Sam D Blogs About Movies

Catfish

2011-04-14T04:23:00.002-05:00

Here, in it's entirety, is my review for the film Catfish, which I watched while studying abroad in Barcelona:

o_O

Inception

2010-07-19T19:40:00.001-05:00

Prologue 1:
September 1, 2009:

Or maybe the whole movie takes place in DiCaprio's head, and it's just about him going nuts. You heard it here first, kids. If I'm right, I totally called that 9 months before the movie came out.

...

Bitches.

...

Prologue 2:
This is my longest post ever. Whatever I happen to say down there, remember this: you should go see Inception if for no other reason than I had this much to say about it. Too many movies are just "there were cool explosions" or "he got the girl in the end" these days. This one had thousands of words in it, and I still have more to say. So get yourself to a theater already.

Review:
Man, it's been a while. Since I've done a real movie review update, but also since I thought about Inception. I was so pumped back when that first trailer came out, and then last weekend it was suddenly in theaters. So I went.

While I recommend going into Inception without having a plot summary since the way the thing was put out there for most film goers, I also just want to put down into words what I remember happening. If we're going to think about a movie like this, it couldn't hurt to have a quick recap. So here goes: Leonardo DiCaprio is a professional thief, but instead of stealing real stuff he goes into people's dreams (with fantasy technology that's just sort of taken as a given throughout the film) and steals their ideas. He's got a team of people who help him with this, including the 500 Days of Summer guy, some other dude who is a pretty serviceable actor, and Juno. Michael Cain shows up for like 10 lines, too. Anyway, playing around in people's dreams is a super cool setup and leads to some pretty sweet special effects (though maybe not enough sweet special effects - more on that in a minute).

Our heroes screw around for a while as the movie lets us figure out for ourselves what the hell is going on for the first half an hour, a technique I appreciated. There was danger that the audience just wouldn't figure out what was up and the whole film would be impossible to follow, but that didn't happen at least to me personally. I'm sure someone's movie experience was ruined by it, though. After the initial action scene shenanigans take us through this setup, we get to the basic plot of the film: some Asian dude wants DiCaprio to go into someone else's mind and preform inception. That is, instead of stealing an idea from someone else, he wants to plant one there. 500 Days of Summer guy says it's not possible, but DiCaprio insists that it is. Gasp! So they gather up their team who I already introduced to you and get down to business planning what is essentially the coolest heist movie since Ocean's 11.

By this point, we've already been introduced to the concept of a dream within a dream, so it's no surprise when it turns out that the heist / inception is going to take 3+ levels of dream. This is cool. There are also complications that arise from DiCaprio's dead wife, who still lives on in the dream world as a projection from his subconscious. She keeps lurking around in the background, potentially sabotaging our heroes plans. Then there are further complications, etc, etc.

Damn good movie, in my opinion. I'd been comparing the previews to Blade Runner, Chinatown, and The Matrix, and while I'm not sure it lived up to quite those standards, the feel was definitely along those lines. The noir aesthetic wasn't as good as Chinatown's, and the script could've used more work. Usually when I say that it's because the dialog was bad, but in this case it was more like they didn't take enough time to flesh out the supporting cast of characters. DiCaprio gets a good amount of personality since the movie basically comes down to his relationship with his wife, and Juno certainly gets moments. We get a hint of something great from 500 Days guy, but it looked to me by the end that that was just because he's a good actor. There's like 4 team members who are more or less disposable, which begs the question of why they were included the first place. Cut a couple and give more time to fleshing out our principals. I mean, the whole inception heist is based on this sort of character study of the guy they're planting an idea inside, yet even he seems a little empty by the end.

Just a quick aside, have you been following all those imdb links I've been throwing out? Holy crap. This movie's cast was just awesome. It's like a who's who of actors that I like seeing in pretty much anything.

So we don't get as much character as I'd like, which is a shame. But characters are boring - what about cool action sequences and sweet dream effects? Sadly, the film does in this area pretty much what it did in the characters section: while full of good intentions, but it didn't push them far enough. You get a couple really great moments like the train plowing through the middle of city streets and the hotel fight scene that takes place as the van one dream level up does a barrel roll, but then it feels like things slide. I want the creativity of Eternal Sunshine, or at least something a little bit more dream-like. I'm okay with relatively mundane settings, but it feels like there should be more terribly out of place things like that train. You've got this troubled guy's entire subconscious to work with, why not make some waves?

Even better, you could kill two birds with one stone by having weird dream projections showing up that give us a deeper insight into our characters. If DiCaprio's wife is coming out of his head, what's to stop other people's personal demons from arriving and giving them trouble? At least let us see some traumatizing clown from our subject's childhood. I wanted to feel more Spirited Away and less action movie. Obviously you can't just drop the action entirely, but you can find cool stuff to do here.

The synchronized kicks I was totally on board with. I love the idea that in order to wake up from a dream you have to get that falling sensation because I know how readily falling in a dream wakes me up. The same goes for death - right up until they changed that rule, I was totally in love with their system. It was the sort of rules system I'd wished we'd gotten to see between Jacob and The Man in Black by the end of Lost. Of course then they went and blew it all by changing the death rule. I don't think they had to do that - instead of putting more on the line in the dream world and compromising your awesome system of rules, but more on the line out in the waking world. That way, for every person that gets killed in-dream and wakes up, the task of inception becomes more harder, and we get drama that way. If the cost of failure is essentially death (as it is for DiCaprio), we'll worry nearly as much about the character's survival without having to re-suspend our disbelief.

Whatever. My original point there was that the kicks system was cool, and they got clever with how each level's kick was delivered. The cue music was perfectly atmospheric, the elevator thing was priceless... basically everything about the kicks I liked.

I have one major technical gripe with the movie, and that is that all the cutting back and forth between dream levels was too quick for me. Instead of going 4 seconds of falling van -> 4 seconds of elevator -> 10 seconds of snow dialog, I kept wanting to see bigger chunks on each level. This way, I feel like we could have actually watched 500 Days guy in the hotel solve the various problems he was faced with, and maybe think about solutions along with him. Instead, I felt like we just kept coming back to him doing some new random-ass thing. I wanted to see him thinking, and larger chunks in each place would have let that process be more visible to us viewers.

Also, the snow level was just kind of random.

Alright, we're getting deeper here. I haven't even touched the big gun issues yet.

As I said earlier, the movie basically comes down to DiCaprio dealing with his wife's death (and the other issue that I'll get to, I promise). I felt like they handled this relationship well. While I wish there were more bits in the film that felt like a slasher flick with Mal (the wife) as the villain who could be just around any turn, the actual characters were good. As much as I complained about the lack of imagination in dreamscapes before, I thought the elevator trip through DiCaprio's memories was near flawless. I would've liked to see multiple trips to this elevator to let the idea build and ferment, but I guess there wasn't time. That seems to be one of the recurring problems with Inception: there were so many ideas packed in that not many of them got room to breathe, even with a 2:20 runtime.

Back to the wife, there's that point at the end when DiCaprio is facing her down in limbo where he talks about how she's not nearly as complex as the real Mal, how she's only a memory, a facet of the complex woman who he actually knew and loved... I loved that bit. I'd sort of already assumed this is what Nolan had been going for with her character, but it was a still a cool pointer in the direction he wanted us to look regarding Mal.

Speaking of limbo, what the hell. That was by far my least favorite part of the film. I didn't understand what it was, how you got there, or what purpose it served. I guess the plot devices it created were important. It let us look at that basic idea of limitless creation that comes with total lucid dreaming, and it set up the foundations for everything between Mal and DiCaprio. Still, it was explained just awfully. How did DiCaprio end up in the same limbo that he'd been trapped in with Mal? Is there really just one, and if so, are we to believe that the two of them were the only ones who ever lost themselves there? Then there's the whole deal with DiCaprio trying to find the Asian guy there which just didn't make any sense at all to me. Why do you need that? Just have the Asian guy not die, and you can have the same ambiguity in the end since DiCaprio has to go down into limbo to bring back the Scarecrow actor guy. What's the point?

Which brings us neatly to the end.

I walked out of the theater with this huge grin on my face. Joey and Danl followed me out the theater and to the bathroom where I promptly broke out laughing and exclaimed, "That was retarded." I mean, as soon as you find out that the opening scenes are a dream within a dream, you have to see it coming that the whole movie could be set up as one big-ass dream. I'm much more okay with this in a movie than on a TV show - if Lost had been a dream (or god forbid it turn out they were dead the whole time), I'd have been pissed. But two hours examining that sort of reality question is fine by me.

So I think I did like the ending despite the fact that it bugs me. Leaving things open for interpretation allows stupid kids like me to think about them for hours on end, which can be fun. Joey thought just having the top fall over should have been how the film ended, and I agree that it would have been a fine conclusion a fun action piece about dreams and reality. Certainly much better than most we get these days.

As is, I'm trapped between two opinions on the ending. The first is that it was perfect. It does so many things at once. It lets you decide on which ending you like better - whether DiCaprio was in a dream the whole time or whether he got back to living his life at the end. This doesn't quite work since the people who want the top to fall over are pissed that the top doesn't fall over, but it's perfect for those who like the idea of the whole movie being a dream. It also plays into my favorite theme in the movie: determining your own reality. We see this a lot as everyone takes turns shaping each other's realities. For starters we've got Juno creating dream worlds, the actual dreamers populating them, and DiCaprio sprinkling his subconscious all over everyone else. Then there's the dreamers in the sedative guy's basement, DiCaprio and Mal's control over limbo, Mal's manipulation of DiCaprio once they're both back in the "real" world, etc. At the end, we see DiCaprio ultimately choosing his own reality as he abandons Mal in limbo so he can return to his kids. He makes the conscious choice to stop all this nonsense and just live his life. In that sense, it doesn't matter whether or not the top falls over after the final cut to black. The important thing is that DiCaprio decided for himself how he was going to live and went and lived that way.

I like that message a lot.

The other thing this ending does is make Carol Donelan super happy. That is, it's commentary on watching movies within a movie. One could argue that since we hear the top wobble just as the film cuts to black at the end, the top must fall over right at about that time. Coincidentally, what else is happening just as the film cuts to black? The film is over. And just after a film engrossing as this one, you really do feel like you've woken up from a dream. At least I do. Having the film end on the wobbling of the top is this great nod at the way we take in films. I can see the arguments either way about whether it's better for the plot to have the top fall or not, but this particular thing about the ending is great.

All that said, my other opinion about the end is that it's just trying to hard. If you let the top fall over, you give us a satisfying conclusion to a fine story. There's plenty of material to be discussed within the rest of the piece, especially if they'd taken the time to flesh everything out a bit more. You can give us our real ending while still asking interesting questions. I guess then you aren't going to get a bunch of free press post-release, though. Probably less of a cult movie, too.

Critics seem to be just shitting themselves over Inception. I definitely liked it a lot. It's better than anything else in its same class that's come out in years. The problem is just that there's so little coming out in that class. So few movies are trying to be good and thought provoking rather than money makers. Hell, so few good movies these days aren't based on some pre-existing intellectual property. When someone comes along and makes a good movie with a budget that doesn't focus primarily on explosions, everyone freaks the fuck out. I liked it, yes, but it was merely quite good. It's just that quite good looks like solid gold when it's peers are a bunch of monkeys.

The monkeys also have bazookas.

Ten Second Film Festival

2010-07-08T21:46:00.000-05:00

It's exactly what it sounds like. Here's the details:

The TSFF takes place on the 4th of July at The Soap Factory near Dinkytown, Minneapolis where I've been living this summer. I was invited to spend the holiday with some people who were going, so naturally I tagged along. Holy crap was it a good time. All I want to do now is make ten second films all day long. It was so worth the back pain caused by sitting on a plant.

The show's format was good. There was a host, this big guy in a white suit and American flag top-hat. He was funny, receptive to the crowd, etc. Good at his job. They'd apparently been taking submissions for a long time (maybe all year?), and they'd picked the best 100 to show. These were divided into 10 categories, each shown consecutively along with an intro video. They had names like "Mindless Violence", "Arthouse", "Documentary", and "Dance Off". Then between the sets of 10 there were judges who chose a winner. The winner got a silly trophy and lots of drunken applause. The whole thing took about an hour and a half, which was a great length.

The best moment of the night needs some setup. After the Documentary category, the crowd favorite was far and away this appropriately named film called Sticks. Everyone was chanting "Sticks Sticks Sticks!" until the judges finally gave in and agreed to give it the prize. Unfortunately, no one showed up to take credit. People got upset, there was booing, etc. It was bad. So they had to give it to the second place winner instead.

Later in the night, another winner has just been announced, and again it's looking like a no-show. Everyone's getting bored looking around, and finally this guy comes in like off the street and walks up on stage. They try to hand him the trophy, but he waves them off. There's some confusion, and this guy finally ends up with the microphone and says to the crowd "Hey, I'm the guy who made Sticks." Cheers erupt, along with demands to give him this category's trophy. So they did. Awesome.

I noticed after the Documentary category that the best films tended to be documentary in nature, even if they didn't fall into that category explicitly. I think capturing the perfect 10 second moment on your phone's camera just has more oomph to it than the other reigning formula of "one ten second joke". Not that those weren't hilarious, mind you.

My favorite film wasn't either of those, though. I wish I could find the video online, but alas, a description shall have to suffice. It was called Puree, and it featured a bleak, white room containing only a blender full of water and goldfish. A hand slowly moved onto the screen, reaching for the power button on the blender and getting closer... closer... CLOSER... and then a smash cut to black. So perfect.

Looking around online, it looks like none of this year's films are online. In fact, very few of them seem to make it up unless they're put there by their creators. Still, here's one of my favorites:

You can see their whole youtube channel here.

Love N' Dancing

2010-06-05T19:38:00.001-05:00

...

Do I actually need to say anything about this movie? You should be able to imagine a 95% accurate version of the film just from the poster.

Let's start at the beginning.

Carleton has a termual (that's once a trimester) tradition called the Library Silent Dance Party. The idea is that a few days before the last Friday of the term, an email starts being forwarded around to pretty much every email list on campus. It contains a link to an mp3 and instructions to download it, put it on your music listening device of choice, and show up to the first floor (aka the Monastary Quiet floor) of the library at 11pm on Friday. Then when all 200+ people have shown up, some pre-designated leader silently counts down on his fingers. When the countdown ends, everyone presses play. Thus begins a dance party in the most quiet location on campus.

The LSDP moves through the library, slowly making its way up the floors. After the break 30 minutes in, it generally beings to move around campus like an ooze, engulfing building after building of innocent by-standers trying to study for finals. It's probably the single coolest thing I've ever done at Carleton. And college is pretty cool, and Carleton is pretty cool for a college. In the middle of it, you just feel connected to all these strangers in a totally awesome non-creepy way. Like, you're just dancing with people. It's great.

...

So midnight comes around this past Friday night, and everyone's leaving the LSDP. Of course, after an hour of such an experience, you can't just go home and go to bed. As tired as you are, your energy level is through the roof. I didn't know what to do, but eventually I went to get smoothies at the snack bar with a bunch of Social Dance Club people. That got us a decent ways, but after the smoothies were gone, what then? I mean, watching a movie is always on the table, but...

I made the mistake of making a comment about how all the things in life that make me feel amazing are slowly converging to dance. Swing dance club, social dance club, contact improv, the LSDP... All these things just make me feel unbeatable in a way that not much else ever has. I say this comment was a mistake because I was in the presence of one Kendra, who immediately demanded that we spend the rest of the evening watching Love N' Dancing.

A few organizational shenanigans later, I found myself along with several other dancers in Kendra's apartment with the opening to what looked like Dirty Dancing all over playing itself in front of me. How had it come to this?

The plot was exactly what you expect. Early on, I made a comment about how the girl was going to take off her big glasses, let down her hair, and rapidly become a ridiculously good dancer. Not only did all of these things happen, but later during a crisis her friend says to her (I shit you not): "Girl, you're wearing contacts. You've let your hair down. You're happy. Why do you think this is?"

And Kendra goes "Dancing". And the friend goes "Dancing".

It was brutal to sit through, though I admit the dancing was awesome. Now that I actually dance a lot, I can appreciate that sort of thing in bad dance movies. I also spent an unreasonable amount of time marveling at how the director had hid the cameras in a dance studio where all the walls were mirrors. Let me just say that there were some very conveniently place pillars and many clever angles. I made a point of it to ruin every moment possible with yet another technical comment.

Still, no matter what I may say about this movie's quality, the dancing was great. And like Kendra, I wish I could do this. Still wasn't worth being up until 3am for.

Sam D Makes An Autobiographical Movie

2010-06-01T16:28:00.001-05:00

In which I actually show the polished version of the movie from the edit in my last post. Assignment: autobiographical movie about 30 shots in 60 seconds.

Sam D Makes A Depressing Movie

2010-05-24T23:19:00.003-05:00

Assignment: make a 3-5 minute concept film in the style of something you'd watch in a museum. The concept? Love.

I sat around for a few days not having any ideas, then I listened to Gymnopedies and decided to just make something that tried to capture the feel of that piece. I'm pretty happy with the result apart from the dirt on the lens in a bunch of shots - there was one really beautiful one I had to cut just because there was too much dirt.

EDIT: Here's a link to the other film I edited today. It was a good day for editing; I was in the lab from like 2pm until 10pm. So much fun. People all around, fellow CAMS majors... We talked, we edited, we discussed next fall's classes... It was great.

Sam D Makes Another Movie

2010-05-07T17:35:00.000-05:00

The assignment: come up with a universal sounding question, ask it of a bunch of people, then edit together the results. This is the results.

Sam D Makes A Movie

2010-04-23T16:30:00.002-05:00

Turns out I do that from time to time. Actually, this one got made back in the fall, and I just forgot to put it up here. It was always my intention to use this site as a place to store movies I'd made and was proud of, and since I haven't had the time / motivation to write anything as of late I thought this would be an acceptable alternative. There's more of these in the pipeline; I even filmed some today! I never thought holding a boom-mic could be so exciting. And I shock myself by saying that without sarcasm.

Anyway, here's a video:

EDIT: Oh God it's embarrassing to go back and watch that again...
EDIT2: Okay only the voice-overs are really embarrassing, and they were only there because they were required. So I'm going to call this one a net win.

The Ghost Writer

2010-03-28T13:18:00.001-05:00

Not to be confused with Ghost Rider, which is a crappy superhero movie starring Nicholas Cage and sounds pretty much exactly the same when you say it out loud.

Saturday was the last day of my spring break in the sense that it's the day I moved back in to college. Sunday sort of counts, but Sunday is a school night, plus I had to work all afternoon. So Saturday was the last "real" day of my spring break. Coincidentally, it was also the first day of my friend Joey's break, and the only day he was going to be both free and in Minnesota. It was pretty much a given that we'd have to hang out.

Plans weren't really made. We knew eating somewhere nice was a on the agenda, and we knew one of us would have to wrangle up a car. Beyond that, we didn't have much idea of what we'd end up doing. So on the way up to dinner, Joey asked if I'd ever gotten around to seeing Hot Tub Time Machine.

(Damnit Danl)

After a delicious meal at Taste of Thailand in Apple Valley, we drove over to Lakeville to see what was showing. This was the first time I can remember just showing up at a theater and then deciding what to see when I got there. It's a much different experience, but one that I like. It's really just giving yourself over to the idea that you're going for the experience of going to a movie rather than going to see anything in particular. There's an added mini-game of trying to remember what all the movies on the marquee are about and deciding how long you're willing to wait to see something. I quite enjoyed it.

We weighed our options, and eventually decided on a movie I'd never heard of - The Ghost Writer. The plot was something like a young Obi-Wan Kenobi does covert spy work to take down James Bond, who is actually George Bush. Meanwhile the old guy from Eternal Sunshine and Adele DeWitt watch from the sidelines.

Wait a second, scratch that.

Ewan McGergor is an out of work British writer who gets a job as a ghost writer for the memoirs of an old British Prime minister (Pierce Brosnan) after the old ghost writer turns up dead in the ocean. Apparently the old writer was drunk, but if you can't figure out from this premise that he was actually murdered you need to watch more movies.

That plot summary is really great. The whole movie felt the same way - we follow the increadibly likable McGregor around doing odd bits of investigation here and there, and he slowly puts together a giant conspiracy. It's fun to watch, intense. I likened it to the feeling I get playing Myst-style adventure games, where you're constantly snooping around in these places and expecting someone else to show up and ask you what you're doing, to which you will have no good response. There's this ever-present feeling of tension. I like it when a movie can give me that.

About halfway through, I was reminded of Hitchcock. We spend the whole film following this one male protagonist as he is accidentally thrown into a world of political intrigue and deception, then gradually gets his bearings. At all times, we know exactly what he knows - nothing more or less. This is such a Hitchcock thing to do. Not to say that The Ghost Writer was as good as most Hitchcock. It was fun, to be sure, but it wasn't amazing. Great atmosphere from the tension coupled with the color palette, sets, weather, etc. The acting was fine. It came together quite well and in a way that didn't need to use explosions or chase scenes (beyond a choice few that again reminded me of Hitchcock in that they actually seemed reasonable). The clues our hero uncovered were all very reasonable. The only gaping plot hole in the movie came at the very end, literally in the last 2 minutes. For a modern film, I can't ask for much more than all that. I highly recommend.

EDIT: OH snap! I almost forgot my favorite part of this movie. The Observer was in it. Yeah. It was hilarious.

Iron Man (2)

2010-03-14T22:24:00.003-05:00

When the first Iron Man came out, I expected it to be just bad. Iron Man the superhero never really appealed to me - I didn't even know his background, so to me he was just some dude who was... made out of iron? I guess? That's so much lamer than spider powers or shooting lasers out of your eyes. With no hope at all for the movie, I figured it would go the way of The Hulk and not be worth my time.

What I did want to see was Forgetting Sarah Marshall. I loved Knocked Up and wanted more of that. Plus that whole love thing... I like hearing what people have to say about it. Good reviews, a promising premise, and appreciation of Apatow's previous work were likely to come together well.

One day I convinced Marie (I think it was) to go see Sarah Marshall with me. We were at the Key, and naturally asked around to see who else we could drag along. Madelyn was down, and we were working on Kellen. "Can't we see Iron Man?" he pleaded. I was opposed, Marie was torn. Somehow we decided the easiest solution was to just go see both, which led to the first time I've ever snuck into a theater (or rather bought one ticket and stayed for two movies - but that's much less cool sounding).

Sarah Marshall came first and was just as I expected - awesome. It was funny and raunchy but in a good way. That is, it was not so raunchy I can't take it like some of Apatow's stuff. Meanwhile it actually had something to say about relationships. It totally delivered.

We giggled to ourselves as we walked down the hall to the Iron Man theater, arriving suspiciously early and taking our seats while the ushers were still cleaning up. We talked about the last movie, and I prepared myself for the cool explosions of a bad action movie. LITTLE DID I KNOW what was in store for me: the acting genius of Robert Downy Jr. This was before I had seen him in anything before; I would see him in Charlie Bartlett about a week after Iron Man where he absolutely made the movie as a supporting actor. I decided to see everything he'd ever been in, then promptly changed my mind when I realized how long the list was.

Iron Man immediately became my favorite non-Christopher Nolan Batman superhero movie. It had a great script, good acting all around, The Dude jokes, a modern setting, and the amazing, amazing RDJ just stealing the show for a full two hours. They even ended it by breaking the classic modern superhero trope of doing the secret identity thing for a few movies and just let the cat out of the bag right away AND the classic modern superhero trope of having all sorts of angst about the love interest and just let them hook up right away. PLUS they did the Batman thing where everyone is just some messed up dude with technology instead of having super-powers. So great. I was totally blown away.

...

So. A couple months ago the trailer for Iron Man 2 came out, and naturally I became interested in writing about it. I actually started writing this post right when that trailer came out, but then college happened. So you get it now.

Let's check out the trailer:
http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/iron-man-2/trailer

I can't embed it, but you should be able to follow that link if you want to actually see it. What I see is this: more of the the same. Mind you, this is a very good thing. More witty banter, more RDJ kicking ass, more Samuel L Jackson having an eye-patch... more of everything that was so fun about the first. I'm pumped. You should be too.

7 May 2010, here we come.

Blood Simple

2010-03-12T00:25:00.000-06:00

I'm beginning to recognize 90s style. There's a certain film grain to films from that decade and the late 80s. I don't know if it's just better cameras or what, but movies look a bit different these days. Probably just technological improvements; the whole shift to digital has come since then, after all.

Blood Simple is the first movie made by the Coen Brothers, and like most of their movies, [SPOILER ALERT] pretty much everyone dies in the end after a crime gone horribly wrong. This one in particular reminded me a lot of Quentin Tarantino - Reservoir Dogs, to be specific. The time the movie was made is about the same, they both have this crime gone wrong thing, they both end in with lots of people getting killed... There's also the whole scene where the main character is cleaning up his bloody car where I kept thinking of The Cleaner from Pulp Fiction.

I feel in some ways like No Country For Old Men was the Coen Bros way of remaking Blood Simple. The motives behind the killings are very different, but they have lots of similarities. Both are set in Texas. Both start with roaming shots of landscapes voiced over by one of the main characters. Both have a nasty bad guy running around trying to kill everyone. Both involve crimes gone wrong leading to massive amounts of bloodshed.

On the other hand, Blood Simple has music. It has a girl who survives. It has dream sequences and that amazing section where the main guy is burying the other guy (oh my god so creepy). It has driving sequences, though they come straight out of Fargo. Or I guess the ones in Fargo come straight out of here. This movie also has a huge emphasis on sound. The music is crazy atmospheric. There's this recurring motif of a repeating sound beating over and over. It starts with windshield wipers but comes back again as a fan, an alarm clock ticking, and the footfalls of someone in the next room. Very soothing but placed in this context that's so intense. It put me on edge the whole film.

Another thing this movie does really well is setting the scene with little close up shots of all sorts of details. Like when the two men are meeting in the back room of the bar: we see some fish heads. We see the fan. We see a chair. We see one of the men talk. We see a cigarette. All these shots come together to give us a really rich scene.

Man, those pipes at the end of the movie...

And that sequence dealing with the first dead guy's body...

Damn.

Damn, y'all.

Disaster Strikes!

2010-03-02T17:11:00.000-06:00

So it appears that SOMEONE (Danl) is going to SOME STUPID (ly cool) CONVENTION on the opening of Hot Tub Time Machine. This means I really need people to go with. If you're going to be around on the night of Thursday the 25th of March and don't have class the next day, let me know so we can hot tub back to the 80s.

Marie, I'm counting on you for this.

Hitchcock I

2010-02-28T19:53:00.000-06:00

Alfred Hitchcock - a name I have long associated with the greatness of cinema. I italicize the word cinema there to emphasize the fact that appropriate word is most certainly cinema and not film or movies. I first heard about Hitchcock while my dad read The Three Investigators books to me as a boy. This was a Hardy Boys* style series with two main differences.

1. There were three of them instead of two.

2. Each story was bookended by the boys handing off their latest adventure to (a fictional version of) Alfred Hitchcock who would then publish them.

I remember starting one and there being this scene in Hitchcock's office. My dad paused mid paragraph and asked "Do you know who Alfred Hitchcock is?" Nope. So he explained, telling me stories of great masterpieces far beyond the quality of anything I'd ever seen before. There was an implied mysticism and an excited admiration in my dad's voice as he told me how great Vertigo was before we finally got back to the book. I was hooked.

(Probably. I'm sure some sort of scene like that took place.)

