(and for those who think they’re too squeamish to see 127 Hours, this was 10 times more cringe-inducing)

127 Hours is based on the true story of Aron Ralston, the guy who amputated his own arm after being trapped by a boulder while hiking in Canyonlands National Park. I read his book (Between a Rock and a Hard Place) last year and was curious to see how it could possibly be made into a movie. Guy trapped by himself in an impossibly narrow canyon for 5 days followed by a gruesome self-surgery? Yikes. And yet they pulled it off. It was a great movie. And I am doubly impressed, because they further restricted themselves by not using any narration (but plenty of dialogue), and by including only the timeframe of the hike itself. The book had a lot of biographical build-up that was needed to establish the adventurous (and cocky, careless) nature of the protagonist. And to be fair, that stuff was justified because it was, after all, a memoir. But the movie accomplished all of that character development with just great acting, direction and writing, and with much better results. Not to knock the book, which was very well-written, but watching the movie on the big screen made me cry, and not just at the end.

Which begs the question, is this a movie most people would even enjoy? I wanted to see it because I read a review, and I read the review because I read the book, and I read the book because our friend Brian had seen Ralston speak at a charity event he attended despite reservations due to the subject manner. Brian raved about it. It’s an incredible story, an inspirational movie, and the arm is fake, you know.

That said, Ed and I both had related nightmares that night. But they weren’t about the amputation. They were about the rest of it.

Frey Thanksgiving on Vimeo.

Here are my mini-reviews of the films we saw:

The American Trap This is a conspiracy theory film about (surprise!) the JFK assassination. It was a different take on it though – it wasn’t told from investigative angle a la Oliver Stone’s ‘JFK’, but as it ‘happened’. It was also a theory I had never heard before. But if you see it, you have to pay attention. It’s complicated and you need to make sure you’re keeping the characters straight. It also didn’t help that we were in the very front row and had to crane our necks. We both liked it though, it was well done with nice suspense. Unfortunately, the screening we saw didn’t have any Q&A after.

Against the Current Ed thought this movie about a man who swims the length of the lower Hudson River was going to be a documentary, but it wasn’t. It was sad and funny, and the acting was good, particularly Justin Kirk. It also starred Joseph Fiennes, Elizabeth Reaser and Mary Tyler Moore. After the movie, writer/director Peter Callahan and Justin Kirk answered audience questions. Kirk is hilarious even without a script.

The 2 Bobs I was looking forward to this one because Tim McCanlies, the writer/director of it was the writer of ‘Iron Giant’ and writer/director of ‘Secondhand Lions’, and because it was a comedy about the videogame industry. It was pretty disappointing though, more stupid than funny. McCanlies was there to answer questions afterward, and seemed apologetic about the film (they didn’t have the budget they thought they’d have, it’s not completely done yet, he just wanted to try something different). Unless this one is reworked, you can skip it.

Animation Competion Because I’m a big fan of animation, we always go to the animated shorts showing. There were eight shorts this year, seven in the competion. The eighth was by Henry Selick, who was the director of ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ and ‘James and the Giant Peach’, and the writer/director/producer of ‘Coraline’. The short was pretty good, but really only included because Selick was in the audience, as he was attending the festival to receive an award. He and Georgina Hayns, who was in charge of puppet fabrication, answered question afterward, and they had one of the actual Coraline puppets with them. After the talk I ran into them in the lobby and asked Georgina what Coraline was made of and how her eyes were animated, and she showed me (part of her face comes off, move the eyes, shoot a frame, replace the face). That was really an unexpected treat. And Ed had a urinal conversation with Henry Selick, whom he had not even heard of before that night.

My absolute favorite animated short, by the way, won the competition. Here it is … ‘Chicken Cowboy’! This cracks me up everytime I watch it, especially the cat. The gunfight is great.  Watching it on Youtube won’t compare with seeing it on a big screen, but you can at least pop out and watch it fullscreen.

Leapin’ Lizards!

• Milk
• Slumdog Millionaire
• Frozen River
• Wall-E
• Iron Man
• Encounters at the End of the World
• Man on Wire
• Oktapodi
• Presto
• In Bruges

All were good, and we also have a list of movies we need to catch up on. Maybe now Ed will let me rent The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. (Also, the award ceremony itself seemed better than usual. Maybe I just haven’t watched for awhile? But I liked the way they had all those legendary actors and actress speak to the nominees for best actor and best actress. I need to find a sound file of Sofia Loren saying “Merrrrryl Strrreep”.)

It was a very good movie, but not a happy one in any way. A sad story, really well acted. After we got home I did a little googling about the subject matter (smuggling), and found this Time article from 1999. I would like to learn more about this, as it’s something I’ve wondered about with all the attention paid to the Mexico border.

I do recommend seeing the movie when it comes out on DVD, but not if you’re already depressed. And yes, it passes the Bechdel Rule.

First some immediate negatives to the service:

• - It’s Windows only. At first this really annoyed me, both because I would rather watch the movies on my laptop, which I can easily hook into the tv, and also because I think that new technology ideas miss the boat by skipping Macintosh, as Mac users are usually the ones who latch onto things like this and advertise them for free on their blogs. I’ve since found references to the fact that this is a technical issue with Apples’ proprietary DRM, and that Netflix is working on it, but when I first tried it on my laptop it suggested I try a different operating system (friendlier message now, I just checked).
• - It’s Internet Explorer only. I assume that this will change if they’re opening up to Macs, but for now, it’s really grating to have to use IE for this, when I haven’t used that browser for years. Again, they may be catering to a large user base who uses the browser their computer came with, but those aren’t the evangelists.
• - The plugin installation was meant to be seamless for Windows XP vanilla or (presumably) Vista, but I use XP 64-bit, and clicking on the install link gave me the runaround. I eventually tricked it into letting me install, and went to Microsoft’s site to upgrade Windows Media Player manually (something Netflix told me my OS wouldn’t support). Now, the average user probably wouldn’t have to deal with this, but still it was completely a problem with Netflix’ install process that would be easy to fix.

Anyway, I got it installed last week, and despite the annoyances, the service itself actually shows a lot of promise. I was worried about performance given that I don’t have the speediest internet connection (DSL grade). The quality will adjust depending on connection speed, but apparently I get the highest quality. There are never any skips, buffering, lags, dropouts, etc. I watch at fullscreen on my 21-inch widescreen monitor, and it looks great. More impressive to me (who watches a lot of streaming video of various forms) was the fact that I could pause the video, sometimes for DAYS in standby mode, and come back and it would pick right up where I stopped it.

From a practical standpoint, I wasn’t sure if I would use this much, especially if I am tied to my desktop. The selection is very small; think what you might see on HBO outside of primetime. A lot of old classics, a lot of documentaries, TV shows. Still, there are a lot of things I’ve missed, and a few things in my queue are available online, so unless they’re something Ed wants to see, I’ll watch them online. I have a futon in my office, a nice monitor, and am in the middle of an office-painting project, so it works out.

If Netflix works out the Mac thing (which I think they will), and the selection thing (which I think they will), I’ll call it a win. I don’t want to rent movies from Apple given their pricing model and expiration date policy, but this method works for me.

Erica and I did go see Ratatouille last night, though. I didn’t think it was quite as funny as The Incredibles, but it had a good story and really phenomenal animation and modeling. The restaurant/kitchen scenes were especially amazing. If you didn’t know any better, you would assume some of it was animation overlaid on a real-life background. The food actually made me hungry. I would actually see it again (or buy the DVD) just for that. I can’t imagine how realistic CG animation will be in just a few years.