FuzzyCo

• Horrible Bosses (2011) A-
• Star Trek (2009) A-
• Moneyball (2011) A-
• The Artist (2011) A+
• Hamlet 2 (2008) F
• Goodfellas (1990) B+ - Heresy, I know, but I gotta go with my gut.
• 50/50 (2011) A
• Charade (1963) A (except for the quality of the print Netflix has - it’s terrible and the sound is off)
• The Punisher (2004) A-
• Punisher: War Zone (2008) A+ - I was primed to enjoy the movie based on the How Did This Get Made episode featuring the movie’s director. But it’s really a great comic book movie. See also Patton Oswalt’s review.

What’s the point of obsessively cataloging your media consumption without sharing it? Here’s the 69 movies I saw in 2011, with my meaningless letter grades.

• The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010) - C
• Easy A (2010) - A
• Drive Somewhere (2010) - B+
• The Social Network (2010) - A
• Smokin’ Aces (2006) - C+
• Descent 2 (2009) - B-
• Let’s Do It Again (1975) - A-
• Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (2010) - A+
• Flashdance (1983) - A-
• Un Novio Para Mi Mujer (2008) - A
• Sherlock - A Study in Pink (2010) - A
• Super High Me (2007) - A-
• Super Size Me (2004) - B+
• I Am Comic (2010) - A
• Ginger Snaps (2000) - B
• Idiocracy (2006) - B
• Jennifer’s Body (2009) - B+
• Faster (2010) - B+
• It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) - B+ (watched because of this review)
• Small Town Gay Bar (2006) - A - So very much more sad and disturbing that we thought it would be.
• Topkapi (1964) - B+
• The Good, the Bad, the Weird (2008) - A-
• The Fighter (2010) - A
• A Room with a View (1985) - A+
• The American (2010) - A
• Hanna (2011) - A
• The Room (2003) - F. Or A+. You know.
• Dr. No (1962) - A
• Bridesmaids (2011) - A+
• From Russia with Love (1963) - A
• Man on Wire (2008) - A - my only quibble - mixing archive footage and recreations
• Goldfinger (1964) - B
• Cars (2006) - A-
• 13 Assassins (2010) - A
• Green Lantern (2011) - B-
• The Illusionist (2010) - A
• No Escape (1994) - C-
• Rubber (2010) - A- - such a weird, weird movie
• Zombieland (2009) - A
• Thor (2011) - A
• Singles (1992) - B- - great music, so dated
• Priest (2011) - action sequences - A, plot - D
• Exam (2009) - B-
• Sleepaway Camp (1983) - C, but how do you even grade something like this, even with my meaningless grades?
• Waiting for Guffman (1996) - A
• Sherlock Holmes (2009) - B
• Bill Cunningham New York (2010) - A
• Serenity (2005) - B+
• Attack the Block (2011) - A
• Best Worst Movie (2009) - B+
• Troll 2 (1990) - D
• Urbanized (2011) - A+
• Colombiana (2011) - C
• Captain America (2011) - A-
• Hulk (2003) - C-
• Friends with Benefits (2011) - A-
• Source Code (2011) - A-
• Pearl Jam 20 (2011) - A
• Seamless (2005) - A-
• Trick R Treat (2007) - F
• Thunderball (1965) - C+ - so many scuba sequences
• The Green Hornet (2011) - C-
• The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 1 (2011) - D
• The Muppets (2011) - A
• Christmas in Connecticut (1945) - A
• Tower Heist (2011) - B+
• It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) - A - believe it or not, never seen it before
• The Kids are All Right (1979) - B- - in Pearl Jam 20 someone says that they hope that it’s their TKaAR. Well, Pearl Jam 20 was much better than TKaAR.
• Blues Brothers (1980) - A+

It only took two years of everyone we know recommending it* for us to finally watch The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. It's a documentary about people who compete for the world records in old video games. There's a slight air of "wow, these people care a lot about something that doesn't really matter at all" but the documentarians have really shaped a compelling narrative out of the competition between Billy Mitchell, who has held the world Donkey Kong record since 1982, and Steve Wiebe, a regular joe who started playing games again because he was unemployed. There are, of course, questions about how much the filmmakers have shaped the narrative, but even if it were pure fiction it's gripping stuff.

FuzzyCo grade: A

* And it being available on Netflix Instant.

It's a bit of a peeve seeing events billed as "the first annual"—until you actually do it the second year, it's just an event that you might or might not ever do again. Well, this year I can say that Erica and I have an annual New Year's Eve tradition. Last year we watched The Thin Man and fell in love with Nick and Nora. They're married and witty and drink a lot. We're just like them, except for maybe the witty part. Christopher and Katie gave us the box set of all six Nick and Nora movies and this year on New Year's Eve we watched the second movie, After the Thin Man. Like the first, it's set on New Year's Eve, which made it apropos. Nick and Nora were as witty as ever, and drank nearly as much as in the first movie. Oh yeah, and a murder gets solved.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Long-time readers of the cavewall scrawlings here may remember my search for a mysterious documentary back in 2005, which ended when I discovered that the film, The Target Shoots First, had been sitting on Erica's coffee table the whole time I'd been looking. And then, in typical Fuzzy fashion, I didn't actually watch the movie until 2007. And then this month, with all the music documentaries we've been watching, it came up that Erica, owner of that magical coffee table, had never seen it. I couldn't find the DVD I had made, but we did still have the original VHS copy, so I re-digitized it (and yes, that was easier than hooking up a VCR in the living room) and we finally sat down and watched it (well, for me, again).

Since I had been thinking of it so much in terms of music, I had forgotten how much it's about office life. It's really such a personal, well-crafted documentary, and I can really see why Chris Wilcha was such a good choice for the TV version of This American Life.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

Sometimes we pick a movie based on when we want to go to bed. I Like Killing Flies is only 80 minutes (and, we are still Documentary Crazy) so it won out the other night on a Netflix Instant trawl.

It's a movie about the idiosyncratic owner of a tiny restaurant in Greenwich Village, Kenny Shopsin, and his family-run restaurant Shopsin's. The restaurant has an extensive menu, like over 900 items extensive, and a bunch of rules. Like, no parties of five. Kenny swears a lot, and philosophizes about restaurants and cooking and life. Halfway through the movie, the restaurant moves to a different space, bigger, two whole blocks away, and we follow the travails of that move, both physical and psychic.

There's a danger in these sorts of profiles of strong characters like Kenny Shopsin for it to either explain away all their idiosyncrasies, or for it to end up as just a big "look at the freak". But I think the film lets Kenny make enough sense that you see where he's coming from, but you still think he's pretty crazy.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Being There is a classic. And Erica loves it. And it's available on Netflix Instant until the end of the year. So, we watched it.

This is a slow and patient movie, which I'm fine with. It's just that slow and patient gets me ready for a character piece, and Chance is the very opposite of a character. He's a void. Which is fine for a satire, that he's the place holder for everyone else to project their own desires onto. But then as a satire, it's a slow and (usually) subtle one.

It's certainly true, though, that it's a thinker of a movie, as I'm still mulling over, days later, what I think of Chance and the whole movie. Which makes the whole reductive notion of my letter grades even more of a farce than usual.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

We'd never seen Elf, which is't quite up there with "I've never seen Citizen Kane"*, but still, we like holiday movies and so we fixed that gap this holiday season.

Charming and silly. Or, silly and charming. I'm still not sure I believe James Caan's transformation (I'm not really even sure I'd believe that that guy would bail Buddy in the first place, before the paternity test, but I guess I'm cynical).

FuzzyCo grade: A-

* I have seen Citizen Kane.**
** I have, though, only seen 50 of the AFI 100, so there's a full 50% chance that some movie you think is great I haven't seen. Oh, Rocky. I haven't seen Rocky. Who hasn't seen Rocky? The guy with the thumbs, that's who.

Despite being a nerd, and being from a family of nerds, and being married to a nerd, Erica had never seen more than a few minutes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. So for Christmas, I decided we needed to watch an MST3K. Now, of course the right MST3K to watch on Christmas is Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. But that's not on Netflix Instant, and so out of reach on a holiday whim. But Mystery Science Theater 3000: Santa Claus is. Oy, what an introduction. Santa Claus, a Mexican children's movie where Santa has to fight a devil, is a terrible, terrible, mind-numbingly terrible movie. The riffing is good, but the the essential badness of the underlying movie seeps through. We had to take a couple breaks just to remember that there are good things in the world, lest the despair at the horribleness of the movie overtake all hope.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

I so enjoyed Dog Soldiers that I went looking for more movies by Neil Marshall. I wondered how he had gone from a low budget thriller to an effects-heavy disaster movie, but it turns out I was mixing up The Descent with The Core. The Descent is indeed another story of a small band facing overwhelming odds, though this time our protagonists are a group of women spelunkers descending into an Appalachian cave system. And though the latter half of the movie, with all the monsters and all (um, spoiler, there are monsters), is great and scary, I was riveted by the first half which is a great story of a caving expedition gone wrong. A couple of beginner mistakes are carefully telegraphed and then we watch the consequences play out for the band of women. I'd happily watch an entire movie of just that real-world thriller.

There was also one of the best uses of the rule of threes I've seen in a movie in quite some time. Well played, Neil Marshall, well played.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Life After Tomorrow is a documentary about the female child actors who made up the Broadway and national touring companies of the musical Annie, and how being in the show affected their lives at the time and since. The movie is a personal journey for co-director Julie Stevens, as she was one of those girls, and that passion shines through. There are a few first-documentary bobbles, bits of information showed into the movie at places they don't really fit, but overall it's a fascinating look at an interesting topic.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

[available on Netflix Instant]

I can't remember if I've been pointing out movies available on Netfix Instant or not (and I'm too lazy to read my own website to find out) but with the fervor of the recent convert, I want to make sure that everyone knows of all the great movies on there. Err… or interesting movies. I'm not sure Operation: Endgame is a great movie, but it's defintely on Netflix Instant.

It's an odd little movie: it's a spy vs spy thriller, set entirely in a underground spy headquarters. Quite a few of the secret agents are played by comedians*, but most of the action isn't played for laughs. There's humor, but it's a very dark humor, and plenty of violence. Oh, and Rob Corddry swears a lot.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

* Rob Corddry, Zach Galifianakis, Bob Odenkirk, Jeffrey Tambor, Brandon T. Jackson, Michael Hitchcock, Tim Bagley.

It's of course impossible to do any channel surfing in December without seeing at least a bit of A Christmas Story, thanks to the endless marathons on TBS. And thanks to the episodic nature of the movie, it's easy to get caught up for 7 or 8 minutes and then happily return to channel surfing at a commercial. But it's been quite some time since I've sat down and watched the whole thing from beginning to end. At a holiday cookie-swap party we did just last. And remarkably for the crew watching the movie, we did it mostly commentary- and quip-free.

My conclusion on this latest viewing is that ACS is not a great movie, but it's a good one. And I think the secret to it's longevity is that despite being a nostalgic look back at childhood and Christmas, it's not a saccharine nostalgia.

"No, I promise, Daddy is not going to kill Ralphie."

FuzzyCo grade: A-

OK, I don't want to sound like a broken record here, but I had really low expectations for Inglorious Basterds. And looking back, I really have no idea why. I even just checked out Quentin Tarantino's filmography, to see if he had serious disappointed me with one of his recent movies and the answer is no. I've enjoyed pretty much every Tarantino movie I've ever seen. Some more than others, of course, but there are no big duds, as far as I'm concerned (I haven't seen Sin City or Kill Bill: Vol. 2 in case those are counter-examples). Maybe something about Grindhouse (I enjoyed it, but it was purposely dumb) and the trailer for IB made me think that the latter was going to be all dumb violence with Nazis. There's a bit, but there's also a lot of patience and tension and twists and turns.

FuzzyCo grade: A

So Erica and I saw The Proposal and I was surprised by how much I liked it, and how good (in context) I thought Ryan Reynolds was in it. So I thought I'd check out some other Ryan Reynolds movies, to see if he was good in his earlier movies as well. So, hey, Van Wilder, I've heard of that. And who doesn't like a good college sex-and-pranks movie? Well, based on this movie, the answer would be me. I just mentioned a movie whose craftsmanship I admired. This would be the opposite.

FuzzyCo grade: D

So, yes, the plot of Inception has you wondering a bit about exactly how many levels of meta you're dealing with (and maybe has one or two plot holes), but let's not get carried away, people—it's nowhere near as complicated as, say, Primer. But I don't mean that to detract from the movie at all—I was really struck while watching it that here was a movie made by people who really cared how the movie came out. There was a level of craftsmanship to the whole thing—the acting, the music, the effects, the editing, and so on—that was what really impressed me.

FuzzyCo grade: A

So, first off, my apologies to my two remaining readers: I'm going to be posting a buttload of my little movie reviews that no one cares about to catch up before the end of the year. My obsessive cataloging of my media consumption has been useful to me, at least, at keeping me in the habit of writing something even as I've veered away from the more personal recently*.

So, anyhoodle, How to Train Your Dragon was great. I'd heard good things, so it wasn't even a matter of exceeding low expectations (which seems be the main way movies are getting into my good books lately). Some things were easy gimmes: our main character is an outcast because he's a thinker and a reader in a world of jocks warriors? Yes, please, sign this nerd up. But the plot went some places I wasn't expecting. And it was really funny. And the dragons were so darn cute.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

* And when I say "recently", I'm meaning the last year or three, recent only in the 15+ years of this website**.
** Man, it's been that long. In Internet time, this is some ancient cave drawings we got going on around here.

I also had really low expectations going into Burlesque. There was something about the trailers that was screaming "Showgirls" at me. And I had read Ebert's review which had a lot of quibbles with plot holes (though which even he concludes is not why you're going to or not going to see the movie). But Erica really wanted to see it, and my brother and his friend were also in, so I gave it a shot. And we were going to see it at the Alamo Drafthouse, so even if it was the worst movie ever, I knew I'd be comfortable and well-fed.

