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Category Archives: Movies
Movie Cliches
I don’t think I ever posted this, did I? Spurred by Cracked’s attack on injury cliches, I present a list of movie cliches I once sent to Roger Ebert for inclusion in his Little Movie Glossary (none have shown up; possibly because I accidentally abbreviated one that could be mistaken for a mis-spelled bad word and therefore tripped a spam filter). Several of these have appeared in cracked and on tvtropes.com. But I thunk of ’em independently.
Upcoming: 2009
I just saw one of the last films on my list of 2009 films to see (yes, I know, I know — hey!) I don’t know what’s more interesting about Up in the Air, its devotion to the details of frequent flyer, frequent driver and other privileged customer clubs … or the fact that IMDB is filled with people noting the errors the film has in the details of those clubs. People really do get obsessed with that stuff.
Me? I have at least two airlines on my shit list because they cancelled my miles (which were enough to get tickets) because I didn’t fly with them enough. Assholes.
Weekend Linkorama
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Banks? Really?
TMQ is on a tear this week about movie depictions of bank robberies, specifically the new hit The Town. Typical bank robberies don’t even involved weapons, apparently.
TMQ is right, but here is my question: who robs a bank, anyway? Bank robbing is so 1930’s. Banks don’t have any money — as we just found out with the bailout — except for exploding dye tablets. If you really want to make money as a crook, get involved with high finance or government.
But then again, that rarely involves shoot-outs.
Update: More here. Affleck says they interviewed real bank robbers to make the story more realistic. I wonder if it they understood that the criminal might be exaggerating their own exploits?
Inception
Having had more than a week to think about the “must-see” movie of this year, I still like it quite a bit. The science is ridiculous, of course, and not always consistent. But as an entertaining thriller, it’s yet another feather in Christopher Nolan’s cap. He has yet to make a bad movie.
What’s really interesting to me is that, over the last year, we’ve had no less than five very good science fiction movies hit the screen. This after a long long wasteland in which no good science fiction movies were being made (roughly between The Matrix and WALL-E). But Avatar, Moon, District 9, Star Trek and Inception were all good, even great. They featured novel ideas, good writing and great plotting. And you can even see the fore-runners of this surge in movies from the past few years like the aforementioned WALL-E and the vivid Children of Men.
I’m sure Time Magazine will come up with some reason why this micro-trend is happening. Back when Potter and LOTR were dominating the box office, TIme ran a front-page article claiming that the stampede to fantasy movies was a cultural attempt to escape from the stress of the War on Terror. I’m not making this up. Apparently, when both series were being green-lighted, the makers knew terrorism was going to be a big deal and we’d need something to escape to. It never occurred to Time, Inc. that people will go to good films no matter what the genre and it just so happened that the two best franchises were in the fantasy genre.
So I’m sure the recent spate of sci-fi success will stimulate someone to claim its escapism from the economy or something. Maybe. But I think it’s just that people like good movies. And the recent sci-fi films have been very good.
Post Scriptum: On the planes to and from Oz, I caught the movies Kick-Ass and Iron Man 2. The former was much better than I expected. I know there was a lot of controversy over the depiction of a 12-year-old girl hurling profanity and slaughtering rooms full of bad guys (Roger Ebert hated the movie because of this). But the depiction was so ridiculously over the top, I couldn’t take it seriously and just enjoyed the ride. The latter also exceeded my low expectations, although I wasn’t that enamored of it. I’m getting a little tired of bigger badder CGI smash-em-ups. The best things about Iron Man 2 were the interactions of the characters. More of that and less explosions for movie 3 would do nicely, thank you.
100 Greatest Movies
Joe Posnanski lists his picks as the 100 best movies he’s seen. Since that post went up a week ago, I’ve been mulling over a post of my own on this subject. I’m still deciding whether to go with my 100 favorite or the 100 best. The difference is subtle but important. By “100 favorite movies” I mean 100 I’d want with me on a desert island (I mean, besides “How to build a raft out of a palm trees and fingernail clippings”). By “100 best movies”, I mean the 100 I’d give to aliens if they said they were going to destroy our civilization and that would be all the remained.
I’ll mull this over and maybe put up a post once week on the subject. I have a deep love of movies, I like lists and I like talking about myself — hence the blog. So this sounds like it’s right up my alley.
Weekend Linkorama
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Thursday Linkorama
This linkorama is brought to you by the letter H.
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Wednesday Linkorama
Fueled by Abby taking swimming lessons…
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Monday Linkorama
The Bechdel Test
I found this to be very illuminating:
This is one of those things that is so fucking obvious that you spend a few minutes slapping yourself in the head for not thinking of it first.
