Archive for January 2008
State of the Union Drinking Game 2008
President George W. (Dubya) Bush will be delivering his State of the Union Address this Monday Night, January 28th, 2008 at 9pm EST.
Unlike last year, there is some cause for celebration as this will be the last address Dubya will deliver as President. Still, he has plenty of time to muck things up, so with equal parts fear and joy, the only way to get through this is to drink up!
Those who got drunk with me last year will notice a return of many of last year’s favorite rules, but stay focused, there’s much CHANGE from last year, and remember, folks, we all love the buzzword of CHANGE!
Here are the rules for The State of the Union Drinking Game, version 2008, Last Year of the Dubya:
Drink Every Time:
-Dubya mentions “The Surge” and how it’s working in Iraq.
-Dubya mentions the need to keep long-term military operations in Iraq and/or Afghanistan.
-Dubya mentions Iran, Pakistan, or North Korea in or out of the context of talking about “nukes”.
-Dubya announces a new PC-term his aides have created for “The War on Terror” or simply mentions the “The War on Terror” or mentions “9/11″.
-Dubya talks about the “Stimulus Package” that will help keep the economy from slipping into recession.
-Dubya talks about the current Presidential Primaries, the upcoming Presidential Election, or CHANGE.
-Dubya squints really hard, furrows his brow, purses his lips, and looks like a chimpanzee.
-Dubya butchers the English language with the mispronunciation of a big word, the missuse of a commonly used word, or the creation of a word that did not previously exist.
-They cut to a shot of John McCain looking tired, grizzled, or electrifying the electorate with his new “smirky stoic” stare. *Note: My sources tell me John McCain will be in Florida gunning for votes and will not be in attendance. Dang!
-They cut to a shot of Hillary Clinton folding her arms, looking constipated, and even more pissed than when Bill said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.”
-They cut to a shot of Barack Obama looking thoughtful, pensive, and confident.
-They cut to a shot of Condaleeza Rice clapping like the lap dog she is.
-Nancy Pelosi (in the background sitting behind the President) looks very stiff and bug-eyed as she tries to hold back a massive attack of “head shaking” and “oh, no he didn’t” gazes.
-Nancy Pelosi blinks. (You’ll be drunk before Dubya even opens his mouth.)
-Dick Cheney (also in his place sitting behind the President) appears to be leaning too far to one side and is about to topple over in a heart attack or strain from an evil grimace.
-The Republican (and still minority) side of the House gives Dubya a completely unwarranted standing ovation.
*Surgeon General’s Warning: If you drink too much, you may find yourself in a coma and not awake until 2009 when a Democrat is back in the White House.
Written by David H. Schleicher
A Review of “Cloverfield”
CAPTION: Lizzy Caplan and Jessica Lucas were ready for their close-ups until that pesky monster came along.
Pretty Close to Something Terrible…, 21 January 2008
Author: David H. Schleicher from New Jersey, USA
At one point during the mayhem of “Cloverfield” our jerky-jokey cameraman Hud (an annoying T. J. Miller) remarks that the monster ravaging New York City is “something terrible.” Well, “Cloverfield” is pretty close to something terrible, but it’s also laugh-out-loud funny and loads of fun.
Taking cues from “The Blair Witch Project”, “Godzilla”, and our current YouTube/MySpace crazed youth oriented culture that believes everyone’s point of view deserves to be recorded, producer J. J. Abrams’ opportunistic “Cloverfield” operates at a mercifully quick clip to maximize entertainment value with a minimum of effort (and budget) while showing us allegedly top-secret video footage recovered after a massive monster attack on NYC.
Though barely ninety minutes long, we still have to suffer through an excruciatingly banal opening twenty minutes of vapid, spoiled twenty-somethings partying the night away before the monster strikes. There was a moment somewhere during this that I actually zoned out completely and found myself staring at the dark theater wall. The cast of unknowns thankfully contains a few people who might be able to act if given the chance in a normal film. Standouts include the painfully lovely Jessica Lucas as the feisty Lily and Zooey Deschanel look-a-like Lizzy Caplan as the sarcastic Marlena. These two young actresses acquitted themselves nicely while a group of anonymous and interchangeable actors playing stupid characters making bad decision after bad decision whirled around them. It made for one of those odd movie-going experiences where you actually start routing for certain characters to die in horrible ways while you hope the pretty girls make it out alive because, well, they’re cute.
