WEEKEND MOVIE GUIDE: Unless you’re an extreme masochist, this seems like the perfect weekend to catch up on those overlooked smaller films, like Midnight in Paris, Tree of Life, Beginners, The Trip, or Submarine. I’d tell you if they were any good, but I’ve been suffering through crap like Green Lantern and Super 8 for you. AVENGE ME! Movies covered: Green Lantern, Mr. Popper’s Penguins (I didn’t see it, but Lindy West interviewed a 9-year-old about it), and HBO’s Summer Documentary series.
GREEN LANTERN: Ryan Reynolds and his ring of green jizz fog sex up Blake Lively, and help make the world safe from giant calamari monsters who suck out your skeleton for some reason.
RottenTomatoes: 24%
Gratuitous Review Quotes:
“Even by the standards of the current run of mediocre comic-book movies, this one stands out for its egregious shoddiness.” -Dana Stevens, Slate
“Even in the brainless world of cinematic comic books gone bad, it’s as bad as it gets — a dumb, pointless, ugly, moronic and incomprehensible jumble of botched effects, technical blunders, and cluttered chaos.” -Rex Reed, NY Observer
“Green Lantern is a new primer on how not to make a comicbook movie unless you want to screw sh*t up. Flat FX, smirky acting, clunky writing and clueless direction. WTF?” -Peter Travers, RS
Armchair Analysis: Again, I don’t really need the armchair here, as I already watched and reviewed it. The gist is that foundation of the movie is a conflict between two abstract concepts, as represented by two abstracted entities (different colored jizz fog from space). Still, the badness of it is more fun than Super 8‘s slick pointlessness. At one point Blake Lively’s character actually says, “Hey, aren’t superheroes supposed to get the girl?”
MR. POPPER’S PENGUINS: Jim Carrey adopts a family of penguins that poop on his shoe and teach him to love.
RottenTomatoes: 43%
Gratuitous Review Quotes:
“Why is Jim Carrey standing around watching penguins be funny? Why isn’t he in a movie where Jim Carrey is funny?” Tom Long, Detroit News [answer: Because it’s not 1997?]
[Lindy didn’t review the film, but she did interview a 9-year-old about it, which I thought was clever]
So would you want a bunch of penguins living with you?
Yes. It’d be fun.
What about all the pooping?
I’d do what Jim Carrey did and hold them over a toilet. –The Stranger
A surprisingly touching, low-key ballad of middle-aged male regret disguised as a kiddie comedy replete with poop and fart jokes and soccer balls launched at Popper’s crotch. -Kyle Smith, NY Post
ARMCHAIR ANALYSIS: See picture at right.
NEXTPAGE: HBO Docs
A MATTER OF TASTE: SERVING UP PAUL LIEBRANDT
So I sort of dropped the ball on reviewing A Matter of Taste: Serving Up Paul Liebrandt, which premiered as part of HBO’s summer documentary series this past Monday (not a great title, btw). It’s a shame, because I enjoyed it a lot. It’s basically about an avant-garde chef who makes ridiculous surreal dishes like a braised pork jowel covered in clams and orange foam, who earns acclaim when he’s 24 but because of the economy soon finds himself making burgers at a bistro. Turns out crazy art food isn’t very economical. Anyway, to make a long story short, I feel like all good documentaries give you an insider’s view into a subculture, and A Matter of Taste certainly does that well. It’s in the specifics that you find universality, and here in the esoteric, insular world of art-food, there’s something greater being said about the conflict between art and commerce. Where an artist (a chef, in this case) wants to create something that’s different than has ever been done before, which tends to be at odds with commerce, which is generally concerned with filling a need that already exists — giving people what they know they want, rather than creating something they didn’t even know they wanted because it didn’t exist before. And food is a strangely perfect illustration of that. My crazy French film professor who I mentioned here once before (the one who worked with Godard, and coined the phrase “grand clowning act of child molestation”) used to say of multiplex movies, “You were ‘ungry and eet feed you. Eez like ‘amburger. Eez bullsheet!”
He further illustrated this by way of a story about him riding around our neighborhood at night ringing a little bell, which still doesn’t make any sense, but is a nice visual.
Matter of Taste is a nicely balanced documentary, because even while helping you understand why this guy wants to make his crazy food, it doesn’t deride restaurant patrons for just wanting something familiar, or restaurant owners for discovering that serving bar food is an easier way to make money.
Next week‘s HBO doc series movie is Sex Crimes Unit, “an unprecedented look at the first division in the US dedicated to sexual assaults.” A Matter of Taste was a little better than Bobby Fischer Against the World, so hopefully the trend continues. I don’t see why it wouldn’t. I like rape. “Sexual” is my favorite kind of assault. Boy, this was a poor introduction.