Friday, July 27, 2007
Hollywoodland (on DVD)
Hollywoodland is a mixed film with some good bits and some not so good bits
The good bit is the story of George Reeves, best known for playing Superman in a TV show in the 1950's
The George Reeve's story is a tale of failed ambition, of initial promises that lead nowhere and a struggle to carry on. George Reeves had an auspicious debut in a small but striking part in "Gone With the Wind". Wanting a Clark Gable career, Reeves ended up playing Superman on TV, at a time when TV was regarded as a slum, while having his life subsidised by the wife of a movie mogul. This was not as bad as it sounds. The Movie Mogul wife really loved him, and he was the idol of the nation for playing Superman.
However, Reeves wanted more and felt capable of more and Ben Affleck who plays Reeves really makes us believe so.
After Superman, Reeve unsuccessfully attempts a career in directing and producing. Failing that he tries for a TV wrestling show capitalising on his notoriety as Superman.
I liked George Reeves story, because it could be the story of so many of us. We have this vision of ourselves of what we would like to be, but never quite make it. Ben Affleck plays George Reeves with incredible empathy (no doubt helped by his own downfall) and subtlety I hadn't thought him capable of.
Unfortunately George Reeves is only half the story. The other story follows Louis Simo, a low rent detective, played by Adrien Brody as he tries to uncover the truth about George Reeves shooting death (which starts the film), while having issues with his divorced wife, who has custody of their son. This story is a plot device given too much screen time. Despite being a good actor, Brody isn't able to do much with role that shouldn't have existed in the first place.
Why introduce a cliché of a detective? Also, the film has no answers about Reeves death. Was it suicide? Did Reeves jilted fiancé did it? Did the Movie Mogul did it? Nobody knows, and all the film manages is to present all options and make a case for each.
To make up for all this lameness, we have Adrian Brodie's character giving up alcohol and forming a meaningful relationship with his son.
With a name like Hollywoodland, the film should have just stayed within Hollywood. Instead of Adrien Brodie, I would have preferred more of The MGM movie mogul played by Bob Hoskins and his wife, Reeves lover, played by Diane Lane. A recreation of Gone With the Wind would also have been fun.
The good bit is the story of George Reeves, best known for playing Superman in a TV show in the 1950's
The George Reeve's story is a tale of failed ambition, of initial promises that lead nowhere and a struggle to carry on. George Reeves had an auspicious debut in a small but striking part in "Gone With the Wind". Wanting a Clark Gable career, Reeves ended up playing Superman on TV, at a time when TV was regarded as a slum, while having his life subsidised by the wife of a movie mogul. This was not as bad as it sounds. The Movie Mogul wife really loved him, and he was the idol of the nation for playing Superman.
However, Reeves wanted more and felt capable of more and Ben Affleck who plays Reeves really makes us believe so.
After Superman, Reeve unsuccessfully attempts a career in directing and producing. Failing that he tries for a TV wrestling show capitalising on his notoriety as Superman.
I liked George Reeves story, because it could be the story of so many of us. We have this vision of ourselves of what we would like to be, but never quite make it. Ben Affleck plays George Reeves with incredible empathy (no doubt helped by his own downfall) and subtlety I hadn't thought him capable of.
Unfortunately George Reeves is only half the story. The other story follows Louis Simo, a low rent detective, played by Adrien Brody as he tries to uncover the truth about George Reeves shooting death (which starts the film), while having issues with his divorced wife, who has custody of their son. This story is a plot device given too much screen time. Despite being a good actor, Brody isn't able to do much with role that shouldn't have existed in the first place.
Why introduce a cliché of a detective? Also, the film has no answers about Reeves death. Was it suicide? Did Reeves jilted fiancé did it? Did the Movie Mogul did it? Nobody knows, and all the film manages is to present all options and make a case for each.
To make up for all this lameness, we have Adrian Brodie's character giving up alcohol and forming a meaningful relationship with his son.
