Peter Krupa

It’s been a long time since I enjoyed a movie as much as I enjoyed Wall-E. And at the risk of hyperbole, I think someday, a decade or two from now, people will look back at this movie as a cultural turning point. How can I say this… Wall-E feels like it was made by a different generation. By a generation that grew up tinkering with computers and treasuring a past it never experienced. Not to get all Obama-y, but Wall-E somehow felt like the Babyboomers had been locked out of the studio. I’d be curious to hear what other people thought.

I usually don’t watch the Oscars because the spectacle of people kissing each others asses disagrees with me. However, something (my wife) made me turn on the TV last night, and I had the shocking experience of watching an award show dominated by (gasp!) foreigners!

The L.A. Times gives it the full treatment here. Pretty much everyone was from the savage lands outside our borders! Javier Bardem gave a speech in Spanish! Best actress went to a FRENCH woman! One guy who won in some category I don’t remember started his acceptance speech, “I don’t really speak English”!

That, and we’re maybe about to elect a president whose father is from Kenya and whose middle name is Hussein. Who says Americans are xenophobes?

No Country For Old Men:

At their best, and for that matter at their less than best, Joel and Ethan Coen, who share writing and directing credit here, combine virtuosic dexterity with mischievous high spirits, as if they were playing Franz Liszt’s most treacherous compositions on dueling banjos. Sometimes their appetite for pastiche overwhelms their more sober storytelling instincts, so it is something of a relief to find nothing especially showy or gimmicky in “No Country.” In the Coen canon it belongs with “Blood Simple,” “Miller’s Crossing” and “Fargo” as a densely woven crime story made more effective by a certain controlled stylistic perversity. 

Sunshine is an amazing movie. Judging from a few of the reviews I scanned afterwards, mine is not a universal opinion. Some reviewers thought the plot was conventional, others didn’t like the twists toward the end.

Under normal circumstances, I would probably join the throng of nay-sayers, as I have before, nitpicking bad science or absurd dialogue. Hitchcock called people like myself the “plausibles,” people who take the fun out of a movie by pointing out how “that would never happen.”

But, for my tastes, a movie only has to be as plausible as it tells you it will be, and the important thing is that it follows the rules it has set out for itself. Considering Sunshine is about a space ship with a multi-cultural crew of 30-somethings whose mission is to re-start the Sun by dropping a nuke onto its surface, I’d say the bar is pretty low.

That being the case, director Billy Boyle basically just asks you to sit back and enjoy this beautiful, intense, and lyrical fable that he’s spun out of the science fiction genre. Some people aren’t really able to do this.

But for those of you who are, I strongly suggest you go see Sunshine on the largest possible screen available to you, and just let yourself be enthralled for 107 minutes.

A busy blog is the product of an idle hand, and vice versa. That is to say, I no longer waste huge swaths of my day reading various and sundry media, meaning there is not much grist for the ol’ mill.

Oh, there’s a lot I could post about, but I doubt you all are interested in the intricacies of the Costa Rican state telecom monopoly vis-à-vis looming free trade agreements, or whatever. I will, however, note that Fidel Castro has come out against Costa Rica’s free trade agreement with the U.S., which is weird considering that he spends the other half of his time complaining about the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba.

Free trade: Good or bad? Castro isn’t sure.

At any rate, in times like these I think we can all look for answers in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Part III, which I happened to see today, teaches impressionable minds like my own that piracy is all about fighting for Justice and Liberty and Freedom. The British, on the other hand, are evil, and it has vaguely to do with capitalism.

“Good for business”? Fuck that! Let’s go pirate stuff!

Anyway, it’s possible I’ve drank too much Coca-Cola.

Mayhew: Ain’t writing peace?

Barton: Well, actually no, Bill. No, I’ve always found that writing comes from a great inner pain. Maybe it’s a pain that comes from the realization that one must do something for one’s fellow common man to help somehow ease their suffering. Maybe it’s personal pain. At any rate, I don’t believe good work is possible without it.

Mayhew: Hm. Well, I just enjoy making things up.

(And at the risk of ruining a perfectly good quote, I would add that every writer needs to watch Barton Fink. It’s a parable about the life of the mind.)

For the second time in a row, my cinematic hopes have been dashed, painfully. And this time I have a serious bone to pick with the movie reviewing community. At least when I walked into 300, I knew it would probably be mediocre. People were speared, speeches were given, and while it was a disappointing experience, it wasn’t entirely a surprise.

