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Dietrich Dörner, in The Logic of Failure, outlines the various ways systems, countries, nuclear safety teams, and minor bureaucrats create disasters, all the while knowing better.  And, for a change of pace, I’m not going to apply this to studio heads, but to myself.  It seems there’s a particular way that we do, that I do, stupid stuff, and that is called Goal Degeneration.  Basically, if you start out trying to run a nuclear power plant, become consumed with how good you are at running that plant, you might try to prove how smart you are and cause a meltdown.  It’s mistaking the means for the ends, and it’s something we do all the time: if you get into a relationship to be happy, and wind up fighting all the time for the sake of the relationship, that’s goal degeneration.  

A few months ago, as a goof, I started writing a little bit about movies that I had seen.  It was fun, trying to be witty, and sometimes succeeding, and putting it down on paper, or, for the more literal minded, on MySQL servers.  Then, it became something I had to do, and it wasn’t so much a goof anymore.   Then, I saw Doubt, and it reached the threshold, what we’ll call the homework continuum.  The goal, of goofing off, had degenerated into something obligatory.  So to get back on track, and not cause any Chernobyls, from a literary point of view, I’m just going to ramble, and see what comes of it. Read the rest of this entry »

I was on the way out of the Westfield Century City shopping complex, and I was in a good mood.  The AMC Century 15 is now my new favorite theatre.  It has a Godiva chocolate store out front, the earliest showtimes in Los Angeles County (a 9:45 morning showtime of Bolt in 3D.  9:45!) Read the rest of this entry »

Now we all hate humanity, at least a little bit.  That’s why we have movies.  Admit it - you didn’t see Independence Day for the part where Bill Pulman raises his hands and goes, “Woo”; you saw it to watch the White House explode.  And The Day After Tomorrow?  Do we really care if Jake Gyllenhaal and co. make it out alive?  Do we even remember if they did?  No, we want to see New York swallowed by a wave of water and then frozen.  That’s why they put it in the trailer.  So out pops the 2008 remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still: another opportunity to witness the annihilation of mankind - what’s not to like?  

The answer to that is The Day The Earth Stood Still.  I’ve made it clear: I hate humanity, but, to paraphrase, people, individually aren’t so bad.  Some of them I rather like.  With one horrible, horrible exception.

Jacob Benson, the kid in The Day The Earth Stood Still.

Die, Jacob Benson, Die.

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You may in fact wonder why I would see Australia, by all accounts, now including my own, an overlong and pointless mess.  Well, I have a rule.  I have many, but this is a new one, to you anyway.  It’s more of a criterion: any ill-adviced story with an obscenely high budget and I’m there.  If Kevin Costner is directing himself delivering mail in a post-apocolyptic Southwest, you know I’m there (an experience that comes replete with an inexplicably enthusiastic Will Patton, as Costner’s enemy, screaming “Ride, Postman, Ride!!!!’.  Again, there’s my $7.50 right there).  

Put Eddie Murphy (and Eddie Murphy!) in space as a detective on the moon.  Sure!  He’s fighting the mob?  Sure, why not?  Are they selling drugs?  No?  Rubbing out the competition?  Not exactly…no it’s a movie about the moon mob’s attempt to monopolize singers in the nightclub business.  That would have been my next guess.  I am, and I was, there.

In a certain sense, the rule has served me well, since what most people call flops are rarely boring.  Enter Australia, which I now realize is a war movie.  Not in the conventional sense, though there are plenty of dull battle scenes in it.  No Australia is going to war with you, the viewer.  

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There’s a bit in the otherwise forgettable remake of The Manchurian Candidate (let’s, said the filmmakers, make Manchurian the name of an evil corporation, you know because corporations are always doing stuff in politics.  It’s an idea that if presented to conservatives even way back in 1962 would elicit the response: “Yes, well, we were hoping for something a little more…controversial.”), where a creepy and somewhat ominous Robyn Hitchcock appears in the background and looks creepy and, well, at very least English.  You wonder, who was that?  When is he coming back?  And why would they update The Manchurian Candidate in 2004 and make it less relevant?

Oh.  Answered my own question.

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Remember dinosaurs?  They were really popular in the 90s, as children correctly intuited that the human race was vast, lumbering, and doomed.  With vestigial dangly arms.  Now, God help us, it’s vampires, who future historians will say represent our view that we inhabit a world where we are simultaneously bored with everything life has to offer, and desperate to have it last forever.  Read the rest of this entry »

I have a rule.  I actually have many, but this is a very important one.  If there’s a new snack on the market, I have to try it.  Pizza Ruffles - check (this was more than just snack irony; I actually miss those little guys).  Gummi fried eggs that taste like eggs - check.  Doritos flavor X-13D (I’m not kidding about this; Doritos released a corn chip in a black bag called X-13D, as a gimmick to promote their experimental flavor.  No one bought it [except me, see “I have a rule” above]; it tastes like pickles left in the sun too long.  Je ne regrette rien) - check.

The Nuart is conveniently located across from a heavily trafficked 7-11, so I was delighted to find the latest novelty - Takis, which are basically corn chips rolled in the shape of taquito.  Being as blanca as can be, I went with Crunchy Fajita flavor, since I didn’t know what Fuego flavor was.  But when I go back, I’ll try those.

They were fine I guess, filling and bizarre, but what would my life be if I had never I tasted them?  

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I had my Quantum of Solace report all planned.  It was to be about identification, and the way movies put us in the place of the hero.  I was going to open with the time someone said I looked like Daniel Craig.  And no, I don’t (as my friends, the only people reading this, will tell you.  Actually, if they’re the only people reading this, they’re going to have to tell themselves), and yes, I still believe that I do.  I also believe that I look like the monster in The Bride.  Not the actor who played him (Clancy Brown), but the way that some make-up artist imagined the monster of the Frankenstein story.  You can accuse me of having either a too high or a too low self image, but if I’m a monster, at least I got to kill Sting after he left the Police.

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What is it about an abandoned mall?  Is it the allure of having a whole post-apocalyptic world to yourself?  Do we see ourselves in the eyes of the empty non-starbucks coffee shop windows, cast aside, hoping someone will buy a muffin?  It is all these things, but in the case of the Sunset 5, it is in particular, the charm of a lost and forgotten era.  Ah, you say to yourself, remember 1995?

The Crescent Heights/Sunset complex is probably cursed, since it occupies the spot which used to be occupied by the Schwab’s drugstore, which was the place where Lana Turner wasn’t actually discovered.  It’s now just as dead as Schwab’s, with two empty floors of exposed plywood standees from a once flourishing Virgin Megastore, the paint shadows of signs marked CDs and DVDs peeking through the floor to ceiling glass.  A visit to the Sunset 5, and you are transported to a carefree time of television that you couldn’t fast forward through, cell phones that you couldn’t talk on (we called them pagers) and moments in your life where you weren’t constantly connected to all the knowledge in the universe.  1995, when people ‘bought’ ‘music’ at a ‘store’.  

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I can’t really say anything about W., since I was 2 minutes late into the theater.  This is not such a bad thing when seeing a film at the Landmark 14, which frequently shows my arch-nemesis: art house trailers.  Trailers are bad enough, since they give away all the good parts, up to and including the ending, but art house trailers are simply agonizing.  Forget the foreign language film trailers that pretend to be in English (with sudden bursts of single words like “Ha!” or “Oh”) - because there are fewer films, the trailers run for longer periods, sometimes as long as six months.  I saw the trailer for Snow Angels so many times, it was practically its own terrible movie.

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