There’s not much to say about this, other than it’s cool and I like it!

Since I’ve been wanting to post more in general, I guess this counts, at least compared to not posting anything at all. Have a good weekend!

It’s been a looong time since I (or anyone) wrote anything on this blog, but I’m pretty sure that all of the authors have good excuses. I know I do, since I’ve got some jobs, a kid, and a bunch of stuff to do.

So I think I’ll try to just post shorter things, so I don’t feel like I need to make huge posts every time I want to add something to the site.

This time around, I wanted to call your attention to the Walk of Life Project, if you’ve not heard of it before. Basically, a man/mad genius has taken the ends of famous movies and laid the song “Walk of Life” by Dire Straits on top of them. It sounds weird, and it is. In fact, it’s borderline stupid, but also borderline amazing. I know in my heart of hearts that it’s really dumb, yet I laughed at each one that I watched. My favorite is probably for Planet of the Apes.

Anyhow, check it out. And thanks for reading!

I get the impression that this TV show is pretty big in the US, so this review may be superfluous. I only started watching it because it was listed really high on Netflix, and I’d heard some comments about it in Slate. Nevertheless, I thought I’d review it anyhow, since the premise of Cinematic Attic is to simply comment on the idea of “Have you seen anything good lately?”

Briefly put, the series is about two KGB spies who are undercover in the US in the early 1980s. It’s got a little bit of action but a lot of plot, and the acting is generally very well done. The main couple, played by Kerri Russell and Matthew Rhys, do look and act like a married couple with children in the early 80s, but I’m not sure if they really seem like convincing KGB spies. Then again, that’s the whole point, I suppose, since they were supposed to blend in with the Americans.

We’ve been watching the first season and have made it through about 7 episodes so far, but I have a fairly good idea of the tone. The series has a few episodes that can work by themselves, but one also gets the feeling that it’s working towards a bigger payoff, which keeps your attention–and is probably about 10 times better than anything that was actually on TV in the early 80s! The plot lines and twists can get a bit intricate and confusing at times, but at the same time it’s nice that they don’t assume the viewer is stupid. A few subplots, like the ones that follow their children, aren’t very compelling, but I suppose they could be in future episodes.

Aw yeah…

The Pilot episode held a lot of promise in terms of music, since it had both Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk” coming and going and growing through the episode, as well as “In The Air Tonight,” “Harden My Heart,” and a few other 80s favorites. However, I was a bit disappointed to see that they didn’t continue with this 80s Night feeling in future episodes, at least in terms of soundtrack. The cars, clothing, and decorations are still pretty cool (and very brown), though. All in all, it’s been entertaining, and I’m excited to see how the season will finish.

RATINGS:

That Good-Ol-80s Feeling: 13/17
Cold War Nostalgia: 13/17
Wigs, Glasses, and Fake Mustaches: 16/17
Overall Rating: 14/17

Thanks for reading!

Hello! I think we’re officially done with our Atomic Film Fest, but I liked the idea of watching and reviewing a series of movies with a similar theme. So if you have ideas of themes for a future series, please feel free to tell me. I actually did see a few more movies, but they were documentaries, and not terribly interesting or post-worthy.

Not like this BBC special, “The Secret Life of Babies.” Angela found it on Netflix and saw the start of it, so we decided to watch the whole thing together. It’s really good. Sorry, it’s British, so I mean “It’s rather quite good.” As can be expected from a BBC documentary, it’s interesting and very well produced, at least in terms of camera work, effects, etc. It basically works like a “Did you know?” type of trivia show at times, but the facts are all interesting, especially for new parents like us. You can also find a more detailed description of the show here (it’s actually got basically all the information in the show, so if you can’t see it for some reason, you can just read that… it’s also where I got the picture above).

I was very surprised that I didn’t know a lot of the information in the movie, and that’s even after I thought I’d done a fair amount of research for our baby. The fact that babies don’t have kneecaps, for example, should have been obvious but it blew my mind. I had to actually feel my baby’s knee, since he was napping on my lap as we watched. Sure enough, no kneecap (They said it forms later as they’re growing).

In any case, if you have Netflix and this special is available where you live, check it out!

RATINGS:

Quality of Baby Factoids: 15/17
Production Values: 16/17
Cuteness: 17/17
Adorableness: 17/17
Preciousness: 17/17
Overall Rating: 16/17 

“The End of the World, the Beginning of Hope.” Wait, that doesn’t make any damn sense!

