Thanks for all the kind remarks. If one of Jesse's future films ever makes it past the minor festival circuit, I'll be providing free tickets for a SOMBIE night out at the movies.

Now on with the countdown...

well, I spoiled myself on jesse's ending at least.

Sounds like a cool movie. Tell him to send it to me for next year.

This is dead-on, I was on board with this is as a potentially great movie for the first two-thirds and then it dragggged way out. Still good and an appropriate ranking for it on this list.

Leggo-By-Eggers










57. Away We Go


Directed By, Sam Mendes


Roger Ebert's 3 1/2-star Review:

Burt and Verona are two characters rarely seen in the movies: thirtysomething, educated, healthy, self-employed, gentle, thoughtful, whimsical, not neurotic and really truly in love. Their great concern is finding the best place and way to raise their child, who is a bun still in the oven. For every character like this I’ve seen in the last 12 months, I’ve seen 20, maybe 30, mass murderers.

Sam Mendes’ “Away We Go” is a film for nice people to see. Nice people also go to “Terminator Salvation,” but it doesn’t make them any nicer. “Away We Go” opened last week in New York and Los Angeles, and now rolls out after lukewarm reviews accusing Verona and Burt of being smug, superior and condescending. These are not sins if you have something to be smug about and much reason to condescend.

Are the supporting characters caricatures or simply a cross-section of the kinds of grotesques we usually meet in movies? I use the term grotesque as Sherwood Anderson does in Winesburg, Ohio: a person who has one characteristic exaggerated beyond all scale with the others.

Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph) live not far from his parents, in an underheated, shabby home with a cardboard-covered window. “We don’t live like grown-ups,” Verona observes. It’s not that they can’t afford a better home, as much that they are stalled in an impoverished student lifestyle. Now that they’re about to become parents, they can’t keep adult life on hold.

“Away We Go” is about an unplanned odyssey they take around North America to visit friends and family, and essentially do some comparison shopping among lifestyles. Her parents are dead, so they begin with his: Gloria (Catherine O’Hara) and Jerry (Jeff Daniels). The parents truly are self-absorbed, and have no wish to wait around to welcome their first grandchild. They’re moving to Antwerp.

Verona is of mixed race, and Gloria asks her conversationally, “Will the baby be black?” Is this insensitive? Why? Parents on both sides of an interracial couple would naturally wonder, and the film’s ability to ask the question is not racist, but matter of fact in a America slowly growing tolerant. In moments like that, the married screenwriters, Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida (both novelists and magazine publishers), reflect a society in which race is no longer the primary defining characteristic.

After the parents vote for Belgium, Burt and Verona head for Phoenix and a visit with her onetime boss Lily (Allison Janney) and her husband Lowell (Jim Gaffigan). Lily is a monster, a daytime alcoholic whose speech is grossly offensive, and her husband and children in shock. They flee to Madison, where Burt’s childhood friend Ellen (Maggie Gyllenhaal) has changed her name to “LN” and become one of those rigid campus feminists who have banned human nature from their rule book.

Then it’s off to Montreal for friends from college, Tom and Munch (Chris Messina and Melanie Lynskey), who are unhappily convinced they’re happy. And next down to Miami and Burt’s brother, whose wife has abandoned her family. There’s not a single example of healthy parenting in the lot of them.

The almost perfect relationship of the unmarried Verona and Burt seems to survive inside a bubble of their own devising, and since they can blow that bubble anywhere, they of course find the perfect home for it, in a scene of uncommon sunniness. They have been described as implausibly ideal, but you know what? So are their authors, Eggers and Vida. They are thirtysomethings. With two children. Novelists and essayists. He publishes McSweeney’s, she edits the Believer.

They are playful but also socially committed. Consider his wonderful project “826 Valencia,” a nonprofit storefront operation in San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Boston and Ann Arbor, Mich. It runs free tutoring and writing workshops for young people from ages 6 to 18. The playful part can be seen in San Francisco, where the front of the ground floor is devoted to a Pirate Store. Yes. With eye patches, parrot’s perches, beard dye, peg legs, planks for walking — all your needs.

I submit that Eggers and Vida are admirable people. If their characters find they are superior to many people, well, maybe they are. “This movie does not like you,” sniffs Tony Scott of the New York Times. Perhaps with good reason.


Ranked Highest By:
n.k.- #4

I can't begin to express how badly I never want to see that movie.

Fuck the haters. I love that movie. Maybe because it was the first movie I saw in the theaters since my son was born (on a date with my wife, no less). But it was funny, enjoyable, and said something about us late-20/early-30-somethings struggling with the idea of being a 'good' parent. Great movie.


