Went to see Lord of the Rings again with Barb and Jeffrey. It stood up very nicely on the second viewing, though I feel little need for a third viewing any time soon. The only irritant was a bunch of obnoxious children in the same row as us who talked and giggled through most of the movie. I went and complained to an usher, who warned them to be quiet, but that only worked for about 15 minutes. <sigh>
Movie time: Dr. No. The first James Bond is more low-key and realistic (sort of) than the later Bond movies. Barb and I are speculating about watching a complete cycle of movies, inspired by the fun I had rewatching all of I, Claudius, and our current thoughts are either all the Bond films, or everything by Alfred Hitchcock. Personally I lean toward Hitchcock, because I've actually gone on Bond watching binges in the past, and they're so formulaic that they quickly become tiresome.
A plodding documentary about open source. Following the usual pattern of books on the topic, the early parts about the Free Software Foundation and the birth of Linux are interesting. Then the second half obsesses with the Red Hat and VA Linux IPOs, making the last 45 minutes feel about 9 hours long. Larry Augustin of VA Linux gets a lot of screen time, but has very little to say. (Ironic, in light of VA's current flailing around in search of a business plan...) Don't bother watching Revolution OS; go read the O'Reilly Open Source book instead, which has more information and technical detail.
Remarkable art direction that veers between astonishing (the sliced horse) and cheesy (much of the bluescreen work), elaborate costumes, all put in service of an utterly contrived situation. I wish Greenaway could have been given the money and the crew for a project such as "Love of Ruins" or "Ausbergenfeld"; at least then there would be a plot. (Or at least there would probably be a plot; all bets are off if he's in an 8 1/2 Women mode.)
Movie time: the silent film Metropolis, with accompanying soundtrack by the National Symphony Orchestra (well, a chamber-sized subset of it, at least). John Goberman compiled the score by assembling pieces of various compositions. Three by Schoenberg (Transfigured Night, and the Chamber Symphonies Nos. 1. and 2) dominate the soundtrack, but Bartók's first string quartet is also used, and a bit of Edvard Grieg's From Holberg's Time is used for the idyllic initial scene in the upper city of Metropolis. The movie's plot is easy to follow, but a bit incoherent, and at the end silly, especially when the mad scientist Rotwang turns into the Phantom of the Opera. Schoenberg always sounds to me like good music to go insane to, so its stridency suits the movie's industrial landscape, but the Bartók, played by a full string section, was incredibly good, dragging my attention away from the movie and toward the players on the stage because of the music's clean, almost lacerating precision.
That brings the "Sound Tracks" series to an end, except for tomorrow's repeat of the John Williams concert. It's been a fun series, just as good for me as last year's series on American music. Next year I may give up on the NSO's season, because the last two or three have been pretty lackluster, and just get a bunch of tickets for whatever festival they'll be doing. Apparently audience attendance for "Sound Tracks" has been good, so the theme might be re-used again next year. If they do the American music theme again, though, I just might have to get a ticket for every single performance; the concerts I saw were just that good.
Movie time: our second viewing of The Two Towers. Rewatching it felt pretty much as I expected it would: the battles at Helm's Deep and at Isengard are as exciting as the first time, while the hobbit strands of the plot are even more boring than the first time because you already know where they're going to end up.
Sadly I did no programming work at all this weekend, due to one thing and another. Mostly I read, instead.
A movie called "The Core" is currently running in theatres. When we saw the trailers, Barb and I thought it looked really dumb, one of those movies featuring completely bogus science. But, surprise! the screenwriter has a physics degree from McGill, according to a Montreal Gazette story:
Screenwriter John Rogers's physics degree from McGill has finally come in handy. Rogers, who originally hails from Massachusetts, came up here to study physics at McGill University in the mid-1980s and ended up staying for a decade. After earning his bachelor of science degree from McGill, he started in the master's program there, but soon bailed to pursue his other passion at the time -- stand-up comedy.
I started my undergrad work in physics at McGill in 1991, and transferred to computer science in, erm, mid-1993 or thereabouts. Rogers might have still been hanging around the physics department at that point, but I don't remember him. (Then again, I don't remember any of the undergrads from that time, except for Greg and Jeffrey.)
The article also mentions that Rogers is currently doing final rewrites on a screenplay based on Asimov's Foundation books.
A long time ago, the Cinema de Paris in Montreal had a B-movie festival. There was trashy exploitation such as "Surf Nazis Must Die", eccentric weirdness such as "Andy Warhol's Dracula", and this movie. Back then we went to see it expecting that it would be MST3K-worthy cheesiness, but it turned out to be really good; this week I rented it from Netflix to rewatch
The actual demon looks a bit fake and in its final appearance shakes around a rubbery little doll representing its victim, but that final scene is preceded by a lot of subtly suspenseful and atmospheric material. I particularly liked the final scene on the train, in which the hero Holden tries to fool the villainous Karswell into taking back the critical piece of parchment which draws the demon. There's also the sight of Karswell as a clown amusing a group of children, making him doubly sinister. In "Casting the Runes", the original short story by M.R. James, Karswell presents a puppet show that's squirmingly realistic and creepy, but that detail is dropped from the movie. There are even a few springloaded cats of various sorts; at one point a hand unexpectedly comes into shot, making me actually jump!
The acting is pretty good -- Dana Andrews is kind of wooden but that suits his part as a straight-arrow psychologist, and Niall MacGinnis is excellent as the jocularly menacing Karswell -- and the film was directed by Jacques Tourneur, who also directed the earlier horror classic Cat People.
Ouch, this movie sounds painful; can Patrick Stewart and Orlando Bloom really find nothing better to act in? What can they be thinking? [From the Guardian, as usual]
Just as the nightmares induced by Gary Sinyor's Stiff Upper Lips were beginning to recede, another Merchant Ivory spoof is being prepared to send audiences screaming from the cinemas. Eric Idle, the retired Python, who hasn't directed a film since that classic Splitting Heirs a decade ago, is cooking up The Remains of the Piano, about a man called Hopkins who returns from India with a Steinway, only to have his life turned upside down by two women with sexual hang-ups (ooh-er missus).
If the single entendres of the cast list are anything to go by, we are in for a rare treat - Patrick Stewart as Obie Ben Kingsley, Anjelica Huston as Countess Von Kunst, Will Kemp as Leonard Bastard, and Orlando Bloom as Daniel Day Lewis. Yes, that's right, Daniel Day Lewis. If that weren't enough to push it over the edge, Robin Williams also has a cameo. First stop, Blockbuster.
Peter Greenaway is quoted in an article on the British presence. Sounds like TLS may not be a complete disaster:
After stumbling recently with 8 Women, Greenaway knows it's important Tulse Luper is a success. 'Like all filmmakers I need to have the largest possible audience, but of course I'd like that audience on my terms.'
On the other hand, Steven Mackintosh, who's in "The Tulse Luper Suitcases", said:
'Honestly, there are bits where I'm baffled as to what's going on,' says Mackintosh. 'But it's a Greenaway film, so that's how you're supposed to feel.'
The whole Tulse Luper project seems to be getting more and more dizzyingly ambitious, though:
Simple. Well not exactly. Tulse Luper is actually the first in a trilogy of films that will be released simultaneously with a TV series, website and eventually 92 DVDs. Having tackled art, architecture and calligraphy, Greenaway is focusing on new technology - and the idea that if cinema is dead, what should our new language be? 'Cinema is on a great cusp of change. After all, the boss of Kodak has said he will only be making celluloid for film production for the next 10 years.'
92 DVDs!?!? <AMK clutches his credit card and moans in pain>
As a treat for Barb after spending most of yesterday working on her proposal, we went up to Bethesda for a movie at the Landmark, lunch, and some browsing at Second Story Books.
The movie was "Spellbound": not the Hitchcock movie that I drowsed through a little while ago, but a documentary that follows eight competitors in the US national spelling bee. The children come from across the economic and social spectrum: a black girl from Washington DC whose mother is scraping by, the daughter of Mexican immigrants who don't speak English, the son of an Indian high-tech executive, and well-off children from New Jersey and Connecticut.
I was expecting the parents to be stage parents of the worst sort, pressuring their children into the competition, but they aren't; most of them are proud that their children are good enough to get into the competition and supportive of all the required training, but also not investing too much in the desire for victory. Only one parent seemed to be very driven about the competition (Neil's father, the previously mentioned Silicon Valley executive) but Barb and I were divided about him; I thought he was pushing Neil too hard, while she thought encouraging his son to strive for a goal was a good character-building strategy. (And in the end, the outcome proved Barb correct, I think). An entertaining and often heartening movie.
I enjoyed the CBC sketch comedy show "The Kids in the Hall", at least until they became too enamored of their stock characters and stopped being funny. "Brain Candy" is a movie made long after the TV show had ended, and unfortunately their creative batteries hadn't recharged much.
Watching this film, I felt like Mr Spock analysing a strange artifact. Clearly, the actions being depicted are meant to inspire laughter; clearly, each scene is supposed to go somewhere; clearly, the jokes are meant to satirize modern society. But I didn't feel like laughing at any point. (OK, so I laughed at one point, where a German model presenting a music award pronounces the word "folk", as in "folk music", as "fuck". But that was it.) Everything just plods dully along, making topical references and occasional in-jokes, and then it mercifully ends. A movie to be avoided at all costs; why waste 88 minutes?
A 1971 film that gave one of my favorite bands its name, and as a bonus it's Sherlock Holmes-themed. Unfortunately it's also a mess. George C. Scott is a retired judge who believes he is Sherlock Holmes and is pursuing Moriarty, whom he believes to be responsible for all the disasters that occur. Joanne Woodward is the psychologist who is supposed to certify him and ends up implausible falling in love with him and joining the delusion. The first half of the movie is played straight, with Scott giving a firm and dignified performance (he'd have made a fine Holmes in a standard adaptation, but here Holmes' standard characteristics are used only superficially), but then it starts to become a kooky 70s comedy. Holmes and Dr. Watson (Woodward's character, that is) meet a succession of eccentric down-and-out characters, such as a couple who have a superbly groomed garden in one room of a tenement. The film ends with a big comedic fight scene in a grocery store where the eccentrics and a squad of police spray whipped cream and throw orange peels at each other. (No, really!) Then Holmes and Watson go off and wait for Moriarty to arrive and finish them off, but they're actually on a railroad track with a train coming. Coming so soon after the slapstick at the grocery store, this scene is amazingly out of place.
It's an inexplicable film: ostensibly a comedy, except that it's not really funny; perhaps a drama, though after the first half it's not at all believable. A very strange movie, but not a good one and not really worth watching.
This was a surprise: I can't remember having ever seen a blockbuster movie whose plot is such a mess. Perhaps the problem stems from the rather nihilist nature of the whole concept. With most comic book characters such as Batman or the X-Men, you have a fairly conventional drive for the plot by giving the hero a foe who has to be defeated. The Hulk, however, gets angry and smashes stuff until he stops being angry. The movie doesn't quite manage to keep this from being boring; after the fight in the desert, the movie felt like it should have been over, but it wasn't. Battles are hard to follow -- in the fight with the dogs, I thought each dog was killed about three times -- and while all the inserts and splitscreens look cool and add a sense of speed, of many things happening at once, they're ultimately just window dressing.
The CGI Hulk looks much better than I expected. Danny Elfman's music sounds just like the music for "Spiderman", "Men in Black", and all the other summer blockbuster movies he's been scoring, a sound that's rousing but forgettable. There may have been an influence from Tan Dun's "Crouching Tiger" soundtrack, resulting in lots of low thumping percussion, but that could be my imagination.
So, overall... enh. It won't stick in my memory very long, and won't inspire any enthusiasm for another viewing.
Back at home, I watched "Dancer in the Dark" on DVD. The musical numbers are great fun, but the scenes between songs are filmed in a slow pause-filled verité style that is painfully dull. Mercifully my DVD player will show subtitles even in fast-forward mode, so I just read most of the dialogue, saving both time and sanity.
Lone Star is only the second John Sayles movie that I've seen, and it's excellent, one of those movies with a sprawling cast and featuring about five intertwining stories. Set in a small Texas town, the movie's primary focus on Sheriff Buddy Deeds Jr., who's investigating a skeleton found in the nearby desert. The skeleton belongs to Charlie Wade, a former Sheriff who mysteriously vanished, and as Deeds Jr. investigates, he begins to suspect that his father was Wade's murderer. Other subplots involve Deeds reviving a high school love affair, the closing of the town's army base, the new colonel and his strained relationship with his father, and the old history of Wade's thuggery, told in flashbacks. Not all of these plots get resolved, but the two primary ones do, in a bittersweet and memorable ending.
Pirate movie day today. First, we went to see Pirates of the Caribbean. This is the first movie I've seen all summer that's actually fun; what a concept! I can understand complaints that all the swordfighting got tedious after a while -- there is quite a lot of it -- but I enjoyed it all. Geoffrey Rush and Johnny Depp had great over-the-top performances, Orlando Bloom is a good romantic lead (Barb was probably thinking "Ooh, yes he certainly is"), and it was fun to see Jack Davenport from Coupling in a slightly more serious role.
