Good art, bad art

I had a short discussion with an artist friend tonight in which I brought up the difference between good art and bad art right before she had to sign off. She was talking about how she entered a few of her pieces into a local fair and how disappointed she was that some of them weren’t even noticed. She got a few ribbons and it made her happy, but its hard to mask disappointment when a cartoon painting of two grizzly bears getting married wins a blue ribbon over your time-consuming watercolor.

Philip Baker Hall

Poor guy.

The Dark Knight

I write film reviews for my local newspaper its a hard job for me since said paper is a small rag where front page news is “Catalytic converter removed from local truck.” Needless to say, the community probably wouldn’t jive with detailed, deep, reviews so I do the best I can to cater to my audience. They reimburse me to for tickets, so I’m a happy man. I reviewed TDK for them yesterday and tapped out a review almost immediately after the IMAX screening I attended yesterday with Joseph … aka Cinexcellence. So here are my glowing, albeit very generic thoughts on the best Batman film so far. I’ll update this post later with some more detailed observations, probably after a second viewing.

Impressive.

More thoughts on this remarkable film forthcoming…

Screwed over.

While working at the pharmacy last Friday, I had what amounted to the most unnerving encounter with a customer in all my six years of work. For privacy purposes, I’ll call her Bertha. Any image associated with that name is probably a correct one.

Lost In Gotham

After seeing the 6-minute HD prologue to next week’s The Dark Knight, I am on complete Dark Knight lockdown until my IMAX screening next Saturday afternoon.  Not a smidgen more information … not even listening to the soundtrack when it comes out Tuesday.

But I can still laugh at this surprisingly well done mashup:

John Hurt and The Oxford Murders

I’ve always been a bit confused about who John Hurt actually is. I’d heard his name thrown around the movie blogosphere for a long time, but for some reason was never able to place him. I’m guessing my first introduction to him was his narration of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (my second-favorite film of 2006), but even after that I still couldn’t place a face and always thought he was some far-off relation to William Hurt. Stupid? Yes. A simple trip to Wikipedia or his IMDb page would have helped, but I was a bit too stubborn.

Well, Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull finally gave a face to the voice I’d become so enamored with. Hurt’s character was one of my favorite parts of the film and I wish Spielberg would have given us more of him. So you can imagine my glee when I was surfing the net the other day and found a new film with John Hurt in a leading role. But not just any leading role — a juicy one as an Oxford math professor, a role that guaranteed lots of satisfyingly long monologues. Its one of those kooky movies made in another country but with American and British actors speaking English that will then be dubbed over for release in said country. Confusing. Anyway, this movie isn’t coming to the US of A anytime soon, but I was able to track a copy down and watch it nonetheless.

The film is called The Oxford Murders, based on a best-selling Spanish novel and directed by popular (at least in Spain) Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia. Its about an American exchange student named Martin finding himself entrenched in a murder plot while studying mathematics at Oxford. Martin is played by Elijah Wood and John Hurt plays brilliant math professor Arthur Seldom, a curmudgeonly old geezer with a flare for younger women and high-strung postmodern thought.

The murder plot is very dark and involving … in some ways the flow of the story reminded me of a Dan Brown novel (Angels and Demons, The DaVinci Code). When it comes to guilty pleasure entertainment, this is just the kind of stuff I like. No matter how cheap it can seem, these expansive mysteries with mucho mythology appeal to me more than most things. So it was with this in mind that I could forgive all the films many missteps: the extremely obvious dialogue, a Russian character with badly dubbed voice, the infantile romance subplot complete with a ludicrous love scene involving spaghetti, and some truly embarrassing acting.

There is much to be admired, though. John Hurt completely owns the film and he makes laughable lines seem completely plausible. He deflects Elijah Wood’s wooden countenance makes the movie his own. Considering what Hurt is working with, its a brilliant performance and worth watching just for his screen time. Iglesias’ direction also has moments of greatness. He makes classroom scenes comprised of long intellectual dialogues seem interesting, often filming historical events spoken of in the dialogue. The production is quite opulent and is always easy on the eyes.

The ideas of the film that also intrigued me even though I disagree with some of them whole-heartedly. The movie begins in the midst of a WWII battle in which British soldiers marvel at one of their men sitting in the middle of a surging battlefield writing in a journal. John Hurt then pipes in with his first meaty monologue saying that this man was not crazy — he was urgently writing what would become the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; what he calls “the most influential philosophical work of the 20th century.” His main idea: there is no way of finding absolute truth outside of mathematics. Philosophy is dead and “whereof we cannot speak, therefore we must be silent.” This idea is bounced around constantly in trying to solve the Oxford murders and is turned around, molded, proved, and disproved all over again until the film’s mind-boggling last scene which takes place in a museum full of fake artifacts. My head was swimming all through the end credits.

