I'LL BE SEEING THIS

MOVIES FOR THE WEEKEND

I'll be getting the chance to see Werner Herzog's The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans on Saturday night, thanks to the good folks at Cinestudio/Trinity College. I am extremely excited.

Nothing from Netflix as I just sent back my recent rental this morning -- Big Fan. AWESOME movie. Writer/director Robert Siegel, who also wrote The Wrestler, is a major talent. It's an extremely dark comedy with a terrific lead performance from Patton Oswalt. Definitely check it out.

I picked up Fargo on Blu Ray for $10 at Best Buy. Gonna give that a watch this weekend at some point. Haven't seen it in quite some time.

THIS ONE SOUNDS NASTY

DECADE FAVORITES: THE NEW WORLD

For some, the cinema of Terrence Malick (The Thin Red Line, Days of Heaven, Badlands) is enough to put them to sleep. Not me. I eat it up. I had the fortune of viewing The New World (2005) 4 times theatrically. The first time was that ultra-private 2 hour and 50 minute cut that he released in the last week of December, in order to qualify for the Oscars (at which he was disgustingly snubbed). After one week in roughly 5 theaters, Malick, ever the perfectionist, asked theaters owners to pull the film, so that he could re-edit it. What was then released was a 2 hour and 30 minute version, which I greedily lapped up three times. I own both cuts on standard DVD and have recently purchased the extended cut on Blu Ray. The New World is a beguiling movie, a film that transcends beauty, a film that is both at one with nature and at one with the soul of cinema. I just love experiencing the world through Malick’s eyes; his understanding of light, texture, and atmosphere is second to none, and the pairing of him with genius cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezeki (Children of Men, Ali) was a match made in heaven. Utilizing only natural/available light, and shooting entirely on location, The New World has a gorgeous yet realistic visual style that is positively transfixing; never overly stylized, Malick relies on the beauty of the natural world to fill the frame. The performances by Colin Farrell and Q’orianka Kilcher are extremely affecting, as is Malick’s dreamy screenplay, which is rife with internal monologue narration which adds to the tone- poem quality of the narrative. This is a bold, quietly moving masterwork from a filmmaker shrouded in privacy who should be celebrated every time that he decides to unleash one of his works on the public.

DECADE FAVORITES: BLACK HAWK DOWN

Simply put, the greatest combat movie ever filmed. Black Hawk Down, director Ridley Scott’s uncompromising vision of urban warfare, set the standard early in the decade (2001) and has been constantly imitated ever since. Scott, along with producer Jerry Bruckheimer, made sure to stick to the core of Mark Bowden’s riveting novel, and in doing so, created one of the most visceral pieces of action filmmaking ever constructed. It’s a physically exhausting movie to sit through, harrowing all throughout, with a constant sense of dread and impending violence. With stunning spatial clarity and obsessive technical finesse, Scott and cinematographer Slawomir Idziak created a gorgeous yet brutal film that pummeled the audience with a sense of sustained cinematic intensity that few other films have rivaled. I saw this film 10 times theatrically, a personal record for one movie. Granted, I saw it 5 nights in a row at my college campus theater (for free), but for me, this is one of the most exciting, most intensely realized portraits of warfare that’s ever been created. I have had a fascination with war for years, and it’s always interested me how Hollywood has interpreted war throughout the years. Black Hawk Down is a benchmark in the genre. And it’s a film that tells a true story of heroism without bowing the cheap, obvious, and overly sentimental clichés. Kathryn Bigelow’s recent film, The Hurt Locker, is the one other war film from this decade that deserves to sit along side Scott’s masterpiece.

MOVIES FOR THE WEEKEND

Won't be checking anything out in the theaters this weekend.

I've got The Burning Plain from Netflix and recently purchased Moon (without having seen it yet, a rare move on my part) so I plan on watching both of those.

Last weekend I saw The Lovely Bones. I thought it was extremely stylish; it has some of the year's best cinematography. I haven't read the book, so I can't make comparisons, but I found it to be very engrossing, visually stimulating, and expertly crafted. The subject matter is a bit icky but Stanley Tucci's performance was riveting. I liked it more than I expected too.

2000-2009: FAVORITES OF THE DECADE

Much like my previous post, 2009: Favorites, this favorites of the decade list (2000-2009) is the same thing: my favorite movies. Not necessarily the "best" movies, but the ones I loved the most. Unlike my previous post, I won't be writing about each film individually...at least not yet. I've got a portion of them written up, but in the interest of keeping the subject timely, I wanted to get this out there in the hopes of generating some good discussion. So...here's my 10 favorite movies from 2000-2009. These are the movies I cannot live without, the movies I've gone back to over and over again for repeated viewings, the movies I adore above all others:


1.) Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down
2.) Terrence Malick's The New World
3.) Michael Mann's Miami Vice
4.) Tony Scott's Domino
5.) Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast
6.) Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man
7.) Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
8.) Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men
9.) David Fincher's Zodiac
10.) Tarsem's The Fall

Runners-Up (in random order): Femme Fatale, Narc, The Road, Gangs of New York, Where the Wild Things Are, City of God, Man on Fire, Collateral, The Departed, The Good Shepherd, United 93, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Punch Drunk Love, Ali, Munich, Minority Report, Oldboy, Wall*E, A Very Long Engagement, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich, The Dark Knight, Elephant, American Psycho, Gladiator, Wonder Boys, You Can Count on Me, Made, Zoolander, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Rookie, Bloody Sunday, Bad Santa, Shattered Glass, Bad Boys 2, Winged Migration, The Aviator, Team America: World Police, Friday Night Lights, Syriana, Kingdom of Heaven: The Director’s Cut, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Ask the Dust, Things We Lost in the Fire, Borat, 300, The Wrestler, Let the Right One In, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Bourne Ultimatum, Up, The Hurt Locker, District 9, Sin City, Public Enemies, Rabbit Proof Fence, Man on Wire, Traffic, Road to Perdition, Adaptation, Synechdoche, NY, The Dark Knight, Amelie, Kill Bill: Volume 1 & 2, 25th Hour, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Eastern Promises, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Gladiator, All the Real Girls, A History of Violence, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Up in the Air, Far From Heaven, Spiderman 2, World Trade Center, Watchmen