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This is a bit late because for some reason I found it difficult to write about this year's BNAT right away. As I look at my notepad - one of three steno pads that now have two BNATs worth of notes each - my notes are woefully inadequate compared to other years. Things seemed to move more quickly than usual, and so much of our experience - much more than in previous years - was not complete film experiences. Some people have dubbed this year "Clip-Numb-A-Thon." Sunday night at dinner, I heard someone call it - pardon the crudeness - "Hand-Job-A-Thon," as in we went there to get laid and got instead a series of ... yeah.
I don't feel that way, though there were a HECK of a lot of incomplete things and clips. And I feel like this year had the most underwhelming ending of any year that I've attended. However, I know that something special has happened if I'm immensely sad when it's over, and while I'm determined not to be childish and shed actual tears (gah - too late), I'm feeling rather emotional that it's all over for this year. More than usual, in fact. This was a special year to me.
The Journey
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angua9 was forced to listen to all of this on Friday, but here goes. I had a plan. I was going to walk from my apartment to the IHOP on 135th for a late, late dinner Thursday night before heading to Penn Station and thence to the Long Island airport for my early morning flight. I had scouted out the IHOP a couple of weeks before, to make sure it would be open, and its "hours" sticker said it was a 24-hour establishment, except on Sundays. So I took my bags - I was so proud to have condensed all my junk to just my carry-ons, though they were still heavy - and walked.
It was raining. I had a small umbrella, because I was afraid if I took my big one, I'd have to make it a carry on and check my bigger bag. So my head stayed dry, but little else did. I got to the IHOP, and it was CLOSED. My stomach growled a bit, and I thought Well, I can go to the all-nite diner across from Penn Station. (I'd been to that one at 3am, so I knew it wouldn't disappoint me.) So here I was, in Harlem, in the rain, after midnight. I thought I knew where the 1 train was from here, but I was wrong, so I settled for a bus stop. At this point, my head *had* gotten wet, and my shoes and socks were soaked through.
I took the bus down to 34th Street, but I was on the East Side and needed to be on the West Side. If you've ever been to New York, you probably know that it's incredibly easy to get 100 blocks uptown or downtown, but getting seven blocks east or west can be an epic tribulation. There was another bus that would take me west on 34th, but it was taking forever, and suddenly $5 for cab fare seemed a more-than-fair exchange for a few minutes spared from waiting and listening to this woman next to me yammer about bus schedules and continually ask me the time.
Dinner at the Tick-Tock was yummy (and most importantly, kept me dry), and it was a very short walk to Penn Station, where I would take a train to the Long Island airport. I was surprised that I had so little sitting around and glad that I had set out as early as I had. It was a nice, dry train ride, and I slept and dried off a little, but once I got to my stop, it was POURING even harder than before, so I got soaked all over again and now the wetness was extending to my bags and their contents. The plane ride was much less eventful, and I had fun watching Iron Man on my laptop before we landed in Austin where the temperature was in the 60s.
After lunch at the awesome Asian restaurant, Buffet Palace, I checked into my very nice hotel, took a shower, took care of my feet, which had been sitting in wet shoes and socks for several hours at that point, and got a few hours of sleep. I woke up and got dressed in the few things I had packed that were dry, and metangua9, who very obligingly had driven over so that we would not miss our annual tradition of December fellowship. We had Mexican food and margaritas at Guero's (if you've seen Tarantino's half of Grindhouse, you might be familiar with it), and went back to the hotel to watch a handful of West Wing episodes. There was much laughing at the super-peppy closing credits music which 99% of the time is completely inappropriate for the normally somber, tense, or emotional close of a WW episode.
The Day
The next morning, I made my preparations, kind of sad that I wouldn't be able to do my usual Downtown Traditions (like walking to the Four Seasons and using their bathroom - hey, it's MY tradition, shaddup), and checked out. I had breakfast at another Austin institution, Kerbey Lane Cafe, and made my way to the South Lamar Drafthouse. I wandered into the theater, wondering where everyone was, and soon discovered that BNAT-ers and standby hopefuls were congregating at an empty former shop just down the strip mall from the theater. I got my goodies - there were a LOT this time, and very good stuff (though nothing quite as awesome as an HD-DVD player :P). Hang on...
*rumbles through stuff* There were several t-shirts (official BNAT shirt and shirts from Black Dynamite, Monsters vs. Aliens, Valkyrie, and Benjamin Button). What I love about the shirts is that, for once, they will ALL fit, two of them are long-sleeved, and they are all well-designed shirts that I can actually see myself wearing. There were several DVDs, most notably Tropic Thunder (I am SO glad I waited to buy that - I was going to buy it in Austin and watch it on the plane ride back, and now I don't have to buy it!). There was a baseball cap, two Gentle Giant HP Bust-Ups (one Draco and one Neville). We got a bottle of "Sex Panther" cologne (remember this from Anchorman? ... "sixty percent of the time, it works every time"), and a Monsters vs. Aliens messenger bag filled with books, including (OMG) an artwork book from Trick 'r Treat. On top of all that, my Secret Santa had gotten me the Angels in America DVD, which is awesome because I love that movie.
After going through goodie bags and chatting a few minutes - and cooing oversmallerdemon's and his wife's adorable sleeping daughter - it was time to go into the theater. I was surprised, but pleased, that there was no checking of bags, and found my assigned seat - front row and center and right in front of Harry. I swear I'm not that cool and have no idea how I get so lucky. Being on the front row would make for a challenging viewing experience, but it also meant that I would see a lot of Harry and the special guests. I should say here that I've only spoken two words to Harry - an awed "thank you" at the end of BNAT 4 - but this year, me and my right-side neighbors talked to him quite a bit. It was the third BNAT for the girls to my right, and not the first but not nearly the seventh for my left-side neighbors, so I was kind of a novelty on my row.
My right-side neighbors, who I will call The Girls (I feel HORRIBLE that I didn't write down their names), and I excitedly watched as Elijah Wood - yep, that was really him on the list - chatted with Harry at the front. And we set ourselves up for a later squee as we speculated that the 3-D glasses on the table in front of us might for viewing of My Bloody Valentine 3-D. And gosh, we were hilariously giddy when we found out we were right.
The event started with an unexpected and utterly awesome event, whencargill started off our "Ten Commandments of BNAT" by presenting Harry with the Ten Commandments. THE Ten Commandments, actually held by Charlton Heston. This was one of four sets that were made for the movie, and it was the one in the best shape. The tablets were not Harry's to keep, but we had them for 24 hours, so it was like DeMille himself was watching over our proceedings, and that was pretty darn cool.
At some point in these early minutes, something happened (for not the first time in the evening) that I was glad for. You may remember that last year there was a great deal of kerfluffle about a movie called The Poughkeepsie Tapes. The BNAT audience hated it, and though I thought the idea was ridiculous at the time ... I think the BNAT audience really did kill that movie and any chance it had at distribution. There was an explosion of egos on the TalkBack ofcargill's review on AICN, culminating in Drew McWeeny (aka, Moriarty) going to a CHUD.com message board and calling the BNAT audience a bunch of "over-entitled c*nts." Not cool, and he eventually realized it. Which made it kind of awesome that Harry ribbed him for it repeatedly throughout BNAT 10, because it diffused a lot of that old ugliness.
We kicked the on-screen happenings off with some great trailers, including STUNT RAWKER!, and Jeff Mahler - who has been mercilessly messed with by previous promises to show his favorite movie Teen Wolf at BNAT (which always plays for a couple of minutes, before the reel melts) - got the thrill of his life when Teen Wolf himself (okay, a guy in a costume) came up to the stage and signed a basketball for him ("To the Littlest Jew, from Teen Wolf"). As in previous years, Tim League promised that this year we really would see Teen Wolf, but it was yet another tease, and Tim told poor Jeff that if he held tight to that basketball and wished hard enough, maybe some year we really would see the whole thing.
And after all of that, it was time for our first feature. Only once has BNAT started with something new, so it was time to reach back to 1934 and see...
Viva Villa (1934)
This was nominated for Best Picture for 1934. Harry told us about some drama that surrounded the directorship of this movie, but I didn't write it down and don't remember very well now. In short, there are two directors, one of them the legendary Howard Hawkes, who did not receive any credit for this film, and if you asked Hawkes he would have told you that most of the footage that ended up as the final film is stuff he shot. Others would claim differently, and I imagine very few people know the truth.
Like most first films of BNAT, this one is a little racist. That's pretty much how it was for early Hollywood movies about a foreign culture. I think people back then just didn't see or care about how important it was to do research on the culture being depicted.
Wallace Beery stars as Pancho Villa, and I concur with Harry's claim that Beery greatly resembles a "shaved King Kong" here, particularly in his scenes with Fay Wray. This is a fairly generous and sympathetic (albeit fictional) portrayal of Villa, and there's a kind of puppy dog quality to him. More than once in the film The Girls and I would utter an "awwwww," most notably on the several occasions where he would ask "What I do wrong?" There's a great deal of humor in this film as well. You could play a drinking game with the number of times Villa tells someone to "SHUT UP!" And his frustration with an artist that he's forcing to write letters for him is hysterical as the artist, against Villa's wishes, continually draws pigeons on everything he's asked to write. There's some great stuff with a jounalist, Johnny Sykes (played by Stuart Erwin), who introduces himself and his financial situation thusly - "I'm a journalist ... all brains ... no dough."