A few years later, I saw North By Northwest. This movie is totally boss. It's an action thriller that remains suspenseful in this modern era while steering clear of explosions. Do you know how hard it is to make an action movie these days without explosions? Even non-action movies usually have explosions! Hitchcock did it, like, 50 years ago better than anyone can anymore. Basic plot is that this businessman gets mistaken for someone else in a restaurant... except it turns out that the guy he's been mistaken for is a government spy and the people doing the mistaking are The Bad Guys. Shenanigans ensue, and pretty soon our hero is wanted by the cops and some mysteriously evil dudes. Plus there's a lady and at least one twist. So good.

You go, Cary Grant

I'm fairly sure I was single digits in age when I saw North By Northwest, which means it was a good 5 or 6 years before I saw another Hitchcock movie. Madelyn Hartke, token awesome female of my high school social group, decided one day that we needed to all watch Vertigo. She was enthralled by it, loved it. If it was a person, we said, she would probably marry it. We watched movies all the time, I'd developed an interest in expanding the number of classics I'd seen, and plus she was a girl, so it wasn't hard to convince us to put it in one evening.

She did not enjoy that evening.

Danl and I tore it apart. Dumb jokes flowed like a river out through our mouths as we ripped this classic piece of cinema to shreds, totally destroying any sense of atmosphere that otherwise would have been created. And for a movie that's so much about atmosphere, that meant there was basically nothing left when we were done. Needless to say, Danl and I didn't like it. Madelyn was sore about us not even trying to appreciate the movie she'd been excited about. Overall, a big failure.

Years later, I'd have to watch Vertigo again for my Intro to Cinema and Media Studies class. I expected it to be better this time - the atmosphere would be creepy. I was more mature, more patient with films. I would be looking at themes instead of looking for dumb jokes. But sadly, it sucked just as much as the first time I saw it, except this time I didn't have Danl around to help me joke through it. It's just... It's a weird movie - this is common knowledge. It's about perception and obsession. I think my problem with it is just that I find the characters so alien. I don't identify with anyone, so I don't care about anyone. That kiss shot is really good, to be sure, but that doesn't mean I like the movie. There's a certain amount of pure entertainment I expect from a movie, even one that I'm watching in order to think about. And Vertigo... Vertigo does not reach that level of entertainment for me.

The summer before my Freshman year of college would bring me two more Hitchcock screenings: Rear Window and The Birds. I settled into a summer routine that involved watching lots and lots of movies, and it so happened that one of the people I was doing this with had the complete works of Hitchcock lying around the house.

Rear Window came first. Like Vertigo, this movie had been severely over-hyped for me. It was one of those titles that my dad had mentioned in a thrilling voice every time I asked for a movie suggestion. "Oh yeaAH, Rear Window! What a movie," he'd say. You've got Jimmy Stewart as this cop (ex-cop? Private eye? I can't remember...) who breaks his leg and is confined to a wheel chair in his apartment for a while. So naturally, he starts creeping on the neighbors. Specifically, he starts creeping on this lady who he becomes convinced ends up murdered. Investigations ensue.

After my experience with Vertigo I was skeptical, though this sounded like a better plot. Still, for most of the movie I held the opinion that I didn't like Rear Window either. Then came the final scene, and I realized I'd almost never been this tense watching a movie before. Anything that can make me freak out as much as the last 15 minutes of this movie is very good.

The Birds was different. This is a strange movie when looked at from the modern lens. You can tell while watching it that it must have been creepy, atmospheric, and crazy suspenseful when it came out. It was so widely acclaimed and there's the beginnings of so many modern horror tropes in there, but we all know what's going to happen next since we've spent so long watching all the tropes that evolved from the ones present in The Birds. And then there's the plot, which goes something like "There's a guy. Also there's a girl. Oh, and then the birds start killing everyone all over the world. Have fun with that."

That... that pretty much brings us up to speed. I bring up Hitchcock because I've watched two of his earlier films for my film history class the past couple weeks and they are fine like a hot chick in the 50s. I'm currently in the midst of some deepish analysis of both The 39 Steps and Sabotage, but rest assured I'll report my findings here when I'm done.

Until Hitchcock II!

=====

* I'm so excited for The Hardy Men even though it's probably stuck in development hell.

Toy Story

2010-02-14T20:28:00.000-06:00

I rewatched Toy Story last night; I was hanging out with a friend when his roommate came back with a bunch of people and pulled us to the lounge to watch an old childhood favorite. It was a weird experience.

First thing I noticed was that I could barely remember what happened on a grand scale, but that I could remember each and every shot of the film as it moved on. I always knew exactly - EXACTLY - what was going to be on the screen next. Apparently I saw this movie a lot of times.

Second thing was how much Pixar has improved over the years. I remember Toy Story looking amazing when it came out, but this... This was okay. Everyone moved just fine. Sort of. There was a little bit of uncanny valley going on, and some weird blinking. The backgrounds were very... barren. Not much on the walls, and every shot was from very low to the ground. That makes sense since all the characters are toys, but it made it seem like they'd created a bunch of walls, put wallpaper on them, and then left the world as this bunch of flat surfaces to be populated only with key props as needed.

Third thing was that that next door neighbor kid Sid had a seriously crappy childhood. I remember being terrified of him, but in retrospect I just feel bad that his dad is an alcoholic, his mom is never around to help her children, he only has one shirt, he sleeps in his bed with all his clothes on and no blankets, eats breakfast in his room (old Froot-Loops)... And he takes out all of his anger on his toys. Imagine, then, this kid that clearly needs help, a tortured soul, imagine his TOYS - the one outlet that he has - literally RISE UP AGAINST him, tell him he's a bad person, and threaten to kill him. Yeah. He's not going to grow up to be okay. At least his sister might break out of the trap her family has set for her. She seemed pretty smart, and her abusive older brother stops being abusive by the end of the movie.

Watching the movie with a bunch of physics majors, I also was treated to the many impossabilities of Buzz Lightyear's exploits throughout the film. Turns out he is a magical space hero after all, because that's the only way you'd be able to trash Newton's laws as thoroughly as Buzz does!

Overall, though, fun times. Pixar has come a long way since the 90s.

Fuck Blogger

2010-02-11T20:27:00.000-06:00

Blogger just ate a post I spent 30 minutes writing. Anyone know much about Wordpress or whatever the other blogging options are out there? I've been meaning to switch for a while now anyway.

Academy Awards for 2009

2010-02-04T19:32:00.000-06:00

The reason I started this blog was... okay, there were a lot of reasons. I like to write, I like movies, I like to write about movies, etc. But one of the more prominent reasons was that every year I wrote a giant facebook note detailing my thoughts on the Academy Award nominations, and I wanted a better place to publish it. It's that time of the year, so without further ado go check out this link. I'll be here when you get back.

...

...

Okay, ready?

First thing to note is that Steve Martin and Adam Baldwin are hosting. That's awesome. I think they're both funny, and they seem to work well together in the commercials. There's no writers strike this year so we won't have another "John Stewart has nothing to say and it's awful because there were no writers" 2008 disaster. I don't know, something about the hokey writing for the awards hosts makes me smile even though it's so bad.

Best Picture

Okay. Guys. WHAT THE FUCK. You nominated AVATAR? For Best Picture? What the fuck? I understand that you increased the size of the nominations to 10, and that's great since it means sweet films like District 9 and An Education get more respect. But did you seriously nominated AVATAR? That movie makes me so mad every time I hear people talk about it being anywhere remotely in the neighborhood of good. It was so boring for so long. I want 90 minutes of badassery, not 100 minutes of exposition then 50 of badassery. Damnit.

...

Okay, other than that, I love the Best Picture list. The Blind Side better not win, but I'm happy to see it nominated. Up marks the first animated movie in freaking forever to get nominated, which is like the one thing about the change to 10 nominees I'm happy about. We never would've seen District 9 nominated in previous years, but here it is - that makes 2 legitimate action movies nomianted for Best Picture. That's fine, I just hope I don't live to see the day when something like Avatar is really considred a better movie than A Serious Man by more than the dumb fucks I avoid at school. Inglourious Basterds, nice. I still need to see An Education, but I'm always glad to see Nick Hornby do well. The Hurt Locker is the only one of these I've never heard of, but I guess I'll have to check it out. Maybe not since I don't tend to like "realistic" war movies, but whatever. Finally, Up in the Air is supposed to be great (I'm watching it this weekend), and Precious is fine being nominated though like The Hurt Locker it's not my thing.

Best Actor

Honestly, I haven't seen any of these movies. Awkward.

Best Supporting Actor

Dude, Christoph Waltz for life. He was so good in Inglourious Basterds; easily the best performance of the year. That I saw, anyway. I hope he wins.

Best Actress

Sandra Bullock doesn't deserve this, though I did like her in that role. I hear the Precious woman was really good. Meryl Streep is always good (or so I'm told), but I'm a guy and therefore naturally prejudice against Julie & Julia. Still gotta see An Education so I can make a judgement on the last nominee. This is apparently a running them tonight.

Best Supporting Actress

Haven't seen any of these movies, but Up in the Air got 2 nominations. Shit guys. I need to go see that. Good thing it's safe on my desktop as I type. Also Maggie Gyllenhaal is awesome. Still, I'm not qualified to comment here.

Best Animated Feature

One of these movies was nominated for Best Picture, too. Guess which one is going to win? And that's fine by me; Up deserves it. Never heard of The Secret of Kells. Something to add to the list of things to check out. This is how I found The Triplets of Belleville after all.

Art Direction

Okay, now Avatar can win. Nine and Sherlock Holmes were both real perty, though. Oh, and brief mention of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus: this was the movie Heath Ledger was working on when he died. And it's directed by Terry Gilliam. That's a kickass combination to me.

Cinematography

As a probably cinema major, I should know the differences between Art Direction and Cinematography. But seriously, what are they? Whatever. Inglourious Basterds had real cool cinematography. I think the difference is probably the difference between a movie like that or O Brother, Where Art Thou? and a movie like The Golden Compass or Avatar. Special effects vs style. And on that level, Basterds is better than Avatar. Avatar will still win, though.

Costume Design

I don't care.

Best Director

Tarantino really doesn't need the ego boost, but he probably deserves it. It's hard to see the effects of good direction since they tend to present themselves as other departments doing their job rather than the director doing his/hers. Anyway, I'm again not very qualified to choose a winner here and am again upset that Avatar is on the list.

A Bunch of Awards I Don't Care About

I don't care about them wooooooooo

Except editing. I care about that one, I just don't watch it very closely when viewing the movies and thus don't have an opinion.

Up should win Best Music. Avatar should win Visual Effects. In The Loop should win writing just because I want it to win something. A Serious Man should win the other writing since Inglourious Basterd's strength was not it's writing but rather the art, direction, and acting and Up... Okay, maybe Up should win. This one is tricky. I think I stand by A Serious Man, though, since it's got so much more depth rather than doing one message really well.

That should about do it. Now to decide on the best Oscar's night drinking game...

Up: Animation Isn't Just For Kids

2010-01-28T01:43:00.000-06:00

I've been reading a lot of comics recently. Comics have always had this thing going on where no one takes them seriously. You've got all these great stories like Sandman and Watchmen and all the really famous ones like Maus and Persepolis (or however you spell it), but no one respects them because the medium has such a bad rep. Just because the people who wrote comics in the 30s and 40s made pulp superhero novels doesn't mean that all comics are about superheroes or that all comics are mediocre pulp in quality. There's some seriously good stuff going down out there and a teeny-tiny audience appreciating it. Web comics have helped, but there's still very little in the way of comic "books", graphic novels if you will. Most of the well appreciated stuff is single strip at a time ala xkcd or Questionable Content. One joke a day, soap opera plots at best (good ones mind you), etc. I freakin' love those comics, but I still don't see much in the way of more serious stories being told with comics.

Animation, I feel, is in a very similar boat. People have done awesome things with animation - look at Bugs Bunny, etc. The Simpsons is a landmark television series. Disney has (had?) been winning awards for decades by putting out amazing animated movies. But when you get down to it, there hasn't been a lot of "adult" stories told with animation. It has the reputation of being a medium, you know, for kids. That's fine since it gives us stuff like Beauty and the Beast, Toy Story, and so forth, but there's this huge untapped potential for animation that involves telling the same kinds of heart-wrenching, gotta see 'em love stories, fast paced action, blockbuster, cry-all-the-way-through, beautiful tales that you get in great live action film. Occasionally you get the great innovative piece ala The Triplets of Belleville, but that's not often. Then you've got all the stuff the Japanese have been up to... In fact, if you speak Japanese, a lot of what I've just said is just lies. They're way ahead of us in comics and animation.

Whatever. Animation is a hugely untapped medium for story-telling. Thankfully, the guys who founded Pixar figured this out back in college and have been slowly getting us, the public, ready to accept animated movies for adults. There's always been jokes for the adults - pop culture references if nothing else - but Pixar has been pushing the morals of their stories farther and farther with every movie. The Incredibles was all about suburban life, a topic the depths of which elude most tweens that I know this sort of movie is classically marketed towards. WALL.E was something special. That opening sequence could've just gone on for ages... I feel like the world building they did there was for an ageless audience. Then the lesson about nature was for adults as much as it was for kids. Still felt kiddy once they left Earth, though.

Up, however... Up is not a kids movie. The whole plot is about letting go of the dead. That whole opening montage of Mr. Fredrickson's life is just... beautiful. That sequence is probably entertaining for kids, but I just can't imagine the full impact of it hitting anyone under a certain age. Honestly, I don't believe the full impact will hit me until I'm middle aged at least. Sure the whole movie is peppered with stuff for the kids. The talking dogs, Kevin, most of what's going on with the boyscout... It's all kid stuff. Not that I didn't like it, quite the opposite. It's just that's the sort of kid targeted stuff I've come to expect from animation. I have not come to expect shots like the one of the house floating down through the clouds as Mr. Fredrickson finally lets go of his wife. That's just... That's just amazing.

So bravo, Pixar. Your master plan of introducing animation to adults has finally come to fruition. And I, for one, applaud you for it. Bravo indeed. I loved everything about this movie except for the fact that I had to pause in the middle of it.

Before I go, I want to step back to my more broad points about animation to say that I'm sort of lying. After all, we see more and more CG in every summer blockbuster, and what is CG but animation? Motion capture is blending the line between animation and live action more and more, redefining what we think of as "cinema" at every turn. Already we don't notice the line between the real and the computer generated. And really, who's to say what constitutes "real" on the silver screen? That sounds like a whole paper all by itself. In a couple years, maybe "animation" will be the standard for all films.

Anyway, I just hope the ride through uncanny valley isn't too bumpy.

Watching Movies - With Who?

2010-01-24T11:49:00.000-06:00

There's something about watching movies that has always prevented me from doing so by myself. Somehwere along the line it was ingrained in my head that watching movies is something you do with other people, while playing video games and watching TV is something you do by yourself. As a result, I watch far fewer movies than I'd like. Occasionally I'm able to find an environment where I'm comfortable watching solo - the inspiration for this blog was that I'd started watching movies late at night over the summer. But I've never been able to watch them alone at my home computer.

I can identify a few possible explanations for this. Maybe I think movies are a social experience because I'm more interested in discussing them with people right after they finish, and I can't do that if I watch them by myself. Though this is probably a lie given how most of my post movie discussions can be reduced to

That was pretty good.
Yeah.
[Random funny quote from the movie.]
Haha! [Random other quote, possibly in response to the first one.]
Haha! Yeah.
Yeah...
So... Settlers of Catan, anyone?

Comedies are always better with other people. It's just easier to laugh when other people are around. Your laughter fuels theirs and theirs fuels yours in this loop that exagerates how funny everything is. This is why bad comedians on television still get people laughing at them, and why live readings by David Sedaris are much better than reading his books.

I have this theory that I don't like watching movies by myself is that I don't like pausing movies in the middle, and when I'm by myself I'm always secretly hoping someone will call me up and get me to go do something cool with them. TV is easier because you only have to commit to 45 minutes, and video games can be left. This fits in with the other OCD thing I do where in public places I'm always looking at the entrance to whatever room I'm in checking to see if people I know come in. I'm always hoping for someone to hang out with. I don't know how accurate this is, since there's been plenty of times I've just holed up for the evening with no intention of seeing anyone and still been unable to put on a movie, but I think it's a start. I am weird.

The most likely explanation is just habit. I'm a creature of habit - moreso than anyone else I can think of. I like the routine. I'm totally fine if people invite me to do things, but I don't take the initiative towards the new by myself. And simply put, my routine is that I don't watch movies by myself. To break that routine I would need someone else to step in and break it for me, but by that point we're at least two in number, and the routine hasn't been broken after all.

Whatever the case, I think it's time for a change. I'm tired of having an enormous list of movies to see that only ever gets longer. It's time to sit down, boot up the compy, turn on utorrent, head to the library, badger my friends, or whatever it takes to get me to watch more movies.

A Serious Man

2010-01-21T23:18:00.000-06:00

Wow.

Wow.

...

Wow.

So I'm a total Coen Brothers fanboy. It's cool, I know it's true. If I watched movies by myself more often, I might need an intervention. Thankfully, I usually need other people to help fuel my addiction... Whatever. The point is that I love their erratic story-telling style in which things often happen for no reason, totally out of the blue. In which every character is more often than not bat-shit insane in one way or another. In which we have iPods in the 1960s. I mean, wait, what?

Doesn't matter. A Serious Man is a movie about a middle aged Jewish guy in the 60s who just can't keep it together. Through no fault of his own he just has too many things thrown on to his plate, and all of them just keep dragging him down. It's horrible to watch, but as someone who is currently experiencing that "too many things" syndrome it was nice to watch this guy be much worse off than myself. Really just depressing stuff, folks. And then, in predictable Coen Brothers fashion, everything seems about to get better, then everything gets a lot worse, and then there's a smash cut to credits. Hilarious.

I don't know, man. What does it all mean? I feel like they're almost parodying themselves with the dentist story. It's this bizarre fable that clearly wants an ending, a lesson, but then provides no such thing. The story teller just doesn't give his audience what they're looking for; in fact, the teller doesn't give the audience anything. So what was the freaking point of telling the story? This is what troubles me about the brothers Coen: they keep telling these compelling stories, and I keep being unable to make any sense of them. What were they trying to say? If they're astute enough to make all the clever jokes that they do and to parody their own story-telling style with the second rabbi, why won't they give us some sort of closure? "What did we learn, Palmer?" I don't fuckin' know either.

I guess we can find some sort of moral in that tornado, and the fact that our hero gets that fateful telephone call right as he gives in right at the end of the movie. But is it enough? And what was the deal with the opening fable? Why was that included?

I think I'm not Jewish enough to get all of this movie. Still loved it a lot, though. I'm intentionally keeping this short because this is one of the places where I actually care about spoilers (and I have to go to bed). I'm still kind of just in awe. If you've got stuff you want to talk about from the movie, though, let me know. I'd love to talk about more specific stuff.

The White Messiah Fable

2010-01-08T18:13:00.001-06:00

Someone on Facebook linked me to this excellent article by David Brooks about Avatar and the "White Messiah Fable". It's basically what I wish I'd written in my review of the movie, and you should go read it because it's short and interesting.

EDIT: Credit where credit is do. "Someone" was Hal Edmonson, my RA from last year and an awesome dude.

Year in Review 2009 Edition, Or "Why Didn't I See This, Either?"

2010-01-05T23:50:00.001-06:00

Over Christmas my dad and I sat down (along with some other family spectators) and went over the list of all movies released in 2009 in preparation for the Oscar nominations. Neither of us could remember many good movies that came out this past year, and with the change in number of Best Picture nominees, we were very intrigued by what would likely be nominated. Seriously Academy, why would you up the number of Best Picture nominees in a year as bad for movies as this past one?

Whatever. Just go quickly scan this Wikipedia page so we can all be on the same... page... for the rest of this post.

First reaction: that list of highest grossing films makes me die a little inside. Thanks, society.

Let's move beyond that, though, and take a look at the movie list. Here's all the movies I saw in the order they were released, not the order in which I saw them:

The Class (Entre Les Mures)
Coraline
Watchmen
Duplicity
Star Trek
The Hangover
The Taking of Pelham 123
(500) Days of Summer
The Ugly Truth
Funny People
District 9
Ponyo
Inglourious Basterds
Taking Woodstock
9
Where the Wild Things Are
The Blind Side
Avatar
Sherlock Holmes

And here's all the movies I wish I'd seen but didn't in a similar order:

I Love You, Man
Adventureland
Drag Me to Hell
Up (Why didn't I see this?*)
Public Enemies
The Informant!
The Invention of Lying
Zombieland (Why didn't I see this, either?**)
A Serious Man (Or this?***)
An Education
The Road
Up in the Air
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

I saw a lot of good movies, a lot more than I thought, and I didn't see a lot of movies I wanted to. I saw a lot of chaff, though. I'd say my top 5 movies of 2009 were, in best to also good order:
(500) Days of Summer
Inglourious Basterds
Funny People
Coraline
Sherlock Holmes

It's kind of sad that Holmes made that list. Of course this doesn't include Up, Up in the Air, or A Serious Man, all of which looked fabulous. When you add those to the list of movies that I didn't feel motivated to see but that will certainly be in contention for Best Picture (The Soloist, Invictus), you get a list that may actually have 10 good(ish) movies on it. Not bad.

And now for some related ramblings

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is the project Heath Ledger was working on when he died. It's a Terry Gilliam piece - you know, the guy from Monty Python that made 12 Monkeys and Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas - so it's probably good. Should probs see it.

After getting Forgetting Sarah Marshall for Christmas and lamenting my lack of a copy of (500) Days of Summer, it began to startle me how many of my favorite movies are love stories, usually ones that start with a break up. Those two, High Fidelity, Eternal Sunshine, Harold and Maude... this list goes on. And they're all basically about the same variation on a theme. I guess I'm just in to love. Or maybe it's the way real people interact (or at least the way they think they interact... or the way they want to portray themselves as acting to us... ow my head) is what intrigues me, and that you don't get to see that much in movies that aren't about relationships. Hmm. I guess I like Big Fish more than most of the above movies, and stuff like Inglourious Basterds doesn't have much love going on. Still "hmm" worthy.

I hope Up gets nominated for Best Picture now that they've got 10 to give away. Animation deserves more respect than it gets. Comics, too. Freakin' sweet.

I'm sure there's more to be said, but I've said a lot of it in other articles. How did you feel about 2009 in terms of movies? What deserves to win Best Pic? Other nominations? You can be sure I'll revisit this topic when the Academy starts doing their thing.

Until next time!

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* I don't know.
** Danl saw it without me.
*** It never came out in wider circulation.

Sherlock Holmes

2009-12-25T23:13:00.000-06:00

It looked like a blasphemous interpretation of the source material. It looked like a bad action movie toting a well known lead character to draw audiences since everyone loves watching the same recycled things over and over again. It looked like it could perhaps be made tolerable by the awesome actors they had in the lead roles, but I didn't have my sights set very high.

It was sooo much better than it looked.

This is not to say that it was a great movie. It was fun, things exploded in a cool fashion, the script was never awful, the actors were great, etc. Action movie done right. But action movies done right are still rarely "A" grade material, more like "B+". Sherlock Holmes followed these lines. I walked out of the theater saying it was the "best mediocre movie" I'd seen in a long time, and I stand by that. Maybe I even upgrade that a twinge.

Going in, the biggest concern of many people I knew was that it looked like a desecration of the Holmes of Doyle's stories. Obviously there were changes - it's hard to make a main-stream blockbuster action movie starring a little old man who's basically just really smart. The Holmes of the screen was a snappy badass, running around and through explosions, beating people up, and thoroughly bitter inside. He always had the comeback, he always knew where to land the punch. There was a boxing scene in particular that seemed bad to me. What Sherlock Holmes ever beat the hell out of people in a back-alley boxing arena?

Apparently the Holmes of Doyle's work, according to my sister. I consider her an expert of source material faithfulness in movies since she's such a stickler on the stuff that she likes, and she knows Holmes waaay better than I do. Holmes is a boxer in the stories. There aren't too many explosions in the stories, but that's just a concession it was necessary to make to the silver screen. Overall, I'm told, Robert Downy Jr.'s Holmes is very faithful in spirit to the books; much to my surprise, my sister approved.

There's a moment about a minute into the film where we're really introduced to our protagonist. He's infiltrating some sort of basementy area and there's a guard up ahead. We hear Holmes narrate as we see each action in slow motion:

Head tilted slightly to the left, so he's partially deaf in that ear. That's the first point of attack. Next paralyze the vocal chords to prevent screaming. Probably a heavy drinker, so punch to the weak liver. Final blow to the kneecap. Estimated recovery time: two weeks.

Then we back up to Holmes behind a corner, and he executes everything we've just seen in slow motion but in full speed. It all goes according to plan.

This is exactly how I expect an action hero Holmes to act: he uses his intellect to efficiently and effectively eliminate his enemies. At the time I felt uncomfortable with the idea that this character I knew as an old fart sitting around a fireplace snorting cocaine and noticing miniscule details would be out and about beating the crap out of people. I'm still not totally comfortable with it, but I'm much more accepting. And either way, the scene was awesome.

And that beggar in front of the carriage thing? And the boxing match? And the smoke from the fireplace? All equally awesome.

The music helped with this transition, I think. It was all fiddley-Irishy music at a quick pace as Holmes didn't punch, but slapped his opponents blows out of the way. Light hearted, jumpy, prancing about like a rabbit, this made Holmes feel like a light guy who just knew how to fight rather than a totally ripped action hero. And not just appropriate but a beautiful score, too, and timed wonderfully.

So I've accepted that this Holmes is faithful enough to the source material to deserve my recognition. My big pre-movie concern satisfied. But oh is there more to say. There's so much more.

Let's start with the plot: the big bad evil guy (not Moriarty) aka BBEG has been murdering people in an occult fashion around London. Holmes captures him at the beginning, and BBEG is hanged. Soon after that, he uses his "magic spells" (it's a matter of argument whether he's really using magic or not) to rise from the grave. He resumes killing people magically. Holmes starts tracking the guy down, meets up with the girl, and eventually uses his cunning to track him to the big finale where Holmes saves the day. Pretty standard.

The most interesting thing is this plot's inclusion of magic, making it reminiscent of the Cthulhu / Holmes crossover adventure game I played with Danl and Paul a while back. I never made it all the way through that game, but it's similarity in plot is worth noting. People seem to love combining the logic of Sherlock Holmes with the impossibilities of fantasy. It's a paradox that's very pleasing to the mind. Neil Gaiman wrote a story in such a universe very effectively. This combination of two opposites is a reliable way to make an intriguing premise. Take note, all aspiring story-tellers.

Really, though, the magic is all a lie. This ending is taken straight from The Illusionist, which is again interesting. Has every twist been used before, or is this one just a fun one? The idea that you would start the Sherlock Holmes movie franchise by introducing magic is silly since you're already going to piss a lot of people off with whatever you make. I guess it makes sense. Sherlock Holmes is all about reason triumphing over everything else.

This presence of "magic" had a very unique effect on the feel of the setting. It felt distinctly steampunk. Steampunk is becoming more and more mainstream, and has been for years. I'm glad we're seeing more of it since it's one of my favorite genres. There were similarities to memorable books everywhere I looked. The bureaucratic society of wizards in London of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, the weird magic stuff in the 1800s of The Anubis Gate, the CG look of the backgrounds that resembled so well The Golden Compass, the token anachronism in the form of the stun baton... I loved it all. What was odd was how anachronistic the whole movie felt as a result. This shouldn't come as a surprise - any modern action movie set in the 1800s is going to feel anachronistic, but it opened my eyes in a way that they hadn't before.