As a gimmick film, “Cloverfield” is as shallow as they come. It’s also too silly and too much fun to end up mad about it. At least the idiot hand-held cameraman/character wants to see the monster and the destruction as much as we do. This leads to some great money-shots of the creature and its tour of terror through midtown Manhattan. It would’ve been more thrilling had I not seen very similarly designed creature effects in last fall’s “The Mist”. Like that film, “Cloverfield” certainly has its moments of giddy monster oriented fun, but it ultimately implodes and leaves behind a wreck of a movie that is pretty close to something terrible.
Originally Published on the Internet Movie Database:
A Review of Juan Antonio Bayona’s “The Orphanage”
Beautifully Sad Catholic Fairy Tale, 14 January 2008
Author: David H. Schleicher from New Jersey, USA
Laura (Belen Rueda) returns to the orphanage she spent time in as a child with her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and little boy Simon (Roger Princep) in hopes of re-establishing it as seaside retreat for children with disabilities only to find there may be some former residents who never left. In Juan Antonio Bayona’s tightly wound “The Orphanage” nothing is as it seems and child’s play takes on sinister overtones.
Bayona belongs to this new wave of Spanish-language directors (most notably Del Torro and Amenabar) who excel when it comes to creating moody atmospheric tales of the supernatural with Catholic overtones. Whereas “Pan’s Labyrinth” took a dark fantasy approach to a Passion Play, “The Orphanage” is closer to the classic haunted house themes of “The Others” as it attempts to give a sentimental view of life after death. Be warned, “The Orphanage” is often more sad than scary, and those not familiar with Catholic mysticism might find things a bit hard to believe. As goes the film’s mantra…Believe, Then You Will See. Those with the patience and the heart will be greatly rewarded as the audience doesn’t necessarily have to Believe to relate to the characters who do.
Working from refined “less is more” psychological horror templates, Bayona delivers the formulaic goods. There will be a simplistic but heartfelt exploration of grief. There will be allusions to classic literature (in this case a very nicely done “Peter Pan” as Catholic allegory motif). There will be uncovering dark secrets from the past. There will be precocious children with spooky imaginary friends. There will be creaking set designs and manipulative sound effects to create “gotcha!” moments. There will be a creepy medium (an excellent Geraldine Chaplin) brought in for a séance. And there will be a twist at the end.
Thankfully, there is also a great performance from Belen Rueda as Laura. She gives a compelling portrayal of a woman devoured by her loss and achingly desperate for the truth no matter how horrific that truth might be. One must have a cold heart not to find sympathy with her, and even the most hardened audience member will find it hard not to feel that stray tear form in the corner of their trembling eye when all is revealed. “The Orphanage” offers nothing terribly new, but sometimes the same old ghost story presented in a beautiful way makes for the best type of cold-rainy-day entertainment.
Originally Published on the Internet Movie Database:
The 2nd Annual Davies Awards in Film
The year’s best film , There Will Be Blood, closed in a orchestral flourish with this amazing piece from Brahms. It was a fantastic way to end a wonderfully strange year at the cinema.
