Archive for January, 2006
January 16, 2006 at 3:11 am · Filed under Movies
Another Heath Ledger movie, and yeah, you do kinda get the feeling he made Casanova after this one to make sure people knew he was really extra-straight, but he’s great in this. Jake Gyllenhaal is kind of unsung by all the people singing Heath’s praises, but he’s darn good too.
<shalit>I wish I knew how to quit you, Oscar!</shalit>
There are enough people talking about this ‘un that I don’t really have much to add. It is interesting that a supposedly sophisticated urban arthouse audience still doesn’t know how to respond to male romance without nervous laughter at inopportune moments. Nevertheless, Sylvia went home happy.
I think the movie, beautifully shot and as elliptical as a mainstream American film gets, is probably in my yet-to-be-compiled top 10 for the year, but 2005 was a weak year for film. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.
I was praying for Papa Was a Rodeo as the exit music. Sometimes praying doesn’t help.
January 16, 2006 at 2:48 am · Filed under Movies
I will begin by saying this is not the worst Lasse Hallström movie. I despise Chocolat for being over-precious and false, and The Cider House Rules ain’t really much better. In retrospect, and in the context of his English-language films, even his best film, My Life as a Dog, is more saccharine than it is, uh, splenda. Hallström seems to specialize in pleasing Miramax’s core crowd (when there was a Miramax) — i.e., the middlest of the middlebrow.
A digression: There’s a roving pack of old ladies who seem to be at every Ritz (i.e., Philly arthouse) movie I see. They explain plot points to each other as those points occur, and they all seem to really want to Get what the characters are experiencing and Feel Deeply when it turns out that the transvestite with the heart murmur (Philip Seymour Hoffman) has only ever wanted to be loved, and to enter the Iditarod. The old ladies, for some reason, are all named Sylvia.
Anyway, needless to say, Sylvia loves Lasse Hallström movies.
I’m sure they love Casanova, too. It’s historicoliterary; it’s set in a ravishingly beautiful, highly sanitized and sanitary 18th-century Venice (you’d even bet the city didn’t stink to high heaven if you didn’t know better); it stars that hunky Heath Ledger; Jeremy Irons is the bad guy; and it’s a bawdy sex farce with absolutely zero bawd or sex.
There seems to be a conscious effort to make Shakespeare in Love (a Miramax ‘n’ Sylvia movie that I happen to adore), only a century later. There are quite a few Shakespearisms (lots of confused identities and doubling, a Portia-like woman playing at barrister), and I even believe that Tom Stoppard did a script polish. The thing is, Casanova is not nearly as smart. There is a masked ball scene with Casanova juggling his two fiancées (yes, this Casanova has fiancées), that gets its timing and comic sensibilities from the “Brady Bunch” episode where Peter has two simultaneous dates.
To further praise with faint damnation, on the way home Patrick R. and I devised an elaborate mapping between Casanova and the 18th-century installment of the Police Academy films that they never got around to making. It is totally easy to imagine Steve Guttenberg as Cadet Giacomo Casanova, Kim Cattrall as Cadet Francesca Bruni, Jeremy Irons as Lt. Harris, The Doge as Commandant Lassard, and, uh, Bubba Smith as Hightower.
Admittedly, the analogy, like the movie, is an amusing mess.
January 13, 2006 at 1:33 am · Filed under Movies
A pretty fun animated short produced by Paul Terry (once known as the “Dean of American Animation”), in which a goat and an old man (Al Falfa) are terrorized by cute elephants who can fly and teleport. The cartoon is black and white, but presumably, the elephants are pink. Who dreamed up this stuff?
The extrapolated implication — or conversely, the interpolated explication — is that it’s a dream induced by the man’s delirium tremens, although why the poor goat?
You can see this cartoon for the first time in 50 years here, at the wonderful ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive.
January 13, 2006 at 1:10 am · Filed under Movies
I had the use of a digital projector for the evening, so Dave C. and I moved various audio and visual components around the living room until we had a not-too-shabby Digital Theater Experience projecting onto the white wall above the stairwell. Probably about a 70″ picture when it was all said and done. I could totally get used to it, except for the obligatory hand shadows and the fact that if you turned your head wrong your eyes got stabbed by the flash of 900 lumens. Maybe 9000? Anyway, it was bright. On to the movie…
We determined while watching this film that it should have been called Flowers for Algertron. Funny! (See, he’s dumb, but he takes extra doses of smart serum and virtual reality and wears a glowy computer suit and becomes a telekinetic evil genius, and…)
It’s kind of amazing to look at the state of CGI in 1992. That state was pretty bad, really. Actually, Terminator 2 was a year earlier, and the liquid metal effects were fantastic, and we’ve already talked about the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, which came out just a year later. So why were the computer graphics in this so lame?
