“Crash” (FX/Satellite)

Crash shows David Cronenberg at his weirdest. Of his more normal films, I have seen “Scanners”, “The Dead Zone”, “The Fly”, “M. Butterfly”, “eXistenZ”, and “Spider”. I have also seen him act in (without directing) “Nightbreed” and “Last Night”.

Actually, next to most of those movies, a car crash paraphilia isn’t terribly weird. It interestingly portrays how a paraphilia can transcend things such as morality, laws, sexual preference, and even survival instinct, giving a priority to the paraphilia above all other things. You have to wonder though, at the end, when Ballard says to his wife “Maybe next time”, just how close they have to be to experience the thrill.

No, I am not quite that stupid. A movie about race relations, prejudice and stereotypes in L.A. There are a also a disproportionate number of police officer characters, for a non-cop movie. It is interesting now, that no matter what you do or say, you can be considered a racist. Place too much importance on race, or try not to place importance on race, and you can be labelled a racist. These two critera can even overlap. It seems that using these broadened critera we cheapen the word “racist” to mean “anyone who notices race”. I’d like to say that race doesn’t matter, but everything matters in the proper context.

But, I do believe political correctness can go too far. At what point will it be politically incorrect to reject prospective lovers based on race, age, weight, or gender? Several states have already thrust themselves (pardon the phrase) into bedrooms nation-wide, illegalizing even today certain couplings or acts (gender, orifice, position, etc), so don’t imagine this is impossible.

Anyway (disclaimer alert), these are just my observations, being a product of the media for the last few decades. Now for the lighter side:

Seen on various blogs and fark threads.

“The Deer Hunter” (DVD)

So, it took 3 days to get throuh The Deer Hunter, at 3:05. Isn’t it funny how during a war, all the war movies are so pro-establishment and glorifying the heroism and sacrifice, but during peace times, the war movies are all about the misery and death and “we can’t go back to how things were”. Maybe it isn’t true, but it seems like that.

Ahh, and again, the ambiguous morality of Vietnam, with the wholesale slaughter of soldiers, prisoners of war, women and children, animals, and defenseless straw huts. Morality is subjective. Morals are ethics forced on us by other people, which we may not even agree with, and in some cases may run counter to our own ethics.

There were also too many Russian roulette games in this movie, the odds were against the characters way too much for them to make it through. Although the subplot did spawn a funny scene in “Meet the Feebles” by Peter Jackson.

Yes, a rare media-embedding in one of my posts. How rare and strange you say. But, most people do not have the attention span to read this much text without an illustration, including myself! On a Fark thread, for example, I mostly scroll down for the funny pictures. So, what the hey.

Anyway, the lessons I take away from this movie are:
•Christopher Walken always plays a psychotic nutcase even when young and blond.
•Russian roulette is best played with medium-caliber hollowpoints so you die immediately without suffering, but don’t injur bystanders.
•Robert De Niro can be cast as a Jew, Italian/Irish, Rusyn, or any nationality he damn well chooses, and if you don’t like it he can break your legs for you.
•The US didn’t win the Vietnam war. Huh. Someone should have told US. Nor did the US win the Korean War before that. Oh, sorry, they wern’t wars, they were “Pagents”, there hasn’t been War declared since WWII. They were partially unsuccessful police actions. Sort of like Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and whatever we are going to do in Iran, I suppose. Hey, maybe we can get the draft going again.

“Casino” (SLEUTH/Satellite)

Ahh, Casino, another film by Martin Scorsese where things start out good with small scams, then large scams, and then Joe Pesci’s character goes ape-shit and ruins it all, and gets whacked, along with most of the cast. In other words, a gambling/teamsters/mafia type movie.

This was on that weird Sleuth channel on the digital satellite box thing. This is a basic cable type channel, meaning no swear words. Now about “Casino”: “When released, Casino had the most uses of the word “fuck” (422) in a feature length film”. So, I spent 3.5 hours listening to people saying “freaking coward” “stick this in your mouth” “stinking momo” “take care of some stuff” and so forth. An average of twice a minute.

Money. All this for money. Sometimes it was for power, respect, fun, love, but in the end it all came down to, and fell apart from, money. I hate money.

Let me tell you about money. Money is a receipt for your hard work that hasn’t paid off. Money is what you have instead of what you want to have. Money is a placeholder for your rewards. Trying to earn it sucks because it is variously: hard work, dangerous, degrading, annoying, etc. Having it sucks, because it reminds you of what you had to do to get it, and the more you have the more you need, and the more you have the more family, friends, and goverment want from you.

