Seen at: Metrolux 14, Loveland, CO on Sun. Oct. 25
On the way back from Cheyenne after seeing Inglourious Basterds, as I drove south on I-25, the last shards of light from the setting sun were sprinkled across the mountains to the west. After such a fun visit to Wyoming, I wasn't quite in the mood to head home yet, and it seemed like a nice evening to make it a double feature. So when I got to the Harmony Road exit in Fort Collins, I kept going on the highway.
I pulled off the highway nine miles further south at the junction of US 34 east of Loveland. Being hungry, I searched out one of my favorite Waffle House franchises, only to discover that it had been shuttered during my year-long absence from Colorado. I had to make due with a Taco John's instead.
Going to the Waffle House always reminds me of the South and Texas. It gives me good feelings. As such, it would have been a perfect set-up for Whip It, which I wound up seeing later at the Metrolux 14, the big sparkling multiplex visible from the Interstate at the cloverleaf. It anchors the giant Centerra lifestyle center that was built about a decade ago, and which became the bane of so many locals who detested this kind of development. I always feel a little icky going to the Centerra, but sometimes it just can't be avoided.
Most of the movies at the Metrolux play simultaneously at the Cinemark in Fort Collins, so it's usually not necessary to go there. But Whip It was an exception, so I took this opportunity to cross the Metrolux off my list in my Radius Project. Now I don't have to go back there, unless I feel like it.
The Waffle House would have been a good set-up for Whip It because the movie, written by Shauna Cross and the first to be directed by Drew Barrymore, is not only set in Austin, Texas, but embraces certain aspects of Austin culture in a way that made me more than a little homesick for the city where I once lived.
The story is about a high school girl named Bliss, played by Ellen Page of Juno, who lives in a small town in Texas, works at a diner, and is bored out of her mind while being pressed by her traditional-minded mother into participating in pageants. By chance, during a trip to nearby Austin, she discovers the local roller derby scene, filled with the kind of free-spirited women she wants to become, and falls in love it.
The obvious conflict will be between Bliss' desire to immerse herself in Austin roller derby and her mother's desire to cultivate Bliss as a traditional pageant star in her own image.
But if you read my write-up of Love Happens, you know about my latest insight about film---to create narrative tension, use deception. Whip It is a perfect example of this. By itself, the conflict I described would make a good indie film. But it is not enough for Hollywood. To make it worthy of a wider release, we need to add the spice of deception.
Thus the conflict will be driven by Bliss' deception in pursuing her roller derby career. As such it follows a fairly standard trajectory:
1. At first the deception works, in that the protagonist reaps immediate rewards and happiness.
2. Eventually the deception starts to cause problems that make it increasingly difficult to maintain the deception.
3. The character has several chances to "come clean" but declines to do so, because of the pain involved and because the deception is still seen as leading to happiness.
4. At a moment of truth, usually on the threshold of some major achievement as part of the deception, the deception is revealed (not by the protagonist but by another agent, or by accident), resulting in public disgrace and bringing down the entire house of cards.
5. The protagonist, in the short run, is worse off than at the beginning, often because of the loss of friendship of others invovled in the deception.
6. The process of coming clean actually clears up the conflict and the character not only resumes the trajectory, now openly, but with increased happiness.
This isn't a perfect outline of the deception paradigm, so I will probably be refining it over time. Nevertheless I think it captures many aspects of it. If you go to Hollywood movies, you will see it over and over and over.
The paradigm will work so long as the story is fresh enough, and the characters are compelling. Whip It is a pretty good example about how to do it. The concept (Austin roller derby) is original enough to make the movie interesting even though the trajectory of the paradigm pretty much could have written itself.
Thematically, the movie is one of the strongest statements I've seen that follows the Postmodern thesis about "strong women, weak men." The females in this movie---from the traditional mother, to the tatooed roller derby members---are all built out of steel. They are independent and driven by strong wills. Barrymore seemed to be making a love letter to the power of the fairer sex.
On the other hand, the men in the movie are universally weak. The pattern is unrelenting: Bliss' boyfriend does not cheat on her, but in his weakness, he doesn't protect a special item of clothing. This enough is to earn our scorn of him, and to show him as unworthy of the heroine.
The weak man is also the sexually frustrated man. Jimmy Fallon of Saturday Night Live makes a fun appearance as the emcee of the roller derby league, and hosts the after-game parties. But instead of being a sex symbol he should be, he is reduced to making hapless and pathetic passes at the (lesbian) players, and to pleading for sex openly in front of the crowd. Let's get ready to bumble!
Even the good men don't have any backbone and can't exercise power. The strongest male character, Bliss' father is still quite flawed and hides from the world rather than engaging it (how awesome it was to see Daniel Stern again!). Likewise, the male roller derby coach is unable to convince his power female players to execute the plays he draws up.
Bliss' boss, a young Hispanic man who is honorable and honext, but who can't even control the nicknames given to him, is in love with Bliss' best friend. At a moment of truth, they are alone and face to face in the back room of the diner. It is an obvious moment of connection, when a kiss is appropriate. I wanted to yell out: kiss her, damn it. But that's not what happens. Instead, it is the girl who grabs the guy and kisses him! I nearly burst out laughing in the theater, it was so much the opposite of what I thought would happen. That's just the way things are done these days. It was characteristic of everything in the whole movie.
By contrast, the only truly unlikable female character is one of Bliss' teenage pageant rivals, a point that is lessened by the fact that Bliss doesn't even want to compete in such pageants. Moreover, this mean girl rival attacks Bliss through control over the rival's weak-willed but thuggish high school boyfriend. Part of the "coming of age" aspect of this story is that this meaningless "immature" rival is replaced by a meaningful "mature" rival on the roller derby stage, a "mean girl" who skates on one of the other teams (Juliette Lewis, doing a very good derby villianness). But it turns out that this mature rival is actually honorable, and furthermore we get to understand her point of view, and her antagonism towards Bliss, in a critical scene towards the end of Act Two.
Postmodern sexual politics aside, this was a fun story, and a well-crafted (if fairly standard) narrative. As a movie, it showed some hallmarks of a first-time director, to be sure, but I thought Barrymore made a pretty good start in this regard.
And yes it made me miss Austin, even if the part of Austin culture it showed was not my particular cup of tea most of the time. Ironically, most of the movie, outside of some location shots of Ellen Page on South Congress Avenue, was not shot in Austin itself but in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Nice job, Miss Barrymore. This former Austinite bought it all.
Verdict on movie: an entertaining Austinesque story with fun original concept, slightly raunch in tone and based around a standard deception-driven plot.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Inglourious Basterds
Seen at: Lincoln Popcorn Palace, Cheyenne, WY on Sun. Oct. 25
This must set some kind of record for me, for delaying and delaying while a movie is in theaters until the last possible chance to see it. How long has Inglourious Basterds been out? At least ten weeks, I'd say. It actually came and went from the second-run theater in Fort Collins, making me chase it down outside of town while it was still showing.
I'll admit that I hadn't exactly been looking forward to seeing this. Scratch that. By the time I actually sat down to see it in the theater, I was very much looking forward to it. It might be more accurate to state that I had been waiting for the right moment, when I knew I'd want to see it.
Don't get me wrong---Tarantino is a great film maker. I won't argue that. But for various reasons, his work just doesn't connect with my soul as it did fifteen years ago when Pulp Fiction came out. During that time, he has grown as an artist and expanded his talents, but meanwhile I migrated away from an appreciation of seeing the world and human nature through his particular lens. Ironically it was watching lots of classical movies that made me stray from the Tarantino faithful. I say 'ironically' because Tarantino's films often come across as a non-stop homage to films of the past.
Tarantino pays homage, to be sure, but Tarantino's past is a revisionist one in many ways, as if he wants to tell us that film makers and actors back then didn't really understand human nature the way that he does, in his enlightened contemporary state. When it comes to people, I think he wants to tell us, Classicism was a lie , so he is going to show it all to us the way it really was.
This attitude is actually what I consider the greatest delusion of the Postmodern Era, namely the assumption that the Postmodern paradigm is the one that really existed all along, but it was just covered up by the self-delusions of earlier times. Specifically it is the notion that humans are without honor, beast-like in their motivations, and that any other viewpoint from the past is wrong, and needs correcting. I think much of Tarantino's work, along with much of contemporary period cinema, reflects this unspoken notion.
I'll admit that over the summer I was particularly put off by the advance marketing campaign for this movie, which seemed to scream out the notion I just mentioned---"You haven't seen World War II until you've seen it through Tarantino's eyes." Gee whiz. And all this time, I thought that I'd gotten a decent impression of the war from Audie Murphy starring as himself in To Hell and Back, made in 1954 using surplus equipment from the war and by a crew that probably fought over the same ground ten years earlier. But what the hell did those guys know? It took a guy who cut his teeth fighting in the trenches of a Southern California video store in the 1980's to really put the right spin on it all.
And then there was the trailer for this movie, featuring Brad Pitt doing a cheesy southern drawl while exhorting a bunch of Jewish-American would-be psycopaths to be as cruel as possible to the enemy. Here's Tarantino at his most Postmodern, conveying that honor and decency are handicaps, that the way to defeat the Nazis is to become as much like them as possible. No war is really about ideals, we are told, but about survival of the fittest. Kill or be killed. That's all there is to it. Any other higher motivation is for losers. What a beautiful reflection of an America in which we now shrug off the use of Nazi "enhanced interrogation" techniques in a phony war to justify our empire. I guess Tarantino may be right about us---at least as we are now. But like I said, it burns me when he puts forth the notion that we were always this way. That's the Postmodern Delusion.
Also I gleaned from the trailer that this was going to be a Jewish revenge fantasy about the war. That's OK on some level, I suppose, but it just seems to be the capstone on the trend over the last few years in Hollywood cinema to assert that the meaning of World War II began and ended with the Holocaust. Leave it to Tarantino to take that idea to a whole new level, to its logical fulfillment.
Waiting all these weeks to see the movie probably helped me burn off some of these expectations, so that when I finally sat down to see it, I was indeed looking forward to it. This ought to be fun, I thought to myself. Tarantino is nothing if not pure fun.
But I have to say a little about where I saw this, which turned out to be the perfect locale. It was last Sunday afternoon, and I had set out for Cheyenne, about forty miles north of here, to see a completely different movie at a multiplex up there, because that other movie (which I'll write about later) was no longer showing in Fort Collins. But I never got around to seeing that movie on Sunday.
With about an hour to kill, I pulled into downtown Cheyenne and parked. Since I hadn't spent much time in the capital of Wyoming lately, I figured I'd give myself a little walking tour of the downtown, but just around the very first corner I ran smack into the huge marquee of the Lincoln Popcorn Palace, a looming classic era theater which I hadn't heard of, because it wasn't in the Google Movie listings for Cheyenne. What a find! What an afternoon!
The large neon script spelled out "Lincoln" and the marquee below listed the movies showing with those big fat red marquee letters. And there it was, starting in only a half hour, Inglourious Basterds. My plan had been to drive down to the north Denver suburbs to see it later that week, but I knew instantly that I had to alter my plans for that afternoon and go see Inglorious Basterds right then and there. It was just the perfect circumstances.
Two wrinkled one dollar bills at the glass booth bought me a matinee ticket. The inside didn't disappoint at all. It was one of those old-time theaters that hasn't really been renovated but retains much of its faded charm and original decor, right down to the typography on the exit signs in the soaring auditorium. Sure it's a little worse for wear after so many years of use, and its subsequent conversion into a second-run house, but just imagine what the multiplexes of today would look like after fifty years without significant renovation. Yikes. They don't build 'em like they used to.
Now as for the movie itself---well it was indeed very fun. No complaints there. Within the first few minutes, during the opening "Spaghetti Western" scene on the French dairy farm, I knew it was going to be a very good movie. On a narrative level, it is nothing if not superior. Tarantino knows how to tell a good story, and his ability has grown better over the years.
Normally one of the things about movies that really drags me down is when I see a plot point coming from a half hour away, and sit there waiting for it to inevitably unfold. Tarantino avoids all this by making the story jump ahead past all these inevitabilities. It's a highly refined version of the style he has cultivated over the years, and by now it seems seamless. This kind of storytelling thwarts the petty tension on a low-level, but allows the building of tension on a higher level with a narrative that never got mired into the convention domino-upon-dominos of what "has to happen next." This feature by itself is one of the strengths of Postmodernity, by the way, and Tarantino is the master of it.
Given that the movie tells a darn good story in an entertaining way, I can forgive a lot about it, but the film is also simply downright well made. Seeing so many movies lately, I have begun to really appreciate when a movie is good as a production. You can really tell when the producers, directors, crew, actors, etc., really went all out to make a quality product. This stuck out to me last year when I saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a movie that I had mixed reactions to overall. It was simply a well made movie, and I can see why it got nominated for Best Picture. The same is definitely true of Inglourious Basterds.
Moreover the sadism I feared would dominate the movie, especially in the context of Jewish revenge fantasy, was much less overpowering than it could have been, partly because of Tarantino's aforementioned style of narrative. The movie, I thought, had just about the right amount of revenge fantasy present to make the narrative work as it did. In the end, I couldn't fault the movie on that level.
Yet also in the end there were things about this movie that kept me from completely embracing it. I ruminated this as I drove home in the dark across the Wyoming-Colorado state line on the High Plains.
First off is the Postmodern Conceit I previously mentioned, that honor is for suckers. At the end of the movie I couldn't help feel that the Nazis came off as looking more honorable than the Americans. We Americans, we are to believe, are better and wiser because we don't fool ourselves that life is anything more than survival. Thankfully that wasn't the dominating theme of the movie, but there was enough of it there to stick out to my Classical eyes to put a deep dent in my appreciation for what I'd just seen.
Or maybe this was the dominating theme. I can't tell yet. Maybe Tarantino is truly equating Classicism with Nazism on some level.
But as you might expect, if you've seen Inglourious Basterds, the biggest barrier to my embracing the film was the alternative history ending. This twist ending concept is so weird and novel---the rewriting World War II to give it a "happier" ending than it had, without any overt consciousness that it is taking such grand liberties with the past. I'm not quite sure what I think of it, and I debated with myself in the car over whether I was just being a stick-in-the-mud for not accepting this an artistically valid way to make a World War II movie.
After all, aren't all movies fiction? Aren't they all a warped version of known events in order to tell a good story? All movies severely bend history, because the artistic medium demands it, so why not bend it to this degree, if it tells a good story? I could see both sides of the argument, to be sure, but my sentiments nevertheless fall on the side of striving to be accurate to the "large" features of the historical record, the inescapable ones that seem to define the very meaning of the event? But on the other hand, have we entered a new era and thus should I just "get over it," as the Postmodern cry would urge me?
I couldn't help think that Tarantino effectively created a new genre with this movie, breaking the ground by monkeying with certain facts of history on level that previously was considered out of bounds. But like I said, I'm not sure what I think about this. It turns me off, yet it forces me to question my own artistic assumptions. After a year, I might know the answer. For now I'm a little too shocked by the ending to be able to think about it rationally.
Even as I reluctantly try to figure out a way to digest and embrace this movie, I more and more believe that next March Tarantino may well be standing on a stage in Hollywood accepting the Best Picture Oscar. Seriously, looking ahead at what remains to be released this year, what else is going to beat it? If it does indeed win the big prize, it will undoubtedly open the door to a new type of historical narrative. Are we really ready to go through that door? Is this a new level of artistic expression and freedom, or a sign that we've reached the logical vacuous end of the Postmodern Era?
If nothing else, the movie got me asking a lot of questions, not only about history, but about movies as an art form, and about my own appreciation of it. What more could you really ask for, for two bucks on an afternoon in Cheyenne, Wyoming?
And as for the Lincoln Popcorn Palace---it's my new favorite theater in the region. What fun indeed.
Verdict on movie: A superior production, and great fun for an afternoon, but what has Tarantino wrought with this?
This must set some kind of record for me, for delaying and delaying while a movie is in theaters until the last possible chance to see it. How long has Inglourious Basterds been out? At least ten weeks, I'd say. It actually came and went from the second-run theater in Fort Collins, making me chase it down outside of town while it was still showing.
I'll admit that I hadn't exactly been looking forward to seeing this. Scratch that. By the time I actually sat down to see it in the theater, I was very much looking forward to it. It might be more accurate to state that I had been waiting for the right moment, when I knew I'd want to see it.
Don't get me wrong---Tarantino is a great film maker. I won't argue that. But for various reasons, his work just doesn't connect with my soul as it did fifteen years ago when Pulp Fiction came out. During that time, he has grown as an artist and expanded his talents, but meanwhile I migrated away from an appreciation of seeing the world and human nature through his particular lens. Ironically it was watching lots of classical movies that made me stray from the Tarantino faithful. I say 'ironically' because Tarantino's films often come across as a non-stop homage to films of the past.