Also, I have to say this ... this is possibly the slashiest movie about straight people that I've ever seen. So much so that I later dubbed it "Brokeback Villa." Villa's admiration for visionary Francisco Madero is genuine, and in stark contrast to his bandito persona, but it comes across as rather homoerotic. The two are portrayed as great friends, but it's the kind of "bromance" relationship that has a different cultural context today than it did seventy-five years ago, when this film was made.
A great beginning to a great night, and next AICN writer Capone introduced what was probably my favorite film of the night...
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
Oh wow. This film is just about perfect. If you've seen the trailer, you pretty much know the set-up. Brad Pitt plays Benjamin, a man that is born old and ages backwards. He's wrinkled and wheelchair-bound when he's seven and playing with toy soldiers. He's experiencing the early stages of dementia when he gangly and pimple-faced. This is a fascinating concept, and I suppose it could have been horrible if it were handled in the wrong way. Thankfully, it was in the hands of David Fincher, who, having directed things like Se7en and The Game, is not someone I would associate with a film like this, but who handles the material with an enormous amount of sensitivity and emotion.
The framing story takes place in 2005 in New Orleans, on that day. Cate Blanchett, in the most convincing old age makeup and giving the most convincing old age performance by a non-old person I have EVER seen, is lying in a hospital (or perhaps nursing home) bed as her character Daisy has Benjamin's diary read to her by her daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond). As the story progresses, hurricane Katrina is getting closer, and what you end up with in the final scene is a subtle and perfect reminder of one of the film's most poignant themes - nothing lasts.
This film might remind you of Forrest Gump - it was actually written by Gump's screenwriter, Eric Roth - and there are some striking similarities. Only in this film, the main character is just going through the ordinary stages of life as an apparent outsider to most of those stages. He loses his virginity, for example, as someone who appears to be a man in his 70s, and he falls in love with Daisy when they're both very young, but he appears to be quite old (which causes some controversy, since he looks like a dirty old man who has an inappropriate relationship with a child).
Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett act the hell out of their roles, and I was repeatedly struck with the complexity of their characters and the complications of Benjamin's actual age versus his apparent age. Brad and Cate sell this at every moment and make it utterly believable. This joins the pantheon as one of the Great Love Stories I've ever seen. Romantic, bittersweet, passionate ... everything. I love that the kind of apex of their romance takes place in the 1960s, and though they're not married, they very much seem like a young married couple, living their "free love" in a house with very little furniture and only a mattress for a bed, but happier than they've ever been or ever will be in their lives.
Also, something rather special happened during our watching of this movie. We were told before it started that the wait staff was going to bring us something during the film, and that we were not to partake until the film came to a point where it was obvious that we were supposed to do so. When they brought out the items, I couldn't even tell what it was in the dark. It came in a little liqueur glass, but it wasn't liquid, and a few minutes later it was joined by a shot-glass of something wet (and, I presumed, alcoholic). Relatively early in the film, Benjamin has an affair with a woman played by Tilda Swinton. One evening, she takes him to a restaurant that (if I recall correctly) she wasn't that impressed with, but they serve the best ... caviar and vodka. We all looked at the items on the table in front of us and gave an appreciative response. Over the next few moments there was a series of clinks as everyone enjoyed their dollop of caviar (served with cream cheese to cut the saltiness) and shot of vodka. And a few scattered choking noises from people whose throats weren't ready for the vodka. :P Thank you, Tim and the Drafthouse. That was pretty magical.
A mistake (though only slight) for me, though, for while it didn't make me tipsy or sick or anything, the vodka sent itself and the large amount of Dr. Pepper I had already consumed that afternoon straight to my bladder. I held it with all my might, because I never (with only a few exceptions in my entire life) leave movies to go to the bathroom, and I was particularly loathe to leave this one, having fallen in love with it already. But somewhere near the end of Act 2, it was clear that I was doing bodily damage to myself, so I hobbled out and made myself feel better, hoping that I wasn't missing something *too* important or special. But it's okay, because I'm definitely seeing this one again.
Two cool things - one funny and one not. If you see this film, watch for a recurring minor character who tells Benjamin about his experiences being struck by lightning seven times. Hilarious! And one of my favorite little details of the film is the story of a clockmaker who lost his son in WW1 and was commissioned to design a clock for a public place in New Orleans. When he unveiled it, he announced that he designed it to go backwards, to express the sense of loss of he and other parents felt who had lost their boys to war, and the wistful hope that if time moved backward they might have them back.
One more thing about Benjamin Button. Later in the evening, Elijah Wood would be chatting with some guys outside and mention that this film ran a little long, to which his companions would respond "Um ... Frodo?" (Translation: "Dude, you were in a nine-hour movie."). Their point was taken. :P
Next was the first of many partial screenings and the first of three helpings of 3-D over the course of the evening. Two fairly long sequences that added up to a little over 20 minutes of...
Coraline (2009)
This thing looks incredible! It's been a while since I read the book, so there were things in the movie that I don't remember from the book, but which may very well be there. Coraline's look is a little different than I thought, but she's as quirky and independent as I hoped she would be. There's a genuinely cool-but-slightly-creepy Roald Dahl-ish tone that's exactly how I felt reading the book.
In addition, this was probably the best use of 3-D technology of all three such films during the event. You literally feel as if you have been propelled into the world of the book, which is exactly what 3-D should do and which is so perfect for this story. Coraline crawls through the tunnel/portal, and you feel like you're crawling through it right with her. This was genuinely amazing, and I can't wait to see the finished product next year. Even if it's (*sigh*) yet another Dakota Fanning movie.
Next was a WW2 double feature, starting with...
Sahara (1943)
Humphrey Bogart looks quite young in this, but this came out the same year as Casablanca, so he can't have been *that* young. Viva Villa started us on the path of Fighting The Man movies, and this one continued in that vein. A great Us vs. Them movie, pitting a handful of American and British soldiers (and one Frenchman) against several hundred Germans. It reminded me a bit of 300 that way, but this is a much better film, in my opinion. :-)
The film revolves around a group of Allied soldiers during the Western Desert Campaign of WW2. A US tank gets separated from its unit and the crew picks up some stragglers at a hospital - among them some British soldiers and a French soldier. Later in the story, they're joined by a Sudanese soldier and his Italian prisoner, and a German Luftwaffe pilot, whose plane the Allied soldiers shoot down. In an effort to find much-needed water, they go in search of a desert well. There is very little water, but they take what they can. When they discover that a German battalion is headed their way, Bogart's character comes up with a plan to stall them and (hopefully) take them prisoner, using the water as leverage to lure them.
This is not one of the greatest war films ever, but it is a great movie. The actor who played the Italian prisoner was nominated for an Oscar and at the BNAT screening, his big scene where he stands up to the German soldier got some hefty applause. Bogart is pretty memorable here as well, and utters one of my favorite lines of the film. Referring to his tank that badly needs gasoline, he says "It's like dames - if you don't feed 'em they won't do nothin'."
And from the 1940s version of WW2 to a more modern take, we followed Sahara with...
Valkyrie (2008)
This was one of the strongest premieres of the night. I've read several pans of this movie, and I don't get that. This is pretty outstanding. And like the best movies about historical events, even though you know how the movie's going to end, it still manages to maintain suspense. You know the assassination attempt isn't going to work, but you still root for the people involved and get nervous for them when they're in trouble.
Valkyrie is based on a true story about a group of German soldiers who try to assassinate Hitler and take over the country in order to make peace with the Allies. At the end of the movie we learn that this was one of fifteen - FIFTEEN - attempts to assassinate Hitler. There's an incredibly intricate plan in place, and we're reminded early on that nothing ever goes exactly as you plan. The stakes could not be higher, and these men have to do some pretty incredible things just to move things forward. There's a tense-funny moment where they're going over the next step and Bill Nighy hands Cruise the amended Operation Valkyrie document and says "You'll just need to get Hitler to sign that."
People have criticized Tom Cruise for his American accent in this film, but there's a couple of reasons why I feel that doesn't matter. First of all, there's a nice voice-over effect at the beginning, where Cruise's character sets the story up. He's speaking German at first, and it morphs into English, as if the movie is saying 'here's the real world where the story happened, but we're tweaking it so that you can better understand it.' Secondly, Cruise isn't the only one who keeps his non-German accent. It's like an old movie where instead of trying the correct accent and taking the focus away from their performances the actors just use their own accents.
This is a pretty great film, in my opinion. I love what I saw to be the theme of it, which is that it wasn't a failure that they ultimately didn't succeed. They tried, and it's stories like theirs that remind us that not all Germans approved of Hitler and his methods.
And, just as a smaller note, I love seeing character actors unexpectedly that I know from other films. I was particularly excited to see Kevin McNally and did a little Gibbs squee. It was kind of a Pirates reunion with him and David Schofield (Mercer) and the exquisite Bill Nighy.
