The Trip List — Movie Quote Hall of Fame

Regular readers of this blog are probably familiar by now with commenter Trip and “quote wars,” a game he and I and the rest of you wackos often derail comment threads into (so not a stickler here for making sure comments stay on topic — topic schmopic, I say on that).

A few weeks back, a couple of us asked Trip for a list of his favorite movie lines, in part to better prep us for future wars (hey, that was my motive, at least), and at long, long last, the Trip List appears in print!  (Along with a graphic drawn by ME PERSONALLY, featuring a favorite line from the movie Airplane.  And yes, I won’t quit my day job and go into art, no worries, ya jerks.)

Here’s Trip’s intro:

Well, I’m really only brushing the surface here, and I’d probably face-palm at the mention of a few others I *should have* included here, nevertheless here’s a first list of quotes I like, which were more instantly memorable to me, and which I’ve used fairly regularly over the years on friends and co-workers alike…

And my follow-up intro is that if he missed any of your favorites, you know what to do, y’all.  Hit it!  (And oh, I know you will.  I know I will.  I know we all will.  We cool like that.)

Enjoy (and thanks for all the hard work, Trip!)!

THE TRIP LIST v.1.0 (edited to add the occasional self-serving link to a Boyfriend write-up or movie review where relevant, which was clearly not nearly as often as it should’ve been — I haven’t featured Bill Murray yet?  What the what?)

• “I came here to kick ass and chew bubble gum…and I’m all out of bubble gum.” – George Nada (Roddy Piper), They Live
  
• “We are the music makers…and we are the dreamers of dreams.” - Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder), Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
• “Your father was captain of a starship for twelve minutes. He saved eight hundred lives, including your mother’s. And yours. I dare you to do better.” – Capt. Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood), Star Trek (2009)
• “All right you primitive screwheads, listen up! You see this? This… is my boomstick!” – Ash (Bruce Campbell), Army of Darkness
  
• “Gimme some sugar, baby.” – Ash (Bruce Campbell), Army of Darkness
  
• “Bitch…you don’t have a future.” – Beatrix Kiddo (Uma Thurman), Kill Bill Pt. 2
  
• “Tell me of your homeworld, Usul.” – Chani (Sean Young), Dune
  
• “You need to be kissed, and often, and by someone who knows how!” – Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), Gone with the Wind
  
• “No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!” – Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe), Goldfinger
  
• “Until at last, I threw down my enemy and smote his ruin upon the mountainside.” – Gandalf (Ian McKellen), Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
  
• “Dang! You got shocks, pegs…lucky!” – Napoleon (Jon Heder), Napoleon Dynamite
  
• “Usul, we have wormsign the likes of which even God has never seen.” – Stilgar (Everett McGill), Dune
  
• “My name is a killing word.” – Paul Atreides (Kyle McLaughlin), Dune
  
• “Brandy! Throw more brandy!” – Prince Hapnick (Jack Lemmon), The Great Race
  
• “I crap bigger than you.” Curly (Jack Palance), City Slickers
  
• “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” – Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), Aliens
  
• “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.” – Clemenza (Richard Castellano), The Godfather
  
• “I like them French fried potaters.” – Karl (Billy Bob Thornton), Sling Blade
  
• “Let’s show this prehistoric bitch how we do things downtown!” – Dr. Pete Venkman (Bill Murray), Ghostbusters
  
• “Game over, man, game over!” Private Hudson (Bill Paxton), Aliens
  
• “Well that’s great, that’s just fuckin’ great, man. Now what the fuck are we supposed to do? We’re in some real pretty shit now man…” Pvt. Hudson (Bill Paxton), Aliens
  
• “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!” – President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers), Dr. Strangelove
  
• “It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses.” - Elwood Blues (Dan Aykroyd), The Blues Brothers
  
• “If you’d have fought one whit below your abilities, I’d have given you a good scar to remind you.”  – Gurney Halleck (Patrick Stewart), Dune
  
• “Only I didn’t say ‘Fudge.’ I said THE word, the big one, the queen-mother of dirty words, the ‘F-dash-dash-dash’ word!” – Ralphie narrating as adult (Jean Shepherd), A Christmas Story
  
• “Only one thing in the world could’ve dragged me away from the soft glow of electric sex gleaming in the window.” – Ralphie narrating as adult (Jean Shepherd), A Christmas Story
  
