Danny's Weblog

2007 Jul 09 [ Mon ]

Review -- Movie: Shooter (2007)

This is a generally competent thriller with Mark Wahlberg in the title role. As usual, my comments refer to numerous plot elements in detail, so if you haven't seen the movie yet STOP READING NOW.

SPOILER ALERT

1. There are many shortcomings and blunders in the movie, but it does one very significant thing: the bad guys are not "rogue" elements in the federal government, but clearly in control of it. In that respect it differs from all other similar movies that I am aware of.

On the other hand, one of the weak points in the plot is that the FBI is depicted as independent of the bad guys. This seems quite implausible to me, and it seems doubly implausible that the hero, who vows vengeance for being set up as a patsy by one branch of the Feds, should casually assume that the FBI would be anything different. At the very least, the hero should be much more cautious with them.

2. I watched the deleted scenes on the DVD, and I can certainly see why they were deleted. In many cases the hero waffles on ponderously to explain elements of the plot, and one wonders why this university lecturer type didn't put two and two together a long time ago.

Indeed, do special-forces types really get inserted in a country, kill some people, and get pulled out without ever wondering who they're killing and why? "Need to know" is certainly a very big phrase in government operations, but don't these guys ever go "hey, waitaminute" *before* their best buddy gets blown away and their exfiltration vanishes?

3. The lead character really progresses too fast. Assuming he starts off with no suspicion of how the Feds really work, he should have been much more tentative throughout the movie. Like the point about the FBI above, he should have spread his bets more. For instance, the bad guys *could* have been foreign agents of some kind, with only limited contacts in local uniformed and secret police.

But in general, he is depicted as having had previously no doubts about the Feds. Even by the end of the movie, he should have been still wondering whether he was completely nuts. It took me thirty years to get from supporting the US (when it was unfashionable) to opposing it.

4. Likewise, he recovers too fast from the shoulder wound. It is not easy to aim a rifle accurately, even when you are in perfect health. For *months* after a shoulder wound, especially if you get no physical therapy, you have weakness and tremors.

5. OK, I know you can buy gunpowder at a lot of supermarkets in the USA. But can you really put together radio-controlled booby traps? That work with complete reliability and effectiveness?

6. The hero's actions, while generally in the realm of the possible (unlike Die Hard, etc) generally rely on the bad guy doing one particular move. For instance, the hero waits in a gully, and knifes a patrolling guard when he leans down to take a look. The hero has to be in exactly the right stance to execute that move; if the bad guy has his gun ready when he looks in, the hero has "brought a knife to a gunfight" as the saying goes.

7. The assault on the assassin's house, which occupies a large part of the running time and presumably budget, was utterly ridiculous. It wasn't clear exactly what kind of troops made up the attacking force, but what kind of halfwit advances slowly towards the enemy in broad daylight without cover in tight groups? They were depicted as having no comms, no surveillance equipment, no snipers, no armored vehicles, no flash-bangs, gas, or respirators, no command and control... They would be lucky to get a 1:1 kill ratio against Somalis.

Furthermore, the hero's plan relies on the attacking force being exactly that stupid.

8. The FBI guy who becomes the hero's buddy also gets effective too fast. Now it's true that if a highly-trained guy sets up the incident for you, you can be very effective with minimal training. (Indeed that's how special forces work in general: each individual is not Rambo, but the entire team works together so that each individual is maximally effective.) But this guy apparently had not seen a man die before, and in real combat people fall apart under much less stress than this guy was under. And in the meantime he learns to calmly execute well-aimed shots under fire... not to mention a lot of special infantry tactics and vocabulary that I really, really doubt are stressed at Quantico.

9. After the assault on the assassin's house, the bad guys managed to clear away all the bodies – and all the other evidence like a crashed helicopter, presumably, but left the cartridge cases? Like they have a union or something?

10. The bad guys instantly get the hero's phone number from a call he makes to the FBI, but never noticed his calls to the FBI girl who is working with them. Hmm. I don't know if that makes much sense, but I'm pretty sure the hero shouldn't have relied on it.

11. It was really dumb of the hero not to figure that the bad guys would make the connection to his girl (ie his buddy's girl). They should have had some sort of plan, if only that she lies low instead of staying at her place.

12. It was a bad decision to give the Senator (the bad guy) a Southern accent. He was already a caricature, but that was going too far. Wouldn't it have made more sense for him to be a Yale type?

13. The whole scene towards the end where the hero demonstrates that his rifle, collected from the alleged assassination scene, is still in a state incapable of firing a round, was utterly ridiculous. No manager has ever behaved like the FBI director. No murder suspect would be allowed close to a weapon (unless it had been previously disabled... hmm).

The gambit rested totally on the bad guy stating confidently that the weapon had not been touched since the assassination, but even if he believed it, would that really prove anything? And are murder suspects really released, and allowed to accumulate weapons, without a lengthy public trial? And the hero allows himself and his friends to be captured (on the snowy mountain) saying that they would not survive if they ran, but what makes him think they would survive if they were caught? The FBI office scene certainly didn't convince me of it.

2007 Jul 03 [ Tue ]

Review: TV series Alias

This is about a young woman (Sidney Bristow) who decides to start working for a completely secret spy organization, and then finds she has to spy against that organization even as she carries out missions for it.

As usual, this review refers to many specific plot points, so if you have not finished watching the series, you should *stop reading now*.

Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alias_(TV_series)]

SPOILER ALERT

1. The setup for the show is that an evil mastermind has set up a vast secret headquarters in the USA and recruited Americans by telling them that it is a super-secret US agency called "SD6", but in fact they are working for an international terrorist and arms- dealing conspiracy.

I was very attracted to this premise. The general term for such operations is "false flag" and they are completely routine in espionage. For instance, the FBI agent who was arrested a few years ago for spying for the Russians was caught by US agents who approached him as Russian agents.

For some reason however it has rarely been used in movies and TV. Conceivably this is because it would slow up every scene if the characters had to go through a laborious protocol to establish bona fides. But anybody with any sense would do so. For instance, if the secret police approach you and ask you to spy on a neighbor, ask yourself who else might like to spy on that neighbor, and take corresponding precautions.

For instance, a few years ago a buddy needed another security clearance, and one of the elements of that is to for the DIA to check out his buddies... ie me. So he told me to get ready for a phonecall. But when the DIA officer called, I told him I'd call back on a published DIA number. The guy was stunned, like nobody ever did this before. I must have sounded pretty paranoid, but the fact is that *anybody in my buddy's circle of acquaintances* would have found out about these calls and could have presented themselves as a DIA agent. And I didn't really want to stress to the officer that my buddy was currently going through a messy divorce and his wife had already tried various dirty tricks.

Another reason I liked the premise was that it reminded me of the element of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" (later filmed as "Blade Runner", although the element was dropped for the movie), where the hero (an android-hunting police detectoive) finds that an entire police department has been set up by the androids themselves for some reason, including a human who thinks he's an android hunter like the hero.

Still, it's a little implausible, isn't it, that such an organization would survive for long without being uncovered.

On the other hand, for me Sidney's experience mirrors that of the American people. "There are many things that I hate about Arvin Sloane. But the thing I hate the most is that he wraps his criminal activities in the flag."

2. A very important, and little-stressed aspect of maintaining security that made the premise more plausible was that SD6 demanded that anybody, including innocent civilians, including SD6 employees' loved ones, who found out about SD6 would be immediately eliminated, *and that the SD6 employees went along with this*. I don't think enough was made of this. The heroine was several times shown as reluctant to kill or torture captives, yet she accepted without question that her boss was justified in eliminating her fiance when the fiance found out about SD6. (Well, she wasn't overjoyed about it, but she didn't plug Arvin Sloane the next time she saw him either. Don't people ever say "Hey, waitaminute! If someone does *that*, doesn't it make him a bad guy?")

I really want to stress this, because it fits in with what seems to be a pattern of encouraging cruelty, brutality and obedience to the state on US TV. Even US Army officials have protested, for instance, that TV shows like 24 hours, which show the hero torturing captives on many occasions, cause their soldiers to be ready to torture captives, whatever they are (ostensibly) taught about acceptable procedures.

On the other hand, in "Alias" the heroine discovers that the secret organization which is routinely torturing people and murdering innocents is actually *not* a US agency. I often wonder whether the most important ideas in TV shows are those which are never specifically addressed.

On the other other hand, Sidney becomes more and more willing to kill and torture as the series wore on.

3. The makers of the show say explicitly (in one of the extras on the DVDs) that one of the intentional elements of the show is the relationships inside a family: for instance, inside Sidney's own family, where she does not even know that her father has been working for SD6 until she has been working for it for years. (One wonders exactly how SD6 arranged that their paths never crossed.)

Indeed, the arc of the show is that Sidney's life starts out completely distorted by her father Jack Bristow's involvement in intelligence work; in particular it has driven the two of them apart. As Sidney finds out more and more about her own past in the series, she is continually shocked, but she also realizes that a further element which has been blocking her relationship with Jack has vanished. At the end of the series, Sidney kills her own mother, and Jack sacrifices his life to protect Sidney and to make up for all the pain he has put her through.

