Animation Movie Meme

From here; I've linked to references I've made to some. (Why are they out of order anyway? ;-))

X what you’ve seen
O what you saw some but not all of
Bold what you particularly liked
Strike-through what you hated

CLASSIC DISNEY
——————————-
[ X ] 101 Dalmatians (1961)
[ X ] Alice in Wonderland (1951)
[ X ] Bambi (1942)
[ X ] Cinderella (1950)
[ X ] Dumbo (1941)
[ X ] Fantasia (1940)
[ X ] Lady and the Tramp (1955)
[ X ] Mary Poppins (1964)
[ X ] Peter Pan (1953)
[ X ] Pinocchio (1940)
[ X ] Sleeping Beauty (1959)
[ X ] Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
[ O ] Song of the South (1946)

DISNEY’S DARK AGE
——————————-
[X] The Aristocats (1970)
[ ] The Black Cauldron (1985)
[ ] The Fox and the Hound (1981)
[ ] The Great Mouse Detective (1986)
[ ] The Jungle Book (1967)
[ ] The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977)
[ ] Oliver and Company (1986)
[ ] Pete’s Dragon (1977)
[X] The Rescuers (1977)
[O] Robin Hood (1973)
[?] The Sword In The Stone (1963)

THE DISNEY RENAISSANCE
——————————-
[X] Aladdin (1992)
[X] Beauty and the Beast (1991)
[ ] A Goofy Movie (1995)
[ ] Hercules (1997)
[X] The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)
[X] The Lion King (1994)
[X] The Little Mermaid (1989)
[X] Mulan (1998)
[ ] Pocahontas (1995)
[ ] The Rescuers Down Under (1990)
[X] Tarzan (1999)

DISNEY’S NEW DARK MODERN AGE
——————————-
[X] Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)
[X] Bolt (2008)
[ ] Brother Bear (2003)
[ ] Chicken Little (2005)
[ ] Dinosaur (2000)
[ ] The Emperor’s New Groove (2000)
[X] Fantasia 2000 (2000)
[ ] Home on the Range (2004)
[ ] Lilo & Stitch (2002)
[ ] Meet the Robinsons (2007)
[O] Treasure Planet (2002)

PIXAR
——————————-
[X] A Bug’s Life (1998)
[X] Cars (2006)
[X] Finding Nemo (2003)
[X] The Incredibles (2004)
[X] Monsters Inc. (2001)
[X] Ratatouille (2007)
[X] Toy Story (1995)
[X] Toy Story 2 (1999)
[X] Wall-E (2008)
[X] Up (2009)

DON BLUTH
——————————-
[ ] All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989)
[X] An American Tail (1986)
[X] An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991)
[X] Anastasia (1997)
[ ] The Land Before Time (1988)
[ ] The Pebble and the Penguin (1995)
[ ] Rock-a-Doodle (1991)
[X] The Secret of NIMH (1982)
[ ] Thumbelina (1994)
[X] Titan AE (2000)
[ ] A Troll in Central Park (1994)

CLAYMATION
——————————-
[ ] The Adventures of Mark Twain (1986)
[X] Chicken Run (2000)
[X] Coraline (2009)
[ ] Corpse Bride (2005)
[ ] James and the Giant Peach (1996)
[X] The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
[ ] The Puppetoon Movie (1987)
[X] Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)

CGI GLUT
——————————-
[X] Antz (1998)
[ ] Happy Feet (2006)
[X] Kung Fu Panda (2008)
[X] Madagascar (2005)
[ ] Monster House (2006)
[X] Over the Hedge (2006)
[O] The Polar Express (2004)
[X] Shrek (2001)
[X] Shrek 2 (2004)
[O] Shrek The Third (2007)
[X] Monsters vs. Aliens (2009)
[X] How to Train Your Dragon (2010)

IMPORTS
——————————-
[ ] Arabian Knight
[ ] Back to Gaya
[ ] The Last Unicorn (1982)
[X] Light Years (1988)
[X] The Triplets of Belleville (2003)
[X] Persepolis (2007)
[ ] Planet 51 (2009)
[ ] Waltz With Bashir (2008)
[O] Watership Down (1978)
[ ] When the Wind Blows (1988)
[X] Yellow Submarine (1968)

STUDIO GHIBLI/MIYAZAKI
——————————-
[ ] The Cat Returns (2002)
[ ] Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
[X] Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)
[ ] Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)
[ ] Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986)
[ ] Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979)
[ ] My Neighbors The Yamadas (1999)
[ ] My Neighbor Totoro (1993)
[X] Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984)
[ ] Only Yesterday (1991)
[ ] Pom Poko (Tanuki War) (1994)
[ ] Porco Rosso (1992)
[X] Princess Mononoke (1999)
[X] Spirited Away (2002)
[ ] Whisper of the Heart (1995)
[ ] Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea (2009)
[ ] Panda! Go Panda!
[ ] Tales from Earthsea
[ ] Horus, Prince of the Sun

