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Guy Haines (Farley Granger) and Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) in “Strangers on a Train.”

So, I finally saw the Alfred Hitchcock movie Strangers on a Train after friends of mine mentioned it to me nine months or so ago.   Yeah, I take my time with these things.

To put it briefly, my comment here about Hitchcock’s work applies perfectly.  It’s an amusing film, but by no means a masterpiece.  I’ll try to avoid spoiling everything in this review, but I will discuss certain plot elements, so be warned!   If you are the kind of sick, deranged person who reads reviews of movies they have not seen (me too)  there is a synopsis here.

The character of Bruno Anthony, played by Robert Walker,  carries the whole movie.  The guy seems completely mad and yet strangely charismatic, which is precisely what the role demands.

The problem is, this kind of works against the story even though it is really fun to watch.  It is so obvious that Bruno is not playing with a full deck that it seems like Guy Haines would have no trouble convincing the police that Bruno’s claims about him are nothing more than the ravings of a maniac.  Of course, then there would be no drama, and it would be a pretty dull movie. So…

…Haines gets enmeshed in a convoluted plot controlled by the madman. There wasn’t much that stood out about it to me, but there were two scenes that caught my interest.  One is the tennis match that comes at a pivotal point in the film.  Although fairly contrived, it was still somehow exciting to watch, even though I knew more or less how it would play out.  This alone may qualify Hitchcock as a great director.  It is one of the most effective uses of sport I’ve ever seen in a movie.

The other thing I really liked was the next-to-last scene.  I love the fact that even in his final moments, Bruno still lies to Guy and the police.  He has no reason to, he has to know that his deception going to be found out as soon as his fist unclenches and he drops Guy’s lighter, and in any event he is mortally wounded; but he lies to them anyway.  That little detail totally sums up the character and how detached he is from reality.  I love that.

Unfortunately, the movie is pretty weak otherwise.  The direction, editing and cinematography are all quite good, but the acting is pretty poor apart from Robert Walker.  Also, once you stop suspending disbelief, which I did whenever Bruno wasn’t around, you realize the whole plot is fairly far-fetched.  [Aside: is suspending disbelief the same as resuming belief? Discuss.]  The other problem with the movie is that even the “good” characters aren’t very likeable, so it was hard to really get invested in how things worked out for them.

Overall, an enjoyable thriller, but not a great one.

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Oh, wow, I had never heard this before.  Studio executives had wanted the Harry Potter movies to be set in America.  I didn’t like the Potter flicks much–certainly, all except the last two installments were but pale shades of the books–but if they’d messed around with them even more they could have been an outright disaster.  That article kind of makes me more forgiving towards the filmmakers’ general disregard for the stuff in the books.  The fact that they couldn’t be bothered to make Tonks’s hair look like the book describes seems minor in comparison to the prospect of seeing Hogwarts relocated to the outskirts of Los Angeles.

As an American, I am vaguely insulted by the idea that people suspected Americans wouldn’t be interested in a movie that wasn’t about them.  Do they think we’re that ignorant and narcissistic?  Man, that would have been an awful series of movies.  I mean, in my eyes, the major draw of the movies was the chance to see skilled British actors plying their trade.  Take that away and they would be nothing.

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It’s not Citizen Kane anymore.  It’s now Vertigo.  Strange that it took Sight & Sound so long to notice a movie made in 1958 was better than a movie made in 1941.

To be perfectly frank, I always thought Kane was a bit overrated.  Not that it’s a bad film by any means; it’s  just not anywhere close to being the greatest ever.  It’s a well-acted drama and nothing more, in my opinion.  Also, there seems to be a massive plot hole at the center of it which has always kind of detracted from it.

I also wonder: did the people who were polled watch every single movie ever made before voting?  I kind of doubt it.  For one thing, think of how many languages they would have had to learn first.  (Watching with subtitles is not at all the same thing.)  What if the real greatest movie ever is a Japanese film that no one in the U.S. or Britain has heard of?