Next, if Benjamin Button was my favorite new film of BNAT 10, this was a very close second, and might have been tops if we'd seen the whole thing. As it was, we saw just about half of Pixar's 2009 release...
Up
Pixar kind of has a pattern going, where one year they'll do a high-concept film like Cars and WALL-E, set in fully realized alternate realities that easily lend themselves to marketing tie-ins and toys, and the next year they'll do something more esoteric and character-driven, like Ratatouille and this film. I can tell you right now that you have no idea what this film is about. All I'd ever seen of this film was the trailer - which is all anyone but the Pixar folks, a small audience in Oregon and the BNAT 10 audience has seen yet - and it doesn't do the story justice at all. It's a true teaser, but it doesn't really let you know anything about what makes this film special. And oh man, is it special.
We start with a young boy named Carl who is at the movies. One of the newsreels talks about an explorer that Carl clearly admires, who went to an exotic place called (IIRC) Paradise Falls (or maybe Adventure Falls, but that doesn't sound quite right - again, my notes are lousy). The explorer brought back the skeleton of some prehistoric creature, but scientists were dubious and went about discrediting him. Carl is outraged at this injustice and dreams one day of exploring Paradise Falls himself. He meets another child, Ellie. A girl who is just as nuts about exploring (and about the explorer from the newsreel) as Carl is. They form an explorer club, and the girl shows him her adventuring scrapbook, which has a huge empty section she's labeled "Stuff I'm Going to Do." We flash forward to some years later. Carl and Ellie are getting married, and there's this wonderful montage of their life together - buying a house, getting pregnant (and even a clear indication that Ellie loses the baby), and growing old together. We see them putting their loose change in a jar marked "Paradise Falls," and repeatedly having to break into it to take care of some mundane domestic disaster - leaky roof, broken window, etc. Their dreams are continually delayed, and eventually Ellie dies, but Carl (senior version voiced by Ed Asner) has not given up. On the verge of being forcibly sent to a nursing home for walloping someone with his cane (four-footed, with little tennis balls - it's so cute!), he decides to act. Having made his living selling balloons, he gets a bunch of helium, blows up thousands of balloons, and attaches them to his house. This gets the house off the ground, and he's even affixed sails to the windows, so that he can steer the house to Paradise Falls.
He is unexpectedly joined by a boy scout, who has been trying to help Carl in order to get a scout badge. They find themselves outside of the house and unble to climb the rope to get back inside, and by now they're just shy of where Carl had planned to land the house. Carl decides that they'll walk the house (which is still above the ground) to the top of the falls, where Carl and Ellie dreamed of living since they were children. While on the island, the boy scout sort of adopts a giant tropical bird, and they are also joined by a talking dog. Talking, because he's wearing a collar that interprets his brain waves and translates his thoughts. Whoever thought of this character (and the other three dogs, which you meet a few minutes later) must own a dog, because there is a perfect little dialogue quirk that encapsulates how dogs' sense of priorities is different than humans. They can be dead set on some serious errand and just be randomly distracted by something trivial that catches their eye. I can't explain it in any more detail than that, and I won't spoil the gag for you, because the less you know the funnier it will be, but it had everyone in the audience randomly shouting "Squirrel!" for the rest of BNAT.
I am truly, truly excited to see this movie, and I LOVE that - even though we saw half of it - I have no idea where it's going next. We talked with the co-directors before and after watching this, and they explained that some of what we would see was storyboards and not yet animated. And Harry, in turn, explained to them that we were the geekiest film geeks that ever geeked and could probably follow it, regardless. :P They told us, too, about some of the merchandising suggestions that have been made, such as dog collars and remote control houses.
Next up was probably the coolest vintage event of the night. I'd seen this film before, but not like this. Harry prefaced it by saying this is not the Ultimate way to see this film, but it's definitely the most fun. So we settled in for the 1984 re-release of...
Metropolis (1927, 1984 re-release)
This is a film that has been re-released a billion times, it seems. Every few years, it seems like they find another reel or more footage and release "the version with more footage than you've ever seen before." According to Harry, the KINO version (available on Netflix) is the ultimate viewing experience of this silent era classic, but the 1984 re-release is massively fun, especially if you're a child of the 1980s and geek out whenever you hear Billy Squier or Freddy Mercury.
The movie is set in a futuristic city called Metropolis, where the people are divided into two distinct classes - the thinkers/planners, who live in the glorious city, and the workers, who work and dwell far beneath it. The workers are badly mistreated and their only hope comes from a woman named Maria, who is a sort of prophetess and tells the workers that there needs to be a mediator (a "heart") between the "head" (the thinkers) and the "hands" (the workers). When a son of one of the planners finds himself in the underground dwelling of the workers, he takes pity on them and swaps places with one of them, getting a first-hand look at what it means to be one of them and falling in love with Maria. Meanwhile, an inventor has created the ultimate robot, and one of the planners (the young man's father) persuades him to kidnap Maria and make the robot look like her, so that he can use the robot to better control the workers.
This was a great film to begin with, and I won't say the music improves it, but ... it does the kind of thing that Baz Luhrmann does with Moulin Rouge, which is to use music to try and press the buttons of your cultural knowledge base. But I agreed with the gentlemen on my left, who joked that it reminded them of an early Michael Jackson dance video. I offered Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation," which they thought was a perfect analogy, and we wondered if those videos had been inspired by this movie.
Next was another tease, two long clips from...
Monsters vs. Aliens (2009)
This was another 3-D taste, but probably the least effective use of 3-D of any of them. Not to say the 3-D is bad, but it doesn't make as much use of the technology as it might. The 3-D aspect is almost an afterthought. The concept is that 50 years ago, there were monsters, and the government captured them (so they're versions of the classic 1950s Universal monsters - Human Insect, 50-Foot Woman, Blob, etc.). When aliens land on Earth, the President (voiced by Stephen Colbert) tries to communicate with them, but that turns out pretty badly. So the government decides to set the monsters free to fight the aliens. What we saw was the President's attempt to communicate with one of the aliens, followed by a "war room" scene where a General W.R. Monger (voiced by Keifer Sutherland) suggests they use the monsters, and the first battle scene (which we thought at first was the climax, until we were told that was just at the 30-minute mark).
In addition to Stephen and Keifer, other voice talent in this film includes Hugh Laurie as the Dr. Cockroach, Seth Rogen as the B.O.B., Will Arnett as The Missing Link, and Reese Witherspoon as Ginormica (who is really the main hero of the piece). Some people found this kind of meh, but I loved it, and can only imagine the extreme glee that the toys from this will bring - toy soldiers, monsters, AND aliens! This was another film that was accompanied by its director, and we had an interesting Q&A with him after the clips were shown.
Someone on our row, during the break, asked Harry if any of the films coming up would satisfy our gore-lust, and he said "Um, maybe the next one?" though he wasn't sure at the time. Oh yeah, baby, it did.
My Bloody Valentine 3-D (2009)
When this title was announced, something pretty hilarious happened on our row. See, when I think of horror fans, I don't think of girls. Or girly things. Or girly behavior. Even the idea of setting a horror movie around Valentine's Day seems incongruous to me. But perhaps my favorite memory of this year's BNAT was the reaction of myself and The Girls upon hearing that we were about to see My Bloody Valentine 3-D. Which was ... to squeal like a bunch of fangirls who just saw Robert Pattinson at a Twilight fan convention event. Let me walk you through it one more time...
HARRY: Our next film will be My Bloody Valentine.
THREE GIRLS: SQUEEEEOMGWTFBBQ!ELVIS!!!!!1ELEVENTYSEVEN!
This movie pretty much rocked my face off. Is it Halloween? Heck no. But it revels in the badness of 1980s horror. And in 3-D! Yes, there's a pretty ludicrous story and an even more ludicrous resolution. Yes, there are a few too many 3-D gag shots with the pick-axe. But it doesn't matter, because it's SO. MUCH. FUN.
It's about a mining town called (snerk) Harmony that has been rocked by tragedy. Headlines and radio bulletins give us a backstory about a mine cave-in where the only people who survived the actual cave-in were brutally murdered by one of their own, who slaughtered them with a pick-axe before something happened (that I don't remember) to put him in a coma. He wakes from the coma years later and goes on another killing spree. And this isn't just Jason-level gore. This dude is like the plague - a limb-chopping, blood-splattering plaque. We find his hospital room STREWN with hacked bodies, and the police surmise that he's headed for the mine. Naturally, there are a bunch of teenagers having a party at the mine for Valentine's Day, and many of them die in an extraordinarily gruesome fashion. Seriously. He takes a shovel and rams it into this girl's face, at first just giving her a Joker smile, but eventually ramming the shovel through her head and into a post, decapitating her from the jaw up, so that her body from the bottom third of her head down just slides down the post. It was pretty awesome.
