I’ve been blogging even less than my normally sporadic posting because I have an easier way of keeping my friends and family up to date on what I’m doing, which is to use twitter to post what I’m doing in 140 characters.  Follow me!

I love the new Bond. 

We went to see Casino Royale  on Sunday and I’ve been trying to figure out when I can go see it again.  I liked Pierce Brosnan as Bond, and had the same doubts about a blond Bond as many other people — but I thought Daniel Craig was superb.  And I really like the move away from the technological toys and special effects, and back to character — although the plot still required a lot of willing suspension of disbelief. 

The opening  credits were visually clever, but disappointingly unsexy.  But the opening sequence made up for that — it’s a stunning scene of  parkour, or urban steeplechase, and exemplifies the move away from high tech and back toward grittier action.  Beautifully done..

A small fun moment was the cameo appearance by Richard Branson.  Maybe he loaned them the airplanes for the shooting?

The card playing scenes went on too long for my taste, but I don’t watch Celebrity Poker or the World Series of Poker on television either — and apparently a lot of people do.  I’ll discuss later why poker is a game and not a sport..

The most post-modern moment in the movie comes when Bond orders a martini and the bartender asks "Shaken or stirred?"  He responds "Do I look like I give a damn?" 

This is a 21st century Bond, and I’m looking forward to more..

Last night for the first time since April, Brad and I sat on our couch and watched a movie.

When we came back from spending the month of May in Paris, our Tivo had died after many years of faithful service.  Instead of repairing /replacing it, we decided to turn off our satellite t.v. account and divorce ourselves (actually meaning me) not only from habitual t.v. watching, but from any television at home.  We kept our DVD player and planned to still watch movies, but since June was just a whirling dervish of activity and we were in Alaska for July and part of August, this was the first chance we’d had to sit down for a movie at home.

The Fast Runner was shipped to our house by Netflix on 3/16/06.  No movies have been shipped  to us in the last 3 months, so I figure that this movie cost us about $80.  The Fast Runner is the first movie made entirely in the Inuit language Inuktitut and was quite fascinating.  It was hard to understand the opening scene, and the official movie website explains the narrative better than the movie did.  I loved the beauty of the arctic scenery, and kept thinking that Brad should do his North Pole Marathon run in mukluks.  At 2 hours 52minutes, it’s a long movie, but definitely worthwhile.

And maybe I’m just getting old and cranky, but I didn’t think The 40 Year Old Virgin was funny at all, even though lots of friends said it was, and it got generally good reviews.  Brad and I only watched about 20 minutes before giving up.  As much as I often get tired of how women are portrayed in movies and beer commercials, I get tired of how men are portrayed, too — as sex-crazed perpetual adolescents who are completely vulnerable to peer pressure and willing to run down streets chasing beer trucks.  Maybe the men I know are just putting on a good front and either I don’t see that side of them or they’re really not so testosterone-poisoned and simplistic.  I’d rather watch The Sopranos or 24 for representations of men..

It’s fun to watch a California dreamin’ movie when it’s about 3 degrees below zero outside, which we did tonight.  I’m just on the margin of being old enough to have nostalgia for the ’70’s.  1976 was 4th grade for me, with all the bicentennial red, white, and blue painting of garbage cans and mailboxes — but I completely missed out on the skateboard craze, which is much of what this movie is about.  Pretty young boys with long blonde hair and tube socks with bright stripes around the top bonding with each other and their addled surfing / skateboarding mentor.  You care some about the boys and their fractured lives, and I liked the soundtrack (great cover of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here), but this one didn’t do much for me.  I usually like the guy version of chick flicks, especially when they involve car chases and crashes and explosions — maybe this one was too sensitive for me?  Or maybe I have a serious case of beautiful silky long blonde hair envy..

Well, if you’re looking for an uncomplicated heart warming tale to watch with your family over the Thanksgiving holiday, this isn’t it.  I loved this movie, for all the reasons I usually love movies — it’s dark, gritty, complex, emotionally taxing, and beautifully acted.  For extra interest, it also addresses issues of religion, faith, and redemption, and leaves them largely unresolved, also just like I like.  Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro and Sean Penn are the main characters in an intricate story with an accident at the center.  From the official website, director Alejandro González Iñárritu describes the film as:

a meditation that explores some of the things in our complex lives: loss, addiction, love, guilt, coincidence, vengeance, obligation, faith, hope, and redemption. I like multi-dimensional and contradictory characters, as I am and as, I guess, are all human beings that I know. No one is simply good or bad. We are just floating in an immense universe of circumstances. I like to show their weaknesses and their strengths without judging them, because only then can they reveal things about our human condition.

Beautifully done.  Would be a great double feature with Crash.

The one movie I saw in September that’s worth mentioning is Crash.  It is beautiful and painful and full of complex characters who are easy to judge at first sight, and then the movie reveals other facets of them that make each person very human.  The only character who seemed entirely beyond redemption was aPersian man who was willing to shoot a man and his 5 year-old daughter and seemed to have no understanding or remorse.  The movie tackles some big issues (race, power and abuse of power, corruption, different cultures clashing) and keeps challenging your initial understanding of scenes.  It’s nice to see a movie that isn’t full of an ironic detachment and actually dares to evoke emotion in a viewer.  Definitely one to see..

