11•11•11

To mark this historic occassion at 11:11 am of 11/11/11 and to continue procrastinating review writing (ugh writer's block) 11 lists of 11 things. Just because. Comment party: Please state your favorite 11 things of today in the comments!

11 Favorite Movies of the Year That Have Already Come Out On DVD (no particular order). 
Beginners, Poetry, Heartbeats (Les Amours Imaginaires), Bridesmaids, Jane Eyre, Rango, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, The Tree of Life, Captain America: The First Avenger, ...and is Certified Copy on DVD yet? I mean other than in the UK?

11 Favorite Colours
Purple, Silver, Turquoise, Green, Almodóvar Red, Blue, Black, Burgundy, White, Platinum Blonde, and any color by Krzysztof Kieslowski

11 Prettiest Male Movie Stars of All Time (no particular order off top of head)
Gene Kelly, Jude Law, Keanu Reeves, Paul Newman, Montgomery Clift, Brad Pitt, Alain Deloin, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Gary Cooper, Warren Beatty, Oh and Marlon Brando for a teeny tiny window of time.

11 Young Actresses I'm Currently Most Excited About (off the top of my head: NON-BINDING!)
Emma Stone, Anne Hathaway, Carey Mulligan, Elizabeth Olsen, Kim Ok-Bin, Saoirse Ronan, Ellen Page, Jurnee Smollet, Mia Wasikowska, and Dakota & Elle. THIS LIST IS NON-BINDING. I'm sure I forgot someone truly amazing.

11 Favorite Edibles
Coffee, Cheese, Ice Cream, Pizza, Pad Thai, Flavored Vodka, sun dried tomatoes, sushi, enchiladas, cake, and a tall glass of water

11 Books That Are Closest To Me As I Type
"Made to Stick", "Inside Oscar", "What You See in the Dark", "Three Stooges FAQ" (what the hell?), "Hollywood Madonna: Loretta Young", "The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael" "Anonymous William Shakespeare", "Swanson", "Eyewear: A Visual History", "Steve McQueen", and "Monsters in the Movies" (by John Landis... more on this one soon)

11 Favorite Animals
cats, elephants, racoons, ladyhawke, snakes, birds, panthers, butterflies, tigers, Monty and mermaids.

11 Things I Have Done This Morning That I Already Regret
not writing a review, typing up all these lists.... and running out of time to actually finish them. I only finished 7 of them. I ruined the 11 mania.

How Long Has It Been Since You've Seen "Close Encounters"?

Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind turns 34 this month. On a whim recently we put in the 30th anniversary edition Blu-Ray* and gave it a spin. I hadn't seen the movie since I was a kid and my memory of it was hilariously incomplete and childlike.

a production sketch shown on the special edition DVD

I remembered, for example, the oft repeated five musical notes that always made me nostalgic for that old light-up Hasbro game "Simon Says" and I remembered all the glowing lights and alien children at the end. My third most vivid memory was Richard Dreyfuss's mashed potato replica of Devil's Tower in Wyoming (a shape to which all the characters are drawn). Strangely I had zero recall of the far more narratively pronounced massive sculpture he builds inside of his house of the exact same structure. Funny the things you remember. The mashed potatoes must have stuck in my child brain because little kids play with their food but they're fully aware that adults aren't supposed to.

To my great astonishment, given decades of familiarity with Spielberg films, the movie is miraculously open ended. It's also open sided and open fronted which is to say that there are dozens of emotional entry points and next to nothing in the way of force-feeding or exposition. You can feel whatever you want to feel about it all the way through without the director telling you how you should be feeling (aside from free-form "wonder" which he expects and earns) or explaining any of those feelings away. In short, were his filmography a bookshelf, this would a lonely inkblot nestled between dozens of how-to instructional textbooks. 

Oscar History and 70s Nostalgia after the jump

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Michael Sheen is Such a Freak...

Sheen as computer program

Sheen as lycan

How did he ever end up in that stuffy English man groove in all those political movies?

This random question is brought to you by the recent full moon (were any of you killed by werewolves?) and my new blu-ray of Tron Legacy in which Sheen really gets his freak on... presumably to entertain himself since the movie won't. [Editor's aside: The BFCA is honoring the 5th anniversary of the Blu-Ray soon so I'm reinvestigating several titles for their blu-crispness and such so I can vote on the honors.] 

