And the Oscar prediction for Best Director ’09 is…
KATHRYN BIGELOW!
Not too shabby, folks. With the exception of Sandra winning and shoving it in Gabby Sidibe’s face, pulling a 3 out of 4 at the Oscars is pretty darn good. Fared better than my crap predictions at least.
Hey, did anyone hear that she used to be married to James Cameron? Man, they didn’t hype that up at all this year.
RESULTS:
– James Cameron: 6 votes (Ouch)
– Kathryn Bigelow: 20 votes (Chicks, man)
– Quentin Tarantino: 14 votes (No love)
– Lee Daniels: 1 vote
– Jason Reitman: 2 votes (Some day, Jason. Some day…)
Alright, one last Oscar poll and then I’ll go back to rating potheads and such. Pinky swear.
Alice in Wonderland (2010)
VERDICT:
2/10 Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests
Tim, I don’t know how you did it, man, but great job on making Planet of the Apes look like your magnum opus.
Alice in Wonderland is about a girl who’s about to be wed to some hideous English dude against her will, so she says, “Eff that noise, chums!” and ditches him at the altar before chasing after a rabbit that no one else can see. Next thing you know, she ends up falling down a rabbit hole and finds herself being touted by many a talking animal as the long-awaited savior of a world that was probably dreamed up by Timothy Leary.
Now, I’ve always been a big Tim Burton fan, but, boy, I really don’t know what happened here. The source material seemed to be right up his alley since it’s weird as hell and even though none of it really works in the long run, I’m gonna give him the benefit of the overwhelming doubt and say that it’s not all his fault. My thinking behind this is that the script he has to work with is a total piece of crap.
It’s not funny, it’s not amusing, it’s totally rushed and there’s nothing more than a semblance of a story line keeping it all together. Everything that made the first Disney version back in ’51 so memorable is stripped bare; it’s no longer a fun adventure through this strange, endearing fantasy world, it’s somehow turned into a sad drudge that sucks from the get-go and becomes increasingly more aggravating to sit through with each new awful, awful scene.
Although from a visual standpoint, it is quite pretty. Tim gets to go nuts with the makeup and costumes and whatnot, so that’s nice, but it still doesn’t feel very “Burtonesque”. It’s all very whimsical, but it’s also very borrowed and doesn’t really play up the nightmarish qualities of Tim’s imagination that no one else can pull off. Just feels like an accentuated version of stuff we’ve all seen before.
And with the exception of newcomer Mia Wasikowska who’s pretty good as Alice, everyone else is just meh. Johnny Depp is okay as the Mad Hatter but his on-again-off-again Scottish accents gets to be annoying quick, Helena Bonham Carter is painfully annoying as The Red Queen if only because of the way she squeals “OFF WITH HIS HEAD!” throughout the whole damn movie, and the same goes for the rest of ’em.
Good call getting Alan Rickman to play the caterpillar, though. Always a good call to cast Rickman.
Well, this is usually the part of the review where I talk about how I didn’t like the movie but my good buddy Fred did and how different strokes are indeed for different folks, but unfortunately, that ain’t gonna happen today. I saw this the other night with three of my friends, Fred included, and while we were all relatively excited to see it, I was kind of amazed at how much we all found ourselves utterly loathing this movie long before it was over.
One of my friends fell asleep for a while and commented that, “It wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” as soon as the credits started to roll. Fred also fell asleep for a while, said that it probably was the worst thing he’d ever seen and that he seriously contemplated leaving to go drink alone at the theater wine bar after he woke up – and while I’m not usually one to promote boozing by your lonesome, I probably would have followed suit in this instance.
And as for me, well, I did my best to try and give this one a 3, but then the dialogue managed to hit a new low of corny within the last ten minutes and Johnny Depp started breakdancing like Regan from The Exorcist. It was at this point that I pointed my finger at my face and started emptying an invisible clip into my brain.
The best thing I can say about Alice in Wonderland is that if you and your friends are looking to bond by actively hating on a movie, this one’ll do the trick. With the exception of being able to walk out of the theater and not feel like That Guy who didn’t like a movie that everyone else clearly went apeshit over, this was just an entirely unenjoyable, unentertaining and painfully annoying movie to sit through in every way. Seeing it in 3-D doesn’t help much either.
