Thighs Wide Shut

To The Wonder
Days of Unleavened
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
R | 112 min

A couple, deep in love, ascend the castle mount of France’s majestic Mont Saint-Michel.  They hold hands, caress, kiss, stare at each other’s beauty, the man-made beauty of the castle, and the heavenly nature-made beauty of their tidal surroundings.  The music swells, the cameras swooshes by, she runs wild on the sand, glowing under the wide open sky, and the eyes of god?  Repeat, repeat, repeat.  Wow, we’re at the very beginning of Terrence Malick‘s next poetic masterpiece… right???  Well…

Well, the couple (Ben Affleck & Bond Girl Olga Kurylenko) decide to leave Europe for the friendly suburban plain planes of America, where he does environmental land things.  Guess what, the caressing, kissing, staring, music swelling, and camera swooshes crossed the ocean with them (although the running wild on sand has been replaced by running wild thru wheat fields).  Repeat, repeat, repeat.  But then after they settle in, maybe he’s no longer that into her as she is into him.  The caressing and kissing are replaced by arms being thrown up in the air in disgust, and the staring is no longer the kind kind, and yet the music still swells, and the camera continues to swoosh.  Her visa is up, and he doesn’t marry her, so she has to go home (with her daughter.  we coulda mentioned her earlier, but the daughter doesn’t matter).  He then meets Rachel McAdams (apparently again, although it’s not clear that they’ve met before) and so he’s found a new lady to caress and kiss and stare at, all while the music swells and the camera swooshes.  New she doesn’t like to run thru wheat fields as much as the old she did, but she certainly still loves wheat fields. Repeat, repeat, repeat.  But then the original she comes back into the picture/America so new she goes bye bye, and then he and old she are doing a combo of caressing, kissing, staring and throwing their arms up in the air in disgust, while the music swells and the camera swooshes by.  That’s basically the movie – one long montage of what we juss described, on endless repeat repeat repeat repeat.  Oh wait, forget to mention that Javier Bardem was in this too.  He plays a priest who has like lost his way, kinda like the old she has, and they’re both trying to find their way back, to god, and themselves, and stuff.  Or something

What actually is going on, or transpired, or whatever ever To The Wonder is is anyone’s guess (some say it has to do with the disintegration of Malick’s own marriage to a European lady).  There’s barely any dialog, mostly lyrical narration, and this spiritual meditation babble gets plopped on top of the swelling music and camera swooshes, and guides the viewer further away from understanding.  Look, this kinda stuff was fine when it was in Tree of Life, cause things happened in Tree of Life, like Bradd Pittt saying ‘hit me‘, and death, and dinosaurs, and the creation of earth, AND STUFF, but when you try to use the same GORGEOUS cinematography against a movie of nothing but caressing and kissing and then not caressing and not kissing and lots of running thru wheat fields it doesn’t really do anything for anybody.  It juss becomes one of those Koyaanisqatsi Powaqqatsi Naqoyqatsi movie things, which aren’t really movies, but juss long montages set to the music of Philip Glass.  That’s what this feels like – pretty images with pretty music with pretty much no point.  Look, there won’t be another film in 2013 as beautiful as Malick’s To The Wonder, but beauty doesn’t make a movie.  If I wanted to look at empty beauty, I’d head to my nearest breastaurant

Oh Malick, why did you make such a Terrence Malicky Terrence Malick homage of a Terrence Malick film???  You tried to make like a modern day Days of Heaven in Hell, and ya juss ended up out-Terrence Malicking yerself.  But hey, I’m not really complaining, cause I love that he’s doubled his own output in 8 short years, and has like 99 movies in the pipeline, but are they all going to be these visual poems with no chapters, footnotes, forwards or epilogues??  Maybe time will be kind to To The Wonder, but I have to wonder, wonder what the fcuk that was all about, but for now, God only knows

Verdictgo: kinda pains me to say, but 9reals, this is totes Sum Merit But No Stinkin Badges

