Author Archives: C.T. Bland
The Innkeepers (2011)
The Innkeepers (2011) DVD / Blu-ray
By: CT Bland (Two Beers) -
BEERate this movie!
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When I was a younger man, I drove out into the snowy forests of Missouri with a bunch of friends in search of the Joplin Spook Light, a floating ball of energy that occasionally reveals itself to drunk farmers and college freshman (like me) who were hoping to get some sexy time with a live human female after experiencing the mysteries of the spectral plane, mysteries that happen to hang out at the end of a country road in the darkest of woods in the boringest of states.
The Eclipse (2009)
Dear Reader,
You have caught me in a lie. What follows is not a review of The Eclipse, a beautiful, elegiac Irish ghost story staring Ciaran Hinds. No, this is a review of the thirty minute Kony 2012 viral video produced by “Invisible Children” and featuring alleged public masturbator and haver of a Hitler Youth son, Jason Russell. I feel it’s important to stay topical and one way to do that is by writing about things that a) Justin Bieber retweeted, b) were promptly exposed as ineffective and probably unethical “awareness-raising” nonsense, c) benefited from backlash backlash, and finally, were d) fully imploded when one of the founders took his Linus out in full view of both Gods and men.
We helped Africa this big!
No. I’m just fucking with you. Let’s talk about The Eclipse. It’s a movie about Irish people, a population also plagued by colonial adventurism, intracommunity violence, and despair, but without all the viral videos.
The Eclipse (2009) DVD / Blu-ray
By: CT Bland (A Toast) -
BEERate this movie!
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A Toast
Hinds, he of the perpetually hangdog face, plays Michael Farr, a lonely widower who passes his time in Country Cork by teaching shop class, caring for his two largely despondent children, and occasionally looking in on his aging father-in-law. Every year, his town hosts a literary festival, the biggest event for miles around (an indication that he lives in a boring place). He decides to volunteer as a driver for visiting talent and finds himself falling in with an American superstar/rake (Aidan Quin) and a fetching writer of high-minded supernatural mysteries (Iben Hjejle, who was in High Fidelity and has a name that is very difficult to type).
Kidnapped (2010)
Kidnapped (2010) DVD / Blu-ray
By: CT Bland (Two Beers) -
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Being a rich man has it’s advantages. People extend you credit as a courtesy, not because they know they’ll eventually be able to sell your organs for scrap. When charities call you on the phone, you get to turn them down not because you’re poor, but because you’re a dick bag. You get to move into nice modern houses with lots of light and keep stainless steel butt plugs lying around the living room masquerading as art/impromptu headmashers (more on that in a moment). But, with the highs come the lows. Sometimes three men in leather jackets and balaclavas break into your airy modern home and terrorize you and your family. If this sounds like your life then congratulations, you are the one percent. The plebes have come to take your shit.
Such is the fate of the family in Kidnapped, a home invasion film directed by Miguel Angel Vivas, who has a lot of vowels in his name and has managed to make a movie that splits the difference between Michael Haneke’s Funny Games and Trespass, starring Nicholas Cage’s severed head.
Nicole Kidman’s is also a talented puppeteer.
A Toast
This is not a philosophically sophisticated film. It may be an allegory about uppercrust paranoia, or it might not be, but it gets under your skin nonetheless. We watch three people, I’ll call them Rich Man, Rich Wife, and Rich Daughter, brutalized in very long takes over the course of the worst night of their lives. It operates as a gut punch, not a head trip, and its verite qualities add a veneer of realism that can be very difficult to watch at times.
The family is getting ready for dinner. And then they aren’t. Three men in masks break in and shit gets real. It operates on a level of such intensity that you might walk away thinking you’ve just accidentally watched snuff. It’s brutal, especially in the final ten minutes.
It is a credit to Spanish and Spanish-language horror that it is generally impossible to watch ironically. We owe Guillermo Del Torro our thanks, he took a genre that has all but died in America and gave it a fertile home in the magical countries where J’s are pronounced like H’s. Vivas does this new tradition proud and employs a number of cinematic tricks like wildly canted angles and cleverly deployed split screen to put us in the moment. As I said before, we are treated to a lot of very long takes, requiring a lot of editorial decisions to be made in the frame while the camera (always handheld) is whirling around like a mongoose (whoever blocked all this is a genius). As such, we are led to believe that we have witnessed an execution that is both onscreen and offscreen at the same time… which is neat.
