What Else I Watched This Month: October 2011

Because you can't review them all...

This is my monthly column to briefly discuss the films I watched (or rewatched) but didn't have the time or energy to write full reviews of. This month (which I guess is now last month...damn you snowpocalypse!), I'll be talking about the future, some dudes, and one fucked-up dinner party, among other things.

Gattaca (3 Stars)
It seems Andrew Niccol hasn't been able to recapture the critical acclaim of his debut—this 1997 sci-fi flick starring Ethan Hawke. And the drubbing of his latest, In Time, shows the downfall has been pretty dramatic. Alas, I'm not sure why expectations were so high. After seeing Gattaca—and having seen the thematically tepid but directorially energetic Lord of War—I'm not totally convinced of Niccol's talents. This film left me quite cold. It earns its stars on premise alone, but trust me, it's not a picture I recommend without reservation. The acting is fine, but the storytelling method is somewhat weak, and it has some excruciatingly slow moments. Still, hard sci-fi like this is hard to come by, and I'll half-heartedly stand by Gattaca for that reason alone.

The Exterminating Angel (4 Stars)
A film I'd stand on a rooftop to shout my love for is Luis Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel. With perhaps the wildest premise I've ever seen, its originality cannot be denied. When a wealthy Mexican couple invites its equally wealthy but totally oblivious friends over for a dinner party, nothing seems wrong. But these individuals soon realize they cannot leave the room they are in. There's nothing visibly impeding them, but they still find themselves incapable of escape, and this brings out their most animal instincts.

Bunuel is known as the father of cinematic surrealism, and it's a title he lives up to here. The story is completely and totally bizarre, and every actor plays to the situation perfectly. Just the looks on their faces as they approach the impossible-to-cross threshold is hilarious. Bunuel does enough interesting things with them (a few die while others resort to witchcraft), and the film is short enough that the premise doesn't get stale at all. And the ending: Pure genius. This is a must-watch, folks.

Sleeper (2.5 Stars)
Perhaps I've overdone it with "silly Woody Allen" lately, but this film—which came just before Love and Death—just didn't do it for me. Maybe it's because the film is basically a futuristic retread of the second half of Bananas, a film I loved (Sleeper even repeats one of Bananas' best gags). But I had a hard time getting through this one, despite the minimal running time. It's just not terribly funny after a while, and it offers nothing you can't get out of Chaplin's infinitely superior Modern Times, or one of the other dozen or so more enjoyable parodies of the future.

Old Joy (3 Stars)
I loved Wendy and Lucy, the 2008 Michelle Williams vehicle directed by Kelly Reichardt. I therefore assumed I was a big fan of the director, which led to extremely high expectations for Meek's Cutoff, her foray into the Western (a genre I adore). Oops, that one kind of sucked. So to break the tie, I turned to Old Joy, Reichardt's first film. I'm happy to report it was more 'Wendy' than 'Meek'. It's a very subdued film—almost to a fault—but it burrows its way into you and stays there. I thought the ideas she presented here (about change and how relationships can disintegrate without you even realizing it) were very relatable. And the two leads kept me entertained. Plus (and I sound like a broken record), it's a short movie. Only 75 minutes! God bless you, Kelly Reichardt.