Show, don't tell
When
I see something like an ad for the Lord of the Rings trilogy playing in
a "world broadcast premiere" on TBS, I have to wonder if the idea is
that somebody who hasn't seen these films by then either in theater,
DVD rental or movie network will want to watch them on a channel that
edits them for time and goes to a commercial break every ten minutes.
Another thing that I don't "get" is these ads that I see about movies
and TV shows sold for PSP and iPod, which apparently somehow assume
that people want to watch movies and TV shows on a screen that is not
much bigger than a postage stamp.
Movies are at their best when viewed on the big screen without yappers and babblers talking around you. In my life, I have been lucky enough to see "Heat" and "The Usual Suspects" in the big screen so that I didn't even know beforehand what these movies were about. I mostly watch movies on TV, though, since we get the Movie Network that plays relatively new movies commercial-free. And The Sopranos, of course. I guess that this show is now their flagship to attract subscribers, since they even renamed their whole "Video on demand" channel as "The Sopranos on demand".
Speaking of that show, I guess they must now have a pretty huge budget to film it, since they can build sets and hire and clothe extras for short scenes that last only one minute. For example, the one short scene at the gay bar. And for the Johnny Sack's daughter's wedding, they brought in that guy who plays Meadow's boyfriend and had him say one line, and I don't think that we have seen him during this season. I don't think that any other show does that, but if they build a set or hire some actor for a speaking role, they use them as much as they can. This gives The Sopranos a very different feel compared to other shows, in which some minor character is either active during the whole episode, or does not appear in that episode at all.
We recently watched "Slipstream", a little movie about a scientist who has invented a portable time machine that allows the user to move ten minutes backwards in time. He devises an ingenious plan in which he goes to the bank, withdraws all his money from his bank account and pockets the bills, goes back ten minutes to the time when he still had money in the bank and repeats this as many times as necessary. You see, when the time machine is used, everything else in the universe returns to the way that it was ten minutes ago, but anything that touches the time machine does not. However, this effect only seems to extend to the human user of the time machine and his clothes and other humans who touch them, but not to other inanimate objects such as the floor, a bus that the user is in, the people in that bus, the air that surrounds them, other people touching this air etc. Apparently there is some kind of a interesting termination condition in the recursion that controls this logic.
As a side effect of this plan, the scientist gets to try different pickup lines for the cute bank teller in style of Groundhog Day. Unfortunately, the plan immediately goes bad since at the same time, a gang of bank robbers lead by Vinnie Jones (playing the same role that he always plays in every movie he is in) barges in, leading to mayhem since Homeland Security agents have been trailing the scientist.
What annoyed me most in this movie is that it could have been so great, but it wasn't. With this basic idea, it is a freaking crime to write a movie this bad, since with a moment of thinking, anyone could come up with plot twists and time loops that would make a great movie. The same basic idea has been used once before in the movie "Retroactive", and that movie should be the model of how time travel movies should be done. Somehow it didn't surprise me that at the end of the movie, it is simply decided that the ten-minute time limit doesn't really constrain the use of machine time at all, so the scientist can roll back the whole day and make everything good again. I am sorry if this spoiled anything, but it's not like you couldn't see this coming when watching this movie.
The movie "High Roller: The Stu Ungar Story" about the poker legend Stu Ungar was a more pleasant surprise. The unintentionally funniest thing about this movie was that after the first fifteen minutes, you could tell that the director had seem every Martin Scorcese movie a dozen times and probably wrote his film school thesis about them too, from the way he tried to make this film look and feel like "Goodfellas" and "Casino". There was even a scene where a woman in a big sixties hairdo and dress walks away from the camera along a hallway and then stops and turns sideways to take her top off. With the poker and mobster boom it was probably easy to get financing for this movie, and the usual actors who are typecast as mobsters to play in it.
