So my daughter, who’s almost 10, and her friend, who is10, seem to have it in their minds that on the last day of Spring Break while Dad is home hanging out with them, that Dad will take them to movies to see, of all things, PROM NIGHT, the remake of the 1980’s Jamie Lee Curtis slasher vehicle. How they arrived at this supposition is truly beyond me, but I am being brow-beaten every 30 minutes by the Clarence Darrow of the pre-teen set (“DAD! It’s only PG-13!” “DAD! It’s no big deal–it’s just this girl who’s family was murdered by her old high school teacher, and then he escapes from prison and goes after her at her prom!” “But DAD! I know it’s all pretend!” “But DAD! It’s the girl from HAIRSPRAY, and that was PG-13!”), and all I can think is:

• Is this what I was like with my parents and seeing DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE at the Windsor Plaza (and of course, the answer is yes), and…
• If your parents were murdered by your high school teacher, wouldn’t you like, move, rather than put on a brave face and go to your prom (or, at the very least, check in with the prison system to make sure everything’s OK with the mass murderer who has pledged to kill you at any cost?)

Kids!

Well, 2007 is almost over.  As far as I’m concerned, it was a pretty swell year.  (A kind of a long year at times, but a pretty swell year…)  As if anyone cares, here are my highlights:

• Media Highlights:
  • TV:  MAD MEN proved that if if you wanted to see a show as intense and psychologically complex as the SOPRANOS (and with cooler clothes), you only had to wait about 3 months; FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS was the funniest and driest show on TV; those gazillion sketch comedy shows made popular on the Internets produced HUMAN GIANT and WHITEST KIDS YOU KNOW; FIVE DAYS on HBO was one of the best police procedurals I’ve ever seen, from the victims to the police press liason.  And let us not forget the one thousand million kajillion kids programs I have become an expert in, especially BOB THE BUILDER, DIEGO, and anything by Pixar.  And thanks to the finale episodes than LOST and EXTRAS–What would I talk about about at the virtual water cooler?
  • MOVIES:  If there was one major theme in movies this year (NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOUR DEAD, etc., etc.) it’s the saimple trusim “Crime is best left to the professionals.”  I could make a decent argument that Anton Churgh in OLD MEN didn’t even exist, but was just a cloud of evil.  Special ponts to Judd Apatow school of filmmaking, which is to teen sex comedies as the Sopranos is to crime shows — proof that weird, fat and strange people can be excellent, moving actors if just given the chance.  And as to the fawning (and mostly deserved) critical reaction..  I’m reminded of David Lee Roth’s comment:  “Most rock critics like Elvis Costello because they look like Elvis Costello…”
  • BOOKS:  This is the year I read my first Stephen King book (scary!), my first Cormac McCarthy books (deep!), and my one hundredth police procedural translated from a foreign language.  And the first year I really got into the whole books on tape phenomenen.  Now why can’t I find REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST online?  And thank heavens for the Ricky Gervais podcasts.
  • MUSIC:  What is that, exactly? 
• PERSONAL HIGHLIGHTS:
  • I got to keep my automotive job while many people did not.  And not one day goes by when I do not think of that.
  • My wife and I remodeled our kitchen from scratch (with invaluable help from my neighbor, tips from my brother in law, and waaay to make trips to the Ikea Fans website).  Next year:  A backyard gazebo (God help me…and my poor wife…and my neighbor…)
  • Our son got a clean bill of health after from his coarctation operation and does not have to go back to the Doctor for two whole years!  (This, combined with his becoming a maniac, was the best news all year).
  • My daughter got Student of the Year at her elementary school, is learning cello (using the new method, called “avoiding practicing”), is still doing her ballet, and is driving me near-homicidally crazy just about every day.
  • My wife and I are still happily married after 17 years and spending quality time together.  And not one day goes by when  do not think of that.
  • My network of friends and family remained relatively healthy and happy.  Some people have passed on this year, which as I get older makes every day and every relationship that much more important and valuable, even if sometimes people bug the crap out of you.
  • I am President of the PTA for the second year in a row, and all that that involves.  (I’m not sure this belongs on the highight list…)
• PERSONAL LOWLIGHTS:
  • I am not ignorant of the fact that I have a certain worldview and a certain sense of humour that is not always to everyone’s taste, and that there are times that I can inadvertantly (or, at times, totally advertantly) offend or hurt the feelings of people I actually honestly care about in my own self-centered way.  Because of this, I’ve been taken off the Christmas Card list of someone I have known for years, and probably bugged many other people without knowing it.  This is something, as Dr. Phil would say, I need to work on.

