At Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, newborn babies stay in the same hospital room as their mothers. I know this is quite a departure from the stereotypical hospital maternity ward scene, but after we've had the pleasure of Simon's company full-time from his birth, the "stick babies in cubical containers and take them out now and then for mama to feed" model seems oddly barbaric, to me at least.
Anyway, there's a scene near the end of Juno, involving Jennifer Garner, that would have had somewhat different logistics at a hospital with the Alta Bates policy.
Meanwhile I'm impressed by how quickly Juno dispensed with two story lines commonly associated with teen pregnancy drama: The abortion clinic, and the unsupportive parents. (The former scene was especially poignant, and managed to walk a fine line: for all I know it still offended people on both extremes, but only the crazy ones.)
Mind, the statement about fingernails was inaccurate (as Juno had just gotten the test results she was surely way before her fifth month).
They have collaborative (i.e. Wikipedia-style) parents' guides.
Among other things in the link I've given you, we learn about a particular scene that is longer in the unrated cut of Superbad than in the theatrical release. Just in case you would otherwise have let your children watch the unrated cut of Superbad.
An exercise for the reader is to find the unintentionally funniest IMDB Parents' Guide. (It won't necessarily be for the most objectionable movie.)
On the plus side, you definitely should swipe this image and the .spoiler class definition from this stylesheet, for your own non-commercial use.
This has probably already been done (by people who do it for a living) but what factors most closely correlate to violent acts committed inside (or just outside) a movie theater?
Fark has a story about one particular example of bad behavior at Notorious. I hadn't thought about it beforehand but in hindsight I'm not surprised, given the violent (and recent!) end to the life of the central figure (and the bad blood that probably persists).
I'd be especially interested to know whether the movie or the theater is a better predictor. (With a very small sample size, the AMC theater near Jack London Square has been low key - i.e. deserted - every time I've been there. Bay Street (Emeryville) is much more bustling but I've still never witnessed violence there.)
The movie: We gave up after about half an hour. We kept waiting for it to get interesting, to no avail. Also, cloying inside references tread a thin line: The funny thing is the less obscure the reference, the more annoying. Setting the show at WLT? Great! - reminded me of some of Keillor's short story work. Vilifying a nameless giant radio corporation based on San Antonio? Well, gosh, no idea who that could possibly be!
I see two silver linings:
1. People who watched it solely because they like Lindsay Lohan must have really felt hosed.
2. This did motivate me to check air times.
The radio show: Julia and I asked ourselves, how come we so rarely listen to this given that we claim to like it so much? Actually bothering to find the station (it's not a station either of us would typically listen to) was a big laziness barrier to overcome.
It's about as good as a show could possibly be without actually being good enough to set one's schedule around. Two hours of upbeat variety music is nice accompaniment, just not the primary thing-to-do. No wonder 90+% of the time I've heard A Prairie Home Companion I've been in a car on the way somewhere.
WTF?
Who decided it was a good idea to make an entire movie about people saying inappropriate (or gratuitously hurtful, or both) things to family members and operating at the emotional level of toddlers?
Was I supposed to notice character development somewhere in the snide comments and accusatory remarks? Was I supposed to identify with even one of the characters?
Based on Googling, this quote has been used for political snark regarding the Big Three auto companies and regarding military stop-loss orders, but -- to my surprise -- nothing recent (at least nothing that would get a high Page Rank).
Without further ado (watch to the end, of course).
Feel free to make suggestions that might jog my memory (or win me over) - better yet turn the disjointed mess that is the Extended Entry into something vaguely resembling structure and order!
On at least one social network my favorite movie is listed as Major League because that's what popped into my head.
Nearly every plausible choice that comes to mind leaves me feeling a bit let-down: "That's THE #1 MOVIE on your all-time favorites??!" And then I start wondering what total gems I just couldn't think of at the time.
For many years I claimed that my favorite movie was The Gods Must Be Crazy. That's got two opposite problems at once: It was a very pretentious claim to make, AND YET when I re-watched the movie a couple years ago I was bitterly disappointed. Maybe the slapstick parts are a lot funnier to a precocious 10-year-old.
Given my genre tastes my "favorite movie" is more likely to be a comedy than anything else. There's also a fighting chance it would be a baseball movie. Major League is the best baseball comedy out there (Bull Durham is good, but have I ever told you how overrated it is? - I've watched it a few times yet always felt a bit disappointed by the difference between remembered quality and actual quality).
Some random possibilities that occur to me:
Better Off Dead? Grosse Point Blank? Both are surely in my top 10.
Ferris Bueller's Day Off? This just feels like the sort of movie one outgrows, and honestly I'd rank Major League above it.
Midnight Madness? I really need to watch soon to see how well it's held up over time.
Is it one of the Pixar blockbusters? But how does one rank those? Monsters, Inc. and The Incredibles would both contend (I think Toy Story got massively overplayed). Finding Nemo was also run into the ground but might be so good that it withstands the hype. When I finally get a chance to see WALL*E will I ask "where have you been all my life?"
My favorite Kevin Smith movie is Dogma, for what it's worth (I'm weird that way).
My favorite Will Ferrell movie is Stranger Than Fiction. (Sort of along those lines: I loved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, hated Fight Club, loved both of the M. Night Shyamalan movies I've seen.)
I wonder how well the Airplane! franchise has aged. (Surprisingly I've never seen any of the "[Adjective] Movie" hybrid spoofs.)
Romantic comedies with Adam Sandler are all far better than they have any business being (sort of the opposite of romantic comedies with Tom Hanks).
I love Christopher Guest across the board but it's impossible to privilege any one mockumentary over another, except maybe Spinal Tap as the ur-example.
Steve Martin's best movies (in my opinion) were HouseSitter and My Blue Heaven, both of which have quite a lower profile than (say) Roxanne or Father of the Bride.
Is Bill Murray's best movie really Lost in Translation? (Or for that matter The Royal Tenenbaums?) I wonder how Meatballs has held up over time. If it hasn't then my favorite 20th century Bill Murray movie might be Groundhog Day, which really really doesn't feel like anybody's all-time #1. (I should love Caddyshack but emphatically... it's not that I dislike it, but that Caddyshack is arguably THE MOST OVERRATED movie of all-time.)
So I already mentioned loving Eternal Sunshine, and the same goes for Bruce Almighty. The Ace Ventura movies are underrated (but still nothing special); I've still never seen Dumb & Dumber because I never forgave the Farrelly brothers for There's Something About Mary (which might give Caddyshack a run for its "Most Overrated" money!).
Oh hey, I just remembered One Night At McCool's! I inordinately enjoyed that movie! But it faded so far into my memory that for a split second I mistakenly thought the title was Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrells. (Sort of but not really along those lines: Julia rented Memento for me while under the mistaken impression that "Memento" was the name of the movie that turned out to be "Unbreakable." But once I finally completely solved Memento it was less than met the eye.)
High Fidelity won't come close to my #1 but I wonder where it ranks. Little Miss Sunshine of all movies might have a fighting chance.
(Wow, second straight post that combines our recent Netflix viewing habits with this column!)
Baby Mama! Far worse than Boat Trip, though not nearly as bad as Just Married.
My wife has had very bad luck with mainstream comedy rentals over the years. This has nothing to do with her taste, which I generally find impeccable, and very little to do her ability to predict movie quality. Rather, everything you know about a movie coming into it will set a reasonable quality expectation, within which there might still be some variance. The variance here has been her enemy. A lot.
Now sometimes she'll rent a movie and I can see a mile away how bad it would be, and I'll ask: "You saw that coming, right?"
And in fairness, there have been times where I was dead certain she'd chosen a terrible movie, yet the movie turned out to be quite good. Off the top of my head that includes Failure To Launch, Guess Who?, and especially High School Musical.
But the out-of-nowhere atrocities are what stick in one's head.
Unrelated to the main topic of this post, but wrapping up the commentary on our recent Netflix viewing: What do we think of Shadows and Fog? I'd file it under "OK, I guess," though I honestly wonder how many people my age (or a couple years older) ought to have become big Woody Allen fans yet had that process delayed quite a bit from being exposed to one of his "just humor him" movies before they had a chance to see Love and Death or Annie Hall or such.
Take your favorite narration-heavy Morgan Freeman movie and imagine that his voice-over work was replaced by the same lines coming from Jenna Fischer (Pam from The Office (U.S. version)).
(A reference in this column, plus our recent Netflix viewing, made me think of this.)
A Wedding: I think our mistake here was assuming that this would be the kind of movie Christopher Guest might make about a wedding, rather than remembering that this was late '70s Robert Altman (or, as one IMDBer put it, "What he did to the military in M*A*S*H he does to marriage."). Julia grew to hate it more and more (despite having Carol Burnett and Desi Arnaz Jr.), while I settled for the "it is what it is" cliche.
Wordplay (wow, the IMDB "Plot" line for this is hideously misleading!): Speaking of Christopher Guest, if you watch enough mockumentaries about hardcore activity people, it's refreshing to the kind of documentary that inspired Guest, yet about genuinely likable people. Julia was deeply impressed to learn that Jason Z. has been teammates with Will Shortz at the world Sudoku championship. Anyway this is exactly the sort of movie that will one day be made about quiz-bowl.
Undeclared: The Complete Series. Very nicely done! (What else is there to say?)
Have you ever been the only person (or only people, if you went together) in a movie theater? Julia and I were the sole audience for last night's 10 p.m. Jack London Square showing of Leatherheads.
Previews: Al Pacino has a couple of cop/legal thrillers coming out. Mama Mia! should have stuck to the stage.
The Hulk franchise has conspicuously airbrushed Ang Lee out of its cultural history. Not that I blame them -- this film was a crime against humanity -- but wow, what a slap in the face to an otherwise good director. (Along those lines I can only wait and hope and pray for someone to finally bury this piece of garbage and do saturation marketing for "the Hitchhiker's Guide movie you've always wanted to see.")
The movie itself: The first 3/4 of it were fantastic! Like a sports movie, only better; like an "old movie" (say, Cary Grant's finest) but recent.
Then all it took was one ridiculously stupid, anti-historical, incomprehensibly slapdash plot development for me to lose interest almost instantly. The plot twist in question may have set a record for being just wrong on so many levels at the same time.
Then again, sports movies are surprisingly bad about sporting veracity, and from what we know of George Clooney in real life it's probably too much to expect civic veracity from him. (For a quick 10 points, which constitutional amendment would effectively prevent an athletic commissioner -- regardless of how he was appointed -- from punishing a reporter who had no business connection to the league in question?)
(Wikipedia doesn't shed much light, but I did read a little bit about this guy and this guy. (This guy needs no introduction.))
Oh, while we're here: Is John Krasinski going to make an entire career out of characters who look crestfallen because everything went to hell because they didn't speak up? If only he'd just admitted he wasn't a real war hero, why, he could be dating Pam!
As best I can tell, Michael Clayton was a box office bomb, yet for some reason everyone and his dog has written a review timed to the DVD release. Slate has one, for example.
I always find it galling when people draw conclusions about real people and real professions based on elements of a vaguely plausibly authentic (the hit men notwithstanding) work of fiction that happens to fit their prejudices.
(You already know I'm about as pro-drug as any non-drug-using (caffeine addiction aside) person could be, so obviously you understand that this is about culture, and cynically derivative efforts, rather than anything personal or political.)
So was Weeds just the gateway TV series?
At this point wouldn't the obvious next step be a Will Farrell movie in which he sells heroin, yet in the style of all his sports movies?
Awhile back I mentioned watching This Film is Not Yet Rated and being appalled by just how wildly the makers overplayed their hand.
But just because they made a terrible movie doesn't mean the original filmmakers weren't dead right about the absurd things the MPAA will sometimes do.
...but easily the two weakest links in the Hairspray remake are the two biggest names (i.e. Tracy's parents).
It's too bad there's so much focus on Mrs. Turnblad's self-image, since without that angle this is crying out to be the show that demonstrates to the High School Musical demographic how to be twice as good as HSM.
My Son the Fanatic: Julia read the short story that inspired this movie; it wasn't what she'd call comedy. Nor was the movie (except in some very subtle indie flick sense), despite every genre classification we've seen. Still well worth watching.
Unbreakable: Julia strongly recommended this to me, having liked it (way back when it came out) despite not expecting to like it. In fact, earlier she'd rented Memento on my behalf even though Unbreakable was the movie she had in mind.
This is how tired I was (and how ignorant I am): Bruce Willis. Emotional distance plus foreboding. The city of Philadelphia. And yet it didn't register until the obligatory M. Night cameo itself who was behind this movie. So far we're 2-for-2 on my deeply enjoying M. Night movies that star Bruce Willis and are set in Philadelphia.
(I don't know if there's a way to put this without spoilers, but I disagree with the claim that this needed to be a trilogy instead of one movie. That is, I disagree with both the implied praise and the implied criticism. The movie is just right in itself.)
(Football, movies, AND politics?)
"The number of current box-office stars who have portrayed hired killers in major-studio films probably exceeds the number of actual professional assassins in the real world. You don't have to be Dr. Freud to speculate that cinema stars, steeped in a Hollywood culture obsessed with personal power, subconsciously fantasize about actually being able to kill whomever they please. But doesn't it strike you as strange that so many big-name stars are willing to portray characters who commit murder without compunction? Can it be coincidence the public is becoming turned off to the movies at the very time so many stars revel in morally vacant roles?"
--Tuesday Morning Quarterback
Easterbrook gave a long list of actors who have played hit men. To his credit, he did not impugn the religious beliefs of any of them.
Politics below the fold.
Anger Management and License to Wed are built on the same premise, that any given everyman will be better off if some psychopath is given official sanction to mess with him, supposedly for his own good.
I still refuse to watch Anger Management; I learned yesterday that we'd be watching License to Wed. (I could have opted out but didn't feel strongly enough to do so.)
Life is not rocket science. Playing well with others does not require elaborate schemes, nor does learning how to play well with others require some sort of contrived adversity.
(Who in their right mind would contrive adversity? Life has enough real adversity to deal with.)
Respect each other. Communicate. Plan ahead, where appropriate. Cope. Repeat over the course of several decades.
I learned three particular things from Reason today: One is that Mike Huckabee is arguably the most frightening plausible president. If he and Hillary (or he and Obama) won their respective nominations, I would volunteer several hours a week to the campaign of the Democratic candidate.
The next is that Britain won't let some fat people immigrate because they would pose too much of a strain on the national health care system. As you might imagine, this wouldn't be a problem if people paid for their own medicine.
The third is that some sheriff's deputies are not only too incompetent to avoid raiding the wrong house, but also too incompetent to avoid shooting an innocent person's dog. "The deputy says he feared for his life."
Do I need to explain how the movie rants relate to the political rants?
(Post-script: How can I be so dogmatic about the right to be left alone, yet willing to support what Brian Doherty calls endless international policing and adventurism? For one thing, I don't privilege Americans over the rest of the world. For another, I do believe that many (most?) regimes are inherently illegitimate, especially the non-democracies. So compared to real libertarians I have a much higher tolerance threshold for international intervention. I'll admit that it's not always clear whether the actual people involved are better off in a war zone than they were under tyranny.)
