fine whine

Look around on the web and you discover many interesting things about Woody Allen’s Purple rose of Cairo:

• It’s supposedly Woody’s favorite movie, of the ones he’s made.
• It garnered him a nomination for the Academy Award for “Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen”, his fourth winless nomination since sharing the honors with Marshall Brickman for 1978’s Annie Hall. He would win again the next year with Hannah and her sisters.
• It probably didn’t make enough at the box office to cover its $15 million budget.
• Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to cheek”, the song that underscores the opening titles, was used in the soundtrack of one film in the 1980s. This one. It was used in ten films during the 1990s. It is from the movie Top hat, with Fred & Ginger, as seen at the end of Purple rose.
• Michael Keaton* was originally cast in Jeff Daniels’s role. Woody fired him after seeing his early footage.

But those are just bits of trivia, facts and hearsay, and easily found ones at that. You’d do far better to actually watch the movie, an eminently enjoyable, whimsical romp through the escapist nature of cinema and the whole movie-going experience.

It’s delightful and fun, startlingly so for a movie set against the bleak backdrop of the Great Depression. Having avoided reading anything about the plot before watching it, everything in Purple rose was a surprise for me, and I think I enjoyed it all the more for it. So I won’t ruin the plot.

One thing I feel I must point out, however, is that while Woody does not appear in the film, even in a bit role (at least that I could see), Mia Farrow has mastered his nuances and cadences so well that her lines often sound as though he could be delivering them, except that they lack most of his neuroses. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just something noticeably odd. Mia does a fine job, and Jeff Daniels rises to the challenge of acting with her. Everybody does well, though, especially the ones onscreen.

I can’t recommend this film highly enough. Grab some popcorn, if such is your inclination, kick back, and watch a wonderful movie.

* Keaton is of course better known for his portrayals of Batman, which I have also recently re-watched. His first turn in the rubber suit isn’t all that bad, despite several telling signs that it is a product of the late 80s (Prince songs prominently figure in several scenes). It seemed to be a decent start for a franchise, if not a bit long on stylization and short on warmth. Unfortunately his return in 1992 was the beginning of the long downward trend of the franchise, with Burton given a freer hand for style and the unfortunate choice of two of the stranger villains, one of whom is as repulsive as he is implausible. Moreover I must wonder about the vehicle choices in the latter film: the police drive Chrysler K-cars (not know for their reliability or horsepower) and the same VW Jettas seem to appear noticeably many times, probably just repositioned and repainted on the tall but claustrophobic street sets.

I’ve never liked the whole ‘bedtime’ concept. Somehow I never got good at it. Well, at least not the falling asleep part.

For years I’ve had difficulty getting to sleep at the proper hour. My next-door neighbor* would squeal on me when she saw my bedroom light on across the driveway. I just wasn’t tired, I’d say in my defense, but my parents wouldn’t hear of it. Later in my formative years I learned to sneak down to the basement and watch TV or use the computer in the relative darkness, and down there I tended to get away with it more often.

To this day I find myself with many a more interesting thing to do than sleep at bedtime. Washing dishes, for example.

Sometimes even when I have given up and bedded down slumber eludes me. I’ll lay there, tossing and turning and kneeing my wife, and I just can’t fall asleep. Having too many thoughts running through one’s head is apparently a fairly common problem, I guess, and I’m no exception. But what then to do with all of those thoughts?

Some of them are interesting enough to write down, or to furiously try to remember to write down the next day (the effort of which only makes falling asleep more difficult) but others are just bothersome, like the invisible monsters of youth but not scary, just annoying. There needs to be a way to make them go away, I say.

So the other night I thought back to something somebody’d suggested, sometime ago. I tried to clear my mind of all thoughts, and to focus instead on the flickering flame of a candle, as the sole light in an otherwise dark room, or my head, or something like that. It’s somewhat like one of those “try not to think of an elephant” exercises, and I don’t think it ever really worked for me in the past, either.

Stupid elephant. You try not thinking about an elephant, if you aren’t already.

But I wasn’t thinking about elephants this time, or not thinking about them either. I was, in fact, thinking about a candle’s flame, and managed to keep focus on it for at least a second or two. Then I noticed that my imaginary candle was apparently perpendicular to my head.

This sounds odd, but bear in mind that every other time I’ve tried this, that I can recall, I’ve been sitting upright. With my head upright, the candle was upright. However, this time I was laying down but the candle wasn’t. Is gravity that important to my mind, I wondered, and tried to think of a candle parallel to my resting form, but even then physics overruled my imagination and the flame burned upward. This struck me as very odd, and my repeated attempts to fight gravity with my mental powers failed. No matter what I tried I could not imagine a candle burning sideways.

