CleverDonkey.com …Musings, Commentary, Opinions, and Drivel

Wall*E is the story of a little robot who does a big job – cleaning up the Earth and saving humanity.  He’s the last of his kind, left behind by the entire human race who have gone to live in the stars, at least for a while.  It seems that man had finally filled up the Earth with so much trash that it wasn’t fit to live on any more, so they built an army of Waste Allocation Load Lifters – Earth-class, or WALL*Es, and set them to gathering and stacking all the garbage.  Meanwhile, the humans blasted off to live in luxurious, automated, sterile, giant space stations while the robots put the Earth back into a livable state.

Unfortunately, the job was too big even for an army of robots, and over hundreds of years all the machines started breaking/dying/shutting down, until only one is left.  Wall*E spends his days gathering trash, compacting it into cubes in his belly, and stacking it in gigantic, skyscraper sized rows of refuse.  Wall*E is happy in his work, sentient, romantic, and a collector of stuff.  When he finds interesting things he takes them back to his house, and watches old movie musicals to pass the time.  Think “The Omega Man”, only with a plucky robot instead of Charlton Heston, and no mutants.  Oh, but there is at least one cockroach, and he and Wall*E share a symbiotic relationship.

Then, one day, out of the sky comes a huge rocket, which lands just long enough to leave behind a little egg-shaped robot to search for plant life.  She is Eve (Environmental Vegetation Evaluator, I think), and her sleek whiteness and technological advancement make Wall*E look like broken-down Tonka truck compared to the latest iPod/iPhone/iBot/iPhaser/iBrain.  She relentlessly combs the area for some sign of plant life, and blasts any perceived threats with what appears to be a phased-plasma flipper.  Wall*E is, of course, smitten, and manages to survive Eve’s defenses long enough for her to figure out that he’s not a threat.

And just as soon as Wall*E starts working his romantic mojo on Eve, she discovers a plant that he has been nurturing and then things get weird.  Eve goes into some kind of extended hibernation until the rocket returns and takes her away again.  Wall*E stows aboard and gets taken with Eve up to one of the human spacecraft, and that’s when the story really gets started.

Suffice it to say that both true love and the fate of humanity hang in the balance of the story, and the tale is funny, exciting, heartbreaking, and ultimately…well…happy.  What else would you expect from Pixar?

The animation of the film is flawless – not that it’s faking reality or anything.  You know that it’s animated, but it is achingly well done.  You don’t notice that it’s animated, and are quickly immersed in the reality of Wall*E.  It also takes quite a while to realize that Wall*E doesn’t really

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When I heard they were making a big screen version of the Iron Man comic books (sorry, graphic novels don’t exist, losers) it felt like a body blow – yet another crude and artless raping and pillaging of our cultural history by Hollywood in pursuit of dollars.  Then I heard that the lead was being played by…Robert Downey, Jr!??!?  Um, I’m sorry, I’m afraid I didn’t hear that right…did you say Robert Downey, Jr. would be playing Iron Man????  That…doesn’t make any sense…at all.  I mean, once I thought about it, it sounded slightly interesting, but what in the world were the Hollywood studio execs thinking?  You have to have a big name star to go in your big budget picture with the big special effects and the big promotional tie-ins so you get the big box office with a big early summer season opener…

…right?

Well, then I found out that it wasn’t produced by a “major Hollywood studio”, it’s actually the first major motion picture produced by Marvel (the comic book folks).  And the director?  None other than Jon Favreau, who is about as unlikely a director of a big-budget, special-effects-laden, summer-blockbuster movie as Downey is as the star.

So then I started to get mildly interested.  But that always happens to me as the summer blockbuster season approaches, and I am disappointed about 95% of the time, so I was still skeptical.  Then I started hearing early reviews – and they were good.  And not the bought-and-paid-for-blurb-friendly-pabulum that gets associated with crap like Transformers, Cloverfield, War of the Worlds, King Kong, etc.  Actual positive critiques of the film by cineastes.

“Huh…”, I thought, with tremendous insight if I do say so myself.

When the film opened yesterday I found myself really wanting to see it – however Mynagirl was just returning from out of town, so schlepping out to see a movie would have been near-torture for her during her post-travel recovery.  But, we both wanted to see it and vowed to attend the first screening today (the Saturday after opening).

Which we did…and it was magnificent.  Go and see it right now – in fact, stop reading and just go see it.  Then come back here and finish this review.  One and only one caveat – this film is based on a comic book, so, well, don’t expect it to be super-realistic.  It’s a comic book story, right?  Go in with that mindset and you won’t be disappointed, because Iron Man transcends what I’ve come to expect from big-budget comic book films.  Robert Downey Jr. is perfectly cast in the lead.  The rest of the roles are also superbly cast, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Terrence Howard, and Jeff Bridges.

