Swept Away (2002)

The good news is, this movie isn’t truly horrible. The bad news is, there seems to be no reason for it to exist – nobody involved in it really seems to know what they’re doing. I'm guessing there was a lot of awkward silence around the craft services table, a lot of furtive glances and avoidance of eye contact.

The story structure closely follows in the steps of the original 1974 film directed by Lina Wertmüller and starring Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato: a bitchy blonde socialite and a robust, earthy yacht servant bicker, then get stranded on a desert island and fight until they fall in love. To be honest, I don’t think Wertmüller’s original film is that great, being a little overly-schematic in a very European, 1970s kind of way: he represents the working classes, she’s the bourgeoisie, now watch them rassle. Plus, the movie takes an odd turn as the relationship devolves into something that looks more like caveman-style sadomasochism than anything else, with Giannini smacking Melato around and thoroughly dominating her, both physically and emotionally, until they get rescued. Point being, it doesn’t seem like a particularly healthy relationship. But the movie is at least interesting in a sardonic, satirical kind of way, and the two leads (especially Giannini) are fully committed to rolling around in the sand.

The Guy Ritchie version, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have any idea what it’s trying to be. There are some crude stabs at the social satire of the original movie, seemingly still present only as a result of inertia (I say this because Ritchie seems to have just copied and pasted big chunks of dialogue out of Wertmüller’s script, including awkwardly anachronistic stuff about Communists). Every so often there’ll be a moment of comedy, but this usually gets spoiled by Madonna’s incredibly cranky, unpleasant performance (and has any husband ever directed his wife to be more unlikeable on camera than in this movie?). I suppose maybe the movie wanted to just be a genuine heartfelt, but then that falls flat thanks to the total lack of chemistry between Madonna and Adriano Giannini (yes, Giancarlo’s son, who has better abs but not as much movie-star charisma than his dad). I will give credit to two collaborators who do solid work here: Bruce Greenwood brings genuine emotional authenticity to his role as Madonna’s husband; and Alex Barber’s cinematography is appropriately golden-hued and ravishing.

But in general, while bad movies can happen for all kinds of reasons, from the ego-driven (The Postman) to the purely crass (Saw VI) to the earnestly incompetent (Plan 9 from Outer Space), Ritchie’s Swept Away seems to exist almost by mistake, a film that nobody involved wanted to be making and nobody in the audience wanted to see, which is increasingly rare in today’s world. This movie is like a two-headed calf: created by mistake, doomed to continue painfully loping around until it finally, thankfully comes to its inevitable end. It didn’t hurt anybody while it was alive, but it’s better for all involved that it be buried in the backyard and forgotten about.

4/10

(This is my contribution to the White Elephant Blogathon, thanks to Silly Hats Only.)

Early December Review or something

Okay, it's been a while and once again I've been reminded that people actually read this blog so here are a few thoughts on the new movies I've watched in the last month or so.

First, real quick, I could use some suggestions on the design and color scheme - I went black for October because black is spooky, but in general? This gray isn't cutting it. I think I want to migrate the whole thing over to Wordpress anyway (any tips on that from anyone?) Anyway:

Big Fan: I saw this as a New Beverly double feature with The Wrestler, as both were written by Robert Siegel (who was also, weirdly, former editor-in-chief at The Onion). The double feature was useful in illustrating the contrast between the two movies, and why Big Fan, entertaining and well-acted as it was, kind of fell short: Both movies are about New Jersey losers who are associated with professional sports, but whereas The Wrestler left me touched and emotionally invested in the characters, Big Fan was made by a filmmaker who, ultimately, condescended to them - The Wrestler has its share of jokes at the expense of the sad-sacks in the lower rungs of the professional wrestling world, but this was tempered by genuine pathos and sympathy. Big Fan is basically all snark, all the time, tempered only by Patton Oswalt's genuine and sincere performance. 6/10.

2012: For reasons I don't quite understand, I've pretty much loved the previous movies in Roland Emmerich's apocalypse triptych (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow) while hating everything else he's ever done (Stargate, The Patriot, 10000 BC). So I was planning to enjoy this movie too, which only a retarded fanboy would do, right? Anyway, as it turns out, the movie itself is pretty lame, with one major exception: the much-trailered sequence of John Cusack and co. driving around through Los Angeles in the midst of a superdeluxe earthquake pretty much rocked my socks off. What's wrong with me, that I should be so radically energized by the spectacle of literally thousands of people being crushed and whatnot? I don't know. But I have to admit that I find this sequence thrilling. 4/10

An Education: There's a certain class of movie that I've gotten used to, over the years, as the high-class snoozer - the kind of highly-regarded movie where you pretty much know, ten minutes in, what's going to happen by the end of the movie, so if you doze off for a few minutes here and there, it's pretty easy to pick up on what's happening. So since it was BLATANTLY OBVIOUS that Peter Sarsgaard was going to turn out to be a pseudo-pedophiliac cad and leave Carey Mulligan high and dry from his first (very creepy) scene in the movie.

Anyway, this movie isn't that bad, but the performances and direction are a lot better than the story itself, which is fairly mundane. 7/10

Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire: This one is interesting to me because it illustrates (like Transformers 2) that despite what all the screenwriting gurus say, audiences don't really care about story, because neither of those two movies really had 'stories' per se as much as they have compilations of scenes delivering what audiences want to see: CGI spectacle in one case, really good actors in scenes of heightened misery in the other. "Academy Award nominee Mo'Nique" seems to be inevitable.

As for the rest of the movie, even though Lee Daniels is obviously great with actors, he doesn't know much about storytelling or visuals and doesn't seem to have much of a vision beyond 'get all this awful drama up on the screen' which limits how impactful the movie can be to some degree. Anyway, not bad. 7/10

Fantastic Mr. Fox: If only Wes Anderson could have found a way to blend his unique style with something more family-friendly, this terrific movie wouldn't have flopped. Because it's basically just like every other Wes Anderson movie - ironic, formal, oblique, fetishistically detailed - but with puppets instead of live actors. Anyway, I very much enjoyed it as the latest entry into his world of upper-class world-weary whimsy. 8/10

Where the Wild Things Are: On the other hand, this one has a lot going for it (amazing performances, production design, creature effects, cinematography) but the story just totally fell flat for me. A big part was that I didn't connect to the kid - I was never a 'pretend to be wild animals and throw tantrums' kid, I was a 'sit quietly in the corner reading a book' kid, and never understood the other kind of kids. But beyond that, the story of this movie felt like an over-obvious pseudo-Freudian allegory for me. As soon as I saw the lead wild thing tearing shit up in Monster Village while the other monsters wonder how to deal with him, I got it. We all got it. 6/10

The Exorcist (1973)

Speaking of movies with backlashes, here's another one, although the backlash against this movie is less about commercial hype than it is about political correctness, so let's get this out of the way: yes, The Exorcist is ultimately a movie with a regressive attitude towards gender roles (two priests must do battle against an unruly female) and towards morality (stark medieval good vs. evil).