Anyway, here’s to 2008!

Now that our son is old enough to be “into” certain toys and clothes and movies, we have, once again, been watching TOY STORY and TOY STORY 2 about one hundred million zillion times per week.  (Our older daughter is nine and pretty much prefers one hundred thousand gazllion bajillion episodes of HANNAH MONTANA).  And the more I watch TOY STORY and its sequel, I do have to say that they are certainly two of the best movies for children ever made.  There is just so much to these movies, they are so many facets — of storytelling, of character development, of discussions on the meaning of one’s existence, of humour.  How many other kids movies grapple with the concept of obsolescence (of toys, of childhood)?  How many other kids movies bluntly face the awfulness of some kids (Sid, the boy who blows up toys in TS1)?  Just the very concept of the “world” of toys, the idea that toys have feelings and emotions and anxieties (how many other movies are there where toys have dream sequences?).    There are very few SHREK-like “jokes for adults to laugh along with” in these movies–they really dig for a deeper core.  Like Buzz says, “Would you rather be loved by a child, or spend the rest of your days living a glass display case?” 

So if you haven’t seen TOY STORY 1 or 2 in a while, see it again.  It you haven’t seen them at all, check ‘em out.  Better yet, get married, have a kid, wait three years, and then watch it twice a day every day until your eyes bleed, like us.  You’ll be glad you did!  To infinity…and beyond!!

 Being a red-blooded American male, I am an aficionado of action movies.  But also being a college-educated snoot, I’m mostly a fan of “good” action movies, of which there are few and far between.  By “good”, I mean that, much like a Shakespearean sonnet, an classic action movie has to hit certain marks, which for me include:

• A relatively vulnerable hero (as opposed to say, a superhuman kick-ass Dude)
• Action sequences that, if not realistic (after all, it is a movie), are at least conceptually possible (more about this later)
• Some semblance of coherent logic throughout the movie, if only “movie logic” in the movie world
• Some lip service given to the philosophy of the action hero, one man doing what he has to do to get things done blah blah
• A loved one in jeopardy the protagonist puts themselves on the line for
• A good bad guy who is kickass and cool and worthy of your viewer hatred and wanting to see dead dead dead, preferably by our heroes bare hands
• Some humour and some pathos

That being said,  movies for me that fit this category are: DIE HARD (the first and best), EXECUTIVE DECISION with Kurt Russell (DIE HARD on a plane), THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT, even SUDDEN DEATH (DIE HARD in a hockey arena) with Jean-Claude Van Damme.  But not many more than that.  (This list does not include totally over-the-top action movies that are awesome in their own right, like CON AIR or POINT BREAK, which makes no sense at all but are still totally cool).

Why?  Well, ever since DIE HARD made like a gazillion dollars, there have been ten hundred kajillion  imitators, most of which are really bad.  And the reason they’re so bad, for the most part, is that they try to take the ingredients of a good action movie (explosions, extended action sequences, indiscriminate killing of faceless minions, funny quips, etc.), confuse “bigger” with “better”, and start fetishizing the movie out of existence (BIGGER explosions!  MORE indiscriminate killing!  FUNNIER quips!).