Burlesque is pretty OK. The songs and dances are great and for a movie of this type, the plot really isn't half-bad. I usually like his reviews, but I really just don't think Ebert was paying attention—I think most of his quibbles are just mistaken. Personally, my biggest quibble is that to match my experience of burlesque performers, the girls don't have enough tattoos (the only one who has any, it's just to indicate to you that she's trouble).[1] And, you know, I don't think Ali should have gotten back together with that guy—she can do a lot better. But over all, not too shabby.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

[1] Erica had a problem with Cher's big solo, because the light guy asks her if she wants a spotlight, she says yes, and then she's lit from behind with a blue gel.

I've had this compulsion lately to watch a bunch of recent big-budget action blockbusters and they've been pretty much uniformly horrible. So I had pretty low expectations going into Salt. I mean, Angelina Jolie, Russian double agents, it's not super promising. So I was pleasantly surprised that it was actually a tight thriller, with plenty of exploso-punching, but also plenty of who's-on-what-side-and-what-will-they-do-next?

FuzzyCo grade: A-

The Expendables is an action movie with 1000% the budget of Killer Tattoo, and yet it manages to be 2000% less interesting. Someone managed to get all these old action stars signed up to do the movie and then washed their hands of the whole process. "We don't need to have a plot or dialogue or anything, right? I mean, we're going to have Swartzenegger on screen for 30 seconds, that's enough. Just make some stuff blow up and have some fights."

I mean, as I often protest, I love blowy-up-stuff and fights. But most fight movies have a consistent fight style. The traditional Hong Kong-style, for example, is very acrobatic and stylized. There are movies with cartoonish, over-the-top gore. And there are more realistic, and disturbing, fight styles—the sudden sickening crunch of bone and all. This movie mixes all three, seemingly at random. A fight is going along all slap-slap-slap, martial arts back and forth and then <crunch> there's a bone sticking out of someone's arm or whatever. Gross and weird.

The plot is laughable, the dialogue ridiculous, and the actors know and are embarrassed by it.

There is a scene for the record books, however, as Mickey Rourke and Slyvester Stallone have the most unrealistic tattooing scene EVER. Rourke sort of dabs at Stallone's back with a tattoo gun for about 30 seconds, while Stallone is shifting all over the place, and then viola, he's done with perfect lettering!

FuzzyCo grade: D-

In the old days, before Netflix and Netflix Instant (and torrents and all) I had a terrible, terrible habit of hearing about some cool Asian movie and I'd order it from DDDHouse and by the time the movie got to me by the literal slow-boat-from-China I'd be off on some other obsession and I'd never get around to watching it. These days I accomplish the same thing by adding stuff to the Netflix Instant Queue and then never watching it—it's much faster.

So one of my ongoing projects is to watch all these old Hong Kong and Japanese and Thai movies from the 90s that I have lying around on DVD, and then getting rid of the DVD. How many times am I going to rewatch any of them?

Well, once at least, it turns out for Killer Tattoo. I picked it out of the pile, started watching, and it took me a quarter of the way through before I realized that I'd seen it before. But I couldn't remember how it ended, so I continued watching all the way through.

The English subtitles on the version I have were pretty badly translated, so the dialog is pretty laughable. But if you can get past that, as an action-comedy it's pretty solidly plotted. Kit Silencer is a master hit man, but he's only doing the work to try and track down the man who killed his parents in front of his eyes, a man with a titular tattoo. He's hired by a crime boss to kill the chief of police, but the boss' flunky doubles up on the work and also hires aging hitman Buffalo Gun, newly released from prison, who assembles his own rag-tag team: Ghostman, tormented by the accidental death of his wife, Dog, who wields explosives instead of guns, and Elvis, an M-16 totting Thai gunman who is convinced that he is Elvis Presley (and speaks only English, or at least what he calls English). Does the job go south because of the competing hits? You betcha, and things get worse from there.

I love a good crime-gone-bad-then-worse story (cf. Fargo, etc.) and this is an excellent example of the genre. But where the movie really shines for me, personally, is that it's also a great example of story and editing triumphing over budget. There are number of action sequences in the movie that I rewound a few times just to see how the use of excellent cutting was creating an exciting scene even though, for example, a "stabbing" never showed you a blade entering a body, nor any blood.

(A side note: there are some references in other reviews and the Wikipedia entry for the movie and so on that it's set in a "future Bangkok"—maybe that's something that didn't come through in the translation, but I really didn't see how it was future at all. It just look like a modern criminal underworld. Whatevs.)

FuzzyCo grade: A

From Paris with Love took me on a little journey. For the first half of movie, it seemed like little more than a big, dumb exploso-fest, with me worrying that John Travolta might need dental work, from all the scenery-chewing he was doing. And then, somewhere in the second-half, a plot twist and the actors' reactions to it got me actually started thinking that it might be a movie with a modicum of emotional complexity. And then, then last two minutes of the film took all that credit that it had built up with me and flushed it down the toilet, leaving me convinced that it's even dumber than I had ever imagined.

FuzzyCo grade: D- (C+ if you turn it off before the last scene)

Dog Soldiers is a great low budget horror movie. A squad of British soldiers are on a training exercise in the wilds of Scotland and encounter… something. Could it be a werewolf? Well, yes. I guess I gave that one away. And maybe the title did as well. But still, it's a lot of fun. And even one of my "c'mon, really?" moments was actually answered later in the movie. So, bravo.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

There are easy jokes like "I liked Gamer better when it was The Running Man," but really that gives Gamer too much credit. It's just a flashy, violent, senseless movie.

FuzzyCo grade: D

I think I mentioned that Team Gerdes has gone documentary crazy. And we're always music crazy. So music documentaries are right in our sweet spot. We've got about 70 or 80 in our Netflix Instant Queue already. On a recommendation from Kyle, Hype! made it to the top of our queue.

Hype! looks at evolution of the music scene in Seattle during the 80s and 90s and the effect of the "Grunge" explosion, mostly on the other bands—you know, the ones who didn't become famous. But refreshingly, there's not a lot of bitterness on display, and only one really pretentious guy. It's mostly a look at an insular music scene, with perhaps different sonic influences and particular personalities, but in flavor very similar to the insular music scenes I've been on the edges of.

Interestingly, a harder-to-find documentary that I've talked about in the past, The Target Shoots First, makes an excellent companion piece of Hype!. There's a section of Hype! that deals with the main-streaming of Grunge, with a montage of Grunge fashion layouts and Grunge sections of catalogs. TTSF, of course, is all about Columbia House's attempts at commodifying Grunge.

FuzzyCo grade: A

The September Issue is a documentary about the process of putting together Vogue magazine's annual extra-large fashion issue. It's a fascinating look into fashion, at the process of putting together a magazine, and at some of the out-sized personalities involved. And it's on Netflix streaming! (We're going documentary-crazy here in the Gerdes house, what with all the docs on Netflix Instant.)

FuzzyCo grade: A

Kudos to the filmmakers of Ink for producing a very good-looking fantasy movie on, presumably, a small, indie budget. Those bad guys are super-creepy. It's too bad the story doesn't really hold up its end of the bargain. And the acting—sheesh. Everyone is trying so hard to convey that this is so serious.

(Available on Netflix streaming.)

FuzzyCo grade: C-

Red was adapted from a Warren Ellis-penned graphic novel. Adaptations of comics are always pretty hit or miss, and Warren Ellis' edgy and angry work seems ripe for a watering-down. So I was surprised when it was really quite good. Action-packed, certainly, but also charming and funny. And there was a plot twist or two that I genuinely didn't see coming.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Mythology very lite.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

Erica and I finally caught up to the year 2000 and subscribed to Netflix, primarily for the Seinfeld Project (more on that later). But Netflix, as all of you not stuck at the turn of century already know, is so much more than just DVDs these days—it's Instant Streaming, which in our house alone we can watch on laptops, iPhones, the Wii, and the Xbox 360. And the very first movie that we watched on streaming was… Spice World.

I liked the Spice Girls' music when their first album came out. It's so catchy, how can you not. But this movie is such a mess. It's just… I mean… So many great actors and personalities make cameos in the movie to such little effect. And everyone is such broad stereotypes. And the Girls, of course, can't act at all. And nothing makes any sense. What was the Alan Cummings documentary film crew subplot even for?

FuzzyCo grade: C-

Youth in Revolt was a terrible disappointment. I'm a fan of Michael Cera, the rest of the cast looked great, and the concept seemed reasonably novel: a sort of teenage Fight Club. But there was so much going on and the movie never seemed to settle on what kind of movie it wanted to be. Was it a quirky, languid first-love story? The aforementioned alternate personalities adventure? A teen sex comedy? In the end, the whole thing was muddled and unsatisfying.

FuzzyCo grade: C+

Date Night was about 50% funnier than I was expecting it to be. I mean, I figured Tina Fey and Steve Carell wouldn't produce anything less than a competent comedy, but this actually rose to the snort-laugh level several times.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I was a little nervous about going to see a movie the night before a big trip (what if we had a lot of last minute packing to do!?!) but Exit Through the Gift Shop was playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center and it was too tempting to pass up. And both Erica and I are really glad we fit it in. The film is amazing, both as a document, of sorts, of the rise to mass popularity of street art, and as an examination of a rather singular individual—a certain Thierry Guetta. Guetta attempted to document the street art movement throughout the early 2000s and himself has become the focus of this film.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

(For Chicagoans, the movie is playing at the Siskel for the rest of the week.)

The Crow is one of Erica's favorite movies and somehow I had never seen it, so we rectified that this last weekend. I usually have a hard time separating movies from their context—and this is one with a ton of baggage—and the whole "goth avenging ghost" plot could have so easily been a farce. But somehow the movie holds up, and I was carried along. It's all just over the top enough that it acquires it's own internal logic that defies too much introspection.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

I've read the first five books of the six-part Scott Pilgrim graphic novel series. Erica has read none of them, so I decided to hold off reading the last one so we could go see the movie together and experience the ending, at least, freshly together. Coming from two such different perspectives on the story, it was great that we both loved it a lot.

The mix of video game elements into a early-twenties love story is funny in the graphic novel, but in the movie it really expands into a magic realism that captures the tone and drama of young adult life. The casting is perfect, the music is great. Ah, what a wonderful movie.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

For a feature film completely written, directed, and produced by a (then) obscure 3-person sketch comedy group, Mystery Team is very well made and is even often pretty funny.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

Erica was pointing out how great it must be to be Tenacious D: you do stage shows in LA about how your band got together, Kyle quits the band, you get back together and then sing about how awesome the band is. You get a show on HBO, what's it's going to be about? Oh, about how your band got together, Kyle quits the band, you get back together and then sing about how awesome the band is. And then you pitch a movie. The plot? How your band got together, Kyle quits the band, you get back together and then sing about how awesome the band is.

But hey, if you've never seen that show, it's pretty funny. And this is the most celebrity-cameod of the versions.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

My excuse for putting in High School Musical 2 is that we're on a new project to watch all the DVDs lying around the house so we can get rid of them. As to why there's a copy of HSM2 lying around, well, we'd seen High School Musical and just had to find out what happened to those compelling characters. Ha ha ha.

HSM2 is, indeed, terrible in all the ways you would expect. But there's one really good dance number ("I Can't Dance") and, dammit, we were in fact humming "Fabulous" the next day.

FuzzyCo grade: C+

It's no Pixar movie, but Madagascar was pretty funny, especially for a lazy holiday weekend. (Thinking of how the animals in Up were hilarious but still very animalistic, I was struck by how the animals in Madagascar moved very much like people in motion capture suits (except maybe for the penguins).) It was also (mostly) unafraid to tackle a topic that's oft-glossed over in animated movies about talking animals: who's going to eat who. (SPOILER: the crisis is averted at the end when they feed the lion some fish. To which I say, what about Finding Nemo! Maybe the fish can talk, too!)

FuzzyCo grade: B+

I've only read just a few issues of the The Losers comic book, but I think the movie misses quite a bit of the subtlety. And we're talking here about a bang-bang, blow-up, quick quip comic. So... it's not a great movie. But it's got the blow ups and the quips.

FuzzyCo grade: B

I really owe Erica an apology. I said, "No, don't watch New Moon without me," and then sighed and laughed and huffed my way through the whole thing. I just need to accept that I am completely not the target demographic for this series and ignore it's existence. I think the confusion it engenders in me is that it uses tropes I'm familiar with—the vampires and the werewolves and so on—to a completely different purpose than I usually encounter. It's as though, I suppose, someone made a deep-fryer training film that featured ninjas and robots. A ninja-and-robot fan would think they were going to be entertained by it, and have certain expectations about plot and so on, but fundamentally it would have been created to serve a specific audience—people who need to learn how to use a deep-fryer—and everyone else would be bound to be disappointed.

FuzzyCo grade: C

Shaun's project of getting me to watch all three Godfather movies continues apace and we made it through the 2 DVDs(!) of The Godfather: Part II. After my complaints about the transfer quality of the DVD of the first movie, I had tried to find a copy of the Coppola restoration of this one but was thwarted. The second movie, as included in the 2000 box set, isn't quite as bad as the first, but there are still some noticeable visual problems.

Even though Part II is 25 minutes longer than the first movie, it seems to move along at a faster clip—maybe because of the intertwining storylines of Michael's continuing story and the origin story of Vito Corleone. The Vito sections of the movie held the most promise for me, but were the most frustrating in the end. I feel like we understand Michael's motivations, flawed and tragic as they may be. But Vito remains an enigma despite all we learn about his early life. Did he feel forced by circumstance into his life of crime, or was he drawn to it? It never really seemed clear to me. Certainly he seemed to move jarringly easily from petty theft to carefully planned execution. What's up, I ask, with that?

