I just noticed that Amazon’s got the upcoming James Bond 50 box sets for 50% off.

This is a massive boxed set containing almost every James Bond film.  (It does not include the Peter Sellers/Woody Allen comedy version of Casino Royale and it doesn’t include Sean Connery’s Never Say Never Again.)  9 of these films are available on Blu-Ray for the first time.  The set includes over 130 hours of bonus material, including some stuff pimping the upcoming Skyfall.

The Blu-Ray set is 23 discs and normally lists for $300 but for I-don’t-know-how-long Amazon’s pre-order price is $149.99.  Get it by clicking this link.

The standard DVD set is just 22 discs and contains no bonus features.  But it is cheaper, listing for $200 and right now on sale for $99.99.  Get it by clicking this link.

The only reason I haven’t ordered it myself is that I already have 8 Bond movies on Blu-Ray as well as an earlier limited edition boxed set of all the movies pre-Craig on DVD.  Even so, it’s tempting.  I have no idea how long they’ll be selling it at this price so if this is interesting to you, click the above links (please) to order one for yourself.

I tend to take it for granted that everyone has seen the cornerstone films from the past – perhaps because most of my friends are big movie lovers – but I know that’s not really the case.  And very few current films move me to write about them, let alone give them much thought once the end credits have rolled.  I watched The Deer Hunter today.  It’s been at least a decade since I’ve last seen it and now it’s stuck back deeply into my head again.

There were two reasons it was on my mind to watch.  The first reason is the recent release of the film on Blu-Ray (hey, it’s only $10 bucks on Amazon right now!) – I’ve seen this on VHS, laser disc and standard DVD and this Blu-Ray edition is the first to do justice to Vilmos Zsigmond’s Oscar-nominated cinematography.

The second reason was because I’d recently watched the HBO documentary short I Knew It Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale.  Actually I watched it twice because it’s so damned good.  (It’s on DVD, find it at Amazon. The bonus features look so good that I might have to buy it eventually.)Who would believe that this was produced by Brett Ratner?  (Fortunately he didn’t direct it.)  Cazale was in only 5 films.  All 5 of those films won the Academy Award for best picture.  Godfather 1 & 2, Dog Day Afternoon, The Conversation, The Deer Hunter.  The documentary does an amazing job in a short time of getting into the craft of acting and explaining just what it was that made Cazale so special.  But I digress.

There are so many reasons that The Deer Hunter is a great film.  Well, we can start with the cast.  Robert De Niro, John Cazale, Christopher Walken, Meryl Streep, John Savage, George Dzundza, Shirley Stoler.  But it’s not just the cast.

And it’s surely not director/co-writer Michael Cimino, who’s almost equally famous for destroying United Artists with his next film, Heaven’s Gate (which, by the way, is much better than people gave it credit for at the time).  Okay, I admit, I like his first film, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.  Year of the Dragon is an extremely guilty pleasure.  After that, he didn’t do much and none of it was worthwhile.

No, I suspect it’s that “secret sauce” – a coming together of all the right creative elements in the right space and time.  And it’s a film very much of its time, the 1970s.  It could never be made today, at least not in the same form.  The focus is on the characters.  The story telling itself is almost jagged, with some very abrupt transitions.

Let’s face it, in the first hour of the 3 hour film, nothing happens (and yet everything happens).  You’ve got a western Pennsylvania steel town and a group of friends.  They are preparing for a wedding.  Then there’s the wedding and the wedding party and then a few of them go out deer hunting.   And then BAM! More than one hour in before you get to the Vietnam scenes that are so justly famous.

But despite the intensity of the Russian roulette sequences, it’s that first hour that draws you in, when there’s almost no attention paid to plot.  It’s just great actors working together so well that you don’t feel as if you’re watching acting.  There’s an honesty here.

And it struck me that it’s so different from most current cinema.  Today, all movies are the same:  they start with a big bam over the top action sequence because they feel they need to get your attention immediately.  Usually after that sequence there will be a title card saying “two weeks earlier” and then the film gallumphs along at a plodding pace until it returns to the action stuff.

The Deer Hunter is different.  I think one reason that the second two thirds of the film work as well as it does is because by that point you really care about these people.  You don’t care about them because they’re played by big name stars and you’re expected to.  You care about them because you know them.

The film rewards patience.  And it rewards repeated viewing – as any great film does – because each time you watch it you can focus in on a totally different aspect or actor. It’s multi-layered.  It doesn’t spell everything out for you.  (Here’s a simplistic example: when De Niro returns to Vietnam and finds Christopher Walken still playing Russian roulette and Walken’s acting damned strange (even for Walken), at one point De Niro pulls the guy’s arm out and it’s filled with hypodermic needle tracks.  There’s no conversation around this.  There’s no “what the fuck are you doing on heroin man?” dialogue.  There are of course more complex examples of this as well.)

