Category: Reviews

Water Margin rocks out, as expected. I got a particular kick out of it because I know Ti Lung from A Better Tomorrow, and it’s funky watching a younger version. Others may recognize Tiger Tanaka from You Only Live Twice as Master Lu, the focus of the plot. But probably not cause he’s decked out in full old master regalia.

Anyway, it’s all kinds of epic but a little disjointed, which is not surprising considering that it’s just a few chapters of the vast novel Outlaws of the Water Margin. It’s easy enough to follow if you don’t mind all the seemingly marginal characters running around — it’s not that they’re unimportant to the saga, it’s that they don’t do as much in this segment. In some ways this was an excuse to put all the Shaw Brothers stars together in one movie.

The martial arts sequences are generally fairly short, except for the big climax. The weapons work is very cool, and there’s a lot of wrestling (mostly from David Chiang as Yen Ching the Young Prodigy) which is something I haven’t seen much of in Hong Kong movies.

Definitely worth watching.

You either like Charlie Kaufman movies or you don’t, and if you do, you’re already going to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, so no big review here. It’s in the top half of Kaufman films for me.

OK, OK. Better than Human Nature and Adaptation, and on a par with Being John Malkovich. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind I sort of put off on the side because it’s a different beast.

I thought it was completely comprehensible. The narrative wasn’t particularly chronological on one level, but on another level it was mostly linear, albeit with one big giant flashback in the middle. It’s all well and good to talk about how messed up a narrative is, but you’d think some people had never read any time travel stories…

Oh, right.

Also I liked the hard core of truth at the middle. There were moments when I worried about a saccharine ending, but not at all. One icicle in particular is perfectly chilling and painful. Kaufman and Gondry have a pretty good understanding of all the ways love can result in people hurting other people.

This happens to be that movie Jim Carrey’s been trying to make where you can forget that he’s Jim Carrey for a little while, by the by. That’s nice too. And Elijah Wood is good, and Kirsten Dunst is good, and so on. But you either like movies written by Kaufman or you don’t.

[That was odd. Sorry about that.]

I rarely have many objections to Mamet, or for that matter to Val Kilmer. Keep that in mind. Still and all, Spartan measured up. Twice I saw the wires on which the god was lowered from the machine, but the tense taut moments more than carried me through. And who knew Mamet could direct an action movie? It is an action movie. It’s also a spy movie.

Hollywood doesn’t make that many spy movies. It should, if they’re going to be this good.

Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe is out. He’s made it available on the Web under a Creative Commons license again, so you can always download it and read it if you aren’t sure about buying it in the store.

This one didn’t work so well for me. As an extrapolation of current cultural trends, I can’t make it dovetail. Doctorow gets the tribal aspect of Internet culture right — we do form tribes across the time zones, driven by our own interests — but I’ve never ever seen a tribe form around a specific time zone. In fact, part of the attraction of the Internet tribe is the knowledge that whenever you log onto the MUD — hit the IRC channel — visit the bulletin board — fire up AIM — whatever — someone will be there. Part of the attraction is that the Internet is always on. Time is irrelevant.

And the tech sucks. One of the McGuffin ideas is broken; one of the character plans to make a fortune from a scheme in which people with more than 10,000 songs on their car MP3 player get to skip tolls. Doctorow loves redistribution of information, which I appreciate, because I do too. However, incentivizing heavy file sharers does not magically pay for itself. Rather, it costs you money because people move towards the behavior which you’re rewarding.

Now, you can fix this by changing the threshold from a fixed number to a percentage; the top 5% by the number of songs shared metric get a free ride on the Mass Pike. But I don’t want to rant endlessly about a single technical point. I want to observe that Doctorow is letting his passions and his technical fondness take over his actual story. He wants extrapolations to say a certain thing, so he writes them that way. Eastern Standard Tribe veers too far towards polemic.

I’m not a big reality show guy, although I watched the first couple seasons of Tough Enough. However, my TiVo enables all kinds of degenerate behavior, including reality TV addiction, so I figured I’d watch a couple of episodes of The Apprentice. The basic setup is simple; Donald Trump brings in 8 men and 8 women to compete for a job with him. They split up into two teams, men versus women, and every week they have a different competition. At the end of each show, Trump fires someone from the losing team.

The first week’s competition was selling lemonade. Both teams were fairly pathetic. The women were exceedingly disorganized, but managed good sales by selling lemonade at five bucks a shot with a helping of sex appeal on the side. Seriously. One of ‘em was hawking her phone number along with the lemonade. The men were fairly well organized but hampered by the inherent difficulty of selling lemonade when you’re wearing a tie.

If you figure it by sales volume, assuming the startup costs were around $50 and the guys were selling lemonade at $1.50 per glass on average, the men and the women both sold around 200 glasses based on the final asset figures quoted at the end of the show. I’d call it a tie, but that’s me. It’s pretty reasonable to set up uneven competitions, which I figure is what was going on, even if Trump didn’t acknowledge that he was doing it.

What really disappointed me is that nobody got clever. Trying to sell a glass of lemonade for a thousand bucks doesn’t count as clever, it counts as stupid. You don’t need a full team of eight people to sell lemonade; either split the teams so you’ve got two teams of four at good locations, or put four people on individual lemonade sales and put four people at figuring out some way to sell en masse. Sell lemonade on the subway. Get creative. You aren’t competing for a sales job, you’re competing for an executive job, so act like executives instead of competing on individual sales ability.

