More Mediocre Movies
Like a lot of movie fans who started out in the trenches of genre film and fiction, I have a soft spot for absurdly bad, over-the-top b-movies. So when I say that Punisher: War Zone was one of the most hilariously awful movies I’ve ever seen, that’s sort of a compliment. Frost/Nixon, which I wrote about today, was a terribly frustrating film: engaging and entertaining in many ways, but shallow and unaware of its own limitations in many others. I’ve still got a couple more Oscar contenders to see, including Fincher’s Benjamin Button, but I’m really starting to worry that this whole season — even the whole year — will end up as a flop.
Just saw Encounters at the End of the World. Easily the best movie of 2008, and surprisingly absent from TAS. I’m not Lenin, either.
— Sanjay · Dec 5, 08:40 PM · #
I second Sanjay’s comments about “Encounters.” I’ll add that, as a Blu-Ray, it’s demonstration-quality, especially the sound.
I want Werner Herzog to narrate everything I see: movies, television shows, film-strips, etc.
— Roberto · Dec 6, 02:41 PM · #
Encounters is my favorite, too, though I had an additional interest: three of my kinfolk lived at McMurdo on several occasions because they couldn’t get it out of their system (this became a problem for one of them, a social maladjustment that took years to get over).
— JA · Dec 6, 04:48 PM · #
This has really been an excellent year: Hunger, Man on Wire, Ballast, Birdsong, Shotgun Stories, Silent Light, Aleksandra, Flight of the Red Balloon, The Visitor, etc… We haven’t had such a rich film year for a while.
Ditto the love for Encounters…, though I expected something more quantifiably ethereal from the Antarctica/Herzog mashup. It lacked the passion of the nature sequences in some of his other films.
— M. Leary · Dec 7, 01:18 AM · #
I should add the caveat that the Lenin thing really tripped up Herzog. One can easily comprehend his desire not to make a move about penguins and, faced with the possibility of having penguins in the movie, to focus instead on deviant and depressing penguins. But he undermines it all by invoking the possibility of the penguin who thinks itself Lenin.
I really think it’s self-evident that everyone(*) would perceive a penguin that thinks itself Lenin to be simply the most adorable creature in the universe. Note here that I’m not talking about some cartoon penguin, holding meetings and publishing underground essays and studying Marx before rallying its penguin followers in Disney English. I mean a real live penguin, bemused by its inability to speak or to grasp writing implements or to even find them among its odd, alien, penguin comrades. A penguin nonetheless assured of its Leninness, but only able to communicate such when you look deep in its anguished eyes. It has never of course seen Moscow, and its Moscow is a Moscow of the Sphenischerian mind, a dreamscape of ice prospekts, snow onion-domes, and endless darkness before endless light, a dictatorship of the proletariat which smells distantly of fish. And of course it wanders off, confused, into the continent. I sincerely hope such a bird exists, or once existed and now lies embalmed by cold as the world thaws around it. Find it and WWF’s fundraising will triple.
(*)except Christopher Hitchens.
— Sanhay · Dec 7, 02:18 AM · #
Oh, wait, damn, I just remembered that Python sketch. Hee-hee: “these web-footed little bastards.”
— Sanjay · Dec 7, 02:30 AM · #