Das Boot

We caught up with the 1981 movie, Das Boot (The Boat) last night, on Maori Television - the channel that actually shows good movies, and not just re-run 'blockbuster premieres.' When I say we caught up with it, we actually missed the first twenty minutes or half an hour; I don't know exactly how long it was. But that didn't cause too much problem in following who was who and how it all fitted together. It probably would have helped to know a bit more about the characters, but ce la vie. 

This was one of Wolfgang Petersen's big hits: even though it was German-made, and shown with subtitles, it was seen worldwide. After The Neverending Story, and a TV series based on Das Boot, he went onto work in Hollywood, producing In the Line of Fire, Air Force One, The Perfect Storm and other well-known titles.

Das Boot has a somewhat meandering storyline, and a host of characters, and yet is full of tension. The big set pieces are very well done: the torpedoing of a group of freighters and being chased by a destroyer; the unexpected dive to the bottom of the sea in the Gibraltar Strait; the ending which pulls the rug from underneath our expectations. But in the midst of all these is the quiet interplay between the Captain and the various officers and sailors, the warmth and humour, the generosity and courage, the creative thinking, the strength of working together for a common cause.

It's hard to think how men in one of these U-boats could have survived the continual stress of months at sea - when two of them are due to be off-loaded for leave, the leave is abruptly cancelled. One character, Johann, who's seen nine voyages on the submarine, has a mental breakdown during one of the crises; it's surprising more of the men don't go off the deep end. The confined space is brilliantly captured: there's hardly room to turn around in some of the areas, and the ordinary sailors live and sleep in a narrow bunk room with hardly space enough for them to sit down. In a couple of scenes they're all seen lying asleep, exhausted, on the floor, curled and entwined around each other, none of them able to sleep with their legs out straight. Several times absolute quiet is required: only the Captain can see through the periscope, and even that view is limited; the rest have to wait and listen, unsure of what's going on outside their metal walls.

The cast is uniformly good, though thirty years down the track one or two of the performances seem a little too large for the cinema (maybe more so for the TV screen). And the detail in the direction is superb, quite apart from the hugely exciting moments when the camera races through the sub following one or other character desperate to fix yet another part of the sub that's come apart.

Reading the information on the Wikipedia page for the movie is very informative. Apparently the TV series used additional material that had been cut from the movie. The original release came in at 150 minutes, but the much later director's cut is another half hour longer. There are fascinating details about what the actors endured during the course of making the movie, and the way models and various versions of the sub were used (at one time the mock-up of the sub disappeared overnight; Spielberg had been given permission to use it for Raiders of the Lost Ark). It's also interesting to read that the scene in which one of the characters calls out 'Man overboard!' was unscripted: the actor who went 'overboard' had actually fallen, and broken ribs. He was also concussed, and had to be brought from hospital for some of his later scenes. There's a great deal more, for those interested.

Lincoln

We watched Spielberg's Lincoln last night. I fast-forwarded through the opening battle scene, thinking I was going to be subjected to another opening like that in Saving Private Ryan. In fact, the battle scene is relatively short, and is the only one in the whole movie. Spielberg eschews physical battle in favour of battles of words, and what magnificent ones they are. A wide range of characters orate and mock and insult within the House of Representatives, and use a quality of language seldom heard in movies these days. (Surprisingly there are a few four-letter words scattered about, which seem out of place in this world of men who speak top quality English.)

This is an epic story without the casts of thousands (even though to begin with it seems we're inundated with new politicians in every scene), or the huge set-pieces. It focuses for more on real people speaking real thoughts, expressing deep emotions and seen in many small-scale scenes.

The cast is full of well-known faces, but Daniel Day Lewis trumps them all with a performance that's magnificent in its understatement. Only occasionally does he get to shout, or orate, and it's all the more impressive for it. He also gets all the best lines, with some wonderful scenes in which he tells stories of considerable humour and wit. Sally Field turns out a wonderful performance too as his wife, a woman whose turmoil and grief isn't easily switched off, and who is as capable as her husband of speaking forthrightly. In fact, the women in the cast, though they're few, have excellently written roles, and aren't merely treated as adjuncts to the vocal men.

