Molten Boron

August 10, 2007

Pseudo-Review: Stardust

If in the near future you find yourself in need of entertainment and possessed of several hours to kill, I can not recommend the movie Stardust heartily enough. It's a delightful fantasy based on a children's novel by Neil Gaiman, who also wrote the screenplay. Cleverly written and fun, it's highly reminiscent of The Princess Bride, and I might even argue it's somewhat better than its spriritual predecessor. It would be a great way to spend an afternoon even if its present competition wasn't Rush Hour 3. As is, it's probably the best thing you can do right now in a darkened room.

Posted by Zach at 11:12 PM | Comments (0)

March 18, 2007

Blowed

Do you find yourself dangerously un-depressed? I recommend a viewing of When the Wind Blows. It's a feature-length animated film by the writer and director who created The Snowman, a charming silent cartoon about the a who goes on a magical adventure to the land of snowmen. In When the Wind Blows, author Raymond Briggs and director Jimmy Murakami decided to go in a rather different direction, subject matter-wise: it's the story of an elderly english couple slowly dying of radiation poisoning following a nuclear apocalypse.

It's an interesting film. The animation is both lovely and harrowing, and it's heartbreaking to watch Jim and Hilda slowly waste away without having any real idea what's happening to them. Jim and Hilda don't begin preparing for disaster until a few days before the bombs fall and rely for their preparations entirely upon a pair of government pamphlets. They expect the experience to be much like World War II, which they both lived through as children. For Jim, particularly, the coming of war is both serious and exciting. He grew up playing at soldiers with Churchill and Goering, Montgomery and Rommel as characters in his imagination, and the prospect of war gives him an opportunity to relive those fantasies. The war lets him recapture his childhood, and his failure to grasp that this war is different makes the couples's demise the more tragic.

Which isn't to say that it makes their death more likely. The film serves as an indictment of the leaders of the time, who are portrayed as having failed their people by giving them too many false assurances and too little useful information. To get the jabs the film is making you should view this public service video, Protect and Survive as context. It's sort of the English version of Duck and Cover, but far less cheerful and far more disturbing. Equally useless, but scary. Yet, in a way, not. The message seems to be "Sorry, there's been a bit of a cock-up and its brought about the end of the world. But don't worry, even after the apocalypse the government will still be there for you to set things right. The wheels of bureaucracy will continue to turn, and the wagon will be 'round on Monday to pick up your dead, so be sure to have them properly labelled, bagged, and tagged."

The animation itself is an interesting mix of live-action film footage, traditional animation, and rotoscoping, which before Richard Linklater rediscovered it was a technique used to give standard animation a creepy uncanny valley feeling. The mix works surprisingly well. I'm normally not a fan of clashing video styles, but Murakami blends things pretty seamlessly. It all fits together to create a film that is both beautiful and bleak.

When the Wind Blows is deeply affecting and powerful. Plus it has opening and ending music by David Bowie, and who doesn't like that? Highly recommended.

Posted by Zach at 10:59 PM | Comments (0)

January 01, 2007

Roquefort

For years a peculiar line of dialogue has periodically invaded my brain. It's infuriating because it seems very familiar, but I can't recall where I've heard it. The line goes something like this:

"I've seen the future, and you're not in it!"

I would imagine the context is something like a goofy science fiction movie, probably involving time travel, and that the quote is uttered at some climactic confrontation. But I can't figure out where exactly it's from. Google has been no help; the exact phrase comes up blank, and a standard search gets a lot of hits but nothing I'm looking for. Is this line familiar to anyone else? Is it possible I made it up myself years ago on one of my flights of fancy and have since mis-remembered it as coming from a movie?

Posted by Zach at 06:31 AM | Comments (7)

October 16, 2006

Movie Review: Tillsammans (Together)

"I think that loneliness is the most awful thing in this world."

-Birger

Tillsammans is a difficult movie to sell people on, because the most accurate brief summary one can give of it is that it's a foreign-language film about life in a swedish commune in the 1970s. Yet it's funny and human and real and very much worth the effort to watch.

The movie is about the residents of a commune, named Tillsammans, and is set in Stockholm in 1975. To start, we have Göran, an amiable pushover who's in an open relationship with Lena, who exploits the relationship's openness far more than Göran would like. The other sort-of couple in the house are Anna and Lasse, who recently divorced when Anna discovered that she was a lesbian. Lasse did not take this very well, but still lives in the house directing vitriol towards Anna and the other residents. Klas, a hapless gay resident, is meanwhile attempting to seduce Lasse. In the middle of this is Anna and Lasse's son, Tet (named after the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War). The house is also home to Erik, a young Marxist who dropped out of school to work as a welder so that he could be closer to the Proletariat, and Signe and Sigvard, a couple that, possibly due to incautious editing, we don't realize live in the house until the scene where they make a big deal of leaving.

The action kicks off when Göran's sister Elisabeth, a housewife with two children, Eva and Stefan, leaves her abusive husband Rolf and comes to live in Tillsammans. We then watch Elisabeth, Eva, and Stefan slowly assimilate into the commune

The director, Lukas Moodysson, doesn't really do plots. Things at Tillsammans are one way when the movie starts and another way when the movie end, and we get to see the events that transpire between the two points, but it doesn't really have a coherent storyline. Instead we have about a dozen characters who interact with one another, and whom we watch grow and change over the course of the film. Moodysson is great at these very realistic character studies. He extracts very naturalistic performances from his actors, such that we can hardly tell that they're acting at all, yet he gives us a real feel for them.

Tillsammans is helped by its ensemble cast. In the other Moodysson films I've seen, Fucking Åmål and Lilja 4-Ever, he takes much the same character study approach, but because he only focuses on one or two characters they tend to drag. In Tillsammans, there are so many characters that Moodysson manages, as I mentioned above, to lose track of a few of them. Still, it means that there's a lot going on in a film that doesn't have any notable plotting.

Moodysson is particularly insightful in his portrayal of lonely characters. There's a notable tendency in most films to cheat with the lonely; the film will make a great deal about how alone a given character is, then hope you won't notice that the lonely character has been given a passel of friends to serve as the hook for forcing the character out of her shell. Moodysson presents us with lonely characters who literally have no friends, who sit around all day doing nothing, who break their plumbing so that they'll have a chance to have a conversation with the plumber when he comes to fix the pipes.

Yet for all this, Tillsammans is a hopeful movie. We watch people leave the commune, we watch people enter the commune, we watch the commune change in character over the course of the film. Yet through it we see the enduring value of togetherness. The residents of Tilsammans are an odd collection of leftists and revolutionaries, yet they're living healthy, fulfilling lives. They're contrasted with the various neighbors and outsiders, living conventional modern lives, who find themselves isolated and desperate and, above all, alone.

At the same time, the film isn't a utopian paean to the glories of the commune, at least as they existed in the mid-70s in Sweden. The film is willing to show us the disagreements that disrupt the commune, from arguments over dish clean-up to Marxist sermonizing. Moodysson takes a balanced view and argues for the communal ideal of human living, without the specific ideological baggage that often comes with real-life communes.

Tillsammans had a very brief theatrical release in the US in the Fall of 2002. I've been looking for a home video release for years without success, but apparently Universal has just put it out on DVD. I can't recommend it strongly enough.

Posted by Zach at 12:47 PM | Comments (0)

May 24, 2006

Movie Review: Art School Confidential

I saw Art School Confidential last Saturday.  I was somewhat excited about it, as I loved the previous Zwigoff/Clowes collaboration, Ghost World, enough that I saw it twice in theaters.  Unfortuantely, Art School isn't nearly as fun or cohesive as Ghost World was. 

Like Ghost World, Art School starts off heavily satarical, then transitions into drama and tragedy.  The satire's done with a pretty broad brush, but it's funny nonetheless.  Ghost World made fun of high school and suburban life, while Art School attacks art school in general and artistic personalities in particular.  The first third of the movie is quite funny.

But where Ghost World started funny then gradually introduced painful elements until the entire world fell apart, Art School goes from making fun of emo-types to being melodramatic in itself.  We're introduced to a score of comic characters in the first third who abruptly disappear right when the movie decides it's time to be dramatic.  Whereas Ghost World moved seamlessly from comedy to drama, Art School changes abruptly, as though they shot two different movies and spliced them together at the first reel change. 

The movie's also disappointing for being put together somewhat artlessly.  The character development is poorly handled, such that we have little idea what motivates the main characters, even the ones that we spend 90% of the movie watching.  Most of the dialog comes in the form of truly ham-handed exposition.  There's one scene that had the most excruciatingly obvious exposition that I cracked up.  Apparently the filmmakers realized they needed to explain the big art exhibition that is the movie's climax, so we have a professor telling his students about it, followed by the following questions:  "Isn't it true that our entire grades for the semester are based on this one exhibition?"  "Isn't it true that the person with the highest grade gets a special prize?"  "Isn't the student who wins the prize each year given an exhibition of their work at Broadway Bob's art gallery?"  "Hasn't every student who's won gone on to incredible fame and fortune?"  "I've heard that none of your students has ever won the prize, and that you're afraid you might lose your job if one of us doesn't win this year.  Is that true?"  I do not exaggerate; these are verbatim quotes from the movie. 

It's a shame, because there actually is a good movie hiding in here.  Clowes and Zwigoff are very adept at showing a certain kind of pain, of showing smart, talented people watch as their lives slowly fall apart and come to realize that their dreams of glory will go unfulfilled.  Most everybody dreams of being at the top, but only a few people can get there and they aren't necessarily the most talented or deserving.  Zwigoff and Clowes are probably the best in the business at portraying intelligent losers, people who miss their chance at fortune and give up on life.

