Day 130: Donnie Darko

Ranking on IMDb Top 250: #126
Year: 2001
Director: Richard Kelly
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal and Jena Malone

Should I really do consecutive posts about cult science fiction movies about time travel that I can't stand? Probably not, but I'm about to. Although, to be fair, next to Donnie Darko, 12 Monkeys looks like Citizen Kane. Hell, next to Donnie Darko, Darko Milicic looks like Orson Welles. I can't even describe my feelings for this film without sounding like a third-grader. What I want to call it is "stupid" and "bad," because it doesn't even have any of the necessary qualities to earn a more fair-handed criticism. It's a childish movie made for people with childlike minds for film who want to be intellectually stimulated on their level, and who want to have something ostensibly highbrow to wear on their Hot Topic-bought t-shirts. In short, Donnie Darko tries way too fucking hard. It's probably guiltier of that offense than any other movie I've seen.

Call me lazy if you must, but I'm not going to dignify this movie with a plot summary. The plot is just too asinine. The performances aren't any good, either. Part of me is annoyed with how popular this movie has become and how zealous its fans are, but part of me just wants to know what it is they're seeing. Perhaps I'm wrong and they aren't just simpletons who got their minds blown by something extremely un-mindblowing (Inception, while great, suffers from the same phenomenon), and there's something great about Donnie Darko that just didn't click with me the first time I watched it in slack-jawed disbelief that it had a generally positive reputation. I'm just not sure I'm willing to watch it again to find out.

And yes, I know this blog post will go down as one of my worst. I just can't dedicate 800 words to something I hate without coming off as an enormous douchebag – which fans of the film probably think I've already proved myself to be.

The Good: Am I going too far if I say nothing? Because I'm going to.

The Bad: Probably the post-production that is still finds itself in. I'm constantly baffled by how much people want to talk about this movie like there's anything to talk about.

The Skinny: Might be my least favorite movie on the list that I've seen thus far.

Day 129: 12 Monkeys

Ranking on IMDb Top 250: #173
Year: 1995
Director: Terry Gilliam
Starring: Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt

I used to have my head so far up Terry Gilliam's ass I could see through his eyeballs, and excluding his work with the Monty Python gang (oddly, the only work of his that really holds up for me today), 1995's 12 Monkeys was my gateway. I worked my way through about half of a totally arbitrary online Top 100 Cult Movies list when I was in 8th grade, and this film placed very highly. I watched it, was enamored by it, and quickly became a huge Terry Gilliam fan and set out to watch all of his movies. Today, I'm not so fond of Gilliam or of this film – I think he's guilty of making every frame so visually interesting (erm, "interesting," I actually hate his visual identity) that the actual plot content of at least half of his scenes becomes utterly uninteresting. He's guiltier of that in fare like Brazil and the still-fairly-charming Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but it exists here, too. Fortunately, Brad Pitt's towering mid-'90s screen presence (Not in stature, but in total dominance of every frame he's a part of – this guy was a star even before he was the great actor he is today.) makes most of the film easy to stomach. But is this a great film? Maybe with a more restrained director at the helm, but not in its existing form.

The plot depicts a futuristic sci-fi dystopia where a deadly virus has forced humanity to live underground. The film explores the realms of mental illness, totalitarianism, corporate interests causing society's downfall, secret societies, conspiracy, and, most questionably and yet most importantly, time travel. All of this stuff intrigued me when I was fourteen, but now I've come to realize it's just kind of a mess. Here Gilliam not only made his scenery too cluttered but also his storytelling, and a final scene that should have packed some emotional punch along with its "a-ha!" realization (like a Christopher Nolan ending, for example), it's just an opportunity for Gilliam to put yet another level of sci-fi intrigue into his muddled plot. I know it's kind of a stretch, but I recently wrote about Back to the Future, a film that makes time travel its principle endeavor. That movie works because it only requires us to think about one thing, and that thing happens to be somewhat complex. 12 Monkeys throws an extremely complex concept at us in the midst of everything else that's already going on, and it doesn't add anything to the film. It just makes it more unnecessarily complicated in an attempt to be almost condescendingly clever.

