Thursday, March 31, 2011

The Blues Brothers (1980)

Jake and Elwood Blues (John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd) are “on a mission from God” to get the band back together, put on a show and raise enough money to save the orphanage they were raised in.

*      *      *

THE BLUES BROTHERS IS THE GREATEST FILM MUSICAL EVER MADE 

Don’t even try to debate me on this. The music is amazing (Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, etc.), the cameos are hilarious (John Candy, Carrie Fisher, Steven Spielberg, etc.) and the car crashes cannot be beat. Yes you heard right – CAR CRASHES! Eliza Doolittle never drove a car through a shopping mall, Jake and Elwood do. And sure Captain Von Trapp and Maria were able to outsmart some Nazis, but only Jake and Elwood could send Nazis splashing into a river. This movie is so good that even The Vatican is trying to ride its’ coattails. It is a genuine religious experience. Please watch with lots of people and LOUD as possible. It’ll do your soul good.

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Movie Town Envy


Living close to/in Los Angeles is wonderful for a cinephile. There is always something to see. Don't believe me? Check out Mondo Celluloid where you can find out what all the various rep houses around So Cal are showing. As nice as this all is, Southern California has NOTHING on Paris France.

Paris is a city that breathes cinema, and the center of that is the Cinémathèque Française which has been celebrating cinema since the 1930s. During World War II they even saved some films from being destroyed by the Nazis!

In addition to multiple daily screenings, the Cinémathèque also puts on multi-month, multi-media celebrations of genres, actors and filmmakers. The Pedro Almodóvar and Jacques Tati exhibits Cinema Nerds attended there were AMAZING. This brings me to the point of why I'm writing this post: Now through the end of July, the Cinémathèque Française is honoring -


Check out this video from Reuters to get a glimpse at how awesome this exhibition is:


Who wants to pay for the This Cinematic Life staff to fly to France so that we can cover this exhibit in greater detail? We promise that it will be money well spent.

FUN FACT: Stanley Kubrick has 12 films available on DVD. Back in 2008, This Cinematic Life did our own year-long, one-per-month Kubrick festival. We highly recommend this!

Chocolat (2000)






It's Lent. Have you given something up?
Vianne (Juliette Binoche) and her daughter open a chocolaterie upon their arrival to a small, stuffy French town, where order, modesty and conformity are valued above all else. The townspeople are shocked by the woman's audacity to open a chocolate shop during Lent, her status as an unwed single parent, and by her befriending of the local misfits and outsiders.

I know what you're thinking. "'Becca'lise is a girl, this movie has Johnny Depp in it, OF COURSE she likes it." Come on. Mr. Depp is not in this movie too much, despite being all over the posters. My favorite acting performance is from Alfred Molina, who plays the mayor of the small town. He has taken it upon himself to destroy Vianne's efforts and stop the chaos he believes will be a result of her success. He's pretty funny despite his sternness, and while you want to hate him, you just can't. The whole cast turns out pretty good performances, actually, playing diverse characters with a multitude of backgrounds, from a battered woman taken in by Vianne to a new priest in town trying to win approval from the mayor.

What brings me back to this movie time and time again (NOT JOHNNY DEPP, GET OVER IT) is the lovely music and scenery. The little town is so brown and dreary and when Vianne and her daughter arrive, it's like bright bougainvillea flowers against a stone wall. The music goes from quaint to emphasize the quiet modesty of the town, to robust when gypsies arrive in the town with their guitars (okay, that's where Johnny Depp comes in, you got me), to mysterious and sensual when the audience learns about Vianne's family history as wanderers and the usually powerful properties of their chocolate.

Also, all the scenes of Vianne making her little treats for the shop will make you HUNGRY. It's not unlike the credits sequence in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, except it has a more homemade appeal.

So, in a nutshell, Chocolat is a perfect feel-good movie to watch during Lent. I just hope you didn't give up chocolate. ;)

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Just Say NO!

Most movie posters these days suck. Occasionally good ones slip through. But when it comes time for a home video release? 

ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE! 

DVD and Blu-ray covers are a crime against humanity. Through the wonders of shitty Photoshop skills, amazing pieces of film art are reduced to giant heads and moronic pull-quotes. A film's theatrical run is a mere flash-in-the-pan compared to the eternal life it will have on home video. That is where most films will be discovered. Yet don't expect the industry to change any time soon. They are only concerned with the bottom line. What is cheapest to produce and will sell the most units to the masses. So what are the cinema nerds out there to do? 