It's not immediately clear the last movie I watched (off the top of my head, last theater trip was the more recent of The Simpsons and HP5; last Netflix rental was Sophie's Choice(?)).
We've been working our way through the entire Get Smart series, with Family Guy thrown in there as change of pace (both the latest DVD set and random earlier episodes).
This list that The Onion AV Club includes two of my most despised movie-watching experiences ever. I'd completely forgotten my seething resentment towards both of the movies in question. (Only one of the two was from a book I'd read; you might be able to find the other in the archives of this blog.)
Oh, I've also seen The Human Stain (with no strong opinion of it) and Breakfast at Tiffany's (liked Audrey Hepburn, tolerated the rest). The other 16 I haven't seen and probably won't.
Apparently YouTube has three kinds of recut trailer (other than the one for The Shining, which is greatness all its own):
1. Comedies recut to horror movies
2. Dramas recut to gay love stories
3. 300
Wedding Crashers version
I was probably the last person to get into these, via YouTube:
The Lion King: the horror movie
American Pie as a medical thriller
The Lion King set to Linkin Park
The Office: Michael & Dwight are bringing Sexy Back
Documentaries made under false pretenses: now the Intelligent Design people are in on the fun!
Ben Stein may have been deceived. Then again it's possible they offered him lots of money, perhaps even five thou-sand dol-lars!
Screw you and your fabled "fault."
No, seriously, I understand the marketing gimmick associated with only making movies available once every N years. However, sometimes this can seriously backfire when it fails to account for events that might increase a specific title's popularity.
Take Tiger Town. Surprisingly, this might be the best baseball movie ever made. I say might, because I haven't seen it since I was young enough probably to have romanticized it too much.
(I was eight when it first aired. I was 13 when Bull Durham came out, 14 for Field of Dreams. Until this very blog post I'd been dead certain in my "memory" of Bull Durham coming out second, as a "drop the sepia tones and understand how life really works" counterpoint.)
Anyway, Tiger Town. "Go get 'em, Detroit Tigers! Go get 'em, Tigers!" Billy Young (Roy Scheider), fading star, only the kid whose mom died still believes in him.
DVD release date: 2004. As you may recall, in real life the 2003 and 2004 Detroit Tigers were very bad.
("Go get 'em, Alan Trammell! Go get 'em, Trammell!")
But in 2006 guess who reached the World Series? What a perfect time for a marketing tie-in, no? Of course, the way I imagine things work at Disney, somebody's great idea from 2006 becomes reality by... 2010?
Mind, they got rather lucky with the timing of the original TV airing: The 1984 Tigers were excellent, and if I remember right the movie was still in rotation.
Shortly after they won the World Series, Lance Parrish et al made a guest appearance on Diff'rent Strokes, arguably the second-most-memorable moment in that show (most memorable other than "very special" cautionary tales of Gordon Jump as a bike shop owner).
I get my entertainment gossip from Kausfiles.
(So, ironically, I'm informed at all only because the LA Times is so bad that Mickey Kaus keeps ranting about it.)
I hate to make light of the dead but for the longest time I thought this guy and this guy were the same person.
Yesterday one of my wife's theater kids hosted a High School Musical 2 premiere party. No boys were allowed, but apparently I don't count: I was the only guy there other than the hostess's baby brother (her father was at work). Otherwise it was 9- and 10-year-olds, with two Little Caesars, i.e. one slice per person.
I suppose even High School Musical 2 should get spoiler space. (It was very good at being what it was. It didn't blow me away like the original (which I'd expected to hate) but I can think of quite a few musicals that aren't nearly as good.)
OMFG: Vanessa Anne Hudgens was in Thirteen (not quite as mind-blowing as if it were Kids -- I confuse those two films sometimes -- but still!). I pity the misguided parent who noticed this but didn't realize what Thirteen was about and rented it for... I suppose this isn't quite Vampire Chicks With Chainsaws, though.
You know you're not quite an adult yet when going your own way entails stepping into the front passenger seat of a mini-van.
Contrary to what I'd assumed, Corbin Bleu is not the name of the lead actor (Troy is played by Zac Efron, who doesn't seem to have [much of] a solo career) but rather his friend with the weird hair.
"Wildcats are a team" ...of ungrateful pricks who are awfully quick to turn on the guy who singlehandedly got them country club jobs in the first place. (This isn't quite spelled out but it seems that when Troy gets the job offer he's crazy enough to ask for jobs for his friends and Fulton is crazy enough to grant that request.)
Where is the love for the piano player? No seriously, literally where? Both HSM installments end with a big dance scene with people paired off, obviously Troy & Gabrielle front & center. At the end of the sequel, both Sharpay and Kelsi are with boys that I don't remember seeing at any earlier point in the movie. Are these just random spur-of-the-moment hookups? For all we know Kelsi could have tons of back-story, but I don't think Sharpay had time to romance a guy while she was so busy scheming after Troy.
Olesya Rulin was born in Moscow. She's 21 years old already (c.f. 20 in October, 19 in December, 22!, 23 in November!!, and "just" 18) and according to IMDB "She's a trained ballet dance and model." Even before knowing anything about her (not even her name) I thought she was prettier than Sharpay and on par with Gabrielle.
(Mixed emotions: Vanessa Anne Hudgens has an incredibly expressive face but how much of that is makeup?)
Everyone is well aware that Troy practicing with those college guys was almost certainly some sort of NCAA violation, right? And if he's that good to begin with, wouldn't he already know it in the form of recruiters making initial contact? Why limit his horizons to the team in his home town?
Would Troy and Gabrielle have any conversations not actually captured in the film sequence? If they don't then their communication is terrible enough that breaking up was the right thing to do; but if they do, wouldn't Troy just tell her what's going on in his life (none of which he should feel the least bit embarrassed about: he's like the antithesis of an Ayn Rand hero)?
And what led her to change her mind about him? She dumps him but then decides "oh I want you back" (and somehow already have the same necklace I returned to you back around my neck) and the one song makes everything right?
In the interstitial sequences where we see the actors lounging around the pool and self-promoting, Kenny Ortega (director) tells the cast "thank you for helping me make a great movie." What a megalomaniac! I don't think there's a single member of High School Musical's core audience who swoons over Kenny Ortega. A normal human being, i.e. one not deluded by years in Hollywood, would've said "thank you for MAKING a great movie."
You must see this movie if you haven't already. I almost bailed after 40 minutes: That would've been a terrible mistake.
Spoiler(s) follow.
I wonder how well this plot would work in a L&O:SVU episode. The Chinatown-ish climactic spoiler surprised me but I felt less-than-brilliant for not seeing it coming.
I can't remember the last time a movie was so painfully obviously about to suck as bad as the Underdog movie will painfully obviously suck.
Oh wait, yes I can: Garfield. Shame on you Bill Murray.
The first time I saw a billboard promoting the movie Music and Lyrics, I did a double-take because I thought it was an ad for some web site. I thought, "did we get scooped?"
Then I wondered if Yahoo! would do some cheesy tie-in with its lyrics product. (This was at least two changes of release date ago.)
We finally got around to renting it. Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore are both the gold standard for their respective roles in this type of movie. It's just what Julia's been looking for, what she myopically mistakenly thought other movies would accomplish: Witty banter plus saccharine-sweet.
Two thumbs up, to say the least.
If you know both the movies I'm indirectly alluding to, we watched them in one setting just now. The original was MUCH better. That the American version resulted in a particular Oscar is bitter irony on many levels.
I'm glad Julia rented Click: I mistakenly believed it would be saccharine slapstick, in the style of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Quite on the contrary!
The obvious comparison is Bruce Almighty, yet there are also some Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind overtones.
There's no right answer to the titular comparison. You might even add Ed Norton to the mix: In hindsight The 25th Hour was overrated but Fight Club is an interesting contrast to these movies and even The Illusionist isn't entirely unrelated.
In general I like the fantasy movies that boil down to "You control your life" a lot better than the ones that boil down to "oops, no you don't control your life, so feel free to hold a pity party."
If remote technology had progressed faster (or Rod Serling lived longer) the Serling version of Click would not have ended happily (I can tell you exactly where it would have ended) -- though he'd have definitely condensed it to half an hour.
"For this is a place where real dogs woo fake ducks, where swim coaches wear speedos, and bad architecture documentaries produce bad architecture..."
A partial list of then-topical references in For What It's Worth (Chappelle's live stand-up at The Fillmore in SF):
Kobe Bryant's rape trial
Michael Jackson's molestation trial
R. Kelly
Elizabeth Smart
Usher
1. Despite my very high regard for The Family Guy, I found Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story to be disappointing. (We got it from Netflix a couple months ago and then recently it was on the indie broadcast station that the A's any time they have a TV game that isn't on cable.) Maybe it was a more precious commodity during that dry period after the show was canceled but before it was revived.
2. Despite my conviction that she's deeply overrated on multiple levels, Jennifer Aniston has co-starred in at least two outstanding movies. (Which two I'm thinking of is an exercise for you the reader.)
Name the movie. Degree of difficulty: No search engine usage.
This is Julia's most recent rental. Before that was The Last Kiss, which is beyond awful. She keeps being surprised that these movies turn out to be so bad.
(Actually in this particular case I'm enjoying it in spite of myself.)
Very different from the book. After all, why present empirical evidence when you can spin a good yarn instead?
(Not that I doubt any of the veracity. It's all sadly plausible, to the point that more people should be cognizant, but the people who claim that something like this "changed their lives" frighten me with their prior ignorance.)
Anyhow, none of this changes my outlook on food, but I'm more than willing to reconsider how I feel about open immigration. Even at that, some points you don't need a feature film to get across when two paragraphs will work just fine.
UPDATE 1: My only point of vehement fundamental disagreement was the rancher's anti-machine rant. After all, it was the conveyor belts who hired illegals, showed them a safety video in a language they don't speak, violated all kinds of health standards, and so on.
UPDATE 2: Bruce Willis! Nice. I hope he wasn't meant to be a straw-man, since everything he says is right-on. Well, not quite, but you get the idea: I actually deeply appreciate that they let a character make those particular points semi-convincingly instead of just being an over-the-top straw-man.
UPDATE 3: "Right now I can think of nothing more patriotic than to violate the Patriot Act."
Well, not that Eric Schlosser would necessarily object to the sentiment, but I don't think the Patriot Act was ever mentioned in the book (I looked in the index under both "P" and "U"), and I wasn't paying close enough attention to the argument at the enviro group meeting to really understand how they managed to work that in. This has devolved into Straw-Man All-Stars.
UPDATE 4: Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. "C'mon, don't you wanna be free?"
Amber (whom Julia correctly pegged as the former Chrissy from Growing Pains, on voice timbre alone) learns a life lesson about what you can('t) get cows to do.
I have no idea what it's like to seduce a woman who turns out to be a man, but a reasonable equivalent has to be thoroughly enjoying Punch-Drunk Love (even as uncomfortable as it made me) only to notice at the end that P.T. Anderson was responsible for it.
One of these things must be true:
1. Maybe I was wrong about Magnolia (but I highly doubt it)
2. Maybe I overrated PDL just now (I doubt that even more)
3. Maybe Magnolia was just a one-time misstep (I'm willing to believe that, though some of you also hated Boogie Nights and/or Coffee & Cigarettes, no?)
4. Maybe PDL was a blind squirrel finding a nut
Speaking of relevant things I've never seen, I've never seen Monk, though I know the basic premise. The crazy ways Monk's mind works aren't really how my mind works, yet the crazy ways Barry Egan's (Adam Sandler) mind works are just alarmingly similar to how my mind works. (So clearly I don't have OCD, yet might have whatever combination of autism, paranoia, etc. ... ?)
Oh yeah: I'd known all about this, my all-time favorite Snopes entry, though if I ever internalized the PDL tie-in, that had slipped my mind by the time we rented it.
And another update: Speaking of late-period Adam Sandler comedies, I've still never seen Anger Management (and probably never will) because the entire premise just freaks me out too much to cope with the whole movie.
Adam Sandler plays "me" remarkably often (but NOT in any of those early Sandler movies where he's always the same idiot man-child).
Watch with English subtitles/captions. ([gasping intensifies] is my favorite)
Watch with French audio.
Pretend Eminem is Derek Jeter. (They're both from Michigan, they both claim to have dated Mariah Carey...)
Pretend Eminem is Chad Kroeger.
I'd already seen it when it came out but Julia had not. I liked it better in the theater.
HouseSitter: Brilliant. I usually hate comedies of deception, where social conventions and the path of least resistance require the hapless hero to pretend to be something that results in his undoing. Julia expected me not to like this at all, but really the opposite was true. Kate Hudson Goldie Hawn (okay, this feigned mistake was an affectation) makes a good wife, at least her character does.
The Best of Prime Time Glick: I idly wonder how many times people ask themselves "WTF was Martin Short thinking?" Maybe I'd have appreciated this more if I had an opinion either way about Regis Philbin.
Jack Valenti makes one hell of a lobbyist, especially given how terrible he comes off as a talking head when edited by a hostile documentarian.
Two particular Los Angeles private investigators are among the most bumbling, idiotic PI's imaginable. But the fact that they both discuss their lesbianism at length just shines a completely different light on the movie.
At least one man identified as a "First Amendment Attorney" seems unable to tell the difference between censorship and freedom of contract.
MPAA raters tend to go too hard on sexually explicit scenes and too easy on violent scenes, at least compared to the values I share with most of the people on the movie. (I don't know what public opinion research says about how other Americans feel.) They also tend to go too hard on offbeat sex. Fair enough.
Most of the controversy seems to be between R movies and NC-17 movies because of how studios choose what to promote. Seven particular corporations have a 93% film market share. Their corporate parents have a 90% market share in U.S. communications, though it's unclear how Kirby Dick chose to define that market. (If anything I'm surprised both numbers are that low.)
The general consensus among participants in the movie seems to be that MPAA ratings should reflect more like majority rule. (After all, something that only 49% of the audience finds offensive can't be that offensive...)
Am I a bad libertarian for failing to be offended by MPAA ratings? They seem to serve their target audience pretty well, and as someone who enjoys indie films I can't quite sympathize with the plight of people who think that an unfair rating hurt their film's distribution. I mean, sure, people who are fervent about the quality of their work want to evangelize it, to spread their films as widely as possible.
The irony about this is that TFINYR itself makes basically zero effort to evangelize its own message. It's a feature-length act of begging the question, and if you're not already part of the choir then the sermon doesn't do much.
According to Netflix we're about to get Housesitter. I'd never heard of that movie until that notice. I hope it's good.
(I remember when I ran my Netflix queue with an iron fist. Then one day I finally gave my wife the right password, and at some point I stopped wasting brain cells on being aware of the queue order. Generally she's done right by us.)
For what it's worth I liked Mixed Nuts even more than my wife did, so the chances of enjoyment seem pretty good.
Must-see movie that we finally got around to seeing, within a year (barely: we watched it Friday) of its failure to win a Best Picture Oscar.
(I love Crash as much as anyone, but now that I've seen both movies, the fact that I could go either way probably means that anyone who didn't like Crash as much as I did (which is probably most people) sees this as a bad choice. I can't blame them.)
