Sunday, January 03, 2010

"Sherlock Holmes" (2009)

I am not a Baker Street Irregular; I have no detailed knowledge of the life and adventures of the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes. I only know the basics. I know he lived on Baker Street in 19th century London; I know his friend and companion was one Dr. Watson; I know his lifelong enemy was Professor Moriarty; and I know Holmes valued logic and observation above all else, taking such to extremes that we find almost supernatural today. Bits and pieces, here and there. Drug abuse. His brother Mycroft.

But I know enough to identify some creative additions in Guy Ritchie's and Robert Downey Jr.'s interpretation of "Sherlock Holmes".

First, in the modern movie, he's far more physical than I recall him being in the past. A rough-knuckled, manic-depressive, substance abuser. Can't remember the last actor who had to have a six-pack to portray the detective.

Second, from what I remember, Watson was nearly always much older; a harrumph-ing white mustached sort of chap. So having Jude Law play him feels like a change. A change for the better, I think. It puts the two characters' friendship into the realm of bromance.

I gotta be honest with you, Marge, I would watch Robert Downey Jr. in anything. He's one of a handful of actors that I find captivating. So it was a forgone conclusion that I would enjoy "Sherlock Holmes".

But Guy Ritchie's direction gives London such a gritty, realistic look, and the proper bantering between Holmes and Watson, and even the addition of a love interest for Holmes, the scandalous Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams)… The movie was great fun, even if the actual mystery, involving a Satan worshipping nobleman, was a bit of a letdown.

Still, if you dig brass-and-glass fittings, and Victorian clothing, and cobblestone streets, this is the movie for you.

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Friday, January 01, 2010

Movies of 2009

In 2009 I saw 30 different films. I attended showings of two movies multiple times: Star Trek got my money three times, and Away We Go got it twice. And this year, for the first time in memory, I had friends accompany me to more showings than in a very long time.

I think that I saw fewer movies this year because I spent more time with friends, actually. And that's not a bad thing. I want to be social and be around people I like, and who like me.

The following star ratings, from 0 to 5 stars, are given on the basis of the other movies I've seen this year, and are not meant to be compared to other years or other, older movies. I try to rate the movie based on my enjoyment, and how well it worked as that type or genre of movie.

Oh, fuck it, don't make me justify my star ratings. I like lots of different kinds of flicks, so I'm pretty generous when handing out stars. Sue me.

The films' title links to the IMDB page for the movie; the star ratings link to my blog post about that movie. Note that there are seven films on the list that I didn't blog about; if I write about them in the future, I'll update this list. Probably. If I think about it.

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Sunday, December 27, 2009

"Up in the Air" (2009)

I'm feeling ramble-y about this movie. Be warned.

People often use the term "arc" as a metaphor for the changes a character in a story goes through. Writers, mostly. And I've always pictured said arcs as a parabola, starting at one point, going up, up, up, peaking, then dropping down. Think the shape of the St. Louis Gateway Arch.

Watching "Up in the Air" reminded me that not all arcs go up.

Am I being ironic and cute? The title of the movie describes, after all, someone flying high over ground, looking down on all the rest of us. The "flyover states". George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a seasoned traveller who feels most at home when he's in an airport or on a plane. He travels from place to place across the country and fires people for a living. This is the kind of soulless profit-driven job that has become a familiar starting point for emotional change in our movies. 60 years ago it was the traveling salesman who epitomized empty work; now we see lobbyists, contractors, day traders; they work for the minor corporations that serve the externalized needs of the major corporations, and actual human lives are just currency to them. Clooney's charm made me feel uneasy about identifying with such a corporatist; I almost felt sorry for him, even before the story, and Bingham's arc, began.

Bingham's tidy, process-driven wandering is interrupted when a young, eager kid, Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick, who manages to embody the inner turmoil and exterior calm of many a corporate drone with just a tight purse of her lip or almost imperceptible roll of her eyes) comes up with the idea to use video conferencing to fire people and save traveling costs. This means the end of Bingham's massive accrual of frequent flyer miles, and right as he's about to reach his nearly meaningless goal: ten million "points" as a reward for his "loyalty" to a legal contract.

Of course, his "loyalty" has been paid with other people's money, his expense account at the company, and not out of his own savings; Bingham is just a feeding tube through which passes abstracted value from one non-person to the next. And to earn those points, all he's had to do is be the bearer of bad news and sit with each actual flesh-and-blood person while they break down, burst into anger, plead for another chance, pretended this isn't happening, and, rarely, simply accept that their services are no longer required. His constant exposure to human emotion has made him sympathetic enough to realize that abstracting it even further with a computer screen may well be the breaking point. Or so it seems to me. Maybe Clooney's charm won me over? After all, Bingham had a selfish reason to continue facing down his fellow corporate workers; his pointless goal of "loyalty" which will earn him status as one of only seven people to earn that many points.

This movie resonates with my growing passion against corporate institutions. Can you tell? I could deconstruct this movie for days, I think. And there may be some of you who find that interesting. But it's also a movie, telling a story. And even though the director, Jason Reitman, is not a newbie director (he directed "Juno" and wrote and directed "Thank You For Smoking", among others - that last one also about corporatist politics, though played as satire rather than straight drama, as in "Up in the Air"), he made some odd (to me) choices.

When I originally saw the trailer for this movie, it featured Clooney, as Bingham, giving a motivational speech. Here, let me show you it:



The monologue, with the sparse piano over it, and the flash of images, set a tone. Somber, serious, contrasting Clooney's charisma with the sociopathic message of the words. To me it felt like a confession in a downtown bar on a weeknight, spoken over a drink or two - enough to get a buzz but not enough to really let go.

In the early part of the movie, when we first hear Bingham give this speech (he gives it, or a variation, three times by my memory throughout the course of the film), the music is much more upbeat. It's a subtle difference but I noticed the change. It felt wrong, sitcom-like. The mood was off. I wondered if I had been tricked by the trailer and my man-crush on George Clooney into the wrong kind of movie.

When Bingham meets his female counterpart, frequent flyer Alex Goran (Vera Farmgia), spellbindingly beautiful and confident, a terrific match - again, with the tone-deaf music.

When Bingham flies back to the home office and has a meeting with his boss, and his boss is Jason Bateman, again I felt the tone was off. I love Bateman, but I love him for his comedic timing and snarky anger, which jarred, just a little, with what I hoped to be the intent of this movie. I felt a bit betrayed, and hoped that this wasn't a comedy in the conventional, and classical, sense. I hoped for a deeper meaning and more mature tone to emerge.

Emerge it did, in the final half. Perhaps Reitman was aiming for contrast; I think I would have preferred a more consistent tone. This is a dark story, a classical tragedy, and, eventually, it arrived there.

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Monday, November 23, 2009

"Pirate Radio" (2009)

I loved and laughed nearly every scene in "Pirate Radio" (released as "The Boat That Rocked" in the UK).

I adore the plot line of a rag-tag group of rock and roll rebels challenging the stifled, stiff-uppper-lip British officials.

I want a copy (legal or not) of every song on the soundtrack. The soundtrack contains 36 of the over 60 songs from the actual movie. That's a good start.

And the movie left me wanting more. Mainly, how did Quentin (Bill Nighy) come to own and operate the boat/radio station? He seemed an unlikely entrepreneur. Was he the station manager, the captain, the owner, or some combination of all three?

But in the end, it was just a cute little comedy that plays very well on my internal anti-authoritarianism.

Still, I can't imagine it being 3 hours long, as Wikipedia claims. Glad they edited it down for US release. But I'd probably watch every deleted scene if I buy the DVD.

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Saturday, November 14, 2009

"The Box" (2009)

There may be spoilers in this review.

At about 45 minutes in to "The Box" I was pretty sure I could see the ending.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, especially for a suspense/horror flick. As the master of the genre, Hitchcock, explained, suspense is built when the audience knows something's going to happen but the characters don't.

The question is, is the journey there a satisfying one? Does the end make sense for these characters?

Well, I thought so. Mostly. I didn't entirely feel that the punishment fit the crime, but… OK.

But some of the odd turns and plot points seemed superfluous. Mars? The wedding? The creepy student? Waiting through all that made the movie a bit tedious. Just a tad.

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Sunday, November 08, 2009

"Men Who Stare at Goats" (2009)

Hearing Ewan McGregor ask, innocently and warily, about Jedi, is a wonderful bit of self-referential humor.

And it nicely sums up "Men Who Stare at Goats".

These aren't real Jedi that Bob Wilton (McGregor) are finding out about, but members of a secret group within the United States Army, who are practicing and honing their psychic warrior skills, like instant complete awareness of their surroundings (Level 1), intuition (Level 2), and invisibility (Level 3). George Clooney as Lyn Cassady, doing his most earnest, deadpan reading, patiently explains all this to Wilton, on a road trip from Kuwait into Iraq during the early stages of Iraq War 2. It isn't until later that we learn about Level 4, the ability to stop a goat's (or other living animal's) heart simply by staring at it.

