Wish we'd seen this a month ago

Last night my wife and I watched Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. Of all the movies we've never seen, we considered this to be the most pressing.

Actually, we'd seen the original in the theater as a necessary break from a frantic Christmas season back east, and found it quite charming as the movie went on -- the rare case of a movie that got better as it progressed in the act structure. We'd had Battle of the Smithsonian on our radar as a good candidate for some mindless fun when our minds needed it. I don't know that our minds needed it especially last night, but I borrowed it from the library on Friday, so circumstance put it in our path.

But I really wish we'd watched it sometime in early June.

See, in mid June, we visited the Smithsonian. That's right, we allotted about two hours on our last day, after which we needed to leave for the airport, to take in the whole Smithsonian.

I will pause for a second while you finish laughing.

See, the way the Smithsonian is referred to, it makes it sounds like it's one museum. One building that has everything from Fonzie's jacket to dinosaur bones. Definitely a museum worth checking out if you're in D.C., right?

Ha. "The" Smithsonian is actually 19 separate museums, a fact we would have realized if we'd seen Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian before our trip to D.C. At about the 15-minute mark of the movie, it's spelled out in no uncertain terms. And then of course becomes a major part of the narrative.

Now, I knew there were a lot of museums in D.C. This was on my radar from when I was a child, when I visited a number of them, and my family always made a big deal out of the fact that they were free. (They're not free anymore, but we happened to be there on a "Free Tuesday," so we lucked out -- which also explains why the place was packed.) But I thought one of them was called The Smithsonian, and the rest were their own other things. And in fact, my delusion lasted all the way up until we arrived, since our GPS also gave us a single address for "The Smithsonian."

It was only once we'd gotten there, circled for awhile and then shelled out a ridiculous amount for parking (something like $18) that we realized "The" Smithsonian was a massive campus of buildings stretched down the mall. Our parking fiasco had already eaten up a good 45 minutes, leaving us only about 90 minutes to consume the entirety of this place, to somehow find Fonzie's jacket.

My wife's interest was in the Natural History portion of the Smithsonian, since that's where Bones works. She watches Bones, and the forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel) has an office on campus. (I guess the true massive scale of the Smithsonian was not made clear by the TV show either.) So that's where we made a bee-line.

And actually saw a decent amount of stuff in what had basically become a condensed hour. We saw the Hope Diamond and a statue from Easter Island and some spiders and some animal skeletons. However, the real coup was stumbling across an exhibit devoted specifically to forensic anthropology. It was a pretty interesting exhibit, tracing the lives and deaths of the earliest settlers of the Chesapeake Bay by where their bones were found. There was even a mockup forensic lab to study bones. I'd say we got our money's worth, especially since it was free.

Fonzie's jacket will have to wait for next trip.

As for the movie? It was cute. Neither Night at the Museum is great, and I think I like the first one slightly better, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that I laughed a number of times during this film. The character overload didn't bother me quite as much as I expected it to, and there were some interesting visual things done here, such as the characters jumping into moving paintings, and the statue of Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial (which we spent the first part of our Smithsonian day seeing) coming to life in a way that looked pretty darn good. Oh, and a giant octopus.

So what's next for Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) and his crew -- the Louvre?

Already been there, at least.

When documentaries aren't enough

When thinking of a fiction filmmaker, we tend to think of either someone who has a specific artistic vision, or someone who's trying to make a buck.

It's a bit different with documentarians. Documentarians have a purpose.

Sure, there are plenty of purpose-driven directors of fiction films. But we can never fully know what their motivations are. Wanting to be rich and famous might be one of them.

Now, we know that's not why people get into documentary filmmaking, or if it is the reason, then they're deluding themselves -- a quality that tends to fly in the face of being a good documentarian. The reason people become documentarians is that they have a story to tell, or corruption to uncover. They want to stand up for the oppressed and take down the giants. They want to save the world.

Seth Gordon may not have been saving the world with 2007's The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. But it's for damn sure he wasn't saving the world with Four Christmases, his first studio feature the next year. And no matter how good Horrible Bosses may be -- it's got a promising cast, that's for sure -- he won't be saving the world here either.

Come on, Seth. I thought you were supposed to be "enlightened." I thought you were supposed to not need the glitz and glamor of Hollywood. In fact, I thought you were supposed to shun it.

I don't know why I feel disappointed that Seth Gordon wanted to be "more" than a documentarian. If I were trying to be a filmmaker myself, I'd want to make fiction films. Why should I fault him for getting his foot in the door with one of my favorite documentaries of the past decade, then bolting for the greener pastures and paychecks of Hollywood as soon as the opportunity presented itself? Even if his debut feature was such inferior schlock? Maybe he always wanted to be a fiction filmmaker, and the documentary was the exception.

But I do. I do feel disappointed.

I guess it's the same way you feel disappointed when a public defender starts chasing ambulances. When a crusading journalist takes a cushy PR job. We expect documentarians to be serving a higher purpose than just creating entertainment. It may not be a purpose we ourselves want, but it's an honorable purpose that the world needs.

Of course, there are all kinds of documentarians. Some really are not serving a higher purpose. Seth Gordon made a movie about two grown men competing for the high score in Donkey Kong. It wasn't about human rights violations or a corporate scandal. It was about men seeking a certain type of personal transcendence by moving a joystick better than anyone else. I'd probably be much more disappointed if someone like Alex Gibney directed Four Christmases and then Horrible Bosses. For Gordon, it's not such a big transition.

But I'm still disappointed.

I think part of that has to do with the fact that I just pieced it together that Gordon directed both King of Kong and Four Christmases, so I'm still stinging from that realization. He also played a role in the multi-director effort Freakonomics, which I saw last month and wrote about here, and in looking at his credits at that time, I made the discovery: The same Seth Gordon who directed King of Kong directed Four Christmases. I loved the first and loathed the second, so this was like a kick in the stomach. It felt beneath him. It felt like he traded in quirky insight into human behavior for a rancid Christmas comedy in which the supposed funny parts involved Jon Favreau giving Vince Vaughn noogies and wedgies.

And I think that's really what gets at the oddness of the transition from documentarian to studio hack: It's not even the same skill set. Even if someone makes the greatest documentary you've ever seen, does that then mean they're capable of getting big Hollywood stars to emote? In the case of Four Christmases, the answer was "no."

Take Michael Moore, perhaps the most famous/notorious documentarian working today. As pure as we seem to think his documentary instincts are -- even if he bends the rules in well-documented ways -- Moore too was lured by the temptations of fiction filmmaking. Like Gordon, he had one wildly successful documentary (Roger & Me) and followed that up with his fiction film debut, the satirical Canadian Bacon, in which the U.S. and Canada come to the brink of war. The film was a massive failure and sent Moore scampering back into the documentary world, where he made a name for himself as the polarizing figure he is today. (And, has made a buck or two along the way as well.)

I haven't seen Canadian Bacon, but I'm guessing that the reason it didn't work is that Moore is not good at making fiction films. He makes documentaries, and satisfies his fix for fiction by inserting staged or fictitious elements into them. (Well, maybe that's taking it a bit far -- but he certainly doesn't take the stand-back-and-watch approach taken by most documentarians.) In any case, he's found his niche and it's working for him.

So especially if Horrible Bosses is a flop, it's time for Seth Gordon to scamper back to documentaries. He may have made only one, but it was a darn good one, and a person who can make one good documentary can make two, or three, or four.

There are plenty of other people who can make bad studio comedies.

Girl immersion

It had always been my intention to read Stieg Larsson's novels about Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist. You may have heard of them: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest.

Then after I was done, I'd watch the Swedish movies based on Larsson's wildly popular novels.

I don't normally prioritize such things. If I did, I'd probably watch a lot fewer adaptations. But with these novels, for some reason, I felt it was important. Maybe that's because the novels are considered more of a phenomenon than the movies, and if I wanted to experience the story in its truest form, I should go into the novels fresh.

