Movie of the Day

Here's a movie to cozy up with the next rainy Saturday that comes along.

Movie and Music

I went to the movies the other day for the first time in awhile. S and I saw Juno and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I knew that Kimya's music was in the movie but I didn't realize that the music was the movie. Kinda weird. The theater was packed. Double weird.

The Friendly Skies

I'm in Seattle hanging out with the kid dammit family unit and the weather is super nice. I saw this anime movie called Paprika which had a wicked rad parade. Overall, I'm having a great time.

In the Houston airport, on the way over, a voice over the loud speaker explicitly stated, "Any inappropriate remarks or jokes about security may result in your arrest." Now, I can understand how making insulting comments or jokes directly to a security worker would be an issue but this warning was a king sized blanket statement. I never thought that I'd hear something like that in this country but there it was.

Movie Bananaza

I just watched a slew of movies over the past few days. The Hunt for Red October, Glengarry Glen Ross, and Chisholm '72. Yes, one of these things is not like the others but all the three movies are really enjoyable. I wish that they came out with sequels.

The Hunt for Red October 2: The Journey Home/Back in the USSR
Glengarry Glen Ross 2: Death of a Motherf-ing Salesman
Chisholm '08: Making Obama Look Like Dole

The first two movies feature some shiny hot acting and Alec Baldwin but are so male and macho that it took the third just to get me back to square one. Seriously, the first two movies combined have female characters on screen for a total of about 40 seconds (no exaggeration).


I tried to make Connery look like he's rolling his eyes but I dont' know if it came off.

Now, He Will Kill Us All

Half of the clip is credits because it's part of the whole movie now on youtube. Here's the check list of goodies from the movie:

Self consciously over the top acting - CHECK
Ridiculous plot twists - CHECK
Nonsense science - CHECK
Smarmy dialog - CHECK
Slapstick - CHECK
Alien invasion - CHECK

I would posit that the tone and style of this particular movie, "Godzilla 2000" were purposely crafted to distance the franchise from the '98 American Godzilla film. The alien being that Godzilla fights earlier in the movie is somewhat symbolic of the conflict between American and Japanese culture and attempts at assimilation. I would further argue that throughout the movies aliens are generally an allegory for American culture while Godzilla represents an aspect of Japanese national pride.

So, it shouldn't be too surprising that, at the end of the movie, the scientists have given up on trying to eliminate Godzilla and just watch as he gets free run of the city and he'll inevitably destroy us all. Oh, well, I guess there's a little Godzilla in everyone.

I'm double posting this clip here and over at recon's just so ya know.

Labrynth 2: Electric Bogaloo

I just saw Pan's Labyrinth the other day and let me just say that

1. I was disappointed that David Bowie didn't at least make a brief reprisal in his role as the Goblin King and


2. Jim Henson has gone in an entirely new direction since he died

But seriously folks, didn't that movie make the Spanish Civil War look like the feel good war of 1944? It was a crowded field that year what with the "Saving Private Ryan Wars", the "War of Iwo Jima" and my personal favorite "Das Boot Battles" all going on at the same time. With that kind of star power to contend with, a lot of Americans except for us lefties forget about the Spanish Civil War. Kind of the same way the US forgot about Franco when we launched our war against Fascism.

And, as far as muppets and puppets go, I realized a few years ago that Jim Henson was so amazing at what he did that an entire medium of expression was weakened when he died. No more "Dark Crystal", "Muppet Movies", "The Muppet Show" or even muppet Yoda.

Monitering you from a Van Down by the River

In the movies, the white cable van is the go to vehicle for discrete surveillance. But, in real life, no one could ever use such and obvious ploy to spy or "surveil" anything. My girlfriend and I realized this the other day when we saw a few cable trucks parked across the street at a neighbor's house.

The reason is that (thanks to the movies) most people get suspicious when they see almost any kind of van parked near their house. I know that I, personally, stop all activity, start watching them through my blinds and tone down my inflammatory rhetoric.

(Lego Surveilliance Van via The Next Left)

As It's Spoken

That's a clip from "Home Movies" which was on UPN and the Cartoon Network for awhile. Thanks to the DVD and the internets I've been watching a lot of it lately. The show was produced by the company Soup 2 Nutz which also did "Dr. Katz" and another education show by called "Science Court". Those were some really good shows.

One of my favorite things about that show and other shows like it such as Nick Park's "Creature Comforts" are their playful use of language.

For the Soup 2 Nutz stuff, the focus on language exists because most of the show is recorded in an improvisational manner and then carefully reedited. In "Creature Comforts", audio teams go all over the UK to conduct interviews in a relaxed natural context with average everyday people.

