Of course, first a couple of shorts:
A DASH THROUGH THE CLOUDS (1912): A very early Mack Sennet short that I had seen at the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival back in 2008. An exciting story of a couple, the aviator who comes between them, and the angry mob who nearly kills him.
CRAZY LIKE A FOX (1926): Hilarious Charley Chase flick. Charley is being forced by his father to marry a woman he's never met. Neither of them are up for it, especially when he meets the woman of his dreams (Martha Sleeper). So he an his valet come up with a cunning plan--he'll pretend to be insane and scare the bride's parents into calling off the marriage. Everything is going great, until he meets the prospective bride, and she turns out to be the girl he met at the train station. Hilarious, and basically an excuse for everyone to act completely nutty.
and then after a short break we saw the feature, THE VANISHING AMERICAN (926). In an age when Hollywood really treated Native Americans poorly (i.e., 'the only good good Injun is a dead Injun'), Richard Dix pushed Paramount to make some small amends by producing this picture, based on a Zane Grey novel. Shot in beautiful Monument Valley, it starts with a brief history of the peoples who lived there for mere blinks in the geological time, and sets up the theme of stronger races constantly conquering weaker ones. Flash forward to the early 20th century, a strong, proud tribe lives on the land, but is being pushed to worse and worse reservations by U. S. Government agents who claim to have their best interests at heart. The worst of them is Booker, who shamelessly steals from the Indians. Richard Dix stars as Nophaie, the chief of the tribe, who has the guts and the smarts to stand up to Booker. It's a gripping, epic story, even including the exploits of American Indians in World War II, where many gave their lives for "their" country and the survivors were still not treated fairly upon return. Excellent, and kind of exhausting movie.
BTW, for all the positives of this movie, and as good an actor as Richard Dix was, it was still awkward to see him and other characters in face paint to play Indians. Which reminds me, there was a black-face butler character in CRAZY LIKE A FOX that also doesn't stand up to modern sensibilities. That's the price of watching silent films, seeing things that just aren't right anymore.
Robert Dix, son of Richard Dix was on hand to introduce the film, answer question afterward, and sign copies of his book, Out of Hollywood.
Which reminds me, during the day he also played his father's movie, THE WHISTLER. Based on a radio play and TV series, this was the first of a series of 8 movies made for Columbia. Richard Dix starred in the first 7, but had a heart attack and was replaced for the 8th (he passed away shortly after). Each movie is introduced and narrated by The Whistler, and they were all unrelated stories (Richard Dix starred in 7, but as different characters every time). In this first one, Richard Dix plays a man overcome with grief from his wife's death (and haunted by rumors that he was responsible), so he hires a man to hire a hitman to kill him. But when the original man dies, and he changes his mind, there's no way for him to find the hitman and call it off. Pretty cool.
Total running time (including THE WHISTLER): 206
My Total Minutes (unofficial): 165,618
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Friday, January 8, 2010
Jason falls into a Vortex and sees BLUE SUNSHINE
Last Thursday I was back at my favorite little underground film cult, the Vortex Room.
There was a double feature, but I only stuck around for the first film, BLUE SUNSHINE. In seemingly unrelated incidents, people very suddenly lose their hair and then go psychotic and kill each other. Jerry (soft-core porn king Zalman King, looking an awful lot like Sean Penn) is accused of the murders at one party, and to clear his name he has to find out the truth. Turns out they were all classmates at Stanford 10 years before, and all took a certain type of acid called Blue Sunshine. Pretty wacky.
Running Time: 89 minutes (note, since I'm not sure what version was screened, I'll use the shortest version listing in IMDb.com. I don't want to cheat on the minutes)
My Total Minutes (unofficial): 165,412
There was a double feature, but I only stuck around for the first film, BLUE SUNSHINE. In seemingly unrelated incidents, people very suddenly lose their hair and then go psychotic and kill each other. Jerry (soft-core porn king Zalman King, looking an awful lot like Sean Penn) is accused of the murders at one party, and to clear his name he has to find out the truth. Turns out they were all classmates at Stanford 10 years before, and all took a certain type of acid called Blue Sunshine. Pretty wacky.