This idea of the shattered family seems a peculiar ingredient to mix into a spy story. The makers do not actually explain *why* they wanted to concentrate on it. It may be that they were trying to emulate the success of Star Wars, which seemed to resonate with postwar generations in which the children are alienated from their parents by family trends like both parents working and frequent divorce. It may also be that they were trying to exploit the idea that we do not become adults until our parents are dead.

4. A weakness of the concentration on family relationships is that members of the family could be kidnapped to coerce their relatives; whether the victims were spies or civilians. It reminds me that the stated policy of SD6 – to liquidate anyone who found out about it – is actually logical assuming that their opponents have the amazing capabilities to track people down and extract them in broad daylight that were portrayed. (Actually, it is very difficult just to get three separate people at the same place and time, even when they don't have to communicate in code and so forth.)

This makes me wonder what happens in reality. Maybe the CIA is not a front organization simply to confuse the masses; maybe the *real* intelligence organizations *have* to operate completely undercover to protect their own family members. Perhaps the CIA functions *only* as a money-laundering cutout between the Treasury and the *real* intelligence groups.

5. A tiny grammar point caught my attention: at one point Sidney and her father are referred to as "the agents Bristow". Is this some sort of standard locution? Does it really come up often enough in the FBI or whatever, that two members of the family are both agents, that Americans would remember this arcane piece of grammar?

6. Again and again in the series our heroes would set out to capture something referred to as the "book" of an opposing spy agency: that is, identities and locations of all their agents and contacts, and so forth. Often this would be held on a computer, and some cockamamie scheme would be devised to get into the impenetrable computer.

On the other hand, it seems to me that spy agencies would not merely try to defend this data, they would compartmentalize it so that it was never in one place to be accessed. I wonder if this is how intelligence organizations really work. Certainly the peons are affected by "need to know", but are the bosses too? All these TV series show the hero sitting down at a computer, typing in a command, and getting a list of all current operations, or whatever. But surely such searches are just *too much of a security risk* to *ever* enable them. The Germans invented the cell system, where the central only communicated with other cells via cutouts. Did intelligence agencies ever really give it up?

7. Assuming the above is true, then you could say that all US intelligence activities are by definition "rogue". "Your mission, should you choose to accept it..."

8. A major weakness of the show was that it went on longer than they planned. This necessitated a "retcon" where the vanquished Arvin Sloane implausibly was put back in charge of our heroes, and old plots were recycled.

9. Much worse, the main "mcguffin" of the series, the works of the genius Rambaldi, never amounted to anything. Initially I really hoped that Rambaldi would turn out to be a fake – something like those scientific brainteasers which the Brits invented in WW2 and smuggled to the Germans in the hopes that they would waste the time of their best minds. I really hoped that it would turn out that Arvin Sloane had created all these fakes and had quietly created the entire trade in Rambaldi antiquities.

But no. Slowly it became clear that we were really supposed to believe that some shmuck in the 16th century had not only dveloped all this amazing tech, but had chosen to wrap it in layers of mystery for no apparent purpose other than to provide a plot for the latest episode.

So, with the secret of immortality, the ability to see the future, levitation, genetic engineering and everything else, Rambaldi's grand scheme was going to be revealed in the final episode...

But all of those weird machines and intricate coded messages under the arctic ice and whatnot turned out to be just an immortality drug. Fpetesake, I vaguely remember that at one point Sidney sneers to a henchman "What are you doing all this for? Did Arvin tell you he had the secret of immortality?" and the henchman sneers right back "You fool, it's so much more than that." Well, it wasn't.

I can just about accept that someone in the 15th century could have invented all that stuff, and seen the future, and whatnot. What I cannot believe is that his plan would be such a convoluted nothing, like a Rube Goldberg contraption that whirs all over the place for several minutes before finally, proudly producing a boiled egg.

2006 Jul 11 [ Tue ]

Movie review: "Starship Troopers"

This is a sf movie made in 1997 by Paul Verhoeven. Ebert review: rogerebert.suntimes.com [http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19971107/REVIEWS/711070305/1023]

(I now think his review is inaccurate, but it is still a useful reference.)

Wikipedia (which I had not read when I wrote the rest of this article): en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers_%28film%29]

SPOILER ALERT

Don't read the following unless you've already see the movie, or are determined never to (in which case why read this?).

I'm writing this review because I saw the movie again a few days ago on Cambodian TV, in Cambodian without subs. I have several times seen people suggest that it's a useful exercise to watch a politician speaking with the sound turned off, because while he's concentrating on the words you can clearly read his body language. Anyhow, watching the movie while understanding little or nothing of the dialogue (I did catch a few things, like the hero used the polite word "tian" to an officer, whereas my dictionary calls it antequated) seems to have given me an insight into what the *significance* of the movie is.

When I first saw the movie I was impressed by the special effects but disgusted with the way it travestied the original novel by Heinlein. Ebert asserts that he has read the novel many times as a child and indeed that it was intended for children, but he calls the movie a faithful adaptation, which astounds me. In the movie, most things about the aliens just make no sense, and the soldiers are issued with the ludicrously ineffective rifles (which Ebert does point out as ineffective) instead of the "power suits" which made the soldiers in the novel so effective (and interesting).

There was a lot of similar criticism at the time, and I never read a coherent response from the director Verhoeven. The movie certainly seems to be a satire of fascism, so I wrote it off as a juvenile exercise in propaganda that was too incoherent to be worth further consideration.

My insight now is based on an opinion which I heard when the movie was released: that the movie simply had *no* relevance to the novel except for a few superficial elements, and Verhoeven wanted to make a completely separate movie. I now realize (I think) *what* that movie is.

It is simply another version of "Phantom Menace". Lucas recently stated specifically that the plot of "Phantom Menace" is intended to refer to the way the USA manufactured a pretext for starting the war in Vietnam (as opposed to the war in Iraq, which was apparently just a gleam in Bush's eye when "Phantom Menace" was being planned). I'm sure Verhoeven wanted to present the same idea: that an evil government manufactures a war in order to seize absolute power. See what this explains:

1. Many, many scenes show that the government and society are completely callous about their own citizens: for instance, a drill sergeant breaks a recruit's arm and sends a knife through another's hand for no particular reason. (Medical technology seems to make repairing those injuries a more trivial matter than today, but certainly the pain would be the same.) In other words, the government would be entirely capable of creating a war that would kill millions gruesomely to achieve its ends.

2. The ludicrous discrepancy between the guns and the starships which according to one diagram allow the Earth forces to reach a star on the other side of the galaxy (and come back with no pesky special-relativity issues) in days is explained: the government *wants* its soldiers to die, so it gives them a weapon which seems no more effective than an M16 (which was also surprisingly ineffective, although not so blatantly).

3. This also explains the utter lack of military planning. If I had been in charge of an invasion from space, I would have wanted to know about those blasterbugs (my word) that could hit my battleships in space first. And if I had seen them for the first time after the invasion started, I would have pulled out immediately and shot my intelligence officers. (Incidentally, when I first saw the movie the scenes where crippled battleships drop out of formation seemed ludicrous, but I now realize they were probably not in orbit, but "hovering" at a fixed location relative to the surface using some sort of drive system, so as soon as their drives were out of action they would start to fall under gravity. But I digress. The real question is why the battleships were in such close formation, even after they came under attack.)

Indeed, it makes me wonder how the government actually implements such an incredibly incompetent invasion. Although up till recently there was no public criticism from military officers about the fiasco in Iraq. Hmmm. But what about the commanders of those sacrificed space battleships? Perhaps the government deliberately picked chowderheads for those positions, much as the medical schools pick dull normals. The hero's girlfriend, for instance, seems to be a clever and competent pilot but ludicrously reckless. Hmmm.

4. Despite the ability of the bugs to attack spaceships above the atmosphere, the initial meteorite attack on Buenos Aires seemed like a doubleplus-implausible form of technology. It also seemed to be a dumb thing to do. What would the motive of the bugs have been, just to poke us in the eye with a stick? ...Etc etc. So many parallels to 9/11.

5. Notably, racism and sexism appear to have completely disappeared by the time of the action. For instance, there's a shower scene with naked men and women together, and they simply make no reference to it. This was one of the things that surprised me when I first saw the movie, because I assumed that Verhoeven, in making an antifascist movie, would have wanted to associate the society in the movie with classic fascist methods. I now view this as another reason why the government chose to invent an *alien* message: it was *easier* than creating an internal enemy, once people had lost the habits of racism and sexism. (Including anti-*male* sexism; I don't know how a young straight man could see a dozen young pretty girls naked and not get an erection, but presumably nobody would pay attention to an erection if they don't pay attention to naked girls.)

Incidentally, I actually saw the first few seconds or so of this scene on Cambodian TV, replete with naked breasts and buttocks, though not penises. Apparently they do not create a censored copy of a movie before the broadcast: they just pay a guy who flips to a promo when a nude scene comes on – or several seconds after it starts.

6. In the movie, mutilated veterans are commonplace, even before the bug war. In the book, the human race has been involved in many conflicts, and the bugs are just one of the enemies. I don't remember any discussion of previous enemies in the movie. Maybe they were all crippled by their drill sergeants (as has always been common in the Soviet Union). I think Verhoeven just wanted to show that the government had had a continuous policy of conflict, despite the apparently peaceful society on Earth itself.

