Last night, Steve and I rented The Da Vinci Code with our cable system’s On Demand feature. I have to say, I liked the movie better than the book. For one thing, Brown’s weak character development was not as obvious in the movie as in the book. I think, for the most part, the actors did a fairly good job with what they had to work with. Clearly, the standout was Sir Ian McKellen as Leigh Teabing. I mused aloud to my husband upon the question of why Brown would choose to take the one interesting character he wrote, the one character with whom we can sympathize, and turn him evil like that.

Steve said that had he seen the movie without reading the book, he might have perceived the movie as a bit “talky.” I don’t know if I agree, but I did feel that the movie was extremely close to the book. The only real changes I noticed were that it was not obvious Silas had broken out of jail, Sophie’s brother was omitted (as a survivor of the accident, that is), and it wasn’t explained that Rémy died of an allergic reaction to peanuts rather than a simple poison.

I’m glad I didn’t see the movie in the theater, but it was worth the $3.99 we paid to rent it. I really enjoyed seeing all the sets — the Louvre, the streets of Paris, London, and Rosslyn Chapel, although I am not sure that was really Rosslyn. It’s kind of a shame, however, when one is more attracted to the sets than the characters. I don’t think this is something that the actors could have helped. As I mentioned before, they didn’t have much to work with.

Technorati Tags: The Da Vinci Code

Flipping channels this afternoon, we discovered that 2001: A Space Odyssey was playing on Turner Classic Movies. One of the things that occurred to me when we watched the film was how difficult it really is to determine what the future will be like. The future depicted in the movie was accurate about the following innovations, all available in 2001 (via Wikipedia):

• Flat-screen computer monitors
• Small, portable flat-screen televisions (we actually watched the film on a small flat-screen, although it’s not portable)
• Television screens with wide aspect ratio
• Glass cockpits in spacecraft
• The proliferation of television stations
• Telephone numbers (in the 1960′s, phone numbers had fewer digits; the film depicts 2001 phone numbers as having more digits)
• Corporations such as IBM, Hilton, and Aeroflot still in existence (this one would be particularly tough to predict, I think)
• Credit cards with data stripes
• Biometric identification (I even had to use handprint ID to get in the dining hall at UGA when I was a student there)
• The shape of the Orion III Pan Am Orbital Clipper was echoed in X-34, a prototype craft (though that may have been an intentional nod to the movie)

Other aspects of life in 2001 proved harder to predict. By 2001, we really didn’t have the following:

• Proliferation of good-quality, high-resolution videophones
• Commonplace space travel (do you ever wonder if the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger was responsible for that, to some degree?)
• Moon colonies
• Manned missions to Jupiter aren’t feasible (one could argue a mission to Mars is feasible, but not likely to happen for some time)
• Orbiting hotels (à la The Jetsons?)
• Routine commercial space flight
• Technology to put humans in long-term suspended animation
• Sentient computers that exhibit self-motivation and indepedent judgment
• Computers with error-free performance records
• Pam Am Airlines (in any form), the Bell System, and Howard Johnson’s (as of January, there are only three HoJo’s left) restaurants are no longer with us
• The Soviet Union

In my opinion, however, the film is still ground-breaking. Not many filmmakers today have the nerve to do some of the things Stanley Kubrick did — the open ending, the use of quiet and sound (who can forget the segments when the only sound is Dave’s breathing).

My dad had the soundtrack to 2001 on vinyl. When I was a teenager, I put in on the stereo and listened. I remember tears streaming down my face as I listened to the Gayane Adagio from Khatchaturian. At the time, I thought it was the saddest music I had ever heard, and I believe it still is.

The scene in which Dave has to shut down HAL is one of the most moving scenes in science fiction cinema. I can’t find a video of the whole scene, but here is the end:

I wish it had the part when HAL tells Dave he is afraid. It’s chilling.

What do you think this movie means?

Technorati Tags: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2001, HAL 9000, YouTube

I have only seen Love Actually a few times, but each time, it stays with me for days. I simply love this movie, and when I haven’t seen it for a while, I forget how much. Every time I see it, it makes me want to move to England. Now.