Kidnapped is also not without a sense of humor. In one standout scene, Rich Wife and Rich Daughter sit bound and gagged on a couch while one of the thieves parks himself between them, snorting coke, eating cheese, and watching TV–It’s the most European thing I’ve seen since I was in Europe, blackly hysterical category.
Beer Two/Special Ring in Hell for Movie Executives
This one goes to the idiots at Netflix streaming, or possibly the distribution company, who decided that this film needed to be dubbed. Remember that stainless steel butt plug I mentioned earlier, person who made the dubbing decision?
That’s the one.
Now imagine it’s white… hot and crammed inside you.
The audience is treated to a supposedly Albanian man speaking suspiciously unaccented American English instead of the charming lisps and rapid fire trills that the actors on screen originally provided. I haven’t said much about performances, and the dubbing is the reason. What might have been nuanced with subtitles is rendered ridiculous by the fact that everyone sounds like they grew up in St. Louis and tried to lose the whine during their years at NYU. In other words, order it on DVD, where you at least have a choice about whether or not you’ll be treated like a dumbass for being American.
Verdict
Best watched on an empty stomach, with subtitles, in a house that no one will ever want to break into.
Bonus Drinking Game
Take a deep drink of Rex Goliath: every time someone’s head is smashed, caved in, or otherwise obliterated.
Take a Drink: every time the dubbing voice actresses fail to scream with the sort emotion we’d expect based on what’s happening onscreen.
Take a Drink: if you find yourself avoiding windows at night because you can’t see out of them when the light is on and hey that’s really freaking you out.
Texas Killing Fields (2011)
Texas Killing Fields (2011) DVD / Blu-ray
By: CT Bland (Four Beers) -
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Beginning in the 1970s, dead girls started turning up in the mesquite-choked wetlands bordering the I-45 corridor between Galveston and Houston. Like the lost women of Juarez, they have remained a mystery, haunting southern Texas and giving birth to local lore, conspiracy theories, and at least one film that, like so many women along that stretch of highway, appeared briefly in the papers before being forgotten and then turning up as the subject of a Dateline: Mystery episode.
For a movie directed by Michael Mann’s daughter, Ami Canaan (pretty competently, I might add), and starring a post-Avatar Sam Worthington (who doesn’t just show up to work, but actually turns in what looks like a real performance this time), and current it girl, Jessica Chastain, it was seen by almost no one. Danny Boyle apparently dropped out of the project, realizing that he doesn’t win any awards for making movies that aren’t ridiculous (I’m looking at you, Chai Boy).
If I’d had my way, you’d never be an uskawenneh!
Worthington stars as a sad sack detective, divorced from fellow law enforcer Jessica Chastain. His partner is Jeffrey Dean Morgan, playing a devout Catholic from New York, who just doesn’t get these East Texas folks. When the brutalized bodies start piling up in and around the bayou, the three work together to crack the case, which has pretty obvious suspects from the get go.
This guy is probably not involved, right? Guys? He’s not, right? Anybody?
A Toast
This is a story with great potential and it is to director Mann’s credit that she avoids easy serial killer and procedural movie clichés, instead focusing on the meditative aspects of being a small town cop, of being a hero out of his/her depth. The men and women portrayed are good people more used to busting up parties and collaring drunks. When corpses start accumulating, the locals start to realize, pretty slowly, how deep in over their heads they are.
This is Mann’s first outing as a director, but she manages to coax some very strong performances from her actors. Worthington in particular manages to slough off his squinty action hero exterior and, with a few stutter steps, actually inhabits a character who we might meet in the real world. Morgan and Chastain are uniformly excellent (as they are wont to be) and the young Chloe Grace Moretz, as the teen in peril, displays a certain soulfulness that tends to be lacking in tween performers. The actors acquit themselves as genuine human beings, caught up in a story that confounds everything they know about life. Everything about the film feels lived in, from the Texas shaped clocks on the wall to ceiling panels in the police station.
