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fable
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I'm going to avoid it for just that reason. I have my own memories of how each character looked and sounded, and how places appeared. The best theater of all is the human mind, and I'd rather keep that particular theater open.Originally posted by Aegis:
<STRONG>I'm awaiting Fellowship, but I think it'll ruin the books for me..</STRONG>
To the Righteous belong the fruits of violent victory. The rest of us will have to settle for warm friends, warm lovers, and a wink from a quietly supportive universe.
I'm torn. I've read the books (literally) every autumn since I was about 12 years old (and I'm over 30 now), so I, too, have a very, very particular idea of sights, sounds, smells, etc. But I have looked through the material on the web, and the movie looks good. Besides, seeing another version may disrupt your ideas, but you can always envision whatever you want when reading.Originally posted by fable:
<STRONG>I'm going to avoid it for just that reason. I have my own memories of how each character looked and sounded, and how places appeared. The best theater of all is the human mind, and I'd rather keep that particular theater open.
Originally posted by Lazarus:
<STRONG>I'm torn. I've read the books (literally) every autumn since I was about 12 years old (and I'm over 30 now), so I, too, have a very, very particular idea of sights, sounds, smells, etc. But I have looked through the material on the web, and the movie looks good. Besides, seeing another version may disrupt your ideas, but you can always envision whatever you want when reading.</STRONG>
For crying out loud Lazarus my review of "Fellowship" is total fiction! It won't be out 'til December 19! It's just speculation and great deal hope and hoopla all rolled into one. Sorry to disappoint 'ya.
C'mon fable, show some solidarity, if not enthusiasm. This is a great cause! Buy a ticket, but bring dark sunglasses and earplugs so that you can block both sight and sound of the picture while still preserving inviolate your personal experience of the Lord of the Rings.Originally posted by fable:
<STRONG>I'm going to avoid it for just that reason. I have my own memories of how each character looked and sounded, and how places appeared. The best theater of all is the human mind, and I'd rather keep that particular theater open.
Like so >
Or avoid it all together, it is likely to be badOriginally posted by EMINEM:
<STRONG>C'mon fable, show some solidarity, if not enthusiasm. This is a great cause! Buy a ticket, but bring dark sunglasses and earplugs so that you can block both sight and sound of the picture while still preserving inviolate your personal experience of the Lord of the Rings.
Like so >
Who knows what it is to be like, only time will tell. Patients is required
I'd have to get drunk every night and talk about virility...And those Pink elephants I'd see.
After all this year has just been so good for movies, how could it not be greatOriginally posted by EMINEM:
<STRONG>Pessimist!
Heaven forbid that it will be anything but the movie event of 2001! My predictions will come true, you just wait and see.
(yes i am being a pesimist but then nothing has made me think another way about the project
)I'd have to get drunk every night and talk about virility...And those Pink elephants I'd see.
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fable
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Bah! Back, foul Dwimerlak! I shall remain true to the words of Tolkien, and shun the commercial Sarumans of this world!Originally posted by EMINEM:
<STRONG>C'mon fable, show some solidarity, if not enthusiasm. This is a great cause! Buy a ticket, but bring dark sunglasses and earplugs so that you can block both sight and sound of the picture while still preserving inviolate your personal experience of the Lord of the Rings.
</STRONG>
To the Righteous belong the fruits of violent victory. The rest of us will have to settle for warm friends, warm lovers, and a wink from a quietly supportive universe.
I think it's fine if people don't want to see it. If they want to maintain their vision of Tolkien, thats great, thats means he did his job. I'm personaly going to see because I want to see how it measures up to the books. I do, however, feel like I may be let down, but that's the risk of book-movie adaptations.
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fable
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This is a review of a film that first saw the light of day in Moscow cinemas, 49 years ago. It in turn first saw the light of day in my house during Christmas '99. Over the years, I've managed to break the Teutonic cultural stranglehold on my wife that demanded practical gift-giving: pens for writing, ear muffs to protect against the cold. I'm of the opinion that you give gifts the receiver desires but would never consider spending money upon if left to their own devices: amber earrings in a hardcarved, handpainted jewelry box, for instance.
