I'm sorry

In reviewing that, and the rest of this blog, I owe you an apology. that last post was absolute crap. Completely devoid of any real insight, and without any attempt at interpretation of anything the filmmaker was trying to do, with the exception of being arrogant. It is thus with great pride in myself and disregard for the rest of you heathen radicals that I conclude that even though this last post was terrible (and this one only slightly less so) this is all you get.

J.Edgar

Shit, I did a DiCaprio movie last time?
Fuck it, here we go.

J. Edgar. Don't worry, no spoilers.
Hoover was a repressed gay, died half naked on the floor, and had thousands of pages of important confidential information destroyed when he died.

Ok, all-the-spoilers, but really, you should know better than to expect courtesies from me.

Now that that's over with, here's the dirt.

DiCaprio was stellar as Hoover; as young Hoover, old Hoover, and every horrible little man in between.
Hammer (Armie) was as convincing as a young Tolson, but the makeup threw me off as an old man. I don't know what they did wrong, but it was just never convincing. It always looked like a young man in old man makeup. Gandy was convincing.
What took me about Hoover was obviously his unending arrogance. The man stole Bobby Kennedy's fireplace for pete's sake.
what I really enjoyed was the way the entire experience had me convinced that being an arrogant, single minded, self-serving prick could really pay off if you were persistent enough about it. Turns out you also have to be mildly to moderately delusional.
It almost occurs to me that the portrayal of Hoover is impossibly arrogant, that the real Hoover couldn't possibly have done that. I suppose I could be wrong, but then Eastwood seems a little arrogant to me too, so I suppose his villain had to seem arrogant even by comparison.

The story was either brilliantly non-linear or an abandonment of storytelling to highlight the percieved character flaws of a highly conflicted man. I can't decide.

Either way, the movie was long as balls but I didn't mind. Visually soothing, which I appreciated; and engaging. I definitely recommend.

again... not doing a movies of the week on Leo.... so suck it.

Almost forgot to do a movies of the week post

And I'm not gonna do one about DiCaprio, so looks like you're not gettin one.

Lets talk about symbolism.

What up Kathy, and maybe Mike.

I just watched Shutter Island, and am currently in the middle of my second viewing. Lets have a quick chat about symbolism here.

The 6th sense: red = the beyond, the afterlife, whatever.

American Beauty: red = spacey's desires, etc, whatever.

Shutter Island:

Now if you haven't seen it, go right ahead and netflix it before reading any further, because I'm gonna spoil the F out of it.

Quick synopsis:

DiCaprio plays a Edward "Teddy" Daniels, WWII Vet and U.S. Marshall called in to a mental institution for the criminally insane in the Boston Harbor (the instutution is in the harbor, the patients are from wherever, you grammar nazis) to find a missing patient. He, and his new partner "Chuck" begin their investigation while Teddy continues to have flashbacks about his dead wife and some little girl.

The woman they're searching for, coincidentaly, has been sent to this place because she drowned their 3 kids and sat them up at the kitchen table for a meal before a neighbor dropped by. Crazy shit right?

Carrying on.

They do their investigating, and it comes to light that Teddy actually took the case as an excuse to track down Andrew Laedis, the man who burned down the apartment building he and his late wife were living in (guess how she died.) His flashbacks continue, now mingling with his WWII PTSD (apparently he was part of a group of soldiers who massacred a staff of guards at a concentration camp.)

Jumping forward, lots of dream sequences, waking nightmares, flashing lights, oh and a hurricane.

At the end of the movie we find out that Teddy actually IS Laedis. His wife started goin crazy and he did nothing about it because booze worked fine for him and he couldn't understand why she was goin nutzo. She killed their 3 kids, and he went crazy and killed her. He creates a fantasy in his head where he is still a war hero and US Marshall. Turns out he's been at the facility on Shutter Island for 2 years already on psychotropic medicine, and the head doc came up with an elaborate role playing scheme to let him play out his fantasy to the end and realize it was ridiculous, hopefully pulling him out of his delusion. Ultimately it works, he realizes he is Laedis, and it was probably his fault his wife and kids are dead, and decides to fake still being bat shit crazy so they'll just lobotomize him and end the misery.

There, you've been spoiled and summarized.

Now I'm obviously not gonna go word for word through the movie, so hopefully you netflixed this thing so you'll understand what I'm talkin about.

Go back and take a look at the attention paid to the little things. Especially fire. Matches, the fireplace, the fire in the cave, the dreams about fire and flakes of ash "your match is about to go out."

It's clear to me that fire is a huge symbol for his created fantasy world, his delusion. And if fire is a symbol of his delusion then water is clearly the symbol of reality. The ocean at the beginning, "that's a lot of fuckin water" The rain, the swim, etc etc. My favorite is the first dream. You can already see the conflict in his brain between his delusion and reality; the girl is at once a burning ember and spewing water, is she real? is she imagined? He sure as hell doesn't know.

Then go back and watch Chuck (or as we find out later, his primary Dr. for the last few years) and his reaction to things, it's pretty clear that is only a single twist, though many claim that they actually drove the real Teddy crazy.

Yes, there are unanswered questions: Why did they let him get on a boat to leave and then come back, how did they know his memory would reset? How did he know to go in the cave, was the lady real? What the hell are the rats all about? Hell if I know, but I don't see you bloggin about it.

