Metropolitan, War of the Arrows, Withnail and I

Metropolitan, by Whit Stillman, 1990

Holy cats, guys, I think I've finally found my Whiteness Threshold.  I'm a dedicated Wes Anderson fan, I listen to and enjoy Vampire Weekend, and I say things like "holy cats", so I'm pretty white, but I think Whit Stillman's Metropolitan may have been too white for me.  It's a pretty good movie, I guess, but I just couldn't relate.

Metropolitan follows the lives of a group of rich New York college kids who are a part of the debutante society.  They meet up on weekends and talk about intellectual bullshit (and it's pretty bullshitty, they're college freshmen after all) and basically act like people I could never have a conversation with.  The main character is a kid named Tom, who has hit a financial rough patch with his parents' divorce, and is hanging out with these snobby types even though he's poor.  He's just as pretend smart as the rest of them, though; one of my favorite jokes was when he quotes a criticism on Jane Austen and the girl who likes him, Audrey, asks if he's ever even read the book.  He admits that he hasn't.  In fact, he doesn't read books at all, only criticism.  That way he can get the story and a point of view on it.

Anyway, I'm just giving the movie a hard time.  Objectively speaking, Metropolitan is a good film.  And the characters actually do grow on you as the story progresses, though I still constantly found myself thinking, "do people REALLY talk like this?"  Whit Stillman is kind of gently making fun of kids like this (with a name like Whit Stillman, I assume he was once one of them), and showing that for all their intellectual and cultured talk, they're really just teenagers and they have no real life experience or wisdom to back up their ideas.  I actually would like to see Stillman's film The Last Days of Disco.  Even though I'm sure everybody still talks like this, the subject matter interests me.

War of the Arrows, by Han-Min Kim, 2011

With The Hunger Games and The Avengers and Brave all out this year, bows and arrows sure are popular.  Well, South Korea got the jump on our little trend and made a huge historical epic last year with more arrows than you can shake a bow at.  This movie has more bows and more arrows than all three of those movies COMBINED.  Not only that, but people get shot with said arrows in every imaginable way.  In the arms, in the legs, in the chest, you name it.  Necks.

War of the Arrows isn't all just arrows.  There is also WAR.  And also a brother forming a ragtag group to rescue his kidnapped sister and ward off an invading army.  It's really cool.  The story is engaging, the action is awesome, the characters are likeable.  These are all icing on the cake, though, because what I'm most excited about is the arrows.  The only way this movie could have been better is if the main character had a talking arrow who helped him aim or something. 

Anyway, I know this review is really short and one-note, but I liked War of the Arrows a lot.  Totally worth your time.

Withnail and I, by Bruce Robinson, 1987

Withnail and I is one of the strangest films I've seen in a while, and followers of this blog might know that I watch a lot of strange films.  It's the story of two struggling actors in London in the late 1960's.  Withnail (Richard E. Grant) is a hard livin' type, pretty much a drunk, always raging at the world.  "I" (Paul McGann, AKA the 8th Doctor) is the sort of complacent second fiddle who always goes along with Withnail's schemes and worries himself to death all along the way as they get into deeper and deeper trouble.

There's not really much more of a "story".  It's just a ridiculous, darkly comedic, and weirdly enjoyable chain of events.  They go to get money from Withnail's rich, gay uncle, wind up stealing his car and the keys to his country house.  They end up stranded there with no money.  Then the gay uncle turns up and tries to seduce "I".  And so on.

Withnail and I kind of reminds me of the Coen Brothers' cult classic The Big Lebowski.  Both have lots of non sequiturs, a seemingly-but-not-really random story, and indefinable in terms of genre.  I was also pleasantly surprised to see Ralph Brown, the aging concert promoter guy (or whatever, I haven't seen it in many years) in Wayne's World 2.  He's basically playing the same guy in this, and he's just as hilarious.

I (me, not the character) thought Withnail and I (the character, not me) was really enjoyable, but maybe I didn't get it.  I'm sure it had some deeper meaning in there, there was definitely some commentary on the end of the 60's.  I might have to watch it a second time and see if there's anything I'm not picking up on.  Even if there isn't, it's a pretty great movie.

