Eastern Promises

Eastern Promises (***1/2)

Based on its opening scene, Eastern Promises seems like a pretty standard mobster movie. We see a guy in a barber's chair getting a shave and a haircut, as another man enters and closes the blinds. The customer soon realizes that the barber's friendly chit-chat was a ruse for his guard to be let down, and before he can get up out of his chair, the barber holds him down as man who recently entered quickly slits his throat with business-like efficiency. This scene is merely the hook though, and the rest of the movie is less of a series of whackings and shifting alliances that a lot of crime dramas often turn in to, and more of an exploration of what happens when the world of the mafia--the Russian mafia in this case--starts to collide with the world at large. Like, A History of Violence, the movie David Cronenberg directed before he directed this one, its done in a much quieter and more matter-of-fact style than a lot of other crime movies of the same ilk. There's nothing as operatic as the baptism scene in The Godfather, and the body count is less than most mob movies in general, but, in a way, the stark reality of the movie's style makes the violence that is on screen that much more brutal.

Our protagonist is Anna (Naomi Watts), who works in a maternity ward in a London hospital. A young pregnant girl is brought to her hospital after collapsing and hemorrhaging blood at a pharmacy. The baby is saved, but the mother dies, leaving no form of identification, except a handwritten diary written in Russian. Knowing that, without having any sort of immediate family member, the baby will be relegated to the slow-moving bureaucracy of the adoption system, Anna takes it upon herself to search the diary for clues. Anna, it so happens, is of Russian descent, and takes the diary back home and shows it to her uncle. After he seems unwilling at first to translate it, Anna finds her way to a restaurant owned by Semyon, who at first glance appears to be nothing more than a simple, kind-hearted, elderly man. Semyon agrees to translate the diary, but seems to have oddly specific terms for how exactly the logistics of it are to work out, and seems to be somewhat angry when Anna returns to him without the actual diary but rather with photocopies of it. Of course, as we the viewer learn quickly, he's not as all as he appears to be, and the restaurant is a front for Semyon's crime family--part of the "Vory v Zakone", which the special features tell me translates to roughly something like "Thieves in law."

Anna's uncle apparently gains a sudden curiosity, finds the original diary in Anna's room, and begins to read it. Upon discovering that the details of it are quite disturbing, and that the Vory v Zakone are involved, he frantically tells Anna to drop the issue. However, as Anna begins to understand the nature of Semyon and his associates, she reads between the lines of her conversations with him and comes to the conclusion that the baby's life is threatened so long as they hold the diary. Thus, Anna, her uncle, and her mother reluctantly become further involved in the matter, and attempt to make a deal with Semyon's people, despite her uncle's warning that these really aren't the types of people that anyone should make deals with.

While this is going on, we also meet Nikolai, played by Viggo Mortensen, who also teamed up with Cronenberg in History of Violence and clearly has a good working relationship going with him. He portrays Nikolai as a cold, unfeeling, sinister mob enforcer, and for much of the movie that's because that's exactly what he would seem to be, although there's a key revelation towards the movie's conclusion which completely changes his character. Nikolai is trying to break into Semyon's crime family, and certainly seems to have both the requisite skills and disposition for it, as we see him in an early seen casually snipping off the fingers of a frozen corpse to prevent anyone from getting fingerprints off of it. As he proves his loyalty, Nikolai follows around Kirill, Semyon's son, whose biggest interest seems to be drinking heavily, and who seems to alternate between liking Nikolai and wanting him to suceed and resenting him for being the "new guy" in between bouts of drunkeness.

One of the more fascinating aspects of the movie--and one of the reasons why its worthwhile to watch a movie about the Russian mafia even if you've seen dozens of movies about the Italian mafia, or Irish mafia, or the Yakuza, or whatever--is its exploration into the practice of tattooing. There's such a thing as a "prison tattoo" in American culture, and if you've ever watched a Japanese Yakuza movie you know they're big on tatooing as well, but Russian tattoos have a certain intricasy that exists nowhere else. Supposedly, if you're in the know, you can essentially a Russian mobster's life story based on what tattoos he has. One of the more interesting scenes has Nikolai basically being studied head to toe in a shadowy room by a group of elderly mobsters to determine if he's truly worth of getting the Vory v Zakone stars tattooed onto him. Its clear watching the movie that a tremendous amount of study and labor was put into making Nikolai's tattoos completely accurate to real life. According to the special features, Viggo Mortensen went to Russia and did a great deal of research on his own in this regard.

