Conan visits ILM

The picture quality isn't great, but drunk C-3PO makes me cry with laughter.

Midnight Cowboy (1969)

4 stars I saw Midnight Cowboy for the first time my senior year in high school in a film appreciation course, which I still think of as one of the best classes I was ever in. Even then, watching it over the course of four 30 minute sessions, I was pretty overwhelmed. Watching it again Saturday night, I was freaking shattered.

Like all of the great movies, it’s much more than the sum of its parts. Joe Buck (Jon Voight) is a handsome, naïve young man from Texas who decides that he is going to move to NYC to become a hustler. A hooker, a prostitute. In his words, “'The only thing I've ever been good for is lovin’.” He’s also decided to take on the persona of a cowboy with the western shirts and the boots and everything. It’s 1969 and even in Texas people wonder why he’s wearing that costume. Things don’t go well for Joe at first and along the way he meets a street guy Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo, played by an almost unrecognizable Dustin Hoffman. Ratso is a different kind of hustler, and dupes Joe Buck into giving him $20 and leaves him high and dry. Eventually Joe Buck runs out of money, is kicked out of his hotel, and through even more circumstances he ends up living with Ratso in a condemned building that is scheduled to be demolished. He has nothing left other than the clothes on his back and a little portable radio he carries around everywhere.

Those are the parts, but I think they say little about what makes the movie so great. First of all, it is put together very unconventionally. The pace of the movie is odd, the order of events aren’t normal, and flashbacks are told so briefly, they feel like glimpses rather than whole scenes. It is wonderfully subjective sometimes and then suddenly abstract. We see scenes play out as Joe Buck or Ratso’s fantasies but sometimes those fantasies turn into nightmares that mix with past memories. It’s all incredibly inventive and never uninteresting. John Schlesinger directed the hell out of the movie, and the New York of 1969 is shot like a eerie precursor to Taxi Driver. It’s aggressive and mean and full of sad, lonely people.

What it really comes down to is Joe Buck and Ratso. It is indeed one of the greatest relationships in movie history. They don’t become romantically involved, but it’s not really a friendship either. They don’t like each other, or at least Joe doesn’t like Ratso, but it comes to the point where they absolutely only have each other. Ratso tries to help Joe move forward as a prostitute (with some hilarity) and Joe for example cheerfully brings home $8 and milk after donating some blood one day. Things get rough in the winter though and there are so many moments of sad silence as we watch these two guys looking at the situation they’re in. It’s cold, Ratso is sick, and they just don’t know what to do. They are two of the loneliest guys in the world and they desperately want to be with any human being that would have them.

Voight is amazing in the movie in one of the best performances I have ever seen. Whatever image you have of him now is nothing like the 31 year-old Jon Voight. Joe is a genuinely good person, a Southern gentleman in some ways, and all of the hurt and disappointment he experiences in New York is imprinted on his face. And they’re burned in my memory. I always remember his looks, his reactions to people’s abuse toward him, and a couple of key scenes when he looks at himself in the mirror. I think Joe Buck is one of the saddest characters I've spent time with and even after the movie is over, I still feel for him. Right now I feel for him. Hoffman as Ratso I think of as more of the funny guy. He is the king of the street rats. One of the great losers movies have to offer. This was the film he did right after The Graduate. What a choice. “I’m walkin’ here! I’m walkin’ here!”

As we headed toward the end, I felt it again. The same feeling I had the first time and probably every time I’ve seen it which honestly is not that much (I don’t watch my Top 5 too much because I don’t want to dilute their emotional power). The feeling I get with Midnight Cowboy is that my heart becomes so full I feel like it’s going to burst. I don’t cry, but my feelings toward these two guys and what they’ve been through and where they’re going is almost too much to take. In usual circumstances I just pop in another movie once I’m finished with the one I’m watching, but I didn’t Saturday night and couldn’t. Catharsis is probably the right word. I’m not saying you’ll have the same experience I did if you see Midnight Cowboy, but for me, it’s a movie I’m so grateful exists. Movies for the most part are entertaining. They’re fun and they can be an escape. Sometimes though, they are a lot more.

Banners 2011 Part 1

(Click on the images for the larger versions)

The Social Network








Ferris Bueller's Day Off








The Informant!








Kill Bill Vol. 1








Dirty Harry








The Matrix








No Country for Old Men








Before Sunset








The Town








The Big Lebowski








Star Wars








Inception








Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind








The Expendables








25th Hour








Any Given Sunday








127 Hours








Fantastic Mr. Fox








How Do You Know








Tangled







Banners 2010 Part 1
Banners 2010 Part 2

Weekly Recap 3/25/11

Watched this Week:
The Good:


















The Bad:









The Ugly: None

Trips to the Theater: None

Actors of the Week: Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Jean Reno, Natalie Portman
Directors of the Week: Alex Gibney, Luc Besson, Steven Spielberg


Trailers/Clips of the Week:
Captain America: The First Avenger. Thought it would be silly, but it looks pretty good.