I still have to prompt my wife from time to time, though. Family conditioning, like beliefs in thought-monitoring aliens or the two-party political system, is hard to break. She doesn't listen carefully for the casually expressed wishes of another soul. Sometimes it has to be spelt out in letters written with gold leaf. When she reminded me this past December that I'm a hard person to buy for, I reminded her that there were a few films at a certain website that I'd mentioned wistfully earlier in the year. This was mentioned several times, in fact.
Therefore, this past Christmas we found Mark Donskoi's Gorky trilogy, and Nikolai Ekk's The Road to Life, sitting alongside the amber jewelry and Polish jewelry box, under our brightly decorated phallic symbol which celebrates the Solstice's latest incarnation. While I could have reviewed the jewelry or the jewelry box, Jan is sleeping now, so by default you get the film review, instead.
My interest in The Road to Life was initially sparked by Jay Leyda's accolades. Leyda learned filmmaking as a student of Sergei Eisenstein, whose classes he attended for three years in the Soviet, back in the mid 30's. He saw hundreds of films that were never released abroad as well as many that were, and wrote about it all after he returned to the US in a book entitled Kino. (His literary output and travels did not cease at that point. Years later he was invited to teach filmmaking in China, another experience he wrote about. And when I say China, I mean Mainland China, not Taiwan, which was China until the United States government waved a magic wand and turned it, like Tibet, from a nation into a diplomatic embarassment.)
Leyda's comments are in the nature of vague encomiums: "Road to Life keeps a high place in Soviet film history for its fusion of technical, dramatic and political achievements...And unlike its several American derivatives, Wild Boys of the Road, The Wild Ones, Blackboard Jungle, the sensational elements in Road to Life never stray from artistic control..." High if relatively undefined praise, indeed.
The Road to Life is fiction based upon a very real, documented problem in the early Soviet: the gangs of pre-teen and early teen "wild boys" who roamed the city streets. Unlike their equivalents in the modern USA or Russia, these gangs were not turf-oriented or into drug dealing. They were primarily used by local professional criminals, ***an-style, for petty theft and minor assault on a grand scale. They made life difficult for the working inhabitants, in a society that was only just beginning to raise its head above the tide of medieval feudalism (and which subsequently slipped right back down beneath the waves).
The film's story involves an attempt by social workers under the early Soviet regime to clean up the wild boys by giving them their own machinist collective, thus creating a sense of responsibility and pride in their own work. One social worker, Sergiev, becomes their "good angel," drawing them away from the "bad angel" adult who leads the gangs. They settle in an abandoned mill/factory, about fifteen miles outside Moscow. When the river floods in spring, Sergiev gets permission from the authorities for the boys to build a railroad to transfer supplies and finished goods.
Alas, the bad angel wants his boys and his business back, and he won't take no for an answer. With wine and women he attempts to lure the boys slowly into his fold, until the boy leaders of the packs (who were originally his lieutenants) get wind of this, and stage a raid on his "party" with the help of the police. The villain escapes, only to reappear on the railroad track, which he tries to destroy. His primary lieutenant shows up, in the finishing stages of checking out the line, and the two fight. The boy is killed, and as the train triumphantly makes its first run to the factory, it carries in mourning the body of the teen.
Bald as this account is, no account would be capable of conveying the acting skills of the wild boys, themselves, and particularly their leaders. None of them were actors, and (according to Leyda), none of them ever acted in films again, not even the remarkable Chuvash boy, I. Kyrla. Their performances prove (as The Bicycle Thief was to prove, as Zero for Conduct was to prove, as indeed so many films that Hollywood repeatedly overlooks were to prove) that sometimes the best acting comes from completely untrained talent with no ingrained habits, working intensively with a good director.
Be it noted that the rest of the cast in The Road to Life is professional. Both the good and bad angels are charismatic actors, as befits their characters, and work very well with the boys. There are many small moments of teasing interplay that can pass unobserved during a first viewing of the film, but which add a depth that's subconsciously noted; rather like the way you can instantly tell a couple are married by subtle gestures or stances that are only obvious once analyzed, later.
Ekk makes occasional use of cinematic montage technique as first developed in Kuleshov's workshop in the teens, and brought to a high level of technical and artistic expertise by directors as diverse as Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Dovchenko (my hero) and Vertov. But in Ekk, montage slips over into mannerism. The quick cuts between shots of breaking iceflows has exemplary energy, but doesn't convey the flooding of the roads which is the ostensible purpose of the sequence. It also lacks any frame of reference: Pudovkin's quick-cutting montage results from the psychological state of a particular filmed character, but Ekk's montage is being viewed by nobody in the cast. It's subjective camerawork in a film that is otherwise resolutely "objective," in the sense that the camera never mirrors the psychological states of its proponents.
