Thursday Movie Picks - The Woods

Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves.  Join in the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!

Growing up, our house didn't have a backyard. Our backyard was woods. It was really beautiful when it snowed - it looked like a real winter wonderland with all the ice and snow coating the branches of all the trees, and it was fun to go wandering and exploring. But during any other time of the year, it wasn't a place you wanted to go. It wasn't often scary-looking, but sometimes, when it was particularly dark and the cicadas and crickets and whatnot were particularly quiet, it made it tough to take the garbage out to the end of our driveway.

This week on Thursday Movie Picks, we're going into the woods, and.... well, there's one that immediately springs to mind, and the rest.... I REALLY had to stretch. Let's see how you think I did!

The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999) Somehow, my family went to see this on a movie outing. I was 15 and my sister was 13. When we returned home from the theater, it was dark out, and pulling in to the driveway, we realized it was garbage night. It took all four of us to bring out one garbage can, because this movie had instilled such fear about the woods and the dark. I know it is now in vogue to dismiss The Blair Witch Project as solely a marketing gimmick, and/or to blame it for all the terrible found-footage horror films it spawned, but this is the REAL DEAL, dealing in genuine terror - the terror of the unknown, of the darkness, of what is lurking just outside your field of vision. It boils down an entire genre to its most basic elements - three people, investigating a legendary witch, lost in the woods, where there are creepy sounds and strange goings-on - and lets our own psyches fill in the blanks. The final scene of this is still the cruelest, most bone-chilling denouement of any horror movie I've ever seen.

The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard, 2012) It's nearly impossible to summarize Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon's horror spoof without giving away it's big secrets, which are best left to be experienced while watching the movie, but it's another movie that boils down the horror genre to base elements: five horny teens, an old, semi-abandoned cabin in the woods and off the grid, and the dark of night. That it actually manages to be as scary as it is funny is pretty impressive... to anyone who didn't watch Whedon's TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer! The Cabin in the Woods is a total delight from start to finish, deconstructing the horror genre and satirizing it better, in a more serious and more loving way, than the Scary Movie series ever did.

Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009) You know what? I can't really in good conscience recommend this one. But GOD DAMN did it blow me away. The basic story is this: A nameless couple (Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe, both fantastic) are struggling after the death of their infant boy (he crawled out an open window while they were having sex in the shower). He is a therapist and she a scholar. After she becomes so grief-stricken she can barely move, he decides to take her to their woodland cabin, Eden, where he starts having terrifying visions and she starts exhibiting increasingly violent sadomasochistic tendencies. It terrible, ROUGH stuff, but cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle has created some of the most beautiful images ever put on a screen for this, and the performances hold absolutely nothing back. It's a hyper-violent, super-pretentious movie, one that is quite possibly not for anyone at all, really. But as an exploration of grief and the masculine/feminine dynamic, it's quite stunning, and totally singular. Just don't say I didn't warn you.

Thursday Movie Picks - Science Fiction Movies (No Space/Aliens)

Written for the blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join us by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and telling us about them!

I LOVE science fiction, so this week was full of fun films to pick, even with the restriction of no space or aliens. These are all different interpretations of science fiction. (It's been a busy week and day, so that's as much of an intro as you're going to get.)

Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011) Okay, so this may be cheating a little, because the sci-fi is really only at the edges, but Melancholia is such a GORGEOUS film, and it uses its science fiction conceit (a planet, the titular Melancholia, is on a collision course with Earth) to explore depression in a way no film has done before or since. Featuring a career-best performance from Kirsten Dunst that justly won the Best Actress prize at Cannes, and another fantastic performance from von Trier muse Charlotte Gainsbourg. The best opening and closing scenes of any movie in recent memory. And the repeated use of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, which features a minor chord repeated throughout that doesn't resolve until the very last note of the opera, is flat-out BRILLIANT. Bonus points for Udo Kier's hilarious minor role.

Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002) For my money, Spielberg's greatest achievement of the 00s, Minority Report features some very cool, prescient special effects, great performances from Tom Cruise and Samantha Morton, and some of the coolest production design you'll see in a sci-fi film set in the not-too-distant future. The story is about a world in which crimes can be predicted by a set of three sibling "pre-cogs" who can see the future, and the policeman who hunts down the people who haven't yet committed the crime for which he's arresting them... until the pre-cogs announce he will kill someone. Of course it was written by Phillip K. Dick, and it's probably the best adaptation of one of the great author's works.