Is the title a play on these two:

+ (Dave Eggers)

Typically that's not the kind of remark you level at an individual.

Don't think he was targeting you specifically. The Now Playing thread had quite a bit of hate directed towards his movie. I myself thought it was pretty awful.

the typecast role krasinski has been playing is just really unappealing to me.

Yeah, sorry, I didn't even read your post before I wrote mine. I was just saying that in general. I know there are quite a few people on this board and some of my friends who HATE this movie. Not me though, I loved it.

To be fair, I have an aversion to the indie beard pose, to Kraszinski playing versions of Jim, to Eggers, to the Juno typography style, and especially to Maya Rudolf, so I just meant that movie had a whole slew of red flags for me. Usually the passion of the locals--in this case you--leads me to give a film a shot.

I liked it, and defended it in the now playing thread, but I didn't like it enough to put it on my list. If my list went to 50 it would have found a spot....but not in my top 25.

I thought it was an enjoyable way to spend 90 mins or so, a few funny scenes. Don't really need to see it again ever. An OK film.

Did not really care for Away We Go. I actually thought Krasinski was at his most charming I've seen him in years, but the rest of it drove me up the walls: bad, unrealistic, uninteresting caricatures (to call anyone else in the movie a character is an insult to characterization); bad, uninteresting situations (the utopian house with the adopted rainbow gang singing musical numbers before bed; the sad amateur striptease; the stupid new age woman); and just...well, pretty much everything. And I went in with an open mind - I don't mind David Eggers, I don't mind Sam Mendes, I like Krasinski, I don't mind Rudolph, I don't mind Alexei Murdoch, I like beards, I LOVE Paul Schneider - but in the end the whole was substantially less than the sum of its parts.

I don't normally condone writing off a movie (or album) without actually checking it out. But if you hate all of those things, then you probably wont like this film. It has the indie beard, John is pretty much playing Jim, its written by Eggers, and stars Maya Rudolf. So, yeah. I just don't have aversions to any of those things.

Pretty awesome that if you do a google search for "turbo fags", this thread is in the top three results.

Ink-blots


"What will become of the restless kind
Where do they go when they've done their time
Wearing their hearts out on the line for all to see"



















56. Watchmen


Directed By, Zack Snyder


Roger Ebert's 4 star Review:

After the revelation of “The Dark Knight,” here is “Watchmen,” another bold exercise in the liberation of the superhero movie. It’s a compelling visceral film — sound, images and characters combined into a decidedly odd visual experience that evokes the feel of a graphic novel. It seems charged from within by its power as a fable; we sense it’s not interested in a plot so much as with the dilemma of functioning in a world losing hope.

That world is America in 1985, with Richard Nixon in the White House and many other strange details, although this America occupies a parallel universe in which superheroes and masked warriors operate. The film confronts a paradox that was always there in comic books: The heroes are only human. They can be in only one place at a time (with a possible exception to be noted later). Although a superhero is able to handle one dangerous situation, the world has countless dangerous situations, and the super resources are stretched too thin. Faced with law enforcement anarchy, Nixon has outlawed superhero activity, quite possibly a reasonable action. Now the murder of the enigmatic vigilante the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) has brought the Watchmen together again. Who might be the next to die?

Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), the only one with superpowers in the literal sense, lives outside ordinary time and space, the forces of the universe seeming to coil beneath his skin. Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) is the world’s smartest man. The Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) is a man isolated from life by his mastery of technology. Rorshach (Jackie Earl Haley) is a man who finds meaning in patterns that may only exist in his mind. And Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman) lives with one of the most familiar human challenges, living up to her parents, in this case the original Silk Spectre (Carla Gugino). Dr. Manhattan is both her lover and a distant father figure living in a world of his own.

These characters are garbed in traditional comic book wardrobes — capes, boots, gloves, belts, masks, props, anything to make them one of a kind. Rorshach’s cloth mask, with its endlessly shifting inkblots, is one of the most intriguing superhero masks ever, always in constant motion, like a mood ring of the id. Dr. Manhattan is contained in a towering, muscular, naked blue body; he was affected by one of those obligatory secret experiments gone wild. Never mind the details; what matters is that he possibly exists at a quantum level, at which particles seem exempt from the usual limitations of space and time. If it seems unlikely that quantum materials could assemble into a tangible physical body, not to worry. Everything is made of quantum particles, after all. There’s a lot we don’t know about them, including how they constitute Dr. Manhattan, so the movie is vague about his precise reality. I was going to say Silk Spectre II has no complaints, but actually she does.

