Today is the anniversary for my sweetie-wife and myself, and it is also her birthday. (She made it easy for me to remember the important dates by loading them all onto the same day.)
We were going to go out to dinner and have a nice night. Sadly, that was not to be.
I woke up with a headache, which grew throughout the day. There were times when I wanted a 9 mm analgesic.
We stayed home of course – I hurt so badly I had only toast for dinner — and plan to go out tomorrow.
Quentin Tarantino’s newest film Inglorious Basterds hit DVD and Blu-ray last week and I luckily got a copy via Netflix to watch as my Sunday Night Movie.
I had heard that what the previews sold and what the film actually was were very different things. This I can say is absolutely true. The previews tell you about Lt Aldo Raines (Brad Pitt) and his small band of Jewish-Americans working in occupied Europe terrorizing the Nazi with acts of brutality and malice.
From that you would expect a film with the first act being about the formation of the Basterds, the second act would be the acts of brutality and terror, which a reveal about the middle of the act, perhaps a traitor from within, leading into a third act with the mucho big target that’s impossible to hit but by gum they are going to do it. Many are killed, but the target is hit. If this is a movie about the good war of WWII then things look up, if it is a cynical film about the futility of war, they hit the target but it makes no difference and their sacrifices are for nothing.
That was not the movie that Quentin Tarantino delivered.
He created something much more interesting and enjoyable that the rather cliched plot I just outline above. I regret that I did not see Inglorious Basterds in the theater. This film deserved the full theater experience.
There are actually three plot line in this movie.
The first starts with Col. Hans Landa ( Christoph Waltz.) Landa is tasked when we first meet him with locating escaped Jew in occupied France. The introduction of the character is a wonderfully construct scene of tight tension developed entirely in table-side conversation. Christoph Waltz is an Austrian actor and like every single person in the film is perfectly cast.
The second plot line is Lt Aldo Raines and is Inglorious Basterds. We actually do not see a lot of their acts of violence. It’s not needed for this story. What we do see is the ingenuity and daring that these men have.
The third plot line is Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent) a young Jewish woman who escaped Col Landa’s grasp. However her plot line is not about escape or hunting down the dear colonel.
The rest of the film is the criss-crossing and finally resolution of all the story-lines in Paris in 1944. There are British spies and secret meeting and loads and loads of tension. The tension is nearly always built around secrets. There are people with lethal secrets trying desperately to keep them while under direct observation by their enemies.
Language is vitally important in the construction of this move. Tarantino does not use the convention that the audience understands all characters regardless of language. The German speak German most of the time, the French their language and of course the American hardly speak anything but English. There is heavy use of subtitles and most of the foreign parts are played by actor of that nationality. The effect is one that really works for creating tension in scenes that had they been conducted purely in English would have lacked the punch that Tarantino found.
This film is not history. Any movie that starts with the inter-card — Once Upon A Time — is telling you that you are about to go into a fairy tale. This is a violent and bloody fair tale, but the real fair tales were too before the Victorians got ahold of them. So with that in mind you should best look upon this as a form of Alternate history rather than a story set in WWII as we knew it.
This film did blow me away. I shall have to buy it on blu-ray and share it with as many people as I can convince to watch it.
This morning a friend and I went to see James Cameron’s first feature film in 15 years, Avatar.
A Science-Fictione adventure set in the year 2153, Avatar is about a paraplegic marine Jake Scully (Sam Worthington) who has step up and take over his brothers position as an Avatar driver for a science and anthropological mission on the planet Pandora. An Avatar driver is a person who has the conscious mind transferred into an artificially created Na’vi body. Allowing them to live free and interact with the native population.
Pandora is a jungle planet with a veracious biome that extremely dangerous. The Atmosphere is poisonous and it is populated by the tribal people the Na’vi. (Cameron observes the Sf cliche of over use of apostrophes in alien languages.) Unluckily for the Na’vi, Pandora is also home to ‘Unobtainium’ a mineral so valuable that it sells for 20 million a kilogram. In addition to the scientific expedition there is a large scale strip mining operation with plenty of ex-military security.
Naturally Jake finds his loyalty tested as he lives more and more in his fully abled body and learns more of the ways of the Na’vi.
