Vacation movies

While we were on vacation in Texas, Kim and I took advantage of the grandparents by slipping out a couple of times to go to the movies.

First, we saw Pixar's Up, in 3D, in San Antonio. I thought it was a lovely film, certainly worthy of the Pixar name, and a charming, unusual, original story until the final act. The first ten minutes of Up is probably the best storytelling we'll get at the movies this year, compact, funny and heartbreaking. Flawless, really. What comes after is truly entertaining and only at the end does the film become louder and rougher and a bit less imaginative, and more like all non-Pixar American animation.

Plus, they had these funky 3D glasses that you could keep if you like to collect junk. Which I do. Backing up a step, in case anyone is curious about why Pixar just keeps making one good movie after another (with the arguable exception of Cars), I revealed the key a moment ago. They tell original stories. Look around at the studio animation scene: is anyone else doing that? Their films also somehow manage to feel auteur-driven, in spite of the thousands that work on them, rather than made by committee. It's hard to understand how they have such balls, but god bless 'em!

Up is currently on track to be the biggest grossing film of the year, after Wall Street analysts initally thought it might do poorly because the story and characters are a little unusual (the star is a grumpy old man) and there isn't the merchandizing potential of, say, Cars or Toy Story. As Bill the Cat would say, THPTH!

Secondly, we saw Sam Raimi's deliriously entertaining horror film, Drag Me to Hell. I suppose I should say, deliriously entertaining for a horror film. Occasionally I have participated in marketing surveys that ask which types of movies I like best, with the option to select from a big list of genres. This always baffles me, because I like any film as long as it's good. (In an earlier post, I describe what I mean by "good.") I see very few horror films because my perception is that almost every single one is a piece of shit. I need to be told to see one, like when my friends recommended the movie, The Descent, a solid example of the form on its better end.

Raimi, of course, has already made a couple of deliriously entertaining horror films and, no, DMTH is no Evil Dead. But it couldn't have been because he had way more money this time and Raimi's humor and perfect timing are intact from those days of yore, so it was great fun to see him cut loose. He's also just a terrific B-movie filmmaker, no matter the budget - I mean, if the Spiderman films are not B-movies, what is these days? The theater where we saw the movie, unfortunately, had the volume up to 11 which is hurting my ears even now, so that was a shame. But the movie was propulsive, disgusting, hilarious, timely, creaky and scary in all the right places, and it ended with a bang.

I admit to some mild disappointment, along with my wife, who pointed out that the heroine of the film, played by the hot but somewhat uninteresting Alison Lohman (whose blandness, nevertheless, works really well here), has very little agency throughout the film. She never actually does anything, until the very end, which one could not say about, say, Ash. She merely reacts to events and allows herself to be pushed and pulled around by every man she knows. A pretty, passive heroine, which, for me is a mixed bag. One does not much like her character or care very much about what happens to her, a bold and interesting choice. In other words, you almost root for the evil gypsy spirit to win which, I think, is really how these films ought to work.

In looking up a couple of things on IMDb for this post, I noticed that one of Raimi's next films is The Evil Dead! Apparently, Ghost House Pictures is trying to remake the original film for some reason. Raimi seems to be into it, for some reason. There's going to be a new director. It's not going to be Evil Dead 4. Whatever. Raimi already remade Evil Dead, calling it Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn. The whole ED saga is already completely self-referential and meta. So this remake idea is pretty darn stupid. Oh, well.

Spring begins in Sunol Regional Wilderness

The East Bay Regional Park District has a lot to offer. 65 parks, 98,000 acres, 1,150 miles of trails. I've enjoyed hiking in many of them over the years. I even shot my first film in one of them. On Friday, the first day of spring, Kim and I discovered a new one, the Sunol Regional Wilderness.

This is the perfect time of year to explore these parks, while the round, grassy hills are still an iridescent green under deep blue skies, slopes busting out with wildflowers, creeks and streams full of water, sun not too hot, a light, cool breeze blowing by late afternoon. We took the Canyon View Trail because the brochure promised a "gentle rise in elevation" and we needed a mild walk rather than a strenuous hike, as the pictures suggest.

The trees, trail, flowers and hill views were lovely enough, but the gem of the park was the rocky canyon on the Alameda Creek called Little Yosemite. We plan to return during the summer and try to sneak a dip, though the water will likely be reduced to a trickle by then. It'll still be worth the trip...
"Little Yosemite"

By the banks of the Alameda Creek.
On the way out, Flag Hill.

Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog Millionaire might be 2008's most over-praised film, an honor I had thought I would bestow upon The Dark Knight. Audiences and critics seem to love Slumdog. I understand it to a point; it's a feel-good fantasy in an exotic setting about an orphan from a hellish slum who becomes rich and wins the girl of his dreams. I like fantasy, too - but not brutally dishonest fantasy.