Tarantino pays homage, to be sure, but Tarantino's past is a revisionist one in many ways, as if he wants to tell us that film makers and actors back then didn't really understand human nature the way that he does, in his enlightened contemporary state. When it comes to people, I think he wants to tell us, Classicism was a lie , so he is going to show it all to us the way it really was.
This attitude is actually what I consider the greatest delusion of the Postmodern Era, namely the assumption that the Postmodern paradigm is the one that really existed all along, but it was just covered up by the self-delusions of earlier times. Specifically it is the notion that humans are without honor, beast-like in their motivations, and that any other viewpoint from the past is wrong, and needs correcting. I think much of Tarantino's work, along with much of contemporary period cinema, reflects this unspoken notion.
I'll admit that over the summer I was particularly put off by the advance marketing campaign for this movie, which seemed to scream out the notion I just mentioned---"You haven't seen World War II until you've seen it through Tarantino's eyes." Gee whiz. And all this time, I thought that I'd gotten a decent impression of the war from Audie Murphy starring as himself in To Hell and Back, made in 1954 using surplus equipment from the war and by a crew that probably fought over the same ground ten years earlier. But what the hell did those guys know? It took a guy who cut his teeth fighting in the trenches of a Southern California video store in the 1980's to really put the right spin on it all.
And then there was the trailer for this movie, featuring Brad Pitt doing a cheesy southern drawl while exhorting a bunch of Jewish-American would-be psycopaths to be as cruel as possible to the enemy. Here's Tarantino at his most Postmodern, conveying that honor and decency are handicaps, that the way to defeat the Nazis is to become as much like them as possible. No war is really about ideals, we are told, but about survival of the fittest. Kill or be killed. That's all there is to it. Any other higher motivation is for losers. What a beautiful reflection of an America in which we now shrug off the use of Nazi "enhanced interrogation" techniques in a phony war to justify our empire. I guess Tarantino may be right about us---at least as we are now. But like I said, it burns me when he puts forth the notion that we were always this way. That's the Postmodern Delusion.
Also I gleaned from the trailer that this was going to be a Jewish revenge fantasy about the war. That's OK on some level, I suppose, but it just seems to be the capstone on the trend over the last few years in Hollywood cinema to assert that the meaning of World War II began and ended with the Holocaust. Leave it to Tarantino to take that idea to a whole new level, to its logical fulfillment.
Waiting all these weeks to see the movie probably helped me burn off some of these expectations, so that when I finally sat down to see it, I was indeed looking forward to it. This ought to be fun, I thought to myself. Tarantino is nothing if not pure fun.
But I have to say a little about where I saw this, which turned out to be the perfect locale. It was last Sunday afternoon, and I had set out for Cheyenne, about forty miles north of here, to see a completely different movie at a multiplex up there, because that other movie (which I'll write about later) was no longer showing in Fort Collins. But I never got around to seeing that movie on Sunday.
With about an hour to kill, I pulled into downtown Cheyenne and parked. Since I hadn't spent much time in the capital of Wyoming lately, I figured I'd give myself a little walking tour of the downtown, but just around the very first corner I ran smack into the huge marquee of the Lincoln Popcorn Palace, a looming classic era theater which I hadn't heard of, because it wasn't in the Google Movie listings for Cheyenne. What a find! What an afternoon!
The large neon script spelled out "Lincoln" and the marquee below listed the movies showing with those big fat red marquee letters. And there it was, starting in only a half hour, Inglourious Basterds. My plan had been to drive down to the north Denver suburbs to see it later that week, but I knew instantly that I had to alter my plans for that afternoon and go see Inglorious Basterds right then and there. It was just the perfect circumstances.
Two wrinkled one dollar bills at the glass booth bought me a matinee ticket. The inside didn't disappoint at all. It was one of those old-time theaters that hasn't really been renovated but retains much of its faded charm and original decor, right down to the typography on the exit signs in the soaring auditorium. Sure it's a little worse for wear after so many years of use, and its subsequent conversion into a second-run house, but just imagine what the multiplexes of today would look like after fifty years without significant renovation. Yikes. They don't build 'em like they used to.
Now as for the movie itself---well it was indeed very fun. No complaints there. Within the first few minutes, during the opening "Spaghetti Western" scene on the French dairy farm, I knew it was going to be a very good movie. On a narrative level, it is nothing if not superior. Tarantino knows how to tell a good story, and his ability has grown better over the years.
Normally one of the things about movies that really drags me down is when I see a plot point coming from a half hour away, and sit there waiting for it to inevitably unfold. Tarantino avoids all this by making the story jump ahead past all these inevitabilities. It's a highly refined version of the style he has cultivated over the years, and by now it seems seamless. This kind of storytelling thwarts the petty tension on a low-level, but allows the building of tension on a higher level with a narrative that never got mired into the convention domino-upon-dominos of what "has to happen next." This feature by itself is one of the strengths of Postmodernity, by the way, and Tarantino is the master of it.
Given that the movie tells a darn good story in an entertaining way, I can forgive a lot about it, but the film is also simply downright well made. Seeing so many movies lately, I have begun to really appreciate when a movie is good as a production. You can really tell when the producers, directors, crew, actors, etc., really went all out to make a quality product. This stuck out to me last year when I saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a movie that I had mixed reactions to overall. It was simply a well made movie, and I can see why it got nominated for Best Picture. The same is definitely true of Inglourious Basterds.
Moreover the sadism I feared would dominate the movie, especially in the context of Jewish revenge fantasy, was much less overpowering than it could have been, partly because of Tarantino's aforementioned style of narrative. The movie, I thought, had just about the right amount of revenge fantasy present to make the narrative work as it did. In the end, I couldn't fault the movie on that level.
Yet also in the end there were things about this movie that kept me from completely embracing it. I ruminated this as I drove home in the dark across the Wyoming-Colorado state line on the High Plains.
First off is the Postmodern Conceit I previously mentioned, that honor is for suckers. At the end of the movie I couldn't help feel that the Nazis came off as looking more honorable than the Americans. We Americans, we are to believe, are better and wiser because we don't fool ourselves that life is anything more than survival. Thankfully that wasn't the dominating theme of the movie, but there was enough of it there to stick out to my Classical eyes to put a deep dent in my appreciation for what I'd just seen.
Or maybe this was the dominating theme. I can't tell yet. Maybe Tarantino is truly equating Classicism with Nazism on some level.
But as you might expect, if you've seen Inglourious Basterds, the biggest barrier to my embracing the film was the alternative history ending. This twist ending concept is so weird and novel---the rewriting World War II to give it a "happier" ending than it had, without any overt consciousness that it is taking such grand liberties with the past. I'm not quite sure what I think of it, and I debated with myself in the car over whether I was just being a stick-in-the-mud for not accepting this an artistically valid way to make a World War II movie.
After all, aren't all movies fiction? Aren't they all a warped version of known events in order to tell a good story? All movies severely bend history, because the artistic medium demands it, so why not bend it to this degree, if it tells a good story? I could see both sides of the argument, to be sure, but my sentiments nevertheless fall on the side of striving to be accurate to the "large" features of the historical record, the inescapable ones that seem to define the very meaning of the event? But on the other hand, have we entered a new era and thus should I just "get over it," as the Postmodern cry would urge me?
I couldn't help think that Tarantino effectively created a new genre with this movie, breaking the ground by monkeying with certain facts of history on level that previously was considered out of bounds. But like I said, I'm not sure what I think about this. It turns me off, yet it forces me to question my own artistic assumptions. After a year, I might know the answer. For now I'm a little too shocked by the ending to be able to think about it rationally.
Even as I reluctantly try to figure out a way to digest and embrace this movie, I more and more believe that next March Tarantino may well be standing on a stage in Hollywood accepting the Best Picture Oscar. Seriously, looking ahead at what remains to be released this year, what else is going to beat it? If it does indeed win the big prize, it will undoubtedly open the door to a new type of historical narrative. Are we really ready to go through that door? Is this a new level of artistic expression and freedom, or a sign that we've reached the logical vacuous end of the Postmodern Era?
If nothing else, the movie got me asking a lot of questions, not only about history, but about movies as an art form, and about my own appreciation of it. What more could you really ask for, for two bucks on an afternoon in Cheyenne, Wyoming?
And as for the Lincoln Popcorn Palace---it's my new favorite theater in the region. What fun indeed.
Verdict on movie: A superior production, and great fun for an afternoon, but what has Tarantino wrought with this?
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Movies I Won't Be Seeing (For Now)
Although I often say that I make an effort to see every movie released in theaters in America, this really isn't completely accurate. There are indeed releases that I pass on.
The movies I tend to skip are the ones in the realm of extreme sadistic horror. Last year, for example, I skipped Saw V, partly because I hadn't seen the first four installments, but also because of the genre. Since I haven't yet seen the Saw movies, it goes without saying that I'm skipping Saw VI for now at least. Perhaps someday I'll get around to seeing them, but extreme horror is a ground that my good friend Thor covers very well, so I don't feel pressed to do this.
Likewise I'm skipping Halloween II for now, but mostly because I never saw the any of the other Halloween movies, except the very first one. If I had seen them, I'd probably see this in the theater.
Finally (no pun intended), I skipped the latest Final Destination movie. Thor has seen all of these, so I'll defer to him. Also it came out while I was on my road trip, and I just didn't feel like filling my head with these kinds of images.
The movies I tend to skip are the ones in the realm of extreme sadistic horror. Last year, for example, I skipped Saw V, partly because I hadn't seen the first four installments, but also because of the genre. Since I haven't yet seen the Saw movies, it goes without saying that I'm skipping Saw VI for now at least. Perhaps someday I'll get around to seeing them, but extreme horror is a ground that my good friend Thor covers very well, so I don't feel pressed to do this.
Likewise I'm skipping Halloween II for now, but mostly because I never saw the any of the other Halloween movies, except the very first one. If I had seen them, I'd probably see this in the theater.
Finally (no pun intended), I skipped the latest Final Destination movie. Thor has seen all of these, so I'll defer to him. Also it came out while I was on my road trip, and I just didn't feel like filling my head with these kinds of images.
Love Happens
Wow, I forgot about this one. I actually saw it a couple weeks back, at the Carmike-down-the-block, just after I got back into town. It probably slipped my mind because the Carmike is so accessible---just a five minute walk or a thirty second car trip.
I have to admit I groaned when I first saw the trailer for Love Happens---sheesh, another romantic comedy with a cheesy title. But I like Aaron Eckhart. He's a sturdy workhorse actor who churns out multiple movies per year in a way that's impossible not to respect. Although I don't have anything against Jennifer Aniston as an actress, her choice of roles is sometimes suspect, such that her name is a bit of a flashing red light to me.
But Love Happens turns out to be slightly more palatable than I feared it would be, mostly because it is actually not a romantic comedy. Rather it's a romantic drama with a plot that has similarities to last fall's abysmal Seven Pounds. Both movies fall into the sub-genre of "widower grief" movies, about a male protagonist struggling to overcome guilt about the death of his wife.
Given that, I'll take Love Happens over Seven Pounds any day of the week, but mainly because the latter was so dreadful. Although Love Happens isn't a comedy by Hollywood genre standards, it is nevertheless one by Aristotlean standards, in that the story has a "happy" ending. Not spoilers here. One could tell that from the title, as well as the soundtrack right from the beginning.
But what I really took away from this movie, after thinking about for the last few weeks, was a deep insight into the use of deception as a plot premise in Hollywood movies. Specifically, the insight is that when all else fails, you can create story tension by the use of deception by the main character.
Deception by the protagonist is the great fairy dust of screenwriting. It can work in many, many circumstances to create a compelling narrative where there might not otherwise be one.
In this case, it works like this: a man (Eckhart) has lost his wife in a car accident. Several years later, he is still mired in grief and unable to love again. He meets a woman (Aniston) who helps him to overcome his grief and learn to love again.
By itself, this would be make a great movie---in France. But there's probably not enough story tension there to make a Hollywood movie. So what do you do? Add deception by the main character.
Thus Eckart's character is not simply a man who lost his wife, but one who is deceiving himself and the world about the circumstances of her death, and how he dealt with it. This deception becomes extended to the romance that springs up between Eckkart's character and Aniston's. This latter deception is the one that forms the essential tension in the love story, which must then be resolved, in the context of the larger emotional struggle of grief.
See how wonderful deception works as a tension-creating device in movies? It's like salt in cooking.
The title to this movie could have thus been extended: Love Happens...When Deception is Cleared Up.
A few fine points to mention here. Classical Hollywood long recognized a double standard when it comes to deception, namely that especially in romance, deception is much more forgivable by women than men. Women are somewhat expected to use some measure of deception in the courtship dance, whereas men are expected "to lay it on the line."
There's a dash of this in Love Happens. When Eckhart's character first approaches Aniston's, she mirrors his "deep deception" by a frivolous surface deception in order to push him away (by pretending to be deaf). But in this case, as in many others, we endorse this kind of thing by a woman playing hard to get against a suitor. Ironically her "mirroring" of his deceptive state is an indication here that they are well-matched as lovers.
A couple other things to mention. First off, Martin Sheen is an awesome supporting actor, a pleasure to watch anytime he is on screen. What a pro.
There's also the fact that this movie is set in Seattle. I felt somehow that this was taking advantage of the image of the city to help set the tone of the story. There is something about the Emerald City, and especially the Space Needle, that is now permanently identified with romantic melodrama because of Nora Ephron. Well, not me. I still tend to think of The Parallax View, but if you know me, you would probably have guessed that already.
I have to admit I groaned when I first saw the trailer for Love Happens---sheesh, another romantic comedy with a cheesy title. But I like Aaron Eckhart. He's a sturdy workhorse actor who churns out multiple movies per year in a way that's impossible not to respect. Although I don't have anything against Jennifer Aniston as an actress, her choice of roles is sometimes suspect, such that her name is a bit of a flashing red light to me.
But Love Happens turns out to be slightly more palatable than I feared it would be, mostly because it is actually not a romantic comedy. Rather it's a romantic drama with a plot that has similarities to last fall's abysmal Seven Pounds. Both movies fall into the sub-genre of "widower grief" movies, about a male protagonist struggling to overcome guilt about the death of his wife.
Given that, I'll take Love Happens over Seven Pounds any day of the week, but mainly because the latter was so dreadful. Although Love Happens isn't a comedy by Hollywood genre standards, it is nevertheless one by Aristotlean standards, in that the story has a "happy" ending. Not spoilers here. One could tell that from the title, as well as the soundtrack right from the beginning.
But what I really took away from this movie, after thinking about for the last few weeks, was a deep insight into the use of deception as a plot premise in Hollywood movies. Specifically, the insight is that when all else fails, you can create story tension by the use of deception by the main character.
Deception by the protagonist is the great fairy dust of screenwriting. It can work in many, many circumstances to create a compelling narrative where there might not otherwise be one.
In this case, it works like this: a man (Eckhart) has lost his wife in a car accident. Several years later, he is still mired in grief and unable to love again. He meets a woman (Aniston) who helps him to overcome his grief and learn to love again.
By itself, this would be make a great movie---in France. But there's probably not enough story tension there to make a Hollywood movie. So what do you do? Add deception by the main character.
Thus Eckart's character is not simply a man who lost his wife, but one who is deceiving himself and the world about the circumstances of her death, and how he dealt with it. This deception becomes extended to the romance that springs up between Eckkart's character and Aniston's. This latter deception is the one that forms the essential tension in the love story, which must then be resolved, in the context of the larger emotional struggle of grief.
See how wonderful deception works as a tension-creating device in movies? It's like salt in cooking.
The title to this movie could have thus been extended: Love Happens...When Deception is Cleared Up.
A few fine points to mention here. Classical Hollywood long recognized a double standard when it comes to deception, namely that especially in romance, deception is much more forgivable by women than men. Women are somewhat expected to use some measure of deception in the courtship dance, whereas men are expected "to lay it on the line."
There's a dash of this in Love Happens. When Eckhart's character first approaches Aniston's, she mirrors his "deep deception" by a frivolous surface deception in order to push him away (by pretending to be deaf). But in this case, as in many others, we endorse this kind of thing by a woman playing hard to get against a suitor. Ironically her "mirroring" of his deceptive state is an indication here that they are well-matched as lovers.
A couple other things to mention. First off, Martin Sheen is an awesome supporting actor, a pleasure to watch anytime he is on screen. What a pro.
