Balls and Walnuts
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Category Archives: At the movies
What I did this weekend
Among other things, I watched movies.
Best of the bunch was Let the Right One In, a subtitled Swedish coming-of-age vampire movie. It’s about a bullied 12-year-old named Oskar (who is a very dark child, despite being all blond and blue-eyed and Swedish) who befriends Eli, a girl (maybe) who has been 12 for the last 200 years. The cinematography is spectacular, the film is well paced, and the child actors are mesmerizing. Most fascinating thing: leaving aside the whole bleeding your victims to death thing, is Eli evil? For most of the movie, I saw her as a practiced user who victimizes the men/boys who become fond of her. Won’t spoil the ending, but it did leave my early judgment somewhat shaken.
Next up was Dead Snow, a subtitled Norwegian zombie movie. Nazi zombies. Fast Nazi zombies. Who prey upon a group of witless but attractive medical students. I know, I know, what more could you ask for? Some originality, for one thing. One of the med students is afraid of the sight of blood. Another is a horror movie aficionado, who really ought to know better than to get laid early in the movie, because of course that means he’s one of the first to die. (Movie tropes dictate that the woman gets it first, because naughty women are more intrinsically zombie food than naughty men.) I recommend you pass on this one.
Finally, we watched a Woody Harrelson movie, Zombieland, a non-subtitled American zombie flick about a neurotic young guy with irritable bowel syndrome who as the movie starts thinks he’s the last non-cannibalistic guy in America, or what’s left of America, which he has renamed Zombieland. But he soon meets up with Woody Harrelson, an actor who surprises me because I never thought the Woody from Cheers would ever amount to anything. I liked him in this, and thought he and the protagonist (Jesse Eisenberg) had great chemistry and were a hoot to watch.
A horde of flesh-eating children. What's not to love?
But then they had to bring a couple of other characters into the film: Abigail Breslin who is supposed to be twelve in the film, probably really WAS twelve, but looked about fifteen, and love interest Emma Stone. They play con artist sisters, and the trouble is, in this cut-throat world these two are just too evil to live. This was sufficiently annoying that my wife stopped watching it (shortly after yelling at the screen, “SHOOT THEM ALREADY!”) but Jake and I trudged on.
It’s all a matter of suspension of disbelief. Or perhaps a trust in male hormones; after all, there’s a good chance Emma Stone is the last eligible female in the mainland 48, so why wouldn’t the two guys put up with a seemingly endless stream of abuse? I had no problem believing that, but my Vulcan wife couldn’t buy it.
Fun movie. Not my favorite zombie movie (Dead Alive and Fido vie for that top slot), but it had enough style and humor to keep me entertained. Much better than boring old fast Nazi zombies speaking Norwegian, anyway. Aside from an annoying cameo by Bill Murray and the aforementioned “why don’t they blow them away” problem, Zombieland (not to be confused with Brad Dourif’s Zombieland, also released in 2009) was a fun ride, great fare for the Fourth of July weekend.
D.
Innaresting
I’ve got one of those interminable low-level headaches. The bridge of my nose hurts — how weird is that? It would only make sense if I had broken my nose, either recently or in the past. If in the past, then I could complain, “It’s my roomatiz.” Maybe it’s my sinuses, but it doesn’t seem quite right for that.
We watched District 9 tonight . . . again . . . this time with Jake, who insisted on stopping the movie every thirty seconds to ask a question. I feel like warning his future wife, “If you care about your marriage, never watch DVDs with him.” Oh, who knows, maybe he’ll marry someone who will do the same. Anyway, I found Live from Joburg (the short from which District 9 was derived) on YouTube here. And here’s an interesting short from the same director, Neill Blomkamp.
See you tomorrow.
D.
Going mainstream
Sometimes it seems as though my favorite directors are going mainstream. When Tim Burton made it big with Batman and Batman Returns, I thought we had lost him for good; but in the midst of all that blockbusterishness, he also created Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, and Mars Attacks!, and his recent movies continue his tradition of the weird. (Oooh, look! He’s working on a feature-length version of Frankenweenie, and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is in pre-production!)
