Grumbler Goes to the Movies

Or rather catches up on some age-old stuff everyone's seen anyway. I've been pretty lazy when it comes to watching movies as of late, so these really are a batch of the same ol' same ol' for anyone who watches movies on a regular basis. I'll be keeping it short.

First off is Woody Allen's magnificent Match Point, a wondrously ice-cold morality tale that genuinely is (and I'm well aware that the same has been said about nearly all of his films for at least a decade and a half - except for, probably, this turd) his best work for years and years. Just when it seemed the nags' and naysayers' prophecies of his artistic demise might actually come to pass, he pulled this unflinching and utterly classy beast out of his hat. Makes you wish he concentrates what energy he has left in that frail body of his on making drama films - his comedy chops have obviously retired before the man himself. I wouldn't hesitate to call Match Point an unexpected classic.

Stephen Gaghan's Syriana I also quite liked. For a Hollywood movie, it is totally uncompromising in its approach of looking at the complexities of the oil industry through multiple partially interweaving storylines. As everyone probably knows, Gaghan wrote Traffic, and Syriana shares much with that film, yet is even more hardcore in its unwillingness to simplify the intricacies of the economic and political aspects of the oil game. You will leave the movie with one overriding thought, though: the American establishment, as always, sucks enormous frigging ass.

And here's another critics' favorite: first-time director Mike Mills' Thumbsucker. It won't shatter the fresh-o-meter, but it is a great slice of masterfully executed classic American indie - quirky (I'm sorry but the laws dictate one to use this word when discussing US indie cinema), atmospheric and gorgeous-looking, it strikes just the right balance between light and shadow. Thumbs up, indeed. (See what I did there?) Also features the Master Dunce, Keanu Reeves, as a philosophizing dentist, which is of course, like, totally rad.