Shutter Island

On a whim, at 7:00 last night I went to see Shutter Island, the Martin Scorcese movie about two federal marshals (Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo) in the 1950's who investigate a woman's disappearance on a small island on which there is an asylum for the criminally insane. It may be that the asylum is being used for cruel psychiatric experiments, or something of the kind, and the previews hint at questions of whether it will be possible for the marshals to leave once they have arrived.

The movie was creepy and a bit scary, and the ending was less predictable than I had anticipated. I'd say that if the premise or previews for this movie appeal to you, it's well worth seeing.

(Oh, one note. If you try to avoid movies with Holocaust imagery, know that one of the marshals has frequent flashbacks/dreams about liberating Dachau.)

My Not-Very-Informative Review of Avatar

Saturday afternoon, I finally dragged Ed with me to see Avatar. I knew the plot wasn't supposed to be that great, but it was supposed to be really pretty. It was indeed quite pretty and the plot was more offensive than I'd imagined, but not as bad otherwise.

We saw it in 3D. It is, as others have mentioned, not very flashy 3D - arrows don't come whizzing out at your head or anything like that. But it was nice to see the depth, and little details, like the 3D displays on people's computer screens in the movie, excited me from time to time. The 3D made my eyes feel slightly tired by the end, and gave Ed a bad headache.

The movie is definitely racially offensive in a wide variety of ways, but I found it easy to overlook while actually watching it. The action was enjoyable despite my not being a fan of action movies. And I really did enjoy the alien world and the aliens themselves. The aliens are more attractive when they move than they look in regular pictures.

I did have trouble identifying with the main character, who is a hero man in the stupid/impulsive/brave/doesn't-take-directions mold. Given that I'm smart, extremely chicken, and a careful listener, I often don't sympathize with the choices made by such men. But then, that's why they don't send me to Pandora to be eaten by the first clawy thing that comes along.

One detail that doesn't come up as often as you'd expect is that the aliens are humanoid but about twice as tall as humans. I was surprisingly moved and excited by a scene in which the main human is tenderly picked up by his alien girlfriend. I'd love to be twice as tall as Ed (you know, assuming this didn't cause a lot of other problems).

As an experience, the movie was worth seeing. I would even see it again pretty happily if I knew anyone who wanted to go.

Netflix to Blockbuster

I've had a Netflix subscription for several years now, but I've never gotten as much out of it as I could. It's very hard for me to mail movies away, since I can't get anything right away. And then when I do want a movie, I can't have it right now. I probably watch 4 or 6 movies a year from Netflix, which is ridiculous considering that I could buy a couple of DVDs every month for what I pay them.

Lately we rent a lot at Blockbuster. (By "a lot" I mean once or twice a month.) That's very convenient and nice, except that I never take the movies back, so I end up owning them. They are only $10 or $12 each, so it's not that expensive, but...still.

So, I have cancelled Netflix (and I give them major props for letting you do this on the website; so many services make you call them) and opened an account with Blockbuster online. What I got, for $12/month, is 1 DVD at a time by mail, and up to 5 in-store exchanges per month. This means that for less than the cost of one rental (when you figure in the high probability that I will never return the movie), we can just go to Blockbuster any time and switch out our movie. Or we can get one by mail if we want one that isn't available locally.

I'm pretty happy with this decision.

Surrogates

Tonight, Ed and I saw the movie Surrogates, which is a near-future sci-fi movie in which most people stay at home in comfortable chairs while sending their more attractive robot alter egos out to live life for them. It's kind of like if Second Life were the real world. It has Bruce Willis as a cop.

It is not very like Minority Report in any particular, but the audience of people who would like one is probably near-identical to the audience of people who would like the other. It's a kind of sci-fi action movie that also has personal relationships in it.

I have found that I really like Bruce Willis in sci-fi movies. Maybe I like him in general and just don't realize it because I don't tend to watch the other kinds of movies he's in. But he's really very funny, attractive, and entertaining to watch. (They did well to choose him for this role, since he looks better when he's not prettied up - i.e., the man is more hunky than his robot double.)

I thought it was reasonably well done overall, so if you like this sort of thing, go see it or put it on your Netflix queue.

Roger Ebert on "Transformers"

Roger Ebert's 1-star review of the new movie "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a real delight. A couple of excerpts:

"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

...

The human actors are in a witless sitcom part of the time, and lot of the rest of their time is spent running in slo-mo away from explosions, although--hello!--you can't outrun an explosion. They also make speeches like this one by John Turturro: "Oh, no! The machine is buried in the pyramid! If they turn it on, it will destroy the sun! Not on my watch!" The humans, including lots of U.S. troops, shoot at the Transformers a lot, although never in the history of science fiction has an alien been harmed by gunfire.

Go read the whole thing.