Running Time: 89 minutes (note, since I'm not sure what version was screened, I'll use the shortest version listing in IMDb.com. I don't want to cheat on the minutes)
My Total Minutes (unofficial): 165,412
Jason reviews 2009, by the numbers
Back by popular demand (in that one person left a comment asking for it)! First, the movies per day:
Max is just 7 movies a day. Pfft, I can do that in my sleep (and probably did, partially).
But here's the important stuff, the histogram and the total:
First, that total, 442 movies. Yeah, that's a new record. More importantly, if you look you'll see there were 164 days when I didn't see any movie. That means a whopping 201 days that I saw at least one movie. That's the first time I've seen movies on more than 50% of the days of the year [Correction, I did that last year, too, but just barely]. I've managed to get above a 1 movie/day average by seeing on average more than 2 movies per day when I do see them. This year, I averaged 2.19 movies per day that I saw a movie. In 2007 (my previous record for totals, the average was 2.36). So my movie-watching had more total volume, but spread out over more days.
Anyway, this is what the rolling average looks like, compared to previous years.
And just looking at it, I'm exhausted. I should get some sleep.
Oh, and if you wanna know what my favorite movie of 2009 was...well, so do I. Do I look like I have time to pick the best one out of 442 films?
Max is just 7 movies a day. Pfft, I can do that in my sleep (and probably did, partially).
But here's the important stuff, the histogram and the total:
First, that total, 442 movies. Yeah, that's a new record. More importantly, if you look you'll see there were 164 days when I didn't see any movie. That means a whopping 201 days that I saw at least one movie. That's the first time I've seen movies on more than 50% of the days of the year [Correction, I did that last year, too, but just barely]. I've managed to get above a 1 movie/day average by seeing on average more than 2 movies per day when I do see them. This year, I averaged 2.19 movies per day that I saw a movie. In 2007 (my previous record for totals, the average was 2.36). So my movie-watching had more total volume, but spread out over more days.
Anyway, this is what the rolling average looks like, compared to previous years.
And just looking at it, I'm exhausted. I should get some sleep.
Oh, and if you wanna know what my favorite movie of 2009 was...well, so do I. Do I look like I have time to pick the best one out of 442 films?
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Jason Watches THE ROAD
Cormac McCarthy, the novelist who wrote NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, also wrote the story behind this movie. And if you thought NO COUNTRY was bleak, you know nothing about bleak. Viggo Mortensen stars as a father who leads his young son through a world that has gone through so/me unexplained cataclysm. Everyone is starving, some are cannibals, none can be trusted. They're on their way to the coast because...because the father has told the son that everything's better on the coast.
They have run-ins with different people. The son wants to be trusting and kind, but the father teaches him survival (if this movie has any redemption for mankind, it is this hint that kindness and empathy is at least a natural quality in children).It's a great movie, amazingly shot, hypnotically scored, perfectly acted. Probably the best movie I never want to see again.
Running time: 111 minutes. My Total Minutes (unofficial): 165,323 (note, I've adjusted the total by adding the specific minutes for the films I've seen in 2010. 2005-2009 are still estimated as 90*number of movies)Jason Watches UP IN THE AIR
George Clooney stars in this Jason Reitman (THANK YOU FOR SMOKING) film as Ryan Bingham, the most frequent of frequent fliers. He works for a company that fires people for a living (so their having a bonanza right now), and that seems perfect for his cynical "keep nothing in your backpack" lifestyle--hell, he travels 350,000 miles a year (more than a trip to the moon) with nothing but a carry-on. And he loves it. He's a member of all the exclusive travel clubs--gold programs for rental cars, hotel chains, airport lounges, and especially frequent flier miles. He's on a quest for 10,000,000 miles--something done by only 6 people before him (more people have walked on the freakin' moon!)
