Best of Bond, Part VI

The Pierce Brosnan Years

While Timothy Dalton gave the franchise depth and emotional darkness, the returns at the box office were poor.  After two films the franchise went into a hiatus for several years, to return with Pierce Brosnan as the new Bond.  Brosnan had been the first choice to replace Roger Moore, and he was a natural for the part of Bond.  With more charm and elan than Dalton, he helped re-popularize the franchise.

And the Brosnan years started well.  Goldeneye is widely recognized as a great Bond film.  But each of the following films was weak in some way.  By the end of the Brosnan run, the films were sinking into the same trap that ruined the Moore movies: an excess of silly gadgetry, too many recycled plots, and a few really awful casting choices.  But even the otherwise awful Die Another Day features great supporting work by Halle Berry - all of the films have some redeeming qualities.

Let's recall the criteria in this series of evaluations again:

• Bond – who the actor is, how good he is, and what he brings to the role
• the Villain- Mr. Big, Scaramanga, etc.  I judge the films on how compelling the villain is.
• the Bond Women – some films have few, some have many, but I’m pretty sure all have at least one. The quality ranges from Denise Richards’s absurd nuclear physicist to, of course, Mrs. Bond herself, not to mention Pussy Galore
• the Good Guys – M, Q, Moneypenny, Felix Leiter in his many incarnations and other sidekicks
• the Henchmen on the other side like Jaws, Oddjob, and Nick-Nack.
• the gadgets – not just judging how neat the gadgets are, but whether they were unwisely allowed to take over the film (as often happened with the later Roger Moore filims)
• whatever else I happen to think of

Quickie Saracastic Oscar Preview

Feels like the Academy is going to reward some stinkers again.  The nominations already have several issues, the worst of which is the bizarre decision to not include The Lego Movie in the Best Animated Feature category.

But rather than have an extended diatribe about the process, I'll just do a quickie scatter-gun preview.

Philip Seymour Hoffman (1967 - 2014) - a retrospective

There's already talk that he's the best actor of my generation..I don't exactly agree but he's certain among the best.  The idea of being one "best" actor bothers me a bit.  I thought I'd go through his career and recall some of my thoughts about his more noteworthy performances.

Going through his filmography, I was repeatedly impressed by just how many great films Hoffman has been involved with.  In this post, I'll highlight some of his most noteworthy work.  A lot of his work was as part of large ensembles, but even then Hoffman always held his own.

Three hours wasted

I should have just seen Catching Fire for a second time.

Instead, I decided that, in spite of my misgivings, I should give The Wolf of Wall Street a try. Because Scorsese. I mean, it couldn't be as dreadful as it looked, could it?

But it was. Three hours of sociopaths, making money by pushing junk stocks on suckers, doing tons of drugs, having orgies, having affairs, driving while on drugs, flying a helicopter while (chemically) high, etc.

I don't know what the point is supposed to be.

The Girl Who Played with Catching Fire

So Part II of the Hunger Games Trilogy is in the theaters, and it's breaking records.  (Well, it's kind of a trilogy and kind of isn't, since there are three books, but the third book will be separated into two films.  Which isn't that unreasonable, when you consider that The Hobbit is being split into three different films.)

The Hunger Games Trilogy is ground-breaking in that it features a female lead.  We've had dozens of trilogies, of all sorts of types of stories, but I'm pretty sure this is the first time Hollywood has had a franchise of this sort whose main character is female.  It isn't, however, the first trilogy with a female lead.  Well, not really.  That depends on who you think is the lead of the Lisbeth Salander trilogy: Salander or Blomkvist. That I refer to the trilogy as the "Salander trilogy" should make my position clear.

That Hollywood gives women few opportunities like this is hardly news.  But I would argue that women have been losing ground in the past decade or so.  In the 70s and 80s there were many films created around strong leading actresses like Ellen Burstyn, Meryl Streep, Jessica Lange, Glenn Close, Sissy Spacek, Jodie Foster, etc.  I really have to wonder whether a film like The Accused could be made in today's Hollywood.

Consider what our most talented young actresses are doing: Natalie Portman is Thor's girlfriend, Kate Winslet did Mildred Pierce for HBO, and Michelle Williams is stuck doing indy films.  Ellen Page is nowhere to be seen (update: she's back as Kitty Pryde in the next X-Men film) and Anna Kendrick is playing a college frosh again in Pitch Perfect.  (I guess 27 is the new 18.) I'm hoping Jennifer Lawrence can break this pattern.

Hollywood has become very formulaic in terms of which genres will be represented in film.  There are the tentpole blockbusters, which in recent years are mostly action films and their several sequels.  The current trend is for comic book hero films, but there are still other franchises (Pirates of the Carribean comes to mind, though that particular one is done.) There are animated G-rated features, which tend to have very simplistic plots (far more simplistic than 'G' requires, but I digress).  There are "rom coms", romantic comedies which themselves tend to a small number of formulas aimed at teenagers.  Then there are horror films, which tend to be low budget (since return is unpredictable) and what I would call "Oscar Bait", the handful of films that are released in December that do not do well in the box office but rake in the nominations for the various award shows.  Recent examples include The King's Speech (dull) and The Artist (flimsy).

