Some rediscovered video of David Bowie performing “Jean Genie” during the hey day of glam rock. If there was a revival today would they call it Bling Rock? Bling Boogie?
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol follows the action/spy thriller formula to the letter. There’s not even a hint of straying outside the genre’s tropes. But they do it oh so well. Fight moves I’ve never seen before. Stunning photography. Chase scenes I’ve never seen before. Cool new gadgets you’ve never seen before that walk the line between plausibility and science fiction. Cool cars. Hot women. Lots of bling from all over the world. I had a damn good time at this movie and can heartily recommend it if you are looking for a good action movie.
The movie is well cast. Never been a big Tom Cruise fan, but this is a good role for him and the supporting cast holds their own in every scene, especially Paula Patton who plays on of Cruise’s team mates. She’s just as bad ass as he is and is not the typical withering female that you find in Bond movies. Simon Pegg is quickly sealing his title of geek of choice in the A List Actors league. And Jeremey Renner could easily carry his own action movie franchise.
Of course all those explosions of famous land marks, car chase scenes, building climbing, computer network hacks don’t leave much time for character development. The few seconds of poignant character background development are laughable, “yeah, whatever” moments in the film. That’s fine. No great loss. For what it is, Mission Impossible: ghost Protocol is a bang up good movie.
I know. I know. Anything to get kids to read and get them interested in the wonderful world of books. But to try to lure kids into reading with Angry Birds really smacks of desperation.
Dec 042011
Hugo Cabret's father teaches him how to fix the automaton.
The first thing I think is important to tell you about the movie Hugo is that it has been misleadingly marketed. The movie trailers give you the impression this is going to be a 30′s era steam punkish sort of movie complete with mechanical automatons. The trailer sets you up to expect that robots are gong to play a central part of the movie. They don’t. I’d say that the automaton you see in the trailer plays a pivotal role in the movie. But anyone who enters the theater expecting a whimsical clockwork movie is going to be disappointed.
At first.
The movie is actually a fairly standard-issue orphan story. But it is story that’s beautifully told and it has many facets that explore the same basic theme. The movie’s protagonist, orphan Hugo, eeks out a living, taking care of clocks in a train station and hoping the authorities don’t discover that his drunk uncle has died because if they do, he’ll get sent to the orphanage. Because his deceased father was a mechanical genius with clocks and automata, Hugo is naturally interested in them too. And this colors his view of the world. About midway through the movie he tells his one and only friend, Isabelle:
“I’d imagine the whole world was one big machine. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured, if the entire world was one big machine, I couldn’t be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason.”
Thus perfectly tying the theme of the movie to the setting.
The theme is played out on several fronts, primarily Hugo’s search to find his place in the world. But the theme is explored through the other lonely people Hugo sees in the train station and a mysterious, crotchety man who runs a toy store in the station.
This story line by itself would have made an excellent movie. Especially one that is so amazingly rendered in film. Every scene in the movie is gorgeous.
For better or worse the movie takes a turn as Hugo’s future gets tied up in finding out how is father died and his father’s relationship to the automaton in the trailer. Telling you any more would spoil it. You might say the sub plot overshadows the main plot of the movie. Or maybe it enlightens the main plot. Kinda hard to say. Up to you to decide.
I’m not a judge of acting. But I’d say the cast was fantastic. Asa Butterfield and Chloë Grace Moretz do the bulk of the heavy lifting in the movie, playing Hugo and Isabelle. They have to convince us they are kids still unsure of how the world works while pulling off some dramatic, emotional scenes with strength. But top acting kudos have to go to Ben Kingsley, playing the crotchety old toy store keeper. The minor characters that Hugo watches in the station are well-portrayed by their actors, coming across, quirky, flawed, funny, but very very human too.
Watch for the cameos. I’ll say no more.
Definitely not what I was expecting, but I also thoroughly enjoyed it.
Nov 262011
Went to see The Muppets tonight. I had the benefit of seeing the movie without any foreknowledge of all the hoopla and drama surrounding the movie in terms of the original muppeteers not being involved etc. I also had the benefit of sitting next to a 5 year old. As a result I thoroughly enjoyed the movie and it made me super nostalgic for the good old days of The Muppet Show.
For the most part, The Muppets movie does a good job of staying true to the spirit of the muppets in general and the muppet show in particular. Full of corny jokes. breaking the fourth wall, vaudeville slapstick, and goofy dance numbers. (The rap by Chris Cooper was particularly inspired.) All of the muppets were thoroughly in character and consistent with their personality as far as I remembered. Everyone got some screen time. Was glad to see that my favorite muppet, Rowlf, had a good few seconds of humorous glory that was just perfect for him.
