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Recently released on Netflix is “Playing Shakespeare,” a program that aired on PBS in America in the early 80’s. The series features John Barton, director, and his cast of thespians from the Royal Shakespeare Company. Many of us will recognize X-Men heavyweights Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, British luminaries like Judi Dench and Ben Kingsley, as well as a host of other actors of note.

Barton will set up an aspect of performing Shakespeare and call forth the performers to illustrate the concept under discussion. Occasionally other actors of the company toss in observations and methodological notes. In that capacity the actor Alan Howard had come to notice as a particularly reserved if not nebbishly. In his collar and sweater and large brown plastic frames he was almost reminiscent of a mid-career Jarvis Cocker.

But then Mr. Howard was called forth to demonstrate his solicitation to the widow of his slain enemy, Queen Anne, in the guise of Richard III. Free of smoldering cigarette and spectacles the camera comes in on a tight close-up of another man: his body was crouched, his eyes glinted with malice, and his tonguue turned into a triangle, like an arrow’s point. He hobbled, crab like to his quarry and professed his love.

While this was noticable, the moment of truth is that the lady Anne spits on Richard, square in the face and Howard betrayed no wince, no flinch as her saliva sat fat on his face. Oddly, his eyes seemed to burn slightly brighter, this facial defilement being nothing but a mere annoyance on the hatiching of his plan.

He was stunning to watch.

In any case, the show, thus far, has been a joy to watch and I recommend it.

Let me leave with a review of Howard’s performance in this role:

Alan Howard’s Richard must surely rank among the few truly outstanding interpretations of this fascinating and exacting role seen during the last decade or so.

This Richard, the very epitome of bitter malevolence, heaves and wrestles his twisted body about a dark cavern of a stage, his vicious tongue as sharp and menacing as the dagger that is rarely far from his hand, and with which he points his vicious verbal barbs.

His mind as twisted as the body he so loathes and resents, he weaves his verbal spells around his victims with the cunning of a snake and the devilish impishness of a medieval Quilp.

From: http://www.alanhoward.org.uk/richard3.htm

I was very excited when Daniel posted the trailer for “Moon.” It looked like a slow, and elegiac science-fiction movie of the “2001” or “Solaris” model. It was indeed a movie of this variety.

While SciFi that blows stuff up and has one-liners (looking at you, Will Smith) is a dime a dozen, one that drives uncomfortable thoughts into your gray matter and makes you like it is a special type of art.

Unlikely to say: “I gotta get me one of these!”

As you may intuit from the trailer, Sam Bell is a man working on the dark side of the moon. He is bereft realtime communication and as such can only trade video mail with his wife and young daughter on Earth. He manages the miner fleet for Lunar industries, a company who has turned harvested lunar He-3 into fusion energy that powers Earth industry, cleanly, greenly. His only companion, such as it is, is a delightfully clunky AI named Gerty who is voiced by the vaguely condescendingly friendly voice of Kevin Spacey.

One fine day one of the mining vehicles is stuck, so Sam hops in a moon rover, and roves out to it but accidentally crashes into the miner owing to some hallucination. He wakes back up with Gerty telling him he had an accident and is back in the infirmary. He recovers and, against Gerty’s protests, decides to cruise out on the surface. There he finds a crashed moon rover, just like his…and therein is a man who looks just like him.

And that’s where things get paranoiac and weird.

The real interesting part is that it’s basically Sam Rockwell playing all these hallucinations(?) of himself. I really like movies like this where an actor just has to perform relative to nothing (Cast Away, for example). You really get a sense of what the actor is capable of and the measure of their commitment to the character.

This film will invariably have a short run at select theatres only, so most of you will only have the chance to see it on DVD, I recommend you take that opportunity.

