We saw This Is the End Saturday night. The first words of the movie are Hey Seth Rogen, what up? so we know that Seth Rogen, the actor, is playing Seth Rogan, the actor, who is waiting at the L.A. airport for his friend Jay Baruchel to clear the gate. What we know and he doesn’t – in the movie – is that the end of the world is coming. It is the funniest movie I have seen in years and the funniest end of the world movie I can remember. I am sure it helped that we saw it in a crowded theater where we could surf on the collective energy. By way of a full disclosure, I should point out that it is a man’s movie (as the picture above implies).
Category Archives: Film
Star Trek Into Darkness
We saw Star Trek Into Darkness Sunday night. I thought it was a mess – a constantly engaging mess in which I was never bored – but a mess that never seemed to have a coherent plot arc. I enjoyed the first rebranding of the franchise in 2009, so I was a surprised that this seemed so generic. The movie starts with a set piece that has no relationship with what will become the major part of the movie which, I guess, has become standard fare for Adventure movies. The first time I noticed this was in James Bond movies but, as I think about it, the first Indiana Jones movie started that way.
For me, the set piece went on a little too long, but, on the plus side, the special effects were spectacular. Even on a huge screen, the Enterprise seemed real. After the credits, Benedict Cumberbatch – who I have a major man-crush on – shows up as a sort of Jason Borne gone bad. His blue eyes glow, but not as much as Captain Kirk’s, and all I could think of was how much post production work was done on every frame of the digital film.
It was heartening that, in the future, only bad guys use drones and torture. It was also heartening that the Startreck family squabbling is still there so that this would not be mistaken for a Starwars movie which – I read – will be directed by the same J.J. Abrams. Maybe the problem is that it is the middle movie of a trilogy. Maybe the problem is that I am not really a Trekkie.
BTW, did I mention that the spectacular special effects were great?
Romeo + Juliet
In preparation for The Great Gatsby, Michele and I saw Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet the other night. I fell in love with it all over again. In my humble opinion, it is – by far – the best Romeo and Juliet movie. As a play, Romeo and Juliet works great but as a movie, it often doesn’t. Movies are usually too real for Shakespeare.
West Side Story, one of the great Romeo and Juliet‘s, is one of my favorite plays. It is stunning on stage. How could it not be, with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, music by Leonard Bernstein, and choreography by the great Jerome Robbins. When Tony kills Bernardo, it is a shock. Every time. The music and choreography highlight the shock. But, in the movie, everything looks and feels fake. The sets, the gritty background, make everything else look and feel like Who are you kidding? For me, the movie was a bust.
Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet gets around that by going overboard. The star crossed lovers become real because of it. The movie opens with the usual, Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. on a TV screen. And then the movie repeats it, and again. One of my problems with Shakespeare is that by the time I get used to the language, I am not sure what I missed. By repeating the opening in several different way, I get the language in time to understand the set-up.
As an aside, after watching this R & J, with all its religious iconography, Michele noticed that it was probably an allegory for Catholic verses Protestant conflict going on in England at the time. This especially makes sense given that Shakespeare’s family was Catholic when it was against the law. End aside.
What the movie shows even better than most play adaptations I have seen, is that this battle, between the Capulets and Montagues, has been passed down to the younger generation. The cause is no loner important, the fighting, the war, has taken on a life of its own. It is senseless but the movie implies that nobody cares any more.
Clare Danes is a perfect Juliet. She was sixteen when the movie was made and could easily be fourteen. In the movie, she has a certain craziness that makes her very believable. Leonardo DiCaprio is lost until he finds his Juliet and then he believably fall in love. Pete Postlethwaite is super as the priest with just enough menace to leave me worried for all the young boys he has hanging around. Both Paul Sorvino and Brian Dennehy, as the family patriarchs, are saddened as their feud spins out of control and they can’t do anything about it.
What makes this movie seem so powerful to me is that we all know what is coming and there seems to be no way to stop it. .