The Nutty Professor (Tom Shadyac, 1996) YES, THIS COUNTS. Eddie Murphy is a sweet, overweight scientist who concocts a weight loss formula which brings out his inner "Buddy Love" in this remake of the 60s Jerry Lewis picture (which I would have picked except I can't STAND Lewis in dork mode). Basically a comic spin on Jekyll & Hyde, The Nutty Professor is science fiction at its funniest. My family rented this one and were laughing so hard at the dinner scenes that we had to rewind and rewatch them. Murphy deserved an Oscar nomination for this, playing not only the titular Sherman Klump, but Klump's mother, father, brother, and grandmother, too, creating a whole family of comic genius. (Unfortunately, he was such a hit in all these roles that a sequel was made with more of them.)

LIST: Directors Who Should Have Directed Fifty Shades of Grey

I read Fifty Shades of Grey. I saw Fifty Shades of Grey. It didn't suck. But I can't seem to stop myself from thinking about all the other, potentially better versions of that film we will never get to see, so I decided to entertain myself. Whose version of Fifty Shades would have been, if not better, then at least more interesting, than Sam Taylor-Johnson's? Here are my Top Ten, in alphabetical order:

Pedro Almodovar - Law of Desire is one of the sexiest films ever, and if it's bondage you want, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is where you should go. Almodovar has also dealt with the book's major themes of identity and coming of age in various films, most notably All About My Mother and Bad Education.

Lee Daniels - At the very least, his version would have been an entertaining mess. Daniels plays around with form a lot, and I can't help but wonder if he would have found a cool way of visualizing the novel's (admittedly, hilariously awful) conceit of the dialogue of Ana's "inner goddess".

David Fincher - Let's be clear: I don't think this would have happened in a million years, but Fincher's cool formalism would have been a good match for this, and as Fight Club and Gone Girl have shown, he knows his way around a strange sex scene. Plus, he got his start making sexy as hell music videos for the likes of Madonna ("Express Yourself") and Paula Abdul ("Cold Hearted").

Adrian Lyne - The master of the erotic drama, Lyne is the man behind Unfaithful (which boasted an Oscar-nominated performance from Diane Lane), Lolita (with Jeremy Irons), Fatal Attraction (another Oscar nominee), Indecent Proposal, Flashdance, and 9 1/2 Weeks (the big screen's big kahuna for kinky sex). Basically, his name on a project is a guarantee of well-made, steamy sex scenes.

Madonna - Hear me out. This is the woman who recorded "Erotica" and made it a hit Billboard single. The woman who made a coffee-table book called Sex. The woman who, in her fifties, posed in leather dominatrix gear on her album cover. Yes, W.E. was terrible. But if there's one thing Madonna knows, it's sex. And if you think a woman who has exerted this much control over her image throughout her career hasn't learned something about capturing hot, rough sex on film, you're crazy.

Nicolas Roeg - Three words: Don't Look Now. The 70s film was banned for the too-sexy sex scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. Perhaps the guy's still got it?

Steven Shainberg - Don't recognize the name? I don't blame you. Shainberg is the man behind the 2002 film Secretary, in which Maggie Gyllenhaal gets involved in a BDSM relationship with her boss James Spader. It's sexy and darkly comic, which would be a good tone for a film adaptation of Fifty Shades. Of course, he's also the director of the terrible Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, so who knows about his taste level... but the fact remains that Secretary is a near-perfect calling card for this gig.

Lars von Trier - DUH. If you wanted a no-holds-barred, NC-17 version of Fifty Shades, this is the man who was most likely to deliver it. Granted, he probably would have had Charlotte Gainsbourg play Ana, and it's is very likely that his version would have also been the misogynistic, anti-feminist version the haters of Fifty Shades want it to be, but of all the directors on this list, he's probably the one whose version of the film I would want to see most.

The Wachowski Siblings - One word: Bound. They're now known for their action spectacles in the wake of The Matrix, but they got their start with this incredibly sexy neo-noir starring Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon. And as we've seen from the Matrix films, they know how to make leather fetish gear look good on film. If they bring on their Cloud Atlas collaborator Tom Tykwer, then so much the better!

John Waters - If you wanted the camp disasterpiece version of Fifty Shades, this is the only human being alive who could have possibly delivered a good one. His filmography revels in it, while never ever shortchanging his characters. Unless they deserve it. I actually REALLY wish this had happened.

Thursday Movie Picks: Movie Musicals

Written for the blogathon hosted by Wandering Through The Shelves - why don't you join us?