All that said, The Exorcist still stands for me as one of the all-time great horror movies, simply on the basis of its ability to create tension and scares and on the basis of sheer storytelling. There's hardly a wasted second in William Friedkin's original cut, with a relentless build towards the final showdown between Max Von Sydow and the demon inhabiting Linda Blair; indeed, this movie is a good example of how a focussed, energetic director's work can transcend a mediocre screenplay - just look at the opening sequence, which introduces Max Von Sydow as Father Merrin, a character who will then disappear until the last half hour of the movie. It's a sequence loaded with an overpowering, foreboding mood, but with virtually zero narrative connection, either to the rest of the movie, or really, within itself. But because Friedkin knows what he's doing, the mood and editing propulsiveness carry us through this sequence and into the main body of the movie.

And the performances are almost uniformly great; We all know that Max Von Sydow and Ellen Burstyn are great actors, but where did Jason Miller come from and why wasn't he in more films? And Linda Blair's performance, natural and easy-going as a normal girl, genuinely diabolical when possessed, is easy to attribute to special effects, but has to be seen as one of the best performances by a teenager, ever.

I need to add, however, that the version I watched on Friday night wasn't Friedkin's original director's cut, but the 2000 'special edition' which is basically William Peter Blatty's preferred Producer's Cut, which adds in a bunch of redundantly superimposed demon faces and a dumb 'happy ending' scene at the very end of the movie, among other details. Now, I think William Friedkin has about as much interest in convincing his audience of the existence of demons as Sam Raimi did in Drag Me to Hell; Friedkin's career shows that he's more interested in telling stories for the sake of telling stories. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if Blatty actually believed in his own shaggy dog tale, since pretty much every choice in his cut of the movie makes it more strained and pretentious.

9/10

The New Beverly All-Night Horrorthon 2009

God, I love the New Beverly, LA's grungiest non-porn repertory theater. This year, as last year, they showed an all-night horror movie marathon in the lead-up to Halloween and I was there, here's the quick rundown:

Dog Soldiers (2002): I had seen Neil Marshall's directorial debut before on DVD; on a second viewing it's still a pretty kickass action/horror hybrid, but at the same time some of Marshall's inexperience felt more prominent, along with the screenplay's seams. Either way, still a fun, smart little movie. 7/10

The Burning (1981): This should be the title for a horror movie about a skin disease, but it's actually a Friday the 13th clone produced by Harvey Weinstein, and like a lot of other movies from very early in the slasher era, it actually has its own identity and some strong moments. Still, not much to write home about, beyond the presence of Jason Alexander, Fisher Stevens, and (somewhere in there) Holly Hunter. 6/10

The House by the Cemetery (1981): This was when things really kicked in for me because of my love for the films of Lucio Fulci, the weirdest and least rational Italian horror filmmaker of the era. Like all of his movies, this one is loaded full of bizarre images only connected by fleeting dream-logic: mannequins losing their heads and bleeding, little girls appearing out of nowhere to give cryptic warnings, monsters that bleed maggots. Good stuff! The former owner of the titular house was a - get this - Dr. Freudstein. 7/10

At this point, the organizers showed three Tales from the Crypt episodes, and while they were fun, I think it would have made more sense to just show a single episode as a palate-cleanser. Three in a row was a bit much.

Superstition (1982): Probably the weakest movie of the night, and one that didn't actually involve 'superstition' per se but rather the vengeful spirit of a witch haunting a house and causing peoples' heads to wind up in microwaves and saw blades to fly across the room and kill people. I nodded off during the second half of this rather slow-moving movie and missed some of the explanatory stuff, but I don't think I missed much. 4/10

Fight For Your Life (1977): I had also seen this one before at the New Bev, basically a Last House on the Left variant with a vicious white racist (William Sanderson, in a great performance) holding an African-American family hostage and spewing the most amazingly awful torrent of hate-speech at them for an hour and a half. Of course it all ends with the family rising up and striking back at their oppressor. I wonder if, at the New Beverly, there was a single African-American person watching it last night or if it was all complacent white hipsters like myself. 7/10

Galaxy of Terror (1981): Probably not the best idea to put another very slow movie at the very end of the night, and this Alien-ripoff is pretty incomprehensible, but it still has Sid Haig chopping off one of his own arms, Grace Zabriskie captaining a spaceship and somehow ending up barbequed, and an attractive blonde actress basically getting raped and killed by a gigantic maggot. When you can't really tell if what you're watching is actually on the screen or just a product of your own movie-addled mind, you've had a good night. 6/10

Overall, a very fun night, although I wish that the programmers would range out a little further - a slew of '70s-'80s grindhouse movies is fine, but I'd love it if they could mix it up with maybe some '50s Hammer or something modern from France or Japan or maybe something more mainstream and classic in there - tossing in a John Carpenter or Wes Craven film alongside the no-name slashers. Anyway, 52 weeks to Horrorthon 2010!

At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (1964) & This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse (1967)

As far as I can tell, Jose Mojica Marins basically pioneered the Latin American horror movie at about the same time that the British, Italians, and Japanese were all launching into the worldwide exploitation market. And like most of those movies, JMM's work is raw, pulpy, and an expression of raw id. Marins' alter-ego, Coffin Joe, is basically the world's worst undertaker, with an ego of colossal, Nietzche-esque proportions and a worldview somewhere between Hitler and Ayn Rand on the subject of the need to extend his bloodline by murdering whatever subhumans will get in his way.