With a name like Hollywoodland, the film should have just stayed within Hollywood. Instead of Adrien Brodie, I would have preferred more of The MGM movie mogul played by Bob Hoskins and his wife, Reeves lover, played by Diane Lane. A recreation of Gone With the Wind would also have been fun.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Spoiler-Free Review (Novel)
For me the Harry Potter series peaked with the forth book, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire". While I found the two books following very readable, I felt they didn't amount to much. Part of the problem is that, after the Goblet of Fire, the Harry Potter series became more concerned with backstories, really stalling the series.
The backstories are compelling. It's presentation through letters, conversations, biographies, newspaper articles and interviews, not so much. For example, the story of Tom Ridell in "The Half-Blood Prince" is great, but it's impact undermined and muted due to it's presentation through flashbacks in the pensieve.
This problem continues in Book 7 -"The Deathly Hallows. The backstory, of Lilly and James Potter shown through letters and Voldemorts memories, of Dumbledore through Rita Skeeters biography and Snapes through the pensieve, mutes their impact.
Mind you Rowling may have deliberately created distance in the backstories. Presented with maximum impact, this book (and others in the series) could well have become unsuitable for kids.
Snape is the most undersold character in the book. The Deathly Hallows should have been about Snape and his relationship with Dumbledore and the Potters. He deserved more than just briefly appearing in the beginning of the film and in the end, where his story is told through the bloody pensieve, right in the middle of a climactic battle. He deserves his own book and movie
This book finally fully reveals Dumbledore, following him through his childhood, to his youth, adulthood and death. Nothing is as it has seemed in other books. His death in the "Half-Blood Prince" never quite made sense but in this book, we finally find out what really happened.
Kreacher, the house-elf that betrayed Sirius Black comes back and his part in the whole saga with Sirius's brother, is also very compelling.
And thats the great strength of the "The Deathly Hallows". The pay-offs of all the major story and emotional arcs have been worth the ten year wait.
A strong villan in a series like this is essential. Voldemort is just that. But it is the manner in which all the characters like Snape, Kreacher, the Malfoys react to him, that make the Harry Potter series.
The book continues its theme of Holocoust-like persecution of Muggles. But we also find that Muggles have also behaved badly.
Books 7 -"The Deathly Hallows"- is a much better book than Book 6 -"The Half-Blood Prince" and Book 5-"The Order of the Phoenix" and ends the whole series in a way that most readers will find satisfying- I read the epilogue several times. Set in the future, it ties up the fate of all remaining characters (those that don't die in the book) in a way that ensures nobody will try to resurrect the series in the future.
The backstories are compelling. It's presentation through letters, conversations, biographies, newspaper articles and interviews, not so much. For example, the story of Tom Ridell in "The Half-Blood Prince" is great, but it's impact undermined and muted due to it's presentation through flashbacks in the pensieve.
This problem continues in Book 7 -"The Deathly Hallows. The backstory, of Lilly and James Potter shown through letters and Voldemorts memories, of Dumbledore through Rita Skeeters biography and Snapes through the pensieve, mutes their impact.
Mind you Rowling may have deliberately created distance in the backstories. Presented with maximum impact, this book (and others in the series) could well have become unsuitable for kids.
Snape is the most undersold character in the book. The Deathly Hallows should have been about Snape and his relationship with Dumbledore and the Potters. He deserved more than just briefly appearing in the beginning of the film and in the end, where his story is told through the bloody pensieve, right in the middle of a climactic battle. He deserves his own book and movie
This book finally fully reveals Dumbledore, following him through his childhood, to his youth, adulthood and death. Nothing is as it has seemed in other books. His death in the "Half-Blood Prince" never quite made sense but in this book, we finally find out what really happened.
Kreacher, the house-elf that betrayed Sirius Black comes back and his part in the whole saga with Sirius's brother, is also very compelling.
And thats the great strength of the "The Deathly Hallows". The pay-offs of all the major story and emotional arcs have been worth the ten year wait.
A strong villan in a series like this is essential. Voldemort is just that. But it is the manner in which all the characters like Snape, Kreacher, the Malfoys react to him, that make the Harry Potter series.
The book continues its theme of Holocoust-like persecution of Muggles. But we also find that Muggles have also behaved badly.
