1/10/09: Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)

GRAB BAG
Completely plotless and largely pointless, Happy-Go-Lucky is British director Mike Leigh's aimable piffle all about Poppy (Sally Hawkins), an incorrigibly upbeat free spirit who can't take anything or anybody— least of all herself—very seriously. Forever joking and laughing at life's minutiae, Poppy parties with her female friends, jumps on a trampoline, prowls through a bookstore and rarely thinks anything she doesn't say. If the film is about anything, it's Poppy's conflicting role as a teacher (of primary school) versus her role as a student (of Flamenco dancing and driving school), and how her endless effervescence and endearing jokiness ultimately attract the best—and worst—in the people around her. After her bicycle is stolen at the beginning of the film, an incident she naturally laughs off, Poppy pays a grouchy driving instructor to teach her the rules of the road; the scenes detailing their clash of personalities become the glue that holds the film together. Beyond that, we spend a lot of time with her as she goes to a chiropractor, visits her pregnant sister, sleeps with a handsome social worker, and even attempts to mind-meld with a mentally disturbed homeless man. The film urges us, Patch Adams style, to live life to the fullest, and Poppy's cheerful refusal to be serious for three seconds is designed to win our hearts, and it mostly succeeds. (The movie should be called Poppyanna.) She's the sort of girl you wish you knew, but didn't necessarily have to spend two consecutive hours with; in Happy-Go-Lucky, she's onscreen virtually every single second. Whether you flip for Poppy or not, Hawkins does give a star-making performance. With Stanley Townsend and Eddie Marsan. Rating: 3/5.

1/9/09: House of Games (1987)

GRAB BAG
I came to House of Games with heightened expectations. I like con-man movies, and I admire the work of David Mamet (this was his directorial debut, which he also co-wrote). It's a decent idea, involving bestselling psychoanalyst Lindsay Crouse and her interactions with con man Joe Mantegna. The film has a reputation of excellence, so I was amazed to find that it is loaded with terrible acting, chiefly by Crouse, who looks all the world like David Bowie and reads her lines like she just memorized them five minutes before Mamet yelled "action." Once you know that the theme is about confidence games, it isn't awfully difficult to predict the main twist in this tale, unless, like Crouse's character, you're exceptionally stupid. With Lindsay Crouse, Joe Mantegna, Mike Nussbaum and J.T. Walsh. Rating: 2/5.

1/8/09: In the Spirit (1990)

GRAB BAG
When I embarked on this cinematic odyssey, I never stopped to consider that some of the films I shoved into the ol' DVD player might just be...unwatchable. Such was the case with In the Spirit, a mess of a comedy starring some of my very favorite performers. Unfortunately, they are saddled with a lousy script and extremely awkward direction (by Sandra Seacat—this was her first and, understandably, last picture). I was unable to sit through the entire movie, despite the presence of the usually hilarious Peter Falk and Elaine May. Truth be told, I did laugh out loud twice, both times at Marlo Thomas, who—along with the rest of the capable cast—deserved much better than this "quirky" comedy. With Elaine May, Peter Falk, Jeannie Berlin, Marlo Thomas and Melanie Griffith. Rating: 1/5.

1/7/09: Force of Evil (1977)

GRAB BAG
A good deal of the nearly 400 DVDs in my unseen collection are TV movies from the 1970s. These were the films I grew up watching, and I get a perverse, nostalgic kick watching them 30 years later. Today's choice was random, although I did deliberately choose a TV thriller from that decade. Force of Evil contains all of the elements I look for in a movie of this type: revenge, murder, suspense and people forced to take the law into their own hands. (The archetype of this genre is 1973's irresistible Outrage, starring Robert Culp as a guy whose family is being terrorized by no-good punks.)

Force of Evil is about Yale Carrington (Lloyd Bridges), a doctor who's visited by a hospital employee he helped send to jail years before on a rape and murder rap. Now on parole, the sinister Teddy Jakes is back to get revenge against the doctor, his wife and pretty daughter, played by former Brady Bunch star Eve Plumb. Very Bad Things start to happen when Jakes is around, but as always, the law's hands are tied because there's no hard evidence against him. The movie is basically a made-for-TV carbon copy of Cape Fear—it even cribs the earlier movie's famous houseboat climax.