Some critics have had a problem with the politics of Marins' films, and it's not hard to see why, since Coffin Joe (more technically, 'Ze de Caixao') is pretty much the only character in either of the two Marins movies that I've seen, with everybody else basically just showing up to cringe at or be enraged by Coffin Joe's antics.

Yesterday night the Silent Theater showed Marins' first two Coffin Joe pictures. At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul is a fairly modest c-level production elevated, more than anything, by Marins' performance as Joe and his own ability to create mood. The plot is pretty flimsy - Joe wants women to bear him children, and kills a few people when they become obstacles - but it all works with a surprising degree of mood and gore, not to mention some blasphemy; the opening scenes take place on a Friday, and Joe rants about wanting to eat meat, and proceeds to blatantly chew on a leg of lamb while watching the local villagers in a religious procession outside his window, chuckling the whole time.

At Midnight was just the dress rehearsal for This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse, a bigger, more violent, more outrageous sequel. Coffin Joe, brought back to life after the events of the previous movie by a retcon line of dialogue, is more intent on ever on his goal of creating a master race with the perfect woman, and basically kidnaps and auditions a group of young ladies for the job. If there's such a thing as tarantula-porn, this movie is it, with spiders crawling all over a gaggle of young women in nighties.

The high point of the movie, though, is a sequence in which Joe find himself transported to Hell, witnessing the torments of the damned in gory full-color. It's a crazy sequence, but it's marred by venturing out of the black and white mood created up to that point - seeing all the crappy papier-mache sets in full color causes them to lose a lot of their charm.

(I have more to say on these films but right now I've gotta go to the New Beverly's 12-hour horrorthon. Until later.)

At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul: 6/10
This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse: 7/10

Lorna's Silence (2008)

Good stuff, in general from the Dardenne brothers, but I fear that their formulas may be beginning to yield diminishing returns. Specifically in this movie, we once again have a movie about the plight of immigrants in scuzzy modern Belgium (just like La Promesse) and a feisty young woman trying to own a cafe (just like Rosetta) and dealing with an acute moral crisis (just like all of them) which is fine - the acting is perfect, the narrative is compelling, the moral issue is suitably drastic - but there's a whiff of been-there-seen-that. And this time, as if in order to juice things up a bit, the Dardennes have given their lead actress a scene or three where she gets (SPOILERS) to go crazy and have delusions, and I don't think this kind of internalized psychology seems to be their strong point. It feels a little contrived and inorganic when Lorna (Arta Dobroshi), the movie's Albanian immigrant, decides to have a hysterical pregnancy in order to deal with her complicity in the death of a Belgian junkie (Jeremie Renier, wraithlike), it doesn't really work - the movie takes on a melodramatic, sentimental quality that doesn't fit.

Of course, let me be clear that the movie is still excellent and better than 90% of what's out there right now - it's just no Rosetta, or even L'Enfant.

7/10

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009)

This is just a quick little ramble so as to maintain some presence on this thing. Basically, the G.I. Joe movie was tolerable. It's watchable in that hit-your-head-enough-time-and-eventually-it-feels-okay kind of way that's increasingly dominating American movies. It's certainly better than Transformers 2, and there are big parts of it that I enjoyed, including the bad guy performances of Sienna Miller, the Asian guy playing Storm Shadow, and the crazy chaos of the Paris chase sequence. I also appreciated that the formerly all-American squad is now an international, NATO-based force, which I know irritates the purists but I'm not one of them.

All that said, it's still probably Stephen Sommers's worst movie that I've seen. Unlike most people, I didn't hate his last movie, Van Helsing - it was overstuffed and had a dumb ending, but you could tell it was being made by a guy who had a real joy in playing with that particular toy box of Universal monsters and expensive CGI and so on. G.I. Joe, on the other hand, feels like a case of pure corporate synergistic hackery, down to the needless addition of shots of aircraft carriers and exosuits and stuff that's basically only in the movie in order for Hasbro to sell more toys. A lot of the movie feels impersonal and pointlessly commercial in order to set up the sequel and so on, and if Stephen Sommers doesn't care about whether or not it makes sense for the Baroness to be good or just misunderstood, or for Cobra Commander's character to make any sense whatsoever, why should I? Also, Channing Tatum is hilariously awful as the alleged lead character - guy, this is the biggest movie you've ever done - you could pretend like you actually want to earn a couple more of these paychecks, at least.

Still, less offensively ludicrous than a lot of this Summer's other movies.

4/10

Auto-Tune the News

As usual I'm about three steps behind everyone else in finding this stuff. The first time I watched this I was 'meh'. By the third time, I realized it was AMAZING.

June and July Update

I've developed this pattern of only posting two or three times a month, mostly involving a Youtube video and a post of short reviews starting with the phrase, "I apologize" so let's just move on from there with quick thoughts on things I've watched since my last review.

Drag Me to Hell. Something of a minor masterpiece, and pretty much the best studio movie I've seen this year. Sam Raimi makes movies that look like cheesy, insubstantial fun but actually have a spine of moralistic steel underneath - Alison Lohman's character performs a wrong, refuses to take responsibility for it (not unlike Mena Suvari in last year's Stuck) and winds up paying the penalty for it. That Raimi could make such a sturdy depiction of individual responsibility in a world that increasingly wants to deny such things - in a movie where an anvil drops on somebody's head and their eyeballs pop out - is some kind of triumph. 9/10

Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country. It's not an easy thing to make a comprehensible film out of a mass of character-less handheld video footage, and the filmmakers here found an ingenious solution, structuring their film around a framing story of one Burmese resistance member coordinating the flow of footage by phone and computer. It's a well-made and fascinating movie, still limited by its topicality to a certain time and place, but crafted strongly enough that it should retain watchability longer than other such political documentaries. 7/10

Up. Pixar's movies have settled into a certain familiarity, which is both good and bad - I kind of want them to exit their comfort zone a little bit more they have lately - only Brad Bird seems to be able to provide real surprises from within the Pixar formula. Still, entertaining, funny, and affecting (and better than Wall-E). 8/10

Terminator Salvation: Stupid and pointless. Just a series of rambling and expensive set pieces linked by a flaccid and poorly motivated narrative. Still, better than the incoherent and boring Wolverine thanks to a good performance from Sam Worthington and some legitimately okay action scenes. 4/10