Worse is the montage that juxtaposes the reforming kids at their collective and the Moscow-based social workers, when the kids start turning out useful mechanical products. While it makes sense for the kids to jump for joy all over the furniture and one another, an office of social workers doing the same looks patently ridiculous. Adults usually reserve displays of wild joy for the conclusion of wars and the winning of state lotteries, rather than a letter baldly stating that some wild kids have produced gardening implements. Social workers also know that small victories achieved in private are cause for cautious optimism, and that the real challenges come when the "reformed" leave their sheltered environments for the real world.
By contrast, the most interesting (and subtlest) element in The Road to Life's cinematic mix is its use of sound. Leyda's remark, that "the sound operation, Nesterov, deserves a share of the universal praise that came to Road to Life, for his deft use of the obviously primitive means at hand" is beside the point. The use of sound in The Road to Life is remarkable, yes, given its primitive state at the time. (And the use of extensive subtitles in the film's first half clearly indicates that it was initially intended for silent issue; one wonders why they weren't removed before release.) More importantly, however, the use of sound in The Road to Life would be considered advanced even today, both for its imaginative diversity of sources, on- and off-screen, and its complexity of layering.
In one scene, for example, three off-camera sounds are layered together during an on-camera conversation; the dialog pointedly acknowledges one of the sound sources, as we hear it grow closer in relation to the other sounds. Another scene features the bad angel, singing and playing a folk-flavored song on the accordion while periodically interrupted by his pals to the left and right. The camera stays on him, but as his eyes flicker to one side or the other, registering a variety of humorous expressions, its difficult not to *hear* the sounds actually proceeding from some space to the left or right of the video screen--so powerful is the imagination when properly invoked. Many scenes, too, include localized, constant background noise, something to which Hollywood at the time was adverse; and contrary to Hollywood belief, these noises did not overwhelm the soundtrack. Instead, they cancelled out the camera noise, which Hollywood dealt with (for several years in the early 30's, at any rate) by using glass-enclosed cases that rendered cameras physically static.
Note that this noise is, like the visuals in The Road to Life (with montage exceptions), objective. I do think Ekk missed out when he didn't show us the sounds inside the skulls of the protagonists--which in the 30's could range from the singing voice of conscience in Rene Clair's Le Million, to the wonderful sequence in Vigo's Zero for Conduct where the children celebrate by tearing up and throwing around their feather pillows, and the music, along with the visuals, suddenly shift into a dreamlike, half-speed gear that makes beauty of anarchy.
One curiosity of The Road the Life which neither Ekk nor Leyda explains is the complete absence of young adolescent or pre-adolescent girls in the story. There isn't a single one in sight; and since the subject evolved out of the destruction of families during the Russian Revolution and directly after the establishment of a Communist state, it's logical to assume that some of those displaced kids were of the female gender. Even when the gang's adult commander tries to lure the boys back under his control through women and drink, he uses only adult hookers for the process. No doubt homeless girls were just as much of a problem as homeless boys; why weren't they shown at all? Was the issue of teenage and pre-teen prostitution too sensitive for the Soviets to tackle in a government-monitored industry, or impermeable of solution? Were they afraid of shocked public reaction at home, or abroad? Whatever the cause, the lack of girls in The Road to Life was a very obvious to me. Curiously, my wife never noticed it.
Where The Road to Life stumbles is precisely where the Soviets would have said it was most solid: its portrayal of reality. For Road to Life, like so many cultural artifacts everywhere and in every time, warps reality through its passionate belief in the social myths of its time and place. Reality can take a lot of pushing and pulling about when the audience is sympathetic and all wear the same cultural glasses; but once those glasses are broken, the film's flaws of logic are all too painfully evident. Is it reasonable to assume that only *one* teacher would accompany and successfully control one hundred otherwise unsupervised teens who have been guilty of everything from pickpocketing to assault to involuntary manslaughter? And when the gang leader tries to seduce the boys back, was it realistic to have three or four boys simply wander away from the work crew on the track--for fifteen miles, and wander back? Didn't anybody else notice when they were gone for the better part of a day, and returned snookered to the gills?
