2011: So far.

Wow, it's been a while since I've been here. After I dust off a few things and get the lights back on, I'll get started. I hope my writing has improved since I last posted here a year ago. Reading old stuff is so awkward.

To start off the new year, here are the new releases I've watched so far. In the interest of space and brevity, plot details and descriptions will be light:


Cold Weather [Aaron Katz]
Being very unfamiliar with the whole 'mumblecore' movement, my slate of expectations was pretty bare going into this. Would it be about the State of the Slacker in a post-recession world? Relationships between young 20somethings caught in a state of ennui? Doug (Cris Lankenau), a college dropout studying forensic science and an admiration of Sherlock Holmes, moves in with his sister Gail (Trieste Kelly Dunn) in where else but Portland and gets a menial job working the night shift at an ice factory where he befriends Carlos (Raúl Castillo). Their lives become wrapped up in a mystery and Doug, literally, puts on his Sherlock Holmes pipe and Cold Weather becomes the most playful movie of 2011 I've seen so far. Doug and Gail become the sister and brother of their childhood and play detectives, using a trick straight out of North By Northwest and putting on disguises, coming only short of using a decoder ring from a cereal box. Like any good mystery movie (see: Fincher's recent Zodiac or even going back to Citizen Kane), it's less about the ultimate answer to the question but the ride you take along the way. [A-]


Kaboom [Gregg Araki]
My only exposure to Araki before this was Mysterious Skin whose eerie calm struck me as far too stoic to enjoy, so when I saw the trailer for this day-glo mashup of MTV's "Undressed"-meets-"Twin Peaks" I was intrigued. There's not much substance here, but you can't help but find pure carnal pleasure out of watching beautiful co-eds fuck each others' brains out while unraveling the threads of a conspiracy theory somehow involved with a doomsday cult. Cerebrally, however, it doesn't do much to rise above nods to junk culture such as the aforementioned "Undressed" and Donnie Darko. But Araki is aware of this, and as quickly as there is the chance your brain might start to ponder something, the extremely silly camera wipes that not even George Lucas would dare use washes it away for us. [B-]


The Housemaid [Im Sang-soo]
The ultimate bait and switch: come for the supposed remake of the Korean classic from 1960, get hit with a trainwreck. Shot with the eroticism of a really bad pay-cable softcore movie and the empty opulence of "Cribs" (wow, that's my second reference to an MTV show), The Housemaid is just simply stupid and its biggest crime is how absolutely unsexy it is despite its beautiful women and its multiple sex scenes. Its epilogue hints at a strangeness lurking within, but none of that was ever apparent and it never comes anywhere near earning that ending. Just watch the original on MUBI.com. [D]


The Green Hornet 3D [Michel Gondry]
What exactly did people find to be wrong with this? No, it's not the cerebral whimsy you come to expect from previous Gondry works, but by God it's an action movie. What Gondry succeeds at where lesser movie have failed is to not foolheartedly tackle heavier issues that often weigh down these lesser movies, instead merely grazing them with a light touch and letting the silliness and the not-too-retro cool look of the movie take center stage. And for a movie whose 3D was only added in post-production (like most 3D disasters have been), the movie looks terrific with the glasses. The fight scenes liberally take cues from slapstick comedies and Hong Kong shoot 'em ups, and sprinkled with a colorful Gondry touch they are a delight to behold. My favorite moment among these might be when Britt Reid (Seth Rogen) gets into fisticuffs with Kato (Jay Chou, who isn't terrible) and Kato repeatedly punches Reid's head into a trashed HDTV, providing colorful flashes reminiscent of comic books flashing "BANG" and "POW" with each hit. [B]


Unknown [Jaume Collet-Serra]
It's a movie of cheap thrills, and it delivers. After all, as Manohla Dargis pointed out in her review, these kinds of movies were made for us to watch car chases on icy German streets. Yes, it's a scenario lifted straight from the Bourne trilogy, but it benefits from its lack of phony gravitas and the irritating Paul Greengrass-patented shakey cam. And while it's not really worth harping much longer on the merits of lack thereof in a movie like Unknown, what I did think was worth pondering were the confused politics of the movie. On one hand, you're made to empathize with a charming old man who happens to be an ex-Stasi officer who "proudly" served (Bruno Ganz), but ultimately the triumph of the movie is that the rescued party is a humanitarian whose work would not have been possible without Liam Neeson to save the day. Not quite at odds but also not quite aligning. Weird. [C+]