Category: Movies

So the new DVD for Atlas Shrugged came out last night, so instead of watching the St. Louis Blues resoundingly defeat the Chicago Wolves (at least, I think they must have looked like a minor league team), I watched it. I was a little sad I missed it in the theaters, you know.

Some were disappointed, but I was not; I realize that the entirety of the book could not fit easily into a film, no matter how many parts they split it into. Galt’s speech alone runs three hours by itself. So if you’re that keen on absolute textual integrity, as so many OBJECTIVISTS probably are, yeah, you’re disappointed. Also, the characters won’t look exactly like you imagined them. Worse, they won’t look exactly like Ayn Rand (PBUH) incarnated them.

But the themes are there. The main plot points, as I recall them (it’s been almost ten years since I read it, prolly). The plot moves along and the dialog is more punchy than what Ayn herself wrote. So if you’re an objectivist apostate, like me, you’ll probably enjoy it. If you’re not already an Ayn Rand fan, perhaps you’ll find something of a story where increased government intrusion into private industry results in disaster that leads to increased government intrusion into private industry (rinse, blather, repeat).

But because those are the main themes and the businesspeople are unapologetically the good guys, I wonder if this sort of story can resonate with audiences. The theatrical return were disappointing, if I recall. Maybe the DVD and online sales will prove lucrative. I expect so. It looks like Part II is a go. Good.

But here are a couple nitpicks I had:

• In one of the radio/television cuts in the “How Bad Things Are” montage, they mention gas is over $37.50 a gallon. And then Dagny Taggert, protagonist, and Hank Rearden, industrialist and hence protagonist, drive from Colorado to Wisconsin and back. Maybe that’s to show how rich they are, but the economics of it don’t add up.
• When Dagny and Rearden consummate their relationship, it’s a tender, PG-13 love scene. Come on, a tender love scene in an Ayn Rand novel means they use open hands. Admit it, when you read Ayn Rand depicting the mating ritual of homo sapiens, you imagine it something like this:

Still, a worthy way to spend an hour and a half. Makes me want to cue up my videocassette of The Fountainhead which trumps Atlas Shrugged because, well let me put it syllogistically:

1. Gary Cooper
2. Patricia Neal
3. QED

So I was reading this story about how film colors are going ka-bluey in modern films compared to Technicolor films, and the image at the top made me pause:

All right, the top image is Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, so it’s To Catch A Thief. But the bottom one…. That’s Sophia Loren and Gregory Peck. What is that?

Turns out, it’s a 1966 film called Arabesque. The trailer:

One: The film deals with an Arab prime minister, but Sophia Loren’s character works Persian magic? How much more sophisticated those of us who are paying attention are fifty years later to know that Arabs and Persians are different, as the world might find out if the Israelis don’t “fix” the Persian nuclear problem and the Arabs rankle under that. Not all Mohammedans are the same.

Two, does anyone else think that the villain looks like Bono?

Bono	The Villain
Or vice versa, I can’t tell.

The story: Peck is an American professor of antiquities in London contacted by an evil Arab businessman, Bono, who wants him to decipher an inscription. Loren plays a beautiful woman who is caught between the businessman, a violent resistance movement in her native land, and the prime minister who is in danger. Peck endures a number of double crosses and overlapping lies until he discovers the truth which is….

Well, let’s not overthink the MacGuffin here. A day later, I realize it makes no sense. But the story is a 60s-paced suspense thriller. The cinematographers play with perceptions a little using mirrors, fish tanks, and special effects to emulate the experience of being drugged. So they had fun with it.

The film is also punctuated quite appropriately with lights falling on Sophia Loren’s eyes and face quite a bit. Also, between the foot massages (pronounced with the original French emphasis) and shoe gifts/shoe trying on sessions, I suspect this film might be the source of 37.98% of all foot fetishes in Baby Boomers.

It’s a good film of the genre, and I watched it in spite of Peck, whom I don’t rather like as a presence (based mostly on his work in The Keys of the Kingdom, Gentleman’s Agreement, and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit). I’ve always found his topic matter a bit too audience-enlightening, but this turn isn’t so message-oriented. Also, during the course of the film, I had a personal revelation: I tend to like Cary Grant and Gary Cooper more than Peck and want to emulate them, but maybe Peck rankles me because I’m more like him than them. Woe is me.

