Category: Movies

I saw Zombieland over the weekend; I owe myself and y’all a review, since I promised myself I would make a note of every movie I see in a theater. It’s one of my major topics.

But since I haven’t yet completed a review of The Informant!, which I saw earlier in the week, I’m a bit behind.

So I’ll make a note of them, and move on.

I also took a train up to Seattle to catch the very last Mariners game of the season. The tickets were Kevin’s, and our seats were in section 194, high above center field. I took many pictures and a few videos, and will post them when I get a chance to see if there’s anything in there anyone other than Kevin or I would want to see.

Oh, and the Mariners won, 4-3, against the Texas Rangers. Turned out to be a beautiful day for a ballgame!

Oh, and don’t google shiskaberries unless you’re ready for the horrible truth to be revealed to you.

After seeing the first trailer for Inglourious Basterds, and learning that Quentin Tarantino’s next flick would be a World War II movie, I could not wait to see it.

I’ll admit it up front; I’m a huge fan of Tarantino’s work. The more seemingly-pointless dialogue, the more senseless bloody violence, the more homage and in-jokes, the better.

But here and there, little hints seeped in. I saw the headline of IO9’s review, but did not read the body, and saw the phrase “alternate history”, for example. Well, sure. That makes sense. Any movie is going to be fictionalized. So I had some hint that maybe things wouldn’t turn out the way they did in our timeline.

And the satirical article in The Onion, headlined “Next Tarantino Movie An Homage To Beloved Tarantino Movies Of Director’s Youth”, followed by a rant from a co-worker who had seen the movie about how every Tarantino pastiche was on display in Inglourious Basterds, gave me another hint. “48 minutes of two people talking while sitting at a table!” he said. “They don’t leave!”

That was all I knew. Oh, wait, one more thing; several folk on Twitter told me to go see this movie.

Saturday I finally did. The short version is, I enjoyed it very much. The long version, mild spoilers included, begins now.

And it was, indeed, a Tarantino movie. There wasn’t one single 48 minute long scene of people sitting at a table, however. There were, by my hazy memory, 5 or 6 scenes that were people sitting around a table and talking about something other than the obvious topic. And in each of those scenes, the tension is incredible, because the audience knows something that not everyone at the table knows. The cumulative effect of scene after scene after scene of this, though, is a ridiculous (but enjoyable, to me) self-awareness that this is, in fact, a Quentin Tarantino movie.

The action, when it comes, is heightened by all the tension created through dialogue, and all the more so because it’s often so matter-of-fact to the characters – casually cutting scalps from Nazi soldiers’ heads while discussing something else entirely, for example.

And even though Brad Pitt is shown, prominently, in the trailer, hamming it up with his chaw-filled mouth and his goofy Tennessee accent, this movie is not about Lt. Aldo Raines at all. It’s about Shoshanna Dreyfus, a Jewish girl who tries to hide from the Nazis in occupied France and operates a movie theater. Yeah, Quentin loves old movie theaters, so how perfect is it that so much of the film is set in one?

Except for a few background-fillling-in flashbacks, though, the story is told in a straight linear fashion, which is not a Tarantino cliché at all. Instead of jumping around, as he’s done in so many other movies, this one is a direct line from past to present. Perhaps he focused on the “table dialogue” so much to counter the fact of such a simple story?

Who knows?

I loved it. Not as much as Kill Bill: Vol 1 and Kill Bill: Vol 1, mind you, and not as much as Pulp Fiction… but still, I loved it.

I can’t really tell you why I didn’t like 500 Days of Summer without giving away the ending. I mean, probably. So there may be spoilers in this review. In fact, I may, at one point, tell you how it ends, describe the scene to you. But without context, you may draw the wrong conclusion about what I’m describing; you won’t know for sure unless you read the whole review, spending as much time as I want to spend writing this out, only to find that you’re wrong.

If I did that to you, would you enjoy it, think that it was a surprise and a delight, worth the time? Or would you feel cheated, forced to focus on something, an event or character that ultimately proved to be nothing more than a distraction, a cipher?

