Relevant History

Les Mis

Yesterday the family went to see the new film version of Les Miserables, with Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe et al. I can see why critics dislike it, but I found it quite engaging. Yes, Russell Crowe approaches singing the way some Americans approach making themselves understood in a foreign country-- if the cabbie doesn't understand you, just yell your destination, and your words will be magically translated-- and the close-up style that worked so well in The King's Speech takes a little getting used to.

But the movie is every bit as manipulative and heart-tugging as the play, Tom Hooper can be sweeping and bold when the scene calls for it (some of his shots of Paris and Javert singing from rooftops reminded me of Gore Verbinski), Amanda Seyfried and Samantha Barks were terrific, and the film did the musical justice.

Quote of the day: Margaret Thatcher

Via Meryl Streep:

If you want something spoken about, ask a man. If you want it done, ask a woman.

Quote of the day: Cars 2

From Slate:

A little girl near me kept asking her dad, "Which cars are the bad guys? What are they doing?" Her father shushed her politely, but he would have done his fellow audience members a bigger favor by loudly and accurately answering her questions, since we were just as stumped.

Uh oh.

Even Uwe Boll can watch "Battle: Los Angeles" and say, "Man, this sucks"

When Roger Ebert calls your movie an "assault on the attention span of a generation," you know you're in trouble:

Here's a science-fiction film that's an insult to the words "science" and "fiction," and the hyphen in between them.

Ouch!

[To the tune of Johann Johannsson, "Part V: The Sun's Gone Dim and the Sky's Turned Black," from the album IBM 1401, A User's Manual (a 5-star song, imo).]

Oh how I love Netflix

I don't care if it could destroy the Internet: Netfliex streaming has totally changed my life.

Okay, that's not quite true, but I've had somewhat the same experience with it that I had with iTunes in the early days, when I used it to buy digital copies of singles I'd loved in high school and hadn't heard in twenty years or more. There are lots of movies I haven't seen in ages that I've watched again (though for some reason they turn out no to be so great-- what was up with Ghostbusters 2?).

More interestingly, Netflix also drives down the cost of experimenting: it becomes incredibly cheap and easy to try a vast range of movies and to dive into unfamiliar genres. Scandinavian World War II movies? Spanish feral children serial killer films? Mountaineering tragedies? Thai action flicks? It's all here, and if you don't like what you've chosen, after 10 minutes you can switch to something else. (It reminds me of how picture-taking changed when I got a digital camera.) It's like channel surfing, only there's actually stuff to watch.

And the kids have access to every episode of Johnny Test ever created in this universe, which they seem to quite like.

Airbender: the new Plan 9 From Outer Space?

Maybe when the kids are back from camp we won't go see The Last Airbender after all. The kids love the original animated series (called Avatar: The Last Airbender, but to avoid confusion with the Cameron film they dropped the A-word), which I find to be smart, funny, and ultimately very deep. My daughter had always had doubts about a live-action version of the story, and according to Gawker's roundup of the early reviews, it looks like she was right. This is Roger Ebert:

"The Last Airbender" is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here.

And, incredibly, it gets worse. Then there's the New York Times:

After 94 minutes — was that all? I could have sworn it was days — of muddy 3-D imagery and muddled storytelling, the idea that this is just the first "Last Airbender" seems either delusionally optimistic or downright cruel. An astute industry analyst of my acquaintance, who is 9 and an admirer of the Nickelodeon animated series on which the movie is based, offered a two-word diagnosis of its commercial prospects on the way out of the theater: "They’re screwed."...

The problem — the catastrophe — of "The Last Airbender" is not in the conception but the execution. The long-winded explanations and clumsy performances are made worse by graceless effects and a last-minute 3-D conversion that wrecks whatever visual grace or beauty might have been there.... So the best way to watch "The Last Airbender" is probably with your eyes closed.

Apparently the 3-D is singularly bad. The Chicago Tribune calls it "the latest 3-D offering in theaters, yet barely functional in 2- or even 1."

Even The Onion is not amused:

Shyamalan lets his unimpressive special effects do the work for him while coaxing performances from his young cast that make Jake Lloyd’s performance in The Phantom Menace look studied. [ed: OMFG OMFG OMFG] (Star Noah Ringer, who plays a messianic figure who might unite the warring forces, delivers his lines as if reading a book report, and his older co-stars don’t fare much better.)

And they're not the only ones who think the acting is bad:

Newcomer Noah Ringer, who plays the title role of Aang, a messianic child with the power to manipulate the elements, is woefully miscast. Not because he's white, but because the kid can't act.... Ringer brings less than zero gravitas to the role. He makes the kid who plays Gibby on "iCarly" look like Sir Lawrence Olivier.... Making matters worse are Ringer's young castmates. Playing Katara and Sokka, Nicola Peltz and Jackson Rathbone are stiff and awkward. Short of a screen test, it's hard to imagine less convincing line readings.

I admit I was a little taken aback by the whitening of the main characters (Katharine Hepburn's niece as Sokka and Katara's grandmother? really?) but that turns out to be the least of the movie's problems, and the whole project will accelerates M. Night Shyamalan's downward spiral. That's a shame, because I really liked The Village (it kind of reminds me of my kids' school), and you get the sense that he's trying hard to do interesting things, even if he often fails. (As one commenter said, "so the twist is that it sucks? he's done that one already.") I think I'll just watch the cartoons again.

[To the tune of Willie Nelson, "September Song," from the album Stardust (a 3-star song, imo).]

Too brilliant (though completely NSFW)

Bill O'Reilly rant remix (thanks, Jess!)

[To the tune of Joni Mitchell, "Strong And Wrong," from the album Shine (a 3-star song, imo).]

