Thighs Wide Shut

Precious: Based on the
Novel Push by Sapphire
The Anonymous B.I.G.
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

In the past couple of decades, African-American dramas have been dominated by Spike Lee’s joints, Tyler Perry’s disjoints, blackstoric epics told by white men (Color Purple, Glory) and one and done eye/thigh-openers (Singleton’s Boyz ‘N the Hood and the Hughes Bros’ Menace II Society), so when an imaginative film that’s equally as crushing as it is uplifting, like Lee Daniels Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (almos a curious a title as The Men Who Stare At Goats) is, comes along, you have to consider it to be one of the best of that bunch. However, when you take it out of that genre, it’s still a sight to be seen, but we wouldn’t exactly say that this elevated after school special is the most special and precious thang that one has seen in ages, as the hype machine been sayin ever since it’s debut at Sundance

Precious (Gabourey Sidibe, in an unforgettable career-defining, career-ending performance… seriously, where does she go from here besides Nikki Blonskyland?) is an obese, illiterate school girl with one mentally challenged daughter and another kid on the way thanks to some rapage by her momma’s baby momma. Said momma aint no role model neither, as she’s the nightmareiest of nightmare mothers (Mo’Nique, one bark away from ‘NO WIRE HANGERS EVER!!!!‘), and finds every which way to welch welfare checks and mentally and physically abuse her once precious Precious at the same time. There’s nowhere to go but down, but since this is a movie, ya juss know that things will slowly start to turn around. Precious escapes hell through fantasy (seen numerous times, which sometimes feels a little out of place and pace), and eventually escapes her horrid public school by being transferred to an alternative one where teachers (namely the luscious, soulful Paula Patton, see below) actually care and her classmates have better things to do than tease her, like being her friend, something she’s in dire need of. Yeah, the story is a tad predictable, yet it doesn’t completely head down the cliched alley that it seems like it’s heading directly towards

Precious delivers roundly (pun intended) on the talents of its cast (with unlikely solid turns from a no-make-uped/mustachioed Mariah Carey, replacing Helen Mirren???, and a sunglassesless Lenny Kravitz) and a starkly muted mise-en-scène that captures a rundown NYC in the 80s to a T. One of the more revealing kudos that the film has earned is the lending of Tyler Perry(and Oprah)’s own name to the credits to ensure a wider audience, hispecially when his chitlin’ circuitry works lean more toward a ForUsByUs nature. Yes, Precious is black, but her tale of rising above a stack of shitty circumstances will hit home with anyone, regardless of skin color. Don’t know if the same can be said about Madea, who belongs in cinema hell right next to Ernest

Patton Pending: why is Precious the first we’ve ever heard or seen of the gooooorgeous Paula Patton????? oh yeah, maybe cause we skipped out on Hitch, Idlewild, Deja Vu, Swing Vote and Mirrors. did we miss much with any of those? thinks snot, unless she totally had a shower scene in all of them. oh wait, she DOES have a shower scene in Deja Vu! and whaaaaat, she’s married to Alan Thicke’s son, WTF?!!@@@!

Verdictgo: Breast In Show

The Men Who Stare At Goats
Mind Over Does It Matter?
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

Apparently there was a unit within the US army that specialized in implementing really odd mind tricks in fighting our enemies. Some of them were used in the war on terror and yes, one of them tactics involved staring at goats. Strange! but true!! it muss be cause Jon Ronson wrote a book about it!!! Fascination abound!!!! but the movie (directed by Goodnightgoodlucker Grant Heslov) made from that book is more foolish (not a bad thing at all) than hard factual (can we handle the truth?), and while we laffed and laffed and laffed sum mo, ultimately wees was like, well, what’s the point of all this sensenon? So go in not expecting a point and come out experiencing the closest thing we’ll get to a Lebowski sequel… til The Big Lebowski II happens, which it won’t and shouldn’t, but why shouldn’t it? Doesn’t Tara Reid need a job? Dude, are we serious? Dude, where’s your car? Dude, anytime Jeff Bridges is playing a hairy stoner and forces George Clooney to dance like a jackass, and Clooney in turn has to explain to Ewan McGregor what a Jedi is and Kevin Spacey has a super gay mustache AND isn’t super annoyi
ng, it has got to count for something over nothing, is wees right? Of course wees is, cause ours mums said wees was always right, eggcept when wees was left!!!

