Serious Movies
I've been to several serious intellectually fulfilling movies recently.
This is your basic Will Ferrell vehicle. But I mean that in a good way. If you like Ferrell movies, you'll like this one. If you don't, well then, you won't. It's really as simple as that.
Plus, The Rock continues mining the gold vein of playing an outsized version of himself, much like he did in Get Smart. And that's always fun to watch.
It's a comic book just thrown up on the screen. But I mean that in a good way.
I'm a little older than the target audience for this. And I've never read the comic. (Although I do read comics. It's just that I tend towards superhero comics.)
Still, I loved the movie. Yes, the Ramona character is thinly sketched. Yes, the ending is muddled. Still, the damn thing sizzles and pops with energy. The comic book world works better than I would have imagined.
And I'll watch nearly anything with Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Although, she looks skinnier, which I don't like. Also, frankly, Alison Pill looks hotter in the movie. (I'm a sucker for a freckled nose.)
Boobs + gore + cheesy 3D effects = WIN.
It's a big cheese-ball of a movie. But I mean that in a good way. Check your brains at the door and just enjoy.
There's blood and guts galore. And they're not coy about it.
Plenty of boobs on view, but don't expect sexy. It doesn't work that way. There's an extended underwater nude scene that I think is supposed to be sexy.
Instead, I giggled all the way through it.
The 3D consists of jabbing things at your face, which is exactly what it should be in a film like this.
Plus, there are several homages to Jaws.
How can you go wrong?
Twitter Meme
Twitter erupted with a fun meme this weekend. Called #oneletteroffmovies, it's simply goofy film titles that result from adding or removing a letter from an existing title.
Here are my contributions, in reverse chronological order:
- Watch where you step in That Darn Scat!
- It's Gentiles in Space! courtesy of Astro Goy
- Don't fuck with Bing in the Catholic horror flick The Hells of St. Mary's
- Zombie boxing movie: Fight of the Living Dead
- Dolly Parton biopic: Tits, A Wonderful Life
- It's so obvious that I feel bad about The Bitches of Eastwick
- Eric Idle's controversial porn/comedy movie Nuns on the Nun
- Dog-sled through the Korean War with M*U*S*H
- Tired of bad calls? Well, the umps are tired of you in The Umpire Strikes Back
- Ghost porn: Ectopussy
I think this one took off because it was a perfect combination of easy and funny.
Toy Stories
Went to see Toy Story and Toy Story 2 in 3D over the weekend. It was loads of fun. It's a limited engagement, so go next weekend or you'll have missed your shot.
Both films work great in 3D. The rendering technology was still fairly new at the time, so they engage in plenty of sweet perspective shots.
It is a little strange to see how, well, primitive Toy Story looks in comparison to generated animation today.
Toy Story is notable in that it doesn't retread the same old Pixar plot. Maybe because Pixar hadn't yet got stuck in the same old plot yet.
What? Same plot? Yeah. Most Pixar movies adhere to a set plot. They're supposed to be about the secret lives of X, but are really about the value of friendship.
- Toy Story is supposed to be about the secret lives of toys, but is really about the value of friendship.
- Bug's Life is supposed to be about the secret lives of bugs, but is really about the value of friendship.
- Monsters Inc. is supposed to be about the secret lives of bugs, but is really about the value of friendship.
- Cars is supposed to be about the secret lives of cars, but is really about the value of friendship.
- And so on...
But Toy Story 2 is about actually playing with toys instead of storing them away in boxes or displaying them mint in box.
Of course, it does this while wrapping it in the value of friendship between kids and their toys.
So, Toy Story 2 is supposed to be about the value of friendship, but is really about playing with your damn toys!
A nice touch for this double feature is a 10 minute intermission between the movies. The time is filled with trivia and a few scenes from the movies. It's perfectly pitched so that you're decently entertained for the 10 minutes, but you haven't really missed anything if you leave to pee.
Atragon!
I've been watching some classic old Japanese SciFi movies lately. The most recent was Atragon. It's about the Mu Empire trying to take over the world. Defending the world, reluctantly, is a submarine that can also fly and drill through the earth.
It starts out great, with some sweet shots of the Mu Empire. Then the middle drags horribly. In the last 25 minutes, things pick up. An absolutely stunning model of Tokyo is destroyed. Crap is blown up. And the world is saved!
One question, though: If the Mu Empire is so advanced, then why does it arm its soldiers with nothing more than spears. They don't even get shirts, much less any body armor.
And, yes, there's a monster in it. Japanese SciFi directors at the time were often forced to insert monsters in what would otherwise be straight SciFi.
Burn It Down
Watched Fahrenheit 451 a bit ago. Definitely a flawed movie. Julie Christie can't act. (So they let her have two roles.) Oskar Werner can sorta act, but it's a really weird sort of acting. (If they hadn't given Christie two roles, they could have had Terence Stamp.) And Truffaut can't write English dialog.
