2. July 2011 by admin.

The other night, I found myself watching Up in the Air on the tube.  The movie, featuring George Clooney as a traveling ‘career transition counselor’ (i.e. telling downsized employees that they’ve been fired) resonates with me at the same time as it bothers me.  Is this what American business has come to, that the hot new field is helping other businesses destroy themselves?

In my own business, I’m busy: that’s part of why I don’t post here as often as I’d like to.  But I’m compelled to wonder how long it will last.  And I watch George Clooney do demolition, one downsizee at a time, as he wonders about being his own happy life of air travel being demolished as well.

About halfway through the movie, my wife came home and changed the channel.  ”Thanks, Ducky,” I told her.  ”You saved me from myself.”

*          *          *

Quickie Update: I did not need to wait for the rest of the summer for the Daily News to raise its price to match the Post.  It only took one week.

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24. April 2011 by admin.

When I was in my early twenties, one of my aunts recommended the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged to me.  It illuminated my life: it clarified my place in the world, and the power of one’s mind and of productive energy.

On 15 April. a movie version of the first part of the novel was released.  I finally got around to seeing it today.  It’s a little strange: it’s playing at a regular theatre, not an art house, but there is very little publicity about it: no newspaper ads, no TV commercials, not even a poster in the lobby.  In fact, if I hadn’t been for some random Web surfing a couple of weeks ago, I would have missed it.

It’s not spectacular: the production is clearly constrained by its budget, and in the interest of not making it too ‘talky,’ some of the wit in the original dialogues was dropped.  But it’s a good telling of the story, with solid performances.  I went today with my son, and will take my wife to see it next weekend, if it’s still open.

The popular perception of the movie is heavily politicized, but both sides are wrong.  Liberals see Ayn Rand as vaguely evil, with her warnings against altruism.  But it’s not that she didn’t believe in charity: it’s that she didn’t believe that it was the government’s job to subsidize people out of poverty.  And conservatives praise her as an apostle of free-market economics, which is true, but she was a champion of free enterprise without government help, which is very different from what passes for capitalism today.

In any case, it’s a good picture.  I enjoyed it, and look forward to Part II.

Posted in Ayn Rand, Politics, Movies | 1 Comment »

22. January 2011 by admin.

My wife is a member of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), and as a result, we get advance DVD copies of movies so that my wife can watch the movies and vote in the SAG awards.  I had wanted to see The Social Network, but missed it in the theatre, so now was my chance.

I’m glad I saved the $25 that two movie tickets would have cost.

It’s not that The Social Network is a bad movie: it has a compelling script, is well-photographed, and has excellent performances.  The cast and crew have more than done their job in bringing the story of Facebook to life.  But I very quickly came to the realization: I don’t like these people.

I remember old movies about how great enterprises came to be.  Their founders struggled with practical problems, overcame them, and proudly succeeded.  But we see nothing about the practical problems of creating Facebook: instead we see how its founder promptly got embroiled in lawsuits.

In fairness, perhaps I’m biased.  Facebook, we’re told, is the social experience of college wrapped up in a Web site.  Alas, I had no social life to speak of in college: we were all engineering nerds, and what few girls there were in class quickly got snapped up by the guys who were better at that sort of thing than me.

But if Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg is supposed to be what a modern captain of industry looks like, we’re all in deep, deep trouble.

Posted in Computers, Media, Things Falling Apart, Movies | No Comments »

20. July 2009 by admin.

Yesterday I finally got around to seeing the new version of The Taking of Pelham 123, the story of a New York City subway hijacking.  The original 1974 version, with Robert Shaw and Walter Matthau, was one of the touchstones of my adolescence, and the first R-rated movie that my parents took me to see.

The reviews of the new version were all similar: it’s a good movie, but don’t compare it with the original.  Alas, such a comparison is inevitable: the new version sucks.

When the original was made, the Transit Authority was afraid that someone might actually try to hijack a train.  While much of the movie was actually filmed on the subway, a disclaimer at the end indicated that the TA did not render any technical assistance. Nevertheless, the movie presented an authentic view of the subway and its operation.

The current version was made with the full cooperation of the TA, and they seemed to go our of their way to get the details wrong.  If you ride the real subway regularly, the version in the current Pelham will seem ass-backwards.

Some of the biggest howlers come from the abject rearrangement of the city to fit the script.  There is no Federal Reserve Bank in Brooklyn, and the police car delivering the money appears a half-block from its destination (Grand Central Terminal) before getting wrecked on First Avenue.  And a train can’t go from the Lex line to Coney Island without backtracking.

While John Travolta and Denzel Washington put in good performances, they’re done in by the script.  Travolta is Ryder, a former Wall Streeter who was thrown in prison for embezzlement and now sports a tough-guy tattoo.  He is violent, but strangely philosophical when he talks on the radio.  The real Ryder (like the one in the 1974 movie) would have known to state his demands and shut up.  (But then, of course, there wouldn’t be a movie.)

