Phillip's comments (member since Nov 06, 2008)

Phillip's comments from the Science Fiction Films group.

hell yes! see the original!

it was on the radio here in the early 80's and i remember the place where i worked had it blaring over the speakers and i caught a lot of it...i remember really enjoying it.

i think mr bungle did some sort of nod to the prisoner as well...it was trevor dunn that gave me my prisoner box set a few years ago for a christmas present.

trust me, moi droug, you will never feel a sting of regret for missing it.

the only way i would watch it again is if i had a six year old to watch it with.

that's pretty damned unlikely, so.....

a friend dragged me to see 9 over the weekend. i'm posting here because i guess you could call it science fiction. it probably works for kids but there are so many things i would rather do with two hours of my time than see that movie. not recommended for anyone on this list....unless you have kids. and still...take them to see 500 days of summer or any other of the myriad of films out there aimed at adolescent america.

i have the entire series on DVD that came out a few years ago. it comes in three box sets with a few DVDs in each box. yes, the set has the original "arrival" episode. i pull them out and watch them every once in a while. it's a great series. i had a roomate from england a long time ago who introduced me to the series when it was broadcast here in the bay area on public television (circa 1980). he told me about how audiences would call the studios complaining that the series was too weird and how the producers and such just took it further and further out as they realized the network was going to pull the plug.

i agree with becky. i saw it again tonight and brought a lot of the questions and concerns that some folks have expressed on some of the discussion groups, and the emotional power of the film just steamrolled those concerns. in short, i was moved by it.

seeing it again did clear up quite a few of the questions folks have raised. and the powerful political allegory at the heart of the film is beyond bi-partisan politics and shows how deeply we as a human race fail to tolerate "the other" in any manifestation.

there have been complaints that the clever cinema verite style sort of morphs into an action movie. I do think the final confrontation is drawn out a little longer than i would have allowed, but it's not like the multinationals are ever ready to relinquish power, and it's not like they wouldn't call in military force to deal with this kind of situation....especially if you look at the prawns as a metaphor for low-income citizens of townships or ghettos. i haven't forgotten the watts riots or the rodney king riots. i've seen the city where i live invaded by military presence in order to supress resistance of any kind by brutality, force, and stone cold murder.

i really admire the way the filmmaker handled the moral position of the protagonist. he is a company man and carries out the eviction orders to the end of his rope. it isn't until his life is threatened by the surgeons on the operating table that he sheds his allegiance to MNU. then you are allowed to see the world of the film through the eyes of the aliens.

and the way that the mercenaries insist on militarizing the escape of christopher is outrageous. it's clear they want the aliens to leave but they are so insistent on policing, that they fire on the ship when it tries to depart. the military must justify its presence....

no one is going shake my admiration for this film. i think it succeeds in what it set out to do: show that the capacity for human beings to categorically, bureaucratically, and with extreme prejudice, externinate anything that triggers xenophobia in any of its manifestations.

sorry, i got cut off...

i was going to say that the films that use violence in a way that i can appreciate offer me some kind of emotional catharsis. in all of my favorite horror films, for example, the violence portrayed on screen helps me understand something unique about human behavior, and some, like texas chainsaw massacre, really push the level of what is acceptable to show on screen. in the case of tcm, i am wholly sucked in to the plight of the girl's survival. and the grizzly violence represents aspects of family (and fledgling capitalists out to milk the american dream) that are horrifying. again, there is an emotional catharsis in tcm that i don't find in inglorious basterds.

to narrow the focus, let's address the topic of violence in cinema... you cite two examples: full metal jacket and the shining.

dick haloran's death is the shining is devastating. you're rooting for someone to help wendy and danny. when haloran arrives and jack hammers an axe into his chest, there are so many reasons to feel despair. the scene moves me because kubrick made me care about all of the characters; i am just as concernned with jack's redemption as i am the family's survival.