If nothing else, I'm getting an urge from all these movies to just go read Mario Puzo's original book and get this story un-edited.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

We've had Kit Kittredge: An American Girl in the to-watch pile ever since Hodgman noted that it had "quite a bit well-researched information about hobo life and hobo symbology". Since then, when we're picking a movie to watch in our copious free time there's always a pause when we come across it. "The Godfather… Stranger Than Paradise… or we could always watch Kit Kitteredge… ha ha, OK, Starbooty…"

But even a broken record is right twice a day, so the other night we got to KK:AAG and said, oh what the heck.

The really interesting thing about this movie is that it's a reasonably harshly-honest look at a really hard time in American history—the Great Depression—that nonetheless manages to be a cheery and delightful movie aimed at young girls. The cast is great (Stanley Tucci rocks a mustache like no one's business) and you know what, there was a plot twist that for-sure twisted me. Pretty good all around for a movie based on a book based on a doll.

FuzzyCo grade: B+ (A if you're an 8-year-old girl)

I really should have blogged about Hot Tub Time Machine weeks ago, since we saw it opening weekend (and even got to fill out little surveys about why we had come to see the movie, which characters we liked best, etc). I loved it! How's that for a naunced review? Now, it may have just hit me right that night (Erica just thought it was OK, and was bothered by some elements she saw as misogynistic) but I seriously belly-laughed my way through the movie. And on a less-visceral level, I thought the movie was directed incredibly well—it surfed between different styles of comedy so that it never wore out its welcome with any one style.

FuzzyCo grade: A

We watch a lot of performance movies and so Turn the Beat Around, a made-for-MTV movie about a revival of disco in LA, seemed tailor-made for us. But even for a genre that normally has tissue-thin plots, the characters' actions and reactions seemed especially random. The fades to black (for commercials) came at odd times and when we faded up the plot would seem to have advanced by a herk-a-ma-jerk. And it committed the ultimate sin for this sort of movie: there simply wasn't enough dancing.

FuzzyCo grade: C-

I like a good romcom as much as the next guy, especially if that next guy is Erica, who's in a romcom mood lately. For the genre, The Proposal is pretty good. Ryan Reynolds has some excellent sighs.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

What are the chances that the roller derby championship is the same night as the pageant? OK, other than that, Whip It is sweet and cute and fun. Rawrrr... roller derby.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

When I was a kid a common trope* in sci-fi novels I read was "the generation starship gone awry". So I think I was predisposed to like Pandorum, and given that it dealt with the topic non-idiotically, I was well satisfied. There's not really a lot of intricacy to the plot, but there's a boat-load of atmosphere and the whole ship just kind of feels right, and then there's certainly plenty of mutant-punching-and-kicking-and-stabbing.

FuzzyCo grade: A

* Or maybe there were just a few that really stuck with me.

Chris Rock has made a really fascinating documentary about black people and their hair and the things they do to get the titular Good Hair -- which is to say, to look like European or Asian hair. I think Rock does a great job of just presenting the situation without any overt agenda, but in a way that really makes me, at least, go "wow, that's effed up". As a narrator and guide, he's charming and funny.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

Pros of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers: "Bless Yore Beautiful Hide", fancy-dancing mountain men. Cons: They abduct the women! They're kidnappers! I know the solution to our romantic problems: get blankets and rope!

FuzzyCo grade: B-

Every Little Step is a documentary about the casting of a Broadway revival of A Chorus Line, which is a musical about the casting of a show. So the levels of meta here are deep.

But the story is so straightforward: some of these people are going to get the parts and some are not. It's just a straight documentary, so there's none of the nonsense those casting reality shows have. It's just working singers/dancers/actors putting their best out there.

A weird little side-story: one of the actors up for a role is Charlotte d'Amboise and in one of the interviews we meet her father, Jacques d'Amboise, who talks about being a ballet dancer and knee surgery and so on. After we were done with the movie we were IMDBing, as one does, and saw that Charlotte was married to Terrance Mann, who had played Larry in the movie of the musical and we thought it odd that they hadn't mentioned that in the documentary. Watching all the dancing put Erica in the mood for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and just before we watched it Erica mentioned that her favorite of all the brothers was "the ballet dancer". We watch the movie (more on that weirdness later) and then as credits roll... Ephraim Pontipee: Jacques d'Amboise, courtesy New York City Ballet. !!!

FuzzyCo grade: A

Califone performs after the movie screening

The opposite of going into a movie with a lot of expectations is going to see one knowing nearly nothing at all. I like that, especially when it turns out to be a good movie. That was my experience with All My Friends Are Funeral Singers.

All that I knew going in was that our friend Megan Hovde Wilkins was in it, there was music by the Califone in it (and the performance we went to was going to have them performing the score live), and that it might be a little scary.

It turns out to be a ghost story, but not that scary. It was written and directed by a member of Califone, and their music makes up a big portion of the film. I have no idea what it'd be like to see the film on its own, because the band and the music were very present, in a good way, throughout the whole performance. If you get a chance to see one of the showings where they're performing the score, I'd do so.

FuzzyCo grade: A

So, I had never seen The Godfather. I know, I know, your instinctive reaction was "Really?" Yes, really. But, you know, I was 2 when it was made and then the this and the that and we all make choices about our time. It's actually a lot harder for me to see a movie that's supposed to be good because then I have to carve out 2 hours (or, in this case, 3) to pay attention. A bad movie I can watch while upgrading servers or something.

Anyway, Shaun was so offended by this gap in my cinema education that he decided to organize a Godfather Marathon and trap me at his house to watch all three. We downgraded that to setting aside a Sunday night to watch just the first one and Erica and I trundled over to watch this cinematic masterpiece. We ordered in some pizza and pasta (and yes, cannoli. I know the line. Everyone knows the line.) and settled in for three hours.

My reaction: It's an OK movie.

So first off, while you're preparing your "my god you have no taste" comments, I have to say that the transfer from film to DVD that was done for the 2000 box set is terrible. Anything outdoors is shiny and looks like videotape. Anything indoors is so dark you can't see what's going on. I read that the newer "Coppola Restoration" discs (from 2007?) is much better, and I'll definitely seek those out when we move on to watching parts II and III.

And then it suffers somewhat from all the ways it's sunk into the zeitgeist. Clever lines become a "oh, that's where that comes from" instead of a real zinger. I wondered why they were playing Generic Gangster Music over every other scene, until I realized that the Godfather soundtrack has been co-opted by every imitator since. And you know, I get it with the scope and Michael's story and so on and so forth, but it just didn't seem to have the umph for me that it has for so many other people. I was ready to be blown away, and I wasn't.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

Update: Timing! Merlin Mann just blogged about the terrible state of the Godfather negatives pre-Coppola restoration.

Erica and I wanted a light movie to watch and what could be more light-hearted than Hotel for Dogs. Like Snakes on a Plane, the movie's right there in the title. Completely light-hearted, sweet, and predicable. Thank goodness it doesn't have any deceased parents, families being torn apart, or issues of saving animals from shelters. Aw, crum.

I really can't tell you what people not in our particular circumstances might think about this movie. A cute, dumb movie with dogs? Something like that.

Setting a mediocre thriller in an exotic location just means you can add implausible environmental complications to your implausible characters.

FuzzyCo grade: C-

Daybreakers starts with an incredible premise—if vampirism starts spreading in a population, before long everyone will be vampires and who will they feed on then? And for kicks, it layers on a noir feel, which is like the bacon of movie motifs—it goes with everything!

And from that great start, the movie manages to squander every good idea and meanders around from pointless action sequence to makes-no-sense confrontations, until the final dramatic but-why-did-he? ending.

FuzzyCo grade: C-

Bottoms Up's claim to fame, if you can call it that, is that its two stars, if you can call them that, are Paris Hilton and Jason Mewes (Jay of Jay & Silent Bob). I had picked up a copy of the movie for $2 at a Big Lots because hey, Paris & Jay! And then someone gave us a copy with a post-it that said, "Not that you asked, but I was uncomfortably surprised w/ how much I liked Paris Hilton's performance in this otherwise crap movie." I don't know who that was, and I almost don't want to know because I don't want to know which of my friends is insane. Otherwise crap? It's entirely crap. This is a terrible, terrible movie. And not even so-bad-or-weird it's good like Plan 9 or The Room or something. Just teeth-gratingly bad. It's boring and offensive and badly acted and makes no sense and poorly edited and just really, really bad.

FuzzyCo grade: F

I think the trailers for Next Day Air did it a disservice. I went in expecting a certain kind of low-brow stoner comedy and instead found a dark, gritty comedy about drug dealers and thieves—sort of Elmore Leonard meets The Wire.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I think everyone I've talked to feels the exact same way I do about this movie—I would happily watch a two-hour movie with Meryl Streep as Julia Child; as charming as Amy Adams normally is, I'd like the forty-five minutes I spent watching her as Julie Powell back. I especially think the contrast is not flattering to Powell, because it seems that Child met every challenge with a cheerful attitude and a sense of self, where Powell whines and mopes and seems to be focussed on external validation. And it's not the movie's fault, but the thing was really tainted for me by knowing that the real-life Powell's next memoir was about her adultery. It adds such a sad subtext to all of her interaction's with her husband Eric in the film.

FuzzyCo grade: B- (A+ for just the Julia Child parts)

We went into The Princess and the Frog with very low expectations and gosh-darn it, it was good. It was funny and suspenseful and romantic, and really captured a lot of the flavors that go into making New Orleans the city that I love so much.

FuzzyCo grade: A

There is so much to love about District 9 that I feel almost bad that it bugged me that it wasn't consistent about the documentary-style camera work. Is that picky of me?

FuzzyCo grade: A

I go on sometimes* about plausibility and contrivance being qualities of a movie that can satisfy or turn me off, respectively, very quickly. Moon is a great example of a movie with the potential to be very contrived, but I thought it led us into Sam Rockwall's character and his situation with enough plausibility that by the time we get to the really out-there stuff, we're pretty much along for the ride. I've really only got one big quibble with the movie… and this is really a movie that's hard to talk about with spoilers. So I'm give my grade and then we can talk about the movie in more detail after the jump.

FuzzyCo grade: A

* Maybe more in person than here.

Why do I waste time watching movies I know I'm not going to like?

FuzzyCo grade: C-

As I've mentioned repeatedly, I'm a big Terry Pratchett fan. So I was pretty excited to see this made-for-TV adaptation of the first Discworld book, The Colour of Magic. Now, admittedly, the book is a mess, an episodic parody of a variety of fantasy genres. But this movie is even more of a mess. It's… boring. I think it really highlights that Pratchett is a very literary writer. I mean, he's got wonderful footnotes and those just don't translate to the screen very well.

FuzzyCo grade: C

If nothing else, I guess you have to applaud Gregg Araki for thinking he could bring something new to the field of stoner comedies. He almost succeeds, as Anna Faris (always a treat) struggles to complete a fairly ordinary day's to-do list, hampered by an accidental extreme over-indulgence of weed. Do you think she might encounter a cast of wacky characters, in an episodic journey? You bet! Also, more drugs.

FuzzyCo grade: C+

Erica loves movies where nothing happens and people just sit around and talk. And yet she had never seen My Dinner With Andre, perhaps the prototypical such movie, so I picked up the Criterion Collection version for her for Christmas and we finally got around to watching it. The movie is just as I've said—two men meet for dinner and talk. Absolutely nothing happens, nothing is decided, no one changes. And it's a wonderful movie. Andre Gregory's story of his personal and theatrical explorations verge on self-parody, but there's a sincerity that carries him through.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

Bolt is a movie that definitely falls in the "much better than we thought it'd be" category. There are certainly elements that are predictable, but the relationship between Bolt and his traveling companions Mittens the cat and Rhino the hamster actually has some depth. And there's plenty of great sight gags and well-written jokes.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

I think I would have said "I've never seen Sixteen Candles all the way through", because I've certainly seen a scene or two and it's just one of those movies that quoted and referenced often enough that you feel like you've seen it. But it turns out I had never really seen Sixteen Candles until we actually sat down and watched the whole thing.

What was interesting to me was how, in hindsight, it seems rest almost exactly halfway between the wacky-sound-effects and exaggeration of Vacation and the touchingly personal comedy of The Breakfast Club. You can almost see the wheels turning that would become the later Hughes oeuvre.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

What a sad, uplifting, romantic, harsh movie. And staring at George Clooney for and hour and a half doesn't hurt.

FuzzyCo grade: A

You know what really goes well with a whole day of putting together Ikea furniture? A nice more-witty-dialogue-than-action movie like His Girl Friday. Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell are good and all, but really I think I'm a Ben Hecht fan. Zingers!

FuzzyCo grade: A-

Erica and I spent New Year's Eve in, drinking and playing online trivia. And if ever there was a movie to make it seem romantic to be a married couple drinking and staying in (when they're not off catching murderers) The Thin Man is it. So, thanks to TCM for running that marathon on New Year's Eve and to Zulkey for tipping us off to it. Hooray for Nick and Nora (and Astor).

FuzzyCo grade: A

There's a point near the end of this movie (spoiler alert, I suppose, but really you'd have to be a serious dullard not to see it coming) where the two main characters are sitting separately in dark rooms, sure that their relationship is over. "Fade to black, credits," I whispered in Erica's ear. That might have been an OK movie. But no, waa-waa, family is the most important thing, let's have a baby. Boo.

And I guess I know real-life couples like this, but I kept worrying that Vince Vaughan was going to crush Reese Witherspoon. He's just soooo much bigger than her.

FuzzyCo grade: C-

Liam Neeson looks so sad to be kicking everyone's ass so hard in Taken. That's gravitas, folks.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

The unexpected thing about The Tale of Despereaux, especially given the title, was that it really was the tale of 5 or 6 different folks, all dealing with different kinds of regret and loss. Is it a big spoiler to note that it ends with a chorus of sighed "I'm sorry"s? But don't worry, there's plenty of mouse sword-fighting before you get there.

