A Simple Plan

A Simple Plan is a thriller in the snow, made two years after Fargo by Sam Raimi, a friend of the Coens. This movie though is not a simple Fargo rip-off, but a masterpiece that is one of the best movies of the nineties.

The main characters are Hank, Jacob and Lou. Hank is an educated man who went to college, but struggles to make ends meet, now his wife is pregnant. Jacob is Hank's brother. He is not very well adjusted socially, mostly because he is not very intelligent, but he tries hard to live the best life he possibly can. Lou is his best friend. He is a bit of a simpleton, out of a job and supported by his wife. One day these three man find a bag with more then four million dollar in it, in a fallen plane.

Jacob and Lou want to split it, but Hank says that is stealing and they should bring it to the police. Hank doesn't have much moral problems with stealing. His problem is that it might get you arrested. They eventually agree that Hank should keep the money for awhile and if after some time no one searches for it they'll split it.

Hank returns home with the movie and it's here that the movie shows it's greatness for the first time. Hank asks his wife, also a college graduate, whether it's hypothetically all right to keep money you've found in a fallen plane. His wife says that it is wrong of course, and the person that finds it should return it. She quickly changes her mind when she sees the money. We all may now what's right and cast judgments on others when they do something wrong. But that is meaningless if we don't act the same way in practice as we think we should theoretically. And many people don't. The movie constantly reminds us of this, and nowhere better than in this scene. The movie also seems to argue that we should not act according to the law, because it is the law and we will get punished if we don't. We should act according to the law because it's the morally right thing to do. And throughout the movie Hank has to do things against the law. He doubts a lot of time about whether he should do it or not. But he doesn't doubt first and foremost because of the moral consequences of his actions, but because of the legal ones. When he doubts whether to kill someone who may cause him problems, he does this not because killing is wrong, but because it might get him to jail.

Jacob, brilliantly played by Billy Bob Thornton, may not be intelligent and a bit of a social misfit, but what makes his situation poignant is the fact that he knows it. He knows that he doesn't have a great life. And he also knows that no matter how hard he tries, his life won't get much better. The money can be very useful to him. But when he accidentally hurts a man and his brother then kills the man, he wants to stop everything and give the money to the police. His conscience does hurt when a man dies because of him.

In the end Hank does not get caught for any of his crimes, but due to him a lot of people have died, some dear to him, and he has lost the money. All the trouble was for nothing and Hank is worse off than he was at the beginning of the story.

I won't tell much more about this movie, because the story is full of surprising twist and turns which should not be spoiled.

All Star

-All Star (Smash Mouth, 1999) This song fits perfectly in Rat Race (Zucker, 2001), but it's probably the least interesting song on my IPod.



I didn't know this, but the song is obviously made for the movie Mystery Men (Usher, 1999) which I haven't seen. According to IMDB it's about a 'A group of inept amateur superheroes who must try to save the day when a super villain threatens to destroy a major superhero and the city.' It's with Ben Stiller, William H. Macy and Hank Azaria, among others. They also star in the fairly simple video clip which wants to show that the mystery men are indeed inept and amateurish. So we see Steve Harwell, the lead singer of Smash Mouth performing super-heroic tasks, like saving a dog from a burning house or a woman from underneath a truck. This while arriving everywhere before the Mystery Men, who therefore don't have much saving to do. Of course Harwell also looks and acts way cooler then the Mystery Men and he is constantly surrounded by sexy women, while nobody really seems to like the Mystery Men. They seem like schmucks, which is of course further emphasized by the fact that William H. Macy is among them, who's made his career playing schmucks. And of course by all this the clip also wants us to show that Smash Mouth is really cool.

House of Sand and Fog

This was such a great movie for such a long time that it is really a pity it completely lost it in the last 15-20 minutes.

Kathy is a woman who is not having the happiest time of her life. Her husband has left her and due to a administrative error which is partly her own fault she has to go out of her house. She doesn't have enough money and so has to sleep in her car.
Meanwhile Behrani is a proud Iranian immigrant who a long time ago for political reasons had to flee Iran with his family for political reasons. His daughter is now married and he has financial troubles, because he had to pay for her wedding. He conceals this troubles for his family. When he learns that Kathy's house is auctioned for a cheap price he buys it, with the intent of selling it for a higher price. It's a good idea.

Kathy goes to a lawyer to get her house back, but her lawyer tells her that legally there is not much she can do anymore, since Behrani has bought the house and the law is on his side now. Not all is bad for Kathy though. The cop that had to tell her that she lost his house, has fallen for her and they start a relationship. One problem though, the cop is still married. Now in a lot of movies the following would happen: the cop would tell to his mistress that he'll leave his wife and then he'll go to his wife, have a lot of quite dinners with her while in deep thoughts, while she'll be asking him whether everything is fine and stuff like that, until he realizes he made a really big mistake and return to his wife. Well, not here. In a surprisingly good scene he tells his wife bluntly that the situation is what it is and that he loves Kathy more then her. When his wife asks him what she should tell her children, hi simply says she should tell the truth. Unfortunately Kathy has seen to much of these aforementioned movies and believes that her new lover won't come back. She gets drunk and tries to kill herself. This sets what happens in the last 30 minutes in motion, but more on this later.

Before all this Kathy and the cop try to persuade the Behranis a couple of times to leave their house. Of course they don't do this. The strength of the movie is that nobody is wrong in what they do. This are all pretty good people. And when they do something wrong they do it out of love for others and usually regret doing it. And we care about both parties without taking sides.

Ben Kingsley as Behrani and Jennifer Connelly as Kathy give great performances in this movie. I didn't use to notice Ben Kingsley much, but after this movie and Sexy Beast (which is a pretty lousy movie anytime Kingsley is off-screen) I see him as one of the best actors alive. Jennifer Connelly is a very beautiful and very good actress and her beauty is actually pretty important in this movie. We believe that the cop can be infatuated with her and that he'll go very far, sometimes too far, to help her.

The cinematography is very good too. The house is at night surrounded by a thick fog, which is very common for San Francisco These shots at night around the house are eerily beautiful and seem as if they come straight from a horror movie. They give us the feeling that the house is haunted and that things won't end well for the people involved with. Well they do not end well. Not for the people involved and not for the movie itself.

When Kathy tries to kill herself she does that in the backyard of the house. When she starts crying. Behrani hears her and rescues her and gets her into the house where the Behranis care for her. While bathing she tries to kill herself again and the Behranis save her again and realize that they should probably give the house back to Kathy. Meanwhile the cop arrives at the house realizes what happened and loses it completely. He locks the Behranis in their bathroom and only lets them out once they agree to leave the house or make some kind of deal that is good for Kathy. Eventually they reach a deal and the next morning the cop, Behrani and Behrani's son go to finish the administrative details. The cop forces Behrani's son to come too so Behrani won't do any stupid things. There is a lot of tension between them which is heightened because the cop keeps calling Behrani's son Ismael, when in fact he is called Esmail. Esmail, who during the film seems to gain respect for his roots, gets fed up and, in a moment of inattention, steals the cop's gun and points it to him. Other cops see this shoot and Kill Esmail. This was a bit too over the top, especially since the rest of the movie was so calm and realistic, but I can understand why this had to happen. There are a lot of conflicts like this one in the movie all over the world. So if you make a movie about one you got to make sure that this one has really big consequences. You got to make your audience believe that this particular conflict mattered. And as I said before the movie did, through its cinematography foreshadow that it would not end well. So if the movie ended here it would be a truly great drama.

But it didn't. What followed was that first Ben Kingsley was made to act (I can't possibly believe that it was his own idea to act like this) like a complete idiot to show us his grieve for his son. I understand that one can lose his mind when he loses his son in such a way. But Ben Kingsley acted like a retarded man losing his mind instead like a sane man losing his mind. Then his character decided that he and his wife had nothing to live for anymore, despite still having a daughter who they obviously loved. The movie seems to forget this. So Behrani poisons his wife, without her knowing anything about his intentions or that her son is dead. When his wife dies he puts on his Iranian uniform and pulls a sack over his head. This has the probably unintended effect of making him look completely ridiculous. After he dies Kathy finds them both and is devastated. When she calls the police the man asks her whether this is her house and she says no.

So in the last 15 minutes the movie manages to make Behrani a parody of himself and does not give any kind of satisfying end scene to Mrs. Behrani, thereby making it look as if she was completely unimportant, which she was not. If the movie meant to criticize the position of the woman in Muslim marriages with this it completely failed, because it basically did to her what it wanted to criticize. Furthermore the movie made it look as if Kathy was to blame for the whole situation, thereby losing its objectivity and lack of judgment, the qualities that made it so good in the first place.

There Will Be Blood

There Will Be Blood is a great movie that perfectly combines style and substance. Every scene in the movie is really great, yet every scene is also crucial for the story.