(Previous appreciation of Ms. Loren here, and by “here,” I mean “there, in July 2004.”)

As you can probably guess, I have two sets of shelving for my videocassettes and DVDs. Not based on format, but based on whether I’ve actually watched the videocassette or DVD. Not based on whether I’ve watched the film, mind you; based on whether I’d watched that particular copy of the film since I bought it for a quarter at a garage sale or book fair. Sometimes, too, I put a movie back on the to-watch shelves when I want to watch it again sometime soon, and sometimes that sometime soon stretches into years.

But when the aforementioned beautiful wife travels for business, I relive some of my bachelor nights and pseudobachelor-but-before-children nights where I watch a couple of films to pass an evening. This week, I had the chance to do so and watched and rewatched a couple of videocassettes. Frankly, I like videocassettes because they present the film from start to finish, often with coming attractions that take you back in time (see also this recent post, wherein by “recent” I mean “almost two-year-old”). Also, if a videocassette fails, it fails spectacularly, whereas my recent viewing of Charles Bronson’s The Mechanic on DVD ‘failed’ by skipping 20 minutes of content, and given the pacing of the movie, we weren’t really sure whether it was just a 70s stylish jump cut.

But I digress.

This week, I watched:

	The Eiger Sanction starring Clint Eastwood, which is why I own it. It sounds like a Ludlum title, and it has some elements of the basic thriller, wherein an assassin is called out of retirement to ‘sanction’ assassins who ‘sanctioned’ one of our agents, and although he can get one guy with intelligence provided by the albino, former Nazi head of the agency employing Eastwood, who is a professor teaching art history and collecting smuggled art work with his fees. Very similar to the Chuck Norris character in Good Guys Wear Black and, for that matter, the original Jason Bourne.   The film then takes a big detour into mountain climbing training, as intelligence indicates only that the other assassin will be part of a team attempting to climb the Eiger’s north face in the Alps. So Clint Eastwood’s character teams up with an old covert agent buddy who’s the ‘ground’ man for the team and tries to climb the mountain with the team, uncover the assassin’s identity through intrigue, and carry out his assignment.   Definitely a product of its time and of Eastwood’s emerging film direction/production ego. It’s said he wanted to make this film because he wanted to climb mountains and whatnot. What, Where Eagles Dare was not enough seven years earlier? I guess not.   At any rate, it’s not a great bit of work, as you can tell by the fact that 40 years later, only die hard Eastwood fans watch it.
	Just Visiting starring Christina Applegate and Jean Reno. Friends, you can claim to be a Jean Reno fan, but unless you’ve seen this film more than once, you’re a piker. Sure, Ronin and The Professional are okay, but are they essentially a French comedy brought to the States and Americanned up by John Hughes? No, they are not.   It’s a funny enough bit about a medieval nobleman and his squire brought to modern (pre-September 11) New York when they seek to go back in time slightly to right a dastardly bit of courtly intrigue. Hey, I laughed at it a couple times. And this, after I saw it in the theater in 2001.
	Frankly, it’s only the proven depth of my Jean Reno and Clint Eastwood fandom that allows me to admit that I watched The Cutting Edge. Again. What can I say? I’m a fan of montages, and this film has them in spades. Figure skating montages, though.   If you’re not familiar with the story, it’s about a hockey player who’s hit by the West Germans in the Olympics and loses some sight and can’t play hockey again. It’s also the story of a figure skating princess whose father’s dream has been an Olympic gold metal since she was young, but she sabotages her performance on ice and her relationships with her skating partners. It’s his last chance and her last chance.   Hey, I can relate to a story of a hardscrabble guy from up north falling for a girl above his class. Also, this film taught me everything I know about skating: when I’m at the rink’s skate rental counter, remember to ask for hockey skates so I don’t trip over the toe pick. I discovered while researching this post that there were three sequels 26 years after the original came out: The Cutting Edge: Going for the Gold (2006), The Cutting Edge: Chasing the Dream (2008), and The Cutting Edge: Fire and Ice (2010). I have no words to express how I feel in light of this new knowledge.
	Geri’s Game is a Pixar short, an early bit of computer animation that won the Oscar for short films in 1987. How short is it? It took me longer to rewind the wonky videocassette than it took to watch the whole thing. In it, an old man plays chess in a park against himself.   Not to be confused with Gerald’s Game.

