Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

My favorite thing about this movie was the way the dead bodies slapped into the cement after going down Sweeney Todd's little barber chair chute. The insouciant way Todd slit the throats while singing his song was also rather delightful. I'd never seen the musical, but I imagine mostly everything that was cool about this came from that, and it was good enough here that I can't imagine they fucked up too much about the musical. Johnny Depp, of course, was enjoyable.

Someone needs to get Burton to back of the digital color manipulation though. He already's ruined a few movies with it's over/misuse, and could've done so here if the music wasn't good enough to inject life into the movie even though Burton tried to sap all the life from nearly every frame. Mrs. whoever's (HBCarter's) extended daydream with the extra-saturated color, though, was a nice touch, but it didn't need the grayed out London of the rest of the movie to make it effective. Burton decided, I guess, to make the whole thing seem as if the characters were all wearing the One Ring...

The Golden Compass

It flew by really quickly and I felt very entertained, and it made me really want to read the book. No, really, when it ended I thought: when's the next one come out? I was seriously ready for about an hour more of movie. By which I mean, I guess, it felt like a lot was missing, but what was there was very good and made me want more. I just kind of wish this wasn't the finished movie, and I could go up to the filmmakers and say, "Yeah, that's a really good start. Keep going." I'm not sure if that's a bad thing or not.

I did feel like there was a pretty serious critique of authority kind of happening in the background... No, actually, I guess it was pretty explicit, it just wasn't actually very interested in it. I think that's why I want to read the books. I assume the book was actually interested in that aspect of it. If I read this book to my kids will they grow up to be good little anarchists? I hope so!

I Am Legend

I really wanted this movie to be good, but it wasn't. It's stubborn refusal to actually go anywhere with any of the intriguing developments it presented completely ruined it.

Why did the zombie leader not do anything except scream? If he was smart enough to set up a trap for Will Smith? Are their people out there who really think huge-mouthed screaming is that awesome or scary? And why are those people allowed to make movies? Now I just want to watch the Omega Man again and dream about the present-day big-budget blockbuster that could really do this movie right and pretend this movie'd never happened.

It almost felt like someone had come in and decided that the three-hour movie the first hour and a half seemed to be setting up were just too long and so they ripped off a page from the Judge Dredd playbook and decided to blow everything up.

I've hated this movie more every day since I watched it a week and a half ago.

Duck, You Sucker

Really kind of awesome, actually.

The introduction of James Coburn's character has to rank near the top of the list of coolest entrances ever--so great that it almost made me forget about the twenty minutes preceding it until just now, with Rod Steiger acting perfectly disgusting but still ending up more likeable than than the rich snobby folks in their coach. The closeups of their mouths while they were chewing seemed especially refreshingly un-Leone to me, an intrustion of a Fellini-esque weirdness into the hard edge of Leone's usual style.

I think it's probably that exact excess of ideas that is the major difference between this movie and Leone's earlier trilogy. They were so focused and sharp--even TGTB&TU at nearly three hours never really meanders. This has the first half hour of pure Leone coolness and then it kind of wanders into a more... something else... I guess if there's a genre of small-guy-accidentally-getting-caught-up-in-historical-events, a la Forrest Gump and Zelig, it was kind of that for a while... the momentum of that first half hour probably doesn't quite hold up the rest of the movie, especially with the draggy flashbacks to Ireland. They were so long and weird that I have to assume part of the point of them was their length and their weirdness, but I'm not convinced that they were very necessary anyway.

I really have no idea what to think of the final flashback, where Coburn hands over his girlfriend to his future-traitor friend. It was already creepy how happy they all were and how into watching them make out Coburn's friend was, but what exactly the hand-off was there for is beyond me, unless as some kind of indication that the revolutionaries in Ireland were also sexually liberated or something, which is a point that doesn't really seem to have a place in the movie. But, whatever. I'll give it points for being weird and for being the logical conclusion of all the creepy shoulder-patting by Coburn's friend while they were kissing.

Can't forget to mention the shot when they finally get to Mesa Verde and the camera pans across the posters of the governer and then stops to settle on one poster for a while until suddenly a finger protrudes from the white space to the left of the governor's face and tears a straight strip across his eyes, and then from behind Rod Steiger's eye's move into the light and look out from behind the governor's face. No word for that but 'awesome.'

In a Lonely Place

Where this movie really got me was about fifteen minutes in (maybe less) when Bogart takes the coat check girl back to his place and she's blabbering on about the book, and the perspective switches for a few minutes so that she's suddenly talking directly at the camera. Except that I'm not completely sure that the camera was suddenly supposed to be in Bogart's head, because he wasn't in the same spot that the camera was when she started talking to it. Maybe it was still supposed to be a Bogey POV shot, but the effect was that she was talking directly to the audience. I just wasn't expecting it, and it completely sold the movie to me.

I do think I could watch Humphrey Bogart trade flirty barbs with his sassy costars for the rest of my life and never get bored of it. He just did it so well, and either he just got extremely lucky with his costars or he was able to draw it out of them, but I don't know that I've seen anybody else who could do it quite like that.

What was the deal with the masseuse lady, though, I wonder? Somehow she was supposed to be able to take care of any problems for Bogart's gf? It just seems weird that it was the masseuse who was supposed to be her savior...

Blade Runner: The Final Cut

It was hard to watch this without trying to spot differences between this and the Director's Cut, with which I'm pretty familiar. I really didn't see all that many, aside from a few short shots that seemed new to me, and of course the different order of the ending sequences, so that Deckard runs away with Rachel after surviving his fight with Batty.

I was a little confused by his nod. Since everyone knows that after the Director's Cut the big question was about Deckard's human/replicant status, it almost seemed like having the nod be the last bit of expression we see out of Deckard, after he picked up the origami unicorn, it was pretty easy to assume that the nod was meant to be in response to that question, so that Deckard seemed to be actually thinking about that question more than I ever thought he was before, except that if that were the case, just nodding seems like a pretty stupid response to him making up his mind. Or maybe he just nodded because Harrison Ford couldn't figure out how else to respond to an origami unicorn, but thought he should respond somehow. Also, maybe the shot where Batty kills Tyrelle was held a little longer? I don't remember so much blood before, but I'm not sure.

I was really happy to be able to see it on a big theater screen, but I can't see the cut seemed to be that much of an improvement over the extant one.

(12/9/07)
Okay, so my worst fears have been realized. Here's Ridley Scott on "the nod"

Wired: You shot the unicorn dream sequence as part of the original production. Why didn't you include it in either the work print or the initial release?

Scott:As I said, there was too much discussion in the room. I wanted it. They didn't want it. I said, "Well, it's a fundamental part of the story." And they said, "Well, isn't it obvious that he's a replicant?" And I said, "No more obvious than that he's not a replicant at the end." So, it's a matter of choice, isn't it?

Wired: When Deckard picks up the origami unicorn at the end of the movie, the look on his face says to me, "Oh, so Gaff was here, and he let Rachael live." It doesn't say, "Oh my God! Am I a replicant, too?"

Scott:No? Why is he nodding when he looks at this silver unicorn? I'm not going to send up a balloon. Doing the job he does, reading the files he reads on other replicants, Deckard may have wondered at one point, "Am I human or am I a replicant?" That's in his innermost thoughts. I'm just giving you the fully fleshed-out possibility to justify that look at the end, where he kind of glints and looks angry. To me, it's an affirmation. He nods, he agrees. "Ah hah! Gaff was here. I've been told."

I've always kind of wondered how the guy who made Blade Runner and Alien could've also made Gladiator and... well... pretty much all of his other movies. Apparently it's because he's kind of an idiot (seriously, what kind of an imagination thinks "Yeah, when Deckard finds the unicorn he thinks 'Ah hah! Gaff was here. I've been told.' and then his response to learning unequivocally that he's a robot is to nod quickly and walk away"?) Oh, well. Blade Runner's still great (even if now it will forever have that silly nod), but I guess I can stop wondering what happened to Ridley Scott...

I'm Not There

The movie itself might seem somewhat inexplicable, at least insofar as there's nothing really within the movie that ties any of the pretty much discrete narratives together, so it's interesting that the movie lets itself be propped up by the reality of Dylan's already gigantic mythology. It's not a biopic in the sense that it really tries to explain it's subject to the audience, or even present any kind of new insight into him. It seems like ultimately what Haynes tried to do--or at least all he accomplished doing--was to make a movie out of Dylan's mythology. And he even tied it less the actual Bob Dylan, or the actual Robert Zimmerman, than it already was.

I especially liked how each of the different narratives was really a completely different kind of film. Julianne Moore pretty much existed in a flat-out parody of Joan Baez from the Scorcese doc; Heat Ledger was in some kind of contemporary character-driven drama about a relationship and it's disintegration; Cate Blanchett wandered around in a Fellini homage; Richard Gere in an even more psychedelic version of the Billy the Kid story than Peckinpah's original, but that was obviously the reference. Christian Bale was also in some kind of movie, but I'm not sure exactly what. The only one who seemed to really exist in just this movie was the Franklin kid, but maybe there was another type of movie he was supposed to living through. I also liked the ways some of the stories bled into each occasionally without ever really trying to account for each other in any especially satisfactory or clear way.

Ultimately, though, like Control, I don't think the movie ever managed to explain why the subject was interesting. If you weren't already interested in Dylan, I doubt you'd walk away from the movie wanting to go out and get any of his albums. I wonder, is there a music biopic that makes its subject interesting to someone who might watch it with not interest in him/her beforehand?