At home we watched Treasure Planet. I don't know why they bothered to put Treasure Island in a science-fictional setting. The change of scenery didn't add anything substantial to the story (beyond the opportunity for some silly astrophysical errors), wasn't impressive (except for the shot where we zoom in on the crescent moon and find it's actually a spaceport in orbit -- that was a shivery moment), and the original setting would at least have had the charm of history.
Secretary is a love story, a somewhat dark romantic comedy. Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a young woman with a dysfunctional family and a history of self-mutilation who goes to work for James Spader, a prickly and demanding lawyer. Their relationship begins as employer/employee but, as Spader begins correcting her typos and changing her clothing, it becomes more of a master/slave relationship.
I wanted to see this movie ever since seeing Gyllenhaal in John Waters' Cecil B. Demented because she's just so darned cute. Watching this movie, Barb pointed out that she bears a striking resemblance to Willow in the early seasons of BtVS, and you know, she was right; she does look a lot like Willow. A submissive Willow. (At this point I need to go for a bit of a lie-down.) There are two very erotic scenes in this movie where Gyllenhaal is bent over Spader's desk for punishment, and the final denouement (where, of course, they realize they were meant for each other) follows a surprisingly harsh final task for her -- to sit at his desk for three days without leaving -- with a touchingly gentle love-making scene.
It's really hot out today, so of course I decided to spend the middle of the day outside finishing one of my bookcases. That required sanding it, brushing it with wood conditioner (which opens the wood fibres or something) and then staining it. Tomorrow I'll varnish it.
We wanted to go see a movie afterwards, and decided to see LXG despite all of the bad reviews. They're fully warranted: the plot is utterly incoherent, the CGI effects often cheesy (an early shot of a house in Kenya exploding is obviously just a flame effect superimposed over the picture) and when they try to imitate :title-reference:Lord of the Rings: simply pathetic, Connery is just coasting on his Bond-like shtick for the whole picture, and in the end it's all forgettable. To paraphrase one of Crow's lines: "At least the bad editing covers how poorly it was shot." It's probably a good thing that I haven't read volume 1 of the comic yet; I'd probably have blown a gasket if I knew what had been done to the original.
There are a few -- a very few -- things to like; I enjoyed some of the performances, notably Peta Wilson's feral Mina Harker and Naseeruddin Shah's Nemo; I really wish they could play the same roles in a good production. Barb pointed out the saddest thing about the movie is that it could have be something really good and memorable, but instead ended up being yet more Generic Action Film Product.
Brotherhood of the Wolf is very stylish-looking, but it's also derivative; you can watch it and think "Oh, they're Matrix-ing this fight" or "Hey, this is their Crouching Tiger scene`. The plot is somewhat parallel to that of Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow, which we rewatched just last night. Both movies are about an investigator sent out to investigate a series of deaths in a remote provincial area. In Sleepy Hollow, the investigator is eccentric and only semi-competent, recoiling at the sight of blood and hacking up a body in a clumsy autopsy as memorably performed by Johnny Depp (who has the field of quirky smart guy portrayals sewn up). In Brotherhood, the investigator is de Fronsac, the super-competent taxidermist to the King, and his Iroquois sidekick, and he's investigating a series of attacks by some ferocious beast.
In Sleepy Hollow, the plot moves quickly through various twists and turns. In Brotherhood, the plot moves sluggishly with much, much padding -- side trips to the court, pointless battles with peasants, a lengthy brothel sequence -- that consumes time but doesn't make what's happening any more coherent. It finally winds up with an explanation, but I can't say that I really understood it -- the Vatican was responsible, or something like that.
Nightmare Before Christmas (I keep wanting to type "Nightmare Before Elm Street") is a lot more fun. I only saw it once, when it was running in theatres, but had a tape of the soundtrack for many years, and I could still remember most of the songs, almost well enough to sing along.
I watched this movie a long time ago and remembered thinking that it was a worthy successor to the 1939 Wizard of Oz. On rewatching it tonight I'll temper that opinion a bit. I still quite like it for the new cast of characters -- Tik-Tok the clockwork soldier is my favorite of them -- and for its dark tone. At the beginning of the film, Auntie Em is worried about Dorothy's constant talk of Oz and decides to take her to a doctor for electrical treatment, an accurate 19th-century touch that lands her in a Dickensian hospital. I vaguely recall people disliking how spooky the film is, but it's easy to forget how frightening the original film was -- remember the flying monkeys?
On the other hand, the original film is crammed full of incident but this movie's plot is surprisingly short: Dorothy is sent to the hospital, winds up in Oz by drifting along a river, discovers that the Emerald City is in ruins and its people turned to stone statues, finds Tik-Tok and escapes from the creepy Wheelers, nasty shouting people with wheels instead of hands and feet, and falls into the hands of the evil Princess Mombi. After escaping Mombi, Dorothy and her party end up on the Nome King's mountain and have to play a guessing game to restore the Emerald City, and she succeeds, of course, after which she can go home. Hm, on re-reading the plot isn't as short as all that, but to me the movie certainly seems less eventful than the original.
Part of the problem is that the movie is only 109 minutes long and its scenes don't move very quickly. For example, the prologue takes roughly 15 minutes of running time, the Nome King's game is drawn out almost to the point of boredom, and the happy epilogue is also just too darned long. While I still think it's an enjoyable film, it doesn't reach the heights of either the original or other children's films such as Roan Inish.
A depressing and horrifying documentary about how Terry Gilliam's attempt to make a film of Don Quixote collapsed during its first week of filming. The documentary begins two months before filming, showing the extensive planning and preparation: costumes, sets, casting extras. There are already warning signs at this stage: one of the stars still hasn't signed her contract and her agent is not being helpful; other actors aren't reachable; the budget is small and the schedule is tight, leaving no wiggle room if anything goes wrong.
Once filming begins, everything falls apart. Jean Rochefort, the actor playing Quixote, becomes ill. Extras have not been rehearsed and have to learn their movements during filming time. The location is next to a military airbase and jets repeatedly roar overhead, ruining shots. After the first week, only a few shots have been done and the schedule is in complete disarray, but there's no way to reorganize and the panicky investors and insurance company want to do something -- anything -- to fix matters, but Gilliam has lost hope.
In fact Gilliam is a study in tragedy through all of this; in one moving conversation with the first assistant director and the director of photography, he's the first person to voice the question they're all thinking, "How do you pull the plug on something like this?" Then there are meetings, lots and lots of meetings, and the insurance company takes over and boxes everything up. It's a truly sad ending. It's not quite clear what Gilliam's conception of the film was going to be, what with a time travel element and fighting puppets and goofy giants and all the other touches I would expect from him; it's difficult to say if the film would have ultimately been a great success, but it certainly would have been interesting.
Two fluffy brainless movies today.
The Borrowers is a children's movie based on a series of novels by Mary Norton; I haven't read the books. The story is about the Borrowers, little people who live in the walls of the Lender family's house and borrow -- not steal, borrow -- various human artifacts as they need them. It starts well, explaining the backstory and showing the Borrowers' home; the props and set decoration are really amusing. Then the villain, an unscrupulous lawyer played by John Goodman, shows up and the movie gets rather means-spirited. Goodman gets sprayed with burning foam and insecticide, tripped, electrocuted, and finally tied up with wires. I found all this torment a bit off-putting, but I suppose the Home Alone movies were a prototype for it. Not bad, but also not quite what I was expecting.
On the other hand, it was still better than The Avengers, an unearthly mess. While watching it, the startling thought came that LXG was actually better. Both movies have completely incoherent plots, but LXG has some interesting characters such as Mina and Nemo while Avengers has no characters of any interest, not even Steed or Mrs Peel. The only memorable scene is a meeting chaired by the villain (Sean Connery on acting auto-pilot) where all of the attendees are wearing teddy bear costumes. Silly and pointless, yes, but at least this one scene managed to be entertaining for around 30 seconds. The special features on the DVD should have included one titled "A Sincere Apology", but they don't.
Whale Rider is a great little film. It's a story about the generational battle between Koro, chief of a Maori village, and his granddaughter Paikea. Koro is searching for someone to become the new chief; Paikea's father isn't interested, and Paikea's twin brother died at birth, so there's no good candidate. Paikea thinks she should learn the songs and rituals, but her grandfather thinks only boys can be chiefs. Because it's a family film, you can guess what the ending is going to be, but there are a few surprises along the way. The movie reminded me of Roan Inish in having a plucky heroine who perserveres despite stern injunctions from her guardians. I didn't love it as much as Roan Inish, which holds a special meaning for me because of personal reasons, but it's certainly worth watching.
Rat is a bizarre but fun little film. Pete Postlethwaite is the hard-drinking father in an Irish family. One night he comes home drunk, and while his wife is berating him he turns into a rat, a cute little brown rat who's argued over by the family: should they kill him? give him away? keep him as part of the family? The film is a deadpan comedy, and the actors make it work very nicely. Frank Kelly is fun as vastly knowledgeable Uncle Matt, and Imelda Staunton is hilarious as the long-suffering and nagging wife, whether she's singing or helping dry the rat out after too much Guinness.
Joe Bob Briggs has an excellent retrospective column on the film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Many people believed, and still believe, that the movie is entirely true, in part because of its effective cinema verit351 documentary style. In this respect, Tobe Hooper anticipated "The Blair Witch Project" by 26 years, and he did it without the advantage of cheap video. Far from being an artless "shaky-cam" documentary, "Chain Saw" is Hitchcockian in its complex editing: in a film less than 90 minutes long, there are a total of 868 edits, some of them as short as four frames, or one-sixth of a second. No wonder it shocked the world. Forry Ackerman, the writer and film historian who has watched every horror film since 1922, said even his jaded eyes believed the actors were real people. "It's a watershed work," he told Brad Shellady in the video documentary "Texas Chainsaw Massacre: A Family Portrait." "It brought a new dimension of reality to horror films."
And that reality, in 1974, was not entirely welcome.
Catching up on my Netflix queue...
The Avengers '65 Vol. 2 was much more enjoyable than the previous one, because the stories moved quickly and didn't drag, a and while the three episodes on this DVD are still silly, the situations were played more seriously. I decided that I like The Avengers after all.
Everyone was rhapsodizing over Spirited Away while it was in theatres, but on watching I wasn't too impressed. There are some lovely images, such as the train running over tracks covered with water and the shadowy presence of No-Face, but in the end I didn't find the movie amounted to much. There are weird pointless things, like the No-Face gorging scene (which features an amount of vomit that puts Mr. Creosote to shame) and Yubaba's three disembodied-head sidekicks posing as the baby that are never explained and don't really lead anywhere. Perhaps the intention of such details is to make the fantasy world larger than that of the primary plot by not having every single event be relevant to the plot, but if that was the aim, it didn't really work. Oh well; I suppose the appeal of anime continues to elude me.
A day for watching movies, both at home and in the theatre.
We went out to see Gothika. It's a supernatural-tinged Hitchcockian suspense story, let down by a final resolution that I just didn't believe and ultimately it's kind of disposable, but there are some effective spring-loaded cats along the way and the production design is nicely atmospheric. Worth seeing if you like this sort of thing.
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is a bizarre creation. Based on game show creator Chuck Barris' book, in which he claimed to be a contract killer for the CIA, this movie doesn't take the claims very seriously and plays it as a drug-fueled . Sam Rockwell's performance as the increasingly freaky Barris is excellent, and he's placed in the middle of a perfect re-creation of the cheesiest 1960s/1970s styles.
After finishing that DVD, we spun the dial around and came across the 1980 Xanadu which, I was amazed to learn, featured Gene Kelly. Xanadu is oh-so-riffable: the hip 1980s fashions, the cheesy special effects, the bad dialogue, the cringing embarrassment you feel on Kelly's behalf, and the plot's mainspring being the heroic battle to open a new roller disco. ("But Zeus, shouldn't we be doing something about wars, pain, death?" "No, no, this roller disco takes priority.")
Of course we went to see it, choosing an early Sunday morning showing that would be less crowded. It's a great film that's just as entertaining as the earlier ones, and has a number of jaw-dropping moments such as the battle with Shelob, Rohan's troops riding into battle, and my favorite, the lighting of the torches of Gondor.
My minor quibbles with the film?
When I moved down here in 1996, art movie theatres in the DC area were closing all over the place. The Biograph in Georgetown closed just after my arrival, the Key (or whatever it was called) on Wisconsin closed some time later, and the City Paper was predicting doom.
Now things are looking up. A few years ago Barb and I discovered the Landmark Theatre in Bethesda, and she introduced me to the Greenbelt movie house, which has one screen on which they show classics -- we saw The Birds and The Man Who Knew Too Much there -- and certain current releases such as Gosford Park. Maryland is really far from my usual territory, but when Barb was up in Beltsville we were there every other weekend.
After moving to Vienna, we found out about the Pickett Arts theatre, which is just a few miles away from home and is small and unremarkable. This week I noticed a Post article about a new one opening downtown:
Tomorrow, the E Street Cinema opens -- the first mainstream movie house to operate downtown in decades. E Street Cinema will show foreign, independent and documentary films in eight small- to medium-sized theaters, adding another entertainment option to the growing list of restaurants, nightclubs and playhouses opened recently or proposed for Washington's once-moribund downtown.