So I’ve moved 4 videocassettes out of my cabinet of unwatched films to the wall of watched films. This will probably hold me until my wife’s next trip. But I did take a moment to rearrange the dozens of movies, documentaries, and television shows to bring things I wanted to watch this week closer to the front. Although whether that will hold true next time I get a hankering for cinema remains to be seen. If you can call the above films cinema,.

You know, in the 1982 film Poltergeist, at the very end, the whole You moved the cemetery, but you left the bodies, didn’t you? thing? That doesn’t make sense.

I mean, look at it: it’s a completed subdivision with fire hydrants, roads, and basements. There would have been a lot of construction, digging by a lot of different groups of people, from the water company to the electric company, not to mention the people putting in the houses and the swimming pools and whatnot.

You’re not going to cover up leaving the graves. Seriously, they would have plowed up a lot of people.

29 years after the film comes out, I’m suddenly bothered by this.

UPDATE: So I’ve heard that it makes perfect sense in California, where due to homes on slabs, corrupt contractors, and lack of a frost danger meaning they leave the utilities lying on the ground instead of burying them deeply, that Poltergeist is accurate.

I’ll broaden my point: That state where this 30-year-old movie was set doesn’t make sense.

They turned the game Battleship into a full length feature film, so I’m hard at work on a screenplay of my own.

Called Solitaire, it will feature one man’s struggle with the elements as he tries to reach a camp during the Yukon gold rush of the 19th century.

Also, zombies. Or something. Does it matter? Not in 21st century Hollywood.

As I said on Facebook the other night:

Brian J. Noggle snivels, slinkers, and mutters, “Our two dollarssess, we wantses it.”

You see, I thought I would be the only guy in the world who could successfully mash-up Johnny from Better Off Dead:

With Gollum from the Lord of the Rings trilogy:

Yeah, I thought I could possibly be the only one who could pull that off.

But, wait, there is another:

That’s Demian Slade, who actually played Johnny in Better Off Dead 26 years ago.

In a slug leading to a review of the film Battle: Los Angeles, someone talks about a film he or she has not seen:

Remember ‘Black Hawk Down,’ ‘District 9,’ Independence Day,’ and ‘Cloverfield?’ The war against aliens went better in those movies.

The Somali are from another planet? Really?

The review itself, written by someone who has presumably seen Black Hawk Down, does not make the mistake the slug does.

Actors from the film Predator (Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzeneggar) go onto become governors; Actors from the film Predator 2 (Gary Busey, Danny Glover) go on to make Turkish anti-American films (Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, Five Minarets in New York).

Actually, since Predator 2 also starred Robert Davi and Adam Baldwin, it cannot have been something on the catering truck.

I shudder because Busey and Glover also starred in the holiday classic Lethal Weapon. I don’t think I’ll ever enjoy it unequivocally again.

My wife and I attended the cinema this week, and we saw the action film Red.

Because it’s almost the same thing, really, someone with the theater chain or studios determined it would be a good idea to run the trailer for the Valerie Plame fiction (inspired by true events, where the “events” are emotional outbursts of the left).

I booed it, of course.

Here is Kyle Smith’s review, which is also a boo of sorts.

Anyone want to guess the Box Office on this one? I go with $7 million total. Unexpectedly, the American people won’t understand the message and genius of the film that’s for their own good.

(Link seen on Big Hollywood.)

So I watched To Kill A Mockingbird last night for the first time, and when we got to the courthouse scene, the defense’s closing argument delivered by Gregory Peck:

I couldn’t help but think that the speech would have been far cooler if it had been written by Ayn Rand and/or delivered by Gary Cooper:

Of course, I’m enough of a fanboy of Objectivism to think that speech was cool and prefer Gary Cooper over Gregory Peck. It was the best performance of Peck I’ve seen so far, but that just meant that it was a performance where I didn’t think the main character was a complete wuss.