FuzzyCo grade: A

For a cheapy-made, poorly-acted scifi movie, They Live has some pretty hard-hitting social commentary that has weathered the last 20 years very well: Aliens coming to invade us won't need to come in with guns blazing -- exploting our own worst tendencies to zone out and go with the flow will work just fine, and the few people who do notice can likely be bought off. Unless, of course, they're Rowdy Roddy Piper.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

I had a feeling, watching the Monsters vs Aliens trailer, that maybe we were seeing all the best jokes of the movies. Thankfully, it turned out that the trailer just has the best jokes of the first third of the movie. The plot was a little predicatable, but the characters were engaging and the jokes were pretty funny. And what a distinctive character design all the human authority figures had. Am I crazy that maybe it reminds me of Will Elder?

FuzzyCo grade: B+

I might have wondered whether the world-weary Fantastic Mr. Fox could be appreciated by children as well, if I hadn't seen it with my niece and nephew, who seemed to enjoy it just fine. Though, my nephew seemed most impressed that Ash was named the same as a character from Pokemon, so there you go. I enjoyed it just fine as well.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

Haven't I suffered enough? I already read the book, but Erica is watching vampire movies for her [redacted] project and so how could we skip this pop-culture phenomenon? Yeah, being a movie didn't make me like it any more. Less, perhaps, because even suspense was gone since I knew what was going to happen. I will give the movie one thing over the book--the 'blackout instead of describing a vampire fight' is replaced by, as is right, the freaking vampire fight.

FuzzyCo grade: C

I'm not sure what I was expecting from (500) Days of Summer, but whatever expectations I had were shattered. Does that make sense? Anyway, the narrator at the beginning lays it right out, "This is a story of boy meets girl. But you should know up front, this is not a love story." But it is a story about love. It's, perhaps, a little too precious at times (like Tom's young sister Rachel) but overall quite a real movie, artfully filmed.

Oh, it was weird to me that it was set in Los Angeles. Not that it would be in LA, but the LA of the movie felt a lot more like New York-lite or Boston or something. The words "LA" were first spoken outloud half-way through the movie, as I remember, and I actually did a double-take.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I'm not sure why Sunday morning would have me so sentimental, but yeah, this sap got all weepy at Dan in Real Life. The plot is a little predictable, but pretty much everyone from Steve Carell to even Dane Cook turns in great performances. And the soundtrack by Sondre Lerche is delightful.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Immediately after watching the first five Saw movies, I needed a palette cleanser. I folded some laundry and watched Bob Hope in My Favorite Brunette. Hope as a timid baby photographer has finally gotten a chance to act as a tough detective and soon gets in over his head. When it's slapstick and Hope quipping a mile a minute, it's quite enjoyable, and fortunately they keep the movie clipping along at a pace where you don't usually notice that the plot doesn't really make any sense.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

I was talking to Shaun about a particular movie pet peeve of mine and made the mistake of using the Saw movies as an example when I had never actually seen them. Shaun suggested that I was incorrect in my assumptions about the movies and so I decided there was only one way to know for sure—to watch all of them. Erica was out of town a few weekends ago and so I powered through all five Saw movies available on DVD. (This kind of thing is why I've still never seen The Godfather.)

The good news is that, while not great movies, they certainly are better than I thought they would be. The intricate plotting is intriguing and, especially watched back-to-back, the incessant retconning of their own plot lines is fascinating, although by Saw VII or VIII I'm sure we'll discover that everyone ever on screen in a Saw movie was actually working with Jigsaw.

FuzzyCo grade, Saw 1-3: B+
FuzzyCo grade, Saw 4-5: B-

Se7en is one of my many "you've never seen that?" movies. There's only so much time in the day.

My worry, coming to it so late, was that it might be a victim of the oft-imitated innovator—sometimes when I watch an older, then-innovative movie, the key scenes or techniques have been copied or parodied so many times by later movies that I have seen that their power is diluted. And too, I had the impression that it was a gruesome movie and I was sure that the bar has been far raised by all the "torture porn" movies of late.

But fortunately, the movie is primary a character piece, I found, which holds up very well. And when it is horrific, it hints more than shows, leaving the worst to your imagination.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I love the art of Mike Mignola so much that just the faithful translation of his style into live action in Hellboy II: The Golden Army would probably be enough for me to be satisfied. Add in the fact that the acting is half-decent and the story is un-terrible and I'm a happy clam.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

Rize is a documentary by photographer David LaChapelle about the intertwined dance movements of Klowning and Krumping in East LA. The film does a great job of getting out of the way of the dancers, presenting their lives and dancing with neither sensationalism nor sentimentality. There's even a movie-cliche-style public "dance battle" near the end of the movie, and there's a "winner", but it doesn't seem like the end of the story -- it's just another marker along many life stories.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I'm sorry. Fraser. So, yeah, that's my review. FuzzyCo grade: C

(large size)

The horror action in Drag Me to Hell is so cartoony that it's not really scary—it's like one of those ooky carnival rides where you're not actually frightened, but you jump every time something lunges at you just because, well, something is lunging at you. So that's all good. But Alison Lohman is such a dead fish that it's really hard for me to care, even in a cartoony way, whether she gets dragged to hell or not.

FuzzyCo grade: C

Zack and Miri Make A Porno was a somewhat frustrating movie for me. It got a lot of points (and laughs) for its hardcore take on the old b-movie "how are we going to save the old Drive-In? I know, we'll have a bikini carwash!" plot. And there's plenty of Kevin Smith-y rambly, funny dialogue. But at its heart, it's a pretty bog-standard, cliched romantic comedy. The "3 months later" late in the film really galled me—I think that one moment would have gone a lot better for me if it was "a week later" or something.

Oh, and because I know you were curious, too, yes, those are Jason Mewes' real tattoos.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

[•REC] is a Spanish zombie movie that is, as a quick touchstone, a close-quarters Cloverfield. A reporter and cameraman for a television program called "While You're Asleep" have come to a fire station to profile what firemen on the overnight shift do. The entire movie is shot from the perspective of that camera. In the middle of the night, the reporters and two firemen go out on a routine call to assist someone trapped in their apartment. And then... did you notice the part above where I said "zombie"?

I watched this movie on a sunny Sunday afternoon, and I have to say I found it pretty scary. There were even, in such a well-trod field as zombie movies, a couple of fresh takes on the whole notion. But mostly it's just a well done, claustrophobic, "look out behind you!" monster movie.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Leningrad Cowboys Go America is a 1989 Finnish indie film about a Russian band traveling across the US to get to a gig at a wedding in Mexico. Nothing really happens. There's lots of shots out the car window of the scenery they pass and every now and then they play a gig at a dive bar. Jim Jarmusch has a cameo as a used car dealer in New York and I'd almost say it was like his movies where nothing really happens and people just have conversations, except that there's little talking in the movie. If that sounds like it would drive you crazy, then it probably would, but Team Gerdes really enjoyed letting it wash over us.

FuzzyCo grade: A

The success of The Hangover—and not to keep you on tenter's hooks until the score at the end of this short post, I did enjoy it—hinged largely for me on the performances. I mean, I feel like I've seen the "wacky misadventures in Vegas, with an odd celebrity cameo or two thrown in" plot plenty of times before. There were a few plot twists and turns I wasn't expecting, but overall I think the humor of the movie was the overwhelming good turns by nearly everyone involved (even Mike Tyson manages not to overact).

FuzzyCo grade: A

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist was a frustrating movie for me -- there're a lot of great performances, lots of funny moments, and a few touching ones, but the overarching drama -- especially Nick and Norah's respective terrible exes -- seems a bit overwrought and cliched. But hey, maybe this is another case of me not being in the target demo. The movie is based on a YA novel. (That novel, I understand, tells the story from the alternating viewpoints of the two main characters, which sounds interesting.)

FuzzyCo grade: B-

Was it John Huston who grumped that Hollywood should stop remaking good movies and remake the bad ones? I couldn't find a quote. But in any case, without even seeing the new Taking of Pelham 123, I think the original 1974 version could be a poster child for that stricture. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is an incredible movie. It's tight, suspenseful, action-packed and funny. Just, perfect.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

I was entirely prepared for Push to be terrible. And it's not incredibly innovative or anything -- super-powered teens on the run from the government is certainly not breaking any new ground. But there's a look and feel to the film that shows that somebody actually cared about such things. And hardly anybody does anything to provoke my "oh, come on" reflexes. This might be a pretty low bar, but Push clears it.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

You don't need me saying, oh, this Coen brothers movie is great. Except, unless there's anyone who, like me, had seen the trailer for Burn After Reading and thought, "oh, that movie is going to be OK, but no rush to see it". Yeah, um, it's great.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

I had heard good things, but I was really impressed with how good I Love You, Man was. It's really funny and in such a non-mean-spirited way.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

I've been watching so many bad scifi movies lately and Van Helsing fits right into the mold. It's a big, dumb, over-the-top monster-fighting adventure. And... I liked it. It grew on me. I mean, it's still dumb, but it was a fun dumb.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

La Jetée is the French short film that inspired 12 Monkeys. Watching the former on YouTube made me realize that I didn't remember all the details of the latter so I dug up a copy. The film is not as hallucinogenic as I remember, but it's plenty Gilliamy and plenty bleak. So bleak, in fact, that I almost feel like the very last, oddly hopeful line of the movie is a cop-out.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Back in April I saw a show called BriTANicK: The Infinity Prison at the UCB Theatre in New York that used 4 actors, a video projector, and a time-travel plot to create a remarkably rich story for a half-hour sketch show.

The Spanish film Time Crimes (Los cronocrímenes) is similarly tight in scale -- there are only four characters (and that's something of a spoiler right there, sorry) and one extended location - Hector's house, his neighbor the scientific institute that seems to have invented a time machine, and the woods inbetween. And there's really not even that much going on, though you do get to that same not-much repeatedly from Hector's time-traveling perspective. (It's a sort of sci-fi Rashomon.)

FuzzyCo grade: A

For the first half hour, Stomp the Yard looked like it might have an original story. And then it turned into a pretty standard teen performance movie. Not that there's anything wrong with that--that's why we were watching it in the first place. It's just that there seems to be a script template for the "he's from the streets and has to integrate his urban style into the classic [performance art] style" movie and the writers just search-and-replacement to generate the next movie. In this case the performance art is stepping, which was different (but the plot was the same) and the dancing was great.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

I remember seeing trailers for The Forbidden Kingdom and as I recall they were all about "together for the first time — Jet Li and Jackie Chan!". I don't remember a single thing being mentioned about "a wimpy time-traveling white teenager!"

The parts of this movie that are a Chinese action movie are a pretty good mystical Chinese action movie. The parts that an American teenager having a coming-of-age are pretty standard for that genre, which is to say, pretty lame.

FuzzyCo grade: C+

Twentieth Century is oft-cited as one of the first "screwball" comedies, but by modern standards it's a pretty sedate movie. My biggest question was whether Carole Lombard and John Barrymore are terrible over-actors or whether they are carefully playing terrible over-actors. Either way, there's a lot of terrible over-acting going on.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

You know who did a great job on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? The art direction group and prop builders. The diving gear outfits of the Nautilus crew, for example, are gorgeous. You know who did a terrible job? Everyone else. It wouldn't be that great a movie just standing on its own, but given that it's based on one of the best comic books ever, well the disappointment rankles.

FuzzyCo grade: C-

I really don't know what's wrong with me -- there are plenty of good movies I haven't seen and I feel a compulsion to go back and watch old, bad sci-fi and fantasy movies. Underworld even starts with a good enough idea -- vampires and werewolves* are locked in an ancient war -- and then goes and just makes a muddle of it. Maybe this war has been going on for so long because both sides are full of idiots. ("The security arrangements for the visiting dignitary were changed at the last second, and then she got assassinated. Nope, nothing suspicious about that.") And if you've got vampires and werewolves, why so many guns? If you like guns so much, why not make a regular-people-shooting movie.

FuzzyCo grade: C-

* Excuse me, "Lycans". Do we really need a new word for werewolf?

Here's the faint praise I can give Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: it's been a couple of days since I've seen the movie, and I don't remember any of the things I didn't like about it. (And believe you me, I hold onto grudges against bad movies. Just ask me about Center Stage sometime.) There were some car chases, I remember, and some fights and some really hungry ants. I think if it weren't the fourth movie in a storied franchise, we might even think it was a pretty good movie.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

We had such high hopes for Spring Breakdown — the world needs, Team Gerdes thinks, female versions of the dumb-but-smart, character-based buddy movies that have been, thankfully, so prevalent lately (your Superbad, your Forgetting Sarah Marshall, etc). Rachel Dratch wrote this movie and we've been big fans of Rachel since her Second City days. Sadly, this movie is not the one we've been waiting for. Even more sadly, it's not just a case of thwarted expectations -- it's not even a very good movie. The characters in the movie are all broad caricatures and then even those are sacrificed to jokes in scenes.

FuzzyCo grade: C

Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanemo Bay. They do, you know, which is good because it's right there in the title. Anyone ever see Penn and Teller Get Killed and right at the end they do and there's that voiceover where they say, "well, once we named the movie that, we had to live up to it". That doesn't have anything to do with Harold and Kumar, I just thought of that.

Here's a fun game to play with this movie: try to figure out exactly which scene of sex, gross out humor, or drug use that got Kal Penn that job at the White House.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

The look and feel of the near-future, worn-down world of Babylon AD hangs together. But, like all too many movies of its ilk, the plot is so nonsensical as to insult the intelligence. I guess there's an extended cut of this movie, which the director claims completes his original vision or somesuch. I'll never know, because I'm not going to waste another two hours of my life.

FuzzyCo grade: C-

So there's a new documentary, Every Little Step, about the casting of a Broadway revival of A Chorus Line -- which is, meta-alert!, itself about the casting of a musical. Erica and I were talking about it and it came out that she had never seen A Chorus Line. Which one of us is the choreographer? Anyhoodle, we fixed that. I have a secret fondness for audition montages in movies, and this is just a big long audition scene… with songs!

