Junto Boys

JANUARY MOVIES

GOING IN STYLE (1979) – I remember seeing some of this movie as a kid and I don’t know why I remembered it as a comedy except that the trailers tried to paint it as one. It’s sometimes funny but more drama than anything else. Three old men George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg decide to rob a bank out of sheer boredom. All three pull off their roles well, but I was especially impressed with Burns who rose above the schmaltz of Oh God franchise among other things. To ruin the plot, Strasberg becomes ill and dies. Burns and Carney decide to give most of the money to Carney’s nephew and they take the rest to lose in Vegas. Instead of losing they come away with a bigger stack than they got out of the bank. The whole thing is handled in a very unsentimental way and I came away enjoying it for its quiet tone and interesting performances.

SPAGHETTI WEST (2005) – A documentary about Spaghetti Westerns is quite interesting when the subject is Eastwood, but wanes when they talk about Klaus Kinski and the myriad of films with the title Django. The period of filmmaking didn’t last long, but it produced a whole lot of celluloid and it influenced the American westerns that followed.

MYSTERIOUS SKIN (2004) – The movie was described as a missing time recollection and how a teenager studies UFOLOGY to learn what happened to him that day years ago when his little league game was rained out and he woke up in his basement with a bloody nose. There was also a second little leaguer that became a gay prostitute after getting a little too cozy with the baseball coach. Despite the review I read, the other kid is the one that actually dominates the film, and though I haven’t seen Brokeback Mountain, I’m sure it’s tame compared to the gratuitous graphic nature of this movie. Men come off pretty lousy in the piece; they are poor fathers, absentee fathers or pedophiles while the women are all long suffering.

THE CLEARING (2004) – Robert Redford shows up so infrequently these days you have to wonder what he looks for in a script to finally do a film. Here Redford is kidnapped in the first 5 minutes by Willem Dafoe and it’s easy to see that he isn’t a professional at such jobs. The men begin to have pretty normal conversations about their wives and their regrets and although one is rich and the other is poor, both wish they could have been better husbands. Redford has another woman on the side, but he still loves Helen Mirren the most and he comes to realize that during the snatching. The movie is told in separate action with Mirren and the kids learning things days after they happened inter cut with Redford on the day of the incident. I thought the movie was compelling enough but maybe the device of good guy/bad guy parallel lives has been done a bit too much. HEAT may have had the classic take on that issue.

ANIMAL CRACKERS (1930) – I’ve seen it countless times and I decided to start the new year with a Marx film to remind me that life is pretty great. I think it’s the best of the early talkies, because although it has the same technical limitations, and it’s nothing but a filmed version of their long-running stage play complete with Groucho’s asides, it still brings laughs in buckets. Groucho’s intro speech was my standard audition monologue for years. The “I shot an elephant in my pajamas” got a laugh every time. I don’t think it ever got me any parts, but it was fun to deliver. I auditioned for Disney once in college and one guy on the panel laughed all the way through. He must have been familiar with the movie.

+LOVE ACTUALLY (2004) – WHEN HARRY MET SALLY was a clever and unique film when it debuted in 1989, but it spawned so many half-assed imitators and created such an obnoxious sub genre that I have little patience for what Americans do with romantic comedies. In fact, I think that the resurgence of witty teen comedies is a direct result of creative minds tired of the adult genre. A minor teen comedy like TEN THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU was more interesting than any romantic movie comedy that Meg Ryan has made since 1989. One romantic comedy that I liked was the Julia Roberts vehicle, NOTTING HILL. I don’t know whether it was the mostly British cast or just the fact that it didn’t try to be too cute. And now the British film, LOVE ACTUALLY takes the British version of these films one step further. It was one of the best films of 2004 and I’ve seen it twice again this month and it just plain works on every level. It finds a very honest way to deal with the subject using humor, sadness and even some sentimentality. It also helps that the cast is amazing, using about half the British actors any American could name, and some you recognize and can’t name. A few interesting Americans show up too. Like any movie with a big cast, there is a little too much of people running into one another randomly in a big town like London, but I can forgive SHORT CUTS ands MAGNOLIA for this so why not forgive this worthwhile effort too.

PIE IN THE SKY (1995) – I had no business watching this movie except that it came on when I was writing email and it had a couple of laughs and I wound up seeing too much of it to turn it off. Josh Charles stars as a guy obsessed with the traffic and his idol, John Goodman, the traffic reporter on the radio. He meets Anne Heche during college and although they have a decent spark, they lose touch until a few years later when he happens to run into her in a Los Angeles diner. The audience gets to wait around for Josh to have his big shot as traffic reporter and reconciliation with Heche. Films shown on TV are a great study of the economics of time. Why is it that we’re more likely to sit and watch something on TV, when we wouldn’t watch the same thing on DVD if it sat right in front of us? Or why is it that we’ll be held captive by some movie that comes on that we enjoy when we own the same DVD and never bother to put it in? I don’t fall victim to it as much as some I know, but now that we have HBO again, I notice that it happens with greater frequency than I would have predicted. I won’t sit and watch films on commercial networks no matter how much I like them, but I know many that will wade through the commercials instead of putting in the same DVD.

THE GREAT RAID (2005) – A war movie based on real events that lacks the rightwing Rambo heroism or the leftwing cynicism and gore. It’s simply about a group of American soldiers tasked with liberating a Japanese prisoner of war camp. The men in the camp are leftover from the Bataan death march years earlier and if disease doesn’t kill the last 500 of them, then the Japanese will probably execute them as they retreat in order to leave no war crimes witnesses. The mission holds no strategic value, but saving the men is the right thing to do. The value of honor is summed up when Benjamin Bratt tells James Franco that the mission is the most important thing any of them will ever do in their lives. Success will lead to an inner glory that the men will carry with them forever. It has a quiet sort of tone and a slow pace, the kind you might expect for a movie made for HBO. It could have been 20 minutes shorter maybe, and the subplot of the beautiful woman in the underground helping the prisoners is too movieish, but the characters mostly seem like real people. And if you consider it an ode to the old fashioned 40s era war movies, then it’s downright restrained.

+WAGES OF FEAR (1952) French film and winner of the Cannes film Festival. A group of streets bums are given the task of taking some explosives to an oil field over bumpy terrain. They’ll be risking their lives but making so much money they can’t pass up the offer. Theirs great suspense and more challenges along the way than one screenwriter generally imagines realistically. We even get the pining French girl for our hero to return too.

OCEANS 12 (2004) – It’s been on a lot this month and although preposterous it’s so much fun that I keep on in the background. Like the first, the music is good all the way through and the dialogue delivery funny in a dry sort of way. The Clooney/Pitt banter is always fun and the little things with Bruce Willis showing up and the Sixth Sense jokes are worthwhile too.