PI

Movie of the week:
PI

God is not an exact science …….

I have friends who tell me I’m going to hell for some of the things I say. I tell them that if God can’t take a joke, then he’s not worth the belief. This generally doesn’t change their mind concerning my demise. The following quote was recently brought to my attention. It’s from the Old Testament of the Bible: Kings I, chapter 7, verse 23. God gives Solomon instructions on how to build portions of his palace.

And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.

Apparently, according to God, PI equals 3 (30 cubits divided by 10 cubits). Not 3.142-something-something-and so on. Just 3. Some fundamentalist Christians that I know claim that of course this is correct. The number 3 is significant in Christian theology – it’s the number of the Trinity. Our imperfect mathematics cannot supplant the word of God in the bible, therefore PI = 3. Maybe circles were smaller back in biblical days. What these people don’t seem to realize, is that there are certain things – common sense things – that everybody throughout history understood, and thus never thought it needed to be written down. Things such as: you know - the International Bureau of Standards and Measures hasn’t been invented yet, and so not all cubits are created equal – so – when I say 10 cubits by 30 cubits, that’s a ±10 percent tolerance!

I’ve spent a number of years studying chaos theory which, ironically enough, is not about randomness but is about finding order and patterns in nature. The idea that there is an elementary fundamental pattern which can used to explain all other patterns and statistical phenomena from weather patterns, to the shape of coastlines, to the rise and fall of the stock market, and to the behavior of large populations. If such a fundamental pattern does exist, then it can be expressed as a finite pattern of numbers.

In this week’s movie, PI, Max, a mathematical genius, is searching for such a number. I say he’s a “mathematical” genius, as opposed to your ordinary run-of-the-mill know-it-all, because that’s about all he knows. Virtually all of his working brain volume is devoted to finding the mathematical answer to the great question of life, the universe, and everything. Near the beginning of the film, a small neighborhood girl quizzes Max by giving him huge numbers to multiply together – which she verifies with a calculator. He always has the answer before she can key in the numbers.

The problem is, with all of his available brain resources working on the chaos problem, that doesn’t leave anything left over for some of the other important things – like dreaming and thinking about stuff and taking care of himself and so on. To make matters worse, the answer always seems to be out of reach and so he has to delve deeper into untapped parts of his brain …………..where the “crazy” is. He has become paranoid and psychotic and throws back pills (of some sort), literally by the handfuls, just to cope. The film becomes a race against time. Can he find the answer before his minds snaps – or is it already too late.

He has a special computer, which he built himself to devote to this task, which he tweaks and works the bugs out (literally). Then there’s a new wrinkle, posterity isn’t the only one who might be interested in the secret of the universe. It seems there’s a group of ……..people who might be interested in what the stock market might be doing, say ….next week. They offer Max a deal. They have a secret classified government super- computer processor thingy that they’ll loan to him. What the hell? He could use a little extra help - free up a few extra brain cells and all that. So what if they expect results? Other groups are also after him to fulfill their own agendas.

Thing is, what he and everybody else doesn’t understand is – if you do manage to unlock the secret and know the key to the universe, it’s very difficult to un-know it again.

This was director, Darren Aronofsky’s first feature film. He has since gone on to make Requiem for a Dream (PI has a very similar visceral feel to the cinematography), and most recently, The Fountain. He didn’t have a lot of money and he had no reputation to promote so he had to employ some of the tricks that many first-time film-makers do.