when private pyle shoots the sargeant and then himself in full metal jacket i'm equally as heartbroken. more than anything, i want pyle to either a) go home to hisfamily and work at a gas station, or b) survive training camp.

kubrick uses the first half of his film to show us the severe methods of dehumanization used in training young people to be trained killers. pyle's behavior is one possibility in development of the teachings of drill sargeant hartman. he is the crazed animal, turning on its master. the negation of everything human, as expressed in pyle's downfall, is tragedy with a capital T...

but with inglorious basterds i didn't feel anything when the room full of nazis is torched. you don't care about anyone in that room. i don't care about the nazi soldier who gets the baseball bat treatment because he just appears out of nowhere...i'm encouraged, instead to laugh at it.

tarantino made me care about the characters in his early films, and i think those films work. this doesn't work for me. i'mnot willing to enjoy violence for the sake of entertainment.

tarantino

word.

my friend just called and asked if i wanted to go see district 9. i said sure (i had a rehearsal that got cancelled...what else am i going to do?)

i'll let you all know how it holds up on a second viewing.

sounds like fun, rob!

i had a great time watching it and my experience hasn't changed at all.
:)

there's a little faux news clip toward the beginning that shows it...that's why christopher jones spends all his time searching the trash heaps..he's looking for the missing piece so he can fix the ship and go home.

I thought they showed that the pod was knocked off the ship when the earth vessel (helicopter) approached the ship for the rescue mission when the humans first encountered the aliens.

it may be that the aliens, at that point, were low on food, but from the get-go we are shown that they were physically weakened and terrified (and because of those conditions) they were extremely docile. or, that's just the way they are naturally.

of course we expect them to be just like us: cunning, ready for a fight, full of that good ol' american ingenuity....(re: ruthless).

because they looked something like frogs (from the neck up anyway), from the get go i associated their behavior with our docile reptiles...i guess that's one reason why i didn't question their behavior so much.

you probably have much better things to do!
have a great trip!

i responded to this earlier today while i was riding the train and while passing through a tunnel the server ate my lengthy response. grrrrrrrrrrrrrr. and i was on a roll, too.

i'm going to let alex defend his points on his own and respond to the points that rob raised in what i assume are responses to items i mentioned.

rob wrote: They may be strong influences, but he definitely IMPROVES on them. And, let's be honest....how many people would KNOW he was riffing off of these obscure films if he hadn't come out and said as much?

you've used this argument in other discussions i've had with you...

well, i noticed, and i'm no film scholar. i'm a guy that likes movies and watches them. but what's your point? it's ok if he steals from others as long as no one knows who he's stealing from?

let's start with the copycat issue. as i said, i don't feel there's a big plagiarism fest going on in inglorious basterds. i was referring to kill bill, and i remain steadfast in my position. watch the last 20 minutes of kobayashi's hara kiri, or the ending sequence of samurai rebellion and you will see, shot for shot, a great deal of choreography that tarantino out right lifts from those films. i'm talking about the sequence in kill bill towards the end of part one where uma takes on that whole room full of black suited assassins....and that's just one example.

this isn't just a case of "influences". it's a case of ripping someone off note for note and passing it off as your own work. and those are not grindhouse flicks, as you mention, rob - the ones i mentioned are samurai classics. i think tarantino probably has a film collection at home that all of us would envy and i also think he has a great knowledge of films (and not just grindhouse - i've heard him talk about truffault and many other "art house" directors). i am also fully aware that art does not exist in a vacuum and that we are all influenced by the masters, or whoever it is that we have been inspired by.

my point is at this stage in his career, tarantino has a lot of clout in hollywood, a lot of committed fans and has earned a helluva lot of critical acclaim. we're not talking about some obscure filmmaker that emerged from rural wisconsin and fell into the limelight by accident. we're talking about Quentin (kiss my arrogant white ass if you ain't feelin' me) Tarantino. The guy earned our respect with his early works, but from where i'm sitting he's resting on his laurels and not pushing himself. i don't think he succeeded in kill bill and inglorious basterds. QT has earned a lot of critical acclaim and if he wants to continue to maintain our respect, we have to hold him to certain artistic and aesthetic standards, whether his influences are grindhouse or not. i'll get back to this in a second.

