Thighs Wide Shut

Joy
Mop & Glowing
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
PG-13 | 124 min

The Silver Linings Playbook/American Hustle crew is back!  And possibly better than ever!! David O Russell and Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper bring the JOY and the pain in what has got to be the greatest movie that has something to do with a mop and/or QVC – Joy 

Joy is prideful, and joyful, and funny, and mildly melancholy, and 300% fun.  You know the movie is super super dope when it utilizes Robert De Niro talent (in this day and age) and instead of stupefying it.  And you know I aint no J-Law fan, but I love J-Law in this, and thus I love this movie!!

And the story is all true-ish!!!

Joy Mangano is an inventor.  She invented the Miracle Mop

At one point in time, there was no Miracle Mop, and Ms Mangano needed a miracle to support her children, and her ex-husband, and her wacky mother, and her twice-divorced father.  The mop changed everything and this movie is about getting that mop to market and the struggles to get there.  A total underdog story, that you’ll be rooting for from the get go.  Go Joy! Go Joy! Go!!!!!!!!  

Wait, they made a whole movie about a woman who invented a mop?  Well, it’s more than juss that.  It’s about ideas, and family, and things and stuff.  And what a family!!  You couldn’t ask for a more fun and willing bunch of family folks helping her along - Isabella Rossellini, Édgar Ramírez, Elisabeth Röhm, Diane Ladd, Virginia Madsen and the Gadsby twins.  Loved them all.  Makes me wish I was a member of her family so I could hug these people!!!

And the QVC stuff was super cool.  You get to see what it looked like at the beginningish, and things, and stuff, and I think it’s juss so super super super cool and honorable that Melissa Rivers played her mom Joan Rivers, and how eerily alike they look

Did we mention that this movie was 300% fun?  You like fun, right?

Verdictgo: Breast In Show

Joy to the world – everywhere on Xmas day

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Zero Dark Thirty
OBL STK MIA DOA A-OK GO USA!
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
R | 157 min

Dude, do you remember how intense and thrilling and awesome Kathryn Bigelow & Mark Boal‘s Hurt Locker is was????  Well guess what, Biges and Boals did one better on collab numero 2, basically telling Homeland and Argo to argofuckthemselves.  Zero Dark Thirty is like watching one of those Bourne movies, cept what’s going on REALLY HAPPENED and what we’re being shown seems really really fcuking real.  FO REALS!!! not faux reels!!!

So what is Zero Dark Thirty?  It’s 2 minus 2, the opposite of day + 30.  BAM!  C’mon, you know what this is about – it’s a summarization of failing for ages to find Osama bin Laden, and then maybe finding him, and then deciding whether that maybe is close enuff to a certainty as humanly possible, before pulling the final trigger… on pulling the trigger on OBL.  It’s frustrating, and more frustrating, and even more frustrating, but then it gets exciting and even more exciting, and even more more exciting, and then we’re back in the Bigelow-Boal thrill ride where yer heart’s a pounding and yer palms are a sweating, even though you know that OBL aint living past the end credits.  SPOILER ALERT – OBL dies.  But how did we get to that point?  THAT’S WHAT THIS MOVIE IS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  And it’s incredible!!!!!!!!!!!!

So when Bigs was making this movie, she was probably like, I want to have someone awesome like Jodie Foster to play my Clarice Starling darling character, so she got herself Jessica Chastain.  PERFECT!  Then she was like, we need a bunch of random actors that are good, but not huge names, to help Chasty out, and she was like welcome aboard Kyle Chandler, Jennifer Ehle, Harold Perrineau, Jeremy Strong, Mark Strong, Mark Duplass & [my boy] Édgar Ramírez.  Then she was like, I need a beardy guy that’s super good at yelling and torture and then they got Jason Clarke and he did that.  Then she was like, I need two beardos to play beardo Navy Seals, so she got that guy from Parks & Rec who’s character isn’t as funny as everyone thinks it is and fake Owen Lars from the BS Star Wars poo-quels.  But guess what, the casting didn’t end there.  She was like, oh, I need some fat guy that could pass for Leon Panetta, and so BAM, put on some 80s Japanese bidness-man eyeglasses James Gandolfini!  And she threw in Stephen Dillane for good measure.  That’s eggzatcly how the casting was done, as told to me by a magic elf fairy from Rivendale

What more do you need to know?  GO AMERICA!  NEVER QUIT!  Always keep your eye on the ball.  Kick a guy in the balls, but only IF it will lead to info that will get us to Osama bin Laden.  And if we get that info, lets lose it for like 7 years, but since we don’t give up, we find it again and follow up and finally hang our ‘mission accomplished’ banners.  Way to go us/US.  Red, White & BEST!!!!