As the movie heads towards its climax, more and more of the diary's contents are revealed, and why Semyon and his son Kirill don't want it out in the open. At the same time, the fallout from death we see at the beginning of the movie leads to a bloody conflict between rival mobsters complete with the deception and entangling alliances that you'd expect from any good organized crime movie. As I said though, Cronenberg's stark realism gives the movie a slightly different tone than a lot of such movies, and makes the death seem much less like simple Grand Theft Auto-esque exploitation and much more hard-hitting and disturbing. At times, I think there's perhaps too much of his quiet, minimalist style, to the point where we don't learn enough about the characters. The movie's plot is certainly complete. But I think there's more that could have been delved into regarding the standoffish relationship between Nikolai and Kirill, or the tense moments when Anna confronts Nikolai about the violent realities of what he does, only to have him reply "I am merely driver. I go left I go right. I go straight." The movie is pretty short at just over an hour and a half, and I felt it could've held my interest for much longer. IMDB tells me that there might be a sequel in the works with Cronenberg and Mortensen both returning. Normally, this wouldn't seem like the sort of movie that would have a sequel, or that could benefit from one. But I think there's a lot left unexplored about Mortensen's character, and especially about what you learn about the true nature of his character by the end of the movie that could be built on. I'd certainly be interested in seeing the sequel if it happened.

Prince of Persia, aka Collect a bunch of orbs with no risk of dying

I never got around to playing any of the Prince of Persia games from the last console generation, and so when I was at Best Buy and saw the new, re-launched Prince of Persia, which introduces a new main character and is independent of the previous series, I decided to pick it up. It seemed more interesting than most anything else on the shelf, and it had gotten a fair amount of acclaim. Suffice to say, I found the game incredibly disappointing. The game is nothing short of gorgeous to look at, and its clear that a lot of effort was put into its production, but its not enough in my mind to make up for the fact that the actual core gameplay just isn't really all that fun.

The premise of the game is this: you're a lone miscreant who's out in the desert looking for your donkey when you run into Elika, a mysterious woman who worships the God Ormazd, from whom she is granted magical powers. She enlists your help in restoring the ancient city which she was once the princess of, which is now deserted of people and has been covered in black goo that vaguely resembles the stuff the Venom suit was made out of in Spiderman by the evil God Ahriman. It's a pretty simple, by-the-numbers video game plot. In an attempt to make the characters more endearing, your character and Elika have a bunch of back-and-forth banter throughout the game, which I think is supposed to be witty, but is moreso just annoying, not to meniton that some of the stuff they say seems completely anacronistic to ancient Persia. At any point when you're standing still outside of combat, you can hit L2 to talk to Elika to get more of her backstory. The game pushes this constantly, and actually awards you trophies for your Playstation account if you talk to her often enough. For me though, the prospect of an intangible virtual trophy isn't nearly enough incentive to hear Elika recant uninteresting tales of her childhood growing up in the royal palace, or hear the latest round of the two characters's never ceasing argument about whether they were brought together by fate or coincidence.

This is, of course, a video game and not a movie, and so all of this would be easily forgivable if it was fun to play. I guess it did hold my interest enough for me to beat the game, but I beat it with a constant feeling of tedium, never really excited to see the next area or fight the next boss. Here's the basic layout of how the gameplay works: You pick an area on your map of where you want to go, and through a bunch of acrobatics you dodge all the evil black goo and get to the "Fertile Ground," which is guarded by one of four of Ahriman's servants, who you each fight six separate times in battles which are slightly different each time, but not by much. After that, the lead is healed, all the black goo disappears and you go acrobating your way around the area again to hunt for "light seeds," which are used to open up new areas.

The biggest problem with the whole game is that its just way too easy. Any time you "die", Elika will just magic you back to life, and after your character says some ridiculous one-liner, you're good to go again. If you die from a fall, you're put back on the last piece of solid ground you were on. If you die in combat, you don't even have to leave and re-enter combat; the enemy simply gets a little bit of its health bar back. Its understandable that the game gives you an infinite number of lives, because some of the big chains of moves that you have to put together to climb up to an area at some point can be tricky to find out at first, but there has to be more of a penalty for dying than there is. You don't really feel like there's any pressure to get something right at any point, and its very rare that you'll need more than a couple chances to get through any given area.