And what would you think of me for having done all that? I may seem clever and charming; or I may seem mean spirited. It all depends.

There are categories of jokes like that. They’re called “shaggy dog stories”. If you don’t want to click the link, a shaggy dog story is one in which the narrator tells a long, involved story with lots of repetition and digressions, all to distract you from the horrible anti-climactic ending or, worse, the awful pun that has nothing to do with the story you’ve been made to listen to.

Some people find shaggy dog stories funny. Those people are usually the ones telling the story, or people who enjoy telling them. Often, the reaction to hearing a shaggy dog story is not laughter, but a groan, for having fallen for the setup and not seeing the punchline coming. The listener groans because they’ve been had.

Likewise, at the end of “500 Days of Summer” I felt like I’ve been had, like I’ve been made to sit through scene after scene that almost promised me character development, that gave me tantalizing glimpses of the possibility of Summer’s (played by Zooey Deschanel) having some kind of inner life or rational motivation for doing all the things that Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) saw her doing to him.

Sadly, no.

Very little reason is given for Summer doing the things she is shown doing in the movie. And, worse, several times she’s shown doing the same thing in different scenes, but the second time is given different context, so the meaning of her actions are changed. There are times when this writing technique is clever and used to good affect, but trust me, this movie is not Rashômon and the director is not Kurosawa.

In fact, Summer is not a real person; the character only exists to give the needy, clingy and lack-witted Tom something against which to run the gamut of emotions from ecstasy to despair. She is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl without even the semblance of a mind or life of her own.

Worse, with all the post-modern flashbacks and scenes with more than one interpretation and fourth-wall-breaking dance numbers, the writers chose to use a freakin’ narrator. Narrators that are not identified as one of the characters in the film generally imply an omniscient viewpoint; but of course, nothing is to be trusted in this movie. Is the narrator up front? Are we to believe his descriptions of things? To the writers’ credit, they have the narrator tell us at the beginning that this is a boy-meets-girl story, but it is not a love story. To their detriment, however, they also tell us that Summer is special and amazing, without giving us much more to go on than Zooey Deschanel’s impenetrable charm and giant soulful eyes to validate that.

Seeing Summer’s hand, complete with wedding ring, resting on Tom’s hand on a park bench means nothing without context. Hearing her say things like “I’m not looking for a relationship right now” and then randomly kissing Tom in the copy room at work is the kind of story self-absorbed and emotionally-fragile men tell, not the kind of thing real living breathing women do. Tom’s view of Summer is distorted by the writers’ lack of imagination; it feels very hateful. I have no doubt that there are lots of men who will tell me that they, too, have known women like this; the “seduction community” is almost entirely made up of boys with exactly that take on women. But I am sure that the opposing stories, from the feminine side, would talk about stalk-y, grasping boys with bottomless pits of need to be filled. Or not filled.

My want for a believable set of characters, likewise, remains unfilled by this movie. But I kinda knew that going in.

This movie is Not Recommended.

With the recent 40 year anniversary of the first Apollo mission to the moon, I had an opportunity to read an account from the media-proclaimed “loneliest man since Adam”, Michael Collins. He was the astronaut who had to pilot the command module, and remained in orbit around the moon while Aldrin and Grissom landed on the surface and got all the glory.

Being farther from any humans than anyone before him, enclosed in a tiny capsule smaller than a walk-in closet, and out of even radio contact whenever he passed behind our planet’s satellite, you’d think he’d be feeling very isolated. Turns out, not so much.

I know from pre-flight questions that I will be described as a lonely man (”Not since Adam has any man experienced such loneliness”), and I guess that the TV commentators must be reveling in my solitude and deriving all sorts of phony philosophy from it, but I hope not. Far from feeling lonely or abandoned, I feel very much a part of what is taking place on the lunar surface. I know that I would be a liar or a fool if I said that I have the best of the three Apollo 11 seats, but I can say with truth and equanimity that I am perfectly satisfied with the one I have. This venture has been structured for three men, and I consider my third to be as necessary as either of the other two.¹

But still, to this day, the idea of space exploration being the loneliest pursuit persists in fiction and film.

