Just finished watching “Fire of Love”, the NatGeo documentary about the lives of volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft on Disney+.
The Kraffts were kinda heroes of mine as a kid, alongside Cousteau and Haroun Tazieff, and this film triggered a fair bit of nostalgia! Here we follow their journey around the globe, their love of the mineral, of volcanoes, of each other, amidst some of the most breathtaking footage you can imagine of what Mother Earth is capable of… and each step bringing them closer to that fateful day in 1991.
I remember when the radio announced the news, and I always feel emotional watching that ominous pyroclastic flow… It is interesting that from a certain point of view the lessons of St. Helens were not heeded at Unzen, despite the fact that both the Kraffts and fellow US volcanologist Harry Glicken had to learn it first hand. Yet, in both cases they set up their observation station in a place they thought was at a safe distance, only for the blast of the eruption to end up much more powerful, and going in a different direction, than anticipated. This is not to blame them for being there, mind, but it goes to show how treacherous and deadly these explosive volcanoes can be…
A poignant and fantastic film, and very recommended!
This isn’t really a mini-review, but I saw The Babadook (2014) again for the first time in years. I don’t quite remember my take back then, but I really liked it now, probably one of the best representation of grief on screen that I’ve seen, blending the imaginary with the real to show how utterly destructive and annihilating unchecked emotions can be… and a poignant final message that sets it apart from others in the genre.
Beautifully done.
Coincidentally, as I post this, I realize I saw it on the 23rd, meaning it was seven months to the day since Dad left us. Seems oddly fitting…
Here’s something for a change: Yesterday’s movie yield was a double feature 😎
(mild spoilers ahead)
Let’s start with Tenet: I finally saw it after noticing that it had landed on HBOMax. I went into it without knowing anything more than it being about a cop and some kind of time travel… I liked it a lot, and that feeling was from the get go, not from analyzing it afterwards, and it makes it probably my favorite Nolan flick after Inception. I liked the twist on time travel and the way it goes about narration, reminded me of Memento in several ways. (Incidentally, it also completely ruins one of my WIPs called Tempus Fugit that had very similar time travel elements with a cop investigating crimes then traveling in time and realizing it was him doing it, leading to interesting confrontations, thank you so much Nolan for showing me I’m not that original…) It’s well thought and runs on other proven time travel tropes that tie everything together neatly, and of course being a Nolan movie the cinematography and SFX are exceptional.
Later that day, I had scheduled a showing of Everything Everywhere All At Once: I also went in blind, only knowing it was a comedy with multiverse stuff and it had Michelle Yeoh in it. This thing is absolutely bonkers, I loved it. It’s fresh, full of inventiveness and so well written, it’s hilarious and it’s emotional, and it’s also so profoundly human at its core, putting its characters first and letting them deal with the increasing absurdities of the premise. It’s a breath of fresh air and what cinema always aspired to be: a mirror, a dream, a glimpse of magic, a window through which we watch reflections of ourselves do what we can’t… Pure joy.
It’s funny that I ended up seeing both of those on the same day because they’re so diametrically opposed, and somewhat complementary, visions of sci-fi. Both deal with EOTWAWKI but one is frantically world-spanning, serious and heavy with big speeches and moral conflicts and secret organizations, while the other remains centered around a single family that doesn’t quite know how it got into this mess but just rolls with it. One deals with humanity as a whole, more a concept that needs to be saved than actual people (Kat and her son excepted, I suppose, giving the Protagonist a moral anchor of sorts), while the other deals with the human, bending genres to play with more intimate themes so universal that anyone can relate: the greener grass just beyond one’s grasp, the roads not taken, regrets, and love. And, for some reason, hot dogs and googly eyes.
Of course, I had to see it because, hello, it’s got planes in it so that was a given, but I will admit I was intrigued by the number of positive reviews before I went. And I can say, this is absolutely the most unlikely case of a sequel being better than the original that I could ever have expected. The story’s tighter, the action scenes are spectacular, the characters are well developed and distinctive enough from each other… I would also say that it’s definitely one of these movies where it’s really worth watching it in theaters if you can, because the editing and photography are top notch.