Days of Being Wild, and Minnie and Moskowitz: Two Films That Delve Deep Into Their Characters

Days of Being Wild, by Wong Kar Wai, 1990


Not too long ago, I watched Wong Kar-Wai's first film, As Tears Go By, and was surprised that it wasn't that much like the other Wong Kar-Wai films I had seen. It was kind of a standard Hong Kong crime movie, though signs of the director he was to become show through. Now, I have learned that his second film, Days of Being Wild is really where he found his voice as a storyteller. It apparently kickstarted a whole wave of similar Hong Kong films other than his own, too.

Days of Being Wild, like most of Wong Kar Wai's films, doesn't have a plot, or a linear one, anyway. It follows and deeply explores several richly drawn characters, as their lives collide. Set in 1960, the main-est character of this movie is a man named York (Leslie Cheung), a ladies man who really kind of uses and abuses the women in his life. First he seduces a girl who works at a ticket stand (Maggie Cheung), and when she wants to get serious, he drops her and gets to work on a showgirl (Carina Lau). We eventually learn that his destructive behavior is due to the fact that his adoptive mother has refused for years to tell him who his real mother is. He treats her no better, holding her sort of psychologically captive until she tells him. There's also a police officer (Andy Lau) that gives some comfort to the ticket stand girl, depressed over her relationship with York, before he goes off to become a sailor.

I didn't give away the whole movie, though it almost seems that way. There's a lot going on in there, and a lot happens after where I left off. That's how dense and emotionally textured Wong Kar Wai's films are, and one of the reasons he's so highly lauded. The other is, of course, the beautiful photography by frequent collaborator, Christopher Doyle. This is their first work together, and it looks great. There's a huge difference between this and his first film, which, while still having Wong Kar Wai's vivid colors, looked very much like a seedy low-budget 1980's movie.

Days of Being Wild is a very good film. With it, Wong Kar Wai found both his storytelling and aesthetic styles and in subsequent films honed and improved upon them. I'm looking forward to watching more of those films.

Minnie and Moskowitz, by John Cassavetes, 1971


I've been wondering what I was going to say about this movie ever since I watched it a few weeks ago. I'm not too sure I'm able to sufficiently explain why I loved it so much. I watched it twice within a week, which is something I almost never do, and I liked it even more the second time. I think Minnie and Moskowitz is one of my new favorite movies.

A quirky and unconventional love story, Minnie and Moskowitz is the story of the turbulent whirlwind romance of Seymour Moskowitz (Seymour Cassell AKA Max's dad from Rushmore), a ponytailed, biker-mustached, Jewish, New York parking lot attendant, and Minnie Moore (Gena Rowlands), a depressed 40-ish WASP, in an abusive relationship with a married man, and ready to give up on the very idea of romance.

The characters are so rich, detailed, and completely human. Seymour is impulsive, almost aggressively socially awkward, if that makes sense, and is prone to mouthing off and getting in fights. Minnie's self worth has been so damaged that she hides behind a gigantic pair of sunglasses, even indoors. But despite the fact that these two people are so different, you never question the believability their relationship through its ups and downs. One of my favorite moments is when Seymour questions a romantic gesture that Minnie makes. Embarrassed, Minnie immediately retreats back into her shell and starts putting her sunglasses on, and Seymour just reaches over and pulls her hand down and tells her he gets it. I also love the scene where their different ideas of what romance is becomes crystallized for Minnie, when a passionate Seymour bursts out, "I think about you so much I forget to go to the bathroom!"

I'm just now discovering director John Cassavetes. I've seen him acting in a couple of films, but I'm pretty blown away by his work as a director. He seemed like an awesome guy. He paid his dues doing acting roles, often as bad guys or tough guys, and used his paychecks to independently finance his own movies. He was a real trailblazer in the world of independent film. He worked largely with friends and family. Rowlands was his wife, and she starred in just about all of his films. His actors improvise a lot of their dialogue and Cassavetes would patiently let the camera eavesdrop, often embracing accidents or impulsive acts from the cast members.

