Going Out With a Bang!

The early bird deadline for submissions just passed yesterday and DVD’s have been rolling in for the past month. This is just about the time of year where we begin to hunker down with indie movies and I rarely get to see Hollywood films until the summer. So, I decided to go out with a bang last weekend and went to see three movies in the theater.

Beowulf was the first movie I saw. A lot of people have been dumping on it for the use of computer animation. This is obviously still a new technology and there are still some rough edges to knock off of it, but overall I was pretty impressed. I think it has come a long way since the creepy eyed little kids in the Polar Express. It was especially interesting to see how they completely re-imagined the bodies of Ray Winstone, Angelina Jolie and Anthony Hopkins. I’m very interested in seeing them improve on it, but am admittedly a little weirded out by any non-surgical option that can take 10 years or 30 pounds off an actor. I was most impressed to see how far 3-D glasses have come since I was a kid though. They used to be those cardboard red and blue things that gave you a headache, and now they could almost pass for really cheap, nerdy sunglasses. Almost.

My wife really wanted to see No Country for Old Men, but I talked her into seeing Southland Tales instead. In retrospect, this is kind of like talking someone out of a 4-star restaurant so you can drop acid and hike to McDonalds. Just like a big portion of America, I fell in love with Donnie Darko. I even had the opportunity to meet Richard Kelly at a film event that I was volunteering for a few years ago. I wanted to like it so much, but this movie was such a mess. It really showed what happens when someone has too much success too fast. Name actors had lined up to be part of the project (I read later that many of them still don’t understand it) and it was as if people couldn’t throw enough money at it. The result was a self-indulgent, bloated, wandering film that couldn’t figure out what it was doing. The best part, was Justin Timberlake’s lip synch and dance number, but I’d look for it on Youtube somewhere instead of wasting 2 and a half hours of my life waiting for a good 2 minute part. If Dwayne Johnson wasn’t such a good looking guy, I don’t know if my wife would have forgiven me for making her sit through it.

So, we decided to finish with No Country for Old Men. It was a plotline that felt like it had been done a few times before, but nobody has ever made it work like the Cohen brothers. Josh Brolin plays Llewelyn Moss, a rugged hunter who wanders onto the scene of a drug deal gone bad. He finds a briefcase full of money and hightails it out of town with an airgun weilding psycho in tow (played brilliantly by Javier Bardem). Almost everything seemed to hit in this movie. The casting was fantastic, the suspense was riveting, the details of each scene were incredible. The only thing that left me wanting was the ending, but the rest of the movie was so good that I was willing to let it slide. All in all a great way to cap off the weekend.

Now, to this stack of indie screeners. If one of them is yours, thanks for sending it in. If you haven’t sent one to us yet, please do!