The main premise of the movie is still the same: the northern hemisphere has been destroyed and the fallout is coming down to Australia to kill everyone. Some details are different, though. In this version, it was a war between the US and China, not the USSR. Some of the places in the US where the sub goes to try to find life have been changed. Some of the effects are better (this time they were actually able to make San Francisco look like it was destroyed, which was apparently too difficult to do with f/x technology in 1959), but some are worse, actually (like the weird spinning camera). The acting is sometimes better (the Aussie guy and his family are maybe more convincing than the guy from Psycho, at least in terms of seeming Australian…in fact, basically all of the Australian actors are better than the ones in the original), and sometimes it’s worse (Armand Assante plays an über-macho American sub captain, but Atticus Finch managed to convey more presence with subtlety and class). There are also more details in this version, which I actually liked. I was made for TV, though, so I guess they could take that luxury.

Here’s the opening scene, so you can get an idea of how it starts out:

The tone is mixed. The original was more somber, which may have had to do with the black and white film. This one looks and often feels like a soap opera, and that makes you almost think that it may pull a happy Hollywood ending out of nowhere at the very end. To their credit, though, they don’t resort to that, and the end is just as sad as the original, if not more so. The scenes with the Aussies and their family are more detailed here, and they’re much more effective as you see the hopelessness of it all, even if they try to die with dignity.

So what’s the overall verdict? Well, I probably shouldn’t have watched it right on the tails of the original (and other nuclear death movies), since I may not have had a chance to cleanse my movie palate. I guess I can say I “enjoyed” this, with the same caveat that it’s not really possible to enjoy them. I guess “appreciate” would be a better word. It does a good job of making you seem powerless and making everything seem bleak, but mixing in a dash of hope since we’ve not actually lived through all the crap happening in these movies. We can only hope that movies like these will help function as deterrents to keep us from destroying humanity.

RATINGS:
Nostalgia Factor: 3/17 I guess it made me think of fashion from about 14 years ago, but that’s not really a positive thing.
Scariness of the Nuclear Scare: 16/17 Since it’s been thoroughly updated in many ways, this one may actually be scarier than the others. It’s just that the way it’s presented isn’t 100% convincing since it’s too flashy.
Armand Assante’s “Serious Face” Use: 15/17 (Probably way too much)
Overall Rating: 14/17

This very-similarly-titled movie was also released in 2000, making it hard to find pictures for the Aussie TV soap opera movie. But since it featured Leonardo DiCaprio–who I don’t care for–I decided to put up this pic of his co-star.

Thanks for reading!

Good evening! I’m taking a break from the Atomic Film Fest to talk about a movie I watched last night called Once Upon A Time In The West. It’s pretty great, if you’ve not seen it.

Actually, I’m not sure why or how I’d not seen of it until just recently, and I don’t even think I’d heard of it. I know I’ve seen How The West Was Won, so maybe I got the titles mixed up or something. I see now it’s even at #26 on the IMDB all time list. That’s a little bit amazing. So who knows. I do know that I thoroughly enjoyed it, though.

It’s a movie by Sergio Leone, the guy who did the famous Clint Eastwood westerns. It’s also got a score by Ennio Morricone, some gun battles, a bunch of cowboys, a millionaire on a personal train, a prostitute, a land grab, and those half-doors in a saloon. Basically, it’s got everything you’d need from a western.

Since I came into the movie without knowing anything about it (I just added it on my Netflix list based on their recommendation algorithm), I won’t really tell anything about the plot, since I think that enhanced my experience. I can say that while I expected it to be a “normal,” by-the-numbers western, it was actually completely unlike what I might have expected. For some reason–and that reason may just be that I’m dense–I was surprised by most every twist in the story. I also like how they don’t over-explain or linger on some things that have happened, and let the audience figure it out (or not) on their own. Even now, I can recall at least five points that made me think, “Wait, what the hell happened there?” That may sound terribly annoying, but it wasn’t, for some reason.

It is a very slow, deliberately-paced movie, but again, not in a negative way. It just revels in longer takes, stare-downs, and scenic views. The acting is also good, with big names such as Charles Bronson, Peter Fonda, and Jason Robards. Actually, I didn’t even know Robards’ name, but I recognized his face. I just couldn’t remember where I recognized it from until I saw on IMDB that he was one of the main characters on The Day After, the nuclear holocaust movie I reviewed the other day. Just compare:

As I was watching it, it sort of achieved Tarantino consciousness, actually. It’s even proto-Tarantinoan, although I should probably say that Tarantino is neo-Leonean. Now that he’s made Django Unchained, which is basically a western, it’s even more obvious, but one can notice many of the stylistic elements that Tarantino also used in his other films, even including thoroughly modern ones like Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill Vol. 1. And I guess he did also have Morricone write some scores, so I should have known.

