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?)

So Harry Potter took the record for top grossing weekend in the US, with a take of $168 million, beating out the last Batman movie.  Both are WB films and a testament to WB’s crack marketing squad.  But also HP benefits from the extra amounts charged for IMAX and 3D and the ever-increasing number of screens in the US.  Internationally, it took in $307 million.  That means that the film grossed close to $500 million in just its opening weekend.  However you want to look at it, that number is staggering.

So the theatrical business remains healthy even as home video is dying because the fools at the studios wasted years debating around DRM delaying a full entry into digital distribution.  So now DVD is dying, Blu-Ray isn’t picking up the slack, legal digital is still in its infancy.  These people have no one but themselves to blame.

I want to write more about the whole Murdoch thing but haven’t had the time to fully collect my thoughts and cite sources.  I’m sure the scandal will not end at the borders of the UK.  The FBI is said to be looking into things now.  Plus, one report has it that MySpace was just sold for $32 million – Murdoch bought it 6 years ago for $580 million.  Karma is a bitch, dude.

Also wanted to transcribe some bits of this past week’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, one of the best episodes I’ve ever seen.  Guests included Dan Savage, Mark Cuban, Marc Maron.  Savage calls Bachmann and Palin “grifters and scumbags” – I think he was being too polite.  When they talk about the debt ceiling, about what might happen if the US defaults on bond payments, how the US is missing the boat on climate change, even the opening bit with that doctor who co-wrote The China Study talking about how the Republicans have even managed to politicize nutrition for fuck’s sake, well it’s an hour worth watching.

Anyway, here’s one statistic I remember from the show, hope I’m remembering it right.  In 1995, there was only one state in the US that had a population in which more than 20% were classified as obese.  Today there is only only state in the US in which less than 20% of the population is obese.  Why do you think that is?  It is the relentless mass marketing of garbage food.  I love my Double Stuf Oreos and Krispy Kremes as much as the next guy, maybe even more, so I’m pretty guilty of this shit, but I do try to balance it by otherwise trying to eat as much natural, unprocessed stuff as possible.  I’m not in great shape, true, but I’m just about 6 feet tall and usually weigh under 180 pounds, so I’m not doing that bad, though I could be doing better.

Anyway, long day, rainy day, Monday.  Time for sleep.

So I’m in New York, Da Bronx to be exact.  For my mom’s 90th birthday I set her up with Netflix instant video using a ROKU box.

In previous years, I’ve tried to set up WiFi in her apartment with zero success.  I’d go to Best Buy and get a Linksys router, bring it back to her place and spend hours on the phone with her cable company and Linksys tech support and end up returning the router the next day, completely unable to get it going.

This time I bought her a Medialink box via Amazon – it’s Wireless N and sells for only 50 bucks and has tons of 5 star reviews.  As soon as my order was placed, I received an email “from the CEO” of Medialink’s parent company, thanking me and giving me all sorts of links in case I needed help with the set up.  Seriously – who else does this?  Why doesn’t everyone?

I didn’t need those links.  I got the router up and running in under 5 minutes.  Then the ROKU box – I bought her the middle model, it has an HDMI outlet and streams HD.  This also took just 5 minutes to set up.  ”Channel” choices here include Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, Hulu Plus, Flixster and several more.  She already has a Netflix account so it took about a minute to associate the box with her account.  (There are other hardware options that include XBOX 360 and PS3.)  US$8 a month for unlimited movies; the only drawback being that the Hollywood studios won’t let them stream films until several months after the DVD release.

So at random, I typed in Bananas and the Woody Allen movie came up in about 30 seconds.  It played through with no lag, no pause, no waiting for buffering.  (I ran a speed test – her internet line tested at 16.2 Mbps.)  Couldn’t find Unknown, the recent Liam Neeson film, but found Big Lebowski (in HD), some Louis CK stand-up specials, Gone With the Wind, Martin & Lewis TV appearances from 1950 … I recall reading that they have about 100,000 titles.

