PunkKittyDiddy

Fast but Filling Film Fun at the Film Floozy Cafe

Howdy, hon! 

If you're hungry for a bit of hooey, please stop next door at the Film Floozy Cafe and grab yourself a seat.  I'll pour you a hot steamin' cup of hogwash and serve up some fresh- (albeit half-) baked mutterings about movies.  While it's none of that fancy gourmet gab that you can expect from serious film critics, the portions are generous, and I can dish it out like nobody's business.  Yup, the Film Floozy is nothing if not hot, fast and cheap............. 

Today's special is No Country for Old Men - a meaty slab of shoot 'em up action paired with sharp dialogue and smothered in a tangy neo-noir sauce, served with a side of extra-crusty Tommy Lee Jones.

Or, if you're hankering for lighter fare, help yourself to the fluffy little fragment in which I writhe in estactic anticipation over the upcoming release of Mamma Mia, the movie.....

All this and more, available 24/7 - there's always fast but filling film fun at the Film Floozy Cafe!  Come on by!

  

Now Playing On Channel 2.........

  

Come on in!  I'm sorry I didn't hear the doorbell ring....I was just out back tending to my garden of blooming movie delights. 

Do take a gander - my hydrangea of horror has produced a lovely blossom by way of The Orphanage (produced by Guillermo del Toro, and it shows).  I try to prune prudently, but inevitably a few wayward weeds sprout up here and there........such was the case with the virulent British comedy of manners, Death at a Funeral (best to nip those in the bud -  I personally find that pruning shears work best, unless of course you are fortunate enough to have a full-time crop duster on staff................).

And thus spring has sprung!  Pop on by and enjoy the bouquet of cinematic delights and duds now growing in the Film Floozy's backyard.

Adventures in Netflixing: "P.S. I Love You"

If you will kindly direct your attention to the flight attendant standing at the front of this posting, she will now point out the location of the nearest secondary blog affiliated with this site.  In the event that you are bored with all this hooey about nothing in particular, please click on the link in front of you, and you will be redirected to my blog that is specifically about movies. 

Our in-flight entertainment this evening is the passable chick flick, "P.S. I Love You."  Gerard Butler is in it.  Please check your grasp on reality at the gate or shove it into an overhead compartment, since if you like to watch chick flicks, your grasp on reality has probably long since been whittled down to a nub anyway and will fit easily into a small compact space.  You may then proceed to turn to the person seated next to you, imagine he's Gerard Butler, and strap him firmly over your mouth.  Resume thinking normally before realizing that the real Gerard Butler is probably nowhere near as sensitive and sweet as he's portrayed in this film.  That's why they make chick flicks, dummy. 

Thank you for taking this flight of fancy with the Film Floozy, and have a pleasant journey.

Adventures in Netflixing: "Atonement"

   Oh, gentle reader, please do partake of the latest review at my summer blog in the Hamptons - Adventures in Netflixing:  "Atonement," a story of a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her, but not really..............

It's a grand sweeping epic in which the red herring is served up finely minced inside crustless finger sandwiches during tea time on the south lawn.  It was pretty good, I guess.

Now Playing on Channel 2......

So, I've just launched a second, more topically focused blog as part of the grand experiment I was blathering on about earlier.  This blog will be all movies, all the time, but in an "antithesis to the serious film critic" kind of way.  I have christened it, Cinematic Sass from a Film-Lovin' Floozy, and it's a film-focused flophouse where my movie reviews and other flick-related flibbertigibbetry will hereforth prop up their feet and crack open a cold one.

I've just reviewed the DVD, "Hitman," starring Timothy Olyphant.  Mosey on over if you're starved for amusement.  And I'll let you know here whenever there's new stuff over there, so you don't develop whiplash trying to keep up.

Of course, I'll continue to expound upon everything else under the sun on this side of the fence.

More soon!  Over and out. 

Adventures in Netflixing: "Cloverfield"

The plot:  a giant sea monster (or space alien or whatever) rampages through Manhattan, cracking open buildings and sucking down the people inside 'em like a drunken businessman at a sushi bar barreling through a rapid succession of oyster shooters.  Throw in intentionally jerky hand-held camera work a la Blair Witch for a more *authentic* feeling and *immediate* experience.

I thought this flick was a blast.  When it was released theatrically, the smattering of reviews that somehow filtered into my subconscious convinced me this would be a third-rate Godzilla knock-off, at best.  Just now I hit the web to get a more comprehensive sampling of how it went down amidst reviewers at the time.  Some liked it, as I did.  Those who weren't fans echoed a few popular refrains:  "Waaaah waaah waaah!  The characters aren't fully developed!  Waaaah waaah waaah!  Post 9/11 images of exploding buildings are in poor taste!  Waaah waah waaah!  This film could have made a stronger case against contemporary society's tendency to be too busy capturing life, via camcorders and camera phones, to actually live life."

