fine whine

I hate to do this to y'all, but ladies and gentleman, I am attempting to turn over a something of a new leaf. You see, 2 A.M. (EST) is too late to go to bed every night. This of course is not your fault, as I generally tell you that I'm going to bed a while before I actually do, in fact, go to bed.

It's not a lie, it's just a little stretch of the truth. Does that make me a dishonest person?

I'm a negative person. Or so it seems lately. This does not make me happy*. I'm also one to occasionally dodge culpability, so I'm putting the blame on those late nights. Lack of sleep and whatnot.

It's probably a completely incorrect diagnosis, but it's what I'm going with for right now.

In the few days that I've started getting to bed before 1:30 (once even before 12:45) I've not necessarily been more pleasant. I've been no meaner, to boot.

I've also been waking up earlier, since I'm stuck in that rut of however many hours of sleep I'm used to getting, from between two or three when I fall asleep until five sometime when Jessica's alarm sounds.

Of course I very rarely hear her alarm, or at least react to it in a way that I can remember later. When she leaves for work and I fall back asleep, I generally don't even notice it, until I wake up at eight sometime (my clock is rather... inaccurate. Consistent, but inaccurate) and hastily rush myself off to work.

So that's how things were before. Lately I've awoken before my alarm, sometimes even having moments of dreams. Happy dreams.

So what I'm trying to tell you is that I'm trying to go to bed earlier.

But enough about me. Let's get back to the west coast.

Tonight I watched The Hitcher. It's the story of a guy who's trying to get to San Diego.

At first I didn't quite understand why driving a Cadillac from Chicago to San Diego would place our protagonist in the middle of nowhere Texas. After I watched the movie I checked out the route, and realized/remembered that the vast majority of the middle of these great States of ours isn't crisscrossed with convenient diagonal highways. A flying crow wouldn't cross the Lone Star state's borders (barring poor air conditions) but those confined to wheels on the ground find themselves at the mercy of the interstate highway grid, and that grid appears to pass through Amarillo between the city of broad shoulders and America's finest city (or so they say).

But our protagonist, played by the same guy I'd last seen (and only seen) in Soul man, is at the mercy of something much more sinister. He encounters Rutger Hauer, who I'd last seen (and possibly, again, only seen) in Blade runner, an enigmatic dark stranger who seems to vindicate every old wives' tale and urban legend ever uttered about hitchhiking.

I'd been told it was a creepy movie, and I was told correctly. It's quite creepy. So as to not give anything away, like the excessive bodycount (lots, but almost all of the violence is served offscreen), or the surprise ending (revenge is served), I'll just mention that it is crafted well enough, for what it is, and enjoyable enough, for what it is. It's not 'horror' (so I don't know where I thought I'd heard that), and it's not particularly deep, but it does lend me a tiny bit of perspective into Highwaymen, directed almost twenty years later by the same guy.

Let's hear it for Robert Harmon. C. Thomas Howell doesn't do too bad (he makes for a good everyman coming unhinged) but Robbie's really the star of the show. This time.

* In fact, by nature of being negative, I'm not happy. By definition, even.

So today is the eleventh of September, a date to which has been given great significance here in America. If not for the recent destruction of New Orleans I'm sure there would have been more attention given to the annual rending and gnashing and whatnot.

Well, I'm not interested in gnashing nor rending. I'm aware of what happened in 2001, and it was indeed a tragedy, and I'm aware of what happened two weeks ago, and that too is a tragedy, but having an opinion of the events is about the extent to which I am involved with either, and that's about it.

So let's talk about escapist cinema. Tonight I finally saw Highwaymen*. The movie is as bleak and sparse as the highway that sometimes sets its stage. All of the dialogue is treated as though capital "I" Important, with some of the more obvious foreshadowing clichés.

Readers not interested in plot spoilers should skip a ways down, to the part after I mention how there's this guy killing people in an old El Dorado and there's this other guy who chases him in a Barracuda, but somebody else shoots the murderer at the end.

