What i've been up to

Right.  Okay.  Movies.  Let's go.

i've watched many more movies over the last couple of weeks than i will mention here.  the ones i do choose to bring up are because of the director, others because they have a classic status i should at least acknowledge, and still a couple more that i mention because i loved them, because they had some effect, because they were meaningful on some level.

to begin with: Alfred Hitchcock.  i cannot say it enough.  go watch his movies.  they are wonderful.  i've just recently seen several from his...i think "British period" is what some people might call it.  from the silent period up until about the movie Rebecca, which won the best picture oscar, and after which he got into his more famous style, with more distinct "Hitchcockian" elements, either in camerawork or other visual production values.  Blackmail, The 39 Steps, Sabotage, Strangers on a Train, and Marnie are the ones i've seen most recently.  they're all good, but the best are probably The 39 Steps and Strangers on a Train.  To save time, i'll just tell you again to go watch them, and let the joy of them speak for themselves.

i've also continued watching several more Woody Allen movies -- i'm understanding more and more what all the fuss is about, and he's quickly becoming one of my favorite directors.  it's fascinating to see him go from his earliest films, which are completely absurd (his very first, What's Up, Tiger Lily?, is nothing more than a japanese spy movie with dubbed over voices creating a new story, not unlike Mystery Science Theater 3000), to his more mature, serious works in the late 70s and 80s, taking his comedy to existential levels.  i've not seen anything from the 90s, and the most recent decade saw a back and forth, hit and miss sort of thing happen (Match Point and Vicky Christina Barcelona among the successes).  one of his best movies, Crimes and Misdemeanors, manages to somehow be a comedy while very seriously dealing with questions of adultery and murder and making something meaningful out of our lives, all with an underlying question of just what God has to do with it. 

This all says something awesome about comedy, that one of its fundamental elements essentially is tragedy.  comedy is about pain, but with a different perspective on it.  either a schadenfreude thing, or perhaps just a more hopeful look at it, but it finds light in bad situations.  there's something here that i haven't quite tapped into just yet, but i'll be sure to write something incredibly profound and publication-worthy when i do.

Let's see, what else?  The original 1932 Scarface, a pretty awesome film noir gangster movie.  it's one of those things that laid groundwork that allows us to subsequently have other things like, well, large chucks of the film noir period, The Godfather, The Sopranos, Martin Scorsese, and more. 

Doctor Zhivago - 1965, directed by David Lean, who's easily one of my favorite directors.  i read somewhere that he puts internal characters and internal stories onto a large scale in the midst of very externally driven circumstances.  This movie's greatest strength is easily its visuals -- the movie just looks so breathtaking at times.  the story, though, is essentially a bit of a soap opera about finding true love (outside of preexisting marriages, of course) during Russia's Bolshevik Revolution.  so the story, while essentially trite, is fine given the feast for the eyes that Lean manages to make of it (it helps that is also acted well, with enough passion from Omar Sharif to make the soap opera elements digestible).  definitely worth the 3 1/2 hours if you're looking for a movie that'll absorb your attention and lose you in its world.

Catch-22 -  one of the best books ever (and definitely one of my favorites), is unfortunately just a little too immense, and takes up too much of its story inside the characters than outside them, to work well as a movie.  that said, Mike Nichols does about as good a job as someone can do with it.  definitely gets some of the comedy, and some of the travesty of war, and almost captures the frenetic chronology of the book, but somehow just can't pull it all together just right.  i think a big part of the problem lies in the portrayal of Yossarian by Alan Arkin (a very good actor).  something about the character is just too...weak, i suspect.  Yossarian is by his own admission, a coward, but he stands by the sanity of his cowardliness so steadfastly and with such conviction, that one cannot help but believe him to be both a coward, but also deeply principled, and also quite the badass.  in the movie...he was just kind of pathetic.  so, all in all, the movie is a noble, worthwhile failure.

