Men in Black III

The third film and second sequel in the Men in Black franchise. Recently released in the summer of 2012, it is directed by Barry Sonnefeld and once again led by the dynamic duo Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. I watched this one in theatres in Sao Paulo. Its nice to see the audience here are just as receptive to all the humour and nuances in this film as I was. Though its not surprising since this is a mass appeal film. Its got Will Smith! How much more universal can you get?

Plot:

Since this is a recently released film, I won't be too free with the spoilers.
Boris the Animal a rather unpleasant biker dude with vagina dentata on his hand escapes from the high security prison built for him on the Moon. He's out to seek revenge against Agent K who shot his arm off and put him there. His plan is to go back to 1969, the day K shot him, and kill K before he can complete his plan. Apparently K also single-handedly wiped out Boris's entire evil alien race that was bent on destroying Earth by launching a defense system called "Skynet". After Agent K is mysteriously erased from present time, Agent J goes back in time to change it back again and save K's life. In the process he meets a younger K and they get up to shenanigans, namely nearly disrupt the Apollo 11 launch. Oh and the Earth is going to be destroyed in under 24 hours if J doesn't save K.

Now that I look at freeze-frame, that gaping hole is a bit disturbing

I wonder how he faps.

Thoughts:

No comparison to the first since its original and set up the movieverse. I do think this is more enjoyable than the second film, which walked a fine line between low-brow funny and plain annoying. Upon rewatching it recently I decided the combination of the man with a floaty sock puppet second head, the annoying worm aliens and the talking pug just gets to be too much. Not to mention the romantic subplot was cheesy and unbelievable as hell.

They realized their mistake this time, skipped the romantic subplot and stuck to the bromantic mainplot. Smart move. Although the set-up of their sudden relationship angst is obvious and a bit forced, as was the final over-poignant 'twist', its still effective in introducing the main emotional conflict, making this MIB more than just plain save-the-world-from-aliens action movie.

There are some really amusing scenes and the overall comedic value is high. I like how they tapered the obnoxious funky aliens down to a minimum. The obligatory funky alien in this one is a wise multi-dimensional crazy but mild-mannered hobo. Funky? Yes. Annoying? No. Good job writers.

Also I approve of the younger Agent K. He's pretty good, pretty convincing.

Notable Scenes:

"No, I just have you."

Aww, that's some touching bromance they got going on.

"O...K...."

This scene made me laugh the hardest. Oh Will, you've still got it.

TL;DR:

Watch MIB III if you liked the any of the first two, or if you like Will Smith and his brand of humour.

Enter the Void

A 2009 film by Gaspar Noe. Known for being shot from a first person point of view, head wobbling and blinking included. Then shot from a dead first person point of view.
Trippy cinematography. The whole movie's one long gorgeous bad acid trip. I had to finish it in two settings because I got motion-sick halfway through.

Plot:

It's an exploration of the seedy underbelly of Tokyo. Really pretty plotless. Some burnout kid from the states lands himself in the drug scene in Tokyo pretty deep and has half a mind to try to get out. His little sister's down on her luck and comes joins him. His friend pressures him into one last deal but it turns out to be a bust by the cops. In his hurry to destroy evidence he locks himself in a bathroom stall and takes half the pills while dumping the other down the toilet. He gets shot through the stall door in the stomach and drifts into a disembodied spirit. The rest of the film is a half death-vision half drug trip from bird's eye view.
He, or it, mostly haunts his sister. The girl falls into grief, then with the shady no-good characters he called his friends, who all wasted no time capitalizing on the naive young thing. Sex happens. Drugs happen. Drama and violence happen.
There's a short intersperse where he hallucinates that they somehow revived him, but he can't speak, can't do anything but blink while everyone treated him with disgust. Its implied he's back ala Frankenstein's monster style, an abomination that can barely quantify as living.
At the end of drifting, he enters into his sister's belly glowing in the middle of coitus (yes he watches his sister having sex) and is seen reborn as a baby. I took it as a happy ending.

