signor_ferrari

Over at the Basement. My takes on Terminator: Salvation and Star Trek.

Does a suit really make that much of a difference?

In hold ‘em, the general rule of thumb is that being dealt a suited hand (i.e. two cards of the same suit) gives you a three percent edge over the same hand unsuited. So getting the ace and king of spades to start is slightly better than ace of hearts and king of diamonds. The reason being in addition to being able to pair either or both of your two hole cards, you need one fewer card on the board to make a flush.

The edge that comes from a suited pocket is something that is routinely mocked amongst experienced poker players. When someone makes what appears to be a boneheaded call, the subsequent fold when their cards don’t hit is accompanied by many a losing card player’s lament: “But they were suited!” Newbies tend to overvalue being suited more than experienced players, but despite the mockery, there’s still some merit in suited cards.

I mention all this because of late, I’ve come to wonder if the same could be said of a person. More specifically myself.

A month ago today, I went the wedding ceremony for a lesbian couple I’m friends with. It was a beautiful ceremony, outdoors on a spectacular evening for it. I was dressed up for the event, looking good even if there was no chance of potentially hooking up with someone at the reception, given most of the women there were also lesbian and one of the few non-lesbians attending happened to be my ex-wife. But Carol and Christian are good friends and I wanted to look good for their big day.

I was missing my regular cash poker tourney for the ceremony, but knew that there would probably be people playing a cash game getting knocked out. I figured it would be worth it to drop by the house, see who was playing and put the cash I had set aside for my buy-in towards the cash game to see what I could make of it.

Cash games tend to work against my strengths in tournament play. Cash games usually prompt much looser play, making it a lot harder to get a read on the other players. There tend to be some things that are consistent within a player regardless of whether it’s cash or a tourney, but overall I tend to find myself down in most cash games I play in. But the itch to play was there, so I figured I might as well go ahead and scratch.

I walked in, and everybody immediately started making comments because I was dressed up. “Hey Shawn, I didn’t realize we were playing Bobby’s Room at the Bellagio!” The comments made me smile, as I am one of those odd guys that tends to feel more at home in a suit than in casual wear because I know I look better dressed up. I mean, most guys look better dressed up than not, but for me I genuinely feel at home within that look.

And I guess my comfort in the outfit reflected itself in my play. I took a shot to the mouth pretty early on, dropping close to $12 of the $35 I bought in with within the first three hands. Normally that’s enough to get me to shut down and play ultra-tight, but something just didn’t feel right about going conservative that night. Next thing I know, I start catching some good cards and went on a heater like I’ve never been on before. I went in with $35 and came out of the game with close to $120.

There’s something poker players have that’s called “table presence”. It’s how their playing style and attitude are perceived by the other players at the table. Rocks are steady, tight players that only go in with quality hands and don’t vary their style much. Maniacs, as you can guess, are reckless erratic players that can go in with small bets on a premium hand like pocket aces, and then start raising up crap hands like 7-2 offsuit.

I liked the table presence I had with the cash game so much that I decided it was worth experimenting to see if I could keep it going. A little more than two weeks ago, I show up for the tournament decked out in my suit again. People looked at me more oddly than when I showed up wearing a fez for a few games, but it didn’t matter to me. I felt comfortable and confident. In cards, that goes a long way.

In the first hour, I played brilliantly. There’s one guy at this game who has won some really big money at tourneys in casinos in LA and OK. He finished ahead of a well established pro (Scotty Nguyen) at Nguyen’s own tourney in OK late last year. And I caught him and the tourney host out on a hand where I turned an a straight and kept betting out with what I knew had to be the best hand. They stuck with me to the river, but to this day I don’t think they knew what I had.

Things went ice cold after that first hour, but I managed to hold onto my patience and kept hanging around. I made it to the final table, finished in the money at fourth place and doubled up my buy-in. And then I took $20 of my winnings over to the cash table and hit big over there as well. In the house with $60, out with $147.

I can’t let a good thing go, so this past Saturday I show up at the house again decked out. Very first hand, I’m dealing. Blinds are $25-50, and I call the big blind with four other people in the hand ahead of me. With five players going to the flop, I burn off a card and turn over three. 9-9-9 hits the board. Small and big blinds check. A solid, aggressive player ahead of me pushes the action, betting $225. I think about it and call from the button and the other players fold out. The turn brings a Jack. He checks, I check. River puts a 5 on the board, and Mr. Aggressive best $375.

I go into the tank for a little bit, and then push back hard, raising it to $900 (we start with $4000 total). More than ¼ of my starting chips are in the pot, and this gets the other player thinking a good long time. My guess is that he had a Jack to make the full house. I never really found out because after a few more seconds, he folds his cards, telling me, “If you could just control your breathing a little better, you might have gotten me to call. Your quads are good.”

I think he was full of shit about my breathing, and just knew that I had the fourth nine in my hand. Regardless, I flipped it over to show I was raising with the top hand. I felt like I could fly, but it didn’t get that good for me again for a very long time. No cards came and I worried I might have shot my wad right out of the gate. But patience paid off again, and people started dropping out one by one. We got down to the final six players, and I’m in a race with two other players trying to hold out and make the money at fifth place. I just managed to eek things out, when the guy who started the final table as the biggest chip stack donked off the last of his chips on a really questionable call when he was way behind in the hand, and didn’t catch the cards he needed to pull it out.

My net profit for the tournament was only $9, and I left that on the cash table afterwards, losing $30 pretty quickly. But I didn’t care at that point. I’ve only made the money three times in a year in this group once before: my very first year playing with them, when I made the championship table at the end of the year and eeked my way into third place. This year, I’ve made it three times (a third, a fourth and a fifth place finish), and the year’s not even half over. Including the money I took from the house bad beat jackpot in January, I’d wager I’m net positive in my cashflow from this poker game for the first time ever.

Being me, I can’t just leave this alone. I have to figure out what’s different that I’ve been able to be so successful. Given there was a point where I actually entertained walking away from cards early this year, it seems like a ridiculous turnaround in a short period of time. I mentioned reading Gus Hansen’s book, and that helped a fair bit. But for this stretch of six weeks, it can’t just all be from one book. So to borrow a phrase from the old Mars Blackmon commercial: It’s got to be the suit! Right?

Yes…and no.

It’s been a long time in coming, I think, and as anyone who knows me can guess, I’m loathe to admit this publicly, simply because save for the federal government, there is nothing I am more cynical about in this world than myself. But the reality is that I’m really starting to find my confidence in myself again, and in a way that is different from any other time in my life.

At the card table, I’m making plays I never believed I could make before. The plays were always too risky, the moves above my level of play to the point where I couldn’t execute them properly. In my mind, I’ve never been as good as what people have told me about my play would indicate. And I would still think that even today.

Except…

Starting at Thanksgiving, there’s been a second cash tournament I’ve started playing in, hosted by a different person. Actually, most everything about this second game is different from the first. The blinds start out roughly the same but increase at a faster rate. We start with a ridiculous amount of chips relative to the starting blinds. The players at this game are a broader mix of styles, which is augmented by the additional chips to start. There are bounty chips, cash bonuses for taking players out, which also provides incentive for more aggressive play.

I made the final table the first night I played in this game, going out ninth. I made one other final table three weeks later, and then that was it. They run it weekly, with cash prizes awarded quarterly for those who do the best over a 13-week period. I never so much as sniffed the money during the last quarter, making one lonely final table three weeks ago.

I went to play last night, the second week of the new “season” for this group. I had been on the heater I’d run through the last month at the other game. But yesterday I was in less than ideal card playing form. I’ve been fighting the allergy fairy and losing since Sunday. Yesterday a periodic hacking cough and lots of phlegm accompanied the stuffiness. A headache was also lurking, and I’d not eaten since lunch. I expected to come in, donate my cash, and get washed out quickly.

After all, I wasn’t suited…

A funny thing happened on the way to the muck, however. My style of play, normally very tight in tournaments and only occasionally aggressive, opened up considerably. I’ve never been a player who could change gears within a tournament itself, but I found myself doing that here. Started out big, gave back my earnings a little at a time, then lurched ahead again. I was doing well picking up a lot of small pots and amassing chips a little at a time, then making a big play when the opportunity presented itself.

Five hours later, I made my way down the stairs and out the door, $35 richer than I came in. Fourth place, solid play until the very last hand. That last hand was the only time I got my money in bad and then had to hope for a miracle at the end. My first time in the money with this group. And in that five hours, with (by my best guesstimate) a little more than 150 or so hands played, I saw

- exactly two hands where I started with a pair. Jacks, which I played passively and nearly lost with towards the end. Those came in hour number 2. And aces once in hour 4, and I won with those pre-flop by pushing a bunch of limpers out of the way.

- Only one hand where I had an ace with a second card higher than 10. Ace-King in the fifth hour, suited, when I went all in and faced against…ace-king offsuit. We split that pot.

In the meantime, I was winning nice pots with hands like queen-five, 9-10, K-J. I hit a monster when I flopped the straight with 5-3, a really weak hand but one I play sometimes for sentimental reasons. I was, in a word, a very good player last night.

Fuck it. I was damn good last night.

I recognize that I’m getting to the point where I’m really comfortable in my own skin again. And it’s for something that I’m doing on my own, not because I’ve got a pretty girl on my arm. It would be nice to be dating again, and I think I’m to the point where I’m feeling good enough about myself that I’m probably going to try and get back in the pool again. Because the thing that’s changed about me isn’t just feeling faith in myself again, but an appreciation for the time it takes to make things work the way I want them to. I’m seeing that at work a bit now as well, but that’s a story for another day.

It feels good, though, to wake up each morning and feel like it doesn’t matter what hand life deals me for that day. Because I know that I can and will make the right decisions to either make that hand pay off for me the best it can, or walk away from it not beating myself up because I know I’ve got a new hand coming up. I recognize I’m not just a rock at the card table.

The very best presents (presence) I could ask for is one I don’t need to open, because it opens me up instead. I don’t know why, but suddenly I feel like there’s something good waiting for me in the future. I don’t know when, but I know I can wait until I get there. Because when the opportunity comes, I know I’ll make the most of it.