The tales are told in flashback, as Cassady describes how a New Age guru, Bill Django (played by Jeff Bridges), a loving, peaceful kind of warrior, passing out daisies and smiling beatifically, becomes a force for good within our military, giving training exercises in dance and handing out psychedelic drugs to unleash the soldiers' inner children. All of which is a response to spy reports that the Soviets are working on developing their own Jedi, which they started in response to false reports that we were working on it. Which explains why it all needs to be kept secret; can't have the Soviets finding out that the project they falsely learned we were developing was in fact, not a secret.

The serpent in this new camo-colored Garden of Eden is Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey, who makes a great Dark Sider), a former sci-fi writer who tries, but just can't seem to get all this crazy empathy stuff, and who works to undermine the unit. It's he who introduces Level 4 - which causes Cassady to balk.

Every time Clooney tries to explain psychic warfare to McGregor, he appears oblivious to the fact that he's wrapping a bit of magic around a balls-out crazy physical attack; the way he talks about getting into an enemies' mind to dissuade him from attacking, before giving the punch-line of stabbing the enemy in the neck with a pen to create a fountain of blood. Uh, wouldn't the stabbing part be the effective part? Clooney tacks that on almost as an afterthought.

And McGregor, playing an emasculated and cuckolded reporter for a small-town paper, buys into it all. Eventually. He wants redemption for losing his wife to his boss. And given Clooney's charm, I very much could see someone overlooking the crazy to see the message underneath.

But then, I'm one of those crazy dirty fucking hippies who hate war in the first place. Of course, I'd buy it all.

But I'm not going to leap into a fight without even a knife, trusting in the Force to guide me though. That's just nuts.

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Friday, October 16, 2009

"Where The Wild Things Are" (2009)

Carol, the angry almost-leader of the Wild Things, has taken his King, Max, on a tour of all the things Max is King. Carol has shown Max the forests, the deserts, the beaches, and up into the mountains.

Hidden up in the mountains, in a cave, is a miniature mountain range; each mountain a tall, pointy, white-capped sculpture of twigs. Hidden in the twig-mountains are small clay replicas of the Wild Things.

The dream logic is impeccable - of course there are tiny mountains hidden in the larger mountains. Carol is a Wild Thing, a monster, anarchic, free in a terrifying sense. But of course he has spent some of his creative energy to craft and control a tiny world that's a lot like the larger one he can't control.

And in a moment of vulnerability, he has taken his King to see his handiwork.

Max, of course, is a human boy, who has donned his wolf suit and run away from home. Max's mom is overwhelmed with work that she has to bring home, and is now dating a "friend" since Max's dad is absent. Max loves his mom and needs her attention more than ever, but he doesn't have the experience or language to know why, exactly.

So Max ran away, and sailed the wide ocean, and found where the Wild Things are.

The Wild Things are pure id - raw need, and rage when their needs are denied. And Carol is the second-most dangerous one of them all (the first being the bull-like Wild Thing who almost never speaks, just groans and chuffles and looms). But showing off his twig-mountain sculpture to Max, he bares a sensitive soul.

"Do you know that feeling," Carol says, "where your teeth are all falling out? And they start to fall out faster and faster?"

Aha, I thought, hearing that. It's explicitly a dream. Almost too explicit. But the pull of the images on screen, and the connections I made to the feelings invoked by the Wild Things' monstrous visages, and surreal dialogue and their dysfunctional, wounded, bipolar interactions, entranced me.

I'm more prone to dreaming that my teeth are rubber and I'm unable to chew. Or that I have wads and wads of chewing gum that is stuck to my teeth, and I pull and pull but there's more and more, filling up my mouth and threatening my ability to breath. But I've had the tooth-falling-out dream, too.

And I have the strong feeling that tonight, again, I am going to visit the same place that Spike Jonze, Dave Eggers, and Maurice Sendak have pulled their words and images from.

Maybe I'll learn something tonight, like it appears Max did.

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Sunday, October 11, 2009

"Capitalism: A Love Story" (2009)

Watching Michael Moore's latest effort, Capitalism: A Love Story, at least two things occurred to me, at two different points in the narrative.

First, while watching Moore ask the question, "Is capitalism evil?" of successively higher officials in the Catholic Church gave me a strong sense of disorientation. Really, Michael? You're basing part of your argument against the excesses of capitalism on the opinion of one of the most staggeringly wealthy institutions on the planet?

The Age of Enlightenment caused a shift in power and money from the church, particularly the church allied with government in the form of inherited rule. Capitalism was one of the economic ideas that grew out of the elevation of reason and intellect that was the Enlightenment, so it could be argued that capitalism reduced the Catholic Church's power and shifted it to business and government.

And yet the Catholic Church is still vastly wealthy; after several Google searches I can't find a decent estimate of the total wealth hoarded by the Pope and all his minions across the globe. Surely the many fabulous palaces and works of art in Vatican City alone are priceless heirlooms of human history. Would members of such a institution, which has stockpiled uncounted riches for century upon century in spite of its founders' admonishments to give away all wealth, view capitalism and its ideal of hard work making one wealthy, as evil? Probably so. No shit, Sherlock, as they say.

And for Mr. Moore to use Catholic priests as mouthpieces for his movie to label as evil the economic system that dethroned the Church just invites consideration of what, exactly, on a moral scale, the Church would be. The Church uses its vast wealth to protect it's clergy from taxes as well as from legal justice (which is the least satisfying form of justice) against accusations of pedophilia and abuse of authority. Oh, and sure, to a degree, the Church does some good work, too, though I'm far too lazy a blogger to go looking for examples. I think the millennia of greed, warfare and injustice would wipe out any good works they may have done.

My laughter at the parade of clergy on the screen was surely not what Mr. Moore intended. To be fair, I was already in agreement with the filmmaker on the morality of capitalism as it has been practiced for the last 100 years or so; I just thought his method of arguing the point was tone-deaf.

Speaking of justice brings me to my second point, where social justice - which is the best kind of justice - makes its appearance in the movie. Moore mentions that our country's Constitution does not specify capitalism as an economic system, and that leads him to an observation that I have found to be true: for all the love of democracy we have in this country, there is damned little democracy in our workplaces. The standard business is run as a dictatorship. Where workers and employees have any power at all, they have it amongst themselves in the form of electing representatives to negotiate with the exalted rulers known as Management.

But Moore goes one step further, and shows examples of businesses in America that are run democratically: co-ops. He shows a bakery in California whose name I am far too lazy to search for that is set up where every employee is a part owner, and everyone, from the CEO on down, has one full vote in the operation of the business. And Moore claims that this bakery makes money, and lots of it, to stark contrast with titans of industry like Enron, Worldcomm, General Motors, Lehman Brothers, the list goes on and on.

The employees at this business can vote out the management if they wish. In a flash, as soon as they'd mentioned that, I realized just how differently a business would be run if management had to submit to a vote of their subordinates.

And in a second flash, I knew what was wrong with government.

What reason can anyone give for not running government agencies and bureaus like a democracy? If Democracy is held to such a high ideal in our country, and the topic of many many beautiful speeches by impassioned elected officials and unelected business tycoons alike, then why are we not running our government agencies like a freakin' democracy?

Businesses can be run any way the owners want, so I'll leave them out of the question for now. There are still folk who would prefer to just follow a king and not have any personal responsibility or power. But government? Why isn't the City of Portland, or Multnomah County, or the State of Oregon, or even the Federal Government itself, staffed and organized on the principle of "One person, one vote"?

If it's good enough for the country as a whole, why isn't it good enough for everything?

I'd really like to know. And now, finally, I have a life goal to work towards.

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Thursday, October 08, 2009

Whip It

Aw, crab, another movie seen and no review has been written.

I caught a 4:40 PM showing of Whip It yesterday after work. It's Drew Barrymore's directorial debut, and she has a small role in it as a crazy roller derby chick. There's a lot of crazy roller derby chicks in it, since the movie is about roller derby and finding a family and doing your own thing and the beauty myth.

It's a great movie and I loved to see the empowerment message aimed at the female segment of our population, in the form of Ellen Page sneaking off to join a crazy roller derby team and abandoning her best friend to get busted for underage drinking, because, hey why not?

But the most surprising part of the movie for me was discovering that Kristen Wiig, who is known for her one-note deadpan passive-aggressive bit parts, is actually pretty hot when she smiles. Also, she very much reminds me of my favorite stripper, Sharai, especially in the scene where Maggie Mayhem (Wiig's character in the movie) shows up to practice wearing a long muu-muu; I've seen Sharai show up to work wearing something very similar, before she goes up the stairs to Dancer Heaven and comes back all stripperfied.

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Monday, October 05, 2009

Weekend

I saw Zombieland over the weekend; I owe myself and y'all a review, since I promised myself I would make a note of every movie I see in a theater. It's one of my major topics.

But since I haven't yet completed a review of The Informant!, which I saw earlier in the week, I'm a bit behind.

So I'll make a note of them, and move on.

I also took a train up to Seattle to catch the very last Mariners game of the season. The tickets were Kevin's, and our seats were in section 194, high above center field. I took many pictures and a few videos, and will post them when I get a chance to see if there's anything in there anyone other than Kevin or I would want to see.