Many things felt very 2010 about the film - the seamless use of bullet time during fight scenes, the distortion of the whole audio track when an explosion or a gunshot went off right next to the camera. It felt like you were actually there in a "new" way (I use quotes because I know this effect has been used before, but not as commonly as I'd like). The whole movie is something that's all the rage right now in cinema: take a beloved book, action it up, cast some well known names or attractive young actors, and rake in the dough. They even added this whole magic thing to make it seem more like Harry Potter! This is, like, the defining example of a movie from this time period. It's so perfect. Precisely mixing modern cinema with old familiar characters and stories. It's beautiful.

I was reminded of Inglourious Basterds. As with all of Tarantino's work, Basterds was as much about movies as it was about anything else. One of the central themes was that "this is a movie - it doesn't have to act like the time and place it is set, nor does it have to pretend to. This is a modern movie, and it is being made in 2009, and it is about 2009, and it is however the director wants it to be." My favorite part of this was in the middle of a big gala full of powerful German leaders, titles in what looked like a hand-drawn font would pop up on the screen with arrows and point out the important people and who they were. It's so out of place. It's so wrong. And it's exactly how it's supposed to be. All at the same time.

That is how I felt watching Sherlock Holmes. I felt like the writers / director / whoever were all keenly aware of what they were presenting. The story was not set in the 1800s, it was set in what people in 2009 expect the 1800s to be like, with little patches of falsehood here and there to service the plot.

AND THAT'S NOT ALL! This is all just build up for what is no doubt one of my favorite scenes in modern cinema. Holmes has just finished a ritual he's gotten from BBEG's spellbook, and now the girl and Watson are on the scene. Yes, it's now time for the first of Holmes's big reveals, in which he tells us everything he's discovered so far (but not what he's going to do next!). He talks about how the murders have all been around the city in the shape of a pentagram, how each has represented a different animal that's part of the mythic Sphynx, how the next target is going to be parliament, and how we all must go now to save the day! And what does he do? The whole time he's giving the speech? WHAT DOES HE DO?!

...

He uses a cane.

Bitches.

The Sherlock Holmes of 2009 is channeling House, a character DIRECTLY BASED ON SHERLOCK HOLMES. Holy freaking shit is that meta. That's so meta! That's soooo meta. It's so modern. It's a complete anachronism. It means the writers are consciously putting references to the modern world into their version of the 1800s. It means they were using this other character as a basis for their character, but it's all actually just based on their original character! It's exactly what Inglourious Basterds was telling us about. It's so cool.

This modern feel doesn't end at House references and computer graphics. The way the story is told is a modern way of telling a story. There's bullet time. There's a man hanged to death from a giant bridge by a metal chain - very hard core. There's the presence of magic. Everything about this movie is a 2009 thing, right down the raven that appears whenever a new death is about to be discovered.

This movie made my day.

...

Also, Rachel McAdams is pretty.

Avatar

2009-12-23T23:50:00.001-06:00

No surprises here, kids. If you've heard or seen anything about Avatar you should already know what I'm going to say here.

It looked freaking awesome. Giant blue dudes falling through the jungle, raptors with wings flying through floating mountains, a mech warrior suit Matrix 3 style in a knife fight with a giant panther, amazing lights at night, crazy good motion capture effects, explosions, giant planets bright in the night sky, etc. Hells yeah. It was coolicoolicoolio. At 2 and a half hours it gets a little long, but it's still probably worth seeing just for the effects.

Good thing, too, since the rest of it is trash. The plot is bad and predictable. The science is BS - case and point, the valuable mineral being mined on the wonderful new planet is called unobtainium. I shit you not. The blue aliens are tribal, stereotypical, and otherwise offensive whether you interpret them as Africans or Native Americans. It doesn't matter; they've got headdresses and a deep resounding connection with their nature god either way. Then there's the half-hearted attempt at a typical mother nature theme. Basically it goes: people who like nature - good! People who blow up giant trees - baaaad. My sister said she left the theater "offended as a person and a scientist". She tends to get worked up about these sorts of things, though. I mean, after all, the point is that it looked really cool.

The story reminded me of Princess Mononoke much more than it should have. Mononoke actually has substance to its plot, but I felt like the message (if there was one) was predominantly the same. Also, there were moments when it felt a little like Dollhouse. I kept waiting for the avatar body to develop a consciousness of its own and start calling itself Echo. Of course that'd be way too interesting for an action flick like this, so instead we just watched Jake "learn the ways of The People". There were definitely traces of Star Wars Episode 2 where you got the feeling that the director should be in charge of every visual effect you lay eyes on for the next decade but that he needed to be tied up out back while someone else wrote a half-way decent script.

That's a lot of other source materials that Avatar felt like. Maybe I'm becoming more well versed in movies, but I find it much more likely that Hollywood is just recycling the same crap it always has and that I'm just starting to realize that it's visuals too, not just plots, actors, and scripts.

EDIT: Oh man, 2 things I forgot. First, the planet is named Pandora, prompting me to wonder where all the skaags were (and more importantly Danl). Second, that tree network giant computer ecosystem thingy was pretty sweet until I remembered it was just that Myst 3 world, again prompting me to wonder where Danl was.

Movie Trailers #8

2009-12-20T01:39:00.000-06:00

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Cool effects? Check?
Modern setting fantasy? Check.
More cool effects? Check?
Anyone starring except Nicolas Cage? Ch...god damnit, this movie almost looked like a fun action flick. I was all ready to maybe get a decent plot out of it but be content with just a fun setting, then they go and ruin it by casting Nicolas Cage. I don't know, maybe if the guy had more than one tone of voice I'd respect him. And it's not like everything he touches turns to dust; he's like Jim Carrey - capably of putting out the occasional great movie (Adaptation, The Weatherman, Matchstick Men, or in Carrey's case Eternal Sunshine), but usually annoying as hell. With Cage, action movies are probably going to go the National Treasure route instead of the quality route. I guess I liked seeing National Treasure with my family on Thanksgiving, though, so there may be a place for this movie, too.

Greenberg

I feel like I'll be a bit young to truly appreciate this movie. I've repeatedly seen "shit, I'm getting old" movies done well, and I repeatedly like them, and I repeatedly feel left out of the loop. Probably because, you know, I'm 19. Still, as I said, they're often good. Melancholy comedies are pretty much my bread and butter of favorite movies, I almost always like Ben Stiller, etc. It'll be nice to see him as something other than this

or this

It sometimes seems like the guy only has two characters. And I wouldn't like him so much if I didn't like those characters, but I know he's capable of more. Or at least, that was my impression. Maybe I'm wrong - I can't remember the last thing I saw him in where he wasn't either a nut-job or a bumbling romantic comedy lead.

Point is, I wah see Greenberg.

I guess that's all I've got for now; I wrote most of this a couple of days ago and haven't found any more trailers I care about in the mean time. Bad romance / rom-coms are about it. Next time let's check out the Christmas season movie options.

Hot Tub Time Machine: New Trailer

2009-12-17T13:10:00.000-06:00

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Oh man, what (")great(") jokes. What hilarious time travel shenanigans. My anticipation grows with every moment.

New news: the release date has changed to March 19th, 2010. I don't know about you, but that's the first week of my spring break. PARTY TIME? I think yes. Just gotta make sure Danl is on break, too. If not, looks like I'll be in Iowa for part of spring break.

Duplicity

2009-12-16T22:02:00.000-06:00

I honestly don't remember what this movie was about. I think it was pretty unnecessarily confusing, though.

Also, I've never liked that SAM'S VERDICT thing that I do. Probably time to stop doing that and just making people judge what I say by what I say instead of a one sentence summary. If I want people to read a one sentence summary, I'll write them a one sentence summary. What idiot made it a requirement, anyway?

PS: Dollhouse season 2 is super duper good. Like, super duper. Get on that.

The Blind Side

2009-12-15T22:00:00.002-06:00

This is the one with Sandra Bullock doing a southern accent. Quite admirably, I might add. If you’d seen her in lots of other stuff it might be hard to adjust to, but it sounded natural enough to me.

The previews make this look like another bad sports story movie. Southern white woman takes in poor black kid, buys him stuff, fixes him up, makes him a football star, and then the cast of characters together overcomes whatever twist begins the third act. I’ll be honest, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. The Blind Side follows this plot to a tee but turns out to be enjoyable all the same.

Hold that thought: it bothers me how much I seem to open these reviews with a paragraph like that one. I describe some stereotypical movie formula, say that whatever I’m reviewing fits said formula like a glove, and then follow that up with a “but it wasn’t that bad”. Apparently formulas work. That must be why Hollywood keeps using them.

Back to the review. Actually, do I even need to go back to the review? If you’ve ever seen a movie about a disadvantaged person coming from behind and overcoming obstacles to become some sort of hero, you know exactly how this movie will go. And holy balls is there a lot of movies about that. There’s a lot of books, comics, verbal tales, etc about that. That’s, like, one of the most basic story arch-types. It’s a good’un. This one doesn’t stick out much, but it does have uniquenesses(amases). Sandra Bullock’s character is great. It’s not a new character, but she plays a mean tough modern woman doing what she thinks is right. The story focuses a lot more on the home life of the characters rather than football, which I prefer.

Yeah.

On the flip side, there’s some probably racially insensitive black thugs, a really dumb excuse for the cops to get involved with our heroes, and some really odd “look at us, we’re in a southern movie; isn’t that wacky?” moments. Like, they hire this old woman to tutor the poor black kid when he needs better grades to get into college, and there’s this awkward moment where Sandra is about to hire her. The tutor lady goes “now before you hire me, there’s something you should know… I’m… I’m a democrat”. This is set up as a total *gasp* moment, which is kind of weird. I felt kind of offended for southerners.

Anyway, it was good.

SAM’S VERDICT: It’s the good version of exactly what you‘d expect from the back of the DVD box.

Lars and the Real Girl

2009-12-02T22:38:00.000-06:00

Nice. Nice.

So Lars is an anti-social guy. Kinda weird. Actually, it turns out he's SUPER weird when he orders a Real Doll and starts insisting "Bianca" is his half Danish half Brazilian girlfriend. Yeah. There's a brother who's gruff and mad about the whole thing and who looks like Sylar. There's a sister in law who's very maternal. Actually breathing love interest at the office. Creepy friend as a cubical roommate. Kind old woman psychiatrist. And so on. The plot is predictable - every side character gets a scene or three depending on their importance in which they interact with Bianca and Lars. Lars ends up falling for the office girl who has had a crush on him since before she appeared on screen, they go on a date, and eventually he finds a way to remove Bianca from the picture.

Lars and the Real Girl is marketed as a comedy, and I guess it is. It's... light-hearted, I guess. There are some funny moments. I think it's less a comedy and more just a story. A well told story, at that. Whether or not you like the premise, and I think you do, it's a well told story. The pace is oddly slow; the moments that could have made for an odd-ball million dollar budget shitty rom-com are instead played for emotion, and it shows. By the end of the film, I was cheering for everyone even though most of them were pretty one or two dimensional. The acting, the script, and everything else made me emotionally invested in the characters in a way that not many movies have in the modern day. I didn't expect everything to work out in the way I do a lot of the time, I really wanted everything to work out. Spoiler alert: it did.

Okay, reality check, the premise is stupidly unrealistic. Lars' "delusion" is weird and more a good gimmick for a movie than something that could actually happen. Let's suspend our disbelief for that, though, and take one step closer. If Lars did start dating a Real Doll named Bianca, I don't think the whole town would be so supportive. Someone would be an asshole and shoot him down. There's dozens of people working together to support his insanity in the film, and that just seems... not likely.

But maybe that's the message of the movie - people are willing to love and support each other like that. Maybe we forget how much (most) other people are willing to help when we need them. We forget how much they care, and how much we care about others.

In the end, it doesn't matter whether the plot is realistic or not, because I believed it enough as I was watching the movie. The story was told well enough that I didn't notice or care about the plot holes enough to worry about them. I was too busy thinking about Lars and the people in his life. Most movies are ridiculously fake, and we go to them for the spectacle. This is a movie that's just pretty fake, and I watched it to hear the tale and listen to what the writer had to say. I liked what I heard.

SAM'S VERDICT: Well told, optimistic, and cute. Unless you have an aversion to that last one, you'll probably like it.

Also, what is up with these girls I keep seeing in the movies? Evidently there's some pretty girl in every shy guy's life who is just not noticed by said guy but who would be perfect for him. Have I always been that oblivious or has Hollywood LIED TO ME YET AGAIN?

...probably both.

Term-In Review: Quick Hits

2009-11-26T11:49:00.000-06:00

Apparently college is time consuming. As you may or may not have noticed, this slowed down my posting a lot the past couple months. But have no fear! I am now on winter break, so I'll be stuffing my empty days with movies and blogging again in no time. I'm running out of ideas so you should suggest those, but in the mean time I'm going to do some quick notes on all the stuff I saw this term but didn't blog about.

Miller's Crossing: still good. Great gangster motifs. It's always fun to watch one guy completely control (or at least try to) a situation in the way that our hero does in this film. Coen brothers are awesome, and so are most of the actors they use regularly. Very violent at the end, though.

Blue Velvet: Yeaaaaaah... not recommended for a date movie. Just because I was able to watch this movie with a girl and salvage the situation into a relationship hours later doesn't mean you will be able to. It took some serious Joss Whedon smoothing over in there to make that happen. I guess if you're in to severed ears, crazy people, the 80s, crazy people, drugs, relationship abuse, creepy stalker college kids, and crazy people, by all means go for it. Otherwise steer clear unless you feel the need to pad your cinema buff resume.

When Harry Met Sally: Yup, it's the mother of all modern romantic comedies. There's a reason everyone else takes after it, you know. It's that it's a pretty good movie. Sure the plot is just "guy meets girl, they have a friendship, eventually they get married," but there's a lot of scenes in there with real character that most modern romcoms lack. Harry being divorced right off the bat is odd. Now-a-days, we'd want to have the perfect man as our star, not the every man. Then there's the restaurant scene, that opening road trip, and that scene with the wagon wheel table... I like all of 'em. Worth seeing, even if you are an emotionless hag (DANL).

Entre Les Murs: Another one for my French class. Very stylized movie about the modern school system in France. Lots to say about what works with rowdy middle school kids, what doesn't, and what the system is doing wrong. Very grim. No music. Cool camera work (think The Office style faux-documentary stuff). Depressing, but interesting if you've got a thing for teaching.

High Fidelity: Still one of my favorite movies, partially because I can watch it every 6 months and still love it. If you haven't seen this yet, please leave now and get on that.

Is that really all I've seen? Apparently I've had even less free time this term than I thought. Just a movie every other week on average. I've been filling my free time with TV shows and video games. Couple new TV shows, though. I can blog about those, too!

Angel: Ah, the Buffy spin-off I never watched. It's... pretty much exactly the same as Buffy. The second best character is the ghost in Cordelia's house, a good running gag. Not much to say other than if you want more Buffy but have finished Buffy, you can get more by watching Angel. Huzzah.

Supernatural: Two brothers wander around the country fighting ghosts. Very X-Files-esque, though more mid-western. Instead of being in this central urban government setting at the beginning and end of each episode, our heroes are constantly out in the boonies. They live off credit card scams, charity, and petty theft. A different enough setup to do some new things with the characters. The first season involves them looking for their missing dad, which adds this whole quest aspect to the show that's always lurking in the background. Still pretty standard TV horror plots, but it's fun. The second season gets more in the way of long term plot, and I hear it only goes up from there. For the record, it's currently airing season 5, which is also the end of the creator's initial long term plot idea.

That's more like it. 7 things to talk about when 2 of them are TV shows? I can live with that. Sorry I never got you guys another trailers post before Thanksgiving; I know my family always goes to a movie after dinner on turkey day, and it'd be nice to have some advice as to what sucks and what's cool. SORRY I COULDN'T PROVIDE.

Au Revoir Les Enfants (et des autres choses)

2009-11-22T12:49:00.001-06:00

I watched this movie for my French class. Actually, we had to read the novelization of this movie for my French class. We watched most of the movie, too, but the main point was to do reading. Traditionally when I have to read a book for a class, I end up hating it. Part of this is because times change, and old books no longer had the appeal they once did. Part of this is because I hate being forced to do anything, especially on a schedule not of my own devising. Part of this is because English teachers aren't traditionally good at picking books high school guys want to read.

They didn't tell us it was a novelization when we started reading it, or maybe that bit was just lost in translation for me. Either way, I figured out what was up about a third of the way through the book and promptly torrented the original movie with subtitles. I'm more of a movie than book person.

I was impressed. Maybe it's just that a movie is so much easier for me than a book, but maybe the movie was just really good. I liked it.

The plot is a cross between a stereotypical boarding school story and stereotypical "hide the Jews from the Nazis" story. There's a boarding school and a kid at it. Kid is secretly unhappy but also the coolest kid in his class. New kid shows up, starts getting picked on by other kids. Main character kid starts seeing subtle hints that new kid may be a "Jew" (quotes because he's not actually sure what that means), and eventually they become friends after a capture the flag game gone wrong ends with them both lost on a bonding experience in the woods. Main character kid starts to get the implications of new kid being Jewish just in time for their friendship to blossom and the Nazis to show up and take new kid away. Loss of innocence, etc, etc.

Let's get the pesky review part over with quick.

SAM'S VERDICT: It was good if you like boarding school movies. I don't mind them.

The big question this movie raised for me was "why can stereotypical plots be so good or so bad depending on how they're used?" There wasn't a single twist in this movie I didn't see coming, and I predicted most of the key scenes within the first 15 minutes. Yet in the end, I still liked it. In fact, as I watch more and more movies, I get better and better at predicting everything before it happens. And if I can tell what's going to happen before it occurs, then what's the point of seeing the movie? Why not just read a blurb about it and construct it in my head, then get back to playing video games?

It's always fun to watch stories unfold, even if you know where they're going. It's the same reason (some) people enjoy watching the same movies over and over. The familiarity of a story can be comforting, and thinking about an old plot in a new way can also be worth your while. Predictable plots can also let us focus on some other part of the film - action movies all have similar plots so that we can keep our minds on the explosions, and Disney movies all have similar plots so that we can keep our minds on making sure our 3 year old doesn't choke on something. Also the music.

Beyond that, it's fun to watch a predictable movie you haven't seen before because there's always the chance that they'll defy your expectations, that this time you really will be surprised. We have to put up with the predictability of most movies so that the few that cut through all that have something to stand against. If everything was unpredictable, then unpredictability would become the new predictability. There has to be a base line for the top 5 contenders.

I think familiarity is the biggest reason. People don't like change.

Top 5 Villains

2009-10-22T16:23:00.000-05:00

I started this post with the intent to make a list of what I thought were the top 5 most iconic villains in film. Yeah, that didn't turn out well. Turns out the American Film Institute made a list of the 50 greatest villains rather than 5, and it still leaves out some of my favorites. Not to mention it was created before The Dark Knight came out.
What's a guy to do? Change the criteria is the most obvious answer, so that's what I'll do. There's iconic villains, and then there's my favorite villains. The Wicked Witch of the West is an obvious inclusion on the first while someone like The Underminer might only make it to the second, and it takes someone (or thing) special to straddle both.

Top 5 Favorite Movie Villains
The Joker (The Dark Knight)
Cruella DeVil (101 Dalmations)
Kaizer Soze (The Usual Suspects)
Tyler Durden (Fight Club)
Darth Vader (Star Wars)

Honorable Mention to Mr. Jones (Fringe) who is bumped off the list because he comes from TV rather than a movie.

I'd be happy to talk about my choices more if anyone has questions, but I think this should be pretty self explanatory. I love twist endings, apparently. Also Cruella is a scary bitch. Let me know who I'm forgetting or if there's another Disney villain I should give Curella's spot to. For reference, here's the basic list of contenders I whipped up before compiling the above 5:

Inglourious Basterds Nazi dude
Hannible Lector (Silence of the Lambs)
Mr. Jones (Fringe)
The Joker (The Dark Knight)
Wicked Witch of the West
Darth Vader (Star Wars)
Voldemort (Harry Potter)
Tyler Durden (Fight Club)
Agent Smith (The Matrix)
Bill (Kill Bill)
Hans Gruber (Die Hard)
Dr. No (Dr. No)
HAL 9000
Jack Torrance
Cruella DeVil
Kaizer Soze (The Usual Suspects)

Where The Wild Things Are

2009-10-19T19:51:00.001-05:00

When I first saw the trailer for this movie, I was blown away. What a remarkable trailer - it seemed full of the imaginative world of the wild things, full of discovery. The soundtrack was perfect, and it looked like the director may have tried to do something a bit dark with the story. Lord knows I love a good corrupted children's story from time to time. Still, I expected that what I saw in the trailer was about all I'd ever need to see of Where The Wild Things Are. It is, after all, a 7 sentence long story. No matter how awesome the guy who made the trailer was, it was unlikely they'd be able to pull 90 quality minutes out of 7 sentences.

Turns out I was dead on in my expectations. It was cool to see them try something other than your traditional uplifting kids story and play with the themes of divorce and the loneliness of childhood, but as I foretold, 7 sentences do not a 90 minute movie make. There was a lot of space and boredom to be had, so I used the time to practice not being embarrassed in public.

No matter how the movie actually was, the puppets looked amazing. It was reminiscent of the giant puppet parade I used to see as a child up in the cities. Great big things that move both like people and like puppets at the same time and inspire wonder. The CG they did with the mouths, too... very impressive. It legitimately looks like the giant live action monsters are moving their mouths as they speak, and not just in a Kermit the Frog up and down way. I mean a forming of each syllable way. Very cool.

There were some surprisingly dark scenes. The end was just kind of sad, and it's not a totally happy ending. Max doesn't solve any of his problems, he just learns that freaking out isn't the best way to deal with them. My favorite part of the movie, however, is this almost The Talented Mr. Ripley moment where the main wild thing freaks out and tears another guy's arm off. In a PG movie. Then it starts "bleeding" this white goop... it's scarey, man. Plus, after that, the guy who's now missing an arm doesn't, say, reattach his arm. Oh no. He grabs a stick that looks sort of like an arm and wears it around in his shoulder socket like a snowman. What the crap, guys.

The most infuriating part of the movie were the voices. I recognized almost everyone, but couldn't remember from where. IMDB saved me from tearing my ears out after I'd gotten home. This is a common phenomenon: recognizing a voice is easy, but pinpointing who's voice it is without their face there on the screen is much harder. Anyway, this seems to me like prime time to play another round of

Spot The Actor

I'll post a picture (and maybe a youtube link to give you the voices), and you tell me who that actor is or what else they've been in. Hoo Ha!

In order, we have Carol, Douglas, Judith, KW, The Bull, Alexander, and Ira. I think. If those names are wrong I'll be very sad, but what can you do. I know I at least thought I recognized the voices of Carol, KW, Judith and Ira, but I couldn't place any of them without IMDB help. What about you?

But yeah. Pretty mediocre movie. Like most modern pop culture films, it looks great and is only tolerable in the long run. At least they tried new stuff even if it didn't pan out too well for them.

SAM'S VERDICT: It's a kids movie, guys. And not one made by Disney or Pixar. What were you expecting?

Girlfriend thought it was cute, at least. Though Ponyo is probably a better choice if that's what you're in the mood for.

Spot The Actor Answers:
1. James Gandolfini. The Soprano's star. Also the American general from In The Loop.
2. Chris Cooper. I saw him in Breach a few years ago.
3. Catherine O'Hara. I think I know her best from the Waiting for Guffman documentaries.
4. Lauren Ambrose. Apparently she was in Cold Souls, but I don't recognize her.
5. No one actually cares who this guy was.
6. Paul Dano of Little Miss Sunshine fame. Nice 5 degrees of Kevin Bacon connection with Steve Carell.
7. Forest Whitaker. He's probably famous, but I don't know who he is.

Fall TV Shows Part 2

2009-10-05T14:52:00.000-05:00

Picking up where we left of last time. This has a bit of a misleading name since it turns out 2 of my 3 remaining shows don't air until Februaryish. Lame!

Chuck

Chuck is a pretty awesome show, guys. One part romantic comedy, one part spy movie, and one part nerd herd.

Yeah, that's right. The premise is that regular guy Chuck Bartowski works at the local Buy More (aka Best Buy) as a Nerd Herd (Geek Squad) tech support guy. Yes they have cute little cars. One day he's being depressed about getting kicked out of Stanford and being dumped by his true love college girlfriend when he gets an email from his former roommate. It's got an attachment which Chuck opens, and it turns out to be full of all sorts of government secrets. Also happens that the original database was destroyed, so now he's the only copy. CIA agent Adam Baldwin (Jayne) and FBI agent Sarah Walker (love interest) are assigned to protect him. Chuck starts leading a secret undercover spy life while still trying to keep his normal stuff going, and he's adorably incompetent but also surprisingly good at being a spy. Then there's all sorts of sexual tension between him and the FBI lady because there's definitely feelings there but they can't be together because she works for the FBI and also her cover story for sticking around is being Chuck's girlfriend. Hilarious. Each episode there's also a subplot with Chuck's nerdy coworkers at the Buy More and the shenanigans they get themselves into which.

Overall, it's super forumulaic. Good thing the forumla works so well then. So well, in fact, that it wasn't until the end of season 2 (the most recent one) that I felt like they really needed to switch things up. Then they promptly did so at the end of season 2, so... there you go! Only problem left is that it only got renewed for another half season. God knows why; there's a ridiculous fanbase for a show that's so casually predictable and laid back, and it seems like the kind of thing tons of people would watch. Apparently there were issues with what it was scheduled up against. Dumb reason to kill a show if you ask me, especially given how accessable Chuck is. The tropes are so obvious you could probably jump in to the middle of any episode in the series and write the first half from memory of other stuff you've seen. What makes the show so impressive is that it's fun even though it's so predictable. It's like Bond movies and good rom-coms in that way the same way it is in content. Fun stuff.

This is the one that doesn't come back on until February in case you were wondering.

Castle

Yay Mal! Honestly, it's surprising even to me that I started watching Castle. The initial spots for it I saw on Hulu were... well, now that I think about it, a great way to sumarize the show. Take a bad cop show premise - she's an ice-queen badass New York cop with a tragic past; he's an easy going murder mystery writer millionaire who's in need of a new thrill and decides to follow her around as inspiration for his next series - and then throw in two leads with great chemistry. Nathon Fillion is really impresive; I thought for a while he might just be an okay actor who got lucky enough to work on Firefly, but it turns out he can hold his own with bad scripts, too. The female lead is also great, but no one cares about her as much because she's not Captain Hammer.

So yeah. Meh scripts at best, the occasional fun puzzle of a murder, and two leads that compliment each other perfectly. The fun is just watching the banter of the show. Lesson learned: line delivery can make a show all on its own. Oh, and Fillion's character has a great family, too. Smart, good looking high school daughter who can also hold her own in the banter category and mother reminescent of Lucille Bluth several notches down on the horrible person scale. Both of them live with him, so there's fun home life scenes. Then there's the poker group for famous writers...

Why are poker scenes so fun to watch? They're all so predictable and bad. Guess it means I should start playing that game. Probably pay my way through college.

Where was I? Castle. Something stupidly fun to watch if you like watching TV. I might call it the best mediocre show on television right now. Then again, I don't watch much mediocre television so how would I know?

Lost

Yeah, I watch it. If you want to talk to me about it, I'm always free for a Lost conversation. You probably know exactly what you think of this show, though. If not, go watch it. Oh, and I've got some paint you can furnish the underside of your rock with; I imagine it's a little stale down there unchanged for 5 years now.

That's what I watch. Oh, also Venture Bros, but that one probably deserves its own post. Other good shows I've seen all of: Cowboy Bebop, Firefly, Buffy, Flight of the Conchords (note: may or may not actually be good), and all the others I'm forgetting. I recommend them all.

