Movies
- Audiobooks: Listening to a good narrator reading a book can help and improve the experience
- Don’t be afraid to jump somewhere in the middle of a book and start reading to spice things up a bit. Books are slow; most chances are you won’t spoil everything if you read a page or two.
- Push yourself to read at least 10% of a book before putting giving up. Many books take their time to get interesting. On the other side of this coin (I’m adding this as a personal note), if a book still sucks after that 10%, don’t force yourself to keep reading it. There are plenty of other books to read.
- If you read a book and find yourself glazing over pages or reading the same line over and over, put it down and read something else. Reading a book is a skill. Develop it on something lighter for a bit (like magazines or blog posts) before trying for a whole novel.
Golda, 2023 - ★★★½
I read a review somewhere that Mirren can play many roles, but Israel's Golda Meir is not one of them. Bullshit.
Mirren is the gem of the movie. If you disconnect yourself from the history lesson angle and embrace the movie as a portrait of one of the strongest world leaders (say what you will, but she was the leader of a country during one of its worst wars), I think you'd appreciate how both women - the actress and the woman - mesh well together. It's the cast around Mirren (Heuberger specifically, as well as a couple of others) that don't rise to the occasion as I felt they should.
As an Israeli with an uncle who is a Yom Kippur war veteran and his big sister as my mother who lived through this war, I can tell you the movie doesn't stray much from facts. The yellings of the troops, the news blurbs, and even the curtain at Golda's apartment (my grandma had these) are real. Lots of details and effort were put into the movie to make sure it's as close to reality as possible.
I came out of the movie asking myself, who's this movie for? It's too real and too Israeli for the majority of the American public to relate to. It's too American and "Holywood" for Israelis to take it seriously. Perhaps the Jewish-American audience, who's looking for heroism from a passing era. Sad, but true. Golda is a p
Blade Runner, 1982 - ★★★★
I watched Blade Runner more than once, but this time, I did so after reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. To me, there's no question about it: the movie is much better. No, let me rephrase this. The film is on a different plane.
There's a moment early in the movie where Ford (Decker) walks into the police station to talk to his old boss, who sits in a booth in an otherwise large hall. The camera pans slowly from the heights of the ceiling, showing us a dissolute police station that looks more like a train terminal with rows of empty seats. At one point, it crosses through the ceiling of the smaller booth inside the hall; this is where I paused the film for a moment to admire the details. On the booth roof, among the debrief, there were pieces of facade from the walls next to something that looked like an old rake and a few more pieces of trash. A shot of perhaps 2 seconds showing us junk, nothing significant - and yet, so much attention to detail. Someone thought about this trash, and someone was creative about this trash. This movie goes above and beyond to give you details.
A rich world with future society lights and music aside for a moment (I could go on for an hour about these alone), we have to talk about the actors. There is, of course, Rutger Hauer as Roy Battey and the famous tears in the rain. But Harrison Ford and Sean Young come close second, even when they recite lines from the book that seem a bit out of place. The supporting cast provides additional gravity to the world (Edward James Olmos as Gaff is one of my favorites). And then there's the music, a rich soundtrack I could listen to on a long commute, humming along.
But what makes this movie a masterpiece is not all that there is there, lying in front of us. It's what it implies. Especially today, it brings up the topic of what it means to be a minority group and how, under a certain light, one group can be morally exterminated. It asks us what makes us human and has us watch tests trying to prove just that and (in light of the end of the film) fail spectacularly. It also gives us a vision toward a future, in my opinion, better than the one in the book (which seems to focus more on religion and its role in human life). A future where everyone's different, but everyone's the same. A depressing shadow of a world that was destroyed (was it the war mentioned in the book? An environmental catastrophe? Doesn't really matter) due to the apathy of its inhabitants.
I'm going to watch this one again.
Grumpy Old Men, 1993 - ★★★
I felt like I wanted to watch something lighter, and this was definitely it. It's the 90s through and through, with humor and the budding start of giving women a role that's going a bit beyond (but not enough) the constant cringy 80s roles. Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon are of different time periods, but that doesn't mean they can't deliver good comical relief today.
Joyland, 2022 - ★★★★
When this movie starts throwing punches, it doesn’t let go. Joyland has many layers that are both beautiful and terrible. It’s culturally refreshing, emotionally draining, romantically charming, gender and traditions devastating. It’s a milestone when you consider its Pakistani origins.
