packbat

If I may venture a prediction: feech, you would not like this movie. Like in Duel, very little plot transpires in a given minute of Sorcerer - the chief part of the story can be summarized in a couple sentences, but it all takes two hours to play out.

What I found compelling, though, was this sense of characterization and atmosphere. The characters are all trapped, desperate and struggling, but trapped - by financial problems, legal problems, extralegal problems, and, for the four protagonists, in the end by the job that they have taken itself. What drives the film is this almost certainly fatal struggle to escape the terrible circumstances they have found themselves in.

Don't be fooled by the title: it is a remake of the 1953 French film Le salaire de la peur (English: The Wages Of Fear), and the "Sorcerer" is merely a truck. There is a sense of sorcery about it, perhaps, as one poorly-punctuated review on IMDB suggested, but it is the inimical spirit of bad luck, no agent who may be blamed.

I found the characters compelling, and the story tense. It is not a happy film, but a good one, I think.

h/t deviantart::ByoWT1125: "Junkers Come Here", in eleven parts.

(I have not watched it all the way through.)

Watched it today in IMAX. baxil has the goods - I, not having read the comic, have nothing to add.

Have you ever ruined the ending or given away plot developments in a book, movie, or tv show by telling someone who hasn't seen or read it what happens? Has anyone ever done this to you? View other answers

Indeed I have, and have been! Most memorable of the former regards "Just Cause" (1995), starring Sean Connery and Lawrence Fishburne, where I in my effusive state blurted out a major plot twist (fortunately to an individual who didn't care, or at least so professed), and most recent to my recollection of the latter regards "Wall-E" (2008), which I still haven't seen.

As a rule, I avoid spoilers assiduously from both ends, regardless of the age of the work. I firmly believe I benefited greatly from seeing "The Sixth Sense" (1999) without knowing even the tagline, for example, and I would have been quite peeved if someone had blurted out the solution to the mystery in "The Woman in White" (1860) before I reached it. For other people, though, I generally do not voice any objections if the work is at least thirty years old.

(I'm still mad about the widespread disregard for this rule with respect to "The Sixth Sense", actually. I didn't suffer from it, but only because my mom sat me down and made me watch it before I had the chance.)

(By the way, if you get the DVD, after you've seen the movie, check out the alternate ending in the deleted scenes - it's worth seeing.)

'Tis the season for scary movies. Some rank The Evil Dead as the best horror film of all time. What is your favorite scary movie? View other answers

Darkness Falls is my favorite. Definitely Better Than It Sounds fuel, and well, well done.

Question for the day: what's your favorite deleted scene from a movie?

For me, it's a tie between the bit that was edited out of the ending sequence in Dead Again and the alternate ending of The Sixth Sense.

Edit: Comments may contain spoilers. (Duh.)

I was lazing about in bed in this morning when my mom yelled up the stairs that the new Indiana Jones was showing at 9:30 and 10:00, and who wanted to go?

Well, I'm back. And I'll say this: it was no disappointment. Blogger Mark Kennedy's concerns were warranted, true, but it rose above them to deliver a satisfying moviegoing experience.

Overall, I preferred Iron Man - although Mom pointed out that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull had more actual female characters. But neither is a waste of your $8.25 U.S., nor of your afternoon.

(And, as with Iron Man, we went to the bookstore after. Newest acquisition: The Album Leaf, Into The Blue Again.)

In the comments on my artist-QOTD post, jfs gave a good definition of art: art occurs whenever a person creates something whilst trying to evoke an emotional reaction. I was just thinking about the specifics of that - why "emotional" reaction, what kinds of reactions can/does art make, what kind of moral value should we ascribe to the methods and contexts of these reactions ... I don't know if this will be coherent, but it might be interesting interest.

I guess I'll start with Dan Brown and Myst. No - I'll start with Agatha Christie and Myst; it's wrong to snipe at works you haven't perused.

Wait - no, the point doesn't really work with Agatha Christie. I'd better just start somewhere, and let the chips fall as they may.

One purported property of Dan Brown's writing is that it makes the reader feel clever. Specifically, The Da Vinci Code is accused of making its readers feel clever by showing them stupid puzzles. Assuming "feeling clever" is an emotional reaction (not much of a stretch, I think), I point out the following:

• Assuming it was on purpose, The Da Vinci Code is art.