More on Avatar

The New York Times weighed in a few days ago on the Avatar Interpretation Complex (something I wrote a bit about), and I'm just now getting around to reading it:

["Avatar" has] found itself under fire from a growing list of interest groups, schools of thought and entire nations that have protested its message (as they see it), its morals (as they interpret them) and its philosophy (assuming it has one).

Over the last month, it has been criticized by social and political conservatives who bristle at its depictions of religion and the use of military force; feminists who feel that the male avatar bodies are stronger and more muscular than their female counterparts; antismoking advocates who object to a character who lights up cigarettes; not to mention fans of Soviet-era Russian science fiction; the Chinese; and the Vatican. This week the authorities in China announced that the 2-D version of the film would be pulled from most theaters there to make way for a biography of Confucius.

That so many groups have projected their issues onto “Avatar” suggests that it has burrowed into the cultural consciousness in a way that even its immodest director could not have anticipated. Its detractors agree that it is more than a humans-in-space odyssey — even if they do not agree on why that is so.

"Some of the ways people are reading it are significant of Cameron’s intent, and some are just by-products of what people are thinking about," said Rebecca Keegan, the author of "The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron." "It’s really become this Rorschach test for your personal interests and anxieties."

[To the tune of Oleta Adams, "I've Got To Sing My Song," from the album Circle Of One (a 2-star song, imo).]

Avatar redux

Today I took my son and his aunt to see Avatar in 3D. I saw Avatar a few weeks ago, and wanted to see how it looked in 3D. To be honest, while there are some terrific things that the it offers-- the night scenes on Pandora are really cool, and some of the flying is terrific-- it's hard to notice the 3D in the big battles-- i.e., the entire last hour of the film.

Which is really hardly a criticism. And in other respects, it holds up really well, or is even better the second time. (For all the hype about it transforming cinema, I think it's just a really good movie, which is good news: when I think of a film that's not a movie but an "event," I think of something like Matrix Revolutions.) Cameron is a genius at his craft: as everyone knows by now the film's cast of characters includes some people we've seen before-- the Yuppie scum played by Paul Reiser in Aliens, the tough Latina soldier played this time my Michelle Rodriguez-- and some of his favorite technology-- snub-nosed, mean-looking landing craft, and utilitarian robots that turn out to play a pivotal role in the action. And of course there's Sigourney Weaver, who does a nice turn as a character who would have probably hated Ripley. I was also impressed again at how many science fiction and fantasy references the movie manages to pack into even three hours: Pandora owes a huge debt to the work of Roger Dean, and the influence of the Dragonrider series is more evident.

I think the film also stands up against the cultural criticism lobbed against it. Some contend that the film is a condemnation of imperialist adventure and displays contempt for white people; others, that it's an imperialist adventure in face paint, a retread of tired SF tropes, and racist to boot. The right has tied itself in knots. Some of it stretches the bounds of stupidity: Nile Gardiner seems to have completely missed the fact that the military forces on Pandora are mercenaries, not servicemen (a fact that Cameron doesn't stress enough in my view, but still-- if I could catch it, Gardiner should have too-- unless we really want to equate mercenary armies and armed services). But commercial reality aside-- this is a film rather than a dissertation, and you shouldn't be surprised when a $300 million film hedges its bets with some familiar elements-- the appearance of the trope of the noble savage shouldn't be any more surprising than the fact that there's a romantic thread in the movie. That Cameron was trying something as complex as creating a new species pretty much guaranteed that he would end up falling back on some familiar package of metaphors, much as the artists on James Cook's voyages reflected Enlightenment ideas about non-Western peoples and academic ideas about landscape-- even as they tried hard to faithfully represent the scenes and peoples before them. (And arguably there have been far more damaging representations of the Other than one that emphasizes their inherent goodness and capacity for living simply.)

Then there's the question of how powerful Jake really is. Annalee Newitz's argument that the movie is an extended essay on white guilt and escapist fantasies privileges race over class: it ignores that Jake is in the situation he's in because he's disabled and poor, and that he doesn't have a lot of power among his own people. He's useful to the company, but that's not the same thing as having any influence. And for all of his determination, you get the sense that his disability is always going to leave him on the margins of his own people, the mercenaries whose worth is defined by their ruthless skill and capacity for violence.

Likewise, in movie-world logic, his leading the Na'vi during the war makes sense because he knows the enemy from the inside, even if it stretches the bounds of real-world credulity. (Imagine a high-ranking German defector leading an Allied division at Normandy. Can't do it? Neither can I. That's what I mean by movie-world versus real-world logic.) Just as Wikus in District 9 is able to help save aliens because his humanness gets them into places they can't go alone, Jake isn't superior in any absolute sense, but useful because he understands humans. And for better or worse, people aren't as likely to watch a movie in which the main character becomes a bit player when he joins the other side.

Cameron could easily have made the film subtler and more interesting with a couple tweaks. Jake's relationship with his dead brother kind of disappears 10 minutes into the movie, even though Jake is literally taking over Tom's body (or avatar) and life. Driving home from the theatre, I imagined what the film would have been like if his video journal had been an imaginary conversation with Tom: it would have opened up some chance for Jake to talk about that relationship, and ultimately to say goodbye in a way he never does in the film. Jake's relationship to his own damaged human body doesn't change over time, and by playing up the adventure element of becoming an avatar, Cameron skips over what could have been another motive driving Jake to throw in his lot with the Na'vi. And this time I realized that we never see the Na'vi without Jake, and it would have been interesting to have a couple scenes where Jake's not a presence: it might have allowed us to see the Na'vi the way they see themselves, and get a sense of them trying to figure him out, just as he's trying to figure out them. He's taken in because the tribe's leader decides they need to understand humans; but we don't get a sense later on of the Na'vi still thinking about how to deal with humans, until it's too late.

