haywire – movie review

haywire is like a modern day exploitation film without the sex.  it’s essentially one long chase scene that is executed very well.    having former mixed martial arts fighter gina carano star in it is an interesting choice for soderberg, but i don’t know why it matters who stars.  apart from the fight scenes, she’s not really given much acting to do.  this is just a by-the-numbers genre exercise.

the movie is also a tremendous exercise in montage and editing.  soderberg spends a lot of time telling the story and providing necessary details using pure cinema.  it’s just moving pictures to music for some of the more interesting bits.   you can almost feel the shots coming.

it goes like this:  master shot of someone toward a bedside table.  now close-up on their face as they ponder their next move, close-up of their fingers as it operates the phone, medium reaction shot of them thinking about what they just did.  master shot of them walking away.

the editing is perfect, but textbook.  it’s not dull, it’s just not interesting apart from what is immediately apparent on the screen.   there’s no subtext and no over riding ideas.   it’s standard fare action-for-action’s sake.

there’s not much else here.  the movie trudges through very familiar territory in familiar ways.  the novelty of carano being a woman wears off quickly as she’s just fighting for survival.  it’s a movie we’ve all seen many times.

towards the end of the movie there’s a fight sequence between carano and ewan mcgregor on a beach.  don’t worry – i’m giving nothing away.  nothing about this movie is a surprise, even the double-crosses.   the fight scene is curiously shot from about 7 different angles but all of them are master shots.  it’s a different way to stage the action but i don’t know if it’s more effective.   this was the only interesting sequence in the movie and i don’t think it worked.

if this were a first film, like this year’s bellflower, (by evan glodell), you would think ‘this film marks the arrival of a strong new director and cinematic voice’.  but coming from a veteran like soderberg, it just felt like ‘that’s it?’.

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the iron lady – movie review

the idea of meryl streep playing margaret thatcher in a biopic is really intriguing.   it should be a great film, but it is not.  the iron lady is ponderous and dull.  it tells really very little about the woman and even less about her motives or even her policies.   it paints her as an old lady, losing her faculties and mostly thinking about her father and her dead husband.  it’s downright boring.

i don’t know why but the screenwriter and director are morbidly fascinated more with her dementia than with her life.  pivotal moments are alluded to, but aren’t explained or even demonstrated, save for a couple of moments in parliament and in a couple of cabinet meetings.  imagine a movie about ronald reagan that concentrates more on the last two years of his life than on his presidency, or his appearance before huac, or his time as governor.  that’s how this movie approaches it.

the past in this movie only serves to explain the emotions of the old lady.  it seems like the narrative is built completely wrong, totally backward.

i try not to go into movies with expectations, and i had heard bad things about this one.  but i still had high hopes and had largely ignored the criticism.  now i see what it was all about.   but you can’t fault streep.

this is a great performance by streep.   what she does here is some of the most patient and remarkable film acting i’ve ever seen.   it’s just a shame she didn’t have more compelling material to work with.

since the film is about margaret thatcher, below is a clip of her talking mostly about socialism in one of her last appearances before the house of commons in 1990.

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the artist – film review

the artist is a magical movie that tries to be many things.  it succeeds at them all.

it’s a silent film.   it’s a story about devotion and enduring love.  it’s the story of the end of the era it personifies.  it’s a film about movies and movie making.   it’s a story about loyalty.   it’s a story about art.

there are many nods to other films.  specifically, films like murnau’s sunrise and welles’ citizen kane are used as inspiration to wonderful effect.   i won’t detail how.  if you know the films, you’ll smile in these instances.  if you don’t know them, it wouldn’t matter.

as a patron i see more silent films in a theater to live music in one year than most people see regular movies in two.  i’m lucky to live by a place that shows them about 20 times a year.  i’ve also made a study of certain of the great silent directors i admire.   so…i probably know a little bit more than the average person about silent film and silent film making technique.   but i don’t think i enjoyed this movie any more than anyone else.  you don’t have to know or like silent film to enjoy it.  the film is sweet, beautiful and has a universal appeal.