Anyhow, if you’ve not seen this one, you should definitely check it out. I’d also be interested to hear from anyone who has, especially if you have any explanation about how I could have missed this movie up until now.

RATINGS:
Unexpected Plot: 16/17 (It’s not Memento or anything, but it continually took me by surprise, for some reason)
Intensity of Charles Bronson’s Grimace: 17/17
Intensity of Jason Robards’ Lamb Chop Sideburns: 16/17
Un-ironic Use of Stupid Hats: 14/17
Overall Rating: 16/17

Hello again! Our Atomic Film Fest continues this evening with 1959’s movie On The Beach. There was also a remake in 2000 (which I’ll discuss soon), but I think this must be one of the earliest movies made that contains a nuclear scare, although the “scare” is fairly mild.

Quick Aside: When I was looking for pictures for “The Day After” in my last review, I kept getting pictures of “The Day After Tomorrow.” For this review, I kept getting pictures of these idiots, on something called “Ex On The Beach.” Is that the Jersey Shore that everyone was angry about a few years ago? Oh well, maybe having pictures of “attractive” (but is that what passes as attractive these days??) dummies in swimsuits may drive up Cinematic Attic’s page views.

The idea is that The US and The USSR have bombed each other to hell, and there’s not much left of the northern hemisphere except a cloud of radiation that’s slowly making its way south. The bulk of the story takes place in Melbourne, Australia, where a US submarine crew has surfaced. There’s a bit of romance, as well as the question if there’s absolutely no hope up north, or if there might be survivors in Alaska or some other place.

The movie was based on the novel by Nevil Shute, which I read in elementary or junior high school. I may be taking part in some revisionist personal history, but I think it was actually my mom who recommended this book to me. If so, that’s a bit dark, but it did work out well as blog fodder twenty years later. From what I remember of the book, it’s quite similar to both of the adaptations, although all three take place at different times. And all three are mostly bleak, no matter how much romance they try to add in.

This one has some pretty decent acting, at least by old movie standards. I must admit that I’m generally not a fan of older movies, since they’re usually unbearably cheesy, but this one is pretty good. The ever-gravitas-filled Atticus Finch plays the submarine captain whose family has been killed out in the US, and the guy from Psycho plays an Australian military guy who doesn’t have an Australian accent. He’s married and has a baby daughter, so they’re especially concerned about the family’s impending doom. Fred Astaire, who I don’t think I’ve seen in any other movies but whose name I recognize, plays a kinda drunk-ish guy who drives a sports car. And finally there’s Ava Gardner; it’s probably best to just say she’s a bit crappy in this movie. That’s perhaps another issue I have with old movies: both the men and women seem to have motivations that are completely foreign to me, for whatever reason. I just get uncomfortable when watching them, like they way I felt when I saw Pierce Brosnan sing in Mama Mia! It’s not necessarily bad, but it’s certainly not good.

The Guy From Psycho and this woman were both pretty good actors, especially taking into account it was 1950s acting. In the movie, they must come to terms with the idea that they may need to take a suicide pill, as well as give one to their daughter, to avoid the longer, slower radiation poisoning death. That’s legitimately heavy. Also, if you click on this picture, it’ll take you to a better review than this one. 

All that aside, it’s actually a pretty good movie. This one especially drives the point home that the war was avoidable and, for the people who watched it when it came out, that they were playing with fire if they thought a full-on nuclear war would be winnable. I would maybe even watch it again. Has anyone else out there seen it?

RATINGS:
Nostalgia Factor: 13/17 I was actually reminded a lot of the book when I saw this movie. But if I still remember plot points of a book I read 20 years ago, either it had a big effect on me, or I’m forgetting something else because of it, like how to perform canine CPR. Actually, that’s probably it. I took a canine CPR course in Germany in 2002, but I can’t remember how to do it. Dammit.
Scariness of the Nuclear Scare: 16/17 Unlike the 2000 remake, this doesn’t show any nuclear bombs at all, so technically the “scare” is in the invisible radiation that will kill all the survivors in the world. Which, now that I think about it, deserves a 17/17.
Guttenbergometer Reading: 0/17 (Not even trace levels of Steve Guttenberg detected)
Avagardnometer Reading: 17/17 (Annoyingly dangerous levels of Ava Gardner, including Ava Gardner trying to act drunk)
Overall Rating: 14/17

One more for the road: Women wearing what I assume are supposed to be bikinis, although I can only recognize one as a garment bearing that name.

