couple of flics

For some reason i watched a couple of films over the past 24 hours. During the opening credits of the first, I was thinking to myself, "Arnold Schwartzenegger and Wilt Chamberlain co-starring, what could possibly go wrong?". 90 minutes later that question was answered with a resounding "plenty". The previous conan film, Barbarian, was good naive fun, and essentially worked despite generally poor acting and a fairly thin premise. The same cannot be said for the second, Destroyer - the acting is much, much worse (Wilt Chamberlain is the least of the problems, despite probably being the only member who at the time had a credible other career), the premise is thinner, the pacing is terrible, and it all just doesn't work at all.

Then, this morning, on a whim, before going to work I put on "How To Lose Friends and Alienate Poeple", with Simon Pegg and some other people. I suppose it was written as a comedy, and it kind of has some grin moments, but very few laugh-out-loud ones, so I guess it doesn't really work as a comedy. It kind of works as a movie, though - the little plot tumbles along nicely, and Pegg and co-stars (Kirsten Dunst) are amiable, so it makes for a distracting flick, and I left for work feeling good about the day.

I don't know what it is that makes films work or not. What made Conan the Barbarian work for me, and Destroyer feel like rubbish? What makes HTLFaAP work for me, even when its raison d'être isn't really satisfactorily met?

while i'm in a blogging mood...

I inadvertently had a weekend during which I watched a lot of movies. On Saturday I picked up my IMDB list and settled on The Day The Earth Stood Still - the 1951 original, not the current Nenanu remake (which I haven't seen, which I won't see, and which I am nonetheless quite prepared to put in a basket with other crap remakes of classic films). The film does a good job at the science fiction edict of using tehnology as a McGuffin in order to shine a light on some aspects of human nature. Perhaps its more by the accident of a stretched budget than by design, but the film also does a good job of using special effects matter-of-factly and not letting them overshadow the film's story and message (a restraint I can't imagine being respected by the remake). Also, the performance by its lead, Michael Rennie, is surprisingly good for an early film of a genre not known for acting.

On Sunday Mick brought round a DVD of Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, an ensemble drama with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney and Marisa Tomei. Its essentially a character study of family members perpetuating and dealing with an event that messes with their identities and relationships. The performances are strong, and although the first half of the film has some pacing problems - it seems to hurry the event itself in a rush to explore its consequences - it's a solid effort.

Come Sunday evening, the next IMDB flick picked out was The Sweet Smell of Success. Burt Lancaster headlines ahead of Tony Curtis, but in reality its Curtis' film, and a pretty solid one, about the New York journalism/gossip machine but mixed with a nice dose of charisma, fuelled by that pre-70s style of scriptwriting that died with the mainstreaming of realist dialogue.

I had an ambitious plan to turn it into a double feature, and started watching Fritz Lang's Metropolis. I was impressed by what I saw, particularly in terms of the scope of the technical achievement, but my eyes had been bigger than their capacity to stay open, so I had to abandon after 40 minutes.  To be continued...

My IMDB list progress has essentially stayed stagnant over the last month or two at roughly 230/250. My plan is to get that up towards 240 over the coming break, and hit the line some time in the new year.

Paralympics

I posted a couple of times on the Olympics, so its probably only fair that I comment on the Paralympics.

I haven't been watching an awful lot, although I did see quite a bit on Saturday. The ABC coverage gets 10 for effort, but to be honest, some of the commentators are pretty crap. I was watching a close wheelchair basketball game, and the team that was down was fouling as soon as the other team inbounded, which is simply what you do in that situation, in any form of basketball, but the commentators seemed to have no idea why it was happening, which is just weird.