But I did get to see the first full-length trailer for Tron Legacy, and that was freakin’ awesome.
So, folks, consider yourself warned and don’t make the same mistake I did – stay at the wine bar, get a little tipsy, make a new friend, get creative. Just don’t see this movie.
And keep the kids away, they wont like it either.
The Scorecard ’09
Best Picture
– Will Win: Avatar
– Should Win: The Hurt Locker
– In A Perfect World…: Up or Inglourious Basterds
Best Actor
– Will Win: Jeff Bridges
– Should Win: Colin Firth
Best Actress
– Will Win: Sandra Bullock
– Should Win: Carey Mulligan or Gabourey Sidibe
Best Supporting Actor
– Will Win: Christoph Waltz
– Should Win: Christoph Waltz
Best Supporting Actress
– Will Win: Mo’Nique
– Should Win: Mo’Nique
Best Animated Feature Film
– Will Win: Up
– Should Win: Up
Best Art Direction (whatever that is)
– Will Win: Avatar
– Should Win: Avatar (sure, why not)
Best Cinematography
– Will Win: Avatar
– Should Win: Avatar
Best Costume Design
– Will Win: The Young Victoria
– Should Win: The Young Victoria (period piece = shoe in)
Best Documentary
– Will Win: The Cove
– Should Win: The Cove
– In A Perfect World…: Anvil! The Story of Anvil
Best Documentary Short
– Will Win: The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner
– Should Win: Who the hell cares
Best Editing
– Will Win: Avatar
– Should Win: The Hurt Locker
Best Foreign Film
– Will Win: The White Ribbon
– Should Win: Haven’t seen a single foreign film all year, but I’ll go with A Prophet or The White Ribbon anyway.
Best Makeup
– Will Win: The Young Victoria
– Should Win: No opinion whatsoever
Best Original Score
– Will Win: Avatar
– Should Win: Again, no opinion whatsoever. Still sore that There Will Be Blood didn’t get recognized back in ’07.
Best Original Song
– Will Win: “The Weary Kind” – Crazy Heart
– Should Win: “The Weary Kind” – Crazy Heart
Best Animated Short Film
– Will Win: A Matter of Loaf and Death
– Should Win: A Matter of Loaf and Death (haven’t seen it, but it’s Wallace and Gromit, and Wallace and Gromit rocks)
Best Short Film
– Will Win: The Door
– Should Win: How the hell should I know
Best Sound Editing
– Will Win: Avatar
– Should Win: Avatar, based on my “expertise” on the subject which is more fully explored in a recent piece I wrote for The LAMB.
Best Sound Mixing
– Will Win: Avatar
– Should Win: Whatever
Best Visual Effects
– Will Win: Avatar
– Should Win: Avatar
– In A Perfect World…: Zeroes
Best Adapted Screenplay
– Will Win: Up in the Air
– Should Win: I hear In the Loop was really good
Best Original Screenplay
– Will Win: Quentin Tarantino – Inglourious Basterds
– Should Win: Quentin Tarantino – Inglourious Basterds
Well, that’s what I’m thinkin’, folks. Won this thing in last year’s family pool, here’s to hoping I don’t totally screw the pooch this time around.
FUN FACT: The crew over at Rotten Tomatoes has put together a nifty little Oscar ballot here for everyone to play along. So print that sucker out and get pumped for Sunday! YEEHAW!
The Cove (2009)
VERDICT:
9/10 Toxic Fish Sticks
Saving the dolphins with Ocean’s eleven. Sounds bizarre, but it’s freakin’ amazing.
The Cove is about a documentary crew that teams up with one Ric O’Barry – the guy who trained Flipper and, after learning the error of his ways, has since devoted his life to freeing dolphins from captivity – to expose the dirty secret of Taiji, Japan where dolphins are being slaughtered by the thousands thanks to the help of a mass government cover up.
