A Movie Nearly Every Night: It's a triple feature!

8 1/2 (1963)
Dir. Federico Fellini
Starring: Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimee, Sandra Milo

Ice Station Zebra (1968)
Dir. John Sturges
Starring: Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine, Patrick McGoohan, Jim Brown

Don (1978)
Dir. Chandra Barot
Starring: Amitabh Bachchan, Zeenat Aman, Pran

Ques es mas macho?

The weekend started Friday with a media night featureof 8 1/2 and the man movie theme just seemed to carry over naturally thanks to Turner Classic Movies and Netflix. As I've already admitted on the post about The Dirty Dozen, I like boy movies, mostly for the boys, but also because there's a comfortable security in films about men bonding as brothers to take down Nazis, invading Arab troops, gangsters, etc... This doesn't mean that I let go entirely of my feminist mindset. Movies like The Departed still leave me angry and frustrated with their treatment of female characters in film ---- take out the psychiatrist in The Departed and you'd still have a coherent movie, but take out the cell phones ... well ...

Guido's medicinal spa sighting of Claudia Cardinale

With that in mind, I'm a fan of Fellini because he tells you up front where women rate in his films. Some say he treats women like objects, but what's nice about this movie (and others) is that it states plainly how important that object is to guys like Guido/Fellini. Women have influenced everything Guido has done and it's sweet how open this movie is about that -- yes, even as it skirts a little too close to misogynist territory when the older women are banished to the upstairs. But this idea, starting a revolt at first and until it's eventually accepted by Guido's dream harem, also carries over to the male characters. Look at the poor set designer who has a hell of a time making the spaceship and cries about how he's too old to do it anymore. Everyone is facing age and death and loneliness and in the end they join hands and circle around their inevitable end together. That's really sweet.

(not so) secret agent,"Mr. Jones" in his man fur
(thanks to Retro Daddy on opensalon.com for the photo)

Alistair MacLean on the other hand dispenses with women altogether and leaves out the messy feminist anger. It's boy movie all the way with marines in a sub and cold war espionage on the ice. And Patrick McGoohan is always a treat with his scowling growl -- does he ever play a happy man? The men wear the fur coats (and thank God or you wouldn't be able to tell them apart when they're covered: McGoohan wears brown, Rock Hudson wears blue, etc...) and have somewhat charged emotional moments (like girls). But, God! when the sub is going down under the ice ... dude ... I almost had to leave the room. I can't imagine being in a submarine at all let alone one trapped under ice and sinking. I'd cry and wet my pants.

Not your little sister's Don

Don is a whole other boy picture entirely. The cousin/roommate remarked how it starts off like a Beastie Boys video (wild, wacky graphics of car chases in crazy orange and yellow negative fabulousness) and then slows a bit and then picks up and then gets silly, but it's entertaining throughout and the female lead, Roma, knows judo and kicks just as much a** as the boys do. Say what you want about male dominance in the east, but I've seen more equality in a Bollywood picture than I have in an equal number of western-made films. Women aren't tied into that "journalist out for a story" or "single mom hooker" character-stamp that we have here, and the men sing just as many goofy songs as the women do. And, unlike the women who look good all the time, Amitabh has to try and pull off being a tough gangster while wearing a bow tie. Try that Tom Cruise. Anyway, this is far superior to the 2006 Shah Rukh Khan remake, which has its moments (and Shah Rukh) and updates the songs and makes some interesting plot changes, but I'll take 1970's Hindustani funk soundtrack over modern electronica any day of the week.

Look to the heptagon for it is there...

When we were kids my brothers and I saw this creepy movie more times than I can remember --- but not enough times to remember the name of it. Thank God for YouTube. It's Rod Serling's masterpiece Encounter With the Unknown (1973) and it must have been on every Friday night up through the 1980's. My little brother and I like the first part in particular with the college kids and the curse laid on them by "the seventh daughter of the seventh son":

"Listen you well to my word. One by land. Two by sky."



It's part Hammer Horror, part Ed Wood, which makes it both fantastic and a little slow and dreary. Still ... "Seven times around go the three of you." How can you ever get that out of your head?

Facebook? Yeah, sometimes it's pretty cool

This picture was posted by a friend of a friend, "Washboard" Breezy Peyton (of The Rev. Peyton's Big Damn Band -- check them out). It's from a wall at a music venue in Seattle:

Breezy, if we ever meet, I owe you one.