Recently I rented Tarkovsky’s Solaris, the film based off of Stanislaw Lem’s story of the same title. I was very much moved by the movie and consider it to be one of the finest science fiction movies I have ever seen. I esteem it so because in this science fiction future, humans, and our essential need for emotional contact and connection are so thoroughly explored without being directly mentioned. Further, the movie has some of the best visual tableaux and spatial constructions that I have ever seen.

The movie may not be easy for a Western audience. It has an extremely slow pace, sometimes glacial, sometimes brooding, crosses the 2-hour mark and suffers under the strictures of USSR film budgets. Humorously, the “city of the future” sequence is footage of driving through Japan with “future vehicle” sounds foleyed in. But the patient viewer will find visual richness, narrative complexity, long-take shots, and shall know Tarkovsky to be a true lover of the medium of his creation.

Beautiful and confused, Natalya Bandarchuk plays “Hari.” Here she realizes she is not who she is told she is, but is becoming who she wants to be, almost like a human.

The story opens on Earth — beautiful Earth! — where her greens, her water, her rain, her beautiful animals, her sensuous humanity is set up in long sequences to create a full character, a foil to space, and the sentient planet, Solaris. Here we are introduced to our protagonist, Kris Kelvin, a man burdened by his past, his widowerhood, his cold relationship with his parents, who is to be sent to the Solaris observation station to evaluate whether it ought be decommissioned. Having arrived, Kris finds a disheveled Solaris observation station populated by a bitter scientist, a frightened scientist, a recent suicide, and an inexplicable collection of apparitions: projections from the planet. Understanding the broken men, understanding the alien projections, and trying to understand himself urge Kelvin on a psychological and philosophical journey that attempts to limn the boundaries of what “human” means.

Animating the plot is Lem’s question, “What” if the aliens were fundamentally unlike us, non-anthropomorphic, could not speak, could not relate to us. What if we had only a dark, warped mirror in their consciousness in which to see ourselves? How would we interact with such an intelligence, and what if that intelligence were an ocean? What exactly would we do then? Given the difficulties or flat-out inability to relate to such an Other, Kris’ considerations implode into himself — saving when he discourses with the two other members of the skeleton crew, and the Solaris-produced simulacrum of his late wife — and provide the context for his psychological journey.

The gravitas of the movie is formidable, and the colors, the construction, and its love story — about loss being the only thing that truly makes us appreciate the now — are so rewarding that potential viewers should not be scared away. I recommend you view The Criterion Collection version.

Both Lauren and I were deeply affected by the film for several days and have tried to puzzle out Tarkovsky’s message to us. I hope you take the opportunity to do the same soon.

PS. Soderbergh: Pure folly to think you could remake this one, although Natasha McElhone as the visitor was a great casting call. No one could have gotten this right but a metaphysical post-Dostoyevskyist.

Quoth Stuff White People Like:

White people love Wes Anderson movies more than they love their kids. If a white guy takes a white girl to a Wes Anderson movie on their first date, and neither of them have seen it, they will immediately commence a relationship that is reflected in songs by Ryan Adams and Bright Eyes.

— On: “Wes Anderson Movies”

If you read my review on “The Darjeeling Limited” (“The Darjeeling Mumbledy”), I make no bones about my dislike of the cult of Anderson that has so thoroughly given him carte blanche to make vapid etchings into celluloid with pretensions of grandiosity-cum-naïvité.

It’s one thing to criticize an artist with words, but to criticize bad art with good art, now that takes a special breed of determination. I give you Alex Cornell’s vision: “A Hypothetical Wes Anderson Film Festival.” Thanks @meghatron.

[— Alex Cornell]

But what is it that irks me so about Anderson hipster juggernaut that the beautiful work of Cornell so successfully indicts him on? It’s the “tweed becostumed ingenue beneath a façade of gentle meekness” schtick that is absolutely calculated and drapes heavily on all Andersonia. It’s the “Anderson movies are the most insightful thing under the sun” that his fawning public holds as credo.