Finally, Titus, directed by Julie Taymor, easily one of the few true visionaries in the film and theatre world today.  Aside from the fact that it is an original and exciting interpretation of Shakespeare's play, Titus Andronicus, it is visually one of the most awesome things i've seen in a very long time (except, in different ways, Doctor Zhivago).  by blending Ancient Rome with Mussolini's Italy with various other historical elements, Taymor creates an entirely independent other-world, both tangible to us and distant from our own reality.  She then take Shakespeare's most violent work, and puts it over the top so as to be both affecting and alienating.  i am already head over heels in love with Taymor's work in Frida and Across the Universe, not to mention the stage version of The Lion King (which i believe to be one of the absolute best creative achievements in film or theater in the last several decades), and with Titus (her first film) Taymor demonstrates again that she is a creative powerhouse.  We lament so frequently nowadays that we are losing originality in our creations.  Adaptations of adaptations of adaptations are all we see, not to mention the sequels and franchieses.  And then there's Julie Taymor, who, even when she has source material in an animated film, or a Shakespeare play, or the paintings of Frida Kahlo, or the music of The Beatles, never stoops to the level of imitation or re-presentation - she uses this preexisting works as muses for her own creative juices, not ripping them off or cheapening the value of the originals, but reworking them into something new and visceral and phenomenal.  (NOTE: Baz Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet with Leonardo Dicaprio and Claire Danes did something of similar newness and originality, but with comparatively less gravity than this film.  Where R&J made me go, "man, that's cool...i like what they did there...interesting take on that!...etc etc," this one made me go, "hey wow that's....i mean, it's just....gah, that's so...!!! ...jeez, that's freaking awesome...what the WHAT?!")

Check out the trailer (with awkward Polish subtitles) HERE.

i'm not sure if that part about the "ultimate sacrifice of love" is really accurate...

but anyway, that's where i've been lately.  i know, Titus could have had it's own post, keeping this one more trimmed, but whatever.  If you've read this far, way to go!  you get a gold star :)


peace.

Something Worth Saying

it's been nearly two weeks since i last updated, i know. 

i have, of course, continued to watch some good movies, too many now, in fact, to give them all mention here.  i've also finished another book.  i won't get into any of it right now - but i will look over the movies i've watched and determine which most deserve something on here - i just want to make sure if i say something, it's because i have something worth saying.

in the meantime, i'm considering a new name for this blog (have i already mentioned that?) and presumably along with it a new URL (for continuity's sake), and i might want a new background/template design.  i feel the blog, while experiencing it's recent rebirth, did not go the full distance. 

back soon.

Je ne sais quoi.

i cannot explain adequately just what it is about Woody Allen movies that i find so wonderful.  of course, he is well-respected (21 Oscar nominations, with 3 wins) and i'm sure plenty of critics have described why his films work so well.  i, however, cannot put a finger on it.  i just watch them and discover i am...well, delighted is the word that comes to mind. 

A little while ago i watched one of his earliest movies, Bananas, about a youngish man whose girlfriend dumps him because there's "something missing" and in order to win her back, he joins the cause of revolution in Venezuela, a cause his ex-girlfriend strongly supports.  It's already a far-fetched notion, but add to it elements like ordering 1,000 tuna sandwiches from a small diner for the rebels, Allen's character becoming the president of Venezuela after a coup, and Howard Cosell literally commentating on the events of the coup as though it were a sporting event, and suddenly the balance tips from being obscure and odd to being so bizarre one cannot help but just sit back and laugh at the ridiculousness. 

Next was 1979's Manhattan, a more serio-comic movie where Allen is torn between his 17-year-old girlfriend and the mistress of his best friend.  Again, a seemingly absurd premise, but this time made somehow very human in the telling of the story.  Allen's tendency is to take what should be comic supporting characters, and turn them into protagonists.  Imagine Dwight Schrute, strip away some of the inanity, and give him a story of his own.  Allen makes these stories work.  i think it wise not to get too much into my own analysis of Manhattan, in part because i wouldn't know where to start, but mostly because i think far superior writings could be found from real critics. 

very soon i'll write another post on some things i've watched more recently.

(Kind of a) Book Review: Reconciling All Things

i recently finished a book called Reconciling All Things.  it's written by Emmanuel Katangole and Chris Rice of the Duke Center for Reconciliation.  i'm not sure i have the energy or even the full comprehension to adequately summarize and explain the book right now, but i'll give you a few highlights.

First, reconciliation is not necessarily the work of vast sweeping movements and intensely organized efforts.  it is not merely celebrating diversity (or ignoring it), and it is not a way to put a band-aid on problems that require more intensive work.

I was struck particularly by a chapter on lament, and the necessity of it as a discipline in the hopes of reconciliation down the road.  We must recognize problems and lament their existence, finding a true desire for improvement.  In order to pursue these solutions, according to Katangole and Rice, we must keep in mind certain things: we must move slowly, we must be close to the problem, and we must recognize that we are seldom (or perhaps never) truly innocent or removed from the situation.  We might not be complicit, exactly, but we are not innocent.

