It’s harder reviewing the really, really good movies. What more are you going to say about There Will Be Blood? Yeah, Daniel Day-Lewis was awesome, and Paul Dano was too. The soundtrack was terribly cool – I didn’t read it as a horror movie soundtrack so much as I took it to be a parallel narrative of the industrialization of the United States. It groaned and crashed and squealed like machinery. Lovely. ...
I’ve seen a few critics recommending minimal knowledge of Cloverfield going into the movie, and I think that’s right. It’s also a sign that it’s a gimmick movie. That’s not a pejorative, since there’s nothing wrong with gimmick movies, but you always have to ask: does the gimmick contribute to the story? In this case, since the story’s more about how people react to the giant monster eating New York City than it is about the monster, I think the answer’s yes. To the degree that Cloverfield doesn’t succeed, it’s not any fault of the found footage conceit. Rather, it’s that the characters aren’t all that interesting, excepting our primary cameraman Hud. They aren’t boring, per se. I cheered for them. I just wouldn’t have been cheering if it hadn’t been a monster movie. ...
I saw No Country for Old Men weeks ago, and it’s taken me this long to come to grips with it; or to at least find an entrance point for discussion that made sense to me. I spent a while musing on the nihilistic nature of the movie. My first draft of this noted “family counts for nothing except danger, and the monsters are not destined for jail time.” But that’s not true. I’ve seen nihilistic movies. A truly nihilistic movie ignores consequences; the crop of Tarantino/Besson-influenced movies come far closer to nihilism than No Country for Old Men. Consider Snatch, in which the protagonists are pretty completely immoral but walk free at the end. I liked Snatch but there’s about zero morality in the whole thing. ...
Show me a semi-hot newish show, and I’m likely to want to read the books it was based on. They’re more portable, after all. Accordingly, I picked up and read Darkly Dreaming Dexter and Dearly Devoted Dexter over the holidays. Serial murderer protagonists are very Solstice! I can’t say they made a lasting impression. Dexter is a rather defanged protagonist. The series hinges on his code of ethics, which forbids him to hurt anyone except other killers; there’s no way that code is going to be broken any time soon, because the series takes a markedly different direction if that ever happens. So no tension surrounds that particular dilemma. ...
Everyone except Susan, who discovered Blackpool, is fired. Completely fired. A BBC mystery miniseries in which the actors periodically burst into popular song? Or, more exactly, popular song bursts onto the soundtrack and the actors sing along, like demented British karaoke? This sits right smack on my sweet spot and whispers sweet nothings into my ears. It’s the love child of Dennis Potter and, I dunno, something a lot more lighthearted than Dennis Potter. ...
I just finished watching the first season of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I hadn’t expected brilliance; I’d watched enough of it the first time round to know I was buying some pretty flawed television. It was no Sports Night or even West Wing. But I am a sucker for Sorkin, and in this case I figured I’d get a ton of interesting insight into watching him fail fairly noisily. ...
Richard Thompson’s one of the most depressing lyricists in the world. He’s also one of the artists I admire the most for his skill. In retrospect, a bit of emotion on my part could have been expected, since Susan and I saw him five days after we found out about the Benoit tragedy (original). I teared up hard during the first song. You’ve got a viewpoint character singing about bad relationships, you’ve got guitar playing that echoes through the minor keys and embraces atonal harmony as a metaphor for futile rage, and somewhere in there Thompson’s voice has become just about as effective an instrument as his guitar. I think it was cathartic: despite what the world’s lost, life goes on, and talent goes on, and there’s aught yet to admire. ...
Spoilers ahead. I’m unclear as to whether Stranger Than Fiction is a comedy or a tragedy. I guess strictly speaking it’s a romantic comedy, but really, that’s not the story of the movie; the story of the movie is about how something dies. Does a great person have a downfall? Yep. So I think I have to read it as a bittersweet tragedy, albeit one with an ending which could be seen as rather happy. ...
The Last Colony is a pretty fun read in the “crowded galaxy with humans jostling for position” subgenre of the space opera subgenre. It’s kind of hard for me to evaluate it objectively, because it kept hitting all these SF tropes I know and love. Look! A colony lands on a new planet, and yeah, that thing that happens quite often in colonizing novels happens. Hey, there’s a wide-ranging alliance among semi-hostile races. And… wait, no powered armor. ...
I don’t really care about the Oscars anymore, thanks to Forrest Gump. However, I’m still capable of getting curious about the winners, and if Best Foreign Picture didn’t go to Pan’s Labyrinth, a small part of me wants to know why. In this case, The Lives of Others just happened to be a better movie. Not by a huge margin, but I have no complaints about the Academy’s decision in this case. It’s about two intertwining lives; that of Gerd Wiesler, a Stasi agent, and that of Georg Dreyman, a playwright. One watches the other; the other performs, unknowingly, for the one. The third actor in the drama, Christa-Maria Sieland, is a pivot point for everyone else in the movie. Her choices create the context in which the others… ...