Over the weekend, I had the frustrating experience of seeing two movies based on books I’ve loved for years, both of which completely failed to capture what I find so appealing about those books. The first of these was Sahara, which, as the opening titles kindly point out to anyone who didn’t know, is “A Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt Adventure.”

If that means nothing to you, I’ll explain: Dirk Pitt is a character created by an author named Clive Cussler in a series of best-selling novels that read like a combination of Indiana Jones and James Bond, with a smidgeon of Jacques Cousteau thrown in for flavor. These novels don’t begin to qualify as good literature, but they are good reads — they’re fun, exciting page-turners that are perfect for lazy summer afternoons and long airplane rides. I first discovered them when I was in my early teens, and I’ve loved them ever since. I’m not at all ashamed to admit that Dirk Pitt was a hero of mine as I was growing up, and, like a lot of people who have favorite literary characters, I have a very definite image in my head of who and what he is.

That’s why I decided weeks ago that I wasn’t going to bother seeing Sahara. As I explained in an earlier entry, I had grave misgivings about the casting of the terminally bland Matthew McConaughey as Dirk, and I figured it would be best to spare myself (and my unfortunate friends and readers) the aggravation of seeing one of my heroes brought to life badly.
Fate, however, had other plans, and when my foursome couldn’t get into The Interpreter on Saturday night, I was outvoted on which film got to be our second choice. Anne braced herself for my inevitible post-movie tirade, while our friends Jack and Natalie both tried to convince me I should lay aside my preconceptions. None of them will believe this, but I honestly did try to judge the movie on its own merits and not compare it to the books I’ve known since puberty.

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It’s been a while since I posted a film review here on the ol’ Web site. I got out of the habit when politics consumed me last fall, and I haven’t seen anything in the months since that was especially blog-worthy. Oh, I’ve seen some good films, but nothing that really stood out from the crowd, that worked me up, made me think, or inspired me to write. Nothing, that is, until Sin City…

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Just in case you’re assembling a dossier on Anne and myself, we are in the habit of going to movies on Sunday afternoons. Our reasons for going then are pretty obvious, when you think about them: Sunday is the most unscheduled part of our average week, the theaters are rarely crowded on that day (we do live in church-going Utah, after all), and the matinee prices are easy on the checkbook. Generally, we like to make a nice, relaxing day of it by going out for brunch, possibly doing a bit of shopping, then catching a show in the 2-3 o’clock range. By Sunday evening we’re headed for home and I usually have a pretty good idea of what I’m going to say on this blog about whatever we saw (even if I don’t actually get around to saying it for several weeks, as in the cases of Collateral and Sky Captain).

Sunday afternoon this week followed our usual pattern: breakfast at Denny’s, a quick run through Costco for bulk groceries and the latest DVDs, and then a movie. But this week the process stalled out at this stage. The words for the blog failed to come that evening and even now, 48 hours later, I’m still not sure what to say about a weird little film called Napoleon Dynamite.

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The recent Tom Cruise/Jamie Foxx vehicle Collateral looks and feels very much like an episode of the old Miami Vice TV series. That’s not surprising, considering the film was directed by Michael Mann, who executive produced Vice and is widely credited for giving that series its striking visual style. It’s also not a flaw, in my estimation, because Vice is one of my all-time favorite TV shows (I’m eagerly awaiting the DVD release of the first season in January). In many ways, the show was a conventional “buddy-cop” police procedural, but the scripts often displayed a lot more meat than I think most people remember today, and certainly more than was common to most ’80s cop shows. There was also an appealing undercurrent of weirdness in Vice, a sense that this seemingly mundane story of cops vs. drug dealers could spin off into The Twilight Zone at any moment, and I believe that the times when this current was allowed to surface directly influenced the most popular crime shows currently running on TV, the assorted C.S.I. properties, which traffic in weirdness all the time.

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Although I grew up during the 1970s and ’80s, it sometimes seems as if I spent more time in the ’30s and ’40s. No, I didn’t have a time machine in my closet, nor am I the sort that claims to have recovered memories of past life experiences (although I do have an unusually healthy sense of deja vu sometimes…) What I mean is that during my childhood, through some quirk of timing and the cyclical nature of popular culture, I was often immersed in stories and forms of media that had first entertained my grandparents.