Moon: Reasonably entertaining and well-acted, but kind of unimaginative. You can stick a guy on the Moon, and the only thing you can have him do is take part in yet another 'corporations are evil' bulldozer? Come on, David Bowie's son, show us something we haven't seen before. Here's an idea for the sequel: Two Sam Rockwells are good, but a dozen are better. 6/10

Land of the Lost: Misbegotten. I like the idea of creating a bizarre fantasy-landscape made of fragments of every era of history. Too bad they populated it with a pair of unlikeable idiots and a vacuous bit of female eye candy. 4/10

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Low expectations helped me to experience this movie as tolerable and not eyeball-gougingly awful. The narrative and characters make no sense to the point of being downright insulting to the audience (stepping through a door from Washington's Air and Space Museum to some Southwestern desert? Fuck you too, Michael Bay). But all of that is beside the point given Bay's command of spectacle, which he manages to deliver on. There are amazing, earth-shattering sights in this movie. Too bad they're still embedded within a very expensive commercial for Hasbro, GM and the U.S. military. Oh, and those racist Autobots? Soooooo amazingly racist. I can't believe that Bay isn't getting laughed out of theaters the same way M. Night Shyamalan and Brian DePalma have been in recent years. Also, I realize this may put me in the minority, but I find Megan Fox's appearance to be creepy and a little disgusting, like an overblown drag queen parody of femininity. I can almost imagine an actual good-looking women coming up to her and going, 'are you making fun of me?'. 3/10

Bruno: Sort of funny, but really only in an 'I'm so much smarter than those people on screen!' kind of way. I enjoyed Borat but only because it was more honestly outrageous and more warmhearted, factors that feel warmed-over and insincere this time. Sacha Baron Cohen is amazingly talented and a courageous performer - too bad he has so little interest in using his talents in the service of any idea larger than dividing his audience into the 'get-its' and the 'don't get its'. Ron Paul is a loony and a homophobe (apparently) but he deserves better than this kind of unfair ambush comedy. 5/10

And the most interesting old movies that I've seen lately:

The Sinful Dwarf (1973): A demented little person teams up with his faded showgirl mother to kidnap girls for a sex-slavery operation. You've never seen so much devious mugging in your whole life in this grimy, entrancing bit of schlock. 5/10

Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975): Sort of a case study in cinematic S&M, watching a series of men being dominated by the towering, imperious Ilsa, as played by Dyanne Thorne, who winds up getting an appropriate comeuppance from her concentration camp wards. Probably more interested in terms of pathology, but like The Sinful Dwarf, something of a must-see for fans of '70s softcore kitsch, and better than its sequel, Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (which played as part of a New Beverly double feature). 5/10

Ivan the Terrible Parts I & II(1944-46). Eisenstein's unfinished trilogy is an amazing achievement, an expressionistic political nightmare that extends beyond Stalin-era allegory into the realm of Shakespeare. I especially liked Part II as the film descended even deeper into realms of paranoia and lunacy. 8/10 and 9/10.

The Long Riders (1980). Another New Beverly viewing, a sort of rambling and not particularly focussed Western about the James and Younger gangs. Like the Andrew Dominik/Brad Pitt film from a couple of years ago, I don't think it makes a coherent statement about what it means to be an outlaw or a folk hero or anything like that. It does have a bunch of fun performances from the likes of David Carradine, Stacy Keach, and Pamela Reed, plus a fairly amazing Peckinpah-esque shootout sequence. 7/10

Hospital (1970). I've seen four Frederick Wiseman films now, and with each new one I feel like he's an essential, underrated American genius. The trick is subtlety: a lot of movies take on social issues, but not many use his strategy, seen here, of merely observing ordinary people and letting their simple dramatic situations illustrate the pedantic points that Wiseman wants to make. It's more effective than just interviewing the same people and letting a narrator fill in the gaps. 9/10

Hopefully more to come soon.

Angels & Demons (2009)

Ron Howard seems like such a nice guy, why does he insist on making such shitty movies? So here we have another Dan Brown movie - stiff, self-important, blithely clueless on its own subject matter (church history, particle physics) at the service of some kind of weirdly self-serving rhetoric about the Catholic Church being out of touch with the modern era. It has a little more energy than its predecessor, The Da Vinci Code, in terms of people getting murdered and explosions, but not enough to make it a good movie.

Sunday I saw Drag Me to Hell, the kind of energetic, inventive, fun movie that made me fall in love with the movies in the first place and be a filmmaker (more about it in another review). Yesterday I saw Angels & Demons, the kind of numbing, stale, made-by-committee product that makes a person want to just give up. I guess it's a notch less depressing than Wolverine, because there's an added dimension of competence and craft - Salvatore Totino's cinematography is moody and sharp, and the movie works through its nonsense at a steady (if overlong) pace. But what both this movie and Wolverine have in common is that I just can't imagine that the filmakers had any passion whatsoever for what they were making. They're just such empty, by-the-numbers pieces of mechanical clockwork with all humanity stripped out of them.

Hanks and Howard are bored by the material and it shows (hey Tom Hanks: you're making, what, $20 million? $40 million? to be in this movie, if you're not having fun, maybe you could pretend?). As for the real auteur behind this material, Dan Brown, what's his deal and why do so many people love his stuff, above and beyond other modern authors of simple potboilers? I think the answer is that he's found a way to exploit many peoples' modern, Western dissatisfaction with the institutions of the Church (Roman Catholic and otherwise) combined with their longing for something spiritual to fill the gap. Neither The Da Vinci Code nor Angels & Demons is simple-minded Catholicsploitation, but both end on notes of progress, of reformation towards finding a balance with science and feminism. Too bad the movies are so incredibly stupid or they might actually impact people.