Unlike the Olympics, all of the sports I've seen in the paralympics are objective - no diving, dressage, gymnastics or judo. I am a little uneasy about the classification systems, but its an inevitable problem - the disabilities that people have are different, and although they have lots of categories (and hence LOTS AND LOTS of events), you still get people with wildly different disabilities competing against each other - someone with cystic fibrosis swimming against someone with no arms, against someone with one arm and one leg. This makes it interesting, but in some respects its a bit less even. What is incontestable, though, is just how impressive the individual performances are. Seeing someone with no arms swim 100m of I-guess-you'd-call-it-butterfly is just super-impressive (although banging into the wall with their head makes me giggle, I confess), and the number of personal bests is just amazing. I saw a swimming relay last night where the Australian team took the world record from 4:22 to 4:11, which is just crazy. There have been similar big records elsewhere in swimming and in track - one Kenyan arm-amputee runner broke the 5000m world record by 19 seconds (he earlier broke the 1500m record by 6 seconds).

The team sports are the best of all. Wheelchair basketball is impressive, and seems to be the marquee event. Australia won bronze last night, beating Japan, having taken out the world-champion Canadians in the quarter-finals (the Australians might be the second-best team in the tournament, after the Americans). The men are playing for gold tonight against the Canadians.

My favourite, though, is the wheelchair rugby. The Australians have this guy, Ryley Batt, who is just a superstar. He's a big bloke, built like a prop, which superficially might seem an advantage in a sport called rugby, but it really makes little difference. What sets him apart is his speed in the chair and particularly his acceleration. More than any other player he's a nightmare in terms of blocking the runs of one or more players on defense, and of quick spins and acceleration to get out of traps in attack. He beat the New Zealanders scoring with 0.2 seconds earlier in the tournament, and last night he was key in beating the Canadians in overtime (the Canadians had a great chance to send it to a second overtime but had a skill error on the last play).

250 progress

One of my ongoing quests has been to get through the IMDB Top 250 films of all time. I made solid progress on this in France, particularly while lame during the winter months, and advanced to around 205. I've been slowed a little since, only advancing about 10 films since coming back (its a moving target, so I've probably seen 15-20 films in that time). Yesterday, in an idle space, I got inspired and watched 3.

I have a bunch (about half) of films on the list that are old foreign films. These are intimidating for a number of reasons. They're not colour, the sound quality is often poor, and they're generally in 4:3 aspect ratio, which all combine to mean they're a little less immersive than post-1970 films. Mainly, though, they just require more concentration, either because I need to watch the subtitles, or because I need to concentrate to understand the French (there aren't many French entries left, actually).

Top of my list, then, was Le Notti De Cabiria, by Fellini. The previous Fellini film I'd seen was 8 1/2, but this one was very different, more reminiscent of De Sica's Ladri di Biciclette than of 8 1/2. The plot follows an Italian prostitute through a few days of her life, exploring aspects such as her work, life, religion, and relationships. The lead, Giulietta Masina, really makes the film work with a very charismatic and compassionate performance.

Next up was Stalag 17, by Billy Wilder. Wilder has even more films in the list (7, and it could easily be 8 with Ace In The Hole) than Fellini (4) - by my reckoning, only Hitchcock and Kubrick have more - and I've seen and quite enjoyed all but one (The Lost Weekend) of his others. Stalag 17, though, I found weak. The characters are, in general, thinly drawn, and the comedy really missed the mark for me. The plot winds along nicely enough, but its just lacking anything really substantial for me. Perhaps its greatest contribution is that it seems to have been the inspiration for Hogan's Heroes.

The third film was American Gangster, by Ridley Scott (also 4 films in the list). This was probably the longest film of the bunch, as is the nature of this genre (life-and-times/rise-and-fall film, a la Goodfellas, Blow, Once Upon A Time In America, There Will Be Blood most recently). The performances are pretty solid, although both Crowe and Washington have done better (which is no slight - they are two of the more capable actors working today). The script is solid, although not spectacular, but it does feel a little bit "been there before", and the ending felt a little bit non-sequitur and slightly corny.

I'm currently at 214, with about 16 or so waiting to be watched.

sup

I guess, while I'm posting gruesome photos, I might update, since I haven't done so since Christmas.

I had a quiet Christmas, really. I chatted with Chris and Mick in Basel, and my family in Toowoomba, both via webcam, and also with the extended family who were in Mullumbimby by phone. I watched a bunch of films, and had a pretty luxurious dinner with ham and smoked salmon, followed by a roast chicken, and date and walnut pudding for desert. A bottle of Champagne awaited me in the fridge, but my medications forbade it, so it remains in the fridge, perhaps awaiting submission of my thesis. I also managed to find a nurse, who came around in the evening to give me my shot of anticoagulant.