There's also the fact that this movie is set in Seattle. I felt somehow that this was taking advantage of the image of the city to help set the tone of the story. There is something about the Emerald City, and especially the Space Needle, that is now permanently identified with romantic melodrama because of Nora Ephron. Well, not me. I still tend to think of The Parallax View, but if you know me, you would probably have guessed that already.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Amelia
Now we're cooking with gas! I made enough progress on my movie watching that I can afford to move beyond damage control mode of seeing current releases just before they are about to leave local theaters for good. On Friday I allowed myself the pleasure of seeing a brand new release on the very first day it was in the theaters---Amelia, at the local Cinemark multiplex.
This really is the way to do it. Seeing a movie on its first day of release makes you feel as if you are right in the cultural swing of things. I didn't think that would be important to me, but somehow it heightens the experience of movie going to see it when everyone else is talking about it---it's the blog chatter, you know. Although I can't imagine being a premiere junkie, scrambling to see a movie before everyone else gets to it, I can somewhat understand why some people do that. For me, for the time being at least, I'm content to be in the Gaussian swell of the masses when a movie goes nationwide.
But, oh, there is a price for this. Lately I'd gotten used to being the only person in the auditorium, but on the first afternoon of the release of a big drama like Amelia, you are simply not going to be alone. You're going to have some company, and though I like other people, this is not always a good thing.
In this case, the pitched stadium seating of the Cinemark was quite full. That being said, I was one of the youngest people in the auditorium. I had to switch entrance aisles to get into the theater because the first one I tried was blocked by a very slow moving elderly person on a walker. She wasn't the only one there with such equipment. I could make a crack about how everyone there probably met Amelia Earhart in person, but this kind of demographic is pretty typical for a first-day matinee release of a drama. I think the nursing homes load up minvans for such events.
Amelia was one of the movies that came up over dinner at the Char-Co-Broiler on Monday when Agnes, Thor, and I were sorting out the possible early contenders for the Oscars this year. I was eager to see if it could be placed in the category of an exceptional film. After seeing it, I can with absolutely 100% certainty that Hillary Swank will receive a Best Actress nomination for this, and I wouldn't be surprised if she wins, depending on the other performances. She's extremely good in this role, and I believed that she was Amelia Earhart from start to finish. It was seamless and perfect in this regard.
As for the movie itself, it felt a bit too light and airy, if you will, to be a solid Best Picture contender. But it was a still well-made movie that I enjoyed watching, one without any fatal flaws or things that made me outright dislike it. Perhaps I've just been disappointed so often lately, especially over the summer, that anything that doesn't completely offend me will actually impress me.
The narrative framework is fairly standard. We start in May 1937 as Earhart is about to take off on her last and ultimately fatal round-the-world flight. Then we jump back in time ten years to when she starting out as a professional flier, on her first Cross-Atlantic trip. The story mostly follows from the earlier storyline, occasionally flashing forward to stops on the 1937 flight until the story "catches up" to the main framing plot, where we follow the last legs of her fatal trip. That's pretty much how I would have done it, if I had been charged with writing the screenplay for a Hollywood film of Earhart's life.
One of the beefs I have with late-vintage period films set in the 1930s is that "every woman is Katherine Hepburn." I think it's difficult for contemporary film makers and actresses to capture the essence of femaleness as it existed back then without interjecting the judgement of how things, in their view, should have been. We understand a Kate Hepburn now much more than, say, a Ginger Rogers, who was the most popular actress of that decade whereas Hepburn struggled for audiences.
Given the fact that Hepburn herself played spunky Earhart-type characters back then (see Christopher Strong (1933) for the best example), I was curious to see how this new release would play out on screen in light of the trends I've mentioned. To my surprise, it seemed that Swank somehow actually underplayed the Hepburn-ness of her character, giving her a vulnerable femininity throughout the story that other actresses would have been unable to convey with believability. This will probably be a disappointment to some people when they see movie, given they will expect the "Full-Hepburn."
But the biggest and nicest surprise of this story was on the thematic level. Given the subject matter, I was expecting the theme to be about the sexism that Earhart faced in trying to be a "girl aviator" in a man's world. If this movie had been made in the 1980's or 1990's, I have no doubt this indeed would have been the focus of the film. But instead the theme was far more subtle and interesting, and much more believable for me as fan of 1930's movies.
Specifically, one of the things that has emerged to me so strongly, after watching so many movies from that earlier era, is that our view of "gender roles" from that time is somewhat inaccurate. The idea that "a woman can do anything a man can do" was not as foreign to people in the 1930's as we might think, and perhaps not as foreign as it would become two decades later. There were many strong female characters in that era who did "men's" jobs. Rita Hayworth as a research chemist springs to mind, and well as Glenda Farrell as the perennial spunky "girl reporter" in the hard-bitten city news world.
To bo sure, such characters were often shown as exceptions to the rule, but the point is that they were indeed on screen. The aspect of1930's gender roles that would actually feel entirely alien to today's audiences, however, is the iron clad rule from that time about marraige. Specifically the rule was that a woman can do anything a man can do in the professional world until she is married. Once a woman marries, she is absolutely expected to withdraw from the professional world and devote herself entirely to her husband and to her children---no exceptions. To do anything else was considered to be downright un-female.
Amelia suprised me by showing historical consciousness of this maxim, and focusing more on it instead of the overt sexism she must have encountered. The conflict of the movie is not whether Earhart can be a pilot in a man's world (although there is some of that, to be sure), but about whether or not she can be a wife amidst it all.
I love it when movies nail historical consciousness correctly like that. I can forgive a lot about a movie if it gets something like that right.
If there's a criticism to make of the narrative, it is probably that the writer and director were unable to use these main thematic elements in a way that explained and informed the inevitable climax of the movie. They were constrained, to be sure, by the actual facts of Earhart's final end (or at least the facts that are known). But a superior film would have found a way to use the main thematic elements to set up her death as a tragic downfall based on aspects of her character that emerged throughout the movie.
This is what the movie didn't do, I thought. She crashes (we think), but what is her tragic flaw that created this? I guess you could say it was her ambition to keep flying, but this is rather weak, given all the other things going on in the movie. Earhart is not portrayed as a reckless risk-tasker, but someone who calculates things out, to find a way to make the impossible happen.
The movie thus felt interesting and informative, but not overly powerful in explaining Earhart or the era in which she lived. A Best Picture nominee, perhaps, but if this wins Best Picture, it surely means it was a very weak year indeed.
But like I said---Swank was awesome. You won't be disappointed with her at all, no matter what you think of the film itself.
Update: here's a review from someone who didn't like the movie very much. I agree with many of these criticisms. Like I said, I think I've developed low expectations. I especially agree with one point in the linked review, namely that the movie completely leaves unaddressed any mysteries surrounding her disappearance, basically treating it as fact that she simply ran out of fuel and crashed.
Update: Forgot to mention that this is actually the second Earhart movie this year. The first one, Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian was of course a barely watchable farce, but I thought Amy Adams was perhaps even a better Earhart than Swank. But you know how I feel about Adams.
This really is the way to do it. Seeing a movie on its first day of release makes you feel as if you are right in the cultural swing of things. I didn't think that would be important to me, but somehow it heightens the experience of movie going to see it when everyone else is talking about it---it's the blog chatter, you know. Although I can't imagine being a premiere junkie, scrambling to see a movie before everyone else gets to it, I can somewhat understand why some people do that. For me, for the time being at least, I'm content to be in the Gaussian swell of the masses when a movie goes nationwide.
But, oh, there is a price for this. Lately I'd gotten used to being the only person in the auditorium, but on the first afternoon of the release of a big drama like Amelia, you are simply not going to be alone. You're going to have some company, and though I like other people, this is not always a good thing.
In this case, the pitched stadium seating of the Cinemark was quite full. That being said, I was one of the youngest people in the auditorium. I had to switch entrance aisles to get into the theater because the first one I tried was blocked by a very slow moving elderly person on a walker. She wasn't the only one there with such equipment. I could make a crack about how everyone there probably met Amelia Earhart in person, but this kind of demographic is pretty typical for a first-day matinee release of a drama. I think the nursing homes load up minvans for such events.
Amelia was one of the movies that came up over dinner at the Char-Co-Broiler on Monday when Agnes, Thor, and I were sorting out the possible early contenders for the Oscars this year. I was eager to see if it could be placed in the category of an exceptional film. After seeing it, I can with absolutely 100% certainty that Hillary Swank will receive a Best Actress nomination for this, and I wouldn't be surprised if she wins, depending on the other performances. She's extremely good in this role, and I believed that she was Amelia Earhart from start to finish. It was seamless and perfect in this regard.
As for the movie itself, it felt a bit too light and airy, if you will, to be a solid Best Picture contender. But it was a still well-made movie that I enjoyed watching, one without any fatal flaws or things that made me outright dislike it. Perhaps I've just been disappointed so often lately, especially over the summer, that anything that doesn't completely offend me will actually impress me.
The narrative framework is fairly standard. We start in May 1937 as Earhart is about to take off on her last and ultimately fatal round-the-world flight. Then we jump back in time ten years to when she starting out as a professional flier, on her first Cross-Atlantic trip. The story mostly follows from the earlier storyline, occasionally flashing forward to stops on the 1937 flight until the story "catches up" to the main framing plot, where we follow the last legs of her fatal trip. That's pretty much how I would have done it, if I had been charged with writing the screenplay for a Hollywood film of Earhart's life.
One of the beefs I have with late-vintage period films set in the 1930s is that "every woman is Katherine Hepburn." I think it's difficult for contemporary film makers and actresses to capture the essence of femaleness as it existed back then without interjecting the judgement of how things, in their view, should have been. We understand a Kate Hepburn now much more than, say, a Ginger Rogers, who was the most popular actress of that decade whereas Hepburn struggled for audiences.
Given the fact that Hepburn herself played spunky Earhart-type characters back then (see Christopher Strong (1933) for the best example), I was curious to see how this new release would play out on screen in light of the trends I've mentioned. To my surprise, it seemed that Swank somehow actually underplayed the Hepburn-ness of her character, giving her a vulnerable femininity throughout the story that other actresses would have been unable to convey with believability. This will probably be a disappointment to some people when they see movie, given they will expect the "Full-Hepburn."
But the biggest and nicest surprise of this story was on the thematic level. Given the subject matter, I was expecting the theme to be about the sexism that Earhart faced in trying to be a "girl aviator" in a man's world. If this movie had been made in the 1980's or 1990's, I have no doubt this indeed would have been the focus of the film. But instead the theme was far more subtle and interesting, and much more believable for me as fan of 1930's movies.
Specifically, one of the things that has emerged to me so strongly, after watching so many movies from that earlier era, is that our view of "gender roles" from that time is somewhat inaccurate. The idea that "a woman can do anything a man can do" was not as foreign to people in the 1930's as we might think, and perhaps not as foreign as it would become two decades later. There were many strong female characters in that era who did "men's" jobs. Rita Hayworth as a research chemist springs to mind, and well as Glenda Farrell as the perennial spunky "girl reporter" in the hard-bitten city news world.
To bo sure, such characters were often shown as exceptions to the rule, but the point is that they were indeed on screen. The aspect of1930's gender roles that would actually feel entirely alien to today's audiences, however, is the iron clad rule from that time about marraige. Specifically the rule was that a woman can do anything a man can do in the professional world until she is married. Once a woman marries, she is absolutely expected to withdraw from the professional world and devote herself entirely to her husband and to her children---no exceptions. To do anything else was considered to be downright un-female.
Amelia suprised me by showing historical consciousness of this maxim, and focusing more on it instead of the overt sexism she must have encountered. The conflict of the movie is not whether Earhart can be a pilot in a man's world (although there is some of that, to be sure), but about whether or not she can be a wife amidst it all.
I love it when movies nail historical consciousness correctly like that. I can forgive a lot about a movie if it gets something like that right.
If there's a criticism to make of the narrative, it is probably that the writer and director were unable to use these main thematic elements in a way that explained and informed the inevitable climax of the movie. They were constrained, to be sure, by the actual facts of Earhart's final end (or at least the facts that are known). But a superior film would have found a way to use the main thematic elements to set up her death as a tragic downfall based on aspects of her character that emerged throughout the movie.
This is what the movie didn't do, I thought. She crashes (we think), but what is her tragic flaw that created this? I guess you could say it was her ambition to keep flying, but this is rather weak, given all the other things going on in the movie. Earhart is not portrayed as a reckless risk-tasker, but someone who calculates things out, to find a way to make the impossible happen.
The movie thus felt interesting and informative, but not overly powerful in explaining Earhart or the era in which she lived. A Best Picture nominee, perhaps, but if this wins Best Picture, it surely means it was a very weak year indeed.
But like I said---Swank was awesome. You won't be disappointed with her at all, no matter what you think of the film itself.
Update: here's a review from someone who didn't like the movie very much. I agree with many of these criticisms. Like I said, I think I've developed low expectations. I especially agree with one point in the linked review, namely that the movie completely leaves unaddressed any mysteries surrounding her disappearance, basically treating it as fact that she simply ran out of fuel and crashed.
Update: Forgot to mention that this is actually the second Earhart movie this year. The first one, Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian was of course a barely watchable farce, but I thought Amy Adams was perhaps even a better Earhart than Swank. But you know how I feel about Adams.
Opa!
In trying to catch up with my movie schedule, the bane of my existence are "one-and-done" movies---that is, releases that play for only a single week. It's like trying to fight a huge fire and having put out small brush fires at the same time.
That being said, this annoyance was perhaps the only reason I was not looking forward to seeing Opa! on Thursday evening over at the Carmike 10, which I can see out my window as I type this. I'd seen a trailer for it, I think in Dodge City last month, and I wasn't even sure it was going to make it to Fort Collins. It's an independent movie that actually showed at the Toronto Film Festival in 2005, but only now is being released in theaters, for a very limited run without any marketing. I was glad when I saw it arrive nearly on my doorstep. Even so, I waited until Thursday evening, the last possible showing, to see it. Such is my laziness.
When I tried to buy a ticket to it, the college-aged guy with a beard in the glass booth told me, "That isn't showing anymore." I looked up at the marquee to double check. He corrected himself, saying he forget it was here, because I was the first person to buy a ticket for it all day long.
Needlessly to say, I was the only person in the auditorium. It turns out this was a good thing, because it was showing in the tiny corner auditiroium at the Carmike and they had forgotten to turn the heat on.
This gave me a chance to walk around, and eventually to...dance!
Yes, dance! Of course I danced to keep warm. Who wouldn't have? This is a movie about the Greek Isles, after all. But unlike the abysmal My Life in Ruins earlier this summer, this is a real movie about Greece.
Indeed it was very Greek. It was shot entirely in Greece, on the island of Patmos where it takes place, and in the first few minutes I felt like I was transported to the Aegean, not just in the stereotypical sense, but with all the little details familiar to anyone who has been there. I knew I was going to like this the minute I saw the tree trunks painted white beside the road, and the calf-length pants worn by the heroine's preteen daughter.
Moreover, the Greek characters actually speak Greek with each other when out of earshot of the English speakers. How nice! I love the Greek language, and the minute I started hearing it, I found myself stretching my mouth muscles to pronounce words and phrases I hadn't heard in a long time. And when they started dancing, well, I've already told you that the auditorium was cold.
The narrative is a love story between a geeky American archaeologist named Eric (Matthew Modine) and a local Greek woman named Katerina (played by Cypriot Agni Scott). Katerina is free-spirited and open, quite the opposite of Modine's archaeologist.
The story takes full advantage of this comparison in an early scene on the patio of the waterside taverna that Katerina owns and operates. Both characters in effect "dance" on the patio separately, then later together. Eric's "dance" takes the form of awkwardly guiding an electronic detection device (that looks like a giant suitcase) among the tables of the startled and suspicious patrons and staff. Later, Katerina moves over the same ground (literally) but in the form of traditional Greek dancing with the tables cleared away and music playing. She then drags Eric onto the floor. What a wonderful way to make the characters come together in parallel fashion, especially since the patio itself turns out to be the literal stage of the conflict that will arise between the two lovers.
The conflict is specifically that Eric is searching for a long-lost treasure (the cup of St. John the Divine, the author of the Book of Revelation, on Patmos). Eric's father was unable to find the cup, and thus we get a "redemption of the father" narrative tension.
What follows is a Local Hero type of conflict---will the taverna be destroyed in the name of unearthing the treasure that possibly lies beneath? Of course, this conflict will spoil the love story for a while, until the hero can patch it up by doing the right thing.
But as in any good narrative, the tension arises not so much from the fact that Eric wants (at first) to dig up the taverna patio, but rather that he conceals this from Katerina, allowing her to fall in love with him, all the while knowing what he is planning for her beloved taverna.
I liked how Eric is written and played not as a heartless scientist, but simply a little awkward, one step behind in the dance. He earnestly attempts to fix his mistakes as he discovers them without digging in his heels.
