Movies

As a slightly late birthday present^[1], my older nephew (don’t ask) took me out for dinner and a movie. We watched The Dark Knight. I’d been looking forward to seeing it, as everyone and their dog has been telling me how great it was; I wish they hadn’t, because I was ultimately let down a bit.

Don’t get me wrong - it’s a good movie. I enjoyed seeing it. But for a time, it was #1 on IMDb’s Top 250 list. That’s just cooky. The Dark Knight better than Schindler’s List? Than Star Wars? I don’t think so. The Dark Knight has since slipped to the #3 spot, which I still think is way too good of a spot for it. It was a good movie, but I wouldn’t put it in the top 10 at all. I felt that it dragged on a bit too long, or perhaps a lot too long. If it had been 45 minutes shorter, I would’ve liked it more, I think; as it was, I kept thinking, “okay, here’s the big action sequence that’ll wrap it up.” And then that sequence would end, and the movie just kept going.

Despite my complaints, I still liked it. Some good points:

• One thing I heard from folks was that Heath Ledger’s Joker was excellent; and on that point, I’ll agree. I liked his psychotic killer version of the Joker a lot more than the classic look. I’d have to rewatch the original Batman movie to refresh my memory of Nicholson’s portrayal, but I think I’d end up liking Ledger’s more.
• A few too many of them, but the action sequences were excellent. I particularly liked the car / truck / armored car chase scene.
• The special effects in general. Two-Face was quite impressive, among many other things.

Do see the movie, whether it’s in theaters or on DVD. Just don’t pay as much attention as the hype as I did.

1. I turned 24 on the 11th. One more year and I’ll be a quarter of a century old! [↩]

This past weekend, in addition to Revenge of the Sith, we also watched Into the Wild. In talking about movies in one of my classes (before the class started!), a few people said it was excellent, and so I wanted to check it out.

(Danger, Will Robinson, Danger! If you’ve not seen this movie yet, you may want to skip this one; spoilers ahead.)

Alright, is everyone who doesn’t want to read spoilers gone? Good. For those who are braving ahead even having not seen it, the plot is this: a young recently-graduated college student basically abandons his family - parents and one sister, the latter with whom he is extremely close - to go tramping across the country. While he goes many places, his ultimate goal is to go to Alaska; he wants to find the ever-elusive Truth, and he thinks that going into solitude and living a simple life will help him do that. He ultimately ends up dying in Alaska, trapped by a flooded river. In the movie at least, he dies from ingesting a poisonous plant that he had confused with another, edible plant. It’s not clear whether he truly died from eating a poisonous plant, or simply starvation.

The movie lived up to the hype of my friends; it was quite good. I was really swept up into the story, and found myself thinking a lot about the message the guy was giving throughout his travels: modern life is too complicated, and we need to simplify. Near the beginning there’s a scene where him and his family are at his graduation dinner. His parents offer to buy him a new car, and… he gets angry with them. What’s wrong with his old car, he asks? He likes his old car - it works; he accuses them of obsessing over things, “things, things, always more things.” His attitude about much of life is like this - less is more, essentially. Get back to nature, get back to experiencing the moment.

The day after I watched it though, the more and more his actions bugged me. I felt that in the movie, he (Christopher McCandless) was portrayed as noble, in a way, for abandoning his family and going off into Alaska. There’s nothing wrong per se with leaving your family and doing your own thing - I’m certainly not saying that. But he was of age; if he wanted to do such a thing, his parents couldn’t have stopped him. Why didn’t he send a postcard or letter to them, or at least to his sister? Did making them suffer through the worry help him in doing what he was trying to do? It almost seemed like he got off on leaving all of them hanging.

Furthermore, there’s a line between being adventurous and being stupid, and I think he crossed it when he went into Alaska with, more-or-less, nothing. On the Wikipedia page about it, it’s stated that he decided in July, after a few months there, that he was ready to leave; however, the river he had crossed on his way in was larger and swifter, and he couldn’t cross it. In August, there’s a journal entry which is assumed to be his last words. His body was found in early September. Even if one assumes that he died immediately after writing his last journal entry, that was still a month’s worth of time for him to attempt to get out. The real kicker? There was a hand-operated tram 1/4 of a mile from where he tried to cross the river. If he’d gone “into the wild” with a few maps of the area, he would have known that, and he could have been able to walk right out.

While I did enjoy the movie a lot, the more I think on it, I’m afraid I share the sentiments of a park ranger, who is quoted on the above-linked Wikipedia page:

When you consider McCandless from my perspective, you quickly see that what he did wasn’t even particularly daring, just stupid, tragic, and inconsiderate. […] Essentially, Chris McCandless committed suicide.

I get what the guy was trying to do, and part of me thinks, yeah, we should all simplify more; we don’t need all the crap that we have now to be happy. But the other part of me thinks that he could have let his family know what was up, at least his sister, and that he could still be alive right now if he’d executed his plan with a little less idealism and a little more common sense.

One of the things I did in between studying and writing was watch the movie Das Leben der Anderen (released with English subtitles as The Lives of Others). While such a statement from me is problematic due to how few movies I watch, I’ll say it anyway: it was one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. I think my feelings on it are correct though, because it seems that it has scored well across the board, both with critics and everyone else. At Rotten Tomatoes, it has a 93% (!) rating.

