Here and There

Okay, okay. Today has been a good one.

Beyond description.

This from Websurdity on the “coincidences” involved in the destruction of the Death Star.

Funny stuff. And good-looking site.

I was in downtown San Francisco the other day when I came across this:

If you can’t tell, it’s a USPS mailbox. On the back of the box was the web address http://www.uspsjedimaster.com. I snapped a photo, but wasn’t able to look up the site until later.

I’m thinking Wednesday’s announcement has to be Star Wars stamps. Awesome. Either way, R2D2 mailboxes are good enough, too.

I started meeting them last week. You know the types … “Oh, The Departed doesn’t deserve to win Best Picture because it’s a remake” is their motto. They’ll admit to having appreciated the movie, some more so than others, as with any movie. But they’re not willing to admit to its proper place in the upper echelon of American cinema, and only because this filmic production of the story wasn’t its first.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to have seen Infernal Affairs (one of the most infernally titled translations ever) at the Asian Film Festival in San Francisco. It was a nice surprise. What sounded good enough to me (a movie about cops and gangsters) turned out to be somewhat of a thinker’s movie. Wait, let me take that back. It was a popcorn movie, to be sure, but one that also makes you think, keeps you on the edge of your seat, and has some kick-ass fight scenes.

I may have seen another movie or two at that year’s festival, but it was Infernal Affairs alone that stuck with me.

When the rumblings began that Scorsese was remaking a Hong Kong cops and gangsters movie, the thought occurred to me that the original could be Infernal Affairs. Then I heard Leonadro DiCaprio signed on and I was equal parts thrilled and repulsed. But I knew the story, and I knew Scorcese’s ability as a filmmaker to be equally capable of killing a decent plot or seeing it out to its natural end. I saw The Departed.

Like Scorcese, DiCaprio is not always on the mark, but when he is, it’s a good time. And I really can’t think of any actor who wasn’t just this side of superb in the movie. From Alec Baldwin to Mark Wahlberg to Kevin Corrigan to Matt Damon, the characters were caricatured enough, but not too much, to be both believable and entertaining.

Now, about the re-write. People have been revisiting works of art for centuries. Cover songs, rewritten novels, remade movies, they’re uniformly viewed as legitimate forms of art in their own right. I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss a song, book, movie, or whatever outright just because the performer/author/director isn’t the work’s first render. Certainly it’s more complex than that.

First, the original has to be good, but not exclusively. Second, and here’s where personal preference comes into play, the remaker chooses between staying “true” to the original and making it their own. Those are the extremes, and there’s plenty of room in the middle. Scorsese was in the middle. He ported the Hong Kong thriller to Boston, Americanizing the story just enough as to render it palatable to those who never saw the original.

I think it’s really easy to take a good story and fuck it up (the Star Wars prequel trilogy, anyone?). It’s also possible to take a bad story and make it good. The Departed took a solid foundation and built upon it. Making it American, and doing a seamless job of it, automatically translates it for thousands, possibly millions, who otherwise wouldn’t experience it.

And I’m not necessarily arguing that winning an Oscar for Best Picture automatically validates a movie. I would’ve written this post regardless of last night’s ceremony. It does add a gram of weight to the argument that The Departed, though a remake, gets a lot of things right.

At the end of a year, it’s really tough for my feeble memory to keep track of the movies I saw that year. Not that I see a lot of movies. More like I just have a really bad memory.

