Fantastic Mr. Fox

By this point, you’re either with Wes Anderson or you’re against him.  Some will say he peaked with Rushmore, and everything after has been a succession of diminishing returns.  Others, myself included, whilst recognizing that Rushmore just might be his masterpiece, have found a lot to love in his recent work.  Royal Tenenbaums is pretty wonderful, and I can’t really understand whatever criticisms people might throw at it.  Life Aquatic is deeply unfocused, and yet it’s entertaining and interesting and the finale never fails to bring a tear to my eye.  I even admire Darjeeling Limited, which benefited a great deal from a second and third viewing.  If you can handle his somewhat precious aesthetic, and accept that this is his style and he probably won’t change it, there’s a lot of good to be found in his work.  On the other hand, if you find yourself unable to take his style, Anderson has absolutely no interest in helping you out.  With that understanding, let us press on with his newest feature, the stop-motion animated Roald Dahl adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox.

The 25 Best Television Shows of the Decade – Part 4

A message board I frequent is running a poll on the top 25 television shows of the decade.  There were threads for nominations (which I missed), and the votes had to be chosen from the resulting list of a couple of hundred programmes.  The qualifying rules meant that any show had to air episodes in this decade, but could started in the fall ’99 season.  If shows started before then, only the seasons aired from fall ’99 onwards were to be considered.  This is Part 4, which features numbers 5-1.  Part 1 can be found here.   Part 2 can be found here.  Part 3 can be found here.

The 25 Best Television Shows of the Decade – Part 3

A message board I frequent is running a poll on the top 25 television shows of the decade.  There were threads for nominations (which I missed), and the votes had to be chosen from the resulting list of a couple of hundred programmes.  The qualifying rules meant that any show had to air episodes in this decade, but could started in the fall ’99 season.  If shows started before then, only the seasons aired from fall ’99 onwards were to be considered.  This is Part 3, which features numbers 10-6.  Part 1 can be found here.   Part 2 can be found here.  I apologize for the lateness of this entry.  The final part will be posted this week.  I promise.

The 25 Best Television Shows of the Decade – Part 2

A message board I frequent is running a poll on the top 25 television shows of the decade.  There were threads for nominations (which I missed), and the votes had to be chosen from the resulting list of a couple of hundred programmes.  The qualifying rules meant that any show had to air episodes in this decade, but could started in the fall ’99 season.  If shows started before then, only the seasons aired from fall ’99 onwards were to be considered.  This is Part 2, which features numbers 20-11.  Part 1 can be found here.  Part 3 can be found here.

The 25 Best Television Shows of the Decade – Part 1

A message board I frequent is running a poll on the top 25 television shows of the decade.  There were threads for nominations (which I missed), and the votes had to be chosen from the resulting list of a couple of hundred programmes.  The qualifying rules meant that any show had to air episodes in this decade, but could started in the fall ’99 season.  If shows started before then, only the seasons aired from fall ’99 onwards were to be considered.  I’ll address a show not available, then a few honourable mentions (my initial pass through yielded a top 47), and then onto the main event.  This is Part 1.  Part 2 can be found here.  Part 3 can be found here.