When I first heard about this movie, I was of the mindset that this was going to be nothing more than ASPCA jibba-jabba about how animals have rights too and if I’m not out there on a dingy circling deep-sea whaling ships with a giant poster in hand then I’m part of the problem. Thankfully, this movie does a great job of not guilt tripping its viewers (unless, you know, you club seals on the weekends) and totally lives up to the hype it’s garnered as the eye-opening powerhouse doc of ’09.
The structure of The Cove plays out very similar to Man on Wire, and that right there is a good quality to have. Right from the opening credits where we’re introduced to the director and his crew in the dead of night as they film themselves illegally breaking into a place they’re clearly not allowed to go, you’ll get the gist that this is not a sit-back-and-get-ready-t0-be-educated kinda trip. Make no mistake, this sucker is intense and a lot more entertaining than a documentary about the plight of dolphins should have any right to be. Man, the last time I was so on-edge watching a movie was probably Star Trek and there aren’t black holes or anything like that here.
It’s just dolphins, people who love dolphins and people who hate dolphins.
And that’s why this movie worked so well for me, not only because of the way it uses real life to create a thriller the likes of which Hollywood hasn’t come up with in ages, but because it’s just an important movie about a story that needs to be told, especially since no one else is talking about it. Sometimes it absolutely boggles the mind to see the depths of the human soul and how far a blind eye can be turned when a big fat dollar sign is staring someone in the face, and you’ll see a lot of that here. All director Louie Psihoyos (no idea how you pronounce that) has to do is just point the camera and he’s got his villains, heroes and suspense right there waiting for him, but that’s not to take away from everything he does well because he puts it all together like Ric O’Barry is actually the aging version of Jason Bourne.
Isn’t it great to come across documentaries that make chumps out of movies with actual scripts to work with? Time to up your game, writers.
It’s pretty bizarre how over time we’ve come to view dolphins as nothing more than big fish in a bigger tank that are better off in captivity where they’re free from predators and can jump through hoops for us in the meantime. You won’t get it just by reading this review, but these mammals are smart, way smarter than we give them credit for and too smart to shacked up in a cage. There are some scenes here of dolphins interacting with humans – the ones that aren’t trying to kill them – that left me stunned and thoroughly convinced that O’Barry isn’t just some nutjob with a Peter Benchley crisis, but rather much more in tune with these creatures and what they’re capable of than the actual nutjobs that are butchering them. These aren’t just mindless fish we’re dealing with, they’re rational, thinking beings that are being treated like mindless fish, and if you don’t see it now, you’ll see it soon enough.
And I hate to sound like a hippie, but what the hell is up with SeaWorld? Really, what’s the draw and is it that important to us to have sea life on display at the cost of taking them out of their natural habitats? I don’t know, in light of recent events at the said water wonderland, you can’t help but think about these kinds of things. Was never a huge fan of aquariums to begin with, but I’ll be happy hitting up YouTube the next time I want to see Shamu doing cool stuff.
I’d be awfully surprised if The Cove doesn’t win Best Doc this year, even though I’m still sore that, for some reason beyond my understanding, Anvil! The Story of Anvil isn’t even in the running. But alas, this is an outstanding documentary in its own right that does a great job of pulling back the curtain, getting you angry and keeping you amazed from start to finish. Who knew this story was out there and that it could be anywhere near this captivating?
Dolphins, man. Crazy.
And keep your eyes peeled for Hayden Panettiere as a surfing protester for the dolphins. Wasn’t expecting her to turn up, but hey, way to go, Hayden!
Little Children (2006)
VERDICT:
4/10 Baby Daddies
Like watching two movies at the same time and only one of them is good.
Little Children is about a suburban wife with a failing marriage and a child she can’t relate to, a suburban husband who’s a child at heart and can’t live up the adult responsibilities that’s expected of him by his wife, and a convicted sex offender who moves back into town with his mother after exposing himself to a local kid. Through a strange course of events, the suburban wife and the suburban husband strike up an affair, try to realize through each other the lives they could have had, and the sex offender works (poorly) to settle back into society while getting harassed up the wahzoo by a former cop.
Yeah, there’s too much going on in this movie. Wish I could write up a shorter synopsis, but that’s as brief as it’s gonna get with this one.