A Movie Nearly Every Night: JCVD

JCVD (2008)
Dir: Mabrouk El Mechri
Starring: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Francois Damiens, Zinedine Soualem

"aware"

Honestly? Honestly ... it was slow in some spots. It's a robbery/hostage story and that has limited possibilities and they've all been done somewhere else. But, honestly, this stretches into some new territory if you stick with it and that saves it. Although, honestly, what really saves it and makes it satisfying is Jean-Claude Van Damme. He made me cry. Mickey Rourke didn't make me cry in The Wrestler. JCVD makes me cry in JCVD. How Mickey got a nomination at the Oscars and Jean-Claude didn't equals robbery with no hostages.

Honestly.

Would I recommend it? I don't know. I like Jean-Claude, but if you don't like him ... well, sure you might still like this. Why not? Good is good.

Weak

Sorry, just not getting around to the blog lately. Last week was our busiest week at work, which means more sales, which translates into a larger percentage of people who "want to speak with a supervisor" because the internet is run by witchcraft and shysters out to screw you.

There's also the general line of wackos that show up all year 'round and just have more of a presence this time of year, like the guy complaining about how Sharpie pens roll of his desk and can we fix that (and calling one of our customer service reps a F***NG C**T because we couldn't) or someone who wanted me to apologize for telling her something I didn't tell her (not fix the problem -- just put "in writing" that I told her the thing I didn't tell her) or the guy who's kid was sniffing markers and was that dangerous or why do we keep putting things on Bob's computer???????? stop!!!!!! Stop!!!!! Stop!!!! (I'm paraphrasing that one, but his name was Bob).

Anyway, we've watched portions of movies last week, but nothing substantial because sleep happens suddenly. We have managed to watch a couple of discs of Knot's Landing and, friends, scoff all you want, but that is one entertaining little program. We laugh and laugh, and the commentary by Joan Van Ark (Val) and Ted Shakelford (Gary) is priceless. (Did they get ideas for stories out of Ladies' Home Journal and Redbook? Like when Karen kills her husband?) I wish they would release the later shows, the ones with William Devane and Michelle Phillips because those are over the top fantastic.

So if people are barking at you all day and you reach that point (God knows I've reached it a few times last week) where if one more person barks at you you're going to snap --- put in a little 80's television, sit back and make it all better.

Avatar

Look, I'm getting a lot of pressure to go see Avatar. People at the office, people on Facebook, Manohla Dargis --- they all keep saying how great it is and how it's the best movie ever, but when I ask why, with the exception of Manohla, the responses are less that satisfying.

"It's awesome." "It was so good." And my favorite, when questioning the film's ham-fisted message: "Maybe I don't want to think all the time. When I go to a movie sometimes I just want to be entertained." To me that's like excusing heroin addiction or alcoholism -- I just want to block out everything for a while and not have to think about things. Watch Intervention and tell me if I'm wrong. And, yes, I realize that I had said that about Bollywood spectacle cinema, but I don't tell anyone else that they have to see it in order to justify my guilty pleasure in watching it. It's good at what it does, but it's not for everyone, and, above all, I noted that Bollywood spectacle doesn't preach. Not so with James Cameron. You're being fed his take on social inequality (and the "boo-yah! love conquers all with rocket fire" solution) whether you realize it or not.

Now, I generally like Manohla's New York Times reviews, and I trust her 90% of the time. Her review of Avatar touts the visuals ("eye-popping detail," "slender hips, a miniature-apple rear"), but it doesn't give me any hope that the rest of the movie backs up the eye candy: "on occasion losing you with some of the comically broad dialogue. He's a masterly storyteller if a rather less than nimble prose writer." I'm not going to argue against the visual aspects of the movie, which appear to be really impressive, expensive and gorgeous to look at. But what I can't get passed is the Sociology for Dummies aspect of the story, which is "less than nimble."

The same can be said for Titanic, yet another James Cameron film that everyone told me to go see and, in that case, I listened. Yes, the ship breaking apart in Titanic was fantastic, and the visuals were stunning, but sitting through DiCaprio saying "I reckon" to show he's American and watching Billy Zane hit Kate Winslet to show he's bad was torture. It's everything that's right and wrong with cinema: using technology to paint a picture and dumbing everything else down to the level of a 3-year-old's mentality to make sure we all get the message. I'm not a complete idiot and I hate being treated like one, especially by someone who appears to be a bigger idiot than I am.

I can't tell from the reviews, word of mouth or the trailer that Avatar is any different in essence from Titanic, and the idea of handing that jerk $8 of my money on top of having to see him jump around on stage at the Oscars again after stealing 3 hours of my life ... dude ... it's more than I can bear.

So quit buggin' me.