Still, it's always easy to wish that the director had made a different movie than the one you saw (I really felt that way about Star Wars: Episode III, and having also watched that again with my son recently, still do.) Nonetheless, I love Avatar. Maybe I'll see if the IMAX version is any better.

Alec Baldwin and "the principle of preposterous virility"

From James Parker's piece on Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers in the December issue of The Atlantic:

Sitting at the bar with his ex-wife, his round a little glass something or other, Baldwin... is florid, potent, gloatingly and inflatedly masculine, like a genie who came out of a bottle of aftershave.

[To the tune of Radiohead, "Airbag," from the album Radiohead in Berlin (I give it 2 stars).]

Happy 30th, Ellen Ripley

The Guardian has a good piece on the 1979 movie Alien, and its introduction of the first female horror / SF heroine, Sigouney Weaver's Ellen Ripley. I find the whole series fascinating, and in fact I just put a copy of the quartet-- or quadrilogy, as the box set's creators unfortunately call it-- on my computer, so I'd be able to fall asleep to it in foreign hotels.

Watching the scene now, at a 30-year lag, you find yourself drawn as much to the reactions of the other actors as to the creature itself. Scott famously shot the film in one take with four cameras, and purposely kept the actors in the dark as to what, exactly, they were about to witness. It is safe to assume that none of them were as startled as Veronica Cartwright (playing the Nostromo's navigator), who is shown recoiling in genuine horror from a spray of blood. "What you saw on camera was the real response," recalls co-star Tom Skerritt. "She had no idea what the hell happened. All of a sudden this thing just came up."

Cartwright's shock would be mirrored in cinemas around the world. "Everybody remembers the moment when the creature comes out, because it was such a staggering event; totally beyond prediction," says Thomson. "I remember seeing the film at the time with my wife and she was so horrified that she stood up and walked right out of the theatre. Afterwards she admitted that it was a very well-made film and all of that. But she could not take it; could not live with that possibility. It was as though she thought: if that can happen, anything can."

Then there's this unforgettable bit of prose:

Giger's alien features the requisite razor-blade teeth and unreadable, implacable air. Sometimes it is limpid and wet, fashioned on the set out of oysters and clams brought in from a local fishmongers. Sometimes it is hard and blunt. Not to put too fine a point on it, the alien in Alien comes in two guises: vaginal and phallic.

"Alien is a rape movie with male victims," explains David McIntee, author of the Alien study Beautiful Monsters. "And it also shows the consequences of that rape: the pregnancy and birth. It is a film that plays, very deliberately, with male fears of female reproduction."

Yeek.

[To the tune of Departure Lounge, "Runway Doubts," from the album Jetlag Dreams (I give it 2 stars).]

Claude Lelouch's Rendezvous

Via Slate, this pretty amazing short film consisting of a drive through the streets of Paris-- at 140 mph.

Claude Lelouch's Rendezvous... from Dat on Vimeo.

As Kevin Conley explains,

The director, who had no permits to film or to stop traffic, hooked a camera to the front bumper of a Mercedes-Benz (in the only bit of film trickery, the sound of the motor was played by a five-speed Ferrari) and filmed the entire movie in a single cinema-verité take: He drove through the streets of Paris at five in the morning, through red lights, around the Arc de Triomphe, down the Champs-Élysées, against one-way traffic, over sidewalks, at speeds up to 140 miles per hour. The film ends after nine terrifying minutes when the driver parks the car in Montmartre and a blonde comes up the stairs toward Sacre Coeur. (It was a date.) After the first showing, the director was arrested for endangering public safety.

I suspect if you're familiar with Paris, this is even more terrifying a spectacle.

Kitten on a Roomba

Yes, I'm working on a bunch of different things, but... who can resist video of a kitten on a Roomba?

Tom Cruise, sex, money, and the future

A perfectly entertaining fluffy piece on Slate on Tom Cruise and Risky Business takes a sudden turn into actual insight, when it talks about how Cruise and his friends paid for their adventures by cashing in savings bonds given to them by relatives.

("You people have a lot of bonds," observes one of the hookers, dryly.) It is a perfectly calibrated act of rich-kid heedlessness but with the clever subtext that, during a time of runaway inflation (as the '70 were), it makes little sense to save for "the future." This is a word the script of Risky Business never loses a chance to deploy. The hookers say future and mean the shameless score. ("He's got such nice friends. Clean, polite … quick. I think there's a real future here.") The boys say future and mean some far off Valhalla to which they may never be invited. "I don't want to make a mistake," Joel whines to his friend Miles, his Faustian tempter, "and jeopardize my future!" "Joel, let me tell you something," replies Miles. "Every now and then say, 'What the fuck.' 'What the fuck' gives you freedom. Freedom brings opportunity. Opportunity makes your future."

The '80s did for money what the '60s did for sex. They told a miraculously tempting lie about the curative powers of disinhibition. It took AIDS, feminism, and sociobiology a while to catch up to our illusions about free love. It has taken cronyism, speculation, and manic overleveraging a while to catch up to our illusions about free money. Now that Ponzi capitalism is collapsing in on itself, the perverse disjunction, of saying "what the fuck" and thereby securing your "future," is simply no longer tenable.

I guess this is why I read Slate. Or why I read at all.

Second quote of the day

Alex Kingston on living in Los Angeles:

It's an odd place, but there are things that are nice about it, like the weather. You wake up knowing exactly what the day is going to be like and it's you that's going to do something different; the day itself is the same.