See the 2012 box office leaders for example.  The top two films were comic book adaptations, as with #7. We have other franchises at 3, 4, 5, and 6, and animated kids' films are at   8, 10, 11, 12.  Seth McFarlane's Ted is the only exception, but even Ted has plenty of animation (though it's hardly a kids' film).

The collapse of Hollywood's products into these pre-defined genres has meant that high quality video entertainment is largely relegated to the various cable networks.  There seems to be a working presumption by film executives that moviegoers only want to see the same thing, over and over.  There are even people in the field of "Big Data" working for Hollywood, telling them what "elements" a film needs to have to make money.  The NY Times decsribes this kind of consultant.   Apparently bowling scenes are bad for business.
Here's another discussion of this phenomenon.  In this case, the focus is on a guy named Nick Meaney, and his company, Epagogix.  My take-home quote here is

"One of the heads of the studio laughed and said, 'Oh that’s great! You’ve just saved me $12 million!'" says Meaney, recounting the conversation.  "And we said, 'How so?' And he said, 'The person I had in mind for the female lead was Ms. X,' a very well known Hollywood actress, 'and you’re saying that role doesn’t need to be as big as it was, so we don’t need her.'"  

So that's what's happened to Nicole Kidman.  A computer geek told a Hollywood executive that women are fungible.  (I don't know that he's referring specifically to Kidman, but he could be.)

And we're supposed to believe this has nothing to do with pre-conceptions, or the male domination of the board rooms.

So, back to the top: what can we hope for these two?

The parallel that struck me here was not only that they are in trilogies, but both of their middle volumes treat with fire.  Lisbeth's second film was "The Girl Who Played with Fire", and Katniss's is "Catching Fire".

The success of these series shows that the "analysis" of the number crunchers above provides little in terms of true predictive beyond the maxim from statistics: garbage in, garbage out.  When film executives consistently cast women only in secondary roles, they not only neglect opportunities for women, they also shape the expectations of the public.  And while the producers defend this practice by saying that their formulas predict what the audiences, I think it's clear that the audience also wants interesting stories, and to be occasionally surprised.  Perhaps this decade is more ready for a lead actress like Jennifer Lawrence than the 1990s were.  But I would argue that the history of action films with female leads is that these series have historically either used dreadful leads with little talent (Tanya Roberts?) or entailed scripts that simply tried to ignore the gender of the lead (the nonsense that Renny Harlin and Geena Roberts did in the '90s).  

So what is my general point here?  It's that people claiming to "analyze" public preferences may be doing far less than they claim to be doing.  That sexism persists in Hollywood and in society at large.  There is no other way to explain how actresses are consistently cast aside when they hit 30, while actors can stick around for decades, even as romantic leads with increasingly improbable younger female partners on screen.  (Michael Douglas is a great example here: in one four-film sequence in the early 90s he went from Kathleen Turner (b. 1954) to Melanie Griffith (b. 1957) to Sharon Stone (b. 1958) to Demi Moore (b. 1962).  And of course he's married to Catherine Zeta-Jones, b. 1969).

To get better roles for women in film, we need to get better roles for women in the society at large.  The triumphs of Katniss Everdeen and Lisbeth Salander are hopefully a step along this path.  But I'm less optimistic than I might be.

Best of Bond IV...Old Bond

Bond, Part IV

This post has been slow in coming, probably in part because these are the dismal years.  Let's face it: Roger Moore stayed with the role too long.  By the end of his run he was 57 and looking it.

So...the late Moore films.  A mixed bag - not uniformly bad but only one of the bunch is actually good in my opinion.  We last left the series with Moonraker, a film that has not aged well.  Then there was For Your Eyes Only, a film that has aged well.  And then we have the slow decline into Octopussy and the face plant known as A View to a Kill.

I think when I started this series I may have said that Never Say Never Again would be tucked in with the two Timothy Dalton films.  While that would partition the films more evenly, I think it's more natural to throw it in with the Old Roger films, since it was contemporaneous with Octopussy and has many of the same flaws (in addition to its own unique flaw!)

While the previous round of Roger Moore films featured super villains in hidden mega-complexes threatening to destroy the world, the later films eased up a bit on those cliches.  Still a lot of gadgets, though.  And a lot of camp.  Almost no concern for realism.

Let's recall the criteria in this series of evaluations again:

• Bond – who the actor is, how good he is, and what he brings to the role
• the Villain- Mr. Big, Scaramanga, etc.  I judge the films on how compelling the villain is.
• the Bond Women – some films have few, some have many, but I’m pretty sure all have at least one. The quality ranges from Denise Richards’s absurd nuclear physicist to, of course, Mrs. Bond herself, not to mention Pussy Galore
• the Good Guys – M, Q, Moneypenny, Felix Leiter in his many incarnations and other sidekicks
• the Henchmen on the other side like Jaws, Oddjob, and Nick-Nack.
• the gadgets – not just judging how neat the gadgets are, but whether they were unwisely allowed to take over the film (as often happened with the later Roger Moore filims)
• whatever else I happen to think of

And now we move to

For Your Eyes Only

Best of Bond III, It's Roger Moore!

Bond, Part III

OK, we've made it up to the early Roger Moore years.  We're talking Bond of the 70s, when gadgets ruled the day and the series didn't take it very seriously.  In particular, we're talking Live and Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Moonraker.

