So if you are a couch bum on the weekends as well, or you're wanting to take up the art, here are some movies I partook in over the weekend that can help you get there.
1. I Love You, Philip Morris
When I first saw the trailer for this movie way back before it was released into theaters, I remember what I said. I said, "That looks awful." Guess what? I was wrong. This movie rocked.
I was most surprised at how little I hated Jim Carrey in this movie. His performance, along with the performances of Ewan McGregor and Leslie Mann, was astonishingly sincere and at times very tear-jerking - both from sadness and laughter. It's a movie about gay men, the high life, scamming the system, and probably the biggest little known pathological liar in history. But more than anything, it's a movie about love.
Even if you find on-screen homo-eroticism a little uncomfortable, there are enough laughs in this dark (DARK) comedy to go around for any person of any background. Unless you're a Mormon. Then don't see this movie. I don't want to get a letter later saying how offended you were that Jim Carrey wore spandex shorts and stockings.
2. SLC Punk!
"SLC" stands for "Salt Lake City", which I'm sure is the worst place in the world to live. Sorry, I don't mean to be anti-Mormon in this post (I swear, this was not planned). If you want to be Mormon, hey, it's your life, that's cool. You can drink whatever flavor Kool-Aid you want.
Anyway, even if you don't like punk music or punk kids, you will like this movie. From Italian director James Merendino, who grew up in Salt Lake after moving from Rome, it's hysterical, smart, and full of bizarre flashbacks and neon-haired anarchists. Matthew Lillard especially did a great job as the main character Stevo, who finds himself and his friend Heroin Bob are the two lone outcasted punks in a conservative, religious city in the 1980s. His dad is pressuring him to go to Harvard and finally grow up, but all Stevo wants is chaos without selling out. You'll see how that works out for him.
3. Marwenchol
Marwencol is a documentary about a man named Mark Hogancamp who, after a violent assault by a gang left him nearly brain dead, turned to the comfort of a 1/6 scale model of a post-World War II Beligium town named Marwencol he built in his backyard. He buys figures and Barbie dolls and fills the town's bars, houses, and church with SS men, barmaids, rugged soldiers and sexy women, but each figure has a story and a past that Mark explains elaborately to us. He is as close to his creation as a parent would be to its child. Many of the figures are based on his real family, friends, and co-workers (he even has an avatar for himself), and Mark works tirelessly every day on either expanding Marwencol or taking photographs of it.
The effect the attack had on Mark is evident throughout the movie; this film has more PTSD in it than Born on the Fourth of July. The intimacy between Mark and the inanimate inhabitants of Marwencol would be creepy if it wasn't so depressing. Instead of feeling judgmental, you feel sympathy for what Mark has gone through, and where it has taken him. Marwencol is a little slower type drama, but it exposes the audience to an art form that Mark has been able to pick up, along with the pieces of his life, after a near death experience.
(image sources = whoisscout.files.wordpress / listal.com / fest10/0rg / arttherapyblog)
You watch a lot of weird movies... I commend you.
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