Out of a sense of loyalty to David Gordon Green that now appears to be quite misguided, I went to see Your Highness last Friday evening. I didn't find it boring, and parts of it were wild enough to be funny, but overall... well, star Danny McBride explains it pretty well.
“And then he's explaining Your Highness, as best he can. How it all started as a joke. How he and his old film-school buddy David Gordon Green [...] used to play this movie-nerd game years ago, where Green would throw out a title and McBride would start pitching him back 'f— retarded ideas for movies.'
“Green would say something like Face of Danger, and they'd come up with ‘some weird story about Steve Danger, who's a plastic surgeon and he solves mysteries.’ Your Highness was one of those. Green said it; McBride said, ‘What if I was in the Middle Ages fighting dragons and getting stoned all the time?’ ”
All the Real Girls was the first David Gordon Green film I saw, and along with Green's other early movies George Washington and Undertow it's part of an impressive trio of Southern films. McBride is in All the Real Girls, and he's great. But after getting in on Seth Rogan's Pineapple Express, it looks like Green and McBride jumped at the chance to have studios give them tons of money to put an old joke on the big screen. Surely it's fun to make this kind of movie -- coming up with the costumes, goofing off with James Franco, wandering up and down hills in Ireland, etc. -- but I wish Green would undo his regression. Looking at his next few projects, I'm not optimistic. From here on out, I guess I'm setting my hopes on Junebug director Phil Morrison's triumphant return to the big screen.
Certified Copy
I don't remember the last time I saw a movie twice in the theaters, but I'm definitely going back for another viewing of Certified Copy. At this point I can't say I have a solid theory on what's going on. I can tell you that a man and a woman wander around Tuscany talking about art, and eventually about more, but whether the movie should finally be judged as realism, pastiche, or something else, I can't yet say. Oh, and the woman is Juliette Binoche. I'll be writing more on this one after I see it again.
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