June 13, 2007
Tough Guys Don't Dance
After reading Mark Singer's puff piece in the May 21st Talk of the Town, I was intrigued to see the movie Tough Guys Don't Dance, directed by and screenplay by and based on the novel by Norman Mailer. Critics panned it at the time, but, gee it was such rollicking good fun to make etc., etc., etc.
The Critics were Right. This is the worst movie ever (from the ranks of movies whose producers [which included Coppola] never once imagined they might be making the worst movie ever, anyway). Also Ryan O'Neal's worst movie, Isabella Rossellini's worst - need I go on? I stuck with it to the end only with numerous breaks (a fresh martini, fifteen minutes in the spa, some light housework) just for the suspense of seeing how much more wretched it could get.
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June 11, 2007
Sopranos/Big Love
I loved the end of the Sopranos. It was perfect symmetry. Personally, I think he bought it listening to Journey with an onion ring in his mouth. Do I feel the need to see it spelled out like all the other bloody murders? No.Greatest show in television history, after the Simpsons. For me, it finally edges out Oz as HBO's best.
The season premiere of Big Love may have the been best so far. I love this show, for lots of reasons. Ok, the acting/script type reasons, obviously. I love that alternate sexualities are normalized, to an extent; despite the macho, Joseph Smith/patriarchial take (admittedly more than just a "take" of course, in world history), it shows very imaginatively how some Americans would deal with a stigmatized, alternative sexuality. The whole show can be read as an allegory of homosexuality circa 1975. Why shouldn't people be able to form this kind of family if they want, and are not constrained or coerced or brainwashed (the Juniper Creek bogeyman)?
The show also makes me think of the interviews I've heard on NPR recently where fundamentalist Christians express surprise at the incredibly bizarre things that "otherwise intelligent" Mormons believe. Indeed! Mormonism is so weird and so American and so Christian in a sense that it is a constant reminder and reflection of the deeply irrational basis of Judeo-Christianity in general. The Republican primary is going to be so interesting in this respect: So, paradise is in Independence, MO? Yes, well, the Bible is a biology textbook? So, Jesus was hanging out in Central America? Yes, well, Jesus was born of a virgin? Etc., etc., etc.
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March 09, 2006
The Aristocrats
Not a huge fan of this film. The joke is not that great, and some of the renditions, George Carlin's for example, are just so gross and over the line that the idea of flirting with the line is left far behind. The "three missionaries" version was amusing ("But first, the Aristocrats!"). Billy the Mime's publicly mimed version of the Aristocrats joke was great, however. Inured to the horrors of the joke by so many retellings at that point, I couldn't stop laughing at this sketch. By the time he got to the dog, I was literally on the floor holding my sides.
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February 28, 2006
Miller's Crossing
I finally got around to watching this early Coen brothers film. I loved it. Very funny. I would use Johnny Caspar's (Jon Polito) discourse on ethics in the first scene as a humorous introduction to ethics in an anthro class some time.
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August 03, 2005
¿Quién Diablos es Juliette?
(Eng: Who the Hell is Juliette?) This is a charming little mock-mocumentary (!) by Mexican music video director Carlos Marcovich.
The best summary I've found is here.
The film makes Cuba look very appealing, Italian sex tourists very much not (they look like the Germans in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro, except noisier). It's a very reflexive and self-referential film about the life of a Havana teenager he met and cast while filming a video there. Features everybody as themselves, in particular 16-yr. old Juliette Ortega and her family and the gorgeous Mexican model Fabiola Quiroz.
I used to understand some Spanish. Man, those Cubans talk fast!
I watched it while halfway through the novel Dreaming in Cuban. It took me a long time to get into the book; the film propelled me into it more deeply, I think, and I ending up liking the novel in the end.
Posted by John at 12:22 AM | permalink | Comments (1)
July 27, 2005
Mondovino
Ok, most people liked this documentary on the global wine business, and I expected to but didn't. I guess this is the new style of documentary filmmaking: hand-held, whimsical cinematography; impressionistic and understated but insinuating interpretation. Not everyone can pull it off. This film is tedious and mainly incoherent, visually and narratively. It's always fun to watch rich people and corporate lakeys lying and saying outrageously stupid things on camera, but I didn't learn anything new about wine and precious little new about the industry -- and I really love wine and have a good general base of knowledge. It's a great film for dog-lovers, though; the cameraperson seems to have a fixation.
Posted by John at 03:47 PM | permalink | Comments (0)
July 12, 2005
The Four Feathers
Here's a movie so unmemorable that it wasn't until forty minutes into it tonight that I realized that I'd seen it before, and it's only from 2002. With the first plot twist, I was thinking that maybe I'd read the novel or seen an earlier version of the film. But no! I have a lousy memory, but I rarely forget a film. This one is ghastly. I don't know how it got on my Netflix list.
