peteg's blog 2005-12-04.autumn

Chicken Run

The Odd Angry Shot on DVD from Dr What!.

Good Night, and Good Luck in the later evening at the dear old Verona. David Strathairn, the lead actor, is good, really good. Clooney doesn't irritate and does a great job of running the show. There are some loose ends to the plot, and the editing feels a bit weird at times. Great to see Frank Langella again.

Watched the rest of Bangkok Hilton. The final ninety minutes is relatively lame.

Went out to Blacktown with Lucy to see The Nightingale's Prayer as part of the Sydney Arab Film Festival.

Couldn't sleep, so I watched the first two thirds of Bangkok Hilton.

The Island. What a turkey.

Hal Hartley: The New Math(s)

Pretty damn obscure.

Headed out to Campbelltown with Lucy to see Terra Incognita, part of the Sydney Arab Film Festival. A bit too scattered for my taste, but it had some beautifully subtle moments, such as the moment the radio news reader shares with his taxi driver on the way to work. I couldn't keep track of all the male characters, and the alluring supporting lady-character was underused. Made with French backing.

You and me and everyone we know with Rob at the Dendy in Newtown. It chugs along quite pleasantly.

Hal Hartley's The Book of Life. In some ways (due to the cast) this feels like a failed attempt to recapture his magnificent Henry Fool, and in others it seems like a dumbed down version of Surviving Desire. Let that not dissuade you, this is a Hal Hartley after all. PJ Harvey is wonderfully languid as she cuts a swathe through millenial New York.

Salaam Namaste at Cinema Paris, Fox Studios, with Jake and his mates. Three hours... with an intermission.

Inside Deep Throat. Largely pointless and uninsightful. The porn industry was once young and idealistic? Really? I always had the impression that the second thing (after the Bible) to be distributed via a new medium was pornography, and I can't see what's so special about this movie.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

At The Ritz. Pretty funny, with Robert Downey Jr chaotically funneling his Wayne Gale character from Natural Born Killers and Kevin Spacey's from The Usual Suspects. Knowingly subtle, but not annoyingly so. It felt like something out of the 90s.

Nightwatch

At The Ritz in the later evening. Those crazy Russians. This movie was in little danger of making sense.

Serpico

Angel Baby

In the Name of the Father

I was quite impressed by Daniel Day-Lewis in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and he's also excellent in this one. It's somewhat eery to watch this old classic in the pall of the Howard Government's proposed anti-terrorism legislation.

Layer Cake

With Rob and Lucy.

Notorious

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

At Fox Studios with Pete R. et al.

A Streetcar Named Desire

One Perfect Day

Pretty trashy.

2010

Matrix Reloaded

Matrix Revolutions

Supevixens

Vera Drake

The Matrix

Mystic River

Constantine

Closer

The Machinist

A post-Fight Club Fight Club.

Terms of Endearment

Shame of the Jungle

Children of a Lesser God

Cube Zero

Pretty crappy.

Collateral

The Wounds

Serbian, similar themes to Natural Born Killers.

City of Lost Children

My Own Private Idaho

The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie

On Bernie's recommendation.

The Rage in Placid Lake

Spartacus

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Million Dollar Baby

A Clint Eastwood insta-classic. Paul Byrnes wrote a glowing review in the Smage.

Fat Pizza

A bit funny, very trashy, and robustly representative of the contemporary Australian cultural output.

Key Largo

Intermission

A terrible, cliché-ridden, Lock-Stock clone starring Kelly Macdonald.

The Shining

Storytelling

Finding Neverland

It's a fabbo effort with Johnny Depp sporting a soft Scottish burr. Good to see Kelly Macdonald again.

The Merchant of Venice

Shrek 2

Good Will Hunting

It made the most satisfying sound as it hit the trashcan.

Cecil B. Demented

What's Eating Gilbert Grape?

An early Johnny Depp effort.

