has anyone seen this?
heart in the right place, i guess — heroes schmeroes, PTSD, the banal brutality of war. but why oh why do american directors have to spell everything out so damn explicitly? and why oh why do they feel a need to give us the same damn soundtrack every single time?
i wish i hadn’t seen it.
so, this is the new hbo show, the one milch lost interest in deadwood for. most critics have savaged it. partly for this reason, and partly because i wasn’t ready to go straight from the sopranos finale to a new show, i didn’t watch it on sunday, but caught it tonight on the repeat. i understand critics get 3 episodes of shows/series to write their preview-reviews and maybe the next two are pretty bad, but i quite liked the premiere and don’t really understand why it was trashed in the particular ways it was: a common theme was that the show is a mishmash of genres that don’t come together. well, it does veer towards self-conscious weirdness, and most of the acting is pretty bad–the exceptions are whoever the guy is who plays the title character, al bundy, luis guzman, and stanford from sex in the city–but i thought it pulled off the surf-scifi-noir thing quite well. the writing is generally decent, though some lines sounded like the actors were auditioning for twin peaks. it held my interest more than the first episode of deadwood had. i’m signed on for at least another 3 episodes. i don’t know if there’s a whole lot to be said about it at this point. jeff? anyone else watching?
i’ve become more than a little lackadaisical about posting regularly to the blog. not sure why, but i’ve been more regular with comments on existing threads on movies i’m watching than with new posts. perhaps some blog-weariness? or just inertia since so few of us are making new posts? mark urged recently in a comment that we not hide posts about movies that don’t yet have topics of their own in comment threads for topics from years ago, and since it is rare that mark makes sense, here i am to post briefly about battle royale, which sunhee and i watched last week (on mark’s recommendation).
Continue reading battle royale
Notionally a loose sequel to Henry Fool, Fay Grim defies easy characterization. A Hal Hartley film, on the face of it, this is an elaborate international spy thriller. Fay Grim becomes aware that Henry Fool, to whom she was once married, was a spy working on and off for the CIA. The notebooks containing his “confessions†are then clues to his past, and every intelligence service in the world is after Fay and the notebooks. But it is clear that this is far more of a parody of spy thrillers than one itself. The plot becomes ever more elaborate and bizarre, with dead ends and twists that strain credulity.
So I’m not sure what the movie actually is, except to say that this is probably my favorite movie of the year so far. It is darkly funny, and the writing is superb. I was hanging on every word of the dialogue, especially scenes with Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) whose seriousness in the face of the absurd was a joy to watch. Almost every performance is excellent, even Jeff Goldblum. It is nice to see him not perpetually wise-cracking, and he utters the perfect deadpan line when asked by Fay why he and the US tried to overthrow Allende: “it was not appropriate for our economic interests.†Parker Posey goes a little over the top as she plays Fay, but her character grew on me as she transformed from shallow ditz to sacrificing sleuth. Fay and Henry’s son, Ned (Liam Aiken), also turns in a great performance. The movie’s tone changes in the last half hour, becoming more serious, but it is still riveting, particularly a long conversation between Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan) and an Osama bin Laden character played by Anatole Taubman. Finally, the camera work is great as almost every scene is shot a little crooked and from below so that all the actors lean to one side and you get ironic detachment just from the framing. Highly recommended.
Closely based on the play (which I have not seen), this is set in the recent past and follows the experiences of a group of 7 or 8 boys at a British grammar school as they spend a semester studying for the Oxford and Cambridge University entrance exams. This was a curiosity of British education, now abolished, that involved students spending an extra semester at school to take specialized exams for Oxford and Cambridge, because those two universities claimed that the regular final exams (A levels) did not adequately test for what they were wanted in an undergraduate. The main theme is conflict between the gaining of knowledge for its own sake, and learning in order to pass the exam. The former is symbolized by the old History teacher, Hector, and the latter by a new teacher, Mr Irwin, brought in by the headmaster to increase the number of the school’s students who go to Oxbridge (one of the primary status symbols by which schools are judged). The very different approaches are on display as the two teachers prepare the boys for the exams and interviews, with Hector encouraging singing, soulful discussions of poetry and the First World War, and using one’s French to pick up prostitutes, while Irwin tells the students to choose the topics they write about and their favorite hobbies and composers strategically in order to impress the examiners. Years ago, one of my students who was also an English major, told me that all English majors at Oberlin could be neatly divided into either “truth and beauty freaks†or “theoryheads.†Hector clearly champions truth and beauty, while Irwin represents less theory than Thatcherism: the sublimation of all value to that of the market.
Continue reading History Boys