It's a Landmark, owned by the same chain as the Bethesda theatre, so I'm sure it's going to be really attractive and comfortable. Hey, they're even showing :title-reference:"Bubba Ho-Tep" right now!
Like Master & Commander, this is a historical miltary story. Tom Cruise is a despondent American soldier who's become disgusted with the wanton slaughter of Indians that he's witnessed. He accepts a job in Japan training the nascent Japanese army, and after a disastrous first battle, is captured by Katsumoto, the samurai who is leading the rebellion. While it's not as memorable as M&C, it was still an enjoyable and impressive movie.
Went to downtown DC tonight to go see Bubba Ho-Tep (main site), an odd little horror film in which Elvis and JFK, both stuck in a Texas nursing home, discover that an Egyptian mummy is sucking the souls out of residents. Stray thoughts:
Perhaps the most depressing film experience in my life.
This is a documentary about Mark Borchardt, an amateur filmmaker whose great dream is to make movies, and his struggles to complete a short film. What makes this movie so depressing is that there's no evidence Borchardt has any actual talent, and his life is such a complete mess that the filming effort is just delusional. He has three -- 3! -- children from a previous relationship, and frankly he's unstable enough that I wouldn't put him in charge of three goldfish, let alone leave three children developing under his influence. There are also several pathetic scenes where Borchardt attempts to cajole his senile uncle Bill into investing money in the film production; these made me cringe at the opportunism of the whole situation.
The final film, Coven, is included as a special feature on the DVD. It reminded me of some of the short films I saw at Necronomicon; there's not much of a plot, much of the character motivation is never made clear, and while the writer/director obviously has some vision or worldview in mind, the film is so inept that I can't actually figure out what that vision is.
It's all so grim that this film had me in a funk for the rest of the evening and most of the next day. Memorable, yes, but in a bleakly and depressingly funny way.
An entertaining two-part series from ITV. Steve Baxter is an unremarkable video store clerk who disappears (for forty days?) and then reappears to announce that he is the son of God. For some reason people believe him -- a miracle in which a shaft of daylight pierces the night sky over Manchester for several hours certainly helps -- and chaos ensues, getting worse when he announces that a Third Testament has to be written within five days. If no testament shows up, it'll be Judgement Day and the end of the world. Another force (Satan? Or God himself, in a bit of misdirection?) is also around, quietly possessing people to nudge events into the proper pattern. The ultimate resolution of the situation is not entirely satisfying because the explanation isn't quite clear enough, and it also employs much the same thematic points as the conclusion of Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. The film is made in a documentary style that's very effective in depicting the breakdown as Baxter's revelations sink in.
Another reason I had for watching the movie is to get an idea of what the upcoming revival of Doctor Who will be like. The script was written by Russell T. Davies, who's now busy writing the new DW series, and Christopher Eccleston, the star of this movie, will be playing the Doctor. I'm now really enthusiastic and looking forward to the series. Eccleston is off-kilter enough to make a fine Doctor, and Davies' writing laconically draws the characters and packs a surprising amount of plot into two-and-a-half hours. He's also bright enough to explore all the ramifications of Steve Baxter's announcement, though I would have liked to have known more about what happened after the climactic event. (Did all the churches close down, for example?)
Hm. I'm not sure what I think.
There's some excellent acting here; Sean Bean is a great Odysseus, Eric Bana's Hector personified nobility, and Orlando Bloom was a good Paris. Paris is admittedly dumb as a bag of hammers, but that fits the character pretty well. Brad Pitt even made a decent Achilles.
But there's also some bad acting (Agamemnon, Patroclus, and Peter O'Toole's glassy-eyed Priam) and some painfully bad writing. In the first hour the script make the point that the warriors at Troy will be remembered for a long time, and it makes this point again and again; yeah, yeah, I got it the first time.
Another inadvertently funny moment comes just before a one-on-one battle (I think the one between Achilles and Hector), where the camera zoom in on Helen accompanied by the soundtrack having a panic attack. Then it repeats for Priam. The third time, for Andromache, I started to think I was watching a spoof of some sort.
While watching, I was struck by the thought that Briseis' story --captured by the Greeks, taken by Achilles, taken again by Agamemnon, given back to Achilless -- is really quite interesting, and telling the Iliad from her viewpoint could be heart-breaking. (Sitting in the movie I confused her story with that of Cassandra, but later I looked it up. The Iliad never says what happens to Briseis after Achilles dies; it's Cassandra who's carried off by Agamemnon and killed by his vengeful wife Clytemnestra. Merging the two stories would provide a tragic ending for Briseis. Novelists, feel free to take this idea and run with it.)
Overall... Troy isn't bad but it isn't great, either; I may not be able to remember any scenes from it in six months, and that's a sign of mediocrity.
Errol Morris's documentary is a fascinating extended discussion with Robert McNamara, who was US Secretary of Defense from 1960 to 1967, a period that includes the initial years of the Vietnam War. McNamara was an early example of the political figure as CEO, giving presentations full of charts and graphs on combat fatalities and bombing runs. He talks about his life as an executive at Ford Motor Company, his army service during WW II, and a bit about his time as president of the World Bank, coming across as an extremely thoughtful and intelligent person. But thoughtfulness and intelligence may not be enough; McNamara observes that incomplete information and bad luck can doom the best plans.
Morris mostly lets McNamara speak for himself, sometimes on-camera, sometimes as a voiceover with newsreel footage or graphics. The film is remarkably skillful at conveying information very quickly; in two sequences he shows rapid clips of newspaper stories about McNamara to quickly show the contemporary opinion about him: "educated", "cold", "arrogant", "rational". Another memorable sequence shows Japanese cities and their fatality rate from US bombings during WW II, pairing them with American cities of comparable size. An amazingly good documentary.
This morning we biked to Reston to go see a movie. We started from Hunter Mill, but we seriously overestimated the distance. It turns out to be only 4 miles or so, which is pretty trivial for us. Next time we'll start from Vienna, which will add three or four miles to the trip; still not a distance that stretches us, but at least it'll be a bit more effort.
So, Harry Potter... this is my favorite of the three movies so far. I really like the grim and dark tone of the film, feeling that the first two films spent too much time showing how magical Hogwarts is without advancing the plot; sort of "welcome to our whimsical and wondrous world of whimsy and wonder", y'know, which got tiresome. This movie is all plot, with even the obligatory quidditch match being shortened and more relevant. Hogwarts is gloomier and wetter, and the recurring seasonal imagery is at times quite lovely.
Stray thoughts:
Looking forward to the next one!
Third in the series of films with music by Philip Glass and images by Godfrey Reggio, Naqoyqatsi is the most abstract and manipulated of them. There's a fair amount of stock footage and a lot of CGI, and the natural world is not shown very much. Glass' music, essentially a cello concerto, is excellent; there are beautiful and gentle solos, and the first section, "Primacy of Number", is a driving piece that reminded me of John Adams.
On the other hand I have no idea what the point of the film is. There are lots of images of technology, of soldiers, and of war, but they're juxtaposed with advertising, computer graphics, and stock footage. I have no idea what any of this is supposed to mean -- that advertising techniques are used to sell us on the idea of war? that our culture is celebrity-obsessed? Nothing new there, then.
A thought-provokingly ambiguous documentary about Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite news channel that's been a persistent irritation to the US government because it shows gory footage and occasionally contradicts the military's statements. The documentary starts in March 2003 just before the invasion of Iraq and looks behind the scenes at how the news is captured and presented. There are really two control rooms: the TV studio where Al Jazeera produces their news channel, and the briefing room at CentCom where the US tries to control the media's view of the war. The bombing and invasion of Baghdad, the death of on-location reporter Tareq Ayoub, and the closing of CentCom are shown; near the end the documentary begins to drag and there's no real conclusion, but it's a remarkable glimpse of the people putting together the news.
So is Al Jazeera slanted? Judging by the scenes shown here, it certainly is, but not any more than, say, Fox News is slanted in the opposite direction. Many people belie their stereotypes. One Al Jazeera producer likes the US and want to see his children live there, going "from the Arab nightmare to the American dream". A reporter says he has confidence in the American people, that the next election will put things right. The US army spokesman talks very movingly of his reaction to seeing footage of dead US soldiers, and how it made him understand how painful the footage of injured Iraqi civilians must be for Middle Easterners. Someone from the State Department says "We need to talk to Al Jazeera and get our side of the story out there", but the Defense Department is in charge, and instead of a friendly approach Donald Rumsfeld calls the channel a pack of liars. (This was the most depressing part for me. Defense was in charge because State was too friendly, too empathic. I wonder: if Colin Powell and State had been running things from the start, would the situation be so bad today?) American journalists, in unguarded moments, seem much more negative and less credulous than they do on-camera; why can't we get news with that much bite?
A forgettable thriller in which ~10 characters are stranded at a motel and begin getting killed off. The twist isn't much of a surprise, and the bleak ending is visible from a mile away.
A lot of movie-watching this weekend. We were planning to go out on Saturday, but I pulled a muscle in my back and had to spend the day resting. Barb took me out for lunch and to rent some movies.
Johnny English: A disposable but entertaining James Bond spoof; Rowan Atkinson does a competent job as the hapless title character, but nothing about the movie is especially memorable. It's a good movie for watching in the background while you do something else.
Willard: Crispin Glover was born to play creepy, intense guys in movies like this. This slick remake about a loner who acquires a horde of obedient rats, was produced by Glen Morgan & James Wong, formerly producers and writers for the X-Files. And in fact the movie feels a lot like an X-Files episode, using some of the same stylistic tricks (e.g. playing a song while something bad and disturbing happens, long slow panning shot, richly shadowed photography). Not a classic, but an enjoyable horror film.
The Terminal: We went to the theatre for this one. It's an amusingly fluffy comedy about a man trapped in an airport, and Tom Hanks does the required physical comedy very well. It's almost Lost in Translation-lite.
Ripley's Game: This direct-to-video movie is a follow-up to The Talented Mr Ripley, sort of. It's 20 years later, and Ripley is played by John Malkovich instead of Matt Damon. This time, Ripley and an old partner in crime incite an ordinary man to become a hit man for them. The target of their scheme is a picture-framer in his thirties who's dying of leukemia; he's desperate for money to support his family after he's dead, and therefore reluctantly agrees.
It's a middling movie. Malkovich is as superb in the role as you'd expect, sophisticated yet indefinably reptilian, but the character of Ripley seems softer, less harsh than in the earlier film, and there's the barest hint that he's sorry about the tragic conclusion, though there's no way it'll keep him from his life of palatial ease, of course. I found the earlier movie more queasily memorable.
We finally went to see it, in a sparsely attended Thursday matinee with around 10 people in the theatre. Like "Bowling for Columbine" , it's an entertaining polemic marred at certain points by silliness. Moore's points about the PATRIOT Act being foolish and about the military being the only career option for disadvantaged people are good ones, but then he has to go spoil it with some silly stunt such as buttonholing Congressmen and asking them to send their children to Iraq.
The film opens with a reminder of the contested 2000 election, concluding that Al Gore likely. After the opening credits, 9/11 is evoked by a long stretch of black screen, while Arvo Pärt's "Festina Lente" plays; a simple rendering, but moving and painful. The long-running connections between the Bushes and the Saudis, and between the Bushes and various defense contracting firms are discussed. Stupid security measures are discussed; lighters are confiscated while coasts are left completely unguarded. It's a sham, designed to make it look like something is being done. (I wonder if Moore read Bruce Schneier's scathing comments on homeland security?)
The last hour of the film just made me angry. Moore's narration is sparse and most of the footage is purely factual, showing the violence, the profiteering, and the tragedy of the Iraq war. Moore follows Lila Lipscomb, whose son was killed in a helicopter crash, and her family's pain is heartbreaking. Will the US people realize what's going on and throw out the bums in the current administration? I certainly hope so, though I don't know if F9/11 will affect the situation at all; quite likely it's preaching to the converted.
James and the Giant Peach is odd, somewhat nightmarish, and ultimately not particularly good. The characters lack the charm of the earlier Nightmare Before Christmas, and the songs are pedestrian.
Cabaret is an interesting study of its setting, though also a fairly plotless one. Bizarre cabaret scenes are interspersed between scenes showing the intense but doomed love affair between cabaret singer Sally Bowles and student Brian Roberts, and there's always the background awareness that Naziism is rising. I enjoyed it, but thought that listening to Ute Lemper's "Berlin Cabaret Songs" album is a much better way to get the feel of the period.
Spiderman 2 is good silly superheroic fun. I loved Alfred Molina as the tragically villainous Doc Ock, driven mad by the AI in his superpowerful arms; his performance was the highlight of the movie for me.
De-Lovely: The biographical part of this movie is kind of scattered, not bothering to identify secondary characters or make the passage of time clear, and too much screen time is spent on the Porters's decline and death. But the highlights of the movie are the musical numbers, and they more than make up for the rest of it.
