Coincidences 3, 4, & 5

Coincidence #3: Two references to the Wee Kirk O' the Heather within a few days.

A few days ago I watched Paper Heart, a nice little road flick about Charlyne Yi interviewing people about love while herself becoming loosely entangled with Michael Cera. One of the stops on her travels is the aforementioned chapel in Las Vegas. Yi (as played in the film) is sweet, low-key, and often childlike as she tries to get an explanation of what love really is; she's wary and tentative but not at all bitter. So is Cera (again, according to the film). They kid around in a let's-keep-the-stakes-low-OK? manner, never venturing too far from an exit.

Wee Kirk O' the Heather also appears on page 246 of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice, which I am two-thirds of the way through at the moment. Around 1969 or '70, Larry "Doc" Sportello, a hippie P.I. in Los Angeles, is hired to locate a missing real estate developer. His frenemy is philosophical police officer Christian "Bigfoot" Bjornsen. The story rambles like The Big Lebowski, and Doc's cool reminds me of The Dude. I picture Inherent Vice as a movie (or better yet, a cable mini-series), produced/directed by David Lynch, with James Franco as Doc and John Krasinski as Bigfoot.

Coincidence #4 (weak): Inherent Vice also mentions Val Lewton, a movie producer praised in another book I've been reading, Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber. Check out Lewton's Curse of the Cat People.

Coincidence #5 (weakest): The real estate developer sought by Doc Sportello is named Mickey Wolfmann. This weekend The Wolfman opens in theaters. Based on reviews, I probably won't be checking the movie out.

You had me at kaboom

Critics have been slobbering over The Hurt Locker for some time; I finally checked it out on DVD last weekend. The episodic structure reminded me of The Big Red One, and both movies end by gesturing poignantly back to the beginning.

Bigelow and Boal state their thesis - that "war is a drug" - and use a cool documentary style to back it up. The characters are well drawn and consistent, with one exception I'll get to in a moment. The Iraqis are not one-dimensional victims and villains, though they are portrayed as strange and often dangerous, from the Americans' point of view. Action sequences are clearly and believably staged. Occasional use of slo-mo subverts the documentary feel, but overall the tone doesn't suffer much.

I have a problem with the scene in which one soldier discusses the possibility of killing another soldier. (The death could be made to look like an accident.) This seemed crazily out of character for the would-be assassin. Boal was a reporter embedded with a bomb-disposal unit in Iraq. My hunch is that one of the soldiers he was covering initiated a similar discussion, and Boal couldn't resist putting it into the movie.

The Hurt Locker isn't quite up to the level of Generation Kill, but that mini-series had seven hours to tell its story. Overall, I'd rate The Hurt Locker a very good movie.

Coincidence #2

The day after posting my entry on coincidence, by pure chance I listened to the Radiolab podcast on stochasticity, which explains things much better than I could.