But then I had to be honest with myself. I'm a really, really slow reader. Not only that, but I barely budget the time for it. It's been so bad that the last new novel I started was almost a year ago, when World War Z was supposed to be my 2010 summer reading. I just couldn't get it into it, but stubbornly refused to abandon it. Finally this past April I allowed myself to move on, to read an old favorite (Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye) to jump start that part of me that likes to read. I read about 200 pages of it on vacation in Mexico ... and about 15 in the 2.5 months since I've been back.

So even if I'd started Larsson's novels when I first got the urge, it's possible all three American remakes of these movies would be released before I'd finished reading.

So I came to the realization that I'm going to be the guy who sees the movies and understands the phenomenon based on that only. Oh well. That's just who I am.

Which cleared the way for us to have a themed watching weekend this past weekend. That's right, we watched The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo on Friday night, The Girl Who Played With Fire on Saturday night and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest on Sunday, thanks to all three being available for streaming on Netflix. And each night prepared a Swedish dinner to go along with the theme.

So instead of honoring the United States on 4th of July weekend, we honored Sweden, even kicking things off on Thursday night with our screening of the Swedish film Together.

The first time we'd used this template was for our Godfather weekend, back in the summer of 2008. On Friday night, we watched The Godfather and my wife made a pasta dinner. On Saturday night, we watched The Godfather Part II and I made a pasta dinner. Then on Sunday night, we ordered pizza, which turned out to be an appropriate level of respect for the vastly inferior Godfather III.

In that case we'd both seen the first Godfather but none of the others. This time, neither of us had seen any of the movies, though my wife did read all three novels. That background provided an interesting contrast for how we might receive the movies.

First let me tell you what we ate. Friday night, since we'd both been working that day, we decided to keep it simple. I stocked up on a trip to the Ikea grocery on Thursday, and that night we had their famous meatballs in their signature gravy, with mashed potatoes on the side. Scrumptious. I was amazed at how well their mashed potatoes cooked up in the microwave. For desert we had Frodinge cakes with raspberry filling and marzipan topping, seen here. They were even better.

Saturday was supposed to be the day I ventured into genuine Swedish cooking, making something both authentic and tasty from scratch. I'd settled on something called Swedish Chanterelle Mushroom Pate. We agreed that the ingredients sounded good, and it was decided. But my trip to the grocery foiled us. I figured I wouldn't find chanterelle mushrooms, and was prepared to accept a substitute. I felt the same about shallots, hoping that scallions could take their place. But when I couldn't find ground pork, and asked my wife if we could just grind pork cutlets in our food processor, she made the wise suggestion that this recipe just wasn't meant to be. So we shifted our planned Sunday night dinner to Saturday night: Smoked salmon and cream cheese on toast with a salad.

Saturday may have been noteworthy for a different thing we did not eat: herring in mustard sauce. I'd procured a jar from Ikea and we intended to eat it on something called Skorpor Fullkorn, which is a pretty flavorless crusty oat bread, at happy hour time. However, I could only stomach a single slice, at which point we threw out the herring sauce without my wife even trying it. Hey, there's a reason herring is not more popular. At least the Swedish cheese I'd picked up livened up the Skorpor Fullkorn.

We also had our only Swedish themed drink on Saturday night, when my wife made a vodka drink with lingonberry syrup over crushed ice. She flavored it with lime and ginger and it was delicious. Our desert was also good, a Swedish chocolate almond cake, but it could not live up to the standard set by the Frodinge cake from the night before.

I determined not to let the whole weekend go without preparing a Swedish meal from scratch, but we cheated a bit on Sunday night. Wanting to use up some leftover ingredients, we made something called Pasta Med Ost Och Skinka, which just translates as "Pasta with Smoked Ham and Cheese." It ended up seeming more Italian than Swedish, but we got it from an online Swedish cookbook, so it counts. We ate it with garlic toast and the whole meal was pretty yummy. And for desert we relished the remaining two Frodinge cakes.

To close out our consumption of Swedish foods, we had Swedish pancakes with lingonberry preserves on Monday morning. Man, were they good. They were like something you'd get from a creperie, and a good one at that.

Oh, I suppose you'd like to know what I thought of the movies. Warning, thar be spoilers ahead.

First off, since there were three books before Larsson died, that made me naturally think "trilogy." I now know that perhaps there were other Lisbeth Salander adventures planned, and possibly even a fourth unpublished manuscript. Knowing that might have changed my expectations going in. As they were, my expectations were that events set up early in Dragon Tattoo might not fully pay off until the end of Hornets' Nest. As those of you who read the books or saw the movies will know, it doesn't exactly work that way. The second and third stories have a lot to do with each other, but the first has little to do with either of the others. I guess that was sort of a disappointing realization as I went on in the films, because the first story is the most interesting in terms of a traditional mystery, where Salander plays the role I expected of her most (a hacker investigating things that might get her into trouble). In the second and third movies, she's either on the run or already captured, and I felt like neither of these is the best use of her as a character.

Overall I found the films to be more like extended procedural television programs than real movies. However, I wouldn't call this a criticism, as I was interested the whole time. I guess I say this because they generally have a small amount of action and a large amount of talking, meaning they were easy to complete under shorter production schedules -- though I still don't know how all three movies came out in Sweden in the year 2009. That seems nearly impossible.

As with most people, I really liked Noomi Rapace as Salander and Michael Nyqvist as Blomkvist. However, I found it strange that they spend most of the series apart from each other, with Salander basically disavowing her eternal champion for the last two chapters of the series. It's consistent with the books, I'm told, but it's a curious narrative choice in any case. Each has interesting stories and each has big moments in terms of taking down the bad guys, but they interweave only a few times after the end of Dragon Tattoo. I have to conclude that this was a problem for me on some level.

During the weekend I told a friend that I thought the events of the series would be more epic than they were, but later realized that the events are more epic than I was giving them credit for. In fact, it's damn near operatic in the sense that Salander's father, Alexander Zalachenko, is trying to kill her as revenge for her trying to kill him when she was a child. (He abused her mother, you see.) Not only that, but he's doing it with the help of her heretofore unknown half-brother, a huge, hulking man with a congenital disease that prevents him from feeling pain. So I guess it's the execution that leaves things feeling less epic than they should. As I said previously, there's a lot of talking and a lot of plot development, and while most if it is interesting and some of it is easy to follow, the lack of big set pieces gives it something of a smaller scale. I guess that's what some people like about the movies. Me, I appreciated that aspect, the sense that most of the things that happened could actually happen -- with the exception of a rather unbelievable occurrence at the end of the second film. However, it did make the whole thing feel a bit less cinematic to me.

One thing I found interesting is that the movies were each over two hours long, yet I did not get bored nor check my watch. The drama is kinetic enough that it keeps you involved even though it isn't "exciting" in the traditional sense. I do have to admit that we got a later start on Sunday, and eventually I just couldn't stay awake any longer (it had already been a busy weekend). So I watched the last 24 minutes of the series over coffee the next morning.

Even though I probably liked The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo the best -- I think that's also the story readers connect to most -- I did find its twist to be somewhat strange. The investigation by Salander and Blomkvist is designed to uncover who may have murdered Harriet Vanger. Turns out, they do find a murderer in the Vanger family, even though the reason they started looking for him -- the presumption that he killed Harriet, whose body was never found -- turns out not to be the case at all. In fact, they find Harriet alive at the end, living in Australia. Does that mean there's something less valid about the clues they've been amassing through the story? It almost ends up seeming like they found a murderer by dumb luck.

A former journalist myself, I liked the series' old-school casting of a journalist as a hero. These days, it seems that members of the media are treated with great suspicion in Hollywood -- they tend to be venal villains who only want to gum up the works. Nowadays, if you want to have a character turn the establishment upside down and risk his/her own safety to find the truth, you usually cast a cop or a private eye in that role. Glad to see Larsson make Blomkvist a genuine hero whose brilliant detective work is in service of no other gain than punishing the wicked and clearing the names of the innocent.