There are also some sincerely scary moments. In what is the masterful centerpiece of the film, we watch as a downtrodden single mother frantically calls the cops while a masked killer lurks behind her bedroom door–we realize it before she does, and it’s terrifying. It’s a well controlled sequence, which underscores the wasted potential of the rest of the film.
Beer Two
The good guys don’t always win, and in the case of the real story, they haven’t… yet. What begins as a slow burn work of dread, an investigation of parochial evil that lurks just below the surface of the South, ends in a neatly tied up bloodbath in which most of the bad actors dispatch each other with guns and knives. The mystery should feel deeper, more complicated, but it boils down to a few honkies getting their rocks off by hurting women and dying up in a Mexican standoff. Blame these contrivances on the script, written by Don Ferrarone who did not make the transition from cop to technical adviser to screenwriter with any particular grace. Texas Killing Fields, a movie that starts out as something in the league of David Fincher’s Zodiac (one of the best movies ever made, period) devolves in the last act to resemble an episode of Law and Order: SVU.
Beer Three
East Texas accents are a weird interbreeding of drawling and twang, taking as much from the Louisiana Delta as they do from the Texas Hill Country. I should know, my accent (which comes out when I’m drunk) is of the Northern Panhandle Slowtalk variety. It is perhaps not Sam Worthington’s fault that he comes across as an Australian impersonating adulterer and presidential candidate John Edwards, but it is a distraction. Complaining about accents is a niggling thing, but it’s exceptionally egregious here, especially because, given the pedigree of the movie, maybe somebody could probably have just called Tommy Lee Jones for a quick lesson.
Seriously, he’s not really doing anything these days besides shilling for fracking companies.
Beer Four
I stand firmly in the camp that says adaptations of both real life and books have no obligation to follow the facts religiously. Films are a unique animal and they need their breathing room. L.A. Confidential was a prime example of how one should go about the task of dealing with a sprawling plot, and it stands to this day as an object lesson in the utility and thrift of screenwriting (even James Ellroy said as much). I cannot, regretfully, give any such pass to Texas Killing Fields. The real case is so much more complicated, so muck murkier, and so much sadder. Mann and Ferrarone would have done well to borrow more from real life. Had they done that, they might have come up with something transcendent.
You’re better off watching the 48 Hours: Mystery retelling. The I-45 bodies haven’t gone away and the people involved in this bleak chapter of Texas history are still alive to tell their own piece of the story. Nobody saw the movie, but maybe everybody should know the tale. Or just rewatch Zodiac.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLGz5tdZYfs
Bonus Drinking Game
Take a Drink: whenever Jeffrey Dean Morgan says a prayer over a body.
Take a Drink: when you see the Shiner Bock banner, a just so detail that adds a shot of authenticity to the proceedings (it’s like mother’s milk in Texas).
Take a Drink: whenever you see the map of the kill sites.
Daniel y Ana (2009)
Daniel y Ana (2009) DVD / Blu-ray
By: CT Bland (A Toast) -
Be the 1st to BEERate this movie!
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We don’t need science to tell us that almost everybody watches porn at least once in their life. The internet is fifty percent porn and for the most part what people consume is pretty prosaic. But some of it’s a little weird. And some of it’s a lot weird. Incest porn is on the a lot weird end, but for the most part it’s not real. Those people onscreen may look alike, but they’re probably not related. But supposing some of it was real and there were people out there willing to pay top dollar for authenticity…
Kaboom (2010)
Kaboom (2010) DVD / Blu-ray
By: CT Bland (Two Beers) -
BEERate this movie!
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Director Greg Araki made one of my favorite films of the naughts, the deeply emotional and deeply weird Mysterious Skin, starring Joseph Gordon Levitt as a teenage hustler in Kansas. That movie, incidentally, involved aliens… maybe. Six years later, Araki returned to features with Kaboom, which is a lot like Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, except better. It’s also a movie about the end of the world hinging on the actions of a strangely touched young man, but Kaboom is less somber, more full of life. In that way, it’s more like Kelly’s Southland Tales (did anybody like it besides me?), an apocalypse that had time for dance numbers and Mandy Moore repeatedly uttering the phrase “cock chuggers”.