This being a comedy, the lovers will eventually get back together. I'm obviously not spoiling anything in that regard.
There were plenty of wonderful little touches in this movie that made it both coherent and fun. For example, a trio of black-clad older Greek women act like a chorus from a classical drama, commenting on the characters from time to time.
There's a wonderful scene between the two characters in a chapel inside a cave. Love stories typically use these kind of "encounters in a chapel" scenes to informally bind the characters in a de facto marriage. This "wedding" one was especially well done, especially photographically. There's also a good comparison between the sacred cup which the hero is looking for, and the informal use of shared drinking (of ouzo) between the characters which binds them together in social fashion--one of many little narrative touches that impressed me.
Another surprisingly nice part of the film was that it treated Christianity in a decent way. This was undoubtedly because it was Greek, not American. A Hollywood movie would never have had these kind of subtle touches that used the characters' Christian religious sensibilities in a way that didn't display it as dysfunctional.
This is a lightweight "chick" drama to be sure---nothing very deep, and with a story that's been told many times before. But I don't need original concept at every turn, just a good story.
Yet I couldn't help thinking that this movie just had utterly the wrong title. The word "Opa" is a Greek exclamation of happiness, one we hear the heroine yell several times. But Americans don't know this, and so it just looks like a goofy word. I think the movie would have done a bit better to have been named, for example, "Treasure of the Greek Isles," or something like that. It might have sold a few more tickets.
But then I might not have been alone in the Carmike. And then I wouldn't have been able to dance.
That being said, this annoyance was perhaps the only reason I was not looking forward to seeing Opa! on Thursday evening over at the Carmike 10, which I can see out my window as I type this. I'd seen a trailer for it, I think in Dodge City last month, and I wasn't even sure it was going to make it to Fort Collins. It's an independent movie that actually showed at the Toronto Film Festival in 2005, but only now is being released in theaters, for a very limited run without any marketing. I was glad when I saw it arrive nearly on my doorstep. Even so, I waited until Thursday evening, the last possible showing, to see it. Such is my laziness.
When I tried to buy a ticket to it, the college-aged guy with a beard in the glass booth told me, "That isn't showing anymore." I looked up at the marquee to double check. He corrected himself, saying he forget it was here, because I was the first person to buy a ticket for it all day long.
Needlessly to say, I was the only person in the auditorium. It turns out this was a good thing, because it was showing in the tiny corner auditiroium at the Carmike and they had forgotten to turn the heat on.
This gave me a chance to walk around, and eventually to...dance!
Yes, dance! Of course I danced to keep warm. Who wouldn't have? This is a movie about the Greek Isles, after all. But unlike the abysmal My Life in Ruins earlier this summer, this is a real movie about Greece.
Indeed it was very Greek. It was shot entirely in Greece, on the island of Patmos where it takes place, and in the first few minutes I felt like I was transported to the Aegean, not just in the stereotypical sense, but with all the little details familiar to anyone who has been there. I knew I was going to like this the minute I saw the tree trunks painted white beside the road, and the calf-length pants worn by the heroine's preteen daughter.
Moreover, the Greek characters actually speak Greek with each other when out of earshot of the English speakers. How nice! I love the Greek language, and the minute I started hearing it, I found myself stretching my mouth muscles to pronounce words and phrases I hadn't heard in a long time. And when they started dancing, well, I've already told you that the auditorium was cold.
The narrative is a love story between a geeky American archaeologist named Eric (Matthew Modine) and a local Greek woman named Katerina (played by Cypriot Agni Scott). Katerina is free-spirited and open, quite the opposite of Modine's archaeologist.
The story takes full advantage of this comparison in an early scene on the patio of the waterside taverna that Katerina owns and operates. Both characters in effect "dance" on the patio separately, then later together. Eric's "dance" takes the form of awkwardly guiding an electronic detection device (that looks like a giant suitcase) among the tables of the startled and suspicious patrons and staff. Later, Katerina moves over the same ground (literally) but in the form of traditional Greek dancing with the tables cleared away and music playing. She then drags Eric onto the floor. What a wonderful way to make the characters come together in parallel fashion, especially since the patio itself turns out to be the literal stage of the conflict that will arise between the two lovers.
The conflict is specifically that Eric is searching for a long-lost treasure (the cup of St. John the Divine, the author of the Book of Revelation, on Patmos). Eric's father was unable to find the cup, and thus we get a "redemption of the father" narrative tension.
What follows is a Local Hero type of conflict---will the taverna be destroyed in the name of unearthing the treasure that possibly lies beneath? Of course, this conflict will spoil the love story for a while, until the hero can patch it up by doing the right thing.
But as in any good narrative, the tension arises not so much from the fact that Eric wants (at first) to dig up the taverna patio, but rather that he conceals this from Katerina, allowing her to fall in love with him, all the while knowing what he is planning for her beloved taverna.
I liked how Eric is written and played not as a heartless scientist, but simply a little awkward, one step behind in the dance. He earnestly attempts to fix his mistakes as he discovers them without digging in his heels.
This being a comedy, the lovers will eventually get back together. I'm obviously not spoiling anything in that regard.
There were plenty of wonderful little touches in this movie that made it both coherent and fun. For example, a trio of black-clad older Greek women act like a chorus from a classical drama, commenting on the characters from time to time.
There's a wonderful scene between the two characters in a chapel inside a cave. Love stories typically use these kind of "encounters in a chapel" scenes to informally bind the characters in a de facto marriage. This "wedding" one was especially well done, especially photographically. There's also a good comparison between the sacred cup which the hero is looking for, and the informal use of shared drinking (of ouzo) between the characters which binds them together in social fashion--one of many little narrative touches that impressed me.
Another surprisingly nice part of the film was that it treated Christianity in a decent way. This was undoubtedly because it was Greek, not American. A Hollywood movie would never have had these kind of subtle touches that used the characters' Christian religious sensibilities in a way that didn't display it as dysfunctional.
This is a lightweight "chick" drama to be sure---nothing very deep, and with a story that's been told many times before. But I don't need original concept at every turn, just a good story.
Yet I couldn't help thinking that this movie just had utterly the wrong title. The word "Opa" is a Greek exclamation of happiness, one we hear the heroine yell several times. But Americans don't know this, and so it just looks like a goofy word. I think the movie would have done a bit better to have been named, for example, "Treasure of the Greek Isles," or something like that. It might have sold a few more tickets.
But then I might not have been alone in the Carmike. And then I wouldn't have been able to dance.
Cold Souls
In trying to catch up with current releases, I feel as if I'm on two tracks---one for the mainstream Hollywood movies, and the other for the indie releases. The latter are somewhat harder in that they often play only in arthouses, and stay only for a week or two before the print gets shipped out to the next arthouse.
Very quickly I noticed that the two northern Colorado arthouses---the Lyric Cafe Cinema in Fort Collins and the Kress Lounge in Greeley---tend to trade prints. That is, if a movie is showing at the Lyric, it will often move over to the Kress afterwards, and vice versa. This allowed me to be a little lazier than I would have otherwise been, a year ago, when we only had the Lyric.
Cold Souls had been showing in the Lyric when I got back into town, so of course I waited until it migrated over to the Kress (which I visited two weeks ago and liked very much). Of course I waited until late in the week, until I found out that it had only two days left. I combined this with the trip to the Greeley Mall to see Pandorum to make it a two-fer in Greeley on Wednesday.
Cold Souls turns out to be a fun movie with an original concept that kept my interest throughout. I recommend it for everyone.
It stars Paul Giamatti as a fictionalized version of himself. At beginning of the story, he is struggling through a rehearsal as the title character in an off-Broadway production of Uncle Vanya by Chekhov.
The Russian aspect here is important. Much of the movie actually takes place in, and was shot in, St. Petersburg. It's almost as if this is an absurdist and self-aware adaptation of Chekhov, using the play as a starting place for telling a modern science fiction story that attempts to convey the sentiment of 19th Century Russia.
And indeed it is absurd. Paul, weighed down by his soul, discovers that there is a business in Manhattan that will extract one's soul and store it in a secure vault. Moreover, one can "rent" souls, having them temporarily installed inside your body. It turns out many of these rented souls are from a black market that goes back to Russia. Russian souls, it seems, are in demand.
My favorite line of the movie is when one of the Russian black marketeers suggests selling American souls to Russians. "Who would want an American soul?" I burst out laughing in the theater.
Underneath all this absurdity is fairly standard structure that makes the movie work in an emotional sense. To wit, the tension of the narrative arises in part from the fact that Paul keeps all this soul-exhanging a secret from his wife. This leads to a husband-wife breach. To heal the breach, and resolve the narrative, Paul must come clean with wife and reconnect with her.
But you wouldn't even notice this unless you're a Classicist like me, looking for such things. Movies like this work well when the absurd comedy is on the surface, and such themes are woven in seemlessly so that they seem just a natural part of the story.
Very quickly I noticed that the two northern Colorado arthouses---the Lyric Cafe Cinema in Fort Collins and the Kress Lounge in Greeley---tend to trade prints. That is, if a movie is showing at the Lyric, it will often move over to the Kress afterwards, and vice versa. This allowed me to be a little lazier than I would have otherwise been, a year ago, when we only had the Lyric.
Cold Souls had been showing in the Lyric when I got back into town, so of course I waited until it migrated over to the Kress (which I visited two weeks ago and liked very much). Of course I waited until late in the week, until I found out that it had only two days left. I combined this with the trip to the Greeley Mall to see Pandorum to make it a two-fer in Greeley on Wednesday.
Cold Souls turns out to be a fun movie with an original concept that kept my interest throughout. I recommend it for everyone.
It stars Paul Giamatti as a fictionalized version of himself. At beginning of the story, he is struggling through a rehearsal as the title character in an off-Broadway production of Uncle Vanya by Chekhov.
The Russian aspect here is important. Much of the movie actually takes place in, and was shot in, St. Petersburg. It's almost as if this is an absurdist and self-aware adaptation of Chekhov, using the play as a starting place for telling a modern science fiction story that attempts to convey the sentiment of 19th Century Russia.
And indeed it is absurd. Paul, weighed down by his soul, discovers that there is a business in Manhattan that will extract one's soul and store it in a secure vault. Moreover, one can "rent" souls, having them temporarily installed inside your body. It turns out many of these rented souls are from a black market that goes back to Russia. Russian souls, it seems, are in demand.
My favorite line of the movie is when one of the Russian black marketeers suggests selling American souls to Russians. "Who would want an American soul?" I burst out laughing in the theater.
Underneath all this absurdity is fairly standard structure that makes the movie work in an emotional sense. To wit, the tension of the narrative arises in part from the fact that Paul keeps all this soul-exhanging a secret from his wife. This leads to a husband-wife breach. To heal the breach, and resolve the narrative, Paul must come clean with wife and reconnect with her.
But you wouldn't even notice this unless you're a Classicist like me, looking for such things. Movies like this work well when the absurd comedy is on the surface, and such themes are woven in seemlessly so that they seem just a natural part of the story.
Pandorum
My "Radius Project" of seeing movies in every theater within 100 miles of Fort Collins has gotten off to a moderately slow start, but I had actually planned it that way. Right now, my priority is simply to catch up with the current releases, and so I have been seeing movies in theaters wherever they are showing. If I pick up new theaters along the way, so much the better.
This was the case on Wednesday when I drove over to Greeley in the mid afternoon to see Pandorum, a science fiction and horror movie that has been out for about a month. It had left the theaters in Fort Collins, but it was still showing at the Cinemark multiplex at the Greeley Mall.
I hadn't been in the Greeley Mall in, about, twenty years, so I arranged to go early to give myself a walk through. Like so many malls lately, it has fallen on hard times. In my walk through I counted sixty regular storefronts, out of which nineteen were languishing empty. Of the anchor stores, only two were occupied with full-time stores. Another one was shuttered, and the remaining one was temporarily occupied by a Halloween Party store.
The Cinemark was the liveliest part of the complex. Like its corporate sibling in Fort Collins, it has an ample but plain-brown-wrapper boxlike lobby with a conventional concession counter lining the back wall. The auditorium had stadium seating, but not as fancy as the one in Fort Collins, where one goes up a ramp to the auditorium hallway, in order to allow sunken auditoriums with a steep seating pitch.
I was one of two folks there to see Pandorum on its next-to-last afternoon in northern Colorado.
It had been a while since I had seen a trailer for this movie, and I barely remembered anyting about it, which is a good thing for this kind of movie, as it allowed some fun element of surprise. As I remembered, it is the genre of "deep space" horror movies, that is, about what happens psychological to human beings in the far, dark reaches of outer space. It's a concept that I think is fun to explore on film from time to time. Many folks had compared this to Alien.
To be honest, I was turned off in the first few minutes by the usual rigamarole of predictive programming about the impeding end of the world due to environmental destruction, and how a select group of humans will be allowed to survive it all. I didn't really need the globalist political preaching to go along with the story. Sometime I'm going to have to start talking more explicity about predictive programming in this blog, because I'm beginning to notice more and more of it every time I go to the movies, even though it has been around for many decades.
Otherwise, the story has a nice set-up. Two characters awaken from the deep slumber of cryogenic hibernation. They are alone. Where is everyone else? What has happened to the ship? It's darn good concept for the start of movie.
Slowly the characters discover what has been going on. They meet other characters who explain things to them. An urgency develops by which the characters must act swiftly to save the ship from destruction (the old ticking clock that every suspense movie needs). There are hideous monsters out to get them. Part of the mystery is where the monsters came from.
There are couple juicy plot twists, one which takes advantage (not surprisingly) of the title concept of the movie---"Pandorum" is the name given to the madness that overtakes humans in the isolation of deep outer space. There is also a big plot twist at the end that I didn't see coming at all, but seems to work fairly well in setting up the final resolution to the story.
All in all, I thought this was a pretty good way to spend a couple hours. It's not for everyone---it is indeed a horror movie, and there a few graphically gory scenes involving the monsters.
This was the case on Wednesday when I drove over to Greeley in the mid afternoon to see Pandorum, a science fiction and horror movie that has been out for about a month. It had left the theaters in Fort Collins, but it was still showing at the Cinemark multiplex at the Greeley Mall.
I hadn't been in the Greeley Mall in, about, twenty years, so I arranged to go early to give myself a walk through. Like so many malls lately, it has fallen on hard times. In my walk through I counted sixty regular storefronts, out of which nineteen were languishing empty. Of the anchor stores, only two were occupied with full-time stores. Another one was shuttered, and the remaining one was temporarily occupied by a Halloween Party store.
The Cinemark was the liveliest part of the complex. Like its corporate sibling in Fort Collins, it has an ample but plain-brown-wrapper boxlike lobby with a conventional concession counter lining the back wall. The auditorium had stadium seating, but not as fancy as the one in Fort Collins, where one goes up a ramp to the auditorium hallway, in order to allow sunken auditoriums with a steep seating pitch.
I was one of two folks there to see Pandorum on its next-to-last afternoon in northern Colorado.
It had been a while since I had seen a trailer for this movie, and I barely remembered anyting about it, which is a good thing for this kind of movie, as it allowed some fun element of surprise. As I remembered, it is the genre of "deep space" horror movies, that is, about what happens psychological to human beings in the far, dark reaches of outer space. It's a concept that I think is fun to explore on film from time to time. Many folks had compared this to Alien.
To be honest, I was turned off in the first few minutes by the usual rigamarole of predictive programming about the impeding end of the world due to environmental destruction, and how a select group of humans will be allowed to survive it all. I didn't really need the globalist political preaching to go along with the story. Sometime I'm going to have to start talking more explicity about predictive programming in this blog, because I'm beginning to notice more and more of it every time I go to the movies, even though it has been around for many decades.
Otherwise, the story has a nice set-up. Two characters awaken from the deep slumber of cryogenic hibernation. They are alone. Where is everyone else? What has happened to the ship? It's darn good concept for the start of movie.
Slowly the characters discover what has been going on. They meet other characters who explain things to them. An urgency develops by which the characters must act swiftly to save the ship from destruction (the old ticking clock that every suspense movie needs). There are hideous monsters out to get them. Part of the mystery is where the monsters came from.
There are couple juicy plot twists, one which takes advantage (not surprisingly) of the title concept of the movie---"Pandorum" is the name given to the madness that overtakes humans in the isolation of deep outer space. There is also a big plot twist at the end that I didn't see coming at all, but seems to work fairly well in setting up the final resolution to the story.
All in all, I thought this was a pretty good way to spend a couple hours. It's not for everyone---it is indeed a horror movie, and there a few graphically gory scenes involving the monsters.