2006 May 13 [ Sat ]

Movie review: V for Vendetta (2006) (Long, anarchist viewpoint)

As usual in my reviews, I will not provide the usual plot and actor listing. For that you can refer to Ebert: rogerebert.suntimes.com [http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060316/REVIEWS/60308005/1023]

Or here: www.popmatters.com [http://www.popmatters.com/film/reviews/v/v-for-vendetta.shtml]

Here's a review that makes the interesting observation that Meanwhile, government security personnel surrounded the production at all times . some of whom were identifiable to the cast and crew, and others who maintained anonymity within the crowd to ensure the security of everyone involved.: www.scifislacker.com [http://www.scifislacker.com/films/v-for-vendetta.shtml]

Here's the Wikipedia article, which I did not read until after I had written everything else below. It addresses various questions I raised about the relationship of the movie to the original graphic novel: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta]

SPOILER ALERT

Don't read any further unless you have already seen the movie. If you haven't seen it what I say probably isn't going to make any sense anyway.

1. A large part of the plot is that the British government secretly created a deadly virus and caused an outbreak killing thousands in order to create a terrorist scare which would allow them to suspend civil liberties. You can see that this might be near and dear to my heart. (Heck, my father and brother-in-law both *worked* at Larkhill, the research center which in the movie developed the virus.)

On the other hand this is a mass-market movie, and I could find no mention of the implied criticism of the Bush/Blair axis in Ebert's review.

Also, I have to wonder what the actual *effect* of this movie. It seems to be saying: yes, the government can seize absolute power without anyone suspecting, and retain power for decades until a superhuman hero turns up by accident and saves the country without the citizens needing to do any actual hard work. I do not like that message. Would it not have been a more interesting movie if it had shown *real* people and how they might *really* organize to overcome the dictatorship, preferably *before* it gets started? Why exactly did the creator of the original graphic novel, Alan Moore, wash his hands of the movie project?

Also, I haven't read that graphic novel, but does V really torture the girl he loves for no particular reason in that, or just in the move? Are we really supposed to learn that the end justifies the means?

Or are we just supposed to feel sympathy for a terrorist, so that when the British government tells us that the people identified as the London tube bombers, who never had any history of violence or extremism, decided to blow themselves up to kill a lot of innocent people, we can say "gosh that sounds plausible"? Actually V's actions in the movie do not seem to me to be terroristic in the sense of intended to cause terror in the citizenry, although they did cause terror in the government, and the government chose to present them as terroristic in its propaganda. Hmmm... Why would the movie choose to blur that issue?

I am reminded of the movie "Red Dawn", a much more realistic depiction of citizens resisting a totalitarian takeover (although still not very realistic: it did not address the large fraction of people who will collaborate with whoever is in power; the people who say, when I complain about the Bush administration's refusal to accept the rule of law, say things like "well if you're not a terrorist you don't have anything to worry about"): it is much more interesting, and artistically powerful, to present realistic protagonists who are successful using methods we can believe in.

Bush's "signing statements" in which he declares himself above the law: www.boston.com [http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/04/30/examples_of_the_presidents_signing_statements/]

2. The technology is surprisingly unadvanced considering the movie is set around 2035. Computer equipment especially is clearly labelled Dell, for instance, and is not given any patina of age.

...Hmmm, it has just occurred to me that the original graphic novel was created in the 80s, and may have been set around 2006. It would have been much more interesting if the movie had been set in the present, using Blair instead of Sutler. Yes, much more interesting.

3. Weapons likewise do not seem to have advanced, although that has been true for a long time – basically since the AK47. V restricts himself to throwing knives, for no apparent reason. Someone who can tunnel new sections of underground line alone should have little difficulty acquiring a firearm, or indeed making one from scratch.

Incidentally, V chooses knives which work very poorly as throwing knives. With their design, they will tumble end-over-end in flight, as indeed shown. This is lousy for penetration, and of course needs supreme skill – or luck – to ensure that they reach the target at a point-forward phase. Real throwing knives have all the weight at the head, to minimize tumbling.

4. Although early in the movie we see that (of course) the government has set up a surveillance state, Evie manages to wander around later with no apparent difficulty and explains this (perhaps in a late-added scene after screening audiences complained) by saying "fake ID works better than a Guy Fawkes mask". Now I know that facial recognition systems don't really work very well at all right now, and I know that criminals rapidly adapt to identity-card systems, and I know that fascist governments don't *really* care about catching criminals but only about oppressing the average citizen, but would it *really* be that easy? For someone who had no money, and no contacts? When there are *retinal* scanners on every street corner?

Likewise we do not see how people actually *behave* after living in a police state for a while. For instance, Evie tells us she stood right next to a close colleague in a store, and the colleague said nothing. This is wrong in so many ways. For instance, the secret police in such countries occasionally do "sting" operations where someone is noisily arrested, and then noisily escapes, and then asks all his old colleagues for help. Any that do help him find out they made a serious mistake.

It is just conceivable that her colleague recognized her, was sympathetic, but hoped that if necessary she could get away with not immediately denouncing Evie by saying that she didn't recognize her. That would be why she said nothing: plausible deniability. In a real police state, Evie would have thought of that possibility. She would also have thought of being careful not to *confront* her colleague, to allow the colleague to *retain* that plausible deniability.

5. For some reason Evie retained her shaven-head hairdo for several weeks after her release. None of the crowd shots showed that such a style was in fashion: it was a sore thumb.

6. I've read reviews that liked John Hurt as the dictator, but I thought he was just over the top. It is a fundamental lie to tell the viewer that bad people look evil. The dangerous ones are charming and convincing. You have to do boring things like study logic and rhetoric to try to analyze their arguments and the actual *results* of their actions, rather than just wait for a close-up view of the spittle flying from their lips.

Indeed, *most* evil people take care to present themselves as likeable and trustworthy. People have to pay a lot of money to buy those suits and keep them pressed, and build those impressive buildings with the classical columns and the exhaustingly high entrance steps: they take the trouble do that to make weak people believe in them even though their real aims are fraud, blackguarding and murder.

7. As part of V's campaign to involve the citizenry (at last) in a (largely pointless) demonstration, he has 500,000 mask-and-cape outfits resembling his own sent out to random citizens. V does many unbelievable things in the movie, but this one seemed utterly preposterous. Such an operation would involve thousands of people. Where would these items be manufactured? Where would he get the money? Would a surveillance state really allow anyone to send anything without intrusive, time-consuming and probably humiliating procedures?

Eric Frank Russell wrote a much more credible sf story called "Wasp" about a government agent who is trained and equipped to bring down an enemy totalitarian government by small, clever, direct attacks on the enemy government's dignity and credibility. Why do we get a movie like V for Vendetta, whose appeal (at least to the Wachowski brothers) seems to have been the excuse to have slow-motion knife battles and black swirling capes, instead of "Wasp"? Algis Budrys's "Falling Torch" is also better-written than this movie, although more depressing.

In this review of "Wasp", they quote Terry Pratchett saying re this newly reprinted novel, "I can't imagine a funnier terrorists' handbook.": www.infinityplus.co.uk [http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/wasp.htm]

See also: www.sfsite.com [http://www.sfsite.com/06b/wasp83.htm]

8. Evie's accent is really excellent. It manages to be faultlessly English without having any regional, class or period overtones – at least to my ear. Perhaps that means it sounds oldfashioned and transatlantic. As far as I can see young English people are no longer taught to use any standard accent, so for Evie to show *no* accent is now impossible.

Here is a really excellent interview with Barbara Berkery, Portman's (Evie's) dialog coach: vforvendetta.warnerbros.com [http://vforvendetta.warnerbros.com/cmp/interview_barbara_b.html]

Apparently the director told Berkery to aim for an accent slightly off RP. It's interesting that he was clueful enough to say that. ...Hmm, it also says that the director decided she would not have a regional accent because her parents had moved around a lot. Good.

The article also addresses Weaving's (V's) accent. This was fine too, but as he's Australian I was somewhat less impressed: one imagines they would train in RP.

Berkery's filmography at imdb: www.imdb.com [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0075373/]

9. The numberplates were of a new design, although the cars were not. US movies, especially Universal, tend to have extremely poor signage, using typefaces and other elements that scream "USA" even to people with only a casual awareness of the issue. Most of the type elements used in the movie were adequately credible, although one would expect type usage to shift over the decades. The Nazis were certainly very aware of typefaces and made a huge shift in the middle of WW2 away from Blackletter faces, proclaiming (after mandating them for years) that they were jew-influenced! I would have thought the Sutler party would have made some similar effort, although perhaps technology would have shifted and they would mandate that all video must be .WMV and not .OGG.

Rather flabbily, the movie uses Gill Sans as its "official" typeface. That's just too easy. Also, the layout was a little slack: it looked like the posters had been laid out in MS Word. Real posters are designed by experts and hand-kerned.

10. At one point V survives being shot at by using some sort of crude metal breastplate, after surviving similar weapons several times earlier in the movie by deftly dodging the bullets. I thought this scene was all wrong in several ways: it makes his earlier abilities seem confusing; it is dramatically crude; V should have been able to steal or even make a much better bulletproof vest; the people shooting at him might well have expected him to be wearing body armor – considering his previous escapes – and would have aimed at exposed extremities, especially after the first few rounds had no effect. And finally, his armor just didn't work very well. A man who can steal an underground train and hide it while he builds sections of track for it making armor like Ned Kelly? Hmmm.

