Monthly Archives: March 2011

Well, my previously mentioned idea of picking several genres and then watching 30 films from each by the end of the year is underway. The fact that Moon was expiring on the ole’ Netflix ‘Watch Instantly’ feature made an easy decision as to what the first genre and film would be.

This was my second time watching this one (which was true for my viewing partner, Brian, as well).

Let me tell you folks, I love this movie. Sam Rockwell just acts my fucking socks off. Rockwell’s perfect portrayal of the same man at the beginning and end of three years alone in space is stunning. This is made even more impressive by the fact that often he isn’t acting with anyone else, playing alone or opposite the Hal-like robot, voiced by Kevin Spacey (who gave a fantastic performance as well).

This movie is proof enough that the Academy ignores far too many deserving films each year. Not only was Rockwell ignored, but a wonderful directorial debut by Duncan Jones, and a brilliant script. Meanwhile, The Blind Side was nominated for Best Picture that year.

In Moon, Duncan Jones and company got everything right. It’s one of those select films where I wouldn’t change a single thing if given the chance. The script, the score, the direction, the acting. Everything is so well crafted.

The film is in rarified air in its attention to small details, especially in terms of the development of the story and the character(s). The nuance is so pitch-perfect that it takes scenes which, in most films, would be throw-away scenes, and transforms them into profound moments in the film.

This movie is perfect. It’s easily 80% of the reason I’m excited for Duncan Jones’ upcoming film Source Code (Michelle Monaghan makes up the other 20%).

Oh yeah, and can anyone tell me how the hell they filmed the ping pong scene?

The Head and the Heart, that’s who.

Just another gift from Seattle, to the world.

[photo via Creeping Elm]

This is by far the most brilliantly crafted and affecting of the films so far. There isn’t a close second. Time of the Wolf is a dark, quiet, terribly real film about what the western world might actually look like in the wake of a truly and completely catastrophic event.

The film has no music, the dialogue is sparse, the cinematography is simple and beautiful. We never discover what caused the apocalypse, we don’t even really know if it was worldwide or just French; we simply see the effects on ordinary people trying to move away from city centers and survive in the country. The film has moments of troublingly ordinary violence, but never in frame. There is no gory voyeurism. Whatever voyeurism may be at play is purely emotional.

It’s a difficult film to watch. It is one of those films where you are always tense, always waiting for something terrible to happen again. In that way, it is masterful in helping the viewer enter into the world inhabited by the characters on screen.

The world depicted is so ordinary, so like our own. The small kindnesses and cruelties are our own. I watched, wanting to believe that people wouldn’t really behave this way, when the chips were down. Yet, we do. Every day, all over the world, we kill and rape and destroy. I became aware watching this film that many times the violence of humans in extreme situations is simply a violence that has always lived in them, finally given a reason and opportunity to manifest itself.

While, as I say again, this is a hard film to watch, I recommend it as highly as I can. This film should have been hopeless. I expected it to be, even many times during the viewing. Instead, I found myself feeling a profound hope when all was said and done, with a powerful message for me, in my day to day life, pre-apocalypse.

Throwing ourselves on the fire cannot have any hope of redeeming a broken and bleeding world. Only loving each other can do that.

Another ‘post-apocalypse’ entry will be up later today, but I am thinking about perhaps changing the format a bit of ‘Another Day, Another Movie’ to make it easier, but still awesome.

I want to start the ‘Movies in Space’ edition of ADAM, but I also have a ton of non-space related movies at the top of my Netflix queue that I am really looking forward to. Also, it looks like I’ll be having people over every week or so to watch a different samurai movie. That makes it impossible to do a normal Samurai ADAM. So, what I’m thinking is, I’ll pick a few genres, and commit to watching 30 films from each genre between now and the end of the year.

Again, a good name for this entire blog could be, ‘In case anyone cares.’ In case anyone does, that is the immediate future of ‘Another Day, Another Movie.’ It seems to me it will actually help me even more to immerse myself in certain genres over the rest of the year, because I won’t have to figure out how to free up 10-30 nights in a row for a certain genre. I can just get rolling right away. It would also make it easier to incorporate movies coming out this year, as well as relevant television series and video games. For this year that would include, to name a few: Battlestar Galactica, Samurai 7, Red Dwarf, Cowboy Bebop, and Doctor Who: Series 6.