Wonders why today in limited release & on-demand

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

42
Artful Dodgers
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
PG-13 | 128 min

42 – the story of Jackie Robinson(‘s first year in the majors) – is exactly like Trouble With The Curve, except 42 is really dang good and Curve is really stupid, and instead of an crotchety old man played by Clint Eastwood, we get an old man who sounds like he’s crotchety played by Harrison Ford, and instead of Justin Timberlake being the würstest wannabe play by play announcer of balls thyme we have John C McGinley eloquently barbing like Red Barber, and instead of Amy Adams looking not hot, cause she’s kinda plain like plain yogurt on a plane, we get Nicole Beharie who makes us want to bat our eyes and bunt our balls, and instead of a bunch of dumb actors playing baseball players, we have Chadwick Boseman totally chad wicking the bose as Jackie Robinson, MAN!!!!  Wait, what am I even talking about?  STEAL SECOND!

42 could have been a cornball flick about a dude who did important stuff, like being the first black dude to play major league baseball in a sea of nuttin but whitey fords, but it wasn’t corny at all (ok, so there was a LIL corny-corny-ness-ness, like when a lil black boy in the grandstands says cheesy corny corny cheesy things, but it’s OK, cause he meant well, and the kid didn’t write the corncheeseball dialog).  And even if Harrison Ford hams it up, wrapped in bacon, it’s his (Branch Rickey) story as well, cause he had the balls to put a black dude with white dudes (like Pee Wee Herman Reeses Pieces Lucas Black!), cause he wanted to win, and he knew that white dudes suck at sports.   It’s true  (apologies to white people).  So Rickey/Ford & Robinson/Boseman take chances on each other, and make giant leaps, and the audience is so hooked, lined, and sinker-balled, that we never want them to land, and when they do, they’re safe at home, cause they scored, and we cheered!!  Go home team!!  Especially the home team with the one black dude and 38832 crappy white players!!

The movie doesn’t take risks, but it still rewards.  Nice work Brian Helgeland, although I’m sure somewhere Spike Lee wants to bat your face in cause yer a white guy doing a movie about Jackie Robinson, but Jackie Robinson is not juss a black story, it’s a black AND white AND read all over story.  It’s a story of us, the US-A.  We’re not perfect, but sports is where we level our playing field.  Are there any other sports puns I can make?  Christopher Meloni balks and talks, and Alan Tudyk clears the benches, by doing the mos thankless acting job in the movie – being really really realy racist to Jackie while he was trying to hit a baseball.  Well, Tudyk’s character and racism STRUCK OUT, cause black, yellow, red and white dudes all play baseball together, and it’s awesome, especially when the Ws are mad curlied

Verdictgo: Jeepers Mos Worth A Peepers

42  adds up at a theater near jews this Friday 

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

The Place Beyond The Pines
Brooding Broods
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
R | 140 min

Derek Cianfrancespainengland knows pain and unhappiness, and he has no issue serving it up thru the face of Ryan Gosling, and we have no problem with any of that cause if you don’t love Gosling’s face you either cannot love or don’t have sight.  If you saw their first heartbreaking pairing – the 4th best film of 2010 – Blue Valentine – you knows whats wees sqwaking bouts, and you should so be inclined to see their second pairing, where Gosling plays a motorcycle stuntman who finds out that Eva Mendes is having his baby, so he decides to like help and stuff, even if he has no money, and Eva doesn’t want his money even if he had some, and she’s living with some black dude anyways, and he has a crying dagger tattoo, so you know this situation aint great, cause who wants your child to be the son of a dude with a crying dagger tattoo??

To spell out how the rest of the movie is spelt is to spelled out too much.  There are basically three movies in this single movie.  The first movie centers on Gosling robbing banks, with an assist from that creepy awesome Australian dude with that lisp - Ben Mendelsohn.  It’s like Drive meets Point Break.  In the second movie, policeman Bradley Cooper pops in and then this thing turns into Copland meets Copland.  In the third movie, time passes and Bradley Cooper has a son (Emory Cohen) who’s like The Wackness and stuff.  I really really really can’t tell you ANYTHING that links all of these mini-movies into the one movie, cause you shouldn’t know anything, but you should know that all three movies are worth watching, even if the culmination of them don’ts necessary add up to a hill of beans/pines, in, around or beyond them