4/10

May Update

Yeesh, it's hard to keep up-to-date on this thing when I'm working 60-hour weeks. But enough excuses, here's a quick roundup of the last several things that I've seen:

Anvil: The Story of Anvil. Why the redundant title? Otherwise, it's a pretty good, if limited, picture of a couple of guys in mid-life crisis as they try to recover their glory days, basically a cross between American Movie and This Is Spinal Tap (down to the almost carbon-copy finale). I don't care much about heavy metal, but the movie is smart enough to gloss over the technicalities in order to linger on the elements that do matter, like working crappy day jobs and getting shafted by Czech promoters. I enjoyed it and it's funny and touching, I just wish it had gone a little deeper and not been quite so conventional in its storytelling arc. 7/10

Star Trek. Yes, I'm the guy (alongside Roger Ebert and Armond White) who didn't like J.J. Abrams' Star Trek. I want to say more about it separately, but for me it all comes down to Abrams' vision simply being less expansive and imaginative than what Roddenberry put into motion 45 years ago, and I thought it was frantic and pointless. On the plus side, we have good performances from most of the cast and one beautiful image (the Enterprise rising out of the clouds of Titan). 4/10

Adventureland. Sweet and funny, and richer and more complex than Superbad was. This makes me want to check out Mottola's other stuff, especially The Daytrippers, which I ignored back when it came out. My only gripe is with the finale, which seemed contrived and emotionally phony in a way that the rest of the movie hadn't been leading towards. Also, I hope Jesse Eisenberg grows into his horseface sometime soon. 8/10

Monsters vs. Aliens. Amusing, forgettable. Makes me wish that Guillermo Del Toro was directing his remake of Creature from the Black Lagoon. 6/10

Il Divo. Amazing visuals and an obviously excellent performance from Toni Servillo, playing Giulio Andreotti as a cross between Peter Bogdanovich and Nosferatu, but not being a student of post-War Italian politics, I didn't have any fucking idea what was going on in this movie. Not the movie's fault, obviously, but it was sort of like watching Oliver Stone's Nixon and only knowing that it was about a sweaty guy who had gotten into trouble about something, somewhere in politics, sometime in the '70s. To be revisited on DVD. 7/10

Tyson. Really fascinating stuff, and I like the strategy of simply structuring the film as a long, free-flowing first-person monologue, bringing us inside the head of an odd, but understandable and very human person. This film might just be one of the more avant-garde things I've seen in quite a while. And on the subjects of his domestic violence against Robin Givens and his rape conviction, Tyson gets enough rope to hang himself with. 8/10

Dark and Stormy Night. This is the newest undistributed film from Larry Blamire, the guy who made The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. It's a stilted parody of the 'old dark house' movies of the 1930s and '40s. As such it's funny and entertaining but kind of an artistic blind alley - this is the kind of clever genre rehash that everyone accuses Tarantino of making, except without the creativity. Still, if you only see one movie this year involving a guy in a gorilla suit, a psychic in a turban, and a freak with two heads, this is the one. 6/10

More to come soon!

The International (2009)

I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Filmmakers are always looking for real-life stories to draw on for material, and liberal filmmakers are always looking for abuses of the system to make movies about that'll get their audiences riled up in rightous indignation, and liberal filmmakers who also have commercial instincts are going to look for ways to make socially relevant material digestible and entertaining. So I'm not surprised that a world-class filmmaker like Tom Tykwer would decide to make a movie about the political and social abuses of global finance, and I'm not surprised that he and his collaborators would decide to do it within the framework of a global espionage thriller. And I'm not really surprised that it resulted in a well-meaning, half-baked movie that feels like the bastard spawn of Robert Ludlum and Naomi Wolf.

It's a handsome movie, shot in and around great locations in Berlin, Milan, and New York, but it barely has a pulse; Clive Owen is on autopilot and Naomi Watts barely registers (to be fair, her character has next to nothing to do besides tag along with Owen and get yelled at by The Chief). The movie's centerpiece, a shoot-out at the Guggenheim, is fun, but even it defies logic (spoiler alert!) as Owen, trying to open the veil of secrecy around a powerful bank, tries to arrest their key assassin - and immediately the bank's henchmen launch an insane gun battle in one of the most famous museums in the world? Way to maintain a low profile, guys. And then the scene ends on a note of total confusion as Owen strolls out unscathed - I must have missed something. Of course, that's after a prominent Italian politician delivers a line something along the lines of "I'll tell you everything I know about this powerful and evil bank - but pardon me while I take a hatless ride through Dealey Plaza first."

Ultimately, The International is done in by its own self-importance, its leaden feeling of carrying the burdens of the world on its shoulders, but with no real sense of complexity or novelty, which is odd for a movie from the director of such weird, offbeat films as Run Lola Run and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. Better luck next time.

5/10

The Canterbury Tales (1972) & The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)

Two more Pasolini movies before I try and make a stab at the feces-encrusted elephant in the room, Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom.

Anybody who ever snuck a look at what Cinemax used to show late at night (do they still?) will be familiar with the style of Pasolini's The Canterbury Tales, which, alongside his The Decameron and Arabian Nights were pioneers of the softcore European skin-flick, tales of ribaldry with assorted glimpses of nudity justified by 'literary' content. Take some clueless husbands, mix one part randy wife with one part clever suitor and toss in a dash of Euro-humping. Of course, becoming a business rival to the Emmanuelle series was hardly what a gay Marxist like Pasolini had in mind when he was making these three films - after successfully annoying and frustrating audiences with difficult films like Teorema, his new goal was to make popular, sex-positive films reflecting the progressive mood of the times. And in addition, Pasolini works in some serious undercurrents to his sex romps. His version of Chaucer's Friar's Tale includes a lengthy addition in which a rich man and a poor man are both spied on in the act of sodomy and then threatened with legal exposure - the rich man bribes his way free, the poor man gets put on trial and burned alive before a crowd who munch on concession snacks. The end of the film, Chaucer's Summoner's Tale, concludes with a not-in-Chaucer episode set in Hell in which Pasolini stages a Bosch-esque panoply of demons and tortures, including the devil himself bending over and literally pooping out friars.

In spite of wonderful moments such as these, the film itself is a mixed bag, as most episodic movies are, and suffers from a rambling lack of structure. I definitely did not need to see Ninetto Davoli (one of Pasolini's favorites) doing a bizarrely anachronistic Charlie Chaplin impersonation in one episode. Also, Tom Baker is in this, and I never needed to see the naked body of '70s Dr. Who, ever.

I liked Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew more, as a pared-down, neo-realist story of the life of Jesus, and as an obvious inspiration for multiple Scorsese movies, plus of course a certain Mel Gibson film from a few years ago. But where Gibson emphasized the bloody death of Christ, Pasolini emphasizes his teachings, his sermons and revolutionary attitudes that made him the enemy of the Jewish and Roman power structures of the time, in true 20th-century Marxist manner. This isn't to say that Pasolini's version of Jesus is an unbearable hippie ideologue, but rather that he's a fierce opponent of the status quo, including the wealthy and the powerful. Jesus's trial, scourging, and crucifixion are depicted from afar, as if captured by a contemporary documentary camera.