There's a lot of interest in this movie, but it's poorly edited, has terrible characterization and dreadful dialog.  It's worth seeing getting when it comes out on Netflix, I think, but not worth spending money to see in theaters.  Not recommended.

Posted by Zach at 01:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 17, 2006

Yet Another Reason to Hate David Lynch

I recently got The Elephant Man from Netflix. I sat down to watch it about a week ago. I was drowsy when it started, but quite enjoyed what I saw. After about forty minute my sleepiness overtook me and I decided to turn it off and pick it up later. Today I returned to it. I turned on my DVD player, put in the disc, and waited for the title menu to load.

Shit.

Shit, shit, shit.

I had three options on the menu: Special Features, Set Up, and Play. I checked Special Features. Theatrical Trailer, production featurette, interview with David Lynch. Try set-up. Language and subtitle options. I tried selecting Play and hitting the chapter skip button. No dice.

I had forgotten that David Lynch thinks very highly of himself and his films. So highly, in fact, that he does not appreciate the idea of folks watching his films willy-nilly, in manners that he does not approve of. Therefore, The Elephant Man, like Eraserhead before it, has no scene selection and no chapter stops. If you wish to watch a David Lynch movie, you must watch it the way David Lynch intended: Starting with the first frame, you must proceed through to the last frame, viewing each frame in order and giving it its proper due. If you wish to leave a David Lynch film that's your prerogative, but if you ever wish to see the ending you must start over at the beginning again and appreciate the genius of its totality.

I'm getting a bit hostile. DVD players aren't well-designed for fast forwarding, so it took fifteen minutes of holding down the "search forward" button to get to where I left off. This left me somewhat peeved. I very nearly took the DVD out and sent it back then and there.

It would have been a shame if I had, because The Elephant Man is actually a very good movie. I recommend it highly, though I'd also recommend setting aside the two hours, four minutes needed to watch it in its entirety, because David Lynch doesn't want you leaving in the middle.

Enough grousing. The Elephant Man is actually a normal movie, which if you've seen any of David Lynch's other works should be a shock. That is, it has a sustained and coherent narrative that starts at the beginning, moves to the end, and almost never makes you want to punch David Lynch in the face for being a self-absorbed pretentious git without the faintest idea of how to communicate his thoughts in a visual medium. This movie, by being as good as it is, actually makes me think less of Lynch: I'd always assumed that he couldn't shoot a movie that makes sense because of some infirmity on his part. Perhaps he had a great story in his mind, but he lacked the ability to put it onto the screen in a way that was understandable to others. I could certainly understand that; it's hard, in telling a story, to be sure that you've included all the parts that are necessary for someone else to make sense of it. Your mind fills in the gaps that you leave out, and you risk neglecting crucial details and thereby leaving your audience puzzled.

I had always assumed, until now, that David Lynch is just one of those people who can't quite tell a coherent story. I had a theory that critics and others had mistaken this for genius and, as a result of their ill-deserved praise, Lynch had never bothered to cultivate the core competencies of story-telling. But now I find out he can make a movie, and this makes all his other movies the more intolerable. Before I could watch Dune and say "...Well, it was certainly a nice try. You definitely put a lot into it, David. Maybe you should pick a slightly less ambitious subject next time." But no. Now I know that when Lynch makes me listen to Paul ramble cryptically over and over and over, he's doing it because he decided consciously that this is better filmmaking than actually providing the context necessary to make what Paul's saying make a damn lick of sense.

Wow. I didn't mean to get this angry. Especially since The Elephant Man is quite good. I recommend it. But, because he took out the chapter stops, I refuse to do Lynch the favor of elaborating as to why I like it.

Posted by Zach at 07:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 13, 2006

Nervous Thoughts from Criminal Law

Am I the only one who can't see Christopher Hitchens:

without being reminded of Richard Burton in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?:

Why does Word's spell check dictionary recognize the word "Appellant," but not the word "Appellee?" Logically, for every appellant (or set of appellants) there must be an equal and opposite appellee (or set of appellees). What gives?

If I might be indulged to complain briefly about our career services here: Last Fall they corralled us into a large auditorium to introduce us to the services they provide and prepare us for the First Year Summer Job Hunt. Their advice was to contact friends and relatives and explore possibilities working with them. In case that didn't work, they gave everyone a free copy of the National Association of Law Placement's big book of contact information for every legal employer in the country.

In other words: Your two best bets for finding a job are nepotism and cronyism. If that fails, here's the phonebook; get calling.

On the other hand, this is somewhat more helpful than the advice I got from Berkeley career services, which seems to operate on the premise that if nobody knows your organization exists, then nobody can give your organization a bad evaluation.

Posted by Zach at 08:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 08, 2006

Well Played, Clerks

You might, perhaps, have noticed that I have a tendency to the hyperchondriacal. It's a rare list of symptoms that I can read without being absolutely sure that I have the disease in question. There was a time in my younger days when I was pretty certain I had ghonnorhea, despite the inconvenient fact that I hadn't, as yet, engaged in the sort of activities you need to engage in to get ghonnorhea (to wit: Sex). I've been certain I had gangrene on at least three occasions. And I have a nice litany of self-diagnosed psychological problems.

My hypochondria (both by its nature and through its existence) leads me to believe that I'm somewhat paranoid. I received further evidence of this paranoia when I first moved into my apartment. I live in a very old, very sturdy building. It was finished in 1907, and the walls and floors are thick enough that you can barely hear noise through them at all. I live on the third floor of the buiding, which is eight stories in total.

As I lay on my unfamiliar bed on the first night in my new apartment, I began mentally cataloging its various positives and negative. On the plus side, near the subway. On the minus, a somewhat janky stove. On the plus side, nice neighborhood. On the minus, no furniture yet. Eventually I came to the subject of airplanes. I decided that a huge plus for my current residence is that it is probably airplane-jet-engine proof. Even should a jet engine fall out of a plane with a trajectory that puts it on a direct course for my bed, chances are that, between the five stories above me and the building's solid construction, its momentum would be stopped before it crushed me in my sleep. I'd be much more nervous if I were on the sixth or seventh or, God forbid, the eighth floor, but here on the third floor I can sleep the sleep of the just. There won't be any scary seven-foot-tall rabbits in my future.

Posted by Zach at 02:16 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 01, 2006

Dork Out!

I just noticed something odd in the dialogue in the first Star Wars movie. That is, I probably noticed it earlier, but the oddness of it was only made clear just now.

In the first Star Wars (that is, Episode IV: A New Hope) there's a scene where a bunch of Imperial middle-managers are hanging around a conference table discussing how neat their Death Star is. That leads to the following dialogue:

Middle-Manager: The Rebellion will continue to gain support in the Imperial Senate as long as....

Grand Moff Tarkin: (Entering) The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I've just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away.

Middle-Manager: That's impossible! How will the Emperor maintain control without the bureaucracy?

Tarkin: The regional governors now have direct control over territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station.

First, there's the oddness of Middle-Manager's leap from Senate dissolution to Bureaucracy dissolution. Generally, administrative agencies fall under the purview of the executive, not the legislature. Moreover, even if under legislative control (a monstrously inefficient arrangement, but one that is perhaps plausible given the rot of the Old Republic) it does not necessarily follow from "Senate dissolved" that all of its subordinate administrative agencies would therefore be dissolved with it, or that the bureaucracy would disappear. The Emperor could transfer control of the administration to himself. Or, if he worries that the old bureaucrats are loyal to the Old Republic's ways, he could build his own bureaucracy that's loyal to him. Presumably he'd have already done this, much as Hitler used the outside structure of the Nazi party to take over and supplement many of the tasks of government that he couldn't trust the old structures to handle to his satisfaction.

But moreover, the explanation Tarkin gives is totally unsatisfactory. He makes the odd leap from an upset in the balance of power (destruction of the legislature and transfer of its authority to the executive) to some sort of ... federalism? Is that the Empire's tyranny? Devolution of enforcement powers to local authorities? I have to say, while not necessarily being a huge fan of federalism myself, that decentralizing power tends to be a move in the direction of less tyranny rather than more.

It could be Lucas was just confused. In fact, it's likely. But if we take things at face value, the plan seems to be to eliminate the centralized mechanisms of control and enforcement, except the military, and trust to local authorities to handle all the day-to-day tasks of governance. There's no local autonomy (they don't get to make the rules) but there will be local enforcement of centrally made rules. Of course, giving people elaborate sets of rules, into which they have no input, and telling them it's their responsibility to enforce those rules is essentially granting them de facto autonomy, particularly if you've destroyed all of your centralized mechanisms for ensuring compliance.

Which leads to Tarkin's final point. "Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station." So the idea is that local governments will be given rules and told to enforce them in line with the Emperor's will. If they fail to meet the Emperor's expectation, the Death Star will obliterate them. This, it must be said, is a terribly ineffective means of governance, even from the perspective of the tyrant.

You're faced with the sort of problem Eisenhower faced with the Massive Retaliation scheme he implemented in the 50s. Essentially, we built a lot of B-52s, loaded them with atomic bombs, and set them patrolling in international/friendly skies just outside Russia. The idea was that we were prepared, if the Russians started anything, to bomb the crap out of them (the general outline of this scheme can be seen in Dr. Strangelove and Failsafe). The problem with Massive Retaliation is that it's only really appropriate in the case of an all-out war. If Russian soldiers had started pouring across the Iron Curtain, we would have been ready. But what happens if Russia instead just pushes a little? What happens if they support communist rebels in Greece and Turkey? What happens if they blockade Berlin? Are these actions worth launching a nuclear holocaust over? When your only option is all-out war, you're in trouble when the enemy tries something that doesn't really justify it. You either go too far or you stand by and let them get away with it. When this became clear, we adopted a more flexible range of military responses to Soviet aggression.