It's not a totally worthless film, though. As I mentioned earlier, Brad Pitt starring in damn near anything in the 1990s is worth a gander because of the way his young face just lit up a screen. His performance as anti-corporatist animal rights activist mental patient Jeffrey Goines is no exception. But 12 Monkeys is still a rental copy at best. (Do people still say that when they recommend movies? Should I instead say "Put it toward the bottom of your queue"? I'm so
confused!)

The Good: Pitt's performance.

The Bad: Terry Gilliam making a Terry Gilliam movie. Sorry, Terry Gilliam fans.

The Skinny: I wouldn't put it anywhere near the Top 250.

Day 128: The Graduate

Ranking on IMDb Top 250: #161
Year: 1967
Director: Mike Nichols
Starring: Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft

Ah, looking at that poster brings back some fond memories. When I was a senior in high school preparing for my graduation party, I made a pretty wicked PhotoShop of the poster to The Graduate – a movie I was slightly obsessed with at the time – putting my face in place of Dustin Hoffman's. Subtlety wasn't (still isn't) my forte, but hey, it made me laugh. I wouldn't have been inspired to make that poster if the source material wasn't excellent, and even though it's been since my high school graduation that I've actually watched the film, I can assure you that it is. It's given us some truly timeless quotes, it gave Simon & Garfunkel an excuse to write one of their best songs ("Mrs. Robinson"), it has some entries in the canon of oft-imitated-but-never-replicated movie scenes (See the last twenty minutes of Wayne's World 2, which parody The Graduate by restaging it with Mike Myers and changing nothing. And I thought I was unsubtle.) and, above all, it's an enjoyable, funny movie that lives up to every bit of the hype it has generated in the 40+ years since its release.

The film follows recent college graduate Benjamin Braddock (a very young Dustin Hoffman in his first movie role) as he returns to the West Coast where he grew up and is seduced by a friend of the family while accidentally falling in love with her daughter. It's one of those movies that even if you haven't seen it, you've seen it because of how many times it's been parodied, paid tribute to, and referenced in pop culture since its release – and as such, I'll forgo a proper plot summary here. I'd kind of like to look at the culture impact of the movie over the past forty years, but that sounds like a 2000 word essay, and I'm writing three blog posts tonight and have three research papers to finish by Saturday, so, uh, nah. So yeah, you're kind of getting ripped off with this post. As with a lot of comedies, it's kind of difficult to write a self-contained piece about the film and nothing else that's very useful or interesting, so I'm copping out. If you want a paragraph on Wayne's World 2, I could probably do that, but somehow I doubt if that's in high demand. At least you learned about some fun I had with PhotoShop in high school, so this wasn't totally a wash, right?

The Good: "Plastics" and "Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me, aren't you?" are two of the greatest movie lines ever, and the Simon & Garfunkel song is so good, but I think the final shot of Dustin Hoffman looking out the back window of the bus with his presumed bride-to-be and that incredible look of doubt and apprehension on his face as the film cuts to credits says so much of what needs to be said about this movie. It's one of Hoffman's single greatest moments ever as an actor.

The Bad: Anne Bancroft's performance is surprisingly a little bit shaky, and not nearly as sexually enticing as Hoffman's character plays it as. Honestly, it's mostly creepy.

The Skinny: #161 sounds a little low to me. This one's a classic.

Day 127: The Princess Bride

Ranking on IMDb Top 250: #184
Year: 1987
Director: Rob Reiner
Starring: Cary Elwes and Robin Wright

I'm gonna take a lot of crap for this one (just kidding, no one reads my blog), but I don't love The Princess Bride. I guess I get why people love it so much, but to me, it doesn't rise above the level of any other fairytale movie, and I'd much rather watch Labyrinth for the umpteenth time than watch The Princess Bride again, and that's not even to mention the dozens of superior Disney movies that adhere to the same formula. There's still a lot of charming things about this film, many of which stem from its excellent supporting cast (headlined by the greatest bit part actor of all time, Wallace Shawn, the late, great Andre the Giant, and the immortal-line-spewing Mandy Patinkin). Still, something keeps this movie strictly in the cult phenomenon zone for me and well shy of the "great film" range.

