Lotsa Movies

Moliere

The Apartment

Buster Keaton

Benny and Joon

Iron Man

Charlie Wilson’s War

Watermelon Man

Stromboli

Tropic Thunder

More Hussein’s Insanely Nebulous Movie Reviews from the uber-guru of the True Church of Reform Islam, Balack Hussein OBerlin.

Ralph Hussein, are you making fun of a particular presumptive presidential candidate?

No, Hussein II, but I should point out that he has fathered two black children. The world needs to know this.

Maybe so, but you need to know that getting into heaven is a lot easier the lighter you are which means losing the ego, O mighty uber buber. Even with your recent fan mail there is still a chance that your reviews are enjoyed the same way as fruitcake.

What? Well, onto the races, of which all but the first one was viewed in Augusta while mooching off my mother while various siblings dropped in or stayed in as in Tish.

Moliere, the 2007 version, was great fun, good acting, sweet story. Based more on his plays than his life. A reviewer on IMBb said it better than I have time to, even if I could: “Moliére may not fully capture the true essence of the French author but the fact that it does suggest a writer of depth, wit, and inspiration may entice the viewer to seek out the source material first hand. Granted that the film is speculation, not biography, but it is art and the payoff is a romantic and richly entertaining tribute to one of the greatest playwrights in history.”

The Apartment (1960) with Shirley Maclaine, Jack Lemmon, and Fred McMurray was great. Wow! What a story and acting! Billy Wilder had fun pushing the Production Code (precursor to the ratings system we have now) to its limit. Adultery and how to do it in the era of hotel detectives might have been the obvious plot, but just as obvious, through the incredible directing, is the same story as in Children of Men. Faceless individuals who get lost and lose their soul. All three main characters have no clue as to how their own actions affect their ability to become individuals. Much more of a drama than a comedy. Jack Lemmon’s character has become a model for man as mouse.

I had brought some Buster Keaton movies after having seen Benny and Joon 20 times. Silent movies are fun to watch, but unfortunately Buster Keaton used a really annoying musical score in College that worked much better with the sound turned down. He sure looks like Johnny Depp. Or is it the other way around? It’s eerie to watch him and see how much he influenced Depp not only in Benny and Joon but in Depps’s other movies.

Benny and Joon is just a beautiful movie. The soundtrack along with Depp sitting in a tree makes the movie. We didn’t watch it this trip, but I had to mention it.

Iron Man is great fun. As a certain California-based musician wryly noted, “Robert Downey, Jr. is so sardonic.” “Yes, he is, California musician female-type person”.

We did love the movie and saw it in the cheap theatre with the Augusta-based matri-familia type person who also liked it. Apparently and inexplicably, I may have found some of the more sardonically sexist jokes funnier than my companions found them. I do think that Terence Howard deserves much more than being cast as the token A-A gofer, best buddy character. But still a very good comic book movie. Great message movie which Nicholas Cage also did so well with in Lords of War. The real-life arms merchant that Cage’s character was based on was finally arrested this past year. No news yet on what happened to him next. I’m sure someone else stepped in right away.

We saw Charlie Wilson’s War the other night. The bonus feature on the real Charlie Wilson was good. Movie was good, too, but the book might be better according to Chris who lives in Birmingham, Alabama, not Birmingham, England, which recently discovered that their city’s webpage uses a picture of the skyline of Birmingham ---- Alabama..

Watermelon Man from 1970 was funny, still-topically satirical, and very dramatic at the end. Godfrey Cambridge stars and was very good. He starts off a white bigot and then wakes up black. Some early reviewers called it worth seeing but a one-joke movie. It is a long joke, however, with many layers.

Stromboli was the 1950 Ingmar Bergman movie in which she fell in love with the director, Rosellini, and left her husband and child for him even though she had just learned how to speak Italian and probably didn’t know any better. Then she left him several years later after she learned what those Italian men are really after.

Fascinating movie. Some actual book research in the library told me that the original version is a good bit longer than the international version and has a different ending. I couldn’t tell which version we were watching. It was VHS without any special features. It was also full-screen which means we may have missed some parts of the scenes without the wide-screen option of which letter-boxing fans like me and Tish were out-voted by old-school matriarchs like Mom. Still, a well-worth watching movie. The in-house Bergman expert visiting from California (at least, Tish claimed to have read her autobiography) said Bergman was the only professional actress on the set. All the others came from the island of Stromboli (the resident food expert visiting from St. Paul just stayed hungry throughout the movie; Pinocchio experts were missing ). The big mystery in the movie is why in the hell anybody lives on an island which has a volcano that blows up frequently. The evacuation scene in the movie looked really difficult.

Speaking of difficult, Tropic Thunder must be at the top of whatever level of difficulty movies are judged. It’s also near the top of the list of movies not to see with your mother. A Clockwork Orange is probably the first movie people think of when trying to find a movie not to see with their mother. Tropic Thunder is a close second. But, fortunately, I’m at the age now where when I go to a movie like TT with my mother (and adult sister, I might add) I can rest assured that at any time I can look over at Mom and see that she has fallen asleep.

The jokes in this movie-within-a movie, which is supposed to be a joke in itself, are mostly a repeat of Ben Stiller’s one-joke empire. The satire is appreciated. The irony is lost. At least on me.

I think it’s wonderful that Stiller and company included a skit on making fun of movies that use mental retardation as a theme. Unfortunately, they aren’t the ones to make that kind of joke. Most of the people who will see this movie (other than me, of course, and two other people of which at least one was awake for most of the movie) are going to be adolescent boys who may not understand that calling someone “retard” really is not a joke. It is sad that as the “N” word gets to be finally politically incorrect the “R” word is replacing it. Wow! What a surprise.

But the worst part about Tropic Thunder was that Robert Downey, Jr., while good, was not sardonic. According to Tish. I’m still learning what the hell that word means. And after 10 days in Augusta playing tournament Berlin Scrabble (rules are constantly shifting in Berlin Scrabble) I learned that my mother can add an “O” to “blini” and call it an Irish pancake which means that sardonicy has risen to new heights. I also learned that cheating at Scrabble gets harder when other people can see how long I’m taking to look up a word after a challenge. A certain old-school person had a strong objection to the Scrabble dictionary and since her one vote counted for more than any number of other votes we had to resort to calling up loved ones who happened to have Internet connection so they could look up a non-sensical two-letter word for us.

We finally forced our way in and bought a Scrabble dictionary but allowed the use of the in-house Webster’s to also count. Big mistake. Tish played “ra” which I knew was not in the Scrabble dictionary but she found it in the Webster’s which meant I lost my turn. I got so upset I called the phone number listed in the Scrabble dictionary and was promptly told that I should have insisted on using only one dictionary.

Wow, Ralph Hussein Oblini! And to think that only a few months ago I was happily enjoying heaven and now find myself in hell being channeled by a fruitcake.