Clone Wars

We went to see Star Wars: Clone Wars this afternoon, because a weekend spent at Monterey Bay Aquarium and the park with cousins wasn't entertaining enough, or something. (Actually, I'm going to be away for a week, and we sometimes go into hyper-activities mode for a bit before a trip.) Naturally, the kids enjoyed it, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I was watching a bunch of wooden pieces from a novelty Star Wars chess set.

In a way, of course, given George Lucas' notorious inability to get interesting performances out of even really expressive actors (one mustn't blame him for Hayden Christensen, but what other director in history has inspired Samuel L. Jackson to not be a badass), it's a very logical decision to make an animated Star Wars film in which the characters look wooden; it's cinema verité for that universe.

And maybe the hyperkinetic light saber duels are what Lucas always wanted those fights to be like. But the battles are shot using a combination of sweeping, Peter Jackson-like pans and zooms, and Spielberg, Saving Private Ryan-like shaky first person handheld camera views that is, to say the least, inconsistent: the one wants to impress you with the terrible grandeur and awesome courage summoned by war, while the other wants you to smell the vomit and cordite.

The story itself wasn't any worse than any other of the recent Star Wars movies, but talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations....

What I'd really love to see is a series of remakes of the whole series by different directors. If there's one franchise that could survive having competing versions, it's this one. What could John Woo, for example, do with the epic story of friendship and betrayal that is the first three movies? What if someone refashioned Amidala into a seriously complex, interesting character who's actually ten or fifteen years older than Skywalker? I like Natalie Portman, but what could Julianne Moore, or at least Jennifer Anniston, do with the role?

movies, Star Wars

Harsh

The Guardian reviews the new Star Wars: Clone Wars.

Drained of wit, charm or intelligence, (un)animated avatars of what were once, figuratively as well as literally, flesh-and-blood characters drag their way through an opaque and tedious farrago, uttering lines that would disgrace a speak-your-weight machine.

Tags: starwars, movies, reviews

Prince Caspian

I took the kids to see the new Narnia movie last weekend, and we all thought it was pretty good.

Thinking over the film these last few days (and not giving away anything essential), what sticks with me most is the transformation of Susan, the oldest girl and an archer, into an efficient and remorseless killer. While Peter and Edmund are all adolescent bluster and heraldry, Susan just notches arrows and brings her opponents down, without all the histrionics. (She makes Orlando Bloom's Legolas look like Hamlet.)

What's also interesting is that nothing is made of it in the plot. Susan doesn't start taking out people (or trolls, or horses, or whoever) to make up for being neglected by her parents, or because she's competing with Peter, or anything like that. if anything, it's either old-fashioned sublimation, or just the sort of thing a protective older sister does... in a dangerously unstable alternate universe.

World's End

Last night I watched Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. The kids saw it at Safeway the other day, and having just been allowed to watch the first movie, wanted to make sure we had the complete set.

I really liked the first movie, and thought the second was perfectly entertaining, but this one suffered from the same problem that plagued Spider-Man 3 and Matrix Revolutions: namely, the writers seemed to hope that putting in five plots, gigantic special effects, and endless action would hide the absence of a single good idea and clear story. And the final disposition of the main characters, especially Will Turner, is a total let-down.

You know it's a bad sign when you're watching a movie that features a guy with an octopus face, for goodness sake, and you react to some new plot twist with the thought, "Now that's implausible."

[To the tune of Bombay Dub Orchestra, "The Berber of Seville (The Berber of Suburbia Mix)," from the album "Bombay Dub Orchestra".]

Strange caveat

From the New York Times review of "Starting Out in the Evening:"

“Starting Out in the Evening” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some profanity, sexual situations and references to the work of D. H. Lawrence.

[To the tune of Pete Townshend, "Give Blood," from the album "Gold".]

Best. Movie. Criticism. Ever.

From Dana Steven's review of Shoot 'Em Up:

Michael Davis... seems to have scribbled the dialogue with one hand while operating a gaming joystick with the other.

Davis has cited John Woo's cult classic Hardboiled (in which Chow Yun-Fat rescues a baby in the midst of a gunfight) as an influence, proving once again that watching cool movies is a less-than-sufficient apprenticeship for making cool movies.

Actually, come to think of it, one day that's probably how we'll write.

[To the tune of Pink Floyd, "Not Now John," from the album "The Final Cut".]

Technorati Tags: movies

Sunshine and sacrifice

For some curious reason, within the last few week I've seen "Sunshine," the Danny Boyle movie about a mission to the Sun, and Steven Soderbergh's remake of "Solaris."

Solaris has its moments, and is a great example of the science fiction film as exercise in close-observation psychology. However, it lacks Tarkovsky's crazy inventiveness, and the movie's end is strangely limp and ambiguous, particularly in contrast to the original's wild ending.

Sunshine has gotten some pretty negative reviews, but I thought it was brilliant and haunting: hardly perfect, but admirable for its audacity. Visually it's very striking, great at contrasting the claustrophobic and slightly crazy life within the ship with the terrifying energy outside it, and struck through with all kinds of fascinating visual touches-- virtual reality rooms, holographic displays, things you've seen in lots of science fiction movies before, but done really well. There aren't many movies this bright, where the light is allowed to be so strong and overwhelming. (It's as if the film were made by a people with a hundred different words for sunlight.) At its best, the music is wonderful, as are the sound effects generally. And I don't buy the idea that the ghost ship detour, or the twist in the last half hour, is a bad move: I thought it worked, especially given who the "ghost" turns out to be.

(Spoiler after the jump. Carpe diem.)

Technorati Tags: movies, science_fiction

Ratatouille

After dropping off my daughter so she could go to a birthday party, my son and I went to see Ratatouille. It was brilliant. It's your basic Brad Bird "unlikely buddies triumph despite many adversities, several crazy chases, and a big misunderstanding that must be overcome" movie.

