citizen kate: day three

as day three dawns, so does a realization. i am in a bad relationship. i find myself staying at work longer than i have to now. i look for something, anything, to do rather than come home. time spent at home now is mostly grim with just enough flashes of what used to be to remind me of how things aren't anymore. i would say it's not you, it's me but that would be a lie. queue, it's definitely you. it feels like we are manacled together for eternity. speaking of, we start today with another abc family production, ron underwood's holiday in handcuffs (2007).

hi! i only shop in malls. i only eat processed foods. i get up at 3 a.m. for black friday. i think wedding cake toppers with the bride dragging the groom are a real hoot. have you checked out the latest self-help/diet/inspirational publication they were talking about on good morning america? it will change your life! don't forget to have a drink, watch football and have babies!

abc family thinks you're an idiot. 6.7 million of you are eager to prove them right. i only bother to outline the plot here to illustrate how asinine this is. a floundering waitress who can never please her parents needs to make a good impression over the holidays so she does what anyone would do in that situation - she kidnaps a complete stranger at gunpoint in the middle of a busy restaurant and takes him to the country to pass him off as her handsome, successful boyfriend. wouldn't you know it! they fall in love, he calls off his wedding and instead decides that life with an imbalanced felon is preferable. what a crazy world! these productions are to real movies as contemporary christian is to rock music. at a glance they seem like they could be the genuine article but there's almost immediately something about the way they sound, the way they move, some frequency they hit that clearly sets them apart and somehow only their fans are deluded that they pass for the real thing. anyone on the outside just sees a collection of pastels, marketing triggers and code words that no one but them uses in that context, like "joy". if i have to watch another one of these this week i am going to commit seppuku with the shards of a precious moments figurine. look for my suicide note scrawled on the back of the nearest thomas kinkade painting.

let's take a break from christmas for a bit. instead we'll hang out for a while with tim skousen's the sasquatch gang (2006).

it's the story of a group of nerdy misfits who stumble upon evidence of a bigfoot while walking in the woods. unbeknownst to them, it was planted there by a couple of nitwits who plan to exploit its discovery for enough financial gain to pay off a delinquent credit card bill and buy more corn dogs. young love blooms, friendships are tested, lessons are learned and carl weathers licks sasquatch poop. here's what happens: an indie movie comes out of left field, becomes a surprise success and a number of imitators try to cash in on that before the corpse gets too cold to hump. for example, tarantino blew up and as a result we are stuck with truth or consequences, n.m. (1997). well, in the wake of napoleon dynamite (2004) there was a glut of transmissions from off-kilter loserville and this is one of them. it's actually the most closely related, as our director here was that film's first assistant director and both jons, gries and heder, show up in this. it's all in the family. actually, if it was all in the family it would have been funny. instead it was mostly irritating and mawkish. justin long's mullet is a stillborn joke ten years too late and carl weathers hits an all time low, and i am saying that about a man who participated in this:

that may not be the original music.

i did like addie land as sophie. she seems like a sweet kid and, while maybe not a stellar actress, she has a quality about her that makes you pull for her. can't say the same for the rest of them, the most egregious case being joey kern as shirts (he never wears a shirt! get it?!) jokum:

who, in developing his characterization, was apparently under the impression that none of us had ever seen american movie (1999).

the sasquatch gang - i'm sure it's funny when you're too high to remember where you put your copy of napoleon dynamite.

the last volley fired by the hate tank that is today is andy fickman's you again (2010).

so many of my favorite tropes in one delectable bon bon (am i right, ladies?) that i don't even know where to start. take two cups "high school sure is hard and you never get over it", one cup "how things work in the girl world" (a direct quote) and ladle on a hearty dollop of wacky wedding shenanigans. half-bake in a lukewarm oven for 105 minutes and then stick it directly up your ass. i'm not talking about it anymore. i've had enough today.

tomorrow we're going to blah blah blah. who even cares?

citizen kate: day two

day two of the queue is wall-to-wall holiday cheer!