The Hangover and The Saturday Night Fever Effect

2009-10-04T11:12:00.001-05:00

I'm sure you've heard of The Hangover if you paid any attention to the 2009 summer movie season. When the trailers came out in the spring, it looked like another one of those atrocious movies where a couple of guys get really drunk, forget their wild and crazy night, then have to piece together what happened over the course of the movie. I've never seen one of these movies get acceptable reviews, and the quick plot summary isn't interesting enough to get me to go see one. Thus, I assume they're all awful.

When The Hangover came out, this was the generally accepted way of thinking about it. "Doesn't that look terrible?" could've been its tag-line. But then something happened: people started seeing it and liked what they saw. Reviews popped up all over the place praising it. Friends of all kinds said it was the must see comedy of the summer. It was apparently the funniest thing ever, and therefore I felt a little guilty when I never got around to seeing it. And let's face it: this is not the kind of movie I'd pick up from a video rental place.

Fall came and I returned to college. Carleton has this awesome program called SUMO. Don't ask me what it stands for, but what it does is find two movies a weekend that are either somewhere between theater and DVD release or classically awesome and screen them multiple times over Friday and Saturday. It's a great thing to do if you're bored on a weekend night, especially if you like movies. Since that last sentence seems to specifically describe me, I tend to go to a lot of SUMO movies. This week, as you no doubt have guessed, they showed The Hangover.

I wasn't even planning on going, to be honest. Few of my friends wanted to see it, and I still wasn't intrigued enough to check it out myself. After all, what's sadder than seeing a guy bonding movie all by yourself*? Then 11:30 on Friday night rolled around, and I happened upon a friend making her way over to the Olin lecture hall to attempt to stay awake through the subject of today's review. (Generally the drunk people yelling at the screen help with that awake thing.) I followed her over, and...

What a mediocre movie. I mean, I liked it, but it was super average. The plot is nothing we haven't seen plenty of times before. The crazy antics of the night before are exactly what you'd expect from a blackout bachelor party set in the silver screen version of Vegas. The jokes made me smile but rarely laugh. What was so wonderful about this movie that it made so many people recommend it to me?

Here's my theory. I believe this is a perfect case of The Saturday Night Fever Effect at work. A term stolen from the book First Among Sequels in which the characters discuss the movie their effect is named for. The idea is that if you go in expecting Saturday Night Fever to suck, then it will be great - an eternal classic. But if you go in expecting that classic status, it turns out to suck. Expectations completely change your opinion of a work. I've seen this thing at work even on movies I've seen before. When I saw the first Harry Potter movie, I thought it was bad. A week later when I saw it again, I thought it wasn't half bad. This is because the first time my expectations were through the roof, and the second time they were in the toilet.

I think The Hangover is a victim of this effect. People must have gone in expecting crap since that's what the preview seems to promise. Then when it wasn't crap, they told everyone it was solid gold. Then everyone else went expecting solid gold and, well, it didn't deliver.

Perhaps I'm over thinking this. Maybe the people that actually went and saw it were just the kind of people that goes to a movie like The Hangover even before they've heard it's good. These people would be used to low quality films, so an average one would knock their socks off. They told their friends, and their friends went and found what was actually there: a few laughs and tolerability.

Whatever the case, The Hangover is an okay movie. The important thing to take away here is that I want to study the way expectations shape our experiences. Such a cool idea. I'm trying to think of other movies that have been colored by what I've heard about them, but I'm falling short. Catch-22 wasn't great for me probably because the book was so amazing. That's a common occurrence with adaptations, I think. I bet I wouldn't hate Spiderman 3 as much as everyone else does since I'd go in expecting nothing. Little help, anyone?

SAM'S VERDICT: Okay. Delivers exactly what it promises.

*Answer: twelve dead puppies**.
**Be glad I didn't go with my original answer***.
***You thought this was going to be the original answer, didn't you? Instead I'm just going to say "WOOOO NESTED FOOTNOTES".

An Evening With The Coen Brothers

2009-10-02T19:48:00.004-05:00

week ago I went to the Walker to see the Coen Brothers. Live. Talking about movies. This started to come about a few months ago when my dad told me about this 25th(?) anniversary of Blood Simple talk they were giving. Apparently my parents are members of the Walker, so they got first crack at the stupidly expensive tickets. Yay massive disposable income. My mom didn't especially want to go, so my dad said he'd get 3 tickets and that if my sister didn't want the 3rd I could bring someone from college.

An interesting conundrum! Who would I invite? I have several friends from town who I'd love to bring to a talk like that. DBlock and Joey come to mind, and Danl is not a bad backup. Sadly none of them were in town, so I started thinking of people at Carleton. Turns out most of my friends here are either not very interested in movies or I don't know well enough to invite on what looks sort of like a date except my dad is there, too. Awkward. (Yes, the majority of the college people I like spending time with are girls, so that last sentence makes sense.) Silly me, I'd forgotten Joey was going to Olaf this year and didn't get around to inviting him until he was already busy with rehearsal for some unspecified thing. Lame. Turns out my sister took the ticket anyway, so no harm done. I like the theoretical question, though. You've got an extra ticket to some cool thing that you're going to with a parent. Which of your friends do you offer the ticket to? Almost like one of those boundaries things. Once I know you well enough to offer you that ticket, I know we're tight.

We left early so we could eat Thai food for dinner. It wasn't the greatest, but I like most anything branded as Thai food. Plus, free meals. That means so much to a college student. It was rainy and cold out, which sucks. I remember last year we had such a beautiful fall and this year it's just dreary. Stupid Minnesota getting my hopes up.

The line to get into the performance hall was long even though we were 10 minutes before doors opened. Everyone was dressed up except me in my unicorn-riding-a-motorcycle t-shirt. Also everyone was suspiciously middle aged. Given the price of the tickets I'm not surprised. I'm probably one of the few kids who would've tried to get tickets to this thing at 17, so I don't know what I was expecting. Different age groups are just scary.

They had this slide show on the giant screen going for the 30 minutes before the talk that showed pictures of all the other people the Walker had had come for this lecture series. Elena and I talked about how creepy that one guy looked. You know the guy. This guy:

Holy shit, guys. That guy is freaky looking. John Waters of Pink Flamingos fame. I still haven't seen that, but judging by what I've heard that's a good thing. I recognized maybe a 3rd of the people.

After way too long, someone finally came out on stage and started introducing the men of the hour. Blah blah blah, they're awesome, go see their new movie, this was the room Blood Simple premiered in, etc. Shut up and give me my Coen Brothers, lady. She complied with my request pretty quickly, and voila! There they were! Huzzah! Standing ovation!

This other guy came out with them. Some movie critic who was there to ask them questions so they'd have something to talk about. Problem was, he was all "oooo, film theory" and they were all "yeah, we pretty much just like telling stories. Aren't stories awesome? We like reading, too." Then the critic would go "yeah, what about this thing? What about that film theory thing?" and they'd go "yeah. Um... yeah?"

My favorite exchange pretty well summed up the whole night. The critic plays this clip from Miller's Crossing where an Irish gangster's house gets shot up while Danny Boy plays in the background. It's a great scene, beautifully timed to the music and very important to the movie. This guy gets shot like 100 times by a tommy gun at one point but the movie is stylized like that so it's okay. Anyway, great scene. This gets shown and the critic asks "Why Danny Boy?" to which they reply "Um... because he's Irish?"

Overall, a bit disappointing. I felt like I didn't get a whole lot out of it. It was hilarious just how casual they were - just a couple of guys that make movies doing their thing. Hopeful, in a way, because it means maybe I can be that guy some day. I just gotta go find me a friend to write with. That's what college is for, though. Right?

Quick Time Travel Link

2009-10-02T00:18:00.000-05:00

Yahtzee summarizes what I was trying to say in my Index of philosophies in about 1/1000th the words. Start around 50 seconds, then obsoive:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/957-Darkest-of-Days

The Informant

2009-09-24T10:53:00.001-05:00

I think my favorite regular program of any kind is This American Life. The show is just... they're so good at capturing those moments in life that make you feel warm inside, and those that make a shiver run up your spine. The modern independent radio story is more or less a carbon copy of the stuff TAL has been doing for years. If you've never heard their stuff before, go subscribe to their podcast right now. It's the best thing you'll listen to all week every week, and you can appreciate it while taking a walk. It's probably the only thing that gets me out and about some weeks.

"But Sam," you say. "This is a blog about movies! Why are you talking about a radio show? Well I think I made it pretty clear in my last post that I'm not above branching out in my subject matter. There's plenty of stuff out there that acts like a movie but isn't. To be sure, radio is a step further away from movies than TV is, but it's still in the same spectrum of story-telling. That's what I'm interested in in the first place - story telling. It's just that I like forms that get told to me in 2 hours rather than books I have to read over weeks. I'm from generation X; I'm impatient and easily distracted.

There's more than that, though. I put on this week's podcast a couple days ago. It looked like a re-run from nearly a decade ago. Turns out the show is all devoted to a single story about an FBI informant who helps take down one of the biggest price fixing schemes ever found and rooted out. More importantly, they reran it this week because a movie version of their 2000 radio story just came out starring Matt Damon.

I remember seeing this poster around and not being excited. I never even bothered to watch the preview for it on Hulu. But after hearing the TAL story... well, they get me interested in everything. The main character is such an interesting guy, and I can easily see Damon playing him really well. The guy almost reminds me of The Talented Mr Ripley if you replaced the murder with doing illegal business stuff.

Two recommendations then:
1. Go listen to as much of This American Life as you can get your hands on. Right now. Why are you still here? I know for a fact that this week's show is free, and you can listen to any show for free if you stream if from their website.
2. Go see The Informant. I can vouch for the story's quality, as can reviewers (apparently). It looks like one of those precious few "true stories" that actually remains true to its source material.

Have at it, movie goers! Before I go, here's an embedded trailer:

Fall TV Shows

2009-09-20T23:40:00.002-05:00

It's that time of the year again, the time where I'm in school and stop having time for watching / blogging about movies every day. My time is broken into smaller pieces than it was in the summer, so I fill it with smaller sized movies. That is to say, TV shows.

There are some big differences between TV and movies. TV episodes have to be a very specific length, so they tend to fall into a small number of plot formulas. These plots tend to rise and fall at very specific times, namely commercial breaks. At the same time, the stories told on TV can be much longer than those in movies since they come back every week. This again leads to a repetitive rhythm in stories as shows that do choose to have story arcs that last more than one ep(isode) tend to have high points at the beginning and ends of seasons, and during that one week in the winter where ratings are measured more than other times. Not that is particularly bad for the medium as restrictions breed creativity, and sometimes the deadline of a season's end can make a show get on with it. Remember the third season of Lost when they didn't know how long they were going to have to keep the show going, so they just dragged everything out as long as possible? Yeah. Bad news bears. An ending for the show was great for them. Could've helped The X-Files a lot. Smaller plot threads can do the same thing, and a season's end can be a good way to make the writers wrap things up. With an appropriate cliffhanger, of course.

Yes, TV is limited by the network system. Blah blah blah Firefly comment blah blah. Nothing to be done about that, though. It's a shame, but we deal. It's not like Hollywood doesn't have that going on.

Anyway, I'm going to start periodically updating my faithful readers on my current opinion of the shows that I watch.

WARNING: ALL TV SHOW POSTS WILL HAVE MASSIVE SPOILERS. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK (I.E. DON'T UNLESS YOU'VE SEEN THE SHOW. ALL THESE SHOWS ROCK MY SOCKS OFF).

Now without further ado...

Fringe

WOOOO FRINGE! This show just started its second season this past Thursday. It's a show by J.J. Abrams, also known for his co-creation of Lost and Cloverfield. I still struggle to find differences between Fringe and The X-Files beyond the fact that the buzzwords we're willing to suspend our disbelief for have changed since the 90s. Instead of aliens we've moved up to anything with the word quantum in it. Great show, though. It's my favorite show on television at the moment, and it had me hooked from episode 1. Here's how the pilot ends:

Bunch of dudes in white lab coats in a pristine white basement somewhere beneath ominous corporation Massive Dynamic. A boss woman we've briefly met comes in to the lab, and we see that they have the body of an important dude who just died in a car crash on a gurney.

BOSS LADY: Is he dead?
LAB TECH: Yes.
BL: How long?
LT: About three hours.

pause

BL: Question him.
smash cut to black

Yeah, bitches. That's some heavy hitting right there. Then there's the end of the first season where, well, I know some of you ignored my spoiler warning so I won't spoil it here. Besides, it leaves me speechless - it's such a visual thing.

Then the characters are... actually, for the most part I like the supporting cast a lot more than the main cast. The black dude is amazing, Astrid is fun and perky, and Nina is fucking sweet. Walter is fun, though it seems like every ep they have to give him a new stupid line about food. We get it, he's nuts. It's a good way to introduce new viewers to his character, yes, but please. You're professional writers. You can come up with another way to quickly depict him and switch off episodes; you don't have to use the same joke every time.

Olivia is fine, though not amazing. I'm a fan of Peter even though he feels like a 7 or 8 when he should be a 9 out of 10. Everyone's better than Mulder at least.

Oh shit, then there's that one guy. Mr. Jones. What an awesome villain. He totally gets a spot on my top 5 villains of all time. So creepy.

Pretty much. If you were a fan of The X-Files and don't like this show, it better be because you're squeemish. There's a lot more downright disturbing ideas in Fringe I think because society has sort of upped the ante in what creeps it out. You have to be pretty hardcore these days.

Dollhouse

It's not Firefly, that's for sure. Probably the worst of Whedon's shows, but that still leaves a fuck-ton of room for goodness. Oh, and the first 5 eps are complete trash. If you want to get started on this show but don't want to deal with the horrendous beginning, here's what I recommend: buy (or "buy" [by which I mean torrent]) the DVDs, watch the original pilot episode, then read plot summaries of the first 5 eps. If you're really bored, watch episode 2 because I actually liked that one. If you're really, really bored, watch the one where she's robbing a bank, too. If you're really, really, really bored, still don't watch the rest of them. They blow. After that, watch episode 6 and just go from there. It should be enough to hook you unless you actually need those first 5 eps to figure out what's going on, in which case the show is as good as dead. Probably is anyway given the ratings.

If you can make it all the way through the season, the payoff is HUGE. The end of the season is merely fine, but they filmed a 13th episode for the DVDs called Epitaph One. It's awesome, though disappointing that the show is so close to dead that they had to essentially put 5 seasons of plot into a single episode. I feel robbed of 4 years of setup and reveal. 4 years should be 4 years, not 43 minutes.

I think the biggest problem with the show in its first season is that there's no character you can really like. Topher is sort of likable, but he's also creepy as fuck. You're "supposed" to like Echo, but she by definition doesn't have a personality. The doctor is likable I guess. Everyone else is not up to empathy standards. Epitaph One greatly implies that this will change, but still. You want people to like your show in season 1, not season 5. That first one is where it's most important.

Whatever. Lots of faults, probably worth it if you follow my advice about what not to watch. Hey, that gives me an idea...

Chuck

Oops, I'm out of time. I'll be back later this week with Chuck, Castle, and any other shows I watch but am forgetting about. In the mean time, check out Fringe season 1 on DVD. It's awesome.

How To Get To Movies On Time

2009-09-13T15:29:00.000-05:00

I remember when I first realized that everyone I knew was bad at organizing trips to the movies. We were getting on to interstate 35 on our way to see TMNT, and we only had 8 minutes to get to Lakeville theater, a drive that would normally take 12. Somewhere between 80 and 90 mph, I wondered why we hadn't just left 15 minutes earlier. We'd be able to safely get to the theater, people who wanted to spend atrocious amounts of money on snacks would have time to do so, and everyone could empty their bladders before the movie began. Why were we so late?

Then the realization: everyone thinks that if you're going to a 9:00 movie and it takes 25 minutes to get there, you should leave your house at 8:30. It'll take 25 mintues to get there, and you get 5 minutes to get all your friends, get your tickets, go to the bathroom, and get to your movie.

Think about that. I know when you, dear reader, head out to a movie, that must be approximately your thought process. You probably just think "25 minutes to get there plus a few more for other stuff". But that other stuff takes, like, half an hour itself! It takes me more than 5 minutes just to get to one friend's house; what happens if I'm taking 4? Not to mention the time it takes for people to get out of their house when you show up. No one's perfect, and everyone takes a bit of time. You have to account for each person you're bringing, traffic and construction, and getting to your theater once you've gotten out of the car.

That trip to see TMNT was a great example of this. Someone had told everyone to meet at Blue Monday 30 minutes before the movie started. Naturally, no one showed up until 28 minutes until showtime, and then we spent 5 trying to figure out who should drive and who should go in what car. Just as that had been decided, we realized someone who was coming hadn't showed up yet, so one car had to wait for him. He showed up at about 20 minutes until showtime, and then it took another 2 minutes before the car engines were starting. Now we had less than 20 minutes to make a 25 minute drive, buy our tickets, and sprint to the theater.

After that night, I decided to start taking matters into my own hands. If I'm going to a movie these days, I make sure I know what showing I'm going to, who I'm taking, and how long it takes to get to the theater. (I'm always the driver, although that's mostly because I have a car and don't mind rather than anything else.) Then I take the expected driving time, add 10 minutes of travel time per person I have to pick up, add another 5 for good measure, and leave with that total amount of time to get to the theater.

"Wow," I bet you're thinking. "Don't you get to the theater stupidly early? I don't want to have to sit through those horrible movie adds." This, my friends, is the best part of the whole system. Yes, I do get to the theater early, but since I started doing this, that early time has become my favorite part of the whole trip. You aren't feeling rushed during it because you have plenty of time, so you get to have a nice, relaxed conversation with your friends. See, the reason I watch movies is the same reason some people like to drink: I like having something to do with my friends. When you get down to it, there's nothing more interesting in life than other people. Not everyone is interesting to everyone else, of course. You have to be able to connect with another person on some level to make them worth your time. It may be a competitve connection, like you're playing a game, or it could be a social connectiong, like you happen to both feel passionately about your favorite brand of rootbeer. Whatever. Everything worth your time in life somehow contributes to cool interactions with other people. Personally, one of my favorite ways to interact with others is through stories. I like telling them, but I also like hearing them. Talking about stories with friends is fun, and going deeper and really analyzing them can lead to all sorts of good, meaty conversation. It just so happens that I enjoy film as a medium for storytelling, so I like watching movies with friends. And that pre-movie time you get when you're early is wonderful for talking! You can continue whatever conversation you were having in the car, you can compare expectations for the film you're about to see, or you can scrounge up something to say from those terrible adds for small local businesses and churches that for some reason feel the need to advertise. The time before a movie is ripe for conversation.

Anyway, I was originally planning to give out some helpful pointers for making your movie-going experience more enjoyable. I didn't mean to get a philisophical on you. Not sure what I was going to say, though. It's mostly stuff people already know but don't actually follow through with. How about a list?

1. Stop at a gas station for snacks. Assuming you want them, that is. It's easy to smuggle in food, and you can save, like, $3 a person if you make the time to stop at a gas station instead of buying movie theater food.

2. Obviously, make sure you have enough time to get to the theater. I just spent a huge amount of space ranting about this, but leave a good 20 minutes earlier than you think you have to. It'll leave everyone less stressed and with a better outing. If you don't like spending that extra time talking to your friends, you should reconsider more than just when you're going to leave for the movie.

3. Don't bring people to the movie that are going to ruin it for the rest of you. For example, I no longer watch Pixar movies with Danl unless I want to spend the whole time trash talking with him. If you must bring that one person along who really would rather be doing something else, make them sit on the end next to someone they won't bother, and honestly, you should consider finding something else to do entirely.

4. That last bit transitions nicely into thinking about who you're going to sit next to. You don't have to go this far

(although someone probably will), but you should consider stuff like "who is legitimately in a relationship with someone else here?" and "am I going to be wanting to lean over and make jokes about this film to the person next to me? If so, are the people next to me up for that sort of thing?" and "is it really a good idea to let the two girls who are going to be screeching loudly together and thereby bothering the whole theater sit together?" and "is it really a good idea to let the two guys who are going to make jokes about the terrible rom-com script and laugh loudly thereby bothering the whole theater sit together?" and "will I have to pee a lot during this movie because I got a mega-large Coke, meaning I should take the aisle seat?" All good questions. As Munroe says, don't just file into the row haphazardly.

That sounds like it for now. If you've got any movie-going advice of your own, let me hear it. I always enjoy new ways to improve my movie experience.

Until next time, remember: leave early!

The Onion is Funny

2009-09-12T14:09:00.002-05:00

Tarantino would.

9: Why College Is So Important

2009-09-10T01:00:00.000-05:00

So there's this guy, we'll call him Ane Shacker. He grows up as the quiet kid in class who doesn't speak much even when you're trying to have a conversation with him. In high school he doodles through history instead of taking notes, and comes up with some pretty cool sketches. When he goes off to art school, he's already got this idea floating around in his head: it's for this group of little guys made out fabrics and nick-nacks, and he sketches them a lot. Pretty much every project he does features these little guys in some way, and in the ones where he can't he tries to find ways to fit references in anyway. In portraits they show up as logos on shirts; in pictures of flowers they're silhouetted in the background. He doesn't mind that they look corny, he's more into computer arts anyway. Eventually he starts developing a story for them, too.

Somewhere along the line, Ane gets lucky. He's showing off some of his digital sketches to someone important, and they think it's great stuff. He gets some money and some buddies willing to work for tiny amounts of money, and they put together pieces. This is looking even better now, and a big studio is even thinking about picking them up. Things start going fast; they get more money, more people, and pretty soon they've got a whole movie made about these guys! Damn they look cool, too. Tim Burton's even signed on to hook his name up with the publicity. Ane's dream has come true! He's gotten his little doll-guys onto the big screen! Now everyone can see his sketches in full 3D! But wait, shit, were they supposed to write a story to go along with it somewhere in there? Ane's always pictured them as fighting soul stealing robots, so some of those get thrown in. The robots look cool, too, because Ane did a series of roboty looking things back in school. Yeah! Movie done!

Okay, so that's probably a bit off from the facts. Maybe. Check out this imdb page, though. Yes, that's a link to 9, a short film made by the same guy who made the movie this review is about. A short film made in 2005. Wikipedia says it took 4 and a half years to make, so this thing's been in the works since 2000! This guy's been working on this project his whole life! It's his baby. It's just too bad he didn't hang out more around the English department so that he'd make some friends that can write.

9 looks awesome, you can't argue with that. I'm always looking for animated movies that target themselves at people above the age of 4. It's just that I want them to make sense, too, and this movie doesn't.

The plot is... well, take all the post-apocalyptic stories and all the AI gets too advanced and kills all the humans stories, put them together, shake them up, and draw out like 6 at random. Chop those up, use a couple pieces from each, and voila: you've got 9. Evil machine creatures? Check. A band of people seemingly alone in the world? Check. Each of them is a boring stereotype? Check. Beautiful sky above the clouds but dry crappy world beneath it? Clues hidden by someone who came before this group about what they should do to survive? Sacrifice of the selfish guy who turns noble at the last minute? Cool explosions? All checks. Seriously, it's a boring plot, and it's full of holes. There's something about souls being sucked out of our numbered heroes, and something about saving them from the machines. There's a deux ex machina ending. There's even a fucking HAL9000 style red circle for the evil bad machine's "face". Everything is a cliche. My dad speculated that some of the scenes were actually homages to other movies, but we both thought hard and couldn't come up with anything. Conclusion: the scenes are all so cliched that it just feels like they're homages because they're so fucking overused.

But enough about the bad. I'm only so pissed because I was hoping the plot would be good so that animation as a genre could take a step forward. And because it would have been SO EASY to give it a mediocre plot instead of a bad, nonsensical one. Why would you want to see 9? Here's some reasons:

Yeah baby. That last one especially; it may not look like much, but that snake slash machine thing is awesomely creepy. You've gotta see it to appreciate just how disturbing it is, but basically it uses one of the puppets that has died as bait for the rest of them, hypnotizes them with the dead puppet's eyes, then picks up the limp bodies, sews them with blood red thread into a subdued form, then puts them inside itself to carry back to the machine lair. It's terrifying.

The character design is also great. It's an intriguing puzzle: how does one differentiate nine of these little rag doll guys? Each opens up along the chest, and each closes in a different way (buttons, zipper, shoe laces, etc). Each has different looking eyes. Each is made from a different fabric. More impressive is how each of these design choices helps bring across the doll's personality. The hunter has a bone mask. The girl looks softer and lighter than the rest. The angry guy has different eyes, more capable of looking angry and suspicious. The librarians are small, thin, and don't speak. Every one of them looks unique and cool.

Man, I could sit here all day and talk about how cool looking this movie is. I could also sit here for the same amount of time and bitch about the stupid plot. If you just want a sweet looking 80 minutes, what are you waiting for. Otherwise, you can pass this one up.

Hey, it beats an art museum.

SAM'S VERDICT: Easy on the eyes, just bring some earplugs.

5 Movies You Haven't Seen But Should

2009-09-09T01:05:00.003-05:00

Okay, so you may have seen some of these, especially if you're my dad and watch all the same stuff I do. But the rest of you probably haven't even heard of most of these, and they're all great. If you're looking for something new to see, check this list over and see if anything catches your fancy.

The Hudsucker Proxy

I'm a sucker for everything Coen Brothers. They've got a pretty standard forumula that about half their movies follow. It involves various groups getting involved with some sort of illegal activity, then due to either people being stupid or just bad luck everything goes to hell. People die, the heist / murder / what-have-you goes fowl, etc. I like that formula. They've done it adapted from a book with No Country For Old Men, they've done it as a comedy in The Big Lebowski, they've done it straight in Blood Simple, and they've gotten it nominated for best picture with Fargo. This movie, The Hudsucker Proxy, is one of their movies that does not follow this formula.

So you've got a hyper-stylized version of the "newsies" era. What is that, the 20s maybe? Whatever. It's New York City, people are all walking around in gray suits with briefcases not turning their heads. The sky is white rather than blue. All the buildings all super tall. Tim Robins is a young guy fresh out of school looking for a job, and he finds one in the hectic mail room of Hudsucker Industries.

Meanwhile, Mr. Hudsucker jumps out the top floor of a skyscraper. That sucks. The board of directors, being evil and such, tries to decide how to deal with the fact that they will no longer have control of the company. They devise a plan to put an idiot in charge, drive the company into the ground, buy up all the cheap stock, then get back in charge and make millions.

And just after this, who should walk into the office of the Head Evil Guy with a BLUE LETTER

but Tim Robins. He gets the job, and it goes from there. And yes, before you ask, there is a fast-talking, hard-working, woman-in-a-man's-world reporter with too much sass and not enough patience.

The brilliant red pops so well against the otherwise gray pallet of this movie. If I ever get disheartened as an artist, I'm just going to watch this movie again. Ideas can come from anyone, guys. Everyone has a beautiful idea inside of them waiting to blossom, and everyone has a different take on everyone else's ideas. Remember that.

Metropolis

Not the modern animated one. I haven't seen that one, but I hear it's good. No, I'm talking about the old school black and white masterpiece that's never been fully recovered and has substantial sequences missing because they've been lost to time. Metropolis is one of those old movies you see the poster of in classrooms inhabited by old people or cinema profs with movie posters on the walls. I know what I think when I consider watching old movies: no way. Times have changed, stuff that was funny even just 15 years ago is stupid now. Action has gotten better, drama has gotten more dramatic, and everything has gotten more colorful. Seriously, though. This movie is a masterpiece. It's arguably the first sci-fi movie ever made, and certainly a very early story in that genre in any medium. On top of that, the plot is good. It's just a good movie. I only watched it because I was forced to for a high school film class, but it was great. I stopped looking for techniques like I was supposed to super early on and just watched it because I wanted to know what happened next.

