movies

movies first, murder later

~ Anthony Lee Collins

As I indicated last week, I was thinking of moving the best of the movie reviews I've written into this blog, and then taking down the movie review site itself.

It's a good idea, really, but it would be too much work. There are times when I really enjoy messing around with codes and links and formatting and so on, and other times I can't be bothered. This turns out to be one of the latter times.

But I will plug some of the better movie reviews here, just because I haven't in a while. Then, next week, I plan to start another mystery. I was thinking that a short one would be nice, as a break between The Vampire Murder Case and the next long one (which will probably be called The College Murder Case), but the fact of it is that a lot of the beginning of the The College Murder Case is all ready to go, and the two shorter ones I was thinking of aren't even started yet. So, they'll have to come later, at least for now.

Movie Reviews

I used to write a lot of movie reviews. I used to see a lot more movies than I see now. I stopped writing reviews right around the turn of the century, but there were two more recent movies for which I donned my reviewer's cap again. They are very different (to say the least), but what made me want to review them, even though I'm "out of the business" now, was that all of the reviews I read of them missed the point(s).

One was Gosford Park, which was Robert Altman's last really great movie (though he made good ones after it). Its greatness (equal to any movie he made during his "glory years," and therefore comparable to any movie ever made by anybody) was not really recognized, and the points he was getting at weren't understood, at least in anything I ever read.

The other was Kill Bill, which was even more misunderstood, in that most reviewers started from the assumption that the movies (part 1 and part 2) weren't actually about anything, so they didn't figure out what they were about.

By the way, another situation where I think a lot of reviewers missed the point was Woody Allen's movies Match Point and Scoop, as I referred to here, though I've seen some things more recently which made the points that I made.

Another review that I'm particularly proud of was my review of Ghost Dog. Oh, and my review of eXistenZ. Some of the reviews of that one got some of what it was about (it was generally better understood than Kill Bill, for example), but I think some things were missed. That review (the second part, after the spoiler warning at the bottom) is also an argument for not putting all of the reviews into this blog, since that review really depends on its formatting (as you'll see).

Other than those, the main things I think are worthy of a continued life here on the world wide interweb are my other Robert Altman reviews, and my Orson Welles reviews, which are what started me in writing about movies to begin with, back on the BBSs, since I realized that I was part of a fairly small minority, people who had seen all of Welles' movies (in theaters, not just on video or DVD).

So, check them out. Next time, The College Murder Case begins.

P.S. In poking around the movie reviews, I found this, which I had forgotten about completely.

let me be the 1 (one)

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 4 Comments

As I think I indicated before, I liked The Golden Compass quite a bit, both the book and the movie, though of course the book is much more etc. etc. etc. (you know the drill about books and movies).

But there is one thing I don't care for in the story, and that's the prophecy of the witches. Lyra is special because there's a prophecy that says she will do various things, and the only question is whether she's that child.

Like Neo in The Matrix, like Anakin in Star Wars, the only question is whether she's "The One."

Yeesh. Can't anybody ever just do something because they decide to do it? This is one thing I like about The Lord of the Rings. There's a little hint of "The One"-ness right at the beginning ("Maybe you were meant to have it"), but then that's pretty much dropped and we end up with the council at Elrond's, where everybody argues and yells and insults each other until they come to an uneasy and imperfect agreement, sparked by Frodo's decision to take the responsibility for the Ring himself.

Which, unlike this "One" stuff, is how things happen in the real world. So, if hobbits and elves and dwarfs can work this way, I think Jedi knights and witches and those matrix people could, too. Just like Vicki, who found herself in a particular position, quite unexpectedly, and realized that she could be useful. And even Jan Sleet, who has a rather high opinion of herself, fully appreciates that she ended up where she is by (as she would put it) a combination of random chance and applied intelligence.

Of course, as an atheist, that would be her conclusion. And her atheism will play a part in the current mystery, where she's investigating vampires.

Oh, and speaking of The Lord of the Rings, I do recommend an episode of South Park called "The Return of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers." As Cartman would say, it's hella funny.

lyra and her daemon

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

"Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen."