So there's this guy killing people with Cadillacs. The opening of the movie is an artfully shot (by which I mean "gratuitous use of slow motion and fast cuts mixed with over/undersaturation") and introduces us to Rennie Cray, yet another version of the unshaven, sullen-but-determined character that Jim Caviezel seems to play most of the time. He watches his wife (and a bag of citrus fruit) run down by a speeding, swerving maniac in a Cadillac. Fast forward five years and suddenly we're beset by angelic voices. Is this the score? Are we hearing the chorus because something significant or action-packed is happening? Alas, we are merely hearing some random choir practicing.

They practice on the stage in "Orchestra Hall". The city is never named, nor the highway, and so forth. It's obvious that the movie was shot in Canada well before the credits confirm that fact. The camera follows Molly (Rhona Mitra) out to the front of the Hall, where after a brief conversation with "Boone" (sorry, but the name just sounded silly when she said it) she hops in an old Mazda with her friend Alex (Andrea Roth). As the plucky little hatchback pulls away and eventually into a tunnel the Ontario license plates are visible. Oops. They'd been chased by a speeding and oddly menacing El Dorado and, already spooked, aren't ready for what scares await them ahead.

This town has a tunnel, and our ladies find it to be a scene of confusion and carnage before long, with upturned trucks and a spooked horse inside. One driver is obviously very hurt, and Alex runs out to get some help. Which, we all know, is a major movie mistake: never leave the main character alone and go for help (fittingly she's wearing a red shirt). She is hit by that menacingly "winking" Caddy (one set of headlights is not lit, though later the bulbs are in fact missing. I guess the continuity guy wasn't watching the car that closely) and dies a bloody death, but not before getting her friend Molly close enough to the car for the door to swing open and her snapshot taken with a bright flash. Somebody shows up, she escapes, and the next morning the cops come.

We meet Will Macklin (a familiar Freddie Faison), a state traffic investigator (for a state never named) who, surprisingly enough, isn't nearing retirement. He of course lives through the whole picture.

Actually, come to think of it, there aren't many deaths in the film. The opening titles use accident photos as a background and many are quite graphic and gory, but only six people, by my count, died during the proceedings; one off-screen (presumably) and another two or three times over in various flashbacks.

At its core it's a chase movie, a revenge thriller that puts the pedal to the metal and leaves it there the whole time. More or less, that's it. Back to the movie. Will finds Molly at the scene, Rennie finds her sleeping in the hospital, and Molly meets Will at his office, where it is revealed by some convoluted exposition that her family was killed in another accident. Well, that just sucks.

Will makes sure to mention that he doesn't carry a gun nor has he shot anybody. Idle chitchat, or foreshadowing? Only time will tell.

Molly is next shown as the only person wearing a brightly colored outfit amongst accident survivors in a sort of therapy session. The leader begins with "Here in America..." and I missed the rest as I laughed, having already seen the Ontario plates and guessed where "here" really was. Next we find Rennie and Molly engaged in some harmless banter in the hallway, and then some stronger words and intimidation that bring Molly to the point of agreeing to meet Rennie for a ride after choir practice, but as he waits for her then she is helped into an aging Saab by the aforementioned Boone, and the two drive off. Rennie is left to have a brief Adam-69 (two cars, facing opposite directions so the drivers can talk... it's fake cop lingo) with Will who is inexplicably also at Molly's practice, despite being a pretty sorry baritone. Rennie speeds off in his 1968 Plymouth Barracuda and Will can hardly keep up with his X-files surplus Ford Crown Victoria. Rennie gets away, and we cut back to Boone and Molly just before they are catapulted sky-high by a feat of leverage few square-fendered road yachts could hope to match in the real world. The sorry Saab soars and once it comes to rest Molly is shocked to find not only that Boone is likely beyond help, but that the madman has attached a tow chain, and she is soon being dragged at great speed in the upside-down Swedish coupe.

This sequence is quite cool looking, especially when Rennie appears, the knight in shining steel. He bashes off his door, and after some jockeying for position grabs her from the (now flaming) car. Immediate danger averted, he spirits her off to a convenient junkyard, where he will reveal to her his dark past (and thus his drive for vengeance), patch up her wounds, convince her to help him catch the guy, and find a new door for his car. Before that, though, we are treated to a ("Roger"-free, oddly) CB conversation, with closeups of an LED bar grafted onto an old CB radio to give some sort of visual effect to the scene.