The movie is told in flashbacks that the down-and-out old Stu tells in a motel room to a well-dressed and charismatic mystery man who sits in shadows so that we never see his face, and his identity is not revealed until the end. Based on what I read about Ungar, the choice of Michael Imperioli to play the starring role was a bit strange, since the character he played is about 180 degrees from the real man. And even though Imperioli looks much younger than 37 years or so that he was during the filming, it was strange to see other characters referring to him as a "kid" in scenes where he was supposed to be 20 or so. But one truly positive thing in this movie was that Stu wasn't depicted as a master poker player by having him get full houses and straight flushes all the time, in the same moronic way that some movie character who is a master chess player shows this by coming up with a one-move checkmate. I have often wondered how come their opponents who are also supposed to be master chess players don't seem to be able to think more than one move ahead.
I watched the movie "Blind Horizon" in hopes that it would be as good as the excellent "The Salton Sea", since Val Kilmer stars in both movies. It wasn't, but at least this movie illustrated vividly that few things create suspense in a movie as well as the sound effect where monotonous metallic clinging speeds up in reverse geometric series. A mystery man wakes up in the desert with an amnesia and tries to find out from his flashbacks and other evidence why he believes that the President is in danger to be assassinated. Along the journey he encounters a blonde nurse and a dark mystery woman who says she is his bride. Since there is not enough room in one movie for two good women for our hero to love, one of these women must be a villain... but which one?
I really liked the Nicolas Cage movie "Matchstick Men" since I honestly didn't see the twist ending coming at all. Even though this was a con artist movie, the fact that it was filmed using conventions of a totally different genre tricked me not to expect the compulsory twist ending. And what was even more delightful, the twist ending was totally consistent with the preceding events of the movie, and it wasn't just some decision that "hey, you know, let's just surprisingly reveal that this character is actually a villain even though it doesn't make any logical sense", as was done in "Confidence" or "Heist". With my innocence taken this way, in the movie "Criminal" about a master con artist and his new protege it was obvious from the start that there is going to be a similar twist ending, but the question is who is going to be revealed as being something different than what he has pretended to be. Unfortunately, the twist ending didn't really make sense in this case.
The movie "Spanglish" was almost like somebody had read Fred Reed's essays about the superiority of warm and feminine Mexican women who love and support men and want to have families over histrionic white American women who have been brainwashed by feminism, and turned them into a movie. (Man, am I so ever glad to have found and kept a good woman like my dear wife.) A young Mexican single mother moves to Los Angeles and becomes a maid for a successful master chef and his wife who is a caricature of a neurotic Western woman who wants it all. Gee, I wonder which woman the master chef who prefers a quiet happy life ultimately ends up with. Maureen Dowd and other feminists probably didn't like this movie very much, but it's not like men's happiness, preferences or interests have ever been important issues for them.
An unrelated funny detail about this movie that tickled my ribs was seeing all those houses that had been precariously built to a narrow beach between the sea and a road. I guess land is expensive over there. Let's hope that no driver ever loses the control of his car on that curvy stretch and end up crashing into somebody's bedroom.
Speaking of disasters, I have been intending to watch the movie "Nature Unleashed: Tornado", since the movie network magazine describes it thusly:
Movies are at their best when viewed on the big screen without yappers and babblers talking around you. In my life, I have been lucky enough to see "Heat" and "The Usual Suspects" in the big screen so that I didn't even know beforehand what these movies were about. I mostly watch movies on TV, though, since we get the Movie Network that plays relatively new movies commercial-free. And The Sopranos, of course. I guess that this show is now their flagship to attract subscribers, since they even renamed their whole "Video on demand" channel as "The Sopranos on demand".
Speaking of that show, I guess they must now have a pretty huge budget to film it, since they can build sets and hire and clothe extras for short scenes that last only one minute. For example, the one short scene at the gay bar. And for the Johnny Sack's daughter's wedding, they brought in that guy who plays Meadow's boyfriend and had him say one line, and I don't think that we have seen him during this season. I don't think that any other show does that, but if they build a set or hire some actor for a speaking role, they use them as much as they can. This gives The Sopranos a very different feel compared to other shows, in which some minor character is either active during the whole episode, or does not appear in that episode at all.