What I immediately liked the most about it was its slice-of-life manner of delivery. Nothing is fantastical. The actors are authentic and candid (especially Alina Khan and Rasti Farooq). You get a front-row sit into the intimate life of a family who could easily be your neighbors, sans the language and the country. The assumed culture is, surprisingly, too uncomfortably close to home.
Go in emotionally prepared and with a box of tissues nearby. This one’s gonna hurt.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, 2018 - ★★★
A collection of shorts by the Cohen brothers that takes place in their favorite time period. Some are golden nuggets, and some are just, well, ain't that good. All in all, it was fun to watch them. I don't think I can go wrong with the Cohen bros. Solid and fun acting, good storytelling, and symbolism you may or may not miss.
A Man Called Otto, 2022 - ★★★
A tested and proven formula, the other movie that comes to mind immediately for me is Gran Torino. Tom Hanks pulls off a more likable human being than Clint Eastwood, which is part of the point. Hank's Anderson is also less realistic than Eastwood's Kowalski, which is (maybe) also part of the point: grumpy old men don't usually accept people as they are (Anderson), but how they seem (Kowalski) - at least at first.
Still, it's good to see how movies change to adopt our reality as it is, with our neighbors being of every background, gender, and ethnicity. Or maybe it's just the New Yorker in me speaking.
A film full of symbolism, from big hearts to loyalty to principles (and where these principles get you in life), this movie was mostly entertaining, not educating.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 1964 - ★★★★
I'm sorry I haven't watched this sooner. A masterful Satire, frighteningly still related today almost as it was in the 1960s. This movie should go on the "need to watch" list of those who, unfortunately, will never watch it or will miss the message altogether.
The drumroll of the bomb run is so catchy I've made a phone ring out of it, hopefully to be listened to by other passengers on a subway car one day as a reminder.
Tetris, 2023 - ★★★½
This movie surprised me for the better. I thought this was going to be a flashy movie about a classic video game - which it is - but there's more. Egerton (Henk Rogers) delivers a good act as the only un-crooked businessman around in this sophisticated spy story thriller. The art direction is excellent, with a few cherries on the top at well-orchestrated moments. A typical Hollywood movie with smarty-pants glasses, this delivered entertainment in abundance.
The Thing, 2011 - ★★★
I'm not sure I watched The Thing, or I don't remember if I did, but this movie makes me want to watch the original. The story is not too unique, but the execution kept me guessing and entertained. This is a good movie to watch with friends while eating popcorn. Don't eat meat though; it might come back up.
Knives Out, 2019 - ★★★
An entertaining watch with smart kind of fun. There aren't enough mystery movies, and this one is built with care and skill. Definitely watch if you like detective movies. It goes a bit further and shines on immigrants with a positive light, yet another thing we don't see enough in movies. I will watch this one again.
Liquid Sky, 1982 - ★★★★
I'd like to say this movie is before its time, but it's not. The issues it raises were present in the 80s as well as in the 1800s. We just take more notice now.
Liquid Sky is not easy to watch. It's an explosive, colorful, emotional,l drug-influenced, NYC-punk, alien, in-your-face, weird sort of a thing, and it gives zero fucks about it. Which is exactly how it should be.
I'd stop here and say good job, but the movie went further and made me question my values, past and present. It grabbed me by the throat and forced me to look. I'm glad I did.
Leviathan, 1989 - ★★
Your typical 90s suspense flick with all the clichés. I enjoyed the story, and the effects are nice. It makes you appreciate the stunts department before we had AI integrated into everything.
We have come a long way since the days of women being sexy meat sacks that always need rescuing. It's good to watch one of these movies to remind you why this was a problem. It made me cringe more than once.
Think Aliens underwater without Susan Weaver to kick ass.
The Beast, 1975 - ★★★½
Ok, let's get this out of the way first. Yes, there's horse dick in this movie. Lots and lots of it. So if you have a problem with horse dick, this is not the movie for you.
As a movie, it's OK. It gets a 7 out of 10. The story is not revolutionary, and the effects didn't exactly age well. Still, I found that it was well performed. It tells the familiar story (all men are sexual beasts) but it turns it around, with women beating men in their own game.
