TV/Movies Megathread

[Josephus]

Watching the two part BBC series Spies of Warsaw based on the book by Alan Furst (did I ever mention he's one of my favourite authors?). Liking it so far.

Hmmm...second part sucked. Three hour show. First two hours stuck true to the book. Then they tacked on a completely made up ending to it. Strange.

[Admiral Yi]

Watched Roger Dodger last night.  New York adman tells his 16 year old nephew everything he knows about getting laid in one night out together in Manhattan.

Shelf, if you haven't seen this movie I think you'd love it.

[Darth Wagtaros]

Invader Zim. Funny.

[Ideologue]

Pain and Gain (2013).  The first shot of Pain and Gain is Mark Wahlberg doing some impressive sit ups on the side of a building, while the unnerving score plays; the first words spoken in Pain and Gain are "My name is Daniel Lugo, and I believe in fitness."  And he had me.

Would you buy it if I told you that Michael Bay's foray into small-time cinema was the best movie I've seen so far this year?  Now, I've missed a few important ones--James Franco's blockbusting combo of Springbreakers and Oz most notably--and the other current, and surely more critically acclaimed, crime-and-character-study, The Place Beyond the Pines, is on my list but not yet viewed.

I would bet a hard-earned American dollar backed by the full power of our nuclear weapons that Pain and Gain is better than its more nobly pedigreed box office opponent.

This movie is only not funny when it chooses to be chilling and horrific, and the whiplash of mood, often a source of problems in films by lesser (?!) directors, is Pain and Gain's perhaps literally unbelievable triumph.  The script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely is exceptional and the pacing, previously a challenge Bay has tended to ignore, is dynamite (it may run ever so slightly too long, but this is likely an artifact of a 10:10 viewing).

The performances are to be noted in detail.  Mark Wahlberg seems to possess only slightly greater mental faculties than he did in The Happening, but here it works wonders.  Wahlberg is Daniel Lugo, and he could have been directed by the Coen Brothers in his role as the dim-witted bodybuilder possessed of a ressentiment born of a betrayed, if rather mistaken, belief in the powers of self-improvement, who comes to take his class (and race, and creed) anger out in a violent comedy of errors upon Tony Shaloub's Victor Kershaw, a Jewish-Colombian restauranteur, Horatio Alger story, and all-round rich prick.  As Lugo explains after he and his gang take him hostage, he doesn't just want everything he has; he wants him not to have it.

But as good as Wahlberg is here, it may be Dwayne Johnson who steals the film as a born-again recovering-addict ex-con who gets involved in Lugo's kidnapping scheme for the money, but also because he just wants to belong to something.  He is at turns hilarious and deeply affecting as he goes deeper into fear and dissolution, as he crosses each line he tries to draw for himself--one after the other, till finally there are no more lines at all.

Anthony Mackie rounds out the trio of personal-trainers-turned-criminals, and turns in a more than respectable comic performance, though he's got less to work with here.  He likes to fuck fat white women but steroids turned him impotent.  It's not meaty, except for his girlfriend, and I suppose the erectile dysfunction drug injection scenes (ouch), but it is pretty funny.

This is a movie with something, I think, to say.  Unlike a thoughtless film like the Dark Knight Rises, where class warfare rhetoric is used to make-pretend something profound is going on, Pain and Gain, however unlikely it may seem, asks the questions and addresses its themes in a complex and unflinching way.  It may at first glance appear to have essentially conservative answers--that poor people are poor because they suck, and when they turn into criminal monsters, it proves the point.  But that's not what I took away.  I think it asks if the quintessential American quality is not hard work, or even greed, but if it is just brutal, simple, cruel envy, and the desire to be envied, that drives our nation--rich and poor alike, smart and profoundly stupid alike.  It puts the American Dream on the bench and films it, watching as it struggles to even lift the bar.

I think it's the first great movie of the year.

A

[Admiral Yi]

Whiplash of mood?  Really?

[Ideologue]

Whiplash of mood?  Really?

The phrasing, or whether it had it?

[Admiral Yi]

The former.

[Ideologue]

Well, that's the phrase I'm using to describe an experience that goes basically: LOLOLOLOHFUCKIWANNACRYLOLOLOLOLOLOMGMARKWAHLBERGJUSTCAVEDAGUYSSKULLINLOLOLWHOAPROFOUND

[Syt]

I think Mood Whiplash sounds better.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MoodWhiplash

[Ideologue]

Ok ok.  Noted.

[Ideologue]

Oh, and one more thing re: Pain and Gain.  Simon Abrams, in his milquetoast semi-negative review (2 1/2 stars), did make a good point:

In "Pain & Gain," Bay's typically vile brand of chauvinism is amplified in order to make a silly but grand cynical statement about the scam that is the American dream.

That is a true thing.  Bay is still putting his always sexist, often homophobic, and more than occasionally racist imprimatur on his work.  But here?  100% appropriate and 100% effective.  That shit doesn't belong in Transformers, but these attitudes are fully at home here in this movie, and in its spiritually ugly people.

[Eddie Teach]

Django Unchained. It was ok.

[Queequeg]

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I think it really is a perfect adaptation.

Outstanding.

Santa-Lenin was one of my favorite scenes in years.

[The Brain]

Wanted to mention that my first review of The King's Speech was negative.  The film has constantly grown on me with each re-viewing.  I think it's a great film.

When will you have finished it?

[Admiral Yi]

When will you have finished it?

I can't predict when a film will lose replay value for me.