• “Well, I’m a mushroom-cloud-layin’ motherfucker, motherfucker! Every time my fingers touch brain, I’m Superfly T.N.T., I’m the Guns of the Navarone!” – Jules (Samuel L. Jackson), Pulp Fiction
  
• “Well, that’s a huge noggin. That’s a virtual planetoid!” – Stuart Mackenzie (Mike Myers), So I Married an Axe Murderer
  
• “I’m not kidding, that boy’s head is like Sputnik; spherical but quite pointy at parts! Now that was offside, wasn’t it? He’ll be crying himself to sleep tonight, on his huge pillow.”  – Stuart Mackenzie (Mike Myers), So I Married an Axe Murderer
  
• “The fact that you’ve got ’replica’ written down the side of your guns…and the fact that I’ve got ‘Desert Eagle .50′ written down the side of mine…should precipitate your balls into shrinking, along with your presence. Now…fuck off!” – Bullet Tooth Tony (Vinnie Jones), Snatch
  
• “Well, he should have armed himself if he’s going to decorate his saloon with my friend.” – William Munny (Clint Eastwood), Unforgiven
  
• “I’d like to think that the last thing that went through his head, other than that bullet, was to wonder how the hell Andy Dufresne ever got the best of him.” – Red narrating (Morgan Freeman), The Shawshank Redemption
  
• “Ha ha! You didn’t count on my loyal army of prostitutes, did you?” – Mitch (Norm MacDonald), Dirty Work
  
• “You will learn a system of self-defense that I learned after two seasons of fighting in the octagon.” – Rex (Diedrich Bader), Napoleon Dynamite
  
• “I ain’t got time to bleed!” – Blain (Jesse Ventura), Predator
  
• “The light that burns twice as bright burns for half as long – and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy.” – Tyrell (Joe Turkel), Blade Runner
  
• “Ray, when someone asks you if you’re a god, you say ‘YES!’” – Winston (Ernie Hudson), Ghostbusters
  
• “Why worry? Each one of us is carrying an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back.” – Dr. Pete Venkman (Bill Murray), Ghostbusters
  
• “Generally you don’t see that kind of behavior in a major appliance.” – Dr. Pete Venkman (Bill Murray), Ghostbusters
  
• “I hate Illinois Nazis.” – Jake Blues (John Belushi), The Blues Brothers
  
• “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Oswald was a fag.” – McManus (Stephen Baldwin), The Usual Suspects
  
• “I like how you burritoed me in the sofa cushions.” – Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga), Up In the Air
  
• “Mikey, why don’t you tell that nice girl you love her? I love you with all-a my heart, if I don’t see-a you again soon, I’m-a gonna die!”  – Clemenza (Richard Castellano), The Godfather
  
• “Training is NOTHING. Will is EVERYTHING,” – Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson), Batman Begins

MOVIE: The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band) (2009)

This quiet, disturbing film is the latest by Austrian director Michael Haneke, a filmmaker who doesn’t always impress me with his stories or even his point of view, but who definitely never fails to leave a mark on my brain one way or another (Funny Games in particular, Caché to a lesser extent — and watch for reviews of The Piano Teacher and The Seventh  Continent coming soon).

Annnnd, yeah.  You see that sentence right up there?  I’ve had that sentence written for a week now and I can’t seem to move beyond it.  I have no idea what to say about this film.  I think this film is absolutely brilliant.  Is it?  Am I right about that?  I have no idea.  But it makes me feel like anything I say about it will be almost necessarily stupid by comparison.  Bear with me.

Here’s what I can manage:  The White Ribbon is about a small village in Germany, set just before the start of World War I.  A bunch of weird things are happening — people getting hurt, barns being burned, etc. — and nobody knows who to blame.  There’s a pack of kids in the village who all act strangely — unsettlingly nice, kind of — and we’re led to believe immediately that they are the ones carrying out these progressively horrific  crimes.  Ranging  from ages 6 to 12 or so in about 1917, they would also clearly, then, be the kids who grew up to be Nazi officers and prison guards and the otherwise-evil perpetrators of great cruelty during WWII.

We’re led to believe that their parents, who are an unsettling mix of evil and good, are the ones who put them directly on this path.   We can see how that would be the case quite clearly.  For one thing, the ones who misbehave are made to wear white ribbons in their hair or around their arms to “remind them” of the type of purity they are supposed to be aiming for — marked, like the Jews during WWII, and raised to be obsessed with the concept of white = clean.  The movie is shot in black and white and is sort of hyper-lit so that those whites are almost overpowering in their brightness, the blacks then mostly just shades of various gray.  The look of this film is marvelous.  And very powerful.