So, I’m thinking, 30 movies this year from: Samurai, Kung-Fu, Movies in Space (maybe including alien invasion? maybe invasion should get its own?), maaaaybe doing 30 more Westerns? What say you, good citizens? Anyone? Anyone?

Or, maybe everyone hates these and wishes I would stop doing them. Which, would also be welcome criticism, not that it would necessarily stop me.

Mad Max: Part III. I’d watched two Mad Max movies for this ‘ADAM’ already, why not a third? Sure, Tina Turner gave me pause, but at the very least I’d finally know what Pac was referencing in the ‘California Love’ video.

I’m assuming it’s due to the fact that they’ve most probably nearly run out of gas altogether now, but Mad Max doesn’t have a car anymore, he rides around with a camel-drawn wagon instead. His shit gets stolen by our friend, the pilot with the terrible teeth, from The Road Warrior. Somewhere in the post-apocalyptic landscape of Australia, the pilot has managed to find an orthodontist and now has pearly whites.

Max follows the trail of his wagon to Bartertown, a small city that runs off of methane (in this case, it comes from pig shit). Tina Turner tells Maxwell that if he kills her primary political rival in single combat, she’ll make sure he’s made whole from his recent losses.

So, Aunty Entity’s (Tina Turner) chief rival is actually two people who function as one, they’re called Master Blaster. They consist of a little person, Master, who functions as the brains; and a giant, Blaster, who acts as the muscle. Aunty wants to keep the brains around, while crippling him without his muscle. All Master, no Blaster. That’s the setup, and the action stems from there.

There are certainly some glaring weaknesses. For one: Tina Turner was teeeeerrrrrrible, godawful even. Ugh. Two: why, in the name of all that is reasonable and logical in the world, does the “genius,” Master, have the vocabulary of the Incredible Hulk? I mean, sure, I’ll suspend disbelief all you want, but there has to be some reason why. “Me order. Me Master. Me run Bartertown.” What the fuck?

As far as the cheesiness factor goes, it really wasn’t so bad. I mean, cheesy, sure, but no worse than, say, Willow or other similar movies. With the introduction of a Lost Boys-esque tribe of kids, and a PG-13 rating, they basically made the third movie a family film. I know, I know, it’s sacrilege, but I liked the movie anyway. I thought the tribe of kids was actually really well executed and entertaining. They never pushed the kids over the edge into annoying territory, I found them likable and emotionally engaging throughout.

Go ahead, call me a lame-ass, but as long as Tina Turner wasn’t talking, I really liked this movie.

I’m not going to lie, I think this looks awesome.

La Jetée is by far the most critically and academically celebrated film on the list so far. It’s a 1963 French film, made up almost entirely of still images (there is only one brief moment of motion in the film).

While many details were changed, the general premise is the basis for 12 Monkeys, another classic post-apocalypse film which is only left off this list because I’ve seen it several times and, with a few exceptions, I wanted to focus more on movies I hadn’t seen before.

La Jetée is about a boy who has the image of a woman’s face burned into his memory as a child without understanding why. His memory of this woman comes just before WWIII ends life as we know it. Much later, he is kept in an underground prison beneath the ruins of Paris as an adult. It is there that he is used in time travel experiments, because they need guinea pigs with strong images connecting them to moments in the past.The experiment successfully projects his consciousness into the past in physical form, allowing him to meet the woman whose face he carried with him through the horros of the apocalypse.

The short film is only 28 minutes long, so I can’t really go into more detail than that without giving away the whole thing, but if you’ve seen 12 Monkeys, **spoilers ahead, skip to the next paragraph if you haven’t seen either of the films mentioned in this post.** the two stories, along with the shared theme of post-apocalyptic time-travel, are both rooted in the idea of a young boy witnessing his own death, unbeknownst to him that this is what he has seen.

This film was so delightfully unique. Perhaps the series of still images with narration would have grown tiresome over a feature length film, but for half an hour it never bogged down or lost emotional depth. It was almost like a graphic novel, with photographs instead of hand-drawn art, and no dialogue. It was also a slightly different motivation for time travel than I’ve seen in a story before. The film was ambitious enough that, while it was well-received and influential, it hasn’t been truly imitated stylistically on a large scale.

Most of all, I appreciated the subtly with which it grappled with huge ideas, some philosophical, and some fantastical in nature.