The Deer Hunter won 5 Academy Awards (film, directing, editing, sound and supporting actor for Walken) and it’s one of those best picture winners that actually deserved to win.  (And it was up against some tough competition that year – Coming Home, Heaven Can Wait, Midnight Express, An Unmarried Woman.)

Another reason that I liked Deer Hunter so much was because the previous film I watched was Safe House and it was absolute bollocks.  I love Denzel Washington.  He’s a consistent actor and most of his films are at the very least solid entertainment (even though he does seem unusually attached to working with Tony Scott).  This one could mark the moment where his career jumps the proverbial shark.  And I say that despite the relatively strong rating it currently has on IMDB (6.9) – I think the 54% on Rotten Tomatoes is much closer to my opinion.

On paper at least, it looked promising.  For a Denzel Washington film, it has an unusually strong supporting cast.  Ryan Reynolds (who has more screen time than Washington), Vera Farmiga, Brendan Gleeson, Sam Shepard, Ruben Blades, Robert Patrick, Liam “Sir Davos Seaworth” Cunningham.  The director is Daniel Espinosa – half Chilean, half Swedish and apparently seen as an up-and-comer in Sweden.  It’s got the same DP and editor as the Bourne films.

It should be good.  It isn’t.  About ten minutes in you find out there’s a leak in the CIA and I promise you that anyone who has ever watched a movie at some point in their lives will know who the source of that leak is and after that, it just kind of spins out by the numbers, albeit with some vaguely decent actions scenes.  Mostly it’s cardboard characters in predictable situations and the 115 minute running time seems more like 115 hours.  Maybe the blame goes to screen writer David Guggenheim – this is his first feature film after one TV film.

Oh well.  With lots more rain predicted for this week, looks like I’ll have lots more time to watch movies.  I hope there’s gonna be at least a couple of good ones.

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything related to films I’ve watched.  That’s mostly because most of the ones I’ve seen have been extremely unremarkable.  Here are brief reviews and I’m saving the best for last.

Last night we went to see David Fincher’s remake of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  I remember watching the original Swedish film and thinking that the story was okay but that the film itself was artlessly made, ran far too long (this was before an extended director’s cut edition was made available) and was poorly paced.  When I heard that David Fincher would be doing an English language remake of the film, I was dismayed that he was doing a remake and revisiting what for him would be old territory.  Yet I was certain that he was the one director who could turn this into greatness.

I was wrong.  Okay, we get the star power of Daniel Craig – to which I say, why?  He has almost nothing to do here and exhibits about the same level of charisma as Michael Nyqvist.  The changes from the previous film are mostly subtle and it still runs too damned long.  Yes, they had to keep this in Sweden – especially for reasons that become more apparent in the following films – but it’s distracting to listen to all these people speaking English in Swedish accents (and all written material displayed on screen is in Swedish).  Tech credits are solid but overall I found the best thing about the film to be the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and the performance by Stellan Skarsgard (one of those guys I just love to watch onscreen).

Rise of the Planet of the Apes – Simply put, I wanted to hate this, I expected to hate this, I should have hated it – but I didn’t.  It may be faint praise to say that this is the best of the 7 Planet of the Apes films but it is.  It probably works well if you haven’t seen any of the others but it’s even better if you’ve at least seen the original.

Drive is a low budget crime film that just oozes style.  It’s not quite as good as its admirers will tell you; it stands out mostly because 2011 was such a shitty film year.  Ryan Gosling stars as a guy who works as a mechanic, drives get-away cars in heists and occasionally works as a stunt driver in films.  Gosling’s pretty good but it’s the supporting cast that’s worth mentioning here – Albert Brooks in particular is so completely convincing and so different from any other role he’s ever played, I can smell Oscar nomination here.  Bryan Cranston’s quite okay but is there some new rule in Hollywood that says he has to be in every picture made now?  Christina Hendricks is wasted, Carey Mulligan isn’t given too much to do, Ron Pearlman stands around and acts scary.  At its best moments, it seemed the film was reaching to be on the level of Michael Mann’s magnificent Thief but it never quites get there.  Even so, it’s an entertaining diversion and director Nicolas Winding Refn is clearly someone to watch.

The plot of Warrior is so over-the-top preposterous that you keep waiting for someone to tell you it’s based on a true story but it’s not.  A family split apart by the actions of an alcoholic father, two brothers who haven’t spoken to each other in years both fighting for the UFC championship.  It seems like something a 12 year old might write and who would think that a “sport” like UFC could yield an Oscar caliber film – and yet that’s what this is.  Start with an amazing comeback performance from Nick Nolte (although his character seems to fade into irrelevance in the final third of the film) and a nuanced and controlled performance from Tom Hardy.  Then there’s the script which manages to rise above its B-movie material in the way it looks at the disintegration of the family, the ravages of alcoholism, the way Americans are coping with the 21st century.  The fight scenes are appropriately brutal, the editing is tight – on the other hand the open 20 minutes or so are more than a little clumsy in terms of exposition and the film runs long.  Nolte will probably see an Oscar nomination (if he manages to stay out of prison and the gossip pages) and director Gavin O’Connor has a real winner here.

