It's a magical world

Death and the Compass. Dir. Alex Cox, 1992/1996.

The BAM/PFA does a lot of cool movie retrospectives and whatnot that I never get around to seeing (even when I put them on my calendar!), but I managed to convince my roommate N to see this with me because it has Christopher Eccleston. I'd never actually heard of Alex Cox, but I really enjoyed this movie, both in itself as an adaptation of the Borges short story of the same name.

Cox was actually there at the screening (we watched his personal print, which unfortunately has some sound issues), and in the Q&A afterward I asked how he decided to adapt this story - he said he originally wanted to do "The Aleph," but the BBC didn't have the rights to it, so he wound up with this one. Some elements of "The Aleph" still linger in the movie, even so.

The 1992 version was shot for a TV miniseries event for the BBC and a Spanish television company, celebrating, as Cox put it, "the 500th anniversary of the burning of the library at Grenada." The original version is about 1/3 shorter; Cox expanded it by shooting scenes of Treviranus, post-retirement, explaining the events of the story in increasingly self-delusional, and inaccurate, fashion.

I don't know. I read all of Borges' short stories ten years ago, in high school, but I didn't particularly remember this one; I did really, really like the movie, which is simultaneously surreal, OTT, darkly humorous, and mordantly sarcastic and exaggerated. It was shot in Mexico City, and I think the Latin American setting definitely adds a certain something to the movie as a Borges adaptation. I also really liked the music, which was overpowering and bizarre, and the costume design, which puts the characters in some of the most brightly colored suits I've ever seen and makes, in context, total sense.

Looper. Dir. Rian Johnson, 2012.

I really, really liked this movie. It was very well-done in a lot of ways, and JGL and Bruce Willis and the whole cast, really, did an excellent job.

Wired:: The movie gets major points for handwaving the mechanism of time travel - at one point Old Joe even says, "I'm not going to explain how it works, we'll be here forever with straws for diagrams, fucking time travel," and really, that's about right: no science bullshit that people who know science could see through from a mile away, no mess, no fuss. I also really liked the well-thought out details of worldbuilding - who else caught that by the 2040s the world is on a unified currency? - and the way that shiny new tech coexisted with older, jerry-rigged and repaired tech. I like Joe's fashion sense and Abe's and the fact that this may be the only movie I've seen in eons that actually understands how quantum mechanics works and what its actual ramifications would be in the event of actual time travel. The movie also understands the mob and how it works pretty well, which I always appreciate. Perhaps inevitably, I was reminded of Holly Black's Curseworkers trilogy, and unlike some other people I know, I found it pretty realistic that humanity would invent time travel and then immediately cede it to the mob. We're the civilization that invented the internet and now uses it primarily to serve advertising, after all. I don't think our posterity is going to give us very high marks in that respect.

( Spoilers are from the future. Go to China. )

JGL did a great job playing Bruce Willis, and the movie was really great overall. If you haven't seen Brick, you really, really need to.

The Dark Knight Rises. Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2012.

Overall, I liked this movie. There were a lot of nice shout-outs to the comics and cartoons (and to at least one Batman novel that I read in high school), and it did a good job of tying the trilogy together and tying it off. Nothing will ever match the transcendent nihilism of the Joker tearing around Gotham in his purloined cop car, but this movie did have some good moments…as well as some things that made me laugh out loud inappropriately, and some things that just made me really angry.

( It was the best of times; it was the worst of times… )

The fantastic screenwriter Nora Ephron died on Tuesday night. She will justly be remembered for screenplays like When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, but my favorite movie of hers will always be My Blue Heaven, which is the best movie that no one buy my family has ever seen. It stars Steve Martin as a mafioso in the Witness Protection Program, Rick Moranis as the strait-laced agent riding herd on him, and Joan Cusack as the local DA who really needs to loosen up, and it is hilarious. (It's also very accurate on New York-California differences, and relations. Sometimes I'm feel like I'm living this movie, I'm not going to lie.)

I embed one of the many hilarious scenes from the movie below. You should go watch it. She was great.