So for instance the Wife and I saw saw LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD last night.  And while it was much better than I would have  thought–it had logic, it was funny, some of the action sequences were very exciting–it started to lose my respect towards the end.  Why?  Well, you’ve all see the first DIE HARD, right?  And you know the scene where John McClain is trying to escape being shot by the helicopters on the roof of Yakatoma Plaza, so he takes a firehose, wraps it around himself, jumps off the roof of the building, then he can’t break through the glass of the window with his bare feet, so he has to shoot it out, and then he finally gets in, and then the metal spindle that held the firehose falls off, and nearly pulls him back OUT of the building to his death? There’s such coolness in that sequence, and fear, and suspense, and “oh sh*t!” moments.  It’s awesome.  Compare that to LIVE FREE where John McClain, well, jumps from a truck onto the outside of an F-14 fighter plane, then onto a bridge.  And it’s like, no big deal.  I mean, we all know movies aren’t real and could rarely if ever happen in real life, but .. come on!

The villain, Mr. Cool Tim Olyphant from DEADWOOD was cyber-cool but nowhere near Alan Rickman cool.  The supporting characters were well-played.  But I still yearn for when Hollywood people would analyze the good parts of movies and not just emulate the most-easily-exportable parts, like big-ass explosions and hot chicks and indiscriminate murders of underlings (who accepts these jobs, anyway?  What is the career potential?  Is there a summer intern program?)

So I guess I’m still waiting for the next great action movie.  And it looks like it might be a long wait.  Next up:  Brad’s best crime caper movies, contemporary noir, and why Quentin Tarantino should just give it a rest.

Hey, guess what happened to me? I was driving home from work last night when my cellphone rang, and it was my PTA buddy Gary saying he had a free pass for the press screening of GRINDHOUSE that night. After obtaining a work release from the wife and trying to round up a date (no one was available—something about “commitments”), I went by myself, just me and 200+ other people with piercings, punk rock T-shirts, short skirts and go-go boots (and those were just the guys).. Not even having to run back to my car and dispose of my cell phone for security purposes (after all, who but a 40-something PTA President is more likely to make a pirate copy of the movie on his RAZR?) was enough to dissuade me from enjoying myself.

The stuff I liked? Robert Rodriguez PLANET TERROR was terrific, probably his best movie ever. It may have been a cheesy homage, but it had tons of stuff his other movies (ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO, SPY KIDS, etc.) did not — it had loads of plot, it had interesting characters who had real (if movie-like) emotions, it had awesome action/suspense sequences, it took its time. (Too many RR movies are like a kid hyped up on Mountain Dew and Pop Rocks trying to speed talk from one action setpiece to the next.) Rose Magowan was terrific, Freddy Rodriguez was too cool for words. And the soundtrack, by RR himself, was frickin’ awesome. It was just a great movie!

The stuff I wasn’t crazy about: Tarantino’s DEATH PROOF has so much footage of chicks yappin’ and jawin’ and hemin’ and hawin’ I thought I was watching MY DINNER WITH ANDRE with chicks and car chases. The action sequences are very cool and exciting, but the chicks! The yappin’ ! The infernal yappin’! I know QT kind of reinvented the whole talking about nothing entertainingly genre, but come on! Quit yer yappin’!

Also, if you were to ask me (and aren’t you glad you did?), QT cheats! While RR plays by the rules, updating 70’s-style action sexploitaion horror grindhouse cinema, QT barely acknowledges this concept at all. DEATH PROOF is more an homage to Eric Rohmer French cinema than Russ Meyer or LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT revenge flicks. I mean, I like that kind of thing, but as we say–it may be nice, but it wasn’t the assignment, was it?

The fake previews are also swell, especially MACHETE, DON’T, and Eli Roth’s awesome THANKSGIVING. (And what about the Austin audience award previews, especially HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN?)

So check it out. And when it’s time for DEATH PROOF, re-fill the popcorn, pick up some jujubees, hit the bathroom. Take your time. Because believe me, by the time you get back, it’s guaranteed — those chicks will still be yappin’!!

I’ve always loved detective books, and the older I get, the more I’ve been drawn to “police procedurals”, which basically show the method by which law enforcement officers try and solve crimes. I think the older you get, the more you are interested in how things are accomplished, probably because you start to realize how hard it is to accomplish anything yourself. So detective books are no different.