But then there’s Sam Raimi, who gave us the brilliant Army of Darkness, the capstone of his Evil Dead trilogy. Raimi hit mainstream with the Spider-Man movies, and if Drag Me to Hell is any indication, his horror has gone mainstream, too. Raimi’s IMDB page indicates he has 20 projects under development. Is that humanly possible?
My latest sorrow is for David Cronenberg, a guy who was creating slipstream* movies before slipstream fiction even had a name, with gems like Videodrome and Dead Ringers, and later Naked Lunch and Crash pushing our comfort zone for what a movie should be.
But then in 2005 he teamed with Viggo Mortensen in A History of Violence, a solid thriller that I found fun to watch, but fun is not what I expect from a Cronenberg movie. Interesting, uncomfortable, surprising . . . and maybe fun is fourth on the list. And in 2007, apparently happy with the collaboration, Cronenberg gave us Mortensen-as-Russian-mafiose in Eastern Promises.
You get to see all this and so much more.
The premise: London midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) delivers the baby of a 14-year-old Russian prostitute, who does not survive the delivery. Among her effects is a diary written in Russian; fortunately for the plot, Anna is the child of Russian immigrants, and has an uncle who can translate. But Uncle is a bit of a dick, so she follows a lead provided by a business card buried in the diary: she goes to Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a Russian restaurateur who seems like such a nice man, especially when he’s not trying to kick the virility out of his son Kirill (French actor Vincent Cassel).
Viggo Mortensen plays Nikolai, Kirill’s friend and driver. Nikolai is portrayed as ambitious, smart, and cool, the ice cube to Kirill’s blow torch, and he’s enough of a bad boy to intrigue and frighten Anna. At the risk of dropping a few spoilers, the lack of a love scene between Anna and Kirill was one of the movie’s few surprises. That Semyon is a right bastard and Nikolai is not all he seems to be were “twists” telegraphed miles in advance.
Cronenberg fans will appreciate the movie’s gore, which included the most realistic throat-cutting depiction I have ever seen. (No, really — it’s not that easy to slit a throat, and for once we get to see that you have to work at it. I mean there’s a reason our heads don’t just pop off. All that muscle and skin and gristle.) But if you were hoping for the Russian version of The Godfather, or even a gangster movie with the depth of, say, Miller’s Crossing, then you’re going to come away disappointed.
Chief among the film’s deficiencies were a lack of character development and inadequately developed motivation. Who is Nikolai and why is he taking these risks? For that matter, who is Semyon and why (other than the fact that he is a crime boss) does he have enemies back in Mother Russia? Even the movie’s central killing — of Soyka, son and made man from a rival Chechen family — receives only hints of an explanation. If well developed characters have six layers**, we are provided only the first one or two.
And some things are just plain inexcusable. There’s a vicious, bloody, nekkid-butt-waving and wiener-flopping fight scene in a steam bath, which Karen found objectionable for its poor choreography. I agree with her but I was more offended by the premise that the bad guys would mistake Nikolai for Kirill because of his star tattoos (sign of a made man). True, they’ve never met Kirill and don’t know what he looks like, but surely they would recognize tattoos that are less than two days old? And this is a pivotal moment, plot-wise.
Absent from Eastern Promises is that slipstream feeling of strangeness. No, I wasn’t expecting Nikolai’s hand to morph into a gun, nor did I expect him to pull a cup of borscht from the middle of his chest. But aside from some high stakes gore, the movie never takes chances.
Cronenberg is working on a sequel, which should come as no surprise to anyone who has seen the movie. By movie’s end (SPOILER), driver and dirty work guy Nikolai has risen to seat of power in this family, much as cadet James T. Kirk gloms onto the captain’s chair near the end of the recent Star Trek movie. (The ascension is every bit as unbelievable.) Will Nikolai and Anna meet again and relieve our sense of coitus interruptus? Count on it.