This is going to sound pretentious, but I mean it as an honest to goodness word of advice: if you need things more traditional and “mainstream” (for lack of a better word), it might be out of your strike zone. Otherwise, I recommend firing up the old Netflix ‘Watch Instantly’ feature to check it out.

Escape from New York is different than all the other movies so far. It’s unique in that the apocalypse isn’t worldwide. It’s only in New York, which from the perspective of 1981, when the film was made, is a pretty fair assumption.

As the story goes, in 1988, crime rises in the US by 400 percent. So, in response, they build a big wall around all of Manhattan and turn it into a super maximum security prison where criminals are sentenced for life. There are no guards inside, they just send you in and you’re on your own. It’s the perfect cocktail for all sorts of crazy-ass gangs and criminal bedlam.

In the distant future year of 1997, Airforce One is hijacked by crazy communist Americans (because Hollywood isn’t very good at imagining new bad guys), and it crashes inside Manhattan. The president is needed alive, because he was on his way to a summit in Hartford seeking peace with China and the USSR (who, apparently, have made up post-Omega Man, and have rekindled their war with America, resulting in WWIII).

The NYPD, who by ’97 is an army camped around the walls of the prison, has no choice but to send in the newest incoming inmate, former special forces super soldier and convicted bank robber, Snake Pliskin (overacted by Mr. Kurt Russell). He has to save the President of the ole’ US of A. Oh yeah, as well as a cassette tape that apparently has a bunch of important information on nuclear fusion on it… oh, the 80’s. If he fails, they’ll detonate charges they implanted in his neck and kill him instantly.

All sorts of crazy tomfoolery ensues. Pliskin, while great pains are taken to show us he’s a bad-ass, never feels organized or skilled enough to be a super-soldier. The movie is fun on a campy early-80’s level. No part of it is believable, or even makes much sense, but it definitely does have some things going for it, for example: Ernest Borgnine as a cabbie who, for some inexplicable reason, stayed behind to keep driving his cab when they walled off the city; Lee Van Cleef, as the head of the NYPD, who, for some inexplicable reason, is wearing a gold hoop earring; and Isaac Hayes as the self-appointed Duke of New York, who, for some inexplicable reason, doesn’t sing once.

If all you expect is stupid, absurdly campy, 1980’s dystopian “action,” it’s a moderately enjoyable hour and a half to spend watching a movie which has been influential in several genres.

Australia has already made several appearances in these post-apocalypse movies. With The Quiet Earth, it was New Zealand’s turn. All I knew about this one going in was that it was a post-apocalypse film, that it was on lots of the lists I found, and that since it was called The Quiet Earth, it was most probably a ‘last man on earth’ sort of movie. I don’t want to ruin anything, because I really appreciated going in blind. I’ll keep the details sparse.

I could be wrong about this, I didn’t check at all, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Kiwi movie. Sure, movies filmed in New Zealand like Lord of the Rings, but not a truly Kiwi film. The Quiet Earth was made by New Zealanders, based on a novel by a New Zealander, and set in New Zealand. If I were going to be small-minded and base my entire opinion of New Zealand on this movie, I would surmise that the people of New Zealand are trippy as shit. Now, obviously, I don’t actually base my assumptions about New Zealand on The Quiet Earth, I base them on The Flight of the Conchords.

The first portion of the film, which is just Bruno Lawrence as the main character trying to make sense of the empty world he finds himself in, is the best part of the film. I was really drawn in by how well they tackled that familiar part of the genre. The increase of tension was really well proportioned to the slow revelation of small details about what the hell was going on.

As I’ve already implied, this movie had several key moments that were mind-bending, including the conclusion. Director Geoff Murphy won’t even officially say what the film’s ending means.

The film had so many strengths that I wished I’d enjoyed it more than I did. Sadly, the relationships between characters, as well as the motivations for people doing what they did, was weak, even nonexistent. Maybe it was better in the novel, but in the film it was like: ‘Hey, I’ve got this really great sci-fi idea for an end of the world movie. Oh, wait, I forgot to include actual characters… give me an hour to let me throw some people in this bitch and we’ll get this show on the road.’

Anyway, Bruno was great, the film had tons of really great things going for it. Yet, the weakness of the third act makes me sadly admit that, in my humble opinion, The Quiet Earth was good, but not great.