Take, for example, “Moon”, Duncan Jones’ debut film. In it, we are introduced to Sam (played by Sam Rockwell). He has taken a 3-year contract with Lunar Industries to be the sole human worker at a helium-3 mining operation on the moon. He has a companion of sorts in GERTY, the computer that helps run the station. But that’s the only interaction he’s had for 3 long years; and let’s face it, GERTY’s empathetic words, when provided by Kevin Spacey’s sarcastic voice and illustrated by comical cartoon faces on GERTY’s one video display, aren’t much comfort. Sam is two weeks from the end of his contract.

Sam’s loneliness is assumed, and underscored by scenes showing him viewing videos from home of his wife; he’s not allowed two-way communication because of a faulty relay satellite that the company has not yet repaired. He’s shown doing his job of directing the giant mining robots. He’s shown running on a treadmill; an international symbol of solitude and drive. He burns his hand with hot coffee when he thinks he’s seen someone else, a brunette woman, in his lounge, a woman that, to my knowledge, does not appear again for the rest of the movie.

Then one day, when he’s out checking on one of the mobile mining machines, there’s an accident, a bad one. He wakes up in the infirmary, under the watchful eye of GERTY. Sam’s confused and slow to recover. And his burned hand is fine.

GERTY and the bosses back home seem unconcerned about Sam’s inability to work, and they send a rescue mission to repair the damaged mining machine, but Sam wants to go outside. He thinks something’s wrong, and after arguing with GERTY he finally manages to contrive a reason to go out via sabotage. Once out there, he finds something… extraordinary.

I’m loathe to give anything away, even though the trailers for this movie have given away this crucial plot point. If you are considering this movie, do yourself a favor and don’t see or read any more; just see it.

The cinematography of the lunar surface is stark and beautiful and reminds me (intentionally I’m sure) of the stark black and white videos sent back from the Apollo missions. The large mining machines look like nothing but Jawa Sandcrawlers crossed with farm vehicles. The station, all white panels and stainless steel cabinets and low ceilings, remind me of the interior of the Discovery from 2001 – and of course, GERTY is a grudgingly anthropomorphized HAL from that same movie.

There are probably plenty of other sci-fi inside jokes throughout the film, but that gives it a familiarity; it inhabits the mental space where many sci-fi movies have come and gone. But the story that’s being told is a subtle one, different from past summer blockbusters. It’s a story about identity and humanity. I know, I know, that sounds like bullshit psychoanalysis but I’m not going to give anything away, dammit!

The movie’s conclusion was both unsettling and utterly expected, and ended the movie but left me wanting to know more. What was the ultimate goal of Lunar Industries? Where did all this technology come from? What would happen to Sam?

We’ll never know. And that’s a brave stance for a filmmaker to take.

I recommend this movie.

¹
Quote taken from Andy Ihnatko’s transcription of Collins’ Carrying the Fire, under Fair Use.

There were so many times as I sat in the theater and watched John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph talk back and forth in character as Burt and Verona, when I wanted to turn to Lindsey and say, “That sounds just like us!” or “I can totally see us doing that.” or “I’ll bet that’s just like we would do.”

I should have seen Away We Go with Lindsey. But she was at home, doing laundry and cleaning up, taking her one day for herself in the week, and I was hiding from the heat of the day in a cool dark movie theater.

Burt and Verona are afraid they’re fuck-ups. They live in a broken-down house, have the kinds of jobs that don’t seem to require much interaction with anyone (he sells insurance to insurance companies, apparently by phone; she’s a freelance medical illustrator), and they’re expecting their first baby. They realize, on a deep level, that they need a support system to help them with raising their child; their first attempt at building one comes during dinner with Burt’s parents.