We went over to our friend Chris’s house tonight for movie night and to see friends and family and to check out his new furniture.  It was great to share time with some of my very favorite people after the somewhat hermit-like time in Alaska.  We had pizza and watched Touching the Void, which was quite an intense movie, some about luck, good and bad, some about the indomitability of the human spirit.  It’s the true story of two mountain climbers who successfully summit a mountain in the Peruvian Andes that had never been climbed before, and then run into a bit of trouble on the way back down.  From the official website: 

Joe Simpson and Simon Yates set out to climb the west face of the Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. It was 1985 and the men were young, fit, skilled climbers. The west face, remote and treacherous, had not been climbed before. Following a successful 3-day ascent, disaster struck. Simpson fell a short distance and broke several bones in his leg. With no hope of rescue, the men decided to attempt descent together with Yates lowering Simpson 300 feet at a time in a slow, painful process that could have potentially been deadly for both. One further misstep led to Yates unknowingly lowering his injured partner over the lip of a crevasse. With the gradient having gone from steep to vertical, he was no longer able to hold on. Certain they were about to be pulled jointly to their deaths — the only choice was to cut the rope.

We actually kept laughing at the British flair for understatement and all that stiff-upper-lip stuff that results in memorable lines like, "I was really quite knackered," after days without food or water and inching down a mountain in whiteout blizzard 80 below zero conditions.  "I could really use a cup of tea."

And the ensuing controversy about whether to cut or not to cut the rope continues.  Apparently the purists want the top climber to sit there and freeze and not cut the rope, while he slides slowly down and over a cliff.  It’s a very complex situation; really a Hobson’s choice.  I can’t even imagine being in that situation, or really guess what I would do.  I suspect that survival really is all, in the end.

I really liked the alternating voice over narration by the two actual climbers.  You can see that Simon Yates is a tortured soul.  He uses the passive voice to describe "what happened to Joe" rather than "what I did to Joe," and when he finally says "I cut the rope," his eyes look away and his voice shakes.

Joe Simpson’s narration is incredibly poignant.  He talks about how he didn’t want to die alone like an animal in the wilderness and how when he thought he was going to die he still didn’t return to the lapsed Catholic faith of his childhood, but really believes nothing happens when you die except that you become part of the rocks around you. 

The movie ended rather abruptly, as though once they were back at base camp the story was through.  I want to know more about the ensuing controversy, and what happened to each of them afterward.  Now I need to read the book.

Just watched my first artsy, indie, foreign language movie since sometime in June.  I had Tivoed Swimming Pool back in May, and after trolling around the 500+ channels available to us on the magical satellite t.v. and finding precisely nothing of interest, resorted to watching pre-recorded stuff.  This is a French movie, starring Charlotte Rampling as a British mystery writer who is in a bit of a lull.  She goes to her publisher’s house in the south of France for a restorative break, and encounters the publisher’s daughter, played by French actress Ludivine Sagnier who is hot, hot, hot in that surly, naked breasted, cigarette smoking, slightly unwashed French way.  The narrative is quite engrossing until precisely 90 minutes into the movie, when it took a completely unbelievable turn and lost me.  When you discover a dead body in the toolshed in the garden, you call the police, don’t you?  I would.

One of the recurring motifs in the movie is of women writing their way to sanity, which I really like.  And I like the curmudgeonly, cranky writer character.  But I get weary of these movie ideas that sex is merely a tool, and a way for powerful women to manipulate poor befuddled men.  There are a lot of beautiful visuals, and nice scenes of daily life in the Luberon, shopping in the village and spending time in a cafe.  There are scenes which transform part-way through and reveal themselves to be flashes of imagination and not the "reality" of the scene.  Part of the intrigue of the movie is that it’s difficult to tell how much of it is "real" narrative and how much of it happens only in the writer’s imagination.

Probably ready for an action/adventure movie now — or maybe we’ll watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is queued up in the Tivo.

On Memorial Day weekend Brad and I usually sit outside with binoculars trying to spot early forest fires caused by careless barbecuing activity in Eldorado Canyon State Park which borders our property.  Since we’ve had to evacuate for fire three times, once in the “just grab the family photos and the dogs and go” mode, it’s not just idle paranoia on our part.  However, this weekend we’ve imported our weather from Seattle and have had steady drizzle, then heavy rain, then fog, then some more drizzle — so fire danger is low and we’re hunkered down inside watching movies.  We’ve had the same three Netflix movies since before I left for Paris on the Ides of March, and decided to watch them.  Netflix has definitely made money on us in the last 2 1/2 months.  We watched The Skulls (which wasn’t as bad as I was afraid it would be, but just barely) and started Skulls 2 (guess which movies are Brad’s rentals?!?) before realizing after about 7 minutes that it was just like The Skulls and stopping.  Then we watched The Virgin Suicides, which is Sofia Coppola’s first movie.  I loved loved loved Lost in Translation and like to imagine it’s the kind of movie I’d make myself.  It has some of the dreamy, episodic things I’m trying to do in my writing in The North Side of Trees.  I had read The Virgin Suicides as part of my First Novels campaign, and hadn’t really loved the book — I liked its quirkiness, but felt there was a semi-misogynistic streak that repelled me.  I hoped that Brad wouldn’t exert his veto power over Chick Flicks and that Sofia’s deft touch for dark and quirky was developed here.  And indeed it was — very dark, indeed.  I told Brad I could teach a Media Studies course called “The Other Side of the Picket Fence” that would start with American Beauty and Blue Velvet, and would definitely include The Virgin Suicides.  Brad just kept saying, “Well, that was disturbing.”  I love a disturbing movie.