It would help to post the actual text, wouldn't it?

My latest post is up at the Charge of the Geek Brigade. Enjoy.

So the blog has been getting neglected again, although at least I'm better about popping up here on occasion and saying some bloody thing just to acknowledge I'm still alive. Having lapsed out with Quirkee, however, there has been a gap in my intellectual tapestry that needed something to fill it (shut up, I know it's a metaphor that's mixed on the order of almost being pureed).

Which is why it's useful to have friends who are also writers. A friend in one of my circles observes randomly that he wished he weren't lazy, because:

Cause I would totally set up a blog and link site called "ComingoutoftheBasement.com" about geeks being mainstream. I've seen a couple pieces lately about how to explain to people you're a geek, a gamer, an mmo player, etc.

Sadly, I am.

And lo and behold, because many of my friends are tech savvy, and geeky....well...presto. My personal goal is to contribute over there at least twice a week, if not more. I'll still be writing here, but figured I'd give everyone the heads up. My introductory post is here. Enjoy!
 

Surfing over to Kevin Drum's blog at Mother Jones, I saw he'd excerpted an article from the New Yorker. George Packer had written a brief story about how the economic downturn was affecting the contractor fixing his roof. Though the story was meant to relate more about the financial situation, Kevin found a different money para within the story:

It turned out that cell phones had become a major headache in his work. Customers called him all the time, expecting him to hear every little complaint even while he was wrestling with a roof hatch. Meanwhile, they were more and more unreliable, not answering their phones, missing scheduled appointments.

[snip]

“It’s the technology,” the roofer said. “They don’t know how to deal with a human being. They stand there with that text shrug”—he hunched his shoulders, bent his head down, moved from side to side, looking anywhere but at me—“and they go, ‘Ah, ah, um, um,’ and they just mumble. They can’t talk any more.” This inadequacy with physical space and direct interaction was an affliction of the educated, he said—“the more educated, the worse.”

Drum is skeptical about the roofer's observations:

WTF? These folks call constantly on their cell phones, so it's not that they've lost the ability to carry on a verbal conversation. It's just that they can't do it face-to-face. Do I have that right?

Is anyone else skeptical about this? Obviously I have zero experience with 20-something metrosexuals in New York City, but, seriously? Is this happening? More anecdotes, please.

I have equal experience with 20-something NYC metrosexuals. But here's the thing...I don't think the roofer's wrong, though my own theory about why it's happening is drawn from a slightly different theory, one I've recounted to a few people and want to put out there to a wider audience.

When I'm at work, it's fairly common for me to have as many as ten different IM windows going at the same time. There's a couple/three personal ones, that were actually spread out over two applications until they upgraded my work system and I found it came preinstalled with Adium. Adium let me consolidate my friend lists from multiple systems and put them all into one tabbed window.

There may be as many as five or more different work conversations. My planners each have a tab so I can ping them if anything confuses me about the guidance they've given me for my products. I might have a couple open with the reseller account managers if there are specific accounts I'm either looking for throughout the day. My manager might have one open with me. And then there's the occasional one-off when someone pings me for info for some random situation.

Keeping all these conversations straight isn't a problem, but there is a point I recognize when I run the risk of information overload. I think I work hard to keep all the different chats straight because I recognize the potential for disaster if I pick up the wrong conversation in the wrong window. The problem comes in the differences between IM etiquette and conversational etiquette.

In IM you don't have to worry about talking over someone. I can see when someone's starting to type something in the window, but I can still type out whatever thought I've got when I have it. If there's something missed in the conversation as my thought and the person I'm talking to pass each other when we both hit "ENTER" at the same time, we can just type up a brief addendum tied back to the omitted thought.

It's that instantaneousness of the dialogue that I think has severely impacted my ability to hold conversations by phone. It used to be ridiculously easy for me to keep a conversation going with someone for an hour or more. And conversations with me always had a good flow, lots of back and forth, give and take. And I still manage that well in person when talking to people because I'm good about watching for my visual cues and interpreting body language to know when to break in and when to let the other person's thought flow.

But over the phone, when I'm lacking those cues, I'm lost initially. When it's someone I've got history with, I can eventually adjust back to what I'm familiar with about their conversational style. Subconsciously, I can get back into that flow even without them there. My subconcious puts them physically in the conversation I guess, making up for their real world absence. For someone I don't have that history with? I'm lost and find myself stumbling for words a LOT. That may be one of the biggest challenges I've found with dating outside of just the MEETING people part. Over the phone, I imagine I sound like a frigging moron the first call or three.

So I disagree with Drum, I think there's something to that, but my mileage may vary. I'm curious what other people think, because I know a lot of people who hate talking on the phone and wonder if this theory plays into that at all, or if that hate comes from something else.

You know, if I'd known it might somehow contribute to my being able to predict the end of the world, I would have tried harder to learn how to do sudoku.

Ok, Nicolas Cage's latest film Knowing isn't based on quite that stupid a premise. But dear god, is it close. It's one of those rare occasions when I feel stupider exiting a movie than I was going in and not just for the fact that I spent money on it voluntarily. And I really have to wonder just what it is I'm missing when Roger Ebert gives a piece of crap like this four stars and calls it "one of the best science fiction films (he's) ever seen".

In a brief intro, we learn that in 1959, an elementary school in the suburbs of Boston is having an event to celebrate its opening. A time capsule will be buried in front of the school, to be opened fifty years hence. The students from the school's first class (sixth graders, I'm presuming, though it could be younger) will place drawings of what they imagine the world will be like in the first decade of the 21st century. Their counterparts fifty years hence will have the privilege of seeing the capsule opened and finding out just how many crappy rocket ship drawings people of their grandparents' generation can produce.

Young Lucinda Embry (Lara Robinson) is compelled to put her own flare on the project. Compelled by whispering voices only she can hear, Embry frenetically fills her piece of drawing paper up with a random jumble of numbers from edge to edge. Lucinda gets chastised by her teacher, but since throwing the paper out would result in Knowing being a short instead of a feature, the paper does mange find its way into an envelope and into the capsule.

Flash forward fifty years. John Koestler (Nicolas Cage) is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at M.I.T. He is also a widower, getting by day to day with the company of his son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury). Caleb is naturally one of those preternaturely mature children who always know more than their parents and only seem to exist in the movies. Caleb also happens to go to the same elementary school that Lucinda did (convenient), and happens to hear the same sort of whispering voices that Lucinda did through his hearing aid (very convenient). When his school has the ceremony to open up the time capsule, it just so happens that Caleb gets Lucinda's letter (convenient to the point of asking just how fucking stupid the filmmakers think we are?).

John hasn't gotten over the loss of his wife, who died in a hotel fire. We know this because we always see him drinking at home and looking melancholy. I think if they'd been able to get Morrissey to sign off on it, Koestler would be listening to a lot of Morrissey and Smiths and looking very emo. Apparently they didn't have the budget to pull that off, so we get Koestler listening to a lot of emo classical music instead.

Before we get to the letter, we get to listen to Koestler delivery what might well be the most inane lecture on the virtues of determinism versus chaos theory. I had the misfortune my first year at UT of taking Intro to Macroeconomics with a prof who had been voted one of the worst on campus for four years running. I can safely say nothing he spouted during that semester ranked a tenth as simplistic as Koestler's discussion of determinism with his class. One watches the scene and wonders if anyone who is sending their kids to M.I.T. might be contemplating demanding a refund or discount on their kids' tuition.

Until one realizes that anyone who would be sending kids to M.I.T. would be smart enough to not watch this movie in the first place and would therefore never have reason to question. I digress.

So Caleb brings home Lucinda's proto-sudoku even though he wasn't supposed to, since the letters/drawings are the school's property. Koestler chastises his son for the thievery, until while in yet ANOTHER drunken pity party, he happens upon accident to notice a peculiar (wait for it....wait for it....) coincidence within the series of numbers on the page. He notices a series of numbers that in sequence form the date and number of people dead in the attacks on the Twin Towers. He also sees the date and number of people dead in the fire that claimed his wife. And like Richard Dreyfus with a plate of mashed potatoes in Close Encounters, Koestler, a man who is convinced that there is NO order to the universe (as he asserted in lecture), is certain that this means something!

(Keep the Close Encounters reference in mind, we're going to be back to it in a bit.)

Koestler tries to convince his coworker Phil that this paper contains the dates and number of people killed in every major world catastrophe to occur in the last fifty years. Obviously to just about anyone, this would seem like absolute crazy talk, especially when there's a hole in Koestler's theory that he can't quite explain. But when his guess finds itself being borne out by the dates on the paper yet to occur, Koestler finds out that there's something even more horrific yet to come.

At least another 60-75 minutes of this agonizingly bad movie.

It's more than a little bit pathetic when what is possible the best effects sequence in the film (one of the disasters yet to come when Koestler comes up with his revelation) appears to have been lifted almost whole cloth from a video game I've been playing obsessively for the last few months (no, not Rock Band). That it elicited a snarky comment from me to that effect is not surprising. That the companion attending the movie who I made the comment to mentally went to the exact same place since he also plays the game says much about just how badly this movie was going. Actually, Knowing is so utterly derivative I could swear it was produced by AIG.

(1 in 10 of you may get that joke. Those that rank amongst those 1 in 10, know that I love you with all my heart :-).)

Seriously, I imagine the pitch for this thing sounded something akin to:

"Hey, let's take the whole dodging death concept of the Final Destination movies...and then smash that together with the seeing patterns thing from Signs. We can even have the lead character with a crisis of faith like Gibson in Signs had."

"You know, that might be workable. But can we not make him a priest? I mean, we're godless Hollywood and all, we need to be more secular to keep our pinko commie cards active."

"Ok, we'll make him a scientist. Oooh...an astronomer, how's that?"

"Hmm...like Jeane Dixon?"

"Astronomer, you jackass, not astrologist."

"But for this movie, wouldn't it all be the same?"

And yeah, as this screenplay goes, it would all pretty much be the same. Either way, it's a case of making the evidence fit the pattern one really wants to see, except here it all winds up being true. But it's so obviously setting everything up to fit together neatly that there's never any doubt what's going to happen next. Koestler goes looking for Lucinda, naturally the teacher from fifty years ago remembers her and just happens to know Lucinda's dead. Doesn't have two other brain cells left to rub together, but she remembers that.