Bird's eye view porn. Unusual I guess.

There are several interpretations of it. The director himself states that the whole thing's a hallucination of his drug addled brain in the few moments before total brain death. Time does get wonky when the brain's in a different state.

Notable scenes:

Scary as shit sudden flashbacks of when their parents died. Two little wailing children in the backseat staring at their dead parents' upside-down bloody mashed-up face inches away from their own. My gosh. If you had a mind of watching this movie while tripping on something, be careful of those scenes. They turn up unexpectedly and quite a few times.

 This film isn't about the dialogue.

What I liked:

All the rainbow neon love goodness. All the colors of the city night. 

<3

TL;DR

Seriously seriously beautiful and trippy movie. The tripping scenes and the shots of soft glowing neon Tokyo is enough to warrant a watch.

List of Movies

Here's a list of movies I've watched for the first time since opening this blog, excluding the ones I've already posted about. The purpose of this blog was to prevent myself from watching too many films because I have to write up a blog entry on each film. Guess that didn't work out too well. I will review them, one way or another. I'll do short reviews, and maybe proper ones for select films. I'll be coming back to strike-through the ones I reviewed.

- Professor Layton
- Bridesmaids
- Iron Man II
- Scott Pilgrim
- Zombieland
- Source Code
- Rio
- Brazil
- 12 Monkeys
- Green Lantern
- Cars 2
- Burn AFter Reading
- Harry Potter & Deathly Hallows II
- Enter the Void
- Kick Ass
- The Big Lebowski
- Barton Fink
- Udaan
- Man on Wire
- Fear and Loathing
- From Dusk till Dawn
-The Animatrix
- The Princess Bride
- All About my Mother
- Delicatessen
- Paprika
- Pokemon Movie 8
- Ghostbusters
- Punch Drunk Love
- Sherlock Holmes 2
- Sleep Dealer
- Borrower Arriety
- Blade Runner
- Final Destination 5
- Hugo
- Lilo & Stitch
- Jacob's Ladder
- The Human Centipede II
- Brothers
- X-Men everything
- A Knight's Tale
- Thor
- Hot Tub Time Machine
- The Usual Suspects
- Men in Black III
- Taxi Driver
- Pacific Rim
- Leon the Professional
- Heavy Metal 2000
- Clash of the Titans
- The Hobbit
- The Avengers
- World War Z
- Wreck It Ralph
- The Room
- Rocky Horror Picture Show
- Taxidermia
- In Bruges
- Babies
- Captain America the First Avenger
- Cabin in the Woods
- Splice
- Olympus has Fallen
- Monster University
- The Purge

Idiocracy

2006 film by Mike Judge on the sad state of America 500 years in the future.


Plot Sum:

Extremely average intelligenced dude volunteers for experiment to be freeze-dried and woken up a year later, only to wake up five hundred years later. In this new world, due to government welfare and cheap fast food, the below-average proliferated while the elites merely had one or two children. The human race have devolved themselves to retardation. Its a world full of hillbilly consumerism cliches, in which Carl's Jr. is the only form of food, Costco is as big as a city, and the President is a popular wrestler. Frozen alongside our hero is a prostitute, who defroze at around the same time. In this new world they are geniuses, and together they traverse this wasteland made up of lowest common denominators and save the people from themselves.

Thoughts:


The whole thing runs like an overlong SNL skit, which means the concept is funny, but it gets stale in movie form. SNL's Maya Rudolf starring in the film doesn't help. I'm not entirely sure I approve of the message either. Dysgenics, is it called? That's also known was eugenics, what the Nazis used to justify genocide. The anti-corporate message, though overused, is much more palatable.

Notable Scene:

"Welcome to Costco, I love you."

One of the few scenes I genuinely lol'd at.

TL;DR:
In the future, the whole world becomes dumb and dumber. The end.

