Everything Must Go, and Blue Valentine

These movies are depressing as SHIT.

Contagion

This movie was pretty much what I expected: a "good" but not very emotionally compelling depiction of what a pandemic might look like if a bunch of movie stars were involved. I was a little ahead of the game, from having played the board game Pandemic -- and I got a little distracted trying to figure out whether Laurence Fishburne was supposed to be the Operations Manager or the Dispatcher, or why they didn't just set up a research station in Macau from "Day 1". I guess these are the burdens of being an expert!

The Big Nowhere, by James Ellroy

This is without question the darkest book I've ever read. Although it was my first Ellroy novel, I pretty much knew what to expect from "L.A. Confidential" (the movie) and "The Black Dahlia" (the horrible movie) -- two or three cops with nearly polar opposite personalities, thrown together by happenstance or machination, explore the criminal underbelly of mid-century Los Angeles in a dangerous attempt to unravel a potentially explosive conspiracy. What I did not expect was skullfucking.

Ellroy does a fantastic job of personalizing the characters' investigations in a believable way, and there's a lot of great stuff about the extent and nature of Communist influence in Hollywood and the politicians' less than patriotic motives for uncovering it. Howard Hughes is a minor character. Howard Hughes's pimp is a major character. There is a dog called Rape-o.

I think James Ellroy would be good at writing phools' names.

Stripes (1981)

A comedy starring Bill Murray and Harold Ramis with no jokes.

In Pharaoh's Army by Tobias Wolff

This knocked Michael Herr's "Dispatches" out of top place for best book I ever read about Vietnam. The writing had such a quality of honesty that it shined an embarrassing light on most other memoirs, and made me realize how much other memoirists are bogged down with carefully calibrating their self-presentation. Wolff seems to have blown past that to some higher Zen level. Sometimes he seems heroic, sometimes he is selfish, sometimes he is kind, or cruel, or just plain dumb, but in very human ways. He seems to never exaggerate his incompetence for comedy or his dark experiences for tragedy, it all seems presented cleanly and evenly. As if he already thought through everything you could think of him and moved on.

This book is in the form of short chapters, short stories really, which makes for easy reading. I did sometimes think the chapters were completed with a short story-style tidiness, like well-made dumplings. As if he'd been thinking about them so long the reality of the experience became too polished? But he knows better than me what it's like to remember these things.

At one point Wolff befriends a Harvard guy. That was a really interesting chapter.

Fire In Babylon

This documentary is about the West Indes cricket team in the 1970s. You might think, "Wow, what a great example of a thing I don't care about!" BUT: this movie is terrific. Great characters, great drama, twists and turns, great villains, great music, a great part where one of the Wailers shoos away a dog, great footage of Jamaica and Barbados in the '70s.

The Thin Blue Line

This was a deep one on my queue, but with the help of FF BFD I polished it off last night. Very compelling. Both the form of the movie and content of the story kept me engaged. It was so artfully constructed it made me think most other people making documentaries are a whole class below Errol Morris.