Dig that Howard Kosell Wide-World-of-Sports jacket in the photo in the mock-up above? Designed by a custom designer (Thom Browne) in Brooklyn, not some vintage off-the-rack find. And what’s with the Futura obsession? Ah, I get it, it’s an hômage to the Italian futurist movie-makers. Aren’t we clever. Oh, wait, I get it, you’re too naïve to be that hip, how quaint.

These ideas are effectively lampooned by Cornell, in a beautiful art design project it’s hard to believe he put so much work into a parody. That through simple design and typography he is able to communicate this is truly a commendation to his talent.

I might be asked, am I projecting this? An interview with Anjelica Huston documented this amore of affect. She described how she, playing an archaeologist, asked the esteemed auteur if she were playing his mother, also an archaeologist. She then related thaht he shook with a start of absolute surprise that this could have been latent in his script. Really, you didn’t realize your major matriarchal protagonist was based essentially on your mom. How darling! I don’t see that one could be caught unawares.

“But what about Rushmore?”

Yes, well what about it. Yes, it was a very good movie, and I would quite nearly forgive him the many sins that came after this movie for the lovely tale of Max Fischer and company. It’s the sort of achievement that gets used to justify all sorts of terrible movies post facto.

Let’s say on on old time balance scale that you have “Rushmore” and “Bottle Rocket” on one side. Now heap in “Life Aquatic”, “Darjeeling”, and maybe split “Tenenbaums” 50-50. I can almost see those scales balanced out.

But for me what makes the bad-Anderson pan weightier than the mass of the two good movies in the good-Anderson pan were the absolute howlers of “The Darjeeling Express”

“I guess we’re going to have to let go of Dad’s baggage”

…this is the quite-literal line delivered as the characters let go of their, uh, late father’s baggage and the inherited (emotional) baggage and run to the future. This could have been done with pictures (we are making a movie here). How about tight-framed gunfighter-style shots on the brothers, sweating, angry that they’re about to miss the train. A slow-mo of Owen Wilsons eyes pan left to a tight shot on Brody, Brody the same to Schwarzmann, a look of desperation, tight shot of their feet with India’s dust swirling on the colorful planks as one bag falls behind, close-framed shot, surprise dawns on each of them…etc.

And what about the conceit of Schwartzman’s character contending “All his characters are fictional” when they are so clearly à clef. I honestly thought I might bust an iris rolling my eyes.

I would love to see Wes Anderson take on M. Night Shamalyan in a pretension-off, Summer Slam-style. Both ride the coat-tails of their early work to make woefully bad movies in the present that are given far too much leniency.

[— Alex Cornell]

Yes, Alex Cornell, you say it so, very, very well.

Going to see “Revolutionary Road” was an exercise in controlled discomfort. I knew what the subject was, how it invariably would end, and what the upshot would be. I also knew it would be a chance to see two great actors ply their craft: Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are fine, emotional, and unafraid performers. The film, helmed by director Sam Mendes of “American Beauty” fame, rides like a Buick all over the “Suburban American Dream” with whitewall tires but does so in a clumsy and exploitative manner. Redeeming qualities of the movie are well-written argument scenes and the value of having a difficult mirror in which to examine one’s life.

This post has a light-spoiler warning: it’s not much you couldn’t have garnered from the trailer. For those who are going to see unaffected by any input shouldn’t read further.

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When I first moved to the Bay area I would see mentions of Harvey Milk’s name in The SF Chronicle like the name was common knowledge. I had no idea who he was and I suspect the same is true of most of America today. Gus van Sant’s movie about Milk is an attempt to educate the post-1980’s-born generation about the man’s life, his work, and to demonstrate that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are rights that all Americans are entitled to pursue by birth in this land.

(more…)

It’s really a delightful movie with a lot of heart. It felt fresh, lively, and fun the whole way through.