We recently watched "Slipstream", a little movie about a scientist who has invented a portable time machine that allows the user to move ten minutes backwards in time. He devises an ingenious plan in which he goes to the bank, withdraws all his money from his bank account and pockets the bills, goes back ten minutes to the time when he still had money in the bank and repeats this as many times as necessary. You see, when the time machine is used, everything else in the universe returns to the way that it was ten minutes ago, but anything that touches the time machine does not. However, this effect only seems to extend to the human user of the time machine and his clothes and other humans who touch them, but not to other inanimate objects such as the floor, a bus that the user is in, the people in that bus, the air that surrounds them, other people touching this air etc. Apparently there is some kind of a interesting termination condition in the recursion that controls this logic.
As a side effect of this plan, the scientist gets to try different pickup lines for the cute bank teller in style of Groundhog Day. Unfortunately, the plan immediately goes bad since at the same time, a gang of bank robbers lead by Vinnie Jones (playing the same role that he always plays in every movie he is in) barges in, leading to mayhem since Homeland Security agents have been trailing the scientist.
What annoyed me most in this movie is that it could have been so great, but it wasn't. With this basic idea, it is a freaking crime to write a movie this bad, since with a moment of thinking, anyone could come up with plot twists and time loops that would make a great movie. The same basic idea has been used once before in the movie "Retroactive", and that movie should be the model of how time travel movies should be done. Somehow it didn't surprise me that at the end of the movie, it is simply decided that the ten-minute time limit doesn't really constrain the use of machine time at all, so the scientist can roll back the whole day and make everything good again. I am sorry if this spoiled anything, but it's not like you couldn't see this coming when watching this movie.
The movie "High Roller: The Stu Ungar Story" about the poker legend Stu Ungar was a more pleasant surprise. The unintentionally funniest thing about this movie was that after the first fifteen minutes, you could tell that the director had seem every Martin Scorcese movie a dozen times and probably wrote his film school thesis about them too, from the way he tried to make this film look and feel like "Goodfellas" and "Casino". There was even a scene where a woman in a big sixties hairdo and dress walks away from the camera along a hallway and then stops and turns sideways to take her top off. With the poker and mobster boom it was probably easy to get financing for this movie, and the usual actors who are typecast as mobsters to play in it.
The movie is told in flashbacks that the down-and-out old Stu tells in a motel room to a well-dressed and charismatic mystery man who sits in shadows so that we never see his face, and his identity is not revealed until the end. Based on what I read about Ungar, the choice of Michael Imperioli to play the starring role was a bit strange, since the character he played is about 180 degrees from the real man. And even though Imperioli looks much younger than 37 years or so that he was during the filming, it was strange to see other characters referring to him as a "kid" in scenes where he was supposed to be 20 or so. But one truly positive thing in this movie was that Stu wasn't depicted as a master poker player by having him get full houses and straight flushes all the time, in the same moronic way that some movie character who is a master chess player shows this by coming up with a one-move checkmate. I have often wondered how come their opponents who are also supposed to be master chess players don't seem to be able to think more than one move ahead.
I watched the movie "Blind Horizon" in hopes that it would be as good as the excellent "The Salton Sea", since Val Kilmer stars in both movies. It wasn't, but at least this movie illustrated vividly that few things create suspense in a movie as well as the sound effect where monotonous metallic clinging speeds up in reverse geometric series. A mystery man wakes up in the desert with an amnesia and tries to find out from his flashbacks and other evidence why he believes that the President is in danger to be assassinated. Along the journey he encounters a blonde nurse and a dark mystery woman who says she is his bride. Since there is not enough room in one movie for two good women for our hero to love, one of these women must be a villain... but which one?
I really liked the Nicolas Cage movie "Matchstick Men" since I honestly didn't see the twist ending coming at all. Even though this was a con artist movie, the fact that it was filmed using conventions of a totally different genre tricked me not to expect the compulsory twist ending. And what was even more delightful, the twist ending was totally consistent with the preceding events of the movie, and it wasn't just some decision that "hey, you know, let's just surprisingly reveal that this character is actually a villain even though it doesn't make any logical sense", as was done in "Confidence" or "Heist". With my innocence taken this way, in the movie "Criminal" about a master con artist and his new protege it was obvious from the start that there is going to be a similar twist ending, but the question is who is going to be revealed as being something different than what he has pretended to be. Unfortunately, the twist ending didn't really make sense in this case.