The main draw of course is that the planes are real, and it’s really the actors in them (with the exception of the F-14 obviously). The enemy is unnamed, and probably the same “rogue nation” as in the first one, a mix of Soviet Russia (they have Mi-35 helos and the latest Sukhoi Su-57 fighters) and Iran (they also somehow have obsolete F-14s… and an “unsanctioned” nuclear program). The flight scenes are visceral, and you can see the Gs pile up on the actors’ faces in a way no CGI could reproduce. They used real F/A-18s and the actors had to learn to manage their own camera setup for flight scenes! The main action set piece is pretty much the Death Star run on Earth and it’s TENSE. It really works, to the extent you completely forget they’re pretty much starting a war as the “rogue country” hasn’t attacked the US at any point. But then again, they did that in the first one too…
Story-wise, you really have to give it up to Cruise for managing to play the same character convincingly some 35 years after the first film… But the emotional weight and really for me what made the story work, is Val Kilmer’s cameo, reprising his role as Tom “Iceman” Kazansky. The character’s only there for two scenes and it’s really heartbreaking to see his ordeal knowing his illness isn’t an act (his few spoken lines are actually computer generated). I was glad to read after that unlike his character, Kilmer seems to have recovered for now. His scenes are the pivotal moment of the movie, the moment Mav finally learns to let go. The central conflict, once you understand where everyone’s coming from, is grounded and mostly believable, if you get past how old everyone is.
They lay it thick with the nostalgia bit, with an opening that’s a complete remake of the original with updated planes, and a whole lot of subtle (and not-so-subtle) nods to the first movie. Spotting those is a lot of fun.
On the disappointing side, it’s a shame that Jennifer Connelly is so underutilized as Penny, Mav’s love interest. It feels like there was a whole lot of backstory or moments that stayed on the cutting room floor. She’s such a fine actress and she and Cruise have the right sort of chemistry together for it to work, but she’s just in the background.
As Cruise said, TGM is a love letter to aviation. It’s also a recruitment piece for naval aviation, we can’t ignore that, but it’s interesting because it doesn’t shy away from showing that, while being a fighter pilot is neat, it’s also fraught with danger, and not just from enemy fire: equipment failure, bird strikes, blackouts, these folks take off knowing there’s a chance they won’t come back. But it’s all worth it, because cloud dancing is the only thing that counts.
As an aviation nerd, will definitely see it again. 4.5/5
I came across a list I had made in 2003 of 100 reasons why I loved cinema. My love of the silver screen still stands, but I had to refresh a few entries with some recent refs before I could present it below 🙂
1 – “What have you been doing all these years?” – “I’ve been going to bed early.” 2 – You want to move to Montana to learn fly fishing 3 – “I am your father, Luke” 4 – Steward Granger and Edwige Feuillère in “Woman Hater” 5 – The pale face of Alec Guiness when he first appears in “The Lady Killers” 6 – Anita Ekberg wades into a fountain and you want to be Marcello Mastroianni. 7 – Tiffany’s will never look the same at dawn 8 – “We’re gonna need a bigger boat” 9 – Monsters do exist in movies 10 – Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration 11 – “We have all the time in the world.” 12 – You still hope Steve McQueen is going to make it in “The Great Escape” even though you’ve already seen the movie a zillion times 13 – The race in Ben-Hur 14 – James Stewart discovers that life is wonderful, and it’s wonderful 15 – The bridge scene in Sicario 16 – You know who is Kaiser Söse and wish you didn’t so that you can find out again 17 – “I am Wind In His Hair! Do you see that I am your friend? Can you see that you will always be my friend?” 