Steven Rubio's Online Life

what i watched last week

28 Days Later. It doesn’t hurt to have seen it before … it’s still excruciatingly tense. While I tend to be suspicious of style-over-substance movies, when they put me through this much of a wringer, I forgive a lot. And Naomie Harris has great abs. The one thing that was disappointing was the quality of the Blu-ray. I bought this some time ago, in the early days of our having a big screen … it was an impulse buy at Costco, and I should have known better. Danny Boyle’s excellent decision to shoot most of the film in DV worked great in a theater, and probably works great on a regular TV as well. But high-def is known for bringing out not only the best but the worst … just ask any actor whose imperfections are shown in unfortunate detail in HD. 28 Days Later looks just awful on Blu-ray, which is no surprise … Boyle went for a low-fi look and got it, but on Blu-ray, low-fi becomes crap-fi. Once the movie gets rolling, though, it barely matters. 8/10.

Pink: Funhouse Tour: Live in Australia. Watching this, I realized something unusual, for me at least. In April, I saw Bruce Springsteen for the 33rd time since our first Bruce show in ‘75. It was a fine show, not the best, not the worst. But I saw a better show later in the year, by an artist who wasn’t even born in 1975. This disc documents that tour … I waited an extra month-and-a-half until the Blu-ray version came out. It’s all that I expected. 10/10.

Julie & Julia. There is nothing really surprising here … if you’ve heard a one-line summary of the plot, you know what to expect, Meryl Streep does her usual good job (in the mode I much prefer from her, where her character experiences joy). Nothing I can add to that, so I’ll just mention a couple of things that struck me. Meryl Streep is lauded for her ability to immerse herself in a variety of roles, with her facility with accents being especially commented on. She has been nominated for 15 Oscars, and that will likely be 16 when Julie & Julia is considered. So why does Eddie Murphy only have 1 Oscar nomination? His movies often suck, but then, Meryl Streep was in Falling in Love … it’s not like every movie she ever made was a classic. Murphy is an excellent mimic, able to play multiple roles in the same film, and showed in his one Oscar-nominated performance that he’s a fine dramatic actor as well. I’m not saying he’s in the same league as Streep, but he’s pretty much ignored when the talk moves to great acting. One other thing … Julie & Julia is said to be the first major motion picture to be based on a blog, and it gets blogging down pretty accurately. The Julie of the title is obsessive, self-absorbed, neurotic, just like many people I know who have personal blogs (yes, I mean me). 7/10.

Bottle Rocket. Just the kind of full-of-itself movie I hate. Owen Wilson has the Vince Vaughn role as the insufferable prick we’re supposed to love. I didn’t. There is very little point to the movie, which ambles along in an amiable fashion which might even be charming if it wasn’t so self-congratulatory, and if Wilson’s character wasn’t so relentless annoying. 4/10. The disc includes the original short that led to the feature being made … Wilson turns down the energy quite a bit, which is a relief, as is the short length. It’s a nice little movie about a couple of guys goofing around town. You can see why it got some attention … it’s a better movie than the feature. 6/10.

i read the news today, oh boy

Emily Nussbaum:

[F]or anyone who loves television, who adores it with the possessive and defensive eyes of a fan, this was most centrally and importantly the first decade when television became recognizable as art, great art: collectible and life-changing and transformative and lasting. As the sixties are to music and the seventies to movies, the aughts—which produced the best and worst shows in history—were to TV. …

Television had always been a pleasure, a mass entertainment. It was by nature collaborative, requiring and rewarding compromise from those who created it. But in the aughts, the best TV-makers displayed the entitlement of the artist, a risk in an industry dependent not only on advertisers but on the willingness of viewers to continue to let you in, week after week. When his online fan base howled at tragic plot turns, [Joss] Whedon argued, “It’s a mandate: Don’t give people what they want, give them what they need.” [David] Chase resisted fan worship of Tony Soprano by grinding our faces in his anti-hero’s repulsiveness. In an interview just before the Mad Men finale, [Matthew] Weiner mused, “You know what, I don’t want to have the tail wag the dog; I don’t want the audience deciding what I do. Because I don’t think in the end they’re the best judges of that.”

