Recent IMDB Comments
August 23, 2010 The Quantum Activist: Qubit Cubits
Year: 2009Ted's Evaluation: 1 / 4
IMDB Rating: 8.5
DVD at Amazon
Gosh, yet another something to buy as a shortcut to enlightenment. Yet again we encounter quantum physics as the magical combo: a scientific mystery that "proves" the mysteries beyond. Just what those mysteries are, depends on the salesman of course, but it is usually some Jungian truths presented with sparkly eyes.
In this case, we get an esteemed professor who teaches the stuff, so he must know what he is talking about, right? Oh, and he is a Hindu with spiritual awards as well, so has street cred there too. Problems:
What we have in this film is basically this one guy prattling on. I suppose one could edit this into a tight film like Linklater did in "Waking Life," or could spread out like we saw in "Ayurveda." Of we could have amusing animations like "What the ##."
You have to know a few things. One is that just because someone teaches accounting doesn't mean he has insights into the dynamics of the economy. Quantum mechanics is clerical work; it is quantum logic (or whatever you choose to call the principles when divorced from physics) that is where the mysteries lay. You should also know that there is a long and seamy relationship between spiritual pitchmen and scientific notions: magnetism, vibrations, relativity, the fourth dimension have all had their turn as proof without realizing that they are metaphor.
This is bad filmmaking, bad science and unconvincing spiritual wisdom. I would point the student to "Andrey Rublyov" instead.
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August 23, 2010 Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: Sparkles after Hitting
Year: 2010Ted's Evaluation: 3 / 4
IMDB Rating: 8.2
DVD at Amazon
This is the most fun I've had at the movies for a while. I believe is it because it is inventive in several ways and the inventiveness is coherent through the thing and across the narrative pathways (cinematic effects, narrative rhythm, character reactions). It is not difficult to push the envelope in any one of these, in fact I see it done even accidentally because film conventions form such narrow roads.
But it seems difficult as getout to control it well enough that it emanates from a coherent world, to make a long form project that lives in the inventiveness rather than just sees it from time to time. Much of this is credited to the filmmaker, and how he can focus his team. Since there is very little motion capture, the effects did not have to be planned in advance and I imagine there was a lot of tinkering.
Some of the credit has to go to the source, which I understand is a comic. I have not seen it but I imagine the overall shape was set and refined there.
But we have to give the key actor credit too. He has to understand the cosmology of the thing well enough to convincingly inhabit it. This is a difficult acting challenge. Remember Bill Murray? It was his gift I believe to anticipate the finished tone of the film and place himself square within it. "Groundhog Day" depended on us seeing that it made sense to him.
I have to admit to a generational deficiency that made this even better for me. The girls were unattractive, excepting the redhead drummer who is shunted to buddy status. They were emotionally damaged, intellectual nitwits and not physically desirable. In the story of course, they are all a guy lives for, literally. I am imagining that it made sense to the young audience that these trivial beings mattered. But for me, it increased the weirdness and otherworldliness of the thing.
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August 22, 2010 Flyboys: Eye Knots
Year: 2006Ted's Evaluation: 3 / 4
IMDB Rating: 6.5
DVD at Amazon
*** This review may contain spoilers *** I suppose the first step in self-realization is understanding what your personal porn profile is. For me it is spatial, and I am a sucker for just the sort of thing this highlights. It has some dumb character-oriented stuff, and the necessary structure to let us know about the war. But it is packed with air combat scenes. The computer generated character of these scenes was noticeable, I am sure, had I been looking for it, but I wasn't. I was flying.
There are three kinds of shots here. The first are the static shots of the guys in their cockpits, so that we can see that it is not planes at war, but these guys we are supposed to care about. Boring.
But then we have the shots where we see the maneuvers of the planes, spliced in with the POV shots. The composition of these is not particularly inventive. The maneuvers are not historically accurate or aerodynamically possible. But they fit the spatial vocabulary we have built incrementally starting with "Hell's Angels," punctuated by "Star Wars" and elaborated in the last few years by Pixar. The way this crew carries the viewer through these motions is really quite competent and that is saying a lot. It has to do with continuity and rhythm of shifts in space of the planes and the eye.