A Dangerous Method (2011)
A Dangerous Method (2011) DVD / Blu-ray
By: CT Bland (Two Beers) -
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(Full Disclosure: I saw this movie in Austin, Texas on New Year’s Day, fighting a mighty hangover and trying to piece together the previous night which involved getting kicked off a hotel roof and a really detailed conversation about David Koresh’s motorcycle. Also, I turned 28. Enjoy.)
I’m not a Scientologist, but I still don’t trust therapists. I come from the “suck it up, your parents’ divorce wasn’t that bad–everybody’s parents are divorced” school of dealing with emotional trauma and the only problem I seem to have these days is the one that allows me to write for this site. “How do you feel about that?” a therapist might ask me. “I feel nothing,” I answer back.
Psychoanalysis is a relatively young discipline and the two giants who invented it, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, while they were wrong about almost everything, still cast a shadow over the quest for understanding the human mind. Freud believed, in the cliff’s notes version, that all ailments of the psyche could be reduced to the human fascination with sex and death, while Jung took an even wackier approach, positing a collective unconscious, populated by universal archetypes which will absolutely touch you in your swimsuit area. Both theories sound really sexy until you have to read them in a graduate seminar and realize that they make no goddamn sense.
“How is this about my father, again?”
Luckily, we have David Cronenberg around to tell us the story of Freud and Jung when they were friends, then enemies, then frienemies in what would make for a lot of really interesting face book status updates had either been men of the 21st century. A Dangerous Method tells the story of two great minds brought to blows over a woman–ain’t it always the way–and while it falls trippingly across the screen, it is still a (minor) thing to behold.
A Toast
Viggo Mortensen (playing Freud and once again standing in for the clinical sensibilities of Cronenberg) plays the cigar-smoking intellect as a reserved, almost reptilian, human calculator, appraising every situation with a cool gaze and an appropriate sense of Edwardian smugness. Mortenson’s Freud is a man who always knows he’s right, and it would be infuriating if it weren’t for Michael Fassbender’s portrayal of Jung as a fresh-faced lech who seems to justify his actions always in terms of his jaw line and the baby blues in his head. His mentor, the inimitable Freud, is not happy. Let’s take a moment to reflect on the fact that it’s always nice to watch two very attractive people talking, even if what they’re talking about is now considered inane bullshit by most scholars.
The real Jung was also ugly on the outside.
Speaking of pretty, There is Keira Knightley, an unfairly (in my opinion) maligned actress who plays Sabina, the woman who both men take a scientific interest in, an interest which Jung translates into a full blown spankfest, displeasing Freud. Sabina is a character that could very easily cross over into Nell territory, but Knightley is self-possessed enough to keep that from happening. She’s written as an over-the-top (literally hysterical) woman who Knightley manages to turn into a flesh-and-blood human female. The Pirates movies aside, maybe we can all start treating her like a grownup actress who has the chops for this kind of difficult material.
Beer Two
The script is talky… really talky. And the direction is often flat (something that will disappoint Cronenberg fans). This betrays the movie’s origins as a (probably boring) play. What may have come alive on the stage here just looks micromanaged, framed in the ever useful (but uninteresting) medium shot. The film often lacks the energy of Cronenberg’s other efforts, even the more mainstream ones of late, containing just enough juice to make for a very interesting, very respectable period piece. Cronenberg’s stamp doesn’t seem to be on this at all–it could have been directed by the guy who made the regrettable/illiterate The Reader (Stephen Daldry, who is behind what I will no doubt eventually consider the worst movie of the twenty-teens: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) and been pretty much the same movie.
Twee: The Book is now Twee: The Movie!
Verdict
I was tempted many times to compare this movie to Cronenberg’s earlier film about a pyschologist’s unhealthy relationship with his patient, Rabid, which while more of a gut punch, and more interesting, is not something you can watch with your mom. Rabid had murderous midget babies, after all. For Cronenberg, a guy who has often plumbed the depths of science, or pseudo-science, for interesting, horrifying stories, A Dangerous Method isn’t all that dangerous.
