Don Jon

Don Jon

Glad I changed my mind and had us all watch this instead of "One Day" (which I did end up watching anyways..that movie would not have resulted in any kind of good discussion).

I enjoyed Don Jon. I've liked Joseph Gordon Levitt ever since he was in 10 Things I Hate About You. He directed, wrote and starred in this movie and it was a pretty big departure from the sweet, nerdy, hipster characters he usually plays. And he does a great job at playing that Jersey Shore meathead stereotype that everyone loves to hate. Minor thing (and Shane pointed this out to me)- in the scene where he is lifting weights, he is only lifting 30 lbs. Minor. But kind of dumb for a guy who is super into working out. Scarlet Johanson is fine, as usual. She's always just kind of fine. The gum chewing and the accent got a bit tired and started to annoy me. But then again, pretty sure we were supposed to be annoyed by her character. Julianne Moore is always great. Tony Danza is perfect as Jon's dad. We get a glimpse at where Jon's superficiality may come from through his character.

This had a solid plot, good premise and a few surprise twists thrown in. All things that make for a good movie in my book. I loved the way that they repeated certain plot elements to keep a common thread through the movie. The confessionals, the gym scenes, even the sounds/sequences they used when he was watching porn (that's the first time Ive use the word porn in a review about movie featuring a porn obsessed guy. Crazy). And of course the sequences changed slightly throughout the movie to reflect the current state of Jon. Love that. As he becomes a better person he becomes less and less meathead looking and more like a normal human with better hair. And again the sounds really did it for me, specifically the repetition of certain sounds. This movie could have gone into cheesy or classless territory with the subject matter, but it didn't, at all- which I would credit to excellent writing.

The scene where they are arguing in the Wal Mart (or wherever they are in front of the curtains) about cleaning was bizarre. I get that the scene was used to give us our first inclination that Barbara isn't as perfect as she's initially made out to be, but it seemed awkward and forced. I'm sure there could have been a better way to indicate that she was a little nutso without a weird argument about Swiffers. I was sort of shocked to see that side of Barbara's character come out. I didn't see it coming that she would be crazy.

Julianne Moore's character is perfect. Initially, I thought she would just be a side character with no real major part in the film. She seemed too old to be a potential love interest for Jon and frankly, a little weird. As the movie progressed, I started to think she would become a confidant for him. And once I started to see where they were going with her character and I got over my thoughts on the age gap and I liked their story line (plot twist!). Liked that she knew everything about him and fell for him anyways. Loved that when Jon was with her, he found what he was looking for and started to fill the hole (no pun intended) that was empty. He finally got a glimpse of what meaningful sex with someone you care about can be like.

I read a few Rotten Tomatoes reviews on this (because, duh) just to see what critics were saying after I watched. A few of them pointed out that the climax (again, no pun intended) wasn't super dramatic. I agree- and on that point it was also pretty predictable. Of course he was going to get caught eventually (who doesn't know to clear their browser history every now and again?). However, I thought he would get caught, she would eventually forgive him, and then they would live happily ever after. So glad this didn't happen. A few critics called it a comedy, which sort of confused me. I can't really recall any points where I laughed out loud. Maybe a quirky drama? But not a comedy...

Overall I liked this movie. I'd give it a B. Only because I don't really want to watch it again for some reason? I really can't justify WHY I wouldn't want to watch it again, it's just one of those movies where once is enough. Good movie, good actors, good story.

Major League

I have no prior relationship to this movie.  I've known about it, but just never got around to watching it during its heyday.  I didn't watch an R-rated movie until I was a teenager, and we were into Nicolas Cage's action period by then, so a sports movie with a raunchy reputation didn't register.  I clearly missed the right period to watch Major League.  This did not work for me at all.  It's just a sports movie, marketed as some kind of breaking-all-the-rules story with F-words.  It follows the same 

patterns, same jokes, same big moments.  I have no idea why you all have rated it so highly.

Was this movie supposed to be funny?  I kept a running total of times I laughed.  It was once.  I laughed once.  Early in the movie, when there's a quick montage of Cleveland-ers talking about how bad the team is, the Japanese guys got a chuckle out of me.  That was it.  The announcer interplay was alright, but it was all in Uecker's delivery, not anything funny he was actually saying.  Compared to his blernsball announcing career, this was a footnote.  Wesley Snipes's dancing around was solid physical comedy, but that was more an admiring smirk than a laugh.  How could this be so devoid of humor?  I've got comedies in my all-time top 50.  I have a good sense of humor.  Where was any of that here?  The average episode of Breaking Bad has more laughs than this, and that's one of the most depressing shows ever made.  How is this regarded as a classic comedy?