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[Ed. note: I’ve been pretty lax about the movie reviews lately, so I’m going to try and make up for lost time over the next few entries. FYI, I’ll be talking about films I’ve seen over the course of the last month. I mention this only because I don’t want you to think I’ve spent the last three days sitting in a darkened theater. Not that that’s a bad way to spend one’s time, of course…]

I must be honest before beginning this review: prior to Shaun of the Dead, I’d only seen one other zombie movie in my whole life, namely the seminal Night of the Living Dead. I suppose you could count Sam Raimi’s delirious Evil Dead trilogy, which has certain similarities to “traditional” zombie flicks, but if you’re rigidly defining the genre as “armies of shuffling corpses moaning for ‘braaaaaaaiiiiiiinnnnnnsssssssss’ and getting shot in the head,” well, then, there’s only ever been the one. Nevertheless, I feel quite secure in proclaiming Shaun to be, as The Simpsons‘ Comic Book Guy would say, the best zombie movie… EVER! Certainly it’s the funniest film I’ve seen in a good long time. And, in an odd way, it’s the most touching, too.

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As I mentioned in my review of Spider-Man 2, I like comic books. I’ve been reading them fairly consistently throughout my life, with the exception of a few years in my mid- to late teens when I thought I was too grown-up for such things. (Ironic, since the teen years seem to be the time of life when most comic fans are most heavily involved in the scene, but then I’ve always tended to be out of synch with whatever my peers are doing.)

My interest in the medium was rekindled while I was a student at the University of Utah. It happened almost by chance: I was passing through the Student Union one afternoon when I spotted another student setting up a table in the large open area between the video arcade and the food court. People were always selling items there of one sort or another, and sometimes those wares were actually kind of interesting, so I stopped to see what the guy had to offer. It turned out that he was a comics fan who’d decided to liquidate part of his collection. I wasn’t too interested — I figured comics were something I’d put behind me long ago — but one title caught my eye before I could walk away: Aliens vs. Predator.

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One of the more lamentable cinematic fads of the last few years has been the use of the “Shaky-Cam,” that unstabilized, handheld camera perspective that looks like what you could expect if you turned over your Super8 to a caffeine-buzzed four-year-old. When used sparingly, this technique can provide a sense of immediacy, a “you-are-there” feeling. The problem is that many modern (and presumably younger) filmmakers are too enamored of the device. Basically, they use it too much, even in situations when it simply isn’t necessary, no doubt because they think that having the picture jerk and weave like a punch-drunk boxer will give their project that all-important “edge” that appeals to the skateboard-and-Xbox crowd. Combine the shaky-cam with the curious reluctance of modern directors to shoot anything from a distance — I have a theory that everything is shot these days with the eventual DVD release in mind, so directors don’t want their actors to look too small on a television screen — as well as the hyperkinetic, post-MTV editing style that requires a jump-cut every two seconds, and you end up with quite a mess. You end up, in fact, with The Bourne Supremacy.

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As I demonstrated recently, my knowledge of so-called higher culture is pretty shaky. I’m especially ignorant when it comes to music, at least of the pre-rock ‘n’ roll variety. To me, “The Great American Songbook” and “Tin Pan Alley” are vaguely understood terms at best, and up until a couple of weeks ago the only Cole Porter tune I could name was “Anything Goes,” and that’s only because I’ve seen the opening credits of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom so many times.
But then I saw De-Lovely, an unconventional biographical picture about Porter, and I realized that I do, in fact, know quite a few of the popular songs from the first half of the 20th Century. I’ve heard them for years in movies both new and old, and I think it’s fair to say that they are woven into the fabric of our cultural consciousness; in other words, everybody knows these songs, even if their origins are cloudy these days. (I’m personally quite fond of “Begin the Beguine,” which I knew from the film The Rocketeer, and from a CD collection of Big Band music I picked up a few years ago, but I never realized it had been written by Porter.) De-Lovely is filled with Porter’s music, performed by modern-day singers such as Sheryl Crow, Elvis Costello, Alanis Morisette, and others whose faces I recognize but whose names I escape me. The film actually is a sort of musical, although the songs are used more to punctuate a given scene’s emotional impact than to drive the action or reveal information, as they do in a more traditional musical. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

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