Isn't any fantasy dishonest? Or any and every film, for that matter? Okay, but how far do you need to take this? Some films tell you up front that they are fantasies; Slumdog tries to have it both ways. It tries to be grounded in the reality of life in hell and make it flashy and sexy, too. It "corrects" the violence, filth and savage injustices of its characters' lives with coincidence, shallow characterization, all-conquering love and lies upon lies. I am not usually bothered when popular filmmakers use colorful Third World backdrops because they rarely ask us to take their tourism seriously (in The Incredible Hulk, for instance, or the Bourne and Bond films); also, I just don't give a shit about that kind of argument. But, alas, director Danny Boyle seems not to know that he is a tourist here, reminding me of the gullible travelers in his film's Taj Mahal sequence. Yep, it's a film set in India, made by a British director - and it has a Taj Mahal sequence. Of course it does.

To be fair, Boyle's Taj Mahal sequence is not without irony. I've tended to like his work in the past and had some hopes for this film, in spite of what its ad campaign suggested to me. The first half of the film is rather charming, too, when he's following the main character as a child. In spite of the horrors of their lives, children are resilient - to a point. It's just so bleeding unlikely that everything is going to work out so well, fall so neatly into place, for anyone as an adult, let alone someone who reaches adulthood under the circumstances depicted here, that the film just goes off the rails after a certain point.

That is to say, what had been a pleasant fantasy becomes an unpleasant, treacly fantasy that stops making sense even by its own rules. As one absurdity after another piles up, I start checking out.

As for the viewing experience, tonight we sat in the Alameda's balcony for the first time, which was a novel and extremely pleasant vantage. Sadly, in the row behind us was a pair of middle-aged women who seemed to mistake the gigantic, art deco theater for their own living room. They reacted audibly to each twist and turn of the film, including simple sounds and full sentences of advice for the characters, and they occasionally struck up conversation with each other. Perhaps my reaction to the film comes in part from the fact that I was distracted both by their noise and by what I might do about it.

I considered talking to them right in the middle of the film; I also went over several scenarios for talking to them after the film was over. In this situation, if I make it through the film without saying anything, there's about a 50% chance that I will say something afterwards. This time I said, "Ladies, a little too much talking during the movie." They flattened their faces at me and sort of subtly bent back and away. I continued, "This is not your living room."

By now, Kim had practically turned into a gas in her efforts to get out of there. We left.

Look, I don't crave that kind of confrontation. I don't love to embarrass my wife, or be a dick. But if you go to the movies, SHUT THE FUCK UP. Or don't go. Those are your options. If you are too stupid to understand that, you are too stupid to attend the movies.

The last time I went to L.A., it was like this

Once upon a time in Texas...

Halloween II

The Idiot Box

I have to admit, I love television. Sure, there's lots of crap on television, but that would seem to be the nature of any medium so broadly and deeply embraced by a culture. There are something like 1 1/2 billion TVs in the world, yet one can still find plenty of people who claim to not watch television; I know people who don't even have one. I guess they spend a lot of time reading, which I also love to do.

I watch television more or less daily. I embrace it. Kim watches, but gets sick of it after a couple hours. Sure, it's a time suck. I'm just someone who is able to keep watching and watching. Not just TV shows, of course, but a lot of movies. To me, it's kinda all the same thing.

Anyway, here's a short list of what I think are the best shows I've ever seen:

Twin Peaks
Max Headroom
The Office (BBC)
The Wire
Monty Python's Flying Circus
The Singing Detective
Sesame Street
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Twin Peaks, actually, is one of my favorite - what would you call the category into which both TV and movies fall? Moving image narrative? And why isn't Max Headroom available on DVD? I'm trying to track it down. I imagine a lot of people, if they remember Max at all, think of the Coke pitchman, not the TV show. But the show was great, a cyberpunk TV show right around the time cyberpunk was actually a thing, instead of years later. Truly innovative and ahead of its time.

I truly love the American Office, too, it's like great TV comfort food, but it's nothing compared to the British version, which is sheer genius, moment-to-moment, from start to finish. Of course, it's maybe easier to do that when you have a total of 12 regular episodes and a long special episode. Still, the compromises and simplifications made for American viewers (thumb-sucking, unsophisticated Yanks that we are) keep our version from being truly great. Why is British TV often so much funnier (or more serious) and sharper than our own?

I don't think TV makes people dumb; a lot of TV, though, is made for the lowest common denominator and is obviously little more than an advertising delivery vehicle. You could say that people make TV dumb. With some shows, it's a bit difficult to articulate what makes them popular or effective, other than that people watch them, and it's easy to become cynical. But then you get a show like The Wire, which really shows what the medium can do - you know, the Dickensian aspect, the duration, the focus, the superb writing and character development, the long arcs - and one finds that we're really in a golden age of this medium: The Sopranos, Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica (at least the first two seasons), Mad Men, 30 Rock and many more. American TV is so much stronger and more interesting as an art form than American film these days...

Makes me want to make television for a living which, actually, I do already. But, you know, different stuff.

So much more than a hardware store

Pagano's is one of the delights of life on Alameda. It's a hardware store that crams everything and the kitchen sink (yes, literally) into a labyrinthine old fire-trap in the Bay Station district of the island (not sure if these districts mean anything or if it's just marketing), a pleasant Sunday afternoon bike ride away. Like that bedeviled Moscow apartment in The Master and Margarita, it's much bigger on the inside.

We bought some twine so Kim can tie up her peas properly.

Kim enjoys the backyard...

...while I try blogging from my iPhone.