I felt the non-Hollywood ways of these films in other ways, such as the fact that many of the cases being discussed were cold cases to an extreme degree, involving people who were now extremely old. In a story that originated in Hollywood, the Harriet Vanger disappearance would be something that happened recently. Here, it happened in 1966, more than 40 years earlier. I don't think it detracts from the story, it's just curious to note.

I shouldn't close this piece without a word or two about Noomi Rapace. I thought she did great work, reminding me of a young Gina Gershon. I loved the way she gave Salander a hard shell, but not an impenetrable one. One way to interpret this role would be to have her be some kind of badass superhero who just goes around kicking the asses of people who deserve it. In fact, maybe that's what I was expecting. Since I was familiar with the poster for Hornets' Nest, specifically Salander's hairstyle, I guess I was expecting her to have some kind of rampaging Travis Bickle moment at the end, where she goes in shooting, expecting not to come out alive. I think these movies deserve credit for being more life-sized than that, and Rapace deserves credit for bringing subtleties to her characterization that may not have been required, or that a lesser director wouldn't have asked for. There are pretty evident stylistic differences between Niels Arden Oplov (who directed the first film) and Daniel Alfredson (who directed the last two), but both directors get a consistent portrayal out of Rapace, who seems to have really thought about this character and lived the ostentatious details of her life. I'll be eager to see if Rooney Mara can do the same when David Fincher's version of Dragon Tattoo comes out in December.

Is there probably more I could say? Yeah. But have I said enough? Yeah.

Good patriotism, bad patriotism

I'm not a particularly patriotic person.

I do love living in the United States and enjoy the freedoms we have here. But I don't believe that means I have to support every initiative Americans pursue in international affairs, especially when some of them have been massively wrong-headed. "America, love it or leave it" is what the most jingoistic Americans tell us, which disregards the third option of trying to refashion America according to the ideals you can imagine for it.

But I'm not immune to patriotism either. It's kind of funny how we always think that Republicans are the ones who characterize themselves as patriots, while we Democrats are more ready and willing to admit to doubts about America's foreign policy and how we represent ourselves in the international community -- to acknowledge occasionally feeling shame on behalf of the United States. But really, isn't patriotism mostly a function of which party is in office? I feel plenty patriotic when I see that my fellow countrymen have elected Barack Obama president, and the Republicans who are committed to making him a "one-term president" (as they are fond of saying) might be considered something other than patriotic as they refuse to raise the debt ceiling, in the hopes of seeing the country derailed while a Democrat is at the wheel.

And so I didn't want to just write today about movies that make me sick to my stomach with their overt love for God and country. I also wanted to write about the movies that have really gotten to me, made me feel American pride perhaps even in spite of myself.

Before we get started, let me just lay some groundwork. I don't necessarily love all the movies in one category nor hate all those in the other -- I'm concentrating specifically on the use of patriotism in those movies. And I'm not talking about movies that make me loathe being an American, because that can be a very valid artistic goal. It's manipulative uses of patriotism vs. those that aren't.

So without further ado, here are ten examples of good American patriotism at the movies -- and ten examples that aren't nearly so good. Let's start with the bad, because that's more fun. (Also, it'll allow us to end on a positive note.)

Alphabetically:

1) An American Carol (2008, David Zucker). Appropriate that we start with a movie that deals with the 4th of July itself. An American Carol is not such much a parody, even with David Zucker in the directing chair, as a hateful screed against liberals, in which a documentarian based on Michael Moore (named Michael Malone) is trying to push through his agenda to banish Independence Day. He's the butt of the film's nominal jokes as it takes on the loose format of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Pure Republican propaganda -- really unusual for a film starring recognizable Hollywood actors (Kelsey Grammer, James Woods, Jon Voight) -- the film wears its troop love on its sleeve, including several lingering shots on lines of men in uniform. Remember, it's not the message itself, but how it's being delivered to me -- in a movie that disavows the very usefulness of documentaries and people who want to uncover corruption.

2) Armageddon (1998, Michael Bay). The film that made me think of this blog topic in the first place. There's an undercurrent of jingoism in Bay's film, as a team of blue collar workers tell each other "Gentlemen, time to save the world," with a uniquely American kind of machismo. But the thing that's supposed to really make you weep with national pride is when the jets fly over at the end, after the aforementioned world has been saved. I still hold onto this as the primary reason I don't like this film, though there are surely plenty of others.

3) Birth of a Nation (1915, D.W. Griffith). This one is almost too easy to include, but it's also from such a different time that it's almost cheating. One of the most groundbreaking films of all time is also one of the most loathsome, as the third act events you're supposed to cheer are the Ku Klux Klan coming in on horseback to vanquish the slaves. Or something like that. I'm reminded of it for this piece primarily because of its patriotic-sounding name, and in truth, Griffith does seem to be trying to get us swept up by his racist ideals for the country.

4) Delta Farce (2007, C.B. Harding). A trio of mistaken military reservists (led by Larry the Cable Guy) are accidentally dropped in Mexico, which they mistake for Iraq. Not only do the main guys have to be pretty stupid to make this mistake -- some representation of American intuitive powers -- but they actually take a can-do conservative approach when they end up with a real battle against a Mexican warlord, refusing to "cut and run" (those words are actually in the dialogue, as an attempt to echo a conservative catchphrase used to deride the values of anyone who sought to end the conflict in Iraq).

5) G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009, Stephen Sommers). It's American military types turned into a private army out to fight villains (specifically Cobra), but don't be confused by that into overlooking the message about the role of American military in world conflict. I just really dislike this movie so I saw this as an opportunity to get in another jab.

6) Independence Day (1996, Roland Emmerich). If there's a Michael Bay movie on this list there should also be a Roland Emmerich movie, and this is an obvious choice. I should have been super excited for humans (read: Americans) to defeat the alien scourge, but I remember feeling nothing but manipulated by the "This is our independence day!" speech by Bill Pullman as the American president. I also think that this movie prizes American sass as the only way to fight the aliens, typified by Will Smith shouting "Welcome to Earth!" and punching an alien in the face.

7) The Kingdom (2007, Peter Berg). While I didn't object to this movie in total, it did a hell of a job making Americans look like loose cannons and arrogant bastards in the guise of celebrating their take-no-bullshit method of solving problems. The problem in question is a green zone bombing in Saudi Arabia, and as the Americans clash with the Saudis on their method of investigating, they strut and swear and offend local culture in all the ways imaginable. An absurdly protracted firefight at the end, in which they are taking out bad Saudis to save good Saudis, doesn't do much to wipe the taste out of your mouth.

8) Man of the Year (2006, Barry Levinson). We are supposed to be filled with a rush of pride about democracy running on all cylinders when a late-night talk show host (someone like Steven Colbert) parlays a bunch of lame one-liners into getting elected for president. It would be one thing if the movie treated this topic as farce, like the Chris Rock vehicle Head of State (which is also terrible and which I considered including on this list), but it's more like ill-considered Frank Capra stuff, and Robin Williams is just annoying as hell. And then it strangely changes into a thriller.

9) The Patriot (2000, Roland Emmerich). Entry #2 for Roland Emmerich. I'm from New England and the American Revolution was something I grew up in and around, so if you really want to tap into my dormant sense of patriotism, it's through my Lexington heritage. Except if you're this movie, which includes Mel Gibson in lone vigilante mode, taking out British soldiers like an action hero, and probably the most exaggerated villain you are like to see on screen (Jason Isaacs' Colonel William Tavington), who's the caricature he is in order to leave zero doubt about our rooting interests and zero doubt that the Brits were depraved sadists.

10) Tears of the Sun (2003, Antoine Fuqua). I don't remember much about this movie except that a group of exceedingly brave Navy SEALs go into some sort of war-torn African nation, on a suicide mission to save a bunch of locals. Every American is unfailingly brave and Bruce Willis does a lot of stoical squinting. It almost felt like propaganda.

