If you close your eyes and listen to Rainn Wilson, especially in Six Feet Under re-runs, you can swear he’s about to say, “Dave … I can’t let you do that.”
Creeps. Me. Out.
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“Forget the wax & feathers, and do a better job on the wings.” *
YouTube – Stanley Kubrick Accepting the DGA Award
* Kubrick’s take on the moral of the Icarus story, rather than “Don’t fly too close to the sun.”
Guillermo del Toro is a bloody genius. The Devil’s Backbone is one of my favorite movies ever, and I can’t wait to see Pan’s Labyrinth — I have to wait until January 12 for it to even open here though. Argh!
Click the poster below to see delToro’s sketchbook …
I just watched My Architect, courtesy of Netflix. The son of architect Louis I Kahn goes on a journey to know more about his father (whom he knew only a little at a time before Kahn’s death in 1974).
You know, I keep wanting to run down architecture that seems to be about the spectacle, the shape and light and mass, instead of the usefulness of the structure. But I think this is the first time it has really clicked for me how *useful* the spectacle can be.
When an architect from Bangladesh is brought to tears explaining what Kahn’s incredible design for the Bangladesh national assembly means to the people of that country, and when you see its image on their money and in the graffiti of their streets — somehow that makes it click.
Not that it’s always justifiable if it makes buildings unusable — thousands of poor Bangladeshis carried concrete on their heads to make that building. What if it had turned out to be hard to use for its purpose, and had gotten in the way of the people’s government instead of supporting it? Its visage wouldn’t have meant nearly as much.
I think I’d just about fly to Bangladesh to see that thing. It’s phenomenal.
Philadelphia Daily News | 09/12/2006 | Flavia Monteiro Colgan | ABC’s ‘9/11’: Clinton was right
The tragic events of 9/11 are not something to be trifled with. Putting words into people’s mouths and showing them doing things they never did is not acceptable.
The docudrama portrayed Clinton as a president who didn’t care about terrorism, but his record tells a different story. He had daily briefings on al Qaeda and meetings three times a week. Compare that to a president who couldn’t break away from clearing brush to read a memo that said, “Bin Laden Determined to Attack America.”
The fact is that Clinton proposed an additional $1.1 billion in anti-terror efforts. Clinton was acutely aware of the financial aspects of terror and wanted us not to do business with international banks that held al Qaeda money. A bill that would have mandated that was called totalitarian by some Republicans – and they gutted it.
It’s incredible to me how blatantly people can manipulate the record in the public mind and get away with it. I’d like to think that all the voices that have said this movie is wrong will keep most people from being affected much by it, but I’m not that optimistic. Narrative storytelling is always more powerful than logical exposition. Always. I even find myself sometimes believing a particular ‘fact’ that my intellect should know better than to think only because the story was so compelling.
David Cronenberg’s Body Language – New York Times
Cronenberg is now a year older than his father was when he died. And while there is nothing “old” about him other than his shock of white hair, you can see in both “A History of Violence” and its predecessor, “Spider,” that his gaze as an artist is starting to turn backward – from the presumed horrors of the future to the permeability of the border between present and past, the invisible distinction between who we were once and who we think we are now.
Excellent interview/article on Cronenberg.
via jjg
Last night I was reading this article in the Guardian, that was published in 2002, about the “Millennium Challenge” wargame, where the military was outfoxed by the ex-marine consultant they hired to play the bad guy: Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Wake-up call. I got the link from a post over on Antonella’s blog. She’d linked it because the story is also used in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink.
I’ve been reading Blink as well, and I may have more to ruminate about that, because it’s remarkable (and everybody’s reading it, it seems, so others may have done the ruminating for me).
Anyway, what converged in my head when looking at this story was what I saw earlier the same night when watching a movie with my daughter. See, we were watching the last of the old Star Wars movies, Return of the Jedi. And for years I think I undervalued the movie in general — I think it’s better than I remembered. Not great, but better. Still, it really is a sort of “Muppets in Space” flick and a little annoying at times. But I digress.
In that movie, we see brave rebel forces sacrificing their lives when fighting the overpowering Empire. Because the rebels don’t have the resources of their enemy, they have to be more clever, daring, and ingenious in their tactics.