Southland Tales

It kind of makes me feel a little sad that most of the things I thought were so great about Southland Tales are exactly the reasons that most people will hate it. It probably goes out of its way to explain the whole "thing" behind everything than Donnie Darko did, but there's no character in the movie who's anywhere even close to as relatable-to as Donnie was--there aren't any characters who are even supposed to be as relatable-to as Donnie was. And most people need that in a movie, I guess. I don't, for whatever reason.

Wherever I read it was right: Kelly's better when his cosmology is hidden or obscured. I liked that there were many aspects of the movie that weren't explained completely, but I also imagine that Kelly has it all packed away somewhere the exact explanation for everything, and I just wouldn't really be interested in all of that. The reason is something like this:

By ignoring conventional questions of explicability and coherence, Kelly isolates the fundamental building blocks of film and lets them work together on their own without the scaffolding beneath of them of plot and character. I mean, I guess there's plenty of plot in here, but the best parts are, for instance, Timberlake lip-synching to The Killers in some kind of arcade while hot chicks in vinyl nurse outfits dance around him, and he pours beer over his head, and that scene is mentioned in virtually every review as being a part that its worth seeing the movie for, and it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the rest of the movie. Or: the whole thing with the Star Spangled banner being sung first in Spanish and then English over a discordant quartet (was it the Kronos Quartet?) while the Zeppelin went all shiny and new into the LA skyline and fireworks went off everywhere. These scenes are absolutely perfect and are pure film, and for whatever reason I like that they're allowed to exist in relative isolation because of the general incoherence around everything.

Also, what I think Kelly is especially good at, maybe as good as anyone aside from Lynch, is presenting to form of something, such as the climax of this movie that is only really a climax because it has the feel of a climax. I mean, it is the climax, but because the overall story has been relatively shapeless before that, it's not exactly a climax that exists because of the story. Or something.

But what bothers me ultimately about Kelly is that he does have a very clear idea some ridiculously complex sci-fi/supernatural/spiritual plot behind everything and he wants you to spend a lot of time decoding everything until you unpack it all and understand everything. Which just seems kind of lame to me: story as puzzle. So in the end, Kelly's just as stuck under the tyranny of narrative as virtually every other filmmaker in America.

Kiss Me Deadly

Holy shit!

I cannot believe I didn't know about this movie. I can't believe I sat on it for so long, either (I got it in the mail from Netflix several weeks ago, maybe over a month ago, and just didn't get around to watching it...) The Netflix description on their little sleeve says:

"Shortly after sleazy detective Mike Hammer picks up a scantily clad hitchhiker, his car is forced over a cliff. He awakens from unconsciousness to find his passenger dead -- but it wasn't the fall that killed her. As Hammer sets out to uncover the woman's deadly secret and find her unknown assassins, he ignores explicit signs that he should mind his own business. This classic film noir was adapted from Mickey Spillane's novel by the same name."

Well, I guess that's not technically wrong in any way, but wow does it undersell the movie. In a way I suppose I'm kind of glad that I didn't really know what to expect when I went into it, because I probably wouldn't have been quite as floored by it, but how is it that I've never seen superlatives being thrown around w/r/t to this movie before?

Anyway, even before the ending it's amazing. Hammer is such a total sleazeball, and the way every woman just throws herself at him is almost surreal, especially with his complete lack of interest it. And there was actually a lot of really well-written dialogue throughout, mostly being spoken by women. And. And. And.

Okay, I don't really have a lot to say about this right now, except that I think that lots of parts of this movie must have been the source for various scenes in Lost Highway, and there were shots from this movie being watched in the background throughout Southland Tales, so apparently the movies known in certain circles.

I want to buy it.

Control

Yeah, really very beautifully shot, no doubt. But ultimately it runs into the same problem that almost all musician bio-pics tend to run into, or troubled genius bio-pics run into, which is that it focuses too much on the turmoil in his life to the exclusion of his artistic life. Not that there should be less of a focus on his life. In fact, I do think that specifically for this movie at least, one of the things that it does right is that it doesn't really forgive Ian Curtis for being an asshole. (Even better, it also never really condemns him for it. It does really a pretty good job of letting us see how much of an asshole he ultimately is being while also allowing us to see how from his perspective he's just in an impossible situation and he doesn't know what to do about it.) Further along those lines, it does manage, mostly, to not add a whole bunch of extra symbolic meaning to Curtis's suicide. It kind of just seems like a particularly jack-assed thing for him to have done, in the end, and you don't really get a sense that he thought he was accomplishing much of anything by it. So, anyway, it does those things right. But it also falls into this very common trap of not portraying the creative process at all. Which I could forgive the movie for if it had at least tried, but it doesn't even care to look especially like it's tried. We see at the beginning that Curtis is a kid with exceptional musical tastes and capable of quoting Wordsworth and stuff, but he doesn't really ever talk about music with anyone and he doesn't really do a lot of writing throughout the movie. It's just like, he goes to a Sex Pistols show, then he tells the New Order guys that he should be their singer, and the next thing he's singing these amazing songs, and we're left to wonder where they've come from. It's like he just decided to be the singer in a band and all of a sudden he's singing songs. We don't even see him figuring out how he wants to sing or anything. (Also, the staged performances are really pretty spectacular. They almost make the movie worth it. Or they almost make up for the movie's giant gaping flaw.) And the fact that they didn't even try to put any of that creative process into the movie ultimately makes me assume that the director just must not have been very interested in it, which makes me not like him a lot, and made me spend a lot of the movie griping to myself that it was kind of a waste of time.

INLAND EMPIRE

The ending of this movie, and I mean actually the closing credits of this movie, are one of the weirdest things Lynch has ever done in a movie. It's unclear at the end if Laura Dern is supposed to be Laura Dern or one or all of the characters she played in the movie, and then there's that chick from Mulholland Drive, the dark-haired chick, who wasn't even in this movie, blowing a kiss to Dern, who returns it. And then a bunch of girls who at first seem like they're the prostitutes from the movie because they're dressed like them but then you realize they're not all come out and dance and lipsink to a Nina Simone song. And it feels genuinely joyful and alive in a way that I don't think anything ever has in any Lynch movie before, even Straight Story. That is, it's obviously a staged moment, but it's also a staged real moment; it doesn't even pretend to have some symbolic referent that you might be able to get at to understand why it's there. It's just a bunch of women dancing to Nina Simone, plus Laura Dern and a few other people who are all pretending to or all actually are and probably a little bit of both enjoying it. I mean, the movie closed with a music video pretty much the way TMNT II did. That's fucking weird.

No Country for Old Men

First Coen brothers movie in how long? I'd look it up, but I don't really care to. Definitely a return to an older style for them, having more in common with Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing than The Big Lebowski or The Man Who Wasn't There. And maybe more in common with Blood Simple than any other movie they've made due to the fact that it didn't seem like a rehearsal of a type of movie the way almost all of their other films do.

I actually did think a few more scenes could've used incidental music, but that's probably because I think the score from Fargo is so good and they use music so well in a lot of their other movies. The lack of it through most of the film definitely made the one scene where it finally showed up, when Tommy Lee Jones arrives at the hotel to find Moss dead, way more moving than anything else in the movie. They way Moss's death happens off-camera seems even more jarring in the film than in the book, since you kind of expect even more of a film that it will include you on everything important, and certainly the death of the guy who up until then seemed to be the protagonist is an important thing. But they got that structural move from the book, so they get props I guess mainly for recognizing how important it is for what the book/story is trying to do that there not be some kind of climactic battle scene between Moss and his killers.

I never thought I'd say this about any movie ever, but Tommy Lee Jones might've been the best thing about the movie. He was absolutely note for not perfect.

Watching the movie after having read the book so recently, and noting especially how closely they adhere to the book and to what it has for dialogue, the one glaring change they made really stuck out. The conversation between Tommy Lee Jones and his old uncle, the statement his uncle makes to him about thinking that the world has gotten so much worse on his watch being just vanity, seemed like the Coen brothers responding in kind to McCarthy, as if the movie was both an adaptation of the novel and a way for the Coens to respond to the book--I'd say engage the book in dialogue, but it's hard for me to imagine a way that McCarthy would then respond to the movie, so they kind of automatically get the last word in, which isn't really a dialogue.

*****

(11/14 10:30 PM)

I was also wondering a little bit about the female characters in the movie. The Sheriff in the book goes on at length a few times about how great his wife is, and how Llewelyn's wife is really the better half of that pair, and how he's sure Llewelyn knows it and whatever, and I'd say what you get of the female characters in the book kind of backs that up. The female characters are certainly not violent at all, and seem mostly unaffected by that whole violent world of drugs and money, up until Chigurh goes to visit Llewelyn's wife at the end. But her demise is described as Llewelyn's fault by Chigurh, and it either is or it's Chigurh's fault. In any case, the women are truly innocents. But they seem like real characters just as much as any of the men are real characters. In the movie, I'm not sure quite that that came across at all. I don't think the Coens were really interested in that aspect of the story much at all. Llewelyn's wife mostly seemed kind of hapless, and like just the type who sits and stares at the television and that's all she's good for. Of course, her mom was comic relief, and I think she mostly was in the book, as well, but it's weird that the only female character from the book that really got fully translated in the movie, and even got sort of amplified, is the elderly woman for comic relief. The Sheriff's wife was in the movie, and I can't remember if she actually appeared in the book or if she was always only discussed by the Sheriff. But she was very genuinely important to the Sheriff in the book, very genuinely important as a person, as his wife, as sort of his moral compass or something. I think she just kind of seemed like a benevolent non-entity in the movie. It would be hard to convey the importance of someone who's even more beside the story than anyone else in a movie, I guess. But they included the Sheriff voiceover stuff, and none of his discussion of how important his wife was made it into the movie. I think there was a subtle point being made by McCarthy in the book, and I think the Coens just ignored it or didn't notice it. I'm not sure I entirely agree with the point he was trying to make, but it did add a level of nuance to the novel that I think would've not been a bad addition to the movie. This isn't really all that much of a criticism, I'd say, but I did come up with it pretty quickly when I was thinking of something more to discuss about the movie to add the dialogue of the dying Mexican in my cover of the first chapter of No Country for Old Men for my National Novel Writing Month novel.

