Big Screen: True Grit

Posted on January 11, 2011 by Duff

Really fantastic. Bridges blows the top off the barn, Damon is HILARIOUS, the girl is great, Brolin didn’t even annoy me to his usual extent. The setting is wonderful, GOD I LOVE WESTERNS (hey! I grew up on this stuff!).

This one’ll win a lot of awards and it does indeed deserve it.

Is it just me, though, or is Jeff Bridges not totally channeling Kris Kristofferson (both here AND in his role in Crazy Heart)? In that first scene, where you hear the drawl before you see him… Wow. (Not to take anything away from Bridges’ amazing performances.)

DadReaction chimed in to say that while he also loved the movie, it made him go back and re-read the book and the snake pit scene is a LOT WORSE in the book. He even had a hard time turning the pages! You’ve been warned!

Big Screen: Somewhere

Posted on January 11, 2011 by Duff

I really (REALLY) liked this movie. I thought it was beautifully filmed and acted and got its point across really poignantly.

And then I got in the elevator with a ton of people who were in the same theater as me and they all HATED it.

Yes, it is really REALLY, I mean REALLY, slowly paced. One might call it glacially so. There were a couple times when I did find myself wondering “So is the camera (and the actors in the scene as well!) not going to move for an entire….song? Should I be watching the edges, is someone going to jump into the frame?” But hello, it’s Sofia Coppola, what are you expecting? This isn’t a Michael Bay film.

The film stock is all faded and dusty and super vignettey around the edges — I kept wondering if they had to treat it to achieve that effect or if they found some boxes of film that expired in the ’70s in an old warehouse and used that — and it just serves to reinforce the point.

Remember that horrific (not that I saw it and I certainly hope you didn’t see it) movie my former boyfriend Joaquin Phoenix and Casey Affleck made last year about the disintegration of celebrity and how empty and shallow that life is? Yeah, this film tells that story in a very different (and actually artistic) way. All the booze and drugs and access to ladies doesn’t make for a LIFE.

Also the ending is completely open-ended, you have to decide how you’re going to take it, and where you think he is.

Stephen Dorff is surprisingly great. (Not in that I thought he was bad previously but in that he’s never been on my radar as someone particularly good.)

Big Screen: Rare Exports

Posted on December 14, 2010 by Duff

This movie will definitely be in my top 5 for the year.

It’s called Rare Exports. It’s Finnish. It’s about Christmas. Fantastic writing, fantastic acting, fantastic directing. A fairytale that you would never predict or expect.

It opens in Chicago Christmas Eve at the Music Box. I believe it opens in NYC then as well. I hope word of mouth gets the film to more cities and more theaters because it is such a wonderful experience.

It is a piece of wildly creative, truly inventive, FANTASTIC filmmaking.

Thumbs up to the uppest of possible degrees.

Mystery/Fiction: Faithful Place, by Tana French

Posted on December 12, 2010 by Duff

Gifted!! The third book in the (loosely connected) series by French that began with In the Woods and The Likeness.

I was worried I wouldn’t like this book as much; a number of friends read it earlier than me and the reception seemed a bit so-so.

Well, I had nothing to worry about. I loved this book; in fact, it MAY be my favorite of the three. It dips into Frank’s past and the current him gets confronted by the biggest mystery (and heartache) of the younger him. Rosie, his daughter, and really all the members of his family, are so richly drawn. I felt all caught up in their love affairs and their fights and those bitter things we can never take back. Frank was a bit of a cold fish in his earlier appearances in the other books, but you can see inside him here, through his many layers of self protection.

I love mystery and I love fiction but I super extra big time love when they come together in this world of deeper, thicker mystery fiction. Tana French can do no wrong!

Apparently her fourth book will also have a similarly loose connection, following Scorcher Kennedy, who drove me bananas in this book! I can’t wait to read a book from his point of view and come to love him just as I did Frank.

Here’s a cool interview where, among other things, French touches on that idea of moving up above that genre fiction labeling: More and more crime writers are rebelling against that, and I’d love to be a small part of the force that finally crumbles that ridiculous imaginary barrier.

