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Posts Tagged ‘movies’

Winter Light and the Light of Christ

Posted in Religion, tagged , , , , , , on May 5, 2013 |

This week I finally saw Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light.  What a beautiful film, in many ways.  I absolutely loved it.

The most striking part, though, was a scene near the end where a supporting character gets his screen time to talk to our protagonist, a pastor plagued by doubt and melancholy.  The church sexton confesses to the pastor that our apparent understanding of Christ’s suffering is superficial, limited to the cross.

He wonders if the emotional suffering of Gethsemane, and the spiritual elements of the crucifixion might not have been worse.  He describes these scriptural details in a way that deeply intensifies the Lord’s suffering.

I sat up pretty straight during this scene.  His confused reaching for truth brings him so close to a Latter-day Saint knowledge of the Atonement.  I wanted to tap him on the shoulder and talk about the Book of Mormon.  I wanted to show him Jeffrey R. Holland’s Easter talk below.

Sadly, YouTube doesn’t have a clip of just this scene.  It starts around 7:00 in the 7th video in the linked playlist, and runs about 40 seconds into the 8th.

Winter Light YouTube playlist

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The Long, Long Trailer

Posted in Humor, tagged , , , , , on April 17, 2013 |

I haven’t ever seen this full movie yet.  I just remembered my parents watching it when I was a kid, so I’ve now put it on my hold list at the library.  God bless my parents’ good taste.



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Dark Movies

Posted in Humor, tagged on March 6, 2013 |

We’ve recently had movies come out called Zero Dark Thirty and Dark Skies.  Later this year there will be Dark Circles, Star Trek Into Darkness, and Thor: The Dark Worlds.

I think I see a trend.  And I think I could make a hit movie if I just called it Dark Darky McDarkdark.

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The Time Machine

Posted in Arts, tagged , , , on February 18, 2013 |

I saw the 2002 version of The Time Machine over the weekend.  Talk about plot holes!

  • The Eloi learned English from a small collection of stone signs?  You can’t decode a foreign language from the names of stores and bridges.  How would they know the sounds, much less the grammar?
  • One of the signs uses Elizabethan verbs like “abideth,” but the Eloi don’t talk like that.  Why not, if that’s how they learned English?
  • None of the Eloi wonder about the time traveler’s skin, even though they’re all caramel-colored and he’s as white as chalk.  If anything, they should have assumed he was a Morlock.
  • After 800,000 years, the Eloi are still completely the same as humans now.  Especially considering the massive environmental disasters shown in the film between today and then, why haven’t they evolved more?  Meanwhile, some Morlocks evolved psychic powers?
  • Though not really a plot hole, I have to wonder: with all the great special effects in the film (the broken moon is awesome), why not use more of H.G. Wells’ original ending, where the time traveler goes ahead and watches the gradual death of earth as the sun goes out?  That could have been beautiful!

 

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Mike’s Movie Ministry

Posted in Religion, tagged , , , on February 10, 2013 |

As I work with the teenage boys in my congregation at church, I often think about Mike.

When I was a teen myself, I was deeply attached to the media, and its messages led me to largely reject the faith I’d so recently embraced.  I didn’t go to church much, and wasn’t always kind towards efforts to reach out to me.

The biggest exception was Mike.  Mike was an older, divorced man in my ward at church.  One day, he called and asked if he could take me to a movie.  I thought it was odd, but hey…free movie.

We talked about the ideas in the film afterwards, and he took seriously my shallow, morose interpretation of things, without knocking them down as he easily could have.

Over the next several months, we got together a few more times.   (more…)

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“Then He Kissed Me”

Posted in Arts, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on January 28, 2013 |

I’ve never seen GoodFellas, but I found this scene on YouTube when looking for this old song by the Crystals.  What a work of art!  Scorcese perfectly uses the period music and adoring, long tracking shot to establish this guy’s bravado, in the service of impressing a girl.

I mean, when a club holds a table for you, you’re powerful, but when they build a new one in front when you show up, that’s serious!

But the technical artistry here is the best part.  Getting that shot must have been tough, but it was worth it.  It’s a joy to watch.

Reminds me of this long tracking shot from Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil:

But, of course, like all kids who grew up in the 80′s, “Then He Kissed Me” mostly reminds me of the opening of Adventures in Babysitting:

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2012: My Year in Movies

Posted in Arts, tagged , on January 3, 2013 |

I saw 70 movies in 2012.  Here they are, with the date viewed, and how much I enjoyed each, on a scale of 1-10.  Looks like I gave five movies that I saw for the first time a perfect ten (tens are in italics). It was also a pretty good year for foreign film:

 

1. Tito and Me (Serbian), 1/2–8

2. Eyes Without a Face (French), 1/4–7

3. Cowboys and Aliens, 1/6–7

4. Through a Glass Darkly (Swedish), 1/7–6

5. The Madness of King George, 1/11–10

6. The Secret of Kells, 1/12–8

7. Touch of Evil, 1/14–7

8. Richard III (1956), 1/18–8

9.  Rise of the Planet of the Apes, 1/20–8

10.  Russian Ark (Russian…duh), 1/23–9

(more…)

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Classic Chariots of Fire Scene

Posted in Arts, tagged , , , , , on December 16, 2012 |

I love how this scene illustrates both the free joy and excruciating focus of running.  I wish the clip included the bit of speaking in the chapel at the very start–it’s a great setup to the beach run.  Still, a memorable scene of boundless youthful energy in its prime, set in a pristine, bygone time and place.  Perfect intro to a fantastic film.

