This blog isn't really dead. It's just moved here, where I can be less embarrassed about it.

101st post

Well, I posted on here a hundred times, and I'm not entirely satisfied with the results, so I'm going to retire this blog. ("retire this blog..." Is that even a meaningful thing to say?) The main purpose was that I wanted to get myself to write more about movies I was watching, since I was watching a lot of movies. I haven't been watching all that many movies lately... and then when I have watched movies that I've thought of things I might want to write about them (or other things besides movies), I've not got around to it, partly because I felt like "what's the point?" when I'd watched so many and skipped writing about them. There was something that felt productive about this for a while, and I think I want to try to get back at that, but in a more focused way. I do, eventually, want to have a career as a professor, a central aspect of which will be doing scholarly work--and I like that idea because I do like doing that, but I also think that in order to get better at things like that it would help to make writing about things I read/watch/listen to something that I do often. And seriously. But I won't be doing that here. Maybe, non-existent readers, it will be at this address.

Body of Lies

Someone could probably very easily make some kind of Orientalist reading of this movie. Actually, probably a lot of them. Like, how there's supposed to be this contrast between the way American intelligence operates and the way Oriental intelligence operates, where the Jordanian intelligence is controlled by one man, a guy who's almost a prince or royalty for all practical purposes, whereas American intelligence is run by normal guys, who have to run their whole thing literally while unpacking their kids from the mini-van for a soccer game. I think in the movie that whole "normal family" thing was supposed to highlight how this is all just a job for the Americans, their essentially employees or something... And I think, in some kind of vague sense, therefore "democratic," like how we are. Except, of course, Leo and Crowe seem to pretty much be doing whatever they want, beholden to nobody. I'm not sure if the movie was aware of that or not. I think not, but I might just not be giving it enough credit.

But, whatever, I don't feel like doing that. It was fun, and really the only thing that had me conflicted is that by using a "real" setting I'm pretty sure somebody thought they were making some kind of noble point. Which is too bad. Cuz that would be a hopelessly idiotic thing to think.

The only real problem, formally, was the end: Why have such an unrealistic ending when you could just as easily have given the audience an ending that was tonally identical but not factually problematic? I mean, you can't just quit being a super-deep spy by saying, "I quit" and then going to buy some at an outdoor market. Leo could have just as easily talked about quitting, and, like, meant it (Acting!) and everything, and done it all for the hot Jordanian nurse lady, and it would've been just as satisfying. Whatever.

Videodrome

A resounding yes. For some reason I've never completely trusted Cronenberg, and I don't know if Videodrome has totally convinced me about him... But I kind of can't believe I've never seen this movie before, or even heard very much about it. I had this weird feeling through most of the first half, a feeling that I don't recall every having before, but it was something like regret at never having seen this before. Strong regret. Like I wished I'd watched this on VHS back when I was in high school and used to stay up late watching movies on my little white TV/VCR. Strange...

Here's something solid: unlike most movies that rely on bending the 'reality' of the narrative, there's not any clear real/hallucination divide here. I love that. Also, James Woods sometimes grows a giant vagina in his stomach.

But then, I think why I can't completely trust Cronenberg is that despite all his grossness he still seems very much "high art" to me. Like he thinks he is and is committed to being high art. I can't say exactly why. But I just think that. Maybe it's cuz he's British. Is he British? I think he's British. Oh, never mind, I guess he's Canadian. Still, I bet he's very expensively educated and is proud of that fact and has spent his whole life almost exclusively around other expensively educated people. For some reason, I just don't think I like him, even though his movies are...

Well, this movie is seriously fucking good.

Sleepaway Camp

The most interesting thing about Sleepaway Camp, as I'm sure anyone who's seen it would agree, is the ending. But a lot of how effective the ending is has to do with the rest of the movie, and especially the tone. There's not a lot of sudden violence, even in the most directly presented murder scene--the sexy/snotty counselor getting stabbed in the shower. Instead, the movie mostly opts for a kind of subdued ambient feel, beginning with the slow tracking shots across the empty playgrounds, and most memorably (in my mind) the really excellently well done long shot of all the kids arriving at the camp, the huge pan from left, across the three buses, with the kids streaming across the shot as it pans right and down into the camp, the loud camp-director guy standing in the middle and shouting--but even here obviously not "acting," at least in any competent sense. The "classical" score adds to this part of the tone.