The screenplay is intelligent and funny, and the story is engaging.  Yes, the bad guys are a shade stereotypical, but Tony Stark (Downey’s character) is a conflicted hero.  He’s the brilliant son of one of the key players in the Manhattan Project, as an engineer he’s a prodigy, and

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We live in a small country town (Brenham, TX – population ~13,000), and love it.  One drawback, however, is that there is only a single movie theater here, six-screens showing the absolute worst of Hollywood crap…we call it the Yokelplex.  There has been only one exception, which is when they showed Gone With the Wind on the big screen in partnership with a local community theater that was staging a play about the making of the movie.  But other than that – a constant parade of dreck.  For example, here's the current playlist:

21Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a WhoDrillbit TaylorLeatherheadsNim's IslandSuperhero MovieTyler Perry's Meet the Browns

Not every movie on that list is execrable, but most are, and none are compelling enough to get my entertainment dollars.  We've been to see maybe 5 or 6 films at the theater, and we've lived here for a year and a half and I *love* going to the movies.

What does this have to do with In Bruges?  Well, nothing directly, except that we had to drag ourselves into downtown Houston (90 minute drive, to the sadly decaying Angelika Theater – more on that at the bottom of this article) in order to find a movie worth seeing.  And, to me, this is indicative of the drought of good films being produced by the mainstream American film community.  Are there occasionally good American films?  Yes.  However, most of the mainstream films are simply horrible.

At one point we were so desperate for movie entertainment that we took a couple of weekends to visit the Yokelplex and see the films that were most highly rated by the combination of RottenTomatoes and IMDB.  One weekend it was The Spiderwick Chronicles, which we knew was primarily a kid's movie, but I've got an open mind and have loved many "kid" pics, such as The Incredibles.  Well, Spiderwick was so bad that we walked out, something we rarely do.  It wasn't really bad, it was just incredibly derivative and boring.  As are most mainstream films that we are able to go see.

However, In Bruges, is a different story altogether.  We had seen some brief trailers for it, and it looked kind of like an action comedy, and it is…sort of.  But it's much more than that.  First of all, it's so well written that it shames virtually every American film we've seen in the last few years, with only a few exceptions like Michael Clayton, Superbad, and Stranger Than Fiction.  Second, it defies expectations at every turn – and not in the in-your-face, clonk-you-over-the-head, artless manner of most mainstream American films – but in subtle, unexpected, and even frightening ways.

I really don't want to talk too much about the film because I don't want to spoil it.  Suffice it to say that Bruges is the name of a city in Belgium, and Colin Ferrell and Brendan Gleeson (who also played the father with the little girl in 28

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First and foremost, go into this movie with the realization that it is Rated R, and heartily deserves it.  If you are easily offended by nudity and/or sexual situations then you probably want to skip this film.  The scenes in question are not gratuitous and are germane to the plot, and are also some of the funniest scenes in the film.

And that's the key to this movie…it is funny…damn funny.  Judd Apatow and his ensemble have created another winner here, and it's looking to be a habit (Drillbit Taylor notwithstanding).  The screenplay was written by Jason Segal, who is also the star.  His character is a journeyman composer in the film and TV industry, but he happens to be dating the hot, blonde starlet (named, of course, Sarah Marshall) of a TV crime drama.  However, between her success and his professional mediocrity, she decides that they're "just going in different directions" and dumps him.

Peter Bretter (Segal's character, above left) tries several methods to cope with his broken heart, including sobbing, eating cereal, acting out at work, and nailing anything that moves.  Nothing helps – then a friend suggests that a vacation might be just the thing to break the funk.  Peter heads to a resort in Hawaii that Sarah had mentioned, and when he gets there who does he find?  Sarah (above, middle), of course, along with her new beau, the preening pop star Aldous Snow (above, right).

He also meets Rachel, who works the front desk of the resort.  As you might imagine, he and Rachel fall in love, but not without complications, of course.  All of the characters in this film seem like they would fit stereotypes from a hundred other romcoms, but they all seem to defy expectations by being more real and quirky than I expected.  Aldous Snow the pop star, in particular, really ends up differently than one might presume from his initial scenes.

And that seems to be the key to the Apatowian juggernaut – characters that feel real, that develop, and that are funny and poignant in ways that don't seem to be contrived for a film.  Now, I'm not saying that people in the real world would ever act exactly as these characters do in all situations – but it's close.  The characters also draw our instant empathy because of their familiarity, even Sarah.  She's not a demonized vixen, she's more like a confused person who let success go to her head, and now isn't sure how to act "normal" any more.