So, Fear of This Battle Station. What happens when Kuat Shipyards starts producing Imperial Star Destroyers that aren't quite up to calibre? Blast them out of the skies? If Bothawui's governor decides that he doesn't have the resources to maintain vice enforcement, and focuses instead on smugglers, is that a genocide-worthy offense? It's simply not plausible to maintain complete local compliance when your only control mechanism is the death penalty for a region.

Alright. Assume Tarkin is being hyperbolic. The Death Star's for extreme circumstances, like rebellion. Generally, though, the Empire will deploy a flexible military response to failures by local authorities. This, too, seems ineffective. Fine for military matters; they can use their various spies and military intelligence to determine when local systems are aiding the rebellion. But how will they determine if, for instance, health care policies are properly implemented? Transportation? Taxation? Will Storm Troopers be reviewing citizens' Space 1040s? And is military force an effective means of ensuring compliance with education laws? Doubtful.

My point is that this whole decentralizing + tyranny idea makes no sense. A far better explanation would be that the Senate had been disbanded, but that the Emperor would maintain control through his own centralized bureaucracy. Destroying your central enforcement mechanisms, trusting to local government to pick up the slack, and figuring that military force will ensure compliance is madness. Madness!

Posted by Zach at 10:19 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

January 26, 2006

Movie Review: Coyote Ugly

I need to do a non-law related post, but law school has occupied essentially all of my mental real estate the last couple of weeks. Still, I found time last night (between 1 AM and 3:30 AM) to watch Coyote Ugly. I'm glad I did; I believe I have found the Funky Town of film.

What I mean by that is, just as I feel Funky Town is the platonic ideal entertainingly bad song, I now feel that Coyote Ugly is the platonic ideal entertainingly bad movie (I realize not everyone shares my opinion on Funky Town. Feel free to substitute your own favorite terrible song in its place).

Coyote Ugly tells the story of Violet, a young woman who aspires to be a songwriter. She decides to follow her dreams by packing her bags and moving to the Big City. This is preceeded by a lot of long, heart-felt goodbyes and terrible, terrible speeches. This is the screenplay's first major misstep. We are expected to become emotionally invested in her move from the small town to the big city. She's making her way somewhere new and exciting! She's all alone and on her own! She's leaving everyone she grew up with behind and forging her own path in a foreign land! But the screenwriters didn't want her moving too far from home, because they wanted to bring her dad (played by John Goodman) in for occasional wacky hi-jinks. So her hometown is South Amboy, New Jersey. They drive the silliness of all this home by mentioning off-handedly that South Amboy is 41 miles from New York City. So she's making it by herself... less than an hour from home. This makes a lot of the movie seem melodramatic and pointless. She has a house 41 miles away. There's no real reason why she should be living in New York City; she can do the aspiring song-writer thing just as easily from home, driving into the city for gigs and pavement-pounding. Granted, she wants independence, she's starting her own life, etc. But whenever her ability to maintain herself in New York is threatened, the prospect of going home is seen as The Death of All She's Ever Dreamed Of. It clearly isn't; going home means The Death Of Her Somewhat More Convenient Commute.

She doesn't get any leads selling her music, except the following apparently iron-clad law: If you want to make it as a song-writer, the only way to do it is on the open mic circuit singing your own songs. I'm willing to buy that. I don't know enough about the music business to know where song-writers come from, and that seems plausible. But it's problematic for Violet because she is ineluctably shy about singing songs she has written. More on this later. She meets a guy with a cute face and an annoying Australian accent who will eventually become the love interest. And, out of desperation, she takes a job at a bar called Coyote Ugly.

As you know from the previews, Coyote Ugly is a bar where the bartenders are all attractive women who dance on the bar. Every night, including weeknights, the bar is packed wall to wall, because even though their liquor selection is poor (cheap tequila, cheap scotch, and cheap beer, marked up to thrice its normal asking price) this bar has hot women dancing on the bar. There's no stripping, no sex, just well-choreographed line dancing. If this movie were your only source of information about New York City, you might assume that women were incredibly scarce there, and that most New Yorkers would brave long lines to get into a terrible bar just for the opportunity to get a fleeting glance at one.

Violet is nervous about her new job at first, but eventually she finds her schtick: Standing on the bar and singing along to the juke box. This act is apparently so mind-blowingly awesome that it can stop a bar riot in its tracks. Further, it brings in hordes of new customers. Which throws the movie's biggest plothole into sharp relief: Violet is shy, but only about singing her own songs in front of other people. She can dance on a bar without any problem. She can stand on a bar and sing other people's songs. She can sing her own songs into a microphone and give the tape to other people. But she can't sing her own songs to others in person. Now, I sympathize with stage fright, but this is just bad writing. She's not shy about singing, she's not shy about singing in public, and she's not shy about people hearing her own songs, sung by her onto a tape. She is, in fact, boisterous about all of these activities. But when she has to sing her songs in public, she curls up into the fetal position. This is an astoundingly specific psychosis: "I'm afraid of visiting the third story of buildings after I get on the elevator on the fifth floor, but only on the second Tuesday in April."

Most of the movie is spent watching her blossoming romance with the Australian fellow, who helps her work through her oddly idiosyncratic stage fright by having sex with her in front of a bunch of cardboard cutouts of famous people. This is the movie's one redeeming scene. Granted, it's an entirely gratuitous sex scene, but Australian Guy actually has a really cute butt. Or at least his nude double does. In any case, there is a cute butt in the scene, and it makes the scene worthwhile.

The movie sort of meanders for two hours with a lot standard-issue plot conflicts thrown in at random (Australian Guy's dark past, Violet's father's disapproval of her job, Violet's father getting ill, Violet getting fired over a misunderstanding, Violet getting re-hired, Violet and Austrialian Guy breaking up over a misunderstanding, then getting back together, and of course, Violet getting her big break and becoming a star). Conflicts are introduced and resolved within minutes, and nothing of significance happens until the movie ends.

Having said that, it was a fun movie to watch. There isn't a single scene in the film that won't make you giggle at some point about how unrealistic and contrived it is. And to the movie's credit, the dialogue is at least reasonably snappy. It's decently acted for what it is, and the cinematography is agreeable. It suffers from a terrible script that goes nowhere, does nothing, and befuddles the viewer with its fundamental disconnect from reality.

I've heard this movie described as Showgirls without stripping. That's true only in the sense that they both use the same hackneyed plot. This movie is far less self-important than Showgirls, but it's also more competently made. The acting is better and the characters, while underdeveloped, are more likeable. It's a lot less painful to watch than Showgirls, but maintains the consistent level of goofiness you need to make a bad movie truly great. Recommended.

Posted by Zach at 02:40 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

December 28, 2005

Movie Review: The Family Stone

This movie is a trainwreck.  I'm somewhat surprised this got released at the height of the holiday season; it seems like the sort of film that would get held by the studio until Spring, when studies dump films that they have no confidence in.

Make no mistake: The studio has no confidence in this movie.  You may have seen the trailer for The Family Stone, or perhaps an ad.  You probably got the impression that it's a mildly zany comedy about a woman trying to win the affection of her boyfriend's family.  Perhaps you thought it would be a slightly higher-brow version of Meet the Parents.  If you thought that, you have fallen for the studio's cunning ruse.  You have been snookered.

The Family Stone appears to have been a comedy, at some point.  Perhaps it was intended as such.  It's difficult to tell, because the humor is very dry.  The script could have been printed on melba toast.  The story board likely looks like a book of New Yorker cartoons.  It's the sort of humor where you recognize the jokes, you understand the jokes, you realize on an intellectual level, that, yes, this is funny in a clinical sense.  It has the essential elements of absurdity to create a joke.  But the material isn't innately funny and it lacks the cleverly written script neccessary to make dry humor work.  This is David Mamet humor with a Joe Eszterhas script.

There's also a weird failure of communication in the script.  The plot has Everett (Dermot Mulroney) bringing his long-time girlfriend Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker) to meet his family for the first time at Christmas.  Have you ever heard somebody's name, maybe a few details of her life, and immediately hated her?  Just been filled with an absolute hate, the sort that would cause you to endeavor to make her life hell if you ever met her in person?  No?  Then there will be a fundamental disconect between you and this movie.  Everett's entire family hates Meredith for no reason, at least none that's explained in the movie.  They joke about how much they hate her before she's arrived.  At this point, they've never even met her, except for the spiteful daughter Amy who saw her once on the street.  Presumably everything they know of her has come from Everett, who apparently needs to do a better job of selling his girlfriends to his family. 

Surely, then, there's something really wrong with Meredith?  An obnoxious personality, a character flaw that is so transparent that anyone could understand the Stone's preemptive hatred.  Not really.  She's bland and inoffensive.  The explanation proferred is that the Stones are a laid-back family, while Meredith is too up-tight.  They hate her because she wants them to like her.  So their natural reaction, when faced with a nervous suitor who wants to impress them, is to treat this suitor like crap.  The Stones are just cruel for no reason.  You get the feeling that they're the type of family that would gather together to tear the wings off of flies or melt ants under a magnifying glass. 

We face this problem throughout the movie: Characters do things and have opinions for no rational or explained reason.  For instance: the young man who sloughs off his girlfriend for her sister after talking to that sister for a couple of hours.  He falls so madly in love that it leads to a climactic interception at the bus stop as he desperately tries to persuade her not to leave.  This scene is interesting because the movie actually expends more screen time on the climactic "please don't go!" scene than it does on the entire rest of their relationship.  Seriously.  The entirety of their prior joint screen time is one two-minute scene where they have an inane conversation ("You like to go weird places and look at things?  I like to go weird places and look at things, too!").  This is used to justify a ten minute trying-to-convince-her-not-to-leave-because-he-loves-her-so-desperately scene.  It feels as though we, the audience, have been left out of the explanations that would cause this movie to make any kind of sense.