Escape Goats: a majority of the book/film is based off of The First Earth Battalion Operations Manual [peep the whole thing in pdf form], pieced together by Lieutenant Colonel crackpot Jim Channon, the basis for the Lebowski II character

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

That Evening Sun
Tennessee Ill-ones
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

Hal Holbrook, zero Oscar wins. His That Evening Sun co-star Ray McKinnon, one Oscar win (it was for a short film). Is there justice in this world? No, except DAVID JUSTICE! And that fact aint gonna stop Hal, who has always chipped in credible incredible work as an actor’s actor (usually playing Abe Lincoln or Twain), from trying. He mcnabbed his very first Academy nod recently in Into The Wild and aints stopping there, not going gentle into that not goodnight. Scott Teems adaptation of William Gay‘s short story is short on story (and reeked of upyo AND An Unfinished Life), but Hal’s work as a grumpy old man refusing to let go of his farm and home to a white trash family (McKinnon + Carrie Preston & Mia Wasikowska) is as good as it gets in terms of performances, and as father time clicks on Holbrook’s book (see Peter O’Toole in Venus), it’s a memorable late chapter even it’s not exactly a page turner, or a Tina Turner neither, or Ted, Michael, Bachman Overdrive, et al

Not So Whistlin’ Dixie: Holbrook’s real life wife Dixie Carter plays his real dead wife in the film. she speaks no words. her last movie that she probably had a line of dialog in was back in 2001. Poor Dix. and what, they couldn’t give a part to Meshach Taylor whiles theys waz add it?

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Goats goes baaah most everywheres, while Precious & Sun rise in limited release

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

A Serious Man
Schlimazel Tov
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

College professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg, who looks like Joaquin Phoenix, but acts as good as River) is trying to keep his nice Jewish suburban life from falling apart, while trying to figure out why it’s falling apart. His wife (Sari Lennick) wants to run off with freshly widowed, serious-ier Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed, with his velvety Barry White voice), but they need his official blessing to make it a holy union in the eyes of their community. His brother Arthur (Richard Kind, a kinda guy we’d love to see more of in anything and everything) is a misguided sad sack with medical and genius issues, who has no job or home, and takes up space in his house, much to his family’s chagrin. His daughter (Jessica McManus) and son (Aaron Wolff) are needy teens, one wanting a nose job and the other a clear telly signal so he can watch F-Troop, when he probably should be working on his Haftorah portion. And that’s just the problems that exist within Larry’s home. Outside of it he’s got to deal with a gruff and tumble white-bred neighbor, a failing student attempting to bribe him for better grades, lawyers with gigantic hourly rates, the school’s board who are deciding his tenure fate, endless badgering phone calls from the Columbia Record Club (oddly with this anachronistic goof), and many other forms of agita that plagues poor Larry’s mind. He seeks answers in low places (from his pot smoking hottie neighbor, played by Amy Landecker) and from places with a higher calling (different Rabbis from his congregation, Simon Helberg and George Wyner, each who speak loudly, but with nothing really to say, cept about the marvels of parking lots and mysterious Hebrew-lettered teeth). Murphy’s law ru(l)es the day here and never lets up on Larry (thankfully he doesn’t f#ck a stranger in the a$$). It’s one long cringe-worthy affair, like what befell Gaylord Focker in Meet The Parents, yet there’s not much to laugh at, but there is a helluva lot to marvel at (bless you D.o.P Roger Deakins)

Judaism has dipped its toes in Ethan Coen and Joel Coen‘s films before (John Turturro in Barton Fink and Miller’s Crossing + the no rolling on Shabbos stylings of John Goodman in Lebowski), but with A Serious Man, it makes one giant plunge into a world filled with nothing but menches, noodniks, schleppers, schlemiels, schlimazels, and any other Yiddish plural nouns you could possibly think of. This mad Man world that they have conjured up rolls out in the late 60s, in an unnamed Midwestern town (filmed in Minnesota), which also happens to be the time and place the brothers Coen went from being boys II Bar Mitzvahed men. To call this their most personal film would be an understatement. To call it one of their most accomplished works wouldn’t eggzactly be an overstatement (esp since most of their films are accomplished, cept the intolerable Intolerable Cruelty). To call it a film that you cannot pass up whatsoever is what we simply call a statement (or maybe a command, as in we command you to see this!). There are only two warnings we muss raise: some of you gentiles (or goys, if you prefer that word) may feel a bit lost with all the nebbishness abound, and also, its got one of them No Country For Old Menesque ‘you call that an ending’ endings, but none of this should really matter when yer taking in one of the finesestest Jewish-oriented (non-Holocaust) films since The Ten Commandments. Eat yer farts out Woody Allen and Neil Simon!