The critics are right: Bird has become quite brilliant, the animation world's answer to Spielberg or Kubrick. One of the long tracking scenes, which follows the main character (a rat named Remy) through the walls of an apartment building and up to the roof, is as imaginative as the spider scene in Minority Report; the animation is fabulous; and the action scenes... they're terrific, but I can't help but think, "Boy, this would make a great ride. I wonder how much that concern shaped the scene." Then I wonder, so long as the scene is good, does that matter?

And my son loved it, too. No doubt he'll love the ride as well.

Technorati Tags: children, movies

Johnny Depp attacked by precocious Japanese pirate-pianist children

This (via Defamer) is very peculiar. It peaks in about the second minute, when two 4 year-olds play Rimsky Korsakoff... but it's quite strange throughout.

Technorati Tags: Japan, movies

Even more Departed

The L.A. Times reports that there are ideas for a sequel to The Departed:

The elegiac title and murderous conclusion of "The Departed" may have signaled a brutal, blood-red finality, but in Hollywood any potential franchise can be revived by a strong-enough dose of green.

"The Departed" is by far director Martin Scorsese's biggest hit, with a gross of more than $260 million worldwide — a number bound to escalate if the intricate thriller wins an Oscar next month for best picture (one of its five Academy Award nominations). And so sources close to the film say that screenwriter William Monahan, who also received a nod for his "Departed" screenplay last week, has begun working out a potential take that would extend a connected story line and involve some of the same characters.

Given that everyone but Mark Wahlberg dies at the end, I don't see how they can possibly do a sequel.

Technorati Tags: IM, movies

Heat again

My wife went to bed early tonight, so after the kids were asleep, I did what I often do when I'm alone at night: get out edits to an article, and put on Michael Mann's great movie Heat. Having recently watched Miami Vice (which I thought was totally brilliant), and having spent a long week banging out several proposals for new projects, I was in the mood for something stylish and diverting.

I always like Heat, but I noticed two things about it-- and more generally, about Mann's work-- this time around.

First, Mann has a terrific ear. Yes, he made Jan Hammer a household name in the 1980s, but despite that, his choice of music for his movies is inspired. I was impressed with the soundtrack to Miami Vice, and the choice of Moby's "God Moving Over the Face of the Waters" at the end of Heat turns an already-strong ending into one of the most amazing movie finales ever.

Second, while Heat, Collateral, and Miami Vice are very much guy movies, what with all the guns and cars and attention to the fine technical details of criminal and police procedure, Mann places tremendous weight on his female characters-- and they come through. None of the women in Heat have happy lives, but when you're working with Diane Venora, Amy Brenneman, and Natalie Portman, they're never merely Symbols of The Evil That Men Do: they're too good to let their characters collapse into single dimensions. Their work is all the more impressive given how little screen time they actually have, and how economically they have to communicate everything that's going on with them: Portman's three brief, wrenching scenes have more emotional complexity than Star Wars I-III, and in her last scene, Brenneman manages to communicate an immense amount of confusion and turmoil just standing still. Really amazing.

Back to editing. Maybe I'll cue up Infernal Affairs next.

Technorati Tags: movies

The power of Cars

Across the street from my in-laws there's someone who owns an ancient VW bus. It looks like it's one step from the junkyard, but like many VWs, it seems destined forever to defy the odds and keep running.

This evening, as we were leaving their grandparents, my daughter pointed to the bus and said, "Look! That's the kind of car that sells the organic oil!"*

[To the tune of Steven Tyler, "I Love Trash," from the album "Songs From The Street: 35 Years Of Music".]

Technorati Tags: children, movies

The Prestige

Today-- yesterday, by now-- my wife and I went to see The Prestige. She thought it was terrible (though her reaction immediately after the movie was, "I wasn't crazy about it" and ratcheted up with each person she told). In contrast, I thought it was absolutely brilliant: the story, the acting, the crazy Victorian machine-work magic-- it all worked fabulously. (The obligatory Ricky Jay appearance did not disappoint.)

About the title: as Michael Caine (who is reunited with two other Batman Begins alumni, actor Christian Bale and director Christopher Nolan) explains in the opening, every good magic trick starts with "the pledge," which sets up the illusion; "the take turn," in which the object disappears; and "the prestige," in which it reappears.

To say that the movie has twists and turns is a vast understatement. I thought I had it figured out, but was blown away by the end.

My wife had one objection that I agree with: you don't really like either of the main characters, and don't feel like rooting for them. It's more like watching two scorpions: you're interested in the outcome, but not invested in either side.

Though I'm going to be a sucker for any movie featuring Victorian London, Nikola Tesla (played by a very good but unrecognizable David Bowie), and professional obsession.

The Muppet Matrix

How did I miss this?

Clearly I need to check Alex Halavais' blog more often.

Technorati Tags: movies, science_fiction

Now I have to live with the image of Kermit the Frog with two AK-47s

The Muppet Matrix:

Clearly I need to check Alex Halavais' blog more often.

Technorati Tags: movies, science_fiction

Foreign films are a different world

My wife and I are looking for a movie to see this weekend, and so I hit Fandango. Between the films I don't want to see (Flicka) she doesn't want to see (The Departed), and neither of us want to see (just about everything else), we're having a hard time finding anything. [Update: For the record, Heather declares that Flicka is a kids' movie. In my defense, the preview looked like they'd updated it some-- I think Flicka is now captured by terrorists, and that country singer Ali McGraw goes to save her.]

But I came across this, and can't decide if the synopsis reflects bad translation, shoddy work by a resentful freelancer-- or, most frightening of all, actually is an accurate description of what the movie is about.