SATOSHI KON
——————————-
[ ] Millennium Actress (2001)
[ ] Paprika (2006)
[ ] Perfect Blue (1999)
[ ] Tokyo Godfathers (2003)

SHINKAI MAKOTO
——————————-
[ ] She and Her Cat (1999)
[X] Voices of a Distant Star (2001)
[ ] The Place Promised in Our Early Days (2004)
[ ] 5 Centimeters per Second (2007)

OTHER ANIME FILMS
——————————-
[X] Akira (1989)
[ ] Appleseed (2004)
[ ] Appleseed: Ex Machina (2007) -
[X] Arcadia of My Youth (U.S. Title – Vengeance of the Space Pirate) (1982)
[X] Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (2003)
[X] The Dagger of Kamui (U.S. Title – Revenge of the Ninja Warrior) (1985)
[ ] Dirty Pair: Project Eden (1987)
[ ] End of Evangelion (1997)
[ ] Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz (1998)
[X] Fist of the North Star (1986)
[ ] Galaxy Express 999 (1979)
[X] Ghost in the Shell (1996)
[ ] The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)
[X] Lensman (1984)
[X] Macross: Do You Remember Love (U.S. Title – Clash of the Bionoids) (1984)
[ ] Metropolis (2001)
[ ] Neo-Tokyo (1986)
[X] Ninja Scroll (1993)
[ ] Origin: Spirits Of The Past
[X] Patlabor the Movie (1989)
[ ] The Professional: Golgo 13 (1983)
[ ] Project A-ko (1986)
[ ] Robot Carnival (1987)
[X] Robotech: The Shadow Chronicle (2006)
[ ] Silent Möbius (1991)
[ ] Space Adventure Cobra (1982)
[ ] Steamboy (2004)
[ ] Sword of the Stranger (2007)
[ ] Unico and the Island of Magic (1983)
[ ] Urotsukidoji: The Movie (1987) I have no intention of watching this.
[X] Vampire Hunter D (1985)
[ ] Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust (2000)
[X] Wings of Honneamise: Royal Space Force (1987)

CARTOONS FOR GROWN-UPS
——————————-
[ ] American Pop (1981)
[ ] The Animatrix (2003)
[ ] Beavis & Butthead Do America (1996)
[ ] Cool World (1992)
[ ] Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)
[ ] Final Fantasy: Advent Children (2005)
[ ] Fire & Ice (1983)
[ ] Fritz the Cat (1972)
[ ] Heavy Metal (1981)
[ ] Heavy Metal 2000 (2000)
[ ] Hey Good Lookin’ (1982)
[ ] Lady Death (2004)
[ ] A Scanner Darkly (2006)
[ ] South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999)
[ ] Street Fight (Coonskin) (1975)
[ ] Waking Life (2001)

OTHER ANIMATED MOVIES
——————————-
[X] Animal Farm (1954)
[ ] Animalympics (1980)
[ ] Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon The Movie (2007)
[ ] Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker
[ ] The Brave Little Toaster (1988)
[ ] Bravestarr: The Movie (1988)
[ ] Cats Don’t Dance (1997)
[ ] Care Bears: The Movie (1985)
[X] Charlotte’s Web (1973)
[ ] Fern Gully (1992)
[ ] G.I. Joe: The Movie (1987)
[ ] Gobots: Battle of the Rock Lords (1986)
[ ] He-Man & She-Ra: The Secret of the Sword (1985)
[X] The Hobbit (1977)
[X] The Iron Giant (1999)
[ ] Justice League: The New Frontier (2008)
[X] Lord of the Rings (1978)
[X] Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (1992)
[ ] My Little Pony: The Movie (1986)
[X] Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1982)
[X] The Prince of Egypt (1998)
[ ] Powerpuff Girls: The Movie (2002)
[ ] Quest For Camelot (1999)
[ ] Ringing Bell (1978)
[ ] The Road to El Dorado (2000)
[ ] Rock & Rule (1983)
[X] Space Jam (1996)
[ ] Starchaser: The Legend of Orin (1985)
[ ] Superman: Doomsday (2007)
[ ] The Swan Princess (1994)
[X] Transformers: The Movie (1986)
[X] Wizards (1977)
[X] Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
[ ] Wonder Woman (2009)
[ ] Balto (1995)
[ ] Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002)

ADDENDUM
[X] 9 (2009)
[ ] The Ant Bully (2006)
[ ] Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
[O] Bee Movie (2007)
[O] Beowulf (2007)
[ ] The Chipmunk Adventure (1987)
[X] Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (2009)
[ ] Felix the Cat: The Movie (1988)
[X] Flushed Away (2006)
[ ] Happily N’Ever After (2007)
[ ] Hoodwinked (2005)
[ ] Horton Hears a Who (2008)
[X] Ice Age (2002)
[ ] Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006)
[X] Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009)
[ ] Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (2001)
[X] Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008)
[ ] Open Season (2006)
[ ] Pokemon: The First Movie (1999)
[ ] The Princess and the Frog (2009)
[X] Robots
[ ] The Rugrats Movie (1998)
[ ] Shark Tale (2004)
[ ] Shrek Forever After (2010)
[ ] The Simpsons Movie (2007)
[ ] Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003)
[ ] Space Chimps (2008)
[ ] The Spongebob Squarepants Movie (2004)
[ ] The Tale of Despereaux (2008)
[O] Valiant (2005)
[ ] We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story (1993)

ADDENDUM II
[ ] Mind Game
[ ] The Secret of Kells
[ ] Shonen Sarutobi Sasuke (U.S. title “Magic Boy”)
[ ] Princess Arete
[ ] Urusai Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer
[ ] Cat Soup
[ ] Summer Wars

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Be Seeing You

Yes, I broke down and watched The Prisoner. Which version? you ask. Both, I answer. The first one's better, isn't it? you ask, looking for affirmation. I shrug.