I'm not sure what to make of the bad acting as far as how it serves to help the movie--and maybe it just doesn't. No one has a boring performance, though. There are no flat line readings. But pretty much nobody here is in any sense a "good" actor. Certainly that works for the kids, who are all appropriately aged, and so their inability to actually act always reminds us that these are obviously real teenagers, quite often behaving exactly how "real" teenagers would behave at a camp like this. It's probably less effective, though, with the older "actors," who all seem to be at least trying to "act" in a way that only makes the viewer aware of how bad they are at acting. Sometimes it's quite funny, this way, but I don't think it really adds to the movie the way the non-performances of the kids and most of the counselors does.

And I think it's important that the campers are all real kids because this is a summer camp slasher movie, and it is very obviously a summer camp slasher movie, by which I mean that is not trying to be anything else (which seems important to me), and the viewer is likely (almost certainly) aware of certain expectations for this type of film--which almost certainly include sex being had by the campers, and of course nudity. But here, because the performers are kids, the viewers expectation of this, and more especially the viewers obligatory desire for this, is thwarted--nobody actually wants to (want to) see real naked teenagers. So the movie sets up a little bit of disgust for the viewer to direct toward him/herself, since we're trained to want the voyeuristic thrill of nudity in movies like this, but we're constantly being reminded that this would be a genuinely perverse desire in the case of this film.

So there's already this seed of frustration and disgust throughout the movie--which, I should add, is quite often actually really well done, especially the "good old summer camp" scenes with the boys horsing around, playing baseball, etc, but when it veers back into the set forms of slasher movie the viewer can't help but be a little uncomfortable about it. And then there's the big "shock" at the end, which is genuinely pretty shocking--but I think the most shocking thing about it is that it is suddenly so absolutely tasteless. There's at once this "shock" of the narrative "twist" that's completely dwarfed by the shock of how blatantly tasteless the actual reveal itself is. ... I'm not quite sure exactly how to express this. I think it's extremely interesting that the shock you feel at the end of the movie is really more about feeling disgusted at the movie itself, not actually a shock within the narrative of the movie. And that it's very specifically disgust at the tastelessness of it. But it's somehow not, I think, "anger" or anything like that being felt toward the fimmakers. You don't think they're jerks, or monsters, or something. Maybe crude... But it seems so intentional, and not sophomoric, so it's not even being let down by them. ... I think it's incredibly effective, and I think it's interesting that they're using this provoked reaction of disgust toward the movie itself as a way to slam home the ending... And of course there's also probably something about how the ending is finally nudity, but it's shocking male/ambiguous nudity that you don't get to enjoy at all. ... But it's not emotion the way you normally expect to feel emotion in watching a movie--it's not at all cathartic. It's not an emotional response directed toward or even projected from within the narrative of the movie, which is I think how emotion almost always works in movies. It instead provokes an emotional response in you, the viewer, directed not inside the movie but at the movie itself. ((And I think part of what's been interesting me so much about horror movies lately is that horror movies often are looking to provoke something more like this kind of emotional response, a response of viewer at movie rather than viewer within movie, or a kind of actual physiological response that isn't purely emotional, but I think that even in horror movies it's often still tied to the narrative of the movie, and it's nearly always perfectly cathartic, even at it's most tasteless.))

Pick Up on South Street

The McCarthy-era would've been an especially shitty time to live in this country. This movie had a decent thing going until everyone suddenly freaked out about the Commies, and suddenly fighting the Commies makes everyone (even the sleaze-ball abusive pickpocket the heroine inexplicably falls in love with) into a hero. Thelma Ritter's performance as Moe is pretty outstanding, on kind of a different level from all the other actors in the film. And I suppose Candy's love for Skip McCoy was supposed to be redemptive or something, but it seemed symptomatic of an abused woman who goes from one abuser to another. The movie was extremely well shot, though, with some really tight action. I just didn't buy the rosy, "We got those commies!" ending.

