While Watching "Life as We Know It"...

...I couldn't help but feel terrible for Katherine Heigl. You know you're watching a bad, bad movie when you spend the entire film wishing it was Heigl who died at the beginning so we could get more of the luscious (and oh so warm in her few scenes here) Christina Hendricks.

Anyone else saw this movie? Did you enjoy it? When will Heigl stop playing the same damn characters? If you were really bad at something, say acting, would you keep trying?

Style Sunday.

I don't know when's the last time I saw Reese on a movie screen and what the hell is she doing in red carpets everywhere, all I do know is va-va-voom!
Has she ever looked this sexy? Sure, the fantastically layered Jason Wu dress she's wearing might add something to her (belts and ruffles together!) but she looks incredibly fresh.
Whatever she's been doing she should keep it up!


Kylie Minogue is a vision of purity and elegance in this simple David Koma dress. If the Azzaro inspired top and ample skirt suggest Kylie's a good girl, all we have to do is take a peek at her fabulous leopard print shoes to know she means business.

What do you think? Don't you miss good Reese movies? Isn't Kylie looking younger than ever?

Machete **

Director: Robert Rodriguez, Ethan Maniquis
Cast: Danny Trejo, Michelle Rodriguez, Jessica Alba
Jeff Fahey, Steven Seagal, Cheech Marin, Lindsay Lohan
Shea Wigham, Don Johnson, Robert de Niro

For a movie that has Jessica Alba playing a U.S. Immigration officer, Cheech Marin as a gun toting priest and Danny Trejo as a sex symbol, Machete sure is less fun than it promises.
Adapted from the faux trailer that came with 2007's Grindhouse, the film expands the basic premise of "man seeking revenge" and turns it into a full on blood and guts extravaganza with a message.
The film follows Machete (Trejo), a Mexican Federal betrayed by the force and hunted by the evil druglord Torrez (Seagal) who also killed his family.
Years later, while working illegally in the States, he's approached by a mysterious man (Fahey) who blackmails him to have him kill anti-immigration US Senator John McLaughlin (De Niro). He's betrayed once again and realizes that getting payback might get him closer to avenging his family.
If the basic plot is essentially the exploitative premise from the trailer, the film itself is a convoluted mess of cinematic references, more subplots than it can handle and a distasteful social message.
It doesn't take much to realize that the whole idea of this Machete is to make a comment on the preposterous position some American government officials have taken towards immigration.
The film grabs these, mostly Republican, beings and turns them into monsters like Sen. McLaughlin who enjoys shooting "wetbacks", taping it and then getting donations from people who get a kick out of watching this.
Yet for every monster cliché he can get, Rodríguez also delivers a heroic counterpart. Therefore we have She (pronounced Che and played by Rodríguez) a humble young woman who runs a taco stand by day and leads a resistance movement by night.
The idea of her counterrevolutionary methods isn't as out of place as the fact that she is shaped after one of the most controversial figures in history. Throughout the whole movie the director can't help but wink at us letting us know almost everything is referencing something else.
Hence we have Lohan playing a drug addict gone good, Johnson as the kind of corrupt creature he would've been fighting against in Miami Vice and Alba as a police officer who's both capable of beating the crap out of a gang but also has time to strike sexy poses while she showers.
If the idea behind Machete was to pay homage to the B movies that shaped it, Rodríguez seems to have forgotten that these movies were usually happy accidents and never strategically manufactured products.
These movies became legendary because they eventually came to represent something for people; whether it was female liberation, anti war movements or just plain old fashioned anti-establishment agendas, these movies originally were made just for fun.
Yet everything here is winking at something, recurring to cheap stunt casting or trying to preach about immigration.
It's here when the movie gets confusing, because when you try to deliver an important message about society it's risky to say the only people who can get it solved are murderous, vengeance-seeking outlaws. This could result hilarious to people in on the joke but might easily shock those who oppose the ideas the movie's against.
Rodríguez can't have his social message cake and eat it too!
This is why Machete often feels dull as a butter knife even when it pretends to be completely sharp.

"It's a hard world for little things."

The Night of the Hunter is above all a movie about storytelling.
From its opening scene in which we see Lillian Gish narrating a passage from a lullaby as a group of cherub-like children materialize from the stars, we get the overall idea of what the movie will be like.
What few people tell you is that unlike movies where children bedtime stories are filled with princesses, unicorns and happy endings, the one we're told here is marked by murder, tragedy and fear.
Completely Grimm-like (and outstandingly grim) the film follows the twisted Rev. Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) as he sets on destroying two orphans (Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce) whose mother he murdered (was any actress killed by her husband more than Shelley Winters during the 50's?)
The film which was directed by Charles Laughton (he never directed again!) has a pervading mood of melancholy only overshadowed by its perversity.
It's not as if Laughton likes to make his characters suffer he just seems to have too much respect for them to give them an easy way out.
It's also interesting to note that Laughton never had any children of his own, which might explain why he never seems interested in being too reverential and sugarcoating life for the kids who ended up watching this movie.