Tommy Lee Jones plays Tommy Lee Jones, as always, but his character is rich in verbosity and he revels in the chance to speak lines that are short and succinct, as he's had to do in many of his better-known movies. Picking out anyone else in the cast is difficult; everyone makes a top-notch contribution, no matter how big or small his or her role.

It's interesting to see how things have changed in the White House, or its 19th century equivalent. Plenty of staff, but none of that checking at every door as to who is who, and security creeping around everywhere, and people struggling to treat other people as ordinary human beings. Lincoln's young son Tad (who is the one we see when we hear that Lincoln has been shot - offstage, as it were) breezes around the house, in and out of offices, without so much as a flicker of concern from anyone. The servants are friends, and the staff are known by name and touched on the shoulder by Lincoln in an affectionate manner. Compare this to the controlled chaos of the White House in The West Wing series...

I didn't think I'd enjoy Lincoln, and it does take a while to get to grips with the debates and arguments that are going on, but this film has a clever and thoughtful script (by Tony Kushner, the third of three scriptwriters to work on the film), and has been directed impeccably by Spielberg.

Snow, and Snowy

One of those strange Dunedin days: mild initially but with a bitingly cold wind. Then a drear sky. Then sunshine, just when you'd turned all the heating on. And then, just as we were going out for lunch with a young friend who's been in England for a year (he's my younger son's best mate) and another older friend, the sky went deep gray and the wind sent snow flakes hurling at you at a rate of knots. By the time I got from the house to the car I was covered in them (snowflakes, not knots).

And then, while we sat inside the pub having our meal, the snow vanished completely (it hadn't settled on the ground at all) and it was sunshine again.

Meanwhile, I've just had a look at the first official trailer for Tintin. He wasn't ever a great favourite of mine, but I must have read some of the books at some point, as the characters presented here all look fairly familiar. But where's the personality behind them? If the trailer's anything to go by, the CGI process presented here is no better than the one in Polar Express in terms of characterization. Where's the real Jamie Bell under all this, or Andy Serkis? There was a great deal more life in the latter's Gollum or even in his King Kong. These characters lack something which I can't quite put my finger on. The various comments on the Guardian article put it down to a deadness in the eyes, which, when you think about it, is odd, because there are real actors involved in the production of what is essentially an animation process. Why should there be any deadness?

The trailer looks very hustle and bustle and not terribly enticing, to be honest. Maybe it just presents all the fast bits and none of the slow...

I make the top of the search list more than once!