If the comedy side is a near-failure for me, how about the sports side?  Better, but still not great.  The owner-as-villain is a fine idea, but the stakes are whether or not she's going to be able to move the team to Miami.  In the late 80's, that sounds like a great idea.  Forget Cleveland, go to Miami, by all means.  There's so many Latinos down there, they should have a baseball team.  Setting aside my disinterest in the stakes, building the team had some potential, but it's all start and finish with no middle.  Vaughn's got an arm but no control, Hayes has running speed but no bat, Cerrano has power but can only hit easy pitches.  Raw talent and no polish.  I'm with the movie here.  Talent will only get a person so far, but they have to layer the technique on top of it.  The movie walks away from this because there's too many players to service and everything just gets magically solved.  There was a real movie in bridging the gap between talent and technique, but just slap some glasses on Vaughn, Cerrano curses Jo-Bu, and everyone's an all-star.  This made it look incredibly easy to be a professional player.  The actual beats of the movie could not be more predictable.  Of course Dorn's going to encourage Vaughn on the mound.  Of course they're going to play the Yankees at the end, and each player will get their big moment.  It was so transparent that it became boring.

Back on the stakes, the goal line isn't win a pennant; it's sell greater than 800,000 tickets.  The ticket mark gets totally lost.  The journey of the movie shouldn't be about winning pennants; it should be about making the city love them.  The players have either seen better days or they're scruffy outsiders, overlooked by everyone else and hoping for another chance to play the game they love.  There's a solid metaphor in there about the decaying Rust Belt, but instead, it's just generic Let's-Win-It-All boilerplate.  Semi-Pro nails this kind of movie, though it has other problems.  That team isn't going to win anything, but what they can do is give Flint, MI a little bit of pride for one night.  That's a movie that is putting a twist on the sports genre, instead of riding every cliched thing about it into the ground.

So, I didn't like it as a sports movie either.  Any memorable characters or relationships in there?  I've praised Uecker's voice already, so there was that.  Vaughn is a non-entity, a supposed bad-boy who doesn't do anything in the movie to earn the reputation.  Hayes is probably my favorite, but apparently, all he needed to become a professional was a bunch of push-ups.  He's not developed any further, and he somehow is hitting .291 by the end.  Taylor is pretty much a hangdog douchebag.  We talked about stalking in the Fisher King.  At least Parry just tailed Honey Bunny.  Taylor walks into what he thinks is Rene Russo's twice.  No knock, no call, no buzz.  He just walks in.  That is creepy as hell, and I'm not rooting for him to finally get it together.  The manager is a standard, gruff authority figure.

This movie has a difficult relationship with what's viewed as acceptable today.  I can't decide if everything around Cerrano is racist or not.  The owner slapping his naked ass and the jungle music behind him are pushing things in one direction.  Holy shit, how did this manage to get made without Indian protests?  Uecker uses every euphemism and stereotype in existence to liven up his broadcasting, plus the imagery of fat white people dressing up in feathers, red face paint, and rain dances.  The depiction of the owner is pretty rough, especially the cut-out of her that they slowly remove pieces from.  Apparently, there's an alternate ending in which she's revealed as a die-hard fan who voluntarily placed herself as the villain to rally the team.  She personally scouted all these deep cut players, and has to make excuses for the shitty planes and buses because the team was actually bankrupted by her useless dead husband.  That is such a better movie, and it solves the problem of how these players are all so good so suddenly, but test screening revealed that audiences liked the character better as a vindictive bitch, so that's what they went with.  Wonder what's going on there.

It wasn't a total wasteland.  An epic shot of Vaughn getting off his motorcycle was fine, and I hate Charlie Sheen.  There's a prescient line about celebrity that very much applied to the Sheen of the late 2000's, full of cocaine, domestic abuse, and tiger blood.  Cerrano's big home run is stirring, but the movie doesn't get a lot of credit for that, because that moment can only be stirring.  I actually laughed twice.  In a big climactic moment, the director cuts to a yawning kid.  Probably an accident, and not really earned by the movie, but I enjoyed that fuck-up.  Vaughn's red ticket and Taylor's bunt were nice twists.  That's all the good I have to say about this.  Completely forgettable.  Not funny.  An utterly average sports movie, which is a genre I'm not a big fan of already.  Get out of the top 30, Major League.  You're a D+.

Dear Zachary

“Dear Zachary” is one of the few documentaries that could not have been a movie.  No movie this infuriating and depressing would ever be made.  Hell, the fact that it even exists in this form is some kind of twisted version of serendipity.  This is the most affecting movie I have ever watched, pulling out emotions from me that I didn’t know I could have for people I have never met.  It’s an incredible story that filmmaker Kurt Kuenne does a great job in almost every aspect of, and is especially effective with unexpected twists in the story.