Robert Mitchum, asked what it takes to make a movie star:

Somebody asked my wife once, what's your idea of your husband? And she answered: He's a masturbation image. Well, that's what we all are. Up there on the screen, our goddamn eyeball is six feet high, the poor bastards who buy tickets think you really amount to something.

what i watched last week

Up. I liked hearing the brain-to-mouth-with-no-middleman conversation of the dogs, and the movie was pleasant enough … deserves credit for not being too smarmy while offering up a Nice Lesson in Life. But the lessons were pretty much it … this isn’t a comedy with a lesson, it’s a drama with comic moments. And the drama wasn’t THAT good. Not bad, not classic. 7/10.

The Last Emperor. How times have changed. When this movie came out in 1987, I was in my mid-30s and still able to insist on my holier-than-though attitude where I never left a movie while it was running, no matter the reason. My main memory of The Last Emperor is that it was very long, and I had to pee really bad, and finally, with not that long until the end, I had to give in and scurry to the bathroom. Now I own the Blu-ray, I just put it on pause when nature calls. I’m not exactly sure what Bertolucci is saying here. Does he really believe in Communist “re-education?” At one point, an interrogator looks at Pu Yi’s “confession” and says it’s nothing but a bunch of dates. Bertolucci plays around with flashbacks, but essentially, that’s all his movie is, a history lesson with dates, and an ode to passivity, which isn’t a particularly cinematic topic. The movie is gorgeous, as is Joan Chen, and it’s not boring, exactly. But like I say, I can’t tell what the point is. 7/10.

Red Cliff 2. 10/10.

red cliff 2

Red Cliff was probably my favorite movie of 2008 … only other possibility would be Man on Wire. It took us several months of maybe-perhaps-ok before we finally got around to watching Red Cliff 2, and it looks like John Woo is going to be sitting atop my list again this year. I didn’t say much about the first installment, so I’ll stretch out a bit now. I should note that I haven’t seen the version playing now in American theaters, which edits the two parts down into one movie.

There are two essential items going on here, the strategy preparing for battle, and the battle itself (as I recall, it was much the same in Part One). I’m not a fan of “war strategy” movies, but this stuff is fascinating. It takes place in the early 3rd century, so the weapons aren’t very advanced. But they are put to ingenious uses, and the overall strategies on both sides are interesting mostly because of the point/counterpoint feel. The leaders on both sides know how war is “supposed” to be fought, and there’s a bit of game theory going on, as first one side and then another attempts to figure out how the other will vary from the norm, so that they can themselves vary in a useful manner. The result would please the A-Team’s Hannibal … as you watch in admiration, you think “I love it when a plan comes together.” The final battle sequence is as good as any you’ve seen. The only problem is that we’re getting aesthetic pleasure from the deaths of tens of thousands of people, and while there are brief moments when we’re reminded of the deceased, for the most part our reaction is more “Wow!” than “poor fellow.” This was true in Woo’s HK action films, of course, but the scale here is far beyond that of a movie like Hard Boiled. Still, watching Woo put all the pieces together in such a way that the audience can clearly follow the action mirrors the way the warlords put the pieces of their plans together.

I don’t know enough about the history being told here to say anything with confidence about how close to reality Woo comes, but I don’t know that it matters. I also don’t know how the two films reflect on contemporary China … Woo made his name in Hong Kong, left before the handover, made a gazillion dollars in Hollywood, then returned home to make this remarkable epic that I’m sure says something about how things are today. But Red Cliff and Red Cliff 2 are magnificent, stirring films … they are as inventive as his earlier heroic bloodshed movies, on a much greater scale. 10/10.

what i watched last week

Attack of the Giant Leeches. Just as bad as its title. 1/10.

Slumdog Millionaire. Don’t know what to make of this one. I liked it, got caught up in the story, bought into the game show/flashback structure. And I don’t think only Indians can make movies about India. Yet I never quit thinking that this was the movie of a visitor, if not a tourist … a good visitor, but an outsider when perhaps an insider was called for. It’s entirely possible, though, that I’m over-intellectualizing this one … I did like it very much, after all. 8/10.

what i watched last week

Il Divo. I confess I knew little about the titular character, Italian politician Guilio Andreotti, before watching this film … typical American provincialism at work. One of the nice things about Il Divo is that it works even if, like me, you don’t know the history, since it’s more about politics in a general sense. It’s a bit like a Godfather movie, only made by Italians. Unfortunately, the Godfather movie it most resembles is Part III, but Il Divo is better than that one. Toni Servillo does a terrific job as Andreotti, moving around like Max Schreck with blood, showing a passive face to the world while directing corruption from behind his mask. 8/10.

