Category: movies

I actually went to see this
movie in a theater yesterday. Mostly because it’s the first
3D movie I’ve heard of that I really cared about seeing. I did
watch Avatar,
because it was on the Hugo awards ballot, but I
certainly didn’t expect to like it $15 worth.

Since the incremental cost of most of the movies I see is $0,
since I get them on my Netflix subscription, I’m
usually just telling you whether I think the movie is interesting
enough to be worth the
time you spend watching it. In this case, however, I will also address
whether it’s worth the time, money, and trouble to go to the movie
theater and see it in 3-D, instead of just getting it on Netflix
when it comes out.

Well, first, if you’re interested in any of archeology,
anthropology, film-making, or Werner Herzog, you do want to see
the movie. It isn’t as tightly put together as the best of the
Herzog documentaries (e.g., Grizzly
Man), but you aren’t going to be able to actually see that
cave, and you do want to.

I went with a bunch of friends, and one of the first things we
talked about after the movie was all the topics that could have
been covered in more detail. For instance, one of the friends is an
anthropology professor, and he had been hoping to use the film in
his class about the origins of religion. The people who have been
researching the cave are in fact working on the light these
discoveries shed on that topic, but the movie has only a 5 or 10
minute segment about it. Another friend wanted to know more about
the actual process of making the paintings than we saw.

Of course, there’s only so much you can cover in 90 minutes,
but it surprised me how random the topics covered seemed to be.
Another of the friends, a rock musician who has made movies, said
that he was sure the sequence with the albino crocodiles at the
end only happened because there was this film crew that could only
spend four hours a day in the cave, so they had time to see the
tourist attractions in the area, and they saw the crocodiles and
said, “Wow! We have to put these in the movie.”

That was probably the most gratuitous insertion, but there was
a lot of stuff about German archeologists working on similar
periods that didn’t really relate to this particular cave at all.
It was fun to hear the bone flute played, though.

Now for the 3-D. I’m glad I saw it. There were some
absolutely spectacular shots, which would still be beautiful in
2-D, but not as impressive. On the other hand, when you’re
interviewing a talking head in front of a window onto a scene of
snow-covered trees, it’s a little distracting to be able to see
the trees that well. And although the camera lingered lovingly on
the cave paintings, there were still times when you wanted the
coffee table book so that you could look at what you wanted to see
in the lighting you wanted to use.

On the whole, you can probably get a lot of what I got out of
the movie without the 3-D, but if it’s not a terrible
inconvenience or a major expense, it’s worth seeing.

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This
movie, about the poem Howl and it’s
connections to the life of its author and the still-ongoing debate
over free speech, was better than I expected. Mostly because the parts I
liked best weren’t discussed in any of the reviews I read or
heard.

There are three intertwined threads:

• James Franco reading a transcript of an interview Ginsberg
  gave during the obscenity trial.
• An all-star cast performing the transcript of the obscenity
  trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti for publishing Howl and
  other poems.
• James Franco reading Howl as voiceover to an
  often marvelous animation of the poem.

It’s the last of those I really enjoyed. I also enjoyed the
DVD extra film of Ginsberg himself reading Howl and
a few other poems. He wasn’t a professional actor, and he
couldn’t get through something as long as Howl
without making mistakes. (Franco probably needed retakes, too.)
But he had the rhythms of the poem in his head in a way that
Franco wasn’t even trying to. If you like the poem at all, I
think you’ll want to hear both versions.

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Moliere would have liked this
movie.

There isn’t really anything nicer than that to say about a
French farce. If you’re thinking that it’s virtuous to watch it
because of what it says about the international arms trade, you
are mistaken. What it says about the international arms trade is
that enough people find it distasteful that you can make the arms
traders the butt of the farce without making the audience
unsympathetic to the “good guys”.

Moliere used old men who are forcing themselves on young women
in that role; in this century we can use arms traders. But you
wouldn’t watch Moliere to learn about sexuality in the elderly,
and you shouldn’t watch this to learn about arms trading.

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This
movie was the standard Hollywood movie on my Netflix Watch Now
list that I was up to watching after spending the afternoon at the
Pub Carol Sing.
It’s about two officers on the Army’s Casualty Notification Team,
whose job is to tell the next of kin that their loved one has been
killed in action.

One interesting thing about it was watching Woody Harrelson
play the jaded older officer, after all those years of watching
him on Cheers as the dewy-eyed young kid.

Another highlight was an actual explanation of why you might
knock
instead of ringing: Woody Harrelson is explaining how they go
about doing their job and he says something like, “I always knock — there are a
lot of those doorbells that play some silly tune and if it’s going
‘Yankee Doodle went to town…’ and I start saying ‘The Secretary
of the Army wants me to extend his deepest sympathy…’, it just
doesn’t flow.”

Definitely worth watching if you’re tired, and maybe a bit
better than that.

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This
movie was made in 1931, with a script by John Galsworthy and
directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

It’s historically interesting — the opening screens specify
that it’s a “talkie”, and there isn’t any music in the
background. In other words, it’s a filmed play, since they
didn’t yet have the modus operandi for making movies with
sound that developed later.

There are a few points where you can see flickerings of what
Hitchcock would become, but most of the cinematography is pretty
primitive. The picture quality of the DVD leaves something to
be desired, and the sound quality is really bad in some
places.

The script is the kind of annoyingly simple-minded diatribe
about the class system that the Galsworthy plays I read in high
school were. (The novels are much better.)

So if you’re interested in the history of film, see this movie,
but if you want good drama or great cinematography, look elsewhere.

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This
movie makes me feel a lot better about the ability of
cinematic costume designers to show us good clothes than the last
movie about Coco Chanel I saw. The dress he seduces her out
of is just brilliant.

There are two other reasons the movie is worth watching. One is
the piano
lesson he gives her, where he has her play:

and then improvises on it underneath her. If piano lessons
were like that, I’d have stuck with them. But there’s no
evidence that she did.

The other is that the whole first 20 minutes is the original production
of The Rite of Spring that incited the riot. I’ve
never understood before why that music would have incited a riot
— it isn’t that different from what Debussy and other people
were doing at the time. But if you see the costumes and the
dancing, and realize, as Diaghilev remarks in the movie, “They
wanted to see Swan Lake,” the riot makes more sense.

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I’d always thought I’d seen and enjoyed Bertolucci’s 1900.
It was in the late 1970’s, it was a long Italian movie
with gorgeous pictures of the Italian countryside and a marxist
plot, so nothing I read about 1900 disabused
me of the idea that I’d seen it.

As I said, I remembered enjoying it, so when they put out a
special collectors’ edition with restored footage that made it
even longer, I ordered it from Netflix.

I was quite surprised to find that 1900 was
not the movie I had seen. There were scenes I would
certainly have remembered if I’d seen them, and I didn’t, and
there were scenes I remembered vividly from the movie I
had seen that just weren’t there.

I tried searching Amazon,
Netflix, and IMDB for the movie I had seen, to
no avail.

Then I read a mention of Rotten Tomatoes as a
place where movies were reviewed, and up popped Tree
of Wooden Clogs, which seems to have been the movie.

So I’m putting that on my netflix list, now.

For the record, the scenes I remembered were the grandfather
gleefully implementing his secret process for growing the earliest
tomatoes in town, cutting down a tree to make his grandson a pair
of wooden shoes so he could go to school, and the whole family
being evicted as penalty for having cut down the tree to make the
clogs. So my search term was something like “italian tomatoes
wooden clogs”, and it worked on Rotten Tomatoes but not on the
other places.

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