The common themes of these films, other than Roger Moore and his dry humor, include villains with absurdly large and complex secret layers, increasingly elaborate and unrealistic chase sequences, riffing off other major film trends, and Jaws.

Let's recall the criteria in this series of evaluations again:

• Bond – who the actor is, how good he is, and what he brings to the role
• the Villain- Mr. Big, Scaramanga, etc.  I judge the films on how compelling the villain is.
• the Bond Women – some films have few, some have many, but I’m pretty sure all have at least one. The quality ranges from Denise Richards’s absurd nuclear physicist to, of course, Mrs. Bond herself, not to mention Pussy Galore
• the Good Guys – M, Q, Moneypenny, Felix Leiter in his many incarnations and other sidekicks
• the Henchmen on the other side like Jaws, Oddjob, and Nick-Nack.
• the gadgets – not just judging how neat the gadgets are, but whether they were unwisely allowed to take over the film (as often happened with the later Roger Moore filims)
• whatever else I happen to think of

And now we move to

Live and Let Die

crazy mathematicians on film (update)

I know I owe the dear readers a continuation of the Bond series, but I'm taking a digression to write about math in film.

An update to my previous post on this issue.

Just saw the Paltrow/Hopkins film Proof, which deals with a father and daughter who are mathematicians who each has issues with mental illness.  In the case of the father, he is presented as a leading light of his generation who, tragically, succumbed to his illness as he grew older, becoming first incapable of doing serious work, and ultimately falling apart completely.  Oh, and he died before the film started.

As for the daughter, she's dealing with two issues.  First, there are her hallucinations of her interacting with her father.  To make the movie more exciting, the film also contains flashbacks!  The second issue is the discovery of a proof that is believed to be earth-shattering in its importance.  But there is a question of authorship.  The daughter claims that she was the author, but her sister thinks it's probably her father's work. Jake Gyllenhaal's character is initially skeptical but ultimately decides it's more likely that the daughter, even with her limited background, is the author as opposed to the father, who had drifted out of the field quite a time ago and wasn't familiar with the more modern methods used in the proof.

From  my perspective, this was a bizarre point to get stuck on.  If and when I am the author of ideas, I am the master of them.  A mathematician would not be able to fake authorship of a 40-page proof of seminal importance, which is what this proof is supposed to be in this film.  There is more to the presentation of ideas than the mere words that are on the page.

Anyway, this is certainly an interesting film, even though it's yet another "crazy mathematicians" film.  I have a bit of an issue with how the people talk when they're talking about math.  They simply aren't "talking math" like working mathematicians do.  This is something that would be harder for a non-mathematician to create.  Most of the discussions about math in this film are entirely at a superficial level, and never talk about content. A few words are sprinkled in here and there, but they feel more like oregano on a salad than anything else.  (Example: in a flashback Gwyneth is talking to a math prof about some homework she hasn't done well.  He says something like: surely you're not saying that differential equations are boring!  It's hard to imagine any mathematician saying something like that, for the simple reason that differential equations are among the most boring topics in all math.)

The meta-discussions are ok, and they do a good job in terms of how mathematicians talk about math to non-mathematicians.  But when mathematicians are talking to each other (and Paltrow and Gyllenhaal are supposed to be mathematicians in this film), they don't talk about math at that level.  Concepts should be flying back and forth but we see pretty much nothing.

Trying to think of other films that do a better job at this particular issue.  Fermat's Room does so, I think.  A Beautiful Mind?  No, not really.  Certainly not Good Will Hunting.  It's the kind of thing that Stanislaw Lem does so well in his writing.  Lem actually writes fictional math, which most authors don't dare to try to do.

Having said that, I think Proof does a better job in terms of explaining the social sphere of mathematicians than most films do.  Your typical mathematician is more like the guys in this film than they are like Ian Malcolm of Jurassic Park.

Oscar preview

OK, it's that time of year when I look at the list of Oscar nominees, excoriate the Academy for their bizarre choices of the recent past, and submit my predictions of how they'll screw things up this year.  In addition, you'll be favored with my preferences for the various awards.

Fair warning: I'm trying to be aware of recency bias.  And I just saw Les Mis.  Went into it with tepid expectations, based largely on the cast.  But more on that in a bit.

Best of Bond, the Blofeld films

The Best of Bond, Part 2

Continuing the series begun earlier. I’m not going to rehash all the plots. This is meant for people who have seen all the films.

I’m looking to judge these films by a number of criteria:

• Bond – who the actor is, how good he is, and what he brings to the role
• the Villain- starting with Dr. No, I judge the films on how compelling the villain is.
• the Bond Women – some films have few, some have many, but I’m pretty sure all have at least one. The quality ranges from Denise Richards’s absurd nuclear physicist to, of course, Mrs. Bond herself, not to mention Pussy Galore
• the Good Guys – M, Q, Moneypenny, Felix Leiter in his many incarnations and other sidekicks
• the Henchmen on the other side like Jaws, Oddjob, and Nick-Nack.
• the gadgets – not just judging how neat the gadgets are, but whether they were unwisely allowed to take over the film (as often happened with the later Roger Moore filims)
• whatever else I happen to think of

I’m not concerned mainly with ordinal values but rather am going to assign a number between 0.0 and 10.0 to each.

