From the Queue

A little something to discuss while I'm traveling today...

Remember when you were a kid and the mail was a daily event you looked forward to? Maybe a card with cash from Grandma would arrive or a new issue of "Sports Illustrated" would be there. Then you got older and the mailbox held bills and past due notices and jury summons. Who wanted to get the mail then? I still dread it. The fun stuff comes in email; the misery via USPS.

Ah Netflix, my old friend. It makes going to the mailbox fun again.



This weekend we saw a great doc: "My Kid Could Paint That" about Marla Olmsted the 4 year old art prodigy whose father was subtly accused of painting for her by a 60 Minutes producer. It's very well-balanced, neither pro or con and allows you to make your own decision.



We also saw "Elizabeth: The Golden Age." Not so golden for the big E. Although I love Cate Blanchett and Clive Owen, I felt like this saga of Elizabeth's life was depressing all around and ther was very little joy in it. In the previous movie, she at least had love even if she had to give it up. And btw, how much did Joseph Fiennes (from E 1) and Clive Owen (from E 2) look alike?

Wristcutters: A Love Story

On its surface this movie, starring Patrick Fugit and Shannyn Sossamon, sounds incredibly depressing and in many respects, it is. We are introduced to a world in which every inhabitant has committed suicide. It is a world much like our own "but slightly worse." Our hero, Zia (Fugit) has offed himself but wishes he hadn't as he is still in love with his ex Desiree. When he learns that she too has offed herself (the preferred phrase to describe the action as opposed to the more horrific term "suicide"), he goes on a road trip to find her, convinced she did this because she loves him.

With him is Mikal (Sossamon) a beautiful girl who claims this was a mistake, that she accidentally OD'ed. She hitches a ride with Zia and Gene (a very funny Shea Wigham) to find the men in white who are the PIC (People in Charge). Along the way they run into Tom Waits and his miracle crew who are a very wacky bunch and may not be who they claim. And yes, it is a love story, and not wholly unexpected.

The director, Goran Dukic, adapted the script from a short story by Etger Keret and apparently gave the film a happy ending that the original did not have. He also added a few supernatural touches that do give the movie some humor. On the whole, the film was good but slow-moving - although the running time was less than 90 minutes, it felt much longer. Not sure who I could recommend this to - it's not graphic or anything but knowing how the characters came to this place does make one shudder.

Maybe 1 out of 3 Vees would dig this.

Meet The Robinsons

When this animated film came out last year, I thought it looked cute but insubstantial: boy invents time machine and accidentally travels to the future. Nothing to write home about and I wasn't so sure I cared for the animation. But it was really sweet and funny and clever and pretty much nothing like the trailers made it out to be.

12 year old Lewis lives in an orphanage, having been abandoned as a baby by his mother. He is "unadoptable": no one seems to want a child obsessed with inventions and science (a little oversimplified but I went with it for the movie's sake) and he knows that when he becomes a teenager, it will only get worse. He becomes determined to find his mother so he invents a machine that will take memories from his brain and turn them into pictures so he can see what she looked like and find her. At a science fair, where he will present this gizmo, his presentation is disrupted by a young boy who tells him he's from the future and to watch for a Man with a Bowler Hat (his official credit). The machine gets broken during the melee and the anonymous boy whisks Lewis off to the future where he meets an eccentric group of people, the Robinsons.

If you have seen any time travel movies at all, you know our hero has to do something that will set things right but also not disrupt the already-established timeline. And this being a children's movie, you know that it has to end happily. But the way they get to happy is funny and sweet and a little touching. I love the Man with the Bowler Hat - not quite a villain, just a little misguided. The voice actors are terrific, with Harland Williams as CARL the robot a standout.

"Meet the Robinsons" was based on a children's book by William Joyce , "A Day with Wilbur Robinson," and there is a wonderful interview with him about it on the DVD. Joyce's book was published in 1990 and was solely about a boy who meets a very eccentric family which was itself based on Joyce's own family. The movie's animation resembles the original illustrations which are beautiful.

The director, Steve Anderson, says he was drawn to the script because Lewis is an orphan and he, Anderson, was also adopted. You can definitely feel his fondness and sympathy for the character throughout the movie.

I think all Vees would dig this.