Combat is a little bit tougher to get through than the climbing/jumping sections, but not really in a good way. It feels very "rock-paper-scissorsy." After fighting the first couple forms of each enemy in which you can pretty much do whatever you want, the enemies start to transfer between different "states", at which point only one of your types of attacks (each face button is a different attack) will hurt it. Really, all you need to do to beat any given battle is to deflect the enemy's attack at the right time and then immediately counter by spamming whatever button corresponds to the "state" until the enemy gets its composure back and you have to hit the block button again. They try and make it more interesting by having certain events happen if you have the enemy up against a wall or on the edge of the platform you're on, and every once in a while you'll lock swords or something and have to mash Square to break out of it. Even these get extremely repitative though, and happen often enough to the point where the combat feels even more scripted and simplisitc. Really the only reason why combat can be a little bit difficult is because of how much life enemies have, and if you botch blocking once it may take a while to get back into a rhythm. But that's all it really is is repeating the same rhythm of moves over and over again. In the pause menu there's a big tree of combo moves you can do, but I never bothered to figure them out because they were never once necessary. Just spamming one attack would generally get the job done.

A lot of the environments are great to look at, as are the bright, cell-shaded characters, but the game still feels dead at times. There are literally no other characters you meet, except yourself, Elika, the main bosses and another key player or two in the story. I realize that the premise of the game is that you're restoring a long abandoned city, but would it have hurt that much to through in one wandering hermit or something to break up the monotony? Many of the areas quite similar as well. After the initial few, you can complete areas in pretty much any order, which I guess works to make the game less linear, but it also prevents the game from having any real progression that makes you anxious to keep getting farther in, and makes reaching each new area seem like an acomplishment. The final battle, if it can be called as much, is tremendously unsatisfying, as is the ending which would seem to literally erase pretty much everything you accomplished while playing the game. Maybe this isn't actually the case, and it will be elaborated on further in the sequel, but, frankly, unless the gameplay is totally different, I don't see myself playing the sequel. A huge disappointment.

Watchmen

Watchmen (***1/2)

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

The Superman exists, and he's American.

Like many others who have read the graphic novel, I followed the news and trailers leading up to the release of Watchmen with some excitement, but also a great deal of anxiety. I'm not as militant as Alan Moore himself is in that I certainly never thought that the very idea of an adaptation of Watchmen was somehow unnatural, but I was certainly skeptical as to how well the book could be transferred to another medium given its structure and the fact that its just really, really densely packed. The choice of Zach Snyder to direct seemed questionable. Snyder had made a name for himself directing 300, also a graphic novel adaptation, but a much different one for which filming some badass looking slow-motion fight scenes against some pretty CGI backgrounds was enough to get the gist of it. Having now seen the movie, I think Snyder, as well as the writers (one of whom is David Hayter -- Solid Snake!) deserve a lot of credit for putting together what is probably the best adaptation one could probably realistically hope for. It isn't perfect, but it manages to stay true to the spirit of the Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's work, and manages to include quite a bit of the details packed into the 12 chapter story into the 2 1/2 hour movie. I'm curious as to how well I'd be able to pick up on every detail had I not first read the book. A friend of mine who saw it without having read the novel loved the movie and had no problems following it, but I've read the reactions of a number of critics who seemed confused amidst the various jumps in time and the asides meant to develop the characters which aren't directly related to the main conspiracy story. Then again, many of the same critics didn't really seem to buy into the whole concept of the movie at all, and they may not have been on the edge of their seats putting every effort into following everything that's going on. Watchmen is certainly a story that not absolutely everyone is going to find accessible and engaging to them.

The movie starts out with the hook: The Comedian--a former masked vigilante, first with the Minutemen in the 1940s, then with their successors the Watchmen in the 1960s, and who then worked as an agent of the U.S. Government after vigilantes were outlawed--is thrown out of the window of his studio apartment by an unknown assailant. After this introductory scene, we get the opening credits, which believe it or not are one of the coolest things in the movie and are almost like a tiny movie in and of themselves. There's a lot of history in the world of Watchmen that occurs before we're introduced to it in its alternate version of 1985: Nixon has been elected to five terms, two teams of masked heroes have come and gone, and the world's first honest to goodness "superhero" has appeared, and America is now using him as the ultimate deterrent in the Cold War. Many of the details of these events are mentioned only in passing in the book, or relegated to one of the afterward sections of each chapter, which masquerade as newspapers, magazines, and other documents that "exist" within the world of the story. The credits are a way of quickly giving a novice audience the gist of some of these details in a quick way that doesn't hold up the story, and I don't think it could've been done better than the way it was. With Dylan's "The Times They Are-a Changin'" playing, we're shown a series of vignettes of famous moments that have been altered from our own in Watchmen's reality: the famous embrace from the ticker-tape parade at the end of World War II is now a lesbian kiss, the assassin on the grassy knoll who killed JFK is the Comedian, and Dr. Manhattan is already standing on the moon when Neil Armstrong takes his first steps. They're scenes that are simple with a strange power to them. Its almost worth seeing the movie simply for this.