It's precisely these moments which made my wife snort scornfully. "But is it any more reasonable," I asked, after we saw the film, "for a handful of four or five people to successfully destroy an overwhelming armada of spaceships? Or is it realistic for the smartest, most powerful strategist and warrior in the universe to personally employ tons of bumbling oafs as his handpicked militia?" She just grinned; but it's a valid point. People who believe in the myth of the frontier and worship at the shrine of Star Wars, complete with MacDonalds cups and comicbooks, should not throw stones at the temples of others. The pigeons of reality pass over both, with predictable results.
Yet despite my criticisms of The Road to Life's acceptance of conventional social views, it also breaks those rules on occasion. The ***an-like bad angel displays likeable social qualities. The father of one of the boys reveals a more complex character than many in the early Soviet era poster-like depictions of working people, including those unmentionable qualities, drinking to excess and physical abuse. And the obligatory happy ending, climaxed by the first passage of the railroad over the tracks that the boys' have laid, is dashed by the murder of the lead boy, and the discovery of his body. No doubt it was meant to serve a subtle social purpose: "Rise up, comrades! Let us destroy the evils of recidivism amongst us, grieve for our fallen, but emerge victorious through new dedication!" Even so, it throws cold water on the expectations of the audience--heady stuff for Moscow in 1930, and just as challenging if it were done today.
Let's finish, as we began, with Leyda. His remarks about Ekk's subsequent career are both disparaging, and puzzling. "Nikolai Ekk himself is identified only with this film; all his later work and projects depend on some innovation as striking as this first manipulation of sound," Leyda writes, "the first Soviet color film, the first Soviet Shakespeare film, etc. There are passages in Road to Life so filmically satisfying that Ekk's later retreat in novelities seems a great pity."
So for the next 40 years of Ekk's career, he did nothing but seek out novelty? Surely forty years is a long time to occupy with nothing but a single color film and a single Shakespeare film. What were these like, and what were the other novelties Leyda refers to? And how do we know that Ekk himself viewed them as novelties, and not as means to an ever more communicative end? These are questions Leyda never answers. What remains is The Road to Life, an interesting film which examines real issues with intermittent success, yet remains enjoyable and entertaining to this day.
I still have to prompt my wife from time to time, though. Family conditioning, like beliefs in thought-monitoring aliens or the two-party political system, is hard to break. She doesn't listen carefully for the casually expressed wishes of another soul. Sometimes it has to be spelt out in letters written with gold leaf. When she reminded me this past December that I'm a hard person to buy for, I reminded her that there were a few films at a certain website that I'd mentioned wistfully earlier in the year. This was mentioned several times, in fact.
Therefore, this past Christmas we found Mark Donskoi's Gorky trilogy, and Nikolai Ekk's The Road to Life, sitting alongside the amber jewelry and Polish jewelry box, under our brightly decorated phallic symbol which celebrates the Solstice's latest incarnation. While I could have reviewed the jewelry or the jewelry box, Jan is sleeping now, so by default you get the film review, instead.
My interest in The Road to Life was initially sparked by Jay Leyda's accolades. Leyda learned filmmaking as a student of Sergei Eisenstein, whose classes he attended for three years in the Soviet, back in the mid 30's. He saw hundreds of films that were never released abroad as well as many that were, and wrote about it all after he returned to the US in a book entitled Kino. (His literary output and travels did not cease at that point. Years later he was invited to teach filmmaking in China, another experience he wrote about. And when I say China, I mean Mainland China, not Taiwan, which was China until the United States government waved a magic wand and turned it, like Tibet, from a nation into a diplomatic embarassment.)
Leyda's comments are in the nature of vague encomiums: "Road to Life keeps a high place in Soviet film history for its fusion of technical, dramatic and political achievements...And unlike its several American derivatives, Wild Boys of the Road, The Wild Ones, Blackboard Jungle, the sensational elements in Road to Life never stray from artistic control..." High if relatively undefined praise, indeed.
The Road to Life is fiction based upon a very real, documented problem in the early Soviet: the gangs of pre-teen and early teen "wild boys" who roamed the city streets. Unlike their equivalents in the modern USA or Russia, these gangs were not turf-oriented or into drug dealing. They were primarily used by local professional criminals, ***an-style, for petty theft and minor assault on a grand scale. They made life difficult for the working inhabitants, in a society that was only just beginning to raise its head above the tide of medieval feudalism (and which subsequently slipped right back down beneath the waves).