Not only they, but also the cute little (evidently human-eating?) Ewoks, whose Endor is overrun as part of the clash, have to bring whatever means at their disposal to the task of dispatching the Empire forces.
As I was watching, I couldn’t help but wonder (and be pretty sure) that people like Bin Laden have seen this movie and others like it (because after all, Star Wars wasn’t especially original — it mainly repackaged a lot of tropes from previous Hollywood fare). Every time I saw an Ewok or a Rebel fighter use the Empire’s own destructive power against it, or crash a ship into an Imperial destroyer, I thought — hey, all it takes is a slip of perspective to see that other people could easily see themselves as the heroes in their own story, fighting the Imperial Americans. Would this be a fair perspective? Maybe not. But perception rules. If the US and the west in general are perceived as evil oppressors, it doesn’t take much to convince oneself that they should be brought down at all costs.
Anyway, that’s nothing new — the point’s been made plenty before. But what struck me was the ingeniousness of the ‘good guys’ in the battles of Star Wars, thinking outside the box and hitting the lumbering Empire in ways they don’t necessarily expect.
Then I read the Guardian article and am reminded of the tactics Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper used when imitating Saddam in the giant wargame:
As the US fleet entered the Gulf, Van Riper gave a signal – not in a radio transmission that might have been intercepted, but in a coded message broadcast from the minarets of mosques at the call to prayer. The seemingly harmless pleasure craft and propeller planes suddenly turned deadly, ramming into Blue boats and airfields along the Gulf in scores of al-Qaida-style suicide attacks.
And I thought about how he essentially did the sort of things that we’ve seen the underdog do in movies for generations (or in books even before that), and you have to wonder: How the heck could the US military have such a major blind spot? And how can we, in general, invade countries whose cultures and point of view our leaders seem to so basically misunderstand??
Like I said … nothing new here. I’ve seen others ponder the same thing. But it was an odd juxtaposition that made it so clear to me — Ewoks and Arabs. Go figure.
My daughter’s staying with me for the month of July, and we can’t wait to see the upcoming upcoming Blob Festival here in Phoenixville. It’s the weekend of July 15.
We watched the movie, and it’s a trip. I hadn’t seen it since I was her age, a crummy pan and scan broadcast on TV. So it was a treat to see it remastered and in its full glory on the Criterion DVD.
Steve McQueen was 28, playing a teenager.
This movie did so many things that you see as tropes in other movies since — the question mark at the close of the movie “The End ?” for example. Also, it may be the first horror movie to pull the little postmodern trick of having people getting attacked in a theater during another horror movie. (Pre-Scream!) Also, now that I’ve seen the new War of the Worlds, I can’t help but think Spielberg’s rendition of the cellar scene was in part inspired by an exposure to the cellar scene in The Blob — the menacing red stuff at the cellar window seems just too similar in some respects, and the claustrophobic feeling of being in a cellar of a structure that’s enveloped by something unspeakable that devours human blood. I don’t recall a scene like that in the original novel or the older versions of the film, but I could be wrong (and I’m too lazy to look it up right now).
At any rate, here are some links about the upcoming Blob Festival, and other info related.
- Phoenixville, Pennsylvania – Blobfest – Theater Panic Re-enactment
- Blog writeup on 2005
- 2 Camels writeup for 2005
- The definitive blob info site
- Colonial Theater History
- Info on Blobfest 2002
- The movie playing during the infamous Blob Theater scene.
Yeah. I’m gonna ramble about SW3.
First of all, at one point in the movie (SW III) Obi-Wan actually addresses a clone commander whose name is “Cody” (at least it sounded that way). So yeah, at one point he actually says, “Commander Cody, blah blah blah blah…” well, there’s some orders and stuff there, not blahs, but you get my drift. “Commander Cody” is (or was…hell maybe I’m just old, even though it was before my time) the name of a space-hero from movies in the 50’s. See here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045382/
This, to me, is a key for understanding why SWIII is a mess. (A glorious mess, but I’ll get to that.) Lucas is full of pieces and parts of things he wants to do all at once, but not especially adept at cramming them all together so that they work dramatically. Tons of what he does amounts to little homages to things he loved growing up and since. So this bit of dialogue is cute, in that sense. He would’ve seen the movie linked above when he was about the age I was when I saw the first SW movie. The problem is that it’s stuck in a spot where there’s a lot of action and tension, a sense of deep foreboding in the threads of the movie. It’s just misplaced, and ends up sounding like pastiche. (Another misfire is when Darth learns of a tragedy and holds his arms out and yells “Noooooooo!!!” — and it sounds and looks so much like a parody, that it’s hard not to burst out laughing.)