Spoiler-Free Review of Watchmen

Ed and I saw Watchmen tonight, in IMAX glory. And I promise this (brief) review will be completely spoiler-free, so read without fear.

I either read or started to read Watchmen years ago while dating Robin. At any rate, I didn't remember anything about the plot at all, though the opening sequence of the film was very familiar and I think it was shot a lot like you'd expect from the beginning of the book. I was glad not to know the plot going in.

I should preface this by saying that I have a hard time getting into any kind of plot-based action movies, especially superhero movies. I saw Iron Man. Watched The Dark Knight. They didn't really do anything for me even when I could recognize the artistry. I wasn't really drawn in at all, and they felt tedious to watch and I waited for the plots to resolve. Honestly, I feel similarly about the more recent three Star Wars movies and about The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter movies. I can modestly enjoy them but I wouldn't go see them if they weren't blockbuster spectaculars that one should see. (And I saw a lot of those with Mosch, who always wants to have seen those movies.) Oh, and Pirates of the Caribbean and the sequels. Same deal.

But Watchmen I liked. I mean, I really, really liked it. I was aware while I was watching it that I was just having a fantastic time.

I'm trying to think why that was. I think that, unlike with most other action movies, I was actually into the characters. Other than perhaps the romantic female lead (if you can call her that), any time a character was on screen I was watching in a mesmerized fashion. I found every one of the men attractive in some unusual way. I just wanted to look at them all day. And somehow that really helps.

The movie is gory in parts - more gory than I prefer. It is probably what Robin would call "cartoon-like violence," but for me it was mostly just violence. But I was willing to tolerate it in order to see the rest of the movie, and only one part really disturbed me.

It has a lot of fighting, but as best I can recall no high-speed chasing types of sequences, which was good since those usually bore me. There was interesting machinery and structures. And beauty.

So, if you're at all inclined to see it, go. You'll probably like it.

Manic Pixie Dream Girl

You've probably heard of this movie archetype - the manic pixie dream girl. She's that young (generally) woman with a whimsical view of life, a tendency to overshare, a lot of energy and light, and eccentric hobbies. In a movie she is typically drawn to a sullen, depressed, repressed, or otherwise drudge-like man. She rescues this man by awakening his interest in life. As with the magical negro, it's not always clear what the MPDG is actually getting out of the relationship. Garden State was a particularly egregious MPDG movie I saw recently.

I've been thinking about this character because Ed and I are in the middle of watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is an unusual MPDG movie in that it shows the consequences of actually having a long-term relationship with one of these women. You might eventually get tired of dealing with someone who is continually impulsive and has no purpose in life.

I have a few trains of thought about this archetype. First, I wonder if the MPDG is primarily a male or female fantasy. Is it that men dream of having some light-filled girl-creature enter and brighten their dull existences? Or is it that women dream that they can immediately let a man in on all of their eccentricities and, instead of being weirded out or disturbed, he'll find them adorable and entrancing? It seems to me that it could go either way. I don't think you often see a Manic Pixie Dream Man, though the love interest in The Family Stone comes close for me (and the woman is definitely a classic Drudge).

The second set of thoughts I've been having is a bit more serious. It strikes me that the MPDG and the Drudge that she rescues both have something in common - neither is applying energy to anything meaningful. The Drudge has a meaningless job (which can be high-powered or not) and basically no meaning in life, and he's generally low-energy. The MPDG has plenty of energy flying in all directions, but she's applying it only to meaningless things like her inevitable eccentric hobbies (making figurines out of potatoes, collecting kitschy trinkets, or whatever).

One vision of the "good life" would be applying energy and creativity to something that matters. I guess in movies, most of these characters are Crazed Artists; the guy in Pi comes to mind. Of course, in real life, such people exist and many are not crazed. In movies, you're either crazed, or you're famous and the movie is a biography. (Or both, of course.)

Ed reports that his high school girlfriend was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. I had Mosch as my Magical Negro stand-in (I used to call him my "magical Jewish friend"). I don't think I fit any of these archetypes particularly well. I have some eccentric qualities and overshare, but overall I am a plodding rather than a flitting creature; my life has drudgelike aspects, but I also pursue meaning. Ed is clearly a Crazed Artist type.

Do you bear resemblance to a movie archetype? Are you someone's magical friend, manic pixie dream, drudge suitable for rescuing, or a crazed artist? Are there people in your life who fit these categories? (Do you wish there were?)

Dogville

Ed and I watched Dogville recently. I'd seen (and enjoyed) the movie before, and was keen to have him see it. I remember Sally said something to me before the first time I saw it, which I'd never managed to reply to after I saw it (I think). Specifically, she wrote,

...the majority of reviews I read indicated that the reviewers did not understand what the movie was about even after having seen the whole thing...

and when I saw it, I totally agreed. The rest of this post will have Dogville spoilers, so if you haven't seen it and intend to and don't want it spoiled, please stop reading now.