"John, would you tell me a story?" asks little Pearl (Bruce) to big brother John (Chapin)

The film was shot by DP Stanley Cortez using techniques that give the entire film the quality of a Gustav Doré engraving by way of Dr. Mabuse.
In this way he and Laughton are able to come up with iconic shots that seem to be extracted from either a storybook or a nightmare (the scene where Powell rides under the moonlight as the kids watch him from a barn still gives me goosebumps).
And my favorite shot in the film encompasses this very idea.


Lillian Gish's Ms. Cooper keeps vigil as Powell lures outside her home waiting to attack and take the kids with him.
I love how the lightning reminds you of something nostalgic like Whistler's Mother but then you realize this lady has a huge rifle with her.


I'll be cheating because I didn't go for a single shot, given that I see this series of shots as a single one united by Gish's pose and defined by the way in which they manipulate light.
As Gish waits in the dark one of the kids comes up to her with a candle, perhaps to reveal that the light banishes evil (giving the entire scene yet another rich layer of how Laughton deals with spirituality and faith)


Ms. Cooper tells her to turn the thing off, completely sure that the darkness can only remain such surrounded by darkness, and when she does we realize Powell is gone.
You could say that in this moment Laughton materializes all of our childhood fears and takes them to the level of adulthood where we realize that perhaps fairy tales do not come true.

This post is part of the lovely Nat's Hit Me With Your Best Shot series.

15 Directors.

Mr. Paolo from Brown Okinawa Assault Incident decided to tag me in a meme and seems to have forgotten to tell me about it...
Most of you know I suck at memes because I never know what to say but this one is particularly interesting because lately I've been asked a lot who my favorite filmmakers are. I was going to eventually compile a list and Mr. Paolo just made my job easier by making me do one ASAP.
So without further ado, here are my fifteen favorite directors and my fave movie of theirs.

The Holy Trinity
Elia Kazan (A Streetcar Named Desire)
Francois Truffaut (The 400 Blows)
Federico Fellini (La Strada)

The Rest of the Best
Alfred Hitchcock (Notorious)
Pier Paolo Pasolini (Saló or the 120 Days of Sodom)
Pedro Almodóvar (Volver)
Woody Allen (Annie Hall)
Lars von Trier (Dogville)
Michael Haneke (The White Ribbon)
Catherine Breillat (Brief Crossing)
Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven)
Victor Fleming (Gone With the Wind)
Jane Campion (The Piano)
Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!)
Vincente Minnelli (Meet Me in St. Louis)

Are these who you expected? Any omission you think I made? Who are your fave fifteen?

The Wicked Witch of the North (Shore).

"I'm a pain in your rectum
I'm that bitch y'all slept on
Heavy hitter, rhyme splitter, call me Re-Run
Hey, hey, hey, I'm what's happenin'"
- Missy Elliot

Few films capture the horrors of being a teenager in the way Mean Girls does. This first-class satire directed by Mark Waters and written by, Academy Award nomination-robbed, Tina Fey (adapted from a book by Rosalind Wiseman) is a hilarious (in a laugh to keep from crying sort of way) that deals with the lives of a group of teenagers and their interaction with "the plastics": the popular girls everyone hates and loves.
The Queen of them all is Regina George (Rachel McAdams) a girl so hateful that when we first meet here we learn that "evil takes a human form in Regina George."
This gives path to my favorite shot in the film.
Highlighted by Missy Elliot's addictive "Pass That Dutch" we see a blond queen being carried by her faithful slaves.


All of them seem to be honored that they get to be used as Regina's means of transportation. Like a perverse Cleopatra she relishes this moment and makes her subjects know she knows how much they love her for being her slaves.
She smiles at them filled with satisfaction (never disbelief) and we understand that her every wish is fulfilled by them.
However her glow comes with a warning, "don't be fooled cause she may seem like your typical, selfish , backstabbing slut-faced ho bag but in reality she's so much more than that."
And she is, as the plot moves forward Regina makes it clear that her reign will be over when she wants it to be over.
Later in the film we get a bookend to this first glimpse of Regina's glory. After wreaking havoc in her high school and in the process destroying her kingdom she watches the scene with the same sly smile we saw before on her face.


As people around her insult and hit each other she just stands there completely untouchable. It might be because the others are so concerned that they haven't even noticed she's there but we know that to Regina this actually means her subjects are still so terrified and respectful that they would never approach her like they would an ordinary being.
The camera in this shot pulls back and we see that Regina stands above some stairs like a wicked Madonna from a Renaissance tableaux.
Regina's always on top, even when she's not.