Anyway, in Part 1 I addressed the first four Connery films. Part 2 concerns the three Blofeld films, You Only Live Twice, with Sean Connery, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, George Lazenby’s sole contribution to the series, and Diamonds Are Forever, featuring the return of Sean Connery.

Parts 3 & 4 will cover Roger Moore’s many films. Part 5 will cover Never Say Never Again and the two Dalton films, Part 6 will cover the four Brosnan films, and Part 7 will look at the three Daniel Craig films

And now we move on to

You Only Live Twice

The Best of Bond

The Best of Bond, Part 1

In reponse to this article by Isaac Chotiner, which I feel is deeply flawed, I’ve compiled my ratings of all the Bond films, starting with Dr. No and ending with Skyfall. I’m not including the TV version of Casino Royale from the 1950s, nor the Peter Sellers send-up of the same story. Haven’t seen the former and the latter is simply of a different genre. I’m not going to rehash all the plots. This is meant for people who’ve seen all the films.

I’m looking to judge these films by a number of criteria:

• Bond – who the actor is, how good he is, and what he brings to the role
• the Villain- starting with Dr. No, I judge the films on how compelling the villain is.
• the Bond Women – some films have few, some have many, but I’m pretty sure all have at least one. The quality ranges from Denise Richards’s absurd nuclear physicist to, of course, Mrs. Bond herself, not to mention Pussy Galore
• the Good Guys – M, Q, Moneypenny, Felix Leiter in his many incarnations and other sidekicks
• the Henchmen on the other side like Jaws, Oddjob, and Nick-Nack.
• the gadgets – not just judging how neat the gadgets are, but whether they were unwisely allowed to take over the film (as often happened with the later Roger Moore filims)
• whatever else I happen to think of

I’m not concerned mainly with ordinal values but rather am going to assign a number between 0.0 and 10.0 to each. By way of calibration, 0.0 is reserved for unwatchable films like The Love Guru, while the 10.0 might only go to The Godfather. and Hot Tub Time Machine. Just seeing if you’re paying attention there.
Anyway, in Part 1 I’ll address the first four Connery films. Part 2 will do the other Connery films through Diamonds are Forever, as well as Lazenby’s sole contribution. Part 3 will cover Roger Moore’s many films. Maybe I’ll split that in half. Part 5 will cover Never Say Never Again and the two Dalton films, Part 6 will cover the four Brosnan films, and Part 7 will look at the three Daniel Craig films

Without further ado, we jump in to

criticizing movies I haven't seen yet

So, it's Oscar time. And the nominees are named, and I hate most of them. Even though I haven't seen them yet. After the debacle of "The King's Speech" getting Best Picture for a story about an extremely wealthy man who had his life handed to him on a plate, well, I was hoping for more this year.

Let's look at what's going on:

The Artist: apparently the favorite. The strikes against it are
a) it's black-and-white
b) it's a silent film
c) it's about Hollywood.

Because of (c), it's going to win. That's because Hollywood is self-absorbed.

The Descendants
Apparently this is some kind of film with George Clooney. Hollywood loves George Clooney. I think he's pretty good, but you don't have to give him a nomination every year. Apparently the film is about how hard it is for a man to be a parent. Yawn.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
I'm really looking forward to 9/11 replacing the Holocaust as the best option for Oscar bait. After all, it was uber-tragic. Not just regularly tragic.
Tom Hanks dies. Deal with it. At least they didn't kill his dog (Turner & Hooch).

The Help:
Apparently black domestic women in the South have lessons for all of us. I'll pop in reruns of Good Times first.

Hugo:
It's OK to not nominate every single freakin' Scorcese film! It's too late, Hollywood. You dropped the ball with Taxi Driver and Goodfellas. I don't even know what this one is about.

Midnight in Paris:
aka 6 p.m. on the East Coast. Owen Wilson plays a screenwriter. Please, screenwriters, stop writing films about screenwriters!!! Nobody else cares! There are 6.8 billion people on the planet, and like 43 of them are screenwriters. Surely you people can do a little legwork and write stories about other people!

Moneyball:
Yay, Billy Beane turned a last place team into a playoff contender that never won a post-season series. Worse, Jonah Hill got an Oscar nomination. Jonah Hill? What's up with that?

The Tree of Life:
I feel obliged to favor this film because the title mentions the subject of phylogeny, which paid my rent for a few years. OTOH, I ultimately found phylogeny to be not exciting enough to stay in. I bet the film isn't even about phylogenetic reconstruction algorithms!! Or, if it is, they probably like Neighbor Joining, like all the drones in computational biology who use an inferior algorithm just because it was published first. Read a book!

War Horse:
See Hugo, above, and replace Scorcese with Spielberg.

And they couldn't find a tenth film? Here's a suggestion: Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Or maybe include Inception again and make up for 2011!

Two more films from Best Actress:

Albert Nobbs. Um, Glenn Close still looks like Glenn Close. She's got to do more than get a haircut to look like a man. For one thing, she's only 5'4.5" tall. For a guy, that's midget-sized. And she has the facial structure of a women. The sad thing is that Glenn Close really deserves an Oscar for something. But I think I'd giggle a lot if I went to see this film.

Iron Lady. Could we please stop worshiping right-wingers? In the past decade, we've seen a Best Actor go to an English King and a Best Actress go to an English Queen. Enough already! We've had the revolution. And Margaret Thatcher was a terrible PM. If the UK hadn't been lucky enough to find oil in the North Sea, her austerity measures would have succeeded in destroying the economy completely.

