Agenda Movie Club: The Fugitive

Posted on May 6, 2013 by

The Fugitive

Andrew Davis

1993

Everyone’s seen this, so some stray thoughts:

1) This still plays pretty well, but you can tell it’s 20 years old. There are just some style differences that you’d see if this movie were made today. So much swelling orchestral music (throughout) that feels dated. Some of the action stuff would be way slicker. Don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing.

2) The couple of pieces that everyone remembers– Ford jumping off the train, Ford jumping off the dam– really all happen in the first half hour or so. The real meat of the movie is also why it’s so good: it turns into mystery while being a chase movie. The best stuff is Ford investigating the one-armed man, and his near-misses (or “near-hits” if you’re George Carlin) with Tommy Lee Jones along the way. It’s pretty nicely put together.

3) It’s really weird watching Tommy Lee Jones here. He looks like a CGI version of his current (old) self made to look 20 years younger. I guess he was just born to be old. I liked him a lot here, he’s definitely fun, but you’re not going to convince me he should have won the Oscar over Ralph Fiennes (and maybe Pete Postlethwaite, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen In the Name of the Father).

4) I don’t really understand why Jeroen Krabbe doesn’t just help the police catch Kimble. It’s not like Kimble was going to find out, and it’s pretty reasonable for Krabbe just to say, “man, the guy is my friend, but this is the law we’re talking about,” and just slip the cops some info, let them catch Kimble, and be on his way, never to be discovered as the big bad guy. Instead, he’s all, “Kimble is innocent and smarter than everyone, you’ll never catch him, ha ha ha,” and then, sure enough, all that is true and Kimble kicks his ass because he’s actually the bad guy. Why? We sort of decided that he must have just been so arrogant that he thought he could behave that way and never get found out, but he sure could have saved himself a lot of trouble. I mean, that’s really, really stupid.

5) I want to see the movie where the middle-aged doctors have a climactic fight where they look like middle-aged doctors. Like, basically they’re really bad at fighting, and one guy lands a good punch and it really hurts (both of them, cause the puncher probably breaks his hand) and it just looks kind of terrible and doesn’t last very long. Did not like the action-movie punch out at the end here.

6) Really, the movie’s probably about 10 – 15 minutes too long.

Update: Oh, also, I like the visual “quotes” the movie takes from other movies. I saw a couple from Indiana Jones movies, and another from The Conversation. I’m sure there are some that I missed. Kinda fun.

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Agenda Movie Club: 56 Up

Posted on April 18, 2013 by

56 Up

Michael Apted, Paul Almond

2013

I wonder if I’ll ever write a post about this entire series. It won’t be today, but I keep feeling like I will.

It seems like the people spend more time in this movie talking about the impact of the series on their lives than they have in previous installments, but it’s possible I’m not remembering correctly. It just has a much greater “meta” feel than I recall. Is this Apted kind of recognizing that he might not be around for 63 Up?

Appropriately, Nick is the one who takes things to the real meta-level and makes the point that, while all of the subjects spend this time talking about how the movies haven’t really captured their true lives, the movies aren’t actually even about their lives, they’re about everyone’s lives.

I say “appropriately” Nick says this, because in the narrative that Apted has created, Nick is the “thinker.” I have absolutely no doubt that other people in this series have said exactly what Nick said, but Apted chose Nick to say it in the movie because it fits his “character” best. And I’m fine with that. I’m willing to play along.

I’m willing to play along with all of it. I’ve said more times than I can count that I think this series is the greatest achievement in movie history. I love it. I love it so much. I got a little teary-eyed when some of the people would show up on screen. It’s life, you know? What a thing.

I want to go through each person, but I’m not going to. Maybe some day. I think Apted knew exactly what he was doing by saving Tony for last. Amy and I were very, very curious to see how he was doing after he had been buying real estate in Spain directly before the global financial crash, so we were pretty worried about him. Turns out, he’s fine. Thank goodness. How did he end up being fine? That part, I’m not so sure about. But he’s Tony, and he’s resourceful, and he figured it out.

The original movie wanted to outline how the class system structured the lives of the kids, and how it would for the rest of their lives. I think if you watch that first one and then 56 Up, there is no question that class had a LOT to do with where people ended up. Some of the people in the movie don’t agree with me. Some of them do. Could it have something to do with how Apted wove the narrative? Yeah, but only to a degree. A lot of it is very real.

But mostly, life. I remember Roger Ebert, and probably plenty of other people, saying that the really difficult thing to imagine about dying is how you don’t get to see all of the stuff that happens the next day. Life is pretty amazing.

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Agenda Movie Club: Men In Black 3

Posted on April 15, 2013 by

Men In Black 3

Barry Sonnenfeld

2012

I liked this a fair bit, although I’m really wondering if I felt that way just because of how much better than Men In Black II was.