I enjoyed Eastern Promises, found it “fun,” especially Armin Mueller-Stahl’s sweet and sparkly Russian grandpa with a heart of bile. I’m just not so sure that “fun” is what I want from David Cronenberg.
D.
*From Sterling’s article:
Instead, this is a kind of writing which simply
makes you feel very strange; the way that living in
the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are
a person of a certain sensibility. We could call this
kind of fiction Novels of Postmodern Sensibility, but
that looks pretty bad on a category rack, and requires
an acronym besides; so for the sake of convenience and
argument, we will call these books “slipstream.”
But Mr. Sterling, Novels of PMS does have a certain je ne sais quoi.
**I just made that up. But it sounds about right, doesn’t it?
GREAT SF!
The wife and I just caught District 9 on TV, and wow. You have to see this movie.
Ordinarily, I dislike pseudo-documentary films (can’t watch Blair Witch Project, for example, since the camera work nauseates me) but the technique was so well executed, the film sucked me in within the first few minutes. In those few minutes, we learn about the arrival of an alien ship over Johannesburg, the sorry state of the ship’s occupants, and their subsequent ghetto-ization in District 9. Any superficial resemblance to Alien Nation quickly dissipates when we meet the ETs, who are most decidedly not cute humanoids plastered with a little silly putty and face paint. In a brilliant move, the movie’s creators made the aliens chitinous, segmented beasties whom the humans come to call Prawns. They’re hideous garbage-rifling, cat food-devouring creatures with more than a passing resemblance to cockroaches. They’re easy to hate, and the only thing that arouses our sympathies is that the humans in the movie are oh so much uglier.
The movie focuses on Wikus Van De Merwe, son-in-law to the CEO of Multi-National United, the corporation tasked with relocating over one million Prawns to District 10, a concentration camp located 200 km outside of Johannesburg. District 9 is too close to home, and the resident humans are tired of having aliens in their midst. MNU execs decide Wikus (portrayed by the movie’s producer, Sharlton Copley, who is kind of a good-looking Steve Carrell) is just the man to lead the relocation. As he makes the rounds of District 9 evicting Prawn after Prawn, military with guns drawn covering his back, Wikus proves to be an odious ambassador of humankind, lying to the aliens, perpetuating stereotypes, chuckling over the sound alien eggs make when they explode in the fire — “Just like popcorn! Do you hear it?”
Wikus is the hero.
Some historical background courtesy of Wikipedia:
Like Alive in Joburg, the short film on which the feature film is based, the setting of District 9 is inspired by historical events that took place in South Africa during the apartheid era, with the film’s title particularly referencing District Six. District Six, an inner-city residential area in Cape Town, was declared a “whites only” area by the government in 1966, with 60,000 people forcibly removed and relocated to Cape Flats, 25 km (15 mi) away.
District 9 surprised me several times; on many instances, it ran contrary to standard Hollywood tropes, but it didn’t so at every plot turn. It was unpredictably unpredictable. Does the relocation program end in genocide? Are the aliens planning some nasty surprise for their human oppressors? Ooh — they’ve made a getaway in a vehicle — now’s the obligatory chase scene, right? And will there be a happy ending? You gotta watch and see. And so I advise you not to read the IMDB entry or the Wikipedia article, but to view this one cold.
D.
Remake hell
Why does Hollywood do nothing but remakes? Or at least that’s how it seems sometimes. In the gym last weekend, I watched nearly all of Ben Stiller’s version of Heartbreak Kid. The original, starring Charles Grodin in the title role and Cybill Shepherd as the girl he meets and falls in love with while on his honeymoon, was an odd gem — I remember not being sure whether to laugh or cringe at Grodin’s sociopathic character. Been a long time since I saw that movie, but I recall it as an oddity: edgy, not a little disturbing. Certainly not rom-com.
The new one is pure rom-com, with only the slightest nod to the original working its way in with the ending “twist” (ZOMG, he’s gonna break another heart!) Other than that, the new version is pure formula, with new love interest Michelle Monaghan being oh-so-perfect (and beautiful, but who wouldn’t be beautiful compared to a baked lobster covered with Noxzema?), throwaway cameos by Carlos Mencia, Daily Show alum Rob Corddry, and Ben’s dad Jerry, and requisite grossness (which seems to be de rigeur ever since Something About Mary) supplied by a folk cure for jellyfish stings.
