I think it’s entirely appropriate that I use monoglot to discuss words that do not otherwise appear in the universe. Vunglozz is just one of those words. I want this to eventually become your one-stop-shopping experience for all your vunglozz needs. I will provide links to all vunglozz materials in the history of everything.
Do you have interesting vunglozz facts? Please provide them! Thanks!
Maybe you have questions about vunglozz? I can help!
This is no great shakes, but it was better than I thought it would be. I found the salty dialog amusing for the most part. In general I like the kvetching Kevin Spacey module, featured here, better than the subdued Kevin Spacey, featured in Pay It Forward or The Shipping News. I think Judy Davis, who must have the record for the Australian in the most Woody Allen movies (four by my count), is awesome, and I’m probably likely to think more favorably of movies she is in. I sort of even liked Naked Lunch.
This is primarily a vehicle for Denis Leary to be Denis Leary, and a little definitely goes a long way with him. 93 minutes of him is about 84 minutes too much. What’s with the Mrs. Robinson pose on the DVD box?
And what’s with the weird upbeat ending? These people hate each other, and should continue to into infinity. Supposedly this originally ended much more appropriately, with Leary getting caught and going to prison, but test audiences hated it. Morality is a harsh mistress.
It seems like I’ve seen a lot of movies lately about crime bringing people together. Maybe all movies involving crime do that to some extent. Any outliers?
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What does it take for me to like Theodore Dreiser, born exactly 100 years before me and similarly full of frustratingly unfulfilled potential? Apparently, it takes Woody Allen to film An American Tragedy filtered through the triplequadruple-action lenscharcoal of Chekhov, George Stevens, Patricia Highsmith and Dostoevsky. And yeah, there’s probably some Bergman in there too, this being one of Allen’s more seriouser endeavors.
There’s also a lot of Crimes and Misdemeanors involved, which I like and recently resaw. Crimes is regarded as Allen’s masterwork by people who aren’t me (how can you top Annie Hall?). But I feel like this movie has just as much to say about transgression as C&M, with very little of the to-my-ears repetitive and fluffy rumination. It also takes a different tack to the problem of sin in an amoral world. The power that be is not God or legally-blind rabbi Sam Waterston’s nebulous higher power — is God nebulous because he’s blurry? — but dumb luck.
I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers’ one-note, callow fancy-lad characters in movies like Velvet Goldmine, The Governess, and Titus (and did you know he just played Elvis on TV?!?), but he’s got an edge and a depth to him — a depthy edge — here that really works. I cannot speak to his work in Bend It Like Beckham but I believe Jessica disliked MP primarily because of the BILB connection.
Jessica hates BILB. Someone is going to have to unbend it, and I’m afraid it might be me.
Scarlett Johansson’s role is a little different for her as a down-on-her-luck actress who temporarily makes good. It was a little hard to buy her character change toward the end of the film, but I appreciated the depthy edge she was trying for.
Did you ever think you’d live to see Woody Allen embracing CGI? By my count, this makes the third movie of his (following Everyone Says I Love You and Deconstructing Harry) that features critical scenes augmented with computer graphics. It kind of makes you wonder what Zelig would be like if he made it today.
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This placemat commemorates our journey to the Mastoris Diner in historic Bordentown, New Jersey to celebrate Jon’s swinging bachelor party.
Click to embiggen us all.
Here’s something I apparently wrote 19 years ago, courtesy of my very pregnant sister Sarah.
One can only imagine that similar items from my past will trickle into the public realm for many years, and probably continue after my death, just like it went down with L. Ron 2Pac.
Will someone please forward this to the Swedish Academy? My Nobel for Literature is in the freakin’ bag!
Another movie everybody has seen but me. Even though it was directed by Jim Henson, I was surprised by the number of puppets involved. I was overwhelmed by them: I think even more than in the all-puppets-all-the-time The Dark Crystal, but I haven’t seen that since it was in the theaters and I was 11, so my puppet tolerance may well have decreased in the intervening years.
Jennifer Connolly is very young here, and her accent is strangely British, which I suppose has to do with the movie being shot in the UK when she was at a linguistically impressionable age.
Labyrinth was mostly written by Monty Python’s Terry Jones and in retrospect you can see his handiwork. Certainly the interest in quests and fairies and dwarves, et al. The film has its absurdist and amusing bits, but it’s not really Python-quality in most places. At the same time, I think I understand the nostalgia that a lot of people have for this film, down to the not-half-bad musical extravaganzas such as “Dance Magic Dance,” although I will complain about the difficulty inherent in parsing the song’s title. Is he commanding the magic to dance? Is he suggesting that the dance magic should dance? Maybe the dance should do the magic dance? Very hard to tell.