In response to the haters, all I can say is, it's a monster movie, people - not a Daniel Day Lewis biopic.  Although a more apt title than the arbitrary, Cloverfield, could well have been, There Will Be Blood, And Bleeding, And Bloody Bleeding Eyeballs. 

As for the criticism that the film misses an opportunity to explore our societal tendency to document life instead of living it.....well, the character who mans the camera for the greater part of the flick is so busy filming the chaos, at one point he neglects to notice a skyscraper-tall sea monster standing over him, licking its chops and eyeballing him like the last coveted h'ors d'oevre on a tray at a happenin' cocktail party.   I'd say that makes the point rather nicely.  Of course, if the filmmakers were more interested in lecturing or wagging their finger at us than entertaining us, they could have by-passed that whole camcorder angle altogether and had the character lug around a laptop, stopping in the middle of the ravaged streets and corpses to blog about the monster's rampage on an hourly basis instead.  (That would have been pretty funny, actually.)

Even the monster effects were decent, which lends credence to my theory that surgically extracting A-list salaries from a production budget might indeed pave the way for more fruitful expenditures in the creature creation department.  The whiplash filming style probably further lent itself to the overall believability..........it's not like they were ever focused on the monster long enough to reveal the pixelated equivalent of the zipper at the back of the costume.  Bonus points to whoever conceptualized the highly unique strain of eczema the monster was stricken with, whose secretions could not only chomp your backside but also impart a gnarly case of Bleeding Eyeball Disease. 

Good stuff.  A+!

He Can Infiltrate My Wardrobe Anytime

As a kid, I was a voracious reader.  Of course, in imagining along as I read, I typically cast myself as the central heroine of every story, and I was consistently inclined to cast any and all "older" adult-ish characters (basically anyone reputed to be over the age of 13 or so) as anonymous and faceless shadow figures......... not far off from how the grown-ups in those animated Charlie Brown specials were portrayed, which was off-screen altogether, speaking in a warbled, "Wah wah wah wah wah wah!" sort of blather, if and only if it was absolutely necessary to acknowledge the trifling presence of grown-ups in the first place. 

I read the Chronicles of Narnia repeatedly (its first installment, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, remained my favorite), and I have a vague recollection of Prince Caspian as just another such anonymous and faceless adult shadow figure.  Judging by the trailers, I see that the casting directors of the new upcoming movie opted to go in the "Latin hottie" direction instead.

Rahhhhhhhhr!  Nice choice.  It's a far more scenic direction, to be sure.

Adventures in Netflixing: "I Am Legend"

Finally.  Finally this DVD saw fit to rip like a buzzsaw through the thousands of other outstretched, greedy, grasping fingers of my fellow Netflix members and cut a swath of severed digits right to my doorstep. 

  It was as much fun as I expected it to be. 

If a proverbial mad scientist was toiling in his lab to make a clone of THE coolest leading man on earth for an action picture (thus skirting the issue of having to pay an A-list salary for the real deal), obviously Will Smith's DNA would be the strand most at home in that particular petri dish.  (Uh, do they even put DNA strands in petri dishes?  What the hell do I know?  I was an abominable failure in middle school science - sorry.  But I digress.)  Smith brings a perfect balance of emotional subtlety and ass whuppin' mastery to the role.  And overall there's sustainable build-up of suspense, a great climactic confrontation of good versus evil, all that jazz........      

My main gripe with this flick was the FX-generated cartoons cast as the legion of undead (in lieu of human actors).  I'm sorry, but digital effects have yet to evolve to a point where they can transcend that whole suspension of disbelief stumbling block.  In contrast, 28 Days Later did a great job of tarting up its actors with blood-red eyes and blotchy effect makeup, and those suckers were plenty scary.  Sure, I can see where digital actors are more economical in scenes of scale, where you wouldn't otherwise want to deal with the expense of providing enough craft service for 10,000 real live extras, and/or where said extras can't possibly be expected to perform superhuman feats, as in the wharf scene showdown in Legend where the zombies are required to swarm rapidly up a fifty-foot-high lamppost and topple it over whilst exhibiting signs of advanced onset of rabies. 

Though I'd kill to be a fly on the wall of that particular soundstage if they had used humans for that scene......I mean, actors are pretty gullible:

Actor:  "What's my motivation?"

