Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters – Like revenge, Mishima might be a dish best served cold. I had no clue what it was and it surprised the hell out of me with it’s tight storytelling, confident direction by Paul Schrader, and incredible score by Philip Glass. Might be one of the better biopics I’ve had a chance to see.

Klute – I’m a big fan of Alan J. Pakula’s work in the 70s but Klute had continued to evade me. I popped it on one rainy Saturday and was engaged completely. Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda are pretty great and while the central mystery is pretty clearly solved halfway through, I was still engaged with the two characters. Also, it’s another example of Gordon Willis being one of the best cinematographers.

Pin- Holy fuck, this movie is ridiculous! Unfortunately, this truly is one where the less said, the better. But my god Pin is absolutely the type of movie that demands at least a few (if not, many) drinks to go along with it. A psychological horror film with a nice dark sense of humor, Ana put it perfectly when she called it “a really awesome, long  ‘Are You Afraid of the Dark’ episode.’”

Dreamscape- This one is not so great. Dennis Quaid has psychic abilities and is commissioned by the government to start going into people’s dreams and helping them battle their demons. There’s not much conflict in the film at all until the final showdown which involves a trolley car, the President and a giant snake-man. It also gets a little uncomfortable when Quaid pretty much mind-rapes Kate Capshaw. Worth it only for some vintage Quaid action.

Bed and Board- Yet another installment in the life of Antoine Doinel. Doinel is the character Jean Pierre-Leaud played for most of his life in the films of Francois Truffaut. Bed and Board has Doinel married and attempting to get by in life by selling carnations. Marital issues bubble to the surface when a young Japanese co-ed takes a liking to him. A stronger and more satisfying effort than its predecessor “Stolen Kisses.”

Consenting Adults- Okay, this is where shit gets weird. Also directed by Pakula, this 90s Hitchcockian thriller fails at almost every turn. Kevin Kline and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (one of my early childhood crushes) play a jingle-composer/producer couple who become fast friends with their new neighbors Kevin Spacey and Rebecca Miller. They have dinners, sing, box, ride bikes, go to clubs together, hit each other with their cars and commit insurance fraud, just like all friends. Mind you, this is all in the first 30 minutes. Spacey wants to screw Kline’s wife and vice versa so Spacey hatches a plan so they can both switch beds in the middle of the night and do the deed. They do so but things go horribly wrong when Kline shows up at their house the next day and finds Rebecca Miller bludgeoned with a baseball bat and Spacey screaming that Kline killed her. Shit goes sour and Kline is in jail. Now he’s determined to clear his name and win his family back. Oh and Kevin Spacey has an Uzi at one point. Not a good movie but almost worth it just because I was amazed at how ridiculous it got.

Wednesday: Got out of work early and headed to the grocery store to grab the necessities for my dishes I would bring to Kristi’s for the big meal. Best buys: bottle of Chimay Grande Reserve and some cheap white zin. I had a date with the white zin later on that night as I watched “John & Mary” and “Nights & Weekends.” Really enjoyed both of them even though the first ten minutes of “Nights and Weekends” almost made me turn it off.

Thursday: Headed over to Kristi’s with all of my ingredients and got cooking. Bowie, Kristi’s french bulldog, and I were hard at work in the kitchen making stuffed mushrooms as an appetizer and some potatoes in the stove (mom’s recipe). A few walks, a couple of treats and several beers later, Kristi got to the apartment and she started working on the bird. Some more beer and a bottle of wine later, we were finishing up the meal as Davis, Maddie, and Makda showed up for dinner. Kristi brined the turkey for 24 hours and it was the most succulent, delicious turkey I’ve personally tasted. The night ended after a viewing of “Swingers” which was a timely precursor for events to come.

Friday: Woke up early and decided it was the perfect day for a good old fashioned theater hop. Hit up the AMC Burbank 16 for the first screening of “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” Some lady flipped shit for the new “Alvin and the Chipmunks” sequel (I’ll be goddamned if I actually refer to it as a “squeakquel”). Personally loved the movie, thought it was Anderson’s strongest film since “Royal Tenenbaums” and the animation was just so damn endearing. I’m sure it will be in my top ten at the end of the year. One that won’t be however is “Ninja Assassin,” the next film on my hop. It just bored me to tears. In a ninja movie, I want some kickass fight scenes. Unfortunately, James McTeigue decided to shoot everything in extreme close up so I was robbed of what I wanted. Oh yeah and there’s so much ridiculous CGI bloodshed, it made “Kill Bill” look like a documentary. Finally, I went bleak and ended things with John Hillcoat’s adaptation of “The Road.” It’s a fine film with solid acting and directing but I wasn’t really drawn in, having read the book a couple of years ago. It just felt like an unnecessary movie to me. Might have been different if I hadn’t read the novel. Went over to Kristi’s to help clean up the massive mess I made in the kitchen. Day old turkey carcass is not a fun thing to deal with.