When people speak in real life, they hesitate, repeat words, change sentence structure mid sentence, and interrupt and overlap with other speakers. Almost all TV shows and movies abandon this mode of speech in favor of cleaner and more presentable stage speech.

What is it Good For?

A couple of ongoing fictional series' have indirectly taken on the War on Terror as a subject for drama. The new Battlestar Galactica and Marvel comics Civil War certainly try. One of the most appropriate works which takes on the issues of the war is the Japanese manga turned anime Full Metal Alchemist.

If you don't like anime and you want to see what I'm talking about, you should skip ahead to 6:40.

Even without any political overtones, Full Metal Alchemist reaches the top of the anime pyramid as it alternates between comedic and dramatic, lighthearted and deep in contemplation of the darkness of the soul. It does get a bit long winded and plot twisty in the middle of the series though. Leave it to Japan to understand what it means to be a dominant colonial power as well as a satellite state.

Tin Tin Quentin

Pulp Fiction is a fluke. It's the one movie in the overblown portfolio of Quentin Tarentino that I like. Normally, I try to refrain from being a hater but QT is such a petulant egomaniac that in this case I just can't help myself.

Why do I gotta knock the Q? After all, he's a decent director and has produced a series of almost watchable movies. My problems is that his stuff outside of Pulp Fiction is basically a mediocre reworking of older and better movies. All these other Hollywood jerks pretend that he is this brilliant and that his "homages" are in fact favors to old genres instead of exploitation.

I would watch any Shaw Brothers or Sonny Chiba film over the Kill Bills any day.
Black Belt Jones in all of its outstanding awfulness is a peg or two above Jackie Brown.

Quentin made a big deal of bringing Wang Kar Wai's "Chung King Express" (an awesome movie) to the states. If you get the US version, it starts with about 10 minutes of him explaining how great the movie is. He does a decent job but you know who does a better job of doing that? The G-D movie that he's putting on hold by talking about how great it is.

So here's the thing. I love the old genres that Tarintino mines to get his material. I love the fact that Sonny Chiba and Gordon Liu have some cool scenes in a big Hollywood flick. But, if someone just redid "Master of the Fatal Flying Guilotine" with respect to the original, he would be my hero.

Future Days of the Past

I admit that when I was in middle school I used to play this great game, "Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?". The game was later turned into a kid's tv game show featuring the vocal talents of Rockapella. Ah, the halcyon days of nerdery.

There is one thing about the game that bothered me though. In the intro, the game referred to the year 1990 by which point time travel will be used to commit and solve crimes. The game was created in 1989 and by the time I started playing it '90 had come and gone. Every time I played, my still forming brain was dumbfounded how far off these people's predictions were about the future.

Turns out that this is a common mistake in the world of future prediction. Images of the future often diverge enormously from where the actual future turns out to be (Recon has beaten me to the punch with some 1900 postcards of 2000). The speed of progress can be easily overestimated. For futurists, time travel, growing human organs and robot butlers always seem to be just around the corner. Fictional series from Buck Rogers to Star Trek jump this gun again and again.

But, of course, my favorite version of the past as seen by the even paster is the '68 Godzilla movie "Destroy All Monsters. Let me see if I can sell this movie to you by saying: If you only see one Godzilla movie in your entire sad life (and it will be sad indeed if you only see one), let it be this movie. Here's the beginning.

You can watch the entire movie on youtube. It's worth every penny that you don't have to pay. Rating $3.

(Picture via consoleclassix)

Take This Truckin' Convoy

Increasingly, American culture is being designed from the top down. Maybe, this is a simple result of the US losing manufacturing jobs and moving into the so-called idea economy or maybe not. Either way, we've certainly put those factories to good use making popular music, art for advertising, and blockbuster movies. Plenty of the bottom up culture still exists but good luck finding it.

That's one of the reasons that I've been so enthralled last few weeks by snippets of Honk Horn Music of Ghana. This is music created Ghanian truck drivers and features vocals, horns, and various metallic percussive instruments. The phenomenon has been followed recently by Steven Feld who has done a few years of field work recording this music at gatherings of drivers and especially at funerals.

How awesome is it that the musicians are truck drivers. I love it. The music itself is a mix of west african style with influence from american jazz. You can hear exerpts of it from an npr story and see some video at a smithsonian site. There are a lot of really cool aspects to this music but one of my favorites has to be the pump song and dance. The song supposedly has its origins in the days when drivers had to deliver supplies deep into the forest. When they would get a flat, they would quickly run out of the truck and pump up the tire while a friend would bang on anything around to keep wild animals away (Nothing scares away cougars, anacondas and saber-toothed elephants like banging on a truck). Eventually, this ritual turned in to a song and dance with distinctive pumping action.