Bonus Drinking Game
Take a Drink: whenever Vincent Cassell arrives to liven things up a bit
Take a Drink: whenever Freud appears with cigar in hand (actually, make that every time he doesn’t)
Take a Drink: for all the white interior shots
Christmas with a Capital C (2011)
Christmas with a Capital C (2011) DVD / Blu-ray
By: C.T. Bland (Six Pack) -
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Imagine that Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has been re-imagined as a tone deaf, possibly gay allegory with no sense of historical perspective. Now make it set in Alaska. That’s pretty much what Christmas with a Capital C is. Ebeneezer Scrooge is here replaced by a man named Mitch Bright, who is played by Danny Baldwin, one of the lesser Baldwins known primarily for being a drug addict and for having a neck that is trying heroically to swallow his head. One wonders what it was like for Baldwin to be surrounded during this shoot by literal mountains of snow (waka waka).
Mitch rides into Trapper Falls, Alaska as a fancy lawyer from one of the gayer blue states who really hates nativity scenes displayed on public property. Struggling against this tyrannical one man war on Christmas are the Reed brothers, Dan and Greg (played by Ted McGinley and Brad Stine or, if you prefer, a Treat Williams Real Doll and a Bizarro Josh Holloway). Mitch doesn’t just want to burn down the Nativity scene and piss on its ashes (or move it to private property as the U.S. Supreme Court suggested in ACLU v. Scarsdale–basically the same thing, right?), he also wants to become mayor of the town, throwing his hat into the ring with campaign promises of (probably Socialist) income from whale watching tours, and let’s say, I don’t know… plans to build a thriving bath house district. Eventually everyone comes to their senses, no one learns anything, and Christ remains in Christmas (on private property, as the U.S. Supreme Court suggested in ACLU v. Scarsdale).
A Toast
While every character in this film has absolutely no understanding of what the first amendment actually means, the ending does find our friends, Christian and Baldwin brother alike, compromising on the basics of constitutionality. It’s a nice little live and let live moment that underscores a core American value: you can believe whatever you want to, just don’t be a giant dick about it.
“Methinks I still question ye olde wisdom of including the phrase ‘giant dick’ in our founding document…” – James Madison
The Christians show compassion, and Danny Baldwin happily accepts it with grace worthy of Alec. America! It shows that maybe somebody was thinking when they wrote the ending in spite of the rest of the movie being a total clusterfuck. On to the beers.
Beer Two
One of the problems Christian entertainment has is its absolute sincerity. Because the people producing these films ostensibly live their values and have a very black and white view of wholesomeness, it may be difficult for them to predict what assholes like me will read into their creations. Case in point, Dan Reed has a son named Cody(!), played by Cooper Peltz.
MfW: discreet feathery-haired birdboy seeking companion with lady parts for family events and work functions
On the surface, Cody’s subplot has to do with a depressingly chaste romance that might be blossoming with the Christian version of a manic pixie dream girl. But if you look at the subtext, and choose to read very very deeply into it (like I do), Cody is actually a closeted youth struggling to come to terms with the fact that he likes boys. All of his dialogue sounds as if it could be from the world’s most downtrodden twink porno (seriously, just play a baseline in your head every time he speaks). This issue isn’t limited to Cody; every time Danny Baldwin and Ted McGinley appear in a two shot together you’ll find yourself wondering when they’re just going to fucking do it already. God! This would be funny if it weren’t also quite disturbing given that the people who made this film, who will watch it and recommend it to friends, probably don’t like gays very much.
Beer Three
This tone deafness also extends to race. Somehow, Trapper Falls manages to be the one town in Alaska with absolutely zero indigenous people in it; perhaps they all turned into Ravens and flew away, or perhaps including them in the story would have complicated the film’s already stilted understanding of religious freedom. The town does have one black character, a large woman with braces who not only embodies sassy black woman stereotypes, but also doesn’t seem to get what the big deal about rights is. Yes, you read correctly: this is a film in which the only minority in town actually makes an argument for crapping on minority rights.
“Christmas without Christ is like having 3/5 of a Christmas.”