And now the good, some of which are admittedly guilty pleasures:

1) Air Force One (1997, Wolfgang Petersen). Call me crazy, but damned if I didn't feel a little rush of pride seeing "my president" (Harrison Ford in this case) defend his private jet against a bunch of Soviet terrorists. I suppose the line "Get off my plane!" could have gone in the other category as easily as this one, but there's something sort of thrilling about seeing a political figure of this stature involved in physical altercations, instead of just altercations of state. I also felt the tension in the scenes where the terrorists manhandle him and his family. What can I say, it suckered me.

2) Apollo 13 (1995, Ron Howard). Another battle against the Russians in the form of the space race, Apollo 13 is not overtly about American patriotism or even Americans at all -- it's about brave people with the grim determination to do what's needed. And they don't even have an altruistic mission, per se -- they are just trying to save themselves. However, there's something consummately American about this film, filled as it with NASA pride, and just a bunch of role players at all levels, buckling down to solve an almost impossible problem. I like to think that that's the core of what it means to be American.

3) Dave (1993, Ivan Reitman). Another movie about believing in your president, and this time it's Capra done right. Kevin Kline is wonderful in the role of a regular guy who's a doppelganger for the president, and secretly steps into the president's shoes when the president has a stroke under scandalous circumstances. It's interesting how a movie that is essentially founded on a corruption of the constitution can also have such optimism about American politics. The earnest changes Dave tries to make in the government, as well as admitting to "his" wrongdoing (it's actually the wrongdoing of his predecessor), gives us all hope about what we can accomplish within the political system -- and once he's back to his regular life, Dave intends to do it all again, this time honestly, by starting a grass roots campaign to run for local office.

4) Deep Impact (1997, Mimi Leder). A chance to bash on Armageddon again in the form of putting its rival in the "right" (not politically but morally) group of American patriotism. By couching the survival of the human race not in American terms but human terms, Morgan Freeman's President Tom Beck showcases American determination without calling attention to it, thereby making it seem all the more wise and enlightened. It's amazing that two such similar movies could be handled so differently and create such a divergent impression in us.

5) Glory (1989, Edward Zwick). An answer to Birth of a Nation 75 years later? No Civil War movie has a more profound appreciation for the stoic righteousness of the North than Glory, Edward Zwick's masterpiece (most of his other films are not even in the same ballpark). Denzel Washington and the aforementioned Freeman are both terrific, but it's the selfless sacrifices of Matthew Broderick's Robert Gould Shaw that really stick with me. Perhaps this film is just singularly effective on me because of my white guilt, but Glory reminds us that the fight to abolish slavery was in some cases taken as personally by whites, who did not specifically stand to benefit from it, as by blacks. Equality among men was what the United States was founded on, a philosophy worth dying for.

6) Red Dawn (1984, John Milius). Another guilty pleasure here, and another involving the Russians. Perhaps it's just proof that the extent to which we feel patriotism is the extent to which the enemy seems truly evil, but back in 1984, it seemed very real to me that the Russians could invade and occupy the U.S. Therefore, this group of brat packers who were hiding out and attacking, to defend our country against its occupying army, really resonated with me.

7) Saving Private Ryan (1998, Steven Spielberg). Americans again going up against impossible odds, without calling attention to themselves and just doing their duty. There are so many things Spielberg's film does right that I barely think of it as a film that caused me to feel patriotism, specifically -- perhaps it's just a sign of Spielberg's success at getting us to care about his characters that makes me feel so much pride when they achieve their mission, even if it does feel like a hollow victory to them. More than anything, there's got to be one movie in here where we get to hate Nazis, and Saving Private Ryan is a perfect movie to honor on Independence Day.

8) Swing Vote (2008, Joshua Michael Stern). I'm not sure how well this underdog movie fits the list, but I felt compelled to include it mostly to shine some light on it. You may recall that it's founded on a very unlikely scenario, that a single man in a single voting district (Kevin Costner) gets a chance to cast a vote that will determine the American presidency. The admittedly exaggerated setup works, however -- both as a chance to poke mild fun at the lengths to which politicians will go for victory, but ultimately, to focus attention on the idea that every vote counts. Americans' civic duty to vote is always a valuable lesson, and Swing Vote goes about this lesson the right way -- in addition to being pretty funny in spots.

9) Three Kings (1999, David O. Russell). Another odd choice here, as this film deals primarily with opportunistic soldiers in Iraq who want to steal some gold. However, I'm including it a) because it's really good, and b) because Russell gives his characters souls as the narrative moves on, as they make the decision to become involved rather than walk away when innocent Iraqis are killed by Saddam Hussein's goons. I don't suppose it's anything outside the realm of typical hero stuff, where the protagonists have to do the right thing in order for us to root for them. But it doesn't change the fact that I feel a rush of pride and emotion during that scene where the Iraqi played by Cliff Curtis, along with his group of refugees who have just been led to safety, stare at the American soldiers as they're being dragged away, raising a hand to wave. This solemn gesture of gratitude speaks far more than words. Even if it's a manufactured moment out of pure fiction, the moment makes me feel that ideal America has such a hard time attaining -- actually helping a native population with its presence, rather than just complicating the situation.

10) United 93 (2006, Paul Greengrass). And we end on the other film (in addition to Armageddon) that inspired this piece. The most patriotic I have ever felt in my life was the weeks after September 11th, when I waved flags on several occasions and participated in several candlelight vigils. It was like all my sense of irony had been temporarily tucked away. The only film version of the events of 9/11 that has made me feel that way again is United 93. For most of the running time I'm just marveling over Greengrass' naturalistic recreation of the events, so naturalistic that it almost seems like a documentary (a feeling supported by the fact that some of the air traffic controllers played themselves). But the tensions of the final 20 minutes of the film truly level me, specifically when the passengers of the doomed airplane rise up to overwhelm the terrorists holding them hostage. The scene fills me with adrenaline and pride -- not specifically because these are Americans defending their country, but because they're people doing the right thing.

And that's a good summary of this piece on the whole. True patriotism comes from a pride over people doing the right thing, not over showy displays of the red, white and blue.

But people doing the right thing can be from any country, and perhaps that's why I don't consider myself a patriot per se -- I don't feel like Americans are inherently more likely to rise to the seriousness of the occasion than people elsewhere. Being American alone does not mean you are more likely to behave morally in a grave situation.

But because I'm an American, I do have a bias toward seeing Americans doing the right thing. It's like when I hear that the star of my hometown sports team has done something charitable -- I believe it reflects on the team, and likewise, on me, even if it's just his own individual act of goodness, the kind of which any human is capable.

So on this 4th of July, let's just all try to be good humans. It's probably the most patriotic thing we can do.

And, it will reflect well on our team.

Reconsidering the theatrical imperative

There, did I get your attention with my highfalutin, graduate-thesis title? Hope so.

Okay, on with the regular post.

It was pretty unlikely that I'd see Lukas Moodysson's Together even once, let alone twice. Yet last night it became the 429th movie I've seen more than once.

I owe both viewings to a random decision to see it in the theater ten years ago, in the middle of a weekday afternoon. Making it possibly my most unlikely theater-going experience ever.

I wish the idea of seeing a small Swedish film about life on a commune in the mid-1970s in the theater didn't seem so, well, foreign to me. But it's come to be so.

However, let's step back a little bit and consider the conditions under which I saw Together, known as Tilsammans in Sweden.

It was the summer of 2001, and I had only just moved to Los Angeles. Late summer, I guess, since I see that the U.S. release date of Together was August 24th. I was trying to earn my living exclusively as a critic back then, and had no job keeping me pinned to a desk during the day. That period of my life, with too much freedom and not enough pay, lasted only the first year I lived here. But during that year, I really could see a movie whenever, wherever I wanted.

The "wherever" part is the part that really interests me when it comes to Together. It wasn't playing in many theaters, pretty obviously, it being a small Swedish film. In fact, it was probably playing in fewer theaters than it would be today, since there's been something of a boom among theaters that show independent films in Los Angeles in the last decade, perhaps exemplified most in the growth and expansion of the Arclight brand. So to see Together, I had to drive to Pasadena -- which is closer to where I lived then than to where I live today, but still pretty far. Mapquest puts the drive at about 19 miles.

