fresh movie reviews and yum cha daily

dir: Richard Curtis
We're all kooky and crazy and freaky despite all being middle aged. Groovy!
It’s getting to the stage where hearing that Richard Curtis, the genius behind such pop cultural fodder as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and the diabolical Love, Actually, which actually opens and closes with long montages of people hugging. Hugging, honest to fucking gods…

No, I haven’t forgotten what other stuff Richard Curtis was involved with back in the day, like actually funny stuff, like the various Blackadders and maybe even the Vicar of Dibley. But that was mostly as a writer, as a writer of gags. Humorous asides and witty banter. Funny, mildly amusing stuff.

Then he wisely, from the perspective of making more money, started directing the monstrosities he was writing the scripts for on numerous post-it notes while drunk out of his skull. And thus a directorial legend was born.

Now he inflicts these awful goddamn flicks on us which have too many characters, most of which are little different from each other, with sequences that connect little to the ones preceding and following, and which exude an overall stench of desperation that never hides the fact that he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing, but hopes the editing, popular songs and cheeky swearing can hide the fact.

The Boat that Rocked, or Pirate Radio as it was briefly known when it was released in the States, is another in a long line of pointless Richard Curtis vehicles that’s nowhere near as funny or coherent as Richard Curtis thinks it is, or as funny or as coherent as Richard Curtis thinks Richard Curtis is.

dir: Jody Hill
Ignore and Avoid
Damn, this is one ugly movie. I’m usually comfortable with the kinds of flicks about which people say “I felt like taking a shower after watching it”, but in this case, I want to lift my brain and eyes out of my skull, and scrub them clean with something caustic and abrasive.

As if I didn’t currently already dislike Seth Rogen enough, here he is in a ‘starring’ role as a mentally ill, possibly retarded security guard who holds onto his job for no reason I can glean. He is a stupid and violent prick, and yet he is the hero of this incomprehensibly bad film. At first I thought it was a drama. Then, a comedy. Then, a black comedy. Then a drama again. Then maybe a horror flick, then maybe a romance. A character study? Slice of life? Social satire? By the end I’d given up trying to figure out what genre the flick resides in, because I figured the people making it couldn’t figure it out either. I haven’t seen such an ending with so little credible believability in a long fucking time. That this character gets the ending this flick doles out is a travesty of injustice alongside the fact that it’s taken over thirty years to bring that scumbag Roman Polanski to justice.

Ronnie Barnhardt (Rogen) is the head of security at a suburban mall. Very quickly, our first question becomes: how can such a clearly stupid, deranged and violent lunatic continue to be employed? How is it that they are completely obvious to the range and vitality of the abundant lawsuits his daily actions would result in?

It’s never explained, not to my satisfaction. For the longest time, no-one else points out this obvious fact either, until his frustrated employer bellows at him, “Ronnie, are you fucking retarded?”

It’s an interesting question. Though clearly Ronnie takes medication every four to six hours for his bipolar disorder, he seems to be, as well, just very stupid, as opposed to intellectually handicapped. His every interaction with every person who crosses his path drips such incredible moments of idiocy that you wonder how it is that he exists in this universe other than having been deposited here by alien intellects, vast and cold, who’ve brought him here from an alternate dimension as an experiment to test out our species’ tolerance for putting up with excruciating bullshit.

dir: Kevin Smith
This film is about as tragic as these costumes
The question burning on everyone's lips is not "Will I be selected for Big Brother II?" or "Just how does someone sow their lips together?", it is moreso, considering the grand opening of the aforementioned Kevin Smith film in Australian cinemas yesterday, that question remains "Is Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back better than Dogma?"

The answer, like any good cocktail, is mixed at best. Smith has taken the sacred duty of satisfying the dictates of his ego to ridiculous extremes, to the point where he now has made a film about his other films, a self-referential exercise in self groin rubbing that represents an increasingly tightening spiral of self-indulgence. Couple that with a breathtaking amount of pettiness on his part, and you are left with a bloated,
embarrassing film that occasionally works brilliantly, yet more often than not stinks like week-old entrails in the sun.

