News You Can Bruise for 2015 November 1

Sun Nov 01 2015 16:17 October Film Roundup: This month starts very mainstream, with lots of gunplay and explosions, but—plot twist!—takes a right turn into the avant-garde. And then ends with some random stuff. Just the way I, and, hopefully, you, like it.

• Inside Man (2006): A Sumana recommendation. I never would have seen this movie based on the poster. It looks like "Denzel Washington Has A Gun: Part XI". If I were in charge of the poster it would just say "SPIKE LEE MADE A HEIST MOVIE". However, the point is moot, the poster was designed, let's just live with it.

  This movie's really fun. It's got good twists, all the characters are genre-savvy ("This isn't Dog Day Afternoon"), and the tension to violence ratio is very very high. It's also full of classic New York set pieces like the cops suddenly falling into a big argument about MTA trains versus Metro North. Good stuff.

  Fictional video game watch: the kid in this movie is playing a PSP game that's a parody of 50 Cent: Bulletproof.

• Sneakers (1992): Another Sumana recommendation. I know that this is Brendan's favorite movie, but it's... not my favorite movie. It is okay. I like its portrayal of pre-Internet tech companies and the common varieties of nerd. The action is corny, and even though they've both done thrillers before I feel like Robert Redford and Sidney Poitier are kind of acting below their pay grades. I... don't regret seeing it? But not a revelation or anything.
• The Martian (2015): Matt Damon, regretting his performance in Interstellar (2015) as the least competent astronaut imaginable, called a Hollywood do-over and portrayed the most competent astronaut imaginable. Seen with Sarah, who disliked it, not as much as Interstellar, but she felt it was like watching a documentary. I like documentaries, so although I wasn't crazy about this movie I had a good time. I loved the 'aha!' moments of puzzle-solving that did duty for plot twists.

  My least favorite thing about The Martian: Jeff Daniels's incompetent NASA administrator. I don't object to portraying NASA brass as incompetent, but when something like this happens, and your reaction is sustained incompetence, you can't keep your job. Yet there he is in the epilogue, still running NASA, happy as a clam. I hate clams. Always so damn happy. Who do they think they are?

  This film takes an Alphaville strategy where, logically, the film must be set in the future, but the Earth scenes are effectively set in 2015. All the gee-whiz technology is in the space or Mars scenes. It's a good choice, and something you don't notice watching the movie in 2015, but I don't think it will hold up well. But maybe it's better than having some token future changes. Also they did a lot of smaller-scale time skipping, where events on Mars are interspersed with what happens on Earth twelve minutes later, when Earthlings become aware of what happened in the previous shot. I think that decision will probably age well.

  Fictional video game watch: this movie mentions real video games. No credit.

• In Bruges (2008): They say the neon lights are bright... in Bruges. This was a fun movie that had some laughs, some really good plot twists, and then disappeared up its own ass trying to set up an ending with maximum dramatic irony. Great dialogue though. I was inspired to see this movie by this random NYCB comment from 2012, so beware! You never know when you might inspire me?
• Bombay Velvet (2015): I witnessed an interesting phenomenon during this movie. It's full of things Sumana hates in movies—mainly graphic violence against women—but unlike other movies the presence of these elements didn't make her hate the movie as a whole. She really liked this movie, because pretty much everyone in the movie is Indian. Getting to see a nearly all-Indian cast in a gritty retro-noir movie is a rare occurrence.

  This is an Indian movie for people who love American movies, which may explain why its IMDB rating is a measly 5.8 compared to Baahubali's bestounding 8.8. The Scorsese influence (via Scorsese's editor Thelma Schoonmaker) is really strong. In addition to the violence and the lavish spectacle you get riffs on other Scorsese films: Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy; maybe Shutter Island, I dunno, didn't see that one. The political corruption was top-notch.

  Overall it's kind of a borderline recommendation for me, but I thought it was a better take on the "rags to blood-soaked riches" story than Scarface, so if you love that kind of movie, I think you'd really like Bombay Velvet.

  Also, Bombay Velvet probably has the best soundtrack of any movie I've seen since the invention of Film Roundup. Hot nightclub jazz + all-out Bollywood singing. It's great.

• The Forbidden Room (2015): I feel like Guy Maddin is the Thomas Pynchon of avant-garde film. He surveys the landscape and says "Damn, this is a landscape of pretentious crap. I'm going to show you how it should be done, but at the same time I'm going to be really goofy so you know I don't take it seriously." And that's The Forbidden Room. It's a pretty fun movie but it's really painful to look at. Everything looks like it's been sitting in a film canister in someone's garage for sixty years, and the fact that it's intentional doesn't help.

