IMDb #110 Review: Like Stars on Earth (2007)

Source: Wikipedia

Remember the high-pressure Indian school system from 3 Idiots? Now apply that shark tank mentality to elementary school. And condense all three idiots into a bucktoothed dyslexic savant.

Frankly, he's a weird kid. Friendly to animals, precocious artist, a total space cadet. At school, he's the punching bag; at home, the doofus makes his conventionally successful older brother look good. Which infuriates their disciplinarian dad. He's convinced his young son is dumb and the problem is his attitude.

Never mind sports, the kid's too uncoordinated to put on a shirt without help. When school gets too hard, he plays hooky and seeks solace in his deranged cartoon imagination. Simple arithmetic becomes whimsical adventures about colliding planets. The parents send him to boarding school (to toughen him up), then special school (when he's too tough to let anything out).

Then he meets the teacher to change his life.

The substitute art teacher. Who shows up to the first day of class dressed as a rapping French elf clown. He shares life lessons in song while dancing on desks. And instantly obtains choreographic control over a conga line of twerking schoolchildren.

(I ... what ... you ... you got me, Bollywood. I expected "unconventional," and not a single word of the previous paragraph.)

So the *ahem* unconventional teacher pries the potential out of the repressed genius using the rainbow crowbar of LEARNING THROUGH FUN. Through his experience instructing mentally retarded children, he explains to parents and superintendents the symptoms of dyslexia.

As it turns out, "stars on earth" refers to children and their unwritten futures, not huge raging balls of gas that would obliterate the planet and possibly the solar system. All it takes is a stellar teacher to keep the gas-balls from collapsing prematurely, to release an impossibly gifted child who can then achieve a predictably uplifting ending.

Can we spare a teacher's undivided attention for each troubled child? Hell no. The pay isn't worth it. Which emphasizes the rarity of these exceptional cases. And the tragedy of how many latent geniuses remain undiscovered -- or worse, become engineers.

(For example, I could be a kazoo prodigy and never know it. You could have been a world-renowned pet masseuse. But here we are. Where did we go wrong.)

164 minutes.

IMDb #111 Review: Unforgiven (1992)

Source: Wikipedia

The Wild West wasn't so wild to live in. It wasn't so much rugged loners taming a harsh land, as it was harsh land punishing the angry violent shitheads who couldn't survive anyplace else. And thus Clint Eastwood, old and charmingly crotchety, sets out to demolish the very myths he embodied in his youth.

For reasons unexplained by the introductory text scroll, a young lady marries a thief. He becomes a shitty farmer, until smallpox reduces his wife to a a mound of inanimate chemicals. Alone, he can't manage his hogs, let alone his motherless children.

Elsewhere in Wyoming, bad guys (who claim they aren't bad guys) rape and mutilate a prostitute. Without their pimp knowing, the ladies-of-the-night save up to put up a $1000 bounty on the bastards. This provokes the ire of the townsmen, who want to avoid the sort of ruffians attracted to the bounty on the other ruffians.

The prior category of ruffians include a crack-shot Englishman. He travels with his nebbish biographer and preaches monarchy to provincial dunderheads. Then the little town's petty sheriff (and shitty carpenter) kicks the shit out of the old man and provides the bland truth behind the embellished biography. This same sheriff strictly enforces the town's no-gun policy -- using guns, of course.

In the only predictable part of this anti-western, the farmer abandons retirement to hunt the bounty. He rides out with a young man who over-inflates his personal legend (whereas the old man downplays his).

It's an ugly, grungy story, grounded in reality and fertilized with pain. Guns make smoke; weapons fire and misfire. Men and women die slow and agonizing deaths, pathetically, sometimes in the outhouse. Riding out in the rain results in potentially fatal fevers. Self-styled heroes fight dirty, whereas braggarts run screaming at the first sign of danger. And killing messes people up for life -- "It takes all a man is, all he'll ever be." For both victim and perpetrator.

131 minutes.

IMDb #112 Review: Scarface (1983)

Source: Wikipedia

A rough-edged tough-talking Cuban immigrant achieves the American dream -- fortunately, karma and law enforcement remind us it's a crock. Meanwhile, the titular antihero bends the world to his will, by the power of gravitational friendliness and gigantic adamantium balls.

This guy crawls up from the gutter -- shooting a Communist for a Green Card, scrubbing dishes in a roadside food stand -- to a key position in the coke trade. Mostly by accident. Also by a bloody negotiation breakdown which leaves several positions open.