Oh, and the Mariners won, 4-3, against the Texas Rangers. Turned out to be a beautiful day for a ballgame!

Oh, and don't google shiskaberries unless you're ready for the horrible truth to be revealed to you.

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Monday, September 14, 2009

"Inglourious Basterds" (2009)

After seeing the first trailer for Inglourious Basterds, and learning that Quentin Tarantino's next flick would be a World War II movie, I could not wait to see it.

I'll admit it up front; I'm a huge fan of Tarantino's work. The more seemingly-pointless dialogue, the more senseless bloody violence, the more homage and in-jokes, the better.

But here and there, little hints seeped in. I saw the headline of IO9's review, but did not read the body, and saw the phrase "alternate history", for example. Well, sure. That makes sense. Any movie is going to be fictionalized. So I had some hint that maybe things wouldn't turn out the way they did in our timeline.

And the satirical article in The Onion, headlined "Next Tarantino Movie An Homage To Beloved Tarantino Movies Of Director's Youth", followed by a rant from a co-worker who had seen the movie about how every Tarantino pastiche was on display in Inglourious Basterds, gave me another hint. "48 minutes of two people talking while sitting at a table!" he said. "They don't leave!"

That was all I knew. Oh, wait, one more thing; several folk on Twitter told me to go see this movie.

Saturday I finally did. The short version is, I enjoyed it very much. The long version, mild spoilers included, begins now.

And it was, indeed, a Tarantino movie. There wasn't one single 48 minute long scene of people sitting at a table, however. There were, by my hazy memory, 5 or 6 scenes that were people sitting around a table and talking about something other than the obvious topic. And in each of those scenes, the tension is incredible, because the audience knows something that not everyone at the table knows. The cumulative effect of scene after scene after scene of this, though, is a ridiculous (but enjoyable, to me) self-awareness that this is, in fact, a Quentin Tarantino movie.

The action, when it comes, is heightened by all the tension created through dialogue, and all the more so because it's often so matter-of-fact to the characters - casually cutting scalps from Nazi soldiers' heads while discussing something else entirely, for example.

And even though Brad Pitt is shown, prominently, in the trailer, hamming it up with his chaw-filled mouth and his goofy Tennessee accent, this movie is not about Lt. Aldo Raines at all. It's about Shoshanna Dreyfus, a Jewish girl who tries to hide from the Nazis in occupied France and operates a movie theater. Yeah, Quentin loves old movie theaters, so how perfect is it that so much of the film is set in one?

Except for a few background-fillling-in flashbacks, though, the story is told in a straight linear fashion, which is not a Tarantino cliché at all. Instead of jumping around, as he's done in so many other movies, this one is a direct line from past to present. Perhaps he focused on the "table dialogue" so much to counter the fact of such a simple story?

Who knows?

I loved it. Not as much as Kill Bill: Vol 1 and Kill Bill: Vol 1, mind you, and not as much as Pulp Fiction... but still, I loved it.

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Tuesday, August 11, 2009

500 Days of Summer (2009)

I can't really tell you why I didn't like 500 Days of Summer without giving away the ending. I mean, probably. So there may be spoilers in this review. In fact, I may, at one point, tell you how it ends, describe the scene to you. But without context, you may draw the wrong conclusion about what I'm describing; you won't know for sure unless you read the whole review, spending as much time as I want to spend writing this out, only to find that you're wrong.

If I did that to you, would you enjoy it, think that it was a surprise and a delight, worth the time? Or would you feel cheated, forced to focus on something, an event or character that ultimately proved to be nothing more than a distraction, a cipher?

And what would you think of me for having done all that? I may seem clever and charming; or I may seem mean spirited. It all depends.

There are categories of jokes like that. They're called "shaggy dog stories". If you don't want to click the link, a shaggy dog story is one in which the narrator tells a long, involved story with lots of repetition and digressions, all to distract you from the horrible anti-climactic ending or, worse, the awful pun that has nothing to do with the story you've been made to listen to.

Some people find shaggy dog stories funny. Those people are usually the ones telling the story, or people who enjoy telling them. Often, the reaction to hearing a shaggy dog story is not laughter, but a groan, for having fallen for the setup and not seeing the punchline coming. The listener groans because they've been had.

Likewise, at the end of "500 Days of Summer" I felt like I've been had, like I've been made to sit through scene after scene that almost promised me character development, that gave me tantalizing glimpses of the possibility of Summer's (played by Zooey Deschanel) having some kind of inner life or rational motivation for doing all the things that Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) saw her doing to him.

Sadly, no.

Very little reason is given for Summer doing the things she is shown doing in the movie. And, worse, several times she's shown doing the same thing in different scenes, but the second time is given different context, so the meaning of her actions are changed. There are times when this writing technique is clever and used to good affect, but trust me, this movie is not Rashômon and the director is not Kurosawa.

In fact, Summer is not a real person; the character only exists to give the needy, clingy and lack-witted Tom something against which to run the gamut of emotions from ecstasy to despair. She is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl without even the semblance of a mind or life of her own.

Worse, with all the post-modern flashbacks and scenes with more than one interpretation and fourth-wall-breaking dance numbers, the writers chose to use a freakin' narrator. Narrators that are not identified as one of the characters in the film generally imply an omniscient viewpoint; but of course, nothing is to be trusted in this movie. Is the narrator up front? Are we to believe his descriptions of things? To the writers' credit, they have the narrator tell us at the beginning that this is a boy-meets-girl story, but it is not a love story. To their detriment, however, they also tell us that Summer is special and amazing, without giving us much more to go on than Zooey Deschanel's impenetrable charm and giant soulful eyes to validate that.

Seeing Summer's hand, complete with wedding ring, resting on Tom's hand on a park bench means nothing without context. Hearing her say things like "I'm not looking for a relationship right now" and then randomly kissing Tom in the copy room at work is the kind of story self-absorbed and emotionally-fragile men tell, not the kind of thing real living breathing women do. Tom's view of Summer is distorted by the writers' lack of imagination; it feels very hateful. I have no doubt that there are lots of men who will tell me that they, too, have known women like this; the "seduction community" is almost entirely made up of boys with exactly that take on women. But I am sure that the opposing stories, from the feminine side, would talk about stalk-y, grasping boys with bottomless pits of need to be filled. Or not filled.

My want for a believable set of characters, likewise, remains unfilled by this movie. But I kinda knew that going in.

This movie is Not Recommended.

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Monday, August 03, 2009

Moon (2009)

With the recent 40 year anniversary of the first Apollo mission to the moon, I had an opportunity to read an account from the media-proclaimed "loneliest man since Adam", Michael Collins. He was the astronaut who had to pilot the command module, and remained in orbit around the moon while Aldrin and Grissom landed on the surface and got all the glory.

Being farther from any humans than anyone before him, enclosed in a tiny capsule smaller than a walk-in closet, and out of even radio contact whenever he passed behind our planet's sattellite, you'd think he'd be feeling very isolated. Turns out, not so much.
I know from pre-flight questions that I will be described as a lonely man (”Not since Adam has any man experienced such loneliness”), and I guess that the TV commentators must be reveling in my solitude and deriving all sorts of phony philosophy from it, but I hope not. Far from feeling lonely or abandoned, I feel very much a part of what is taking place on the lunar surface. I know that I would be a liar or a fool if I said that I have the best of the three Apollo 11 seats, but I can say with truth and equanimity that I am perfectly satisfied with the one I have. This venture has been structured for three men, and I consider my third to be as necessary as either of the other two.1

But still, to this day, the idea of space exploration being the loneliest pursuit persists in fiction and film.

Take, for example, "Moon", Duncan Jones' debut film. In it, we are introduced to Sam (played by Sam Rockwell). He has taken a 3-year contract with Lunar Industries to be the sole human worker at a helium-3 mining operation on the moon. He has a companion of sorts in GERTY, the computer that helps run the station. But that's the only interaction he's had for 3 long years; and let's face it, GERTY's empathetic words, when provided by Kevin Spacey's sarcastic voice and illustrated by comical cartoon faces on GERTY's one video display, aren't much comfort. Sam is two weeks from the end of his contract.

Sam's loneliness is assumed, and underscored by scenes showing him viewing videos from home of his wife; he's not allowed two-way communication because of a faulty relay satellite that the company has not yet repaired. He's shown doing his job of directing the giant mining robots. He's shown running on a treadmill; an international symbol of solitude and drive. He burns his hand with hot coffee when he thinks he's seen someone else, a brunette woman, in his lounge, a woman that, to my knowledge, does not appear again for the rest of the movie.

Then one day, when he's out checking on one of the mobile mining machines, there's an accident, a bad one. He wakes up in the infirmary, under the watchful eye of GERTY. Sam's confused and slow to recover. And his burned hand is fine.

GERTY and the bosses back home seem unconcerned about Sam's inability to work, and they send a rescue mission to repair the damaged mining machine, but Sam wants to go outside. He thinks something's wrong, and after arguing with GERTY he finally manages to contrive a reason to go out via sabotage. Once out there, he finds something... extraordinary.

