Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Another Gorgeous City Day
First to answer my darling brother Richard:
Richard: I am not sure the Red Door I wrote about is the same one in that film, since I neevr saw that film, but the Red Door name is pretty much linked to Elizabeth Arden and if Michelle Pfeiffer was going to an upscale city spa, then yeah, it probably is that one. But, as I said , I didn't see the movie.....but there are a few films that I did see recently and need to write about them, for you to see, Richard and for others as well....but, speaking sister to brother, these are films you will adore and need to see, though two of them may make you terribly uncomfortable to watch.
Peter and i treated ourselves to a night at the movies (rather than going out to a crowded theatre to see my ever adored SHREK sequel....so we snuggled down and ordered Pay-per-View right here in our own cozy living room and went thoroughly into three movies in one evening! That's a lot even for us to watch at one time, but we did it and we loved it.
First we watched a dire and dark thing called CHILDREN OF MEN, a British film, that takes place in 2027, when it has come about that the Earth has become totally infertile and unable to bear children. The resulting upheavals of 18 years of hopelessness are portrayed in the film as cataclysmically depressing and nations have imploded with fear and terror, until England is the only land left with any sort of non-anarchic government, so people from all over have been flocking there...the result of all that inpouring of immigrants has resulted in a militaristic push to rid the nation of all illegal immigrants, and the warring, dark, terribly ruined landscapes are filled with wire pens filled with miserable foreigners waiting to be sent ...somewhere....wherever it is , is not good...ANYWAY: there is a thing called the Human Project somewhere on an island, composed of the worlds' greatest minds...and when a small rebel group discovers a young girl who has actually managed to get herself pregant, the film becomes about how to get that girl safely to that Human Project haven. Of course, the path is made practically impossible by all the groups who war with each other to obtain the girl for their own agendas, and there are killigs, explosions, maimings, betrayals, more killings and bloody wrenchings, and yet more betrayals , until you don't know who is good and who is bad, but it is all pretty damned awful.
Our hero (Clive Owen) finally manages to not only birth that precious baby in some squalorous prison camp somewhere behind horrible refugee walls filled with dirt and excrement and hate, but he somehow dodges all the billions of bullets to finally get her to the foggy bay where the ship called Tomorrow (yep, it's that kind of movie) , we assume, picks her up and takes her to safety...of course, our hero dies at the last minute from a wound he somehow managed to obtain without our knowing it: part of being a hero is to show stoicism til the bloody end....Michael Caine is in it and is wonderful (he meets a martyred but nonetheless horrifying end, as a remnant of the wafting '60's counter-culture, hidden away in the woods with his catatonic wife, until the ugly world gets in and kills him...this made me sad)....and Julianne Moore is the head of the main group wanting to rescue the girl...Julianne also meets a bloody end at the betraying hands of her own comrades...sad to see the stars killed off so early...but somehow right for this, finally, effective and powerful movie. There is not a thing wrong with our planet that is not somehow addressed in this movie. And I for one am in the mood recently to appreciate film makers who give a damn and want to make a movie for the good of mankind rather than for its money......which leads me to the next uplifting bit of cinema:
FAST FOOD NATION....warning: if, for any reason , you want to continue eating at any fast food joints, if you need your weekly fix of McDonald's, Wendy's or Burger King, do not, I REPEAT: DO NOT SEE THIS MOVIE! If you want to break yourself of the bad habit of eating from cardboard containers and drinking shakes with no milk in them, then by all means see this film. I , myself, will never walk in the door of another fast-food joint as long I live.