this film takes only the best of the silent techniques and artfully puts them to work.  just when you think it’s going to turn into melodrama, it takes a more honest and authentic turn.   it’s never maudlin and never boring.  it’s well paced and there’s not a wasted frame.

the film is the story of george valentin, a silent film actor, mostly of action films.  at a premiere he meets a young extra who is trying to break into the business.  he flirts with her though he is married.  he helps her career when the opportunity presents itself.

there’s a scene she is an extra in.  they do several takes of it in the film.  they have to, because every time he momentarily dances with her he screws it up because he gets lost looking at her.  it’s charming.

then the era of the talkies comes and he finds himself marginalized.  for a reason i won’t divulge here, he doesn’t want to speak on screen.  eventually his wife leaves him.

as it happens, the girls career is now on the rise.  she’s mary pickford-like, becoming america’s sweetheart.  unlike a lot of silent actresses, who it turns out had atrocious voices, she transitions to the talkies well and becomes a star.

there’s a scene where he storms out of his producer’s office (john goodman) and meets her on the stairs.  of course, she is on her way up, as he is on his way down, just as in their careers.  this is reinforced doubly in the scene by how she stands above him and the way the master shot is set up.  she is oblivious to the subtext because she is so happy to see him.  she writes down her phone number.   it’s wonderfully acted and staged.

watching the film i was struck at the magic of pure cinema and how, if you tell a simple story well, it is riveting film making.  there is no need for dialogue throughout this film, and there is none.  i thought about all the movies i’ve seen that rely so heavily on sound, on effects, on setting.  i’ve often suspected that some movie makers rely heavily on these or music or ostentatious setups because they don’t believe in their story – or they have little to say.

the artist isn’t smarter or cooler than me.  it tells a story i already know the end to.  but it’s well crafted and lovingly set.  i only just saw it today but i think it’s already one of my favorite movies about movie making that i have ever seen.  and there are some tremendous allusions of self awareness in this movie, too, but it never feels like it’s putting on.  it’s a perfect balance.

the actors are spot on.  everybody from the leads to the smaller parts all make use of a kind of ‘silent movie’ acting that never feels like pantomime.  it’s as though they found a middle ground between that silent movie facade and modern film acting that is it’s own hybrid.  it’s really special.

sadly, the theater i saw this in had seating for at least 400 people.  there were 10 in attendance.  i hope more people see this perfect movie.

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bain of existence

there are a class of people who live among us.   they putter about often in old junky trucks.  the sadder seeming ones use inappropriately small cars.  they prowl neighborhoods and the backs of stores.  they put out pleas on the internet.  they spray paint the sides of the vehicles.  they comb their towns for anything made of any metal that no one wants.  sometimes they steal it outright, taking stuff they have no right to.  they are the scrap metal guys.  they are usually very poor.  in  a way, they live on the fringe of mainstream society and they just barely get by.

at one point, i was working on an idea for a television show based on a universe of these characters.

they are classic asset strippers.

but they are on the bottom end of the financial spectrum.  they have a corollary in the upper echelon of the financial and business world.   this is best seen with organizations like bain capital.  this was the company mitt romney was with before becoming a politician.

they are a venture capital company and a hedge fund.  they are also involved in private equity.

venture capital is money given to new or expanding businesses.  it enables them to grow and develop, especially in fields of tech which take a lot of money to get going, and in any business whose risk level is high or complicated enough that simpler financing is unattainable.

and in part, this is part of what our economy is built on.  in fact, venture capital injections do get a lot of businesses going, keep them going and create/preserve a lot of jobs.

a hedge fund is like a very exclusive, high end mutual fund.  it can invest in whatever it wants.  you have to be a large organization or super rich to put your money into a hedge fund.

private equity is a little shadier.  this is where mitt romney is getting a lot of criticism.  strangely, he’s getting it from people in his own party who claim to share his values.