There is a shot of a husband crying over the body of his dead wife next to a blindingly bright window that I will never forget — all you see is his back shaking off to the side while this almost painful white blast of sun bores holes into your retinas.  There is the sound of a injured child howling that I will never forget — I almost had to get up and leave the theater at that point, in fact, because the howling was so awful and so real and it went on for an absolutely unbearable amount of time, an amount of time that felt so much longer than necessary (and, oh, Mr. Haneke, I KNOW you did that on purpose).  There is the look on the face of a young girl who glances up nervously with a wistful, fake “it’s all right” smile at her brother while her father is in the middle of abusing her — I will never forget that either.  And, my god, the speech the doctor gives the midwife — that’s when I finally started to cry.  Her face.  Those words.  Her face.

I spent the entire two hours of this film sitting with my knees pulled tightly into my chest.  It was that hard to watch — I needed that much of the rest of my body between me and it.   And yet, at the same time, it was also oddly beautiful.  The narrator, the town schoolteacher, falls in love for the first time while all this is going on, and it was a romance of such quiet charm and innocence.  Such a strange, intense counterbalance to the other stories we were seeing.  And the mothers — the mothers.  Them too.

Oh, you see?  This all sounds utterly inane.  I tried to warn you!   Look, this film is impossible to talk about; you’ll just have to go see it for yourselves and do your own thinking.  When you’re done, come back and think some more with me?  Maybe then we can figure out what to say.

And man, it is SO time to rent some trash now.  Trash coming soon, trash coming in great quantities (aided in no small part by an upcoming trip to Mom’s this week, hurrah!).  Trash, trash, trash, and laughs — I promise.

[Pre-queue it at Netflix | View trailer]

Genre:  Drama
Cast:  Christian Friedel, Ernst Jacobi, Leonie Benesch, Ulrich Tukur

BOOK: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (2008)

This quietly moving collection of short stories focuses on a small town in Maine (Crosby) and the wide variety of people who live therein.  Tying each story together is the Kitteridge family, a local clan headed by matriarch Olive, a retired schoolteacher with all the social graces of a chainsaw, and her husband Henry, a passive, loyal man who reacts to most of the world around him with a sweet sort of gentle bewilderment.

Not every story in this collection is about Olive, but every story features at least a glimpse of her in its periphery, and as we continue to read the various tales of the various residents in the town of Crosby, we come to know Olive very, very well.  She’s a hard, wise, straight-talking woman (in her mid-60’s as the book opens and aging as we go) who doesn’t believe in beating around the bush.   She lacks patience for empathy, at least externally, and appears to be a strong proponent of the “suck it up and press on” philosophy of coping.

The strange thing is, while I started the book bristling at Olive’s every move — few things pain me more than people who are mean to other people, even if it’s just by way of a natural lacking in the empathy department — by the final story, I was wrenchingly in love with her.   Underneath the armor casing her outsides is a woman all too painfully familiar with loss.  In fact, almost every story in this book, about her or not, is a story about loss of some sort:  lost love, lost children, lost chances, lost will.  And through it all, Olive remains wrapped up snug in her toughness, bruises buried deep, enduring, persevering, pressing on.  As I read, I kept thinking of something else I wrote a month or two ago, a description of a woman on my bus who I called (in my head) “Sourpuss.”  Olive Kitteridge looks just like Sourpuss to me.  Right down to the wrinkled creases of suffering folded up like gentle origami all over her face.

To say much more than this would, I think, spoil some of the power of this book, so I’ll save the details about the stories, the characters, and the actual fictions for you to discover on your own.  Suffice it to say I found this book, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction last year, brilliantly and movingly written, almost vibrating from a deeply woven rippling undercurrent of compassion for the world, and nearly impossible to put down once picked up.

Read this one.  Even if you think you don’t like short stories.  Just trust me.

[FICTION]

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This Week in Steve McQueen: Nevada Smith (1966)

The latest installment in the Steve McQueen festival I’ve been attending was last week’s screening of the 1966 Western, Nevada Smith.  I’d actually seen this movie once before, at the impressionable age of about 13, and mostly all I remembered about it were the things the average impressionable girl of about age 13 would remember — the Native American woman being stripped to shame her and then brutally murdered (while she looked her also-being-murdered husband in the eye and said, “I am not afraid” — I never forgot that), and the romantic scenes involving first the Cajun woman who loses her life trying to help the hero and later the young Native American woman with whom he first experiences “true love.”