FuzzyCo grade: B+

Cube has a very clever conceit at its heart -- it's a variation on the classic 'people trapped together devolve to their base instincts' trope -- see Lifeboat or Lost -- but the six protagonists are trapped in a series of booby-trapped cubical rooms arranged in a larger cube 26 rooms wide. So, if nothing else, as a budget filmmaker I was impressed that they'd managed to make a location of 17,576 rooms with a single set. Near the beginning of the film, I was even thinking about how easily it could be adapted to be presented on stage.

And maybe it could be presented on stage, logistically, but I wouldn't want to do so with the exisiting script.

Things move along nicely as the captives try to figure out how to survive in the deadly cubes, and as they wonder why they're in this situation and who has done this to them. It's when they actually start to discover the answers to some of those questions that it falls apart -- because the answers are really dumb. If they had left it mysterious it might be frustrating, but might be better (see Lost, again).

FuzzyCo grade: C-

As I've mentioned before, I love going to see a good movie without knowing anything about it. As soon as I saw the first trailer for Up that was, if memory serves, simply the house taking off and Carl waving from the window, I knew that I was going to see the movie and so I did my best to avoid watching any more trailers or reading anything about the movie.

Not that there are any twist endings to this movie or anything, but I do just love discovering every little bit of a movie as it unfolds -- the trailers (which I've since seen) do give away a few jokes and so on.

But whatevs. What's really important is that Up is one of the best movies I've ever seen. And not one of the best animated movies -- best, period. It's a movie that … Well, if you haven't seen it yet, just trust me that you should and I'll stick my score right here:

FuzzyCo grade: A+

Transporter 3 wasn't quite as good as the first one, but it was leaps and bounds (and kicks and shirtless Jason Stathams) better than the second movie.

FuzzyCo grade: B

The House Bunny is a completely confounding movie. I'm confounded. The dialogue, plot, and acting is absolutely sub-par -- like if Animal House had had multiple direct-to-video sequels and we were now up to Animal House 9 and this was the shoddy phoned-in product. BUT. Except for Anna Faris. She's hilarious. She's stuck in the plot, of course, but her dialogue is miles above the movie and her performance is stellar. Did she write her own lines or something? I can't wait to see her star in something good.

FuzzyCo grade (The House Bunny): D
FuzzyCo grade (Anna Faris in The House Bunny): A

If I think about it for five minutes I could come up with a list of things wrong with Music and Lyrics, but the whole thing is just so charming that I was swept along by, well, I suppose the romance and the comedy, and was throughly entertained.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I suppose you don't want your raucous rock-n-roll comedy to be described as "pleasant enough". Sorry, Rainn.

FuzzyCo grade: B

Gary Hustwit's Helvetica is a documentary focussed on the titular typeface - through conversations with designers, he illuminates both the history and evolution of the typeface and allows the designers to wax philosophic about issues in design. His new film, Objectified, takes the same approach to the much broader topic of industrial design. Because the topic is so much more general -- in a Q&A after the showing I saw last night, Hewitt said he set himself some arbitrary limits of no clothing or shoes on one end and no architecture on the other -- the philosophizing goes much farther afield. But it's still a look at a field that it's very easy to let fade into the background of our modern lives, even though the results of industrial design affect us every day. And it doesn't hurt that it's beautifully shot and the score is delightful.

The showing I saw last night was a one-off sponsored by AIGA Chicago, IDSA Chicago, and Coudal Partners (the latter to whom I owe thanks for tickets). The film will be back for a week of screenings at the Siskel Center in June.

FuzzyCo grade: A

One of the great things about Crank was the unexpected ending (SPOILER ALERT!) -- likeable rogue Chev Chelios fell out of a helipcopter and after a mid-air freefall battle, which he won, he bounces off a car and dies. Roll credits.

Crank: High Voltage opens with his lifeless body being thrown into a van and an artifical heart being installed to keep his body alive while his organs are harvested. Of course he escapes and tears across Los Angeles looking for his heart so he can have it reattached. From the very first moments with the power meter of his artifical heart's battery pack counting down, Crank: High Voltage plays out like a movie adaption of a video game of the movie. Just like the first movie, the action is relentless, so as to distract you from the ridiculous nature of the plot, and the visual styles are exuberant and varied, to the same end. There are a few missteps -- I thought a kaiju-inspired sequence was ambitious, but ultimately weak -- but overall it was enjoyable escape.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

Since my last experience with vampires was so soppy, I felt like a good ol' bloody violent vampire movie was needed. 30 Days of Night fit the bill. Based on a graphic novel (that I've never read), vampires descend on the northernmost town in Alaska to take advantage of the titular polar night. It's a really good entry in the "realistic"* genre of survival horror. Scary, affecting, and the ending really came out of nowhere (except, in hindsight, perfectly foreshadowed). I was really impressed.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

* I know, I know. I mean, given the notion that there are vampires it proceeds realistically from there. My only quibble in that regard was that there was an ill-defined number of vampires that seemed a little high sometimes.

I'm still not quite sure what to make of Happy-Go-Lucky. I enjoyed watching it, so I suppose it worked or something. But what does Poppy's endless optimism mean? And is it terrible that I sympathize with the quiet book store clerk at the beginning of the movie who just wants to be left alone?

FuzzyCo grade: if you like movies where not much happens and people talk a lot, like Erica does, you'll like this movie. I still don't know where I land on it.

Kenny was on some sort of "10 best movies of last year you've never heard of" list and so we gave it a shot. It's a mockumentary from Australia about the titular character, who works in the porta-potty industry. The odd thing is that it plays out with a quiet mix of humor and pathos that has much more in common with a good actual documentary, rather than the exaggerated characters and humor we're used to in other mockumentaries. This might be a double-hybrid: a dramedy mockumentary. In any case, I really got to like Kenny and didn't mind spending an hour and a half with him.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I was of two minds about Role Models. Everyone sleep-walked through the plot: will these two differently-damaged men come to actually care about the boys their court-ordered community service hours have them mentoring? If you think they won't, I have a bridge you may be interested in. But there was enough flat-out nonsense going on in the dialogue, especially from Jane Lynch, that it redeemed the movie for me.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

We watched Sita Sings the Blues last night and I'm happy to report that it lived up to the hype*. It's the story of an Indian Princess and her complicated relationship with her husband. And it's also the story of a modern woman named Nina, the same as the writer/director/animator Nina Paley, and her complicated relationship with her husband. It's also told in about six different styles, one of which is a very busty cartoon Sita who sings the songs of Annette Hanshaw. One of the "recommended reading"s listed at the end of the movie (yes, a cartoon with a bibliography) is Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, gives a clue to the "the stories don't always add up and that's ok" approach that seems to be going on. And the music's great and the monkeys are cute.

Beyond the artistic experimentation of the film, Paley is exploring new financial realms. The Annette Hanshaw songs are still under copyright protection and Paley has determined that, even after clearing the songs, she can't afford to sell the film. So she's giving it away. She's spent $50,000 to 'decriminalize' the use of the songs and every copy of the film will be given away, to avoid triggering the 'per-sale' provisions of her agreements with the copyright holders. (She does, however, accept donations.) The movie is already available from Archive.org and in a torrent. I also have the 1.4 GB 480p version, if you're physically accessible to me and you'd like me to hand you a copy.

FuzzyCo grade: A

* For me. Erica was not quite as enthralled as I, but she has her own blog if she wants to weigh in.

We've discovered the free movies available on our cable's On Demand (well, free in that they keep convincing me to keep the 'premium channel package' whenever I call to cancel it - bastards). We also discovered last night during a hot chocolate break in the middle of Ocean's 13 that the On Demand won't stayed paused for more than the time it takes to make hot chocolate and just goes back to the main screen and then the 'resume' button just starts it over again from the beginning and you have to fast forward an hour into the movie. Bastards. Ocean's 13 is Ocean's 11, over again, but fortunately I like that movie.

FuzzyCo grade (Ocean's 13): B+
FuzzyCo grade (RCN On Demand): B-

A dance aficionado might watch Step Up 2: The Streets. Dance nerds spend an hour after the movie looking up to make sure that, yes, that was Shorty from Beat Freakz (currently on America's Best Dance Crew) in the '410 Crew', etc. Erica has turned me into a dance nerd.

FuzzyCo grade: B

There's something really satisfying about going into a good movie knowing nothing about it. If only there was some way to arrange that all the time. (There's a plan! If all the studios would just agree to only make good movies then we could all just go watch all of them.) Very early in The Triplets of Belleville I realized that what little memory I had of what the movie might be about was completely wrong, other than that it's an animated movie. What it was about was... well, if you haven't seen it I don't want to ruin it for you. I'll just say it's about a great grandmother. And a dog. And bikes. And frogs.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

The thing that makes Scarface laughable to the modern viewer, besides Pacino's radicchio Cuban accent, is the terrible music. It sounds like someone's trying to lead an orchestra with a Casio keyboard. "Oh, we couldn't afford a real soundtrack, so we found these MIDIs." And when something dramatic is happening, it often slips into straight-up soap opera "dun-dun-dunnn". Too much, too much, I say.

FuzzyCo grade: C

Coraline is a movie based on a book by Neil Gaiman and directed by the director of Nightmare Before Christmas, Henry Selick. So what's not to love? Nothing, in my book*. Oh, and we saw it in 3D and that was really cool.

Did anyone else notice that the song that plays while Coraline is exploring the house sounds a lot (to my ear, anyway) like the Komaneko theme song? The world of stop-motion is so small, it can't be a coincidence. Unless it is. Or unless I'm mis-remembering what the Komaneko song.

FuzzyCo grade: A

* Erica had some personal issues with the movie.

It's probably a little ridiculous for me to be as proud of making beef stew as I am tonight. But somehow I'd never actually made beef stew before and I got it into my head to make some today and all I needed was the beef (I even had turkey stock in the freezer from Thanksgiving) and then I just made it and it was great. Cooking!

And that segues into Tampopo, which is one of my favorite movies and I just got to share it with Erica (and happily she liked it, too). Tampopo is about food -- all kinds of food and all kinds of ways that food is important to people. There's a main through-line about some truckers (who are, sorta, cowboys) helping a widowed noodle shop owner transform her moribund noodle shop. The noodles she's making are not haute cuisine, but everyone involved treats the food with a deadly seriousness.

But Tampopo's quest is not the only thing going on in this movie -- the camera darts from vignette to food-related vignette. And there's a food-obsessed gangster who speaks directly to the audience. There's so much going on that it could be a big mess, but it all hangs together. I overuse "delightful", but this movie really does fill me with delight.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

I can't believe it took me this long to see Ratatouille -- I've loved every Pixar movie I've seen, I like Patton Oswalt, and I love food… Oh well, life. Anyway, we loved it. Big surprise -- all those reasons above (oh, plus I'm a sucker for 'you have to be true to yourself'). On a screen-writing-nerd note, I did like that the fact that Linguine can't understand Remy (beyond shrugs and nods) provides an excuse for the otherwise bog-standard 'if we'd just have a talk, we could avoid this misunderstanding' plot points.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I know that some of my co-workers disagree (in fact, I watched it because they recommended it), but I think that Grandma's Boy is a really, really dumb (and not in a good way) comedy. None of the lead characters are engaging, the stoner comedy is over-played even for that non-subtle genre, and the paper-thin plot introduces and then solves its only real conflict in the last ten minutes of the film. About the only thing I enjoyed about the movie was the set design. Somebody took the time to go look at an actual video game company or two, because the office looks like all the video game companies I've seen. And I did like the posters in the office for the previous games that Brainasium has made -- I've put a little gallery of them after the jump…

FuzzyCo grade: C-

What a grubby little movie, and what a totally loathsome character Eddie (Ben Stiller) is. Ick. Was Charles Grodin any less hideous in the original?

FuzzyCo grade: D

I think my favorite thing about Pineapple Express is that everyone in the movie, even the rival "criminal masterminds", is kind of a pothead fuckup.

FuzzyCo grade: A

There's no excuse for that "Lincoln's birthday" blackface routine and it's annoying that Bing Crosby needs a sassy black woman to tell him to fight for his lady so late in the movie. But otherwise, Holiday Inn is not too bad. Fred Astaire's 'drunken master' dance is particularly enchanting.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

Right at the start of White Christmas, the titular song is a haunting and effective number sung to a group of war-weary soldiers in Europe. By the end of the movie, the song has come to signify a sort of bland, middle-class "let's have a nice Christmas". (No wonder that Clark Griswold references this movie in his own quest for an unrealistically happy Christmas.) And what the F is up with the random attack on modern dance (the number "Choreography")?

FuzzyCo grade: B- (would be a C, but Danny Kaye brings it up a grade.)

I suppose a hallmark of a good "based on a true story" story is when it takes a twist that seems to come out left field and the screenwriter can just point at reality and say "it happened". American Gangster takes just such a twist late in the 3rd act. Which is good because the first 4 hours* of the movie are very well made, but almost a little too perfect screen-written to be true. Of course Denzel Washington's titular gangster is a family man and polite to a fault. Of course Russell Crowe's cop is too honest for his own good and has a terrible personal life.

FuzzyCo grade: A

* An exaggeration. I think the whole movie is only 8 hours long.

There are certain movies that if you reveal that you've never seen you get a reflexive "really?" (I've never seen The Godfather or Dirty Dancing, for example. Did you just say "really?" in your head?) And then there are movies that you might need to see because your wife and in-laws quote them constantly. Fortunately, I like Jim Jarmusch, so it wasn't a chore to watch Down by Law. And I suppose, if you weren't into this style, it could be. Jarmusch certainly never met a long, slow take that he didn't like.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I think we saw My Name is Bruce under as ideal of conditions as possible: a room full of enthusiastic fans all jazzed with the knowledge that Bruce Campbell himself was somewhere in the room. So will you laugh as loud at the jokes poking fun at Bruce Campbell fans, sitting at home watching the DVD. Probably not. But if you are a Bruce Campbell fan, it's definitely worth a watch. (And gosh if he isn't as charming as all get out in person.)