the private equity side of bain is where they would invest in an existing company.  often the company is in trouble.  so a stake is purchased in the company and the asset managers (like romney) get to work.  they reshape the business from every aspect to try to make the company profitable.  many times the ‘changes’ are superficial – marketing and the like.  often it involves more drastic measures, like moving jobs overseas, firing people or changing the business model drastically.  typically the company is sold after the turnaround.

an example i’d like to use where bain both saved a company and ruined an industry would be the world of radio.  bain has had a stake in clear channel, one of the largest radio corporations.  now, radio is basically dead as a medium and bain and some companies like it ushered in it’s demise.

in a nutshell, it happened like this:  radio was deregulated.  what happened in this was that larger corporations and not smaller companies and single individuals, started to buy up and operate all the radio stations around the country.  they changed the definition of a radio ‘market’.  slowly stations were bought by competing companies so that now the radio looked like national television looked before cable:  three networks.

hedge funds started buying stakes in these corporations and, wanting a higher return on their investment, insisted on streamlined operations.   a handful of radio hosts with good ratings were decided upon and they began to be syndicated on all the corporate stations.   now whole stations could be programmed nationally and local talent were rendered obsolete.  its like mcdonald’s on the radio.

the result was a very profitable business model and the slow but steady death of a medium.  but everyone was and is still making money, although fewer and fewer people listen to the radio every year.

however, this is a success story for a company like bain.

the strange thing is that some of his republican challengers are now attacking his business experience as vulture capitalism.  they liken mitt romney to being as slippery and as unsavory as some of those scrap metal guys i mentioned.

i see no difference between companies like bain capital, those scrap metal guys or the globalist asset strippers who insert themselves into troubled countries under the pretense of helping in the hopes of getting whatever resources or treasure that is there.

it’s a curious aspect of humanity that single-minded self interest can bring about one’s demise.  it happened with radio.    it happens to poor scrap metal guys all the time.  it almost happened to the entire economy in 2008.  and i think its going to happen to mitt romney.

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heat of the moment

i did a bit at stand up that failed miserably once.  it was about how we call the idea of climate change ‘global warming’.  it seems that was a poor choice of words, because the name hints at what it is.  therefore, any time there’s a cold day or a big snow, certain folks who’ve looked into the phenomenon very little will declare that it must be nonsense.

the proper name for it is climate change.   scientifically, there is little doubt that climate change is happening, but why it is happening and how it will resolve or evolve itself is something we can’t say definitively.  for the most part we do not know.

it could be the results of changing sun spot activity on the sun, something totally out of our control.  it could be the way we are care taking for the planet environmentally, although i am lately suspecting that we may have less to do with it than we might like to think.

the point is we aren’t perfectly sure.  any scientific theory can be disproven by future events, and mistaking cause and correlation is one of the biggest intellectual mistakes humans can make in interpreting the universe.

science is essentially just our description of the universe.   we are smart enough to pay attention to trends and see that the climate seems to be changing.    and the scientific among us endeavor to find out the reasons for it and what might be coming.  this type of approach has moved us forward throughout history.

there’s a great analogy of a chess game.  it’s being played by the gods, or whomever.  we are on earth and we can watch the pieces move.  that’s it.  from our observing, eventually we will be able to determine the way the pieces move and the rules for the pieces.  eventually we start to get ideas about the rules of the entire game and have a good sense of it.  the thing that quite often eludes us, though,  is the ‘why’ of the move.  why would someone move a piece in that way?  that looks crazy – he’ll lose his queen!  etc.  the strategy of that game is the more elusive part of understanding chess, not that bishops always move on a diagonal.

with global warming, we are still just figuring out the ‘how’ of the pieces moving.  we haven’t yet determined all the rules of the game.  we don’t know what the universe has in store, but many people have decided, knowing little about it, precisely what it is and what’s happening.

one faction of people in this country says that it’s how we treat the environment that is causing ‘global warming’ and therefore, we have to change the way we live.  the more rabid among them want to create a whole economy of ‘carbon taxing’ which will generate income and make people essentially pay for their use of the environment.

another faction says it is not a true phenomenon and the other faction are just a bunch of environmentalist chicken littles, but they still urge us to buy newer, more fuel efficient cars.  somehow it’s always about money.

