It didn't help that I sat with an audience of chess enthusiasts who'd come not to see a quirky, nearly-plotless indie movie, but rather to hear Joel Benjamin and Murray Campbell talk about their work on Deep Blue. See, the World Science Festival didn't mention the name of the movie they'd be showing, because it technically hadn't had its New York premiere yet. I knew the score: I'd heard of Computer Chess, this mystery movie was obviously Computer Chess, and I was really looking forward to seeing it. But most of the people coming in didn't know, and this movie left them... nonplussed.
And I'm on their side, honestly. This should be a great movie, verily, the kind of movie I would make. Not the kind of movie that would make the chess fans stand up and cheer necessarily, but there's a decent through-line in there about the ethics of computer programming, and a nice conceit about two mutually unintelligible groups of people circling each other curiously when they rent the same conference center over a weekend. But it's... it's too Sundance. In fact, it's so Sundance that it's winning prizes at Sundance, so it doesn't need any help from me.
I'm sure this has only niche appeal, but Computer Chess features an actor who looks kinda like Roy Fielding, playing a character similar to John Goodman's character in Barton Fink. That was a sweet spot for me.
Uh, I'll talk about the panel discussion as long as I'm here. There was some interesting stuff. Murray Campbell was a veteran of many computer chess tournaments like the one shown in the movie, and confirmed that everything except the fantastic elements was extremely accurate. He also mentioned that into the 1990s, people had preconceived ideas about "how computers play chess", and when computers like Deep Blue started having a grasp of strategy (and were preprogrammed with responses to various openings), human players started freaking out, accusing IBM of Mechanical Turk hijinks, etc.
This is just another reason why I don't give ratings to the movies I see. The Final Frontier is an awful movie and Into Darkness is a mediocre movie, but there's nothing in Into Darkness to match those three things from Final Frontier.
Over the years I a) mellowed out about this and b) saw the wonderful movies that had put Lemmon on the gravy train to begin with--The Great Race, The Apartment, Some Like it Hot, The Fortune Cookie. I grew up a little and learned to forgive. But for some reason, in my mind The Odd Couple was the turning point, the top of the slippery slope that had Grumpier Old Men at the bottom.
Well, now I've seen The Odd Couple, and... sort of? I'd say The Fortune Cookie is the top of this particular slippery slope: a great movie that moves Lemmon away from zany capers and exploits his abrasive chemistry with Walter Matthau for dark, cynical character-driven comedy. The Odd Couple is a little way down the slope: it's funny, it's character-driven, it's dark, but it's not cynical at all. Everybody just needs a hug. In other words, it's not a Billy Wilder film. But hey, nobody's perfect.
PS: If you're going to put any faith in my reviews (which I don't recommend) you should know that I get extra visual enjoyment out of any movie set in New York during the 1960s and 1970s: The Odd Couple, Marathon Man, etc. So even a film like Taxi Driver which I hated, I'll go away thinking "at least there was some classic New York griminess."
More problematically, The Great Magician mixes real-looking stage magic, in-world stage magic that was clearly done with camera tricks and CGI, and real honest-to-goodness in-world magic (also done with CGI). That's even more confusing. The end result is I don't understand what happens in this movie; whether or not I should be rooting for the warlord character; or what political point, if any, the movie is making.
Perhaps I approached this viewing with the wrong attitude. The Goonies is not supposed to depict a believable sequence of events. It's a dramatization of kids' adventure fantasies and the lies they tell each other. You gotta go in with that attitude. Maybe I did! Let's say I did. But it didn't last, because the first thirty minutes of The Goonies does its best to dispel that attitude, showing a relatively realistic setup that gets the kids to the restaurant. Once they're at the restaurant, the coming-of-age movie collides with the crime movie, and all bets are off.
Maybe other people don't even notice this. Maybe I only notice it because I'm working on a novel that features drastic tonal shifts and misfit kids in terrible peril and people chasing other people, and am becoming very familiar with the attendant problems.
Things where I remember the book being better than the movie: it has a much tighter POV on Mikey (I think it might even be first-person), and it's a lot more explicit about the class warfare going on between the Goonies and the country-club folk. Underappreciated thing about the movie: Ma Fratelli's string of pearls. The only bit of white on her black outfit, and the only bit of femme in a very butch role. Things where the Konami NES game Goonies II is better than book or movie: music and weaponry. (Speaking of which, the PC in that game is clearly Data, not Mikey.)