There Will Be Blood

There were so many amazing things about this film that it's kind of a shame the final fifteen minutes had to happen. I guess there needed to be some kind of final confrontation between DDL and preacher-guy, at least from the standpoint of narrative and story arc and everything, I mean that it "needed" a "climax" to properly follow the rules of movie-story, but the scene kind of fell victim to that old Great Acting = screaming idea, and the only redeeming thing about the final scene was that there was, indeed, blood.

I suppose, since PTA aspires so much to be Robert Altman, that, like his hero, you just have to take the good with the bad. There was even some of that in Punch Drunk Love, when PTA let Phillip Seymour Hoffman go nuts with his little scream/acting bug.

Enough complaining, though; this movie was incredible right from the start. It was at least ten minutes in before there was any dialogue, and it would be pretty hard to convince me that the opening wasn't a pretty direct reference to 2001, with all the origins-of-man symbolism that might entail. The pan up to the hills with Jonny's score climaxing in a long martian-chord drone, and the score's subsequent descent as the camera pans back down, that whole little shot was easily one of the best bits of film I've ever seen. Worth the price of admission alone.

And it might even have been out done by the well explosion sequence: the way it comes out of nowhere, the totally arrhythmic beating and hammering that gradually finds its way into an insistent pounding not unlike a heartbeat, with the long takes of so many men running around frantically, and the oil geyser burning bright orange against a deep blue sky. I wish I could watch that scene over and over again. It was incredible.

Jonny Greenwood's score is incredible, and PTA is proving with this movie and PDL that he knows how to use scores better than almost anyone else out there, with the possible exception of that guy who made Huckabees, whatever his name is, which I should be able to remember but I can't.

No discussion of this movie should exclude a mention of Paul Dano. DDL was great, of course, but he kind of always is, and he's kind of always great in the exact same way. Paul Dano, though; wow. He might be the best American actor to hit the scene since Johnny Depp. His performance in Little Miss Sunshine was probably the most overlooked thing about the movie, and probably because of the fact that he wasn't speaking for most of the movie. Here he has no shortage of lines, and he should get some kind of Oscar recognition just for completely holding his own in every scene he shares with DDL. I'm really looking forward to watching this kid's career.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Like an apprentice Terrance Malick movie. Highlights: the law men descending from the patch of trees toward the house in the middle of nowhere, the snow being thrown on the frozen blue-ing body of... that guy they killed... (I'm writing this a long time after watching it...)

It's hard for me to really fault a movie for trying to be a Terrence Malick movie, but I thought it could've been improved by just completely going for it in a few places where it didn't quite.

Especially, I'm thinking of, the scene when someone is approaching from the horizon on horseback, and his approach is framed by a doorway, and on the inside of the doorway its not quite (very very close) black, and outside the sky is gray and the ground is white, and there's this slightly curvy but essentially straight path of darker gray dirt, and the guy on horseback approaches right down this path, and I know it would have been a reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally long shot, but I found myself wishing very strongly that the shot would have been held in real time for the guy's entire approach, where instead he faded out from the distance and faded in into the foreground. Boo...

But the colors and the light throughout was spectacular. I wanna watch it again for that reason.

I wasn't really interested in the whole epilogue part, though. Or, I mean, I don't think I'd want to watch that part again. It was good information-wise, I guess.

We Own the Night

Pretty much exactly as good as I thought it'd be. At some point I'm going to have to forgive Joaquin Phoenix the grudge I hold him for being in Gladiator and then further soiling my memory with his performance in Signs, cuz he's really actually a pretty good actor.

The car scene, in the rain, was easily the best point of the film: the way they used no (or almost no?) incidental music through the thing, no exaggerated speed noises or screeches of tires, the way the overwhelming color was the actual blue color of rain, they way they kept the jump-cuts pretty minimal. It could've been better if they'd have let the seen run up a little bit before the point when you realize what's happening, with maybe a lighter beginning in the car or something, but the actual action itself was extremely well done, and in a subtle way you usually don't see in huge mainstream flicks like this: of course, it was allowed to do it that way because it's a cop drama, not a cop action movie.

But then they followed it up with the scene in the hotel room where Eva Mendez finds out that Joaquin "Bobby" Phoenix is taking the cop exam and gets upset, followed by Joaquin doing some serious "acting" like slamming his fist on the counter and tipping over the bottle of whiskey and screaming at her. It was such a half-assed scene, poorly acted by both the characters but it would've been hard to act right because of how poorly it was set up and the really bad dialogue for them to try to act around. Also, it'd been so long since we'd really seen anything of their characters by that point that there really wasn't much of a sense of who they were anymore.

There were some real chances for good shots in this: especially in the climactic scene, the wide shot of the grass burning and the overall scene of Bobby walking through the tall grass hunting Vadim, but the movie didn't linger enough for them to work like I wanted them to. (I'm thinking along the lines of the scenes in the grass in The New World, maybe).

I also kind of felt like the movie was working too hard to try to make a point at the same time that it was working too hard to appear like it wasn't trying to make a point. So you're supposed to walk away thinking, "Well, Bobby joined the side of the 'good guys,' right, but look where it got him? His dad's dead; his girlfriend's gone (highlighted by Bobby's misrecognition of a face in the audience at his graduation ceremony); and now his brother's getting a desk job so he won't get to work with him, either. He's really alone. So maybe he'd have been better off to stay out of it or something?" I don't know. Ultimately it just doesn't seem like that interesting of a question; especially because the binary between a rich life with lots of friends and the ascetic life of the strait and narrow is one that the movie totally created in the first place (not that it "created" it since it's obviously a long-standing idea in human consciousness, but that it created it for itself).

But, whatever. Could've used more and better eighties music, too. At least some New Order in the background or something.

***
(10/18)

The most actually interesting thing about the movie was the way it kept reiterating that the bad Russian guys "were not afraid" of the police. They didn't view the police as all-powerful, and they didn't see them as anything but another group of guys trying to fuck with their shit. The movie itself seemed to go a little out of its way to present the police as just another group of guys, as well. Most of the cops know Bobby, and the fact that his father and brother are high-ups in the department make all the actions of the police toward Bobby seem to be, at least to some extent, just and extension of Bobby's father's power. Similarly, Bobby's "conversion" to the good guys only comes about because he wants revenge against the guys who shot his brother and murdered his father, and it's really his family connections more than anything that makes it possible to join the police and suddenly be assigned to the same case that his brother's working on. The most hammer-over-the-head moment along these lines comes when Bobby's kind of beating up his old friend, and he says something like "I'm a cop now, so I can do anything I want." In other words, to a degree the film is trying to expose the monopoly on power that the police have as being nothing more than just their assertion of that monopoly, not something granted them by God or, more mysteriously, "the public." The police in the movie behave in pretty much the same way you'd expect a rival mafia to behave if the movie were just about two mafias. Even the film's title, which apparently comes from some slogan on NYPD badges is just an assertion of power, nothing at all like the mystical force for good we're conditioned to believe to be the case in our society.

Really, though, I wonder how different this is than a lot of cop movies, like even Dirty Harry, where the cops are portrayed as loose cannons, etc.? The most important difference, I guess, is that even in the Dirty Harry movies, the organization of the police itself is never really exposed or questioned, it's only the individual cops. And, actually, I do think the movie succeeds a little bit in its attempt to expose and critique the state monopoly on power, but I wonder if, by making the film a period piece, it might not weaken the critique just a little bit.

Here's James Gray on Bobby in his movie: "He became a police officer and abandoned his true self." Gray seems to think that's the heart of his movie that everyone's missing. It seemed pretty obvious to me. There's the opening scene, with Eva Mendes's boob, and Bobby saying "I could die right now and I'd be happy" and then the closing scene, where Mark Wahlberg says "I love you very much" and Bobby repeats it back to him, but it's obvious that he's not happy. But, I don't know, "abandoned his true self?" That's such a lame problem, this pining after yr "true self," like that's some actual thing out there that you have to discover and then adhere to. In a more realistic interpretation of Bobby's character, his problem at the end seems to have a lot more to do with loneliness than any true self abandoning. He loved Eva Mendes but he lost her because he acted like a dick and treated her like an accessory to his own, more important life. But he was kind of doing that before he abandoned his "true self;" at least some of why he chose her as the girlfriend to bring to meet his family was that he knew bringing a Puerto Rican would piss his dad off, and making out with her in the stairwell while the cops had a moment of silence for a fallen comrade was consistent more with that. But that's enough psychology. There's too much shoddy psychology in movies, this one included.

Eastern Promises

Kudos to Cronenberg for keeping me completely in the dark until the big reveal of Mortensen's characters true nature, and similarly for not treating it like this huge deal, like the way Shyamalan or even someone not quite that shitty would've. Also for not having Mortensen really give away his secret to Naomi Watt. But I really did not buy the kiss between them. It was the type of kiss that only happened because this was a movie; there's no way two people in the situation would've decided to kiss. It was just ridiculous. Did some suit make Cronenberg do it, or was that really all his decision? Or in the script I suppose...

