and hair are really fun and over the top. Marty McFly's down vest is in evidence, too. And Crispin Glover, the original George McFly, has a silly part, worth the price of admission. Back to the Future's plot started in 1985 and he traveled to 1955. This one travels to 1986 but an eagle eye posted on the imdb link above that the LED readout on the hot tub (which looked a lot like the DeLorean's) said 2006 at the beginning of the movie and 2010 at the end. Gee, I wonder: was the release of this masterpiece delayed?

Sadly, no bonus at the end of the credits, but one from the middle: "and introducing William Zabka," refers to the actor who played the bully in The Karate Kid (1984) and has a cameo in HTTM. If you loved The Hangover you will like this one (but Jack reminded me today, "It's no Zombieland").

Chloe (2009)

This movie is stylish (wardrobe, sets, locations), moody (suspicious, depressed), cold (Toronto in the winter), and hot (most definitely R rated for nudity and sex), and Jack and I found it entertaining, though the only laughs were a couple of lines by Julianne Moore's character's colleague. The music by Mychael Danna (most of director Atom Egoyan's work, Being Julia (2004), Capote (2005), Little Miss Sunshine (2006), Lakeview Terrace, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, and many more of high quality) is also stylish and moody. Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies (2005) was similarly about deceit and sex (I had meant to see Exotica (1994) and his Oscar nominated The Sweet Hereafter (1997) but never did). The screenplay was adapted by Erin Cressida Wilson, who wrote the wonderful Secretary (2002), from the French movie Nathalie... (2003). Moore's Catherine is so tightly wound that she rarely smiles, exhibiting a different kind of desperation than in A Single Man (I wrote more about her for that role, though now I should mention she can do comedy: her two recent 30 Rock episodes proved it). Luscious Amanda Seyfried (Mean Girls (2004), the HBO series Big Love, and Mamma Mia are the ones I've seen) gives the titular Chloe depth and heart as well as her astounding beauty and a showcase for great clothes. Poor Liam Neeson (some of my faves: Husbands and Wives (1992), Schindler's List (1993), and Kinsey (2004)) lost his wife Natasha Richardson (Vanessa Redgrave's daughter) to a skiing accident in the middle of shooting this (March 2009), but insisted on finishing anyway and we would never had known he was suffering behind his role as Catherine's husband David. The settings of the bars, restaurants, and particularly the boxy modern home in which Catherine and David live with their teenage son (Max Theriot) are spectacular. The reviews of this have been quite mixed (I'll put in some links but there are tons of spoilers). The normally positive Los Angeles Times was negative, almost as unkind as Rolling Stone. The New York Times didn't like it much either (why do these reviewers insist on telling so much plot?!?) but you should watch the little video that's on the left side about halfway down the web page. It's narrated by Egoyan, about Toronto "playing itself" for a change. Rottentomatoes.com averaged the 36% positive critics with the 70% positive viewers and came up with 51%. So that makes us pretty average for liking it.

A Prophet (Un prophète - 2009)

Jack and I were lucky enough to be invited to an advance screening of France's Oscar nominee for last year (it didn't win). Extremely long, extremely violent, yet strangely mesmerizing, this coming-of-age story with a twist (it takes place almost entirely in a prison) kept us engaged for most of its 144 minutes. I was a big fan of director/co-writer Jacques Audiard's Read My Lips (Sur mes lèvres - 2001) and this is very good, too. Audiard and Thomas Bidegain started with an existing unproduced script and re-wrote it, which won them one of eight César Awards (the French Academy), and the movie won the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes and others. Tahar Rahim, in his first starring role, is a young Frenchman of Algerian descent. His character, Malik, is a non-practicing Muslim, who has to endure the same prejudices the worshipful guys do. It made me think of the promo NPR aired last week for the story about there not being a box on the US Census to check for Iranian. In the clip the comedian said, "They called me camel jockey, towel head, and all I had to say was, 'Dude, I'm white!'" Malik begins his prison term as a 19 year old boy and grows to be a man as he learns to survive the "protection" of the incarcerated Corsican mobsters and their scary boss played by Niels Arestrup (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le scaphandre et le papillon - 2007) and others). I didn't get why the movie was called A Prophet; one time someone calls Malik that but it only relates to that scene as far as I could tell. The music is by the prolific Alexandre Desplat (I wrote about him in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Coco Before Chanel, and after those he scored Chéri, Julie & Julia, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and more!) but the most noteworthy songs are Turner Cody's Corner of My Room, which is in the trailer and sounds remarkably like Bob Dylan (listen here), and Jimmie Dale Gilmore's version of Mack The Knife, sounding a bit like Willie Nelson (check it out), over the credits. Like I said, extremely violent, but if you can handle it, you'll be glad you saw it.

Misconceptions (2008)

Lightweight and improbable, this farce about a religiously conservative married Southern woman who chooses to be a surrogate mother for a gay male couple because God spoke to her could be a Lifetime movie (I guess--I don't think I've ever watched one) except for the taboos. Starring A.J. Cook (one of the sisters in Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides (1999) and 107 episodes of Criminal Minds, which I haven't seen) as the surrogate and Sarah Carter (the take-no-prisoners lawyer on Shark (2006-08)) as her sister, both with accents so thick you could cut them with a knife, and David Moscow (young Josh in Big (1988), who grew up to look nothing like Tom Hanks) and Orlando Jones (7-Up pitchman, TV writer (including his own show), and lots of other credits, including my personal favorite: Little Melvin, the R&B musician, in Liberty Heights (1999)) as the prospective fathers. There were some laughs in it, but not enough, really.