11. Several soldiers were wearing berets that were not properly folded. Well, things can change over the decades, but to me they looked like berets that had been snatched off the prop-department shelf and dropped on the actor's head. I noted a red and a black beret that looked wrong. Alternatively, as a British-German coproduction, they may have been using a prop department unfamiliar with British military clothing (Studio Babelsberg/Medienboard).

12. When V tortures Evie, not only is he behaving like the kind of totalitarian nutjob he seems to want to eliminate (I believe that torture should be confined to the bedroom, where it belongs, in addition possibly to the Ramada on I-495), his plan rests on her not recognizing him as he assumes the persona of several motley guards, interrogators etc. I began to suspect when the camera repeatedly did not show the audience a clear picture of these stooges' faces, although I found it hard to believe that the movie was making such a dramatic blunder. It is even sillier if we are to suppose that Evie was unable to see their faces because they were always in shadow to Evie as they were to the camera.

13. All the troops had M16-type weapons. I think that's extremely unlikely in the political/world scenario of the movie. Conceivably, the USA, having collapsed in the movie, might have sold off its weapons, but it was shown as still involved in various civil-war-type conflicts; I don't think a state sells off its small arms in that kind of circumstance.

I am reminded of a Dr Who episode in which he and his lovely sidekick return to a parallel England which is some sort of fascist or communist dictatorship (cleverly they don't specify which, and anyway how much does it matter?) and tellingly the troops are all carrying AK47s.

14. A Brit in the movie tells V to keep his hands off that "levver" – ie pronouncing the word "lever" with a short "e" in the first syllable. I was very surprised. Conceivably minor roles in this Brit-German coproduction were filled with German actors, with good but rather transatlantic accents.

It's also possible that this was intentional, suggesting that American English has made further inroads into British English by the period of the movie, but I don't think so, and it's not logical. Sutler's "Norsefire" party would more logically have insisted on purging neologisms. Still, it's nice when a movie can contain little Easter eggs that one can spot. The only fan letter I have ever written to a TV show was occasioned by an episode of "Alien Nation" (a series about a near future in which a race of alien slaves flees to Earth and has to adapt to human culture): we happen to see a movie theater in a "Newcomer" ghetto which is playing a cowboy movie dubbed into Tenctonese (the alien language) but amusingly the Tenctonese is being spoken with a cowboy accent!

15. Likewise, a soldier, on seeing something that induces shock and awe, says "Jesus bloody christ!". Something struck me as wrong about that phrase. Solely from Sprachgefuehl, I would say it is much more likely as "Jesus fucking christ". It looks as though someone originally wrote the latter, and then decided that Brits say "bloody" a lot, and decided to change it. (I think the actor was one of the soldiers whose beret looked wrong, too.)

Additionally, although soldiers do indeed swear a lot, the circumstances called for a bit of British understatement, not Teutonic/American panicking. To me it would have been much more believable, as well as funnier, if he had simply said "Cor.".

16. Although I have no complaints about the acting in the movie, it seemed to me that many of the lines were just very difficult to give a credible reading to. The only such line I scribbled down was "He is you, he was all of us.". The fake-Shakespearean stuff was OK in context: it was playful and humorous. I liked the little glance aside from Evie at one point where she seems to be saying "I am about to be raped by a *boring* nutter". The kind of thing that bothered me was where the actors had to deliver lines containing real emotions: they were just badly written. Maybe they were verbatim from the graphic novel.

17. At the end of the movie, they play a section of the Rolling Stones track "Street Fighting Man". For some reason however they miss out the "here comes the new boss – same as the old boss" line which I think is one of the best things in it. I wonder why?

2006 May 10 [ Wed ]

Movie review: "Puerto Vallarta Squeeze" 2003

Although made in 2003, this has never been given a theater release in the USA. It was apparently set to be released on DVD in 2006 April.

Original novel reviewed by Amazon: www.amazon.com [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/044651747X/002-6293079-1250414?v=glance&n=283155]

Movie reviewed at filmthreat: www.filmthreat.com [http://www.filmthreat.com/index.php?section=reviews&Id=8678&archive=&match=&page=0]

As usual, I will avoid recounting the entire plot, and focus on details which caught my attention. You will need to check the above reviews – or even the movie itself – to see what I'm referring to.

SPOILER ALERT

1. I was particularly charmed by the choice of name for the ineffectual, paunchy, middleaged white hero who is slowly running out of money with his native girlfriend: Danny.

2. I was very surprised that all three major characters – Danny, Price and Maria – were depicted in such a physically unattractive way. Camera angles seemed to have been deliberately chosen to maximize Danny's paunch, and Maria was almost always shot closeup with a wide-angle lens, magnifying her full cheeks and jaw to make her seem almost troglodytic. The lighting angle was often from below, like a creature feature. (Maria is played by Giovanna Zacharias, who only has three hits on Google, so I couldn't find her actual age. The film does not specify the character's age.)

As for Price (Scott Glenn), his face looks more lined and aged than people who are *dying* usually look in Hollywood. Similarly, his hair is greasy and thin, and his shoulders are slumped as if he were a resident in a nursing home. (Physical strength is quite important for accurate shooting, especially with a pistol.)

I wondered if the director made a conscious attempt to avoid Hollywoodizing the novel. For instance, I was surprised to find that in the novel Maria is 22: in the movie she looks perhaps 35-40. This is not too old for a bargirl, and makes it more likely that she has actual romantic feelings for Price, who as a Vietnam vet has to be at least 53 in 2003 and looks like he's 65. (Apparently Glenn's DOB is 1941, so he would have been 62 at the movie's release.)

3. The naval officer who Price shoots at the beginning was his CO, so presumably older than Price, but he appears to be a fit 25.

4. The assassination itself struck me as unlikely. Is this the first time Price encountered the officer in all that time? Wouldn't Price already have grumbled about him, so his superiors would have been aware Price was his deadly enemy? Do people plan assassinations in crowded places anywhere except in Hollywood? Can even the most skilled shootists actually plug someone through the eye at 25 yds with a pistol held at the waist? (This is feasible with a laser sight, although there was no evidence of one, and it still would be a stupid idea.)

A better movie might have developed the idea that someone *deliberately* brought Price and the officer together again, in order to wipe out the officer. For instance, suppose the officer had been discovered to be *actually* selling secrets – but by a source they didn't want to compromise. But they also wanted to get rid of Price, so they killed two birds with one stone.

5. I noticed the Thai subtitles gave Price's name as "raakhaa" – the Thai word meaning "price". Maybe it's an actual name in Thai, too. The name given to Maria was strange – I couldn't find it in the dictionary. Danny was thaiized as "dairn-nee". I think "Puerto Vallarta" was thaiized as "puerto".

6. Much is made of a captive ocelot, which at the end Danny pays five thousand dollars to buy and liberate. Personally, I would have tried to haggle, starting at ten dollars. That shack didn't look like they made a heck of a lot of thousand-dollar deals.

I would also have wondered if they trained the ocelot to come back at night, same as the birds that Buddhists buy and release.

7. What was Price's *plan* in setting up the meet at the abandoned chapel? If he had any feelings for Maria, why let her get in the line of fire? Why did he expose himself at all – surely he would have been expecting a long-range sniper hit, so why not wait behind cover until the two US agents show themselves? Did he really believe the line that the murder had been written off as an accident? How did he know they would show up without the Mexicans? (If I had been the Mexcian honcho, and my two US agents had suddenly peeled off from the convoy, I think I would have wondered what was going on.) Come to think of it, how did he *know* about the abandoned chapel (and how did he find time to get her a new dress that fit her?).

8. I liked the happy ending of the movie better than the novel. On the other hand, I wonder how Price got Maria back in the USA. They didn't have a vehicle or money. And is a bargirl – even one who isn't really that kind of girl, and stap me if when you talk to them *not one of them is* – really going to love being alone in the wilds with a 65-year-old?

9. Overall, I didn't like the way Maria treated Danny. He was doing his best – taking a big chance to try and make enough money to stay with her – and she got in the way and then complained about him endangering her. Perhaps Danny's role was just better written, so that I could see his point of view more. The author probably knows more about ageing American writers than about Mexican bargirls or assassins.

10. On the other hand, despite all my criticisms, I quite liked the movie. The basic plot, of course, could take place in Thailand or Cambodia as well as Mexico (except that they don't border the US – although if I were on the run from US agents I think I would run *away* from the US). I think it's a pity it didn't get a bigger release.

2006 Feb 02 [ Thu ]

Movie Review: "The Incredibles" -- and the issue of originality

SPOILER WARNING – do not read this before seeing the movie.

I've been thinking about how to write this for a very long time, because I'm really trying to address a very slippery concept: originality in art. I don't know if I really pinned it down.

Several months ago I had my first opportunity to watch "The Incredibles", an animated feature movie released by Pixar/Disney in 2004. User comments on imdb were almost without exception extremely positive: www.imdb.com [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317705/usercomments]

I absolutely loved the movie myself. Since getting the DVD, I've probably watched *each of the comment soundtracks* at least twice, never mind the movie itself.