You could pick nits here and there about the characterizations of the various muppets and make claims about how, maybe, the voices weren’t quite right. But they got all the essential basics right.
My main complaint, to the extent I have one, is that they tried to cram too much into one movie. To many major themes and plots. This is a movie that could have benefited from a thinner story line in order to give the muppets more time to, ahem, flesh out their character.
But I still heartily recommend the movie. Good family fun. Lots of cameos from famous Hollywood folks. Classic muppet humor.
Yesterday Boing Boing posted an article about PT Barnum’s The Art of Money Getting. Among other things, I learned that PT Barnum is not the guy who coined the phrase, “there’s a sucker born every minute.” According to their sources, it was a competitor who coined the phrase.
In any case, they posted a link to an apparently public domain version of The Art Of Money Getting. I read the whole thing in about 15 minutes. That was one of the things that struck me about the book. It’s amazingly concise. It’s concrete, but not wordy.
Another thing that impressed me about the book was simply that it proves the market for self-help books is not a new phenomena. This is very clearly a book intended to give advice about how to accumulate wealth and be successful in business. I don’t know why but I kinda thought that was a modern invention.
The diction is archaic but refreshing somehow. The only really bad anachronism that came across was that for the most of the book he talks about boys choosing careers and the mistakes they make in trying to accumulate wealth. In the introduction he clearly says that any man or woman can be successful and build up wealth. But the bulk of the book is written as if he were only addressing men.
One surprising thing that came out was how much he railed against tobacco. Of course he approaches it from the perspective that it is a waste of money that steals money from more productive pursuits. But it’s also interesting that he correctly describes it as an addiction.
But the most surprising thing is how much good advice can be packed into such a small book. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any of the advice that I disagreed with or thought was archaic.
Highly recommend spending a few minutes reading this book.
Sep 172011
Had the opportunity to see Moneyball at a sneak preview yesterday. I’m always a little leery of sports movies, afraid that they will turn horrendously cliche’ or overly smarmy. But Brad Pitt was the main producer on this film. He put his own money into so he could play the lead character, Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane. This is the man who led the Oakland A’s to an unprecedented 20 straight wins and arguable the man who changed how modern baseball is managed. I’m glad to be able to report that Brad Pitt has an eye for a good story and that the movie is neither cliche’ nor smarmy.
The premise of the movie is that Billy Beane is the general manager of a relatively unsuccessful team in a small market. Because he’s in a small market and the owner can’t afford to buy the players that other teams like the Yankees can. Anytime he gets a good player, some other team outbids Beane and he loses the player. Beane knows he can’t compete with other teams on money, so he has to find a way to be successful without the money. Bean is observant and willing to try anything and as a result he stumbles across Peter Brand, an economics graduate from Yale. Not exactly the type of guy to fit into the good old boys club in team management. But Brand is from an emerging school of baseball junkies that believe you can use high powered statistics to find good players that other teams have passed over. He compares them to “an island of misfit toys.” The one thing you can say about Billy Beane is that he had courage to try something different. He hires Peter Brand as his assistant and then together they start putting a team together from the league’s rejects.
But this is not at all a Bad News Bears kind of movie. In fact, Beane’s relationship with the players is deliberately distant. Does Beane’s team succeed? In a way. After everyone, including his own staff has totally has written off Bean and his misfit players, they begin to show signs of promise and before the season is over, they have broken the all time winning streak in Major League Baseball.
It turns out that the team’s success, or lack of it, is irrelevant to the point of the movie. The real question is, Did Beane change the way people think about baseball? Did he prove that statistics are a better tool for recruiting than veteran scouts? The answer to that one is, hmmm, well now we’re moving into spoiler territory. And what really emerges from the plot is why Beane was so driven to change the game of baseball and whether or not he managed to put his own demons behind him. I liked how the screen play doesn’t make a showcase of Beane’s personal problems you barely even notice them through the movie because he’s so focused on his job of managing the team. But at the end of the movie, you realize it’s less about “Moneyball,” less about changing the game of baseball, and more about what drove Billy Beane to have the courage to try something so radically different. And that makes the story really interesting.
Sep 102011
I went to see Contagion, expecting a more or less standard issue disaster movie, but it turns out to be very different. Contagion went for the super-realism aspect of the disaster and I’d say it was more of a cross between magic realism and a documentary, which is to say it’s an odd beast of a movie.
