Author: Chris

Is anyone watching this? I am not sure if there is much to add to the comments made here about season two, but I am astonished by the consistent quality of this series. Almost every moment and every scene is perfectly crafted. The language is as lyrical as ever. Every character, no matter how minor, has depth (except perhaps Timothy Olyphant). Ian McShane is an even stronger presence, and now the underlings are being given a chance to shine. Unlike the last series of the The Sopranos, here the loose story linking the episodes (the battle between Hearst and Swearengen) is never hurried, but nor is it lost: it infects every secondary character and plot in the camp. This is quite sublime and easily the best thing on TV at the moment.

The British bloggers will instantly recognize this title; I am interested to know how widely known this is outside the confines of the British Isles. Anyway, for the uninitiated, Doctor Who is a cult British sci-fi TV series that has lasted on and off since the early 1960s. It follows a time travelling “Time Lord” who jets about the universe in an old blue Police call box with a series of pretty companions. To handle the change in actors playing the Doctor, every so often the time lord would experience a sort of death and a new doctor would be reborn. My formative experience was with the Doctor played by Jon Pertwee and then Tom Baker.

The series was distinguished by its tiny production budget and consequent cheesy special effects, wise-cracking and often camp dialogue, and extremely loyal following. Enough 14 year old boys found the implications of time travel and the possibilities that the inside of a box could be larger than the outside to be sufficiently profound that the fan base sustained itself.
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I was impressed with ‘Inside Man.’ The plot is pretty silly, and there is at least one enormous gaping plot hole (which renders much of the intrigue irrelevant), but this is a superior action movie/thriller. It is absolutely enthralling; not a moment seems wasted or dull. Denzel Washington is a joy to watch, and he plays well off all the other actors, esp. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Clive Owen (but not Jodie Foster, who is wasted), and makes them raise their game. He is so damn relaxed. The scenes where hostages are being interviewed after the heist is over are superb: funny, clever, full of little details that become relevant later (chewing gum). I am not really enough of a Spike Lee fan to say what makes this a distinctively Spike Lee Joint. Certainly the attention to race is unusual in a movie this kind, and the lighting and changing grain of the film betray some real craft. But since ‘25th Hour’ is my favorite Spike Lee film, I am not qualified to place this among his other work. Regardless, this is a highly competent movie, and a fine way to spend two hours.

One of the previews was for ‘Flight 93′ which I’m dreading because of the political/patriotic baggage that it will carry. But it is directed by Paul Greengrass, which might save the movie.

This was a series of 8 short (7-10 minute) films by well-known directors, each hired by BMW to highlight new cars. I won’t make great claims for them, though if you like Clive Owen (who plays the hired driver in all 8 movies) and car chases, and you want to see directors forced to operate within the constraints of an extended commercial, they are worth seeing. The films by John Woo, Ang Lee, Wong Kar-Wai and Joe Carnahan are all good, while Guy Ritchie’s, featuring Madonna, is predictably horrible.

They can be downloaded in DVD quality at www.bmwfilms.com though it is a long download. I have an extra copy of the actual DVD if anyone wants it (region 1). If you do, let Reynolds know and he can send contact information.

‘Bubble’ is a mere 75 minutes long, shot with a digital camera by Steven Soderbergh, and using “real” people as actors. Soderbergh found a hair stylist, a KFC manager and a slacker and recruited them to play the primary roles in this bare bones story. The movie is set on the Ohio-West Virginia border, which is where the actors all grew up and live today.

The plot itself is a little simplistic, and I’m not sure I like the motivation used to explain the murder, but what makes this a quite wonderful little movie is the cinematography. Soderbergh does for mid-Ohio what he did for LA in ‘Limey’: in a few brief stills he captures the heart of a certain kind of existence. In this case it is the gray, flat world of working people struggling to keep their heads above water in a minimum wage economy. Every single damn shot is a masterpiece of composition. Unobtrusively, the store names, the contents of the vending machines, the posters on the walls, the church pews, and everything else behind and around the principal actors paint a picture of this part of the United States and of a social milieu that we rarely get to see on film. Much of the movie is filmed at night, or in dimly lighted factories, diners, trailers and rooms. The contrast to the dazzling light of ‘Limey’ is striking. The interiors are superb, particularly the doll factory which manages to evoke efficiency and soul-destroying monotony simply with a few stills and the hum of machinery.
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I’m a little embarrassed that I had never seen this. In fact, I had not even heard of it until I was leafing through a bad book of essays by Roger Ebert recently. I watched it as part of a double bill with ‘Nashville’ (which I had seen before) and really enjoyed it. The grittiness of the mining town (mud, rain, misshapen people) is done very well; ‘Deadwood looks downright slick against ‘McCabe.’ I had associated the less glamorous image of the West with Eastwood’s later Westerns (esp. ‘Pale Rider’) but Altman clearly got there first.

The principals were not particularly impressive. Warren Beatty mostly mumbles his way through the movie, looking bemused, and I’d say that Julie Christie was wasted except that I’m not sure if she can act (she raises banality to the level of an art form in the brief interview Peter Whitehead does with her in the Pink Floyd documentary that John mentioned a while back: “What do you love?” “The sun, sunflowers, cats… strong relationships”). But the strength of the movie is the background scenes. A young hired gun provokes a kid into drawing his gun and then kills him. Prostitutes enjoy a hot bath. Beatty boasts of his bargaining skills all the while showing his fear. And the final extended sequence is a masterpiece: the townspeople rush to put out a fire, oblivious to the cat and mouse game between Beatty and the gunmen hired to kill him. He slides around in the snow trying to hide while an early fire engine chugs up the hill to help put out the fire.

Anyway, well worth watching, not least to see so many actors who re-appear in ‘Nashville’ in larger parts. And of course, Keith Carradine was here and in ‘Deadwood.’

Has anyone seen ‘Ice Harvest’? He seems to have been in some weak movies in recent years. What are his best movies? We can probably all agree on ‘Con Air’ but what after that? For me, probably ‘Grosse Pointe Blank’ (which ‘Ice Harvest’ seemed to be trying and failing to emulate), ‘High Fidelity’ and ‘Being John Malkovitch.’

Anyone seen this? It’s a remarkable film: a loose sequel to ‘In The Mood for Love’ with many familiar Wong Kar Wai elements, but all of them taken to another level. To the extent that it has a narrative structure, it is all over the place. It skips back and fore in time, from the “real” story to the fictional one that the protagonist (Chow) is writing, and it replays certain scenes as new information makes them more poignant, or marginally intelligible. I kept thinking of ‘Beau Travail’ as I watched it because that’s another film that I can watch over and over for its imagery without ever really understanding what is going on. So I won’t even try to explain the plot, and it is in any case irrelevant to the pleasures of the film.

Tong Leung is fabulous both because of the half smile that always plays on his lips, and because his sentences always end with a rising inflection that makes him sound questioning even when he is making a statement (this is a film that has to be watched with subtitles rather than dubbing). His three loves, Li Gong, Faye Wong and Ziyi Zhang, are all superb, especially Zhang as the prostitute that falls hard for Chow. I’m not sure anyone can demonstrate the bittersweet quality of love as well as Wong Kar Wai.

And the cinematography is, as you would expect, nothing less than stunning. Almost every image is beautifully composed; you would expect to see them hanging in an art gallery rather than strung together in a movie. Oh, and check out the first deleted scene in which Black Spider visits Chow. It should not have been cut, and would have made a wonderful ending to the film.