1. He saved some money by shooting on grainy 16mm black & white, using a hand-held camera. Sounds dreadful, but actually lends the right kind of surreal atmosphere to this film.
2. His mom catered the film shoots. What this means is that she packed sandwiches and hot soup in thermoses for the handful of people on the shoot.
3. He couldn’t afford to hire police to keep the crowds back. Luckily, that wasn’t a problem.
4. He also couldn’t afford filming permits. Friends were posted on street corners to watch out for cops, so that they could pick up and make a quick get-away should the law show up.
5. He raised money. He went to everybody he knew and asked to borrow $100. When that got used up, he made the rounds again, showing them what their money bought so far. The whole shebang totaled around $60,000. The film won big at Sundance and at a number of smaller festivals. As a result, he sold the film to Artisan for $1 million. Each contributor got back 150% of their investment.
6. Most of the props and set decorations were literally hot-glued together. The smell, because of the lights, kept making people sick. So – it wasn’t just good acting…..
7. The scene with the brain promised to be costly. So, they had to steal a real brain from the experimental biology lab in a jar labeled “genius” – forcing the experiment to continue by using the “abnormal” brain – with absolutely no foreseeable negative consequences.
8. I actually rented this DVD about four times before I ended up buying it. Now if everybody did that – think of all the money they’d make – and of all the money you’d spend.
9. Words used to describe this film include: kinetic; visceral; thrilling; obsession; bizarre; intelligent; brilliant; philosophical; stylish; sureal; and innovative. 50 cent words – the lot of them. They could have used 10 cent words (like “cool”, or “neat”, or nickel words like “good”) and saved a bit of money, but as you can see, they splurged on the important things.
10. Coming soon! A: Avogadro’s Number! ……..about a man racing against the clock to determine the number of molecules in a mole – after that, a full-sized rat!

PI is one of Steven Jay Schneider’s “1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.” …….and no, seeing this film will NOT make you die any sooner.

Enjoy some PI (not = 3) – even if you don’t like math.

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BUG(2006)

This week’s movie:

BUG (2006)

Film makers have some nerve these days.

If you’re going to make a film called “BUG”, you should at least have the decency to make it about a government lab near an isolated rural community. The refuse from a secret experiment infects some cockroaches (movie rule #154: always use cockroaches for maximum “bug” effect), making them both super intelligent and super aggressive (plus they reproduce quickly – so they’re also super ……what? horny). They get out and head for toward town. Here’s where you can take time to introduce the main characters and give a little back-story. Cliff is a stranger in town. He's just passing through, really – but he has a secret he’s not telling. Trevor, the sheriff, years ago had a relationship with Sally, the woman who owns the diner. Sally’s been widowed for four years now but has a teenage daughter who is dating (sort of) the smart kid at school – even though the football jock keeps hitting on her. Then, of course, there’s Professor Evans who, by coincidence, is an entomologist (he studies bugs). He will eventually find a way to destroy the bugs, but will be horribly killed before he can tell anybody. There’s the mayor who will refuse to contact the authorities or admit that there’s anything wrong. Then there are the Gladwells (Molly and Dan) who run their farm out on RFD 122, but don’t get too attached to them – they’re the first ones to get killed.

When livestock starts to disappear, the sheriff starts to investigate (it’s a slow week). When the Gladwells don’t show up in town for a week, the sheriff and the stranger go out to pay a visit and find only skeletons – and not funny ones, like in The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, just dead ones. Now the town is up in arms. They want the sheriff to find out who killed Molly and Dan ………..and then ate them. Was it the stranger? It must be ………because he’s a stranger!
Soon the bugs are everywhere, killing (and eating) everybody. Just for a change, there’s this one guy that they don’t eat entirely. The bugs bore into the back of his head and eat his entire insides – so that there’s just skin and bones left – and full of thousands of bugs. The bugs move in such a way so that it looks like the man is walking. He “walks” into town and people say, “Hey! Isn’t that old Fred from the garage? Hey Fred! How’s it going?” But Fred can’t talk – the bugs can only make him say, “SSKKKKKRRRRRREEEEEEEEE!” And they’ll say, “Huh, what’s wrong with him?” “Must have a cold. I hear there’s a bug going around.” Oh course, the entire movie is just a premise to build up to this one-liner. Before the end of the movie, Trevor and Sally will hook up again for old time sake – “I’ve never stopped loving you….”, - and the stranger’s secret will be revealed – and everybody at the government lab will get gobbled up by bugs – and the smart kid from high school will figure out how to kill the queen bug, who by this time has grown to be four stories tall and living in the old abandoned mine.

