Three films a day

#53, 5/27 – X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) (tofw)

I was disappointed.

I liked the first movie, loved the second one, and looked forward to this one, despite director Bryan Singer’s defection from the project. Some of my understandably flawed reasoning went like this: Anna Paquin alone made the first two movies worth it and I thought surely she would be enough to carry the third. (She wasn’t.) Plus, they had the Phoenix storyline to deal with, and I was sure it would be fun. (It wasn’t.) And there was a chance that two-time cameo-maker Shadowcat would have something heroic to do in this movie. (She did, but one out of three ain’t so hot.)

Any X-Men movie needs three different elements (well, four). 1) The personal issues of the characters have to be dealt with; 2) A big evil plot must be thwarted; 3) The equal rights subtext of plain old Homo sapiens fearing and persecuting the Homo sapiens superior in their midst should come out; 4) Pure, old-fashioned action sequences have to come into play, too. And the movie’s got all the elements but I think the balance is way, way off. And, for most part, it’s the characters who were under-served. Sadly.

Take Angel, for instance. Warren is a plot pawn. His existence gives our movie its raison d’etre: The “cure” for mutantness would never have been researched or created had it not been for Daddy Warren. But all we know about Angel is that he has wings and he decided, fairly late in the game, that he didn’t want to lose ‘em. OK. But there’s nothing else about him, really. He spent ten years as a lost and confused mutant in the closet, and we don’t get any interesting insights about his character.

And so on. They could have done more with Mystique, but didn’t. They could have used Kitty as something more than a Rogue foil, but they really didn’t. They could have explored Rogue more, but again, didn’t. I know. A lot of characters. A lot of elements which need time, and very little time to cover them all. I dig it.

Despite all my complaining, I liked it. I just think it pales in comparison to its predecessor, which managed to get what I considered a very strong balance.

Also, I love Olivia Williams, who played Moira MacTaggart (I may not think much of The Heart of Me, but I thought she was amazing) so seeing her even for a couple of seconds was a treat. And it was absolutely wonderful to see Shohreh Aghdashloo show up in something that didn’t have to do with Jack Bauer, honor killings, or unfortunate arguments over a house. Lastly, it was great to see Hard Candy’s Ellen Page in something I didn’t despise. I got the feeling while watching Hard Candy that I’d like Page a lot if I saw her in a different movie. I was right.

[@Village Theatre North]

#52, 5/20 – The Proposition (2005) (tofw)

In a sentence, I thought The Proposition was a scummy, brutal movie about scummy, brutal people doing scummy, brutal things. I liked it, but not as much as I’d hoped I would.

I’ve had a few days to bounce it around in my head but I still don’t have anything very interesting to say about it. But it has seeped into my life in an odd way. See, in the movie, there are three Burns brothers: Arthur, Charlie, and Mikey. At one point when Arthur asks Charlie about Mikey’s whereabouts, Charlie concocts a story about how their younger brother had found a lovely red-headed girlfriend named Molly O’Boyle. (The truth was Mikey was rotting away in jail, and due to hanged by the neck until dead, dead, dead in just a few days time. It’s too bad this movie was set in 19th Century Australia: Charlie had the makings of a great White House Press Secretary.) Anyway, Sunday night I had a dream which swirled around a chance meeting, in Australia, with a red-headed woman named Molly O’Boyle. Like I said, odd. (Though, truthfully, I don’t think it has much to do with the movie itself and it probably just shows my love for the name Molly O’Boyle. I could say it all day long.)

Speaking of women named Molly, things set in the 19th Century and scummy, brutal things I like, Deadwood’s almost back. And I, for one, welcome my Dakotan overlords. (I hear this is the final season, though, and I am not pleased about that.)

Love that Molly.

[@Century 12 Evanston]

OK, I’ve fallen a little behind. Of course, in the month of May I’ve seen two movies—two!—so, it’ll be easy enough to catch up. I’d actually started writing this piece about Hard Candy on the 6th, but then other things intervened and so here it is, what, a couple weeks late. I handed in a term paper several months late once…. Or at least that’s the story I’m going to tell all my friends’ grandkids.

#51, 5/6 – Hard Candy (2005) (tofw)

On the train to the theatre I went back and forth on whether I wanted to see United 93. I ultimately decided to give it a pass because I’m pretty sure I’d leave the movie wondering why I’d put myself through it. Ironically, when I came out of Hard Candy—the only other movie on the docket I thought might be worth seeing—I was asking myself that very question. It’s my own fault. I never looked at the poster. The entire movie is described in that one image.

As far as I can tell, Hard Candy is getting mixed reviews from the critics and adoration from general audiences. In this case, I’m with the critics who didn’t like it. In particular Jonathan Rosenbaum (“what served as mere titillation in Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Audition (2001) now gets stretched out to feature length“), Mick LaSalle (“The movie amounts to a mere wallow in ugliness and shock effect and a real bad time for all”), and Desson Thomson (“Though Hard Candy clearly believes pedophiles should be chopped into little pieces and buried in an unmarked grave, its only purpose is exploitative“). In fact, I’ll even bring a little Scott Foundas (a critic I disagree with quite often): After mentioning that Hard Candy “calls to mind a whole back-catalog of torture-as-catharsis cinema”, Foundas writes: “Some may even detect the finger-wagging moralism of Lars von Trier’s Dogville or Michael Haneke’s Funny Games at work, though what all those films contain that Hard Candy lacks is an essential human dimension — a sense that its characters are made of real flesh and blood, bound not by bungee cords but by the emotional and psychological weight of their actions.”

Exactly. (Well, I’ll have to take his word for it on Dogville, a film I don’t want to put myself through and which my local move buddy despises. But Funny Games? I think that was 3000 times the film this was.)

Credit where due, though. The sound editing on Hard Candy’s most, um, visceral scene is so disturbingly suggestive a woman sitting in front of me momentarily fled the theatre; she didn’t come back in until her boyfriend went and told her the coast was clear. Frankly, I wish I’d followed her out and just kept walking to the el stop. I would have had at least an hour of my life to do better things.

Juggling live hand grenades, for instance.

But I sat through the whole thing and earned my red badge of courage. If I ever get to live that day over, I’m so doing the thing with the hand grenades instead.

[@Century CinéArts 6]