Being Kind, Rewind: Richard Kind has one of the mos unforgettable faces in all of cinema. we’ve never forgotten it ever since we first came into contact with it in Vice Versa

Verdictgo: Breast In Show

A Serious Man opens in NY, LA and Minneapolis(!!!!) today, and elsewhere, elsewhen

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Capitalism: A Love Story
Moore of The Same, And That Aint Such A Bad Thang Whatsoever
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

Like with White Castle hamburgers, you either love Michael Moore or you flat out hate him. There is no inbetween. One’s opinion on the muckraking filmmaker can easily change from documentary to documentary, as it has for us, hearting him like mad for raising very valid questions in Columbine and SiCKO, and despising him for Fahrenheit 9/11, which did nothing cept preach to an already harping choir. With his latest, Capitalism: A Love Story, we’re once again bitten, and forever smitten. It tackles a lot of the same finical collapse territory explored in last month’s American Casino doc (+ returning to the land of Roger & Me, and sum parting shots at his boy GW Bush), but since he’s a man of and for the people, his doc is a lot less heady academia and much more plebeian. Therefore it’s a lot more accessible, and since it’s a Michael Moore piece o’ work, it’s wholeheartedly entertaining too (the ye olde archive films utilized here are tres bestest). One minute you’re horrified, the next you’re belting out some laughs, and in a another yer holding back the tears (the stories about companies taking out life insurance policies on their own employees and then basically rooting for them to die is particularly tough on the psyche). Love em or hate em, you have to admit that we as a country need more people like Michael Moore, even if he’s pointing out obvious truths, and even if he does so in the most annoying ways possible. Capitalism‘s strokes my be broad, but looking at the complete picture, it’s an absolute triumph, insult, dog!

Whoop That Hat Trick: finally, thanks to this conjoined twins post, we finally learn what’s under MM’s hat…

bi the gay, think there should be a websight dedicated to all the hats his wears. someone get on it!

Verdictgo: Breast In Show

Capitalism is currently playing in select theaters across this still great country

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Inglourious Basterds
An American Nazi Party Worth Joining
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

After that semi-failed grindhouse experiment (his half being the most faileded of the two), that killer Bill and the 1 Bill that should have been killed, and whatever that borefest Jackie Brown was, Quentin Tarantino has finally handed in his first proper follow-up, in terms of equal bestness, to Pulp Fiction (a film we saw in theaters SEVEN times). His Inglourious Basterds, which should not be confused with the unwatchable The Inglorious Bastards, not only finds the writer/director on warm and rich creative ground once again, with his usual Tarantinoisms strewn about (cheek in tongue dialog, chapter headings and credits with wily graphics + familiar members of his acting troupe, although Sam L and Harvey K are heard and not seen), but there’s something rather mature at play in his immature revisionist look at how WWII could have ended. Sure, it’s one giant Jewish revenge fantasy, but this aint no make-up call for Señor Spielbergo’s Munich as some have made it out to be (Munich was such a mos eggggsalad flick, besides that part where they crosscut between offing Arabs and Bana banging his hot wife), as the killah (American) Jews here are simply window dressing to everything and everyone else in the film

Dats right, the Jews (including director Eli Roth and The Office‘s B.J. Novak, who’s almos as pointless here as he is at Dunder Mifflin), led by gentle gentile Brad Pitt, are storming across Europe, scalping every Nazi in their sights, but besides a handful of dirty dozen brutal beatdowns, they’re barely a part of the whole proceedings, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Like any Tarantino soiree, there’s a lot of character cooks in the kitchen, and each here are serving up their own plate of hotness, so there’s plenty to sink yer teeth into, whatever yer tastes may be. The rest of the good guys are really farkin good: a delirious caricature of a British lieutenant (Michael Fassbender, looking much happier here after starving to death in Hunger) + his cheerio superiors (Mike Myers! & Rod Taylor, in franztastic cameos), a vampy German double agent film star (Diane Kruger, playing quite well with the boys) and a lovely lone surviving French Jewish gal (eye/thigh opener Mélanie Laurent, basically in the Uma role) who runs the film’s central setting, a movie theater that will literally over-explode with action

