One blog. Two opinions. One zillion films.

Tam,

I appreciate you sending me nice emails from your world travels, but you should really post them here as filler. Gotta keep feeding the beast. I’ve been busy

• lamenting the passing of Alpinist magazine

• shooting more scenes of Killpecker! even though our target of the Alpinist Film Festival is no more

• gloating that The Snaz will add us to their blogroll

• being stoked that David Gonzalez piped up in Comments

• and conflating one note from DG into two separate bullet items, thus padding out this post. 

Also, I went to a 3-D Real-Time Movie, what you Earthlings call “live theater.”

At Center for the Arts they’re doing an especially wack Midsummer Night’s Dream, recast in a kitschy 50’s style. It’s very funny in parts, and the audience loved its lengthy list of oldies inserted between the ol’ quatrains. Sometimes the songs were showstoppers (Caryn Flanagan can really sing!). At other times, the show just stopped. If they completely 86′d “True Love Ways,” it’s a win all the way around.  

The cast is terrific, quite physical and bold. Most important, the actors ace Job #1 when it comes to Shakespeare: they lay real flesh and bone onto the Bard’s wonderful scribblings. I heard funny, sexy stuff I’d never heard before.

And a big logrolling shout-out to Cord Reynolds, Jamie Reilly and Kelly Bouma. They’re part of the Killpecker! crew and they’re in full command here on stage as well. 

Midsummer Night’s Dream has one more series, next Thursday through Saturday starting a 8 p.m.

In a parallel universe resides Wigged Out. (Really. Same show times.) I’ve been to quite a few Jackson Hole High School productions so I am not being fabulist when I say this: they are always outstanding. Not “outstanding for teenagers.” Outstanding, period. I don’t know if it’s the water or the teacher (Evie Lewis) or just plain tradition, but when locals kids get on stage, they are prepared and they are fearless. 

Wigged Out is local lore. It’s based on a horror film by local artist Greta Gretzinger involving earwigs, aliens, or maybe alien earwigs. (I have not seen the movie. I do not rate. Sigh.) Following Saturday night’s shows I got an unusual late-night call from a friend who is usually in bed by 8. I’d seen Midsummer, he’d seen Wigged Out.  He raved, “Ya gotta see this. You’re not going to believe it. It’s hilarious. The effects are amazing.”

I will. Final shows this week at the high school Thursday, Friday, Saturday. School calendar here.

One more thing. Don’t Fence Me In, the documentary on working Wyoming women by Bonnie Kreps and Charlie Craighead, is being screened at the Center for the Arts Tuesday night. Charlie, er, is the producer and cameraman and thinker-upper of Killpecker!

D.-

Such snowy nights are perfect for a trip to the movies. What a fine group you had; wish I’d been able to join you.

I may be coloring outside the lines, but because I suspect I’m not going to see this movie, I’ll relate a few observations my good friend Susan passed on about “Body of Lies.” Her take springs from a woman’s heart, a heart very sad and depressed over the world’s troubles. Wish she were here to write this.

Somebody get that girl a computer!

Susan was appalled by this film’s level of graphic violence; apparently she didn’t see any televised previews.

Oh, right…She doesn’t have TV! Luddite!

I don’t know why, but I could see the heavy duty violence comin’ a country mile off. Some movies are so violent that, if I’m watching them, I can’t watch. The heightened gore becomes so pervasive, positive attributes fade to black. Hands over eyes for two hours.

And I’m miffed, because DiCaprio and Crowe (big fat method boy!) are always great to watch. DiCaprio is an actor who can pull just about anything off, despite his boyishness.

Howard Hughes, for instance. Who would have thought he’d nail that bizarre, complex personage so adroitly?

Susan and I viewed “American Gangster” together, and that film was certainly violent; but in a different manner than this Scott film. “Gangster’s” sterilized violence didn’t bother me at all. I flipped over “American Gangster,” it was one of my favorite films, and the dumbfounding slight it suffered at (was it two years ago?) Oscar time made me want to go bury all Hollywood in a cement overcoat. That movie was a Russell Crowe venue, too, portraying an all-too-human cop.

Susan felt “Body” lost its message, whatever that message is. My impression was that perhaps this movie was meant to be a patriotic banner, as well as statement about global mistrust and terror, but that a morass of mucky violence and overly scripted action tripped it up.

Susan did not mention your Mark Strong, but she did remark on the actress playing DiCaprio’s love interest. Susan felt she was magnetic.

Hey, did you know there’s a spy-vs-spy museum in D.C.? How cool is that?

Susan left the theater feeling bleak. She does, however, think the movie will do well at the box office. What do you think? Is it in for the long run?

Swift Satellite: HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

T.

Weird, this snowstorm, like late November here in mid-October. Yet friends called who love that Ridley Scott. We foolhardies took to the greasiest of highways to join them for Body of Lies.

For a movie filigreed with hot-button issues — jihadism, torture, the Method Obesity of Russell Crowe — it’s entertaining and oddly irrelevant. The writing is there, with cues for a peace-love-understanding now and then, but Ridley Scott has polished his craft to a dull matte finish. It’s an action film. (His last, American Gangster, felt the same.)  What starts out looking like a timely examination of Bush’s counterproductive panic ends up being a picturesque thriller complete with the arrival of the cavalry at the last second.