Lots of great kills in this movie and classic horror movie dumbness (oh, NOW you hit the alarm) as well as twists on the same. Lots of great "boo" moments, and even though the ending is silly and fairly predictable, the film still manages to do a good job of keeping up suspense about who the bad guy is. And fans of Jensen Ackles will be pleased to know that they can enjoy his prettiness for a great deal of the movie's running time. Oh, and for the fellas, there's loads of T&A.
After the film, we were joined by the director and two of the film's stars, Jaime King and Megan Boone. They talked about the usual filming stuff, and the fact that they shot way more than they intended to use to kind of fool the MPAA into giving them the R-rating without having to cut the stuff they wanted.
Next was a comedic offering. A new Paul Rudd comedy called...
I Love You, Man (2009)
This is in the same vein of the Judd Apatow/Seth Rogen crude comedies. This time the focus is male relationships. Well, all of these types of films are about that in some way or another, but this one really tackles the etiquette of a guy starting up a friendship with another guy. Giving out your number, what signals to give to make sure the other guy doesn't interpret your advances as romantic, the Man-Date, etc. Basically, Paul Rudd plays a guy who has just gotten engaged, and his fiancee is worried about the fact that he doesn't have any real guy friends. We see why that is almost immediately. He just doesn't come off as cool or the kind of guy that you want to hang out with. He's not very confident with other guys, he can't do the random nickname ("Steve-a-rino!") thing (though his efforts are HYSTERICAL). But he kind of hits it off with a guy named Sydney (Jason Segel), and the bromance begins.
This film isn't as good as, say, Knocked Up or Superbad or Pineapple Express. But there's enough there to love to make it worth seeing. And if you love the band Rush - and really, who doesn't - you'll love Rudd and Segel jamming out to "Limelight." Sunday night, I went back to Guero's for dinner, and that song was playing. I couldn't help thinking of Paul Rudd and "slappin' da bass."
This movie led to the second freebie from Tim and the Drafthouse. There's a scene early in the film where Rudd and several guys do a beer boat race (Google it if you don't know what it is - I'm no good at explaining it). Just before the film was over, we were all handed a bottle of Miller Lite, and after the film, Tim invited us all to have a toast to Harry, followed by a "boat race" (only not an actual race, just the chugging and slamming of empty bottles on the table). I'm not a beer drinker, but I managed a few swallows before making the "AHCK" face and putting the bottle down. Let no one say I'm not a sport. :-)
It had come to that time in the event - the wee hours of the morning - where we saw something weird, contoversial, and wonderful...
White Dog (1982)
This was a film by Samuel Fuller, who made Pickup on South Street, which was a hit at last year's BNAT. White Dog pretty much ruined Fuller's career, in what I can only assume was a furor about the film's content before anyone had even seen it.
Kristy McNichol plays an actress who is driving through Hollywood Hills one night and hits a dog. She takes the dog - a beautiful white German Shepherd - to the vet and gets him taken care of. She's reluctant to take him to the pound, because of what will happen if no one claims him in the next few days, so she takes him home and puts up posters herself, halfway hoping that the owners will not call because she loves the dog. She loses track of him one day, when he goes chasing a rabbit, and we see him viciously attack and kill a black man. As it turns out, he isn't just a white dog. He's a White Dog, and has been trained to attack and kill black men on sight.
Kristy and Burl Ives contact an animal trainer (Paul Winfield) to try and recondition the dog, though it's dubious whether any attempts will cure the dog entirely. It looks as though he's had some success, though, and Kristy goes to pick the dog up. On her way, she encounters a man and his two children. She thinks they're fans, but soon finds out that they're the owners of the dog, and the man trained the dog himself.
I can see why this would have been controversial, but it's not offensive at all and really is a pretty good film. The theme is pretty obvious - that racism is taught, not innate. And the black animal trainer's tenacious attempts to cure the dog, determined not to give up and kill him unless he absolutely has to, struck me as fairly poignant.
Next was Clip-A-Palooza, with short looks at three films and a longer look at at a fourth.
Push (2009)
I don't remember much about this except that it has Dakota Fanning in it, trying to be edgy, and a guy whose superpower appears to be the ability to make fish tanks and fish explode.
Knowing (2009)
This is a Nicholas Cage film. I've seen the trailer, where kids draw their visions of the future and put them in a time capsule, and fifty years later they dig them up, finding lots of drawings of spaceships and flying cars and one drawing of ... a bunch of numbers, which Cage's character somehow figures out are dates for every disaster that has happened in the last fifty years. This was a decent action scene, but I'm not sold on the movie.
Terminator: Salvation (2009)
I was surprised that McG (I'd use his full name, but even his IMDB page lists him as "McG") brought this himself. The AICN TalkBackers (and even the writers) are pretty vicious about him sometimes, but he does certain kinds of films well and I was pretty impressed with what we saw of this movie. I also love that he talked to James Cameron about it and explained why he wanted to tell the story about how John Connor became the hero and leader he became and jump into that world that we only see glimpses of in Cameron's films.
And next was what a lot of us had been dying to see. It wasn't the whole thing, but the first 22 minutes is better than nothing, especially when we got to watch it with Rorschach.
Watchmen (2009)
The films starts with the Comedian's murder - a rather stellar fight scene, culminating in that great shot from the trailer of him going through the window. Oddly, my favorite part of what we saw was the credit sequence. Normally, I hate it when credits go over a film - I always want to ask the film "What do you want me to pay attention to - the movie or the names?" This part of the movie covers a lot of the backstory about the first generation of heroes, the Minutemen, and it's a series of live photo shots of the characters in deliberate poses - as if they're posing for news photographs. And the song playing over these shots is Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changing."
This footage also included the crime scene and Rorschach's diary, plus Rorschac's visit to Nite Owl II. This looks really, really great. It sucks we didn't get to see the whole thing, but it wasn't because some studio decided we couldn't. Zack Snyder is literally still mixing the rest of it, and there's nothing more to see that's in any kind of final form.
The footage was followed by a Q&A with Jackie Earle Haley, who plays Rorschach. If you saw Little Children, you might remember him as the newly paroled sexual predator. But you wouldn't recognize him in this film, because he wears a mask that covers his entire head. Someone asked him if he would do his Rorschach voice, and he said "Um, no thanks." It was great to see him geek out with the rest of us, because he was seeing this footage for the first time along with us.
We were kind of surprised to hear at 7-something AM that we only had one more film. And that film was...
Che (Part One and Part Two, 2009)
This is actually being released as two films in January, but the studio is releasing both parts as one movie for a week (this week, in fact) in NY and LA, so that it can get Oscar consideration. And the long version is the version we were seeing.
Okay, here's the thing. This is a very well-done film, especially the first part. There's what might be called a self-indulgence about it. It's clearly not a movie made to inform anyone who doesn't already know a good bit about the revolutionary Che Guevara, but if you do happen to know more than just a trivial amount of his life story, then you might find it an incredibly informative look at what kind of man and what kind of soldier he was. But while I can respect the filmmaking ... it was not a great film to close BNAT with. I think it was an awesome bookend to the event's theme of bucking the establishment, which began with a very different portrayal of that in Viva Villa. But closing a film geek event with a four-hour biopic was, in my opinion, not a great idea. I understand that something backed out, which led Harry to program this, and I can't think of another new film we saw that would have been an appropriate closer, along the lines of previous BNAT closers. Maybe Valkyrie or My Bloody Valentine, but I don't know. This would have worked much better earlier in the night, though.
In addition, as a subtitled movie, I found it VERY difficult to watch while seated in the front row. I could either look at the image or the subtitles, but never both. So I was missing a WHOLE lot of the visuals and what I'm sure was a great performance by Benicio del Toro just to keep up with what people were saying. And it made it that much harder to follow the characters (which I ultimately could not do).
I'd like to see this again, because I'm sure I'll get more out of it with a properly rested body and a seat a bit further back. But it ultimately ended the event on a down note. Again, not that it was a bad movie - it was just a bad time to show it, and asked a little much of the audience, I think.
There was a consensus at dinner Sunday night, though, that all of those fake "fight the power" hippies who buy shirts with Che's face on them at Banana Republic should be force-fed this movie. All four hours of it.
The Aftermath
The Drafthouse crew had to do a quick turnaround to get the theater ready for the Sunday movies, so there wasn't a lot of time to hang out in the theater afterwards. People drifted outside to the sidewalk and chatted a bit, but I was anxious to get to a shower and a bed (which I ultimately couldn't do until 3pm anyway). When I woke up later that evening, I became obsessed with the idea that I was somehow going to miss the Tex-Mex gathering that I had heard about. I had heard someone mention Guero's and I took a leap of faith, but I ended up eating alone. It wasn't until I was headed out the door that I found the group of BNAT-ers, seated by the front door. So I stayed for another hour or so and geeked out with everyone, thankful that I had managed to do at least one social thing with some of them. I opted out of the activities slated for later in the evening (though it would have been fun to go to Elysium and dance to 80s music), because I was just too pooped. Too pooped, it turned out, to even do much in the way of writing this report, which I didn't begin in earnest until Monday morning.