Forbidden Planet

Okay, so Leslie Nielsen looked weird when he was younger. Some people only get better looking with age, and I guess he is one of them. The movie itself was actually better than I thought it'd be, with a lot of really interesting-looking special effects that I assume must have been absolutely top-notch for the time it was made. Much like many modern sci-fi flicks, all the attention to the special effects obviously came at the expense of attention to everything else: script, acting, etc. There was a pretty (accidentally) hilarious attempt at comic relief by way of a subplot involving the ship cook and his love of Kansas City bourbon, but it was somewhat undermined by fact that the actor playing the cook seemed pretty bored by the whole thing, too. I guess they must've been trying to treat the spaceship crew the way they'd treat the crew of a navy boat in old movies or something. All the "romantic" interactions seemed bizarre, largely as a result of their exaggeratedly forced enactment of gender stereotypes of the day. There's also the whole fact that apparently Nielsen's character is supposed to be perceived as heroic and wonderful when he's actually a grade-A dick constantly trying to "subtly" advance himself, performing some pretty blatant cock-blocking by ordering his second-in-command to stay behind while he goes to grab some nookie with Morbius's daughter (which, hilariously, number two gushingly congratulates him for, saying, "She got the right man!"). The only confusing part about it was I couldn't tell if we were supposed to not realize how much a dick he was, or if that was all supposed to be part of why we thought he was heroic, or if the writer's didn't notice/care that he was such a dick...

Best line: "We're all monsters in our subconscious! That's why we have laws and religion!" said by Leslie Nielsen through gritted teeth as he tries to choke Morbius into unconsciousness.

Transsiberian

On my way out of the movie theater, I concocted a highly complex response to this movie, and then I voiced it to my companion, "It was good enough." I stand by that claim. Woody Harrelson is pretty delightful as that relentlessly upbeat brand of meathead, although, like always, he's still Woody Harrelson (which, as far as I'm concerned, is a reason to like him). Actually, the four main characters are all kind of stereotypes, and Harrelson was the only actor who sort of transcended his, although, like I said, I think that's mainly because even when he's shooting really hard at embodying a stereotype, he's still Woody Harrelson.

The only really impressive thing about the movie, though, is they how subtle they are about Kate Mara's character, "Abby." It's just a couple of throwaway lines here and there that didn't even register for me until well after I'd the movie was over, but after piecing a few things together, it's possible that her character is actually the most in control character in the entire movie, aside from that little slip up of being captured and tortured. I'm also not sure, at this point, how much Emily Mortimer's character "Jessie" comes to understand about Abby. There's actually about three different ways you can read their final scene together, and I'm not at all sure which is the most likely. What I like the most about this whole mystery is that it's not at all made the focal point of the climax. So, there's that.

Hellboy II, The Dark Knight, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

That screenplay isn't so bad that it really ruins anything, but it definitely is the weakest part of the movie. The strongest? The special effects! And I don't mean the way they were awesome in T2 or anything. All the mythical creatures throughout the whole movie were great, even good enough that they pretty much justify the movie. I don't know anything about how they were done, but Del Toro pretty much know what he's doing when it comes to this. I found myself thinking, "This guy should've directed the new Star Wars movies," mainly because he manages a bunch of creatures with as much charm as any I've seen since the original Mos Eisley cantina band, and all of that stuff was mainly what distracted from the thinness of the plots in the original Star Wars films. Also, Ron Perelman is pretty much perfect as Hellboy.

And there was just enough weirdness to the story that it stayed interesting, at least. It was totally baffling how the main baddy kept just appearing in random places, like suddenly on the roof of a building that Hellboy had scaled, but the unabashed lack of concern for plausibility w/r/t the dude's whereabouts almost ended up giving him some kind of vaguely symbolic function that made it forgivable (obviously, the fact that he delivered the most heavy-handed little speech to Hellboy about "they'll never accept you" and whatever helped in this respect). And the way nobody seemed overly concerned with the agents getting pretty brutally killed by the little magic termites at the beginning placed the film in a pretty different moral universe than we're used to seeing in big action/superhero movies.

I've never read the comic book, so I don't know to what extent this is just because of the comic book, but this seemed by far the least comic-book-movie-like of the big summer comic book movies.

The Dark Knight

Not much point in mentioning that this movie was good. I do think it's interesting that the Nola's have managed to make two insanely good comic book adaptations by taking exactly the opposite tactic of everyone else making comic book adaptions--by dialing up the (perceived) realism, even to the point of letting Batman stand in the middle of a brightly lit interrogation room and not framing him to look like anything other than a guy standing there in a bizarre suit. And it's always nice to see a big budget movie that's taken obvious care with the cinematography. It's just all so... stately, and huge, and crisp. The shot from the mayor's office (I think that was it) with the view of Gotham was one of the most beautifully photographed scenes I remember seeing in a contemporary movie.

