New To Me Movies

As a follow up to Tom’s post, I thought I’d round up some recent films I’ve seen.

I don’t get to the movies anymore of course – this is largely due to being skint, having a wean who still, after 3 long years, requires constant supervision and my longstanding hatred of watching a film without being able to have a fag.

I did get to see about 20 mins of “Happy Feet” the other weeks there, my daughter Jodie’s first ever trip to the cinema. This ended in disaster when, after mildly crying at the 30 foot across images suddenly dangled before her for the whole film, she totally lost the plot when the movie’s protagonist “Mumbles” (or whatever), the baby penguin was waylaid and threatened by some pretty nasty looking crows. We took our leave forthwith, having stuffed 14 quid firmly down the tubes.

I did see a couple of noteworthy recent films though, namely “Art School Confidential” and “Nacho Libre”.

I was confident “Art School Confidential” would be well worth a watch, coming as it was from the Clowes/Zwigoff stable that had given us the very enjoyable “Ghostworld” a while back.

But naw, it was pants. Written by Clowes, it’s a thin story based on a short from his comic Eightball and it lacks pretty much everything.

The main character was a complete cipher, with virtually no characteristics, flatly played by the appalling Max Minghella who mistook intensity for squinting throughout.

The source material provided all the comedy, but since that was a 3 page comic filler short, there is a totally unconvincing and dull love story tacked on and a ridiculous murder scenario chucked in as well, manifesting itself firstly as a distraction until the other strands of the tale totally run out of steam and the whothefuckcareswhodunnit plotline takes over.

Considering how talented Danny Clowes is, this is a surprisingly dull mess and I have to say that while I enjoyed his sneering arrogance when he was a struggling cartoonist, it’s a lot less endearing and amusing now he’s a big success.

John Malkovich for example plays a hack artist/professor whose character is sneered at throughout, despite the fact that he doesn’t really do anything to deserve it other than produce “bad art”. Quite the irony.

In stark contrast sits “Nacho Libre”, a daft yet quirkily original comedy from the makers of “Napoleon Dynamite” and Jack Black.

This is brain meltingly stupid in places but it works mainly thanks to the original production design and pacing and the fact that everyone knows they are making a daft comedy. And of course Jack Black throws himself totally into the daftness, somehow making his cod-performance entirely convincing.

Ok, it’s not the greatest film ever made but it blends dumb comedy extremely well with the endearing fascination with ordinary people that made “Napoleon Dynamite” so watchable.