‘green jobs’ is a new buzzword.  politicians use it a lot.  people think we should have a ‘green’ economy based around catering to the environment and using alternative power.  at first this seems like a great thing.  but some part of me says it’s just a weird alternative to having an economy based on satisfying everyday needs and meeting that demand.  we don’t make anything in this country anymore and our debt is now bigger than our gdp.  i don’t know if the green economy is an altruistic, smart new direction to go or just the further marketing of bullshit to us all:  busy work for the masses to keep us all able to buy stuff.

the silly part is that, with how little we know about what might be causing the phenomenon we seem to be observing, both sides have definitively decided that they know precisely what is happening and why.  they interpret the observable facts through their ideological points of view and it’s off to the races.   for the most part, they can not now think clearly or learn anything more about the issue.  i can see how both sides will see this simple blog post as an outright ‘attack’.  such are people.

i don’t think anyone on earth is yet able to determine what is causing climate change.  i don’t think we know if it will destroy all life or if it’s just a cyclical occurrence.   i do know that our various responses to the idea of it detail the very aspects of human nature and society that hold us back and cause our lives to often seem like hopeless quagmires.

but there are some out there who are observing, reasoning and experimenting.   eventually, hopefully…their work will lead us closer to the truth and therefore, a more rational approach to climate change and life itself.

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inter-net is a good word for that it is

i’m beginning to see the internet not just as a thing separate from man, as a tool that we use, but rather as one giant, prevailing consciousness made up of all those who take part in it. eventually, i hope we will all be able to harness the power of this collective intellect to solve problems and advance the concerns of mankind, if we can find a way to not be enslaved inside the seemingly beneficent but increasingly authoritarian global consciousness that arises from it.

how can we share so much but retain our privacy and therefore, control of our lives and destinies?

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tinker tailor soldier spy – film review

tinker tailor soldier spy is a fine film, although it is very, very deliberately paced.  almost strangely so.  and yet it works.

the film tells the story of george smiley (gary oldman) who is retired from a british intelligence agency (herein referred to solely as ‘the circus’) who is asked to investigate the suspicion that there is a double agent at the very top of the service.  he is asked to do this without any official sanction or access to records.  he doesn’t even have access to the men himself.  of course, through his patient skill-set he indeed unmasks the traitor.

the film takes so much time in setting things up that at first it might seem exasperating.  but then you realize it’s a technique, not poor storytelling, and before you know it the situation is quite thick and you need that pacing to keep the details straight.

this was filmed previously as a 7 part miniseries in 1979, with alec guinness playing smiley.  i plan on watching that soon.  but imagine that a novel so dense that it could be a miniseries being reduced to a single, feature length film.  there is a lot of tiny bits of information here.

this is a very adult movie, requiring maturity, patience and attention to sort it all out.  it has a silky feel to it that kind of stays with you.

the credit for this goes not just to the direction but also to the tight screenplay that says little but yet reveals all the right details.  in fact, it only takes time to give you the precise details necessary to keep things going forward.  everything else from the novel, which i have read, is omitted.

the performances are masterful.  gary oldman is restrained and subdued and yet, in a couple of key scenes, reminds you of just who is behind all the old man makeup.

that cast is rounded out with amazing performances by the great (and unfortunately named) benedict cumberbatch, colin firth, toby jones, mark strong (who at first i swore was andy garcia at 25 years of age) and john hurt.  they are all astounding.  to a man they all use an economy of acting which, like the spies they portray, gives away only enough to make you wonder what their real motives are.

i wouldn’t say this is a great film, but it’s very compelling and it reminds that gary oldman is one of the best actors of his generation.

