Movie roundup

On film:

• The Seventh Seal (1957)


• The Virgin Spring (1960): Seen as a double-feature. Difficult for me to believe (much less admit), but this was my first time seeing anything by Ingmar Bergman (other than just clips). Max Von Sydow is awesome. Seventh Seal is quite striking, with some great sound and imagery. But there's no drama; the outcome, by definition, is inevitable; if it doesn't happen at the end of the film, it will certainly happen after the film ends. Some acknowledgement of this irony would have improved the film. Virgin Spring, on the other hand, has much sharper drama, and the visuals don't suffer a bit. It was pretty excellent.


• Ocean's Twelve (2004): a half-assed mess, but an entertaining one. Still, someone needs to explain to me why the second half of the film happened, according to the film's own logic.


• Notorius (1946): Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman were great as usual, but I thought the suspense was pretty flat. Three rows in front of me, an obviously home-schooled 11 year old boy was being escorted by two parents, two parents, and possibly an aunt and an uncle. It appeared that this was his coming-of-age introduciton to Hitchcock. Adults were coaching him through every scene in whispered tones. I think it's great that they took the kid to see Hitchcock in the theater. But Notorious? What were they thinking? North By Northwest, sure, or maybe The Birds. But if you want to give an 11 year old boy, any 11 year old boy, a good first impression of Hitchcock, don't take him to see Notorious. All of Hitchcock's movies are repressed sexual desire, but at least pick one that expresses that with action, not just dialogue and camera angles.


• Finding Neverland (2004): If it's showing during your airplane flight, I recommed watching it.


• The Incredibles (2004): A true landmark. The traditional formula for success was to make a kids movie but include jokes aimed at the adults. Here's a movie where the plot is aimed at the adults, ignoring the kids altogether except where action and humor are concerned. And the results are brilliant. Hopefully this begins an age when we adults drag the kids to see our movies and the kids are surprised at how much they're entertained, reversing the trend of the last two decades.

On video:

• Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988): I was in junior high when this first came out; I still remember the overwhelming feeling it gave me, that there is a world of truly unlimited possibilities. It was possibly the most inspired I've ever felt by a movie, and it impresses me even more today: for the production to work, every detail had to be worked out carefully in advance; none of our digital-tweaking tools were available to them, and everything has to be locked in before the hand-animating could start. Interesting sidenote: Disney makes terrible DVD product. Before you can listen to the commentary track, you have to view a disclaimer screen which declares that the opinions expressed in the commentary track do not represent the views of the Buena Vista Motion Picture Group. Oh, brother. (Not eligible for Best Old Movie of the Year, since I'd seen it before.)


• Walt Disney: On the Front Lines: Disc 1 (1941-1946): mostly boring and unfunny cartoons to support the war effort in various capacities. Interesting to note that Disney was making war bond promos for the Canadian government even before Pearl Harbor. The "From the Vault" section contains slightly more controversial cartoons; each of these are proceeded by an apology by Leonard Maltin ("It is sometimes useful for a government to demonize its enemies") which Disney deems required viewing: it is impossible to skip past or fast-forward through them to get to the cartoon.


• In the Mood for Love (2000): It starts off entrancing, but after awhile I wished the trance would just give way to sleep. The framing and color were very cool; the drama was too cool. The mood doesn't develop so much as it slowly sinks.


• Chris Rock: Bring the Pain (1996): Very funny stand-up performance.


• Head of State (2003): Moderately funny hack-job of a movie.


• Dark Blue World (2001)


• Teddy Bears' Picnic (2002): I'm a big fan of Harry Shearer's radio program Le Show, mostly for its smart satirical writing. So I was all the more disappointed by his extremely flat and unfocused script for this movie. It really felt like there must have been an entire plotline that was excised in the editing room. What's left, unfortunately, isn't even worth a Shearer fan's time.