The nurses (3 in all) came every day until last Monday, to give me my heparin shots, change my dressings and take my blood test. On boxing day, I also started physio, which I've been doing 3 times a week since then. I've been impressed with my progress, which has been noticable, and the physios tell me I'm coming along very quickly. The rehab doctor, who I saw last Friday, agreed but encouraged me to take it slowly.

In between physio and being stabbed by nurses, I've been making progress on the thesis. Its been a bit sporadic, though. After Christmas was pretty slow, then I had a good week after New Year's. Mick arrived for a few days on the 5th, which slowed me only a little, since he was happy enough to amuse himself for at least one day catching the train down to Vannes.

I went into work last Tuesday for a meeting with Jean-Marc, and he seems to agree that I'm still on schedule to send it off in early February. I hit a bit of a speed-bump on Thursday, with a design change to Kermeta setting my finish date for Chapter 3 back by a few days. I got back moving yesterday though, and today has also been productive. With a little luck, I will start Chapter 1 tomorrow, and after a week or so on that and Chapter 5, I can give Jean-Marc a fairly complete draft. Mark has been kindly riding me to keep making progress every day, which is good of him.

I guess the other thing I've been doing is watching films in ridiculous quantities. I've seen 42 in just 22 days since getting out of hospital, which is obscene.

Anyway, back to it.

random stats

Two loose facts about me.

1. I am endless fascinated with calculating useless statistics.


2. I am working my way through the IMDB's list of top 250 films.

With that in mind, its probably interesting only to me to note that:

• I'm 68% (169/250) of my way through the list.


• I'm at 82% (113/137) for films made since 1970, but just a shade under 50% (56/113) for films made before then. Of the films I still have to see, more than 70% were made before 1970.


• I'm at a woeful 24% (5/21) for film made before 1940, including 0% (out of 6) for films from the 1920s. These are Keaton (2), Chaplin, and some early German films (3).


• Just under 1 in 5 of the films are non-English language. I've seen only 30% (14/47) of these, whereas I've seen 76% (155/203) of the English-language films. The non-English language films I haven't seen include german(9), french (7), japanese (6), italian (4), swedish and spanish (2 each), korean, russian and danish.


• My viewing percentage descends linearly with quintile. I'm at 98% (49/50) for the films from 1-50, 80% (40/50) for films from 51-100, 66% for films from 101-150, 56% (28/50) for films from 151-200, and 38% (19/50) for films from 201-250.


• Subjectively speaking, although I enjoy the majority of the films I see, I do find some disappointing. Yesterday, I watched A Christmas Story, which was rubbish. Last night I watched Citizen Kane, which was good but not as good as advertised, and Roman Holiday, which was nice. This evening I finished watching The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which was a little underwhelming (not up to the standard of the other Bogart entries: Casablanca, The African Queen, The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon.

last rites of summer

Summer is ending; I can feel it rattling.

I risked spending all Saturday inside watching teev, but Mark swung by and we rode out to Chantepie to have a look at overgrown retail warehouses and stuff. After a couple of hours of that I had to leave him in order to head back and make biscuits ahead of dinner at Erwan & Manu's. We had Sylvain with his wife and two kids (respectively 2 years and one month), plus Ashu, Erwan and Manu. Audrey Dub turned up later on, and we had a pretty decent fish tandoori marsala. Most entertaining.

Sunday looked like going the same as Saturday had, but I got off my butt and went for a little 20km ride up the canal towards (but not to) Betton. There were lots of people out making the most of the sunshine, on foot, bike and boat. I stopped after about 10k just to relax and read a little of my book, but some other cyclist stopped at the same bench to have a ciggie, so I only read a few pages before feeling uncomfortable and heading off. Soundtrack for the whole adventure was PMG's First Circle on the way out and Louis Armstrong coming back.

Teev of the week has been House MD, Love My Way (Australian drama!), and My Name Is Earl. The latter isn't exciting me too much, but the others are pretty watchable.