actually, that is a filthy lie. beginning the day with gil junger's abc family production, christmas cupid (2010), we have arrived at an all new nadir. this now replaces whatever used to be at the bottom of the list as the single worst thing i have ever had to endure courtesy of the queue. this dreck is a retelling of a christmas carol updated for millennials, a description which already makes me want to vomit. christina milian plays a shallow, conniving publicist who must see the error of her ways before it is too late. the jacob marley to her scrooge is a vapid starlet in the lindsay lohan mold who can't seem to not shoplift expensive coats or drunkenly roll on the floor in the most public of ways. instead of marley's chains we have the incessant clink of her martini glass sounding in our ears as she introduces us and the aforementioned publicist to the ghosts of x-mas - they're all ex-boyfriends, get it? - past, present and future. she has her eleventh hour epiphany, finds true love and her dead, superficial, alcoholic client gets her wings. oh my god, this is insipid garbage. there is no way to emphasize how many ways this is terrible. it looks like a commercial, it smells like make-up and was quite obviously written by a computer program. i would say television can go to hell but it looks like it's already there. 3.4 million people tuned in to this when it originally aired last year. i hope at least a few of them noticed that in their abc family-approved production no lessons were learned. in a christmas carol ebenezer scrooge learns magnanimity, generosity, a love for one's fellow man and sympathy for their plight. this character, sloan is her name, is motivated by her desire to not be alone, so when she "changes her ways" in the grand finale it is simply one more strategy she adopts to achieve what she wants. she doesn't learn anything and i learn only that television is often even worse than i think. i kind of want to quit now.

so thank jeebus for jim henson and his magnificent emmet otter's jug-band christmas (1977).

this li'l charmer was jim henson's first real attempt to branch out from the skit-based, full-tilt zaniness that was the muppet show into longer narrative work and it is both a fine family outing and a nice little time capsule. like the previous film, it is a twist on a classic christmas tale, in this case o. henry's the gift of the magi. unlike the previous film, it doesn't make me hope christmas never comes so i don't accidentally stumble across it ever again. the story is a simple one: ma otter and her son emmet live on the river, scraping by on odd jobs, taking in laundry and the kindness of other river folk since pa otter died a few years back. they get wind of an upcoming talent show and each make secret plans to participate, hoping to use the prize money to buy each other christmas gifts. the hitch is that emmet has to put a hole in ma's washtub to make his bass for the band and ma has to sell the tools emmet uses to buy fabric to have something presentable to perform in. they both rock the house but ultimately lose to the shady last-minute entry, the riverbottom nightmare band, a muppet explosion of edgar winter, alice cooper and felt. ma and emmet's band soon discover that they are a natural fit, though, and land a gig at doc bullfrog's with regular pay and all the mashed potatoes an otter can eat. turns out all they needed was each other. it is a sweet, homespun tale from back when the state of the art was still an actual puppet and if you don't like it, well, i'd venture to say you're just broken inside. the puppetry is, of course, wonderful and expressive. not to keep harping on our disastrous beginning today, but do you know what a testament it is to henson and crew (and an indictment of every living being in christmas cupid) when an inanimate object exhibits an array of feelings that not one of the actual human beings in that first movie seemed capable of? the elaborate sets are a marvel and, being the seventies, paul williams provides his usual batch of snappy tunes. most importantly, it manages to tread a delicate line of being sentimental without tipping over into maudlin. it comes dangerously close a time or two, i'll admit, but always manages to pull back just shy of it so what we end up with is a simple fable, heartfelt and warm. we should all be so rich.

we end the day with the mixed holiday blessing of warren p. sonoda's cooper's christmas (2008).

originally titled cooper's camera but changed for subsequent dvd release, it is a simple idea: a man accepts a camcorder in lieu of payment for a debt and, using this cutting edge technology, he records the chaotic family meltdown that is christmas, 1985. i was surprised at how much i ended up liking this. it is a peculiar mix of high concept and lowbrow that caught me off guard now and then. it's essentially a one-joke bit stretched out to feature length, that joke being family dysfunction over the holidays, and i'm not saying it's great, but sometimes they nail it. sometimes boner jokes, getting punched in the pills or dad on the toilet is just plain funny. sue me. they actually deliver this kind of material in a way that doesn't seem tired. it's more than that, too, though. it's weird family secrets that foster ill feeling and distrust. it's pushing up just to the edge of improper (and going over) with your hot cousin. it's being comfortable enough with the people you love that you are more apt to lose control in front of them. you shouldn't lump it into national lampoon territory. it trafficks much more in the comedy of discomfort that is so prevalent these days, rather than set-up/punchline type humor. they certainly aren't afraid of being unattractive or taking chances. it takes a little while to get rolling and it suffers now and again from trying too hard (it also suffers from dave foley's penis being introduced in the first five minutes, but that's a different story) but there are a number of oddball moments like gord trying to hit the high notes during caroling that make it worth your while. i suspect this is one of those that twenty different people will laugh at in twenty different places, depending on what their family and holiday experiences have been like. i do wish they would have had the guts to stick with the weird darkness and not have their version of the "everything's going to be o.k." ending. it severly undermines the preceding eighty or so minutes, in my opinion. too bad they couldn't take it all the way. they might have really had something. as it is, if you like christmas not so holly-jolly, you could do worse than this.

