The Last Three Days

If memory serves, there is a reasonably shitty movie by this name. This posting is literally about my last three days. A period in which I saw three movies:

Just Go With it
Dogtooth
Hall Pass
Four Lions
Drive Angry 3D
Incendies

I'm not going to waste a whole lot of time reviewing these movies, but I will give my brief thoughts on them; Just Go With It may be one of the most predictable movies I've ever seen. It is a movie with almost zero redeeming features. There isn't even any redeeming characters.

I really only saw this movie to balance out what I anticipated to be a doozie in Dogtooth - a movie I planned to watch later that day. It's really hard to believe the two movies are even the same art form? Dogtooth is about a mother and father who keep their children completely isolated from the outside world. They are their soul providers of everything from Information to Sex (relax, they pay someone else to do it). It's an allegory for what it's like to live in a country like North Korea. It's also, as you might expect, a criticism of it. The children live innocent lives and accept it as they aren't really harmed physically in any way because they don't know any better. Things only start to go wrong when the eldest daughter sees a movie from the outside world. It's well worth watching. Going any further risks ruining the movie.

The movies are so stark in their comparison that it really both fills you full of hope and depresses you. When something as limp dicked as Just Go with It gets made it depresses me a little that I am not a heavy hitter in hollywood and that crap like this gets made based solely on a few stars without an exec. even reading a script (clearly). On the other hand, a movie as dark and twisted as Dogtooth gets made and I realize that all you need in this industry is a well told story and you stands a chance (how's that for a secretly arrogant statement!).

Four Lions - Funny but a little fat needs to be cut. It's about four borderline mentally handicapped muslim extremists try to plan a bombing in London. Things go wrong - and funny. If this is on Netflix or some other provider give it a watch. It's worth it.

Hall Pass - it had it's funny moments but there were no surprises. At least the characters are somewhat likeable. Rent the thing or wait for it on cable.

Drive Angry - It had some of the shittiest dialogue ever committed to film. The thing is, they said it with such confidence that I have to believe they know what they are doing. There is lots of violence, the dialogue is so bad it's funny, and there is a lot of action that is just plain ridiculous. There also isn't much to the script. It IS however a spectacle so I'd see this one in theatre if possible. Only if you are interested in this type of movie, it's not going to change any minds.

Incendies - The mother of a grown set of twins dies and leaves the mystery of her past life in Lebanon for her children to figure out. It is both tragic and sweet with some of the best cinematography I've seen all year. See it if you can.

On the way to see Drive Angry today, I saw this weird guy on the bus. I've seen the guy around and he is one of those weird for being weird types. I've seen him wearing a dress although he's not a cross-dresser. This was in the middle of July, so hallowe'en is out of the question. He seems like the nerdy type of kid one meets in University that goes to extremes just to reinvent himself because high school was miserable for him. I don't begrudge him this, in fact I wish him well.

Today he had a ladies trench coat covering a set of slacks wrapped up in socks to his knees carrying a leather backpack from the early nineties and a ladies shoulder bag. I don't know why he bothers me so much. Sure, it's a chore to look at aesthetically, but he isn't the only person that was tough for me to look at yesterday. He wasn't impolite, he didn't smell, nothing. The fact that I was bothered by him bothers me a little bit? Is it that I'm jealous that I would never have the stones to wear something like that? Maybe it's that I've always been a little bothered by people who try to use their wardrobe as a way to express their personality? Maybe I just think he's trying to hard? Perhaps that I've always thought that looking nice for your fellow humans is important as it shows you have respect for them.

It's probably some lame answer like it's a combination of all of them. Oh well, not everything has a funny and succinct conclusion I guess.