I'm back from the Northern Territory.And though I would love to regale you with details from my trip, including the number of crocodiles and wallabies seen, I've got plenty of things to catch up on (including more than 400 emails) so I'm going to speed through a recap as quickly as I can.
I should also note that because I was away when it happened, I have been pretty disconnected from the tragedy in Houston. I feel like I should make some mention of it on my blog, but to this point I know only the vaguest of details. My apologies for concentrating on film at at time like this, but it's the only thing that's happened from the last eight days that I even know about.
My heart sank when I boarded our plane for the 4+ hour flight last Saturday and saw no TV screens in the backs of the seats. Shameful as it is to admit, one of my favorite things about going on trips is the chance to watch movies on the plane. A minor detail in the grand scheme of a vacation, of course, but it's my chance to catch up on movies I would otherwise not make time for, and I do cherish it.
But all was not lost. Virgin had a system for allowing its passengers to access in-flight entertainment, only it relied on our own devices.
This may not be new to you, but it was to me. You download their in-flight entertainment app (thank goodness I was planning on using a device with its own data plan to allow the download), and then can access a series of movies, TV shows, music, books and games during the flight, using WiFi. It wouldn't allow access to the internet, as I discovered when I tried to check in on my baseball scores, but my choice of a good 20 to 30 movies was plenty good for me. Going in Style, the heist movie starring three Oscar winners over age 80, was my choice.
The system worked surprisingly well. I guess the only drawbacks were that it put a premium on our devices -- I had to let my son borrow my phone for about 30 minutes on the way back, meaning I couldn't watch anything during that time -- and that the screen is smaller than it would be with the seat-back option. Also, if you got out of the app it didn't remember where you had paused the movie, but fast-forwarding was easy and just involved advancing the scroll bar with your thumb.
As for Going in Style, in which Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine and Alan Arkin rob a bank, it was pretty much the perfect "airplane movie." It might not be that much of a movie without its stars, but the stars really sell the material, and in truth, the material is pretty good too. A minor pleasure. Who knew Zach Braff could make a good "director for hire" film?
There's a repeated line in the movie about it being the duty of a culture to care for its elders, and I think that's the duty of a cinematic culture as well. This may not be the movie any of these guys would have made in their heyday -- Arkin, maybe -- but for octogenarians who are all still sharp at their craft, it's a pretty darn good option. Just honoring their amazing legacies would be reason enough to see this movie. (The movie also features Ann-Margret, still doing quite well at 76, and Christopher Lloyd in a smaller role. Lloyd's the youngest of the men at 78, but the most advanced in terms of losing his faculties. It seems hard to believe that Lloyd was only a few years older than I am when he made Back to the Future. How could that be?)
And now, quick comments on the other movies I watched while I was away:
Allied
I meant to watch this in the week before I left, but on the night before I left I remembered I hadn't. Why that was important was that the 30-day rental window on iTunes -- I'd picked it up as a weekly 99 cent rental -- was set to expire while I was gone. So I jammed it on my ipod and brought it with me, to watch on a tiny, cracked screen.
Not the way to watch an epic Robert Zemeckis movie with the same scope and thematic territory as Casablanca, but what are you going to do.
I started the movie on a hot and lazy Sunday afternoon in our glamping tent at the wilderness lodge where we were staying, while my son napped on the bed next to me. The heat and the atmosphere put me a bit in mind of the film's Sahara setting.
I've been a consistent fan of Zemeckis throughout -- you may remember my affection for his last film, The Walk -- but Allied was only of minimal interest to me. There are some great scenes and a very good performance from Marion Cotillard, but the end was less than the sum of its parts. I guess that's why the film didn't make much of a splash last year despite its cast (Brad Pitt is the other star), budget and subject matter.