Comedian: This documentary follows two comedians around as they work on their respective standup acts. One is Jerry Seinfeld, who still agonizes over audience reactions despite his fame. The other is the up-and-coming Orny James, who's irritatingly self-obsessed and prickly, quick to blame audiences and fellow comics for his problems. Seinfeld's story is the more interesting one as he makes surprise appearances at comedy clubs and slowly writes more jokes. The game is all about minutes of material, going from 5 minutes to 20 to the holy grail of 60 minutes, enough for a solo performance. (At one point Seinfeld and Chris Rock are talking, and they're both awestruck by Bill Cosby doing 2 1/2 hours of material. "That's with an intermission, right?" Seinfeld asks. "No intermission", Rock says.)
A Mighty Wind is yet another low-key documentary spoof. This one pokes gentle barbs at 60s folk music, provoking smiles but not that many actual laughs. It's amusing to watch, but I didn't find it very memorable.
And two TV show: Freaks and Geeks, which I never saw before its cancellation but turns out to be really funny, and the old SCTV, which turns out to be slower-moving and not as funny as my vague memories claimed. But perhaps that's because I was watching the first two episodes, which are usually a bit rough...
I just can't work up much excitement over Vegas movies. The setting is always the same, the stock characters of mob types, smooth gamblers, lunkish Middle-Americans are always present, and the plot always turns on money. So while I can appreciate The Cooler as well-made, and enjoyed William H. Macy's performance as a hapless loser whose luck is so bad that he can stand next to a gambler and make them lose, the movie still left me flat and largely unmoved.
The ending is where it falls apart. The explanation of what's been going on is astonishingly clumsy, pivoting on a very implausible hiding place, and then we learn that the setting is not what we think it is, to some degree invalidating what has come before. It didn't make me hate the entire movie, however; contrast this with Roger Ebert's review , where he writes:
It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore. And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we're back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets.I didn't think the ending was that bad. This is a bit odd because book 3 of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy takes a not-dissimilar twist, and that twist did in fact ruin the whole setting for me. Here I wasn't too bothered. Perhaps it's because reading two books is more of a time-investment than watching a movie for an hour, so it's less painful when earlier details are invalidated. Whatever the reason, I walked out of the theatre not feeling cheated.
There was one annoyance, unrelated to the film itself. The showing was in the special Director's Hall theatre; you pay $2 extra for leather seating, assigned seats (but who cares?), and, er... that's about it. You're even still stuck watching commercials at the beginning. Annoyingly the theatre's listings don't tell whether a showing is in the Director's Hall or not; this time we decided to pay the extra $2 instead of waiting a half hour for the next showing, but I'd like to avoid this pointless surcharge in future.
This was great fun, successful in a way that the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie didn't manage. The CGI is equally cheesy; the plot is equally confusing (I'm not sure what happened at the end); yet Hellboy was successful and LOEG wasn't. I think it's because the actors carry the film much more lightly; in particular Ron Perlman is great fun as our grumpy demon hero, bashing monsters and rescuing kittens. The supporting cast is also quite good; especially John Hurt as Hellboy's adoptive father and Selma Blair as the vulnerable-yet-highly-dangerous love interest.
Lovecraftian in-jokes abound, and the secret government agency reminds me of the Delta Green campaign setting. The director is an HPL fan and wants to do a film version of "At the Mountains of Madness" some day; after seeing this movie, I'm guardedly optimistic that he can manage to translate AtMoM to film. In the meantime, I need to pick up a few of the original graphic novels.
I really enjoyed the first movie, The Bourne Identitity. This one was almost as much fun, though marred by the handheld camera-work. I've enjoyed the two Bourne movies because they're grimmer versions of James Bond. Bond is silly and joking, while Bourne has little sense of humor and is just a highly effective killing machine. Bond never gets injured, while Bourne does, getting more and more battered as the movie progresses.
The primary problem with the film was the jerky hand-held camera style used for most shots. This looks cutting-edge in small doses and makes hand-to-hand fights seem breathlessly fast, but it makes the car chases largely incomprehensible, and after an hour I began to feel motion-sick. Maybe it was the popcorn. Still, I had fun, and drove home pretending I was being pursued by nefarious Russian agents.
After leaving the cast of Saturday Night Live and separating from her husband, Julia Sweeney bought a house of her own, intending to write, relax, and laze about listening to Tchaikovsky. Things didn't work out that way; "Life is what happens while you're making other plans", as Woody Allen once said. Sweeney's brother Mike develops lymphoma, and moves in with her. Her parents came down from the Northwest to LA to help take care of Mike, and they also moved in with her. From one person in the house, to four. For the next year, Mike's condition declined. Six months later, Sweeney was herself diagnosed with cervical cancer.
In this one-woman show, Sweeney describes that difficult year with good-natured exasperation and wistful regret. She describes her parents' irritating habits, Mike's struggle to cope with the chemotherapy (and with getting a shunt installed in his head), and how the experience made her feel more like a teenager than an adult. It's alternately funny and moving. To quote from Roger Ebert's review, "At the end of the film, we feel we've been through a lot with Julia and Mike Sweeney and their family. We're sad, but we're smiling. I was thinking: Life's like that." Yes.
Dreary, dreary, dreary, with a few flashes of black humour that don't come often enough. I dislike movies where all of the characters are depressed, boring, and want to change their lives but are too dumb to figure out what to do. That's a capsule summary of this film, where Jennifer Aniston is a supermarket clerk bored with her life and job who falls into an affair with an unstable co-worker. It all ends badly, and because the movie is set in Texas, it ends in gunfire. Luckily none of the characters are likable, so that's OK.
I guess it's a good summer for movies featuring remorseless hired killers, what with first the Bourne movie and now this one. Tom Cruise is the killer here, who hires hapless taxi driver Jamie Foxx to drive him around for the five murders planned for the night. Not bad; I preferred the earlier portions where the almost-Hitchcockian situation is being set up, because the ending is more conventionally Hollywood (and not particularly plausible).
Beautiful CGI and superlative design, combined with a plot that doesn't make the tiniest particle of sense. It had some of the same period verve as Raiders of the Lost Ark but in the end wasn't as much fun, though I still really enjoyed seeing it.
John Sayles's movies, filled with characters and interwoven subplots, always hold my attention and often are quite moving. Silver City feels perfunctory, though, and the B plot about a Dubya-like politician, aptly named Dickie Pilager and played by Chris Cooper, running for governor of Colorado has only one note. The joke is that the politician is quite dumb, and that's about it for the B plot.
The A plot, featuring Danny Huston as an ex-reporter turned investigator, is better. After Pilager accidentally hooks a body floating in a lake, Huston's character traces the dead man's history. The solution turns out to be less interesting as expected, and as treacly socially-conscious as you'd expect. Minor Sayles, in short; entertaining while it's going on, but immediately forgettable.
A fine horror movie, and even better than the original. In the original movie, a teenage girl named Ginger is bitten by a werewolf, and the film follows her decline and eventual transformation into an improbably large and massive wolf. Ginger Snaps was a fun movie, but the end wasn't very original -- yet another battle to the death -- and felt rather rushed.
In this sequel, Ginger's sister Brigitte is struggling to avoid going the same way as her sister, using injections of wolfsbane to delay the transformation and cutting herself to track her state (she heals faster the more wolfish she gets).
She's also on the run because she's being chased by another werewolf who invariably kills bystanders when he catches up. (Halfway through the movie we find out why she's being pursued; eeeew.) Then Brigitte, who looks like a heroin addict because of all her injections, is picked up and put into rehab in a run-down institution. Here she meets various characters such as the weird and creepy Ghost, the well-meaning but out-of-her-league doctor, and a truly slimy intern. She needs to keep up the wolfsbane but can't get it, and the other werewolf will soon catch up...
Unlike the first one, this film didn't fall into any clichés and the ending is utterly startling because the monster isn't at all what I thought (being vague to avoid a spoiler). The broken-down hospital setting is reminiscent of Session Nine, and there's a pervasive sense of claustrophobia in the hospital's locked rooms and boring wards. An excellent piece of work.
(Bonus: this is a Canadian horror film, shot in Alberta.)
Note to self: look for more movies directed by Mira Nair. I loved Monsoon Wedding and really enjoyed this one because of the beautiful music and photography.
Movies based on Victorian novels are often confusing for me because it can be difficult to tell characters apart. Novels are easier because characters usually have distinct names, but in movies I find myself thinking "Oh, now Sullen Guy is hitting on her... hang on, isn't she married to him? No, wait, she's married to Soldier with Sideburns..." That happened a bit in Vanity Fair, but not enough to send me off the rails completely.
In this interview with Stephen Fry (warning: the content of the linked-to page is safe for work, but most of the content on the site is highly not safe for work -- use discretion), Fry quotes Peter O'Toole:
... we were at a memorial service for a great English comic named Spike Milligan. I had sent him the script [for Fry's new movie Bright Young Things] and I asked him if he wanted to do it. He says “I’d love to fucking do it darling. It’s fantastic. Fucking great. They kept sending me that fucking wank that twit all that fucking Tolkien. Pixies and fucking elves. That fucking adolescent masturbatory fantasies. They kept sending me that fucking thing and wanted me to play a fucking wizard. I said fuck off I don’t want to play a fucking wizard. ...” This was in a church! A crowd was gathering around. Then he said “I gather Ian McKellen is going to do it and it will fucking suit him.” That’s a little insight into the casting of Lord of the Rings.
The same site also has an interview with Ramsey Campbell, whose most recent novel The Darkest Part of the Woods is excellent. (Yes, it's October again...)
I, Robot at the second-run theatre: ugh, is there a single cliché this movie doesn't use? Cold, unemotional female scientist? Check. Control of many robots from the CEO's office? Check. Service passages with no security measures? Check. Renegade cop getting his badge taken away? Futuristic setting where protagonist has old technology (like a motorcycle)? Heroes who fight dozens of super-fast, super-strong robots yet survive more than 30 seconds? Check, check, check. Will Smith doesn't really pull off the 'tough renegade cop' act, many of the minor characters are irritating, and the futuristic designs were like rip-offs of Minority Report. Asimov's original robot stories were rather philosophical, taking the Three Laws and showing how they could lead to unexpected consequences. This movie skips all that in favor of Extruded Futuristic Thriller Product. Avoid at all costs.
Disney's Brother Bear is certainly better than I, Robot, but it's also generic and unmemorable; none of the characters holds your attention, the songs are dull, there are no breathtaking flights of animation or great vocal performances. Blah.
The best thing I watched this weekend was The Sign of Four: Jeremy Brett is at the top of his form as Sherlock Holmes with none of the oddities that would come later, the mystery is laid out creepily and effectively, and there's Ronald Lacey's scene-stealing performances as the strikingly eccentric Sholto twins ("I am forced to be a valetudinarian"). A high point of the Granada Holmes series, I think.
In the Hour; presumably this is because The Tulse Luper Suitcases is showing at a festival in Montreal.
Hour: Audiences will find Tulse Luper a rough experience. The film loads each moment with a tempest collage of images, words and sounds, oversaturating the senses.Greenaway: I don't think we need to say "over," do we?
The Canadian Space Program has plenty to be proud of these days. Telesat's Anik F2, the largest commercial communications satellite, became fully operational last week, following final on-orbit testing. Also, Dextre, the Canadian dual-armed robot, has been handpicked to rescue the ailing Hubble telescope. And then there's NEEMO-7, the Canadian astronaut-led mission to demonstrate remote-controlled surgery underwater....
You won't find any of this stuff in its official press releases. For some reason, the CSA reveals little of its in-house projects, even though many of those projects are quite newsworthy.
That diffidence, combined with its largely supporting role on the international scene, reminds me of a bahu – a traditional Hindu daughter-in-law, dignified but demure, always walking a few steps behind family "elders" like NASA and the Russian space agency.
And, on a completely unrelated note, there's a William Shatner film festival in London, Ontario:
Shatner surely is not obscure, but I think that some of his lesser-known stuff from the '60s and '70s is," says Skot Deeming, the festival's organizer.I've wanted to get a copy of Impulse ever since reading the Agony Booth's recap of the film. It would be great for a bad-movie night.The centerpiece of the event will be a triple bill consisting of 1962's The Intruder, 1974's Impulse, and 1977's Kingdom of the Spiders.
...
The response to the festival has so far been enthusiastic. One person even sent Deeming an e-mail asking if he could bring alcohol.
Deeming's answer: "Maybe you should bring some alcohol. It's five-and-a-half hours of 1970s Shatner films. You might need a little bit of that."
The Shining is wonderfully creepy. The plot is greatly changed from the original novel, but I think the film version's ending is more frightening, leaving the Overlook Hotel intact and with one more ghost. Shots are often fairly long with dialogue that subtly heightens the sense of menace as the scene continues. My only problem is with Jack Nicholson's mugging as Jack Torrance; this movie contains lots of the mannerisms that comedians use to imitate Nicholson, and they're present from frame 1, making it seem like Torrance is insane from the start.
The Forgotten reminded me of this summer's The Village: good build-up, lackluster conclusion, and the more you think about it the less sense it all makes. I also wish that the trailers and ads for this film hadn't given away what would have been the most startling moment. If you care about this movie, wait for video.