Human Traffic

A 1999 film written by Justin Kerrigan, directed by David Buckingham. Five friends let loose one weekend at the local club/rave scene. That's it.

This has quickly proceeded to become one of my favorite films of all time. It runs like a Friends episode, except with drugs, clubs and pubs, and illegal substances that won't go well on prime-time. Its been criticized to have no point, no plot line, no tension or conflict, but I say who cares? Why does every film about drugs need to be moralizing? The only people who don't like this film must have never experienced the unrestrained unity portrayed in it. Its a perfect, heart-felt snapshot of the best of today (or slightly yesterday's) youth subculture. That's all it is, and it doesn't pretend to be anything else. There's no before and afters, no fall-outs or long term effects. It's not an epic. Just because it's momentary doesn't make it unimportant. As Jip says "ultimately, we just want to be happy", and be it happy for a night or a moment, that's all we're chasing after, and its all worth it. Those who know it love it.
Most of all, it has a happy ending. Not all happy endings are effective, but this one is. The temporary but effective escapism is real, The music, the characters, the mood, it stays and stays, and that's an indication of a good film. The fact that what stays is positive, is good, makes it an enjoyable, rewatchable, and therefore a 'favorite' film of mine.

I can rave about it forever (pun, haha) but bottom line is: awesome film that I fell in love with. Jip! Moff! Lulu! Nina! Koop! I've only known them for two hours, seen a brief weekend of their lives, but they feel like old friends. 

So many good things, least of all JOHN SIMMS!

 Awesome Jip

 Cool Cat Koop

 Paranoid Moff

 Pretty Lulu

Sweet Nina

Oh the classic lines, I can quote this movie forever. So many great scenes, set to great music. This film is simply gorgeous!

Lost Highway

I quit updating this blog in part due to my unwillingness to write about Lost Highway. This is Lynch, and Lynch is creepy, and I don't like to revisit creepy if I can help it. Lynch is not good creepy, like Jeepers Creepers scream-in-equal-parts-delight-and-fright creepy, or plot twisty Charlie-is-your-split-personality creepy. Lynch is under your skin, under your consiousness creepy. It unsettles on a deep level and stays with you for days, coloring the world a sickly, uncomfortable sepia. Lynch is a master in stream-of-consciousness. The loose narrative he throws in only serves to confuse as the audience tries to grab onto it, only to have it switch tracks or disappear altogether halfway through the film.

Summary/Spoilers:

Plot summary might be the most challenging part of reviewing a Lynch film. This one's actually pretty straight forward compared to his other works. Some hotshot young hollywood couple start receiving creepy footage of their own house in the mail. The footage becomes longer and longer with each tape, until finally it pans inside the house, through the living room, into the bedroom, aaannnd darkness. In between receiving the tapes the couple goes out to a party, have a seemingly unimportant conversation, and have sex during which the man hallucinates a creepy pasty man-face as his wife's. They receive one last video tape, in which the camera finishes panning to the bedroom, to the man screaming, cradling his dead wife in his bloody hands. The lines between TV and reality disappear, and it seems the man really did kill his wife, although he doesn't admit it, doesn't remember it. He is locked up in jail, and then Lynch started working his magic.

The rest of the movie is too nonsensical to summarize. Basically the man disappears completely, to be replaced by a young man random and unrelated. This young man, with a different life, differently family, somehow meets the man's wife. Some confusing Lynchian mindfuck ensues, a long drive along a dark highway later, the young man transforms back into the husband.

Thoughts:

Lynch is so good at setting up a mood, a tone, at making the viewer feel whatever uneasiness he wants them to. The overly slow pan-overs mixed with sudden explicable phenomenons makes sure the viewer has zero comfort level throughout. Case in point all the appearances of Creepy Pasty Man. I am highly susceptible to non sequitor freak outs. His mini series Rabbits nearly did it in for me, while everyone I showed it to thought it was boring, or even funny. There's something so disconcerting about grown ups prancing around in animal suits (see The Shining's Furry Freakout).