The film's story involves an attempt by social workers under the early Soviet regime to clean up the wild boys by giving them their own machinist collective, thus creating a sense of responsibility and pride in their own work. One social worker, Sergiev, becomes their "good angel," drawing them away from the "bad angel" adult who leads the gangs. They settle in an abandoned mill/factory, about fifteen miles outside Moscow. When the river floods in spring, Sergiev gets permission from the authorities for the boys to build a railroad to transfer supplies and finished goods.
Alas, the bad angel wants his boys and his business back, and he won't take no for an answer. With wine and women he attempts to lure the boys slowly into his fold, until the boy leaders of the packs (who were originally his lieutenants) get wind of this, and stage a raid on his "party" with the help of the police. The villain escapes, only to reappear on the railroad track, which he tries to destroy. His primary lieutenant shows up, in the finishing stages of checking out the line, and the two fight. The boy is killed, and as the train triumphantly makes its first run to the factory, it carries in mourning the body of the teen.
Bald as this account is, no account would be capable of conveying the acting skills of the wild boys, themselves, and particularly their leaders. None of them were actors, and (according to Leyda), none of them ever acted in films again, not even the remarkable Chuvash boy, I. Kyrla. Their performances prove (as The Bicycle Thief was to prove, as Zero for Conduct was to prove, as indeed so many films that Hollywood repeatedly overlooks were to prove) that sometimes the best acting comes from completely untrained talent with no ingrained habits, working intensively with a good director.
Be it noted that the rest of the cast in The Road to Life is professional. Both the good and bad angels are charismatic actors, as befits their characters, and work very well with the boys. There are many small moments of teasing interplay that can pass unobserved during a first viewing of the film, but which add a depth that's subconsciously noted; rather like the way you can instantly tell a couple are married by subtle gestures or stances that are only obvious once analyzed, later.
Ekk makes occasional use of cinematic montage technique as first developed in Kuleshov's workshop in the teens, and brought to a high level of technical and artistic expertise by directors as diverse as Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Dovchenko (my hero) and Vertov. But in Ekk, montage slips over into mannerism. The quick cuts between shots of breaking iceflows has exemplary energy, but doesn't convey the flooding of the roads which is the ostensible purpose of the sequence. It also lacks any frame of reference: Pudovkin's quick-cutting montage results from the psychological state of a particular filmed character, but Ekk's montage is being viewed by nobody in the cast. It's subjective camerawork in a film that is otherwise resolutely "objective," in the sense that the camera never mirrors the psychological states of its proponents.
Worse is the montage that juxtaposes the reforming kids at their collective and the Moscow-based social workers, when the kids start turning out useful mechanical products. While it makes sense for the kids to jump for joy all over the furniture and one another, an office of social workers doing the same looks patently ridiculous. Adults usually reserve displays of wild joy for the conclusion of wars and the winning of state lotteries, rather than a letter baldly stating that some wild kids have produced gardening implements. Social workers also know that small victories achieved in private are cause for cautious optimism, and that the real challenges come when the "reformed" leave their sheltered environments for the real world.
By contrast, the most interesting (and subtlest) element in The Road to Life's cinematic mix is its use of sound. Leyda's remark, that "the sound operation, Nesterov, deserves a share of the universal praise that came to Road to Life, for his deft use of the obviously primitive means at hand" is beside the point. The use of sound in The Road to Life is remarkable, yes, given its primitive state at the time. (And the use of extensive subtitles in the film's first half clearly indicates that it was initially intended for silent issue; one wonders why they weren't removed before release.) More importantly, however, the use of sound in The Road to Life would be considered advanced even today, both for its imaginative diversity of sources, on- and off-screen, and its complexity of layering.
In one scene, for example, three off-camera sounds are layered together during an on-camera conversation; the dialog pointedly acknowledges one of the sound sources, as we hear it grow closer in relation to the other sounds. Another scene features the bad angel, singing and playing a folk-flavored song on the accordion while periodically interrupted by his pals to the left and right. The camera stays on him, but as his eyes flicker to one side or the other, registering a variety of humorous expressions, its difficult not to *hear* the sounds actually proceeding from some space to the left or right of the video screen--so powerful is the imagination when properly invoked. Many scenes, too, include localized, constant background noise, something to which Hollywood at the time was adverse; and contrary to Hollywood belief, these noises did not overwhelm the soundtrack. Instead, they cancelled out the camera noise, which Hollywood dealt with (for several years in the early 30's, at any rate) by using glass-enclosed cases that rendered cameras physically static.