Denzel Washington is Garber, a manager demoted to the Control Center because of an alleged bribe.  At least the scriptwriters tried to make him a realistic Control Center operator: he talks the talk and looks plausible through the made-up procedures.  But we lose him, too, when he turns into an action hero.

In brief, the charm of the original Pelham is that it feels real.  The new version does not.  The original turns on crisp dialogue, much of which has been replaced with psychobabble.  Perhaps if I had watched it in another frame of mind, I could have laughed at all their stupid mistakes. But as it was, I just found it annoying.

Nevertheless, I’ll probably get the DVD when it comes out, and keep it as a benchmark of how far we’ve gone down since 1974.

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23. May 2009 by admin.

Last Sunday, I went with my son to see the new Star Trek movie.  Visually, the movie is a masterpiece, although some of the special effects seem a little overwrought for my taste.  But there was something missing, although I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

My son thought the movie was wonderful: “There seems to be more action, more fun.  The older Star Trek was tied up in procedures, and the Prime Directive and such.”

Aha!  That was what gave Star Trek its satisfying snap, and what was missing in this incarnation.  Starfleet, we imagine, had its origins in earthbound military forces, and the earlier versions were bound to military traditions of respect and discipline.  The current version, striving to be more like Star Wars, cuts loose from the tradition: the leadership is a bunch of old fogies, and rules are for sissies.

While the current movie establishes a basis for a new generation of Kirk and Spock adventures,  they’ll probably follow the same pattern.  The older movies presented serving on a starship as something to aspire to; now anyone can do it if they can bend enough rules.

Rather the same thing happened with James Bond: the previous incarnations of the character, through Pierce Brosnan, presented a man who lived and worked by his wits.  The Daniel Craig Bond, in contrast, is an Energizer Bunny who dances through machine-gun fire, but doesn’t seem to have much to say.

No, I can’t go home again, except perhaps on DVD.

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28. December 2008 by admin.

For Christmas, my son bought me the last installment of the collection of original James Bond movies (Sean Connery through Pierce Brosnan).  The package included On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, with George Lazenby as Bond.  I suspect that it didn’t do well at the box office, and Lazenby did not reappear in the next movie (Sean Connery returned in Diamonds Are Forever).  I saw the movie once on the tube as a teenager: the rest of the movie seemed OK, but the ending was a terrible downer.

After my recent experience with Quantum of Solace, it was time for a fresh viewing.  And if you simply disregard the last two minutes, it turns out that On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is actually a good movie.  Among James Bond movies, it’s solidly in the middle of the pack, safely above the dogs: Thunderball, For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy,  and Licence to Kill.

It’s even better than the current film, Quantum of Solace.  Telly Savalas is Blofeld, a villain with a real plan for world domination, unlike the business-school wannabes of Quantum.  There’s just enough violence to make us feel the situation that Bond is experiencing, unlike the newer pictures in which Bond is the Energizer Bunny, waltzing through machine-gun fire.  And the instrumental theme music kicks ass, even almost 40 years later, while the theme from Quantum is, well, mush.

George Lazenby is actually a good Bond.  He would have been better if the scriptwriters hadn’t confused James Bond with Derek Flint.  And unfortunately, he was saddled with what is probably the lamest Bond-movie gadgets ever: an automatic safe-opener that requires a half-hour to work, and a photocopier.  But he presents himself well.  OK, he still comes in last, but he’s in very strong company.  I wouldn’t have minded seeing him again.

But the ending (or more specifically, the end of the ending) is so bad as to be throughly stupid: one of the basic tenets of the old-school Bond film is that it ends on a high note, with Our Hero saving the world yet again, and running off with the girl.  The current generation of Bond films with Daniel Craig don’t follow this convention, but at least leave one with a sense of accomplishment.

So dust it off and watch it, but find something else to do for the last two minutes.

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28. November 2008 by admin.

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving to whoever might be reading this.

It was another quiet Thanksgiving in our house.  We don’t go visiting relatives: my wife and I are both only children; our parents have all passed away; our other relatives don’t live nearby.

For many years, I didn’t have much to do with my relatives.  It wasn’t that I had anything against them, but later I understood that my relatives thought there was something vaguely wrong with me.  Or maybe it’s just that we have don’t have much in common.
So for Thanksgiving it was just my wife, my son, and myself.  I think I like it that way.

This morning, I made a traditional dinner.  I cooked the turkey according to the directions on the Butterball Web site, and it came out slightly overcooked.  Not terribly badly, but a little bit dry: it would have been better if I had taken it out of the oven about 20 minutes earlier.
I have to believe that the lawyers have figured out that nobody will sue them for an overcooked bird, but people will sue for an undercooked bird that makes them sick.  The published cooking times are therefore overly long for their protection.