As the movie progresses, it follows along the track of Rorschach's investigation of the Comedian's death, which he is convinced is part of a larger plot against all former costumed heroes, but stops for pauses along the way to fill in some of the asides involving the individual characters that popped up throughout the graphic novel. Some of them are a bit rushed and compressed from what they were in the comic, but its certainly mostly there, and with a run time of over 2 1/2 hours, they probably included just about all that they reasonably could. Rorscach's psycho-ananlysis, The Comedian's assault on the original Silk Spectre and her daughter's confuntation of her mother regarding it, Dr. Manhattan's time-jumping story of his transformation ("A circulatory system is seen out near the security fence..."), and Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian during their stint in 'Nam are all there. I've read some reviews complaining that these asides are too distracting from the main story. I disagree. The main story is okay for for what it is, but its ultimately just sort of a "who-dunnit" detective story as the conspiracy is unraveled. All the flashbacks are what make Watchmen what it is, and at its heart, more than anything, its a deconstruction of the comic book superhero mythos. Dr. Manhattan has Superman like powers, but instead of being infatuated with humanity like Clark Kent, because of how he now sees the world, Dr. Manhattan can no longer relate to it. Whereas some superhero characters like Peter Parker are constantly trying to balance their normal lives with their life as a masked hero, Rorschach is trying to use his vigilante persona to repress and destroy who he used to be, to the point where he considers his mask his real face. Whereas the Justice League is generally unquestioned as a force for good, the Watchmen are seen in their world as an inherently fascist idea, existing underground, occasionally rising from the depths only to suppress the "normal" people. Its an attempt to challenge the established idea of a comic book hero.

I've also seen the movie dismissed as too nihilistic. Its certainly one of the bloodiest, grittiest, darkest, and cynical comic book movies ever made, but I don't think its nihilistic. I suspect the biggest reason why its been labeled as such is because of how it ends, and the decision Ozymandias makes, which he believes has to be done to "save" the world. But the movie certainly doesn't endorse what he does, and another main character actually dies in protest of it. If you really want to come away with a central message of the movie, I don't think you should look to Ozymandias's decision, but reather an epiphany that Dr. Manhattan comes to at the end of the film, having spent most of the film before hand speaking more nihilistically than anyone ("A living human body and a dead human body have the same number of particles. Structually, there is no difference.") For as much as the movie walks you into the abyss, I think it walks you back out at the end. There is a lot of death along the way, but consider Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, a movie with many of the same themes of Red Scare-era paranoia, which ends with literally the world being destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. I don't think Dr. Strangelove is nihilistic either. I think it shows how nihilistic thinking in some of its characters leads to very bad things happening, to send a message to the real life powers that be to hopefully dissuade them from that sort of thinking.

The cast of Watchmen is mostly comprised of relatively unknowns, but they do a very good job with the material. Particularily, Jackie Earle Haley impressed me as Rorschach. While I thought his raspy Batman-esque voice was perhaps a little much (I never really imagined Rorschach talking like that. I imagine that he perhaps imagines himself talking in that voice), but once he's unmasked, he plays his character with a fearsome energy, constantly keeping this pierecing gaze on his face. The actress who plays the second Silk Spectre was a little off, I think, but in many ways she had the hardest sell, having to convince the audience that she was the lover of a giant, naked, blue CGI dude. I think the comic will always be the definitive Watchmen experience and that being a comic is the best medium for it, but there is a certain undeniable excitement in seeing what Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons created on a static page on a big theathre in motion. Its one thing to see Rorschach's mask in a still imagine, its another thing to see it constantly shift around, something which could only be described to us in the book. Watching the Watchmen is certainly a tremendously worthwhile experience.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (***1/2)

Somehow I managed to avoid ever seeing Butch Cassiday despite how well known it is, so when it was on TCM last month I DVR'd it and just got around to watching it last night. Having now seen it, its certainly easy to see why the film has garnered the acclaim that it has and why its still remained popular, though I have to say that the movie didn't completely blow me away either. The biggest reason why the movie has the following that it does is that its two title roles are played by absolute legends in the forms of Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Indeed, their buddy cop movie-esque banter throughout the movie is its strongest suit. The repore of the two fantastic actors goes a long way in terms of the movie's sheer entertainment value, but I'm not sure its enough to propel it to the status of, say, the 150th greatest movie of all time.