For some reason Netflix recommended this movie to me; not a bad suggestion, it turned out. Deeply is a Canadian/German coproduction about a fishing village where every fifty years the fish stocks disappear due to a curse, only coming back at the cost of a human life. Kristen Dunst plays the young woman who's "the one" this time around. A framing story around this, with Lynn Redgrave narrating the story, involves another teenager who comes to the island much later, and has her own grief to cope with. The film is beautifully photographed, though it's a fullscreen DVD (annoyingly -- what were they thinking?) so some carefully-framed shots get truncated.
Everything about the story has an aura of misty unreality. The village's location is never made explicit, though it seems more like the Maritimes than, say, Ireland, and the film was in fact shot in Nova Scotia. The time period is left equally vague, perhaps with Dunst's story taking place in the 1940s and the framing story in the 1990s. Dialogue is often cryptic and the characters are all basically ciphers. (Minor Greenaway connection: a secondary character is played by Anthony Higgins from The Draughtsman's Contract.)
In some ways, Deeply is like John Sayles's Secret of Roan Inish reflected in a dark, gloomy mirror. It's not as good as Roan Inish, which I think is absolutely perfect in every single respect, but that would be a difficult standard to meet. In the end, Deeply is good but not outstanding; it's an entertaining tragic fantasy.
There are good ideas in this thriller, but they're rendered in the most soporific way possible. The plot is about two priests whose old teacher is murdered, and their "investigation" leads them to a sin-eater, a man who can take the sins of the dying upon himself. I put "investigation" in quotes because they investigate mostly by wandering around randomly and having things happen to them. Sin-eaters were an Irish or English idea (see Fiona McLeod's story for a fictional portrayal),but putting the sin-eater in Rome is an acceptable variation (and I liked the flashback to the construction of St. Peter's.) My problems were with the endless cryptic dialogue that leads nowhere, the implausible characters, the nonsensical plot twists.
Two out of five stars, mostly for the art direction; it's an attractive movie to look at, even if what's happening on screen doesn't make any sense.
We caught an early-morning showing in a mostly-empty theatre. This is especially important for movies that attract lots of children; having a sparse audience ensures that things are fairly quiet. In this case I needn't have worried -- even the noisy children quieted right down once the short subject started, and during the entire movie everything was amazingly still.
Wow -- The Incredibles has just replaced Finding Nemo as my favorite Pixar movie. Great writing with substantial intelligence underlying the jokes, fine vocal work (Holly Hunter's voicing for the harried Elastigirl is superb), sly spoofing of both superhero comics and Bond films, a nifty Saul Bass-like closing credit sequence, near-perfect pacing that only dragged very briefly in one spot (Dash's chase through the jungle), and no Randy Newman. Dangerously close to perfection.
(I'm not a home theatre geek, having never even had the impulse to buy a plasma screen or surround-sound speaker -- no, not even my beloved Greenaway films have made me lust for a 60-inch high-definition screen. Watching the closing credits, though, I thought "this movie really does need to fill your field of view". And the acquisitive monster began to stir, if only for a little while.)
Today I watched the second of the Evil Dead films, having watched the first one last week. I really enjoyed the third movie, Army of Darkness and had vague memories of seeing the first one when I was in my teens, so I wanted to watch movies #1 and 2; Netflix to the rescue!
Their tone is wildly different. Evil Dead is a straight horror film, with five people trapped in a cabin and getting successively killed off. There are a number of creepy and memorable scenes, such as the pencil-through-the-ankle moment, the demons asking "Why do you disturb our sleee-e-e-p?", and a scene where one character is raped in the forest by vines. (This last scene was the one playing when my cousin and I were watching the movie and my parents decided to check on what Andrew was doing. Of course.) It's very, very low-budget. The music is wildly variable, at times decent and at times very cheesy; I was astonished to find that it was composed by Joseph Lo Duca, who went on to write some very good music for the Xena series. I also listened to Bruce Campbell's commentary on the DVD and found it highly entertaining.
The second film is midway between the straight horror of the first one and the horror-tinged comedy of the third; it's a vaguely comic horror movie. Unfortunately, it's also awful: the comedic bits aren't funny, but do make it impossible to find the movie frightening. Often it's just stupid; characters are repeatedly doused with torrents of blood for no reason, and at one point (the only funny point) Bruce Campbell has to chase down his possessed hand after chopping it off. Strangely, the movie also manages to look cheaper than the first one; perhaps it's simply impossible to make stop-motion animation and matte paintings look good. I could have just skipped the second movie completely.
The best movie about science I've ever seen.
If one thing was learnt from Kinsey's reports, it was that human sex lives are stranger than we imagine. Liam Neeson absolutely nails the role -- boundless curiosity, the obliviousness to social convention, the self-centeredness, of someone consumed by the goal of learning more, and the strangeness of a man who talked about sex at the dinner table, mutilated himself in small ways, and steered his research group into a complicated polyamorous web. I don't know enough about Kinsey to know which bits of the movie are credible and which ones aren't, but whatever inaccuracies there might be, it's still a fascinating story. I should look for a biography.
I also liked the ending. Many biopics end with the deaths of the main character, possibly taking in their spouse's death along the way. It gives the actors a chance to croak meaningfully, giving them a good shot at the Oscars, and is a cheap and easy way to manipulate the audience's sympathy. It can be taken too far; for example, De-Lovely seemed to spend more time on Cole Porter's dying than it did on his life. Kinsey doesn't resort to that; while Kinsey is aging and sickening, the final scene is much more positive, with him and his wife glorying in a forest where they've paused for a little while, until Kinsey walks off, saying "We have work to do." (The scene also reminded me of the closing scene of Doctor Who, which also ended with the Doctor walking away from the camera while delivering a monologue that ends on an identical note.)
Basically a highbrow Hallmark special. Johnny Depp is the unworldly playwright J.M. Barrie, and Kate Winslet is the genteelly poor widow he takes under his wing. Society thinks they're having an affair, but really Barrie just feels sorry for her, and the stories he tells to her children provide the basis for his play Peter Pan before she dies of consumption. Not bad, but it's trying too hard for significance, and the story really isn't that significant.
(While watching I kept thinking of Scaryduck's encounter with Kate Winslet, which made me take many of her scenes less seriously than the filmmakers intended. Don't think that made a large difference in my assessment of the film, though.)
This follow-up documentary looks at Trek fandom, dividing its attention between American and non-American fandom (primary European, except for Brazil). It seems to be gentler than my memories of the first movie. Oh, there's some goofiness here -- Star Trek tribute bands, a man whose entire apartment is a set -- but mostly the fans are portrayed as devoted and somewhat obsessed but well-intentioned and with a sense of humour about themselves. It's almost a PR puff piece for fandom.
Oddest moment: watching the movie and seeing a fan talking on screen; in one of the sessions at SMOFcon earlier today, this same person had been sitting two seats away from me. This is why documentaries are fun.
Another John Sayles film. This one follows a group of American women in an unnamed South American country as they sit in a hotel and wait for their adoption applications to be processed. Subthreads involve some of the hotel staff and some street children, who intersect with the women in various ways. The film's attitude toward the adoptions is ambiguous; for example, Marcia Gay Harden has a great performance as a type A bitch who clearly would be a terrible choice as a parent. This is counterbalanced by Susan Lynch (the selkie from Sayles's Roan Inish) having a great speech in which she wistfully imagines what her life will be like with a child. This speech is delivered to a hotel maid who doesn't understand English but has a poignant monologue of her own in Spanish. The street children have dead-end lives, committing petty thefts and sniffing inhalants, making it clear that life in the unnamed country is no picnic. The final impression is of a bleakly random process, where some children find good parents, some don't, and some are left to slowly kill themselves.
This 1997 movie was an early role for two Texas actors, Renee Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey, whose respective agents have since tried to suppress this movie because it was just so embarrassing. Both Zellweger and McConaughey had breakout roles in 1996, so perhaps this movie sat on a shelf for a while and was released to cash in on its stars' newfound fame. In any case, I wish the agents had succeeded, because it's absolutely terrible. It's not even MST-able because most of the scenes are just characters running around screaming, and you have nothing to riff on.
The plot makes no sense whatsoever. Zellweger is one of four teenagers (college kids? who knows?) who get lost on their prom night and crash their car. In the early part of the movie,she's all mousy and determined-looking, and is completely adorable. The other three characters don't have a brain cell between them. After the accident, they run into Vilmer, a bionic tow-truck driver (no! really!) played by McConaughey in full-on scenery chewing mode. He kills one of them, and then chases Zellweger around for the rest of the movie; she gets chased by McConaughey, threatened with chainsaws, zapped with a cattleprod, thrown off a roof, and licked by a guy with an English accent.
No reasons or explanations are ever given for anything that happens, so the movie just drags on like this until she finds Vilmer's remote control (for his legs, see?) and escapes. It's possible this is some sort of comedy, spoofing the horror genre, but if so it's completely unfunny, even less funny than It's Pat.
We saw this in a nearly-empty theatre today. I didn't like it as much as the first movie, because it recycles some of the same situations after first straining to break up Bridget and the impossibly perfect Mark Darcy. One plot twist tosses our heroine into a Thai prison, an astonishingly misconceived idea for a romantic comedy. (According to Barb, who's read the book, the Thai prison sequence is even longer and much darker in tone; I guess the screenwriters tried to water it down as much as they could.)
Zellweger is cute and manages to make Bridget appealing even though the character is as dumb as a box of rocks. Everyone else is competent but one-note: Colin Firth is romantic, Hugh Grant is slick and seductive, Gemma Davis is dotty, and so on, and so on. An OK time-waster, but nothing memorable.
Kenneth Branagh is a misanthropic playwright, and Robin Wright Penn his long-suffering wife. She wants to have a baby. He's dead set against it. When an eight-year-old girl moves in next door, his wife likes her but he carefully avoids the child. His plays haven't been doing that well, though, so when his actors suggest that an offstage child's dialogue isn't realistic, the playwright reluctantly begins talking to his new neighbour and soon (perhaps a little too soon) discovers that he enjoys talking to her. By the end of the movie, when the girl's family moves away, the playwright and his wife are back at the fertility clinic.
All this sounds obvious and sentimental and rather sickening, but the script saves it. The playwright's cynicism is expressed in snarky one-liners that get fired back and forth; it's like Gilmore Girls with swearing. Kenneth Branagh invests the role of an angry young man who's turned middle-aged with a hateful glee. Lynn Redgrave plays his mother-in-law, who's slowly going senile and delivers a number of funny lines and one poignant speech. While the ending was the obvious one I was expecting, it was low-key enough that I could stomach it.
This is the third in the Ginger Snaps series of werewolf movies. This one is only loosely a prequel, rolling back the clock to the 1700s, when fur traders were mapping the Canadian wilderness. The same two actresses from the two earlier films, Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins, star in this one as two sisters who end up alone and lost in the woods. They stumble across a trading outpost that's under siege from a pack of werewolves lurking in the forest. The palisade is keeping the wolves out for now, but that's not enough to keep Ginger from being bitten. I enjoyed this film, probably more than I did the first one. (The second movie is also good, so the first movie ends up being the weakest, violating the usual rule about sequels.)
I loved the idea of being stuck thousands of miles from help and with dwindling resources, and it was implemented well; this wasn't filmed on a shoestring budget. At times the movie was like a grimmer and bloodier (much, much bloodier) version of The Village; there are a few shots of foggy gloom reminiscent of The Village's photography that were quite chilling. The only problem I had was that the two lead actresses don't act like they're from the era; they sound just like they did in the first two movies. For example, when Ginger says at one point "We're fucked", it snapped my suspension of disbelief for a little while. It didn't prevent this movie from being effective.
(And the werewolves were more credible than in the first one! In that movie, Ginger turns into an enormous beast that's the size of a horse, but it's impossible to swallow a 130-pound girl turning into a creature that would have weighed over 500 pounds. Here the wolves, as played by guys in suits, are unnaturally long-legged but look much more reasonably-sized.)
It's silly SFnal movie week.
Shaun of the Dead is great fun, a spoof of the endless parade of zombie movies. It doesn't take the Scream approach of having characters aware of genre conventions; instead for the first half the main character is blithely oblivious to the crowds of zombies, ignoring newspaper headlines, TV reports, and even pools of blood at the conveience store. Very funny in a deadpan way, yet there are also a few poignant moments (the deaths of Shaun's parents, for example).
Lost Skeleton of Cadavra is a spoof of a different genre, the 1950s sci-fi B-movie. It's uneven, with a number of good lines and goofy scenes, but also a few scenes where the joke drags on for too long. Amusing but forgettable.
We had plenty of free time today because of the snow, so I got through two movies.
Bad Santa is a grungy foul-mouthed tasteless comedy. Quite a funny one, too. Billy Bob Thornton is a safecracker who poses as a department store Santa every year, and every year he and his partner rob the store on Christmas Eve. Unfortunately he's no good as Santa; he's drunk all the time, swears, is prone to violent rages, has sex in the store's dressing rooms... it's not pretty. A pathetic loser kid begins following him around, and the Bad Santa begins to feel some twinges of empathy. Four stars, as long as you don't mind a very dark and trashy comedy.
