Off the Mark

I have been watching a couple movies during this break. Maybe I could be doing more productive things, but my mind also needs a break, time to do some leisurely processing in the background. So movies it is.

I have mentioned some of them already, but would like to flesh them out with wsome mini-reviews.

Friday, I watched Steamboy. It was OK, but ambivalent on “science” in the end. [Should rightly be applied science and, thus, technology, though. The movie referred to it as "science."] Set mostly in England, and particularly London during the Great Exhibition of 1851—Crystal Palace and all—steam was king and “science” was ascendant. Science was portrayed as the means of helping humanity or as a highly dangerous way to make more powerful and efficient weapons of war to be sold to the highest bidders. The latter way was winning. Motives in the movie were rarely this simplistic, but this simplistic dichotomy was nonetheless explicitly set up for the”purpose” of science. It was an entertaining movie, well done in many ways; I just feel cheated by its vague and simplistic stand on one of the supreme (and complex) moral issues of all of human history.

Sunday, I watched The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. This was a good, but odd movie. I’m not sure what I felt about this movie; may have to watch it again some day. It is very complex morally. In the end, it is hard to embrace any of the characters. In this sense, it is a vastly human movie. I do not necessarily require “clean and tidy” movies, but this one seemed to be pushing at the edges of “clean and tidy” for me. But then life is rarely clean and tidy, either.

Kingdom of Heaven was watched over Sunday and Monday. While a visually lush movie (Ridley Scott), this just did not resonate much with me. There is a fair amount of character development, and almost everyone learns some hard lessons, but they do little for the characters or the film, in the end. I did find the premise interesting, and it’s a timely topic. I just wanted more. Maybe it was supposed to be representative of the time and not judge that time morally, but we need nuanced discussion and views in these matters today and not simply lush, big budget, films that have no real statement to make. Yes, it seems I am expecting too much of mass entertainment.

Monday I watched Adaptation. I really don’t know what to say about this one. Not really very good, nor recommended.

I watched Paradise Now on Tuesday. My comments are at the LibraryTavern post that caused me to put it on my list, assuming Liz approves my comment. Recommended, but (for me) lacking.

Word Wars (Scrabble) is a pretty good documentary, but knowing words just as objects and combinations of specific numbers of letters on lists is a seriously bad “word issue” to have, IMHO. I’ve enjoyed some Scrabble in my day, but that is a wrong reason (and way) to know words. It seems to me that that would be (is) a good use of computing technology; we humans ought to know words in the sense that computers cannot. The people in this movie are all characters, full of real quirks, predilections, and motives. I watched this Wednesday.

After Word Wars, I watched Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I had already seen this but wanted some mindless entertainment for one of my movie slots where I wasn’t prepared to really concentrate. Not really a good movie at all, but it has its moments. Really, read the books, or any other format in which you prefer some version of the story.

Yesterday, I watched Junebug, Sirens, and Napoleon Dynamite. I feel that all of these were oversold to me, but in vastly different ways. They weren’t bad movies, and for what I paid were worth it, but … I got nothing else either.

Still to watch:

Maria Full of Grace. I need to watch this today so I can return it before 9 PM.

Spellbound (1999 National Spelling Bee). More folks with word issues. I have until tomorrow for this one.