Oh, and now people who loved the movie are getting mad that people are pointing out how much of the movie mirrors the administrations responses to the war on terror. Um, really, you didn't notice? I thought it was pretty obvious and obviously intentional, and kind of a little heavy-handed. The whole total surveillance part was the dumbest part of the movie, I thought, and seemed like it was only there as some kind of a bid for topical relevance. And I thought it was a little weak the way they let themselves off of the hook by having Morgan Freeman take his big principled stand that really amounted to, "well, okay... just this once," which is ultimately not much of a principled stance. Cuz, of course, Batman does use the total surveillance to catch the Joker, and it's the only way he could've caught him, and we're supposed to believe that just because he has it self-destruct that he's "aware" of the questionable morality of it? Why not just accept the fact that the Batman you've created isn't exactly a hero to be admired? That's kind of why he's so much more interesting as a character than almost all other comic book heroes in adaptation are.

Iron Man

Quite a ways on the other side of the "pure fun" spectrum from the Batman movie. Ultimately, the movie seemed like not too much more than a setup for something else, and it's small ambition served it quite well. It was good to see the amount of work Favreau let get done by his actors, though. They're really what pull the movie along. Downey's charm is through the roof, and he and Paltrow really make the sexual tension sing, which is pretty impressive considering the not-much they had to work with scriptwise. And Jeff Bridges is just fucking scary. Why doesn't he get to do cool stuff like this more often?

The weakest part of the movie is it's own rather clumsy bid for topical relevance. Super heroes only make sense when they're fighting super-villains. When Iron Man decides to try to take on terrorism, it just doesn't make much sense, because ultimately the problem is not one that can be handled with just better and more powerful weapons. The scene when Iron Man lands in the town and there's a brief break in the fighting while all the baddies have their hostages held in front of him, I was actually kind of excited for a second because I thought I saw some kind of realization of exactly that futility coming, but then he happened to have exactly the right super-powerful weapon. Oh, well. It got around to its super-villian eventually, and then it made more sense again.

The Incredible Hulk

Nothing in this movie made any sense. It was terrible. I never understood why people hated Ang Lee's Hulk so much. It was certainly way the fuck better than this piece of garbage. I'm just not even going to bother listing off everything that was wrong with it, but while I was watching, I found myself grumpily thinking things like, "WTF? Why is it suddenly raining?"

Wall-E

Before I went, my dad told me, "It's pretty boring. Nobody talks for like the first half of it." Conversely, most reviews mentioned this exact thing as a positive, as if the movie was very experimental for doing so and successful in its experimentalism. Then later while I was driving through Wyoming this guy on NPR was talking about how they made us connect to the robot by giving him toddler-like features, with big eyes and head, short stubby arms and legs, fat torso. I thought that was all old news, like who doesn't know about those tricks? Anyway, the movie, like all Pixar movies I've seen, was thoroughly enjoyable. I especially liked the no talking parts, which felt, far from being experimental, like a throwback to Charlie Chaplin, where the humor and delight is all in the movements alone, and the fact that they were able to accomplish this in animation seems worth celebrating to me. The robots all seemed more likeable and quirky and ultimately human than the actual humans, but of course that was on purpose. My favorite robot was the little scrubber robot, and his burst of excitement, like a giant blocky exclamation point, when he jumped off the path of the little line laid out for him. Utterly delightful.

Jurassic Park

I have no idea how many times I watched this when I was a kid, but I realized while watching it I pretty much had every line memorized. I knew exactly what everyone was going to say before they said it. Of course, that's also a function of the screenplay being little more than a collection of phrases. Nobody is even close to being a character, which wouldn't be a bad thing except that the screenplay obvious thinks that it's doing a lot of things to establish characters. Basically, it's just a downright awful screenplay. I'm not even going to get into it; it's just terrible on every level.

Which is kind of too bad, because Spielberg really was at one of his peaks when he directed this. The fluid way the whole first half of the movie flows from scene to scene is really well done, and as close to being subtle as probably would be possible in a blockbuster about dinosaurs. And once it gets down to business with the monsters, the action scenes are still seriously scary. I mean, I actually felt my heartbeat elevate. And despite the fact that none of the main characters ever actually gets killed or eaten, unlike in the new Indiana Jones movie, there is a serious feeling of danger--you actually feel like the main characters are genuinely having their lives threatened. Frankly, after reading the screenplay, Spielberg should've just cut all the dialogue and decided to revive the silent film. The dialogue is so bad it actually ruins the tension a number of times.