I'm loathe to give anything away, even though the trailers for this movie have given away this crucial plot point. If you are considering this movie, do yourself a favor and don't see or read any more; just see it.

The cinematography of the lunar surface is stark and beautiful and reminds me (intentionally I'm sure) of the stark black and white videos sent back from the Apollo missions. The large mining machines look like nothing but Jawa Sandcrawlers crossed with farm vehicles. The station, all white panels and stainless steel cabinets and low ceilings, remind me of the interior of the Discovery from 2001 - and of course, GERTY is a grudgingly anthropomorphized HAL from that same movie.

There are probably plenty of other sci-fi inside jokes throughout the film, but that gives it a familiarity; it inhabits the mental space where many sci-fi movies have come and gone. But the story that's being told is a subtle one, different from past summer blockbusters. It's a story about identity and humanity. I know, I know, that sounds like bullshit psychoanalysis but I'm not going to give anything away, dammit!

The movie's conclusion was both unsettling and utterly expected, and ended the movie but left me wanting to know more. What was the ultimate goal of Lunar Industries? Where did all this technology come from? What would happen to Sam?

We'll never know. And that's a brave stance for a filmmaker to take.

I recommend this movie.

1
Quote taken from Andy Ihnatko's transcription of Collins' Carrying the Fire, under Fair Use.

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• 6:51 PM 0 comments

Away We Go (2009)

There were so many times as I sat in the theater and watched John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph talk back and forth in character as Burt and Verona, when I wanted to turn to Lindsey and say, "That sounds just like us!" or "I can totally see us doing that." or "I'll bet that's just like we would do."

I should have seen Away We Go with Lindsey. But she was at home, doing laundry and cleaning up, taking her one day for herself in the week, and I was hiding from the heat of the day in a cool dark movie theater.

Burt and Verona are afraid they're fuck-ups. They live in a broken-down house, have the kinds of jobs that don't seem to require much interaction with anyone (he sells insurance to insurance companies, apparently by phone; she's a freelance medical illustrator), and they're expecting their first baby. They realize, on a deep level, that they need a support system to help them with raising their child; their first attempt at building one comes during dinner with Burt's parents.

Burt's parents, though (played with giddy selfish passion by Jeff Daniels and Catherine O'Hara) have decided to move to Amsterdam to follow some dream of theirs that they claim to have been putting off for a very long time. Their timing couldn't be worse; they're moving a month before the baby is due.

Verona's fears are soothed by Burt's optimism, and they decide to go on a road trip to visit various family members and old friends, to audition them for their role as the village they think it will take to raise their baby. The trip includes Arizona (Phoenix and Tuscon), Wisconsin, Montreal, and Florida, and we get to meet several different types of parents, most of them juuuuust outside of normal, which makes Burt and Verona seem normal by comparison, even though they aren't.

OK, my description isn't doing this movie justice. I just loved how Burt and Verona talked to each other, and I liked how they always seemed like real people; whether happy, or bored, or tired, or angry, they obviously loved each other very much. They wanted to make it work, and they feared they didn't know how to make it all work.

Just like real people.

And holy crab; they've got some strange friends and family.

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• 6:02 PM 0 comments

Sunday, July 12, 2009

"Up"

How did Pixar take an annoying little boy and a grumpy old man and make a wonderful, sweet movie?

Also, I will now always secretly wish that every dog had a speaking collar like Doug the Dog.

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• 4:58 PM 0 comments

Monday, June 08, 2009

"The Hangover"

I got the groom to the wedding, after making sure he had the time of his life. The bride, of course, was pissed. And the groom and my friendship soon disintegrated.

That was both the first, and last, time I was in charge of a bachelor party. That was 15 years ago.

The evening included lesbians, binge drinking, strippers, gambling (and winning!), the phrase "A round of drinks on the house!", taxicabs, the groom passing out and requiring first aid, many venue changes, and very little sleep.

It did not include traveling to another city, animals barnyard or exotic, surprise elopements, or criminal elements (that I'm aware of).

If the one I was in charge of is any indication, a bachelor party is a source of much material for stories written and filmed. Even a tame one, like the one I was in charge of, would, if filmed, make for much entertainment. And with just a bit of exaggeration, a truly epic movie could be made.

Like, say, "The Hangover". The main characters in The Hangover start the movie in deep trouble. They're out in the desert, scarred, scared, and in possession of a nearly-destroyed vintage Mercedes-Benz. Phil (Bradley Cooper, playing the charming live-for-the-moment member of the party) is calling the bride to tell her that, well, they lost Doug (Justin Bartha). The bride is livid; don't they know that she is getting married in five hours?!

"Yeah," Phil says, laconically if sympathetically. "That's not gonna happen."

And the movie then flashes back to show the lead-up to this grave situation.

The best part is, the movie doesn't actually show the events in question. No, after some set-up, it jumps forward and leaves the men nothing but a handful of clues with which they are supposed to retrace their steps and find their friend; Phil is wearing a bracelet from a hospital; Stu (played by a hilarious Ed Helms), the normally co-dependent doctor dentist, has an ATM receipt from the Bellagio for Eight Thousand Dollars; there's a live tiger in the suite's bathroom, and a chicken wandering around the (literally) smoking remains of the hotel room; a mattress that they, somehow, recognize as belonging to the groom is impaled on a statue outside the hotel, as if flung from a great height; and Alan (Zach Galifianakis), the befuddled, mysterious, vaguely threatening brother of the bride, has discovered a baby in a closet (which produces almost no surprise, considering it's not the first time he's found a baby).

And the three men have literally no memory of the night.

Do the men learn a valuable lesson about male friendship and reach a place of peace with their choices in life? Who the hell cares? As the work their way backward in Las Vegas, the stakes continue to be raised and many, many laughs are had.

My one complaint about the movie is that the three female roles are not even sketches of real women; the anxious bride, the shrewish controlling girlfriend of Stu, and the stripper/escort Jade (the still-innocent Heather Graham), are barely there. I suppose that's inevitable in a movie like this, which is more about the Hollywood myth of bromance than actual real-life relationships. For that matter, the male characters aren't much more than a handful of quirks themselves. Charming quirks, though.

Wait... wonder whatever happened to the friend whose bachelor party I was responsible for? Did his shrewish wife force him to disavow me as a friend after we showed up, barely on time for the wedding, the groom so hungover he had to wear sunglasses inside? Whatever happened to his brother, the socially-awkward repressed kid? And why can't I remember the names of the two lesbians who accompanied us that night, and what their relationship was to the rest of us? What happened to all the money I won at video poker?

Hmmm... either I'm a living stereotype, or Hollywood might just have something to tell us about ourselves, after all.

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• 6:52 AM 2 comments

Monday, June 01, 2009

"The Brothers Bloom"

Going to a movie is like dreaming in public. Images and sounds projected into a dark, curtained space; people whispering back and forth but mostly silent (if you're lucky); faces turned all in the same direction, illuminated by the flickering light.

There are many ways to enjoy a movie. You can examine the philosophical points raised in it; you can let the pure visceral id experience of the action and images wash over you without delving too deeply; you can dissect it with the expert eye of a graphic artist or cinéast; Or you can view it as a writer, enjoying the plot and characters and how they interact. Or, of course, a little bit of some or all of those.

It may not surprise you that I primarily view movies as a writer. I love to pay attention not simply to what the plot points are, but in how they are told. How are the characters' personalities and motivations explained to the audience? Does it depend on the dialogue and actions, or upon the actors' craft? Do the choices that the characters make sense?

In other words, I love stories. I love telling them. I love paying attention to them.

The Brothers Bloom is a movie that is about a pair of con men brothers and the sequestered heiress that is their current target. It is also a love story, between one of the brothers and the heiress, just like many con movies before it; the question asked is the familiar, "Is he actually falling in love with her, or is it part of the con?" And it's also, of course, a love story between the two brothers, who start out with the familiar tension found in paired confidence men; one of them loves the whole enterprise, and the other wants to get out.

The movie is also a philosophical treatise on free will vs. determinism, finding an answer to the question "Is it possible to live an unscripted life?"

But the writer/director, Rian Johnson, is far more inventive and lively than my simple description makes it sound. Bloom (Adrien Brody) is the younger brother, and I may have missed why the pair is collectively known by his name, and he is a lost soul, the deep thinker, the one who sees their life as nothing but lies. Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) is the older brother and he embraces his role in the pair as that of a writer, imbuing their con games with themes, dramatic arcs, and subtext. Their target for the movie is Penelope (Rachel Weisz), who is beautiful but more than a little socially awkward since she's lived her entire life on a ridiculous estate somewhere in a magical New Jersey. In pursuit of the con, the three of them, along with Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi), their silent aid and explosives expert, travel to Montenegro, and Prague, and St. Petersberg; they travel by ship, and by train, and once by modern jetliner; part of the charm of the movie is its mix-and-match approach to technology and fashion.

I want to recap this movie, but honestly, it would be a dry and lifeless retelling. What I recall most are the small moments between the characters.

