Avdat

Natives run off imperialists

No, this post is not about Iraq. 

While it poured yesterday afternoon the kids watched the first half of Return of the Jedi.  While I've seen Empire repeatedly over the years, I haven't seen the third movie since, I don't know, maybe going back to when I was a teenager.  And you know what?  Dude, the movie like, sucks.

Let me get this straight.  For inspiration, George Lucas turns to cannibals on the island of Borneo, transforms them into cuddly teddy bears, and relocates them to a temperate rainforest?  And they destroy the Empire?  Oh, and C3P0 gets to be the Coke bottle from The Gods Must Be Crazy.

It's really quite dreadful.

The honesty's too much

Ever since 1980 you've been wondering, Just what is the meaning of that insult the droid hurled at C3P0 upon 3P0's arrival in the Cloud City, just before he discovered the storm troopers and almost wound up in the smelter?  A rough transliteration might be, "Echukwa!"

Well, the linguistic insights from the previous post can shed light on this enduring mystery.  Clearly C3P0 was manufactured in the south, where civility takes the form of indirect speech that's padded with pleasantries.  And this anonymous droid whom C3P0 finds so offensive was obviously assembled north of the Mason-Dixon line, where people appreciate directness of speech.  Thus we can conjecture that Echukwa probably means something like, "I don't have time for this conversation," a statement far too honest and unadorned with platitudinous falsehoods for our golden protocol droid's sense of decorum and good taste.

And now you know.

Raise your hopeful voice, singer-songwriters of the world!

Once:  I had the same experience watching this film as I had reading Anne Tyler's Ladder of Years.  I was so fixated on the question "How are they going to get together?" that when they didn't, I was nonplussed.  Hollywood makes a movie about chaste love, love for art's sake.  Who'd have thunk it?

Take it away, Guy and Girl:

HT:  Jennifer.

Movie meme

The virus spreads...

1. One movie that made you laugh
Raising Arizona

2. One movie that made you cry
E.T.

3. One movie you loved when you were a child
The Empire Strikes Back

4. One movie you’ve seen more than once
Bull Durham

5. One movie you loved, but were embarrassed to admit it
I don't hang out with movie snobs.  I'll happily admit to anything.

6. One movie you hated
A.I.

7. One movie that scared you
The Shining

8. One movie that bored you
Full Frontal

9. One movie that made you happy
The Triplets of Belleville

10. One movie that made you miserable
Pulp Fiction

11. One movie you weren’t brave enough to see
No Country for Old Men

12. One movie character you’ve fallen in love with
Betty Sizemore, played by Renée Zellweger in Nurse Betty

13. The last movie you saw
La Vie en Rose

14. The next movie you hope to see
The Bourne Ultimatum (It arrived in the mail just today!)

15. Now tag five people:  Jennifer, Jennifer, Jonathan, Lee and Sarah.

Marvin reviews movies

La Vie en Rose:  In a nutshell, every great artist leads a tragic life.  The art, in this case, music, was superior.  The tragedy was sufficiently pathos-inducing.  It was a bit long, however.  Ah!  Tragedy!  Art!  Just keep it under 110 minutes!

Match Point.  I have seen a ton of Woody Allen movies, and I couldn't tell you a thing about them.  In other words, I find his work largely forgettable.  But this one was different.  It begins as another languid tale of infidelity among the idle rich, only in London rather than New York, but then morphs into a thriller that reminded me of The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Spoiler warning...

I choose to see the movie as morally serous and not cynical.  Chris is a retired tennis pro because he's unlucky.  The ball hits the net and falls on his side just a few too many times.  But that "unluckiness" results in a marriage, a job with his father-in-law's firm, and a fatal attraction with his brother-in-law's girlfriend. 

After the murder, when he tries to throw the evidence away, it hits the net and falls on his side, so to speak.  But the irony is that failed attempt to destroy the evidence winds up implicating another person as the culprit.  And yes Chris is not lucky at all for getting away with murder.  He's trapped in a loveless marriage, and, as Chris himself admits to his erstwhile lover's ghost, to get away with murder is to be condemned to living in a world without God, and without justice.

It's one of Woody Allen's most thought-provoking films. 

No country for Marvin

Why should I see a movie that reviewers can't describe without the following cluster of adjectives?

• Grim
• Bleak
• Unrelentingly despairing

I don't think this makes me shallow.  I just think that there are enough reasons to despair in the real world.  I don't need to pluck down ten bucks at a theater and find a whole bunch of extra, fictional reasons.  It's not good mental hygiene.  So I'd rather watch You Tube, and, you know, hope:

Am I a sucka?  Guilty as charged!