As for the Stones themselves, they appear to be a Royal Tenenbaum-style family of interesting people, except the writer forgot to make them actually interesting.  We have the free-spirited (yet surprisingly nasty) mother Sybil (Dianne Keaton), the pregnant daughter Susannah (Elizabeth Reaser), the gay, deaf son Thad (Tyrone Giordano), the pot-smoking, documentary-editing laid-back son Ben (Luke Wilson), Amy, the daughter who was apparently born with an inability to feel any emotion except hatred (Rachel McAdams), and father Kelly (Craig T. Nelson) and son Everett (Dermot Mulroney), distinguished by the fact that neither of them has any personality whatsoever.  The characters all have some high-concept somewhere that would mark them as Interesting, but the script doesn't follow through on that by making them actually interesting.

Also, the mom has cancer.  This is getting to be a disturbingly common device in families-trying-to-learn-to-love-each-other films: if the mother is too nasty and unlikeable, give her cancer, thereby forcing the audience to feel some sympathy for her and excuse her putrescent character (See, e.g., Stepmom, Pieces of April). 

This movie feels like it didn't start with an idea, or a script, but with connections.  Somebody realized they knew the right people to get Luke Wilson, Dianne Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Sarah Jessica Parker, Claire Danes, etc. to appear in their movie, and from there decided to write a script around the cast.  It's funny; you can clearly see that some characters get lots of lines and screen time because they're played by famous actors/actresses, and other characters practically don't exist because they're not (like the pregnant daughter mentioned above, who shows up a lot but says almost nothing and has no distinguishing character traits beside her pregnancy). 

Finally, there are about 5 minutes of wacky hi-jinks toward the end of the film.  These 5 minutes represent 90% of the trailer.  My guess is that the studio watched the final prints, realized they had a turkey, and decided on a misdirection-based ad campaign.  Pitch it as a goofy family comedy, play up how many big stars are in it, and hopefully enough people will be suckered into watching it to make back what it cost to produce.  Well, my sisters and I were among the suckers, but you don't have to be.  I would strongly advise against watching this movie.

Posted by Zach at 04:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 15, 2005

On CS Lewis: Lions, Witches, and Criminal Punishment

I picked up a copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe the other day. I was surprised, to start, at how short it was; you could read it in a dedicated afternoon. I think I expected something much different going in. I had heard so much about the friendship between Lewis and Tolkien that I sort of assumed that the Narnia books would be quite similar to Tolkien's works. They are not.

Lewis's work is squarely aimed at children. This is not a bad thing, and the spareness of the prose is something of a relief compared to Tolkien's dense descriptions. At the same time, I felt as though I wasn't nearly as drawn into the fantasy as I have been with most other fantasy novels. Perhaps I would come to love the land of Narnia and the Pevensie children more if I read the later novels, but it feels as though the only character in this book that we get any sort of insight into is Edmund. It would be nice to get to know the characters a bit better. Instead, Lewis rushes from plot point to plot point as quickly as possible so he can cover all the allegorical bases.

As for the allegory... Well... It's very odd. Everyone I've talked to who read these books as a kid has said that they didn't feel ministered to, and quite enjoyed the books on their own merit. And certainly large parts of it seem to be enjoyable on their own. But then you get to the parts about Aslan. While reading it, I felt as though if I didn't know Aslan was Jesus, I would just think he was a big Mary Sue. Think about it; everyone's talking about how great he is, there's an aura about him that causes everyone to love him, he magically solves everyone's problems, and despite the danger he puts himself in he can't really be killed. Thanks to Lewis's economy with descriptions and characterization, we don't really know why everyone loves him or why he's so wise, we're just told he is and everyone acts as though it's true.

Further, large parts of the book don't seem to make sense if you don't know that it's an allegory and what it's supposed to really mean. The parlay between Aslan and the White Witch seems particularly incomprehensible. All the talk of Deep Magic and the White Witch owning all who commit treason and Aslan not even considering circumventing the laws of the Emperor-beyond-the-sea seems like it would be quite obtuse when read without outside context. But if you go in knowing that Aslan is Jesus, the White Witch is Satan, and the Emperor-beyond-the-sea is the Father part of the Trinity, it all makes sense. So I'm curious, to those who read it without knowing of the allegory, whether it all hung together well on its own. And, I should add, I leave open the possibility that this all makes sense and gets explained within the context of the books in later Narnia novels.

Despite all this grousing, though, I quite enjoyed the book. It's refreshing to have a plot that moves so quickly; I've grown accustomed to much longer books that contain less plot than this one, bogged down with ponderous prose and endless descriptions. At some point I'll probably buy the omnibus edition of all the Narnia books and read through that. For now, though, I quite enjoyed The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It gives a pretty significant return for a relatively small investment of time.

I also owe Lewis an apology. In comments below I'm afraid I mischaracterized an argument he made in one of his political writings. This was not a conscious misconstrual; it had been some years since I'd read it and I recalled his argument being rather different than it was. You can find the piece I was talking about here.

It's interesting; I read that piece before I had done much serious study of the theory and practice of criminal punishment. After a lot of subsequent coursework on the subject, I find myself far less inclined to disagree with him than I was when I first read the piece.

Lewis's main argument, which I tend to agree with, is that the problem with purely humanitarian visions of punishment is that they are, paradoxically, inhumane to those upon whom they are inflicted. The humanitarian vision, as Lewis characterizes it, is that people commit crimes because of a mental illness. They are products of society, or their upbringing, or whatever. The goal of our system of justice, then, should not be punishing criminals for moral transgressions; rather we should attempt to reform them, to cure them of their criminal tendencies and turn them into good citizens, fit to become productive members of society.

The trouble as Lewis sees it is that this not only drops the bottom out of a sentence (a hardened criminal could theoretically be cured and released within a week for even the most heinous of crimes) but extends the ceiling of a sentence to infiniti (a petty criminal might never be considered cured, and therefore could spend his life in prison for shoplifting from a convenience store). When we have a justice system premised on a moral theory, there is a need for a rough correspondence between crime and punishment. A small transgression deserves an equally small punishment. A grave crime requires a serious punishment. But when you remove the moral dimension and treat crime as a disease to be cured, there's no longer a need for correspondence between crime and punishment. You can always justify keeping the criminal within the correctional system so long as he is still diseased and still needs to be cured.

These are the points on which I largely agree with Lewis. He, however, held very radically skeptical views on the value of expertise (only the natural sciences should be permitted, and even then treated with caution. Social Science in all forms is an abomination, because it is not man's place to know the intricacies of Man, God's greatest creation. All forms of meddling with the natural order of things will inevitably lead to evils). Because of this, he felt that the humanitarian view of punishment had no place whatsoever in criminal justice. I tend to disagree; I think there's a place for reformation and rehabilitation of criminals, but it should be a secondary factor and always subject to certain constraints based in morality and human rights. Non-coercively attempting to get a criminal to reform his way of thinking to be more amenable to society is fine. Forced therapy to get a criminal to, for instance, change unsavory political views is not fine.

It's this last point where Lewis goes off the rails. He worries that soon Christianity will be deemed a mental illness, and Christians will be rounded up and forcibly reformed of their disease. This isn't entirely unfeasible, but he's arguing in bad faith. That's the sort of thing you would see in places like Soviet Russia and Maoist China, but there are very fundamental differences between that sort of hard-core utopian Leftism and the more moderate liberal democratic leftism of the sort Lewis was arguing against. It's an unfair argument in the same way that it is unfair to dismiss an argument from a Christian perspective by invoking the fear of inquisitions. Within the political context that the argument is being made, the worst-case scenario being spun is neither feasible nor intended by the opponent that the argument is made against.

So I'd recommend Lewis's Narnia books, and caution that, while there is merit to the political writings, they should be approached with a healthy skepticism.

Posted by Zach at 07:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 14, 2005

SLOANESTRAVAGANZA!

Tonight, in celebration of finishing my Torts final, I sat down on the couch and watched a marathon of Rick Sloane movies. Specifically, I watched the first three Vice Academy movies back to back.

Rick Sloane's a fairly obscure cultural artifact. I first learned of him through USA's Up All Night program. The USA network used to run a pair of movies starting at 11 o'clock on Friday and Saturday nights. Friday nights they were hosted by Rhonda Shear (Possibly a porn star?) and Saturday nights be Gilbert Gottfried. In any case, they tended to be B-movie schlock, but, luckily for me, a young lad in middle school allowed to stay up late on weekends, they often showed carefully-edited quasi-softcore porn movies. You know the sort of movie I'm talking about; teenager sex comedies from the 80s where you sit through 80 minutes of terrible jokes to get at 10 minutes of underwear, and maybe a naked breast if you're lucky (with the breasts carefully edited out of the USA versions). Well, the Vice Academy movies were the monarchs of the Up All Night quasi-softcore empire. The movies were the most enjoyably bad, and the sexuality was practically nonexistent.

It's also possible that you know Rick Sloane from Mystery Science Theater, Episode 907: Hobgoblins. Hobgoblins was the movie that Sloane made before the Vice Academy movies. Sloane actually personally suggested that the Mystery Science Theater folk do Hobgoblins, single-handedly inspiring Mystery Science Theater's "No more movies given to us by their directors" rule.