I loved Minnie and Moskowitz. It feels so human and real, and it's both funny and emotionally intense. It really lets the viewer come to understand and love the main characters, and it might actually be the ONLY movie from the 1970's with a happy ending. That's a joke, you don't have to list other 70's movies with happy endings for me.

Shadows and Fog and Walker: Two Comedies About Sticking Our Noses Where They Don't Belong

Shadows and Fog, by Woody Allen, 1991


I've seen most of Woody Allen's films at this point, although I've fallen off in recent years. I was pretty sure I had seen most, if not all, of the best ones, which left me pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed his 1991 film, Shadows and Fog.

A darkly comedic homage to German Expressionism, Shadows and Fog has some really beautiful black and white cinematography. In fact, there are tons of shadows and lots of fog in the movie, as I suppose should be expected. Set, I think, in the 1920's, a serial killer is stalking the streets and strangling his victims. Kleinman, a nebbishy 50-ish Woody Allen type, played by Woody Allen, is awakened in the middle of the night by the men of the neighborhood, who are forming a vigilante group to hunt this guy down. He is peer pressured into joining, despite his well-founded reservations.

At the same time, at a travelling circus outside of town, a couple, a sword swallower (Mia Farrow) and a clown (John Malkovich) to be exact, get in a fight over cheating and having kids, and the sword swallower, Irmy, leaves the clown. In the city, she falls in with a prostitute (Lily Tomlin), who takes her into her whorehouse for safety, and the two main stories begin to collide.

I really liked Shadows and Fog. The story is complex, funny, spooky, and interesting, Allen's directing is at its best, and the cast is top notch. It includes Allen, Farrow, Malkovitch, Tomlin, Madonna, Kathy Bates, Jodie Foster, Donald Pleasance, John Cusack, and even a brief appearance by William H. Macy. I especially enjoyed Pleasance's small part as a coroner, and Cusack as a young student infatuated with Farrow, who he believes to be a prostitute. The payoff at the end is pretty great too.

Woody Allen has made a lot of movies. I'm not sure where Shadows and Fog would rank among them, but I'd put it somewhere in the top half, and that's saying quite a lot.

Walker, by Alex Cox, 1987


I didn't know what to expect when I turned on Alex Cox's trippy anti-Biopic, Walker. Cox, director of Repo Man and Sid & Nancy (which I still haven't seen!), brought his punk-rock ethos to the Historical Biography genre, and destroyed his own Hollywood career in the process. Walker is a truly strange mess of a movie, and I kind of loved it.

Walker is the story of William Walker (Ed Harris), an American soldier of fortune in the 1850's who leads a group of mercenaries into Nicaragua to liberate the locals, only to take over and become dictator himself. Cox is not so much interested in historical facts, however, and he plays fast and loose with the truth. He's more interested in commenting on what America was actually doing in Latin America in the 1980's, and he viciously comments on it throughout.

There's lots of hilarious black comedy in Walker, such as the battalion drummer who asks to sit out on the next day's battle because he's noticed in all the war paintings that the drummer is always one of the corpses. Walker looks him in the eye like a holy man and says "as long as I am your commander, no harm shall come to you." Of course, at the battle he is gunned down violently and repeatedly, as Walker is somehow able to walk through all the carnage magically unscathed.

In addition to the comedy and the carnage, there is a surrealist element to Cox's film as well. As the movie progresses, he starts sneaking in historical anachronisms, to remind us that this isn't the 1850's he's talking about, this is today (1987). At first it's something like someone lighting a fuse with a Zippo lighter, or a guy drinking a bottle of Coke, but by the end, there are helicopters disrupting the period authenticity.

Add to all this an excellent, moody musical score by Joe Strummer of The Clash, and you have in Walker a great piece of anti-establishment cinema; shocking, funny, violent, and rebellious. I think it was slammed by critics at the time of its release, but like the best cult movies, has later experienced some rehabilitation and found an audience. Some even hold it up as Alex Cox's best film. I still need to watch Sid and Nancy, so I don't know yet. I sure dug it, though.

