fine whine

There's something worse than having an extraordinarily deep pile of work. It's knowing that there's an extraordinarily deep pile of work that's not quite ready to drop on you yet, and there's nothing you can do about it either way*.

* So there.

So these hallowed pages have been a little more 'hollow' lately. Why? I can't really say. I'd been on a bit of a roll there, writing somewhat lengthy diatribes* about movies and my workplace woes, and then suddenly... nothing. This isn't the first time I've stopped writing, or even the fifth, but it's the longest gap in recent memory.

If I were to give an excuse, well, the best I can muster is that I was catching myself up on the movies and got stuck with what I wanted to say about Star wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. I'll likely go back and finish that eventually, once I've formed a bona fide opinion, but for some reason it stopped me from writing anything afterward, as well.

Well, I haven't quit. My writing days are not over. I've done a little bit of programming again, in an attempt to better leverage some lists and a source code repository, but until I have something that works I'm not saying anything more.

But I'll try to say more about other stuff. For the sake of completion, I'm going to try to fill in those blank days before now with one or two lines about something I did, read or watched then. I'll use the future to flesh out anything worth fleshing out, I suppose.

* So lengthy, in fact, that every single one apparently merited an asterisk with some further aside or tangent.

So today is the eleventh of September, a date to which has been given great significance here in America. If not for the recent destruction of New Orleans I'm sure there would have been more attention given to the annual rending and gnashing and whatnot.

Well, I'm not interested in gnashing nor rending. I'm aware of what happened in 2001, and it was indeed a tragedy, and I'm aware of what happened two weeks ago, and that too is a tragedy, but having an opinion of the events is about the extent to which I am involved with either, and that's about it.

So let's talk about escapist cinema. Tonight I finally saw Highwaymen*. The movie is as bleak and sparse as the highway that sometimes sets its stage. All of the dialogue is treated as though capital "I" Important, with some of the more obvious foreshadowing clichés.

Readers not interested in plot spoilers should skip a ways down, to the part after I mention how there's this guy killing people in an old El Dorado and there's this other guy who chases him in a Barracuda, but somebody else shoots the murderer at the end.

So there's this guy killing people with Cadillacs. The opening of the movie is an artfully shot (by which I mean "gratuitous use of slow motion and fast cuts mixed with over/undersaturation") and introduces us to Rennie Cray, yet another version of the unshaven, sullen-but-determined character that Jim Caviezel seems to play most of the time. He watches his wife (and a bag of citrus fruit) run down by a speeding, swerving maniac in a Cadillac. Fast forward five years and suddenly we're beset by angelic voices. Is this the score? Are we hearing the chorus because something significant or action-packed is happening? Alas, we are merely hearing some random choir practicing.

They practice on the stage in "Orchestra Hall". The city is never named, nor the highway, and so forth. It's obvious that the movie was shot in Canada well before the credits confirm that fact. The camera follows Molly (Rhona Mitra) out to the front of the Hall, where after a brief conversation with "Boone" (sorry, but the name just sounded silly when she said it) she hops in an old Mazda with her friend Alex (Andrea Roth). As the plucky little hatchback pulls away and eventually into a tunnel the Ontario license plates are visible. Oops. They'd been chased by a speeding and oddly menacing El Dorado and, already spooked, aren't ready for what scares await them ahead.

This town has a tunnel, and our ladies find it to be a scene of confusion and carnage before long, with upturned trucks and a spooked horse inside. One driver is obviously very hurt, and Alex runs out to get some help. Which, we all know, is a major movie mistake: never leave the main character alone and go for help (fittingly she's wearing a red shirt). She is hit by that menacingly "winking" Caddy (one set of headlights is not lit, though later the bulbs are in fact missing. I guess the continuity guy wasn't watching the car that closely) and dies a bloody death, but not before getting her friend Molly close enough to the car for the door to swing open and her snapshot taken with a bright flash. Somebody shows up, she escapes, and the next morning the cops come.

We meet Will Macklin (a familiar Freddie Faison), a state traffic investigator (for a state never named) who, surprisingly enough, isn't nearing retirement. He of course lives through the whole picture.