Burt’s parents, though (played with giddy selfish passion by Jeff Daniels and Catherine O’Hara) have decided to move to Amsterdam to follow some dream of theirs that they claim to have been putting off for a very long time. Their timing couldn’t be worse; they’re moving a month before the baby is due.

Verona’s fears are soothed by Burt’s optimism, and they decide to go on a road trip to visit various family members and old friends, to audition them for their role as the village they think it will take to raise their baby. The trip includes Arizona (Phoenix and Tuscon), Wisconsin, Montreal, and Florida, and we get to meet several different types of parents, most of them juuuuust outside of normal, which makes Burt and Verona seem normal by comparison, even though they aren’t.

OK, my description isn’t doing this movie justice. I just loved how Burt and Verona talked to each other, and I liked how they always seemed like real people; whether happy, or bored, or tired, or angry, they obviously loved each other very much. They wanted to make it work, and they feared they didn’t know how to make it all work.

Just like real people.

And holy crab; they’ve got some strange friends and family.

How did Pixar take an annoying little boy and a grumpy old man and make a wonderful, sweet movie?

Also, I will now always secretly wish that every dog had a speaking collar like Doug the Dog.

I got the groom to the wedding, after making sure he had the time of his life. The bride, of course, was pissed. And the groom and my friendship soon disintegrated.

That was both the first, and last, time I was in charge of a bachelor party. That was 15 years ago.

The evening included lesbians, binge drinking, strippers, gambling (and winning!), the phrase “A round of drinks on the house!”, taxicabs, the groom passing out and requiring first aid, many venue changes, and very little sleep.

It did not include traveling to another city, animals barnyard or exotic, surprise elopements, or criminal elements (that I’m aware of).

If the one I was in charge of is any indication, a bachelor party is a source of much material for stories written and filmed. Even a tame one, like the one I was in charge of, would, if filmed, make for much entertainment. And with just a bit of exaggeration, a truly epic movie could be made.

Like, say, “The Hangover”. The main characters in The Hangover start the movie in deep trouble. They’re out in the desert, scarred, scared, and in possession of a nearly-destroyed vintage Mercedes-Benz. Phil (Bradley Cooper, playing the charming live-for-the-moment member of the party) is calling the bride to tell her that, well, they lost Doug (Justin Bartha). The bride is livid; don’t they know that she is getting married in five hours?!

“Yeah,” Phil says, laconically if sympathetically. “That’s not gonna happen.”

And the movie then flashes back to show the lead-up to this grave situation.

The best part is, the movie doesn’t actually show the events in question. No, after some set-up, it jumps forward and leaves the men nothing but a handful of clues with which they are supposed to retrace their steps and find their friend; Phil is wearing a bracelet from a hospital; Stu (played by a hilarious Ed Helms), the normally co-dependent doctor dentist, has an ATM receipt from the Bellagio for Eight Thousand Dollars; there’s a live tiger in the suite’s bathroom, and a chicken wandering around the (literally) smoking remains of the hotel room; a mattress that they, somehow, recognize as belonging to the groom is impaled on a statue outside the hotel, as if flung from a great height; and Alan (Zach Galifianakis), the befuddled, mysterious, vaguely threatening brother of the bride, has discovered a baby in a closet (which produces almost no surprise, considering it’s not the first time he’s found a baby).

And the three men have literally no memory of the night.

Do the men learn a valuable lesson about male friendship and reach a place of peace with their choices in life? Who the hell cares? As the work their way backward in Las Vegas, the stakes continue to be raised and many, many laughs are had.

My one complaint about the movie is that the three female roles are not even sketches of real women; the anxious bride, the shrewish controlling girlfriend of Stu, and the stripper/escort Jade (the still-innocent Heather Graham), are barely there. I suppose that’s inevitable in a movie like this, which is more about the Hollywood myth of bromance than actual real-life relationships. For that matter, the male characters aren’t much more than a handful of quirks themselves. Charming quirks, though.