It's hard to compare because they're so different. I don't think the second one is trying to remake the first; it's just taking some of the same ideas and running with them. Both series are somewhat disjointed, if you ask me; many episodes make complete sense in their context but don't cohere well with other episodes.

In the first series, for example, I didn't much care for Many Happy Returns in the first series, and the series conclusion (Fall Out) did strike me as a little over the top. But, at least I understood correctly who Number One was (as confirmed by a subsequent interview with Patrick McGoohan that I found on YouTube) notwithstanding the fact that (a) it's an allegory (by McGoohan's own insistence) and (b) several sites online insist that Number One is really something else.

I was especially frustrated that Rachel Herbert's Number Two in the original series' Free for All didn't return in another episode, because she was by far my favorite Number Two: evil genius. I reckon that tells you more about my own inadequacies than about the original series', of course; nevertheless, de gustibus non disputandum.

In the second series, the overall story ended in a way that struck me as just plain wrong. I don't know how to explain it as just that, well, I figured there had to have been a deception going on by Number Two and his wife, but the authors never reveal it if so.

Also, the second series explains too much in comparison to the first, losing much of the beauty. Still, I like it a lot more than most of the reviews I've seen online—and I think Caviezel makes a fine Number Six, actually.

The biggest difference I noticed between the two is that the older series didn't feel compelled to populate the show with "young and beautiful" types. Sure, the characters were, in the main, not unattractive, but they're mostly middle-aged, and many are paunchy and unhealthy. Most were also quite unfashionable. In the re-imagining, by contrast, most all the main characters are young and beautiful, and McKellen, God bless him, is both elegant and striking for an elderly gentleman. Contrast him to Leo McKern, or some of the other Number Two's from the original.

As you can guess, I can't discommend either. I think both deserve watching. There are moments in each when I said to myself, This is awesome! and there are moments where I groaned with dismay. Oh, well.

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The 13th Day, on DVD

The 13th Day, a portrayal of the 1917 events at Fatima, is now available on DVD from Netflix.

My opinion? This is no Bernadette, nor even a Song of Bernadette. The film needs to be longer, to provide more detail, and to develop the characters more.

The children are little more than cardboard cutouts of sanctity, lit with sepia; their govenrment opponents are little more than cardboard cutouts of villany, lit with high black-and-white contrast. The filmmakers should have focused less on the lighting and more on an exposition of the families' trials, the interaction with the authorities of the Church, and the visions of the three secrets. Most people watching this film will be interested in the secrets, but they are, at best, touched on in rather rushed fashion.

Probably the one best sequence of scenes happens to be the one where the directors took time to let the characters develop: the prison scene. The appearance of one prisoner can be seen even as a rebuke of the obsession with the grotesque in Mel Gibson's deeply flawed Passion of the Christ. (The directors probably didn't mean this, but God works in mysterious ways…) That scene of Jacinta dancing with people whom society has written off as irredeemable is more touching and inspiring than most anything else in the film.

The music was quite good, but I couldn't understand much of the film's dialogue: there are no English subtitles, and the sound is poorly balanced on the DVD. Some speakers are Irish, but some are Continentals for whom English is quite obviously not their first language. So I would not recommend the DVD to anyone who doesn't have an ear for thick foreign accents or who can't read Spanish. The theater experience might be more acceptable, though.

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First things discusses best films of the decade

See here.

I was somehow the first to comment (thank you, Google Reader) and my contribution is heavy on foreign and foreign-themed films. So much for my nationalist sentiments. ;-) In fact, I took my list from last year's list, so if I were to think hard about it I would add more films.

I may try something similar here in a few weeks.

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Memories in the sand

This is one of the most beautiful, original, and moving things I've ever seen:

It's from a show named something like, "Ukraine's Got Talent". (You can kind of guess it from the website in the upper left corner.) For those who don't read Ukrainian, the final words are,

Ты всегда рядом: You are always with us.

I guessed that myself (that's what the Russian would mean), but more on the translation (and on the video) is here.

(Thanks to the Italian news website corriere.it, where I read of it.)

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What went wrong with Battlestar Galactica?

I'm not the only dissatisfied viewer of the late Battlestar Galactica re-imagining; I've found some complaints across the net. It's a huge disappointment for me; I really liked the show's early direction. However, I haven't seen anyone complain about what really bugged me, so I decided to collect my thoughts and see if anyone could confirm or (more likely) correct me.

