I Has a Blerg. What a Dump.

Catching up the last month. Hey, better than nothing.

The Master (2012, Paul Thomas Anderson) 85
Stellar work from Amy Adams and Philip Seymour Hoffman, and an utterly raw, animalistic volcano of a performance from Joaquin Phoenix, channelling the best of Brando and De Niro, puts him on the Oscar shortlist. A tough, enigmatic piece from Paul Thomas Anderson, with large, glowing cinematography that elevates the overall picture from a "really good" small-screen pic to a "really great" large-screen one.

Blue Sunshine (1978, Jeff Lieberman) 70
10 years after a group of college friends tried a bad batch of LSD they start feeling the aftereffects, namely a spate of mindless zombie-like killing, in this cheesy, culty piece of drug/zombie paranoia that dropped before the rise of the slasher film. You could almost say this is the anti-Big Chill. Loads of fun.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973, Peter Yates) 90
Always great to dig up a lesser-known crime classic. This one, from the director of the ultracool Bullitt,
ranks with Robert Mitchum's finest performances, right up there with Night of the Hunter, Cape Fear, and Out of the Past. Watchable, re-watchable, memorizable, and so good it hurts like a bastard.




The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003) 88
Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999) 70
Director Errol Morris provided two very different portraits of two very different men, but both films are stamped with his deep-probing documentary style. The Fog of War is perhaps the pinnacle of his career, gleaning surprising insight from an all-time irascible interviewee into many of the most pivotal moments of the 20th Century, including but not limited to the bombing of Japan, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Mr. Death is also engrossing with an oddly egotistical subject, a man who gained success designing execution machines and selling them to various states for use on Death Row, but brought more notoriety by positing as an "expert" and becoming one of the most important Holocaust deniers in the movement.

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (2011, Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky) 82
Another on the doc front, the final piece (for now) of a truly remarkable story 20 years in the making that is important on so many levels. The trilogy is a testament to the evolution of the documentary format, the failures and frustrations of police and legal procedure, and a testament to indefatigable spirit in the face of overwhelming adversity.

Pulp Fiction (1994, Dir. Quentin Tarantino) 100
Okay, this was at least my tenth viewing of this, and it never looked better than in HD after a bunch of cocktails. I wanted to recommend the next time you watch it take note of all of the times food is mentioned. Made me hungry for a Durward Kirby burger, bloody as hell, of course.

A Dangerous Method (2011, David Cronenberg) 64
I've seen just about everything Cronenberg's done, yes including the oddball of his career Fast Company, and sad to say this is one of his weaker efforts. Kiera Knightly's perf is hit-and-miss, the excellent raw physicality mostly ruined by a distracting, mediocre accent. Not enough happening here to fully pull me in.

Bad Taste (1987, Peter Jackson) 87
Jackson's wild debut feature packs a lot of punch up its low-budget sleeves, with amazing, gory makeup and special effects holding up a hilariously wild story about a team of bizarre Kiwis saving  Earth from an alien takeover. He's made a mint with the Tolkien stuff, but he should also be remembered for the unique, twisted start of his career with this, Dead Alive, and Heavenly Creatures. An all-time great movie poster as well. >>

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012, Marc Webb) 74
Maybe the terrrrrrrible third part of Sam Raimi's installment left a >> in my mouth. Or maybe I just really like Emma Stone that much more than Kirsten Dunst. For whatever reason, I enjoyed this quite a bit. Great FX. Good supporting cast. Over-the-top baddie and ending.

Melancholia (2011, Lars von Trier) 82
Speaking of Kirsten Dunst...yeah, not a huge fan, but well, at least she has a glowingly framed nude scene in this one. The rest of the film is weirdly gorgeous on the eyes, with lots and lots of unresolved Tristan chords. It's also brutally depressing in line with a lot of von Trier's oeuvre, and maybe not a good suggestion for anyone worried that Earth is truly reaching her last days.


That catches up some stuff for now. I also spent a little time working on Season 4 of "Breaking Bad" and Season 2 of "The Walking Dead" (not fully caught up on either, yet, unfortunately), and then I started a week of James Bond from the get-go, from Dr. No through On Her Majesty's Secret Service, including a quick detour at Casino Royale (the 1967 spoof). I'm frozen on the Bond-a-thon until I either get my hands on a digital copy of Diamonds are Forever or finally get around to hooking up my VCR to a monitor.

Tabloid (2010) --69/100--

Errol Morris has a knack for building documentaries around unique personalities, from Gates of Heaven, to Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, to Mr. Death to The Fog of War, and now Tabloid. His latest is perhaps the juiciest but not necessarily the most effective. The story revolves around Joyce McKinney, a Southern ex-beauty queen, who gained a sordid notoriety in Britain in 1977. As she tells it, Kirk Anderson, the man she loved and had engaged to marry, was abducted by a Mormon cult. So she flew to England to help him escape and have a child with him.

The film relies mostly on interviews with McKinney, who is a charming, vivid storyteller with a streak of dark humor, but of course, that is just her version of the events. Once he returned to his mission and the press got their hands on the story they included the important details of how she took him to a cottage in the country and chained him to the bed so she could recondition him...with her body. He became known as the “Manacled Mormon,” and she went on trial for rape but was soon hanging out in clubs with rock stars. Don’t worry, it just so happens I haven’t spoiled all of the weird stuff yet.

For me the fascinating thing about documentaries, other than the real-life stories being told, is dissecting the ways that they are told, the methods used by directors to frame the happenings and engage the audience. This interest holds for narrative film as well, but with documentaries there is an especially sensitive line because of the “ideal” notion of a dispassionate eye recording the subject. Too often the unmistakable influence of the director behind the camera and in the editing room amounts to a clearly defined agenda, blurring the line between documentary and propaganda. Any documentary that upholds this ideal gets bonus points from me (Last year’s Restrepo is a solid recent example.)

I bring up this digression because Tabloid is very clearly a film about manipulations, where we are being told different sides of the story and it is nearly impossible to know exactly where the truth lies. Joyce certainly feels that Kirk was being manipulated by the Mormons. Other interviews substantiate the idea that she was manipulating him and the other people surrounding her, and there is a strong thread about the manipulations of information by both the press and the court system. Ultimately, Tabloid is the final manipulation of the story. Morris adds in some flashy collages of press clippings, photos, maps and home movies, deftly keeping things visually interesting and the momentum of the film moving at an amusing pace.

Unfortunately, there is an empty space in that there is no real entity to defend the side of Kirk Anderson and the Mormon church. The lone voice that comes close is is from a “reformed” Mormon who definitely has an axe to grind, making sure to ridicule Mormon theology, specifically its rules about sex and marriage, and highlighting the idea that abstinence is a critical sacrifice one must make so that when the world ends you can get your own planet. This imbalance leaves Tabloid wallowing in the realm of its subject matter, tickling with sensationalization, but wanting for substance.