Category: Movies

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 satellite, 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.

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.

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.