From Russia With Love

From Russia With Love is the second 007 film, and I can't for the life of me remember the plot. Something about SPECTRE going after Bond with some blond-haired tough guy and sending some blonde-haired woman...not that plot matters, but here's the IMDB logline:

"James Bond willingly falls into an assassination ploy involving a naive Russian beauty in order to retrieve a Soviet encryption device that was stolen by SPECTRE."

As in Dr. No, the 007 theme music appears frequently, though not enough to be as much of a distraction as in the previous film. Still, sometimes I notice James Bond's most trivial movements accompanied by the theme. Walking into a hotel — play the Bond theme. Drive a car — play the Bond theme. Raise an eyebrow — play the Bond theme.

I'm rather glad the Daniel Craig iterations don't feature the Bond theme so prominently.

Watching early Bond films can be difficult, thanks to the efforts of Mike Myers and the Austin Powers franchise. Frau Farbissina, Dr. Evil, and Number Two all have equivalents in this picture. I can't help some inadvertent laughing.

I can forgive the quaintness, but I can't get past my inner monologue, saying the name "Frau Farbissina" while impersonating Dr. Evil. It got weird.

The "chick fight" at around the 43:00 mark? The two women who fight for a husband? Yeah, that fight looks pretty bad now. I get the impression that fight was choreographed by a man. There's just not enough screeching and hair-pulling. They look like two members of G.L.O.W.

Speaking of appearances, how about Robert Shaw as Donald Grant, the Bond heavy here? He looks like a congressman from my home state of Indiana:

My biggest complaint with From Russia With Love is the rather abrupt ending. Stuff blows up, then Bondandthegirlrideawayinaboattheend.

Again, though, that complaint sort of gets at the writing, and criticizing the writing of a Bond film is rather like kicking a baby. All of the Bond films have varying degrees of bad writing, from cheesy dialogue to general implausibility. Who gives a crap?

Caring isn't worth the trouble. I like Bond films for the escape they deliver, and as I'm going through the grieving process and settling my mother's estate, this stupid stuff is the perfect antidote.

From Dusk Till Dawn

Remember when vampires were a surprise?

In From Dusk Till Dawn, we get no hint of vampires for the first hour of the film.  Nobody mentions anything about vampires. Nothing.

This isn't like everybody talking about Harry Lime in The Third Man for the first hour or so, and then Orson Welles finally shows up in the shadows. In that film, they established the character's presence in the world of the film because other characters talked about him, and then he finally showed up.

This isn't really like Psycho, either, in which Janet Leigh's character goes on the lam, only to die in the shower in the middle of the film. Psycho goes on from there with different, new main characters, sort of rebooting the narrative.

Strangely, From Dusk Till Dawn is a bit like both. We get no clue about vampires, and when all hell finally breaks loose near the one-hour mark, we spend the remaining 40 minutes watching the characters (some new, some newly dead) deal with the consequences of the choices they made before the vampires appeared.

The Gecko brothers choose to flee the law to Mexico. They choose to kidnap a family with an RV.  The family chooses to go along rather than try to get away, fight, or attract the attention of the border patrol to get help. The family, in fact, chooses to travel by RV, yet stay in the hotel where they run into the Gecko brothers. From Dusk Till Dawn is a film about extreme consequences to even the most minor choices.

From Dusk Till Dawn is a screed about the merits of personal responsibility, and I don't think that's my sleep-deprived state talking. In the end, all the characters drive off by themselves, presumably to take care of themselves.  The two surviving characters have no one left to care for them, and no one left to care for, either. They're only responsible for themselves. Why not? Everyone else they've known in the last 12 hours turned into a monster.

That's part of what brings me back to this film. You get the standard Tarantino/Rodriguez touches — the hyperviolence, the clever language informed by '70s television, etc. But this film takes real risks, not the least of which is randomly throwing vampires into the mess after an hour of weird choices. This is what can happen if you are dumb, mean, or psychotic, the film seems to say. But this film also seems to tout the merits of self-reliance rather than some dipshit sparkly vampire bliggety blah.

Yes, blah blah blah, vampires possess some kind of romantic or sexual allure. Someone is always falling in love with a vampire, either in some trance or by choice. Here, that doesn't happen. This film is more about the mayhem and gore rather than the paranormal necrophilia of something like "True Blood" or the Twilight series. I prefer the mayhem. If vampires exist, this is probably what you'd get if you found a vampire bar out in the middle of nowhere. They don't have to be sneaky.

Ah, but tween girls don't line up to watch a movie with Cheech Marin as the vampire. You don't have HBO making an entire softcore porn series out of Mexican vampires in a truck stop/topless bar. Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino weren't writing and selling gazillions of formulaic "paranormal romance" novels. Doesn't happen.