My god is that movie (Tron Legacy) incoherent. And I'm not talking about the plot since one can forgive movies about people getting trapped inside computers and creating malevolent digital versions of themselves for plotholes and diversions; part of the territory! I'm talking about the filmmaking. From scene to scene but more problematically from cut to cut nothing ever makes any sense. Where is this character standing? Which direction are they moving in? Where did that other character come from? Did they leave where they just were? Perhaps they turned around to face another direction? Why are we looking through a window now? Why did we just watch Tron fall into water from underneath the water? Why does that butterfly conveyor built thingie take 21 minutes to take the characters to the climax when every other distance in Tron world seems to be covered in like 4 seconds? We're talking basic spatial incoherency constantly. And you can't blame "the grid"... don't know if you've ever noticed this but cities built on grids are super easy to navigate in comparison to cities that aren't. 

This post was brought to you by 2010. Thanks for listening.

SuperFreak and his unsuspecting lady friend Rachel McAdams

As you were.

DVDs. The greatest film I...

...almost never saw, or is it? Paolo here again. I'd normally be the first person to watch a movie that features attractive men wearing fedoras and Emily Blunt doing contemporary dance, but fate had other plans. But between The Adjustment Bureau's theatrical release and now, it was a movie that had a minor 'bucket list effect' on me. 

In one of its DVD extras 'Leaping through New York,' writer/director George Nolfi praises the city as an all around "magical place". But the film's visual version of New York is underwhelming and dour, since we mostly see colours like blue and grey and it seemingly takes place in perpetual dawn or autumn. That's how I felt the first time, although repeated viewings made me appreciate how the sunlight would hit on the upper half of the city's Metropolis-like art deco skyscrapers.

New York, as this film depicts is, makes its citizens feel anomic. We get this feeling specifically through the way the titular adjusters are depicted within the shots, as when four mid-level adjusters look out from a rooftop to countless windows in front of them. That image is essentially repeated when two adjusters Harry (Anthony Mackie) and Richardson (John Slattery) look out a window inside the bureau. A high angle long shot of the bureau's library before we see Harry thinking about one of his cases, David (Matt Damon) offers a similar feeling. The city is an overwhelmingly large frame for an internal and masculine struggle, as Harry becomes wary of how his job affects others. But maybe the film dwarfs the adjusters to highlight a part of their function, to have the least ripple effects, as invisible, microscopic, unnoticed.

David and his star crossed lover Elise (Blunt) are also lonely people without family...

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I Am Number Four's Power Apps

Have any of you seen I Am Number Four? In a brain dead mood -- it's summer, it happens -- it was watched right here. At first I thought I might write up a whole review. Its jumbled five or six films in one chaos might be worth savaging as it continually reveals itself as a member of the  "we're making this shit up as we go along!" school of storytelling. Pettyfer is number four of a race of escapee aliens who are being hunted on Earth by their old nemesis and they're being killed in numerical order. I'll give you one guess as to how many of them are already dead.

Number three is dead.

Good guess!

I knew nothing about I Am Number Four's origins but immediately assumed it was based on a comic or graphic novel due to its continual expository mythology. All this for one stand alone feature? It must have fuller origins elsewhere. 

But in the end the movie is too disposable and harmless to be mean to. So let's just focus on the troublesome pet peeve: Alex Pettyfer's Magic Hands.

Pettyfer knows he's an alien and he knows he's number four but he doesn't actually understand his own powers yet and strange things keep happening to his body, like pulsing blue light from his hands. Pettyfer is a bit too, um, well-developed for I Am Number Four to double property as a puberty metaphor but it seems to be trying anyway. Once he starts using those hands his powers seem limitless. His hands are always ready with some solution: lock-picking, energy blasts, heat generation, super strength, you name it. At one point when he just decides to use them as flashlights in a dark room where key exposition secrets are hidden we had to add our own dialogue from the couch: "I've got an app for that, too!"

There's just nothing those mitts can't do.

Note to all filmmakers of this and Green Lantern and anyone taking on any future heroes with undefined powers: it doesn't work. If your hero's gifts are never defined there are no stakes. You can't push them to their limits for a dramatic climax if you've never given any indication that they have any. Think it over.