Peter Krupa

In no particular order:

1. The Big Lebowski
2. Amelie
3. High Fidelity
4. Bubba Ho-tep
5. The Apartment
6. The Man Who Wasn’t There
7. The Royal Tenenbaums

Now that James Cameron says he’ll be directing a sequel to The Most Derivative Movie Ever Made, I thought I’d throw out some ideas for the new film.

• Jawal is a Na’vi cop. He’s a rebel who uses unorthodox methods to get results. But when he crashes another winged batty thing in a madcap aerial pursuit, his superiors have had enough. They assign him a new partner: A human fresh from the academy, who does things strictly by the book.
• An evil inter-galactic emperor rules Pandora with a heavy hand. With only her pluck and indigenous  ingenuity, as well as the help of a mysterious human who can make things float with his mind, a Na’vi princess is able to mount an insurgency that frustrates the Evil Emperor and brings him to their planet. She leads her people to victory in a climactic battle against a bunch of walking machines. The emperor and the floaty human have a showdown in which it is revealed that the emperor is his father.
• A giant meteorite is threatening to destroy Pandora. The humans have to work together with the Na’vi to stop it – BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE.
• Uhllanta, a beautiful Na’vi female, invites her fiancé over to spend a weekend with her manipulative mother and authoritarian father. Hilarity and awkwardness ensue when it turns out her fiancé is a human.
• Jenny really wishes her boyfriend Nummbata – a Na’vi worrier – would propose to her. After all, they’ve been dating long enough. But all he’s interested in is hanging out with his friends, smoking pot, and killing things with spears. She wishes he would get serious and take that job her dad has offered him as a mid-level manager at Staples corporate headquarters. Then, God appears in the form of Anthony Hopkins. He whisks her off on a journey through time and shows her the true meaning of Pandora, or whatever.

There’s more where this came from. Cameron: Call me.

From the New York Times:

The blacks who are enraged by “Precious” have probably figured out that this film wasn’t meant for them. It was the enthusiastic response from white audiences and critics that culminated in the film being nominated for six Oscars by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, an outfit whose 43 governors are all white and whose membership in terms of diversity is about 40 years behind Mississippi. In fact, the director, Lee Daniels, said that the honor would bring even more “middle-class white Americans” to his film.

I’ve been wondering for ever so long why movie studios always manage to release odd films with roughly the same premise at basically the same time. Two volcano movies, two asteroid-destroys-the-Earth movies, two Victorian illusionist movies, and now – now! – two guy-wandering-through-desolate-post-apocalyptic-wasteland movies. First, The Road:

And now The Book of Eli:

I ask you, dear reader: What the dickens?

Up in the Air is the Benjamin Button of this Oscar season. That is, it sucks – hard – but for some reason everyone loves it and it will win all sorts of awards. Basically, it’s a buddy movie, which prejudiced me against it from the get-go. I hate buddy movies almost as much as I hate wearing pants.

More than that, though, Up in the Air is nefarious. Ironically, it tries to do exactly what its main character does for a living, which is distract us from the fact that we’re all getting fired. Don’t worry about losing your job: The guy who canned you is miserable, and anyway you’ll get to spend more time with your family and indulge your love of French cooking, and isn’t that what life’s really about? Hmmm? Now run along.

It’s disappointing because this would have been a perfect moment for a poignant movie about the Great Recession. People are hurting. People believed in America, they believed that if they worked hard, saved for retirement, and paid their taxes, they would be rewarded. They were wrong. Now they have been fucked, and the people who fucked them continue to have all the money. You can almost taste the outrage. What a great time to make a movie, right?

But Up in the Air is not that movie. It almost entirely punts, even ending with a 23-year-old getting a job, as if that were happening somewhere in America. The fact that so many Americans love Up in the Air says a lot about the lack of respect we have for ourselves. Frankly, I doubt the French would ever put up with a movie like this.

A Serious Man is an amazing movie. It’s not necessarily a fun movie, it’s not an action movie, it doesn’t even have any particular plot, in the Hollywood understanding of that word. It is simply an amazing movie. Its symmetry is breathtaking. Its degree of subtly and polish places it in at least the top three of the Cohen brothers’ repertoire.

Basically, in the very best sense of the word, it is literature.

This is a relief. I worried for a bit that the Cohen brothers had lost their magic. The best part of Burn After Reading was the trailer. The Ladykillers starred Tom Hanks. Intolerable Cruelty… well, I don’t remember  anything about Intolerable Cruelty. No Country For Old Men was great, but it was written by Cormac McCarthy, so of course it was great.

A Serious Man, however, is the kind of movie that makes you sit back and say, “I could never, ever do that.” In fact, I’m still not entirely sure what it is they did. Superficially, the story echoes a classic from the English 101 Western Literature canon. In that respect, it is reminiscent of The Man Who Wasn’t There and O Brother, Where Art Thou?.

But as in The Big Lebowski, there is such a richness of imagery, characters, language, and dark humor that I could never say with confidence what A Serious Man is about. Suffice it to say that if a movie is good, I find myself thinking about it hours, days, even weeks after seeing it.

By this measure, A Serious Man is very, very good.

1. La Ley de Hérodes (Eng: Herod’s Law) – A tragicomic fable of Mexican politics. An eager-beaver party no-body gets tapped to replace a corrupt provincial governor and bring the beleaguered locals “development and social justice.” Shenanigans ensue when the naif’s ideals begin to slip. He ends badly (or does he?).

2. Kung fu (Eng: Kung Fu Hustle) – An unlucky wanna-be Shanghai gangster ends up caught between a form-dancing hatchet gang and the residents of a slum who turn out to be not as helpless as they appear. People fly around, kung fu magic ensues, and things happen that you never, ever expect.

3. Nueve Reinas (Eng: Nine Queens) – A young man meets an experienced Buenos Aires confidence man who shows him the ropes. They’re soon gunning for the big con: Passing off a set of nine stamps to a Spaniard for a sizable amount of money. Double-crosses ensue, etc.

4. El Laberinto del Fauno (Eng: Pan’s Labyrinth) – Nominated for six Oscars in 2007, won three. Set during the time of the Spanish Civil War, a little girl caught between her brutal military father and her ailing mother escapes into a fantasy world in the countryside. Beautiful, haunting, informative (you thought Europeans were civilized?). Sadness ensues.

5. Le Placard (Eng: The Closet) – Sad-sack office drone learns he is about to be fired. The only way to keep his job is to make people think he’s a homosexual. Shenanigans ensue. This movie should be shown in University drama clinics as an absolute perfect modern execution of a comedy (that is, comedy as in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” not “Twins”).