Books 7 -"The Deathly Hallows"- is a much better book than Book 6 -"The Half-Blood Prince" and Book 5-"The Order of the Phoenix" and ends the whole series in a way that most readers will find satisfying- I read the epilogue several times. Set in the future, it ties up the fate of all remaining characters (those that don't die in the book) in a way that ensures nobody will try to resurrect the series in the future.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
A Fistful of Dynamite aka Duck You Suckers (seen on DVD)
I discovered director Sergio Leone’s films in the early nineties in a small town in the Fiji Islands called Lautoka. I was working in the local sugar mill, as an engineer, living in the mill grounds (which were very tropical and very beautiful) in the Bachelor’s Quarters (a large and lovely British colonial building). There wasn’t much to do outside work, except get drunk and get stoned in the ganja (marijuana) grown in the cane fields.
One of the few activities outside substance abuse was movies. There were two cinemas, both dives but I went there a lot anyway. In between, I watched things on a 17” Sony Triniton TV and VCR, that I bought brand new (I was quite staggered by my extravagance).
One of the problems with watching movies on TV (aside from the tiny screen) was the poor quality of videos. By the early nineties, most videos available in Fiji were pirated usually through video cameras taken into cinemas. This was one reason why I visited the ratty cinemas. The only films available in original transfers were older ones mastered in the mid to late eighties. Even these looked pretty bad due to use they had got over the years.
As a result, I ended up seeing films I wouldn’t have otherwise bothered with. In those days, I was disinterested in certain genres like Horror, Gangster Movies and Westerns find their violence dull repetitive and unpleasant. For me a fight sequence was like a pointless song and dance number in a Bollywood film- In there for its own gratuitous sake and nothing else. Therefore I hired Leones “Once Upon a Time in America” from the video store without much expectation of doing much more than a brief look.
The print of “Once Upon a Time..” was great, almost overcoming the limitations of my small TV. People hadn’t bothered to hire it out much. It also blew me away, even though it was 4 hours long and I had trouble following the film. It has a very complex structure set in 3 time periods between which it moves fluidly, often in single take. I was also distracted and mesmerised by the sheer physical beauty of the film and Ennio Morricone glorious score.
What struck about Leone’s film was that while it had all the trappings of a gangster film, it was not really a film about gangsters. It was a film about friendship and betrayal and I realised for the first time, what it was for a film to transcend its genre.
It was 12 years before I saw a Leone film again- and it was the same one. “Once Upon a Time in America” on DVD seen on a plasma TV, won in an American Express competition. I looked Leone up and discovered that he had done a lot of spaghetti westerns and I was disappointed. I had seen a few spaghetti westerns in my teens and hated them.
Still I bought “Once Upon a Time in the West” when it came out on DVD and again I was blown away. The film begins with a group of thugs waiting at a train station for a train. Just this event is shown in real time for over10 minutes, with no score except natural sounds designed by Morricone. My flatmate couldn’t take it and left declaring it to be the worst film he had ever seen. Five years later, he still expresses outrage for having sat through those 10 minutes.
Since then I have watched Leone films as they appeared on DVD and they have continued to surprise me. All his films transcend their genre by their themes, which though powerful and epic, are so well integrated in the films that one is barely aware of them. An example of this is the “War is bad” theme in “The Good, The Bad, The Ugly” illustrated by a wordless scene where Clint Eastwood offers a dying solider, barely out of his teens, a cigarette.
Don’t have dinner while watching this film, as I did as it starts on an extreme close up of a torrent of pee drowning ants. It sets the tone for what is a very provocative film.
The film, set in Mexico in the early twentieth century, begins with a peasant hitching a ride in stage coach of rich passengers, who while initially outrage by the intrusion decide to make sport of him. They ask him, if he knows how many children he has had, how many children his mother has had, if he knew his age or his father, of deriding his intelligence. He reacts with all the intelligence of a cow. The highlight of this abuse, which goes on and on, is a monologue by a fearsomely prim lady, who claims to know all about these peasants, the lot of them squeezed into a small room, and when the light goes out they reach to, mother, sister, brother, goat, her voice trembling with the lasciviousness of it all.
The peasant, Juan, turns out to be bandit and very efficiently and brutally robs the whole coach with his gang composed mainly of kids he has had with different women.
There is nothing glamorous about Leone’s peasants. You can almost smell their stink, they look so disgusting, conforming in many ways to stereotypes the coach passengers have fun with, but don’t in other ways.