• In addition, The Da Vinci Code is successful art in the evocative¹ sense, not merely in the financial sense.


• It is being criticized for the way it evokes these feelings - its critics say it should not make the reader feel clever in this way, presumably because the reader does not earn feeling clever.

"Hey," my brain said. "What about Myst? It does take a little cleverness to solve those puzzles - isn't feeling clever justified there?"

I'm not going to divert to the obvious moral, here. (I was tempted, mind - any excuse to plug Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit is welcome.) Instead, I think we should consider where this idea of justification of art, in this earned-emotion sense, leads. Is the emotional climax of Terminator 2 justified? What about the excitement and satisfaction of a good game of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City? Or of a good performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C minor? Or, on a more abstract note: are we justified in evaluating these works and the reactions they evoke? Or, higher still: are we justified in rejecting such evaluations as unworthy, or unnecessary, or inappropriate?

Comments are open.

1. "Evocative of emotional reactions". Hey, I wanted something short and snappy. ^

Okay, so there are four Die Hard movies, yah? One, Two, Three, and Four, also known as the original, Die Harder, Die Hard With a Vengeance, and (depending on where you live) either Die Hard 4.0 or Live Free Die Hard. They're all Die Hard movies, of course, but how do they stand up next to each other?

Well, here's the metaphor that I just came up with.

The first one? That's Bruce Lee. The quintessential defines-the-genre Real Thing.

Second one? They couldn't get Bruce Lee, so they found some other Asian dude and told him to fake Bruce Lee. It's not horrible, admittedly, but it's not actually good, either.

Third? Jet Li. Inevitably (yet justly) compared to the first, but cranked up to 11 with heavy distortion on the electric guitar.

Fourth? Wesley Snipes. Looks completely out of left field, but is actually (a) very good and (b) preserving many of the essential parts of the tradition (in world of the metaphor, the martial arts prowess).

A couple points:

• As feech/channing pointed out, the movie does the whole "Ride, Postman, ride!" thing, which one might find annoying.
  
  • Oh, and clothes left sitting on a decaying corpse for decades aren't usually crisp and clean. Details like that might annoy.
  
  
• The acting is good. Extremely good.
  
• 178 minutes.
  

Sorry for the lame entry. I'll try better tomorrow.

Belated reply to alchemi's prompt: revisiting my Nuclear War Reading List.

Really, 'Nuclear War Reading List' is the wrong name. Especially as I expand it out to not-books.

Anyway, the list, expanded:

Books

• Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank (Harry Hart) - a remarkably clever story of events in a small Florida town after a nuclear war.
  
• Failsafe by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler - a good story, exploring the possibility of an accidental nuclear attack.
  
• Warday by James Kunetka and Whitley Strieber - another story about the aftermath of a nuclear war. Not so realistic as "Alas, Babylon", as it suffers from an excess of sci-fi zeal, but a worthy book on its own merits.
  
• The Curve of Binding Energy by John McPhee – a good nonfiction book about nuclear issues, including judgments of how difficult it would be to build weapons.

From the comments:

• kirabug: A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. - a classic postapocalyptic science fiction story.
  Not included: Farnham's Freehold - these are stories about, not stories including, nuclear weapons; Earthwreck! by Thomas N. Scortia - I haven't read it yet.
  
  Movies
  (Excluding adaptations of the above books.)
  
  • The Sum of All Fears - modern, but still dealing with the same stuff.
    
  • Dr. Strangelove - duh.
  
  
  Songs
  
  • "99 Luftballoons", Nena - in the lyrics, a nuclear war is launched when the 99 red balloons are released and mistaken for an attack.
  
  From the comments:
  
  • baldanders: "8 1/2 Minutes", The Dismemberment Plan - 8 1/2 minutes is implied as being the length of the 'war'.
  
  
  I'm obviously missing tons of these - any opinions?

Of course, this is counting school plays recorded on videocassette as 'films', and I can't actually verify the existence of two of the links, but:

1. I was in a performance of the musical "Green Eggs and Ham" beside my voice teacher, Cate Frazier-Neely.
   
2. Cathryn Frazier-Neely was at Maryland with soprano Alessandra Marc, and hopefully was caught on video with her at some point (Weak Link #1).
   