Micah thought this could be a good set up to a series of films, and maybe it could be but I think I like it as just it's own. It's pretty obvious where Vigo's going from there, and subsequent films would just consist of arbitrary complications in order for there to be a plot. All the big work that the film wanted to do is already done, I think.

Really, really great Russian accent by Vigo. I wish I could do a Russian accent like that. I wonder if that's even an actual localized accent he had that was in some way different from the accents of the other characters?

It's almost kind of funny how obvious it is that Cronenberg wants to really show us the gore: like the shot of the frozen finger being snipped off or, especially, the kid pulling down his scarf so we can see the slit in his throat and the blood starting to come out. And, like KSM mentioned, how obvious the prosthetics are sometimes: especially the guy in the barber's chair.

In retrospect, though, it doesn't make a whole of sense for the barber guy to make the kid do it. It seemed like it was setting something up at the time, but I'm not sure that it ever paid off.

Mean Streets

It's kind of unbelievable how good this movie gets in the third act. Not that it's bad before then, but even though you know it's going to explode eventually, even though you see it coming through the whole movie, when everything goes to shit it's still shocking. And wow could Harvey Keitel and Robert DeNiro act back then. Did they just get sick of it or something?

Also, even though Scorsese's never really gone quite the way of those two, there's a real anger (or something, something trying to get out) that I'm not sure is present in his more recent string of really good movies. Maybe should see the Departed again, just for comparison purposes.

It could be that there's just something I find inherently more interesting and powerful when you can tell a person's trying to figure out there craft, that explosion of creative energy and power when they're just starting see what they can do and are maybe even a little in awe of it themselves, more interesting in that case than the type of controlled mastery Scorsese's been showing off lately.

I still don't think this is quite as good as Taxi Driver, though, but it certainly erases any sense that Taxi Driver's whole understated opacity was just all Scorsese really knew how to do, which I think I kind of thought. Though a lot of this movie is just about as opaque as Taxi Driver was, there's not a whole lot about that's understated, I'd say.

Plus, who knew that Wes Anderson cribbed his whole slo-mo film w/pop music thing from Scorsese? Some of the times Scorsese does it in this almost made me think I was watching a Wes Anderson movie for a second, but of course there's not even a hint of that storybook cuteness that Anderson somehow gets in every single frame. (A lot of that probably has to do with the framing of the shots.) I wonder if Scorsese did that a lot in his other movies? I don't remember seeing it anywhere else before...

The Darjeeling Limited

This was certainly better than I thought it'd be, I guess because for some reason I was thinking Wes Anderson was bound to descend into a mid-career slump of crap for a while here... Not sure exactly where I got that idea. But I would say he hasn't exactly entered that phase of his career. Though he has got the point that I don't think he's really trying to figure out anything new; he's just working on perfecting what he's getting at. I'm worried he's getting close to arriving there, and I hope he knows where to go from there.

I'm not sure that I've ever seen a filmmaker aside from Kubrick who can actually control everything that you see in the frame to the extent that Anderson has managed to do at this point in his career. Even things you notice going on in the background have probably been consciously put there by Anderson, or at least taken into account. He goes about as far as it would be possible to go toward separating what he's shooting from reality. It's certainly a feat.

What does it mean that the main characters in this movie are probably the most mature main characters in any of his movies? And is that even true? I think it might be, except for maybe Anjelica Huston in Tenenbaums. It was great to see her pull off her character in this movie, too. There was no way she should have been able to make her character seem even remotely believable, but she ends storming into her scene like she's the only one with anything real going on. Wes Anderson should make a movie with Anjelica Huston as the main character. He owes it to the world. What he manages to get out of her is on a whole other level from everything else he's doing--even his resurrection of Bill Murray. Actually, I think that's a really good idea. Maybe it would allow him to escape from his little world of arrested development that, while certainly unique and interesting and entertaining, gets further and further from seeming like there's actually anything at stake in every film. I probably wouldn't even feel that way about it if it weren't for Anjelica Huston in this movie. But she really did seem more actually compelling than the three brothers during her brief intrusion into the movie.

***
(10/18)

The thing that bothered me the most about this movie, and it's something I tried to articulate to Elliot but that I also admitted to being uncomfortable with (it's a criticism I'm a little uncomfortable having) is the way the movie used the death of the Indian boy to trigger whatever "real" spiritual awakening the three brothers are supposed to have. First of all, it's just such an obvious move: the death of the Indian boy brings them out of themselves so they have to experience something beyond their own self-centered world; except that it's obviously the function of the death of the Indian boy to be that for them, so, for the movie, the death of the boy is just as much about them as everything else. I kept waiting for some moment when the audience would be forced to see the death as something outside of the symbolic world of the three brothers, but the movie never takes that step. I don't think it's just the fact that it's an Indian death triggering a spiritual experience for three white Americans: it's the fact that the narrative is so focused on the three brothers that really nothing outside of them can exist in and of itself, and this fact gives the audience permission to experience the boy's death as something purely functional and symbolic (along with everything else in the movie, of course...) And if a narrative is really nothing more than a creative presentation of thought or thinking, which it is, then this form of thinking encourages the audience to enclose experiences in symbolic trappings. I'm uncomfortable about this criticism because it's such a moralistic critique.

Escape from New York

There were things about this movie that were much better than I expected. The cinematography, especially was really pretty, with lots of lens flares and stuff done very well--it seems more than in most movies.

Particularly, the whole opening sequence, with its long tracking establishing shots, with Carpenter's characteristic music. And then Kurt Russell shows up with his eye patch and kind of tears a hole in that whole thing. So it was all very pretty to look at, for pretty much the whole movie, but I can't help but think they totally fucked Russell's costume in this. Maybe it's because I just watched Death Proof so recently, but I know Russell is capable of seeming way more rugged and cool than he ever does in this movie, and it starts with how shitty is costume is. The eye patch just looks silly, and then, what, is he wearing that Under Armour stuff? And his nicely combed hair... Obviously, someone on the set knew how to do costuming, because Romero is fucking awesome--really creepy and cool looking, and he manages to do the creepy laugh thing right, so it actually is kind of creepy. Other than Romero, though, most of the costume stuff that is supposed to be awesome is pretty much not awesome.

What especially doesn't work is the script, which is so bad you'd almost think it must have been created just as a challenge for the actors--and a challenge that none of them are particularly up for, save Harry Dean Stanton. Even he obviously struggle to put something into the words, but at least a few times he manages to deliver effectively. Oh, yeah, and also Romero. Was someone else just in charge of everything involving Romero, or something?

I can't forget, either, the part when Russell (or Snake... oooohhh!! Snake!) floats into NY on his glider, the music playing is a Carpenterized La Cathédrale Engloutie! It was really pretty perfect actually. Which is exactly the embodiment of what is so weird about this movie. There are some things about it that are done so well, especially the cinematography, and basically all the scenes except for the fight scene when nobody's talking... But as soon as it comes to directing the actors or the action sets, it's just all so flat. Which is especially weird, because wasn't Carpenter supposed to be like an action director? Has the action in action movies really gotten so much better since 1981?

Actually, the establishing shots and all the longer takes and everything made me think, once again, that film vocabulary, as far as how you film a scene and set up the players and everything, was significantly better in the late seventies and into the very early eighties than it is now. Not that I want to be one of those people who's always complaining about all the quick cuts in movies now or anything, but they are a technique that is overused, for sure. It's so much more compelling when things are captured in one shot, generally, than a bunch of cuts. Specifically, here, when Snake and Brain and the Prez and Maggie (?) all come out of the room where the President was being held, after killing Romero, they run across a fairly wide shot, and as the camera pans to follow them, the shot is interrupted by a guy in the foreground shadows, who watches them run off. I think in most contemporary movies that would've been accomplished with a cut, but there's something so much more interesting about doing it the way they did it here, I think.

Heart of Glass

This movie is pretty much a failure. It's an interesting failure, but a failure. There's just not a whole lot that really works.

I somehow had forgotten that this was the movie where he used hypnotized actors the whole time, and I guess that adds a bit of interest to the film, but I'm glad that I was able to watch it w/o that knowledge--although I did find myself thinking a few times, "Why is everyone acting like zombies?" There are whole sections where the actors just stand there and proclaim their lines, and I'm not sure it would've made much difference had they been hypnotized or instructed to act hypnotized.

What I mainly thought while watching it was, "Here's a bit of proof that it really is hard to do a film like Lynch and get it right."

It seems like Herzog is at his best when he creates a situation in which he's inherently out of control and films the results. Even in Fitzcarraldo, for which he got the reputation of being a maniacal control freak, a lot of the things that are most interesting are the result of the difficulties involved in undertaking such an insane project, so there's so much that is just beyond his control, no matter what he does. Here, though, it seems like Herzog is in control of nearly every action, and nothing is quite as interesting, somehow.

The only part that really worked the way it was intended was the final bit about the two islands with the narration by the prophet guy. Herzog is just great at using long tracking shots of beautiful extreme landscapes with perfect music and sounds overlayed. The island was breathtaking, and the long shot all the way around with the lone figure standing on the precipice is pure Herzog at his best--the type of thing that I want to find a word for, something better than "Herzogian." Also, the shot from the inside of the little boat that they're rowing out to see was pretty incredible, followed by one of Herzog's many long takes of flocks of birds, another thing that he captures like virtually no one else.