I won’t even begin to address the question of how there can be a single greatest movie when there are so many different genres.  I like Lawrence of Arabia and My Fair Lady, but it’s hard to really compare the two.  This is why they do genre rankings, although even then there are problems, like why is Star Wars always listed under “sci-fi” when the man who created it says it isn’t?

The sound effects are *awful* by today’s standards!

Finally, there are technical issues, like: if a film was great “in its time”, does that mean it’s always great?  Metropolis is considered a very great film, but if it were made today, would anybody think it was any good?  Moreover, if a new technique is created and used with great success in a film, it is inevitably copied by other films, thus diminishing the value of it for future viewers.  Does a film deserve bonus “greatness points” for being the first to try something that eventually becomes common?  And when a viewer fifty years later sees a transition or camera angle that is familiar to him, but was brand new at the time, how will he ever be able to appreciate it?

I think that many critics are aware of this issue, and so overcompensate by giving undue weight to older movies.  It’s similar to what I was talking about here with video game rankings. In some cases, you have to admit, “well it was certainly great then, but there can be little doubt the special effects would be much better if they could have made it today.”  What was yesterday’s special effects masterpiece may look awful to the viewer of nowadays.

That’s not saying, by the way, that newer movies are automatically better.  Sometimes, they have better special effects, but vastly worse acting, characters, dialogue and story.  In fact this happens rather a lot.  But from a technical point of view, it makes ranking difficult.

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This should tell EA and BioWare that they have a problem: I am a huge fan of the KotOR games, and yet the news that the MMO sequel The Old Republic is soon going to be free-to-play still does not make me a slam-dunk to get the thing.  I might, admittedly; which is far better than my “no way” stance before this news, but I’m still not guaranteed to.

Even without the awful problem of a subscription to deal with, there’s still the problem of having to get online to play the game, not to mention the hassle of making PC games work in the first place.

I am a console gamer, because you only need two things to play console games:

  1. console
  2. game

It is really just that simple.  If both the disk/cartridge and the console work, you can play your game. Contrast this with a PC game, where you need:

  1. game
  2. compatible sound card
  3. compatible graphics card
  4. compatible processor
  5. compatible monitor

And with online games you need all that, plus:

  1. stable internet connection
  2. reliable internet service provider
  3. reliable servers at the game company

The fewer single points of failure you have in a system, the better.  Online gaming introduces more single points of failure into the system.  If any one of these things breaks, no game for you.  (Christopher Knight documented the pain that “always-online” caused Diablo III players.)

This doesn’t even take into account the nightmarish trials inflicted upon PC gamers by Digital Rights Management (DRM) tools.  I’m all for protecting the rights of the artist, but for Pete’s sake, the movie industry manages to get along okay without punishing their customers every time they watch a movie.  Why can’t the PC gaming industry do likewise?  And if they can’t, then all gaming should move to consoles, since apparently they don’t have the piracy issues.

PC gamers tell me “but having the PC game makes it easier to fix bugs in the game!”  While this is not technically a lie, it conceals a key fact in order to mislead the listener.  The unspoken component is that bugs are far more common in the PC games than console versions. You don’t need to fix bugs on the console because there are less of them.

The other thing I get is “but I can download mods that aren’t on consoles if I have a PC game”.  Well, yeah, if you do somehow manage to make your PC game work and then feel like taking the chance of crippling it by installing stuff that third-parties designed, then yes, I suppose consoles cannot compete with you there.  Personally, I’d prefer to just buy a game that already had the features I wanted in it, but to each his own.

Diablo III and The Old Republic together demonstrate pretty much everything that makes me try to avoid PC gaming.  Alas, I fear that console gaming is already slouching in the same direction, and that soon the truly “single-player” game will be a thing of the past.

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Famous scene from the 1922 film “Nosferatu”. The shadow is scarier than the actual monster (see below) because your imagination fills in the details.