Not content with the screen time he and his good friend Jason Mewes have had in the past, he's decided to up the amount of time they appear to the point where they are practically in every scene, with hilarious results ensuing. An arguably simple formula can be applied to Kevin Smith films, that being the greater the
amount of time Silent Bob and Jay appear on screen, the worse the end result.

The main reason being, again arguably, that Jay's brand of constant profanity and excess is hilarious in small
doses, but when exposed to it on a constant basis for nigh on two hours, it becomes wearisome. The same goes for the taciturn Kevin Smith playing Silent Bob, whose shtick of only speaking for maximum impact works only when you haven't had to watch him ham constantly for the film's entire duration. Neither of them are particularly good actors, but Kevin Smith is easily the worst actor in the film, which would be okay if he wasn't in every single fucking scene.

That said, this film has a hit to miss ratio regarding its gags and film parodies of about 1 to 4, similar to the equally uninspired yet occasionally spleen burstingly funny Scary Movie. Smith has thrown in everything including the kitchen sink into this film, hoping that something sticks.

dir: Tim Story
Barbershops are so old-school. Just like bordellos
With the recent release of its sequel I thought it was about time I caught up with a film I’d heard was pretty funny back in the dim distant reaches of the heady days of 2002. See, there aren’t many funny films out there, at least films I find funny. Sure there are stacks of comedies pumped out by the studios, but even the thought of most of them makes me want to tear my eyeballs out of their sockets using salad forks.

I was a fool to think Barbershop would be an outright comedy. It’s a treacly tv movie with something to say about tradition and community. I know this because every time any character started talking about the good ol’ days of Calvin’s barber shop and the importance of community, this drippy, cloying piano music would start up in the background. It’s very handy if you didn’t know how to feel about the scene. It’s a very convenient shortcut for those of us that couldn’t work out what our reaction was supposed to be. Thanks to the quality direction, we no longer have that worry.

The story, such as it is, covers a day in the life of some people orbiting around the central focal point that is Calvin’s Barbershop, on the south side of Chicago. Calvin, played by legendary rapper Ice Cube resents the shop that his daddy left to him and sees it as a burden. He continually searches for get rich quick schemes in order to be able to kiss the shop goodbye. Over the course of the day he will be taught to appreciate how great the shop is and the general wonderfulness of community. He will realise this at various points as he stares into the middle distance (with the drippy piano music playing in the background) whilst wiser people than he tell him how great the shop is and the general wonderfulness of community. Like we had any doubts.

dir: Jim Jarmusch
Go on, Tom and Iggy, drink yer coffee and smoke yer smokes
The amazing, contradictory nature of art is that much of the time it
is simultaneously crucial and pointless. Even at its best art is
ultimately superfluous. Blasphemy, you think. Hypocrisy, as well,
especially from someone who styles themselves an artist (by way of
being a writer). But hear me out: no-one having a heart attack ever
had their life saved by having the Mona Lisa applied to their chest
instead of those electrical things that they use yelling 'Clear!'
before they do so. I know they're called defibrillators, but I didn't
want to show off. No drowning child was ever pulled out of the water
using the Sistine Chapel. You can't put a fire out with Picasso's
Guernica. And no girlfriend ever chose not to leave you because you
had a copy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude in
your hand. Trust me it doesn't work. They just keep walking.

dir: Trey Parker
Keeping the World Safe from Everything Except Them
It's a new world, which looks remarkably like the 'old' world as
portrayed in movies circa the 1980s. The entire globe is defined (as
in European, Egyptian and Korean cities) in terms of distances and
directions from the US. The soundtrack is the power chord laden
empty-headed nonsense as typified in glorious fashion by the title
song 'America? Fuck Yeah!'; a song so good Van Halen are kicking
themselves that they never recorded it. And the jingoistic action is
over the top, constantly explosive and cheesy / ridiculous in the
extreme. In short, this is an 80s action film parody chock full of the
requisite cliches of the era, except with puppets.