Lucinda's daughter Diana (Rose Byrne) just happens to be around and have a daughter just Caleb's age. And they both naturally have some kind of connection to these voices, which wind up being conveniently tied to mysterious figures following Koestler and Caleb around. Rose has some of the same ambivalence of purpose that Koestler suffers from, didn't believe anything her mom said about hearing voices or seeing the end of the world. But dammit, this crazy astronomer from M.I.T. comes around spewing this bullshit, why hell yes, we'll believe it now!

And just when this whole thing can't get any sillier, whether it's the ridiculous conveniences that tie everything together beyond all reasonable suspension of disbelief or the ersatz cheesy sentimental bonding amongst the principles, it goes and kicks up the stupidity another notch by shoehorning in a third movie/genre to bring the movie to a big finish. One that's so ridiculous that I couldn't resist blurting out, "You've got to be fucking kidding." Remember how I told you to keep the Close Encounters reference in mind?

"Are you sure you want to try and squeeze that in there too?"

"Are you kidding? Of course we do! It'll be like we're giving the audience three movies for the price of one! Where else are you gonna get that kind of value in this economy?"
 

Ladies and gentlemen, when Snakes on a Plane has you beat for story plausibility, it might be just a wee bit too much.

What in the high holy hell happened to Alex Proyas? Like Ebert, I liked Proyas' Dark City, a flawed but ambitious riff in the sci-fi genre. I also dug the hell out of The Crow before it, even if I understand and completely agree with a friend's criticism that it is little more than a two-hour music video with Brandon Lee's real-life death cut out of it. But then Proyas goes and does the abysmal I, Robot, and follows it up with this thing. Maybe he's trying to live out in reality Koestler's take on chaos theory, giving his career up for his art?

No, that would sort of make sense, thereby defeating the theory.

It's not like I expected the movie to be any good. Hell, half the reason I and my friend Kurt went to check it out was just to see how bad it really was. But Jesus Christ on a Devil's Tower of mashed taters, making movies really has to be treated like raising children. At some point, someone really has to step in, be the grown up and say, "No!" And take the toys away until they've learned their lesson. Maybe rub Nicolas Cage's nose in the celluloid to try and train him to stop...

No, wait, the man's eaten a real live cockroach in movie for his art...no saving that one.

Actually, had he eaten a cockroach in this one I think I might have enjoyed it more. For once in all 120 minutes of this dreck, I wouldn't have seen that one coming.

There were Encyclopedia Brown mysteries Peanuts comic collections. Later maybe Judy Blume's Superfudge or some of Madeline L'Engel's Wrinkle in Time series. Pretty much anything that held my interest and I could get my hands on in the school library I took with me. At least once or twice a week, from 2nd to 4th grade, if I was done early with my schoolwork for the day, I'd raise my hand and ask permission to go to the principal's office. And the principal at that time, a woman who if memory serves had the misfortune to also be named Sandy Duncan, would take an hour out of her day whenever I showed up and just let me read out loud to her because I could.

It's something I've been doing for almost as long as I can remember. My paternal grandmother, Mama China, taught me to read by the time I was three years old. I'm not talking primers, I mean she had me reading articles from the newspaper to people to show off how well she taught me and how smart I was. It's something that still surprises me sometimes, how powerful the written word can be when read aloud.

So it could be said that I was biased before I ever saw a frame of Stephen Daldry's The Reader. Irrespective of that personal connection to the subject matter, I found Daldry's film to be a powerful, thought provoking story of love, loss, and the choices we make in our lives. The story's approach to these matters lingered with me long after I'd left the auditorium.

In modern day Germany, Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes) says good-bye to a woman he's been dallying with. It's obvious from their parting that he's not a person who connects well with the opposite sex. As the woman leaves his flat, Berg lingers on her departure, and finds himself swept up in memories of his life many years before.

As a young boy (in flashbacks played by David Kross), Michael is riding a trolley in his hometown one day while desperately ill. He's noticed by the ticket taker on the trolley, a serious looking woman named Hannah Schmitz (Kate Winslet). When Hannah heads home after her shift, she finds the poor sick boy huddled in the foyer of her apartment building, his having collapsed there by chance. She takes care of him and gets him home to his family, where he slowly is nursed back to health.

Once Michael is well, he seeks Hannah out to give his thanks for her help. Their second encounter winds up being the springboard for an unlikely May-December romance in which Hannah teaches Michael how to make love to a woman. Though there seems to be little outside of the physical realm to bind them, there is an emotional bond that grows as the couple's interludes become more frequent.

As part of their ritual, Hannah asks Michael to read to her from the various books he's studying for school while they spend time together. The works Michael selects seems to parallel the growing affection he feels for Hannah, and the complications stemming from that brings their relationship to a pivotal point. A decision is made, and Michael finds himself forced into adulthood, bringing the first act of the story to a close.

Flash forward several years and Michael is now in college, studying law. It's obvious from his interactions with his fellow students that he still hasn't put his experience with Hannah completely behind him. His emotional center stuck in the past, he pours his focus into his studies. When one of his classes takes him on a field trip to observe a major national trial, Michael finds himself crossing paths with Hannah under most unexpected circumstances. Major secrets about her are revealed, ones which color not only Michael past experiences with her, but force him into difficult choices for both his and Hannah's futures.

Were that where the story came to an end, I think I could have been perfectly content and found The Reader to be a solid, if unspectacular film. It's funny, I mentioned to the friends I saw it with that I knew next to nothing about it going in, and so some of the revelations that come in the second act hit me more unexpectedly than I think it did them. Before that point, I'd actually been more than a bit underwhelmed by the film, finding it a luke warm coming of age story.

But it's what comes out in the second act that had me rethinking nearly everything I'd assumed about the first act. Things said and done took on alternate meanings and motivations that made the ending to the first act so much more poignant and sad. The chemistry between Kloss and Winslet is played out note perfectly. They're something beyond friends with benefits, but not passionately in love and the reasons why this has to be as it is feel so perfectly in tune with what comes out in the second third of the film.

Winslet is in my eyes always exceptional in everything she does on film. Here, she plays so much older than she really is, an attitude that comes off as beat down by life in the first act. When her reveals are brought to the fore, I found it amazing at just how subtly she set those facets up in the first.

Filmspotting had a poll recently asking if you had to choose one Cate/Kate and one only today, which would it be, Blanchett or Winslet. The poll came in dead even at 50-50 with several thousand votes cast and this doesn't surprise me at all. I'm biased towards Winslet, having fallen in love with her Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But it's a very close choice for me. Blanchett showed me she can do the sultry, passionate things I associate most closely with Winslet with her work in Benjamin Button. It's here in The Reader that I see Winslet doing the heavyweight work I've long associated with Blanchett's repertoire, that I first saw from her in Heavenly Creatures. And I think it may be every bit as heartbreaking a role as Creatures.

The young Kross holds his own with Winslet admirably. I think the thing I liked most about his performance was seeing just how much he grows as a man over the course of the two acts. It's not just about the bravado and self-confidence one expects from a boy who has found his first lover, though that part rings especially true. It's the more nuanced emotional variations that color his mood as he works through the difficulties of his relationship with Hannah that were revelatory. There was still some emo to what he was expressing, but it developed a much more adult edge as the situations worked themselves out.

And on top of all this, there's a third act that spends time with Michael in his adult life and how he ultimately faces the repercussions of his and Hannah's decisions and tries to find...actually I'm not sure what I'd call it. Closure? Forgiveness? Redemption? All of these words and maybe none of them apply to what he does and how Hannah receives it. And an even larger question could be asked about whom those attributes are really meant for, her or him? Fiennes is up to the material as well, which I would well expect from him. When he made me feel genuine sympathy for a Nazi in Schindler's List, even if it was only for a moment before I saw the monster that Amon Goeth was all over again, I knew this man had incredible skill as an actor. Everything he does as the adult Michael makes sense to me, and I could even see myself making some of the same choices, despite the ones I disagreed with earlier.

By the denouement, I know everything I need to know about these people and can understand everything that happens to them. And I think it's a testament to the performers, director Daldry and the screenplay from David Hare, that I not only left thinking about these characters and this story well after it was done, but trying to think of different choices they could have made that would have changed how things played out. Because I wanted a different life for these people, even if that's not really the story that is meant to be told.

And I think it brought to mind for me personally just how much I missed reading to someone. It was something I did in my marriage, with my ex-wife and I alternating reading from just about anything we could get our hands on. It was something I did in my last long term relationship, though the source materials had changed considerably from the days of my youth. Even Jenny humored me for the couple of months we saw each other this last summer. The movie moved me so much that, despite the missed appointment I had this afternoon that I'll have to reschedule, I don't just want to volunteer with Reading for the Blind and Dyslexic. It's something I feel I actively need in my life.

Some stories need to be told, need to be shared. This, in my mind, was unquestionably one of them.

I think one measure of a great film is when it can still arouse emotions in you, even when you know what's coming.

When the cellar scene at the end of Silence of the Lambs starts, the moment the lights go out, I feel tension in the pit of my stomach. I know how the scene plays out, who lives and who dies. I've seen the movie maybe 30-40 times. It still gives me chills.

There is a scene in the latter part of Zodiac involving Jake Gyllenhaal and Charles Fleischer (who you know best as the voice of Roger Rabbit). I knew what happens in the scene long before I'd ever even put the film in my Netflix queue because of a discussion about it on the Filmspotting podcast. It's not necessarily critical to any big spoilers in the ending, but it is a setup for a scene that is meant to mess with your head just a bit, exploit any doubts you might have about what's going on. And even knowing what comes up and how it's meant to shake out, I could still feel myself on the edge of my seat. David Fincher roped me in and left me hanging by a strap. And that is exactly as it should be.

On July 4, 1969 in Vallejo, California a young couple is shot multiple times in a car on a turnoff near a golf course by an unknown assailant. An hour or so after the shootings, police receive an anonymous phone call from a man claiming to have committed the crime. Police arrive to find the victims exactly as described, the woman DOA, the young man barely alive.