What I’d forgotten, or more likely not even noticed, was that this is actually a pretty bad stinker.

The story focuses on a young man, Max Sand (McQueen), who arrives a few minutes too late to save the lives of his (white) father and his (Native American) mother after they are tortured and murdered by a gang of three bad guys.

Max’s response, as a hot-blooded young’un, is to immediately pack up his horse and the eight bucks he’s got to his name and set out on a quest for vengeance.  One by one, he hunts down each killer and takes them out — until gets to the final one, the ringleader, where he suddenly has an epiphany of sorts about the (lack of) value of vengeance.

Meanwhile, he meets some good guys, smooches some hotties, etc. etc.  The story is fairly standard, though I appreciated some of the things the writer was trying to do with his tale.  But the direction of this film, and, I’m sorry to say, the hammy acting from Steve McQueen, eventually turn what could otherwise have been a fairly solid (if predictable) Western into an absolute wreck.

For one thing, the director, Henry Hathaway, tried way too hard to turn his film into something visually grand.  A visually grand Western epic.  There are lots and lots (and LOTS) of swooping, dramatic shots of stunning enormous scenery, for example.  And while those shots were, in fact, frequently lovely, it finally got to the point where I stopped appreciating the beauty, which served no narrative purpose I could see, and instead started to get really annoyed.  Okay, enough with the hills and trees already– let’s get on with the story.  I don’t have all day here, and neither does Max Sand.

Even worse, though, were the badly, madly choreographed fight scenes, which were where, surprisingly enough, Steve McQueen really fell down on the job for me.  Silly faces (baby faces, really, far too young for his character), poorly done pulled punches, and some “stunt” work that was absolutely laughable  at times — both clumsily done and ludicrously out of place with the action.  So bad.  So BAD.  So very, very bad.

The acting was so goofily overdone in places it was impossible for me to connect to any of the characters, the direction was an annoying and unpolished blend of lethargy and startles, and the look of the film itself was just. . . meh.  Uninspired.  It was like Hathaway had seen lots of really great Westerns and was trying to replicate what he’d seen without truly understanding it.  He was missing the point.  He missed the point completely.  He totally Passchendaele‘d it.  And man, I hate it when that happens.

Overall, I give Nevada Smith decent marks for theory, but low, low marks for execution.  Definitely one you’re better off dodging, and that goes double for fans of Steve McQueen.  (Avoid!  Avoid!  Avoid at all costs!)

Tune in next week for my review of The Sand Pebbles — three hours of Steve McQueen hanging out on a boat and periodically blowing some shit up in Asia.  Yeah, bring it, Steve.  I’m in.  I’m up for that.  But, please, for me, dearest good sir, try to act your age?  No more of this silly baby-face stuff and the flying over branches when you’ve barely been tapped on the shoulder.  You’re a man now.  Let’s not be ridiculous.

[Netflix it | Buy it]

Genre:  Western
Cast:  Steve McQueen, Karl Malden, Brian Keith, Arthur Kennedy, Suzanne Pleschette, Martin Landau

MOVIE: Carriers (2009)

This flick, about a group of four young adults driving around aimlessly after a pandemic has wiped out most of the world’s  population, is pretty much exactly like every other post-pandemic road-trip movie you’ve ever seen.  If you’re not a fan of the genre, there won’t be anything in this one for you (except possibly the pleasure of seeing Captain Kirk again — as it turns out, Chris Pine is always Captain Kirk even when he’s not).  If you ARE a fan of the genre, on the other hand, this movie will be somewhat disappointingly familiar, but you won’t really mind.  Because, well. . . because you’re a fan of the genre.  What more do you want, after all?  It’s a post-pandemic road-trip movie, dude.  *shrug*

The four main characters are two brothers, Danny and Brian (Pucci and Pine), Brian’s girlfriend Bobby (Perabo), and Danny’s friend Kate (VanCamp).  As the story opens, they’re their town’s last survivors of a worldwide viral pandemic, and they’ve decided to embark on a road trip with no clear destination in mind.  There’s some talk of a set of “rules” (ala Zombieland, but not nearly as clever), rules they promptly break when they encounter a father (ex-Boyfriend Christopher Meloni) and his obviously infected little girl.  The father tells them he’s heard of a school a day’s drive away that has a cure, and since each of their two cars has a problem only the other car can resolve, the two groups have to team up to survive.

