Month: May 2005

Riding Giants

Crikey.

First of all, I should have gone to see this in a theater. No excuse. I’ve made a decision not to spend $11 on whatever Nicolas Cage craps out anymore, but I should go see and support independent films and documentaries in theaters when I can, and I’m sorry I missed this one.

I am not even a fan of surfing; it’s not a great spectator sport to be honest, and I don’t do it myself, so this should have been just marginally interesting. But this film is SO GOOD. The history, the interviews, the fantastic old home movies that Stacy Peralta tracked down are wonderful.

His story arc tracing this bohemian post-war lifestyle to the jet-ski aided extreme sport it is today seems to happen gradually, and Peralta doesn’t dwell on whether this is a good or bad thing – it just is.

It’s not deep. It’s just very sweet. Peralta’s respect for the sport and its pioneers comes through all the time. And it is completely captivating. We started watching this movie late at night, and I didn’t glance at a clock once, or even get up.

I can’t say enough for the quality of this film. I honestly can’t think of another film I’ve seen in the past year or two that was as enjoyable and transporting as this one.

for me to poop on

last night i watched “national treasure”. why, i don’t know. i have nothing to say about this film except that it may be time to put nicholas cage out of his misery.

last week: “blade: trinity”. entertaining enough i suppose, but really worth seeing only to see parker posey play the role she was born for: an anorexic vampire with a bad attitude. there’s a super vampire in this movie who is apparently unbeatable in battle but who runs away from blade at their first meeting, even though he’s supposed to kill him. it isn’t clear either why super vampire, the first vampire even, does what anorexic vampire with a bad attitude wants him to do. there is, however, an amusing scene in which said super vampire goes into a store replete with vampire kitsch, including a vampire dildo. i really hope they lay this franchise to rest with this film–the second and third ones have made the original seem like a masterpiece. or perhaps there will eventually be a crossover between the “blade” and “underworld” universe. maybe even in space.

michael, i’m guessing you’re the only other person here likely to have seen either of these–am i missing anything of note?

closer

we watched this some weeks ago. i didn’t blog about it then because i thought sunhee–who liked it more than i did–would; but she didn’t. then yesterday we were at a party where a number of people raved about it. i heard what they had to say but remained largely unmoved. has anyone else seen it? it is about four (beautiful) people in london who fall in and out of love over the course of a few years. i found parts of it funny and touching and it is a stylish production (in the way that mike nichols’ films are) but other than clive owen’s performance there’s nothing here i would recommend to anyone. beautiful people fall in love, are shallow, cheat, swap partners, get back together, have control issues and deal with them differently. on the whole i had a hard time caring about any of them or any of it. in many ways it goes over a lot of the same ground as “we don’t live here anymore” (did we discuss that here?) but i preferred that film (which i didn’t like that much either).

someone want to convince me otherwise?

fritz lang–“m”, “metropolis”

watched the criterion disks of these in the last week. i’d seen “m” a long, long time ago and if you can believe it i’d never seen “metropolis”.

“m” first: i can’t remember what my original response to “m” had been–i wasn’t a very engaged film-viewer then and in any case was probably too aware of its status to register a genuine response. watching it now i was struck by all the things that make it such a landmark film–the use of voiceover, the use of music as narrative device, the camera-angles, all the noir devices that would soon become mainstays of the genre etc. etc.. but i was most struck by the fact that exactly because it has been such an influential film these things don’t really have an effect anymore (not on me anyway). now that every crap film and television show uses all these devices it seems, to me anyway, hard to register “m” as anything but a historically significant film–it didn’t surprise me the way “the testament of dr. mabuse” did. i’m interested to hear your takes on this both in relation to this specific film and in general. (by the way, i can see what welles took from lang for “citizen kane”, but again i have to say that while i recognize “kane” as a historically significant film the welles that remains fresh for me is “touch of evil”.)
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