Basically what I’m getting at is that there are tons of things going on at once — political and philosophical introspection, incredible design, a “love” story written by a third-grader (which is like that, I think, because Lucas *had* to tell that story but would prefer to skip it altogether — he’s said before that he prefers designing things to writing scripts), Campbell “hero of a thousand faces” mythmaking, wicked cool and fast spaceships and things that are essentially floating racecars (another of his obsessions), excellent swashbuckling, etc etc.
He manages to put it *all* in this movie, and somehow, amazingly, I wasn’t completely appalled. I was actually touched at certain moments — mainly because of Ewan MacGregor’s superb acting (his swashbuckler twinkle-eyed pluck is fun as hell, and such a lovely throwback to Errol Flynn and the like, and his reaction to Anakin’s deceit and defeat sort of jut out of the movie to say “look this is what acting looks like”). But the clutter means that some scenes feel amazing, others feel like they’re from a wholly different movie.
I’m more impressed with the actor (forgot his name and no time to look it up) who played Anakin now — though with the dialogue he had to work with, it’s interesting how he’s more convincing as an actor when he’s silent than when he’s trying to say anything Lucas wrote. But when he is silent and smouldering, it’s *very* convincing, chilling even.
One fun part was seeing how the ‘look’ of the older star wars movies gets gradually folded into the sets and costumes in this one. It still doesn’t make sense — all that elegant and rich design evolved into duplo-block widgets?? Whatever… but still, because I saw the first movie at the age of 10, seeing it brought kid-feelings up that overwhelmed any 90% of my adult jadedness.
And off to my meeting …
The general opinion of Revenge of the Sith seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, “The Phantom Menace” and “Attack of the Clones.” True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion.
I honestly think I’ll enjoy the movie. But I’m there for different reasons, and I’m not carrying a grudge against Lucas like so many uppity folk seem to be. That’s not to say I didn’t giggle at Lane’s review.
He makes some interesting comments about the puritanical, “fascist” undercarriage of the film, and honestly I think he’s barking up the wrong tree.
One complaint goes like so:
Did Lucas learn nothing from Alien and Blade Runner — the suggestion that other times and places might be no less rusted and septic than ours, and that the creation of a disinfected galaxy, where even the storm troopers wear bright-white outfits, looks not so much fantastical as dated? What Lucas has devised, over six movies, is a terrible puritan dream: a morality tale in which both sides are bent on moral cleansing, and where their differences can be assuaged only by a triumphant circus of violence.
This is just ignorant. If anything, those movies were inspired by Lucas’ idea that science fiction worldscapes should feel used and like a hodgepodge of real stuff from different designs and eras just like the real world. (They were also inspired by French sci-fi comics, especialy “Metal Hurlant,” which inspired the “Heavy Metal” magazine in the US) but those movies weren’t up to the same stuff Lucas was in Star Wars. His first SW film was a sincere (i.e. not outwardly ironic) combination of Buck Rogers, dogfight movies, Japanese samurai/buddy flicks, and homebrew mythmaking. The ‘used future’ idea that Lane mentions was a major reason for a lot of the design decisions in the episodes 4-6 (as proven in old films from the 60’s showing Lucas discussing the idea with Murch and others — see the extras disc for the new THX 1138 release).
Star Wars’ original agenda wasn’t to cast a shadow of interpretation over current events, but to look backward and try to construct something that did all the stuff going on in Lucas’ head — basically to cram all his favorite stuff into a movie that felt like the serials he loved as a kid. He’d already done dystopian SF (see THX 1138) and it’s still devastating, bleak stuff, complete with the ‘blue’ stuff Lane wants more of. So it’s not like Lucas never had that a thought in his head about making that kind of film. It’s just that Star Wars is something that, holding to its heritage, isn’t an “adult” film series (… although the new movies put in a twist, more on that in a bit).
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Just passing along a link to this clever little resource:
The New Yorker: Online Only: The Film File
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