Of course, in reality, they have to team up because you can’t have  a post-pandemic road-trip movie without some kind of Hope Mecca to journey to, and so, Hope Mecca: check.

What happens next?  Oh, you know what happens next, don’t be silly.  It all goes wrong, people die, we’re reminded again of the terrible things humans will do to keep themselves (and only themselves) alive, there’s some shootin’, there are a few scenes of gross looking dead or near-dead people, someone in the gang of four gets sick and has to be left behind, some militant survivors hassle them for a while, someone else gets sick and has to be taken out, the movie ends fairly lacking in hope.  Like I said: you’ve seen this before.

But hey, credit where credit is due:  at least this one doesn’t involve zombies, which I’d say is probably its one and only original idea (at least, it felt original in this day and age, when it seems like every disease-based disaster movie is really just a zombie movie in disguise).  Instead, it involves something far scarier in practical terms — a virus that is highly contagious through air or contact, has an incubation period during which people are infected but not symptomatic, and takes over a week to kill:  a long, long week of pain, sickness, misery, and isolation.

The thing is, despite what it lacks in the originality department (third floor, ding!), I still found this one thoroughly watchable.  The acting is believable, the story is tolerable, and I appreciated the filmmakers’ attempt to make a scary disease movie that would actually feel somewhat plausible.   If you like any of the actors, or you’re a fan of virus disaster flicks in general, this one is probably worth a rental.  If not, well, hey, why’d you read down this far?  Thanks for doing that.  That was sweet.

[Netflix it | Buy it]

Genre:  Deadly Virus
Cast:  Chris Pine, Piper Perabo, Lou Taylor Pucci, Emily VanCamp, Christopher Meloni

This Week in Steve McQueen: The Cincinnati Kid (1965)

First off,  let me say I thought this movie was filmed beautifully.  I was immediately struck by both the colors and the camera work — angles, people in foreground versus background, stuff like that.  Brilliantly done, in that regard.  After I saw it last week in the Steve McQueen film festival I’ve been going to lately, I looked up a few things about it and was surprised to find that the original director, Sam Peckinpah, had been planning to shoot the film in black and white.  I think that would’ve been a mistake.  It would’ve fit the time period much better, sure, but for a movie about the red and the black of poker, having the colors of the cards pop the way they did — and somehow, they really did POP — felt like a mandatory effect to me.

That said, I can’t help but wonder if this film would’ve been ten times more interesting with a man like Sam at the helm.  One of the reasons he got canned, in fact, was because he was trying to “vulgarize” the script, according to the producer.  Well, no offense, Mr. Producer Man, but this movie could’ve used a little vulgarity.  Or at least a little spicing up.  Because otherwise?  Propped up next to other movies of its ilk, it just fell flat and dull, dull, dull.

See, the story is one we’ve just seen too many times done so much better.  It’s the tale of a spunky young gambler, Eric “The Kid” Stoner (McQueen), who finds himself face-to-face with the most famously successful pro-player in the history of stud poker, Lancey “The Master” Howard (Edward G. Robinson).  After some caution from his friend and dealer Shooter (Karl Malden, who I loved in this, incidentally), The Kid decides to take the risk and jump into Howard’s big game.  Also joining the game is the rich, arrogant William Jefferson Slade (Rip Torn), who hires Shooter to deal the game and then tries to bribe him into helping him cheat.  When Shooter refuses, Slade calls in thousands of dollars in markers owed to him by Shooter and also threatens to expose a secret about Shooter’s wife Melba (the way, WAY overacting Ann Margret).  Commence much wringing of hands, as Shooter is faced with having to choose between his honor as a straight dealer and his honor as a husband.

That conflict sounds more interesting than it actually is, I’m afraid.

The big game finally comes and we watch the various participants struggle with their ever-shifting roles in this massive spectrum of personal relationships, professional honor, and greed.   But what could’ve been complexity and drama ending up feeling more like, well, like watching poker on ESPN.  There was a game.  Some guys yelled at some other guys.  Somebody won, somebody lost, the end.

This isn’t a BAD film.  It just lacks in oomph somehow.   And while it may have lacked in even more oomph had it been filmed in black and white as Peckinpah originally wanted, I think his proposed script changes probably could’ve pulled  this film out of its stupor.

Alas.  Win some, lose some, eh, Kid?