It’s difficult to assess how films do on this test off the top of my head. But after thinking about it for a while, I’m somewhat stunned at just how many films fail it. For example, of the 25 top-rated films on IMDB, going by memory:
Three of the movies — Shawshank Redemption, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and 12 Angry Men have no significant female characters at all.
Eight films — Stars Wars, Empire Strikes Back, the Dark Night, Casablanca, Fight Club, Once Upon a Time in the West, the Usual Suspects and Seven Samurai — have only one significant female character. Same goes, incidentally, for the Star Wars prequels. To be fair, the female characters in several of those films are strong. But they fail the test. My recollection is that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and City of God also fall into this category.
The LOTR movies and Pulp Fiction have several women, but they do not interact.
Goodfellas and both The Godfather films have several female character who interact. But my recall is that they only discuss the men in their lives. Raiders of the Lost Ark has a brief exchange between Marion and Sala’s wife about monkey, but I don’t think that counts. I’m not sure about The Matrix but I don’t recall a female conversation. There’s a reference to an offscreen conversation between Trinity and the Oracle. But that was about Neo.
Only four of the top 25 films meet this test:
Schindler’s List, despite being dominated by its male characters, has numerous scenes of Jewish women discussing the situation.
Rear Window passes the test. Despite Hitch’s icy blonde reputation, he always had interesting female characters. Psycho fails the test, but mostly because of the way the film is structured.
Silence of the Lambs has some interaction between Clarice and one of her friends at the academy.
But even those four are marginal passes.
So is this indicative of extensive sexism in Hollywood? Yes and no. One problem is that a number of those films deal with subjects — war, crime, prison — which have historically been male-dominated. Others take place in circumstances where there few women — 12 Angry Men, for example, was written when juries were usually all-male.
In addition, IMDB’s top 25 movies among women is little different. Most of the women-favored movies are identical to the male-favored list and the new ones aren’t exactly breaking the mold. Amelie and Forest Gump I don’t recall well enough but think they fail. Gone With the Wind passes (more on that in a second). I’ve not seen American History X but doubt that it passes. To Kill a Mockingbird and Beauty and the Beast pass, I think. Up fails, as does WALL-E. So one could argue that women aren’t exactly demanding movies that pass the Bechdel test. Even the conventional “chick flick”, if I can use the term, is mostly about romance.
However, that misses the point, in my opinion. The problem is that our movies have, for the most part, been heavily divided between “chick flicks” about romance and “guy movies” about everything else. This doesn’t have to be the case; it simply represents a blind spot in the mostly male writers, producers and directors of movies and TV. Almost all of the top 25 movies could have passed the Bechdel test if writers gave two shits about creating more than one interesting woman character. The movies that do pass the test didn’t exactly go out their way to do it. They just rounded the movies out a bit, made them fuller and more realistic.
In the end, this trend may be less of symptom of sexism than sexism convolved with writers attempting to economize on character development. One thing I’ve noticed in movies and TV is the startling number of characters who are single children, have deceased parents or have no children of their own. This is mainly because it gets so complicated to write about real people with real families and real circles of friends. Writers also tend to write exclusively male characters since it’s so easy to write your own gender and “Gary Stu” the damned thing. (As an unpublished writer myself, I used to be that way. But I eventually started writing female characters and found them far more interesting.)
As an example of how things could be different, you can contrast Star Trek: The Next Generation against Babylon 5. The latter had interesting female characters who frequently talked about something other than men. The former, however, danced on the blade quite a bit, never seeming to know what to do with its female characters (although it still usually passed the test). This was a principle reason why, in my opinion, B5 was the better show.
As another example — the most successful movie of all time — Gone With the Wind — is a vast war epic that has numerous interactions with women that are not just about men (just mostly about men … Oh, Ashley!) Titanic and Avatar dominated the box office and, I think, both pass the test or at least dance on the blade.
I’m not saying that people should rewrite movies to make sure they pass this test. If nothing else, I don’t want to watch a movie and hear my brain shriek “Bechdel scene” when some pointless all-women conversation is shoe-horned in. The Bechdel test is a thought experiment, not a recipe. Some movies and genres are simply unsuited to having multiple dynamic women characters — Lawrence of Arabia or Master and Commander, for example. “Bechdelling up” books like LOTR would be misguided and smack of tokenism.
No, I think the lesson here is that Hollywood still has a blind spot. Not about women, but about life.
The Hurt Locker
I finally saw the Best Picture of 2009. It’s good, maybe even great. It has some inaccuracies that I’m sure drive genuine Iraqi vets up the wall (one particular sequence, in which the soldiers run around in the dark without using their night vision, was particularly egregious). But as an action-thriller, it works very well, held together mainly by the lead performance and exquisite directing.
