It’s funny how old movies can be interesting on so many different levels. On the most basic level. Is it fun, sad, exciting, basically is it worth your time watching it, that’s all that really matters. The next level has more to do with how good the movie could have been. Is the story there, is the acting good, is the direction and cinematography competent. None of these things are necessarily required but the better they are in most cases the better the movie is. If they could have been improved 99 times out of 100 the movie would have been a better movie. I find myself thinking about this stuff watching the original Gone in 60 Seconds. The direction and cinematography are decent enough considering the conditions this movie was made under. The opening scene was iconic enough for Tarantino to homage it in one of the Kill Bill movies, I think it was the second one. The acting is not bad except for when then actors are acting if that makes any sense. The story is crap, but the forty minute car chase that is the heart of the movie is an outstanding feat of narrative. Back to the point this is a very enjoyable movie really marred only by the fact that the protagonists are thieves. I don’t care if you only steal cars that are insured car thieves should be strung up by their balls. I could write a big long screed about how great the car chases are in the movie, aside from some frivolous gags that seem to have only been included to up the carnage level, but that’s not what fascinated my watching the movie tonight. The next level, maybe not the next but another level. The time capsule level. Now everybody knows what a time capsule is, but think about what a time capsule really is for a moment. A time capsule is a collection of items that people want the people in the future to remember them for, not particularly what is important or truly representative of the time being recorded. The hair, the dialog, the cars, this movie is a great time capsule movie. There are some scenes that look like everybody walked walked out of a magazine ad. Did anybody really walk around dressed like this? Well that’s the interesting part. There are enough crowd scenes in this movie, enough extras that you can actually see that nobody did dress like that. Another big kick I got out of the movie this time is I’ve actually been on several of the roads that are covered in the car chase. It was amazing seeing these thirty five year old views and comparing them to my memories from a month ago. Long story short I think I enjoyed this movie more tonight than I ever have before.
I watched Bill Maher’s Religulous tonight. Thanks Jay. I’m not sure why. I figured it would be a steaming pile of narcissistic slop and it was, but it wasn’t quite as odoriferous as I expected and despite the way it may seem after reading these words I did enjoy it. I actually found myself chuckling here or there, even laughing out loud on the bits about Scientology, Mormons, and Islam. It is a strange fact though there does seem to be a direct proportion between the time spent lampooning a particular religion and the tendency of that religion to strike back either legally or physically. Basically Maher travels around the world speaking with a few experts and religious scholars, but mostly everyday men and women and a handful of crackpots. He shows himself to be a master at putting people at ease as he manages to poke fun of their most closely held beliefs. A technique he is especially skillful of is coaxing a deer in the headlight look from his subjects. He is honest, at least in the conduct of the interviews. He is straight up with everyone he encounters with just what he believes and doesn’t try any kind of trickery to elicit certain responses. At least from what we see in the doc. To be cynical though, and I can’t help it when Bill Maher is the subject, that is the magic of editing. We only see what he wants us to see and in the order that he wants us to see it. A short little aside about the editing, there is no real structure I could discern to the doc. It just seems to jump around from topic to topic. There was no thread linking it all together, just a beginning, bunch of facts, more facts, and an ending. He should have let my buddy Stephen Lackey edit it. He can find some kind of narrative in anything. Still though he was more fair than I expected him to be and he was always polite and courteous so I give him credit for that.
The biggest curse of the thing is that it’s just the same old arguments; it doesn’t add anything new to the dialog. He basically just goes out and finds some people that he knows will do or say something silly if they have a camera on them long enough and a handful of people that agree with him. He’s preaching to the choir, and while I’m sure the choir will find it amusing he’s getting no closer to the goal he professes in the wind up, which is to get people to drop religion as an old outdated institution that mankind can’t afford to waste effort on any more.
Maher comes across as a straight out atheist, nothing wrong with that, I’m an atheist. But at the same time he is always referencing his doubt as well. He talks about his doubt, but at the same time he is certain that religion is at best a silly eccentricity and more likely a crutch that believers cling to keep from seeing the world as it really is. He brings up the old shibboleth that more blood has been shed in the name of religion than any other influence. After the twentieth century I’m not sure that really hold up any more or not, but granting that it’s true it still missing the point. Religions are institutions of man, kind of an obvious point for an atheist I would think. Mankind has a pretty good track record for finding reasons to kill, maim and enslave with or without religion. For every war fought in the name of God, for every instance of a Catholic priest buggering alter boys you have to weigh the good that religion has brought to the world. It’s an inescapable fact that Western Civilization has been the most liberating force in history and along with some ideas that the Greeks came up with a long time ago the pillars of that civilization are the Judeo-Christian creed. Not to mention the fact that most people find some kind of religion comforting, something I don’t understand but can’t deny.