The mystery of the Comedian’s death seems associated with a plot to destroy the world. The first step in the plot may be to annihilate the Watchmen, who are All That Stand Between, etc. It is hard to see how anyone would benefit from the utter destruction of the planet, but remember that in 1985 there was a nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union that threatened exactly that. Remember “Better Dead Than Red”? There were indeed cold warriors who preferred to be dead rather than red, reminding me of David Merrick’s statement, “It’s not enough for me to win. My enemies must lose.”

In a cosmic sense it doesn’t really matter who pushed the Comedian through the window. In a cosmic sense, nothing really matters, but best not meditate on that too much. The Watchmen and their special gifts are all the better able to see how powerless they really are, and although all but Dr. Manhattan are human and back the home team, their powers are not limitless. Dr. Manhattan, existing outside time and space, is understandably remote from the fate of our tiny planet, although perhaps he still harbors some old emotions.

Those kinds of quandaries engage all the Watchmen, and are presented in a film experience of often fearsome beauty. It might seem improbable to take seriously a naked blue man, complete with discreet genitalia, but Billy Crudup brings a solemn detachment to Dr. Manhattan that is curiously affecting. Does he remember how it felt to be human? No, but hum a few bars. ... Crudup does the voice and the body language, which is transformed by software into a figure of considerable presence.

“Watchmen” focuses on the contradiction shared by most superheroes: They cannot live ordinary lives but are fated to help mankind. That they do this with trademarked names and appliances goes back to their origins in Greece, where Zeus had his thunderbolts, Hades his three-headed dog, and Hermes his winged feet. Could Zeus run fast? Did Hermes have a dog? No.

That level of symbolism is coiling away beneath all superheroes. What appeals with Batman is his humanity; despite his skills, he is not supernormal. “Watchmen” brings surprising conviction to these characters as flawed and minor gods, with Dr. Manhattan possessing access to godhead on a plane that detaches him from our daily concerns — indeed, from days themselves. In the film’s most spectacular scene, he is exiled to Mars, and in utter isolation reimagines himself as a human, and conjures (or discovers? I’m not sure) an incredible city seemingly made of crystal and mathematical concepts. This is his equivalent to 40 days in the desert, and he returns as a savior.

The film is rich enough to be seen more than once. I plan to see it again, this time on IMAX, and will have more to say about it. I’m not sure I understood all the nuances and implications, but I am sure I had a powerful experience. It’s not as entertaining as “The Dark Knight,” but like the “Matrix” films, LOTR and “The Dark Knight,” it’s going to inspire fevered analysis. I don’t want to see it twice for that reason, however, but mostly just to have the experience again.


Ranked Highest By:

RadioHitchcock- #8

Hated Rudolph on SNL but she won me over in Idiocracy.

Had to post this- too cool.

InkBlots are referncing the graphic novels, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle features "The Watchmen".

Pretty awesome that you're searching for "turbo fags."

Must have been a pretty brief search. XD

Only funny because normally turbo fags search for me.

Implying that Bob Loblaw is a turbo fag in my post, for those who didn't get it.

That dunk is about as solid as they come.

I'm the all time #1 SOMBie!

Pavement 1st Rad

I have no problems with this movie, or this placement. I thought it would be a colossal misfire, and it was pretty damned faithful (Watchmen being one of the very rare times I can bitch about an adaptation, as I almost never read the (comic) book before the film). And my favourite part in the entire Watchmen comic book, is the whole origin of Dr. Manhattan issue, and they didn't blow it in the film, and, really, what more can I ask for?

Also...





Whole slew more here

I don't mean to be over sensitive, but that dunk is just really offensive.

I think I eluded to that earlier.

the watchmen was quality, managed to not bore despite a lengthy run time. great visual style and sound design. much better than 300. would've been even better if they could've found a way to reconcile having so many earnest important lines be delivered by a naked glowing blue man with no eyes. kind of hard to take all his waxing seriously after awhile.

Well I don't think there's any such thing as a defensive dunk, Bob.

I'm sure Shawn Bradley did that once or twice.

The kind of remark you leveled at this individual?

Cry bith.

Sorry PT, this thread has crawled up its own ass. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

War's just based on hate and fear
Stop fighting North and South Korea
You're both basically Chinese...

I have a dream for the Third World: clean water, food and teaching
In every village and every town, a place for anal bleeching











55. Bruno


Directed By, Larry Charles

Memorable Quotes:

Wilhelm Schmidt, Adolf Pittler and Der Fuhrer.