so i have fulfilled my abc family christmas tv movie obligations as of today, right? tomorrow is a new day and all that jazz, right?

aw, hell. can you just point that over here? consider it an early christmas gift.

trailer tuesday

this week's entry is for lynne ramsay's we need to talk about kevin (2011). it is also a lifeline for me, giving me hope this week that all movies aren't terrible.

citizen kate: day one

queue de grâce kicks off this month with one of my favorite christmas movies, terry gilliam's brazil (1985).

it's a bleak dystopia that awaits us, it would seem. sam lowry is there already. he lives in a dark and paranoid world, passing his days as a drab cog in an immense, ugly machine. his only escape comes via his dreams, where he becomes something of an avenging angel, soaring through endless skies, sword in hand, haunted by a vision of a particular damsel in distress. in his waking life the most excitement he sees is rectifying clerical errors, like the instance where a fly in the teletype results in an innocent man being mistaken for a terrorist ending in his detainment and death. on a visit to the man's widow to get some paperwork signed, sam catches a glimpse of their upstairs neighbor who turns out to be the literal woman of his dreams. the potential to live out these dreams, at least a little, is enough to make sam throw caution to the wind and risk everything in pursuit of this woman. his life comes off the rails as he attempts to balance a new promotion, his mother's meddling, what has to be his first love and keeping the orwellian darkness from encroaching on his new-found happiness. he seems to succeed, but it turns out that, like everything good in his life, it is only a dream and the film ends with a catatonic sam receding further and further into his own broken mind. i think, uneven though it is, this is still gilliam's masterpiece. all of his trademark themes get their best going over in this wicked satire. orwell's menacing totalitarian state has been replaced by one that is run more by mindless bureaucrats, not so much inherently evil as inept and cowardly. the most evil thing you can do in this universe is be ambitious. those lean, hungry ones are always the ones you have to look out for. along this tangled way, he takes shots at rampant consumerism, human vanity and air conditioner repairmen, all with a backdrop of the most commercial holiday we have ever created. every human physical interaction is awkward. every living space is crowded with ductwork. every other camera angle is vertiginous. it is absurdly funny. it is probably the closest gilliam has ever come to putting his own personal struggle with the world as we know it onscreen, at least until he finishes the man who killed don quixote. the problem with putting so much of gilliam's mind onscreen at once is that it becomes a little disjointed and overwhelming. i would rather have that, though, than some competent middle manager of a filmmaker, playing it safe. it made me think of how gilliam is the antecedent to the charlie kaufmans of the world and how without the messy brilliance of brazil we wouldn't have the undisciplined and fantastic risk taking of something like synecdoche, new york (2008). funny how the bleakest, most paranoiac film on the list this week is the one that fills me with the most hope.

from there we move on to everyone's favorite magical fairy tale about goths who cut themselves, tim burton's edward scissorhands (1990).

i don't have a lot of patience for tim burton. the only things i have really enjoyed of his were pee-wee's big adventure (1985) and sleepy hollow (1999), both of which are still comfortably in burton's wheelhouse by being about misunderstood outsiders, both of which succeed primarily because they aren't tim burton-y misunderstood outsiders. you probably all know edward's story. it seemed to me while watching it i had seen it once before...when it was called frankenstein (1931). edward was created by a kindly, if a little mad, doctor - vitagraph favorite, vincent price! - who lived in the gothic castle on the hill. his creator died before edward was quite finished leaving him with scissors for hands and finishing school applications unfilled. edward is discovered by another kindly type, this time the local avon lady, who brings him home and tries to integrate him into polite suburban society. things go awry, as they are wont to do - you know, fire bad and all that - and the angry villagers chase the monster back from whence he came, only satisfied when they think that he is dead. there were some things i enjoyed about it. without a doubt, burton has a truly idiosyncratic visual style and i liked a number of the set design elements a great deal. danny elfman's score was predictably decent, if occasionally christmas jewelry commercial-ish. johnny depp had some great moments in the margins, little throwaway things that were charming and appropriate for his goth-out-of-water character. where burton loses me is in his attempts here to generate pity. it doesn't come across as pathos, just pathetic. and i think it was a huge mistake on his part to spend so much time in a suburban landscape that was an obvious pastel cartoon knock-off of john waters' usual stomping grounds. here's what you underline when you do that (note depp in both):

john waters: freaks (and i mean that lovingly) who wouldn't spend five minutes giving a shit what you think because they have their own thing going on.