In the evening, we went to see the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace.  The ‘rebooted’ Bond, in his second outing, has already gotten tiresome.  Whereas the old-school Bonds (Connery through Brosnan) got by on their wits and Q’s clever gizmos, Daniel Craig’s Bond is simply indestructible.  If you try to shoot him, he wil simply bounce out of the way.  It was clever at first, and now it’s just repetitive.

Quantum is, apparently, a secret organization of powerful men who hold meetings during live opera.  And their sinister plan for world domination is actually a part of the normal business-school curriculum (How to Screw Over Third-World Peasants).

So are they really villains after all?

Even the Bond-movie-as-travelogue disappoints: we’re told that Bond is traveling to Haiti and Bolivia, when in fact, the scenes in those countries are actually shot in Mexico, Panama, and Chile.

Perhaps I can’t go home again.

Posted in Life Goes On, Movies | No Comments »

18. August 2008 by admin.

Last week, as a birthday present, my son took me to see the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight. He thought it a motion picture masterpiece, and has razzed me on occasion for not going to see action movies anymore.

So we took an afternoon off from work to see it in Imax. My son was overawed by the Imax presentation, but for me, it was just a movie on a really big screen.

In terms of execution, it was, indeed, a cinematic masterpiece. It was photographed beautifully, was rich in detail, with excellent performances. Heath Ledger, in particular, was chilling as the Joker, perhaps too chilling.

But, in brief, I just didn’t like it. Gotham City is a tired, corrupt place, where all the trappings of civilization are still there, but the underlying premise of civilization–that others have integrity and can be trusted, at least enough to maintain civil order and enable commerce and the exchange of information–has rotted away. There are what appear to be flaming non sequiturs where events simply don’t make sense, until you realize that someone was probably bribed.

And the Joker is a vicious madman. There are some things that I simply don’t understand, and the modern fascination with psychosis as a subject for motion pictures is one of them.  Part of me wonders if Heath Ledger took the character too seriously, to the point where he became the Joker, went mad, and killed himself. Oops: I’m not supposed to say that, for we know that Heath Ledger died from an accidental overdose, having taken five different kinds of pain killers at the same time.

I don’t like movies whose main characters are criminals, unless they commit some extraordinarily clever crime, and I don’t like movies with vicious madmen. And now I wonder if our fascination with such characters has led to the death of a fine young actor.

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26. July 2008 by admin.

For the last couple of weeks, my flaky Internet connection at home got even flakier, to the point where it was up for only a couple of hours in the middle of the night. “Call the cable company and complain,” my wife told me.

But then I’d have to dig up their phone number, and the account number, and wait for twenty minutes on hold, and then they’d tell me, “We’ll get right on it,” and then I’d probably have to call again. It was easier to simply live without it. Pointless Web surfing is a bad habit, except that I can’t update my blog.

A couple of days ago, the connection came back up: I guess someone else complained.

* * *

All of that is rather pointless, except as introduction to my current funk. If my mother saw me writing this post, and read the title, she’d knock me upside the head. “Stop your self-pity,” she’d tell me.

*     *     *

Yesterday afternoon, my wife called me at the office: there’s was a concert in Prospect Park, and she wanted to see it. As I read the description, it was a performance of music from the movie Powaqqatsi. I was mildly interested, so I agreed.

We got to the Prospect Park Bandshell, paid our admission, and I saw that we had a choice: we could sit on seats in the bandshell, or spread out beyond it, on the lawn. This is good, I thought: I had brought a ground cloth, and we could stretch out and relax, since the performance was not due to start for another hour.

Instead, my wife pulled me toward the bandshell, to the second row behind the seats that had been cordoned off for VIPs. I really didn’t want to sit in an uncomfortable metal folding chair for four hours, with no legroom, hemmed in by crowds so that it would be a major production to go to the can, but I’m the good husband, so I went.

Worse, I hadn’t brought my computer, or anything to read. But my wife had brought a play that she was studying for one of her classes, so at least I could read over her shoulder.

Powaqqatsi is one of a series of three movies about life and (although those responsible will jump up and down and swear otherwise) how modern civilization is screwing it up.  There is no plot, no dialogue, not even any visual references to specific places: we’re somewhere in Asia or Africa or wherever, but we can’t quite tell where. The visuals are a series of mostly dreary images from these exotic locales, of people doing the little things they do to keep their world going. These are interspersed with images of our modern world, chosen and edited for ugliness.

This is accompanied by grinding music that is somewhat related to the visuals, occasionally echoing the sounds that would have been present during filming, but mostly just grinding. Sometimes, the music evokes a feeling of triumph, but there is no triumph on the screen.  In fairness, the live music was the best part of the production.  It would have been stirring if it had been presented by itself, or with better visuals.