And for once, spankfully, after endless emotionally draining Holocaust movies, we get a group of Nazis that are enjoyable… assholes! Hitler and Goebbelsszz are impossible to make fun, but all the other yesSS men are worthy of a heil. You go QT! Only you could make us write such things, when the only thing we hates more than Nazis be Duke Basketball and Julia Roberts!! For those who don’t keep up with current German cinema and their wonderful band of actors, Tarantino rightfully employed many of their talents and put them on GLORIOUS display, hispecially for those who would otherwise never experience these craftsmen at work. Dudes like August Diehl, Christian Berkel and our boy of boys Daniel Brühl (he totally rüles, and you should see him in Good Bye Lenin! or else!) relish their time on screen (although he shoulda tapped Bruno Ganz to play Hitler, again), but all the Nazi love, and love of the film in general should be directed directly at Christoph Waltz and his INNNNNNNcredible performance as Colonel Hans Landa. Landa is hands and thighs down the single greatestestest character Tarantino has mt EVERest dreamt up. He’s a little bit of everything, overly smart, overly smarmy, overly cunning, overly conniving, and while you’ll be plenty busy hatin his guts, you’ll also find yourself loving his guts at the same exact time! There’s never a dull moment in the longish Basterds, hispecially when Basterd #1 Landa is playing it at attention and at ease simultaneously. Lettuce hope this isn’t the last (we see of) Waltz, and the last bit of greatness from QT taz well, although we doubt we’ll have to worry about either

The Reservoir That Never Dries Up: QT is a man’s sorta man, but he rarely gives the proper love to the hotties (although seeing Winstead in that cheerleader outfit made everyone cheer!). Basterds is a whole new ball game with Kruger and Laurent holding their own, and one relatively unknown making us hold our crotches, Léa Seydoux

Verdictgo: Breast In Show

Basterds will tear the roof off at a theater near jews (and hopefully not Nazis) this Friday

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

District 9
Things Fall Apartheid
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

The Peter Jackson produced Halo flick didn’t happen, but that loss turned out to be every movie lover’s gain. The studios didn’t have much faith in Jackson’s pick for Halo‘s director, so instead of walking away with nothing ventured, he and said pick, Neill Blomkamp,+ a meager 30 mil budget, turned one of his short films (see ‘Short Shorts’ below) into a full blown, wholly original (with evening shades of E.T., Enemy Mine, V, Contact, Tsotsi and anything futuristic by the genius Paul Verhoeven) and wholly kick a$$ feature that purty much blows away most of the other so-called blockbuster entertainment that hit theaters this summer. With no big names on the marquee, the money was poured into the yumcrdible effects work, and it’s amazing how far that money went considering Transformers 2 cost 170 mil more to make and their effects work was, to put it slain and pimple, shit

District 9 takes place in South Africa and it’s no secret that the film is one giant parable for apartheid and the rampant racism in that country. Instead of a million blacks sectioned off into one gigantic slum, separated from the rest of ‘proper’ society, D-9 is filled with a million space aliens, referred to as ‘prawns’ due to their crustaceany appearance and bottom-feeding ways. Our story begins, in a jarring documentary type style, filling us in on how these unwanted visitors one day appeared on Earth, got stuck here with no answers as to why or how, and eventually became such public pariahs that they had to be quarantined off from everyone else. Then the story shifts to the now, when a large corporation that specializes in weaponry wants to shut down the slum, move the beasts further away from the big city and into another area for better control. That’s where we meet our reluctant hero Wikus Van De Merwe (acting novice Sharlto Copley), with the cheery disposition and blind optimism of both Michael Scott and Murray Hewitt, who is tasked with serving the eviction notices. His job purty much sucks, and the ruff and tumble evictees don’t make it any easier

At first, we as an audience are disgusted and scared by the aliens’ look and garbled speech, but then midway thru the movie the magic is slowly unveiled, and as the tables are suddenly turned on our man Wikus (we wouldn’t dare tell you any mo as to not spoil any of the fun fun fun!), we start to look at the aliens in an entirely new light and are forced to reexamine our own prejudices. Woooah! Nobody asked for such brainy goodness to be wedged into a wicked action flick, but what does one expect when it was made outside of the (mostly) brainless Hollywood system? It’s purty brainless if you ask us that they were unable (to trust Jackson and) recognize that Blomkamp was totally capable of delivering a big budget summer movie, hispecially since he delivered one of the bestest we’ve seen in ages, with no big budget in which to speak of

We Wear Short Shorts: here lies Blomkamp’s short film Alive In Joburg, which is free of any D-9 spoilers and totally worthy of yer eyes & thighs

Verdictgo: Breast In Show

D-9 grinds at a theater near jews this Friday

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…