My only other complaint about the movie is that it's a little too efficient. I guess this was before it was okay to stretch a movie very much longer than two hours, but I really think the movie could've used some more time on the island before everything went to shit. I guess that's why the score goes nuts when they first see the Brachiosaurs: Spielberg was trying to milk every possible bit of emotion out of that scene because it was the only scene in which he got to really show the wonder of the island. I just don't think it quite worked, or I mean it doesn't quite manage to make up for the fact that it's the only scene like that.

Kung Fu Panda

Something about watching kids' movies makes you, an adult person (or at least, me), watch them even more closely for the moral message, because somehow it just feels like ultimately the point of a kids' movie is it's moral message. Maybe it's because I don't really think kids are complex enough to handle a movie without a clear moral message--although I think this reveals a certain bias on my part (that I'm a little uncomfortable about being aware of) toward judging movies based on their moral message. On that level, I guess Kung Fu Panda is fine. I saw the big reveal of what the Dragon Warrior scroll was going to be coming from pretty much the second it was set up as the ultimate prize. And from a critical perspective, I'm a little curious about the fact that after getting it Po is suddenly able actually do incredible Kung Fu. And I'm a little wary about how much this movie (and, I can't help it, "movies like this," whatever that actually means) just gloss over the amount of actual hard work required to become very good at some skill. But, whatever. This movie was probably the most genuinely fun kids' movie I've seen since Spy Kids (I'd count Pixar, but Pixar movies always go for the heartstrings at some point, and I've decided arbitrarily that is grounds to exclude them from this short list). Jack Black and a lot of the visual gags are really really funny, and the action sequences are just delightful. And it's really hard not to be completely won over by a movie when, during the climactic battle, there's a little girl behind you screaming "Go Panda! Go Panda! Go Panda!"

True Stories

For about ten or so years there, David Byrne was pretty amazing. He still manages to pull off some pretty great stuff (see "Empire" from Grown Backwards) although he never has and never will match the consistency of his output from then. True Stories is almost like "The Big Country" from More Songs about Buildings and Food turned hilarious and stretched out into a feature length movie. It pulls off the same feat of being trenchantly of "the blandness of middle America" while at the same time being just as critical of the reflexive nature that criticism has for coastal people (he pulls this off, I think, by having the song/movie be from the perspective of a narrator who is obviously not from the place he's describing (and I think, though I may be projecting my actual knowledge of Byrne onto this, just as obviously from one of the coasts) and having that narrator adopt a faux-naive tone--or he seems to at once know more than he's letting on and not to know nearly as much as a he thinks he knows), but the movie/song isn't just critical. Both manage to also be kind of celebratory of the very differences they exploit to lay their criticisms. Also, they're very funny and moving. Byrne was just kind of brilliant.

Indiana Jones

Crystal Skull & Raiders of the Lost Ark

Harrison Ford is old. I used to have fantasies, back when I watched The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles every week and Harrison Ford (i.e., Han Solo/Indiana Jones) pretty much defined the masculine ideal for me, back when I first heard there were plans to make another Indiana Jones movie even though Ford would obviously be to old, that they'd make it a different kind of Indy movie, like where Jones is now an old tenured professor, way way smart and cunning and everything but just not able to keep up with all the kinetic action of his younger self, who either has to guide some younger hotshot through some ordeal or has to actually outwit instead of out-athleticize his nemesis. Instead, Crystal Skull is just one giant piece of denial of age. None of the people involved in the original are still up for this sort of thing, and yet here they are trying to do it all over again, in precisely the same way, except this time Jones actually marries the hot Ravenwood chick, happy to take on the full responsibilities of adulthood only about forty years too late, rather than leading her on and leaving her so he can have a new blond bombshell in the next flick. Crystal Skull is fun enough while you're watching it, so its not as complete a failure as the Star Wars prequels, but there's not really much at all to admire about it.

Rewatching Raiders for the first time in I-have-no-idea-how-long, I was surprised at how much there is actually to like about how it's done. It's just a flimsy a fantasy as it should be, but Spielberg really knew how to put together a movie back then, and Harrison Ford actually had the charisma to pull off his non-character. One thing I noticed: just like the original Star Wars, a lot of the strength of the story here is how it is constantly subtly implying a back story that's never quite articulated, so the viewer gets to supply a backdrop that's just as operatic as he or she wants it to be. With Star Wars, that backstory is really what captured my little imagination, even more than the story of the films themselves; they always felt to me like the final conclusion of this huge, impossibly morally complex and sweepingly dramatic, decades-long story that was never actually presented to me. Then when Lucas did decide to present that, I felt betrayed, literally feeling like, watching Revenge of the Sith, "That's not how it happened!" With Raiders, that back story is not as much the point, but it is what allows us to flesh out Jones as a character--since there's not really a whole lot of character development going on here. And how could there be? Like a full fourth of the movie is taken up with that over-the-top chase scene, then there's the opening action set piece, the fight in the bar, the fight in the streets of Cairo, etc. etc. Really, the only time in this movie Harrison Ford is anything more than a stunt man with a few lines are the scenes at the university, and all we learn about here is that he's smart and sassy and likeable. It's the off-hand references to his past, the way characters are all people he's known before and has a history with, that allow us to buy him as a real person. At least a little bit.

