38 movies in 28 days (February 2009)

My goal is to watch 365 movies in 2009, and so far it’s looking pretty good, at least I am slightly ahead. Here is the list of movies I watched in februar, rated and sometimes commented. I hope you find something to watch…

1. Tunnel rats (****) It is impressive that someone can still manage
   to do a movie on the Vietnam war and find a new twist on it. This movie
   has no famous actors, no heroes, not even a plot to speak of, it just
   shows some guys stuck in a shit hole, trying to stay alive long enough to go home.
2. Flightplan
   (**) Entertaining in an annoying way, but the plot is about as
   believable as god, Santa Claus and the Easter bunny rolled into one.
   This has to be the most complicated plan in the history of crime! OK
   everybody, lets find a woman in Germany that is a jet propulsion expert
   and knows the plane we are going to hijack, push her husband off a
   roof, hope that the woman books a plane flight for the plane you and
   your evil partner happen to work on, and that she brings her daughter
   and her dead husband on the plane with her, plant explosives in the
   dead husbands coffin, then kidnap the daughter without ANYONE seeing
   it, in a cabin, with 400 people and with the mother sleeping right next
   to her. Shove the daughter into a food bin, still without anyone seeing
   it, then take the daughter down into the cargo hold, drug her in some
   way, enough to make her sleep all through the trip, gamble on that the
   mother goes nuts so that she becomes a credible «insano scapegoat» so
   that you can get away with it, gamble on that the crew and captain
   falls for the ruse (and that NO ONE on the plan can verify that her
   daughter was on board), gamble on that the mother doesn’t ACTUALLY goes
   insane and ACTUALLY crashes the plane with you in it, throw some spooky
   Arabs into the mix, gamble that the captain and airline actually goes
   along with the transfer, instead of, as is usually the case, to board
   it with swat teams and not transferring a damn thing, etc etc etc. What
   a mess. «Mommy? Are we there yet?» Jesus!
3. My name is Bruce (**) Waste of time, but at least it made me want to see the Evil dead trilogy again, and perhaps some of the other strange movies starring Bruce Campbell.
4. Sex Drive (***) Funnier than most teen angst cumming of age movies, not as shallow as the 10 previous ones I’ve seen, and with some excellent lines to boot.  Quotes: «Our dicks are huge! You can see them from outer space!» + «I’m just trying to show another human being a little compassion. And my DICK!»  +  «I really can’t stress enough how much you are going to enjoy visiting grandma. I visit grandma two or three times a week, and it is always a pleasure. She is such a delight.»
5. Good dick (****) Strange love.
6. Outlander (***) It is not often one get to use the words aliens and vikings in the same sentence. Normally I wouldn’t touch this movie with a stick, but because of the location (Norway) , I just felt I had to. So there went 2 wasted hours. Bastards.
7. Evil dead (****) Jesus, had forgotten what a b-movie this is. But a classic still. I actually wanted to watch Army of darkness, but I thought it best to refresh my memory and watch the entire trilogy.
8. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (***** or ******) «Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss». It took me the entire movie to understand what it was trying to tell me. It is so understated that I missed it completely. At first I found it soooo boring, nothing happened, even though the premise laid out in this story seemed  absolutely RIPE with opportunities, good ideas that could have grown and bloomed where left in the dirt, unreleased, one after the another, the main character going nowhere, and slow, as if telling the memoir of a life lived seen from the outside. But then I got it. That is exactly the point. To understand this is to understand life itself. Good quotes: «I hope you live a life that you are proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start it all over again.» + «I hope you see things that stop you.» Update, 15 minutes after the movie ended: Oh crap, now I’m crying… :) Oh, and it made me want a sailboat again.
9. Body of lies (***) Let me guess, the CIA is evil and are paying muslims to blow up.  Jup. I think they used about 50 bucks on CGI on this movie, plus another 20 on knee pads for Leonardo DiCaprio’s girly knees
   to protect them for all the ducking behind rocks and goats. I hate car chases, and this on has has a car chase in the middle of a desert. Nuff said. Good quotes: «Those to whom evil is done do evil in return» W.H Auden  + «It is a fallacy that prolonged war will weaken an enemy.»
10. Permanent Vacation (**) I honestly don’t know why this movie was made at all. A few fun quotes brings it up from one star, like: «Shampoo, haircuts, barbers … they are just symptoms of a bankrupt civilization. In a State of Nature we would have none of these things.» + «What the world needs now, is cocks, big cocks. Not just for some, but for everyone» (sung by a stuttering albino). + «It’s always been my fantasy to be rogered simultaneously by two well endowed dwarfs one at each end»
11. Private Valentine – Blonde and dangerous (*) I only saw this to watch Jessica’s boobs jiggle in a mysterious way, but Jessica’s boobs are not in this movie, so there is no reason for any human being on god’s green earth to watch this crap. Quote: «If I wanted reality I would stay home and look at my ass in the mirror. When I go to a movie I want to laugh.»
12. What just happened (**) Another meta movie about making movies. I am sure there are some hollywooders that dig this flick, but for everyone else this is a total waste of time.
13. The Escapist (****) Memo to self, don’t get jail time. Beautiful cinematography! Perhaps a little to similar to Prison Break though, and as soon as the «running around in tunnels» part starts, I’m no longer that interested, I would rather see them out and clear, I would especially to see Frank meet his daughter. Luckily there are flashbacks while they are on the run, without that and the fantastic imagery, I would have rated this lower.
