Toshi and I have just been on a streak of good movies lately. The last 3 were really keen, and the last four were at least tolerable.
We started with Shanghai Knights. It was exactly what you'd expect, only with glaring historical glitches thrown in for the sake of cheesy jokes. The movie pinpoints itself as happening very precisely between the years 1897 and 1912. It happens in several years between those two, in the space of a week. It wasn't really a problem, except that this could have been avoided with the inclusion of fewer crappy jokes. That's all I really have to say about that. It's Jackie Chan. It's what you expect.
We saw Monster Squad, Toshi for the first time in years and me for the first time ever. It wasn't as bad as I'd heard. I liked several of the jokes, the effects were at that point in the 80's when they weren't quite horrible and they actually used the odd puppet instead of lousy computer animation. I thought the transformation scenes (Dracula to bat and vice versa, and human to wolf-man) were particularly good. The story is silly, but if you go into a movie called Monster Squad that touts its virtues relative to Ghostbusters, you have no right to be surprised when its silly. Ghostbusters is silly. This is silly.
Between these two, we saw a movie that was a genuinely pleasant surprise: Jeff Daniels' Escanaba in da Moonlight. What can I say about this movie without ruining it for everyone? Nothing, really. It's a movie about a man who hasn't shot a buck. It's a movie about hunting. It's a movie about Jeff Daniels. It's... It's artful, smooth, awfully close to home for those of us with a midwestern heritage and absolutely the nicest surprise I've had from a movie I knew nothing about. There isn't a bad performance from any character in the movie. Despite the handicap of having been made in 2001, this movie honestly projects the 80's Aura called for in the script. It's entirely possible that you need to walk into this movie expecting a comedy, but don't get your heart set on it. It's much more. It's beautifully screwed up, and by the time it's over, it's gotten so weird it's come out the other end and wound up back at normal. I'll bet the stage play was great.
Most recently, we watched Elling. It's about two men being relocated from a mental institution in Norway to a welfare apartment (in Norway). It's a great movie, but really, really intense. I found through the film that I wanted desperately to like Elling (Per Christian Ellefsen), but absolutely could not. I think that's one of the halmarks of a great performance, being able to show the complexity of wanting to be liked while being unlikable. Kjel Bjarne (Sven Nordin) comes across beautifully as a man with no guile thrust into a real world in which he only marginally functions. He wears his emotions on his sleeve and is, as Elling calls him right from the start, an orangutan interested only in food and women. Both actors are wonderfully believeable, and the duality of the personalities is played nicely. The cast is small, but every member does an admirable job of sinking the audience deeper into the story. It is very intense. We had to stop it for a breather and five minutes of King of the Hill to decompress before we could finish it.
So, four movies, I owe you four ratings:
Shanghai Knights: 682
Monster Squad: 550
Escanaba in da Moonlight: 446
Elling: 467