Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries, The Long, Hot Summer, Rhapsody in August, The Boys of Baraka, Notorious C.H.O., & The Science of Sleep

Stupid work has been keeping me from watching and keeping up on this nearly as much as I would like. I also have watched the second season of Veronica Mars and the third season of Arrested Development (both well-worth watching), along with worked insane hours of work, so that really explains why my movie watching was so low the past couple weeks. Probably won't increase much until after November 7th, either. Oh, and go Bengals and Buckeyes. So these are more half-assed than normal.

Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries was better than I was expecting. I really felt like I needed another show to make sure I never cleared off my DVR, and this was it. Lots of recommendations from Sci-Fi nerds and the promise that it was much better than most TV Sci-Fi. Well, it's not as good as Firefly/Serenity, but very little is. Certainly a worthwhile add to my Series recording list. Now, I just have to finish the first and second seasons before the third premieres on October 6. Or else I will continue to be someone who is alone in watching it among friends, rather than joining people at a Frak Party, or some such. Maybe I'll just try to watch as much as I can and still go. The effects were actually pretty good, the acting was generally not bad, and the story was interesting. (plus Grace Park and Tricia Helfer are attractive...)

The Long Hot Summer was another of those movies in the late 50s that should have been made a few years later, because the restrictions from the production code were driving me crazy. Yeah, they did get to say that women think about sex, but you could tell that if this were a little later, the son would have been made impotent and the daughter's non-Paul Newman beau gay. Damn them for neutering films. Then again, All the King's Men was a pretty neutered version of the book, and the remake is supposed to keep all that in and still be boring as hell. Not that the original was boring, I happen to really like it. It was weird to see Orson Welles, because at first I thought, "Orson Welles", and then "It can't be him", and I went back and forth until I just checked the IMDB.

Rhapsody in August is Akira Kurosawa making everyone feel really depressed because it's all about how people were affected by the atomic bombs. A little later than Hiroshima Mon Amour, but I still got a little weepy-eyed when the kids were wandering around Nagasaki looking at the various monuments and the like. Maybe some Americans don't want to remember that we're the only country who've ever used nuclear weapons in war, but it's pretty hard to forget that. Using the children as a way to get people to connect to the story was pretty effective as well, since there were four of them and most people could identify with one of them at least. And, of course, it was strange to see Richard Gere speaking in Japanese. I couldn't tell if it was halting or if he was mispronouncing words, but he seemed fairly up on it, at least when he wasn't supposed to be muffing words.

The Boys of Baraka was an interesting look at the Baraka program, which takes high risk kids from Baltimore and sends them to Kenya to try to get them out of the areas where they're likely to go to into the drug trade or get into trouble with the law. It was interesting, especially comparing that to the somewhat bleak view that the Wire is seeming to get into this season. I'll have to think about them together at some point in the future (may not actually happen).

Notorious C.H.O. is Margaret Cho's second concert film, and this one was more about sex and, consequently, I didn't care for it nearly as much as her other films that I've seen. Just wasn't nearly as funny to me. Eh.

The Science of Sleep was strange, in the wonderful way that a Gondry film can be. It felt much less organized than had it been written by Charlie Kaufman, and it was much more visually impressive, like his videos. It reminded me of Eternal Sunshine, as they're both about relationships, although clearly opposite ends of them. I'd like to think that I don't go quite as bizarre when one of mine starts, but then again, my imagination does like to get way ahead of reality. Can't quite remember my dreams, though, so I can't tell whether I've ever gone so far as to have them end up becoming real. And that is, if there is even one, the problem with the film. If you're looking to find a movie with closure, or one that isn't going to confuse you at all, you're not going to like the film at all. In fact, you may even hate it. I can see someone hating it very easily. It takes both an ability to separate dreams from reality and an overactive imagination in the realms of love and relationships to get, and some people don't really want to work that hard while watching a film. It's not as immediately brilliant as Eternal Sunshine, but really, few films are. It's more of an earworm, slowly burrowing in, taking over your life, until you'd be happy to ride around on a mechanical horse below cotton ball clouds with the woman you love (and may or may not love you back). Then you wake up.

Smiley's People, Igby Goes Down, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, Silkwood, & Norma Rae

Smiley's People isn't as good as Tinker, Tailor, but it's still a superior miniseries. Neither of them have nearly enough Patrick Stewart, and really, that's a damn shame. I know that the books didn't have more, but it's like Hearts of Darkness with the Kurtz section down to a page or two. Seriously, I hate when someone is all over it all and doesn't really appear. Damnit. Guinness is brilliant again, and the supporting cast is also good.

Igby Goes Down has some very very good scenes, and some very very good things in it, but there are some things that don't seem right at all. Good cast, even with not one but two Culkins. It just sort of felt like a movie that was trying to do way too much with not nearly enough. I think it has to do with the Culkins. I still can't get past them. He wasn't bad at all, just felt slightly off. I can't even put my finger on why I found the movie slightly off-putting, except that I also hated The Catcher in the Rye. Young angsty jerks don't tend to agree with me.

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne is an early Bresson film, but I really didn't care for it. Had a feeling of pointlessness. And it was slow, even at only 86 minutes. I think I'm going to hold off for a long while before I check out another Bresson film.

Silkwood is an excuse for Meryl Streep to use another accent. And to put another Confederate flag on screen. I'm just wondering if there's a point to saying that she was very good in it? That Kurt Russell and Cher were good was only a little more of a surprise. Craig T. Nelson was a bad guy, rather than a dad in this film. You know that he only has two roles, right? Dad and bad guy. The ending of the film is way too mawkish. Can't there be a ban on endings just like that? Amazing Grace over a montage is just eh.