This is an erotic movie from the 70s which you won't find on any streaming services today. The question to ask yourself is not if you're OK with the sort of taboo the movie shows, but why you no longer have the option to wonder about this.
Neptune Frost, 2021 - ★★
I gave this movie about half an hour before giving up. A cloud of buzzwords in different languages thrown into trippy song and beautiful costumes. There's no plot here, just floating ideas.
My thoughts about Mirco.Camp and what I learned
Micro.Camp 2023 is over. I had fun, enjoyed listening and participating, and got exciting new ideas to explore. For me, these include mainly three categories. books, photos, and movies.
Books
Micro.blog (MB) has an excellent book integration built into the left sidebar. You can find a book there and import it directly into a post. My problem with books is that I can’t get myself through reading one. I turned to the book lovers of MB for advice and got several good tips. Here they are in no particular order:
Photos
The MB community is very active around photos. There’s a dedicated photo page by default in most themes and an option to upload photos to short and long posts, which can also be re-posted to other services automatically, like Flickr.
Lurking in the chatroom, I learned that Glass is now available on the web and on Android. I registered and quickly realized why it’s a photographer’s favorite. The interface is beautifully minimal and shows you nothing but photos. Unlike Instagram, you won’t find folks using posting pictures of text. Zero ads. You have to pay to use Glass, but I feel it’s worth it.
While Glass comes with an RSS feed that can be used with MB (go to your Glass profile URL and add /rss at the end), it doesn’t allow much customization. The MB team is looking into ways to improve Glass' integration, but for now, it seems there’s not much to work with from Glass’s side.
Still, the resourceful MB community came up with a couple of plugins and themes that work better with photos (I’m experimenting with one of them right now, under the photos page.) This is a good place to mention Jean’s post about Discovery, prompting people to make sure their photos include a description (via the “alt” HTML tag).
Movies
Weird/indie/rare films are something I tried to get into in the past and failed. I knew there were movie lovers on MB, and I feel lucky I stumbled upon Chris Campbell’s presentation. Chris uses letterboxd is a movie professional, and listening to him about the benefits of letterboxd sold me within a minute. I had a profile on letterboxd I haven’t really used, but I intend to fix this now.
Letterboxd calls itself “a global social network for grass-roots film discussion and discovery.” It’s a free service that offers a clean browsing experience (almost no ads) and a lot of information. And yes, it also comes with an RSS feed.
It seems like I have a couple of movies to catch up on…!
When I joined MB, I was looking for a place to save me time messing around with Hugo. But MB proved to be more than a blogging solution. It’s a community of passionate individuals with similar interests to mine. The true value of this place is the interaction with the community, something I learn to appreciate a bit more every day.
Mousa, 2021 - ★★ (contains spoilers)
This review may contain spoilers.
Mousa's has a problem. Its main actor, Karim Mahmoud Abdel Aziz, is trapped in a crappy movie. Such a waste.
The settings of the story are not too bad: a gifted but socially-awkward challenged electrical engineer has a tough life at the university. He lives alone with his father and has an interesting relationship going on between them. Yehia (Karim) has a possible love interest(s) (it's not obvious with Yehia's shy approach, which makes things more interesting), and as he tries to maneuver those with the guidance of his sympathetic father, things go bad.
Unfortunately, things go bad not just as part of the plot, but also for the whole movie, which flatlines to a dumb terminator-turned-a-good-guy superhero flick. (Spoilers alert)
The bad guys show up for some vague reason, steal money and watches (the father was a watchmaker), and run, let the father die in a fire. Yehia, paralyzed in fear, has to watch his father die. He survives the fire and comes back, sells the house, and decides to live in the lab (the "hut"), and build a termin... sorry, a remotely-controlled robot who will avenge his father's death.
It doesn't take long before his engineer-woman friend shows up. She hacked Yehia's computers and knows his secret, but is somehow too dumb to figure out how to fix her car. She convinces Yehiya to go beyond simple revenge for his father into a full vigilante and go after the bad guys. There's a professor at the university who has some jealousy issues with Yehia also. I'm pretty sure he will become the nemesis, but I won't know because I stopped watching after the second skirmish between the term...err, robot, and the bad guys.
The robot animations are bad. Not awful, but seem to be a couple of years behind. I'm sure the producers don't have the budget Hollywood movies do, but I've seen better animations made in Blender by college students in their free time. That, however, I can forgive.