Why they replaced the needle gauge that usually is there is beyond me, other than to punch up the visuals. Over ninety percent of the viewers wouldn't notice, and those who did probably wouldn't care. I'm not entirely certain that I care.

So some more stuff happens. In the sensitive moments in the junkyard office we learn that Molly "can't drive" because of the accident that killed her family.

Any time you hear an "I can't" or "I've never" or "I won't" or "I don't" in these movies it seems that the speaker "can" or "will" do what needs to be done, and this one is no different. It's a cliché, but apparently it works because this was the second movie in as many years to use that idea (the other was the dreadful remake of Taxi with Queen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon).

In that sequence we also learn that Rennie didn't just watch his wife get hit. He hopped into his Mercedes and chased down the killer Caddy in another artfully action-packed and effects-laden chase culminating in him t-boning the killer, totaling both cars and our antagonist. Rennie spent three years in prison and Fargo (somewhere along the line we learned his name) got 18 months in the hospital and re-hab being built into the near-cyborg that now roams the roads.

All of this of course builds to the tense final confrontation, but not until after Rennie sways officer Will to join him on his vigilante quest. Near the end he (and the camera) looks up to reveal an engine hoist or something else cross-shaped, and one can but wonder if he has any Christ-figure parallels in this movie as well.

Jesus always struck me as a Mopar fan, you know.

I really enjoyed watching Highwaymen. It's silly, and high-concept, and implausible, but it takes everything at face value and runs with it full throttle. Sure, director Harmon and his cast probably are capable of much, much more, but for what it is, it does well enough. Car chase fans and cheesy thriller buffs alike should give this a watch, if for no other reason to see something of a new take on age-old conventions.

* When first I saw the trailer for this, I thought it was a joke. I can't now recall the DVD that had the trailer for this, but it was a spoof or at least a comedy, and it didn't seem out of place on the disc to have absurd trailers for a fake film or two. This one just seemed so unreal, so contrived that it couldn't be real: In a world gone mad, two men speed around in 70s muscle cars, linked by killings and one woman who might just be the key to bringing the murderous streak to an end.

Well, it turned out that the film did in fact exist, and moreover to be available from my library. I reserved it, and, well, you can figure out the rest. Seeing as it was, in fact, really a movie, it has an AMG synopsis fraught with, well, one error. Matthew Tobey writes:

The culprit, it seems, had his heart broken by a woman long ago and now copes with his grief by hunting down and killing random women, using his green 1972 Cadillac El Dorado as his weapon.

As Caviezel's character explains, the homicidal maniac was the son of an insurance claims investigator who had been exposed at early age to gruesome accident photos. Growing up he transitioned from collecting the gory sights to staging them himself. The reason he only kills women is never explained. Likewise the reason he apparently always drives Cadillacs, as seen near the end in one or two shots of the dead cars in front of his motel. Some things, I guess, we were just not meant to know**.

** And some things aren't known by other people too. The subtitle authors for the DVD apparently weren't aware of what a Hemi was, nor did they have the script to work from, as Rennie's 'Cuda is described as "heavy" and not "Hemi" for the exceptionally large and powerful hemispherical-headed engine. "Heavy" indeed.

It has come to my attention that the phrase "Suffice it to say," has become the new "Actually..."*.

Well, I actually just made that up. But I am seeing that phrase all over the place, and I don't recall encountering it so much in the recent past.

One movie in which I do not recall hearing the phrase is the intelligently written and enjoyable Life aquatic with Steve Zissou. I just watched it and rather liked it, I'd say.

I'd been looking forward to seeing it, despite not knowing much about it (and having missed it in the theaters altogether, I believe). My ignorance was somewhat self-imposed, as I wanted to have as fresh an experience of watching this as possible. I skipped over all but the most vague of reviews and ignored specifics from the few people who told me they'd seen it. The plot somehow still was revealed to me: There's this oceanographer, and this shark who eats his partner. It's a revenge story... but that's a rather broad outline, into which Wes Anderson added his laid-back story, set it in an imagined world where oceanographers are superstars, and populated it with his standard players (and a few notable additions). The production design merits a special mention, at least for the (half) ship with its obviously fake set construction and 'tricky camera moves'. The fact that these people inhabit such a fake environment somehow makes it all the more real, in a way I cannot explain. It's not the Max Fischer Players Do Cousteau, but I could see that used as a catchy pull quote or pitch line.

