Category Archives: Reality Level

A Quantum of Solace: Pretty Good Bond Movie

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I realize I saw awesome too much.  To me, many things are awesome, at least in the moment.  Later the experience fades and I can compare the awesome moment with many other moments, and awesome fades to average.

The latest Bond movie, for instance.  We walked out of the theater, to a nearby restaurant, without anyone commenting.  Once seated, I said “I’ll open with a bid of ‘Awesome!’”  My snarkiest friend said she’d open with “pretty good.”  We turned to another friend who seemed to be resisting the urge to say anything.  Finally, “I did not like it,” he said.  He did not enjoy it in the least.

Talking about it, I realized I had seen many flaws, but had buried them while watching.  The plot runs on, there is an inconsistency in how the scenes are shot.  Some are over the top bids to be great art, and much of the action is too close up, like the Bourne Identity but without the intensity.  There is at least one character who is a complete throw-away.

But I had enjoyed it, hadn’t I?  I love the story between Bond and M.  The story started in Casino Royale, is carried forward here, and promises much more.  So I’m still loving the new Bond series.  Maybe that’s it.  Perhaps, even though this was not a good stand-alone movie, it still gave me the pleasure of being part of the ongoing story.  Like an average episode in a great television series, it still keeps you moving towards the next.

Best Buy Wrap-Up

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Turns out Best Buy can’t just steal your hard drive.  It took a judge to explain that to them, but he did and they gave it back to me.  The whole thing is still pretty stunning.  Basically:

  • Best Buy pulled a perfectly functional hard drive out of my laptop, without ever mentioning it to me.
  • They returned my laptop, without bothering to put an operating system on the new drive.  Or mentioning that they had taken the old one out.
  • Inexplicably, they then refused to return my old hard drive, with all my stuff.  The store manager was unable to see the difference between a full hard drive and a car battery.  I don’t think he knows much about computers.
  • The judge in small claims court managed to clarify the concept of property law to the clueless Best Buy people.

Signs of Patriotism

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Sometimes I hear people describe criticism of Sarah Palin as “hate”.  “All you liberals are hating on Sarah Palin!”

It’s not hate, it’s patriotism. 

If you believe, as I do, that she is utterly unqualified, and that the country is in deep trouble, you have to believe that Palin is a threat to our country.  It’s not just politics.  I don’t agree with a lot of conservative positions, but usually from a moral, philosophical, or economic basis.  I don’t usually think they are trying to destroy our nation.  We can argue over minium wage, a woman’s right to choose, and proposition 8 (hate).  These are important arguments, and the Republicans are morally wrong.  But lots of people are wrong.  I’m sure I’m wrong about something too.

Patriotism is a different thing.  Patriotism starts from the premise that this is my country, and I care about what happens to it.  I don’t think it’s the greatest possible country, or that it’s always right.  But I live here, as do most of the people I love.  It has given me life, prosperity, space to become who I am.  I owe it something in return.

One thing I owe it is criticism of its leaders.  If we’re going into a war we can’t win, for reasons that are misguided, I owe it to myself, to the troops, to the future of our country, to object.  Also, while my politics are important, I owe the country at least the awareness that people who disagree with me are still Americans.  We’re in this together.

If I were to push a person or an agenda that satisfies my personal interests, the economic status of my class, or the specific requirements of my religion, that has to be balanced against the interests of the country as a whole.  I can do so, of course.  But if I push for my particular bracket to get great tax relief, while other brackets suffer, that’s not patriotic.  If I take it to the extreme, undercutting the financial health of the country as a whole, I’m being unpatriotic.

After the Katie Couric interview, it became obvious to me that Palin is not ready to lead.  Not even close.  If you don’t see that, and you are for Palin still, that’s fine.  We disagree.  But if you did see it and are ignoring it because she represents your party or your religion, then you are being unpatriotic.  The most patriotic thing I can do, right now, is to strive against her.  It’s not because I hate her, it’s because I love this country.

Max Payne, Minimal Fun

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There’s a movie in my head.  I built it out of trailers for Max Payne.  It has powerful, scary villains, a tortured hero, and the eternal, supernatural struggle between good and evil.  It is laden with Norse mythology, and punctuated with intense set pieces that include guns and explosions and Valkyrie.

It could be awesome.  But the actual movie has none of those features.  You might think you saw them in the trailer.  Maybe you heard a quote about “The Devil building his army” and “Max Payne is looking for things God wants hidden.”  You probably saw images of winged Valkryie and fiery skies.  Those things are said, and the images do occur, but they don’t have the meaning you’d hope.  The quotes are just one guy’s ramblings, a guy who is entirely tangental to any part of the story.  The images?  Well, apparently they aren’t meant to be taken literally.

