One of the things you may or may not know about me is that in addition to editing this section and writing for the newspaper, I also maintain blood, dirt & angels (blooddirtangels.com), a website devoted mostly to pop culture.
A lot of movie-related material we can't fit into this section winds up on the blog. If we run out of room -- or if a film doesn't screen in time for our deadlines -- we can put a movie review there. We also run more DVD reviews and other bits of pop ephemera. For instance, when filmmaker-comedian Levi Agee recently directed our attention to the precursor of the Oscar-nominated Whiplash -- the short film that director Damien Chazelle produced to raise money for the feature -- we posted it on the blog.
While I'm not as diligent about finding things to stick on it as I was in its early days, we're well into our sixth year, which in the blogosphere probably makes us downright venerable. (I've read the average lifespan for a blog is about 33 months, which seems long given all the sites that are abandoned almost immediately.) But I usually post at least five or six times a week, sometimes more.
One of the things I've been trying to do on the blog is keep a semi-accurate record of the movies I watch but don't necessarily feel compelled to write about in a feature I call "Off the Clock Movies." I hit upon this idea after seeing Steven Soderbergh's blog list of the books, movies and television shows he consumed in 2014. It seemed like an interesting experiment, which would probably prove useful. I'm one of those people who tends to forget what he has seen, at least until a quarter of the way through re-watching it. I never can remember exactly which episode we were up to on The Wire.
Since it's just the blog, I don't really worry about whether anyone else would find it interesting. Experience has taught me that it's always the more esoteric and drilled-down items that get the most attention. The worst advice I ever got about blogging was to avoid long-form original pieces; it turns out people will not only read 4,000 word reviews of Birdman, they'll "like" them.
But, in practice, I've been pretty bad about maintaining that feature. In part, it's because I'm just lazy and I don't always want to write a couple of sentences about The Quiet Man or Terence Davies' The Long Day Closes. I don't endorse all that I view. I watch a lot of sports and Downton Abbey (what a lot of rot that is), Archer on Netflix and Nurse Jackie on DVD. I tend not to use entertainment products for self-improvement purposes. I'm still not sure what I think of some shows I regularly watch (Girls infuriates me and, because I know that's the point, I probably tend to give Lena Dunham more credit than she might be due). I don't necessarily want you peeking over my shoulder.
On the other hand, I'm a movie critic. So maybe it's nice to know that I can enjoy a diversion like Kingsman: The Secret Service, Matthew Vaughn's uneven but spirited love letter to the vintage Bond films. (Those movies, like Dean Martin's Matt Helm series, piggybacked on the archetype of the suave yet brutal secret agent man.) Like almost all projects that aspire to mass adulation and franchisehood, it loses a good bit of momentum once it knuckles down to saving the world, but it surprised me more than once.
If you like Kingsman, you might want to check out Michel "The Artist" Hazanavicius's OSS-117 movies, 2006's Cairo: Nest of Spies and 2009's Lost in Rio, which star The Artist's Jean Dujardin as a French super agent operating in the swingin' '60s. They're like Austin Powers pitched in a slightly more grown-up, slightly more cosmopolitan key.
It's also a good way for me to make use of some viewing I did for work, but for whatever reason never made its way into the newspaper. For instance, I watched a screener of Will Bakke's clever satire Believe Me last year, but the movie never opened theatrically in Arkansas, so I never had a chance to review it. Until now. It was released on DVD March 3.
While it's not exactly a take-down of faith-based cinema (Bakke and co-writer Michael B. Allen made their bones with the documentaries Beware of Christians and One Nation Under God), Believe Me takes judicial notice of the fact that not all evangelicals are true believers. A movie about "the power of platforms," it ruthlessly satirizes the machinery of belief-based fundraising without stooping to mock the sincere souls liable to be taken in by such schemes. It focuses on four college students -- chief among them Sam (played by Australian Alex Russell) -- who establish a fake charity, Get Wells Soon, ostensibly to provide clean drinking water for Africa, but actually to finance their educations and lifestyles. This doesn't exactly pan out, but Sam's gift for public speaking gets noticed. Soon he and his buds are recruited by the leader (Christopher McDonald) of a "legitimate" nonprofit for a nationwide fundraising tour.
(While Nick Offerman -- who's featured somewhat prominently on the DVD cover-- appears in only a single scene, he nails his turn as a college counselor more interested in self-medication than guidance.)
As slick as it often is, Believe Me has trouble maintaining the delicate balance it establishes in its first 45 minutes once it turns semi-serious, but Bakke does not make the expected concessions at the end of the film. Basically, what we have here is a well-realized, strongly acted and at times genuinely subversive piece of independent pop filmmaking that genuinely understands Christian culture and deserves an audience far more than the average Hollywood romantic comedy.
That's not unusual -- you don't have to dig very deep to find stuff that's more interesting than what's available through mainstream channels. That's the nature of mainstream channels. And while the mission of this section is to cover movies that open in Arkansas in a given week, it's also my job to attend to other frequencies. So when I pick up a different signal, I'll try to remember to let you know. Either here or on the Internet.
Email:
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
blooddirtangels.com
MovieStyle on 03/06/2015