Anyway, Little Children is the sophomore effort by writer/director Todd Field, who got his big break back in ’01 with the effing phenomenal movie In the Bedroom. Five years down the road, I don’t know what happened, but this follow-up doesn’t quite measure up.
It starts out strong enough by establishing two interesting and morally immature characters who are looking to break out of the shells they’ve grown into in a very Lester Burnham-like fashion along with one character who’s seriously flawed and shrouded in mystery. I dug it, I wanted to learn more, but the more I learned about these first two hippies, the more unfocused their stories became. By the time everything got resolved at the end, my interest in the lives of these two-timing suburbanites had waned to the point of complete indifference, which was a bummer, but thankfully the same wasn’t true for our friendly neighborhood kiddie flasher. But I’ll get to that in a second…
The real culprit that led to Little Children‘s failure was Field’s decision to the throw an omniscient narrator into the mix.
The problem with the omniscient narrator is that the minute he started talking, all I wanted was for him to shut the hell up. Having someone tell you what every character is feeling and thinking throughout the whole movie rather than just letting their actions do the talking comes off not only as gratingly pointless, but also as a kind of slap in the face to the viewer. I mean, isn’t that the whole point of casting good actors in a movie, so that you don’t need a gimmick to explain to your audience what’s going on every second?
To make matters worse, whenever the O. N. isn’t spelling out every bit of subtlety for you – you know, just in case you missed it, dumbass – the characters themselves tap in and take on the role for him. There’s this one scene where the husband and wife combo are going at it in the attic – which is usually not the best time to strike up a conversation about anything at all – and right in the middle of things, the husband starts going on about, “Do you feel bad? ‘Cause I do. I feel really bad.”
You do? Whoa! Where the hell did that come from? Couldn’t tell that from the guilty look that’s permanently tattooed on your face and the million other subtle tells that cheaters usually give off when they lie to their spouse about banging the chick next door. You, sir, would make a fine poker player.
I don’t know why Field thought this was a good idea, but it is so effing stupid and annoying that it ruins something that could have been much, much better had there just been no God-like presence telling the story to us like he’s reading a book. Doesn’t help either that the resolution for this plotline is totally ridiculous and doesn’t redeem things whatsoever, regardless of the narrator.
Then again, the storyline with the sex offender is great. It plays off like In The Bedroom mixed with The Woodsman and it’s about the one thing about this movie that really works. The narrator is gone, his story is the most compelling of the bunch, and Jackie Earle Haley got robbed of an Oscar for his turn as Ronnie McGorvey. Granted, Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson (dude would make a great serial killer a la Patrick Bateman) are really good in their respective roles, but Haley runs away with this one. So convincingly troubled…how Alan Arkin got the award that year, I will never know.
The thing with Little Children is that if it were just about Haley, it would be great, and if it were just about Winslet and Wilson, I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt and thinking it would also be better. But that’s not movie we have and together, it feels confused. Field sure knows how to work a camera, and he obviously knows how to write one hell of a script, but it’s never a good thing when the story that takes up three quarters of your running time is a silly mess.
Not sure what happened, but here’s to hoping he hits it out the park with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
Bright Star (2009)
VERDICT:
5/10 Honest Efforts
Just wasn’t my thing.
Bright Star is about 19th Century poet John Keats and the relationship he develops with his muse, one Fanny Brawne, before his untimely death a couple years later at the age of 25.
Thought I’d give this one a shot after watching a video where Quentin Tarantino ran down his favorite movies of ’09 and mentioned that he needed to watch this one again, and being that I respect the guy’s opinions, I figured this was worth seeking out. Normally, any movie that takes place in 19th Century England, features people who dress in homemade frocks and bring back horrible memories of hours spent zoning out in one Brit. Lit. class after another doesn’t usually warrant a slot in my Netflix queue, yet somehow the impossible happened.
In hindsight, I’m more likely to believe that I misheard Tarantino and that he probably said something along the lines of, “The sun is a very bright star, Aiden,” but either way, this thing found itself a spot on my shelf for over a month and so I forced myself through two hours of indifference if only to justify my sending it back.