There were a few other mildly interesting bits, but overall it felt like a lot of flailing around trying to find something interesting. Which is still interesting, and you have to give him credit for really trying to create something unique. But it's just never really interesting as a finished project. That's not a criticism; it's a description.

Also, the opening shots were very good. He'd already figured out how to do all that at this point in his career. The mist cascading over the wooded hills; the cattle idly chewing away at the grass in the foggy morning; and all those broad landscape shots that I think were maybe being filmed as a projection onto heavy cloth? Pure Herzogian goodness.

3:10 to Yuma

I went to this movie to recover from the Bears loss, and it worked well enough for that. It's gotten some pretty amazing reviews, all of which indicated that it is a "good" movie, a serious film that is good because it takes itself seriously, because it allows viewers to project conflict between the protagonist and antagonist into something vaguely philosophical/meaningful, because it has some serious acting in which the actors fully inhabit their characters, etc. (I need to come up with a better formulation of that idea. Essentially, it's that the "good" movie is as much a genre of movie as action, comedy, romance (or romantic comedy?), etc. Mostly, the "good" movie is just a subgenre of drama, and critics tend to go nuts when a Good Movie disguises itself as a less reputable genre--typically some offshoot of action, like sci fi. Still need to come up with a better articulation of all of this.)

Anyway, critics love this movie because it takes the somewhat disreputable genre of the Western and turns it into Good Movie. And it does a pretty good job of it. Russell Crowe is about as fun to watch as he's been in any movie I've seen him in, except for maybe Master and Commander. And I always love watching Christian Bale act. Oh, and Tucker! from Flash Forward! !!! Is really very good as the creepy super villain guy, who functions mainly to be shot by Crowe at the end so the audience can really feel that Crowe has changed somehow.

Really, the climax was the part that I thought worked the least. Even though the scene with Bale and Crowe alone in their room was supposed to be the big crux of the thing, and there was evidently supposed to be some kind of big meeting of their souls or something, I just didn't quite get it. It pretty much just let the audience off the hook, I think. The movie had moved itself into a situation where there wasn't really a possible good ending, and then suddenly Russell Crowe realizes that Christian Bale is the only guy in the film who can equal his charisma, or something? I mean, it was a very satisfying ending, because Crowe was just too likeable to be all bad, as Bale's son correctly surmised. I think what bothers me most about it is that it really is just shallowness, and pretty extreme shallowness, masquerading as depth, because this is a Good Movie, so it's obviously deep. Ultimately, the ethic of the movie is that charismatic people are less dispensable than non-charismatic people, and that likeable people always have a good heart, deep down--at least when it comes to people they recognize as similarly charismatic and likeable. Because Bale is the only person in the whole movie who dies who the audience even cares in the slightest that they've died, and his death is avenged immediately by the slaughter of all of Crowe's posse by Crowe. But Crowe's character is a truly reprehensible person, and Bale's is actually kind of an idiot who sacrifices his life for his sons' adolescent fantasies of heroism, but there's supposed to something noble about the way it all ends.

I thought Tucker from Flash Forward's character, who really consisted of nothing more than an impenetrable set of tics and an unblinking stare, was the highlight of the movie, and in the end is the most honest thing about the movie. By never acting recognizably human he manages to be extremely charismatic and enjoyable without suckering the audience into buying his personal code of ethics. He obviously has one, but we are left to judge it instead of invited into it. Why do I find that preferable? I don't know... I'm not sure why "honesty" seems to me like such an important measure of a movie to me... or what exactly I mean by "honesty," here...

Shoot 'Em Up

I'm writing this immediately after writing my note about 3:10 to Yuma, which is on Monday 17 September. In some ways this movie was a good contrast to that movie. It did not once try to be anything like a Good Movie, and has been thoroughly snubbed by critics for precisely that reason. Well, and it's just not as good of a movie as Yuma, but it's not as much worse as the Metacritic score might lead to one to believe. (Ebert, at least, sorta gets it.)

The basic problem with this movie is that it is never as clever as it wants to be. Really, the only thing that I thought worked on all of the levels it wanted to was the part in the opening sequence when Clive Owen's character shoots the umbilical chord after realizing that he doesn't have anything else to cut it with. Actually, the whole delivering a baby during a shootout thing was very awesome. But too much else in the movie just fell flat. What was up with the carrot thing? The only good (not really good, actually) thing that seemed to come out of it was the "What's up, Doc," line, which at least managed to do for "wit" what much of the rest of movie did for "plot", "action", or whatever.

If this movie had come with a text opening explaining what year it was, what had happened to America after the nuclear war, etc., absolutely everything else about the movie could have stayed the same and it would have been a perfectly believable bad scifi movie, a la Judge Dredd or Demolition Man. All that would have been missing was some obligatory explanation of some High Tech weapon some random character would've felt compelled to make. But, even with that missing, I think it would have been completely buyable as a sci-fi action movie. I'm not sure what that means, other than that Hollywood seems to think that sci-fi seems to mean B-Action movie.

It really is too bad that Monica Bellucci isn't in more movies, though.

Stardust

I never would have watched this if Rachael hadn't wanted to go, and I'm glad she did. It was way better than any of the advertisements made it seem like it would be. It's weird when a film is so misrepresented by its advertisements... Could they really not figure out a way to market this film? It was just fun, sort of the way Shrek movies are fun, except way less annoying.

All that said, I don't remember a whole lot about the movie, which I can hardly believe I saw only a week ago. De Niro's portrayal of Captain Shakespeare was pretty funny, and I thought he played it far better than the role even needed him to.

I did have to wonder, though, why Michelle Pfeiffer's sisters were both played by young people with old person makeup on, since neither of them ever had to change into younger looking versions of themselves. It's hard enough for aging actresses to find work in the Hollywood world that it seems almost immoral to cast young actresses in the role of older characters for no reason.

Detour

The bad transfer is almost like an extra stylistic effect, making the story seem even more murky than as it was originally filmed--and it was plenty murky. Neal's Roberts probably isn't supposed to be but comes off as kind of deranged. One minute he's a sullen pushover, but then he flies off the handle at slight provocation. The strangest shift was probably at the beginning of the flashback, when he gets sore that his dame is moving to LA and promised not to speak to her ever again. Next thing, he's pounding away at the piano in his club without a band, playing really brilliantly except he keeps shifting to a new song every twenty seconds or so. That is something that didn't seem intentional, although I'd believe it was. It makes the whole thing seem just a little bit more like a memory--a much more interesting way of accomplishing that than the standard fog flying around everywhere through these early scenes.

Further evidence for the total subjectivity of the flashback: his gf, once she's out in LA, apparently just sits there waiting by the phone with a blank hopeful expression on her face. Roberts apparently only remembers his side of the conversation, as he doesn't leave time for her to respond to any of the questions he asks. There's even a cut to her open face while he just rambles right on through her lines. Maybe he was on speed? It's the only time he ever appears happy in the film, and it seems like crazy happiness, not just being really happy about anything. Also, I think he just got up in the middle of his shift playing the piano and left the club to make his manic phone call.

Best shot in the whole film is Ann Savage walking toward the car after Roberts says he'll give her a lift. It's held just a little longer than it needs to be for the effect of just pushing the plot along, and it's really kind of a beautiful shot, with Savage's road-weary face and hair and her sure stride. The length of the shot turns it into something far prettier than it was intended to be, and it's kind of funny that it was probably basically an editing blunder, because I don't know if the vocabulary for that type of shot quite existed yet at the time this was made. But it's pure film, right there.

Then, later, in the car, with Vera sitting in the passenger seat exactly as Haskell had when he died, and Roberts is talking about that very fact, and suddenly Vera's eyes are open! Totally creepy! I didn't see her eyes open or anything, and she doesn't move her head or body at all which just made it extra scary. Her eyes are just suddenly open and she's staring at him, and he doesn't notice at first so he just stares out ahead of the car and rambles on in the voiceover. Then, Bam! Closeup of Vera screeching, "What have you done with the body!" Really brilliant!

Ann Savage really does steal the movie. She seems to be the only one in the show who can actually act, and the way she screeches half her lines outshrews even Liz Taylor, but with barely even a breath she's sometimes all of a sudden very sexy. It's amazing how she goes from repulsive to sexy so quickly, often without the help even of changed camera angles or anything. But you never really feel anything about her but fear.

Really funny but kind of cheap how Roberts lectures Vera on the way to the used car guy about how she should let him do all the talking, but when they get there he doesn't say a word. And then in the voiceover he talks about "we haggled" for the right price, but it still seems like he probably didn't speak.

Also it was especially creepy that Vera seemed the most purely attractive and sexy when she was dead. She was shot to look beautiful at that point, even. Instead of showing what would have been a truly gruesome picture, most likely, at that point she becomes a true femme fatale.

Nightmare Alley

I definitely want to see this one again.

I wasn't expecting much. I just wanted to watch an old noir movie, and I didn't have any Netflix on hand, so I decided to try to find one on Netflix's Instant Viewing thing, but, surprisingly enough, it proved pretty hard to find old noir films they have ready for instant viewing. Nightmare Alley was the only one I found after about thirty minutes of searching, so I decided I'd settle for it. But I really was not expecting I'd find such an enjoyable little movie.

The whole "Are you going to marry her," seemed to me like a sinister version of that question as it's posed by all sorts of children, especially the way they forced Stan to marry the girl. It actually took me a couple of minutes to figure out that it might have been not as bizarre a thing for its setting. It was how they showed Stan had had sex with her.

wow I'm tired right now... write more later....