Beer Four
Then there is the matter of Greg Reed, played by “Christian Comedian” Brad Stine, who my buddy Chris likened to Robin Williams in every movie he’s not trying to win an Oscar for. Every scene he’s in stops the movie dead in its tracks. Stine plays Greg like the tweeker on the street corner manically jabbering about the apocalypse and the masturbation practices of Skull and Bones. At one point he forces his gay nephew and preteen niece to act out the birth of Jesus in an impromptu stage play for his nephew’s potential girlfriend/beard. How anyone thought this would come off as zany and sweet is beyond me. It’s more like what flashed through John Wayne Gacey’s head just before his heart stopped in the electric chair.
Sawyer never made it off The Island.
Beer Five
It’s at about this point that you’ll want to close your eyes and imagine that Danny Baldwin is actually Jack Donaghy–Danny does sound an awful lot like Alec. Start playing that movie in your head instead of this execrable mess, which doesn’t even manage to use its gorgeous shooting locations to much effect.
Beer Six
The man pictured below makes multiple appearances in the background and has, as far as I could tell, no purpose or dialogue. Is he the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come? Is he a wendigo, lurking about the edges of the story in hopes of devouring manflesh? These are questions that need answering.
‘Twas pity that stayed Bilbo’s hand…”
I’m a secular agnostic. I like Christmas. A lot of my friends are conservative evangelicals. With that said, here’s wishing you “Happy Holidays” on behalf of me and Danny Baldwin’s neck. Also… HOLY SHIT, A BEAR!
Bonus Drinking Game
Have a Four Horsemen: every time you see the old man above looking hungrily at his fellow characters
Have a Glass of Manischewitz: when you spot the really bizarre Seinfeld reference
Have some Jesus Juice: every time characters appear outdoors in jeans and light jackets in what is supposed to be Alaska in the dead of fucking winter.
Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage (2008)
The Christmas Cottage (2008) DVD / Blu-ray
By: CT Bland (Six Pack) -
Be the 1st to BEERate this movie!
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Every year around Christmas-time my academic friends and I gather around a big screen TV to get shitripped and watch an inspirational Christian-themed movie ironically. It’s a roaring good time–once a former Vanderbilt football player almost choked to death during our screening of Fireproof because of its confused racial politics and also, you know…
Last year we selected Christmas Cottage, a film that tells the true story of how artist Thomas Kinkade started his career, saved his mother’s foreclosed house, and brought a town that is maybe run with an iron fist by Chris Elliott (yes, that Chris Elliott) together in the Holiday (sorry, Christmas) spirit by painting a nightmarish mural after skipping the day they taught perspective at art school. There is a pageant, some light cursing, and a weird amount of double entendre that the film’s target audience (your grandmother’s Bible club) will probably not pick up on. So, in other words, fun for the whole family if your family is a bunch of drunk graduate students.
Thomas Kinkade? Why is that name familiar? Thomas Kinkade is the “painter of light”, a genuinely shitty artist who for years has made millions selling hilariously overwrought, idyllic “artistic” abortions to one percent yuppies who were too cheap to buy taste. He is hated by art critics and beloved by Christians for his wholesome works featuring Jesus, soldiers, and weirdly disturbing Hobbit holes.
As seen on AMC’s Hoarders: Middle Earth Edition
And one could argue that Thomas Kinkade maybe really does process light in a different way. For example, in the film he is portrayed by Jared Padalecki, a very handsome young man who looks like this:
“I’m often mistaken for C. T. Bland’s homelier brother. Sigh…”
In reality, or at least to those of us who don’t see the light quite like he does, Kinkade looks like a circus goblin who doesn’t think you’ll ever manage to guess his name before the deadline passes and he takes your firstborn child away:
The light was being a real C-word that day.
The picture above is a mugshot taken after Kinkade was arrested for public urination… at Disneyland. A while earlier he was kicked out of a Siegfried and Roy show for shouting “codpiece” over and over… and over, in what one assumes were the sweaty throes of making sweet love to a margarita. Thomas Kinkade, painter of light, is too wacky for Siegfried and Roy, one of whom was mauled by a tiger while wearing glitter make up.
