Author: Josh K-sky

K-sky is pronounced KAY-ski. Or k-SKI if preceded by "Yo!"

Monday Movies’ Best Unseen Movies of 2012

~ Josh K-sky ~ 5 Comments

In keeping with past practice, here are my top 2012 movies I haven’t seen and want to:

  • Compliance
  • Les Misérables – please don’t ask how it’s possible that I haven’t seen it. Since Christmas, it’s been hard to invest an outing with the appropriate amount of hysteria.
  • Margaret
  • Take This Waltz
  • This Is 40
  • Your Sister’s Sister

Special consideration:

  • The Master. I reviewed it here, and even after reading Kent Jones’s magnum opus review in Film Comment, I still couldn’t get over the feeling I came away with — that the movie’s circle was too tightly closed around Freddie and Master. But I wish I’d seen the movie Jones did, and I’m very glad to have read his review.

What have you missed? (Here’s the comprehensive list I’m working from — it’s a mix of the Village Voice ballot and the Oscar reminder.)

Monday Movies Is a Little More Used to Americans Than He Is

~ Josh K-sky ~ 24 Comments

Have you seen Django Unchained yet? What did you think?

Quentin Tarantino’s films are such excesses of signifying that I get headachey trying to write anything comprehensive about what’s becoming known as his slavery revenge epic (not entirely accurately, for reasons I’ll get to). So I’ll throw out a couple of thoughts I had and hope that by now some of you will have enjoyed it and will throw in.

If you haven’t, I’m going to spoil away below the fold. You may prefer to prime your Tarantino pumps with this seemingly unending, possibly ouroborean, Kotsko-Canavan-et-al Twitter battle royale on the subject of Tarantino and revenge. I wrote a scattered summary of my thoughts on Tarantino before IB came out, and wrote about the use of language in its first scene here (with the return of polyglot performer Christoph Waltz as Dr. King Schultz, it remains relevant). AUFS discussed IB here, in many terms that pertain to Django.

Continue reading “Monday Movies Is a Little More Used to Americans Than He Is” →

Who Were Monday Movies?

~ Josh K-sky ~ 2 Comments

Holy Motors — Begin in a dream (at least, call it a dream) of pushing through a forest wall into the balcony of a movie theater; a child, or a dog, walks on the red-carpeted aisle below. The audience pays no attention. A girl watches through a window.

“Goodbye, Papa!” You are stout and grey, and you walk down the driveway of a compound where men stand on the rooftops. “Good morning, Monsieur Oscar,” says the driver of your limo, an elegant, tall blonde d’un certain age. So that is your name.

There are nine appointments today. In the limo, you dress for the first one, and emerge as a hunchbacked gypsy woman with a cane and a cup. You walk away from the limo and find yourself on a bridge, where you panhandle, muttering aloud — or maybe to yourself? No one stops. No one even sees.

Back in the car, you strip it all away. You are no longer the gypsy woman–what’s more, you are no longer stout or grey, but wiry and shaven bald. For each of your appointments, you will don prosthetics, clothes, years, emotions. You will commit acts of violence, some savage, some skilled, some simply by dint of parenting, some by way of motion capture. You will murder; you will die. You will repeat your lines.

It will emerge that you are performing, seemingly for cameras smaller than the eye can see. This idea of a total theater is complicated by some of its impossible effects: how is it that you can confront a man who resembles you entirely? Your patron appears in the limo, neither exiting nor entering. He suggests your heart isn’t in it.

Your heart… by some chance, your limo bangs into another performer’s. The two of you steal what appears to be a genuine moment — itself an aria sung from a balcony — before she gives a performance that appears to be her last.

Is this a world of total surveillance? Is it our own? Is the self a prison which only your costly exertions can obliterate? Is the home you start in and the different one you end in an impossible odyssey, a parody of permanence in a Heraclitean river of a life?

***

Merry Christmas, AUFS! Have some additional cheer.

Monday Movies Is Our Best Self Today

~ Josh K-sky ~ 3 Comments

Is the The Silver Linings Playbook, directed by David O. Russell, a romantic comedy? You might start to think so — clearly the story exists to unite Bradley Cooper’s broken motormouth Pat with Jennifer Lawrence’s angry widow Tiffany. Is the movie a romantic tragedy, about two people whose best hopes are ultimately misplaced in each other, or whose families’ inadequacies and suspicions trash their chances at happiness? It almost seems possible, as both crash over and over on the shoals of mania and heartbreak, that they’ll founder on them forever.
Continue reading “Monday Movies Is Our Best Self Today” →

You Never Confide Anything in Monday Movies, So We Have to Extrapolate

~ Josh K-sky ~ 4 Comments

Barcelona — Mrs. K-sky and I blew off our families, got on a plane, and spent Thanksgiving and the following week drowning our jet lag in small plates of small fish in the Catalonian capital. She’d never seen anything by Whit Stillman, so we queued up his 1994 sophomore effort for the flight back.