In Leone’s world the concept of right and wrong has almost no meaning. This is particularly evident in Juan’s rape of the prim lady. We don’t see actual rape, so we don’t know how she reacted. But she certainly went in heat, as she described the peasant orgy, and the impression left is, she probably enjoyed it. She definitely didn’t enjoy being stuck in cart, nude, with all the other male passengers, also nude, and then tipped into a pig sty.
These peasants while extremely downtrodden, aren’t noble but given their circumstances what else can they but extremely brutish.
Juan’s lifes ambition is to rob a bank in a city called Mesa Verde, which looks like coming to fruition when he meets a dynamite expert, Sean an ex-IRA “terrorist”. Sean manipulates Juan to become involved in a revolution.
Leone’s films are dense with plot, but such care is given to characters and their environment, that for the time you are watching the film, you are completely hooked.
In many ways this has got to be one of Leones strangest work. The camera work of the Mexican Sequences are simply “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Ben Hur” epic, yet it seems to have a cartoonish and low budget sensibility at the same time. Ennio Morricone, uses classical music as was used in cartoons to underline specific moments. This approach ensures the film doesn’t come across as self-important (it does open with a quote from Chairman Mao).
This is the third Leone Western I have seen, the others being “Once Upon a Time in The West” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”. After seeing “A Fistful of Dynamite”, I can’t wait to get the others, yet to be seen..
One of the few activities outside substance abuse was movies. There were two cinemas, both dives but I went there a lot anyway. In between, I watched things on a 17” Sony Triniton TV and VCR, that I bought brand new (I was quite staggered by my extravagance).
One of the problems with watching movies on TV (aside from the tiny screen) was the poor quality of videos. By the early nineties, most videos available in Fiji were pirated usually through video cameras taken into cinemas. This was one reason why I visited the ratty cinemas. The only films available in original transfers were older ones mastered in the mid to late eighties. Even these looked pretty bad due to use they had got over the years.
As a result, I ended up seeing films I wouldn’t have otherwise bothered with. In those days, I was disinterested in certain genres like Horror, Gangster Movies and Westerns find their violence dull repetitive and unpleasant. For me a fight sequence was like a pointless song and dance number in a Bollywood film- In there for its own gratuitous sake and nothing else. Therefore I hired Leones “Once Upon a Time in America” from the video store without much expectation of doing much more than a brief look.
The print of “Once Upon a Time..” was great, almost overcoming the limitations of my small TV. People hadn’t bothered to hire it out much. It also blew me away, even though it was 4 hours long and I had trouble following the film. It has a very complex structure set in 3 time periods between which it moves fluidly, often in single take. I was also distracted and mesmerised by the sheer physical beauty of the film and Ennio Morricone glorious score.
What struck about Leone’s film was that while it had all the trappings of a gangster film, it was not really a film about gangsters. It was a film about friendship and betrayal and I realised for the first time, what it was for a film to transcend its genre.
It was 12 years before I saw a Leone film again- and it was the same one. “Once Upon a Time in America” on DVD seen on a plasma TV, won in an American Express competition. I looked Leone up and discovered that he had done a lot of spaghetti westerns and I was disappointed. I had seen a few spaghetti westerns in my teens and hated them.
Still I bought “Once Upon a Time in the West” when it came out on DVD and again I was blown away. The film begins with a group of thugs waiting at a train station for a train. Just this event is shown in real time for over10 minutes, with no score except natural sounds designed by Morricone. My flatmate couldn’t take it and left declaring it to be the worst film he had ever seen. Five years later, he still expresses outrage for having sat through those 10 minutes.
Since then I have watched Leone films as they appeared on DVD and they have continued to surprise me. All his films transcend their genre by their themes, which though powerful and epic, are so well integrated in the films that one is barely aware of them. An example of this is the “War is bad” theme in “The Good, The Bad, The Ugly” illustrated by a wordless scene where Clint Eastwood offers a dying solider, barely out of his teens, a cigarette.
Don’t have dinner while watching this film, as I did as it starts on an extreme close up of a torrent of pee drowning ants. It sets the tone for what is a very provocative film.
