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.)
A follow-up to
Roger & Me.
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.
Got all geed up to go to the
Elvis Costello concert this evening, only to
be told (when I arrived) that it had been cancelled due to poor ticket
sales.
sigh It had actually been cancelled back on January 9 (or
earlier) but I didn't think the check.
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.
A Swedish classic that I saw with
Pete R. back in '98 or '99. The acting
by the two leads is brilliant.
I thought Elisha Cook Jr. looked familiar, and indeed he was in Kubrick's
The
Killing.
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.
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).
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.