Probably not, I think it was generally pretty good. The two things I liked the most:

1) Josh Brolin killed it.

2) The whole infinite possibility/alternate universe thing. I love that. That’s a fascinating idea, and they took it and made it a lot of fun.

Something I think is interesting is watching that guy who played the alien who can see the alternate realities. His name is Michael Stuhlbarg, and he often plays characters with some kind of major weakness, but he also plays Arnold Rothstein on HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire,” a character who has very little weakness. Watch that and then watch him in Lincoln and then go watch him in A Serious Man. He’s good, and versatile.

I thought the ending was silly, but whatever. Mostly this was fun and I didn’t expect much else. And so much better than #2.

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Agenda Movie Club: Searching For Sugar Man

Posted on March 4, 2013 by

Searching For Sugar Man

Malik Bendjelloul

2012

I get very excited when I see/hear/read stories like this because they’re just so amazing and so absorbing and it makes me think that if this story exists in the world, I can’t wait to find out what else there is. (I felt the same way when I discovered George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” [Game of Thrones] a year ago, which I realize is fiction while Searching For Sugar Man is not, which means either I don’t distinguish or it doesn’t matter and a good story is a good story.) It’s just hard to believe that this happened and I’m just now hearing about it. That’s so damned exciting.

Also, it’s just such a good story. Can you imagine? And the structure of the movie is just set so well, especially if you have absolutely no idea what it’s about. Amy literally said, “what the hell?” when it was revealed that Rodriguez is still alive, and didn’t set himself on fire or shoot himself on stage or whatever (I’m not sure by that point she believed he’d done those things, because it was obviously a little fishy that there were so many different stories about how he’d died, but I think it’s reasonable to have assumed that he died from drugs or hard living or just something). And then arenas full of people? Just… man.

Amy said I needed to find out which country secretly thinks the Skaguanas are the greatest band of the 20th century.

I can’t even begin to understand this guy, though. I’d like to. I’m not obsessed with material things by any means, but I mean holy crap. So not only do we have just an exceptionally thrilling story (and it is), but the guy at the center of it lives some kind of transcendent life.

I used this Mark Twain quote one other time, when I talked about Marwencol:

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.”

Right?

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Dispatches From the Void

Posted on March 1, 2013 by

The singularity may be coming, but it’s going to look a lot messier than Kurzweil imagined, one thinks.  The clean-up on millions of rat brains hooked up to the internet is not something to be undertaken without some serious Purell.  

Also, too:  Let us all be amazed at the literal creation of hindsight.

Posted in Science | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Agenda Movie Club: A Dangerous Method

Posted on February 28, 2013 by

A Dangerous Method

David Cronenberg

2011

This is a grown-up movie about grown-up things for grown-ups. It’s talky talky talky, which makes sense, since it’s about the birth of talk therapy. It’s also a lot more than that.

It’s pretty exciting to see what apparently is a pretty painstakingly accurate depiction of the early days of psychotherapy (accurate if David Cronenberg is to be believed, and who knows about that). Freud was wrong about a ton of things, but he did get the ball rolling, at least, and I find it fascinating to see Freud and Jung tossing ideas around and being really quite concerned about the reaction of the rest of the world to what they were doing, which was revolutionary.

And this is Cronenberg, so of course there are a whole lot of deeply uncomfortable and conflicted feelings about sex. Keira Knightley’s Sabina Spielrein is extraordinary and intense and sometimes terrifying, and Cronenberg not only doesn’t tell you how to feel about her, he’s got ways to make you feel a lot of different ways about her. It’s clear that her sexuality has been deeply affected by her earlier abuse– this makes you feel uncomfortable. But it’s also clear that she’s doing things that she very much wants to do, and expressing her sexuality in ways that seem very much not to have been acceptable, which also makes her kind of a liberator. That she goes on to become a psychotherapist herself seems pretty relevant, too.

And speaking of extraordinary actors– I’m not sure we think of Viggo Mortensen that way, but look at these three movies that he’s done with Cronenberg: A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, A Dangerous Method. Could there be three more different parts?* And he absolutely nails all three.

I’m really entertained that, of all the movies Cronenberg has done, he says that this one is far and away the heaviest on digital effects. Pretty much every scene is people sitting around and talking. But it turns out that a lot of the landmarks are computer-generated– the houses in the background, Lake Geneva through the window, the bridge over the river. It’s pretty amazing.

There’s a lot going on here, there are a lot of layers. This post could be very, very long, even though I’ll stop it now. They do make movies for adults, and we should appreciate them.

*Probably, but you see what I mean.

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Arrrrrrrrgo Liveblog Yourself!

Posted on February 24, 2013 by

Click Here

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , | 1 Comment