So, yeah, wasn’t crazy about this one, but I should have known that going in.
The acting’s fine, the directing is pretty and the story is interesting, I guess. Even though it’s based on the actual life of John Keats – whose works I am entirely unfamiliar with and have zero desire to be enlightened opon – the plot still feels very familiar and doesn’t bring anything all that new to the table. Wish I could say it had me hooked and took a bonnet-sized crap on all my preconceived notions of what period pieces are capable of, but this is not that movie.
Look, if you’ve got a major jones for everything John Keats, if you wrote your dissertation on the guy, and/or if you planning on naming all your children irrelevant of gender after him, you’ll freakin’ love this movie.
If the sound of people talking in 19th Century British dialects doesn’t put you to sleep or make you want to shove a pen in your brain, you’ll probably run and get “Bright Star” tattooed on your forehead by the time the end credits roll.
If you just finished discussing the complete works of Jane Austen at your latest book club meeting and still wish a man like Mr. Darcy would come to sweep you off your knickers, good God, see this movie, bring the Kleenex and never look back.
Shockingly enough, I can’t exactly relate to any of these reactions.
I didn’t give Bright Star a 5 out of 10 because I didn’t like it or anything, it’s just the most neutral rating I can give a movie that I have such little interest in and, as a result, can’t fairly criticize or praise. If it seems like your thing, it probably is; if it doesn’t seem like your thing, trust me, it isn’t. It’s well-made and I can understand why some folks out there might totally dig it, but I’m not even gonna pretend to be part of the choir until someone makes a movie out of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
Fish Tank (2009)
VERDICT:
8/10 Teenage Wastelands
A wild, rough and thoughtful trip down Teen Angst Lane.
Fish Tank is about a 15-year-old girl living in the projects of Essex, England with a mean chip on her shoulder, an unemployed mom she doesn’t get along with, an expulsion notice from her school waiting on her doorstep and a passion for dancing when she’s not randomly headbutting chicks. One day, her mom starts going steady with this hunky Irishman, he gradually becomes a household staple and helps this problem child to keep things in check as she hints at the possibility of pulling her life together. But things are never that simple with teenagers, are they?
Man, really wasn’t expecting 2009 to play out as the year of teen girls with shitty home lives and worse role models. James Cameron really dropped the ball on that one.
Now, don’t be fooled by the ambiguous title and the seemingly harmless girl on the poster wearing a hoodie in a wind tunnel, this is one in-your-face movie that starts up like a blindsided knee to the groin and drags you along by the collar for the rest of the bumpy ride. Unfortunately, it eventually gets to be a little too bumpy for its own good, but life is tough when you’re eating five cent gums, not knowing where your meals are comin’ from (NAME THAT TUNE!), but everything else before and after that rough patch works very well to the point where it almost garnered a 9.
The first half of this movie is just great. Apparently lead actress Katie Jarvis had never acted before in her life and was discovered by the casting director while arguing with her boyfriend at a train station. A crazy story worth mentioning if only because I can’t be the only one who wishes that would happen to me and also because she’s freakin’ fantastic as our guppie of the hour, Mia. She comes off as very natural as the role seems to more or less require her to be a 15-year-old girl who’s pissed off at the world, curses like it’s going out of style and is quick to push others way when they try to get close. Doesn’t seem like much of a stretch, but who cares, she does a great job and what else can you really ask for in a debut role from someone they found at a train station?
But the thing I liked most about her character is that after the first five or ten minutes of the movie where she’s raising hell and drinking forties in her bedroom, she quiets down and lets her actions do the talking. There’s a good long stretch where she doesn’t say much at all as new people are introduced into her life, displaying this silent complexity to her character that felt extremely believable and refreshingly atypical. It’s this element of restraint shown by writer/director Andrea Arnold that really stood out to me as something special that does a great job of tapping into the mindset of an angsty, rebellious kid without having her open her mouth to tell us how’s she’s feeling.
This whole vibe of trying to understand Mia is what makes up the first half of the movie and it works incredibly well, so does the dynamic between her and her mother’s boyfriend, played incredibly well by one Michael Fassbender (who is quickly turning out to be a kickass actor as well).
