The 10 11 movies I saw from 2007, part III

That's right, I managed to see another one in the few weeks following my last post. I saw it on TV. It was awful. But you'll have to read until the end to know just how bad it really was.

6) Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

This film was a sort of antithesis to hip crime dramas that make bank heists and other such criminal acts look slick, sleek, and sexy: here, a fairly minor jewelry theft in a Westchester strip mall absolutely ruins the lives of everyone connected with it. I enjoyed it overall--Hollywood can always use more nihilism!--though a couple of people who also saw it at Talk Cinema last fall absolutely hated it. Director Sidney Lumet makes much use of the Tarantino-esque "showing the same events from different perspectives and points in time" plot device, and while this was generally a good choice--in showing just how far-reaching and negative the consequences of the robbery turn out to be--he chose to preface these shifts in time with rather grating sound effects that I found superfluous and obnoxious (and I listen to noise music), like an attempt to drive in to the audience how "daringly experimental" his plot technique was.


7) Control

I have to say first and foremost that Control's picture quality was beautiful. It was shot in a rich black-&-white that resembled silver-print still photographs; if nothing else, it was lovely to look at. The guy who played Ian Curtis was great (and quite easy on the eyes as well, like a pre-junkie flab Pete Doherty), and it was interesting to see various landmarks of Joy Division's evolution, like Bernard Sumner's design for the "drummer boy" cover image that now graces a poster on one of my friends' walls, and recognizing scenes from the Werner Herzog film Stroszek that Curtis watches on TV before a certain major plot point that can easily be spoiled by looking up his Wikipedia entry.

I did, however, think it focused too much on the love story aspect, which is probably fitting since the film was based on a book by Curtis's widow. I wasn't especially enamored of either Curtis's high school sweetheart-turned-timid, frumpy housewife or the airy Belgian hipster he cheats on her with; throughout, I kept thinking: For fuck's sake, Ian! Just get a divorce! Perhaps Curtis might still be alive today if he had.


8) Superbad

I saw this on DVD at the apartment of friends and ended up liking it more than I expected to: it's more wittily written than most movies in the teenage-boys-looking-to-get-drunk-and-laid genre, though I'm still not among the critics falling over themselves to give Judd Apatow "the best blowjay ever." The three leads actually look like guys you might have gone to high school with, rather than obvious twentysomethings ripe for vacant pictorials on the covers of teen magazines right next to blurbs promising to inform the reader which type of jeans will make her ass look the least fat; I was glad to see it didn't have the sort of pat, everyone-gets-laid-and-learns-a-Valuable-Life-Lesson ending of something like American Pie.

Here's a movie about teenagers in which heterosexual young men openly express their (platonic) love for each other, the most squirrelly-looking kid is the first to get some, and hot women do, in fact, menstruate. It also illustrates the definitely-not-limited-to-teenagers experience of hitting on a guy while drunk, whom you're attracted to while sober, and having him reject your advances as politely as possible: not necessarily because he isn't attracted to you, but because you're just far too drunk and are probably going to vomit and/or not remember it later. (Not that I have any experience with that . . .)


9) Caramel

Critics are often comparing this to Sex and the City, which was my thought when I saw it last fall, although it's really more like Not Getting, or Denying That You're Getting, Sex in the City of Beirut. I admit I knew very little about Lebanese culture before watching this movie, like the social status afforded to those who speak French or are of partially French ancestry, or the large Christian population; the displays of cultural conflict between Eastern traditionalism and Western (particularly sexual) mores, like an engaged couple who are harassed by police simply for sitting, chastely, in a car at night, are what make Caramel interesting.

But this conflict can also be problematic, as it makes certain plot developments difficult to really relate to, or to interpret how they are supposed to impact the audience emotionally. If you don't want to read any spoilers, I suggest you skip ahead to the next paragraph, as my biggest issues with Caramel are with the endings of various story arcs. There's a Muslim bride-to-be who goes through an unnecessary minor surgery to get her hymen replaced, rather than be honest with her fiancé about the fact that she's no longer a virgin (the trip to the hospital is portrayed in a fairly lighthearted, hanging-with-my-BFFs manner). There's a post-menopausal actress with the face of an over-the-hill drag queen who struggles to compete with younger women in auditions for TV ads, eventually resorting to dropping fake blood on the rear of her skirt and on pristine maxi pads she leaves in the restrooms of casting calls so her competitors will think she can still have periods: are we supposed to be amused or appalled at this rather vile, pathetic cry for attention? There's an elderly seamstress, the caretaker of her senile sister, who gets romantic attention from a Western client, only to wordlessly start wiping off her makeup and stand him up for a date when she hears her sister's constant shouts from the next room: is this supposed to be a sad, bittersweet moment, realizing that she can never have true happiness with a man as long as she is saddled with an inappropriately-flirtatious sister suffering from dementia, or is there supposed to be a kind of relief here as she has some "revelation" about The Importance Of Family inherently overruling any possibility of romance? Then there's the lesbian hairdresser who never actually gets any, exchanging poignant looks with a gorgeous client whose hair she washes, eventually cutting the woman's hair into (essentially) a mullet; this new short haircut is supposed to represent freedom but is actually much less flattering than her previous long hair. (Okay, that one is just a matter of taste.) But, really, there were too many moments in which it was impossible for me to tell whether I was supposed to laugh with these women or pity them.