Saw the movie House of Dracula on TV the other night.  It’s a 1945 Universal Monsters flick that contains three of their most popular monsters: Dracula (duh) the Wolf-Man, and Frankenstein’s monster.  It was fairly well-done for what it was.  John Carradine is great as Dracula.  Also, the film features the stereotypical hunch-backed assistant to the mad scientist, but for a change the character is female, and fairly attractive apart from the hunch-back. It’s an unusual role, and the actress, Jane Adams, does a pretty good job.

But what was especially notable about the movie was that it falls into the awful horror movie pitfall of trying to explain the source of the horror scientifically.  So, it turns out that Dracula has a blood disease, and that the Wolf-Man can be cured by brain surgery and some kind of weird fungus that the aforementioned scientist grows in his castle.

Folly!  I’ve blogged about this before: horror movies should not rationalize or explain the horror in any way.  When they do, it becomes less frightening.  They make this mistake all the time in horror movies.  It’s much better when the scientifically-inclined are skeptics and shown to be wrong, and the monster is an inexplicable violation of the laws of nature.   The intelligent, scientific  types being wrong is how you know you’re in trouble.

If you try to explain everything, it is less scary.  This applies not only to trying to give explanations for the monster’s origin or condition or whatever, but to every element in any scary story.  Just give people a few hints of the monster, and  let them piece together the rest, that’s what I say.

See what I mean?

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I tried to read the first book of the Hunger Games series awhile back, and although I thought it was well-written and had a good setting, it was hard for me to get into it because it was fairly predictable.  I’m sure that’s partially because it was written for a younger audience, but I think it also is a just a little too cliche filled.  I’m not saying it’s bad.  It’s a decent book, but I pretty much knew where it was going from a very early point.  This is a problem I have with a lot of dystopian fiction–it all seems cut from the same cloth.

You know, I had an idea for a dystopian movie once.  It would be set at an undefined place and time, in a country where a totalitarian, fascist government had taken over.  The main character would be some kind of violent goon for the government who went around suppressing all dissenters.  And the whole film would present him as the hero–he’d be played by a “leading man”, the camera angles would present him heroically–the whole film would seemingly approve of the dystopian society.  Then, at the end, there would be some kind of title card or something telling the audience that this was a propaganda film approved by the fictional government, perhaps even detailing some of the techniques involved.

The point of this would be to pull the rug out from under the audience; see how many of them would have found themselves being subtly seduced into rooting for the main character–and the society he represents–by the film’s technique.  The “plot twist” would actually be a test to see how much people would start to buy into something awful because of good cinematography. Then they would have to re-evaluate what they had just watched.

The trouble is, this is more of a science experiment than an entertainment movie.  The trick of the movie is that usually, in dystopian stories, the protagonist begins to question his society, and through him, the audience is told about the society’s problems. (e.g. Winston Smith in 1984, Guy Montag in Fahrenheit 451)  There would be none of that in this movie.  He’d be 100% behind the society, and looking to maintain it.  It would be kind of like 1984 from O’Brien’s perspective.

The thing about my idea–and I’m not saying it’s a good idea–is that it plays with the tropes of the dystopian genre.  Dystopian stories give the audience some character they can turn to to see the dystopia’s flaws; or at least the “tone” of the piece, or the “voice” of the narrative give it away.  Here, there are no societal outcasts or anything like that for people to turn to. (The main character takes care of that.)  I thought this up largely from noticing that every dystopian story seems to rely on the same devices, and that makes them pretty predictable.

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I see Michael Moore is going on Piers Morgan’s show tonight to talk about the awful shooting in Colorado and gun control.

I’ve seen three of Moore’s films: Roger & Me, Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine.  Bowling is technically speaking the worst one, but it’s also by far the most interesting.  Because unlike the other two, which are amusing but kind of simplistic propaganda pieces, Bowling is really more of an open-minded exploration of the issues.