Still, the film has lots to recommend it. It has a great look to it, with nice use of color and a combination of retro and modern technology. (I'd love a model of the firetruck.) Cyril Cusack does it a nice turn as the Firehouse Captain. And the soundtrack is great. The DVD also has some interesting bonus features.
Hormones and Wands
Well, it was awhile ago, but I did see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It was fun but strange. Basically, the first two-thirds of the movie was a teen romance comedy. And I liked that part lots. While I don't think that Rowling writes this kind of stuff well, the actors in the movie handled it just fine. It made for a fun time.
And then the movie switches gears and the last third is all dark. The transition doesn't work well. I know they have to include this section because it's in the book and it bridges to the final book. But it just didn't thrill me. I would have been happier with this as just a magic-based teen romance comedy.
One complaint I had with the final book in the series is that it blows off characters developed in the sixth book, specifically Ginny. She becomes a major character in book 6 and then disappears in book 7, coming in at the end to do little more than sigh Oh Harry!
I hope Bonnie Wright gets better treatment.
And let's have more Evanna Lynch, too!
And knowing is half the battle!
Went to see G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra a couple weeks ago. I was leery of seeing it as the previews turned me off. The previews feature exo-skeletons, which just looked stupid to me. I was dreading a movie filled with them.
But David Willis strongly recommended it. So I took a chance.
And I loved it. I could have done without the Duke/Baroness sub-plot. And Cobra Commander looks ridiculous. But what you saw of the exo-skeletons in the preview was about all the movie contained.
It was gloriously stupid and tons of crap blew up. What more could you want?
Inglourious Basterds
So we took in Inglourious Basterds last weekend. And we really liked it.
What do I want from a Tarantino flick? Simply this:
- Beautiful cinematography
- Long, interesting, but often meaningless conversations
- Oddball characters
- Bloody violence
And Basterds
delivers on all four. Add in Christoph Waltz's wonderful performance and you have a great 2+ hours in the dark. I'm tempted to go again tomorrow.
Old Tapes
I've been dumping old VHS tapes to DVDs lately. No real reason other than being able to then toss the tapes. There's been some interesting stuff:
- Several tapes worth of the British
Whose Line Is It Anyway?
Have some of the US version, too. Just tossed 'em. - The Beatles Anthology documentary.
- An episode of an old PBS documentary focusing on Punk Rock.
- Home videos of my brother's kids.
- A segment from some MSNBC show about old computer collecting. I shows a bit of my defunct Obsolete Computer Museum site. The segment is so old that is has the old purple background instead of the green-line paper.
- Horrible quality video of the Replacements that my brother sent me.
- Video of NCSC staff assembling the trade show booth, including me in all my fat glory.
- Promo video for the NCSC.
Those are all things copied off of a TV or video signal. There are also some commercial tapes that may not copy due to Macrovision copy protection:
- Michael Palin's
Full Circle.
- Something called
Zero Woman Triple Shot.
Bloodsucking Freaks,
a movie you really don't need to see.- A wide variety of cheap superhero cartoons.
- A wide variety of Laurel and Hardy videos.
- Some Jonny Quest videos. I have the full Quest episodes on DVD. But some of them have some saltier dialog dubbed. Maybe these tapes don't.
- A handful of movies, some still shrink-wrapped.
This isn't the first time I've dumped VHS tapes to disc. Previous copying included:
- Michael Palin's
Pole to Pole,
with no Macrovision! - Several episodes of
Let's Bowl,
clearly the best comedy bowling show set in Minnesota, ever. - A slew of Laurel and Hardy movies. Long ago, AMC held a L&H marathon, showing movie after movie. I taped the whole thing, on several VHS tapes, and never played them again, saving them until a better format came along. Now they're all dumped to DVD. Sweet! There's been talk for years of a huge L&H DVD box set produced from the cleanest film copies available. Haven't actually seen it produced yet. I'd put my collection up against any DVDs you can currently buy.
Just a gimmick?
Notice how all the new computer-animated movies are in 3D? We've seen this before. Is 3D just a gimmick?
Well, I've been to a couple 3D shows now (Monsters vs Aliens and Up). And the technology is basically there. The glasses are fairly comfortable and even my local theater has the specialized 3D equipment in place.
The results are great. It looks 3D and I don't get a headache. In a movie like Up, where they don't shove whiz-bang 3D effects at you, you eventually forget that it's 3D and just let the 3D-ness enhance the experience, not be the experience.
But that doesn't mean that there aren't 3D gimmicks out there. I picked up Coraline on DVD yesterday. My local theater did not yet have the 3D equipment installed when Coraline was in theaters, so I never had a chance to see it in 3D. Well, the DVD has both 2D and 3D versions on it!
And how, pray tell, do they provide a quality 3D experience on your TV? They don't. It's the old red/blue glasses. (More like magenta and amber these days.) Everything's purple-ish and you can't watch long before your head hurts.
3D in the theater? For reals!
3D in the home? Gimmick!
