Cinematic Throwbacks: April 2000/2010
Preface:
I have become rather obsessed during quarantine with the Rewatchables podcast on Spotify. This is the Bill Simmons' The Ringer podcast, the idea of which is simply to get a few people together and talk about older movies. I think it's very entertaining and it's kind of inspired me to do something similar, which I've also kind of wanted to do for a while. I've wanted to do some sort of look back at movies from the past that matter to me or I enjoyed or had an impact or whatever.
And I figured the easiest way to do this would be through anniversary viewings, which is something that to one degree or another I've done for years.
And I figured for the purposes of putting something on the blog it would be easy to just do the anniversary recaps the way that I've just naturally watched movies for many years. Specifically movies from 10 years ago and twenty years ago.
And now that 1990 is 30 freaking years ago (Holy shit, 1990 is 30 years ago!) I may even be able to fit in some 1990 movies.
So I figured I would start. this new recurring series with a look back at a couple movies from the month of April, being both 2000 and 2010.
2000:
Gotta start with a Natalie movie of course.
Where the Heart Is arrived at the tail end of what was probably my peak Natalie Portman fandom period. That whole Phantom Menace through Anywhere But Here through Where The Heart Is period.
I recall at the time thinking that it was a notch or two below her previous couple of movies that I was just over the moon for.
Although at the time it didn't matter that it was probably an inferior film. I still saw the thing five times in theaters. This is the way of Natalie fandom at the time.
This is the movie where Natalie is a pregnant teen who is abandoned at Walmart by her dipshit boyfriend. And she lives in the Walmart for a while and gives birth in the Walmart and then after that becomes kind of a local celebrity and eventually meets the some of the town's folk and builds a life in that small town. Over the years this movie is pretty much settled into being a movie that I like but I don't really don't love.
It has a lot of problems both in the way the story is structured and also some of the kind of stereotypical characters that are in it.
But watching it again in full for the first time in some time recently it still has a lot of easy charm to it.
Natalie is of course beautiful beyond comprehension in it and sweet and goofy. She probably just more adorably goofy stuff in this movie than anything short of Garden State. It's not always credible when she is asked to play dumb because we know she's not dumb. But it's still a terrific performance. It was also really her first true top of the line, top of poster star turn.
At the time this movie was made Ashley Judd was still probably the bigger star and she's very good in it too. This was sort of during her own peak as a movie star. Stockard Channing is just like a warm blanket of goodness in her role.
The movies flaws definitely are centered on the male characters. The love interest for her in the movie is James Frain who is not terrible, but just kind of a dullard and you don't really buy so much that there's a real love connection there.
But worse is the boyfriend played by Dylan Bruno, who is portrayed as such an completely cartoonish irredeemable villain that you never even understand what the hell Natalie's character Novalee saw in him in the first place to get pregnant by him.
In general the movie is hampered by an insistence on constantly cutting back to follow the boyfriend character as he goes through a series of mishaps. He gets arrested, he goes to jail, he becomes a songwriter in jail, he gets out of jail and is suddenly a country singer, and then he gets fired by his manager (Joan Cusack in an amusing cameo) becomes a drunk again and becomes basically a cripple and then there's this reunion very late in the movie that kind of tries to tie a bow on his character and make him redeemable but it doesn't really work because we just saw him be a total prick the entire movie.
It's also a pretty sloppy book adaptation. I read this book before the movie came out, and it was very good, but the film tries to cram a lot in and also has this weird motif where characters are using dialogue to tell us how far along in the story we move from scene to scene.
So those were the things that kept the movie from being on the level of some of the great Natalie movies.
I do like the movie for it's good parts though, Natalie chief among them. This was kind of the the end point of the sort of head in the clouds Natalie fandom of mine. And you know for just for that reason alone, it still has a lot of nostalgic pull for me.
2010:
It looked like a one joke piece of garbage, basically. Even the title Kick-Ass seemed like a sort of desperate grab at being cool and edgy.
Then I saw the movie.
And maybe it shouldn't have been this good. But it's a case where all the pieces fell into place exactly as they had to in order to make this premise and this idea work.
Now back in 2010 the idea of a rather meta R-rated superhero comedy was fairly novel. This was before Deadpool. This was obviously before other R-rated examples of the superhero genre such as Logan.
And I still think it's the best of its type including the highly underrated sequel, which if I'm still doing this blog in 3 years I will get to
The big thing with this movie is they really nail the tone. It's Irreverent and energetic and fully takes advantage of its R rating in both graphic violence and language.
But whereas Deadpool really never breaks from the bit, Kick-Ass also kind of works as a serious gritty superhero movie when it has to.
The titular character isn't just doing this whole thing as a goof or bit. He has a legitimate moral center. He genuinely wants to do good, even if he is a geeky hormonal teen who has the girl that he wants but can't get it, and nerdy friends. The lead character really works and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, pre-Quicksilver is very good in the role.
But of course he has the movie completely stolen from him by Chloe Moretz as Hit-Girl and Nicolas Cage as Big Daddy, doing his hilarious Adam West impression. Obviously the movie would work just as well if it was just the two of them.
They are both fantastic characters played perfectly. It's one of Cage's best comedic performances. And of course this movie launched Chloe Moretz who was pretty much unknown at the time. And even though these are characters that are on on the surface very broad and comedic, they too have some substance to them, and you give a shit about them.
The villains are also memorable, with Mark Strong, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who is not at all intimidating but that's kind of the point. Even Mark Strong's henchmen have some colorful dialogue bits.
The action is really good for a low budget. Watching Hit Girl lay waste to roomfuls of thugs will never not be a blast.
This still holds up for me as one of my favorite movies of 2010.
Coming next month: Anniversaries for Iron Man 2, Gladiator, Back To The Future 3, and maybe something else too.
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