Saturday:This is where the weekend made a hard left turn into awesome. After a day of stuff I can’t remember, met up at Kristi’s and she, myself and Makda embarked on our journey to Las Vegas. Fast forward three and a half hours, we were checking into our room at the Luxor, home to Criss Angel and Carrot Top. After a quick meal at T&T’s (Tacos and Tequila, supposedly “great American food”), we got changed and headed for the Palms to see Paul Oakenfold. We waited at a bar for the Vegas Family to meet us there. Luckily, a KISS concert had just let out so there were plenty of leather-clad elderly folks with faces painted to keep us entertained.

Sidenote: The Vegas Family are a group of kids around my age that Kristi had met months before in Vegas. They know everyone. And they party hard.

After the Family talked to the doorman, we made it inside the club, free of charge. Walking into the club was quite the experience. After entering through a red-lit mirrored hallway, we emerged into the club which had intense lighting rigs (that shot fire, fog and foam snow out), trapeze artists and robot dancers. Oakenfold wasn’t on yet so we decided to try a little something. Kristi went up to the doorman for Ghostbar, the bar on the roof of the Palms. This is how it went down.
Kristi: Oh, what’s this?
Doorman: The entrance to Ghostbar. Its the bar up on the roof.
Kristi: Oh, really? Can we go?
Doorman: Uh, are you on the guest list?
Kristi: Hmm, we’re on someone’s guest list, I can’t really remember.
Doorman: Is it just you guys?
Kristi: Yup.
(Doorman looks around)
Doorman: Okay come on in.
In short, Kristi is a magician. So up we go to the 55th floor, again free of charge. The view was epic and the shitty shot above taken with my iPhone does not capture the beauty, wonder and gaudiness that the strip provided. After a few minutes up top, we headed back down to the club to enjoy the sounds of Paul Oakenfold. Right before the show started, it turned into the Flauston Paradise with platinum wigged stewardesses on the tv screens and a whole mess of Leeloos dancing around the club. Oakenfold brought it hard and I emerged three hours later a new man. A little house party and a taxi ride later, I returned to the Luxor in the morning sun to get a few hours sleep before we checked out.

Sunday: Thanks to Thanksgiving traffic, it took eight hours to get back to L.A. It was a long trip but it was definitely worth it.

*This post may seem like I’m bragging but awesome shit happened, so it seemed necessary. If something cool happened to you, I hope you would brag about it.

Time For Miracles

Adam Lambert | MySpace Video

It’s been a week and a half since my last entry. This is what happens. I always start it but never continue cause I get bored or reruns of “Iron Chef America” are on.

I’m a huge film soundtrack geek. Witnessing the perfect combination of the right piece of music set to a scene is one of life’s greatest pleasures, to me. Every year, I latch onto a soundtrack that not only makes me think of the film it belongs to but one that can exist on its own. I certainly have my favorites that I usually latch onto such as the work of Jon Brion or Mark Mothersbaugh. Brion’s work on “Synecdoche, New York” is an album I often put on when I need to get some work done. While I enjoy a good needledrop soundtrack as much as the next guy (that award goes to “Adventureland” for this year thus far), it’s original compositions that really get me pumped.
Today, the soundtrack for Spike Jonze’s “Where The Wild Things Are” hit store shelves and imeem.com has an embed player that allows you to listen to the whole thing for free. So guess what I’ve been doing at work all day. Karen O. along with a whole mess of folks from the indie music world created a fantastic, fun and uplifting set of songs. This is one that I’m going to be listening to for a while. If the track “Lost Fur” is any indication, I’m also going to have to pick up the film score album coming out later on this year by frequent Jonze collaborator Carter Burwell. “Where The Wild Things Are” might be hipster catnip but I’ll be damned if I’m not completely taken with it already.

Now, let’s get down to business, dear reader. So I have a blog. And I work for a film company. I sense a tension within, cause everything inside of me is telling me not to do this, but what the hell! “Mystery Team” is a very funny film and deserves to be seen by more people. Good comedy deserves to be rewarded, don’t you think? So here’s what you can do. Click on the widget I’m going to install below and demand that Mystery Team comes to your city. Your one vote just might possibly change the fate of this film forever. So give it a try. For me, at least? Thanks! I promise I’ll have something of substance tomorrow.