In the simplest sense, the movie tells the (at least partially) true story of Butch and Sundance, leaders of the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang, who narrowly escape capture and become fugitives after a train robbery that the law apparently saw coming and dispatched a posse to intercept them there. Butch and Sundance flee into the wilderness and, after several attempt to throw their pursuers off their trail fail miserably, they deduce that they're being followed by a sort of all-star team of the west's best lawmen and trackers. This all leads up to the famous waterfall scene, where Butch and Sundance opt to take their chances jumping rather than try and survive a gunfight in which they'd be outnumbered and surrounded. They manage to make it back to the home of Etta Place, who is Sundance's lover, although really the most extended period we see Etta with either of the two by themselves is when she's out bike riding wtih Butch in the "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" scene. This is as good a time as any to point out that I really, really, don't like that song, although the rest of Burt Bacharach's score is actually pretty good.

At any rate, Butch, Sundance, and Etta decide to travel south to Bolivia, where Butch--being the self-described brains of the operation--assures that it will be smooth sailing. There are some funny scenes where they realized that they forgot to learn Spanish at any point, and eventually end up robbing a bank while looking off of a notecard to tell the employees what to do. They run into much bigger problems, though, when they think that their old enemies from America have caught up to them, and they make brand new ones as word of the "banditos gringos" starts to spread around. They make an effort to go straight, but it seems as they're fated to remain the outlaws they've always been, and the movie ends with them still fighting, guns blazing.

If there's anything the movie is trying to be more than just a crime/cat-and-mouse chase movie, it seems like its trying to be a commentary on the end of the old west. There's a scene in which Butch and Sundance enlist the help of an old friend who's now working as a sherrif who tells him essentially that the era of the wild west outlaw is over, and that they're either going to die in a shootout or end of rotting in jail. I think the fact that we never really see the posse that's pursing Butch and Sundance for most of the movie up close and none of its members are developed as characters--despite Butch and Sundance explaining how formidable they are--adds to this motif. In a way, they're not really trying to outrun a pack of people, but they're trying to outrun the inevitable incursion of progress that's going to stifle the lawlessness of the frontier west. When they're forced to jump down the waterfall, they're literally being pushed aside by the new era. They eventually escape to Bolivia, but as we see from a montage sequence that separates the American part of the movie from its final act in Bolivia, they spend much of their treck down to South America intermingling with society-types at various gatherings. So, even though they physically escaped capture, they would seem to have lost some of their identity.

A lot can be discussed about how the movie plays off this idea of the end of the old west, and I'm sure on repeat viewings there would be more that would come up, but I can't see the movie being as endlessly watchable as a movie like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. That movie can be dissected literally almost shot-for-shot, and can be looked at from an endless amount of angles, from the operatic duel of its three principal characters to its condemnation of the brutality in the Civil War. Really the best things going for Butch Cassidy are its cinematogrophy, and the amazing repore of Paul Newman and Robert Redford, two greatly talented and charismatic actors who play off each other extremely well. These things make for a movie that's well worth watching, but as far as the greatest westerns of all time are concerned, I don't know that I put it up as high as some others might.

The Stuff on the Side of the Page

You may or may not have noticed the two sets of blog links in the right-hand margin of the page. If you have, you may be wondering what the hell they are since I haven't really made mention of them or why they're there. So... how about I do that right now:

Blogs of people I know:

1. Here She Be -- The Battlements: The blog of a friend from college who's an aspiring writer and current English major. He's also something of an aspiring artist and will link to stuff on his Deviant Art page from time to time. His postings will range from anything from poetry, to sections of a novel he's working on, to philosophy essays. If at any point you're tired of the myriad spelling and grammatical errors that most certainly litter all of my posts, you can check out his blog, as he's a much better writer.

2. Fortune Cookie Muse: Another writing blog from another college acquaintance. Admittedly, I don't read it regularly, but she was nice enough to link to this blog, so I figure I should return the favor.

3. We Built Another World: The blog of another friend who went to work for a consulting firm in Washington D.C. First and foremost, his blog gets like 80 awesome points for being named after a Wolf Parade song. Secondly, he stumbles upon a lot of cool grassroots initiative stuff like this: http://depave.org/blog/.

4. Screaming Lemur: Another blog of a friend who shares a lot of common interests like movies and Mystery Science Theatre 3000. As you can tell, he also reads a helluva lot more than I do. This blog may be on a bit of a hiatus right now, as he just joined the Navy as an officer, and is going through whatever the hell their equivalent of boot camp is called. I can't remember.

Blogs I read but have no affiliation with:

1. Balloon Juice: A political blog run by a guy named John Cole, who is a self-described "recovering Republican." Its written with the perfect combination of informed analysis and soul-crushing cynicism. If you ever want to simultaneously laugh while feeling like your brain going to explode, read his posts labeled "Clown Shoes," which are examples of far right-wingers being completely insane.