There is a girl, natch. Pretty. The hero does not get the girl, and the black guy does not get killed. So the story is intelligent from that perspective.
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August 22, 2010 The Last Sin Eater: Harmful Superstitions revealed
Year: 2007Ted's Evaluation: 1 / 4
IMDB Rating: 5.7
DVD at Amazon
I watch these missionary films from time to time. There is an earnestness in most of them that makes up for the fact that they are so horrible.
In my city is Pat Robertson's film school, training hundreds of people a year to make these things. I often wonder what will happen when they actually are able to make good movies?
I am beginning to believe that this may never happen. Film may be making Christianity obsolete. I know this may sound strange. Cinema seems profoundly malleable, a vehicle for any story. And Christianity has survived by adapting far, far from what Jesus believed, making any necessary compromise.
But film has rather rigid dynamics when combined with the forces of how we define ourselves through stories. It is extremely flexible, but only within a conceptual marketplace where the collective projections of self reinforce each other. Cinema allows us to define our own cosmos. It worries me that the rivers are sometimes so banal, but such the way of the collective — and young imaginations have surprising sophistication.
Christianity on the other hand is about accepting a prefabricated story. Well, different ones depending on the preacher's agenda, but the cosmos is defined in a very top down manner. Theoretically, they could overlap a lot, but that is not what the world seems to want. Even the most obvious Jesus stories like Harry Potter don't follow the rules of the Christian institution.
This film has prompted me to believe that it may be impossible to make powerful cinema with the existing dogma. Everything about it fails.
The irony is that the story flows are about rigid superstition being made obsolete, not by the Bible in the story, but because people simply want to explain for themselves what the world is.
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August 22, 2010 Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief: Spoiled Lotus
Year: 2010Ted's Evaluation: 1 / 4
IMDB Rating: 5.8
DVD at Amazon
My superficial reaction to this is the same as most, I suppose. As a friend says, it has all the essential elements of Harry Potter, with none of the narrative engagement.
It has some extra baggage that I think would hurt it if it were good enough. The Potter books are poorly written but very cleverly imagined. They make a cosmology from scratch, but using standard religious iconography. They are imagined cinematically.
Now here is the very same director who got the Potter movies started. And he apparently had the budget for special effects. But what a disaster!
The baggage is the Greek myths. The Jesus story is simply the historical figure completely recast by Romans in the Greek mold, but with Persian influence and flexible invention. The pantheon of local gods and the extension of the various stories of powers and vendettas simply fractionated the believes of the Romans and a singular religion was required for a newly singular empire. Probably anything would have worked, but the staying power of Christianity is the holes it leaves to be filled opportunistically, like with Potter.
The Greek gods are remnants from the invention of narrative. They are the residue of a long dead process and can only echo the forces that can be carried by modern narrative. The only thing going for it is the presumption that kids will know the stories because of the industrialized educational system we have that favors Greek history.
And, the built in parent dynamics. You have a problem with your dad? Think "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings" too complicated? Here is ready material for that angst to settle in.
When watching this, I was astounded that Catherine Keener would do this. Her character is a nitwit in every dimension. Here is a real actress who has a serious career. I cannot imagine this was easy work, what with the effects. The money must have been good with the promise of many sequels, one of which would allow her to do something.
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August 21, 2010 (500) Days of Summer: Death by Numbers
Year: 2009Ted's Evaluation: 2 / 4
IMDB Rating: 8
DVD at Amazon
*** This review may contain spoilers *** Boy, how frustrating it is to have a movie that is nearly perfect in some respects but broken in others, especially when it has the potential to do things.
This has the potential because it is a love story that bends the expectations from movie romance more toward the ebbs and flows of real life. In breaking this habit of expectations it uses a clever device: it breaks the linear narrative, giving you a numeric timescale. This is handled effectively because the film establishes a space for us outside the flow, populated by us and a narrator when we shift times.