The men looked terrible in the segment where Trump chose his victim, anyhow. If I’m managing a team, and Trump asks me “who’s the weakest guy on your team?” I’m gonna say “Sir, I’m not going to damage the cohesion of this team by criticizing one person in front of everyone else. I’d be happy to express those criticisms with you and the person in question in private, but I’m not going to do it in public.” I’d say something similar as a rank and file team member, for that matter. It’s better business and it’s better reality TV show strategy.

That’s probably going to be the main failing of the show, though; it’d take some pretty amazing management style to get through a competitive process like this while still displaying good team leadership qualities. Troy, who got stuck with the management role this time, was very rough on Sam in front of everyone else. He clearly thought Sam was going to be fired, but Sam’s going to be there with him for at least a little while longer. Ooops.

I suppose it’s a test of who can work well together despite personal feelings. Still, once you’ve said you don’t trust someone on a business level, how do you explain why you’re delegating to them next time around?

And yes; this is my Mr. Sterling for this year.

Whoops, let’s add one to the Best of the Rest list: Down With Love, easily the best romantic comedy of the year. (I thought Intolerable Cruelty suffered from being written by people who were not the Coen brothers, despite being a fun trifle.) Witty and charming and full of banter, plus it took itself (and its genre) exactly seriously enough.

I’d been thinking it wasn’t a great year in film, but looking back on it I was dead wrong. It was, in fact, a superb year in film. The disappointments of the Matrix sequels and The Hulk (which I liked, but it should have been so much more) kind of cast a pall on the summer for me, I think. And I wanted Demonlover and Bubba Ho-Tep to be excellent, and neither of them really made me get up and dance. Metaphorically speaking.

So I started putting together my favorite movies of 2003 list. I wound up this kind of decent list, but I wasn’t all that excited about it, and then I went back to look at my reviews from the blog. That reminded me of what I said in February and what I said in August and I got a lot more cheerful.

This is the list of my ten favorite movies of 2003. I didn’t see every movie I wanted to see, so I can’t claim it’s the ten best movies of 2003. I’m also being a little liberal about foreign flicks; if it was made in 2002 but was released in the US in 2003, or if it hasn’t been released in the US yet but I saw it in 2003, I’ll count it as a 2003 movie. Foreign movies from 2001 and earlier don’t make the cut, though. (Apologies, thus, to Vidocq, Battle Royale and Audition.)

Enough preamble; on to the lists. It’s my personal favorite ten movies, plus other movies I thought were really worthwhile but not quite good enough to crack the top ten, plus some movies I wish I’d seen but missed.

I finished up the Firefly DVDs yesterday. Overall I liked the show quite a bit. Nice snappy Whedon dialogue, potentially interesting universe, characters with secrets and conflicts, and a decent enough plot.

I say potentially interesting, because despite Whedon’s claims that “Sometimes the Alliance is America in Nazi Germany,” he didn’t show any good in the Alliance during the first season. Mal may be an antihero, but in the short space of 11 episodes he’s never wrong. I’m willing to take Whedon at his word, and assume that the shades of grey would have shown up later. They just didn’t show up yet, and so the interesting elements of the Firefly universe remain potential.

The framework is good, though. You’ve got enough tension and questions and so forth on that little ship to keep a good story running for a few seasons, and so it’s very sad that it got cut off halfway through the first. Me, I don’t blame Fox. I blame Joss Whedon.

Because, look: Fox was right. The pilot episode was slow and clunky. It’s almost purely an introduction to the characters, which is really not the right way to get a series underway. Go back to the first episode of Buffy. The opening sequence sets the stage clearly and succinctly, and the rest of the episode manages to introduce the characters while telling a story.

The opening sequence of Firefly is an action sequence — good — but it’s got nothing to do with the rest of the episode except that it introduces the main characters. It doesn’t set up a damned thing in the context of the next two hours. Total loss.

Then you get a lot of introductions, and a linear plotline without very much dramatic tension. Problems arise, and problems are solved. There’s one plot point which lasts for more than a few minutes, and it’s not all that threatening. If I were a television executive, I’d have been pretty dubious about that pilot as well.

So then Whedon complains that he had to write a new pilot which, shockingly, forced him to introduce all the characters again. It’s episodic television. You should never be writing an episode which will be incoherent to new viewers, particularly during the first season when you’re trying to build your audience.

Yeah, Fox did a lousy job sequencing the episodes and it’s a shame they didn’t give the show longer to build, but I don’t think Joss Whedon is completely blameless here.

Enough ranting: the show was still pretty darned satisfying, and I recommend it. I liked the characters, I liked the plots, and I wish there was going to be another season. I hope the rumored movie happens, and I hope Joss writes a kickass screenplay and some network gives the show another chance after the movie is a huge hit. If only because I want to know what’s up with Book.

About Cheaper by the Dozen: Roger Ebert is wrong, and pretty clearly wasn’t paying close attention to the movie anyhow, since he has a couple of factual errors in his review. So, no, it’s not a three star movie. 1.5 stars, maybe. Not funny, not charming, kind of depressing. Me, I like my cheerful uplifting Christmas movies to be about success rather than failure.