It starts out as a propaganda, dark comedy sort of movie, but it actually turns into more of a examination of American culture.  At one point in the film, Moore says that people also own lots of guns in Canada , but they don’t have the same crime problems we do. Surely, this point contradicts any gun control agenda he may have.  The middle of the movie is very interesting; Moore seems to admit he doesn’t have all the answers, and is actually revising his opinions as he learns more.

Now, towards the end, Moore remembers that he is making a movie, and he reverts to his ambush/ask awkward questions style and it totally doesn’t work and it makes him look like a jerk.  It makes for a really uneven movie, but it’s still thought-provoking to watch.

That said, I think Moore is unfair in singling out America for violence.  His new line is to portray Americans as singularly bloodthirsty, but I think we know that’s not the case.  There are mad men and evildoers in every nation.

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In Hollywood, they can’t just *suspend* disbelief, they have to have it leaping out of a helicopter while being shot at.

Via J.E. Sawyer, another good example of how real life is NOT like action movies.  I remember that Cracked did a great article about this sort of thing once.  No wonder we have a “gun culture” in this country; our movies depict them as having magical powers!

It reminds me of the movie Last Action Hero.  A lot of people hated it, but personally I thought it was brilliant.  If you haven’t seen it, what happens is: Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a generic action movie hero in a movie-within-the-movie.  Then he gets magically transported into the “real” world, and is confused when all the stuff he did in the movie world doesn’t work.  Like, there’s a scene where he shoots at a car the bad guys are in, and is shocked when it doesn’t explode.

Still, that’s why people watch movies: to see stuff that doesn’t happen.

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The way he announces it is priceless.  It’s too bad he never won an Academy Award for any of his outstanding performances.  (He did win an honorary one.)  He’s one of the greatest actors ever.

Everyone remembers his awesome performance in Lawrence of Arabia–as well they should–but in my opinion, his greatest performance was in a truly bizarre film called The Ruling Class.  It’s one of the weirdest movies I’ve ever seen–funny, disgusting, thought-provoking, somewhat blasphemous, and kind of campy all at once.  I can see hating it or loving it, but either way O’Toole’s performance in it is incredible. (Incidentally, Carolyn Seymour, a voice actress in many famous video games like Mass Effect and KotOR, also appears in this movie.)

Ah, well.  Nearly all his performances are great–if you’ve never seen him in anything, you really should.

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I was reading about this upcoming sci-fi movie starring Tom Cruise called Oblivion.  The IMDb synopsis says:

A court martial sends a veteran soldier to a distant planet, where he is to destroy the remains of an alien race. The arrival of an unexpected traveler causes him to question what he knows about the planet, his mission, and himself.

Hmm.  That sounds a bit like the plot of what I consider the most overrated movie of all time, Avatar.  Also like Avatar, this thing seems to share a name with another, totally unrelated franchise.

Of course, people say the idea for Avatar was itself stolen from Edgar Rice Burroughs, or some British comic book, or Dances with Wolves.  I wouldn’t say “stolen”, exactly; but it’s an age-old plot.

The plot of Avatar is:

  • Guy is sent by military to deal with exotic natives to help pursue military’s interests.
  • Guy becomes sympathetic to natives.
  • Guy rebels against military, helping natives.

This is, in broad strokes, also the plot of one of my favorite movies, Lawrence of Arabia.  The difference is in how it’s done–compare the character of General Allenby in Lawrence with Colonel Hambone from Avatar.  (Okay, so that’s not his name.  But it should have been.)

This is so often the case with fiction.  Another example:

“A video game about someone who causes tremendous damage to a planet, and must then face the consequences of that action.”

This could be describing either Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords or Tonic Trouble.  The former I consider to be the greatest game ever made; a masterpiece of storytelling and characterization, complete with a philosophical depth more powerful than any other work of fiction I have seen.  The latter is about a purple cartoon alien who fights mutant tomatoes.  “The Devil is in the details”, as they say.

Zaphodb2002 pointed out in a comment on this post that if you just give a synopsis of the most basic points, so many great works don’t sound all that impressive.  It is, as he said, how the story is told.