Way to pick an easy one this week! Musicals are only my favorite kind of movie, so I only have about a hundred different movies I could choose to write up for this. Therefore, I had to come up with an extra criterion to even begin writing. Therefore, here are three Non-Hollywood Musicals.

1. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964) I'm not going to lie, this may be my favorite musical of all time. The key to getting into musicals is accepting the very heightened reality in which they exist, one which allows for people to spontaneously burst into song when they're feeling too much to simply speak. In Demy's vision of war-era France, people primarily communicate through singing (yes, very near the whole thing is sung-through), and the mise-en-scene is even color-coded to match their emotions (and outfits), so it helps you along this path. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is also one of the most swoon-worthy romances in screen history, as teenagers Catherine Deneuve (in her film debut) and Nino Castelnuovo fall madly in love right before he gets drafted to serve in the army, all to Michel Legrand's gorgeous, Oscar-winning score. Will they ever get reunited? All I'll say is that Demy's Palme d'Or-winning film (one of three musicals to claim cinema's most prestigious honor) contains one of the finest ending scenes of all time.

Hey! If you like this one, why don't you try: The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). Even more candy-colored fun from Demy and Deneuve, with Gene Kelly for extra flavor!

2. Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (2001, Ashutosh Gowariker) Even for people who love musicals, Bollywood films can be a bit daunting: At least three hours long, with unbelievably (necessarily) complicated plots, and expensive, expansive musical numbers that often sound like they're sung by particularly nasal children - and all in a foreign language! But what they have in their corner is unrivaled spectacle. My freshman roommate in college was of Indian heritage, and every once in a while he would pop in a Bollywood movie to watch when he was bored, and I would tag along. Thankfully, they had subtitles. Lagaan was the one that stood out to me the most, probably because it's very atypical. Epic even by Bollywood standards, it's an historical drama set during India's colonial British Raj (and thus lacks the sparkle and pizazz of most Bollywood films). The residents of a small, poor village are oppressed by the high taxes imposed on them by the crown, so one of the more arrogant British officers makes a wager: The villagers will not have to pay the tax (the "lagaan" of the title) if they can beat the Brits at a game of cricket. Problem is, the villagers don't know how to play. Can they overcome all the odds and win? The result is a lot more fun than it sounds. Unlike most Bollywood musicals, the songs aren't modern-sounding at all, using period instrumentation. Plus, instead of stopping the action dead in its tracks, they are integrated into the story almost seamlessly. They also tend to enliven scenes that would otherwise be standard clichés (a training sequence, a "let's show those outsiders we have culture, too!" party). At three hours and forty minutes, Lagaan may sound like torture to anyone who doesn't like musicals, but I'm telling you: This is entertainment of the highest order, even if it doesn't sound like it. (BONUS: the film's score was composed by A.R. Rahman, later of Slumdog Millionaire fame.)

Hey! If you like this one, why don't you try: Devdas (2002) Aishwarya Rai is only one of the most beautiful women in the world, and the musical numbers truly have to be seen to be believed.

3. Dancer in the Dark (2000, Lars von Trier) Either you like Bjork or you don't. Either you like Lars von Trier or you don't. But Dancer in the Dark is an undeniable triumph for the both of them. Bjork is simply remarkable as the poor factory worker Selma, who has a genetic degenerative disease which is slowly stealing her eyesight. She saves every penny she can in in the hopes of getting her son an operation that will prevent him from suffering the same fate. Will she be able to do so? In a sort of middle ground between the classic musicals Selma loves to watch with her co-worker Kathy (Catherine Deneuve) and a more naturalistic musical like John Carney's miraculous Once, the musical numbers here come from what Selma hears around her, be it the factory machines, a flag flapping in the breeze, or a train rushing past. And the songs are rather gorgeous - "I've Seen It All" was even nominated for an Oscar (yes, this is where we got Bjork's infamous swan dress). Deeply felt but also typically von Trier in the way it toys with, interrogates, and alienates the audience, Dancer in the Dark is quite divisive despite it's Palme d'Or win. I love the film's subtle stylistic flourishes (the musical numbers are filmed with static cameras with brighter colors than the rest of the film, which used handheld cameras) and incredible performances. Bjork has said she found the filming of this to be so nightmarish that she would never make another film ever again. Whatever von Trier did to her (and I hate to say this), it was probably worth it for this sublime film.

Hey! If you like this one, why don't you try: ...yeah, there really isn't anything like this one. The closest you'd get is probably the aforementioned Once (2007), which is a truly perfect film.