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The Triumph of Hope over Experience

Archive for category Movies

Easy Bake Movies

May 25

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Movies | No Comments

Dirty Harry at Libertas has another spot on post about Hollywood: Must We Destroy Hollywood In Order To Save It?:

The reason I want certain films to fail is because it might facilitate actual change. Sequels, remakes, old TV shows, and comic book films can all crash and burn. I’m sick of them. Sick to death. And I’m sick of them because they all share one common trait: We know the story before the lights dim. We know the characters, we know the world they inhabit, and we know how it’s gonna end. I want to meet new people, see new places, and not know what happens next. But that requires originality. It requires talent. It requires risk-taking. And Hollywood hasn’t met those requirements since the peak of maverick (and liberal) film making in the 1970’s.

Amen, brother Dirty. Easy filmmaking isn’t good filmmaking, and that’s all we’re getting these days. We’ve seen time and again, make a good, original film and fannies will flood the theater. Make another lousy remake, and you’ll go down like The Poseidon.

United 93

May 15

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Movies | No Comments

This weekend the funWife and I celebrated our wedding anniversary by seeing United 93. It isn’t the typical date movie, and I was worried about seeing it since I’m going to be on some long plane flights this summer, but we went ahead anyway and we were glad we saw it.

It is an amazing movie. Normally Hollywood takes a great story and tries to improve upon it but rarely succeeds. Thankfully, there was none of that for this movie, and instead it was told in a documentary style that let the events speak for themselves. The power of the movie comes from the power of the events themselves, and not from any artificial additions (compare Saving Private Ryan with its miserable phony framing device to Schindler’s List which (by and large) just told the story). This is the second movie I’ve seen where it simply starts – no previews, no title sequence, just the lights go out and the movie starts. It makes for a better experience, IMHO.

The movie starts with the hijackers getting ready in the morning and then the attack of 9/11 is recreated through the story of United 93 – the airtraffic controllers, the military, the passangers and hijackers on the flight. No backstory, no flashbacks, nobody is introduced except through the details of the exposition itself. It’s a hard movie to watch because it brings back all the horror and confusion of 9/11, and sitting through the final scenes of the passangers, scared, confused, and yet ultimately fighting back is especially difficult. And that’s why this is filmaking at its finest – an unflinching look at events very few people really want to look at, but you want to during the movie.

It must have been very hard for the actors who portrayed the hijackers. I know a lot of big stars love playing the villain in a movie, but that really is play acting as those villains aren’t real, and the byzantine plans of mayhem and distruction are pure screen writer fantasy. Not so in this case, where the villains, the mayhem and the destruction were all too real.

The only thing I found odd was that the movie has some European passanger counseling do nothing and even tries to tell the terrorists the passangers are plotting to attack them. Is there some basis for this?

Libertas liked the movie;
A student at Cal Poly didn’t ;
And the final word(s) goes to the ladies of the cotillion.

Crash the Movie

Apr 20

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Movies | No Comments

My wife and I found an idle moment to watch Crash a while back — I think it was a free weekend on Showtime or something. It features a large cast who with a couple of exceptions play racists of varying race and ethnicity. I thought the racism was exaggerated for effect, as you will find few people who are so openly and unconflictedly racist.

I don’t know that I can say that I enjoyed it since it is a pretty bleak movie, but I was pleasantly surprised by it. I didn’t find it an indictment of American society as racist, but an indictment of racism, or better yet to use the words of Andrew Young, ethnocentricity itself. Crash is the best endorsement of color blind society I’ve seen, as the message I took away from the film is that people who are obsessed with race/ethnic origin make their own lives worse. They just pass the hate around. They were in prisons for their own making. As I’ve observed before, if virtue is its own reward, vice is its own punishment. There are three characters who aren’t racists — the DA played by Brendan Fraser, the locksmith played by Michael Pena, and the daughter played by Karina Arroyava — and while they are affected by racism, they aren’t actually hurt by it like the others are. In fact, one is even saved by another. They do not pass the hate around. But while the racist cop played by Matt Dillon is able to rise above his hatred at a critical moment, the movie ends with more hatred all around.

Another thing that struck me was how desperately lonely all these people were, but were unable to reach out past the bars of their own making. Their lives were hell. Which put me in mind of this.

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Mark On Movies

Apr 3

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Movies | 2 Comments

I admit it – I’m fascinated by movies. I can still remember the days when I lived in LA and a visit to my brother in the Bay Area was its own movie festival. Mark at Kaedrin also likes movies, and he has a trio of posts

Offbeat Movie Corner — he likes The Matador. Greg Kinnear isn’t in many movies, but they are usually good (he’s Gandalf the White to Owen Wilson’s Saruman the White).