Posted by John at 11:56 PM | permalink | Comments (0)
May 22, 2005
Underwater clapper loader
H2G2 also has some of the best screen credits I've noticed in a while. My two favorites were Underwater Clapper Loader and Head of Hair and Fur, no pun intended, I assume. There was also the usual dose of unbelievably stupid credits. Who decided that completion bonding companies deserve screen credit? And so many lawyers and accountants! I have always made it a practice to stay to the end of the credits, but these days, unless I'm looking for a soundtrack detail (why are they always at the very end?), it's hard to do as these totally uncinematic "roles" scroll by.
Posted by John at 10:13 AM | permalink | Comments (0)
Thanks for the fish...and damn Star Wars to hell
Partly at the suggestion of a commenter on Motes and Queries, I saw Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy last night ("H2G2," as a young woman in front of me explained to her parents). I went along because the first of the likely suspect companions I called were seeing Star Wars, that Business with the Sith. The second set were staying at home to watch Star Wars, the original. {Slapping head, again.} No matter: I'd usually rather watch movies alone anyway, and I did go to the house of one of the offending couples and drink their scotch and keep them up past their bedtimes after the film, so it was really almost the same in the end.
I like H2G2 a lot, but I have to confess that I fall into the category of viewers that never read the book. My friend, John -- yes, one of the unfortunate Star Wars viewers -- said there would basically be two categories of audience: one that read and loved the book and will nitpick every detail and those blissfully unencumbered by faithfulness concerns. My only complaint is about how dish-rag/love-object Trillian's role was. I suppose I expected more sexual equality from a famously counter-cultural story. Also, I never really figured out where she came from and how she got into space. Probably not important.
Posted by John at 09:13 AM | permalink | Comments (0)
April 20, 2005
Revolution OS
For a wannabe geek like myself, this film (Netflix #4, still within the free trial period! -- and my housemates who share the account have seen five more and we still have three days to go on our "trial") is very inspirational. It has extensive interviews with luminaries like Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Eric Raymond, and others. For anyone not already in the movement in some way (either open source or free software) and seeing these events in nostalgia mode, it's not likely to be too persuasive or entertaining. But, on arrival in the fall at Pitzer College, heavily dependend on Microsoft servers, networking tools, and workstations, I plan to give copies of this film to the President and Dean of Faculty and start a Linux Users Group in the Claremont Colleges. (The nearest one is the Linux Users Group of the Inland Empire (LUGIE!!) It's insane for a college with the official mission and general culture that Pitzer has to be Microsoft gnomes.
Posted by John at 12:15 AM | permalink | Comments (0)
House of Sand of Fog
The latest Netflix journal entry! I really liked this film, far more than I expected to. I knew I would like Ben Kingsley, and thought that Jennifer Connelly would probably be good, but I was blown away by all the performances. I was grooving right along with the tone of the film, a classic tale of seemingly equal legal and moral claims on something -- in this case a small, dilapidated house on the California coast -- right up to the end, which I initially thought to be a bit over-wrought. Then, having seen Don Giovanni the night before at the Met, I realized that this film, especially the ending, is best viewed as opera, actually. An American opera with no music. Four stars.
Posted by John at 12:10 AM | permalink | Comments (0)
April 15, 2005
Maria Full of Grace
Excellent film, although not quite what I was expecting from, I guess, trailers and reviews from last year. It's more El Norte than the Latin American Requiem for a Dream I was steeling myself for. Catalina Moreno is incredible, especially for her first film. The globalization links -- the flowers being sold on the street in Queens, after being packaged by exploited workers in Colombia, not to mention the cocaine -- are useful, and, despite a growing realization that one will be set up for an emotional motherhood appeal, the story is compelling and moving.
Posted by John at 12:34 AM | permalink | Comments (0)
April 13, 2005
La Sociologie Est un Sport Martial
I moved this entry to my more academic blog at AnthroBlogs. The permanent link to the entry is here
Posted by John at 12:43 AM | permalink | Comments (0)
April 10, 2005
The Corporation
Directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. I had to finish this movie this morning because we couldn't watch it to the end last night. This is a significant: if three academics in full political sympathy with a documentary can't make it to the end, it is too long! Two hours and twenty-five minutes. Jeez.