• The biggest offense: The Plan. The series promised early that the Cylons had some kind of plan. At one point you could even guess one of several things: that they were pursuing the few remaining humans of the Twelve Colonies in order to find the humans of the Thirteenth Colony in order to wipe them out as well; that they wanted to create of a hybrid human-Cylon race (see Baltar's vision, below), or even that they wanted to keep a farm of humans for use as hybrids. It could even have been any combination of the three, or something else entirely that at least would have made sense, and I would have been satisfied.
  
  The writers were not, apparently, satisfied with any of the explanations that would have made sense. They never did explain it during the course of the series, but they couldn't just pretend a plan never existed (lots of questioning about this in online forums), especially since opening titles of the show's first seasons included the announcement, And [the Cylons] have a plan. I wonder how many times the writers sat around regretting that. Whatever the case, they scripted a special film, post-conclusion of the series, to explain the plan. It turns out that… "the plan" was not the Cylons' plan; it was one Cylon's plan: the Cavil model's plan, to wipe out the human race so the universe could bask in, uhm, "justice".
  
  That doesn't fly. The opening titles of early seasons alluded to a plan in the present tense. The "present" here indicates the time after the near-elimination of the human race. I don't buy it.
  
  The one mitigating aspect of that otherwise forgettable film was Dean Stockwell. BSG has at least featured many great actors: Olmos, Stockwell, McDonnell…
• The revelation of the Five Final Cylons was so unbelievable, and the method used to introduce them so ridiculous—a Bob Dylan song playing in their head! really!!! a Bob Dylan song!!!—that I was sure the writers were merely introducing a new Cylon tactic: what marketers refer to as FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Dismay). That would have been all kinds of awesome, and could have redeemed and reinvigorated the show's clear decline throughout its third season. Instead, the writers doubled down on this bet.
  
  Again, I don't buy it. A flashback early in the series shows Tigh and Adama meeting as a younger men. Tigh is both balding (as opposed to bald, later in the series) and has hair color (later a stately white). This is a problem because Cylons don't age. Cylons whose bodies are old, be they Cavil or Tigh, are born old. Tigh's body is shown in a Resurrection Ship, and he looks old. Indeed, if Cylons could be born young, it would have been stupid to infiltrate the fleet with copies that are all the same age.
  
  Then again, as the third and fourth seasons progress, the Cylons are made out to be increasingly stupid, emotional, and petty, flatly contradicting earlier seasons of the show, where they are portrayed as brilliant, logical to the point of exploiting human emotion, and profound.
• The meaning of Cylon "evolution" changed from the beginning to the end of the show. At the beginning of the show, it was clearly implied that the biomechanical Cylons were an evolution of the purely mechanical kind. At the end of the show, the meaning was completely different, because the very word "Cylon" had assumed a second meaning. By the end of the show, "humanoid" Cylons were not, in fact, an evolution of the "toasters", but were instead an invention of the misnamed "Final Five", misnamed, I say, because they were, in fact, the "Original Five" humanoid Cylons, and weren't even mechanical originally, but were human, only not really human, because they were from the mythical Thirteenth Colony, which turns out to be a Cylon colony, not a human colony—Because the Scriptures of the Twelve Colonies would have mentioned a Thirteenth Tribe that went in search of another planet and was never heard from again, but would never have mentioned that this thirteenth tribe consisted of enemies of the other twelve, let alone non-human beings.
• Gaius Baltar's second, third, and fourth acts ruined a really good character. At the outset, Baltar is a scientist who is trying to hide the fact that he accidentally betrayed the human race to a Cylon of whom he now has recurring visions. He more or less abandons science all too quickly, at first for politics, in a way that is almost believable, and subsequently becomes a religious leader. Most disappointing to me, Baltar experiences at the end of the first season a vision regarding a child that he supposedly must guard. This is how Battlestar Wiki describes it:

  Entering [the Opera House], he is shown the "face of things to come", apparently a baby in a crib, the "first of the new generation of God's children" - and he is to be their protector.

  This never materializes, but a different vision later in the show, shared by several characters, tries to supersede it. Baltar never assumed the role of protector for anyone, let alone the the "new generation of God's children".

Oh, well. It's only a TV show.

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Sink me! Two great comedies, one monstrous intolerable!

I recently watched two great comedies from across the pond. The first is a French film, The Dinner Game. Netflix describes it thusly,

Writer-director Francis Veber's clever comedy shadows a group of French intellectuals who gather each Wednesday night for a dinner game, in which the challenge is to bring along the most idiotic guest. Pierre (Thierry Lhermitte) thinks he's found a ringer in François (Jacques Villeret), a civil servant whose passion is making architectural models out of matchsticks. But Pierre gets more than he bargained for when François becomes his houseguest.

This is an example of what we call misdirection. Admittedly I'm not the brightest fellow, but I had a completely different notion of how the film might go. Without giving the game away, I'll simply say that I expected to see the dinner: but the two main characters never actually go there.