He represents his boss to his boss's boss in Bolivia, speaking for the scary people with guns and money. He proposes marriage to the boss's girl at the man's own pool. It's incredible that his stomach hasn't swollen to galactic proportions with all the guts packed in there.

As usual for a career man, family relationships deteriorate like they're doused in acid. His mother refuses blood money; his sister wants to date men, but he's unreasonably protective of her and her afro.

The easiest way to turn a success story into a tragedy is to keep telling the story. Now at the top, he skis downhill off a mountain of cocaine into the canyon of deep shit.

Strangely enough, it's his uncompromising moral standards that ruin him. He wants the best for his kid sister, and kills to make sure of it. He won't hurt kids, and blows off the big boss to show it.

His personal gravity also makes him a bullet magnet.

This angry awkward Cuban and his weird cocky slur deserve their place in the movie museum of immortality. As does the final shootout in his villa, the last stand of a fascinating idiot who stuck to his guns till the guns stuck to him.

170 minutes.

IMDb #113 Review: Raging Bull (1980)

Source: Wikipedia

A boxer's anger issues make and break his life. He blasts through the competition in the ring, but his outside life becomes so awful he wouldn't want to be anyplace else. A bull in a china shop, if broken crockery could sue for damages and file for divorce and hire thugs to pound his face to a pulp.

In the 1940s, while most young men are fighting in the world war, Jake LaMotta fights a war against the world -- and its pesky age-of-consent laws. He picks up a hot blonde teen at the public pool, treats her to a couple shitty dates, and despite his imperiousness and thick head manages to make it work. And withholds coitus to keep energy for fights. Nice going, champ.

Somehow he gets it into his thick head that his wife's cheating. He sure treats her like it. Then flips out when it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

More importantly, he dominates the ring. He conks out opponents, despite small hands. His fast-talking brother manages his madness, though the beast on a short leash drags him places he would never go alone. The brothers share one big thing -- mistreatment of their wives. Them's the forties.

As much as the protagonist punishes everyone else, he punishes himself. Hard diet, hours in the sauna, slimming down to meet the bare maximum for middleweight. For one shot at the title. And if he wins? Sit around, watch TV, get fat. Until the collected rage breaks out and reduces his social life to Bikini Atoll.

Where am I going with this? Good question. Where is this going?

His fame goes nova, and he subsides into the white-dwarf shame of post-celebrity life. He opens a shitty nightclub. Becomes a cringeworthy stand-up comedian. And a jailbird, since it turns out acting on ephebophilia is still illegal.

Robert de Niro acts phenomenally, even when playing a character who's playing a bad actor. The best parts weren't even acting -- the physique, or subsequent lack thereof.

Then it just ends.

What's the point? I don't know. It'a a true story. The guy's still alive. You ask him. I'll...wait here.

129 minutes.

IMDb #114 Review: 3 Idiots (2009)

Source: Wikipedia

There must be serious problems with India's school system. Not only because of this movie's subject matter, but because of the little things it gets wrong.

First off, there are four main idiots, not three. And they're not really idiots, though they act like it. They're actually enrolled at a prestigious engineering college. Where the straitlaced superintendent remains convinced of their idiocy.

The possible exception among their gang is a cheerful laid-back genius. He flouts the rigid structure and advocates learning through fun (and song). His foil sneers at his laxity and crams his way to the top, bragging and flattering and forgetting everything he memorizes. The other two guys follow the first guy, because he's infinitely cooler. (Easy when you're rich and attractive and not just smart.)

No, it's not a school piece. Not entirely. The guys reunite ten years after graduation to find out who's most successful. Problem: the cool guy, name of Rancho, is missing. So his cronies (along with the weaselly brownnoser and his lethal flatulence) embark on a road trip to find him. It quickly skews into bizarre directions. While they flash back to the college misadventures that made them love him this much in the first place.

The main villain is the pressure to succeed. Fathers decide their sons will become engineers, never asking what their sons want to be. Wildlife photographer? Inventor? B-student? Dropout? Disowned. Brutally exemplified with a rash of student suicides.

There's an undercurrent of mischief -- the guys botch job interviews, sabotage stuffy speeches, crash weddings, threaten to drop a dead dad's ashes into a toilet, even foil a dignified suicide.

What could become unbearably gloomy or vacuously fluffy opts for the middle road: cheesy. There's singing (most notably "All Is Well," which works like a boppy poppy Engrish-saturated "Hakuna Matata"). Cartoonish sound effects accompany the contrived hijinks. And, another Bollywood staple, add the godawful CGI.