moving on:
i would agree that the colonel and shoshana turned in good performances, and i said as much in my post...but in the case of the other performances, (the bastards in particular), they felt like cardboard constructs and the script they had to deal with was empty...it's not like you could coax a great performance out of a lot of those lines.

this introduces my next main issue. the nazis are a cheap trick propped up to justify the kind of film tarantino wants to make (a violent film). if he were telling a well developed narrative here, i could almost applaud it. as i mentioned above, there are some excellent films like der untergang that take on the nazi question from the inside with remarkable results. this just isn't that kind of film, and perhaps it's foolish of me to hold him to that kind of standard, but again, the plot feels really flimsy to me....and we're talking about a film that runs well over two hours...it's not like he didn't have time to develop some ideas. i feel he uses the nazis because he knows he doesn't have to do a lot of exposition - he just assumes everyone hates them on principal and wants to see them tortured and maimed and burned at the stake.

i'm going to relate this to your point about the audience as voyeurs in the cinema, cheering when the nazis get roasted. i didn't feel that way at all, mostly because i can't call a superimposed chalk line with an arrow pointing to goebbels (or any of the other notable SS crowd) as plot development. no one in that theater existed on any kind of deep human level to me, and that's tarantino's job to give me something to hang on to so i can feel something when a scene like that goes down. if i compare it with one of the final scenes in "come and see" (one of the greatest war films i know of), where the nazis round up an entire village, lead them into a barn and burn it down, well, wait a minute, i can't compare it to that scene. the barn burning scene in come and see WORKS (i dare anyone to watch that and not be weeping uncontrolably when it's over). the fire scene in IG just reads like some kind of whacky WB antics. there isn't an emotional climax there for me at all because tarantino didn't do what he needed to do to prepare me to have one.

finally, i suppose i am particularly sensitive to this whole way-overdone-nazi-bad-guy routine because i have so many dear friends in germany who are truly lovely people trying their best to overcome this enormous shadow that still hangs over their country, despite their current progressive politics and their continued artistic and cultural excellence.

i neglected to mention death proof in my original post, because i have only seen it once. here's a situation where i feel QT is really on a roll. the film isn't overly long (which isn't a problem with me as long as the movie is keeping me engaged), and it seems like the perfect kind of romp that he can pull off without straying too far from where his talents rest. i wish he would make more of those 90 minute flicks, i think he has a real flair for it, and leave the films that are trying (in his own unique way) to merge into more "serious" (forgive me for using that word) cinema. whether you think inglorious basterds is "serious" or not, i think in both kill bill and inglorious basterds he is trying to come from a different set of traditions that exist in art house and related styles.

surely not. there have been awful trailers for great movies but very rarely great trailers for awful movies.

i have a pretty wide embrace of style and intent when it comes to film (not so much with literature). i bought this box set with 50 horror films recently. this is a good example...there are some great films in that box, there are some so bad it's good films in that box (like attack of the giant gila monster), and there are some really awful, unwatchable film in that mix. i figures i would enjoy even the really bad ones, because my tolerance for B-movies is pretty high. but i realize that, like alex, i need good characters and a good story...the execution and the budget (and plotholes) are irrelevant.

i don't know - are we still talking about district 9? i thought it had all of the things i want from a movie. yes, it may have been the ganja, but the plotholes never kept me from being swept up and taken away by the narrative.

nice! paul westerberg was representin' minneapolis style, eh?
i played that festival a few years ago. what year did you attend?

i've got things under control out here. remember, marijuana is basicallly legal in oakland. we voted it that way. and we're proud of it.
:)

theaters in san antonio?

man, i think i've been there once or twice. i don't really know, but i have a lot of friends down there, i can make an inquiry on the houston new music discussion list. they all seem to know what's going on all over texas.