We saw “Hellboy 2: The Golden Army” last weekend. I disliked it. It is for movies such as this that the 2.5 star rating was invented. There were some good ideas, in spots, but never that unified, compelling vision thing ( apologies Poppy Bush ) just never really materialized ( like Jr. Bush ).

So here’s the gig. Humans are greedy and destroy the earth’s natural sylvan beauty. Elves and goblins, understandably tired of this, put together an unstoppable army that numbers, in the Lovecraft ordinal series, “seventy by seventy” unstoppable soldiers. After these clockwork and aurium terminators lay waste to such a degree that the beloved elven woods are actually damaged by the excess of blood, the Good King, his Moody Son, and his Good Daughter ( the twin of Moody Son ) decide to split up the crown which entitles the wearer to command the horde and put the army into a slumber.

Moody Son is not too happy about this but Good Sister agrees with Wise Father-King and thus began a truce lasting unto the present day.

Guess which unspeakable crime Moody Son must inflict? Guess who he must hunt to get that elusive missing piece? The movie telegraphs its arc in the first 8 minutes. But they don’t call hero stories archætypal for no reason, so I don’t bear this as a mark against the film.

The movie’s art direction is excellent.

The entire backstory I recounted above is told in a “reading of a story come alive” with a stripped–down animation that looks like ornate chess pieces acting out this tableaux from the forgotten pre-pagan yesteryear. It was a great start. It was a compelling, and eerily child–like setting of the story’s parameters.

Now, in time I believe that director Guillermo del Toro’s notebooks will be revered like so many sticky-pages of “Heavy Metal” magazine. His eye for creatures presents a large section action set in “The Troll Market”, a cross between the Mos Eisley cantina and Diagon Alley.

Stunning art direction is also seen in the unbelievable “Angel of Death” who recalls some of the more disturbing elements of “Pan’s Labyrinth”:

Finally I loved the soldiers of the Golden Army as steampunk Terminators. The meticulous attention to the gearwork appearance worthy of Gabriel “Sylar” Grey was something not required but which really showed that del Toro loves the material and great art design.

On these levels, the movie is a stunning success and I would love to see a fan edit that turns this into 5 minutes of a deliciously beautiful visual nightmare.

Ron Perlman also deserves some kudos for playing the working class Apocolypse-bringer Big Red himself in a realistic way.

But here’s the counterpoint, and I think I could do no better to quote Dustin Rowles at Pajiba

Guillermo del Toro throws a ton of eye candy at you, and it’s difficult to digest the true mediocrity of a film when the director keeps plinking you in the forehead with shiny pennies. But more than that, del Toro makes the shiniest pennies in Hollywood—golden pennies that reflect sunlight like a funhouse mirror in Alice’s Wonderland.

Well said, the visuals aside, the story, quite honestly, is entirely lame…and I liked the first one!

First, important questions are brought up, and never answered. Red and Liz’s relationship is explored and some fairly significant issues ( at least to the mind of anyone who’s been in a real grown-up relationship ) surfaced that require some delicate and sensitive discussion or couples therapy.

Some things like “Why am I the only one who cleans up the dishes” cannot be replaced by “whew, we narrowly avoided death there, I love you!”

Further, mentors give advice that is supposed to come in as important at a tell-tale moment, when the character chooses to evolve, you know, “use the force” style, to stop being so immature and be a better man / woman / demon–but. Those moments never surface. Instead we have these sagacious chestnuts that never get converted into kinetic utility.

The dialog is also jarringly inconsistent. Seth MacFarlane (over-)plays a Stewie goes to Salzburg voice as ectoplasmic doctor Krauss. Krauss is a by-the-numbers paranormal investigator who inspires a major intellectual man-er,fish-crush in æsthete and polymapth Abe Sapien. Krauss has great learning, great technology, and a rigid adherence to “Just Following Orders”.

Now why, in Anung An-Rama’s good name would such a character ever have conceivable reason to utter: “Suck my ectoplasmic schwanstuker”. Verily, the studio was assured this would get those 12-year-olds in the aisle rolling. For the 30+ set it merely set the eyes a’so.