William Watson, a hulking badass with a grotesque grin and an evil glint in his eye, is perfectly cast as the villain, but the movie goes off the rails in its third act when things go from implausible to ridiculous. Still, it was a fun ride until the last 15 minutes. With Lloyd Bridges, William Watson, Pat Crowley, John Anderson and Eve Plumb. Rating: 3/5.

1/6/09: Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

GRAB BAG
I had been under the impression that this was an indie film made on the cheap in Mumbai, and that it had really connected with movie audiences and critics alike. I was expecting kind of a feel-good type of feature, but nothing could have prepared me for how truly gruesome, nauseating, violent and profoundly distasteful much of the first two-thirds of this movie is. It's a particular quirk of mine to be turned off by depictions of children in peril, and more than half of Slumdog focuses on chidren living amid poverty, filth, garbage, crime and such abhorrent conditions that I found myself repeatedly having to look away from the screen. (In one scene, the child protagonist is compelled to wade through a giant pile of human waste; another shows us how another boy is deliberately blinded to make him a profitable beggar. And that's just for starters.) I suppose Slumdog's portrayal of kids living in poverty is an accurate one, but the sheer gruesomeness of it was relentlessly repulsive to both me and Joan, my faithful movie companion. The adults in the movie don't fare much better; a young woman's face is slashed with a razor, a teenage boy is repeatedly tortured, first by being nearly drowned, then electrocuted. There are also numerous killings by handgun, including one murder carried out by a child. The film is terribly potent and brutal.

Having said all that, the final third of the movie lightens up just long enough for a satisfying payoff—a surprisingly corny Hollywood ending. (Thank God; I'd have felt cheated without it.) Despite being occasionally difficult to watch, the film is stylistically brilliant and deserves its universally great reviews, thanks in no small part to the first-rate direction, excellent performances and extraordinary script. My review does not reflect the quality of the movie—just my excessive squeamishness. With Dev Patel, Anil Kapoor and Freida Pinto, a real standout as the immensely beautiful grownup Latika. Rating: 2/5.

1/5/09: Frost/Nixon (2008)

GRAB BAG
Peter Morgan adapted the screenplay from his own stage play. It's a (very) slightly flctionalized dramatization of the real-life interviews disgraced President Richard Nixon did back in the summer of '77 with British TV personality David Frost. It was apparently Nixon's plan to snare an easy $600 grand by doing the equivalent of a "puff piece" interview with Frost—who surprised everybody by being much better informed and researched than Nixon could have guessed. It's a battle of wits as Frost attempts to trick the Trickster into admitting his guilt in the Watergate affair; the film shambles along at its own pace until the electrifying third act, where Frost finally confronts Nixon about Watergate. Certain dramatic licenses were obviously taken (the real interviews did not climax with Watergate, and Nixon's movie "confession" is wildly blown out of proportion), but it's still a fascinating—if fictionalized—account of the meeting of two very interesting public figures. With Michael Sheen as Frost and Frank Langella as the very sweaty ex-POTUS. Rating: 3/5.

1/4/09: Endless Night (1972)

GEORGE SANDERS WEEK
And we close out George Sanders Week with this Agatha Christie adaptation, which also stars one of my favorite actresses, Hayley Mills. Sanders had aged quite noticably in the 11 years since yesterday's selection, 1961's Five Golden Hours. This was one of his last films, released the same year he committed suicide by swallowing several bottles' worth of barbituates; he was 65.

Endless Night surprised me by reuniting Mills with Hywel Bennett, the young co-stars of The Family Way, one of my all-time favorite films. This is a Hitchcockian chiller with a Gothic-type setting, about two lovers moving in to a spectacular mansion they've built on land supposedly cursed by gypsies. There's something menacing and sinister in the air, and the film contained a fairly surprising twist I didn't see coming, which was a nice surprise. Mills struggles with an American accent, and her singing voice is obviously dubbed in a scene where she accompanies herself on piano (I own her 1961 single "Let's Get Together," so I know her real singing voice pretty well). The movie lacks Hitchcock's directorial style and finesse, but the creepy Moog-highlighted musical score helps to heighten the suspense. With Hayley Mills, Hywel Bennett, Britt Ekland and George Sanders. Rating: 3/5.