Of course, even still, he's not a real person at all. One of his defining lines early in the movie is when he tells Marcus he doesn't believe in "superstitious mumbo-jumbo" or something like that, w/r/t the Ark's power. Of course, at the end of the film he is presented with proof of exactly that, the type of thing--I mean, we're talking actual experiential proof of the existence and power of God, here--that would through a thinking atheist like Jones into, at the very least, a bit of personal crisis. But he's not even phased. He's just happy to get out of it alive with this hot lady from his past. So maybe in the next couple of movies he's more willing to believe that weird things happen sometimes, but he's certainly not a man who's come as close as anyone ever to seeing the face of God and surviving. He experiences all of this religious mythology (and now pseudo-new-age alien stuff) pretty much the same way we, the audience, do--as little more than excuses for some spectacularness.

So why is Crystal Skulls so much less satisfying than Raiders? First of all, I think some of it is all the CGI action pieces. In Raiders, as spectacular as it was, there was still at least something of a sense of real danger, and I have to assume that at least some of that was because they were limited to filming things that a stunt man partly had to actually do. Shia LeBouf swinging through the trees like Tarzan isn't even plausible the way that everything Jones does in Raiders is at least plausible. Plus, when the opening sequence concludes with Jones being blasted a few thousand feet inside of a refrigerator that he promptly stumbles out of, not even dazed, we know we're in a world in which Jones is now essentially indestructible. But the other thing, I think, is that Spielberg and Lucas tried to put some character development into this movie--which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, I think, except it's so shallow. In Raiders we accept that Jones is essentially impervious to character development, so it doesn't really bother us when none of it happens. Here, Jones is treated as more of a character, who's supposed to learn things and, you know, develop, which he kind of does by marrying Ravenwood at the end and kind of trying to suddenly develop fatherly feelings for LeBouf--except that this is the same Jones who, as I mentioned above, survived the presence of the Lord and now has just learned about the existence of trans-dimensional beings, and all he can think about is belatedly doing the right thing by his woman? By trying to give Jones a little depth and failing so spectacularly at it, Spielberg and Lucas force us to notice how kinda dumb and shallow Jones is as a character, and he's instantly a lot harder to love the way we love the unabashedly shallow Jones from Raiders.

Thieves' Highway

The DVD for this movie contains a ridiculously charming ten-minute interview with Jules Dassin. I watched the interview before the movie, which was maybe a mistake if I wanted to have an "unbiased" viewing or something, but it was hard not to like this movie after watching that.

The Naked City was really good, but a lot of that had to do, I think, with its central gimmick being so interesting. With Thieves' Highway, there's nothing like that that could end up being seen as a weakness. It's just a good movie, with the exception of a few scenes that seemed a little superfluous; and here the interview especially helped because it explained why those scenes ended up in the movie in the first place.

Richard Conte plays Nick Garcos, the son of a California truck driver who has just returned home at the beginning of the movie. He finds out his dad's legs were lost in a trucking accident, probably because he got screwed by a San Francisco produce mogul named Figlia. Nick vows revenge, hooks with another trucker, buys a bunch of apples and trucks them north to San Francisco, where not really everything works out quite as he'd hoped. I was thinking for a minute how it was interesting that the movie has a very noir setup, but in place of the usual criminal underworld the action all takes place in the cut-throat world of produce shipping, but then I realized that, of course, that was the point. Apparently Dassin didn't get blacklisted for nothing (I mean the whole blacklist thing was stupid, but Dassin's got his communist heart emblazoned proudly on his sleeve here). The ordinary capitalist system that leads to you finding your fruit in the supermarket is here shown to be just as underhanded and bluntly evil as the criminal underworld, full of double-crosses, exploitation, and outright physical intimidation and violence.