Jason Segal is the only credited writer for the screenplay, and if wrote all of it himself then it's an astonishing debut.  It was surprising and refreshing to hear snappy, funny dialog that didn't feel recycled or derivative – and he keeps it up throughout the entire film.

I'll wrap up by reiterating my opening warning – if you are offended by nudity and sexual content, you may want to skip this

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Michael Clayton is an old-fashioned movie, which means that the movie is built on a great script, great directing, and great acting.  It is exciting with minimal special effects.  It is tense with little or no blood or gore.  It is funny without gross-out humor.  There is a hero, but he is a flawed human being.  There are strong male and female leads, but no love story.  There appears to be some type of redemption at the end, but it is of cold comfort.

George Clooney (above, right) plays the title character, who is a cleaner at a high-powered law firm.  When one of the firms big-wig clients gets dirt under their fingernails, the firm sends in Michael Clayton to clean up the mess.  He’s not a trial lawyer, he’s a fixer.  He greases the right skids, spins the right stories, smartens up the clients as to realistic expected outcomes, and then moves on to the next mess.  He’s highly paid, but not a partner, and apparently never will be given the…distasteful…nature of his specialty.  He’s a mercenary fighting for the side with the most money, and rightness and justness are left for children’s fairy tales.

And despite his high wages, Clayton is broke.  He started a bar with his brother as a partner, but his brother fell off the drug wagon and took the business with him.  Clayton also spends too much time at back-room poker games, and also funded the failing bar with loan shark money.  This pressing debt makes it very difficult for him to see that he is mortgaging his humanity for money.

His latest mess involves one of his own firms star trial attorneys, Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), who for the last six years has been leading the defense of one of the firms clients (a gigantic food company a la Con Agra or Archer Daniels Midland) against charges that one of their farming chemicals kills said farmers and their families, and the company knew about it and did nothing.  But Arthur has snapped his cap, stripped naked during depositions, and chased the opposition around a parking lot in nothing but his socks.

Arthur’s madness is not random, it is a breakdown brought on by the fact that while sifting through tens of thousands of documents during discovery he uncovered a report from the client’s own scientists…stating that their product will kill people…escalating the issue to executive management…and with an acknowledgments page containing the signature of the CEO.  In other words, not only the smoking gun, but the gun, the bullets, the motive, the opportunity, the blood, the body, the microbes, the fingerprints, the gunpowder residue, the security cam footage, and the confession. The signed confession.

However, all Clayton knows is that the lead counsel for their largest client has gone off his rocker, and as the fixer he needs to get him under control and not jeopardize the upcoming settlement.  However, as Clayton digs into the facts he begins to learn the truth, and the

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Before going to see Superbad ask yourself if you are offended by crude sexual humor, crude language, underage drinking, underage sex, underage smoking, male bonding, funky geeks, or penile oeuvres. And if you think you might be, ask yourself this: could put up with them in order to see a movie that will have you snorting your soda out of your nose with laughter?? And also ask yourself if you could put up with them if they are not the point of the film (as they are in the vast majority of “teen sex comedies”) but instead are necessary to the plot, because the plot revolves around two male graduating high-school seniors, and those things define their lives?

And also know that the film actually has a message hidden beneath the teen hijinks plot. Not a message that bludgeons you over the head, but a simple and sweet message about being friends and becoming adults. It’s sometimes hard to see the sweetness through the crudity, but then that’s the paradox of all young men on the verge of adulthood, which this film captures perfectly.

The movie focuses on two lifelong friends who are facing the last few days of high school together. They’ve gotten into different colleges and so are facing the prospect of a drastic and unwanted change in their lives. They also both want to get girlfriends for the summer – one (Seth) so that he’ll be good at sex before he hits college, the other (Evan) because he really likes a particular girl. The focus of their goals is a graduation party where both girl-targets will be in attendance, and each couple has engaged in some awkward-teen flirting during the school day prior to the party that night.

The boys have another friend, Fogell, who is the ultimate total geek. And even though neither Seth nor Evan are particularly suave or smooth, they look like James Bond and Cary Grant when compared to Fogell. But Fogell has a trump card – he has gotten a fake ID. Seth’s target-girl Jules thinks that Seth will be bringing the booze for the party she’s hosting, and the three boys quest to acquire and deliver the alcohol is the crux of the movie.