Marionettes, to be exact, I guess. I bet the lunatics responsible for
the recent Thunderbirds debacle, a movie I'm sure many of you didn't
even realise had ever been released, are kicking themselves over the
fact that this puppet feature worked out better than their film did,
despite the fact that they had humans and all (though I might prefer
DNA evidence on Sir Ben Kingsley before I can confirm his humanity).
Basically, the pugnacious, malevolent, occasionally brilliant
arseholes responsible for South Park, Cannibal: The Musical, Orgazmo
and BASEketball for some inexplicable reason decided to cash in on the
current level of global unrest with a movie that ridicules the
political bent of pretty much anyone currently alive and several
people already dead.

dir: Wes Anderson
The gang's all here. For some reason.
Whilst watching one of Anderson’s films, you really have to wonder who he thinks the audience is for the magic that he serves up. Tis clearly not a guy aiming to pack out the multiplexes and get Armageddon or Passion of the Christ’s Comeback Special-kind of ticket sales. I wonder if he even really cares about the audiences that watch his films, because thus far the only audience I can figure out that he aims his movies at is himself.

dir: Judd Apatow
Some people choose a life of celibacy. Others have celibacy thrust upon them
It’s rare that I venture forth to the cinema in order to catch a comedy. They’re rarely funny and usually so disposable that I forget I’m watching them whilst I’m watching them. It’s always scary when you have to check your ticket to remind yourself what you’re watching. Ah, senility, my friend, you make everything old new again.

It’s far easier to catch them on DVD or cable, with little loss to my time, brain cells or threadbare wallet. In this instance there was clearly something different going on. I went out of my way to see this instead of the myriad other stuff on display at any of Melbourne’s fine theatres. There was a different thought process involved.

dir: Jason Reitman
And thank you for the cocaine
Maybe it says more about me than the film, but it took me a while to realise this flick was meant to be a satirical comedy, and that it wasn’t a documentary.

Okay, so I’m bullshitting, but most of the material here is less of an outright parody than it is a fairly accurate (in spirit) depiction of the manner in which most of modern society is dependent upon people selling out at every level. Taken further, moral compromise and capitulation is a necessary part of getting by in the modern era.

Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) is a master of the dark arts of spin. He lives and breathes arguments and loves nothing more than verbally demolishing adversaries with his well-chosen words and rapid-fire delivery. He talks, talks and talks for most of the movie’s 92 minute running time.

And what does he say? He’s a lobbyist for Big Tobacco, the conglomeration of tobacco companies desperately trying to retain their place in a country where they’re under attack in the media, in the courts, and by the government, all for the sensitive, innocuous crime of selling a product which causes hundreds of thousands of deaths per year.

The thing is, Naylor doesn’t deny any of this. Being a spin doctor usually means dressing up indiscretions and outright fuck-ups in newspeak babble and outright lies. But Nick is so good at his job, so good at never being wrong, that he can still make the case in support of smoking whilst never technically lying.

He tells his son early on that the skill to doing what he does resides in the ability to argue correctly: “That's the beauty of argument, if you argue correctly, you're never wrong.” And he technically is never wrong.

dir: Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris
This little bitch is responsible for getting whole generations of kids onto acid
Even though it looks like just another American film about just another dysfunctional American family, Little Miss Sunshine has more going for it than that. At the very least, it manages to provoke a few more chuckles than the average film of this type usually does.

True, there’s no shortage of movies, both mainstream and art-house, that try to outdo and out-quirk each other with crazy families and their crazy adventures on the road to getting to their version of a happy ending. The lazy message always is, no matter how wacky and insane members of your family are, they’re still your family. So, you know, appreciate them for who they are.

Well, this film boasts a quirky collection of characters, and has the same predictable message regarding the thickness of blood versus water. But it ends up being a lot more fun that usual, even if it doesn’t have anything new to say about anything.

Olive (Abigail Breslin) is a cute little awkward girl who somehow makes it to the finals of a beauty pageant for cute little girls. For various unimportant reasons, her entire family has to accompany her on a cross-country trip in an old Volkswagen Kombi van as they try to get to Los Angeles for the competition.

Along for the ride are her drug-using, foul-mouthed grandfather (Alan Arkin), her Nietzsche-worshipping brother Dwayne (Paul Dano) who has taken a vow of silence until he becomes an air force pilot, her suicidal uncle (Steve Carrell) who’s depressed about no longer being the number one scholar on Marcel Proust in the United States, her motivational speaker father Richard (Greg Kinnear) and her mother Sheryl. The only thing remarkable about Sheryl is that she is played by Australian actress Toni Collette.