The reviews I read (about) were rather mixed. Some writers felt that Anderson had lost his edge, that intimate quirkiness that emanates through Bottle rocket through the Royal Tenenbaums, and that by embracing action sequences, albeit in an artificially static fashion, he was selling out or cashing in or falling prey to some other cliché that so easily pours forth from the reviewer's scornful pen.

Others thought it was too deep for a mainstream film (two water puns!), Anderson notwithstanding, and the artificiality and extreme characterization would be too imaginative and off-kilter for audiences to handle, since they'd undoubtedly be seeking shallower fare (three!).

This being a revenge picture, more or less, one can but wonder how one of Hollywood's staple action heroes might approach it. Charles Bronson, naturally, would be my first choice.

But this isn't an action movie. It's a character piece that just happens to have explosions and gunfights and other bits of excitement. Zissou isn't a man of action, he's just some guy who is still playing at his childhood ambitions after many a decade, but slowly realizing maybe he's just going through the motions.

It's ambitious and whimsical, neither at the expense of the other. The little touches (snappy dialogue, imaginative stop-motion sea-life) don't distract from the bigger picture. It's all worth seeing, and I look forward to watching it again.

* However I doubt that I will fall prey to this as I did to "Actually", since "Suffice it to say" is at the same time cumbersome and stuffy. It's the sort of think I think people throw in to sound more sophisticated, or to cover for a lack of proper transitions or background information. This is not to say that I don't succumb to those sorts of things; I'm just not going to use that phrase. Er, anymore.**
** Of course I always omitted the "it" anyway. Silly me.

I didn't really enjoy Bang the drum slowly. It's a forgotten baseball movie starring Michael Moriarty* and an almost unrecognizable (in appearance and demeanor) Robert De Niro.

It's supposed to be a story about friendship, about sticking up for the underdog and integrity (except when conning easy marks at cards), and selling life insurance. It is, in fact, a story about friendship and sticking up for the underdog and all the rest, but it's not a great one.

Maybe I'm just not a baseball movie fan.

I enjoyed the original Longest yard far more when I watched that last month than this. Even though they are less than two years apart, the difference between the films extends far beyond the difference between baseball and football. But that latter distinction does matter: baseball is the sport of intellectuals, and football, the lunkheads.

Odd, then, which one is our supposed national pastime, isn't it?

But back to the movies. Drum is apparently rather faithfully adapted from a 1956 novel of the same name.

I don't know the statistic off hand, nor do I care to check it, but if I were to guess I'd say the baseball novels outnumber the football ones by, oh, a hundred to one.

Of course I'm making all of this up; these are the conclusions of a fan of neither sport. To my knowledge I've never read either sport's fiction.

So anyway, Drum is more cerebral. It's about friendship, and bonding, and so on. Several sequences feel drawn out and tedious, as though they'd be hilarious on paper but are barely carried by the strong acting on screen. When the coach grills our protagonist about what he may or may not have been doing in Minnesota, repeatedly, the stories he concocts get more convoluted and complicated (but more or less corroborated) but in a fashion much better suited to a medium in which one is able to flip back to re-check the story from before.

As an aside, I don't believe that Abbott & Costello ever approached the subject of football. The Monty Python guys eschewed both football and baseball, sticking to their own 'football'.

I'm rambling. The baseball movie rambles. So much so that it needs a narrator to keep things moving.

The closest football movies get to having voiceover narration is the announcers during the games. But I'm talking about baseball, and Bang the drum slowly. To be sure, it's better than Bull Durham (about which I have written before), but that's like choosing between two of those reality shows where they follow schlubs on embarrassing dates.