Fame
Another of my favorite Fort Collins theaters is the Cinema Saver 6. It's a second-run Kerasotes cineplex about a mile and half from my parents' house, and thus an easy drive. The matinees are only two bucks, and the evening shows are only a dollar more. Can't beat that!
The downside is that as a second-house it changes its listings very slowly, much slower than, say, the West Boylston Cinema in Massachusetts or the Regal in Hookset, New Hampshire, which I had frequented last winter. The Cinema Saver 6 seems to hook into money-making movies and keeps them there forever. For example, when I got back to town a couple months ago, even though I was behind in my moviegoing, I had seen all the ones showing at the Cinema Saver 6. I wondered when I'd get a chance to go back there.
Thankfully I didn't have to wait long, as Fame, which I hadn't yet got around to seeing, hopped over from the first-run multiplexes into the Cinema Saver last week. Perfect! As it happened, they kept Fame around for only a week, so once I saw from the advance listings that it was leaving, it went straight to the top of my list last Wednesday evening.
When I walked in the door of CS6, I almost burst out laughing because I was confronted with a situation that seemed to happen every time I went to the place last year. Specifically there was a young couple, in high school or college, standing side-by-side, about six feet away from the ticket counter, staring up at the marquee listings, trying to figure out what they were going to see. It's as people go out on dates without any idea of what they are going to see there. So they stand there, wishy-washy, not quite in line, but not quite allowing enough room to make it clear that they aren't line. The girl is usually looking at the guy as if to say, "please make a decision," while the guy mumbles, "uh, uh, uh" and keeps demanding a synopsis of each movie from the person behind the counter.
From previous experience, I've learned that this can literally go on for ten minutes of mumbling and feet shifting, and that the thing to do is to make eye contact with the ticket seller, who is usually quite relieve to wave me right up to the counter so I can buy a ticket.
This is exactly what took place, but before I skirted the wishy-washy couple, I heard the young man ask about Fame. What's that? "It's a remake of a movie from the Eighties," said the young woman behind the counter. She was no more than seventeen years old. "I've heard it isn't that good."
Well, that's sure a ringing endorsement. I paid my three bucks and took my seat inside the large auditorium (no stadium seats, very conentional), with about seven other people, all of them high school or college age.
As I waited for the movie to start, I realized that I was going to spend a lot of emotional energy trying to figure why the hell they remade this movie. It was one of those titles that when you heard that a remake coming out, you probably said "Huh? Why?" But it has indeed been twenty-nine years! If the original Fame had been a remake of a movie from 1951, would anyone have cared? Of course not. But such musings only serve to illustrate that 2009 is culturally closer to 1980, than 1980 is to 1951, no matter the exact number of years.
As I sat thorugh the trailers it occurred to me, in somewhat cyncial fashion, that this entire remake was a cheap attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the High School Musical series from Disney. Hey, we can make some mone off this trend if we resurrect the old movie that the kids don't even know about!
It also occurred to me, as the opening credits rolled, that it had been so long since I saw the original that I would have little ability to compare the two movies, beyond vague recollections. This was probably a good thing, I realized, because it would force me to evaluate the movie on its own terms.
But something started to happen, about ten minutes into the film---against all my cynicism and suspicion, I started to like it.
One thing to mention is that I'm actually a very impatient and fidgetty movie goer. You'd think, with all the movies I go to, that I would enjoy going to movies, but in a lot of cases, I feel like I"m just waiting for the movie to be over. It's rare when a movie actually makes me forget the clock entirely, and where I sink into the world of the story in a way that relaxes me and takes me outside myself, the way movies used to be when I was a kid. It's very rare, in fact.
For whatever reason, perhaps because my expectations had been so low, this is what happened during Fame. I began to relax and really enjoy watching this movie. I began to savor the experience of being there and seeing it in the theater.
It was both the same movie as 1980, yet a completely different movie. Of course it deserved an update! What the hell was I thinking? Perhaps a different title woudl have been better---Fame Revisted? Somehow this movie just hadn't connected with audiences, but it was surely connecting with me.
I loved the stories of the kids, and the way it was told, using stylistic updates that were in harmony with the original. The freshman kids were both the same as the ones from 1980 (the year I started high school, as it happens), yet with the characteristics of the millennials as well. It was exactly the way it should have been.
The music is updated of course, with hip hop numbers appropriate for 2009. Yet, just when you think it's all new, you get the classical pianist young girl sitting on stage and singing "Out Here on My Own" in a beautiful tunnel through time to the original by Irene Cara.
These are simple stories about the ambitions of talented kids. If you're not in the mood for that, then don't go see this movie. Keep that in mind. But I sure thought it was fun.
It was definitely well cast too, especially for the adult teachers---Bebe Neuwirth, Kelsey Grammer, and Megan Mullally seem as if they were made to be high school techers instead of actors. But the best part was getting introduced to some wonderful new talent, especially 19-year-old Kay Panabaker as Jennie. This is a young woman you will see many times in the future as she matures (which seems to do during the course of the movie itself---awesome). I would also be shocked not to see Kherington Payne several times in the future, although she may have to wade through a bunch of campy horror movies as the bitchy blonde.
Such are the dues that have to be paid, if you want your name to be remembered.
The downside is that as a second-house it changes its listings very slowly, much slower than, say, the West Boylston Cinema in Massachusetts or the Regal in Hookset, New Hampshire, which I had frequented last winter. The Cinema Saver 6 seems to hook into money-making movies and keeps them there forever. For example, when I got back to town a couple months ago, even though I was behind in my moviegoing, I had seen all the ones showing at the Cinema Saver 6. I wondered when I'd get a chance to go back there.
Thankfully I didn't have to wait long, as Fame, which I hadn't yet got around to seeing, hopped over from the first-run multiplexes into the Cinema Saver last week. Perfect! As it happened, they kept Fame around for only a week, so once I saw from the advance listings that it was leaving, it went straight to the top of my list last Wednesday evening.
When I walked in the door of CS6, I almost burst out laughing because I was confronted with a situation that seemed to happen every time I went to the place last year. Specifically there was a young couple, in high school or college, standing side-by-side, about six feet away from the ticket counter, staring up at the marquee listings, trying to figure out what they were going to see. It's as people go out on dates without any idea of what they are going to see there. So they stand there, wishy-washy, not quite in line, but not quite allowing enough room to make it clear that they aren't line. The girl is usually looking at the guy as if to say, "please make a decision," while the guy mumbles, "uh, uh, uh" and keeps demanding a synopsis of each movie from the person behind the counter.
From previous experience, I've learned that this can literally go on for ten minutes of mumbling and feet shifting, and that the thing to do is to make eye contact with the ticket seller, who is usually quite relieve to wave me right up to the counter so I can buy a ticket.
This is exactly what took place, but before I skirted the wishy-washy couple, I heard the young man ask about Fame. What's that? "It's a remake of a movie from the Eighties," said the young woman behind the counter. She was no more than seventeen years old. "I've heard it isn't that good."
Well, that's sure a ringing endorsement. I paid my three bucks and took my seat inside the large auditorium (no stadium seats, very conentional), with about seven other people, all of them high school or college age.
As I waited for the movie to start, I realized that I was going to spend a lot of emotional energy trying to figure why the hell they remade this movie. It was one of those titles that when you heard that a remake coming out, you probably said "Huh? Why?" But it has indeed been twenty-nine years! If the original Fame had been a remake of a movie from 1951, would anyone have cared? Of course not. But such musings only serve to illustrate that 2009 is culturally closer to 1980, than 1980 is to 1951, no matter the exact number of years.
As I sat thorugh the trailers it occurred to me, in somewhat cyncial fashion, that this entire remake was a cheap attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the High School Musical series from Disney. Hey, we can make some mone off this trend if we resurrect the old movie that the kids don't even know about!
It also occurred to me, as the opening credits rolled, that it had been so long since I saw the original that I would have little ability to compare the two movies, beyond vague recollections. This was probably a good thing, I realized, because it would force me to evaluate the movie on its own terms.
But something started to happen, about ten minutes into the film---against all my cynicism and suspicion, I started to like it.
One thing to mention is that I'm actually a very impatient and fidgetty movie goer. You'd think, with all the movies I go to, that I would enjoy going to movies, but in a lot of cases, I feel like I"m just waiting for the movie to be over. It's rare when a movie actually makes me forget the clock entirely, and where I sink into the world of the story in a way that relaxes me and takes me outside myself, the way movies used to be when I was a kid. It's very rare, in fact.
For whatever reason, perhaps because my expectations had been so low, this is what happened during Fame. I began to relax and really enjoy watching this movie. I began to savor the experience of being there and seeing it in the theater.
It was both the same movie as 1980, yet a completely different movie. Of course it deserved an update! What the hell was I thinking? Perhaps a different title woudl have been better---Fame Revisted? Somehow this movie just hadn't connected with audiences, but it was surely connecting with me.
I loved the stories of the kids, and the way it was told, using stylistic updates that were in harmony with the original. The freshman kids were both the same as the ones from 1980 (the year I started high school, as it happens), yet with the characteristics of the millennials as well. It was exactly the way it should have been.
The music is updated of course, with hip hop numbers appropriate for 2009. Yet, just when you think it's all new, you get the classical pianist young girl sitting on stage and singing "Out Here on My Own" in a beautiful tunnel through time to the original by Irene Cara.
These are simple stories about the ambitions of talented kids. If you're not in the mood for that, then don't go see this movie. Keep that in mind. But I sure thought it was fun.
It was definitely well cast too, especially for the adult teachers---Bebe Neuwirth, Kelsey Grammer, and Megan Mullally seem as if they were made to be high school techers instead of actors. But the best part was getting introduced to some wonderful new talent, especially 19-year-old Kay Panabaker as Jennie. This is a young woman you will see many times in the future as she matures (which seems to do during the course of the movie itself---awesome). I would also be shocked not to see Kherington Payne several times in the future, although she may have to wade through a bunch of campy horror movies as the bitchy blonde.
Such are the dues that have to be paid, if you want your name to be remembered.
Bright Star
One of the benefits of coming back to Fort Collins was getting to hang out with my friends Agnes and Thor. I called Agnes a few days after I got back, and she suggested we get together for dinner. Actually it was my birthday dinner officially, and I suggested we go out to the same old local steak house that we often go to. It was great to see them again after a year, and to see Thor looking good a year after his bone marrow transplant.
We talked about politics in the car, but we switched to movies once we got in the restaurant. It's a subject we all like to talk about. In fact, it was Thor more than anyone else who is responsible for the fact that I am seeing all these movies and writing this blog.
I mentioned how even though it was October, I had no idea what movies were supposed to be the ones that were going to be the Oscar favorites. At this time last year, I could tell from the trailers, for example that Frost/Nixon, Benjamin Button, The Reader, and others were primed for Oscar contention. I have having a much harder time this year.
Agnes mentioned, to my surprise, that she thought Abbie Cornish was probably going to get an Oscar nomination for Bright Star, a movie that none of us had yet seen. Last year I loved Cornish in Stop-Loss, but Agnes suggested that because Cornish has stolen Reese Witherspoon's boyfriend, and because Witherspoon is beloved by the Hollywood community, that Cornish was on the permanent no-go list for the Academy. But now Agnes thought that Cornish was probably a good bet for a nomination. Time changes everything. Besides, it does indeed seem like a slim year.
As it happened, I got a chance to evaluate the movie and Cornish's performance a few days later when I went to see Bright Star at the Lyric Cafe Cinema in downtown Fort Collins. The Lyric is Fort Collins' local arthouse. It opened up a few years ago in an old dry cleaners on the edge of Old Town. It's sort of rustic experience in movie-going, but I missed it when I was on the road.
I was the only person in the small auditorim for the matinee showing on a weekday afternoon. I sprawled out on one of the old sofas in the front of the seats to enjoy the show.
I had high hopes for the movie, a period drama directed by Jane Campion and set in the "Jane Austen era" about a love affair between the poet John Keats and a young neighbor (Frances, played by Cornish). But after about twenty minutes, I began to feel severely let down, a feeling that stayed with me for the rest of the movie.
The thing that really struck me was how slow-moving the story is. It's been a long time since I've seen a Camion movie, so I can't remember if this is her usual style, but it felt like much of the screen time was directed to setting the period mood and feeling, instead of advancing the story.
I kept waiting for the story to really take off, but it never really did. I could write the entire plot in a small paragraph (which I won't). This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I couldn't escape the lugubrious feeling of the narrative. In my case, it kept from really understanding the characters and their motivations, and caring about them.
Even though it's a movie about John Keats, I felt like I learned very little about him by the end of the movie. It was as if there was an important subplot that was entirely missing from the story.
That's not to say there weren't good parts about the film. Certainly Cornish's performance was one of them. She does everything she's supposed to, and this movie only deepened my appreciation for her as one of the best unknown actresses working today.
But frankly without her performance, this would have been a dreadfully boring movie. The other interesting part was the Scottish-accented rants of Paul Schneider as Charles Brown, Keats' poet collaborator and friend. Brown serves as an antagonist to Frances' interest in Keats, although I never could really figure out what his motivations were. His words and actions seemed just to come out of the blue for me. Or are we just supposed to assume now that every male friend in a movie is secretly in love with the male protagonist in a repressed homosexual fashion? God, I hope that's not what it has come to.
But like I said, it's really Cornish that makes this movie interesting. I'd be shocked if she won the Oscar for this, just because it's not that big of a movie, but I certainly won't be surprised if she gets a nomination. In fact, I think she'd be cheated if she doesn't get one.
Agnes, I think you pegged this one right.
We talked about politics in the car, but we switched to movies once we got in the restaurant. It's a subject we all like to talk about. In fact, it was Thor more than anyone else who is responsible for the fact that I am seeing all these movies and writing this blog.
I mentioned how even though it was October, I had no idea what movies were supposed to be the ones that were going to be the Oscar favorites. At this time last year, I could tell from the trailers, for example that Frost/Nixon, Benjamin Button, The Reader, and others were primed for Oscar contention. I have having a much harder time this year.
Agnes mentioned, to my surprise, that she thought Abbie Cornish was probably going to get an Oscar nomination for Bright Star, a movie that none of us had yet seen. Last year I loved Cornish in Stop-Loss, but Agnes suggested that because Cornish has stolen Reese Witherspoon's boyfriend, and because Witherspoon is beloved by the Hollywood community, that Cornish was on the permanent no-go list for the Academy. But now Agnes thought that Cornish was probably a good bet for a nomination. Time changes everything. Besides, it does indeed seem like a slim year.
As it happened, I got a chance to evaluate the movie and Cornish's performance a few days later when I went to see Bright Star at the Lyric Cafe Cinema in downtown Fort Collins. The Lyric is Fort Collins' local arthouse. It opened up a few years ago in an old dry cleaners on the edge of Old Town. It's sort of rustic experience in movie-going, but I missed it when I was on the road.
I was the only person in the small auditorim for the matinee showing on a weekday afternoon. I sprawled out on one of the old sofas in the front of the seats to enjoy the show.
I had high hopes for the movie, a period drama directed by Jane Campion and set in the "Jane Austen era" about a love affair between the poet John Keats and a young neighbor (Frances, played by Cornish). But after about twenty minutes, I began to feel severely let down, a feeling that stayed with me for the rest of the movie.
The thing that really struck me was how slow-moving the story is. It's been a long time since I've seen a Camion movie, so I can't remember if this is her usual style, but it felt like much of the screen time was directed to setting the period mood and feeling, instead of advancing the story.
I kept waiting for the story to really take off, but it never really did. I could write the entire plot in a small paragraph (which I won't). This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I couldn't escape the lugubrious feeling of the narrative. In my case, it kept from really understanding the characters and their motivations, and caring about them.
Even though it's a movie about John Keats, I felt like I learned very little about him by the end of the movie. It was as if there was an important subplot that was entirely missing from the story.
That's not to say there weren't good parts about the film. Certainly Cornish's performance was one of them. She does everything she's supposed to, and this movie only deepened my appreciation for her as one of the best unknown actresses working today.
But frankly without her performance, this would have been a dreadfully boring movie. The other interesting part was the Scottish-accented rants of Paul Schneider as Charles Brown, Keats' poet collaborator and friend. Brown serves as an antagonist to Frances' interest in Keats, although I never could really figure out what his motivations were. His words and actions seemed just to come out of the blue for me. Or are we just supposed to assume now that every male friend in a movie is secretly in love with the male protagonist in a repressed homosexual fashion? God, I hope that's not what it has come to.
But like I said, it's really Cornish that makes this movie interesting. I'd be shocked if she won the Oscar for this, just because it's not that big of a movie, but I certainly won't be surprised if she gets a nomination. In fact, I think she'd be cheated if she doesn't get one.