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky and Breathless: There Are Lots of Different Ways to Be Great

Wow, everybody, I'm not going to make a big deal of it, but Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is the 300th movie I've reviewed on I Probably Liked It. That's a lot of movies for someone to probably like in only 20 months! I haven't slowed down at all since watching it either. I still have almost 30 movies to review. I'm really wanting to be caught up by the end of this month, but writing takes a lot of time that I don't necessarily have, so we'll see.

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, by Lam Nai-Choi, 1991


I've been hearing about this movie since I was in 9th grade. Back in the early, pre-Stewart days of The Daily Show, they always used to show a clip of a guy smashing another man's head with his fists like Ghallagher smashes a watermelon with a sledgehammer. The older geeks who were more in the know than I told me about The Story of Ricky, and thus a legend was born.

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, set in a hellish not-too-distant future of 2001, is about a good guy who is imprisoned for killing a crime boss. The prison is just as corrupt as the outside world, as Ricky soon learns when he comes to the defense of a poor old man who is just shy of parole. In doing this, he makes enemies of not only the worst of the prisoners, but also the evil warden and his lackies. Now Ricky must fight his way through these guys and out of the jail that would rather see him dead.

This movie is nuts! I don't know why it took me so long to see it. I guess because it was never sitting directly in front of me, until it popped up on Netflix. The violence is super over-the-top and hilariously fake looking. It's like if Evil Dead 2-era Sam Raimi made a science fiction kung fu prison drama/comedy. We're in a world where pretty much anything can happen. We see Ricky smash his fists through heads and torsos, and one of his foes tries to choke Ricky with his intestines at one point. Ricky has superpowers and is basically indestructible, unfortunately for these bad guys. You never feel like the odds are overwhelming for the hero, you just watch to see how he's going to eviscerate one boss after another.

I'm guessing my description isn't really selling Riki-Oh. You're probably wondering what's so appealing about it. It's hard to do this movie justice with words. Let me just say that it's weird and funny and culty and great to watch with a group of friends (inebriation optional). Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is off its rocker, and totally awesome for it.

Breathless, by Jean-Luc Godard, 1960


While I think you could say the Story of Ricky achieves a kind of greatness, Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless is the real deal. Sure, it doesn't have a scene where the hero shoves a bad guy into a meat grinder, but it has its own non-meat-grinder related merits. There's a reason this film is frequently voted by critics as one of the best ever made.

One of the films that kick started the French New Wave, Breathless is the story of Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a guy who steals a car and shoots a cop and now needs money to get out of the way. He goes into the city to find someone to give him a loan. While he's there, he also tracks down Patricia (Jean Seberg), an American girl he's slept with a few times, and wants to come with him. Much of the movie is set in her apartment, as they smoke cigarettes like they're in a French movie and discuss their situation and she tries to determine whether she loves him or not, while the cops are out there tracking him down.

It says something about a movie when it is the source of all the stereotypes of what a certain kind of movie is. Breathless is like that. Every American parody of an "artsy" French film on TV, in cartoons, and in movies, is just doing its own version of Breathless. This is that movie. The philosophical voice-over narration of the hero, the frequent use of jump-cuts. Not only often parodied, but often used for serious. The way Godard used jump-cuts in his editing was a brand new thing at the time, though it's become recognizable and commonplace over the last 50 years.

I had seen Godard's Alphaville before this, and I liked it, but now that I've seen Breathless, Godard seems much easier to get into. It's bold, groundbreaking, and personal and it still feels that way half a century later. This would have been a much better film for me to start off with.

Grab Bag: Fist of Fury / The Chinese Connection, The Lion in Winter, Alice

Look at me! I'm back! Writing about movies once again, now with an all-new, all-Chicago-y backdrop. I still don't have the internet yet, so updates may still be sporadic, but I haven't stopped watching movies in my absence. I think I have like 30 movies piled up to talk about, including some real-deal classics.

Fist of Fury / The Chinese Connection, by Lo Wei, 1972

Much like Enter the Dragon, I'm pretty sure I watched The Chinese Connection when I was a kid, but I don't really remember it. Bruce Lee plays, well, a Bruce Lee-type who returns to his home town to find his master murdered by Japanese bad guys. Bruce Lee then kicks everybody's ass to avenge his teacher and prove Chinese superiority. I can't think of too much more to say about it right now because I'm a bad writer, but it's good stuff.