A few weeks later, a letter arrives at the editorial offices of the San Francisco Chronicle. In very neatly handwritten text, the letter lays out information only the police or the killer would know about both this killing and one that occurred a few months prior in the nearby town of Benicia. Included with the letter is a strange block of symbols and letters, a cypher the killer wants run on the front page of the paper in the afternoon edition, or he'll kill more people. The letter advises that similar cyphers and letters have been sent to the San Francisco Examiner and the Vallejo Times-Herald.

Thus the public became informed of the presence of the Zodiac killer, one of the most infamous unsolved serial killing streaks in US history. Crime beat reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr) takes an immediate interest in the investigation and the crimes, trying not only to report the story but developing an unhealthy obsession with the case and who might be committing the murders. His zeal is shared by the paper's editorial cartoonist Robert Greysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), who finds himself fascinated by the puzzle the cypher presents and haunted by the killings.

While Avery and Greysmith follow the leads from the journalistic side, the police conduct their own investigation. Inspectors David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) are brought into the case when investigating what appears to be a random robbery killing of a taxi driver. A new letter from Zodiac claims the killing, as well as an assault on a young couple at a nearby lake which left another dead victim in his wake. The subsequent letters contain a variety of threats on the people of the city, leading to a wave of panic and fear that grips most of the Bay area.

Based on Greysmith's book, James Vanderbilt's screenplay begins as a suspense film. It balances out the city's fears and anxieties about the killer as reflected through Avery & Greysmith with the frustrations of law enforcement to break any new leads in the case through Toschi & Armstrong. As is to be expected with a murder who communicates through the press, the four men's paths cross in the investigation and at times sets Avery against the police in their separate pursuits to figure out who the killer might be. The frustration mounts on both sides, as evidence begins to amass that muddies the picture of just what killings the Zodiac is really responsible for, and which he's merely laying claim to because he can.

When the case goes cold, it leaves all four men somewhat broken. Avery was well on the way to being an alcoholic when the killer sends a threat at Avery directly. The anxiety over his personal jeopardy leaves Avery a shell of himself. Greysmith seems determined to help find the killer because he feels like no one besides he and Avery really care about the case. Toschi can't find any resolution, especially when their best suspect comes up clean enough that they can't pin anything to him. Armstrong just seems done in by a long stretch in homicide, Zodiac being enough to push him off that beat and into a desk job for good.

The film could end there and be a decent, if unspectacular film, and in fact it almost seems to. There's a fade to black and then a montage of audio clips and music from the time period gives the viewer a chance to feel how California has moved on as the Zodiac killer has fallen silent. Then the scene picks back four years later. Avery's washed out at the Chronicle and moved to Sacramento. Toschi is still working homicide.

Greysmith's life seems to have changed for the better. A divorced father of two when he's first introduced, he's married to a woman named Melanie (Chloë Sevigny). He had his first date with Melanie after spending time with Avery at a shooting range learning to defend himself if he should run into Zodiac. So Melanie is aware of how close to case Greysmith is and has been for some time. But his interest has turned into a full blown obsession, as he feels certain he can unlock the puzzle with just a bit more information and time.

The second half of the film plays out like a mystery/police procedural story as it tracks Greysmith in his efforts to run the case down. He hits up Toschi for any information he can, and gets set on the trails to Vallejo and Napa Valley in trying to put all the differing evidence together. The obsession becomes very personal for Greysmith and puts him in danger of losing everything he holds dear. And Toschi's involvement with Greysmith creates unexpected complications for him down the road when Zodiac comes out of hiding with another letter.

What I find fascinating is how different the two halves of the film feel, and yet how each half is equally engaging for me despite their different approaches. Gyllenhaal doesn't work as well for me in the first half, as it's hard to understand exactly why he feels drawn into the web of the Zodiac murders. Avery is a much more memorable character, not only for how he's written but for what Downey, Jr brings into the role. My man crush on him grows with every movie I've seen him in since he got sober. Maybe my favorite actor working today.

Ruffalo's performance as Toschi is solid, workmanlike. It's a by-the-numbers police detective in spots, but Vanderbilt's screenplay gives him just enough color to stand out and Ruffalo realizes those subtle touches nicely. It's actually a sharp contrast with Edwards as Armstrong, who I think has to be one of the most poorly realized characters in the whole picture. There's something that feels flat about Edwards' performance, almost as if it were guided more by bad cop TV dramas than anything in the screenplay of Fincher's direction.

When Toschi and Greysmith continue to work what seems to be a completely cold case on the Zodiac, it feels like they're two halves of the same coin. They need to find an end to this because it's what they do, no matter what. Even when Greysmith's marriage finds itself threatened by his continued involvement of the case, there's never any question that he might let it drop finally. Whatever the costs, he just has to know, and it's that aspect that I felt like Gyllenhaal sells better in the second half of the movie. When we get to the pivotal scene with Fleischer I mentioned earlier, I actually feel attached to him for his dedication, which makes the tension palpable even though I know what's going on.

When I saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in January, I thought it was a flawed film but at the time felt it Fincher's most ambitious and most human work. I thought the characters, at least the supporting ones, were more authentic and carefully drawn than anything Fincher had presented before. I think I'm going to have to rescind that notion having finally caught up to Zodiac. The two films bear some commonalities, both in running time and in their tracking certain events over the course of several years in history.

But the big difference between the two lay in the quality of the characters as written, and the pacing of Fincher's direction. Button really lags in spots, and there are a number of characters I just find it hard to care about, not least of which is Benjamin himself. By contrast, even Edwards' poorly realized Armstrong and Sevigny's underwritten role as Greysmith's second wife still hold my interest better in Zodiac because I never feel like I'm waiting around for something to happen. Fincher keeps the story moving and the audience chasing the leads, and never lets you settle into the idea that you fully know what's really the truth (reflecting the unsolved nature of the actual crimes). It won't ever exceed Fight Club as my favorite film in Fincher's catalog, but it's a close, respectable second for me.

Will have to update tomorrow. Zodiac is a hell of a lot longer than I knew. Good so far though.

Yes, I'm still here. Obviously, I'm going to hell, since I've not fulfilled either of my Lenten obligations well these past two weeks.

It's a quarter end week, so all work wants to do is eat my brains. But it's not unreasonable. I mean, no one's gonna eat my eyes. For my Facebook peeps, yes, I'm aware that's a redux from a status update earlier in the week. Cope, I'm about recycling when I need material.

I've also just not been able to carve out the time to watch films like I'd like to. Part of it is because there's not a whole hell of a lot out there I want to see. Watchmen proved to be such a shattering disappointment, that everything else feels like it can only be better from here. So I've got that going for me, which is nice....

I've been enjoying the social life with many of my various friends over the last few days, which has been an unexpected plus. There has been drinking, talking, Rock Banding and eating. There aren't a lot of things more than that I could ask for in life, so I would say I'm coming out ahead in the deal.

Today was a drinking day, spending a nice couple of hours chilling at one of Austin's best dive bars (La La's) and tipping a few brews after waiting out one mother of a storm at the office. Reports of three inch hail south of Jollyville, which is just a few miles from where I work. A friend from work fared much more poorly than I did from the storm. I hope he's got a low deductible on his auto insurance (many sympathies, Sean, that sucks much ass). I got out to find my car pockmarked, but not damaged enough to warrant a trip to the body shop, thank God. Course, now my car looks like it's been scarred by acne, but it could be worse.

I do hope to at least have a topic of conversation tomorrow, if not another movie write-up. But I just wanted to pop my head up and say hello.

Sometimes you just can't see a movie until you're ready.

I was thirteen years old when Kiss of the Spider Woman was first released. Back then I had no concept of what it meant to be gay, beyond it being a long running joke on the TV show "Three's Company", which I watched a lot when it was on. That's a fact I'm not particularly proud of today. I mean, I recognize I was too young to know what it was I was laughing at, and it's certainly not like my folks were going to explain to me what it meant to be gay. As I was heard in a song, "I was young and stupid then, I feel old but stupid now."

In any case, I knew next to nothing about this movie when it first came out, beyond the fact that it was apparently a very big deal for it to get nominated for a few Oscars that year. I would only come to understand much later on just how groundbreaking the film was for what it accomplished. Produced for less than $1 million, it would be the first truly independent film to be nominated for Best Picture, building on momentum it earned at Cannes in 1985 where actor William Hurt won the award for Best Actor (a feat he would duplicate at the Academy Awards with the role in 1986). It would be more than ten years later before I would see it for the first time, and it's only now as an adult that I truly appreciate just how moving and sad a story it is.

Valentin Arregui (Raul Julia) is a political prisoner in Brazil, some time in the 1960s. A journalist arrested on suspicion of treason and collaborating with rebel factions, Valentin has been routinely tortured in the hopes he might reveal more about the leftists he knows. When not being beaten by the prison authorities, he spends his time in a cell with Luis Molina (Hurt), a homosexual serving a sentence for indecency with a minor.

Valentin and Luis have nothing in common, and if anything, Valentin harbors contempt for Luis. Not for Luis' sexual orientation, but for Luis' tendency to revert into escapist fantasy. Luis likes to while away the time spent in incarceration recounting for Valentin the plot to a film he loves. It was a movie he first saw with his mother, one which holds a special place in Luis' heart because of the love he holds for the leading man, and Luis' desire to be like the female lead: Leni Lemaison (Sonia Braga). The fact that the film wasn't very good is irrelevant to Luis. As is Valentin's eventual realization that the movie was probably a Nazi propaganda film.

For Luis, the only thing that matters about the film is that the characters embody and have what he wants most: true love, and a good man that is everything Luis idealizes in a mate. Valentin finds Luis' predilection for a fantasy world to be frivolous in the context of the bigger picture. To Valentin, the "movement" is all that matters, in the hope that somehow changing the status quo might move society closer towards and ideal of justice and better world.