Agnes, I think you pegged this one right.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Zombieland
Before I got back to Fort Collins, I saw on Facebook that one of the members of my high school class, whom I hadn't seen in a long time and with whom I'd worked on the school newspaper many years ago, had posted a message about an informal "reunion" of our class at a local bar following this year's homecoming football game.
As I approached town, I thought about going, but I didn't want to reply and commit myself, because I wasn't sure I'd have the gumption, given that none of my still-in-contact friends would be there. I hadn't posted a Facebook update since Memphis (where I stayed with a high school classmate and wrote about being in a bar trivia contest as the "Lambkins," our school mascot). So I knew I'd have the element of surprise to anyone there, which would be fun.
As it turned out, I did indeed muster the gumption and decided to go. There were about two dozen people there, sitting around a long table at the restaurant. I recognized about six people, and talked to them all night. I actually spent much of the time talking to the newspaper advisor, whose son I had babysat way back when, and to a couple people I hadn't seen in about, oh, 25 years. It was fun. One person, a junior high school friend named Mark, apologized for not coming to my aid in a fist fight in ninth grade. The shame of that had weighed on him all this time. It was nice to give him absolution from that.
At the end of the evening, we had had so much fun that a small group of us decided to continue the festivities by seeing a movie the following Sunday. Through Facebook, we arranged to see Zombieland at the local Cinemark in the mid afternoon. It was convenient time for most folk, because the Broncos were playing on Monday night that week.
I had told them about my hobby of seeing all the movies that come to theaters. Suddenly I was the "guy who sees all the movies." I told them it was a rare treat to get to see a movie with a group of folks, and that often I am the only person in the theater. Indeed, it was a treat, so much so that at the Cinemark, I splurged and bought a large popcorn and drink combo. Being on a budget, I rarely buy concessions, unless I'm at an indie theater or a drive-in.
So there I was, wedged between my ninth grade friend Mark and my newspaper photographer comrade John, who in tenth grade got me drunk the first time in my life before a Poco concert. Life has interesting turns.
Everyone was excited to see the movie, especially John, who likes the zombie movie genre. The outing had been his idea in the first place. I was expecting to like it, and I wasn't disappointed. It was a fun way to spend a Sunday afternoon, all in all.
One of the things that occurred to me while watching it was how advanced the zombie genre is. There have been so many zombie movies, and the canon is well advanced. Because of this, we don't need an elaborate introduction on how the zombie world has come about. We assume there has been some sort of biological event, a bioweapon perhaps, and that the world has turned into zombies, leaving a minority of remaining humans. We need only a cursory explanation now, and as a comedy (which it is), Zombieland takes advantage of this accumulated canon to a high degree.
Instead of focusing on the zombies themselves, therefore, the real story of the movie revolves around more "everyday" themes of Postmodernity, in this case the breakdown of the family, and the attempt to recreate it.
That is, the emotional thread of the narrative is basically: in the Postmodern world, the connections between human beings has broken down to such a degree that our experience is one of between preyed upon by almost everyone one in meet in some sort of reactive, brainded fashion. True connections and humanity is rare, and when you find it, you have to nurture it and preserve it. In fact, Zombieland is fairly explicit about this message, and that it is a movie about the ad hoc recreation of the family structure.
In most zombie movies, the essential narrative tension for the human characters is easy and straightforward: survive until the end of the film. Overlaid upon this is the hero's quest of the protagonists, which is usually more personal. In this case, the hero is Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg, appearing in his second amusement park movie of the year, after Adventureland).
Following the age-old storyline going back to Gilgamesh, Columbus meets the "rough-hewn" version of himself, in the form of hard-edged Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson). Where Columbus is the introspective thinker, who keeps a running tally of the "rules" of survival in Zombieland, Tallahasseee is the man of action who shoots first is quick on the trigger.
Besides survial, the quest for the virginal Columbus will, after he meets the Wichita (Emma Stone), of course become true love. Following the Postmodern female archetype of comedy, Wichita is cynical and distrustful of all men. One of the best things about this movie was how well it could take those Postmodern character themes and make them seemlessly part of the survival world of the Zombieland it created. That is, Wichita isn't just an ordinary bitch, but one whose bitchness came partly from evading creatures trying to kill her and eat her flesh. That makes her inherently more sympathetic to us, and more plausible as a love interest for Columbus.
Columbus, on the other hand, is the typical hapless Postmodern Weak Boy who has no idea of how to get over the "fear barrier" of talking to a woman who interests him. To conquer this barrier, he needs the advice and prodding of the upfront and experienced Tallahassee, who becomes a father figure to him. He also needs to become a true "action hero" in the conventional sense by an act of boldness which shows his true feelings for Wichita in unambiguous fashion. In a world in which the characters are menaced by flesh-eating monsters, this "save the girl" situation is not hard to arrange.
So here we have arrived at the logical conclusion of Postmodernity---a world in which everyone else is out to eat our entrails, and where we spent our emotional and physical energy trying to fight off this assault on our being. To survive, we must overcome our Postmodern cynicism and training, and somehow muster up the inner traits of being a classical hero or heroine. Why wouldn't I like this movie? Of course, I did like it.
But the style of slapstick comedy (even more so that, say, Shawn of the Dead), signifies that the zombie genre as a whole is in a very mature state. There are probably scores of low-budget zombie movies being made right now across the country. How much longer will this metaphor be of interest to us? In any case, this phenomenon surely signifies that our culture itself is in an advanced state of decay. The end really has arrived, in some sense. But what's next?
I have to say it was sure fun talking about these things after the movie, when our small group went over to a nearby pizza joint to bounce our opinions off each other. Like I said, it's rare that I get to do this, and it was surely a pleasure. John suggested we get together in the near future at his place for a showing of the remake of Dawn of the Dead. I'm looking forward to it.
As I approached town, I thought about going, but I didn't want to reply and commit myself, because I wasn't sure I'd have the gumption, given that none of my still-in-contact friends would be there. I hadn't posted a Facebook update since Memphis (where I stayed with a high school classmate and wrote about being in a bar trivia contest as the "Lambkins," our school mascot). So I knew I'd have the element of surprise to anyone there, which would be fun.
As it turned out, I did indeed muster the gumption and decided to go. There were about two dozen people there, sitting around a long table at the restaurant. I recognized about six people, and talked to them all night. I actually spent much of the time talking to the newspaper advisor, whose son I had babysat way back when, and to a couple people I hadn't seen in about, oh, 25 years. It was fun. One person, a junior high school friend named Mark, apologized for not coming to my aid in a fist fight in ninth grade. The shame of that had weighed on him all this time. It was nice to give him absolution from that.
At the end of the evening, we had had so much fun that a small group of us decided to continue the festivities by seeing a movie the following Sunday. Through Facebook, we arranged to see Zombieland at the local Cinemark in the mid afternoon. It was convenient time for most folk, because the Broncos were playing on Monday night that week.
I had told them about my hobby of seeing all the movies that come to theaters. Suddenly I was the "guy who sees all the movies." I told them it was a rare treat to get to see a movie with a group of folks, and that often I am the only person in the theater. Indeed, it was a treat, so much so that at the Cinemark, I splurged and bought a large popcorn and drink combo. Being on a budget, I rarely buy concessions, unless I'm at an indie theater or a drive-in.
So there I was, wedged between my ninth grade friend Mark and my newspaper photographer comrade John, who in tenth grade got me drunk the first time in my life before a Poco concert. Life has interesting turns.
Everyone was excited to see the movie, especially John, who likes the zombie movie genre. The outing had been his idea in the first place. I was expecting to like it, and I wasn't disappointed. It was a fun way to spend a Sunday afternoon, all in all.
One of the things that occurred to me while watching it was how advanced the zombie genre is. There have been so many zombie movies, and the canon is well advanced. Because of this, we don't need an elaborate introduction on how the zombie world has come about. We assume there has been some sort of biological event, a bioweapon perhaps, and that the world has turned into zombies, leaving a minority of remaining humans. We need only a cursory explanation now, and as a comedy (which it is), Zombieland takes advantage of this accumulated canon to a high degree.
Instead of focusing on the zombies themselves, therefore, the real story of the movie revolves around more "everyday" themes of Postmodernity, in this case the breakdown of the family, and the attempt to recreate it.
That is, the emotional thread of the narrative is basically: in the Postmodern world, the connections between human beings has broken down to such a degree that our experience is one of between preyed upon by almost everyone one in meet in some sort of reactive, brainded fashion. True connections and humanity is rare, and when you find it, you have to nurture it and preserve it. In fact, Zombieland is fairly explicit about this message, and that it is a movie about the ad hoc recreation of the family structure.
In most zombie movies, the essential narrative tension for the human characters is easy and straightforward: survive until the end of the film. Overlaid upon this is the hero's quest of the protagonists, which is usually more personal. In this case, the hero is Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg, appearing in his second amusement park movie of the year, after Adventureland).
Following the age-old storyline going back to Gilgamesh, Columbus meets the "rough-hewn" version of himself, in the form of hard-edged Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson). Where Columbus is the introspective thinker, who keeps a running tally of the "rules" of survival in Zombieland, Tallahasseee is the man of action who shoots first is quick on the trigger.
Besides survial, the quest for the virginal Columbus will, after he meets the Wichita (Emma Stone), of course become true love. Following the Postmodern female archetype of comedy, Wichita is cynical and distrustful of all men. One of the best things about this movie was how well it could take those Postmodern character themes and make them seemlessly part of the survival world of the Zombieland it created. That is, Wichita isn't just an ordinary bitch, but one whose bitchness came partly from evading creatures trying to kill her and eat her flesh. That makes her inherently more sympathetic to us, and more plausible as a love interest for Columbus.
Columbus, on the other hand, is the typical hapless Postmodern Weak Boy who has no idea of how to get over the "fear barrier" of talking to a woman who interests him. To conquer this barrier, he needs the advice and prodding of the upfront and experienced Tallahassee, who becomes a father figure to him. He also needs to become a true "action hero" in the conventional sense by an act of boldness which shows his true feelings for Wichita in unambiguous fashion. In a world in which the characters are menaced by flesh-eating monsters, this "save the girl" situation is not hard to arrange.
So here we have arrived at the logical conclusion of Postmodernity---a world in which everyone else is out to eat our entrails, and where we spent our emotional and physical energy trying to fight off this assault on our being. To survive, we must overcome our Postmodern cynicism and training, and somehow muster up the inner traits of being a classical hero or heroine. Why wouldn't I like this movie? Of course, I did like it.
But the style of slapstick comedy (even more so that, say, Shawn of the Dead), signifies that the zombie genre as a whole is in a very mature state. There are probably scores of low-budget zombie movies being made right now across the country. How much longer will this metaphor be of interest to us? In any case, this phenomenon surely signifies that our culture itself is in an advanced state of decay. The end really has arrived, in some sense. But what's next?
I have to say it was sure fun talking about these things after the movie, when our small group went over to a nearby pizza joint to bounce our opinions off each other. Like I said, it's rare that I get to do this, and it was surely a pleasure. John suggested we get together in the near future at his place for a showing of the remake of Dawn of the Dead. I'm looking forward to it.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Free Style
Cripes, I forgot about this one.
Usually I try to do my write-ups in order of my viewing of the movies, but this time I screwed up. I saw this at the Cinemark in Fort Collins the day before my trip down to Westminster. Somehow it just sort of slipped my mind.
I hadn't wanted to see it that day, but I noticed that it was getting flushed out of the theaters about only a single week. I don't think I've ever seen that. Even Delgo, which set a record last December for the lowest opening weekend take ever for a wide release movie, hung around the Leominster multiplex for two weeks. But Free Style was a true one-and-done movie, at least in Colorado (later I found out that it stayed in Brighton a second week---but still...)
In case you didn't know, this is the story of Cale, played by Corbin Bleu, a teenage amateur motorcross rider in the Pacific Northwest who dreams of making it on the pro circuit. He's young and hungry, with a lot of heart. The odds are against him. We are supposed to root for him as he faces his obstacles---including poverty, a job that takes up all his time, a rival who is a bully, a faithless girlfriend, and simple bad luck.
It has the makings of a typical "underdog triumphs" kind story, set on the dirt track of motocross. Why did it do so poorly.
Well, it's just not a very good movie. In this case, it's not the story, which isn't that bad, even if its not very original (I can forgive unoriginality, so long as the narrative works).
What's horrible about this movie is the directing and the editing. It just went horribly, horribly wrong. As the movie started, I noticed that it seemed to be told in the hurried manner of a montage---many half-scenes piled on top of each other, the way the story of movie is sometimes accelerated in the third act of a conventional drama. But this wasn't in the third act. It was in the first act. It felt all herky-jerky, and made me feel like I was watching a trailer for the movie, instead of the movie itself.
By contrast, the actual motocross action scenes were often done in slow-motion. Should have been the other way around---the storytelling needs to come first. The action sequences, unless they are advancing the story itself, are just ornamentation.
I just now went and looked up the director William Dear on imdb. I didn't recognize any of his other titles, except for The Perfect Game, a little league baseball movie which was supposed to be released in the summer of 2008 (when I first saw trailers for it), but which still hasn't been released. A bad sign, to be sure.
Like I said, it wasn't all bad. I was most contented when this movie was sticking to the tried and true formula, for example in how the hero rejects his faithless girlfriend (she not only doesn't believe in his life's purpose, but then cheats on him) in favor of a new one, who is his true love (at least in narrative terms). The fact that she is so stereotypically Hispanic is a little bit of a canard, but I didn't mind it that much.
The movie did have its moments. CorbinBleu (Cale) is black, as is his younger sister in the movie. Their mother is played by Penelope Anne Miller. Just as I'm trying to figure that out, there is a scene in which the baby sister asks Cale, "Are we black or white?"
When a movie comes right out in the open and faces an issue like that, early on in the story, it gets a little gold star from me. Too bad this movie was returned by the choppy style in which is was made. It could have been a quiet little convention underdog story, with just enough original concept to make it worthwhile seeing. In that case, it might have even stayed around for a second week.
Usually I try to do my write-ups in order of my viewing of the movies, but this time I screwed up. I saw this at the Cinemark in Fort Collins the day before my trip down to Westminster. Somehow it just sort of slipped my mind.
I hadn't wanted to see it that day, but I noticed that it was getting flushed out of the theaters about only a single week. I don't think I've ever seen that. Even Delgo, which set a record last December for the lowest opening weekend take ever for a wide release movie, hung around the Leominster multiplex for two weeks. But Free Style was a true one-and-done movie, at least in Colorado (later I found out that it stayed in Brighton a second week---but still...)
In case you didn't know, this is the story of Cale, played by Corbin Bleu, a teenage amateur motorcross rider in the Pacific Northwest who dreams of making it on the pro circuit. He's young and hungry, with a lot of heart. The odds are against him. We are supposed to root for him as he faces his obstacles---including poverty, a job that takes up all his time, a rival who is a bully, a faithless girlfriend, and simple bad luck.
It has the makings of a typical "underdog triumphs" kind story, set on the dirt track of motocross. Why did it do so poorly.
Well, it's just not a very good movie. In this case, it's not the story, which isn't that bad, even if its not very original (I can forgive unoriginality, so long as the narrative works).
What's horrible about this movie is the directing and the editing. It just went horribly, horribly wrong. As the movie started, I noticed that it seemed to be told in the hurried manner of a montage---many half-scenes piled on top of each other, the way the story of movie is sometimes accelerated in the third act of a conventional drama. But this wasn't in the third act. It was in the first act. It felt all herky-jerky, and made me feel like I was watching a trailer for the movie, instead of the movie itself.
By contrast, the actual motocross action scenes were often done in slow-motion. Should have been the other way around---the storytelling needs to come first. The action sequences, unless they are advancing the story itself, are just ornamentation.
I just now went and looked up the director William Dear on imdb. I didn't recognize any of his other titles, except for The Perfect Game, a little league baseball movie which was supposed to be released in the summer of 2008 (when I first saw trailers for it), but which still hasn't been released. A bad sign, to be sure.
Like I said, it wasn't all bad. I was most contented when this movie was sticking to the tried and true formula, for example in how the hero rejects his faithless girlfriend (she not only doesn't believe in his life's purpose, but then cheats on him) in favor of a new one, who is his true love (at least in narrative terms). The fact that she is so stereotypically Hispanic is a little bit of a canard, but I didn't mind it that much.
The movie did have its moments. CorbinBleu (Cale) is black, as is his younger sister in the movie. Their mother is played by Penelope Anne Miller. Just as I'm trying to figure that out, there is a scene in which the baby sister asks Cale, "Are we black or white?"