Must’ve been because I was so tired.

* My grandma, no less! I think my mom put her up to it. Of course I realize she wasn’t trying to be mean or anything, but all I was doing was reading anyway, even if it was well after my bedtime.

Attack of the killer tomatoes! has some very amusing bits, including the outrageously hilarious tiny meeting room and the titling of San Francisco footage as “New York”*, but overall, it both tries too hard (naming a reporter Lois so as to allow a Superman joke later) and is lazy (commercial gags about a blind traffic cop and Jesus as a spokesman have no bearing on the plot) at the same time, and it all comes off as too many winks and not enough nostalgia. Attack is supposed to be a parody of and homage to B-movies of the 50s and later that used sparse sets, slapdash writing, stock footage, and creative-but-low-budget effects to try to tell a story in something of an earnest fashion.

I’m not certain it’s entirely possible anymore to make a B-movie like that in this post-ironic modern day and age (or is it ironic post-modern?) with pure intentions. All of those black & white clunkers were amateurs trying their best at their one shot at the big screen. The ’stars’ of Attack of the killer tomatoes! aren’t trying to act on screen; they’re trying to be outrageously funny. It doesn’t work. Like I said, many a moment is funny, but overall you’ve gotta love this film to like it.

* Later they show a slide of what might be the Golden Gate bridge, and title it “New York?”. This, my friends, is comedy.

I can but wonder why Disney considers 1971’s Bedknobs and broomsticks to be a suitable film for children. Having watched it today for the first time since I was a child, I can’t say that I appreciate it more now than I did years ago. Based on what I see now, I’m not sure I should have even seen it as a child. Set against a backdrop of World War II, the story weaves in some pretty heavy themes:

• child abandonment and the death of a parent (the three children are orphans of a sort)
• wanton and unchecked pollution (Miss Price*’s motorcycle spits out a cloud of foul yellow smoke)
• witchcraft (well, that one’s obvious, but the scene where the witch joins the children in a post-prandial prayer stands out)
• dishonest clergy (the priest seems to have plans to somehow acquire Miss Price’s land and estate, and seems to be faking illness to avoid military service)
• blackmail (the children know Miss Price is a witch and hold it over her for better food and a bed knob)
• obvious drug trip overtones (the psychedelic flying bed sequences)
• confidence games and scams (the Professor sings a song about selling ‘cures’ that don’t work and charms that do nothing, though he sells only one broken trinket to the smallest child)
• wasting food (the Professor cracks eggs and pours milk on the head of one of the bystanders)
• mail fraud (the Professor didn’t expect his correspondence course spells to actually work)
• illegal squatting and disobeying government orders (the professor has appropriated a nice mansion vacated by people more squeamish about the unexploded bomb in the front yard)
• taking children to pawn shops (Portabello Road, obviously the Disney backlot, seems to be where people sell things when they’re down on their luck, but still ready to dance away their sorrows)
• art forgery and other misrepresentation of goods (Portabello Road)
• vandalism (again, Portabello Road, wherein the youngest child defaces a bust with a mustache, and the older boy breaks a couch)
• racial segregation (the tedious and interminable Portabello Road dance sequence is segmented many a time, but never integrated. Turbans and steel drums don’t mix)
• threatening children with violence (a knife is held menacingly against one of them)
• children swearing (well, if “bloody” counts)
• a general disregard for the reality of physics and other science (nevermind witchcraft and a flying bed or breathing and dancing underwater, but talking animals? Give me a break)
• a disregard for proper grammar and speech (besides the children, the animals speak very poorly and do not set a good example for an impressionable audience)
• cheating and other poor sportsmanship (the animals’ soccer game is brutal, particularly on the referee)
• theft (the professor steals the king’s medallion, and the smallest boy stole a book from the Professor’s squat)
• encouraging cohabitation (the shopkeeper is happy to think that the professor and Miss Price are shacking up without being married)
• butt-kicking (the witchcraft-animated pair of shoes kicks the witch in the rear end)
• overt sexual innuendo (one long shot has the Professor giving a large sausage to a pussy-cat, hmmm)
• cruelty to animals (he steps on its tail)
• general war-is-hell kind of stuff (shooting, fisticuffs, and whatnot, albeit with spectral solders on one side and scared Germans on the other)

All that, and it was rated ‘G’. Go figure.

