Tag Archives: Sunday Night Movies

Sunday Night Movie: Sibiriada (1979)

So this is a quite different kind of selection for my Sunday Night Movie series. Sibiriada is a sprawling Russian epic about four generations of families in a small isolated village in Siberia. The image presented in the post is of the character known as The Eternal Old Man and he is the one constant in the story of change and revolution. ( I joked as I watched this film with my sweetie-wife that in a western remake he’d be played by Anthony Hopkins. It would be a better role that that of Sir John Talbot, I can tell you that.)

When I describe this movie as a sprawling epic I am not giving in to hyperbole. The Running time for this film is 275 minutes. That’s 4 hours and 35 minutes of Russian characters, names, and history. It far too much for my sweetie-wife and I to watch in one sitting and so this sia  film we have digested in bits and pieces.

The film starts in the 1800 when the Czars still ruled Russian and it introduces to the feuding families, the wealthy and prosperous Solomins and the poor and unfortunate Ustyuzhanins. Across the decades we watch the families feud and fight, why possessed  by their passion for the land of the small forgotten village of Elan.

We watch as each generation deals with the hardships of their age. The brutal police of the Czars, the chaos of revolution, the struggle for survival in WWII, the desperate search for resources in the fifties and sixties to satisfy the central committee and finally the treat of the land itself being eradicated in the name of progress.

This is not a film for light viewing. It’s dense with a strange narrative structure. There is an element of the mystical  — as seen in part by The Eternal Old Man — which seems at odds with the normal Soviet insistence on realism and scientific processes. (Though the Soviets were horrid about perverted that process for political ends.) However if you like dense films with dozens of foreign characters to keep track of and no sense what so ever of the three act structure, then Sibiriada may be for you.

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Sunday Night Movie: Casino Royale(2006)

So, one the gifts I got for Christmas was a gift card to Borders. Now, as regular readers of the blatherings know I have purchased an ebook reader in 2009 and so I have transitioned to e-books for my pleasure reading.

Sunday I was at Borders with my sweetie-wife and I used the gift card to upgrade my DVD of Casino Royale to a blu-ray collectors edition of Casino Royale.  I got a much better picture and sound quality and additional bonus feature. Which is like crack to me.

I really liked this reboot of the James Bond Franchise. Frankly the Bond films had slipped into fantasy and as such were not very satisfying.  Now, don’t get me wrong, Bond in the books is not about realism. Bond is a larger than life character. He’s a tough man who can win any fight and knows what to do to survive and to win. As a character he is interesting because of what he went through in the story Casino Royale. These are the events that armored Bond, that until the story of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service rendered him cold to women. If you want gritty complex spy novels with a heavy dose of realism you should read the works of John Le Carre. There’s nothing wrong about either approach. James Bond is what we would like to have out there on our side and John Le Carre’s characters are what we fear are out there on our side. Continue reading

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Sunday Night Movies John Carpenter’s The Thing

So I sat down to consider which movie to watch as my Sunday Night Movie last night when I noticed that on my Netflix play now queue John Carpenter’s The Thing was going to expire on Monday. If I was going to watch it as a play now without the disc it had to be right then.
That was fine by me I was in the mood for a horror film.

John Carpenter’s The Thing (1981) is a remake of the Howard Hawks’ film The Thing From Another World (1951) and both used are their source material the story Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell. I have not read the original short story so I can’t compare the films as adaptations, but these films are great moments in the culture when they were made.

The Thing From Another World was made shortly after WWII and the culture of the military and the deep faith in the US military infuses every scene of the film. These military men are America’s best and most noble resource. Courageous and resourceful in the face of a blood drinking monster from beyond the planet these men do not despair and do not quit. The scientists of the movie are not evil, not cackling mad scientists here, but are naive in the evils that can exist in this world, evils that these military are well equipped to fight. This film ends upbeat but the the admonition to “Watch The Skies.” Evil can come again at any time and we must always be vigilant.

John Carpenter’s The Thing while released in 1982 is very much a 70’s movie. The viewpoint of people in general is a cynical one and the military men are now seen as misfits and malcontents either lost in their petty power structures, stoned out of reality, or rebels doomed to failure. These military men are unkempt disordered and far from vigilant. Faced with terror and the unknown they are more prone to panic and paranoia than competence and action. The scientists while still not portrayed as evil as more useless and powerless before the alien threat. The film ends more cynically and without optimism. There is no admonition to watch for anything, because doom, destruction, and death are our fates.

These two films makes fro quite a contrast to view. The special effects in the 1982 film are far superior, but that is to be expected. John Carpenter’s The Thing is perhaps John Carpenter’s best film, and he was well served by not composing the music for this film. (The man seems to have a very limited library of musical themes and he has used them all to death.) This movie is not without flaws. There are scenes that are edited together in a ham-fisted way, causing the characters to appear stupid when they were merely ignorant. (These are very different qualities.) Despite the warts though the film is worth watching, particularly when seen in conjunction with the Howard Hawks classic.

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