The film is nearly three hours long and represents a new level of excellence in the relatively young art of performance capture. Actors have their performance captured digitally and this drives the animation of their digital doppelgangers. Robert Zemeciks has been experiment with this as a tool in motion picture, but on films that retained an animated look to them. With Avatar James Cameron has given us photorealistic performance capture. Truly the trailers do not capture the perfect images that have been created for this film. I watched the movie and was totally amazed by the look and realism of the scenes. I could not even begin to guess what elements were real and which elements were digital outside of the alien life on Pandora. The 3-d effect was the best I have ever watched and really did help place you right into the reality of the story. If you have any interest at all in seeing this film you need to see it in the theater where the achievement can truly be appreciated.
As for the story — well sadly there the film was simplistic and predictable. The baby-boomers simply cannot let go of Vietnam and this — in part — is Vietnam all over again. The characters are flat and without and real depth or complexities. From what I have told you — all of which is available in the trailers – you should be able to guess nearly every major plot-point, development, and ultimate resolution on the story.
The film suffers from the need to lecture and allows this soapbox mentality to mar a perfectly fine production. Now mind you, the three hours passed quickly and the visuals are gripping. The story did not fail so badly as to bore me, but it didn;t fully engage me either.
The film also suffered from people behaving stupidly for plot devices reasons, as well an inconsistency in realism. (for example in once scene we see that cockpit glass is tough enough to stop sub-machine guns rounds, but in another it is unable to stop an arrow.)
Still, I am glad I saw it in the theater. Home video, even blu-ray, would not have done this film justice. However I am also glad I paid a bargain price. Keep all that in mind when you make up your mind as to weather you want to see Avatar or not.
My sweetie-wife has traveled back home to help her mother and I have to fend for myself for the weekend.
It will be videos, video games, friends, and tomorrow morning an early showing of Avatar. I don’t expect much from the story but I want to see the new technology.
Xcor, a southern California rocket company, as signed a deal with an agency in South Korea for funding to operate Xcor’s sub-orbital rocket plane. It’s always a good sign when money changes hands,
Here’s the link to the press release…Xcor and South Korea.
And here is some fin commentary at Transterrestrial Musings.
And h/t to Instapundit.
Not that I had gotten much push back on it, but I am now vindicated on my choice for a blu-ray player.
When I was looking into blu-ray players one of my prime concerns was compatibility. There was already Blu-ray 1.0 and 1.1, and 2.0, the basic discs would work in any machine, but some special features would only work if you have the latest version of the blu-ray playing software. Because of that I selected the Playstation 3 as my blu-ray player. Its internet connectivity allowed it to update its firmware as the needs arose and keep up to date on playing blu-rays. I have been quite happy with its performance and not regretted buying it for a moment.
Today the specs were released for something I knew was coming, Blu-ray 3D; 3-D movies with full 1080p quality from you home TV. Sony a prime backer of blu-ray is going to have a firmware update for the Playstation 3 to show the 3-d Blu-rays.
No hardware upgrade for me.
Way back in the 1980’s I first conceived of my fictional character, Seth Jackson, and the universe he inhabits. Seth is an American who has risen through the ranks of the European Star Forces to command a starship. In this universe, Nationalism has not faded away as is so often the case in science-fiction and the Unites States is no longer a dominate power-player.
Part of the themes I wanted to play with back then were the ideas that America without money and without dominance would find itself nearly friendless and alone on the international stage and that Americans would be scorned in general. To get to that situation I had to work out how America might fall by the wayside and become a second rate power.
I looked at two forces that concerned me for the future of my country.
First – the growing sense of political correctness in our culture along with its twin evil, collective rights, and second the out of control spending by a government that didn’t seem to understand that every bill must eventually be paid off. Extrapolating those trends outwards and without and restriction in their growth gave me the future I needed foe the stories I wanted to write. This was not me trying to play prophet, but merely playing with ideas.
Politically in the 1980 I did fear is the liberal faction of our political culture retained control for too long in our government. I didn’t see that faction as putting the breaks on either of those two trends. I myself am much more of a libertarian-conservative. Leave people alone unless that are actively violating the rights of others. I had hopes that the conservative movement in the Unites States, which called for sensible fiscal spending might someday exact that sort of control.
In 1994 the conservatives took power in the legislature, while the liberals retained the executive. For a brief period we seemed to have found a return to intelligent fiscal planning.