What makes the movie special is in how the two men slowly forge a relationship despite their own delusions and faults. As they get closer, it becomes obvious what the movie really represents for Luis in his retelling and what his part in the movie within the movie really is. Valentin's idealism gets exposed for what it really is, and Valentin's intolerance for human weakness in anybody, but particularly himself, is laid bare. Time eventually gives way to love, sadness, and betrayal, all building towards an ending the is as melodramatic as Luis' fantasy film, yet still significant and meaningful.

Because it was the original indy, the film never had a major studio handling home video release. As the now defunct website DVDJournal.com noted back in 2001:

With no major studio at the helm, Weisman entered into home-video agreements with Island in the United States and CBS overseas — only to see both companies go defunct a few years later, causing the licenses to bounce around from one film library to another (including AVCO/Embassy, PolyGram, and MGM). Spider Woman can only be found nowadays on very old videotapes on eBay, and while several studios have expressed interest in releasing a DVD, the 15-year licenses expired recently and the home-video rights have fully reverted back to Weisman. And he isn't looking to make a quick buck off the film either.

My first exposure to the film came through one of those hard-to-find video copies, likely from Vulcan Video near UT's campus. I remember being excited when I read about the potential for DVD release when I saw the above note on the website. Sadly, there was next to nothing about the film after that until DVDJournal.com ceased publication. I thought perhaps the plans to develop disappeared into the ether, never to be heard from again.

Then while browsing release dates last summer, I saw it on the calendar. Weisman had put together what he considered to be the best DVD package he could hope for, and struck a deal to release it on DVD exclusively through Amazon.com. Eventually, the distribution was opened up wider, and I picked it up on blu-ray a few months ago.

It's a little sad to watch it today and see some of the things that haven't changed in the almost 25 years since it first screened, as well as the things that have taken on a new context in a different political environment. Listening to Hurt as Luis talk longingly about the things he really wants out of life, encapsulated in what he idealizes as what a "real man" is to be his companion, I find myself hearing much of what has been said repeatedly in favor of gay marriage over the last few years.

It's a jarring image when Luis recounts his life outside of prison as a window dresser. He talks about how he had just really come to the point where he wondered if his life truly had any meaning and what life was all about. There's a sadness, a loneliness echoing in what he says and how he says it, a yearning to just be happy with someone. He does this as he affixes the veil onto a mannequin festooned in a wedding dress. Here now, a quarter of a century later, and that image has an entirely different significance socially compared to the middle 1980s.

I'm going to be seeing six of my lesbian friends declaring their love to one another in three formal ceremonies in the next six months. It makes me sad that one couple has to leave the country to get that benefit legally, while the other two couples will be having ceremonies that I hope have as much meaning for them as it did for me when I was married more than a decade ago. That society still won't grant them the same legal rights I was given just pisses me off something fierce.

I think it makes me more emotional because Hurt's Luis is such a tragic figure, bordering at times on pathetic. His longing is something that I feel deeply sympathetic about, and it makes me like his character despite his particular idiosyncrasies that might make him otherwise a bit annoying. When his character gets a reveal that shows another side to everything he has been saying or doing up to that point, then it becomes easy to either loathe or pity the man. Different scenes in the movie make me feel both emotions in varying degrees.

Playing off of Hurt's Luis, Julia is subtle and steadfast as Valentin. In the beginning, he spouts off the revolutionary rhetoric so matter-of-factly that there's no real zeal in it. It's easy to see why Luis thinks Valentin every bit as delusional as Luis is, living in a idealized world that bears no resemblance to reality. As Valentin opens up more, the cracks in his facade make him very vulnerable, if not overtly frightened of what the future might hold. Which makes much of Luis' machinations all the more unsettling as the action unfolds, including a seduction sequence that feels very right and wrong simultaneously.

Adapted from a novel by Manuel Puig, the movie feels very much like a stage play, so it wasn't surprising to see it adapted to stage musical for Broadway 1993. The scenes when Luis' movie are depicted are an entertaining diversion and diffuse some of the tension in the prison for how perfectly they're acted as bad melodrama. Sonia Braga winds up pulling off three roles throughout the film, but her impact is felt most as Leni in the propaganda film. She has a look that very much captures the feel of the period when it would be taking place, but hits all of the over-emoted facial expressions that make you realize it's all in Luis' head. I half expect to hear Luis' voice when she speaks, even though I know that never really happens.

But it's when she drops in briefly as Marta, a woman Valentin loves on the outside, that I appreciate just how well Leonard Schrader's screenplay is constructed and how Argentinian director Hector Babenco pulled it all together. The parallels in the two mens' lives come so much into focus for me, and whatever flaws each man has in his motivations, I can't fault them for any of it. I don't know that I could make the same choices they do, but I respect those choices regardless. I think that is the testament to a well crafted story. When you can appreciate deeply the things that you love, as well as understand the things you disagree with or don't understand.

Just like any good marriage, no?

Cheating a little bit today and instead writing about a book. A book about poker, no less, which means I've lost about 90% of my readership, but it's an interesting read if you play and want to learn more. Plus it's my blog, so bleah!

If you're a poker player or aspire to be one, then you're well aware of, or have your own copy of Super System, the original strategy guide by the legend of poker himself, "Texas Dolly" Doyle Brunson. If you're just starting to learn the game, it's the poker Bible, the book you have to at least skim through some at the library to learn a fair bit of the terminology, slang, and some pretty solid strategy that even a basic player can pick up on. Doyle's fundamentals about small pot poker are still useful and reliable today, even though everybody and their dog who's picked up the game is familiar with it.

But that familiarity is also what limits the effectiveness of the book. Even Doyle himself has said he had to change the fundamentals of his game after the book was published because people played back at him so much after it came out. He's said at times that he might not have written it if he'd known what the results would be. As a man who's seen countless millions of dollars come and go, I shudder to think how much he might have won if he hadn't published his strategy, given that his prime earning years pre-date the internet.

There are other more current strategy guides out there. I'm hoping to eventually pick up Sklansky and Malmuth's Hold 'Em for Advanced Players, which is supposed to be golden for the more eggheaded player who can crunch the probability numbers in their heads with ease. Dan Harrington's books likewise offer a lot to tournament players. Quite frankly, back when I first picked up the game if I'd known more about the players and such, I'd have turned to either of these sources rather than the strategy guide written by the "Poker Brat" Phil Helmuth for my first guide, but even this asshole's work has something to offer.

But I had to admit I was particularly intrigued when I heard about the concept behind Gus Hansen's book Every Hand Revealed. Gus (known as "The Great Dane") is a hell of a card player, very active in both tournament play and cash games today. I happened to catch an episode of "High Stakes Poker" last summer when I saw him catch lightning in a bottle on one hand, catching a lower set against Daniel Negranu on the flop but making it pay when he caught four of a kind on the turn to sink Daniel's full boat, a hand that cost Negranu $250,000.

Gus has a reputation as a wild player, and the book bears that up to a point. But the detail Hansen displays in the book show he's got a brilliant mind working as well to back up his play. What Hansen did was while playing the Aussie Millions tournament in 2007, he would pause between hands to dictate into a voice recorder what happened on every hand he was involved in, including blind levels, chip stacks for the opponents involved, what cards played and what his rationale was for every action, be it bet, raise or fold.

When I described the concept to the good Constance Reader, she replied, "That sounds awfully obsessive." And she has a point. Gus recorded everything in Danish so his opponents would gain any knowledge from what he was saying on each hand, and in actuality while he probably was involved in 800+ hands over a 4 day tournament run, he actually only details out roughly 350 or so on his way to winning the tournament and $1.5 million Australian. But that meticulous detail provides within this guide one key element other strategy guides don't. That element is why I think I found it to be most useful for me in analyzing my play and learning how to really improve the level of decisions I've made in playing over the last couple of months.

The element is context.

Virtually any guide will tell you that controlled aggression is the key to being a successful card player, and will give you specific hand holdings and boards to get an idea of what to do in a specific situation. But while they can give you a basic overview about how to play said hand against a particular style of play (tight or loose, passive or aggressive), it's hard to apply that into a real world setting when what is an aggressive style to someone who's played the game for 20 years may seem positively maniacal to someone like me, who's only had a few years in a home game for background.

Hansen's details about what his chip count is relative to the blinds in a given hand helps illustrate what relative strength is in any given situation, especially in the context of the other players at Hansen's table and the actions they've been taking against Hansen's. Watching pros on TV, it's easy to forget that with I think only one exception, the shows only let you see highlighted hands, and not the hands where pretty much one person raises, another may re-raise and then everyone folds out. Hansen's book fills in the gaps and lets you see how and why that action might make sense for his play, even with a miserable hand like K-6 suited out of position.

I liken it to a book that tries to explain football. It's one thing to see how a play-action pass is executed on the field, but by itself in a diagram it's meaningless. When you see it in the context of an actual gameplan, when constant rushing of the ball sets up a defense to react to the fake run and open up the pass, the lightbulb goes on. At least for the three of you still reading who also understand football, never mind the rest of the people I just chased off by switching analogies.

In all seriousness, Hansen's book let me see tournament poker in the ways it is similar to chess. A particular bet here, or pattern of calling versus raising there winds up setting an opponent up for a false sense of security when the monster hand comes. Then, when Hansen sets up a trapping hand, the strategy involved and the types of bets or raises suddenly had more meaning for me. I now fully understand the concept of "switching gears" in my play, and think I've been able to put it into practice pretty successfully in the games I've been involved in since I started reading it. Play that may seem counterintuitive suddenly becomes the height of rational strategy.

There are times when having an anal-retentive personality actually pays off. Hansen's put that attribute into a guide that makes good common sense for the added layers it provides. And the dude's got an amusing personality that peeks through at times as he explains not just his successes, but when he's gone on tilt and makes some boneheaded moves before pulling it back together to win the big prize.

If you have any interest at all in an alternate take on poker strategy, I think it's a must read.

When describing the Rock Band/Guitar Hero phenomenon to people unfamiliar with it, I tell them the two games are the bastard grandchildren of Simon. Along that same vein, the film Quarantine, like Cloverfield before it, is the bastard grandchild of The Blair Witch Project. Unlike Cloverfield or Blair Witch, I actually liked this SOB.

