Jason goes to Bad Movie Night and watches TOTAL RECALL (2012)

What the fuck was that!?

Okay, it kept the three-boobed prostitute, but it was just a random cameo that simultaneously made no sense and made more sense than anything else in the movie.

I'm technically going to get spoiler-y here, but I don't care because you can't spoil shit. They never get their ass to Mars. Instead, Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell, stepping into the Arnold Schwarzenegger role for some reason) lives in "the colony" (Australia) and works in "U.F.B." (United Federation of Britain, i.e., the U.K. Or just Ultra Fucking Boring.) To commute every day, he (and thousands of other workers from The Colony) travel through "The Fall." That's a giant tunnel through the center of the earth, with a building-sized transport vessel and a fancy-shmancy zero-gravity part near the center of the Earth.

Blah blah blah...shit happens. U.F.B president/meth chemist Heisenberg plans an invasion of The Colony. But Quaid/Hauser/Bullseye/whoever stops him by...blowing up The Fall. Which destroys the ability for thousands, if not millions of colonists to commute to work, plunging their economy into chaos. But at least he thwarted the invasion, because in the future there's no way to get from the U.K. to Australia without going through the center of the fucking earth!?

Running Time: 118 minutes
My Total Minutes: 310,755

Jason goes to the Niles Film Museum for a Laurel and Hardy afternoon with The Sounds of Silents.

The second Sunday of every month is the Laurel & Hardy "talkie" afternoon at Niles. But last Sunday, these weren't technically talkies--they were sound films with a recorded Vitaphone soundtrack, but no talking. These are films that were shot as silents and had soundtracks recorded for them after the fact. It's an interesting little window looking into the transition period between silent and talkie films. In fact, a couple of them I had seen as silent films before.

LIBERTY (1929): Laurel & Hardy are great proponents of liberty. You would be too, if you'd just busted out of prison. First things first--they have to change out of their prison uniforms and into street clothes. Problem, the accidentally switch pants (so Stan can't keep Ollie's giant pants up, and Ollie barely fits into Stan's), which leads to a lot of comedy based on them trying to disrobe and trade pants in public. Eventually the action takes them onto a skyscraper under construction. They actually built a fake skyscraper set on the roof of another building. So they really were dangling ~10-15 feet over the roof, and the shots of the ground below are real (not back-projected.) As someone with slight acrophobia, these always get me.

BARNUM & RINGLING (1928): Our Gang sets up their own circus inside a fancy hotel. Lots of wacky hijinx with animals. And a cameo appearance by Oliver Hardy.

Then after a brief intermission, two more shorts!

CAT, DOG & CO. (1929): Our Gang, working with animals again. This time they're taught to be kind to animals and are deputized into the Be Kind to Animals Society. So they run around and try to free animals from all sorts of situations, including many where they were supposed to be in cages.

BACON GRABBERS (1929): Laurel & Hardy are officers sent to repossess a radio from Edgar Kennedy. He certainly doesn't make it easy for them, and a good bit of hilarious destruction ensues.

Total Running Time: 74 minutes
My Total Minutes: 310,637

Jason watches HYDE PARK ON HUDSON

Bill Murray is pretty good, but I couldn't stop seeing him as Bill Murray--I never saw him as FDR. He's just too iconic as Bill Murray for me to lose him in the role (the way, say, Daniel Day Lewis disappeared leaving only Lincoln behind.)

The movie unevenly bounces between FDR's relationship with his distant cousin Daisy (Laura Linney) and the important weekend visit of King George (Samuel West) and Queen Elizabeth (Olivia Colman.) This is the same stuttering King George from THE KING'S SPEECH, of course, and Samuel West does a fine job.

The press goes wild for the announcement of the first visit by a monarch of England to the U.S.A. Especially when he dines on a hot dog. But, of course, the purpose is really to secure American support for the war effort (at this point America had not yet entered WWII.) And the scenes with FDR and King George talking (and drinking, and smoking) privately are some of the most fascinating. And one of the best moments was when FDR explained why nobody mentions his polio or George's stutter. It's because the people want their heroes, and don't want to see their heroes dragged through the mud (clearly this was a different time.) However, this, to some extent, is exactly what the movie does. It shows FDR as not just a polio-stricken cripple, but a serial philanderer. It shows George not just as a stutterer, but as a weak, scared man lacking the confidence required for his position. It shows them both fighting with their wives (and in FDR's case, fighting with his mother.) And then...well, in the end it wants you to still treat them as heroes. I think the point is to show that our heroes are fallible, and in fact that their ability to relate to the common man (e.g., the king eating a hot dog) is part of their heroism. I just don't think it makes the case very well.

Running Time: 94 minutes
My Total Minutes: 310,563

Jason watches IMPOLEX

That was an enjoyable little piece of weirdness.