Broadway is even worse, stealing regularly from books, movies, and itself. Hairspray the musical surprised me, but I’m not holding my breath for Pink Flamingos the musical. But I do reserve dibs for the libretto for The Exorcist the musical. Imagine: possessed Regan in full makeup, head turned 180 degrees, cross brandished, lapsing into song! Oh, I love it already. It’ll be the best thing to hit Broadway since they recycled The Producers.
D.
High Zombedy
That’s Carrie-Anne Moss (doing her best June Cleaver) dancing with Scottish stand-up comic, John Cleese-lookalike, and zombie Billy Connolly (warning, profanity in that YouTube vid), in Canadian zombie comedy (yes, zombedy) Fido (2006), our latest NetFlix rental. Fido takes place in an alternative universe where the earth has passed through a radioactive cloud which has caused the dead to walk, and hunger for tacos cerebros. Folks live in towns surrounded by high fences, and they live a sort-of normal life until they die, at which point they become zombies. The well-to-do prepay for funerals in which the head is buried in its own little casket separate from the body, elementary school kids practice target-shooting with rifles, old people are suspect, lawbreakers get tossed outside the fence.
And, oh, zombies with control collars fill the role of the permanent underclass — as gardeners, butlers, and even concubines.
Relative newcomer Kesun Loder plays Timmy, Carrie-Ann Moss’s son, and he brings to mind a young Macaulay Culkin moreso than Beaver Cleaver. But the movie’s creative minds have Leave it to Beaver on the brain, or perhaps Father Knows Best, with zombies. (Certainly no stranger than Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.) Moss plays the typical perfect housewife, Dylan Baker her tight-sphinctered husband Bill. Fido (Connolly) proves to be a better father than Bill, but when he accidentally dines on a neighbor, chaos follows.
I’ve probably already told you too much. This movie was a delight. Ever since George Romero invented the modern zombie flick, these films have served as vehicles for social satire, often in a heavy-handed way. And while I can’t accuse Fido of subtlety, the satire didn’t lack for personality or cleverness. Rent it.
D.
You Don’t Know Jack
Believe it or not, in med school we did receive instruction in medical ethics. Our teacher was a minister, if I remember correctly, but he usually did not have much of a judaeochristian bias — at least, none that I could detect at the time. One day, he talked to us about euthanasia, and while sympathetic to the cause of euthanasia’s proponents, he felt certain that doctors had no business practicing euthanasia. “We need another professional specialty altogether,” he said. “Call them thanatologists.”
The two things I remember from that moment: the uncannily bright grin of one of my classmates, a fellow we’d nicknamed Mickie Mouse for his uncannily bright grins, and who would eventually go into psychiatry; it was as if the clouds had parted and he had looked upon the face of God. Like he had found his home. Sometimes I wonder what he’s up to*.
The other thing I recall: a loud and persistent thought. Why isn’t this our domain? It’s all a matter of how you view doctors. If our role is to keep people alive, then yes, euthanasia is a clear conflict of interest. But if our role is to relieve pain and suffering, then euthanasia should be part of the job.
About this time, the late 1980s, Jack Kevorkian was just getting started in his role as “death counselor,” soon to be death facilitator, eventually to be known to the media as Dr. Death. The media loved to portray the man as a ghoul. Sometimes I suspect that he reveled in this caricature; his artwork, which could best be described as “fitting for the Night Gallery,” would do nothing to destroy this image.
Knowing Time Magazine, I wouldn't be surprised if they had picked murderer.