Boys In Love: I Love You Beth Cooper, (500) Days of Summer, and Adventureland

Rom-coms that centre around adult women tend to be about unbelievably gorgeous career woman who just haven’t found the right man, and that right man is almost always a well-built, clever, and extremely handsome man.  He probably lacks a heart-on-his-sleeve sensitive side, but the woman need only scratch beyond the bickering and the brusque exterior to find it.  Perhaps this is true of teen movies that centre around girls as well.  After all, Molly Ringwald ends up with Jake and Blane, not the Geek or Duckie.  In whatever circumstance (yes, Ringwald was the outsider in both those films), you rarely see a film in the genre where the athlete is the star.  Oh, there are exceptions, but even in She’s All That, it’s Rachel Leigh Cook that goes on a journey, not Freddie Prinze Jr.  So perhaps the makeshift rule that should be completely disregarded after reading is that if a film is targeted at women, the guy can be hunky and awesome, but targeted at men, the guy will often be an awkward outsider, maybe even a loser (the exception here is Say Anything, in which Lloyd Dobler is much-beloved, an athlete, but still sensitive and culturally savvy enough to be considered outside the ‘conformist mainstream’, if that’s what it is).  I suspect, to go further and narrower, this happens a lot in films about teens/young adults because the (typically) male director was himself a sensitive, artistic sort, and their own nostalgia might be wrapped up in the story enough to the point that they identify with the underdog protagonist.  The boys in these stories, through disconnection with the mainstream popular kids and through a lack of experience with the opposite sex, have a tendency to construct idealized notions of women, and in many cases, a particular one.  The three films herein discussed all deal with boys who do just that to varying degrees of success.

Inglourious Basterds

Back in the mid-90’s, I recall a critic (possibly Ebert, but I can’t positively remember who it really was) saying that watching Pulp Fiction was to watch a kid let loose in a toy store.  The kid was, of course, the film’s co-writer and director Quentin Tarantino, and he wanted to play with everything.  It was pop art nonsense at it’s most explosive, vibrant, and shallow (and I mean that in the best way possible).  It released a slew of imitators and rip-offs, but the original excitement has never really dulled.  A critical darling for a time, Tarantino now finds himself, 15 years later, sometimes still praised, oftentimes derided.  Claims that he’s not what he used to be are based on his 21^st Century output, which admittedly contains the lackluster Death Proof, and that he’s given himself over to fanboy self-indulgence.  Granted, nothing since (and including Basterds, we’re only talking about four films here, also assuming you believe Kill Bill to be two separate entities) has reached the emotional and character heights reached by Jackie Brown, his most (only?) mature film. Indulgence is certainly an issue, but Death Proof’s best moments came when he was fully embracing his exploitation B-movie love, providing a thrilling and tense finale, while Kill Bill popped with a visual inventiveness rarely seen in action films whilst also providing some fantastic Tarantino trademarked dialogue scenes.  So how does his latest opus, Inglourious Basterds, fare?  The short answer is ‘quite well, all in all.’

The Hurt Locker

Kathryn Bigelow is no stranger to the macho adrenaline junkie.  Point Break and Strange Days are all about the rush, whether it is surfing, robbing banks, or feeling someone else’s experience.  The Hurt Locker is no different, this time setting the action around a staff sergeant in a bomb disposal unit in Iraq.  I’ve mentioned the failings of Iraq War based film ventures before, and Bigelow wisely sidesteps the issue completely.  This is not a political film, but neither is it a straightforward action picture.  It’s thrilling at times to be sure, containing some of the best suspense sequences this year, but it’s more interested in the characters and how they function in such a high-pressure environment.

District 9

Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 is a rare treat.  Its high concept is established with an opening presented as a mockumentary, providing exposition in a witty, politically pointed manner.  The first thirty or so minutes of the film are extraordinarily good, no doubt as it was an extension of the short feature from which this current version was borne.  What’s so rare about it as how it eventually (and yes, to a degree, sloppily) abandons this approach and becomes a fairly standard fugitive/sci-fi/actioner, and I wasn’t left disappointed in missed opportunities.  When I say “standard”, I should add that this is actually executed with an above-average level of skill, even if it never truly rises beyond the tropes of the genre.

Struggling to Care: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

I had rushed to the cinema on opening day to see the latest installment in the ever-so-popular Harry Potter series in the hopes of writing something for the blog and having it posted by the evening.  Ever the punctual sort, here I am sitting down to start it several weeks later.  The problem I ran into, in addition to my poor attention span and generally lazy attitude towards life, was that I really didn’t have anything to say about it at all.  Yes, it’s well made.  It’s perfectly diverting, it delivers the action and fantasy that Potter fans have come to expect. It is in no way a bad film.  I just didn’t care.