I note the IMDB rating is rather low (7.9) for such an acclaimed film and Amazon’s review are a bit mixed. It ranks around Iron Man and Frost/Nixon for 2008, the year it was technically released. That seems about right to me, actually. Right now, I rate it an 8. Good, but not Great.
What puzzles me is why this won Best Picture. It’s a good movie, but it’s in the same category as District 9 and Avatar, two fellow nominees whose presence also puzzles me. It’s an action movie; a “guy movie”, really. It doesn’t have a great deal of artistic merit and it’s unlikely to be remembered as an all-time classic. I liked it better than Up or Inglorious Basterds and haven’t seen the other films. But some strike me as being more in traditional Oscar territory.
So why did it win? Was it really that great a picture? I don’t think so. I think Hurt Locker’s victory can be attributed to two factors.
1) Many people didn’t want Avatar to win and stampeded to the alternative. And if they gave the middle finger to Cameron by decorating his ex-wife, all the better. (I don’t think it bothered Cameron at all, though. I’m sure he’s crying all the way to the bank.)
2) I think many Academy members didn’t watch the movie and figured that it must make a statement against the Iraq War (which it doesn’t).
In short, it strikes me as a victory of Hollywood politics.
The politicization of award season has really stopped bothering me anymore. I was furious when the mediocre Shakespeare in Love triumphed over the amazing Saving Private Ryan. But ever since Lord of the Rings won the Oscar, my interest has waned.
And I really don’t think that’s a bad thing. What point do the Oscars serve anymore, other than for Hollywood to worship itself? Critic’s top ten lists are online. Places like metacritic will merge them into a big list for you. Rotten Tomatoes compiles reviews. IMDB compiles user ratings. Hurt Locker is one of the rare films that got a boost from winning the award. But it’s not like no one would have heard of it otherwise. Maybe I only have 50% of the X chromosomes needed to appreciate the “elegance” and “spectacle” of the awards show, but even those who have a full complement seem to be getting bored with it.
(And as an aside, I had to turn off the Oscars during the actor’s award presentations. It’s intolerable to watch each actor get some worshipful paragraph read to them by another actor. Give me a fucking break. These are actors, not miracle workers. No matter how good Meryl Streep is, it’s not like she cured cancer.)
Anyway, the movie is good. I may be even buy it. And in the end, that’s all that matters: whether people watch it and keep watching it in the future. Awards come and go. Art remains.
The Digital Now
This Christmas, I heard a lot of people express skepticism about buying new DVDs and blu-rays. The reason was because was are supposedly going to go to digital streaming and storage of movies. What do you need a blu-ray for when you can have all the movie you want on a hard disk?
I remain skeptical of this.
I’ll ignore for the moment any arguments about technology. I’ve been streaming netflix movies to my TV for some time and they look fine. I’m sure that will only improve. I have no doubt that a lot of movies will be watched that way. And while there are concerns that the internet infrastructure can keep up, I’m sure enough money will make the problem go away.
But I remain skeptical that an iTunes like device will completely replace the video library, at least for a long long time. My skepticism is based on three recent events.
First, I recently bought both The Dark Knight and Star Trek on blu-ray with the so-called digital copy. If this is the future of home video, you can leave me out. The digital copies are only authorized on a certain number of machines (and the bad code caused it to register on my laptop twice). Hollywood has been immensely stupid on DRM and I have no intention of putting my movie pleasure at their mercy. I suspect I am not alone in this.
Second the recent incident in which Amazon yanked copies of 1984 off of Kindle was alarming. Bezos apologized but the reasoning behind it sounded ominous — a copyright violation. What might happen if we have, say, a “Coming to America” style copyright dispute? Will the movies vanish from our hard drives? Or what happens if some government agent decides that, for example, “The Tin Drum” constitute kiddie porn and then unilaterally yanks it from every video library in America?
Finally, there is the very real danger that certain directors (*cough* Lucas *cough*) might decide to put out new and improved versions of their movies, replacing original copies while you sleep. Do we want to give them that power?
The fundamental problem here is that Hollywood’s (and Washington’s) attitude is that you do not own digital copies of movies, music or books — you merely license them. I see this as the pin that may eventually burst the digital ballon. Until we move to a fairer system of copyright law — on in which you permanently own copies and fair use is protected — there will be curmudgeons like me who will resist. And with good reason.
It’s simply a fact that the technical hurdles of the digital movie era may be nothing compared to the pinhead politician problems. I’m not sure that has a solution.