BlueMumble Reviews | Movies, Books, TV, and Music

Move over, Tony Shaloub. It’s Sherlock Holmes for the purposely illiterate. James Roday’s the new Monk in this week’s episode of

TELEMUMBLE
Wasting your time faster than the real thing

Back in late 19th century London (probably my most boring opener yet) Britain’s finest used to laugh at the private investigator’s crime-solving techniques. Nowadays you won’t find a CSI episode where Warrick or Nick or Eric (Bruckheimer must like his “ics”) doesn’t look at footprints or try to name the brand of cigar left at the scene.

Now that the original Sherlock Holme’s act’s pretty much part of standard police work, TV networks try to put new twists in their shows, like having shows where the feds hire genius mathematicians (Numb3rs) or computer geeks (Chuck), or having cases solved by Emmy award-winning guys with OCD (it’s a shame Stark Raving Mad never got off but he and Doogie seem to be doing well on their own). Or, in this Telemumble episode’s case, having a police force gamble its reputation on a guy who claims he’s psychic.

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Dirt (FX)
Season 1 - 13 episodes
Debut: January 2, 2007
US Schedule: Tuesdays at 10PM
PH Schedule: Unknown

I miss Friends.  When it folded out a few years ago, NBC went from No.1 broadcast network to No. 3 the season after Friends ended.  Joey failed to fill in the six pair of shoes and coffee mugs of Friends.  There went Matt LeBlanc’s (Joey) post-Friends career.  David Schwimmer (Ross) went behind the camera; Lisa Kudrow’s (Phoebe) HBO series The Comeback was not renewed after one season; Matthew Perry (Chandler) guested in a few TV shows (Scrubs), starred in a TV series, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which was axed by NBC after a season; Jennifer Aniston (Rachel) hogged the tabloid headlines with her divorce from Brad Pitt, stripped for GQ, transitioned into movies with more misses than hits; and Courteney Cox-Arquette (Monica) was bent on making a baby.  Instead, she executive-produced and starred in FX network’s drama Dirt.

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Tell Me You Love Me (HBO)
Pilot Episode
Debut: Sept 9, 2007 (US)
US Schedule: Sundays at 9pm
PH Schedule: no info yet

Are they doing it for real?  That’s one question you’d ask - the critics certainly did - when you’ve seen this new HBO series.  If The Sopranos were controversial for its violence, Tell Me You Love Me generated buzz for its explicit sex scenes - full-frontal, back, breast exposure, name it.

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Stephen King’s The Green Mile (1996) was first published in a series of short novels with 6 volumes. It was viewed in the big screen in 1999 with Tom Hanks as the lead character potraying Paul Edgecomb, a corrections officer in block E of the Cold Mountain Penitentiary.

Mr. Edgecomb spent his senior days at a home of the aged, a close walking distance to a beat-up house where a very talented mouse who was named Mr. Jingles, still lived. The mouse is just one of the mysteries in this film and a very interesting past time in that block of prison cell during his time.

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12 Angry Men (1957)
Running Time: 1:30
Tag Line: Life is in their hands - Death is on their minds!
Cast: Henry Fonda
Genre: drama / crime / classics
Rating: 9/10

Extremely entertaining for a movie shot almost entirely within a single location (i.e., the jury room) (recall Phone Booth starring Colin Farrell). A kid’s on trial for murder, and eleven members of the jury think it’s an open-and-shut case. One juror doesn’t think they’ve got enough to convict the kid, but how can one person convince eleven others to see things his way? Doesn’t matter if you’re into the actual jury deliberation details or not; 12 Angry Men is mainly an interesting exercise in character study. Click here for the movie summary (spoiler alert).

Technorati Tags: Movie Review, 12 Angry Men, Henry Fonda

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Irreversible
Starring: Monica Bellucci, Vincent Cassel
Directed by: Gaspar Noe
US Release Date (Limited): 07 March 2003
US Box Office: US$753,501
US MPAA Rating: Not Rated
Initial Release Date: 22 May 2002 (France)
Philippine Release Date: N/A

Le temps detruit tout.  Time destroys everything.  And in this movie, time moves from end to beginning.  Memento-esque, some would say.  That 2001 indie hit movie where the beginning frame is the end story, and the end is the beginning.  Though both movies invoke the same backward sequencing of events, the similarity ends there.