The plot is pretty standard, though it has its twists. A beautiful girl falls in love with a poor man but is betrothed to a rich prince. She gets kidnapped before the wedding can happen, and the kidnappers are pursued by both of the beautiful girl's suitors. Her true love (the poor man) catches up with her and they eventually ride off into the sunset together after the man weasels his way out of a duel with the prince. This is all framed by a grandfather (who may or may not be the poor lovestruck man himself) reading a story to his sick grandson. There's lots of other, more interesting things happening in what I would call the "B-plot" if this were a TV recap, but you don't need those here. If you're going to watch the movie, though, those are the bits you'll want to watch it for. The three aforementioned supporting actors, along with Billy Crystal and Christopher Guest, are all hilarious and better than the two leads (Robin Wright and Cary Elwes).

I'm not here to hate on The Princess Bride, though. Seriously. If I was eight years old in 1987, I would probably have a poster of it on my wall right now. But I didn't necessarily see it first at the right age or in the right environment to care very deeply about it, so it's easy to look for comparable movies that do what it does in a more interesting way. At worst, it gives me a chance to see Wallace Shawn – an actor whom I'm pretty sure I like more than anyone else on Earth does – in a relatively big role. Top 250, though? Inconceivable.

The Good: The scene wherein Wallace Shawn's character overthinks which cup the poison is in...

The Bad: ...leading to his death. This movie needed more Wallace Shawn.

The Skinny: Nah, it's not Top 250 good, at least not in my opinion.

Day 126: Glory

Ranking on IMDb Top 250: #248
Year: 1989
Director: Edward Zwick
Starring: Matthew Broderick and Denzel Washington

Contemporary filmmaking hasn't been particularly kind to the American Civil War. It's mostly been reduced to four-hour blocks of fan service for the kinds of guys who subscribe to Blue and Gray and reenact the battle of Antietam in their local parks, and when truly great movies taking place during the Civil War are made, they're generally not really about the Civil War at all (see Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The). Glory is one glorious (heh) exception. It's got some of the hallmarks of ho-hum Civil War movies – namely extremely long battle scenes and resulting shots surveying fields covered in bodies that directly reference Matthew Brady's photography – but the story it tells is a fairly unique, or, at the very least, interesting one. Most of the credit goes to the casting, which gave Denzel Washington his first Oscar, gave Morgan Freeman a chance to shine as the wise, simple older man two years before he'd perfect it in Unforgiven, and gave Matthew Broderick the chance to reinvent himself as someone besides Ferris Bueller (it didn't stick, but hey, he pulls it off well here).

Criticisms have been leveled at Glory for being a black movie with a white hero. Okay, fair enough; Spike Lee probably wouldn't have jumped at the chance to direct this script, but this was a movie based on a series of letters from a white colonel in charge of a black regiment. I'm not saying history isn't sometimes racist, but that being said, it is history. The degree to which the black characters are integrated into the United States Army in Glory is pretty much the most equality they could hope for in 1863, and I think Edward Zwick does a fine job of reconciling that. Morgan Freeman has spoken out in defense of the film against black critics who argued that it was an "Uncle Tom" movie, and I'd say that the film's reputation has mostly been restored in the 21 years since its release.

Glory is not a perfect film (far from it, in fact), but considering the odds that are stacked against it – accusations of veiled racism, the handicap of making a Civil War film, the apparent obligation to show at least twenty minutes of boring war film footage complete with clichés like the formal rivals saving each other on the field of battle – it's a damned fine effort. The plot is immaterial because it's pretty much like that of any other war film about an embattled regiment, just this time it's about race, but the excellent cast makes it worth at least one viewing.

The Good: Washington, Freeman, and Broderick give an excellent trifecta of performances.