• Blast From the Past (1999): I caught this on cable at my parents' house over Thanksgiving, and I was really surprised by how much I enjoyed it. The first 20 minutes are so are the best part, and much of the plot makes no sense given the hero's motivation, but it was very pleasant, warm, charming time.


• The Last Days of Patton (1986): Patton, played once again by George C. Scott, breaks his neck and takes a long time to die. This made-for-TV movie aims to share with you his experience. Like clockwork, between every pair of commercial breaks, someone says something to Patton which triggers a slow zoom into his eye, at which point we are treated to a flashback of a young, lanky Patton (resembling the bulldog Scoot in no way whatsoever) doing something boring. Then we return to watch the older Patton lie in bed some more. This teleplay does revel something about Patton I hadn't known: while in Europe, he was boffing his niece!?!?


• Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944): Forgettable.


• Man on Fire (2004): I watched this on an airplane, so I think a lot of the cruelest violence was edited out, which must have been something, because the cruelty of the violence I saw was quite enough. Tony Scott is very effective at building and sustaining a tone that makes you feel like a hot boil os growing in your brain.

Roger, Ebert, I read you

Every once in a while, after I see a movie, I like to read Roger Ebert's review just so I can remind myself how bad a writer he is. Which isn't to say he's not a good film critic; I have no real opinion of the matter, frankly. But he writes at a high-school level, and what's more, he consistently gets details of the movies wrong. By consistently, I mean that every single review of his that I have ever read (which is not a lot) has contained at least one factual inaccuracy. This really blows my mind because a) my memory is often not very good, b) my mind wanders a lot and c) unlike Ebert, I'm not taking notes. So how can I remember all these movies better than he can? Maybe, since he sees so many more than I do, he's remembering details from other movies.

So I thought it would be fun to start a new regular feature. I'll see a movie, I'll read Ebert's review, then I'll post all the details Ebert has gotten wrong (using no research but my own memory banks, so you can determine whether I judge Ebert too harshly), plus any particularly bad examples of high school-level writing. WARNING: passages of Ebert may contain SPOILERS, since the bulk of his critiques does nothing but describe the plot, in the course of which he gives away twists, sabotages suspense, and telegraphs punch-lines.

Here's my entry for Ocean's Twelve (2004):

Benedict is accompanied on his visit by evil-looking twins and has a off-putting practice of poking people with a putter.... It's a cane, or walking stick.

Damon's character is named Linus, a good choice, since he is forever imagining himself shooting down the Red Baron but rarely gets out of the doghouse. Um, that's Snoopy.

When one character is excoriated as agoraphobic (what a wonderful phrase that is, "excoriated as agoraphobic," don't you think it's almost musical?), .... No, I don't, but thanks for taking time out to admire your own turn of phrase.

...It appears that another thief, the Night Fox, is in business against them, and is either more skilled than they are, or a supernatural being. The possibility of supernatural beings is never addressed in any context. But surely, this is just Ebert's extremely clumsy attempt at hyperbole.

Rather than describe some of their other targets, such as a priceless jeweled egg, .... Poor Ebert doesn't know the meaning of the word "describe", or else he'd know that he's just done it (with two adjectives, or "descriptor words", even).

The genius is that one of the stars is really there, and the other star is not really there, although she is there in the person of the character who seems to be her. This will all become clear when you see the movie. Thank you for reassuring us. Then, having seen the movie, we will breathlessly re-read your column so that we can knowingly chuckle at your clever wording.

Let me get this straight

There's a machine I've been designing in my mind. Two pads rest under the arms. These connect by a long screw to a padded girdle that fits above the hips. The screw is connected to a crank via a gearbox with a very high gear ratio, i.e. you must turn the crank many times to gain a single revolution of the long screw. Thereby, turning the crank separates the pads from the girdle and very gently straightens the spine. Another section of the machine would likewise place pads above the shoulders and a padded brace around the jaw and base of skull. I'd like it in red or blue. Please ship it to my place of work, as I have difficulty receiving packages at home.

Nerdism