Let’s start with just the raw emotions of this thing.  I hit numerous emotions I just don’t like to deal with on a regular basis.  I couldn’t help but feel pity for Andrew, the sad clown who was loved by all but himself.  I got serious chills hearing the calls from Shirley talking so non-chalantly to Zachary’s “babysitters” Dave and Kate.  I couldn’t help but feel exasperated when hearing about the legal proceedings and the lunacy that surround that whole saga.  Then, not sadness for the big reveal of Zachary’s murder, but, much like Dave, I felt sheer anger.  How could you not?  The system had failed them in spectacular fashion.  In the end, when Kuenne went to the roll of everyone talking about Dave and Kate… Oh it got QUITE DUSTY in the Crone household.  How many movies can pull out that many emotions so effectively?  I would say it’s in the single digits.  It probably helps that it’s a documentary, so everything we are seeing is very real.

It would be tough to experience these emotions if Kuenne didn’t do a good job of leading the audience through the story.  He set up each transition well, and built suspense for what would happen next like any good storyteller does.  He maybe went a little overboard with the murder reveal, but it worked well.  He needed to fill time there to give the audience adequate time to recover from the megaton he dropped at that point.  The section detailing Shirley’s clear mental instability was the most well-done portion of the movie, where he splices facts about her with repeating the one judge’s lines about Shirley’s crime being specific in nature and that she was not a threat to the general public.  I think I could feel my blood pressure skyrocketing during that particular portion.

Kuenne was able to lead the audience so effectively because this story was happening as he was making the movie.  I used the word already, but serendipity is the only word that comes to mind when thinking about how this movie was made.  Kuenne had a ton of footage of Andrew from their various movies.  He had all the stuff with Zachary.  He had interviews with Dave & Kate pre- and post-Zachary.  With that many twists happening as he’s making the movie, Kuenne had to do quite a bit of changing his focus on the fly.  We start with a purpose of one last movie with Andrew and then go into the letter to Zachary gimmick, sticking with it throughout, even after the tragedy.  I did like Kuenne openly questioning why he was continuing, and finally finding reason by dedicating the movie to Dave & Kate, who went through an unimaginable hell and came out the other end… intact if nothing else.  Good on Dave getting a minister to admit his plan to potentially murder Shirley was “logical.”

I was also glad that Kuenne chose an angle and stuck with it – namely, the incompetence of the court system in Canada to not get Shirley extradited.  I felt like he did a good job weaving together the legal battle with the personal battle between Shirley and Dave & Kate.  It helped that it was a straight chronological telling of the story, but the transitions could have been jarring if done ineffectively.
There are other issues that could certainly be explored here, namely our society’s treatment of people with clear mental health issues.  This is going to only continue to become a bigger story in our society.  We don’t learn much about Shirley, but we do know she left three kids behind, so a version from her POV highlighting mental health issues we have in this country is a story worth telling.  However, had Kuenne focused on that, we would need quite a bit of time learning more about Shirley.  Kuenne’s intention was not to humanize her, and for good reason – she did almost certainly kill his best friend.  Would you want to humanize someone like that?  This was a very personal story for all involved, and it showed and benefitted from it ultimately.

The fact that this is so personal is what keeps it from being perfect for me.  The first 30 minutes of the movie, before we know who “Zachary” even is, was Kurt making his movie with Andrew.  This was a little choppy and didn’t flow well.  My only other minor complaint was the goofy moving mouths on the judges.  Was this done for comedy relief?  If so, it felt a little out of place, especially in the last third of the movie.

Many of my favorite documentaries start down one path and wind up somewhere completely different.  Had “Dear Zachary” stayed as a letter to Andrew’s living son, it would have still been a very good documentary with some justice at the end.  However, through this heinous tragedy, we end up with something very unique that we will likely never see again.  It was one of those docs that, thanks to all the source material available to Kuenne, was going to be good and he just needed to make it great.  I think he pulled that off.

 + Very affecting

+ Kuenne leads us through the story well

+ Has a message and sticks to it

- Early third did not flow well

 Grade: A

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

This is going to be short and sweet. I liked the movie but it didn't really pack much of a punch. There were lots of iconic scenes which seem to have become tropes. I had seen bits and pieces of the movie through the years and now that I have seen it through it still feels a bit like I have scene bits and pieces. It has the chaotic non sequitur feel many movies from the 60's have. I find it jarring and don't care much for it. I feel it is a good movie but suffers too much from the time frame it was made. I found myself wondering in the middle of it about how hair styles have changed in westerns made in different decades. Robert Redford was rocking a serious quaff in this film. Some damn fine lines in the movie though. "there ain't no rules in a knife fight!" "hell the fall will probably kill you!"

Eh probably won't sit through it in toto again. B-