What was the last movie you saw at the theaters?

Saw And It Sucked!

Quantum of Solace.

First Daniel Craig 007 I've seen straight through. He's a refreshing, much better Bond. I noticed a distinct lack of clever witticisms in this movie -- a few by Dench that had folks laughing, but not many, really.

It's a pity the movie starts out so slow, though.

__________________
Linda's Author Website
Linda's Amazon Author page

Twilight. I saw it Sunday.

__________________
"One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them..."

The Lord of the Rings

double feature last night:

madagascar 2-- i had a bad day so i needed to laugh

quatum of solace-- needed more explosions

So what did you think or it?

__________________
Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.
Buddha

My Name Is Bruce
I had a few problems with it, but at the end of the day this movie did exactly what it was supposed to. It's no Citizen Kane, but then Citizen Kane well nigh put me to sleep once. But the best part about the movie for me was the personal presence of Bruce Campbell at the screening. He introduced the movie and took questions from the audience afterward. He is a man of much charm and wit- his personal presence is warm and powerful. You can see that this is a fellow who loves what he does and that comes across in even the worst films that he has been in. I have never seen Bruce 'phone it in.'

Should you see this movie? Only if you are a Bruce Campbell fan and fun self-conscious and self-parodying/celebrating B-movie cheese is your cup of tea. And most especially if Bruce himself is coming to your neck of the woods with it. If Campbell is personally on hand for the showing, then I can almost certainly guarantee that you will have a good time- even if you hate the movie itself.

__________________
“A Boss in Heaven is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore If God did exist, he would have to be abolished.”
-Mikhail Bakunin

Back on the 17th I went with my girl to The AFI in Silver Spring Maryland to see Peter Greenaway's new film about Rembrandt, Nightwatching.

It's a beautiful film and possibly Greenaway's most overtly romantic film to date. It's a fictionalized account of a maverick artist with an intensely, dangerously personal vision, and he paints a romantic, passionate Rembrandt who is pretty hard not to sympathize with -- for the most part. His Rembrant is commissioned by some some effete nobles, rich poseurs, all of them pretty nasty guys, who want their military careers glorified on canvas. Witnessing secondhand many of their shenanigans, the painter suspects foul play and decides to create a cryptic but unmistakably scathing portrait excoriating the phony princes on pretty much every level.

There is a lot of direct audience engagement asking you to question what matters in film and art and of course life and conflating these questions with those Rembrandt's passions lead him to ask. It makes the plot a bit messy but it works, this film rocks, see it on the big screen if you can.

I thought it was great actually. I mean, the book was better, but the movie was amazing.

Synechdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)



meaty, Holden, and Sexy have already described and discussed their feelings about the film, so I don't find it necessary to rehash what they said about the plot. I will try to briefly explain my first reaction, try to put it in some context and maybe guess about what might happen upon future viewings.

I realize that I should have realized this long ago, but Kaufman is really a gloomy guy. In his first filmed screenplay, Being John Malkovich, directed by Spize Jonze, he depicted a life and a marriage in disarray, and Jonze filmed the beginning mostly seriously and grittily, even though a puppeteer was the main character! This remains my fave Kaufman film because aside from all its originality and cleverness, it's really funny.

I'm going to skip up to Kaufman's last film, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, directed by Michel Gondry, who I'll admit is more of a "romantic" director than Jonze. This film seems to be beloved by many people, but it does have one of the darkest, despairing openings of any film I can remember, and I just don't feel the romantic epiphanies that many others do. What I do see is a highly-creative writer being interpreted by an equally-creative director, but it hits me as just all flash and no substance. I basically feel manipulated and not in an "old-fashioned" way. I've seen Eternal Sunshine only three times and none in the last three years, but I must just be too old a fart to understand its profound appeal. I still believe that everyone should watch it for oneself, but I feel that about most movies which attempt something beyond the boring norm.

Now, I finally get to Synechdoche, New York, where Kaufman can keep his personal vision intact and not worry about others reinterpreting him. As I said, I don't want to retread what the other links said, and I hope you've all read and + repped them, but I do agree that Kaufman's creativity has probably never been so apparent before. He has come up with a rich metaphor about how all people live their lives alone and die on their own. See, I told you he was a gloomy guy! Now, I'll admit that this film may actually be profound, but it also makes you feel like a side of meat being punched by Rocky Balboa. One thing I want to take exception with is that the film is actually that funny. I enjoyed the wicked, but subtle, satire of both how the characters see themselves and how amenable they are to play and be played by others, but to me, it's just more intellectually clever than anything to laugh at. I admit I laughed out loud a couple of times, but that was it.