14. Taken (*** or ****) From what I’d read this was going to be very predictable, and so it was.  Unfortunately for me, as a father, with a daughter, this movie plays on all my strings, and I can’t help to «like» it. And by liking it I mean I want to find me some human traffickers and FUCK THEM UP. Hard! Oh, and it has a car chase of course, how original (I hate car chases).
15. Changeling (****) Made me angry. Is it politically incorrect to ask for the reinstatement of the death penalty in Norway? So be it. Good quotes: «Never start a fight. But always finish it.»
16. A good day to be black and sexy (***) I’m neither :)
17. Chris Rock – Kill the messenger (***) Chris Rock live. The first half was really funny, bit I thought it fell through after that.
18. Star wars Episode 5 – The empire strikes back (*****) Quote: «Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.» – Yoda.
19. Milk (**** or *****) The gay rights struggle in the US and San Francisco in the 70’s was surprisingly exiting and violent. What a story! And a must for anyone fighting for a cause, or remotely interested in politics.
20. Thick as Thieves (*) Second movie abortion of the year! I hate Antony Bandera, what a total dweeb! And Morgan Freeman is rising very rapidly on my overrated-actors list. The man has the register of a loaf of bread. The only way to watch this is to FFD through all scenes with Bandera playing loverboy (or talking), and perhaps slitting your wrists a little. That is actually a suggestion from IMDB, where someone wrote that seeing this movie was second on their list «after committing suicide».
21. XIII – The conspiracy (***) 3 hour miniseries that looks a lot like «24».  To long, and very predictable.
22. Big Lebowski (*****) Strange movie to come out of the hands of the Coen brothers? Maybe, but still one of their finest. I must have watched this 10 times now.
23. Choke (***) Mostly messy, sometimes funny.
24. Bad Boy Bubby (******, or actually a *******!) A classic. A fucked up classic, but a classic still. Quotes: «It is the duty of all human beings to think God out of existence.» + «Angel be beautiful. God be a useless cunt.» I’ve been thinking a lot about religion and god lately, and I have decided to flame the son of a bitch as much as possible :) God must go, and all religion to. John Lennon said that.
25. The Popes Toilet (****) Working your ass off to build a shitter before the pope comes to town and then seeing it all go down the drain. Poetic. This must be the first movie I’ve seen from Uruguay.
26. Son of Rambow (*****) Excellent! I thought this was «Stand By Me 2»-ish, so I thought I would drop seeing it, but several people recommended it. Glad they did, this movie is fantastic. It has a great balance between comedy and darkness.
27. Mister Lonely (*****) A Michael Jackson impersonator moves to a commune of other impersonators. What more could one ask for in a movie! Quote: «Life was just to difficult for me. I wasn’t cut out for it.»
28. Tideland (*****) Terry Gilliam, the master of strange and beautiful! NOT a children’s story! Quote: «An untidy house means an untidy person.»
29. The Usual Suspects (****) This movie was a ****** the fist time I saw it, but it kind of loses it’s punch when you know the ending.
30. Clerks (1994) (******) Quotes: » I’m a firm believer in the ruling class, especially because I rule» – Randall (?)
31. Rescue dawn (****) It takes skill to make a good Vietnam movie these days, and what rescues this movie is the mood it manages to create, with its melancholic soundtrack.  If you liked this I also recommend «Little Dieter wants to fly», a documentary about Dieter Dengler, whom this movie is about.
32. Permanent vacation (**) Jim Jarmusch, 1980. «A young slacker wanders New York City searching for some meaning in life and encounters many idiosyncratic characters». In short, no plot, just Jim having an urge (and a camera). I am getting increasingly bored with art school movies. This movie is probably what I would have made in high school had I been a pretentious bastard. This is of course his first feature film, Jim Jarmusch’s first critically acclaimed work came four years later, with Stranger Than Paradise. My favorite movies by this director is Ghost Dog , Night on Earth , Dead Man and Broken flowers (in that older), with Ghost Dog being one of my all time favorites. Oh, and I want to slit the main characters throat 17 minutes into the film just to not hear him say another line.
33. Miller’s Crossing (******)   Quote: -«Look in your heart!» -«What heart.»
34. Good morning Vietnam (*****) Quotes: «Reading from letter: «Captain Hauk sucks the sweat off a dead mans balls»…  -I have no idea what that means sir, but it seems very negative to me.» + «What a country! Heat, humidity, terrorism… Still, it’s better than New York in the summer» + «I’ve covered for you a lot of times because I thought you where crazy. But you’re not crazy, you’re mean. And this is just radio.» + «You’re in more dire need of a blow job than any white man in history»
35. Reservoir Dogs (*****) A classic. It doesn’t have the same editing and dialogue finesse as Pulp Fiction, but it is still my second favorite Tarantino flick (I think).
36. Chicago 10 (****) Interesting form, with a mix of animation and documentary footage. I’ve always had a thing for hippies, and for Abbie Hoffman and the Merry Pranksters especially.
37. Don’t look down (*) A spanish version of the norwegian classic/turkey «Dis»! Fucked dialogue, but lots of sex. Just turn off the sound if you want to keep your sanity.
38. Pulp Fiction (******) Tarantinos finest work, a pure masterpiece, with amazing dialogue. I can’t watch this enough times.

My rating system:

* = total waste of time, stay away
** = if you have absolutely nothing better to to
*** = weeeell, its ok i guess, it has parts worth seeing but don’t expect too much
**** = pretty good! but probably not worth seeing twice
***** = really, really great
****** = a must!