mike | 6 Dec 2011 | 335 Views | 2 Likes | 0 Dislikes

The DVD/Blu Ray Shed: December 6th

Inspired by a spectacularly annoying lactation consultant who berated my just-out-of-labour wife and I with a series of haranguing rhetorical questions (whose argumentative efficiency I would later come to admire), I've decided to ask a stupid question in each of my little reviews this week. Enjoy! It's annoying as hell!

The Hangover II
Dir. Todd Phillips

Look, if you were a comic actor - an Ed Helms, for example, or a Bradley Cooper - or a stand-up making his way into the movie world - a Zach Galifianakis, if you would - and if, on one or another of your kicks at the comedic film can you absolutely destroyed it, crushed it, sent the can screaming into fiery orbit where it eventually smashed directly into planet money setting all kinds of records for Most Surprising Money Smasher Ever and somebody offered you a) the chance to kick the can again and b) a percentage of the total amount of money smashed out the second time around rather than a flat can-kicking fee would you, and here is the question, change your shoes?

Would you eat a different breakfast?

Kick with your other foot?

F**k no you wouldn't. You would do the exact same thing again hoping that you could kick the same god damned money planet in half this time, so that you would never feel compelled to work or even get out of bed ever again. That, unfortunately, is the reason that The Hangover II is an incredibly crappy movie - it's a sh*tty copy of a movie that was clever and surprising enough to capture a summer comedy audience's attention. The sequel is a mimeograph on turd paper, and everybody involved made an absolute fortune. They can make even more if you buy the BluRay! So make your moral, artistic decision wisely, can fan.

Cowboys & Aliens
Dir. Jon Favreau

Look, if you had the rights to a bit of source material - a graphic novel called "Cowboys & Aliens", for example - a piece of material if not precisely in the "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" or "Lincoln: Zombie Hunter" wacky genre-crossover realm than certainly near it, and you had the pull and the money to basically cast anyone you wanted to, and make any kind of movie you'd like, would you - and here is the question - make a deadly serious joke-free and somewhat dour take on what's probably the single fun-but-dumbest idea for a summer blockbuster ever? Well, that's what the people behind Cowboys & Aliens did, and that combined with some truly poor performances is the reason this movie made less money than The Smurfs did on opening day. It's not very good.

The Help
Dir. Tate Taylor

Is it possible to make a movie about a white woman helping black people to overcome their problems - with all of the necessary stereotyping, story-flattening and corner cutting that must happen to tell a complete if compact narrative in under 120 minutes - without making a movie that makes some white people feel guilty about theoretically enjoying a movie about white people being brave and helping black people?

I have no idea. I enjoyed both The Help and The Blind Side and was troubled in an almost inexplicable way by both, feeling that I was participating in some great big cultural shaking-off of guilt. As if by identifying with good looking on screen people (an identification that flatters me) who are brave (flattering) and stand up for their black friends (flattering) even though it's difficult and a sacrifice as(flattering) and all this (flattery), in the end, is transformed into absolution, into forgiveness for being a part of a system whose inherent racism has helped me for my entire life while hindering others. These movies are well made and entertaining, but it's like there's a big white face in Al Jolson make-up on a screen just behind the one The Help played on whispering to me about how nice and brave and absolutely not racist I am.

Stieg Larsson's Dragon Tattoo Trilogy
Dirs. Niels Arden Oplev, Daniel Alfredson

Can Rooney Mara out-"Girl" Noomi Rapace, the first actress to play heroine Lisbeth Salander? David Fincher's American version of Stieg Larsson's astoundingly popular Swedish crime series is coming out in a couple weeks, and the just-in-time release of this BluRay box-set of the three original Swedish films gives us a performance from Rapace that's going to be hard to top. At this point you, statistically, have either read the books or have seen the movies or both, so I'm not sure what else there is for me to say. It's like reviewing air at this point.

Portlandia

Can I review something I haven't seen? Not really... and so while I haven't actually seen any episodes of Portlandia, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein's microbudget sketch series for the American Independent Film Channel (mostly because if it did run here it was on Bravo or TeleHistory or FrancoCommunityTV or something and I didn't know when it was on), I have watched this clip about a thousand times, though, and it rules.

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