catching up

I normally sleep during the trans-Pacific leg of the voyage home, but this time around I decided to watch a whole slew of movies I'd been wanting to see, but hadn't seen while in Korea. The list, with quick reviews:

1. "Beowulf": By far my favorite of all the movies I saw on that flight. Corny, yes, and strangely retro as action movies go, but entertaining. Helmer Zemeckis, a Spielberg disciple, made good use of the liberating world of CGI to introduce plenty of swooping, whooshing camera shots. A moment toward the end of the movie reminded me of John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany (those who've seen "Beowulf" and read Owen Meany will know what I mean). The moral of the film (though perhaps not of the original poem) appears to be: "What goes around comes around." Some purists will be scandalized by many of the jarring changes made to the original story. Not having read the original story in years (despite a recent purchase of the Seamus Heaney translation), I can't say I was all that uncomfortable with those changes. The movie stands up well on its own.

2. "Juno": Snappy one-liners by all the major characters left me feeling a bit cold, given the film's weighty subject matter: teen pregnancy. I ended up thinking the movie had been over-hyped. At the same time, I thought most of the performances were fantastic, so I suppose my problem with this movie wasn't so much with the actors as it was with the scriptwriter(s). Not a movie I'd be eager to see again, but not a horrible experience, either. A few lines made me laugh, I admit.

3. "The Golden Compass": I'll need to read Bill Pullman's series to catch his theological (or atheological) drift because the film left me with many questions and few answers. Unfortunately structured in a way that reminded me of the incompleteness of "The Phantom Menace," "The Golden Compass" made me wish the movie had been more of a self-contained story, as was true for the 1997 "Star Wars" and for 1999's "The Matrix"-- both of which told complete stories while also allowing for the possibility of sequels. One enormous annoyance in this film was the overbearing musical score, which sometimes seemed not to match the action at all. I ended up liking the child lead (Dakota Blue Richards) quite a lot, but I found I couldn't get into the relationships she built up with the many, many (many!) characters she met along the way. The story that made it to the screen seemed to be a horribly compromised version of whatever story Pullman had written. I imagine the movie would have been more wondrous had I been 3.8 years old as opposed to 38.

4. "There Will Be Blood": I'm not sure I could sit through this movie a second time-- at least not right away-- but that doesn't mean I didn't like it. "Blood" is definitely an actor's movie, and scenery-chewing Daniel Day-Lewis steals the show as Daniel Plainview, a self-described "oil man" who, from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, builds himself up as a huge success. Plainview is at times a frightening man, and the root of his problem is summed up in a single chilling phrase: "I have a competition in me." How this competitive spirit leads him to perform two brutal acts is part of the film's fascination. The film pits Plainview against Eli Sunday, a young charismatic preacher ("charismatic" in the sense of "charismatic Christian"), resulting in a strange relationship that endures for years, but terminates as abruptly as a suicide plunge. It's not a particularly shocking movie, but it does a good job of building up the menace of Day-Lewis's character in much the same way that the movie "Sexy Beast" built up Ben Kingsley's Don Logan. Here, too, the musical score was intrusive and often seemed not to match the action, but unlike in "The Golden Compass," the music of "There Will Be Blood" seemed to be a separate character, often reminiscent of a Greek chorus: whenever the men would strike oil, for example, the music, far from being celebratory, would take on a sinister tone. This effect added layers of subtext to the film and made it more intelligent than it might otherwise have been.

5. "No Country for Old Men": This Coen Brothers film had all the typical Coen Brothers elements: (a) concentration on a linguistic quirk (in "Raising Arizona," it was the phrase "OK, then"; in "Fargo," it was the Nordic "Oh, ja!"; in "Old Men," it's the Texas twang and idiom); (b) an apocalyptic figure (in Raising Arizona, it was The Lone Biker of the Apocalypse; in "Old Men," it's Anton Chigurh); (c) a fascination with the slow-witted (something the Coen Brothers share with the Farrelly Brothers); and (d) more than a passing flirtation with insanity. While not the most suspenseful or unpredictable of the Coen Brothers' films, "Old Men" was eminently watchable. I was a bit frustrated by the number of unresolved issues at the end of the film, as well as by the fact that one of the main characters, supposedly the "soul" of the film, ends up being little more than an ineffectual observer of important trends. Despite these flaws, though, "Old Men" was a good movie.

I was happy to get so caught up. Today (Monday), I also went with my brother David on several errands, including an errand to a local Barnes and Noble where I bought Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild (I wanted a downbeat contrast to Peter Jenkins's upbeat A Walk Across America) and Colin Fletcher's The Complete Walker IV. I have Fletcher's The Complete Walker III buried in boxes somewhere, but that book's information is sorely out of date in terms of the latest changes in hiking/camping technology.

Personal note: Mike, I owe you a phone call.


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