The trip back was blissfully uneventful, and I enjoyed watching the Director's Cut of Tropic Thunder that came in my BNAT goodie bag. I'm so happy I got to go this year, and I can't wait to try and get in again for BNAT 11. We're told that, since Harry is turning 38 next year and it's BNAT 11, the theme will be BNAT-1138, and we were encouraged to start coming up with themed photo ideas for next year's submissions.
...
I think I'll recover from this year first. :-)
I don't feel that way, though there were a HECK of a lot of incomplete things and clips. And I feel like this year had the most underwhelming ending of any year that I've attended. However, I know that something special has happened if I'm immensely sad when it's over, and while I'm determined not to be childish and shed actual tears (gah - too late), I'm feeling rather emotional that it's all over for this year. More than usual, in fact. This was a special year to me.
The Journey
Poor
angua9 was forced to listen to all of this on Friday, but here goes. I had a plan. I was going to walk from my apartment to the IHOP on 135th for a late, late dinner Thursday night before heading to Penn Station and thence to the Long Island airport for my early morning flight. I had scouted out the IHOP a couple of weeks before, to make sure it would be open, and its "hours" sticker said it was a 24-hour establishment, except on Sundays. So I took my bags - I was so proud to have condensed all my junk to just my carry-ons, though they were still heavy - and walked.It was raining. I had a small umbrella, because I was afraid if I took my big one, I'd have to make it a carry on and check my bigger bag. So my head stayed dry, but little else did. I got to the IHOP, and it was CLOSED. My stomach growled a bit, and I thought Well, I can go to the all-nite diner across from Penn Station. (I'd been to that one at 3am, so I knew it wouldn't disappoint me.) So here I was, in Harlem, in the rain, after midnight. I thought I knew where the 1 train was from here, but I was wrong, so I settled for a bus stop. At this point, my head *had* gotten wet, and my shoes and socks were soaked through.
I took the bus down to 34th Street, but I was on the East Side and needed to be on the West Side. If you've ever been to New York, you probably know that it's incredibly easy to get 100 blocks uptown or downtown, but getting seven blocks east or west can be an epic tribulation. There was another bus that would take me west on 34th, but it was taking forever, and suddenly $5 for cab fare seemed a more-than-fair exchange for a few minutes spared from waiting and listening to this woman next to me yammer about bus schedules and continually ask me the time.
Dinner at the Tick-Tock was yummy (and most importantly, kept me dry), and it was a very short walk to Penn Station, where I would take a train to the Long Island airport. I was surprised that I had so little sitting around and glad that I had set out as early as I had. It was a nice, dry train ride, and I slept and dried off a little, but once I got to my stop, it was POURING even harder than before, so I got soaked all over again and now the wetness was extending to my bags and their contents. The plane ride was much less eventful, and I had fun watching Iron Man on my laptop before we landed in Austin where the temperature was in the 60s.
After lunch at the awesome Asian restaurant, Buffet Palace, I checked into my very nice hotel, took a shower, took care of my feet, which had been sitting in wet shoes and socks for several hours at that point, and got a few hours of sleep. I woke up and got dressed in the few things I had packed that were dry, and met
angua9, who very obligingly had driven over so that we would not miss our annual tradition of December fellowship. We had Mexican food and margaritas at Guero's (if you've seen Tarantino's half of Grindhouse, you might be familiar with it), and went back to the hotel to watch a handful of West Wing episodes. There was much laughing at the super-peppy closing credits music which 99% of the time is completely inappropriate for the normally somber, tense, or emotional close of a WW episode.The Day
The next morning, I made my preparations, kind of sad that I wouldn't be able to do my usual Downtown Traditions (like walking to the Four Seasons and using their bathroom - hey, it's MY tradition, shaddup), and checked out. I had breakfast at another Austin institution, Kerbey Lane Cafe, and made my way to the South Lamar Drafthouse. I wandered into the theater, wondering where everyone was, and soon discovered that BNAT-ers and standby hopefuls were congregating at an empty former shop just down the strip mall from the theater. I got my goodies - there were a LOT this time, and very good stuff (though nothing quite as awesome as an HD-DVD player :P). Hang on...
*rumbles through stuff* There were several t-shirts (official BNAT shirt and shirts from Black Dynamite, Monsters vs. Aliens, Valkyrie, and Benjamin Button). What I love about the shirts is that, for once, they will ALL fit, two of them are long-sleeved, and they are all well-designed shirts that I can actually see myself wearing. There were several DVDs, most notably Tropic Thunder (I am SO glad I waited to buy that - I was going to buy it in Austin and watch it on the plane ride back, and now I don't have to buy it!). There was a baseball cap, two Gentle Giant HP Bust-Ups (one Draco and one Neville). We got a bottle of "Sex Panther" cologne (remember this from Anchorman? ... "sixty percent of the time, it works every time"), and a Monsters vs. Aliens messenger bag filled with books, including (OMG) an artwork book from Trick 'r Treat. On top of all that, my Secret Santa had gotten me the Angels in America DVD, which is awesome because I love that movie.
After going through goodie bags and chatting a few minutes - and cooing over
smallerdemon's and his wife's adorable sleeping daughter - it was time to go into the theater. I was surprised, but pleased, that there was no checking of bags, and found my assigned seat - front row and center and right in front of Harry. I swear I'm not that cool and have no idea how I get so lucky. Being on the front row would make for a challenging viewing experience, but it also meant that I would see a lot of Harry and the special guests. I should say here that I've only spoken two words to Harry - an awed "thank you" at the end of BNAT 4 - but this year, me and my right-side neighbors talked to him quite a bit. It was the third BNAT for the girls to my right, and not the first but not nearly the seventh for my left-side neighbors, so I was kind of a novelty on my row.My right-side neighbors, who I will call The Girls (I feel HORRIBLE that I didn't write down their names), and I excitedly watched as Elijah Wood - yep, that was really him on the list - chatted with Harry at the front. And we set ourselves up for a later squee as we speculated that the 3-D glasses on the table in front of us might for viewing of My Bloody Valentine 3-D. And gosh, we were hilariously giddy when we found out we were right.
The event started with an unexpected and utterly awesome event, when
cargill started off our "Ten Commandments of BNAT" by presenting Harry with the Ten Commandments. THE Ten Commandments, actually held by Charlton Heston. This was one of four sets that were made for the movie, and it was the one in the best shape. The tablets were not Harry's to keep, but we had them for 24 hours, so it was like DeMille himself was watching over our proceedings, and that was pretty darn cool.At some point in these early minutes, something happened (for not the first time in the evening) that I was glad for. You may remember that last year there was a great deal of kerfluffle about a movie called The Poughkeepsie Tapes. The BNAT audience hated it, and though I thought the idea was ridiculous at the time ... I think the BNAT audience really did kill that movie and any chance it had at distribution. There was an explosion of egos on the TalkBack of
cargill's review on AICN, culminating in Drew McWeeny (aka, Moriarty) going to a CHUD.com message board and calling the BNAT audience a bunch of "over-entitled c*nts." Not cool, and he eventually realized it. Which made it kind of awesome that Harry ribbed him for it repeatedly throughout BNAT 10, because it diffused a lot of that old ugliness.We kicked the on-screen happenings off with some great trailers, including STUNT RAWKER!, and Jeff Mahler - who has been mercilessly messed with by previous promises to show his favorite movie Teen Wolf at BNAT (which always plays for a couple of minutes, before the reel melts) - got the thrill of his life when Teen Wolf himself (okay, a guy in a costume) came up to the stage and signed a basketball for him ("To the Littlest Jew, from Teen Wolf"). As in previous years, Tim League promised that this year we really would see Teen Wolf, but it was yet another tease, and Tim told poor Jeff that if he held tight to that basketball and wished hard enough, maybe some year we really would see the whole thing.
And after all of that, it was time for our first feature. Only once has BNAT started with something new, so it was time to reach back to 1934 and see...
Viva Villa (1934)
This was nominated for Best Picture for 1934. Harry told us about some drama that surrounded the directorship of this movie, but I didn't write it down and don't remember very well now. In short, there are two directors, one of them the legendary Howard Hawkes, who did not receive any credit for this film, and if you asked Hawkes he would have told you that most of the footage that ended up as the final film is stuff he shot. Others would claim differently, and I imagine very few people know the truth.
Like most first films of BNAT, this one is a little racist. That's pretty much how it was for early Hollywood movies about a foreign culture. I think people back then just didn't see or care about how important it was to do research on the culture being depicted.
Wallace Beery stars as Pancho Villa, and I concur with Harry's claim that Beery greatly resembles a "shaved King Kong" here, particularly in his scenes with Fay Wray. This is a fairly generous and sympathetic (albeit fictional) portrayal of Villa, and there's a kind of puppy dog quality to him. More than once in the film The Girls and I would utter an "awwwww," most notably on the several occasions where he would ask "What I do wrong?" There's a great deal of humor in this film as well. You could play a drinking game with the number of times Villa tells someone to "SHUT UP!" And his frustration with an artist that he's forcing to write letters for him is hysterical as the artist, against Villa's wishes, continually draws pigeons on everything he's asked to write. There's some great stuff with a jounalist, Johnny Sykes (played by Stuart Erwin), who introduces himself and his financial situation thusly - "I'm a journalist ... all brains ... no dough."