For the movie watching experience the best part is the scenery (now that I know it was actually filmed in Alberta, I have a some sightseeing to do before I die). In a theater, the worst part would probably be the slow-as-molasses pace of the dialog. (Yes, I grew up in Oklahoma. But yes, I've been in either Boston or San Francisco for the last 15 years; why do you ask?) We watched it at 1.35 speed, which made the dialog pace seem exactly normal (as opposed to the Sorkin/Mamet style that a speedup usually generates) but the words themselves quite rapid, though still not enough to require subtitles.
Ennis is not necessary gay. He loves Jack, of course, and of course Jack is gay, but Ennis is a cold, reserved man who's lived a hard life and really doesn't connect much to anyone, male or female.
We actually know someone whose visceral revulsion from this movie was to the idea that otherwise straight Ennis could be successfully seduced, or to the idea that once that person's young son were in college, he could get the idea that it doesn't matter whether he dates men or women and could happen to choose to date a few men.
(N.B. To which my response would be, well, it doesn't matter whether he dates men or women. If he's biologically straight, then with 99.99% probability any given date he goes on will be with a woman. Geez, more people should watch -- and understand -- Kissing Jessica Stein.)
Anyhow: Sad movie. Very moving. Best of both worlds in that it had a chick-flick plot but without the maddening irrationality of a stereotypical "chick" protagonist. (Quite the opposite, given how both Ennis and Jack are such "guys.")
What do you think:
"First Super Bowl win for Martin Scorcese" or "first Best Director Oscar for Peyton Manning"?
Same joke either way I suppose.
It's certainly a step up from mainstream-formulaic film. Good Slate article here defending Little Miss Sunshine, a movie that I'm surprised would ever actually need a defense.
I thoroughly enjoyed Little Miss Sunshine, ditto The Royal Tenenbaums. On the other hand Garden State is one of the worst movies I've ever seen.
Since this is a movie post: We rented Fight Club earlier this week, years after my sister began urging me that I needed to see it. This is a fantastic movie but one would have no idea why until actually watching it. (Remember, "the first rule about Fight Club is that you don't talk about Fight Club.")
Two off-the-wall ideas that would have improved Fight Club in my opinion (but probably nobody else's opinion):
1. Replace Ed Norton with Zach Braff.
2. Go back in time 20 years further and replace Ed Norton with Woody Allen.
Best movie I've ever seen?
You'd think every good movie ought to leave that impression in the immediate afterglow, yet that's not quite the case. The best counterexample I can think of is any Christopher Guest movie. They're all well worth your time to watch, superbly put together, immensely enjoyable, yet by a week later it won't be terribly relevant that you saw it.
Not that a movie needs lasting impact to be good, in fact I think some of the worst movies ever made (quick crash course for new readers: the two worst movies ever made are in fact Magnolia and Donnie Darko, and it's not even close) are painfully obviously shooting for that. But still.
We can cop out and say this is the best movie I've ever seen not involving Bill Murray, Harry Potter, J.R.R. Tolkien, or Steve Martin. I'll have to sleep on whether that's still true, or which of those modifiers one can get rid of (apples and oranges, really). Oh, or Christopher Guest.
With apologies to Woody Allen, if he's ever made a better movie than Stranger Than Fiction, I haven't seen it and it (unlike other Woody Allen movies) certainly hasn't gotten the hype. In fact Woody Allen did make Melinda & Melinda, the other work-of-fiction-within-a-movie "is it comedy or tragedy?" involving Will Farrell. That wasn't nearly as good as this, if only because ever scene with those pompous asses sitting at the table talking (the overarching conceit of the movie) was a waste of our time.
Choose your opinion (all from posts 234-235 of this comic strip thread):
(Various minor typos fixed.)
A. Woody Allen is lost. Has been for 20 years. He’s a terrible analogy for Lynn Johnston. He sucks because he’s lost his moral center.
B. Woody never had a moral center - his early work was always about the amoral man. His best serious work (Crimes and Misedemeanors) is about getting away Scot free. I mean, did a Woody Allen character ever learn a lesson or become a better person? Even in a comedy, a genre in which the hero always goes through the cliche of becoming a better person at the end?
Woody sucks now because he’s totally unconnected to his time and place. He always was, but what’s charming and endearing in a younger man is bizarre, off-putting and repellent in an old man. You want a comics equivalent to Woody Allen? Look no further than Johnny Hart.
C. Really? I think he had a moral world. It was an existentialist morality pinned in intellect and philosophy, rather than metaphysics, but Woody Allen heroes used to get away with shit and neurotically tear themselves up. Since C&M, it’s been like “I’m too old to worry about anything catching up with me in this lifetime and I don’t sweat any possibility of any other, so what’s the point?”
Which is a valid view, but life is too short to watch films full of douchebags.
We saw Christopher Guest's latest at the Parkway last night. Very well done, though it's the kind of movie that by a month from now I'll have probably forgotten we went to see.
(Julia didn't remember that we had rented A Mighty Wind together but for my part I couldn't pull out the exact title until just now anyway.)
Good detox after so much residual spouse-mortality fears brought on by the previous movie we watched together.
Our Netflix queue ought to be loaded with movies similar to For Your Consideration. Instead, Thursday we're getting The Usual Suspects because it's apparently way too good a movie for me to continue having never seen it, even though it might be days before we're of the right mindset to watch it (and also have time to).
(By the way, responding to M.S.'s comment on the Sixth Sense thread, I've never seen Boogie Nights and don't plan to.)
My favorite sentence clause from that bio might be "Part of Anderson's artistic DNA comes from his father [...]"
You don't say. Tell me more about how this DNA inheritance thing works.
For a quick 10 points name the minor character from The Sixth Sense whom I would beat to death in righteous anger, were this character real rather than fictional.
You won't be able to get that unless you've seen the movie, but if you have I'd be shocked if you managed to get it wrong.
I liked it even more than my wife (who'd already seen it long ago) did. She scoffed when I speculated whether it would make an all-time top ten list of "you need to see this" movies (note that the top N "you need to see this" movies may be very different from the N best movies: does this distinction make sense?). Given time to sleep on it I don't think it makes a top 10 but it easily makes a top 100, probably makes a top 50, and might make a top 25.
Julia claims that there are much better psychological thrillers. That may well be true but I didn't process The Sixth Sense as a psychological thriller. Instead I saw it taking on subject matter similar to Magnolia yet with exact opposite results: Magnolia tried to be a drama but utterly failed (in my opinion: as covered here awhile back, I think Magnolia is one of the worst movies ever made, and of course your mileage may vary). Even if it was trying to be a psychological thriller, and regardless of whether it succeeded at that (given the buzz it generated, apparently it wildly succeeded), I found it to be a far superior drama to 99.[some number of 9's]% of the self-described "dramas" out there.
As for the "spoiler," even though I can't read M. Night's mind I'd like to think that he didn't intend for the ending to be a twist.
I'd like to think that he assumed audiences would realize what was going on the whole time, but then when people in a test screening didn't get the point until the very end, the powers that be took the "surprise" as an inadvertent feature (in the "not a bug but a feature" sense).
I already knew too much to about the plot to be plausibly surprised, but I claim I would have figured it out no later than the compulsive viewing and re-viewing of the wedding video.
Julia and I watched it on December 24, just as we did last year and probably will for years to come. I don't think I included anything here that one could easily Google or IMDB-search, but you never know.
Bit parts include a karaoke proprietor named Don, a security guard named T-Bone, an Indian (South Asian) who runs an Irish pub, and a guy who keeps having sex in his office. That last guy and the protagonist who peeps at him are played by a real-life husband and wife.
The film opens with one of the protagonists on a bender, lamenting unrequited love a unique humiliation that resulted from his identity and his unrequited love. A climactic late scene shows a different protagonist taking drastic measures to get the attention of that same love interest.
Two well-known directors can also be seen in the movie, one with a bit part, the other as the groom seen in old wedding photos. (His real-life wife shows the photos. I just now learned something ironic (in reverse) about that marriage as it relates to the plot of this movie.) Conversely, this film was directed by one of its stars. It is that star's only directorial credit at the moment, though he's also directing (and starring in) a film currently in production.
Outstanding movie.
Also apparently a perfect storm of indie flickdom, since none of the major players seem to have done much either before or afterward. I hope Woody Allen likes this movie, given how much of it is an homage to his style. Julia and I also thought of Kevin Smith*, but in hindsight really not.
My two biggest nitpicks are that (at first) Jessica Stein comes off as a rather annoying person (the way she takes her job and her supposed intelligence so seriously, though I assume we're meant to take both her and Helen less than 100% seriously), and that plot points are resolved so quickly/breezily sometimes, as if "oh yeah... but it turned out like this." (They overuse the "Three Months Later" narration card.)
Even so, probably better to resolve things too breezily than to drama queen it all and club the audience over the head on various points.
It's a sweet movie, a flawed movie whose flaws are all the more endearing, about two human beings and their sweet relationship (with a lower-case "r"). The more I think about it better this works as a Woody Allen movie, where the Woody character happens to be female.
*- Julia mistakenly believed she'd already seen Kissing Jessica Stein. The movie to which she'd incorrectly associated that title is actually Chasing Amy, which we've both seen. I saw it in a Boston movie theater with a guy friend. Just about everyone in the theater arrived as same-sex twosomes. I might have been the only straight guy in the theater.
(Yes, my friend realized I was straight. We liked each other's company all the same. Now I wish I remembered better who attended the housewarming party at my Boston studio. This guy Scott was either 1/3 or 1/5 of my guest list. There was also Peter and Ashlie, and as I was typing this I became 90% sure of who my other two guests were: two Harvard guys who were dating at the time of the housewarming but broke up shortly after that. So a guy-guy couple, a guy-gal couple, a single gay guy, and a single straight guy, and the latter two saw Chasing Amy together a few weeks later.)
We watched What's Cooking? just after 24: Season 2 and just before the movie in the post right below this. I think it was on our queue because of Dennis Haysbert.
I liked it, despite almost the entire film consisting of quick-cut scenes where it was unclear whether any plot or character development would take place.
The general plot is Thanksgiving dinner with four different Los Angeles families: One each black, Hispanic, Vietnamese, and Jewish (with lesbian daughter & de facto daughter-in-law).
This movie has a distinct spoiler -- the great thing about indie flicks is that spoilers don't get so widely spoiled (compare to the other movie in our current Netflix trio, "The Sixth Sense"...) -- and even though it's nothing Earth-shattering, suddenly I liked the movie a whole lot more than I previously had.
(By contrast Julia didn't like it at all. We've seen a few one-thumb-up, one-thumb-down movies in 2006.)
Oddly (given that I liked the movie and she didn't), I think large-group Thanksgiving dinners are profoundly overrated. There's just so much stress, and it's all so avoidable.
[And yet I think of myself as part of a relatively functional family, really not prone to stereotypical Thanksgiving dinner table outbursts.]
Freshman year of college, I took a midterm Wednesday morning then flew home for Thanksgiving. The rest of Wednesday was travel, all of Sunday was travel, all crowded airports and related nastiness, 1.8 travel days spent to enjoy three days in Tulsa. From that point on, with apologies to my parents, going home for Thanksgiving was just never worthwhile to me, and they accepted that.
I eventually came around to at least not hating it, though I still didn't like it. I seem to be in a distinct minority on that point.
As I watched it, my first point of comparison was The Big Chill. The film didn't further that parallel at all (what would my generation's equivalent be of the Big Chill soundtrack? - '80s anthems? certainly nothing like the band featured in this movie's soundtrack) but I'm glad it at least went SOMEWHERE. The first half hour at least was painfully pointless.
If I'd paid any attention at all to the Netflix sleeve blurb or any media coverage of this movie, I'd have picked up on a comparison to Donnie Darko a lot sooner. Thankfully this isn't nearly as bad as Donnie Darko was.
Once scene late in the movie reminded me of The Life Aquatic. After the fact, the main couple in this movie reminded me of the main couple from Good Will Hunting (I also realized in hindsight that I don't like GWH, though maybe when I watched it I liked it).
Julia compared it unfavorably to Punch Drunk Love, a movie I've never seen. As for this movie itself, Julia lost a whole lot of respect for its director/star.
Oh, this is seemingly completely unrelated but when we watched it last year I liked Harold & Kumar a lot more than she did. She didn't like it per se, just appreciate it as the sort of lowbrow comedy one finds in I Love Lucy or Dude Where's My Car.
I should check when I get home on whether the Netflix sleeve hyphenates the title correctly. When it was in theaters the official title was ungrammatical, as seen on the main title of this IMDB page.
"Do you know how I know you're gay?" is:
A. Homophobic
B. Homoerotic
C. Offensive
D. Hilarious
E. evocative of Kevin Smith movies
F. some combination of all of those
I never had a car in Boston. The other day I found an old journal: I'd forgotten how frequently I went on first or second dates in 1998-1999 (the very beginning of the on-line personals era).
In the poker scene everyone is holding five cards. I predict that this is the last major movie poker scene to depict draw poker rather than hold em. (The Casino Royale remake -- which I haven't seen -- apparently used hold em in plcae of baccarat.)
How much time passes between the scene in which the 16-year-old claims that the protagonists are always having sex, to the scene in which she tells Andy that she can tell he's a virgin?
Two hours, thirteen minutes seems too long, and yet I could see myself watching three straight hours of Dateapalooza, even (especially?) as improv comedy.
I will save the two most interesting observations for actual conversation with my wife, but probably add them here later this week.
One link from The Australian leads to another.
Indian film star appears very scantily-clad at London event, likely derailing her Bollywood career.
This reminds me of an SF Chronicle review of the touring High School Musical. The reviewer contrasted HSM to Grease, pointing out just how sanitized it is, but made the bizarre claim that HSM lacks sexual tension. We live in a sad world if people have become so desensitized that they don't notice sexual tension absent lewd behavior.
(Hint: I don't think he puts his basketball career in so much jeopardy just because he happens to be fond of his new friend. I suppose there's the claim that he's just that enamored of his previously unknown musical gift, but if that were the whole story then it wouldn't matter who his duet partner was.)
I came really really close to shoving spoilers down your throat (for your own good). Instead I'll urge you to click through, if only because that's 100 minutes of your life you'd never get back.
(Maybe the novel isn't craptacular, though I suspect it's garbage in, garbage out.)
First off (though this is mostly unrelated to why the movie is so awful): Spelling bees are the most overrated pseudo-academic pursuit imaginable. Never mind that they're a cheap advertising ploy by the monopolists at Scripps Howard News Service (the more I know about the newspaper business the less respect I have for the people who run it). What possible utility is there from memorizing sequences of letters of words you'll probably never use in a sentence in real life? Even forensic competition (i.e. debate) demonstates a highly useful skill.
Onto the film: My fantasy is that the makers of Little Miss Sunshine saw a sneak preview of Bee Season, realized OH MY GOODNESS THIS BLOWS, and asked themselves "What would it have taken to improve this movie?" If you think of Little Miss Sunshine as partly a parody of Bee Season then it's beyond brilliant.
Okay, spoilers:
Her mom's a klepto. Her brother hates her dad so much that he becomes a hare krishna.
Her dad teaches her the kabbalah so well that she achieves enlightment the night before the national final. (If she were older it'd be a lot like an orgasm.)
She makes the final two, then gets "origami" for the championship but tanks because she somehow knows that choking on purpose will magically bring her family back together. (I wonder how frequently that approach works in real life.)