While Kevorkian initially acted as a facilitator, he ceaselessly pushed the envelope. As long as he served as facilitator and not prime actor, he was judicially unscathed, thanks to the craft of lawyer Geoffrey Fieger and the sympathies of the juries. (When people are forced to confront the prospect of their own deaths, few would not want the option of a painless passing.) But when he himself administered the euthanasia drug to an ALS patient and then arranged for the videotape to be broadcast on 60 Minutes, the D.A. went after him. Kevorkian unfortunately represented himself in this case, and was ultimately convicted of second degree murder. He was ultimately paroled in 2007 after a little over 8 years in prison.
You Don’t Know Jack (HBO) is a wonderful bit of docudrama, not to be missed. Susan Sarandon stars as Hemlock Society member Janet Good, John Goodman as Kevorkian’s friend and assistant Neal Nicol, and Al Pacino plays Kevorkian himself. And while I like Pacino in just about anything he does, I have to admit that lately, Pacino plays Pacino and it’s rare to see him play anyone else. But in You Don’t Know Jack, Pacino lives and breathes Kevorkian. If you’ve ever watched Kevorkian on TV (and if you haven’t, I’d be surprised if he isn’t well represented on YouTube), you’ll find the resemblance striking. Also remarkable casting: Danny Huston as lawyer Geoffrey Fieger. I had to google “Geoffrey Fieger” to make sure he wasn’t playing himself.
I can’t praise this one enough, people. It’s a thoughtful, albeit biased analysis of the issue of doctor-assisted suicide. If you’re looking for a character in this film who can provide a cogent argument against euthanasia, keep looking**. Much like its subject, the movie has an agenda. But it was entertaining, too — funny, poignant, and above all a showcase of terrific acting.
D.
*Ach, what a disappointment. Just googled the man. He’s a successful molecular biologist at U of Chicago . . . not a thanatologist.
**Really, the only argument that comes close to being persuasive is the possibility for abuse by next of kin; but abuse to the point of death can occur in many and varied ways, from neglect to outright physical harm, and the law is there, ready to punish the offender. Euthanasia, since it is such a public act — it must ultimately pass muster with a coroner, I would think — could be easily regulated to greatly reduce the possibility of such misuse.
Some good, some bad, some ugly
From Vimeo, the Independent Film Noir and Dystopic Science Fiction website, one of the good ones:
Amazon Doomsday Commercial from Maladaahn on Vimeo.
Looking for another? Zigurate (on the homepage of the Vimeo site, as of this writing) was provocative, a bit eye-candyish in the Michael Mann sense, and borderline pornographic. And I have no idea what the ending means.
D.
Wealthy as Croesus
Just got done watching The Family Man, a 2000 film from Nicholas Cage’s production company, Saturn Films. Cage is (for me, anyway) mesmerizing as usual, so an otherwise bland and predictable plot didn’t manage to drag down the movie. The Family Man is basically a latter day It’s A Wonderful Life, with Cage in the George Bailey role, Don Cheadle as the angel Clarence. Granted, it’s an inverse Wonderful Life, since Jack Campbell’s (the Cage character’s) real life is sucky, and the imaginary one is divine.
The movie is a paean to the simple pleasures. What good is wealth if you’re alone, and aren’t the joys of a loving wife and two great kids ample recompense for a top job on Wall Street, a hot car, and a high-rent Manhattan condo?
Is it possible to give spoilers on a ten-year-old movie? If so, you’ve been warned. Once Jack gets enough of a taste of life with Kate & the kids to know this life is superior to the real one, Don Cheadle (another actor with riveting stage presence, btw) reappears and Jack knows the jig is up, he’s been given his “glimpse” of an alternate life, and now it’s back to Wall Street for him. But the old life is empty and he wants Kate, who in this universe he left over a decade ago, dumped really, and she’s long since gotten over him and moved on. No husband or boyfriend conveniently enough, but she does have a box of old boyfriend Jack’s stuff which she wants to unload on him before moving to Paris.