Basically this is a great film. As a film lover, or even liker, it has a lot to offer. Its challenging, but not so much when compared to Muholland Drive or Inland Empire. There's loads to say about it, like all Lynch films its open ended and up to individual interpretations. It makes the most sense to treat the second half of the film as an extended dream or fantasy sequence, during which the man makes up a legitimate reason for the death of his wife, in which he's not the murderer.

I'd like to think behind the fucked up narrative about some sex murder story, Lynch is taking another stab at Hollywood, at the general materialistic lifestyle the couple leads. The man finds peace of mind living the simple life of a young mechanic, reveling in the youthful virility and simple mindedness. It is when he falls once again for the wife, the beautiful seductress, a symbol of the material, does he lose grasp on his newly forged reality.

I really didn't want to put any screencaps, really really, but Lynch's cinematography is too impressive to ignore.

Notable scene 1: Creepy Pasty Man

Creepy Pasty Man, or CPM, shows up in the midst of a crowded party. He walks straight to the protagonist, and proceed to have creepy-bananas conversation. “I'm at your house, but I'm also right in front of you, so who was phone?”

Notable scene 2: Highway Cuss-Out

Lynch is funny, there's no denying it, and this scene is proof.

Another thing, the wife:

I knew there was something familiar in her breathy voice. She's Kissing-Kate Barlow from Holes!

TL;DR:

Conclusion: hell is being trapped in a Lynch movie.

How many times did I use 'creepy' in this review?

Star Wars V & VI

Its one of those classics I never got around to watching. I started with episode V, which I kept in mind is the equivalent of starting with The Two Towers for LOTR. I tried starting properly with A New Hope before but never managed to get through twenty minutes.

The comparison with other sci-fi can't be helped. It does bear similarities to Star Trek, from the lightspeed travel (warp mode in Trek) to the charismatic all-American lead (though Kirk easily embodies both Han and Luke). Though its science is not as well thought out or as captivating. At their cores the two stories are about different themes, so the comparison is not apt. Star Wars is a very traditionally American underdog story (the Death Star is basically British, the allegory is pretty obvious), whereas Star Trek is really Utopian sci-fi, all about exploration and curiosity. I daresay Star Trek is much more universally appealing, especially to the female gender.
So Star Wars is not about fantastic new worlds or mind blowing technology. But its politics are not nearly as intricate as in say, Dune. Its a straight-forward story of a rebel force overcoming all odds and defeating the big evil dictatorship. And honestly its a bit of a mess between the explosions, unconvincing shoot-outs and Luke's inner struggle.

The biggest plot points have long been spoiled for me and for pretty much everyone not living under a rock, so the main 'twists' were no surprise at all, making the movie lose all suspense. I blame that for not even wanting to pay attention to the sixth and most exciting installment of this universally acclaimed series.

Filmography-wise Star Wars gives off that pirate-y feeling. The Jabba the Hut sequence was fantastic. The designs made some memorable characters, from Vader to Yoda to R2D2. The Ewokese really left something to be desired though, looking like furbies and speaking like racists mock-imitating Asians.

The almighty Empire, brought down by these furbies.

Sidenote:

Why do most sci-fi favor either icy freeze-your-arse-off planets or scorched barren desert planets? Are there no in-betweens? Like moderately-weathered pine forest planets or all manners of climate Earth-like planets?

Also I know its an old movie,, but I don't recall seeing acting this stilted way into the 80s.

The sidekicks are not as endearing as the film makers think. Chewbacca's gurgle got repetitive and annoying real fast. Not to mention it never added anything to the film, only wasting time as Han second-hand interpreted the gurgle for the audience. The two robots were less so but getting there at the end of two hours.

kindly STFU

Vader's theme is absolutely kickass, no arguments there.


So all in all, this franchise never delivered the enchantment it promised. Maybe its because I watched them out of order (1, 3, 5, 6), or because I never finished the entire series, but at this point I have no intention to.