Thanks for reading!

As I mentioned in my last post, a couple months ago I got on a kick of watching movies related to nuclear scares and post-nuclear-apocalypse tales. WarGames was a bit goofy but entertaining overall, but that movie stands in contrast to another movie from the same year which kicked off my film fest, The Day After.

The Day After is a 1983 made for TV movie that apparently made a huge impact when it was released, although I was only three when it came out, so I guess I wouldn’t know. What I do know now, with thirty years of hindsight, is that it’s definitely disturbing, even if it is a product of its time.

The idea is that there’s a nuclear war between the US and the USSR, basically annihilating the populations of each country. We don’t get many glimpses of what happens in the broader scheme of things, though, since the story is set in Kansas and stays there nearly the whole time. We follow various characters as they try–and ultimately fail–to deal with the fallout of…well, the fallout.

Oh come on! You’re even gonna let radiation sickness kill off The Gutte??

The effects and production are probably really good, at least for 1983, but the acting is a bit cheesy at times. There are some pretty well-known actors like Steve Guttenberg and John Lithgow, but the soap opera acting isn’t really the reason this movie has an impact. Its impact is entirely based on the scenes of nuclear destruction and the absolute hopelessness of it all. It’s a bit of a trope in movies, but when they say something like “The ones that were killed were the lucky ones,” we still root for the survivors and know that they’ll find some way to make it through. This movie has the courage, if that’s the best word, to show us that the survivors won’t make it through, no matter how hard they try. It really does drive home the point that a nuclear war is un-winnable and indeed un-survivable.

And that’s just the scene when the bombs go off. It just goes downhill from there.

So, I can’t say I enjoyed it, but I can say I’m glad I’ve seen this movie.

RATINGS:
Nostalgia Factor: 0/17 I can’t really say this made me miss anything about the past, but that’s a good thing.
Scariness of the Movie’s Nuclear Scare: 16/17 Even though you can tell the special effects are from 1983, they’re still effective and disturbing.
Guttenbergometer: 14/17 (High to Severe levels of Steve Guttenberg)
Overall Rating: 9/17 I don’t think it was bad at all, but I don’t think I’ll be watching this one again.

That’s All, Folks! Yech.

Hello! It’s been a while since I rapped at ya, but I’ve been busy. You know, baby and all. I’ve also not watched too many movies lately. But I’ve been doing Blogtoberfest throughout all my websites, and I thought it was high time for a new review on Cinematic Attic.

Let me explain the idea of the Atomic Film Fest. A few months ago I read an article that mentioned a 1983 made-for-TV movie called The Day After. It was supposedly about an atomic attack on the US, and it followed a bunch of people in Kansas. For some reason, it caught my attention. I remembered reading a book called After The Bomb (about an accidental bombing of L.A.) and On The Beach (about a U.S. submarine crew in Melbourne, Australia, waiting for fallout from a nuclear war to head south and kill everyone) when I was a kid in school. That’s probably a bit heavy for a kid. Actually, I know that was a bit heavy for a kid, since it was a bit heavy for me. Yet it was strangely compelling.

It’s bizarre to think about the idea of nuclear war these days, and it’s easy to forget that that threat loomed over the world for a few decades. And it also produced a strange fixation on the idea of nuclear war in authors, movie-makers, and kids like me. So since my curiosity was piqued once again, I was able to find The Day After (I’ll review it in a future post). That kind of got the ball rolling, and I found a few other movies in the same vein. So I’ll start this periodic series with the most entertaining or at least interesting one, 1983’s WarGames (yes, the two words are crammed together for some reason).

There’s a good chance many of you have seen this movie, so I won’t go into too much detail. And if you’ve not seen it, I actually would probably recommend it. But the main premise is that Matthew Broderick is a sort of Ur-Hacker, and he’s able to get into government missile launch computers. Only at first he doesn’t realize that it’s real, and by the end of the movie he’s racing to stop a nuclear war from accidentally igniting. And Allie Sheedy comes along for the ride, although it’s never quite clear why exactly she does.

