3 posts tagged “movies”

I saw No Country for Old Men last night. It's a good movie, certainly, but since it followed many of the rules of a typical genre action/chase/thriller. In that context, which you'll understand if you've seen it, it's ultimately unsatisfying.

One of the classic action genre moments is where character of Anton Chigurh performs self surgery using supplies he recently stole from a pharmacy. I love these scenes. I'm normally so squeamish about blood, all aspects of our organic machinery, but I'm fascinated watching someone who can suture their own wounds as if they were wiring a plug. Like the wetware equivalent of recompiling a kernel.

It's Hollywood shorthand for badass. Assassin, outlaw, good guy who for some reason is on the run from the authorities. It says "I don't need anyone's help". Full respect for the expression of self-sufficiency, yet uneasy distrust at someone who consciously prepares themselves to survive outside of society's protections.

It seems clichéd, yet when I check the imdb for movies with the keyword 'self-surgery' I only get five results, none of them the aforementioned. Fail. Come on internets, there has to be more than that. A Bourne at least?

I've just watched The Bourne Ultimatum.  It's an excellent action movie/travelogue, but not as all-round entertaining as, say, Die Hard 4.0 due to the utter lack of humour.  Bourne's been described as an "anti-James Bond" in some of the publicity interviews. Principally, because Bond, like anyone who works in a field dealing with death, has developed a dark humour as a coping mechanism.  Bourne kills, but kills without quips.

Director Paul Greengrass critizised Bond for "wearing Prada suits", seemingly oblivious to the fact that his protagonist runs about with a grand's worth of shiny Tag Heuer on his wrist.  Presumably because wearing a watch worth more than most men's suits fits in nicely with the "low profile" look they were trying to achieve
with the wardrobe?

Oh, and also he "doesn't rely on high-tech gadgets".  This is, of course, balls.  Bourne makes extensive use of cell phones in all three movies - a gadget that would have been considered pretty fantastical if featured in the bulk of Bond movies.

One of the reasons Bond movies of the 60s were popular was because they presented their spycraft gadgets as objects of  everyday commuter mundanity. Wristwatches.  Briefcases.  Bowler hats.  The possibility of a world existing just below the surface.

There was a time when wireless radio headsets were the sort of thing you'd see in  "send-a-team-in" movies (You know: an elite team of well armed, technologically tricked out, highly trained operatives are sent in to deal with an unknown threat.  One by one they're picked off - and the only survivor is usually some unlikely civilian.  A botanist, say.  With a gammy leg or something).  These days a bluetooth earpiece hardly bestows its wearer with any dangerous glamour.

The gap between movie fantasy and everyday mudanity for gadgets can be smaller than the time between sequels.  By 2007 the movie world's CIA is apparently using Google Maps to track targets.  CIA computers protected by Norton Anti-virus.  By comparison, the real-world's supervillian "box-cutters" are already widely available.

One thing that struck me is that, for a globe-trotting movie, Bourne doesn't seem to fly anywhere. Maybe it fits in the logic of the movie as a security/tradecraft thing?  He's in cars, and conspicuously on trains, buses and boats, but never on planes.  For example, the journey from London to Madrid seems to be via train - presumably via Paris again.  (Although I assume some unseen leg of his trip to New York would have been by plane).

The CIA guys seem to fly everywhere.  In Supremacy, Pam Landy flies from Berlin to Washington DC for a few hours and then flies back to Berlin.  Maybe, in the the current climate of eco-sensitivity, it's a subtle way of separating good from bad, especially now that no-one's allowed to smoke any more.

My taste in movies is a broad church - Hollywood popcorn shifters sit next to European art-house in my DVD collection.  And after several weeks of just watching French movies I finally got to balance it out yesterday with a chest-thumping action movie - Die Hard 4.0.

And while my criteria for liking films can be as simple as the fact that they had nice production design, it's rare that I come out of a cinema thinking "that was awesome".  Die Hard 4.0 is, imho, 'teh awesome'.  Haxxors, geek references, very subtle intra-series jokes, explosions, helicopters, martial arts,  funny action sequences, French-speaking Parkour assassins - everything.  If, at the end, it was revealed that the bad guy (the drug dealer from 'Go') was a vampire it might possibly have been the perfect movie.

I'd very recently watched the TV spin-off of The Net made in the 90s.  I'd warn you it's an ultimately unrewarding experience.  One of the interesting concepts from the movies was that the cyber-terrorists, the Praetorians, were positioning themselves to use their power to execute an invisible coup.  The Praetorians of the TV series seem to have no political aims, and they don't seem to have any grander objectives at all.  Crimes are committed in order to fund criminal schemes.  When they do the "shutting down the power grid" episode and it just seems like a pointless exercise.  It's possible that The Net also took some cues from the same 1997 Wired article mentioned in the Die Hard 4.0 opening credits, since it seems to be a tighter and more coherent retelling of that series arc.

If there's any criticism I have, it's the same thing I thought watching Firewall (awful) - if you're buying computers specifically for use in criminal activity you wouldn't buy Dell.  Sure, they're good enough machines, but, since they inevitably get abandoned at some point, the fact that they're configured to order is just going to provide more leads for investigators.