I'd give you a quick plot synopsis, but I honestly don't remember what happens. Something about a girl and some serious class divisions. Heaven and Hell imagery frickin' everywhere, man. I think there's robots involved.

The Weatherman

I know what you're thinking: first he wants me to watch a "classic" piece of cinema for entertainment rather than to be able to say that I've seen a "classic" piece of cinema, and now he wants me to endure Nicholas Cage. Yes, that is what I'm telling you, but keep reading. I swear. He's actually tolerable in this one.

Tolerable... that's an apt word to describe The Weatherman with. This is the bleakest of comedies I have ever seen. It's black as a black bear wrestling Malcolm X at midnight on a moonless night, all covered in black paint. If you take me up on this suggestion, be prepared to be depressed.

Nicholas Cage is this guy. He's got a dad who's a famous writer who he's always stood in the shadow of. His ex-wife has custody of the kids, and she's got a new boyfriend. Cage only gets to see the kids from time to time, and both of them have some pretty serious problems. His job is as the weatherman for a medium level network. Basically, his life is going down the toilet and he doesn't know what to do about it. The movie is about it circling the drain, and the slight glimmer of hope that comes to him in the form of the chance to interview to be the weatherman for a really big network, maybe make 6 figures...

It's as bleak as it sounds, but it's also heartwarming in some sense. It has a few of my favorite bits of all time in it; the discussion of people throwing stuff at Cage, the tarter sauce bit, and the brilliant ending thing with Cage narrating and walking through the streets as people dissipate around him... It's all so depressingly beautiful.

Plus it has Michael Cain in it. Everything with him in it is at least watchable. Oh! And the kid from About A Boy. Yeah.

Man On Wire

You see that movie poster? That is a guy slacklining between the towers of world trade center. Need I say more?

...

I don't think I should have to, but I know you won't be motivated to actually go watch the movie unless I do. Also I want to. So there.

Man On Wire is a documentary about this French dude in the 70s who slacklined between the twin towers. No joke, this actually happened. It's an awesome idea to begin with, but the telling of the tale just gets better. Watching it felt like watching Ocean's 11. There's a good script, there's a love interest, there's all this great history, and then there's the way they tell the story.

It comes in two parts that jump back and forth throughout the movie. The first is the story of actually getting into the twin towers with all the necessary equipment, which feels like a crime movie. This was by no means legal, remember, so they had to sneak past guards and such. Some guys dress up as business men, some as construction workers, there's an inside man, security guards... it's exhilarating. The other story thread is all the history behind Philippe (the guy you see in the poster there). This wasn't the first giant structure he'd slacklined on / around / between...

It's a beautiful movie. Gymnopedies is probably my favorite piece of music ever, and I've never seen it better used.

Hoodwinked

It's one of those movies where they tell the same story from lots of different perspectives, except that going into it we already know the story: it's Little Red Riding Hood. It's like we were already given one perspective, and now we get 3-5 more (I don't remember how many). I love this movie because I love all point of view movies, but also because it's a great animated movie done at a tiny fraction of the cost that Pixar works at. I'm always happy to see someone come close to matching a giant in any field, even if the giant is lovable like in this case. But yeah, it's funny, it's clever, it's unique, and it has Joe / Brock / Patrick Warburton in it. I love his voice acting.

Trust me on this one, though. You don't need an excuse like babysitting your cousin to go watch this one. You may have to pretend you're 14 again to not feel awkward while watching it, but if you can get around that feeling that you're too old, this is a kick. High squirrels, British frogs, snowboarding grandmas, everything you could want from an early teen movie.

There you have it, people. 5 movie suggestions that you probably haven't heard from me before. I recommend them all, even though I doubt any of you will take that too far to heart. Even if you don't like one of these, go watch a movie sometime soon! I know any readers here do a lot anyway, but seriously. Pick up something new next time you've got the opportunity. Who knows, you may be pleasantly surprised. Branch out! Try new things! ENJOY THE CINEMA!

Edit: I discovered after writing this that Hoodwinked actually has a sequel coming out called Hoodwinked Too! Hood Vs Evil. Title aside, it looks as good as the first. Apparently it's got a Hansel and Gretel thing going on. Go check out the first one before that gets here so that if you're interested you can grab some friends and all go to the second together so it's less awkward.

Ponyo and Miyazaki's Relationship to Disney

2009-09-07T02:24:00.000-05:00

SAM'S VERDICT: This is the most adorable thing I have ever seen.

Okay, first thing's first. I went to see this movie at this new theater in Burnsville called The Cinemagic Atlantis Theater. Yeah bitches. Cinemagic. And it's Atlantis. What place could better house your movie viewing experience? No other. You walk in the front door and there's a ticket both in front of you with an elaborate cage between you and the cashiers, and the whole place is decorated to look like marble. Then once you get your ticket, you step into the main lobby where there's all kinds of giant pillars, crazy elaborate fantasy murals of muscular men and scantily clad maidens, and giant statues of a guy with a trident and his babe. After taking that in, you realize that the awesomely epic music you're hearing is not coming from the usual tvs showing a loop of previews, but rather hidden speakers. This is some seriously epic music we're talking about, too. Big building and booming pieces that sound like the soundtrack to a place that has earned the right to the name Atlantis. Walking down the hall to the theater, the music kept playing. It was great. I bet the employees want to kill themselves, though. Listening to one 4 minute loop over and over for 8 hour shifts can't be good for morale.

Then there were the seats! These were the most comfortable movie theater seats I'd ever sat in. Big, comfy things with leather headrests. They leaned back so far it felt like mine was trying to eat me up. Plus they were brand new, so they didn't squeak at all. Movie theater heaven, let me tell you.

Anyway, what movie was I going to talk about? Oh yes: Ponyo.

I heard a lot of talk a couple weeks before Ponyo came out about how Miyazaki was selling out with this movie by associating it with Disney. To that I say "BS". Just because someone accepts corporate sponsorship for their artwork doesn't mean they're somehow getting worse. People who make good art should be rewarded for their efforts, and if they're being offered lots of money, well, who doesn't want that as a reward? If Disney had taken creative control away from Miyazaki that would be something else, but my sources tell me this was not the case.

A related topic is the huge number of famous American actors doing voices for Ponyo. This is a more debatable point; some of the same people that thought Miyazaki was selling out with Disney thought he was also selling out by agreeing to let all sorts of famous American dudes into the cast. Seriously, look at that cast: Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, Tina Fey, Liam Neeson, Betty White... that's some serious name dropping going on. This is something one could get mad about for more legitimate reasons. After all, it's possible that an actor would get cast in this movie for their fame rather than their talent. I liked the voice acting myself, so this wasn't a problem. I always feel weird listening to famous actors do animated characters, though. It's like... I know that voice, and I know the person that voice belongs to, and it's not the person who's body that voice is coming out of. Liam Neeson and Betty White bothered me a lot in this movie for this reason, though they both did fine acting jobs.

On to more review-y things! As I said in my verdict, this is probably the most adorable thing I've ever seen. Cuter than lol-cats, cuter than baby pictures, cuter than pretty much everything. I haven't seen any of Miyazaki's "for kids" work before, just Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. I actually laughed out loud many times just at how hilariously cute the scene in front of me was. That bit where Ponyo is running across the ocean following Sosuke is just so full of innocent glee, it makes me feel all young and pure again. The movie has the marks of a kid movie all over it, you know, because it is one. Stuff like there not actually being any villains just challenges, no unlikable characters, messages about acceptance and love, the works. It's so happy and optimistic, like if we were all like this everyone would be happy all the time.

[IF YOU WANT TO KEEP THE INNOCENCE OF THIS MOVIE ALIVE STOP READING NOW PLZKTHNX]

So yeah. Adorable kids movie. Too bad I'm an adult now, and thus the ending was ruined for me. I kept thinking about what would happen if after Ponyo and Sosuke grow up he stops loving her? What happens if he finds someone else? Does she turn into sea foam? Does she summon her mother and wreck havoc on the land? Does she just cry her eyes out live a crappy life as a human? Then I realized that I was a monster - all I can think about is the repercussions of the ending, I can't just accept it as a beautiful children's story. I'm tainted by age. Me, someone generally considered optimistic, I can't help but try and find faults in the perfection of this tale of love. What's wrong with adults?

Life is hard. I do my best to have fun, and hopefully that will do me well.

[OKAY YOU CAN READ AGAIN GUYS]

Ponyo is a wonderful kids movie, but it is a kids movie. I know a bunch of people out there not into that sort of thing, and that's fine. This isn't the movie for you. But you Miyazaki fans and older folks that enjoy a good kids piece would do well to go see this. It's blissfully innocent.

Top 5 Animated Films

2009-09-05T18:00:00.002-05:00

1. Beauty and the Beast
2. Spirited Away
3. Fantasia
4. The Incredibles
5. Triplets of Belleville

Honorable Mentions: Princess Mononoke, Hoodwinked, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Toy Story, Shrek, Aladdin, WALL.E, Rejected (assuming short form is acceptable)

I tried really hard to not have the whole thing be Disney and Pixar movies. It's sort of sad how much of a stranglehold they have on the American animated movie scene. For that matter, it's sad how much of a stranglehold kids movies have on the animated movie scene. Here's hoping that one middle east documentary animated weird thing I don't know the name of turns out good.

Beauty and the Beast gets on the list because it's awesome. I've probably seen this movie or Aladdin more times than any other film because of my childhood. Not only is it representative of the kickass Disney animation of the 90s, but it's got damn good music. Damn good. The lyrics are clever, witty, and fit with the music all the way through. The Gaston song alone is one of the greatest musical accomplishments of the 20th century. Plus it's funny. I've seen it a couple times since becoming a teen / "adult", and it's still good. That's hard to do, guys. Movies that entertain all ages and both genders, movies with a fantastic score, and good animated movies are all hard to come by. This is all three.

I like to brag that I saw Spirited Away before it was cool. My parents dragged me to an uptown showing of it when it first came out, and I was drawn in by it from the first scene. I'd seen Princess Mononoke (also great) before, but I went into Spirited Away not knowing who Miyazaki was or that he'd been in charge of both films. Watching this movie is like dreaming: it ebbs and flows perfectly while you're in the middle of it, each scene transitioning to the next smoothly. But when you look back on it later, very little about it makes logical sense. Fun ride. The atmosphere is great; it's tense but kiddie, romantic but casual, epic but personal. Oddly creepy at points, too. That black spirit with the mask is scary as shit when he's running around eating all the frog dudes and spirits. Now that I think about it, I wonder how I got through all the creepy images I saw in these animated films as a kid. That creepy doll head on the spider body toy in Toy Story, Jafar at the end of Aladdin, guys like that mask spirit eating everyone, that fucking talking broccoli from Sesame Street... Everyone had that one image that scared their pants off, you know? I probably repressed mine.

Fantasia... Oh Fantasia. I lied before. I definitely remember watching this movie more than any other. It's great, wandering animation to great, classic music. The parodies still make their way into pop culture. Every piece is a whole world imagined for us, and there seems to be a boundless world beyond the screen. Sometimes you move from image to image like you're on a roller-coaster tour of the coolest place you'll ever go. Other times the movie broods along with the music. Still others feature crazy dancing mushrooms, hippopotami, brooms, or whatever else is handy. Crazy cool scenes, and a great way to make sure your kids get classical music cemented into their head at an early age. And so unique! Who else has done anything like this? I'm sure there's stuff out there, but this is old and unparalleled in its concept. Ridiculous.

Pixar needs representation on the list, and sorry kids, but Finding Nemo just didn't do it for me in the same way as it seemed to for most of popular culture. Not a bad movie by any means, but not the best of the Pixar pieces. I could hand the slot to Toy Story, the first Pixar kids movie as we know them and a groundbreaking landmark. I could give it to WALL.E, which is current and would definitely be up there if the whole movie was as absurdly good as the first 20 minutes. I could just screw it and give out all 5 slots to Pixar movies, because frankly they might deserve it. But no, I chose one. And no, it's not any of those. I chose The Incredibles. It's such a hilarious parody of both the superhero genre and suburban family life. That final sequence starting with our heroes escape from the evil lair is just one scene that looks like its an action sequence but is actually commentary on suburbia after another. First they're driving down the highway fighting over which exit to take, then they're fighting over the remote control to stop the evil robot. Then there's the superhero parody stuff. The cape monologue, the myriad of homages in everyone's powers, the villain's discussion of "monologing", the way our heroes actually use their powers together to awesome effect (think that scene where Violet covers herself and her brother in a ball while he runs really fast so as to bring her with him)... It's both smarter than classic superhero stories while showing respect at the same time. Plus, superheroes are awesome, and so is Samuel L Jackson. And The Underminer! Best. Villain. Ever.

And finally, we have The Triplets of Belleville, a film that only stands up against the crazy Disney / Pixar competition because it's so unique. Each character is a parody of themselves, each scene almost like a song in the rhythms of its pacing and sound effects. The whole thing has a beat to it. All that and more, all without a single line of dialogue. It's not a silent movie by any means; quite the contrary. Sounds are a key part of the atmosphere. It's just that no one every says anything, and this somehow helps everything move along. Nothing needs to be said. Man. I think of that maitre d' and just crack up every time. Every character is super-stylized! Everyone is a self parody. I know I said that already, but I like that line. Everyone is a self parody. Even the boats are self parodies. They're giant things with billowing smoke stacks, each ship raised hundreds of feet from the ocean by a crazy tall body. So unique.

Honorable mentions to Shrek for having an awesome script and Hoodwinked for making a movie just a few notches below Pixar for a tiny fraction of the cost. What can I say, I'm a sucker for stories told from multiple points of view. Also A Nightmare Before Christmas for just being awesome. A unique animation style coupled with a stupid number of good ideas and a story that seems so obvious you wonder why it hasn't been done before. Of course, it'd be on the list if it hadn't been done before; it's just Grinch crossed with "depressed guy with his heart in the right place accidentally screws everything up".

Wait a minute, why didn't I think of How the Grinch Stole Christmas before? Maybe I need to reevaluate...

Taking Woodstock

2009-09-04T18:11:00.000-05:00

My cinema prof once told me that all movies are really about the time in which they're made. If nothing else that time period is reflected in the film, and we can help make more sense of a movie if we view it through the lens of its time. This is a good thing to remember with Taking Woodstock. It will help a lot when I talk about why they chose not to show much (if any) of the concert itself.

But first, let's see what I said about the trailer:

This one is a Madelyn request. I wasn't impressed when I first heard about this one, and the trailer I saw before District 9 was hardly inspiring. This Hulu trailer, though... It gets me more excited. Demitri Martin is mostly great, and this trailer takes it from "probably bad comedy" to "mediocre comedy with a heart" in my mind. That's much more viewable. Still, while trying to come up with things to say about it, I can't think of much. It's a pretty bland story; I could write you the plot and all major twists from the name alone. There will be a scene with someone from town trying to shut them down, parents not liking the idea then deciding it's great, a revelation on the part of or humiliation of the bad guy just in time for him to join in on that mud slide, and undoubtedly a romantic scene on a hill with a beautiful girl and Demitri that gets rudely interrupted by the crazy / in your face / over the top best friend. Still, stereotypes can be fun, and I'm curious about any progress in Martin's career. Friends could convince me to go. Okay, I'll be honest, a girl would have to convince me to go.

I was right about at least one thing: a girl got me to go.

I'm still having trouble coming up with things to say about it. I think this is because it wasn't that compelling for me. This is a movie with jokes in it, but I'd hesitate to call it a comedy. It feels... empty a lot of the time, a space that Madelyn and Marie filled with talking about how attractive Demetri Martin is.

The story is that of a guy who offers up some fields in his town to Woodstock, and it's the 20-something version of a coming of age story. Demetri is this wannabe artist who's never broken out of his shell, largely because he spends most of his time and money keeping his parent's small town hotel afloat. His parents are both great characters. Mom is a stingy, tough, little old Russian Jew. When all the hippies show up, she starts charging people for pillows at the hotel, and there's a good bit where she hits some kids bangin' in the woods with a stick. Dad is also an old Russian Jew, but he's more depressed. He's the kind of guy that feels like he's got nothing left to do but wait around to die. Both parents are good performances on the part of the actors, and the characters are much more 3 dimensional than you would expect from a bad summer comedy. This is probably because Taking Woodstock isn't a bad summer comedy.

What else did I predict? This movie does have a heart; I was right about that. You won't find any of the scenes I listed, though. There are some townspeople who get mad and try to shut Woodstock down, but they're not a major plot point. The point of their scene was more to demonstrate just how enormous this thing had become and just how futile their efforts to shut it down were.

Oh, and I was wrong about how you spell "Demetri".

Back to the story. So Demetri is unsure about what to do with himself since he wants to take care of his parents but recognizes that this is eventually going to ruin him. With nothing else to do he does nothing. Until Woodstock shows up.

[Begin spoilers]

Ultimately, the film's conclusion did not conclude everything. Demetri finally breaks away from his parents, largely because his dad gets some life back into him after participating in the organization of the concert. Mom has some serious unresolved issues, though. She's just a messed up woman, and it's probably too late to do anything about it. She'll probably end up okay with dad taking care of her for as long as he can, but it's just sad to see her so screwed up. At least dad gets healed. Demetri wanders off into the world, presumably to California to start a career in art. Woodstock happens.

I'm not sure what the conflict was in this story. Okay, that's a lie. The conflict is in Demetri's head; it's the decision to either head out into the world or stick around with his parents. This conflict is even resolved. Maybe my problem was just that the movie didn't make me care enough. The theme of family obligation vs your own life is not one I've ever connected with well, and this movie wasn't above average at making that connection.

But there were good things! Number one on this cinema nerd's list was the allusions to the famous Woodstock documentary by liberal use of split screen action. One scene with lots of cameras all showing the action simultaneously was a recurring feature. There were even some shots that were framed and set up to look like footage from the documentary; a lot of the construction comes to mind, but there were other moments, too.

The acting was good. There were plenty of funny moments - the theater troop's performance was particularly spot on parody. Demetri is, I'll admit, a pretty awesome dude. Having a gay main character is something I admire. It's getting more and more acceptable to actually show GAYS IN THE MOVIES. Scary, I know. I was saying on the way home that I was fully expecting an academy awards style movie about being gay soon only to be one-upped by Madelyn. Milk already exists, apparently. Whatever. The point is that it's good more movies are having this as a (sub)plot, even if Taking Woodstock didn't do much with it. In fact, if the real life person Demetri was based on hadn't been gay, I bet Demetri's character would've been straight. At least it's good that they aren't leaving that out entirely; a decade(ish) ago, the main character just wouldn't have had a love interest.

Which brings us back to my first comment, that every movie reflects the time period it was created in. It's an obvious time to make a movie about Woodstock since it's an anniversary that's a multiple of 10, but it's never an obvious time to make a movie about Woodstock with no scenes that take place at the actual concert (drug trips excluded). There's got to be symbolism in the fact that Demetri's character never makes it to the concert despite trying for three days. The directer had better have a damn good reason not to include any scenes at the actual concert, because that's what would otherwise sell this movie. It's ballsy to make this movie with no concert footage. There's gotta be a reason.

Let me get into CAMS analysis mode real quick here.

...

...

Alright. If this movie is about the present, then it's not much of a stretch to say that Demetri represents an average guy from 2009. For one thing, Demetri the actor is this more or less average guy in 2009. He acts just like he does in 2009, he looks just like he does in 2009, etc. From there, let's look at his progression through the movie. He starts off without much direction; he hasn't been doing well recently. He's in trouble financially, and he's at a loss as to what to do next. He's busy dealing with obligations he's given himself in the form of his parents, and he's got a barn full of crazy 60s hippies that he occasionally checks in on.

Next he calls up the guys organizing this concert that needs a place to happen and tells them to come to him. A whole bunch of stuff happens real fast, and pretty soon he's finding out all sorts of things. He's gay. On top of that, there's other gay people out there, there's people who are even weirder sexually than he is, and his dad doesn't really care about any of that. The world is an interesting place full of all sorts of great, wacky people, and there's way more of them than there are naysayers. This whole thing is sounding like a statement about the 2009 silent majority, if you will.

On the other hand, maybe we see Woodstock as a representation of the 60s ideals: peace, acceptance, happiness, etc. After the concert actually begins, Demetri is encouraged by his dad to go. He tries every day, but each time something gets in his way. Drugs, the weather, his parents... Everything keeps him from actually getting there. We haven't gotten to that heightened level of acceptance.

In the end, he at least gets somewhere. We may not be loving everyone and the world around us, but at least Demetri ends up with some sort of direction. We don't know exactly what he's going to do out there, but we're confident it's a move in the right direction.

...

SAM'S VERDICT: Appearances can be deceiving. It's more character and less comedy than the box would have you believe! Still just okay.

Hot Tub Time Machine: Keeping Tabs on a Masterpiece

2009-09-03T20:03:00.001-05:00

It's like Donnie Darko if they replaced the confusing parts with hot tubs. It's like some shitty porno that takes place in a hot tub if you replaced all the parts other than the hot tub with time travel. It's like Snakes On A Plane if you replaced the snakes with time travel and the plane with a hot tub.

That's right. It's Hot Tub Time Machine.

We don't know much about this brilliant piece of cinema other than that it's in the works, but I'm here today to tell you what we do know. This may become a regular feature, building up to my inevitable attendance of the midnight premier. Now, what are some facts about this elusive masterpiece?

FACT: Hot Tub Time Machine is due out on February 26th, 2010.

FACT: This is the R rated trailer, which is predictably awesome:

FACT: Hot Tub Time Machine is coming out in the same month as Valentine's Day. For maximum Great Success, I recommend planning ahead with your significant other to delay your celebration of Valentine's Day until the 26th so that you can experience it in maximum style. Optimally you will attend a theater where they let you view movies from hot tubs. Just as a side note, if you find one of those, let me know. I want to go move in.

FACT: Hot Tub Time Machine stars John Cusack, which means that both men and women alike will have someone to gaze upon should the movie stall. This doesn't seem likely given the film's content, but should a stall occur, you'll know what to do. It's like, if Hot Tub Time Machine was an airplane, the stewardesses would come out at the beginning and say "In case of stall, your John Cusack can be used as a hottie".

FACT: If you're a guy worried about needing backup oggling material, you're in luck. Hot Tub Time Machine costars Lizzy Caplan, some girl I've never heard of but who looks good. "If John Cusack is not functioning correctly, Lizzy Caplan will drop from above your seat. Please secure your own Lizzy Caplan before assisting others."

FACT: Dudes, other leads are also awesome. You've got that one guy from the daily show, that one black guy who's the bouncer in Knocked Up, and some nerdy guy I've never heard of. Man, I love those guys.

FACT: Chevy Chase and Crispin Glover also make appearances in Hot Tub Time Machine. Hahahahahahahahahaha.

FACT: This is what Hot Tub Time Machine writer Josh Heald said when asked what his screenplay was about and why we should trust him:

Hot Tub Time Machine is probably the greatest gift anyone's ever given the world. Time will show that it ranks up there with the Statue of Liberty and free Internet porn.

OK, removing my tongue from my cheek for a moment and without giving away anything without first consulting the directors or studio, let's just look at it logically -- I was able to sell a script called Hot Tub Time Machine. To an actual movie studio. That in and of itself seems ridiculously implausible, and yet, here we are. I think I should get an award of at least some sort of free sandwich. I will say, without giving anything away, that my goal with the screenplay was awesomeness, through and through. And audiences will not be disappointed.

Why should you trust me? I dunno. Depends on what you're trusting me with. I can make you laugh. But God help you if you go on vacation and trust me to water your plants. Because we all know what will happen. I'll probably end up fucking your plants. Not in a weird way or anything. Just, you know, sexually.

(FACT: That quote came from this article.)

FACT: This movie is called Hot Tub Time Machine. No, I'm serious. It is the new Snakes on a Plane, except instead action it's going to have comedy. Probably watchable comedy. That's, like, miles ahead of Snakes on a Plane, which was already fun as hell (once). You have to trade Samuel L. Jackson for John Cusack, but that's a fair trade in my book. Especially when you're shifting genres.

We can only hope that this movie includes the line "I'm tired of all this muthafuckin time travel in my muthafuckin hot tub!"

The 26th better be a block break, or I'd best make some dumbass friends quick.

An Incomplete Index of Time Travel Philosophies

2009-09-02T20:00:00.001-05:00

I have few true loves in this life. Good movies is one; maple candy is another. High on the list, on some sort of cloud-like throne, sits theoretical discussion of time travel. More specifically, I like the different ways different movies handle the mechanics of treating space and time like some filthy whore, poking through various wholes willy-nilly. Here then is an index of some of the classic approaches.
But first, some definitions.

Timeline: one particular set of events / reality. That is, say we all live in timeline A. The Big Bang happens, a bajillion years later you're born, you die, the world moves on and eventually ends. That batch of events in timeline A. If, however, some dude figures out how to travel through time, goes back and introduces bananas to North America long before they were supposed to be, and thereby changes history, everyone is now living in a new set of events. This new set of events is a new timeline, timeline B.

The Grandmother Paradox: this is a pretty standard time travel paradox. If you go back in time and kill your grandma before she gives birth, what happens to you? Do you cease to exist because your grandmother died before she had kids or what? And if you do suddenly disappear, does your grammy come back to life because you no longer exist? And if so, then you'll snap back into existence and make everyone's head hurt in the process of trying to figure out what the crap is going on.

The Butterfly Effect: no, not the movie. This is the idea that if you send a butterfly back in time to the land of the dinosaurs, a single flap of its wings will change the winds a little bit, and over time that slight change in wind will lead to different storm patterns down the line, different people getting rained on, and different lives for everyone in the world. Simply put, a little change goes a long way when you've got years to wait.

With that out of the way, here are some types of time travel:

One Timeline Time Travel

I'll let my favorite trailer ever explain this one:

This is the kind of time travel where there is only one timeline, and everyone just jumps around in that. Like, imagine a movie of all of time. You can fast forward, you can rewind, and you can jump around to whenever you like, but at the end of the day you can't change it (we'll pretend you're too cheap for video editing software). You can move all around in this single time line, you can select the scene, but you can't change anything. It's all preset. If you go back in time, you have always been a part of history. You've always been back there doing whatever it is that you do. If you go back and try and kill your own grandma, it'll turn out that you fail at the last second or she isn't actually your grandma. Usually, it'll turn out that you're your own grandma because that's a fun plot twist. This kind of time travel often ends up with a protagonist going back in time to solve some problem only to discover that by going back in time they've caused the problem they were trying to solve because everyone loves irony.

Examples: 12 Monkeys, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Branching Timeline Time Travel

This is the other obvious approach to time travel. Under this philosophy, if you go back and change something, it changes the future. If you go back to the 80s and make someone's parents never meet, when you go to the future that person won't exist. Kill Hitler in the 20s or 30s and he'll never rise to power. And so forth. Depending on the mood of the story, changes due to your actions can either be subtle or enormous. For example, in Back to the Future, our hero goes back and somehow gets his dad to beat up a bully. This brings him to the future where he still exists (the exact right sperm and egg still got together to make him), but his family is happier and lives in a nicer house where they live happily ever after until Doc shows up just in time to have a cliffhanger ending. Contrast this with The Butterfly Effect, where changing one childhood event can make our hero end up in places he's never been when he gets back to the present.

