A Serious Man
Written and Directed by: Joel and Ethan Coen
Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Aaron Wolff

In an age of high profile franchise blockbusters, months in advance it becomes very apparent via very expensive marketing campaigns what the year’s event films are going to be. For me though, it is instead a handful of directors’ names that predetermine who is getting my money and attention. It should be obvious by the fact that I’d even write this that the Coen Brothers are on this list, and it’s wonderful to have such a list when it means you can walk into one of their films relatively cold. It also brings an entirely different set of expectations than you’d give something that has spent months doing everything it can to impress you.

My expectations from the Coens have become numerous — I now demand a higher level of quality. I look forward to a certain kind of dialogue, where side characters repeat each others’ names with condescending derision and yes, may even have catchphrases. They are realistic but ridiculous, lovable but also worthy of being shit upon by each other at any given moment for my entertainment. I expect that the plot will have moments where doing the right thing is punished worse than doing something underhanded. And of course, if Roger Deakins is on board, it will look fantastic. The Coens tick off all these marks with ease here, in a film I would argue is a Coen film for Coen fanboys. Do the Coens have a formula? Sort of, but to use a catchphrase from A Serious Man, they’re also Fuckers. This is their true trademark, and I am happy to say I was fucked with more than enough times in A Serious Man to get more than I expected.

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The Invention of Lying
Written and Directed by: Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson
Starring: Ricky Gervais, Jennifer Garner, Rob Lowe, Louis CK, Jonah Hill

You have to wonder what kind of person has it within them these days to conceive of a fantasy-based comedy and believe in it enough to see it through. Movies like this simply haven’t been very good or funny lately, and despite a promising trailer, The Invention of Lying seemed destined to contain a zillion unexplainable and/or nonsensical holes, and would at best resemble a mediocre SNL skit stretched to 90 minutes. Most people opined that it looked like another take on Jim Carrey’s Liar Liar. But of all things I worried that the brilliant creator of The Office, Ricky Gervais, would turn out a high concept comedy as torturous to sit through as Year One or Click. While it turns out that while some of these fears were well-founded, I’m also pleased to say that I was wrong to underestimate Gervais when he has more to deliver than just laughs.

Like many other comedies with outlandish premises, this film has a tough challenge of finding a balance between fleshing out the world with effective satire while at the same time delivering believable characters and an actual story. Groundhog Day succeeds by being somewhat of a “time travel” movie, with real people who are merely living each day anew. Idiocracy falters (although I’ve come to like it a lot more on rewatches) by having so much to say about an idiotic future that it has no time to breathe, and thus its main cast of characters are uninteresting, and the supporting players are actually overplaying their part to a cartoonish end that ironically undermines the premise for the sake of humor. The Invention of Lying lies (ugh, no pun intended) somewhere in the middle, meaning we end up with a likable, occasionally charming movie with something to say that at the same time is missing several opportunities for comedic exploration that makes the previously mentioned films so unique.

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The Class (Entre les murs)
Directed by: Laurent Cantet
Written by: François Bégaudeau, Robin Campillo, Laurent Cantet
Starring: François Bégaudeau, Nassim Amrabt, Laura Baquela, Cherif Bounaïdja Rachedi

Despite winning the Palme D’Or this past year, The Class completely went under my radar until just about a week before it opened, when seemingly every Toronto critic all of a sudden had a 5 star review and was retroactively insisting it to be one of the best films of last year. I went to see The Class pretty much blind, and perhaps this was a good decision. I doubt a trailer for a film like this would exactly pop or get asses in seats.