Norma Rae is a movie I had seen the most famous scene in my true film class back in college. One of our projects was to use a scene from a "true" movie and then write a paper on it. I wanted to do the famous one take call in All the President's Men, but that was too long, so I apparently wrote about a scene in Erin Brockovich where she gets a phone call. Clearly I wanted to deal with phone calls. Actually, looking through my papers from that class, I wrote about a different phone call in All the President's Men. I was obsessed apparently. Norma Rae is a better film than Silkwood. Probably would have had an even worse impression of Silkwood had I not seen Norma Rae right afterwards. Of course there are problems with this movie as well, but those are fairly minor compared to Sally Field as Norma Rae.

Yeah, I watched two straight 70s liberal films. So?

Cure, Our Brand Is Crisis, & the entire Sharpe series

Cure is the movie that made Kiyoshi Kurosawa a star, and it is very good. It's also somewhat disappointing in that I think I had it built up in my mind as a great film, and it's merely very good. Of course, the very good film Fallen is similar, so it's not like I don't like movies like this. It's more about the detective rather than a supernatural being inhabiting the bodies though. It's not as good as Pulse, but it's better than most serial killer movies made of late.

Our Brand Is Crisis just makes me happy I never work for bad candidates... oh, man. I could tell some stories, but I won't. At least I don't work for Bob "0 for 7" Shrum. Just watching these guys try to struggle to reframe the election explains why Democrats have been screwed for a while. Ugh. I wonder, though, can we blame Bob Shrum for all the deaths in Bolivia during the revolt? I'd like to. It's not like we can't blame him for a lot of other deaths through his incompetant campaigning.

Sharpe (and his miniseries of now 15 movies (which I've watched over the last fifteen weeks)) follow Lt. Sharpe (and his various promotions and demotions) and British troops from Portugal through Spain, France, England, Belgium, and on into India during and right after the Napoleonic wars. As I'm a fan of the Bernard Cornwell books and had seen the first few when they originally aired on PBS back in 1993 and 1994, I enjoyed them all. Until it got to the one not based on a book of Cornwell's, Sharpe's Justice (although Sharpe's Mission wasn't based on a book, it was at least still set during the war), which is set in Yorkshire after Napoleon was exiled to Elba. And is horrible. Really, just very out of place in otherwise superior TV movies. The series has a lot of people I enjoy in sometimes small, sometimes large roles, ranging from Brian Cox, Pete Postlethwaite, Elizabeth Hurley, and Paul Bettany to Alexis Denisof, Alice Krige, and Phillip Glenister. And that isn't to forget Sean Bean as Sharpe and the very good Daragh O'Malley as Sgt. Harper. The main cast is generally very strong, and the theme song (of sorts), Over the Hills and Far Away, gets stuck in my head quite a bit.

Superchunk at the Cradle 9/1/06

Because I was out of town for Labor Day weekend, I didn't get to watch as many movies as normal, but instead, you, dear readers, get something much more rare: a concert review. Yep, I actually went to a concert. In a club! And not just any club, but one of my favorite places to see a show, especially now that it's smoke free. The Cat's Cradle is very nice. And a concert there with one of my favorite bands of all time is very very nice.

Cadmium
Animated Airplanes over Germany
Rainy Streets
Art Class (Song for Yayoi Kusama)
Learn to Surf
Song for Marion Brown
Nu Bruises
Winter Games
Package Thief
Seed Toss
Sunshine State
Why Do You Have To Put a Date on Everything?
From the Curve
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The First Part
Detroit Has a Skyline
Cast Iron
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Slack Motherfucker
Precision Auto

Opening band was Tenement Halls, who were... boring. I mean, it wasn't bad or anything, but they barely talked, the music all sounded the same and I just couldn't get too excited. Could've been the migraine I had though.

Superchunk just continues to be lots of fun. Good setlist (although no Driveway to Driveway or 100,000 Fireflies or Brand New Love, and I don't really care for Seed Toss), and the two new songs were good. After The First Part, I was thinking I really hope they play Detroit Has a Skyline, and then they did. It made me very happy. In the second encore, I tried to get them to play Brand New Love or 100,000 Fireflies, but apparently, my power was used up on Detroit. I think I need to work on improving that. That power could be used for good. Or evil, but I doubt I'd go to the show and use the power to play Swallow That. Anyway, now that I've just made a joke that very few people will get, mainly because it's not funny, I will mention that they said there'd be a new album in 2012 and it would be beamed directly into our brains. That'd be awesome. Not the 2012 bit, but the brain-beaming of new music.

Fighting Elegy & The Mosquito Coast

Fighting Elegy is a satire of the militarism that lead to Japanese involvement in World War II. It's very well done and touching, although the touching parts depends if you can handle a character playing the piano with his erection. Actually, it's not really touching. Well, the erection is touching the piano, but the movie is just touching in the normal way. The most interesting aspect is just how ridiculous everything is played out in the film, with Kiroku feeling frustrated by the fact that the Catholic girl he's in love with is not going to get physically intimate with him, and taking out his sexual frustrations with violence. And, by extension, suggesting that a lot of militarism is a result of not enough sex. I'm not sure where the writer was going with Michiko's statement about why they couldn't be together. Maybe there was something more explicit in the original novel, because that seems a little bizarre and like it came out of nowhere.

The Mosquito Coast has one of Jason Alexander's first roles. I didn't recognize him, but the IMDB did. Harrison Ford is very good, and it's an interesting premise, but I just don't understand how someone can be so obsessed with something so ridiculous. I mean, building an ice-making machine in the middle of the Honduran jungle is really crazy. A young River Phoenix was nice. It seems like something that probably would have been better in the original novel, again. Weird how that is.