tim burton: freaks who spend an hour and a half trying to get you to feel sorry for them.

no contest! i know which ones i would rather hang out with. if john waters had made this then you might have something. as it is, not so much. and winona should never go blonde again. next!

we end things on a synthesized note with giorgio moroder presents metropolis (1984).

this is one odd duck that leaves me with all sorts of conflicted feelings. in the early eighties, disco/synthesizer impresario giorgio moroder took it upon himself to restore fritz lang's silent science fiction masterpiece metropolis (1927). an admirable idea, right? lang's film had suffered terribly at the hands of editors, rendering some of it nonsensical. in addition to redressing these cuts, though, moroder also composed a new contemporary score. contributing to the synth-driven proceedings are such luminaries of mtv's infancy as pat benatar, billy squier and adam ant. don't get me wrong. i love how music and film interact and i really don't think anything is off limits when it comes to mixing the media and watching them recontextualize each other. fantastic planet (1973) is brilliant for this, for instance. you can play anything as you watch it and each new piece of music brings out something different in it. in this case, though, whether lang's film doesn't lend itself to this type of experimentation or it's moroder's score, it mostly doesn't work. a couple of times something subtle and thoughtful happens but, for the most part, it is unremarkable. for a "contemporary" score the music from 1984 seems more dated than the film from 1927 and for a "restoration" this print is pretty bad. it was amusing to see the intertitles at the beginning talking about how missing scenes had been lost forever, knowing now that that's not true. if you want to see an exquisite version of the film, check out kino's restoration of the complete metropolis. i appreciate moroder's passion for the film and his invaluable contribution in keeping interest in the film alive, unfortunately it just doesn't help his version pass beyond the bounds of novelty.

and with that we bring an end to probably the only day this week that won't make me want to gouge my eyes out at least once.

ho ho ho!

starlite advisory: you'd better watch out

prepare for starlite cinema to deck your halls! our december program is going to feature a holiday confection unlike any you've seen before, jalmari helander's rare exports: a christmas tale (2010).

a group of finnish reindeer herders find their holiday disturbed, first by ominous, mysterious excavations on their mountain and then even more so by what the excavations have seemed to unleash upon the countryside. santa claus has come to town and has set his sights on the naughty. in the finest brothers grimm tradition, this digs back through centuries of christmas tradition (with nods to the pagan forebears they stole their ideas from) and unearths for us a most dangerous, blackly comic lump of coal. it's actually a feature-length expansion of a pair of short films from a few years ago. they will give you an idea of what sort of holiday cheer you have to look forward to. they aren't necessarily all that spoiler-ish. sort of apples and oranges to the feature film, if those apples and oranges were put in a sock so as not to leave bruises. enjoy!

the festivities begin at 7:30 p.m. on saturday, 12.17.11. here is the event page if you would like to rsvp there. if you're not facebook enabled and you would like to attend, just let me know. i will get you the pertinent information. we hope to see you there!

p.s. HE SEES YOU WHEN YOU'RE SLEEPING!

let it queue, let it queue, let it queue

queue de grâce returns to ring in the holidays early next week!

the rules: for a full week i turn over complete control my netflix streaming queue to one of you kids. during the week, excluding visits to actual theaters and screenings i host, i will only watch what you choose. no other films, no other television, no respite from the cinematic rigors that you have assigned me. i then report in on a daily basis, detailing my travails and triumphs.

this time around our guest programmer is intrepid newshound kate ludlow.

she appears to be skeptical of my ability to withstand her cinematic onslaught, no?

kate can be found most days keeping the community informed at the liberty hill independent. when not occupied there, she can be found ruminating on more personal matters over at achromatic places, which i suspect may feature rebuttals, defenses and encouragements for me during the week to come. her week at the helm runs 12.5.11 through 12.11.11. please stop in and see what sort of holiday cheer she has in store for us.

like clockwork

an overwhelming love of the magic of movies issues forth from martin scorsese's delicately intricate new machine, hugo (2011).

