(500) Days of Summer — Kabuki, Metreon
Oh I love that vest. Thanks, I like your flats. Isn’t it great we’re stuck in this elevator together? It’s like a movie or something. Tell me about it. Hey, do you like Phoenix? MGMT? Spoon? What about The Smiths? “If a double-decker bus crashes into us”…I’d be fucking thrilled. This movie is so colorful the trailer makes me want to drive off a bridge. No, too nauseous to drive. I might just spew a little bit here. Hey, maybe if I throw up, other people in the office will throw up too. Then we could all go home. It’d be like a snow day! Except with vomit.
I saw this at the San Francisco International Film Festival. It’s like skipping through a pumpkin patch in your favorite dress because you just got flowers and each flower said “I love you!” and you said, “Thank you flowers. I love you too, but I’m young and independent and feel obligated to prove it so I’m not going to water you for a while. K Bye! Does that sum it up? This movie is lip gloss. Lip gloss. Website.
Humpday — Embarcadero
I don’t know what this is and I don’t think it’ll be that good. But it’s a slow weekend for movies and this is called Humpday and I thought the description needed some annotating so here we have it:
It’s been a decade since Ben (Mark Duplass [Is that French for “double ass?”]) and Andrew (Joshua Leonard) [Hi I’m John John, have we met before?] were the bad boys of their college campus. Ben has settled down and found a job [are they hiring?], wife and home.
Andrew took the alternate route as a vagabond artist [route detours into a ditch], skipping the globe from Chiapas [delicious] to Cambodia. When Andrew shows up unannounced on Ben’s doorstep [in a paper bag lit on fire], they easily fall back into their old dynamic of macho one-upmanship [I do this with my cat Precious].
Late into the night at a wild party, the two find themselves locked in a [steamy] mutual dare: to enter an amateur porn contest together [oh that is steamy]. But what kind of boundary-breaking, envelope-pushing porn [I love envelope porn] can two straight dudes make? [you don’t know a lot about porn do you?]
After the booze and ” big talk” run out, only one idea remains–they will have sex together…on camera [I covered my eyes, what’s happening now?]. It’s not gay; it’s beyond gay. [like Deep Space Nine] It’s not porn; it’s art [gay art]. But how exactly will it work? [gay science?]
And more importantly, who will tell Anna (Alycia Delmore), Ben’s wife? [child protective services?] Writer/director Lynn Shelton, director of My Effortless Brilliance [also the name of my forthcoming biography] and recipient of the Someone to Watch Award [what?] at the 2009 Independent Spirit Awards, expertly mines the biggest ironies of the male ego [hope she’s not a canary] to hilarious effect in this [not gay] buddy movie gone wild.
Appeal videographer Cassidy Friedman did an interview with the director, we embedded it above. Info.
Julia — The Roxie
Oh Tilda Swinton. It’s so hard to hate you even though sometimes you look like an emaciated Hilary Clinton and have a tendency to leave hair dye in for hours two long: exhibit A, B, C. But you do good movie after good movie and well we just love that.
Harry Potter — ubiquitous
In case you missed me getting elbowed in the stomach. Website.