Not so far to go for a film you've been hugely anticipating that might be playing in limited release, but pretty far for a film you know nothing about. That's the thing -- I can't for the life of me remember how Together was even on my radar. It must have been the recommendation of a fellow critic, either made personally to me or something I read, but I just can't remember. But even if the film had been recommended, it still takes a few other factors to go from "hmm, maybe I'll see that" to "I'm buying tickets right now." One of those factors would likely be geographical convenience. Another might be money, and since I wasn't making much of it, I didn't have much of it.

Yet there I was, on a Thursday (let's say), driving to Pasadena and plopping down for the mid-afternoon showing of a delightful little movie about human beings living in close proximity, displaying behavior that runs quite contrary to their idealized philosophies of the world. And leaving feeling absolutely charged by its qualities as a film and the sensation it left with me.

Those were simpler times.

Today, my theatrical imperative has changed entirely. Never mind the fewer opportunities to go to the theater, which go hand-in-hand with my transition from a single freelancer to a married 9-to-5er with a 10-month-old. It's the type of movies I see in the theater that have also changed.

Nowadays, one of my post important criteria for seeing a movie in the theater is whether it will look significantly worse on DVD. You could call it the Avatar Theory. I knew (or at least suspected) that Avatar might not be a great movie, but if I was going to see it at all, might as well see it right -- on an IMAX screen in 3D. Even if there were a couple dozen films I didn't see in the theater in 2009 that deserved it more than Avatar, Avatar got the slot because of the uniqueness of its visual properties.

Now, Avatar may not be such a great example, since it was a bonafide ground-breaker that changed many of the rules. The problem comes when you start to apply Avatar logic to lesser films, whether its lesser visually or lesser in terms of plot. Like, "I better see Battle: Los Angeles in the theater because it won't look as good on TV." Turns out, it didn't look that good in the theater either.

Unfortunately, however flawed it might be, this has become a guiding principle for me, something I still follow today. Sometimes it leads me to smart viewings. For example, with The Tree of Life, I caught a non-blockbuster that needed to be seen in the theater in order to be fully appreciated. But sometimes it leads me to dumb ones, such as Tron: Legacy, because I know that the shred of sensory fulfillment I get from it will only be possible on the big screen. However, in the case of Tron: Legacy, I did find 20-30 minutes of sensory enjoyment to be worth the price of admission. Which, unfortunately, only reinforces my current theatrical imperative.

But last night's viewing of Together made me realize that I don't want to spend all my movie ticket money on loud, visually bombastic films that don't deserve it. I want to reward small movies from Sweden about communists trying to live together in harmony. I want to reward movies that make me leave the theater feeling joyous and fulfilled, not half-satisfied, trying to come up with the appropriately middling terminology to describe my experience.

Because let's face it, Together would never pass my current litmus test. It has a kind of muddy look (I think that's intentional) and it's not shot in a memorable way, though it's more than competent. Practically speaking, it's the kind of movie that's just as good small-screen watching as big-screen, as my wife and I discovered last night, when I was reminded how wonderful it was and she discovered that for the first time. But no movie is really as good on the small screen as the big, and in some cases, we don't even give them that opportunity.

So I hereby commit to changing my theatrical imperative. I hereby commit to not missing out on the Togethers of this world, just because they don't have explosions or aliens. Sure, I may have to commit my next couple theater-going experiences to the likes of Harry Potter, Cowboys and Aliens and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, but I hope also to fit a Submarine, a Beginners or a Terry in there. Or something a lot less well-known, something I may not even know about right now because I'm concentrating only on seeing 20-foot-high CGI.

As for Together in particular, I feel like I should say a bit more about it, since it's currently available on Netflix streaming and you'd be well suited to seek it out. As discussed previously, it concerns about a dozen Swedes who live on a commune in 1975. The event that triggers most of the plot is when the sister of one of the commune's residents leaves her abusive husband and moves into the commune with her two kids, aged about 13 and 10. These three become our surrogates, newcomers to the daily commune existence as we are, seeing for the first time a host of colorful characters whose desire to live according to a political philosophy is outweighed only by their human foibles that make that impossible. The film simultaneously celebrates the post-hippie joy of their situation and their decidedly post-hippie tendency to argue and become frustrated with each other's shortcomings. Moodysson does a brilliant job developing his characters and ingratiating them to us, giving them all arcs that resolve in satisfactory ways, without the film ever seeming splintered or aimless. The best evidence of his humanistic approach is that even the man who hits his wife, causing her to seek refuge for herself and her kids in the commune, is essentially a sympathetic character just trying to rise above the things that make him human. The film is funny and sweet and satisfying.

And without a random Thursday afternoon trip to the movies ten years ago, I might never know this.

Getting acquainted with ... Elizabeth Taylor

This is the fifth in a monthly series designed to help me expand my library of older films, in the form of watching three films by a film personality I think I need to get to know better. I should ALERT you now that there may be SPOILERS.

Okay, so I'm a couple months late for the "Liz Taylor Appreciation Piece" on my blog. But that's because when she died, I would have had little to appreciate. In fact, it was reading a piece about her career that caused me to realize I hadn't seen many of her films -- that caused me to line her up as my choice for June. (Besides, I'd been getting acquainted with men for the first four months of this series, and I desperately needed a woman).

I guess you wouldn't exactly call her a prolific actress, and she quit at an age when she would have still been viable for awhile longer. But the fact remains that she was an icon, yet I had still only seen two films in which Elizabeth Taylor appeared: Cleopatra and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Both to honor her and as a legitimate pursuit of cinematic knowledge, I decided I should broaden my number of Taylor films from two to five.

The only problem is, watching three films by a movie personality and then trying to examine overarching themes in a month-end piece is a bit easier to do with a director than an actor or actress. After starting with James Cagney in February, I then proceeded to Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini and Alejandro Jodorowsky, each directors who had definite interests they kept returning to. I didn't realize this with Cagney, but I did with Taylor -- actors tend to play a more passive role in the process of making films, and it's not always possible to extrapolate similarities between their roles. Sometimes, three separate films are just three separate films.

Such was my experience with Taylor. But that doesn't mean I won't or can't write about her. She was, after all, an icon, undeniably talented in front of the camera, and beautiful even from when she was 12.

National Velvet (1944, Clarence Brown). Watched: Tuesday, June 14th

Which, conveniently, is where we start with Taylor. National Velvet was one of those movie titles I'd always heard, but didn't know anything about until recently. In fact, not until reading that piece after Taylor's death did I even know it was about horses.

I did know it starred Mickey Rooney in addition to Taylor, but I didn't have any idea that I would also meet a young Angela Lansbury in the movie. Her role as the older sister to Taylor's Velvet Brown is brief, but memorable for anyone who got acquainted with Lansbury much later in her career (Murder, She Wrote was about the time she came on my own radar). She seems impossibly tall in this movie.

But let's not let the erstwhile Jessica Fletcher steal the spotlight from Taylor, who truly shines. Taylor was 12 when the movie was released, meaning she was probably 11 or younger during filming. And she certainly does command the screen. As this is considered her star-making performance, it shouldn't be any great surprise that I found her captivating, especially with the benefit of hindsight. What did surprise me a little was how many of the horse-riding stunts she appeared to be doing herself. In fact, falling off a horse in this film contributed to back problems she had later in life.

The film itself is about a young girl's desire to win England's Grand National horse race with her horse, called The Pie, short for Pirate. In this instance, Hollywood doesn't do a great job making us think all these people are British, however. For one, a disconcerting number of the characters have no British accent to speak of. Isn't that the first rule about setting films in England, especially when you shoot them in California?