In spite of its strengths, Pasolini's movie suffers from the same problem that I have with just about all Christ movies: Jesus never really is allowed to be an actual character in his own story, but rather just goes through the cinematic stations of the cross: Virgin Birth, check; meet John the Baptist, check; Sermon on the Mount, check; trial and crucifixion, check; resurrection, and we're out. Even though Pasolini was an atheist, he still doesn't really change the fundamental bearings of the supernatural/mythical narrative. I appreciate the gritty, down-to-earth, '60s rebelliousness that Pasolini brings to a genre which had been afflicted by Hollywood glossiness and shallow pieities for more than a decade. I wanted to like this more - I was hoping it would be the ultimate Jesus movie - but Pasolini still doesn't reinvent the Bible-movie wheel, as much as he just alters its tone and inflections, and Jesus wouldn't be an actual narrative character until Scorsese finally made his movie version (which has its own flaws) more than twenty years later.

The Canterbury Tales: 6/10
The Gospel According to St. Matthew: 7/10

Mamma Roma (1962) & Teorema (1968)

I've been watching some Pasolini movies for the last couple of weeks to gear up for watching the new Criterion DVD of Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom.

First, Mamma Roma, which is a sort of updated Neorealist parable about a middle-aged prostitute's attempt to break way from her sordid lifestyle, for the sake of her teenage son - do I need to say that it doesn't have a happy ending? What's most interesting to me about this film is the performance by the brassy, sassy Anna Magnani as Mamma Roma, the kind of virtuoso almost-over-the-top performance that only an experienced, trained actor can give. This is ironic since in most of his films, Pasolini preferred to use non-professional actors, or at least non-stars, and in his own words, Magnani took her performance beyond what he had in mind for it. And yet, probably because of the friction between Pasolini's detached direction and Magnani's empathic, expressive performance, this is the most emotionally affective Pasolini movie that I've seen.

Second, Teorema, which consists of a sort of detached analysis of a bourgeois Italian family who fall under the sway of a mysterious stranger (Terence Stamp) who has sex with everybody and seems to enthrall them before leaving abruptly, letting them flail about in his life-changing wake. This one falls into the category of 'more interesting than good'. It's a highly intellectualized, distanced film, the kind where you're not really supposed to identify with the 'characters' (who are all sociopolitical types anyway) and rather to ponder what it all means, perhaps in a bistro over tiny cups of coffee.

I didn't dislike it, and it has sporadic scenes that are as good as anything else I've seen by Pasolini - the sequences in which the family housekeeper retreats to a village and seems to become a saintly figure, capable of healing boils and levitating are especially good - but that's in large part because of the performance by Laura Betti, who we actively are drawn to and empathize with, not necessarily because of the atheistic/Marxist ideas Pasolini is playing with.

But anyway, that's one good sequence of scenes within a movie that is otherwise something of a slog.

Next up: The Canterbury Tales and Salo itself, wish me luck!

Mamma Roma: 8/10
Teorema: 5/10

Get Smart (2008) & You Don't Mess With the Zohan (2008)

First, apologies (to anyone out there who cares) about the lack of posts lately, the holidays and my impending unemployment ($&#*^ing freelance job) have kept me out of it. So here's a couple of easy ones.

Get Smart is pretty much a waste of time, with lame direction from Peter Segal (the guy who gave us Tommy Boy), a lazy screenplay, and cruddy digital cinematography. The only things it has going for it (and not coincidentally, the main reason I saw it) are the performances from its leading actors. And even though Steve Carell, Anne Hathaway, and Alan Arkin aren't given much to work with, they earn their massive paychecks, squeezing every possible chuckle and emotional moment from their desiccated material. Carell is especially good as the nerdy, quasi-idiot savant Maxwell Smart. But this is probably giving too much credit to an unnecessary TV adaptation that isn't very good anyway.

On the other hand, I enjoyed You Don't Mess With the Zohan a lot more than I expected to, more than any other Sandler comedy since Little Nicky (yes, really). One thing I especially liked about it was its good-natured open-heartedness on an insanely touchy subject - this is a movie that suggests that a Palestinian master terrorist (John Turturro) might not be such a bad guy, and can even join forces as the hero's sidekick in foiling a nefarious conspiracy plot from an alliance of American capitalists and rednecks. Think about that - a mainstream Hollywood movie with a budget of something like $90 million dollars predicated on showing that businessmen and hicks are bigger bad guys than Palestinian terrorists. It's a more extreme position than the one taken by Spielberg in Munich, which was pretty widely attacked as "defeatist" and "morally relativist" - which is to illustrate the amazing and subversive power of comedy, to slip under the radar and present ideas without people realizing.

I don't want to say that Zohan is as rich or complex as Munich because after all, it's still an Adam Sandler movie, and its ideological ideas are simplistic and based on stereotypes. Fortunately the movie doesn't really need to be rich or complex as long as it delivers as a comedy, which it does - it's often a breathtakingly silly movie, with scenes of cats being used as hacky sacks, Lainie Kazan in a sex scene, and hummus everywhere. The Israeli superspy Zohan Dvir is Sandler's best comedic creation since Canteen Boy, a Sabra goof with supreme confidence and a ridiculous accent, yet not a trace of condesension (I can't honestly say the same for Rob Schneider's brownface Arab cab driver). Sandler's movies have been open-minded and inclusive for a long time, to gays (I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry), imprisoned convicts (The Longest Yard), and weirdoes in general, and I'm glad to see him broadening his approach to include the Arab-Israeli conflict as well.

The movie's signature scene: a group of New York Jews and Arabs confront each other about politics until the conversation devolves into which First Lady they all find more sexually attractive - and if Rob Schneider hadn't already made The Hot Chick I'd suggest that Sandler just needs to cross women off his list of groups next.

Get Smart: 4/10
You Don't Mess With the Zohan: 7/10

Spartacus (1960)

So after watching Ben-Hur again I had a hankering for another epic or two.

