Inception

Normally, I avoid anything starring Leonardo DiCaprio like the plague, but encouraged by Liz's studio mate Karen, we recently watched Christopher Nolan's Inception, which won both Hugo and Nebula. And it deserved them. It builds a complete, complex, self-contained world in which DiCaprio's character is in the business of stealing industrial secrets by sneaking into people's dreams. Even though DiCaprio's name is above the title, it's an ensemble cast, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Ken Watanabe, and Marion Cotillard, and they succeed in carrying the movie. The dream within a dream within a dream within a dream is a stunning plot device. Cotillard's character appearing in DiCaprio's mind and in the shared dreams even though she's dead is a lovely on-going threat. This movie also succeeds in showing Nolan's scriptwriting and directing chops, which he hasn't done in the commercial Batman fluff he's been doing, or the crappy Superman reboot he wrote last summer. It has a brilliant, haunting closing shot.

Into The Night

We recently rewatched Into the Night, a lovely little 1985 movie about emeralds purloined from a Persian pasha and smuggled into the United States by a woman who has to escape from the Iranian thugs who are trying to steal them. She literally falls onto the hood of the car belonging to an insomniac aerospace engineer. The woman is played by Michelle Pfeiffer, and the engineer is played by Jeff Goldblum, both of them frighteningly young. There is much chasing around Los Angeles in the night (with just enough geographic errors to amuse me), there are cameo appearances by everyone imaginable, many of them directors of other movies. Carl Perkins and David Bowie have a lovely knife fight, though Bowie's scenes have a cheerfully understated menace. Director John Landis plays one of a flock of Iranian thugs, who provide comic relief.  Director Amy Heckerling plays a diner waitress at the landmark Ship's on Westwood Blvd. Dan Ackroyd turns in a funny performance as Goldblum's carpool buddy.  Richard Farnsworth does a nice job as Pfeiffer's sugar daddy with Vera Miles as his snarling wife. If you have not had a chance, find and watch this little-known thriller.

Double Feature: Deep Impact & Armageddon

Recently we had an interesting "compare-and-contrast" double feature over two evenings. We re-watched Deep Impact and Armageddon, 1998's two "oh my God! the earth is about to be smashed by a meteor" movies.

     First things first: Deep Impact is about people; Armageddon is about technology. The science in Deep Impact is somewhat more accurate. That NASA acquiesed in helping to push Armageddon out to an unsuspecting public suggests they're loonier than we've given them credit for.

     Téa Leoni gives an absolutely wonderful and nuanced performance as the newswoman in Deep Impact. She's ably supported by the likes of Vanessa Redgrave, Morgan Freeman, and Elijah Wood and Leelee Sobieski as the teenagers. Geologist Gene Shoemaker --- who figured out as a grad student what caused the thing in Arizona we now know as Meteor Crater --- acted as advisor on the film. It's a real story, with a beginning, a middle, an end, with intelligent characters doing the best they can under the circumstances. Best line: Mary McCormack as one of the astronauts, thinking about their choices, says, "Look on the bright side. We'll all get high schools named after us."

     On the other hand, in terms of emotional manipulation Armageddon is much more effective. It didn't help that there's a shot about nine minutes into the movie, at the end of a meteor shower hitting New York, of both towers of the World Trade Center in flames --- painfully too close to what we saw in real life only three years later. And, as I've observed recently, there's a shot in this movie at Launch Pad 34A, where the Apollo I fire occurred, that always leaves me in tears --- not because of the content of the scene but rather because of the setting and the realization that we haven't served their memory at all well. It's got Bruce Willis, running his usual emotional (non-)range, Ben Affleck, Steve Buscemi, and Billy Bob Thornton, giving the best performance of the lot. It's also got, as the sole respite from testosterone-laden grimaces) Liv Tyler. (Though Tyler appears to exist in the script for two purposes: to look fetching, and to wail "that's my daddy up there!" at the appropriate moments.) Best line: Buscemi, playing the brilliant, but crazy, geochemist, "Why do I do this? Because the money's good, the scenery changes, and they let me use explosives."

     They've both got their good points, but Armageddon is a thrill ride, while Deep Impact is a movie.