Oh, but she beat up Argentina. Wow. Enough wars already. Yes, Meryl Streep should have about five more Oscars by now. But not for this one.

I'm off to see a black-and-white silent film because apparently I live in 1926 and that's all the cinema has.

getting organized

Told the good Frau Doktor I would update my blog sometime soon - this was two months ago. Well, I'll try to update anybody interested soon.

The biggest update of the past week was walking away from Mafia Wars. Facebook game was eating up perhaps as much as 20 hours per week. I'm still doing a few passive games (MouseHunt, Fishwrangler, Ghost Trappers) but it's nowhere near as much time. And with the complete lack of Diplomacy commitments, I have time now.

Sister visited last week, which was cool. Place feels a lot more alive when another person is about.

I wonder if I can whip up a decent post for my nascent science blog. I started a blog called Pineapples in Alaska. I wonder, though, if there's a lot for me to say. I'm not really a content producer by nature. I'm much more of a critic or reviewer. I like sucking in lots of information and comparing it a lot more than producing material creatively. Let's see what I can put up there this Wochenende.

If I were to go into something more journalistic, my talents would be more as an editor, I would think, than as a writer.

Where does that leave me as a blogger?

It seems weird to me that journalism these days has become a business interested more about producing volumes of product than of trying to see what impact the products have. Indeed, that seems to be the guiding light of our professional class.

Obama is really bumming me out. The blame-the-liberals game is getting old, and his penchant for creeping authoritarianism is unforgivable, as far as I'm concerned.

Good films seen recently: Inception, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Girl who Played with Fire. Of the latter two, I liked GDT more than GPF, simply because it fit the format of a feature film much better. The latter film was a bit hampered by the need to cram all sorts of stuff into a film. It didn't really fit.

I've been reading the associated books, and I've decided the reverse is true. The first book takes hella long to get started, while the excess information which drowned the second film fits quite easily into the second book. That brings up the question : do I see Wasp's Nest before I read it or vice versa?

Another film I saw recently which I really like was the Austrian film Das Weisse Band. (The White Ribbon, auf englisch.) It's a film set in rural Germany circa 1914, in a small town where deadly pranks keep happening. For example, right at the start of the film, the town doctor falls from his horse when they run into a wire strung across the entrance to his yard. The acting in this film is tremendous, and in particular they did a great job casting the large number of children's parts. In any case, it's a film far more interesting than 95% of the crap in RedBox.

It occurs to me that I probably should make note when I use a fake word like "hella". Das is nicht gutes Englisch.

Up way too late. Pessimistic about the Pats winning a road game against a good team. But at least Ginger is in great shape. Oh - I ran noch ein Halb-Marathon vor zwei Wochen. Next up: the Army Ten Miler.

Viel Spass noch!

Best in Film of the Naughties: Villians

I've been thinking to continue this series with a focus on animated films, but I'd been waiting until I can see "Up" at least, and maybe that one about Mr. Fox.

So I think I'll start with the villains instead. A good decade for bad people. I'm a bit loose with the word "villain". Some of the villains are the main characters in their respective films, and can be quite charismatic.

I'm not a huge fan of ranking artistic performance. But it's a common thing to do, and in some cases there are particular performances which really stand out. So, meh, people can live with it. Also, I'm constantly worrying that I have forgotten some performance which ought to stick out in my mind, which I enjoyed at the time but has fallen to the back of my mind.

Many villains could not make this list. Voldemort hasn't gotten enough screen time but Bellatrix Lestrange almost made it. The Bond series gave us a couple villains, but none that really stood out. Ian McKellan could easily have made the list as Magneto. Christian Bale nearly made the list for American Psycho. Hannibal Lecter, Agent Smith, and Palpatine were characters continued from earlier decades who might have made the list for their work in the Naughties. Bill Nighy and Geoffrey Rush did admirable work in the Pirates series.

Sacha Baren-Cohen really could be on this list for Jean Gerard in Talladega Nights.

Going for 10 to 1...

10. Alan Ford as Bricktop in "Snatch".



(from IMDB)

Brick Top: You're always gonna have problems lifting a body in one piece. Apparently the best thing to do is cut up a corpse into six pieces and pile it all together.

Sol: Would someone mind telling me, who are you?

Brick Top: And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it's no good leaving it in the deep freeze for your mum to discover, now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies' digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, "as greedy as a pig".

Alan Ford managed to make an aging Brit with bad teeth and outrageous glasses into a man who was to be feared. For some reason American villains are always well-groomed (well, modulo Tony Soprano). Brick Top is just an old-school thug. And he's an eminently watchable villain in one of the few films that I find myself able to watch over and over and over without getting bored.

9. Lucy Liu as O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill, Vol 1.



This list is dominated by male characters, and most of the characters who were close but didn't make it were also male. Let's face it - the big villains are almost always male. And the villainy of your typical female villain is often something pedestrian like using sex in a manipulative fashion (a la Sharon Stone). A good villain should be after power for the sake of power. And so we have Lucy Liu as O-Ren Ishii.



Another feature of a good villainous performance is that the actor (or actress) can be seen as more appealing than the good guy (chick). And with all due respect to Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu was fabulous as O-Ren.