Killer of Sheep

(backlogged to 9/10/07, 1:21am)

I'm glad I found out about this movie being shown at the Red Vic, since it's apparently kind of hard to find.

After about two and a half weeks, the strongest image in my mind of this movie is the scene when Stan dances with his wife, the way she starts to so hungrily kiss and grope him and how distractedly he just kind of walks away; it could've come off as too disaffected like the worst Antonioni or something, but it doesn't, it felt really potent. And then Stan's wife standing there, and does she leave the frame or not? and the window, empty, divided into nine smaller squares of white against the dark gray and black everything else, burning away in the middle of the frame. The way Burnett held the shot, too, on just that empty window. It's just so amazing when the reality of a specific object in actual time pokes through the narrative of a movie. (is that maybe part of the secret of how this thing works?)

The whole part where Stan goes with his friend to get the motor, the quirky behavior of the people in the house who sell him the motor, his friend hurting his fingers and then carelessly leaving the motor on the back of the truck, that whole scene was probably the most narratively fulfilling: it was funny and heartbreaking, very much in the way of an old Italian movie, like Umberto D or The Bicycle Thief.

The scene toward the beginning with the kid peeking out from behind the wooden board and the other kids throwing rocks at him, that scene was kind of ruined by my reading of Ebert's review before watching it. I tried to hard to make what I was seeing seem as perfect as how it had sounded as described by Ebert: there's a true instance of a spoiler!

Many of the reviews had said the scenes in the slaughterhouse were so disturbing, but I wasn't really all that disturbed by them. I mean, slaughterhouses suck, but I already knew that. Why was that such a sticking point for so many of the reviewers?

Deep Red

I read in a Reel.com review of Blowup that Dario Argento, who was a film critic at the time of Blowup, was upset by the invasion of the two teenage girls while David Hemmings is assembling the narrative of his photographs. He apparently thought it was indicative of Antonioni's inability to keep the plot moving. Which really seems to me like it was kind of the point of that scene, but whatever. The Reel.com review said something about Deep Red, which also stars David Hemmings, being Argento's response or corrective to Blowup. I think that negatively influenced my viewing of the film at first. I kept looking for parallels, or things that might seem to be directed at Blowup. Frankly, if this was meant to in some way one-up Blowup, it's a complete failure.

There are a lot of weird things in the movie, though. The Blue Bar: was it supposed to look like that famous painting of the Hollywood bar at night, the one with Marilyn Monroe and James Dean? I don't know enough about that painting, but the bar looked so much like it that it seems like the painting must either have been painted of the exact bar used in the film, or it was meant to look like that. I couldn't figure out what the point of the reference was there, though.

About the only thing that really seemed like a nod at all to Blowup was the way David Hemmings sees for just one second the murder-lady in the window when he walks into psychic-lady's house, but Argento lets it go by quickly and Hemmings is never really sure what he saw until the very end. That was easily the best thing about the movie, even though Argento almost ruined it with the flashback when Hemmings is investigating the apartment again. The flashback completely eliminated the question mark in the viewer's mind about what Hemmings saw.

The parts that were meant to be scary really worked, unless the violence was supposed to be scary. Especially the weird little robot thing that floats toward the professor before he gets killed. It was one of the most legitimately creepy things I've seen in a movie, especially because it seemed completely out of place. And then when it turns out not to be supernatural but to be a robot thing, well, that's not an explanation of why it's there. Also, the scene when David Hemmings sets the flashlight on the table and then hacks his way into the walled-in room, with the darkness behind the hole because of how bright the light immediately on this side of the hole is, was really creepy. Even the pulled back shot of Hemmings looking into the room with rotted corpse in the middle of his flashlight light was creepy.

At least in this movie, Argento obviously had some fascination with random things from the world being dangerous. Hemmings' little scare on the outside of the old house, when the facade starts crumbling beneath him was the first instance I can think of it, and it really was bad. It just seemed like random suspense for no reason, and the fact that it was because Hemmings had just stupidly decided to scale the side of the building without a ladder or anything made it even dumber. I mean, it was kind of funny, but completely out of the place for the movie. Then Carlo gets hooked by a passing garbage truck, is dragged through the streets until he's nearly dead, and has his head smooshed by a random passing car. All of which was actually pretty funny, I thought, but I wasn't sure that Argento meant it to be for laughs. And the final scene with murder-lady, Carlo's mom, who gets her necklace caught in the elevator which then beheads her. So anticlimactic from a plot point of view. And, really, the shot of her head being severed was kind of hilarious.

The murder scenes were easily the most compelling scenes in the movie, which was kind of the opposite of Belly of the Black Tarantula, in which the scenes with the investigator and his wife were most enjoyable to watch. The domestic scenes in this between Hemmings and reporter-chick were not especially compelling. There was this weird kind of slapstick thing going on with reporter-chick's car, and their conversations about chauvinism and feminism were really stupid. And the arm-wrestling scene? It's possible that was in there to make you think reporter-chick might be the killer, since she was demonstrating her strength. But overall, their romance seemed to come out of nowhere and Argento either didn't care enough to bother with it or really had no idea how to develop that kind of thing. It as interesting to the extent that reporter-chick seemed to be invading from some other movie every time she was on-screen. Then Argento seems to pretty much forget about her after she gets stabbed. Clearly, the relationship between Hemmings and reporter-chick was not as important as the amount of screen time it got.

Almost forgot: the conversation between Hemmings and Carlo about what Hemmings saw also seemed to in some way be a nod to Blowup. Was having it come out of Carlo's drunk ass meant to be mocking Blowup pretensions? It was all one shot, with Hemmings on the far left and Carlo on the far right, and most of the middle of the shot taken up by the statue of some reclining god. Really, it was almost a good shot. I wonder now if knowing who that god was would have added anything to it?

The other weirdest shot: Hemmings and reporter-chick walking down the hallway of the school. They kept looking at each other in a way that seemed like it was being kind of pointed out, especially reporter-chick, but it was unclear what the significance of it was. I actually really liked that. It was intriguing and not confusing in a bad way.

Blow Up

(with commentary)

For some reason, I was kind of excited when I saw there was audio commentary with auther Peter Brunette on the Netflix DVD I have, even though I have no idea who Peter Brunette is. I just tried watching it, but I could only make it about a third of the way through. I had to stop when Peter said, "presumably the line about queers and poodles wouldn't have made it into the script these days." Come on. Why not? Because he finds the line offensive, or because he assumes that everyone would find the line too offensive, or because he thinks everyone's more enlightened these days, or because he thinks the PC police would have stopped it? I mean, I assume this guy's supposed to be some kind of film historian or something, but does he watch any movies that actually come out these days? Of all the things in this movie that wouldn't make into a "Hollywood" film these days, why choose that to single out? Especially when I don't think there'd really be much fuss about the line anyway. What world does Peter Brunette live in?

The other problem with the commentary was just the general problem that many movie commentaries seem to have, which is that he kept talking about the film in such a way to avoid "spoilers," but why? Who is going to watch the movie for the first time with the commentary on? I think if you're doing a commentary, you can safely assume that anyone who listens to the commentary has already seen the movie at least once. So talk about the movie that way.

Peter Brunette, although he seems like a pleasant and intelligent enough guy, fell back too many times on his little critical tricks. Also, although he paid lip service to the complexity of the presentation of photog guy, he seemed incapable himself of anything but disgust for him. Even ordinary things like how he flips the camera from one hand to another, Brunette couldn't point out how suave it was without the word "suave" having some pretty obvious disgust quotes around it. Also, the fact that the junk shop leaves him utterly speechless is a little disappointing. He can't seem to talk about it because he doesn't know what it "means," because it doesn't fit into any of his critical tricks. Although I'm not saying this is the ultimate thing about the junk shop scene, it seems to me like at least one worthwhile conjecture is that photog guy is there because he thinks junk is interesting. Maybe Brunette couldn't offer that or another opinion because there wasn't anything easily condemnable about his interest in the junk shop? Who knows... Actually, it seemed to me like a simple case of not being able to offer any idea about the junk shop because he couldn't think of anything "profound" about it.

I really was hoping for an interesting commentary, though. Pretty much everything Brunette said about the film was obvious, surface-level criticism. "He's setting up a binary between the merry-makers and the poor people." Not only is that obvious, but it doesn't really expand on any of the oddness of the merry-makers. Or the fact that if that's all it is, it's a completely unbalanced binary, because the merry-makers veer so close to the completely surreal that the almost seem like they have to have some kind of rhetorical weight, whereas the poor people who come immediately after do not seem at all surreal. So while there's certainly an intentional juxtaposition of the merry-makers to the dour faces of the poor, they can't simply be a binary; they're not equivalent enough.

I worry, though, that by being so dismissive of Brunette but so emphatically in love with the movie that I'm setting Antonioni up to be "the master" just as much as Brunette so nauseatingly does in his commentary. Well... The film is a truly singular example of a spectacular film. Brunette's commentary is mediocre commentary. Nothing too disturbing about that formulation, I think. Or I want to think right now.

Another annoying thing Brunette did: all that talk about the camera being this "cold, medal" thing that was "mediating" between photog guy and the supermodel, or some such nonsense. Now, it is interesting that photog guy does seem to get some kind of emotional distance from reality through his camera, but that's more a psychological thing that's specific to him; there's nothing less real about taking a picture of something than just looking at that thing. Yes, it changes the way you're interacting with that thing, and just as with photog guy here it is possible for a person with a camera to use the camera for some kind of emotional distance from what they're photographing, but that's a psych thing, not an ideological thing. But simply taking a picture of something does not make your experience of that thing somehow less authentic. It merely is another aspect of your experience. The garbage Brunette spewed about the "cold, medal" camera was just lazy falling back on crit speak.

