The Handmaiden

The Handmaiden - Official Trailer
Free on Amazon Prime, not to be confused with The Handmaid's Tale, for which Amazon wants $10.

The movie appears to be set in Korea in the 1930's. The Handmaiden is an 'erotic psychological thriller film directed by Park Chan-wook' who also gave us Oldboy. It's pretty great. The New Yorker has a good review.

The story is complicated and a little bizarre (a little bizarre? More like totally psycho.), but the best part is that when the story is first told it is completely believable (given that it is a movie), but with each subsequent retelling, everything you thought was true is revealed to have been a lie. Very cleverly done.

Ballistic Missiles

    Finally got around to watching Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol this weekend. The DVD from Netflix has been sitting on the table for at least a month. Well, we were busy with Damages. Can't watch everything all at once.
    There are some pretty realistic shots of an SLBM (Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile) flight during the last part of the movie. Naturally, it is interlaced with the climatic fight scene between our hero and the really nasty-ass villain.
    During the missile's flight, it ignites a second stage, which surprised me. I thought all ICBM's, and especially SLBM's were single stage rockets. I figured Hollywood just added that to have something to show. I mean a missile just gliding along isn't that interesting. Turns out I'm wrong. All current US and Russian SLBM's use three stages.
    They did get the re-entry scene wrong. When these things re-enter the atmosphere they are hustling along at a pretty good clip, like several miles per second. At those speeds friction with the air is going to heat up the warhead until it is glowing bright red. No sign of any re-entry heating in the movie.

Mission Impossible 4 Missile Launch Sequence

    Another thing was how long the final pursuit and fight lasted. You know how these scenes go in movies, they seem to go on forever. You know the hero will prevail, but they keep you on the edge of your seat for what seems like forever. You're pretty sure that if this was real life, the bomb would have gone off hours ago, and all this fighting would be for naught. Not quite the case. Ballistic missile flight times are on the order of 30 minutes from ignition to detonation, so in this case the time frame was plausible.
    Ethan (Tom Cruise) made the mistake of not finishing off the bad guy before attempting to abort the missile. If he had just concentrated on doing one thing at a time, the fight would have been over much sooner and he would have had plenty of time to deal with the missile. But then we wouldn't have been on the edge of our seats as long.
    SLBM's owe their existence to MAD, the policy of Mutually Asssured Destruction. MAD is just that: mad, as in insane. I can see where you might want to maintain the capability of building and delivering nuclear weapons, but keeping a whole arsenal of the things primed and ready for launch at a moments notice is just asking for trouble. Yes, someone could launch an attack and destroy every large city in our country and do it without fear of immediate retaliation. But what would that gain them? And how long would it be before the survivors, however few there were, found a method for exacting revenge? And how would the rest of the world treat someone who had unleashed a nuclear holocaust on us? Sure, a few nut cases might celebrate, but most nations would wonder who was next on the agressor's list. Having a bunch of nuclear missiles on hand, primed and ready to go, is a bad, bad, bad idea. If we removed all of our nuclear weapons from front line deployment, other nations might follow our lead.

Update: It occured to me that final impact sequence was wrong as well. Anything going as fast as it should have been would only have been a momentary streak and it's impact in S.F. bay would have created an explosion of steam and a mini-Tsunami that would have rocked every boat in the bay, at the least.

Update March 2016. Replaced missing video.

Inception

I read a review of this movie that made it sound really great, so I looked forward to seeing it. Turns out it was okay. There was some interesting stuff in it about ideas being able to tell reality from imaginary, but there was a whole lot of your generic action movie stuff in it: car chases, gun fights and fist fights. A little too much of that for my taste. They did have some weightless scenes, and they were very well done. I've seen stuff where the actors are hanging from wires, and I've seen videos of astronauts in the space shuttle. Weightless is hard to fake. Maybe they used the vomit comet (that jet airliner they use for training astronauts) to film these scenes. Maybe they used wires. I don't know. It's science fiction and they use a box with wires to share dreams. Each participant has a wire clipped to their wrist that connects them to the box. Problem with this is that it was too much like virtual reality and not enough like dreaming. It simply looked like somebody gave the action department the go ahead to pull out all the stops. There were a couple of ideas that were interesting. One was that dreaming happens ten times faster that real life. That is, your time sense is distorted. You can have a dream that seems to last for hours and in reality it may only last for minutes. Of course, they have to expand on this and have you go to sleep in your dream and enter another level of dreaming, so now your time sense is expanded by another factor of ten. You go down one more level and now things are happening a thousand times faster in your dream than they are in real life. The second idea is how you get out of your dream. Well, you could just wake up, but they are messing with drugs and multiple dream levels, so we have to have a trick. One is the famous feeling of falling. The other is you die in your dream. That should wake you up. Unfortunately, if you are several layers deep in your dream, you may have to die several times to wake up. And what if you can't tell when you are finally, really, truly awake, and think you need to wake up one more time? That could be a problem. This whole business of having multiple levels or dreams that look like virtual reality reminds me on another movie I saw a few years ago called eXistenZ. The third idea was that an idea could be the most contagious disease. Once you have told someone, and the idea starts to spread, there is no way to stop it. I think I've heard that one somewhere else before. The best part was Leonardo's wife, who she was, or wasn't, and the effect she had on him.