8. John Malkovich as Ripley in Ripley's Game




There's a certain group of actors who are the usual suspects as villians: Gary Oldman, Christopher Walken, and Jack Nicholson, for example. They show up and you cheer even before they say anything. Robert Shaw had it back in the day. But the only one of these guys who made this list is John Malkovich.

He only made this list because I saw Ripley's Game on cable TV. Actually, Ripley's Game was never released in the US, and I cannot understand why. The film is certainly good enough to have done well on the artsy circuit. Are American distributors so afraid of amoral characters? I don't quite get it.

Malkovich owns this character. His Ripley is insulted by a local man at a small social gathering, but he finds a way to get revenge when an old contact (played by Ray Winstone) needs a hitman. It's a great story, but what really makes it special is how smoothly Malkovich makes the transition from polite discussion to amoral sociopathy.

7. Andy Serkis as Gollum (and Smeagol) in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.



My precious! The only CGI character to make this list. Gollum rocks!

6. Denzel Washington as Alonzo Harris in Training Day.



While we have a couple Oscar winners on this list, Denzel is unique for having won Best Actor (as opposed to Best Supporting Actor). Lt. Alonzo is the ultimate cop gone bad. His idea of law enforcement consists on counting the number of arrests made while overlooking pretty much everything else. He's the over-the-top king of the roost, in charge of who gets busted and what gets overlooked.


5. Ben Kingsley as Don Logan in Sexy Beast.



Oh yeah.
Don Logan is tasked with going to Spain to bring his old made Gal (Ray Winstone) out of retirement for a robbery in London. Problem is that Gal is comfortable in Spain and has promised his wife that he's retired for good. But Don cannot take "No" for an answer.

That gives us conversations like (courtesy IMDB.com)

Gal: I am going to have to turn this opportunity down.
Don: No, you are going to have to turn this opportunity yes!

and
Don: Shut up, cunt. You louse. You got some fuckin' neck ain't you. Retired? Fuck off, you're revolting. Look at your suntan, it's leather, it's like leather man, your skin. We could make a fucking suitcase out of you. Like a crocodile, fat crocodile, fat bastard. You look like fucking Idi Amin, you know what I mean? Stay here? You should be ashamed of yourself. Who do you think you are? King of the castle? Cock of the walk?
[He gut-punches Gal]
Don: What you think this is the wheel of fortune? You think you can make your dough and fuck off? Leave the table? Thanks Don, see you Don, off to sunny Spain now Don, fuck off Don. Lying in your pool like a fat blob laughing at me, you think I'm gonna have that? You really think I'm gonna have that, ya ponce. All right, I'll make it easy for you. God knows you're fucking trying. Are you gonna do the job? It's not a difficult question, are you gonna do the job, yes or no?

and...

Gal: No!
Don: Yes!
Gal: No!
Don: Yes!
Gal: No!
Don: Fat cunt!
Gal: No, No, No!
Don: Yes, Yes, Yes!



4. Christopher Waltz as Hans Landa in "Inglorious Basterds".



My theory about this film is that it is a sober, serious drama that was invaded by Brad Pitt who turns every scene he is in into a comedy. The opening scene with the French dairy farmer is devastating. Landa is on the hunt of a family of Jewish refugees who are hiding under the floor of the farmer's house. Landa gradually breaks down the farmer's confidence through a combination of politeness, chutzpah, and persistence.

But as the film progresses, his persistent charm gradually peels away to reveal a psychotic misogynistic sadistic personality. (How many other pop psych buzzwords can I toss around?)

3. Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men.




Chigurh is a great psycho in a bad hair cut. He's on the hunt for Josh Brolin's character, who has walked away with a couple million dollars scavved from a mutual massacre of drug dealers in the Texas desert. Three things are particularly appealing about Chigurh's modus operandi. First, his weapon of choice is a gas-powered skull gun of the kind used by cattle ranchers to save on the cost of bullets. Second is his presence, his aura which radiates menace (in spite of the mop top). But what is truly chilling is his world view, in which is a kind of random nihilism where life or death can be decided by the toss of a coin.

Literally.

2. Heath Ledger as The Joker in Batman: the Dark Knight.



I first enjoyed the performance of Heath Ledger in The Knight's Tale, a light, enjoyable piece. Ledger was reasonable in Monster's Ball, but really came into his own in Brokeback Mountain. But as the Joker, Ledger really discovered a character. Historically, the Joker started as a maniacal goofball with a unique way to mix zaniness and homicide. Cesar Romero played him in an excellent campy fashion for the 60s TV show. Then, in the 80s, Jack Nicholson took over the character and heightened his capacity for evil, while maintaining a panache that only he can achieve.

Ledger did something completely different. He internalized the capacity for evil as a reflection of the Joker's negative feelings about all of humanity.

1. Daniel Day-Lewis as Billy the Butcher in Gangs of New York.


Not a great film, but a great performance by Day-Lewis as he steals the film. Billy the Butcher is the leader of the Nativists, who are violently hostile to the immigrant Irish moving into Hell's Kitchen. Billy has one eye (physical deformities always being a plus for a villain), loves a good knife fight, and uses his knowledge of anatomy to make knife fighting an art.