A Toast
There’s an ongoing disagreement between me and my friends about whether Christmas Cottage is ham-handed hagiography of a douchebag with less talent than most painting apes or a biting satire riffing on Hallmark movie archetypes. I’m in the latter camp. Exhibit one is Peter O’Toole (or, more accurately, Peter O’Toole’s corpse), who appears in the film as Kinkade’s mentor/banshee who lives in the family’s barn. He dispenses nonsensical advice to Thomas such “Paint the Light, Thomas!”, “Art is About Life!“ and “Close the Damn Door!” in tremulous, milky-eyed tones that will remind discerning viewers of every single scene from Awakenings.
In the course of the film, Zombie O’Toole recites “Humpty Dumpty” not once, but twice, for reasons that are known only to him; possibly he’s alluding to a string of unsolved animal mutilations that happened in my home town a few years ago (that’s how I choose to interpret it, anyway). He is the rabid bridge troll of the movie (he even carries a walking stick I assume was pilfered from Gandalf’s love dungeon), showing up when needed to speak in riddles and terrify children.
Unfortunately, the movie never lets us know what this crazed misfit toy truly thinks about the Chinese problem, other than that he apparently missed the memo on how you can’t say “Oriental” anymore. Exhibit two is Marcia Gay Harden as Thomas’ mother, who seems to believe that she’s been cast in a movie about hysterical women experiencing the first tingle of menopause. It’s a shrill performance that looks to have been phoned in from whatever planet Jon Waters is from. Her arc goes like this: “I’m losing my house! Oh Christ, The Pageant! Wootwootwoot! Why is it so hot in here?!? I’m not losing my house!” If my theory is correct and The Christmas Cottage is satire then O’Toole and Harden are either very much in on the joke, or very much out of it.
Zombie O’Toole: I made a painting of you as you slept. With my poo.
Hardin: I’m bad at math.
Either way, it’s terribly fun to watch these two established professionals shred their way through the script, which was written by a monkey (who is also possibly a Christian). If I’m wrong… It doesn’t matter. Drink the rest of your beer.
Beers 2-6
Whether the movie is attempting camp or simply stumbling into it by accident, it’s great fun to watch while imbibing and rewinding every few minutes to rewatch the characters say or do something that no sane person ever would. The man who pissed on Mickey Mouse is at one point likened to our savior Jesus Christ with utter seriousness–it’s that kind of movie. Did I mention that Chris Elliott is in this, playing someone who I think is maybe the mayor, or else is the king of the tent city all the pedophiles had to set up on the outskirts of town? There’s a moral in there somewhere, maybe about how being mediocre and following your mediocre dreams can sometimes lead you all the way to the bank?
The things that make this movie terrible are also the things that make it great. Like so many films aimed at sincere Christian audiences, the fallen heathen may well enjoy a viewing with friends while getting appropriately bombed.
Much like Thomas Kinkade at Disneyland.
Holiday Bonus Drinking Game
Sip on egg nog: every time Chris Elliott appears seemingly out of nowhere to do something vaguely menacing
Have a toddy: whenever Peter O’Toole’s corpse emerges from the shadows to clack its teeth together in a grotesque attempt at forming language
Down some Irish Crème: when Ed Asner wanders in from some other movie set to scowl at everyone. Seriously, he doesn’t seem to know how he ended up in this goddamn barn/banshee cave looking at a Thomas Kinkade painting.
Love Actually (2003)
Love, Actually (2003) DVD / Blu-Ray
- By: C.T. Bland (Three Beers) -
- BEERate this movie!
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A lot of people have asked, “what if Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterpiece about tangentially interlocking stories, Magnolia, was more of a holiday romantic comedy set in Britain than an existential nighmare about death and despair in Los Angeles?”
What’s that? No one has ever asked that question? Wrong, jerk off (n: 1. wanker)! At least one person has asked that question and his name is Richard Curtis. He made a movie called Love, Actually, starring every British actor ever born and, despite the fact that I am an emotionally stunted Texan who likes to shoot bb guns at stacks of cans, it’s a movie that I can’t help but watch all the way through when I come across it on cable this time of year.