What I'm grumpy about is the waste of talent and story. I'mYou have a good actor who plays the role beautifully. The character is smart and capable. There's also a gifted woman who happens to be a hacker. Why not use that raw brain power on the bad guys? Do some more flashy matrix-rip-off hacking? Why not develop on the complex relationships Yehia has with his peers? Maybe give the father more of a role somehow? Anything is better than the bad guys. They are so flat and boring, evil robots would have more personality.
Director [[https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5394027/][Peter Mimi]] is rushing to get to the juicy action part and leave the "boring" introduction as soon as possible. The problem is that the juice reeks of rip-offs and cheap effects with zero depth. The only good part is the rushed introduction.
Too bad.
Oblivion, 2013 - ★★★ (contains spoilers)
This review may contain spoilers.
A bit of the Matrix thrown into a cheesy heroic story about freedom. Good for a chill night for easy viewing, don't expect anything special.
The twist in this movie is not really a twist, because by this point we're used to it, like turning around full 360. Bla bla aliens enslave humans, bla bla brain washing humans, bla bla somehow humans' brain can't be brain washed completely, bla bla true love will unlock everything, etc etc.
Left unexplained: why do such advanced aliens need humans to fix their own machines? Why keep any humans alive? What's the point?
Cool tech, cool toys, nice action, awesome drone noises. Tom Cruise with his Top Gun sunglasses is still flying like a bat from hell.
The Mist, 2007 - ★★★ (contains spoilers)
This review may contain spoilers.
This was an OK movie. I enjoyed it. It was good enough to hold my interest (which is not easy to do).
Stephen King can build believable characters and Frank Darabont does a good job following up on that.
First, a few trigger warnings. If you have issues with gore horror, this might be a problem here, though it's far from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The religious zealots are more of a problem if you have issues with that. Unfortunately, it's also believable: all you need to do is to read the news. People kill in the name of God for much less than being threatened by the supernatural.
The movie builds toward the climax nicely, and you get the chance to get up close and personal with the characters. The feelings of dread and panic are believable. There's a bit of a cross into the cliche with some military experiment gone wrong and creatures crossing from another dimension. This is not a huge spoiler, because the origin of the horrors in the movie is of little importance. Way more important is what the people do to survive and how they cope (or don't cope) with the monstrosities. This is the beef of the movie, and King drives it home well.
I'm a bit angry with the ending (Spoiler alert! stop here!!).
It doesn't end well, and I don't like how fast David (Thomas Jane) gave up on everybody, including his son. He decided that, nope, that's it, time to commit group suicide and give up. It feels pushed. King wanted to show us that real hell is making decisions, but this last one doesn't make sense with the rest of the movie. Oh well, it was still fun.
Gave up on The Colony. Here's what I had to say:
"too much "been there, done that" to care. It feels like a Children of Men mixed with Mad Max, and it fails at both... ..."
The Colony, 2021 - ★★★
I started watching yesterday, got bored, started watching again today, got bored again, decided it's enough for now.
The Colony starts OK. Earth is kaput, and the rich humans settled in a different remote place, where they discovered they can't reproduce. Desperate for the survival of the human race, they return to earth to see if they can restart.
But it's too narrow, and too much "been there, done that" to care. It feels like a Children of Men mixed with Mad Max, and it fails at both. Blake, played by Nora Arnezeder, crash-lands on earth with her co-pilot Tucker. It seems like Earth is hostile, with badass mutants and radiation, and the pair worries about that - at start - but we soon learn Earth is actually fine, the humans survived, and decided to capture them both, because you know, humans.
We learn that Tucker is Blake's 80-percent fertile match, which probably means that if everything is OK the two can bone and have kids. hoary! Blake is captured, and she learns that she's fertile because she has a period again out of nowhere, and it's time to contact back home to let them know she's ready to pop out kids, so please come and join her, start bone and making babies.
The story around that doesn't fully pick up. Instead of checking out what happened with Earth, the creatures, the sea, the rain, the movie starts focusing on the petty war between the locals and those who crash-landed before, in some sort of a fight about mother earth against evil technology and rich people. I can smell and see this miles away and with every second movie beating the same drums, I yawned away and went to watch something else.
Good start, but this movie is too scared to pick up on what could be more interesting: what's wrong with earth and how to save it. Instead, it's the old good guys against bad guys.