Anyway, his lifestyle is threatened when a bright young Cornell psychology grad Anna (Natalie Keener) comes in and revolutionizes the company with a bold idea--firing people by web cam. Well, Ryan doesn't like this, and for all his complaining his boss (Jason Bateman) decides to send Anna on the road with him so she can learn the ropes.Many things about the story are predictable--Ryan will get a kick in his cynical butt (thanks to fellow frequent flier/love interest Alex, played by Vera Farmiga), and he'll learn to appreciate his family (although frankly the scenes at his sister's wedding slow the whole film down), and there's one scene that really bugged me (spoiler alert: can we please retire the cliche of people starting an important speech and then stopping and walking off without saying anything? It was never even believable enough to be a good cliche, and I know no way to make it interesting anymore)
But there's two sides to this. Ryan's not that unlikable, and he's not that bad at relationships, he's just bad at permanence. He's actually a genius at 1-minute relationships. He sizes up Alex right away, and the scene where he fires J K Simmons is brilliant.
I'm sure this just proves I missed the point of this movie, but I identified with Ryan Bingham more than anyone else in the movie. I don't travel much at all, but I drive a pickup with the idea in mind that if things got really bad I could toss everything I need in the back and leave with at most one other person (maybe a dog). And I ended up wondering what the film-watching equivalent of 10 million airline miles is...So let's calculate that. After a quick googling, I get that the average airspeed of a commercial airplane is ~600 mph (I couldn't find ground speed, which would be more appropriate, but let's make the poor assumption that tailwinds and headwinds cancel out and that ground speed on flights averages to 600 mph). That's (conveniently) 10 miles/minute, so 10,000,000 miles is the equivalent of 1,000,000 minutes in the air (approximately, and this isn't including bonus miles you can get through other deals--credit cards, ordering airline tickets online, etc.) Please feel free to challenge/refine my assumptions, but I think 1,000,000 minutes will be the closest big round number that's equivalent to 10,000,000 airline miles.
So anyway, I'm defining my equivalent of 10 million miles as 1 million minutes watching movies. I started this blog three years ago, but I started tracking every movie I saw in 2005. I won't count movies before then, since you don't get frequent flier miles before you join the program. Since then I've seen 1,835 movies (including this one). Estimating 90 minutes per movie (a conservative estimate, I think, and I'll try to go back and look up running times to get a real total) I'm at 165,150 minutes (unofficially).So from now on, I'll be counting my minutes, too, and each post will include a running total of minutes. Follow me on my idiotic quest for 1,000,000 movie-watching minutes. Remember, I don't count home video, only the big screen. Let's hope the big screen lasts long enough for me to get there.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Jason watches INVICTUS
And that's my first movie of 2010, and it's a pretty good one.
Given the legendary (and continuing) status of Nelson Mandela's life, it's probably a smart idea to keep a biopic limited in scope and let a short period illustrate the character of the man. And in fact the few times Clint Eastwood lost my attention was when he tries to expand beyond the details of the story--frankly, I don't care if Mandela had a troubled family life. Sure, it's fine to show him as mortal and flawed, but it was just shoe-horned in there akwardly.
The story takes place shortly after Mandela wins the Presidency, and is trying to unite his "Rainbow Nation." Now a little background about sports in South Africa at the time (summarized neatly in the opening scenes): blacks play football (soccer) on rundown, dirty fields; whites play rugby on green, well-maintained fields. The national rugby team, the Springboks, is very popular among the whites but blacks routinely root against them as they view the team as a symbol of Apartheid.
In this environment, Mandela makes a political gamble and backs the Springboks over officials who want to remove the name and colors. His reasoning is that he can never unite black and white Africans if his government does everything the whites were afraid of--like remove their beloved cultural icons. But as the story unfolds, and Mandela enlists team captain Francois Pienaar (Mat Damon) to inspire his struggling team to greatness in the 1995 World Cup, it becomes rather clear that this is more than political, Mandela's a true fan of rugby. And soon, thanks to outreach efforts ordered from the top, the whole country is as well.