FuzzyCo grade: C+ (B+ if Bruce Campbell is in the room)

I was impressed with all the levels Tropic Thunder had -- not just the levels of meta (of which there are many) but also the variety of humor, and even actual suspense, in the thing.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

We finally got to see Wall•E and I love it even more than I thought I might. I'm just sorry we didn't see it in the theater on the big screen. And hey, it's nice to see that Fred Willard is getting work.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

A viewing of Death Race (2008) this weekend made me realize I'd never seen more than a few scenes from Death Race 2000 (1975).

The newer remake has, as you might expect, a much bigger budget, more explosions, and a much better perhaps-requisite fight in the garage. In star power, it's probably a tie as the new one has Jason Statham and Ian McShane (Lovejoy? Anyone?) but the original had David Carradine, Sylvester Stallone, and The Real Don Steele. But the biggest difference, I think, is scope and breadth of vision.

The remake is set just a few years in the future (2012) and the entire race takes place in a near-future privatized prison. (I'm intrigued by the notion that privatizing prisons, something that already occurs, would allow those corporations to just kill off prisoners at whim, but ok, sure.) Jason Statham is an unalloyed good guy -- framed for the killing of his wife and wanting to escape to be re-united with his daughter.

The original was much more ambitious. It's set a full 25 years in the future, when the United States, which now extends to Asia, has been ruled by a fascist "Mr. President" for most of that time. The eponymous race is cross-country and the racers are deviled by the attacks of a resistance who are targeting the race as a symbol of the government. For all of the cheesiness and over-acting, I found it an actually engaging story.

FuzzyCo grades
Death Race: B-
Death Race 2000: A-

I'm really not sure why the Wachowski brothers didn't just make Speed Racer an animated feature -- there's so much CGI already that the real people look rather lost. And, seriously, what's up with the increasingly Palin-esque names the Racer family gave their kids: Rex, Speed, and then Spritle. (Pops seems to be Pops' legal name -- it's how the process server addresses him.) I imagine kids would like this film, or at least be hypnotized into submission by the colors and motion.

FuzzyCo grade: B

Bang, bang! I'm James Bond! Grrr... maybe I'm all sad on the inside because my girlfriend is dead, but I'll never show it, because I'm tough. See, I'll kiss this pretty lady. Now, bang! Bang, bang, zoom, bang!

FuzzyCo grade: A

I love the idea of Blue in the Face: when Wayne Wang and Paul Auster were done making the scripted movie Smoke they discovered that they had done so ahead of schedule and under budget, so they decided to use up the rest of their money and time by making a second movie. As Smoke was set in a neighborhood cigar shop and was about the interleaving stories of the inhabitants of the neighborhood, it was easy enough to set a new series of stories in the same location. Wang and Auster set up some scenarios which the actors improvised through. They even got some celebrities to make cameos -- Madonna, Michael J. Fox, Lily Tomlin. The whole thing is edited together with some footage of Brooklynites talking about their neighborhood. The best part of the movie is an extended conversation between Auggie Wren (Harvey Keitel) and Bob (Jim Jarmusch) as the latter gets ready to smoke his last cigarette before quitting. With the way it's edited it's pretty obvious that what we're seeing is just part of a very long conversation, and I think I'd rather have seen that long conversation. The movie has a whole just doesn't gel for me -- there's too little plot to make sense as a complete narrative, but there's too much plot to just pass it off as a extended montage.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

In the wake of Minutegate, I promise you that my policy at FuzzyCo has always been that I don't review a movie (for as shabby of values of "review" as we see around here) unless I've seen the whole thing. (Erica and I got sucked into Back to the Future 3 on Encore on Saturday night but I won't be writing about it, because we came in at about 20 minutes in.) But what I can't promise you, however, is that I've watched a movie in one sitting. I watch most TV shows and movies that I do see when I'm on the train, which means that I get about 35 consecutive minutes in a viewing. (The other day my train stopped for 10 minutes outside of Belmont, which meant that I got to watch a complete episode of House in one sitting.) And then when you factor in my problem with watching socially awkward situations -- OK, so have I talked about that before?

I find it really hard to watch socially awkward situations. And it happens a lot, especially in comedies -- like when the nerd is about to be humiliated in front of the whole class or Michael Scott opens his mouth. If I'm on my own, I'll pause the TV every 30 seconds or so and fidget around the room. I love The Office, but the only way I can make it through an episode is to watch it with Erica, so that I'm socially constrained myself and need to just sit and watch the darn thing.

So, anyway, back to Death at a Funeral -- this gentle English comedy (directed by Frank Oz of all people) derives most of its humor from the awkwardness and tension at a funeral and so it took me weeks to watch the whole thing. Which, I'm sure, affects my perception of the flow of the thing. I found it funny, but not hilarious.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

Erica and I have been trying to watch Mystery Train forever. You've got to be in a slow, talky, ethereal mood, but if you are, it's hard to go wrong with Jarmusch. And what really struck us about Mystery Train was how much it was like a Neutrino Project (Wednesdays at 8 pm!) -- three stories that are mainly united by their common location and some vague interactions right at the end of the film. Oh, and the way that "hooray - we visited Graceland" covers an off-screen visit to the location they couldn't secure.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I was pleasantly surprised with how low-key and funny Forgetting Sarah Marshall was. Good job, Jason Segel.

FuzzyCo grade: A

It's been a while since I've sat down and watched a Marx Brothers movie all the way, and I don't think I've ever seen A Day at the Races before. A Day at the Races doesn't have any of the famous routines in it, and really, the routines are the only reason to watch these movies. It's not like the plots are very coherent or compelling. And the musical interludes, at least in this movie, are very dated.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

I've been watching the first season of Burn Notice on Hulu and the service suffers from too-few sponsors -- if you watch more than a few episodes of anything you get to see the same commercials a lot. Which, I suppose, worked on me, because after seeing the Eagle Eye commercial a couple dozen times, I wanted to see the darn movie, just to find out what was the secret conspiracy leading Shia LaBeouf around by the nose.

What happens was pretty boring. I mean, sure there's plenty of shooting and explosions and shouting, but (um, spoilers) super-powerful computer built to spy on everyone becomes intelligent and thinks it knows best? Yawn.

FuzzyCo grade: C

Shut Up and Sing is an inside and intimate look at a musical group dealing with a career-changing controversy. The Dixie Chicks' Natalie Maines' off-handed remark about President Bush at a London show on the eve of the Iraq War ignited a firestorm that ended up with the band virtually vanishing from country radio. The movie bounces back and forth between the evolving controversy in 2003 and the 2006 process of recording a new album.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I guess I can understand why The Promotion didn't make a bigger splash -- it's a fairly subtle comedy, with rather subdued performances from two actors who usually go big (Seann William Scott and John C. Reilly). And the plot is chock full of moral ambiguity.

(Kenner did a day of extra work on the movie as a doctor, but I couldn't see him.)

FuzzyCo grade: A

I didn't expect great things from a movie called Yo-Yo Girl Cop, but dear lord was it a terrible movie. It made no sense, the special effects were terrible, and acting was atrocious. And if the title of the movie includes the name of your crazy martial arts weapon, maybe we could have more than one battle that uses that weapon?

FuzzyCo grade: F

I'm still not sure what I think of In Bruges. I mean, it's well-made certainly. It was adapted from a play, if I remember correctly, and a lot of the dialogue has a certain stage-cleverness about it, which on screen seems a little too precious, perhaps. And maybe it all wraps up a bit too tidy (in a way). Hmmm... But if you like medieval Belgian architecture and a spot or seven of mindless violence, you just might enjoy it.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

I gotta say, if your family is going to move into a creepy mansion that turns out to be infested by faeries, it's helpful if your older sister is into fencing. Even if noone in your family can get along because of a messy divorce. Umm.. goblins?

FuzzyCo Grade: B

When my sister was, oh, nine or so, my mom read her pretty much every Nancy Drew book, working through them a couple chapters a night. Every now and then when something would come up for my mom, I'd sub in. Suddenly I'd find myself in the middle of a mystery, with no idea of the significance of the red scarf that Nancy had just found or why Ned was so startled by the old man with the thick black glasses. So it was perhaps apropos that I watched the 2007 Nancy Drew movie while working on some animation. And that should also be your warning that my comments don't come from devoting 100% of my attention to River Heights' girl sleuth.

But I think the problem with this movie is that it was trying to be too many things at once. It was trying to be a straight-forward Nancy Drew adventure at the same time as it winked and nodded at how out of place Nancy was in the modern world. But what do I know - I'm not a tween girl, so I'm obviously not the target audience for this movie.

FuzzyCo grade: B.

I was prepared to dislike Kung Fu Panda, but I actually found that the plot had a rather sweet message -- you're at your best when you're yourself. Jack Black is kind of annoying, but I guess that even sorta fits with the theme.

FuzzyCo grade: B

The Baxter is a charming little movie. I certainly felt like it was 90 minutes un-wasted.

The conceit of the movie is an interesting one -- Elliot Sherman (played by writer-director Michael Showalter of The State and Stella) is the nice-but-bland guy who always gets the girl stolen away by the romantic lead at the end of the movie. And he's realizing, in a not-quite-realizing-he's-in-a-movie way, that he is that guy. And so he's determined not to lose his fiancee to her high-school sweetheart who's suddenly returned to town. But is she really the one for him anyway? (I'm not giving anything away that isn't obvious in the first 5 minutes of the movie.)

As with most romantic comedies, it's all pretty obvious, but it's still a very sweet little movie.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I didn't think I was going to like Wanted -- I had thought director Bekmambetov's Night Watch was such a hot mess, I can't stand Mark Millar's writing and, besides, they didn't actually stick with the plot of the original comic, so who knows what kind of mess they might have come up with.

But what I think they've come up with is a pretty kick-ass action movie that extracts the best parts of Millar's story. And, I have to confess, I was pretty taken with how well it uses Chicago as a backdrop for the story. Blahblahblah, secret order of assassins. But it actually all sort of held together.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

Wow. Heavy, but wow.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

In preparation for the Sex and the City movie coming out, Erica borrowed the complete series from her aunt and jammed through all six seasons in a few weeks -- she had seen many, but not all of the episodes when they originally aired and wanted to be completely up to speed when she saw the movie. I was so proud -- it's just the sort of OCD completism I'd do (smiley!) I drifted in and out, watching an episode here and there and Erica kept me caught up. I like the show, but I'm not an uber-fan, I suppose.

And then the movie opened and we've been busy and busy (as usual) and we were starting to get worried it'd be gone from the theaters. But yesterday we had a few hours free in a row and finally got out to the theater to see it on the big screen.

At 2 and a half hours, the movie is equivalent to 6 episodes and it felt to me much like a 7th season slightly condensed. There were very strong episodic elements -- problems arose and then were solved without a lot of overlap-- with the overarching story of Carrie and Big's relationship carrying the bigger picture, much like on the TV show. There were a few "three months later"s and reported off-screen conversations where I think we would have had B-plots. Anyway, the feel was fine and translated perhaps better than other episodic shows that try to extend their plot lines to feature film length.

And I certainly can't pretend I didn't get teary-eyed a couple-three times. Oh, love.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Night Watch is a Russian vampire movie that made a bit of a buzz a few years. There are a number of cool sequences, but my overall impression of the movie is that it's kind of a muddled mess.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

The Team Gerdes Occasional Teen Performance Film Festival got around to Step Up today. She's a dancer from a privileged but cold family. He's doing janitor work at her art school as community service for his juvenile delinquent ways. Will his streetwise hiphop moves change her stiff classically-trained choreography*? Will they find love despite their different backgrounds**? Will the death of a young friend force him to reexamine his life***? Will there be a big dance number at the Senior Showcase that brings together everyone's talents and impresses the talent scouts****? What, are you retarded? Of course there will.

Maybe I just wasn't feeling it this afternoon -- Erica correctly pointed out that the plot isn't any worse than any of this sort of movie we watch all the time -- but Step Up seemed particularly inane and arbitrary to me. The filmmakers wanted the movie to have stakes, it seemed, but weren't willing to actually spend the time to create characters or situations that support those stakes. "Saying the words doesn't make it so," the School of the Arts Director tells Tyler when he proclaims his commitment to dance, and I think it's advice the filmmakers should have heeded. (And, seriously, WTF kind of stakes is "if you don't get immediately hired into a dance company out of high school, you're going to have to go to Cornell. Boo hoo.)

The dancing's not bad, though.

FuzzyCo grade: C+

* Just like in Save the Last Dance.
** Just like in Save the Last Dance.
*** Just like in You Got Served.
**** Just like in Center Stage. Actually, just like in every movie in Team Gerdes Occasional Teen Performance Film Festival.

Ninja III: The Domination is a terrible, terrible movie. Which is why I was watching it -- it's the movie we're doing for It Came From the Neo-Futurarium - the Neo-Futurists' annual summer series of staged readings of bad movies.

But, dear god, it's a terrible movie. One illustrative moment: our main character has been established (sorta) as a "health nut" ("I don't use soda.") and so when she's seduced by a temper tantrum, she takes her new cop boyfriend back to her place and pours the sexiest thing she can imagine down her chest for him to lick off: V-8 juice. Umm, yeah.

FuzzyCo grade: D

I mean, I've seen Wayne's World before. And Erica has seen it a hajllion times. And she quotes it all the time. So it was a kinda special romantic moment for us to watch it together. Awwwww.

Anyway, the old thing holds up pretty good. Editing has, in general, gotten a little faster, so it feels a little slow. And 29 years-old Mike Myers already looked 40 in that wig. But it's still delightfully weird. Alice Cooper's holding forth on the history of Milwaukee drove me into a fit of giggles.

FuzzyCo grade: A

J.R. Jones at the Chicago Reader reviewed Get Smart last week by comparing it (unfavorably) to a French film, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies. The French film sounded interesting and so when our friend P. Brennan said he wanted to see it, we leapt at the chance.

I'm so glad we did!

