Movies I saw in February

I'm going to make this a monthly thing. A list keeping of the movies I watched that month.

Eastern Promises

I am a fan of Cronenberg so I might be biased. But I thought this was tense, interesting, and really well made. Viggo Mortensen is always impressive, I have a soft spot for Vincent Cassel, and while Naomi Watts didn't really get to flex any actorly might in this, she was still well used. Some have complained that it's a "standard mob movie", and there is some truth to that. But I also think it has some really unflinching moments that other directors would have shied away from and other actors would not have been able to pull off.


Dark Floors

This is also known as "The Lordi Motion Picture". And that's what this is. A movie by Lordi, mostly Mr. Lordi, the head costume designer/singer/songwriter for the band. Don't know Lordi? You're not alone! And they're a little hard to describe for Americans. Think GWAR and add a lot more "dragons and demons and epic fantasy battles" kind of themes in their music. Less visceral gore and mayhem.... more dark angels coming to save the princess kind of stuff. They're from Finland.

The movie was far better than it had any right to be given that it was conceived and produced by a Finnish "hard rock" band with song titles like "Give Your Life For Rock and Roll" and "Don't Let My Mother Know". It was honestly creepy and unique, even if it didn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense when all was said and done.


Catfish

The distributors or the makers really screwed themselves with the trailer that they released, which looked like another "reality horror" vehicle. But thankfully that wasn't what this was at all. It's best to approach this movie like you would a documentary. You're just here to learn about these events, about these people. Most of the sour grapes I've seen about this movie come down to deceptive advertising and the torture porn kiddies who thought they were getting another splatter fest being let down by something that actually wanted them to, ya know, think about stuff or care about things. For me, this was a great movie. And I know for a lot of people I know online and in meat space it will hit some of the same chords.


Blood Simple

FINALLY saw this early Cohen Bros. movie. Now I'm down to just not having seen two for their movies (Intolerable Cruelty and their remake of The Lady Killers which I have zero interest in ever seeing). It's interesting to see them early on. It's definitely their "vibe" but feels incomplete or not fully formed yet. You definitely see a lot of their later work in its infancy here. And it's awesome seeing Frances McDormand in her screen debut. Overall it's a really interesting, slow, and satisfying movie.

Megamind


Way better than I thought it would be. Pretty darned entertaining and not too WILL FERREL SAYS STUFF FUNNY HAHAHAHAHA. Not much to say about it really. It's about 10 million times better than Despicable Me, which I kind of disliked.

Paranormal Activity 2

Still pretty crappy, but miles better than the first one. Because I don't automatically hate the main character(s). In the first movie I just couldn't wait for the douchebag boyfriend to die or for the main chick to walk out, get posessed and kill him, beat him to death with his camera... anything... something. Nearly unwatchable and really hokey/not scary.

But this one at least does a better job of dealing with the tension, pacing things out, and the casting was a heck of a lot better :)

Rifftrax: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Love Rifftrax. Go buy some of their stuff.

Winter's Bone

Amazing movie. I don't have much to say about it except that I guess it wasn't "big" enough to get the attention of the Oscar voters. I was really hoping any one of the women involved in the major components of production would have won. Instead Melissa "I'm a whore, pick me, pick me!" actually won for her role. Good for her. I hope it's the last I ever see of her.
What? Too Cranky?
Winter's Bone is again, a quiet, interesting, compassionate look at a completely disenfranchised group of people who have had to build up their own rules in order to survive. The strong female lead doesn't feel fake or too plucky to have been raised this way. She just has this quiet strength about her which reads and entirely real to me. Which makes the whole movie really compelling.


The Skeptic

Almost feels like a made-for-tv movie. It's not great, but it was entertaining. Ghosty/spooky stuff.


Date Night

I don't know why it took me forever to see this. I think I was on Carrell overload or something. It was nice to have both a male and female lead who are great with their timing as opposed to having just one obvious straight man that the other played off of. It really adjusted the dynamic in a way that made them seem a littler more like real people. It was also less overall goofy than I expected. Not a howlingly funny kind of movie - but definitely pretty good.


Don't Torture a Duckling
Early Giallo from Fulci in a style that he isn't really known for. Fulci is the director known for gore, eye trauma, gallons of blood, horrific deaths, truly nightmarish plots and settings. But here he made a very restrained drama/mystery. Parts of which play like a procedural cop show more than anything else.
It was incredibly interesting to see this direction known predominantly for sensationalism delivery a really tense movie about suspicion, superstition, the conclusions people in small towns draw about each other, and all the things you *don't* know about your neighbors.


So that was my movie month. Lots of show-based stuff in between. I'd like to keep up this level of movie watching or increase it in March. All depends on amount of work and how mushy my brain is after 16+ hours of it.

Skepticism makes me sad

The world is upsetting to me. Because it has fundamentally changed my basic nature.
Let's go through the time line that brought me to that realization this afternoon.

Still waking up with my first cup of coffee (it's been rough sleeping lately), I was scrolling through Facebook and found this link to a plea for donations/assistance.

It's a horrendous story. A man walking through Brooklyn gets harassed and then attacked and wakes up with a literally broken face. And he has no health insurance. But the donation page doesn't offer any of that information - that's what I got off of someone saying they knew him, one of the people posting this link around Facebook, often on the pages of prominent/well known Drag personalities who are likely to have a lot of fans.

In reading the page, my gut reaction was "how much cash do I have in my account right now?" My gut reaction with "help". Then, just to get more information about what happened I looked up the name. Nothing but a Friendster profile that hasn't been updated since 2006. So I tried some news searches - surely there would be at least one little blogger blurb about a really violent gay bashing in hipster-land Williamsburg in February. Surely. Right? Nope. Nothing.

Then I realize that there's no actual information about the assault, what happened, background. Anything. There's no police report as far as I can tell. There's no information at all about this happening. And suddenly - I realize I'm building this case for this all being a scam to prey on the good natures of these Facebook queens and their fans. Who want to help and who feel awful for this person. I realize that my instincts drove me to double check, to verify - like calling back the bank who just called me and asked for my account information. Like checking phishing sites to determine the veracity of an email from PayPal I just got. Like a million other scam-reflexes I've developed in my time on earth.

And now I'm just sad. Sad and frustrated that it's become only natural to second guess when someone needs something. That my gut reaction says that this is cooked up by someone taking advantage of a lot of people for really shitty reasons and that there is unlikely to be a Barie Shortell in a hospital bed in pain who needs my monetary help. And if there is - that need is going unmet. Because what? Because it doesn't add up? Because it feels sketchy? Because I've come to learn when someone taking advantage of generous natures looks like?

I don't hope this happened to this man. But I do hope that if it really did happen, that this is a cobbled together, poorly explained effort from his friends, in desperation, to help him. For the sake of everyone who is being sent this link and donating. Preying on the better natures of humanity is far far worse than preying on their weakness and hate. Because trust and compassion are extremely precious non-renewable resources. Once they're gone they're just ... gone.


I'm going to keep searching for something about this. Get proven wrong, and donate to help this man. At least that's what I hope will happen.

Until then, I'm just sad that my skepticism is so easily triggered.