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Global Metal
Directed by: Sam Dunn and Scot McFayden

Sam Dunn is a Toronto anthropologist, bassist for death metal band Burn to Black, and the co-director and face of the successful 2005 Metal 101 documentary Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey. The success of that film, largely due to DVD, has brought Sam a large amount of respect from his peers, and letters from all around the world letting him know that simply covering North America and Europe’s biggest and most controversial bands meant his job wasn’t finished. With this, Global Metal was born, a travelogue to many of the worlds hot spots to see how these varying cultures have made this style of music their own, as well as how they’ve had to deal with oppressive governments and limited freedom. Call it an ‘advanced study’, a passion project that like Wordplay or Helvetica, hooks you in through the passion of the obsessive fans and filmmakers rather than a specific controversy or accidental plot.

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Gone Baby Gone
Directed by Ben Affleck
Written By Dennis Lehane
Starring Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Ed Harris, Morgan Freeman, Amy Ryan

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Once in a while a film comes along that leaves you confused about what you think about it after its over, struggling to weigh the many highs of it vs some staggering lows. Such is the case with “Gone Baby Gone”, Ben Affleck’s directorial debut starring his younger brother Casey.

GBG tells the story of a 31 year old private detective named Patrick Kenzie, hired by a frantic grandmother to augment the police investigation of a missing girl. Monaghan, as his partner Angie, immediately refers the case to another investigator, perhaps realizing before Kenzie that this piece of work might be a little much to deal with. She would turn out to be correct, as the case goes deeper and deeper to a nearly insane, morally ambiguous degree that could possibly ruin Kenzie’s career and personal life. Read the rest of this entry »

Goon here, checking in after a long time from actual reviewing. I remembered why I had took so long between uploading items when I went to post this quick audio review. I was horrified to find out I had thrown away the final product with a musical intro and outro, and only had this worse audio version of it left behind. Well I figured I would put it up anyways and hope my second go around goes better than the first. I hope you can suffer your way through this not-so-clean sounding 10 minute review of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

download mp3

When Grindhouse was released, there were accusations that Quentin Tarantino had lifted the premise from a small indie film. By the evidence there didn’t seem much to take seriously. However this week some major press is being made accusing Judd Apatow of lifting the concept of “Knocked Up” from well known Canadian journalist Rebecca Eckler, who wrote a memoir called “Knocked Up: Confessions of a Hip Mother-to-be”, released months before Apatow made his movie pitch. Eckler has enough credibility to make some noise here, and there are indeed similarities – a young journalist who had too much to drink only to be impregnated by a Jewish Canadian, aided by her sister. The Toronto Star has a piece today, and this week Canadians’ favorite waiting room time killer Maclean’s has this extensive piece by Eckler herself detailing her full rationale for believing “Knocked Up” was well, knocked off. Personally, I would think Apatow would be smarter than blatantly ripping off a story, especially with the same title – and the tale is simple and universal enough (and really, from the slacker male point of view – of a Jewish Canadian actor who has always gone out of his way to make this part of his character in every Apatow production he’s been a part of) that I would have a hard time seeing this hold up in court. Take a look at the article and judge for yourself.
UPDATE – I’ve discovered this blog keeping close tabs on this story.

While at a screening for Pan’s Labyrinth last week (best movie of the year, by the way), this advertisement ran for a group called “Equality Rules”. Half the audience laughed at the over the top “Clerks”-ish situation, the other half was quite upset and even spoke against other people in the audience for laughing. You can count me among those that found the situation, choices of words and the presentation funny. You have to admit, with that setup and the way advertisements try to throw people, it could have turned into an ad for any number of things. The question is, was this first section of the ad intended to be funny, or were advertisers serious yet just too dumb to realize you dont mix PSAs explaining the horrors of abuse with clever or funny situations/presentation. Whatever it is, these ads are not the sole example of this “its not okay when X does it” goofiness. These other abuse ads for example, could easily have been a segment of “Family Guy”:

“She Spilled My Coffee”
“The New Numbers are Right”
“Pick that Thing Up!”

I’m used to drunk driving commercials for example, both trying to traumatize a person as well as trivialize the situation with humor. The talking head against a white background PSAs have had their own kitschy value. So what do you think is the best method of putting forth a message, and are these types of advertisements appropriate to show in theaters? I can imagine the superb ironic value of one of these ads running before a James Bond film.