Godard once said the best way to criticize a film was to make another film, which is pretty much what happened with Spartacus. Kirk Douglas coveted the starring role in Ben-Hur that won Charlton Heston an Oscar, so he bought the rights to Howard Fast's novel and produced it at Universal for himself to star in. After a few days of shooting he fired director Anthony Mann and hired Stanley Kubrick, on the basis of their prior collaboration on Paths of Glory. Kubrick later virtually disowned the film since he was a director-for-hire, but it was an essential step in his path towards artistic freedom and autonomy. Certain scenes, like the training sequence in the gladiator school, or the climactic battle scene, are reminiscent of later Kubrick imagery in Full Metal Jacket or Barry Lyndon.

Compared to Ben-Hur or The Ten Commandments, the direction in Spartacus is substantially more modern, with a greater emphasis on fluid camerawork, long takes, and location shooting. There's also a refreshing dash of violence, with a shot in a battle scene of Douglas chopping a guy's arm off with a single slice of his mighty sword. The script, by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, is better too - more complex and literate, with more interesting dialogue. And it's hard to go wrong with a cast that includes Charles Laughton, Laurence Olivier, and Peter Ustinov.

Where the movie doesn't hold up as well, ironically, is in Spartacus's personal relationships. The scenes between Kirk Douglas and Jean Simmons as his love interest are as turgid and forced as any other Biblical epic. And can someone tell me why Tony Curtis is in this movie? For someone who was a big star at the time, he's given virtually nothing to do except participate in Olivier's "Snails and Oysters" speech and battle Spartacus to death at the end of the movie. What should be a heartbreaking scene between two comrades pitted against each other is robbed of its power - give this scene to the character played by John Ireland, who fought alongside Spartacus from the very beginning, and you'd have something - but for Spartacus to battle the singer of songs? And while Kubrick does bring a dash of fresh air to his direction, you can also tell that he's bored in big chunks of the movie. I can just see him rolling his eyes in any scene involving Universal contract hunk John Gavin as the least charismatic Julius Caesar in cinema history.

All of the major epics of this period focus on the same basic conflict - the individual vs. the power of the state, be it the Roman Empire or Egypt of the Pharoahs. Spartacus takes this conflict and provides a protagonist who doesn't just give in to the whims of fate or a deity, but takes revolutionary action into his own hands; and yet, even then his fate isn't truly under his own control, as Spartacus and his army remain pawns in the rivalries of the Roman power elite. As a result the film has a specifically mid-20th-century leftist feel to it, but one that still resonates today.

8/10

Standard Operating Procedure (2008)

This is almost totally gone from Los Angeles, so I'm glad I saw it in time, although it's not exactly the kind of film you walk out of smiling.

Before getting to the substance of the film itself, I want to say a little something in appreciation of Errol Morris: his storytelling instincts, his mastery of editing, his interviewing skills, they're all just remarkable and it's a pleasure, independent of the content of the movie itself, to see a film artist working at the top of his game.

As for the film itself, it's probably his best in a decade or so, possibly because I think Morris does better when he can juxtapose multiple storylines and narratives in a single movie, as here and as in The Thin Blue Line or Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, than when he's dealing with a single character, as in Mr. Death or The Fog of War. Morris's perspective is always broad and expansive, and focussing on a single character's flaws, even through their own voice, hasn't been as interesting as seeing the clash of individual perspectives, the contingent, complicated, messy truths that have been the underlying theme of Morris's career.

Standard Operating Procedure is the story of the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in central Iraq, where thousands of photos were taken of the military guards demeaning, humiliating, and mentally abusing, the Iraqi prisoners. Morris makes the point that just as there would have been no scandal without these photographs, they also limited the reach of the scandal to those American soldiers who were dumb enough to allow themselves to be captured on film; and that where there's smoke, there's fire, and that the worst atrocities must have only occurred in places where people were smart enough to not allow idiots with cameras around.

I was outraged by the Abu Ghraib situation when it came to light, and I'm sure Morris was as well, but he's smart enough to know that these kind of events don't come out of nowhere, but rather emerge from a set of conditions, rules, culture: put a bunch of young and inexperienced soldiers in a place where they basically have absolute power over a demonized and diminished enemy, allow their superiors to turn a blind eye, add in the stress of long hours and the occasional mortar attack from outside, and the results were pretty much inevitable. What Morris does is make clear that, while the actions of the soldiers were reprehensible, that it's the system that's ultimately to blame. Morris also makes a point of the inherent amorality of human beings: stick a person in a culture where brutality is the norm, and they'll settle into it, even if beforehand and after the fact they understand what they did wrong.

The movie's biggest shock, for me at least, isn't the elaboration of the human pyramids or genital-pointing, but the determination of which prisoner treatments were illegal and which were acceptable: the revelation that the prisoner who had wires wrapped around his fingers and was forced to stand on a box, beyond a puddle of water, for countless hours out of fear of electrocution, we are told, is 'standard operating procedure' to 'soften up' a prisoner for purposes of interrogation. Amazing, but true.

All this is structured by Morris in a series of fascinating interviews, where the participants are allowed plenty of rope to hang themselves (one former guard whose military career was ruined for witnessing abuses and not reporting them out of loyalty to his fellow soldiers laments, "I guess that's what you get for being a nice guy") and the occasional reenactment, shot in a stylized, distanced, indirect manner by master cinematographer Robert Richardson, plus an uncharacteristically elegant score by Danny Elfman.

I haven't seen a lot of the many Iraq War documentaries of the last few years, but this is now my favorite thanks to Morris's thoughtful perspective and his lack of interest in making it a simplistic anti-administration screed. It's the kind of film that actually has meaning above and beyond its immediate moment.

8/10

Speed Racer (2008)

I have mixed feelings about this one. The intellectual, avant-garde, postmodern side of me loves the idea of an utterly mind-blowing 4-D freakout made of equal parts Picasso, Super Mario Kart, and Pixie Stix, a liberating and over-the-top visual experience.