Also, I have to say this ... this is possibly the slashiest movie about straight people that I've ever seen. So much so that I later dubbed it "Brokeback Villa." Villa's admiration for visionary Francisco Madero is genuine, and in stark contrast to his bandito persona, but it comes across as rather homoerotic. The two are portrayed as great friends, but it's the kind of "bromance" relationship that has a different cultural context today than it did seventy-five years ago, when this film was made.
A great beginning to a great night, and next AICN writer Capone introduced what was probably my favorite film of the night...
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
Oh wow. This film is just about perfect. If you've seen the trailer, you pretty much know the set-up. Brad Pitt plays Benjamin, a man that is born old and ages backwards. He's wrinkled and wheelchair-bound when he's seven and playing with toy soldiers. He's experiencing the early stages of dementia when he gangly and pimple-faced. This is a fascinating concept, and I suppose it could have been horrible if it were handled in the wrong way. Thankfully, it was in the hands of David Fincher, who, having directed things like Se7en and The Game, is not someone I would associate with a film like this, but who handles the material with an enormous amount of sensitivity and emotion.
The framing story takes place in 2005 in New Orleans, on that day. Cate Blanchett, in the most convincing old age makeup and giving the most convincing old age performance by a non-old person I have EVER seen, is lying in a hospital (or perhaps nursing home) bed as her character Daisy has Benjamin's diary read to her by her daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond). As the story progresses, hurricane Katrina is getting closer, and what you end up with in the final scene is a subtle and perfect reminder of one of the film's most poignant themes - nothing lasts.
This film might remind you of Forrest Gump - it was actually written by Gump's screenwriter, Eric Roth - and there are some striking similarities. Only in this film, the main character is just going through the ordinary stages of life as an apparent outsider to most of those stages. He loses his virginity, for example, as someone who appears to be a man in his 70s, and he falls in love with Daisy when they're both very young, but he appears to be quite old (which causes some controversy, since he looks like a dirty old man who has an inappropriate relationship with a child).
Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett act the hell out of their roles, and I was repeatedly struck with the complexity of their characters and the complications of Benjamin's actual age versus his apparent age. Brad and Cate sell this at every moment and make it utterly believable. This joins the pantheon as one of the Great Love Stories I've ever seen. Romantic, bittersweet, passionate ... everything. I love that the kind of apex of their romance takes place in the 1960s, and though they're not married, they very much seem like a young married couple, living their "free love" in a house with very little furniture and only a mattress for a bed, but happier than they've ever been or ever will be in their lives.
Also, something rather special happened during our watching of this movie. We were told before it started that the wait staff was going to bring us something during the film, and that we were not to partake until the film came to a point where it was obvious that we were supposed to do so. When they brought out the items, I couldn't even tell what it was in the dark. It came in a little liqueur glass, but it wasn't liquid, and a few minutes later it was joined by a shot-glass of something wet (and, I presumed, alcoholic). Relatively early in the film, Benjamin has an affair with a woman played by Tilda Swinton. One evening, she takes him to a restaurant that (if I recall correctly) she wasn't that impressed with, but they serve the best ... caviar and vodka. We all looked at the items on the table in front of us and gave an appreciative response. Over the next few moments there was a series of clinks as everyone enjoyed their dollop of caviar (served with cream cheese to cut the saltiness) and shot of vodka. And a few scattered choking noises from people whose throats weren't ready for the vodka. :P Thank you, Tim and the Drafthouse. That was pretty magical.
A mistake (though only slight) for me, though, for while it didn't make me tipsy or sick or anything, the vodka sent itself and the large amount of Dr. Pepper I had already consumed that afternoon straight to my bladder. I held it with all my might, because I never (with only a few exceptions in my entire life) leave movies to go to the bathroom, and I was particularly loathe to leave this one, having fallen in love with it already. But somewhere near the end of Act 2, it was clear that I was doing bodily damage to myself, so I hobbled out and made myself feel better, hoping that I wasn't missing something *too* important or special. But it's okay, because I'm definitely seeing this one again.
Two cool things - one funny and one not. If you see this film, watch for a recurring minor character who tells Benjamin about his experiences being struck by lightning seven times. Hilarious! And one of my favorite little details of the film is the story of a clockmaker who lost his son in WW1 and was commissioned to design a clock for a public place in New Orleans. When he unveiled it, he announced that he designed it to go backwards, to express the sense of loss of he and other parents felt who had lost their boys to war, and the wistful hope that if time moved backward they might have them back.
One more thing about Benjamin Button. Later in the evening, Elijah Wood would be chatting with some guys outside and mention that this film ran a little long, to which his companions would respond "Um ... Frodo?" (Translation: "Dude, you were in a nine-hour movie."). Their point was taken. :P
Next was the first of many partial screenings and the first of three helpings of 3-D over the course of the evening. Two fairly long sequences that added up to a little over 20 minutes of...
Coraline (2009)
This thing looks incredible! It's been a while since I read the book, so there were things in the movie that I don't remember from the book, but which may very well be there. Coraline's look is a little different than I thought, but she's as quirky and independent as I hoped she would be. There's a genuinely cool-but-slightly-creepy Roald Dahl-ish tone that's exactly how I felt reading the book.
In addition, this was probably the best use of 3-D technology of all three such films during the event. You literally feel as if you have been propelled into the world of the book, which is exactly what 3-D should do and which is so perfect for this story. Coraline crawls through the tunnel/portal, and you feel like you're crawling through it right with her. This was genuinely amazing, and I can't wait to see the finished product next year. Even if it's (*sigh*) yet another Dakota Fanning movie.
Next was a WW2 double feature, starting with...
Sahara (1943)
Humphrey Bogart looks quite young in this, but this came out the same year as Casablanca, so he can't have been *that* young. Viva Villa started us on the path of Fighting The Man movies, and this one continued in that vein. A great Us vs. Them movie, pitting a handful of American and British soldiers (and one Frenchman) against several hundred Germans. It reminded me a bit of 300 that way, but this is a much better film, in my opinion. :-)
The film revolves around a group of Allied soldiers during the Western Desert Campaign of WW2. A US tank gets separated from its unit and the crew picks up some stragglers at a hospital - among them some British soldiers and a French soldier. Later in the story, they're joined by a Sudanese soldier and his Italian prisoner, and a German Luftwaffe pilot, whose plane the Allied soldiers shoot down. In an effort to find much-needed water, they go in search of a desert well. There is very little water, but they take what they can. When they discover that a German battalion is headed their way, Bogart's character comes up with a plan to stall them and (hopefully) take them prisoner, using the water as leverage to lure them.
This is not one of the greatest war films ever, but it is a great movie. The actor who played the Italian prisoner was nominated for an Oscar and at the BNAT screening, his big scene where he stands up to the German soldier got some hefty applause. Bogart is pretty memorable here as well, and utters one of my favorite lines of the film. Referring to his tank that badly needs gasoline, he says "It's like dames - if you don't feed 'em they won't do nothin'."
And from the 1940s version of WW2 to a more modern take, we followed Sahara with...
Valkyrie (2008)
This was one of the strongest premieres of the night. I've read several pans of this movie, and I don't get that. This is pretty outstanding. And like the best movies about historical events, even though you know how the movie's going to end, it still manages to maintain suspense. You know the assassination attempt isn't going to work, but you still root for the people involved and get nervous for them when they're in trouble.
Valkyrie is based on a true story about a group of German soldiers who try to assassinate Hitler and take over the country in order to make peace with the Allies. At the end of the movie we learn that this was one of fifteen - FIFTEEN - attempts to assassinate Hitler. There's an incredibly intricate plan in place, and we're reminded early on that nothing ever goes exactly as you plan. The stakes could not be higher, and these men have to do some pretty incredible things just to move things forward. There's a tense-funny moment where they're going over the next step and Bill Nighy hands Cruise the amended Operation Valkyrie document and says "You'll just need to get Hitler to sign that."
People have criticized Tom Cruise for his American accent in this film, but there's a couple of reasons why I feel that doesn't matter. First of all, there's a nice voice-over effect at the beginning, where Cruise's character sets the story up. He's speaking German at first, and it morphs into English, as if the movie is saying 'here's the real world where the story happened, but we're tweaking it so that you can better understand it.' Secondly, Cruise isn't the only one who keeps his non-German accent. It's like an old movie where instead of trying the correct accent and taking the focus away from their performances the actors just use their own accents.
This is a pretty great film, in my opinion. I love what I saw to be the theme of it, which is that it wasn't a failure that they ultimately didn't succeed. They tried, and it's stories like theirs that remind us that not all Germans approved of Hitler and his methods.
And, just as a smaller note, I love seeing character actors unexpectedly that I know from other films. I was particularly excited to see Kevin McNally and did a little Gibbs squee. It was kind of a Pirates reunion with him and David Schofield (Mercer) and the exquisite Bill Nighy.
Next, if Benjamin Button was my favorite new film of BNAT 10, this was a very close second, and might have been tops if we'd seen the whole thing. As it was, we saw just about half of Pixar's 2009 release...