The US, on the other hand, has a truck driving culture that can only be expressed through a song so rockin' that it was turned into a movie.

CONVOY!

Thanks to Kid Dammit for pointing the way to this masterpiece demonstrating the ability of Hollywood to process trucker culture into fine goo. It actually is a decent movie. I particularly appreciate Ernest Borgnine and a plot that makes absolutely no sense (most likely because they had to make it fit with the song). So, here's the ending of the film with plenty of spoilers and if you just want the song skip ahead to 1:56.

To Boldly Go Back to 1982

Apparently, watching War Games a few weeks ago has put me in the 80's mood. I've got a hankerin' to dig up the outstandingly awesome 113 minutes that is Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Chock full of some of the most iconic moments of cinema, the rest of the Star Trek franchise is either prologue or epilogue to this movie as far as I'm concerned. An entire generation of people developed a heightened fear of insects crawling into our ears thanks to an early scene of that movie.

Beyond the death of Spock, the spectacular Genesis machine and the budding career of Kristie Ally, I most enjoy the battle of overacting between Shatner and Montalban that mirrors the contest between their characters. Check out this clip to get the idea of the extent to which these actors go to upstage each other and even their own characters.

This clip features Shatner's much parodied Khan! scream. Watching it again, I get the feeling that scream has been parodied so much that the original is too subtle. Almost too subtle.

Anyway, everyone is invited to my house for the movie this weekend.

Fun Fact: The actors playing Khan's men were Chippendale dancers by night.
Rating: $6

Movie Rating System

For all those of you who've asked (ie. no one), I have a real down to earth and easily understood movie review system. The rating is simply a cash amount. The cash amount is how much money is worth spending on the movie. You can spend that money by going to the theatre or buying the dvd or renting it or whatever. Here's how that system works for a few example movies:

Fight Club: $15
Metropolis: $3
Jaws: $6
Jaws 2: $1
Jaws 3: 25¢
Jaws 3 in 3D: $3
Sin City: -$8

Simple system huh. I don't know why no one thought of it sooner. There's no reason why we can't go further with it and free-market-libertarian-up the language. No more "it's a nice day." We should be saying "it's a $500 day." No more "You're a good friend." We need cash values. "You're a $10,000 friend." That's the stuff.

The only problem with this system is adjusting for inflation. So, hopefully, for the sake of my own personal movie rating system, we won't have too much inflation coming.

War Games

I just watched this movie again for the first time in at least 15 years. If you don't remember, or are too young to know, War Games features Reagan era cold war attitudes, a plot packed with technical detail about the early days of personal computing, and 80's stalwarts Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy. Can such a movie withstand the test of time?

Answer: Yes yes yes. The movie surives because it's well constructed with a little bit of comedy, a little romance a little action and even a little Michael Madsen threatening someone with a gun. There are some nice plot twists and turns and some solid acting.

Spoiler alert! and while I'm at it Nerd alert! for my favorite scene.

At the end of this movie, deep in the bowels of NORAD, the heroes are trying to stop a rampaging supercomputer from starting World War III by teaching it to understand the concept of futility. They start with a game of tic tac toe hoping that the computer will learn that the game is unwinable. Just as they're setting the game, some poor defense department computer jockey yells out in all seriousness and urgency, "Put X in the center square!." Pretty damn funny moment but also a great distillation of the cold war attitude. Don't question the game; Just play to win (even if it means using tactics that don't work on anyone older than 8).

Rating: $7

Movie Franchises

After an evening's deliberation, I've decided that Toho's Godzilla gets my vote as the best movie franchise of all time. Harry Potter second. Oh, and the Toho's part is important since I choose not to include Tristar's bumbling remake.

Most people don't think of Godzilla when they think of movie franchises but consider this:

• 28 movies
• +50 years
• 3 separate series of movies (Showa, Heisei, and Shinsei)
• Unabated use of rubber suit technology in the face of CGI
  
• UFO's and psychics consistently play supporting roles
• Godzilla could either save the earth or destroy it or both
• Godzilla fights like a 30 story pro wrestler.

Other people might go with one of those american hero franchises (Batman, Superman, Rocky, Spiderman, etc.) or Star Wars/Indiana Jones but to me they take themselves too seriously. Star Trek is real hit and miss. The Pink Pather is another fairly good set of movies but unfortunately it ended with Peter Sellers and also unfortunately more movies will come out (sorry Steve Martin).