For example: Bloom saying goodbye to Penelope for the first time after she eagerly subverted the brothers' script for introducing them to her. He stands outside the estate, mouthing the words of his script, and Penelope realizes that he's leaving, after having given her a real (to her) honest conversation for the first time in forever. He reaches out to shake her hand while he speaks, and the camera cuts to a closeup that shows his thumb lightly rubbing her wrist and barely touching and reaching under the cuff of her sweater. Cut to her face, and a blush, as obviously an effect as the oft-parodied glint on a movie hero's smile, paints her cheeks, and yet Weisz sells the look with her eyes.

Perhaps it's because I am currently in the throes of love myself, but I felt that caress along with Bloom and Penelope. My life has seemed unscripted so often in the past, and it has left me wanting a better story, an honest story. I think I have found it, and it's more than a bit shocking to see the emotional core on the screen of a downtown multiplex, told with idealism and humor but (there's that word again) honesty, too.

This movie is fucking amazing.

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• 6:59 AM 0 comments

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Thoughts after a third viewing of "Star Trek"

[Note: Spoilers for "Star Trek" follow]


  1. I have a huge totally straight man-crush on Karl Urban's Dr. McCoy. Still.
  2. Not only do the giant water tanks and transparent (transparent aluminum?) water tubes seem a bit incongruous on the new Enterprise, I think whoever designed and routed them needs some instruction in simplicity and efficiency. Was there some need, other than to make an entertaining action set-piece, for the tubes to run every which direction before terminating in a giant potentially-Scotty-killing turbine?
  3. Getting a promotion in Starfleet seems super easy! Here are two possibilities:

    • Get recruited after losing a bar fight, cheat on your final exam, sneak onto a starship during a military engagement (twice), and get the acting captain (a Vulcan (OK, technically a half-Vulcan) to completely lose his shit and resign his commission. That gets you to Captain.
    • Abandon your ship to fly into a trap, get captured, tortured, and give up the defenses for Earth. That gets you all the way to Admiral!

  4. On the other hand, defending your homeworld (unsuccessfully), shooting malcontent stowaways into space, giving out crew assignments on the basis of sexual favors, destroying random bridge consoles in fits of rage, and advocating against peaceful diplomacy and mercy - all that will only get you busted back to the second-most important position on a Starfleet vessel, while retaining your rank and commission.
  5. Given Scotty's propensity to test his crazy transporter theories on animals, perhaps he was using the tribble as a quickly reproducing test subject? Just feed it and you've got plenty of lifeforms to beam around!
  6. Still love the casualness of the bad guy. "Hi, Christopher. I'm Nero."
  7. Are we sure this isn't the mirror universe? I will not be surprised if Zachary Quinto grows a goatee for the sequel. Not surprised and at least a bit delighted.

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• 12:28 PM 2 comments

Monday, May 11, 2009

Spoiler-free "Star Trek" review

I've been worried about Captain Kirk.

More specifically, I've been worried that Chris Pine, who was cast as a young James T. Kirk in the new Star Trek franchise reboot, just didn't have the chops to make me believe he was a younger version of William Shatner's cocky, swaggering, speechifying Captain Kirk. The promotional pictures, and the few million clips and trailers I've seen in the last several months, just did not go far enough to convince me.

Still, Zachary Quinto is physically about as close as someone could get to a young Leonard Nimoy, and Quinto's portrayal of Sylar on NBC's "Heroes" certainly shows he can play "emotionless".

And, while I enjoy Simon Pegg's past performances (particularly "Shaun of the Dead"), he really didn't look like James "Scotty" Doohan at all. But I'd be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on pure personality alone.

The rest of the canonical bridge crew of the Enterprise everyone remembers was given to a bunch of young kids I've paid almost no attention to prior to finding out they were in this movie.

...except for the role of Dr. Leonard McCoy. Wait a minute, what? Eomer is playing Bones? How is that a good move?

I always knew I would see this movie when it came out. What I wasn't sure of was whether I would buy it or not.

Or so I thought. This clip1 totally sold me:

I've watched that clip many times prior to seeing the movie. And during the movie, after that scene, I turned to my girlfriend, Lindsey and said, basically, "Squeeee!"2

I saw the movie with a group of friends. Some I've known a long time, some I've known a shorter time. Some were fans of Star Trek and action movies; some were not. We drove out to the mall in which I spent much of my formative teenage and young adult life, so that we could see it in digital projection with awesome sound.

And we all enjoyed it, I think. The writers were faced with an enormous task; to take the mountains of backstory, some official and much of it unofficial but widely accepted by the fans, and still manage to make a movie that's watchable, that covers a significant point in the characters' lives, that doesn't descend into boring pseudo-scientific Treknobabble that has marked some of the later excursions into the Star Trek universe.

Holy crab, did they succeed.

In fact, without going in to spoilers, they took the most basic tentpole of the Star Trek storytelling technique, a technique that's been used in good Trek and bad Trek, and used it to refresh the characters and, almost literally, reboot the franchise. Yes, these are in fact James Kirk, Spock, McCoy.

No, you have no idea what's going to happen next.

Congratulations to all involved. You did it. I love this movie.
1 Sorry about the branded video clip. The non-branded one I found earlier has been pulled by Paramount's sharks in suits lawyers.

2 Luckily, Lindsey is awesome and did not hold my fanboy-ish joy against me at all.

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• 6:41 AM 3 comments

Sunday, March 08, 2009

Past as prologue

In 1985, I was 20 years old.

Of all the factors that our society considered the hallmarks of adulthood, I had some but not others. No job, no car, unable to drink alcohol legally, still living with my parents. Yet I could vote, I had a steady, long-term girlfriend, whom I had met in high school. I was not a virgin. And I could think.

I knew that I was a citizen of the United States, and that the country and the leadership of my county were locked in a deadly enmity with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic, and that the weapon of choice for expressing that animosity was the nuclear bomb. Both my country and the enemy had access to nukes; horrible weapons that did not just destroy the target, large targets, targets the size of large cities, but which also rendered the targets uninhabitable for decades, centuries, and caused deformations and illness in any victim unlucky enough to have survived the initial blast.

And both sides didn't just have one or two or a dozen of these bombs. They had hundreds. More than were necessary to merely "win" a "war". Enough to wipe each other out, and every ally, and everyone else, all over the world.

The strategy being pursued by my government, and the enemy (my government told me), for prevailing over the enemy was astonishingly insane: the strategy was to build more and more of these bombs, in order to scare the other side into not using their own bombs.

The madness that you and I now live under, the madness that caused men in caves to fly a jetliner full of innocents into large buildings, and the madness that caused our country's leadership to respond by invading a country they despised but had not direct connection to the attack of the men in caves, is almost understandable compared to my memories of the Cold War. Almost.

But back in 1985, it was such a horrible dark cloud hanging over the heads of all Americans that our responses were, by and large, anger. Punk rock is hard to define, but for me it will always include an anti-authoritarian, cynical, and political viewpoint, along with the feeling that, if we're all going to die we might as well have fun. And punk rock was born under the threat of mutually assured destruction.

Punk rock was part of a sub-culture that included comic books and bad movies. And in contrast to the conduit that the internet gives to making sure sub-cultures reach everyone interested today, back in 1985 sub-cultures were both more tightly-knit and harder to find and join. I had few people with which to discuss the paltry few comic books I read. I had few people with which to pick apart the lyrics to a song by the Clash or Bad Religion. I had to come to my own conclusions, by and large, about what, exactly, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons were outlining in their 12-issue limited series "Watchmen".

I didn't get it at first. I didn't understand that the characters of Ozymandias, Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan were created out of whole cloth, with a complete backstory (there were previous versions of Nite Owl and Silk Spectre). I didn't see the depth that the Tales of the Black Freighter, a story of pirates and survival at sea, gave to the main story of the Mask Killer.

But I did understand the alienation of John "Dr. Manhattan" Osterman, a man who was given nearly unlimited power and found himself more and more detached from the fragile people around him. I did understand the Doomsday Clock, which gave us all a sense of how close we were to annihilation by nuclear holocaust, and its use in the comic. I did feel deeply affected by the depiction of heroes as sociopaths: the Comedian and Rorschach had their bizarre twisted ideas of right and wrong, each a viewpoint I could see in those around me. Kids I grew up with who worshipped the guns and armor used in Vietnam without understanding or caring about the human cost of the same. Cops who saw evil and crime everywhere but never looked at how far into criminality they themselves descended. I saw the point of asking who polices the policemen; how do we hold accountable those who we entrust with our safety so that we can remain free?

And, of course, the madness of trying to win a nuclear war.

Who the Hell were these people? Were they really the same species as me? Yes, I often felt anger and disillusionment, but it nearly always turned inward. If I were faced with a Darth Vader, a dark father intent on corrupting me, I would respond as Luke Skywalker did in "The Empire Strikes Back" and fall to my doom rather than fight back. Protecting myself by wiping myself out, and fuck all y'all; you're on your own.

I had no goals, I could see no future, beyond hoping I was still around next week, next month, next year.

I read every issue of Watchmen while standing in the 7-11 near my house. Standing in front of a wire rack in a convenience store, plate glass in front of me showing the ebb and tide of cars and customers in and out of the parking lot and the flow of traffic on the street beyond, hearing the bells and beeps of the video games and pinball machines off in the corner, and needing the brief escape from the emptiness of the rest of my life.