Which is what made the tacked climactic scenes so interesting. I mean, they just don't work if your trying to evaluate the movie from a purely aesthetic sense, since they're just not done as well as the rest of the movie and they're thematically so different. But when the cop's head is suddenly full frame and he's yelling directly at you, the viewer, "You shouldn't take the law into your own hands! That's our job!" well, that's actually really interesting, I think. It's like... well, I can't think of any really good things to say that it's like, but it's kind of awesome. It was obviously an attempt by the studio to try to undo the "damage" the rest of the movie might have done, but by making the point so clumsily and overbearingly it kind of just goes further toward undermining traditional ideas of authority. I really was annoyed when the scene happened while watching the movie, but thinking back on it I actually think it makes the movie loads better.

Also, just like in The Naked City, the villain is ultimately more compelling than any of the heroes, for whatever reason, although it's not quite so pronounced here. And the prostitute with a heart of gold gives him a run for his money. If a filmmaker wanted to see how to do subtly sexy, s/he could do worse than to watch the initial scene when she takes Nick back to her room, and when she turns away from the camera to reveal that the top buttons on the back of her blouse are undone. I've seen whole movies that were based around trying to be sexy that didn't even come close to matching that one scene.

Dark Star

Okay, if someone had said to me "John Carpenter is a great filmmaker," I would have accepted it. I mean, the guy pretty much invented the American '80s psyscho/slasher horror movie with Halloween in 1978, and on top of that he made The Thing, Assault on Precinct 13 & Escape from New York, and I'd have accepted those as enough evidence. I might not have made the argument myself. I'd have accepted, sure, but ultimately I'd have thought that he was in some important way a pretty limited filmmaker.

Dark Star is the type of movie I wouldn't have thought he was capable of--or probably more accurately, interested in--making. The movie is basically a small, slo, subtle movie a group of four guys alone on a tiny spaceship who shoot around the galaxy in search of planets to blow up. They're searching for planets with irregularities in their orbits that they blow up in order to prevent the future possibility of the planets careening off their orbits and, I guess, becoming dangerous. That's really all the explanation there is in the movie of the overall setup. Sure it's a sci-fi flick, but it's also a comedy, and the type of comedy that I guess I'd have to call existential. That said, it's also ridiculously entertaining. Nearly every scene is hilarious, and they're all funny in different ways. There's the obviously Douglas Adams influenced climax with the talking bomb that is persuaded not to explode through the use of "phenomonology", the long slapstick sequence of trying to feed the alien (hilariously just a beach ball with clawed feet), the sequence of Pinback's video confessional/journal, the conversation where Pinback explains that he's not really an astronaut but just happened to be wearing the wrong suit when the spaceship left along with the absolutely bored reactions of the other crew members, and then the brilliantly boring sequences of the three astronauts sitting together in the control room and nodding their heads to the countdown. Of any John Carpenter movie I've seen, Dark Star easily has the best screenplay for him to work with.

I think what surprised me most about this movie as John Carpenter movie was that it doesn't ever rely on anything sensational. Not that I ever think the sensational in any of his other movies is a weakness, because part of what made him so good was how all-out sensational he went, but it's particularly impressive to see him handle something so thoroughly non-sensational so deftly.

Aliens

Confession: I've hated this movie for a long time. The reason was based on some kind of resentment for Aliens not being as good a movie as Alien. But, when I saw that Aliens was the middle part of a triple feature, between Explorers and Dark Star (a movie I knew absolutely nothing about), I was sold.

I still think Aliens is nowhere near as good as its predecessor, but it's kind of a pointless observation because Aliens is not interested in being the same kind of movie much at all. Aliens just wants to be an action movie, flat-out. sci-fi action, sure, but mainly action. It might have been one of the reasons that science fiction has become mostly just a sub-genre of action movies, but it does it so well that it's hard to blame everyone from trying to copy it. (It certainly looks easier to copy than something like Alien, although I'm not sure that's true.)

The thing that really did disappoint me about the movie this time, though, was that it really looked like it was shot for TV. The framing was pretty much all set up to be easily cut in half of a square set, and so many frickin' closeups! I have no idea if the foreknowledge of the video market actually had anything to do with why it was shot this way (although it seems likely enough), but in any case I was bored enough with so much of the cinematography that I started hypothesizing reasons for why it looked that way.

What it especially excelled at, though, and probably a lot of why it was so popular, was essentially the movie version of a splash page. Watching this with a lively audience really hammered it home to me: there are so many places where the movie basically pauses for you to look at how awesome something is and for you to scream out in acknowledgment of the awesomeness. And that is just fun.

