Control Room: 2004, dir. Jehane Noujaim. Seen at Paramount (Oct. 10).
I said I was getting tired of political documentaries, but we had Paramount movie passes to burn and I had no desire to see Winged Migration. I thought it would be Good For Me to see this profile of Al Jazeera, the Arab news network, and its coverage of the war in Iraq in 2003.
I did not expect to find the movie as compelling as it was. No voiceover, which was a nice change of pace. No blatant propaganda pushed in my face. No grandstanding. No, well, no Michael Moore or even Errol Morris.
Author: jette
The Front (1976)
The Front: 1976, dir. Martin Ritt. Seen on DVD (Oct. 7).
I have been wanting to see this movie since I read about it in high school or college, and I finally rented the DVD. My boyfriend wasn’t planning to watch it with me—he thought it was a Woody Allen movie—until I told him it was about blacklisted writers in the 1950s and he realized this was a movie he’d heard about before and wanted to see. The writer (Walter Bernstein), director (Martin Ritt), and some of the actors in The Front were all blacklisted in the 1950s.
Woody Allen’s character, an apolitical restaurant cashier saddled with gambling debts, offers to be the front for a blacklisted screenwriter friend of his, so the guy can keep writing TV scripts. Next thing you know, he’s working as the front for four writers, impressing a female TV producer whom he starts dating, and becoming known as a well-known TV writer. Eventually he’s investigated as a potential Communist sympathizer, and he has to decide whether to play along or risk becoming blacklisted himself.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: 1974, dir. Tobe Hooper. Seen at Alamo downtown (Oct. 18).
I had wanted to see this movie ever since last year, when I went to an Alamo event where Joe Bob Briggs showed clips from the movies he highlighted in his book Profoundly Disturbing. Plus, it was shot near Austin, and seeing local landscapes and actors always adds an element of interest to a movie.
In retrospect, I wonder why I thought it would be fun to see a bunch of films that are considered disturbing, but at least I decided to skip the worst ones. (For example, I have absolutely no desire to see Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS. And I am still recuperating from seeing only the ear scene in Reservoir Dogs.)
I was so excited that I would get to see this movie in a theater that I forgot about the part where, well, I would get to watch a lot of blood and gore and hear a lot of screaming and tense up with suspense over who was going to die next and when and how.
Holidailies brainstorming
It’s the time of year where I start thinking about Holidailies again. Holidailies is a project I started in 2000, in which I decided I would update my Web site every day in December. A few other people decided it would be fun to do the same thing, and the project grew from there. Last year, I had a portal for Holidailies and more than 100 people participated. You can currently see last year’s portal here.
Even though I don’t have a very personal Web page anymore, and tend to write about movies more than anything, I still like the idea of Holidailies. (Besides, posting movie reviews counts for the daily entry.)
I’m currently brainstorming ideas for this year’s portal and other aspects of the project. If you participated in previous years, or if you read entries from the portal, or if you’re just an opinionated person, I’d like to hear your ideas for improving Holidailies.
Shaun of the Dead (2004)
Shaun of the Dead: 2004, dir. Edgar Wright. Seen at Alamo Village (Oct. 24).
Oh, my. Shaun of the Dead was delightful, better than I expected. It is strange to say that a movie with zombies was delightful, but then this movie is just that kind of strange.
Shaun of the Dead is the rare film that has extremely funny moments in it but also delivers an overall solid and entertaining storyline. It doesn’t let comedy get in the way of the action—there are intense, serious scenes as well as hilarious ones. I would say that Shaun of the Dead is a romantic comedy, but my boyfriend is not generally fond of romantic comedies and he liked it a lot.
movies this week: bloodless feast
It was 9:00 on Monday night when my boyfriend and I declared that we would never watch another horror movie again. Or in my case, at least not for the foreseeable future.
I was grateful to Alamo Drafthouse Downtown for programming a lot of horror movies this month that I hadn’t seen before and wanted to see. Some were part of a tribute to the recently deceased art director Robert A. Burns. They also scheduled Suspiria. And when Shawn of the Dead was released in Austin, my boyfriend and I thought we should watch some George A. Romero movies first so we could get possible in-jokes.
However, after weeks of seeing Night of the Living Dead and not-quite-half of Dawn of the Dead and Re-Animator and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and various other gory or frightening movies (I was tempted to count Control Room because Donald Rumsfeld looked convincingly zombie-ish, but I will restrain myself), we have Had Enough, Already.