Spank dog Morgan Spurlock never found OBL, cause otherwise this movie wouldn’t eggsist

Verdictgo: Breast In Show

Zero Hot Tens: Jessica Collins is in the movie for all of 8 seconds, but she hypnothighsed me with her eyes

and then I remembered where she had done it before – the sorta-brilliant but cancelled Rubicon

Zero Dark Thirty sees the light in NY & LA on Wednesday and elsewhere on January 11

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Carlos
Highjackal!
Official Website | Trailers & Mo

Simple rule of thumb for exceedingly crazy-arsed long movies: a movie can be as long as it needs to be, just so long as anything over the perfect runtime of 90 minutes is absolutely necessary.  Most movies could use a good trim (the 3rd LOTR flick) and some could stand to be expanded (Zodiac, duh!), and some shouldn’t have been made longer than 5 minutes (Nerderberg’s insufferable Che).  Olivier Assayas‘ Carlos, a sprawling and masterful 3-part French TV mini-series epic, turned into one gigantic film for other countries, clocks in at a WHOPPING 330 minutes (5 1/2 hours), and we can honestly say that not a single moment was wasted, even if one’s eyes will fall out of their sockets after sitting thru it.  (there will also be a 165 ‘theatrical cut’ being shown in theaters, which we have yet to see and are THIGHLY curious to check out what got cut in half!!!)

What’s moist hammazin about Assayas’ mammoth undertaking is not how he pulled it off (but seriously, HOW DID HE?! 2 decades of story, shot over 7 months, in 7 different countries, in countless languages, all looking MIGHTY 70s/80s GORGEOUS!!), but how dang fast it all flys by!!!  ZIP ZIP ZOOOOEY!!!  Luckily he took his pacing cues from Fincher’s Zodiac!  Even if the film went unmade, the work and research that Assayas and co-writer Dan Franck put into a 300 page screenplay is worthy of applause all on its own!!!!  And guess what, so little is actually known about Venezuelan global terrorist Carlos the Jackal (Édgar Ramírez, who deserves a ton of accolades, and more accent marks in his name) that they had to make up a bunch of stuff!!!  And who cares, hispecially if it’s so dang captivating (even if it’s hard to maintain fluid and tense drama for that long of a period)!  It’s like what Finchy and Sorkin pulled with The Social Network, but Carlos deals with stuff that’s actually important, like hurting people, and not juss their feelings!

OK, there’s some known stuff about the Jackal, like killing some cops, taking some hostages here and there, flying planes to shady countries, drinking tons of whiskey, smoking tons of fags, banging some slutty revolutionary chicks, plotting, plotting some more, plotting some more after some more, until he eventually became a bloated nonentity and a relic dinosaur of terrorism’s past, before eventually being captured!!!  In a shellnut, that’s the entire story

Carlos is the flipside of Spielbergo’s Munich, AKA the best movie of 2005!!  While we’re not likely to put Carlos at the very very top of our list at the end of 2010, in time, that may turn out to be a decision we regret.  What to do, what to do????  Dunno, but you should give up 330 minutes of your life to see this, which you’ll gladly never get back!!!

Time Out of Mind:  so what is the longest movie ever?   Guinness sez The Cure For Insomnia. sounds more like the cause of insomnia!!  here are two lists of the longest films evers!!

Verdictgo: Breast In Show

Carlos will be released as follows:

TV – broadcast premiere on the Sundance Channel from Rocktober 11 thru 13 (sorry about the late notice!)

THEATRICAL – opens in NY on Friday.  330 minute Special Roadshow Edition at IFC Center – Roct 15 to Nov 2 ONLY.  The 165 minute ‘theatrical cut’ will be shown at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas.  Both the extended version and the shorter cut will roll out theatrically elsewhere elsewhen

VOD – the 165 minute cut will also be shown on video on demand beginning Rocktober 20

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…