1st A.D.:  "OK, you're Spiderman on crack.  You've had a run of bad luck, Mary Jane dumped your sorry ass, you're broke, you're asking yourself what's the point, you've turned to the crackpipe for comfort and fallen in with the wrong crowd, yadda yadda.....now I'm gonna need you to just wrench your limbs from the sockets and bend them completely backwards, foam at the mouth, and show me existential crisis - by the way, that lamppost over there is your mother, who abandoned you when you were just four years old - and....ACTION!" 

  But there were plenty of other scenes in this picture in which a close-up on a live human (I mean, undead, inhuman) zombie would have really cinched the moment for me.  An overly apparent computer-generated pile of pixels going, "ARRRRRGHHHGGHHH!!  OOOGA BOOOOGA!!!!"?!?!?!  Not so much.

Eh.  Such is the ongoing dilemma within the scary movie genre - believable monsters so rarely come in under budget.  Not that I'd want to divert resources from preventing human rights violations perpetuated by China or coming up with a stopgap for global warming, but surely we could throw a spare Nobel Prize in the general direction of the first digital effects guy to create a genuinely scary zombie, or werewolf, or whatever. 

Still, I Am Legend was an awfully fun way to kill a couple of hours.  I give it an A-.            

Adventures in Netflixing: "Lars and the Real Girl"

When I first heard of this picture, I immediately thought of Adrian Brody sporting a different kind of wood in Dummy.  I'm sure there has to be enough other comparably themed movies to fill a small sub-genre entitled, "Movies About Maladjusted Boys Who Love Inanimate Objects."  Though when I tried googling this topic, I mostly wound up getting an eyeful of weird porn, so never mind. 

Somehow the filmmakers behind Lars avoid getting too schticky (a la Weekend At Bernie's) or weird, which is pretty remarkable for a film centering around a guy's relationship with a sex doll.  Actually, the premise made for a rather nice metaphor about the sometimes ludicrous baggage being carted around by the people we love and live with, and what they in turn must endure when we start digging deep into our own bag of tricks. 

The scene in which Lars first presents his "girlfriend" to his brother and sister-in-law at dinner is particularly hilarious, in no small part because of the universal experience of that first meeting with the invariably flawed significant other of someone we know.....a meeting which all too often spurs us to also retreat to the kitchen and gasp or snicker in disbelief behind their backs when the love interest in question fails to live up to our own exacting standards.  Then again, many of life's standard scenarios lead to gasping and snickering behind people's backs afterward because they fail to live up to our own exacting standards.  Such is life, and filmmaking in particular.

Beyond one or two truly LOL moments, like the dinner scene mentioned above, I mostly found Lars and the Real Girl to be equal parts wry and sweet.  More than one serious film critic trotted out the word, "Capra-esque" to describe this flick. (What is it with serious film critics, anyway?  They can't seem to go for more than two or three reviews without invoking one of the "greats," a la Capra or Kurosawa.  It's like a gag reflex with those folk.  But I digress.....)

Gosling kicks ass and steers this vehicle away from the predictable potholes in which a sex doll movie might otherwise look like little more than a life-sized posterior cavity plug.  Patricia Clarkson and Emily Mortimer also work it nicely.  I give it an A-. 

Adventures in Netflixing: "The Savages"

This is one of those tricky movies that you can't simply like or dislike, because your opinion will inadvertently speak volumes about what kind of person you are. 

If you enjoy a movie like this, you are probably a well-educated person who likes to champion anti-studio underdog movies and cinema verité, though you also risk coming across as an elitist snob who desperately needs to prove his or her intellectual worth.  If you dislike this sort of movie, you might be a free-thinking mensch who is confident in his or her tastes and refuses to bow to the pressure of critical acclaim, but on the other hand, your refusal to be impressed may simply mask the fact that you're too busy wondering where the car chase sequence went to appreciate the subtle nuances of well-written dialogue.

That's a lot of pressure on a person, frankly.  Sometimes I just want to watch a damn movie without having to declare my shortcomings.  Anyway....... 

I really loved this movie, though I can't say I really enjoyed it, seeing as how it's about aging parents who have been rendered helpless and are then shuffled by guilt-ridden adult children into smelly nursing homes.  Whee!  However, the dialogue and characters are too good to ignore, and I have no choice but to add to the white noise of ubiquitous Phillip Seymour Hoffman adoration by insisting that he is an actor with few if any contemporary rivals.  Laurey Linney is also breathtaking in her vulnerability.  For what it's worth, there are an ample number of sharp, crisp, amusing moments scattered amidst the stinky bedpans and sad, leathery expressions of old people whose toes curl up right before they die. 

Good stuff.  I give it an A.  Mind you, it is sending me screaming into the action-mongering, vampire-zombie-slaughtering arms of Will Smith for some soothing escapism (yes, I Am Legend has finally de-queued itself and is heading to my front door as I type!  Oh joyous day!).