But, to the point. Sloane made 6 Vice Academy movies. These movies are soft core porn parodies of the Police Academy movies. That's right, porn parodies of comedies that weren't funny to begin with. The cast shifts around, but they always star Ginger Lynn Allen (Of Wing Commander III fame. Also: Porn!). There's actually a noticeable improvement in the quality when you watch them back to back. The first one is intensely amateur. The second one has better production values, but a plot with too many undeveloped ideas (as Rick Sloane put it in an interview "We didn't even end up needing a script to shoot Vice Academy 2." Wow. Just, wow). The third one actually looks vaguely professional. Surprisingly, Sloane got a three picture deal from Paramount for these movies. The second one's the only one that's officially a Paramount Picture, with Paramount logo and everything, but still. Major studio backing.

Sloane has a certain style to his films, and that style is "Cheap and Terrible." He comments in one interview that he liked to do films with a "kids have to run around and solve some problem in one night," plot. You know, like round up the escaped hobgoblins before dawn, or arrest ten people to meet the Vice Academy graduation quota (!) before graduation at 7 AM. So why the recurring plot? Some deep metaphor about the fleeting nature of life? A meditation on the power of night? "Because it's really hard to shoot during the day without a shooting permit, because people get in your shot. But if you set your whole movie at night, and just shoot on empty parking lots, everything's fine." Ah.

Sloane likes to inject humor into his movies. Unfortunately, Rick Sloane isn't funny. No, it's more than that. Rick Sloane doesn't understand what funny is. He's like a four year old kid who's heard jokes, heard people laughing at jokes, maybe heard some simple "Why did the chicken cross the road?" kinda jokes. The kid's used to people laughing at him when he jokes, either because he's cute or because they're humoring him. So he starts making his own hybrid jokes based on jokes he's heard before. But the kid doesn't get what makes jokes funny, so the jokes he makes aren't funny, and he's no longer cute enough to get away with non-funny jokes. Rick Sloane is a guy who makes jokes but doesn't understand what makes jokes funny, and nobody has had the heart to tell him he isn't funny. So we get 50 knees to the crotch in a row. Or we get zany sound effects (a Rick Sloane trademark) for no damn reason. Or we get characters saying lines in unison that apparently are supposed to be funny, but patently aren't (For example: In the first Vice Academy movie a gang of ten hookers steals the cops' van. They drive off and, for no explained reason, the van rolls over onto its side. The hookers then say, in unison, "Awwwww! Somebody call a tow truck!" Then there's a zany "Boing-oing-oing-oing-oing!" sound, and we cut to another scene).

Also, and this isn't necessarily Sloane's fault, the movies are definitely products of their time. That is, the women in them are dressed in the height of bar fashion for their day. Sadly, particularly for the first movie, their day was in 1988. So we get a lot of spandex, puffy skirts, and big crimped hair. The second movie's a bit better, and they almost look normal by the third one, which was shot in 1991. By then we at least have Blossom-style fashion and reasonable haircuts.

It's also of note that these movies are completely non-arousing. They drain sensuality from your life. What's disturbing is that I remember that when I first saw these movies in middle school I thought they were the height of sexy. What's more disturbing: I recall now having some weird penchant back then for women in uniform. I only remembered this when I started watching these movies and vaguely remembered once having thought that sort of thing was super-hot. Needless to say, it's gone now. So I guess fetishes can die of neglect.

Finally, I'll leave you with a couple more telling insights from the interviews on the DVDs. First, from Elizabeth Kaitan, who played Candy in Vice Academies 3-6: "I learned a lot from working on Vice Academy 3. Like Rick Sloane taught me how to do a shot in one take. I learned fast that if I, like, goofed a line or started giggling he'd just keep going and it'd end up in the movie." And from Rick Sloane, holding up a pizza box that said "Vice Academy" on it. "I always liked this promotional item. Here's why. See, lots of other independent soft core directors, they throw a lot of sex and nudity in their films. But if you watch my movies closely, you'll see there's a little, but not nearly as much as the other guys put in, even though my movies sell, like, 4-5 times better than theirs. So I like to think that I'm like the pizza delivery guy of movie directors: I make you wait for 90 minutes, and then I never deliver in the end."

Posted by Zach at 04:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 09, 2005

Narnia

I never read the Narnia books as a kid. I did, however, read the Lord of the Rings books as a kid. I thoroughly enjoyed the Lord of the Rings movies that came out the last few years, to the point where seeing a Lord of the Rings movie after winter finals has left an indelible mark on my memories of college. On the one hand, this here Narnia movie that's coming out looks good. But at the same time... Does it REALLY look good, or am I just experiencing (surprisingly fast-acting) nostalgia for the Lord of the Rings movies?

A further question: Assuming I do go see the Narnia movie (as I undoubtedly will, in the end): How're the books? Worth reading? Worth reading before I see the movie?

Posted by Zach at 09:55 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 21, 2005

Ten Movies I Hate

Apropos this post on Traumdeutung, I thought I'd post ten movies I hate. This was actually really tough for me, and I had to spend most of my intellectual energy during Contracts section thinking about this. I generally like most movies. That is to say, if I go to a movie in a theater, it's rare that I don't leave entertained. It's also pretty seldom that I rent a movie I don't like, on some level. It's possible that I'm just preternaturally good at selecting movie's I'm likely to enjoy (I DO read a lot of reviews), but more likely it's that I just enjoy watching movies. I love going to the movie theater; something about being in a dark cave with the image filling my vision and big theater sound greatly enhances my ability to suspend disbelief. I almost always enjoy a movie as I'm watching it. It takes hours, even days, to regain my objectivity and assess my experience.

I tend to enjoy movies I watch at home less, because I can't invest my entire being in the film. I'm still very aware that I'm a guy sitting on a couch in an apartment watching a movie. The phone rings. I get up to get a snack. I shift positions on the couch. My roommate enters or leaves. I get bored and start screwing around on the internet and watching out of the corner of my eye. But given that I can distract myself, I have a tough time calling a movie bad even if I lose interest. After all, it's not like I didn't find other ways to entertain myself during the time.

So I had to sit and really think about movies I even just dislike, let alone hate. It took about fifteen minutes to just come up with three movies that I didn't like. Eventually it came pouring out, though, and I came up with thirty I dislike, which I culled down to the ten I disliked the most. So even though this is "Ten Movies I Hate," it's more "Ten Movies I Quite Dislike." The criterion for making it on the big list if it was a theater movie was how I felt leaving the theater. If I was disappointed, or otherwise felt I hadn't gotten my ticket price's worth in value, I didn't like the movie. Similarly, for a home movie, if I wound up on the internet or reading a book or something 2/3 of the way through the movie, I didn't like it. So here we go. 10 Movies I Hate. Bear in mind that this list is both over-inclusive, since I had to struggle and pad the list with some that I merely dislike, and underinclusive, since there are a lot of forgettably bad movies that I couldn't remember even having seen. In no particular order:

1. Manos: The Hands of Fate
I had a rule, setting out on this excursion, that I would only include one movie that I'd seen through Mystery Science Theater 3000. After all, you can't go into a show like that expecting diamonds. On the other hand, my excuse for allowing even the one was that I knew that that one would be Manos. Manos is the worst movie ever made. There is no excuse for it. You can't watch the entire thing in one sitting; you need to take lengthy breaks and drink lots of fluids. The actors can't act, the story is vague and slow and doesn't really go anywhere, the sound production is so terrible that more than half the dialogue is completely incomprehensible, and the content of the film is repugnant. It's something about a dark lord (Manos) with a bunch of wives, who might be dead, and a family winds up in his evil... shack in the desert. And he has a henchman named Torgo, a classic movie monster whose scary feature is his huge knees. In the end, there're a lot of women dancing around in their underpants, then everyone dies bloodily. There's no understandable reason why these things are happening, but you're just happy to see that there's no one left alive to talk at you, so it must mean the movie's over. Don't watch Manos, it's not good, and it's not "so bad it's good." It's soul-crushingly bad.

2. Star Wars: Episode I
I didn't mind Episode II, insofar as I liked the second half, so it met the "leaving the theater happy" criterion, though it did so on a technicality. I thought Episode III was serviceable. I spent the first half of Episode I expecting it to get awesome any minute now. I spent the rest just wishing something would happen to make the movie okay. But no. Nothing. I won't go on. The badness of Episode I is the deadest horse that's ever been beaten. I wouldn't even have included it if I hadn't been looking to pad this list to ten entries. I mean, I really didn't like it, but I don't have anything unique to say about it.

3. Total Recall
Poor Phillip K. Dick. On the one hand, he died far too young. On the other hand, at least he didn't live long enough to see his stories turned into utterly terrible sci-fi action movies. Total Recall is based on a Dick short story called "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale." Total Recall is also one of those action movies, peculiar to the period from the late-80s to the mid-90s, which you can only enjoy if you have no soul. It's the kind of movie where car chases occur in which the hero mows through hundreds of innocent people, and we're expected to just ignore their gruesome deaths because, damn it, he's gotta get the bad guy! This is also the movie where I reached a startling realization: Everyone loves Arnold Schwarzenegger (well, not everyone, especially now, but you get my meaning), and yet he has never made a good movie. Ever. Really, go look. This leads to another question (which I bugged my co-workers with at the stacks a couple of years ago): What other stars can you think of who are famous for making movies but have never actually been in a good movie?

