We find ourselves drastically out of our depth of understanding in the backwater world of methamphetamine cookers in the rural Ozark mountains. The lead character - portrayed masterfully by Jennifer Lawrence - finds herself caring for two younger siblings and a catatonic mother with her father in the wind after an arrest for cooking meth. She finds that the family home and timber land will be forgeit if her father doesn't show for his trial.
The plot begins as a simple enough search by Ree, Lawrence's character, for her father gone missing. In the course of her search, we see the world of the Ozark meth trade - full of distrust, family, trickle-thin blood relations, unspoken threats, and absolute brutality when necessary. Ree had been backed into a corner by poverty, her mother's helplessness, and her father's abandonment, and she finds herself taking the absolute last chances possible, risking her own life to protect her ability to save her siblings.
The film puts us in Ree's place with an almost wordless simplicity, letting us see the abject poverty in which Ree and her community members live and the rarely spoken rules - don't speak to the sheriff, keep your knowledge to yourself, back off when told - by which they survive. Every actor - two of whom are Deadwood alums - is note perfect, and many were apparently found as the film was shot on location.
I worried, initially, that I was in for a hopeless ride, and while there certainly were moments of desperation, the film actually is surprisingly hopeful as Ree's determination drives the action. If Jennifer Lawrence - a Louisville native, by the by - is really this good, we're seeing a star being sparked.
I remember an NPR interview with Steve Carell just around the release of Despicable Me in which the interviewer referred to the 'minions' shown in the poster.
The storyline of Despicable Me is simple enough - evil villain is past his prime, new rival is showing him up, villain adopts three moppets as part of evil plan, love ensues. There's really nothing much there of note, but the performances by the entire voice cast here turns what could be a very pedestrian movie into a total winner.
The minions are brilliantly written, animated, and voiced, as are all of the characters really. The plot is almost a red herring to the movie's real exploration of family both real - Vector and his banker father - and improvised - Gru and the moppets, Gru and the minions, Gru and Dr Nefario.
The film is a lot of fun and a nicely heartwarming tale that never wanders into saccharine territory.
By the most basic genre definition, Let Me In is a vampire movie, but it's a whole lot more than that. It's a film about alienation and connection, and as such it's a masterful exploration of what it's like to be alone as a child.
Owen, our main character, a twelve-year-old boy, is friendless and is being bullied at school. He spends most of his time alone - isolated from his classmates, his parents, his world. Into that world comes Abby, a young girl who doesn't seem to need shoes in the Albuquerque snow and who doesn't seem to have much interest in attending school or eating the Now 'n' Laters that Owen offers her.
It quickly becomes obvious just what's up with Abby (I won't tell here, but it wouldn't be much of a spoiler as you watch the film - or probably as you read my review so far) but the movie isn't about what Abby is but rather about the bond between the friendless Owen and his new neighbor, Abby. What comes as the film develops isn't puppy love or a childish crush, but it's far, far more than just friendship. As Abby and Owen's friendship/relationship grows, they find in each other someone on whom they can depend as they reveal the full nature of who they each are.
The film is a truly masterful exploration of the loneliness of childhood - the loneliness that many people feel throughout their lives - and what steps we will take once we find someone with whom we can truly connect. Along the way the filmmakers present us with all the trapping of a classic horror film but with a drastically impressive tale of friendship and love on top of it.
The are also a number of good boxing movies out there: Rocky III, Million Dollar Baby, Diggstown, The Hurricane, Ali.
Now there's one more 'good' boxing movie out there: The Fighter.
The story is, honestly, pretty pedestrian: down on his luck fighter falls a little more because of poor training/management/focus...cuts ties, gets a new girlfriend, gets some success...has to deal with the fallout when management/trainer/etc want back in.
Yeah, the boxing scenes are very well filmed. The director brought in the HBO fight film crew in to shoot all the boxing scenes. The performances by Amy Adams, Melissa Leo, and all the two leads' sisters are well captured, probably the most impressive female performances in any boxing movie that I can remember.
Walhburg's performance isn't all that special. He effectively plays Mark Wahlburg here but an admittedly really ripped Mark Wahlburg.
The real heavy lifting here comes from Christian Bale as Dicky Ware, Wahlburg's screw-up brother, a big deal in their hometown of Lowell, MA. Bale makes his typical transformation into the character, letting Dicky inhabit him enough that - according to the dvd extras, anyway - family members got Dicky and Bale mixed up from a distance.
I don't see how this was nominated for best picture, but Bale's performance is worth a watching.
Give it a try.
Sigh No More by Mumford & Sons - I have to apologize to GRob and others who recommended that I check out Mumford & Sons. I didn't listen to your advice and clearly should have.
I was shocked just now to read in the wildly negative Pitchfork review that the band is a quartet of West Londoners. I would have absolutely sworn that the band had hailed from North Carolina, long steeped in the twang of the Avett Brothers but filtering that music through the spirit of Vampire Weekend.
Loving the album...loving it...thanks to my student aide for giving me a copy to listen to.
