Movies in February

Having finished off Buster Keaton, or as much as the library had, we've moved on to Charlie Chaplin. Now back when the Robert Downey Jr. biopic came out, I grabbed every Chaplin movie they had at Mr. Movies. Which wasn't much. So if I'm not mentioning The Kid or The Gold Rush etc. it's because I'm only blogging on movies I'm seeing for the first time. (Man, if I blogged every movie that I watch in a month for a second or tenth or hundredth time... Actually, if I kept track of that I'd probably be pretty ashamed. I watch movies the way normal people listen to music; there's always something in the background).

At any rate, I watched Modern Times for the first time. A silent film made after the advent of talkies. OK, there is some sound here, even some speech, but the Tramp and his girl don't speak, and that's the key thing. I found it interesting that Oliver thought this ending, with the Tramp and his girl thrown out of their latest attempt at work and heading off west together to try again, was much better than the ending to The Gold Rush, which ended with the Tramp a millionaire.

The Great Dictator is a Tramp-less talkie. Chaplin had quite a melodious voice (although I'm giving Keaton an edge here; I like his timbre). There is a lot of Chaplin's heart in this one, sympathisizing with the plight of the Jews in the Nazi-mandated gettos. Even that much of it, the being set apart and labelled, is horribly dehumanizing and must be spoke out against, loudly and often, is the movie's message. He says in his autobiography that if he had known what was really going on, how much worse it all was, he never could have attempted a movie about it at all.

A few Bollywood movies: I finally saw Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge with Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol. I think I heard too many good things about it, though. It was fun, but a bit underwhelming, and it was far too rushed in the end (a common complaint I have with Bollywood movies). Swades was much better, but then from the director of Lagaan and Jodha-Akbar (namely Ashutosh Gowariker) it would have to be. I was expecting a period piece, so to see in the opening that SRK is playing a NRI who works at NASA was a jolt, but a pleasant one. And I liked how his character used his skills to build the power generator for the village in India, a combination of solid math and some guess work since it's not the sort of engineering he's ever attempted before; it felt real to me. Plus this was gorgeously shot, with great A.R. Rahman songs. Lastly I watched the 1955 version of Devdas. I'm told it follows the book more closely than Sanjay Leela Bhansali's version (I'll let you know when I've read the book myself), and I did think that Dilip Kumar was a much better Devdas than SRK, who quite frequently in his movies comes across as a sanctimonious prick. However, the Bhansali version has much better songs, and I assume it's gorgeous. (Have I complained lately about the bad, bad DVD version of this? There's not a month goes by that I don't Google to see if anyone's put it out on BluRay yet. Someone must have it somewhere; I've seen HD versions of the songs up on YouTube and they are gorgeous. I want to see that movie!).

In the category of Spanish films, I saw átame, a Pedro Almodavar film. I've liked the others of his I've seen, but this one I found upsetting and baffling. I'm not sure what point he was trying to make, or what some things meant. They must have meant something. It was frustrating.

Moon I liked, but with some reservations. Sam Rockwell is awesome in it, as multiple versions of the same guy, and Kevin Spacey was the perfect choice for the AI's voice (because of his previous films, I'm always disinclined to trust any character protrayed by Kevin Spacey; I think this works to Moon's advantage). My only gripe: why set it on the moon? I can see why attempting to recreate lunar gravity would be a pain, but if you weren't going to do it, set the story somewhere else. There is nothing here storywise that necessitates the moon and not a planet in another solar system or a space station with 1G spin. I know, I'm nitpicky, but I found it distracting.

I have no such reservations with my admiration for The Hurt Locker. Wow. War films are so prone to the hurky-jerky camera and quick-cut editing; the long, slow scenes in this movie really built the tension to a fever pitch over and over again. Especially the sniper scene, the agonizing wait. It was brilliant.

Also pretty good: The Jane Austen Book Club. Having read the novel second, I after the fact questioned some of the casting choices, and the waywardness of Prudie's plotline, but the best lines of the book made it over to the movie intact, and it was a pleasure to watch people talk about Austen.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith I've been meaning to catch for a long time. I mostly like Angelina Jolie's choices on what roles she plays (I know, I'm the only one who liked the Tomb Raider movies), and I can see what attracted her to this one. She and Brad Pitt play off each other well, a nice no-holds-barred battle between equals. My only gripe would be why does he get to be part of a co-ed organization, while she is part of an all-girl assassin group that specializes in death by pretending to be a hooker, and the only man is the boss? Ick. If she can snap a man's neck with her two hands, I don't think she needs the dominatrix outfit to pull it off.

A movie I expected to find disturbing and would not really like was Tideland, and boy was I surprised. I thought this movie was wonderful, completely inside the head of a tween girl emerging from a very tough childhood which she of course thinks is all perfectly normal. It's classic Terry Gilliam with the visual flair. I would still hesitate to actually recommend this one to anyone I didn't know really well; it is disturbing even if I found it storywise justifiably so.

Now, with TV on DVD this is stuff I finished in the month of February, not watched start to end all in the shortest month of the year. Just sayin'. So, Caprica the miniseries setting up the prequel to Battlestar Galactica I liked, although the ads for the series to follow with Eve naked and holding an apple I'm not thrilled with. Yes, I get the metaphor (it's an obvious, overdone one), but in the miniseries she's a girl who owns her sexuality, and now her she's one who's selling it. I don't like.

