“My unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism, or ageism, or lookism, or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: ‘Is this person in between me and what I want to do?’ If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you.”

Now get out there and discover something.

A full minute before the curtain lifts, John Carpenter’s already got you with that music … that 5/4 building octave wreaking havoc over credits. Halloween‘s opening salvo unfolds exactly like Spielberg’s Jaws – looping music over credits, cut to teenagers, slight flirtation, an invitation, followed by the insinuation of some unknown evil, creeping, slowly, eerily, unseen … driven on by pairing beats, the camera zooming in upon some naked woman’s body … building, building, ever-closer, straight on up until the bloodbath hits.

There are a host of other similarities, sure, but the majority of them tend to lean toward the age-old art of storytelling – a small town, familiar characters, some lonesome hero railing mad against bureaucracy. We’ve seen this entertainment through and through. But we’ve rarely seen it done with such panache as Halloween, a point which goes to show that less is more in terms of Horror. Less killing, fewer blood packs, stronger story.

Consider what John Carpenter was working with – a $300,000 budget that only allowed for three weeks worth of shooting, one willing B-list movie star, and the casting of some virtual unknown to play the female lead. The arch-villain would be portrayed by an old college buddy at a cost of $25 per day.

That’s a grad school film project, not a major motion picture. Continue reading →

“There was this boy. And he was a tiny boy – a very, very little boy. He was so small that his mom had to buy him a wooly hat that he would one day grow into. And it sits on top of his head stiff and upright and entirely empty of head. And it’s a cold day – a very cold day – so he’s got his coat on, he’s got his wooly hat on, and he’s got his mittens on. With his left mitten, quite tightly, he’s holding onto his mom. And with his right mitten, even more tightly, he’s holding onto a balloon. And he’s holding the balloon in that way that only children really hold balloons, in that way that says, ‘I’ve got it. I’ve got the balloon. I’ve been stung by balloons in the past, you know. They’ve blown away, they’ve floated up into the sky. They’ve even been known to burst on occasion. Not this one, though. This one’s different. This one’s a keeper. I’m gonna take this one home and I’m gonna put it in my bedroom. And then I’m gonna watch it slowly die.’ That whole story could be seen as a metaphor for life, where the boy represents all people and the balloon
represents any sort of happiness or love.”

1. The silence feels so welcoming
2. Brilliant camerawork
3. Early dialogue plays like it was written for a video game
4. First 15 minutes, one continuous take
5. First 15 minutes, all tell
6. Amazing how they accomplish this without inducing motion-sickness
7. Bullock: “Well, you know what.” (non sequitur)
8. Only one major cut during initial 25 minutes
9. Clooney = soothing
10. The sense of security that comes along with being attached to somebody
11. “Swingin’ On a Star“
12. Lake Zurich = What a wonderful place to raise a family
13. Set adrift inside the womb
14. Major Tom/”Space Oddity”
15. What motivates someone to make a critically-acclaimed space movie?
16. Holy Toledo!
17. Please don’t let this movie have a happy ending
18. Inscrutable attention to detail
19. “Nothing can hurt you up here.”
20. Final 15 minutes, all show
21. “Rocketman”
22. How’d-he-do-dat?
23. Quite a feat
24. Circle of Life
25. That final sequence was astonishing
26. 2001
27. Totally forgot about my M&Ms

(Gravity arrives in theaters nationwide today.) 

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The experienced climber is well above 8,000 meters when the initial wave of atrophy occurs. The early symptoms are quite subtle – narrow breathing, cramping limbs, perhaps the sudden, stilted loss of equilibrium. One is well within the summit push come this point, trapped inside what seasoned vets might call the Death Zone. Pressing onward causes lungs to swell, the air now thin and weakened to a point where one is breathing through fixed tubes. Meanwhile, the frost is seeping in through numb extremities and stiff toes have given way to midnight blue. Looking up, the line of sight becomes obstructed, blurred by frozen goggles and snow-blindness. And yet, one presses on, beyond the serac and the snowdrifts, beyond the avalanche and ice, beyond the setbacks and the casualties, beyond it all until one stands upon the summit.

And that, my friends, is when the real mortal danger almost immediately sets in.        

For it is upon the steep descent that 75% of all fatalities occur. It is upon the steep descent that one in four climbers go dying. And it was upon the steep descent that the lion’s share of 11 professional mountaineers met their death during a weekend climb during the summer of 2008. Twenty-two climbers started up. Only 11 came back down.

The Summit provides a fairly breathtaking – if not slightly disjointed – job of chronicling the events that led up to and through that landmark expedition. I suggest that you go see it in a darkened theater, with no distractions and no cell phones. Otherwise, you won’t actually be seeing it at all.

(The Summit opens this Friday at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema and Lincoln Plaza in New York City.)

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The bigger the war, the more incomprehensible its depths. That dynamic may very well explain why the majority of war-epic directors tend to zero in on a specific regimen or event, using it as a microcosm for the more deplorable whole. When it comes to the all-time greats, crucial plot points tend to say as much about the blinding fog of war as they do about the directors themselves. What’s more, the same way it takes a certain je ne sais quoi to direct a gripping war epic, it also takes a certain caliber of actor to appear in one. To wit: Sean Penn and John C. Reilly appear in two separate movies on this list (both times as an army Sergeant and low-level infantry soldier, respectively), while Martin Sheen shot footage for two, despite only appearing in one.