After all, if she'd won the whole shebang, her mom would still be a klepto, her brother would still be a hare krishna, and her dad would still be the self-centered know-it-all that I sense the filmmakers want us to blame.
(Incidentally, if a movie is described as "coming of age" then shouldn't at least one character actually come of age rather than the entire family just stagnating until the final seconds of the movie when suddenly we're supposed to accept that everything became okay on its own?)
This was by far the best movie in the Disney Channel rotation of the 1980s. (It's been in the "Saved" portion of my Netflix queue for months now.)
If you want to get into even more obscure baseball movies, Blue Skies Again was surprisingly hard to find given that I couldn't remember the exact title. Finally had to search for "Denver Devils" and happen upon this NY Times movie review.
...but, again, could easily look up (and may have already known if you're in Julia's family):
My brother-in-law is a producer/animator. His most recent project was Everyone's Hero . Even apart from being required to see it, I'm honestly looking forward to it.
Anyhow, IMDB (correctly, my wife confirms) gives him exactly one acting credit -- random movie in which he was an extra. But his first production credit lists him as production coordinator for -- for 10 points -- which TV special?
Hmm. Come to think of it I bet someone really does get this right without looking it up. We'll see.
The Pink Panther: Classic Cartoon Collection
These are brilliant. (They also bring back fond childhood memories.) I'd mention to mention this in the post below (Kid-related musings) but briefly forgot.
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster
Couldn't make it through the whole thing. The Spinal Tap-style unintentional comedy didn't quite make up for these being dyfunctional self-centered brats (maybe brat singular (Hetfield)) whose massive success resulted in their never having to grow up.
The Royal Tenenbaums
Richly deserves its one-of-the-best-ever reputation.
A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
Very good; I liked it.
(The value judgment in the subject line is literally true, no exaggeration.)
In no particular order:
1. Use a combination of urban legends and crim law hypotheticals as a framing device.
2. Cast the biggest star of the movie as a quirky anti-hero with an obscene tag line that a good chunk of the audience will go on to quote into the ground.
3. Present quiz-bowl style competition as a form of child abuse.
4. Speaking of child abuse, run the gamut of dysfunctional child-parent relationships, all of which are nothing compared to the main plot element:
5. CANCER SUCKS. (This was a completely novel concept to anyone watching this film, of course.) Oh, and hating your immediate family sucks. But what sucks most of all is THE PAIN THE PAIN THE PAIN THE PAIN.
6. Seeing people that profoundly hurt is entertainment in itself(?!), but if six or more cast members can deliver overwrought lines in "I'm angling for an Oscar" form then it's a guaranteed classic.
7. Even though everything else about the movie is straight-up drama, why not introduce exactly two satircal themes (well, three counting "respect/tame"), one involving urine and the other involving incongruous COPS-style police officer narration, so that a hipster audience segment will think to themselfs "ooh, just like COPS" and chuckle to themselves smugly.
8. If you can't figure out how the heck you're going to end this thing, why not a deus ex machina? Nobody's done "animals fall from the sky" since the Old Testament, and the allegory even suggest itself (without necessarily having any one particular meaning).
9. The moral of the story? Everyone should be more communicative (Dr. Phil style) and less inhibited (juvenile fiction style). After all, if the apex of literature are those novels that reach out to alienated 10th grade boys then the apex of cinema should be obvious enough.
10. And how could you possibly cram a story this involved into just three hours? C'mon, they could've easily made it five.
NOTE: The previous movie we saw was Match Point. Therefore I can say pretty confidently that "bad/sad things keep happening to people" isn't what makes this movie so bad.
Spoilers...
1. What on Earth do they both see in Maxine? She's a self-centered, amoral twit, which I assume isn't in itself her appeal. I realize there are movie characters whose physical attractiveness overcomes their character flaws, but to accomplish that don't you actually need to be attractive?
2. How did two people who seem to despise each other so much (or if not despise then at least abjectly fail to care for, identify with, or respect) get married in the first place?
3. The movie pacing suggests that when Lotte confronts Dr. Lester about Malkovich and meets his compadres, she ends up staying with them permanently until the big event. Does she just abandon all those animals?
4. The more I think about this movie the less regard I have for it -- but if the reasons I hate it are eerily similar to the reasons I hate Donnie Darko then does that make me an anti-intellectual or just an anti-pseudo-intellectual?
Oh, some more:
5. Was the fictional Malkovich born on the 44th birthday of one of his parents, who in turn was born in the 44th birthday [etc.], or is the fact that the successor vessel is his own daughter a remarkable coincidences that equally remarkably isn't treated as at all coincidental?
6. How on Earth does the pan-Malkovich scene make sense? If the porthole followed strict procedures then wouldn't he simply end up watching himself watching himself [ad infinitum] in the corridor, just suspended in the white light for 15 minutes until he hit the ground? (And wouldn't the previous client hit the ground a few minutes before he himself did?)
7. On the other hand, if you assume the portal just does whatever it feels like doing (a much safer assumption if you ask me), then isn't it strange that Craig et al assumed/asserted so confidently (after a sample size of just one) that the portal always took you to Malkovich and always left you on the NJ Turnpike, rather than e.g. {Bev Johnson of Peabody / Foxwoods parking lot} or some other combo?
...or do I have a valid beef?
The extended entry spoils Fever Pitch (the movie, not the book).
CLAIM: No movie should ever involve a sympathetic character running out onto the field in the middle of the game as a plot element, no matter how contrived the plot point is or how high the stakes seem to be.
In real life, those who run out onto the field are cut off at the pass, arrested, and (probably) savagely beaten -- and to some extent they... "deserve" is the wrong word, but what's the word for when you shouldn't be the least bit surprised by your fate?
Running out onto the field is comparable to anything this guy did, and yes it's a real security problem.
Getting back to the movie in question: Call me an O. Henry fan, but it would have been a much better movie had this particular gambit barely failed to be timely.
Oh also: I know they had to do something analogous to the book (and they couldn't luck into everything happening in real life the way it had to) but seven runs in the ninth is nothing compared to three goals in the final minutes.
Meet Tracy Enid Flick (17 years old, Female, OMAHA, Nebraska)
(Great movie, of course; I'll comment about it some other time.)
Sadly no Tammy Metzler page, even though that would be much more interesting for stereotypical MySpace content.
I've never seen The Big Lebowski.
I've never seen the original American Pie.
I saw American Pie 2 and American Wedding. From the former, both Michelle and Heather stood out, certainly not Vicky.
Danni Sullivan ("Scrubs") is one of the most disturbing minor characters in any TV show story arc. I'm embarrassed to admit I briefly found her attractive, and long after losing that notion I still found her compelling enough to do the research that led to this weblog entry.
Last but not least, I've definitely never seen (and will never see) "Taradise."
A partial list; feel free to add your own, assuming the theme makes sense:
Annie (real musicals)
California rolls at Star Market (real sushi)
Over the Hedge (Pearls Before Swine)
Post inspired when I learned (to my horror) that OtH was made into a Disney movie.
I bailed after the first half-hour. Will my life be any worse from missing the rest?
Maybe the real-life Capote really was like this but P.S. Hoffman's over-the-top queeniness became unwatchable. Also, at the risk of underrating a 20th century lit classic, I'm not convinced that In Cold Blood has more merit than the best of the post-O.J. books or what a non-hack writer may have done with the JonBennet case.
From the sleeve synposis apparently this vaguely similar to a Columbo episode, with Capote's mannerisms substituted for Peter Falk's. I still don't buy the idea of a media guy out-investigating the cops on a case this big. (If Capote did indeed "crack the case" then I'll apologize to him for my historical ignorance.)
Again, Crash was NOT (primarily) about race relations, no moreso than it was about the criminal justice system. One of the best scenes to support this involves a spoiler.
Apropos of nothing I should mention the soundtrack was awful. This would have been quite a different movie with justicious remix and reuse of the best of the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. (Julia said this movie owed a lot to Spike Lee; I say it owes at least as much to Tarantino.)
Also, did you notice that (aside from Shaniqua) the women in this movie pretty much look alike regardless of ethnic background? I found the four main black men more visually distinctive than the four main women.
But you know what they say: All women look alike. Oh, don't get me wrong, some of my best friends are women. My mom, my sister, my future wife -- all female.
So anyway, the spoiler: When Officer Matt Dillon molests the director's wife, what adjective(s) best apply to his act? I don't think "racist" would even make the top 100 (certainly dwarfed by "sexist"), and yet somehow when Ryan Philippe was talking to his supervisor they'd both let it morph into a racial thing?!
No sir, it's not that this closet racist has been on the force for N years, it's that a guy in uniform abused his position to cop a feel. Not accceptable under any circumstances and completely independent of race. (The act itself; I'll admit there were racial overtones to the power structure in the traffic stop.)
That's a one-and-done, not only a no-brainer that the guy gets reassigned but also an act that internal affairs should prosecute. Making it racial deprived her of justice.
Read the review here: I still think it's complete and utter pabulum. I'm most offended by the parts that were probably designed to give offense, yet not for the direct reasons you might expect. Rather, I found my intelligence insulted by attempts at parody that were neither clever nor insightful.
Mock me at length here if you were one of those who actually liked this piece of...
(As always, spoilers after the jump. I don't think I spoil anything in the main part but I'll reread just in case.)
Although this is a silly thing to say without watching the other contenders (we also have Capote on hand and I'll make a point to queue Brokeback after all), in absolute terms at least Crash richly deserved its Best Picture Oscar.
Julia and I haven't disagreed this much about a work of art since we saw Christopher Durang's play Laughing Wild. (Think of the woman in the supermarket who decked a guy for standing in the way of her tuna.) She liked it; I thought it was a load of crap and disparaged her taste. We saw it way up in Sonoma; had a long ride home because admittedly my critique got too snobby and maybe even too personal.
Anyhow, this time it's the exact opposite. She saw a movie about "a bunch of racist a'holes" (contraction added) almost none of whom have any redeeming virtue. I disagree with her about the redeeming virtues, and more importantly I saw this as a movie about a bunch of a'holes, period. Even though race relations are such an important plot element, viewing the movie and the characters through that lense takes you further away from what's really going on here.
I can completely see the frustration involved in watching this movie, and the exasperation that I'm sure we all felt with almost everyone. It's astounding to me the extent to which, exactly when they need to let go and keep things in perspective, people will still be rude little f's: Selfish, petty, and imbecilic. That said, the worst things happened to the people who had nobody to trust.
If you were to draw conclusions from this movie about how to live your life (which is a bad idea for most movies and not at all the intended purpose of any given movie), the race relations part tells you nothing. Rather, get the chip(s) off your shoulder; learn to let go; trust people, and most importantly, behave in such a way that you're worthy of other people's trust.
Julia asked me what the point of this movie was -- not the moral (despite the previous paragraph, I don't think the movie has a "moral" as such) but rather the purpose. Well, just like any other movie, it was made for audiences to enjoy it. I happened to enjoy it (a lot going on, some interesting ambiguity), she very much didn't. I happened to find almost all of the characters interesting; she, rather, found them appalling.
I'll readily admit that some of the coincidences in the movie were a little too convenient, though people who act as though the movie was beneath them need to just come off it. You can be upfront and say it just wasn't your cup of tea (tearjerkers and/or "serious drama" usually does nothing for me), but:
"There are racial problems in LA?!? How shocking!" Whether or not the snark is justified, if you leave it at that then you've flat-out missed most of the movie.
Best scene in the movie, by far: Off-duty cop picks up hitchhiker. You know the scene. They're just about to discover how much they have in common, but a silly misunderstanding combined with a cycle of belligerence... for all I know if I'd been in a different mood I'd despise this scene (and this movie) out of frustration. But it illustrates really nicely the for god's sake just LET GO part of the moral I took from the movie.
Second-best is either the confrontation between the convenience store owner and the locksmith [and his daughter] (I thought this was amazing; I'm sure many erudite viewers just found it all hokey but it's their loss), or the rescue-from-a-burning-car scene. I presume it goes without saying why "behave so that you're worthy of other people's trust" is the operative lesson here.
(Yes, Officer Matt Dillon did a really brave thing. But just doing his job neither excuses nor makes up for his violating someone. Admittedly saving someone's life in some sense is more good than violating her is bad, but violating her is still inexcusable and you can't just pretend he didn't.)
Honorable mention to the entire sequence that included the filmmaker-carjacker confrontation .
...but the parallels are striking.
Fiddler on the Roof (the movie).
Think of the start of the "Main Theme" from Star Wars: Two long notes, three short, two long.
The three short notes fall on what beat of the measure? I suspect most people get this wrong, at least I always used to growing up.
(First beat of the second measure. Two half notes, triplet, half note quarter note. I always used to think of the triplet as being the fourth beat of the first measure, getting ahead of things.)
Fatuous, tendentious, and trite.
Perhaps I'd have liked it more without the pretentious dinner party framework. That is, Woody didn't need to clobber the audience over the head with a 2-by-4 to drive home the premise of the movie. He certainly didn't used to. Apparently in his effort to expand his audience he's taken to making Woody Allen for Dummies movies.
I think nearly every early-to-mid Woody Allen movie would be fantastic, indeed likely better than the original, if it were remade with Allen's part itself played by Will Ferrell. Julia strenuously disagrees, at least in the case of Annie Hall. I stand by this assertion, though, with the caveat that this says more about the (counterintuitive) nature of Allen's best movies than it does about the (counterintuitive) nature of Farrell's best performances.
This isn't something you'd know cold but you might randomly guess it.
The latest in a new genre of Turkish popular culture that vilifies the United States, a Turkish movie shows American soldiers in Iraq crashing a wedding and pumping a little boy full of lead in front of his mother.
They randomly machine-gun dozens of people to death, shoot the groom in the head and drag those left alive to Abu Ghraib prison -- where a Jewish-American doctor cuts out their organs, which he sells to rich people in New York, London and Tel Aviv. (from an AP report, quoted by Jesse Walker at Reason's "Hit and Run" weblog)
For a quick 10 points, what American actor plays the doctor?
Headline that doesn't mean at all what you would have expected it to mean had you come across it completely free of recent context:
"U.S. Condemns Cartoon Violence."
By the way, Julie Kavner is excellent in Radio Days. Was the megasuccess of The Simpsons a good thing or a bad thing for her career output? (Obviously a great thing for her pocketbook.)
I think I'm on one of those piano lesson days.
If you're on either stage of wining and dining Andie McDowell, I'll wish you luck.
So last year (two years ago?) everyone and his dog was raving about Million Dollar Baby. This was supposed to have shattered the scale of good movies. All the buzz had a contrarian effect on me, and I never did see the movie, though the big plot twist (one of the big plot twists?) has long since been spoiled for me.
Maybe Million Dollar Baby is really as good as the hype, but I doubt it, if only because they hype went so far.
This year... I just hope Brokeback Mountain is anywhere near as good as the buzz suggests, since the buzz sets a standard that may actually be impossible to live up to.
This article describes what sounds (to me) like a terrible business decision. That said, the columnist seems to be advocating (ironically) the same kind of peer pressure and social ostracism that homophobes have so long applied to gay people in the first place.