The greatest impression the film made on me was not Taylor, nor Rooney (who reminded me of Dana Carvey's impressions of him on Saturday Night Live), nor Lansbury, but Anne Revere, who plays Velvet's mother with a mixture of benevolence, wisdom and slyness that I won't soon forget. The characterization ran rather contrary to what I expected of a movie made in 1944, where you'd think the patriarch might receive more of the positive character traits. Instead, he's a bit of a buffoon, and Revere is grace and intelligence incarnate. Something about Revere seems so familiar to me that I have a rather hard time believe I've only seen her in a single other movie, Gentlemen's Agreement. And while I did see that movie for the first time within the past five years, it did not make a particular impression on me.

The other big takeaway from National Velvet is the climactic racing scene, which some critics have called the greatest horse racing scene ever captured on film, and I'd be hard-pressed to disagree. Especially for the time in which it was shot, with its significant technical limitations, the sequence is crackling with tension and life. It also seamlessly incorporates a number of wipeouts that seem like they should have injured either the horse or the rider, but presumably did not. No, it's not Taylor -- whose Velvet disguises herself as a man in order to ride The Pie in the race -- on the horse during these sequences, but the close-ups with her in them are also executed unobtrusively. With its grand scale and complicated staging, this sequence had to have influenced the chariot races in Ben-Hur a full 15 years later.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958, Richard Brooks). Watched: Thursday, June 16th

Fourteen years later brings us to our next Taylor movie, by which point she has matured into a full-fledged ingenue. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was of course also familiar to me, both as a movie and as a Tennessee Williams play, but I'd gotten to this point in my life without seeing any version of it. Time to change that.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof disappointed me a bit out of the gate, for a very simple reason: the title makes its way into the dialogue not ten minutes into the movie. I admit, from having seen clips of the film, that I knew the words "cat on a hot tin roof" were spoken by Taylor in the dialogue -- they would almost have to be, wouldn't they? But I always assumed they would come during some climactic part of the narrative, when we'd sat with the characters for the majority of the play, and the simile (she says she feels like a cat on a hot tin roof, so it's a simile, not a metaphor) would have this kind of cathartic impact on us, make us understand the character in a way we hadn't previously. Coming so soon in the story, there's no way it can have that effect, and I couldn't help but be disheartened by that. Williams should have chosen a line in the third act for the name of his play.

However, I did soon get into the story and the characters, which involve a drunken ex-athlete (Paul Newman), his possibly unfaithful wife (Taylor), his obnoxious brother (Jack Carson) and sister-in-law (Madeleine Sherwood) who continually churn out babies, his "Big Momma" (Judith Anderson) and his "Big Daddy" (Burl Ives), who may or may not be dying of cancer. This big dysfunctional bunch meets in the psychologically close confines of a sprawling Mississippi mansion, where they yell at each other over perceived and real slights over the course of 107 minutes.

That's an oversimplification, and is not actually meant to be a slight to this film. More, I mean it to be that I was surprised at the level of real, visceral anger and barely contained violence that was present in this film. Not that 1958 was such a genteel time for the movies, just that I found Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to be more sexually frank than I was expecting, and more scandalous as well. I guess I have this idea that a Williams play -- since they all seem to deal in some way or another with scandals and betrayals among families in the steamy south -- would be safe for the stage, but might need to be toned down a bit for the movies. The consistent honesty of emotion, the brutal refusal to pull punches (emotionally) but nearly come to blows (physically) ... it left me feeling I was witnessing a truly modern entity, when I might have been inclined to consider the 1950s a time when the movies were just trying to make us happy. (Like I say, this is a vast oversimplification of that era, but I have to be honest when I tell you what impressions I may have carried into the viewing experience.)

One thing I will say is that Cat on a Hot Tin Roof does not serve particularly well as a showcase for Taylor in a month devoted to examining her films. Although she is probably the name most associated with this movie -- she's the centerpiece on the poster -- she is only the third most important character, as Williams' play is really a showdown between Brick Pollitt (Newman) and his Big Daddy (Ives). Taylor's Maggie actually disappears for stretches of the film, as much as one can disappear while still in the same house as the rest of the characters. It's Newman's first really famous film in a movie career that began four years earlier, and he sure announces himself as a heavyweight, surly and quick-tempered and oozing magnetism. Meanwhile, the actual heavyweight, Ives, is an actor I don't think I've ever seen outside of possibly his most famous role in a considerably more benign context -- he of course voices the snowman narrator in the Rankin-Bass TV special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Having been fully aware of Newman's dramatic capabilities, I was therefore considerably more surprised to see just how much Ives can bring it. He's a gargantuan presence who lives up terrifically to the name Big Daddy and the role of the rich paterfamilias who's full of contempt. The one-on-one scenes between these two actors, which make up the bulk of the film's most memorable moments, are scintillating tutorials on acting.

When she is on screen, which is probably more than I'm giving her credit for, Taylor is certainly a captivating presence as well. I really noted how director Richard Brooks made use of her sexuality, as he lingers on a scene of her removing her stockings early on, bringing her status as a budding sex symbol to the fore. National Velvet didn't require much range from the actress, since she was just an adolescent, but Roof demonstrates the chops we'd see in future performances in which she really dominates, such as Virgina Woolf.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof also made me really think about the contrasting narrative possibilities of a play and a movie. Because most plays are limited by the logistics of set design, they involve a lot of talking about events that may have happened elsewhere, rather than showing them. This film in particular seems to be a great example of that, as the event against which most of the characters are defining themselves -- the suicide of Brick's friend Skipper -- is never dramatized, occurring off-screen at an earlier time. If Cat on a Hot Tin Roof had been conceived as a screenplay rather than a play, it's very likely that Skipper would have been played by an actor and there would have been some kind of flashback to the fateful night in which various characters think they made some crucial error that led to him killing himself. Instead, the event is discussed in the dialogue only. Without being much of a Williams scholar myself, I think this might be a common element in his other plays: conflicts deriving from events that have to be told to the audience, rather than shown. While that runs contrary to the main guiding principles of cinema, I found it to be quaint in a way I enjoyed. With only one shooting location for this film, it's stripped of distractions and can focus only on the acting and on the depth of the characters' emotions. Which are two pretty damn good reasons why we go to the movies.

The Taming of the Shrew (1967, Franco Zeffirelli). Watched: Tuesday, June 28th.

The Taming of the Shrew was not my first choice for my third Taylor film. In fact, it was not even my second choice. But Netflix was being a fickle mistress, perhaps in part because other people were also watching Taylor's films in the wake of her death.

My first choice had actually been Butterfield 8, for which Taylor won the first of her two Oscars, only two years after Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. However, Netflix listed this film as having a "Very Long Wait." Not a short wait or a long wait, but a "very long wait," meaning way past the end of June. So I shifted my attentions to 1951's A Place in the Sun, which, to remain in chronological order, I would have watched before Roof. Frustratingly, the same length wait was listed for this film as well. I knew of Shrew as Shakespeare's classic more than I knew of it as an Elizabeth Taylor classic, but opted for it as the best of the remaining options I hadn't seen. Besides, I'd never seen Shrew at all, and as a lover of Shakespeare, I felt like that was something I needed to correct.

(Only after Shrew was already on its way did I see the "Very Long Wait" notation disappear from next to Butterfield 8. Shucks. Then again, looking today, I see that it's back, so maybe I only imagined that it disappeared in the first place. Also, I just now noticed she was in Giant. Seeing that would have also allowed me to see the only James Dean movie I haven't seen.)

Anyway, maybe there was a reason I hadn't seen any dramatic performance of The Taming of the Shrew before now. I have always considered myself a lover of Shakespeare, and took a class devoted entirely to his tragedies in college. However, I have always disliked his comedies. It all started when I saw A Midsummer Night's Dream and thought it was ridiculously frivolous. My opinion didn't improve with Much Ado About Nothing, although I find that title incredibly accurate. If I had to choose one Shakespearean comedy as my reluctant favorite, it would probably be Twelfth Night. But I try to avoid them in general.