I'd heard The Bride was an unrelentingly awful movie, but on actually seeing it, it's not that bad. Oh, it's certainly a bit of a mess. Sting, of all people, plays Baron Frankenstein, who has just constructed a woman for his first creature. The lightning gets a bit out of control, so the lab goes up in the flames, the male creature flees, and Frankenstein is left to educate the female creature. Midway through the movie Frankenstein inexplicably becomes addicted to opium and begins mistreating the female creature. The other creature ends up in a circus, where he learns friendship and other valuable life lessons before coming back to rescue his intended from Sting's now-evil clutches.
The notion of having the female creature survive isn't a bad idea, but the implementation's not so great. The story's ultimately rather pointless, with the two creatures implausibly going off to Venice at the end. The dialogue feels odd and at times flirts with disaster (goofiest moment: David Rappaport, as the creature's dwarfish friend Rinaldo, telling the creature "he's all man"), though most of the performances are pretty good. Two stars.
(See an article about the film, and an article about an unsuccessful attempt at fictionalizing the story for the stage.)
Lessons I learnt from today's filmgoing:
Back into DC for an evening at the DCIFF. Tonight's show was a set of short films:
The Cinema Arts theatre picked up a package of most of the Oscar-nominated short films (both live-action fictional and animated -- no short documentaries). After reading Roger Ebert's review a few weeks ago, this was an unexpected opportunity. (We didn't get to see "Rex Steele: Nazi Smasher", the student Oscar winner included in the package that Ebert reviewed.) It's great that these short films managed to find a distributor who could put them into theatres.
First, the animated films: "Gopher Broke" is a funny little amusement, but doesn't break any new ground. The eventual winner, "Ryan", is a grippingly metaphorical rendering of the misfortunes of Ryan Larkin, an animator who slipped into cocaine and alcohol addictions. I'm not sure I understood all of its implications -- Chris Landreth, the filmmaker, seems to have his own demons -- but the movie is a remarkably risky work. My favorite was "Birthday Boy", a melancholy story of wartime amusement and misfortune; charmingly done, and deeply sad.
Three of the four live-action shorts feature children in neglect or in danger. "Wasp", the category winner, is a depressing slice of life piece about four children whose mother leaves them outside the pub while she goes on a date inside. "Two Cars, One Night" is similar, with three Maori children waiting in cars outside a bar; it had less of a story, but was beautifully shot in black-and-white. In "Little Terrorist", a boy accidentally crosses the guarded and mined border between India and Pakistan, and has to find his way home with some help from the local schoolmaster.
My favorite was "7:35 in the Morning", a strange little movie in which the customers in a diner perform an increasingly odd musical number; eventually the pieces fall in place and what's going on becomes clear. It's hard to tell if this is a comedy or not, but it was certainly the most surprising film on the program.
Today was a cleaning day. We tidied the top two floors of the house while also running loads of laundry and vacuuming the basement. As a reward after finishing, we went out to a movie.
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is a sweet-hearted documentary about a flock of parrots that lives on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, and about Mark Bittner, a quirky guy who began feeding them years ago and can tell us all about the flock's habits, personalities, and relationships. Parrots are relatively intelligent birds (one researcher suggests parrots are about as smart as chimps, and has constructed web sites for them), so the flock's interactions are fairly complex.
I was fascinated by the different personalities of the birds. Any pet owner will be familiar with the idea of animals having different personalities: they can be friendly, cranky, fearful, bold, and sad. Bittner's reminscence about the first parrot death, a bird named Tupela who died while under his care, is tear-inducing. Birds like to be warm, so she was happily nestling alongside him one evening; he put her on the floor before bed, and she died sometime during the night. The movie made me think about animal intelligence, and glad to be vegetarian.
In the evening, more Dead Like Me and Wonderfalls episodes. Also went through some of the 2005 PyCon feedback and did some of the numeric-counting work (results in the wiki).
A fun English-language implementation of a Bollywood musical, this film is highly entertaining. Some people say that its star, Aishwarya Rai, is the most beautiful woman in film today. Yeah, I can agree with that. It's also great fun to see Naveen Andrews from Lost in a light and fluffy role, one where he gets to jump into the middle of a dance number.
A superb film about Hitler's last days, seen through the eyes of his secretary Traudl Junge. I walked out of the theatre on the verge of tears.
The film opens with Junge's job interview with Hitler in 1942; here he is a grandfatherly figure who's gentle with her nervousness and affectionate to his dog. Fast forward to 1945, and things are very different: Hitler is paranoid and unstable, alternating between screaming rants about betrayal by his underlings and wistful talk about how the situation will be put right after this minor issue of the Russians invading Berlin is settled. (These speeches reminded me of Woody Allen's parody about the memoir of Hitler's barber: "He tips me a pfennig, regretfully saying that ever since the Allies overran Europe he'd been a bit short.") Meanwhile, his officers are trying to get out of the city, or preparing to kill themselves after their Glorious Leader is dead. There are subplots a-plenty, such as a group of Hitler Youth who come to tragic ends and the destruction of the Goebbels family. The latter subplot, which threads its way through most of the movie, is especially horrifying; Goebbels is a lean and sinister figure who looks like he'd break your fingers for a joke, and his wife is smartly dressed, wears a pearl necklace, and says of her five children "I can't bear the thought of them living in a world without National Socialism."
More reading is probably in order. I read Ron Rosenbaum's "Explaining Hitler", on the contentious arguments over his biography and how to discuss him, but I still don't understand why, even when Hitler was descending into insanity, his followers continued to believe in him so strongly that they died with him. Was it cult-like devotion or just a pragmatic recognition that war crime trials and Russian POW camps were all the future held? Did the Goebbels, for example, kill themselves because they feared retribution from the invading Russians and Americans, or because they sincerely believed in Hitler's project and that the world was doomed without it? Either reason is compatible with what we see onscreen. I've bounced off a few histories of WWII, but should give the library another try.
I'm not doing much of anything worth writing about, but hope to have the PyCon details nailed down soon.
To keep the weblog from withering away, here's a run-down of movies I've recently seen.
Neil Gaiman's A Short Film about John Bolton is about an artist who paints vampiric nudes. "It looks so realistic!", someone says of one picture a few minutes into the movie. That's enough to figure out the coming twist at the end, even if you haven't read H.P. Lovecraft's story "Pickman's Model". The DVD version also includes audio of Gaiman reading the page-long story that was the inspiration for this movie, and the reading is far more chilling than the movie. Gaiman apparently made this film as an exercise in directing to prepare for directing a Death movie; that's fine, but you don't need to listen to musicians practicing etudes and you don't need to watch this movie.
The Interpreter is a slick and enjoyable thriller about Secret Service officers trying to prevent an assassination at the UN, and about the interpreter with a murky past who's a key part of the puzzle.
28 Days Later is a retread of the zombie movie that isn't bad, but ultimately didn't seem to do anything new. The zombies are infected with a virus, not dead, so they're fast-moving and not Romero-inspired trudgers, but they're still violent, cannibalistic, and hard to stop. The early scenes of the protagonist walking around a deserted London are very evocative, but then the sudden attacks and shooting starts and we're in familiar territory again. Christopher Eccleston has a supporting role as an ineffectual army officer trying to keep control of his men. Disappointing.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is mildly occupying, but doesn't offer enough detail; it doesn't really explain what derivatives and options are or discuss some of the accounting fictions that Enron used to inflate their profits. I only understood the storyline because I read Frank Partnoy's Infectious Greed. There are heartbreaking anecdotes such as the lineman whose $348K retirement fund dwindled to $1200 as the stock price plunged, and silly anecdotes such as one executive's obsession with exotic dancers. (Shown by a sequence combining shots of strippers with Glass' Einstein on the Beach music; genius!) Perhaps business reporting really needs to be done in print form; movies can try to dress things up with graphics and interviewees, but can't come to grips with the subject. Or maybe only Erol Morris could pull it off.
We metro'ed up to Bethesda for an arts+crafts fair, featuring painters, photographers, and various other craftspeople. There was one photographer whose work I really like; most of his portfolio was taken in Italy, and ranging from restaurant scenes to Roman statuary.
We also discovered that the always-fun Second Story Books was no longer on Bethesda Ave. Checking their web site when I got home, it turns out that happily they've only relocated a little distance and not completely lost their Bethesda presence. A news story about the closing says their landlord wouldn't renew their lease, preferring to replace a shabby used bookstore with some shinier, more upscale stores. Their old location is now occupied by a paper-goods store (meaning they sell cards, notepads, stationery, little gift books containing 25 pictures and 750 words) and an art-object store. Guess I won't need to go back to that block any more.
We also went and saw the Hitchhiker's Guide movie. The reviews I've seen have been all over the place: some (most?) people hated it, some liked it, and some found it middling. Barb really liked it; I hated it. Like Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, which we watched last night, it's clearly intended to be funny, but only rarely is. Most of the time I kept waiting for the film to move on to something more interesting. Things I liked: Stephen Fry's reading of the Guide, the Guide's retro graphic design, the soundtrack music (who also wrote the arrangements for Ute Lemper's album Punishing Kiss), Alan Rickman's voice (though not his lines), Martin Freeman as the hapless Arthur. Things I disliked: the incredibly irritating Zaphod, the fancy yet still fake-looking CGI, the pointless rewrites of Adams lines ("Yes, I found the plans. They were in the cellar."), the general incoherence of the story. Don't bother.
Honorable mentions:
The DCIFF is running early independent films by various directors. On Tuesday I went to see Blood Simple by the Coen Brothers, and tonight I went to see Tarentino's Reservoir Dogs. The theatre has a digital DVD projector, so these films are being played from DVD, not film. The Tuesday show ran into problems -- the DVD began freezing, and there was an annoyingly loud buzz on the sound system -- but while there was some buzz tonight, the playback held steady. I enjoyed RD, though I'll never want to see it again now that I know the various plot twists, but that's better than being bored during the first viewing (which was my reaction to Pulp Fiction).
One session today was a selection of short films. Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties, the films shown were mostly different from the scheduled list; in particular "Access Denied", the film we most wanted to see, wasn't shown. Still, it was an entertaining selection.
"The Elephant's Egg" was our favorite. It mixes several incompatible flavors -- a romantic comedy, a talking dog and a hippo who's a genie, and Salvador Dali's surreal landscapes -- and it makes them all work together. The landscapes are rendered in artificial but attractive CGI, but this movie wasn't intended to be realistic, I think.
"Egg" also mixes things. There's an animated silent movie about a pirate in search of a the yolk of an egg, which he pursues Ahab-like. (Example dialogue card: "Arrrr!") This is intercut with live-action film of three bird women who are being fed by disembodied hands that take food from a conveyor belt and stuff it into their mouths. The stories do connect up, in a rather discomfiting way. A bizarrely memorable work.
"The Least of These" was filmed in a Baltimore diner, and puts a number of characters together long after dark. One character tries to do something nice for another one, and the movie turns out to have a religious message, though the film wears it pretty lightly (as opposed to "heavy-handedly"). Barb was surprised to find that the film is based on a story by someone whose son was a counselor at her summer camp when she was a kid. (Got all that?)
"The Legacy of Adam Francis Plummer" is a documentary short, assembled by a distant descendant of Plummer. Plummer kept a diary of his life as an African-American slave; the diary runs from around 1840 and, written by his descendants, was kept up until around 1920. The film tells about the diary, how it was found and re-united with the family, and how it's being conserved at the Smithsonian, but disappointingly doesn't give any excerpts from it, which would have been the most interesting of all. Oh well. It's clearly an amateur production -- wouldn't surprise me if it was assembled in iMovie -- but it accomplishes its goals. I would like to see more short documentaries, because they're usually more interesting and less self-indulgent than short fictional films.
"Jane Doe" was an odd little vignette about a woman's activities at home, and "Cucarachas" was a completely bizarre short animation that we clearly weren't stoned enough to get.
We also got to watch about 30 minutes of "Domino One", a full-length movie that's a work in progress. (It was shown at the last DCIFF, too; I was interested in going because the description sounded interesting, but couldn't schedule it.) I wouldn't mind seeing the whole film, but the filmmakers are clearly inexperienced; the digital video filming looks very cheap, the script features a few lengthy and boring info-dumps ("We did this research, so damn it, we're going to use it!"), and a few scenes that were unintentionally funny. It's still billed as a work in progress, so maybe a future cut will be better.
I'm tempted to propose another rule for independent filmmakers, based on "Domino One" and the trailers for "Trip Out", another feature being shown this week: depicting drug usage and distribution does not automatically make your film cutting-edge, socially relevant, or interesting. The last drug movie that was successful was "Trainspotting"; your film is not going to be the next.
This week the Cinema Arts began running classic movies at a set of 10AM showings. Today we biked down to see 12 Angry Men, starring Henry Fonda, Martin Balsam, and a bunch of other character actors. I enjoyed its mixture of character-driven sniping and armchair detective work as the jurors slowly disassemble the prosecution case, but thought the ending was weak; the last juror who's holding out for a guilty verdict gives up very quickly, collapsing in the face of disagreement from the rest of the jury.