1/3/09: Five Golden Hours (1961)

GEORGE SANDERS WEEK
George Sanders Week continues with this con-man comedy cut from the same cloth as David Niven's Bedtime Story (later remade as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels). 1950s TV star Ernie Kovacs stars as a professional pall-bearer in Rome who tries to bilk various widows out of money, and hilarity ensues. As The New York Times pointed out in their review, it's the sort of movie Alec Guinness made many times; the all-British cast (except for Kovacs, an American) do a very good job in this sometimes dark comedy. Cyd Charisse—whom I've never before seen in a movie—is extremely charming and beautiful as the widow Kovacs ill-advisedly falls in love with. Sanders himself doesn't show up until more than halfway through, but he's worth waiting for. This was his first movie following my beloved Village of the Damned from 1960. With Ernie Kovacs, Cyd Charisse and George Sanders. Rating: 4/5.

1/2/09: Death of a Scoundrel (1956)

GEORGE SANDERS WEEK
Two years (and about 10 movies) after starring in Witness to Murder, my selection from yesterday, George Sanders headlined this quite different crime drama. Far better acted and directed than that earlier two-dimensional story, Death of a Scoundrel recounts the life of Clementi Suborin, a Czech refugee who becomes a super-suave womanizer, stock manipulator and professional con man by unscrupulously plotting and bilking his way to astonishing wealth. (How Suborin acquires his money isn't a mystery; where he got his perfect British accent is the real puzzler.) It does the Citizen Kane trick of starting with the main character's death, and the rest of the story unfolds in flashbacks.

A variety of actors familiar to me from their later TV appearances come along for the ride, including Lily Munster, Col. Klink and George Sanders' ex-wife, Zsa Zsa Gabor, looking and sounding much more lovely than that shrew who would go on to slap a Beverly Hills cop 33 years hence. The film is a fictionalized account of real-life Wall Street wizard Serge Rubenstein, whose bribes, schemes and other illegal activities led to his own unsolved murder a year before Death of a Scoundrel came out. With George Sanders, Yvonne De Carlo, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Nancy Gates, Victor Jory, Werner Klemperer and Tom Conway (Sanders' real-life brother). Rating: 4/5.

1/1/09: Witness to Murder (1954)

GEORGE SANDERS WEEK
There was no compelling reason for me to launch my crazy project with this film noir from 1954. I don't even particularly like noirs; I'm just a big fan of its star, George Sanders, who would go on to star in my favorite movie, Village of the Damned, six years after this one. I've got four Sanders movies in my vault, and since this is a partial week, it should work out fairly nicely.

Sanders strangles a woman in his apartment, but makes the classic 1950s movie mistake of doing it with the drapes wide open, leaving neighbor Barbara Stanwyck to watch the murder in horror from across the street. Naturally, this being the ’50s, the cops don't believe her and accuse her of dreaming the whole thing. Released the same year as Rear Window, this movie has absolutely none of Hitchcock's directorial flourish—it reminded me more of TV's Dragnet (which isn't helped by the film's blatant references to it).

I found Stanwyck to be homely and somewhat difficult to look at, and the script isn't much better. Much of the drama involves Stanwyck confronting Sanders about the killing, and him denying it ("I saw you do it!" "I did no such thing"). Eventually it turns into a game of cat and mouse, with Sanders successfully framing Stanwyck to look like a nutcase. When she's hauled off to the psych ward, the story recalled 2008's The Changeling, another movie about a woman unjustly thrown into the looney bin. There's a preposterous romantic subplot involving Stanwyck and Gary Merrill as a sympathetic cop who thinks she's merely hallucinating everything, but he digs her anyway, despite her ho-hum looks and debilitating psychosis. The intrusive music soundtrack works triple time to compensate when there's very little happening on the screen. With Barbara Stanwyck, George Sanders, Gary Merrill. Rating: 2/5.

A Movie Every Day?

Most people know him as Tom Servo, a sort of robotic gumball machine who lives aboard a spaceship in the cult TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000. In real life, however, he is Kevin Murphy, an extremely funny comedian who, as part of the MST3K cast, has provided me with enough grins and guffaws to last a lifetime.