The only time money is good, is when you get rid of it, and only under specific circumstances. That is, when you buy something you want and enjoy, or when you give it to someone who can do the same. When you buy food or overpriced gasoline or pay taxes, it is just annoying, knowing you will need to do it again, which means you will need to earn more! Arg!

Then there is gambling. Gambling for money, with money, is about the most horrible thing I can imagine doing, short of working in a sewage treatment plant. If you lose, you are out money with little to show for it. If you get really lucky and win something, the temptation to keep playing is too great, causing anxiety. If you actually get to keep it, you just have more money, which sucks.

Now, I don’t believe in outlawing gambling. I think everyone has right to gambling, drugs, prostitution, and a few other things that are illegal because they are “dangerous” (even though they are a lot more dangerous because they are illegal), as long as they are not hurting anyone except themselves. Just, none for me thanks.

And I do like playing cards, gambling with meaningless chips for a night or a pile of pennies that go back in a jar, for example. Or cranking on an antique penny slot with no intention of keeping the winnings. Just, no gambling for me, kthxbie.

Sunlight

Today was the first day I didn’t watch any new films on my to-do list at all. Although I did finish 5 yesterday (two of which I had actually started the day before). I am in the middle of “Casino”, and also watched “The Invisible” and a horrible Li-Lo film “I Know Who Killed Me”.

Most of the day, I spent outside in the big blue room getting sunlit. Very annoying. I hate being awake before noon, but I am trying to get my sleeping patterns back to normal (for me).

“No Country for Old Men” (DVD)

No Country for Old Men is another story of the generic hired killer (or bounty hunter) who ends up a loose cannon that kills the messengers, kills the man who hired him, kills anyone he sees, goes out of his way to kill a few people, and doesn’t kill one person just to break the pattern. The movie is somewhat famous, or infamous, or uninfamous, for having no real resolution, it just sort of stops when the Coens got bored writing about Bell’s description of his dreams. The Coens are good at writing the middle of stories, and sort of skipping the beginnings and endings.

The Coens have a disturbing number of movies, and a number of disturbing movies, in the Top 250. Why are they considered so good?

I have a theory that certain confusing movies like “Donnie Darko”, with lots of potential clues scattered throughout, have high re-watch potential, but this one seemd to be fairly straightforward, with most of the clues being so obvious (often spoken outloud by Bell) as to make you wonder if they’re trying to actually hide anything. This isn’t a movie I feel like rewatching though, so from where does the high ratingness come from?

“Juno” (DVD)

Juno reminded me most of “Ghost World”.

I was surprised to enjoy it. It was different. It was also quite explicit (language) for being only PG-13, but I guess that is what the kids are in to nowadays.

Update (July 26): A good indication as to how much I enjoyed the movie can often be determined by how thoroughly I’ll check out the special features on the DVD (if available). Now, I didn’t get through all 4 commentary tracks on “The Return of the King”, but right now I’ve gone back to Juno and am watching the deleted scenes and commentary track.

“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (DVD)

Ahh, mental institution movies. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest follows the tradition of (No, wait, it came before them didn’t it? Well fuck it.) “Girl, Interrupted”, “Gothika”, “High Anxiety”, “Quills”, “Twelve Monkeys”, “, etc.

Some rhetorical (in that I don’t expect answers but wish to express them anyway) questions:
* Do mental institutions usually have mostly unsupervised patients wandering through all the halls? I mean seriously.
* Were Brad Dourif, Danny DeVito, and Christopher Lloyd ever this young? Geez.
* Why did they insist on using catsup for blood in 70s movies? Was Technicolor that new?
* Is electroshock therapy that painful for that long after a single jolt?
* If you try to strangle the head nurse, would they really give you a dual frontal lobotomy in 1963?
* Why give Jack Nicholson an Oscar for being himself?

But what is normal and what is crazy? The baseline is decided by (or measured against) the majority, and dictated by the tyranny? Yes. So behave or you get treated as insane, have your human rights revoked, and become the playthings of sadistic nurses. Although some people enjoy that sort of thing.

This was the 150th of the 250.