The film has some enjoyable images and many wonderful soundbites. It seems to have a long "introduction" that would probably be recognizable as such in text form, but in the film simply makes subsequent references to things in the intro part seem repetitive. Until the dissection of the psychopathic personality framework really kicks in (a great motif!), the film feels very rudderless. The usual left heroes--Naomi Klein, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore--say predictable and good things, but nothing earth-shattering. Earth-shattering are the comments from Ray Anderson, Chairman of Interface, a carpet company who saw the light big time on the global effects of the Industrial Revolution and the corporate model and is now exhorting his fellow execs to a sustainability model. Very eloquent. Interesting to be reminded of the historical development and totally imaginary quality of the corporate charter, at a time when its naturalness seems take for granted. Also, the history of the corporation as a person and the ridiculous disproportionality of 14th Amendment cases protecting the rights of corporate persons versus the black persons it was designed to help. My new thought on watching the film is that campaign finance reform should totally exclude corporate donations to any electoral candidate ever for any reason, since the corporation's legal definition forces it to ignore the public interest and focus only on maximizing profit. That such entities should have no voice--financial or otherwise--in elections seems now to me a no-brainer.
Overall, I was disappointed with this film, which I had hoped to use as a teaching tool, perhaps in my upcoming class on Studying Up. Now, I think the book, by Joel Bakan, must be far better than the film. He seems serious and smart, based the interview on the Majority Report Air America show included on the dvd.
Great narrator voice, but one wishes she would speak up a little more and go more slowly.
Posted by John at 07:18 PM | permalink | Comments (0)
April 08, 2005
The Day of the Locust
I guess this film got on my NetFlix list because I saw it mentioned as a classic Los Angeles film, and, having just more or less moved to the Los Angeles area, felt I needed to see it. (I have started a list of L.A. films somewhere...where? my palm pilot? my wiki? Christ, I'm lost in my own technologies....Some of the films on my "movies to see" list have been there so long that I don't remember why I wanted to see them.)
This film has a surprisingly disturbing ending after an often very funny two-hour lead-up. Looks very much like other favorite mid-seventies films: Five Easy Pieces, Chinatown, etc. Also Midnight Cowboy, obviously. I enjoyed it a lot. It is a classic Hollywood story. Reminds me of Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, for different reasons. Watched it at home tonight with Alvaro and Philo. This film will do, for me, for "Jeepers Creepers, Where'd You Get Those Peepers?" what Blue Velvet did for the song of the title!
<Nostalgic reminiscence>Blue Velvet was the first movie I ever walked out of thinking, man, I need a drink. I saw it in 1986 with Andrea in Seattle's U-Distric, and we walked to whatever bar was on the corner there. I had scotch. After a childhood viewing of Song of the South when I derided my sister's tears as a way of suppressing my own, this is the next most powerful experience of being knocked on my ass by a film. Also the first time an emotion was linked with alcohol? Maybe a therapy topic for ten years from now...:-) </Nostalgic reminiscence>
Noticing that Day of the Locust has an R rating, which makes a certain sense, makes me wonder whether DVD releases of films this old go through a review process again or use the same rating as when they were released. In this case, the rating would be no different, I think.
Posted by John at 11:21 PM | permalink | Comments (0)
March 05, 2005
A Very Long Engagement
Saw this Wednesday night, March 2. Liked it a lot. Amazing to see Jodie Foster speaking excellent French. The combination of gruesome battle scenes, dark comedy, and sentimentality (about the maximum I can stand, actually) really worked. Audrey Tatou is so interesting to watch. (Did I say "interesting"? Is that a euphemism of some kind??)
Posted by John at 08:12 PM | permalink | Comments (0)
December 15, 2004
Dirty Pretty Things
Watched this movie by Stephen Frears last night (Dec 14) with Philo. Excellent movie. Audrey Tatou is very convincing as an illegal immigrant Turkish woman in London. The Chinese pathologist character is wonderful.
Posted by John at 10:00 AM | permalink | Comments (0)
November 18, 2004
I {Heart} Huckabees
Monday, November 8, I went alone to see I {Heart} Huckabees. What an unlikely cast, which really works, however. I found the film thoroughly engrossing, very funny, a laugh or brain-twister a minute.
Posted by John at 02:06 AM | permalink | Comments (0)
November 08, 2004
Sideways
Saw Sideways Saturday night with John and Smita. Enjoyed it immensely. Paul Giamatti was great. The New Yorker today had a short profile on him in the "Talk fo the Town" section. He's Bart Giamatti's son.
Posted by John at 01:06 PM | permalink | Comments (0)
November 06, 2004
Books, mead, and a movie
Smita recommends a novel about a slave ship builder called Sacred Hunger.
Saw Sideways at Kendall Square tonight with John and Smita. Great flic.
Before the film we started a batch of mead with the wild blackberry honey from Washington State, Snoqualmie Valley Honey Farm in North Bend, WA.
Posted by John at 11:42 PM | permalink | Comments (1)