Angela Vidal (Jennifer Carpenter) is a news reporter working the human interest beat. She is currently collecting footage for her latest assignment, giving the local news audience an insight into the life of firefighters by participating in a ride-along program. Working with the graveyard shift at a local firehouse, she and her cameraman Scott Percival (Steve Harris) spend a bit of time with Jake (Jay Hernandez), learning the ins and outs of what life is like for a firefighter and EMT. There's some friendly banter, and perhaps more than bit of flirting as Jake and Angela seem to have some nice chemistry. All of that gets put on hold when the crew has to respond to a 911 call.

The call takes them to a tenement where the landlord has called in with concern about an elderly woman in one of his units. She's been making some odd noises and the landlord has concerns she's not well. When the crew enters the apartment, they find the woman standing in the shadows and attempt to aid her. When the woman attacks Jake's partner, a police officer responding to the call shoots her, but not before the attack leaves one of Jake's crew clinging desperately to life.

Attempts to evacuate the wounded firefighter are thwarted when the military arrives and seals the building up with everyone still trapped inside. The parties inside the building are advised that there is a potential biological hazard that has to be quarantined for public safety. It's only then that those inside the building find out just how deadly the threat is, and wondering if any of them will make it out alive.

I admit when I first saw the full trailer for this movie, I was pretty skeptical. I imagined the pitch for the screenplay being something along the lines of, "Think Blair Witch meets 28 Days Later, with maybe a bit of Die Hard thrown in." Taken from those disparate elements, it would seem to be a pretty unimpressive concept. Perhaps those lowered expectations made me more open to what the movie had to offer, because I found myself seriously engaged in the ride it took me on and jolted more than I would have expected.

When I saw Cloverfield, one of my chief complaints was that while I enjoyed the novelty of the P.O.V. form of storytelling, I couldn't care less about any of the characters involved. As a result, while I was interested in a lot of the action on screen, none of it really stuck with me and I really had no interest in revisiting the material. While Quarantine uses a lot of the same P.O.V. technique, I think it provides characters that are more enjoyable and easier to relate to, which sucked me in more effectively. And it couches the P.O.V. technique in a much more believable context, which made it easier to get lost in the story.

Carpenter's characterization of Angela Vidal was a point of contention between the friend I saw this with and myself. As I recall when I saw this during the theatrical run last March, she was disappointed and annoyed with the fact that Vidal was largely a shrieking pile of jello with the shit starts hitting the fan and never really moved from that point (Kellz, if I'm remembering it wrong, chime in if you feel like it). She expected or wanted Angela to become tougher in the face of the adversity and try to be more in control of the situation.

For my part, I found Angela's reaction to be one of the more realistic responses from a lead in a horror film I've seen of recent note. There are moments where she seems to retreat to her journalistic roots and pushes Scott to try and document the things of importance that are happening to them so there's some kind of record.

But the reality is that this isn't Christiane Amanpour who's seen the worst of war torn parts of the world and has become used to human horror on some level. She's a local news reporter used to puff pieces. That she doesn't become catatonic in the face of some truly horrific stuff is about as far as I would expect her to go. So in that respect, screaming and complete spinelessness feels authentic and let me stay in the illusion.

Jay Hernandez as Jake gets just enough time one-on-one with Vidal that you can see where the romantic subplot might have developed if this was some other movie. So that he works so hard to try and keep Vidal in the here and now, when others would have given her up for dead also felt right to me. He seems like an actor who could do some good things with his natural charisma given the right opportunity.

The real stars of the film work from behind the camera. Director John Erick Dowdle and his brother Drew co-wrote the screenplay, and while I have no idea how faithful it is to the source material, I think on it merits they made a successful first mainstream film. The movie moves along at a smart clip, constantly moving from one plot point to the next in a way that makes sense and lays out what I thought was an interesting twist on the...I guess you'd call it zombie genre, but that's not entirely what were dealing with here.

The "trapped in a bottle" element of the story helps keep the tension high, and the stakes of what the occupants are fighting for (namely, survival) are always kept in the fore. The ending comes about with a resolution that might leave some people wanting a little more closure, but I thought it was right for the story they were telling. It's not some gimmick to leave the door open for a sequel, but rather just tying out the final plot point in a fashion that makes sense given everything that's happened prior.

Quarantine just got released on DVD last week, and if you're looking for a good scare flick, I definitely would say check it out. I actually think I might be picking it up myself, something I rarely do with horror films, but I think this might be the exception. If I wind up renting the original, I'll let you know if it measures up favorably, or if it winds up lacking by comparison.
 

So you noticed no posts over the weekend.

The short answer was I hit the wall. The longer form answer is that I'm finding it increasingly challenging to write, and watch a movie a day, AND have a life all at once. Especially when I can't always incorporate the three needs simultaneously.

I don't feel necessarily like I've failed keeping Lent, as I think I've finally come untracked as far as being able to actually write what's in my head in a way that makes sense and sounds reasonable. So I'm going to keep pushing through to Easter and try to get as much out there as I can, but I think in giving myself the occasional respite, I'll hopefully find it less likely to hit the finish line at Easter and then say, "Whew! Ok, that's it for a while," and then fall flat again with the production. We'll see how that pans out.

I did mange to spend some time with a couple of my peeps on Friday night and while there see a movie I'd heard a lot about: Let the Right One In, a vampire film from Sweden. When it was first released theatrically here in the states, it wound up sort of fading to the background a bit. Part of that came about because, vampires or no, it was a subtitled arthouse style flick. The other impediment to it perhaps gaining a bit more popularity was that it was released right about the same time the film adaptation of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight hit the screens. Though they both sort of deal with similar concepts and themes, I think Let the Right One In is a superior (if slightly flawed film).

Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) is a quiet reserved 12-year old boy living with his mother outside Stockholm. He's finding adolescence and puberty a bit more challenging than usual, as he is constantly bullied and belittled by a mean kid in his class named Conny (Patrik Rydmark). His mother never seems to be around, and when she does acknowledge Oskar it seems to be to scold or worry after him as much as show affection. On the occasions when Oskar spends time with his father, it's clear Dad dotes on the boy as much as he can, but even then Oskar feels a bit like a second class concern when a friend (and possible lover?) comes over to drink.

Oskar's world undergoes a major shift, however, when while sitting out in the courtyard by his apartment building one night he's visited by a mysterious young girl named Eli (Lina Leandersson). Eli tells Oskar that she just moved into the apartment next door to his, and that they can never be friends. Oskar finds this a bit odd but takes things in stride, and they bond over a Rubik's Cube that he loans her to play with through the weekend. You can see the hormones flaring in Oskar's eyes, and the hope that maybe things are starting to turn around for him.

Which would be fine if Eli were a normal 12-year-old girl. Or, as she puts it, "Twelve...more or less." See, Eli is a vampire. She lives with a middle-aged man named Hakan (Per Ragnar) who you're never quite sure about his relationship to Eli. Is he a father? Familiar? Both? Regardless of which, Hakan works earnestly to help feed Eli, sneaking out at night to kill random strangers and drain them of their blood to bring home to Eli. When one of these outings goes awry, Eli and Oskar find themselves thrust together in dependence upon one another, while Oskar has to reconcile the fact that his first love is a monster.

Or is she? That's a parallel director Tomas Alfredson and screenwriter John Lindqvist draw prominently in looking at Eli and Oskar's lives and the things Oskar endures. Eli drinks human blood, and that would probably earn her the label of monster in anybody's eyes. But when compared to the sadistic bullying of Conny, who is mean simply because he can be, it becomes clear that whatever abominations Eli may by guilty of, she is at least honest about who and what she is. Compared to Conny and his equally sadistic older brother Jimmy, it's not so clear about who the greater monster really is.

The notion of vampire as outsider is also something that Alfredson and Lidqvist explore, and in a fashion that has far more subtlety and passion than Twilight ever did. Maybe it's just a function of not speaking the language and taking the story in through subtitles that made me focus more on the character development. But I felt like Oskar and Eli struck more genuine human emotions than the characters of Twilight did. Though it's important to keep in mind that the targeted audience for Twilight probably skews much younger than that for Let the Right One In.

Oskar is a creepy and sad little boy. I found it interesting that when we are first introduced to him, and as we see some of the things that he focuses on, the first thought I had was, "This kid would be one of the Columbine killers if he reached his late teens in this country." It's a comparison that I think the filmmakers deliberately want the audience to see and presents a very unromantic notion of what early teen years are like.

Hedebrant's performance lends a lot to that. He feels like a very fragile ego, one that only starts to develop strength when Eli shows a continued interest in him beyond that first encounter. Hedebrant's physical bearing plays as much into that as how he delivers his lines, and it's what makes me feel sympathy for him despite the fact that he unnerved me a bit as well.

If Hedebrant is unnerving, Leandersson as Eli is downright freaky. Pale and lanky, she's got eyes that are penetrating even in the context of the rest of her face she looks like she's not slept in weeks, almost like she's strung out. Her physical bearing belies a maturity that exceeds her looks greatly, and I think it was a wonderfully subtle way to make her appear both young and at the same time potentially decades older. That gaze works to full effect in one scene about halfway through, when a flawless camera angle and just a touch of special effects just made me cringe back in my seat at the sight of her.

But despite all of that, she is still just a young girl, and it's when she feeds out of necessity when Hakan's attempt to get blood for her fails that you realize why he does what she does. In addition to being fairly indiscreet about how she sets about taking her prey, when she's done feeding and there's blood smeared all over her face that she really feels like every bit the awkward teen that Oskar is, not really knowing how to conduct herself and caring just as little about it.

Some parts of the story feel poorly developed, and I wonder what wound up on the cutting room floor or written out Lindqvist's own novel from which the film was adapted. Hakan's relationship to Eli, as I indicated earlier, is never really explained. While I imagine that the Lolita-esque creepout factor is part of what they're going for with Hakan, the fact that is never really laid bare makes it feel incomplete.

There's a similar plotline with a local woman named Yvonne (Karin Bergquist), who would be another of Eli's victims were the feeding not interrupted. The story gives a glimpse of perhaps how Eli came to be, but then just as quickly skips over to a couple of shocking scenes that appear to be exploring some aspects of vampire lore as interpreted by Lindqvist that just as quickly flame out and go away.