When Philip Pullman wrote that line, the first line of The Golden Compass, he had no idea what a "daemon" was. He just knew he had a problem to solve, since he'd already written several versions of the first chapter, where Lyra sneaks into the Retiring Room of Jordan College and hears things she isn't supposed to hear. The chapter wasn't working, because there was nobody for Lyra to talk to. There's a reason the Hardy Boys did all their eavesdropping as a duo.

So, Pullman invented a "daemon," and made up its attributes as he went along.

(All this is according to one of the documentaries which comes with the Golden Compass DVD.)

There are people (not writers) who like to think that writers have everything planned out before they start writing, both the plot and the underlying themes. Some, at least, do not.

When Randi first appeared, in U-town, it was because I was thinking about a joke which starts, "A guy comes into a bar, talking to himself." I don't know of a joke like that, but I'm sure there is one. Then I started to speculate about who Chet might be talking to, if he wasn't talking to himself.

Daphne was introduced because it occurred to me that none of the characters had pets, and I thought it would be good to introduce a pet (since many people do have pets, and I've even had a few myself). Now it's hard to think about Pete without Daphne, almost as hard as it is to think about Lyra Belacqua without Pantalaimon.


There more of The Hospital Murder Case posted, starting here.

a different choice

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There’s more of the new chapter posted (I was setting up the files and the coding, hence the slight delay with this entry), and now it has a name, A Different Choice. It’s a quote from the Alanis Morissette song “Out is Through” (as in “the only way out is through,” which is very true).

You can go right to the new parts here. There’s a bit more to come in this chapter.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Alanis recently, though mostly not “Jagged Little Pill,” which was very popular (#1 album of the 1990s, #1 album ever by a female artist) but isn’t really very good. Her more recent albums, though nowhere near as popular, have been much better. She has an annoying banshee wail of a voice, the tendency to sing her own lyrics as if she isn’t familiar with the English language and doesn’t know how to inflect it, a deep sense of the responsibility of her position in the world, and a sense of humor that nobody seems to notice (listen to “Eight Easy Steps,” and how can you miss the fact that the jokes are all on her?). What’s not to like?

I just saw an interview with Kevin Smith where he reported that he teared up when she played “Still” for him the first time. It plays over the closing credits of the movie “Dogma” (in which she plays God) and it is a very moving song, about how awful people often are, and (by implication) how much better they could be:

I am the harm which you inflict.
I am your brilliance and frustration.
I’m the nuclear bombs if they’re to hit.
I am your immaturity and your indignance.

I am your misfits and your praised.
I am your doubt and your conviction.
I am your charity and your rape.
I am your grasping and expectation.

I see you averting your glances.
I see you cheering on the war.
I see you ignoring your children,
And I love you still.
And I love you still.

By the way, after writing this entry, I thought of another question in “Dogma” which is answered by the end of the movie (or, as Smith would have it, the “flick”). Bethany is complaining to a co-worker about men, the other woman wonders if she’s thinking of “joining the other team,” but Bethany says that women are insane. Her friend says that she needs to go back to church and ask God for another option.

This question is answered by the end of the movie as well.

Later: A friend recently asked why I disliked the movie “American Beauty” so much (I had said that I thought it was the worst of the Best Picture Oscar nominees the year it won). I said:

It was meretricious (a favorite word of my father’s). It pretended to depth that it didn’t have, it pretended to concern about the female characters which it certainly didn’t have, it posed serious questions about life and gave pretentious answers consisting mainly of flapdoodle, it had preposterous and arbitrary plot developments (beware of movies where one character needs money and another suddenly happens to have a lot of it for no good reason except that it makes the plot work), it had mechanical character development (the rigid Army man turns out to be a closeted and repressed gay, the “fast” girl turns out to be a scared virgin, etc.), it deplored the middle-aged man’s lust for the aforementioned “fast” girl, but it encouraged the audience to feed the same way about her that he does.

That’s all I remember, but I think there was more.

By the way, I allow the “sudden appearance of convenient cash” in Kevin Smith’s last movie (“Clerks II”) because it was a comedy, and because (for those who were paying attention) the existance of the money had been clearly established in a previous movie. As I indicated in a blog entry, Smith is a much more careful writer than his “dick and fart jokes” image would suggest.