Just as obvious as it is to me that there is no God it is obvious to many more that God exists. People I respect, love and I know are a lot smarter than me believe in God. I don’t understand it, but I’m not ready to call them all fools. Maher is though. Maher seems to believe that getting rid of religion would rid the world of all of the corruption and evil that can be laid at its feet, but the corruption and evil doesn’t come from religion it comes from man. As an atheist where else could I believe it comes from? Without it man would find some other avenue to express it. He claims that doubt is the only hope for the world, he prescribes doubt for everyone else but he expresses none himself. His closing argument is that mankind’s thirst for religion will lead to our destruction. I guess I’m just not as pessimistic as Maher. I admit I find myself extremely pessimistic about the coming years, but if you plot the welfare of man across our history the trend-line is unmistakably on an upward trend, there are bumps and dips but over the millennia it is up, up and up to such and extent that if the rest of our lives and our children’s lives were spent in pure misery they would still only represent a small dip in the total history of man.
I’m kind of sick of best of worst of lists, but we are getting one together for the podcast Thursday. The funny thing is I’m interested in what Brian, Alan and Stephen come up with. So maybe it’s not the lists it’s the people making the lists.
Anyway I’ve been going through all of the 2008 movies I’ve seen over the last year. I know I’m leaving stuff out but I came up with a list of thirty eight movies. Twenty nine of them actually in the theater. I don’t know if that’s a lot or not. I know I’ve probably watched at least that many non 2008 movies at home. Hell I watched all twenty of those stinkers on that Burnt Rubber compilation I picked up after Christmas. Now that I think of it I may have watched that many bad kung fu movies. Okay now I’m starting to get depressed.
The weird thing is that while five favorite movies of the year will be easy to come up with. Coming up with the five worst is giving me a little bit of trouble. The problem is I actually did a decent job of avoiding stinkers this year which under any other circumstances would be a good thing but right now it’s going to force me to put some movies I didn’t think were that bad into the “worst” category. Anywy I’ve got until Thursday to figure it out.
Well the holidays are all over now (well they will be at the end of the day at least) and everything can go back to as close to normal as it gets. The next couple of months are going to be a little crazy. I’ve got three business trips coming up; Memphis, San Francisco and Indy, and likely weekend trips to Lexington and Atlanta. I’ll get to drive to Indy and Memphis, but I’ll be flying to San Francisco. I’d love to drive to San Francisco but it just ain’t practical. Anyway that’s me till the end of February.
I’ve been watching a lot of stuff on DVD since Christmas, got the Jeeves and Wooster and Blackadder complete box sets for Christmas, thanks Mom. I’ve just barely cracked into them so far. I’ve been distracted by a little four dollar treat from the Great Escape. It’s one of those multi disc el-cheap-o packages of mostly public domain movies. This one has twenty movies that have some, sometimes quite slight, connection to racing, or cars. They are all B level or worse films but they are all pretty interesting for one reason or another. The older ones have plots of varying levels of ridiculousness and tons of stock footage, one even has some glorious clips of European Grand Prix racing. The real jewels though are three movies made in the seventies. One biopic of Richard Petty starring Richard Petty, he’s not bad actually, and the dad from The Christmas Story playing Lee Petty, There’s some fun car chases with vintage iron and seventies NASCAR racing. Then there is the sublimely bad, a movie about a couple of dope smugglers and one about the most unlikely California Highway patrolman turned repo men you can imagine. They make Cannonball run look like Citizen Kane. What’s cool about them though is that they got made at all. You can just imagine the filmmakers hitting up their families and friends for money and maxing out credit cards to finish the things. The scripts and acting are pitiful but they still manage to put up some interesting car chases.
