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Apr 28 2009
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movies, travel

movie review: into the wild

This afternoon I watched Into the Wild (2007) and thought long and hard about my lack of balls. Now, I’d never be able to do what the main character of the movie does in the end, heading up into Alaska to live off the land. Nope. You’ve seen me complain about living in a heated insulated place over a winter. And the movie bothered me with all the beautiful blue skies he had up there. Granted it was an Alaskan summer not winter, but still. That there was only one day of horrible weather shown put the lie to the whole enterprise.

But the rest of the travelling he does, well, I probably wouldn’t be able to do any of that either. Sad really. When so much of what I think of myself and try to project has to do with that wanderfooted image. Gah. This was a movie I shouldn’t have watched right now. Stirs up too much guilt and hope. I blame Aileen.

What day was it today? Tuesday I guess. Must be. In two days I’ll be getting ready to hit the road in my own meagre way. Paying for the wheels conveying me. Like a wannabe chump.

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Mar 07 2009
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books, comics, movies

movie and book review: watchmen

So I saw Watchmen this afternoon, and am happy to report that it didn’t make me want to claw my eyes out, but it’s really not as good as the comic. I don’t know that I ever expected it to be and I was kind of relieved it wasn’t.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

While it was neat to see a bunch of the stuff on screen, it felt like it was a lot of eye candy but with like a salmon flavour (possibly tunafish). Just off somehow. Like Veidt is trying to get society off fossil fuels, when in the book he’d already done that and it hadn’t really helped the world. And Rorshach kills the kidnapper/killer with a cleaver instead of letting the guy make his own compromise to save his life or not. There wasn’t really a reason to care about anyone in the movie apart from the fact that it was a great book (which might have been the metatextual point).

The pace of the thing was wrong. I mean wrong for a movie and wrong for the book. In the book the simultaneity of the arrangement of panels on a page means that the whole Dr. Manhattan episode is actually happening all at once. It’s all right there and you can go with it back and forth, instead of being pulled through flashbacks. A movie goes forward even when it doesn’t really. But the structure of the thing needed to be handled differently. Movie flashbacks aren’t the same as comic book flashbacks. I know I’m probably just parroting a bunch of Alan Moore stuff here (it seems I a lot of my “views on comics” are the most easily understandable bits of his interviews), but I think in the end I do agree that it was unfilmable. (I do stand by my previous assertion that the best possible adaptation would have been as a 12-episode HBO miniseries.)

That’s not to say it was horrible. They did a good job with what they could do. There are lots of bits I missed seeing but they’re all still in the book. I just checked. No pages were erased by the existence of the film.

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Feb 14 2009
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library, movies

movie review: brand upon the brain

We have the Criterion Collection DVD of Brand Upon the Brain in the system and somehow it made its way out to Intrepid the other day for me to grab up. I felt bad for missing it when it was playing in the city but watching a Guy Maddin with other people around would seem to be a recipe for hearing people be self-important douches as they leave the theatre. Here it was just me and I could like it without having to sound like a douche to anyone. Except you, I guess. I think I’ll watch it again tomorrow with a different narrator.

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Feb 07 2009
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movies

movie review: coraline

I did my part and went to see Henry Selick-directed Coraline (2009) last night. If it had just been Selick’s stop-motion movie I probably wouldn’t have seen it opening night, but it’s also a Neil Gaiman book, so adding my dollars to the opening weekend pool felt worthwhile. Apparently it does make a difference when you see a movie. Not when it’s Dark Knight or something big, but when it’s just a little one. I guess it matters for the big guys too, just not as much individually.

Anyway, the movie was good. I saw it at Grant Park in 3D. John Hodgman and whoever did the cat were my favourite voices, and the stop-motion was beautiful. The whole actual quest part of the story felt like it went too quickly. I mean, it looked good and all, but sitting in the theatre it felt like there was tonnes and tonnes of buildup and then boom! it was all over. In a nice neat package. I should know better than to expect the same kind of introspection you get from a book. And maybe I brought all that slow pacing to the book myself. Who knows?

