movies on a whole minute

Last Friday I attended “The Age of Immersion”, a talk about cinema by two famous names in Hollywood – Walter Murch and Matthew Robbins, moderated by Professor Andrew Feenberg. And I thought, these moviemakers are on one side of an issue, and I am on another. The nature of authorship and authority is changing. Their belief in their authority as creators lies so deep in their souls that they do not even realize it is challenged. …

Last summer, having barely watched TV for months, Cindy and I finally cancelled cable. The Internet and books have taken over. Now we subscribe to zip.ca (a DVD-by-mail service), so we see quite a few movies. Here are some brief reviews. ...

The Firefly movie leaves me with two reactions. First, it confirms my bias for good television over good cinema. Second, it really does remind me of the old BBC show Blake’s 7. (Warning: major spoilers follow.)

Well that was disappointing, especially after Zhang Yimou’s excellent Hero. I thought Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was also much better, whatever the criticisms of my Chinese friends. All of that talent wasted with a script missing in action. Although I won’t reveal major plot points, if you plan to watch it you may not want to read on. . . .

I just saw X-Men 2. Again I am disgusted by the brutal sentimentality of Hollywood film – values which place the life and death of a single person above the murder and mayhem which surround them. Nevermind that the other characters – good, bad, innocent – have suffered. Never mind that enemies have been killed without a second thought merely because they are enemies, and the innocent left to die because they somehow end up on the wrong side of a law which says the heroes are inviolate, and all who stand between them and success worth nothing. . . .

The local library was rebuilt a couple of years ago, and it is absolutely beautiful. Raised up on stilts with parking beneath, floor-to-ceiling windows look out across a sports field and picnic area where men play bocce, kids play soccer, and all sorts of people walk and jog around the running track. Beyond, the north shore mountains rise up, their peaks touched by snow. . . .

The second half of the movie left me cold, but the first is a beautiful delight. Cindy pointed out it’s like a Tarkovsky film with water and the sound of rain, a white horse in a field, and mirrors everywhere. The way the film intercuts scenes, or shows a bit of the future mixed in with the present, is simply joyful. But most of all, the sex scene is rightly famous. There are only two genuinely good sex scenes I can remember seeing in film, and this is one of them. It has that seventies naturalism of real people. Their undress is intercut with them dressing afterwards for dinner – he picks a tie, she pulls on her pants, she is standing in the bathroom as he walks past the door. You see them in their unguarded moments, and the relationship between them is so clear: their sadness, how their presences mix and they share space in a room. I think it is the most intimate sex I have seen in a film. . . .