It was a great slice of the 1980s. Honestly, it’s amazing to consider how much things have changed since then, especially in technology and culture. It’s got the guy who played the boss in 9 to 5, and he’s smoking cigarettes inside an examination room at a clinic. It’s also got scenes at airports with seemingly no security whatsoever. It’s got a gigantic computer with random lights, beeps, and hums that have absolutely nothing to do with its functions. And, of course, it’s got a government official who yells at nerds from the lab and says, “Tell it to me in English!” Watching it is like freebasing the 1980s with your eyeballs. It’s great.

“She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, kid.”

The plot isn’t that incredible, but it’s still enjoyable. You’re supposed to think that nuclear war is a bad thing, of course, but you’re not supposed to think that much about it. And there are other weak areas, at least functionally. Like I said, Allie Sheedy’s character doesn’t seem to do much except keep Matthew Broderick company, but that’s actually OK. I don’t really like The Breakfast Club and besides that movie, I don’t think I’d seen anything with her in it, and I never really saw what people thought was good or interesting about her. But in this movie she does seem to have it, whatever that it may be, that kinda catches your interest. Well, until you see her pants, and remember it was filmed in 1983:

Matthew Broderick looking seasick… or maybe just pantssick.

Ouch. Anyhow, I don’t have too much more to say about this one, except that it should be required viewing for anyone from a younger generation who complains about technology. After seeing the slow-ass computer clunkers in this movie, they’ll probably shut up about Snapchat, Sextr, or whatever apps they’re using these days to send pictures of their genitals to each other. If kids in 1983 wanted pictures of their friends’ genitals, they had to go to the public library, load a 7-inch floppy disk into a computer, call up the image using DOS and wait 20 minutes until it appeared fully pixelated (and that was how it was supposed to be–it was the high resolution version!), print it out in greyscale on a dot matrix printer, and pull the little paper strips off the side that allowed the paper to be fed through the printer. And all that was uphill both ways, in the snow!

RATINGS:
Nostalgia Factor: 17/17 (Even though I didn’t have to deal with a lot of the crap in the movie, it still makes me think of my childhood.)
Scariness of the Movie’s Nuclear Scare: 3/17 (Sorry, but it wasn’t that scary.)
Overall Rating: 13/17

This has been Old Man Sitzman, signing off.

]]> http://cinematicattic.com/?feed=rss2&p=2693 0 http://cinematicattic.com/?p=2682 http://cinematicattic.com/?p=2682#comments Mon, 18 Aug 2014 03:42:23 +0000 http://cinematicattic.com/?p=2682 Continue reading →]]>

Hi everyone! It’s been a while since I did a post, so I’ll remedy this with a quick review of Seven Years in Tibet, the 1997 movie starring Brad Pitt. I’d read the book, a non-fiction account by Heinrich Harrer, a few years ago (Here’s what I said about that).

The movie is good, but it’s easy to forget that Brad Pitt used to invoke so much anger in people because of his pretty-boy looks. Just look at the movie poster:

Yep, that’s a beautifully punchable face if I’ve ever seen one. The movie is pretty close to the book, and it kept our attention well for over two hours. It certainly doesn’t depict the Chinese authorities in a positive light, though, so I can also understand why I seem to recall there being a controversy around the movie when it was released.

The movie is also visually very beautiful, and the acting is generally good. When I read the book, I got the impression that Harrer was a bit of a D.B., and Pitt absolutely conveys that with his performance. The kid who played the young Dalai Lama does good work, too.

But then there’s the bad part: Pitt’s accent. Yes, Heinrich Harrer is/was Austrian, so he would have had an accent…if he were speaking English. But he wouldn’t be speaking English with his German friends! So you see where this gets tricky and fake pretty quickly. It’s “foreign” accents like this one and many others–such as Meryl Streep’s “Danish” one in Out of Africa, for example–that just seem dumb. Unless you’re going to invest millions of dollars to teach Hollywood actors to speak actual foreign languages, any accent that isn’t a variation of an English accent will just ring false. Not that I was hired on as an accent consultant on this film, but still. Just drop it and have them speak like they normally speak, since otherwise the accent becomes a distraction.

Anyhow, I’d give it about a 14/17 for the acting, story, and images, but a 2/17 for accents.

That’s a good quote. Anyhow, have you seen this movie? What did you think? Thanks for reading, and have a good one!