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never ending whory

this post is a mess. it’s a hodge podge of ideas. i wrote it on my phone and emailed it to myself. this is a fine example of how what you compose on (or with) can determine your style.  perhaps it also is an example of how our devices, by their nature, may inhibit creativity or clear thought itself:

why do people think that the iowa caucus means anything?  just because it’s first?  how many people who have won iowa get the nomination or become president?  and, except for perhaps ron paul, why do people really think there is a difference between any of them, be they republican or democrat?

i was wondering about the GOP field today.  they are a curious bunch.

i can’t tell if they love america as it is.  rather, it seems like they want to remake america in their ideological image and only then will it be perfect. they’d love us only if we weren’t so fat or if we made more money.  they seem only interested in representing the dreams and ideas of those who agree with them politically and morally

if they ceased solely playing up to their base, if they could politically represent those they morally disagree with they might be a lock to win.

then again, a lot of their talk about lowering taxes and cutting spending is just paying fiscal lip service.  it’s rhetoric that their base wants to hear.  they buy the ideal of financial responsibility except when it comes to war or global monetary policy.

i was listening to a right wing radio guy.  i found myself observing the commercials during the break:  food storage, buy gold as a hedge against inflation and tyranny, a water ionizer to purify water after an unnamed (but referenced) ‘disaster’.  there was also a smoking cessation tool called the ‘vapriot’ because it’s a vapor and because it, like you, loves america,.  it occurred to me that almost all the ads were based on fear or playing off of it.  that’s who they think is listening, I guess.  just an observation.

so the right bases it’s approach on fear.  the left seems to as well.

meanwhile both sides seem to be shameless in their one world approach to monetary and foreign policy.  i can’t imagine a single thing besides obamacare (which will likely get struck down and was only a potential boon to health insurance companies) that could distinguish an obama administration from romney (or bush).  there really is no difference.   this got me wondering.

think of every movie you’ve ever seen.  they go to a distant planet.  they are greeted by the leader.  it’s never the leader of a country.  almost always it’s the leader of the whole planet.  one planet, one ruler.  sometimes the galaxy itself has just a single ruler.  this is just fiction but fiction comes from the minds of creative people.  they design a universe that makes sense.  one world rule seems hardwired into people, is my point.

perhaps this is just human nature and the way it will inevitably evolve.  throughout history, once a nation becomes powerful enough, they start to colonize.  they try to expand.  this is true for nations just as it is for people.   watch anyone in business.  you make 5 dollars, now you want 7.  sell them some add ons.

any kid who gets paid to mow a lawn looks down the street and imagines all those yards and all that money if he mows all those lawns.

any bum who gets $5 from someone thinks there might be another $5 from the next person.  it all seems the same instinct to me.

i use the world ‘globalist’ a lot when discussing politics because it seems to be the steady course we’ve been on.  i don’t know how deliberate it was, but it seems to be tacitly agreed upon by all sides now, since about 1984.

why does it feel like they try to hide their globalist agenda from us, then?  if it’s a part of our makeup, why would the selling of this shiny future be so difficult?  why does it seem to happen incrementally, in secret?  is it all just a giant accident?  do the people helping to bring it about not know that this is where their actions are leading?  it would seem they must know.

it seems like it started rolling in earnest with unregulated corporate growth.  now there are corporations with more money and power than the governments that ought to be policing them.

and unlike politics, where you can impeach a leader or throw out a government, with big business you will always have your money.  even if they knock you down, tear apart your company and send you to jail, you can still emerge wealthy and powerful.

in my lifetime it feels like corporate hegemony has become the norm.    and as a business wants to expand as much as possible without conscience, so too do the governments they now partner with.  i think all the gamesmanship is now just about which nation will be the one to encompass all the others.   perhaps some of them haven’t gotten on board yet, and so there is struggle.  and there is deception.

people in positions of responsibility and authority lie all the time.  parents constantly lie to children.  religions seem to lie to people, too.

and much the same way parents lie to children, perhaps so too does government think it has to lie to us to give us what is probably best for us?  i’m speaking here of globalism.

except for the authoritarian possibilities (which are many), maybe globalism is the natural order of things.

so why don’t the GOP, or obama, run on a globalist platform?  just put it all out there.  it’s how they comport themselves, so why not run on it?  the time has come for responsible and honest globalism.

the age of fiddling about, acting like ‘us’ is better than ‘them’, that their policies are damaging, immoral and insane and ours are beneficial, godly and correct is over.  or should be.