The movie audaciously starts in 1898 with 15 minutes of no dialogue. We just see the main character, Daniel Plainview, working in the oil rigs. It's established right away that this Plainview is a tough man. After he falls down and breaks a leg he crawls to the seemingly very far city on his only healthy leg. Unfortunately he is not the only one to have an accident. One of his colleagues is less fortunate and dies. He has a baby son which Plainview now adopts. Cut to 5 years later and Plainview is now a relatively successful oilman. Together with his 'son' he goes around cities and does all kinds of business with oil. We don't now how he got to do this, but we get the hint that he uses his son to establish trust between him and the people he does business with. One day Eli Sunday comes to him and tells him that there is oil where he comes from and that he'll give him information about where it exactly is if Plainview gives him 500 dollars. Plainview thinks the risk is worth taking and offers him the money. Now Plainview goes to the farm of the Sunday's and it is now that the story truly begins.

When Plainview (together with his son) arrives at the farm he is greeted heartily by the father,Abel, but a little less so by his son Eli, who is Paul's twin brother. Paul assumes they live above oil and gives a very high price for the farm, saying he will use it for his church. Plainview in the end comes to an agreement with Eli and so the work can begin. Plainview has big plans. He wants to build a pipeline, so he isn't dependent on the railways to transport his oil, which of course means he'll earn money. By the end of the film he'll succeed in his plans and will be a rich businessman living in a great house.

An oil rig is built and very soon a worker dies. Eli accuses Plainview, because he did not let him bless the rig. Plainview says that if the workers wouldn't have to go to Eli's preachings they would be less tired and make less dumb mistakes. This starts a lifelong conflict between Eli and Daniel which will come to an end in the ending scene of the film which some found way over the top, but I think it was pretty logical. More on this later.

Two other plot points are still important. After an explosion of the oil rig Plainview's son becomes deaf and mute. This frustrates Daniel a lot and he tries a lot of things to help his son. Mostly unsuccessful and eventually his son has to learn sign language and talk through a translator.

One day Daniel is met by a man who claims to be his brother from another mother and needs help. Daniel offers him a job and a place to live, but when it turns out this man is just imposing for his brother, Daniel kills him.

I've read when this movie came out quite some reviews of the film. They all talked about how Daniel Plainview was a great villain and used words like monster,inhuman and all kinds of other such words. People jokingly talked about battles between Anton Chigurh and Daniel Plainview (Since No Country for old Men and this were the big rivals in the Oscar race). Well I was flabbergasted while watching the movie, but Plainview is not a monster or even a enormous villain. Sure he is no hero either, but if you have to choose between villain and hero I'd choose the latter. Bust mostly he is a hard working human being with some flaws.

It is true that Plainview uses his son to gain the trust of the people. But he does not lie. When he tells them that they run a family business it is quite true. He always explains to his son what and why they are doing and his son does really help him a lot. And it's quite obvious that Plainview loves him, even though he is not technically his. And the son obviously loves what he is doing and he loves his dad. He surely has a better life now then if Daniel left him alone. It's very probable that his real mother is dead, since he was constantly with his father. Now you can put against Daniel that his son doesn't seem to have a real name. He is simply called H.W. Plainview.

In his conversations with his 'brother' it becomes pretty obvious that Plainview does miss his family, but he comes from a poor upbringing so he can go back there. He does everything he can to make some money and live a slightly normal life. Those first scenes are very crucial to the movie. They show that he is just a human being trying his best to make a living. So when he says to his brother that he doesn't like this people he works with we can understand. They work less hard then he does and some may even feel exploited and most hope God will one day save them from their troubles. But they are a lot better with him then without him. Sure Plainview doesn't work himself in the rigs and he earns most of the money. But his workers have better conditions then he ever had. And yes these better conditions aren't there because Plainview loves them so much, but because they are good for business. Plainview never pretended otherwise. Many movies have been made about brave people who stand up for the rights of those who are fragile. Well, this is not about such a man and most people at the beginning of the 20th century simply weren't like that anyway. For Plainview,like for most people back then, that is a luxury he can't afford. Besides no one cared for him when he worked his ass off and he never complained. He tries to do the best he can for him and the people he loves. And he does it all in a legal manner. Most of us would do the same, we can't blame him for that.

We can blame him of course for the killing of his 'brother', but even that is kind of understandable. He confides in him a lot. He seems to be happy that there is finally someone who really seems to understand him. Daniel also does his best to help him, since he had hit a rough patch. When his 'brother' tells him he lied to him we can understand that he is really furious. It was obviously important to have some family around.

After Plainview is insured he's going to get his pipeline, we cut to 1929. Plainview lives in a big royal house. H.W. now older says that he wants to start as an oilmen for himself in Mexico. This makes him Daniels' competitor. This enrages Daniel of course, but we can understand both people's reactions. The enraged Daniel asks H.W. to say it to him with his own mouth and not via his translator. H.W. does this with a lot of effort and this does enrage Daniel even more and tells H.W. he is really a bastard son. In the next scene Eli comes to Daniel and asks him for money. In a scene completely over the top where Daniel seems to be completely mad he kills Eli. Again we can understand his madness. First of all, it is 1929. Eli says he's lost a lot of money. Well it's very probable that Daniel has lost quite a lot of money. Earlier in the film we saw that he is willing to take risks if that's good for business. He probably still does that and taking risks in 1929 was not very rewarding to say the least. Plainview might have lost a lot of his fortune. For a man that had to work so hard to earn that can come as a real blow. In the 21st century the financial crash was a lot lesser then in 1929 and bankers who have worked a lot less then Plainview have committed suicides. But that's not all. Plainview's son whom he learned everything he knows about being an oilman is gonna start his own business, with money probably earned by Daniel and thus become his rival. What's more the first time in years H.W. said something aloud. And it was that he is gonna leave Daniel. Surely it must hurt him that his son only know put in an effort to do this. This after everything Daniel tried to make him speak again. On top of all this Eli comes to him to lend money from Daniel, while hypocritically posing as his friend.

Paul Thomas Anderson is a great director. Besides this movie I've seen Boogie Nights and Magnolia and all three movies are masterpieces. This one is his best. He seems to be interested in people that are not great minds and have no great jobs, but they all try to make a living by doing the things they can do in the best way they can do them. It was true for the porn people in Boogie Nights, it was true for specifically Don Cheadle's character in Boogie Nights whose dream was to sell radio's. It was true for the cop and the nurse in Magnolia and it is true for Plainview. This are not all great jobs, but they are necessary in our society. Anderson's strength is that he sees that this people are important too, without making a moralistic, sentimental movie about how we should all love cops or nurses.

Of course one can't end a post of There Will Be Blood without mentioning Daniel Day-Lewis who does indeed give a truly great performance. It's not one of the best ever however. He basically gives the same sort of performance as he did in Gangs of New York as Bill the Butcher. Of course that was a great performance too. What is more surprising in this movie is that Paul Dano as Eli/Paul acts just as well.

All around the world

All Around the World (Lisa Stansfield, 1989) This is a fun song that's certainly not among the best on my IPod. The text is not very interesting on first sight either. But it is interesting that this is an objective song about a break-up. Stansfield just gives the facts of what happened and at no point in the song does she take sides about who was wrong or right. They both were equally wrong, she basically says.




Well, I've never seen this video before, but it's quite boring. What it does seem to say though is that the blame for the break-up lies more with her, then with him. When she sings 'I did too much lying' we see her surrounded by a lot of men, this implying that she slept around quite a bit. That she is not someone you can rely on becomes obvious that, while she sings that she'll go around the world to find her baby, in this clip, she doesn't get much further then her front door. Again like she says in her song, she says too many things she doesn't mean.

Advertising Space

I am going to write something about each song I've got on my IPod. I'll devote a post per song and I'll write about them in the alphabetical order they are on my IPod. Important to note is that I'll write very little about their musical qualities, because quite simply I don't know much about music. I can't read a single note, and I even often don't know exactly what instrument is playing. Instead I'll write more their narrative qualities. Because, despite the fact that we usually like songs, because of their melody or the singing of the artist, songs do have texts and we can't ignore these texts. I'll also analyze the video clips of the songs.

-Advertising Space (Robbie Williams, 2005) Williams is a little bit underrated. He has never made a really classic song, but he's also never made a bad one. You always know what you get with him. This is his best song. It's got a pretty interesting, but a bit vague text. It seems to be about Elvis Presley and how soon we forget even the best artists after they die. Maybe we'll get wiser by analysing the video.



We start of by seeing a pretty ordinary guy playing om his guitar in his bedroom intercut of him walking anxiously around his room. After a while we realize that the shots of him walking through the room happen chronologically after him playing relaxed on his guitar. And we realize that he is preparing for something. We have a hunch of what it is, but don't know for sure yet. Interesting to note is that his bathroom wall is full of pictures of naked women that are a bit more erotic then one usually sees on boy's/men's walls and are almost pornographic. Important to note is also that while he is first clothed in white and played a pink guitar, he now is clothed in black. We see him transformed into Elvis Presley and the lightning in the scene is just like the lightning we see when godlike heroes are presented in film.