The film, set in Mexico in the early twentieth century, begins with a peasant hitching a ride in stage coach of rich passengers, who while initially outrage by the intrusion decide to make sport of him. They ask him, if he knows how many children he has had, how many children his mother has had, if he knew his age or his father, of deriding his intelligence. He reacts with all the intelligence of a cow. The highlight of this abuse, which goes on and on, is a monologue by a fearsomely prim lady, who claims to know all about these peasants, the lot of them squeezed into a small room, and when the light goes out they reach to, mother, sister, brother, goat, her voice trembling with the lasciviousness of it all.
The peasant, Juan, turns out to be bandit and very efficiently and brutally robs the whole coach with his gang composed mainly of kids he has had with different women.
There is nothing glamorous about Leone’s peasants. You can almost smell their stink, they look so disgusting, conforming in many ways to stereotypes the coach passengers have fun with, but don’t in other ways.
In Leone’s world the concept of right and wrong has almost no meaning. This is particularly evident in Juan’s rape of the prim lady. We don’t see actual rape, so we don’t know how she reacted. But she certainly went in heat, as she described the peasant orgy, and the impression left is, she probably enjoyed it. She definitely didn’t enjoy being stuck in cart, nude, with all the other male passengers, also nude, and then tipped into a pig sty.
These peasants while extremely downtrodden, aren’t noble but given their circumstances what else can they but extremely brutish.
Juan’s lifes ambition is to rob a bank in a city called Mesa Verde, which looks like coming to fruition when he meets a dynamite expert, Sean an ex-IRA “terrorist”. Sean manipulates Juan to become involved in a revolution.
Leone’s films are dense with plot, but such care is given to characters and their environment, that for the time you are watching the film, you are completely hooked.
In many ways this has got to be one of Leones strangest work. The camera work of the Mexican Sequences are simply “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Ben Hur” epic, yet it seems to have a cartoonish and low budget sensibility at the same time. Ennio Morricone, uses classical music as was used in cartoons to underline specific moments. This approach ensures the film doesn’t come across as self-important (it does open with a quote from Chairman Mao).
This is the third Leone Western I have seen, the others being “Once Upon a Time in The West” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”. After seeing “A Fistful of Dynamite”, I can’t wait to get the others, yet to be seen..
Sunday, July 15, 2007
About Movies from Melbourne
Making movies is a difficult business- hugely expensive, with many elements having to align to achieve the end product. Yet many reviewers take a very superior attitude as if given the chance, they would have made a much better movie they are reviewing than the film makers.
i will concentrate on the good things about films-mostly. This year has been particularly good for films. I have loved a lot of the films I have seen. This includes, the Transformers, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Knocked Up, Oceans 13, Sunshine, Black Book, Spider Man 3, Pan's Labryinth and Children of Men. Others I enjoyed, including Pirates of the Carribean, Night at the Museum, Babel.
The big Summer Spectaculars seem to be getting over special effects and have rediscovered old-fashioned story telling and characterisation- even Michael Bay with The Transformers (though it could be Steven Spieberg had something to do with that).
I have also been seeing bollywood films. I have been reviewing them under http://bollywoodbollywood.blogspot.com/.
i will concentrate on the good things about films-mostly. This year has been particularly good for films. I have loved a lot of the films I have seen. This includes, the Transformers, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Knocked Up, Oceans 13, Sunshine, Black Book, Spider Man 3, Pan's Labryinth and Children of Men. Others I enjoyed, including Pirates of the Carribean, Night at the Museum, Babel.
The big Summer Spectaculars seem to be getting over special effects and have rediscovered old-fashioned story telling and characterisation- even Michael Bay with The Transformers (though it could be Steven Spieberg had something to do with that).
I have also been seeing bollywood films. I have been reviewing them under http://bollywoodbollywood.blogspot.com/.
The Sun Theatre in Yarraville Village
I recently bought a townhouse in Yarraville, a rapidly gentrifying suburb, west of the city of Melbourne in Australia. A former working class industrial suburb, Yarraville has the vibe of a small country town, accentuated by its shopping area set out a in a series of small streets. Aside from a couple of mini supermarkets, greengrocers, flower shop, hairdresser, cafes, restaurants, bakeries and bookshop, it also features an art deco cinema complex with six screens, showing both arthouse and commerical films.
