Thighs Wide Shut

The Theory of Everything
Cosmically Coupling
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
PG-13 | 123 min

Behind every great man there’s a great woman. Such is the case of Stephen Hawking and his wife Jane Wilde Hawking. As his brainiac star was rising at Cambridge, so was his penis – for Jane, but then, so was his ALS. There were no ice bucket challenges to be had, but Jane took on a challenge of her own – being in love with someone who would be rapidly deteriorating, and could soon die. But Stephen didn’t die (just in case you didn’t know), and he didn’t give up, and Jane never gave up on him, and helped him become the Stephen Hawking we all be still talking bout. GO JANE GO!!!

James Marsh‘s The Theory of Everything is not really Stephen’s story, but Jane’s. It’s based on her memoirs – Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen – so if you’re looking for the theories within Theory yer better off reading Stephen’s A Brief History of Time or watching the Errol Morris doc of the same name. And while Jane’s story is worthy of telling, the movie kinda lacks the brainy Stephen stuff it’s purposely avoiding

Stephen is played by Eddie Redmayne, who talks and walks steadily in the first act, and then basically becomes a lump of human flesh in a wheelchair for the rest of the film. Not sure if that’s a performance to be applauded, or juss to feel uncomfortable about. Jane gets her justice in the form of Felicity Jones, who carries Stephen and the film from start to finish. How does she do what she does, for him, and not get much in return besides some kids and a lot of anguish? HOW????? See and find out, but I wouldn’t say the answers are so vast that they would fill a black hole

Marsh does a good job with the material, but I STILL expect much more from the guy that gave me my favorite movie of 2011 (Project Nim) and a top 5er from 2008 (Man On Wire). His last non-doc flick – Shadow Dancer – kinda felt the same – good, but not grand. I appreciate Marsh expanding his universe, but it’s juss a little hard for me to curb my enthusiasm when I expect any and ALL of his work to be out of this world

Get yer a$$ to Mars, and orbit Uranus!!

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Everything is currently everywhere

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Shadow Dancer
In The Name of The Undercover Mother
Official Website | Trailers & Mo 
R | 101 min

Collette (Andrea Riseborough)’s got a tough life that’s about to get tougher.  Born of an Irish Republican Army friendly family (which tends to happen when yer lil brother gets mistakenly gun downed by British soldiers), Collette is tasked with blowing up a London Underground station, but the plot fails, she’s caught, and then caught with a tough decision to make – be a single mother headed to jail for 25 years or be an agent MI5 and spy on her own family and friends.  What to do, what to do?????

James Marsh takes a break from making UMcredible docs/two of my favorite films of the past decade (Man On Wire & Project Nim) to make a serviceable little film about The Troubles during in the 90s (Marsh is SO dang good about evoking specific times and places – see also his Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1980).  And just when you thought that they ran out of movie ideas about the IRA, here comes something new that isn’t exactly like all the others flicks that proceeded it. I appreciated that Shadow Dancer focused more on the characters than the movement itself, and the quiet performance by Riseborough shines through because of it. She’s paired with MI5 agent Mac (Clive Owen), who goes above and beyond his duty to protect her, when his agency (headed by Gillian Anderson) may not be as keen to do so  

Can Collette trust Mac?  Can Mac trust Collette?  Can Collette’s IRA brethren trust her?  Can you trust that there’ll be a happy ending?  Of course not, it’s a tale about Northern Ireland, where happy is about as commonplace as sun is in the forecast

Shadow on you tiny dancer!

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Shadow casts its spell in NY & LA & On-Demand tomorrow and elsewhere elsewhen

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Oblivion
Lost At Earth
Official Website | Trailers & Mo 
PG-13 | 124 min

It’s the future, and it’s bad, cause Earth is barren, and the only people left on it are Tom Cruise and Andrea Riseborough (hello again Ms Thang!).  Their job is to make sure that all the robot probes are in working order, before they call it quits and head back to the mothership hovering above in space, where Melissa Leo‘s annoying voice barks southern-fried orders at em, sugar.  But things get complicated when a spaceship crashes and one of the survivors (Olga Kurylenko) gives Tom Cruise a wicked case of Déjà vu, and a boner.  The truth is ultimately revealed (with help of wise-ole/check cashing Morgan Freeman), and it feels like 1238381288 other bad future movie reveals that you’ve already seen before  

Director Joseph Kosinski is so good at making the future look cool as sh!t, but not so cool when he tries to pair it with a lukewarm script.  Same thing befell his Tron: Legacy, but it’s OK, cause sometimes a bad future looking mighty good is good enuff, and oblivionus to the rest!