We are now 1:57 into the video and we can look a bit into the meaning in the video. Due to the contrast of there clothes we realize that white Williams and black Williams have two different personalities. White Williams is a timid good guy that plays on his guitar and dreams of one day being a rockstar. When he dresses himself like Elvis he unleashes his inner rock star and becomes a little bit of a bad guy. In other words if you follow the footsteps of Elvis you might one day become a rock star even if you are just a timid guy. But you can't never reach to Elvis' heights. He is like a God of music. You can only admire him, perhaps even sexually. (The pink guitar in combination with the pictures might be a hint that our rock star has homosexual feelings for Elvis.)

Next we see him in a bus going somewhere again intercut with pictures from him in his house. But we see that there is more weirdness going on. At home he opens his closet and there is a huge doll inside by the name of Cylla, which he adores and sings to. We realize that the doll is probably the object of his fetish. Later in time he goes down a glamorous street to give a concert as an Elvis impersonator in a bar. The bar is pretty empty though and no one really seems to care. He leaves and the lights go out. In a pretty brilliant shot at the end the lightning on the doll changes too and the doll now eerily looks like Michael Jackson, after which we end with a cut to Robbie Williams.

Well we can get a lot out of this. First of all the unsuccessful concert. It can have two meanings. First of all it seems to say, no matter how glamorous you are or how much you try to look like Elvis there is only one Elvis and you just can't ever reach his heights. Secondly it might accuse the people of not caring at all about great artists like Elvis anymore. In the restaurant nobody gives a damn that someone is impersonating Elvis, not even in a negative way.
The line 'no one learned from your mistakes' is obviously addressed in this last part of the video I think. Elvis was on drugs and even though that messed him up horribly and eventually caused his death, it didn't serve as a cautionary tale for other pop/rock stars. And obviously Michael Jackson is one of the artists who couldn't resist the pressures of fame. And neither did Robbie Williams himself. Obviously Robbie Williams' character in this video is crazy too. But he is not a rock star yet. Perhaps Williams wants to say that you have to be a bit crazy to be a great rock star and that maybe the craziness of artists like Elvis and Jackson and himself wasn't caused by their fame, but their craziness caused their fame.

The Matrix

Throughout history people have asked questions about the world. Why does this happen? How can that happen? What, actually, is the world? These are all pretty compelling questions and throughout history there have been been written many books and made many movies about these subjects, the most notable being of course The Bible, which I believe is just as fictional as the movie I'll be discussing here. I am an atheist, who believes that eventually the science will be able to answer this questions. That doesn't mean that they are not worthwhile and fun to discuss. And The Matrix addresses these questions in a very fun way.

In The Matrix the world we live in is a simulation. The Machines have taken over the real world and made it a very bad place to live. Due to a simulation though, they give us the people the idea that nothing's changed and that everything's OK. The Wachowski brothers are obviously heavily influenced by Jean Baudrillard's ideas of simulacrum and simulacra which they also acknowledge in a scene. They do seem to slightly misunderstand Baudrillard's ideas and take them a bit too far, something which apparently infuriated Baudrillard so much that he dismissed the whole film. The Matrix basically claims that nothing we see really exists. Baudrillard does not really claim that nothing we see exists, but that what we think to be the truth, really is not. When Baudrillard said that the Gulf War did not take place, he meant that that it did not take place in the way we saw it on CNN, not that there never was such thing as a Gulf War. Anyway, all of this does not make The Matrix less interesting.

Not everybody though has fallen for the tricks of The Machines. There are some people who know what's going on and fight against the Machines. They do this via a ship that, if I understand it correctly, inside a computer program. The crew we follow is the Nebucadnezzar crew led by Morpheus, played by Laurence Fishburne in a great performance. They find a hacker, who in the virtual world of computers (or in this case the real world of computers) goes by the name of NEO. This crew for, unclear reasons, believe that NEO is the one who'll beat the machines. By the end of the film they realize he really is the ONE. Something we already knew since he is NEO. The fact that the makers seem to think that they are very clever for naming the ONE, NEO is the only point of annoyance I had with this film.

The film does a lot of interesting things with world it creates. Before I start talking about them though I have to mention what I think is the biggest quality of the film. The story always follows the logic of the world the Wachowskis created. Everything that happens makes sense according to the rules that are laid out. When there are fights, they happen according to the rules, so does the humor. I am not a big fan of science fiction and fantasy and have not seen many such movies and read many books in this genres. But practically every one I've seen or read breaks its own rules of the fantasy-world it created to do something interested, whether it's to have a cool fight or to make the story even more interesting. The Matrix achieves something great by not breaking it's own rules and still having cool fights and managing to make the story more interesting.

The Matrix uses Avatars in a better and more exciting way then Avatar did 1o years later. And I must say that I am a bit dissapointed in Avatar after seeing The Matrix. Avatar only has new technology, but doesn't do anything really great or new with it. How different is this for The Matrix, whose action scenes made partly possible by the at that time new bullet-time technique are way more spectacular then any of those in Avatar.

It's now time to discuss some of the greatest scenes in the movie. One of the more mysterious things that can happen to us is when we experience a deja-vu. When Neo experiences a deja-vu this is a sign to our heroes that their enemies are close. Because what is a deja-vu according to The Matrix? A glitch in the system. It happens when the Machines make a mistake in their simulation and try to fix it.
These people that fight the machines are pretty much ordinary people who don't know how to do the things needed to beat the machines, like fighting for example. They of course need to learn fast. So they get the course they need (like jujitsu) downloaded into their head. At one point while fighting the bad guys, our heroes are in a bad situation and are only able to get away by flying a helicopter. Problem is, nobody can fly the thing. So one character gets the course flying a helicopter downloaded into her and the next thing we and they know, they are on the winning hand.
In a wonderful scene we learn that Nebucadnezzar has a spy inside it's crew. The man wants to stop fighting with the Nebucadnezzar and asks to became a part of the machines. The reason he gives is that despite knowing that the world is fake he misses to eat a fake tasty sandwich, to drink the tasty fake drinks and to make fake love to a fake woman. Because even though he knows that it's fake it just feels better than the real drinks, the real food and the real sex he gets in the actual world. This is a surprisingly poignant scene, also because we can really identify with the guy.
All of the fights in this movie are pretty spectacular, the last fight is absolutely brilliant though. It's made with surprising humor and it's choreographed and scored like it's a fight in a western.
My favorite scene in the movie though is a very simple scene. The machines have captured Morpheus and now he is being investigated by Agent Smith, the leader of the Machines. Agent Smith is played by Hugo Weaving who gives one of the best performance of the 90's here. He acts with such menace despite basically talking in only one tone throughout the movie, like a machine. In the scene I mentioned he is at his most menacing and due to the completely bizarre dialogue he is given in it, this scene is bizarrely great.

It's worth concluding in the end that The Matrix, together with Pulp Fiction is probably the most influential movie of the 90's. Even while watching I could immediately point out that it has influenced Harry Potter, the Kill Bill films Avatar and dozens of other movies made who tried to unsuccessfully copy The Matrix.

I saw this movie on my road trip in USA. It is a movie I was a bit prejudiced against due to my dislike of science-fiction movies. I loved it and it was not the only movie I saw there which I would probably not have seen soon due to my prejudices about it. And that I would have been wrong in not seeing. I am not a big fan of Pixar, but Up was a very funny movie with a brilliant first half an hour.
I also don't like horror, but the Norwegian zombie-film Dead Snow was a delightfully funny movie. It had so many funny scenes and it was obvious that the movie was made with such energy and fun by the whole cast and crew that I would classify this as a feel-good movie, despite the fact that every single living person in the movie dies.

I'm Still Here

Some thoughts on Casey Affleck and Joaquin Phoenix' documentary. I haven't seen it yet, but I am utterly fascinated by it.

-I've never been a big fan of Joaquin Phoenix, more so of Casey Affleck. I think what they've done shows that they are very intelligent people and some of the most interesting people working in the movies today. It takes a lot of guts to do something like this and even if it turns out that the emperor has no clothes, the work Affleck and Phoenix put into this, is at least something to be respected. And it just is a very original way to make a movie

- Two years ago, Joaquin Phoenix announced the end of his acting career, to pursue a career as a rapper. He also appeared to have a complete meltdown. His good friend and brother-in-law Casey Affleck said he would make a documentary about this stage in Phoenix' life. Now the documentary has come out they admitted it was all a hoax and that it was all performance art, while simultaneously satirizing a bit the media's obsession with stars. I have not seen this documentary and I do believe that it's probably quite boring what is on the screen. I don't believe that that's the point. This is probably a rare movie where the reaction of the society on it and what point that makes about the society is more important then the movie itself. The movie is hardly important for the discussion, but without the there probably wouldn't be any discussion.

- To me it's slightly weird that so many people really believed that this was real, especially after Affleck announced he was going to make a documentary about it. If only because of common sense. Casey Affleck is married to Joaquin Phoenix' sister. The Phoenixes have already lost one sibling in River Phoenix due to a meltdown. Surely Summer Phoenix wouldn't agree with her husband exploiting her brother's meltdown. This fact, that the media were so eager to accept the fact that Phoenix really lost it is reason enough for this movie to exist. It really shows that the media is sometimes more interested in conflict then in the truth. This performance took two years. It was filmed in public places, a lot of people took part in it, some knowingly, some not and not a single media outlet in the whole world reporting about this was willing to dig really deep to find the truth. Or they tried, but failed which may even be worse.