Ron Paul: [later, in the hallway] That guy's queerer than the blazes. He took his clothes off. Let's get goin'. He's queer, he's crazy, he put a hit on me and took his clothes off.
Brüno: [narrating] I couldn't even schtupp RuPaul.

Brüno: Look at the four of us; we are so like the Sex in the City girls!
Donny: Oh no, we aren't either!
Brüno: Which one are you, Donny?
Donny: I ain't any one of them, I'm Donny.
Brüno: That is such a Samantha thing to say!

Brüno: We have chosen your baby to be dressed as a Nazi Officer, pushing a wheelbarrow, with a Jewish baby, into an oven!



Roger Ebert's 3 1/2 star Review:

"Bruno” is a no-holds-barred comedy permitting several holds I had not dreamed of. The needle on my internal Laugh Meter went haywire, bouncing among hilarity, appreciation, shock, admiration, disgust, disbelief and appalled incredulity. Here is a film that is 82 minutes long and doesn’t contain 30 boring seconds. There should be a brief segment at the next Spirit Awards with John Waters conferring the Knighthood of Bad Taste to Sacha Baron Cohen. If he decides to tap Cohen on each shoulder with his sword, I want to have my eyes closed.

To describe Cohen’s character Bruno as flamboyantly gay would be an understatement. He makes Bruce Vilanch seem like Mike Ditka. Bruno is disgraced in his native Austria when he wears a Velcro suit to Fashion Week and sticks to backdrops, curtains and models. It’s slapstick worthy of Jerry Lewis. Then he flies to Los Angeles with Lutz (Gustaf Hammarsten), his loyal worshipper, vowing to become a celebrity.

As in his 2006 hit "Borat," Cohen places his character into situations involving targets who may not be in on the joke, and have never heard of Bruno or, for that matter, Sacha Baron Cohen. Some of the situations may be set up with actors, but most are manifestly the real thing. I include an interview in which Bruno lures Rep. Ron Paul into a hotel room, his appearance on a Dallas TV morning show, the screening of a TV pilot before a focus group, counseling with two Alabama ministers dedicated to “curing” homosexuals and a gay wrestling match before a crowd that is dangerously real.

The setups include an interview with Paula Abdul and originally included one with LaToya Jackson, which was cut because of her brother’s death. That accounts for the running time being three minutes shorter that at the movie’s London opening. I also believe those are real parents at interviews trying to get their babies hired for a proposed film — mothers who say their babies are ready to work with pyrotechnics, dress as Nazis or be strapped to a cross. These moms want their babies to be stars.

One incredible scene involves a darling little black boy who Bruno claims to have adopted in Africa. He appears with this child on “The Richard Bey Show” in Dallas, before a manifestly real, outraged and all-black studio audience. The host is indeed Richard Bey, but I suspect he was in on the gag. I learn that the audience wasn’t.

Certainly it takes sheer nerve for Cohen to walk into some of these situations, knowing he’ll only get one take — if he’s lucky. Bruno plays an allegedly gay-hating straight wrestler in a scene promising gay bashing, and then shows the two men in the cage getting turned on as they grapple. There is also an eerie tension in a scene where Bruno, the gay new hunter, sits around a campfire with macho hunters who are very, very silent.

It is no doubt unfair of Cohen to victimize a perfectly nice man like Ron Paul. Watching Paul politely trying to deal with this weirdo made me reflect that as a fringe candidate, he has probably been subjected to a lot of strange questions on strange TV shows and probably is prepared to sit through almost anything for TV exposure. However, he has made a lot of intolerant comments about homosexuals, so by shouting “queer!” as he stalks out along a hotel corridor, he lost his chance of making amends. Helpful rule: If you find you have been the subject of a TV ambush, the camera is probably still rolling.

The movie is directed by Larry Charles, who in "Borat," Bill Maher’s "Religulous" and his TV series "Curb Your Enthusiasm" has specialized in public embarrassment. Come to think of it, this may explain his outstandingly awful feature film debut, the Bob Dylan vehicle "Masked and Anonymous" (2003). In that one, stars like Jeff Bridges, Penelope Cruz, Angela Bassett, John Goodman, Val Kilmer and Luke Wilson appeared as straight men while Dylan as Jack Fate occasionally deigned to utter brief and enigmatic proverbs. Maybe they were told, ha-ha, they were going to appear in a real movie.


Ranked Highest By:

Johnny Boy- #11

it's not as polarizing as you may think - it's just an average film with a really good premise. but that premise loses gas less than halfway through the film. It did, however, help me appreciate Ricky Gervais more.

I disagree vehemently about Jennifer Garner - if anything this film made me recognize how odd looking she is. Do not understand her appeal at all.