OR

Make it about a scientist who mixes bug DNA with his own in order to cure his cancer. The cancer goes away ………….but ……..slowly – little by little – by imperceptible degrees ……..he turns into a giant cockroach. At first it’s just a nuisance – he eats holes in people’s cereal boxes and such, and scampers like hell when the lights come on – but the situation goes downhill pretty quick. As a side effect, it makes him super intelligent – but also, unfortunately, super aggressive – and, really unfortunately for his victims, super horny. The authorities come to kill him with torches and pitchforks and boric acid and some guns too (they’re not stupid). However, his fiancée pleads for his life and they let him live. However, he can no longer trust himself not to kill anymore so he commits suicide by rigging up a twenty-foot boot on a large piston. After a long dramatic soliloquy, he presses the button that sends the boot crashing down on him with a loud crrrrrrrunnnnchh! The end ……….or is it? Did anybody think about what happened to the cockroach that got a little of his human DNA?

These are the only two logically possible plots for a movie called “Bug”. However, neither of the two films that I know of, with that name resembles anything described above. One, we’ll call BUG (2002) – one of FranksFilms recommended movies – is a dramady that starts with a small boy stepping on a bug and triggers a cause-and-effect series of events that have nothing to do with bugs (well, there may be a bit about bugs – but not much bugs). If you haven’t seen this movie yet – do it! Now!

Then there is this week’s movie, we’ll refer to it as BUG (2006), which may or may not feature a lot of bugs – I’m not giving anything away (you’ll have to watch it for yourselves) – nevertheless doesn’t resemble either plot, described above, in the least. It does start with a mysterious stranger, which we immediately can tell should be avoided, but for some reason, no one else does. He is troubled – a mysterious troubled stranger, the worst kind – with an equally mysterious past. What is this mysterious past? Will we find out before the end? By the end of the movie, you won’t even remember the question. The movie sets up a little tension right from the beginning. As the film progresses, the tension gathers little tension buddies until you have a tension crowd and then finally a tension mob. Mob behavior isn’t pretty. It kicks butt and takes no prisoners.

Ashley Judd is terrific as a lonely woman who is so grateful to make a connection and fall in love with a “nice” man that she is willing to follow him anywhere – even to crazyville. Things get interesting when his paranoid tendencies start to surface. For Ashley, it’s indeed an Oscar worthy performance, but don’t expect to see any nominations for her – it’s too risky a performance and the Academy doesn’t often reward such risks. I will say this – it is the role of a lifetime, although I’m sure many won’t agree with me. It even features Harry Connick Jr. as the ex-husband, and he doesn’t even sing!

This is what’s known as a polarizing film. I am not referring, by the way, to the 3D IMAX technology, what I mean is that everyone who sees this film either really loves the movie OR really really hates it - no middle ground. About half the people “get it” and the other half don’t. This applies to critics as well – the tomatometer scores around 50% (actually 58%). Interestingly enough, they either love it or hate for exactly the same reasons. The question is, will you love it or hate it. I couldn’t say, what side do you tend to fall in “love or hate” situations? Don’t know? Maybe you need some more info to help you decide.

1. Based on a very successful stage play of the same name. By successful, I mean in Chicago and New York – I’m not quite sure it played anywhere else. It has a stage play feel to it – that is, most of the action takes place in one room (sets are expensive for an off-Broadway production).

2. If you get squeamish at the sight of swarms of creepy bugs – don’t worry. It’s not that kind of movie. That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of other creepy things going on – there are – in spades!

3. People who hate this movie really hate Ashley Judd’s freaky intense over-the-top performance in the main character role as her descent into insanity quickens. People who love this movie really love it – like me.

4. It was directed by William Friedkin and many think this is his best movie since The Exorcist. Of course some people think that’s not saying much. Friedkin won the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes this year. I have absolutely NO idea what that is.

5. It’s different. Normally, it would be a swarm of super aggressive cockroaches that terrorize the main characters. Here, its aphids – too small to see.

6. There’s some nudity and some sex – not with the bugs – with actual people.

7. There is a kind of urgent panic-driven freaky logic that pervades the last third of the movie that, looking back, seems absurd but that made perfect sense at the time.

8. Obsession is dangerous. It’s not the bugs that provide the scares here, that provide the danger – it’s the paranoid obsessions of its main characters.

9. Quite independent of the rest of the film, you will either love or hate the ending. I hated it at first, but the more I thought about it, I realized that when you, for example, head down a road marked “Post Office this way”, don’t be surprised to find a post office down there.