There is another device, used less expertly: architecture. The setup is that our guy is not a whole man romantically because he is trapped in a traditional romantic comedy sort of world. He literally works for a metaphorically apt greeting card company, generating fantasy. This is as opposed to the more three dimensional world he sees and appreciates but has yet to commit to. We are reminded of this whenever we enter that neutral narrator's space because the timeline is a number over an "architectural drawing" by his more mature self.
It should have worked. It surely was well enough considered and has a first class place in the film. But the problem is that the filmmaker did not understand architectural dynamics well enough to use them. What he thinks is architecture is the grouping of buildings you see when sitting on a park bench and mapping the three dimensional experience to a two dimensional drawing. This is as great a mistake as being in the greeting card business and sort of poisons the dynamic that this is supposed to support.
But I count it a plus that they knew about the dynamic and tried even though they didn't actually capture it.
The thing that doesn't work in my opinion is the girl. I've just seen another film, much more ambitious that Zooey anchored. She mastered the thing with a practiced stance at being outside the reaction of self without being within a state of self knowledge. Here, she is supposed to be ubercute but secure in action, something not normal in film woman. But she cannot pull it off: either she is earnest or she is submissively appealing, or she is in control of her life but never all three at once. And this is what we need.
In fact, in the midst of our hero's depression, he has a blind date with an attractive redhead played by Rachel Boston. (Why are so many secondary redhead actresses named Rachel?) She is better at this synthesis than Zooey, but perhaps that was deliberate.
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August 20, 2010 The Boat That Rocked: Stolen Treasures
Year: 2009Ted's Evaluation: 2 / 4
IMDB Rating: 7.5
DVD at Amazon
Every waking moment we convert our lives to stories, with the largest component stories we share with those we choose and those we don't.
At some point for each of us, that shared story contributes to a genre and loses its personal connection. That is a death of sorts where your visceral connection to life is transformed to the same connection but through a medium controlled by market forces and a narrative shaped by its own laws. That death hurts, so while some big part of us celebrates when we re-encounter the thing, some other part dies.
If you were there in the summer of 67 when music mattered in a way impossible to communicate now...
If you were there when it seemed that the actions of a few musicians and the millions who fed them drove, literally drove the cosmos, pulling the dead husks of the old behind...
If you really believed in a God and the goodness of life because you knew it through the joy of shared ears...
Then this movie will present quite a challenge. You cannot do other than love it: the craft of the narrative is strong. It hits the entertainment marks in ways and at times that we expect because we paid. The music is strong, very strong and illustrated in ways that at least do not offend. The characters are derived from those we want to like. The sex is affable enough. Rock music is saved at the end by an enthusiastic public who we see throughout the story as being of all ages and classes.
And yet there is this sense of loss that this is what it has come down to, some pop tropes with familiar sounds. Some amusement as though the tentative futures we held so dearly and the prayers we burned for did not matter. Compounding the ambiguous feelings for this well done thing is the involvement of Hoffman as our (in my case) American surrogate on the scene.
He is there for the music and not for the fame or sex. He alone is willing to die. As an actor, we have seen him before straddle the line between what matters and the way it has to be delivered. But he does not do that here. He simply goes with the record.
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August 19, 2010 Gran Torino: Cleaning Up
Year: 2008Ted's Evaluation: 3 / 4
IMDB Rating: 8.4
DVD at Amazon
I saw this together with the recent Sly Stallone director-actor effort, "Expendables."
That's because the have similar sensibilities of justice in the world. But Sly is an actor who makes movies. He knows that the effects he is looking for have to come from his face and body: the movie is just the delivery vehicle for his brand. Eastwood on the other hand is a filmmaker. Even in the spaghetti days, he was a collaborator with the director, reaching for an effect rather than a character.
He really is quite a filmmaker and just knowing he is still vital at nearly 80 is cause for some pleasure. Never mind that the only reason to make this is to parade that fact. He's colored it with a story about old-school suburban texture because he seems fascinated with what it means to be American and how film defines and reflects that. Never mind that the story arc is as feeble and cheap as "Million Dollar Baby."