* ‘Eglantine Price’ seemed such an odd name that I was forced to run some anagrams on it. The most promising ones I found, well, weren’t that promising.

• I nip a neglecter
• Certain peeling
• I pin a recent leg
• Inelegance trip
• Pelican integer
• Near nice piglet

Of course, “Eglantine” is merely an anagram of “Inelegant”, but is it really that simple?

If I instead use ‘Miss Eglantine Price’ I also get:

• Mantlepieces rising
• Single priest cinema
• Grim penis latencies
• Replaces meningitis
• Angelic Mister Penis
• Genitalic primeness

Genitalic primeness, indeed. To think, this movie is for kids!

I finally did it. I changed my eBay password after seven years, six months and four days.

What was my password for those 392 weeks? ‘password’. I know it’s a really, really bad password, but had eBay not been annoying me with a page informing me of my bad choice of passwords for these last couple months, I’d probably still have ‘password’ today, and for who knows how many more weeks.

Seven years ago I had many a password, and I often used variations of the word ‘password’. Sometimes I’d substitute numbers for the letters or reverse them, but eBay never instituted mandatory password changes like the university or anywhere else did. If any site ever were to introduce such a simple security method to so many people, it would be eBay*, but the best they do is apparently mere pestering.

But I’m all secure now, I suppose. Oddly enough, in all of those 65,800 hours I never had any problem at all, even with a password that must be in the top five easiest to guess.

Passwords are such silly things anyway. More often than not they are used to provide the illusion of security, not reality. Rarely do I stoop to putting my password on a Post-it note as others I’ve seen have done, but I’ve slipped up in other ways, not the least of which was using ‘password’ as one. I also regularly use the same three or four passwords in different places, and sometimes I use all letters or numbers without any punctuation or changes in case. And you know what? Only once, ever, have I had a problem other than merely forgetting my password.

In that case somebody logged onto an application at work with my username and the default password we all know. It’s such a dumb thing anyway, since I need to log onto a computer with the application installed to use that application. Anyway, nothing bad came of it, and I promptly changed my password to something less well-known. I suppose if that is my only slip-up I haven’t done too badly.

And now I’ve got eBay off my case, too.

* I am not aware of what America Online’s password changing policies are, or if they even have any. Nor do I know which service can claim more active users.

It has come to my attention that the last Ford Excursion has rolled off the production line in Louisville. No doubt it will fetch a pretty price somewhere in Texas, being all collectable and whatnot*.

I realize this isn’t the end of everything, as the line isn’t going to be suddenly cranking out skateboards or hybrids. Most likely it will be repurposed for large trucks, but hopefully ones that are sold to people who actually need big trucks and use them properly.

Sounds like they’re getting rid of a couple hundred employees, as well. Wonderful. On the upside, they probably have enough unsold Excursions to drive all of the unfortunately downsized folks home. I figure they only need ten or twelve of them.

But seriously. There are already a lot of Excursions out there, and lots of other SUVs too, not all of which start with the letter “E”. Apparently sales have been dropping, and even worse the resale market has gotten very, very bad. Bearish, you could say.

So what then to do with these assault vehicles that nobody wants? Especially if you happen to be a government that wants businesses to make lots of money? How about this: Ship them all down to Louisiana and Texas (and Mexico) and give ‘em to the evacuees. Cut them FEMA checks for their gas fill-ups, and shazam, subsidies for the oil companies. The evacuees, at least as well off as Barbara Bush says they may be, could probably use some personal space, and in some cases probably didn’t have as much room as a 19′x6′ behemoth can provide, with luxurious carpeting and plush leather.

I’m joking, of course. If only I were kidding about the hundred-odd thousand Excursions that were already manufactured and sold. In September alone they sold 1,740 of the things, and 13,583 from January to this month. I couldn’t find all of the numbers but still, every one of them sold was one too many.

* Mentioning this might be a tad extreme, but Nazi regalia is still avidly collected. Knives and guns generally kill only one person at a time, though.

I forgot to mention one thing about Darkness yesterday; it does have one genuinely creepy shot. Late in the movie, amid a near-montage of running-though-hallways-with-bleeding-walls bits there’s a shot of some swings in the kitchen. They do not belong there, as we were shown them at least five other times and we know fairly certain that they are, in fact, out in the backyard. So it’s a bit creepy to see them in the kitchen. Well, maybe you just need to see it*.