But I promise the weirdness leads to a point. The boozing, the romance, the rebellion -- it culminates in a climax as stirring as it is absurd. A bunch of male engineering students must midwife a baby during a power outage using only the miscellaneous tools at hand. How? I'm still not quite sure.

I've seen Bollywood formula work this way before. It softens the heart with warm sentimentality, then burrows in with rock-candy teeth and lays eggs.

171 minutes.

IMDb #115 Review: Up (2009)

Source: Wikipedia

The title of this Pixar adventure helpfully indicates in which direction it is misleading us. Not up, it's down. From America to South America, from soaring dreams to grounded reality, from breezy comedy to zephyrs of romance to doldrums of tragedy to the squalls of raging geezers clumsily dueling on a nosediving zeppelin.

A quiet nerdy boy meets a loud nerdy girl. They marry, grow old, endure tragedy along the way. Life eats their dreams and shits them out as lost time.

So the retired balloon salesman revenges himself on physics and society. He exacerbates the world helium shortage. He circumvents urban expansion and a pending lawsuit and the nursing home system by raising his decrepit technicolor homestead into the stratosphere. Using balloons. Many, many balloons.

Without proper steering or navigational equipment, the impossible flying house impossibly reaches its destination. The wild jungle of Paradise Falls, Venezuela.

Nothing can stop him now. Except a stowaway, a chubby Asian Boy-Scout-in-all-but-name (see: violently defended copyright).

The old grouch sends the kid on a snipe hunt. The kid returns with a hyper-intelligent chocolate-loving rainbow ostrich. Which the kid dubs Kevin.

In the untamed jungle of Venezuela, away from oil crises and drug wars and raging totalitarianism, there's a valley of weirdness. Realism need not apply. An elderly explorer can maintain a zeppelin large enough to house an airborne paleontology museum, staffed by talking dogs whose translation collars let them share their moronic thoughts with the world. This explorer guy has to be truly ancient; by now he's sunk so much time into his snipe hunt that he's not above cold-blooded murder.

Here we have Pixar at its silliest and downright darkest. It's presumably a realistic universe (despite, you know, balloons lifting a house and collars explicating canine minds), where the real magic happens in the animation and soundtrack and storytelling. The kids laugh; the adults fight back tears and hug their kids more often.

Anyway, the old man (the one with a cinderblock for a head, literally and figuratively) learns about the rigors of moving and moving on. The kid learns about the inherent risks of assisting the elderly. Sometimes you cross the street, sometimes another continent, and sometimes you're picking a dogfight with a flying fortress and a squadron of dogs in biplanes.

Like old age, happens to the best of us.

IMDb #116 Review: Chinatown

Source: Wikipedia

Film noir in color feels wrong for so many reasons. Not least of them is young Jack Nicholson.

Despite the title, of the story actually happens in Chinatown; most of it concerns the Los Angeles water supply in the Silver Age of the silver screen. Water, not Asians. In California, only one of these runs in short supply.

Even then, detective work sucked. But the typical detective personality makes hard work harder. He's a cynical, morally murky, antagonistic mercenary. The perpetual poverty intrinsic to the vocation doesn't help.

When work dries up like water in the desert sun, the alleged hero resorts to dirty jobs. He secretly photographs adulterers and distributes those incriminating Polaroids and accidentally detonates marriages. Amid the sleazy paparazzi moonlighting, he strikes a gusher: the water wars.

Digging around, he unearths weird shit. Disappearing water, dead people, and forged land records signed by long-dead people. As payment for services rendered, he receives a tax-free helping of trouble. A slit nostril keeps his smug mug in bandages for a predominant portion of the film.

Apparently moving water around is serious business. Divert it from farmland, dump it in the ocean,  and people freak out and start cutting up noses.

To keep the detective on edge, he bumps into the requisite femme fatale. The daughter of a wealthy water mogul (which exist -- California), she has more issues than a water tower made of mosquito netting. Her typical L.A. marriage problems, like infidelity and murder, escalate into kidnapping and even more murder and the police doing as little as possible about it. Which makes more room to work for our anarchic detective.

The consensual underage incest subplot becomes skeevier in retrospect considering director Roman Polanski's later scandals. And the infuriating ending only makes it worse.

What's there to do when you witness something horrible that there's nothing you can do about? Forget it, it's Chinatown.

131 minutes.