So, the basic plot of the movie is that Kidman's character (Grace) shows up in this mountain town during the Great Depression; she's on the run from some gangsters. The townsfolk decide to let her stay for 2 weeks, and she sets out to prove herself useful by helping everyone. They resist at first, but come to appreciate her help, and all is well for a while.

At some point, though, things start to go bad. Wanted posters appear and the townsfolk use them as an excuse to demand more labor from Grace. She attempts to escape at one point but is thwarted, and after that is more literally enslaved, with a collar and chain connecting her to a bell (so she can be heard) and a giant wheel that she has to drag around. And she's raped by most of the men in the town. (This is a terrible plot summary, but hopefully you've already seen the movie and I'm just refreshing your memory.)

Eventually, her boyfriend in the town calls the number on the card one of the gangsters gave him in the very beginning, hoping that she'll be taken away because she represents a threat to his image of himself as a moral person. When the gangsters show up, we find out that the head gangster is her father. Grace and her dad have a long talk in the car. She starts out on the side of the townsfolk, despite how they've treated her, but after thinking on it some more, decides that the world would be better off without them, and has them all murdered (including their children) and the town burned down.

Now, this is what Roger Ebert (who gave the movie 2 stars out of 4) wrote:

In [director Lars von Trier's] town, which I fear works as a parable of America, the citizens are xenophobic, vindictive, jealous, suspicious and capable of rape and murder. His dislike of the United States (which he has never visited, since he is afraid of airplanes) is so palpable that it flies beyond criticism into the realm of derangement.

and

What von Trier is determined to show is that Americans are not friendly, we are suspicious of outsiders, we cave in to authority, we are inherently violent, etc. All of these things are true, and all of these things are untrue. It's a big country, and it has a lot of different kinds of people. Without stepping too far out on a limb, however, I doubt that we have any villages where the helpless visitor would eventually be chained to a bed and raped by every man in town.

You can also go see David Edelstein's review for Slate here.

Now I know nothing of von Trier, so for all I know this could have been his exact intention and maybe he really does hate Americans and think we're all assholes. But since I'm looking at the movie and not the director, I don't really care what his intention was; I feel free to judge the movie on its own terms.

Some review I read (which I can't easily locate now, years later) thought that the ending just showed the utter bleakness of human nature, as inevitable crime is inevitably followed by excessive retribution. And I didn't see it that way at all.

Grace offers herself up, Christlike, and she maintains that mien right through the conversation with her father. In that conversation, her father calls her arrogant for refusing to apply the same high standards to others that she does to herself. He calls that the ultimate arrogance. And she rejects this idea, but leaves the car to wander around the town.

The turning point in her thoughts (which the narrator helpfully illuminates for us), and the point that I found really thrilling, is when she shifts from the question "Wouldn't I do the same as them in their place?" to the question "If I acted as they have, would I have any defense for myself? Would I not deserve whatever came upon me?" (These are paraphrases.) It is after this realization that she orders the town destroyed and the occupants killed.

I don't, of course, condone the murder of whole families, whatever crimes the parents might have committed. And the ending is a bit too horrifying in execution to be satisfying, at least to me. But I actually do love the moral reasoning. It's not about whether you're really any better than others; there's an actual standard to which everyone should be held, whether you yourself meet it or not. (There's some Kant for you.) And I like the turning on its head of the Christ idea. It changes from "Forgive them, for they know not what they do" to "Ah shit, the world would just be better off without these assholes, and they deserve it." It's like Noah's flood without, well, Noah. (I guess the dog, the only member of the town who is spared, is Noah, but I don't want to take this analogy too far.)

Also, contrary to Ebert's assertion that hardly anyone will enjoy the movie once, and nobody twice, I did enjoy it thoroughly both times. I find it rather captivating.

Juno

Mosch and I saw Juno last night - a movie about a smart, quirky teenager who gets pregnant. I thought it was pretty fabulous, with consistently smart dialogue, unexpected humor, and a lot of warmth.

At first, I was concerned that the main character (played by Ellen Page) was going to just be too much - too amazingly quirky and cool in a way that even the best high school kids aren't. Instead, I really bought into the character and fell in love with her almost immediately. And I loved Michael Cera here (similar to how I loved him in Superbad). All of the characters were great, actually.

There are times when you think the movie is going to take potshots at easy targets (yuppies, for instance) and...it doesn't quite, or it does so only gently.

Ultimately, the movie is very cool, but not too cool. It's clever but not in love with cleverness. It doesn't idolize coolness or cleverness above other qualities.

Go see this movie, or put it on your Netflix queue.