Day-Lewis completely steals this movie from Leonardo DiCaprio's indecisive Irish immigrant.

Truth be told, I could shuffle the top four characters in order and it would be equally valid.

a treat for a cold winter

Featuring P^2 in a film most readers probably haven't seen.



I cannot honestly say that the film is all that great. I think it's the kind of film you could watch with the sound off and not miss much. Except that it's packed to the gills with product placements, which is kind of annoying.

Best films of the decade - Collecting candidates

As we aim for the last several weeks of 2009, it seems like as good a time as any to think about the best films of the 00 decade. (It'd be nice if we could include a Bond film to the list, and I think ultimately we can put Casino Royale on the list.) I don't have a preset idea of how long the list should be, and I don't think it's terribly meaningful. For example, the 150th best film of the 70s was certainly better than the 50th best film of the 90s.

I'm more inclined to try to sort the list by genre. But to start, I'll just look through the lists of awards from each year and include or exclude the best films from that year, with a bit of commentary.

2000:
Best Picture winner: Gladiator
other nominees: Chocolat; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Erin Brockovich; Traffic
other notables: Requiem for a Dream, Shadow of the Vampire, Pollock, Almost Famous

Of the above listed, for me the only must-include film is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. While I enjoyed Gladiator, it's little more than an action film with neat CGI. I've heard great things about Requiem for a Dream, but haven't had the stomach to face it.

p.s. Best In Show deserves mention in at least a couple categories.

2001:
Best Picture Winner: A Beatiful Mind
other nominees: Gosford Park, In the Bedroom, The LotR: the Fellowship of the Ring, Moulin Rouge
other notables: Shrek, Training Day, Mullholland Drive, Amelie, Memento, The Royal Tenenbaums, Vanilla Sky, A Knight's Tale

You might expect me to automatically include the Nash biography, but I found its treatment of schizophrenia to be too magical for my tastes.
Shrek has to be included in any list of the decade's best animated films - at least the first of the three. The LotR trilogy certainly has to be included somehow. Moulin Rouge would definitely be on my list of the decade's best musicals (way ahead of Chicago). In the sci-fi category, I'd go against a lot of the sentiment at the time and exclude Memento as incoherent crap, while reserving judgment on Vanilla Sky. If only it didn't feature Tom Cruise, it'd be a lock!

Amelie is a lock, certainly. While Denzel was great in Training Day, I haven't felt that the film really has kept my interest well. OTOH, A Knight's Tale is certainly on my list of the best popcorn films of the decade.

One film from 2001 that has grown on me a lot over the past decade is The Royal Tenenbaums. This story of a dysfunctional family of geniuses initially frustrated me because it didn't seem to go anywhere, but now I think it's brilliant.

That leaves us with one more film, Gosford Park, which has been on my list since it came out. This Robert Altman-directed version of a British manor mystery is utterly delicious.

p.s. Donnie Darko.

2002:
Best Picture: Chicago
other nominees: Gangs of New York, The Hours, The LotR: the Two Towers, The Pianist
other notables: Spirited Away, Adaptation, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Far From Heaven, Bowling for Columbine

Even with a short list of musicals to choose from, I cannot include Chicago. The casting was terrible, by which I mean Renee Zellwegger. In fact, I find the entire Best Picture list to be weak.

Y Tu Mama Tambien is an amusing piece of soft porn masquerading as art. I could include it in a list of "best socially acceptable porn", I suppose.

Bowling for Columbine raises interesting questions about Michael Moore's documentaries. From a technical standpoint, they are not the best, but they cover the most important topics - topics that are conscientiously avoided by the rich and powerful studios.

The only unqualified entry from this year is Spirited Away, which not only soars to the top of the list of the decade's best animated films, but is surely on the list of best films overall.

Adaptation makes the cut. I'm a big Charlie Kaufman fan.

p.s. Bend it Like Beckham. Gonna mull over what to do with this one.

2003:
Best Picture: The LotR: the Return of the King
Other nominees: Lost in Translation, Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World, Mystic River, Seabiscuit
other notables: Finding Nemo, Cold Mountain, Pirates of the Caribbean: the Curse of the Black Pearl, Whale Rider, The Barbarian Invasions

Already commented about The LotR trilogy. At the time, I was a huge fan of Mystic River. Has it held up? I'm unsure. Master and Commander and Seabiscuit are both simple, light fare.

Lost in Translation is definitely on the list.

The first installment of Pirates of the Caribbean is certainly on my list of best action films. I have a soft spot for Whale Rider. It'll fit in somehow.

2004:
Best Picture: Million Dollar Baby
other nominees: The Aviator, Finding Neverland, Ray, Sideways
other notables: Hotel Rwanda, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, House of Flying Daggers, Lemony Snicket's a Series of Unfortunate Events, The Incredibles, Troy, Super Size Me

A good list for Best Picture. I'm a big fan of Million Dollar Baby, which makes the list for a number of reasons. The only nominee definitely not passing muster is The Aviator, but it's hard to say much about Finding Neverland since I've never seen it. Ray is on the list of best biopics. Amazing job by Jamie Foxx. And Sideways is also on the list, for a number of reasons.

In retrospect, it's hard to be happy with the process that left Hotel Rwanda off the Best Picture List. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has the top spot in my list of the best sci-fi films of the decade. The Incredibles has a spot on the list of the best animated films.

p.s. Der Untergang
p.p.s. I saw Land of Plenty (sort of) in France. I need to see it again because I fell asleep during the film. It was never released in the US.