Blow Up

2nd time

Memory is weird. I didn't remember at all the scene when photog guy goes and actually sees the corpse in the park, even though this time it seemed like a very striking scene. I wonder if it was so striking because I didn't remember it? When he went to the park the second time, I thought it was the scene when he went and found nothing, so the sudden presence of the corpse was rather alarming.

Also, at the end, I was sure there was a shot of a tennis ball bouncing away, or something like that. I was sure of it, in fact. I kept expecting it, and the whole time was composing this sentence in my head, "The final shot of the tennis ball bouncing is the only misstep in the whole movie." Does that mean, then, that there are no missteps in the whole movie?

I can still remember things about when I watched this for the first time, with Joe, who didn't like it at all, but it was one of those movies I didn't think all that much of at first. I thought there were some kind of intriguing things about it, but mostly was kind of boring. But letting it float around in my head for a while really worked apparently, because I knew well before I watched it this time that I'd like it a lot if I ever saw it again.

Seeing the scene with Vanessa Redgrave "dancing" to the music this time reminded me of something else I'd seen, but probably what it reminded me of was that very scene. The way she moves is amazing. Of all the near-explicitly surreal moments in the film, that is by far the best. I almost want to call it Lynchian, even though this was way before Lynch. I can't think of anything like it an any other movie I've seen, though.

Listing to the "music only" track right now. What a strange feature for a film with almost no music through the first five-thirteenths of the movie.

At present, Wikipedia has this to say about the movie:

"Ultimately, the film is about reality and how we perceive it or think we perceive it. This aspect is stressed by the final scene, one of many famous scenes in the film, when the photographer watches a mimed tennis match and, after a moment of amused hesitation, enters the mimes' own version of reality by picking up the invisible ball and throwing it back to the two players. A tight shot shows his continued watching of the match, and, suddenly, we even hear the ball being played back and forth. Another version of reality has been created. Then, at the very end, Hemmings, standing all alone in the green grass of the park, suddenly disappears, removed by his director, Antonioni."

I don't know why I find that such a stupid explanation of the movie. Is it "the film is about"? I don't know. But it not only seems really pretentious to me, it also fails completely to capture or explain what is so compelling about the movie. I mean, I guess whoever wrote that isn't a professional critic or anything... But I do imagine that it's probably a paraphrase of what's written an many Film 101 textbooks.

(later) The scene when Vanessa Redgrave disappears into the crowd is one of two Antonioni moments that I know of that are technically amazing. I have no idea how he did it. I slowed down the DVD, and I just can't figure out at all where she goes, how she disappears, etc. Maybe if I knew more about technical aspects of film it would be easy. Maybe it's a simple thing. But I can't see it. It doesn't look like it'd be possible for it to be a simple splice of one shot with her into one shot without her; there's too much else going on. The other scene is in The Passenger the final long shot looking through the window where the camera moves forward and somehow passes through the bars of the window, even though I know the camera must be too big to make it through there. How did he do it?! Brunette, of course, is no help, but he does point out the interesting (though obvious, but I had meant to write it here) point that when seeing that scene for the first time the viewer does wonder just as much as photog guy presumably does if he's actually seen Vanessa Redgrave standing there before she disappears. She's only there for a couple of seconds, and it of course takes a couple of seconds for us to recognize her, and then she's gone. And watching this movie in a theater when that was the only way it could be seen, wow that would've been frustrating. I would've had to pay to see it again and if what I really wanted to know was if she was there the I would've had to sit through the rest of it and try to remember exactly what to look for, and then it would've been over so quickly again, and I wouldn't have been sure if she really did disappear or if I just kind of lost her in the crowd of other people, and there would've always necessarily been a lot of time in between every time I was able to see it. What an incredibly frustrating bit of film.

Superbad

As funny as expected. I'm really looking forward to watching Michael Cera's career. Hopefully it's a long one. Dude is hilarious.

The scene with Michael Cera singing in the room full of drugged out guys: I'd hate to think how that scene would've ended up in Adam Sandler's or most other comedy director's hands. Or maybe it was just all Michael Cera, and nobody could've fucked it up. The weird thing is when I saw that scene in the previews, I thought it was him trying to be cool with a bunch of friends or something, and it was exactly as funny.

Elliot thought the stuff with the cops was the funniest stuff; I definitely thought the interactions between Michael Cera and the guy who played Seth were the funniest. How much of that is because I loved Arrested Development so much?

I thought the blood on the pants thing veered a little too close to American Pie 2 territory for me, but I guess really the movie had no pretension to be anything other than a really good example of exactly that sort of thing, so it's probably unfair of me to be put of by it. But I still was.

Why is heterosexual male friendship always to be interpreted as homoerotic among a certain significant portion of the intelligentsia? It's always pronounced in this way that makes the pronouncer superior to the characters; like the pronouncer has seen through the two males' relationship in a way that the two characters would just never be able to. It seems, if anything, more an example of the way most people think men are just never not thinking about sex, or that men are oversexed or something. These two guys' friendship is indicative of their repressed homosexual longing for each other that they can never express because they are forcing themselves to be heterosexual, as if it were completely impossible for a man to feel closeness to another person without it being sexual. Sure, some guys might have problems expressing their emotions to each other because they've been conditioned to think of themselves as compulsively oversexed creatures who can't truly feel emotions without sex. Whenever there are movies about female friendship (which, sure, are sadly too rare and far less common than male friendship movies) there is not this kind of snarky chatter about how they're really lesbians.

Went to this with Patrick, Elliot, and Erin.

The Long Goodbye

I absolutely loved this movie. Robert Altman seems to be a frustratingly mixed bag. This movie in incredible, and from what I remember I liked Nashville a lot, but it's been years since I saw that. Three Women was okay, but not even close to this, I think. Short Cuts was kind of interesting, but not only in a TV movie on a Sunday afternoon kind of way.

The camera is almost never still in this movie, but it's not jerky the way non-stationary cameras usually are on contemporary movies. The camera floats around outside of every scene. It's beautiful. I especially liked the way the camera sometimes would float backwards out of the scene, to the point that the actors seemed to be performing in the background, although there was nothing in the foreground. It's such a weird little touch that I can think of very few movies doing, and it would be really hard to do it, I think, without it becoming annoying. Maybe a lot of people would find it annoying here, too, but I, obviously, loved it.

Elliot Gould is really what makes the movie, though. His performance just might be one of my favorite film performances ever. The way he basically mumbles every line, to the point that it sometimes doesn't seem possible that the other characters actually hear anything he says. The effect of that little quirk is the viewer feels closer to Marlowe than any of the other characters, because it is almost like we're getting to hear his private thoughts--without any voiceover narration or any actual private thoughts being aired.

The cat in the first scene really acted like it lived in that house. I wonder how they did that. Was it actually the cat of the house? The cat also seemed really familiar with Elliot Gould, which makes me wonder if it was Gould's cat, if that was Gould's house. I doubt it, but however they did it, the cat looked really naturally at home, which I think is kind of amazing.

My favorite shot in the whole film came when the husband and wife were talking to each other and they sent Marlowe outside. So the scene is their discussion, which you see through the giant window, and in the reflection of the window you can see Marlowe strolling around on the beach, throwing stones or whatever. It is really a beautiful shot. It did seem a little out of place, though, only because it's the only time in the movie, I think, where there's a significant amount of time spent with Marlowe not as the focus of the scene, or not really present. There are small moments of that throughout, so it's not like it violates any precedent really, but the length and seeming significance of the shot did seem sort of out of place. The shot was so pretty, though, that it didn't really matter.

The chicks, though, who live in the apartment across the way from Marlowe, seemed like a total misstep by Altman. They were far enough outside the realm of normal human behavior that they bordered on surreal, which made them seem as if they must be there for some kind of symbolic purpose, but I don't think they really were supposed to be. I assume that simply the weird surreal thing is what Altman was going for, but they just didn't really bring anything to the film aside from the funny couple of lines by the guy who was supposed to be following Marlowe.

Also, from a plot standpoint, Marlowe tracking down his old friend in Mexico seemed closure enough. The fact that Marlowe then shot him was really jarring, and frankly I think it shouldn't have happened. Based on the little bit of the interview with Altman I watched, I assume this was supposed to be Marlowe's ultimate giving in to the new morality or lack thereof. It almost seemed like some sort of following of the dictum that the main character of a story must be a protagonist, which means he must undergo some kind of change. But the change seemed completely forced. It was not consistent with Marlowe as he was at any other point in the film. It seemed kind of like adding an exclamation point tacked on the end of an ellipsis. I have this idea that that's the sort of thing you have to deal with in Altman films, though: sometimes really misguided things put in that he probably thought were really smart or cool but are actually just kind of stupid.

Black Belly of the Tarantula

My first giallo! Actually, it was a little tamer than I expected after the first couple of minutes. The first murder was by far the goriest, and I figured that each muder would escalate in goriness, but that wasn't the case. The first instead set the tone and you just let your imagination run away with what was going on in the other ones, if you wanted. Which I kind of didn't. Or did. I dunno.