DON

Cast: Shahrukh Khan, Priyanka Chopra, Arjun Rampal
Director: Farhan Akhtar
Genre: Action/Adventure, Art House/Foreign
Synopsis: A huge Indian group embarks on a dangerous mission to capture Don - the drug mafia king in Malaysia. When Don is severly wounded in a police encounter, word spreads that he is dead. The secret is that Don is held captive in a secret location, while Vijay, his bumbling look a like, is made-up and sent to take down Don's gang.

Is it just the Provigil wearing off, or does that make no sense?

I think the new Christopher Nolan movie about competing magicians in late Victorian London, or the one where Helen Mirren plays Queen Elizabeth, are probably the best compromise candidates.

A talking head among the escargot and Norwegian sparkling water

I spent the morning at the Draegers in San Mateo, being interviewed for a British documentary on new technology. It was quite a lot of fun.

An awful lot of film work is just setting up shots

I've only done a couple of these interviews-- print is more my medium-- and I've got a lot to learn, but I find them very interesting experiences. For one thing, watching the negotiations between members of the film crew can be fascinating, because good crews are a highly skilled bunch, who have to pay constant attention to their surroundings: if you stand too close to a freezer, you pick up a hum on the mikes, and if you're walking down the wrong aisle the light might reflect in the wrong way. An immense amount of attention and work goes into making ten second piece of film look like regular life.

The monitor shows you what the shot looks like, so you can catch things if they go wrong

While we were shooting, one of the shoppers came up to us and said he was a retired sound engineer, and we chatted a bit. He expressed disdain for tape, but admitted that when he was in the business, the old-timers thought magnetic audio tape was a step backwards: they liked being able to look on the audio track on the film, and see where there were gaps in the sound, when something was too loud, etc..

Working through the shooting script

The other fascinating thing is that while you get called because you know stuff, it's not enough to just be an expert. You also have to kind of act the part of an expert. But if you look too self-conscious and artificial, that's bad. You're doing a kind of performance around what you are; it's almost like you're playing a better-looking or more distinguished version of yourself, the authoritative and recognizable you'll actually be... after this thing airs.

Draegers has a lot of stuff, but I think this looked atypical even for them!

My advisors in grad school used to tell me before interviews to "be yourself, only more so," and I think this is what they were getting at.

And while it may seem like a curious place to talk about technology, Draegers, along with Fry's, represent the alpha and omega of Silicon Valley retail experiences.

[To the tune of Jean Jacques Perrey and Luke Vibert, "You Moog Me," from the album "Moog (Soundtrack from the Motion Picture)".]

Technorati Tags: draegers, san mateo, Silicon Valley, television, work

Re-watching the Alien movies

Last week my wife and I removed all the grown-up movies from the living room, and put them on bookshelves in our bedroom. And not a moment too soon. One of this year's birthday presents was the Alien Quadrilogy (is "quadrilogy" even a word? why not "quartet"?). When I was a kid, even the art on the box would have freaked me out for a week; so it's best that the movies are hidden away.

The box set is a pretty amazing collection of stuff: 9 CDs, theatrical and director's cuts of the films, and various behind-the-scenes things. Of the four, the expanded version of Alien 3 is the best, largely because you see a lot more of the prison colony's weird culture, and because the ending is different-- and better. In the theatrical release, you get references to the prisoners having found religion, but you see very little of it: they seem awfully rough-edged and profane, and at best insincere in their collective piety. In the expanded version, in contrast, that part of Fury 161's culture is filled out-- they almost see the alien as an angel of judgment, in fact-- and is a lot more believable.

Alien Resurrection is, in some ways, the most fascinating of the films, because it combines some really brilliant scenes with others that are total, complete train wrecks. On one hand, the chase through the drowned kitchen, and the ambush in the freight elevator shaft, are very well-done. The medical team that clones Ripley is wonderfully amoral and creepy. And they have the whole military-industrial-space look down pat.

In contrast, the last twenty minutes are virtually unwatchable. The entire thing with the mutant alien creature that thinks Ripley is its mother is so astonishingly misguided, and operatically presented, I can hardly believe it made it into the theatre. (Brad Dourif's turn as the Greek chorus to the alien queen is really absurd, and along with his turn in The Two Towers, establishes him as Hollywood's PR Rep of Evil.) Yes, I know, the creature is intended to be Ripley's mirror opposite-- mainly alien, with a little human-- and her wasting the creature (by blowing it out a space hatch! how original!) symbolizes her alienation (as it were) from humans, aliens, and her own kind. But given how much the film revels in obscenity (there's more gratuitous cursing than in the first three movies combined), and the fact that it has more splattered brains than a George Romero zombie movie, the attempt to Get Profound at the end feels very disjointed.

I know it may seen weird to accuse a movie whose three predecessors features a monster that bursts out of people's chests of gratuitous violence, but I'll stand my ground. Alien was scary as Hell, but it is to Alien Resurrection as erotica is to hard-core porn: effective because it's shows shadows and lets your mind's eye fill in the bodies, instead of lingering on the mechanics.

Still, it's fascinating to watch such an ambitious attempt at Creating Meaning fall so flat. At least they broke the sound barrier before they crashed.