Yesterday I sat in a theater, beside my best friend from those days, and watched Zak Snyder's adaptation of "Watchmen". Many were the moments I remembered the kid I used to be; the feeling of the paper beneath my fingers, the look of four-color printing showing earlier versions of the scenes digitally projected onto the screen in front of me. I had not read the books in years, many years, and yet Snyder's faithfulness to the comic's words and images meant many small nostalgic moments during the 163 minute film's run.

I want to know if anyone whose experience doesn't include the hopelessness of living under threat of the entire world coming to an end can feel the same thing I felt watching the movie and recalling that I and everyone I know and everyone else might die due to the insanity of my government's idea of defense. I want to know if anyone who didn't try to escape entirely into a fantasy world, learning the ins and outs of costumed heroes and Jedi Knights and paladins and rangers and rogues, can feel what I feel when seeing those fantasies being portrayed by living human beings. Is that possible?

Are these feelings I have... nostalgia? That's what I felt when watching "Watchmen". So lost I was, and the world was, then.

Not sure we've come very far since then, either.

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• 3:10 PM 0 comments

Sunday, March 01, 2009

"Coraline" IN 3D

Neil Gaiman, author of the book "Coraline", has this to say on the subject of where to sit when watching a 3D movie:
"@lunarobverse for 3D movies you don't normally want to be in the front couple of rows, and middle's seems preferable."
I have to admit, getting a direct answer from the author of the book that was translated into a movie to my question about where to sit has me feeling more than a little bit fanboy-ish.

I love the immediate feeling of connection I get from Twitter. I actually posted my question while waiting in the lobby prior to the movie, while the theater personnel were cleaning the theater, just 20 minutes before the movie was to start. I posted the question from my iPhone, on a whim. And had my answer in plenty of time to adjust where I was sitting to take full advantage of 3D during the film.

Even some of the previews were in 3D, and for the most part, it worked: the preview for "Monsters vs. Aliens" actually looked almost enjoyable from a technical standpoint, although I still suspect it lacks the depth of any random Pixar flick. Except, perhaps, for Pixar's next flick, "Up", which leaves me feeling underwhelmed. Really, Pixar? A movie about a grumpy old man who wants to get away from everyone? Of course, I'll still go see it in the theater, but color me skeptical.

Oh, wait, this was supposed to be a review of "Corline" IN 3D. I got distracted by the special effects for a moment, and the tiny interaction with one of the films' originators.

I have not read the book on which the movie is based, but the film was sufficiently creepy from the very start. Coraline is a little girl who feels neglected by her parents and alienated from her friends and hometown; the family has just moved to a rainy little place called Oregon, and her parents are always grumpy and nose-deep in their writing and computers. Little Coraline goes exploring and soon stumbles on a parallel world where her Other Mother and Other Father are happy, doting, and giving people who cultivate a garden that looks like Coraline and bake all her favorite foods and buy all her choices in clothes and do nothing but play games with her.

So of course the ones who spoil her and lavish attention on her are the bad guys.

Seeing the movie with adult eyes, I felt creeped out by all the attention the Other Mother and Other Father gave to the little girl. I wonder if any of that translated so well to the younger members of the audience. I would be surprised if it did not, though I have only my own instincts to go on.

I'm glad I got to see the movie in 3D; with only a couple of scenes near the beginning and during the end credits, the effect was used to simply give depth and perspective to the movie, and not to shock and reach out of the screen. The level of detail to the world was evident.

I recommend the movie. If you can see it in 3D, more the better - but hurry, because apparently the 3D screens are being slowly replaced with some Disney Jonas Brothers thing. Ugh.

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• 6:47 AM 1 comments

Monday, February 16, 2009

Somber

Here's what I knew about "The Reader" before I saw it Sunday:

  • It has been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.
  • It stars Kate Winslet.
  • It has some connection to the Holocaust.

All of those things are true.

The movie itself is somber, which is expected for a movie that has some connection to the Holocaust. But that is not the only theme. The script also deals with how normal people can be involved in the most heinous crimes, and how best for us to pass along the stories and lessons of the past, and the murky ethics of seducing teenagers, and whether one has a moral imperative to save someone who appears unwilling to be saved.

"The Reader" may join the list of movies that I enjoyed once, but never really wish to see again. It's given me much to think about.

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• 6:59 AM 0 comments

Friday, February 06, 2009

"The Wrestler"

Yeah, yeah, Mickey Rourke turned in an amazing nuanced performance, subdued and beaten in the real world, powerful and assured in the ring, but the scenes in The Wrestler that I found to be most realistic were in the strip club.

Man, some of those awkward, are-they-friends-or-are-they-working conversations between (naked nearly all the time) Marissa Tomei and Mickey Rourke could have been lifted straight from my life circa 1992-'98.

When I pointed this out, Kevin said after the movie, "It's apparently not just you, after all."

(I should write a full review but this should suffice for now.)

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• 6:46 AM 1 comments

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Rags-to-riches

Yesterday I scratched another movie off my Oscar best picture list.

I saw "Slumdog Millionaire" in a packed matinee theater.

Here's what I knew going in: it's a rags-to-riches story about a poor kid who gets on a game show, and it might be a musical. Oh, and the leading lady is stunningly beautiful.

Here's what I learned while watching it: it's set in India, specifically in Mumbai. It is not a musical. It's directed by Danny Boyle, an Irish working-class guy whose previous movies include an awesome zombie movie, a sci-fi flop, and a movie about drug addicts. And the structure of the movie intrigued me as a writer.

Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) is being tortured because he's suspected of cheating in India's version of the game show "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" Seems the local corrupt constabulary don't believe that a kid who grew up in the slums could possibly know all the various trivia that lets him work his way up the ladder until he's on the verge of winning twenty million rupees (about US$407,000 - not a lot to you and me, but I'd imagine it's a life-changing amount of money in India).

Jamal has had no formal education, he's scammed his way around India with his cruel but loyal older brother, Salim, and his only goal in life is to find, and rescue, Latika, the young girl who joined the two brothers as the third Musketeer to their Athos and Porthos but was kept by a Mumbaikar Fagin and forced into a life of crime.

But as he tells how he knows the answer to each trivia question, the movie flashes back to show the specific circumstances that led to him gaining that knowledge. The coincidences add up as the movie fills in his squalid life until he's got a semi-respectable job as a "chai wallah" (tea server) in a customer call center, but I never lost my willingness to suspend belief. I did sometimes recall Cliff Claven's dream board in Jeopardy, but Boyle and his screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (who adapted the novel "Q&A" by Vikas Swarup) never play it for laughs and each incident seems organic and natural. It's only on reflection after the fact that I began to question it all, and by then the charm of the story had overcome any misgivings I had.

In fact, now that I think about it, the story parallels the rise of an adherent of Hinduism through the ranks of the four Puruṣārthas, or goals of a human existence. But I don't know much about that beyond what's in Wikipedia. Someone more scholarly than I is invited to analyze the story from that perspective.

Me? I just enjoyed the hell out of that movie.

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• 6:27 AM 0 comments

Sunday, January 04, 2009

"Let The Right One In"

Since it was my first visit to Living Room Theaters, I'm tempted to review the theater, rather than the movie. Large, comfy seats, foot rests, an upscale bar/dining room attached, in-theater service, premium sound and crisp all-digital projection, and only a small premium over the "regular" theaters (my matinée was $9)... nice. Only downside was a distracting reflection on the screen, but it wasn't enough to bug the management about.

Still, as my first movie of 2009, the film itself deserves some mention. It's about a lonely kid who meets a strange kid in the woods one night. The strange one doesn't mind the cold, is smart enough to solve a Rubik's cube at first sight, and one night, attacks and kills a grown man, drinking his blood.

Yeah, she's a vampire.

Yes, I said "she". This ain't "Twilight". It's "Låt den rätte komma in" ("Let The Right One In"), a Swedish import. It's creepy and sweet and sometimes hilarious (apparently cats, in Sweden, hate vampires to an extent I didn't think possible)... but mostly creepy.

Eli, the vampire girl, played by Lina Leandersson, has that other-worldly affect and world-weariness that seems far beyond her years. Truthfully, so does Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), due to his preternatural, almost albino, blondeness.

Oskar doesn't seem to know what he's getting in to by befriending, and more, a vampire. Or care, which sends a chill down my spine. Hey, she convinces him to fight back against the bully who torments him at school. It all seems to end up all right - or does it? The fate of Eli's dad at the end of the second act hints at a darker ending in store for Oskar.

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• 7:19 AM 0 comments

Thursday, January 01, 2009

Movies of 2008

The following are all the movies I saw in the theater in 2008. It includes some second-run flicks because, for a while, I was attending the Independent Film Revival group's Monday movies.

I didn't think to keep track of any movies I saw on DVD or online or at friend's houses. Maybe I'll do that next year.

Each movie is linked to it's IMDB listing, and after each movie is a link to my post about it, if available; the link indicates how many stars I give it, on the standard 5 star scale.

