Dan Mooney

-One moment towards the end of Cowboys & Aliens summed it up for me. I hope it won’t give too much away to say there are also Native American Indians represented in the movie, and thankfully the Cowboys team up with them instead of just killing all non-Cowboys in sight. When the groups team up, or shortly thereafter, Harrison Ford shares a look with and nods at one of the Native American Indians – implying “we’re in this together,” tugging at the heartstrings and rewriting American history when it comes to Manifest Destiny and the dire fate of many of our country’s native peoples. It was a moment designed to fill a space, somewhat inspired but overwrought and not entirely well thought out and if that’s a metacomment on the film itself it’s probably by accident.

-I so enjoyed last month’s escape into the Harry Potter franchise that I rewatched all but the last one again. That should hold me.

-Ah, yes. The Millennium Trilogy. I borrowed the first two books of the series, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and The Girl Who Played With Fire, from a coworker at a job that no longer exists. I’ve had those for a year and reading the first one will forever remind me of the summer of 2010, fresh off the job, getting sun for the first time in years, trying to read more than I recently had to stretch out my attention span. That it took a full year for me to finish the books says less about my attention span (still not great) than about the books themselves: Overlong treatises on the tyranny of evil men, full of political intrigue and a journalistic level of detail crafted by the journalist author, the late Stieg Larsson. If the purpose of art truly is to hold a mirror up to nature, then nature feels endless and pointless and nearly entirely without meaning, the only recognizable thread of narrative buried so deep under piles of impractical details, so slowly discovered and difficult to find and follow that merely getting to the end is the accomplishment, the enjoyment of it hardly worth addressing. In that case, maybe as art the books do their job, but as books I just didn’t like them.

I did enjoy the mystery of the first, and the revealing backstory of the second and third, so I thought the Swedish versions of each of the films would be ideal. The inessential would be hacked away and the story alone would be left to enjoy apace. Well, like a rushed haircut, they took too much off the top. I figured you’d have to have read the books to know why any of this was important and how people truly felt, because the actions in the movie were nearly all actions, performed without most of the rising and falling emotions that pull a reader or viewer through the experience. At least the first had a mystery to dive into; the last two were buildup to a release that, while nearly worth my yearlong wait in the books, was on film over way too quickly.

Noomi Rapace plays the definitive Lisbeth Salander in a series of productions where she is the most convincing part: Good for her, but she so outpaced every other aspect of the production it was unfair. I’m looking forward to David Fincher’s versions, to see how he and the writers parsed all this material. But for these versions, I spent far too much time wondering why I was watching these in the first place. Then I remembered it was only to have watched them, maybe the poorest reason of all, and the most insulting, and the least worthwhile.

Moon is one of those movies that are tremendously satisfying to finally get the hell off your Netflix queue. It helps that it’s also quite good, but I’d heard such positive nerdy word-of-mouth about it that it made my queue instantly and stayed there long enough to eventually only be available on DVD, which I guess is something. It’s directed by Duncan Jones, the enthusiastic director more recently of Source Code, and for a smaller, self-contained little film it aims high. It’s set on the Moon where Sam Rockwell’s character maintains a fuel-harvesting outpost. There are shades of 2001 and Cast Away in his lonesome pursuit but while Moon also tackles the Big Questions, it didn’t leave me quite as cold as either of those two. At that rate, it’s not entirely lighthearted fare, which I might have sensed in letting it linger, but it was very worth having seen. The acting hits all the right spots and the special effects are very well done, nearly to the point now of being taken for granted. Included on the DVD I had was Jones’ 30-minute short Whistle, yet another clever foray into technology. It’s not quite as deep as Moon but it doesn’t have to be, and does the short film genre well as a thoughtful, appealing short-story-on-film.

Staying in space, I watched Star Trek, from 2009. I hadn’t seen it in theatres, in part because I was not yet neck-deep in J.J. Abrams (my crash course in LOST wouldn’t begin until early 2010). I did not grow up a fan of any iteration of Star Trek, so I wasn’t able to enjoy it on that level, though I understood some of the most blatant references as most people would. Given the pedigree of its makers, I should have figured for the plot to be as it was. For another thing, I don’t know why I expect Simon Pegg ever to play any role besides comic relief, at least in these major productions. Zoe Saldana, freed of the Avatar blues, is otherworldly beautiful. I still might not use this viewing as a springboard for catching up on past Star Trek movies, but I’d watch the upcoming sequel, sure.