Yet many fans of MST3K may be unaware that Murphy is the author of a book entitled A Year at the Movies: One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey, in he chronicles 12 months living up to an extraordinary goal. "Beginning tomorrow, January 1, 2001, I, Kevin Murphy, promise to go to a theater and watch a movie every single day, for an entire year," he wrote. And he did it. The tome is less a book of movie reviews than a travelogue—Murphy traveled to all sorts of places, from local drive-ins to Cannes, France, to see movies.

As 2009 quickly approaches (it's in less than 2 hours, by my clock), Murphy has provided the inspiration for me to attempt something similar, albeit slightly less ambitious. I'm going to try to watch a movie a day for a year, but I'm going to drag my ass to the theater every day. I have, in my private collection, nearly 400 movies on DVD that I've never seen. The problem is, I never watch them. I've been squirreling them away, not for the winter but for my old age. Well, I guess that time has finally come. Time to bust open the floodgates and sample some of the films I've been collecting. It's a pretty interesting batch of movies...classics (Born Yesterday), musicals (Funny Girl), heavy dramas (The Pawnbroker), science fiction (I, Robot), light comedies (I'll Take Sweden), westerns (Joe Kidd), innumerable 1970s TV movies (Family Flight), and schlock (Schlock).

In fact, after careful perusal of my list of unseen DVDs, it occurs to me that to keep things interesting, I can schedule "theme weeks" for myself. I was able to organize most of the movies into categories such as:

BRITISH WEEK

Three Men in a Boat

The Railway Children

Skallagrigg

The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer

The Witches

The Wrong Box

Accident

1970s WEEK

The Seven-Percent Solution

The Eiger Sanction

The Getaway

Pretty Baby

Hearts of the West

Play it as it Lays

The Last of Sheila

SUSPENSE FLICKS WITH ONE-WORD TITLES WEEK

Revenge

Payback

Breakdown

Impulse

Derailed

Shattered

Speed

ASIAN CHARACTERS WEEK

Snow Falling on Cedars

Long Life, Happiness & Prosperity

The Joy Luck Club

Double Happiness

Eat Drink Man Woman

The Last Emperor

Xiu Xiu

Other theme weeks I'm planning will include the following categories: science fiction, musicals, foreign language, remakes, cult/trash, historical dramas, movies based on plays, comedy, horror, thrillers, obscurities, westerns, and movies featuring some of my favorite performers: Woody Allen, Walter Matthau, Dustin Hoffman, Barbara Eden, George Sanders, and the Marx Brothers. In addition, I'll do a week of the seven movies I most want to see in my vast collection, as well as one week each highlighting the selected favorites of my dear friends Merf and Connie.

Before I even embark on my own odyssey, I know in my heart it is doomed to failure. There's just no way I can watch a movie every single day, especially since I already watch a bunch of TV shows (including Desperate Housewives, Lost, Scrubs, The Office, Special Victims Unit, Without a Trace, 30 Rock and Monk). So I'm going to give myself a little slack—I'm going to try to see an average of one movie a day. If I skip a day, I've got to watch two the following day. Or, if I see two in one day, I get the following day off.

Oh. And if I see a movie in an actual theater, sorry, but that's going to have to count as my having seen a movie.

By the end of 2009, I will have made a huge dent in my collection. And although I am constantly adding more titles, the ones I already have represent most of the films I most want to see. I can't help but wonder how many I will actually enjoy. Each film will be graded on a 1-5 scale. At the end of the year, I'll tally the results and work out the average of all 365 movies; I'll predict the average will be 3.2.

The friends I've discussed my plan with agree that I lack the drive, the determination, the sheer time such an undertaking will require. I can't say I disagree with them, but I'm keen to see how long I can go. A week? A month? We shall see...

Beginning tomorrow, January 1, 2009, I, Brett Bayne, promise to sit at home on my lazy ass and watch a movie every single day, for an entire year.

90-Second Song

Getting ready for Mike Myers

English has many peculiarities, but one that has always fascinated me is how the phrase "get ready" has been rendered so meaningless.