The Lion in Winter, by Anthony Harvey, 1968

Well, I didn't have much to say about Fist of Fury, so hopefully I can make up for that with the next two.

I said I watched some true classics, and this is one of them. Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn star as King Henry II and his wife Lady Eleanor in this vicious adaptation of the play of the same name.

The Lion in Winter follows the machinations and maneuverings of an aging Henry and Eleanor, their three children, Richard, Geoffrey, and John, in determining the succession of the British Crown. Henry wants his youngest, the snivelling John on the throne. Eleanor wants the eldest, the kingly Richard (Anthony Hopkins in his first movie role). Geoffrey, the middle child, wants Geoffrey on the throne, but nobody else seems to care. Backstabbing, eavesdropping, and manipulation abounds. It's like watching two hours of the most epic domestic dispute of all time.

The characters are all thoroughly wretched people who care for little outside of themselves, but they're thoroughly wretched interesting people, especially O'Toole's Henry. Hepburn won a well-deserved Oscar for her performance.

I didn't know what this movie was going to be like when I started it, and I did not expect it to be so dark and filled with such acidic dialogue. I assume it's a fairly straight adaptation of the play. The family kind of reminded me of the Lannisters in A Game of Thrones. The Lion in Winter is thoroughly engrossing. The writing and the performances pull you in and don't let go for the entire 2 hour plus running time.

Alice, by Woody Allen, 1990

When I was 21 or so, I discovered the films of Woody Allen and never looked back. Like most comedy guys, I prefer the early, zany stuff, but I still appreciate a lot of his later work, all the while yearning for the Woody Allen of old. I've seen the majority of his films, though I've fallen off in recent years. Every once in a while, I look into one of the movies I've overlooked. Alice is one of those movies.

Alice is one of his whimsical fantasy comedies, along the lines of The Purple Rose of Cairo or Midnight in Paris, two of my favorite post-Manhattan Allen films. It is the story of Alice, (Mia Farrow) an unhappy rich housewife who lives a boring, struggle-free life. When she is recommended to a Chinese holistic healer, he gives her all sorts of magic herbs that allow her to fly around the city, speak to ghosts, turn invisible, and so on. Through these she is able to see herself and others in a new light and can make the changes that will allow her to live the life she had intended for herself.

Alice was a decent enough movie, but I wouldn't even put it in my top 10 Allen films. I guess it was said to be a riff on Alice in Wonderland, but really, the only similarity is that she ingests things that give her powers. I also found Allen's take on the mystical Chinese healer to be pretty outdated and borderline racist, in that way where grandpas are racist even when they don't realize it. Still, it has some really fun and funny moments, and it's better than some of his films. I would say check out Alice, but only if you have already seen all the really great Woody Allen films and feel the need to watch more.

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I was hoping to have time for more reviews but this entry alone has taken me days to put together! Things will be calming down in the next week or so, and hopefully I can get back to a regular schedule by then. See you soon!

Matilda

For some reason, I didn't grow up with the stories of Roald Dahl. I watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory many many times over, but nobody ever told me there were books! I would have loved them as a kid. It wasn't until adulthood that I started reading Roald Dahl's children's books, and even a collection of his adult short stories. I actually just read Matilda for the first time last year.

Adapted into a film in 1996 with Danny DeVito directing, Matilda is the story of a special little girl (Mara Wilson), born to the wrong family. Her dad (DeVito) is a greedy scam artist who runs a crooked used car dealership, and her mother (Rhea Perlman) is a preening, beauty-obsessed, Bingo-addict. While Matilda teaches herself to read and write at a very early age, her parents and big brother mostly ignore her, but sometimes berate her for not being more like they are.

As the years pass, Matilda proves herself more and more gifted, able to do long math, spending her days reading library books rather than watch game shows with her family. After a while, she sees her family for what they are, and decides that little kids aren't necessarily the only ones that need to be punished. She decides that when her dad does something especially bad, she'll turn the tables on him with a prank of some sort.

