Three-movie weekend!

 Last weekend, with time on our hands, it was movie time!  The weather was terrible, my wife had COVID, I had to quarantine with her due to contact (but I never did test positive), so I got to watch THREE movies in one weekend!

First up, my Oscar requirement - this time, Moonlight, the eventual Best Picture winner after the embarrassing La La Land announcement.   While the storyline didn't go the way I expected (I thought it was more about Maherasha Ali's character), it was a great look into the life of a man who wound up in a place he didn't want, and the (sometimes unexpected, sometimes predictable) forces that led him there.  Really well done (duh, it won Best Picture), I thought it was more relatable than a lot of the other BP winners in the past.

After that, I switched to the current year.  Lately, I've tried to watch at least half of the Best Picture nominees before the actual Oscar ceremony, so I can have a reason to root for / against some of the films.  I'd already seen Power of the Dog, Dune (Part 1 - let's wait for Part 2), and Don't Look Up (shouldn't be a contender).  So this week, we watched Belfast, a (mostly) black and white film about the experiences of a young boy too innocent to understand the forces at work around him.  This was another great film, worthy of the nomination, and probably a top 3 contender in the end.   I have a couple of weeks before the actual nominations come out, so we'll see if I can get half of them done before the awards.

Finally, a movie with an actress I really like - Carey Mulligan, in a film that was a little less deep than the other two this weekend.    My wife didn't expect me to like this show, Promising Young Woman, due to the subject matter, but I thought it was story well told.  Sad, to be sure, on just so many levels, but a well thought through concept.  A few twists kept the story moving, and helped to convey the reasons for the main character's actions, at least to a point.  For a simple movie goer like me, it didn't have that same type of 'missing minute' that I mentioned in Taxi Driver.  That's not to say that you didn't have to think about the character's motivations - it wasn't all put out there for you, but you could follow the thought process of the characters more clearly.  

This week - no movies for me....a bit too much work and football.  Next week, I'll be babying my wife while she recovers, but if she's out of it, it's two war movies for me.  Patton and Platoon are both on my list (how have I not seen some of these films?), albeit from two very different wars.

Books and Movies - a few throwbacks

 Two weeks ago, I got to watch two classic movies.  

After years of hearing about it, I finally watched Taxi Driver, Yes, I'm probably one of the few people my age who had never seen it, but it's just so often referenced in pop culture, I felt the need (even though it wasn't an Oscar winner, which is my current quest).  In short, it was a good movie in the context of what New York was like at the time, but there were elements I just didn't fully get.  Travis Bickle's descent into what he became wasn't as cohesive as I would have preferred....it felt like I missed a key 1-2 minutes of the movie that would have explained more of that.  The ending was certainly ambiguous in many ways, and in a good way - it does leave it to the viewer to sort out reality and the implications for the future.  Certainly not a pure "American" ending, where everything works out for everybody.

Less ambiguous of an ending came in my other film for the weekend, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.  I selected this one due to the recent loss of Sidney Poitier (whose best film was, of course, with Robert Redford - the classic Sneakers 😀 ). I really enjoyed this one, even though the premise of the film was intentionally uncomfortable.  I viewed it as a comedy, surrounding the various reactions of the characters in the film, but Poitier's steady performance really was striking....an island of calm in waters with turbulence just below the surface.  His portrayal of understanding of 'his place' only reinforced what I took to be the message of the movie - that we are all dealing with race relations, and it takes calm, rational thought to overcome the inherent biases we have against 'the other'.  It's a message that frankly still resonates in many ways in today's America.  

Finally, on my book pursuit to read everything by Philip K Dick.  This week, The Cosmic Puppets, a dramatic departure from the last two books I read.  While those read like precursors for Sci-Fi classic movies, this one was a Twilight Zone episode.  The initial premise is that a man returns to his hometown after 18 years to find everything different.  That's not surprising, as it has happened to many people after a long absence.  This is more than just years of progress though - all of the streets have been renamed, different buildings stand where old ones used to be, and no one remembers the same history that he does.  Soon, paranormal activities start happening, leading to a battle clearly between good and evil, though as readers, we're not sure which is which.  There's also an underlying theme about the value of remembering the places from which you came, which is an echo from some of his earlier work as well, and will probably arise in other novels.

Books and Movies: Watching all of the Oscars, Reading all of PKD.

For the last few weeks, I've been working on a couple of entertainment projects.  First, I'm trying to watch every Best Picture winner that I haven't seen already.   For some people, that might take a weekend, but for me, I started out with over 50 movies on that list, and I'm down to 47 as I start this year.  I have a long way to go.  

Added to that, I'm also watching some classics that didn't make the Oscar Best Picture, so this is going to take me a while.  It doesn't help that my wife is only interested in about 4 of the Oscar films (she's much more caught up on the recent ones, and has no interest in the old ones), so I'm working on the other classics with her.  Of course, she often tells me that the book was better.

This weekend, we watched Bullitt, with Steve McQueen.  This comes after we recently watched the French Connection and Six Days of the Condor, which helped us appreciate the films that were made when we were very young - all of them have held up, although Bullitt seemed a bit dated, and it was easy to tell that it was a prototype for many movies yet to come.  

Why am I doing this?  I don't know - it seemed like something to do when the pandemic started, and I just didn't spend a lot of time on it in 2020 (or the first half of 2021, for that matter).  But I am highly confident that I would not have watched movies like Marty, The Apartment, or the Treasure of the Sierra Madre without deliberately doing so.  I think my challenge will be to find some of the very old Oscar winners, but I'm hopeful that Netflix and Amazon will come in handy.

The other project I'm on is to read all of the novels of Philip K Dick, a prolific author who wrote the stories behind many, many popular science fiction movies.  These include Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, The Man in the High Castle, and others.  I'm intrigued by his writing, and his imagination, and I want to explore the other worlds he's created.

I started with a non-science-fiction novel called Voices from the Street, about a young man in 1950's San  Francisco seeking his place in the world, disappointed with what his life has become (at 25!) and a descent into a form of madness that followed.  Long and drawn out, it probably could have been 100 pages shorter, but it had a good sense of foreboding throughout the novel, and was an interesting exploration into the psyche of someone who feels like there should be more in his life, but not sure why he feels that way.

I moved from there to a few of his early sci-fi stories, including Solar Lottery, which has a number of elements that fed into his "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" (the source for Blade Runner), and Vulcan's Hammer, which was an early take on despotism.  Even in the short years between these novels, I can see the evolution of his writing and his storytelling.  I'm looking forward to this journey, assuming it doesn't fall into the story told multiple times.