Dinner party in Kate's high raftered loft, around a wooden table from her family's farm. Two painters, a woodworker, a sculptor, beef borscht, fresh biscuits and a shitload of wine. We got talking about Netflix, and how we've all found ourselves lately watching just 20 minutes of a movie and then moving on, or stopping and never coming back...on the negative side, it's part of the distractability (auto-correct says that's not a word, but I say language evolves) of the Internet...skipping around, never fully immersing...

On the positive side, the whole Netflix thing has shifted the experience of watching movies toward my experience of reading books...I read for awhile, set the book aside, then come back to it when I'm in the mood again...or just dip in once to get a taste of something. Why not do that with movies too? Makes them, like books, part of the ongoing conversation of life...which may actually enrich their presence in your week...

Although I'd never want to give up that church like experience of settling down in the dark with strangers to fully immerse myself in another world...support your local theater! Splash out for the overpriced popcorn - it keeps the seats open!

But now that I know other people are doing the same thing, why not review the 20 minute Netflix Instant dip-ins I've done this week...

First, not long after MI IV was Blade Runner, which I hadn't seen in years and years...going from MI IV to Blade Runner was like going from a bright, thrilling amusement park ride to some kind of voodoo, techno-bayou swampland...spooky, humid, freaky. I haven't read the Philip K. Dick novel the movie's based on - though I remember my brother's 70s psychedelic paperback of it, which sat on his desk below his Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon stickers - so I don't know how directly any of it matches up...but the movie is really, genuinely freaky, even in the opening minutes. Ridley Scott must have at least been liberated into that freakiness by PKD, even if he wasn't directly quoting it.

There's that eerie closeup of the eye in the opening sequence...reflected geysers of flame searing across the pupil...then the city itself, a damp, technological near-apocalypse, dominated by vast Mayan-ruin-like pyramids (2012!), hunched between flaming burn-off towers...the street level shanty food shacks, the misting rain, the whale-like video hovercraft slowly wallowing through the sky with its bullshit images of a better life 'off-world'.

And that opening psychological interview with the replicant Leon...freeeaky! "You're walking through a desert..." "What desert?" "It doesn't matter...there's a tortoise on its back, its baking in the sun, it can't turn over, and you aren't helping it...why aren't you helping it?"Leon is fidgeting, sweating, staring. And then the kicker, "Tell me about your mother, only the happy memories." "I'll tell you about my mother" - BLAM!

There's an amazing mixture in that scene, and all of them, of cool futuristic shit - Leon's gun actually sends the interviewer blasting through the wall - with rundown, believeably make-shift, fucked up technology that has just accumulated and decayed along with all sci-fi innovations. There's the old fans turning slowly through cigarette smoke, like a 40s noir movie; the weird valve pump on the eye-tracker, which looks like part of a 19th century camera; the smug, 50s bureaucrat suit the interviewer is wearing. And all around them the vast build up of technology run amok - the towers, the ad-blimps, the flying cars, the replicants on the loose.

Everything about the movie's world is unsettlingly mixed, muddled, uneasy-making...Scott also did a great job with that in his breakout movie, Alien, which was a similarly uncanny mixture of futuristic technological marvels and creepy, believably human industrial decay. And all that's before the movie gets into the existential, replicant-fueled questions of What does it mean to be human, in a technology dominated world...and that's even before Rutger Hauer shows up with his impossible blue eyes, Roman god face and devilish smirk, quoting apocalyptic poetry as he menaces underlings of the Tyrell Corporation...

I stopped the movie there, after the treat of watching Hauer saunter menacingly into the eye-making shop, intoning "Fiery the angels fell..." with his leather coat collar turned up like black wings...

I was thinking, all credit to Harrison Ford for jumping into this swamp of weirdness right after the sunny good fun of Raiders of the Lost Ark - and then remembered that even Clean Cut MI Cruise has spent his time in the darklands of Philip K. Dick. Netflix Instant didn't have Minority Report, so I went to icefilms, which taps into megaupload to let you download almost any blockbuster you can imagine...but in the wake of the recent SOPA brouhaha, megaupload is down. Damn.

So that was my night...it was getting late and I didn't feel up for the full ride of Blade Runner...but I'll be picking that book up again...

More 20 minute opener reviews next time...La Femme Nikita, La Profesionnel (Belmondo, not Jean Reno), and Charley Varrick (Walter Matthau, the movie from which Tarantino stole the line about going to work on somebody with pliers and a blow torch).

Welcome to the campfire...which is mostly going to be about movies - our modern version of getting together in the dark to share stories - though other things might start to crop up too, and I'll be inviting other people into the blog too to make it a real campfire...

For my first post, Mission Impossible IV. I was talking about the movie today with Brett, while we were taking a walk in the Mt. Auburn cemetery with his daughter Georgia (my goddaughter). He'd given me the latest about his dissertation on American evangelicism and we started talking movies.

We both loved MI IV. The action sequences were actually thrilling... they were full of so many surprises, I found myself actually counting moments when there was something familiar. And the tower sequence is as amazing as people are saying - I got a full, physical rush of vertigo watching Cruise run down the face of that glass. If it's true he was actually out there, I guess it just proves that Scientology makes you invincible. Who's got tiger blood now, Charlie Sheen!

I also loved how Brad Bird openly embraced that connection between action movies and musicals - they're both about choreography. Bird is an amazing director - see The Incredibles if you haven't already - and the opening sequence is awesomely choreographed. Cruise is breaking out of a Russian prison, with the help of a remote team, and is fighting his way down a corridor jammed with fighting guards and prisoners. As he takes down one after another, fighting his way forward body by body, the remote team - for no sane reason except that it makes the scene into a musical number - starts pumping a Dean Martin song over the prison loudspeakers. So Cruise's long, sinuous, brutal chop by chop escape down the hall is all to the tune of Dean's mellow crooning...awesome.

The rest of the action sequences are all also amazing and inventive (the dust storm!) with amazing choreography - though the rest of the music is the usual invisible soundtrack. But Bird knows musicality is part of what makes a great action sequence work, and these really sing. The tower sequence is definitely the best, but they're all good.

The humor all the way through the movie is great too...Simon Pegg is the main comic relief, and the contrast of his light as air goofiness against Cruise's pounding manic focus also feels like great music. Playful riffs against a driving beat. Definitely one to see on the big screen.