Category Archives: Movies

Tuesday Recommendations

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Butter toffee from Guth’s End of the Trail Candy Shoppe in Waupun, Wis., a burg southwest of Fond du Lac. Every year a PR company I’ve long dealt with sends me a box for the holidays. It’s the only time I eat toffee. It’s insanely good. Only a few pieces will make you feel a little queasy, so rich is the confection. But you eat them anyway.

The Man of Bronze. It’s the first Doc Savage novel, and probably the only one I’ll ever read. With genre pulp, that’s usually enough. I have memory fragments of the mid-70s Doc Savage movie I didn’t see – not many people did – so I’m probably remembering the commercials. My friend Kevin recommended Doc Savage as an entertaining read of no consequence, and I’ll go along with that so far. You have to like a yarn that begins with the sentence, “There was death afoot in the darkness.”

Gravity. It’s a really engaging Man Against Nature story, or to be more exact, Woman Against Vacuum. With a one-damn-thing-after-another plot that keeps your attention. Also, worth the extra money to see in 3D, and not too many movies are. In fact, the depiction of space alone is worth the price of admission. A few of the space-science stretchers bothered me a little – I don’t think hopping from spacecraft to spacecraft is quite that straightforward – but not that much. I don’t want exact space science from a movie, just high verisimilitude, and this movie delivers.

Lizard Point Consulting’s geography quizzes. Every now and then, I make Lilly and Ann take some of the easy ones, such as U.S. states or capitals. It’s my opinion that every adult American citizen without cognitive impairment ought to know all of the states.

But I can’t brag about a lot of the other quizzes. It’s clear that my knowledge of, say, French regions is fairly meager, and sad to say I don’t do that well on Japanese prefectures, either – I tend to remember only the ones I’ve been to, plus a scattering of others (like Aomori, where Aomori apples come from, because it’s due south of Hokkaido).

Even quizzes that ought to be easy-ish, such as African nations, have their confusions. Without looking, which one is Swaziland, which one Lesotho? Which is Benin, which one Togo? Which one is Guinea, which one Guinea-Bissau? (That should be easy, Guinea’s bigger.) Similarly, it’s hard to keep track of which –stan is which in Asia, except for Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Kazakstan.

To Dully Go When No Man Has Gone Before

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More snow today. Seems like we’ve already gotten more snow this winter than last, even ahead of the Solstice. Which is just the Solstice, not the “beginning of winter.” Winter got out of the gate early this year.

File the following under (1) movies I’ve seen pieces of lately and (2) movies I saw long ago that I never need to see again in their entirety, which is actually most of them. I chanced across Star Trek: The Motion Picture the other day, about which I have vague recollections from early 1980. That is, I vaguely remember it being a yawn.

So I watched about 10 minutes of it. The Enterprise had encountered one of those sprawling, amorphous energy beings that it seemed to run into with some regularity, and the ship was boldly going into it. Or at least going in with some trepidation.

Two things struck me. First, the purpose of the scene seemed to be to show off the movie’s special effects, which probably did look swell on the big screen in 1980. But the scene went on and on, with the characters and the audience seeing light patterns go by, something like the “through the star gate” scene in 2001, only a lot slower.

Also, everyone on the bridge just stood there, wide-eyed. This is the bridge crew of the Enterprise we’re talking about. They’ve seen a lot of outer-space marvels and weird things in their time. So why weren’t they at their instruments, trying to figure out what the thing was?

Im Cabaret, Au Cabaret, To Cabaret

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What’s winter up North without a spot of snow? Last winter, that’s what. So far this winter — which seems to be under way, despite what people say about the solstice marking the beginning — has more snow than last. At least, we got some today.

The dog likes to run around in it.

On Saturday, Lilly and I watched Cabaret on DVD. That movie and I go back a long way. In fact, I was taken to see it with the rest of my family when it was new, though I was too young to understand much of it. Since then, I’ve seen it — four? five times? It’s one of my favorite musicals, though technically I suppose it isn’t a musical, but a drama with a sort of Greek Chorus. We had the soundtrack on LP and later I got it on CD.

Some time ago I saw Cabaret on the stage, and more recently read The Berlin Stories, which count as the source material, though it’s remarkable how different all the iterations are. For instance, I remember working my way through Christopher Isherwood’s stories and thinking, when is Sally Bowles going to show up? She does, in one story. In the greater scheme of the narrative, she’s one of a number of passing characters. Well drawn and with some the elements of the later Sally, but not the main character she’d ultimately become. If I were a completist, I’d look into the ’50s movie I Am a Camera, but I don’t have a particularly strong urge to do so.