(With obvious differences that go without saying. First person to cite literal gay bashing loses.)
I was warned once that movies from the 1960s are almost uniformly bad. Everything wrong with this movie reminded me of the archetypical bad 1960s movie as I'd imagined it in my head.
In the "if you can't say something nice" department: The "everyone spikes her drink" scene is so perfect for Lucille Ball that the idea of a remake just seems wrong.
Also, this movie has the best "birds and the bees" scene ever. If you're trying to tell a teenage girl what she needs to know about sex, hard to beat having her own (step?)mother go into labor at the same time.
Owes a lot to The Wedding Singer. (Compare Owen Wilson's depressed wedding crashing with Adam Sandler's depressed wedding singing.)
I liked it much more than Julia apparently did. It may be a stupid movie but it's decidedly not a bad one. I'm disappointed in the filmmakers for using a truly despicable antagonist as a crutch: If this were a better movie, it wouldn't have been necessary for Sack to be so totally without redemption. But if you're already suspending enough disbelief then that's a minor quibble.
Chaz was a perfectly cast cameo, so much so that I actually hope he was uncredited. I've never seen a movie reduce its own premise to absurdity so effectively.
I idly wonder about the archetypical Netflix inventory-chain employee, whether the closest match is to food service, retail sales, or Barnes & Noble. I'd like to think the latter, or better yet the aspiring filmmakers with whose stints in short-term data entry I'm familiar.
Anyhow, whoever those Netflix inventory-chain employess are, I hope the notes brighten their lives rather than serving as an annoyance. (Yeah, I realize that the idea behind note-leaving is for a note to slip past to whoever rent the disc next. Somehow I don't think that happens much.)
(It's hard to explain succinctly where the atrocity lies, since there's more to it than cuteness as such or "breaking the wall" as such, but read on.)
Whoever produced the DVD for March of the Penguins completely ruined it by putting a computer-generated dancing penguin at the start of the unavoidable set of trailers.
Note that the movie itself features real live penguins and that the whole reason it's so awesome, the whole point of the movie is how breathtaking their actual behavior is.
This is the second-most-appalling thing I've ever seen in this vein. The most appalling thing of all-time that I've seen in this vein is the video they play (or played, as of December 2003) when you go up the elevator to the Sears Tower observation deck. The conceit was that a computer with the personality of a young eager boy was navigating, only it screwed things up and shot the elevator into space, with the contrived drama of reintering the atmosphere and "landing" on the 96th floor.
I assume that even the least English-cognizant tourists realized this was all fake, so there wasn't much of a "likelihood of confusion" issue. Even so, I wanted to hunt down whoever created and approved this abomination and beat some good taste into them.
The mistake made in both cases is similar to the mistake that some sportscasters make when they insist on talking over the immediate aftermath of dramatic moments rather than letting the play on the field (and the sustained crowd noise) speak for itself.
Why ever settle for appreciating the splendid things reality gives us, when we can also pat ourselves on the back over the hackneyed artifices we graft onto it?
(Speaking of things clumsily grafted onto other things, now is as good a time as any to rail against the sins against theater committed by this genre. I'd been reluctant to comment on this earlier, given my second-hand association with the theater in question and also some of the performers (all of whom are fantastic actors), but there's still a major audience-exclusion problem here: Any time you have a deluge of knock-knock jokes (literally knock-knock jokes) but also snarky references to (say) the size of a magician's "wand," in some sense you have a show that's inappropriate for all ages. And even if a specific theater in a specific locale commissions your script, there's no need for your throwaway lines to be as gratuitously local as e.g. making fun of the 2005 San Francisco 49ers. All that said, I should note that turning "Baby It's Cold Outside" into "Baby There's Gold Inside" is pretty clever, if not Hasty Pudding clever then at least close.)
It was hard for me to watch Polar Express without constantly thinking of The Ladykillers. (Tom Hanks needs to work on diversifying his portfolio of regional accents.)
I understand now why so many Protestant churches were screening this last December, though: As his friends got older, they all stopped hearing the bell, but not him. Analogously, as all your friends reach adulthood, go through mid-life crises, or whatever, even if they happen to slip into agnosticism you still hold onto your particular faith apparently just for the sake of believing ("Believe") in something.
(Pascal's Wager can be refuted when it comes to salvation and eternal life, but for getting presents from Santa an analog to it seems to hold.)
Spiritual flippancy aside, Polar Express works best as a poor man's Big Fish. (Polar Express is to Big Fish as the Children's Sermon is to the regular homily.)
For what it's worth, I "believe" in Santa Claus inasumch as I believe I'll make a great Santa for as-yet-unborn children. I believe (no scare quotes) that God is more-or-less as described in the Bible and that Jesus is who he claimed to be, neither for some great reasons nor even as a "have to believe in something" belief but just at face value that I happen to think it's true, while realizing that this is an irrational thing to think.
I intend never ever to see Pretty Woman, not for any moralistic objection but just because it sounds impossibly saccharine and stars the most appalling actress in film history.
As it happens, though, twice in the past 72 hours we've seen other movies that fit the title theme of this post. Mighty Aphrodite is fantastic. I will claim even without seeing Pretty Woman that Mighty Aphrodite is at least 10,000 times as good.
By the time I'm 40, I probably will have seen every Woody Allen movie ever made. Some of them will no doubt stink, but films like Mighty Aphrodite will make it all worthwhile.
On the other hand The Wedding Date was staggeringly awful, to my complete lack of surprise but to Julia's inexplicable shock. (That is, I'm surprised by how surprised she was.) More than anything else it's the triteness that erodes one's will to live while watching that movie. Apparently the funniest they can do is ten minutes worth of demonstrating OMG how nervous she is, or busting her chops for listening to Air Supply.
Representatively atrocious lines from that movie:
"Is that an old ballet exercise or are you just so used to walking on eggshells around your family?" (Dermot Mulroney apparently isn't a male prostitute so much as a male avatar of Oprah.)
"Everybody have a drink for my hoo-hah." (That nasty older woman.)
Oh, and they overuse everybody's favorite trite-movie crutch: Drown out milestone-but-otherwise-mundane (in that they happen to everyone at some point) events with catchy soundtrack tunes so that all the 14-year-old girls in the theater will ooh and aww and feel like part of the experience.
These two men are so amazingly funny (I've been a Murray fan as long as I can remember; I have Julia to thank for discovering the full extent of Martin's brilliance), yet if they made a movie together, say sometime in 2006, I bet people would leave the theaters almost suicidally depressed if the subject matter were anywhere near as heavy as (at least) Murray's most recent offerings.
For a quick 10 points (I had to do an IMDB search; you may have to as well, though if you know off the top of your head more power to you): Name the only movie they appeared in together (so obviously not SNL or other TV stuff).
Martin was a supporting character; Murray had just a bit part, appearing only in scenes with Martin, in which he supposedly ad-libbed all his lines.
In one particular nude scene of Shopgirl, I wonder whether during the filming Claire Danes thought to herself, "Bite this, Scarlet J..."
Random superficial similarities between Shopgirl (the movie, as opposed to the novella) and Lost in Translation:
Leading man is a 50-something comic star who broke out in the really old-school SNL, then made a bunch of cornball family comedies in the 1980s and 1990s compared to which his role in this movie is strikingly poignant/heavy.
Leading lady is a beautiful redhead who's attractive (the character moreso than the actress, though the actress as well) in spite of or perhaps even because of being so introverted and contemplative.
Despite being so much older than her, the leading man becomes close to the leading lady on a hard to define level where they're seemingly more than friends yet a true relationship is off limits.
The cinematography focuses at length on the leading lady's legs and/or butt.
The leading lady has another guy in her life, though Jeremy from ShopGirl gets fleshed out way more than that dippy Yale guy from LiT ever did.
All major characters feel isolation and loneliness, in part because of what they do for a living and in part because of the difficulties presented by the big, faceless city/culture they're in (Tokyo; Los Angeles). The sense of isolation is conveyed even further by the recurring haunting themes in the instrumental pieces on the movie's soundtrack.
So if all you knew about Shopgirl were the 25-words-or-less basic plot, you could be forgiven for expecting (fearing?) that it would feel a lot like a Woody Allen movie. Thank goodness it came nowhere near that look & feel.
Emma Watson has aged well, of course.
More important -- and bear in mind how straight I am, or claim to be -- this is the most handsome man to appear on the big screen in quite some time. Where did they find him? (In Sofia, based on his IMDB bio...)
Wow. Were he American, he'd be perfect for those ads for the Marines. Even as it stands he'd be perfect for those ads.
Quick: What do these movies have in common? (See extended entry.)
Kids
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
American Pie
The Breakfast Club
Animal House
Better Off Dead
Porky's
(That seems like about the right order. Your mileage may vary, including what belongs on that list and what doesn't.)
Fast Times at Ridgemont High reminds me in turns of each of those movies, though with the notable exception of The Breakfast Club each of them is demonstrably superior to Fast Times.
(By the way, apologizes to Julia for blogging this in lieu of a more in-depth conversation in person, though her general reaction seemed to be that it was a dumb movie exactly because it's set in an era of stupidity, with no compelling reason to discuss further.)
Let's get The Breakfast Club out of the way: It and Fast Times are on opposite ends of the "show versus tell" spectrum. John Hughes makes Judd Hirsch Nelson et al talk and talk and TALK to no end about how crappy their lives supposedly are; Cameron Crowe just gives you a series of almost random events with well-chosen musical accompaniment.
There's one hideous exception to that "show don't tell" trend, involving perhaps the worst line of dialogue in the movie:
"I don't need sex. I don't want sex. I want a relationship. I want romance." (IMDB has only the last two sentences of this but I believe the first two are right.)
My appalled reaction to this line stepped on Phoebe Cates's response (which is actually a good line) but two immediate reactions:
1. YA THINK?!? I mean, it's not like the last guy you were with spent about 10 seconds inside you and GOT YOU PREGNANT or anything.
2. What you really want (though you don't even realize what you're missing) is foreplay. We get to see Jennifer Jason Leigh (by the way, Greg(?) is right that the truly memorable nudity here isn't Cates but Leigh -- I don't know why Fast Times came up on this weblog before or why I happened to remember it coming up but there you go) twice in intimiate situations, plus sitting on her bed with Rat at the end of their date. So help me Rat did more to stimulate her (without meaning to) than Damone and the guy who took her to the Point combined.
Anyhow, the comparison to Kids should be obvious enough. There might be other similar dramas that I'm not thinking of, though Fast Times certainly has a lighter tone. (I would write that it tries to be both a comedy and a drama, except that as explained more below, a distinctive feature of Fast Times is that in general it doesn't try, it's just there.)
For high school comedy that plays on one-dimensional characters, Ferris Bueller is better hands-down. (Spicoli is painfully bad. It's tempting to claim that Sean Penn has come a long way, but come to think of it Sean Penn himself is painfully bad.)
Just as Fast Times and The Breakfast Club are on opposite ends of "show vs. tell," Fast Times and American Pie are on opposite ends of "explicit vs. suggested." The former is very explicit of course. Aside from Leigh's doe-eyed expressions of anticipation and/or frustration (her expression as she lies there naked after Damone's premature climax is deeply moving, though so is her naked body itself), one get no sense in Fast Times of WHY those youthful sexual discoveries are so urgent, so wonderful, so risque, etc.
Think long and hard about this: Is there any actual nudity (among the more attractive cast members) in the American Pie franchise? Unless I'm missing something (ignore director's cuts for now), I believe there isn't. They push the envelope so much that you wind up thinking the movie is a lot more explicit than it is.
(That's not 100% good or 100% bad. In general it's to American Pie's advantage, but contrast the topless Phoebe Cates scene itself ("Doesn't anybody knock anymore?!") to how over-the-top the Weitz brothers would have been with that same scene.)
To the extent that Fast Times is an ensemble movie (i.e. moving away from the main storyline of Stacy's love life), it's very much like Animal House in the series of wacky hijinx that don't seem to bear much connection to each other. The most obvious tie-in is the "Where are they now?" subtitles at the end of the movie. WOULD IT HAVE KILLED CAMERON CROWE TO GET SOMEONE TO PROOFREAD THESE?! Everything I hated about the lack of effort put into Fast Times, I hated ten times more when I saw those barely literate subtitles in the ugly color scheme they chose.
Oh, and as bizarrely pointless as is the escalating mayhem of the climactic scene of Animal House, at least it's not a complete right turn from the rest of the movie. So yes, the end of Fast Times is moderately enjoyable in its own right. ("Dude, no towels...") But THAT's how you get closure?
Exercise for the reader: Think of other movies and what their ending would have been like if tacked onto their actual ending were a convenience store robbery scene.
Last but not least: Fast Times accomplishes something very hard to accomplish in that it's a worse movie than Porky's but with better nudity.
(Depressing post-script: Jennifer Jason Leigh is 43 years old now. (She was 20 when this was made.) If you were fantasizing about her Stacy character, thinking of her in Road to Perdition would ruin the moment completely. Phoebe Cates hasn't been in anything in awhile.)
Better Off Dead is a parody of a lot of things, but I never realized until now the extent to which Fast Times might be among the things sent up. If that's by design, Fast Times is a deserving target.
My would-be filmmaker colleague has a visceral hatred of the acting of Zach Braff. This despite (because of?) their mild resemblance in looks and mannerisms.
As a recent viewer of Scrubs on DVD, I like Braff up to a point. I think he loses me on Chicken Little. (I've also been told that Garden State is atrocious specifically because of him.)
One of the most hilarious movies I've ever seen.
I'm sure it was meant seriously -- and 38 years ago I imagine it was scandalous -- but goodness what a ridiculous film. Certainly quite enjoyable.
Now I absolutely must rewatch both "Mrs. Bouvier's Lover" (The Simpsons) and "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein" (Family Guy), the more fully to appreciate the references.
Apparently Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World is really, really, really bad.
This doesn't surprise me at all given who's behind it, though I suppose the true surprise is his finally making something so bad that people other than me realized how bad it was.
I blame Albert Brooks for my taking so long to get into Woody Allen. Thanks to some unfortunate assumptions, I inferred that if I couldn't stand the former's movies, the latter were probably the same to an nth degree. Not even close to the truth though.
(See also the post right below this.)
1. If I call this the most nihilistic movie I've ever seen, am I using the term nihilism correctly?
2. Very little plot or character development takes place; rather, stuff just happens. Scenes/themes that I'd have assumed recurred over time, instead are about five minutes apart. You could watch any given chapter of this movie and lose nothing compared to seeing it in context.
3. Disappointing if my expectation threshold were set to the movie's iconic status; not so disappointing once I'd braced myself for the possibility that it would be dated, suck, or both. It is the giant 6'2" dude on whose shoulders movies like Old School stand.
Am I turning into an old fuddy-duddy or was Anchorman not quite all that its fans tout it to be?
It's the Bill Simmons curse, I tell you, though at least columns like this make a whole lot more sense if you watched the movie in question within the previous 24 hours.
Simmons would make a great bizarro-world movie reviewer, between all the movies he's touted that I've subsequently been disappointed in and his hatred of unsung masterpieces like Dodgeball.
But "disappointed in" puts it too strongly. Anchorman was a satisfactory movie for what it was. Just not great. Maybe good, though that stretches the definition of the word a bit.