“Amadeus” (OVATION/Satellite)

Amadeus. Another story of a young character meeting an old character near the end of their life, and hearing their life story in a long series of flashbacks. I am more a fan of Beethoven’s music, but “Immortal Beloved” was not quite as interesting a story as this. This has the bonus of being one of the few movies in the top 250 that I had not seen, that was not about war, gangs, boxing, or by Hitchcock, so it earns points for that as well. Overall, as a fictional romantisized history, it is worth watching.

This was, also, the first time I actually watched DISH Network channel 157, Ovation TV, which seems to be a commercial-heavy artsy farty channel. It reminds me of Oxygen, Hallmark, and other weird channels that I rarely have a reason to watch for very long. The commercials every 5 to 10 minutes (arg!) made the film three and a half hours long.

Now, while watching, I had stuck in my head Peter Griffin singing: “I’m a tumor, I’m a tumor, oh oh I’m a tumor.” repeatedly (to the tune of Rock Me Amadeus). Also, I kept hearing the conversation between F. Murray Abraham and Arnold Schwarzenegger from “Last Action Hero”:

AS: “He said you killed Mozart.”
FMA: “Moe who?”
AS: “Zart.”
FMA: “I kill a lot of people.”

Anyway, as a total tangent, you should go out and buy (or download, for you pirates out there) Beethoven’s Last Night by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. While mostly about Beethoven, it does contain several pieces inspired by Mozart. The Trans-Siberian Orchestra itself came about from an earlier heavy metal band from Tampa/Clearwater, called Savatage. Three albums in particular, “Edge of Thorns”, “Handful of Rain”, and “Dead Winter Dead” illustate beautifully their painful evolution into the TSO, combining genres of heavy metal, power metal, blues, the death of their lead guitarist, and of course the inspiration of classical compositions. They are a terribly underrated band, and in a way the continuing and increasing success of the TSO somewhat belittles their music and legacy, especially over the greatest hit for them, “Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24)”. To quote: “Oliva has stated however that he was saddened about the success of the record, citing the fact that the same song was released by both bands, yet TSO’s rendition became a bigger hit. This led Jon to believe that the biggest barrier to success would be the Savatage name.”

Also, for amazingly amazing rock operas (or general over-story albums, especially those mixing genres but with a common theme or story), you should listen to The Alan Parsons Project “I, Robot”, The Moody Blues “Days of Future Past”, The Who “Quadrophenia”, Golden Earring “The Continuing Story of Radar Love”, Kansas “Point of Know Return”, Pink Floyd “The Wall” and “Dark Side of the Moon”, Savatage “Dead Winter Dead”, and Jethro Tull “Aqualung”. So much good music there.

“Casablanca” (DVD)

Made in the middle of World War II, Casablanca is an interesting, if over-quoted and over-mis-quoted, look into the peripheral struggles that went on outside of Europe. The phrase “concentration camp” is tossed about rather lightly (probably owing to the fact that in 1942, few outsiders knew exactly what was happening in the German and Polish camps).

I watched this with a friend, and we tried to MST3K it a bit. However, we found the movie more often than not, was riffing itself. The movie itself was also rather short (102 minutes) for such an epic tale, and rather narrow in scope for such an… epic tale.

Also, interestingly, Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman, age 27) at one point refers to Sam (Dooley Wilson, age 56) as “boy”. “That’s racist!”

Also, Germans love David Hasselhoff. That is all.

“Life is Beautiful” (ENCR/Satellite)

La Vita è bella, written, directed by, and starring Roberto Benigni. The first half of this movie was quite funny slapstick, the second half is the worst holocaust film I’ve ever seen. Worse than “The Grey Zone”, “The Pianist”, “Judgement at Nuremburg”, “Fatherland” or a half dozen others I can’t remember the names of.

I don’t mean it was bad, or it was boring, or not entertaining. I mean it was hard to watch. I could watch “The Grey Zone” (the most brutal and explicit one I’ve seen, telling of some Sonderkommando at Auschwitz) in one sitting. I had to pause this one about every 5 minutes when I caught myself being amused, and go do something else.

The last time I can remember being scared by a movie, was “Poltergeist”, when the clown attacked Robbie. An interesting observation we came up with (those I watched it with at the time) were, that we were empathizing with the point of view of the children in the movie so strongly, that the cheesy special effects were still powerful and realistic 20 years later. Or something.

Now, I wasn’t scared by this movie, but the phenomenon of being more emotionally attached to a film by experiencing it through the eyes of the child, in this case Joshua, I think is interesting.