- While most media and people really believed that Phoenix had a meltdown, almost everybody was making fun of or with Phoenix. When at the Oscars Natalie Portman and Ben Stiller (who were in on the joke) imitated Phoenix everybody was talking about what a great job they did. There was no one who mentioned that it is not really nice, to put it mildly, to make fun of a person's rough time. Especially not in front of his peers. Now it turns out that it was a hoax, some of this same journalists direct their anger at Phoenix for making them worried about him.

America! Part 2

I have know idea whether the famous philosopher Jean Baudrillard ever visited Las Vegas, but if he did, he would leave Vegas being very satisfied with his theories. To summarize (very) shortly Baudrillard states that we are losing sense of what is real and are creating a simulation of reality, mostly trough the media. This is one of the core ideas of post-modernism and the whole city of Las Vegas is like a theme park on postmodernism. Quite simply everything in Las Vegas is a simulation of reality. To feel like you are in Paris, they built a fake Eiffel Tower, to feel like you are in Venice they built a fake San Marco square, etc. This is another reason why this is almost a confirmation of Baudrillard's theories. This simulated reality is represented through symbols, so in this case the Eiffel Tower is the symbol for Paris. Now this is all pretty bad, but it actually gets worse according to Baudrillard. After a while these signs and symbols will stop reflecting reality and start only reflecting other signs and symbols. This is called hyperreality. Las Vegas came dangerously close to hyperreality when we saw people dressed on the street like Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp's character from Pirates of the Carribean and Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson's character from Pulp Fiction) waiting to be photographed with. Anyway, enough science for now, even though I'll come back at Baudrillard soon when I write about Inglourious Basterds and The Matrix, two movies I saw at this road trip. Even if you don't think about Baudrillard, Las Vegas is absolutely fun to see. It's a city in which you really believe anything can happen. I really mean this and I actually don't think that a movie set in Las Vegas can be criticized for being unrealistic. Nicolas Cage drinking himself to death? Nicolas Cage jumping out of an airplane in an Elvis costume? A bunch of guys losing their friend who is about to get married? It can all happen in Vegas.



Our next destination was The Grand Canyon. Up until then everywhere we went, it was incredibly hot. So the prospect of seeing The Grand Canyon was, despite and because of it's reputation, not very pleasing. Our believe that it would be incredibly hot at the Grand Canyon became even stronger after a short stop at the spectacular Hoover Dam where it was incredibly hot. But as we drove closer and closer to the canyon the weather got colder and cloudier. When we arrived at the Grand Canyon the canyon was in deep mist. One literally couldn't see anything. Luckily we waited for an hour or so and the weather got better and once we saw the canyon we realized that it was absolutely worth coming here. The Grand Canyon is truly on of the most beautiful natural wonders. In fact we liked it so much there that we came back the next day. And again the weather was perfect. Not cloudy and not smoking hot. The weather was actually nowhere on this road trip better then on the Grand Canyon.



You can't go to America without visiting LA. Ha! That's what you'd think. In fact there is no single reason why anyone should go to LA, unless you work there. It's more like a village then a city. Granted, a very big and rich village, but a village nonetheless. Luckily I went on a tour around Warner Brothers studios or else it would have been a big waste of time. These studios are very interesting and I plan to write about them in a separate post some day. For now it's worth saying that the studio seems to be most proud of the Batman movies and of Friends and, slightly ironically, due to vacation no tv-show was at work except for Charlie Sheen's Two and A Half Men.



After LA we went to Yosemite National park which is very beautiful but have no idea to write anything interesting about it. There are beautiful paths through the woods and up on the mountains and it was really great to walk on them and see the woods and the mountains, but there just is not anything interesting to write about.

Next up was San Francisco. San Francisco is a very interesting town. It has a lot of beautiful places and at times it has a great atmosphere. The uphill and downhill streets are also very spectacular.


But the city center is one of the unsafest centers of a city I've ever seen. There are a lot of tramps and peasants. And most of them seem and act like they belong in a madhouse. When we were in LA my cousin mentioned that you can't go to LA and not go the cinema. Which we did. We went to Salt. In San Francisco one gets the feeling that you can't be there without being witness to a shooting. Which my cousin unfortunately was. Perhaps this is only fitting in the city of Alcatraz.
Despite all this San Francisco is a great city. It seemed like there was music everywhere, there was a very relaxed atmosphere and even the pier was pretty interesting. San Francisco was also the third town on this road trip with a connection to Forrest Gump. It's where he started Bubba Gump. In 'honor' of this there even is a real Forrest Gump store.

In San Francisco our adventure on the west coast ended and we flew back to Chicago. Here we celebrated my other cousin's birthday, and saw the interesting parts of Chicago. The city is beautiful, but it doesn't have the electrifying atmosphere of New York or San Francisco. I saw the city, liked it a lot but I didn't get any special feeling out of it. Which may be a bit of a shame. Chicago after all is the city of Michael Jordan and Roger Ebert, the best basketball player ever and one of the best film critics ever. We actually saw the Chicago Bulls' hall and it is one of the most boringly made sports stadiums I've ever seen. Fittingly it has one of the most bland names one can imagine for a sports hall: United Center.
In short what Chicago needed was a bit more Razzle Dazzle!



After Chicago we went to our last destination: Knoxville, where some old friends of us live. Knoxville is a place which has absolutely nothing interesting and we had fun there with our friends, but there is nothing else I can write about the city. Our last night there we watched we watched Inglourious Basterds. That was a fun experience. Not only is the movie great, as I've already mentioned a couple of times, but Knoxville is Quentin Tarantino's birth place.
In fact the whole route Chicago-Knoxville is of some significance for popular culture. Along the way you pass Gary, Indiana and Lexington, Kentucky, which are the birthplaces of respectively Michael Jackson and George Clooney. Both cities are pretty awful. On our first visit to Chicago we went on a short trip to Lake Michigan, we got a bit lost in Gary, the second most criminal city in America after Miami. You got to Beat It! from there as soon as possible. In Lexington we ate in a KFC (duh!) where every single person was over 200 kilograms. At least.



Well after Knoxville we left for Tampa and so the road trip ended. It was a great experience and I left America with a very positive feeling about the country.

Sure there are probably more rednecks and religious nuts then in any other country, but there are probably also more open-minded people and big scientists then in any other country.
There probably are more pathetic cities, but probably also more spectacular cities then in any other country.
Hollywood probably makes more crappy movies, but it also probably makes more great movies then any other film center.
The Americans probably are the worst drivers in the world, but... well, I can't give a positive spin on this.

America!

I've been on a road trip to America. That and more is what this slightly different post on my blog will be about.



Me, my parents and my brother went on this trip together with my aunt, uncle and cousin who live in Tampa, Florida and that's where the trip began after landing in Orlando, Florida. Florida is absolutely the most boring American state we've visited on this trip. It's flatter than the Netherlands and there are absolutely no interesting cities in it. The landscape consists mostly of shopping malls. Anyway, while I was on this road trip I was thinking about writing about it on this blog. I thought of filling this post with interesting and fun media related with the places I've visited. I couldn't even come up with something interesting for Florida. That's when, near the end of the trip, Bill Maher came to the rescue, with his fun but slightly nonobjective documentary Religilous in which he objects against the lunacy of religion. Sometimes he goes too far in making fun of it, but some things are just so preposterous one can't help but make fun of it. One of these things is the Holy Land Experience theme park in Orlando. Orlando has many theme parks about all kinds of crazy things. But this one is actually so preposterous that, well it has to be seen to be believed.





When we left Tampa we went on our way to Washington D.C., but that's a to big distance, so we stayed a night in Savannah, Georgia. Savannah is a quite beautiful, typical Southern city which seemed full of life. Kids were playing by the river and musicians played nice music. It's also the first of quite some places on I've visited on this trip where Forrest Gump was. The park where he explains that 'life is like a box of chocolates' is in Savannah. We couldn't now which park it was, because it turns out Savannah has a lot of parks with benches like in Forrest Gump.



Mr. Gump of course also went to Washington where in the pool of water close to the Washington museum he reunited with his beloved Jenny. It was so hot in Washington that many people who were there those to days probably thought of reenacting that scene.

Before I go further, I'd like to say that despite me making fun of Forrest Gump, the movie is a wildly original and great one. The scene where Forrest gives John Lennon the idea for Imagine, is one of the most inventive scenes I've seen. It's a bit sad that both Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks careers have now become a bit boring. Zemeckis has made with the Back to the Future films, Forrest Gump and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? some wildly original movies. It's a shame he now makes movies like The Polar Express. As for Tom Hanks, he used to have interesting roles even in some lousy movies. I don't like either Philadelphia or Big very much for example, but he gave a great performance in both of them. The Robert Langdons and Charlie Wilsons he now plays, he could do in his sleep. But most importantly, he seemed to act with a lot of joy and energy. Now that seems all gone, although there was some of it in The Terminal.