4. Blade Runner
I have seen this movie so many times. So many times. Probably a dozen. For a long time I was convinced this was a good movie and the only reason I didn't enjoy it was because of a defect on my part. But now I have attained film self-actualization: This is a bad movie, and I don't care what anyone else thinks. Yes, it's stunning visually. But god damn it, they cut out every interesting aspect of the book, they butchered Dick's subtle and insightful religious message to replace it with a goofy allegory, and they did it in a way such that you have no idea what the hell is going on or why things are happening the way they are. And this isn't intentional/artful confusion, this is bad screenplay/poor editing confusion. This was the first Dick work to be butchered when transferred to screen, but it wasn't the last. After Total Recall there was Minority Report (which I avoided) and Paycheck (a serviceable action movie. Nothing painful, but idea-free). If there's one thing that can be said for the recent spate of Dick's work being turned into movies, it's that it seems to have grabbed the literary world by the lapels and forced them to take notice of him. The local pretentious book shop here, which pointedly does not have a science fiction section, stocks a selection of Phillip K. Dick books in the Literature section, the only representative of the genre other than Kurt Vonnegut. So good for him. I'm still not seeing A Scanner Darkly when it comes out, though.

5. Breakfast at Tiffany's
This one might be a bit controversial, but it's definitely one that I genuinely hate, not just one I kinda dislike. I've read the novella. I love the novella. This movie is a travesty. It takes an engaging tale of a spirited young woman, told by an interested but ultimately unengaged third party, and turns it into a cliched romance. Even ignoring the fact that her love interest in the movie was gay in the book, the movie has the wrong feeling from start to finish. And it gets off on absolutely the wrong foot by giving us Mickey Rooney, whom I hate to begin with, playing possibly the worst Japanese stereotype set to mainstream film. Ugh. I still have nightmares of him saying "Mee-suh Go-Right-Ree! I must protest!" Probably enjoyable on its own, but in light of the book it's irredeemable.

6. Gone with the Wind
Yes, it has some great lines, but they're buried under a big four-hour mound of bullshit nostalgia for the glory days of the Old South coupled with the longest break-up in movie history. This movie is one of the great perpetuators of the Lost Cause mythology that allowed segregation, Jim Crow, and the disfranchisement of African American's in the South to continue unabated for a century after the Civil War ended. I'm unable to enjoy this movie because I spend the entire time I'm watching it dissecting every part of it that serves as propaganda for a truly repugnant racial, social, and economic ideology that should have been discredit long ago. And it doesn't help that the entire last two hours is spent watching Rhett and Scarlett fight. On several occasions while watching this movie I screamed "Just tell her you don't give a damn already and walk off into the mist! Why must you torment yourself, and me, by staying with that shrew!" A film desperately in need of an editor.

7. The Corporation
Hey, speaking of agitprop, The Corporation has it coming from the opposite direction. I'm much more sympathetic to leftist arguments than rightist ones, but I still don't like being lied to, and I really don't like being lied to for two and a half hours. Yes, corporations do a lot of bad. At the same time, they do good, too. And I don't mean good in a figleaf charity to cover up their evils way sense. I mean that corporations, and capitalism generally, is a very effective way of ensuring that a variety of goods are produced in enough quantity to satisfy both people's needs and their wants. The thesis of this movie is that corporations are the evil creation of evil people designed to wreak evil upon the world. The creators, in short, commit the error of assuming bad faith on the part of their targets. Now, they make quite a few valid points. They also make a lot of invalid or screwy points, and they generally fail at answering the question "so what should I do about this?" The two answers hinted at, and they are only hinted at, are "unite and overthrow your corporate overlords!" and "some weird thing in India where people pass seeds back and forth, and I don't even think it's relevant to the point they're making, but an Indian woman insists that this is cheaper and far more efficient than what corporations do and who are we to doubt her?" This is the only movie I've ever seriously considered walking out of, but I was in the middle of a packed row and I didn't want to disturb people. Nonetheless, this is a movie I genuinely hated. I also didn't much like that Enron documentary from last year, but mostly because it was boring and did a poor job of creating a coherent narrative. But you want to know what propaganda documentary I really did like? The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Clearly biased, but it has some amazing and unique footage.

8. Akira
Amazing visually, but the plot was utterly incoherent. And not on purpose; they had to cram a 3000 page comic book into a three hour movie, and on top of that the screenplay was written before the comic book was done, so they just had to wing it for the last hour. Good insofar as it was the thin end of the wedge in terms of bringing Japanese animation to an American audience, but its importance can be overstated. After Akira it was still years before Japanese animation and comic books built a large enough audience in America to be considered mainstream, and a lot of unsung heroes of localization invested and lost a lot of money trying to bring this stuff over before it became popular. Back on topic, though. Akira was pretty but incoherent. It also gave the false impression that all Japanese animation is sexual, ultra-violent, and incomprehensible. Not (necessarily) so.

9. Ghost in the Shell
This entry is padding. Again, I couldn't think of ten movies I genuinely hate, and, while Ghost in the Shell and Akira are, as you may have noticed, different movies, I tend to lump them together in the same category as vastly over-rated early Japanese animation imports. One distinction between GitS and Akira: Akira is at least based on a good comic book. Ghost in the Shell's comic book alternates between action that's too complex to convey in the comic medium and pages upon pages of incoherent high school-grade techno-philosophizing. I didn't really mind the Matrix 2 all that much, if only because I'd already been inoculated to its peculiar brand of pseudo-philosophical nonsense by Ghost in the Shell.

10. Mission to Mars
I include this because it's the absolute worst regular mainstream movie I've seen, but at the same time it's highly entertaining. I was laughing throughout, which was embarrassing in a crowded theater. From the painful product placement (they stick a Pennzoil sticker on the outside of the Mars lander, they find an air leak in the shuttle by opening a packet of Dr. Pepper and watching where the droplets are sucked out) to the laughable take on genetics at the end, I was kept in stitches the whole time. So it's probably not fair to call this a hated movie, but it sure was bad.

Posted by Zach at 11:42 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

November 18, 2005

At the Movies

I wandered down to Union Square today after class. I went to the Barnes and Noble there, looking for a particular book. No luck. So I went to the one in Astor Place about 5 blocks down (Barnes and Noble is ubiquitous in New York. It's not quite as omnipresent as Starbucks is on Market Street in San Francisco, but it's close). Still no luck.

So I tried The Strand (16 miles of used books!) but with no more luck and considerably more annoyance. The Strand is a fine used book store in many respects, but they clearly hate Science Fiction and Fantasy. It's relegated to one bookcase in the far back corner (far less than is given to, for example, Egyptology. Not that there's anything wrong with Egyptology, but, you know, if you pitted all the SF/F fans against all the Egyptology fans in a cage match, it would, you know, have to be a really big cage. But not for the Egyptology fans. I'm saying there are more SF/F fans than Egyptology fans. A lot more). Further, whereas other sections are organized alphabetically by author, Science Fiction and Fantasy is organized by whereever the fuck there was room when some SF fan sold their book to The Strand, forcing the bored clerk to walk all the way to the back of the store and put it away. That is to say, the SF/F books are not organized at all. I found 6 Piers Anthony books on the case, two on the top shelf, one in the middle, two on the second shelf from the bottom, and one on the bottom shelf. This is why I have never bought books from The Strand, despite having visited on many occasions. While they offer large numbers of books at low prices, I'm an incurable dork who always heads to the SF/F section whenever I enter a book store. When I find The Strand's SF/F section in such a state of disrepair, I get upset and stomp out of the store in a huff.

So after leaving The Strand I wound up at the UA Union Square, and watched Jesus is Magic (Quick Review, because there's not much to say: It's an hour and fifteen minutes of Sarah Silverman doing stand-up, intercut with some musical numbers. I thought it was funny throughout. But: The material is somewhat racist. Not, like, Hitler Youth racist, but it makes fun of racial issues. I can see and understand people getting offended by it. If I were writing a full review, I'd gush about how Sarah Silverman provides a daring post-modern ironic hipster view of racism in America. But I have neither the energy nor the inclination to write an essay on the sociology of ethnic jokes, so there). I arrived about 15 minutes early, and so I was forced to sit through most of The 20, which is UA's way of punishing people who get to movies on time. The 20 refers to the 20 minutes of advertisements they inflict on you before the movie starts. Just as I'm not going to bore you with thoughts on racist jokes, I also won't make you sit through my rant about ads before movies. Long story short: I watch ads on TV because it's free and the ads subsidize the programs. But movies in theaters aren't free. They're making me pay twice to watch their movie, first robbing me out of my front pocket with $10.75 movie tickets, then robbing me of my time and mental energy by forcing me to watch advertisements. Grr!

During the pre-movie ads, there was a local ad for Carmel Car Service. You know how companies get catchy or easy to remember phone numbers so that you'll call them when you're stuck and want Service X, but don't want to grab a phonebook? Carmel Car Service got one of those numbers, but the one they settled on, easy to remember though it is, is (212)666-6666. Carmel Car Service: The Car Service of the Beast.

I returned to Barnes and Noble after the movie to do some holiday shopping. As usual, I found myself in the Science Fiction/Fantasy section. I had decided to buy a book for myself, but nothing particularly leaped out at me. So I decided to let randomness pick my book for me. I chose, as I always do, to play Eenie-Meaney-Miney-Moe. You would be surprised at how many decisions in my life have been made with Eenie-Meaney-Miney-Moe. I'd guess well over half. I have a very specific way I play it: I count by syllables, not words, and the words I say (contradictory though they are) are: "Eenie-Meaney-Miney-Moe, catch a tiger by the toe, if he hollers let him go, Eenie-Meaney-Miney-Moe. My mother told me not to pick the very best one and you are not it." This eliminates whatever I land on, and I play again until only one remains. The way I decided to play in the bookstore was to set each bookcase as one distinct item. I would eliminated down to one bookcase, then go to that bookcase and eliminate down to one shelf. Then I would pick one book from that shelf, altering the game slightly so that I would pick the one I landed on, rather than eliminate it, so as to not spend too much time. Barnes and Noble had 11 bookcases of SF/F books, so eliminating them took a while. During that time, I scared several patrons, who walked into the area only to find me frantically pointing at bookcases while mouthing quietly to myself. After about 10 minutes, I adjourned to my chosen case and proceded to point rapidly at the shelves while mouthing to myself silently. Unfortunately, I had neglected to exclude the licensed book section from my random selection, so I wound up on a shelf of Forgotten Realms-based novels. I took this as a sign and decided not to get a book.