Examples: Back to the Future, The Butterfly Effect, Primer

Time Is Like A River

This school of thought says that you can go try and change stuff in the past, but history is inevitable and has a way of correcting itself. So if, say, your sweetheart dies in a horrible accident and you invent time travel so that you can go back in time and save her, you might be able to save her from getting run over by a stagecoach, but then she'll just drown or something. If she didn't die horribly, then you'd never have the motivation to invent time travel, and that'd just end up weird. Also, some things are just inevitable. In these stories fate is fate, and you can't work around it. You can go back in time and set a big-ass rock in the middle of the river of time, but time will just flow on around your rock. You'll have changed little bits of flow right near your rock, but the water is still all going to the same place, and most other parts of the river won't be affected.

Sometimes, though, a little rock and change the course of a whole river... Some stories have moments where time is particularly mutable, moments where a little change could divert the course of history. This variation is called The Trousers of Time by Terry Pratchett, and I see no need to come up with a new name. The metaphor there is that for the most part time just rumbles along, but occasionally will reach a point not unlike the divide between legs in a pair of trousers. At those points, it's up to the individuals at hand and their actions to determine which pant leg time will tumble on down.

Examples: The Time Machine

One Present Time Travel

This kind of time travel is similar to branching timeline time travel in that if you go back in time and do something, it changes the future. The difference here is that if you go back in time and change something, it doesn't tend to have lasting effects; there is no butterfly effect. The clearest example of this I can think of is in Day of the Tentacle, a 3rd person puzzle video game featuring a time travel mechanic. Early in the game one of your characters is stuck in a tree, and to get them out you have to go back in time and cut down the tree. Having done so, the tree just disappears in the future and the girl previously stuck in the tree falls suddenly to the ground. No lives are changed; everyone who was previously born is still born. Simply removing the tree doesn't do anything beyond removing the tree.

This kind of time travel can be tricky; sometimes characters remember things that end up changed and sometimes they don't. That is, the girl who just fell out of the tree definitely knows there used to be a tree there, but the guy who comes and talks to her right after she falls out of it doesn't seem to care that a tree just disappeared. Some people know that something just changed, and some people don't. This can lead to plot holes.

The way I like to visualize this is with a set of moving bars. Bear with me. Imagine your timeline, which looks like this:

Imagine that the timeline is always growing; each moment gets tacked on to the end as it happens. Now some asshole invents time travel and heads back a few decades to try and fix their broken life. They find themselves at some point in the past, which I'll represent with a red bar:

Both the blue bar and the red bar are always moving forward at the same rate. Each moment that passes by the blue bar gives exactly enough time for a moment's worth of time to pass by the red bar, so they're always the same distance apart. I like to think of the red bar as being a part of the present. You might imagine a universal clock that's completely independent from the timeline always ticking away. Each moment that it ticks moves both the blue bar and the red bar one moment further through time. You might also think of the present as a movie playing, and when someone time travels away from it someone starts up another copy of the movie running on a screen right next to the original present. The only moments that the universe is keeping track of at any given point are the ones where someone from the original present happens to be. I'm not sure which of these ideas are most applicable.

So there's someone from the blue present at the red present, and the moment that someone does something at the red present, it echoes out through the future and changes everything beyond it. Except that the universe is only keeping track of the two times where people from the original present happen to be, so if you do something at the red bar, the reality at the blue bar just sort of suddenly adjusts. If you cut down the tree at the red bar, it disappears at the blue bar. People will probably remember the tree has always having been there, or they might just feel like "there should be a tree here". Or another example, if you appear and tell some dude in a Hazmat suit to go find your mum in 10 years time at the red bar, he'll suddenly remember this happening at the blue bar.

Examples: Day of the Tentacle (a video game), Lost (probably), Star Trek: First Contact

I'm sure this "index" is incomplete. I haven't seen every time travel movie ever, and I'm missing some important ones like Terminator 2. The first Terminator looks like it should be one timeline time travel, but I always hear that the sequel is branching timeline time travel. I should do some research.

Before I sign off, there's one more thing I want to mention. The movie Primer has a really cool time travel related idea that more stories should pick up. In that movie, time is like space in that you have to pass through each point between you and your destination in order to get there. So in space, if you want to get from your computer to the fridge, you have to walk through each point in space that exists between you and your fridge. Then after that if you want to get to yesterday, you have to pass through each moment between now and yesterday to get there. This means that you have to sit in a special box for 24 hours if you want to get to 24 hours before now. This leads to lots of... stuff. Weird stuff.

Alright readers, I know you're out there because you keep either commenting on my posts or talking to me about them at dinner. Dad. Tell me what philosophies of time travel I've missed, tell me what movies fall into what categories, and tell me good time travel movies I should check out. Just don't get into Donnie Darko stuff; we can leave that for another time. I plan on writing a Donnie Darko walkthrough at some point. Or maybe I'll just link to one.

Movie Trailers #6: Double Feature

2009-09-01T16:03:00.003-05:00

Just two trailers today, but I'm VERY excited about both. If you haven't been watching the trailers I usually embed here, I recommend you actually watch these two.

Inception

Weird looking, I know. But dark, noir-esque sci-fi is so good. All I know about this movie beyond the style is that it starts DiCaprio and is directed by Christopher Nolan, but really. Why would I need more than that? This looks fantastic. It looks very much in the style of The Matrix, while possibly being less action packed and more with its roots in Chinatown and Bladerunner. That's some big expectations, I know. I have big expectations for this movie.

Let's pick this trailer apart, starting simple. Awesome lead? Check. Awesome director? Check. Cool looking cinematography? Check. Foreboding music? Check. What else we got?

The tagline: "your mind is the scene of the crime". That inspires so many cool ideas. It means this is probably a movie that starts with a crime, then follows DiCaprio around while he tries to solve it. It's a detective movie in other words. It also suggests some sort of telepathic thing going on. Mental shenanigans are involved. I don't know about you, but I'm a man who loves telepathic shenanigans, dark settings, good actors, and detective movies. Rolling them all together sounds like Christmas morning.

The other thing going on in the trailer is this gravity manipulation business.

The shot of this glass of water is super cool. Something is making gravity shift around, and it's creepy. Apparently it's killing people, too, given that scene on that hotel floor. It doesn't seem like this gravity manipulation would be a world wide thing, or society would crumble. No, my guess is that someone has figured out how to make someone's personal gravity change or just make them think their personal gravity has changed. This would fit with the "your mind" part of the tagline. Someone is screwing with the way people's minds work or perceive the world, and it's throwing gravity all over the place.

Or maybe the whole movie takes place in DiCaprio's head, and it's just about him going nuts. You heard it here first, kids. If I'm right, I totally called that 9 months before the movie came out.

The name Inception is one last bit of info. Something is beginning, this title says. Something new has been created, and it's going to change the way the world works. Looks like it's going to change the way gravity works. Maybe it's a gravity gun. Or maybe it's the emergence of telepaths. Whatever it is, I can't wait for it to get here.

What a crazy idea. This is so sci-fi it hurts. It's so cool. Man, everything about this trailer just leaves me wanting more. That's how a trailer should be.

...

I hope it doesn't suck.

...

It'll probably suck.

The Men Who Stare At Goats

Speaking of movie persons who I like, check out that cast! Holy shit! Ewan McGregor is one of my favorite actors, now that I think about it. I can't remember seeing him not do well in a role. Then George Clooney on top of that... More like that on top of George Clooney! He's a good actor, he's smooth, he's funny, and he's got all the ladies in love with him. I don't think I've seen him play a bat-shit insane character before (Burn After Reading comes close), so this should be good. Uniquely crazy characters are great; I hope he can be memorable rather than just nuts. Plus the two leads have The Dude and Kevin Spacey backing them up. Sweet.

I guess we've got a telepath theme today. I like the plot sketched out in the preview a lot. Comedy about the U.S. government training psychic super soldiers that also happen to be nuts... Sounds fun. It could easily turn into Clooney stealing the show and making us forget about any importance the plot may have had to begin with, but I don't see that with Ewan backing him up. I believe he's capable of grounding us.

What I don't like is all the "based on a true story" BS. Movies love to say they're based on an incredible true story, but the truth is that they're not. Every writer gets inspiration from somewhere; every story is based on something that actually happened. They're based on ideas their writer had, which come from that person's experiences. They're all based on real life. Even Donnie Darko. Just because this one lines up more with real events doesn't make it less fictitious. Trust me; The Men Who Stare At Goats will leave up for debate whether Clooney is really psychic. Judging by the cloud thing in the preview, they may even come out and say he is psychic. That, my friends, means that this is not a true story. Psychic people don't exist.

Aside from that sad necessity of marketing, I love everything about this movie. I'll be the first to admit that I'm obsessed with goats,

(

)

so it makes sense that I'd want to see this movie no matter what it's about. That shot of Clooney staring down the line of goats and then one falls over... that's just so funny. It's hilarious. I love it. Everyone looks so crazy, which is awesome. There's goats. There's psychic super soldiers. There's guys running into walls. There's George Clooney and Ewan McGregor. What could possibly be better than this? When's it coming out?

Review: Cold Souls

2009-08-31T17:23:00.000-05:00

Deep shit, bro.

Cold Souls is a strange movie. I can't decide whether its clever or just trying too hard to be existential. Paul Giamatti is a fun actor to watch, but is it just too much when he's playing a kinda famous actor named Paul Giamatti? You can make a sci-fi movie about real life ideas without rubbing it in our faces, guys.

Alright so Paul is this dude who's feeling depressed and out of it, partly because he's doing this crazy depressing Russian play that's really tough on him emotionally. He's feeling crappy one day when his agent calls him and tells him to look at this article in the New Yorker about a company that can extract the soul from the body and put it in storage.

Mmmk.

Paul checks it out, and it turns out they're saying that removing your soul actually makes you feel lighter; it removes a great weight from your conscience. Paul thinks this all sounds crazy, but what the hell. If it's bad, he can always just put his soul back in his body and he'll be fine. It's only for two weeks while he does the play, right? What could go wrong?

Oh movie characters. When will you learn that things that sound crazy-dumb usually are. Life lesson: if you are ever told that removing your soul from your body is a good idea, you are being shitted. This is a classic idea that always ends badly. Just look at Liches, or if you're more pop cultural than that Voldemort. Taking your soul out of your body is just stupid. Classic symptoms include feeling empty, emotionless, scaley (as in lizard-like), and nothing at all. That is, feeling nothing at all. Look what happened to Bart Simpson - he felt anxious and empty. Sliding doors stopped opening for him. Crazy supernatural shit went down. Yeah.

To no one's surprise but his own, this is exactly what happens to poor stupid Paul. He feels empty, hollow. I guess removing that intangible piece of yourself that makes you "you" rather than some other schmuck is a bad idea. So what does he decide to do? Rather than put himself back the way he was, he decides to "rent" the soul of a Russian poet. Uh huh. Because if feeling empty is bad, feeling full of something distinctly not you will feel great. The movie itself compares this to sleeping with the person who's soul you now have in you.

There is a moment here that was very intriguing. Paul is ranting about how it sucks to not have a soul when the doctor stops him and asks "have you felt a single bad thought since you extracted your soul?" No. "Have you felt anything at all in the past week?" No. This isn't exactly a good thing, but it is what Paul was trying to do. He was trying to detach himself from his life and work, from his play. It's a classic case of getting what you want but not realizing the full price that you paid.

What's going on with this movie? It's obviously circling around the classic "what defines who we are" topic, but there's more to it than that. The mule lady is so important to the story, and she's so good to Paul, what's being said when it turns out she can't ever get her own soul back? Life is tragic, maybe. Life can be tragic.

What's with the whole Russian theme? I just don't know much about Russian history or culture to know what's going on there, but there's so much of it that it's got to symbolize something. If anyone out there has ideas, let me know.

Then there's the movie poster. Check it:

What does this tell us? Well, Paul Giamatti is definitely in this movie. I get the impression this movie is going to try and say something, probably about the soul - the abstractness implies that for me. Abstract posters usually lead to thinky movies. The Russian doll thing with his head... oh man. Oh man! The Russian motif is right there on the poster, albeit cleverly hidden. WELL PLAYED, COLD SOULS. WELL PLAYED. Anyway, that makes me think about trying to get inside Paul's head. We want to understand what's in there, but each layer is just more Paul. As we go in there and look for him, we'll pass by all this other stuff that is also him. And when we get there, it's just Paul. He's there giving us a snarky glare. That layer thing is important, too. People are like onions, after all. They have layers.

Why does Paul's soul look like a chickpea? I think this is the part where we get a message about how something as wonderful and beautiful as the soul doesn't have to be big. It can be as small and boring as a chickpea and still house all the essence of a human being. Then you get obvious implications about what has happened to his soul when it's all withered out after the actress lady is done with it, and you get to make jokes about how some famous celebrity has a soul that looks like a charcoal.

I don't know, I feel like almost everything in this movie has been done before. Souls are important, souls can be small and innocuous while still being beautiful, some people have good souls, some people have bad souls, everyone's soul is different, what happens to the soul when we die, what are people like when they don't have a soul, what does that imply about the nature of the soul, etc, etc. It's just not new and not that innovative in its presentation.

I did like the laboratory scenes. The sci-fi aspect of the movie was the perfect blend of wit and polish.

Also, someone get the directer a fucking steady-cam. If you're filming Cloverfield, that's one thing. You have an excuse for your shaky camera. If you're filming a serious movie, your artistic statement about the uncertainty of reality and life is better left to the script and actors than to a technique that makes me queezy.

There were a couple of symbolic things I did like a lot. The recurring shots of people standing looking out at the beach and into the ocean were good. I like the use of the beach as sort of a dividing line between life and nothingness, between having a soul and not. The other well done bits were the ones where we got a look into people's souls. The cinematography was really good there, and being wide open to interpretation is something a soul should be. The Russian poet's soul felt deeply tragic on some level. I did feel longing and sorrow during that sequence, like I had once had hope but most of it had been beaten out of my by the crappy factor that I work in.

Paul's soul, too, is well done. It feels so intimate. He wants a son, or maybe his wife had a miscarriage, or both... He maybe wishes he was a kid again but is happy with where he's ended up. Ultimately, he's content with whatever he came away with after looking into his soul. I think that's the most important part of the movie. It's the part that actually verged on powerful for me. It's hard to really look into yourself, to give yourself a good examination. It's not something you always want to do. But it can help. Coming to terms with yourself, or reconnecting with your soul as the movie puts it, can make you feel good about yourself. Chances are you have a beautiful soul. Let yourself into it.

...

Anyway, I did enjoy it. Paul Giamatti is fun to watch. Some of the soul stuff may be overdone, but it's still an interesting subject. The sci-fi stuff is good, and there's some funny lines. I don't get the Russian thing, and that might open up more understanding of the film. Maybe it's supposed to add to the bleakness of the world that a soul can light up. I think of Russian stuff as pretty bleak.

SAM'S VERDICT: If you like Paul Giamatti or are feeling existential, jump on in. The water is not fine, exacty, but full of existentialism and Paul Giamatti.

Also, just because I'm a filthy Joss Whedon whore, I'm going to go ahead and recommend Dollhouse here. This is Whedon's most recent TV show, and it's dealing with a lot of the same ideas as this movie. You know, who are we, and what makes a person a person. Dollhouse starts out really, really, REALLY bad, but it picks up at episode 6. If you can get your hands on the DVD boxed set, watch the original pilot, then read episode recaps of eps 1-5, maybe cherry-pick a couple out of there to get an idea for the show, then skip to episode 6 and go from there. I stopped recommending the show a while back, but after seeing Epitaph One (a between seasons episode they shot for weird reasons), it's officially on my list of good shows.

Movie Trailers #5: Coming Soon

2009-08-29T14:30:00.000-05:00

This time we've got a couple movies that are coming out soon. Note that in addition to these I recommend the following movies coming this month and early October that I've commented on in August:

9 - coming September 9th because they're clever.
The Invention of Lying - September 25th
Zombieland - October 2nd
A Serious Man - October 2nd
Toy Story Double Feature - October 2nd

Damn. I might have to pull a quadruple feature October 2nd. Now on to the meat.

Extract - September 4th

I thought this was a documentary from the movie poster. Boy was I wrong. Jason Bateman is never any character other than Michael Bluth, so I guess it's a good thing that Michael Bluth is a fun character to watch. Juno's dad is rapidly becoming my favorite actor; so good in both Juno and Burn After Reading. Ben Affleck is Ben Affleck. Mila Kunis is pretty good... LOOKING. That beauty pageant judge from Little Miss Sunshine is so much fun to hate. Man, I wonder what that actress is like in person. She must be the most lovable middle-aged lady ever to parody horrible moms as well as she does. Anyway, even if the premise sucked (which it doesn't), the cast is fantastic. Plus it looks funny. Definitely on my list to see.

I Sell The Dead - September 7th

You go, Dominic Monaghan. Looks mildly entertaining. Not great, but deece. Grave robbing is just such a hilarious concept, man, it's a wonder this thing doesn't look like a total riot. But yeah. Zombedy told through flashback. Nothing wrong with that. It's got some awards, too, so maybe it's better than it looks.

Gamer - September 4th

Okay, first of all, didn't this movie just come out last year? Except then it was called Death Race. No, seriously, if you watched the Gamer trailer go watch this Death Race trailer now. It's the same fucking movie except one is Twisted Metal and the other is Counter-Strike. I would bet a large amount of pride that the one twist Death Race has (that is given away in the trailer) also shows up in Gamer. They even look the same with that overly gray, gritty modern action movie look going on. Someone aughta be sued.

Okay, so that's silly, but let's move on to ridiculous. The plot. Um... what? Death row inmates are put up to be controlled in some sort of real life Counter-Strike thing? Aside from the fact that this remote controlling people technology is just stupid, if it existed, I don't think we'd be using it to control death row inmates in some sort of stupid video game. Why the fuck would we bother with that? I don't think there'd be much of a market for watching that game over regular games, and I don't think there'd be much of a market for playing that game instead of a digital one. But I'm being silly; that's not what this movie is about. This movie is about a premise that thinks it's clever and the market that comes along with the word "gamer". They're trying to appeal to gamers, and it's fucking working. I only know about this movie because someone said to me "d00d, did you hear about this Gamer movie? I think it's about video games."

It stars Gerard Butler, who I just saw as the lead in The Ugly Truth. Yes, this is King Leonidas again. I will never be able to take him seriously. Gamer seems to think it's a serious movie, or at least it wants us to think that it thinks it's a serious movie so that we can laugh at how stupid it is that it thinks it's a serious movie. So you've got Gerard Butler in this stupid, "serious" action movie just a couple weeks after I've seen him giving people pep talks in The Ugly Truth about men and women. I wonder if he magically always has the same amount of stubble in this movie, too.

Also, what the fuck. The premise is so stupid. If you survive 30 games you get to go free, right? What the shit is up with that? You have no control over whether or not you win. That's like saying "if you play 30 dota games in a row and don't have any leavers you go free." You have to get super lucky; you have to get a good player controlling you every time, and your player has to be lucky every time. That's just stupid. That's just... I can't express how bad this premise is.

Of course the biggest problem with the premise is that it requires a teenage guy to be in a lead role. I've never met a pubescent guy who doesn't piss me off in one way or another, myself included. It also means that if what plot there is requires this kid to be anything except a total fuckhead, it's not going to be realistic.

I hate middleschoolers.

Then there's a cameo by Ludicris. Like... I've been writing about this trailer for about 5 paragraphs now, and I still have more to say about how stupid this movie looks. What does that tell? I bet I could go see it, come home, and write a blog post about this film by cutting and pasting this rant, then adding "also there was this one part where the action sequence was particularly cool." Yeah.

I'd probably see it if Danl was in town, though. Oh, that reminds me. Riddle me this: Danl wants to see this movie but thought G.I.Joe looked like a waste of time. At least the preview for G.I.Joe had some sweet bullet time dives, cool green smoke effects, and a tag-line to kill for. "What does it accelerate?" "You." Hahaha. So good.

Apparently I have a lot to say about Gamer. I don't think there's much else I've heard of coming out in September anyway, so let's stop here. If you want more previews, though, I recommend Avatar and Inception, both of which I'll be talking about soon.

Movie Trailers #4: Quick Hits

2009-08-28T19:37:00.003-05:00

Despite my best efforts, there's still a lot of trailers I haven't covered out there. Fortunately, there's not much to say about most of them. Because there's a bunch of them and not much to say, I'm not going to embed these ones - instead I'll link them. Now without further ado...

Toy Story Double Feature: In preparation for Toy Story 3, Pixar is re-releasing the first two installments in this franchise... IN 3D! Actually, the 3D part is not cool. I hate having to wear those silly glasses. Whatever, these movies were great the first time around. Toy Story marked the move into modern animation instead of classic Disney animation, and at the same time it was one of the best kids movies I've ever seen. I'm biased, though, since I grew up on the stuff. Then #2 came out and didn't suck, a feat which I'm very impressed by. So yeah. If you're into Pixar movies and don't mind the 3D gimmick, head out to this one. It's only going to be around for 2 weeks in October.

Legion: Yeah, bitches! Let's blow some shit up! WOOOOO KILLIN ANGELS

When In Rome: Yeah, bitches! Shitty romantic comedies starring Sarah Marshall! That's her name, you know. Sarah Marshall.

Tron: Legacy: Tron has The Dude in it? That's the movie I want to see; fuck Tron. I want to see Tron set at a bowling alley. I want to see The Dude just out for a bike ride when some asshole cuts him off and ruins his day. Yeah. I've never seen Tron, so I have no reason to fan-boy out about this movie. Thus to me, it just looks like another bad movie about an animation team having way too much fun for their own good. Er, I mean, another bad action movie.

Law Abiding Citizen: Ew. I hate torture movies, and I hate "bad things happen to good people for no reason" movies. Okay, I hate the torture movies, and I hate the kind of "bad things good people" movies that only use that motif to set up the torture parts of the movie. This looks like a good example.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon: Hahahaha no.

Whiteout: This looks like a great one shot RPG where everyone dies at the end. Maybe I'll run something like that in a few years for ERPL. Looks good enough to go see with Danl and not as bad as the premise would have me believe.

I just found this preview for a movie called Inception, but I think I could write a whole post on that preview alone. So I will in a couple days. Until then.

Trip to a Drive In

2009-08-27T13:41:00.003-05:00

Drive in movies. What a concept! Even in the modern day, the drive in movie has a lot to offer. You get 3 movies for $7.50, you get that cool retro feel to the experience, and you get privacy for you and your friend(s) to either heckle the film or make out in peace. Then on top of that you get to tell all your friends the next day about how you, no for reals, got to go to a drive in movie.

A couple nights ago, I found myself at this particular drive in theater located east of St. Paul. It's one of only 3 or so drive ins left in the state. Both Danl and Evan have girlfriends that live not far from its location, so we'd been planning the event for a while. My college best friend also lives within 5 minutes, but she was inconveniently at a cabin somewhere with family. Luckily I have multiple friends at college, and coerced one who was in town to come.

Our movie schedule was District 9, The Ugly Truth, and The Taking of Pelham 123. Clearly I was not there for the movie selection. Drive ins seems much more about the social experience rather than what's playing, so it didn't matter that the only one of those films I was keen on seeing I already had. I could see District 9 again, have a running commentary with Danl through The Ugly Truth, then doze off for Pelham. That was the game plan.

I pulled in late with the people arriving from Northfield, and we were met with hellos and did-you-get-losts. We busted out the snacks we'd procured at Kwik Trip at quarter movie snack prices, set up the backs of various cars for comfortable seating, and had some good pre-movie conversation. Pretty quickly the previews started. There was only one, and I was very upset by this fact. It was for Zombieland, so if you want my thoughts on it check out this post. This was a longer trailer, but my impressions didn't change.

Evan and Annie (his GF) had taken up residence in the back of her truck, while Danl and Andrea (his GF) had gotten comfy in a pile-o-blankets in the back of her van. I was left alone in the middle (my friend Sarah had gone to to the concessions stand) without a convenient place to sit in my car, and anyway that would've been awkward since I wasn't on a date with Sarah. (Yes, it was a little awkward anyway. No, not very much.) I sidled on over to Andrea's van and "convinced" them they should let me and Sarah join them. By which I mean they offered because they're nice.

District 9

This movie taught me some basic lessons about drive ins.

LESSON #1: Bring a place to sit. If you don't have a car with a back compartment to fit people into or you've brought more than 2 people who can sit in the front of your vehicle, bring chairs. Nothing sucks more than sitting on a bunch of rocks. Everyone's got lawn chairs lying

LESSON #2: Bring bug-spray! Even in the back of a van, the bugs were everywhere. I got eaten alive, and this was with blankets covering much of my open skin. I can't imagine what it would've been like if we hadn't had a vehicle covering 5 of our 6 sides.

LESSON #3: It's fuckin' cold out there! Blankets are awesome. Vehicles with heating are awesomer. Just don't freeze yourself to death as Evan and Annie almost did. Lucky for them I'd thought ahead and brought plenty of warm covers, but even then it Evan complained about the temperature.

LESSON #4: Snacks are delicious! Everyone likes to eat snacks with their movies, and it's never been easier to sneak snacks into a theater than when you've got a whole car to do it with. Stop for some at a gas station before heading out for the evening. Even if you don't normally have snacks, this is 3 movies. That's 2 more than most movies you'll go to in your life, and you'll probably end up hungry. Don't forget pop if you're into that sort of thing, but be careful. Caffeine can either keep you up through that third feature or keep you up way longer than you wanted to be up. Plan accordingly.

Aside from that, it was fun to see this movie again. I already reviewed it, but it's always interesting to hear second impressions. The second time through was better in at least one way: I could choose to not look at that part when Wikus is peeling off his fingernails, that part when he's chopping of fingers, and that part when he's pulling out teeth. Seriously Wikus, you're gross.

I still think it's a great 20 minutes of documentary followed by 2 hours of mediocre action, and I still don't like the main character. Marie's comments from last time stuck with me, though. I do like the idea that this less than ordinary man is doing such extraordinary things. The baby alien is also awesome; I don't remember if I mentioned that last time.

Here are some other people's impressions (paraphrased):

Sarah said she was hit by the fact that if aliens really did show up today, if the stuff in Disctrict 9 actually happened, that's exactly how people would react to it. It pinpoints very well the bad parts of human nature and governments.

Danl thought it looked cool.

Andrea said "yeah, that was alright." So did Evan and Annie. I don't remember any more specific comments than that, which might say more than any specifics would.

The Ugly Truth

First a review: imagine a standard romantic comedy. Are the jokes good? Yes? Then your rom-com is not standard. Tone them down until they just barely cover the 90 minute run time. Is the acting good? Yes? Then your rom-com is not standard. Tone it down until it's bearable, but both you and your date are watching the leads rather than listening to them. Is the story good? Yes? Really? Okay, you're shitting with me. I asked you to imagine a standard romantic comedy. Bring it all down a few notches on the quality scale, throw in a couple of stock characters (controlling girl, bad boy), set it in a slightly out of real life location (news room), and voila. You get this. If I ever have to give an example of a rom-com that was completely and utterly form fitting, this would be it. It's like they've got a mold back there in those Hollywood buildings in Cali, and this one came straight out of the one labeled "summer romantic comedy".

Some of you may remember my comments on romantic comedies from my discussion of the The Invention of Lying trailer:

I've always secretly wanted a girlfriend who insists on going to see all sorts of bad romantic comedies so I have a reason to see them.

This still stands. But wait! I am not a hypocrite! The problem is that mediocre romantic comedies are not the same thing as bad romantic comedies. Bad rom-coms have silly magical gimmicks and scripts you can make fun of where mediocre ones have scripts that put you to sleep and take place in a fake-fake-fake version of the real world. Bad rom-coms are a guilty pleasure. Mediocre rom-coms are unpleasant. There is a difference, and it's not always possible to tell the difference from preview alone. Often you have to see a movie yourself before you can decide whether that was so bad you liked it or so bad you'd like to punch the director.