Note that this noise is, like the visuals in The Road to Life (with montage exceptions), objective. I do think Ekk missed out when he didn't show us the sounds inside the skulls of the protagonists--which in the 30's could range from the singing voice of conscience in Rene Clair's Le Million, to the wonderful sequence in Vigo's Zero for Conduct where the children celebrate by tearing up and throwing around their feather pillows, and the music, along with the visuals, suddenly shift into a dreamlike, half-speed gear that makes beauty of anarchy.
One curiosity of The Road the Life which neither Ekk nor Leyda explains is the complete absence of young adolescent or pre-adolescent girls in the story. There isn't a single one in sight; and since the subject evolved out of the destruction of families during the Russian Revolution and directly after the establishment of a Communist state, it's logical to assume that some of those displaced kids were of the female gender. Even when the gang's adult commander tries to lure the boys back under his control through women and drink, he uses only adult hookers for the process. No doubt homeless girls were just as much of a problem as homeless boys; why weren't they shown at all? Was the issue of teenage and pre-teen prostitution too sensitive for the Soviets to tackle in a government-monitored industry, or impermeable of solution? Were they afraid of shocked public reaction at home, or abroad? Whatever the cause, the lack of girls in The Road to Life was a very obvious to me. Curiously, my wife never noticed it.
Where The Road to Life stumbles is precisely where the Soviets would have said it was most solid: its portrayal of reality. For Road to Life, like so many cultural artifacts everywhere and in every time, warps reality through its passionate belief in the social myths of its time and place. Reality can take a lot of pushing and pulling about when the audience is sympathetic and all wear the same cultural glasses; but once those glasses are broken, the film's flaws of logic are all too painfully evident. Is it reasonable to assume that only *one* teacher would accompany and successfully control one hundred otherwise unsupervised teens who have been guilty of everything from pickpocketing to assault to involuntary manslaughter? And when the gang leader tries to seduce the boys back, was it realistic to have three or four boys simply wander away from the work crew on the track--for fifteen miles, and wander back? Didn't anybody else notice when they were gone for the better part of a day, and returned snookered to the gills?
It's precisely these moments which made my wife snort scornfully. "But is it any more reasonable," I asked, after we saw the film, "for a handful of four or five people to successfully destroy an overwhelming armada of spaceships? Or is it realistic for the smartest, most powerful strategist and warrior in the universe to personally employ tons of bumbling oafs as his handpicked militia?" She just grinned; but it's a valid point. People who believe in the myth of the frontier and worship at the shrine of Star Wars, complete with MacDonalds cups and comicbooks, should not throw stones at the temples of others. The pigeons of reality pass over both, with predictable results.
Yet despite my criticisms of The Road to Life's acceptance of conventional social views, it also breaks those rules on occasion. The ***an-like bad angel displays likeable social qualities. The father of one of the boys reveals a more complex character than many in the early Soviet era poster-like depictions of working people, including those unmentionable qualities, drinking to excess and physical abuse. And the obligatory happy ending, climaxed by the first passage of the railroad over the tracks that the boys' have laid, is dashed by the murder of the lead boy, and the discovery of his body. No doubt it was meant to serve a subtle social purpose: "Rise up, comrades! Let us destroy the evils of recidivism amongst us, grieve for our fallen, but emerge victorious through new dedication!" Even so, it throws cold water on the expectations of the audience--heady stuff for Moscow in 1930, and just as challenging if it were done today.
Let's finish, as we began, with Leyda. His remarks about Ekk's subsequent career are both disparaging, and puzzling. "Nikolai Ekk himself is identified only with this film; all his later work and projects depend on some innovation as striking as this first manipulation of sound," Leyda writes, "the first Soviet color film, the first Soviet Shakespeare film, etc. There are passages in Road to Life so filmically satisfying that Ekk's later retreat in novelities seems a great pity."
So for the next 40 years of Ekk's career, he did nothing but seek out novelty? Surely forty years is a long time to occupy with nothing but a single color film and a single Shakespeare film. What were these like, and what were the other novelties Leyda refers to? And how do we know that Ekk himself viewed them as novelties, and not as means to an ever more communicative end? These are questions Leyda never answers. What remains is The Road to Life, an interesting film which examines real issues with intermittent success, yet remains enjoyable and entertaining to this day.