Lilly had something of a 16-year-old girl reaction to the film. Which is only reasonable. She didn’t like the fact that by the end of the movie, Sally and Brian weren’t together any more. But they weren’t right for each other, I said. No matter, that isn’t the ending she wanted. She reported greater satisfaction from Catching Fire, which she saw on Saturday night with her friends and assorted millions of others. Wonder which entertainment will stick with her longer.

Thursday Bits

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In the mid-afternoon, a call center employee called me, pitching an extended service plan for a major appliance I bought about a year ago. That doesn’t count as violating the do-not-call list, I suppose, because of some verbiage in the sales agreement. She was about 15 seconds into her pitch when I offered up a curt “no thanks” and hung up.

My reasoning about most service plans and extended warranties and so on is fairly simple. If it were to my benefit, the company wouldn’t be offering it. The odds are I’d pay them to do nothing, and they know it. I know it too.

I saw about 20 minutes of Geronimo the other day – the latest in a long line of movies I’ve seen bits and pieces of. It’s vintage 1962, so while the Indians were portrayed sympathetically, the title character wasn’t actually played by an Indian. I recognized him at once: Chuck Connors.

His blue eyes weren’t the only Hollywood stretchers in the movie. In 1886, when the story takes place, Geronimo was already in his late 50s. Connors was about 40, and a buff 40 at that. The Apache warrior’s wife was played by an Indian, however. An actress born in Bombay.

Never mind. One of the U.S. cavalry officers looked awfully familiar. The one who wanted to let Geronimo surrender, rather than blow him up with artillery, as his commander seemed eager to do. Who? I thought for a minute. Adam West. A pre-Batman Adam West.

Here’s a lesser-known Geronimo story: as an old man at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904.

I had reason to be out briefly at about 11 p.m. tonight, under a near-cold, clear sky. I had to look for him and he was there, off in the southeast, large and rising over the horizon: Orion. Harbinger of winter in these parts. So are the chill in the air and the increasingly bare trees, but it’s good to have celestial cues, too.

The Dangers of Philosophy

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The DVD box for the movie The Clone Returns Home (2008) contains the following line, in red, and all capitals: WARNING: THIS MOVIE CONTAINS SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF PHILOSOPHY.

I understand the danger. I knew some guys back in college who OD’d on philosophy. It’s easy enough to do. You start out with Greeks, maybe even some pre-Socratics, then move on to humanists and German idealists, and the next thing you know, you’re strung out on Heideggerianism.

We have to return the disk soon, so I’m not sure I’ll have time to watch The Clone Returns Home, a Japanese movie about an astronaut who dies, is reborn in his clone somehow, and bad things happen to him that allow the audience to philosophize. I don’t mean to snidely prejudge the movie, since I haven’t seen it, but that’s my takeaway from reading the back of the DVD box. It’s probably an interesting movie, if you can suspend your disbelief about certain things, such as Japan having a manned space program.

I rarely get to see whole movies these days anyway, at least at home. Too many distractions. Sometimes I manage to see representative slices, such as a bit of The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999) the other day. It might not have been such a great movie all together, but 15 minutes worth of 15th-century French and English soldiers hacking at each other was worth watching.

Lombok

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Not long ago I saw the first 15 minutes or so of Hercules in New York, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first movie. I soon decided that I didn’t need to see any more, for the usual reasons (life’s too short, who’s going to give me those 91 minutes back?, etc.) In the age of YouTube, watching all of a bad movie isn’t necessary anyway, because you can watch the likes of this.

If you’re interested in a fittingly puerile review of the movie, there’s always this.

According to the imdb, the movie was made in 1969, released in early 1970. I wonder if anyone watching the movie in the theater had any inkling that the muscleman on the screen would ever be, say, the governor of a major U.S. state. Of course they didn’t.

Lombok was an interesting place. Drier than Bali, but still fairly green. This view near the town of Kuta, on the south coast of the island, shows the greenery.

We arrived on July 31, 1994, and stayed a few days. One of the persistent clichés about the island was that it’s “not as spoiled” as Bali, which wasn’t remotely spoiled, as in ruined by its popularity. Bali shrugs her lovely shoulders and the visitors pass through.

Still, that sentiment was in guidebook print, and I heard people talk that way, including one woman who was persuaded that the further east you traveled in the Lesser Sunda – Lombok, Sumbawa, Flores, and so on. — the better. I couldn’t say for sure, since we didn’t make it any further east than Lombok. But maybe she was just romanticizing poverty.

Why a Duck?