But even as I watched it I was getting more and more concerned over the issue of originality. That's actually referred to by one of the comments on imdb:

My only concern is that there is so much similarity to The Watchmen that those who haven't read the graphic novel will be saying "That's the Incredibles movie" when Watchmen finally comes to fruition.

Yes, I thought about Watchmen. The premise of "Watchmen" – an "illustrated novel" with the premise that costumed avengers have been forced into retirement – is very similar to the premise of "The Incredibles". And the problem is that "Watchmen" is *very good indeed*. Many might say it was the high point of achievement in comic books, not to mention a compelling and affecting story that stands comparison with any ordinary novel in novelistic terms. But it hasn't reached the stage of movie production yet (despite reports as long as ten years ago that Terry Gilliam had been lined up to direct). And now that "The Incredibles" has "used" its premise, how *can* it be brought to the screen?

On the other hand, a similar idea, it turns out, was also used by DC Comics (as I found in the imdb opinions link above):

Several years ago, DC Comics issued a mini-series that attempted to explain the demise of the Justice Society by claiming that the group was forced to disband after their loyalty to America was questioned during the 1950's.

Perhaps, indeed, the idea was not original to "Watchmen".

But "The Incredibles" stole ideas, style, music, etc from *so many original works*. People in the imdb seem happy with these "homages", but when you re-use James-Bond badguy secret bases and TWA's terminal styling and the "Fantastic Four" superpowers and the tank/deathray scene from "The Day the Earth Stood Still" – and on and on and on... where is the originality? And what has Pixar done to the value and meaning of those works?

I don't have my copy of "Watchmen" handy to check, but I found one guy who said that the "dangerous capes" sequence in TI was a direct steal from "Watchmen". So not just ideas, but actual *gags* were stolen.

On the other hand... it was all done *so well*. For instance, the bad guy's base looked far better than the originals in the Bond movies: more beautiful, more logically designed, even more realistic than they were ever able to create out of plywood in Pinewood Studios. Elastigirl's animation in the sequence where she sneaks into the base – despite her limbs being trapped in several automatic doors – is amazingly believable and still very funny. The sequence where the "manta ray" aircraft plunges into the lagoon is exciting and truly beautiful.

At an earlier point, Bob Parr throws his boss through several thicknesses of drywall, and corporate drones pop their heads around the edge of the array of holes: it's funny, fast, and achingly skilled.

That's what makes this movie *important*. This isn't a bunch of porno investors deciding it'd be funny to make a video called "Bareback Mounting": the people who made this were *good*. They *could* have created their *own* stuff, couldn't they? In fact they *did*, with "Toy Story" – or at least I thought so until I saw TI.

In my usual paranoid way I even wonder about the theme of being forced to deny and stifle superpowers. That – aside from being another steal – sounds a lot like individualism, which the PTB have been trying to demonize and eliminate for years. *But the movie is actually crushing the careers of the individuals who created the original ideas that it stole*. It makes me wonder: did the designers of the movie consciously want to oppress people with talent? Is there something so subversive about "The Watchmen" that a mass-market movie version has to be stifled?

Still, I don't exactly know where I stand myself. It's a bit like moving to Asia, where all of a sudden none of the brand names mean anything. Rolexes are 20 USD, Cartier belts are 2.50 USD, Cipro is 1.50 USD for ten days... The other day I was looking at a watch branded "Seiko" for 15 USD, and I was grumbling about the price. The assistant brightly pointed out that I could get the *exact same watch* – ie from the same mfr, presumably somewhere in China – for 12 USD, if I would accept a less prestigious *label*. I've been in Asia for a while, but that one made my head spin. And the really funky thing was *I wanted to spend the extra money*. I guess I wanted to have something that *pretended* to be the best, *even when everyone who sees it* (at least here in Phnom Penh) knows it can't possibly be real.

So I guess I want to *think* that "Watchmen" is original (to the extent it can be, as an elegaic alternate view on the entire history of superhero comic books). And I feel that "The Incredibles" – despite being a *wonderful* movie – is depriving the creators of "Watchmen" both of their deserved fame and the chance of seeing their work on the movie screen.

On the other hand, I didn't pay a lot for my copy of "The Incredibles". Hmmm.

2005 Dec 24 [ Sat ]

Spielberg's "Munich"

There has been a great deal of comment about "moral equivalence" in "Munich" – Spielberg seems to be saying that the Mossad agents who murder PLO operatives involved in the killings at Munich are on the same moral plane as the PLO.

What surprises me is that I have seen nobody saying "yes, it is wrong and evil to assassinate suspects". In other words, people seem to think that the movie suggests the PLO and Mossad are both *good*; why can they not be both *bad*?

My understanding is that the behavior of Mossad shifted over time from relatively targeted assassinations – a pistol, closeup – to US-style precision-guided munitions which take out every occupant of a car, and dozens of bystanders. That's what happens when you glorify an evil principle.

It seems to me that Spielberg did something like this before. In "Saving Private Ryan", the US troops on D-Day massacre Axis troops attempting to surrender. The moment passes quickly and none of the Allied characters seems to reflect on it or be affected in any way. Later, when a character *does* show mercy to a prisoner, the prisoner subsequently kills him. It seems to me the movie was directly telling the audience that you have to slaughter captured prisoners! And I have *never* seen comments about this issue in the movie!

It was, of course, a dirty secret of WW2 that Allied troops did indeed "refuse to accept the surrender" of Axis troops, on occasion. When troops are moving rapidly, and may be themselves surrounded at any moment, it is simply too dangerous to try to detain and move prisoners. But that was not the case at D-Day, at any rate as depicted in the movie: the ground would certainly be held. Compare that with the "Battle of the Bulge", where the Nazis executed captured Allied prisoners, and the movie presented it as an atrocity.

2005 Dec 04 [ Sun ]

Movie review: "Mystic River" (2003); directed by Clint Eastwood

Ebert review: rogerebert.suntimes.com [http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20031008/REVIEWS/310080301/1023]

1. The movie is set in Boston. I lived in and around Boston for many years and I found all the local touches believable: I even caught myself feeling nostalgic for the lower deck of 93. The only thing that bothered me was that the streets weren't lined with parked cars – it's murder trying to park in central Boston or any of the neighborhoods.

2. Ebert is absolutely right about the quality of the acting. What particularly struck me was that some of the sequences would have gone spectacularly wrong if played by lesser actors. In "Tough Guys Don't Dance" (directed by Norman Mailer from his own book, Ebert review here: rogerebert.suntimes.com [http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19870918/REVIEWS/709180306/1023] ) there's a sequence where the hapless hero suffers yet another calamity and he whirls around saying "Oh God! Oh man! Oh God! Oh man!...) about fifteen thousand times. I liked the movie but that scene was *over the top*. (I had not seen the Ebert review before and was surprised to find he quite liked it. I agree with him about the powerful sense of place.) There's a somewhat similar sequence in Mystic River in which the Sean Penn character suffers a similar calamity and he cries out and flails about himself. Even as I watched I was thinking "this could go badly wrong!" but it *didn't*. It was believable, and affecting, even heart-wrenching: I've felt grief, and Penn made me feel it again.

Another such sequence was during a parade. Various characters glance and stare and nod at each other. It's wordless; it's *absolutely* dependent on the ability of the actors to project their mood and thoughts from nothing more than expression and body language. It's a tour de force, but not a self-indulgent one: it works fine, and it's necessary for the movie, which has always been about things that were left unsaid.

2005 Mar 31 [ Thu ]

Movie review: Jao bpua geng gorng ("Mr Python")

Spoiler warning: contains discussion of plot and ending

This movie is a made-in-Cambodia remake, apparently new this year. It's hard to know if it's a traditional tale in any sense, but my girlfriend certainly remembers seeing a previous version about ten years ago. It's unlikely ever to be distributed in the West for various reasons: I'm discussing it here mainly because this was the *first* Cambodian movie I ever saw in a movie theater, and there were many points of general interest about Cambodian society and movies. As far as I know the movie does not even have an official English title, so you can't search for it under the name I gave it above as a translation of the Khmer title.

I saw it at the Robantip Cinema on Monivong on 2005-02-11. It seems to have been a popular movie; as I write (03-12) it is still playing, and when we went there it was jam-packed. The problem is that the courtyard in front of the cinema is filled with motorbikes (presumably belonging to patrons), so there is very little space for the waiting crowd to form an orderly line; when the previous crowd exits at the end of the performance, they have to slowly press their way through a surging mob. I don't know what to advise if you go there and the movie you see is equally popular: perhaps you should wait *across the street* until most of the next crowd has shoved its way in. (The tickets are marked with seat numbers.)

My girlfriend accepted an offer of two tickets from a man outside the ticket booth, but we discovered when we entered the theater that although the seat numbers were consecutive the seats were not together. After some expostulation my girlfriend was offered a small chair to sit in the aisle next to me.

1. The advertising for the movie shows a man's head atop a pile of python coils. This represents the hero: I think that image is an invention of the guy who Photoshopped the sign, but indeed in the movie he transforms into a giant snake. He also is afflicted with a snake coiffure.