The problem that I have with the movie is that, too often, the Wachowski Brothers weigh down the effervescence of their film with too much narrative (135 minutes is just too long) and obnoxious sloganeering about the evils of capitalism - or rather, capitalists in the form of Roger Allam's sneering bully Royalton. I have no problem with a movie that encourages kids to follow their dreams and families to support one another against the harsh outside world, but I really think it takes a lighter touch than the Wachowskis show here to work effectively. For me, the movie's worst element is that of the bad guy, Royalton. The Wachowskis can't just let him be the cackling villain in the corner, they demand that we fear and loathe him, and the heavyhandedness and one-sidedness rubs me the wrong way. The monumental, messianic transcendence that Speed reaches in the movie's final race is a little bit much for me, too, especially when it's coupled by huge, adoring crowds applauding our hero. I usually don't care for Anthony Lane's 'criticism' in the New Yorker, but when he calls the movie's climax 'pop fascism' I have to admit he has a nugget of a point - it feels forced, heavy, manipulative, when it should feel breezy and cathartic.

So basically, my problem with this candy-coated live-action cartoon is that it takes itself too seriously. Who woulda thunk?

Now I don't want to leave the impression that I disliked the movie, merely that I think the Wachowskis are better at visuals than they are at character and narrative, and that they seem to be a little too full of Joseph Campbell pretensions (which basically spoiled the Matrix sequels for me). But the races, even when they're inconsequential, are fun, the visuals are spectacular, Michael Giacchino's score is excellent, and the comic relief from Speed's little brother Spritle (Paulie Litt, giving the movie's best performance) and the family chimp Chim-Chim is perfect. I wish the movie had a little bit more of their anarchy amidst all the rest of the intricate designs.

6/10

Tribulation 99 (1992)

After watching Joe Dante's The Movie Orgy it put me in the mood to finally watch my DVD of Craig Baldwin's found-footage film Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America. Made from a huge number of clips from 1950s monster movies and newsreel footage, the movie operates as a crackpot underground 'documentary' of the conflict between the American government and the alien Quetzals, refugees from an alien planet come to Earth (hiding underground, flying spacecraft in and out of a hole at the South Pole) to secretly conquer the planet, illustrated using clips from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Kennedy assassination, and so on.

That's a fun enough premise for a movie, but Baldwin's real point is to offer a subtle, subversive history lesson about American military and political involvement in Latin America since the end of World War II, told in the manner of a sarcastic, almost Eisensteinian montage; the CIA overthrow of President Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954 is justified by his being an alien doppelganger, accompanied by a clip from It Came from Outer Space with a man turning into a one-eyed monster and a Mothra sound effect to heighten the effect. Fidel Castro's survival in the face of multiple assassination plots is explained by his being a super-powered android ("You can't kill something that isn't alive!" the narrator whispers conspiratorially), matched with footage of a bearded man from some Biblical epic and the Mission: Impossible theme song.

The effect of the movie is to turn the meaning of the movie clips it presents inside-out. Most of the monsters seen in clips from movies like Black Scorpion or The Deadly Mantis were originally made to express and capitalize on American Cold War fears, nuclear mass destruction and paranoia of enemies barely understood. By matching these clips with their real-life counterparts, Baldwin manages to express and subvert American mainstream thoughts and feelings from this era. Discussing the left-wing President of Grenada, Maurice Bishop, and matching him with footage from Blacula, leading into the 1983 U.S. invasion, makes a simple point about how our politicians and media manage to frighten us into agreement and complicity in their various power games.

Once you get past the basic joke of the movie, its pleasure lies in absorbing the complex montages and clashes of iconography, and it resembles what would probably go on in Oliver Stone's head if he was less interested in mainstream filmmaking. It's a thoroughly one-sided film, meant to channel Craig Baldwin's dissent in a particularly entertaining, subversive manner that a more straight-forward film couldn't manage.

Also on this DVD are two earlier, shorter films: Wild Gunman, a mash-up of Marlboro ads and arcade games, and RocketKitKongoKit, a similar 'alternate history' of neo-colonialism in central Africa that doesn't have the same oomph as Tribulation 99 but ends on a more ominous note.

8/10

The Movie Orgy (1968-ish)

I've been wrapped up in work lately so I didn't have a chance to write about the grand finale of the Joe Dante series at the New Beverly last week, his 1968 4-1/2 hour program The Movie Orgy, which is nothing less than a deep warm bath in cinephilia. Dennis Cozzalio interviewed Dante and got the best description of how The Movie Orgy came to be. He also goes into great detail about the structure and workings of the 'film'. For me, it was nothing less than pure pleasure, enlightened escapism. I don't think there's any realm of moviedom that I have more fondness for than the sci-fi and horror movies of the 1950s and early '60s, the era of atomic mutants and killer robots in cardboard suits, of Ray Harryhausen and Edward D. Wood Jr., and Dante's film was a near-perfect gratification of that part of my mindbrain. The most satisfying aspect of the whole experience is the occasional recurrence of clips from the 1959 film Speed Crazy, in which a James Dean-ish young rebel, who also happens to be something of a psychopath, constantly repeats the phrase "Don't crowd me, man" as his rallying cry against '50s conformity. Spread out over the course of the film with expert timing, Dante turns schlocky screenwriting and acting into comedy perfection.

At the same time, the whole thing isn't just an exercise in nostalgia (or for people like me, fake nostalgia, since I'm a full generation out of touch) because of Dante's satiric, distanced perspective on the more ridiculous aspects of the clips presented. For every warm embrace of a clip from The Lone Ranger or Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, there's the bitter mockery of a clip from Andy's Gang, an early kids' show starring the raspy-voiced Andy Devine featuring the Lord's Prayer accompanied by the torturous, hallucinatory appearance of a cat and hamster playing a keyboard and drums; or Nixon's "Checkers" speech, bitter fruit to the 1968 generation indeed. The film gives us the kind of experience that I find really valuable: it celebrates both the best and the worst of the Baby Boomer era, giving us the schlock and the cultural detritus and fully embracing it, not with condesenscion when regarding the more problematic aspects of war, racism, sexism, and stupidity, but merely with a sort of detached amazement - this is who we were, and who we are, when showing something like a clip from Dick Clark's American Bandstand - the initial response is to laugh at these geeky white teens, awkwardly hurling their bodies across the dance floor, but Dante holds long enough for us to really look at these youngsters, today at retirement age, and think about the distance of time. I guess Joe Dante probably wasn't intending for someone to have these thoughts, forty years ago when he started putting his clips together, but I guess he didn't need to - when you've got 4-1/2 hours of footage, it's easy to find elements that speak to you.