10. It is a frantic and intense psychological thriller that races headlong toward its inevitable ending. Not gory at all, but smart and visceral and terrifying.

It doesn’t feature swarms of cockroaches wearing human skins as disguises, but BUG(2006) is a rarity in today’s horror film landscape – a truly scary intelligent movie ………..with a naked Ashley Judd.

Enjoy.

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ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW

This week’s movie:

ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW

I think I’d like to vacation in Pleasantville this winter.

Why not? I hear it’s pleasant there. “Everything’s pleasant in Pleasantville.” They make sure of it. It has to beat New England winter at any rate. I go there occasionally and think about all the changes I could make with my modern-day coolness. It’s an escapist thing, I know, but everybody’s got their own way of dealing. I have a whole list of escapes – movies are good for this sort of thing. Sometimes, in my action hero fantasy, I’m Bond, James Bond – mostly just the Sean Connery Bond but occasionally, of late, I’m the new Daniel Craig Bond (not just because of Eva Green – OK, mostly because of Eva Green).

Sometimes I’m Brad Pitt. Sometimes I’m married to Angelina and run around with George Clooney and play the coolest characters in filmdom. And it’s not just because of Angelina (OK, mostly because of Angelina), it’s mainly about being the “Pitt” – oozing Bradishness – being the man. It’s the kind of charisma that causes women to swoon, and many men to reevaluate their heterosexuality looking for a possible loophole. It works for a little while but soon wears off. I know, for example that there is no such person as Brad Pitt – he exists only as pixels on my TV screen. Think about it – have YOU ever seen him in person?? Hmmmm?? Of course not - nobody has. The problem is that he has the best life, the best luck, great things happen to him, and he always knows exactly the right thing to say at all times. I can’t possibly relate to this for long.

A person that I once recommended Pleasantville to, told me that he didn’t like it because it was too “fantastic” – he likes movies that are more realistic. Not everybody buys in to the escapist possibilities of film - or - maybe he was on to something. Can realistic films be escapist? If you can make this work, it would be effective for much longer. Why? Because you have to place yourself into a movie for it to work. It’s much easier if the movie looks more like real life – and it’s much more natural if the movie looks a lot like your life. This week’s film YOU AND ME AND EVERYONE WE KNOW is populated with mostly unfamiliar faces. The characters don’t look like Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie or Sean Connery. The main character looks like me, and another looks like you and the rest looks like everybody else we know. They’re not suave, they don’t have exciting adventures, and they don’t know the right things to say.

Miranda July, who plays the lead character, wrote and directed the movie – it’s her first feature film. She gets all the important things right. The film follows a small group of characters as they try to make connections with each other while dealing with life. Does that sound familiar? It should – we all do it every day. Do you want to know the plot? That’s it!

The MPAA (those chicken sh*t bastards!) have rated this film R for “disturbing sexual content involving children”. They obviously didn’t see the same movie I did. They also didn’t see the same movie most people did, as it won the “Very Young Critics Award” in 2005. There really are times, in real life, when children come across things they shouldn’t, but the power of this film is that it doesn’t sensationalize it. Miranda July doesn’t venture into taboo territory. She may take you to a cliff and point to taboo off in the distance and say, “I could take you there – if I wanted to – but I won’t. If this was a Todd Solondz film, he would take you there and leave you without a ride home – but I won’t. I don’t have to.” She handles these instances in exactly the right way. Absolutely no one I’ve shown the movie has found this disturbing. Hollywood would have turned this into a tabloid circus instead of a normal part of life. However, if you think this is going to bother you – don’t see this movie!

YOU AND ME AND EVERYONE WE KNOW won big honors at Cannes and Sundance in 2005. It was a critics’ favorite. I won’t tell you more about the plot – or the characters – but you can get that info from the IMDB site. If you need more, you can read film critic Roger Ebert’s review here (don’t worry about spoilers – there’s no actual plot to give away) – he liked it a lot. Let me tell you why I like the movie.

1. It has one of the all-time funniest lines in movie-dom, involving a chat room. I could tell what it is because it’s probably almost as funny taken out of context …….but I won’t.