adapted from brian selznick's excellent children's book, the invention of hugo cabret, it tells the story of an orphan who secretly lives within the walls of a paris train station. he passes his days surreptitiously performing maintenance on the station's clocks and scavenging wheels, pins and gears from toys he has stolen from the station's toy shop. he must take care to avoid the overzealous station inspector, who takes great delight in sending wastrels off to the orphanage. he must also avoid being caught by the embittered, sorrowful old man who runs the toy shop long enough to accumulate the materials he needs to refurbish his mechanical man, which he believes bears one last message from his father. he doesn't manage that bit very well. the old man lures him into a trap and confiscates hugo's notebook that contains his father's sketches of the automaton, partly out of spite, partly because he finds the contents of the notebook upsetting. hugo enlists the help of the old man's niece to retrieve his notebook and their resulting adventures together, sneaking into the cinema, haunting bookstores and libraries and repairing the automaton uncovers wounds, connections and significance they could never have imagined. if you want to be surprised by these revelations, stop here and come back after you've seen it. i cannot effectively talk about what i enjoyed about the film from this point on without revealing one of its essential secrets.

as it happens, the proprietor turns out to be georges méliès, retired magician and one of the pioneers of early cinema. it was méliès who first saw film's potential to go beyond documenting the everyday, to understand that the magic of film and the worlds it could transport you to were limited only by the filmmaker's imagination. his genius in editing and developing fantastic special effects made it possible, for the first time, to put dreams on the screen. by the time we find him, though, he is a relic. his art is lost to the world and he sits all day in the station, morose and forgotten. the kids slowly begin to unravel the mystery of his identity with the help of one of the coolest booksellers ever, christopher lee, and an academic and film historian who originally believes méliès to be dead. their diligence leads to a revival of both the man and his work. as a result, some of the world's most important pieces of cinema are saved from oblivion and the message hugo was waiting for has led him home.

it is a beautiful film and the leading candidate this year for film most likely to be lost on most of its audience. ostensibly a kid's movie, i don't think that's quite right. yes, there are things in it kids will enjoy, mostly embodied by sacha baron cohen's gangly station inspector. his (at times incongruous) broad physical comedy and cartoon menace provide the best place for kids to find purchase in a film that otherwise might test their patience. it's also not truly for holiday viewers in search of a blockbuster to while away a couple of hours, though it may be marketed as such. it is appropriately magical and entertaining and those folks will enjoy looking at it. its 3D is only the second legitimate use of the technology that i have seen this year and it certainly qualifies as spectacle but it's also much, much more than that. at its heart, it is essentially a paean to antiquated technologies, the magic of movies - from their very inception - and is the most eloquent and lovely argument in favor of film preservation that you may ever see. it was made for people like me and i am grateful. i would accuse scorsese of reading my diary, if i kept one. it's made for those of us who love things made of iron, wood and burnished brass and painted by hand, steam trains, sleight of hand, leatherbound books, snow falling and that special girl with a good vocabulary whom you can share all your secrets and greatest adventures with. most of all, it's made for those of us who genuinely love the movies and who envy those fortunate people who were there when pictures moved for the first time. it's funny to think that it took all this time and adapting a piece of children's literature for martin scorsese to make the movie that might be his most personal. if you are familiar with the man, you know how much he is in love with the movies and how infectious his enthusiasm for them is. i could listen to him talk about the movies for as long as he could go on. case in point: his documentary my voyage to italy (1999), in which he talks for four hours about all the italian films he grew up loving and it seems like it's over in thirty minutes. his lengthy reminiscences are interspersed with long clips, many without the benefit of subtitles, and the whole thing is absolutely riveting, even if you only have a cursory interest in world cinema. with hugo he is finally able to combine his prodigious technical abilities with this seemingly limitless enthusiasm for being transported by the magic of the movies. he brings all of his skill, knowledge and love to bear on the material and it is wondrous. it comes at an opportune time, as well, as it seems film is in danger of extinction. i hope people are paying attention. years from now, i'd like to think back on this as a love letter to film, not a valediction. if you love movies and all that they are capable of, you owe it to yourself to see it.

if you have some time, and are so inclined, you might also check out the film foundation. it is a nonprofit that scorsese founded in 1990 dedicated to film preservation and education. they do good work.

trailer tuesday

blogger wasn't working for me most of the night, so this one is a little late to qualify for tuesday. by way of apology, we will turn things up a notch. this week's entry is for steve mcqueen's shame (2011), which i cannot wait to see.