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Unusually cool for this time of year, with rain a lot of the time, but not so many thunderstorms lately. During such moments, at least when work doesn’t intrude, there’s always the option of parking yourself somewhere with a book. Such as Hail, Hail, Euphoria! by Roy Blount Jr. (2010), which is about the making of Duck Soup, “the greatest war movie ever made,” according to the cover.

From page 15: “… when the director of Horse Feathers couldn’t get the crowd he had assembled for a big football scene to show any enthusiasm for the third or fourth take, Harpo said he’d take care of it. He did a lap around the field naked and honking his horn, and the fans went wild.”

No Thanks, Mr. Luhrmann

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Back to posting around June 16. Not exactly a summer vacation, especially since the pace of for-pay work isn’t slacking off, but more like a warm-weather interlude. Except that it isn’t quite warm enough to be summer, at least not in northern Illinois.

I’ve heard about the latest version of Gatsby, and so decided to read the book again. I’m going to pass on the film, for reasons stated before. But also because I’ve heard about the soundtrack.

From hotnewhiphop.com: “The director, Luhrmann, spoke on the adaption of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book, and creating music for it that blends the Jazz Age with a modern spin. ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is peppered with contemporary music references specific to the story’s setting of 1922. While we acknowledge, as Fitzgerald phrased it, “the Jazz Age,” and this is the period represented on screen, we—our audience—are living in the “hip-hop age” and want our viewers to feel the impact of modern-day music the way Fitzgerald did for the readers of his novel at the time of its publication.’ ”

Something like Classical scenes in medieval paintings featuring clothes and armor that looks suspiciously medieval? No, that’s being too generous. The producers clearly believe (and correctly so) that a genuine period music soundtrack — or even one featuring closely authentic, newly recorded versions — wouldn’t sell as well as a hip-hop soundtrack, and are pretending it’s for artistic reasons. Yet posh Jazz Age clothes and cars seem to be OK for the movie (to judge by the marketing). I don’t see why Jay Gatsby shouldn’t be dressed like a hip-hop star.

I forget which costume drama I saw about Marie Antoinette some years ago, but it had the same problem — a distractingly modern soundtrack. In that case it was ’80s New Wave, which I’d prefer over hip hop any time, but it still didn’t sit well on the film.

Water-colored Water & Pink Flamingos

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Rain promised early in the day on Monday, but it didn’t come until late in the evening. So I had time to mow the lawn, a task that I’ve put off lately. I enjoyed cutting all the high dandelions and scattering their seeds to the winds.

We saw an odd feature of Lilacia Park: a fountain spouting blue-colored water. I’m pretty sure that the last time I saw the fountain, non-tinted water was used.

It made me think of Mon Oncle, which I haven’t seen in many years. One of the features of the ultramodern house in that movie, if I remember right, was a fountain spouting blue-colored water. It was something seen in passing, not commented on, but I think it was supposed to be a visual comment on the vacuousness of the haute bourgeoisie, or burgeoning postwar consumerism, or something (I’m entirely too Anglo-Saxon to care much about the subtleties of Gallic social criticism).

Also noted at the park: a couple of pink flamingos. There were exactly two that I could see, just idling next to one of the walkways. Say what you want about pink flamingos, I think there ought to be more of them in parks and gardens.

Argo

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Saw Argo on DVD recently. It deserved its praise for suspenseful plotting and all-around storytelling. Lilly and her mother watched it with me – Ann isn’t really old enough to be interested – and toward the end, Lilly said, “I can’t stand this anymore! What’s going to happen?”

I didn’t tell her. That would have spoiled a cracking good yarn. Part fictionalized? Who cares, if the results are good.

I faintly remembered the extraction of six embassy workers from Iran in 1980 as a momentary good-news pause during the early hostage crisis, and vaguely remembered the much-later revelation that a bogus movie production had been involved. I didn’t believe for a moment that Revolutionary Guards chased a departing Swissair flight down the runway in Tehran, or any of the other last-minute excitements depicted in the movie. Not that such things were impossible, but they seemed too cinematic to be real, and of course they were.

I enjoyed reading about some the real details of the operation afterwards. I especially liked the reason for the timing of the escape, which was on an early-morning flight. Revolutionary Guards, it was reasoned, don’t like to get up early either, zeal or no zeal.

“This was another reason for choosing the 7:30 a.m. Swissair flight,” wrote CIA agent Tony Mendez, who led the escape on the ground at considerable personal risk. “If we arrived at the airport at 5 a.m., the chances were the airport would be less chaotic. Also, the officials manning the controls might still be sleepy, and most of the Revolutionary Guards would still be in their beds. This was the case that Monday morning, 28 January 1980.”