Fantasy: Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins

Posted on December 12, 2010 by Duff

The final book of the Hunger Games trilogy.

I loved it just as much as I loved the first two. It broke my heart and made me cry numerous times.

I’ve seen a lot of complaints online or “it’s OK…but not as good as the first book!” type of comments. If I enjoyed a story enough to let myself get lost in it (which is ALWAYS my goal), then I’m not looking to make that kind of judgement.

And I really would not have wanted it to end any other way. I thought it was fantastic.

Winter Tunage (Tune-age)

Posted on December 11, 2010 by Duff

There’s an awesome mix over at Music vs. Misery. I would especially recommend Song #9 as The Good Natured covering Sufjan is incredible–reminiscent of First Aid Kit covering Fleet Foxes.

I was surprised to find I already had some of the songs I thought I didn’t know in my iTunes (#s 6 and 26 for example). Need to go on a “what haven’t I listened to” quest sometime soon.

Sci Fi/Fantasy: Ice Song, by Kirsten Imani Kasai

Posted on November 29, 2010 by Duff

This book was SO GOOD, I find myself very reluctant to return it the library. What if I NEED to read it again, some more, incessantly, every night?!?! The lead character, Sorykah, is a mother of two kidnapped babies, an ice-drilling engineer…and a Trader who can switch back and forth between genders. Her world is also populated by Somatics, people who are part human/part animal, and her search for the twins finds her making unexpected alliances.

As with so many books I love, it was rich in detail to the point of tactility; the characters were heartbreakingly real in all their aches and pains and loves and hates. I believed in the world and the story and the quest and the emotions. It all came alive.

Apparently there is a sequel coming out in July. Maybe I’ll just read this a few more times before then.

Big Screen: Unstoppable.

Posted on November 27, 2010 by Duff

Pure (often adrenaline) entertainment. And unexpectedly, so many lovely shots, even when 1206 is going slow and knows not the danger to come.

Not a surprise really; trains are just inherently cinematic, aren’t they? Even the old crappy cargo ones.

Thumbs up, people.

Big Screen: The Town

Posted on November 1, 2010 by Duff

LOVELOVELOVELOVELOVE does not even begin to describe how I feel about this flick. This is some EXCELLENT moviemaking, y’all, and I encourage you to get yourself to a theater to see it. Now. Before I buy all the tickets. (I’ve seen it three times already.) It’s my #1 movie for 2010, edging Inception aside. I loved that flick, but I became much more emotionally involved with this one.

I was on the edge of my seat, spellbound, from beginning to end. Great performances, great mood, great settings. So well done. Serious kudos to Ben Affleck on becoming such a great director after such an oddly varied acting career. He also does some great acting in this and he’s totally rocking the Mark Messier skeletor look btw. Jeremy Renner is great; Jon Hamm is great; the gray-haired dude whose name I can never remember even tho he’s on my favorite show Sons of Anarchy is great (this dude); Blake Lively blows the roof off, her performance is a stunner and what a surprise.

Great car chases on one-way cramped up streets in Boston. Great performances by the neighborhood gangster thug florist and his right-arm: the feelings of menace are just so well done here. Hamm’s last line of dialogue: SUCH a great threat. I want to have a reason to use that line. Fun to see so many people from Affleck’s previous directing flick (Gone Baby Gone) popping up again here in very different roles.

SO steeped in its time and its place and its smalltown-in-the-big-city focus. SO many randomly great moments: the nuns getting out of the car and the cop turning his head; the hand on the tattoo when leaving the table; the pictures at the barbecue; the late-night walk to the AA meeting; the “CSI. All the CSIs. Bones.”… I could go on and on.

A heist movie that feels so original and so beyond the constraints of a heist.

I just loved it. Obv. Anyone need someone to go see it with them? 🙂

[p.s. quick DadReaction: pretty well done heist movie, but he hated the ending and thought one thing specifically was just “nope! wouldn’t happen!”]

Big Screen: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World