Review – Trumbo

Famous blacklist victim Dalton Trumbo gets the sentimental celebrity treatment. Aside from an unseemly digression about masturbation, the documentary focuses almost exclusively on the writer’s role in the Hollywood Ten and associated HUAC witch-hunting. Several movie stars – some of whom worked on Trumbo pictures and some of whom didn’t – read passages from the writer’s personal correspondence, which of course gave the whole thing a sense of currency and importance it might otherwise have lacked. Normally I tend to regard that as a cheap tactic, but here I’m willing to overlook it. Considering the current political climate, 21st century audiences could stand to be reminded about the risks of letting intolerant idiots run the government. Mildly amusing

Great moments in theology #5

 

Judging by the art on this billboard, what else might Christ be up to on your behalf?

1. He smelled a bad smell for your sins
2. He took an algebra test for your sins
3. He ate a day old pizza with anchovies for your sins
4. He smoked a doob for your sins
5. He filed an amended return for your sins
6. He stood in line at the DMV for your sins
7. He watched three Bruce Willis movies back to back for your sins
   

Seriously, was this ad really created by the Roman Catholic Church? C’mon, guys! You have the world’s single most awesome art collection – including at least two or three pictures of Jesus – and this is the best you can do?

Review – Barbarella

Journey back to the wacky days of 1968, when the “sexual revolution” gave the movie industry free reign to revel in sexuality worthy of a adolescent boy who just discovered masturbation. Jane Fonda hops merrily through an endless string of absurd perils and skimpy outfits in a realm of psychedelic sets and flimsy plot twists. Watching this movie stoned would likely lead to either the best or worst trip of your life, though either way would still be better than watching it sober. See if desperate

Review – The Grudge 3

The creepy Japanese ghosts are still up to their creepy ghost business. Now they’re slowly (and I do mean slowly) making their way through a mostly-deserted apartment building. Other than some creepy ghost stuff, there isn’t much to this at all. Mildly amusing

Review – Midnight in Paris

I wonder if it’s possible to make an entire feature-length movie out of nothing but clever moments. Woody Allen comes really close here. A discontented writer (Owen Wilson) finds himself transported to Paris in the 1920s, where he gets to pal around with literary and artistic greats. Overall there’s some kind of point about living in the real world rather than becoming obsessed with fantasy. But the real draw isn’t the sitcom plot as much as the small touches. My personal favorite was the protagonist feeding the plot for Exterminating Angel to Luis Buñuel, who’s having none of it. That took me back to my film school days! Mildly amusing

Review – The Best Years of Our Lives

More than six decades later this tale of three vets home from the war is powerful stuff, so I can only imagine the impact it must have had back in 1946. Fredric March, Dana Andrews and Harold Russel play three guys having varying degrees of trouble readjusting to civilian life. March resumes his everyday job at a bank and suffers from what nowadays would be diagnosed as minor depression complicated by alcoholism. Andrews battles nightmares, swallows enough of his pride to go from Air Force officer to drug store counter help, and falls out of love with his wife and in love with March’s daughter. But Russel outshines them both as a former sailor learning to live without hands. Russel was an actual disabled vet facing the same challenges as his character, and his lack of slick Hollywood pedigree helped him bring an impressive honesty to the role. Despite a touch of the melodrama typical for the time, this still stands as one of the best movies ever made about the difficulties service members can face. Worth seeing

Review – Silent House

So now we’re stuck with shaky-cam even in movies that don’t follow the “found footage” formula. In 15 minutes a woman finds herself trapped in a deserted house, and in 20 I quit caring why she was there or how she might escape. Based on the ham-handed plot structure, this promised to be either a Scooby Doo (uncle trying to drive his niece insane) or a hallucination (niece is already insane). I won’t spoil the twist for you just in case you’re inclined to spoil it for yourself. See if desperate

Review The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

Morgan Spurlock takes on product placement in movies with a production that aspires to be Super Size Me but falls way short. The gimmick this time is that he’s trying to get corporate sponsors to give him money to make the documentary we’re now watching. Ever so briefly he makes a solid point about sponsor interference in the creative process. But overall he left me wondering why I should care about movie characters drinking a particular soda or driving a particular car when the money from a placement deal might make the difference between seeing a movie I want to see and missing it because it never gets made. Mildly amusing

Six shots or only five?

Several days later, the Clint Eastwood speech at the Republican National Convention is still bugging me.

At first the whole talking-to-an-empty chair thing was just bewildering. Apparently an imaginary Barack Obama heckled Eastwood throughout his rambling, incoherent speech, repeatedly telling him to shut up. That by itself would have been odd, as I can’t say as I’ve ever heard the President tell anyone to shut up. I suppose he’s done it, but it seems more like Bill O’Reilly’s thing.

Far more chilling was the spirit of Ralph Ellison invoked by the stunt. Black people have gone from not being seen when they are there to being seen when they aren’t. That’s a funny kind of progress.

Overall the experience just made me sad. I’ve enjoyed Eastwood’s work in the past, even admired some of it. But here he was clearly trotted out by the GOP with the cynical supposition that no matter what he said, his remarks would still serve as a rallying point for the party faithful. Mission accomplished. I posted a dig on Facebook about the difference between Eastwood’s notion of who owns America and what the Constitution says on the subject. It drew an “I liked his speech” from an acquaintance who sports hunter orange in his avatar photo.

The most telling moment: when even Eastwood wouldn’t stoop to uttering the line for which the crowd so deeply lusted: the Reagan-co-opted line from Sudden Impact. Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle raised the only question worth pondering about this legendary moment: why the hell would a handful of heavily-armed criminals just sit there gawking while Dirty Harry reached into his jacket to draw out his trusty hand cannon? “Do 50 bullets in your ass make your day?”

Do you feel lucky? Well do you, RNC?

Review – Adult Entertainment: Disrobing an American Idol

Not that we really needed it, but here we have another hour and a half worth of proof that there isn’t anything productive to say about pornography. The folks who create it come across as sleazy, and the folks who hate it come across as puritanical fanatics. The producers try to add some gravitas by stirring in a test of porn’s effects on a couple of average mooks, but even by the looser standards of the behavioral sciences this experiment is packed with artifacts. The result doesn’t exactly qualify as interesting. Mildly amusing