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Nov 30 2008
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movies

movie review: the sun also rises

The Sun Also Rises (2007) is not a version of the Hemingway novel. It’s a Chinese movie directed by (and starring) Wen Jiang. Todd gave me this DVD (and a bunch more) the last time I was in China but I hadn’t watched it until last night. I don’t know why. There’s a son with a fengde mother. Well, she’s only fengde after she loses her fish shoes to a CGI bird. There’s a house in the woods made up of artifacts of her madness and after her son has a sneezing fit inside she’s back to normal before disappearing.

Then there’s the story of Teacher Liang who’s accused of groping five women at his school. He’s caught and beaten by a horde with flashlights. The flashlight chase scene was so pretty. There are a couple of shots I would frame a frame of and hang it on my wall. Eventually he is exonerated and then kills himself.

Then we jump back to the boy in the village and the teacher’s friend Tang and his wife are out there for him to be re-educated (it’s 1976). The boy’s mother has just disappeared and Tang goes out hunting with the peasant kids, leaving his wife in the shack to have an affair with the boy (who’s like 20) with the fengde mother. Tang finds out and says he’ll kill the boy when he learns what velvet is.

Finally there’s a flashback to 20 years before and Tang’s wife and the boy’s (soon to be since she’s a million months pregnant) mom are riding camels through the desert, one to a wedding and one to claim the body of her dead lover. The boy’s mom gives birth to him in the toilet on the train and she stops the train so she can run back along the tracks to find him. And the sun rises. The end.

The whole thing was kind of crazy and dreamlike and good. It was shot beautifully except for that damned CGI bird. The main thing that bugged me was how many clothes the peasant boy had. He never wore the same thing twice.

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Nov 26 2008
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movies

movie review: synecdoche, new york

I saw Synecdoche, New York (2008) on Monday at the Globe. I must admit that though I’ve been waiting for this one to show up in Winnipeg I’ve been mispronouncing the title for weeks (in my head), depriving me of the pun. It seems to be my fate to always read the letters che as a sh sound. When the words come from the Greek instead of the French that is incorrect. Beyond my ignorance on pronunciation the movie didn’t disappoint. Well, the absence of Catherine Keener for most of the film was a bit disappointing, but I loved the way time went and the circular stuff that happened and the absurdity and the deathbed scenes and the doubling trebling of everything. Philip Seymour Hoffman was so good, so painful to watch. Great movie. Weird and awesome and true.

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Nov 17 2008
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movies

movie review: sunshine

Danny Boyle’s movie Sunshine (2007) is the first scifi movie I’d watched in a while. I’m reading a lot more SF recently and it occurred to me I hadn’t seen a movie set in space in a long time. So I took Sunshine out of the library and watched it. And while I liked it, I realized why reading SF works better: zero-G doesn’t cost anything extra in a book. It frustrated me to no end to watch this sort of realistic ship in the year 2057 or something let the people walk around on board like they were in Star Trek. Especially when there was cool good stuff like the hydroponic garden on board. But you can’t film zero-G for cheap. Sigh.

Other than that, Sunshine was pretty much the movie I wanted it to be. I’ve been noticing this a lot recently, that when I see a movie I’m seeing whether I would have made similar choices. I saw Pineapple Express (2008) this summer and completely recognized it as the movie I would have made at age 18. Sunshine has the stuff I would put in a movie now: the challenge that’s faced, the timing of the beginning, the choices made, the body count, Cillian Murphy (I just cannot look away from his face when it’s on screen). Maybe not some of the ending stuff.

All in all though, it wasn’t the best SF movie I’ve seen recently, but it was what I was craving, which it turns out was a less horrific Event Horizon. (My favourite recent SF flick being The Fountain (2006) which is exactly the movie I’d make if I were making one today.)

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Jul 20 2008
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comics, movies, winnipeg

nothing is any good if other people like it?

I was part of the phenomenon of The Dark Knight’s box office record breaking on Friday. Go me for liking things other people like.