The Sun Theatre is a dream come true. Within walking distance from home, reasonable ticket pricing, comfortable and beautifully renovated theatres and most importantly, it's the only cinema in Melbourne which shows no ads-not one. You buy your ticket, go in the cinema, see one movie preview and launch right into the movie.
Most of the movies reviewed were seen in the Sun Theatre.
If you are a visitor out of town, out for a local experience, then catch a train to Yarraville (on the Williamstown line), and check out Yarraville Village and the Sun Theatre.
The Sun Theatre is a dream come true. Within walking distance from home, reasonable ticket pricing, comfortable and beautifully renovated theatres and most importantly, it's the only cinema in Melbourne which shows no ads-not one. You buy your ticket, go in the cinema, see one movie preview and launch right into the movie.
Most of the movies reviewed were seen in the Sun Theatre.
If you are a visitor out of town, out for a local experience, then catch a train to Yarraville (on the Williamstown line), and check out Yarraville Village and the Sun Theatre.
Black Book
Director Paul Verhoeven , the author of such memorable movie moments as Sharon Stones crotch in Basic Instinct, the three tittied whore in Total Recall, and wall to wall dismemberment in Starship Troopers, remains hardcore in his latest movie.
Black Book is the story of a Jewish Woman who goes blonde (upstairs and downstairs) to survive the Nazis at the tail end of WWII in Holland. Going into the film, I expected Paul Verhoeven to deliver a mass market experience about heroism and adventure with lots of sex and violence. And that is exactly what he delivers and more.
At this point in time, I didn't think there was anything new that could be said about WWII and the Nazi's but I was wrong. Verhoeven aims to debunk the myth that the Dutch were the shining heros of WWII for resisting the Nazis. Much of the film takes place after the defeat of Germany and we get to see the allies behaving badly, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. Women implicated in collaborating with the Nazi's are publicly humiliated by having their heads shaved, sewage poured over them and beaten, by the Dutch and the Allies behaving pretty much the way Nazis did. Like Roman Polanski's The Pianist, the only "good" Nazi in the film is executed by the Allies as a result of petty bureaucracy, even though he has vital information.
Strangely enough, Black Book reminded me of another Verhoeven film- Starship Troopers. Ostensibly, a sci-fi creature feature with a military flavour, it seemed to glorify fascism though a second viewing clarified the film as a sly satire (the reason I was unsure was that it seemed unbelievable that a big budget film like this would be allowed to be a satire).
To me, the military heroes of Starship Troopers were depicted, in the way the Nazis saw themselves, a perfect race, fighting for a noble war against an enemy that weren't human. Black Book makes the point that there is a Nazi lurking in all of us.
Black Book is the story of a Jewish Woman who goes blonde (upstairs and downstairs) to survive the Nazis at the tail end of WWII in Holland. Going into the film, I expected Paul Verhoeven to deliver a mass market experience about heroism and adventure with lots of sex and violence. And that is exactly what he delivers and more.
At this point in time, I didn't think there was anything new that could be said about WWII and the Nazi's but I was wrong. Verhoeven aims to debunk the myth that the Dutch were the shining heros of WWII for resisting the Nazis. Much of the film takes place after the defeat of Germany and we get to see the allies behaving badly, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. Women implicated in collaborating with the Nazi's are publicly humiliated by having their heads shaved, sewage poured over them and beaten, by the Dutch and the Allies behaving pretty much the way Nazis did. Like Roman Polanski's The Pianist, the only "good" Nazi in the film is executed by the Allies as a result of petty bureaucracy, even though he has vital information.
Strangely enough, Black Book reminded me of another Verhoeven film- Starship Troopers. Ostensibly, a sci-fi creature feature with a military flavour, it seemed to glorify fascism though a second viewing clarified the film as a sly satire (the reason I was unsure was that it seemed unbelievable that a big budget film like this would be allowed to be a satire).
To me, the military heroes of Starship Troopers were depicted, in the way the Nazis saw themselves, a perfect race, fighting for a noble war against an enemy that weren't human. Black Book makes the point that there is a Nazi lurking in all of us.
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