2. I’ve seen a lot of movies lately that venture off into taboo-land. It seems that many film-makers today feel that they need to spark controversy in order to draw attention to their movie. This week’s film doesn’t have to. It has the confidence to let its storytelling and its characters draw attention to the movie. Granted that is hasn’t gotten a lot of attention outside of critics circles, but that’s not the film’s fault. It was not deemed a moneymaker, and thus it was ignored by the studios.

3. I would rather be John Hawkes and have Miranda July fall in love with me in this movie, than be Brad Pitt and have Angelina Jolie fall in love with me in Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Fewer bullets, for one thing.

4. It’s a feel-good movie with an uplifting ending and which promotes positive social values …….if you like that sort of thing. It makes you feel good – in a feel-good sort of way.

5. It has some of the most simple and yet most powerful and memorable scenes of any movie, period. Perhaps the most memorable is one in which two of the main characters walk down the sidewalk to the end of the block – yes, it’s THAT simple.

6. The characters are less like Hollywood stereotypes and more like real people you know than the majority of films you’re likely to see. I can easily identify with one of the characters (I won’t tell you which one), and I knew exactly how he was going to act – not because of any stereotypes or movie-logic rules, but because that’s what real people would do.

7. There are no contrived plot twists. On the other hand, it’s also not just a collection of random scenes. There is a quiet arc to the film that gets resolved in the final reel. Tension ….tension ….tension – and then release. Maybe there is sex in it after all.

8. The title bugs the crap out of people who are bothered by incorrect grammar. The film producers actually had enough confidence in the power of this film to risk alienating this important demographic.

9. Miranda July’s character in the film (Christine) is based very closely on herself. She is just like that in real life, cute as a button (a cute button).

10. Read Roger Ebert’s review here. “Frank. Why do you always link to Roger Ebert’s review site?” Roger Ebert is perhaps the most respected film critic in the business (He won the Pulitzer Prize). He has befriended and interviewed many many film-makers over the years, and usually has a unique perspective that many other people wouldn’t. So there! (besides, I keep hoping someday he’ll pay me)

ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW …..

will enjoy this movie.

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GRINDHOUSE

This week’s cheesy double feature:

DEATH PROOF

PLANET TERROR

Perfect memory rarely is.

The problem with memory is that the world is too full of detail. And as marvelous as the human brain is, it has a finite capacity. So, to conserve resources, it decides what is worth remembering - the rest is discarded. You know this is true - how many times, while driving, have you suddenly realized that you can’t account for the past twenty minutes? Were you not paying attention? Of course you were, but nothing happened of any importance, so why waste brain bytes? You usually do store a certain amount of detail – but with time, keeping it needs to be weighed against cleaning up the clutter and making space for new memories.

People my age remember the sixties as though it were the Golden Age. They remember the great music and the revolution (everything was a revolution in the 60’s), the Cultural Revolution, the political revolution, the sexual revolution, the civil rights revolution, and the lesser known squid revolution (people started eating more squid for some reason). They remember the excitement of big things happening and especially the music. Ask anybody around at that time and they’ll tell you the same thing, “The music was the best, and things - man, things really seemed to matter. Not like today.” Was it really that great?

No.

But the emery cloth of time sands down the structure of memory until you get a little polished marble that represents just the thing you’ve decided was important to remember, the essential concept. Details like The Cold War, the filth, the bad drugs, the gender gap, the generation gap, the bad music, clashes with the police over civil rights and the war, the “real” war in Viet Nam – these are just sawdust that end up on the workshop floor. Does that mean memory becomes less perfect with time? No, just the opposite. Memory becomes more perfect with time because it becomes more focused ……polished ……..shinier.

I remember a lot of the grind house movies from the 60’s and 70’s (we didn’t use the term “grindhouse” back then). They were just quick and cheap movies that would come out every week (more so in the summer – drive-in theater season) and was just an excuse to go to the movies. They were always sensational with lots of sleaze and shooting and stuff exploding and scantily clad women. I’m sure there was more to it, but those are the kind of details that now lie on the workshop floor.