The Taming of the Shrew reminded me why. Given how sober and somber his tragedies are, I find it endlessly frustrating how much Shakespeare showed himself to be the polar opposite in his comedies, populating them with loud, boorish, drunken fools. In fact, it seems that each comedy has at least one and usually several characters whose role is, literally, The Fool, whether it's Puck in Midsummer or Feste in Twelfth Night. I'm sure there's one in Much Ado About Nothing, but I've only seen that once (as opposed to at least twice for the others), so the characters don't leap immediately to mind.

I found almost everyone to be the fool in Shrew, starting with Richard Burton as Petruchio and continuing on to almost everyone he comes into contact with -- most problematically, Taylor's Katharina. But my first impression of the film was the following: "Hey, this is the plot from 10 Things I Hate About You!" I'm kidding of course, as 10 Things is a modern-day update of Shrew, a fact I knew at the time I saw it. In the intervening decade, I'd forgotten which play 10 Things was updating. But I actually think I might have liked 10 Things better than this film/play -- and I didn't really like it very much at all.

The reason is simple: 10 Things is a battle of the sexes fought with equivalent artillery on both sides, as a movie made with modern gender politics in mind must be. Shrew is not. In fact, Shrew is unforgivably misogynistic. I was aghast at how few times Katharina scores against Petruchio. She's a one-dimensional harpie who is tamed, as the title promises, but a lot more quickly than I imagined she would be. She's subjected to numerous humiliations, most notably when her horse falls into a puddle and Petruchio leaves her to walk back to his castle, some number of miles, through the snow. He then denies her food, drink and warmth, which she direly needs. Through this process she turns into a doting wife who does everything her husband tells her. The end.

Really, it's almost that bad.

I couldn't believe it. I was in shock. I know that Shakespeare's plays are often considered to be sexist in one way or another, but usually, they make up for it with astute observations about the human condition or brilliant turns of phrase that have become some of the classic lines in English literature. Not so here. The Taming of the Shrew has the usual farcical mistaken identity elements that I hate in most of Shakespeare's comedies, which occasionally are clever despite their trying frivolity. But they aren't particularly clever here, and the fault is compounded by a significant lack of smart observations and brilliant language. In fact, The Taming of the Shrew may now be my least favorite of Shakespeare's plays.

I also found it oddly out of balance. As you know if you saw 10 Things I Hate About You, the crux of this play is that a father won't allow his younger daughter Bianca, a beauty who is sought by many suitors, to marry until his older daughter, the shrew, is married off first. This leads to considerable scheming and many of the mistaken identity stuff alluded to above. But I thought I remember the Bianca plot in 10 Things being only slightly less important than the Petruchio-Katharina plot. In the actual version of the play, it's frequently an afterthought, with most of the time being frittered away on the gross dynamics of the relationship between the reprehensible lout and his shrew. (Petruchio actually seems much more shrewish than Katharina -- her main fault seems to be that she likes to throw temper tantrums.) Not only that, but the problem of marrying her off is resolved fairly early in the narrative, leaving a lot more time for the taming process, during which the play becomes unforgivably sexist. The coup de grace is when Katharina ends the play with a speech -- a genuine speech, not a ruse with hidden agenda -- in which she extols the virtues of obedience to one's husband, whom she sees as her lord. Has Petruchio earned this? I think not.

Okay, I don't want to say too much more about this movie/play. However, I will finish with a couple things:

1) I was interested to see that Franco Zeffirelli was the director. Zeffirelli also directed the Mel Gibson Hamlet from 1990, and probably the most famous screen version of Romeo and Juliet (which I haven't seen) from 1968. He was probably cinema's most regular Shakespeare interpreter before Kenneth Branagh came along, so I was interested to see his work in Shrew. I found it generally undistinguished and very broad, although of course that is also dictated by the material.

2) Taylor herself. Thought she deserved a mention. She's pretty feisty at times and is certainly very watchable. She's also pretty sexy as she is required to show plenty of cleavage here and there. However, I found myself thinking that she was already starting to seem a bit matronly in this movie, even in her still-young mid-thirties. Perhaps that's just a relative observation based on seeing her on screen this month in films where she was significantly younger, but it took me by surprise.

3) I read after the fact that Burton and Taylor shot this film when their marriage was already on the rocks, rather publicly. In retrospect, it's interesting to see how that adds extra fire to their on-screen conflict. However, the film may be more interesting as an insight into their personal lives than it is as a work of art in its own right.

Okay, for not thinking I had very much to say about Elizabeth Taylor, I ended up writing quite a lot about these three films.

Next month: Back to directors, and back to films with a very definite theme connecting them.

A loose interpretation of Wednesday

I got an email yesterday from movietickets.com telling me to "be among the first to be transformed."

(I may actually be transformed, but I refuse to be "among the first.")

The email was to tell me that "midnight comes early" at AMC theaters, which are showing Transformers: Dark of the Moon tonight at 9 p.m.

It's become common for theaters to show midnight showings of new releases, even the ones that aren't that big a deal. In fact, I remember when the last Twilight movie came out, there were showings at some theaters starting every five minutes from midnight to 1 a.m. After that I think they did the decent thing and told everyone else to wait until the matinee showing later that afternoon. Though it's not unprecedented for movies to screen throughout the night, which is I think what happened when The Phantom Menace came out 12 years ago.

But the one governing rule used to be that you at least had to wait until the clock struck midnight to start showing the movie, so it was technically the correct release date. Well, not anymore. AMC theaters -- at least in Los Angeles but probably elsewhere -- is getting a three-hour head start on the movie's official June 29th release date. Anticipating the huge rush of fanboys who care a huge amount about the scintillating mythology of Michael Bay's mechanical monstrosities? (Note the sarcasm.)

The whole thing reminds me a little bit of the increasingly earlier opening times for retail stores on Black Friday. Back in the day, businesses trying to sell Christmas presents on the day after Thanksgiving used to wow us by opening their doors at 7 a.m., a good two hours before they normally would. Then it became 6 a.m. Then 5 a.m. Then 4 a.m. And then at that point they may have just skipped the really wee hours and jumped all the way back to midnight.

The Wednesday release date is already a head start on Friday, and the midnight show is already a head start on the Wednesday matinee. Now a 9 p.m. show? For Transformers 4, someone will have to push the envelope further and start the show at 8 p.m. (Though it occurs to me that perhaps the 9 p.m. time was chosen because it's technically midnight on the East Coast, though that logic is flimsy at best.) The really funny thing is that the June 29th release date itself seems to be a recent phenomenon, as I couldn't find a single poster on google images that displayed the June 29th release date. The one here, and all others, listed it as July 1st.

Sigh ... yeah, I might be seeing this movie. In the theater. In IMAX. I know, I know.

A friend of mine, with whom I saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (also in IMAX), recently treated me to a night at the Hollywood Bowl. My friends and I don't usually treat each other to such extravagant outings, but this was an exception -- when he invited me, I told him I had the interest in going to Star Wars in Concert, but not the money. I thought that would be the end of the discussion, but he called my bluff and offered to pay for my ticket. So I accepted, thinking I'd pay him for at least half of it. When he refused my money, telling me instead I could treat the next time we went to the movies, I hatched the plan to see the third Transformers with him in IMAX -- IMAX being closer in price (if only by a few bucks) to the Hollywood Bowl ticket than a regular movie.

At a recent birthday drinks, however, he hedged, negating that part of him that didn't care about the mass hatred of Michael Bay and just wanted to witness a spectacle. So we may see something different. (Rise of the Planet of the Apes, perhaps.)

You'd think I'd breathe a sigh of relief, that I didn't have to sit through the third Michael Bay suckfest in the theater, but what can I say. They've done a pretty good job with this trailer, and I was secretly happy to have an excuse to see this movie based on the obligation to repay my friend's favor -- which saved me the embarrassment of having to actually choose to see the movie of my own free will.

We'll see what happens. At least I know that I will not be among the first, and certainly not on the day before the movie is actually released.

Super 7 2/3

We parents, we just can't catch a break.

Last night was the first time my wife and I went to the movies together since we saw The Town in October, and it still got screwed up.