3. Alessandra Marc "appeared in a gala concert at the Brooklyn Museum of Art co-chaired by legendary R&B/rap pioneers, Russell Simmons and Danny Simmons" (Weak Link #2).
   
4. Russell Simmons was in the 2002 film "Brown Sugar" with Kimora Lee (this link and the next forged by the Oracle of Bacon at Virginia).
   
5. Kimora Lee was in the 2005 film "Beauty Shop" with Kevin Bacon.
   

Therefore, I've a Bacon number of 5. Anyone else want to play?

Don't be like Spoonless Joe – buy a spoon today!

P.S. I got my laptop back!

Courtesy of paulsoth, a short video on Male Restroom Etiquette.

( LJ-Embedded Version )

I'm feeling silly. My roommate has a copy of Poolhall Junkies, which just watched for our movie night, and I'm going to grade it, category by category. Everything's on a scale from one to ten, with references for each category. (Obscure references, admittedly, but I have eclectic tastes.)

( The Scorecard )

Overall, though? I give this one a 8.5. Not a classic, but definitely choice.

Remember I said I wasn't sure if the movie "Z" made sense without the book? Well, I talked to my mom today, and she tells me Yes, it did, and it was excellent.

(Does the capitalize-no-quotes thing work as an indicator of paraphrase, here? Just wondering.)

In other news... err, I don't have any. Cranial remote controllers (link from Skepchick), anyone?

Yesterday, I saw "Elizabethtown".

Some movies do not restrict themselves to an emotion. That's true of all art, of course; Shakespeare opens "Romeo and Juliet" with a scene of witty banter that thrilled me to read it. Perhaps that is a characteristic which people have forgotten to appreciate – like some, maybe most, of the best movies I've seen, "Elizabethtown" was a terrific failure in theaters. But it takes something to make people laugh one minute and cry the next, and to do it as honestly as this.

( Spoilers, possibly minor. )

But really, what's most impressive about the movie is the characterization. People talk a lot, they interact, they get angry and sad, and from the greatest to the least they seem like real people. To talk about the movie again with my mother is to see even more in it than before.


Also, on the side, I shouldn't talk about this movie without talking about the music. The music in this movie is superb. I rarely notice music in movies and I could hear how terrific this soundtrack is.


Yeah, other stuff happened today – installation of a folding futon and so on – but some things aren't worth talking about, and others are.

Got back late last night, so here's yesterday's update. As implied in the Subj., the notable events were my watching "Ice Station Zebra" and my sister's orchestra in concert.

"Ice Station Zebra" is a good movie set during the Cold War. I suppose it's more like a John le Carré spy novel than anything else I can think of – it's got several dramatic scenes, to be sure, but there's also an intellectual complexity that's clear in it if you look at the subtleties. It more than stands up to a second watching; there's a lot there that you simply wouldn't know to look at if you hadn't watched it before. (I watched the first half again this morning.) We finished the movie just in time to head out to school to watch my sister's concert.

The concert was very good. She'd gotten us three comp tickets; my dad and I were sitting in the fifth row from the front, and it was amazing. Something that you don't get when you're in the balcony or towards the rear of the theater, and that you usually don't get if you're listening to an album, is how the different 'voices' come from different places. I remember near the beginning of, hmm, I think it was Mahler's Symphony no.5 in C-sharp minor, how the melody came in with one instrument on the right hand of the stage, and then gets picked up by another on the left side. More than just that sort of thing, the pieces in the concert – Siegfried's Funeral March from Richard Wagner's Götterdämmerung, Benjamin Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem, and the Mahler – all have a certain amount of contrapuntal melodies in them, and the fact that each melody comes from a different place makes them stand out in a nice way.

After the concert, my mom (who had been in row Q) and I went to the reception for a few minutes to congratulate my sister, then we went home. It was after 11 then, so we pretty much went to bed.


I'm cranky and strange today – don't know why. I don't think it's lack of sleep, but I'm getting annoyed over the stupidest things, like taking an hour and a half to write this entry because nanakikun is watching "Numb3rs" and playing Space Invaders simultaneously while interrupting me to point out various pieces of videogame news. Actually, I probably ought to warn him in case I do something stupid.