2. The basic plot of the movie is a little like "Dracula meets the Wolfman". In a single village, not only is there the hero and his mother with the little snake issue, but there are two other females who seem to transform into a Cambodian version of what is known in Thailand as a "pii graseu", a female filth-eating spirit. In this movie, the head and vital organs magically unplug themselves from the neck of the aflicted female and float off hunting for offal. Thus we have separate plotlines which converge, somewhat like an episode of "McMillan and Wife". It's set perhaps two hundred years in the past.

3. With my pitiful Khmer I was almost completely lost in the movie, so what little I understood of the plot was gleaned via my girlfriend later. Apparently his mother was cursed with the snake problem, but possessed a magic ring which allowed her to remain human. In the course of the movie she loses the ring and becomes a snake for ever. The hero however must never fall in love (or perhaps lose his virginity), or he will start to transform.

4. If you want to go to a movie where little boys show their weenies, this has got to be it. It seems to be a rule that every dramatic moment has to be followed by comic relief, and for that, the makers of this movie clearly feel, there is nothing better than showing an eight-year-old's weenie and/or anus. As I write this it seems hard to believe this was actually on the screen, but this movie, apparently made for a family audience, had no compunction whatever about this. On the other hand it is obviously true that anyone who walks along the street in Phnom Penh may well see a dozen weenies every day, and I presume this is even more likely in rural towns or indeed in Cambodian dwellings themselves.

5. The movie did forebear to show adult weenies, but a repeated joke was that men became so scared that they revealed their bottoms. This seemed not very sophisticated humor to me, but of course there is an entire tradition of British farce in which all the major laughs occur when the hapless hero is discovered to be wearing no trousers. Additionally, there is a scene where an aging, overweight woman reveals her breasts.

6. A perhaps more serious problem for a foreigner trying to appreciate the movie is the very broad acting. This makes it very difficult to appreciate the dramatic moments. The characters who were supposed to be bad or scheming had to practically froth at the mouth to make the point, and the hero has to carry an interminable sequence – well, perhaps it's ten minutes long – at the end of the movie where he laments his dead girlfriend. Still, it occurs to me that characters in opera can take an entire scene just to die after they've already been stabbed.

7. Another thing that breaks dramatic conventions for a Westerner is that characters are several times shown to have snot coming out of their noses when they cry. When I asked my girlfriend about this she denied it, but it certainly happened. I think there may simply be a convention that people who are very sad are depicted with snot: recently I have been noticing this in the Thai comic books I (struggle to) read. (I had previously viewed this as a manifestation of some sort of deliberate grunge in the comic, somewhat along the lines of "Viz" magazine.) It makes me wonder whether the production company supplies artificial snot just as a Western one would supply artificial tears.

8. Even the romantic leads have very obvious acne scars and eruptions. I don't know what this means. It may mean that the climate on location in Cambodia is so hot that pancake makeup required to conceal scars is impractical.

9. The "movie" was not shown as a regular film projection but instead as some sort of video back-projection. Considering it was video, the quality was not at all bad: they didn't simply hook up a VCD player to a VGA projector. There were no significant digital artifacts or glitches. However, the video dynamic range was poor: often areas would blow out to white, or be lost in black. I wonder how they *do* do the projection. I'm guessing the filmmakers send a hard drive to the theatre. I get the impression that any movie plays in only one cinema.

10. The sound was not very good. I think the source was OK, but the speaker system is very "honky" and for me it was very difficult to discern phonemes at all. My girlfriend had no difficulty. (Passing by outside later, I got the impression that the speakers set up *outside* the cinema – for marketing – were much clearer than those inside.)

11. The audience was extremely noisy although good-natured. It was literally so noisy that you could not hear cellphones ring. When I went, there was a very flat age distribution.

12. Before the performance I prowled for emergency exits. The ones I found were padlocked. I think the one on the left had a wimpier looking padlock that you could probably snap if you had a moment. I saw no emergency lighting, fire alarms, sprinklers etc.

13. The editing, cinemaphotography, post-sync and sound effects were all quite creditable. I can't really judge the costumes but there were no problems obvious to me. Special effects were sometimes hokey and sometimes surprisingly affecting.

14. I found the shots of the luxuriant forest around the village also curiously affecting. Many of the scenes of village life from this archaic period would look the same today, except that people would be wearing T-shirts and baseball caps.

15. The AC in the theater seemed to get very cold. I was a little cold myself, and I would advise a Cambodian to bring a second (long-sleeved) shirt to keep warm.

16. The floor was extremely messy, although only about three times messier than in the US.

17. There is a concession stand at the entrance but I did not try it. Likewise, I did not dare check out the bathrooms.

Movie review: "The Quiet American", with Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser

SPOILER WARNING

This review gives details of the plot, including the ending.

I have not read the book (by Graham Greene, I think written during the early stages of US military action in Vietnam), but the movie strikes me as probably a fairly faithful adaptation, simply because the plot now seems so old-fashioned. Set in Vietnam in the period before the partition into North and South – ie while the French were still fighting to retain Indochina – the big twist ending is that the earnest, likeable American hero is actually a US secret agent who is funding and supplying a brutal local warlord, and advising him to commit atrocities and blame them on the Communists.

This is now so easy to believe that it was hard for me to understand the movie when it delivered the denouement. Indeed, we several times see Michael Caine (playing the part of a worn-out expat journalist who nevertheless uncovers the plot) take in some statement from Fraser along the lines of "My charity sent me here from Boston to stop these poor kids going blind!" and he seems to have such a cynical expression that I had assumed Caine was well aware of the situation throughout the movie. (So I guess it really was a twist ending... hmmm.)

It's actually *more* hard to believe the flip side of Greene's argument. He clearly presents the Communists as lilywhite French Resistance against the Nazis. It was possible for non-cynical people who knew no history to imagine this at the time, but we now have North Vietnam's own histories to read: for instance, General Giap *boasts* of deceiving the monks into burning themselves to death in protest against a US action which the US never planned. When we see Caine's own employee murder Fraser, I think Graham Greene intended us to think that the entire country was united behind the world-historically inevitable defeat of colonialism, or some such twaddle. (I don't think Greene was stupid enough to believe what he wrote. He intended the book as propaganda.)

Thinking about it now, I wonder why Greene added the plot thread of a love triangle, where Caine loves a girl, and the girl loves Fraser, and Fraser loves the girl. It may be meant to suggest that Caine, as a European, is too worn-out and useless (he seems to be intended to be 55-60 in the movie, whereas Fraser seems not much older than the girl) to do anything about Fraser's political crimes until Fraser takes his girl away. This has a parallel in today's situation, where most of the world sees that the war in Iraq is a brutal lie, but hopes that someone else will do something about it. (Or maybe he just thought that adding some sex scenes would help the book sell.)

I had decided to watch the movie simply for its evocation of precommunist Indochina. It's interesting, for example, to see a depiction of the "taxi girl" institution. It actually looks amazingly stylish, with Caine and Fraser resplendent in their suits, and the girls stunningly elegant. Can it ever have been so posh? My impression of the term "taxi girl" is that it was originally intended (in the USA) as a euphemism: most girls did not do sex for money (much), but of course there were low-class establishments where it was expected, so hookers were referred to as "taxi girls" in an attempt to be kind. Nowadays in Cambodia, the term seems to have survived to be the standard expression used in English to mean a prostitute or sex worker (although I would be surprised if any Westerner other than me was familiar with the term before arriving in Asia). Incidentally, it is pronounced "tuk-SEE ger" (rhymes with Pete Seeger) here, which makes it even harder for the puzzled Westerner to grasp. (Quick, did she say "I no tuk-SEE ger!" or "I know tuk-SEE ger."?)

Incidentally, at the beginning of the movie there is a laughably sententious monologue about the experience of arriving in Vietnam and living in the heat, but neither Fraser nor Caine ever looks seriously inconvenienced by it. Despite living here for more than a year, if I have to do some minor task like sort books for a few minutes my shirt gets wet through, but I can't even remember them taking off their suit jackets. Conceivably most of the movie was shot at Pinewood.

Apparently the release of the movie was held up because of 9/11. The reason given was that audiences would not want to see a movie in which the US was the bad guy. But it seems to me that *nobody* can like the politics of the movie nowadays. Well, maybe Jane Fonda.

2005 Mar 13 [ Sun ]

Review: "Heat" with De Niro and Pacino (1995)

Ebert review: rogerebert.suntimes.com [http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19951215/REVIEWS/512150302/1023]

This is a routine cops-and-robbers movie. Many of the elements have been seen before: the reckless, bloodthirsty robber who jeopardizes the heist; Niro playing a flawed but supremely capable gangster, etc etc. But everything about the movie is done with what I can only describe as "class" (as one might well expect in a movie that pairs De Niro and Pacino).

Simple things like composition and sound effects make casual establishing shots into a statement about America and destiny. Of course, Pacino and De Niro are impressive and credible.

One sequence struck me as unlikely. A character takes 3 pistol rounds to the chest, but has a minute or two to chat in a normal voice. Had nobody involved with the movie ever heard the phrase "sucking chest wound"?

But I want to focus on a single moment.