Definitely worth a rental for steadfast McQueen fans, and also for fans of either Malden or Robinson, who were great in this.  But for the casual McQueen liker, it’s probably one you could pass up.

Up next week, Nevada Smith!  Stay tuned!

[Netflix it | Buy it]

Genre:  Drama
Cast:  Steve McQueen, Edward G. Robinson, Ann Margret, Karl Malden, Tuesday Weld

BOOK and MOVIE: Push by Sapphire (1996), Precious (film version) (2009)

Two weeks ago, I read the novel Push by Sapphire, and then last week, I saw the movie that was based on it, Precious.  I had been reading gushing reviews of the film ever since it came out a few months back, and had been really intrigued by it, so when it left theaters before I’d had a chance to see it, I decided to pick up a copy of the book and start there instead.

Unfortunately, I think the brilliance of the novel so overshadowed the film for me that I wasn’t able to appreciate the movie version very much at all.  The story centers on a sixteen year-old, dirt-poor, African-American girl in Harlem named Precious Jones.  Pregnant with her second child (both children the product of incest with her father), Precious is kicked out of school.  She finds out about an alternative program in her area, Each One Teach One, and, after some nudging from a school counselor who believes in her, she gets herself registered, wanting desperately to learn how to read and write.

There, she meets Blue Rain, her teacher and ultimately the woman who inspires Precious to get back on her feet and press on towards a brighter future.  Miz Rain, as Precious calls her, teaches a class for teenagers who can’t read or write, and her unique instruction methods (she has all the students write in a journal daily, whether or not they can write at all, and responds personally to every one of their entries) inspire the students and bring them together into a tight bond.

When Precious has her second baby and her abusive mother sends the baby flying to the to the floor in a fit of rage, blaming Precious for “stealing her man” (which tells you everything you need to know about her mother, right there), Miz Rain helps her find a halfway house where she and her newborn son, Abdul, can live safely.  Eventually, Precious also regains custody of her first child, a daughter with Down’s Syndrome she calls “Little Mongo,” and by the end of the story, we know Precious Jones and her babies are gonna be all right.

The novel version of this story is written in Precious’s voice, the text spelled phonetically just as she’s speaking it.  While it took me a few pages to get into the rhythm of this writing style, ultimately, I found it absolutely overwhelmingly powerful.  It takes us right into her head, and the details of her emotional responses to her repeated rapes by her father literally made me break down and weep time and time again.  So much confusion, so much shame, so much terror, and all in such a little, little girl.  It’s just heartbreaking.  To then watch her writing change as she begins to learn from and be inspired by her teacher is a revelation, and by the end of this novel, I felt like I knew Precious Jones as well as I’ve ever known anybody.  I loved her.  I loved her.

The film, on the other hand, kind of robs you of that inside look at Precious, and necessarily so.   It can’t be filmed the way it was written — there’s no way to make that work.  But without that intense inner voice, that uniqueness, the story ends up losing a lot of its impact and mostly just ended up feeling t0 me like every other inspiring-schoolteacher-with-poor-troubled-students film I’ve ever seen.  It follows exactly that pattern and, as such, is pretty predictable.

That said, the acting in the film is phenomenal.  I was moved very much by Gabourey Sidibe’s performance as Precious, and Mo’Nique’s, as her brutal, equally-broken mother (Mo’Nique just won a Golden Globe for this role, I believe).  Actress Paula Patton (Deja Vu and Mirrors) is also great in the role of Blue Rain and it was nice to see her in a meatier part like this at last.   Additionally, Lenny Kravitz surprised me by showing up (What the. . .?  Is that LENNY KRAVITZ?)  and then doing a pretty decent job with his role as Precious’s maternity ward nurse, and even though he was clearly added to the film as eye candy (his character isn’t in the book at all, I don’t think), I did not mind this one iota.  No sir.  Not one bit.

Overall, I think this is an absolutely riveting, beautiful, inspiring story, and one not to be missed.  But my recommendation is to skip the movie and go straight to the book.  If you feel a need to cover both bases, I’d suggest, in that case, starting with the film.  I think if I’d gone that route myself, I would’ve appreciated the film a lot more than I did.  Instead, the moment the movie was over, I just wanted to pick the book back up again so I could reacquaint myself with the REAL Precious.  She is, quite simply, an inspiration.

Highly recommended!