Sly has never made a decent movie and never will. It isn't because he has dumb values. It is because he is an actor. Clint has made one excellent film and several very good ones. All of them are crafted well, coherently envisioned and narratively closed. I think I can summarize the style as economical. I prefer loose ends and open narratives, ones that deal with ambiguities, analogy and sliding truth. Clint shows and indicates nothing that does not move the narrative ahead. His shooting style mirrors this; investors love him because he doesn't diddle.
One risk he is taking; the use of the muscle car as a symbol of a lost nation may become quickly obsolete, and this lose much of the punch he built around it.
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August 19, 2010 The Expendables: Sliding Planes
Year: 2010Ted's Evaluation: 2 / 4
IMDB Rating: 7.7
DVD at Amazon
"Speedracer" and the "Transformer" movies, even the second "Charlie's Angels."
These are silly or even bad films by the conventional measures. This is too. It is vapid, misogynistic and fundamentalist. I wouldn't recommend that anyone go unless they now themselves well enough.
But like those other movies, there is a lot of cutting edge filmmaking craft in this and I enjoyed it for that reason alone. I think there must be some separation from Sly the image and Sly the filmmaker. I surely — for example — admire the effectiveness of cable TeeVee demagogues at the same time I find the effect vile.
There are three notable things.
There is a neo-Kurosawan notion of planes, even in the fight scenes. Here is a sophisticated example: The film starts with Sly checking out the mission and deciding to not follow through, abandoning a woman to rape and torture (torture by the way by waterboarding). As in all his combat movies there is a scene where he pensively encounters his conscience and decides to do the right thing, turning into a killing machine for justice. The setup has Micky Roarke in the close foreground giving a story about how he is cursed by not having saved the life of a woman. (What he is doing while giving the speech is cool. The speech itself is pure formula, but the fact that he is painting flowers on an old guitar for a woman who has left him is sweet. He plans to smash the guitar when finished.)
During the scene, Sly is in the background out of focus. This is not the way Akira would do it: he would and back and use a telephoto so both would be in focus. Welles talked about compositing two shots with multiple focal points. But here Sly is blurry; he is further away than he would be in reality. We shift to a closeup of Sly as he meets himself and comes to his decision. It is a closeup. His face fills the screen, but he is still out of focus. What they did was crop the shot to zoom in. It takes a craftsman to even think of this and the cinematic effect it gives. And how it mitigates the worst part of any Stallone movie, that turning point, because he just cannot act. So the camera does it for him by setting planes.
Throughout, we have muted colors, lots of shadows that swallow the scene with piercing lights. This not only makes the thing Eastwood-moody, it allows for strobes and shadows to animate the battle scenes. They are done well if you can allow for the macho silliness and magical powers.
And for every key sequence of scenes, we have a sliding three dimensional camera. Christopher Doyle has changed the world of the eye, bless him. There is a seaplane that glides and swoops like seaplanes do. The camera emulates these movements after showing them to us, and continues throughout much of the movie.
Bruce and Arnie make fools of themselves.
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August 19, 2010 Glitch: Canine Cells
Year: 2008Ted's Evaluation: 1 / 4
IMDB Rating: 4.5
*** This review may contain spoilers *** This is bad in all the ordinary ways. The idea is bad and the general setup. The science is bad.
But many of the background characters are worthwhile. The usual pattern for these cartoony projects is to have the main characters operate in an environmental sea of props and secondary characters who are little more than props. If you innovate with the main characters in some way, you never tinker with the background; the more familiar it is, the better.
This confounds that approach, because the secondary characters are pretty well drawn and interesting.
We have the brother of one of the three main characters. He's a huge, taciturn Baby Huey who has brain damage from combat in Iraq. We have the father of another character, someone written with some sensitivity to the fact that he is a failed neurophysiologist.
Though we hardly would need a skilled brain surgeon for the story because so many fundamental necessities are elided, we are provided with one. He has lost his license for substance abuse. That's boring, but everything else about him is pretty interesting — even the set dressing of his cabin. The plot has his handiwork going awry implicitly because of his work with wolves. So if you find yourself stuck in this, look around.
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