There was still some promise.  The apparent bad guy seemed to have some kind of superhuman strength and resistence.  Maybe Max Payne shot him six times.  Maybe not.  My friend leans over and says: “promise me this is going to get better.”  Sure, I assure her.  But then the wheels started falling off.  Max Payne is only tortured in the most cliched sense.  There isn’t so much one evil bad guy as several sort of bad people doing apparently random bad things.  Some of them are highly improbable.  The rules fail to be applied consistently.  We thought someone was invulnerable, but he dies from a single shot.  The Valkyrie show up at odd times, but seem to signify nothing.

The central theme?  Nothing supernatural, or gripping, or high-tech.  It’s a concept that’s been used in a hundred lower-budget movies: somebody’s experimenting with something to make soldiers more soldiery.  Naturally, something goes wrong.  But this particular experiment is even dumber than most.  Instead of making soldiers stronger, smarter, or able to take punishment, it just makes them “feel” invulnerable.  And it only works on like 1%.  Don’t we have drugs like that?  Crack?  Cocaine?  Meth?  Even alcohol has been known to make idiots braver.  And more idiotic.  This version doesn’t seem much better, except for being blue.

I thought I had lowered my expectations.  But I guess I really had something I was looking for out of this movie.  Given the trailers, I think my hopes were somewhat justified.  But like Epic movie, where the jokes were actually funnier in the trailer than in the context of the movie, the scenes from Max Payne were better without the context of the movie.

Quoted in the Post

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Today’s Washington Post quotes me, as follows:

the $700 billion price tag “doesn’t seem comprehensible to me. Theoretically, most of it should be paid back, right?”

Now, I did say that. I even gave the writer (who is an attractive woman, BTW) permission to use the quote, by itself. I don’t have a problem with it, don’t feel I was mis-quoted or mis-represented. But I was curious about the nature of the story.

The reporter wanted to write a story about the “feelings” of the person on the street. When she first asked me, I explained I didn’t really have feelings. I had some thoughts. I gave her a lot of my thoughts. She noted that I seemed pretty well informed, implying I probably did have feelings. My quote was my way of saying that, because the number was so inconceivable, there was no point in processing it on an emotional level. In the article, it was just another feeling.

I liked the article, but I just think it’s interesting. Newspapers assign stories according to well-known structures. When they go out to find the quotes to fill in the structure, they find what fits.

Washing that Mummy out of My Brain

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It always annoys when my friends say something like: “I could have told you that,” after I report that some movie really sucked.  No, no you couldn’t have told me that.  Sure, the Mummy III: Tomb of Jet Li Phoning It In looked bad.  There were many warning signs.  But these friends would have said the same thing about Hitman, or Tank Girl, or Blade III: Trinity.  Say what you will, I enjoyed those movies.  I loved all three Resident Evil movies.  I savored the badness (and the cage scene) that was BloodRayne.  Would you deny me those pleasures?  So I take a lot of chances.  Sometimes, as with Babylon A.D., I get about what expect, a flawed movie with derivative elements and some good action.  Even the bad ending didn’t ruin it for me.

But sometimes I get the third Mummy movie.  It’s not so much bad as it is tired.  The almost ritualistic character portrayals using every old trope and stale piece of dialog dragged down the small moments in which the action actually worked.  I love Jet Li, and I like Brendan Frazier.  But neither of them showed up for this movie.  Surrounded by CGI badness, they read through the exhausting dialog with no hope of adding anything fresh to it.  Retired hero misses action.  Father has problems expressing approval of son.  Evil emperor wants to take over world.  (what to good emperors do?)

Fortunately I had already downloaded the unrated version of Hitman on my PS3.  I got home, feeling like I needed to bath in something to get that “Mummy-to-far” feeling out of my system, I started watching this hyper-cool, intense action flick, in which the characters actually seem to care about what they are doing.  Though the reviewers generally have gone negative Hitman, it’s really a lot of fun.

A Defense of Uwe Boll

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Uwe Boll is, possibly, the worst director, ever. Worse, he has attacked one of my other loves, video-games in his ridiculous attempts to adapt a number of classic videogame franchises for the big screen. The primary crimes against video games, against movies, and against humanity itself include:

  • Alone in the Dark (ridiculous)
  • House of the Dead (OMG Stupid!)
  • Bloodrayne (Wow, not even Ben Kingsley can act in this POS)
  • Bloodrayne II: Deliverance (Wait, it’s bad, makes no sense, and this one has NO NUDITY!)

Unlike Ed Wood, who is often given that title, Uwe Boll isn’t trying to express some strange, complex vision, yet failing. Ed Wood had odd plots, mixing aliens and transvestites in some kind of pattern that you think secretly must make sense in his head. But Boll’s pattern is just derivative crap. You know pretty much what he’s trying to say, because other people have already said it better.  His best shots are clearly copied, his worst show that he didn’t understand what he was stealing.