The other is The Scarlet Pimpernel, which introduced me to Anthony Andrews, who as the title character in this 1982 retelling of Baroness Orczy's novel outshone Ian McKellen. Let me repeat that in case you missed it: there is a living actor who outshines Gandalf/Magneto/Richard III, and it wasn't as if McKellen was doing less than his best; one review of the movie puts it this way: young actors should be forced to study McKellen's facial expressions in this film.

Andrews, however, goes over the top as the foolishly foppish, snuff-sniffing, ruinously rhyming Scarlet Pimpernel. (You could say he inspired my abysmal alliteration in the previous sentence.) I loved it. My wife loved it. My 13 year-old son loved it, saying something to this effect: That's pretty good for an old movie.

Old?!? It dates only from 1982!!!

Up, by contrast, has a superb opening, but slides downhill from there into a huge disappointment. It's worth watching for those first 5–10 minutes, where so much more is told without words than in the remaining hour and a half or so. I really thought I was going to love the (Squirrel! …) film at the outset, but then it lost its novelty.

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"The 13th Day" is coming

I read only today about this upcoming film of Fatima. It looks as if it will have a gorgeous look to it; I hope the story matches the quality of the visuals.

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Valkyrie

Having watched Valkyrie twice, I can say that eating ice cream while watching men put their lives at risk in order to demonstrate that honor still exists in their country feels somewhat small. Next time I watch it, I'll hide the ice cream.

The film definitely impressed me. Reading some of the history online from the hopefully-reliable Wikipedia, I was further impressed with the film's apparent historical accuracy. Even the actors are cast so as to resemble the historical characters.

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Television is making you smarter! ...and more distracted

A while back—and by "a while", I mean a few years ago—someone on public radio interviewed a guy who had written a book explaining that television had made us smarter.

Fair enough. I don't see the cause & effect relationship myself; I think it would work the other way around, to be honest, but that's a fair assessment.

Last week, my wife rented some episodes of Columbo. For those not in the know, Columbo was a very popular detective show from thirty years ago. And, yeah, I guess you might argue that there weren't many subplots, and not much depth of character, although it sure is fun to watch Peter Falk do his thing.

While watching it, it dawned on me that the show was incredibly slow-paced. I mean, it dragged. It was interesting nevertheless, especially watching the banter between Columbo and his unsuspecting quarry. One of the conceits of the show is that the audience already knows who has committed the crime, and how, and where, and when, because the first ten or fifteen minutes of the show are… well, the setup and commission of the crime. The rest of the show features Columbo figuring out what's wrong. Try keeping a modern audience with that setup on Law & Order. (This is where someone comments that there is a modern crime show that does exactly that. Please, do tell.)

Anyway, following this insight somewhat, I began to wonder: if modern television viewers can handle more complex plots and characters, can they still handle the single-minded focus and slower pace of older television shows, or at least of Columbo? or are they now so accustomed to distraction that they can't focus any more on a relatively uncomplicated plot that does, at least, have a lot of twists?

I dunno mysefl. I don't watch enough television to comment! So it just sits there: a question.

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Little Red Riding Hood: the Soviet version

My wife has a few DVDs of Soviet-era films for children that she shows our kids. A lot of them really are wonderful, especially comedies involving a trio of incompetent criminals: the Exprienced Man, the Fool, and the Coward. (See here, here, and here. Or, to watch one, see here and here.)

Then there are the films whose politics verge on overwhelming the childlike nature of the film. Today, for example, while preparing for work, I heard a wonderful song by a girl. I looked at the TV, and saw a man in priest's clothing, talking with a girl in a red hat. I asked my wife what the film was, and she said it was the story of Little Red Riding Hood… or actually, Little Red Riding Hood's life after the original story, "as interpreted by the director."

I guess that's the wolf? I asked.

Yes—well, actually, one of his children, my wife explained.

Ah! So Soviet cinema anticipated American television by three or four decades…

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"Why not Venezuela?"

In an otherwise entertaining review of the Transformers 2 movie for the Washington Post, John Anderson asks,

[The Autobots have] moved in with us like unwelcome relatives and have been working with the U.S. military. Why are aliens always working with the military here? Why not Venezuela?

That's actually a great idea. Imagine the audience reaction to this line from such a film, spoken by the Venezuela's current, indispensable President-for-Life:

Finalmente: la nuestra hora ha llegado! Optimus Prime, ayuda nos, los difensores del pobros, exterminar la injusticia del capitalismo del mundo: comenceremos con los Estados Unidos!!!*

I'd pay to watch that film.

---

* What I'm trying to write: Finally: our hour has come! Optimus Prime, help us, the defenders of the poor, to exterminate the injustice of capitalism from the world: we start with the United States!

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Two films with--dare I say it?--Christian sacrifice

Too often, films with Christian themes are overly sentimental, if not saccharine. Not these two.