March 2011 Reviews 3 (Tangled)

Tangled 3 ½ stars I can’t believe how much I liked Tangled. A Disney princess movie about a girl with extremely long hair. That’s so down my alley. I wasn’t even going to rent it but my DVD place has this 2 for $3 deal and I had to get something else and there it was.

Tangled is the story of Rapunzel, a princess with magical long blonde hair and that hair has the power to heal. It also has the power to keep people looking young and evil Mother Gothel decides to kidnap baby Rapunzel and keeps her locked inside a tower for 18 years. Rapunzel has had no contact with the outside world other than through books. She’s been told there are monsters down below, and the only friend she has is a small chameleon named Pascal. But she wants to leave. She wants to see the world. Then a dashing young rogue stumbles upon her tower and yes this is all very close to The Little Mermaid. But it works, and one of the big reasons it works so well is Mandy Moore as the voice of Rapunzel. Ariel was bit of a flake but Rapunzel is a genuinely funny girl. Clumsy and unaware of how to behave at times, she is fun to spend time with. When Flynn Rider shows up (Chuck’s Zachary Levi) she freaks out and slams him in the head repeatedly with a cast iron frying pan. Her subsequent interrogation is pretty funny too.

I have to mention how great the movie looks. It is CG, but they’ve used certain hand drawn techniques and the animation looks fantastic. Think of Aladdin if it was done with CG animation today. It’s a gorgeous movie. The movie though is mostly about Rapunzel and Flynn and there isn’t a lot of big action sequences or even that many supporting characters, but I liked that. There are unfortunately old school musical numbers which I guess I can’t tolerate anymore. Every Disney movie in the 90s had songs, but it’s hard to stomach these days. That being said, it’s a fun film, with strong filmmaking, and I remember laughing a lot. And of course a girl who never knew her parents, how can that story not get to you. Despite its lazy title, I think it’s one of the better animated movies I’ve seen recently. I liked it a lot, better than Up. Probably because it didn’t have an Asian child I wanted to murder.




Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer 3 ½ stars All I knew about Eliot Spitzer was that he resigned as Governor of New York because he had a relationship with a prostitute. They aren’t escorts, they are prostitutes. I would also accept the word hookers. I didn’t know he was known as the Sheriff of Wall Street. I didn’t know that he effectively cracked down on financial institutions. I didn’t know that he was a potential Democratic candidate before Obama came on the scene. As I continue my streak of great documentaries, Client 9 covers a lot of the career of Eliot Spitzer, and it also gives a fascinating, tasteful look at high class prostitutes. How these companies advertise, how their clients pay, and what is involved. It is the girlfriend experience. A paid date with a guaranteed happy ending. One technique used in the film really knocked me out. One of the girls Spitzer met with quite often didn’t want her face on camera or her voice on tape. So director Alex Gibney decided to hire an actress to basically play out the interview. It isn’t a trick as the technique is revealed during the film. We see an attractive actress (my pull toward redheads continues) put on make-up and look at her lines before she starts the interview. It’s very effective, and the actress Wrenn Schmidt is completely convincing. We believe these words are coming out of a thought process as she tries to remember what happened on specific nights with Spitzer. And yet we are aware she is an actress and are therefore more curious about who the real Angelina might be. It’s a strong documentary, informative, but also tragic. This guy could’ve done great things, but he gave his enemies the ammunition and they shot him down.




London Boulevard 2 stars William Monahan won the Oscar for his screenplay for The Departed back in 2006. London Boulevard is his directorial debut and you’d never know that this movie was written by the same guy. London Boulevard is another in a giant heap of British gangster films. There are great ones like Sexy Beast or Snatch. This one is a dud. Mitch (Colin Farrell) has just been released from prison. And will he go straight, or will he go back, or blah, blah, blah. This is a thoroughly uninspired story about a good tough guy who takes a job as a bodyguard for a movie star Charlotte (Keira Knightley). But the movie wanders aimlessly back and forth between the unconvincing romance between Mitch and Charlotte and this criminal world where there are many clichés and none of it is very original. Or very fun. I can’t think of a more dull crime film. The actors themselves are compelling but the material is not. There’s a reason this movie won’t get a domestic release in America. Some writers should not direct. The only bright spot is the always great Ray Winstone as a cockney heavy. I wish the movie was about him.



The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader 1 ½ stars Still one of the worst movie titles. This series should end. If anyone remembers anything about Narnia it’s because of the books not the films. I can’t even name all four children. And why do the movies refuse to grow up? They are PG 80s family fare with little to no excitement. Does anyone even care about the movies? I can’t summon the energy to write anything else about it. Utterly forgettable.

A Brief History of Title Design

http://www.artofthetitle.com/

2011 Crappy Movies So Far

January 16th was the last time I was in a movie theater. It was The Green Hornet and I liked it. For the past 2 months there has been nothing I've wanted to see in the theater. Maybe The Adjustment Bureau, but definitely not Battle:Los Angeles starring Michelle I always play a soldier or a cop Rodriguez. The beginning of the year is usually slow but this is unusually crappy.

- The Roommate has one terrible poster.
- Beastly has the most unintentionally hilarious tag line: Love is Never Ugly. LOL
- And who the hell cares about some guy named Alex Pettyfer!