Personal Movie Journal

(You can watch this on YouTube.) Surprisingly thrilling, as people in 1906 seem to have a death wish. No road rules. Pedestrians everywhere. Stupid crazy drivers. I swear, I just witnessed seven near-death experiences. Are we sure no one was harmed in the making of this film? There's an essay in here about the nature of thrills in action scenes.  Early movies are fun to watch because we know there is an actual element of danger in what's going on - e.g. Harold Lloyd. Modern films need to find a way to reestablish that sense of danger and thrill.  These days an action sequence, or a thrill, can be well choreographed, but we all know that the whole thing is safe as milk.  This desire is perverse, I guess - it's not that I want people to be hurt, or even to risk being hurt. But it certainly does give a film an edge. Maybe this has to do with the popularity of YouTube videos, and even the Jackass series - real people doing really dangerous stuff.

Fantasy works best in cinema because film is fantasy - nothing we're seeing is actually real, so why pretend it is?  Let's do away with that altogether, and embrace the possibilities of crazy costumes and sets and camera tricks. I was surprised over and over again that things that appeared to be matte paintings actually had dimension - like the rocket itself.  The fun of a certain kind of movie is trying to figure out what's real and what's a camera trick.  And a camera trick is just like a magic trick - we should be wondering and guessing, "how did they do that?"  Nowadays, there's none of that left.  The answer is just "CGI. They did it on a computer."  It's all animation.  Nobody ever wonders how Bugs Bunny did that. Movies have stopped being magic shows, and that's a shame.

Great article  by Alissa Wilkinson. As “faith-based” films flooded into theaters last year, writers fell over themselves to declare 2014 the “year of the Bible movie.” It seemed as if the market—meaning Christian audiences to many—had finally come into its own, a decade after the runaway box-office success of The Passion of the Christ. Certainly, movies that reinforce beliefs their target audience already hold can make a lot of money, from political documentaries directed by Michael Moore or Dinesh D’Souza to films titled with declarations of religious certainty. God’s Not Dead, a drama about an evangelical student who clashes with a philosophy professor, earned $62.6 million on a $2 million budget. Heaven Is for Real, starring Greg Kinnear, cost $12 million and made $101.3 million. Son of God, which cut down the television miniseries The Bible to feature-film length, made $67.8 million, or three times its budget. And even Biblical epics that religious audiences found questiona...

Just watched Ex Machina, while working on a review for Annihilation. Both by Alex Garland.  Because I've seen it before, I knew the twists were coming - and yet... it's still not as simple as it proclaims to be.  If we accept that Caleb is there as a foil, that Nathan is testing Ava's ability to manipulate him to get what she wants (to escape,) there are several problems with this. First off, he's a terrible subject for this test. An only child whose parents died when he was young and spent a lot of time in the hospital growing up and has no girlfriend or apparently friends to speak of - everything about him screams naive, lonely, and easily emotionally manipulated. He is clearly below average on the emotional IQ scale.  Could she manipulate a more savvy person?  Second, and more confounding - after all, the test is whether or not she can manipulate a human being to get what she wants, not especially how good at it she is - is all the ways Nathan helps her out....