But then there’s the second half where things get…complicated for Mia, and that’s when it starts to derail a bit. It thankfully redeems itself at the end, but the plot towards the end of the second Act takes a questionably insano turn that quickly goes from regretfully believable to you’ve-gotta-be-kidding-me, so much so that had Arnold allowed one more consecutive snafu to go down, it might have ruined the movie entirely for me. But like I said, it recovers and life goes on.
But Andrea Arnold really does do a great job of both writing up an honest script that isn’t sugarcoated in the least and directing it in such a way without still shots or tripods that totally complements the intensity of the performances from her outstanding cast. Arnold’s got a harrowing story to tell but she clearly knew exactly how she was going to tell it.
And her song choices are also out of freakin’ sight from a both lyrical and audial standpoint.
I saw this movie the other night with three other trusty moviegoers whose opinions I all hold very, very dear to my heart, and by the time we all walked out, I quickly found myself to be the most enthusiastic of the bunch. Fish Tank is a movie that sets out to challenge you and get you talking and get you racking your brain about what the hell was going on Mia, but that’s why I liked it. Might not be for everybody and that rough patch I was talking about back there might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for some, but it’s always nice to come across an edgy take on an otherwise trite premise like this.
It’s like An Education mixed with Precious, only everyone talks like they’ve been watching Trainspotting right out the womb. Won’t need a tissue box for this one, but Fish Tank sure is intense.
And the Oscar prediction for best Actress ’09 goes to…
GABOUREY SIDIBE!
Girl, you are having yourself one hell of a year.
Really have no idea who’s gonna walk away with it next week, but Gabby’s a solid pick if you ask me. That Precious had it rough.
Good voting as always, folks.
RESULTS:
– Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side: 9 votes (I should probably see this)
– Helen Mirren, The Last Station: 0 votes (still questioning whether this movie actually exists)
– Carey Mulligan, An Education: 10 votes (my vote)
– Gabourey Sidibe, Precious: 13 votes
– Meryl Streep, Julie & Julia: 4 votes (the one time where I’d probably be upset if Meryl won)
And now to finish out Oscar week…
The Crazies (2010)
VERDICT:
7/10 Township Rebellions
Finally, a good horror remake. It’s about damn time.
The Crazies is about a group of backwoods townies in the midwest who lose their minds for reasons unknown, start killing friend and family alike for reasons unknown, and the town sheriff who’s trying to figure out what the hell is going on before he finds himself at the wrong end of a pitchfork.
It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed a horror movie here at Cut The Crap, mainly because there hasn’t been a horror movie actually worth seeing since Paranormal Activity last Summer, but waddaya know, this unexpected remake has proved to be a damn good way to kick off a new decade of horror. It’s not the scariest thing you’ll ever see, but damn if it doesn’t do a lot of other things right.
The first thing worth mentioning is that, for once, the characters aren’t stupid. With the exception of a couple times where the gang thinks they’re safe to split up, only to find themselves totally effed five minutes later, there’s a very realistic quality to the characters and how they react to what’s going down. When the crazy stuff starts happening, they’re the first to utter, “What the fuck is going on? We need to get the hell out of here,” and instead of panicking like a jackass or going down that dark alley with a dull knife to defend themselves, they continually manage to keep their cool, stay armed at all times and take intelligent actions towards saving their asses with each new life-or-death situation they find themselves in.
And oh how refreshing it is.
Man, aren’t we all tired of stupidest mother effers invading our horror movies? How is this still happening? We’re ten years into a new Willennium for cryin’ out loud. It’s just great to watch a movie like this and not feel compelled to yell at the screen or shake my head in frustration, hoping the hero gets killed just for acting like a total douche. More folks really need to get on this bandwagon, stat.
Only complaint with the characters is that they don’t get much time to develop and we don’t get much time to connect to them as a result, but a small price to pay for a crew who actually knows what the hell they’re doing.