He tries to make headway with her, but she is over him, I mean really OVER him, and all the soulful looks in the world won’t penetrate. Paraphrasing here, “Yeah, you broke my heart once, Jack, but that was a long time ago, and I’ve moved on.” He begs her not to get on the plane but she blows him off. It’s all very moving, and if she had gotten on the plane, and if perhaps we could then see Jack striking up a conversation with someone new, this would have been a great movie. Think about it: there’s the tragedy of what he has lost, but at least he’s learned enough that maybe there’s hope for him yet. Not a Happily Ever After, but honest, because in real life you can’t go home again, but you can make a new home elsewhere.
This movie? Nuh-uh, not honest. Kate’s in the boarding line and Jack starts yelling about how they have a house in Jersey, and two kids, and how they still love each other after all these years, and how she won’t even let him touch her unless he tells her he loves her, and how their daughter can’t play violin very well but is precocious nonetheless, yatta yatta yatta . . .
Bad turn by the screenwriter, because I don’t care past relationship together or no, this woman who hasn’t heard from this guy in what, 15 years, she’s gonna be thinking, Crazy. Stalkerish crazy. And she’s gonna be calling security if he takes one more step towards her. Instead, she has coffee with him. Role credits.
The irony here is that Nicholas Cage the real life dude makes Jack Campbell look like a burger-slinger. He owns his own production company, Saturn Films, which has been turning out some big movies since 2000, including National Treasure. Cage is on his third marriage, and at one point owned 15 homes (including an island near Nassau and a 24,000 square foot home in Rhode Island), a “flotilla of yachts . . . [and] a squadron of Rolls Royces,” as well as lots of odd purchases of jewelry, art, and a big fossilized dinosaur head, for which he overbid Leo DiCaprio.
No one can accuse Cage of making nothing but HEA movies (Bangkok Dangerous and Knowing, to name two, had downbeat endings), so perhaps he can be forgiven for making one film with a sentimental ending. But it seems to me that if anyone understood how The Family Man should have ended, it would have been Nicholas Cage.
D.
Here’s one for your Netflix queue
Quick: name five real science fiction movies. Real ones, not monster movies, nor pseudo-Westerns or pseudo-Samurai or pseudo-whatever with a thin overlay of SF . . . I’m talking a movie that could not exist without the science at its core, and moreover, a movie that focuses on the themes that SF deals with best.
What does it mean to be human, for example.
So toss out Terminator and its sequels (pursuit by crazed killer, feh), Alien and its sequels (monster movie), Star Wars and its prequels (fairy tale) and what are you left with? Karen and I came up with 2001, THX 1138, and Blade Runner. Maybe Planet of the Apes, for all its flaws.
And then there’s Moon (2009).
Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, the sole flesh-and-blood operator of the helium-3 mining station Sarang, on the Moon’s far side. He’s accompanied by GERTY, the soft-spoken AI (voiced by Kevin Spacey) who will instantly conjure memories of HAL 9000. Sam’s nearing the end of his three-year term, with only two weeks to go before shipping back to Earth to be reunited with his wife and the nearly three-year-old child he’s never met. But all is not well with Sam; he’s having headaches and hallucinations of increasing intensity, and when he crashes his rover into one of the station’s four harvesters, things really start going to hell.
This is one of those films that cannot be reviewed. Either you screw up the next viewer’s experience with spoilers, or you provide such sketchy details that the reader draws the wrong conclusions. Yes, there’s a ruthless corporation (anyone with any sense of irony whatsoever will see right through the movie’s opening, wherein we are treated to a Lunar Industries Limited commercial — aren’t they wonderful?) and Kevin Spacey’s GERTY seems more than a little likely to win the AI Most Likely to Go Nuts Award, so isn’t this more of the same-old same-old?
Um, no.
Instead, this is a movie that confounds its viewers’ expectations, that provides a richness of detail that can keep people arguing for days (check out the discussion boards on IMDB — after you’ve seen the movie, of course), that packs a huge dramatic punch, and that tackles one of the big SF themes in a fresh and provocative way. There’s even a sly bit of social commentary here, snuck in on us with the film’s last line. It’s subtle and damn near everyone watching the movie will pass it off as a joke. And no, it’s not the oh so tired “Aren’t big corporations eeeeevil?” trope.
Good stuff, my friends.
D.