Wait… wonder whatever happened to the friend whose bachelor party I was responsible for? Did his shrewish wife force him to disavow me as a friend after we showed up, barely on time for the wedding, the groom so hungover he had to wear sunglasses inside? Whatever happened to his brother, the socially-awkward repressed kid? And why can’t I remember the names of the two lesbians who accompanied us that night, and what their relationship was to the rest of us? What happened to all the money I won at video poker?

Hmmm… either I’m a living stereotype, or Hollywood might just have something to tell us about ourselves, after all.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpOdCWaTsIk&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

Going to a movie is like dreaming in public. Images and sounds projected into a dark, curtained space; people whispering back and forth but mostly silent (if you’re lucky); faces turned all in the same direction, illuminated by the flickering light.

There are many ways to enjoy a movie. You can examine the philosophical points raised in it; you can let the pure visceral id experience of the action and images wash over you without delving too deeply; you can dissect it with the expert eye of a graphic artist or cinéast; Or you can view it as a writer, enjoying the plot and characters and how they interact. Or, of course, a little bit of some or all of those.

It may not surprise you that I primarily view movies as a writer. I love to pay attention not simply to what the plot points are, but in how they are told. How are the characters’ personalities and motivations explained to the audience? Does it depend on the dialogue and actions, or upon the actors’ craft? Do the choices that the characters make sense?

In other words, I love stories. I love telling them. I love paying attention to them.

The Brothers Bloom is a movie that is about a pair of con men brothers and the sequestered heiress that is their current target. It is also a love story, between one of the brothers and the heiress, just like many con movies before it; the question asked is the familiar, “Is he actually falling in love with her, or is it part of the con?” And it’s also, of course, a love story between the two brothers, who start out with the familiar tension found in paired confidence men; one of them loves the whole enterprise, and the other wants to get out.

The movie is also a philosophical treatise on free will vs. determinism, finding an answer to the question “Is it possible to live an unscripted life?”

But the writer/director, Rian Johnson, is far more inventive and lively than my simple description makes it sound. Bloom (Adrien Brody) is the younger brother, and I may have missed why the pair is collectively known by his name, and he is a lost soul, the deep thinker, the one who sees their life as nothing but lies. Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) is the older brother and he embraces his role in the pair as that of a writer, imbuing their con games with themes, dramatic arcs, and subtext. Their target for the movie is Penelope (Rachel Weisz), who is beautiful but more than a little socially awkward since she’s lived her entire life on a ridiculous estate somewhere in a magical New Jersey. In pursuit of the con, the three of them, along with Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi), their silent aid and explosives expert, travel to Montenegro, and Prague, and St. Petersberg; they travel by ship, and by train, and once by modern jetliner; part of the charm of the movie is its mix-and-match approach to technology and fashion.

I want to recap this movie, but honestly, it would be a dry and lifeless retelling. What I recall most are the small moments between the characters.

For example: Bloom saying goodbye to Penelope for the first time after she eagerly subverted the brothers’ script for introducing them to her. He stands outside the estate, mouthing the words of his script, and Penelope realizes that he’s leaving, after having given her a real (to her) honest conversation for the first time in forever. He reaches out to shake her hand while he speaks, and the camera cuts to a closeup that shows his thumb lightly rubbing her wrist and barely touching and reaching under the cuff of her sweater. Cut to her face, and a blush, as obviously an effect as the oft-parodied glint on a movie hero’s smile, paints her cheeks, and yet Weisz sells the look with her eyes.

Perhaps it’s because I am currently in the throes of love myself, but I felt that caress along with Bloom and Penelope. My life has seemed unscripted so often in the past, and it has left me wanting a better story, an honest story. I think I have found it, and it’s more than a bit shocking to see the emotional core on the screen of a downtown multiplex, told with idealism and humor but (there’s that word again) honesty, too.

This movie is fucking amazing.