I'll say that it's definitely weird though, so that should automatically appeal to many people. One of the most bizarre scenes to me, and even if it's a throwaway (I doubt it) is the zeppelin scene. I can't for the life of me remember the context. Was the zeppelin in a scene where it appeared there was a riot or martial law declared? I really didn't find the film that confusing, and I was pretty sure I understood what was going on at most any given moment, but I'll admit that there are multiple layers going on which probably will become more meaningful. It's just whether one believes it's worth seeing the first time, let alone all the additional viewings. I'll be rewatching it when it comes out on DVD, but I won't be going back to the theatre to watch it because I wasn't as impressed with the visuals as meaty was.

One left field comment I'll throw out there is that the film seems to begin and end at about the same time, 7:45. Between the alarm clock at the beginning and the drawn clock on the brick wall at the end, I started to think that maybe the entire two-hour movie was just Philip Seymour Hoffman reliving much of his life at the potential moment of his death. Did anyone notice the thanks to Dustin Hoffman in the end credits? I wonder if that was for Dustin helping to create P.S.

__________________
It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

Glad you saw it Mark , I just got back from seeing it again. The zepplin could be flying around because of the war that is going on outside of Cotard's play. I didn't even notice there was a war when I saw it the first time.

The next time it's seen is on the inside of the warehouse which has expanded much farther by then.

__________________

So, what's up with that zeppelin? And what about 7:45?

Haven't noodled through the 7:45 yet, other than, as you say, it may mean the entire thing is one of those "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" things that happens in an instant of the mind.

As for the Zeppelin, there definitely is a war alluded to and there are instances of people saying that it's better "in there", meaning the production, than it is in the "real world". Whether or not the inside or outside are to be taken as really happening, metaphorically I think it shows where Cotard's framing mindset still is, that his own machinations and thoughts are more important and even in their chaos preferable to the madness beyond his control outside those airplane hangers full of doubles and constructs. At least to him it is more preferable.

As for why the specific iconography of the Zeppelin, I think that's clearly more of the stuff about his wife and daughter, who have "gone to Berlin" whether they are actually there or not. Germany, that's become the brand name for the otherplace he can't reach them in, part of reality that because of his sadness and frustration and sense of loss and distance is starting to overwhelm what he thinks of as "outside" the production. So while the "real world" is apparently dark and its structure crumbling, including his wife and first child slipping away, he keeps walking under and away from the Zeppelins and such and returning each day to the constructed world, as imperfect and ultimately uncontrollable as it proves to be.


I think I'm beginning to talk in circles, but Synecdoche, New York will do that to you. I've still only seen it the once so far, so I'll have to see it again and again to check out my own various theories and conclusions. But the fact that his first family has moved to Germany and the imagery of the Zeppelin are definitely intertwined. I think.




As for the romantic appeal of Eternal Sunshine, the thing that always gets me about the ending is it sums up how I feel about love. The people I have loved and lost, no matter how that loss has come (but I can certainly relate to the disintegration of a romance over time), if you told me at the beginning that I was going to experience the highest of emotional highs at the apex of that love and relationship but when it left it was going to hurt so much I feared I was slipping into despair, even with that foreknowledge if you then gave me a choice between erasing the entire thing from my memory and consciousness or starting over again knowing ultimately it was going to be the worst emotional pain I have ever felt all over again, I would do it all over again without hesitation. For sure. I'm no fan of pain, but you can't know true heartache without first knowing love, and if they have to be intertwined then so be it.

And that's why Joel's choice to reenter a relationship with Clementine even though he possess a kind of irrefutable proof that it will end horribly touches me. Can't speak for anybody else, but that's what the movie says to me, and it's powerful and even romantic, in a crazy kind of depressing way. But not depressing, really, but a kind of eternal optimism in spite of all evidence to the contrary that love will win. If not, those highs one experiences during love's best moments are what makes life worth living, so how can you want to erase them without erasing the best parts of yourself?

__________________
"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

MILK
2008, Gus Van Sant

Van Sant's Milk tells an important story in an engaging way, with great recreations of the period (it would make a great double bill with Fincher's Zodiac in that regard) and a summation of the greatness of this man as well as the immensity of his loss.