There have been an awful lot of absolute atrocious comics to come across my library account of late - Hawkman: Endless Flight, Astonishing X-Men: Exogenetic, Superman: Last Stand of New Krypton (vol 1 & 2), and so many more. I'm not going to waste your time or mine on the awful ones. I'll only be mentioning the
Luckily, this collection has a nice hook to it as it opens with Batman dragging the Joker into the police station. From there The Joker causes mayhem with the police officers booking and transporting him, the judge trying him (is that the right verb for a judge adjudicating a trial?), and the psychologist evaluating him, eventually pushing one of the officers over the edge into blaming and trying to kill Batman for bringing this destructive force of nature into the officer's life.
It's, admittedly, a foolish premise, but it's one that works and that paints the joker as an agent of chaos but one who is more jovial than the understandably compared-to Heath Ledger interpretation of the character. This is a fun volume.
My guess is that it's nothing that'll change the history of Batman or the Joker, but it's a fun story. I am kind of curious as to how busy Batman's first year was considering this is the umpeenth 'first encounter' story between Batman and the Joker.
This volume contains each of those two feelings, and in the end, they're telling the same tale. The first tale shows the men of the Empire State Building, an almost entirely self-contained cult of former security guards/officers from the pre-DMZ days. We follow one of the men as he is inch by inch turned into a suicide bomber, as his titular heart and mind is manipulated with classic pushes and pulls of his superior. We don't know just where the tale is going until the very end, and even then the ending isn't revealed until the last possible panel. It's an impressively effective story that shows how rich a world Wood has created, rich enough that he can spend a few issues without ever showing where our protagonist, Matty Roth, even once.
When, in the second tale, we return to Roth's tale and find him still deep in the loving arms of the new Delgado administration. He is the spokesman and not-so-reluctant leader of secret killing squads for the Delgado administration, something that Roth would never have dreamed of a few volumes ago, something that happened so slowly, in such tiny incremental steps that the readers are left wondering whether Roth has any idea how he got to this position.
Throughout the course of Roth's Hearts and Minds tale, the tension throughout the DMZ get ratcheted up and up as the Delgado administration reveals to the world that they are in control of a fully-armed nuclear device and will set it off if either side - the Free States or the United States - steps into the DMZ in an action of hostility. This raises the stakes and seems certain to draw one of th sides into the DMZ, leaving the Delgado administration either in the position of martyr or trap-setter.
As this volume ends, we still aren't sure which Delgado is, but we do know that Matty Roth's predicament looks so very much like that of the former officer-turned suicide bomber that we can be nothing but impressed with Wood's masterful storytelling.
DMZ's an automatic read, and this volume does nothing to change that.
Shut up, I dug the television series and was admittedly a little sad when it flipped from the WB (which I got on my tv at the time) to UPN (which I didn't). Because of the network change, I didn't - and largely don't - have any real ideas as to what the heck happened in the last two seasons of the television show.
All this made my first few issues of Buffy season eight (a comic-book continuation of the television series that ended after seven seasons) a little disjointed. All the sudden Xander had an eye patch, Buffy was leading a world-wide army of slayers, Giles was nowhere to be found, the Watchers had been decimated, and Dawn turned into a giant. This isn't a series that gives you a nice tidy recap even though it's been five years since the last episode of season seven was broadcast.
These issues are written the same way that a single television series of Buffy would have been even though they're expanded to forty issues (with season nine in the planning stages and set to begin in a few months). We get a large-format story arc in which a Big Bad (whose identity has yet to be revealed in the volumes that I've been able to procure but who is easily revealed on Wikipedia, of course) has a plot to destroy Buffy and her army of slayers. In the course of the season, most every character from the show appears in one form or another, even bringing back Oz who had left the show early in the series's run.
Because of the extended format of the comics rather than the twenty-or-so television episodes in a season, the writers (mostly Joss Whedon with some help) have a chance to explore the relationships among the reconstituted Scoobies and to include a number of world-spanning stories that would have been cost prohibitive on a television series. Whedon seems to be having a lot of fun being able to throw in thousands of Slayers and to bring in giants, Hindu gods, time travel, flight scenes for Willow and Buffy, flying submarines, and the kitchen sink, too.
This is a fun read, and Whedon is doing the original series's legacy proud.
White People by Handsome Boy Modeling School - So...How's Your Girl was an entertaining lark by Handsome Boy Modeling School (Dan the Automator and Prince Paul's light-hearted collaboration), and like so many second albums the ability to recapture the energy and fun of the first seems to have escaped the performers.
Where So... was fun and entertaining, using clips from The Chris Elliott Show as both their inspiration and their bumpers between songs. Here they replace that with skits recorded specifically for this album by Tim Meadows in the vein of The Ladies' Man, and they aren't funny.
The musical tracks see Paul & Dan bringing in more guests, more people to fill out the tracks in a manner reminiscent of The Beatles bringing in Billy Paul so that everyone would be on their best behavior. Luckily - as they did with Billy Paul - things kind of worked with the guests. The RZA in particular adds a nice sense of levity to the proceedings here.
It's not a great album, and it's far lesser than So...
Seems we were lucky that Paul and Dan went their separate ways after this one.
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