Movie-a-thon

Saturday, 18 February 2012

Back in my earlier days – a dark time when I was without children and hadn’t yet reached 30 years of age – my wife and I watched movies all the time. It wasn’t unusual for us to go to the local non-Blockbuster video store and rent three movies, then return those five days later and rent three more. This thus followed a practice I began in my teens, when, after the family went to sleep, I would drag the TV and VCR into my bedroom and watch a movie I had borrowed from the local library. (I worked at the library, so I could rent them for free.)

But with the rise of Netflix, and the appearance of, first, a child and, then, children, our movie watching has waned. We have been proponents of Netflix for nearly a decade, but during that time we have mostly rented TV shows. A 45-minute or half hour show is way, way easier to squeeze in at night after the kids f-i-n-a-l-l-y go to bed.

Well, this post will detail our sudden, undoubtedly temporary, return to those halcyon days of your you’re yore.

Last night, we watched Moneyball. ‘Twas a decent flick. We only watched it because it’s nominated for a barrel of Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Brad Pitt) and Best Supporting Actor (Jonah Hill).

Tonight, we watched Bridesmaids. No, Bridesmaids is not nominated for Best Picture, but it does have two nominations, including Best Supporting Actress for Melissa McCarthy. Several people have raved about this movie, saying it’s the funniest movie they’ve seen lately and that I’ll really laugh at some parts.

Well…it was funny. In some parts. I don’t think I ever had one of those tears-running-down-my-face laughs, but I chuckled a few times. Maybe guffawed. There were scenes that I know were supposed to be funny but, for me, acting ridiculous just ins’t that funny on film (although it is funny in real-life). A co-worker told me she viewed the movie as one long Saturday Night Live sketch. That helped me put it into perspective. Like so many SNL skits, the players are often having more fun than the audience. For five to ten minutes, that’s fine. But not for two hours.

 Sunday, 19 February 2012

This evening, we pissed away 139 minutes of valuable time by watching something called The Tree of Life. It’s nominated for three Oscars: Best Picture, Director, and Cinematography. It might win the Cinematography award…and that’s all it should win.

We laughed at the film before it even started; a title card appeared on screen informing us that the film’s producers recommend that, in order to hear all the whispering in the film, we play it loud. Ha! Okay, so right away we know someone did a lousy job mixing the audio.

After that, the film bolted out of the gate promising. It began with one of my favorite bible verses:

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?…when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of god shouted for joy? -Job 38:4,7

And then showed scenes of a family in the 1950s romping in their yard and going about their day. Then tragedy stikes. There’s a great scene of the mom collapsing, and then the story flashes forward to the present day. An adult man – evidently one of the three boys from that family in the 1950s, though I never figured out which one – is depicted walking around a downtown area, riding an elevator, and otherwise lost in thought.

Suddenly, there are about twenty minutes of screen saves. Nope, I’m not kidding. Beautiful, yes. Interesting, no. If you want to see the sort of images I’m talking about, just go to NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day. There, at least, you can read fascinating descriptions and not have to sit through meaningless pretentions.

After that, the film follows an impressionistic route. We are shown several slices of life. The mom is gentle and caring; free-spirited, even. The Dad is a harsh disciplinarian. He’s the kind of Dad that encourages his kids to be assertive and not take crap from anyone, yet simultaneously wants the kids to obey him like he’s some sort of god. Every so often, the story cuts back to teh present day and we watch that man (Sean Penn) riding the elevator. It’s all supposed to mean something, I guess. Only, it doesn’t (check the discussion boards if you don’t believe me).

There’s one part where the kids ask their mom to tell them a story of when she was young. She relates a tale of when she rode an airplane. The kids find this enthralling, and the movie cuts to images of the mom, as a teenager, riding a prop plane. Then it cuts to her floating about three feet off the ground, under a tree. It’s funny, to me, this was the only thing that made sense: instead of the mom actually saying “Riding in a plane made me feel like a bird; like I was floating,” the film-makers simply show us how she was feeling. I say this is funny because, judging from the FAQ pages at Internet Movie Data Base, this one scene appears to have baffled people more than any other.