When the film GRINDHOUSE showed in theaters last summer, it was as a double feature, quite common in the grind house days - two movies, one directed by Robert Rodriguez and the other by Quentin Tarantino. They have now been released as two separate movies on video. While they are not like the cheap grind house movies from back in the day, they are, in essence, the marble that is the polished memory of those films. All the essential elements are there. Shooting, fast cars, a mad killer, scantily clad women, stuff blowing up, monsters. Face it, anything that doesn’t survive the sandpaper of time isn’t worth showing anyway. They’ve just filled up the leftover space with more of the good stuff.

They obviously did their homework by re-watching a lot of old films. They’ve reproduced this experience by making their films look “old”. I’m not sure why – certainly they didn’t look old when the films were new. They’ve added scratches, color gone awry, and in one movie, even a missing reel of film. Each of the directors brought their strong points to their film. Tarantino’s strength is in dialog. In DEATH PROOF, his characters have great revolving conversations with hip dialog. A huge cinephile, he throws in lots of inside movie references – how many can you get? Don’t get them all? Check out the trivia page at the IMDB site. There is an amazing chase scene at the end with incredible stunts. Tarantino made the brilliant decision to hire the stuntwoman, Zoë Bell, as a member of the cast. Zoë Bell plays herself as a stuntwoman – BTW she did all the stunts for Uma Thurman in the Kill Bill movies. DEATH PROOF is the “cooler” of the two films.

Robert Rodriguez uses his talents to pack a movie with wall-to-wall over-the-top absurd action. In PLANET TERROR, his retro-futuristic vision of horror, there is so much shooting and zombies and stuff blowing up and blood and guts and scantily clad women, that there’s virtually no time for much of anything else – which is OK because why would you want anything else? It’s very very violent – but absurdly so – so much so that it’s actually pretty funny – much like the Itchy & Scratchy cartoons from The Simpsons. PLANET TERROR defies logic. When you watch it, if you try to apply physical logic to anything happening on screen, you will certainly lose your grip on reality and may go completely mad. Not even movie logic can be applied here, not even grind house logic works – only Rodriguez logic exists. I think this is what helps viewers deal with the totally bizarre images on the screen.

PLANET TERROR is the “fun-er” of the two movies. It’s just jam-packed with impossible images and funny dialog. This is the movie that has the missing reel of film. The resulting abrupt disconnect provides one of the best sight gags in the movie. On other memorable sight gag occurs during a romantic interlude and involves a wooden table leg (don’t go there – not what you’re thinking!). I think that the enduring legacy of this film will be the still photo shown above. To me, there is no greater iconic image in the history of cinema than that of Rose McGowan standing in profile, wearing a tube-top and sporting a machine-gun leg. Then again, that’s just me.

To recap. Here’s the top 10 reasons why I liked the two GRINDHOUSE movies: DEATH PROOF and PLANET TERROR.

1. Rose McGowan standing in profile, wearing a tube-top and sporting a machine-gun leg.
2. You don’t have to watch both together, as a double feature. With the magic of two separate movies on two separate DVD’s, you can watch them in ay order and at any time you want.
3. It performs a vital public service by promoting the importance of the seat belt law.
4. Fergie’s in it, and Bruce Willis too – although not at the same time.
5. It features the best barbecue in Texas. That’s got to be good, doesn’t it?
6. Bruce Willis says he shot Osama and I believe him. So, the troops can come home now, right?
7. Did I mention Rose McGowan standing in profile, wearing a tube-top and sporting a machine-gun leg?
8. If you remove any restrictions that you have to follow some kind of logic, all new possibilities open up for you. For example, the same gun that chips some splinters out of a door jamb in one instance can knock down a brick wall in a fiery blast a moment later. Another example: Rose McGowan can shoot her leg-gun (how does she pull the trigger? - No, no! Mustn’t use logic! Logic, bad.). She can do this while standing on one leg and blow a door out with the blast ………without any apparent recoil.
9. DEATH PROOF: Fast cars ……..faster women ………and Kurt Russell.
10. If you can actually “death proof” a car, why doesn’t everybody have one. Then everybody can “bumper-car” their way to work in the morning. Oh wait – they do that anyway.

As a double feature, GRINDHOUSE makes the IMDB top 250 at #149, between The Princess Bride and Brief Encounter.

DEATH PROOF
PLANET TERROR
Double feature or one-at-a-time – it’s all good.
Enjoy.

view Death Proof trailer

view Planet Terror trailer