* It wasn't until well after finishing watching this that I realized why Michael looked so familiar. He was the prosecutor for early seasons of L.A. Law, but his character was so different (from ballplayer to lawyer) that without help I would likely never had made the connection.

What is odd about this, of course, is that De Niro's never really played anything similar to a ballplayer either (except perhaps his boxer in Raging bull) and doesn't seem to know how to do it, distractingly so. He's just not a convincing ballplayer.

War is hell. That's really all I can say, having finally seen all of HBO's Band of brothers. It's quite a powerful series, following the U.S. Army's Easy company from their training before Normandy up to V-E day, done in a very visceral style. You know, like the beginning quarter of Saving Private Ryan, but much, much longer.

As a series, though, Band falters more than once. Having been spread over parts, each with a different director and other inconsistencies (a couple had a DVD chapter stop right after the opening credits; most didn't) with the styles of visuals and narration, it was more distracting than it should have been. Switching the focus from soldier to soldier is one thing, and not so bad at that, but constantly changing the look and feel of the show meant I needed to get used to each episode's style all over again, every time. In this regard it very much reminded me of From the Earth to the Moon, another HBO (mini-) series*. That show, of course, was much less violent.

Band may be violent, but it never seems inauthentic. The battlefield scenes are almost too vivid (complete with the currently-in-vogue shaky camera motion) and realistic. I've never been in a war and now, more than ever, do I know that I'd never want to be in one either. War is hell. I don't know what more to say about it. I'm not so dedicated to my country, nor so dead-set against some evil to take up arms and fight and potentially lose my life. I suppose I owe my respect to those who do (and for that matter, my freedom and livelihood). So thank you all, but can't we all just get along?

* Also produced by Tom Hanks, oddly enough. His son Colin didn't ever appear in that, to my recollection, and fortunately so. That kid just doesn't have his dad's acting ability, yet.

Another day, another mistaken All Movie Guide synopsis.

This time it's for the little-known 1954 Charlton Heston love story/distaster movie The naked jungle.

The movie's an interesting combination of a watered-down love story and a watered-down disaster movie; ironically it ends with everything being flooded*. Charlton Heston stars as an iron-willed cocoa bean plantation owner deep in the jungle of South America, and Eleanor Parker as the mail order bride who turns out to be much more than he can handle, being a thirtysomething virgin.

Anyway, to the AMG mistake du jour. In their synopsis, 'written' by Hal Erickson, it mentions this:

Charlton Heston plays South American plantation owner Christopher Leiningen, who spends most of the film preparing for the hellish onslaught of deadly soldier ants.

I was watching the time display. It wasn't until forty eight minutes (perhaps forty eight and a half, even) had passed that the whole Marabunta issue is broached. The birds that pique the Commissioner's (and his government's) interest are seen at the beginning and mentioned once, but for the subsequent 45 minutes there follows nothing but the love story plot. How this can be taken then for 'most' is rather a stretch of the word, in my opinion, when taken into consideration that the movie clocks in at ninety five minutes. You might be able to call forty seven of ninety five half, except that even once he is warned of the approaching hordes, he still goes about antagonizing his wife and so forth. Had I paid closer attention I probably would have only found maybe twenty minutes of 'preparing', and maybe another ten of truly 'hellish onslaught'. But hey, at the end of the day Hal Erickson probably gets paid, and I'm left to watch movies and wonder if protracted speeches in them about the relentlessness and organization of soldier ants as a fearsome enemy in a movie from the fifties is meant to be some sort of jab at communism or not.

In fact it reminded me of a MacGyver episode I watched once, but only until the special effects really kicked in and the real ants (and the animated ones) showed up. You see, in that episode, the producers couldn't procure actual ants, 'soldier' or otherwise, and were forced to reveal the attacking hordes solely in scenes of stock footage. One time Jungle was too obviously showing stock footage, unless Charlton's binoculars were somehow able to filter color to black and white. For all I know the MacGyver footage was taken from this film. It wouldn't surprise me.

I don't think I'll inform AMG of their mistake this time. I have yet to see acknowledgement of my other attemps to correct them, so for now, I'll just rest on my, well, whatever it is that people who point out trivial mistakes and poor semantics rest on.

* i.e. watered down.