128) The Pirates! Band of Misfits (2012)

128) The Pirates! Band of Misfits (2012) Dir: Peter Lord and Jeff Newitt Date Released: April 27, 2012 Date Seen: April 25, 2012 Rating: 3.75/5

Fun! And smart! And not showy at all! I like! See my review for Capital New York.

127) Ninja Assassin (2009)

127) Ninja Assassin (2009) Dir: James McTeigue Date Released: November 25, 2009 Date Seen: April 24, 2012 Rating: 1.75/5

Ridiculous. Of course I wrote about it for Press Play. Because, well, why not?

128) Strange Fruit: The Beatles' Apple Records (2012)

128) Strange Fruit: The Beatles' Apple Records (2012) Dir: Chrome Dreams (?!?!) Date Released (DTV):  April 24, 2012 Date Seen: April 23, 2012 Rating: 3.75/5

Exhaustive, informative and generally pretty interesting portrait of Apple Records, the Beatles' failed Utopian record and film distribution label. See my Movieline piece on this surprisingly strong doc. 

127) Sound of My Voice (2011)

127) Sound of My Voice (2011) Dir: Zal Batmanglij Date Released: April 27, 2012 Date Seen: April 22, 2012 Rating: 2.5/5

Pretty underwhelming dramatic thriller that is often bogged down by narrative contrivance to ever really take me anywhere new or earn any of its speculative heft. Generally speaking, this was just too slight and vague to ever take off. I didn't engage with the characters and their world beyond a point and that's mainly because of the film's skimpy script. Atmospheric at times, certainly. But so what?

126) Detention (2011)

126) Detention (2011) Dir: Joseph Kahn Date Released: April 13, 2012 Date Seen: April 22, 2012 Rating: 4.25/5

I fucking adored this film. Its brazen post-post-modern attitude is equal parts Gregg Araki and Richard Kelly and its sense of humor is just too irresistibly punky and nerdy for me not to love it. I also can intensely relate to the film's basic concern, namely the notion that our collective sense of misappropriated nostalgia has gotten so out of control that we now conflate signifiers from the '80s with the '90s with the '00s to the point where everything's insanely fucked. You make a movie that embraces that chaos and has fun with the idea that our pop culture present is a weird hybrid period of blank pastiche, and you do it with as much style and humor as Joseph Kahn did? Yeah, you're pretty much guaranteed a spot on my top 10 films of the year list. 

STARCLAW 4 LIFE.

RV!: Mission to Mars (2000)

RV!: Mission to Mars (2000) Dir: Brian De Palma Date Released: March 10, 2000 Date Seen: April 21, 2012 Rating: 3.5/5

I'm surprised that much of this film's hard science fiction narrative falls as flat as it does. De Palma just doesn't really find a toehold into this film's narrative until the weird search-for-god-on-Mars plot kicks in. Mission to Mars strikes me as a weirdly literal adaptation of an Arthur C. Clarke story: very hard sf spine with a healthy amount of mysticism and theological speculation thrown in too. It doesn't totally work as it was adapted here. But I still dig it. Probably not as much as I did when I was rewatching it. But still, ooh, pretty.

125) Simon: King of the Witches (1971)

125) Simon: King of the Witches (1971) Dir: Bruce Kessler Date Released: April XX 1971 Date Seen: April 19, 2012 Rating: 3.25/5

This gritty little whatsit is actually more interestingly peculiar than it is, y'know, cohesive or flat-out good. But I kinda like that this is basically a feature-length "What If" comic book story as written by a guy that clearly doesn't know what a comic book is. The narrative goes something like this: What if Dr. Strange was a homeless guy and nobody believed he had magic powers, not even him (sometimes)? It's a really bizarre fantasy film, one whose tone is mostly just confounding. But the dialogue is often pretty snappy and the characters are never uninteresting. Glad that my buddy Steve Carlson hipped me to this one. I don't really know what to do with it but that's ok.