Seeing some of these movies at Alamo made it worse, because in order to get to the theater on time for a 7 pm movie during the week, we ate dinner at the theater. We tried to get there early enough to eat before the movie started, but inevitably I would have a mouthful of fries during some blood-drenched scene and ugh.
Seeing The Texas Chain Saw Massacre while attempting to eat a pizza was the last straw. I think I will wait for another opportunity to see Suspiria because in the past month, I have seen enough Karo-syrup blood to fill up Sam Raimi’s garage. I am making an exception for Shawn of the Dead this weekend (I hope) only because people have assured me that it isn’t a horror movie, it is a comedy.
To prevent anyone else from having such difficulties, I am evaluating the movies opening in Austin this week based on their horror and gore factor. As a further public service, i am including my estimate of dining possibilities for these movies—what would be safe to eat, or if it would be safe to eat at all. You want to be careful. You never can tell what unexpected horrors you might encounter at this time of the year.
Dear Pillow (2004)
Dear Pillow: 2004, dir. Bryan Poyser. Seen at Alamo Village (Sept. 19).
It’s more difficult for me to write about very good movies than about stinkers. It takes longer, at any rate. I saw this movie nearly a month ago and I truly enjoyed it, and have thought about it a lot, but am just getting around to typing my thoughts about it now.
I think if Dear Pillow had played another week at Alamo, or if I’d seen it earlier in its run, I would have written the review earlier to encourage people to see it. But I didn’t see it until its last week in theaters, which was still two weeks longer than it had originally been scheduled to play at Alamo anyway.
Dear Pillow is about a 17-year-old boy who wants to write porn, such as the kind he reads in a Penthouse-letters-style magazine called Dear Pillow. His neighbor, who writes for this magazine and who used to direct porn movies, acts as his mentor. Meanwhile, Wes (the kid) is living with his dad, with whom he has some complicated issues, and lusting after the apartment landlady, on whom he is eavesdropping.
six babble-icious years
It was six years ago today that I started posting entries to Anhedonia, the Web site that my friend Columbine set up for me on his domain. Whatever I wrote that day wasn’t particularly memorable, but it was great to use a CGI script to type in whatever I liked and then hit a button and poof! All the navigation was correct and I didn’t have to hand-code a lot of fiddly little things. I could update my Web site whenever I wanted! Wow.
Thus began my foray into online journalling, or blogging, or whatever we’re calling it this week. At the time I just called it “updating my Web page.” I’d had a Tripod page before Anhedonia, called am I blue?, but it had been meant as an exercise in Web design and writing that I could perhaps show to potential employers when I was job-hunting earlier that year.
movies this week: the puppets are here
The big movie event in Austin this week is the Austin Film Festival. Several movie theaters in town have screens dedicated to showing festival movies. However, there are so many cool movies playing in town this month, even if you don’t make it to the festival, you can see a different movie practically every night. Yeah, even if you skip the lame ones.
There are all kinds of new movies this week: heartwarming, quirky, melodramatic, bursting with big-name acting talent. But only one of them has irreverent puppets fighting terrorism, and that’s the only one I particularly want to see. They’re not Muppets, but that’s all right.
Re-Animator (1985)
Re-Animator: 1985, dir. Stuart Gordon. Seen at Alamo downtown (Oct. 11).
I decided I had better see Re-Animator because it’s one of the better known horror cult films, because I hadn’t ever seen any Stuart Gordon films, because I don’t see enough horror movies, and because this is one of my little brother’s all-time favorite films and he would just die if he found out I missed the opportunity to see it in a theater. Not to mention it was Dollar Night at Alamo Downtown (part of a tribute to the film’s art director, Robert A. Burns, who recently died).
I don’t always agree with my little brother (he adored Napoleon Dynamite) but I definitely enjoyed this movie. “Enjoyed” is kind of a weird word to use about a movie that contains graphic images of brain surgery, the use of a bone saw to kill a reanimated corpse, a very sad and gory little cat, a decapitation with shovel that eventually resulted in a reanimated severed head, sexual assault involving the aforementioned severed head, reanimated decomposing corpses with gore streaming from their mouths, and other nasty stuff. But I had a good time and even laughed a lot at some of the more outrageous gore.