Their quest is complicated by the fact that Fogell’s fake ID shows his name simply as “McLovin” – no first name. When asked why he picked that name, Fogell states that they let you pick any name when you get down there, and he was stuck between “Muhammad” and “McLovin”. By the end of the film the name “McLovin” has muscled its way into the American patois and I predict will forever be used to refer to geeks, with the implication that they will flower into intelligent, successful, sensitive men (as geeks usually do, take note teen girls). It’s nice to see geeky dorks getting a cool archetype – thus is the genius of

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When I first heard that Sylvester Stallone was making Yet Another Rocky Movie I cringed. How pitiful, I thought, that Sly would hang onto the lower rungs of Hollywood and exploit his purest achievement in a base attempt to recapture former glory.

Mea culpa. Boy, was I wrong, and I freely and joyfully admit it.

Rocky Balboa captures much (but not quite all) of the punch and emotion of the first Rocky film, and remains true to the original’s flashes of gritty realism mixed with slightly unbelievable heroic feats. However, if it were all believable then why would we go to the movies to see it? There’s nothing super-human and there’s no magical realism, and while the story is implausible it is not impossible. For those who don’t know, in the new film Rocky is an aging ex-champion boxer who runs a nice restaurant that traffics on his fame as a local Philly hero. Adrian, his wife, has been dead for several years and Rocky is going through the motions of trying to have a life after the loss of his soul-mate and in the face of his deepening estrangement from his son.

Rocky is still the kind, considerate palooka who speaks with simple wisdom and humor, and cares for those around him. Some guy he once knocked out eats free at his restaurant whenever he wants. A character from the first film, the young girl who Rocky walked home and admonished to stop smoking and quit hanging around with losers, is now a grown woman with a son of her own, and Rocky gives her a job and takes her son under his wing – with no romantic or lecherous undertones, just because he feels it’s the right thing to do.

But he misses Adrian. He spends a lot of time at her graveside visiting her. He takes a tour of old places from the first film – the pet store, ice skating rink, Mick’s boxing gym, his own old apartment, etc – and he drags his brother-in-law Paulie along with him, until Paulie can’t take it any more. You see, Rocky is living in the past and not moving on – he’s staying alive, but he’s festering.

In a parallel thread we learn about the current heavyweight champ, Mason “The Line” Dixon (great name!). He’s undefeated and undisputed, but he’s beaten all of his opponents so handily that nobody takes him seriously as he has yet to prove he has enough heart to go the distance against a worthy opponent.

And so one night ESPN airs a special in which a computer simulation of Rocky in his prime fights Dixon in his prime, and the computers say that Rocky would win. This gives Rocky the idea of getting back into boxing, even though he’s 60 years old. Nothing big, just local club fights, because as he tells Paulie, he’s still got some stuff in his emotional basement that he needs

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Holy sacred cow, what a hilarious movie! I’ve never seen Da Ali G Show nor the character of Borat created by Sacha Baron Cohen (other than in all the ads for this film). We went to go see it tonight based on the universally positive reviews, coupled with the hilarity of the clips in the ads and talk shows, and the film definitely lived up to, and even exceeded, our expectations. To put it into context, we walked out of this movie and I immediately got on the phone with my friend Bruce to tell him to go see this film. I can’t remember the last time I did that, if ever, and Bruce is my movie-watching-hermano to whom I would NOT make such a recommendation lightly.

Borat (the film) is smartly dumb and dumbly smart, whereas Borat (the character) is a Frankenstein’s monster amalgamation of Christianity, Islam, Judaism (…NOT!), Eurasian, nomad, disco dancer, sex machine, journalist, pilgrim, and tabula rasa. The parts don’t fit together well, but through the sheer force of his laserlike dumbness, Borat manages to orchestrate his many facets into a compellingly hilarious and sympathetic whole.

I’m struggling in this review not to give away plot points and gags, as they should be experienced without preamble, but suffice it to say that I don’t believe there is a single major taboo that is not broken, nor a single demographic group that is not mocked in this film. And mocked effectively. Borat holds a mirror up to “America”, to our faults and to our greatness, and the dissection is as painful to watch as it is revelatory and uproarious. The theater literally screamed with laughter during the vast majority of the film, and there were times when I had to simply look away as my sensibilities couldn’t take any more, and I’m a pretty jaded, worldly, not-easily-offended movie-goer.

Almost lost in the film is the absolutely pitch-perfect portrayal of Borat by Cohen. Cohen reaches Spinal Tap levels of believability, where you easily forget that what you are seeing is a double fake-out…a mock documentary about a completely fictional character. When Borat and his producer scream heated gibberish at each other, I don’t know what they are saying, but I’m sure it has nothing to do with what’s being portrayed by the English subtitles, and it’s probably some amalgamation of nonsense and Hebrew (Cohen is Jewish), but it sure *sounds* like what I, as an ignorant American, would expect a Kazakstani to sound like.