And what have I learned from these books? What does it take the solve a crime? Work. It’s not intuition, or beating up an informant, or going on a “hunch.” It’s just plain work. There’s meetings every day, at the beginning and the end of each day. It’s taking notes. It’s following up on leads even if you know they won’t pan out (because most of them don’t). It’s going over things, then going over them again, and then again after that. It’s coming up witha theory, then abandoning that theory, and trying antother. It can take weeks, months, or years. And it may not happen at all. It takes a special kind of person with a special kind of teancity, a kind of tenacity I’m not sure I would have.

This week I saw David Fincher’s ZODIAC. This is most engrossing movie I’ve ever seen about the drudgery of police work. This case was invesigated over twenty years, and no official arrest was ever made. Many men put many years of their life into trying to solve these murders, and, as the movie makes very clear, the world kept on turning, people kept on living their lives, and other murders are committed by other killers, and at some point you have to ask yourself “Why go on?” What good would it do? What are you accomplishing except tearing up your own family life to search for an answer you may not find?

I don’t think this movie will be that popular, if that’s important. No one chases the criminal down a dark alley or draws a gun or jumps off a building. There are no explosions. And while the movie makes a strong suggestion as to the identity of The Zodiac Killer, there is enough ambiguity there to make you question if they are picking the right man. In fact, there are so many facts and leads and possibilities, maybe you can’t find the bad guy. This is why I think it won’t be that popular and why I, of course, think it’s a very compelling movie, and a very thoughtful piece of art. Anyway…check it out.

P.S.

No, I am not Zodiac.

I‘ve seen all but two of the films nominated for Best Picture this year, and here are my brief comments:

THE DEPARTED
I really enjoyed this movie, and I thought it was well-directed and well-acted, especially by Leonardo DeCaprio and Mark Wahlberg. And while I hate to sound like a movie snob (which is probably what I am anyway), but I’ve seen the original Hong Kong movie INFERNAL AFFAIRS upon which this is based and, to me at least, it’s a better, more consistent movie. Why? Because THE DEPARTED has a waaaay over the top performance by Jack Nicholson as not just “The Bad Guy”, but as The Personification Of All Evil that really detracts from the overall story. And the American version also has a love interest that has relationships with not one, but both of the main characters, which makes an already psychologically complex movie even more complex. And these things take away from my favorite thing about the movie, which is the relationships between the criminals and the cops, the male bonding, and the flipping allegiances of the main characters. I’m not saying it’s a bad movie at all, and I think Wahlberg deserves an Oscar nomination (as did Leo), but I would urge you to seek out the HK version (and it’s two sequels).

BABEL
I can say without a doubt that the first movie by this writer/director team, AMORES PERROS, is one of the best movies of the past ten years. It had many of the same things that make this movie a critical favorite — strong performances, great directing, a splintered storyline that gradually becomes related. So did their second film, 16 GRAMS, which I didn’t care for despite some excellent performances (it was just too, shall we say, lugubrious, aka “slooooow”). BABEL is very good, with really good performances, but the movie moves just slowly enough at times that the mind starts to wander, and questions come up, such as:

–What parents in their right mind, after the death of a child, would say,, Hey, why don’t we take a break and leave our other two children at home while we take a vacation in the middle of frickin’ nowhere?
–What Dad in his right mind would stat away from home while his teenage daughter is going throgh an agonizing emotional spiral, even if he is a Salary man in Japan?
–Shoudn’t there be a movie law against close-ups of the wizen, wise faces of foreigners who are more in touch with their humanity than our floundering main characters?

Also, the inevitable plot connections between the characters seem rather forced and ultimately not that signiificant. Do we really need forced connections to show the similarities betweebn different cultures and peoples? Do we really think other people from other backgrounds don’t also face anguish and alienation from their fellow man?

For that reason, Brad concentrates on:

LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE
Besides CHILDREN OF MEN, this was certainly the best movie of the year, with great performances, a story that is both refreshingly cynical and bracingly honest about how hard it is just to get by in a family and in life, but is also full of emotion and heart and reminds you why you love movies and why people go on living.

Still to come: That grumpy queen, and Japanese soldiers disemboweling themselves..

Excellent think piece by my man George Saunders in the New Yorker, after the break.
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