This movie opens on the staff-marketing meeting of the Mickey's Company (right there a swipe at the fast food Disney empire of non-nourishing film crap),,,they named the fast food chain in the movie Mickey's...anyway...sales are up and all looks rosy, and the broad smiles on the faces of the men (all men...hmmm..) responsible for product development let you know that their coffers are nicely lined because of this upswing in Mickey's fortunes...their iconic Big One is selling like crazy...the nation is flocking through the pre-fab doors of their thousands of locations......juicy, hot, tasty and popular: the Big One! Greg Kinnear (who walks the fine line between pleasure and its attendant guilt better than any actor I know) is Head of Marketing....The Big One is his baby! Suddenly....a fly in the ointment ( in this case not so far off the mark), trouble in Paradise: the DEO takes Greg aside and asks him to go off on a field trip to investigate rumors that microscopic traces of excrement have been found in their burgers! There is shit in The Big Ones! Ick! So, of course, he sends the Head of Marketing to investigate: how are we gonna package this bit of news? So, off Greg K. goes to some vast part of the Southwest, where the largest meatpacking plant stands, stinking, awful and yet somehow clean looking and shiny...it is near the Mexican border, so we cut to sweaty illiegals schlepping across the nighttime borders and we soon switch to their POV's: indigent illegals needing work and they come to need that big shiny stinking plant in order to make a living.
This Evil versus the Innocents is underscored by Bobby Carnevale playing a lecherous hansome evil stinking sexual predator who nonetheless is Supervisor of The Killing and Cutting Floors! He fucks anything in sight, and I now fear one more thing that may be in our hamburgers,,,but I digress...(do I really?)...
ANYWAY: Greg discovers all sorts of horrors that go on, but he nees his job and covers it all over with a smile (Bruce Willis plays the most amazingly convincing contractor whose outrage at being discovered selling dirty meat is so pure (the outrage) that he almost convinces me that a little shit in our food is part of a well-rounded life...ANYWAY...Willis is brilliant in this movie. And a thorough villain if ever there was one: he personifies our Federal Government as it now stands: duplicitious and all too convincing, turing black to white and day to night, and it's our fault if we waver in believing him. So on the story roles, and it only gets bleaker as, from the illegals POV, we discover the true horror of what ges on in this plant....we are spared nothing: long lingering shots of meat being sliced, cut, stomachs disembowelled, kidneys "pulled", workers arms and legs being shredded in unblinking machinary, the Management blaming drug-free workers for being drug-addicted in order to blame them for the accidents,etcetcetc....it is clear that the cattle are not the real animals: Management is.
MORE TO COME ON THIS FILM and the third one we saw....right now: gotta go teach!
Richard: I am not sure the Red Door I wrote about is the same one in that film, since I neevr saw that film, but the Red Door name is pretty much linked to Elizabeth Arden and if Michelle Pfeiffer was going to an upscale city spa, then yeah, it probably is that one. But, as I said , I didn't see the movie.....but there are a few films that I did see recently and need to write about them, for you to see, Richard and for others as well....but, speaking sister to brother, these are films you will adore and need to see, though two of them may make you terribly uncomfortable to watch.
Peter and i treated ourselves to a night at the movies (rather than going out to a crowded theatre to see my ever adored SHREK sequel....so we snuggled down and ordered Pay-per-View right here in our own cozy living room and went thoroughly into three movies in one evening! That's a lot even for us to watch at one time, but we did it and we loved it.
First we watched a dire and dark thing called CHILDREN OF MEN, a British film, that takes place in 2027, when it has come about that the Earth has become totally infertile and unable to bear children. The resulting upheavals of 18 years of hopelessness are portrayed in the film as cataclysmically depressing and nations have imploded with fear and terror, until England is the only land left with any sort of non-anarchic government, so people from all over have been flocking there...the result of all that inpouring of immigrants has resulted in a militaristic push to rid the nation of all illegal immigrants, and the warring, dark, terribly ruined landscapes are filled with wire pens filled with miserable foreigners waiting to be sent ...somewhere....wherever it is , is not good...ANYWAY: there is a thing called the Human Project somewhere on an island, composed of the worlds' greatest minds...and when a small rebel group discovers a young girl who has actually managed to get herself pregant, the film becomes about how to get that girl safely to that Human Project haven. Of course, the path is made practically impossible by all the groups who war with each other to obtain the girl for their own agendas, and there are killigs, explosions, maimings, betrayals, more killings and bloody wrenchings, and yet more betrayals , until you don't know who is good and who is bad, but it is all pretty damned awful.