2. Calculated Risk: This is a financial blog. Under normal circumstances, I probably wouldn't be caught dead reading a financial blog, as I never found the world of high finance or really any subject in the realm of economics the least bit interesting. These, however, are not normal times, and I like to keep myself informed as to exactly how close we are as to being completely and utterly screwed. Reading Calculated Risk makes that pretty easy to do. Some of the commenters that post there regularly are also absolutely hilarious and give themselves usernames like "The Notorious A.I.G" and "Market Call of Cthulu." That's just inspired.

3. Glenn Greenwald: Another political blog and, I think, a very important one. His writing is much dryer than the "we're all screwed anyway, so lets make fun of everyone on the way down" sort of style of Balloon Juice, but I think everyone could learn a lot from reading his blog on any given day. There are a lot of tremendously important stories that, for one reason or another, a lot of people in traditional media completely ignore. Greenwald pursues these stories relentlessly, and explains in easy to understand terms why they're important and what the consequences of them being ignored are. Two examples that are clear immediately if you dig through his old posts a little bit are the wiretapping of U.S. citizens as authorized by the FISA bill under the Bush Administration, and the detaining of people without trial at Guantanamo Bay. The only downside to reading his blog is that it'll make you way angrier at pretty much everyone holding public office than you ever would be otherwise. Ignorance is bliss, I guess.

4. Polite Dissent: I just love the concept of this guy's blog. He's a real-life licensed doctor, but most of what he posts about is comic books and episodes of House. If you're reading a comic that just came out and there's a long narration by some character with a bunch of medical terminology and you're wondering if what they're talking about has any bearing whatsoever on real life, chances are its discussed here. He also publishes a medical review of every House episode that examines in depth the entire process the cast uses to arrive at a diagnosis. His reviews are up and down from episode-to-episode, but in general he likes the show a lot and considers it to be the most accurate medical show on television (which is still pretty far from being totally accurate).

5. Funnybook Bablyon: A comic book-centered blog that I stumbled upon at some point. I liked it first and foremost because it provided excellent annotations for the recent Batman R.I.P and Final Crisis series, which were both incredibly dense and pretty damn confusing for someone who doesn't have everything there is to know about the DC Universe committed to memory.

6. Todd Alcott: The blog of a professional screenwriter who's been lucky enough to have worked in Hollywood a few times in the past. His devotes most of his blog to analyzing movies that he's recently watched, either because he just felt like watching them, or because he's doing some sort of a broader analysis on a particular set of movies. Recently he just did a big series of posts on various superhero movies. He also personally knows James Urbaniak, also known as the voice of Dr. Thaddius Venture, and he posts ridiculously in-depth analysis of episodes of The Venture Brothers, which he clearly has a great fondness for, outside of the fact that he's acquainted with one of the voice talents.

That's all I've got for now. I'm sure I'll add more in the future, at which point I'll update this.

Burn After Reading

This is probably going to be pretty short because its been a while now since I watched it and its not that fresh in my mind anymore, but here goes.

Burn After Reading (***)

After watching Burn After Reading on DVD, I watched a little big of the "making of..." featurette included in the Special Features which included Joel and Ethan Coen being asked how the origin of the movie came about. The Coens explained that it arose from having a bunch of separate ideas for characters specifically tailored to actors that they liked, and then they built the rest of the story to tie together these parts. Hearing this was unsurprising, firstly because the actors do clearly seem to have a lot of fun in their roles and do seem to be excellent matches for most of them, but also unsurprising because the story feels extremely haphazard and rough around the edges. It is intended to feel somewhat, because its an ensemble movie that turns into this big, interconnected comedy of errors in which no one character really knows the full extent of what's going on. But in other movies of this ilk, take for example Guy Ritchie's Snatch or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, the movie eventually brings all of the separate storylines together at a climax where it becomes clear how everything ties in and all of the stories come to a satisfying resolution. In Burn After Reading, there definitely is a converging of storylines, and there certainly is some sense of closure to some of them--notably for one character who doesn't make it out alive--but it nevertheless doesn't feel complete at the end. The payoff, when you look back at the whole movie from its ending, isn't quite satisfactory, and though the movie tries to be clever through its various twists and turns and intertwined relationships, it doesn't have the same wit that the Coen brothers' previous forays into comedy like The Big Lebowski have in droves.