In defense of "True Blood," though, you do see them touching on social issues much more than in a film like From Dusk Till Dawn. Indeed, Rodriguez's film eschews political correctness, such as when George Clooney's character refers to the Asian character as a "Jap" when in fact the character is Chinese. (When corrected, Clooney's character says something along the lines of "Excuse the hell out of me.") This sort of apolitical correctness is present in most of Tarantino's films as well. Characters are often racist, sexist, etc. They want money, sex, alcohol, and other id-driven desires. These characters are not seeking some kind of sociopolitical redemption. They don't want to evolve.

From Dusk Till Dawn is not a great film (when I re-watch this one, I'm usually floored by how many bad, silly moments are here), but this is an interesting example of '90s cinema. My first look came in the mid-'90s, when everything Tarantino and Rodriguez did was "awesome" but no fanboy could explain why. Now, with some distance, context, and education, I can sort of articulate what's happening here — or at least, what I can make of this now. I like that.

The Frighteners

Lord of the Rings would not have happened without The Frighteners.

In Peter Jackson's introduction to this DVD release, he notes how many computers and hard drives WETA ended up with after post-production on The Frighteners — going from just one machine to something like 35.  What to do with all that technology?

That set WETA up to be one of the few digital effects houses in the world that could handle something like the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  When they finished The Frighteners, that's what they were thinking, too.

This film marks Michael J. Fox's last starring role in a live-action motion picture.  Although he went on to lead voice-acting roles in the Stuart Little pictures and supporting roles in a couple films and various television shows, this is pretty much the end of Michael J. Fox's career as a bankable lead actor.  There's a certain peace to be found in watching this film.  Like the Back to the Future trilogy, he's forever young(er) here.

Peter Jackson's career was a blind spot for me prior to film school.  My old roommate Justin sat me down in the summer of 2000 and made me watch Dead-Alive and The Frighteners.  I remember noting distinct stylistic similarities between the two films.  We might have watched them on separate days — I can't recall.  Justin was always making me watch a movie, and even though we eventually lost touch, I owe a lot to that guy for pushing me into unfamiliar movies.

I pushed myself into watching this one again today.

Here's a film that depicts a spectral serial killer who kills the living by inflicting heart attacks — squeezing the life out of his victims.  When characters die, we see a light tunnel open above them, and their spectral selves emerge from their bodies, and they ascend.

Yeah, that's a little hard to watch right now.  Pretty much anything about death is hard to watch since losing Mom, but I'm going ahead anyway.  What's harder is not getting back to normal things, like spending a Sunday afternoon watching a silly movie and writing.

Friday Night Lights

Call Friday Night Lights a football film if you want.  I see more.  I can't help it right now.

Getting back into this project, or any project for that matter, has been next to impossible since Mom died last month.  Everything I watch seems to have a detail, moment, or theme that takes me right to her.  Everything I do leads me right back.

Maybe I'm just predisposed to wandering thoughts that always end up in the same place.  I find myself looking ahead to a stretch of films about loss and death, and I'm not good at this.

We hadn't spoken in five years.  The "why" seems stupid now.  We didn't get along, so we didn't talk.  She wanted me to call and I didn't.  I wanted her to treat me differently and she didn't.  There's not much more to say right now.  We hadn't talked in years, hadn't gotten along in even longer, and I'm the one who has to live with that, not anybody else.

I told my wife and myself several times this year, probably more times this year than ever, that I should call Mom.  I should drop this shit and just call her.  No, it'll be bad, I thought.  I'll do it later.  Yeah, maybe at the holidays, I'll try it again somehow.  And then...well, I can't tell you everything.

Mom lived in Texas for a while before she got together with Dad.  Watching this film tonight, I'm not actually looking at a film about football — I'm not even thinking about the film at all.  I'm thinking of Mom, 40 years ago, out in that big, wide open nothing of Texas, where the landscapes stretch out forever.  I like to think she was happy there, at least for a while.  I have pictures of her from that era of her life, and she's young and pretty and happy.  She had blonde hair then and I never knew why.

Listen to this soundtrack.  Explosions in the Sky delivers these big, echoing, ebbing and flowing post-rock anthems that put the great big open nothingness of Texas to music.  Throw in some rap and metal from the late 1980s and even Bad Company's "Seagull" over the credits and you have one of the finest soundtracks out there — the kind you can play on repeat and ride the arc of the film if you want.  These instrumentals take me right to her again.