What does that mean, that it stays with me for days? I keep replaying my favorite parts in my head. And I don’t want to do anything except to watch it again. Here’s a trailer for you.

I am probably the last person on earth to see this movie, and I hesitated to write about it here, because it’s so last year or something, but who cares. It’s my blog, and you don’t have to read about how much I loved a movie that came out last year.

One of the things people say over and over about Brokeback Mountain is that it stays with you. I felt that after initially reading the short story. It was so powerful, so spare, and so moving. I don’t often tell my husband he has to read something, because our reading tastes (most of the time) aren’t all that similar. It isn’t that he doesn’t like literature. I think he just sees reading true crime as research, and I think that’s the direction he sees himself going, writer-wise. One thing I read that Larry McMurtry said after reading Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain,” was that he wished he’d written it. That was how I felt after I read it. I can’t explain why, because it’s not like anything I write. It reminded me, actually, of Cormac McCarthy. The characters were so well drawn with so few words. They were so real. And their story was so moving. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I read it, and after seeing the movie, well, I can’t say I’m speechless, because here I am blathering, but it was probably one of the most amazing movies I’ve ever seen in my life.

One of the things that pierced me to the core was the sky. The sky only looks like that in the West. The movie was filmed in Canada, but I was forcibly reminded of the landscape and sky in Colorado, where I grew up. You kind of forget that sky, I guess, but then when you see it again, like I did in this movie, it seizes you; it all comes flooding back. My family has lived in the West, mostly in Texas, since the late 1800′s. I kept thinking of the trips we’d make to see my great-grandparents, who lived in a very small town in Texas. It looked so much like the small towns in this movie. The house that Jack’s parents lived in was so much like my great-grandparents’ house. They paid $500 for it when they first married and lived there until they died in the 1980′s. Everything about the setting in this movie was totally authentic. It made me so homesick.

I think it’s a shame that Heath Ledger had to make this movie the same year that Philip Seymour Hoffman made Capote. I have not seen Capote yet, but Steve loved it and said Hoffman was totally deserving of the Oscar he won for best actor. If it had not been for Hoffman, I feel sure nothing would have stood in Ledger’s way of winning the Oscar. He was incredible. I am related to guys like Ennis, and Ledger perfectly captured that set of the jaw and the way they swallow their words. There is a beauty in their simplicity. It took me a long time to appreciate that.

One of the things I admired about the story, and then the movie, was the way that it dealt with Ennis and Jack’s relationship as one of passion and love — one that couldn’t be fulfilled because of society and Ennis’s fears. I can’t figure out how to explain this, but you don’t dwell on the fact that they are two men in love so much as that they are two people in love, and they can’t be together. It’s heartbreaking. On the one hand, it’s rather obvious that it’s two men, but somehow that isn’t where you focus. It is so subtle, and I just can’t figure out how to explain it. On the one hand, I hate to even say that, because it insinuates that there’s a problem with having a love story about two men. Let’s face it — in our modern American society, there still is, isn’t there?

Obviously you’d probably have to be living under a rock not to have heard some of the more famous lines, and having read the story, I knew how it would end. I was still sobbing at the end. It was so moving — the tiny little shrine Ennis created in his closet. I started crying when Ennis and Jack parted for the last time, and I didn’t stop until the film was over. If anything, I just sobbed harder.

The movie was incredibly faithful to Annie Proulx’s story. The women characters were fleshed out a bit. Some of the relationships were expanded a bit. I don’t remember the Thanksgiving scene at Jack’s being in the story. The Thanksgiving scene at Alma’s was rendered exactly as it was written in the story.

In all, the movie was pitched perfectly. The actors, screenwriters, and director are to be commended on their performances.

Have you read my squee over the new Harry Potter flick yet?

I have also been having a bit of a squee over Makani’s fan art. This one is Maggie’s favorite:

She keeps asking me if she can look at the picture of Squidward dressed up like “Professor Snake.”