The movie "Spanglish" was almost like somebody had read Fred Reed's essays about the superiority of warm and feminine Mexican women who love and support men and want to have families over histrionic white American women who have been brainwashed by feminism, and turned them into a movie. (Man, am I so ever glad to have found and kept a good woman like my dear wife.) A young Mexican single mother moves to Los Angeles and becomes a maid for a successful master chef and his wife who is a caricature of a neurotic Western woman who wants it all. Gee, I wonder which woman the master chef who prefers a quiet happy life ultimately ends up with. Maureen Dowd and other feminists probably didn't like this movie very much, but it's not like men's happiness, preferences or interests have ever been important issues for them.
An unrelated funny detail about this movie that tickled my ribs was seeing all those houses that had been precariously built to a narrow beach between the sea and a road. I guess land is expensive over there. Let's hope that no driver ever loses the control of his car on that curvy stretch and end up crashing into somebody's bedroom.
Speaking of disasters, I have been intending to watch the movie "Nature Unleashed: Tornado", since the movie network magazine describes it thusly:
A volcanologist's warning of an imminent eruption near a resort town is scoffed at by the town's mayor.
I
guess you can pretty much visualize every moment of the movie from that
description alone. You could say that there is a slight disconnect
between the name of the movie and the description, but perhaps the
earthquake somehow causes the tornado, in a magical joyride of B-movie
special effects. Let's hope that Steve Dutch
eventually writes a scathing analysis and review about this movie,
since he seems to do that for every movie that somehow includes
geology. And why is it always that the greedy mayor or governor who
decides that a small risk is not worth losing all tourist revenue for
that season and therefore going totally bankrupt turns out to be the
pompous fool who pays with his life? It would be interesting to see a
movie about a mayor who ignores such an unlikely warning and then
everything goes all right.
A while ago we saw a short clip of
some other turkey movie that might perhaps be worth watching for the
sheer humor value. This one is apparently about a volcano under Los
Angeles. In the clip we saw, an old guy heard something in his storage
shed or garage and opens the side door to investigate. Hey, maybe it's
burglars or something. After we see him opening the door, he stops and
shrieks in horror one second before a giant red hot lava flow bursts
out of the door and engulfs him. Now I certainly didn't expect that to
happen! Perhaps this movie will also include a scene where some woman
is peacefully reading a book in her living room sofa, hears a knock at
the front door, goes to open it and is similarly engulfed by an
incoming flow of lava. Heck, I'd pay to see that.
The message of the movies "Retroactive" and "Slipstream" is that you can't go back into the past and change time so that the present is better than the way it originally happened - unless, of course, you go really far back, beyond the length of time you are supposed to be able to go back.
Posted by Glaivester | 11:41 AM
I like your blog.
You mentioned something that's a real problem. I used to sit in the movie theatre like a votary. Shared experience, a sense of importance for the film itself, big screen, big sound.
I stopped going completely years ago. People just will not stop yammering in the movie theatre. And I stopped going before cell phones became ubiquitous. I can only imagine what a zoo it is now.
Another interesting item: seeing a good or fresh movie without knowing much, or anything, about it before you attend. Heat is a very underrated movie, and must have looked amazing on a big screen for the first time.
I got collared in a shopping center many years ago, while out with my father. Want to attend a sneak screening of an as yet unreleased film? Yeah sure.
It was Jaws. Seems trite today, but it was quite innovative for its day, and fresh. The audience was literally shrieking and wailing.
My father was visibly moved during Quint's soliloquy about The Indianapolis. He told me, later, he had bombed Tinian during WW2 and later landed on it.
I went swimming again last week.
Posted by SippicanCottage | 1:06 PM
Heat is a very underrated movie, and must have looked amazing on a big screen for the first time.
It was. Like I said, I didn't know anything about that movie beforehand. I had nothing better to do that evening so I went to the local two-screen movie theater that turned out to be jam-packed that night, when other nights it was usually almost empty.
Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen | 9:52 AM