Like I said, it's been a little while now since I watched this, but from what I remember, the gist of the story goes something like this. Osbourne Cox (John Malcovich) is an easily agitated CIA Agent, who gets called into a meeting in which he finds out that he's been "reassigned" from his current job. His superiors assure him that this isn't the same as him getting fired and that they have another position lined up for him, but this is cold comfort to Osbourne, who decides he's going to leave his job on his own terms and quits. With a lot of free time now on his hands, Osbourne decides his going to write memoirs of his time in the CIA and try and get a book deal out of it. His wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), who obviously doesn't have a lot of confidence in his ability to write an entire book, this a fairly absurd idea. Actually, Katie dislikes being with Osbourne for more than just his memoirs and is planning to divorce him, which is probably for the best because she's already secretly banging another married man, Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney). Harry, in turn, also ends up banging Linda Litzke, a woman who seems to be going through a bit of a mid-life crisis which manifests itself through her planning a bunch of plastic surgeries and trying a bunch of online dating services.

Thing is, plastic surgery costs money, of which Linda isn't swimming in from her salary as a personal trainer. As such, she is immediately interested when her co-worker, Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), finds a CD with what he describes as "Some serious CIA shit with like... numbers..." in one of the locker rooms. In actuality, the CD is stuff Katie pulled off of her husband's computer. The "CIA shit" is fairly harmless information from Osbourne's memoirs, and the "numbers" are from his tax statements, information which a lawyer suggest she obtain before filing divorce papers. This never occurs to Chad and Linda, who attempt first to extort a random out of Osbourne Cox, then, when that doesn't work, try to sell the disc to the Russians, who they apparently still consider America's number one enemy. The CIA eventually gets wind of this attempted espionage, but doesn't really find out much about the whole situation, except who's sleeping with who.

Brad Pitt's character is easily the funniest part of the movie, and I'd say the movie is almost worth seeing just for his performance, even if the movie as a whole is kind of a mess. His chracter is kind of a spazz, and Pitt spends most of the movie in bicycle shorts dancing to music on his iPod or drinking out of a water bottle in the most effeminate way possible. The thing is, his character is completely ridiculous compared to the other main characters involved in the love triange (or love whatever the polygon would be for the total amount of people involved) part of the storyline. He seems more like a character that would be alongside Walter or "The Jesus" from The Big Lebowski, but the rest of the movie doesn't have the surreal quality that Lebowski has that allows you to believe that its taking place a world where those characters can exist. Which brings me back to where I started this. The movie has a lot of clever ideas, but they're clever ideas that seem to be pasted together with that crappy glue stick they give you in second grade art class that doesn't hold anything for more than about 20 seconds. Its not a terrible movie, but with what the Coen brothers have done in the past both dramatically and comedically, I expected something more polished.

I guess that didn't end up being all that short.

It's gettin' to be about that time, eh chaps?

Baseball season can't get here soon enough. Watching the Cubs get swept 3-0 in the NLDS at the hands of the Dodgers, making a 97-win regular season all for naught, was kind of like getting kicked in the nuts in super slow-motion. Neither a respectable, but not particularly memorable, 9-7 Bears season nor the possibly playoff bound, but still terrible outside of Derrick Rose Bulls have done much to take the sting away. Now here we are and February and, well, that sting is still going to be there for a while. Spring training games just started on Wednesday and we're still a good 7 weeks away from the regular season starting. And to be frank, its hard to imagine the regular season being all that satisfying an experience either. The Cubs won the NL Central pretty comfortably last year, are returning rougly the same team as last year, and the rest of an already pretty bad division would seem to have gotten substantially worse. As such, the Cubs winning the division this year wouldn't be a huge deal at all, and not winning it would represent a monumental collapse. The only thing that's going to remove the sting of getting swept in back-to-back NLDS series is going to be getting back to the playoffs and getting to the World Series. Even still, there's always a degree of excitment that comes with baseball starting up again, so let's talk about it.

Probably thanks in part to the recession, it was a pretty quiet off-season around the league with the exception of the Yankees, who threw massive piles of money at Mark Texiera and C.C. Sabathia. The Cubs are returning a roster that's largely the same at its core but its been tweaked a little bit. The two most significant losses are Mark DeRosa and Kerry Wood. Seeing Wood go is kind of bittersweet because, even with all of his injury issues he's been a member of the Cubs for a decade, and he seemed like a genuinely good guy. Although, I have to say, going to mlb.com and seeing a news story that Wood's back was bothering him and knowing that I didn't have to worry about it was something I can get used to. It seems like Carlos Marmol will be handed the reigns of the closer's job, although Kevin Gregg was brought in as well from Florida and could probably do an adequate job in a pinch. Provided Marmol doesn't have a huge breakdown (and the prospect of that is always going to scare the hell out of me so long as Lou's having him throw 40+ pitch outings and come right back the next day), the loss of Wood shouldn't be hugely crushing.