1. Gran Torino

It was not without trepidation that I watched Clint Eastwood's latest film. Many of his films that I've watched over the last few years have struck me as nihilistic (Mystic River, for example) or glorifying adultery (The Bridges of Madison County). I understand that one cannot measure the quality of a film only by its moral content, and they are extremely well-made films, but when I heard of the objections raised to Million Dollar Baby in some quarters, I concluded that I didn't want to watch it.

Gran Torino is completely different from other Eastwood films I've seen, and I suspect that Eastwood is one of the few directors who could have made it. Walt Kowalski, played by Eastwood with delicious gusto, is a retired employee of the Ford Motor Corporation who expresses antipathy towards immigrants and change, especially the sort of immigrants ("gooks") and the change (foreign cars, white flight, teenagers' fashions, gangs) that surround him. That the movie turns this man into a kind of hero without really changing these aspects of his personality is remarkable.

If you've heard anything about the film, you probably know that Kowalski meets, and takes under his wing, a H'mong teenager who has suffered harassment at the hands of local gangs. What I didn't hear, and you might not have heard, is that:

• Kowalski initially catches Thao trying to steal his car as part of an initiation into the gang. Thao isn't all that enthusiastic about the gang, preferring reading and gardening, which earns him the scorn of every other H'mong who knows him—not only his cousin who leads the gang and saves him at least once from another gang, but also the scorn of his mother, his sister, and his elderly grandmother—who remarks that if only his sister would marry, they'd finally have a man in the house again.
• Kowalski's "rescue" of Thao from a second attempt to coerce him into an initiation ritual is more of a threat, delivered from behind the barrel of a loaded gun, to blow off the head of anyone gets on his lawn, Thao included.
• Kowalski subsequently takes Thao under his wing only because the H'mong neighbors won't leave him alone with their gratitude for "saving" Thao, and he hopes this will get them off his back.

All of this is developed with abundant racial epithets delivered from both sides—mostly from Kowalski, but the remarks delivered in H'mong by Thao's grandmother, who has an amazing ability to spit large quantities of colored liquid, are priceless.

These are only a few of the surprises I found. My favorite, however, is the ending: a Christ-like sacrifice that, for me, lifted the film to the level of being a "Christian" film, more so than many of those products that wear the label "Christian" on their sleeve.

The Catholic bishops' movie reviewer was unimpressed, but you have to take that with a grain of salt.

And now to a film with a completely different kind of racial intolerance:

2. Beyond the Gates

You know the story of the Rwandan genocide; you know what will happen in films set at the outbreak of the crimes; and you know how such a film must end. Somehow, this film still finds light and inspiration in the story, thanks to a Christ-like sacrifice.

It's also a beautifully-made film. The images of a steadily growing crowd of Interahamwe thugs gathering outside a Catholic school, dancing and blowing whistles while listening to the exhortations of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines is genuinely creepy—especially the whistles.

I've heard on occasion that Catholic Hutus in Rwanda at best did nothing to stop the Rwandan genocide, and at worst gave the Interahamwe a hand in massacring Tutsis. I've also heard several times that Catholics died defending Tutsis from the Interahamwe. In one particularly memorable example, a mission priest told my Arizona parish of a monastery where Hutus and Tutsis lived together, and when the Interahamwe came, died together.

Which is it? Probably both: life is complicated, and Christ's Church is filled with both the wheat and the chaff, even if some contemporary post-Vatican II priests prefer that Jesus didn't mean what he said he meant by that parable. (No exaggeration.)

The film slightly botches an explanation of Christ's presence in the Eucharist, suggesting that it is no different from God's presence everywhere at all times, but it also highlights the importance of the Mass and the Eucharist in Christian life for both the priest (based on a real person) and the people.

One thing I found interesting in the film was the characterization by a BBC viewer of the difference between the Bosnian genocide and the Rwandan genocide (from memory, perhaps not verbatim):

When I saw an old Bosnian woman face-down in the mud, I thought, "That could be my mother." When I see an old Rwandan woman face-down in the mud, I don't think that. I think only, "There's another dead African.

For myself, I don't feel that way now, and I wonder whether I felt that way at the time.

I'm also not entirely sure that it's accurate to say that "whites" did anything to avert the Bosnian genocide and war; to my recollection, there was a lot of dithering, evasion of responsibility, and questionable value of UN peacekeeping, just as in Rwanda. Wikipedia does not appear to disagree. That said, since the mid-90s there have been at least two major, high-quality films about the Rwandan genocide, Beyond the Gates and Hotel Rwanda. How many major, high-quality films have been made about the Bosnian genocide?

The Academy Awards had more important things to do in 2006 than recognize this film, but I guess that's not surprising, considering the much more important fare they had on their plate that year. (Yes, I'm being sarcastic. I haven't been impressed with the Academy Awards for a long, long time.)