I'd been talking about the movie line up a few days earlier with Danl. We both agreed that this movie looked bad. I said that watching it was like part of the cost of admission, to which Danl agreed. Then he recounted a horrible tale. Apparently he'd had this same "sizing up the line up" conversation with Andrea, and this was the movie she'd gotten excited for. NOOOOO!! One of those girls! The kind that likes formulaic rom-coms with no style! He was dating a monster.

[Disclaimer: Andrea is actually awesome. Not all people who like formulaic romantic comedies are monsters. Just most of them.]

It got worse. The previews began for this movie (yay, more previews!), and Andrea exclaimed that she was excited for this one. "What's it about?" asked Sarah, to which we explained. "Oh, that sounds good! I can't wait!" Danl and I exchanged looks, then groans. Andrea and Sarah turned to us. "Now I know you guys like to run commentary through movies like this, but please don't. We want to enjoy the movie," they said. Danl and I groaned louder.

Needless to say, we didn't respect they're wishes. We held off for a while, mostly because the material was so stale we had a hard time coming up with witty comments. Instead, Danl and I dived into a game of "Spot The Actor".

Spot The Actor: The Ugly Truth Edition

Alright, here's how you play. You see some actor that you sort of maybe recognize in the movie, but you can't quite place them. Then everyone stops paying attention to the movie and starts thinking of where the crap it was that they've seen that person before. And now you can play from home! This way you don't even have to burn 90 minutes sitting through a bad movie to play. Just give another movie + role that you've seen a person in, and see how many you can identify. No IMDB, of course. You don't have IMDB at a movie theater. I'll have two sets of answers at the bottom: one of my own, and one from IMDB.

Ready?

Who's that lady? Where have you seen that guy before?

The female lead...? She looks like she's playing, too.

And the male lead. He was tough for me; I ended up having to use a movie that's not out yet.

Answers at the bottom of the post. I recommend people comment their guesses, though. I'm always curious both about who can recognize what actors, and what sorts of movies people have seen and remember.

The Taking of Pelham 123

Remember those molds I was talking about Hollywood having? This one came out of the "Hostage Negotiation" one after they put the Denzel Washington clay into it. They must have so much of that Denzel Washington clay... I bet they give it away to starving children. Could probably feed all of Africa for a year with the amount they have lying around back there.

With nothing special happening on the screen I turned much of attention towards other things, namely trying to find a comfortable lying down position in the back of a van while sharing the space with 3 people. If you ever find yourself in such a situation, let me save you some time and tell you how you get comfortable: you don't. Just sit up or shift around a lot, because there's nothing else you can hope to do effectively. Maybe if we'd moved the car sideways and watched out a window... No, no. I'm done with that problem. I'm done with it.

Sarah fell asleep as she is so prone to do. Even through the gunfire, nothing wakes her up. Danl and Andrea successfully refrained from any uncomfortable PDA. Denzel did his thing, and John Travolta made watchable work of a meh script. Evan and Annie did whatever they were doing in the other vehicle, and all was right in the world.

When the credits finally rolled in at around 2AM, we packed up and said our goodbyes. It had been a good trip. I had enjoyed it, at least. Sometimes I think sitting through 3 movies, even good ones, sounds like torture, but every time I do it I come out having enjoyed myself. The ride home was filled by of one of Evan's moderately entertaining monologues and decent music. I dropped my fellow Northfieldians off, and turned in.

I'd do that again. Remind me to keep tabs on how often their set of movies changes.

Epilogue

One of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies is set at a drive in. It's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Jim Carry and Kate Winslet are sitting in a car outside the fence of a drive in movie. They're at this happy point in their relationship where it feels like they don't need anyone else; they're great by themselves. There's two actors on the screen of the drive in, but because they haven't paid to get in they don't have sound. To compensate, they're filling in the actor's dialogue themselves. It's very adorable and funny; maybe the point is that this is more fun than watching a movie. Maybe they like filling in their own words for infinitely less of a cost? It makes me think about what it is that I like about movies. Sometimes I'm in it for the story or the spectacle, but for the most part it's the people I'm with that make the film. Bad movies become good when you've got a friend to make fun of them with. Good movies become bad when you don't have anyone to talk to about them when you're done. It's more important to have a good time than it is to respect the movie. I'd much rather fill in a mute actor's lines with a friend while parked outside a drive in theater than watch a masterpiece of cinema while alone in my basement.

Spot The Actor Answer Keys

My answers:
Woman from pic 1: couldn't place her. I wanted to say some sort of Judd Apatow thing, but I think I'm wrong.
Man from pic 1: Arrested Development prosecution lawyer. I love this guy, man. He's great. We also suspected he was in the Waiting For Guffman documentaries. I specifically remember him in A Mighty Wind.
Female lead: couldn't place her, either. I recall my parents saying she's a Grey's Anatomy alumni, though.
Male lead: he's going to be in Gamer, and I think another stupid action movie I saw a preview for at District 9 the first time I saw it. Yea, IMDB says it's called Law Abiding Citizen, and it looks just awful. I'll have to review it now that I remember what it's called.

IMDB answers:
Woman from pic 1: Cheryl Hines. She was apparently in Waitress and Along Came Polly. I don't remember seeing much else from her bio.
Man from pic 1: John Michael Higgins. I was right on all counts.
Female lead: Katherine Heigl. Oh duh, she was in Knocked Up. That's why she felt so at home in the romantic comedy lead position to me. Grey's Anatomy seems to be the big thing for her.
Male lead: Gerard Butler. HOLY SHIT IT'S KING LEONIDAS!!!!1! Hahahahaha, if I'd known that The Ugly Truth would've been great. Just throw out another "THIS IS [blank]" joke every few minutes and Danl and I would've been set for the night. Also in P.S. I Love You, which I may now need to see so that I can get those jokes in.

Inglourious Basterds

2009-08-23T22:41:00.011-05:00

[Note that this post is mostly discussion. If you're reading this to decide whether or not it's a movie for you, skip to the bottom.]

Spoiler alert:

This movie is a movie. You can tell because only in movies do people like Brad Pitt's character exist. Only in movies do theaters explode and gunfights happen in bar basements ending in the death of everyone involved. Only in movies can you mother-fucking kill Hitler, bitches.

Yeah, that's right. Hitler dies. What are you going to do about it? It's a movie; it's not historically accurate. In the movies, The Jew Hunter was a real person. In the movies, enough Nazis have been killed to wipe out the entirety of German's forces several times over. In the movies, time travel is possible. In the movies, some guy figured out how to extract dinosaur DNA from mosquitoes and set up a dinosaur park for tourists before it all went bad and a bunch of people got eaten. Also that last one lead to a childhood fear of raptors for thousands, but that part was real. That part wasn't in the movies.

Inglourious Basterds is a movie about film making. This is something my cinema professor last year said about nearly every movie we watched, but I think in this case it's actually true. Quentin Tarantino knows he's hot shit, and hot shit directors like to be clever. Nothing says clever in the world of film like a good movie about movies, so that's what he's delivered. I first thought this might be the case when it was revealed that the most important location in the film was a movie theater; that's a big hint. I wasn't totally sure, however, until Hitler died. This is the most important event in the movie to me. It's like Tarantino has turned to us directly and said "Look, I'm directing here. I can do whatever I want, and there's no one to stop me. I could have aliens show up right now, in the middle of WWII, and that would be what happens. I can do anything. I can kill Hitler. Yeah. Look, there I go. I'm killing Hitler. Anyone stopping me? No? Didn't think so. This is my art, this is my self expression. Fuck you." Then Hitler's dead, and the film doesn't even make a big deal out of it. It focuses on the flames and the crowd and the explosions than on some dumb historical figure. Of course the point needs to be made that, yes really, Hitler just died, so one of the generic good guys throws some extra bullets into him for good measure.

The other scene where I really felt this was just before Hitler's death. It was the scene where The Jew Hunter (I don't remember his formal name) has P J Novak and Brad Pitt captured. He sits them down at a desk, excuses his guards, and sets a telephone on the desk between them before explaining the situation. The all important cinema and location of our film's climax currently has Hitler, a bunch of important German leaders, and a helluvalota explosives in it. The Jew Hunter explains that he can either make one phone call and put a stop to the American's mission, or he can do nothing and cause the end of the war and the end of the Third Reich.

What's it going to be, he seems to ask? Does he make the call and have history go back to its regularly scheduled programming, or does he do nothing, sit back, and enjoy the ride? Tarantino presents this as a real choice. And in the movies, it is a real choice. And this being the movies, this story is in the business of delivering us a happy ending. What's happier than Hitler biting the big one, taken down by a combination of a hot chick and Brad Pitt?

The phone scene is made even stranger by The Jew Hunter being at his most absurd. He's been a great character the whole movie. He's smart, he's cunning, he's creepy, he's German, he's evil, etc. We hate him. So when he delivers his "Bingo" lines, you're caught completely off guard. What is going on, you ask yourself. The whole theater laughs awkwardly. This guy can't possibly be for real. Of course, he's not. He's in the movies. He's like the 'toon from the end of Who Killed Roger Rabbit?. He's fake, and so is this whole piece of work. Sort of.

Sort of.

Shortly thereafter, Hitler's death happens in the background of the climax, and it involves the burning of several hundred films, a projection screen, and a whole cinema. I haven't quite wrapped my head around what exactly is being said here, but I can tell for sure that it involves the fragility of movies, the fact that you can use films for lots of different things, and specifically that you can destroy people with them. Look at Fahrenheit 9/11. It didn't single handedly destroy anyone, but it and media like it brought a ton of crap down on the Bush administration. Films can be destructive.

On the other hand, films are also easy to destroy. The flames created by those old movies brought down the Third Reich, but it was only because film is so combustible that this was possible. Film is fragile; you can tear it apart or burn it up. You can change it - you can edit in a giant picture of your face telling a bunch of Nazis they're about to die into an action flick.

Which makes me question the seriousness of the whole thing in the first place. Tarantino may have some cool stuff to say, but can we take him seriously when some modern Brad Pitt caricature of a Tennessee-ian Nazi killer running around scalping people and carving swastikas into their foreheads? Maybe the whole thing is just mind games and good times.

Oh, and then there's all the anachronistic stuff. The film is constantly breaking (or at least taking a swing at) the 4th wall by putting modern looking titles over old looking places pointing out important people or explaining important things. Sometimes it takes first-act-of-Juno-esque breaks from the action to just run off on a tangent and talk about something else. I'm sure this is again commenting on the nature of the viewer watching this "historical event" through modern eyes or something like that.

Quick Summary (Sans Spoilers)

With my analysis done, let's get back to basics. Who is this movie for? Well, it's a bit of a mind-fuck in that it's just... odd. It's probably all that post-modernism. Don't see it if you can't take Tarantino levels of violence, because those exist. It's funny and well written.

SAM'S VERDICT: A very lighthearted telling of a very gruesome tale. Great writing. Expect all of these things, but go see it if you're okay with that violence thing.

Man, I've gotten this far and haven't even mentioned the formatting. The films takes place primarily in just 4-5ish twenty+ minute scenes, each awesomely written and tense all the way through. Even when the characters are laughing, you're wondering when someone else is going to get twitchy with their trigger finger and flip out. I was on the edge of my seat for the whole thing. Such writing.

And The Jew Hunter! Oh man. He's such a good character. Remind me to do a "Top 5 Villains" list sometime soon. He probably won't be on it, but he's the kind of guy that makes me want to make such a list. I'm also going to have to come up with my own categories for Best Ofs come Academy Awards time. Best New Character will probably go to Malcolm from In The Loop. Mm... Exciting...

...

What a nutty movie.

Violence in Cinema Part 2, or Bourne vs Coen Violence, or Kill Bill Revisited

2009-08-21T22:11:00.007-05:00

After my last post on the subject of violence, I decided it was time to go back and watch Kill Bill again. It seemed natural to go on a Tarantino binge with Inglourious Basterds coming out and me needing to see Reservoir Dogs.

Last time my question went something like this: why is my opinion of cinematic violence changed so much based on the movie? Why do I not bat an eye at action movies, can't watch parts of films like No Country For Old Men, and love Kill Bill? I think all these things are pretty easy questions to answer after a recent viewing of Kill Bill.

Why Can't I Watch Parts of No Country For Old Men?

This is simple: they're horribly violent, and I don't want to look at that shit. Easy. I can't take a whole lot even after being desensitized by modern society, so scenes where you can see the bone coming out of some dude's arm freak me out. This is not to say that I automatically don't like movies like No Country For Old Men; I love many of them. Case and point: No Country For Old Men, which I recently put on my Top 5 Adaptations From A Book list. A lot of Coen Brothers stuff falls into this category. This point also smoothly transitions us into our next question.

Why Do I Love Kill Bill?

Also simple: it's a great movie. The script is good, the acting is good, the cinematography is good, the directing is good, the music is mostly good, the special effects are good... It's smooth and polished. The story is your classic revenge story boiled down to such a pure form. There's exactly one twist, and it doesn't change the outcome of the story much. Everything from The Bride's yellow jumpsuit to the dusty Texas landscape is carefully placed with a specific purpose. Everything serves the story.

So why am I so much more okay with Kill Bill's violence than the Coen Brother's? Well, I'm not. As it turns out, I don't say "cool" to Kill Bill's violence for the most part. It's just as cringe worthy and horrific as No Country's or Fight Club's. The difference I was observing in my last post is something related to my third question.

Why Don't I Bat An Eye At Action Movie Violence?

This seems to be the underlying question. Here's what I said last time:

What sets Tarantino's films apart is their style. What draws me to Kill Bill is not the fact that The Bride just kicked the shit out of 88 ninjas, it's that the way she did it was so fucking cool. You can kill people, or you can stab them with a fucking bad-ass katana in slow motion with circling cameras on an elaborate set all set to a pumping soundtrack. Hell yeah.

Even that's not enough, though. Tons of movies come out each year with bad-ass weapon wielding heroes and heroines kicking the shit out of henchmen in slow motion with circling cameras on an elaborate set all set to a pumping soundtrack, but few of them compare to the Crazy 88 scene. There's something more to Tarantino pieces.

There is something more to Tarantino pieces: it's great writing and directing. He's a good story teller and a master of the cinematic media. That's what puts his movies above your common action flick. My comment about few other action sequences comparing to the Crazy 88 scene is just wrong. It stands up there with cool modern action sequences, but your average summer blockbuster car chase is going to come up about level with it. The difference I was remembering was all in the setup for that scene, where Tarantino beats the crap out of this month's blockbuster.

What we actually have in modern movies is two kinds of violence. You've got Bourne (as in The Bourne Identity) violence and Coen Brothers violence. On the Bourne end of the spectrum, your violence is cool. It's streamlined, it's entertaining, it's fun to watch, and it's all played out in slow motion with circling cameras on an elaborate set all set to a pumping soundtrack.

On the Coen end, you have violence that is up close and personal. It's really, really disgusting. It's not fun to watch (unless you're a creeper), it's not streamlined. It's bloody, it's sickening, and it makes you want to look away from the screen. Most of the time when you see this kind of thing, the mood is ruined by at least one person you're watching it with covering their face and asking you to tell them when it's over.

It's pretty clear to me where Bourne violence came from. We as a culture love to watch shit blow up. Cool action movie violence is... cool. It's super cool. And cool things are profitable. Put a good action sequence in your movie and you'll sell tickets. This leads to lots of mediocre action movies that have put a lot of time into the coolness factor and pretty much nothing into their scripts. These are fun, especially when they star Will Smith. I like them, but I don't love them. There's something impersonal about them. It's hard to get too attached to the characters because we know they're invincible. If they weren't invincible then we'd be moving towards really personal violence, Coen style violence. Threats to actually human beings. And that stuff is not what you put into something people want to go enjoy with their friends on a Sunday afternoon.

Coen violence is trickier. There's an audience that will pay money just to see horrible violence, but I'd like to think this concept didn't come from a need to sell tickets to them. Certainly some movies are made to cater to these people. The horror genre has been gravitating more and more towards torture and mutilation and farther away from atmosphere. I don't watch movies like this much, but I hear the Saw series is just ridiculous at this point. Creeps aside, I think it's much easier to say something with Coen violence than with Bourne violence, mostly because it's so much more personal. If you want to tell a "good things happen to bad people" story that involves violence, you use this kind. Same goes for "showing what people are capable of doing to each other" stories, "people are greedy bastards" stories, and "commentary on modern society that isn't a parody" stories. This kind of violence provokes a very specific negative emotional response from the viewer, and if you want to relate that response to a subject or symbol, Coen violence is the way to do it.

Aside from all of this, comedies can use either kind of violence for their own purposes. Parodies can make fun of both Bourne and Coen violence, and you can also use horrific images just for shock value in stuff like Shaun of the Dead. Comedy has its fingers in everything.

I'm still not done with this subject. I've talked a lot about what I think of violence in cinema, and now I've gotten into a sort of general theory of violence. However I still want to get into specific examples of violence as symbolism. Expect some thoughts on Fight Club. Until next time...

Top 5 Adaptations

2009-08-19T18:09:00.002-05:00

Adaptations are a tricky thing. More and more you see anything that was remotely popular as a novel making the jump to the silver screen, and it's sometimes completely unwarranted. I'm sure this is related to the recent flood of remakes; apparently people will pay to see anything that's familiar to them, and Hollywood has picked up on this fact. Oh franchising. You suck so hard and are a topic that deserves its own post.

As I was saying, adaptations are a tricky thing. On the one hand you get stuff like The Lord of the Rings triology that takes a fairly cinematic story and delivers a beautiful projection of it in movie form. On the other hand you get stuff like the Harry Potter movies. (That's code for absolute trash for those of you that don't know my opinion of that series.) Even those aren't two ends of one spectrum since the HP films look so great and just suffer from "too much material to fit into 3 hours" syndrome. There's also stuff out there that was just adapted horribly, stuff where very important details were changed, and then stuff like Adaptation. Seriously, that movie is theoretically based on The Orchid Thief. No matter how much content may come from The Orchid Thief, Adaptation is not about its source material in the slightest.

On top of quality, you get a big problem with any novel-movie adaptation. That is, what you imagine it looked like when you read it is not going to be what it looks like on screen. This will make you upset, and you may never be able to experience the novel the same way again. It sucks, I know. This and TMMTFI3H syndrome are the big problems with the book to movie transition, though that's assuming the writers are respectful of the original material.

What are some great adaptations? In no particular order,

Lord of the Rings
The Shining
The Shawshank Redemption
No Country For Old Men
Chicago (though this came from the stage... still a difficult jump)
Big Fish
High Fidelity
About A Boy
The Princess Bride
The Maltese Falcon
Pretty much every old-school Disney movie (assuming you count adaptation from classic fairy tales)
Fight Club

...and that's just off the top of my head! I forgot how many movies these days are based on another source, and also how not all movies based on something are bad. It might be more entertaining to do a worst adaptations list. That one would have a lot of competition.

When making a Top 5 adaptations list, how much should one take into account faithfulness to the original material? For example, I hear Fight Club the movie is very different from Fight Club the book, but both are widely loved. I can't speak on this example directly having not read the book, but it's an important question. In my list above, I've only read 2 of the books those movies are based one (counting Lotr as 1 book). If faithfulness is an important quality, I have some serious work to do before I can make my list here.

Whatever. Let's see what comes up.

Top 5 adaptations from a book:
High Fidelity
The Maltese Falcon
Big Fish
No Country For Old Men
The Shining

Those are all from my above list, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some that should be on here. I wish there was room for stuff like Fight Club and The Shawshank Redemption, but the faithfulness factor knocks the first down a peg and the 5 on my list I like better than Shawshank. The Shining just does such a good job with atmosphere and pacing, it's easy to imagine getting that down in the book but doing an even better job in the movie. Considering that's what the story is all about, I think that should give it a spot. The first 3 on my list are just some of my favorite movies that happen to be books, too. Then No Country For Old Men is just... ridiculous. I guess. I dunno, it feels like it should be up there.

Now to work on a worst adaptations list. Consider that one in the making. Also, please remind me what obvious movies I'm missing for either list. Yes, I know about Catch-22; it's my favorite book but the movie is just alright.

Review: Reservoir Dogs

2009-08-18T02:07:00.008-05:00

There's spoilers all through this, for the record. It's really more of an analysis than a review.

I'm not sure why you need so much violence to tell this story. You can have the same movie, even keep most of the ear scene, but just put more of the violence off screen, and I don't think you'd lose any of the film's potency. I just don't need to see the place where someone's ear used to be. Although maybe that's the way we're supposed to feel about Mr. Blond.

The script is fantastic. I love the first scene at the diner. Tarantino knows how to write dialogue even if he is excessively violent. It feels so natural to watch a bunch of guys talk about tipping and the true meaning of Madonna songs, and at the same time you get some serious character development. Mr. Orange's fake story about the bathroom is the best sequence in the film. It picks apart the nature of storytelling and lying, how you can make a lie true by knowing it well enough and how you need a few lies to make a story that actually happened really shine. I want to watch it again just to analyze the story the cops are telling within Orange's tale. Is the cop telling the story making stuff up to entertain his partners, or is he telling or embellishing the truth? The whole scene is all part of Mr. Orange anyway; what does it all say about him? He's telling a fake story about someone telling a possibly fake story, and they both get away with it. That is, if the cop is lying at all. What does it say about Orange if the cop in his story is telling the truth? Either way, the fact that he's telling a story about getting away with something right under someone's nose is great since he's currently getting away with something right under everyone's noses.

I think it's best to take this movie as fourish character studies framed by this robbery. Pink is selfish, Blond is horrific, White is compassionate and loving, and Orange is... Well, I think he's the most interesting. He's the good guy, the cop, but he doesn't seem like a completely great person. He's got that sort of relaxed, cocky asshole banter going with his black friend in that diner, and he's apparently screwed up his marriage judging by the wedding ring in the bowl of pennies. Maybe that's why he decided to go undercover in the first place; he screwed up and wants to try and make things better.

White is also fun to look at. He takes Orange under his wing and starts to really love the guy. I think he probably follows the old empathetic killer stereotype and sees a lot of himself in this new kid. He probably wants Orange to be happy, to succeed, and to live a long, enjoyable life. That's all anyone would want for themselves. But then Orange's inevitable betrayal comes along, and White's anger at being deceived is just enough to overpower his hopes for this kid...

Pink is pretty simple. He's selfish, as I said. Take any scene he's in and this character trait will emerge, from talking about not tipping to staying out of the final standoff. I like him (Steve Buscemi is great), but there's not a ton to say about him.

Then there's Blond, who just creeps the hell out of me. Torturing for fun just ain't cool, kids. Anyone who does that is horrible, nasty, and almost inhuman. He makes me squirm. I'm liking this idea that his personality is portrayed by the horrific violence; the gruesome images are a depiction of his character. That's sort of an excuse for the violence, in that it's a way to convey what's going on inside Blond's head. The problem is just that I don't want to watch a movie about what's going on in Blond's head because it's scary as shit.

Overall, it's good stuff. Tension, drama, characters, script, all of it good. There's something there to be learned, too. Something about either how bad things lead to bad ends or how unlucky things lead to bad ends. I'm not sure which.

SAM'S VERDICT: amazing script if you're able to take a lot of graphic violence.

Movie Trailers #3

2009-08-17T12:42:00.001-05:00

More!

Zombieland

Danl requested this one. It's appropriate that he would be the one to point this movie out to me because he's probably the only person I'd actually consider seeing it with. This looks to be very much a bro's night out flick. It's a zombie movie, it's light hearted, the jokes look just good enough to both laugh with and at, and there's ample opportunity for Left 4 Dead references. It'll be fun, but it's not like it's new. Zombie films have been beaten to death as of late, and Shaun of the Dead covered a lot of the zombie comedy (zombedy?) stuff already. This looks like its mostly that southern guy killing zombies in cool / ridiculous ways and then making snarky comments about it. The gags look good enough, though that "zombie kill of the week" one from the preview is probably the high point of the whole film. But if this comes out and you're a guy, call me up. We'll grab a couple bros and head up to Lakeville.

The Bluetooth Virgin

This looks promising to me. It could be a smart comedy about the writing process while also being a decent parody of the Hollywood system, or it could wish it was that while actually being pretentious, unfunny, and bad. Maybe the jokes are good; maybe they suck. Maybe the protagonist is likable, maybe I want to punch him in the face, or maybe he's just boring. I'm not sure what to think, but I am intrigued. I like movies about writing - Adaptation and Barton Fink both come to mind as great ones, though this looks much less weird than either of those.

Alice In Wonderland

Oh Johnny Depp. You so creepy.

It looks cool, I'll give it that. Tim Burton stuff always looks cool. The question becomes whether any other part of it is any good. I have no knowledge of the script's quality, or even plot. Hulu says that this movie is about Alice returning to Wonderland for a second time when she's grown up, so who knows what the story involves. Maybe someone sucked all the brightness out of the world, which would explain why all the landscapes look so dark. Whatever. I'm not impressed enough to get excited. We haven't been given enough to work with here. Without more, I'm assuming this is just another Charlie and the Chocolate Factory style remake money grab. Given Johnny Depp's lead role and Tim Burton's involvement, I think we can expect exactly what we got with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: a decent modern take on a classic film much in Burton's style. I'll see it, nod my head in recognition of the neat visual style and crazy Depp antics, then be done with it.

Actually, maybe I won't. This is going to make a third movie like that after Charlie and Sweeney Todd. It's a good formula, but it's becoming old, and this is the one I'm least interested in to begin with. We'll see. Maybe someone will convince me it's worth it.

Ninja Assassin

Yeah. I'm not even going to embed this preview. Suffice to say it's exactly what it sounds like. Exactly what it sounds like.

Taking Woodstock

This one is a Madelyn request. I wasn't impressed when I first heard about this one, and the trailer I saw before District 9 was hardly inspiring. This Hulu trailer, though... It gets me more excited. Demitri Martin is mostly great, and this trailer takes it from "probably bad comedy" to "mediocre comedy with a heart" in my mind. That's much more viewable. Still, while trying to come up with things to say about it, I can't think of much. It's a pretty bland story; I could write you the plot and all major twists from the name alone. There will be a scene with someone from town trying to shut them down, parents not liking the idea then deciding it's great, a revelation on the part of or humiliation of the bad guy just in time for him to join in on that mud slide, and undoubtedly a romantic scene on a hill with a beautiful girl and Demitri that gets rudely interrupted by the crazy / in your face / over the top best friend. Still, stereotypes can be fun, and I'm curious about any progress in Martin's career. Friends could convince me to go. Okay, I'll be honest, a girl would have to convince me to go.

Next time I do trailers I'll be talking about Ponyo, Toy Story 3, and Tron: Legacy. Until then!

Violence In Cinema, or Quentin Tarantino: A Retrospective

2009-08-16T21:00:00.000-05:00

With Inglourius Basterds coming out in under a week, I thought this would be a good time to talk about Quentin Tarantino movies. Then I decided that the real meat of what I wanted to say centered around cinematic violence, so now you get a discussion of violence in film using some Tarantino movies as examples. Sweet.

So what's the deal, modern society? When did we all decide it was okay to desensitize the population so hard? If you look at TV from the 70s, there's pretty much no graphic violence. The closest you get is this. Now we've got stuff like 24 and Lost flying around. Have you seen some of that shit? A friend of mine decided to play a drinking game while watching the last episode of Lost season 5 a few months ago. The rule was you drank whenever a bloody face showed up on screen, and when retelling this story this friend couldn't remember anything about the episode. And that's just the action shows. House is sometimes even worse; I just stop watching the screen every time they go into the operating room.