I was surprised, though, that the most interesting parts of the movie were actually the parts when the inspector guy is just hanging out with his wife. Interesting in a way that was not at all forced. They didn't try to be anything other than just them hanging out, talking about furniture, I think, mostly. The sex scene was really nice and, well, loving. I assume it was done that way so when we see the rooftop peeping tom watching them, we don't feel implicated along with him. I think if there had been nudity in that scene (or more nudity), if it had been filmed to be an obviously sexy sex scene that the viewer is supposed to get off on, we would have then felt complicit when it cut to the peeping tom guy watching them. It also helped us feel extra embarassed for him when all the police are watching the tape and making crude comments. It was all handled actually kind of deftly in a movie that elsewhere has a decent amount of boobs and blood, and opens with a long slow shot up and down the naked body of the woman getting the massage.

The score was wonderful, of course. Ennio Morricone rules. I especially liked the whispers and hums that seemed to come out at random times.

The whole "psychological" explanation of the killers motives seemed kind of pointless, though, if an obvious nod to Hitchcock. It didn't add anything really to the movie, because we were never wondering about what made the killer click. Kind of like how all the investigation into the life of that VTech shooter guy and his movies and his plays and stuff doesn't make the tragedy any less disturbing or more meaningful, if that had been the point of the final scene. But I don't think it was the point. It seemed like they thought it was some kind of necessary conclusion to that part of the story, but it just seemed empty to me. A place where "depth" isn't actually deep, doesn't actually open up your understanding of anything. It's really just more noise.

Nemesis

8/13/07 Laptop alone 1:00pm

I remember watching this movie at my dad's apartment in Yankton, or I remember my dad watching it. I'm pretty sure it was this movie anyway; the Netflix version was a TV edit and the only image I remembered strongly from the movie was a butt. I'm pretty sure I know which scene it was from, but there was no butt. Mainly I remember the butt and the gritty neo-noir type feel copped from Blade Runner, which describes the first half of the movie fairly well. The title sounds right. It must have been this movie.

I think I mostly read a book while dad watched it, because I was pretty contemptuous of movies like this. Not a "real" movie, just a stupid scifi actioner. Now I'm almost more interested in movies like this than "real" movies, sometimes.

The opening action scenes were actually pretty bad, though. The type that remind me of the gunfights in The Life Aquatic, where people just pose in the middle of the frame and fire their guns, and then you cut to the people whom they're aiming at and watch various of them get hit or other things explode around them. No attempt to make individual gunshots correspond to any individual hits. The characters firing generally don't even appear to be aiming at all. Sometimes they hold their guns stationary; sometimes they wave them around in broad circles. The effect is the same. I wonder why even bother shot an action scene like that. You'd think if you're making an action movie you'd at least be interested in the action enough to try to make it have some kind of order or sense to it.

It's weird how the movie seemed to completely changed once it moved to Java. All of a sudden, the villains got way more weird, as if they just let the actors go crazy. Where it seemed like it was trying to strike a "restrained" note through the first half of the movie, once they go to Java it seemed to be much more about just trying to have fun.

The "fun" seemed most present with the weird well-dressed smiling guy cyborg, who showed up about ten cuts before he really became relevant, almost as if the movie was trying to warn us that we should be ready for him. He seemed to be kind of equivalent to a later level boss in a game like Final Fight or something. He was built up to be like some kind of badass, but as soon as he's dead he doesn't matter. As soon as he enters the movie for real, though, he jumps main-character-cyborg guy and they fall through a window on what appeared to be one of those giant slides they have at carnivals that you ride down in a potato sack. This quick trip down the slide led to two of the weirdest shots in the whole movie. The first came as the two are struggling, with smiling guy on top trying to choke main character guy, and first there's a POV shot from main character guy's perspective, a close up of smiling guy making a weird facial expression and reaching toward the camera. This shot is followed a few seconds later by a shot of what is supposed to again be a POV shot from main character guy's perspective, but this time the background behind smiling guy is all pink and glowy, and he's not wearing a shirt, appears to actually be standing still, and smiling open-mouthed at the camera, when his face cracks open to reveal a gun behind his right eye. They'd had a cyborg do this earlier, but the weirdest part about it was that he wasn't wearing shirt, which made him look like he actually was naked. One of those moments that's almost more surreal than anything an a "surrealist" movie, since it's not lingered on or presented as a surreal moment or anything.

The other interesting thing comes at the end of the slide, when main character guy shoves smiling cyborg's head into a big pipe that's suspended over the slide. Then we watch as the cyborg, whose head is apparently stuck in the pipe and possibly completely destroyed, we watch as his body, practically hanging from the pipe, the lower parts of the legs limp, the arm pointing a gun and randomly firing into the air, making the body wobble back and forth. It's really a pretty creepy little shot. Possibly one of the only shots in the whole movie that really works on the level it's intended to.

Throughout the movie, the characters keep making references to the main character guy's level of humanity. "86.5% is still human!" he says. "You're practically a cyborg anyway. You should join us!" The funny thing is the movie doesn't really seem interested in the slightest in the question of whether he's still "human" with all the mechanical parts in him, which ultimately isn't really that interesting of a question anyway. But it's brought up in just about every conversation main character guy has with another character. It's like the movie thought it had to pay lip service to the idea since it was a science fiction movie and there is often this idea that science fiction movies should explore some kind of question like that, at least a little bit. But really it was nothing more than a recitation of the question. And, ironically, the question probably would've seemed more relevant to the movie if it'd never even been mentioned.

Rocket Science

8/10/07 Embarcadero, w/ Elliot, 7:30pm

Indie-comedy paint-by-numbers, (Rushmore + Royal Tenenbaums + Squid and the Whale + Napoleon Dynamite + Election + Thumbsucker), which isn't meant here to be a criticism. The movie was extremely enjoyable. Afterwards, I told Elliot, "It made me wish I was in high school again," which them prompted me to go off about how much fun all that angst was, which ultimately let to me saying something like "It was all [the angst] so visceral!," and "I mean, it wasn't fun at the time. But looking back on it is fun to remember." Any movie that makes me wax nostalgic about high school must have done something right.

What made this most different from Rushmore, and part of the reason why it probably isn't as good or why it would not hold up to nearly as many repeat viewings as Rushmore, is that the movie is very much from the perspective of the main character. The viewer sympathizes with him, and as much as we laugh at him trying to throw the cello through the window, in the end we want him to get it through. You can't really ever see him from another character's perspective. In Rushmore, it's easy to watch it from the point of view of Bill Murray's character, or the teacher lady. It's also easy to see Max from the perspective of his little friend or his father or the headmaster. In Rocket Science, the other characters exist only insofar as they matter to the main character.

The only possible exception is the character of his father, who avoids that fate mainly by not appearing in the movie after the opening scene until the closing scene, which is possibly the best scene in the whole movie. The way the father at first doesn't even answer the kid's question and instead starts to talk about how he had trouble getting off the interstate to pick up the kid instantly gives the father way more depth as a character than anyone aside from the kid. And the weary way in which he finally does answer the question with pretty much "I don't know," tired but not exasperated at the kid. The scene also opens up the world of the two characters because the conversation is obviously just another scene in the relationship of the two, a relationship we haven't really seen at all. Really, the whole movie is probably best viewed as a perfectly entertaining setup to the final scene in the car.

The other great thing in the car is the moment when the kid says something about how one day he's going to find a way to say what he needs to say at that moment. Like Elliot said, it makes you hope the movie is autobiographical at least a little bit, and that the movie is in some way the way the kind found to speak.


The voiceover narration that opens the movie at first felt a little to close to that of Royal Tenenbaums', but it was written really well and was actually quite a bit denser than RT's. I couldn't figure out why Elliot & I were the only two laughing; it was hilarious.

Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade

(8/10/07 w/Elliot & Patrick, the Mariott at California Extreme in San Jose, 7:00pm)

1) Really funny and snappily edited in most places. The 3-D animation of the 2-D games was a great touch; there should've been more of it.

2) I think they were really trying to just make every person in the story as human as possible, but because...(read more) of the number of people and the short run time, it kind of ends up just showing off the funniest aspects of their lives for us to gawk at. What a bunch of bizarre geeks!

3) The cut from the two guys explaining their bread knife technique of getting the high score on Track & Field and how that "just blew everyone's mind," to the critic, who'd obviously just been told the story, saying, "that blows my mind!" Excellent.

4) Why was Mr. Awesome in this movie? He didn't seem to have any real connection with anyone else in the movie, and it kind of seemed like he was just there for us to point and laugh at. Granted, he was hilarious, but the time wasted on him could have been better spent on some of the actual subjects of the film.

5) Like Elliot said, even though I'd spent the whole day playing old video games before I watched this, when it was over I just wanted to go play more video games.

The Driver

(8/12/07 laptop, by myself, 4:30 pm)

1) I have to find more movies with Bruce Dern in them. He is awesome.

2) This movie really gives a good sense of being in the city it's filmed in. The way the characters wander around back alleys and the cars fly up and down empty ...(read more)night streets, it feels like it's actually happening in a real place that real people live in.

3) I like that the movie didn't go out of its way to try to invent some pop-psych motive for the characters, especially the Driver. In the hands of lamer folks, there would have been a scene between the Driver and the alibi chick where she asks him why he lives like he does, and either through flashback or based on something he says, we would learn that he was abused as a child or that his dad abandoned him or something--all done under the false impression that it would somehow make his character more "interesting." Instead, it's not even clear what the Driver does when he's not driving other than lie on his bed and stare at the ceiling. If the viewer wants, she can invent all the psychological trauma for him that she can.

4) The car chases are actually kind of beautiful, especially the shots from the "front" of the car, with the bright buildings shining in the black night sky.

5) The whole scene on the AmTrak seemed kind of pointless, though. I'd have cut it. Or at least made it shorter. It messed with the rhythm of the film just a little bit.