This is 50 movies, and two of them I saw more than once ("Iron Man" three times and "Quantum of Solace" twice). That makes 53 trips to the theater, or just over one per week. Man, I really love movies.



Now I'm going to hit "publish post" before I re-think my star ratings. Feel free to disagree with me. By the time anyone comments, I'll probably have changed my mind several times.

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• 6:55 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

"The Spirit"

So I did it. I gave in and saw Frank Miller's "The Spirit".

The dialogue was atrocious, awkward and did little to set up, or even explain, let alone advance, the plot.

The visual style was overdone.

Samuel L. Jackson's Octopus was horrible.

Gabriel Macht's The Spirit/Denny Colt was boring.

Not nearly enough of Scarlett Johanssen's cleavage. She does give very arch line readings, though.

The other women were OK, here and there, hit and miss. But the unexplained lust the women had for The Spirit just came off as bad as porn movie writing.

However! Eva Mendes' ass was, all by herself, worth the price of admission and justified the entire movie. Seriously. Magnificent. Whether it was clothed or (for a few glorious seconds) naked, seriously, that woman's hindquarters are worthy of being considered high art. Words fail. No, really. Just... whoa.

I'm responding on a primitive, pre-language level here (which doesn't work so well with blogging, but, evs). Eva...

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• 6:03 AM 0 comments

Monday, December 29, 2008

Is this wrong?

The reviews of Frank Miller's "The Spirt" keep coming in.

And they keep on piling on the negatives. In just one weekend, it's achieved a 16% at Rotten Tomatoes (as of this posting - the score may go down even lower once people get back to work today and surf).

But when I read things like this sentence (from The Onion's A.V. Club review):
"As a babe-delivery system, The Spirit is a rousing success."
...I realize that that, alone, could be enough to put my butt in a seat, even when the very next sentence is:
"In every other sense, it’s a pronounced failure."
Maybe this helps to explain why I've seen so many damned movies.

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• 1:10 PM 0 comments

Movie fanatic

Hat tip to Dale at Faith in Honest Doubt for finding the No Life Movie Quiz. I notice, however, that Dale only posted his score (87) and not the actual list of movies he's seen. He "beat" the number that apparently defines someone as having no life by two (said number having been set by the original author of the list). Dale does regret having seen some of those, it must be said.

And as sympathetic as I am to Dale's pangs of remorse, since I have seen 99 of the movies on that list, and since I'm a self-described movie fanatic, I take my score more as a badge of honor. I'm of the school that can find value in nearly any movie. Sure, some of the flicks on the following list could have been better (in some cases, much, much better), someone, somewhere, was proud of it and in nearly all cases, many people worked hard to produce and distribute it.

Of course, not all of the movies on my "seen" list were ones I actually paid money to see. That, however, does not color my opinion after I've seen it; it only indicates my feelings of its worth prior to viewing.

As a side note, I could find no rhyme or reason to the grouping of movies on the list. What do "Blazing Saddles", "The Never-ending Story", and "Universal Soldier" have in common, for instance? And each section is variable in length - what's that all about? I've left the original formatting (though I did clean up an error that seems to have caused all the x's in the list to be replaced with a space).

As a further side note, this list must be a few years old. Several third sequels, like Spider-Man 3, were missing. My score would likely be higher if they were included. I'm a sucker for some, not all, franchises.

And my final side note: In the cases where I've seen several versions, I'm only counting them once. If you want to do the math on that, feel free, but I'm already way over the arbitrary line. It won't matter to me how much further into the pucker-brush I go sailing...

My list follows:
(x) Rocky Horror Picture Show
(x) Grease
(x) Pirates of the Caribbean
(x) Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest
( ) Boondock Saints
(x) Fight Club
(x) Starsky and Hutch
(x) Neverending Story
(x) Blazing Saddles
( ) Universal Soldier
( ) Lemony Snicket: A Series Of Unfortunate Events
( ) Along Came Polly
( ) Joe Dirt
(x) KING KONG all three versions
Total so far: 9

( ) A Cinderella Story
( ) The Terminal
( ) The Lizzie McGuire Movie
( ) Passport to Paris
( ) Dumb & Dumber
( ) Dumber & Dumberer
( ) Final Destination
( ) Final Destination 2
( ) Final Destination 3
(x) Halloween
( ) The Ring
( ) The Ring 2
( ) Surviving Christmas
(x) Flubber Orignial version only
Total so far: 11

( ) Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle
( ) Practical Magic
( ) Chicago
( ) Ghost Ship
( ) From Hell
(x) Hellboy
( ) Secret Window
( ) I Am Sam
( ) The Whole Nine Yards
( ) The Whole Ten Yards
Total so far: 12

( ) The Day After Tomorrow
( ) Child's Play
( ) Seed of Chucky
( ) Bride of Chucky
( ) Ten Things I Hate About You
( ) Just Married
( ) Gothika
(x) Nightmare on Elm Street
(x) Sixteen Candles
( ) Remember the Titans
( ) Coach Carter
(x) The Grudge
( ) The Grudge 2
(x) The Mask
( ) Son Of The Mask
Total so far: 16

(x) Bad Boys
( ) Bad Boys 2
( ) Joy Ride
( ) Lucky Number Sleven
(x) Ocean's Eleven
(x) Ocean's Twelve
(x) Bourne Identity
(x) Bourne Supremacy
( ) Lone Star
(x) Bedazzled both versions
(x) Predator I
(x) Predator II
( ) The Fog
( ) Ice Age
( ) Ice Age 2: The Meltdown
( ) Curious George
Total so far: 24

(x) Independence Day
(x) Cujo
( ) A Bronx Tale
( ) Darkness Falls
(x) Christine
(x) ET
(x) Children of the Corn
( ) My Bosses Daughter
( ) Maid in Manhattan
(x) War of the Worlds (both versions)
(x) Rush Hour
( ) Rush Hour 2
Total so far: 31

( ) Best Bet
( ) How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
( ) She's All That
( ) Calendar Girls
( ) Sideways
(x) Mars Attacks
( ) Event Horizon
(x) Ever After
(x) Wizard of Oz
(x) Forrest Gump
(x) Big Trouble in Little China
(x) The Terminator
(x) The Terminator 2
( ) The Terminator 3
Total so far: 38

(x) X-Men
(x) x2
(x) x-3
(x) Spider-Man
(x) Spider-Man 2
( ) Sky High
( ) Jeepers Creepers
( ) Jeepers Creepers 2
(x) Catch Me If You Can
( ) The Little Mermaid
( ) Freaky Friday
( ) Reign of Fire
( ) The Skulls
(x) Cruel Intentions
( ) Cruel Intentions 2
( ) The Hot Chick
(x) Shrek
(x) Shrek 2
Total so far: 47

( ) Swimfan
(x) Miracle on 34th street
( ) Old School
( ) The Notebook
( ) K-Pax
( ) Kippendorf's Tribe
( ) A Walk to Remember
( ) Ice Castles
( ) Boogeyman
(x) The 40-year-old-virgin
Total so far: 49

(x) Lord of the Rings Fellowship of the Ring
(x) Lord of the Rings The Two Towers
(x) Lord of the Rings Return Of the King
(x) Raiders of the Lost Ark
(x) Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
(x) Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Total so far: 55

( ) Baseketball
( ) Hostel
( ) Waiting for Guffman
( ) House of 1000 Corpses
( ) Devils Rejects
(x) Elf
(x) Highlander
( ) Mothman Prophecies
(x) American History
( ) Three
Total so Far: 58

( ) The Jacket
( ) Kung Fu Hustle
( ) Shaolin Soccer
( ) Night Watch
( ) Monsters Inc.
( ) Titanic
(x) Monty Python and the Holy Grail
(x) Shaun Of the Dead
( ) Willard
Total so far: 60

( ) High Tension
( ) Club Dread
( ) Hulk
(x) Dawn Of the Dead
(x) Hook
( ) Chronicle Of Narnia The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe
(x) 28 days later
( ) Orgazmo
( ) Phantasm
(x) Waterworld
Total so far: 64

(x) Kill Bill vol 1
(x) Kill Bill vol 2
( ) Mortal Kombat
( ) Wolf Creek
( ) Kingdom of Heaven
( ) the Hills Have Eyes
( ) I Spit on Your Grave aka the Day of the Woman
( ) The Last House on the Left
(x) Re-Animator
(x) Army of Darkness
Total so far: 68

(x) Star Wars Ep. I The Phantom Menace
(x) Star Wars Ep. II Attack of the Clones
(x) Star Wars Ep. III Revenge of the Sith
(x) Star Wars Ep. IV A New Hope
(x) Star Wars Ep. V The Empire Strikes Back
(x) Star Wars Ep. VI Return of the Jedi
(x) Ewoks Caravan Of Courage
(x) Ewoks The Battle For Endor
Total so far: 76

(x) The Matrix
(x) The Matrix Reloaded
(x) The Matrix Revolutions
(x) Animatrix
(x) Evil Dead
(x) Evil Dead 2
(x) Team America: World Police
( ) Red Dragon
( ) Silence of the Lambs
( ) Hannibal
Total so far: 83

( ) Battle Royale
( ) Battle Royale 2
(x) Brazil
(x) Contact
( ) Cube
(x) Dr. Strangelove
( ) Enlightenment Guaranteed
( ) Four Rooms
(x) Memento
(x) Pi
(x) Requiem for a Dream
(x) Pulp Fiction
(x) Reservoir Dogs
( ) Run Lola Run
( ) Russian Ark
(x) Serenity
(x) Sin City
(x) Snatch
( ) Spider
(x) The Sixth Sense
( ) The Village
(x) Waking Life
( ) Zatoichi
( ) Ikiru
(x) The Seven Samurai
(x) Brick
(x) Akira
Grand Total: 99

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• 9:33 AM 1 comments

Friday, December 26, 2008

"Why would I want to talk to David Frost?"