Piecing Together Obscurity — this could apply to X Files as well – a show I finally just gave up on as it constantly promised, but never delivered.

Philadelphia Film Festival — Mark sees a lot of movies so you don’t have to.

One Good, One Bad

Mar 30

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Movies | No Comments

My wife and I rented a couple of movies the weekend before our vacation. We got Wedding Crashers for the adults since we’d read good things about the movie, and Madagascar for the family, since we’d heard good things about it. We learned to trust word of mouth more than what you read in the media.

We watched Wedding Crashers first, and boy, was that a lousy movie. At then end, my wife and turned to each other and in unison said “I thought it was supposed to be a comedy.” I know what you’re thinking – I’m just an old fuddy duddy. All I can say is, I found the American Pie movies quite funny, even if they were tasteless. Wedding Crashers was about two self-centered jerks who after suffering a series of completely unfunny experiences were by the end of the movie still a couple of self-centered jerks. I’m beyond the point of laughing at something that is “inappropriate” just because it isinappropriate. When I watch a comedy, I want to laugh, so I’m willing to let almost everything slide except the laughs. Wedding Crashers didn’t make me laugh even once, but it did lead me to coin the Owen Wilson rule of movies – he makes every movie worse, and he’s only funny if he’s paired with Jackie Chan. I think the Jackie Chan pairing works because they have opposite onstage personas. Compare Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers – the one without Wilson was much funier than the one with, even though it was a sequal. And don’t get me started on The Royal Tenenbaums which had both Wilsons, and which was 109 minutes of boredom for just one laugh. Yes, when there is only one, I can keep track. The only reason I can think Wedding Crashers did so well is that there are so few (OK, pretty much none) good grown-up comedies out there.

On the other hand, Madagascar was sheer delight. Funny, inventive, memorable, yes, fun for the whole family. There were jokes, situational humor, sight gags, references to other movies – I laughed throughout the movie. You couldn’t go wrong with a movie that included penguins in a major role in 2005.

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Are All Creeds Created Equal?

Mar 19

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Culture, Movies, The War on Terror | No Comments

You just have to love a title like “Jesus and the Duke”, and the post itself doesn’t disappoint after such a strong lead. Andrew Klavan looks at creeds, honor killings, and how they relate to Elizabeth Smart. Yes, there is a difference in creeds, and what make the United States a rare country is that it a nation built on a creed and not ethnicity. Mr. Klavan writes:

I couldn’t help reflecting that if Elizabeth had been the child of Islamic hardliners, her welcome home might not have been quite as loving as it was.Now the Mormons and every other group have their extremists, but they’re not accepted by our society as they are virtually throughout the Muslim world. To the vast majority of Americans, the idea of punishing, let alone murdering, a raped child is so appalling that language fails. And there can be no multicultural dithering about it: our way is better than their way, as civilization is better than savagery, as love is better than hate. But, of course, our superiority isn’t a matter of individuals, it’s a matter of ideas. The Islamofascist’s creed is a bad one; the American creed is not.

Which brings me at last to the films of John Wayne and the ministry of Jesus Christ. I mean, if these are not the twin pillars our nation rests on, man, I don’t know what those pillars would be. Thus my texts for today’s sermon, brothers and sisters, are John 8: 3-11 and John Ford’s The Searchers.

Not just anybody who can weave the Bible and John Wayne together. I might have gone with Romans 12:19 myself.

I wonder what text Mr. Klavan would choose to go with True Grit?

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Oscars: Context and Explanation

Mar 7

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Movies | No Comments

Sunday night my wife and daughter attended a ladies only Oscar Party at the Fischers. Dress was strictly red carpet. So Mister and Master Fischer came to our house and from there we were going to go see a movie. Only there weren’t any movies any of us wanted to see. So instead we stayed home and watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail and then played Scene It just for fun. And that’s what’s wrong with Hollywood — we wanted to go spend money on their product but they didn’t have anything we wanted to buy. And just to be clear here, Mr. Fischer liked Fahrenheit 9/11.

I think the biggest problem for Hollywood is that they’ve lost sight of the fact they are another business, just like every other business. When butts aren’t in movie theater seats, the response shouldn’t be that there is something wrong with the audience, but that the movies aren’t compelling enough. Yeah, movies have more competition than ever, but I can think of few more enjoyable ways to spend a couple of hours than at a good movie. Hollywood just doesn’t make enough good movies anymore, and I think that there is a real danger for them that once you don’t go to a movie in a while (depending on the person), you stop even thinking about going to movies. It takes something like Passion of the Christ to get people back who’ve lost interest.