Tru Calling was a show that took a long time to find its voice (getting rid of the gratuitous boyfriend was a step in the right direction, and how cool is quasi-evil Jason Priestley?), and then it got axed just when it was getting interesting. *Sigh.* This is why I don't watch TV on TV anymore.

Also cancelled before its time: The Adventures for Brisco County Jr. To be fair, the show never did hit its stride, but it felt like it was about to. And who wouldn't love a steampunk/scifi/western/comedy type deal? Well my boys sure loved it, especially Oliver, and especially Lord Bowler. Just what the boy needs, another curmudgeon to idolize...

Not yet cancelled, and not likely to be soon I hope: The Big Bang Theory. I admit I was sceptical when I heard the premise, it seemed to play too hard on stereotypes (that scientists are nerds, that hot girls don't get science, etc., etc.), but after watching two seasons I'm giving the show a little salute, to show my respect. How they manage to squeeze in so many jokes that must only be funny to a select few is admirable. (I particularly liked when Sheldon called Aishwariya Rai the poor man's Madhuri Dixit. Boo yah!)

This month I'm going to leave you with a trailer which I've watched many, many times, and am already dying to see this movie. Please let it be the awesome...

Books in February

I started February by polishing off Jane Austen. Northanger Abbey I liked better than I expected to; I'd heard it was her most minor work and it's clearly the work of a young writer just finding her own voice, but I liked it because of that, I think. I similarly liked Love and Freindship (there were some other things, shorter things; from looking at Wikipedia I'd guess you'd really call this her Juvenilia, Volume 2). Persuasion is a lovely last book. It feels like a last book, it has a wintry, end of a cycle quality to it. I also read Lady Susan, which was dark and interesting. All of her other books are about women up to the wedding; here is a book about a woman long after her wedding. I wished she had had a chance to write more of those.

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Austen-related, I read Flirting with Pride and Prejudice, a collection edited by Jennifer Crusie full of essays, critiques, historical backgrounds, and even fan-fic all centered around Pride and Prejudice. It's a fun read from a wide variety of writers (all who love Colin Firth. But then who doesn't?)

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Then I picked up The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler. More accurately, I watched the movie, which I liked but hoped that the book would have more Austen discussion in it, and before the credits were done rolling I had downloaded it to my Kindle and dug in. I like it better than the movie (but when isn't that true?), it was deeper and had more of an edge. The women, for one, were older than they were in the movie. And I thought Grigg's recommendations on what books an Austenite should read to get into sci-fi were spot on (although I'd add a few, like Lois McMaster Bujold (particularly A Civil Campaign) and Naomi Novik; although she's more fantasy/alt history than sci-fi she's very Austen-y).

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I've long wondered why no one was really writing superhero novels. Oh sure, there have been a few in the romance genre which were fun, and of course there's Michael Chabon using superhero elements in The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, but I long for more. So I went into Black and White by Jackie Kessler and Caitlin Kittredge with some pretty high hopes. It didn't disappoint; two ex-classmates from a superpowered school are now nemeses in a big, bad city. Every element of this book works; I loved it. The powers are awesome, and the mechanics of how they work and why are well thought-out. And the characters are wonderful and complex. And in the irony department, the sequel is going to be called Shades of Grey. Which is such an awesome title...
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...that Jasper Fforde has also used it. Although the book itself is filled with all sorts of colors, an entire world built around colors, and who can see them, and who can't. Remember what I loved about Niven, how he took a concept like tranfer booths and really worked through all the implications? Fforde does that here. It starts out as a simple concept, that people only see one color, and some see it better than others, and creates a vast, complex world out of it (with a caste system based on what color you can see, and how well you can see it). This isn't straight up funny like his former books, but his wit is still there, always there. I already can't wait for the next book in the series.

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Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld also featured meticulous world building, and nice details with its alternate history. My only complaint was that I wished it had been longer, but then it's a lushly illustrated YA, so it's probably just the perfect length and it's really the next book I'm longing for.

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Tenth Grade Bleeds by Heather Brewer I didn't like as well as Ninth Grade Slays, but it's still a fun, fast-paced read that really gets interesting at about the midpoint. It has middle of a series syndrome, I think; too much series plot business and not enough unique-to-this-novel plot. Still, here again I'm looking forward to the next installment.

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Lastly was a nonfic,

Literary Women by Ellen Moers, the book that Joanna Russ led me to (and there's a writer that Grigg recommends!). It's a celebration of women writers more than anything. It ends with a rather detailed list of women writers and their novels which I copied out. It's going to take me years to get through all of it, maybe a lifetime, but that's cool.

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You know, with the movies I always find something on You Tube to take onto the end, and I've been wanting to do something similar with books but wasn't sure what to do (book trailers - not my kind of thing). One of the cool things about the Kindle is that I can underline things without marking up an actual book that someone else might want to read someday. So I've been highlighting all over the place. As much as I love characters, and dig good plots, what I really love is a cool line, a thought I particularly like or an artful turn of phrase. I came up with this idea late in the month, though, so this first time out I only have a couple, but next month on I'll have more, maybe more than one from a book. In the meantime:

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"Doubt is good. It's an emotion we can build on. Perhaps if we feed it with curiosity it will blossom into something useful, like suspicion - and action." Shades of Grey

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"Her eyes darted back and forth between the rolled-up yellow cloth and the approaching storm, wondering what a boy would do." Leviathan

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"Not five minutes earlier her mother's death had been painted acros her face like one of those shattered women Picasso was so fond of. Now she looked dangerous. Now Picasso would be excusing himself, recollecting a previous engagement, backing away, leaving the building." The Jane Austen Book Club