Pitt was part of my problem. Interestingly, this is another film that finds him playing the role of an American (actually Canadian I guess) who goes to a party where he's trying to convince Nazis he's European. In Inglourious Basterds, he was pretending to be Italian, with no success; here, he's pretending to be French, with more success I guess as no one discovers his ruse. In both instances, though, the failure to be totally convincing feels like a bit of a metaphor for Pitt's owning acting style. Although he can be pretty good, he's never quite the equal of the actors he's paired with, which was again the case with Cotillard.
Vampire's Kiss
This was one of two movies I downloaded, somewhat randomly, using my app for our Australian streaming service, Stan. I came across it Friday night before leaving and set it to download, which took much longer than it should have. The second one downloaded much more quickly using the free WiFi at the wilderness lodge, which you would figure would be of a lower quality and strength than my home internet. That was Southpaw, and it didn't end up getting watched. Vampire's Kiss got watched in our room at the place we stayed at Kakadu National Park for the second half of the trip, over Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.
I'd known this was an example of earlier Nic Cage, and in fact had heard it recommended recently on a podcast as one of his Nicolas Cagiest performances. But nothing could have really prepared me for what Cage does in this film as he believes he's turning into a vampire.
Simply put, I loved this. Cage goes Full Cage and then some, both in his bizarre obsession with finding a lost book publishing contract and how he punishes his assistance (Maria Conchita Alonso) for failing to find it, and with the tics he develops on the road to vampirism. You can find a dozen clips on YouTube, I'm sure, and that would serve you much better than me trying to describe them. It's a totally gonzo performance but it does not feel self-indulgent either. Or if so, self-indulgent in ways for which we should all be incredibly grateful.
American Made
Watched this on the final night of the trip, in the Northern Territory capital of Darwin, where we stayed one night in order to catch a 7:20 a.m. flight back to Melbourne Saturday morning. The original plan had called for me to do something far more interesting, going to a so-called deckchair cinema on the Darwin waterfront. The photos looked gorgeous, and the film would have been Ali's Wedding. But after a lot of walking that afternoon and then splashing about in a wave pool, I decided that the movie theater two blocks from our hotel held more appeal for me. The experience alone of watching a movie in another city is what I like. The quality of that experience is less important.
And so it was that I saw a 9 o'clock showing of the newest Tom Cruise movie, spending $35 on a ticket, a Coke and a bag of Skittles because (probably needless to say) my critics card wouldn't have worked at this theater.
It was not the type of money I wanted to spend on a movie like this. I'll have a review of it linked to the right in a day or two, but for now I'll just tell you that it's a bit of a Goodfellas knockoff in its narrative style, except that we never get a sense of what motivates Cruise's character to run guns and cocaine and other cargo to South America from the southern U.S., nor anything else about his character. In a movie that spends so much time with its main character, we need to care about or at least understand him, and I just didn't.
Paris Can Wait
My second use of the Virgin in-flight entertainment system on our trip home was not as successful as the first, but not for any technical reasons. A good airplane movie should make the time pass, but Paris Can Wait made it slow down to a crawl.
It's directed by Eleanor Coppola, Francis Ford's wife of 54 years, who directed the great (or so I'm told) documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. She's making her first feature film at age 81. And she's chosen to make a wish fulfillment travelogue fantasy for disenchanted housewives.
The story involves an actress who has made a career of playing disenchanted housewife types, Diane Lane, who here plays the disenchanted wife of a hotshot movie producer played (briefly) by Alec Baldwin. He's had to delay his trip to Paris with her in order to go save a floundering movie shoot in Istanbul, and sent her on a road trip to Paris through the French countryside with his business partner Jacques (Arnaud Viard).
Simply but, this was an absolute bore. We watch two rich and privileged people eat their way through France while displaying the worst stereotypes of both French and Americans. Will they? Won't they? Who cares? It's like the most boring romance novel adapted to a torturously slow 90 minutes, with no stakes and no interesting characters to follow.
Sorry, Eleanor, I guess you should stick to documentaries.
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