  The only visuals I enjoyed were the animated appearance of the nightclub singer Blob-U-Lo(?), a sort of incomprehensible phenomenon that can only be perceived as a hole in space. Super creative. He/it sings a song about being obsessed with butts, in case you were doubting the Pynchon comparison. Here's the music video.

• World of Tomorrow (2015): A fun sci-fi short, full of cool ideas and abstract eyeball kicks. Recommended.
• Cosmodrama (2015): I pitched this to Sarah as "the antidote to The Martian", and that much is correct. In The Martian an astronaut is abandoned by his companions and must rely on Science™. In Cosmodrama a group of astronauts are abandoned by Science™ itself, and must recreate their knowledge of the universe from scratch. It's a French film, so you know it's all a metaphor for the human condition.

  For the first time ever, I was annoyed that a science fiction film included too much science. You could take the title literally: it's a dramatization of Cosmos (1980). Unfortunately this makes it unclear which of the movie's ideas you're supposed to take seriously once you leave the theater.

  If you're already up on dark energy you don't need to see people explaining it; if you're not, this film makes it feel like a plot device instead of a real-world scientific mystery. I really liked the use of Lee Smolin's hypothesis about universes being created inside black holes (this is the official multiverse cosmology in Constellation Games, BTW), but it's just a hypothesis at this point. In the movie it's presented as a discovery and it's likely to read as technobabble. Especially since it's accompanied by real technobabble that has no factual basis.

  In a Lem-esque twist, the astronauts are never named and are identified in the credits only by their specialties. One of them is "the semiotician" (Lem would have written "the cyberneticist"). In another Lem-esque twist, this movie wants to be Solaris but isn't nearly as deep. It looks great though. A classic 1970s spaceship in glorious digital high definition.

• The White Haired Witch of Lunar Kingdom (2014). A.k.a. "The White Haired Beauty", a.k.a. too many other titles to count. A mediocre Chinese historical action movie. Little bits of it were cool, but overall not worth the running time. Probably the best thing about this movie is that its historical hook is an incident called "The Case of the Red Pills". The pills sound really gross. Oh, also there's a plot point where someone gives the order: "You must deliver these snacks." The snacks look delicious.
• How To Marry A Millionaire (1953): Pretty fun, so long as you don't expect a step-by-step guide. Apparently marrying a millionaire is a matter best left entirely to chance. Some surprising plot twists as William Powell, initially set up as a creepy old guy, turns out to be a mensch. Also a baffling sequence before the titles, where the orchestra plays the overture for, like, four minutes, and you're just watching the orchestra do its thing. I didn't come here for no Leopold Stokowski, I wanna see some dames pass the Bechdel test! We speculated this was to make the experience feel like watching a Broadway musical, but How To Marry A Millionaire isn't a musical. My current hypothesis is, that bit was just supposed to play as people were walking into the theater.

  There's a fashion show in this movie, and although the outfits everyone wears for the rest of the movie still look cool and glamorous, nearly everything in the fashion show is tacky and ugly. And I gotta ask: did that stuff ever look good or is it a joke?

And now, the continuation of Television Roundup. We actually finished a show this month!

• The Legend of Korra (2012-2014): Really really fun. Creative action scenes, good humor, realistic family dynamics, cute animals, enough twists on the "Chosen One" narrative that it wasn't annoying, a big ensemble of characters who wax and wane in importance over the seasons. We had to pay attention at close to an adult level since it's assumed we watched a previous show we didn't actually watch. We had a lot of fun speculating about the worldbuilding. Highly recommended.

  Random character notes that I enjoyed: Every season Korra figures out she's being manipulated a little earlier, until in the final season she's too smart for that plot twist to work at all and they have to give that job to Bolin. Bolin, whose job throughout the series is to be Phillip J. Fry. Seriously, he never makes a decision or says a line that Fry wouldn't make or say in the same situation. It could get tiresome, but Bolin gets less time after season two. And Varrick has a cool arc that reminds me of Londo from Babylon 5. Londo starts off as a buffoon, then becomes a monster and ends up a tragic figure. Varrick starts out as a buffoon, then becomes a villain and ends up a hero—but he never stops being a buffoon! Also, he's Dr. NakaMats. Great stuff.