The Bad: Why the hell did Zwick decide to put Frederick Douglass in this film? So, so, so gimmicky and unnecessary. Also, ending your film with an utterly cliched battle scene and, of course, a shot of a battlefield strewn with bodies followed by, you guessed it, title cards? Pretty lame, Zwick. It's easy to tune out the last twenty minutes.

The Skinny: Yeah, sorry, it definitely isn't Top 250 material. I liked it more in 8th grade, and even then I'm not sure I would have totally understood it being on the list.

Day 125: Citizen Kane

Ranking on IMDb Top 250: #34
Year: 1941
Director: Orson Welles
Starring: Orson Welles and Dorothy Comingore

Full disclosure: I'm three days behind, so I'm doing this blog post with Glory on the television. Don't worry, I've seen it before, it doesn't require my full attention, but I feel guilty enough about it to admit it. After I type up Citizen Kane and Glory, I'll turn my attention to two other films that I've seen enough times to blog about without re-watching, and boom – I'll be caught up. Did I mention what a huge fucking mistake it is to promise to write about 250 movies in 250 days?

On the subject, it's worth noting that Citizen Kane is the 125th movie I've written about, which means I'm officially halfway through this journey. I'll be honest, it feels like it's been a hell of a lot longer. But enough bickering about the practically Sisyphean task I've forced upon mine own brow, let's talk Kane. Critics have, more often than they have any other movie, called it the greatest film of all time. It's considered one of the most revolutionary films ever made, and its larger than life main character Charles Foster Kane is brought to the screen epically by its even bigger writer/producer/director/lead actor, Orson Welles. He was as much an iconoclast as the beleaguered newspaper mogul he sought to immortalize – and he perhaps too successfully communicates Kane's hubris. Citizen Kane is kind of like the Chicago Bulls' 1990-91 championship team, with Orson Welles filling the role of Michael Jordan. Yeah, it's one of the greatest, but if it weren't for him, it sure as hell wouldn't be. There is no Citizen Kane without Orson Welles. You can't have someone else write a thinly veiled biography of William Randolph Hearst, have someone else direct it, get someone else to finance it, and cast someone else in the lead role and get Citizen Kane out of it. Without Orson Welles, this movie doesn't exist, and it's a testament to the triumph of the individual in Hollywood that has never been replicated.

I do have to briefly take issue with the cult that has arisen around this film, though – you know, the one that has placed it atop the Sight & Sound and AFI list every year for the last half-century. I've got to be totally honest: I don't understand that at all. Citizen Kane is a great movie, but when it's so difficult to arrive to a consensus on what the greatest ever is, why has it seemed to earn the title time and again from the people who allegedly know the most about films? It's a little frustrating, even though Welles' motion picture is undoubtedly a masterpiece. Here the IMDb Top 250 is a bit fairer, I think. I'm not saying that there's only thirty-three better movies than Citizen Kane, or that the thirty-three that are above it on the list are all better than it, but it does put it in a more realistic, less ivory-towered perspective than those AFI and Sight & Sound lists do. I think if you put your finger on the pulse of movie-loving America, you'd find that Casablanca and Gone With the Wind have more support in the ill-defined "classic film" category.

Getting into the plot of Citizen Kane feels superfluous, but I'll take a small stab at it. It follows the life of newspaper mogul Charles Foster Kane by opening with his death. The story is told in a "Rashomon-style" fashion (And yes, I know that Citizen Kane came out over a decade earlier than Rashomon. I'm totally taking the piss out here because I'm getting really fucking sick of critics using that stupid term to describe anything where multiple people give different perspectives on a character or event.) as a newsreel editor sends his team out to learn what Kane meant when he uttered "Rosebud" as his last word on his deathbed. This narrative structure lets the story breathe, and effectively retells Kane's life and times from his youth to his death, leaving very few stones unturned. In the greatest already-spoiled spoiler of all time, it turns out Rosebud was the name of Kane's sled. Yep. There's been entire books written on the meaning of this, and whether it was effective or not. I'm not in a position to judge since I, like most people with the Internet or who have ever talked to someone about movies, already knew the ending going in, and I think a lot of its emotional punch was taken away due to that fact. Still, I can appreciate that it was a good ending, and it came at the end of an unquestionably great film. Just not the greatest film ever.