Yeah.  100,000 titles, unlimited viewing for US$8 per month.  That’s about HK$60.  Legal.  Presumably I could buy one of these Roku boxes for myself and configure a proxy or VPN at the router level and then it would work for me in Hong Kong, though I am concerned that my 8 Mbps line plus trans-Pacific latency would mean that it wouldn’t work quite so flawlessly for me.  Tempting though, isn’t it?

If any of my readers is in Hong Kong (or elsewhere in Asia) and is doing this, please let me know!

To the best of my knowledge, Hong Kong doesn’t offer anything even remotely (pun, geddit?) close to this.  It’s too small a market for the international players to make a priority and I also suppose too small a market for PCCW or one of their competitors to feel that they need to offer this level of service.

For my mom, it’s really sweet – except she’s 90 and I wonder how many days it will take before she forgets how to use this.  I’m expecting nightly phone calls – which in this case probably means she’ll be calling me while I’m on the MTR heading to work.  People on the train will get to hear me yell into the phone, “Mom, the home button on the remote?  The one that looks like a little house?  Press it?  Press it down?  No, you have to use your finger and press it!”  Maybe I can charge my fellow riders $10 each for the entertainment I’m sure I’ll be providing them.

Seriously.  Netflix is big time in the US.  They are phasing out their rentals of physical DVDs in favor of this streaming service for obvious reasons.  After Youtube, they’re one of the top sources for streaming video on the net.  8 bucks a month and legal, who wouldn’t do this?

The only negatives I’ve found so far are the somewhat limited selection of titles and the inability for the system to show subtitles (unless it can and I just haven’t figured it out yet).

So … anyone in HK using Netflix?  How fast is your connection?  You using a Roku box or your PS3 for this?

If you didn’t take my previous recommendation to start listening to Marc Maron’s What The Fuck podcast, this is me saying that if you like comedy and comedians, you really oughta check it out.  In the past month, he’s been outdoing himself show after show.  Bobcat Goldthwait (great stand-up and indie director), Andy Dick (tremendously talented even if he’s said to be a dick in real life), Sally Wade (George Carlin’s companion for his last ten years, a very emotional interview), Ed Helms.  And then some dream stuff ….  an hour with Conan O’Brien.  Jonathan Winters, fer crissakes!  And the topper, for me, this week Garry Shandling.

Now I don’t know about you, but I consider the Larry Sanders Show to be one of the great achievements in TV comedy series.  I put it up there with Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office (UK version, natch), Seinfeld, just about any series you care to name.  Rip Torn at the best he’s ever been?  Jeffrey Tambor, hey now?  So how often does Shandling sit down for an extended interview?  Once in a decade, maybe?  So it’s great to hear him at the garage at the Cat Ranch talking about his craft (and Marc’s issues).

This is stuff too good to miss.

Also firing on all cylinders this year is Criterion.  They’ve always been the gold standard for DVDs – the best digital transfers, the best bonus features and, let’s face it, the best films.  They seemed a bit tentative about Blu-Ray last year but this year they’re putting out some killer stuff (as well as going back to their catalog and remastering some of their older titles).   I took advantage of a 50% off sale at Amazon to nab Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, Mike Leigh’s Topsy Turvy, Le Cercle Rouge, Kes, Army of Shadows, Double Life of Veronique and a few others.  And in the past year or so they’ve also released Paths of Glory, Breathless, Broadcast News, Diabolique, Solaris (the original, not the Clooney remake).  And what about the end of 2010 when they released that BBS blu ray boxed set that included Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Last Picture Show and Head?

This Criterion stuff is saving my movie sanity.  In an era that seems to consist of nothing but “franchises” rather than films, one comic book movie after another, sequels to sequels of sequels, unremarkable remakes of unremarkable films, there is so much to watch and experience and love in their catalog.   Click this link – it will lead you to masterful blu-ray releases of Thin Red Line, Amarcord, Wings of Desire, The Red Shoes, Seven Samurai, Something Wild, Night of the Hunter and, yes, Robinson Crusoe on Mars.   You gotta check it out.