Sidenote:

American Chopper, you been watchin? Well I have.

when Sr.'s camera crew interviewed him in front of Jr.'s shop and you could see Jr. and his camera crew and vice versa, the producers say it felt ok to break the 4th wall and admit that there were cameras and producers there all the time, but that wasn't the whole story. As soon as those camera crews filmed each other, they effectively dichotomized the camera crews on one side or the other. They became characters in the story and they had to land on one side or the other. At least that's my take.

Hey y'all. Back again. Here's my special features post!
Blogger still sucks, but I'm making due. here goes.

Scene composition!

I hope I got some serious action for agreeing to watch this movie in the first place (no worries, I'm sure I did.) But it ended up bein ok BECAUSE, there was an awesome scene composition and editing behind the scenes special feature. They disect a few scenes with good explanations of why and how and what. Real good stuff for teaching what camera angles and framing do to convey meaning. (if the lion king thing ever gets old)





















Sound Design.

Pixar has begun a tradition of awesome special features, and this is no disappointment. The sounds of this entire world had to be created along with the characters and environments. The high tech sound creation is sometimes no more useful than good old fashioned techiques, good thing they take a look at that too.

Definitely wanted to be a sound designer after I saw the special features for LOTR. G'head, call me a geek. I'll kill you, and get it on ADAT.

Makin stuf look good.

They filmed this movie in springtime in mississipi. It looks dust-bowl-ish because of state of the art (at the time) post production. Definitely worth checkin out this stuff.

The invisible man + old school animation. OR, the last hurrah of the old school animator.

Awesome. Watch the special featured and then watch the movie to find out where they goofed stuff, even better.

Story development.

The Incredibles.

Brad Bird is a storyteller first and foremost. I was gonna post a picture but blogger sucks again.

Bird and his cohorts do an awesome job of explaining what motivated characters, and how they tick and why they do what they do and how they do it. Someone say runon sentence. Anyway, it's quite the ordeal. Somethin like an hour of special features footage, plus 2 commentary tracks. Bangin stuff.

Till next time boys and girls, be cool.

DVD Special Features

I'm going to post about DVD special features, as soon as I'm no longer pissed at just how gay blogger's html composer is. Good day bitches.

And the fun shall continue

Ok folks, and this time by folks, I mean Kathy, and maybe Mike if he gets these updates...
Now, at the request of Kathy, I'm going to continue this tom foolery on a limited basis, but on one condition:
When writing for class, I always had an angle, a purpose, a keyword, something for each movie that I could generate a coherent thought about. From now on, I will require someone to provide me with such a starting block. Feel free to get creative, I just need something to talk about.
This week, however, is a freeby.

Bram Stoker's Dracula
and a word of inspiration...... legend.
Yes yes, that'll do nicely.
For what is Dracula if not a legend?
I'm relatively new to any serious inquiry into vampire lore, but from what I've seen, they're creepy and awesome.

Some Common Vampire Legends C/O the FVZA (Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency....seriously I'm not makin this shit up... www.fvza.org... no foolin)

1. Vampires sleep in coffins
- probably not true, a vampire would sleep wherever it feels safe
probably arose from the fact that when people were infected with whatever various and sundry disease was believed to be vampirism at the time, they were interred before they died, I guess to save time or something.

2.Vampires can be repelled by garlic
- while vampires have heightened senses to compliment their superhuman strength and durability, garlic serves only as a particularly pungent odor, and is really just a temporary distraction. I.E. garlic is to a vampire in bloodlust as the lingering stank of my last turd loaf is to me en route to my next.

3. Sunlight causes vampires to burst into flames
-according to the good folks at the FVZA, vampires have hyperdilated irises, therefore sunlight blinds them. Also, for some reason, the neural connections in a vampire's brain go haywire when sunlight hit's their skin? I dunno if I'm buyin this anymore. Your tellin me vampires COULD walk in the day if they were middle eastern women with sunglasses?, or bought snuggies? Kinda makes em seem a little lazy.

OK, enough of that nonesense, back to the movie.

Gary Oldman (commissioner gordon in the new batman movies) is a bad-ass extreme in this one. Old man, young man, monster, bat-thing, werewolf, fog, creeper, you name it, he does it. I hope the vocal work is all natural, because that was friggin sweet, I suspect some heavy tampering with his voice though.

Anthony Hopkins is Abraham Van Helsing, a crazy old doctor in this rendition. Often fun to watch, but more often a WTF kinda guy. Guy's crazy as a rat in a tin shit house.

Other secondary characters were also believeable if not spectacular: Cary Elwes as Arthur, Bill Campbell as.... Jesus, I can't do this anymore

KEANU REEVES AND WINONA RYDER?
What the holy crap was he thinking?
it's like Pauly Shore bailed on being dracula, and Coppola said "shit, now I actually gotta make a serious movie"
I don't know if I've ever heard worse british accents than my mom doing an Austin Powers impersonation after a round of Jack Daniels, but Keanu is close.
In all fairness, there were boobs..... quite a few boobs. And Tom Waites, who I didn't know acted, that was a pleasant surprise.

Ok rant over. This was actually a solid find, It's very true to Stoker's original, the visual effects are elegant and very effective (except that blue flame shit, what's that all about?)
The shape transitions were cool, but probably a little over-used. The whole movie was a fairly creepy affair, but I loved the way the sets used for the castle seemed just that much creepier.
This is a story that might take a few viewings to fully appreciate, but I'm down with that.

That's what I got for now folks. Maybe more to come on this one, but it's bedtime right now.