Another missed opportunity in Alien Resurrection is that Sigourney Weaver's character is weird, yet weirdly undeveloped. One of the great pleasures of Alien and Aliens was watching Ellen Ripley develop from your basic Last Female Standing to someone quite a bit stronger. This development starts to falter in Alien 3, and in Alien Resurrection it just short-circuits completely. On one hand, she's come a long way baby: two hundred years have passed, and this Ripley is a genetically engineered chimera combining the old Ripley DNA and the alien's (assuming a creature that bleeds acid has DNA). But she communicates this mainly by sniffing things, putting her head to the deck and listening to the aliens, and being filmed at weird angles. Spooky. (Winona Ryder, in contrast, is about as edgy as the lead in a high school production of Our Town.) There are head-fakes toward Ripley being aware that she now can survive and triumph over the aliens because of her similarity to them, but she's usually too busy running from or killing them for this tension to be explored fully, and the head-fakes usually end in decapitations, anyway.

So Ripley doesn't become more human in the course of the movie, nor does she become more alien. Like Arnold or Keanu, she isn't so much acting as being a reference to the character she could have been, in this case the Complex Female Action Hero. As Jacques Derrida said, every decoding is another encoding. And sometimes it's also a decapitation.

[To the tune of The Beatles, "I Want To Hold Your Hand," from the album "Anthology 1 [Disc 2]".]

Quote of the day

From Slate's review of Miami Vice:

In Miami Vice (Universal), the nightscapes of L.A. are replaced by a transnational [Michael] Mann-land: Whether you're in Miami, Havana, or a lawless frontier city straddling the borders of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil, there's no shortage of stark-white apartments with spectacular ocean views, where gorgeous biracial women take long hot showers as R&B throbs in the background.

[To the tune of U2, "Miami," from the album "Pop".]

Technorati Tags: movies

Keanu and the coolness of emptiness

A perceptive bit about Keanu Reeves (one of my favorite organic synthespians) from Slate's review of A Scanner Darkly (one of those drug-saturated books that really makes you want to not take drugs):

Like the self in Buddhist philosophy, Keanu is less a person than an empty place-holder....

[I]t's often been observed that Keanu Reeves is less an actor than a reactor. But, like the stolen hydrogen-powered device in the 1996 Keanu vehicle Chain Reaction, he can be a reactor of unexpected force and power. This is how the androgynous Keanu has succeeded for more than a decade as an action star. It's Keanu's very passivity, his unflappable Zen emptiness, that makes him a compellingly quiet and focused hero. Somehow you believe he could stay calm while defusing a bomb on the underside of a moving bus, or even halt a bullet using only his mind.

[To the tune of The Beatles, "Hey Jude," from the album "1".]

Technorati Tags: movies, science_fiction

Why you don't sit next to experts at movies

One of my worst movie experiences was watching the Robert DeNiro-Jeremy Irons film The Mission. Not because it's a bad movie, or because I was in a bad theatre.

No, it was because I went with my father, who's an expert on Latin American history, and spent the whole time complaining about historical inaccuracies in the movie.

The high point was when he grumbled that a certain ornamental cross in one scene actually wouldn't reach southern Brazil wouldn't fifty years. I must admit I also felt a certain degree of admiration that he'd know something that obscure.

So this critique of Pirates of the Caribbean by a marine biologist struck a familiar, nay even nostalgic, chord.

[via Schneier]

[To the tune of The Beatles, "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds," from the album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".]

In how many movies...

...has Keanu Reeves played a character who could download information directly into his brain?

There was the Matrix trilogy, of course, and the lamentable Johnny Mnemonic. Where else has Keanu been able to put information in his head the way the rest of us put money on our cash cards?

[To the tune of En Vogue, "Free Your Mind," from the album "Funky Divas".]

Technorati Tags: science_fiction

My movie critic

Yesterday we took the kids to see "Cars," the new Pixar, umm, vehicle. I liked it more than I expected to, given that the reviews have been pretty lukewarm.

As we were leaving the theatre, we ran into another Peninsula School family. They asked us what we'd just seen.

"Cars!" the children yelled.

"How was it?" they asked.

"It was cool," my son said.

My daughter added, "It was mainly about friendship."

I suppose it's not the subtlest movie, but I was still impressed at her comment.

Technorati Tags: cars, children, movies

An Inconvenient Truth

My wife and I went to see An Inconvenient Truth this afternoon. (She's actually seen Gore give the talk live, but still...) I think the movie would have been strengthened by dropping the few minutes' criticism of the Bush White House's opposition to climate science and rewriting of scientific reports on global warming. At this point, who doesn't know that the White House's attitude to scientific truth is one that would seemed too relativist for the Yale English department in the heyday of deconstruction?

But overall, I thought it was great. Granted, you're basically watching a guy... give a... Powerpoint presentation. A very well-done one, and actually Gore uses Keynote, but still. Clearly we've reached some significant moment in our culture when you can make a movie of a guy's multimedia presentation.

I have to wonder, what talk will Dick Cheney give hundreds of times after he leaves office? I look forward to seeing the answer.

Technorati Tags: environment, movies

Greatest. Cover. Ever.

William Hung's version of "Hotel California," mashed up with expletives from the "Bus Uncle" video.

This is the future of entertainment!

Technorati Tags: China, movies, music

Our best hope to compete against China

--is the popularity of things like this:

Bus Uncle... a six-minute film showing a grumpy man scolding a fellow bus passenger in Hong Kong for interrupting his phone call... has been viewed nearly 1.7m times on the video website Youtube.com - the second most-viewed video on the site in May - spawning spoofs and new slang drawn from the ranting subject's emotional soliloquy. The grainy film, which is apparently shot with a mobile phone on the top of a double-decker bus, is hilarious for its sheer absurdity and dramatic twists.

The film starts with the middle-aged protagonist reacting strongly when a young man sitting behind him taps his shoulder to ask him to keep his voice down while talking on the phone.