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war horse – movie review

i wasn’t going to write about this one.  i saw it opening day because there was nothing else out i hadn’t seen, it was a colder day and i had nothing else to do.  i should have known better.

what can i say about steven spielberg that i haven’t said before?  i don’t know.

he is an emotional tyrant.  he is the most schmaltzy and manipulative of film makers working today.  just because he is also one of the best technicians making films doesn’t mean he has a strong enough story to tell.  and war horse should have been an easy enough story to tell.

the story features animals, which humans always find sympathetic.  is details the awfulness of war and human conflict.  it has a story of familial loyalty and honor to tell.

but it’s not enough for spielberg who insists on running an almost constant sound track during the first hour, in case you didn’t already know how to feel by the images and emotion on the screen.

there’s a scene where the horse is bought by a guy with his rent money and it’s set up so that if the boy doesn’t get the horse to plow a field, the family will lose everything.  it sounds silly but that’s ok – you go with it.  then the whole town turns out to watch a boy plow a field.  it was just downright goofy, but it’s filmed with all the earnestness and big film making you can imagine.

there is a pivotal scene where the horse is between the english and german fighters.  the horse, in fleeing, gets caught in the barb wire between the two armies in their trenches.

after some back and forth, one of each of the armies ends up in the middle helping to free the horse.  they have a nice but guarded chat as they free the horse.  they part friendly.  i get it – war is absurd.   spielberg seems fascinated by the obvious and is so unsubtle about it that every time i see one of his films i say it’s the last one.

this review sounds more like a rant but i just can’t help it.

i want to add plagiarism to spielberg’s list of crimes against the audience.   maybe it’s an homage but gone with the wind is used like a textbook here in a few places.   most notably:   a sequence of a field hospital during world war 1 and the camera pulls back to reveal a sea of wounded, and in the final sequence which is so color tinted it made my teeth hurt.

there is some stunning stuff of the horse jumping across trenches during the war and running through the trenches trying to get away from all the cannon and gun fire.  this is exciting stuff.  it lasts about 10 seconds.  for me, that’s all i enjoyed about this ponderous movie.

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we need to talk about kevin – movie review

this film seems like it ought to be great.  the subject matter is timely and compelling:  the story of a mother’s struggle with the present and the past after he son runs amok at school and kills a bunch of people.

and yet, i couldn’t stand the movie most of the time.  it does the criss-crossing of it’s timeline which seems to be the fashion of film making right now.  sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.  here it mostly works.  it helps to inform her inner world as we see her outwardly express very little except discomfort.

the only thing of interest for me in this movie was it’s star, tilda swinton.  though i found this movie infuriatingly pretentious at times, and often contrived, her performance is sweet, patient and sad.  she is downright tortured, really.

she looks for a job and everywhere she goes people just stare at her.  some people say cruel things to her.  at one point she is slapped by an old woman.  her house is vandalized with symbolic red paint.  throughout the movie she works on cleaning it off, kind of purging herself as she does.  she’s hester prynne, through no fault of her own.

the relationship with her condescending and creepy son is detailed.  they were always awkward and aloof, though she tries to get through to him.  she tries to be patient and loving but is rebuffed.    the idea put forth by the film about kevin is that some people are just born that way.  i’m not so sure that this is the case.

nothing about kevin’s life with his peers is really detailed.  we don’t know if he was straight or gay.  we don’t know what he was interested in, besides showing his mother how little he loved her and how much he adored his father, whom he later kills along with his sister.   the content of the film gave me mixed messages, and little is explained.

the biggest thing that bugged me about the movie and the mother’s story was this:  why didn’t she just move away?

a nice companion film for you to check out might be gus van sant’s elephant.

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