To the Righteous belong the fruits of violent victory. The rest of us will have to settle for warm friends, warm lovers, and a wink from a quietly supportive universe.
It's been a while since I've had enough time off from work to see a movie, but I got to see one last night.
Training Day
Featuring Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke
The movie takes place over the course of one day, which happens to be the training day for Ethan Hawke, a police officer who wants to see a lot of action by joining the narcotics unit of the LAPD.
Denzel Washington is an experienced member of the narcotics unit, and the two drive around Los Angeles searching for leads on drug busts.
During the course of his training day, Ethan finds out more than he wants to about what it's like to be a narc.
I found this to be a compelling movie. Parts of the movie were not altogether enjoyable -- there are quite a number of violent scences. However, the action was quite intense, and the movie easily captured my attention for the whole movie.
Denzel gives a masterful performance. It was refreshing to see him play something other than the righteous man he usually plays.
Ethan was okay, although in truth I think that anyone could have played his role.
Two thumbs up from me.
Training Day
Featuring Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke
The movie takes place over the course of one day, which happens to be the training day for Ethan Hawke, a police officer who wants to see a lot of action by joining the narcotics unit of the LAPD.
Denzel Washington is an experienced member of the narcotics unit, and the two drive around Los Angeles searching for leads on drug busts.
During the course of his training day, Ethan finds out more than he wants to about what it's like to be a narc.
I found this to be a compelling movie. Parts of the movie were not altogether enjoyable -- there are quite a number of violent scences. However, the action was quite intense, and the movie easily captured my attention for the whole movie.
Denzel gives a masterful performance. It was refreshing to see him play something other than the righteous man he usually plays.
Ethan was okay, although in truth I think that anyone could have played his role.
Two thumbs up from me.
* * * * *
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HighLordDave
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I went to see Monsters, Inc. today. It was excellent, but not as good as Toy Story, Pixar's "other" CGI animated film franchise.
I won't bother summarising the plot because it's fairly transparent and predictable once the show starts. John Goodman as "Sully" and Billy Crystal as "Mike" are a scream, as is Steve Buscemi as "Randall". Note to Steve: If they ask you to be part of the next Final Fantasy, say "Do you want that in one word or two?"; if they ask you to be a part of the next Monsters, Inc., sign the contract without reading it.
Monsters, Inc. is the second best animated film of the year (Shrek being the best). The animation is Oscar-calibre, but that's not the movie's only strength. Sully and Mike are genuinely likeable heroes and Randall is truly despicable. The little girl, Boo, is also fun, as are the supporting characters.
Where Monsters, Inc. falls short of Toy Story and Shrek is in the humour aimed at adults while entertaining the kids. At the showing I attended, there was a kid/adult mix of about 70/30. On a couple of occasions I found myself to be the only one laughing at jokes I didn't think were Dennis Miller-level obscure (I was also the only one in the theater laughing during Independence Day when the powerbook says, "Hello, Dave", so the average moviegoer may just be a little slow).
All in all, Monsters, Inc. is a very worthwhile recipient of your $6.50 (or whatever you pay for movies in your town). It's funny most of the time, mushy when it needs to be, and very entertaining. I give in 7.5 out of 10.
I won't bother summarising the plot because it's fairly transparent and predictable once the show starts. John Goodman as "Sully" and Billy Crystal as "Mike" are a scream, as is Steve Buscemi as "Randall". Note to Steve: If they ask you to be part of the next Final Fantasy, say "Do you want that in one word or two?"; if they ask you to be a part of the next Monsters, Inc., sign the contract without reading it.
Monsters, Inc. is the second best animated film of the year (Shrek being the best). The animation is Oscar-calibre, but that's not the movie's only strength. Sully and Mike are genuinely likeable heroes and Randall is truly despicable. The little girl, Boo, is also fun, as are the supporting characters.
Where Monsters, Inc. falls short of Toy Story and Shrek is in the humour aimed at adults while entertaining the kids. At the showing I attended, there was a kid/adult mix of about 70/30. On a couple of occasions I found myself to be the only one laughing at jokes I didn't think were Dennis Miller-level obscure (I was also the only one in the theater laughing during Independence Day when the powerbook says, "Hello, Dave", so the average moviegoer may just be a little slow).
