It’s easy to suppose that Patrick McGoohan’s John Drake from Danger Man is the same man as #6 from The Prisoner. Both are resourceful spies, ruthless but with a core of integrity, and of course with McGoohan’s sometimes bizarre but wonderful personal tics. But the most fun thing about such speculation is the occasional flash of the future prisoner in certain episodes of Danger Man. Oh, I know there probably wasn’t any grand intentional scheme that tied them together, but there are episodes of Danger Man where Drake begins to become dissatisfied with his masters. And there’s even one about a sort of proto-village. It transitions into the Prisoner rather nicely. Also, Drake often says “be seeing you”.

Probably the first episode in which Drake clashes with his masters is Whatever Happened to George Foster, in which Drake learns that a wealthy British lord is subverting the government of a small country for his own ends. The lord manages to influence Drake’s own boss (and his boss’s boss’s boss, the foreign secretary) to have Drake removed from the case, but Drake continues on his own and ultimately stops the lord by uncovering enough dirt on him to blackmail him.

The hypothetical resignation almost could have come about as a result of It’s Up to the Lady (though this theory is really dismantled by the fact that the episode is from the first season), in which Drake is called upon to persuade a defecting Englishman to return home. (spoilers) Drake manages it by persuading the man’s wife to change his mind, and he seals the deal on a promise that the man won’t be prosecuted on his return home — a promise made to him by his own boss. However, when they return, the man is immediately arrested. Drake seethes at his boss in vain, and the disappointed wife simply turns her back on him and walks away.

One fun Prisoner-esque episode is Colony Three, in which Drake finds himself (spoilers) at a Russian spy-training facility in the middle of Siberia that is a perfect model of an English town, complete with English defectors who are forced to play along. It’s very much a proto-Village, even down to the forced frivolity and undercurrent of menace. The other episode is The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove in which Drake has a variety of very weird adventures that involve odd camera angles and sinister music. It turns out (spoilers) that Drake has gotten bonked on the head in a road accident and the whole thing has been imagined, incorporating the doctor and others standing around him, Wizard-of-Oz-stylee. It’s weird in a way that would become familiar in The Prisoner.

 

*** The Wicker Man (1973)
**** Coraline

The 1973 Wicker Man should not be confused with the recent Nicolas Cage remake, which by all accounts is horrendous. This one was good. It’s a little off-putting at first, at least if you don’t like weird hippy pagan musicals, but on the other hand there’s some boobs and after a while the musical stuff goes by the wayside as righteous christian policeman edward woodward battles against the depraved pagan hippies. The ending is kinda sweet.

I can’t imagine Coraline being anything other than terrifying for a child, but that aside we thought it was great. It will be a long time before we let NLP see it, I think.

 

*** OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies
*** Dark City

Kind of a slow month for movies. OSS 117 wasn’t at all what I expected — a lot more slapstick and silly than the sort of cool spy parody I was expecting. It was pretty funny in places, not great. E found it uninteresting.

Dark City was about as I remembered — interesting and with lots of good bits but on a grander scale kind of silly. As I so often say in my reviews, the setup and the first hour of running around and figuring out what was going on was pretty good, but the working out of the plot kind of meh. And good ol pre-24 Kiefer Sutherland with his various overacted tics was just sort of odd.

 

**** The Wire (Seasons 4-5)
* Jubilee
*** I’m Alan Partridge (Season 1, ep1-3)

I don’t really know what to say about The Wire. It’s as good as everyone says. I was that into the idea of it, but got hooked about ten minutes into the first episode and was hooked all the way through the last episode of the last season. So if you haven’t seen it, I’d say just go watch it.

E got Jubilee because she thought it was a different half-remembered movie she’s always wanted to see. It wasn’t. Instead it was some awful Derek Jarman thing (and all that that implies). We watched a little bit and fast-forwarded a bit and then just gave up.

I like Steve Coogan and I thought Alan Partridge was pretty funny (though it contains a lot of the discomfort humor that I find so discomforting) but after watching about three episodes I felt like I’d gotten my fill.

 

**** The Wire (Season 3)
*** Zero Effect
* Bottle Shock
*** Up the Yangtze

The Wire is still great. Season 3 brings in politics more, but also explores Bunny Colvin’s radical solution to the drug problem in the western and features his awesome paper bag speech. As a sometime libertarian, I really got into that storyline, and thought they worked out the implications, good and bad, in a meaningful way.

Zero effect was pretty good. I had no expectations (can’t remember how it got on my queue), and it turned out to be some good entertainment.

We were so thoroughly uninterested in the people we met in the first 20-30 minutes of Bottle Shock that we just ejected it and sent it back to Netflix. Sorry, Alan Rickman, I promise to watch you in something better soon.

We missed Up the Yangtze, a documentary about the effects of China’s three gorges dam on people living in the area, at SIFF last year and were looking forward to renting it. It starts off slowly but gradually picks up and becomes a fascinating and understated story. It follows a girl whose family’s house will be covered (like many’s) by the new lake created by the dam. Her family sends her to do menial work on a riverboat to support herself and her family, instead of going to school as she wants. The contrast between her rural family’s life and that onboard the riverboat (both among the more modernized young people working there and the rich tourists coming through) is staggering, and underlined by the images of the new lake slowly consuming the family house.

 

Robert Vaughn, Bullitt (1968): “In your parlance, you blew it.”
Christopher Lee, The Wicker Man (1973): “He’s dead. Can’t complain, had his chance and, in modern parlance, blew it.”