2007 ended up being a great year for films, possibly the best since 1999. While 2006 was consistent in its passably entertaining mediocrity, filmmakers seemed to take more chances in 2007 leading to more highs (see below), more curiosities (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Beowulf, Sweeney Todd), and more lows (I Am Legend–not quite legendary). The year’s two greatest films explored Greed and the American Dream. There Will Be Blood took an epic approach to explore how greed driven and focused can build nations while slowly devouring the soul of the individual, while Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead took an intimate approach and explored how greed ill-planned and misdirected can destroy a family in the blink of an eye. While Hollywood seemed to cash in on more name brand sequels and three-quels than ever before (and the public ate them up ad-naseum only to quickly forget them a few weeks later) three trends stood out in my mind that I feel defined 2007:
1. It was a great year for the auteur. Some, who we thought had passed on, came roaring back firing on all cylinders. Sidney Lumet regained his 1970’s stature with the darkly complex ensemble piece Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Meanwhile, Joe Wright came into his own by delivering his first near masterpiece, Atonement, a movie with an already classic continuous tracking shot of the Dunkirk evacuation during WWII that nearly a month later still holds me breathless. Still another auteur who already seemed to have settled into his own unique style, Paul Thomas Anderson, performed a shocking evolution on a Kubrickian level with There Will Be Blood and delivered an American Epic on the scale of The Godfather.
2. Thanks to the success of last year’s Oscar and Davies winner for Best Picture, The Departed, 2007 became a renaissance year for the grim melodramatic crime thriller. Flicks like Zodiac, Eastern Promises, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, and Gone Baby Gone point towards a film movement not unlike the film-noir of the 1940’s that mirrors America’s anxiety towards the chaotic outside world inward against the intimate settings of neighborhoods and families in stylish and unsettling ways. While these films were similar to their more overt counterparts that feebly attempted to deal directly with the greater world’s current ills (films like A Mighty Heart, Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, and Lions for Lambs) in that they didn’t exactly light the box office on fire, I suspect the former rather than the later group with have a more artistic resonance in future years. I don’t think anyone will be watching In the Valley of Elah in twenty years, but I can imagine Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead being studied shot for shot in film classes.
3. On the flip side, it was also a watershed year for comedies. At the forefront, and rightfully so, is Juno, which has positioned itself as this generation’s Annie Hall. We also saw laugh-out-loud teen sex romps (Superbad), lightly satirical animated films (The Simpsons Movie), obscure absurdist sketch humor (The Ten), and destined to be cult classic spoofs (Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story). We needed these laughs in the worst way, and they provided the perfect escape from the horrors of the real world and the neo-noir films playing right next door at the multiplex.
In the end, it was a wild year at the cinema. At times, it was extremely frustrating. There was one actor I just wish would retire. After 2005’s The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Tommy Lee Jones essentially phoned in the same performance in 2007’s In the Valley of Elah and No Country for Old Men. Nobody else seemed to notice he played essentially the same character in all three films, but I say enough already, old man! The summer movie season also seemed endless and void of anything worthwhile. Still, in the final weeks of December, two films that couldn’t be more different emerged and have the potential to become cultural landmark films for this generation. With Juno touching our hearts and tickling our funny bones, “I swear to blog!” all the hip teens will be copying its quirky fashions and spouting off its one-liners well into the summer. Meanwhile, There Will Be Blood is just beginning to infect its select audience and is making an indelible impression on those who have experienced it. There are speeches in There Will Be Blood that will be memorized and studied in acting classes for years to come. There are also many quotable lines that may find their way into films like Juno twenty years from now. My early money was on “I drink your milkshake”, but upon a second viewing of There Will Be Blood, “why don’t I own THIS?”, “I see the worst in people”, “bastard from a basket”, “draaaaaaaaaaaainage!”, and “I’m finished!” all run the risk of joining the pop culture lexicon. Well, I’m not quite finished…
And now…move over Golden Globes. Say goodbye to the Oscars. Novelist D. H. Schleicher semi-proudly presents:
The 2nd Annual Davies: Awarding Excellence and Idiocy in Film (for the year 2007).
The Top Ten Films of 2007:
- There Will Be Blood
- Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
- Atonement
- Gone Baby Gone
- Rescue Dawn
- Sicko
- Juno
- Zodiac
- Eastern Promises
- Amazing Grace
*Special honorable mention goes to The Lives of Others and Black Book, two thrillingly thought provoking foreign films that were technically released in 2006 but didn’t reach stateside until early 2007. As such, they have unfairly ended up in limbo with no official place on lists from either 2006 or 2007.