Verdictgo: low end Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Oblivion is future-present in a theater near jews

 

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Project Nim
The Linking Miss
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
PG-13 | 93 min

When humans monkey around with monkey bidness, with aims for human bidness, the results aren’t always fair and kind to the chimps.  You saw what happened when they tried to teach them simians flying tricks in Project X, right?  Well whatta ya think happens to lil Nim (Chimpsky) in his eponymous project, which also doubles as the name of this sad, often times frightening, and all around fantastic documentary by James Marsh (Man On Wire)?  Don’t worry, Nim doesn’t get gassed with radiation poising, but his life aint all a bowl of bananas either

Back in the groovy 70s, Columbia University professor Herbert Terrace wanted to see if our chimpanzee cousins had the same capacity for language that we have… cept they’re incapable of actual speech, so ASL would be the sign of these times/experiments.  In order to do so, he would take a newborn chimp from his mother and replace her with a human one.  Terrance found his subject in Nim, a Oklahoma research lab pup, and transported him into the wilds of New York’s Upper West Side.  The professor put Nim in the caring hands of one of his former students, an easy-going gal who didn’t like structure, and apparently did like breastfeeding animals (you read that correctly)

After not much progress, and a little too much non-monkey bidness (Nim drinks beer and smokes pot!), Terrace changes Nim’s surroundings, and continued to change his surrogate mothers, with even younger, and hotter research assistants, who taught Nim our language with the use of his hands.  Nim indeed learned how to sign, and even put together some rudimentary sentences, but mainly for getting things that he wanted, like food, or even a little kitten… that he would start to dry hump (you also read this correctly).  As time passed, Nim grew more and more chimp-like, and for his human companions, this could prove to have very dangerous consequences to their vital organs, if he were to ever act out, and guess what, he did act out!

After about 5 years, Terrace had all the info he needed (and sadly not the results he had hoped for), and thus had no more use for Nim, so he was shipped back to Oklahoma, to basically be forgotten.  This is where all the sad weepy stuff begins.  Nim was used to the good life, where humans gave him endless amounts of attention, food and playtime, but that all went away in a flash.  Also, since he grew up without other chimps around, he had no idea how to interact with his own kind.  More like so UN-kind.  The Okie facility isn’t even the end of the road for poor lil Nim, and where it goes from there is juss a frowny and lonely existence until he died.  Chimps may not be able to speak our language, but they still have feelings.  You to do, so FEEL THIS, the best movie we’ve seen in 2011!!!

And Before There Was Nim: there was Washoe the chimp, and before her, there were Nazi talking dogs(???), and before them, there was Clever Hans, the horse that could add(????)

Verdictgo: Breast In Show

Nim is a Project worth participating in, in limited release

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Boy A
The Pity of Lost Children
Trailers & Mo

As a young kid, Jack Burridge (a pleasure to meet you Andrew Garfield) did a very bad deed and had to pay his dues in prison. Now he’s of an adult age with a new identity and released to a world he knows little about, or at least how to act in it, considering his formative years were spent behind bars. The learning curve for this sweet, yet highly guarded and tortured soul is mighty steep, but with the help of his passionately devoted counselor (cpt o’ bestness, Peter Mullan) he’s got a job, a place to live, and more importantly, someone to lean on with all these growing pains (sadly, none involving Boner Stabone). Watching him trying to fit in with new mates (drinks and ecstasy don’t mix well, especially if you’ve never done either) and wooing someone to mate with (he tells a girl he just met that he’s in love with her) is some of the mos heartbreaking shiz we’ve seen all year. Eventually he starts to gain some confidence and begins the arduous task of putting his troubled past behind him, but will he truly ever be free of his past? That’s a question that’s almos as franztastic as the movie itself! Although the title of this film perfectly suits the action within (it’s the name given to children criminals as to help conceal their identities), they could have easily retitled it Boy A+