To the surprise of no one, he gave this movie a bad review.
(Siskel was unavailable for comment.)
Along these lines, this Onion commentary is priceless. Given just how stupendously bad this summer's other movies look, I'm gratified that the Penguins movie is the runaway hit.
Saw the former over the weekend, the latter awhile back. It's no contest, Novocaine being hands-down superior.
Remarkably similar movies, though, right down to the unexpected topless scenes (Helena Bonham Carter looks better than Amanda Peet, though Peet has the better scene).
(I saved something like this as a draft on Tuesday then never posted it. Here goes, with extensive revisions.)
This is without a doubt the most vulgar movie I've seen. (Yes, topping Fockers.) I gave up on it after an hour.
There's a frightening correlation between movies I haven't seen that Bill Simmons describes as classics, and movies that turn out to be horrendous once I finally do get around to seeing them. (An ill portent for Anchorman, both my latest Netflix arrival and the source of the quotes from Simmons's latest column.)
Apparently the Hanson brothers by being young and cheerful and goofy and cute are sympathetic characters, goonsmanship aside. Apparently there's a big dramatic buildup as to whether "gooning it up" to attract fans is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing.
All I know is that the most depressing thing about Slap Shot is how much of the worst of the '70s it exudes. That and when "Hey Hanrahan, your wife s'ks p'y!" is the best line of [the first hour of] the movie, it's just not any good.
The trickier question is how to distinguish Slap Shot from Major League, which I really enjoyed when I saw it. Possibilities:
1. I was a lot younger when I first saw Major League; maybe the next time will be a let-down.
2. Baseball pleases me more than hockey? But if anything I judge pop cultural depictions of baseball more harshly (as a nit-picker).
3. Major League is neither nearly as depressing nor nearly as sleazy. There's something paradoxically innocent about the pace of stripping the clothes off the cardboard cutout of that owner lady; there's a whole lot of the opposite of innocence in Slap Shot.
(Despite being such blatant goons, perhaps what makes the Hanson brothers stick out so much is their trappings of innocence/childhood in a very bleak, very "damaged goods" adult world.)
I'll readily admit that the happy-go-lucky eccentric sappiness of the characters from Major League isn't for everyone (though how could you not love Jobu?). Even so, the kind of atmosphere I want from a sports comedy is surely something other than the Taxi Driver effect.
Come to think of it, I just had a chilling thought: I know that subsequently there were special minor league hockey promotions wherein "the Hanson brothers" (not sure if it's the same actors or facsimiles) would make an appearance. I picture some nine-year-old boy becoming enamored of them, and learning about the existence of this movie, and persuading parents to rent it. Carnage ensues, with a lot of awkward questions to answer and explanations to give.
UPDATE: Then again, "Taxi Slap Shot" really would be hilarious. Can you imagine the Hanson brothers "cleaning up" late-1970s NYC with a few well-placed high sticks? C'mere, Iris Steensma, no we don't wanna f'k you, we just want you to fix our cars, they're broken."
(Special "Y demonstrates the inadequacy of X" edition.)
Three more hideously overrated things:
1. Forrest Gump. Many people saw this movie and inexplicably loved it, some of them enough that it was a life-changing experience. A few significantly more astute people recognized it as rubbish. I was almost in the second camp but I thought I saw something in this movie that apparently nobody else saw: I saw it as a very subtle attempt at extremely black comedy. It doesn't succeed, but it's far less of a failure as an attempt at comedy than if you take the schmaltz totally at face value.
In any case, the movie that I wanted Forrest Gump to be (though it really wasn't) turns out to be have been made 15 years earlier and 100 times funnier as The Jerk. Once the Jerk existed, there's no way Gump should have been greenlighted.
2. Halls of Fame. Taking Craig's recent comment and running with it, I'm fed up with manufactured controversies (excuses to make sportswriters' columns easy and avoid their doing real work or thought) surrounding the HoF. Part of this is that I know I don't fully understand what purpose the HoF is meant to serve - some vague ideas are obvious but if you don't know the purpose being served then the discussions of who should qualify are pointless.
I realized recently that the best purpose a Hall of Fame used to serve was to perpetuate the record of those who deserved not to be forgotten. Before the Internet-driven information explosion, things would easily be forgotten without a good physical archive. Casual fans wouldn't have a chance in hell of remembering any but the all-time top 10 or 20 anyway, but when information was hard to store there was a chance even relatively informed fans might lose sight of the greatness of particular players.
Now that anyone can be easily "remembered" (i.e. looked up), though, in databases that even let you make quick intelligent comparisons, the HoF is in my mind utterly obsolete. Maybe not utterly obsolete, but certainly not worth the generated fuss.
Snoop Dogg. It's not his fault he's obscenely overrated, and to his create I think he's well aware of it (have you ever heard him speak self-deprecatingly about how silly the "izzle"-speak is?). This is all the fault of an entire set of people who inexplicably worship him.
But you should look up Tom Shimura (who records as Lyrics Born) to get a sense of how ridiculously easy it is for even some random Asian dude to be Snooplike only better.
Sometimes it's easy. Slapshot is en route today, and barring immediate changes Animal House and Rounders would follow.
You could call this remedial guy-movie watching, since these are all things you'd think I saw long ago.
Rented the 1971 version and saw it for... maybe the 10th time in my life? I was going to say the first in a few years, yet I vaguely remember seeing it in a theater not too long ago, perhaps the Parkway (you have a good business model if you're the first hit on this search).
Saw the 2005 version this past weekend and blanched. Perhaps Tim Burton falls into "either you like him or you don't" status, though I deeply appreciated seeing someone describe him as "a set designer attempting to be a director."
Every Burton movie has the same atmosphere, and apparently I'm just not goth enough to dig it. The preview for "The Corpse Bride" made me roll my eyes, and then when I realized that Burton was also behind this Wonka remake I nearly threw up in my mouth.
Defining difference between the two movies is the very opening: In the 1971, the chocolate flows smoothly on the screen and looks simple and delicious. In the remake the chocolate is seen rolling along conveyor belts and shaped by machines; Burton goes out of his way to make the opening convey as much alienation as possible.
There's a vast difference in how seriously the two movies take themselves. The Pythonesque teacher (completely absent from the remake) is one example; a better example is how Gene Wilder's Wonka is good natured (a bit Dumbledoreish) but ultimately perfunctory, whereas Depp's is just uptight and catty.
(And no, I don't completely buy into the "He's imitating Michael Jackson" meme. It doesn't work quite well enough to be as prevalent as it's become - not a huge stretch, but enough of a stretch that I believe Depp's denials.)
I'd completely forgotten that Tim Burton is the same Tim Burton who's married to Susan Sarandon. Talk about two people who take themselves just deadly seriously. I'd "forgotten" this because it ain't true. D'oh.
Not that both movies aren't heavy with the drug-addled touches - If these movies mark the difference between LSD and ecstasy (meth?) then I'd say the former is the lesser evil.
Speaking of movies and this past weekend, are any of you in the "Devil's Rejects" demographic? I have no desire to see it but I think it's cool that Rob Zombie's milking his carefully cultivated image for big profit long after I'd have assumed he'd gone out of style.
So begins the Fark headline linking to this story. The Bollywood movie in question is at least the third good pop cultural reference involving human-feline sex.
The others are a two-minute Steve Martin bit and an Onion column (about a novice cat breeder).
Somebody who knows their history of horrotica better than I do: Did The Shiver of the Vampires (and/or other S&M titles put out by Redemption) inspire The Rocky Horror Picture Show at all? Probably not as direct a connection as the Airport series was to Airplane! but still.
DEK points to this fraught story from which I got an unexpected brain cramp:
Note to self - Hayden Christensen is not the same actor as Thomas Haden Church. One wonders how Sith might have turned out differently...
Disappointing movie. Not bad so much as disappointing.
The problems converting books to film are well-known; goes to show just how spoiled we were by the LOTR and Harry Potter movies.
The other day I was thinking about a quiz-bowl issue that reminded me potentially of a particular movie scene.
In that scene, somebody's tried to set up a press conference, only to be disappointed by what appears to be nobody showing up. The disappointment turns into shock and elation when it turns out so many people came they had to move it to a different location.
Couldn't place the reference until an hour later, though you already realized it was this.
It says here that 9 Songs broke a barrier, but if so then did I hallucinate (not once but twice) while watching Sideways?
(Sorry for the unwarned mild spoiler; less-mild spoilage in the Extended Entry.)
Sure, the angle at which TH Church was walked in on precluded full frontal nudity, but what about the fat-on-top-of-fat side view of the waitress and her husband?
Finally got around to seeing it last night. The rest of this post might include spoilers (ditto any comments). Any reviews you've heard about this movie - either good or bad - are vastly overstated.
If you're someone who gushed about this movie, my response is about like Jack's response from the first wine tasting of the movie. If you're someone who hated it... then, too, my response is basically Jack's from Frass Canyon.
What do you need, if you're a high-strung, high-maintenance neurotic who's gone through a rough patch and seems to be afraid of life?
Of course, what you need is a strong-willed, spontaneous, confident friend who will coax you into having a good time and achieving fulfillment by hitting on waitresses.
(And actually, it's funny because it's true.)
Bonus points if your strong-willed, spontaneous, confident friend not only convinces his hot, pervy, promiscuous one-night stand that he's fallen in love with her and wants to move up to wine country (impending wedding aside), but also convinces himself of this.
Jack not only couldn't bear the thought of life without Christine, he also couldn't go a single night without bedding a waitress whom he had the ability to bed.
(Did I mention "funny because it's true?" The paragraph above would seem so unbelievable to me, if I didn't honest-to-goodness know of people perfectly well capable of having both those seemingly contradictory needs at the same time.)
As a movie about appetites and the pursuit of pleasure (with two opposite types of pitfalls to avoid), it works out pretty well. For all the hype and hoopla over making wine country so appealing, it does a much better job of showing just how unappealing (by comparison) some of their less savory, more opportunity-cost-ridden destinations were.
(You're in wine country for a week, so of course for the sake of your friend's torrid fling, you indulge him and leave the area for an evening to go to a bowling alley and watch the lucky lady's mother chow down on fries and ramble on about the lost business opportunity involving a big-box store. Or, you get a major setback in life and you happen to be at a winery that specializes in atrocious wine. Or... huge plates of barbecue with wetnaps. Or... that plus-sized waitress, later seen in flagrante delicto with her even more plus-sized husband, using her own sluttiness for dirty talk while W. himself is on a TV behind them - seeing Our President in that context was the highlight of the movie for me.)
I don't understand why this movie would make wine fandom relatively more of a personal interest than it already had been. I could see it validating someone's wine interest, but becoming newly turned onto wine as a result of this movie seems shallow to me, or at least missing-the-point.
Maya's discourse on why she became interested in wine is also comparable to the Crash Davis "I believe..." speech from Bull Durham, for memorable, eloquent, from-the-heart movie dialogue that could easily become vastly overrated. That said, the immediate non-sequitur reaction of Miles there was hilariously revealing in a that-hit-close-to-home sense.
Ultimately I found the movie compelling in its contrast of pleasurable things to the stupid things we do to render ourselves incapable of enjoying those pleasures (or not as capable as we could have been). Most notably Miles becoming incapable of going to the wedding reception - been there, not about wedding receptions and certainly not about exes, but I've missed big parties because I knew I'd have a depressing lack of a good time.
As obnoxious as Jack is, as debilitatingly stupid as were some of his choices, we all need someone to teach us how to say (and believe), "Actually, I thought it was pretty good."
Thank goodness I'd had all these people tell me how great a movie it was, though; otherwise I'd have seen it on DVD instead of at the Parkway, and if watching on DVD I'd have bailed out perhaps as soon as when they left Miles's mother's house, certainly no later than the drunken phone call. I muttered under my breath, rode all that out, and got rewarded with a pretty good movie that thought through actions and consequences better than I'd feared it would.
Incidental question: Could this movie have been made focusing on any hobby other than wine consumption? My first thought was you could swap just about anything in for wine. Not quite, though. The hobby seems to require:
*- A vacation area specific to that hobby
*- Pleasurable consumption
*- Intoxication
That rules out most hobbies, though you could have a hilarious send-up involving dope and the cast of the Next Friday movie series.
We watched "I [...] Huckabees" and "The Big Kahuna Last Night" (Netflix convergence). Both movies were short on plot development or sympathetic characters, long on archetypes and pop psychology masquerading as something deeper.
In the former a lot of things happened but Julia claimed halfway through the movie that there was still no plot. (I'll charitably call it all slapstick.) If you want a moral... sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence. To be really charitable, I could see some sort of metaparody where the protagonist's attempt to find meaning in his life resembles a fruitless attempt to find something deeper in a text or movie that doesn't have any deeper meaning - it's just an expression, to be taken at face value as entertainment.
Or the whole thing could be an exercise in screenwriter masturbation, take your pick.
The latter had amusing dialogue at times. I realized halfway through the movie that they were still in the hospitality suite and that their "event" still hadn't begun. The tacked-on ending was literally the worst movie ending I've ever seen - insulting on a variety of levels. Julia asked me why I liked "Huckabees" better than "Kahuna" (more precisely, why I thought it didn't suck as much) - the answer is actually pretty easy: In the end, "Kahuna" didn't even so much as entertain.
1. Boat Trip. Crap, of course, but do you understand what I mean when I say this movie worked whereas Just Married was awful even in the context of ironic appreciation?
Much more importantly,
2. American Wedding. Really, the entire American Pie series. It pains me to no end that there are people on both extreme ends of taste who don't understand the vast realms of quality difference between the Pie franchise and the "Meet The" franchise.
Worst movie I've ever paid money to see. The kicker is that I knew full well it would be awful. (The previews say it all, in that "Is this really the best foot forward this movie can put?" sense. Aw, shucks, the kitty flushed the doggy down the toilet...)
If you haven't seen it, you know what not to do. If you have, WHAT WERE YOU THINKING????
My excuses:
1. Having a great day with the love of my life, who asked me really nicely if we could go.
2. Supporting a tiny neighborhood theater that's struggling to survive against city corruption and what I'll call "Communism at its finest" - and I don't use the term "Communism" lightly.
(More on that later.)
The most painful thing of all is contemplating the quality of the movies that Stiller, Hoffman, Streisand, et al, could have been making?
Well, not Streisand. Bless her heart, but she has some of the worst script judgment comprehensible.
Incidentally, second and third-worst movies I've ever paid to see are now Darkness Falls and How To Deal, respectively. Or Just Married in third place depending on how you qualify Netflix for the "paid to see" criterion.
I still haven't seen it but a side effect of Oscar hoopla is that I know too much about the movie already. Enough things will fail to surprise me, and therefore fail to have the intended effect, that... well, why bother?
COUNTERARGUMENT: On the other hand, I still plan to see the Teena Brandon movie someday (speaking of Ms. Swank), and the closer that movie hews to reality, the more I know exactly what happens there.
"My name is Bambi Montoya. You killed my mother. Prepare to die."
Re Sarah, I caught bits and pieces of the Oscars while at a Pooh cast party (the 10-year-olds paid much closer attention than I did) and never saw Rock.