Of course we saw many other monuments in Washington. The Lincoln Memorial was quite impressive and so was Capitol Hill. I did expect the White House to be a bot larger though, but it still was fun to see. The National Archive, where the important American documents are located, is also very interesting to see, but just like it's the case with the museum of Air and Space, it glorifies the army a bit too much. The National Gallery has some very nice (post)modern paintings and the Library of Congress is also very impressive. As one can read we saw many museums and monuments, but what we saw the most were boy scouts. They were absolutely everywhere and they came in all sizes.



After Washington we continued to New York, but not before stopping in the university town of Princeton. It's amazing how little we hear about Princeton in the Netherlands, considering it was founded by the Dutch and is heavily influenced by both them and the Germans. The official color of the university even is orange.



New York is one of the greatest cities in the world. It's full of people and energy. It is a city that really seems to be alive at any time of the day. This is the second time I've been to New York and I've seen most of the important monuments and museums of the city, but what I like the most is just to walk through the city, preferably Manhattan, and just look at all this activity on the streets. There are people hurrying to go to work, some are just strolling through the city, and others sell hot dogs. I climbed the Empire State Building this time and it was absolutely spectacular to look down from there and see all these busyness around. We also went to Moma, which is probably the greatest museum I've visited, although I must admit that I haven't visited many and that I'm not a really big fan of them. I've almost finished writing about New York, but of course no writing about New York is finished without a reference to Woody Allen. Here is therefore the opening to Manhattan.



Next destination: Niagara Falls. For this destination we left the States and entered Canada, because the falls are more spectacular on the Canadian side then on the American and because the hotels are cheaper there. This was the biggest disappointment on this trip. The falls are pretty spectacular indeed, but you kind of expect them to be a bit bigger and you can not watch water fall very long before becoming slightly bored. We've also learned that how much water falls down the fall is regulated by some technology. When there are more tourists, more water falls. That is a bit disappointing. After all you go to the falls to see a natural wonder. Besides all this the city of Niagara Falls is absolutely horrible. They tried to be something like Las Vegas, but as we would later see, it is not nearly as spectacular and it mostly looks stupid and annoying. There are all kinds of museums with wax figures that don't look at all like the people they suppose to look like. There are thematic restaurants which have themes that have nothing to do with Niagara Falls or Canada. For example there is a Rainforest Cafe! On every corner there are people selling shit, sorry, there is no other word for it. Anyway, I've written more about the bad experience, than about the good ones, so here is some proof that not everything Canadian is bad.



From Niagara Falls we went to Chicago. This was only our first stop in the city. My cousin, who is the son of my aunt and uncle, lives here so we had a free apartment. Since we arrived late and were very tired from our first part of our trip we didn't do anything for our first day here until my cousin came back from work. After that we ate in Barack Obama's favorite restaurant. One must admit that he has good taste. The food was pretty good.

The next day we flew to Las Vegas and the west. More about this in my next blog entry.

Garden State

Garden State is a surprisingly good movie, written and directed by Zach Braff. Braff is more famous as the lead actor in the comedy series Scrubs, which is on of the few series whose humor I simply don't get. I have seen some chunks of episodes and I haven't really laughed once, although I do think I understand what the idea of the show is and the actors are quite good too.

In Garden State Braff plays Andrew Largeman. When Andrew was little he accidentally hit his mother, so she had to sit in a wheelchair. He was sent to a boarding school and he hasn't returned home since. Due to this experience he is on all kinds of prescription drugs, sleepwalking through life. As the movie begins he gets a call from his father, telling him his mother died. For the first time in more then 10 years he comes back home, leaving his prescription drugs back in LA, secretly hoping that he'll be able to function without any for a couple of days and then later on maybe more.

Andrew doesn't have a really great career in LA. He works in a Vietnamese restaurant and is an aspiring actor who once played a retarded football-player. But compared to his childhood friends in New Jersey, he is pretty successful. Mark is a gravedigger who steals valuable things from the dead he buries. Jesse has invented silent Velcro, is now a millionaire and has no idea what to do with the rest of is life. He is almost always stoned. Then there is Kenny, a cop who is so unsure of himself that when he stops Andrew for speeding and recognizes him, asks him if he was convincing. Andrew's realtionship with his father, played by Ian Holm, isn't very good. After his' mothers' funeral he has his first conversation with his father in years. It's a pretty awkward one. His father asks him how he feels and Andrew answers he's fine, but that he sometimes has headaches. His father reacts by advising him a doctor he can go to. His father, in fact, is a doctor himself and thinks that everything can be cured by medicine. We later in the film learn that he actually thinks it's good for Andrew that he's on so many drugs. To him the risk of feeling bad is bigger then the reward of feeling great. So he let's Andrew live numbly feeling nothing.

But Andrew more and more realizes that he can live without his drugs and that his life may even be better for it. That is partly due to Sam, a girl he meets while waiting for the doctor. Sam is a joyous, slightly strange girl who just like Andrew doesn't have a very happy life, but thinks you should live your life to the fullest and enjoy it as much as you can. She lives alone with her mother and was a talented figure skater until it turned out she was epileptic. Now she has to wear a helmet while working at a law firm. Of course, one can easily guess how all this will end and the movie's story is not very surprising indeed. But it's told with a lot of wit and originality and it has some wonderful scenes. Before I say more about them though, I should mention something about the acting.

Zach Braff shows that he can act pretty good, but acting-wise he is overshadowed in this movie by Peter Sarsgaard and Natalie Portman.
Especially Natalie Portman, who plays Sam, was a huge surprise to me in this movie. I've seen some movies with her, but I've never really noticed her. In this movie she creates a completely believable character that's a bit wacky yet lovable. True to her character's attitude to live life to its fullest she's almost always doing something. I think that her performance is very important for this movie and is a big part of why it works.

In one scene Sam and Andrew are talking and she suddenly stands up and starts making bizarre movements and bizarre faces. Her reasoning being, it's sometimes nice to do something nobody's ever done before. That seems to be the same attitude Zach Braff had making the movie. Be original, even though it sometimes may not work. There is for example the aforementioned invention of silent Velcro. But there is also a very inventive scene in a mall. Alex needs money, so he takes a set of knives from the store and returns it at the counter asking his money back. When and how he eventually does get his money 'back' is very audacious. Both by Alex and the movie. Sam's lives home with her mother and an African guy who seems old enough to be able to live on his own. He is a bit weirdly written character and doesn't really work in the movie. Luckily he is soon forgotten. But this aren't the only living things living in Sam's household. They also keep hamsters who somehow keep dying because they don't know how to use the hamster wheel. Now the Sam household has a cemetery of hamsters in their garden. It's unclear why they keep hamsters, but why not? I've never seen any other movie do something like this and it's a testament to how good it is that despite all this the characters don't come off as complete lunatics, but as nice, lovable people.

Portugal-North Korea

The World Championship football has reached its final stages and the entertainment level of the games has gone up from the group stages. One of the more fascinating games in the group stages was Portugal-North Korea. Of course the game was very entertaining and one of the few times that a team tipped as a favorite played really great and completely trashed its opponnent by
7-0. But during the game I couldn't help but think about other things. One of the 22 players on the field was Cristiano Ronaldo. Ronaldo is the most expensive player of all time and if one wants to show that football revolves more and more around money, he should be your example. He cost around 90 million pounds. Ronaldo is good but this is pretty ridiculous. It's probably more than North Korea's budget. Not only is he pretty expensive, but we practically know everything about him. We've seen all his goals and commercials, know all his moves, we know what he loves, what he hates and that he occasionally goes out with Paris Hilton. Even people who don't follow football know who Ronaldo is. What a contrast that is with the North Koreans! They play in a country that's practically completely closed off from the rest of the world. Most North Korean players are not even known by the best scouts in the world and we've probably seen more from Ronaldo then, the North Korean people from their own players. Only the leaders of North Korea can watch international television. The people obviously shouldn't come in contact with the evils of capitalism. But the Big Leader obviously let his North Korean footbal players watch some footage of Ronaldo. After all they constantly had two people defending him. Unfortunately they forgot to defend the other player. The other Portugal players sliced pretty easily past the North Korean defense which, in true communist fashion, let Portugal share the ball very easily. Not only that but up until Portugals seventh goal every goal was scored by a different player. Until 6-0 none of this players was Ronaldo and as the score grew bigger and bigger Ronaldo grew more and more desperate. He hadn't scored for Portugal for a very long time and he knew that if he didn't even score in this game the Portugese press would become very critical of his play in the shirt of Portugal. When Ronaldo scored it was very obvious that it was a big relief for him. It is quite ironic that in a game aginst North Korea the man's biggest concern was that he would be criticicized by the free press. The North Koreans lost 7-0 in their first ever international match to be broadcast live in North Korea. They'd be happy if their punishment was being criticised by the free press. The Leader was probably not amused. When a team trashes another team, we often use the phrase 'they killed them'. Although the fate of the North Koreans probably, and hopefully, won't be that bad, this phrase has probably never been closer to being literally true.

Sarajevo Film Festival

Despite coming from the Balkans, I have hardly seen any movies from that region. Not even the famous Oscar-nominated Before The Rain from my home country. Fortunately, from 15 to 25 April Filmhuis Den Haag had a Best of... Sarajevo Film Festival. For 10 days it screened two or three feature films and a couple of shorts every day. All these movies came from countries from former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Romania. I saw two movies and and was in the audience for a panel discussion of producers and directors. What made this discussion clear is that it is not very surprising that I haven't seen many Balkan movies. They hardly get any distribution and financing them is very hard too. The movies are also hardly 80 minutes long and thus way shorter then the average movie. Despite this, the movies I saw were surprisingly good. I saw Cash and Marry and Slovenka. I'll only write about Slovenka here, but Cash & Marry is an absolutely hilarious semi-documentary about the quest of a Macedonian to find an Austrian wife so he can marry her to get all the necessary papers which will enable him to stay in Austria.

Slovenka is about a Slovenian female student, who works as a call-girl under the code-name of Slovenka(Slovenian Girl). When we meet her, business is going good for her. Since Slovenia is the president of the EU, many rich and lonely diplomats arrive there who are looking for some fun and distraction. She even manages to rent a nice apartment. But being a prostitute obviously doesn't offer much job security and her luck soon turns. One of her clients takes to much Viagra and dies. She runs away and now whole Slovenia, including her dad, wants to know who this mysterious Slovenka is.
Her dad is an old-fashioned Slovenian who loves his daughter, but just can't understand why someone would need two mobile phones. He used to play in a band and since his band mates are still his friends he wants to start playing again. After all if Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones still can play at old age, so can they.
In the meantime Slovenka is found by two pimps who want her to work for them or else they will tell the truth about her identity. One of the strengths of this movie is that this pimps are reasoning pretty logically. Slovenka, whose real name by the way is Aleksandra, is already a prostitute. Working for the pimps just means protection and probably more money, which she desperately needs, since she has a debt at the bank. But Aleksandra values her freedom more then this and runs away from the pimps. The rest of the movie simply consists of Aleksandra trying to get enough money to pay off her debt at the bank, so she can keep her apartment. Nothing really spectacular happens, but the movie's strength lies in its details and its often surprising black humor.
We are shown a Slovenia, which despite being in the EU, is still very poor outside of its capital city Ljubljana. Aleksandra's father complains that he can't even kill himself, because the funeral would cost Aleksandra to much money. And most ordinary Slovenians don't see much benefit from their country's presidency of the EU. Every day they here some annoying police sirens and the roads are very busy, it takes much longer to reach your destination And all these EU diplomats who shine on television and are driven around in expensive cars are in fact lonely, miserable people living in hotels around Europe with their only solace coming in the form of a local prostitute.
In the end it's worth mentioning that the actress playing Aleksandra gives a great performance and that the only bad part of the movie is it's incredibly excessive use of close-ups.

3-D

I've seen Avatar and I found it a very entertaining movie, nothing more, but certainly nothing less. James Cameron has done a truly remarkable job in creating a completely new world which also looked very beautiful. I saw the movie in 3-D, but I don't really know how important that was for my enjoyment of the film. That'll have to wait untill I see the movie in 2-D. What is obvious is that I was not the only one to have enjoyed the movie. Avatar has become the most succesfull movie of all time which has prompted studios to make more and more movies in 3-D. This development has divided critics. Some think it is great, some think that 3-D is the death of movies. I don't really like 3-D an I'll probably always prefer 2-D over 3-D. But I believe that me, and everyone else who doesn't like 3-D can't and shouldn't do anything about it. It is a logical development that is simply part of the evolution of film. Up until 1927 films didn't have synchronised sound. In the 1950's and 60's film started to become in color. In the 1980's and 90's movies started to use CGI. And every time some people protested that the new development would ruin the movies. And every time the movies survived and masterpieces were produced. If by 2040 more than 90% of the movies are going to be made in 3-D I won't be surprised, because 3-D, whether you like it or not, simply gives filmmakers more options to make their movies, just like synchronised sound, colored cinematograpy and CGI gave more otions to previous generations of filmmakers. And for those of us who by then still don't like 3-D, well bad luck for us. We'll simply be an anachronism. We can't and shouldn't stop innovation.

The reason for this post is the little 'controversy' that arose on this topic in the last couple of weeks. Martin Scorsese and Werner Herzog, two greatly admired classical filmmakers announced they would make their next movie in 3-D. Some people were shocked. They accused these filmmakers giving up on their craft and giving in to the hype or even of selling out. This is utterly ridiculous. First of all this people work for over forty years in the movies. It is only logical that they are interested in experimenting with a major new development in their business, especially for Scorsese who is known to have an exceptional interest in movies and who wants to know everything there is to know about them. I don't know much about Werner Herzog, but I know that he goes to enormous lengths to make his movies and is not afraid of life-threatening situations in the interest of his movie. And indeed, Herzog is obviously not going to use 3-D just because he can. First of all he is not even going to use hit for his whole film, but just for the filming of some rock paintings in a cave, because he simply thinks that by filming in 3-D is the best way he can do justice to them. One can certainly not accusing him of selling out.
As for Scorsese, he may also have a reason to use 3-D apart from interest in it. His next movie is The Invention of Hugo Cabret. In the movie he has cast Ben Kingsley as George Melies. George Melies is probably the first person to have made a science fiction film and the first one to use some kind of special effects in his movies.

Taxi Driver

Taxi Driver is a movie that has been praised, referenced and parodied a lot during the years. I knew about 'Are you talkin' to me' before I had even heard of Martin Scorsese. Well all that praise is certainly deserved. But what can one say about this movie, that has not been said a thousand times before? I don't have the slightest impression that I'll add to much to the conversation by saying that this movie is great and that De Niro gives one of the best performances of all time. But, well it is and I am going to write about it anyway.

Travis Bickle is a Vietnam veteran who starts working as a taxi driver at night, because he has trouble sleeping. He is not the worlds most adjusted person, but at the beginning of the movie we get the feeling that, with a little help, he should be able to lead a fairly normal life. He does have deep contempt for most New Yorkers and hopes 'some day a rain will come that will wash all the scum away from the streets.' But at least he tries to make the best of his life. He tries to chat with his colleagues and tries to impress a girl he finds very beautiful. The girl is at first rather intrigued by Travis. There are after all not many people who just enter your office, say they like you very much in the first conversation they have with you and ask you out on a date. After their first date, she even agrees for a second date. Travis invites her to go to the movies. Unfortunately he doesn't know much about movies and brings her to a hard-core porn movie. That are, after all, the movies he watches. She realizes then that Travis is not a really great fella and doesn't want to see him again. He stalks her for some time with phone calls which she doesn't return. When he arrives at her office one day to ask for clarification, he is violently thrown out. In voice-over he says that he now realizes that she is just like the other New York scum and now his descent to madness really begins. All these previous scenes are a very important part of the movie. We see him trying to lead a good normal life and unfortunately failing at it. His descent into madness becomes more tragic, because we realize that this has not been a complete psycho. This was a person with some problems, which he might have been able to solve under different circumstances. Travis even realizes and knows that his biggest problem is his loneliness. That is already more then many other troubled people know.

So, now Travis is dumped by his girlfriend he plans to kill the politician she worked for. He also wants to make a 12-year old prostitute,played by a very young Jodie Foster, find another job. A big part of the movie now exists of Travis Bickle preparing himself to kill the politician. He buys a whole set of guns and trains to use them. During this section of the movie the 'are you talking to me' scene takes place. It's a great scene indeed. First of all, we now realize that Travis has gone very insane and that talking to himself is the closest he'll come to having a normal conservation. Secondly he acts before the mirror like any of us sometimes have acted before mirrors, mostly in our childhood. A lot of little kids have sometimes stood before a mirror acting though and pretending to shoot someone with a gun. Does the movie say here that there could be a Travis Bickle in all of us?



Travis eventually does nut succeed in killing the politician. The police finds him suspicious and doesn't give him even a chance to shoot. He does succeed in 'saving' the prostitute. In a bloody climax he shoots her pimp and everybody else in the whorehouse where she works. In a great final ironic twist, Travis is now a hero, because the parents of the prostitute have written a letter of gratitude to him and the papers prize him. He even gets a final chat with the girls he loves. But we realize that all is not well. De Niro acts so good in this final scenes that he makes it obvious to us that, even though now all may be well, it won't last for long. We see that he again notices something he thinks is wrong and probably will do insane things again trying to fix it even if it doesn't need fixing, just like the situation with the prostitute. She was quite happy with her work and had a pretty good, even loving relationship with her pimp.



It's worth mentioning that this movie has a surprising amount of humor, especially in two scenes. The first one is with Martin Scorsese, the director, who is a incredibly nervous taxi-passenger that wants to kill his wife. The second one is the first scene between Harvey Keitel, as the pimp and Robert De Niro. Both actors fall a bit out of their roles during this scene, but that doesn't really matter. The scene is great and it's very obvious that they are enjoying themselves.



I haven't been a big fan of Scorsese. I liked Gangs of New York a lot, but found Goodfellas to be a bitt dull, just as The Departed. I have only seen half of Raging Bull, because my DVD broke down unfortunately while I was watching it. But I didn't see what all the fuss about it was even though De Niro again acted great. Well, I am probably gonnna give it another chance now.

The Informant!

The Informant! is Steven Soderbergh's newest movie. I've found Soderbergh's movies pretty entertaining, but nothing really spectacular. The Informant!, though is an underrated masterpiece and Soderbergh's best movie yet.

The movie starts off as a comedy and gradually grows darker. The main protagonist, Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) works for a big and powerful company which produces corn. At the beginning of the film we hear Mark's voice-over talking about how important corn is and what his company does. That last part is pretty complicated, but, as Mark says, the important thing to remember is that corn comes in one end and profit comes out of the other. Mark is very devoted to his company. In a very funny scene we see Mark and his family having dinner. Besides their normal dinner, in every plate there is a giant piece of corn which is completely out of place. Mark starts to get calls from a Japanese guy who claims he has a spy in the company and knows all their secrets. This prompts Mark's bosses to call the FBI. Now the movie changes direction. Mark says to the FBI that his company is fixing prizes and that he is willing to provide evidence for it to the FBI. The movie now follows Mark and the FBI trying to frame the company. Mark often narrates to us, but he is an unreliable narrator. Often he suddenly starts to talk about polar bears and the composure of sweaters. During the investigation he also climbs the ranks of his company, so he gets second thoughts about his cooperation with the FBI. Unfortunately for him, the FBI now knows too much and they will go on investigating anyway. If Mark stops his cooperation with them he'll have to go down with his company. Mark then naturally goes on cooperating and one day they finally get the needed evidence. But the movie doesn't end here and has a surprising and great third act up its sleeve. Turns out, during the investigation Mark has embezzled money from his company and acts as if that is no big deal. We now slowly begin to realize that Mark may not be completely sane. He gets a lawyer that tries to help him, but with every meeting with his lawyer Mark admits to more wrongdoings, even though he always finishes the previous one by telling that now he has really told him everything. It's not entirely Mark's fault. He has bipolar disorder and he is a compulsive liar. We learn that he lied about being adopted and that his parents are dead. They are alive and well. In a masterful scene near the end of the movie, Mark has forged a letter from his doctor, claiming that Mark should not be punished for his crimes because of his bipolar disorder. When the FBI confronts him on this, he tries to lie himself out of the situation. This is done very well. First we hear in a voice-over what Mark thinks he has to say. He sure thinks fast and he has a retort for everything the agent says. But while he sounds confident in his thoughts, when he says it all loud he doesn't sound all that confident and he never says exactly what he wants to say. He is, of course, caught and goes to jail. At the end I was very surprised to learn that this was based on a true story.

This movie is a great example that style is very important in movies. There are quite a lot of movies with this content, but none of them are this good. There are some important aspects that make this movie very good. First of all, there is the voice-over. In most movies the voice-over is used to explain or narrate the story to us. The person that narrates the voice-over always seems to know that he or she narrates it to someone. That is not the case here. The voice-over has no function to the story at all and consists mostly of Mark's random thoughts about random things. We could say that he is a unreliable narrator, but at the end we realize that Mark is not even a narrator. We just explicitly hear his thoughts and he has no idea of it.

Then there is Matt Damon's performance. It's his best yet. Damon has made a career of playing troubled geniuses, smart crooks and spies. His role as Mark Whitacre is a combination of all of them. If Will Hunting never met his shrink, he might have had ended up as Mark.

In the end it's worth noting, something about the score of this movie. The score is a very important and big part of what makes this movie so good. But I can't comment much about this, since I hardly know anything about composing music. Anyway, the composer is Marvin Hamlisch, a composer from the 1970's. I've read that he composed the movie like a 70's crime movie and it actually feels that way. The score is at the beginning incredibly goofy and grows darker, just like the movie does.

House, what changed?

I am going to devote three blog posts to the three television shows I consider to be the best. These are House,Frasier and Seinfeld. These shows are all very different, but I believe they have more in common, then you'd think. This first one is about House.

House is a show that is completely focused on its main character, the genius, damaged Dr. House. Almost everything the other characters do on the show has some connection to him and in the rare instances that there is no connection to House, the show simply becomes less good.

Dr. House (Hugh Laurie) is a truly genius doctor that saves lives most other doctors can't save. It's interesting that House does indeed know a lot about all kinds of diseases, but that is not the main reason he saves all of these lives. That's his even greater knowledge of the human condition. During the debates about his patient, it are actually his team members that come up with the most possibilities for the disease their patient has. Eventually House finds the cure by deducing the character of his patients. This is practically what happens in every episode and originality is not the shows biggest strengths. However the dialogues are often brilliant and discuss ethical and philosophical issues. There is also a lot of humor.

House himself has some problems too. He is addicted to Vicodin, because his leg is in constant pain. This makes him miserable and misanthropic. He has only one true friend, the oncologist James Wilson. It is often said though that House always was a bit miserable and misanthropic. His leg trouble just made it worse. House is a pessimist, who doesn't have a high opinion of the human race. His two favorite phrases are: "Everybody lies" and "People don't change." Unfortunately most of his patients give him no reason to change his mind. House debates religious people the most. He is a rationalist who tries to find a rational reason for everything.

The main theme of the show seems to be the (in)ability to change. I believe that the show shows that House does want to change. The reason he can't do this is that he believes he needs a big obvious reason to do this. Not for himself, but for the people around him. They need to know that there is something different in his life that is out of the ordinary to truly believe that he is finally going to change. They have known him for so long, that otherwise when he tries to change they believe he lies, that he has some hidden agenda, or that he is having some problem and they start worrying about him. The irony is that House seems to be right about this. To I hope to show this all by citing a lot of different examples from the show.

To a lesser extent all of this also applies to a lot of the other characters on this show.

The first hint of this comes in the season 1 episode 'Babies and Bathwater." A billionaire named Edward Vogler will give money to the hospital if everything in the hospital is to his liking. Of course he doesn't like House, and they get into a lot of fights. Vogler though is willing to forgive and forget everything if House gives a speech about the greatness of a new medicine, which may earn Vogler a lot of money. House doesn't believe in the medicine and deliberately screws the speech. After this, we literally get a glimpse into House's mind. House is fantasizing about talking to Vogler. They are having a friendly conversation and House says that he is sorry Vogler got cancer and that he'll do anything to help him. We see that House thinks that something drastic needs to happen so he can talk normally to Vogler. One may not think that this is very obvious, but this is the first time we get a direct glimpse into House's mind and it's not something that happens very often in the show. It has so far only happened then, in the last episode of the second and fourth season, and during the last couple of episodes in the fifth season. I can't think of other examples unitil the last episode of the second season which is, not without reason called 'No reason.' In it House is shot. During his coma, he hallucinates and looks for reasons why he's shot. House always treats his patients badly and they or their relatives have quite some reasons to hate him. None of them ever shot him though. Since this one did, House thinks his actions had a completely different and worse impact on this guy then on anyone else. There must be a reason for House, why exactly this guy shot him and not someone else. It never occurs to him that this might simply be a bad guy.

After being shot and coming out of his coma House request to be treated with ketamine. Apparently that can diminish his leg pain. For a while it does. During this period we see a reasonably happy House, that treats his patients and the people around him better. At the same time his best friend Wilson bores him to death with his analyzing about why House changed. The ketamine wears off though and House picks up his old habits. The situation is again like it used to be, so House has to be like he used to be. This sets up season 3, the show's greatest season yet.

House gets into trouble when he verbally and physically abuses detective Tritter, a cop who is as stubborn as House and won't back off until he teaches House a lesson. Tritter tries to force House stop using Vicodin. Of course House doesn't want that, but he is in even more trouble when Tritter finds out House has been forging Wilson's handwriting to get even simpler access to Vicodin. This, unfortunately for House, is a criminal act and he can go to jail for it if Tritter can prove this. Tritter offers House a deal though. He can either go to jail and lose his medical license or go to a withdrawal clinic. House doesn't want anything of that. But at Christmas Eve something happens. House almost dies of an overdose. Now this is something that never happened to him, so now he has a reason to go to the clinic. Unfortunately for, now Wilson has a reason too to admit to Tritter that House really forged his autograph. While in the withdrawal clinic House apologizes to Wilson, because he got him into so much trouble. Even though Wilson is his best and only friend, House doesn't treat him too well either and this is the first time in the show we see him sincerely apologize to Wilson. Of course he now has a reason: to apologize is part of the withdrawal course. Every addict has to apologize to someone he hurt because of his addiction. Back in court House is saved by Cuddy's testimony, which is completely unbelievable, but well, if he went to jail the show would be over. He still has to pass a night in jail though for showing contempt for the court. There Wilson again over-analyzes House apology, Tritter can't do anything to House anymore and we're back to the situation like it was before Tritter. And House of course stops the withdrawal course and becomes his old self again. There is no more a reason to behave otherwise.