I have to ask, what the heck is a crowl cage? This is what someone went searching for on Yahoo a couple of days ago. I shouldn’t worry, as it brought my blog up at the top of the list, but since Yahoo thought that John Cage and Mike Crowl had something in common with a crowl cage, it seemed a bit of a pointless result for the query.
Various other equally inconsequential results turned up, none of them having anything to do with a crowl cage. The results are much the same on Google, and I still come up at the top of the list. Well, good on John Cage for providing me with some assistance in terms of search queries.
I'd still like to know what the person was looking for, and what they thought 'crowl' meant.
I didn’t do nearly so well when it came to people getting search results for Baldwin St and wheelie bins. I’ve written about the incident in which a student died elsewhere, but it’s interesting to see that a number of other people have also written about this, and several of them have got their facts wrong. Word-of-blog can be just as muddled as word-of-mouth, rather like the equivalent of Chinese whispers on the web.
Which reminds me that I had a good idea about blogs at lunch time while talking to a friend – which I’ve now forgotten. Maybe it’ll come back before I finish this post.
I did manage to get to the top of the Google list with ‘skin game coughing’ – a fairly meaningless phrase, you’d think, until you realise, as Google apparently did, that it might have something to do with Hitchcock’s movie, The Skin Game, and the scene in which the auctioneer has a persistent cough.
Eeyore’s characteristics turn up again, and I get to third place. Pretty good for a little blog that only three people ever read….
The film, Deliverance, must be being studied at the moment, since a common search is for ‘notes deliverance’. And I get to third place for that too, even though my only comment on this film is to quote from another source – the Christian Science Monitor, in fact – which actually has something good to say about the movie. I remember it as a shocking and nasty piece of work, with the only brief moment of quiet and gentleness being when one of the four main characters stops to play a duet with a young mountain boy. It’s a well-known sequence, but it has very little to do with the violent nature of the rest of the movie. Maybe it’s the calm before the storm.
Back in 2007, I mentioned that Peter Jackson was likely to be directing a film (or perhaps three films made back-to-back) about Tin Tin. Seems like that’s going ahead, with Jackson and Spielberg co-directing. One source says they’ll each direct one movie, and then co-direct the third. I get the impression this is all still in the pipeline as yet.
Extraordinarily I make it to the top of the list again, with a query about John Adams Composer. I was very taken with a piece of music by this composer that I heard in England, and intended to get to know his music better when I got back home. For a brief period, Adams was flavour of the month on the local Concert radio program, but they didn’t play the piece I’d heard, and what I did hear didn’t great excite me. Adams appears to be in the mode of composers such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich, guys who have their moments, but who have chosen to compose minimalist music that can drive you quite insane. Unless that’s their intention, of course.
I’ve been trying to think how I can introduce strollers into this post, and so far haven’t succeeded. Strollers, for those who don’t have, or never have had, children, are those awkwardly-shaped devices that fold up into equally awkwardly-shaped shapes, and in which you carry your toddler (when it’s not folded up – the stroller, I mean, not the child). We used to call them baby buggies, and I think they have a number of different names, depending on where in the world you happen to live. Baby buggies were okay – they were lighter than some strollers I’ve since come across, and we didn’t go through too many of them in carting our five kids around over a period of several years. Nor did any of them ever fold up while the child was in them, which I’ve seen happen with later versions. When we first bought one (in fact, I think we brought it back from England with us), they were the new thing. After that, everyone had to have one. Of course.

Indiana Jones returns!

We went to the movies today to see the latest Indiana Jones escapade: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I had to look the rest of the title up as that part of the film made no impact on me at all!
The reviews I’d read were a bit mixed, but Roger Ebert seemed as pleased as punch about the movie just because it was so much fun that I thought it would be worth catching it at the cinema rather than waiting for the DVD to come out. If nothing else, the sound in cinemas is far more effective than what comes out of our TV – although when we’re watching West Wing (we’ve just gone through the entire sixth season), the phones ringing in the background often seem to be pitched somewhere away from the TV and occasionally make us want to go and answer them.
Anyway, the film is a hoot. It doesn’t take itself in the least bit seriously, plays off against Harrison Ford’s age on more than one occasion, fills itself with in-jokes, references itself back to the other movies - and offers the most extreme villains (and, as usual, disposes of them in particularly nasty ways – they just never learn, do they?).
The car chases and fights on car chases are so absurdly over-the-top you’d have to be a misery guts to carp at them (one or two reviewers have managed to play misery guts), and the spectacular destruction of practically everything in sight has a certain kind of odd satisfaction. It’s a bit like going to the refuse dump (or tip, as we used to call it; it’s now something absurd like the transit station), and throwing piles of glass off the back of your vehicle, or large pieces of borer-ridden furniture, or great heavy chunks of metal, all of which you can smash with completely-permitted freedom.
The Indy story is pretty regular: it starts off with lots of nasty Russians taking over the atomic bomb site in Nevada (Indy manages to set the bomb off, though how he does it is anyone’s guess), shifts to Indy once again in his proper employment as Professor in some elitist college (which narrowly avoids getting thoroughly wrecked), and then sets him off on a madcap trail around half the world, creating havoc everywhere with his newly-found companion, Mutt Williams, a much younger bloke with a surprising ability in sword-play and a penchant for doing his hair rather too often.
There are a couple of real plot surprises (the film doesn’t really have time for much plot with all its other antics), and a curious ensemble of characters, Shia LeBeouf as Mutt, John Hurt as a cracked archaeologist, Karen Allen (dug up, as it were, from the first movie in the series) as Indy’s old flame, and Ray Winstone as a goody/baddie/goody/baddie who doesn’t quite know which side he’s on from one scene to the next. Cate Blanchett has enormous fun as the villain (she’s more interesting than similar bad females in the Bond series, which is saying something). She has a sidekick with a constitution like an ox, and a seemingly endless supply of minor villains, none of whom survive – as far as we can tell.
And since we spend some of the time in South America, we have nasty South American natives – slightly more pleasant than the islanders in Jackson’s King Kong – as well as FBI agents and KGB agents and probably various others whom I’ve forgotten about already.
Being only two years younger than Harrison Ford, I find it hard to imagine how he coped with the rigours of filming this piece; sure there are doubles and stunt men in droves, but there are a couple of scenes where it’s obviously him, and you think: that must have puffed him out, or left him very sore.