Wonder Boys. It gets the social aspects of academic life right, gets reasonably appealing performances from its fine cast (Michael Douglas, Robert Downey Jr., Frances McDormand, Tobey Maguire, Katie Holmes), and … well, that’s it. The plot is quirky like a screwball comedy, but it’s played far more low key than that would suggest, and it doesn’t quite work. If you’re hankering for Yet Another Male Mid-Life Crisis movie, this is a good one. But Wonder Boys is also #111 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They list of the top 250 movies of the 21st century, and that’s just silly. 7/10.

Black Sabbath. 7/10.

Attack of the Mushroom People. Speaking of Creature Features, this movie was the first one ever shown by the Bay Area’s first Creature Feature host, Bob Wilkins, back in 1966. (Info from the great Blog Wilkins website.) It’s nowhere near as cheesy as its American title (original title is Matango, which is the name given to the monstrous fungus that makes the film a horror movie). It’s the kind of movie that begs for complex, subtextual analysis … it’s about class and gender and atomic bombs and anything else you can stuff in there. I also had a hard time staying awake, which is perhaps only fair, since I always fell asleep during Creature Features back in the day (it wasn’t easy for a 13-year-old to start watching a double-feature at 11:00 PM). 6/10.

black sabbath

I watched this Mario Bava classic on Creature Features many times as a kid, and I was looking forward to seeing it again, this time in HD. It was indeed a different experience than I’d remembered … I wouldn’t be surprised if it was in black-and-white when I was young, since I don’t think we got a color TV until later. The movie, which includes three short horror films, is still pretty good, but the most interesting thing about it came to me as I looked it up after my viewing.

One of the stories, “The Telephone,” is about a bisexual call-girl, Rosy, who keeps getting phone calls from her ex-pimp Frank, who has escaped from jail. Frightened, she calls her lesbian former lover Mary … they’re estranged, but Rosy has no one else to turn to, so her ex comes to her apartment. She gives Rosy a tranquilizer to help her sleep, then sits at a desk and writes a confession. She was the one making the calls, impersonating Frank … she heard Frank had broken out of jail and thought to scare Rosy, knowing Rosy would call her and she could come to her aid, bringing them together again. While she is writing her confession, Frank sneaks in, strangles her, then tries to kill Rosy. But Rosy has a knife under her pillow, and she kills Frank instead.

If you saw Black Sabbath when you were young, you might not remember this one in quite the same way. Turns out the entire episode was reworked for the American market. The lesbianism was removed … the estrangement now comes because Mary was with Frank and Rosy took him from her. Rosy was no longer a call-girl. Mary doesn’t impersonate Frank … Frank is the one calling Rosy, which is scary, because Frank died some time before this. The letter Mary writes, her “confession,” is now an admission that she will be calling a shrink for her friend, who is clearly deluded since she thinks she’s getting phone calls from a dead man. Frank shows up, kills Mary, Rosy kills Frank … and we get one last phone call, as Frank tells Rosy she can’t kill him because he’s already dead, and he’ll be calling her every night.

I go into such detail because the changes were so huge, yet were pretty seamless, i.e. I had no idea all of these years that I was seeing a different film entirely. Since the American version was dubbed, it was easy to change the dialogue to fit the new version. What was originally a noirish tale of love and revenge became a horror story about a ghost. As luck would have it, the version I saw was on MGM HD … and guess which version they have the rights to? Yep … I still haven’t seen the original.

what i watched last week

The Road Warrior. Yes, there is some silliness … if in the future, gasoline is so precious, why do the bad guys waste fuel driving around in circles acting scary? So what. The final chase scene is unmatched in film history, taking The General and Stagecoach into the future and cranking up the pyrotechnics so that, even though I’ve probably seen this movie a dozen times, I still grip my chair anxiously. The movie is best at providing thrills; if it took Joseph Campbell to give George Miller his vision, that’s fine with me, but really, it’s all about the action. Still, the archetypical characters suck us in … that hardly any of them actually speak only adds to the feeling that they’ve been dredged up from our common visions of hell. It’s a rare movie that can overcome its own pretensions and win us over because of the masterful use of space, editing, camera work, and iconic characters. Even Brian May’s “I Am the Max Steiner of the Future” soundtrack works. Max is a hero for his time, which is to say he is no hero at all … despite the film’s attempt to present his story as one of growth, there is no evidence that he is any different at the end than he was in the beginning. As he says, he doesn’t have a choice when he drives the tanker … he hasn’t decided to be good, he’s just out of wheels. This film is the standard by which all such action movies are judged, and you can’t blame Miller that almost every attempt to duplicate its success was crap (well, OK, you can blame Miller for Mad Max 3). #391 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They list of the top 1000 films of all time. 10/10.

