Captain Phillips + J. Edgar

I've been suffering from a a splitting headache since Friday. It has something to do with our recent weather here. Some sort of odd pressure system. The mornings begin packed with fog, which then burns off by afternoon, leaving us with bright sunshine. While I have experienced sunny January days in the past during my 20 years in the Emerald City, what is unusual is the fog. Our fall was also unusual in that there were two straight weeks of  these foggy mornings followed by sunny afternoons. Puget Sound area autumns after October are normally just wet and dark.

In any event, waking up with a splitting headache each morning for the last three days does not lend itself to sitting in front of a monitor typing at a keyboard. Today, the cabeza feeling a little better, I'll attempt to get caught up with some posts.

First, some quick-hitters on movies I have seen recently. After viewing all seasons of Breaking Bad in order and then polishing off Luther (Series 3), I decided to watch some feature-length Hollywood film. It is always helpful in terms of ascertaining the spirit of an age to see what is being extruded by the dream machine. I used to have this as a regular feature of the blog, a Sunday-morning comment on whatever recently-released-to-DVD Hollywood film that I had streamed from Amazon the night before. But then Amazon raised its prices and its offerings shrank. So I stopped watching movies and stuck with streaming cable television series like Spartacus and Homeland.

Last night I watched Captain Phillips (2013), starring Tom Hanks and directed by Paul Greengrass. Greengrass catapulted to stardom based on his directorial work on The Bourne Supremacy (2004), the second installment in the Bourne film franchise. Captain Phillips follows the docudrama format of the film Greengrass completed after The Bourne Supremacy, United 93 (2006).

United 93 was a good film, though it buffed up the national security machinery to look like an expensive car commercial. Captain Phillips is not so good. The performances of the Somali pirates are superb (Barkhad Abdi has been nominated for an Academy Ward for his portrayal of Muse the pirate captain).

While there are vague references as to the reasons why the Somali youth are pirates -- they are cogs in a larger criminal enterprise; their waters have been fished out by corporate factory trawlers -- this film in the end is nothing more than an advertisement for the U.S. Navy.

An elite G.I. Joe team of Navy Seals (they're clean cut this time; no beards and keffiyeh as in Zero Dark Thirty) parachute in and mop up the mess with their cutting-edge technology and their deadly sniper rifles. The darkies are made to go bye-bye in a spray of blood, and the traumatized Tom Hanks/Captain Phillips ends the film being ministered to by a beautiful, strong, angelic, milk-fed Navy medic in an immaculate emergency room aboard the destroyer USS Bainbridge. You see, all is right in the world. American military might bestrides the globe.

If you want to see a better Greengrass film, see Bloody Sunday (2002).

Friday night I suffered through the first half of J. Edgar (2011) -- the dark, torpid Hoover bio-drama directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Leonardo DiCaprio -- before throwing in the towel because of my headache. I resumed the following morning in the dark. The movie hopscotches back and forth in time from the Palmer Raids to JFK's assassination to the Lindbergh kidnapping to Hoover's campaign against MLK, Jr. to his gangster wars campaign of the 1930s  The movie is bloodless with no coherent statement about Hoover's FBI and the role it played in America.

Hoover's COINTELPRO; his role in sculpting the Warren Commission Report; his close association with organized crime bigwigs and right-wing captains of industry -- all go completely unmentioned or are alluded to only in passing.

Mostly this movie is a gay love story. The lovers are J. Edgar and his abused companion, Associate Director of FBI Clyde Tolson. It is as if Eastwood shelves good storytelling in order to out the paranoid, megalomaniac, top lawman commie fighter as nothing but a poor queer.

Don't see this movie.

Cloud Atlas: Be Prepared to Suffer

I started late yesterday afternoon. I had stepped out and purchased a medium cheese pizza at the neighborhood Pagliacci. A movie that's close to three hours in length, as Cloud Atlas is, requires nutrition.

Not since The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey have I suffered so. And as with The Hobbit, I was unable to finish Cloud Atlas. I made it 90 minutes in and then had to throw in the towel from sheer exhaustion. Following six separate stories over six different time periods, watching spiritless acting (I found the performances of Halle Berry and Tom Hanks embarrassing) and having to deal with the quick breaks between plotlines, it's hard to establish any kind of connection to the movie. What were the Wachowskis and Tom Twyker thinking? Are they purposely alienating their audience?

I slept for four hours and then got up and sat through another hour. I now have around 30 minutes left to go. I'll finish up tonight. But my advice is don't waste your time with this film. Some of the futuristic Neo Seoul stuff is interesting, probably because it taps into the Wachowskis' The Matrix trilogy, and the San Francisco 1973 investigative reporter plot was decent. But if you're looking for a movie with multiple plotlines that addresses time consciousness and identity, stick with Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010); it's an incomparably better picture.