Hook

I noticed in Roger Ebert’s book, Awake in the Dark, that he classes Stephen Spielberg’s movie, Hook, as one of Spielberg's failures. This surprises me; it’s a superbly made movie, has excellent performances from Dustin Hoffman and Bob Hoskins, (who form a hilarious partnership), a controlled one from Robin Williams that keeps the character in perspective; two marvellous kids – Charlie Korsmo and Amber Scott; and solid supporting performances from Maggie Smith, Julia Roberts and Caroline Goodall.
When I first saw it a few things grated: the roller-skating Lost Boys and some of their other toys that seemed out of place, and Julia Roberts herself. But 16 years on these are minor quibbles. Roberts exudes her usual warmth and has the disadvantage of almost never acting ‘live’ with anyone, which she overcomes in general. The updating of the Lost Boys is woven into the story without much problem, and once accepted, is no longer a concern. The Lost Boys themselves are a marvellous bunch, wonderfully cast, and the performance by Dante Basco as Rufio is full of emotion. (Basco, incidentally, is one of four brothers all working in Hollywood and on TV.)
I’ve watched the movie several times over the years, and it always resonates with me, more than I remember E.T. doing so. The whole business with the father/son thing has particular emotional content for me, and perhaps makes me more partial to it, but it isn’t just that. Spielberg takes a mythic quality story and extends it in a number of directions and manages to make it all work. The design of the movie is a delight, full of magical touches (the appearance of the ‘hook’ throughout, for instance) and there is a great deal of subtle humour (when Tinkerbell flies Peter to Never-Neverland, a tramp on the bridge is lifted off his feet as they pass – not in close-up, but quite casually as part of the shot). Furthermore there’s considerable emotion in the piece: after a number of ‘casual’ and sometimes comic pirate deaths, there’s the real death of Rufio at the end. And the gradual disgust felt by Jack at his father’s lack of interest and lack of ability to save him, is strongly portrayed.
So, Roger, I think for once you were wrong. Maybe the popcorn wasn’t tasting so good that day.

Tin-Tin. Spielberg. Jackson.

You don’t seem to see Peter Jackson looking happy these days. My suspicion is that in losing weight he’s lost some of the jolliness that used to go with him. Be that as it may, it hasn’t stopped him moving forward and making more movies.
(Years ago when I was in London I knew a young opera singer who made it to Covent Garden very quickly after coming to the UK as a student. She was quite heavy, but she had a lovely, large creamy voice. Someone decided that she should lose weight, and drastically, the voice lost a good deal of its warm timbre.)
Tin-Tin. Spielberg. Jackson.
Plainly Tin-Tin held more appeal for Jackson than Harry Potter, which is a pity, because I could see Jackson dealing to the last couple of Potter movies with their increasing gloom and fantasticism. Tin-Tin is okay, but he’s a relatively mild character in terms of adventure, if my memory serves me right. Still, he’s a challenge, especially if he’s going to be created in CGI, like Kong and that other little feller from those three movies about some Ring…