"I don't know you. You don't know me. Why do you do this?" the infuriated man says, punctuating the sentence by jabbing his right hand downward in the air. When the young man, who rarely talks back during the argument, expresses an unwillingness to continue the conversation, the middle-aged man explodes, "This is not resolved! This is not resolved!" - now a catchphrase in Hong Kong. He goes on to say: "I face pressure. You face pressure. Why did you provoke me?"

... Internet users have also added Chinese and English subtitles. The video has inspired numerous spoofs, including a karaoke version and a rap song using the middle-aged man's refrain: "I face pressure. You face pressure."

To paraphrase J. Robert Oppenheimer at the successful conclusion of the Trinity test, "I am Internet, destroyer of productivity."

[To the tune of The Hollies, "Bus Stop," from the album "The Very Best Of 60's Gold, vol. 2".]

Technorati Tags: China, mobility, movies

Llamas on a plane

"Snakes on a Plane" will either completely supercharge Samuel L. Jackson's career, or kill it. Fortunately, the buzz around the movie is so ironic that if it's a bad movie, it'll probably be seen as satisfyingly bad; and if it's good, it'll be surprisingly good.

They should already be thinking about a sequel, like "Llamas on a Plane."

Technorati Tags: humor, movies

The end of civilization

To say nothing of being the very worst, most ill-conceived, movie tie-in in all of history. Just stunning. (And NSFW.)

But the comments are funny.

I really am going to have Pride and Prejudice running on my TV for the next five years. It's getting too dangerous out there.

[To the tune of Stevie Wonder, "Love Light In Flight," from the album "The Woman in Red (Soundtrack from the Motion Picture)".]

Technorati Tags: humor, movies

Tron redux

A couple days ago I stumbled upon a cache of Tron stuff. This was actually work-related, for reasons so obscure I won't try to explain it; but the same task led me to rent the movie, and watch it for the first time in over twenty years.

I was surprised to find that, in some parts, it's really quite good. It's very early 1980s-- look! there's shading on that animation! that female character has Farrah Fawcett Major's hair!-- but for my money, it's still the best expression of the "computer-as-world" vision on film.

Okay, back to work.

[To the tune of Stevie Wonder, "Do I Do," from the album "Stevie Wonder: The Definitive Collection".]

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, end of cyberspace

No one would have imagined...

...that so much Tron stuff could have survived for so long!

I loved that movie when I was in high school. At the time, it seemed like the most brilliant, fully-realized science fiction movie since 2001: A Space Odyssey.

[To the tune of Kronos Quartet, "White Man Sleeps - 1," from the album "Kronos Quartet - Pieces Of Africa".]

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, digital culture, movies

Another cat video

--this time on You Tube.

(Thanks, Nancy!)

[To the tune of Red Rider, "Lunatic Fringe," from the album "As Far As Siam".]

Technorati Tags: cat, humor

Flickr music video

Not quite "cat hitting a hammer," but weirdly compelling nonetheless: Jonathan Coulton's flickr music video.

Technorati Tags: humor, movies, music

Greatest video ever

Cat hitting a hammer. What the Internet was meant for.

Now I'm going back to work.

Technorati Tags: cat, humor, movies

Rule one: never talk about Pillow Fight Club

You can, however, take video.

"Smart mobs," indeed!

The new Pride and Prejudice

We went to see the new Pride and Prejudice yesterday. I'm a big fan of the Jennifer Ehle-Colin Firth miniseries version, and have been impressed at how well most recent adaptations of Jane Austen have turned out, but this one really blew me away. I wasn't that crazy about the choice of Matthew MacFadyen as Mr. Darcy, but Keira Knightley was a much better Elizabeth Bennet than I expected (from Pirates of the Caribbean to Jane Austen-- is there nothing she can't do?), Rosamund Pike was great as Jane, and Simon Woods was a terrific, gawky, lovestruck Bingley.

I also kept noticing two minor characters: Talulah Riley's Mary Bennet, who normally is a total nonentity and comic relief but who gets unexpected depth, and Claudie Blakley's Charlotte Lucas, whose combination of goodness and desperation makes her marriage to Mr. Collins more comprehensible. There's a brilliant two seconds where Collins is in the Bennet house, and storms out after Elizabeth rejects her: everyone's in an uproar except for Mary, who watches him leave with this semi-mystified look of longing. You get the sense that Charlotte knew she was settling, but that Mary would have worshipped him. I don't think that's in the book, but it's a great addition to Mary's character.

And the cinematography and staging were marvelous. You get a much better sense of the impoverished gentility of the Bennet household this time than in some earlier versions of the story, and the contrast between Elizabeth's house, Netherfield, Pemberley, and Lady Catherine's estate are much starker (as are the differences between those three places). The contrast between Mr. Bennet's study and the rest of the house is also clearer; but at the same time, you also get a sense of how him limitations-- his unwillingness to control his family, his avoidance of conflict-- shape the entire house.

And while the New Yorker critic was right that this is a Bronte-d Jane Austen-- lots of windswept landscapes and people having passionate arguments in the rain-- it works. If you're going to give up dialogue for landscape and cinematography, this is the landscape and cinematography to give it up for.

There's a brilliant tracking shot in Bingley's ball, where you move from the ballroom, through various other rooms, hallways, past nooks and crannies, and finally to Elizabeth on a balcony: every major character moves in and out of the camera's crowded view, and you hear only a few words of dialogue, or see them for a couple seconds, but each appearance is revealing. It reminded me of how Kurosawa handled the backstories in Seven Samurai.

And yes, things got changed around, there's an additional scene at the end, minor characters were eliminated, and dialogue was changed. But you want fidelity to the book? Read the book.

[To the tune of Johann Sebastian Bach, "Concerto for Oboe d'amore in A Major, BWV 1055: 1: Allegro," from the album "Oboe Concertos".]

Technorati Tags: Janu, movies