While I was at it, I also picked up this giant-sized book, Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made.  Last year Taschen released this as a super limited edition of 10 books in a giant box for around US$1,000.  Now comes the general release, just one big book, US$70 (and Amazon’s selling it for $45).  I have a vaguely personal collection to all this.  I worked for cameraman/director Robert Gaffney for four years in the 70s and he was the producer of this film.  It’s the reason that he left the feature film business to only work on TV commercials and the reason that I got to help out on The Shining (but so far down the food chain that I didn’t rate a credit).   Thumbing through this, there’s an amazing amount of material.  The script, costume tests, location info, shot breakdowns, historical research material, basically a vision of a film that was completed on paper but never shot.  Mega-Kubrick fans shouldn’t miss this.

From the article Lester Bangs’ Basement by Bill Wyman (not the Rolling Stone) in Slate:

Lester Bangs, the late, great early-rock critic, once said he dreamed of having a basement with every album ever released in it. That’s a fantasy shared by many music fans—and,mutatis mutandis, film buffs as well. We all know the Internet has made available a lot of things that were previously hard to get. Recently, though, there are indications of something even more enticing, almost paradisiacal, something that might have made Bangs put down the cough syrup and sit up straight: that almost everything is available.

I’ve spent most of my life in search of recorded music.  And it was an often-professed fantasy that I wanted to own every album ever made.  That may not be entirely true as I have little use for polkas or death metal.  But from the time I was 14 until I left the US in 1995, pretty much every Saturday of my life was spent in record stores hunting obscurities and bargains.  A friend and I used to hit all the shops in NYC’s Greenwich Village and East Village and later on Brooklyn.  We found a place over on 8th Avenue and 18th Street or so that sold records for 50 cents and a buck and we’d buy something if we liked the cover art or if it had some unusual instrument on it.  (“Ooooh, mellotron, let’s give it a try.”)   Any trip, first thing I’d do was grab the Yellow Pages in the motel, tear out the page listing local record shops and try to hit as many as possible.  London in 1972 when I was 18 years old – I brought back dozens of LPs.

By the 1980s, I owned thousands of records.  For ten years, my first wife and I lived in a 300 square foot studio apartment that had stacks of vinyl everywhere.  I finally parted with most of them in 2001 when I moved to Hong Kong the second time.  I couldn’t afford to ship them across the Pacific and didn’t want to pay for storage (I’d done that during my first four years in HK).  Unfortunately, I was forced to sell them off in San Francisco just after the tech bubble exploded – everyone was selling off their vinyl and things that might have gone for $10 or $20 just a year or two before were fetching just a buck apiece.  I did keep a few boxes of stuff I just couldn’t bare to part with – some rare albums and singles, lots of picture discs and shaped discs, and albums that just represented a particular time or memory, things that I had an emotional attachment to.

Now I still have thousands of CDs.  I got lots of ‘em from owning a CD store in NYC in the mid-80s and even more from the days when I worked in radio and consulted to record companies.  I also bought plenty of them.  They are one reason I’ve never lived in a 500 square foot rabbit hole in HK, although at the moment about half of the collection is sitting in boxes in a room in my flat that’s serving as a storage room.

The rise of MP3′s, a lossy medium that purists will wail about, coincided with my, shall I say, late middle age.  Working rock concert security in my teens, managing bands in my 20s, blasting music in my ears via headphones as loud as possible, all resulted in some loss of hearing at the high end and, yes, tinnitis.  So MP3s ripped at 256 or 320 sound quite okay to me.  Plus MP3s have helped me realize a secondary fantasy – that of being able to take massive amounts of music with me when I travel or actually whenever I leave the house.

I was the same way about movies.  When I grew up, there was no such thing as home video and cable TV didn’t exist yet.  We had seven channels in NYC and you had to wait all year for the rerun of King Kong on Thanksgiving Day.  I had a friend in college who had a projector and a small collection of films on 16mm and to me that was the most incredible thing.  I wanted to own every movie ever made and that became possible in my lifetime via VHS, laser disc and DVD.  I don’t know how many thousands of DVDs I have (working for a major home video company for 8 years certainly helped in that regard.)

