Back to reviews

And now, back to your regularly scheduled blogging:

Bunker Hill
This movie is brought to you by the same fellow who did "C.S.A," KU film professor Kevin Willmott. General premise is a little like Jericho - small town in Kansas becomes isolated after disaster. There is no electricity, and the cars won't start. The townspeople, scared and lacking any information, start on their own personal revolution, ending in demagoguery and xenophobia. Targets of their rage include the town's single black man, gay man, Pakistanis, and independent thinker.
It's not exactly a feel good movie. It ends with an old-fashioned Western-style shootout in the town's square. In a lot of ways, it draws heavily on the Western tradition. The modernity comes in the post-9/11 way these townsfolk justify their new militia and gunbarrel justice.
I was terribly dissatisfied with the ending, which is abrupt and inconclusive. Maybe I'm just a peon movie watcher spoiled on Hollywood endings, but I wanted a LITTLE more closure.

It's only playing at Liberty Hall, and closes Thursday. But if you like a movie that'll make you think about how people respond in crises - try to make it out there.

Beware of God by Shalom Auslander
A delicious little collection of short stories. It's a couple hour read if you do it in one sitting - which you might be tempted to do - but the short stories make it easy to break up if your reading tends to come in 10-15 minute chunks.
The short stories deal largely with our human relation to (obviously) God and the Hebrew God and Judaism in particularly. They vary from absurd to tragic to funny - a very dark humor - all enough to entertain without being cheeseball fluff.
In one story, a man in a near-death experience discovers that God is a giant chicken. In another, two hamsters anxiously await the return of their Savior, Joe. In still another, an average man thwarts God's carefully laid plans for his death, forcing God, Death, and Satan to take matters into their own hands on Earth.
Read this book. Read it now!

Stardust

Well, I probably won't actually get to that backlog promised in the last last post, except perhaps by special request (ie, you writing in the comments that you want to know about something). So to satisfy my throngs of eager readers [*snicker*], here's my latest review:

I read "Stardust" over the weekend, then watched the movie. Now, I will say that I read the book in Spanish, so it's possible that I missed something in the translation... that it might have actually been funnier or maybe deeper... but frankly I don't think so.

I found the book to be disappointing and the movie to be better, but still confusing. The book was, for the most part, written like a children's book, almost a deliberate imitation of The Hobbit (which I hated). Characters go along, do things, run into almost no difficulties, and when they do, they extract themselves with teeth-grinding simplicity. 80 pages in, nothing had really happened. At 100 pages, the "mission" of the book is accomplished, and all that's left is getting home. The problem with seeing it as a sweet children's book would be the explicit language (more an issue in English than it was in Spanish), one fairly graphic sex scene, and a couple scenes of rather descriptive violence perpetuated against a unicorn. These scenes were all the more discomfiting because they're so unexpected in this sort of book. It's like you're watching..."Aladdin" say, and Jasmine suddenly takes her top off while Aladdin yells "Holy fuck! Check out those knockers!" ...and then you're right back to the regular movie.
It lacked depth, it lacked character development, it lacked conflict. There are two other groups of people chasing the star, but it never really all comes together in the grand finale the way you'd expect; the other plot lines just peter out before the end.

The movie was better...in that it wasn't a total waste of my time. We get the grand finale, which is really quite good, and there are some scenes of visual humor that were really entertaining - though they had little to do with the book, that was a good thing in this case. My only beef with the movie is that some of the funny bits were WAY out there - ie, the smart-alecky ghosts and the gay pirate - that I found myself wondering whether the movie was deliberately a spoof/parody or whether it had just ended up that way. There were parts that took themselves seriously, and parts that I said to Eric, "Okay, this HAS to be a parody of a fantasy movie." Anyway, it was a cute bit of fluff, but I'd still recommend going to see "The Golden Compass" for those wanting a bit of high fantasy to go with their evening.

I have a collection of Gaiman's short stories coming in from the library soon, so I'm pretty excited about that.

From my vantage -

We went to see Vantage Point on Sunday. I thought it was really terrific - I had no fingernails left by the end, and I wasn't nibbling out of boredom, either. I really liked how with each perspective we got just a few more pieces of the puzzle, went just a little further forward in time. I thought the moments they flashed back really added a lot of suspense, and that the flashback repetitions weren't annoying at all. The plot wasn't predictable, either - at least not to me, but I wasn't really trying that hard. My only complaints are that the car chase scene was too long by about half, and that the whole plot hinges on a betrayal that isn't well explained or necessarily terribly believable.
Still - well worth a ticket and an hour or two of pure escapist fun.

Movie-going

We went to go see "There Will Be Blood" over the weekend at the Rio Theater in downtown Overland Park, so I have two things to review for you today.

"There Will Be Blood": Now, I know this was a darling of the awards people-who-know-things, and it definitely did have its strong points. On the whole, though, I did not like this movie. It starts out strong, in silence, with high emotion and drama. But here's what I expected from the movie, based on the previews: A drama based on the politics and power struggles between the Oilman and the Preacher, centered on the effects that the Oil Boom has on this small town.

Instead, it was a series of snapshots from Plainview (the Oilman)'s life -- which again, could have been really good, and did make for a great character study. So let's talk character for a moment Plainview is, from the start, less than entirely honest, but he's shrewd and seems fond of his boy. Not your good buddy, maybe, but someone you can respect, if not admire. By the end, he's pure, twisted evil. And I felt - perhaps I'm a lazy moviegoer - that the reasons for this descent were never explained. Suddenly he just does these horrible things, seemingly for no reason at all, leaving the viewer going, "Oh. Well I guess he's just a bad person?" Great study of a character as he collapses, but it's hard (for me, at least) to spend 2.5 hours studying the character of a person I don't like or understand.

My second criticism is a lack of continuity between these snapshots. We see moments from Plainview's life spread out over 25+ years, and while they paint a story (events happening in sequence) there's no traditional plot... no particular conflict that overarches everything, no particular development. We see these fascinating (and very well done) moments, but we don't see causes for the moments, motivations leading to them, or the effects of them. Again - maybe I'm being a lazy movie watcher, but even as I thought about the movie later, as you will be forced to do, I couldn't fill in the gaps.

There's more, but if you read some of the less favorable reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, you'll pretty much get it.

Cinematography was beautiful and talented, score was freakin' sweet.

Now for the Rio itself -
That place was fun! Smelled a bit like Liberty Hall, but smaller and no beer. Seats were more comfortable, though. It was an "old-fashioned" movie experience, but without the bad parts of old-fashioned. They only have one screen, so if the movie they're showing isn't what you want to see, you'll just have to wait. But next time they get a show in that you want to see, check it out!