I liked THE COLOR WHEEL when I saw it at Indiefest last year. In fact, I liked it enough to see it a second time when it returned to the Roxie (warning, that second link gets really spoiler-y.) So, of course, I was excited to see director Alex Ross Perry's first feature, IMPOLEX, at it's one-night-only special screening at the Roxie. Me and...a handful of fellow true cinephiles. I don't think there was anyone there that night who I hadn't seen at multiple film festivals in San Francisco over the years. Even if I didn't know everyone by name, I knew pretty much all of them by sight.

Perry has a unique style of understated, deadpan absurdism. In THE COLOR WHEEL it was muted enough that some people I talked to at Indiefest didn't actually think it was a comedy. In IMPOLEX, it's a little more obvious, as you have Tyrone (Riley O'Bryan) wandering through some unspecific forest lugging around one V2 rocket and looking for another one. And he meets a lot of strange people from his past, and a talking octopus. I'm not sure it's "about" anything other than the absurdity of the situation. Maybe it's about finding your soulmate--if you're a rocket. Yeah, that's what I'll go with. It's a rocket-meets-rocket rom-com.

Running Time: 73 minutes
My Total Minutes: 310,468

Jason watches TCHOUPITOULAS

There's at least a 50% probability I've spelled that right. Just don't ask me to pronounce it.

Okay, I'm about a week behind in updating my blog. My new job is taking up quite a bit of time. I actually saw this last Tuesday (although it's still playing until January 17th at the Roxie.)

This is an odd little movie. Billed as "A real world, real deal analogue to BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD" it's...not quite that. It's faux-verite kinda-documentary story of 3 young brothers from the town of Algiers, right across the river from New Orleans. They take the ferry across to New Orleans and have a night of adventure, seeing all the colorful characters. They miss the last ferry back home, play around in an abandoned steamboat, and...well, that's about it. It's part travelogue, part coming-of-age story, and all done in a cinema-verite style.

But it's not verite. Although it's presented as taking place over one night, it was actually shot over a period of 9 months. And if you read the user reviews on IMDb, it's not a particularly accurate portrayal of New Orleans (starting with a curfew for teenagers in New Orleans, meaning they would've been picked up by the police.) I don't personally know anything about that. I've been to New Orleans once, back when I was in college, for a little Mardi Gras debauchery. But I can't help but remember Werner Herzog's words (paraphrased, to the best of my memory): 'All movies are a lie! All movies are the truth! It's what you bring to it that matters! And if you can't see that, you're an imbecile!'

Unfortunately, I just couldn't find much of anything to bring to this (or that it brought to me.) I was pretty much just bored.

Running Time: 80 minutes
My Total Minutes: 310,396

Jason goes to Bad Movie Night--SNAKES ON A PLANE

I want this motherfucking flick out of my motherfucking brain!!!

That is all...or at least it would be. But I have to ask, why were there so many people there?! Were there a lot of people who really wanted to see this? Were they all there ironically? It's the Mission District, but there's a point where hipsterism goes way too far. And this is it.

Running Time: 105 minutes
My Total Minutes: 310,316

Jason watches DJANGO UNCHAINED

Of course, it's a Tarantino revenge flick, so if nothing else there's a gory sense of fun in it. And for a freed slave to get revenge on slave-owners...well, that's the kind of gory fun I can get behind. Christoph Waltz as Dr. King Schultz gets things started by buying Django (Jamie Foxx.) See, he's a bounty hunter and Django knows the guys he's looking for. For a while it becomes a story of their friendship, and tries to make some interesting observations on the master/slave relationship and comparing it to the mentor/student relationship.

As for the n-word. Yes, it's used excessively...even gratuitously, but not unintelligently. One of my favorite parts is when Django uses the n-word and makes it clear he's also using it to refer to a white guy (a sycophantic assistant to Leonardo DiCaprio's evil plantation owner.) In a way, the film takes less of an anti-slavery view than a worship-of-the-brave-individual view.

But then, there are just the odd moments. Very early on Dr. Schultz shoots a slave trader and then his partner's horse. I was struck how watching a horse fall had a bigger impact than watching a man die. I assume this was done intentionally.

Later on one character gets shot and flies off at a 90-degree angle from the direction of the shot. That was jarringly weird. But I assume that Tarantino is such a glutton for film he's making a visual reference to some film I haven't seen or don't remember. I can't believe he thought that looked right.

But the most egregious example was the proto-KKK scene. A bunch of locals want to terrorize Schultz and Django. So they ride up with bags on their heads, and start complaining about how they can't see through the poorly cut eye-holes. This goes on for several minutes, Jonah Hill turns out to be one of the guys under the hoods. It was funny as an isolated scene, but it felt like a Saturday Night Live sketch jammed into the middle of the movie. Horribly out of place.

But, for all it's excesses and puzzling scenes, it was a fun, bloody ride. And that's all you should really want from Django.

Running Time: 165 minutes
My Total Minutes: 310,211