The collector in me likes having the physical item.  I loved holding LP covers in my hand when listening to music.  The tiny CD booklets never had the same impact; something was definitely lost.  I feel that when I “own” the actual disc I have it; the digital versions seem less permanent.  I have what normal people would consider a hellaciously massive amount of music  on hard disks now, terabytes, and can call up almost any track from tens of thousands of albums within seconds.  So yes, I have rarities and obscurities that I used to point to with pride.  The first 20 singles from Stiff Records.  Almost everything released on Frank Zappa’s Straight and Bizarre labels.  Alexander Spence’s “Oar.”  The original release of the Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request with the 3D cover (and Some Girls with the Lucille Ball photo). The Dave Mason “Alone Together” picture disc that looks like someone threw up on a turntable.  ”Robert Mitchum Sings Calypso Like So.”  A rare promo-only 12 inch single that has the Columbia label on one side and the Capitol label on the other.  A promo-only sampler from Mercury that plays from the inside out.  And so on and so on and so on.

But even that approach is rapidly becoming outdated, as the article in Slate makes clear.

The concept of “rarity” has become obsolete. A previously “rare” CD or movie, once it’s in the iTunes store or on the torrent networks, is, in theory, just as available as the biggest single in the world. (In practice, there are marginal differences, like having to do a few extra searches or wait a bit for a download, but that’s a big difference from, say, driving across town to a Tower Records to find that they don’t have a CD in stock.)

A rarity might be less popular; it might be less interesting. But it’s no longer less availablethe way it once was. If you have a decent Internet connection and a slight cast of amorality in your character, there’s very little out there you might want that you can’t find. Does the end of rarity change in any fundamental way, our understanding of, attraction to, or enjoyment of pop culture and high art?

The article goes on to point towards the easy availability of almost everything online now.  If you can’t find it in iTunes or Amazon, you can find it on a blog or a torrent or on Usenet.  (And the same holds true for video.)

I believe we’ve entered an era where having a collection of music or film is redundant and books are not far behind.  Why buy something when it’s almost instantly available online?  All you need is a fast internet connection and the ability to type a few words into Google.  It’s much more advanced in the US and Europe than in most of Asia.  And we’re not completely there yet.  Why buy a movie and put it on a shelf and have it take up space when you can stream something from Netflix?  Except that there is no Netflix in Hong Kong and the few meager legal choices we have here seem positively 20th century.  And I dread the idea of living someplace like the Philippines, where the average internet connection at home is measured in Kbps rather than Mbps, or a place like China with its censorship and constant need for proxies and VPNs.

The phenomenon crystallized for me while working on a story about the Rolling Stones. I wanted to see the 1972 documentary Cocksucker Blues again. The film, a porny, drug-soaked cinéma vérité by the noted photographer Robert Frank, was never officially released. Indeed, under some sort of legal agreement with the Stones, Frank can show it publicly only when he is physically there. It tends to be presented at college events or in museum screening rooms.

The film took me about 30 seconds to find on the torrent networks, and perhaps half an hour to download. The movie was in great condition. Indeed, I was surprised at how explicit the sex scenes were; although I’d seen it twice before, I didn’t remember them. I wouldn’t swear to it that they hadn’t always been there, but it made me wonder whether Frank had shown expurgated versions at the showings I’d seen in the 1980s and ’90s—and that the illicit one on the Internet was the definitive version

Later, I noticed that I’d made the process unnecessarily difficult on myself: The thing is on YouTube, complete with gobs and gobs of sex. And if you’re into the Stones you can of course find tons of other footage, right down to a circa 1964 Rice Krispies commercial. All the Ed Sullivan performances; odd documentaries, like one from Australia, or another bit of foofara called Charlie Is My Darling.

Sometimes the quality isn’t great, but on the other hand they uniformly lack the bad aspects of official DVD releases: No intrusive previews, many fewer commercials; no security warnings from the FBI or Interpol in multiple languages or legal announcements regarding the commentaries; no inconsistent navigation; and so forth. The so-called “illegal media” are often more consumer-friendly and easier to use than the legal.

It’s just astonishing to me that the major media companies – the record companies and film companies and publishers – are fighting so hard against this inevitable future, actively trying to hurt the future means of distribution in order to protect ancient technologies that will eventually go the way of the abacus and the zeppelin.  I may come from the last generation to build home libraries from atoms instead of bytes and I may or may not think that something intangible is or will be lost in this bit of “advancement” but the fact is that the future is already here and trying to fight it is simply an open invitation to extinction.