Prometheus. Dir. Ridley Scott, 2012.

Well, so that happened.

I think kuwdora, with whom I laughed my way through this trope-fest under the glares of fanboys, said it best when she said, "So Ridley Scott totally just made a Lord King Bad Movie!" Yes, yes he did.

I read a really great, snarky, fairly non-spoilery review before I saw the movie, and one of the things it said was that Michael Fassbender, playing the android David 8 in the single best element of the film, frequently seems to be in a completely different movie, and that it would be nice if the other characters could join him there. ( Big things have small beginnings. )

Tl,dr; Ridley Scott clearly does not know mythology as well as he thinks he does (nor does Weyland, for that matter), because it should have been called Epimetheus.

As a bonus, have mine and kuwdora's fairly non-spoilery Twitter reactions (@s without links are my replies to her):

( Am I being an evil feminist? Evil, maybe, but not wrong )

I went to see the movie Friday night again, with awesome fan people. I enjoyed it just as much the second time around--it was not a completely sold out theater, however, and the crowd was pretty good but nowhere near as good as opening night. There is a reason I am willing to deal with the lines and the crowds and the whatnot of opening weekend for event movies.

( This is longer than my actual first review. Spoilers, obviously. )

Mysteries of Lisbon | Mistérios de Lisboa. Dir. Raúl Ruiz, 2010.

I'd heard, vaguely, that this was one of the best films people saw this year, and it says a lot about me that my impulsive idea of a good time on Friday night is a four-hour movie based off a 19thC Portuguese Romantic novel. And you know what? I was not disappointed at all, because the movie is fantastic--immersive, entrancing, transporting, gorgeous, weird and also funny at times. If you can see it, you should.

The movie is the second-to-last completed film of Chilean director Raúl Ruiz, and it was apparently originally broadcast on TV in Europe as a six episode miniseries; our screening came with an intermission. The plot, such as it is, follows the career of the young orphan (who's not really an orphan) João, whose name isn't really João, but the story is only a little more about João--who we quickly learn is actually named Pedro--than Laurence Stern's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is about the eponymous Tristram (you should all read Tristram, it's awesome). As the story spirals out from Pedro's quest to learn who he is and where he came from, other characters take up and take over the narrative, bringing the story further back into the past and further away from Pedro himself. No one is what they seem, or more precisely, no one's identity is fixed: orphans become counts, counts become beggars, soldiers become dukes, ruffians become wealthy bourgeoisie. Pedro's mentor and protector Padre Dinis acts as a focal point for most of the narrative, but even he has his secrets.

The movie, over and over, is about telling stories, about narrative, about how stories make us who we are--"I shall confess to you," characters say, over and over; "all shall be revealed to you in time." It's a lie, of course, but it's also true, and I was reminded of Tristram all the more because Pedro ultimately comes to seem a footnote in his own life, just a small part of a Dickensian tapestry of coincidence and intersecting lives. More than Hugo, I was reminded of Dumas pére, though no Frenchman could have written the 1854 novel this movie is based on, Os Mistérios de Lisboa by the Portuguese writer Camilo Castelo Branco. Portugal and the other settings of the events are an out of the way corner of Europe, the fact of which is mirrored in the fact that the great events of the day are only obliquely revealed in the characters' lives, and the characters themselves are all obscure addenda to each others' lives.

The other thing is that the movie is very oddly funny, characters fainting, coming damned close to breaking the fourth wall at times, in one memorable instance committing suicide after waiting for a party of duelists to clear out--there's a wry sardonic quality to much of it that's interesting. Ruiz, I think, meant for his audience to laugh at this movie, but not everyone finds the same parts funny, which is an odd experience to have in a movie theater. Sociality and class are subtle themes, brought home to me when one of my favorite characters, the originally lower-class Alberto, reflects on how his life has turned into a "sordid bourgeois drama," just as many of the aristocratic characters have little else but their pretensions to call their own. The movie is a marvel, not only for its very 21stC meditations but also for an exacting portrait of a vanished Europe of the mid C19th.