Waking Ned Devine is a sweet movie about an Irish town, a lottery, and a couple of old friends trying to swindle their way into riches. The setting is gorgeous, even though it wasn’t actually filmed in Ireland. But it certainly has that small-town Irish charm, with plenty of countryside and laughing and scenes at pubs. It has the deft organization of a fable, or a centuries-old play where the plot moves along like clockwork. As a film, there is more space for the illustration of the friendship between the two main characters, a bond more touching than many simplified characterizations in similar stories. I was entirely charmed by the movie, though the Irish half of me felt it a little more deeply.

I felt no shame in having seen Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 the day it came out, nor in admitting this. The last installment was a long time coming and I looked forward to meeting it with enthusiasm, not falling ass-backwards into a theatre weeks later. I had already happily avoided any media buildup backlash and went in fresh, no rereading, no rewatching of the previous movie since seeing it in the theatre last fall. You could say this whole Harry Potter thing is kids’ stuff, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but I feel like I’ve been grandfathered in, having been caught up in the first wave of the phenomenon when the movies first started coming out in 2001. In fact, reading the last book of the series – done in one 13+ hour sitting, with meal breaks – remains the most focused I’ve been, certainly since, maybe ever. That this was four years ago and the endeavor was not of a professional or interpersonal nature is not lost on me, but I don’t give a shit: I’m not the first to point out that our culture is splintering and I’ll sign up for an enjoyable, mass-cultural event like this every time, especially since there might not be many of these kinds of things left for me to get away with as I hurtle towards the imaginary brick wall that is my 30th birthday. Hopefully there will be, or I will care proportionately less about what people think of what I do. Having said all that, the movie was one of the best of the series, though not without its flaws (including a certain death scene that I found a little underwhelming, considering).

I was told Midnight in Paris was “a lit major’s wet dream.” And then some! I saw it at the right theatre, too: It was a Sunday afternoon on the Upper East Side, the theatre at 60th and 3rd. It was me and my two friends (a couple) and several pairs of little old lady bleeding hearts who laughed a little too hard at the anticonservative jokes, if that’s possible – not that I disagreed with them. I wasn’t told the premise and so won’t relate it forward, but it’s set in Paris, which is captured beautifully, and features a shameless amount of somewhere between faux- and genuine intellectualism. Fun was poked at the pedantic side of intelligence, but as I chuckled along with literary in-joke after literary in-joke, I feared the line I was straddling was slowly shrinking between my legs.

Nowadays, my insomnia is back or my rhythm is off, but any way you cut it I found myself watching My Cousin Vinny one overnight. You know how sometimes you might spent Sunday nights on facebook, seeing what your hometown friends are up to – the ones you haven’t seen since graduation, the ones you might never see again? Well, Ralph Macchio went to my elementary school so I think it was something like that. Eerie that I’m now about his age when he was in the movie, eerie only because I was 10 when the movie came out and this aging horse has been beaten to death already but I just remember how old he seemed, how much older than in the Karate Kid movies, like he was someone else entirely. Plus, the public defender was played by Austin Pendleton, who I saw as King Lear during my sophomore year of college. No stuttering, but a similar presence, and that is about as powerful as I’m willing to go regarding name-dropping.

Oh, and a week or so after seeing the last Harry Potter movie, I saw that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was on ABC Family, as usual – and as I told a friend of mine I would, I had to watch the end of it. And so then I watched the …the Order of the Phoenix, …the Half-Blood Prince, and …the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 again. And then I rounded out the month seeing Part 2 in theatres one more time. It’s like Cartman with “Come Sail Away” – sometimes you just feel helplessly compelled to finish what you start.

Stripes

For a long time, this movie’s been on my Life List (aka the What Do You Mean You Haven’t Seen It?? List). I’d just finished reading a book on Saturday Night Live, Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, so it felt right to hit something from that early era. Since I might be the last guy on Earth to see the movie, I’ll assume you know the plot, so I won’t go much into it. But Bill Murray and Harold Ramis play guys unsatisfied in their work, Bill Murray as a photographer/cab driver and Harold Ramis as an English as a Second Language teacher. That they see a commercial for joining the Army is almost incidental – it could have been a commercial for anything more exciting or challenging for them than what they were doing. But much as with Fight Club, this movie speaks to that slacker recklessness, so it’s all the more appropriate for guys of a certain age and disposition i.e. me.