The film ends (long after it’s finished, in my opinion), with bare-footed people walking on a beach towards the water. They might be in heaven, or maybe it’s hell. Sean Penn is there, and he meets up with his family from the 1950s. Not sure why. They embrace him as if he’s the son who died decades ago, and they’re so glad to see him again. Even his abusive father seems happy. After showing us a blurry light bulb for, like, the fifth time, the film mercifully fades to black and we see:

Directed by Terrence Malick

I immediately groaned, and my wife asked what was wrong. I reminded her that Malick is the director who dropped that turd known as The Thin Red Line at the theaters back in 1998. That, I believe, is the worst film I ever saw at the theaters. I was so bored, I got up to use the bathroom and didn’t return for twenty minutes, finding myself more interested in the hallway carpet patterns.

My wife said we are probably the kind of people who like to have stories spoon-fed to us, and don’t like cryptic films like this one. Maybe. But while I love having to search for meaning, or having to pay rapt attention to a complicated plot, I hate it if there’s no pay-off. As I mentioned before, you can search online, but no one knows what the film means; ergo, it has no meaning. I could easily write a poem, or a story, or a script that is so “deep” and “layered” that no one understands it. What would the point be? Did I really make something beautiful, or did I just construct something that has no meaning and tried to pass it off as poetry? The answer is B.

If you want to see a movie that doesn’t spoon-feed you the meaning, watch Magnolia, Being Jon Malcovich, Adaptation, About Schmidt, Inception, Memento, 2001, The Birds, or Dancer in the Dark. All movies with layered meanings and/or deep symbolisms. And all way, way better than whatever it was I just watched.

Monday, 20 February 2012

Happy Presidents’ Day! A day that, unlike Veterans Day, knows how and where to use an apostrophe!

We were going to stay home and honor some of the amazing middle-aged rich white men who have made our nation great – like Martin Van Buren, James Buchanan, Chester Arthur, Warren Harding, and Gerald Ford – but decided to cancel our Commander-in-Chief plans and, instead, go to the theater.

Today we saw Hugo.

Hugo is based on the awesome novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which I first read about two years ago and, conincidentally, am currently reading to my son.

The book, of course, is better. The book begins with a prologue by a character named Professor Alcofrisbas. The professor invites us to pretend we are in a darkened theater and then, as we turn the pages, the curtains rise, and the image zooms in on a boy’s eye. The film dispenses with Alcofrisbas – he’s not in the film at all – and doesn’t begin the film with the same excited antipication. I was hoping for a voice-over, or a curtain rising on a black-and-white Paris. Alas, no luck.

The film fleshes out the Station Inspector character, even giving him a love interest. Unfortunately, during the first five minutes of the film, the Inspector fumbles and trips all over the place, rending the film a near-slapstick. As the Inspector is played by Sasha Baren Cohen, perhaps I should have expected it. Still, the story is not a comedy, and the absurdity of his character in the film – especially so soon in th efilm – give the wrong impression. I cringed.

The book’s uniqueness is due largely to its reliance on full-page images; unlike many story books with pictures, the pictures in Hugo Cabret don’t just enhance the tale, they help tell it – the book would make little sense without the images. As film is such a visual medium, I wish Scorsese would have taken a cue from the book and relied more on images and less on dialogue. Particularly, I would have jumped for joy if the movie had begun with a showing of the 14 minute silent film that forms the drive for the plot. 

Nevertheless, the film does a superb job of brining the steampunk world of Hugo Cabret to life. Ben Kingsley shines as Papa Georges, the exposition of why the early films were lost in the Great War is actually more compelling than the book, and the denouement is satisfying, though not quite as exquisite as the book’s.

Having seen four of the ten Best Picture nominees, my vote is for Hugo. Come Sunday, I hope it wins.