While surfing the internet, I stumbled across an amazing find on CHUD.com. Devin Faraci, fantastic film writer and man about town, visited the L.A. Museum of Natural History this weekend and saw dinosaurs. Not fossils and models, but some living dinosaurs (or, at least, the closest we’ll ever get to seeing them). On the weekends, the Museum has two puppeteers walking around in dinosaur suits and terrorizing small children.

I’m mainly writing this to make you jealous cause I’m going this weekend and I’m gonna hang out with some of nature’s finest creatures. I hope I’m allowed to bring in some NERF guns to hunt the dinosaurs around the museum. “Clever girl.”

Expect lots of pictures.

As usual, the animated film won out, with “Cloudy” pulling in just a bit north of $30 million. It should keep playing well because for the next month, there’s pretty much zilch in terms of quality family-friendly entertainment. Soderbergh’s latest pulled in about $10.5 million and will hopefully be carried by good word of mouth. Who can resist a pudgy Matt Damon? I know I can’t! The Eckhart/Aniston weepy “Love Happens” (which is in the running for most indifferent title of the year, competing with this fall’s “Everything’s Fine”) opened with almost $8.5 million, but the per-screen average shows that the film is playing well on its lesser number of screens. “Jennifer’s Body” is almost as dead as Megan Fox’s soul. It opened with $6.8. Clearly the film didn’t connect with the Horror audience nor did it pull in the Fox fanboys. Fox is something of a lightning rod as of late with her strange and annoying pull-quotes from interviews, maybe the Fox backlash has begun.

Other than that, Madea dropped but kept doing bad all by herself at number two. “9″ lost most of its crowd to “Cloudy,” coming in at number 6. “Basterds” (7) came in seventh but this weekend brought the film to a total of nearly $110 million, making it Tarantino’s highest grossing film (“Pulp Fiction” had $107). “All About Steve,” (8) which is probably what the government now uses instead of waterboarding, isn’t dying fast enough. “Sorority Row” (9) flopped, despite a shotgun-wielding Princess Leia and “The Final Destination” (10) is wrapping things up before another inanely titled “Final Destination” film goes into production.

1. Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs      $30,100,000

2. The Informant!                                            $10,545,000

3. Tyler Perry’s New Thing                           $10,060,000

4. Love Happens                                              $8,456,000

5. Jennifer’s Body                                            $6,800,000

I had three paragraphs of set up here but no one really needs any of that. For this film, one sentence is enough: Megan Fox is hot and eats boys. Sold? No? It’s from Karyn Kusama, the director of “Aeon Flux.” Still not doing it for you? It’s from Diablo Cody, who won an Oscar for writing “Juno.” Oh, you’re suffering from the “Juno” backlash still? Me too.

I think Cody is a fine enough writer who clearly loves films and pop culture. While the first ten minutes of “Juno” are tough for me to stomach, overall, I like the film and the actors are able to make Cody’s dialogue work. In “Jennifer’s Body,” Megan Fox is loaded with the largest amount of “Cody-isms,” and while it can be seen as a character tic for Jennifer, it’s pretty painful at points. Amanda Seyfried is able to hold her own well as wallflower best friend Needy as is Johnny Simmons as Needy’s indie-tastic boyfriend (we know this cause he wears vests over his t-shirts). True hero points, however, go to Adam Brody as a Brandon Flowers facsimile and J.K. Simmons as a hook-handed, curly headed teacher. The two of them are able to truly bring the film to life and fill it with a rich comedic energy.

Kusama is clearly a competent director yet her handle on the scarier scenes is not quite adept, telegraphing jump scares from a mile away. I can appreciate what Cody was trying to write with this film which is flipping the horror genre on its ear by making innocent boys the victims for once. I felt bad for the guys though because they weren’t just shells but pretty well drawn characters that you start to have feelings for before Jennifer exercises her social power and sexuality by seducing them and ripping their guts out.

There’s plenty of blood and black bile but not enough to bring the inner gorehound out. There’s a couple of chuckles but nothing close to a belly laugh. There’s one genuinely creepy moment in the entire film’s run time and that’s cause Fox kinda scares me to begin with. Overall, “Jennifer’s Body” is harmless and not that exciting but certainly more worth your time than “Sorority Row” or the upcoming “Saw VI.” Even though it doesn’t work quite as well as everyone involved would hope, “Jennifer’s Body” was at least trying.

4/10

The points I’d add on for Bill Fagerbakke and Amy Sedaris cameos are negated because of three blatant “Evil Dead” references in one shot. The poster on Needy’s wall, the shirt Jennifer’s wearing and Needy pointing out that Jennifer is wearing her “Evil Dead” shirt. I get it Cody, you like your Raimi.