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So: Tonight, in our first dispatch from Catch-up City—
I’ve actually been to a couple of movies over the last little while, believe it or not. One was Mission Impossible III, which I enjoyed quite a bit, because it has all the usual JJ Abrams pace and trickery plus a heaping side-helping of, oh, I dunno, genuine emotion. Phillip Seymour Hoffman disregards the tradition Bond-villain opportunity to showboat and scenery-chew in the service of creating a villain you quote-quote "love to hate"—instead, proudly and somewhat bravely, he gives us a villain who’s just a scary bastard with no redeeming features whatsoever…total scum, incapable of feeling fear or regret, most definitely (as Linda Schwartzbaum so wonderfully put it in Entertainment Weekly) "itching to kill". Before you ask, meanwhile, Cruise is also good, on every level; those who avoid this film due to personality oversaturation are therefore fucking themselves out of a pretty nice thing, but really, screw it/them. All the more for me.
On Friday we paid Lena to stay late so we could see X3: The Last Stand, which I had heard sucked rocks—and guess what? It didn’t. Not the best thing in the world, nor the best film in the trilogy—that’d be X2, by a country mile. The script is the weakest link, obviously rushed into production long before it should have been—I’d say about a fifth of the dialogue is outright wrong in a cringe-inducing way, for example, and I’m not real happy about the way some of the characters get treated. Yet strangely enough, even Magneto’s most truly over-the-top behavior seemed oddly endearing rather than crazy-making, especially when taken within the context of his long history of canonical epic mood-swings. Here’s a guy whose basic childish lust for vengeance against anyone who reminds him of a certain place where Work Makes You Free is constantly at war with his otherwise sophisticated old guy’s take-the-moral-high-roadness; all y’all who grew up in the Clairmont era, throw your hands in the air if you remember the time he pulled all of Logan’s Goddamn adamantium bones out through his skin, then ended up back at Professor X’s teaching within a fast five months or so. (Or, to put it another way—Genosha, anybody?)
For all that Erik remains my favorite X-character, he’s always had this sort of binge-drinker’s approach to strategy—doing the big slide into quasi-Hitlerness, playing "god among insects", then probably waking up the next morning thinking: "Holy FUCK, what the hell was THAT? I really must’ve been on the bad drugs when I made THAT particular decision." So no, I’m not hugely betrayed by anything in X3, given that it ends on two notes which seem to pave the way for A) Rogue finally going all Brotherhood (or Sisterhood, depending on Mystique’s grudge-holding abilities) and B) the ultimate Prof X/Magneto "Oh, don’t talk to ME about treating human beings like pawns!" snark-off. I had a good time, and I’m simply not invested enough in the fandom to want to send Brett Ratner any death-threats.
Next up, in the prospective theatre-type moviegoing experience queue—The Proposition, a spare and (predictably) poetic-violent Antipodean written by Nick Cave. I’d wanted to see it anyways, even though Janina tells me she overheard one Melbourne audience-member carp: "So he’s ugly, can’t sing, and now we know he can’t write, either" (well, I already know you’re wrong on at least two of those things, bitch…good job I don’t give too much of a shit about the other one), but what clinched it was reading my former boss Malene Arpe’s review in the Friday Star; turns out, she’s at least as big a Cave geek as I am, and damn proud of it. Now, to really appreciate the following, you have to imagine a deep, slightly monotone female voice saying, in an accent not unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger’s: "Post-punk poet/musician Nick Cave has written a movie exactly like you expect a movie by Nick Cave to be. Take these lines from his song ‘O’Malley’s Bar’—‘Jammed the barrel under her chin/And her face looked raw and vicious/Her head it landed in the sink/With all the dirty dishes.’ The Proposition is like that, except not funny."Ooh, hope so!
And that’s all for now. Back to real work.
I’ve actually been to a couple of movies over the last little while, believe it or not. One was Mission Impossible III, which I enjoyed quite a bit, because it has all the usual JJ Abrams pace and trickery plus a heaping side-helping of, oh, I dunno, genuine emotion. Phillip Seymour Hoffman disregards the tradition Bond-villain opportunity to showboat and scenery-chew in the service of creating a villain you quote-quote "love to hate"—instead, proudly and somewhat bravely, he gives us a villain who’s just a scary bastard with no redeeming features whatsoever…total scum, incapable of feeling fear or regret, most definitely (as Linda Schwartzbaum so wonderfully put it in Entertainment Weekly) "itching to kill". Before you ask, meanwhile, Cruise is also good, on every level; those who avoid this film due to personality oversaturation are therefore fucking themselves out of a pretty nice thing, but really, screw it/them. All the more for me.
On Friday we paid Lena to stay late so we could see X3: The Last Stand, which I had heard sucked rocks—and guess what? It didn’t. Not the best thing in the world, nor the best film in the trilogy—that’d be X2, by a country mile. The script is the weakest link, obviously rushed into production long before it should have been—I’d say about a fifth of the dialogue is outright wrong in a cringe-inducing way, for example, and I’m not real happy about the way some of the characters get treated. Yet strangely enough, even Magneto’s most truly over-the-top behavior seemed oddly endearing rather than crazy-making, especially when taken within the context of his long history of canonical epic mood-swings. Here’s a guy whose basic childish lust for vengeance against anyone who reminds him of a certain place where Work Makes You Free is constantly at war with his otherwise sophisticated old guy’s take-the-moral-high-roadness; all y’all who grew up in the Clairmont era, throw your hands in the air if you remember the time he pulled all of Logan’s Goddamn adamantium bones out through his skin, then ended up back at Professor X’s teaching within a fast five months or so. (Or, to put it another way—Genosha, anybody?)
For all that Erik remains my favorite X-character, he’s always had this sort of binge-drinker’s approach to strategy—doing the big slide into quasi-Hitlerness, playing "god among insects", then probably waking up the next morning thinking: "Holy FUCK, what the hell was THAT? I really must’ve been on the bad drugs when I made THAT particular decision." So no, I’m not hugely betrayed by anything in X3, given that it ends on two notes which seem to pave the way for A) Rogue finally going all Brotherhood (or Sisterhood, depending on Mystique’s grudge-holding abilities) and B) the ultimate Prof X/Magneto "Oh, don’t talk to ME about treating human beings like pawns!" snark-off. I had a good time, and I’m simply not invested enough in the fandom to want to send Brett Ratner any death-threats.
Next up, in the prospective theatre-type moviegoing experience queue—The Proposition, a spare and (predictably) poetic-violent Antipodean written by Nick Cave. I’d wanted to see it anyways, even though Janina tells me she overheard one Melbourne audience-member carp: "So he’s ugly, can’t sing, and now we know he can’t write, either" (well, I already know you’re wrong on at least two of those things, bitch…good job I don’t give too much of a shit about the other one), but what clinched it was reading my former boss Malene Arpe’s review in the Friday Star; turns out, she’s at least as big a Cave geek as I am, and damn proud of it. Now, to really appreciate the following, you have to imagine a deep, slightly monotone female voice saying, in an accent not unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger’s: "Post-punk poet/musician Nick Cave has written a movie exactly like you expect a movie by Nick Cave to be. Take these lines from his song ‘O’Malley’s Bar’—‘Jammed the barrel under her chin/And her face looked raw and vicious/Her head it landed in the sink/With all the dirty dishes.’ The Proposition is like that, except not funny."Ooh, hope so!
And that’s all for now. Back to real work.