OSS 117 is a spot-on parody of 1960s spy movies and comedian Jean Dujardin is perfect as the handsome and slightly-dim action hero. It's hilarious from start to finish.

FuzzyCo grade: A

If even just a few people watch Jumper and pick up the books, it'll be worth it, I suppose. As for me, I wish I could get back 74 of those 88 minutes.

FuzzyCo grade: C

It's a shame that these two movies came out so close to each other, because they're both very good, but they're really very different movies and so it'd be sad if someone had not seen one or the other because they'd already seen a movie titled The Something about late 19th century magicians.

The Illusionist, in particular, felt much more like a fairy tale to me -- a story of a prince and a baroness and a poor young man who loved her. Paul Giamatti's police inspector grounds the story in that turn-of-the-century tension between logic and spirituality, but the essence of the story could have been set in any time when love fought against power.

The Prestige, on the other hand, seemed so grounded in a specific time and place that it (SEMI-SPOILER!) really pissed me off when a major plot point was revealed to be pure science-fiction. I did, however, delight in the torturous story-telling of the journal-within-a-journal, and the final reveal was extremely surprising and satisfying.

FuzzyCo grades: A and B, respectively.

I finally watched Shaun's copy of Jackie Brown. It is, in many respects, a very faithful adaptation of the book, which unfortunately meant that I already knew any twists and turns. It's still a great character piece, though.

Those twists and turns form one of my biggest complaints about the movie -- specifically the big "caper" scene at the end of the movie. I really didn't think the caper was all that complicated and didn't need the same-scene-over-and-over treatment to convey the action. It really felt like Tarantino showing off rather than making the best choices for the story or the characters.

FuzzyCo grade: A

This was probably the wrong weekend for me to watch Battle Royale. Usually I don't mind a spot of the old ultra-violence, but perhaps because this movie is supposed to have some sort of societal comment I was paying close attention and trying to derive that meaning, well, I think it frustrated me more than shocked or horrified me. Also, of course, I have to take into account that I'm not really familiar with the Japanese society that Fukasaku would have been commenting on. So I just found the whole thing rather nihilist. As a straight survival-adventure film, it wasn't that bad, albeit gory.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books were, it almost goes without saying, a profound influence on my early comedy-and-science fiction loving years. And the 1982 TV series was awesome, at least to my 12-year-old self. So I went into the 2005 movie with low expectations -- because how could it ever be as wonderful as my memories -- but the movie fell short of even that. Everyone's timing just seems off, and the acting is overall just... blah. Very disappointing.

FuzzyCo grade: C

Amazingly, I managed to avoid learning much of anything about Iron Man before seeing it (even though I had to avoid friend's blogs to do so). And I was trying to keep my expectations in check -- I've been hearing that it's great, but I didn't want to dislike the movie just because it couldn't live up to an inflated standard. If you're the same way and haven't seen it yet, stop reading now, because I'm about to rave!

ZOMFG! Iron Man is awesome! There's enough emotional depth that you don't feel dumb for watching a super-hero movie, and enough action that you don't feel cheated in your super-hero movie. And Robert Downey, Jr. is all sexy and snarky, even in the midst of his redemptive journey. Whee! Squee! Yay!

FuzzyCo grade: A+

Wow. Just... wow. I get bored pretty easy and I'll admit that lately I've been fast-forwarding through parts of tv shows or movies where there's a long, slow sequence and I tell myself, "I get it -- they're having this character stare out the window at the rain so we can tell he's tormented. Noted. Let's move on." Well, No Country for Old Men is chock-full of long, slow sequences and I sat, entranced, the whole time. I'd only not-recommend the movie if you don't like violence, because there's plenty of that.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

I'd never even heard of Vanishing Point until it was referenced in Deathproof (and isn't great that Tarantino is now footnoting his influences right in the movie, rather than making you go and search for them).

The movie is nothing but a car chase -- Kowalski (Barry Newman) is delivering a Dodge Challenger from Denver to San Francisco and when a cop tries to pull him over he just doesn't stop. He just keeps on driving, listening to Super Soul (Cleavon Little -- the black sheriff from Blazing Saddles) on the radio. And meeting up with various freaks along the way. So it's just a car chase, unless it's also a mystical journey into the heart of America. Or something. It was the '70s, man.

I have to say I found the whole film strangely engrossing. Just be careful if you do go looking for it that you don't accidentally end up with the 1997 Fox made-for-tv-movie version. Unless you're really into Viggo Mortensen.

FuzzyCo grade: A

As a commenter suggested on my The Transporter review, I did enjoy Shoot 'Em Up a great deal. The plot is ridiculous, but everyone treats it with such seriousness -- deliberately riding the line of hammy, without ever quite crossing it -- that it carries it along. And the action is right up my alley.

FuzzyCo grade: A

You know, we can talk all day about how lazy and repetitive Will Farrell's frightfully similar characters are. But the problem is that he's funny. Yeah, it makes me mad, too. Except when I'm laughing.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

I went into 21 with a bad attitude -- the movie we'd really wanted to see, Leatherheads, was sold out and Ben Mezrich's last book had soured me on this story already. Of course, I can't really blame Mezrich at all, because the screenwriters have smoothed out any rough edges (or subtlety or nuance) from his book to teen-movie simplicity.

The best thing I can say about the movie is that the Alamo has good beer and a great Puerco Guisada.

FuzzyCo grade: D*

* Erica liked the movie quite a bit, so feel free to chalk this low score up to my bad attitude.

It was interesting how little story or action there actually was in the original Ocean's Eleven. A whole bunch of great actors up there on the screen and none of them really do anything.

FuzzyCo grade: C

Whenever Ultraviolet had talking, it was retarded. Whenever it didn't, it was retardedly awesome.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

I was so impressed with the way The Transporter was sorta-kinda-in-context a realistic over-the-top action movie that The Transporter 2, with its ridiculous drug-dealer with a deadly virus plot, and the terrible, terrible acting from most of cast, seems like a slap in the face. And, and this is the real shame, the fights aren't as good.

FuzzyCo grade: C

I'm on a roll with adaptations of children's books, so I watched The Golden Compass. I know there was some controversy around the movie, but dang if I didn't think it was a gorgeous, rip-rollicking adventure and I thought, even if other fans didn't, that it was very true to the spirit of the books (even if not always the letter).

FuzzyCo grade: A

Given my recent experiences with movie adaptations of childhood classics, I spent most of my time while watching The Chronicles of Narnia - The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe holding my breath, waiting for the brick through the window of my childhood memories. So when I got to the end of the movie and there hadn't been any terrible* desecration of the source material I felt a sort of puzzled relief and realized that I hadn't given myself any chance to actually enjoy the movie. I'm sure the filmmaker had a loftier goal than a begrudging, "well, you didn't f' that up too bad" from his audience, but that's all I've got to give.

FuzzyCo Grade: B-

* It has been a while since I've read the Narnia books, so maybe there's something horrendous that I missed.

P.S. If nothing else, the movie gave us this:

You know what I should be watching in my scant free time? I should be watching season 4 of The Wire so that I can catch up and start watching the current season 5 so I can stop frustrating my co-worker JKB who wants to talk about all the plot twists and turns each week. But, for some reason I got it into my head that I needed to watch Columbo. And, of course, I'm a completist so I started with the first made-for-TV movie (I'm not too crazy, however, so I haven't gone back to the pre-Falk short mystery that became a stage play that became Prescription: Murder.

There's a lot that's dated about this movie, and a certain slowness, but you can already tell why Falk's Columbo is so captivating.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

In the category of ridiculous action movies, The Transporter is top-notch. The fights, especially the several close-work sequences and the rather inventive bus depot scene, are all great. And plot, well it's not Shakespeare, but it doesn't actually go out of its way to insult my intelligence.

FuzzyCo grade: A

One of my favorite fantasy series as a kid was Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising quintology. I re-read the series a few years ago just to check, and indeed it wasn't just the youthful me that enjoyed the books. I think the books may have been my first exposure to a re-imagining of the Arthurian mythos. In any case, they rock.

The Seeker - The Dark is Rising does not rock.

The film isn't bad, as such. It's just pretty blah. Visually it's fine, even well-made. And the acting is pretty strong (though, Christopher Eccleston really doesn't seem to be into his role as the Dark Rider. But he's appropriately creepy as the the cheerful Rider-in-disguise-as-a-friendly-doctor). And I don't mind, as I gather some fans do, that Will Stanton has become an American.

But the story has been stripped of any subtlety, or oddly enough any Arthurian references. And it's not Susan Cooper's fault, writing in 1965, that the "the power of the [y] was split into [x] pieces and hidden" would become a video game cliche, but it has and you think the filmmakers might have de-emphasized that part of the plot. So the whole movie just flies by in a "only you can do it, oh look you did" blur.

FuzzyCo grade: C

There are more reasons to like The Bourne Ultimatum than just that Bill O’Reilly doesn't like it. For example, there's kicking and punching, and a little shooting for good measure.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I'm of two minds about The Host, a 2006 monster movie from Korea. The monster's great--and the movie certainly loves showing it off. No coy reveal of the monster in dark alleys for this movie--you see the whole thing in broad daylight in the first 5 minutes. And the plot is at least slightly different than the usual "monster picking off a small group of people"-type.

But the dialog was totally terrible. I was watching the English-dubbed version and I'm entirely willing to believe that poor translation may have contributed to the awfulness, but even the gist of the dialog was often ridiculous. I think there might be some sort of layered "the effect of the west on our country has been for the worse" thing going on (you know, the way Godzilla is really about nuclear weapons) but it just didn't gel for me.

FuzzyCo grade: C+ (though an A- strictly for creature effects)

I've been well-hyped to see Sunshine for almost a year, so I was surprised that it came and went with so little splash. And I'm doubly-surprised now that I've seen it, because it's a really tight hard sci-fi thriller. Seven astronauts are on a mission to restart the dying sun with a giant bomb, a mission that an earlier team has already failed at. The tension is palpable, the action is exciting, and it's visually fascinating. What's not to like?

FuzzyCo grade: A

I watched a screener of Chasin' Gus' Ghost, a new documentary about jugbands of the '20s and their influence on the '60s folk music explosion and hence on modern rock music. And about modern jugband music. And about current efforts to recognize many of the early performers, often with new grave makers. And it's that sort of "and... and..." that is the film's main weakness -- the filmmaker just found too much cool stuff and tried to cram it all into the doc. As much as I love jugband music, 2 hours might be just a little too much, all at once.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

I think Superbad was even more vulgar than we expected it to be, but was also a lot more sweet and touching than we expected. What an odd combination.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

Cloverfield is awesome!

There have been plenty of monster movies told from the perspective of ordinary people -- most zombie movies are, for example -- but I think this is the first giant-monster movie (or kaiju, as we say in Japan) that follows a group of ordinary New Yorkers as they just try to flee the city. The ubiquity of video cameras these days certainly makes the movie's central conceit plausible -- that is, the entire movie is filmed from the point-of-view of a consumer camera that the protagonists happened to be using to film a going-away party. (There's a funny shot when, moments after the decapitated head of the Statue of Liberty has come bouncing down the street, three or four other people are standing in front of it with digital cameras and camera phones.) The handheld camera and Hud's* voice constantly coming from just behind the camera really create a sense of intimacy that makes the terrifying moments even more frightening.

A lot has been made of the secrecy surrounding this film and the appearance of the monster ("Cloverfield" is, for example, just one in a series of code names the movie has had that just happened to stick). But I don't think are really any Sixth Sense-level spoilers in the film. Not that I'm going to give anything away, but I really think this film is much more about the journey than the destination.

FuzzyCo grade: A

* Chicago comedian T.J. Miller.

P.S. The one reason not to see the movie is if you get nauseous from hand-held camera work. Much of the movie is definitely filmed in shaky-cam and one of our movie-watching crew says he only saw about 10% of the movie, from looking away to avoid puking.

Kate loaned us her Komaneko DVD and it's the cutest. thing. ever.

Komaneko literately means, from what I understand, "frame-by-frame cat" and it's a stop motion animation about a young cat who herself makes stop motion animations. The DVD has several shorts that total about 55 minutes and a making-of feature that's also about an hour. It might tell you how much we loved it that after we watched the shorts we watched the whole making-of feature, even though it's all in Japanese with no subtitles, just to get some more Komaneko.

It looks like the DVD is only available as an imported Region 2 DVD, so get that region-free DVD player cracking!

Juno was delightful. Very real, yet very funny. Or... very funny, yet very real.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I watched Chicago expecting to see a startlingly accurate portrayal of life in 1920s Chicago. I was sorely disappointed.

But for reals I was impressed by the interesting intermingling of somewhat realistic scenes with the "stage" versions of the songs, but I don't think it was 100% successful in every case. (Erica, I think, disagrees because she's still walking around the house singing the songs.)

FuzzyCo grade: B

Erica and I have an irregular, on-going private film festival of what I call, for lack of a more precise term, "teen performance" movies. You know, movies where an individual or team, usually teen-aged, has to overcome obstacles, whether internal or external, to excel at some performance art (occasionally a sport, but usually, for us, dance or roller-skating or cheerleader, etc.). We've been watching these movies for a while, but I'm only just starting to narrow in on why we watch them. There's the performances, of course, and with Erica a choreographer it's research, more or less. The plots of these movies, however, are usually laughable, when they're not downright insulting to the intelligence. I'm starting to wonder that if, in a perverse way, yelling at the terrible plots isn't pleasing to my cantankerous old heart.

Jump In! highlights the bipolar nature of this sort of movie perfectly. The performances (double-dutch jump-roping, in this case) are fairly interesting, if repetitive (and suffer from the problem this sorts of movies often have, where it's hard to really tell the difference between the performance that's supposed to be 'pretty good' and the one that's supposed to be 'incredible'). The acting is respectable. The plot was cheesy, and especially the subtext of "girls are dumb and need a skilled boy to come in and fix their routines and change the name of the team" had Erica cringing. I suppose the messages of "it's OK for girls to box and boys to double-dutch, do what you love" and "be honest with your parents -- they might just understand that you don't want to box any more" are good enough, but the whole "maybe bullies just need to be told that they don't need to be angry anymore" story was just ridiculous to me.