When a movie comes right out in the open and faces an issue like that, early on in the story, it gets a little gold star from me. Too bad this movie was returned by the choppy style in which is was made. It could have been a quiet little convention underdog story, with just enough original concept to make it worthwhile seeing. In that case, it might have even stayed around for a second week.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
You won't like this movie, trust me. You just won't. That's not to say that I didn't like it. In fact, I did. But you won't. It's just one of those movies.
I didn't know much about Tucker Max, but he turns out to be one of the many seduction gurus who has popped up in recent years to help men understand how to talk to women. I completely understand why this phenomenon has arisen. Max turns out to be one of the more obnoxious members of this group, and he wrote a book about just how awful he is. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is based on the book of the same name.
I had spent the afternoon with my sister and her kids in Westmister, and then went to see this at the AMC multiplex a few miles north. Like the Colorado Mills, it is located inside a recently built lifestyle center. I caught the ten pm show, the last one available before the movie was shipped out.
The plot is very similar to The Hangover, which was a huge hit this summer and is still in some theaters in the area. The Hangover was extremely popular, but I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell will not be popular at all. The official reason is that the latter is too raunchy.
But ironically I found The Hangover to be a lot cruder in its own way, because Beer in Hell actually charts the course of a dynamic character, whereas The Hangover is a typical "bromance" comedy. Because Beer in Hell is about Max, who is open about his attitude towards women, it will come across as mysognist, but I found The Hangover to be much more cruel to women.
But this is because I found the classical elements in Beer in Hell to give it deeper meaning. I know that 99% of audiences want the usual Postmodern rigamarole about sex roles, without having to be challenged with anything novel or out of the ordinary, as Beer in Hell will do.
Throughout much of the movie, I couldn't help thinking of Max as the "evil" version of Ferris Bueller---he forces his friends to play hookie in a big way, for selfish reasons, and causes them a great deal of harm in his quest for self-gratification. But unlike Bueller, Max gets his comeuppance in a big way, and is forced to undergo a transformation based on the revelation he receives from this.
Actually I recently read a movie review ont he web arguing that Ferris Bueller was a classic psycopath, and that Principal Rooney was the real hero of that movie. The author makes a persuasive argument. So perhaps Beer in Hell is the "realistic" version of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, a little grown-up to be sure.
I didn't know much about Tucker Max, but he turns out to be one of the many seduction gurus who has popped up in recent years to help men understand how to talk to women. I completely understand why this phenomenon has arisen. Max turns out to be one of the more obnoxious members of this group, and he wrote a book about just how awful he is. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is based on the book of the same name.
I had spent the afternoon with my sister and her kids in Westmister, and then went to see this at the AMC multiplex a few miles north. Like the Colorado Mills, it is located inside a recently built lifestyle center. I caught the ten pm show, the last one available before the movie was shipped out.
The plot is very similar to The Hangover, which was a huge hit this summer and is still in some theaters in the area. The Hangover was extremely popular, but I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell will not be popular at all. The official reason is that the latter is too raunchy.
But ironically I found The Hangover to be a lot cruder in its own way, because Beer in Hell actually charts the course of a dynamic character, whereas The Hangover is a typical "bromance" comedy. Because Beer in Hell is about Max, who is open about his attitude towards women, it will come across as mysognist, but I found The Hangover to be much more cruel to women.
But this is because I found the classical elements in Beer in Hell to give it deeper meaning. I know that 99% of audiences want the usual Postmodern rigamarole about sex roles, without having to be challenged with anything novel or out of the ordinary, as Beer in Hell will do.
Throughout much of the movie, I couldn't help thinking of Max as the "evil" version of Ferris Bueller---he forces his friends to play hookie in a big way, for selfish reasons, and causes them a great deal of harm in his quest for self-gratification. But unlike Bueller, Max gets his comeuppance in a big way, and is forced to undergo a transformation based on the revelation he receives from this.
Actually I recently read a movie review ont he web arguing that Ferris Bueller was a classic psycopath, and that Principal Rooney was the real hero of that movie. The author makes a persuasive argument. So perhaps Beer in Hell is the "realistic" version of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, a little grown-up to be sure.
Whiteout
Upon arriving back in Colorado, I was way behind on my movieseeing, as I've mentioned. At first I had a real gung-ho mentality about catching up. I made a detailed list of all the movies that I needed to see ASAP, and constructed a battle plan for seeing them in Fort Collins and throughout the Denver metro area.
But what I didn't count on was how tuckered out I'd be from all that travelling, and for the first two weeks, I barely felt like leaving the house much at all. A trip down to Denver suddenly seemed like a major venture.
So I've kept straggling along, playing rear guard action, seeing the movies before they leave. This results is the old familiar Thursday scramble, of trying to see movies on the last day before they get shipped out in those big octagonal metal containers that contain the prints.
At the same time, I wanted to go down to Westminster to see my sister and her kids. They'd come up to Fort Collins on my birthday a few days after I got back, but it seemed like for a sense of completeness, I would need to visit them soon, since my trip westward had begun at their former residence in Groton, Massachusetts. They had left about the same time I had, and had reached Colorado in three days. I had taken two months to get hear. The official end of the this leg of the trip demanded a visit. Besides, I just love my nieces.
So I emailed my sister and arranged for a visit last Thursday that would also serve to cross a few last-day-in-the-theater movies off my list. It would also be the first Denver-area dent in my "Radius Project" to see movies in all the theaters within a 100-mile radius of Fort Collins.
I had it all planned it, and thankfully it worked well. I left at 11 am in time to drive down I-25 to just north of Denver, then headed west on the freeway towards the foothills, exiting at the Colorado Mills Mall just on the edge of Golden. My goal was the UA Colorado Mills 12 there.
Actually there are two UA cineplexes there, one right across the road from each other, and I went to the wrong one first, because it wasn't very well marked. I went inside to get directions to the right one.
I turns out the Colorado Mills Mall is a brand new "lifestyle center" kind of place. It's a mall with a central street, like a Main Street, that is narrow with parallel parking, in imitation of a real downtown. The UA multiplex, shining and new, was on the "Main Street" of the Mall. I was both impressed and repulsed. I like the effort of these places, but Jane Jacobs long ago pointed out that real downtowns require buildings with a mix of ages and rents, in order to incubate the kind of economic activity that feels right and real. But like I said, I appreciate the effort. In 100 years, it might be a really cool place to hang out. You have to plant seeds for the future, after all. Besides, I was really there to see a movie.
Whiteout had come out in September, but it hadn't stuck around in theaters very long. The Colorado Mills was absolutely the last place in Colorado where it was showing. It was now or never.
From the trailers, I knew the premise: a horror movie set in Antarctica. Or at least I thought I knew the premise. It turns out it was not a horror movie at all, but rather a suspense movie.
Indeed the movie is set at the South Pole. In the opening few minutes, I began to wonder what I was in for, because the South Pole research station is a fantasy that looks absolutely nothing like the real Amundsen-Scott Station. And for good reason. The base depicted in the movie would be more suitable to the tropics than the South Pole. No way such architecture would make sense, with the buildings up on stilts in order to receive the maximum brunt of the cold winds. Yes, it's just a movie, when a movie violates some of the basic common sense ideas of how things are supposed to be built, it starts to lose credibility with me right off the bat.
Yeah, you've got to suspend a bit of credibility to enjoy this at all, to be sure. The most laughable moment occurred in the last act of the story, when a storm is supposedly bearing down on the South Pole, one that will shut down all travel off the base, and thus serves as the necessary "ticking clock" to accelerate the action and increase the tension.
A storm? Sure. No problem. But on the radar screen that keeps popping up, the storm is obviously a freaking hurricane, a tropical storm with a defined eye. It wouldn't have been such a bad error, but they kept showing it over and over. Like I said, you have to let go of some reality in order to enjoy this movie at all.
Actually I thought I was going to like this movie. Despite the absurdities mentioned, I enjoyed how the tension was set up. Why are people being murdered in Antarctica? Kate Beckinsale is a federal agent assigned there (we learn why in flashbacks), and it is her duty to find out whodunnit, even if that means missing the last flight out. That's a pretty good detective premise, all in all. Nice original concept. I was rooting for this movie to succeed.
I was rooting for it all the way up to the climax, when we finally learn the solution to they mystery of why people are being murdered. Of course it involvesa Maguffin in the form of metal cylinders. But what do they contain that people will kill for?
Cripes. It all just fizzles out. The solution was a huge let down, one of the least interesting ways that the story could have been resolved. Looking back, the set up to the solution was barely meaningful at all, foreshadowed briefly in an early scene involving a gift that Beckinsale's boss gives to her. But that was it. It was a such a disappointment. It was almost like "spin the dial and see what resolution to tack on to this." There was nothing that really felt satisfying about the conclusion at all.
At that point, the weight of the previously mentioned absurdities hit home. Why am I bothering to watch this movie? Half way through, I wondered why it had done so poorly. By the end, I knew why.
A couple other things about this movie: first off, there is a medical doctor at the base. When I saw him, I thought, "Wow that looks like a much older version of Tom Skerrit." Turns out that Tom Skerrit just looks really, really old now.
The other thing that really stuck out to me was the inclusion of sneaked-in globalism themes, in the form of predictive programming that is showing us the way towards World Goverment. This took the form of a "United Nations Detective," who enters the scene as a rival to Beckinsale's U.S. Marshall character. Turns out that according to the movie, the UN Detective outranks a federal marshall, at least at the South Pole. I nearly threw up. World goverment, here we come! Just tell me the global carbon taxes I owe to the World Bank, and where I can send the check!
But what I didn't count on was how tuckered out I'd be from all that travelling, and for the first two weeks, I barely felt like leaving the house much at all. A trip down to Denver suddenly seemed like a major venture.
So I've kept straggling along, playing rear guard action, seeing the movies before they leave. This results is the old familiar Thursday scramble, of trying to see movies on the last day before they get shipped out in those big octagonal metal containers that contain the prints.
At the same time, I wanted to go down to Westminster to see my sister and her kids. They'd come up to Fort Collins on my birthday a few days after I got back, but it seemed like for a sense of completeness, I would need to visit them soon, since my trip westward had begun at their former residence in Groton, Massachusetts. They had left about the same time I had, and had reached Colorado in three days. I had taken two months to get hear. The official end of the this leg of the trip demanded a visit. Besides, I just love my nieces.
So I emailed my sister and arranged for a visit last Thursday that would also serve to cross a few last-day-in-the-theater movies off my list. It would also be the first Denver-area dent in my "Radius Project" to see movies in all the theaters within a 100-mile radius of Fort Collins.
I had it all planned it, and thankfully it worked well. I left at 11 am in time to drive down I-25 to just north of Denver, then headed west on the freeway towards the foothills, exiting at the Colorado Mills Mall just on the edge of Golden. My goal was the UA Colorado Mills 12 there.
Actually there are two UA cineplexes there, one right across the road from each other, and I went to the wrong one first, because it wasn't very well marked. I went inside to get directions to the right one.
I turns out the Colorado Mills Mall is a brand new "lifestyle center" kind of place. It's a mall with a central street, like a Main Street, that is narrow with parallel parking, in imitation of a real downtown. The UA multiplex, shining and new, was on the "Main Street" of the Mall. I was both impressed and repulsed. I like the effort of these places, but Jane Jacobs long ago pointed out that real downtowns require buildings with a mix of ages and rents, in order to incubate the kind of economic activity that feels right and real. But like I said, I appreciate the effort. In 100 years, it might be a really cool place to hang out. You have to plant seeds for the future, after all. Besides, I was really there to see a movie.
Whiteout had come out in September, but it hadn't stuck around in theaters very long. The Colorado Mills was absolutely the last place in Colorado where it was showing. It was now or never.
From the trailers, I knew the premise: a horror movie set in Antarctica. Or at least I thought I knew the premise. It turns out it was not a horror movie at all, but rather a suspense movie.
Indeed the movie is set at the South Pole. In the opening few minutes, I began to wonder what I was in for, because the South Pole research station is a fantasy that looks absolutely nothing like the real Amundsen-Scott Station. And for good reason. The base depicted in the movie would be more suitable to the tropics than the South Pole. No way such architecture would make sense, with the buildings up on stilts in order to receive the maximum brunt of the cold winds. Yes, it's just a movie, when a movie violates some of the basic common sense ideas of how things are supposed to be built, it starts to lose credibility with me right off the bat.
Yeah, you've got to suspend a bit of credibility to enjoy this at all, to be sure. The most laughable moment occurred in the last act of the story, when a storm is supposedly bearing down on the South Pole, one that will shut down all travel off the base, and thus serves as the necessary "ticking clock" to accelerate the action and increase the tension.
A storm? Sure. No problem. But on the radar screen that keeps popping up, the storm is obviously a freaking hurricane, a tropical storm with a defined eye. It wouldn't have been such a bad error, but they kept showing it over and over. Like I said, you have to let go of some reality in order to enjoy this movie at all.
Actually I thought I was going to like this movie. Despite the absurdities mentioned, I enjoyed how the tension was set up. Why are people being murdered in Antarctica? Kate Beckinsale is a federal agent assigned there (we learn why in flashbacks), and it is her duty to find out whodunnit, even if that means missing the last flight out. That's a pretty good detective premise, all in all. Nice original concept. I was rooting for this movie to succeed.
I was rooting for it all the way up to the climax, when we finally learn the solution to they mystery of why people are being murdered. Of course it involvesa Maguffin in the form of metal cylinders. But what do they contain that people will kill for?
Cripes. It all just fizzles out. The solution was a huge let down, one of the least interesting ways that the story could have been resolved. Looking back, the set up to the solution was barely meaningful at all, foreshadowed briefly in an early scene involving a gift that Beckinsale's boss gives to her. But that was it. It was a such a disappointment. It was almost like "spin the dial and see what resolution to tack on to this." There was nothing that really felt satisfying about the conclusion at all.
At that point, the weight of the previously mentioned absurdities hit home. Why am I bothering to watch this movie? Half way through, I wondered why it had done so poorly. By the end, I knew why.
A couple other things about this movie: first off, there is a medical doctor at the base. When I saw him, I thought, "Wow that looks like a much older version of Tom Skerrit." Turns out that Tom Skerrit just looks really, really old now.
The other thing that really stuck out to me was the inclusion of sneaked-in globalism themes, in the form of predictive programming that is showing us the way towards World Goverment. This took the form of a "United Nations Detective," who enters the scene as a rival to Beckinsale's U.S. Marshall character. Turns out that according to the movie, the UN Detective outranks a federal marshall, at least at the South Pole. I nearly threw up. World goverment, here we come! Just tell me the global carbon taxes I owe to the World Bank, and where I can send the check!
World's Greatest Dad
It wasn't long before I was back at the Kress Lounge. In fact, it was only about an hour. After Paper Hearts, I walked around downtown Greeley bundled up in winter garb for about an hour. I have spent so little time in Greeley over the years, that it was actually sort of fun to see some of it, even in chilly weather.
A few mintues before seven p.m., I back in the Kress for the early evening showing of World's Greatest Dad, another film that had already shown at the Lyric in Fort Collins. I hadn't previously seen a trailer of this movie, even though it stars Robin Williams. I had confused it with Old Dogs, which is a mainstream Hollywood movie coming out next month, and only realized that there were not the same movie when they showed a trailer for it before Paper Hearts.
In the afternoon, the Kress sells its tickets right from its bar. By the evening, however, they were selling tickets from a proper concession booth. I got to meet the owner of the Kress, and a couple other staff members. I felt like I had a cadre of new friends.
World's Greatest Dad is made by Bobcat Goldthwaite and is billed as a black comedy. That is surely is. It's very black---but actually not at first. For the first half of the movie, I was wondering what was so dark about it. It seemed like a free-flowing raunchy comedy, overall. But then comes an incredible plot twist, one that is very dark, and not funny at all. When the comedy resumes in the last act of the narrative, it is on a whole different level of humor, a grostesque one to be sure.
There is a nice classical climax. The main character has chosen to engage in grand public deception, and has benefited from it. The classical rules dictate that he must be exposed, and that specifically, if he is honorable, he must expose himself with a public confession.
We know this must happen, for emotional resolution to the story. The question is: what we will the consequence of this. The story pulls no punches in this regard, and keeps up its level of blackness right on through to the denouement. I liked this part of the movie. The subplots are all tied up.
Black, to be sure, but good storytelling that speaks to our time. A second good start for me and the Kress.
A few mintues before seven p.m., I back in the Kress for the early evening showing of World's Greatest Dad, another film that had already shown at the Lyric in Fort Collins. I hadn't previously seen a trailer of this movie, even though it stars Robin Williams. I had confused it with Old Dogs, which is a mainstream Hollywood movie coming out next month, and only realized that there were not the same movie when they showed a trailer for it before Paper Hearts.