Posted by Zach at 09:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 07, 2005

Movie Review Double Feature: Fucking Åmål and Primer

Superficially, these two movies have almost nothing in common, other than having been shot on film. Fucking Åmål (which I shall henceforth refer to by its English title, Show Me Love) is a slow-paced, deeply character driven romance by Swedish director Lukas Moodysson. Primer is a low-budget science fiction film (with a heavy emphasis on the science) by first time director/writer/actor/editor/composer Shane Carruth. What they have in common is a devotion to realism that you don't often see in film.

Show Me Love is about two Swedish high school girls who fall in love with one another. Jesus, that makes it sound like porno. It's not porno. Despite the title there's no fucking in the movie. Well, there is fucking, but it's off-camera, and it's heterosexual fucking, so who cares? Elin's a popular girl who hates living in a small town and has gotten bored with life. Agnes is a smart girl who's deeply unpopular and has a crush on Elin. Elin finds out about Agnes's feelings when she plays a prank on her, then feels bad about it and apologizes.

What's intriguing about the movie is its authenticity. You watch it and you don't feel as though you're watching people reading lines from a script. The dialogue isn't clever, but it's realistic. People do things that don't make sense, just as they do in real life. The director includes scenes that don't move the plot forward, but do give you a deeper sense of the characters. The plot doesn't drive this movie. There's barely any plot at all, for that matter. Just the girls and their conflicted emotions.

The movie ends when they decide to get together, and it works. We know their relationship won't last. They're young, they don't know what they're doing, and Elin's clearly just experimenting. But that's not the point. The point isn't to tell the story of an eternal romance to last through the ages. The point is to show us raw young love, in the first stages of a romance. The movie gets to precisely the point when love is at its most brilliant, when they've decided to commit to one another, before they become a couple and their love becomes ordinary and institutionalized in a relationship. And then it ends.

Primer is also dedicated to realism, which is an odd thing to say about a science fiction film. For starters, it's a science fiction film that is very heavy on science. Science Fiction tends to get divided into Hard SF and Soft SF (or, if you're Harlan Ellison and want to excise the Science from your SF entirely, Speculative Fiction). SF in general tends to be about how people deal with and react to new technologies and environments, but Hard SF gets very hung up on the technical details of how the new technology works, of justifying the fictional leaps that create the backdrop for the story by explaining that, yes, this could plausibly happen. Primer is pretty hard SF. In a sense, it reminds me of Neal Stephenson's justification for calling his Baroque Trilogy Science Fiction, despite being set in the 17th Century and featuring no new technologies or alien worlds. He argued that it was science fiction, not because it had the trappings of the genre, but because it was fiction about science and scientists. That's what Primer is: fiction about science. Of course, it's also pretty heavily science fiction in the classic sense.

There's another sense in which Primer is dedicated to realism, this time in its dialogue. One of the aspects of film that you don't notice unless it's done poorly is exposition. This is where the film tells you what's going on, what's happened, etc. It can be handled ham-handedly ("Remember that time the institute gave us money to travel down the amazon and capture that creature, and that's why we're here now?") or it can be handled subtley. Or, in the case of Primer, it can be avoided entirely. This is realistic, insofar as it's seldom that you stop and recap the events of your life for the benefit of an invisible audience. It can also be very frustrating. The movie concerns a device built by some engineers in their garage. It does something very peculiar. We see them learning what it does, but they never say, "Hey! This thing does *Blank!*" Instead, we see what happens after they use the machine to do *Blank!* only we don't know what it's done. We know the machine does something, we know they know what the machine does, we know they're doing it, but we have no idea what it is. By the time we figure it out the plot's moved a mile ahead, at each step only hinting and insinuating at what's happening, and we've lost all chance of figuring out what's happening. In a sense, that's the point. The characters know more than we do about what's happening, but not much more.

So it's frustrating, but it's also compelling. You want to know what the hell's going on. You want to watch it over and over. Once you know what it is that the machine does, you can watch it again knowing that from the start and piece together a few more of the things that don't make sense. I imagine you can, with a dozen viewings, figure out what it typically takes a movie only one viewing to tell you. It helps that the cinematography is handled so well. I watched this movie with no idea of how much it cost, and was stunned to find out it was made on $7,000. It looks really good.

Overall, I liked Show Me Love a bit better than Primer, but I went in expecting more of Show Me Love. I'm a big Lukas Moodysson fan, and I'd recommend any of his works (Though I like Tilsammans (Together) the best, and Lilja-4-Ever should only be viewed if you're looking for the most depressing film you can conceive of and do not, personally, have a problem with never again being able to experience joy in your life). Still, though, both are recommended.

Posted by Zach at 08:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 23, 2005

Tell, don't show

Expanding a bit on my take on Reality Bites below, one of the things that really bugged me about the movie was the Ethan Hawke character. This is a character billed as a genius philosopher. At one point someone claims, hyperbolically, that he has a 180 IQ. But... he's not actually very smart. Or, rather, the deep thoughts with which he periodically graces us are quite lame. It's annoying because we are constantly told how smart he is, but are left underwhelmed when he displays his brilliance.

The movie compensates for this by making everyone else dumb. Or, rather, it sloppily makes everyone smart most of the time, except in designated "show how smart Ethan Hawke is" scenes, in which suddenly everyone except Ethan Hawke loses their perspicacity. An example: Winona Ryder applies for a job at a newspaper. She had previously been doing film work, but is now desperately seeking a new job after getting laid off. She is rejected at the newspaper for lacking print journalism experience. Ryder tries to convince the editor that she's really interested in newspapers and quite capable of handling the work. The editor skeptically asks her to define irony. Ryder flails and gives up. She meets Hawke at a coffee shop, asks him, while rolling her eyes, if he can define irony. He rattles off a dictionary definition. She is astounded by his brilliance.

High School sophomores can define irony. Ryder is the valedictorian of her college class, her entire leisure life revolves around the ironic enjoyment of pop culture, and we're to believe that she can't define it, and be impressed that Hawke can?

Another painful scene occurs when Ben Stiller gets into a fight with Ethan Hawke and suddenly becomes incapable of forming coherent thoughts. He's fine everywhere else in the movie, but becomes an idiot when he talks to Hawke. Perhaps he's intimidated by Hawke's staggering intellect? Or perhaps the writers felt the need to dumb him down in these scenes to illustrate that Hawke is smart, and Stiller is not. It's funny because Hawke's rejoinders don't even rise to the level of Monkey Island sword fight, yet Stiller is reduced to sputtering and swearing. Hawke may as well have said, "Ha ha! Now you see that the writers are on my side, and have given me all the good lines! You have no chance to survive!" Ben Stiller returns to his normal ability with words once the scene changes.

This hits on a general theme. For one, movies shouldn't oversell their characters. The problem wouldn't have arisen if everyone weren't talking up what a genius Hawke is. But if you absolutely must have a genius/an astounding artist/the greatest living composer/the Great American Author, never, ever try to show us what a genius he or she is. Unless you, the writer, are the Great American Author writing the Great American Screenplay, any prose you throw out to illustrate what a great author your character is will end up disappointing the audience's expectations (c.f. Finding Forrester). Don't show us the astounding artist's work if you can't actually get an astounding artist to produce it.

For the rest of the movie, I don't know. It felt very self-conscious of its Gen-Xness. That is, it seemed to be trying to speak for a generation, and those sorts of projects always end up feeling simplistic and forced.

Posted by Zach at 07:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Blegging the question

I recently had a question implanted in my brain, and perhaps somebody out there can help. I'm not too hopeful, but it's not the sort of question you can google. If you were watching television, in particular movie ads, in the early-to-mid 90s perhaps you can help.

Sometime in the range of 1993-96, there was an ad in circulation for a movie featuring, I believe, Gen-Xers dealing with, I don't know, romance and life and shit. It was some sort of comedy. In the trailer, there was a shot of a girl, perhaps scantily clad, lying on a bed, possibly with someone else in the bed next to her. She rolls over and falls off the bed. It's the falling off the bed thing that sticks in my mind, and that's the only thing I'm 100% sure was in the trailer. For the longest time, I was under the impression that this trailer was for Reality Bites. I just watched it for the first time last night and discovered that I had the wrong movie (Mini-review: Quite underwhelming and with a very fake feel to it. I can honestly say it was the longest-feeling movie I've seen in a while. I didn't check my watch, but I thought for sure as it was wrapping up that it had been significantly over two hours, close to two-and-a-half, and was shocked to learn it was only an hour and a half. This does not, generally, speak well of a movie). The bed-falling-off scene isn't in the movie and isn't in the trailer on the DVD (because sometimes they put scenes in trailers that don't make it into the movie).

So... Can anyone help? Some sort of comedy about romance (not neccessarily a romantic comedy, quite possibly a hipply ironic Gen-Xish take on romance) that either came out around the same time as Reality Bites (causing me to confuse the two at the time the trailers were out) or has a similar title to Reality Bites (Like, I don't know, "Love Sucks" or something). Ring any bells?

Posted by Zach at 06:29 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

October 21, 2005

Two-Fisted Justice

I'm really torn over whether to see Doom: The Movie. On the one hand, I never really liked the game. On the other hand, I feel a powerful calling to support video games in movies (c.f. Penny Arcade, March 15, 2002 I would include a link to the comic, which is more to the point, but for some reason the comic appears to have been deleted. Curious). On the first hand, this movie does look like it has the potential to destroy the souls of all who watch it. Based on the previews, it appears that large chunks of the movie are shot from the first-person perspective, with the only thing you see of the actor the gun at the bottom of the screen, ala the game. I suppose when given such infertile ground for a film as Doom you have to come up with some gimmick or hook, but the effect it seemed to create, from the previews, was of sitting and watching someone else play Doom for 2 hours.