I say "it got screwed up" rather than "I screwed it up" because I swear I saw the time as 7:30 for our showing of Super 8 at the theater at the Howard Hughes Center. I swear.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

My dad and his wife are in town to see their grandson, and we knew that would be an opportunity to get out to the movies. In fact, it was during their visit last year that we went to see The Town. Other family members have visited in the meantime, but trips to the theater for my wife and I have not transpired. Maybe we didn't force them, or maybe we just didn't think the particular family members who were visiting would want to selflessly babysit while we took in a major motion picture.

But my dad and his wife specifically expressed an interest in being as helpful as they could be, so we had no qualms sticking them with a sleeping baby (who didn't stir once) last night as we went to Super 8. Besides, they were looking forward to watching our DVD of The Lives of Others -- which they ended up loving.

So we left the house a little after 6:30 for a 7:30 movie. The theater is about an eight-minute drive from our house, but it has a parking structure, so that takes a couple extra minutes. Then it's a couple minutes to walk up to the ticket counter. We were going to buy our tickets first, then partake in one of the many eateries in the Howard Hughes Center for our dinner.

Only when we got in line for the tickets, we saw that despite playing on three screens, none of the showings of Super 8 was starting at 7:30 as expected. There was one that had started about 15 minutes earlier, and one starting at 8:30. The only one we could make was at 7, and on IMAX, meaning a couple extra bucks per ticket.

Starting ten minutes from now.

I couldn't believe it. I remembered thinking that the 7:30 show was at this theater. I knew I'd been right. I even started to go on my blackberry to check, to see if I got it confused with another theater, before realizing that this would be an extremely poor use of time in our current predicament. Either I'd been wrong or they'd changed the times, but either way, we were stuck with the situation we were facing.

Well, there went dinner. Or did it? My wife was starving, having had to deal with my parents all day while I was at work and never having gotten her snack. The options were either to get our dinner at the theater snack bar, or go to a different movie. (I noted that Midnight in Paris was playing at 7:30, and momentarily thought of suggesting it, given that I'd made one failed attempt to see it already and a second attempt that I aborted before it even got to that point.)

But Super 8 had us both pumped, so we made the hasty decision to buy the IMAX tickets and live with what was at the concession stand. We knew they sold personal pizzas at this theater, and even if they were not great personal pizzas, they met the necessary criteria to qualify as dinner.

Except they didn't sell personal pizzas, not anymore. One of several recent improvements at this theater was apparently to improve the pizzas out of existence. Now the only thing that even fit in a food group you would consider for dinner was a hot dog. I eat hot dogs at the ballpark, but not at the theater -- my wife never eats them.

Now it was 6:54, and suddenly we were heading back up the escalator to get slices of pizza at the pizza place across the way. This had disaster written all over it. My heart sank as the $17.25 IMAX tickets weighed heavily in my pocket.

What followed was a master class in food-gathering efficiency. Despite a gaggle of kids and two confused-looking mothers ahead of us in line at the pizza place, we were up pretty quickly and getting our slices cooked in the oven. I was imagining myself wolfing down two slices of pizza in about a minute-and-a-half -- I might not enjoy it but I could do it -- but I didn't see my wife doing the same. But when the woman behind the counter learned of our movie predicament, she asked if we wanted them wrapped in aluminum foil. Suddenly a plan sprouted to smuggle our pizza into the movie theater in my wife's purse. She has a decent-sized purse, but it still sounded a little far-fetched to me. I thought it would be better for me to remove my outer shirt as if I'd grown tired of wearing it, and use that to shroud the slices. But before I could properly voice my idea, I was being assigned to go get us drinks at the movie theater, where she would meet me.

I half-expected not to see her down there, that she might get turned away by the ticket taker either for obvious pizza smuggling or for emanating the smells of pepperoni and cheese, but in no time she was there by my side. We each filled up our drinks at the self-serve stations they'd set up (another recent improvement). It was only 7:03 or 7:04, miraculously, so I even doubled back to pick up a box of candy for us to enjoy later on. Thank goodness the theater was dead on this Thursday night in late June.

So we got to the IMAX theater no later than 7:05 by my watch -- a watch that is a minute or so fast, if anything. I expected we'd be in the second trailer, maybe third at worst.

Nope. Super 8 was already underway.

And this is why I'm calling this post "Super 7 2/3" -- we missed at least a little bit of it. I need you, dear reader who's seen Super 8, to tell me what we missed. Of course, to do that, I need to tell you where we came in. As we filed to our seats, Joe (Joel Courtney) and Charles (Riley Griffiths) are in Charles' room, talking about shooting Charles' movie. Joe has a Super 8 magazine in his hand.

So did we miss a cool opening set piece? A great title sequence? A funny joke? Or just a really great piece of nostalgia?

I hate missing the start of a movie, so please help me out here.

SPOILERS TO FOLLOW

As for the 7 2/3 we did see, I was absolutely loving it for about 6 2/3 or 7 of that. It was at this point that I realized a lot of things that had been set up were not going to pay off in satisfying ways.

The biggest problem with the film, as I see it, is this: The fact that they were making a super 8 movie at the time of the train crash -- and captured actual footage of the alien -- ends up having almost no bearing on the plot. My wife and I discussed afterward that if you're going to call the movie Super 8 and devote so much time to the making of their film, the film should really relate to the monster in a tangible way. Like, they had to show their evidence of the monster to get someone to believe them, or their footage made them a special target of the military. In fact, they only become a special target of the military because they break into the science teacher's trailer and start looking at his old films. And yeah, that one kid (the least developed one) does show the deputy (Kyle Chandler) their footage in order to convince him, but the deputy's own belief in the monster ultimately has nothing to do with how the story plays out.

And this was just one payoff that didn't happen. How about the relationship between the deputy and the drunken no-good (Ron Eldard) who was supposed to be working the shift at the factory where the deputy's wife was killed? They team up to go find their children, but then they just drive up and there they are. They don't have to do anything, they don't have to trust each other during a key moment that requires a leap of faith. And what about the rules of the alien himself? We know he's an empathic being, because the science teacher has communed with him and learned that he just wants to rebuild his ship and go home. So why does he keep wreaking havoc and killing purportedly innocent people after he's been freed? Why does he kill some people straight away and leave others to eat later? And why does one quick interaction with Joe at the end convince him that he's able to complete the rebuilding of his ship at that very moment and lift off toward the heavens?

So even if only 6 1/3 or 6 2/3 of Super 8 were really super, those super parts were pretty super. I loved the period look and details, which certainly did remind me of Goonies first and foremost, E.T. in a more tangential way (then again, I've seen Goonies many more times than E.T.). The camerawork was all exceptional, moving in ways that really brought you into the action. The kids looked terrific, just like kids out of 1980, not like the 21st century pre-teens that they actually are. I also thought the town had a real dynamism, with its hilly landscape that really enveloped you in the time and place.

The acting was generally good as well, but I want to specifically praise Elle Fanning, whose work impresses me more and more all the time. Particularly in that scene where she's watching the old footage of Joe's mother, and tells him her father was too drunk to go to his shift that day, she reminded me of how much better she is than her (currently) more famous sister Dakota. Even as blown away as we all were by Dakota Fanning when she first came on the scene, I now see Dakota's work as more of a "performance," while Elle seems to really be acting -- which is to say that you don't see her acting. She just acts, and she always knocks it out of the park. In fact, her disappearance for a large portion of the latter half of the movie was part of the 1 2/3 that disappointed me. (If you are still following what I'm trying to do with my little number gimmick.)

A definite thumbs up for me -- a fairly enthusiastic thumbs up. But I can't discount the narrative missteps I've listed above, which only scratch the surface -- there are plenty of other things I could pick at. So in summation: acting, effects, feel, nostalgia -- all brilliant. Story? Needs some work on the structure side.

And in case you forgot the question I asked halfway through this post, let me know what we missed in those first one to three minutes when we were filling up our drinks. Maybe that filled all the holes I've mentioned ... probably not, but maybe.