18 – “So, I hear you, like, ran into these things before? – “Yeah.” – “What did you do?” – “I died.” 19 – You want to spend your next holiday in Rome 20 – “My name is Lymon Zerga” 21 – You can prove that Sherlock Holmes made a cameo in Star Wars 22 – Peugeot will still make cars in 2049 23 – You are not afraid of witches provided there’s some water nearby 24 – “My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die!” 25 – The mere reference to Groundhog day makes you laugh 26 – You never take showers in motels anymore 27 – Taming leopards is nothing more than knowing the right song 28 – “Oh, but you can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you!” 29 – You know who Wong Fei-Hong is, and you just don’t want to mess with him 30 – “Ooh, I’m really scared. Help! There’s a peck with an acorn pointed at me!” 31 – Tiny bits of burning paper flying in the night in the name of the father 32 – You know the names of the magnificent seven by heart 33 – Communication with aliens is nothing more than knowing the right tune 34 – “You jump, I jump, remember?” 35 – “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya punk?” 36 – You’d like to know if that smoke shop really exists in that special corner of Brooklyn 37 – What the heck is in Marcellus’ briefcase? 38 – “Movies don’t create psychos. Movies make psychos more creative!” 39 – Youth pills elaborated by monkeys work too well 40 – “Never fall in love with a woman who sells herself. It always ends bad!” 41 – “I’m the guy telling you the way it is.” 42 – You’ll still wonder if Totoros really exist 43 – You know the names of the seven samurais by heart 44 – Fantasy fight: Captain Vallo vs Captain Jack Sparrow 45 – “Me fifth element – Supreme being. Me protect you.” 46 – “Death is… whimsical… today.” 47 – Paula Alquist is right to be afraid of gaslights. 48 – “Truth is, I help horses with people problems.” 49 – There are some fish that cannot be caught. It’s not that they are faster or stronger than other fish, they’re just touched by something extra. 50 – The mere reference to Groundhog day makes you laugh 51 – Richard Gere proves that statement #40 is not always accurate 52 – Vincent Pryce’s escape in ‘Brazil’ 53 – 12 monkeys are not always what they seem 54 – Al Pacino’s TV in “Heat” 55 – You know where snow comes from 56 – The milk and the cookies in “Man on the Moon” 57 – Painting a whole town in bright red and renaming it “Hell” 58 – Lessons from the past: in “Star Trek” there are no flies in teleport rooms 59 – You’re waiting for a train. A train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you, but you can’t know for sure. Yet it doesn’t matter… 60 – Skynet bugged on August 29th 1997 61 – When you’re on acid, Las Vegas looks… different 62 – Father Gabriel’s clarinet in “The Mission” 63 – Wayne’s guitar in “Wayne’s World” 64 – Christopher Walken’s haunting eyes 65 – “My house, My rules, My coffee” 66 – The cow boy in “The Big Lebowsky” 67 – The way of the samurai is honorable but deadly 68 – Note to self: a cross won’t work against a Jewish vampire 69 – “The bartender never gets killed.” well, sometimes, he does 70 – Lefty in “Donnie Brasco” 71 – Tim Roth’s hoax to be admitted in the gang in “Reservoir Dogs” 72 – “You ever dance with the devil by the pale moonlight?” 73 – “Grease” is the word 74 – “I am a man of constant sorrow” is in your top 10 75 – “There can be only one.” Sequels not accepted. 76 – William H. Macy in “Fargo” 77 – Everyone says “I love you” 78 – John MacLane’s bare feet 79 – Greta Garbo’s laugh 80 – Spock is allied with the body snatchers 81 – Nobody puts Baby in the corner 82 – “War’s first casualty is innocence” 83 – You can watch “Mulholland Drive” fifty times and still understand nothing 84 – You know that “the rain is Spain stays mainly in the plain” and you pronounce it perfectly 85 – William Munny is the best cow boy character ever 86 – Saturday nights will never be the same 87 – You learn all the prime numbers in case there’s a cube somewhere 88 – The plastic bag in “American Beauty” 89 – Perhaps “nobody’s perfect”, but some movies are 90 – You can tell the difference between “Rio Bravo” and “El Dorado” 91 – Tyler Durden has a funny way to tell stories 92 – Marty MacFly’s car really can fly 93 – Harrison Ford’s hat in “American Graffiti” 94 – A piano left on a beach for weeks can still make good music 95 – Rick nods in Casablanca, and everything changes 96 – “I have very fond memories of that dog.” 97 – Cross over: you just know that Captain Nemo’s real name is Lidenbrok. 98 – The Untouchables will always be four, even in the end 99 – Yul Brynner is a terrific terminator 100 – Life is like a box of chocolate, and sometimes it’s the kind you like
I just came back from watching The Matrix: Resurrections a second time, and while the first impression was somewhat positive but confused, this second viewing made me appreciate the film a lot more. Resurrections is beautifully earnest about what it sets to do, and what that is is simply, like the first one, Lana Wachowski’s expression of her life experience through her art.