The other thing about The Crazies is that it’s not all that scary. Half of the scenes feel new and exciting, the other half feel predictable and rehashed, but none of them really scared the living daylights out of me. Part of that is because the trailers give away lot of what’s going to happen before it even appears on-screen, but mostly it’s due to The Crazies being more of a thriller with a horror edge in the long run. It’s also not very in-your-face when it comes to blood and gore, but that might be more of a pro than a con for some. Still, I would have liked some “Holy CRAP!” scenes thrown in there to even out the mix.
Acting’s also pretty solid, which was surprising. That Timothy Olyphant seems to be in everything nowadays and he’s pretty good as the town sheriff, but this guy Joe Anderson (aka: Max from Across the Universe) really kicks ass as the town deputy with an itchy trigger finger. Keep an eye out on Joe. Good stuff, dude’s got potential.
The Crazies isn’t breaking the mold or anything, it just doesn’t fall into the predictable and frustrating cliches that so many horror movies fall victim to nowadays. The trailers might not sell this one all too well, but this is the best horror movies I’ve seen in a good while and it’s the best thing I’ve seen so far this year. Granted, the only other thing I’ve seen is Shutter Island and everything else that’s come out so far looks effing horrendous, so I guess it’s just better than Shutter Island. Pretty sure it’s better than Cop Out, too.
Good story, good execution, good way to spend 12 bucks. Even considered giving it an 8 for a while there.
Now I just need to see the original.
I’m Not There (2007)
VERDICT:
3/10 Identity Crises
An ambitious mess.
I’m Not There is about the life and times of Bob Dylan told through a series of inter-related vignettes that all depict various periods in his life that may or may not have actually happened. At least I think that’s what it’s about.
Honestly, it’s more like director Todd Haynes looked at the covers of Dylan’s first six albums, lit up a fucking bag of reefer, looked back at the album covers for much longer period of time, sat himself down at a keyboard and giggled, “This is gonna be soooooooooooooo good”. Come the next morning, he pulls his face off the keyboard with a deep craving for pork rinds, looks up at the script he’s written and says, “Screw it, I’m not re-writing that thing. Now let’s go film this bitch.”
Pretty sure that’s what happened. There can be no other explanation.
The thing about ambitious movies like this that are inspired by revered musicians and try to step out of the box instead of just making another biopic is that, more often than not, it doesn’t work out as planned and it’s just more fun to spend two hours listening to the music instead. I had the same problem with Across the Universe and I have the same problem here. Granted, you’re kinda screwed to begin with if you’re aiming to set a bar higher than the ones already set by Dylan or The Beatles, but something tells me Todd Haynes isn’t that stupid, even if he is using a different medium.
And going with that, the music is what saved this movie for me. If you’re not familiar with Dylan, this could potentially serve as a great introduction to the hits and the B-sides of one of history’s greatest musicians. But like I said, if you’re going into this because you want to be introduced to Dylan, you’re better off using those 12 bucks to download Blonde on Blonde off iTunes.
The acting’s also good, but the whole effing movie is just all over the place. It constantly jumps from story to story to story and not a single one of them has anything to say. I remember forcing myself to sit through this in the theater and thinking to myself quite early on, “What does this movie even have to do with Bob Dylan?” The end product actually feels more like a charade than anything else, like Haynes had six different short films written out that had nothing to do with Dylan, then just up and decided to have the main character of every story be Dylan, set the whole soundtrack to Dylan and turn it into some bastardized experimental celebration of Dylan even though it’s not about it him.
Might sound harsh, but with the exception of Cate Blanchett’s storyline, that’s the truth. And even though the acting’s good, it’s hard to see the performances for what they are when you’re not really sure what you’re watching to begin with.
Look, Bob Dylan’s life is a strange and mysterious one already, one that you don’t really need to take liberties with to make interesting. I appreciate I’m Not There‘s originality and its efforts to tap into what has always made Dylan such an appealing individual, but if I had my pick, I think I’d vote for a biopic. I hear Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home is supposed to be great, so that’s my suggestion (better title, too).
I’m Not There‘s not horrible, it’s just so far out there that it’s hard to even know what to make of it. I know a couple folks who have seen this and loved it, so maybe it’s just me, but I just didn’t get it. I am all ears on this one.
Cut The Crap Movie Reviews 
.jpg){kind=link}