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[Buy the movie | Netflix it]

Genre:  Fiction/Drama
Film cast:  Mo’Nique, Gabourey Sidibe, Paula Patton, Mariah Carrey, Lenny Kravitz

MOVIE: Heartland (1980)

The other day at Scarecrow Video (my favorite local video rental shop), I found myself pressed for time and needed to find a second movie to rent fast (it was two-for-one day and what idiot only rents one on two-for-one day?).  So, you know what I did?  I went up to the Independent Drama section, closed my eyes, reached out, and picked a box off the shelf at random.  This is the movie I ended up with, and, I’ll confess, I almost put it back when I flipped it over to read the description.  I mean, really, how many times have I seen this EXACT movie?  A million times.  A million, at least.  The box described it as a film about a widow who takes her daughter to Wyoming in 1910 to work for an unmarried rancher who needs a housekeeper, and if you can’t predict exactly where this is headed, then you haven’t been paying attention.

Thing is, even though everything I expected to take place in this film did, in fact, take place in this film, I still ended up loving it.  For one thing, I have always adored Conchata Ferrell, though I confess I never knew that was her name until today.  Remember her as the pizza parlor owner in Mystic Pizza?  Or how about as the boisterous nurse in that 80’s sitcom with George Clooney, E/R?  Always loved her, and man, does she ever carry this whole movie on her shoulders too.  Ferrell plays Elinore Randall, a middle-aged widow with a 7 year-old daughter  who finds herself forced to move from Denver to Wyoming when she loses her job and needs another one.  Rancher Clyde Stewart (Rip Torn) pays her way, under the contract she’ll stay a full year, and their first encounter is when she gets off the train after a long, long journey and he hands her a shopping list and walks off.  Friendly, that guy.

At first, the relationship between Randall and Stewart is an awkward one.  He’s not much of a talker, she’s pretty no-nonsense, and, man, can you imagine having to live that closely with someone you don’t even know?  It’s a two-room ranch house — it’s close quarters.  But as time passes, Randall and Stewart begin to slip comfortably into a routine.  It’s not love at first sight, but it’s functional.  It works.  It’ll do.

Only Randall’s not one to sit still anywhere in life, and the more of Wyoming she sees, the more she begins to love the land and long for her own place, having “worked for others all [her] life.”  When she puts a claim down on the land abutting Stewart’s ranch, he sits her down and gives her the straight talk about how hard it is to make it alone as a rancher in Wyoming, especially in the winters, which are long and brutal.  The conversation ends with a dose of practicality — why don’t we just get married?

So, they do.  And then they have a son.  And then their son dies during their first hard, hard winter together, and so does a lot of their cattle, taken by snow, taken by starvation, taken by disease.  But when spring rolls around and their grief begins to settle, Randall and Stewart emerge as a strong, loving unit, and life goes forward.  Life goes well.  Life has hope and companionship and peace at last.  It’s hard, that life.  But now — now — it can be done.

So yes, you see?  It’s just like every other movie you’ve ever seen about this — hardscrabble people in a hardscrabble land coming together to make things just a little less hardscrabble.  But this one is filmed well, written well, acted well, and features a lady who has, hands down, the greatest laugh in the history of laughs (oh, Conchatta, I love you, keep laughing, never stop).

Definitely recommended, and hey, you know what?  I think I’ll do that blind-selection thing again this Wednesday at Scarecrow too.  So far, so good.

[Netflix it | Buy it]

Genre:  Western
Cast:  Rip Torn, Conchata Ferrell, Lilia Skala, Barry Primus

Best of 2009 Lists Up at the Boyfriend of the Week!

Finally finished my annual list of best books, good movies, and bad movies read/seen in the last year.  Check it out and let me know if I missed any of your favorites!  And Happy 2010 to all you guys.  Thanks for reading and here’s to another 12 months of incredibly cute boys.

http://megwood.com

MOVIE: Humpday (2009)

Okay, first things first, it kind of blows my mind that this movie is both filed under “Comedy” and has the phrase “phenomenally funny!” written in large, white letters across its cover art.  Because while, yes, this movie has its truly funny moments, it is SO not what I would consider a comedy.  Instead, I found this film to be an extremely tender, compassionate, and thoughtful look at friendship and love.  And man, while the concept definitely makes it sound like you’re in for a crazy laugh riot, if you spent the entire film snorting and giggling, YOU DID NOT GET IT, my dear, obtuse friend.