But that was yesterday. Today I watched another so-called thriller, and even though it wasn’t really a better film, I enjoyed it much more. It was Cube 2: Hypercube, the sequel to the underrated low-budget Cube, which I had rather enjoyed when I watched it a couple years ago. Neither movie, despite being described as ’scary’, is scary or frightening, and this second one is considerably less gory or creepy than its predecessor.

The major difference between the two could well be the entire production team, director included, that did not return for the second film. That’s one way to avoid a sophomore slump, I suppose.

Fresh cast and crew aside, Hypercube is nevertheless still very much a sequel. One of the characters is aware of (if not responsible for) the first cube thing (as seen in the first movie) and provides what little transition is given to explain the increased complexity and strangeness of this second cube thing. He, of course, is dispatched before he can explain anything useful to the rest of the cast. The special effect that does him in is discussed at length in the DVD extras, but I must admit that even after having heard their intentions and re-watched the scene, the filmmakers’ intentions and final results are not so obviously well translated as they may think. This is largely irrelevant, as so much of what is happening is not meant to be explained but just survived, so it doesn’t really matter or detract from the proceedings. After all, this isn’t supposed to be completely explained, since it isn’t really supposed to be explainable even inside the movie, though the characters attempt to do just that more than once. To admit inside the movie that the reality of what is happening isn’t really possible is either very bold or very cheesy, and I can’t decide which.

It’s just not something that I want to think about for very long. I enjoyed watching the movie while I was watching it, and wasn’t really thinking about the plot holes and sheer stupidity here and there. Suspension of disbelief, I guess they call it.

Back to the differences between this one and the first Cube, though. This one’s a lot brighter, as the walls look to be made almost out of light. This time around the CGI budget was greatly increased, and even for the shots that aren’t hyperkinetic killer razor cube-things the computer effects are well-integrated into the film so as to not be noticeable. It wasn’t until I listened to the commentary that I realized a number of shots could not have been done optically and hadn’t thought much of it since they weren’t big effects shots. Technically, then, well done.

It gets cheesy at times, and dull at others (never have I seen a more boring zero-gravity love scene) but overall Hypercube is an enjoyable enough movie for people who aren’t too interested in thinking about realistic physics for an hour and a half or so. Hardcore fans of the first movie seem to dislike this one, as I’ve seen on message boards and elsewhere, but for a casual fan like me, it’s likable enough.

* By saying “…you just need to see it,” I am not actually recommending that you watch this Darkness, even for that one scene. I cannot be held responsible for any harm caused as a result of persons watching said movie.

Today I watched Darkness, directed by Spain’s Jaume Balagueró. I was no more impressed than I was scared, and the movie was about as scary as petting our cat*. Apparently well regarded as thrilling or original, I found the movie to be derivative, slow, and dull. Had it not been made a year or two before Ju-on: the Grudge or its remake (Sam Raimi’s The Grudge) I would have assumed that its evil house had been lifted from the Japanese film. Alas, it predates them, but follows who knows how many iterations of The Amityville horror and its ilk, and from what little I’ve seen, it doesn’t add much to the haunted house genre.

It doesn’t add much to anything, nearest I can tell. Harsh lighting and ‘dramatic shadows’ I’ve seen before, and done better. Excessively shaky cameras and lightning-fast editing are nothing new, and anymore they just distract me. Ghostly children appearing and disappearing I’ve seen before, and perhaps better. Thunder and lightning used to elevate tension I’ve seen before, and it rarely works. Likewise walls that bleed. A father driven to madness, banging on doors among other insanity, I’ve seen before, and one movie about that is pretty much enough. Ancient arcane rituals in otherwise ordinary situations has been a mainstay of many a movie or X-files episode, and frankly they never did much for me either. Ostensibly normal people seeking to manifest the ultimate evil just isn’t one of my favorite plots, I guess. Loud, jarring scratchy noises and blurry shapes darting across the foreground, out of focus aren’t anything new either, though I cannot recall where I’ve seen that before. If I were to list all of the movies I saw in this one (from The Shining to The Sixth Sense to The Grudge to The Others and so many others, too many to list) I’d give up long before I was done, and I’d probably just find some of those movies that did well what Darkness tried to crib or cobble together.

I think it’s becoming obvious that perhaps horror thrillers just aren’t my thing. I recognize that dread and foreboding point the new direction the genre seems to be taking, where irony and postmodernism had until recently been the only way to go. Either approach needs to be crafted well to result in something I’ll enjoy, and for all the work that obviously went into Darkness, it sure is light on originality.

* Which served as a welcome distraction from much of the movie, I must admit.