Best Picture: There Will Be Blood
Best Director: Paul Thomas Anderson for There Will Be Blood
Best Actor: Daniel Day Lewis for There Will Be Blood
Best Actress: Ellen Page for Juno
Best Supporting Actor: Javier Bardem for No Country for Old Men
Best Supporting Actress: Marisa Tomei for Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Best Emaciated Actor: Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn
Best Emaciated Actress: Keira Knightley in Atonement
Best Reading of a Dramatic Line: Daniel Day Lewis’ satirical, hilarious, nerve-wracking, and scary ”Here is my Straw, and here is your Milkshake” diatribe to Paul Dano in There Will Be Blood.
Best Dramatic Reading of a Comedic Line: Kristen Wiig’s “I believe you’re gonna fail” retort to John C. Reilly’s “I need you to believe in me” cry in Walk Hard.
Best Original Screenplay: Kelly Masterson for Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Best Adapted Screenplay: Christopher Hampton for Atonement
Most Overrated Film: The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men
Most Underrated Film: Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn
Best Film I Didn’t Like (Most Misunderstood Film): The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Worst Film I Did Like (Best Guilty Pleasure): Live Free or Die Hard
Best Franchise Film: The Bourne Ultimatum
Worst Franchise Film: Transformers
Best Editing: Atonement
Worst Editing: Transformers
Best Music Score: Jonny Greenwood for There Will Be Blood
Best Cinematography: Roger Deakins for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Best Downer Film: Gone Baby Gone
Worst Downer Film: In the Valley of Elah
Most Uplifting Film: Amazing Grace
Best Comedy: Juno
Best Horror Movie: 30 Days of Night
Best Action Movie: The Bourne Ultimatum
Best Ending: There Will Be Blood
Worst Ending: The Mist
Movie Trend I Thoroughly Enjoyed: The Neo-Noir Movement of Grim Melodramatic Crime Thrillers (Zodiac, Eastern Promises, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Gone Baby Gone)
Movie Trend I (Mostly) Ignored: Overtly Political MidEast-themed “Reality” Films (A Mighty Heart, Rendition, The Kingdom, Lions for Lambs, Charlie Wilson’s War, and the one film of this ilk I did suffer through, In the Valley of Elah)
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Results from the 1st Annual Davies can be found by clicking below:
http://davethenovelist.wordpress.com/2007/01/20/the-1st-annual-davies/
We encourage feedback and suggestions for categories next year.
Reviews for many of the films mentioned here can be found under the “Movie Reviews” category.
All of my reviews of this year’s winners, as well as many other insightful critiques, can be found archived on the Internet Movie Database: http://imdb.com/user/ur1069062/comments
Written by David H. Schleicher
A Review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood”
CAPTION: Fathers and Sons, Drowning in Oil.
The World of Blood and Oil According to Plainview, 6 January 2008
Author: David H. Schleicher from New Jersey, USA
*** This comment may contain spoilers ***
There’s a recurring nightmare of mine where I am falling down a well. Our reality is an illusion. This life is simply the dream we have while we are actually falling down a well. It always seemed as if the well was bottomless. After watching “There Will Be Blood” I discovered the well has a bottom. At the bottom of the well is one thing. Oil.
Also falling down this well was “The Performance.” Watching Daniel Day Lewis play the unstoppable, unshakable, unfathomably misanthropic and greedy oil man that is Daniel Plainview, one is left to imagine that “The Performance” was always out there. It always existed somewhere in the ether, in our collective unconscious, in our nightmares and anxieties. It took a visionary auteur like Paul Thomas Anderson to realize that if he did a modern film update of Upton Sinclair’s early 20th century novel “Oil!” and ominously renamed it “There Will Be Blood” then this performance could be channeled onto celluloid as a testament to the defining struggles of 21st century mankind.
Blistering cinematography of stark California landscapes from Robert Elswit, an evocatively organic and haunting music score from Jonny Greenwood (from the rock band Radiohead), and the beautifully fluid movement and framing of Paul Thomas Anderson’s maniacally calculating camera grab you from scene one and never let go. Daniel Day Lewis moves through the film like a cold burning firestorm combining and combusting with the technical elements and the fabulous ensemble cast around him to create a rising tension that is unlike anything experienced in cinema since the golden era of Stanley Kubrick.