In some ways, the central storyline of this film is not all that new.  It’s about two men who were best pals in college and reunite after a long absence to find they’ve taken completely separate paths.  Ben (Mark Duplass of the fabulous grin) got married, has a steady job, and is now trying to start a family.  Andrew (Josh Leonard of the delightful eye-crinkles), on the other hand, has been tooling around the world starting art project after art project, finishing nothing, but striving always for adventurous greatness.  When Andrew finds himself back in town briefly, he decides to pay a visit on Ben, crashing his pad at about 1 in the morning.  Groggy, Ben and his wife Anna (Alycia Delmore of the great bangs) offer to let Andrew spend the night in their back room.

Andrew’s plan to keep the visit short gets revised, though, when the next day he meets a lovely bisexual (director Lynn Shelton) who invites him over for a party at her place that night.  Andrew in turn invites Ben, who half-heartedly invites Anna, who instead suggests he have a lovely time by himself and make it home in time for dinner.  The party is pretty crazy, however, and Ben gets sucked into it quickly, losing track of time.  By the time the conversation turns to porn, both Ben and Andrew are pretty wasted, and when one of the locals brings up the weekly newspaper’s annual Humpfest competition, they are instantly, drunkenly intrigued.  The contest goes like this (and, incidentally, the paper is Seattle’s weekly, The Stranger, and Humpfest is totally real):  enter a homemade porn movie into a contest, watch a screening of it and the other entries, vote for your favorites, win fabulous prizes.

Forgetting all about the waiting Anna, Ben and Andrew quickly pledge to make the perfect entry of all time for Humpfest.  The most original concept ever, brilliantly filmed, total ART.  What they’ll do, they say, is film themselves having sex:  two heterosexual males, loving friends, expressing their affection for each other in a way that is stereotypically WAY, WAY TABOO for straight guys.  It’s “beyond gay,” they say.  It’s virtually guaranteed to win!

The next day, sobered up, the ramifications of this pledge start to reveal themselves to the fellas, who have several long conversations and finally agree to go ahead and give it a shot.  Meanwhile, Ben lies to Anna about it, and Andrew doesn’t, which leads to a whole lotta messy marital conflict.  And while I understood why Anna might be a bit weirded out by the entire concept (oh, sort of, anyway), I do have to say I was really no big fan of hers.  Some of that was because of the painful, painful spectacle of a woman so desperate to have a baby she’s completely separated the act of sex from romantic-love-type emotion.  And then has the gall to go all bonkers about her husband when he, essentially, declares he wants to do roughly the same thing.  Some of it was just the sulking.  She sulks a LOT.  Much as I loved her bangs, I do sort of hate sulkers.  Oh, I have issues.  I’ll shut up.

Andrew and Ben, on the other hand, I absolutely adored.  Their relationship is fascinating and believable, and the dialogue, much of it apparently improvised (something Leonard in particular has demonstrated he’s quite adept at), is sharp and just so, so RIGHT.  Their conversation in the hotel room, when they finally come together to make their film, is among the best dialogue between two male friends in a movie I’ve ever encountered.  It was just so authentic.  I felt like I was standing in the hallway eavesdropping while this real thing was happening to these real people just beyond the door.  This is almost exactly the same reaction I had to Shelton’s earlier film, My Effortless Brilliance (which costars Basil Harris, by the way, one of the members of the ex-Boyfriend of the Week band Awesome), and I was pleased beyond reason to discover that it wasn’t just a fluke.  There’s something about the way her characters talk to each other that hits it right smack on for me, and I love that.  I love it so very, very much.  I think it’s amazing and rare and great.  I think this movie is amazing and great.  I think Lynn Shelton is amazing and great.  And, while I’m at it, let me also mention that I think Josh Leonard’s eye crinkles are amazing and great.  (Watch for him in an upcoming Boyfriend of the Week write-up, by the way, because I can resist his charms no longer.)

Consider me a fan, Ms. Shelton.  And believe you me, I’m in it for the long haul after this one. Looking forward to what you do next.  Though, I do have a question for you — I’ve now seen two of your films, and both of them featured one character telling another character that their hair smelled really great.  Is that line your yellow Oldsmobile Delta 88?  Do you know what I’m talking about?  In any case, I’m looking forward to hearing that line for a long, long time.  Bring it on, lady.

[Netflix it (available on Watch Now) | Buy it]

Genre:  Drama, Not Really Comedy
Cast:  Mark Duplass, Joshua Leonard, Alycia Delmore, Lynn Shelton