 

**** The Wire (Season 2)
*** Shadow of a Doubt
*** Baby Mama
*** The Lady Vanishes

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**** The Wire (season 1)
*** Star Trek
* Honey West
*** The Shop around the Corner
**** The Prisoner
*** Mutiny on the Bounty
***** Touchez pas au Grisbi (aka Hands off the Loot)
** The Master Touch (aka Un uomo da rispettare)
** The Trouble with Harry

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Miss Austen Regrets was surprisingly good, especially if you consider the trickle of not-so-good based-on-jane-austen’s-life movies we’ve gotten in the last few years. Olivia Williams (who was also Jane in the Kate Beckinsale Emma) is a great Austen, and the story is very good. It doesn’t take any simple path of making parallels between Jane and her books, but showing her more as the genuine novelist, worried about being able to write and trying to support her family as best she can. The dialogue is witty and austenesque, but not to the point of being unrealistic, and Jane is drawn as an intelligent, wry, sometimes difficult person — as you’d expect and hope she was.

 

Mickey Pourke Sliders
Penelope Pockets
Slumcorndog Mustardaires
Frosty/Nixonaide
Robert Brownie Junior Mint Brownies
Cate's Caramel Corn
Sean Penne Pasta
Angiepasto
Brad Pitted Olives
Winslet's Gimlets
Wall-e Walla Onion Dip with Veggies

In Bruges has one of the best DVD extras ever: an edit of the entire movie reduced to just the instances of swearing and the word "Bruges" a la the legendary explicit content only edits of NWA (personal favorite: 8 Ball).

I was expecting this movie to just be a good time, and it exceeded expectations on pretty much every front. The over-the-top swearing. The veiled reference to one of my favorite scenes, from Living in Oblivion. Jordan Prentice's delivery of the line "brothels are good". The discussion of the word "alcoves". Thuggish Ralph Fiennes (especially just after seeing him as a gay butler in Bernard and Doris). Thuggish Ralph Fiennes's expletive-laden paean to the fairytale beauties of Bruges. That the story gets dark and doesn't really lighten up.

What I like best aside from the profanity and hilarity though is the movie's moral ambiguity. The movie makes you sort of sympathetic for Colin Farrel and want him to come out okay, and yet he did something very bad. And the movie's thuggish bad guy is, really, the instrument of justice; and you have to admit he obeys his principles. And plus, little people cursing a lot is comedy gold.

For some reason, this picture of Nora reminds me of that picture of Patrick McGoohan.

1928-2009

it's a pretty good time, nothing great, but, you know, do not fuck with gene hackman. he will fuck your shit up.

Lelia Goldoni had roles in a couple episodes of danger man (and various other stuff), one of them as the gun-toting third-world villainess Pilar Lin. rowr.

Really funny, full of great performances. Of course, being a Coen brothers movie, it starts off light and gets much blacker as it goes. There's one moment that takes it beyond goofball hijinks that was just shocking, which rules. And not just anyone can have a scene of utter brutality (it's right near the end) that's a laugh line. I liked pretty much everyone in this. but brad pitt especially -- he's at his best when he turns up the crazy/stupid. tilda swinton does icy cold so well. clooney's jolly not-too-bright philanderer. and of course malkovich provides a wound-up CIA analyst with a very bad temper. but it might be jk simmons and david rasche who make the movie. as CIA higher-ups trying to follow the hijinks, they frame the story and somehow take it to the next level of comedy.

as you may know, I like seven samurai, a lot. I've watched it many many times, going back to my father taking me to see it multiple times when I was a kid. like any old friend, it has all kinds of quirks and things that I love to see, and think about sometimes, and look forward to when I'm watching it. so, what the hell, I wrote them down (spoilers and all).
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E and I saw La Antena at SIFF last year and, as I said in my review, it was marvelous. E and I have both been itching to see it again ever since. Unfortunately, it hasn't gotten a wider release here and isn't available on DVD in the US. However, I did some googling and found here that the Argentinian DVD has English subtitles. One person recommended this site (and gave some tips for negotiating their site if you don't read Spanish), so I ordered it. It just arrived. I was worried about being able to watch it, since it's supposed to be region 4, but for whatever reason it ran fine on my DVD player. And not only does it have the movie, there's a great "making of" short and some other extras. There's also a torrent out there which works, but I'm glad to have the DVD.

and after watching it again, we still both thought it was great. Again, one of the best films I've seen in a long time.

After having not seen it for 20+ years, E and I rented the first few episodes of Star Blazers last week. I'm going to be accused of sacrilege for this, but it was just awful. Terrible-quality animation, weak storylines, appalling English voice acting, and, worst of all, boringly talky and lacking in action. The villains are laughably ridiculous. The only real pluses were that the Argo (nee Yamoto) and its wave motion gun are still cool, and that Nova is still hot in her skin tight star force uniform with the giant arrow pointing at her junk.

Of course, it all seemed really cool when I was a kid. And the disappointing watching experience resembles what happened when I rewatched Robotech Macross a few years ago. With Robotech, the terrible animation etc was soon overcome by its gripping soap operatic story (Rick! Minmei! Lisa!). But with Star Blazers, I don't really wish to give it more time to see if I become engrossed. For one thing, it's even worse than Robotech, quality-wise, and has less-gripping action sequences. For another, Macross and its story made a big impact on my adolescent self and I still remember much of it; I hardly remembered anything about Star Blazers except its comically bad theme song and its impressive space battleship. So uh, sorry Star Blazers. Next up: Battle of the Planets?

Apparently the producers of the lord of the rings movies are trying to do asimov's foundation books next. NY Mag provides a handy chart as to why this is doomed to failure.