Bruno left no impression on me whatsoever. I forgot it came out last year.

wow - had no idea. I want to say something here but everything I'm thinking of sounds rather suburban condescending for some reason. So I'll just say I'm happy that you're in a good relationship!

I'm sick of Krasinski and hate Rudolph, so I keep checking it out from the library and never watching it...love Sam Mendes, though.

considering that giant thread on Watchmen that film really listed low. Not surprised by how low Bruno listed. I remember liking it a lot in the theater, but haven't tried watching it on video.

i tried re-watching watchmen. was not able to finish it. i liked it in theaters, warts and all. but on dvd, it just dragged. no rhythm, no fluidity, no charm. the direction was strong enough, costumes and production values top notch, but it was totally inert.

...a genius with food additives...













54. Extract


Directed By, Mike Judge



Peter Traver's 3 star review:

Right in time for the economic downturn comes Extract, a smart and potently funny workplace comedy about running a small business just as small businesses get routinely run into the ground. Writer-director Mike Judge switches gears from his 1999 white-collar classic Office Space by sending a little sympathy to the bossman. That'd be Joel Reynold (Jason Bateman) a decent guy to the blue-collar assembly liners who produce his flavor extracts. Everything goes haywire for Joel when an accident blows a testicle off a floor manager (Clifton Collins Jr.). Joel's balls are also in danger of extraction, not just from the insurance company but from Joel's wife, Suzie (Kristen Wiig), who wears sweatpants as a chastity belt. Joel is ripe for something. At first, he thinks it's an affair with Cindy (hottie Mila Kunis), a scam artist posing as a new employee. Joel is so eager to get close to Cindy that he relies on the advice of his stoner bartender pal Dean (Ben Affleck, a goofball delight hiding behind a beard). Dean thinks Joel can feel free to move in on Cindy if Suzie cheats first. So he arranges for Joel to hire a seducer named Brad (Dustin Milligan), a hunk dumb enough to have starred in Judge's last film, the underrated Idiocracy.


Ranked Highest By:

RadioHitchcock- #11

That's how I felt watching it in theaters. It's an infantalized version of a great book made by a child who thinks the violence is really cool and it's, like, totally deep and stuff, but doesn't really understand why it's a masterpiece.

I'm also in the camp of liking Watchmen a lot more in the theater than on video.

Wasn't Clark Griswold a genius with food additives? And a similarly hapless member of the aggro-business community?

ogawa, i think we diverge on our attitudes towards the film, even if we agree on its quality. it could have been much worse, and they tried to be faithful to the tone (to a fault), and most of the plot changes were done well enough. it was the lack of understanding, like you said. the scene in the alleyway with silk spectre and night owl, when they kill the gang members was so wrongheaded, that i got confused. it was unnecessary and undermined the feeling of the story and characters.

Lyrics from Bruno's silly song...

The movie is about food additives...

EDIT: Aw shit. Googled too late.

i am a fan of extract, though. movie has its problems, but i loved the untraditional morality aspect. there were times that i thought judge had lost his touch, but the movie stayed true to his brand of elitist humanism by the end. plus, i laughed a whole lot. cliff collins is great in everything (even sunshine cleaners), but he shone here.

I think the only part of the film that Snyder really got right was the Manhattan chapter. That was the only sequence that felt like Watchmen to me. I agree about the alleyway fight and, like you said, it demonstrates a general misunderstanding of the material, but that sort of confusion is all throughout the film. There's no real vision about who these characters are and what kind of world they live in. There's no cohesive thematic statement being made. Snyder translated the images but not the soul. Like someone once said of a skilled but lifeless piano player, perhaps he'd make a good typist.

I've never been taken with the whole "WOW IT LOOKS JUST LIKE THE COMIC OMGZACKSNYDERVISIONARYGEENIUS SO FAITHFUL!!" I wasn't impressed when Rodriguez did it with Sin City, either. It's a silly and superficial decision akin to placing tracing paper over your favorite comic panels. Yeah, it might look a little like the original drawing but there's something missing. As well, it automatically makes the film more about the process of adaptation (tracing) than about the story and characters and themes, especially when adapting the visuals was clearly the primary consideration. When one looks at the film, the first reaction is "Oh, this looks like a comic" and everything that happens afterward is regarded in that context. It's not Watchmen, it's a film that's trying to look like Watchmen. Alan Moore's Watchmen doesn't look like a comic, it is a comic. Snyder's film needed to embrace its own form. Its failures are the result of a lack of intellectual and creative courage and ingenuity.

It also left the squid out. Which is just the stupidest thing to do.