Oh and Dane DeHaan is in this movie and Dane DeHaan is the greatest brooding actor of his generation.  Long may he brood

Oh, and this Mike Patton song is the knees bees

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

–

Trance
Doctor Mindbender
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
R | 101 min

Danny Boyle‘s Trance is like Derek Cianfrancespainengland’s Place Beyond The Pines in that we can’t really tell you all that much about it, cause if we did, it would semi-spoil the mindfudge that Danny Boyle tries to fudge our minds with.  This movie’s kinda Inception-like, but you don’t have to do that much thinking and over-thinking for something that doesn’t really require much thought in the end.  This is minor Boyle, but still, minor Boyle is better than most people’s major stuff.  He’s incapable of making awful movies.  We’re sure A Life Less Ordinary and The Beach will be the greatest movies of all time if we don’t watch them for 50 years (but probably not)

Anywho, James McAvoy plays the Ewan McGregor role, the guy we root for, but is this the guy we should be rooting for????  Or is it Frenchie Vincent Cassel?  Or hypnotist Rosario Dawson, or should we say hypno-tttttttttttttitties, cause you get to see them AND HER BUSH!?????  HOW COULD YOU NOT TRUST A WOMAN WHO SHOWS HER BOOBS and BUSH ON THE SILVER SCREEN????  Maybe we shouldn’t trust any of them.  They all want a stolen piece of art that maybe they stole or didn’t, or did they?  TRANCE TRANCE TRANCE TRANCE!  or something

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Pines & Trance do the dance currently in limited release elsewhere elsewhen

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Upstream Color
Downstream Blather
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
NR | 96 min

I call bullshit on Shane Carruth‘s Upstream Color.  No, I take that back – I call pig shit on Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color.  No, yes, I take that back/forward too also – it’s both kinds of shit, and all other kinds of shit, even if it thinks it’s the shit, in the good kind of shit way, and not the shit shit way I’m talkins bout.  Now don’t spank me wrong, the film is well crafted, especially if you love editing and pigs and nonsense and crap and Henry David Thoreau  (WHO DOESN’T?????).  Well, there’s something definitely going on in the film, actually lots of things, but really nothing – so much nothing that it all amounts to more zippo than a Zippo lighter factory!  I kept thinking – what does all this mean?  But then I remembered that I didn’t care enuff to know the answer, so my question was replaced with – what the fcuk was that?  Anyone who tells you this movie is awesome doesn’t know what it’s about either, and they apparently want you to suffer the same pointless mindmelt that they endured.  I would never tell you anything was awesome juss cause it had snappy editing and pigs and deep thoughts that weren’t so deep (like the oh so ‘smart’ Inception).  That’s why I call bull/pig/all-kinds of shit on Upstream Color.  I could go on and on and on, like the movie does, and so I will, by ‘explaining’ what the movie is – plotwise – from start to finish, not what it’s about, cause no one knows what it’s about, and it’s not worth trying to figure it out what it’s about

