Sketches Of Gehry

I don’t want to be particularly snarky about this one, though director and interviewer Sydney Pollack makes a rather tempting target. I like architecture and Gehry’s buildings can be staggering. LA’s Disney Music Hall is. Seattle’s EMP Museum isn’t. Billbao’s Guggenheim almost certainly is, though I’ve not seen it in person. Continue reading Sketches Of Gehry

Snakes on a Product Placement

The witness to a terrible gangland slaying, the mcguffin getting those motherfucking Snakes up onto the Plane, rather ostentatiously drains a can of Red Bull as he steps off his motorbike. The audience I was with laughed–if the can had been flashing neon, we couldn’t have been more savvy consumers, fully aware of how the movie was shilling before it began. A short while later (in the quick dispensing of plot), as the witness watches a tv news report about the slaying (and just before the goons come calling to gun him down), the camera slyly includes in the frame around the tv literally stacks of Red Bull cans, all wrapped in plastic. Five minutes and most of the plot later, the witness having been saved by FBI hero Sam Jackson is being cajoled/bullied into testifying, and the good guys toss on the table some evidence of him from the scene of the slaying: encased in a baggie, a drained can of Red Bull.

I really wanted to like Snakes, but the film is an aggressively smart-ass deployment of the crude tools of B-film without any of the smarts or real pleasure the best B-films and recreations of B-films offer. Continue reading Snakes on a Product Placement

TV

I’ve been catching up on last year’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, about which I have. It isn’t the masterpiece it once was, or perhaps (three episodes in) I see no gathering momentum, simply a solid funny half-hour of comedy. Its familiar rhythms and pacing and gags may not startle, but I’m still happy to see ’em.

I also either accepted the suckerbait or made an efficient decision, and ordered up the NBC promo disc for two new shows, available only on Netflix. Continue reading TV

Clubland: Le Samourai

I’ll say more about my thoughts on the film later, but I thought I’d just get things rolling with a couple of topics/questions.

1. I find Melville’s film to be devastatingly emotional, beneath the laconic dialogue and cool surfaces (or should I say, “because of?”). Do genre films–or let’s say films within genres that work as a kind of apotheosis of the genre–pack more of a punch emotionally because they are playing on a set of expectations? In other words, is the constraint of genre really a kind of freedom?

2. I particularly like the way the film quietly explodes the idea of a stoic masculinity–actions are not expressions of a philosophy where gesture supplants internal life, but messages from a vast unknown territory. Of course, I am a bit taken aback when I read that Melville describes his protagonist Costello as a “psychopath.” Do you agree? If so, the film might be part of the discussion with Straw Dogs and White.
Continue reading Clubland: Le Samourai

Bank Dick (1940) W.C. Fields

I feel like I’ve not written anything about any movies I’ve seen lately, so I’ll type briefly about this one. I had never actually watched a whole WC Fields film before, and while the caricature of Fields is for the most part backed up by the film, it was much better than I expected.

The jokes tend to be quite cruel, with a nice emphasis on drinking and smoking; all right up my alley for humor, but I was surprised with what they got away with in a mainstream film. Maybe Fields could get away with more b/c of his stature? At one point early on, Fields’ daughter throws a bottle at him, hitting him in the back of the head as he is leaving the house. He groans, rubs his head and leaves. Then a few seconds later he opens the door with a huge potted plant and rears back to throw it across the room and crush the girl. His wife yells at him, and he holds off throwing it, but just barely. Continue reading Bank Dick (1940) W.C. Fields

steve martin’s shopgirl and why we fight

why are movies as vile as shopgirl being made? why are they marketed in such a way that idiots like me fall for it and watch them? if movies such as this one can be made and sold, why don’t we make and sell really groundbreaking movies that unveil the lies and horror of what is happening to the world?

we watched why we fight last night. how do we make it required watching for everyone? anyway, i found it oddly peace-inducing. it’s all so much bigger than i. my activism is futile. i think i’ll have another mojito.

Egoyan – Where the Truth Lies

Atom Egoyan’s latest film, which seems to be quite far removed, in plot at least, from his previous film, Ararat. If a few words could accurately sum up Egoyan’s obsessions and themes, it would be "where the truth lies" which would make this a nice opportunity to look back on Canada’s second best memory obsessed director, except I’m not feeling up for a retorspective.

There are some big problems with Where the Truth Lies; among them the characters, the acting, the amateurish direction, and the plot. None of these are beyond redemption, but parts of each are weak enough to end up being unsatisfying.

Continue reading Egoyan – Where the Truth Lies

Violence

I have had a couple days at home alone, after taking Kris and Max to Omaha. I’d scurry about during the day to do all this end-of-year crap I need to get done, then come home and see stuff I normally wouldn’t have the time or space to see–maybe things a bit more violent than Kris would ever want to watch (and by “bit more” I of course mean “excessively, ridiculously, extravagantly more”). I can turn up the volume, go nuts.

What follows are a couple of strong recommendations and others just to be recorded. There’s a loose running issue in my responses about the ways they depict violence. But mostly it’s just a quick set of recs: Continue reading Violence

United 93

This is one intense film. It is relentless and doesn’t let up until the very. last. moment. I was moved and angered but mostly impressed by the economy of the writing and filmmaking (United 93 makes Munich look like a baroque opera). The “villains” are presented as human (for the most part); you certainly feel their passion and their fear. The passengers lack character per se, but their growing desire to try to do something is palpable, admirable, heroic even (though, by the end, things do go a bit Lord of the Flies . . . puns not intended). The chaos on the ground (in Boston, New York, Newark, Cleveland and some military location) is both outrageous and completely understandable–forgiveable even. There are a couple of ideologically loaded moments (the hijackers in the airport walking past large, glossy, back-lit advertisements for various consumer products. The FAA and the military frustrated by their inability to locate the President to make a necessary leadership decision (the gossip that the Vice President over stepped his bounds by ordering planes shot down is not broached). The audience with whom I sat were visibly emotional and very, very quiet. If one was in any way close to this event, I just don’t know how they could sit through the film.

Yacht Rock

I hadn’t watched anything over at Channel 101 in a while, not since House of Cosbys. I read yesterday that Bill Cosby is still trying to sue over this, and so I wandered over to the 101 website to see what they were up to.

I strongly – HIGHLY – recommend that you folks check out the show Yacht Rock. There are seven episodes up – I’ve watched 2 so far – and it’s really good. Particularly for fans of 70s music – Bruns, Reynolds. In a way, this reminded me of the feel of Z Channel – the yellow tinges of film being shot in 1978 Marina Del Rey. It’s very funny, it’s original, and if it gets too popular people are going to sue faster than Bill Cosby. It’s the back-story of a particular California music genre: Smooth, ocean-going, yet fightin’ too. After all, anything which features John Oates saying, “You’re a fucking loser,” to Peter Cetera has got to be eorth ten minutes of your time. http://www.channel101.com/shows/show.php?show_id=152