The similarities don’t end there. Two of the films on this list were released in 1998 (both of them about World War II), another two were released during the mid-to-late 1980s (both of them about Vietnam), and two of the most critically-acclaimed were released in 1957.

Almost all of the films included on this list met with some level of controversy.

Finally, a word about selection. The phrase I kept coming back to throughout was “sweeping war epic.” I actually eliminated Black Hawk Down – among others – because it failed to qualify as a “sweeping” motion picture (Not to mention Ridley Scott was more than 20 years past his prime and Black Hawk‘s casting seemed unconscionable). I also did my best to avoid any overt form of satire, which meant disqualifying both Dr. Strangelove and M*A*S*H.

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds happened to be the only film I struggled with (before ultimately deciding to disqualify it). Basterds met just about every major requisite, save for the fact there really weren’t any traditional battle sequences. While Basterds does not appear on this list, I’d be remiss if I failed to point out it’s a much more effective motion picture than at least 2-3 others that did make the cut.

In the end I prioritized ensemble over character (no Patton); valor – or lack thereof – over dealing with past consequence (no A Few Good Men). And what it all whittled down to were these eight iconic war epics, helmed by their eight all-time directors:

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“When we passed the Affordable Care Act, there were a number of components to it. A big part of it was essentially providing a Patients’ Bill of Rights that Americans and advocates have been fighting for for decades. What we wanted to do was make sure that if you already had health insurance, that you’d get a fair deal, that you were being treated well by your insurers. So we eliminated – prohibited – insurance companies from imposing lifetime limits, which oftentimes if a family member really got sick, they thought they were covered until suddenly they hit that limit, at which point they were out hundreds of thousands of dollars with no way of paying.

We said to insurance companies, ‘You’ve got to use at least 80% of your premiums that you’re receiving on actual healthcare – not on administrative costs and CEO bonuses. And if you don’t, you’ve got to rebate anything you spent back to the consumer.’ So there are millions of Americans who have received rebates. They may not know that they got it because of the Affordable Care Act or ‘Obamacare’, but they were pretty happy to get those rebates back because it made sure that the insurance companies were
treating folks fairly.

We said that any young person who doesn’t have health insurance can stay on their parents’ health insurance until they’re 26 years old. As a consequence what we’ve seen is the rate of uninsured for young people steadily dropping over the last three years since the bill’s been passed, obviously providing a lot of relief to a lot of parents out there because a lot of young people, as they’ve been entering into the job market at a time when jobs are tough to get and oftentimes benefits are slim, this is providing an enormous security until they get more firmly established in the labor market.

We’ve provided additional discounts for prescription drugs for seniors under the Medical Care Program. And so seniors have saved billions of dollars when it comes to their prescription drugs. So there have been – over the last three years – a whole array of consumer protections and savings for consumers that result directly from the law that we passed. And for those who say that they want to repeal [The Affordable Care Act], typically when you ask them about all these various benefits they say, ‘Well, that one’s good, and that one’s pretty good, and we’d keep that,’ and you pretty much go down the list and there’s not too much people object to. 

You will recall – at the time – that part of the way we paid for the Healthcare Bill was that we said, ‘Medicare’s wasting a lot of money without making seniors healthier.’ And there was a lot of hue and cry about how we were taking money out of Medicare. Well, it turns out we were right, that we could change how doctors and hospitals and providers were operating, rewarding them for outcomes as opposed to just how many procedures they did. You started seeing practices change among millions of providers across the country, Medicare rates have actually slowed in terms of inflation, seniors have saved money, folks are healthier. And some of those savings we’ve been able to use to make sure the people who don’t have health insurance can get health insurance.

Now, this brings me to October 1st.

The one part of the Affordable Care Act that required several years to set up was, ‘How do we provide health insurance for individuals who don’t get health insurance through the job?’ It’s a historical accident that in this country healthcare is attached to employers. And part of the problem is if you’re out there shopping for health insurance on your own – you’re not part of a major pool – there’s no aggregation to risk for the insurers. So they’re basically going to say, ‘Let’s see. You’re 50 years old, you’ve got high blood pressure, and we’ll just look at the actuary tables and we figure you’re going to get sick, so we’re going to charge you $1,500 a month for health insurance,’ which the average person has no way of affording. There’s no pooling of risk. So what we said is, ‘We need to set up a mechanism to pool people who currently don’t have health insurance, so they have the same purchasing power, the same leverage that a big company does when they’re negotiating with the insurance company.’ And essentially what we’ve done is we’ve created what we’re calling marketplaces in every state across the country where consumers are now able to be part of a big pool. Insurers have to bid – essentially compete – for the business of that pool. And what we now have set up are these marketplaces that provide high-quality healthcare at affordable prices, giving people choices so they can get the health insurance that they need and they want, and the premiums are significantly lower than what they were able to previously get.” 

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