The DeRosa loss might be a bit more significant. DeRosa was brought in two years ago as a super-sub type of guy, and indeed, he's played admirably all over the field with the Cubs. Last year, though, DeRosa did more than just field a bunch of positions, he put together a career year at the plate, hitting 21 home runs and driving in 87. It would seem that, in dealing DeRosa to the Indians for pitching prospects, that the Cubs figure that DeRosa is not going to repeat that performance again (he did just turn 34), and decided to "sell high" if you will. Still, it is a little disconcerting that, to replace DeRosa, the Cubs went out and got Aaron Miles. Miles is a switch-hitter and the Cubs made it a goal to get less righty heavy after getting shut down by the right-hand dominated Dodgers pitching staff in the NLDS last year. The thing is, compared to DeRosa, even if he starts to decline, Miles isn't really all that good. He put together a .317 average last year with the Cardinals, but even still he had an OPS of .753 which was good for an OPS+ of 99 (an OPS+ of 100 represents an average hitter). The Cubs do have the left-handed Mike Fontenot, who isn't really that great either, but he's younger than Miles and I'm not convinced he'd be all that worse. The Cubs saved a little bit of money trading DeRosa and getting Miles but not all that much. I think the gap in production between DeRosa and Miles is probably wider than the gap in cost. So I think the Miles signing was somewhat dubious.

Maybe the biggest signing of the offseason for the Cubs was Milton Bradley. The reaction to the signing was immediately polarizing amongst fans, as the Cubs gave a pretty lucrative 3 year deal to a guy with undeniable hitting prowess but also with equally undeniable injury problems. Last year, Bradley had a fantastic .436 OBP with 22 HRs and 77 RBIs for the Indians in 126 games, but was used almost entirely as a DH, something which obviously isn't an option for the Cubs. You have to go all the way back to 2004 to find the last time Bradley was able to play in as many games as he did in 2008, when he appeared in 141 with the Dodgers. If he could stay healthy, the switch-hitting Bradley would likely be a huge upgade over Kosuke Fukudome, should he struggle as he did in the 2nd half of '08, but that's an enormous if. Bradley didn't exactly restore confidence in his health by leaving a spring training game with a quad injury after taking a walk in his first at-bat. It seems like the injury is pretty minor, but its hard to imagine a more ominous sign than that. The Cubs also said goodbye to backup catcher Henry Blanco and brought back Paul Bako, who caught alongside Michael Barrett for the Cubs in the '03 and '04 seasons. I don't really understand why they did this, as Blanco is the exact same age, is a slightly better hitter who every once in a while would inexplicably go on a tear offensively, and seemed to do an excellent job of handling the pitching staff. Bako, again, makes them more left-handed, but we're talking about the backup catcher here. Presumably Bako isn't going to be the first option brought in as a pinch-hitter against rightys. I dunno, this move really isn't a big deal, but I always had an irrational love for ol' Hank White.

In terms of the rotation, the Cubs re-signed Ryan Dempster who had a career year last year. He probably isn't going to repeat quite the success that he had last year, and honestly the Cubs probably paid him more than he's worth, but he seems like a genuinely good guy and he's fun to watch pitch. The Cubs also brought in Aaron Heilman from the Mets, who has split time between being a starter and a long reliever throughout his career. Heilman's numbers aren't stellar at all, but he gives them some pitching depth, which is good because its already being said that Rich Harden is going to be good for maybe 20 starts this year. The Cubs also have Sean Marshall still in their back pocket, but they haven't shown a willingness to put him in the rotation and keep him there yet, and he's going to be 26 next year. At this point you have to believe that the Cubs aren't counting on Marshall's upside being all that much more that what he's shown to this point.

Some of the moves by the Cubs are head-scratchers to an extend, but none of them seem egrigiously bad at this point. The Cubs were looking for fill-in guys, and while I'm not convinced that this group of guys is the absolute best to fill those roles, I think for the most part they'll do an adequate job, and the Cubs have a lot to fall back on this year as well. I think they may have overreacted a bit with just how crucial it was that they got more left-handed at the plate, to the point where they brought in guys like Aaron Miles who clearly weren't the best overall hitters out there, but who knows. If the Cubs run into the Dodgers again in the playoffs, which is certainly possible, those leftys may look like Godsends.

Nothing earth-shattering has happened in Spring Training thus far. Carlos Zambrano went 3 IP without allowing a run in his first start. Hopefully that suggests that he'll get off to a good start again in '09 as he did in '08, breaking a streak of a bunch of bad Aprils from years prior, but who knows. As I said, there's only so much you can read into Spring Training games. Micah Hoffpauir has been getting some ABs, and has hit a couple of home runs already. He'll probably make the roster and, hopefully, will hit a couple of those as a pinch hitter later on in the regular season.

That's all I've got for now.