This post is part of the "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" series, hosted by the very fetch Nathaniel of The Film Experience.

Eat Pray Love ***

Director: Ryan Murphy
Cast: Julia Roberts
Javier Bardem, James Franco, Richard Jenkins, Viola Davis
Billy Crudup, Hadi Subiyanto, Tuva Novotny, Mike O'Malley
Luca Argentero, Rushita Singh, David Lyons

How do you sell a movie about a woman who leaves her husband to find herself, while traveling to some of the most exotic locales on the planet? You get Julia Roberts to play her.
It makes no difference that Eat Pray Love is based on the autobiographical novel written by Elizabeth Gilbert, the truth is that perhaps there would've been no way to bring this movie to the screen without making it feel like a "whine fest" if it wasn't because Roberts turns it into a Julia Roberts movie.
Not to pay any disservice to Gilbert, since apparently those who love her book think it gets to be spiritual and transcendental, but the thing is that watching Julia on a movie screen immediately takes you to a place where movie stars still are gods of sorts and mortals can still drool over them.
This helps the movie because it helps make Gilbert approachable, given that we rarely think of her as an actual "normal" person, she's pretty much Julia Roberts' version of Gilbert.
This makes it easy to like Julia because it wouldn't really be easy to like Liz.
When the film begins she decides to leave her husband (Crudup) after figuring out she doesn't love him. She begins an affair with a young actor (Franco) who she doesn't love either and then decides it's time to travel the world and find her balance.
She begins her journey in Italy where she eats, then goes to India where she prays and culminates it in Bali where she loves (Bardem plays Felipe her Brazilian love interest).
Director Murphy (who also wrote the screenplay with Alice Salt) seems to have no real intention to make anything in the movie subtle.
Besides the obvious explanation of the title, he spends trying to digest everything for the audience. Along with director of photography Robert Richardson he tries to make everything seem like what we'd expect it to be.
Therefore the entire movie is bathed in a golden light that makes everything seem nice but doesn't really allow elements to breathe. Richardson who is an extraordinary DP, here seems restricted by the homogeneous look Murphy tries to impose on everything.
The same can be said about the editing, which more often than not seems overcompensating. The scenes where Liz eats are usually cut with such quickness that they make her bites seem car commercials, it's as if Murphy is too worried we would get too envious about the foods and chose not to show them too much and there's a particularly obnoxious scene where a woman's fashion success is celebrated by an entire crowd of football fans.
It's fortunate then that while Murphy digests for us, Julia gets to do the actual savoring. Her performance might not be a reinvention of modern acting but the actress shows glimpses of a maturity that she has experimented with very few times in her career.
Not only does she look more radiant and beautiful than ever but she also manages to infuse Liz with a certain sense of earthiness despite the whole "she's Julia" issue.
Even when the movie succumbs to cliché Julia takes it to a completely different place. For example it doesn't take long to assume Gilbert was a fan of Sex and the City given the way she narrates and tries too hard to deliver Carrie Bradshaw-isms, but Roberts takes these comments with a pinch of salt and instead of turning them into puns or teabag advice she confronts them and even make us wonder if Gilbert wasn't actually consciously creating a marketable product while trying to be spiritual (think Paulo Coelho minus the ominous hocus pocus).
After all this is a woman who literally had to begin from zero after an ugly divorce. It would make sense, and give her some humanity, to think that she was finding ways to make money after her trip was over.
Eat Pray Love rarely gives us a glimpse of the Julia Roberts laughter, you know that big, loud roar that's impossible to ignore, instead we get more of her soulful smile this time around.
Perhaps the screenplay doesn't really try hard to see what's behind Liz, her motivations rarely move past the "find myself" stereotype but Julia detected this and tries to explore it without acquiring methodical tics.
Instead of approaching Liz like a vessel waiting to be invaded, Roberts gets near her and tries to empathize, which is why it's evident that nobody else would've been able to play this woman and not make her seem selfish and to an extent an anti-heroine.
Because for all its soul searching and mumbo jumbo, Eat Pray Love is still very much about an American woman using the world to expiate her sins but without the selfawareness to make it a satire.
Because it has Roberts though it gains a heart, one that is broken on several occassions (mostly by herself) and because of this we leave the movie, not feeling patronized or offended but actually questioning what we just saw.
If people like Gilbert get to travel the world and still come up empty handed, what hope is there for the people who only get to travel from movie to movie looking for answers to their existential questions.
Murphy doesn't seem to know that his glossy travelogue might seem shallow but Julia does and with a comforting smile lets us know that however deep we sink in our own tragedies, almost everyone knows that a spoonful of gelato makes the world seem perfect even for at least a second.