In the afternoon, the Kress sells its tickets right from its bar. By the evening, however, they were selling tickets from a proper concession booth. I got to meet the owner of the Kress, and a couple other staff members. I felt like I had a cadre of new friends.
World's Greatest Dad is made by Bobcat Goldthwaite and is billed as a black comedy. That is surely is. It's very black---but actually not at first. For the first half of the movie, I was wondering what was so dark about it. It seemed like a free-flowing raunchy comedy, overall. But then comes an incredible plot twist, one that is very dark, and not funny at all. When the comedy resumes in the last act of the narrative, it is on a whole different level of humor, a grostesque one to be sure.
There is a nice classical climax. The main character has chosen to engage in grand public deception, and has benefited from it. The classical rules dictate that he must be exposed, and that specifically, if he is honorable, he must expose himself with a public confession.
We know this must happen, for emotional resolution to the story. The question is: what we will the consequence of this. The story pulls no punches in this regard, and keeps up its level of blackness right on through to the denouement. I liked this part of the movie. The subplots are all tied up.
Black, to be sure, but good storytelling that speaks to our time. A second good start for me and the Kress.
Paper Heart
A few weeks before I got back to Colorado, I loaded up the Google movie showtimes tool. In addition to the familiar cineplexes I knew from a year before, there was a new one: the Kress Lounge cinema. It was actually over in nearby Greeley, about a half hour drive away. In short order, from ithe listings, I could see that it was a small independent cinema, showing basically the same small indie films at the Lyric Cinema in Fort Collins. In fact they tended to swap movies over the course of the weeks.
I was really excited that I had a chance to go to the Kress quite early after I got back to Larimer County. In fact, I was forcded to, as several indie films had left the Lyric already and had migrated over to Greeley.
It was Wednesday---very chilly, after the earliest snowfall ever in northern Colorado. It felt like winter already. I headed over to Greeley all bundled up. The wind comes sweeping down off the High Plains there.
After killing some time in an independent bookstore that had wi-fi, I headed over to the Kress in the late afternoon to buy a ticket for Paper Heart.
I was blown away by what I found. I had expected the Kress to be much like the Lyric, which is located in a refurbished dry cleaners on East Mountain, and is a bit, well, rustic, as a moviegoing experience.
The Kress was totally different. It was new, a nice modern restaurant with a beautiful bar, where I took a seat and watched the Rockies beat the Phillies in a playoff game with the sound turned down.
I bought a hot green tea and warmed up while talking with the bartender. I learned that the Kress had opened up about two weeks after I had left Colorado a year ago. It was just about to celebrate its first anniversary.
The auditorum was small and comfortable, with stadium seating, as well as brand new lounge chairs. I took a seat in one. There were large windows allowing sunlight to stream in. A woman came just before showtime to close them with a large hanger. Before the trailers started I eavesdropped on a pair of young women a few seats away. They were talking about their troubled love lives. It seemed like an appropriate entree to the movie I was about to see.
The movie itself was brilliant. Let me confess right off the bat that I fell for the gag, in that for almost the entire movie, I thought it was a real documentary. Only at the end, with the credits rolling, and I learned that an actor had played the real director of the movie, did I realize that I had been had---it was in fact entirely written and scripted. Brilliant! I love being fooled by that. I'm fairly easy to dupe with narrative, because I like to sink into the world of movie stories, so perhaps that isn't saying much. In any case it all worked for me (actually I began to suspect that it was scripted during the all-too-uncanny fortune teller scene).
I'm now a big fan of Charlyne Yi, who made this movie, and stars in it. She really pulls it off, as the subject of her own mockumentary, looking for the nature of romantic love, which she asserts she has never experienced.
It's not a mindblowing masterpiece, to be sure. There's not any real knockout punch that makes me think: "this is great, everyone must see it." It's just a quiet, fun little movie that was different enough to keep me entertained for a couple hours. Lately, that's good enough for me.
As I left the auditorium and walked past the bar, the barkeep asked me what I thought of it. I gave a mild thumbs up. Good enough for me, I said. And a good introduction to the Kress.
I was really excited that I had a chance to go to the Kress quite early after I got back to Larimer County. In fact, I was forcded to, as several indie films had left the Lyric already and had migrated over to Greeley.
It was Wednesday---very chilly, after the earliest snowfall ever in northern Colorado. It felt like winter already. I headed over to Greeley all bundled up. The wind comes sweeping down off the High Plains there.
After killing some time in an independent bookstore that had wi-fi, I headed over to the Kress in the late afternoon to buy a ticket for Paper Heart.
I was blown away by what I found. I had expected the Kress to be much like the Lyric, which is located in a refurbished dry cleaners on East Mountain, and is a bit, well, rustic, as a moviegoing experience.
The Kress was totally different. It was new, a nice modern restaurant with a beautiful bar, where I took a seat and watched the Rockies beat the Phillies in a playoff game with the sound turned down.
I bought a hot green tea and warmed up while talking with the bartender. I learned that the Kress had opened up about two weeks after I had left Colorado a year ago. It was just about to celebrate its first anniversary.
The auditorum was small and comfortable, with stadium seating, as well as brand new lounge chairs. I took a seat in one. There were large windows allowing sunlight to stream in. A woman came just before showtime to close them with a large hanger. Before the trailers started I eavesdropped on a pair of young women a few seats away. They were talking about their troubled love lives. It seemed like an appropriate entree to the movie I was about to see.
The movie itself was brilliant. Let me confess right off the bat that I fell for the gag, in that for almost the entire movie, I thought it was a real documentary. Only at the end, with the credits rolling, and I learned that an actor had played the real director of the movie, did I realize that I had been had---it was in fact entirely written and scripted. Brilliant! I love being fooled by that. I'm fairly easy to dupe with narrative, because I like to sink into the world of movie stories, so perhaps that isn't saying much. In any case it all worked for me (actually I began to suspect that it was scripted during the all-too-uncanny fortune teller scene).
I'm now a big fan of Charlyne Yi, who made this movie, and stars in it. She really pulls it off, as the subject of her own mockumentary, looking for the nature of romantic love, which she asserts she has never experienced.
It's not a mindblowing masterpiece, to be sure. There's not any real knockout punch that makes me think: "this is great, everyone must see it." It's just a quiet, fun little movie that was different enough to keep me entertained for a couple hours. Lately, that's good enough for me.
As I left the auditorium and walked past the bar, the barkeep asked me what I thought of it. I gave a mild thumbs up. Good enough for me, I said. And a good introduction to the Kress.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Taking Woodstock
O.K., let's talk about what I have had the chance to see.
As I mentioned, my new thing is the "Radius Project" of seeing a movie in every cinema within a 100 mile radius of Fort Collins. I got underway at the Boulder Theater, but my next movie, which I saw the first day after arriving back in the Fort, was as close as you could possibly get to my parents' house.
The local Carmike multiplex is literally about a quarter of a mile from where I'm typing this. Last summer (2008, I mean), I would spend my mornings reading in the nearby Barnes and Noble and hit a movie at the Carmike on my way home, walking in the blue sky and heat to the theater, which was nice and cool.
Well, it's not hot anymore. It's cool. In fact, it freaking snowed here last weekend, which is one of the reasons I just decided to stay indoors, getting me further behind on my moviewatching.
But as it happens, I found myself in the Carmike two Thursdays ago to catch Taking Woodstock on it's last day in town. It's the latest from Ang Lee, whom I mostly appreciate as a director, and I thought I'd missed my opportunity to see this. I was delighted to get the chance (sorry, Shorts, you lost again).
Having suffered through a string of less than inspiring flicks lately, I was particularly looking forward to sitting back and enjoying a fun period piece about the 1960's. Did I say "fun"? Oh, sorry I forgot this is Ang Lee. Nothing is ever quite fun.
The 1960's---well that goes without saying. Everything Lee does is about the twisted dysfunction of America in the 1960's. Even the Hulk movie he did was about the 1960's. So that part I expect.
What I didn't expect was to be so damn confused about the thing. By the time the movie was over I felt like I understood as little about the Woodstock Music Festival as when I walked in.
The first surprise was to learn was Lee that essentially Woodstock was "all about the Jews." Until now, I didn't know that the real story of Woodstock was that a family of Jews living in upstate New York, broke and persectuted by the local Christian bigots, are saved when they arrange for a bunch of rich, hip Big City Jews to come and rescue them with a music festival. Funny, all this time, I thought Woodstock was a universal thing. Turns out it was really just a 1960's America version of a Holocaust movie (and certainly we need a lot more of those).
But then just when I was sure it was all about the Jews, the movie sort of moves on to other things, and eventually it becomes a homosexual liberation movie. Turns out one of the main characters is gay. My gaydar must be faulty because I didn't see that coming at all.
Taking Woodstock is confused and not much fun at all. Maybe that's what the original festival was like. I wasn't there. I felt like Lee didn't want to make any bold statements about the festival, but to give us a pastiche, so no one could say, "Hey, man, that's not what it was all about."
Instead I didn't know how I was supposed to feel about it, or any of the characters. I stopped caring about them. We got very little narrative follow-through and connection to most of the charactes we meet. Everytime I thought a subplot was building, it simply didn't go anywhere.
Was I supposed to see the dysfunction of it all? Lee pays lip service to this, with a reference at the end to Altamont. But what the hell was this all about? It felt like a pointless downer, all in all.
There was a Bruno-esque moment when a hippie theater is giving a free performance to the skeptical, bigoted, non-Jewish locals. The hippies strip off their clothes and start mocking the audience for being narrow minded. As in Bruno, I felt like I was the one being yelled at. I didn't like it. But whose side was Lee on? What did this have to do with the story being told? I just didn't get it.
I suppose I'm just too square, too conservative, too much a member of the, uh, older generation. America is just fucked up, you see, and it takes Jews and homosexuals to shove it in our face. Is that was the movie was saying? Sheesh.
So in summary---a rambling narrative that left most of the characters as malformed cardboard. A big disappointment. The best scene in the movie was an imaginative re-creation of an LSD experience by the main character, perhaps the best acid scene I've seen on film. Everything else felt like a bad trip. Get me back on the Thruway...
As I mentioned, my new thing is the "Radius Project" of seeing a movie in every cinema within a 100 mile radius of Fort Collins. I got underway at the Boulder Theater, but my next movie, which I saw the first day after arriving back in the Fort, was as close as you could possibly get to my parents' house.
The local Carmike multiplex is literally about a quarter of a mile from where I'm typing this. Last summer (2008, I mean), I would spend my mornings reading in the nearby Barnes and Noble and hit a movie at the Carmike on my way home, walking in the blue sky and heat to the theater, which was nice and cool.
Well, it's not hot anymore. It's cool. In fact, it freaking snowed here last weekend, which is one of the reasons I just decided to stay indoors, getting me further behind on my moviewatching.
But as it happens, I found myself in the Carmike two Thursdays ago to catch Taking Woodstock on it's last day in town. It's the latest from Ang Lee, whom I mostly appreciate as a director, and I thought I'd missed my opportunity to see this. I was delighted to get the chance (sorry, Shorts, you lost again).
Having suffered through a string of less than inspiring flicks lately, I was particularly looking forward to sitting back and enjoying a fun period piece about the 1960's. Did I say "fun"? Oh, sorry I forgot this is Ang Lee. Nothing is ever quite fun.
The 1960's---well that goes without saying. Everything Lee does is about the twisted dysfunction of America in the 1960's. Even the Hulk movie he did was about the 1960's. So that part I expect.
What I didn't expect was to be so damn confused about the thing. By the time the movie was over I felt like I understood as little about the Woodstock Music Festival as when I walked in.
The first surprise was to learn was Lee that essentially Woodstock was "all about the Jews." Until now, I didn't know that the real story of Woodstock was that a family of Jews living in upstate New York, broke and persectuted by the local Christian bigots, are saved when they arrange for a bunch of rich, hip Big City Jews to come and rescue them with a music festival. Funny, all this time, I thought Woodstock was a universal thing. Turns out it was really just a 1960's America version of a Holocaust movie (and certainly we need a lot more of those).
But then just when I was sure it was all about the Jews, the movie sort of moves on to other things, and eventually it becomes a homosexual liberation movie. Turns out one of the main characters is gay. My gaydar must be faulty because I didn't see that coming at all.
Taking Woodstock is confused and not much fun at all. Maybe that's what the original festival was like. I wasn't there. I felt like Lee didn't want to make any bold statements about the festival, but to give us a pastiche, so no one could say, "Hey, man, that's not what it was all about."
Instead I didn't know how I was supposed to feel about it, or any of the characters. I stopped caring about them. We got very little narrative follow-through and connection to most of the charactes we meet. Everytime I thought a subplot was building, it simply didn't go anywhere.
Was I supposed to see the dysfunction of it all? Lee pays lip service to this, with a reference at the end to Altamont. But what the hell was this all about? It felt like a pointless downer, all in all.
There was a Bruno-esque moment when a hippie theater is giving a free performance to the skeptical, bigoted, non-Jewish locals. The hippies strip off their clothes and start mocking the audience for being narrow minded. As in Bruno, I felt like I was the one being yelled at. I didn't like it. But whose side was Lee on? What did this have to do with the story being told? I just didn't get it.
I suppose I'm just too square, too conservative, too much a member of the, uh, older generation. America is just fucked up, you see, and it takes Jews and homosexuals to shove it in our face. Is that was the movie was saying? Sheesh.
So in summary---a rambling narrative that left most of the characters as malformed cardboard. A big disappointment. The best scene in the movie was an imaginative re-creation of an LSD experience by the main character, perhaps the best acid scene I've seen on film. Everything else felt like a bad trip. Get me back on the Thruway...
Fallen behind---and now this!
Of course being on the road got me behind on my movie schedules. When I got back to Colorado, one of top priorities was to catch up, but I was so exhausted from travelling that a few movies managed to slip out of the theater before I could see them. This includes the children's fantasy comedy Shorts, which I tried valiantly to see in Fort Morgan on the last day of my trip, but gambled with Food, Inc. in Boulder instead. As it turns out, I could have seen the latter in Estes Park this week. That's the way it goes, trying to play the odds. I'll have to wait for the DVD of Shorts.
It's the "Thursday Game," as I call it. I get lazy during the week and then have to figure out which movies are leaving during the Friday schedule rollover, and then I spent Wednesday frantically putting together a schedule that allows me to see all the "last chance movies" the following day.
It actually wasn't so hard to do with the Google Movies search tool, but for the last couple days, Google Movies is broken hard. It shows only a fraction of the movie theaters, and only an incomplete schedule for the movies that it does have. It seems to be nationwide. I've been coming the message boards about it, and saw a post today from a guy in Madison, Wisconsin complaining about.
That means I have to go to Mr. Movies or Fandango and look at each invidual theater, and painfully load up the schedule for the following weekend, which sometimes you have a pulldown option for already, but then it says "sorry not available yet." I hate that. If they don't have the schedule yet, then don't give me the pulldown option and make me wait for it to load. Arggh. Google Movies, when it worked, was very good this way---a clean, fast-loading interface that provided a one-stop shop for the movie schedules everywhere. I feel blind without it.
So, using the painfully slow method, I managed to learn that I don't have to scramble tomorrow to see a few movies that I thought were going to be leaving for good, but it will nevertheless be a busy day. I get to head down to Denver, specifically to some of the northwest suburbs, to see a few stragglers. Meanwhile so many movies are flooding the theaters. I gotta get caught up. I hate being so far out of the loop.
It's the "Thursday Game," as I call it. I get lazy during the week and then have to figure out which movies are leaving during the Friday schedule rollover, and then I spent Wednesday frantically putting together a schedule that allows me to see all the "last chance movies" the following day.
It actually wasn't so hard to do with the Google Movies search tool, but for the last couple days, Google Movies is broken hard. It shows only a fraction of the movie theaters, and only an incomplete schedule for the movies that it does have. It seems to be nationwide. I've been coming the message boards about it, and saw a post today from a guy in Madison, Wisconsin complaining about.
That means I have to go to Mr. Movies or Fandango and look at each invidual theater, and painfully load up the schedule for the following weekend, which sometimes you have a pulldown option for already, but then it says "sorry not available yet." I hate that. If they don't have the schedule yet, then don't give me the pulldown option and make me wait for it to load. Arggh. Google Movies, when it worked, was very good this way---a clean, fast-loading interface that provided a one-stop shop for the movie schedules everywhere. I feel blind without it.
So, using the painfully slow method, I managed to learn that I don't have to scramble tomorrow to see a few movies that I thought were going to be leaving for good, but it will nevertheless be a busy day. I get to head down to Denver, specifically to some of the northwest suburbs, to see a few stragglers. Meanwhile so many movies are flooding the theaters. I gotta get caught up. I hate being so far out of the loop.
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