I was impressed with a lot of the pre-CGI tech of the film, especially after watching the making-of featurette on the DVD. The Goblin King’s bubble-juggling, the various larger-than-life puppets, and the Escher-iffic set piece at the end are all worthy of accolades.
Somewhat disturbing is David Bowie’s Goblin King package, which is a little too leotardinously exhibited for an ostensible kids’ movie. Also, his hair is Joe Dirt mulletistically bad. If you find my coinage of “leotardinously” and “mulletistically” gratuitous, be grateful that I refrained from coining “spandexticular.”
Interesting item: The eagle-eyed Jessica noticed from the making-of that the choreographer of the ball scene, Cheryl McFadden, was the exact same person who later called herself Gates McFadden and played Beverly Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Do I need any other reason to marry her (i.e., Jessica, not Cheryl/Gates)?
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Jessica and I saw this the night it opened in Philly, and the theater was packed. I know it’s been getting good reviews, but I’m not really sure why this particular audience — primarily the city’s oldfartserati — was at this film. Because it was French? I can’t imagine these people were fans of the Michael Haneke oeuvre (Code Inconnu, Time of the Wolf, The Piano Teacher), but what the hey.
I am very reluctant to say much about Caché, because I think the less you know about it going in, the better. Not to single her out, but particularly don’t read Cindy Fuchs’ review in the City Paper. As usual, she gives too much out in order to fill up her allotted word count. (Not that I haven’t done the same thing.) Suffice it to say the title, which means “hidden,” refers to a surveillance camera and some increasingly worrisome videotapes.
I am fairly certain that 90% of this audience absolutely hated this film. They were looking for the standard French kiss-and-slap, and this wasn’t it at all. They walked out mumbling and confused. Granted, it’s also the way most of them walked in.
Caché is Haneke’s best movie, and the best 2005 release I have seen. Just achingly tense and troubling on so many levels. Daniel Auteuil is always great, but he’s perfect here. Juliette Binoche is very strong in what’s essentially a minor role as Auteuil’s wife.
The film contains one of the most genuinely shocking scenes I’ve ever seen. The movie builds and builds, and you think you’re ready for whatever they can throw at you, and then WHOA. (The collective reaction of the packed oldfartserati audience was something to experience indeed.) I have been unsettled for days. Anyway, don’t see this if you’re old, you don’t like films about unending dread, and/or you like most modern French cinema; you won’t like it. Otherwise, wowie zowie. So good.
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According to an Oprah I saw once around when Far and Away came out, this is the movie Tom Cruise saw that made him want to costar with Nicole Kidman in Days of Thunder. I don’t remember a lot of couch-jumping love-declaratory foofaraw with that particular Oprah episode, so I’m pretty sure this was before he was straight. This is satirical and I should not be sued.
Nicole has very curly hair in this film. That is putting it politely; it’s really extremely frizzy in a bad ’80s perm sort of way. She’s a frizzbucket. She’s still fairly cute, but very young (22), and only approaching gorgeous when her hair is wet and thus de-frizzed.
The film is fairly simple but effectively tense: Nicole and Sam Neill are sailing the South Seas on their nice medium yacht when they come across a schooner in distress and a distraught Craig Bierko, who rows over and says everybody is dead on the other boat. Sam rows over to take a look, and then Craig goes crazy and takes over the yacht and Sam is stranded on the other (sinking) boat with a bunch of dead swingers, and Nicole has to run around on the yacht and try to load the shotgun and poison drinks when Craig isn’t looking, all the while trading secretive and meaningful Morse code with Sam over their busted radios.
I was really glad to see Craig Bierko in this, and I thought he was terrific. He’s one of those solid B-list actors that I have always liked and rooted for, and this was a nice part — a fairly high-profile crazy-guy role — for him, and he nailed it, just scary and teetering on the edge between laid-back surfer and I-will-snap-at-any-time murderer-rapist.
Except the final credits rolled, and to my dismay, it wasn’t Craig Bierko at all, it was Billy Zane. Whom I hate. I had to re-evaluate my whole approach to the performance, and it turns out, it wasn’t that great. Smirky and lazy and not that compelling. For shame, Billy Zane.
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