I loved Moneyball even though I really couldn’t give a shit about baseball.  Maybe it’s because I’m a computer geek but I found myself actually caring about something that I don’t ordinarily do – this tale of a baseball manager trying to figure out how to build a winning team by using computers and statistics.  Brad Pitt gives a great performance but even more surprising is the chemistry between him and Jonah Hill.  Philip Seymour Hoffman is excellent and the script comes from two Hollywood heavy hitters – Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian – and it’s one of those films that manages to transcend its subject and is worth seeing even if you don’t understand anything about the game.

Probably the best movie I’ve watched in the past month is Margin Call.  Taking place mostly in a single night, an analyst at an investment bank discovers just how leveraged the bank is.  The senior staff meet through the night trying to figure out what to do.  First of all, this is the best that Kevin Spacey has been in years.  And the two scenes in which he goes toe to toe with Jeremy Irons are about as good as film acting seems to get these days.  Paul Bettany and Zachary Quinto also turn in great performances, smaller roles filled by Demi Moore and Stanley Tucci are also well-handled.  It’s the debut feature film from J.C. Chandor, who also wrote the original script.  The script is brilliant in the way that it allows every character to get his or her moment in the spotlight and the way in which all sides are presented relatively fairly.  Irons’ character may be monstrous and yet he is almost sympathetic and when he explains why he’s about to destroy the economy of the world in order to save his company, you can at least understand his motivation.  This is the first great fiction film covering the financial meltdown of 2008 (Inside Job of course being a great documentary on the subject).  There’s only one minor flaw here – these are all insiders talking to each other.  They all know what these financial terms mean and there’s no one “on the outside” whom they have to explain it to.  I worked for investment banks in the 90s and I know this stuff all too well but others might have a hard time wading through the jargon.

Warning, there may be spoilers ahead, not that this is a movie with a conventional plot that could be spoiled.

There’s a family. And a messenger arrives and delivers a telegram and runs off.  Clearly the telegram says that someone has died.  The woman, likely the mother, is overwhelmed by grief.  And then …

Then we get a 15 minute sequence with very minimal dialogue that asks very basic questions.  Questions about god and life and death.  And a sequence that shows the creation of the universe, the creation of the earth, the dinosaurs, the asteroid crashing into the earth that changed the climate that killed the dinosaurs.  It’s amazingly, achingly beautiful, and one of the wizards behind this is Douglas Trumbull, the man responsible for the special effects in the final sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, to which this bears some resemblance.

And just when you think it’s going to go on like this for two hours, the film shifts gears.  A baby is born and grows up.  The father is Brad Pitt, the mother is Jessica Chastain.  The boy, who eventually has two younger brothers, will eventually grow up to be Sean Penn.  And it takes two hours but you realize that what’s happening is that Penn has received word of his brother’s death and is pondering the Meaning Of Life.  He remembers back to his childhood, a very normal childhood in Waco, Texas.

Memory is a funny thing.  You don’t always remember the things that people think are going to be significant.  It’s the little things that shape us; those are what we recall.  The boys have a domineering father.  It’s the 1950′s of Eisenhower and Life Magazine.  The father dominates the family.  The boys are taught to obey, to call him sir.  He imparts the lessons of life to them but sometimes these are hard lessons because life has often let the father down.  A failed musician and a failed inventor, he works in a factory and as he gets older, he sees his dreams slip away.  These kids go through all of the normal childhood stuff and it’s all mundane and yet it’s fascinating to watch because it is common to almost all of us and it is so beautifully presented.  The film ends, inside Sean Penn’s head, everyone reunited again and happy.  (I’m try to remember; I don’t recall Penn having a single line of dialogue and I think his total screen time ends up at under 10 minutes.)

That’s essentially the whole film.  What that synopsis doesn’t convey is the stunningly beautiful cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki.  The absolutely seamless editing, credited not to one person but a team of 5 in alphabetical order.  The lush soundtrack by Alexandre Desplat that merges perfectly with a large selection of classical music.  (Berlioz’s Requiem figures heavily in the finale.)

Tree of Life is, of course, written and directed by Terrence Malick.  It is only the 5th feature film he has created since he debuted with Badlands in 1973.  (The others are Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World.)  This is the film he’s been building up to.  It is, on some levels, kind of insane while on others it’s pure visual poetry.  There are perhaps heavy psychological meanings as the dynamics of the family relationships are presented.  None of the big questions are answered because, well, they’re unanswerable.