Who needs therapy when you've got a chain fastened to a radiator?

I caught Black Snake Moan last night, and I'm still trying to get my head around it.  Problem is, the kind of severe child sexual abuse that destroys a person's boundaries doesn't usually turn out little hotties like the character Christina Ricci plays in the movie.  It destroys people.  Nymphomania, now called hypersexuality, is a diagnosable disorder, but the movie gives us something far from a clinical analysis.  More like Beavis 'n' Butthead-style fantasies on the subject.

Then again, I wonder if the producer and director haven't pulled a bait 'n' switch on us.  Provocative title; mean looking Sam Jackson; pretty girl in underwear with a heavy, black chain around her waist--I'm sure a lot of people bought the ticket thinking that they were in for a mainstream treatment of all manner of sexual deviance.  "Everything's hotter in the south," says the trailer. 

But after the first third of the movie, there are no more writhing girls in underwear.  It becomes a story of redemption, as the older, wiser black male shepherds a young, troubled white female to, if not normalcy, then a shot at it.  With an assist from a thoughtful preacher.

The scenery and blues soundtrack evoke the Deep South, but without the specter of Klansmen or southern Gothic stereotypes.  Sultry, but without the undercurrent of hate. 

I can't say I'd recommend it.  The sex and violence are at times shocking.  And I suspect that this is a movie that men and women might experience very differently.  I still can't decide if it's horribly misogynistic, or something far more ennobling.  Have you seen it?  What do you think?

You Tube Monday, Bonus Holiday Version

We all love actors with... range.  Did you know that before Hugo Weaving was an elf and an alien he was a drag queen?  Neither did I!

Or maybe I didn't see a movie about three Aussie transvestites exploring the Outback in an old bus.  Maybe I just had a weird dream--no doubt induced by watching bits of The Fellowship of the Ring back to back with that Carol Burnette tribute on PBS.

But without further ado, here's the unironic original version of I've Never Been to Me, the song that Weaving's character breathed new, campy life into.  If you can watch the entire video, you can probably listen to someone drag their fingernails down a chalk board as well as perform many other feats of skill!

Munich

If you're looking for reviews of the latest movies, then this is definitely not the blog for you, but I will mention that we got around to seeing Munich the other night, and it's a fine film.  In case you're unfamiliar with the plot, it centers on a Mosad agent named Avner (Eric Bana), and four others who are dispatched to assassinate eleven Palestinian militants after the Black September raid on the 1972 Olympic Village that resulted in the deaths of eleven Israeli athletes.

The movie raises questions about to what extent the Jewish state should embody the values of the Jewish people and religion, and the tension between Israeli Jews and Jews in the diaspora.  It will also wind you up, as all good thrillers do, especially the ones in which the hunters become the hunted.

I walked away from it feeling something like emptiness.  I think that Spielberg and Kushner want the viewer to understand that vengeance hollows out the souls of both societies and individuals.  There's simply no return to normalcy after a person or a people set out on such a mission.

Das Leben Der Anderen

We watched The Lives of Others last night.  It's a fine movie.  Set in East Germany in 1984, the plot revolves around a playwright (Georg), his actress-lover (Christa-Maria), and an East German Stasi agent (Capt. Wiesler) charged with spying on them.  In the course of the investigation, the spy begins to care about the people on whom he's eavesdropping, and learns that he's been assigned this mission for more venal reasons than "national security."  When the scrupulously apolitical author decides to commit a subversive act, the spy has to decide whether to blow the whistle or protect them, a choice that precipitates a tension-filled climax.

In Communist regimes, the State takes the place of God.  It's all-powerful and all-knowing, and its ideology gives the people something to live for, and die for.  There's a curiously ironic scene in which Capt. Wiesler gets to play God with one of his subjects, but in a way that undermines the State's god-like power.  He has taken leave of listening in on Georg and Christa-Maria to get a drink in a bar when Christa-Maria walks in.  She's on her way to a "date" with a high-ranking member of the party, over the objections of her lover.  Wiesler knows all this, so he approaches her, and with an amazingly deft choice of words, dissuades her from prostituting herself to the State, without revealing himself as having spied on them. 

The warm, inviting apartment where Georg and Christa-Maria make their home stands out against the gunmetal gray hallways and drab, beige offices of the East German government buildings.  Like a dandelion flower emerging from cracks in the pavement, the movie shows us how beauty can be cultivated even in the harshest climates.  It is testimony to the fact that people can change, and that truth and beauty is the vehicle of change.  Everyone should watch this movie.