(Also, right off the bat, I just loved how familiar faces kept appearing one after the other. There are so many Sense8 actors in there it was like watching a cast reunion, and as a fan I was just super happy to see that. I’m also 99% convinced that the key shop is not just a reference to the Keymaker, it looked exactly like Wolfgang and Felix’s shop!)
After two sequels that were kind of okay but mainly kind of a letdown, Resurrections is a sublimation of the original trilogy. It takes their themes and distillates them through the lens of the last 20 years. It is unapologetically Lana’s Matrix: a sequel that neither sisters wanted to make originally, but when it became inevitable, one that she had to make herself to keep control of her story, of her narrative. Because these movies are (or at least, started from) fundamentally autobiographical allegories, it would have been unthinkable to relinquish this control to a studio. That’s where the whole hyper-meta first act comes from, with its continuous self-reference that is always just shy of breaking the fourth wall.
(Caution: what follows contains spoilers)
It’s no wonder that reflections and mirrors come back as crucial tools and visual cues to navigate between the Matrix and the “real world”. Self-image and representation were always at the heart of the first Matrix movie, and this theme comes full circle here again with the added emotional maturity of a person who’s lived through transition and can look back at what was. Both Neo and Trinity know what they look like, but what the world sees is a completely different person. And eventually, it is no longer “Thomas Anderson” coming out, as the metro barrels down towards him, shouting “My name is Neo” in a defiant, yet almost intimate act of self-acceptance. It is “Tiffany” who instead asserts her true identity publicly and becomes empowered: “My name is Trinity,” she says, and indeed she always was, and nothing her family or society could say or do would change that. It’s not an accident that 20 years later, Trinity, not Neo, has become the One.
The Matrix universe can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and that’s okay. For me, I don’t think you can really dissociate the art from the artist when the art is rooted is such personal life experiences. Resurrections upends the blue pill/red pill binary, because as Bugs say, such a binary solution was always an illusion. Forget about spoons, there is no choice: deep inside, in your heart, you know what you should do to stay true to yourself, and doing anything else would be a betrayal.
All in all, I find Resurrections to be a perfect bookend to the story the Wachowskis started in 1999. It’s not without flaws, the meta stuff in the first third was almost a tad too much, the fight scenes are not as clean or memorable as before (although the Analyst subverting bullet time was pretty neat), and I found the Merovingian cameo to be gratuitous. But the film works despite these flaws, because deep down there is so much love for the characters, and so much earnestness in the tale of their literal resurrection, that it’s impossible for me not to like it.
It’s a leap of faith, and when you find in yourself the courage to take the step… at that moment, that’s when you are, finally, free.
I started fairly ambivalent about this movie. I still don’t know quite what to think of it, usually to me that means the movie’s bad, typically, but it’s not the case here. There are some genuinely good things in this Bond, bold narrative choices, bold characterization too. This is going to remain spoiler-free so I won’t go into details, but here goes…
Like the previous Casio Royale/Quantum of Solace diptych, NTTD serves as a direct sequel to Spectre, which in my mind is the worst of the Craig outings, and one of the worst Bond movies overall. There were production issues and delays, Danny Boyle was initially slated to direct but later dropped out and it doesn’t help that there was much hype about Fleabag‘s Phoebe Waller-Bridge being brought in for script duties after the director swap, and I really didn’t click with Fleabag… So let’s just say that I came in with low expectations.
Turns out that, in many respects, NTTD is a very respectable Bond movie, and an ambitious one at that. Comparisons abound with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and with reason, as it explicitly hangs over the movie with all kinds of subtle and not-so-subtle references. Bold choices, I said above, and high stakes, believable stakes that lead to realistic and shocking consequences all the way to the final scenes… This is a movie where Bond hurts, where you actually do fear for his and his companions’ lives, where the villain is pragmatic and cold and won’t hesitate to shoot you, plot armor be damned.
As a Bond movie, as the final Craig Bond movie, it works. It’s not just a sequel to Spectre, it closes an arc that was started all the way back with Casino Royale. In The World is Not Enough, Q famously told Bond, “Never let them see you bleed.” Daniel Craig’s tenure as Bond has him bleeding, literally and metaphorically, a broken man haunted by personal demons, fighting to make a broken world better.