The showing was bedeviled with technical glitches again, though the movie was being shown from film and not DVD. The film kept sputtering to a stop, at which time the lights went up while the projectionist fixed the problem. It didn't ruin the showing, but I hope the theatre manages to iron out these problems.
A busy day for movie-watching.
First we saw The Talk of the Town, a 1942 movie starring Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, and Ronald Colman. It's one of the Cinena Art's morning movies, in a series of films with a legal theme. (Last week's 12 Angry Men was also in this series.) Grant is a
muckraking reporter who's accused of burning down a factory and manages to escape from jail, Colman is a visiting law professor who's renting the house where Grant winds up, and Arthur is the love interest who's torn between them. The script is a neat mixture of comedy and drama; there are farcical scenes where Ms. Arthur behaves wildly in order to conceal the fugitive, and more dramatic scenes where the two men argue over the law's principles vs. practicality. It's a really entertaining movie.
In the afternoon I went back to see Happy Endings, a current picture with an ensemble cast; in three separate storylines, characters pursue, deceive, and get bitten by their own scheming, often in very neat biter-bit fashion. I was impressed by the seriousness of Lisa Kudrow's performance, and by the calculating nastiness of Maggie Gyllenhaal's. Despite the cruel storylines, I walked out of the movie in a surprisingly cheerful mood, perhaps because I took away the message that no matter how startling or massive the screw-up, it's always possible to recover and to find a happy ending.
Treadwell is a contradiction; we are told he struggled with bouts of mania and depression, and in much of the video footage he does seem loopy. Yet he focused on the bears to pull himself out of alcohol and drug addiction, which I thought an impressive act of will. The film doesn't approve of him; neither do I, but it's a pity that he and Amie are dead.
Arsenic and Old Lace is a goofily farcical comedy. According to IMDB's trivia for the movie, Cary Grant hated his performance in it; he certainly did a lot of broad mugging for the camera and a bunch of double- and triple-takes, but subtlety is not what you need for comedy like this. The supporting cast is also good; here I loved the two dotty aunts who decide that poisoning potential lodgers is doing them a service. Peter Lorre and a Boris Karloff-lookalike (Karloff actually played the role on stage) add a strange note to the proceedings.
Murderball is a documentary about wheelchair rugby players. While this documentary has been widely praised, one reviewer noted that the people are difficult to sympathize with; they're young men who became paraplegic, and often this happens because they did something stupid like driving drunk. Once I saw the film I understood what that critic was talking about; a number of the people in the movie are, bluntly, dickheads. But they're dickheads who've become driven competitors and dickheads who counsel other paraplegics, and so they're still admirable. In one great scene, rugby player Mark Zupan visits a recently injured patient who used to ride motocross bikes, and the patient is enthralled by You might think this movie is probably really depressing, but it's not, and I'd recommend it. (It is, however, produced by MTV and is therefore loud and annoyingly edited.)
Ladies in Lavender turned out to be rather inconsequential. After two elderly ladies (Maggie Smith and Judy Dench) find a young man washed up on the beach, they take him in and Dench's character begins falling in love with him. The trailer made us think the plot was going to be darker and turn on the young man being accused of spying, but that's actually a really minor element taking up only a single scene. The film is heartwarming and domestic, but in a rather flat and unmemorable way.
21 Up continues the 7 Up and Seven Plus Seven. Our interviewees, who were 7 and 14 in the earlier films, are 21 in 1977, and they're beginning to form opinions of their own. They're already beginning to diverge. One young man who seemed promising at 14 is now scraping out a living and squatting in an abandoned building. One of the young women seems to be leading an equally directionless life at this point, but because her parents are well-off she's much more comfortable. I look forward to the next film, because I wonder how they'll look at 28; that seven-year interval is an important one for shaping your adult life.
The Skeleton Key is an OK supernatural thriller with great Southern atmosphere and a few good scary moments. I liked the scratchy recording of a hoodoo ceremony (there's a Call of Cthulhu game idea for you), and the production design on the run-down Southern house where most of the action takes place. Some of the tension was lost on me, though, because I kept getting distracted by Kate Hudson's cleavage; oh, well.
White Noise isn't as enjoyable, though it was nice to see Michael Keaton in a movie again. This film is about the paranormal notion of hearing voices of the dead in static on radios and tape playing. Unfortunately it's not an idea that's well-suited for film because you end up with long scenes of Keaton staring at monitors or listening to white noise, which are pretty boring. At the end we find out there's a killer involved, who turns out to be a character previously seen for about two seconds; this struck me as not playing fair. Directed by Geoffrey Sax, who also directed the Paul McGann Doctor Who movie.
Cinema Arts: You Can't Take It With You is disposable but entertaining. A family, full of quirky characters who dance around the house, write plays, or experiment with fireworks in the basement, comes into collision with a stodgy banker; he's trying to buy all the buildings on their block, but Grandpa won't sell. The banker's son, played by James Stewart, falls in love with one of the daughters in the family. There's much confusion when the banker and his wife come to visit for dinner, ending up with everyone getting thrown in jail, but it all ends happily. Some very funny lines and moments, but pretty forgettable once it's over.
May is yet another horror movie about a strange oddball loner who falls in love, is rejected, and then Snaps Horribly. This time the loner is a young woman named May who works as a veterinary assistant and prizes a creepy-looking doll. The movie starts out rather interestingly, but then falls into a conventional pattern and drags on forever before it finally ends.
Cinema Arts: I'd never seen Casablanca, though of course I know the vague outline of the story from the many references that are made to it in other works. I'd always thought it had a tragic ending, so the actual ending surprised me. It's certainly not tragic; even though Rick nobly gives up the chance to reunite with Ilsa, the film ends with him having rediscovered an earlier sense of purpose, and getting a new (if not necessarily reliable) friend.
THX 1138 is one of those long and boring dystopian SF movies -- regimented people with numbers instead of names, closed environments, processed food, computers controlling everything -- that were made in the 1970s but have mercifully died off.
I went to see The Brothers Grimm because it's Terry Gilliam. Unfortunately it's a muddle. The French and Italian characters are hammily acted, actively irritating, and not funny at all; if all their scenes had been deleted, the movie would have been greatly improved. . It still wouldn't have been great -- none of the remaining actors stands out as especially good -- but while the main plot isn't very original, at least it's somewhat interesting in comparison. Haven't seen that much cheesy CGI since The Mummy, either. I don't recommend bothering, even if you're a Gilliam fan.
A Sidewalk Astronomer is a documentary about John Dobson, directed by Jeffrey Fox Jacobs. Dobson invented a telescope mounting, since named the Dobsonian, that made it possible for amateurs to use larger telescopes than had previously been possible. Dobson is 90 now, and spends his time speaking to amateur astronomers and participating in the Sidewalk Astronomers group that he founded; members take their telescope out into the city, set it up on the sidewalk, and show passers-by the moon, sun, or planets.
Dobson is a likeable guy, and quite a character. He has a seemingly endless reserve of facts about the solar system and, to a lesser degree, about stars and galaxies, and a stock of funny anecdotes that's almost as large. Many city-dwellers have never really noticed the moon -- one person asks Dobson what "waxing" and "waning" mean when applied to it -- and are astonished to see the craters and mountains on its surface.
Yet he's also something of a crackpot, disbelieving in the Big Bang theory and preferring his own ideas; a sizable chunk of the movie shows him explaining them, but I never really managed to figure out what he's suggesting. His Buddhism is certainly an influence; he seems to suggest that matter is recycled (reincarnated?) and that all events and locations are actually the same. I wondered what most amateur astronomers thought of his notions -- do they just nod politely, or take them as words of the Great Man -- but the movie doesn't really show us what people think of him.
Most of the movie is footage of Dobson speaking, in front of a group, around a lunch table, or one-on-one to the camera. There's also a number of sequences of NASA footage and photographs accompanied by music, which are pretty to look at but not as interesting as Dobson's quirky voice. I thought the film was a good portrait of an intelligent and eccentric man, and I'm a sucker for eccentrics.
A Sidewalk Astronomer is running until Friday at the Cinema Arts Theatre in Fairfax, so if you're in the DC area and want to see it, you should hurry.
Like every other person with even the slightest leaning toward SF geekery, I went to see Serenity this weekend. It starts off a bit slowly, having to establish the setting and characters from the series before launching into the main plot, and the story just zips along from there. It's a great capstone for the series, wrapping up River's arc, explaining one particularly puzzling feature of the setting, and it was fun to see Nathan Filion resume performing Mal.
Wow, Whedon sure doesn't do hard SF, though. The layout of the various planets was never really explained in the series, so I assumed there was some FTL technology being used that just never happened to get shown on-screen. In the movie, though, an introductory voice-over explains that everything is happening in one solar system where most of the planets have been terraformed, which is a goofy idea; why do all the planets seem to be equally brightly lit? Shouldn't some of these moons be orbiting around gas giants? Best not to think too critically about the setting...
Best moment: when a certain Bad Thing happens to a certain character, you could hear the entire audience sucking in its breath.
Second-best: The opening sequence in which the camera travels through a number of Serenity's corridors. It seemed to be one seamless take (or, as Greenaway usually puts it in his screenplays, one continuous virtuoso take). Did I miss a subtle edit somewhere in there?
Anyway, I suggest you see it, even if you were only a lukewarm fan of Firefly.
To finish up an increasingly ancient movie entry from October...
Cinema Arts: Breakfast at Tiffany's was directed by Blake Edwards, to my amazement. Like most of Edwards's films, it's aged pretty badly. I most disliked the horrifying running ethnic joke of Mickey Rooney, given bad teeth and yellow make-up so that he can play a Japanese man -- what, there were no Asian actors in Hollywood in 1961?
The movie is considered a romantic classic, but I find it hard to see why; for much of it Holly Golightly is cynically chasing after rich men, and Paul Varjak is a rich woman's kept man. Yes, they fall in love by the end, but only in the last few minutes; most of the movie is rather heartless and calculating. Ugh.
John Adams: A Portrait is a DVD documentary accompanying a filmed concert. It's about a half hour of interviews with Adams, short excerpts from performances (I enjoyed seeing footage from the stage version of Nixon in China), and conversations with some of Adams' collaborators. The DVD also includes a filmed concert, featuring pieces by Adams, Steve Reich (Eight Lines) and Conlon Nancarrow.
Cinema Arts: To Be Or Not To Be, the 1942 version, is a comedy, but while the funny bits are laugh-out-loud funny, they're also rare, scattered among various plot maneuverings and machinations. Not as good as the reviews led me to believe, and not really worth the time.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, on the other hand, is great, an odd romantic comedy with a bite and an absurdly original concept.
Cinema Arts: Top Hat is a Fred Astaire musical; frothy fun where the plot is pretty much irrelevant.
Word Wars is a mildly interesting documentary about professional Scrabble players and their cut-throat world of tournaments. Scrabble patzers (like me) will be astonished at the plays the professionals can pull off. The obvious comparison might be to the documentary Spellbound, but Spellbound is much better; the people are more sympathetic, the competition more exciting, and it raises issues of education and parental pressure while Word Wars just shows us a bunch of oddballs.
With the imminent arrival of this season's outing, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Gambon is once again preparing himself to become a target for Harry Potter fans everywhere - even if some still confuse his work with Sir Ian McKellen's signature role. "A kid came up to me the other day," he recalls. "I was down in Cornwall. He came up to me and said, 'Gandalf - can I have your autograph?' So I said, 'Piss off!'"
John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, was a scoundrel and a rotter, the latter both figuratively and literally, and this film traces a fictionalized version of his life. The movie is very, very talky because it's based on a stage play, and the characters mostly talk in the complex sentences familiar from Restoration-era writing, making conversations difficult to follow at times; I suspect a second watching would clear up some minor plot points.
I liked the movie, overall, but doubt that many people will enjoy it because it's just so nasty. The obvious comparison is to Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract. The Libertine is far grungier in both its city and country settings; roads are muddy, people are unwashed, everyone is corrupt and whoring, even the king sits in a castle strewn with dogshit, the Earl dies slowly and repulsively from the pox, and everything is photographed in a grimy dim light. TDC is far more genteel, its country setting immaculately well-kept and brightly sunlit. From what I've read, though, The Libertine's filth is a more accurate portrayal.
Two more Greenaway links: the IMDB entry tells me that the production design was by Ben van Os, responsible for the classic Greenaway films of the 80s up until The Baby of Macon. And going in, I was well aware that Michael Nyman was scoring the film and hoped that he'd return to his Purcell-influenced mode for it. He doesn't; if there are Purcell quotations, they're buried too deeply for me to notice. The score is resolutely non-contemporary, mostly written in Nyman's current gentle-strings style but with a few piano pieces and two pieces that emphasize the saxophones. One odd footnote: the film closes with a version of his song "If", with revised lyrics that are much more funereal than the original's rather sweet hopefulness.
This is a film version of the opera of the same name, music by John Adam, libretto by Alice Goodman, and directed by Penny Woolcock.