The tag line for the movie is “Nothing spreads like fear.” Problem is, the movie didn’t focus on the fear. The movie focused mostly on the sober-headed public officials trying to track a population-killing virus and find a vaccination for it. Even the Matt Damon character who is supposed to give us a man-on-the-street view of the disaster is remarkably stoic given that he’s lost half his family to the contagion. The few scenes of civic panic and mayhem are much less dramatic than what you see in typical disaster movies.
But at the same time, I suspect that everything shown in this film is a much more realistic portrayal of what would happen in an epidemic outbreak like that. And so the movie’s creepiness comes from how easy it is to imagine it actually happening. Virtually every scene in the movie tracks the what the public officials are doing, how they use a network of researchers to learn how to reproduce the virus so they can work on a cure, how the work with governments and local officials, and the challenges they face in distributing vaccine to such large populations. Honestly, I felt like I was sitting in one of those grade school educational films most of the time.
What makes this movie at all interesting is that because it’s super realistic, it is also realistic about how individuals react to the crisis. All the characters are real people who occasionally demonstrate heroics, self-sacrifice, street-smarts, and compassion. They also demonstrate panic, fear, stupidity, greed, and abuse of authority, which complicates the battle against the contagion.
The one or two scenes in the movie that are not a documentary about how public officials battle the contagion suffer because we haven’t had enough time to explore the characters back-story. When the Bad Guy gets hauled away you kinda watch it with a detached compassion. When you get to see Matt Damon’s character coming to grips with his loss and making a first step to picking up the pieces of his life, you are watching the scene with a documentarian’s eye, not from a sympathetic perspecitve. It’s like, “yeah, people cry when they lose a loved one. Someone call a grief counselor.”
One aspect of the movie particularly stood out for me. The Jude Law character plays a sleazy citizen journalist who can’t get a job with a “real newspaper” and so he publishes his work on a web site. In the movie, he’s one of the first to notice the virus by noticing a video of one of the first victims. He quickly uses the video to boost traffic to his web site and he’s gets drunk on the influence he has with his followers. Next thing you know, he’s using his fame and influence to peddle snake oil “cures” for the virus thanks to some shady dealings with hedge fund operators who help him and themselves get rich selling the snake-oil.
So it kinda pisses me off that the only portrayal of bloggers and business men in the movie are negative. It’s certainly true that bloggers have to watch out for the temptations that come with fame and influence. But doesn’t everybody? Couldn’t they have spared a minute or two in the movie to show positive ways that citizen journalists can help people in a disaster? In a disaster like the one portrayed in this movie everyone has a part to play and everyone has a choice between doing right and wrong. Why do we get to see both sides of the public officials, but we only get to see the negative aspects of citizen journalists and business people?
Contagion is actually an interesting movie and I recommend it if you are into documentaries. Don’t go into expecting a typical disaster movie.
When I went to see Rise of The Planet of the Apes the other day, one of the minor characters was an Orangutan and it reminded me of Every Which Way But Loose. So I had to rent it. Holy Frijoles! This movie is so low-brow you culd sweep the floor. When I say Clyde the Orangutan is the best actor in the move, I’m not lying.
It’s kind of funny to see this version of 1978. Tough guys fighting in meat packing plants. Bar fights. Truck driving. Honky tonks. Bikers as keystone cops. Fun with Trash Compactors. Cars on blocks in the front yard. Everyone smokes like chimneys.
There are also 1970′s era head nods to racial integration that look oh so painfully contrived now. There were references to women that would get guys tared and feathered today and they just roll right through the movie like there’s no tomorrow.
Another surprising thing about the movie is just how many guns show up. I love the sight of a little old lady repelling bikers from her front yard with a shot gun. Yes!
Think of this movie as Animal House for the blue collar crowd. I can’t exactly recommend this movie. But You gotta remember this movie was so popular they actually made a sequel. So it’s worth it to see what was popular that year and you can laugh at it while you are laughing at it.
I enjoyed Rise of the Planet of the Apes a heck of a lot more than I expected to. Given how cheesy all the other Planet Of The Apes movies are, it’s downright stunning how non-cheesy this one is. It’s an origin story which does a good job of explaining not only the big story arc in terms of how the Apes developed speech and intelligence and how humans fell from grace, but it sets out the basic intra-ape-society personality conflicts. It also does a great job setting up the advantages that Apes have over humans. The science tropes aside, the evolution of the Apes reaction to humans seemed to evolve naturally in a way that made you feel somewhat sympathetic to the central Ape character while still maintaining that creeping doom feel that you know is coming.
Not much to say about the acting. No one stood out as being particularly bad, but it’s not a movie designed to make you appreciate the emotive capability of the actors.