When it comes down to it, two things strike me the most. First is the many connections to the TV show Community: the main character’s last name (Winger) to his smart-aleck demeanor to his motivational speeches, more broadly to a “Will the guilty party step forward?” Fakeout, that old chestnut, which in the movie gets Harold Ramis and in Community gets the whole group, minus Jeff and Britta, at their Habitat for Humanity house in the clip show. It could all be a coincidence but if not it’s a pleasure to see one of the influences. The second thing that struck me, beyond just how pretty Sean Young was, my God, was the pace of the film, for a comedy. Maybe I’ve seen too much recent TV comedy but the gags seemed to move slowly, the dialogue not so crisply. Thirty years is a long time, and it’s hard to criticize one of the many classic movies that paved the way through the 80s, but the movie seemed to me as if from an exceedingly distant era with very different sensibilities. The success stemmed more from the plot and the performers’ charm than from the dialogue, which is to say the movie isn’t as quotable as other comedies that came out soon after it. Curious, is all.

The Hangover Part II

Slow week for me and movies this week. Just the one, The Hangover Part II. I hadn’t been to an event movie on its opening weekend in forever, so I made a point to see this one. It seems like there were two ways to go with Part II: Completely Different, or Exactly the Same. Unfortunately these guys decided to remake a really good movie, only they replaced the boozy excitement of Vegas with the frightening underbelly of Bangkok. The templates are virtually identical and the surprises were minimal. The parts that were nearly duplicated ranged from tiresome to infuriating, demonstrating a lack of imagination or courage or both. There were certainly funny moments, two or three really big laughs, but since I’d just rewatched the first part the other day, the experience was more an exercise in noting the similarities rather than enjoying the differences. Now, this was a full theatre, and between the guy on his phone two seats down and the crying baby right behind me whose parents’ idea of the right decision was to tell their one-year-old to “shush” instead of taking him outside, instead of leaving him at home with a babysitter, instead of staying home altogether because you’re young parents now, instead of bringing him to a R-rated movie for God’s sake. The scattered views of Thailand were sort of impressive, the pretty parts beautiful, but otherwise I don’t see a reason to have seen it in a theatre surrounded by folks who can’t be bothered to watch. The movie wasn’t great, but the audience didn’t help it out at all.

-Hanna (2011)

Of all the psychological battles I’ve lost lately, the one with Hanna is one of the most frustrating, but also maybe the most significant. It’s the one that broke the poor camel’s back. I saw the movie and very much enjoyed it, but wrote no review because the very act seemed to me so godawfully tedious for whatever reason. Unlike the movie, which was pretty terrific. Hanna is played by American-born, Irish-raised Saoirse Ronan, the star of The Lovely Bones. Hanna is raised by her father, played by Eric Bana, up in Finland miles away from anyway. They hunt and cook and read, speak several languages, and give nothing away about what the hell is going to happen to them. They’re outsiders, but Hanna’s now a teenager, ready to be reintroduced to society. But she’s also in danger! She can fend for herself but is still very vulnerable in other ways.

I liked everything about this movie, except for maybe a few pretentious choices in camerawork. It’s got plenty of action, a bit of mystery, and a number of locales set across the sea, sort of like a James Bond movie in reverse. The soundtrack was done by the Chemical Brothers, and it sets the mood perfectly, action scenes and otherwise. I haven’t seen Run Lola Run in years but parts feel very close to that in tone. Cate Blanchett is terrific as I understand she usually is. Recommended.

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-The Kids Are All Right (2010)

I’ve had this one on DVD from Netflix since Oscar week, when I was trying to see all the Best Picture nominees before the show. I didn’t, and it seems not to have mattered a lick. But I’m glad to have seen this one, if only to send the DVD back. For all the drama that happens in the film, the line for me was too easily drawn: Julianne Moore’s character is fun and awesome, and Annette Bening’s is cold and distant, and rather unsympathetic – though steadfast and, as we see, no less deserving of love. I would have thought the interesting premise – children conceived via sperm donor contact that very man, a semiautobiographical setup which nonetheless didn’t strike me as overwrought – could have unspooled more dramatically, but as we know the kids in this case are OK with these complications: it’s the parents that fuck it up. Lesser conflicts are shoehorned in – the son’s friend wants to pee on a dog – but all in all it all happens so simply, if not predictably, as to be unremarkable. Now, that’s great news for the world we live in, and I’m glad I feel that way, but it’s bad news for people who like really compelling movies. Incidentally, the movie is far more interesting to me vis-a-vis American Beauty, where Bening plays an eerily similar breadwinner to a much different conclusion. In the end, I’ll just place this movie next to Rachel Getting Married on the shelf of Movies I Suppose I Should Think Are Good But Don’t and just let it go.