If you can survive the first 30 minutes of Irreversible without walking out, getting nauseous, or throwing up, then you can probably sit through the end, which is the beginning of the story.  Screened at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, it was hailed by Newsweek as the most walked out of movie of the year with some 200 people walking out of the screening during the Cannes premiere.

Some walked out during the opening sequence - Marcus (Vincent Cassel) going to a gay S&M club in Paris, walking through a red-lighted labyrinth basement spanning three buildings, where in every corner different sorts of perversion are happening.  The camera is continuously spinning adding to the fuzziness and headiness evoked by the somber, red lights.  The background noise, almost inaudible, was set to 28Hz frequency.  The same background noise produced during earthquakes in which the effect is nausea and vertigo.  Walkout reason number one.

And then they meet: Marcus and the man he was looking for.  The man who raped and killed his wife, Alex, (Monica Bellucci) in the tunnel.  Marcus grabs a fire extinguisher and repeatedly slams it to the man’s head, until the head becomes almost flat, unrecognizable, and extinguished.  The camera doesn’t wince or move away, like all movies do to imply the violence, while the fire extinguisher is being slammed on the man; rather it focuses on it until the head becomes completely obliterated.  Walkout reason number two.

The movie moves earlier in time.  Alex and Marcus at a party.  They had a lover’s spat.  She walks home without him.  Alex stops and asks a woman, the woman tells her: Take the underpass, it’s safer.  Alex goes down the dimly-lit, concrete-colored tunnel, gets brutally raped and beaten in movie history’s most graphic rape scene - genitals and all, and never comes out of the tunnel alive.  Walkout reason number three.

It moves back the time again.  In Alex and Marcus’s apartment just before they go to the party.  They make out, fool around, make love, completely uninhibited before the camera.  The film continuously reverses time, moving back to more and more intimate and tender moments until we see Alex at the end lying on a green grass, beautiful and serene, the wind in her hair, her hand in her belly.  The movie ends.

The backward-sequencing works because it redeems the movie from its initial graphic violence and sex scenes and shows a tenderness of human nature that was absent from the beginning of the movie. 

It is an honest examination of the darkness of human nature and the violence we wrought on each other.  It shows, unforgivingly and unblinkingly, that before time can heal all wounds, it will destroy everything first.

Bluemumble rating: (8 out of 10)
Watch it for: if you like graphic violence

DVD available from your neighborhood pirates.

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The Dreamers
Starring: Eva Green, Michael Pitt, Louis Garrel
Directed by: Bernardo Bertolucci
US Release Date (Limited): February 2004
US Box Office: US$2,531,462
US MPAA Rating: NC-17 for explicit sexual content
Philippine Release Date: N/A

 Long before Hollywood discovered Eva Green, before she became James Bond’s paramour and greatest heartbreak, she starred, disrobed, and had sex in an arthouse movie that was released, and approved without cuts, carrying the dreaded NC-17 rating. 

The movie is set at the time of the student riots in Paris circa 1968.  A young American exchange student, Matthew, (Michael Pitt) become friends with affluent siblings Theo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green), who, on most times, are left by their parents in their twosome.  While the rest of Paris is caught up in riots and chaos, the three are holed up in their house imitating classic movies - their dialogues, blockings and scenes , drinking, smoking pot, experimenting with sex, indifferent to the rest of the world and its worries.

You’d think that the movie is merely a tribute to old movies and pointless beyond that.  But as the threesome’s push and pull relationship develops then unravels; when they are forced to open their windows and see beyond the confines of their house, you’d see how much the title makes sense.  Especially when in their folly and youthful abandon to harm and adventure, they join the riots.  And they find that even though movies mirror real life, the reflected image is not the same as the real one.  There are no shouts of cut, take twos, rewinds, and editing.  There are no grand lines to be memorized or uttered, no slow motions, no fake blood.

Of course, it is not for everyone’s taste.  Some would find it pretentious and self-indulgent; a movie that would require familiarity of old movies and movie lines.  Others would find it erotic, pushing the boundaries of taste. 

It can be all that, but still it is an intriguing one.

Bluemumble rating: (7 out of 10)
Watch it for: Eva Green.

DVD available from your neighborhood pirates.

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