Author Andrew Klavan has a thoughtful piece on Mel Gibson’s potty mouth that reflects on the nature of arts, artists, and wisdom. Also, he quotes Socrates.

Klavan does. Not Gibson. Although it’s interesting in imagining Gibson quoting Socrates: “You enclothe yourself like a perfumed porcine, and if you’re despoiled by a group of Sophists, your intellect will not have prevented such an ordeal.”

As you remember, gentle reader, I read the book in 2005. When I discovered that the Demi Moore film was based upon the book, I bought it and had to watch it.

As I did, I had the following thoughts:

• Maybe Ashton Kutcher isn’t as dumb as I thought.
• I must buy some Annie Lennox albums. I wonder how much she spent for product placement here.
• Robert Patrick could not have made this film and then go on to play a Terminator. Good thing he did the opposite.
• It’s hard to capture a Carl Hiaasen book and its characters and plot in a two hour movie. The filmmakers decided to abandon most of it to fit in more Demi Moore strip routines. A good second choice.

You know what I haven’t seen in a while? A list meme.

The International Cinephile something something has presented its list of the top 100 films of the 1990s. The ones in bold I’ve seen. The ones in italics I’ve seen parts of.

01. The Thin Red Line (Malick, 1998)
02. Short Cuts (Altman, 1993)
03. Trois couleurs: Rouge (Kieslowski, 1994)
04. Breaking the Waves (von Trier, 1996)
05. The Age of Innocence (Scorsese, 1993)
06. My Own Private Idaho (Van Sant, 1991)
07. Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick, 1999)
08. Trois couleurs: Bleu (Kieslowski, 1993)
09. The Ice Storm (Lee, 1997)
10. Goodfellas (Scorsese, 1990)
11. Being John Malkovich (Jonze, 1999)
12. LA Confidential (Hanson, 1997)
13. Sense and Sensibility (Lee, 1995)
14. The Double Life of Véronique (Kieslowski, 1991)
15. Safe (Haynes, 1995)
16. All About My Mother (Almodóvar, 1999)
17. Unforgiven (Eastwood, 1992)
18. The Remains of the Day (Ivory, 1993)
19. Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994)
20. The English Patient (Minghella, 1996)
21. Chungking Express (Wong, 1994)
22. Close-Up (Kiarostami, 1990)
23. The Grifters (Frears, 1990)
24. Barton Fink (Coen & Coen, 1991)
25. The Piano (Campion, 1993)
26. Secrets & Lies (Leigh, 1996)
27. A Taste of Cherry (Kiarostami, 1997)
28. Ed Wood (Burton, 1994)
29. Lost Highway (Lynch, 1997)
30. Happy Together (Wong, 1997)
31. Mother and Son (Sokurov, 1997)
32. Magnolia (Anderson, 1999)
33. Howards End (Ivory, 1992)
34. Les amants du Pont-Neuf (Carax, 1991)
35. The Long Day Closes (Davies, 1992)
36. The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991)
37. Naked Lunch (Cronenberg, 1991)
38. Heavenly Creatures (Jackson, 1994)
39. Lone Star (Sayles, 1996)
40. Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang, 1991)
41. Edward Scissorhands (Burton, 1990)
42. Naked (Leigh, 1993)
43. Fargo (Coen & Coen, 1996)
44. Schindler’s List (Spielberg, 1993)
45. Husbands and Wives (Allen, 1992)
46. Beauty and the Beast (Trousdale & Wise, 1991)
47. The Truman Show (Weir, 1998)
48. La belle noiseuse (Rivette, 1991)
49. Miller’s Crossing (Coen & Coen, 1990)
50. Sátántangó (Tarr, 1994)
51. Jackie Brown (Tarantino, 1997)
52. Rushmore (Anderson, 1998)
53. Rosetta (Dardenne & Dardenne, 1999)
54. Dead Man (Jarmusch, 1995)
55. Groundhog Day (Ramis, 1993)
56. Underground (Kusturica, 1995)
57. Flowers of Shanghai (Hou, 1998)
58. The Wind Will Carry Us (Kiarostami, 1999)
59. Starship Troopers (Verhoeven, 1997)
60. Thelma & Louise (Scott, 1991)
61. Wild at Heart (Lynch, 1990)
62. Days of Being Wild (Wong, 1990)
63. The Player (Altman, 1992)
64. La cérémonie (Chabrol, 1995)
65. Beau travail (Denis, 1999)
66. The Talented Mr. Ripley (Minghella, 1999)
67. Fallen Angels (Wong, 1995)
68. The Big Lebowski (Coen & Coen, 1998)
69. Titus (Taymor, 1999)
70. Vanya on 42nd Street (Malle, 1994)
71. Crash (Cronenberg, 1996)
72. Ulysses’ Gaze (Angelopoulos, 1995)
73. Van Gogh (Pialat, 1991)
74. Babe (Noonan, 1995)
75. Before Sunrise (Linklater, 1995)
76. A Brighter Summer Day (Yang, 1991)
77. Boogie Nights (Anderson, 1997)
78. American Beauty (Mendes, 1999)
79. Dead Man Walking (Robbins, 1995)
80. Kundun (Scorsese, 1997)
81. Porco Rosso (Miyazaki, 1992)
82. Smoking/No Smoking (Resnais, 1993)
83. The Crying Game (Jordan, 1992)
84. Gattaca (Niccol, 1997)
85. The Nightmare Before Christmas (Selick, 1993)
86. Trainspotting (Boyle, 1996)
87. Trois couleurs: Blanc (Kieslowski, 1994)
88. Bullets Over Broadway (Allen, 1994)
89. Everyone Says I Love You (Allen, 1996)
90. Eve’s Bayou (Lemmons, 1997)
91. Goodbye South, Goodbye (Hou, 1996)
92. Se7en (Fincher, 1995)
93. Carlito’s Way (De Palma, 1993)
94. Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (Mirkin, 1997)
95. Un coeur en hiver (Sautet, 1992)
96. The Straight Story (Lynch, 1999)
97. Dong (Tsai, 1998)
98. JFK (Stone, 1991)
99. A Summer’s Tale (Rohmer, 1996)
100. Edward II (Jarman, 1991)