The Good: Orson Welles! This is the greatest one-man show in movie history.

The Bad: This is one of those movies where I can't find anything I have a problem with, but I still can't quite say it's one of my favorites. It did exactly what it set out to do, though, so give it a lot of credit.

The Skinny: I addressed this above, but I'm extremely comfortable with Citizen Kane at #34.

Day 124: The Wrestler

Ranking on IMDb Top 250: #143
Year: 2008
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Starring: Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei

Growing up in southwest Ohio in the 1990s, I was inundated with pro wrestling. T-shirts and trading cards bearing the likeness of Stone Cold Steve Austin and Goldberg were some of the hottest commodities in the halls of my elementary school, and when Booker T brought his TNA tour to my suburb's hockey arena, everyone in town knew at least ten people who were in attendance. I was always a casual fan of the sport; I owned WWF War Zone for the Playstation, and I tried to keep up with what was happening with The Undertaker, whose dark, evil image made him my favorite wrestler. For the most part, though, I was allowed to spend my childhood with a kind of detached fascination with just how fucking into pro wrestling people were. It would probably be fair to say, too, that I didn't totally get it.

Darren Aronofsky's 2008 film The Wrestler is for people like me. Hardcore fans of pro wrestling would probably rather not see the scenes in locker rooms where the wrestlers talk about what moves they'll do on each other and who will win the bouts. People repulsed by the spectacle of pro wrestling would probably rather not see two sweaty, musclebound men throw each other onto barbwire. But I – and, I imagine, much of non-metropolitan America – understand both elements and appreciate the sport for what it is, and Aronofsky's film plugs right into that consciousness. It's not exactly an exposé of pro wrestling even if it sometimes comes off like one; but it's only observational, never condemning. Randy "The Ram" Robinson (Mickey Rourke) has a crumbling life – living in a van, hated by an estranged daughter, only able to personally connect with a stripper (Marisa Tomei), a recent heart attack victim and bypass surgery recipient, and downtrodden grocery store deli employee. The brilliance of Rourke's performance comes through in his resilience in the face of life shitting on him so goddamn much. When life finally gives him more than he can take, he goes against his doctor's orders and decides to get back in the ring. Tomei's character, who he fell in love with, comes to the match and tells him not to wrestle, but he ignores her. He gets dizzy during the bout but insists on continuing to fight. As he climbs onto the post to deliver a finishing move to his opponent, he sees that Tomei has left the arena. Then he leaps. Cut to black.

Randy "The Ram" Robinson's life was so indelibly tied to professional wrestling that he would rather potentially die than have to live without it. It's a fairly standard plot device, but Rourke sells his obsession so well – and Aronofsky brings it to the screen so brilliantly – that the movie works better than you'd expect. When Rourke was heavily favored to win the Best Actor Oscar for this performance and it went to Sean Penn in Milk instead, I was smugly happy because I loved Milk, hadn't seen The Wrestler, and thought a portrayal of a gay politician was intrinsically of greater artistic value than a portrayal of a pro wrestler. Now that I've seen The Wrestler, I might still slightly prefer Penn's performance, but none of my smug delusions remain, and I'm extremely impressed by Rourke's work in the film. It's fairly well-documented how much I hate Requiem for a Dream, but that has everything to do with the subject matter and nothing to do with Aronofsky's direction. The Wrestler proves to me once again that when he has a script that I like, he's one of my favorite directors working today.

The Good: Rourke's performance would seem to be the obvious answer, and I probably agree. More specifically, the scenes where The Ram is out of his element working in the deli are some of my favorites. He's alternately charming and destructive, just like in the ring. Also, Marisa Tomei's breasts. Sweet Lord.

The Bad: Not much, really. I wouldn't call it one of my favorite movies but I can't point out anything that it didn't do well.

The Skinny: Yeah, it deserves its place on the list.