MAKE YOUR OWN

Sam Smith is a very talented designer who has done great work for The Criterion Collection. Not content with the shitty cover art for one of his favorite films of 2010...


He created his own...

You can even download it for for free at his blog. And it doesn't matter if you're not some great graphic artist. If your favorite film has shitty cover art, nothing should stop you from finding some images on Google and throwing something together in MS Paint. Odds are it will still be better than whatever the "official" art is.

FOR EXTRA FUN: Check out some of these silly DIY "Criterion Collection" covers.

Vengeance (2009)



After a violent tragedy befalls his daughter's family, Costello (Johnny Halladay) seeks the help of a trio of Chinese hit-men to help him extract his bloody revenge against the man responsible.


*      *      *

Anyone who claims the Chinese-Gangster-Shoot-‘em-Up genre died when John Woo left for America has clearly not seen Vengeance. It’s like the late 80s/early 90s all over again in this action masterpiece from director Johnnie To. And I’m not using the term masterpiece lightly. This film was actually in competition at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. God bless the French for accepting the fact that art can be fun. It’s like watching The Wild Bunch, Leon: The Professional and Memento ALL AT THE SAME TIME. And for the snobs out there, the film has “echoes” of Ford, Hawks & Melville. Oh and please don’t let the fact that the film’s main characters are French and Chinese scare you because:

(Q) How do French and Chinese people communicate with each other?
(A) In English!

Plus this is an action film, so most of the time people aren’t even talking. Most of the time they’re too busy unloading bullet after bullet into each other. What more could you really want?

(As of this writing, it's streamable on Netflix! Check it out!)

Monday, March 28, 2011

Midnight In Paris

Over the past 41 years Woody Allen has directed 41 feature films. Many of them classics, a few of them masterpieces. In recent years he has been a bit more miss than hit. Judging from this trailer, number 42 might be a hit...

The Bad Seed (1956)






The Bad Seed is definitely one of my favorite movies ever. I grew up watching this (is that weird?) and I always watch it in October along with the rest of my spooktastic flicks. 

Rhoda Penmark is 8 years old. She's blonde, she's sweet, she's polite, she's perfect...right? She's also manipulative, evil, and she always gets her way! Her sweet mother Christine becomes worried when a young boy at Rhoda's school drowns on a field trip, and Rhoda is suspected to be involved. As Christine learns more and more about her "angelic" daughter, she is driven to hysteria and acts of desperation, and learns horrifying facts about her own past.

While this movie definitely has its campy moments, the acting is quite phenomenal. Patty McCormack as Rhoda makes that Omen kid look like a saint. Henry Jones plays the janitor Leroy perfectly as the one person who's on to Rhoda from the start ("She's smart and she's mean...but I'm smart and I'm mean!"). Nancy Kelly as Christine deserves major props for playing a desperate and horrified mother so convincingly. You feel as though you're going mad right along with her.

But my absolute favorite performance comes from Eileen Heckart as Hortense Daigle, the mother of Rhoda's dead schoolmate. Mrs. Daigle has turned to drinking to cope with the tragedy, and she's desperate to find some answers about her son. She goes from laughing and reminiscing about her son to sobbing and accusatory from one second to the next. It's amazing.

All in all, this movie is fun, it's suspenseful, it's creepy, and definitely worth checking out.

ANNOYING AWARD: The landlady Monica Breedlove. Gawd, she's nosy and totally obnoxious.
AWESOME AWARD: Mrs. Daigle for reasons listed above. That's one hell of a performance.

Bottom line: PERFECT CHILDREN ARE CREEPY. That's all!
(As of this writing, it's streamable on Netflix! Check it out!)

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Art of the Title


A Brief History of Title Design from Ian Albinson on Vimeo.

You're welcome!

The Omnivore's Dilemma

Thanks to the prevalence of DVD, Blu-Ray, streaming video, on-demand and digital downloads; the entire span of cinema history is there for the taking. Action films, silent films, experimental films, comedies, romances, etc - the possibilities are endless. Yet in spite of this added ease, the question still remains: 

"What should I watch?"

We're here to lovingly recommend some of our favorite films, from romantic comedies and zombie flicks to beach party movies and Oscar winners. We love cinema and we hope you'll come to love cinema too.

xoxo Craig & 'Becca'lise