And those exclusions certainly can't be for pacing purposes, as the entire movie moves downright glacially in spots. I know Scandnavian filmmakers have a reputation for wallowing in ennui dating back to Bergman, but for crying out loud...pick up the pace a little, will ya? And not just so that we can get a sprint ending that seems to come out of nowhere.

For those complaints, though, it is a good film, well worth checking out if you want something different from standard bloodsucking cinema. It balances out the gore and scares well to keep from maybe turning off more squeamish viewers until the slapdash ending, and when its not plodding along it can tingle your spine with the creepier elements.

I'll leave it to the amateur shrinks reading to analyze this: any woman in a film who could seriously kick my ass I immediately find dead sexy. Uma Thurman in Adventures of Baron Munchausen or Dangerous Liaisons? Beautiful, but not for me. Uma Thurman in Kill Bill? Be still my beating heart. Michelle Yeoh or Zhang Ziyi? Would have me wrapped around their little finger if they so desired. Trinity in The Matrix? Yes. Carrie Anne Moss in anything else? Not so much.

So it shouldn't come as any surprise that when I first saw the trailer for Chocolate, my first thought was, "I'm so there." Given its pedigree with Thai director Prachya Pinkaew at the helm, I expected it to be top notch. Pinkaew helmed the Thai martial arts film Ong Bak with Tony Jaa, a film that you have to check out if you've never seen it and dig martial arts action. Unbridled ass-kickery abounds in Ong Bak. And while Chocolate wasn't quite up to that level, it was still damned entertaining.

Zin (Ammara Siripong) is a collections agent/enforcer for Thai mob boss known only as No. 8 (Pongpat Wachirabunjong). She runs afoul of her boss when she falls in love with Masashi (Hiroshi Abe), a Yakuza in country from Japan. Both the criminal and cultural conflicts of interest force Zin to make a choice between the two loyalties, and she chooses Masashi. He flees the country, while she stays to have a child they've conceived together.

Zin is devastated when she learns that her daughter Zen (JeeJa Vismistananda) is autistic. Still reeling from the news and fleeing from No. 8, Zin winds up taking in a street kid named Mangmoom (Taphon Phopwandee) to help take care of Zen and keep the two of them company. As the two children grow to their teen years, Mangmoom learns his adopted sister has a hidden talent. Her autism has heightened her reflexes tremendously. She can catch anything you throw at her even while she may only barely see it. He tries to capitalize on this by taking her out and "performing" with her for spare change on the streets.

Mangmoom isn't trying to take advantage of Zen. Rather, he hopes to help contribute to the household. For Zin is afflicted with cancer and can't afford the medicines necessary to fight it. When Mangmoom finds an old journal of Zin's that lists people that still owe her money, Mangmoom takes Zen with him in the hope of playing on their sympathies to help Zin out. He has no clue what Zin used to do, and so his entreaties are greeted with hostility. When he and Zen are attacked, he finds out Zen has another talent: through years spent watching martial arts films on TV and muy thai students at the school next door, Zen can imitate almost any fighting style with uncanny and deadly ease.

The premise requires a fair suspension of disbelief. This seems a good deal removed from Raymond Babbitt taking his brother Charlie to Vegas to count cards. And there are a couple of uncomfortable moments, at least for this western viewer, when Zen comes face to face with another autistic fighting wudnerkind. But if you can allow yourself to get into the story, the action will take over and you'll have a blast watching the results.

As Zen, Vismitananda is a very gifted fighter for someone so young. She's 25, but looks and can play much younger, and her moments acting as Zen show she has some skills in that arena, too. It actually serves her well the first time she shows off what she's learned through imitation, in a scene that pays homage to one of Bruce Lee's most celebrated cinematic battles in The Big Boss. Zen strikes Lee's stance perfectly and when she lets loose with one of Lee's trademark cries, it's frightening how much she looks and sounds like Lee.

Her style may not be as forceful as Jaa's, which is to be expected. She looks like she might not break five feet in height and I'd be stunned if she weighed more than 100 pounds soaking wet. But what Vismitananda lacks in power, she more than makes up for with speed and agility. She lets fly with some really amazing kicks and punches that made me flinch just watching her pound someone. In the right vehicles to showcase what she can do, she could be a huge international action star.

Vismitananda's skill plays nicely off of Phopwandee as Mangmoom. He's the defacto straight man to Zen, and he works in that role fairly well. He doesn't get called on to put any kind of physical comedy into the act much, so in some scenes he does little but stand around while Zen's kicking copious amounts of ass. But he does have a few nice moments, especially with Zin. He may not be Zin's son by blood, but he takes that role seriously anyway.

Siripong as Zin doesn't get written much to really show if she can act or not. Beyond laying around and looking sickly much of the time, she gets some of the more campy melodramatic moments, particularly when she's with Masahi. And Abe as Masahi mainly gets to stand around and brood, though he is given a few scenes towards the end to show off what he can do with a samurai sword and makes good on that opportunity.

Wachirabunjong's No. 8 is appropriately menacing for a mob heavy. Being a crime lord is something of an international language I guess. He's got one particularly nasty scene when he extracts some physical revenge on Zen after Zin is born. It's that action that puts the two on the run, and as fucked up as anything you would see in a crime movie here in the states. So it's particularly satisfying to see him get a comeuppance in the end.

But what you see movies like this for is the action, and Pinkaew knows how to stage it and shoot it to maximum effect. If you watch the trailer, you see that there are some ridiculously outrageous stunts being executed, and there is an outtakes reel over the credits that shows not all of them were executed to perfection the first time. When you see someone take a shot to the face and grimace in pain, you may well be seeing a punch or a kick that should have been pulled but wasn't pulled quite enough.

Frankly, given what you see in the outtakes, I'm surprised someone wasn't killed in the filming. But putting that much effort into what they do really pays off in the finished product on screen. About the only serious beef I have with the film is that the ending comes a bit abruptly, or at least feels like it given the frenetic pace at which the story moves along. The movie flew by so quickly when I saw it opening weekend at Alamo, they got caught out without having returned our credit card to cash out for the night.

The film's run at Alamo ended this evening, but it is already out on DVD here in the US, so it's well worth a rental if you have a need to see someone bust some skulls. Especially a cute take-no-prisoners Thai girl. Guess I've got another crush to add to the list.

No movie post tonight, but I figure I'm still keeping in the Lenten spirit if I put up a little bit about poker. That and I've not written about it in a long time, as a friend noted to me the other day.

Confidentially, there was a point where I had seriously considered giving that up to. Not for Lent, I mean for good. I felt like I'd hit a plateau where I just didn't feel like I was getting any better. Not only that, but I felt like I was wasting time and money trying to be something that just wasn't within my capabilities and that I just needed to find better, less expensive hobbies.

I think maybe the low point for me was on my recent trip to Las Vegas. I had a fabulous time overall, but when I sat down at a cash game at the Flamingo on Friday night and burned up $100 in less than ten minutes, that was pretty damn demoralizing. I look back on it, and see where I should have changed up my play, could have maybe gotten myself out of the jam, but it's all hindsight.

That my play was suffering or had maybe declined a bit shouldn't have come as that much a surprise. Given my frustrations in trying to date and feeling like I wasn't getting anywhere, a lack of confidence proves to be equally debilitating in both dating and cards. You can't play aggressively in poker if you're constantly second guessing your hand strength and feeling always a little less than the players around you. And I know that in dating, a lack of confidence shows itself in all sorts of little ways that can add up to something very unappealing.

Last month, though, I turned a bit of a corner playing in the bi-monthly tournament I've been a part of for almost...four years now? Jesus, has it really been that long? Wow...

Anyway, I went and played, and had a pretty damn solid night. I played one hand early flawlessly, not only managing to really snooker one guy out of the hand, but by busting him I wound up taking in a nice chunk of change from the bad beat jackpot that the host started last year. For those not in the know, a bad beat jackpot is basically a little bit of the buy-in that goes into a kitty to be paid out to someone who loses with a really good hand by getting overrun by a larger one.

Originally, the jackpot was only going to get paid out to someone who lost with a full house of aces or higher, but because no one won it all last year, they gradually lowered the qualifying hand until it was any full house of tens that lost would pay out 75% of the kitty (with the other 25% staying in to start a new jackpot). That 75% would get split, 4/5 going to the person whose hand lost, and 1/5 going to the person who won.

In the case of this particular night, I managed to stumble into a full house, queens over tens (Q-Q-Q-10-10), which beat another guy's tens full of jacks (10-10-10-J-J). He walked away with $600. I got $150 AND all his tournament chips which I parlayed into a third place finish for the night, which netted another $127. Might have been the most lucrative night playing cards I'd ever had.

Since then, I've been able to rethink my approach to the game a little bit, and its reflected in my overall play. I haven't won anything since then, but I've been able to analyze my play more objectively and see what I'm doing well. Not only that, but some of the regulars I've played with have noticed as well, and have commented on the change in my style. One really good player at the bi-monthly game I drove batshit this past weekend, raising his bluffs, pushing him out of pots and generally making his life hell. There's something deeply satisfying in driving someone that insane when they least expect it.

In cards, at least.

Tonight was a different tournament, one that's held weekly but I don't play every time. Part of that is because the blind structure and starting stacks make it really difficult to get into a regular rhythm of play. Typically, you want players to start out with 40-50 big blinds in chips. So if you're starting things out at $25-50, you want them to have about $2000 to 2500 to start out with. This tournament starts out with over 160 big blinds in the opening stack, $35K if you're there on time with blinds beginning at $100-200.

The problem with starting with stacks that big is that it encourages a lot of really loose and wild play, and it's difficult to get a read on your opponents. I'd tried to play my usual style tonight, and in the first 30 minutes, I found myself out over $10K with nothing to show for it. Normally that's my cue to get frustrated and just plunge forward blindly with the first decent hand I get.