TMZ.com, the website that initially broke the Michael Richards story a few weeks ago, reports now on a few separate pieces of fallout directly related to the n-word debacle. Andy Dick, unfunny man of TV and film, apologized Tuesday for over the weekend using the term at an L.A. improv. After making fun of Richards on stage he yelled to the crowd “You’re all a bunch of niggers”. Says Dick: “In an attempt to make light of a serious subject, I have offended a lot of people, and I am sorry for my insensitivity. I wish to apologize to Ian, to the club and its patrons and to anyone who was hurt or offended by my remark.”

Meanwhile at the now infamous Laugh Factory, Damon Wayans was fined $320 dollars for dropping the n-bomb on stage. The club has decided to fine comedians $20 dollars for any use of the term, and during a Sunday event called “Chocolate Sundaes”, Wayans for example said: “Give yourselves a big round of applause for coming down and supporting ‘Nigger Night’ ” .

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Starring: Jack Black, Kyle Gass, Jason Reed, Dave Grohl

Despite being around approximately a decade (showing up in “Bio-Dome”, and later in their own HBO series), Tenacious D are known for their 2001 self titled album which also spawned a DVD containing their well known music videos and shorts. Since this time Jack Black has become a much bigger celebrity, who relies on the same type of personality just often enough that he’s in the middle of a backlash. If you ask me, Jack is still funny, but he is definitely overexposed. So now at what seems like a bad time, a Tenacious D feature length movie has been released, following the same generic road movie plot we’ve seen in everything from “Dumb and Dumber” to “Borat” (traveling, meeting weirdos along the way, the two break up and then get back together just in time to reach their goal). If it were funny all this would be forgiven, but with 5 years of expectations, the decks seem to have been stacked against the D.

One of the films greatest strengths is arguably also its biggest weakness. While director Liam Lynch has put together some of their popular videos, and in his own experiments has repeatedly shown to be creative and bizarre enough, he simply does not have the experience to carry the film in its non-musical sequences. The CD soundtrack was 30 minutes long, and with 1 song cut entirely and 2 in the credits, that makes around 20 minutes of material Lynch excels at and around an hour of movie that he simply does not have the skill to make work. The script itself is not all that strong – while the recycling of jokes from the TV show is not all that great an idea, whats worse is the number of people in this film that could have positively contributed who were wasted entirely or whose cameos did not go anywhere – including Ben Stiller, Amy Poehler, David Koechner, Amy Adams, Colin Hanks, David Krumholz as well as many of Jack Black’s former castmates from Mr. Show. A few cameos do work, namely Meat Loaf and Dio in the strong opening sequence, Dave Grohl as the devil, and Tim Robbins in his (not first but) second appearance in the film, but otherwise the film suffers from a lot of filler material where there were opportunites for comedy but jokes simply were not even attempted. It seems to me that perhaps someone like a Jay Roach or a Todd Phillips should have been brought on for the non-musical sequences and Lynch left to focus on what he does best. Either this or maybe a better idea – using some of the self titled albums’ songs and making the full movie a bizarre rock opera, one big long music video instead of a half assed action comedy with occasional music. For a rock movie it doesn’t rock hard enough, and for a comedy it isn’t funny enough.

Yet somehow it is difficult to dislike. When the film does work, as in the drug induced sasquatch sequence and a few other moments, it works quite well. Black and Gass really do seem to be having a lot of fun throughout the film, and so if you aren’t expecting too much, there is fun to be had. It would be hard for me to see a big fan of the band not at least finding the whole thing silly and cute. Overall, “The Pick of Destiny” is destined for cult success, but I don’t know about “cult classic” status. My decision whether or not to pick up the DVD will pretty much rest on the quality of the bonus features. A mild recommendation to those this has been specifically marketed to, and a recommendation to avoid for most others. – Goon