My biggest complaint is a lack of connection to the Hellboy mythos. I love the Hellboy mythos. Black cult Nazi’s are manipulated by dæmonic elements into opening the gateway to Hell. They think they’ll get demons to defeat the Allies, but the demons plan no such thing, but rather to let their reign on Earth begin. The Nazi’s black ritual is interrupted and the plan is thwarted. By accident a single demon does come through, but it turns out it’s a young, naive, demon who incidentally happens to be the one who’s supposed to open Hell’s gate. Thwarting his destiny is the fact that he’s raised by loving and kind humans and thus is set up all sort of angst around Destiny, Duty, Fate, and to what degree a man can beat his fate ( probably explains my like of God of War, as well ).

Is that not some compelling mythos or what?

I can parallel this to the “X-Files” back in the day. You’d tune in for the show, but the ones that were like crack were the ones that advanced the mythos that covered the Scully abduction or featured The Smoking Man ( there was even a song about it ).

In “Golden Army” we get only but brief reminders that this red-chested Hudson Hawk is something of a Biblical–scale bad–ass but only once or twice ( Abe sees his flaming crown through special glasses, the Angel of Death calls him by his demon name, and Good Princes asserts his royal blood by naming him as a demon and heir to the Fallen One). These unique elements of his background never played into his motivation or into how he handled situations ( except for the Right Hand of Doom occasionally illustrating its superior ability as a bludgeon ). It was like watching an entire X-Files season and not seeing Mulder…who would want to watch that?

Lastly there’s a really irritating battle between the forces of myth here. So much of the movie hinges on just how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Hellboy, a demon, with an indestructible stone hand is beating a Middle Earth-worthy troll. In some ways it makes me think about debating who would win in a fight Terminator or Neo. Or would the Easter Bunny beat Santa Claus’ ass if he knew ninjitsu. It makes the audience’s appreciation and ability to scale threats accordingly difficult and, as a result, a lot of dramatic tension goes down the crapper.

Two-point-five stars.

Lauren and I just finished watching the turn–of–the–decade camp–comedy “But I’m a Cheerleader” starring Natasha Lyonne and featuring roles by RuPaul ( as a man ) and Bud Cort ( aka “Harold” ).

The opening song is April March’s “Chick Habit”:

Lacking a canonical video, I’m going for the one with the “Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! footage

This song is an amusing interpretation of Gainsbourg’s “Laisse tomber les filles” (literally, Allow the girls to drop or “Quit the girls” - so an excellent translation by March ) as recorded by yé-yé chanteuse France Gall:

The bass–line is infectious and definitely writhes like Jack Marshall’s “Munsters Theme”. It just screams out “go–go boots, 20–year–old ingenues and two–count–step.”

“Laisse tomber les filles” was written by Gallic naughty–fellow Serge Gainsbourg ( what, in the ’60’s in France wasn’t? ). Serge’s prolific work ranges from an early herald of “world music”, a great horns arranger, and a writer of not–so–thinly–veiled entendre for ever–so–corruptible girls—most “scandalously” his own daughter, Charlotte.

Next time Ms. March is in the area I’mma goin’.

We saw “The Dark Knight”. It was very good. etc.

I thought that the whole “Saw” turn in the writing ( difficult moral conundrums ) was an unusual turn, but it served very well to highlight the trouble with being a masked vigilate ( until March, 2009 when “Watchmen” will give the final word ).

I love Chris Nolan’s direction: he really seems to be the heir to the Hitchcock–style of suspense.

The movie is also very much a product of its times questions of how much humanity do you sacrifice ( torture, invasion of privacy ) of the things that made you once great in the name of preserving that state—at what point do you lose it in pursuit of protecting it ( any bells ringing? ).

“Iron Man”, “Wall-E”, and now “The Dark Knight” it’s been a good summer for movies.