Pirates of the Caribbean

It just hit me (on this second viewing) that there is a complete absence of plot.

Up!

Shine

Teknolust

Sunset Boulevard

Sergio Leone: Once Upon A Time In America

Muriel's Wedding

The Motorcycle Diaries

I saw the short for this when visiting Delvin back in July. Great cinematography. I am surprised that it (apparently) hasn't been released in Australia. (Pete R. tells me it has; I guess this means IMDB is not omniscient.)

Touch of Evil

Michael Moore: Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint

A follow-up to Roger & Me.

Maria Full of Grace

I saw the short when visiting Delvin back in July, but have only now got around to seeing it. I'm not sure what to make of this movie; the players more or less directly represent a few kinds of people from a lesser-developed-country: the expats, the downtrodden workers (one stuck in the loop, one with the courage to break out of it), the mafioso, etc. and as such fail to become characters. I fear my hardboiled cynicism blinds me to the redemptive moments in it, for all I see is a whole string of pragmatic decisions, none of which are principled or pretty. The leading actress is luminous and there is some art in the cinematography.

Pulp Fiction

National Treasure

My Name is Joe

The Corporation

The basis for the movie?

Dead Man

Fucking Åmål (Show Me Love)

A Swedish classic that I saw with Pete R. back in '98 or '99. The acting by the two leads is brilliant.

Van Helsing

Richard Roxburgh does a great Gabriel Byrne (End of Days-style), and this is his finest outing since Blue Murder. Hugh Jackman does the wolf thing again (or I guess lets the CGI do it for him, really). David Wenham camps it up as the geek assistant, in the Noah Taylor Tomb Raider tradition. I was wondering where it was filmed, but as they used the Lord of the Rings CGI equipment it doesn't really matter. The film itself is a pastiche of recent movies and European myths, a smooth integration of clumsy adapatations. For example, the collapse of the bridge in the first Lord of the Rings movie had far more moment, and there's not much going for the "don't talk, shoot"-line lifted lock-stock from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Who cares, for a blockbuster it ain't bad.

Hal Hartley: Amateur

Dune

Team America: World Police

The Maltese Falcon

I thought Elisha Cook Jr. looked familiar, and indeed he was in Kubrick's The Killing.

The Big Sleep

Strictly Ballroom

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Carrey is actually decent in this. I'm starting to get worried. (I was curious to see what Thomas Jay Ryan was like outside Hal Hartley's movies.) The computer that reprograms Carrey is an Amstrad® PPC 640, and I have one gathering dust at my parents' place.

Distorted Morality

Another Chomsky movie, this time just a recording of a lecture he gave at Harvard in 2002. I find it a bit annoying when he gets sarcastic about things as it becomes difficult to know when he is and isn't being supercilious. It's a weak oratory technique IMHO, at least coming from an MIT professor. Politicians use it all the time.

The solution, of course, is to realise he's primarily criticising the US and factor that into all his comments. This is hardly satisfying. It would good if he practised summarising his proof, at indicating how one might validate what he says without studying all media in existence (or the US at least). His common refrain of "It's either like what I say or I'm not aware of a counter-example" would've got me fails on my undergrad essays. :-)

But this is merely nickpicking his presentation. I don't substantially disagree with what he's trying to do — a skeptical analysis of media and the US government — and indeed think it quite worthwhile. What's interesting to me (in a "I'm not likely to do much about it" way) is how we might redirect these economic forces that apparently result in these negative outcomes (excuse the Watson-esque weasel words). Bluntly, why should Rupert Murdoch (Australia's finest export) do anything else but support the various wars if that's in his financial interest? I am not a believer in corporations-as-people, either way (rights or behaviour).

East of Eden

Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent

Penka told me about this film back in July, but I've only got around to watching it now. Chomsky reminds me a lot of RMS in that his working assumption is that no-one's ever read his stuff, and so he always starts from first principles.

Hal Hartley: The Book of Life