So, some green thumbed dude discovers that his plants are giving off blue dust, so he digs into his plant’s pot to find worms, and then he finds more worms and then gives them to his friends who ingest them and then like start tripping or something and do hand jives with each other.  Then he puts a worm into a pill thing and goes out to some bar where he targets some cute girl (Amy Seimetz) and ruffies her and gives her the worm pill and then he like brainwashes her to write out Henry David Thoreau’s Walden on paper chains, and take tiny sips of water and make her think that each sip of water is like the nectar of the gods, and then he makes her turn over all of her money and assets to him, and then he like disappears, and leaves her alone in some house and she starts seeing a worm crawl inside her body, and she’s like scared, so she finds some pig farmer (Andrew Sensenig) who helps her get rid of the worm by connecting her to a pig, and the worm goes into the pig or something.  Then she’s OK and tries to return to normal life, but she’s been gone for weeks, so she loses her job, and she has no money, so she gets a cute short haircut and gets all moody and sad.  Then some guy (director/writer/editor/composer/’genius’ Shane Carruth) comes out of nowhere, and like falls in love with her, cause she’s cute, but maybe also cause the same thing happened to him.  So they like go places and things and stuff, and more things, then stuff, but she’s all distant, while all he wants to do is to get closer… into her pants.  Meanwhile, the pig farmer does things, like raise pigs, BUT ALSO records sounds, like he was Ben Burtt or something.  Well, apparently the movement of the pigs also mimics the movements of humans, mainly the ones who were drugged and had their money stolen or something.  ANYWHO, one of the pigs gives birth to little pigs and then the pig farmer/sound recordist puts the babies in a bag and tosses them into a river or something.  Meanwhile, our ‘heroes’, the guy and girl, start to get crazier and crazier, hearing sounds, and thinking things, and although the movie wants you to think it’s getting crazier and crazier, and deeper and deeper, it’s actually getting more nonsensical, and stupid, and stuff, and whatevs and zzzzzz.  Our gal starts swimming a lot and starts spouting Walden lines, and the guy starts putting ‘it’ all together.  This leads them back the pig farmer, where they do things to him, and then they find his documents and that leads to a list of people who were also wormed to pig synergized or something, and then they have a party at the pig farm and hug pigs and paint fences!  But what about that pig that was tossed into the river?  Oh yeah, it’s dead, and its blue death germs like went into the water and then grew into a rare blue orchid… which brings us full circle to the planting guy in the beginning, but it really brings us full circle to a toilet bowl where this movie should have been flushed, or something

Verdictgo: Sum Merit But No Stinkin Badges

Upstream Color basically rain-blows in NY this Friday, and elsewhere elsewhen

btw, I think this White Stripes video for ‘Blue Orchid’ makes more sense than Upstream Color does did

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

G.I. Joe: Retaliation
The Pryce Is Right, Everything Else Mostly Wrong
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
PG-13 | 110 min

OMG OMG OMG, do you remember how much fun and awesome and dumb perfection and hotty hot hottness the first GI Joe movie was????  I DO!  I DO!!! It made The Transformer movies look more like a has-been trash-bin than the Hasbro heroes we grews up on. Well, they decided to make a sequel, and obviously they had nowhere to go but up, but apparently they decided to go down.  There were rumors that Wild Bill and Shipwreck & Tomax and Xamot(!!!!!!!) would get added to the respective good guy and bad guy crews, but they weren’t, and actually many of the cool characters from #1 were dumped.  They went ahead and filmed the movie, then delayed it by a year.  Apparently they wanted to convert it to 3-D (like anyone was really clamoring for that), and there were rumors that they wanted to un-kill off Channing Tatum’s Duke character.  Well, they still killed him, early in the film.  Yawn

So what’s the problem with the sequel, Retaliation??  I mean, Bruce Willis’ is in it!  Wait, he was in it?  I think he showed up for 10 seconds, smirked, took his check, and then checked out.   The dumb fun from #1 lost the ‘fun’ part of the equation on its way to becoming a #2.  There juss wasn’t much fun to be had, and moistly importantly, and sadly, hottness.  For some reason they dumped Sienna Miller‘s Baroness and Rachel Nichols‘s Scarlett.  That’s like making a sequel to Spring Breakers and replacing the four slutty hotties with four Joan Cusacks (nothing personal Joan).  UNACCEPTABLE!!!  How are Cobra gonna destroy the world and the Joes save it with less hottness???  I mean Adrianne Palicki as Lady Jaye is fine and all, but they didn’t even put her in pleather, or have her take a shower.  UNACCEPTABLE.  But there were ninjas, and briefcases, which kept things watchable, but when your most convincing and masterful performance is two Jonathan Pryces for the pryce of one, you know your GI Joe sequel isn’t as killer as you instinct. It kinda in-stinks.  But them briefcases!  And those ninjas!!!  Yes, those ninjas – Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow – need their own spin-off movie, and if they go that route, please have them ninja star the RZA to death within the first 2 minutes of the movie, and then have Scarlett and the Baroness shower together for the next 7 hours

Verdictgo: Sum Merit But No Stinkin Badges

GI Joe is a yo-no at a theater near jews 

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…