Finally, reconciliation is the work of smaller things than we sometimes think.  It is a lifestyle, not an event.  i'm not sure exactly how to say it better than that.  Reconciliation is in the many things we do continuously, not the one thing we all get together to do at once (though of course, these things can be good, too!).

If any of these thoughts or ideas seem interesting, i recommend getting the book to pursue it further (the authors do a better job than me) - it's a pretty short read, but it's something i know i'll be returning to eventually so that i can continue to find the implications of its message.

After reading it, i thought back to the movie Invictus.  When i first saw it, i thought, "okay, that was pretty good."  i also remember a lot of remarks on the subject matter - not criticism, exactly, but a certain underwhelmed reaction.  A lot of people seemed to think that if there was a movie about Nelson Mandela, it would be be about his imprisonment, or his release, or his campaign for president, or his presidency.

Instead, we got a movie about rugby.  But after reading this book, i look back on the movie and see it differently - yes, of course there could have been a more Mandela-based movie about Mandela, but this movie was, at its core, about reconciliation - about bringing hostile peoples together with a common cause.  And really, isn't that movie much more in the spirit of Nelson Mandela than just another hollywood biopic?  Surely, that is the greater testament to the man's life.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away...

Okay okay, so it's been a while since I updated this. Get over it.

Since the last post i've watched a whole bunch of movies, so let's get started.

i went through the entire Star Wars Series, in order, Episode I to Episode VI. It was really awesome. Here's what i realized: the new movies aren't that bad! Really, truly, they're actually pretty good movies. Do they have weaknesses? Of course. Especially Episode II has some pretty bad writing and an particularly annoying performance from Hayden Christiansen. But the differences between the original and new trilogies isn't a matter of quality. (The originals had some awkward writing and bad performance moments as well.) The new movies are more complicated movies. They're political, and actually a kind of smart political - they're complex and intricate. Senates and chancellors, trade agreements and armies, allegiances and betrayals. The original trilogy had a rebellion and an empire. It was one versus the other, and we were supposed to root for the good guys. End of story. Now, the new movies don't always handle their complexity well, but they frequently do. It's a different kind of story in the same kind of environment our responsibility as viewers is to adapt our expectations. Otherwise, we'll always be disappointed.

i also think i picked up on some interesting Old Testament elements to the prequel trilogy. The originals, what with their fulfillment of prophecies and tame sort of messiah figure, have some mild New Testament themes we can see if we really want them. But there was something interesting, I thought, in the way the Jedi once felt they had everything figured out with Anakin and the prophecy, only to find out they were wrong - the Republic and the Jedi were forced into a sort of exile, a decades long suffering under the evil of the Empire. It's really a pretty loose sort of Biblical parallel, i know - i'm not saying it's profound or deep or anything. But there was an overall "things get worse before they get better" thing going on over the course of the entire series and i couldn't help noticing a bit of the Christian worldview kind of thing happening.

Okay, other movies, briefly:

The Invention of Lying - cute, maybe worth a redbox rental, some really good laughs, but not exactly mindblowing.

Crazy Heart - fantastic performance from Jeff Bridges in a really good movie. Worth checking out.

Also, I re-watched Cinderella Man. I saw it in theaters, I've seen it once or twice on DVD since, but it had been a while, so I went back to it. Guys, seriously, this is such a good movie. Aside from one of Russell Crowe's best performances, and the turn from Paul Giamatti (who deserved the Oscar that George Clooney didn't), it's just so emotionally driven you can't help but be pulled in to the story. By the end, when Braddock is fighting in that last boxing match, you know what has to happen. You know who has to win, but you won't let yourself be sure. I remember watching it in the theater and being so tense, cheering so hard for Braddock to win, and I just couldn't loosen up until after the winner is announced. Then again, the same feelings, the same tenseness, even on my 4th or 5th viewing. It takes a really special movie to stir up the same strong emotions time after time. If you haven't seen it, go rent it right now. If you have, go watch it again. It'll be worth it.

As for awards and stuff - I'm still not sure how Crowe didn't get an Oscar nomination for this. It also deserved a cinematography nod, and maybe art direction as well. It might should have won the film editing and makeup awards it was nominated for as well. For some reason, the Oscar for makeup tends to acknowledge wounds and more subtle makeup for nominations, but always goes with the more over the top mask-type work for the win. Which isn't fair. 2004-2006 should have gone to The Passion of the Christ, Cinderella Man, and Apocalypto, in my opinion, but instead went to (the also impressive and deserving) Lemony Snickett, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Pan's Labyrinth. Those are just a matter of personal preference though.

Okay, all for now, be back later with some classic Woody Allen movies, and maybe a book review.