Tonight, I just slowed it way down and let some of the other heavyweights knock each other out while I waited for good cards, and it paid off. I got lucky on the make or break hand, it's true, but after that comeback, I wound up picking some people off with some really solid, almost fancy post-flop play. It's said that the best players make most of their money post-flop, being able to read players and situations and learning how to take advantage of it. That's what I found myself doing, betting with authority and feeling good about every move I made up until the end. Even my last play was a solid one, flopping two pair and pushing all-in after a big bet to my left chased everyone else out. He had only 5 cards out of 30 that could beat me, and it was just bad luck he got one of those cards on the turn.

I walked away from the table frustrated for the draw, but not frustrated with myself. I'd forgotten how reassuring that feeling can be. Combined with the volunteer opportunity with Big Brothers Big Sisters, it's nice to feel like I'm comfortable in my own skin again. God knows I'm sleeping better at night because of it.

Maybe it's just temporary, but I don't feel like I'm card dead in my life anymore. That just makes me wonder what the next hand will bring.

Again, everything is below the cut in the blog/LJ and below a few spaces to keep spoilers from eyes that don't wish to see, and I strong advise against reading further if you really want to go into the movie blind about the ending. There just wasn't a delicate way to phrase it without essentially giving away the whole enchilada.

( the spoilers )

I've been mulling this film for the bulk of the weekend, and I think I'm finally to the point where I can get my thoughts out in some coherent fashion. Given the nature of the story, how personal it is for me, and that I might still have friends who are interested in seeing it and haven't yet, I'm putting the text of the review behind a cut for my regular blog and LJ, below a few lines of blank space for the Facebook/MySpace readers. If you've not read the source material, or have but just want the film to be a mystery until you've seen it, I would strongly discourage reading further. Come back Wednesday for a different post, or after you've seen it and can chime in if you feel like it.

 

( Start it up... )

The Watchmen write-up is still to come, probably tomorrow. There's just entirely too much to say about it, and I've had way too little time to do so this weekend.

I did manage to take in a screening of Waltz With Bashir this evening. A friend had brought it onto my radar about the time I first started reading bits and pieces about it on the web. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, and also won the Golden Globe in the same category. Though my friend didn't make it out for the screening, she still has my thanks for bringing it to my attention, as it's well worth a viewing.

Director Ari Folman begins the film with a graphic depiction of a dream a friend relates that he's been having for the last two years. In the dream, Ari's friend Boaz recounts how 26 angry dogs run through the streets before stopping outside of Boaz's home. The dogs demand Boaz be given up to them, or they will kill any patrons of the business at the base of the tenement Boaz lives in.

Boaz believes the dream relates to actions he took during the 1982 Israeli war with Lebanon. Folman himself was a 19-year-old infantryman with the Israeli Defense Forces at that time, but has no real memory of the time he served. Boaz's dream triggers not so much a memory as a dream of Ari's own, one in which he envisions himself and two fellow soldiers on the beach in Lebanon. The visions in the dream make Folman believe he might have been part of or witnessed the Sabra and Shatila massacres that occurred during the war.

Without any substantial memories from this time, though, Folman can't really confirm any of his suspicions about what the dream means. He decides to interview several members of the IDF who served in the war, some people he knows directly and some that he does not. Together with their accounts of the period, Folman paints a horrific picture of the horrors of war as they were experienced by several young men just beginning their service in the IDF.

The accounts are tragic and somewhat surreal under the circumstances. Because some of the men, like Folman, have blocked out or disassociated themselves from their memories of that period, there's a bit of a question as to what their true experiences were and what has been colored by the passage of time. That quality is heightened by the fact that the entire film is presented in animation. The style is crude in some parts, quite captivating in others.

Someone at my screening commented that it reminded them vaguely of the style used in Richard Linklater's films Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. Whereas those films took live film footage and then animated the action that was shot, I don't believe the same process was used here. The styles are similar enough that the effect is unsettling during some of the more violent phases of the accounts. It's gripping viewing and reassuring that as digital animation continues to be the preferred choice of many studios, some parties still find a place for more traditional styles to work wonders.

The film is punctuated by a fantastic score by Max Richter, who has previously contributed work on the films Elegy and Stranger Than Fiction, two films that I especially enjoyed. Richter's score contains elements of 1980s dance, pop and punk that all augment the scenes they're played without being too obtrusive. When Richter opts for a more traditional instrumental score, it still fits the scene perfectly, especially when the metaphorical "waltz" occurs as the story moves closer in time to the massacres.

With as limited knowledge as I have about Middle Eastern policy, I can't speak definitively as to whether Folman intended for this to be viewed as statement against either Israel or the more general horrors of war. My read fell more towards the latter, especially given how emphasis is placed on Folman's age at the time. One personal story Folman relates about his furlough time in particular brings that emphasis to light. It relates to a girlfriend who broke up with him just before he began his service, and highlights just how silly young love can be in the face of the more dramatic life-or-death decisions Folman and the others faced on the battlefield.

The one argument to be made for the former position, however, stems from a decision at the end to switch from the animation to actual live footage taken at the scene of the massacres after the fact. Widows cry in anguish over family members killed, and the camera lingers painfully on some of the bodies laying in and half-buried amongst the rubble. It's the films closing moments, and it slammed home the point that however dreamlike the memories may seem to those who experienced it, there were real people impacted by the actions taken during the conflict.

It is poignant, personal filmmaking that lingers well after the last credits roll. If you can handle the heavier subject matter, I think it would be worth checking out if it runs in your area.

This song of the Man and his Wife is of no place and every place; you might hear it anywhere, at any time. For wherever the sun rises and sets, in the city's turmoil or under the open sky on the farm, life is much the same; sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet.

- Opening Title Card, Sunrise

Commenting on silent films is something I find challenging. I picked up some of the terminology and understanding of how film as a medium developed when I took my Development of the Motion Picture class at UT last year. But with such a limited exposure to silent films, I still feel a little lost in talking about them, though I appreciate them just as much as more contemporary flicks.

I did appreciate learning more about the early years of German cinema, especially learning about F.W. Murnau. Like most people, I knew him as the director of Nosferatu, one of the earliest vampire films. I saw it for the first time some years ago at the original Alamo Drafthouse downtown, when they screened it on a double bill with Shadow of a Vampire. The modern score Alamo laid over it by Brown Whornet really left me cold, but the film itself was a real treat.

It was during my time in the class that I first learned about Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, Murnau's first feature after he emigrated to the US and signed on to work at Fox Studios. Sunrise is widely considered to be Murnau's greatest film, and some scholars place it as one of the best of all time. I don't know if I can agree with the second sentiment, and haven't seen enough of Murnau to consider its place in his canon. But I can say it's a solid film, striking some themes that are still relevant today.

After the opening title card, we learn that it's summertime. Through a montage of scenes, we see many people making forays out of the city and into the country. The title cards speak of one city girl in particular (Margaret Livingston), who still lingers in this small country town. City Girl seems to relish being the object of attention amongst the rural folk, and she seems to think that earns her a place above those around her. A quick scene at the inn where she's staying illustrates this through her interaction with the older couple running the house.

City Girl has to get going quickly, though. She wants to make her way out for a midnight rendezvous. She makes her way out to a small farm, where a man (George O' Brien) and his wife (Janet Gaynor) are about to settle down to dinner. City Girl signals the man from outside, and before the wife knows it, her husband sneaks out to meet his paramour. The wife sobs over her lament in the company of their young child.

At the rendezvous point, City Girl asks if the Husband is truly hers heart and soul. When he confesses that he is, she tries to engage him in a nefarious plot: kill the wife in a boating accident and then sell their farm to move to the city with City Girl. The suggestion tears the Husband in two emotionally, torn between his loyalty and his passion. He reluctantly agrees to carry out the plan, and returns home, haunted by the memory of City Girl and the consideration of what he plans to do.

The next day, Husband wakes to find his wife doing some of her chores. He approaches her and suggests they go out for the day. It's a chilling scene, knowing what Wife does not and seeing her reaction to what she interprets as a chance to reconnect with her true love. They set out on the lake, and before long Husband finds himself at the point where he has to make his choice. When stricken with remorse, he opts not to kill his wife when she is certain he is going to, the decision sets forth a series of events that lead the couple to rediscover their love.

There are several elements to the story that, while familiar, don't play as well in this particular setting to a contemporary audience. The Wife makes choices that would prompt just about anyone to scratch their heads and say, "Oh no, she didn't!?!" And there are certain things about the setting that just don't wear their age well. As Constance put it watching the film with me, O'Brien as the husband looks "like a retarded cow" with some of his exaggerated expressions. I can't really dispute that assessment.

But there is some genuine emotion on display, too, and for my money it overrides many of the film's flaws. Most of my praise has to go towards Gaynor's portrayal of the wife. She's a natural in front of the camera. Scenes with their young toddler have moments where the child is obviously not acting, but behaving as a toddler would. Gaynor incorporates everything smoothly into the scene, never breaking character and making every action a reflection of a mother's love for her child.

In the setup for the pivotal boat scene, Gaynor clearly looks torn as she sits in the boat. There's enough in her husband's behavior to give her serious pause, and she struggles with whether to follow those instincts or maintain her faith in her husband. She opts to keep the faith, and so when that faith puts her on the verge of being strangled and drowned, she pleads simply but not overdramatically for her life. It resonates with me for how subdued the scene plays out on her part.

Later when the action carries further into the city, as the couple rediscovers the things that drew them together in the first place, I felt like much of the affection and emotion the couple displays rings true. There's a tracking shot of the couple as they walk down the sidewalk, oblivious to everything around them. I've seen couples like that, am friends with more than few who still have that same feeling for one another. I can't help but smile when I see that from anyone. It's something that just makes my heart feel good.

When the film comes around full circle, there's a dramatic finish that has great tension. By the climax, it's easy to feel great sympathy for the wife, and appreciate just how far around her husband has come in his feelings. The guilt he feels at the end when made the Husband look almost haunted to me. It's an effective way to bring the story to a close, as much of what was on display at the beginning gets imbued with a different meaning at the end.

I think Wings sells the love story much more powerfully as silent films go, and Chaplin's works have more captivating action because of the charisma of The Tramp as a character. But it's a sold work to check out if you ever get an itch to see a silent film, worth renting for Gaynor alone. Tonight, as we sit on the verge of Daylight Savings Time starting, I'm glad in this case that Sunrise came early for me.