Since when are the Super Bowl of movies and the Oscars of professional football held in the same month? What happened to the days when one was end-of-January and the other was end-of-March? Are the Academy Awards calibrated to Easter or something similarly wacky?
In the "stick with what works" department, why don't they just invite Billy Crystal to host the Oscars every year?
Why isn't the Super Bowl confined to {San Diego, New Orleans, Pasadena, or Miami} in rotation?
I suppose for the same reason why Julia and I are both now sick of hearing Tom Lehrer, playlist overexposure having diminished a good thing.
Apparently I'm in the distinct minority in claiming that the second "word" of the Huckabees movie should be expanded to "Love" rather than "Heart."
Maybe I'm making the "Malcom the Tenth" mistake, but I think it's the rest of the world making the "Super Bowl ex-ex-ex-eye-ex" mistake.
Phone conversation after she dropped her Pooh kids off after the Heffalump movie:
"It's been a long time since I saw an animated movie."
"Yeah, it's been about a week. You saw The Incredibles with me, remember?"
"But that wasn't animated. That was... computer-animated. I mean drawn by a person."
Does this mean we won't see aesthetically pleasing Photoshop (eh, make that open-source analog to Photoshop) creations in art museums (other than MoMA's) any time soon?
Until a week ago I hadn't seen any of these.
Then Julia and I saw Ray (as mentioned below). We'll probably see Finding Neverland this weekend as it's showing in a tiny one-screen Alameda theater that obviously used to be a church.
We were the only people at Saturday night's dinner party not to have seen Sideways. I know it's been highly recommended by fellow bloggers but I've absorbed just enough about it to suspect that I saw plenty of these kind of people in college without needing to sit through a feature length worth of their navel-gazing.
Learned of The Aviator when whichever Baldwin brother was the higher-billed Letterman guest than Ken Jennings. Couldn't tell you anything about Million Dollar Baby without looking it up.
If you ask me, the list is suspiciously heavily tilted towards recent movies. The notable snubs were Passion and Fahrenheit (but from what I've heard I'll have to agree with Jeff Jarvis that both snubs were well-deserved).
Aside from that, none of the summer blockbusters made the cut (but what were there: Anchorman? Dodgeball?), nor did any of the indy sleepers (should I stage a mock protest in favor of Harold and Kumar?).
UPDATE: (having read this thread) Yeah, Eternal Sunshine is also consicuously absent.
Netflix: We saw the most delightful comedy Friday night. Christopher Walken played himself as a mobster relocated from NYC to San Diego in the witness protection program, with Ben Stiller as the FBI agent assigned to protect him and Janeane Garofolo as an uptight DA... wait, no, it wasn't Walken and Stiller and Garofalo, it was Steve Martin and Rick Moranis and Joan Cusack. How Martin managed to do a dead-on Christopher Walken before Walken himself became a dead-on Walken is another story.
Speakeasy: Tonight we saw Ray, a biopic of a man with 50 years worth of musical greatness, presented apparently in real time. Aside from the length, this was an experience remarkably similar to reading this biography of Harry Caray, specifically in that a beloved figure with extreme showbiz talent depicted as the protagonist can nonetheless, in a warts-and-all profile, come out looking really rotten if he has enough warts.
How different would Ray Charles's life had been had his mom lived a bit longer?
I have to agree with Jesse Walker about the Passion and Fahrenheit:
"I strongly suspect the overlap between the two films' audiences is much larger than those noxious Red and Blue stereotypes would suggest."
Both are, among other things, base emotional appeals masquerading as factual accounts. Both clearly succeeded as agitprop (no, Bush didn't lose, if you think that was one of Michael Moore's goals, but there are contextual reasons why, competence and Bushiness aside, he should have won a landslide). I feel very smug in my blind dismissal of them both as unworthy of viewing, yet I'd probably enjoy either of them much more than my pose suggests.
1. Peter Gabriel, "Solsbury Hill" (the Topher Grace movie this year, "Big Fish" last year)
2. Traffic, "Feelin' Alright" (seemingly every comedy of the 1990s)
Just to complete the NetFlix trifecta:
I've been excused from watching this after a test audience found it "boring."
(A select few of you just noticed that I occasionally write bonus parts about movies I haven't even seen.)
Against all odds this turned out to be a good movie. Pending rights issues you'll see this on cable TV right before Christmas ten years from now every bit as much as you see (let's say) Miracle on 34th Street now. Not "A Christmas Story" saturation, but not every movie can get the 24-hour TNT marathon treatment, and even that I wouldn't rule out for Elf.
Zooey Deschanel with blonde hair might or might not resemble Maribeth; quite sure. If not Maribeth then that look reminded me of at least someone I know or knew.
There has never been a movie quite like Harold & Kumar and probably never will be. I thoroughly enjoyed it, the surprise being that none of the scenes featuring deep-seated unfairness ever fazed me.
C.f. Ghostbusters, where when I watched it as a kid the scene where Bill Murray electroshocks his test subject (the guy, not the cute one) even though the guy really did start to become psychic at the end, or at least guess right... anyhow, that scene always really agitated me, yet nothing from H & K agitated me.
It's just about the right combination of movie about Asian guys and movie about guys who do drugs. For what it's worth, among my most frequent poker buddies are an investment banker of Indian heritage and a physics grad student of Korean heritage. On the surface it's like if H & K traded roles, except that neither of them resembles either character much.
Of course the one scene I really could have done without was the one scene that inspired its own featurette. That scene singlehandedly ruined my faith in either young moviegoers today or moviemakers who cater to them or both, in that we got the point about five seconds into it, no need to run the joke into the ground.
(Then again... Blame Mel Brooks? Of all the things one would remember from "Blazing Saddles," what's the one scene most people will think of first? Then you have Terence and Philip: Depending on how much of the irony is on purpose, either uniquely stupid or uniquely brilliant or both.)
By contrast - file under "there's a right way and a wrong way to be puerile" - the scene with Mrs. Freakshow was outstanding, especially the dialogue and the timing. Major American Pie influence, with a dollup of David Lynch.
I gotta go with 037429.
Special place in hell for 786936 and 717951.
General apathy for 027616 and 043396 and 024543.
My colleague went on a ski trip this weekend but didn't make it back today thanks to inclement weather.
Harold and Kumar came out today. You have to wonder about first-week-of-January releases, whether they're anything like January theatrical debuts. (If you're ready so close to Christmas/New Year's, how come you couldn't make it work in time for the holiday rush?) This one gets a pass since stoners aren't so big on holidays. (Perfect exclude finally to link to Weed Delivery Guy Saves Christmas!)
Troy: Oliver Stone fans don't strike me as the holiday type either. And for that matter, based on reviews, if you were going to bury any particular movie in the post-holiday obscure week, this'd be the one.
CSI Miami: The Complete Second Season: Damn. Didn't get David Caruso under the tree. Life goes on.
Here's a degenerate case of something I have to worry about for a living. I have mixed emotions about the idea that there are people out there whose quality of life was affected by the specific example.
Danny Aiello: "Will you marry me?"
Cher: "Yes, but you have to do everything exactly right."
Aiello: "Oops, my mom is about to die."
Cher: "Dad, I'm engaged."
The Father: "Harrumph, harrumph, harrumph."
Cher: "I'm about to marry your brother."
Nicolas Cage: "You can't. THAT MAN STOLE MY LIFE! Look at my missing hand..."
Cher: "Stop feeling sorry for yourself -- (big kiss) and have sex with me."
Everyone: "Look at that beautiful moon!"
Cher: "Oops, we messed up. Just kidding!"
Cage: "But I'm in love with you!"
Cher: [slap] [slap] [slap]
(Discontinued because I'm told I just don't understand the human condition. Either Julia's tastes and mine are diverging or they always had been divergent and we got lucky on a whole lot of movies in a row. I will say that this is at least the second time the phrase "human condition" has come up in praise of some drama whose merits I just didn't see. Maybe I'm not human enough to appreciate depictions of this "human condition.")
The various Jackass spinoffs were bad enough. The chicks series are bad enough. Homeless people... that one's been discussed to death anyway. But so help me I want no part of fighting Santas.
Best laugh I've had all month (well, maybe second behind the Sam Cassell swan story, which still makes me lose it), courtesy of Beautiful Atrocities:
My friend Cyndi's had a running conflict with her ex-husband, who's one of those guys that shows he's a good sport by taking his young sons to R-rated movies, or completely over-the-top horror movies
But now Cyndi's lost the moral high ground forever, having recently taken her youngest, age 10, to see The Incredibles. "I already saw that!" he said at the ticket counter. "Well, why didn't you tell me?" she asked. "Let's go see this puppet movie!" he said. "Sure," she shrugged.
That's right. She had no idea what Team America was."
(Do you really need to worry about spoilers for a movie like this? In light of Kate Hudson's pedigree, Julia did describe this as "the perfect Goldie Hawn role.")
Much better movie than I gave it credit for even while watching it -- with a caveat or two. At the outset I expected it to be bad, and as a result had ironic detachment the whole way, including catty remarks about the plot twists that I saw coming. It did have a major plot hole that you have to gloss over lest the movie become impossible to watch: For all the supposed planning ahead the oldest sister did, isn't everybody supposed to know, for sure, in advance where the kids are going to go if the worst happens?
(I knew exactly who would have raised me and my sister; at some point our parents told us. After all, godparents aren't just for religious symbolism.)
What I enjoyed most about the movie were a whole bunch of (gentle) caricatures that, unlike a lot of shallow caricatures, actually worked for me:
The fashion model doyenne (Helen Mirren)
The strict, bat-wielding Indian immigrant neighbor/mother
The young, vibrant Lutheran pastor -- reminded me of at least one divinity student whom I met through my college church group (bonus points for using Protesant clergy's ability to date/marry as a plot point and a source of brief comedic misunderstanding)
The Mother (capital "m") as played by Joan Cusack, though in the first half of the movie the script makes her come off way too negatively; she more than makes up for it down the stretch, though
The unhipness of Queens, particularly the used car dealer with his toupee and painful process of making a usable TV commercial.
And finally, what's not to like about a movie in which the most famous member of my high school graduating class (other than me, of course; even then I might be a distant third behind Amber and NFL wide receiver Kevin Lockett) gets permanent marker drawn on her face?
The Star Wars Holiday Special (as alluded to by Jason in his comment) is legendary, of course.
[Parenthetical comment moved from the beginning to the extended entry. -MLB 12/1/04]
In the movie he's a clean, fresh, audience-friendly (i.e. Tom Hanks) European guy stuck at JFK. In real life, he's an Iranian refugee in the departure lounge at de Gaulle. Based on Wikipedia, Snopes, and The Straight Dope, here's the rough, oversimplified story of "Sir Alfred":
(Incidentally, whoever at TRASH wrote the "movie airports" 5-10-15 bonus with "The Terminal" as the 5-point part and JFK as the answer, shame on you on so many different levels. This bonus itself was the first I'd heard of how badly Spielberg desecrated the true story (update: I learned while in the process of this blog entry that the movie is supposedly a generic story, not necessarily specific to Nasseri at all; that excuses the bonus, though the Baz Luhrmann stuff below still stands), something that came up twice since then. Terrible part inasmuch as it penalizes people who know the real story without bothering to see the movie - almost but not quite as bad as the worst question TRASH has ever written, the tossup with a completely vague lead-in just directly quoting from this Mary Schmich newspaper column (Chicago Tribune) but seeking the exact title of a Baz Luhrmann song. Feh. Don't even tell me who wrote that one because five years later I'm still very angry with you.)
In the 1970s he went to England from Iran to study. While there he took part in student protests against the shah. Suddenly forced to return home (conflicting accounts: either his money ran out or he lost his student visa status), he was jailed and tortured, leading him to seek refugee status.
Much of the early 1980s he spent traveling around seeking asylum from whatever European country would give it to him; they kept turning him down until finally the UN High Commisioner for Refugees (in Belgium) finally gave him refugee status, with the paperwork based in Belgium but his decision of where to live still forthcoming.
As he was en route to fly from Paris to London, his refugee paperwork was stolen (in a briefcase stolen from a train station). He somehow made it onto his flight but was denied entry by British customs, who sent him back to France.
The French denied him entry into the country (from the airport) but did not force him to return anywhere in particular. Legally/formally this was because for lack of papers there was no particular place to force him to go; really I suspect they were too merciful to make him return to Iran.
Now the real cockup/Catch-22 was when he applied to get replacement paperwork. Here it's the Belgians (and not the French, despite how I got the story wrong telling it to Julia recently) who royally reamed him: They wouldn't mail him his paperwork because he had to show up in person for them to make sure he was who he said he was, but they also refused to allow him to enter the country actually to show up in person, taking advantage of some legal loophole that allowed them to do this given that he'd previously been in Belgium as a refugee but subsequently left.
To be sure, eventually they decided he could come to Belgium for his paperwork if he stayed in Belgium and were under the care of a social worker; you can guess why he had no interest in either of those conditions.
And then finally (I gather) France decided he could enter the country if he wanted to, but by then he was so used to the airport (and so deranged) that his expressed preference was to stay put.
Q. He's just a sad mentally ill man. Why doesn't a country commit to putting him in an institution? It's the most humane thing to do.
A. Bureaucracy, not to mention the difficulty getting him to consent to it. In the current state of affairs, I'd say he's harmless and no (further) harm can be done to him. The damage is long since done.
Saw this the night before last. I loved it; nobody else did. The Coen Brothers are sick f's -- and I mean that in a good way.
Why not Kangaroo Jack: G'Day USA?
Or if you just want to be silly, the Hebrew Hammer is Part Man. Part Street. 100% Kosher.
Finally, a serious non-ironic recommendation: If you really do have children to shop for and a DVD is in order, skip the inane stuff and get Eloise at Christmastime, featuring Julia's favorite actress (or second behind Mary Tyler Moore, it's unclear) as the nanny.
(The astute observer will note that these are all November 16 releases. Didn't see anything nearly so noteworthy in the November 23 releases. But then I'm a bit of a philistine; I don't even know enough to know whether sitting through all five hours of Fanny & Alexander (Criterion) would be a good thing or a bad thing.)
What can you say about a movie like this without spoiling it (feel free to spoil it within your own comments; anyone who reads the individual entry page and/or the comments should know what they're getting into)? In no particular order:
Does anyone else find it ironic just how nonexistent the Naomi character is within the movie?
I think I like this movie but I'm not sure. I think Julia doesn't like this movie but again I'm not sure (she professes to have no sense of whether she liked it). I think it's strictly inferior to Being John Malkovich but you'd almost have to watch them consecutively to be sure.
It's definitely a bittersweet movie: 90 minutes later I think I'm still crying a bit, even though they're not really tears of sadness. It's a very good movie at capturing the meta-essence of what memory is and does, especially the score. (The timbre of the piano is borderline cheesy but doesn't actually cross that line after all.)
Julia suggested that Joel was Jim Carrey's attempt at capturing what Bob Harris would have been like as played by Jack Nicholson rather than Bill Murray. I don't know about that but I'll tell you Kate Winslet's character was a dead ringer for someone I know in real life.
(Now I'm idly curious how many of you readers know her; a couple for sure, and then another demographic who might have known her back in the day but might not have been the right class years. Nobody I went to school with, so if you're wondering if it's someone you and I both knew from the same place, probably not.)