But when Matilda goes to school, she learns that her parents are the least of her worries. The monstrous and sadistic headmistress, The Trunchbull, is known for locking children in small rooms and throwing little girls by spinning them around by their pigtails. Matilda decides she must use her gifts to free her school of the tyranny of the Trunchbull.

More often than not, Dahl's books tend to make good movies. He never talked down to kids, and often wrote some strange and scary things. Matilda is loaded with that kind of stuff, with her mean, borderline abusive parents, and the villainous headmistress. But I can't see a kid being too scared, because they know Matilda is smarter than the grownups and will always have the upper hand.

DeVito does a great job adapting the story. He uses his trademark quirky visual style to create a fantastical world that feels true to Dahl's writing. He's also hilarious as Matilda's father. It's possibly some of the funniest acting of his career. Mara Wilson was quite a discovery for the role of Matilda, cute and innocent enough to get away with committing mischievous acts of revenge on adults without ever losing the viewers' support in this.

Of all the Roald Dahl films, Matilda may be the truest to the source material. As much as I love Willy Wonka and Fantastic Mr. Fox, they do both deviate from the books a good deal. I wish I hadn't missed out on this guy's books when I was at the age to properly appreciate them. Come to think of it, I have a niece and nephew who probably have no idea what they're missing. Perhaps it's time to change that.

The Grifters

Making a good Con Man movie at this point is no easy task. It's always fun to watch con artists pull off a job, but the genre itself is riddled with cliches. I get so tired of when you find out that the con man hero was actually being conned the whole time, by his partner or mark. That was a funny and original twist thirty years ago in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, but a tired old gag by the time it turned up ten years ago in Matchstick Men.

The Grifters is, thankfully, different from the typical con man movie. In fact, it's not like any I've ever seen. It is less interested in the act of deception and more interested in getting inside the characters and exploring the reasons why they make a living out of deceiving. Produced in 1990 by Martin Scorsese, and directed by Stephen Frears, The Grifters is a dark and gritty look at what makes the con artist tick.

John Cusack stars as Roy, a young grifter who focuses only on the small game. He learned from his mentor never to pull a long con, never to work with partners, and never to get caught. Unfortunately, he's maybe not as good as his mentor. At the start of the movie, he gets caught by a bartender he attempts to rip off and takes a baseball bat to the gut, resulting in his hospitalization for internal bleeding.

This brings his mother, Lilly (Anjelica Huston), out of the woodwork. She works at a horse racing track for a dirty bookie, betting on horses in order to mess up the odds. Lilly had Roy when she was only 14, and never has fully forgiven him for ruining her life. The feeling is mutual. Roy has issues with her methods of parenting as well.

Roy's girlfriend, Myra (Annette Bening), is also in the game. Though in her glory days, she worked long cons with the big guys, she now also works small time, largely relying on sex to get the job done. There is an instant dislike between Myra and Lilly upon meeting.

What follows is a story of deception and betrayal, as the three characters demonstrate just how far they will go to get what they want. I loved that there wasn't a "mark" or a con that they all team up to pull on somebody. It was all about the three of them.

In the case of Cusack, he's not willing to go quite as far as the women. He doesn't really have what it takes to be in the game, and that's what makes him likeable, and maybe is why his performance is not as well regarded as Bening's and Huston's, who both got Oscar nominations. He really is just as good as they are, though. This was made not long after Say Anything... with Cusack hungry for the big leagues and ready for more grown-up roles.

As said before, Annette Bening and Anjelica Huston are fantastic as well. They take each of their characters to really dark places. Moreso than with Cusack's character, who really just wants to be loved by his mother, you see through them the kind of damaged person one must be to make a life out of lying.

Stephen Frears is an extremely talented director who has made some great movies in a wide range of different genres. He is perhaps best known, in addition to The Grifters, for directing another John Cusack classic, High Fidelity. These two work together excellently. I'd go so far as to say Frears is the best Cusack director there is. They should make another movie together, it's well past time for that.

I laid off talking about the actual plot of The Grifters, because there are some twists and turns and it actually took me by surprise. The story did not play out remotely how I expected it to, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. It's rare and refreshing to see a Con Man movie that doesn't fall back on the usual devices of the genre.