All this I knew, but when I discovered my PS3 could actually sell me movies, the only thing worth downloading and watching was In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale.  I’ve only played a few minutes of that particular game, so I have no particular fondness that could be violated, but I was definitely up for an evening of Uwe bashing.  Many parts are bad, and everything good is not original.  But, still, Jason Statham is putting it all out there, doing his athletic action coupled with sullen intensity.  Ray Liotta is at about half creepy, but that’s still pretty creepy.  And Matthew Lilard is nasty enough that you find yourself really rooting against him.  By the predictable ending, I was engaged.  Not impressed, or blown away, but I wanted bad things to happen to the bad guys and good things to happen to the good guys.

Of course it wouldn’t be a Uwe boll movie without some inexplicable old, but still respected actor phoning it in.  Bloodrayne had Ben Kingsley, this one has Burt Reynolds!  As the King!

But I’m not changing my mind about Uwe just because he directed one mediocrity amidst all his crap.  I loveUwe Boll because the world would be less mysterious without him.  How does he get money?  How does he get medium-large names to appear in his obviously bad movies?  Why does he insist that he’s a mis-understood artist?  Also, he’s the only director I know of who challenged his critics to a boxing match.  Two took him up, and were defeated.  How about having Spielberg fight anyone who didn’t like the last re-hash of Indiana Jones?  I’d be up for that.

The other thing about Uwe Boll is that he’s trying the best he can.  He doesn’t have much talent, and he doesn’t make up for it with technique.  He sucks, but he’s trying to make the best movie he can.  Not so much Spielberg and Lucas.  They have talent coming out the wazoo, but contine to foist crap like the latest Indiana Jones movie on us.  That smacks of contempt.

Leaving Lost Vegas

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Why am I writing this blog?  It’s not as if there aren’t enough reviews our there, or that Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t do a pretty good job of aggregating all those opinions into something you can use.  But people often ask my opinion about movies, and I find myself explaining.  And sometimes, with movies like Leaving Lost Vegas, my view is a bit different.

I saw this years after it came out.  I had long heard that it was a gripping, but tragic performance by Nicholas Cage.  I was never quite in the mood to watch a drunk slowly die, though, so I kept skipping it.  Netflix is where I put movies that I know I should watch, but not right now.  Sometimes, because I don’t alway check to see what’s coming next, a movie like Leaving Los Vegas gets through.  So, instead of letting is sit, I decided to watch it.

First, I can’t say anything bad about the acting.  It’s all good, spot on, gripping.  But the story, I just didn’t buy.  I know a lot about alcoholism, a little about despair, and something about being a frustrated creative.  The story here seems to romanticize those elements, seeing something slightly noble about falling down the hole, knowing full well there’s only death at the bottom.  Waving away all offers of help.  Maybe, but I got bored after a while.  In fact, I started playing World of Warcraft while watching the movie.   I was doing this quest where you have to take some kind of magic cloak to some guy in a cave.  The only way to find the cave is to attract the attention of his pet bear, and it will point the way.  But the mechanics of getting the bear’s attention eluded me.  Stand in front, type wave, stand to the side, right click the bear, left click the bear, I kept trying different things.  It occured to me that I was playing a game that had me waving at a bear.  Over and over.  This is the game that somehow has me addicted.

I finally figured out the bear when the movie went off the rails.  Instead of sticking to the dying drunk, it went off to trail the somewhat random life of Elizabeth Shue’s hooker.  Dead pimp, frat rape, being thrown out of a casino, flashbacks to an abusive father, the cliches piled up quickly.  All bad men in her life, somehow contrasted with the drunken guy lying on her couch.  It didn’t make sense to me, either, but then she ripped off her top and he poured booze all over her at the pool.  That was pretty good.

In the end, I did feel guilty about the World of Warcraft distraction.  There was some sort of meaning going on, and it was passing me by.  But I think the movie could have done more to hold my attention, and I really think that the central premise never gave me anything to by into.  It’s always possible I would have enjoyed this in a theater.  Trapped in the darkness, alone in a sit, but anonymously part of a much larger crowd, I may have been open to the depths of the movie.  You never know.

Speaking of The Incredible Hulk

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I love cameos, but they raise an interesting question.  When you suddenly see, and recognize, Lou Ferrigno, you are participating in the movie, not as pure story, but as part of a continuum with other movies on the same topic, as well as the genre as a whole.  When Stan Lee shows up, or when a pizza parlor is called “Stanley’s”, we are not immersed in the movie as movie, but watching it and enjoying it’s connection to the Marvel Universe.

The reality level of the movie is not set at the story level, but at an understanding of the movie in context of other tellings of the same tale.