I was always amazed at how few people at Warner actually knew the history of the company or its products.   It would seem that in the 16 months since I left, things have only gotten worse.

Case in point:  in May they will release a Blu-Ray boxed set of Stanley Kubrick movies.  They have sent out all the publicity material this week.  I can tell you nothing goes out without having been seen by and approved by multiple people.  Here is the image of the box cover:

By all means click on the image to see the full size.  Look at the list of films.  4th film from the bottom.  Barry London?

Oddly enough, a bit of googling around tells me that in the 1970s, Warner had a VP of publicity and advertising named Barry London.

Which is no excuse for this at all.

Five Easy Pieces is part of the Criterion boxed set America Lost & Found: The BBS Story that I recently received for Christmas.  Bob Rafelson’s second film as a director (after Head) and, perhaps more notably, Jack Nicholson’s first major starring role, the film was huge in 1970, no doubt helped by the chicken salad sandwich scene that “went viral” before the term existed.   When it was first released I was 16 years old and studying piano and found something oddly romantic about the notion of a talented piano player walking away from his talent and family, taking on whatever odd jobs he could find.  The presence of Karen Black, Susan Anspach and Sally Struthers didn’t hurt either.  Forty years later, I’m astonished at how well the film holds up.  On a personal level, it really resonates with me.

I think I laughed at most once or twice while watching Dinner for Schmucks, a Jay Roach film that’s supposed to be a comedy.  My laughs came mostly thanks to supporting players Zach Galifianakis, Jemaine Clement (from Flight of the Conchords) and David Walliams (Little Britain).  Aside from the lame script, I have this problem with Paul Rudd, whom I find competent but mostly  unmemorable in every film  I’ve seen him in, and this is no exception.  Steve Carell is also a let down; I don’t think anyone had a good handle on what his character was supposed to be, aside from the obvious ticks and quirks, and we end up with something that might have worked better in a 5 minute TV sketch.

I don’t think that director Darren Aronofsky has lived up to his potential yet.  Pi and Requiem for a Dream were pretty darned amazing.  The Fountain was an embarrassment.  The Wrestler was a commercial hit yet it struck me as filmmaking-by-the-numbers, taking on an established genre and not doing all that much new with it.   With Black Swan, Aronofsky has the balls to go after The Red Shoes, the greatest ballet film ever made.  Like Red Shoes, this is the tale of a dedicated young ballerina (Natalie Portman) striving for success, dealing with an imposing director (Vincent Cassel) and her rivals past and future (Winona Ryder and Mila Kunis).  That’s where the resemblance ends, because this is the tale of a woman going insane, and the film moves from subtle to lurid in its shockers.   Oddly, for a ballet film, the dance sequences are short – perhaps Aronofsky thought audiences wouldn’t have the patience for long ballet sequences? – and what glimpses we get of Cassel’s supposedly more lurid and visceral Swan Lake make it seem pedestrian.  Portman’s amazing performance is sure to get her at least an Oscar nomination.  In an exceptionally weak year for films, this rates as one of the best.

I tried to watch Reign of Assassins but turned it off in disgust after about 30 minutes.  While it’s co-directed by one of my favorites, John Woo, I suppose the emphasis is on the “co-”.  The other “co-”
is Su Chao-Bin, who also wrote this, so I’m going to assume that the blame lies with him.  Incapable of telling its story directly, the action sequences are so poorly edited, in a modern rock video-ish style that obscures details rather than letting us revel in them.  Anyway, I got to this bit about a woman warrior going for plastic surgery – a thousand years ago?  The doctor explains he’s gonna put poisonous insects in her and they will eat her cheek bones and then he’ll slice her face open and remove the insects and sew her up with golden threads.   No, they don’t show any of this on screen.  But I think they spent more time coming up with that method of plastic surgery than any other facet of the dumb script.