[Note: Spoilers for “Star Trek” follow]

1. I have a huge totally straight man-crush on Karl Urban’s Dr. McCoy. Still.
2. Not only do the giant water tanks and transparent (transparent aluminum?) water tubes seem a bit incongruous on the new Enterprise, I think whoever designed and routed them needs some instruction in simplicity and efficiency. Was there some need, other than to make an entertaining action set-piece, for the tubes to run every which direction before terminating in a giant potentially-Scotty-killing turbine?
3. Getting a promotion in Starfleet seems super easy! Here are two possibilities:

   • Get recruited after losing a bar fight, cheat on your final exam, sneak onto a starship during a military engagement (twice), and get the acting captain (a Vulcan (OK, technically a half-Vulcan) to completely lose his shit and resign his commission. That gets you to Captain.
   • Abandon your ship to fly into a trap, get captured, tortured, and give up the defenses for Earth. That gets you all the way to Admiral!

4. On the other hand, defending your homeworld (unsuccessfully), shooting malcontent stowaways into space, giving out crew assignments on the basis of sexual favors, destroying random bridge consoles in fits of rage, and advocating against peaceful diplomacy and mercy – all that will only get you busted back to the second-most important position on a Starfleet vessel, while retaining your rank and commission.
5. Given Scotty’s propensity to test his crazy transporter theories on animals, perhaps he was using the tribble as a quickly reproducing test subject? Just feed it and you’ve got plenty of lifeforms to beam around!
6. Still love the casualness of the bad guy. “Hi, Christopher. I’m Nero.”
7. Are we sure this isn’t the mirror universe? I will not be surprised if Zachary Quinto grows a goatee for the sequel. Not surprised and at least a bit delighted.

I’ve been worried about Captain Kirk.

More specifically, I’ve been worried that Chris Pine, who was cast as a young James T. Kirk in the new Star Trek franchise reboot, just didn’t have the chops to make me believe he was a younger version of William Shatner’s cocky, swaggering, speechifying Captain Kirk. The promotional pictures, and the few million clips and trailers I’ve seen in the last several months, just did not go far enough to convince me.

Still, Zachary Quinto is physically about as close as someone could get to a young Leonard Nimoy, and Quinto’s portrayal of Sylar on NBC’s “Heroes” certainly shows he can play “emotionless”.

And, while I enjoy Simon Pegg’s past performances (particularly “Shaun of the Dead”), he really didn’t look like James “Scotty” Doohan at all. But I’d be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on pure personality alone.

The rest of the canonical bridge crew of the Enterprise everyone remembers was given to a bunch of young kids I’ve paid almost no attention to prior to finding out they were in this movie.

…except for the role of Dr. Leonard McCoy. Wait a minute, what? Eomer is playing Bones? How is that a good move?

I always knew I would see this movie when it came out. What I wasn’t sure of was whether I would buy it or not.

Or so I thought. This clip¹ totally sold me:

I’ve watched that clip many times prior to seeing the movie. And during the movie, after that scene, I turned to my girlfriend, Lindsey and said, basically, “Squeeee!“²

I saw the movie with a group of friends. Some I’ve known a long time, some I’ve known a shorter time. Some were fans of Star Trek and action movies; some were not. We drove out to the mall in which I spent much of my formative teenage and young adult life, so that we could see it in digital projection with awesome sound.

And we all enjoyed it, I think. The writers were faced with an enormous task; to take the mountains of backstory, some official and much of it unofficial but widely accepted by the fans, and still manage to make a movie that’s watchable, that covers a significant point in the characters’ lives, that doesn’t descend into boring pseudo-scientific Treknobabble that has marked some of the later excursions into the Star Trek universe.

Holy crab, did they succeed.

In fact, without going in to spoilers, they took the most basic tentpole of the Star Trek storytelling technique, a technique that’s been used in good Trek and bad Trek, and used it to refresh the characters and, almost literally, reboot the franchise. Yes, these are in fact James Kirk, Spock, McCoy.

No, you have no idea what’s going to happen next.

Congratulations to all involved. You did it. I love this movie.

¹ Sorry about the branded video clip. The non-branded one I found earlier has been pulled by Paramount’s sharks in suits lawyers.

² Luckily, Lindsey is awesome and did not hold my fanboy-ish joy against me at all.