Actually, come to think of it, there aren't many deaths in the film. The opening titles use accident photos as a background and many are quite graphic and gory, but only six people, by my count, died during the proceedings; one off-screen (presumably) and another two or three times over in various flashbacks.

At its core it's a chase movie, a revenge thriller that puts the pedal to the metal and leaves it there the whole time. More or less, that's it. Back to the movie. Will finds Molly at the scene, Rennie finds her sleeping in the hospital, and Molly meets Will at his office, where it is revealed by some convoluted exposition that her family was killed in another accident. Well, that just sucks.

Will makes sure to mention that he doesn't carry a gun nor has he shot anybody. Idle chitchat, or foreshadowing? Only time will tell.

Molly is next shown as the only person wearing a brightly colored outfit amongst accident survivors in a sort of therapy session. The leader begins with "Here in America..." and I missed the rest as I laughed, having already seen the Ontario plates and guessed where "here" really was. Next we find Rennie and Molly engaged in some harmless banter in the hallway, and then some stronger words and intimidation that bring Molly to the point of agreeing to meet Rennie for a ride after choir practice, but as he waits for her then she is helped into an aging Saab by the aforementioned Boone, and the two drive off. Rennie is left to have a brief Adam-69 (two cars, facing opposite directions so the drivers can talk... it's fake cop lingo) with Will who is inexplicably also at Molly's practice, despite being a pretty sorry baritone. Rennie speeds off in his 1968 Plymouth Barracuda and Will can hardly keep up with his X-files surplus Ford Crown Victoria. Rennie gets away, and we cut back to Boone and Molly just before they are catapulted sky-high by a feat of leverage few square-fendered road yachts could hope to match in the real world. The sorry Saab soars and once it comes to rest Molly is shocked to find not only that Boone is likely beyond help, but that the madman has attached a tow chain, and she is soon being dragged at great speed in the upside-down Swedish coupe.

This sequence is quite cool looking, especially when Rennie appears, the knight in shining steel. He bashes off his door, and after some jockeying for position grabs her from the (now flaming) car. Immediate danger averted, he spirits her off to a convenient junkyard, where he will reveal to her his dark past (and thus his drive for vengeance), patch up her wounds, convince her to help him catch the guy, and find a new door for his car. Before that, though, we are treated to a ("Roger"-free, oddly) CB conversation, with closeups of an LED bar grafted onto an old CB radio to give some sort of visual effect to the scene.

Why they replaced the needle gauge that usually is there is beyond me, other than to punch up the visuals. Over ninety percent of the viewers wouldn't notice, and those who did probably wouldn't care. I'm not entirely certain that I care.

So some more stuff happens. In the sensitive moments in the junkyard office we learn that Molly "can't drive" because of the accident that killed her family.

Any time you hear an "I can't" or "I've never" or "I won't" or "I don't" in these movies it seems that the speaker "can" or "will" do what needs to be done, and this one is no different. It's a cliché, but apparently it works because this was the second movie in as many years to use that idea (the other was the dreadful remake of Taxi with Queen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon).

In that sequence we also learn that Rennie didn't just watch his wife get hit. He hopped into his Mercedes and chased down the killer Caddy in another artfully action-packed and effects-laden chase culminating in him t-boning the killer, totaling both cars and our antagonist. Rennie spent three years in prison and Fargo (somewhere along the line we learned his name) got 18 months in the hospital and re-hab being built into the near-cyborg that now roams the roads.

All of this of course builds to the tense final confrontation, but not until after Rennie sways officer Will to join him on his vigilante quest. Near the end he (and the camera) looks up to reveal an engine hoist or something else cross-shaped, and one can but wonder if he has any Christ-figure parallels in this movie as well.

Jesus always struck me as a Mopar fan, you know.

I really enjoyed watching Highwaymen. It's silly, and high-concept, and implausible, but it takes everything at face value and runs with it full throttle. Sure, director Harmon and his cast probably are capable of much, much more, but for what it is, it does well enough. Car chase fans and cheesy thriller buffs alike should give this a watch, if for no other reason to see something of a new take on age-old conventions.