Finally, I'm intrigued at how all the characters had Eastern European last names. That and seeing Elijah Wood's character and thinking to myself, Frodo?!?
I was going to post a comment to this post but something here (pop-up blocker?) is interfering with the comments widget.
Anyhow, I can't imagine The Princess Bride ever winning out on a large-group movie rental involving my friends. (Did Craig ever do the Movie Quotes tournament? I remember the submit process for initial entries but nothing else - I'm idly curious what movie would win a "Best Movie" tournament among the TFTD audience.) I do know that at least one of the frequent commenters here doesn't like that movie at all (feel free to explain why if you'd like, or to ignore this if you'd prefer not to).
I always thought of Ferris Bueller as the whole-group-agrees movie rental.
Saw this Thursday with my own beloved; meant to have posted on it by now but hadn't.
As you're watching it, this is a fantastic movie. Funny illusion, though: Of the (by my count) nine distinct subplots, each of them either a blossoming romance or a love triangle (or just the rock star guy being sentimental about his manager), I think each one gets maybe 15 minutes of exposition. You never really get depth of character, or why in particular two people fall in love, or any good sense of whether theirs would last.
I realized this a day or two later, and immediately retorted to myself: "Okay, it's not very deep; it doesn't have to be." It is what it is, and it's a masterpiece of what it is.
Although, I do wonder whether, with the sappy Christmas remake that even the rock star realized was crap, whether the scriptwriter was being self-consciously self-referential. After all, it's an awfully sappy movie... but much wittier than crap, of course.
...and where did it all go wrong? We can't all have the Billy Crystal career path, but where were the roles? Was she typecast too soon?
For Corinne Tate, I know I'd leave the priesthood...
See, this is why first impressions can cost you so much in life's cultural experiences. For years now, once in a very blue moon, I'd see the show in syndication, flipping through channels. Probably caught a grand total of five minutes that way, and I swear every glimpse I caught involved either the dummy or the Major. That stupid dummy made me miss so much great television (until now)!
Maybe Thora Birch already was (where is she now?); I don't think Keira Knightley was yet. Anyhow, engaging psychological thriller, the packaging says. Take it; I want no part of this.
UPDATE: Knightley definitely wasn't a star yet (nor did she have much of a role). I love after-the-fact marketing of the supporting cast member who happened later to make it big. The packaging makes her out to be a star; then again the rating reason claims, in addition to the "prevasive [sic] violence," that there's "sexuality/nudity."
Hey, didn't you used to be Judd Nelson and Mark Hamill, respectively?
...about the movie mentioned below:
Doesn't the gender-flipped South Park parody almost write itself?
Cartman as Anais, Stanley as Elena, and Wendy Mr. Garrison!!! as Fernando.
Someone who's actually watched this movie (at something other than 8x fast forward): What the hell is up with the ending?
Also, aside from the ending, doesn't the entire movie boil down to the title character needing to for the love of god eat less (especially on screen, which I assume is the point: the calorie count is staggering) and her older sister need a bit less chastity and a bit less PDA (not public public, but still one extra person in the room too many)?
Did I miss much?
When you watched this (or if you watched this, hypothetically), were you more likely to spend the whole movie thinking of Jackie henpecking Kelso, or to spend the whole movie thinking of Meg Griffin finally snapping?
This is brilliant! Fun for Peter Jackson and Michael Moore fans alike.
Heard this from Julia over the weekend and meant to blog it:
James Lipton's guest on The Actor's Studio this weekend was Jennifer Lopez.
You'd think a movie with Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Christopher Walken would be a lot better than that piece of... The problem wasn't even that all three of them played themselves. Walken is always fantastic even as himself. The problem was really that nothing ever happened, and the things that did happen took five minutes to happen.
I'm trying to think of any Richard Pryor movie similar to this. I loved Brewster's Millions as a kid; if I rewatched it today would I have similar objections about how slowly things unfolded?
Those of you who know who Bruce Villanch is:
Does his own mother even find him good-looking? What about his partners - does he wear a bag?
Incentive for me to keep my hair not-terribly-long, try to lose weight, and especially never ever dye it, I guess.
This is so unbelievably pleasantly surprising! We just watched a movie -- a movie based on a book -- that contained a major potential plot spoiler, something on which ultimately the whole movie hinges. Now, I'm dead certain I've read multiple reviews of the book in question (both before and after it was published, oddly enough), and surely I've seen the movie discussed, reviewed, even synopsized now that it's on DVD.
Through all that, I either never heard about the big plot twist or heard about it and completely forgot -- so when it came up in the movie, I was genuinely shocked. Given the lag time involved in my ever seeing movies, and the probability of my being spoiled approaching one, I think this was my first unspoiled plot twist of that magnitude since "Luke, I am your..." Kudos to everyone involved for not ruining it for me. Seriously!
(Oh, here's the movie I meant. It has one of the most annoying soundtracks I've ever seen in a movie, based almost entirely on the same seven-note riff that I had to play on a piano by ear just to eject from my head. It's also quite a bit overacted, at least by the female lead, and I can't decide whether that's the author's fault, the director's fault, or the actor's fault -- given who she is, probably the latter. More on her in some other post.)
For that matter, what did you think of Good Will Hunting (which I haven't seen in years now, come to think of it)? I liked it, certainly better than Rushmore, thought it did a better job of portraying a brilliant young person than nearly any other movie I can think of, and yet even Good Will Hunting made me at least mildly angry at several particular scenes.
(Side note: While I'm proud to say I love a woman whom I'd place ahead of 99.99% of all baseball games ever, I can't be nearly as sanguine as Robin Williams's character was about the idea of skipping Game 6 of the 1975 World Series for her. Just too good a game, arguably the most memorable baseball game ever played.)
Been sitting on a post about this movie for a few days now; rather than spend the time on it myself, I'll coax your own opinions out of you.
Executive summary of the unmade post: I didn't like it. I nearly always have issues with how movies portray precocious kids, or highly intelligent people in general. I've still never seen The Royal Tenenbaums for that same reason, being dead certain that I'd dislike it enough to feel awkward about whoever successfully recommended it to me.
Thanks to Julia I now have the first three seasons of The Family Guy on DVD. Had they not started up the new episodes again, this would have been the complete collection.
The new episodes are, of course, a good reason to get cable TV. On the other hand, I suppose one could wait until those came out on DVD as well.
Random shows that I've never seen in my life, some of which are or were on cable. Mixed bag as to whether I have any desire ever to see them - generally no, except that I feel as though I'm missing out on a whole lot of pop culture:
The Sopranos
NYPD Blue
Sex and the City (maybe I caught ten minutes once with my roommate Scott watching)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (same "ten minutes" disclaimer)
Queer As Folk
Six Feet Under
The Bachelor
Dawson's Creek
Felicity
Melrose Place
update: Chappelle's Show blows all of the above out of the water - seriously, never seen it!
I watched an entire episode of Bernie Mac once, and also an entire episode of Monk. (Conceptually I like Monk, enough so that my complete ignorance of the show actually once left me very embarrassed in hindsight.)
What else is popular and on cable? What's the featured attraction on Showtime these days? Whatever it is, I've never seen it, not even that Chris Isaak show. (And I call myself a pop culture geek...)
As many of you know I play with DVDs for a living. If a TV show has come out on DVD at all, chances are I've had that show in my possession at work at some point this year. Sometimes I'll wish I'd see a given show at least... well, ever. But then the wish passes when I realize it's probably not that good, and that it's probably-not-that-goodness is part of why I never saw it in the first place.
Anyway, though: Family Guy. Best show ever (better than The Simpsons - I will not argue about this, since it's the sort of thing nobody will convince anyone else of either way); best girlfriend ever.
The best character on the show is of course Brian (the dog, for you newbies), though I can go with the flow if you're more a Stewie type (the baby). Actually I've developed an odd appreciation for Lois (the mom), voiced by a lady who was born in 1971. (Compare her age to the age of the women who've voiced Meg...)
UPDATE: Found it.
Anyone happen to know where, in which movie, Admiral Ackbar first says "It's a trap!"? Chapter number would be perfect, but even the movie and approximately how far into it would do fine. Just let me know by Friday afternoon.
Not that there's anything wrong with my previous office wallpaper (thanks, Joe!)... or for that matter, not that there's anything wrong with my newest wallpaper (second one down, the Miss America one).
Have you ever had three DVDs out at once with as much collective goodness as:
Gone With The Wind
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
The Office (First Series)
?
The first one I'd actually never seen before. I was prepared for hokiness but it actually justifies its length and occasional over-the-topness. There may be dramas or romances as good, but no movie of that ilk has ever been better. Of course whenever the best lines of the movie were about to happen, I could see them coming from already knowing of the lines. It's hard not to be a dork in those situations and say things like "as god is her witness she'll never go hungry again" two seconds ahead of time.
Quick character assessments: Melanie is, of course, wonderful. I had a violent dislike for Scarlet that gradually evolved to grudging acceptance as she herself evolved. I loved Rhett way more than I had any business loving him; it was great how perceptive he was, even about his own scoundrelness. I didn't realize until long after the movie ended just how deplorable Ashley was... so I have to ask, do you think he was trying to have it both ways, or just that clueless about how to avoid disaster where Scarlet was concerned? In hindsight Ashley was so bad that I even have to question Melanie's judgment.
(Depending on how you feel about Rhett or Melanie, it may just be that the best character of all is Mammy...)
The second one of course I've seen billions of times; I may not even get to see it this go-round, though either Julia or someone in her family had managed never to see it.
As for The Office: I've never simultaneously liked a TV show so much and yet felt so horribly depressed just as a given episode ended. That's the point of course: The lives of so many of those characters are just so desultory. None moreso than Tim. It's not just that he's stuck in the love triangle he's in, but for the other two members of that triangle to put him in situations that emasculate him so much (okay, he himself puts himself in a lot of those situations; and at the risk of spoiling the last episode of the first series, he's not as courageous as I would have hoped).
When he gets up on his hind legs and goes full-frontal in those dancing scenes, there are only two possiblities, neither of them good. The studio went with the lesser evil, which was still far more evil than dispensing with the dancing in the first place.
I'm unspeakably disturbed by this, even on the same workday that trashy old-school Japanese film didn't even faze me.
Am I the only guy who finds Jessica Simpson physically repulsive?
Mind, I was pretentious enough as a kid (yes, you can be 5-7 years old and still be pretentious; I defy you to find a kid that age who was nearly as pretentious as I was, in Tulsa for greater degree of difficulty) to claim not to like The Dukes of Hazzard. Even so, Simpson as Daisy Duke is just so wrong that I can't even acknowledge it as happening.
Whether it's worse than Bill Murray as Garfield (which is Just Wrong for totally opposite reasons) is hard to answer.
How'd I fail to notice this?
Scroll down to the Donnie Darko post and read his comment. Suddenly everything makes sense and I have to take back most of my opinion of that movie.
Netflix; Julia's fault.
Actually I liked it a lot; it gave me more-or-less what I was expecting (which wasn't much but still). Needed more nudity; maybe there's a special unrated version I don't know about.
Why the hell is there a keyboard shortcut to mimic a browser's "Back" button? Post #1 having vanished into the ether, I present just the indictment here without as much of the justification. It may not be the worst movie I've ever seen, but -- especially compared to what it could have been -- this movie made me angrier than any movie this side of "For Love Of The Game." Especially how it ended. (And no, this has nothing to do with needing a happy ending: I sort of figured it wouldn't, and that it couldn't possibly be any good with a happy ending.) Onward:
1. It acts as though you're suppose to take it seriously. If it weren't for that, none of the other objections would apply, just think of this as a hallucinatory fantasy, like a poor man's William S. Burroughs set to the big screen. And yet it leads you on.
2. It's hopelessly derivative. Nearly every redeeming virtue of this movie was done 100 times better than American Beauty. Actually this may be a cross between American Beauty and The Butterfly Effect, but a pale comparison to the former and who knows how it compares to the latter.
3. Plot holes galore. And this isn't even the time travel (which will be a later point). For one thing, Jena Malone's mom is attacked by her evil dad (stepdad?), and the police tell her "go to a safe place" and just leave it at that? No protective custody, not even follow-up surveillance? And I'm sure of all the possible safe places, the house where a bunch of teens are throwing a party with the parents out of town is the safest of all. Riiight.
4. It's pseudointellectual. "Cellar door" speaks for itself. That scene is where I really started to turn against the movie.
5. It's teen angst "search for identity" indulgent. Sometimes you can do that stuff well, most of the time it turns out like How To Deal.
6. Too much deus ex machina. Funny how Patrick Swayze just happened to be a child molestor who was exposed when the fire burned the place down. Unconscionable that the movie didn't go anywhere with this: Did his past influence the scheister stuff he peddled? Was Donnie himself a molestation survivor? Not that everything has to have a reason (whither the Chinese "chut up" girl? - I'm totally okay with her serving no real plot purpose), but still.
On the deus front, is it mitigating or exacerbating that Donnie even cites deus ex machina when the thug boy asks him what the hell he's doing there?
7. Too much gratuitous pop cultural namedropping. Lessee: First line of the script is, "I'm voting for Mike Dukakis." At least this goes somewhere, with the dad's various scenes fulminating against him. But the scene where the bitch lady out of nowhere is singing the praises of Dan Quayle, doesn't connect to any other scene in the movie. Throw in the masturbating to Christina Applegate also.
(Old friend of mine has as his favorite joke just the name Dwayne Schintzius. Nothing else, no punchline, just Dwayne Schintzius is enough to make himself crack up, the bewilderment of the rest of the room totally aside. A lot of the gratuitous namedrops here remind me of the Dwayne Schintzius problem.)
8. One gratuitous music video is bad enough; two is a deal-breaker. Mind, I've come to appreciate musical performances within a musical (or even a special musical Buffy episode, which I never did see). Music videos within a movie, by contrast, are hackwork, especially if the musical performers themselves aren't in the movie. Think of that hokey scene from Treasure Planet with the Goo Goo Dolls song.
Here they actually get away with "Head Over Heels": Fantastic song, perfect accompaniment choice, great choreography. But "Mad World" is Just Wrong there.
9. Time Travel violations. Okay, so did he go back in time (like Back To The Future)? If so, that's a paradox waiting to happen. They cart his dead body out, and then find his old self sleepwalking on the golf course and then what?
Or did he rewind time (like Groundhog Day)? But then where would the jet engine come from?
I'll grudgingly accept "it was all a dream that included a premonition."
10. Worst. Closing scene. Ever. Little neighbor boy who isn't in any other scene ever, deadpans about how his neighbor died and he's sad. Jena Malone stops by on her bike (and hey, if she was biking, why did she need to be walked home the day the school flooded?) and asks if the little boy knew him. Or maybe he asks her. Either way, the person answering the question didn't really know Donnie. And yet still Jena and Donnie's mom give that stupid thumbs-up sign to each other and the whole movie ends. That thumbs up is basically the writer's middle finger to anyone who bothered trying to find something clever in his movie.
Mind, I guess if there were a clever tidy resolution, it would have been spoiled long ago. (Donnie was dead all along?!? Jena Malone was a guy all along?!? Donnie was Luke's father?!?)