But Grindhouse? I was expecting something sort of, well, good. That’s because the film reviewers of this nation seem to have given Quentin Tarantino a pass, completely abdicating their responsibility to shield movie consumers from long, boring, poorly-edited crap. And I am angry.

I am not angry at Robert Rodriguez. His half of Grindhouse (Planet Terror) was top-notch kitsch, just as billed, delicious cotton-candy zombie/stripper movie goodness. There was blood, and exploding heads, and rogue army units. All good fun. The fake trailers were excellent as well.

But Quentin Tarantino’s half of Grindhouse (Death Proof) almost made me cut my own throat from sheer, thick-witted, club-footed boredom. From what I could gather, it looks like he took five of the most boring people he knew, fed them cocaine, put them around a table at a bar, and rolled camera. And I sat there in the theater, watching the result, longing for Kurt Russell to show up in his car and kill everyone.

Later, Quentin Tarantino took four more boring people, put them around the table at a diner, and turned the camera on. The result was long, elaborate, diva-girl anecdotes about almost falling in a ditch, and a little tiff about “never call a kiwi an ausie,” which reminded me how tedious it can be hanging around foreigners.

By the time the movie had lurched its way to the final car chase, it was too little too late. Quentin “Watch-me-masturbate-on-screen-for-80-minutes-ha-ha-ha” Tarantino indeed succeeded in reviving grindhouse flicks - and in reminding us that mostly they were plodding, clumsy, and boring as shit, and they are best watched with the silhouettes of two little robots and a human being in the lower right corner.

Personally, I’ve got my money on Delta Farce. The plot:

Three bumbling Army reservists bound for Iraq are accidentally dropped at Mexican village besieged by hostile forces.

Great. First the skinny jeans, Nu Wave, mohawks, old-skool Vans, and leg warmers. Now, mad-cap military comedies. As a culture, I think it’s high time we put a stop to this 80s obsession.

UPDATE: “This spring, they’re not being all they can be, but they’re doing all they can - to get out alive!”

Lord save us.

I can’t believe it. In our zest to anticipate the various scapegoatings in the Cho Whatsit-Something Virginia Tech murder spree, we forgot one: violent Korean movies. I think we can be excused because violent movies are such an old-school scapegoat, like dancing or card-playing. Who thought it would crop up again?

And yet it has. What if Cho Whatsit-Something was imitating Oldboy, an ULTRAVIOLENT Korean movie about REVENGE and KILLING? The pictures look convincing anyway, and for all those millions of people in the American Heartland who will never bother to see a Korean movie, that’s good enough.

Except Oldboy has nothing to do with killing defenseless students. In fact, if my memory serves me correctly, there’s hardly any shooting at all. Not only that, but the guy obsessed with revenge ends badly. Both of them. The freaking moral of the movie is to be nice to people, that revenge doesn’t pay, and neither does malicious rumor mongering.

The thing is, Cho Whatsit-Something was crazy. The movie didn’t roust him from an otherwise placid existence by inspiring him to imitation. He was crazy. He could have been inflamed by The Sound of Music. Because he was crazy.

Anyway, glad this scapegoat was a relatively flaccid one. Now, please. Go see Oldboy. It is excellent.

It was a difficult afternoon. First we saw 300, and let me tell you, Lynne Cheney should get out there right now and form an investigative subcommittee to look into regulating the gratuitous, senseless, and excessive battlefield speechifying found in many of today’s movies. My head was spinning and I felt slightly nauseated as I walked out of the theater, marveling to myself at the wholesale, craven irresponsibility of the film executives who had allowed so much empty, pseudo-philosophical shouting about glory and freedom taint what would otherwise have been good, clean violence.

Aside from that, I thought the movie did a good job of illustrating the perils of placing the leadership of a population in the hands of a man who had been struck about the head all too much as a youngster and as a consequence has to think mostly with his testicles. Yes, you became quite the dead lion Your Majesty, and glorious it was. But that politician back home just raped your wife, so what’s the real lesson here?

The afternoon didn’t improve when we arrived home and were rudely confronted with an internet video of Bill O’Reilly shouting like a rabble-rousing fascist about how Mexican drunk drivers are going to kill us all - shouting at Geraldo Rivera, I might add, making it a very emotionally confusing moment.

A malaise hung over the apartment, an emotional, slow-motion soup of severed heads, pierced torsos, interminable fucking speeches, and Bill O’Reilly shouting at the top of his lungs like some lunatic on the subway.

So I played Ona a song, then another one. Then we opened a bottle of French wine - a cheap one, with a screw top - and now we are making a little dinner. Later, I think we will watch a Canadian movie.

Nothing is more soothing than a Canadian movie.