We watched the extended edition of Avatar today on Blu-Ray.  Not having seen the film in a year, I was newly impressed with the special effects and how packed with detail each frame was.   But overall, I liked the film even less than when I saw it in the theater.  Watching at home, I didn’t miss the 3D at all.  (There is a 3D Blu-Ray version of this film available in the US but you can only get it when you buy a 3D Panasonic TV.  I understand the disc is going for more than $300 on eBay these days.  Feh.)

The Town just opened in Hong Kong and, true to form, the DVD is released in the US next week, which means it’s easily available here now (and from the usual internet sources).   It’s the second feature film directed by Ben Affleck.  The first was Gone Baby Gone, a not-bad film starring Ben’s brother Casey that was mostly let down by a bad ending.  The Town suffers a similar fate.

Affleck stars in this one and has assembled a terrific cast that includes Jon Hamm, Rebecca Hall, Jeremy Renner, Chris Cooper, Pete Postlethwaite, Titus Welliver and, um, Blake Lively.   The movie informs us that the Charlestown section of Boston has produced more bank robbers than any other community in the U.S. and then goes on to give us the story of one such group.   The tech credits are excellent, as are the action sequences.  Renner gives another great performance, Cooper owns the screen during his all-too-brief appearance, Hamm has an odd edge here and Affleck is quite okay.  My guess is that here’s someone whose career got off to a great start and then didn’t just taste failure, he practically drowned in it, and has become all the more interesting for it.

I suspect that Affleck used Heat as his model here.  The structures of the two films are very similar.  But Heat is a far, far better film.  The Town probably felt long at its theatrical length of 125 minutes; the DVD director’s cut runs 150 and has lots of fat that could be trimmed.  And, without giving anything away, I’ll say that the ending pissed me off, and not in a good way.   The critics mostly liked The Town and lets hope that Affleck continues to improve.

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Head remains the sterling example of how to kill a franchise on purpose even though it dates back to a time when the word franchise wasn’t applied to films.  The Monkees were sick of their hit TV series by the end of the second season and looking to move on.  Meanwhile, the series producer, Bob Rafelson, was looking to direct his first film.  The poster for the film didn’t mention the Monkees and it didn’t have their picture – it had a photo of some guy who’s in the film for about 3 seconds.  It opened in one theater on a Friday and it was gone by the following Wednesday.

It’s one of 7 films contained in a new boxed set from Criterion called America Lost and Found: The BBS Story, along with Easy Rider, 5 Easy Pieces and Last Picture Show.  And somehow, I’d never seen the film until now.

Rafelson co-wrote the screenplay with Jack Nicholson.  Apparently they both sat in Harry Dean Stanton’s house, stoned out of their minds, free associating and writing down whatever came to mind.  In a 30 minute interview with Rafelson filmed this year, he describes telling Nicholson that he was trying to imagine the blackest thing on the planet and decided it was Victor Mature’s hair.  At which point Nicholson announced that the entire film would take place in Mature’s hair.  It doesn’t come as much of a surprise when Rafelson says that the film was structured like an LSD trip.  The film makes its intentions clear from the start, with the Ditty Diego War Chant “sung” during one of the initial sequences:

Hey hey we are the Monkees
You know we love to please
A manufactured image
With no philosophies

We hope you like our story
Although there isn’t one
That is to say there’s many
That way there is more fun

You told us you like action
And games of many kinds
You like to dance, we like to sing
So let’s all lose our minds!

We know it doesn’t matter,
Cause what you came to see
Is what we’d love to give you,
And give it one, two, three!

But there may come three, two, one, two
Or jump from nine to five,
And when you see the end in sight
The beginning may arrive!

For those who look for meaning,
And form as they do facts,
We might tell you one thing
But we’d only take it back

Not back like in a box back
Not back like in a race,
Not back so we can keep it,
But back in time and space!

You say we’re manufactured,
To that we all agree,
So make you choice and we’ll rejoice
In never being free!

Hey hey we are the Monkees,
We’ve said it all before
The money’s in we’re made of tin
We’re here to give you more!

The money’s in we’re made of tin
We’re here to give you–

The cast, aside from the Monkees, is a bizarre combination of people, described as losers whom they loved for one reason or another.  How bizarre?   Victor Mature, Annette Funicello, Frank Zappa, Sonny Liston, Vito Scotti, Percy Helton, Teri Garr, Toni Basile (of Oh Mickey fame), Carol Doda, Tor Johnson – even Rafelson, Nicholson and Dennis Hopper put in very brief appearances.