Friday Night Lights is a film about hope.  I see a film that examines how we deal with dashed hopes and missed opportunities.  Friday Night Lights says much about how intrepid we can be when we suffer a loss.  We get back up because we have no choice.  The world might look a lot different in that instant and beyond, and we might hurt like we've never hurt, and we might cry like we've never cried, but we get back up anyway.

And in this case, I find myself looking for solace through some kind of restitution — making her (and others I've lost) proud in whatever way I can because there's no other peace in this.  I don't know what I'm doing, but this seems right.

If I live in a way that would make her proud, then maybe this won't be so hard to carry, and maybe when I see her again, everything will be different.

Free Enterprise

I'm not going to bullshit you.  This movie is not that good.

The idea is fine — two immature, twentysomething geek friends meet the real William Shatner in a bookstore, and he crushes their world by not being Captain Kirk.  Kicking and screaming toward maturity ensues.  Even Shatner has a character arc here.  The film explores the nature of friendship in the face of adulthood, love in the face of childhood, and the imperfections in us all — even our role models.

The execution, however, is for shit.  The writing is bland, the dialogue is longwinded and annoying, and the actors — I feel like I'm watching a group of geeked-out theatre majors at a lame house party where we're all watching a Dream Theater DVD (and I like Dream Theater!).

Pretty much the best actor in this film is William Shatner.

But this film is a funhouse mirror for the geek in me, and gets at so many feelings I have about everything from love to friendship to action figures.  At one point in the late '90s, I thought I'd found treasure here.

I credit this film with giving me the idea to watch Logan's Run on my 30th birthday, which I did, alone, and I'm not sure how I feel about that now.  Now, I guess I just feel like one of a million other geeks, nearly all of whom annoy the shit out of me.

That last bit gets at a strange dichotomy; I like the things that I like, but I often do not like the people who also like the things I like.  Takes a while to get through the door with me.

I'm not saying my fellow geeks are bad people.  I'm glad other people dig this stuff.  I'm glad we have things in common.  I just don't mesh well with them.  My idea of a good time is not hanging out in a smoky restaurant with obnoxious people who smoke pipes, wear furry hats, and grow pointy beards.

Don't get me wrong.  I have a few friends who share my interests, and I love talking with them and spending time with them, but I don't go to comic conventions, I don't do role-playing of any kind, I watch Joss Whedon projects in moderation, and I don't sound like Dr. Bunsen Honeydew or Sheldon from "The Big Bang Theory" when I talk.  Most importantly, unlike a large swath of the geek populace, I shower daily.

Having said all that, maybe I'm a judgmental prick — an elitist among elitists.  But no, there's logic here: just because you like the same stuff as someone else doesn't necessarily mean your personalities will mesh.  I rarely meet someone who not only shares my interests, but also clicks with me.  That's the Great White Buffalo of my social life.

That sort of brings me to the point.  I'm not even sure I want to meet that Great White Buffalo anymore.  In fact, I've stopped looking for it, because I like the people I've found over the years.  If I found the Great White Buffalo now, would that person even fit?  Where?

So yeah, I'm glad that most (though not all) geeks annoy me.  That makes the ones who don't annoy me seem that much more special.  Not only do my friends like what I like, but we also like each other.  Also, they shower frequently.

We don't have to like all the same things.  Some crossover is good, but I'd be freaked if someone had an identical DVD collection to mine, or had read all the same books, or whatever.  That's not interesting; that's creepy.

I need my friends.  I need my wife.  For better or worse, regardless of our differences, I love that we all have our "things" that we share and our "things" that we don't.  The "things" that make us different also make us interesting.  I can learn from the people I know; they can turn me on to a movie I haven't seen or a book I haven't read, or a way of looking at the world that makes more sense than what I was thinking all along.  They also can be the kindest, most wonderful people I could ever want to know.

My mom died a couple weeks ago, and I haven't been able to write or watch anything until tonight.  I don't want to get into that yet.  But things like blogs and stupid DVD collections sort of lose something in the wake of stuff like this.  I haven't compartmentalized all the grieving.

Through the last two weeks, though, I have retreated to my wife and my circle of friends.  On the night of Mom's calling hours, my wife and two good friends took me to the Heorot, which is my favorite bar in the world.  My wife went to the jukebox and put on "Tom Sawyer."  My friends Brian and Chris bought me dinner and a couple of drinks.  We talked like we were all in college again.  We laughed.  I needed that hour or so with them so I could feel something other than what I was feeling.  I felt normal.

I don't have the world in common with these guys, or my wife.  I don't need the world in common with them.  I just need them.  My life is full of large collections, but they are my little collection.  They are my only little collection, but the most important one of all.