Still, though, I might end up seeing it. It seems a tragedy to watch something like Doom when there are genuinely good movies out, but I feel I have to support video games in film, even if the genre of Films based on Video Games has yet to produce a film that even rises to the level of mediocrity. I suppose the best I can hope for is that it's fun in a really bad way.

Posted by Zach at 09:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 02, 2005

Serenity Now!

I saw Serenity today. I enjoyed it a lot, but I also spent the last two days watching nearly every episode of Firefly, the TV show of which it is a continuation. The whole series is a weird mix of science fiction and western, and the exact percentage shifts from episode to episode. There are episodes where it's mostly a science fiction show that happens to have random Western trappings in some of the costumes and dialogue, and there are episodes that are for all intents and purposes westerns, but where you might see a space ship at the beginning or end. The movie's balance is almost entirely at the sci-fi end of the spectrum.

Now I should point out here that when I use science fiction to describe Firefly/Serenity, I use it in the sense of "being set in the future/space." The term science fiction can also have thematic implications, of positing ideas about how things will or might evolve in the future, and then exploring how people and societies react to these changes. Firefly/Serenity is not science fiction in this thematic sense; the only real idea in the series is pure television high concept ("What if, in the future, people totally acted like it were the old west?"). Of course, science-fiction-as-setting is pretty much all you can hope for in most film and television science fiction, and given that Firefly and Serenity do a pretty darn good job.

I get the impression that the film would be understandable for someone who hasn't seen the TV show, but obviously can't speak from experience. The TV show comes highly recommended, but watching the movie first might put a different spin on the experience. The show started with a set of characters and was gradually revealing their backstories and secrets. That got put to an abrupt halt when the show got cancelled. For the movie, they sort of lay all their cards on the table. A lot of stuff is revealed that's only hinted at in the show, and I worry that, if you approach it backwards, it might take some of the impact out of the TV show.

Still, though, the whole thing, series and movie, is highly recommended. Not mind-expanding fare, but very well executed and stylish fluff. Interesting characters, fun plots, snappy dialogue. I'd see the movie in the theater if you can; if plausible, see all or part of the TV show first, but don't let that get in the way of seeing the movie.

Posted by Zach at 06:09 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Dune

I feel as though, in the interest of forthrightness, I ought to confess something. There's been a lot of talk of Dune lately, both the miniseries and the David Lynch film, and I have made some comments which, while technically accurate, may perhaps have been misleading. I have said that it is a terrible movie. It is. Every minute of it. And especially every minute of the extended 3 hour version, which I have seen.

It is a terrible movie, and yet I like it.

Not for reasons discussed earlier; I do not enjoy it on the level of kitsch, it is not a "so bad it's good" sort of movie. I enjoy it because it is nostalgic. When I was a kid, growing up in DC, my parents occasionally went on dates and left me at the house of one of their colleagues, Eileen Marty. Typically my entertainment on these evenings was a movie. As I recall, Dr. Marty owned two movies: Dune and Oliver Twist. Most times, I chose Dune. As a kid, I remember actually really liking Dune. It was science fiction, and I liked Star Wars. Plus, at that age, I didn't really follow plots much. I knew what was going on in a scene, but I didn't really try to put it together into anything larger, which is probably the best way to watch Dune. That is to say, I had no less idea what the hell was going on than anyone else who's watched the movie, but I didn't really think of this as a problem. And the visual design for the movie is pretty stunning. For years the scenes in it, the Guild navigator meeting with the Emperor, the shield fight between Paul and Duncan, the worm eating the harvester, the Baron Harkonnen pulling that one guy's heartplug out then flying around and laughing maniacally, have been implanted in my brain.

So this means that, growing up, I got a steady diet of David Lynch Sci-Fi weirdness. Which probably says more about the development of my tastes than I care to admit.

UPDATE: It also bears mentioning that without Dune the David Lynch movie there would not have been Dune the movie tie-in computer game. Dune the movie tie-in computer game was an adventure game of little merit, competently executed and utterly forgettable, but it in turn spawned Dune II. Dune II was a landmark computer game, insofar as it created the Real Time Strategy genre, still popular to this day (there are some who argue that the first Real Time Strategy game was Herzog Zwei, but I summarily dismiss this argument. While Herzog Zwei was technically the first game that had enough Real Time Strategy elements to call it a Real Time Strategy game in retrospect, it was a commercial flop that had no real influence on the industry).

Posted by Zach at 03:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 16, 2005

Movie Review: The Corpse Bride

This is sort of a tough review to write because, if you saw The Nightmare Before Christmas and loved it, you're going to see The Corpse Bride. If you didn't like it or didn't see it, chances are you're not going to know or care what the fuss is about.

I'm kind of in the intermediate position of not having really liked Nightmare when it came out, but now I appreciate it a lot more. At the same time, I've only seen snippets of it recently and haven't watched the whole thing in years. In any case, I would say that The Corpse Bride feels like a somewhat rushed, slightly half-assed attempt at recapturing Nightmare's feel.

With the caveat that I haven't seen Nightmare in a while, I believe Corpse Bride to be far more technically proficient. The models and animation are amazing, the scenery is well done and cohesive. There's an interesting color scheme where the overworld is all in greys and blacks, while the underworld is very colorful. There are some notably fun character designs, particularly Mr. and Mrs. Van Dort and Mr. and Mrs. Everglot. And, I should say, the movie is quite engaging as you're watching it. It's not in any sense a bad movie.

Still... I would say it has two major problems. The first is that what's there is good, but there just isn't much there. For one, it's very short, an hour and fifteen minutes. You're sort of going through and see hints of interesting plots coming, but they never really develop. There's a constant sense of "This is building to something cool!" and it maintains that sense of impending greatness until it just suddenly climaxes and ends. And the length isn't the only problem in this regard. There are some songs, but not very many (four, if I recall correctly) and none of them are very catchy. You feel like there might be a great song around the corner, but then the movie ends and the great song never materialized. There are some interesting characters, but the movie's too short to develop them and there's not nearly the ensemble cast there was in Nightmare.

The other problem is that it feels like a rehash, which is probably related to the shortness of the whole thing. There aren't a lot of original ideas in it, and it's strictly by the numbers (though, granted, by the numbers as laid out in Nightmare, which makes it original enough to stand out). In general, it just seems like it was made to cash in on the cult popularity of Nightmare, making it feel like yet another in the endlessly-expanding genre of "Sequels that had no compelling reason to be made."

All of this makes it sound worse than it is. It is, as I mentioned, engaging and fun, but it's not a movie I'm anxious to see again. There are some genuinely great scenes, such as the scene of Victor and Emily playing the piano, or the scene where the dead rise for the wedding party. Still, it's being pitched as the next Nightmare Before Christmas, and if you go in expecting that, you're likely to be disappointed. I'd recommend it, but see it at a matinee or discount price if you can.

As a side note, according to the end credits the Pilgrim's Chorus from Tannhäuser was supposedly played at some point. It's one of my favorite pieces of music, but I didn't catch it. I may have to watch it again to search for it, at some point.

UPDATE: And now that I've posted my thoughts and started looking at the professional criticism out there (to which I was blind prior to posting my review) I feel vindicated in my luke-warm reception by the fact that Stephanie Zacharek of Salon, the Wrongest Critic in the Business, absolutely loved it. She does make one salient point that I probably ought to have mentioned: it's great that they did this movie using stop-motion claymation, without a bit of CG. Bravo on that count, and kudos for the reference to Ray Harryhausen near the beginning.

Posted by Zach at 06:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Corpse Bride

I'll give you three guesses who lives in a market that gets limited release films and, as a consequence, has a chance to see The Corpse Bride today while the rest of you wait like schmucks until next week. Here's a hint: It's me.

I have a decently sized gap between my Legal Writing course (gets out at 10) and my Civil Procedure (starts at 1:30). There's a showing at the Lincoln Center Loews Cineplex at 11, so I should be able to go to class, get down there with plenty of time, watch it, and get back for lecture. This is assuming the subways decide to cooperate.

On a more bitchy note, movies in New York are expensive. The lowest price I've seen is $10.25. Also, no student discounts (which isn't too unsurprising) and, more to the point, no matinees. It costs $10.25 whether you're seeing the movie at 8 PM or 11 AM. And this is a universal thing. Haven't New York theaters heard of Price Discrimination? Theaters elsewhere don't give matinee and student discounts out of the goodness of their collective hearts; it's because the discounts make up for the loss in per-unit revenue by bringing in enough more people to compensate for it. Now, not bothering makes sense if your theater's full for every screening, but I've been to some first-run screenings around here and, frankly, they're just as crowded as anywhere else in the country. So what gives?

Posted by Zach at 08:39 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

September 10, 2005

Movie Recommendation

I just got back from seeing El Crimen Perfecto. It was a lot of fun. Not the best movie ever, but certainly one of the best comedies I've seen this year. It's a Spanish black comedy, and I'm not sure if I can say much more other than it takes place primarily in a department store. A good part of the fun is in the plot twists, and they start early on, so I worry that any plot description at all would involve spoilers. In any case, go see it. For Columbia friends, it's playing at the Metro Twin on Broadway between 99th and 100th streets. For folks downtown, it's at the Landmark Sunshine on Houston between 1st and 2nd Avenues, and for Berkeley folk it's currently showing at the Act I & II.

Posted by Zach at 09:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack