All Posts Tagged With: "movies"

I am highly resistant to writing about politics at the moment (and probably will be until the debates start up), and I lack the knowledge to write competently about the financial craziness that’s been going on, so I thought I’d do another edition of what I did a couple days ago when I listed my ranking of Coen brothers movies. I’ll try to make a little mini-series out of this with different directors, and hopefully it will provide a sense of levity as things get more intense the closer we get to Election Day. Today, I’m tackling the films of my all-time favorite director, Stanley Kubrick. From best to worst:

1. Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
2. Paths of Glory
   
3. The Shining
   
4. 2001: A Space Odyssey
   
5. Full Metal Jacket
6. A Clockwork Orange
7. Eyes Wide Shut
8. Lolita
9. Spartacus

Excluded from the list because I haven’t seen them: The Killing, Barry Lyndon, and several of his very early films. This is a tough list to make for a couple reasons. First, Kubrick’s movies are very different from one another, making them difficult to compare. Second, his movies can be very polarizing, 2001 being probably the best example of that, where one person might think it’s the greatest movie ever and another will walk away hating it.

One thing I always marvel at when I think about Kubrick is that a single director somehow made my all-time favorite comedy (Dr. Strangelove), horror movie (The Shining), science fiction movie (2001), and war movie (Paths of Glory). Paths of Glory, by the way, is not as widely seen as many of his other movies, but people really ought to watch it. It’s powerful and courageous in a way very few movies are. A lot of Kubrick’s work strikes me as a series of attempts to cut through various absurdities, and where Dr. Strangelove manages that feat with hilarious satire, Paths of Glory manages it with deadly seriousness. That he’s able to communicate in such different ways is a testament to his range, and that he’s able to communicate so powerfully at all is a testament to his enormous talent.

Also, if there are readers out there who are big fans of Kubrick, I’d recommend the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures.

I love music. Honestly, I know people say they “love” things all the time, but I really mean it. Don’t believe me? Well, take my average day for example:

I wake up at 6am to the sound of two alarm clocks (I really don’t like getting up in the morning). The one next to my bed is an iHome tuned to The X, a decent alternative rock station in the ‘burgh. The other is one of those good old black hotel alarm clocks, which plays the most annoying sound ever conceived by man.

After I come out of the shower and do my hair, I hit the space bar on my computer to turn iTunes onto whatever I was listening to the night before. I take a swig of whatever juice is in the fridge, turn off the tunes, and hop into my car. I have a 6-disc mp3 CD changer, and I always have about 50% of my music collection hiding in a container in the back seat.

As soon as I get to work, I put my 160GB iPod into it’s dock, plug in my stereo headphones, and listen to music whilst I work the day away. A coworker often comes up to me and taps me on the shoulder to say, “Jay, how is the control tower treatin’ you this morning?” I just smirk and politely turn off the tunes and have a nice chat.

My evenings home consist of a large percentage of time involved with iTunes and tweaking my collection (Right now, I’m listening to music of the 1970’s…549 songs as of tonight). I now have gone through all 7500+ songs and ensure that the name of the song, Artist name, Album name, album art, and original year of release are accurate and updated. I also have everything rated on the not-so-good 5-star scale. My next hurdle is to fill in all the genre section in order to make some killer playlists…I haven’t tried it yet, but Billy Joe sent me an email about Tune Up, a pretty cool looking program

I also like movies a lot (don’t worry, I won’t go into detail about that). Anyway, this evening, I caught the movie Almost Famous on one of my over-priced movie channels. It is the best of both worlds; its a movie, but it is immersed in the world of…music! Well, that got me to thinking about what makes a great movie, and more specifically, great movies dealing with music. Therefore, I decided to throw together a list of my top 5 music-themed movies (in no particular order):

• Almost Famous
• High Fidelity
• The Blues Brothers
• Empire Records
• This is Spinal Tap

Honorable Mention goes to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, School of Rock and Reign Over Me, which isn’t exactly fitting with this category, but it is more musically related than some other movies. Then, we have all those great films with killer soundtracks. Such as: Trainspotting, Hackers, Breakin’ (don’t laugh), Footloose, Dazed and Confused, Ocean’s Eleven, anything by John Hughes or Wes Anderson, etc.

I think Almost Famous hits home for me because when I was younger, I always wanted to be a journalist (as you can tell by my posts, I made a good decision by going into the sciences). I really would love nothing more than to go back in time and be a teenager during the mid-1960s through the early 1970’s. To experience the origins of Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Cream, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, some later Ray Charles, Jimi Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater Revival, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Queen, any so many more…would just be unbelievable.

Today, I can say I love these acts because I’ve been able to sort through their entire collection in one sitting and pick out what I like. However, to experience it chronologically, it is so much different. Would I have liked all these artists from their first albums without knowing the great songs that might come later? Not everyone burst onto the scene with top-notch albums like Led Zeppelin’s self-titled debut or Jimi’s, “Are You Experienced“.

So, I guess what this seemingly never-ending post is just supposed to say, I really liked the movie, and could relate to the character of William Miller easily. Most people would discredit my above list for not including the Beatles…but that is precisely why they aren’t on there. This movie wasn’t about some giant act (although they were mentioned a great deal throughout the movie); on the contrary, it was about an up and coming band, and how they were struggling to come into their own. William wasn’t just along for the ride, he was actually a part of music history!

Note: I LOATHE Moulin Rouge, so I don’t want to read any comments containing those words…no reason why, because I don’t need one.

I may just be imagining this, but it feels like way more people say “Have a good Fourth of July!” or the like in D.C. than in Illinois. Which makes intuitive sense, but it’s kinda funny to experience.

In any case, here’s hoping everybody out there in Urbanagora-land has a spectacular Independence Day weekend. If you get a chance, I highly recommend renting the HBO miniseries John Adams if you haven’t seen it. Very, very good stuff, and one of the parts deals with the lead-up to the Declaration of Independence, so there’s no better time to check it out.

If you’re ever in a bad mood for any reason, go out and rent the movie Once. It will solve all of life’s problems for at least one hour and twenty-five minutes.

Last night, the Urbanagora contributor commonly known as Augur and I went out to see Taxi to the Dark Side in the only theater in DC still showing it. Taxi is a documentary detailing the United States’ treatment of those it detains in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, centered around the story of an Afghani taxi driver named Dilawar who died while in US custody at Bagram Air Base.

The movie is produced by Alex Gibney, who competed against himself this year for the Best Documentary Academy Award, having produced both Taxi and the Iraq war documentary No End In Sight. Taxi ended up winning, and rightly so. No End is a terrific film that ably catalogs the many follies committed throughout the waging of the Iraq war, but it ultimately fails by leaving the viewer wondering whether the war was merely a failure of execution or a more fundamental failure of conception. (Incidentally, one of the experts interviewed for No End is Samantha Power, the Obama foreign policy adviser who recently had to resign the campaign after calling Hillary Clinton a “monster.”)

Taxi suffers from no such muddled viewpoint. The movie is designed to outrage and disappoint its viewer, and in that goal it is successful, at least based on my reaction and the apparent reactions of the other theatergoers surrounding me. It is a scathing, brutal indictment of an administration that has both ignored high-level military experts and scapegoated low-level military personnel.

Gibney convincingly persuades us that Dilawar, the Afghani taxi driver, was the victim of a homicide at the hands of the American military, and further that he was probably innocent of any wrongdoing. But Dilawar’s story serves mainly as a vehicle by which the filmmakers show that the universally condemned atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib were not the acts of “a few bad apples,” but rather were the result of a widespread, deliberately vague policy coming from within the Bush administration.

Thinking back on the movie, several moments stand out in my memory: an interview of a British citizen held and abused in Guantanamo Bay without trial, Senator Carl Levin holding up documents released by the Department of Defense that had been redacted in their entirety, an FBI officer demonstrating how to conduct an interrogation that is both humane and effective. But of course what stands out the most are the shocking, sickening images of prisoner abuse – including, by the way, heart-rending footage of Senator John McCain as a young navy pilot held captive in Vietnam, choking back tears as he tries to tell his wife that he loves her. It is only too awful, then, to see Senator McCain try to subject this administration to the rules of civilized society and international law, only to eventually cave in to political pressure and allow the administration to interpret the rules as it sees fit.

Augur and I picked a good time to see this movie, on the same day that President Bush vetoed a bill that would have explicitly prohibited waterboarding, a technique in which restrained detainees are made to feel as if they are drowning. I heard that news before I went to see the movie and was saddened. After I saw the movie, I was downright ashamed.

Go see it, or if it’s not showing in a theater near you, put it on your list of movies to rent on DVD. In a political season in which issues of the economy and foreign policy may fairly be debated, this movie stands as a useful reminder that some issues strike at the heart of our most deeply held values, and that we sacrifice those values at great risk to our security, our rule of law, and our souls.