Then there is another movie that I just got my hands on Monday. I couldn’t watch it Monday night, I had to watch something to review for Cinegeek Monday night so I didn’t get to watch it till Tuesday, but I’ve seen it three times since then and I didn’t get in till about two am last night. It’s Gran Torino Clint Eastwood’s latest movie. It is amazing. A perfect movie. When you get a chance you have to see it. I’m not saying anything else about it so I don’t ruin it for you, if that that’s possible, but it is fantastic.
Well I got just enough time to get this posted and then get cleaned up to meet some friends for lunch so I’ll cut this off for now.
Happy New Year everybody.
Went to the Belcourt Saturday night with Stephen, Suzie, Art, Daniel and James. It was a rather late screening 9:30 but we were determined to see it. Or at least Me Stephen and Suzie were. I’m not sure how the others felt. I think we had all seen the trailers on the web so we knew that Jean Claude was kind of stretching a little bit the question on my mind at least was could he pull it off.
The movie starts with the action sequence from the trailer but it’s expanded and hilarious, It’s all one long take, there are missed cues, bungled stunts, several times Jean Claude has to take a second or two to capture his breath. Then your in the courtroom where the one thing that Jean Claude has managed to do with any success if thrown right back into his face. With a few economic scenes we are shown a man near the end of his tether.
Then Jean Claude stops his taxi to run into a post office/bank, and then suddenly it appears that he’s robbing the bank and possible holding hostages. Was Jean Claude that desperate? The movie then goes back and fills in the story around the corners, filling in just a few more details here and there. Now we see a man not only at the end of his tether but he’s fingering the release.
You’ve simply got to go see this movie. It’s wonderful. Jean Claude with the right material can actually act. The story is great and the cinematography is wonderful.it looks absolutely gorgeous.
If i was any good at this I would back up and tell you how wonderful the last couple of weeks have been. They literally have just seemed to slip through my fingers. Of course if I’m being honest the bad weeks seem to go by at a pretty good clip as well. Hypericon was a blast and the weekend before it was as well, though the details are a little fuzzy, but for different reasons than Sunday morning at Hypericon. So I’ll just leave it at that except to say a late happy birthday to Stephen Zimmer and Roblyn.
This last weekend was pretty good as well. More time with family would have been nice but that was my own fault. Saw Mongol and the Animation Show on Saturday. Mongol was beautiful but flat, the Animation Show was as great as it always is. When we left the Belcourt people were lined up down to 21st waiting to see the midnight showing of Rocky Horror. I was glad to see it was going to be packed. I would have liked to see it but I was going over to Billy’s on Sunday to help him assemble some ARs.
The Belcourt finally announced what the16mm outdoor film for July was going to be. Which is good because I think it’s this weekend. I hope it is, because if it’s the weekend after next is RollerGirls. Anyway it’s Stagecoach the movie that made John Wayne a star. Okay that’s probably overstating it but it’s a wonderful John Ford movie. A Western in the old fashioned Western style. I really want to see it and watching it outside stitting in a lawn chair should be a blast, even if I’m by my self. I doubt I’ll get anybody else interested in going to see it with me, but ‘m going to try.
Anyway that’s all the catching up I’m going to do. I’ll see you later.
Well Friday was a nice relaxing night with friends. I like those nights. Which is good because I did the same thing on Saturday, except we broke it up with two movies. Up the Yangtze and Repo Man.
Up the Yangtze is a doc about the Three Gorges Dam project in China, watching the subtitles I realized I have been spelling dam, damn, for about the last month. More specifically it is about a young girl from an imporverished family going to work abroad one of the cruise ships that ply the river. It’s also about a young man from a more affluent family, there income is revealed to be around 3000 Yuan a month if I remember right, but how that relates to other families in China I have no idea. It’s also about the disappearance of old China, which is literally being torn down and flooded. To me it could have benefited from either tightening the focus or stepping back. Still well worth watching though.
