Wristcutters: A Love Story
Watching “Wriscutters: A Love Story“, I got wondering about what had happened to the ‘Livejournal movie.’ Around 2003-2005, every week there seemed to be some new quirky, independent movie that everyone was talking about on Livejournal. It became a rite of passage, a club you couldn’t join until you made a post about how you’d seen this movie. “You haven’t seen ‘Me, You and Everyone We Know’? Pfft. You’re banned from my journal until you do.” I used to whine about this so much back then. About how this was actually ruining my enjoyment of movies - I’d look around a cinema and try to predict what movies would become ‘Livejournal movies’ - but as well, it seemed like the studios copped to this and started deliberately making films for this demographic and hoping they’d cross over. They became so formulaic, you could play indie-film bingo. Zinging pop-culture script? Check! Big-name star proving his/her ‘cred’? Check! Electronic/Folk-rock soundtrack? Check! John Hawkes? Check! I guess the problem is that these movies have started crossing over into the mainstream. Last year, Little Miss Sunshine got a “Best Movie” nomination at the oscars. This year it was Juno. And shit, we all saw what happened when Donnie Darko became a hit with the xtravision crowd. Suddenly it was all played out and it got dropped quicker than a hot poo.
Anyway, Wristcutters (which ticks at least three of the criteria I mentioned) was pretty good. It’s central concept is so beautifully simple, it makes you wonder why it hasn’t been done before: people who commit suicide end up in limbo, which is just like this world except you can’t smile and they play Joy Division all the time. It’s got some nice, tender performances - like Shea Whigham’s Eugene, a Russian asshole with a heart of gold. And some very nice cameos, from the likes of Will Arnett (basically playing Gob, again) and Tom Waits (basically playing… well, Tom Waits, but that’s no bad thing.) But what impressed me most was how they managed to make such a sweet movie from such a depressing subject. A livejournal movie done right.
Following
R-Point
I’m convinced there’s a good war-themed horror out there somewhere. What started out as a general disappointment with Michael Mann’s The Keep has taken me through The Bunker (awful) and Deathwatch (starts out promising, quickly turns awful). From reading IMDB’s message boards, I thought Kong Su-Chang’s R-Point would answer my prayers.
It tells the story of a squad of Korean soldiers in the Vietnam war sent to investigate radio transmissions coming from a group of soldiers thought to have been killed six months previously. Which is the same setup as Deathwatch. And that’s the problem. Using the plot of Deathwatch as a foundation, R-Point tries to blend a mixture of Platoon, Apocalypse Now, The Blair Witch Project and The Shining, even going so far as to visually name-check some of these films. And among all these heavyweights, the few original things the filmmakers bring seem quite tame and undercooked.
On paper, it’s a recipe for magic: war-themed horror mixed with the nerve-shattering tension that Asian filmmakers seem able to tap into so well. In reality, R-Point is a disappointing anti-climax. Oh well, i still have high hopes for Worst Case Scenario
Shattered Glass
Good Night, and Good Luck
For me, Good Night, and Good Luck fell squarely into the same genre as Downfall: an important movie, but not necessarily a good movie. It ticks a lot of boxes and zipped along at a fair pace but never really engaged me any better than a documentary on the same subject could have. In fact, the chapter about the Murrow/McCarthy feud in John S. Friedman’s The Secret Histories did a better job of providing a context for the broadcasts than Clooney’s film and remains, for me, more entertaining.
Although perhaps that’s because I wasn’t being forced to chew down some paper-thin character development for paper-thin characters. I don’t know.
Walk the Line
As a promotional tool to shift a boadload of Johnny Cash albums, it’s fantastic.
As a way of giving casual fans a context to the songs they’re listening to (even if that context is clearly exaggerated), it’s pretty good.
As an entertaining movie, it’s a load of my hole.
Final Destination 3
Jarhead
As a film, Jarhead was as schizophrenic as the marine mentality it tried to convey. It swung wildly between occasional bursts of brilliant writing into lazy references to other war movies (oh yes, Apocolypse Now and the Deer Hunter, we get it). Sometime beautiful cinematography gave way to murky, uninspired, cliched imagery. Following the same template as countless movies before it, yet structurally, it was a complete mess.
But perhaps this is part of the point it’s trying to make and it’s done so subtlely as to be barely noticable. I’d like to think so, really I would. But the clunky, heavy-handed way in which it tried to make its other points leads me to believe that the word ’subtle’ does not exist for these filmmakers.
Killing Zoe
Copyright © 2006-2008 lowbrowculture • Didn't we have some fun, though? Remember when the platform was sliding into the fire pit, and I said 'Goodbye', and you were like, 'No Way', and then I was all, 'We pretended we were going to murder you'. That was great.