On a related note, why does every show need a torture episode now? Buffy the Vampire Slayer started this tradition for me with Spike getting brutally tortured in one of those later seasons, but Joss Whedon continued the tradition in Firefly when Mal and Wash get electrocuted until they bleed and then one loses an ear for a while. 24 has torture eps freaking all over the place, Lost had that one in season 2 or 3 where Sayid threatens to push sticks under Sawyer's fingernails.

Of course the torture phenomenon is not confined to TV. More and more movies are following suit. I'm not into the whole "horror that is actually just gross stuff" genre, but I think this whole thing started there. It first leaked onto TV, then into Bond movies. That scene in Casino Royal towards the end is just... painful. Then there's Se7en, Hard Candy (which I thankfully have not seen), and this preview I saw a couple days ago for one of those movies that looks like an hour of torture and an hour of car bombs. Gangster movies are up to their ears in it, and that's on top of the blood running down everyone's face from the action sequences. The same can be said for pretty much every genre. How has cinematic entertainment gotten so gruesome?

And yet... Not all the violence is completely unpleasant...

While I'd rather not watch Jack Shepherd get himself all cut up every week, there's a certain kind of stylized violence that I really enjoy. My favorite example of this is Kill Bill vol. 1. I watched the movie at a friend's house when I was young and even more sensitive than I am now, yet I came away longing for more. Kill Bill is a story about killing people. No matter how you look at it, the word "kill" is right there in the title. There's some guy named Bill out there, and this is a couple of movies about someone trying to kill him. The characters have some depth, but most of it doesn't come out until volume 2. Volume 1 just slaps a couple of good stereotypes on it's characters then delivers an hour and a half of people getting killed as The Bride makes her way towards Bill. That's it; that's literally the entire movie. The Bride kills a bunch of people. There's a slight twist at the end. Now go watch part 2.

It's horribly violent. The infamous Crazy 88 scene is so violent that it had to be shown in black in white in the American release of the film. Blood sprays everywhere. Limbs fly around the room like they've each been strapped with an individual jet-pack. Then after that, The Bride chops the top half of some bitch's head off revealing the brain. Holy SHIT, guys. That's it. That's the end.

Why is that entertaining? I walked out of my friend's house loving this movie, but I couldn't describe why. When people asked me what I thought of it I'd tell them that it was the best movie about killing people I'd ever seen. This is true. What separates this from the rest of the movies about killing people out there? I like action sequences, but I'm not a huge fan. It can't be action alone that turns me on to a film. I've already discussed the lack of an amazing plot. I enjoy the way Tarantino rearranges the sequence of his stories, but that alone doesn't make a good movie or everyone would do it. That's on the right track, though. What sets Tarantino's films apart is their style. What draws me to Kill Bill is not the fact that The Bride just kicked the shit out of 88 ninjas, it's that the way she did it was so fucking cool. You can kill people, or you can stab them with a fucking bad-ass katana in slow motion with circling cameras on an elaborate set all set to a pumping soundtrack. Hell yeah.

Even that's not enough, though. Tons of movies come out each year with bad-ass weapon wielding heroes and heroines kicking the shit out of henchmen in slow motion with circling cameras on an elaborate set all set to a pumping soundtrack, but few of them compare to the Crazy 88 scene. There's something more to Tarantino pieces. It's some combination of the way they're both completely serious and completely over the top at the same time. On the one hand, there's very little humor in the script of Kill Bill. It's dead serious about killing Bill. Few jokes, lots of tension, and death through the whole story. On the other, no serious film depicts someone getting their arm severed by the single swing of a sword followed by blood spraying out like a fountain. That's just not a serious image; it's absurd. Being both of these things at the same time gives the film a very distinct style. The violence being unrealistic makes it bearable to watch, and that all together gives the whole story a unique feel to it.

Kill Bill also pulls you in with its mythology. It's such a basic story, but that just makes it more accessible. Tarantino boils the plot down to its most bare bones. The Bride has been wronged by 5 people, and now she is going to kill all 5 of them. Bam. That's all the setup we need, it's all the setup we get, and it's executed with a sort of perfection that draws us in. It's simple, it's clear, and now we care. Now we want to see Bill killed.

That makes it sound like the stylized violence of Kill Bill is so compelling because there's a plot driving it. I don't think this is true. The plot helps, of course. If we didn't care about The Bride we might be rooting for the Crazy 88 the whole time. The reason I don't like this conclusion is how I feel about the story's end [spoiler alert]. Watching Bill take his final five steps is satisfying, but then what? After Bill is dead, the story is over. We have killed Bill. But on seeing this, instead of accomplishment I felt remorse that the story was over. There wouldn't be anymore killing. There wouldn't be anymore sleek yellow jumpsuits or ridiculous stylized violence. It was done. This means that the point was not to kill Bill, but rather the exciting story leading up to that final scene. The point was to have an excuse to show us the Crazy 88 scene, the buried alive scene, the opening hospital sequence, the shootout in the suburban kitchen, and all the rest. The style was the point.

Style. Modern action movies are supposed to entertain us, and some do that with violence. What I'm entertained by is not the violence, though, it's the style of the thing. It's the mood and the feeling captured by the film. Die Hard doesn't give us much beyond explosions, but Kill Bill gives us a polished product and a heart to examine. It gives us something more than just cool sequences.

I'm clearly still trying to pinpoint what exactly that is.

What is a movie like Kill Bill trying to say? It's not saying something in the same way that, say, A Clockwork Orange is. What is the point of all that violence? Why do I find stylized violence so compelling? Maybe when you take violence to the extreme, you can distill some sort of cinematic purity out of it. Maybe I'm wrong about that A Clockwork Orange comment.

Maybe it's just cool.

Review: District 9

2009-08-14T20:45:00.000-05:00

What an impressive feat of world building. There's your summary, people.

District 9 starts out as a documentary in the way you would expect from its previews. You've got your young looking historians who set the background up for you; basically, aliens showed up in a giant mothership, we put them in slums (named District 9) because we're assholes, and now we want to move them to what amounts to a concentration camp because we're still assholes. The historians are engaging, and the news clips and so forth immerse you quickly. As far as I was concerned aliens really were hanging out in the slums of Africa, and that absurdly ominous mothership really was just floating there silently like some sort of giant freaky bomb waiting to go off. This was a bleak world, but a world I was very keen on exploring. Clearly there was a story in need of telling.

Oh man, and the aliens. They have shots of the aliens right away, and they look fantastic. I'm honestly not sure whether they had guys in sweet looking alien suits or just massive amounts of CG or what, but the aliens were right there! Right there in front of you tearing a pig in half. Yeesh. They click, they scamper around, their mouth tentacle things move a bunch, and they eat cat food cans whole. Absolutely fantastic stuff.

The opening historian / newsreels bits are spliced together with "archival footage" of some annoying office worker guy with a funny accent and a sign labeled "I'm the guy who dies first" taped to his back. More specifically, this guy has just been promoted to lead troops into District 9 and hand out eviction notices to all the aliens. Everyone gets ready to head on in, and the world of District 9 has been laid out for us beautifully.

Then, as you would expect, it turns into a mediocre action / horror flick.

Here Be Spoilers

As much as the action sequences are cool, they aren't special in the modern day where everything looks cool. Flipping a car over the head of one's giant robot suit is awesome, as was the electrically charged mushroom cloud explosions of some of the guns. Not much other that was particularly unique, though. People exploding is... well, yeah. Blood splattering onto the camera is also... well, yeah. Very cool, but ew.

I liked the tense sequences, though. From the minute our hero gets sprayed by that black alien stuff, I was waiting for his head to suddenly explode every time he was on camera. More relief came for me when his alien arm was revealed than is natural. Isn't discovering that some dude is turning into an alien supposed to be a point where you freak the fuck out?

The MechWarrior battle suit was cool. Christopher Jones (I think was his name) has a hilarious name. Alien babies are alien babies, blowing up shacks full of eggs and describing it as like popping popcorn is horrible, and chopping off limbs is cringe-worthy even when they're no longer human limbs. I don't know, I wasn't terribly impressed after the first 30 minutes.

My thoughts about this film remind me of my thoughts on WALL.E. I want both movies to take their opening 15 minutes, extend it to be an opening 45 minutes, and then take a bunch of their excess crap and throw it out. That's less true for WALL.E, but this one had a ton of scenes that just ran way too long. For example, the shots of the alien ship getting beamed up into the mothership went on for 2-3 minutes when they should have taken about 30 seconds, and I'd say there should've been about 50% fewer exploding people.

...

Okay, maybe 20% fewer exploding people.

Then there's the main guy (who's name I don't recall). He's just... boring, I guess. I'd so much rather have seen him get killed like he was supposed to. Sure he was a decent guy, but I want more than that. Countless people have a wife and horrible in-laws. Countless people work in boring government offices. Countless people have no personality to speak of, yet you chose one of these people to be our protagonist. And no, an accent plus being small and timid does not a personality make. That's like choosing a memorable quirk or two from the list or random NPC traits in the Dungeon Master's Guide when you need a quick bartender on the fly; it's not how you make protagonists.

I guess I should mention the film's message: people are racist dicks. I know this, I've been told before. I don't think there's anything said here that goes above and beyond the marks other people have made on this thoroughly covered ground of moral issue. Not much else to say here, though I'd love to hear if anyone else got a bigger message out of District 9 than I did. Maybe I should take more from the fact that Christopher Jones is the person you end identifying with the most.

Spoilers End

Well. I did like it. I liked it a lot. The documentary parts were incredible. If the action and suspense sequences were just average, at least something about the film was dead on. No matter how much I may bitch about mediocrity, I still mostly enjoy it. It was a fun film. Very atmospheric. Very much a world building experience.

Oh, but please for the love of god don't franchise this, because a sequel would be awful.

SAM'S VERDICT: Great atmosphere, and suspense / action up to industry standards. Go see it if any of that sounds appealing to you.

Review: In The Loop

2009-08-13T22:38:00.002-05:00

I first heard about In The Loop while browsing movie trailers on Hulu one night several weeks ago. This was the first time since spring I'd remembered how much time I could sink into watching every trailer for every movie coming out in the next year, so it was a marathon session of trailer watching. I came out of it determined to see (500) Days of Summer (which I'd already seen a preview for but still looked amazing), The Invention of Lying (described in my last post), and the subject of today's review. This film looked like an incredibly fast paced British political satire with very improvised feeling dialogue. Having just watching it, I can confidently say that it delivers.

Okay. So. Before I get into the meat of things, here's how single movie reviews are going to work. I want this blog to be a resource for people to come to when they want a suggestion for a movie. They can search around, read a sort of "Sam's plot summary and opinion without spoilers" piece, and then pick out a movie. However, I also want to talk about spoilers, and nothing sucks more than picking up the back of a movie and having it ruin the ending. To solve this, I'm going to write reviews with two sections: the "no spoilers" and the "spoilers" sections. If you haven't seen the film but think it sounds good after reading the first part, go watch it. Then when you're done you can read the rest of what I have to say. Don't worry, what I have to say will still be there when you get around to watching it a week or twelve down the line.

Where was I? Ah yes. A section heading.

In The Loop: No Spoilers Section

I said before that this movie was high paced, yes? I used the phrase "incredibly fast paced". If I truly want to be accurate, I should say up front that In The Loop would pass incredibly fast paced films on the highway by several dozen MPH. It's like that guy in the bright red, shiny new car on the freeway who's behind... wait, no, he's passing you... wait no, he's waaaay off in the distance now. Of course, this is part of the point. It's so faced paced that you're always trying to keep up. And if you don't keep up, then you are, well, no longer in the loop. Just like in the political system it's portraying, everyone is constantly trying to keep up with what is going on.

The preview had me thinking of The Office but with a solid fourth wall. Lots of very natural conversations, people interrupting each other, and so forth. This is how the film plays, though it leads to crazy amounts of fuckwords. By which I mean the word fuck. It also leads to talking about people's hypothetical sweaty horse cocks - that scene is only, like, 10 minutes in, so it hardly counts as a spoiler. Yeah, the British war person secretary guy is obscene. Obscene needs an adjective there, but I'm hard pressed to think of one that describes the vast magnitude of the amount of obsceneness that this guy Malcolm possesses. In every scene he spouts out at least one ten second string of craziness that ends in me thinking "did he actually just say that?" while laughing in shock. Here's a clip:

Then his assistant shows up later... holy fucking cock suckers, man. Holy greased bags of monkey shit. Yeah.

The "hero", pictured above, is an aid to some mostly unimportant politician in London who comes in on his first day only to discover that his new boss may have just accidentally sort of maybe caused people to start thinking about going to war. Oops. Tobee, this aid, is a very sympathetic character to start with. He's got a nice girlfriend in the office across the street, a decent job, and he seems to be the only person who knows what real life is like in the whole office. That's probably not a perk with this job, though. He quickly gets sucked in to his new boss's world of horribly managed public appearances, sailor mouthed war politician crazy fucker Malcom guy, sudden trips to the states, and general hustle and bustle. It just gets harder to keep up from there.

Relentless. In the same way that The Office makes you want to squirm out of your body and just be somewhere other than wherever Steve Corell currently is, In The Loop makes you want to... to... God, I don't know. Maybe to help. I want to just walk into every scene, punch everyone in the face, and tell them exactly what is wrong with what they're currently doing. This, too, is the point of the film. That's how the people making this film feel about our political system all the time. It doesn't help that

WARNING: HERE BE SPOILERS

...

(everyone who wants to be gone? Good.)

As I was saying, it doesn't help that the ending is so depressing. Everyone with any shred of decency in their body is miserable and, in most cases, out of a job. I had such high hopes for our hero stopping the wary and getting together with that American girl permanently, but in the end he's helpless to do anything, out of a job, and pretty much a giant douche when it comes to his whole lady situation. The main British politician guy has had his career destroyed over some wall he was never even involved in fixing or not fixing, and that somewhat likable American general is stuck in a meeting about whether or not it's okay for soldiers to watch I Heart Huckabees. It was horrible watching the last fifteen minutes. What should have been a great revelation on the part of Tobee's on how to fix all of the war problems and maybe win back his British girl was instead a great revelation for Malcolm on how to save his ass by ruining the careers of multiple people and starting a war. That's the brilliance of evil people in politics, I guess.

I don't know how much of the satire to believe. Is our government... does the political system of the world really work like that? The cynic in me wants to say yes, but the optimist wants to... well, turn a blind eye, to be honest. I don't know anyone in Washington, though. I know a bunch of stuff that should be easy to get done can't get done because Democrats and Republicans are too busy fucking each other's mom's (sorry, I'm still channeling Malcolm's tirades), but I'd like to think that war happens because we need it to. It shouldn't happen because... because...

That's the other thing I came out of the movie with: a question. Why did anyone want to go to war? When you get down to it, there were only two people who did want to go to war: Malcolm and the horrible American Midwestern guy who had started the Future Planning Committee. Malcolm didn't actually want to go to war, he just wanted to get back at everyone who had pissed him off over the course of the film and to prove that he had power over the situation at hand. The real motivating force behind going to war was the Midwestern guy, and if it's explained what he stood to gain in the film it went right past me. That's the other lesson, I guess. There's never a good reason to go to war. That and people don't go to war because the war will actually benefit them, they go to war for bullshit other reasons.

I hate Dick Cheney.

...

Spoiler Section Over Plus Verdict

Finishing up here, I need some sort of rating system for movies. Numbers are okay, but I think a couple of words does better. That way when I have a bunch of reviews done I can decide whether "a good trip to funky town" or "assuming I'm drunk" is a better rating.

SAM'S VERDICT: Assuming I was in the mood for political satire, I'd put it highly on my list of choices.

Movie Trailers #2

2009-08-11T23:54:00.001-05:00

Once more with feeling!

Before we get started, I note that Hulu has a trailer for New York, I Love You, an obvious sequel to Paris, Je t'aime. I'd talk about the trailer, but I haven't seen the french film despite its repeated suggestion to me. To the "movies I need to see" list!

A Serious Man

New Coen Brothers! This movie was filmed partially at the old St. Olaf science building across town from me. I kept saying I was going to go over and try and be an extra, but no one told me when they were actually in town and I missed it. Lame. I know a girl who got called back for a part in this film, too. Yeah. How's that for a stretched connection.

Oh man does this movie look bleak. The premise seems to be "Jewish man in horribly bleak 60s small town / at small town liberal arts college". I'm sure the Coen Brothers will succeed in making me feel like my entire existence is boring, depressing, and pointless. I'll walk out of the theater thanking them for showing me this, but I'll be depressed at the same time. That head slamming into the wall pulse through the trailer is almost intolerable, which is the point. Life is like slamming your head into a wall over and over again. Ugh. Is there anything less depressing out there?

Adam

The story I want to tell about this preview would be in bad taste now that I've posted a link to this blog on facebook. Such a shame. Suffice to say that this movie looks okay. Nothing about this movie appeals to me more than other romantic comedies. Watching someone be awkward because of Asperger's Syndrome is not something I feel compelled to do. I don't have faith in this movie to show an above average representation of the condition, so I don't feel like I can learn anything from it in that regard. From there it becomes a totally average romantic comedy where the thing keeping our romantic leads apart is social awkwardness. Then the whole time I'm watching it I'll have a voice in the back of my head telling me that I'm going to walk out of the theater thinking I'm now an expert on Asperger's, and that I'm going to end up making a fool of myself some day when I meet someone who has it. I'd rather watch Hugh Grant learn how to love and leave the theater feeling good about myself than watch the struggles of these characters and leave the theater feeling guilty.

Brothers

I hate movies like this. Specifically, I hate movies with no sense of humor. Pure drama just can't hold me if I'm not having any fun. I don't watch movies for a brutal, relentless experience, I watch them because either I want to be entertained or I want to be entertained while thinking about a particular part of life. I know that war is horrible and that it does horrible things to the people that survive it. I know that I should be considerate to such people, and if I knew what I could easily do to help veterans I would help them. What I don't want is to watch a family get torn apart by war. That just isn't my idea of a good afternoon. I'd rather spend two hours thinking about how to help vets than to watch a movie about how shitty it is to be one.

At least it has Natalie Portman in it.

Hot Tub Time Machine

Really? Really? Do I even need to watch this trailer? I mean, I guess for posterity's sake I should before talking about it, but... really?

Is that a movie with John Cusack, Rob Corddry, that black guy from all the Judd Apatow movies, and some nerdy dude all in the same scene? If you told me those four guys were the stars I'd be there in a heart beat. But even three actors I love will have a tough time saving a movie called Hot Tub Time Machine.

...

Really? It's called Hot Tub Time Machine?

...

I might have to go to this one.

The Invention of Lying

Nothing beats a romantic comedy with a likable gimmick. The script looks good, I love the lead, and it's a premise with... well, hopefully they can milk 90 minutes out of it. I know I'll like it for the first 15, if nothing else. I'll need an excuse to go see it, though. Maybe I can find some sappy bros to go with. I've always secretly wanted a girlfriend who insists on going to see all sorts of bad romantic comedies so I have a reason to see them. This one doesn't look bad, though, so I'm sure I can sucker someone into coming along.

There's still a few more trailers left that I like the look of, but I think five is a good stopping point. Next time I'll have to check out Alice in Wonderland. All I know right now is that Johnny Depp's mad hatter poster scares the crap out of me. I had to look at it for like an hour waiting to get into the midnight release of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, and the whole time I felt completely unnerved. Had to avert my eyes.

Movie Trailers #1

2009-08-11T16:43:00.000-05:00

I'm feeling some quick thoughts about upcoming movies and their trailers today. Let's get right to it.

Nine

I'm always interested in animation that looks targeted directly at adults. Nine doesn't look quite there, but teen action movies are at least older than Disney's target audience. The cast is all people I don't immediately recognize but whose names bring a good feeling to mind. Post-apocalyptic worlds are always fun, and the giant robots running around are... well, they wont beat out Transformers, but they'll do fine. Whoever that old guy is at the beginning has a look to him that I love. Plus the release date is perfect. I'd be excited for any weird looking animated action movie produced by Tim Burton and set in a dark, horrible future. On the other hand, chances are it'll pull an I Am Legend and be great right up until they find the surviving humans and save the planet. Meh.

The Time Traveler's Wife

A great book, but the trailer isn't doing it for me. I like both of the leads. Rachel McAdams I recognize from The Wedding Crashers. Actually the way I found out this book was getting adapted was by snooping around on The Wedding Crashers' IMDB page. She's good but nothing special. Good looking, if nothing else. Eric Bana I recently saw in Funny People, where he plays a not-quite-over-the-top Australian husband-of-love-interest. Does it damn well, too. I liked his scenes a lot, and I imagine he'll make a fine Henry. My problem with the trailer is two-fold. First, I like both leads, but I don't love either of them. They'll do fine, and that will be fine. That's fine but not amazing. Second, the time travel looks shitty. One of my favorite parts about the book is that Henry time travels around his life in a very realistic way. He shows up with no food in his stomach and butt naked, which leads to him becoming adept at breaking into places with food and mugging people to take their clothes. These things are at times central to the plot of the book, or at least provide extra drama in a movie that wants as much sap as possible, so I don't expect they'll change. What they've done, though, is make Henry fade away in some sort of holy light. Bullshit. He just vanishes. One second he's there, then the next he's gone. Tension is built up for Claire because she never knows if Henry is just going to disappear whenever she turns around, even if they're just shopping for groceries. In the movie version she'd have to ignore the brilliant flash of light and the high pitched ringing to have that happen to her. I bet they'll use the "suddenly vanish" effect anyway because it's a good one, but to do it realistically they'll have to come up with some reason for Claire to be half blind and deaf. Realism is obviously very important in time travel movies.

Cold Souls

I somehow missed this one in my numerous passes over Hulu's trailer pages the past few weeks, but was alerted to it by Dan Haas when he asked why I'd been telling him about all sorts of movies he didn't care about and not this one. Glad he asked, because this movie looks great. I love Paul Giamati when he isn't in something terrible (note: this is most of the movies I've seen him in). The main character is named the same thing as the actor playing said character, which would be a nice stylasitic statement about the film, saying that it doesn't take itself too seriously while at the same time saying it's trying to say something about the real world. It would be if it weren't for the fact that the film's advertising campaign shoves this fact in your face, making it come across as more of a pretentious choice than an artistic one. The plot looks goofy and fun, and I believe it when they tell me there's good jokes in there. Add what appears to be some interesting thoughts on the nature of one's self and the soul on top of that, maybe throw in a dash of commentary on modern society, and you could end up with a fine couple of hours. I'm excited.

Daybreakers

Fuck yeah! Fuck yeah. I'm a fan of good vampire stories. Yes, they're over done, but that wasn't always the case. The road that Buffy paved back in the 90s was a good one, and it's not the vampire story's fault that so many angsty teenagers where the ones to drive down it. Then I'm a sucker for new takes on old ideas, and Daybreakers has a doozey of one of those. A world where the majority of people have become vampires... My head is filled with ideas from that sentence alone, and it looks like Daybreakers expands on a hell of a lot of them. A unique setting, explosions, escaping undead monsters, human farms, more explosions, crossbow machine guns (hopefully), Angel-esque vampires, and the inevitable "get the vampire cure into the blood supply" climax... I can see the whole movie playing out in my head already, and I love every minute of it.

An Education

Any movie based on a book by Nick Hornby is a movie I feel obligated to go see. This one doesn't look as good as About a Boy or High Fidelity, but that's some serious competition. Even if it's the worst of the three it could still be one of my favorite movies of all time. Not sure this one will be, though. Smart pubescent kids with problems stories are everywhere, I don't know if I need to see another. An Education does look more adult than most. I think the idea of a 15ish girl and a 30-something guy having a romance is just off-putting. Maybe it's a touching tale! Maybe it's a beautiful story. Maybe. Maybe it's just kinda weird.

Alright kids, that's all for now. Turns out there's a lot of trailers out there, and I'm determined to watch them all. Then once I've watched them, I'll be determined to write about them here. It's sad I didn't start this blog a few months ago; I would've loved to write about (500) Days of Summer, In the Loop, Public Enemies, Up, and the rest of the spring trailer season. Guess I'll just have to do a recap post sometime in early September or individual posts about those that I've seen.

Sam's Top 5 Comedies

2009-08-10T23:38:00.000-05:00

Ah, top 5 lists. What a fine way to think about favorites of any kind. I used to make top 10 movie lists with my dad in the car on road trips. It was and remains a fun way to reminisce about all the movies I've seen in the past, and sometimes through doing so you come across pieces you'd really like to go see again. My problem was that they always seemed a little too long. As a kid I hadn't quite seen enough movies to flesh out my list, but even at 19 it's hard to pick 10 that feel deserving of the "favorite" title.

Enter High Fidelity, a movie where the central characters make top 5 lists of everything. Music is their medium of choice, although Rob Gordon (played by John Cusack) also uses them to reflect on his past relationships. Lists are so neat and orderly; it was fun to watch other people think in the same way I do. The movie left me with a few thoughts. Most of them were something like "I loved this movie, holy shit!", but one was that lists of 5 are very nice. 5 is such a smaller number than 10. Each item on the list feels like it fought hard to get there; each item deserves its place. Plus 5 is easier to keep track of than 10. It's short, it's compact, and you can remember it. For whatever reason, 5s don't have to be ordered, whereas I feel like 10s need to be ranked. It's hard enough to choose just 5 or 10 of something that ranking them is torture. High Fidelity convinced me to both start making top 5s and to move to a free-form, unranked style of list.

In at least one scene in the film, Rob talks about how it would be impossible to make a list of his all-time top 5 songs. It depends on the situation - are we talking top 5 songs alone? With friends? From college or now? Is he depressed or happy, single or in a relationship? Many factors play into his favorite songs just as many things play into what movies I'm in the mood to see. You may see an all-time top 5 favorite movies list from me at some point, but it's always changing. That said, more specific lists are more static...

Top 5 comedies (in no particular order):
Zoolander
Monty Python and the Holy Grail

...

I'm forced to pause at this point since I'm sort of at a loss as to what I can include. It's hard to define a comedy. Do we include anything that's labeled a comedy on the back of its box, or do we include any movie that's made us laugh? Harold and Maude is one of my favorite movies. It's probably on my Top 5 comedies list if that's what you can call it, but it's so much more a story about life and death than it is about making the audience smile. I suppose I could divide the list into movies that are just there to get as many laughs out of me as possible and anything that's sitting in the comedy section, but that still leaves the list full of Judd Apatow films where I'm both laughing the whole time and walking out of the theater thinking about the message.

Let's try this again.

Top 5 movies found in the comedy section of the video store (in no particular order):
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
High Fidelity
Juno
In Bruges

Even that list makes me sad, though. Harold and Maude didn't even make the list. Where's Zoolander? Where's the Coen Brothers love? Does In Bruges even count as a comedy? It's so black. It's blacker than a black bear at midnight on a cloudy night with no moon a thousand miles from any city lights. Only two of these movies have me laughing a lot (Forgetting Sarah Marshall and High Fidelity), and the reason I like all of them is not because they're comedies but because I like what they're trying to say. It seems stupid to make a top 5 comedies list and only have two films on it that I laugh at.

Maybe that last list should be revised to "top 5 romantic comedies", and I could swap out In Bruges for Harold and Maude.

Top 5 movies I laugh at:
Zoolander
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
High Fidelity
Tropic Thunder

I like that list a lot. Lots of variety. A couple movies I've only seen once or twice, a few I've seen over and over, and a decent spread of sub-genres ranging from romance to action to just being stupid. I suppose this would be my actual "top 5 comedies" list. Watching these five in a row would have me laughing the whole time (assuming I didn't have to watch Tropic Thunder with people who aren't into that sort of thing) while providing some serious romantic relief at the same time. Nice.