Yeah, The Oxford Murders may be a mediocre-to-poor film, but John Hurt is darn good and it intrigued me the whole time.  I didn’t feel like my time was wasted. If it ever decides to pop up in theaters here in the US, I’ll write a more formal review. If you can find it, give it a watch. The awesomeness of John Hurt in a leading role is almost too great to pass up.

Mid-2008 Favorites

Over at Looking Closer, Jeffrey Overstreet posted his favorite movies of 2008 so far.  I left a comment with my list and figured I’d post it here too.  I’ve seen more than this, but these are the only ones I feel are list-worthy.

1. In the City of Sylvia - the ultimate people-watching movie; made me think about just how meaningful eye-contact with other people is … among other things. If it doesn’t get a distributor, I’ll be quite upset.  Still, it was worth it to me today to hop over to Xploitedcinema.com and order an imported copy for $33.  I rarely spend that much on a movie and I can’t think of a better choice at the moment.

2. Young@Heart - so unabashedly joyful.

3. You, the Living - totally challenged all of my conceptions of what humor actually is.

4. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - I liked it better the second time … its a very, very fun movie.

5. Wall-E - still growing on me; it gets better and better the more I think about it.

6. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days - so perfectly understated.

Sadly, I missed The Visitor but I’m watching Shotgun Stories this week and from what I’ve heard, it will probably make the list.

Back to Amadeus

For an ardent film lover, its often a guilty pleasure to sit down and watch a movie you truly love for a second, third, fourth, or fifth time. There are so many new things out there to watch that it feels a bit like a cop-out to turn on an old standby. Heck, I’ve got three or four DVDs in my collection at the moment that I’ve never touched and much more than that backed up on my hard drive that I haven’t had time for. But just as I always end up ordering a Tall Caramel Frappachino at Starbucks, so I’ll always spend time coming back to my core favorite films.

I remember watching Amadeus for the first time on a worn-out borrowed VHS early in high school. When it was over, I felt inspired but I don’t think it was because of the story … it was all music. I’ve loved classical music all my life and seeing Mozart on the screen with a score comprised solely of his music was just magical for me. It wasn’t until a few years later that the movie would begin to mean much, much more to me.

I’ve played the piano for about 14 years; some people say I’m quite good at it (I personally think I’m a bit of a faker). Anyhow, through high school I lived in the shadow of someone much more gifted than myself. Neither of us wanted to admit that he was better and everyone knew in the back of their minds that it was the truth. It was around this time that I watched Amadeus again and felt this intense empathy for Salieri because, in a slightly different way, I was walking in his shoes. I didn’t have murderous thoughts, of course, but I did feel a bit blocked artistically by someone who would always be so much better than I.

I’m over that now and have come to the realization that there will always be people more gifted than I. Now I look in wonder at Amadeus as one of those movies so brilliant that I will never, ever wrap my head around it no matter how hard I try. Why? Well, there are many reasons. One is that its about so much. On the surface its a (highly fictionalized) music biopic, but underneath its about greed, love, lust, talent, giftedness, envy, power, and the nature of art. Then there’s F. Murray Abraham in what could be my favorite screen performance; he delivers every monologue so perfectly and with so much emotion it makes my heart ache. It goes without saying that the music is also perfection … after all, its Mozart. But the placement of the music is equally brilliant. Only a few of the pieces used actually resolve and the tension built up by not exhibiting the ending of a Mozart piece works more brilliantly than any original score could.

And now I’m blathering. No, I have no brilliant conclusion about my love for Amadeus. I just know that when I watch it, my skin begins to tingle and my eyes sometime begin to water for in it I see myself at different points in my life. My current self is probably locked away somewhere in the film … perhaps next time I’ll find it.

Semi-final Pistol notes

The premiere of A Pistol In Hand went very well last weekend.  I wish I had some pictures because it was a really beautiful venue.  I made sure the projectionists did their job well and our movie looked very nice on the big screen considering we burned to standard definition DVD.  If you’d like to see the movie, shoot an email to pejohnston2 [at] gmail [dot] com (my secondary email) with your mailing address and I’ll send you one once I receive the second round of DVDs (soon).  I may ask you for a few bucks because, ya know, these things ain’t free.

The only hangup of the weekend was that I got my car towed out of a parking lot.  We had our reception at Bottom’s Up Pizza in Richmond - they had half a lot and customers could park in spaces 1-28.  I must have parked in 29.  So after the reception, in the pouring rain, I was asked to pull up my car.  I ran 1.5 blocks away to get it and it wasn’t there.  Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever expereinced this before, but it has to be one its so shocking and alarming to not find your car where you parked it.  Completely helpless, I ran back to the restaurant soaked to the bone only to find out that the towing place wouldn’t be open on Sunday.  I had to work Monday, so I was pretty depressed and despondent for a while until I realized that there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

I prayed for God to give me a good attitude about it and, lo and behold, we went to the towing place on Sunday afternoon and someone was there to help me bail out my little 1994 Saturn for the low low price of $65.  Thankfully, the rest of the weekend commenced as planned.