Still in season 3 there is the episode Half-Wit. On a side note, this episode stars the wonderful character actor Kurtwood Smit, as the harsh father of a piano player. He specializes in playing harsh fathers, most notably in That 70's show and Dead Poets Society. In this last movie he played the father who drove Robert Sean Leonard's character to death. Robert Sean Leonard is the actor that here plays Wilson.

Anyway, in this episode House tries to fake he has cancer. Suddenly Wilson, Cuddy and his fellows all start acting nicely towards him. His condition changed, so now the people around him change their behavior too. Cameron, a fellow of his who has a kind of a crush on him now finally kisses him. Of course this is not a simple kiss. She tries to take a DNA sample to test if there is nothing to be done about his cancer. She needs a reason too to change her behavior. It's important to note that House doesn't want his fellows or his friends to think he has cancer, but some doctors in Boston. They have discovered some drug that they inject in your brain if you have cancer so you don't feel depressed. We assume that House hopes that this will make him happy. More importantly if someone asks why he is happy, he could have a clear-cut answer for it. It doesn't really matter it's unethical. We've seen House do even more unethical things and we've seen him talk about them.

House Training is a pretty important episode. Due to a mistake of House and his fellows a patient dies, which makes Foreman want to resign. But this is not the most interesting part of this episode. House suspects Wilson uses anti-depressants, and hopes to drug him to prove it. He buys two cups of coffee and drugs one of them. He then calls Wilson for a cup of coffee. He gives him the cup that's not drugged. Wilson doesn't trust his friend and takes the other one which is the drugged one. He can't believe that House'd do something nice for no reason.

Foreman eventually does quit and House doesn't seem to be really bothered by that. In fact he even fires Chase when he becomes mad at House. That is not something that hasn't happened before and there is not really a good reason why House should fire Chase. During the show we've seen House predicting the behavior of complete strangers. So it shouldn't surprise him that Cameron, who by now has become Chase's girlfriend, would quit too if he fires Chase. I believe that House saw Foreman's quitting as a great chance to start over with a fresh new batch of fellows. Foreman, Chase and Cameron have known him for so long that, he believes, that they'll probably ask lots of questions if he really tries to change and probably will not believe him.

Well, his plan doesn't really work. First of all Foreman, Cameron and Chase keep working in the same hospital and of course so do Cuddy and Wilson. Secondly all his new fellows want to work with him because of his reputation as a great doctor. But they also know his bad sides. This is a bit of an uneven season, mostly because in the first half of it the writers sometimes make House's character go way over the top. The second half is great again, though with a great climax in the finale. But before that finale there are two other great episodes. The first one is 'Games' where there is lots of discussion about whether their patient of the week can change or is changed. But an even greater episode is 'No More Mr. Nice Guy'. The patient of the weak is there a guy who is to nice for his own good. House looks at this extreme niceness as a symptom for a disease. There is no real reason to do this and it is rightly pointed out to him that he thinks this, because if niceness is a symptom for a disease, then rudeness might be too. Once the disease is cured, the extreme niceness or rudeness will too. The interesting thing is that House's rudeness has of course nothing to do with a disease, the guys niceness though does. But the most interesting part of this episode is that House fakes he has syphilis. And unlike in Half-Wit, this time he does hope everyone believes him. Not because he wants them to feel sorry for him, but because he knows that syphilis can be cured with medicines which as a side-effect can alter ones personality and make one nicer. House starts to act nicer and the people around him really believe him, though they worry that he might lose his diagnostic abilities. House eventually makes the error of telling Wilson that he faked syphilis, but asks him to not tell it anyone. Wilson does tell it though to his girlfriend Amber, who out of spite for House, tells it to his fellows. And so everything turns back to normal. Not for long though. In the two-part finale House gets drunk in a bar and calls up Wilson to pick him up. He is not there, so Amber comes to pick him up. They get in a bus and the bus has an accident. House hits his head hard and becomes unconscious. When he wakes up the rescue workers are underway, but he feels pretty fine and goes to the hospital. Unfortunately he forgets that Amber was with him, but he does have an uncanny feeling that he forgot something. At the end of the first part he remembers and in the second part he and Wilson find Amber in another hospital. She is pretty banged up from the crash, but that's not the worst thing. She was sick to begin with. The crash destroyed her kidneys and after lots of efforts she does die. House who electroshock-ed his brain to remember exactly what happened to her gets into a short coma. He then hallucinates that he is with Amber in a bus. In this scene we finally really realize that House is not happy with his life and really does want to change. He says to Amber that he doesn't want to be miserable, he doesn't want to be in pain and that he doesn't want Wilson to hate him for what happened. In season 5 we'll see House hoping to achieve all those things.

Over the seasons we've seen House causing Wilson, lots of trouble. Wilson was a better friend to House, then the other way round. But Wilson could never stop his friendship with House. Now Amber died, partly due to House, Wilson finally has a real, identifiable reason to stop his friendship with House. At the beginning of season 5 he does just that. The first episode is fittingly called 'Dying changes everything.' Wilson also quits his job at the hospital. It was pretty clear that Wilson would eventually come back and restore his friendship with House. Unfortunately the writers made it happen very fast. This situation lasted hardly three episodes, but it was handled very well. After Wilson breaks his friendship with House, House tries to visit him. Of course he only does this after he finds a reason that he can give for his visit. His patient might have cancer and Wilson is an oncologist. In a brilliantly acted scene by both it is obvious that Wilson does want to restore their friendship, but since nothing changed since last time they talked he can't. They eventually restore their friendship in the episode 'Birthmarks' House's father has died, but House doesn't want to go to the funeral. But Cuddy drugs him and forces Wilson to drive House to the funeral, because House's mother wants him there. Wilson could of course refuse. He doesn't even work for Cuddy anymore. But now he actually has a reason to be with House again. After an interesting road trip where we find out how Wilson and House met and House finds out that his father is not his real father, Wilson and House restore their friendship. Wilson realizes that House is, despite some flaws, a truly unique and interesting person. All is well again. Wilson does not hate House. Birthmarks is the fourth episode and until episode 15, 'Unfaithful' this season is pretty mediocre. There is a bit too much time devoted to Thirteen's troubles with Huntington's disease and there is even a episode with a hostage situation. This episode is probably the worst episode on House. Apart from being very cliched it has also a big plot hole. The hostage taker wants to test every medicine he gets on one of his hostages. If it kills them he won't take it. That is pretty logical, but in the end he ends up with only Thirteen. Thirteen wants to sacrifice herself and take the medicine, even though she has Huntington's and it could kill her. The hostage taker knows this too. Thus it's utterly pointless for him to try the medicine on her first. Eventually all ends well and nor he nor Thirteen die.

Despite all this there are a couple of episodes between episodes 4 and 15 that are worth mentioning. These are 'The Itch' and 'Joy' and 'Joy to the World'. In 'Joy' House and Cuddy kiss. In the next episode, 'The Itch', the consequences of this kiss are examined. Again we see that the characters don't know what to think of this, because there was not really a reason for them to kiss. The episode also seems full of symbolism. House treats an agoraphobic, who is more cowardly then phobic. After treating him, House, calls him out on his cowardly behavior. It actually feels more like House is speaking about himself. At the end of the episode there is a brilliant parallel sequence, where both House and his patient try to be less cowardly. The patient manages to get out of his house. House goes to Cuddy's house, but he just can't bring up the courage to ring up. There is also a weird dream in the middle of the episode where House tries to kill a mosquito and destroys his house in the process. In 'Joy to the World' Cuddy adopts a baby. This shocks House. It's a change for Cuddy, so naturally House thinks this will change their (not romantic) relationship.

As I said earlier this were all fairly decent episodes, but a bit too melodramatic and not really up to the standards of the rest of the show. Luckily this changes by episode 15, Unfaithful. From that episode on till the season finale there is a stretch of brilliant episodes. Unfaithful does not have much to do with the theme of change, but it contains a lot of philosophical debate. The next episode though, 'The Softer Side' deals a lot with change and is one of the best episodes on the show. Everybody is worried when House suddenly starts to act nicely. He has started using methadone. It makes the pain in his leg go away. Unfortunately it also makes him less focused on his cases and at the end of the episode he stops methadone. The cost of his change was to high for him.
In 'Simple Explanation' Kutner kills himself for no apparent reason. House searches for one and when he can't find it he goes literally insane. He starts to hallucinate and sees Amber again. At first he knows he hallucinates, but in the last episode he hallucinates that he stops using Vicodin and has sex with Cuddy. This he thinks is really true. When he finds out it isn't he goes to a psychiatric hospital. Here I unfortunately must stop. Since I live in the Netherlands, I haven't seen anything yet from season 6.