Freeman, Damon, and Eastwood are all at the top of their game in this film, and although the ending is pre-ordained to anyone with the basic googling skills to look up the winner of the 1995 Rugby World Cup, the climactic scenes are still tense and exciting.
The title INVICTUS comes from a poem by William Ernest Henley (famous ending lines: I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul) which Mandela read to inspire himself during his imprisonment. In the movie, he gives a copy of it to Pienaar to inspire the team, although that story is apparently apocryphal. But the scene where Pienaar tours Mandela's old cell and imagines him reciting it is powerful. And by letting us see it through Pienaar's point of view it's an example of where Eastwood figured out how to broaden the scope without digressing from the narrative.
Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the subplot involving Mandela's security detail and his controversial decision to hire white agents (who protected the previous President DeClerke). Trust-building starts on many fronts, and ultimately they're all professionals doing their jobs.
Oh, and one last thing. I'm wary of believing this is intentional, but in the atmosphere of fear and mistrust depicted among many at the start of Mandela's Presidency, I can't help but think about our current President. Again, I'm not saying it was meant to make that parallel, I'm just putting it out there.
Given the legendary (and continuing) status of Nelson Mandela's life, it's probably a smart idea to keep a biopic limited in scope and let a short period illustrate the character of the man. And in fact the few times Clint Eastwood lost my attention was when he tries to expand beyond the details of the story--frankly, I don't care if Mandela had a troubled family life. Sure, it's fine to show him as mortal and flawed, but it was just shoe-horned in there akwardly.
The story takes place shortly after Mandela wins the Presidency, and is trying to unite his "Rainbow Nation." Now a little background about sports in South Africa at the time (summarized neatly in the opening scenes): blacks play football (soccer) on rundown, dirty fields; whites play rugby on green, well-maintained fields. The national rugby team, the Springboks, is very popular among the whites but blacks routinely root against them as they view the team as a symbol of Apartheid.
In this environment, Mandela makes a political gamble and backs the Springboks over officials who want to remove the name and colors. His reasoning is that he can never unite black and white Africans if his government does everything the whites were afraid of--like remove their beloved cultural icons. But as the story unfolds, and Mandela enlists team captain Francois Pienaar (Mat Damon) to inspire his struggling team to greatness in the 1995 World Cup, it becomes rather clear that this is more than political, Mandela's a true fan of rugby. And soon, thanks to outreach efforts ordered from the top, the whole country is as well.
Freeman, Damon, and Eastwood are all at the top of their game in this film, and although the ending is pre-ordained to anyone with the basic googling skills to look up the winner of the 1995 Rugby World Cup, the climactic scenes are still tense and exciting.
The title INVICTUS comes from a poem by William Ernest Henley (famous ending lines: I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul) which Mandela read to inspire himself during his imprisonment. In the movie, he gives a copy of it to Pienaar to inspire the team, although that story is apparently apocryphal. But the scene where Pienaar tours Mandela's old cell and imagines him reciting it is powerful. And by letting us see it through Pienaar's point of view it's an example of where Eastwood figured out how to broaden the scope without digressing from the narrative.
Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the subplot involving Mandela's security detail and his controversial decision to hire white agents (who protected the previous President DeClerke). Trust-building starts on many fronts, and ultimately they're all professionals doing their jobs.
Oh, and one last thing. I'm wary of believing this is intentional, but in the atmosphere of fear and mistrust depicted among many at the start of Mandela's Presidency, I can't help but think about our current President. Again, I'm not saying it was meant to make that parallel, I'm just putting it out there.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Jason goes to Alaska and watches SHERLOCK HOLMES
Okay, I was actually in Anchorage, AK for a vacation with my family, but while I was there, we did see Guy Ritchies's new take on the classic detective.