Also note that this was a Disney Channel movie, originally, so there are periodic hard fades to black and it's required (for Team Gerdes, anyway) to shout "commercial break" at the fade.

FuzzyCo grade, for the performances: B, for the plot: D

Look at me getting caught up on PopCulture2007! And Knocked Up is exactly what I was talking about in my Walk Hard review with respect to character-based comedy vs. jokes (and it makes an excellent contrast since there's such an overlap of actors and writer). There are plenty of jokes in Knocked Up, but never at the expense of us really learning about the characters. And I was also surprised to discover how brutally honest the film is about the dynamics of marriage and parenthood.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I'm glad we had just watched Coal Miner's Daughter earlier in the week before we saw Walk Hard--it helped to be familiar with the musical biopic genre before seeing this hardcore skewering of the same. I laughed a lot at the movie, but the jokes are so fast and furious that some of the narrative, and chances for deeper, character-based jokes, are sacrificed. Ultimately, as Erica put it, it's more Scary Movie than Spinal Tap.

(Oh, and there are a few hilarious-but-gratuitous scenes of full frontal nudity (male and female) that prevent me from recommending the movie to friends with kids. Well, and maybe all the drug stuff, too. Yeah, OK, completely unsuitable for kids.)

FuzzyCo grade: B

Enchanted walks a tight rope: trying to make fun of the Disney princess movies while still actually being a Disney princess movie. I think it succeeds and is frightfully adorable. There are plenty of fine performances, but Amy Adams really carries the show with a realistic portrayal of her initially very unrealistic character. We heartily recommend it particularly to all of our friends with princess-obsessed girlchildren, but everyone else as well.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Erica got Coal Miner's Daughter for an early Christmas present and in the course of watching it I realized that I've never actually seen the whole thing--TBS syndrome strikes again. At times it seems to be skipping furiously through Loretta Lynn's life to fit the whole thing into an 125 minute movie, and a huge section of the third act--a long sequence of song performances--seems like more fan service than artful biography, but overall there are enough deft brushstrokes that the sketchiness works--I really do feel like I got the sense of Lynn's life.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

We've started the holiday season, here in Vicksburg -- we went down to the main street holiday-ganza* shopping district today and tonight we watched Bad Santa (technically, the "Badder Santa" edition) tonight. Bad Santa got a lot of backlash when it came out, but I think that was the fault of the marketing. Certainly I remember trailers that seemed to indicate that it was a Christmas version of teen-age potty humor. In fact, it really belongs in the "small-time crooks' lives fall apart because they're small-time crooks" genre, like an Elmore Leonard or Carl Hiaasen novel (or film adaptation thereof). And in that genre, it's hilarious. If anything (has the statute of limitations on spoilers run out on this film yet?) I might have almost been happier if Willy had just died on the steps of the kid's house. FuzzyCo grade: A-.

Not for kids! It's not for kids at all. Cynical adults only, please.

* Not very ganza, I have to report, but we did get one present bought.

I'm sure most people would describe Danny Boyle's 2005 film Millions as "whimsical" or some such. I mean, a cute kid who talks to saints finds a bag full of money and does his best to give it away to "the poor". We kind of got hung up on the dead parent part of the plot, though. Thanks a lot, Danny.

Shaun turned me on to this gritty independent film that purports to be a documentary* following a burglar in Chicago. The documentary form allows for a low budget approach to filming, and it also lets the filmmakers leave a lot of questions unanswered. It is, perhaps, realistic, but if you're used to straightforward narratives, or even to thrillers where every twist and turn is explained by the end of the film, the ending may leave you somewhat unsatisfied.

For the majority of the film the actor playing the thief (who's also the director of the film), Malik Bader, is right in front of the camera. So does he have the chops to carry a film like this? He's certainly a engaging character. He's likable despite his decidedly anti-social profession. There's some over-acting going on, but it might just be the kind of dramatic pretense you could expect from the sort of personality who would allow documentarians to follow him along on burglaries.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

* Evidently, this film has been shown at some film festivals as though it were a straight documentary, with inevitable backlash when the deception is discovered. It's a shame that the filmmakers have let a gimmick like that cloud the reputation of a fine indie film.

There are twelve times as many sheep in New Zealand as people. So if a sheep-breeding experiment on a New Zealand farm went wrong, and the sheep became... hungry, that would be something of a problem, to put it mildly. That's the premise of Black Sheep, a 2007 indie horror/comedy from New Zealand. We've got all the classic elements here: a plucky band of survivors, a hero overcoming his fears, family conflict spilling over into the disaster, a mad scientist, and killer sheep. The special effects are suitably gross for you horror fans (courtesy of WETA Workshop, of Lord of the Rings fame) and the humor is pretty... humorous. FuzzyCo grade: A.

MI:3 opens with a terrifying torture scene. After that, it's just sort of an adequate action movie. And, not to give away too many spoilers on a year old movie, there was only a double-cross where I was expecting at least a triple- or quadruple-cross.

The Ghost Rider comic was never what you'd call high-concept, so I wasn't expecting much from the movie adaptation. But I was disappointed even in my low expectations. There's so little substance to this movie that I spent half my time watching being sad that Nicolas Cage and Sam Elliott are obviously working so hard to try to make their characters half-way believable.

XXX is such a terrible movie. And don't think I'm saying that because I'm some sort of snob who thinks an "extreme-sports star turned secret agent" movie is bound to be bad. I think the idea holds plenty of promise. I just think this is a terrible "extreme-sports star turned secret agent" movie. In fact, I'm kind of mad that the movie squanders both the concept and the talents of Vin Diesel, Samuel L. Jackson, and Asia Argento.

In Erica and my on-going teen-performance film festival, we've seen a lot of bad movies. But High School Musical may be the worst. Now, admittedly, we're definitely not in the target audience for a Disney Channel made-for-tv movie, but even taking that into account it's still pretty terrible.

For a movie based on toys, Transformers (or Transforme, as the marquee at the theater said) is a pretty good movie. I mean, it doesn't really make any sense, but it's funny and actiony and a number of actors have a lot of fun with their roles. I give it an A-, Erica gives it an A+.

Slither is a really good scary monster movie. Amazingly, for a movie of its genre, nobody does anything dumb. (Or at least, nothing dumb that's out of character.) FuzzyCo Grade: A

Erica and I saw this hit documentary about a font tonight. Helvetica is a history of the 50-year-old typeface and its influence on design -- and the documentary ends up as an overview of post-war design in general. It was delightful and fascinating. Even Erica, who is not a designer, thought it was great.

Once was recommended to Erica and she decided to wanted to see it on a date night last week. I took a glance at Rotten Tomatoes and saw that it had gotten 97% on the critics tomatometer. I immediately closed the window -- if a movie is recommended a couple of times, I'd rather see it without any extra information that might color my experience of watching the movie. The next day the Regular Guy on XRT reviewed Once -- I managed to miss the review, but heard the DJs say, "wow, the Regular Guy really liked that movie". Great -- another data point in favor of the movie.

So, with the provisio that you enjoy patient (some might even say slow), intimate movies, I'll add my voice to those saying "go see Once".

If you are the sort who wants more detail before you see a movie, I'll note that this is a sort of a kind of musical -- but no one bursts into song for no reason -- the two main characters ("guy" and "girl") are both musicians and so they burst into song for reason. The guy is played by Glen Hansard of The Frames and the girl is Markéta Irglová, also a musician, and they really wrote all the songs they perform in the movie.

Oh, and I was a little distracted during the first part of the movie, because it was filmed with handheld (digital?) cameras and it looks a lot like a Neutrino Project (with better sound than we ever get).

What's not to like about Over the Hedge? Great voice cast, cute animals, slapstick action, original Ben Folds songs, and a heart-warming message about family. Now I need to check out the comic strip. Team Gerdes score: A.

Hot Fuzz is the same creative team behind Shaun of the Dead applying that same treatment they gave zombie movies (half-reverent, half-mocking) to cop buddy flicks.

The result is both hilarious and exhilarating. Team Gerdes gives it an A+.

We saw Grindhouse at the Brew and View, which I think might have been the perfect place to have the kind of complete experience that Rodriguez and Tarantino were trying to create with this movie. I enjoyed both halves, but I really appreciated the layers that Tarantino brought to Death Proof.

Comedian is one of Erica's favroite movies and I needed a movie tonight that I could listen to more than watch, because I needed to do some computer work. The computer work fell by the wayside as I was drawn into the rhythm of this documentary. I didn't learn as much about the craft as I thought I might, and Orny Adams bugs the hell out of me, but it's still a fascinating movie.

TMNT (2007)

I would have been impressed if this was three episodes of a Saturday morning cartoon, but it just didn't feel like it was worth a movie. Oh, and, hey, movie, we get it. "Family is important." Thanks.

And does the first "T" now stand for Twenty-something? These guys are old. Hmm... they have MySpace pages, maybe they are still teenagers.

(Anything you found amusing in this post, Erica came up with it.)

Batman Begins (2005)

After so many cartoony Batman movies, it was great to have a -- I almost said "realistic", but we are still talking about a guy in a bat suit -- thoughful one. With actual, if brief, character growth. Erica and I agree that there could have been a lot more of Bruce Wayne learning his skills. But overall, quite a good superhero movie.

We had some friends over last night specifically to watch Jackass - Number Two. It was the first time for them, but the 5th and 3rd times, respecively, for Erica and I. Jackass is such a specialized (which is to say, sophomoric) taste that I'm not sure what to say about this other than if you're a Jackass fan already, you'll love it. If you're not, you'll hate it. I could try to persuade you of its worth with lots of handwaving about 'transgressive humor' and so on, and then Steve-O would throw up or somebody would poop or something and you'd be grossed out and I couldn't blame you at all.

I was really suprised that I enjoyed Crank as much as I did. The plot is ridiculous -- hitman Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) has been injected with a poison for which the only cure is his own adrenaline (I'm sure the elevator pitch was "it's just like Speed, only his own body is the bus!"). And I'm sure it would be pretty easy to hate the over-abundance of visual effects. But the action is, as Chev requires, non-stop and I came to sympathize with his likeable assholeishness, just trying to survive this terrible day.

Much has been written about 300, and I almost wish I hadn't read quite so much before I saw it. On a purely guys with swords level, it's pretty awesome.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 - Mitchell

Erica and I got quite a bit done chose-wise yesterday and wanted to veg out with a movie a bit. She'd never seen a full MST and Mitchell is one that has influenced the way my brother and I both talk (the reciprocal movie for Erica and her brother is Wayne's World) and I persuaded her to give it a try. It lags a bit in the second half, but Erica still enjoyed it.

"Word on the street is you're a jerk."

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

This wasn't the most brilliant movie ever, but it was a pleasant lazy Sunday afternoon's entertainment. And Erica and I both loved the way that nonsensical comic phrases were heard and dealt with.

I saw this great zombie short -- Birthday Call -- and so when I read that the filmmakers had expanded it into a feature film and that it was going to be shown on SciFi I immediately Tivoed it. And it sat on the Tivo for six months or so, until I got Toast's Tivo2Go working, and then moved it onto my iPod*.

Hide and Creep is a zombie movie that knows about other zombie movies -- the first scene is a great monologue by a video store clerk categorizing the great zombie movies of the past. And as such, I was a little disappointed. The movie never quite seemed to live up to the grand promise it showed in that beginning. There are some great moments, but overall the movie drags. And the one big addition the movie makes to modern zombie lore is revealed too late in the movie to really have any effect on the plot or the characters. A great first effort, but not a great movie.

* I mention these technical details to a) brag that I got all these crazy systems to work together and b) to be honest about the limitations under which I watch some movies. I'm never going to get the full effect of a great special effect on the iPod screen.

Funny story -- a couple of years of ago I was involved with an improv show that was based around documentaries. Part of our rehearsal process was to watch regular documentaries. Watching all those docs, I half-remembered one I had heard about and got pretty obsessed about finding it. Two months later, I discovered that a VHS copy had been lying on Erica's coffee table the whole time. I converted the VHS to DVD and then... never watched it. All that effort, and I just... eh.

I had told this story to some friends and then a few days later ran into them again. They had just been to a live This American Life taping and the director of the new TAL TV show, Chris Wilcha, mentioned his first big project... The Target Shoots First.

And then I came across the digital files I had made in the process of creating the DVD. I ran them through Instant Handbrake to make a file that could play on my new video iPod. And, over the course of several train rides, I watched it.

In 1992, Christopher Wilcha was hired by the marketing department at Columbia House (the record club people) largely on the basis, it seems, that he was a Nirvana fan and the music industry giant has no idea how to market to the growing alternative music culture. He took a brand new Hi8 camera with him to work and began taping everything. The 200 hours of footage he shot became this 75 minute documentary. It's an inside look at Columbia House, but certainly not an expose. If anything, it's largely about office culture, and Wilcha's struggle to adapt to his new job. It's great, though, and if you can get your hands on a copy, please do.

The Oceans 13 trailer made Erica and I realize we hadn't seen Ocean's Twelve yet. We had both enjoyed Ocean's Eleven, so we figured it was worth a whirl. Ocean's Twelve is a delightful bit of brain candy. Fluff, but nice fluff.

By the time they get to Ocean's Twenty, introducing the characters is going to take most of the movie.

I watched Infernal Affairs and The Departed back-to-back this weekend. If you didn't know, the Scorcese film is a re-make of the 2004 Hong Kong movie about an undercover cop and an undercover mobster. In typical Fuzzy fashion, I've actually had Infernal Affairs lying around for a couple years, but only just got around to watching it. It's a good movie, but The Departed is a great one. Of course, it's also a full hour longer than the earlier film, so there's a lot more room to flesh out aspects of the movie.