Cryptonomicon

The elapsed time to originally read its nine hundred pages was nearly three months, but Cryptonomicon was worth every word, and every minute. Neal Stephenson has written two parallel stories of nerds, one in the present day, and one in World War II, and both heroes are wonderful. The story operates in interlocking, intertwined layers as Stephenson stories do. There are simply too many good bits in this to recount them all, from Lawrence Waterhouse spending time at Princeton with some chap named Turing, to Randall Waterhouse bunged up in a jail in Manila; from Robert Shaftoe, haiku-spouting Marine raider, to scuba-diving America (Amy) Shaftoe; from a mysterious excommunicated priest named Enoch, to a dangerous-looking Chinese guy named Wing. I devoured the last two-hundred-odd pages in a binge, punctuated by my stopping, wandering around for fifteen minutes at a stretch and saying "wow!" Very nice. Deserving of its Hugo nomination. If you have not read it, do so now.  It's head-and-shoulders above some of Stephenson's later books.

Making History

A couple of years ago, old friend Stephen Walli and I were discussing Stephen Fry over coffee one morning. He asked if I'd read Making History, which I hadn't, so he delved under his desk and tossed me a copy. It's wonderful. Given that I'm fond of alternate history, this is a great book. It asks the question, What if you could invent a time travel technique that made Adolf Hitler never happen, but what you got instead was worse? It's told in two sequential tracks, matching the two timelines.  There are great characters, lovely dialog.  It's fascinating stuff, with a little less of Fry's usual wit --- see The Liar for that --- but it's still got all of his wonderful insight. 

Captain Phillips

We watched Paul Greenglass's Captain Phillips last evening and it was excellent filmmaking with taut scripting and cinematography. This is the story of the hijacking, by Somali pirates, of the Maersk Alabama in 2009, and subsequent rescue of the Captain from the pirates by Navy Seals. There is a lot of drama, and quite a few harrowing moments. Indeed, the last forty minutes of the movie are just excruciating in their tension, even though we know how the story turns out. Tom Hanks gives a magnificent performance as the eponymous Captain. The last fifteen minutes of the movie are outstanding acting, and Hanks should have gotten an Oscar nomination for the work. [[How Leonardo DiCaprio keeps getting nominated for Oscars, I do not understand. Is this by the same mechanism as L Ron Hubbard's nominations for the Best Novel Hugo in the 1980s and 1990s?]] I'm sufficiently impressed that I will now have to see Greenglass's movie United 93, which I'd been avoiding because of the painful subject matter.

Friday night double-feature: Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag / Snakes on a Plane

If you have not seen it, please allow me to recommend an amusing old Joe Pesci movie called Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag, in which a New Jersey mobster has to take proof of a gangland hit --- the aforementioned heads --- to the boss across the country. Of course, a medical student on his plane has the identical duffel bag, and they manage to exchange luggage. The medical student is heading to Mexico on vacation with his fiancé's parents, who are hilariously played by George Hamilton and Dyan Cannon. The mob boss is starting to believe that the hit never took place. The medical student's fiancé and her mother discover the heads. Pesci's character has to track down the medical student. Mexican gangsters and police, hotel staff, dogs and coyotes, and heads stolen from the medical school all add twists to the story. 

We watched this in a Friday night double-feature with Samuel L Jackson's Snakes on a Plane, which I'd never managed to see.  It is exactly what it claims to be. (Indeed, when the movie first came out and Samuel L Jackson was interviewed on The Daily Show, his answer to Jon Stewert's question about the movie was direct and succinct: "Well, Jon, it's about snakes. And they're on a plane.") Jackson is a character in the movie, rather than carrying the whole thing by himself, which is a good thing. Roughly, the plot is that Jackson is an FBI agent who has to transport a witness from Hawaii to Los Angeles, but the mobster he's going to testify against has put poisonous snakes on the plane to prevent that from happening. It's pretty much as you'd expect: the couple joining the Mile High Club are the first to get attacked, the obnoxious businessman passenger gets it, the mom with the baby are saved by a brave stewardess, the two brothers traveling to meet their mom in LA help each other. There is some suspense, but think of it as a suspenseful comedy and you'll be fine.