Example: a TV commercial for the new Mike Myers comedy The Love Guru just implored me to "Get ready for the comedy event of the summer!" Basically, what the studio is saying is, "A new Mike Myers film opening soon." The rest is just a rather lame attempt to get me psyched. For it is as matter of principle that one of the ways I "get ready" for something like this is to glean the consensus of film critics, who have lambasted this alleged comedy as Myers' weakest effort so far, with a dismal Tomatometer rating of 16 percent. And yet, I feel certain that this was not the way Paramount Studios is expecting any filmgoer to "get ready" for this particular cinematic debut.

This begs the question: how should one get ready for something like this? Obviously we should get showered and dressed, make sure we have $25 to buy popcorn and soda, fill the car with gasoline and so on. But these things go without saying, no? Is there some other way I should be preparing myself for The Love Guru, other than finding a gas mask to wear during the screening?

Congratulations!

Their/There

Erasing the Past

Earlier this month, I was laid off from my job of 12 years.

As I make the transition from full-time magazine editor to unemployed magazine editor, one of my self-imposed tasks has been removing the company decal from my car, where it has been proudly emblazoned for as long as I've owned the car.

But how do you remove a decal stuck to your car window? To find the answer, I went to the experts at AFCA (alt.fan.cecil-adams), the newsgroup I often turn to for "the Straight Dope" on practically any subject. Using the resources they suggested (special thanks to Groo, Veronique, Bill and John), I made it my project for the evening. Here's how it went.

The tools: canvas work gloves ($2.59), razor blades ($3.79), Goo Gone spray ($4.99), potato salad reward snack ($0.99, not pictured). Total cost: $13ish.



Here's the "before" photo of the decal in all its taunting mockery:



Turns out I probably didn't need the work gloves, but I wore them anyway. After spraying the Goo Gone on the decal, I scraped off the letters, one by one:



The job was completed in under two minutes. Here's what was removed:



And, finally, the "after" photo:



These are, of course, merely baby steps in the transition to something bigger and better. Thanks again to those at AFCA who helped me.

Fun With Non-Restrictive Clauses

Heather Johnston, a bank robber known as the "Barbie Bandit," recently entered a guilty plea. In a tearful news conference, the 19-year-old hooligan gave this shout-out to her family and friends:

"If I've embarrassed you or hurt you, which I know I have, then I'm sorry."

Post Mortem

Recently an acquaintance of mine died—really a friend of a friend—and in the grieving process that followed among those who knew her, there was a sudden urgency to fulfill any desires the dead woman had during her life. Did she want to be cremated? Would she have wanted certain friends to attend the funeral? Indeed, would she have wanted a funeral at all? Inevitably, echoes of this game of retroactive wish-fullfillment cascaded back to me. What would I want to happen after I died? It was a curious question. Why should I care now what happens after I die? It won’t make a lick of difference to me one way or the other, for the elementary reason that I will cease to exist. Obviously, when I expire, it is to be hoped that those I loved in life will not have to grieve or suffer too greatly, and that those I resent or hate will spiral into a hopeless cycle of longing, shame and regret. Other than that, who really gives a baboon's bullwinkle?
But let's return to this idea of fulfilling the wishes of a dead person. Two things strike me. The first is that you don't technically have to do anything, because the dead person will never know. Bury him in a Glad bag! Throw a big party and invite all his enemies! There will be no repercussions, unless you're one of those unfortunate people who believe that ghosts can move things, such as a lit candle closer to the curtains.
The second observation is that this process has no real connection to the dead person anyway, but for the grieving survivors, who will somehow feel better knowing that “he would have wanted it that way.” The rush to revise things in life for a corpse must be one life’s most peculiar follies. If you love someone, the time to grant wishes and fulfill dreams for a loved one is in the present, when he exists in more than just your memories. So don't bury my favorite books with me in my grave—go order me stuff from my Amazon Wish List right now.

Take a Stand!

Lately I find myself becoming concerned that people are simply too wishy-washy. I hate that. I wish they would take a firm stand on something. Or whatever, I don't really care.

Punishment & Crime

Practically everywhere you go in this country, it's the same thing: you pay first, then you get to enjoy what you bought. The only exceptions are restaurants and prisons.

If the maximum penalty for assault and battery is two years in the cooler, why do I have to beat the guy up first? Maybe I want to get the punishment out of the way before I have my fun. Can't I simply report to the state pen, do my two years, and then mercilessly beat the hell out of the chump of my choice after I get out? I've already taken care of my debt to society—I merely paid in advance.