All in all, Monsters, Inc. is a very worthwhile recipient of your $6.50 (or whatever you pay for movies in your town). It's funny most of the time, mushy when it needs to be, and very entertaining. I give in 7.5 out of 10.
Jesus saves! And takes half damage!
If brute force doesn't work, you're not using enough.
If brute force doesn't work, you're not using enough.
Just what does everyone have against the FF movie? I happend to think it was wonderfully done. The CGI was by far the best I have ever seen, and the voice talent they brought on board was of high calibre. I believed the script was done remarkably well, and granted the story was a little, different, it was still wasn't bad enough to gain the amout of down talk as it's received.
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fable
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Um, what's the FF movie?Originally posted by Aegis:
<STRONG>Just what does everyone have against the FF movie? I happend to think it was wonderfully done. The CGI was by far the best I have ever seen, and the voice talent they brought on board was of high calibre. I believed the script was done remarkably well, and granted the story was a little, different, it was still wasn't bad enough to gain the amout of down talk as it's received.</STRONG>
To the Righteous belong the fruits of violent victory. The rest of us will have to settle for warm friends, warm lovers, and a wink from a quietly supportive universe.
I saw Memento a few days ago. Its a pretty cool movie. Basically, its about this guy getting revenge for the rape and murder of his wife, but he can't form any longterm memories because of some brain damage he got trying to stop the rapists. So he has to take pictures of things, and take notes of whats important. One of the odd things is that it runs backwards in time, so the chronology of events can get jumbled in your head at times. I really empathized with the main character. I'd give it a 9/10. It really keeps you guessing throughout the movie.
If I asked, would you answer? Its your problem. Its a deep, deep problem. I have no way to ask about that... I have no elegant way of stepping into your heart without tracking in filth. So I will wait. Someday, when you want to tell me, tell me then. -Bleach
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HighLordDave
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The best way to describe Final Fantasy is "visually impressive", which is the exact same terms the president of the Highlander Fan Club used to describe Highlander II: The Quickening.Originally posted by Aegis:
<STRONG>Just what does everyone have against the FF movie?</STRONG>
Ming-Na, Alec Baldwin, James Woods, Donald Sutherland and Ving Rhames were excellent as the voice talent; the weak cast members were Peri Gilpin and Steve Buscemi. Let me say that again: Peri Gilpin and Steve Buscemi. As battle-hardened soldiers. Peri Gilpin and Steve Buscemi!
Don't get me wrong, I love both Peri and Steve; they are the best at what they do. Unfortunately for Final Fantasy, Peri's strength is in comedy and Steve's is playing off-beat idiosyncratic nut cases (ie-Garland "The Marietta Mangler" Green, Rockhound, Mr. Pink, etc.).
Since Jane and Neil (Peri and Steve's characters) are soldiers, they should have talk like soldiers. Ving Rhames sounds like a soldier. Alec Baldwin sounds like a soldier. Gilpin and Buscemi do not. If the producers wanted convincing voice talent in those roles, perhaps they should have tapped Jenette Goldstein and Al Matthews (Vasquez and Apone from Aliens) to do the parts.
Nitpicking voice talent isn't the reason I disliked the film. In fact there are a lot of things to like about the movie. For instance, there are several scenes in which I truly could not tell if they were using CGI, models or live action shots. The facial animation was a little splotchy in places and some of the movement looked forced, but overall the animation was top notch and exceeded my expectations.
Final Fantasy's weakest spots (at least for someone who hasn't played the video games) came in the plot and premise, which was very, very thin. Hard to follow in places with technology that isn't truly explained, the story feels like it was contrived by taking half a dozen sci-fi/anime/fantasy/video game stories and stringing them together.
Overall, I liked Final Fantasy but more from a technological standpoint than because the movie itself was compelling. It was a CGI powerhouse without the cartoonish slant of Toy Story, Shrek, and Monsters, Inc.. I think it lays the groundwork for future realistic-looking CGI films (the true digital backlot). I give the visuals, sound and CGI animation 8 out of 10, the story and characters 2.5 out of ten and an overall of 5 out of 10.
[ 11-12-2001: Message edited by: HighLordDave ]
Jesus saves! And takes half damage!
If brute force doesn't work, you're not using enough.
If brute force doesn't work, you're not using enough.