Popeye

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I recently watched Robert Altman's movie Popeye again, and from a movie standpoint it has good parts (Robin Williams, Shelly Duvall, Bill Irwin, Richard Libertini, the set design, some of the songs) and not so good parts (some of the other songs, the ending), but it also made me think of a couple of my characters.

One was Vicki. It was deliberate, especially in U-town, that she would be very much like Popeye. Stronger than anybody else, but not liking to use her strength unless she had no other choice ("I've had all I can stands, I can't stands no more!"). And also in how centered she is, how sure of who and what she is ("I yam what I am an' tha's all what I yam."). She comes to U-town, where she doesn't know anybody, and she is comfortable keeping a little distance between herself and most of the people she meets. She doesn't want to join a clique or a gang, she is quite comfortable on her own.

The other person I thought of was Daphne, for a very different reason. E.C. Segar originally created a strip called "Thimble Theater," centered around Olive Oyl, her brother Castor, and her boyfriend Ham Gravy. Then, for one sequence involving an ocean trip, a sailor character called Popeye was introduced. He wasn't intended to continue beyond that specific storyline, but he caught on with the audience, and eventually became the central character, to the extent that the strip is now mostly known as "Popeye."

When Daphne was first introduced here, she was supposed to be a walk-on character, an amusing indication of Carl's preferences and enthusiasms ("Think of the advantages," he says to Pete about having a dog in the apartment). But, of course, she lasted far beyond that sequence, and now I'm thinking she might be a (if not the) major character in the next book (if and when I ever finish this one, of course).

Well, even if I decide she will be the central character in the next book, it could go in a very different direction anyway. I thought this one was going to be about SarahBeth, and a lot of it was, but now in these chapters she's mostly offstage.

RSS, movie reviews, design

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a journey in the dark

More of the new chapter is posted. You can read the new parts starting here, or read the chapter from the beginning.

RSS

Mandriva Linux comes with an RSS reader (if that’s even the term) called Akregator. I have never done anything with RSS feeds, but I decided that it was time to take a look. But how does it work, how do you subscribe to the feeds? (RSS feeds, as far as I understand it, is where you can get feeds from blogs and so on pulled to your computer, rather than having to visit each website to see if they’ve updated. It’s more like getting email, where it’s all pulled to one place.)

So, I went to this blog and right clicked on the RSS link on the main page, opening it on a new window. It started to appear, just text and some codes (XML, I believe, and I should remind myself to write about XML at some point), and then Opera asked if I wanted to subscribe to this feed.

So much for Akregator, since it turns out that Opera handles RSS feeds by itself. I subscribed to this blog, and its comments. I subscribed to stormville‘s blog. I thought of subscribing to the LiveJournals of a couple of friends, but I don’t think that would work, since their journals are protected (“Friends Only”) and you have to be logged in to read them. I don’t think that would work with RSS. Also, I’m not sure LJ does RSS.

Also, I discovered that my name here shows up in the feeds as “Administrator” because I never bothered to change it. I think that would be confusing for people who subscribe here, so I changed it.

movie reviews

I’ve been thinking about what will happen here when I finish the draft of the third novel. There will then be a period of rewriting (with the other two novels, this went on for years), and I probably won’t want to post things piecemeal, so I’m not sure what I will talk about in blog entries.

Then it occurred to me that I should take the best of the movie reviews from my movie page (the Robert Altman and Orson Welles reviews, Ghost Dog, Kill Bill, eXistenZ) and post them here. Well, the eXistenZ review I will have to link to, because of the formatting. But the point is to bring the movie reviews here, the ones I’m proudest of, and then eventually take the movie site down (once it’s been picked clean, like the carcass of a Thanksgiving turkey).

new design

As you may have noticed, I decided to change the design (the “theme,” in the WordPress world) of this site. Not because I disliked the previous look (which was a very nice theme called blix), but because I wanted a theme which listed the titles of the most recent entries down the right (or left) side. Blix does that when you visit a specific entry, but not when you go to the main screen. I know there’s a way to get into the PHP code itself and make that happen, but I suspect it’s easier to change the theme itself. I have the idea that once I get into dealing with the PHP code of WordPress, it will eat entirely too much of my time and attention.

So, this design is newsportal, and I like it a lot.