Harvey Milk came to his activism rather late in his life when he maybe should have been slowing down, and while it played havoc with his personal romantic relationships the impact of his public life is undeniable. Sean Penn is fantastic as Milk, a central performance as strong or stronger than anything else I've seen this year. He's not really a dead ringer for Harvey physically and he doesn't get his voice down to the point of a flawless nightclub impression, but much like Dustin Hoffman as Lenny Bruce over thirty years ago in Bob Fosse's Lenny I think Penn really embodies Harvey perfectly. The supporting cast is very strong too, and even though the film purposefully doesn't spend a lot of time examining Dan White's motivations and character in any great detail, Josh Brolin nails him in a relatively short amount of screentime.



The Oscar-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) is maybe my favorite doc of all time, certainly the one I have watched the most, not counting concert documentaries anyway - it's gotta be upwards of over thirty complete viewings. The documentary captures much more of the era and the specific issues and events, as you'd expect, but I think the one key element missing from the documentary, clearly by design, is any kind of examination of Harvey's personal life. That's one of the best aspects of Van Sant's film, and his lovers and emotions are brought into play in a respectful way that stops well short of cheap and easy sensationalism. James Franco and Diego Luna play the two men he's involved with between 1970 and 1978, and both are quite good. One key figure is not played by an actor at all but seen only in film clips: Anita Bryant. I think much like George Clooney's decision to go with the actual footage of Senator McCarthy in Good Night, and Good Luck, here Van Sant decided there was no way to cast somebody without it coming off as ridiculously over-the-top, even if the transcripts were recreated verbatim. Character actor Denis O'Hare (seen in Eastwood's recent Changeling) plays California Senator John Briggs, who Harvey does battle with over Proposition 6, and while he does a fine job I think you see some of that trap there, where he seems almost too arch and inept at times to be true, and yet the actual man was and said all of those things he says in Milk.

Overall it's a very good biopic and I would imagine even more powerful if you haven't seen The Times of Harvey Milk (or haven't seen it thirty-six times). It's a story that is still inspiring, still necessary to be retold (unfortunately), and still infuriating and sad the way life ultimately played out for Mr. Milk. The movie does not dramatize either the trial of Dan White nor the White Night Riots, though both are mentioned in crawls before the credits, as are the fates of many of the supporting players.



If you want to know the facts, see The Times of Harvey Milk. If you want to get a more fully rounded portrait of the man emotionally, see Milk. But really, you should see them both.


The Times of Harvey Milk (1984), A+
Milk (2008), B

I've been on a bit of a tear the past week catching up with movies in theaters. Not going to do full write-ups for all of these now, but between Four Christmases last Thursday and Milk tonight I also saw...


Changeling
GRADE: B+


Happy-Go-Lucky
GRADE: B+


Appaloosa
GRADE: C


Fear(s) of the Dark
GRADE: B-


Role Models
GRADE: B


So seven movies in six days (three of them were on Sunday). And I think I'm going to try and sneak Australia in tomorrow morning. And I've got a pass to a screening of Valkyrie next week. So the march continues!

It seems that an unordinary amount of recent films that you have watched are above par Hold's. That is exciting to me because usually your grades are very accurate in terms of my tastes. I really want to see Changeling and a B- or better film would be great.

__________________

“The gladdest moment in human life, methinks, is a departure into unknown lands.” – Sir Richard Burton

'Tis the season when more good stuff than bad is released, usually. At least for my taste.

Returning home from the movie, Sarah and I did talk about Germany's use of zeppelins during both war and peace time. I told her they were considered as alternatives to ocean liners and not just instruments of death. She has seen Howard Hughes' Hell's Angels which has some of the best zeppelin imagery ever, and of course, she's seen newsreel footage of the destruction of the Hindenburg. Sarah also mentioned that the zeppelin in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade seemed to be a commercial airship, and I told her she was right, but what airline was it, Air Nazi? So, zeppelins = Germans = destruction makes sense, but I can't help but think there's something more. Of course, maybe Kaufman just thinks that zeppelins are cool.

Synecdoche is a very detail filled movie , but I'm not sure if he thought the zeppelin was something to be dissected this far - rather than imagery to show the expansion of the play and Cotard's attempt to alter his life.

I thought the 7:45 showed how Cotard didn't think his life mattered and he made no impact on anything (as told by Ellen/Cotard near the end of the movie).

By the way Cotard's syndrome : a rare neuropsychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that he or she is dead

Maybe it was Deutsche Zeppelin Reederei ?



****ing scary ****.

Took my teenage cousins to see Twilight...

__________________