Also, I was a little put off at first by Bill Paxton gung-ho dumbass character, especially after getting so used to him on Big Love, but his performance grew on me pretty strongly after a while. He pretty much took the loudmouth dumbass as far as it could go. He was pretty much the incarnation of that archetype in this movie.

Explorers

I honestly have no idea how many times I've seen Explorers, but it actually may have only been once before last Friday. I remember going through a period where I was obsessively trying to find it to watch it again, but this was pre-Netflix, and for whatever reason I never tried to buy it off Amazon or something.

Regardless, I'm pretty sure that the last time I saw it I was like eight or nine, but I still remembered so much of it. Kind of amazing. I don't think I can think of a single other movie that I remember so much of that I watched that long ago. Watching this movie might have been the first time I ever self-identified as a nerd in a positive way. That's probably a lot to do with how well I remembered it.

And I did remember that the whole trip to meet the aliens was pretty freaky because the aliens were so frickin' weird and completely unlike what I would've expected the aliens to be like, and I definitely remember how uncomfortably sexual the female alien was, arousing all sorts of disturbing and conflicted feelings in my little pre-pubescent boner. I wasn't really prepared, though, for how genuinely great that whole sequence actually is! Whoever edited all the video for that section deserves some pretty serious kudos.

And then there's the whole pointless/pointlessly disturbing subplot with the old helicopter pilot. I think as a kid it might've made some kind of sense to me and I would've been very empathetic toward that guy--which might actually speak to how well Joe Dante knows kids, I guess--but as an adult, that guy was way beyond sad and not at all empathetic. He was frickin' creepy, especially the way he manhandles poor Ethan Hawke in his driveway. No way should that guy be flying helicopters!

The Naked City

The main gimmick of this movie is the narrator, who maintains his kind of breathy 1950's "Aw shucks" attitude throughout the whole film, even while the story is at its darkest noir moments. It really holds up pretty well as a device, giving the movie a tone that I don't think I've seen in any other movie. The closest thing I could think of would be the scenes from Natural Born Killers with the laugh-track and Rodney Dangerfield, but this is so so much better than that. I think Stone was pretty much mocking the sit-com tone in those scenes (it's been such a long time since I saw that movie), but I don't think Dassin was strictly going after satire with the voice-over in this movie.

The only other Dassin movie I've seen before this was Rififi, which is one of the most amazing movies I've ever seen. I was expecting some kind of flair here, after I realized it was the same director, but there's really not a whole lot in this movie. That's probably necessary. I think if too much of it had looked like a really well-shot movie, it would've undermined the thing it had going with the voice-over guy. I do, though, wonder if it was intentional that the most compelling actor in the whole movie doesn't show up until the end: the killer. He actually managed to convince me they'd somehow got the wrong guy, despite the obvious impossibility of that.

And what was up with Niles's smokin' hot housewife?! Was she supposed to represent some kind of extremely subtle critique of late-forties societal sexism (because structurally she doesn't occupy a position that's supposed to be sexualized on the screen, but, seriously, she sure made me feel sexualized...)?

Ultimately, though I did want the actual noir part of the story to be darker and more intriguing. The actual plot itself just wasn't up to par with the device built around it. Also, I think the photography of the city was supposed to be impressive, but I don't think I know enough about the context or about the way cities were normally photographed in movies at the time, because I didn't see a whole lot that I felt impressed by, other than the final chase scene and the killer's ascension of the bridge tower.

Vertigo

It was pretty awesome to get to see this at the Castro. I should've known, I think, that this was filmed in San Francisco, but I didn't. I guess that made me enjoy it even more, since I was watching it at my favorite place in the whole city.

Hitchcock fuckin' knew how to make movies. It's as simple as that. And this one is probably about as perfect as they get.

My five favorite things:

1. The opening shot, with the extreme closeup of the ladder rung, the city all blurry behind it, and then the fairly quick pull out until it's just a small part of the overall shot, and then the criminal guy, the least important person in the whole movie, is the first guy we see.

2. The animation in the dream sequence. It surprised me, but it was beautiful.

3. The opening credits. I didn't get to watch the whole of 'em, but what I did see was astonishing. Possibly the best title sequence ever. No joke.

4. Midge literally painting herself into the position of object of desire, since no way would James Stewart ever actually do that himself. This was all really transparent Freudian stuff, but done so well that all you can do is just applaud it.

5. The whole introductory sequence of Madeline/Carlotta. That should be studied in school the way they make you study the Odyssey.