* When first I saw the trailer for this, I thought it was a joke. I can't now recall the DVD that had the trailer for this, but it was a spoof or at least a comedy, and it didn't seem out of place on the disc to have absurd trailers for a fake film or two. This one just seemed so unreal, so contrived that it couldn't be real: In a world gone mad, two men speed around in 70s muscle cars, linked by killings and one woman who might just be the key to bringing the murderous streak to an end.

Well, it turned out that the film did in fact exist, and moreover to be available from my library. I reserved it, and, well, you can figure out the rest. Seeing as it was, in fact, really a movie, it has an AMG synopsis fraught with, well, one error. Matthew Tobey writes:

The culprit, it seems, had his heart broken by a woman long ago and now copes with his grief by hunting down and killing random women, using his green 1972 Cadillac El Dorado as his weapon.

As Caviezel's character explains, the homicidal maniac was the son of an insurance claims investigator who had been exposed at early age to gruesome accident photos. Growing up he transitioned from collecting the gory sights to staging them himself. The reason he only kills women is never explained. Likewise the reason he apparently always drives Cadillacs, as seen near the end in one or two shots of the dead cars in front of his motel. Some things, I guess, we were just not meant to know**.

** And some things aren't known by other people too. The subtitle authors for the DVD apparently weren't aware of what a Hemi was, nor did they have the script to work from, as Rennie's 'Cuda is described as "heavy" and not "Hemi" for the exceptionally large and powerful hemispherical-headed engine. "Heavy" indeed.

It has come to my attention that the phrase "Suffice it to say," has become the new "Actually..."*.

Well, I actually just made that up. But I am seeing that phrase all over the place, and I don't recall encountering it so much in the recent past.

One movie in which I do not recall hearing the phrase is the intelligently written and enjoyable Life aquatic with Steve Zissou. I just watched it and rather liked it, I'd say.

I'd been looking forward to seeing it, despite not knowing much about it (and having missed it in the theaters altogether, I believe). My ignorance was somewhat self-imposed, as I wanted to have as fresh an experience of watching this as possible. I skipped over all but the most vague of reviews and ignored specifics from the few people who told me they'd seen it. The plot somehow still was revealed to me: There's this oceanographer, and this shark who eats his partner. It's a revenge story... but that's a rather broad outline, into which Wes Anderson added his laid-back story, set it in an imagined world where oceanographers are superstars, and populated it with his standard players (and a few notable additions). The production design merits a special mention, at least for the (half) ship with its obviously fake set construction and 'tricky camera moves'. The fact that these people inhabit such a fake environment somehow makes it all the more real, in a way I cannot explain. It's not the Max Fischer Players Do Cousteau, but I could see that used as a catchy pull quote or pitch line.

The reviews I read (about) were rather mixed. Some writers felt that Anderson had lost his edge, that intimate quirkiness that emanates through Bottle rocket through the Royal Tenenbaums, and that by embracing action sequences, albeit in an artificially static fashion, he was selling out or cashing in or falling prey to some other cliché that so easily pours forth from the reviewer's scornful pen.

Others thought it was too deep for a mainstream film (two water puns!), Anderson notwithstanding, and the artificiality and extreme characterization would be too imaginative and off-kilter for audiences to handle, since they'd undoubtedly be seeking shallower fare (three!).

This being a revenge picture, more or less, one can but wonder how one of Hollywood's staple action heroes might approach it. Charles Bronson, naturally, would be my first choice.

But this isn't an action movie. It's a character piece that just happens to have explosions and gunfights and other bits of excitement. Zissou isn't a man of action, he's just some guy who is still playing at his childhood ambitions after many a decade, but slowly realizing maybe he's just going through the motions.

It's ambitious and whimsical, neither at the expense of the other. The little touches (snappy dialogue, imaginative stop-motion sea-life) don't distract from the bigger picture. It's all worth seeing, and I look forward to watching it again.

* However I doubt that I will fall prey to this as I did to "Actually", since "Suffice it to say" is at the same time cumbersome and stuffy. It's the sort of think I think people throw in to sound more sophisticated, or to cover for a lack of proper transitions or background information. This is not to say that I don't succumb to those sorts of things; I'm just not going to use that phrase. Er, anymore.**** Of course I always omitted the "it" anyway. Silly me.