I've seen several critics praise Caramel's chick-flick format as a means to connect universally with international audiences, but I think, for me personally, that's part of the problem: I just don't like chick flicks. I find them glib, simplistic, and too unrealistic overall; they almost always bear little to no resemblance to my romantic life or that of my female friends, and thus are difficult for me to appreciate or relate to. My DVD collection is well over 200 titles strong and I can only think of a handful that might, conceivably, fit the chick flick description (for those curious, they are Secretary, Amelie, The Hours, Lovely and Amazing, and Pride and Prejudice). If I'm going to see formulaic Hollywood escapism I'd frankly rather watch something in which shit gets blown up.

As a side note: Nadine Labaki is quite hot in this movie, if you care about such things. She plays the woman having an affair with a married man; she also wrote and directed Caramel. If only more female directors would make movies about subjects other than lighthearted comedies about modern women in love (I am pointing my finger sternly at you, Nora Ephron).


10) The Kite Runner

I saw this at Talk Cinema last fall, where it apparently got something like 98% positive reviews from audience respondents in various cities. I haven't read the book it's based on (which almost everyone in my audience had), so I can't say how it compares, but the film version seems (and I'm sure I'll get called pretentious for this) rather middlebrow in execution. That is, tailor-made for a certain bourgeois sensibility that prides itself on being Informed About World Affairs and Supportive Of Independent Cinema but still falls prey to mawkish sentimentality and conventional endings and morals such as those of The Kite Runner. I mean, as soon as you see those kids flying their kites, you know (or at least, I figured) it's going to be a metaphor for something like "the innocent, simple pleasures of a childhood soon to be lost."

It would have been a stronger film if it hadn't tried to stretch itself into so many different kinds of films: it begins as a reminiscence of a childhood in a country rife with racial and cultural conflicts (I was far more interested in the violent upheaval of Afghanistan's ruling regime than I was in protagonist Amir's cowardly dismissal of his sexually-assaulted friend), then becomes a story about adapting culturally from Afghanistan to America, then ends as an action-adventure about going incognito to rescue a family member from Taliban custody. This point is especially true as there were a handful of genuinely poignant moments, as when Amir's father, who had been a prominent intellectual in his own country, is forced to work at a gas station upon emigrating to America; I just wish there had been more of that kind of subtlety and truthfulness instead of the numerous blatant and fairly conventional messages about The Importance Of Family.


11) Norbit

Is it any surprise that this was definitely the worst film of 2007 among the ones I saw? Perhaps more surprising is the fact that I saw it at all. Well, one weekend evening, decidedly not sober, I returned to the apartment where I've been staying and some friends happened to be watching it on TV. It's not a good comment on your movie when even intoxicating substances can't improve its humor.

Norbit is, of course, totally formulaic. The main joke is that Norbit's wife is fat. And of course, because this is Hollywood comedy logic, a woman who is fat and unattractive must necessarily be a total bitch personality-wise (unless she loses weight and gets a makeover later on, in which case her "inner beauty" is revealed--er, on the outside--and the protagonist realizes she's his Dream Girl). Eddie Murphy potrayed the eponymous character, his awful wife Rasputia, and his Chinese foster father Mr. Rice (get it? Because Asians eat rice! Hyuck hyuck!); my most optimistic guess is that Murphy portrayed the latter roles because no self-respecting Asian actor or woman of size would take them.

It's not even that the perpetuation of such stereotypes is offensive to political correctness, so much as the fact that they're just not funny. It reminds me of that Simpsons episode where Krusty the Klown tries to make a comeback and ends up with a slanty-eyed "me rikey velly much!" routine that leaves the audience in stunned silence . . . except The Simpsons, unlike Norbit, is actually, y'know, humorous. (There's another "Simpsons did it!" moment when Norbit makes a lame joke about Rasputia being banned from a restaurant for her liberal interpretation of its "all you can eat" buffet. I'd rather have watched the episode where Homer gets thrown out of the Frying Dutchman for a similar offense. No, I haven't seen The Simpsons Movie yet.) I cracked a smile maybe once or twice throughout the whole thing (including when it came on TV again a couple of days later and I watched the rest of it in a perverse fascination), and that was at how bad the jokes were.

Naturally, Norbit has a potential love interest who is the polar opposite of his wife: a thin, young, conventionally-pretty girl-next-door type. She's practically a saint, so warm-hearted, giving, and generous that she wants to buy the orphanage where she and Norbit grew up; I wouldn't be surprised if, instead of farting, she emitted a fine lavender mist of perfume. You know Norbit is going to end up with her the moment she first appears onscreen . . . wait, did I just spoil the movie for you? You weren't planning on actually watching Norbit, were you? Pretty much its only redeeming quality is in the advanced makeup technology that transformed Eddie Murphy into an elderly Asian man and an obese woman with cellulite and all; a shame they couldn't have utilized those sort of advancements in a better film.