The Catholic bishops' movie reviewer liked it, but you have to take that with a grain of salt. ;-)

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Klaatu barada nikto, again

As you may have guessed, the reason I had klaatu barada nikto on the brain is that I watched the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. A few comments:

1. The original was better. I haven't seen the original, but it can't possibly have been worse.
2. I actually like Keanu Reeves' laid-back approach to acting, so the critics who call him flat or boring are obviously morons.
3. Proof: Wikipedia summarizes the criticisms of the film as "lacking a coherent story". The sources of these criticisms must be the same ones who claimed that There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men were such great films. I watched them, and they had little or no story, let alone a coherent one.
4. My wife doubts the theory I linked to at the AMC weblog ("Klaatu fight no one"), saying that klaatu barada nikto sounds in Russian like "Klaatu beard no one." I also found that somewhere online, and to be honest the movie would be a lot more interesting if it had something to do with that.
5. I would like very much to read the story the film is based on.

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Klaatu barada nikto

For some cheap entertainment, type about:robots as the address in the Firefox web browser. I understand that you need Firefox version 3 or higher to make this work.

Wikipedia has a page on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaatu_barada_nikto and what amazes me is that (1) a philosophy professor has a theory about the meaning (?!?) and (2) no one has remarked that in Russian, "nikto" (никто) means "no one". For what it's worth, a comment on this AMC blog gives a good suggestion, and also refers to Russian.

Some wag somewhere has joked that the phrase translates to "Biden being Biden", but I won't dignify that with further comment.

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Yes Man

I watched Yes Man recently. I hated the film, but Terence Stamp was, as usual, Zod-like. The scenes with him were great, especially the final scene of the movie, which my wife had to explain to me.

In fact, the scenes with Terence Stamp were the only part of the film worth watching. Too bad you have to watch the rest of the film to understand the last scene.

Stamp has the best quotes in all the films I've seen with him, to wit:

• In Superman II, he corrects the President: Not God. Zod.
• In The Limey, he remarks that I am gainfully employed. I'm on the dole.
• In Yes Man, virtually every syllable he speaks is hilarious, but my preference is his final two syllables, Good God!

Too bad I can't recommend the film in spite of that: The world would be a better place with more Terence Stamp films.

Well, not films like Teorema.

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Quantum of Kazan

The latest James Bond film claims to have a scene in Kazan, Russia. My wife had already heard of this and was excited to watch it. She was somewhat disappointed that after extended scenes in Siena, Italy; some other part of Italy; Bolivia (Chile really); and England, the scene of Kazan occurs at the very end, in only two or three minutes.

Even more offensive is that it wasn't even Kazan—not, at least, any part of Kazan that she recognized. Seeing as how she lived there for thirty-two years, that does seem odd. It's a shame, too, since Kazan has some gorgeous architecture, both around the Kremlin and on Baumann Street.

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21

Many mathematicians complain that members of our profession are portrayed in films as uncommon, unattractive nerds, or as crazy, obsessive loons. Some go so far as to argue that this causes a flight of talent from the profession towards "sexier" fields.

I don't personally see the problem with this, perhaps because I have seen myself since childhood as both an uncommon, unattractive, untalented nerd and a crazy, obsessive loon. We can't all be Kevin Spacey, after all.

He shows men of will what will really is.*

Comes now the movie 21 to portray several people who are good at mathematics as sane, common, and especially attractive hipsters.—Well, except for two of them, who lay on the chubbier side of the spectrum and can only gaze longingly at the girls. And, okay, a third is a kleptomaniac, but this is supposed to be funny. Everyone else is dashingly handsome, sexy, and talented. And these mathematicians regularly visit casinos and use their wits to outsmart the system, grossing hundreds of thousands of dollars, frequenting the strip clubs, and using their story to impress a professor whose help is needed to get into Harvard Medical School. The head of the operation is even played by—I set this up clumsily, didn't I?—Kevin Spacey. His character spends more classroom time sliding chalkboards around than writing on them. I don't think he wrote on a single chalkboard throughout the entire film.

I don't know what my colleagues in the profession think of the film, but in case you're wondering, these things do happen. There are mathematicians who are talented, attractive, and just like regular folk. (Read, "not nerds".) There are also mathematicians who use their skills for great fun and profit. One of my fellow grad students claimed that his knowledge of the probabilities of each poker hand contributed to more than $10,000 or so in online earnings. (Sorry, ladies, he's married.)

As for the rest of us chumps in the office, we earned a little more than that during the nine months of the school year, and how? By the leisurely pastime of bashing our brains out while trying to solve unsolved problems. No one makes films about that.

And you wonder why people choose non-mathematical careers.

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* Verbal Kint's description of Kevin Spacey Kaiser Söze, from the movie** The Usual Suspects. The photo's from Wikimedia.

** While typing this, I discovered that Firefox's spell checker thinks that Firefox and movie are both misspelled. It suggests "move" for "movie" and "Internet Explorer" for "Firefox".***

*** Haha, just kidding: it actually suggests "Firebox" for "Firefox".

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Best movies I've watched this year

I'm too tired tonight to do anything resembling productive, and it seems appropriate to write this near the end of the year.

I recently made the mistake of watching two of the most buzzed-about films of last year: There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men. Talk about a mistake: the films were tedious, pointless bores.