But here’s my best stab at 2006’s list, with brief reactions:

Letters from Iwo Jima. Excellent. Suffered only for a few recognizable faces. Hardly a flaw.
Casino Royale. Great new Bond actor. Good story. Good action.
Jesus Camp. Great in that it showed me something I otherwise wouldn’t see. Scary.
Little Miss Sunshine. Easily the most overrated film of the year. Good at times, but overall cheesy.
The Science of Sleep. As close to Being John Malkovich-perfect as this year came.
Superman Returns. What a waste.
The Devil and Daniel Johnston. A close-up look at a far-out guy. Pretty damn compelling.
Babel. Brad Pitt couldn’t bring this movie down. Some flaws, but overall really good.
The Departed. As I tell people, 99 percent perfect. One percent absolute shit. Tie for best of the year, with …
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. He makes fun of those who need to be made fun of. And he does it well.
Volver. I’m an Almodóvar fan, but this was too sentimental. Too long, also.
The Good Shephard. Good, but overly ambitious. Slightly above average.
An Inconvenient Truth. Good, though I dozed a few times. Saw it late, so there’s that.
Marie Antoinette. I’m not opposed to camp. Just do it well. Coppola did not do it well. And Kirsten Dunst was god-awful.

Sorry to end on such a sour note, but I made this list in the order I remembered the movies. Hope this does something for someone out there.

Funny thing, when the only complaint you can lodge against a movie is that its subtitles should’ve been cast in yellow, not white, yet the overall effect of the film on you is modestly better than mediocre.

That’s not to decry Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima. It really is a well-made film. From the acting, to the on-location shots of the island, to the choice of mostly black-and-white film stock (Is there a technical term for what Eastwood used that I’m unaware of? Probably), Letters does an excellent job of what it set out to do: Tell the story of a famous (or infamous, depending on your orientation) battle from the side of the defeated.

Told mostly through the Japanese general (Kuribayashi) in command of defending the indefensible island and a reluctant army conscript (Saigo), the movie shows the stripped-down realities, the horrors of war, but with none of the trumpeted glory of victory. Instead, the mundaneness of fighting against all odds for your country, for your emperor, is given perhaps its best cinematic treatment.

Again, the only negative criticism I can come up with is that subtitles were hard to read. And I came away thinking what a good job Eastwood and his cast and crew did. That’s not to say this was a great movie. Just a really good one.

I enjoyed Casino Royale. It had good action, good acting, and a decent story, even if it did fall off the tracks at times. Daniel Craig is the perfect new James Bond. It’s true what they’re saying: He’s at least as good as Sean Connery. He makes Dalton, Brosnan, and Moore even more laughable than they already were. He proved to be a more dynamic Bond than his predecessors, playing both the amateur and the budding professional convincingly.I hated Eva Green, the lead female, though. For some reason, she was fine until she opened her mouth (I’m speaking of her lines and her dental circumstances here).

All in all, I enjoyed the movie. But my god, I went into the theater at 11:15 p.m. and got out at 1:45 a.m. And it’s not just by checking the clock that I think movies are too long. Casino Royale, like many films lately, felt un-necessarily too long while I was watching it.

I’m going to try something a little different here with my “review” of Little Miss Sunshine.

I realize it’s naïve and perhaps a bit ambitious, but I maintain and update this blog with the idea that people are reading, people other than my close circle of friends. I value the fact that anyone, friend or not, takes the trouble to read. But the few who go a step further to leave comments or otherwise engage in dialogue make this whole ordeal that much more meaningful.

That said, I’d like to know why people liked this movie. It’s been a long, long time since a movie has been talked up as much as Little Miss Sunshine, and, cynic that I am, I went in with relatively low expectations.

But I can’t figure out why everyone implored me to see it. Or why one friend went as far as to claim that the film was “one of the best of the young century.”

Sure, I laughed at times. And for the first 20 or 30 minutes, the film did a great job laying out and developing a diverse set of quirky and compelling characters. The plot even looked good, until it attempted to get underway.

After that point, the movie fell flat on its face, with corny plot twists and cheesy gags and cringe-inducing lines firing off at every turn.

The only “trees” I appreciated in this “forest” of wasted celluloid were Grandpa’s (Alan Arkin) advice to his vow-of-silence-d grandson Dwayne (Paul Dano) and the behind-the-scenes scenes from the Little Miss Sunshine pageant.