Perhaps the real art of Powaqqatsi is that it causes a group of people to assemble themselves, experience it, and feel edified.

*     *     *

And while I was writing the previous section, the Internet connection at my house went down.  About an hour later, it’s up again.  I had better finish this quickly….

I went to Powaqqatsi by default: it was my wife’s idea.  But if it was my decision, what would I have done?  I probably would have wanted to watch the tube for a bit, and then go to sleep.

But  what do I really want?  If all doors had stood open, and I weren’t tired after a long work week, what would I want to do?

Alas, I really don’t know….

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5. July 2008 by admin.

Last night, my wife and I watched Independence Day, the 1996 movie with Will Smith, in which hostile aliens from outer space start destroying major cities.  It was one of my son’s favorite movies when it came out years ago, and was a huge commercial success.  But my wife hadn’t seen it before.

She was impressed, and thought it was a very well-made movie.  As I watched it with her, I wondered why it seemed so wonderful.

“You don’t watch action movies anymore,” my son often says to me, and it’s true.  And it’s not just that I’m busier now, or that I more often see movies with my wife than with my son: the latest crop of action movies no longer appeals.  I couldn’t care less about the exploits of Spider-Man, Ironman, the Fantastic Four, Hellboy, or any of the comic-book superheroes prowling the screens today.

And when I watched Independence Day last night, I understood why.  Independence Day told the story of ordinary mortals who were pressed to become heroes.  And so it was with the James Bond movies, The Peacemaker, Armageddon, and the other action movies that my son and I enjoyed in the 1990s.  While sometimes it was the hero’s job to be a hero, in every case the hero was still an ordinary person.

I am starved for the sight of such a hero in the movies or television: an otherwise ordinary person who rises to a challenge, faces it with grace and skill, and prevails.

Last week, I went to see Get Smart with my son.  Maxwell Smart was never a hero: he was an amiable buffoon who happened to solve the problems at hand.  And while the movie tends more to action than the 1960s TV series did, it’s still more of a comedy.  So while it was fun, it didn’t hit my hero spot.

And then there’s Hancock, this year’s Will Smith movie.  Hancock is an otherwise ordinary guy with superhero skills.  But since he apparently doesn’t know what to do with them, he begins the movie as a drunken bum.

It was a truism where I used to work (a very large organization) that there are ‘no more heroes.’  In some quarters ‘heroics’ is almost a dirty word: it’s the way unsophisticated, immature organizations accomplish things.  The Disney animated movie The Incredibles took a tongue-in-cheek view, positing a world in which the superheroes were forced to retire under the threat of lawsuits.

Over 400 years ago, Sheakespeare wrote in ‘King Henry v’:

In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;

In other words, the hero is there inside of us, waiting to be unleashed should the circumstances present themselves.

But if we’re told all our lives that there are no such things as heroes, what will we do?

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7. June 2008 by admin.

My wife and I went to see the new Sex and the City movie today.  All the reviews of it that I’ve seen to date considered it either wonderful or horrible.  My sense of it was somewhere in between: it isn’t a cinematic masterpiece, but it’s a good light entertainment.  It would have been better if it were cut about twenty minutes shorter, but I can’t complain too hard: today was the first seriously hot day of the year in New York City, and it was good to sit in an air-conditioned movie theater.

My wife introduced me to the TV series when we got married.  If I had watched it when I was a lonely single guy, I would have hated it: how could I find a decent companion when women were like that?  But ensconced in a happy marriage, the women of Sex in the City seemed unreal: they lived under different laws of relationship physics than the rest of us, and their situations were entertaining when it happened to them, but in the real world, we wouldn’t do things like that.

The TV series got formulaic after a while, and came to a reasonable end in 2004.  The movie represents a continuation of the story a few years hence, and a chance to answer the one thing that I never understood:

What does Carrie see in Mr. Big?

Throughout the entire television series, Carrie Bradshaw, the lead character, is irretrievably attracted to ‘Mr. Big,’ but I could never understand why: Big is a self-absorbed asshole with a fear of commitment.

In the movie, Carrie and Big have been living together, and decide to get married so coldly that the theater had to shut off the air conditioning to prevent frostbite among the audience.  You might have thought that a few years with his true love would have softened Big, but no: he’s still a self-absorbed asshole.  If he were as unsure of himself in his working life as in his relationship with Carrie, he’d be a total loser instead of a bigshot construction executive.  Later, he backs out of his own wedding, and we’re not surprised.

In the end, it’s all resolved, and yes, Carrie and Big get married.  (I don’t think I’ve given away much: in this case, the journey is more interesting than the destination.)  But the groundwork is there for a sequel, say 3-4 years hence, when they get divorced….

Posted in Movies, Television | No Comments »