Alphabetical Movie – Highlander
I watched Highlander a lot last year in preparation to write “Highlander: The Musical.” The show was a part of the 2011 Minnesota Fringe Festival and did pretty well. We didn’t win any major awards but most of the people who watched it said they thought it was funny so – you know – go us.
Here’s the thing – and I know that I’m a bad geek when I say this – Highlander is not a very good movie.
Alphabetical Movie – High Noon
High Noon is known to be an allegory for the HUAC by Senator McCarthy. Gary Cooper searches a town for someone who will help him defeat a gang of men looking to kill him and finds that at the end of the day, he must face them on his own. It is a bleak film about a bleak time. Cooper looks old, tired and utterly alone.
Watching clips of the McCarthy hearings, the film looks like a pretty well constructed allegory.
Alphabetical Movie – High Fidelity
I don’t read a lot of fiction. When someone asks me if I’ve read “The Hunger Games,” I respond with some variation of “I really want to” and then comment that my son read it and loved it. In fact, I have several friends who are published writers and to date, I’ve read none of their books.
I’m a pathetic excuse for a friend. I know that.
I actually enjoy fiction but the problem is, I also enjoy sleep. When I start reading a good book, I want to finish it. Immediately. If that means I have to stay up until 3:00 A.M. to finish it, that is what I will do.
I have the same problem with seasons of “Dexter.”
If I’m going to read fiction, I need to be sure that the sleep deprivation is worth it.
It is notable, then, that when I watched High Fidelity the first time, I really wanted to read the book. I enjoyed the film a lot but I knew there had to be more to the story in the book and, to the film’s credit, I wanted to know the rest of the story.
Reading the book may have been a mistake because while I still like the film, the book is one of the funniest I’ve ever read.
“High Fidelity” is one of the few books I’ve read that made me genuinely laugh out loud. I read humor books all the time and they certainly make me smile. This book made me laugh. In the middle of the night. When my wife was trying to sleep.
When thinking about it, getting someone to laugh out loud while reading to themselves is extremely hard. Reading is a private experience so we are programmed to keep it private. We don’t shout out in triumph when a character wins an important victory and if someone writes a good joke, we typically don’t bust out laughing.
So even though I’ve only read the book once, I remember “High Fidelity” because it made me react in a way most books don’t. When I re-watched the movie, I was thinking “I really should re-read this book.”
I’ve been encouraging my wife to read the book because she didn’t like the movie. She believes (rightly) that the main character is a man-child who is, for a large part of the film, pretty unlikable. I agree with her but like the character’s journey from man-child to (sort of) man.
After I watched the movie this time, she said she should really give the movie another try because I enjoy it and maybe she would like it better if she watched it again. She may be right.
Still, given the book has left a more lasting impression on me than the film, I feel she’d have a better experience with the story if she reads the book first.
Books and movies are different mediums. I don’t believe one is inherently superior to another although I imagine I’d get a lot of argument on that point of view. I believe there are times when the source material is better than the film and times when the film manages to surpass the source material. Frequently, I will argue that they are both good, but in vastly different ways.
In the case of High Fidelity, I can say that I recommend the movie. If you really want a good laugh, though, read the book.
Alphabetical Movie – High and Low
Having just finished with Hidden Fortress, the alphabetical movie gods favored me with a second Kurosawa film. Rather than a samurai epic, High and Low was set in modern Japan so it served as a nice contrast to the period pieces most people associate with Kurosawa.
Most of his modern films were dripping with social commentary and High and Low is no exception. In fact, the more accurate translation of the film title would be “Heaven and Hell” and given the film looks at the sharp division between the wealthy and the poor in post war Japan, that title is actually more evocative of the film’s tone.
Alphabetical Movie – Hidden Fortress
Hidden Fortress came to my house in a Kurosawa Samurai 4 pack that also included The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo and Sanjuro. In geek circles, it is probably the most famous Kurosawa film simply because George Lucas has said that Star Wars was influenced by some aspects of Hidden Fortress.
Before I watched the movie for the first time, I told a friend I was looking forward to seeing it and she told me it wasn’t very good. She’d rented it specifically because of the Star Wars connection and had been disappointed. In fact, she had rented it on VHS and said you could see the points at which previous renters had given up on the film and hit rewind.
Alphabetical Movie – Hero
Yimou Zhang makes some of the most visually arresting films I’ve ever seen. I think that to completely appreciate Hero, I need to watch it once with the sound and subtitles turned off. That way I could completely immerse myself in the look of the film rather than being distracted by the plot.
The story of Hero is a good one but it only takes up around 45 of the film’s 90 minutes. The rest is devoted to fights that are as much about dance as they are about combat and sweeping visuals of remarkable composition. So central is the visual style of the film, I find I don’t have the words to write about it.
Alphabetical Movie – Hercules
A common gripe about Disney is that they mess with the original fairy tale to fit whatever story they want to tell. I imagine the reason people complain about this phenomena is because Disney is producing animated films and if the film is animated, it must be more faithful to the source material than a live action film based on a fairy tale.
Movies reinterpret stories all the time. Yet Disney seems to raise more ire than most other production houses.
Take Hercules as an example. The film has as much to do with Greek Mythology as – say – Percy Jackson and the Lighting Thief. Maybe more. Anyone wishing to learn about real Greek Mythology need not watch the film.
Alphabetical movie – Henry V
When Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V was first released, it was a more popular film than it is now. Especially amongst critics, the film is typically dismissed as inferior to Laurence Olivier’s classic version.
Shakespeare films are, I think, more subject to that sort of analysis than any other. The question is not “how good is this filmed version of ‘Hamlet'” but rather “how does this filmed version of ‘Hamlet’ stack up against every other filmed version of ‘Hamlet’ I know of?” If Shakespeare is indeed the greatest writer in the English language, he is also one of the most frequently produced.
Alphabetical movie – Hellboy & Hellboy II
As a geek, I admit I’ve been excited by the number of super hero movies that have been produced in the last decade. One can argue that the proliferation of computer generated effects is not always a good thing but films like The Dark Knight, Captain America and Hellboy would probably have been much harder to make without the aid of CGI.
Also as a geek, I recognize my tendency to like such films simply because they exist. Yeah, The Green Lantern is pretty awful. But it’s The Green Fucking Lantern man! I knew the movie was going to be awful and I went anyway because I wanted to believe everyone else was wrong.
Alphabetical movie – Heat
Heat is one of the movies I’m using as justification for the alphabetical movie project as it is a movie I own but until recently, I’d never actually watched it. I can’t even tell you why I own it. My wife doesn’t like the film. I’ve never seen it. I’m pretty sure I never actually bought the movie. I have no idea how it ended up in our collection.
There it is, though, nestled comfortably between Heartbreakers and Hellboy. The rules of the project are clear, I had to watch it.
Grail Diary 