Just to be clear about this review and film, I’m not the arrested-adolescent type who laughs at crude jokes simply because I find them funny. Borat is the offensive joke as an art form and as social commentary. If you go see this film, and you should, be prepared to be horrified and disgusted and to laugh yourself to tears and to walk out wiping your eyes and having conversations about human nature, bigotry, international relations,

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We’re in the process of buying a new house, selling our existing one, and moving. Combine this with our always-hectic work schedules and we’ve been up to our eyeballs in things to do for quite a while. We decided to take a respite from the storm and stopped off at the Alamo Drafthouse at West Oaks Mall to see Beerfest. For those who don’t know the Alamo Drafthouse, it’s a theater where they serve you food and drinks, including alcohol, at your seat before and during the film. A couple of cold beers and a Broken Lizard laugh-fest were just what we needed in the middle of our busy weekend.

Beerfest isn’t quite up the standard set by Super Troopers, but it’s still funny as hell, and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. The story is about two brothers who help their grandmother run a restaurant in the US. Their grandmother (Cloris Leachman) is a German immigrant, and the boys are of stout, beer-drinking German stock. The boys are charged with taking their dearly departed grandfather’s ashes back to Germany to be laid to rest in the traditional place, which turns out to be a super-secret beer-Oympics called BeerFest, which takes place in Munich during Oktoberfest but is attended only by the kegnoscenti.

The boys end up being humiliated by their German kin, and vow to return the following year to exact their revenge. They use the year to assemble and train a team of great beer drinkers, made up of the usual Broken Lizard crew.

As you may imagine, R-rated hilarity ensues. There are a lot of laugh-out-loud moments, and just enough plot to keep things interesting. There’s nothing too deep here, but the whole purpose of this film is to make you laugh and keep you engeged for 90 minutes, and it does that very well. We really liked Super Troopers and The Dukes of Hazzard, and haven’t yet seen Club Dread but plan to very soon, if for no other reason than completism (all are part of the Lizard ouvre).

So, BeerFest is good fun, Broken Lizard continues to get more interesting, and we can’t wait to see what they do next. I’m not sure if the hint about their next movie that appears at the end of BeerFest is on the up-and-up, but if it is it looks to pretty damn funny as well.

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So we went to see The Descent on Friday, after much hemming and hawing on what to see. Also on our radar were Miami Vice, Clerks II, and Talledega Night. We decided on The Descent, and the most convenient showtime was the 7pm at the Cinemark Tinseltown on 290. Note that we almost walked out of the theater, not due to the quality of the film but because since we were last at this particular theater it has decayed into a smelly, frayed, unpleasant venue, and we won’t be returning.

The film, however, was scary, tense, and very good. There’s nothing really deep here, although there are some serious plot developments unrelated to the overarching storyline. The gist of the story is that five women go a-spelunking and discover two things: a) catfighting is always popular with the multiplex masses and b) it sucks to be trapped in an uncharted cave system with beings who:

Appear to be an evolutionary offshoot of humans.
Hunt by sonar, like a bat.
Are blind, supposedly due to evolving in caves, but they also hunt on the surface, so WTF?
Can dodge swung pickaxes, even though they are blind.
Can’t sense heat, as they can walk within six inches of a human body (or flaming torch) and not sense it.
Have no sense of smell or touch, as they can stand on top of a human body, and not feel or smell that it’s not the rock floor of a cave (I guess these women all have 0% body fat and don’t use any personal care products?).
The survival skills of mutant cave humans are no match for an angry Asian woman, who kicks their ass in a fair fight, presumably using the innate fighting ability that Hollywood imbues into all Asian characters.

But idiotic plot holes don’t matter in a film like this. Please understand that in spite of the above list, this film is actually more intelligent than most Hollywood films I’ve seen in the last few years, which is sad. However, this film isn’t about logical integrity, it’s about claustrophobia, paranoia, compound fractures, puncture wounds, eye-gouging, rock-climbing, chimney-falling, and mutant-fighting.

This film was originally released in the UK in 2005, and I’ve heard that version had a different ending. I’m there will inevitably be a DVD with all the alternate endings, and I’ll probably get it just to see the director’s original ending, which one presumes is different from the ending required by Hollywood before distributing it to the US masses. That last part is conjecture on my part, but please, you know it’s right, don’t you?

Intact, however, is the excellent mood and feeling of tension the film creates. I’ve always known that I would never be a caver, but this film cemented that decision. There are many shots of tight squeezes and near-falls, sheer face climbs and dangling traverses, all of which look and feel completely real, as if they are taking place in a dank, dark cave

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