Skyfall, Hashima Island, and how do they know?
In the movie, Skyfall, James Bond ends up – I guess he doesn’t actually end up there because it is in the middle of the movie – on an abandoned island off the coast of Macau. The island, at first, does not seem like it can be real but as the scene(s?) go on, it just looks too good to be fake. As it turns out, the island is real. It is an abandoned island off the coast of Japan named Hashima Island. It was originally built – bought and colonized – by Mitsubishi, in 1890, to house workers working on nearby underwater coal mines (and I don’t want to even imagine how that must have worked). Later, as Japan moved away from coal, Mitsubishi abandoned its island leaving me to wonder how the James Bond people ever found it.
Maybe they had a scene on an abandoned island and went searching for one, or, maybe, the local Chamber of Commerce is peddling the island as a great place to shoot a picture. I like to think that I have a pretty good knowledge knowledge of the world but it shocks me to find out that an island like Hashima exists and I have never even heard of it. I had no idea that it existed or that the Japanese mined coal – underwater! – near Nagasaki.
One of the best people to find great locations like this was George Lucas and Star Wars was filled with real locations, from Golden Canyon in Death Valley to Ksar Hadada in Tunisia to Temple IV at Tikal in Guatemala.
I have been to Death Valley – duh! I have probably bee more times than I have been anywhere else away from home – and I have been to Tikal twice but, in 1977 I had never heard of Tikal and I hadn’t heard of Ksar Hadada until about an hour ago (although, at sometime in the distant past, I did know that some scenes were shot in Tunisia which is how I found Ksar Hadada).
On the otherhand, faking the use of exotic places is probably more usual than actually using them. Southern California is an incredibly varied place, both in terrine and culture. As an aside, the California Title 24 building standards which set building standards to cut back on energy consumption is based on 16 climate zones found around the state. All 16 zones are found in Los Angeles County, from Coastal to Above Timber line. End aside.
Justified, one of Michele and my favorite programs, which realistically takes place in Harlan County Tennessee, is filmed in its entirety in and around Los Angeles County (except for the opening credits). The story line is culturally Harlan County but the terrine is SoCal.
Side Effects
Michele and I just saw Side Effects by Stephen Soderbergh. For me, it was the second time and I liked it even more than the first time. But I am a Soderbergh fan. I won’t go so far as to say that he can do no wrong, because he can be very wrong, but his movies are almost always interesting. Starting with Sex, Lies, and Videotape, he has made an extraordinarily varied collection of movies from hits to boxoffice duds.
Think Erin Brockovich and Ocean’s Eleven in the hit category with Kafka and Schizopolis in the dud category. In between, there is Traffic and Contagion. And, probably my favorite Soderbergh movie – it may be my favorite movie, period – Out of Sight. It is such a perfect movie and more delightful because it is just a lite-weight confection that is so perfectly done. I read that Soderbergh is usually his own cinematographer – listed as Peter Andrews – and editor which is probably why his movies are often so idiosyncratic.
Soderbergh says that Side Effects is his last movie and, in many ways, it is a typical Soderbergh movie. It is a little like Contagion in that it does not so much seem to have a story arc as a story wavy line that seems to be going in one direction and then ends up somewhere else. It is a little like Out of Sight in that it a genre movie done well. And it is typical of Soderbergh movies in that it is about people’s work.
It seems to me that most movies – by most directors – are about anything except what most people do all day long: work (none of the Academy Award movies this year – Amour, Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Les Misérables, Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook, Zero Dark Thirty – were about making money). Almost all – OK, maybe just many – of Soderbergh’s movies revolve around people’s jobs, revolve around the different ways people make money (Erin Brockovich, Traffic, The Girlfriend Experience, Magic Mike, The Informant, even Out of Sight). Side Effects is no exception.
If this is Soderbergh’s last movie, I will miss him and I feel vaguely guilty that I didn’t see all of them.