2006-01-18 - 4:36 p.m. Movie Review: Exotica Yes the patriots lost. I kinda knew it was going to happen. The Colts shit the bed. I didn�t see that coming, but I think they are showing that they�ll never win. I firmly believe that if the Colts (14-1) this year can�t win with that record � and lose after a bye week with 2 week prep (and like 3 weeks rest) they aren�t ever going to win. However, my picked sucked, which means I can still be surprised by playoff football. I am picking Denver and Carolina, though I would prefer to watch Pittsburgh and Seattle. To be honest, I have NO idea what will happen this weekend, except I think that Matt Hasselbeck with blow it. This is the busiest season for me, so updates have been sparse. However, I have been watching a lot of movies and think that I want to talk about them here. I�m not a music guy. I honestly don�t respect music very much. I mean I think everyone�s talented and I could never do it, and when it all comes together its amazing and mood setting, but as far as an art form, I�m not a music guy. I listen to music all the time so don�t think I am trashing it, I�m just saying its not my preferred venue of art. I think it has to do with my dislike of poetry. Take Freedom part 2. You know the George Michael one with the model�s in the video and everything from the video �faith� blows up. The song is great. The point? He doesn�t like his image and he wants to change it. It�s a great song, but not exactly a great story. Billy Jean. A custody debate? Michael�s got an illegitimate kid? What? My point is that music is entertaining and not really a good form of story telling. A song can be both timeless and good without really having a point, and songs with points often times are some of the worst songs ever. (Proudest Monkey by DMB). Music succeeds in appealing to you via creating sounds that provoke a reaction out of you. Sometimes these are just words that rhyme and flow to the beat. Sometimes its just an amazing guitar riff. But in the end I think it�s a little arbitrary. Also music isn�t funny. Bands that try it often times get KILLED. Bare Naked Ladies tries to fuse humor into their music and are widely hated. Weird Al made a career off of it and actually succeed in his Mel Brooks style spoof songs. This will sound crazy but I always have looked to humor as a gauge on how sophisticated something is. Why? Because there are certain things that make everyone sad. There are NOT certain things that make everyone laugh. My Life � the imdb tag line is Prepare to sob like a sailor in Thailand, That�s a movie that everyone cries at. About Schmidt isn�t a comedy everyone laughs at. Dumb and Dumber isn�t a movie everyone likes. Tragedy is universal, comedy is subjective. Well movies have the ability to make people laugh. They also have the ability to wrap together almost every aspect of art and capture it. To name a couple big art categories � Performance Art, Music, Photography, Literature A movie is capable of capturing anything we do in real life and bringing it together to tell us a story. I�m not claiming that Corky Romano is a piece of art either. I�m just saying that as far as respect, when a movie comes together in the right way, I think that it�s the highest form of art that we can currently achieve. Why am I babbling! Because I watch a lot of movies and I am going to start talking about a few of them here. There is a movie that you never saw called Exotica The cover of the movie will turn 90% of people off to the film right away. The cover looks like soft-core porn. I�m talking really bad porn like poison ivy 3 and crap like that. This is because the movie takes place in a strip club in Toronto. The main actors you would know from Mandy on 24, Casey Jones from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1 and 3 (he wasn�t in 2!), and This guy who is a poor man�s William H. Macy. Also a very young Sarah Polley who is put into some tense situations. The movie starts out weird at best. Personally the first ten minutes turned me off as I excused the movie as some slow strip club thriller in which a girl turning tricks ends up dead. Not.even.close. This turned out to be both a heartwarming redeeming film, but also one that�s incredibly sad and solemn. It begins to investigate not just the look of the strip club but the motivation for the people that go there, and also work there. And not just the dancers, but the D.J.�s and waitresses. It�s a slowly unraveling human mystery. What I mean by that, is that the mystery isn�t what is going to happen to the people, but what has happened to them that makes them the way they are. Also, for a movie in a strip club, there was a shocking lack of nudity. I�m not talking �strip tease� edited for TBS lack, but just that�s not what the movie centers on. I still wouldn�t watch it with my parents. *** I realized after I rented it that the director was Atom Egoyan. Things started to make sense seeing that he directed The Sweet Hereafter which just might be one of the finest movies ever made. I would put this movie on the highly recommend list as long as you like the following qualities in movies. 1) Chris Kattan is not in it. It�s a fine movie and it�s a shame people missed it. By the same token, it�s a directorial precursor to A Sweet Hereafter so if you had to pick, I�d take the latter. *** I watched Reindeer Games with my parents and Shelly once when we rented it on a whim. There is a scene where Ben and Chalieze start performing oral sex on each other or something�I blocked it out�but lets just say the only sound in the room was my Dad laughing quietly. Akward. I think we all have this kinda story. That one movie with unexpected nudity which was accidentally watched with mom and dad. Shelly�s is Color of Night. Trama. | |||||||||||