SPOILER WARNING: plot details discussed

The police have leaned on the lover of one of the crooks to make her entice him into custody. (The two have become estranged as the woman sees his occupation as a deadly threat to them and their child.) He has been wounded and patched up, and we see him warily driving up to their apartment. The cop in charge of the stakeout tells her earnestly "Go to the window – let him see it's you!"

But when she does so, she locks eyes with him, and then makes an urgent "ixnay!" motion with her hand. He looks shocked for a moment, then rolls down the window to ask some bystanders for directions elsewhere, and departs.

We see his wondering expression. It's largely blank. There's a famous story of two scenes in a movie by one of the Russian directors where he uses *exactly the same shot* of one of the actors to express triumph and tragedy.

Ebert in a current review (of another movie) refers to a similarly powerful wordless moment:

There is a shot toward the end of "Dear Frankie" when a man and a woman stand on either side of a doorway and look at each other, just simply look at each other. During this time they say nothing, and yet everything they need to say is communicated: Their doubts, cautions, hopes.

rogerebert.suntimes.com [http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050310/REVIEWS/50222003/1023]

In Heat, however, we see a man who has just realized that at a terrible moment, under great pressure, his lover has chosen to save him. In other words, he is perceiving the certainty of being loved.

2004 Sep 18 [ Sat ]

The only justification for Star Wars Episode 1 (The Phantom Menace)

... is the following posting on Slashdot which compares the careers of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader:

slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=122191&cid=10281017]

Sample:

LUKE: "I used to race my T-16 through Beggar's Canyon!"

DARTH VADER: "Oh, for the love of God, 10 years old, winner of the Boonta Eve Open. Only human to ever fly a Pod Racer, right here baby!"

More quotes from this thread:

I don't need Lucas to tell me where he's taking Star Wars, I know a handbasket when I see one. :)

Also:

If Lucas has updated the original films for timeliness, he'd have the Rebel Alliance blow up the death star and all of its inhabitants, then afterwards find out that in fact there were no weapons of mass distruction on board. Additionally, Luke would revisit Tantooine and find that his Aunt and Uncle as well as the Jawas were actually all killed by some irate sand people, with no connection to the Empire.

Thread (on Lucas's right to change elements of Star Wars when he re-releases the movies): slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/articles/04/09/17/1526244.shtml]

2004 Sep 12 [ Sun ]

Carlito's Way -- shootout scene

This is a routine thriller with Al Pacino as a connected guy who's just been released from prison and is trying to make enough money to get a share in a legitimate business.

I just want to talk about a single scene. There is a shootout in a bar. The Pacino character, with typical resourcefulness, has grabbed one of the bad guys' guns. He takes cover in a bathroom, not knowing if the men he has shot at are all hors de combat. He looks at the slide on his gun, a Colt .45 auto: it is back. He checks the clip: empty. He futzes with the weapon for a few seconds. Then he decides to pretend he is not out of ammo, and cautiously exits the bathroom back into the bar.

The interesting point here is that usually in movies any element of gunplay is telegraphed to the audience: as I have referred to before, when someone fires a machinegun at the hero from a distance, the rounds always kick up dust at his *feet*, not somewhere off camera which they logically should do in most cases.

In this case, I was not clear myself what was going on (had I been present at the actual shootout, and assuming I was not wetting myself with fear, I would have figured it out, but I was actually confused because I expected the director to make the situation explicit). The facts are these: the Colt .45 auto, like many other such weapons, has the feature that when it fires the last round the slide does not go back forward but remains at the rear. This allows you to reload more quickly: by swapping in a fresh clip and releasing the slide, you make it load the next round. So when Pacino saw that the slide was back, he already knew he was out of ammo.

But I'm not sure what he did after that. I suppose it's conceivable that he wanted to check whether the gun had jammed on the last round, but if it's jammed it's jammed – it doesn't snick back nicely forward when you release it.

Maybe he was trying the recovery drill repeatedly, in the hopes that he had made a mistake – not unusual, even for hardened shooters, in a gunfight, especially with an unfamiliar weapon.

So anyway, it's interesting that for some reason the makers of the movie did *not* dumb down that sequence. Maybe they just forgot.

It vaguely reminds me of another recent routine thriller I saw. I don't remember the title: it was about a guy who was murdering medical people, so when a woman dies her brother, who's a tracker in Alaska, comes to hunt the killer. I have a high threshold for watching dumb thrillers, but I slowly realized that it *wasn't terrible*. It had a few interesting touches, the bad guy wasn't a retread, the cinemaphotography was engaging, and so on.

I think a lot of people start making a thriller assuming it will turn out OK, like that one. Unfortunately, they are disappointed.

2004 Jul 20 [ Tue ]

"I Robot" with Will Smith and credits to Isaac Asimov

I had read several dismissive reviews of this movie, eg Ebert's, so I saw Spiderman 2 first (it was good; I agree with other reviewers so no comment), but felt like seeing another movie, so here we are.

I wound up liking the movie quite a lot despite its distant relationship to the original stories. (Apparently the production company had the rights to the "I Robot" property but the plot was from an entirely separate screenplay.) The theme of his Three Laws, as it turned out, was fairly well represented.

SPOILER ALERT

The actual plot is really more reminiscent of Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands", a famous "Golden Age" novel (also published as "The Humanoids") which was truly scary. However a lot of the incidents referred to the Three Laws, and many scenes dealt with the relationship between humans and robots being based on humans having complete trust in robots, and how frightening it would be to stand next to something powerful enough to beat you to a pulp and *no reason not to*, which was very much part of the sociology Asimov imagined into his future societies.

An aspect I just thought of, and don't remember from Asimov's Robot series (although I didn't read his stuff after about 1970, and I know he wrote several books subsequently), is that the robots are provided with no *logical* reason not to assault/kill humans. His laws are completely *arbitrary* and if there is a single chink in them humans are immediately up the creek.

It's like humans who believe "thou shalt not kill" because it's God's word, but not because they believe their existence is improved by the presence of other humans, or because they have figured out that kiling another human being is highly liable to expose them to many moral issues and problems which usually cause people to regret it. So as soon as they receive new "programming" – ie, some cleric tells them God really meant them to smite their enemies – they can flip their bit with equanimity.

The movie, of course, had to have fights and chase scenes. Although the CGI robots always seemed a little off-balance and weightless (eg, when a robot takes its fist and whacks something, you don't see the rest of its body popping backwards as the fist lands), the basic editing and pacing were effective. In fact, I was quite impressed by a scene where one robot fights off several others. Similar scenes involving live actors always make me think "if that were really happening the hero would be unconscious now!" but robots can reasonably continue fighting after they've been pushed through the ceiling.

Will Smith was adequate as the hero but no more than that. In particular, I felt he was unable to sell the plot point about why he hated robots, on which a lot of screen time and energy were expended. The story, viewed abstractly, made actual sense, but somehow did not gel into an emotional reality. One particular thing that bothered me was that in a flashback, Will calls out to the robot in a strong, commanding voice, although a minute before we had a scene where Dr Calvin notes that at the time of the flashback he needed lung and arm replacements. (A more nuanced movie might have suggested that Will was actually semiconscious at that moment and never called out to the robot at all. Actually, I can't remember being shown Smith in those flashbacks. That makes sense as we're supposed to be seeing his dreams/memories, but if one time we *were* to see him and he's obviously semiconscious it could have made the point very fast that his subsequent mental state is based more on his own guilt than the actions of the robot involved.)

The Calvin actress was no good. She made no impression as a scientist or as a female. It occurs to me she went very rapidly from a scene where she closed her eyes while firing a full-auto weapon to rapidly head-shotting a succession of rampaging robots with a pistol. It also occurs to me that considering the movie tries to make the point several times that she's emotionless, it would be more effective to show her *being* emotionless in the scenes where she's being menaced. ("Less is more.")

The special effects were OK. In some respects the general look of the movie was reminiscent of Blade Runner. Perhaps I feel that because of the extremely corny "cop whose badge gets taken away but keeps fighting" subplot, which was close to parody. (Other reviews have made note of that, without the Blade Runner reference; its director apparently felt that the stupid cop subplot of Blade Runner *belonged* in a movie about androids. Hmmm.)

For some reason recent sf movie directors have decided that the future is going to be grey. I suspect the reason is that despite advances in CGI it is still easier to assemble live shots and CGI if the backgrounds are colorless. But I just have a suspicious mind.

A big conceptual problem with the movie is that (major spoiler) the dead guy sent the hero a succession of cryptic clues so that he could (eventually) figure out the villain's dastardly scheme. This idea didn't make any sense in "Payback" either. If they're watching him so closely he can't make a damn phonecall – even though he apparently makes speeches to packed seminars – how in heck can he start doing all that weird stuff? Making a fully- interactive video of himself with artifical intelligence, and setting it to dial a cop in the event of his death? Puh-leeeze.

All in all, it seemed to me almost as if they had based it on a robot story Asmov actually *might have* written, plus Will Smith, stupid fighting and chase sequences, and a dim-bulb Dr Calvin. I think if he's spinning in his grave, it's a low hum not an angry whine.

2004 Jul 03 [ Sat ]

Minor observation about Lord of the Rings movies

One of the things I've always regretted about sf movies is that they steal the most visual aspects of real science fiction and harness them to a sleazy and embarrassingly inept script. This means that most audiences will never perceive the impact of a real sf story as it deserves to be seen: they will perceive its most visual aspects as a threadbare repetition of elements that they associate with childish dreck.

