Movies in October

I don't really write these monster posts all at a blow, you know. Not that much blogging time these days. I start them at the beginning of the month and add the titles as I watch/read the movie/book in question. I don't usually try to come up with a response right after I've seen something, though. I need time for things to soak in (which is why I'm glad my critique group is an online one. I'm not sure how I'd function in a group where I was expected to respond to something someone just read to me. I'm a slow ponderer. Which is partly why my critiques for the group are so pathologically late, and why these long posts come out weeks after the month ended. That and, you know, working too much).

Well, so anyway, here's trying to pull together a bunch of random notes to myself into some sort of coherent thoughts on what I watched in October. Which was quite a lot, actually; after the big push to finish off the first draft of MITWA I fried my brain and had to vegetate for a few weeks. TV on DVD is just what the doctor ordered. First up: How I Met Your Mother, Season 3. This show still hasn't let me down. I love the intricate way something barely seen in one episode becomes important later, the way a scene that played one way when you first saw it becomes a completely different experience when more context is added later. And the season ending was killer, and exactly where I was hoping they were going to go. The bummer is waiting a year for Season 4 to come out.

The other TV show I watched was X-Files, Season 2. I'm enjoying these, but I'm glad we're borrowing them because I don't think I would be rewatching these a lot. It's rather frustrating; it comes close to being something really good and then backs off. The character arcs aren't very well thought through; Scully believing or not believing in Mulder's theories is wildly inconsistent (people do vacillate, of course, but this isn't handled in a believable way). This comes up more as we progress; I think I'll save the real kvetching for next month.

Some favorite season 2 eps: "Irresistible", set in the backwater of Minneapolis where people never lock their doors at night and dead hookers in the backs of alleys are just unheard of. A mythical land, I think (and it looks a lot like Vancouver. That's our little running joke; the show is set all over the US but always filmed in Vancouver). "Fresh Bones" with Mr. Eko (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) playing a Haitian refugee. I'd totally listen to him read the phone book; I love his voice. "Død Kalm" stood out as the second time Scully and Mulder were rescued by the Deus ex Machina rather than getting themselves out of their own bad situation (in season one they were totally coccooned by the spider things and should have died but apparently the haz-mat team got there just in time. Here they should have died of old age from whatever was in the water but they were rescued by I think the navy just in time). But my favorite ep was "Humbug", set in a town full of carnies. Vincent Schiavelli plays a man with the body of his partially absorbed twin protruding from his chest. There are midgets and lobster boys and Enigma, that guy covered with puzzle tattoos. I loved the moment at the end, when the guy who does the stunt magic is complaining to Scully that in the modern age of medicine there will be no more freaks. There won't even be slight deviations from the norm. No, in the future everyone is going to look like that guy, pointing across the trailer park to Mulder, who's too far away to hear them but for whatever reason he's striking a pose:

Made me giggle.

OK, I already exalted the virtues of Cinematic Titanic's The Doomsday Machine. We also watched their first offering: The Oozing Skull (the old "man at the end of his life has his brain put into a younger body but you know that never quite works out the way they thought it would" story) and their third: The Wasp Woman (a Roger Corman film. Need I say more?). I'm glad they're making these films; they fill the void I've had in my life since MST3K went off the air. And the direct to video is actually a plus for me: I don't think I could keep up with a once a week TV show these days, but sporadic releases suit me just fine.

OK, films in English: Ray, about the life of Ray Charles. I kind of wished I'd watched this before I saw Dewy Cox, as that led to a lot of unintentional giggling. A well done film, and Jamie Foxx is perfect as Ray. Don't watch the version with the added footage incorporated in, though. They didn't bring their extra scenes up to the level of polish of the finished film (they aren't color timed or anything) and it made for a very jarring viewing.

Iron Man rocks. 'Nuff said.

Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. I went in with low expectations; I hadn't heard good things. I was still disappointed. At this point I think just about everybody does Indiana Jones better than Spielberg and Lucas. The Tomb Raider videogame? Totally more in the Indy spirit than this film (although not the Tomb Raider movies, of course). I even liked National Treasure more than this film. There is the problem that the entire plot offended me on a deep and profound level. Early man couldn't possibly have come up with irrigation and writing, aliens must have shown us how. (And did they come back later to explain quantum theory to us? Because we totally couldn't have come up with that on our own, could we?). Bah. And then we have the scene where they find artifacts from all the other cultures the aliens visited and were worshiped as gods. India, Egypt, Babylon. But there's nothing Judeochristian in that room, oh no; that god is the real deal. Oh, bite me.

I hated this movie. But don't take my word for it; Temple of Doom is my favorite Indy film. Clearly there is something deeply off about me.

M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening I enjoyed. It's twist free. I like the way his characters are always ordinary people. Mark Walhberg here isn't some genius scientist fighting this strange menace, he's just a science teacher who knows how to listen to what other people are telling him and synthesize it using what he knows about the scientific method. He and John Leguizamo are both very genuine, very believable as teachers. This wasn't a great film, but it had a lot of heart, something I don't find in a lot of suspense films but are always in M. Night films.

Two Spanish films this month: El Orfanato, a horror story set in an orphanage. This was produced by Guillermo del Toro, so it's probably not a coincidence that it reminded me of him. It doesn't have del Toro's mindblowing visuals, but it's genuinely creepy. It had a very novely feel, something I like in a movie but seldom find, even in movies based on books. Of course that might be because I got to watch this movie all at once in a quiet house with no interruptions because my mother had taken the boys out for the day. A rare experience, watching a movie all the way through without stopping. A kind of like it.

The other Spanish film is one I've been meaning to watch forever, Abre Los Ojos. This was remade in English as Vanilla Sky. It reminds me a bit of the Korean film Il Mare and its English counterpart The Lake House. Both have a younger, grittier feel in the original, where the American version is more polished with older actors. There are pluses and minuses to both; I kind of like having two versions of the same story that are not quite the same.

Bollywood: Rangeela, the first movie to feature music by A.R. Rahman. It's about more real-feeling people than most Bollywood films; by which I mean they aren't rich and living in spacious sound stage-sized homes. The ending didn't work for me, though. I spent the entire movie shouting at Aamir Khan's character to get a job. First get a paying job, that's how you impress the girl.

It's possible I'm missing something in the romantic department.

Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam, an old black and white film. Gorgeously shot in that way that the best black and white is; the faces are just luminous. The story about a girl who marries into a rich family and then never sees her husband and wastes away from the neglect reminded me a lot Raise the Red Lantern.

When I was ordering films I was looking for what I thought were two different movies both called Mr. India, one by Salim-Javed and one starring Anil Kapoor. They turned out to be the same film, which left me with an extra Mr. India, an older back and white film. There is a running joke that Bollywood films have scripts written the night before the scenes are to be shot, but this is the first one I've seen that really felt that bad. Have you ever played the game where one person starts a story, then the next person tells the next bit, and you pass it around like that? Pretty much how they wrote this film. Still, there's a bit in the middle where Helen as a gangster's moll does a dance with daggers, and because she thinks her guys is messing around on her, she keeps throwing the daggers at him and his girlfriend. It was a great number, so I guess I got my $0.99 worth out of this one.

The Mr. India I was actually looking for, the one starring Anil Kapoor as a guy who has a wristband that makes him invisible and uses it to fight crime in Mumbai, was awesome. I love Amrish Puri. You may know him as Mola Ram in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (did I mention I have the doll?), but I've seen him in about a dozen Bollywood films now and he's always great. This role in Mr. India is probably his best, campiest super villian evah. After watching this film I kept saying his line "Mogambo khush hua" ("Mogambo is pleased"; being an evil overlord he talks about himself in the third person). Since then Quin has gotten one of those colds that give you the deep throaty voice for a few days and was saying at work that he sounded like Mola Ram, to which his Indian coworker replied, "Mogambo khush hua." It's like saying the name Arnold Schwarzenegger; someone has to say "I'll be back". It just goes.

So no musical numbers this month but a clip from Mr. India in all of its Austin Powers-y fabulousness. Watch for Captain Zorro with the eye patch and my favorite, the Indian in the wispy moustache playing the Chinese Professor Fu Manchu (although for total un-PC-ness, it pales in comparison to the guys in black face during the calypso number later in the film).