Meanwhile, since the [Watchmen] trailer debuted the other day, packaged with the theatrical release of The Dark Knight, Watchmen has jumped to Amazon’s Number Four overall seller. That’s not a fandom thing: fandom already has its copies. That’s the vox pop sitting through the opening showings of Dark Knight, because the vox pop is totally jazzed about Dark Knight, and seeing this Watchmen trailer that declares it’s based on “The Most Celebrated Graphic Novel of All Time” and saying to itself, “Vox Pop, I gotta get me that thing. That looks cool.”

I noticed that the 20-screen theater where I saw Dark Knight is currently showing five different superhero movies. (They just closed Iron Man.) Just as Tom Disch informed us back at the turn of the millennium that science fiction had conquered the culture while we weren’t looking, what’s clear in 2008 is that the superhero story is a mainstream enthusiasm. Let’s type that again:

The superhero story is a mainstream enthusiasm.

-Jim Henley on tor.com

I was telling Kate about the Dark Knight this morning, not in detail, but saying how I liked it. “It was great in a…” and I was going to finish that sentence with “…in a superhero kind of way” but in mid sentence I realized that wasn’t what I meant at all. It wasn’t just a niche kind of movie. I mean it was a big budget kind of Hollywood thing sure, not an independent piece of cinema, but saying “…in a Hollywood kind of way” felt overly pretentious. trying to come off as an arthouse snob, like I’m better than popular things. In the end, I finished the sentence with “… in an awesome kind of way.” Because I really enjoyed it.

I saw it at the Towne on Friday early evening and the theatre wasn’t full. It being the Towne the audience wasn’t the comic book geek crowd from the suburbs, but a rougher local bunch. There was a lot of laughing at vaguely inappropriate moments (eg. the Joker’s early magic trick with the pencil) when shocked horror might have been more what the filmmakers were going for.

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Apr 01 2008
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movies, travel, writing

good stuff to come, this isn’t it

I’m home.

The sleep schedule’s all messed up but luckily I don’t have to go to work till tomorrow. And even then it’s not like I have to wake up at a normal time. I need four (maybe six, to get me home and back) hours of functionality in the evening. Piece of cake.

Customs went fine despite my statistical abnormality of being gone for a month with two carry-on bags. I didn’t run out of stuff to read on the flights since we had what I like to think of as Austin planes, the ones with the personal video thingies in every seat that my cousin has been installing. I could watch good movies (Michael Clayton, I’m Not There and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) on my schedule which was much better than the flight to Shanghai where we were stuck with one bigscreen showing of Dan in Real Life. I burned through my Eco book then.

I’ll be posting about the trip soon. The tasks today are to drag my pictures over to my computer and then get them up onto Flickr. Anyone want to give me $30 to upgrade to a Pro account over there? Then all my pics become available, not just the most recent 200. I think I can do it myself. I’ve got a tax return coming someday.

I also have a new writing regimen/schedule figured out which begins tomorrow. It means I’m going to be less constantly online than I have been. I get a lot more done without internet access, and even if I make promises to be using the word processor it’s so easy to slip over to check the email or what’s new on the wire and then boom a morning is gone. So it’s going to be mornings in notebooks only. Afternoons and evenings I can go into typing things up (which means things are going through more drafts so that’s a good thing) and mucking about the intertubes, but sitting at a table and cranking out pages by hand worked really well in March. I wrote a short book out there. The first draft of one anyway. Now will take the excessive rewrites and chopping that into something that might be interesting to someone other than myself. Maybe by the end of summer. But that’s afternoon work, night work. Morning work is shitty first draft time. Even if they’re shitty first drafts of things I’ve already had a couple of goes at.

So yes. I had a very good time. Holly’s easy to miss and easy to be with. That’s a good combination I think.

Jan 19 2008
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movies

i wish life were in 3D

Is there something more satisfying than watching an old man cut off his own arm so he can reach that extra inch further into a dragon and rip out its heart with his bare hands? I think not.

Well, actually doing it might be a bit more satisfying. I guess. More bloody though.

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