I watched Exit Through the Gift Shop the other day with friends and parts of it again today. I started to get kind of bored with it at first since it isn't so much about street artists as it is about the guy who filmed them. But then it got much more interesting toward the end.

I think that the accusations that it's all a hoax perpetrated by Banksy and Shepard Fairey go too far, but I do think that the ending was engineered by a small collective of street artists as a (very lucrative) bit of social commentary. Regardless, it's a very clever film.

I watched Mike Birbiglia's Sleepwalk With Me on Netflix a week or two ago. I highly recommend it. It's very funny and very sweet. Birbiglia is essentially playing himself, reenacting events from his past, but he pulls it off without coming across as an egotist or being overly self-deprecating. He strikes a nice balance, and the final product is refreshingly honest. I'd listened to the standup act that the film is based on, so I knew all the jokes ahead of time, and the movie cuts a LOT, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit.

The Wild Bunch is probably my favorite western.

But that's what I mean. Four of the samurai are pretty distinctive, but the others all blur into each other. Even the leader of the bandits is barely a presence.

In TMS, the cowboys all have particular traits and quirks that set them apart. The fake samurai (Toshiro Mifune's character) is even split up to make the kid more colorful (brash but hiding a secret), Bronson more likeable (the kids following him), and McQueen funnier (repeatedly talking about girls). And the bandit leader gets a far bigger and more interesting part.

TSS is the better film but mainly because its themes are richer and its action is better staged. Those repeated charges into the town are amazing.

EDIT: Of course, if you cut the characters down from seven to three, you'd have time to make them much more colorful. Plus, you could probably add an invisible swordsman or something.

Last edited by Zarban (2013-01-04 17:17:21)

Yojimbo is amazing, and Sanjuro is even more fun, if less Jungian. The Seven Samurai is fantastic, but not something I want to revisit as often, largely because of its length.

TSS certainly ranks above Stray Dog for me, which I just watched today. It was made in '49 but looks like it was shot in the '30s. Mifune and Shimura are cops searching for a kid who is committing crimes with Mifune's gun. It's great in comparison to other films of the time but dull by comparison to his later work. Its chief problem is that it's too much like a dull episode of NYPD Blue (or every episode of Dragnet), but only because it and Naked City defined the police procedural.

I have yet to see Ikiru, which Roger Ebert says is Kurosawa's best.

I watched The Last Exorcism on Netflix today. I didn't think I'd be drawn in as much as I was. The mockumentary style is an interesting direction to take what would have been a traditional found footage horror film, and it puts aside the question of, "Why don't they turn the camera off?" I also really liked how the film kept you guessing throughout as to whether or not the events were truly supernatural. The ending is terrible, however. Rather than staying with the smart, interesting answer the film gives us, a final climactic sequence invalidates it completely and goes out on a generic note. Too bad, because otherwise this is a pretty solid film.

I watched Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol yesterday. It was a weird combination of clunky and fun. It felt like a dull script had been punched up by somebody with good comedic skills, and then Brad Bird threw money at it until it looked good. The villain is virtually nonexistent. Jeremy "What Makes You Think I'm Not a Minor Character?" Renner feels out of place. And Paula Patton hasn't quite got the moxie for the role. But Cruise and Pegg are rock solid. The ending has an unintentionally hilarious moment when Ethan Hunt congratulates the others because they worked so well together... only they actually argued constantly, failed to trust each other, and fucked up at every opportunity.

I also watched The Fantastic Mr. Fox after stumbling across it and getting hooked. I like Wes Anderson but not enough to seek him out and so haven't seen Darjeeling Limited or Moonrise Kingdom. It was exactly what a Roald Dahl-penned, Wes Anderson-directed, Henry Selik-animated, George Clooney-starring movie ought to be, which is quirky, stilted, bourgeois sad, full of awkward humor, and focuses on people who are wonderful and yet often let people down. Altho thematically more appropriate for adults, it has plenty of appeal for children, if your children are nerds. (I loved the fact that the characters swear by saying "cuss" in place of actual swear words, which leads to a hilarious exchange between Clooney and Bill Murray that sounds like it came out of the airline cut of Glengarry Glen Ross.)

I just watched The Adjustment Bureau and almost turned it off half-way thru. It's a really well-crafted movie that doesn't know what it wants to be. It acts like a sci-fi thriller, but it's set up like a fantasy rom-com. The movie probably should have just been a full-out fantasy rom-com, with the Men in Hats played by Chris Rock and Patrick Warburton. Then at least the fact that it's a mash-up of Men in Black, Fringe's Observers, The Matrix, Monsters, Inc., and The Graduate would be more forgivable. It's a Philip K Dick story, so it was probably originally intended to feel more like Dark City, but the love-conquers-all theme overlaid on it changes that completely. How can you take Terence Stamp seriously when he's trying to keep two lovers apart by complaining about humans starting world wars?

So, basically, it's El Mariachi if El Mariachi had been edited on meth.

The trailer for Red 2 was released last week or so. As far as I know, it is finished

Finally watched GOODBYE LENIN after two years of saying I would. Good film, great soundtrack.