Early Sunday morning around 2:05 Repo Man was invested into the Pantheon of “THE GREATEST MOVIES EVER according to Clovis Citwood.” It now resides in the same rarified atmosphere as Two Lane Blacktop, White Lightning, Thunder Road, and the sublime masterpiece Smokey and the Bandit III: Smokey is the Bandit. By the way not only motor movies are enshrined those are just the first three or four that popped into my skull. We went to the Midnight Screening at the Belcourt. I feel bad because I’ve missed half of them (uh, now that I’m thinking about it it’s probably more than half). I love what they’re doing but if people don’t show up why bother doing it. So I feel like I ought to be there for every one. It helps that they have all been movies I would like to see again. Back to Repo Man I sow this back in the early nineties. I don’t remember where or how, it may have been on TBS or something because I didn’t remember half of what was going on in the movie. I pretty much just remembered a weird movie with Emilo Estavez and Harry Dean Stanton, bout a bunch of down and out repo men, and there was some there weird stuff going on. I primarily remembered Harry and Emilo in that big green Impala blasting down the LA river. I don’t know if it would have made any difference if I remembered more or not, but I was blown away by what I saw Sunday morning.
Needless to say, I didn’t get into anything Sunday night. I barely got out of the house to make a quick run to Krystal’s, hmm chili cheese pups. Oh wait I did watch The Fellowship of the Ring for some reason I’m not quite sure of. I should have been watching the Comedy Central thing the I need to get reviewed. C’est la vie, okay that still looks super silly written out. Does it sound that pretentious when I say it?
Every week I have great intentions of posting a little something everyday. Of course that never happens. So here I am again on Friday summing up the week. Well last weekend was pretty nice. Let’s see what did I do Monday, besides work. Oh yeah I worked. My sister was having problems with her email so I went to take a look at it. Of course it started working by the time I got there. C’est la vie. Okay I can pull that phrase off in conversation but it just looks pretentions sitting there on the screen. Other highpoints of the week include doing the second CineGeek podcast and finishing my The Air That I Breathe review. I’ve turned in some less than stellar reviews. Not that I’m expecting perfection, but even I have some standards. So I’m trying to make a point of putting more effort into these. I’m really proud of the last two, this one and the one for Red Violin. Of course there is always the possibilty that it may be completely unjustified and misplaced pride.
There are two gun shows this weekend and I’m going to miss them both. Don’t have anything budgeted for guns right now so there’s not much sense in going. It’s fun to look around and drool though. I’ve still got to get my AR to the range. That’s going to be interesting, pulling the trigger the first time on something I put together for the most part. Of course the part that actually matters the most, the installation of the barrel extention on the barrel, was done by a professional so there’s probably less risk involved than the first time I fired the Nagant, the Makarov or the CZ-52.
What am I doing this weekend? Well I’m not sure about tonight, Maybe, Get Smart, maybe Love Guru maybe nothing. I’m not even sure if we are going to Opry Mills or Green Hills. I guess i should ask more questions. Tommorow is a little more nailed down. Up the Yangtze and the midnight showing of Repo Man at the Belcourt. I am interested in anything about the Three Gorges Damn project. I’m awed, horrified, intrigued, dumbfounded about the whole thing. I’m not any kind of enviromentalist but that thing even scares me a little bit but you listen to the engineers who are working on it and they have such an optimism about the whole project and what it will mean for China that you start to kind of turn your thining around, but then you hear about the archelogists who have been working non-stop the last several years trying to recover and document what they can. The sheer unprecedented human scale of the thing awsome, in the traditional sense of the word, as well.
That should be enough for an interesting weekend.
Last Weekend, saw The Incredible Hulk on Friday night. it was okay but hanging out at Kalamata’s and Maggie Moo’s before and after was more entertaining. I loved the opening shot. and the way they rehased the origin in the beginning credits. I loved the old school lab where they crammed Bruce’s brain full of gamma rays. I loved all the little hints about the broader Marvel world, and I’m sure I missed most of those, but besides a few scenes early on I just didn’t really care that much. It’s a fun action movie, but I guess I’m just getting tired of wathcing CGI monsters wail on each other or maybe my organ of suspension disbelief is atrophing in general. Every time that Bruce got big or the Hulk got small I’m wondering where is all that mass coming from and where did is it going. Should there be a huge sucking noise as cubic yards of air are sucked in and a huge fireball from where it’s transformed into green flesh. I can believe someone drinks a potion, gets bitten by a spider, passes through a weird belt of radiation, intentionally shoots himself in the eye with gobs of gamma rays and weird things happen. Maybe they get stronger, have more stamina, they’re senses become sharper, their baldspot grows back in. It’s all extremely unlikely, but I can kinda of believe it. The Hulk is just flat impossible.
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