The movie takes place in the early 80s in East Germany, beginning, indeed, in 1984. Whether that was a coincidence in plotting or a nod to Orwell, I don’t know. The plot focuses on the Stasi, and specifically on one agent, Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler, spying on a playwright and his girlfriend. Why is the Captain spying on them? Because one of the top dogs in the Stasi hierarchy wants his girlfriend, and so wants the playwright out of the way. As Georg, the playwright remarks at one point, “To think that people [like that] ruled a country.”

I won’t give away how the plot progresses or how the movie ends, because I’m hoping that you’ll rent it and watch it. I know that many people dislike watching a movie with subtitles, which is what you’ll have to do if you don’t speak German, but it really is worth the trouble. Ulrich Mühe did a truly amazing job in portraying the almost soulless agent, the “little gray man” as Ebert called him. While the other actors and actresses were all good, Mühe made the film; without him, it probably wouldn’t have worked.

Not only was the movie excellent entertainment-wise, with some of the most tense moments I’ve experienced while watching a film, it also opened my eyes to German history beyond the Nuremberg Trials. In my interest obsession with World War 2, my advancing through German history stalled and eventually stopped. I knew that Berlin had been split between the Western Allies and the Russians, and that East Germany was communist, but that was about where my post-WW2 German history knowledge stopped. The movie has led me to start looking into later events, particularly in regards to East Germany, and I must say: it’s not pretty. I’ve not read a huge amount on the Stasi, by any reckoning, but what I have read is pretty awful. Simon Wiesenthal, the famed Nazi hunter, once remarked that, “The Stasi was much, much worse than the Gestapo, if you consider only the oppression of its own people.”

Poking into the history of the Stasi, however, will be saved for a later post; for now, take my advice. Go out, rent Das Leben der Anderen, and watch it. If you’re disappointed with it, you can come back here and yell (or type in all caps) at me. I won’t mind. (Not that it’ll happen, mind you - you’ll enjoy the movie.)

I was cleaning and reorganizing a bit in our bedroom this past weekend, and saw that the Prisoner of Azkaban movie was on. Having seen only bits and pieces of it previously, and having just finished the book, I thought I’d tune in. I ended up catching the last hour or so. I had a few thoughts on it:

• The Dementors looked eerily similar (eery pun intended) to the Ringwraiths from the Lord of the Rings films. They were a bit more wispy, whereas the Ringwraiths were definitely solid beings, but still - the similarities are quite strong. Not to say that Rowling copied the Ringwraiths, however; tall, thin, black hooded creatures seem to be a pretty common thing in the fantasy world. Ringwraiths, Dementors - hell, look at most depictions of the Grim Reaper.
• I thought the werewolf form of Lupin was somehow off. Its hair wasn’t shabby enough or something. It looked too humanoid and not wolfish enough. Then again, I’ve always been one who prefers his werewolves to be men that turn into just an overly large wolf, not some humanoid looking thing.
• I wasn’t very fond of Gary Oldman’s portrayal of Sirius. He seemed too frantic, too nervous. When reading the book, I pictured him as quite smooth and relaxed, sure of himself. Oldman’s version acted a bit like he was going to explode at any moment. Perhaps I perceived this incorrectly though; I was, after all, trying to maintain some bit of cleaning momentum while watching.
• As noted, I only caught the last hour, so perhaps I would have seen the reasoning for the change if I’d seen all of it, but… why did Harry only get the Firebolt broom at the end of the movie? In the book, he got it much, much earlier.
• The Richard Harris Dumbledore from movies 1 and 2 were so much better. I loved the Harris version, and thought Michael Gambon’s version in Azkaban was, for lack of a better word, awful. His speech was off, and he didn’t have the “twinkle” of character that the Harris version had. Harris’ version, while obviously nutty, was funny and enjoyable. Gambon’s version was just weird.

And, worry not, those of you who aren’t fellow Potter fans. I’m halfway through book 4 already. I’d say once I’m done with the series, my Potter mania will pass.

… could have been a lot better. I just finished watching the movie, and I while I thought it was a pretty good movie, I would have liked a more solid ending. What I expected was the boat finding Kee, and then a brief segment showing the future: the Human Project area, with more people having kids, perhaps showing some signs that civilization might return to its pre-crisis state, etc. Instead I was given an ending showing the boat finding Kee, Theo being dead, and.. well, that was it! Kee and her baby got away, but I would have liked a bit more.

I don’t know if the movie was meant to be a blend of sci-fi / horror, but I actually found Children of Men to be pretty terrifying, moreso than most “real” horror movies. (Actually, I find a lot of “real” horror movies to just be stupid, but I digress.) Why? Because what it depicted really could happen. I’m not talking about the infertility issue (even though I suppose that, too, could happen), but instead, I’m talking about the general condition of the world. The totalitarian Britain that was depicted just creeped me out. It reminded me way too much of what I know about Nazi Germany.

A few pointless but fun asides about the movie:

• I recognized the fellow that played Syd, Peter Mullan, as the guy who gave one of the speeches to the Scottish soldiers in Braveheart. The speech he gave was the one with “We don’t have to die for these bastards, let’s go home!” in it. And yes, I was totally addicted to Braveheart. I’ve seen it many, many times.
• There were a few nods toward Buddhism in the movie. One of the things that Kee and her female protector (I don’t recall her name) kept chanting in the car was Om Mani Padme Hung, probably the most well-known Tibetan Buddhist mantra. Jasper, the old male friend of Theo, said “Shanti, shanti, shanti” a few times, which is also a Buddhist mantra. I couldn’t quite understand what Kee’s female friend was saying on the bus, when the guard was harassing her, but it sounded more like a Christian prayer than a Buddhist mantra. Whatever the religion was supposed to be, I liked the nods to Buddhism.