Up
Pixar kind of has a pattern going, where one year they'll do a high-concept film like Cars and WALL-E, set in fully realized alternate realities that easily lend themselves to marketing tie-ins and toys, and the next year they'll do something more esoteric and character-driven, like Ratatouille and this film. I can tell you right now that you have no idea what this film is about. All I'd ever seen of this film was the trailer - which is all anyone but the Pixar folks, a small audience in Oregon and the BNAT 10 audience has seen yet - and it doesn't do the story justice at all. It's a true teaser, but it doesn't really let you know anything about what makes this film special. And oh man, is it special.
We start with a young boy named Carl who is at the movies. One of the newsreels talks about an explorer that Carl clearly admires, who went to an exotic place called (IIRC) Paradise Falls (or maybe Adventure Falls, but that doesn't sound quite right - again, my notes are lousy). The explorer brought back the skeleton of some prehistoric creature, but scientists were dubious and went about discrediting him. Carl is outraged at this injustice and dreams one day of exploring Paradise Falls himself. He meets another child, Ellie. A girl who is just as nuts about exploring (and about the explorer from the newsreel) as Carl is. They form an explorer club, and the girl shows him her adventuring scrapbook, which has a huge empty section she's labeled "Stuff I'm Going to Do." We flash forward to some years later. Carl and Ellie are getting married, and there's this wonderful montage of their life together - buying a house, getting pregnant (and even a clear indication that Ellie loses the baby), and growing old together. We see them putting their loose change in a jar marked "Paradise Falls," and repeatedly having to break into it to take care of some mundane domestic disaster - leaky roof, broken window, etc. Their dreams are continually delayed, and eventually Ellie dies, but Carl (senior version voiced by Ed Asner) has not given up. On the verge of being forcibly sent to a nursing home for walloping someone with his cane (four-footed, with little tennis balls - it's so cute!), he decides to act. Having made his living selling balloons, he gets a bunch of helium, blows up thousands of balloons, and attaches them to his house. This gets the house off the ground, and he's even affixed sails to the windows, so that he can steer the house to Paradise Falls.
He is unexpectedly joined by a boy scout, who has been trying to help Carl in order to get a scout badge. They find themselves outside of the house and unble to climb the rope to get back inside, and by now they're just shy of where Carl had planned to land the house. Carl decides that they'll walk the house (which is still above the ground) to the top of the falls, where Carl and Ellie dreamed of living since they were children. While on the island, the boy scout sort of adopts a giant tropical bird, and they are also joined by a talking dog. Talking, because he's wearing a collar that interprets his brain waves and translates his thoughts. Whoever thought of this character (and the other three dogs, which you meet a few minutes later) must own a dog, because there is a perfect little dialogue quirk that encapsulates how dogs' sense of priorities is different than humans. They can be dead set on some serious errand and just be randomly distracted by something trivial that catches their eye. I can't explain it in any more detail than that, and I won't spoil the gag for you, because the less you know the funnier it will be, but it had everyone in the audience randomly shouting "Squirrel!" for the rest of BNAT.
I am truly, truly excited to see this movie, and I LOVE that - even though we saw half of it - I have no idea where it's going next. We talked with the co-directors before and after watching this, and they explained that some of what we would see was storyboards and not yet animated. And Harry, in turn, explained to them that we were the geekiest film geeks that ever geeked and could probably follow it, regardless. :P They told us, too, about some of the merchandising suggestions that have been made, such as dog collars and remote control houses.
Next up was probably the coolest vintage event of the night. I'd seen this film before, but not like this. Harry prefaced it by saying this is not the Ultimate way to see this film, but it's definitely the most fun. So we settled in for the 1984 re-release of...
Metropolis (1927, 1984 re-release)
This is a film that has been re-released a billion times, it seems. Every few years, it seems like they find another reel or more footage and release "the version with more footage than you've ever seen before." According to Harry, the KINO version (available on Netflix) is the ultimate viewing experience of this silent era classic, but the 1984 re-release is massively fun, especially if you're a child of the 1980s and geek out whenever you hear Billy Squier or Freddy Mercury.
The movie is set in a futuristic city called Metropolis, where the people are divided into two distinct classes - the thinkers/planners, who live in the glorious city, and the workers, who work and dwell far beneath it. The workers are badly mistreated and their only hope comes from a woman named Maria, who is a sort of prophetess and tells the workers that there needs to be a mediator (a "heart") between the "head" (the thinkers) and the "hands" (the workers). When a son of one of the planners finds himself in the underground dwelling of the workers, he takes pity on them and swaps places with one of them, getting a first-hand look at what it means to be one of them and falling in love with Maria. Meanwhile, an inventor has created the ultimate robot, and one of the planners (the young man's father) persuades him to kidnap Maria and make the robot look like her, so that he can use the robot to better control the workers.
This was a great film to begin with, and I won't say the music improves it, but ... it does the kind of thing that Baz Luhrmann does with Moulin Rouge, which is to use music to try and press the buttons of your cultural knowledge base. But I agreed with the gentlemen on my left, who joked that it reminded them of an early Michael Jackson dance video. I offered Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation," which they thought was a perfect analogy, and we wondered if those videos had been inspired by this movie.
Next was another tease, two long clips from...
Monsters vs. Aliens (2009)
This was another 3-D taste, but probably the least effective use of 3-D of any of them. Not to say the 3-D is bad, but it doesn't make as much use of the technology as it might. The 3-D aspect is almost an afterthought. The concept is that 50 years ago, there were monsters, and the government captured them (so they're versions of the classic 1950s Universal monsters - Human Insect, 50-Foot Woman, Blob, etc.). When aliens land on Earth, the President (voiced by Stephen Colbert) tries to communicate with them, but that turns out pretty badly. So the government decides to set the monsters free to fight the aliens. What we saw was the President's attempt to communicate with one of the aliens, followed by a "war room" scene where a General W.R. Monger (voiced by Keifer Sutherland) suggests they use the monsters, and the first battle scene (which we thought at first was the climax, until we were told that was just at the 30-minute mark).
In addition to Stephen and Keifer, other voice talent in this film includes Hugh Laurie as the Dr. Cockroach, Seth Rogen as the B.O.B., Will Arnett as The Missing Link, and Reese Witherspoon as Ginormica (who is really the main hero of the piece). Some people found this kind of meh, but I loved it, and can only imagine the extreme glee that the toys from this will bring - toy soldiers, monsters, AND aliens! This was another film that was accompanied by its director, and we had an interesting Q&A with him after the clips were shown.
Someone on our row, during the break, asked Harry if any of the films coming up would satisfy our gore-lust, and he said "Um, maybe the next one?" though he wasn't sure at the time. Oh yeah, baby, it did.
My Bloody Valentine 3-D (2009)
When this title was announced, something pretty hilarious happened on our row. See, when I think of horror fans, I don't think of girls. Or girly things. Or girly behavior. Even the idea of setting a horror movie around Valentine's Day seems incongruous to me. But perhaps my favorite memory of this year's BNAT was the reaction of myself and The Girls upon hearing that we were about to see My Bloody Valentine 3-D. Which was ... to squeal like a bunch of fangirls who just saw Robert Pattinson at a Twilight fan convention event. Let me walk you through it one more time...
HARRY: Our next film will be My Bloody Valentine.
THREE GIRLS: SQUEEEEOMGWTFBBQ!ELVIS!!!!!1ELEVENTYSEVEN!
This movie pretty much rocked my face off. Is it Halloween? Heck no. But it revels in the badness of 1980s horror. And in 3-D! Yes, there's a pretty ludicrous story and an even more ludicrous resolution. Yes, there are a few too many 3-D gag shots with the pick-axe. But it doesn't matter, because it's SO. MUCH. FUN.
It's about a mining town called (snerk) Harmony that has been rocked by tragedy. Headlines and radio bulletins give us a backstory about a mine cave-in where the only people who survived the actual cave-in were brutally murdered by one of their own, who slaughtered them with a pick-axe before something happened (that I don't remember) to put him in a coma. He wakes from the coma years later and goes on another killing spree. And this isn't just Jason-level gore. This dude is like the plague - a limb-chopping, blood-splattering plaque. We find his hospital room STREWN with hacked bodies, and the police surmise that he's headed for the mine. Naturally, there are a bunch of teenagers having a party at the mine for Valentine's Day, and many of them die in an extraordinarily gruesome fashion. Seriously. He takes a shovel and rams it into this girl's face, at first just giving her a Joker smile, but eventually ramming the shovel through her head and into a post, decapitating her from the jaw up, so that her body from the bottom third of her head down just slides down the post. It was pretty awesome.
Lots of great kills in this movie and classic horror movie dumbness (oh, NOW you hit the alarm) as well as twists on the same. Lots of great "boo" moments, and even though the ending is silly and fairly predictable, the film still manages to do a good job of keeping up suspense about who the bad guy is. And fans of Jensen Ackles will be pleased to know that they can enjoy his prettiness for a great deal of the movie's running time. Oh, and for the fellas, there's loads of T&A.