It's not a filmed version of a staged production, but instead was filmed on location on an actual cruise ship. I highly recommend watching the accompanying documentary afterwards to see how they filmed live; they were using handheld cameras, and an assistant conductor wove his way among the singers and cameras, trying to stay in the performers' view.
If you look at the Amazon reader reviews for this DVD, there's a one-star review that says "It is agitprop for the Palestinian cause. It is surprising that it is it is not currently being performed throughout Europe, as it assumes the premise that Israel is the root of all of the problems in the Middle East. The only characters that are fleshed out in THE DEATH OF KLINGHOFFER are the Palestinian militants." Another one-star review says "On the political level it was racist crap that demonized the Arab world, making all Arabs out to be crazed, antisemitic Islamists."
Both commenters are clearly insane. The film depicts Palestinians being evicted from their homes in 1948 and stoning a woman in the streets in the 1980s, Jews fleeing the Holocaust, doing the evicting, and being victimized aboard the Achille Lauro. It is understanding of the terrorists' motivations, but not sympathetic to them.
In fact the opera is rearranged slightly in a way that heightens the sadness of Leon Klinghoffer's death and Marilyn Klinghoffer's grief. Originally Marilyn Klinghoffer finds out about her husband's death in the next-to-last section and the opera ended with a choral epilogue with wistful and very oblique lyrics. Here they've been swapped, so we flash-forward to 2003 for the chorus and then return to 1985; the film ends with Marilyn singing her final lines at a press conference, and then being driven away.
It's a remarkable production, and definitely worth seeing if you like Adams' music or modern operas in general.
FYI for any readers in the DC area: the Cinema Arts theatre in Fairfax is showing the 2005 Oscar nominees for documentary short film. Here's a list of the films.
The program is running until at least tomorrow (Thursday), but I don't know if it'll be around next week, so if you're interested it would be best to hurry. We're planning to go see it tomorrow.
As planned, we caught this program tonight.
"The Death of Kevin Carter: Casualty of the Bang Bang Club" is about South African photographer Kevin Carter. He covered violence in the townships for a long time, and later took a photograph of a vulture and a starving Sudanese girl. He won a Pulitzer Prize for that picture, but soon afterwards he decided he could no longer live with the burden of guilt -- over the vulture picture, over a colleague who had been killed, over the deaths he had documented and not prevented -- and committed suicide. The film is a good small biography, focusing on Carter's final days.
is a portrait of women in Rwanda ten years after the genocide. One woman's husband and seven children were killed, and she is now raising a daughter conceived through gang rape. Another woman was also raped but subsequently married and is raising a family; she is watching a friend die from AIDS. One woman is HIV positive and is working as a police officer and studying for a law degree. Another is now in her 20s, and became the head of the family when she was 12 and her parents were killed; she is now responsible for her younger brothers and sisters.
"The Mushroom Club" is about Hiroshima 60 years later. The survivors of the atomic bomb are aging, and the memory of the bombing is slowly fading. In this documentary some survivors are interviewed and shown. Some were young adults in 1945, another was a child, and, saddest of all, we see two severely mentally disabled people who were in utero at the time.
"A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin" (the winner of the award) was the only film that was cheerful. Norman Corwin wrote radio plays in the 1940s on the CBS radio network. His most famous program was "A Note of Triumph", performed the evening of the day that WW II ended in Europe. The writing was at times at Shakespearean, at times like Ray Bradbury, at times overwrought. Like "Good Night And Good Luck", this movie is a reminder of those long-lost days when large corporations would support work that was challenging and novel. I wonder if any of Corwin's work is available on the web or on iTunes?
The Corwin film was a worthy winner, I think; it was well-written, Corwin is a great interview subject, and the footage was edited with perfect timing and handled the excerpts from radio plays well. "The Mushroom Club" would also have been a good winner because I found it the most moving of the documentaries. "The Death of Kevin Carter" was competent enough and told an interesting story, but also didn't do anything very out-of-the-ordinary. Finally, "God Sleeps in Rwanda" was the weakest of the group; while it covers a worthwhile topic and was moving and hopeful (the only documentary that offered any hope for the future), the pace was sluggish and had a narrator so respectful that she sounded comatose.
The Cinema Arts is hosting the NoVA Jewish Film Festival, and tonight after my lesson I went to see "Protocols of Zion", a documentary by Marc Levin. It's about the notorious "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", a fabricated propaganda piece that claims to document the Zionist conspiracy.
The film doesn't really focus on the history of the document, though, and only discusses its fabrication in the first 10 minutes with little detail. (The showing of the film was introduced by a speaker from the US Holocaust Museum and her talk was more informative about the document than the film itself). Instead, Levin wants to show how the Protocols are still influencing the modern world, so he interviews New York Jews and Muslims, appears on a white supremacist radio program and talks to a West Virginia guy who sells the Protocols, related books, and even boots with a swastika-patterned tread. Intersecting with the exploration of current anti-Semitism, we are shown family history; Levin's aging father reminisces about growing up, being an atheist, and recollections of his own father, who was president of the local synagogue for a time. The film is therefore more of a Michael Moore-style personal exploration than the history-focused documentary that I was expecting, but I still enjoyed it.
It's depressing to contemplate how stupid people are, and this film certainly provides plenty of examples. Many interviewees are still believing and spreading the urban legend about 4000 Jews not showing up for work on 9/11, and still citing the Protocols as a historical document. Near the end of the movie, one Muslim from an interfaith group talks about anti-Semitism and expresses the opinion (paraphrasing) that "it's unfortunate, but because Jews have so much money and power it's kind of understandable". And this is from someone who's supposed to talk to and cooperate with people of other faiths! With friends like this... I suppose it should be expected, because by their very nature religions discourage critical thinking and requiring evidence.
British actor Martin Freeman (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Shaun of the Dead, Love Actually) will play Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn in Nightwatching, a film by director Peter Greenaway, says "The Hollywood Reporter" .... The women in his life will be played by Sarah Polley (Saskia) and Minnie Driver (Geertje).
That's three good actors. Greenaway's largest problem is his penchant for casting unknowns with only marginal acting talent, so it raises my hopes to hear that some reasonably skilled people have been cast.
Instead we just went to one movie, 49 Up, the 2005 installment of the documentary series that follows a group of people through their lives at 7-year intervals. The series is a lot of fun to watch and Barb and I always have long conversations about the films afterwards.
Each one starts out with the intro from the 1964 movie Seven Up that began the series. The intro quotes the proverbial statement "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man". Yet the movies actually show that this isn't true at all.
Sure, some of the people had their lives planned out -- when they were 7, John and Andrew said they'd go to Charterhouse and Cambridge and then become solicitors, and that's exactly what happened. But other lives are less predictable: Suzy was a nervous and unhappy teenager but then settled down to being a homemaker; Neil struggled with mental illness at 28 and 35, but is now active in local politics; Nicholas became a physicist, moved to the states, and, in 49 Up has abandoned the fusion research he'd been doing for 20 years (the interviewer didn't pursue this very much, which is a pity -- abandoning a major part of your life's work must have been traumatic). People who seemed unlikely to succeed have done quite well, others are coping with health problems; some marriages have lasted decades and others haven't.
The greater lesson I derive from the series is that people's lives are complicated and impossible to predict, and all you can do is to make your own life worthwhile moment by moment, day by day, and to not worry too much about where you're headed.
Little Miss Sunshine is a dysfunctional family comedy. It's a well-tapped genre, but the actors make it work -- Greg Kinnear and Steve Carell are great in completely opposite ways, and the ending is utterly over-the-top.
Wondrous Oblivion is a 2003 UK film that's modelled on Bend It Like Beckham, except it's in 1960, the protagonist is a Jewish boy, not an Indian girl, and he's obsessed with cricket, not soccer. Some darker elements are mixed into the plot such as anti-Semitism and racism, and a parental affair that happily doesn't have long-term consequences. The BBC review is lukewarm, but I liked it for what it is: a child-friendly film that brings up moral issues without being clichéd. A bit like Whale Rider in that respect.
The Descent is a nerve-wracking horror movie. Six women go spelunking, a year after one of them lost her husband and daughter in a car accident, and things go badly wrong: a cave-in traps them, and they need to find the way out. The movie was recommended by Jim Emerson, editor of www.rogerebert.com, on his Scanners weblog and there A final scene that completely reverses the ending was trimmed from the American release, but it's still on the UK DVD version; see YouTube for it once you've watched the movie.
Spoilerish details follow. It's a very Lovecraftian movie, with intelligent characters who stumble into a dangerous underworld that remorselessly destroys them. It's reminiscent of HPL's story "The Lurking Fear", updated to make it a smidgen more plausible, and there are lots of nods at earlier films (Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, and The Shining -- see the Scanners threads for more film quotations). The claustrophic and shadowy cave is admirably done and I found the environment really nerve-wracking.
I'd recommend all three movies, with the strongest nod to The Descent if you're a horror/suspense fan.
Like Neverwhere, Mirrormask's plot is pedestrian, directionless wandering through a surreal landscape. The protagonist, a cranky teenager named Helena, is less passive than Richard Mayhew in Neverwhere, but she's frogmarched through searches for a series of random objects and encounters with strange creatures. she's looking for the Mirror Mask of the title, talks with a giant blimplike creature who gives her a key, has to find the lock it opens, and so on.
There are some arresting and memorable images here -- I loved the bizarrely structured sphinxes, and the ape/bird creatures -- but there's so much visual novelty crammed into the film that they don't stand out very much. The film is bizarre and quirky from frame one, so the introduction of a fantasy world based on Helena's drawings seems inevitable instead of magical. The photography is shadowed and often murky, though I liked the sun-lit decrepit futurism of the apartment block where Helena's family lives.
The best quote from the DVD is in one of the featurettes: the filming of a blue-screen shot for the ape/bird scene isn't going well, and Gaiman says to McKean (paraphrased): "The monkeybirds were your idea. I suggested mice on rollerskates -- small, easier to handle -- we could wind them up. But you wanted monkeybirds..."
Gaiman or McKean fans will certainly watch this movie and maybe even enjoy it, but non-fans won't be too impressed.
The best of the bunch was "Once Upon a Christmas Village", a musical where Santa drops a magical watch down a chimney and it brings all the toys under the tree to life. The framing scenes with Santa were pointless -- and why does Santa have a magical watch that brings toys to life, anyway? -- but the songs were pretty good parodies of the Disney musical form.
"Mirage" was very well-animated and the biomechanical protagonist is a particular original creation. The story is all poetic and allegorical, though, and therefore doesn't really go anywhere.
Two other films were machinima, animations made using computer games to render the characters, and they both made the limitations of the form glaringly clear. "Saul Goodman" sets out for a conspiracy/X-Files mood, but at 28 minutes, it piles on uninteresting complication after uninteresting complication and overstays its welcome. "Single in the City" takes the speed-dating joke from 40-Year Old Virgin and a zillion other places, and does nothing new with it. It would certainly be fun to make movies like these, voice them yourself, and e-mail the URL to all your friends, who'd find them hilarious ("oh listen, now Andrew is talking in a really bad Indian accent!"). There's no need to inflict them on hapless film festival audiences, though.
Manufacturing films inside computer games is certainly an ingenious hack, but the character animation is very limited and you can't do good facial expressions or complicated gestures. At the end of "Single in the City", the heroine and a male character both smile at each other, and their smiles are hideous grimaces that look like a snarling rictus. In "Saul Goodman", at one point we watch a character v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y turn his head to look left, and then s-l-o-w-l-y turn to look right. Maybe this was very difficult to do correctly in the software and the animator was showing off, but I was sitting there wondering "why do we need to see this?" You could do interesting things with machinima, but you'd need to severely limit the script to avoid needing subtle or well-drawn facial expressions or complicated character movements. Both of today's films ran up against these limitations and ended up falling flat.
The first half of the movie is the strongest, as we watch the teachers in class and interacting with each other. It drifts a bit in the second half as the authors begun to run out of ideas; there's a sequence spoofing Spellbound that seemed a misguided and unfunny idea to me, and like most documentaries, the ending doesn't provide much closure, leaving a few subplots dangling. I still enjoyed it, though.
I'm also finally done with the half-shifting etude, where you start off in first position and then shift up into fourth by progressive steps. Then you shift to the next lower string, go down by steps, switch strings again, and so on. One nice thing I realized from this etude: I've actually learned the locations of the notes pretty well at this point. I may not hit the notes exactly on pitch and shifting can make me slip out of alignment, but the basic positions are starting to become instinctive. At least in base clef; in tenor clef, not so much...
Nyman is an eminent figure on the contemporary scene. Working in a style you could call cerebral post-minimalism, known for his film scores (notably for the late Peter Greenaway), he's smart, hip ...
The late? Eek! But I suspect Midgette didn't check her Google results closely enough. There was an author named Peter Van Greenaway who died in 1988; he also wrote a few film screenplays, so it would be possible to get them confused. Van Greenaway was no relation (as far as I know) to the film director.
(A recent article in a "forgotten authors" series assessed Van Greenaway's work and made it sound like an interesting diversion, if not great literature.)
This page contains an archive of all entries posted to AMK's Journal in the Films category. They are listed from oldest to newest.
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