I suppose the movie might sound boring and many people probably won’t have the patience for it.  I remember when it hit HK theaters, I showed the trailer to my gf and she said she didn’t see anything special about it.  But she watched the film with me last night and she was transfixed.  Every time her phone rang, she didn’t take the call.  She didn’t once ask how much longer there was to the end.  And … she told me this morning, she dreamed about her father.

For me, I think I made a journey from “what the fuck is going on here?” to “I think this is a movie I’m going to pull out and watch again and again,” one of those films where I’m going to get something more out of it each time I watch it.  It made me think about my own childhood, my own relationship with my parents.  It made me think.  Apparently it had the same effect on others – not just an 85% rating on Rotten Tomatoes but also the winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year.

I’ve read several reviews of Tree of Life.  I think Mick LaSalle came closest to capturing how I feel about the film.

If someone gave you, as a gift, a bag of diamonds and rocks, you would not see it as “a mixed bag.” You would see it as a bag of diamonds with some rocks that can be easily pushed aside, and you would be happy to be rich. In the same way, Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” is at times trying and perplexing, but it also contains some of the most psychologically insightful and ecstatic filmmaking imaginable.

Malick shows you the world that you know, but he shows it in such a fever that you see it, not differently, but completely. It’s a vision so alive to the mystery in everything that the simple depiction of a man walking into an office building feels like a feast of limitless possibility and geometric variety. To see “The Tree of Life” is to wish you could go through life seeing things in this way. There would be no fear of death because each moment would be so full as to contain lifetimes.

From the first moments, Malick presents his film as a contrast between two ways of understanding human existence. There is the way of nature, which sees only struggle and looks for reasons to be unhappy, and there is the way of grace, which is in touch with love and the broad movements of the universe. The way of nature is embodied by Brad Pitt as a hard-charging husband and father – it’s a lovely performance from Pitt, whose control-freak facade never completely hides the vulnerability motivating it. Jessica Chastain, as his wife, embodies the way of grace. They live with their three children in a Texas suburb in the 1950s and are seen through the memory of their eldest son, Jack (Sean Penn), looking back from the present.

As in “The New World,” voice-over narration, to the accompaniment of subjective shots of trees and sky, gives us the characters’ inner thoughts. These produce a unique effect. It’s as if we’re seeing a dream of the past and hearing mental vibrations that, either randomly or because of their particular strength, happened to survive time. The feeling is one of privilege, to be picking up on precious currents of consciousness, seemingly lost to the world.

At its most basic, “The Tree of Life” vividly replicates, in cinematic terms, the way we remember. There are general memories, moods and sensations, and then there are incidents and bits of conversation that are recalled with absolute present-tense lucidity. And so the incidents of voice-over are interspersed with straightforward scenes showing this 1950s family. Malick is trying to give us life as it is consciously experienced, the unceasing inner monologue and its interplay with the outside environment, the thoughts of the past mixing with the suspended and yet always available present.

The ambition behind such an attempt is enormous, and Malick’s success is complete. But he doesn’t stop there. In “The Tree of Life” he doesn’t only want to show what life and consciousness feel like. He wants to capture the nature of life – what life is. To this end, he films waterfalls and mountains, gives us long minutes of churning, multi-colored ooze floating in space, and even includes a brief dinosaur interlude. He is trying to give us the mind of God. No, more than that. He is trying to film God.

When he stays within the multiple minds of his various characters, Malick is working here at the level of genius. His handheld camera hovers with a sense of impending revelation. The beauty is beyond description. But when he ventures into explorations of the universe and its origins, the work becomes general and less interesting, liked warmed-over Kubrick.

Still, there is little doubt that “The Tree of Life” will stand as the cinematic achievement of the year.

(BTW, this was the second half of a double feature on Sunday.  The Double Feature From Hell. The first half was Transformers 3.  Unbelievable that this film has John Malkovich, John Turturro and Frances McDormand in the cast (and they’re clearly having a good time, perhaps thinking about what I’m sure is one of the largest paychecks of their careers.  And Ken Jeong is in it, too!  And Ken Jeong’s tongue!  Two good things to say about Michael Bay and this film:  Bay is expert at instantly setting up the emotional response he wants to get from the viewer, though often that’s done via the choice of pop song on the soundtrack – or the absence of music plus slow motion.  And there are very few directors who can combine live action and computer animation so effectively.  But the dialogue, characters and plot are squarely aimed at 10 year olds, despite the presence of the luscious Rosie Huntington-Whiteley.  The technical ambitions on this film are huge and are achieved.  The dramatic ambitions are non-existent.  But come on.  It’s a film based on a series of toys that can transform from trucks and cars into battling robots.  What else should you expect?)