Looking at a few top ten lists of 2008 film here and there I'm getting depressed. For example, some people are listing Batman: the Dark Knight; I've already sniffed at it so you can imagine my alarm. Most of these jokers didn't list one of the films I saw this year that was head and shoulders above either of the two films named above—Roger Ebert excepted—so I'll foist my own list on an unsuspecting public: top recent films that I watched this year, that were head-and-shoulders above any of the baloney that won awards last year, or is likely to win an award this year. No particular order.

1. Eastern Promises, which I described here.
2. The Kite Runner, based on a book by an Afghan. In any just world, this would have won best picture last year.
3. Mongol, which I didn't like that much but is still a beautifully made film. (My wife will read this and tell me, You did like it! Her memory is better than mine.)
4. Baby Mama: Tina Fey has the Midas Touch of Comedy.
5. Persepolis:Not quite as good as the graphic novels, one of which I described here, its animation and its spirit was a delight nevertheless. Marjane Satrapi's sendup of sensitive, artistic, Marxist European males is gloriously delicious until you remember that this is her autobiography. In addition, it gives a much neglected and sympathetic view of the genuine religious piety and faith of many Muslims, while savaging the hypocrisy of others.
6. Bella, which I don't know how to describe except as beautiful.
7. Sweet Land, about a German-speaking mail-order bride's struggles to fit into a community of Norwegian-American farmers. I mentioned it here.
8. Miss Potter, an amazingly sweet story about Beatrix Potter. Ewan McGregor and Rene Zellweger at their best.
9. The Island: no, not the Michael Bay fun fest (which was also quite good) but the Russian film about a holy fool. I described it here in 2007 but Netflix indicates that I rented it this year, so it counts.

Looking over the list, I see that I have only nine. Any suggestions for #10? It has to be a recent film (last two or three years) and can't be either a tedious, pointless bore or a pretentious comic book adaptation.

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Eastern Promises, Speed Racer, and Captain Herlock

Brief reviews of three films I read lately.

• Eastern Promises: A pregnant young woman, bleeding badly, arrives at a hospital in London. She doesn't survive the operation, but her baby does. Obliged by British Law to try to find the baby's nearest family, the surgeon finds a journal among the woman's possessions, written in Russian. What she reads brings her into contact with members of the Russian criminal organization Вори в законе, "Thieves in Law".
  
  A while back, I watched two of the nominees for Best Film from last year: There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men. I don't really understand why they were so well-received, inasmuch as they seemed rather pointless and dispiritingly amoral.
  
  Eastern Promises received many of the same rave reviews as those two films, and from many of the same people, so I prepared myself for another disappointment. If it hadn't featured Viggo Mortensen, whose performance in The Lord of the Rings I enjoyed, I might not have watched it.
  
  To my delight, this film was fantastic! Sure, the Russians are (mostly) bad guys, and I've written that this irritates me in American film. But not all of them are, and some of the "bad guys" turn out to be sympathetic, exhibiting a strong sense of morality. Before attempting to murder someone, one criminal with whom the viewer has grown intimately familiar weeps bitterly at the immorality of the order he has been given. He remains a pathetic character, but it's touching nevertheless.
  
  The acting was superb. The representation of Russian criminal gangs appears to be highly accurate, and I have a good metric. At one point, a member of the Russian mob was told that he would be promoted, receiving a "star" tattoo. My wife, sitting next to me, murmured that in the real organization of Thieves in Law several bosses would meet to interview the man and make sure he qualified for the star. The very next scene depicted the meeting. My poor wife was embarassed; "I shouldn't know these things," she said, "but they show it in Russian TV dramas all the time." For my part, I was impressed. My wife becomes more interesting the longer I know her, and I mean that as a compliment!
  
  If the world were just, Eastern Promises would win lots and lots of Oscars. There was some graphic copulation and a lot of even more graphic violence, and it was all more graphic than necessary. But wow! what a good film.
  
• Speed Racer: I rented this for my son, but I think I enjoyed it more than anyone else. The film exhibited zero pretensions whatsoever, and captured the spirit of 60s and 70s Anime very well: the same lame group of characters; the same "mystery character" who may or may not be the star's long-lost relative; the same purely evil, greedy bad guys; and ooooooooh the colors! My son complained about too much CGI, but it was absolutely gorgeous even if you don't ask for my opinion. A couple of plot twists make it even more fun.
• Captain Herlock and the Endless Voyage: A bunch of Japanese animators get together and ask themselves, "How can we exploit the market potential of the legendary 70s anime character Captain Herlock, while adapting the story to fit current fashions in Anime? I know: let's use zombies!!!"
  
  As if zombies weren't bad enough, they wrote so little plot into any of the episodes I watched that most of the animation consists of the characters posing. I mean "posing" in the most negative sense possible, similar to the slur "you poser!" And Herlock is the worst poser of all: taking himself far too seriously, and looking down his nose at whoever happens to be in front of him. (I don't remember his being so tall in the past.)
  
  Aside from the zombies, the story reminds me a lot of the TV series Firefly, only without the intelligence, the energy, or the point. It's a long way down from My Youth in Arcadia.

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