Sweeney Todd: Tim Burton’s best film in years. Even without the “Ballad.” I like the musical, so I may be biased.
Juno: If you self-consciously inject class into your narrative– contrast cars, homes & attitudes!– and self-consciously model said narrative as a quirky, yet sensitive and oddly Real look at teenage pregnancy, don’t mess up my head by then having all of the consequences of pregnancy happen for the upper middle class adoptive couple. Don’t screw with my mind, man, by having the baby daddy fly home to the lower middle class empty nest and do an acoustic number.
I read a New York Times article about Juno’s screenwriter, Diablo Cody, before I saw the film– but even without the data therein, I would have been able to pinpoint the screenwriter’s age at somewhere between 28 and 32. Only a crumbling, decaying hipster would write teenagers This Cool while being totally clueless as to how The Kids Talk. One sees the project’s genesis in a single image: a heavily-stickered Macbook Pro with a window opened to the screenplay and a second resolutely stuck on urbandictionary.com. And, c’mon, really? Iggy & the Stooges and Patti Smith? I can’t suggest any plausible alternatives for the favorite musical acts of a Unique, Weird sixteen year old girl in 2007, but there’s a reason for that: I’m old. Whatever retro-wave the current crop of freaktards are riding, it sure ain’t the same one as 1994.
Wizard.
Walk Hard: Not exactly funny but astonishingly wry, with an obsessive level of detail. If you’re an idiot like me who loves stupid music biopics and documentaries, then this is your film. Sam Tregar, I’m talking to you. You gots to know, Trick loves da kids.
There Will Be Blood: Other than dating Fiona Apple, I consider all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s previous efforts to be amongst the world’s worst mistakes, but the trailers for There Will Be Blood had me anticipating this film. It was clear that something had changed. And I was right. The first two hours and twenty minutes are about as good as this type of filmmaking can get. Much has been said, rightly, about Daniel Day Lewis’s performance, but I found something completely genuine and realistic about the tone of the character interactions. Dang, it was great, and more importantly: it was like Paul Thomas Anderson had matured & shed his lapdog hangup about needing to be coddled and stroked by his master.
Then there’s the final twenty minutes in which one can smell the artistic self-doubt about what’s come before, including the film’s natural ending, and the director falls back onto his D.O.A. bag of tricks. Suddenly we’re in a Paul Thomas Anderson film. The only thing missing is Philip Seymour Hoffman singing and dancing in Katamari Damacy cosplay.
Gross.
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Special Bonus, The Brave One: It was raining so hard that I had to do something to take my mind off the flood, so I picked this. One of the most racist and paranoid films in a really long time. Awful.