Love, Actually is a deeply flawed film that, if we take cinematic abortions with the same huge cast/holiday/romcom formula (I’m looking at you Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve), should absolutely not work. Nevertheless it hits the spot because it understands that during the Holidays all of us just want to be having at least semi-meaningful sex with somebody who doesn’t steal our wallet in the morning, and because its saccharine message is delivered by some very gifted actors who know how to elevate such calculated material. The script has about a dozen plot lines, all featuring well-known performers from that Harry Potter movie you liked so much who are finding and losing love over the course of the weeks between Black Friday and New Year’s Day.
“In Manchester, we call it ‘Chimney Sweep Friday’, Guvna.”
Some of these plots are better than others, but all of them are fundamentally likeable, and all of them have that weirdly charming Englishness to them that never seems to show up in the horrifying selection of romantic comedies that is our current “Kate Hudson is a wacky career girl who needs a man” slate in America. London is imagined as a small town in which everyone is playing six degrees of Kevin Bacon with one another, from the goggly-eyed caterer to the prime minister, played by Hugh Grant (who made a deal with the devil, stipulating that his eyes will always be slightly crooked and he will never be Colin Firth).
“Colin Firth gets an Oscar for pretending to stammer. My stammer is 100% natural… because I’m so charmingly dimwitted, you see.”
A Toast
Two of the plots in particular are worthy of praise. The first involves Bill Nighy, playing a lonely washout rock star who misses the attention he got during his days as a pre-mummified Mick Jagger-level icon named Billy Mack. Billy is afraid of his impending obscurity, of looking in the mirror to find that his pansexual appeal has faded in the face of pre-packaged boy pop. He is a sad old cuss, who hatches a scheme to top the charts by burning every bridge he has left and generally not giving a fuck (you know, like rock stars did before Rod Stewart became an acceptable guest on The View).
Billy succeeds, but still finds himself alone on Christmas, save for the company of his long suffering manager. There is a wonderful moment when Billy realizes that, if nothing else, he has always had this one friend he could count on. The relationship has actual texture to it and when the two finally confess their platonic love for one another, it feels incredibly honest. We all probably have that one friend who will always pick up the phone and shoot the shit. Now’s a good time to call them.
Especially if they’re Bill Nighy.
The other standout involves the marriage of Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman. It seems like a comfortable arrangement, made strong by the passage of time, the birth of children, and a healthy dose of mutual affection. In order to drive the story along, however, Rickman’s character is written with a wandering eye and he soon acts on his urges. The moment Emma Thompson discovers the infidelity is a quiet one, set to the liquid tones of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”. It’s a powerful, wordless scene that deserves better surroundings. I died a little inside watching it for the first time all those years ago. Here it is. Ignore the first 20 seconds and the fact that everyone is speaking in dubbed Italian.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhDy0JeMSgo&feature=related
The plot with Liam Neeson and his moppet stepson is also quite nice, but I’m running out of steam.
Beer Two
The title is awful.
The title is taken from a monologue at the beginning of the film that’s all about September 11th. Get your own national tragedy to overuse as a metaphor for life, Great Britain.
The closing credits roll over “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys, thus making this the official weird English bizzaro twin to Boogie Nights.
Beer Three
Alan Rickman cheats on Emma Thompson with a horrible monster. Why, Snape? Why?
Release us from this Dickensian Nightmare, Spirit!
Verdict
Not all of the plots hold water, but the world may be coming to an end one year from the day of this writing. Whether the culprits will be the Chinese, vengeful Mayan prophecy ghosts, or congressional Republicans remains to be seen. In the meantime, it might be wise to appreciate the fact that some British loon with a lot of money and a camera put all of his friends in a movie that is fundamentally good-natured… and that love, actually, is all around (wah waaah).
Bonus Drinking Game
Take a Drink: when you see Andrew Lincoln (currently starring as a Southern cop on AMC’s The Walking Dead) speaking in his native accent.
Take a Drink: for every non-British accent used in the film (there are five or six by my count).
Drink A Shot: whenever Rowan Atkinson appears all too briefly, failing to justify his above title billing.