However, the movie also suffers from several issues. It is long, and it makes you feel it, and there are several instances where some trimming could have made it tighter. If characterization as a whole improves overall, especially with everyone returning from Spectre getting much richer dialogue and scenes, the only exception to this would be with M’s badass decay from Spectre and Skyfall, as his plot-related oversights prior to the movie caused the whole mess… The movie also introduces Lashana Lynch as the new 007 (not the new James Bond) and while I have no problem with her performance, I did feel her characterization was a bit on the nose to contrast with Craig’s more “old school” approach.
Discussing specifics would lead me to spoiler territory, so I’ll just stop here. Overall, this is a spectacular Bond outing and a fitting send-off for Daniel Craig. The pacing is messy but the punches land and the movie sticks the landing in a way that both serves the story and is satisfying to me as a viewer. Like OHMSS before it, NTTD breaks the mold and goes where no Bond movie has gone before, ever. And for that, I think it deserves quite a bit of respect.
Tom Hardy rumored to be the next Bond… Yeah I could see that.
In contrast with my usual stance, I’d also welcome a revisit of older Bonds. “Thunderball”, “You Only Live Twice”, etc., set in their original period. “The Man from UNCLE” showed that retro spy movies can work if you care enough about the material…
Call it escapism, but I’d rather watch a fresh take on the classics than modern-day Bond these days. It would also free writers from trying to fit a Cold War hero into a 21st century setting, which let’s face it has become more and more forced with the latest iterations.
This connects to something I was thinking about yesterday, about my own writing. I think, and I touched a bit on that in my guest post for Susan, that old-school adventure should make a come back. Well written pulp stories that are not comedies, yet know what they are and don’t take themselves too seriously.
I’d like to see a comeback of serious adventure stuff, and when I say serious, I don’t mean the movie itself, I mean to take the project seriously and with respect. Respect the story, and respect your audience. Don’t make a fifth Indiana Jones, make a “Tales of the Gold Monkey” movie! Or do something new, something engaging, and fun, like “Romancing the Stone” was… Make Bond pulpy again. Set it back in the 60s, and run with it.
A great example of a movie that does exactly that is “Memoirs of an International Assassin”. It takes the basic concept of “Romancing the Stone” with a clever twist, and delivers brilliantly on everything it sets to be: there’s action, adventure, a dash of espionage, and it’s tremendously funny at times, without being camp.
“Memoirs…” plays with its tropes in a very confident way, because it knows what it is, and perhaps more importantly, what it is not.
I think the world is starved for light-hearted action-adventure. Perhaps it’s time we swing the pendulum away from gritty realism, and get back to the fundamentals:
I just binged “Challenger: The Final Flight” on Netflix. I wanted to start with the first and see the rest in the course of a few days, but I just couldn’t stop. Even when you know the story, it’s just harrowing to see there were so many opportunities to prevent this tragedy, and the ones who tried were powerless to do it…
As one review said, an actual miniseries (i.e. with actors rather than a doco) would make for an excellent counterpoint to HBO’s “Chernobyl”. A combination of cutting edge technology and hubris, and smart investigators who smell through the BS to nail the real culprits behind the disaster…
I liked that it really explored the general political context at the time, not just NASA’s internal management, and that it went in depth into who each of the crew was, instead of focusing on McAuliffe. I found it to be pretty good, and very emotional at times.
Got around to watching “Midway” (2019) on Prime. Great flick in terms of research and terrific work on the CGI, the SBD Dauntless and all the ships are spectacular… I loved the attention to detail given to the flight and dive scenes, crazy to think a lot of the stunts shown are not Hollywood spectacle, but actually happened! Sadly it gets bogged down by an uninspired script and kinda wooden performances, and probably the typical problem of trying to cram to much stuff in a single movie: it goes through the Pearl attack, the Doolittle raid, the Marshall Island & Coral Sea campaigns to build up to the actual Midway climax… That’s a lot for two hours. Still, better than “Pearl Harbor”, and it would be unfair to dismiss it by association. It’s definitely worth a watch