Strangely, I take pride in having seen so few.

It didn’t sound like the sort of film I’d see since I’m not dating/married to a girl who would want to see it, but this review of the film Amreeka doesn’t make it sound like it delivers warm and fuzzies to people of a certain mindset:

The two arrive at the Illinois home of her sister Raghda (Hiam Abbass of “The Visitor”) shortly after the start of the war in Iraq, as anti-Arab paranoia runs high.

Was anti-Arab paranoia peaking in 2003? I would have put whatever anti-Arab paranoia at its peak in 2001 or 2002. Also, I’d like to wonder who diagnosed suspicion of Middle Eastern people after an attack by Middle Eastern people on Americans as clinical paranoia.

A film reviewer, no doubt.

I was treated to this trailer on Veteran’s Day when I treated my wife to what turned out to be an anti-Iraq War film Men Who Stare At Goats:

You know, it could have been a good drama. Soldier dies in combat, and his ne’er-do-well brother straightens out and grows up as he sort of steps into the role of father-figure for his nieces and eventually the lover for the widow. Then, the MIA soldier returns. I could see it being chock full of drama as they deal with the emotional situations.

But.

In the trailer, the eventual seduction takes place over a joint and the movie-normal “I’m not too straight to toke” trope. And the soldier returns home apparently an angry, psychotic fellow who cannot relate to his family and wants to hurt them or commit suicide by cop.

Frankly, through the trailer and my own predilections, the Iraq soldier is the most sympathetic character. But he’s just an archetype to endanger the pot-smoking, non soldier lovers in the film.

I booed the trailer in the theater.

Instead of a dramatic film with real emotion, I think Lionsgate has gone for the sure Oscar award-winning, Cannes Palm D’or, and Nobel Prize for Cinema route. Which probably won’t make any money, but they’re making art. All-too-predictable, comfortable-to-the-artists and offensive-to-the-plebes art. Hey, Hollywood: <expletive deleted>.

UPDATE: I originally identified the soldier as serving in Iraq, but I guess it’s supposed to be Afghanistan. MfBJN regrets this error and retracts everything. Well, everything except the words including the letters I-R-A-Q.