2005:
Best Picture: Crash
other nominees: Brokeback Mountain; Capote; Good Night, and Good Luck; Munich
other notables: Howl's Moving Castle, Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Syriana, The Constant Gardener, Memoirs of a Geisha, King Kong, Pride and Prejudice

The obvious one here is Brokeback Mountain. At the time I liked Crash just as much, but Brokeback seems, in retrospect, to be the far greater film.

I liked Capote, but it's hurt by being in competition with Infamous, a film from 2006 covering pretty much exactly the same material.

While Howl's Moving Castle is not quite at the same level of Spirited Away, the previous film by master Hiyao Miyazaki, it definitely merits inclusion. Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit similarly deserves special acclaim. (That reminds me - I need to add Chicken Run from 2000.)

2005 was a big year for political films.
Syriana is an interesting film that may be just on the outside looking in. Good Night, and Good Luck is just a bit too preachy for my tastes, though I do appreciate its sentiments. The Constant Gardener definitely makes the cut. Does this inclusion show my weakness for Rachel Weisz? Perhaps - but I do think that inclusion of an intelligent, well-formed female character is a strong positive for any film.

There is probably some category for March of the Penguins.

p.s. The Forty-Year Old Virgin. On the list of best comedies.

p.p.s. The Proposition. And The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

2006:
Best Picture: The Departed
Other nominees: Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine, The Queen
Other notables: Blood Diamond, The Last King of Scotland, Volver, Little Children, Notes on a Scandal, Children of Men, Pan's Labyrinth, The Illusionist, The Black Dahlia, The Prestige, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima,

Wow. This was quite a good year!

I've already blogged about how much I enjoyed The Departed. Among the long list of those films above, the ones that I think must be included somehow are

Volver: best foreign-language (not to mention best prosthetic ass)
Little Miss Sunshine: best performance by a kid
The Last King of Scotland: for a couple reasons
Children of Men: on the list for best sci-fi
Pan's Labyrinth: on best fantasy list
Notes on a Scandal might be on the main list. I really like the acting in this film. Same goes for Little Children.

I need to see the two Eastwood films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima at some point.

...and if I thought 2006 was good, here comes 2007, which has the film of the decade and a second film that would have been best of its year most years. The third-best
film is no slouch, either.

2007:
Best Picture: No Country For Old Men
other nominees: Atonement, Juno, Michael Clayton, There Will Be Blood
other notables: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Ratatouille, Eastern Promises, Charlie Wilson's War, American Gangster, I'm Not There, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 3:10 to Yuma, Sicko, In the Valley of Elah

I'm not going to beat around the bush here. No Country for Old Men is my favorite film of the decade.

There Will Be Blood features Daniel Day-Lewis in what I think is the best performance by a single actor in the decade.
Most years, Michael Clayton would be a good candidate for best picture, but it's not close for 2007.

Among films that remained below the radar, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is a great one.

I thought Sicko was better than Bowling for Columbine or Farenheit 9/11.

Juno will be on a list somehow, as will Eastern Promises. And Sunshine.

2008:
Best Picture: Slumdog Millionaire
Other nominees: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, The Reader,
Other notables: The Dark Knight, Doubt, Iron Man

After 2006 and 2007, a relatively weak year. Slumdog Millionaire will at best be listed in a minor category. The year is most notable for the burst of super-hero films, especially The Dark Knight, which is currently listed as the 9th best film ever at IMDB.com, and is the all-time #2 on the list of domestic sales (after Titanic).

Well, there will be other kinds of categories. The Harry Potter films will need to be accounted for somehow.

Last Chance Harvey

One of the nice things of having cable and being essentially housebound with a cold is that you may stumble upon a film you'd never heard of featuring two of your favorite actors. So I've surfing around, having just rewatched the entirety of The Royal Tenenbaums for the first time, and I see a film featuring Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson and, well, that's a Must-See.

It's called Last Chance Harvey. Dustin Hoffman is Harvey, a writer of jingles in London for his daughter's wedding. Emma Thompson works for the government taking surveys at Heathrow. The first time they meet he brushes her off because he's tired from the overnight flight.

His plan is to fly back after the wedding and before the reception because he's got a sales pitch to make. But he misses the flight back, finds out he's being fired, and that his daugher wants her stepfather to give him away, so...he hits the airport bar. And meets Emma Thompson.

I'm not sure there's all that much to this film. For me it hits a sweet spot with the images of an American in London. The dialogue is extremely intelligent. It is very difficult to show strangers overcoming the usual social barriers, but this film does it well. And watching two top actors at the top of their game, in a well-directed film with a great script - why had I not heard of this film before?

This film deals with fractured families, absent fathers, Americans in London, middle-aged people looking for a second chance - basically all sorts of themes smacking Whispers right in the face. Nicely done.

Lucy Liu films

One to see:

Watching the Detectives

One to miss:

Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever

Abandoned the latter 2/3 of the way through because the plot was just stupid. The former is a delight, featuring L^2 as a "borophobic" woman who just loves playing mind games.

That Just Happened!

Watchmen trailer!

Found it at YouTube. I have no idea where it originally came from.