Markie goes to movies (so you don't have to)

Lucky Number Slevin (dir. Paul McGuigan) While it's fun to see Morgan Freeman play a smooth-talking monster and to see Ben Kingsley repeat his Real Bad Guy performance from Sexy Beast and Bruce Willis his from Last Man Standing, someone really needs to tell screenwriter Jason Smilovic that fantastically complex scripts full of quasi-Tarantino dialogue heavy on obscure pop-culture references were played out within six months of Pulp Fiction's release, which makes them about a decade past their expiration date. (Maybe they're due for a revival. God, I hope not.) Markie's review: **


The Devil and Daniel Johnston (dir. Jeff Feuerzeig) It seems to be a golden age for documentaries about really fucked-up genius artists (cf: Crumb, Be Here to Love Me). I first heard Daniel Johnston's music while driving around the Olympic Peninsula--"Grievances" (from Yip Jump Music) sounded like some old-woman revival singer from and Alan Lomax field recording, but turned out to be a gifted-if-nuts cartoonist/songwriter pounding on a chord organ in his brother's garage in Texas. Sadly, Johnston acquired a taste for LSD while hanging around in Austin, and the drugs overamped his already slightly-bipolar symptoms to the point where he started having major religious/psychotic episodes. My favorite characters in the movie are his long-suffering parents: good, salt-of-the-earth, God-fearing West Virginia people who don't quite get their son but are always there to help when he falls off the psychic tightrope he walks. If you've ever bought into the notion of craziness-as-integral-to-genius, this movie makes it plain how hard those crazy geniuses can be to live around day to day. Mark's review: ****