Leonardo diCaprio is solid; maybe he’ll be Harrison Ford’s heir to those punchy trapped-Everyman roles. Crowe gives his all as a CIA bureaucrat, full of hubris and piety and an unfortunately tone-deaf Bubba drawl. Fellow Aussie Kirk Lazarus would have nailed it.

An actor named Mark Strong, however, steals the show as Hani, a suave, insouciant Jordanian spymaster. Now we’re talking: diverting fiction! Body of Lies is a well-knotted spy-v-spy-v-spy movie, John le Carré updated with cell phones that instantly connect halfway ’round the world and surveillance drones that can read today’s Garfield over your shoulder. Scary Commies are now scary Arabs.

Back home now. I took a few days off to haul a pal to Boulder, Colorado. On the way we attempted to camp in the Red Desert. I wanted to grab extra time-lapse footage for our upcoming blockbuster short film Killpecker! Alas, a BLM controlled burn some 60 miles away, and very weird atmospheric conditions, smoked us out. So we drove into the night as far as Saratoga, camped along the North Platte, woke up to a splendid thin October frost on the tent, and greeted the dawn at Saratoga Hot Springs’  free Hobo Pool.

God, do I love the West.

Speaking of Whom, it was a short Boulder visit with time for one movie. I chose Bill Maher’s Religulous. It’s very funny and scathing, preaching loudly to the converted.  My friend Ted found Bill Maher irritating — browbeating, elitist, the very sort of person John McCain and Sarah’s Palin’s recent ugly mobs would lynch given half a rope. 

I wonder if Religulous will make it to Jackson. It’s the sort of film Frank Londy likes to play during Frank’s Film Festivial but it’s not scheduled.  I want everyone to see this film for one reason: religious nuts run too many governments. They must be smoked out. Religulous is a controlled burn.

Tammy,

You pegged Burn After Reading’s key feature: its length. Just as 2 minutes, 30 seconds seems to be the ideal length for a pop song, 90 minutes seems to be the ideal length for a movie. The Coen Brothers are officially The World’s Cleverest Film Students. Among other things, they nearly always adhere to the 90-minute rule.

Burn After Reading is brisk, entertaining and, like about half the Coen-Bro films, dispensable. As I said, the joy is in watching it all unfold in its wry visual glory. The Coens must know this too. The very title is absurd; the plot hinges on secret digital files which can be copied instantly and infinitely. What’s to burn?

The title is an inside joke. The movie’s biggest jokes are more inside jokes:

– The highest levels of spookdom could care less of about “a conspiracy so vast” hoopla found in all other CIA movie

– George Clooney riffs hilariously on his own celerebrity persona

– What George does to Brad, and what happens to that Clooney cool, is script-meeting comedy gold

– Frances McDormand’s ruthless quest for store-bought physical perfection is the personification of celebrity-style shallowness made epidemic by the Military-Industrial-Newsfotainment Complex.

Burn After Reading is light, funny, silly.

Monsieur David-

Well, Pard–You are off to the land of the big orange rocks and I’m settin’ here in the misty mountains. Took in  the Coen Brothers’ latest stab at society, “Burn After Reading.” This compact film’s previews rolled at 4:30 pm, and I left the theater just shy of 6:15 pm .

As a review I read last night notes, the characters in “Burn” are all screwing each other over, and you’re not sure how the heck any of them hooked up in the first place!   There’s a lot of screwball action and comedy.   The story takes place in Washington D.C. and Georgetown, and concerns a purloined disk of data belonging to Ozzie Cox (John Malkovich), a CIA analyst fired for drinking too much.

“Burn” moves along at a fast clip and it’s a pretty mean take on our often hollow and greedy existence…not to mention our penchant for stupidity.  Brad Pitt, though not a great actor, is funny in his role as a hyper, empty headed, bottle-sucking personal trainer.   Frances McDormand, Pitt’s co-worker and friend, works as a gym administrator obsessed with finding the money to pay for a series of plastic surgeries.   A bearded, oiled up George Clooney is D.C.’s most adroit seducer – he’s building a ‘present’ for his wife in the basement that features a giant dildo and black leather easy chair.   After every tryst, George goes for a run. Tilda Swinton’s ice cold bitch pediatrician intimidates her young patients ( Moms cower in the examining room ) and is married to John Malkovich’s sexually ambiguous Cox.

There’s bungled blackmail, cheating and more cheating, surveillance vehicles, botched break-ins and lots of chase scenes throughout “Burn,” and all the characters, save one, have less than honorable agendas.  Everyone crashes into each other near the end of the movie, and a lot of bodies pile up in the river.  The CIA knows bodies are piling up, but they aren’t sure why.  J.K. Simmons is pitch perfect funny as the top-level CIA agent who just wants it to all go away, whatever “it” is.    Nobody else really knows what’s going on either, except the audience.

Despite the Coens’ condemning us, we can’t help but chuckle.

T.

I hope Joe Biden warmly advises Sarah Palin, “You don’t have to go full retard.”

-dav