The Oscars have become another sign of a disfunctional Hollywood. What is the point of the Oscars? Stroking the ego of people who have their ego’s stroked every day and who are paid fantastic sums to play make believe? An excuse to have a party afterwards? No, that’s what they’ve become, but their point from a business perspective is marketing. And the marketing is two fold – the individual product in the form of the movies, directors, actors, etc. who win, who are nominated, and who show up and are seen by the audience watching at home, and the brand of Hollywood movie. From the business perspective, there isn’t a lot of difference between the Oscars and an ad for a particular movie – they are both marketing, although in different forms. So Hollywood would ideally put on a show that people wanted to watch and showed its product (and I’m including “the talent” here as part of the product) in such a way that people want to pay to go see it.

And they are failing miserably on both counts. Viewership is down both in the theaters and of the Oscars. So does Hollywood make use the Oscars (as they used to do) to remind people of the good movies that were made? Nope, they remind people of the crappy ones they stayed away from in the first place. They could have brought Bob Hope and Johnny Carson back from the dead and in their prime, and it wouldn’t have changed that goof. The show reinforces the idea that Hollywood is smug, arrogant, out of touch, and basically not interesting in making a movie you want to see. Does George Clooney’s speech make anyone who’s on the fence, let alone not a fan, want to go see a movie that he’s associated with? In a word, no.

As somebody who really likes movies, should I be worried? Yes and no. In the short term, I’m worried because I don’t think Hollywood is going to pull its head out and make product I want to see. In the long term, I’m not worried because I think between movies made in the old Hollywood mold in other English speaking countries (think Bollywood) and a new breed using new technology in the US once again there will be movies I want to see.

Mark at Kaedrin liveblogged the show, as did Andrew Olmsted in a display of their ability to do what it takes to bring you their opinion, whatever the cost is to themselves.

Libertas, as you would expect, has an in depth look at the night. I think we’re saying the same thing when I say they’ve forgotten they are a business and Libertas says they think they are entitled to an audience.

Manhatten Transfer looks at the politics of Oscar voting this year.

Busy Mom has a non-analytic take on the event.

McQ looks at the numbers and discovers in all of 5 seconds what Hollywood can’t seem to get: People want to see movies the whole family can go to.

Patrick Runkle provides a brief synopsis of everything Oscar.

Crooked Timber notes an unintended irony from the broadcast.

Eamonn Fitzgerald looks at the Best Picture winner, Crash.

The Chicagoist is ambivalent about the oscars.

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Missing Movies

Feb 10

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Movies | No Comments

Andrew Klavan provides a list of his favorite movies this year at Libertas:

All the same, I can’t help feeling a little disgruntled about the movies the Academy decided to pass over. For instance, how could they ignore Heroes In The Sand, that incredibly stirring tribute to the fighting Americans who blasted the Taliban out of Afghanistan? And what were they thinking when they slighted Reason To Live, the biting drama about a once left-wing university professor who comes under fire when he accepts Jesus Christ as his savior? And what about Goodbye, You’re Out of Luck, the classy suspenser about a heroic 1950’s federal investigator who breaks up a ring of homegrown Communist spies?

How did I miss those movies when they came out? I’m sure there are a lot more like those that I miss every year.

Battle of Britain

Jan 4

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Movies | No Comments

I had a good Christmas, very relaxing, and I hope you had a good one too – or if you don’t celebrate Christmas, then I hope you had a good holiday. One of the gifts I received was The Battle of Britain which is one of the great air combat & historical movies. Some of the special effects are cheesy — they couldn’t do flak worth a darn — but the aerial combat scenes are first rate. And the movie took great care with historical accuracy – something that seems to have gone completely out of style in Hollywood these days (the movie is British) – right down to hiring German actors to play Germans speaking german with subtitles instead of speaking english with a heavy german accent. It even continued the tradition of the pointless romantic subplot in a war movie with Susanna York and Christopher Plummer as husband and wife torn apart by the war. It has one of the great montage scences from the dawn of the montage era towards the end that captures the nerve racking terror of massive aerial combat. It’s interesting that it does a good job of capturing the horror of war, does justice to both the British and the Germans involved, but clearly isn’t an anti-war movie.

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Narnia at the Movies

Dec 19

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Faith, Movies | No Comments

The Murphy Family saw The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe friday night in a full house. I have mixed feelings about the movie: it is simply superb in every way – writing, casting, plot, dialogue effects, and all the small touches that go into a first rate movie, yet in the end I was unsatisfied (unlike the rest of the family who all just adored it). The dissatisfaction arouse with the scenes of Aslan’s death and resurrection. I discovered I’m not a big fan of allegory, and especially when it comes to something so important, so central as the death and resurrection of Jesus, and when it is presented in such a way as to make it less comprehensible and comprehensive. I wasn’t offended, just let down.

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