By 2000 the conservative took all the executive and were firmly in control of the purse and the spending. They quickly exposed themselves as hypocrites and liars in matters of spending. Our debt ballooned and no spending bill was ever vetoed while the conservative controlled both the legislature and the executive.
Now it is the of 2009 and the liberals have returned to power across the government and spending is on the rise. The Conservatives — who until recently informed us that deficit spending doesn’t matter — are now making noises about being concerned about our spending. Sadly it is the exact same politicians who spent madly when they held the checkbook, so they are no better than a prostitute lecturing us on chastity.
So this blog post was going to be about why I was angry with Turner Classic Movies and their proposed 1st annual Classic Film Festival.
Saturday Morning I awoke with plans of grabbing a couple of checks that needed depositing and walking to my bank to perform said deposit. That plan fell through when I saw that there was a downpour of rain going on and walking anywhere would result in a through soaking that could only be matched by Washington D.C.
So with my sweetie-wife off doing overtime at her job, I sat down and flipped through the channels on the television. I stopped at TCM — Turner Classic Movies — there was one of those short subjects playing about Claude Raines so I watched that and then the commercials for up coming movies. ( I really like that TCM uses the original trailers to promote the movies they show.) Then the devil stepped up and had an offering.
TCM is hosting the first annual Classic Hollywood Movie Festival. They started running down the lists of movies to be shown and I got more and more interested. My interest needle pegged when they said that they would be premiering the lost print of Metropolis. Oh my, I really wanted to see that! (I admit an interest in seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey on the big screen again.)
Then the host – I am certain — revealed that the festival was going to take place in Hollywood, Florida. Damn it man! That’s not Hollywood, not movie Hollywood by any means at all. I was bummed. (I said as much to my ex later that day when I called to wish her a happy Birthday.)
So tonight i sat down to blog about and of course that meant digging up the link to the festival. Surprise, it’s in Hollywood California like it is supposed to be. It’s four days of panels, events, and classic movies projected onto big screens. Man, for a film nut like me this is just great.
Except a cheap 4 day pass current runs $399.00, and that’s going up by a $100 soon. Le Sigh
I have the money. It would be like a really expensive SF con, nut I can’t justify it. There are individual screenings and I may attend one of those.
My blogging has been very sparse of late and I do apologize for that. Between Christmas, familial illnesses, and my own illness — creeping crud caught at LosCon — it has been a rough couple of weeks. I’m going to try to do better for everyone here and I appreciate your patience.
So last night I watched Sleep Hollow (1999), Director Tim Burton’s take of the classic story by Washington Irving. Starring Johnny Depp as Ichabod Crane, Cristina Ricci as Katrina Van Tassel and a superb cast of English actors supporting out the film. Christopher Walken appears briefly, and mutely, as the Headless Horseman with most of the Headless bit performed by Ray Park.
While the core concept is taken from Washington Irving’s short story, The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow, what Burton has placed on the screen is an updated Hammer Horror film. The cast is English and speak in their native English accents — or affect one in the case of the American actors — and the culture surrounding the characters is clearly British. The nature of the courts, manner of the gentry and so on all make this film feel much more at home in some isolated area of the Britain than in up-state New York at the turn of the 18th Century.
That aside this is a wonderful film, if you like the classic look and feel of Hammer Horror. there is a delightful mix of supernatural and the mundane. Ichabod is a police inspector anxious to prove that modern scientific methods are the only way to detect and prove the guilty. he doesn’t believe in ghost and spirits. Naturally the Headless Horseman is a bit of a shook to his theory that the murders in the Sleep Hollow are the results of a culprit of flesh and blood.
The resolution of these two opposing ideas is one of harmonious balance. Ichabod can both be right and be wrong and in such we see that truth and appearance are rarely the same thing. A theme that is built upon and one that unfolds nicely in the movie.
If you have not seen this film, it is worth a look.
Sorry about the life posting and blogging here of late. There has been a lot going on in my life and it has been sucking up time and energy and emotional fortitude.
Overtime at work is a factor but the largest issues is that my sweetie-wife’s mum is sick and in the hospital again. My sweetie has driven out to be with her mum. We’re hoping for the best but it is stressful and sleep has been lost.
It’s impacted not only my blogging but my writing as well.