I feel like I should add an Update that after thinking about this review for a few days I decided I was too hard on The Goonies, it's just a goofy fun kids movie, but then I thought, why should thinking more about a movie get me to lower my standards? So I dunno. It's okay. People should definitely watch it. Unlike...
Maybe this movie looks a lot better through a thick layer of nostalgia, but I never went to summer camp and it looks like an awful place to be, so screw it. I did like Murray's character's refreshing approach to the inter-camp athletic rivalry: viz., screw it.
Two Meatballs/Goonies connections I thought were odd. 1. Both movies seem to be named after a term claimed by the slobs in a slobs-vs.-snobs movie rivalry. (I'm not sure about this for Meatballs, but otherwise I have no idea why the movie is called that.) 2. In both movies, the fat guy is also the Jewish guy. Why? Was that a big stereotype back then? Neither movie makes a big deal about this, and Fink from Meatballs is clearly not observant, but it's definitely there.
Fortunately, with the movie-watching work we've put in over the past year, we were up to the challenge. If you can read the text you'll find a nice X-Files-esque horror movie that uses arthouse techniques to mask its low budget (the other two possibilities: make the movie an in-world document so that low production values are excusable, a la Blair Witch, or just roll with it and do really cheap gore effects).
No mixes fact and fiction to an almost unheard-of (but not confusing) extent. In Forrest Gump it's clear when footage has been modified, but in No I don't think any footage has been modified. It's just that the footage and the movie are indistinguishable. It's all filmed on period cameras, a la Computer Chess.
During the movie you see this real TV commercial, and you also see a fictionalized recreation of the filming of that commercial. The movie builds a whole behind-the-scenes world around that commercial, creating the kind of person who would have thought it was a good way to fight against a dictatorship, and fought for their creative vision, and won.
Naturally this leaves a bad taste in the mouths of the real people displaced by this fictional viewpoint character. While doing post-movie research I found this no-table article:
English-language reports of this inter-Chilean argument made it sound like the disputed issue is the effectiveness of the television campaign versus other things like voter registration drives. But if machine translation of this interview with Arriagada can be believed, his problem is less with the idea that the television campaign was important, and more with the idea that an "advertising guy" came up with it.
I also found what appears to be a transcript of a roundtable, "¿Por Que Gano El No?". The roundtable presented some poll results which give a lot of influence to the television campaign (again, machine translation):
"Band" and "strip television" are "franja" and "franja televisiva" in the original: i.e. TV and radio time set aside for political campaigns, e.g. the 15-minute blocks dramatized (and shown) in No. Here's an entire block for the "No" campaign, and here's one of the sinister, even dorkier "Si" blocks.
July is gonna be a huge month at the museum, as their theme for the month is "The American Epic". Movies that might show up in next month's review include Citizen Kane, The Grapes of Wrath, Do The Right Thing, Reds, The Right Stuff, Nashville, There Will Be Blood, and The Night of the Hunter. I'm tired already!
Mon Jul 01 2013 09:06 June Film Roundup:
I guess the theme of June was mixing fact and fiction? I dunno why I feel the need to come up with a theme for all the random movies I watched in a month. This thing is long enough as it is. Here you go:
“The film is a gross oversimplification that has nothing to do with reality,” Genaro Arriagada, director of the No campaign, said in a telephone interview from Chile. “The idea that, after 15 years of dictatorship in a politically sophisticated country with strong union and student movements, solid political parties and an active human rights movement, all of a sudden this Mexican advertising guy arrives on his skateboard and says, ‘Gentlemen, this is what you have to do,’ that is a caricature.”
This is a political process that has a very important dimension. For starters, the slogan is defined much earlier, in a technical committee. The pitch is determined by political and peaceful reconciliation tone, not to fear, not violence. From that meeting, also there are two elements, such as the rainbow and the slogan of "Joy is coming". That is a political decision. It was a pretty aggressive bet, but there was no major problem with the world I had to approve it. And then designate two political representatives, who were in charge of directing the band: Juan Gabriel Valdes and Patricio Silva. From them the computer is configured. Here the orientation were entitled to politicians and execution to those who know it, that is to advertisers.
In rural areas over 90% of people said that band saw almost every day. Interviewers who were to land that rural people have, where in many homes no TV, walked from one house to another to get together at night and see this strip television, and more, serving the following question: Where did you learn the meaning of "No"? Answer: 80% for television.
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