Equally importantly, what are they putting in the water in Portugal? I've not read very many Portuguese novels, but they remain some of the best that I have read--Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet is a rich, strange literary experience like no other (all of you should read it, right now), and the Jose Saramago novel with one of Pessoa's heteronyms as its eponymous protagonist, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, is my favorite by the Nobel Prize winner.

Haywire. Dir. Steven Soderbergh, 2011.

I went to see this movie with my awesome roommate N. We were not the only pair of women in the theater who saw the movie at least partly because of Michael Fassbender, as was made clear by the woman in front of us jumping into our geeky conversation pre-previews, and the women behind us squealing when he first showed up on screen. Ah, fandom.

But Haywire! I cannot quite recommend the movie whole-heartedly, for reasons upon which I shall elaborate, but I can recommend that you see it. It is well worth seeing, because the female protagonist, Mallory, is an absolute BAMF. And, as probably a lot of people know, Gina Carano, who plays Mallory, has the martial arts background and training to pull off all the fights with complete realism. Complete realism, actually, is the hallmark of this movie and its treatment of Mallory and her way of getting things done, and I very much liked that about it. MALLORY IS AMAZING.

The thing about Soderbergh is that his movies are so very often rather sardonic--this plays very well with some of his movies, such as the Ocean's films, but in this film the decidedly sardonic tone sat rather at odds with the actual plot of the story, in which Mallory, a former Marine now working as an independent security contractor, is set up for murder by her ex-boyfriend and current boss, and doesn't take kindly to it.

( Spoilers are keeping their eyes open )

Many awesome parts, but in the end, as a whole, a bit too bloodless--compared with Salt, which whatever else you want to say about it had people cheering in the theater when the female protagonist killed her worst enemy, everyone's just a bit too professional for their own good, except when they're not and it gets them what they deserve, and ironically the extreme competence of everyone involved winds up working against the movie's impact.

Hugo. Dir. Martin Scorsese, 2011.

This is a very good movie, but even though it's about a child I'm not actually sure whether it's for children, and also, the reason it got an Oscar nom for Best Picture is because (like The Artist) it looks back on the earliest era of cinema with wonder-tinted glasses. Rightfully so, for the art and life of George Méliès is an important part of this movie's plot, but way to be predictable, Academy.

So, yes. The title character is a young boy whose clockmaker father dies and whose drunken lout of an uncle leaves him after teaching him how to maintain the clocks in one of Paris's major train stations, and in between dodging the stationmaster's dog and cages for children awaiting transport to the orphanage, Hugo is trying to cadge enough bits of clockwork to complete the automaton that his father brought home from a museum before his untimely death. The automaton is his only friend, and his attempts to repair it bring him into contact with an irascible old toymaker and his god-daughter, an orphan like Hugo. The automaton and the toymaker are both connected with Georges Méliès, the early wunderkind of silent film whose movies were largely lost by the end of the first world war, and with the pain of being an artist whose works have all been destroyed and forgotten.

What makes me think that this movie isn't for kids (despite the comedic relief, turned grimly serious, of Sacha Baron Cohen's station master with a bum, part-clockwork leg) is how bloody sad it is. All of the characters are broken in their own ways, and it's a winter's tale, shot mostly in various cold tones of blue and white. Over and over and over Hugo is told, thinks, believes that there is no place for him in the world, that there is no one who loves him, that he is completely cut off from all human sympathy, and only at the last possible instant does anything happen to definitively prove otherwise. Both Méliès (played masterfully by Ben Kingsley) and Hugo do find a measure of the grace that comes of second chances, but the glorious montage-homages to Méliès' movies can't quite paper over the very real abyss that the film dances around.

The movie is based on a book by Brian Selznick that I haven't read, and I'm not sure, having seen this movie, that I could honestly bear to. I will say, as the budding hipster male cinesnobs whom I followed out of the theater commented, that Scorsese has a masterful touch for integrating 3D into his movie without making it feel cheap; it's the best 3D I've seen since Coraline, for sure, and if every director used 3D as wisely I would be much more reconciled to it.