Category: Movies

book review: The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick

David Evans4 Comments

I recently read this fascinating book.  It’s an innovative mix of wordless pictures interspersed with pages of text.  It’s a quick read, and I loved it!

delightful, exciting mix of mystery, adventure, books and film

This book is geared toward young adults, but don’t let that stop you. Selznick offers an exciting story in a novel format. The book is neither traditional novel nor graphic novel: Selznick mixes pages of text with pages of wordless illustrations which flesh out characters and advance the plot.

Hugo Cabret is an orphan who lived in the train station, where his uncle keeps the clocks running. But his uncle has disappeared, so Hugo keeps the clocks going while trying to fix a mysterious automaton his father left behind. Add in a toy peddler, an audacious young girl, a bookseller, and an adolescent cinephile, and you have a recipe for success!  (And we learn something about early cinema to boot.)

Although the book is 550 pages, it took about two hours to read (due to all the picture pages): It was the most pleasurable and easy two hours I’ve spent in a long time!

give me some of your tots

David Evans1 Comment

Sierra Leone is my new favorite country. Some months ago I posted about the used clothing market in Africa and showed this picture taken at Freetown’s ferry port.

Friday, sitting in a car in Freetown (as the driver searched for a lost hubcap), a young man passed with a shirt that said

Give me some of your tots

with a picture of tater tots. For those not in the know, both the picture above and the line above come from the film Napolean Dynamite. Sierra Leoneans have the best taste ever.

I very unfortunately did not have my camera this time.

The Band’s Visit: a funny, sweet film that you probably haven’t seen (but will enjoy)

David Evans1 Comment

An Egyptian police band flies to Israel to play a concert but takes the wrong bus and ends up stranded in a tiny Israeli hamlet.  They get to know a number of the locals, and the interactions run the gamut: painfully (hilariously) awkward, funny, sad. 

 

The interactions between locals are as likely to be awkward (and funny) as those between locals and the visitors, just in more familiar ways.  Maybe the film is about how emotions can cross cultures (even cultures known to have animosity), but I just found it funny and sweet and (sometimes) sad.  But it is very well done, and I recommend it.  (My wife and I both gave it an 8/10, which is strong praise.)

 

The film is in English, Hebrew, and (presumably) Egyptian Arabic.  We picked it up at our local Blockbuster.

 

The film is PG-13.  I remember one swear word and one split-second glimpse of a couple of arms and legs (which could be interpreted as sensuality).

 

Below is a glimpse of the funniest scene in the film, in which the band’s lothario coaches an Israeli on hitting it off with his date.

best line from the hulk

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Last night I took in some fine Tanzanian culture by going to see The Incredible Hulk at a local theater: I went to the Century Cinemax at Milimani. It was showing The Incredible Hulk, The Happening, Speed Racer, and Indiana Jones.  (The other theater I located was playing three Bollywood films.)  The audience was an ethnic mix as the picture below attests.

My favorite line from the Hulk: Bruce Banner, hiding out in Brazil, warns some antagonists in his poor Portuguese.

Don’t make me hungry. You won’t like me when I’m hungry. Wait, that’s not right.

Here’s the crowd, anxiously awaiting the film!

the best elucidation of the credit crisis i’ve seen so far (and other great podcasts this week)

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1. This week’s episode of This American Life has the clearest explanation of the credit crisis I’ve seen: they talk with people in each step of the chain, from homeowners who took mortgages they couldn’t afford, to mortgage brokers, to the banks that bought those mortgages, and on up the chain through Wall Street and to the pool of global savings (they don’t actually talk to someone in the pool of global savings, but they talk to someone at the IMF about the pool).And it’s all in English, not Economese.

The radio program can be listened to on-line here. It’s the best hour I’ve spent this week.

2. The NPR Movies podcast for May 7 has a physicist explaining exactly which suspensions of disbelief are required to accept Iron Man and other superheroes.  You can skip straight to the story here.

3. The Moth podcast for May 9 tells the story of a young African-American woman who goes to work as a health assistant for a terminally ill Klansman. [This one has a little bit of strong language, but not more than you’d hear around town.]

4. This week’s EconTalk has Chris Anderson discussing his next book, all about “the idea that many delightful things in the world are increasingly free–internet-based email with infinite storage, on-line encyclopedias and even podcasts, to name just a few.”  Anderson is the author of The Long Tail and the editor of Wired magazine.  Here is an article by Anderson discussing the major points.

A good week for podcasts.

if you go to see Iron Man…

David Evans4 Comments

…make sure you wait until the end of the credits!  Totally worth it. (It involves an eye patch.)

My wife, my father, and I went on opening night in a tiny theater in a little Virginia town, and the projectionist shut off the film just after the credits began to get the next movie set up. My wife and father charged back to the doorway leading up to the projection room and demanded either a refund or the chance to see the end; after much haranguing (much) the projectionist actually put the reel back on.

Again, totally worth it.

If you can’t get to Persepolis, go rent this awesome movie, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

David Evans8 Comments

Yesterday Chris Blattman posted a positive review of Persepolis with links to a trailer and interview with the author of the book the film was based on.  My wife and I saw the film today and I agree with Chris: this is a very well done girl’s coming-of-age story during Iran’s Islamic Revolution and its many years of war with Iraq.  But it’s a downer (with comic elements).  For people like me who know little about Iran’s history, it yields a peek.

Moving swiftly from the significant to the superfluous but awesome, this evening we finished watching the excellent and highly entertaining DVD (by my estimation as well as by that of the critics), The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, about the ongoing battle for supremacy in … Donkey Kong: Yes, the video game that we played back in the 1980s.  This documentary is particularly skilled in that it gets the viewer to care deeply about a subject and characters that one normally would have no interest in.  I don’t care about video games, but I couldn’t resist rooting for the underdog in this saga.  The tension builds and builds until the credits roll.

In contrast to Spellbound, another extremely entertaining documentary, King of Kong has much less innate appeal.  Spellbound is about kids trying to achieve something great; King of Kong is about middle-aged men playing video games rather than spending time helping their kids with their spelling.  But this film delivers not only a great conflict (with the theme songs from both The Karate Kid and Rocky – Persepolis had Eye of the Tiger as well) but also a cast of characters more entertaining than any screenwriter could invent.

Even the DVD extras, with the brief history of Donkey Kong and the film festival appearances by Donkey Kong challenger Steve Wiebe, were entertaining.

Two favorite lines:

  1. [Walter Day, international referee for retro video games]  I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to be the center of attention. I wanted the glory, I wanted the fame. I wanted the pretty girls to come up and say, “Hi, I see that you’re good at Centipede.”
  2. [Steve Wiebe’s daughter, on the Guiness Book of World Records]  Some people sort of ruin their lives to be in there.

Run, don’t walk.  This is a great film.

the complete lack of cinemas in Freetown

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I love going to the movies.  Anywhere.  I saw Elektra in Manila (bad movie), Miss Congeniality in El Doret (good movie), Never Been Kissed in Kampala (bad movie), Dear Frankie in Cape Town (I fell asleep), Charley’s Angels 2 in Seoul (it seemed really good at the time), Spider-Man 3 in Beijing (mediocre movie)…

People have been able to name at least three cinemas for me here in Freetown: the Odeon, the Globe, and the Strand.  Closed, closed, and almost closed.  The Strand – according to my cab driver – has replaced its big screen with a simple tv screen and just shows football (soccer) matches.

Sierra Leone recently came out of a long civil war.  Now I understand what it means to win the war and lose the peace.