The story is multilayered and allegorical. Led to an untapped area floating in dust on rivers of oil by a mysterious young man, Plainview soon comes face to face with that young man’s twin brother, Eli Sunday (a fecklessly manipulative Paul Dano). Eli is a wunderkind preacher at the Church of the Third Revelation and has the town wrapped around his finger with his claims to be a healer and prophet. Eli agrees to let Plainview buy his family’s land for the right price. The profits are to be used to build a bigger church. But when Plainview refuses to let Eli properly bless the drill site, a series of events unfold that Eli trumpets as acts of “God” while Plainview views them as results of meddling people he can scarcely see any good in and must crush.
The heart of the movie lies in Plainview’s relationship with his adopted son H. W. (a wonderfully naturalistic and quietly expressive Dillon Freasier). When the boy is injured on a drilling site and loses his hearing, Plainview, torn by his love for the idea of the boy looking up to him and the friendly face the boy has leant to the family business, abandons him only to latch on to a shady vagabond (Kevin J. O’Connor) who trots into town claiming to be his long lost brother Henry. Plainview’s replacing of a fake son with a fake brother shows his character’s deep-seeded and wounded need to connect to someone when insatiable greed has been his only driving force.
To explore in detail the film’s deeper message and resonance for today’s audience would be to spoil the ending. Suffice it to say, after the slowly infectious, nerve-shattering build-up, the film culminates with a soliloquy from Plainview to Eli that will make your jaw drop. In the end, it lives up to its title. There was blood. Whose was spilled is not a matter of debate, but what that blood says to its 21st century audience will be discussed and argued and studied for years to come. If you want to know what happens when greed guised in religious zealotry falls down a dark seemingly bottomless well with greed blatant as corporate capitalism, look no further than this film. There is a bottom to that well. There is a winner at the finish line. Meanwhile the blood is on the floor, the walls, the desert sand, the silver screen, the nightly news, and pumping through our bodies until we die.
Originally Published on the Internet Movie Database:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0469494/usercomments-59
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Official site:
http://www.therewillbeblood.com/
For further reading, check out this fascinating discussion of TWBB as political allegory and Kubrick Homage:
http://www.filmbrain.com/filmbrain/2007/12/there-will-be-b.html
For the most in depth and enjoyable to read review of TWBB I have come across yet, check out Wesley Morris’ insightful and energetic treatise from The Boston Globe:
Go With the Flow and Pay as You Go
With the ever increasingly stressful (and quite frankly, unnecessary) holiday season finally over, we can all now look forward to 2008. “Go with the flow and pay as you go” is my annoying little motto for the year. It’s a mantra I can repeat internally to remind myself to relax more.
I’m not much for the traditional resolutions (or “to do” lists) but here’s a quick rundown of what I plan to accomplish in this new year besides the ever present desire to travel more:
1. Finish the 1st draft of my next novel. I’m about 2/3 of the way there after starting in May of 2007. What I do with it after that is anyone’s guess.
2. Lay down the dough for that Rosetta Stone software so I can become fluent in French (finally).
3. Buy a digital camera and perhaps take a photography class.
4. Vote in November. Dubya’s days are numbered. Let’s not screw this one up like we did the last two presidential elections.
Here’s the list of books I plan to read in the early months of 2008 as winter is a great time to get lost in some heavy literature. Hopefully these classics will wipe away the bad taste left in my mouth from Mister B. Gone by Clive Barker, which is a book so mind numbingly awful I don’t even know how to describe it. Mister B. Gone is the type of “curiosity” I was forced to read to pass the time in the wake of the writers’ strike and no late night talk shows. So thank you Letterman and Conan for returning this week so I can fall asleep laughing again! Oddly, though, I was glad to have read it, because sometimes you have to read the garbage to appreciate the classics more and to know what to avoid in your own writing. There’s nothing like gaining a little perspective.
TO READ THIS WINTER:
Dubliners by James Joyce (his short story collection)
Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