Books in October

The books I read in October fall into three categories: for pleasure, for school and for novel research. I think I'll start with the "for pleasure" category.

First up, Hotter Than Hell by Jackie Kessler. This is the third book in her Hell series. I've been enjoying her books so far, she takes such joy in the mythology of hell, her characters are fantastic, and each book comes generously sprinkled with laugh-out-loud lines. This series is fun and rich in fantasy. But this book? Totally blew the first two away. It had an ending I never saw coming and yet was absolutely perfect (my favorite kind of ending). All I can say is, wow. Well done, Jax!


The only other book I read for fun in October was someone I'm sure Jackie would approve of as a follow-up: Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. This book has already been roundly praised pretty much everywhere, so I'll just add a "they're right, you know". I like the Jungle Book format, not so much a novel as a series of connected stories covering the key moments as a boy grows up. I hope when they eventually make the movie version of this they go more for the Chuck Jones style of adaptation than the Disney. Disney's Jungle Book had great songs, but Jones' adaptation was in all other regards superior. It kept the episodic structure and dark overtones intact. And I'm not just saying that because I'd listen to Roddy McDowall narrate almost anything (although that's true too).

OK, I'm trying to polish off the novels that Aidan will be reading for history for the rest of the year, so I'm ahead of him and can help gauge how much time he's going to need to devote each. Our history curriculum is very reading intensive, perhaps a tad too much, but they pick such fine books. This month I read The Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell, about a young Native American woman who gets left behind when her tribe leaves their isolated island home, Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes about Boston in the early days of the American Revolution, and Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare about a boy left alone, waiting for his family to return, in a log house at the edge of civilization in Maine. Aidan will be writing some compare/contrast type thing for the Dolphin and Beaver books. These are all good reads if you like YA historical fiction.

On to the realm of novel research, which this month is all about Islam. Actually this will be in the novel sort of like a bay leaf is used in cooking; it will flavor other things but won't actually be served in the final dish (well, not much). My previous source for all things Islam moved to the United Arab Emirates a few years ago (after 9/11, sadly), so it's just me and a stack of books now. My friend considered himself a cultural Muslim; he had grown up in that world but as an aethist professor of philosophy wasn't really a part of it anymore (which makes me wonder how things are going for him in UAE).

Yahiya Emerick, who wrote two of the books I read this month, is the opposite of that; he converted to Islam as an adult. So it's pretty much the opposite perspective than I'm used to looking at Islam from. In some ways this is better, he looks more sharply at things which someone who grew up in that environment might take for granted. On the other hand, particularly in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Islam he would get pretty heavy handed with the "all other religions are clearly inferior" type of vibe. I had to set this book down and walk away from it quite a bit. Despite that, it did have a lot of useful information in it for me. I fared better with his Complete Idiot’s Guide to Rumi’s Meditations, mostly because I've already read several books on sufism and generally find the sufis more approachable to a pantheist like me. I should probably at some point just get a book of Rumi's poetry and drink from the source. The problem there is the strong temptation to learn Persian so I can read it in the original. That's likely to take a few years...

The last book I read I liked much better: No God But God by Reza Aslan. This is written by a man who spent his early childhood in Iran but moved to the US with his family when the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power (I knew kids in school in the same boat, at least during those times in my life when I was going to Minnesota schools. Tennessee doesn't attract many immigrants). This book covers all of the major historical periods of Islam, particularly dwelling on the culture from which it sprang. This I found very interesting; I like being able to put things into an historical and cultural context. Aslan also covers how the governments in Pakistan, Egypt, Saudia Arabia, and Iran formed, what they were intended to do, and how they've evolved since. I'd recommend this one for anyone interested in learning more about Islam (right up there with Karen Armstrong and John Esposito). It's informative, but it's also written with a strong sense of story (i.e. not dry reading). There are also extensive notes in the back with references to other books. Which just might be my downfall; I'm suddenly consumed with a hunger to learn more about the pagan Arabia that existed before Islam.

No, I'm never getting that To Be Read stack under 200, am I?

Oooh, it's snowing!

Time for the happy dance...




Or if you like it old school:



I think I like Linus' little dance the best.