Our hero (Clive Owen) finally manages to not only birth that precious baby in some squalorous prison camp somewhere behind horrible refugee walls filled with dirt and excrement and hate, but he somehow dodges all the billions of bullets to finally get her to the foggy bay where the ship called Tomorrow (yep, it's that kind of movie) , we assume, picks her up and takes her to safety...of course, our hero dies at the last minute from a wound he somehow managed to obtain without our knowing it: part of being a hero is to show stoicism til the bloody end....Michael Caine is in it and is wonderful (he meets a martyred but nonetheless horrifying end, as a remnant of the wafting '60's counter-culture, hidden away in the woods with his catatonic wife, until the ugly world gets in and kills him...this made me sad)....and Julianne Moore is the head of the main group wanting to rescue the girl...Julianne also meets a bloody end at the betraying hands of her own comrades...sad to see the stars killed off so early...but somehow right for this, finally, effective and powerful movie. There is not a thing wrong with our planet that is not somehow addressed in this movie. And I for one am in the mood recently to appreciate film makers who give a damn and want to make a movie for the good of mankind rather than for its money......which leads me to the next uplifting bit of cinema:
FAST FOOD NATION....warning: if, for any reason , you want to continue eating at any fast food joints, if you need your weekly fix of McDonald's, Wendy's or Burger King, do not, I REPEAT: DO NOT SEE THIS MOVIE! If you want to break yourself of the bad habit of eating from cardboard containers and drinking shakes with no milk in them, then by all means see this film. I , myself, will never walk in the door of another fast-food joint as long I live.
This movie opens on the staff-marketing meeting of the Mickey's Company (right there a swipe at the fast food Disney empire of non-nourishing film crap),,,they named the fast food chain in the movie Mickey's...anyway...sales are up and all looks rosy, and the broad smiles on the faces of the men (all men...hmmm..) responsible for product development let you know that their coffers are nicely lined because of this upswing in Mickey's fortunes...their iconic Big One is selling like crazy...the nation is flocking through the pre-fab doors of their thousands of locations......juicy, hot, tasty and popular: the Big One! Greg Kinnear (who walks the fine line between pleasure and its attendant guilt better than any actor I know) is Head of Marketing....The Big One is his baby! Suddenly....a fly in the ointment ( in this case not so far off the mark), trouble in Paradise: the DEO takes Greg aside and asks him to go off on a field trip to investigate rumors that microscopic traces of excrement have been found in their burgers! There is shit in The Big Ones! Ick! So, of course, he sends the Head of Marketing to investigate: how are we gonna package this bit of news? So, off Greg K. goes to some vast part of the Southwest, where the largest meatpacking plant stands, stinking, awful and yet somehow clean looking and shiny...it is near the Mexican border, so we cut to sweaty illiegals schlepping across the nighttime borders and we soon switch to their POV's: indigent illegals needing work and they come to need that big shiny stinking plant in order to make a living.
This Evil versus the Innocents is underscored by Bobby Carnevale playing a lecherous hansome evil stinking sexual predator who nonetheless is Supervisor of The Killing and Cutting Floors! He fucks anything in sight, and I now fear one more thing that may be in our hamburgers,,,but I digress...(do I really?)...
ANYWAY: Greg discovers all sorts of horrors that go on, but he nees his job and covers it all over with a smile (Bruce Willis plays the most amazingly convincing contractor whose outrage at being discovered selling dirty meat is so pure (the outrage) that he almost convinces me that a little shit in our food is part of a well-rounded life...ANYWAY...Willis is brilliant in this movie. And a thorough villain if ever there was one: he personifies our Federal Government as it now stands: duplicitious and all too convincing, turing black to white and day to night, and it's our fault if we waver in believing him. So on the story roles, and it only gets bleaker as, from the illegals POV, we discover the true horror of what ges on in this plant....we are spared nothing: long lingering shots of meat being sliced, cut, stomachs disembowelled, kidneys "pulled", workers arms and legs being shredded in unblinking machinary, the Management blaming drug-free workers for being drug-addicted in order to blame them for the accidents,etcetcetc....it is clear that the cattle are not the real animals: Management is.
MORE TO COME ON THIS FILM and the third one we saw....right now: gotta go teach!
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