Rafelson says in the interview that since he thought he’d never get to make another film, he’d better throw everything into this one.  So there’s a boxing sequence, a Lawrence of Arabia bit, a western – the kitchen sink might be there and I blinked and missed it.

On one level, this is amazingly influenced by European films of the 60s.  It is completely surreal in the way it jumps from one character to the next, one sequence to the next with minimal continuity.  But pretensions aside, it’s simply not a very good film, something that Rafelson admits when he says that he always hoped that Head would grow in stature over the years but that never happened and perhaps the film isn’t good.

Basically you need to be a huge Monkees fan to sit through this or just have a tremendous amount of patience for a real cinematic oddball.  As for Rafelson, he did get to direct more films – Five Easy Pieces, King of Marvin Gardens, Stay Hungry, Postman Always Rings Twice, so his place in film history is secure.

The Criterion edition packs the usual excellent extras – in this case the 30 minute 2010 interview with Rafelson, a 5 minute TV clip of the Monkees promoting the film in 1968, a documentary on BBS and a commentary done by the Monkees, all of whom are still alive, which I haven’t listened to because that would entail watching the film again, something I don’t feel the need to do for a long, long time.

Tonight we watched Charles Laughton’s magnificent Night of the Hunter via the newly released Criterion Blu-Ray edition.  I haven’t watched this film in ages and it was a pleasure to see it again.

Laughton, of course, was one of the great actors.  Private Life of Henry VIII.  Ruggles of Red Gap.  Mutiny on the Bounty.  The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Hobson’s Choice.  Spartacus.  Advise and Consent.  And many, many more.  But in his entire career he only directed one film, Night of the Hunter, and its failure in its original release probably discouraged him from directing a second and that’s a damned shame.  There are very few films like this one out there.

Ostensibly a bit of southern gothic horror, you might be expecting a bit of gritty film noir.  Instead, this is very stylized stuff.  Most of the sets are barely built out, medium and close-up shots against a bit of a wall.  Working with cinematographer Stanley Cortez, there are some amazing images in here – and not just the famous night time river chase scenes – so many of the bedroom scenes framed by triangles of light.  And while some of the performances are quite realistic, some also seem abstract – Robert Mitchum is terrifying one moment and then camp the next.  Shelley Winters is good, of course, and it’s fun to see Peter Graves so early in his career.  But in the end it’s the magnificent Lillian Gish who is the rock of the film and who brings tears to my eyes every time I watch this.  The film moves at its own pace, at its own eccentric rhythm

This is one of Mitchum’s more famous roles, the psychopathic preacher with LOVE tattooed on the fingers of one hand, HATE on the other.  He’s shared a cell with a convicted murderer and finds out that the guy hid $10,000 away.  The guy gets hanged, Mitchum gets out, marries his widow, stalks the kids, he wants that money.

The conventions of the time play against some of the harder material.  The symbolism of Mitchum continually opening and closing his switchblade knife, which he was supposed to be doing in his pants but it got moved to his jacket.  And the definitely under-aged Ruby getting through the Depression by turning to prostitution is only hinted at.  There’s a lot going on under the surface of what has been described as a sort of twisted fairy tale.

An owl swoops down and snares a rabbit, off screen.  ”It’s a hard world for little things,” Gish tells us, and she’s not just talking about animals.

The Criterion transfer isn’t the best or cleanest that I’ve seen from them but it’s definitely the best that this film has looked since its original release.  And as usual, Criterion has stuffed this with valuable bonuses – the Blu-Ray edition is two discs and you get amazing stuff on the first disc (Peter Graves on Ed Sullivan doing a scene that was cut from the film!), commentaries, documentaries and interviews and then the second disc has another 2 and a half hour documentary filled with outtakes, production footage and more.

“You know, when you’re little, you have more endurance than God is ever to grant you again. Children are man at his strongest. They abide.  They abide and they endure.”  And ain’t it the truth.