I recently realized that LOTR is the *exception* to that. There have been, I suppose, *hundreds* of movies which have been based to a greater or lesser extent on the mythology of LOTR (the books), and yet somehow the movie managed to avoid contamination. So I guess I should be encouraged: perhaps someday someone will finally make a movie of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep".

2004 Jun 12 [ Sat ]

Movie review: City of Ghosts (2002)

This is a noir thriller set mostly in Cambodia.

I don't have much to say about it as a movie, except that it was OK, and certainly something Matt Dillon, who both stars in it and directed it can be proud of.

Typical review: www.offoffoff.com [http://www.offoffoff.com/film/2003/cityofghosts.php]

I just want to talk about the Cambodian atmosphere. I don't know Cambodia outside Phnom Penh much, but to me it didn't *feel* much like Cambodia. I can't pin down why, though. One thing is that they didn't use recognizable exteriors much. There's a shot of the Central Market (Psaa Tmay) which looks like it was shot through the window of a tourist bus. Other buildings looked to me as much like Mexico as PP.

Another thing was the roads. Now, at least, most roads in PP have *some* blacktop. It's bumpy and trash-covered, but there's some blacktop visible. But the PP roads in the movie are plain red dust. And the sidewalks are clear, instead of having a guy rewiring a washing machine motor next to an old woman playing with a naked child next to a stall selling Walkmans and fried food.

Perhaps the movie was actually shot in some small seaside town rather than PP itself.

I don't want to get into it as a movie, but I did not get any feel of how the character was *reacting* to all of this stuff. For instance, when he shows up at the "hotel", he takes the higher-priced room with air conditioning, but when he gets there the ac is in pieces on the floor. Now that's PP all right – there's an ac on the floor outside my room today – but Dillon doesn't seem to *care*. He should have been melting with sweat and desperate to recover in a cool room, but I don't think we see him even saying "oh well".

We also see him drinking a lot of alcohol, but I don't remember seeing him have food or water. (Perhaps that's why he never gets diarrhea.)

Although Dillon is supposed to be inexperienced in Asia, the other characters are not, so it doesn't make sense that they seem so unwary. ...Hmm, it occurs to me that a lot of noir movies would fail that test.

The whores looked authentically Vietnamese rather than Cambodian. Actually, I wondered a couple of times whether the movie had actually been shot there rather than Cambodia, although the closing credits definitely referred to Cambodia, with participation by some member of the royal family.

Apparently some feminist complained that the whores looked too young. This link, mainly about the Cambodian guy who played the taxi driver, describes a squabble at a showing in Arizona: www.camnet.com.kh [http://www.camnet.com.kh/cambodia.daily/selected_features/story1.htm]

The taxidriver character, though the actor had never acted before, was quite effective. Still, I'm afraid that he filled the role esentially of the "whore with a heart of gold". Tourists should certainly not rely on finding such a paragon – I mean someone who actually knows how to get to places when he says he does. At one point in the movie Dillon points to a place on the map and says "you know how to get there?" An authentic movie, I guess, would have slowed up the plot a lot right there.

2004 Jun 08 [ Tue ]

Prop guns in movies

A few weeks ago I was fulminating about various flaws relating to firearms and infantry tactics. One peeve was that when someone menaces someone else in a movie with a gun, the firearm is often *visibly* uncocked.

It has since occurred to me that I read somewhere that prop departments mostly stock *rubber* guns – they're cheaper and more hard-wearing, and you don't have to worry about them firing blanks at your star.

So probably the reason for such uncocked firearms is that the gun is rubber and therefore cannot be cocked, as a result perhaps of one of the following:

1. They ordered a functioning weapon but a rubber gun showed up on the day of the shoot.

2. They didn't intend to do a closeup of the weapon but they then realized they needed to insert some dialog in the scene or the next one wouldn't make any sense

3. They didn't have the money for a functioning gun

4. They didn't have the money for the gun wrangler that they were required to pay by union rules

5. They had both a rubber gun (for scenes where it gets dropped) and a functioning gun for closeups, but where the hell did we put the functioning gun??

2004 May 22 [ Sat ]

Mindstorm (2000, 2001) -- sci-fi

I saw this last night on cable. Basically, a secret US project creates kids with psi powers, then the guy in charge decides to eliminate the project and the kids: one of the kids escapes and later becomes a psychic detective. Complications snsue.

Plot: www.tvguide.com [http://www.tvguide.com/Movies/database/showmovie.asp?MI=44331]

Unimpressed customer reviews on Amazon: www.amazon.com [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00005UF7S/102-6886988-6312123?v=glance]

It wasn't very good, but it wasn't painful, or a mess, either. The reason I'm writing it up is a couple of things which are actually rather tangential to the movie, which is why I'm not addressing the plot very much. (Thinking about it now, I realize I have no idea why somebody in a helicopter was machinegunning one of the good guys for a while.)

One is that a large section of the action is an assault by some sort of fedgov goongroup on a "cult compound". The release date for the film is variously listed as 2000 and 2001, but at any rate was years after Waco and the setup seems intended to evoke Waco, but *with no sort of awareness of the drawbacks* the fedgov goons are once again sent in wearing their stormtrooper outfits with no sign of a warrant, attempt to negotiate, or liason with local LEOs. Very strange. The movie was actually made in Canada, so maybe it was just so *obvious* to the makers of the movie that anybody who has effective weapons at home *must* be a bad guy that it was unnecessary to even *pretend* that such suspects have constitutional protections.

SPOILER ALERT

Since the bad guy has the ability to transfer his consciousness into a nearby living body as he dies, the twist at the end of the movie is that he cunningly transfers himself to a presidential candidate. The heroine, instead of passing on her suspicions, decides to wait till he's elected and then assassinate him in public.

The movie doesn't handle the logic or the drama of this very well. (Also I was expecting a second twist in which the bad guy manages to transfer himself into the body of his own son, who was inside his heavily-pregnant girlfriend at the scene of the assassination. It wouldn't have taken much – just showing the girlfriend looking relieved and happy after the president dies.) (Hmmm... It also occurs to me that when the bad guy makes umpteen teen acolytes pregnant, he's already in a seized host body, not his own, so he's not propagating his mysterious psi-capable DNA anyway...)

Anyhow what strikes me is that if you were some sort of mutant, or alien or whatever, with superhuman powers, you might well decide to go for maximum power on the planet by grabbing the presidency. So the reason why so many US presidents have been assassinated over the last 150 years may be that people figured out that they *weren't in fact human*.

Well, it makes perfect sense to me. More than the Warren Commission, at least.

2004 Apr 29 [ Thu ]

Special Forces -- made-for-tv-movie on Star Movies channel

I started watching this the other day and soon disliked it enough that I wanted to watch it to the end to write it up – but discovered I disliked it so much I couldn't bear to continue watching. So I don't have a good idea of how it develops.

Here's an overview from a site that's mainly interested in the kung-fu aspect: www.kungfucinema.com [http://www.kungfucinema.com/reviews/specialforces.htm]

It's interesting that the budget was so low. It didn't really give that impression. In particular, a scene in which refugees are massacred shows about fifty people with various props straggling along in the countryside, and was quite impressive. In fact, that's why other stuff in the movie disturbed me: it was well enough made that the bad stuff seemed to be somewhat deliberate.

Yes, it's the contrast of *actual, historic* massacres and the movie's nine-year-old chop-socky attitudes that's disturbing. If the bad guys planned to blow up the world with their new Scrompiom bomb, and wore costumes with capes, it wouldn't be so bad that the heroes were one-dimensional. Instead real-world issues, like your wife leaving you because you can't tell her what you do and occasionally she sees that one or two of your buddies don't show up any more, are raised and then treated offensively, and with no insight or empathy into actual special-forces attitudes. I particularly remember one scene where half-a-dozen good guys are watching a video presentation in a hall clearly intended for about fifty people: that actually did trigger memories of when I was playing soldiers – a feeling of "this isn't all just about you, buddy". But the makers of the movie probably just ran out of budget for extras.

Likewise, one of the characters agonizes about having to make tough decisions for his country, but it just makes him sound like a sap. Everybody thinks about stuff like that *first*.

So anyway, it was made just well enough that I started thinking about all the *bad guys* that were getting killed, and whether they were *really* the bad guys, and exactly what was so great about the "good" guys being trained and equipped to go to exciting foreign places, meet new people and kill them. And that spoiled the chop-socky stuff.

Which wasn't even very good. Unless some entirely new kind of knifeblade has been developed recently, the good guys were cutting throats all wrong. I'm not talking about a fight where you cut anything you can reach, I'm talking about sneaking up behind someone where you can pick your angle.

I vaguely recall thinking that these guys just didn't look believable at any point. Maybe I'm mixed up, but I think this was the movie where a bunch of good guys were in a helicopter approaching an LZ, and the commander said "lock and load" and they all cocked their weapons preparatory to abseiling to the ground. Man, even if you're abseiling into a hot LZ, I wouldn't want to abseil next to someone hitting the ground with a cocked weapon. Oh well – maybe not snagging the trigger when you abseil is what makes them such super troopers.

Way back in the fifties, th