The Brothers Bloom. I think this movie, in the con-artist genre, has something it wants to say about something. Or maybe it’s just a con. Entertaining, good acting, confusing plot, and totally inconsequential, even if it is about something. Which is probably isn’t. 6/10.

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan. If these weekly posts are meant to highlight movies I’ve seen, then this probably doesn’t belong. It’s hard to say what it is: a movie, a special episode of a TV show, or what it really feels like, a compilation of deleted scenes. Not that the scenes are actually deleted … while The Plan uses footage from the series (the only chance we get to see Starbuck … Katee Sackhoff is otherwise MIA), there is plenty of new material. But none of it is essential … it’s about as valuable as the deleted scenes on a typical DVD. You learn a little more about a few characters, you find out that the infamous “Plan” wasn’t much more than One being petulant, you get to see a little bit of nudity (none from Six or Eight, for you fans of Tricia Helfer and Grace Park) that will be gone by the time this airs on Syfy … and you get something that will be completely incomprehensible to anyone who has never watched the series. The rest of us get a barely coherent hodgepodge of scenes, not without interest but not really a movie. 5/10.

what i watched last week

The Night of the Hunter. I’d say this was unlike any movie you’ve ever seen, except 1) I haven’t seen every movie you’ve seen, and 2) there are times it reminds us of other films. Nonetheless, this unclassifiable movie, which was recently shown on Turner Classic Movies as part of their Halloween fest, is a horror film, an Expressionist classic, a Southern Gothic, a tale of a world gone evil told from the perspective of children … it’s about l-o-v-e and h-a-t-e, it’s To Kill a Mockingbird crossed with Picnic, except Boo Radley isn’t harmless, and William Holden has become Robert Mitchum … he doesn’t save the pretty blonde from her humdrum existence, he slits her throat and hides the body in the river. There’s Lillian Gish as Mitchum’s opposite, fighting for Good … there’s Charles Laughton, directing for the only time in his life (and demonstrating why that is a very sad fact). 10/10. #37 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They list of the top 1000 films of all time.

Changeling. At this point, reviews of Clint Eastwood movies write themselves. There is more than one kind of Eastwood review … there are people who think he is a great director, people who think he is a bad director, and people who don’t see what all the fuss is about. Whichever category you are in, I’m betting you’ve thought pretty much the same thing about every Clint Eastwood movie of the past couple of decades. “Like a good wine, the master only gets better as he gets older.” “Another dull paint-by-numbers snooze fest.” Or, in my case, “A decent movie, but fifty years from now, people are going to scratch their heads in befuddlement wondering why we thought this man was a great director.” Do I need to write my Eastwood review again? He directs like he acts, he’s Don Siegel reincarnated, he doesn’t do anything wrong because he doesn’t do anything, actors love him because he doesn’t do a lot of takes. Changeling struck me as better than his usual, but I doubt it would stand up to a second viewing, since the intriguing plot twists that carry the film forward would have no power once you knew they were coming. 7/10.

pointless stathead analysis of me and the wild things

All info from MovieLens, where I have rated 1306 movies (it may not be the best or most accurate, but it does more stuff like sorting my ratings).

Average rating for children’s movies: 6.4/10

Average rating for fantasy movies: 6.82

Rating for Where the Wild Things Are: 7

Rating for two other movies Spike Jonze directed: 8 each

Rating for Three Kings, with Jonze in a supporting role: 9

Conclusion from data: I liked Wild Things more than I normally do with children’s or fantasy movies, but less than I liked Jonze’s other movies.

Context, or, once I get started, I can’t stop: the only movies categorized as both children’s and fantasy which got a 10/10 rating from me: The Wizard of Oz and Pinocchio. Only such movies to get a 1/10 rating from me: The Flintstones and Scooby-Doo. Number of “children’s and fantasy” movies I have rated: 28. Number of those I rated higher than Wild Things: 7.