In high school and college, I’d loved Metropolitan and Barcelona (Last Days of Disco less so; recently, Damsels in Distress was a pleasant but underwhelming return) and I was a little nervous about going back to them. Without question, the movie holds up. Continue reading “You Never Confide Anything in Monday Movies, So We Have to Extrapolate” →

Monday Movies is Gonna Have Fun and You’re Gonna Have Fun

~ Josh K-sky ~ 5 Comments

Monday Movies is traveling this week. A few things we liked:

Via Gerry Canavan, a Zizekian reading of Wreck-It Ralph.

At Back to the World, Margaux Williamson reviews Moonrise Kingdom.

I really enjoy this blog, and especially Margaux’s voice for film reviews. She watches with an open mind and notices something about the film and expresses it clearly and simply. Doesn’t sound like the height of ambition but it always works. She’s a painter, I think, and there’s something about her simple but trenchant observations that I like to think comes from cross-training.

How about you? Do you still like movies? Did you see any? Did you make any?

Monday Movies Believes in a God With a Sense of Humor

~ Josh K-sky ~ 5 Comments

The Sessions is a beautiful story, tenderly told. Based on a widely linked 1990 magazine article, it is the (mostly) true story of Mark O’Brien, a thirty-something man with polio who lives confined to a wheeled bed or an iron lung and who, wishing to experience sexual connection, seeks out a sex surrogate. It is not a story of “triumphing over disability,” although there are various triumphs and more than one disabled character.

O’Brien, played by John Hawkes, is an observant Catholic who “can’t tolerate the idea of not having someone to blame for all this.” The movie cuts back and forth between the life he leads with attendants, friends, and the subjects of his writing, and his conversations with and confessions to Father Brendan, a liberal Berkeley priest (William H. Macy). The movie’s unshowy portrayal of O’Brien’s Catholicism is remarkable. O’Brien takes his religion seriously, and it provides a structure for both his succor and his shame, but it’s not a totalizing experience, just a part of his life. It’s one of many details — the Berkeley setting is another — that give the movie a subtle, lived-in specificity. When we first meet O’Brien, he’s crinkling his nose to fend off a sneeze; in two other scenes, characters lift their hands to scratch their noses, a throwaway gesture that illuminates the extent of O’Brien’s prison.

Helen Hunt plays Cheryl, the sex surrogate who O’Brien finds through a therapist. Hunt is matter-of-factly naked and sexual, and the movie’s comic heart lies in their awkward and tender sessions, limited to six. There is a drama of transference and counter-transference — more commonly known as a love story — that feels invented (the various articles bear that out), but the characters feel real throughout. One theme that returns is how O’Brien’s helpers’ partners get jealous of him — it’s well played with the boyfriend of one of his nurses, but a little strained with Cheryl’s husband.

Hawkes is a good bet for an Oscar nomination, but I’d bet against a win–the movie is moving, but not bombastically or unbearably so. There may be a little too much joy.

See any good movies?

Movies. Monday Movies.

~ Josh K-sky ~ 6 Comments

Skyfall is the twenty-third Bond movie and the third featuring Daniel Craig as the priapic spy. It argues the superiority of field agents over computer nerds, HUMINT over SIGINT, the old school vs. the new kids on the motherboard. And for all the thumbs that it puts on the scales — the Aston-Martin ungaraged to save the day after the hackers are out-hacked, the shaking-not-stirring — it winds up making its case against the spy game in toto more than for either the jocks or the nerds. It’s ambivalent to the point of nihilistic. Continue reading “Movies. Monday Movies.” →

Monday Movies Doesn’t Wear The Dress. Make Paul Wear The Dress

~ Josh K-sky ~ 5 Comments

Haywire is Steven Soderbergh at his leanest and most improvisational best. It bears a strong resemblance to The Limey, although it’s not as ambitious — as before, the director is working from a script by Lem Dobbs, although this time I get the sense that they are working more in concert than with knives drawn.

The story is a functional espionage thriller: Continue reading “Monday Movies Doesn’t Wear The Dress. Make Paul Wear The Dress” →

If Monday Movies Is Going To Make a Fake Movie, It’s Going To Be a Fake Hit

~ Josh K-sky ~ 2 Comments

If the first five minutes of Argo were shown in American high schools, we would not be talking about going to war with Iran. A quick scene-setting voice-over plainly lays out how the nationalization of oil resources by reformer Mohammed Mossadegh upset the United States, who backed a coup to install the brutal Reza Pahlavi as Shah. The Iranians rose up against the Shah, the U.S. allowed him in for medical treatment, and when student rioters took over the embassy in 1979, they demanded he be returned to them for justice.

The movie, based on a must-read Wired article by Joshuah Bearman, depicts the storming of the embassy, but leaves its hostages to tell the story of six lesser-known Americans, who escaped that day, hid in the home of the Canadian ambassador, and were eventually spirited out of Iran by CIA agent Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck, who also directed). Mendez disguised them as the director, screenwriter and scouting crew of the Star Wars rip-off Argo. Continue reading “If Monday Movies Is Going To Make a Fake Movie, It’s Going To Be a Fake Hit” →