Stand By Me

~ Mark

Stand By Me. Nothing beats exploring the woods with your friends. Especially when your parents are clueless as to your whereabouts. This one is not as good as I remembered. I couldn’t help but compare it with that other Oregon-based tween adventure from a year earlier, The Goonies, and it comes up short. Maybe it just works better for younger eyes and ears, where the foul language is more scandalous and thrilling, and the loving fisticuffs more relatable. I didn’t realize this is where the production company’s name came from.

Taken 2

~ Mark

Taken 2. I like the flip-flop here, where Neeson has to rely on his daughter for a bit. Love the absurdly nonchalant use of grenades. Neeson is the most nightmarish backseat driver you could ever imagine. Like The Equalizer, he gives the final bad guy a chance to make the right decision, but… people never learn. Not sure what’s up with the images here, like how the colors were pushed and processed into these weird greenish-yellow skin tones. Tick of the Clock is one of the best things to happen to action movies (Cf.). More of the same ain’t bad, but Taken is better.

Dark City

~ Mark

Dark City. Not going to complain about Lizabeth Scott (I only put this one my list because of Pitfall), but there’s not a lot of compelling stuff here. Good job easing into the pivotal scene though. Watch the other completely unrelated 1998 Dark City instead.

Meek’s Cutoff

~ Mark

Meek’s Cutoff. The opening scene has the cast fording a waist-deep river – rushing water taking over the soundtrack – and you sense that’s about as good as it’s gonna get for a while. I love the contrast between the hot bright sunny bleached-out days, and the nights where you can see absolutely nothing but what fire’s light touches. And the square frame makes things feel a bit more fraught somehow. Over and over we see women hanging back while men deliberate their course. (Often with men in long shot, conversations barely audible, while the women get the close-ups and mediums.) And look where it gets them. By the end, it’s time to try something new. Fingers crossed.

Kelly Reichardt’s movies Night Moves and Old Joy are also really good. Wendy & Lucy is still on my list.

How You Know

~ Mark

On re-reading:

Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you’ve lost the source of. It works, but you don’t know why.

[…] Reading and experience are usually “compiled” at the time they happen, using the state of your brain at that time. The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your life. Which means it is very much worth reading important books multiple times. I always used to feel some misgivings about rereading books. I unconsciously lumped reading together with work like carpentry, where having to do something again is a sign you did it wrong the first time. Whereas now the phrase “already read” seems almost ill-formed.

How You Know

You Don’t Have To Be Pretty – On YA Fiction And Beauty As A Priority | The Belle Jar

~ Mark

We never say that all men deserve to feel beautiful. We never say that each man is beautiful in his own way. We don’t have huge campaigns aimed at young boys trying to convince them that they’re attractive, probably because we very rarely correlate a man’s worth with his appearance. The problem is that a woman’s value in this world is still very much attached to her appearance, and telling her that she should or deserves to feel beautiful does more to promote that than negate it. Telling women that they “deserve” to feel pretty plays right in to the idea that prettiness should be important to them. And having books and movies aimed at young women where every female protagonist turns out to be beautiful (whereas many of the antagonists are described in much less flattering terms) reinforces the message that beauty has some kind of morality attached to it, and that all heroines are somehow pretty.

Can we please change the script here?

You Don’t Have To Be Pretty – On YA Fiction And Beauty As A Priority | The Belle Jar

Enemy

~ Mark

Enemy. Unexpectedly good soundtrack. The more chamber ensemble feel is a nice change. Even got some bassoon leading the way at times. Two Gyllenhaals contrast in appearance (leather band dress watch vs. link sports watch; chinos vs. denim; blazer vs. leather jacket; Volvo vs. motorcycle) and behavior (hunch vs. swagger). Nice how each man (emotionally) is the one the other’s wife has been missing. Also a good reminder of how objectively difficult it would be to live someone else’s life – from basics like knowing which keys to use to family history, social circle gossip, etc. – and the futility of escapism when we have our own multitudes we should be reconciling. There’s a good car scene here, particularly as it settles down with a truck-mounted camera, which then cranes down and closer to the action. Not sure about the spider imagery. Something about weaving illusions, bread-and-circus distractions from real life (like the strip club).

Thief

~ Mark

Thief. So great. This was the first time I’d noticed a couple cameos from Manhunter stars: Dennis Farina (Manhunter’s Jack Crawford) as a henchman and William Petersen (profiler Will Graham) as a bouncer at the bar where Caan is late for his date. A few other nice camera/editing odds and ends I appreciated this time around:

  • During the diamond exchange in the diner, I like how he starts unwrapping one of the packages, then pauses, and the camera cuts away when the waitress arrives.
  • After Caan barges into the office, the blocking follows the shifting of power. Caan moves from the visitor’s chair in the owner’s office, then parallel to the desk, then moves behind the desk and forces the owner into the guest’s chair.
  • When using a tracking device to misdirect the cops, the camera tells the story as it zooms past three or four cars, then fixes on the bus.
  • The wide shots of the monolithic safe at the big heist me of similar shots at the El Paso bank in For a Few Dollars More.
  • Just about 99% of the movie is urban, but the final setting is in comfortable suburbia (the sort of life that Caan has been working toward). The climactic scene at the mob boss’s house is nearly silent up until the last moments, and then there’s a crane up into the trees…

One last bit of awesomeness is Willie Nelson’s character, Okla, dispensing some perfect life advice:

Lie to no one. If there’s somebody close to you, you’ll ruin it with a lie. If they’re a stranger, who the fuck are they you gotta lie to them?

Why James Cameron’s Aliens is the best movie about technology

~ Mark

That’s what technology is. It’s the world of things, some impossibly stupid, some smarter than we are, we have assembled around ourselves to cover over our fundamental weaknesses as a species. The strength we have, the advantage this gives us, is our ability to stand apart from the things we’ve made: to use them and set them aside; to make them prosthetic extensions of ourselves and to let them go.

Why James Cameron’s Aliens is the best movie about technology

Stoner

~ Mark

I read John Williams’ book Stoner, and found it strangely mesmerizing. So direct and plain and sturdy and beautiful. A couple lines that liked, that also capture something of its directness. At dinner with friends:

They became a little drunk; they laughed vaguely and sentimentally; they saw each other anew.

While the hero rehabs his house and office, the importance of the spaces we create:

As he repaired his furniture and arranged it in the room, it was himself he was slowly shaping, it was himself that he was putting into a kind of order, it was himself he was making possible.

Other smart people agree that this book is great. It was Dean Peterson’s write-up that gave me the final nudge to buy it. Got on my radar when I heard about it from Austin Kleon, Ben Casnocha, Steve Almond, Tim Kreider, et al.