Otherwise, the film was predictable and bland. Steve Carell even did the same goofy straight-armed run he does in all his films. And I happen to like him.

I just don’t get it. I leave it to you to tell me what I’m missing. Please.

Saw Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep last night. It was one of those very-close-to-perfect moviegoing experiences, and I feel compelled to write something about it.

The movie elegantly blended plot with superficial elements, leaving behind an effective and thoroughly enjoyable experience.
What I mean is that the film was filled with visual and aural wonders, yet also maintained a tangible storyline, as well as some commentary on life.

The performances were great, too. As Stephane, Gael García Bernal again proves his expanding range, taking on a comically plagued individual, playing him slightly more comically than tragically. Stephane’s multi-linguality and “condition” render him a most sympathetic character.

Charlotte Gainsbourg (daughter of Serge) did well with Stephanie, whom we see as more or less a dual-personality. See the film and you’ll know what I mean.

The supporting cast was so amusing. Notable were Guy (Alain Chabat) and Serge (Sacha Bourdo), at times taking the comedic elements of the movie over the top.

It’s a movie as much about waking life as it is about dreams, about the way the two depend on each other and are forever symbiotically tied together. It questions the divisions between our cerebral experiences both in and out of sleep.

The Science of Sleep lacks the name-recognition afforded to Gondry’s last effort, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But it makes up for it in getting every element of excellent filmmaking right. It makes you laugh, it might make you cry, and most of all, it makes you think, though not too deeply.

Wow.

There are very few books or movies I haven’t been able to muster the strength or perseverance to make it through. Atlas Shrugged and the film-version of Breakfast of Champions come to mind.

I tried to watch Spike Lee’s Inside Man the other night, and I should’ve known something was seriously wrong when the opening shot had the unmistakably British Clive Owen monologing deadpan into the camera … speaking with an American accent. Yuck. It was only slightly less terrible than someone like Winona Ryder or Natalie Portman speaking British-English. No. You’re not allowed to do that. That means you, too, Gwenyth.

Then the movie really started, and started to piss me off. Right away, a scene in the lobby of the bank, with strangers talking to strangers as if they’ve known one another their entire lives. What about Denzel Washington’s character, whose first scene has him more or less tail-between-the-legs, his “lady” on the line bitching about something or other? Then, when he’s out on the job, his recently bold sidekick instantly becomes an earpiece for Inspector Denzel’s witty, Academy-worthy one-liners.

Or recently-held hostages speaking to their captors with a gravitas never before seen in cinematography (much less real life). Or how about this lethal dosage of cringe: the scene in which the crime-unit cops play a signal they’ve intercepted on a loud speaker, because, of course, “someone out on the street (in Lee’s beloved NYC) probably knows whatever language they’re speaking.” I paraphrase, but I don’t digress.

I turned the movie off shortly after that scene.

If Spike Lee wants to keep telling small “joints” with big implications, or big ones full of minor life detail, he should abandon all pretense of making his films “realistic.” People don’t behave the way Lee has them behave.

This movie could have gotten better had I stuck with it, but that’s not likely. Even if it did, the rest of the movie would’ve had to contend with 20 minutes of some of the worst moviemaking I’ve ever seen.

Why did they make Superman Returns? I’m racking my brains trying to figure this one out.

In a nutshell, it was boring. I’m not gonna go into detail, mostly cuz I just don’t think the film deserves it.

It wasn’t all bad, of course. The movie was puncuated with funny moments, exciting scenes, brilliant special effects.

But Kate Bosworth is no Margot Kidder. And, try as he may, Kevin Spacey can’t equal Gene Hackman’s immortal performance as Lex Luther in the ’80s versions.

Also, can someone please tell me why so many major motion pictures feel the need to be long? This one clocks in at 154 minutes. That’s about, oh, 74 minutes too long. And I’m not just saying that because we saw the 12:30 a.m. showing.

Okay, I feel I’ve rambled on enough about a film that doesn’t deserve it.