Southland Tales

This movie, from the director of “Donnie Darko,” one of my all-time favorite movies, was not seen by anyone I know. In fact, no one I know saw “Donnie Darko,” so I guess I shouldn’t have expected much. The movie was trashed by critics when it came out: too long, too self-indulgent, too confusing, etc. It is all of those things – and brilliant.

The cast was amazing: I loved how Richard Kelly played everyone against type (Cheri Oteri was a tough chick with a powerful uppercut, Mandy Moore was a total witch married to Dwayne Johnson, Sarah Michelle Geller played a porn queen with a talk show who has dreams of running her own business empire, and Justin Timberlake (nearly unrecognizable to me!) was a turret gunner in the military –among many more).

Narrated by Justin Timberlake, the film has an otherworldly feel – a sort-of future, rooted firmly in our current terrorist-obsessed culture. There is a stifling police presence, a broadcast landscape filled with product placement, politicos being blackmailed by porn stars, and a neo-Marxist underground intent on disrupting the next election. It all takes place in California’s “southland,” Los Angeles and its vicinity. If you live around here, you’ll recognize many of the locations. It’s quintessential LA.

As in “Darko,” the world in “Tales” is facing an apocalypse which would make you think Kelly is a complete pessimist, and yet the world does indeed get saved – by one person who must sacrifice himself for the greater good. In “Darko,” it was Jake Gyllenhaal’s character and in “Tales,” it’s Seann William Scott who was part of a military experiment involving Dwayne Johnson. I would like to believe this speaks to a more sentimental philosophy on Kelly’s part, that good can triumph but yes, there will be blood.

As for charges this movie was long, I think it probably could have been trimmed but there are a ton of characters and their stories take a while to wrap up. Also, I wonder if Kelly suffers from the same problem I do when I write: I have such a great time setting everything up and introducing characters and plots and intertwining them, that the story ends up being twice as long as I had intended. In my case, I always cut back because I’m not famous. But in Kelly’s case, perhaps his success with his first movie gave him license to be a little more indulgent with his second. Personally, I don’t care: I thought every single scene was great. Humor, pathos, surprise, confusion…

…oh yes, confusion. Look, it’s like a Lynch film…you sort of have to let it wash over you. Don’t try too hard to figure it out. Get the rhythm of the characters, watch them interact, enjoy. It all works out in some fashion and you absolutely cannot figure it out from the beginning as you do with many other movies.

I loved this movie. I have to put Richard Kelly on my list of people I would like to meet.

Crazy Love

Some documentaries make me feel smarter for watching them, especially those that deal with the environment or politics or big business.

Then there are others that make me feel stupid for Netflixing them, like the ones HH likes that are basically Tin Foil Hat Society stuff and usually involve UFOs, JFK, and vapor trails.

Now “Crazy Love” comes along and it…it…it confuses me. It’s the story of Burt Pugach and Linda Riss, a couple who fell in sort-of-love when she was just 20 and he was older and rich – and very married. Burt saw Linda one day while he was out driving and became obsessed with her. He had to have her, had to make her his girlfriend or whatever he called it. She was impressed and let him wine and dine her but was shocked to learn he was married. He lied all the time about how he was going to divorce his wife and she believed him until his wife Francine called her and said she would never divorce him.

So Linda left. And she found another man who loved her. Of course Burt was livid when he learned she was engaged to this man. He hired a man to throw lye in her face which blinded her and made her bald. Her engagement was off; her life was off. Burt was sentenced to prison for 30 years but was released on parole 15 years later…

…after giving Linda $4000 and promising the parole board he would continue to give her money! She never married, never felt confident in herself after he ruined her life and took away her sight. When he got out of prison, she agreed to meet him and eventually they married. This in itself is dumbfounding but then we learn that during their marriage Burt cheated on Linda for five years with a younger woman who later claimed he threatened her life. Remarkably Linda not only stood by her cheating man, she defended him!

Their relationship is bizarre. I don’t believe either of them knows what it means to love someone. Then again, who is to say what love really is? They have something that evidently works for them. They each came from very rough circumstances: Burt was beaten by his mother every day and Linda lived with friends from an early age and didn’t have much of a father in her life. Each time I thought I had a handle on who they were and why they acted as they did, something shifted.

So I may not be smarter or dumber by watching this, just more confused.