I am by no means a Holmes scholar, but I did read a collection (I think the complete tales, Volume 1) some years ago. By my faulty memory, here are some things they got right:
Holmes is an athlete--many film versions show Holmes as the brain and Watson as the brawn, but in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, Holmes outclassed nearly everyone in intelligence and strength.
Irene Adler is a real character, and did outfox Holmes (I believe twice)
Things they got wrong:
Holmes and Moriarty (minor, unimportant spoiler) do tangle several times before Watson's engagement.
Although Holmes did use coccaine, and Watson did express concern, Holmes was far from an inveterate drunk during his down time, and his drug use never became a problem.
Things they got...different:
This is an action movie, while the books are far more cerebral.
I don't recall the books ever getting into the supernatural as much as this movie did.
Anyway, as for the quality of the movie itself--I liked it. Robert Downey Jr. is perfect as Holmes, Jude Law plays off him very well as Watson, and the action is engaging and fun. The caper is about Lord Blackwood, a very evil man who is put to death at the conclusion of Holmes and Watson's final case together
If you think about Guy Ritchie's ouvre (minus SWEPT AWAY), you'll see that with LOCK, STOCK, AND THREE SMOKING BARRELS, SNATCH, and ROCK 'N ROLLA he's really been making Sherlock Holmes action flicks for a long time, just with different names and more criminals. (And if you think about SWEPT AWAY, you should punch youself in the brain until you stop*) So he's a perfect fit here, and I'm looking forward to the inevitable sequel (latest rumors--Brad Pitt as Prof. Moriarty)
Oh yeah, and while I was there I also re-watched WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE at the Bear Tooth Theatre Pub. I have nothing to add to my previous review other than my adorable five year old neice liked it, too, and didn't find it scary. Oh, and I liked watching it while drinking beer and eating nachos.
*I've never actually seen SWEPT AWAY, I just heard it sucked. But I couldn't resist a snarky dig.
I am by no means a Holmes scholar, but I did read a collection (I think the complete tales, Volume 1) some years ago. By my faulty memory, here are some things they got right:
Holmes is an athlete--many film versions show Holmes as the brain and Watson as the brawn, but in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, Holmes outclassed nearly everyone in intelligence and strength.
Irene Adler is a real character, and did outfox Holmes (I believe twice)
Things they got wrong:
Holmes and Moriarty (minor, unimportant spoiler) do tangle several times before Watson's engagement.
Although Holmes did use coccaine, and Watson did express concern, Holmes was far from an inveterate drunk during his down time, and his drug use never became a problem.
Things they got...different:
This is an action movie, while the books are far more cerebral.
I don't recall the books ever getting into the supernatural as much as this movie did.
Anyway, as for the quality of the movie itself--I liked it. Robert Downey Jr. is perfect as Holmes, Jude Law plays off him very well as Watson, and the action is engaging and fun. The caper is about Lord Blackwood, a very evil man who is put to death at the conclusion of Holmes and Watson's final case together
If you think about Guy Ritchie's ouvre (minus SWEPT AWAY), you'll see that with LOCK, STOCK, AND THREE SMOKING BARRELS, SNATCH, and ROCK 'N ROLLA he's really been making Sherlock Holmes action flicks for a long time, just with different names and more criminals. (And if you think about SWEPT AWAY, you should punch youself in the brain until you stop*) So he's a perfect fit here, and I'm looking forward to the inevitable sequel (latest rumors--Brad Pitt as Prof. Moriarty)
Oh yeah, and while I was there I also re-watched WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE at the Bear Tooth Theatre Pub. I have nothing to add to my previous review other than my adorable five year old neice liked it, too, and didn't find it scary. Oh, and I liked watching it while drinking beer and eating nachos.
*I've never actually seen SWEPT AWAY, I just heard it sucked. But I couldn't resist a snarky dig.
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