After Hitler, arguably the most hated political figure from history is President Richard Milhous Nixon.

Certainly the most polarizing figure from history, at least.

Nixon's Presidential legacy is nothing but scandal, crime and fraud. Oh, sure, there are people who think Nixon's foreign policy was top-notch, but the people who argue that point are attempting to counter the whole scandal, crime and fraud bit. We know what's important.

In 1974, when Nixon resigned the office of the Presidency, I was 9 years old. I had no idea what these old men were doing on my TV as I ate a breakfast of sugared cereals, fortified with 7 essential vitamins and minerals and bathed in milk. Blah, blah, blah, talking heads, so boring. I wanted my Spider-Man and my Bugs Bunny!

Some people, many people, in fact, still think that politics is boring, nothing but a bunch of blathering old bores, taking up space on the people's high-def entertainment centers. People may not want Saturday morning cartoons anymore, but they certainly don't understand or, frankly, care, about what rich old people are talking about in studios in the District of Columbia or New York City. People would rather watch people eat live bugs in a competition for the prize, or find out what Lindsey Lohan wore to the Oscars, or whatever.

I think, in large part, that this sad state of affairs is a result of the decisions of the people who sit atop the entertainment corporations. There's been a reduction of the momentous decisions and actions that our leaders take, a reduction to the level of... gossip. Entertainment. And that reduces people like President George W. Bush from what he is (a radical who has challenged and distorted almost every aspect of the Constitution upon which our country has been founded, and has abused his office to sow death across the globe and reap huge profits to himself and his cohorts) to the same level as... a movie producer, a celebrity, a "mogul". Opinions differ, they say, and then they quote one from column A ("I don't like him!") and one from column B ("I love him!").

This is a simplification, of course, and just one man's opinion.

But having just watched "Frost/Nixon", I can tell you, that there was a time, way back in the ancient times known as 1976, when the world of the disgraced leader Nixon intersected with the world of the glitzy celebrity of David Frost.

And, apparently, the two worlds reversed their importance.

That's the take I get from watching this movie. David Frost was a flibbertigibbet, a nonsuch, a fluffy emcee, a light-weight. Frost was not a polarizing figure; if you cared about him at all, you either enjoyed his schtick, or you envied him his glamorous lifestyle.

Frank Langella's Nixon, trying to complete the cover-up of his crimes, tries to cloak himself in the cotton-candy of David Frost. And watching Michael Sheen's Frost slowly wake up to the fact that he's being played is compelling.

Most of the movie, once the characters and background are set, is nothing but watching two men talk to each other, while others root from the sidelines. And as boring as that may sound to you, I am here to tell you that it was riveting.

And maybe, seeing the two worlds intersect, will help you untangle them again. Because I think it's important.

It's difficult for me to set aside the implications, even today, of Nixon's actions. Luckily the movie provides me a surrogate in the ever-likeable Sam Rockwell's character, playing journalist James Reston, Jr. It's Reston's real-life work that created the background for this movie. And I recognized my anger at President Bush's actions today in Rockwell's rants about trying to get a confession from, and conviction of, Nixon in the film.

But setting aside the politics, the characters and their interactions, as played by Langella and Sheen, stands by itself and makes a extraordinary story.

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• 9:52 PM 1 comments

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Chin

Oh, yeah, before I completely forget, I got out of the house long enough yesterday to see "My Name Is Bruce", a movie about, and directed by, Bruce Campbell, the B-Movie actor famous for a handful of horror/comedy movies back in the 80s and 90s... and famous for almost nothing else since then.

It was amusing. But probably not worth even a matinee price. Even if it was filmed in Oregon.

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• 4:56 PM 0 comments

Sunday, December 14, 2008

"Milk"

In my quest to see all the Oscar-nominated Best Films of 2008 prior to the nominations being announced next year, using only my well-tuned sense of what constitutes an Oscar-nominee, I went to see "Milk" yesterday, Gus van Sant's biopic of San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk, a gay activist who was (spoiler alert!) shot and killed by fellow City Supervisor Dan White.

Sean Penn did what he always does - completely disappear into the role and make him a real person, with all our flawed perceptions and amazing insights. More than that, though, Penn's performance shows a character that always pushed forward, and maintained a positive outlook, no matter what obstacles stood in his way.

The movie, seen through a wanna-be activist's eyes (mine), also shows how movements were built back in the day. Milk actually tried to get the political support of Dan White - of course, not knowing what White would do in the future, which we now know - by trying to find some common ground. Of course, White's idea of common ground appeared to be either too radical for Milk to support (something about psychiatric tests for children? I was never really sure), or that was another example of Milk's flaw, that he never took the time to look into the issue to find some way he could support White's side. Milk wanted his gay rights proposal to pass the city council with a unanimous vote as a symbolic measure, but when he failed to get White's support he pressed ahead anyway, then, flush from his victory, approached White again. This time, White had a politically unreasonable request - he wanted Milk to introduce a pay raise for City Supervisors, which Milk didn't even consider supporting.

Milk fought against a California state initiative, Proposition 6, which would have banned not only gays from teaching in public schools, but would have also gone further to ban anyone who supported gays. The state legislator who lead the drive for that measure is shown in the movie explaining that there were tests of some sort built into the bill. Milk has a meeting with the gay rights leaders in California at that time, and Milk denounces the pamphlets that they are distributing to fight against the measure: the text does not mention the word "gay", and does not put a human face on the problem, instead taking a "high road" and framing the whole debate in terms of human rights.

Milk urges his friends and followers to come out. His thought was that if more people were aware that someone they knew was gay, they would vote against the bill.

The movie suggests that the reason Prop. 6 lost was because of the courageous approach taken by Harvey Milk and the opposition. Because of the lead time for making movies, the writer and filmmakers had no idea, I'm sure, that the fight in the film would mirror the fight this year in regards to Prop. 8. Sadly, mirror is the right word - thousands of families were torn apart, a right enshrined in the California Constitution taken away because of those who mis-read and mis-understand the stories told by long-dead men, when Prop. 8 passed this year.

As I said, I watched the movie while wearing my activist hat. The struggle for gay rights, which is still in dispute thanks to the misreading of a Bronze Age text by its present-day followers, reminds me of the similarities to the atheist community. We atheists have only begun to collect in groups and to announce our presence to the world at large. On a national level, there is only one elected representative who calls himself a humanist, Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA13), and even Mr. Stark didn't announce he was a humanist until after he'd been elected. I have no particular insight into Mr. Stark's personal beliefs, and I mean no disrespect, but to my ears, "humanist" sounds like a cop-out for someone who can't go the whole distance and call themselves an atheist. And if that is the case, then the reason it's not a tenable label for an elected official is because of the vast influence that the followers of gods have in our supposedly modern society.

Earlier this year, the Secular Coalition tried to find as many atheist elected officials as they could. They released a survey. From the US President, to Congress, down to the state and local levels, there are over a million men and women elected to office.

The Secular Coalition found five; The afore-mentioned Rep. Stark; Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers (I am guessing, since Sen. Chambers was first elected in 1971 and is Nebraska's longest-serving legislator, that he did not come out as an atheist in his primary campaign); and three at the local level, one in Berkeley, California, one in Franklin, Maine, and one from Arlington, Massachusetts.

Harvey Milk's idea of making the fight personal by putting a face on what is otherwise an abstract idea is a good one. And the goal of getting more atheists elected into office is also a great route to take. The atheist community is only now beginning to organize and speak as one group. It's going to be a long fight, but studies show that, as education rises, so does non-belief. Education doesn't just mean advanced degrees; it can also mean just talking to your neighbor or friend.

Our elected officials are, by and large, experienced and well-educated, in most cases upper middle class or better. And yet there are only five out atheists among them? Far more, I think, are in the closet, put there by fear of oppression by the outspoken religious. And yet, we all share something. Atheists are, by and large, the ones who understand that separating church and state protects the church, too. Atheists are natural allies of people with minority religious traditions.

My youngest nephew is 17, and, like me and his father, an atheist. The night Barack Obama was elected by the people to be the President of the United States of America, its first black president, I asked my nephew if we would live to see an atheist president.

He thought a moment, then said, "I probably will," then smiled and continued, "but not you, Uncle Brian."

It'd be nice to prove him wrong - but I suspect he's right.

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• 10:05 AM 0 comments