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Classic Battleship Potemkin Scene

Posted in Arts, tagged , , , , , on October 8, 2012 |

Saw this film recently: provocative propaganda, with this scene as the most moving.  For an 87 year-old movie, it’s remarkably frank in its depiction of violence.  No modern movie would show the baby carriage keeling over like that.

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Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr.

Posted in Humor, tagged , , on September 5, 2012 |

Although I didn’t like this quite as much as The General and The Cameraman, I did think this movie had some of his best physical comedy.  The athleticism evident here is just astounding–some of those pratfalls rise to the level of elegant acrobatics!  And his stunt of quickly descending four stories of a ship–and then scrambling back up!–is simply breathtaking (starts at around 1:09 in the second video).  It’s easy to see why Jackie Chan said his career was inspired by Keaton.

 

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O Brother Where Art Thou: The Music

Posted in Arts, tagged , , , , , , on August 13, 2012 |

Who couldn’t like a movie where Homer’s Odyssey is set in the depression-era American south?  But what popped into my head lately wasn’t the movie itself, but just the music.  It’s amazing: it brought regional bluegrass to the attention of the mainstream, and everybody was gobsmacked by what we’d been missing.  If you haven’t seen it (or heard it), here’s a few highlights:

Alison Krauss, singing a gospel standard here, also harmonizes as a siren on the track below.

 

Doesn’t everyone do their laundry that way?  I feel like there’s supposed to be a lesson here…

 

In the film, this gravel-soaked threat of a song is used at a Klan meeting!

 

And, of course, the Grammy-winning…

 

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Black & White Gives More Color

Posted in Arts, tagged , , , , , on July 23, 2012 | 1 Comment »

As an English teacher, I sometimes show black and white movies in class, which almost always elicits groans and complaints from most of the students.  Something I usually tell them is to notice how well black and white can create sharp contrasts and evocative atmospheres in settings, far more so than color can.

I like to use the first few minutes of Citizen Kane as an example of this–try imagining those exterior shots in color.  It would lose all of its intimidating power.

 

This summer I’ve seen David Lean’s 1948 version of Oliver Twist, and it makes the same point.  Those first few minutes out on the stormy moors wouldn’t be half so gloomy if they were in some glossy, digital HD rainbow.

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The Dark Knight Rises

Posted in Arts, tagged , , , , on July 20, 2012 | 1 Comment »

I just got home from seeing a marathon of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight films, including the new one, and I have to work out some thoughts.  I kept this spoiler free, but most of these ideas will make more sense after you’ve seen it, which (spoiler alert?) I strongly recommend you do.

  • The biggest question, of course, is how good is it?  Does The Dark Knight Rises live up to the other films, especially the second?  Certainly it’s an excellent work, and I’ll be honest that my preference is for the new film (even though I eventually loved The Dark Knight), but I’m fairly confident that most people will say that they thought The Dark Knight was even better.  Most fans of the series will still opt for its darker, more complex vision.  Fair enough.
  • But consider that they are very different movies.  TDK was a dense, episodic thriller.  In fact, watching it again during tonight’s marathon, I was struck by just how much ground Nolan covered.  TDKR, however, is a more linear narrative, with a single focus, albeit one that constantly crescendos to an emotionally explosive climax.  Where TDK packed in as much of everything as possible, TDKR actually goes out of its way to strip down the distractions of excessive characters and subplots so it can develop its primary interests as much as possible.

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Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris

Posted in Arts, Language and Literature, tagged , , , , on May 23, 2012 |

Loved this movie!  What a sweet, beautiful celebration of a single time and place in the history of culture.  However, I wish Allen had squeezed James Joyce in with the rest of his pantheon.  Ewan McGregor played Joyce in a film once; would it have killed Allen to call him up to see if he could swing by the studio for an afternoon for a token cameo?

Also, what’s with the PG-13 rating?  Did I miss something?  It had zero nudity, violence, or swearing, that I noticed.  This could easily be shown in an English class.  The actors really do a superb job of capturing Hemingway and Fitzgerald.  There are some clever in jokes (Luke Wilson’s star-struck time traveler tells Hemingway that thought about Huck Finn being the root of all American literature that would later be attributed to Hemingway himself), and Adrien Brody camps it up in a scene as Salvador Dali.

Speaking of Luke Wilson, as Woody Allen is now too old to be the kind of befuddled everyman he made famous in so many films, I guess he was looking for a stand-in.  Wilson’s muted passive-aggressive schtick works surprisingly well in that mold.

And every shot of Paris in this movie is just a graceful love poem to that city.  Bliss.

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Best Bond Fight In Best Bond Movie

Posted in Arts, tagged , , , , , on April 2, 2012 |

I say that the best James Bond movie was 1963′s From Russia With Love.  My favorite scene is the fight on the Orient Express.

The trend in film has always been for fights to become more and more stylized, but this fight scene is the perfect balance of choreography and brutal, realistic brawling.  Add to that the fact that the scene is done in a confined space, in the dark, and you’ve really got a classic action achievement here.  Just shy of half a century has passed since this one came out, and it’s still one of the best fight scenes ever shot.

 

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