After the film, we were joined by the director and two of the film's stars, Jaime King and Megan Boone. They talked about the usual filming stuff, and the fact that they shot way more than they intended to use to kind of fool the MPAA into giving them the R-rating without having to cut the stuff they wanted.
Next was a comedic offering. A new Paul Rudd comedy called...
I Love You, Man (2009)
This is in the same vein of the Judd Apatow/Seth Rogen crude comedies. This time the focus is male relationships. Well, all of these types of films are about that in some way or another, but this one really tackles the etiquette of a guy starting up a friendship with another guy. Giving out your number, what signals to give to make sure the other guy doesn't interpret your advances as romantic, the Man-Date, etc. Basically, Paul Rudd plays a guy who has just gotten engaged, and his fiancee is worried about the fact that he doesn't have any real guy friends. We see why that is almost immediately. He just doesn't come off as cool or the kind of guy that you want to hang out with. He's not very confident with other guys, he can't do the random nickname ("Steve-a-rino!") thing (though his efforts are HYSTERICAL). But he kind of hits it off with a guy named Sydney (Jason Segel), and the bromance begins.
This film isn't as good as, say, Knocked Up or Superbad or Pineapple Express. But there's enough there to love to make it worth seeing. And if you love the band Rush - and really, who doesn't - you'll love Rudd and Segel jamming out to "Limelight." Sunday night, I went back to Guero's for dinner, and that song was playing. I couldn't help thinking of Paul Rudd and "slappin' da bass."
This movie led to the second freebie from Tim and the Drafthouse. There's a scene early in the film where Rudd and several guys do a beer boat race (Google it if you don't know what it is - I'm no good at explaining it). Just before the film was over, we were all handed a bottle of Miller Lite, and after the film, Tim invited us all to have a toast to Harry, followed by a "boat race" (only not an actual race, just the chugging and slamming of empty bottles on the table). I'm not a beer drinker, but I managed a few swallows before making the "AHCK" face and putting the bottle down. Let no one say I'm not a sport. :-)
It had come to that time in the event - the wee hours of the morning - where we saw something weird, contoversial, and wonderful...
White Dog (1982)
This was a film by Samuel Fuller, who made Pickup on South Street, which was a hit at last year's BNAT. White Dog pretty much ruined Fuller's career, in what I can only assume was a furor about the film's content before anyone had even seen it.
Kristy McNichol plays an actress who is driving through Hollywood Hills one night and hits a dog. She takes the dog - a beautiful white German Shepherd - to the vet and gets him taken care of. She's reluctant to take him to the pound, because of what will happen if no one claims him in the next few days, so she takes him home and puts up posters herself, halfway hoping that the owners will not call because she loves the dog. She loses track of him one day, when he goes chasing a rabbit, and we see him viciously attack and kill a black man. As it turns out, he isn't just a white dog. He's a White Dog, and has been trained to attack and kill black men on sight.
Kristy and Burl Ives contact an animal trainer (Paul Winfield) to try and recondition the dog, though it's dubious whether any attempts will cure the dog entirely. It looks as though he's had some success, though, and Kristy goes to pick the dog up. On her way, she encounters a man and his two children. She thinks they're fans, but soon finds out that they're the owners of the dog, and the man trained the dog himself.
I can see why this would have been controversial, but it's not offensive at all and really is a pretty good film. The theme is pretty obvious - that racism is taught, not innate. And the black animal trainer's tenacious attempts to cure the dog, determined not to give up and kill him unless he absolutely has to, struck me as fairly poignant.
Next was Clip-A-Palooza, with short looks at three films and a longer look at at a fourth.
Push (2009)
I don't remember much about this except that it has Dakota Fanning in it, trying to be edgy, and a guy whose superpower appears to be the ability to make fish tanks and fish explode.
Knowing (2009)
This is a Nicholas Cage film. I've seen the trailer, where kids draw their visions of the future and put them in a time capsule, and fifty years later they dig them up, finding lots of drawings of spaceships and flying cars and one drawing of ... a bunch of numbers, which Cage's character somehow figures out are dates for every disaster that has happened in the last fifty years. This was a decent action scene, but I'm not sold on the movie.
Terminator: Salvation (2009)
I was surprised that McG (I'd use his full name, but even his IMDB page lists him as "McG") brought this himself. The AICN TalkBackers (and even the writers) are pretty vicious about him sometimes, but he does certain kinds of films well and I was pretty impressed with what we saw of this movie. I also love that he talked to James Cameron about it and explained why he wanted to tell the story about how John Connor became the hero and leader he became and jump into that world that we only see glimpses of in Cameron's films.
And next was what a lot of us had been dying to see. It wasn't the whole thing, but the first 22 minutes is better than nothing, especially when we got to watch it with Rorschach.
Watchmen (2009)
The films starts with the Comedian's murder - a rather stellar fight scene, culminating in that great shot from the trailer of him going through the window. Oddly, my favorite part of what we saw was the credit sequence. Normally, I hate it when credits go over a film - I always want to ask the film "What do you want me to pay attention to - the movie or the names?" This part of the movie covers a lot of the backstory about the first generation of heroes, the Minutemen, and it's a series of live photo shots of the characters in deliberate poses - as if they're posing for news photographs. And the song playing over these shots is Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changing."
This footage also included the crime scene and Rorschach's diary, plus Rorschac's visit to Nite Owl II. This looks really, really great. It sucks we didn't get to see the whole thing, but it wasn't because some studio decided we couldn't. Zack Snyder is literally still mixing the rest of it, and there's nothing more to see that's in any kind of final form.
The footage was followed by a Q&A with Jackie Earle Haley, who plays Rorschach. If you saw Little Children, you might remember him as the newly paroled sexual predator. But you wouldn't recognize him in this film, because he wears a mask that covers his entire head. Someone asked him if he would do his Rorschach voice, and he said "Um, no thanks." It was great to see him geek out with the rest of us, because he was seeing this footage for the first time along with us.
We were kind of surprised to hear at 7-something AM that we only had one more film. And that film was...
Che (Part One and Part Two, 2009)
This is actually being released as two films in January, but the studio is releasing both parts as one movie for a week (this week, in fact) in NY and LA, so that it can get Oscar consideration. And the long version is the version we were seeing.
Okay, here's the thing. This is a very well-done film, especially the first part. There's what might be called a self-indulgence about it. It's clearly not a movie made to inform anyone who doesn't already know a good bit about the revolutionary Che Guevara, but if you do happen to know more than just a trivial amount of his life story, then you might find it an incredibly informative look at what kind of man and what kind of soldier he was. But while I can respect the filmmaking ... it was not a great film to close BNAT with. I think it was an awesome bookend to the event's theme of bucking the establishment, which began with a very different portrayal of that in Viva Villa. But closing a film geek event with a four-hour biopic was, in my opinion, not a great idea. I understand that something backed out, which led Harry to program this, and I can't think of another new film we saw that would have been an appropriate closer, along the lines of previous BNAT closers. Maybe Valkyrie or My Bloody Valentine, but I don't know. This would have worked much better earlier in the night, though.
In addition, as a subtitled movie, I found it VERY difficult to watch while seated in the front row. I could either look at the image or the subtitles, but never both. So I was missing a WHOLE lot of the visuals and what I'm sure was a great performance by Benicio del Toro just to keep up with what people were saying. And it made it that much harder to follow the characters (which I ultimately could not do).
I'd like to see this again, because I'm sure I'll get more out of it with a properly rested body and a seat a bit further back. But it ultimately ended the event on a down note. Again, not that it was a bad movie - it was just a bad time to show it, and asked a little much of the audience, I think.
There was a consensus at dinner Sunday night, though, that all of those fake "fight the power" hippies who buy shirts with Che's face on them at Banana Republic should be force-fed this movie. All four hours of it.
The Aftermath
The Drafthouse crew had to do a quick turnaround to get the theater ready for the Sunday movies, so there wasn't a lot of time to hang out in the theater afterwards. People drifted outside to the sidewalk and chatted a bit, but I was anxious to get to a shower and a bed (which I ultimately couldn't do until 3pm anyway). When I woke up later that evening, I became obsessed with the idea that I was somehow going to miss the Tex-Mex gathering that I had heard about. I had heard someone mention Guero's and I took a leap of faith, but I ended up eating alone. It wasn't until I was headed out the door that I found the group of BNAT-ers, seated by the front door. So I stayed for another hour or so and geeked out with everyone, thankful that I had managed to do at least one social thing with some of them. I opted out of the activities slated for later in the evening (though it would have been fun to go to Elysium and dance to 80s music), because I was just too pooped. Too pooped, it turned out, to even do much in the way of writing this report, which I didn't begin in earnest until Monday morning.
The trip back was blissfully uneventful, and I enjoyed watching the Director's Cut of Tropic Thunder that came in my BNAT goodie bag. I'm so happy I got to go this year, and I can't wait to try and get in again for BNAT 11. We're told that, since Harry is turning 38 next year and it's BNAT 11, the theme will be BNAT-1138, and we were encouraged to start coming up with themed photo ideas for next year's submissions.
...
I think I'll recover from this year first. :-)
accomplished