Boy A to Girl A: according to wikipediaaaa, the film/book may have been inspired by the cases of Sakakibara Seito, Mary Bell and the murderers of James Bulger

Verdictgo: Breast In Show

Brideshead Revisited
Rite-Styles of the Rich and Infamous
Trailers & Mo

Did we fall asleep watching Atonement [review] and wake-up a year later watching Brideshead Revisited? Sure feels like it, with both high-brow films featuring pre-World War bratty rich kids (chameleon supreme Ben Whishaw and cutie supreme Hayley Atwell) running around some grandiose English countryside estate and falling in love (yes, both the sister AND brother) with a dashing commoner (dependable Matthew Goode), who in turn hits a roadblock when a dismayed member of the family (an underused Emma Thompson) intervenes and casts him off. Atonement‘s lovers were torn apart by lies and war, Brideshead‘s by a family’s deep devotion to Catholicism butting heads with an atheist. Sounds like Atonement would be the more scrumptious of the two, since religion is about as sexy as the ancient booer, but it turns out that Brideshead is better food for thought, since Atonement was nuttin but pining, so much so that in belonged in a pine forest instead of a theater. Brideshead Revisited is the second adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s book. The first was an 11-part TV mini-series starring Jeremy Irons and this film attempts to cram the same amount of material into 2 sprawling hours. At times it feels a bit choppy and not fully fleshed out, but we’ll take a Cliff Notes version over 659 minutes of Jeremy’s Iron

Revisited Revised: the film has seen its share of casts come and go, including the likes of Jude Law, Paul Bettany, Jennifer Connely and our boy (in name only) Benedict Cumberbatch flirting with the roles

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

WALL·E
Environmentally Sound
Trailers & Mo

The first 30 minutes of Pixar’s WALL·E, where our nuts and bolts title hero roams a desolate and deserted Earth, is a bona fide masterpiece. It ventures into a world of gloom and doom not usually seen in cartoons aimed at kids (well, since Dr Seuss’ The Lorax), and it’s all visually, as well as mentally stunning stuffs. But then our lonely robot trash collecting pal finds love with an iPod girl robot and then himself in a spaceship with obese lazy humans and an eco-friendly tale to spiel, and that’s where the film’s jets lose a lot of its propulsion. WALL·E goes from brilliant one-man band to background player with a troupe of characters that are not even remotely as interesting as he is. Obviously they have to cute this thing up to keep the kiddies in their seats, but imagine what this coulda been had they left WALL·E alone, with a whole extra hour of wonder and discovery (and him saying his name over and over, which is way cooler than the way his iOuttaTuned girlfriend sez it)? It woulda been something to not only write home about, but phone home too

Jedi Mind Tricks: WALL·E‘s sound effects and robot voices were created by big audio dynmo Ben Burtt. Burtt was a former Skywalker Ranch-hand, creating the ‘voice’ of R2-D2, the heavy breathing of Darth Vader, the hum of the lightsaber, and least importantly, the silence of Ebenn Q3 Baobab in Episode I

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Man On Wire
Towers of Power
Trailers & Mo

We live in a post-9/11 world where the Twin Towers are now a symbol of man’s frowning achievement. That wasn’t always the case, and Man On Wire helps us to remember a time when the buildings inspired only awe, and wasn’t partnered with the bombastic word ‘shock’. We saw this hamazin’ doc about high wire walker Philippe Petit’s endless preparation and goosebump-inducing execution of his walk between the towers months ago at the Thighbecca Film Festival, and it’s awe has yet to leave our minds. It’s finally hitting theaters and this is one death-defying act you gotta see to believe

Run For Cover: peep New Yorker magazine’s clever 5th annie verse airy of 9/11 cover featuring Petit

Verdictgo: Breast In Show

Boy A opens in NY only today, Brideshead and Man On Wire open on Friday in limited release and WALL·E, hell, you’ve probably already seen it so we don’t need to remind you that it’s playing at a theater new Jews

until next thyme the balcony is clothed…