Sonatine

Sonatine is a 1993 Japanese crime thriller written and directed by and starring Takeshi Kitano. I believe it's the first movie that garnered him international attention as a director.

Kitano stars as Murakawa, a Yakuza guy who has kind of had it with being a Yakuza, and is looking for a way out. When he and his men are sent to Okinawa for what is essentially some busywork, Murakawa smells a rat and suspects that his bosses are planning to get rid of him. When it turns out he was right, Murakawa and some of his men go into hiding at a beach house in the hopes that this will all blow over.

This second act of Sonatine is what really sets the movie apart from other crime films. While at the beach house, the characters essentially goof off Yakuza style for a good long while. They play games and tease each other, Murakawa plays pranks such as digging sand traps for them to fall into. But it isn't all about laughs. There's a melancholy feel to all the scenes, and the fun and games have a violent underpinning to them, as this is the only life these Yakuza guys really know. There's a scene where Murakawa spies two of his underlings shooting a can off of each others' heads. He approaches them and it quickly becomes a tense game of Russian Roulette. It plays as a reminder of just what these guys are capable of, and also gives us a glimpse of the inner turmoil Murakawa is experiencing.

The strange turbulent peace of act two eventual comes to an abrupt end, and the third act features Murakawa turning the tables on the people who are out to get him, and I'm sure I don't have to tell you things get pretty bloody.

Sonatine is a very well made movie, and pretty enjoyable, although it can be kind of depressing at times too. Don't hold out for a happy ending, folks. You pretty much know from the get go that there's no way that's going to happen. The whole middle section is where Sonatine shined for me, and I believe it is what ultimately makes the movie richer and more thoughtful than other crime movies of this type.

Citizen Ruth

I'm not sure why it took me so long to see Citizen Ruth. I love the films of Alexander Payne. So much that I can't even pick a favorite between Election, About Schmidt, and Sideways. So with the very imminent release of Payne's new film, The Descendants (which I will surely be reviewing this weekend), I thought I would go back to the beginning and finally watch his first film.

Citizen Ruth stars Laura Dern as a paint-huffing mess of a human being who, after being taken in from her latest binge by the authorities, finds out she is pregnant. This is nothing new to her. It will be her fifth child that society deems (correctly so) her unfit for. The judge gives her a choice. She either must terminate the pregnancy, or go to prison for placing her unborn child in danger through her excesses.

While being held in jail, Ruth meets a group of Pro-Life protesters who, after hearing her situation, decide to pay her bail and take her in, with the intention of using her as a figurehead for their cause. Soon enough, the Pro-Choicers get their mitts on her too, and Ruth finds herself caught in the middle of an escalating battle between the two.

The satire in Citizen Ruth is sharp and Payne does a great job of walking a fine line. He does this by making the activist groups on both sides of the issue both pretty equally corrupt and self-centered. They are both willing to do anything to get Ruth's endorsement, even though she really doesn't care about what either side thinks.

Laura Dern's portrayal of Ruth is excellent. She and Payne (and co-writer Jim Taylor) have created a perfect foil for these two groups. Even though she is a complete wreck, Ruth is also innocent in her way; not particularly smart, not interested in the greater issue at hand. Her main concern is getting her hands on some cash so she can score again and get high. Despite all this, Payne shows a great deal of empathy for Ruth and her plight. The situation she is pressured into forces her to rethink her priorities and consider maybe getting herself together.

The supporting cast surrounding Dern is a good deal of fun to watch as well. Kurtwood Smith and Mary Kay Place are hilarious as the Pro-Lifers who take her in. I especially liked M.C. Gainey as one of the Pro-Choicers. Burt Reynolds has a small part, in the midst of his post-Boogie-Nights mid-nineties career revival.

Citizen Ruth was a strong first film, but it is still a first film. As much as I enjoyed it, I think Alexander Payne was still working out his trademark style and tone. The subject matter is bold, and was surely a great way to get his name out there, but I felt the satire in his second film (Election) was a lot funnier, if not quite as edgy, and his (and our) empathy for his often hopeless characters has only grown in his later films. Still, Citizen Ruth is totally worth checking out if you haven't yet, especially if you're a fan of Payne's other work.