And why was the religious symbolism so blunt? A bearded Remington Steele on a virtual cross, the title character named Jobe (remember, he’s dumb, so he doesn’t know how to spell allegorically until much later in the film, when we’re all past carring or hypmotized by the goofy strobe effects).
I had a dim recollection that Stephen King was associated with this film somehow, but his name didn’t make the credit roll; turns out the producers used the title of one of his stories, but it didn’t much match the movie (or he didn’t much like the end result), and he sued to get disassociated from it.
After the movie, it was fun to watch screen savers blown up to ridiculous size on our wall. It was as virtual of an experience as I was prepared to have for the evening. That old Swiss scientist probably would approve. Oh the virtuality!
January 11, 2006 at 9:38 pm · Filed under Asides, Teevee
Cuh-ray-zee! Am I the first person to blog this? I am the geek winner!
January 11, 2006 at 9:01 pm · Filed under Blogstuff
You may have seen the Million Dollar Homepage, wherein some guy is selling ads on his site at $1 per pixel. Bet you wish you thought of that, huh?
There have been many variations to draw inspiration from that model in the few months since it’s been up, and here’s the latest: 1000tags, which is combining the Web 2.0 notion of tags and folksonomies with that there filthy lucre to offer a way to buy your way into a paid tag cloud.
The flipside of their deal, is 1000tags is giving a certain number of bloggers who talk about them their own tag for free if they talk about the service. So here I am. Do I win a tag?
January 9, 2006 at 2:48 am · Filed under Asides
I am very happy that for the nonce at least, Google considers this page to be similar to The Monoglot.
January 9, 2006 at 2:29 am · Filed under Movies
I realize that there are very few movie-goers who have not seen this, and now I am finally one of them uh, finally no longer one of them.
Let me just say that it was fairly dull. We know whassup from the beginning, and that Colonel Jack is behind it all, and from there we proceed linearly until the lightbulb goes on in what’s-his-Cruise’s head and HE CAN HANDLE THE TRUTH. Ugh. Demi Moore is probably at her cardboard worst in this film. Tom is doing his “I am callow, yet I will find a cause” shtick that he spent the 1990s perfecting.
Can I admit that I don’t like Jack Nicholson? Dude’s got the kevorka, I will grant, but I don’t think he’s much of an actor. I realize it’s a heretical notion.
How did Aaron Sorkin get work after this movie? I liked “Sports Night”, and “The West Wing” has its moments, but writing A Few Good Men should not get you other gigs.
And let’s not even talk about Rob Reiner. Okay, let’s. Take a look at his films before this:
So that’s two absolute classics, and four pretty darn good films. Not too shabby. After AFGM:
By my count, that’s two middling, earnest but commercial potboilers and four pieces of total poopoo. This movie completely ruined his artistic instincts, and I’m not sure I’ll willingly see anything else he directs. Shame, meathead, shame.
January 9, 2006 at 1:52 am · Filed under Movies
I’ve heard a fair number of complaints about the length of this movie, but honestly, that didn’t bother me. I felt it zipped along appropriately, and I like three hour movies that you can say that about. It felt like a novelty to see a film set in the thirties that wasn’t in black and white. (Probably, I’ve seen a bunch of ‘em and hadn’t noticed.)
However, I wasn’t moved. Sure, I felt for the big fella, and I thought Naomi Watts was great, but there were some story and technical distractions that made it difficult to buy the story emotionally.
- For example, why did these people go to an island teeming with dinosaurs and come back with a big monkey?
- Why does the wall that the natives have built have an ape-sized door?
- Who built the stairs up to the Kong lair?
- Where did the natives go after their one big scene?
- Why was the CGI so great on the monkey closeups, and so suboptimal on the long shots and the scenes when he’s carrying Anne?
- Why did the dinosaurs in the first Jurassic Park look more realistic than these ‘uns?
The sad fact is, we’re not at CGI verisimilitude yet when it comes to people and creatures. Oh well. Let’s check back in in two years or so. In the meantime, I think I want me a re-viewing of the the original.
January 8, 2006 at 11:51 pm · Filed under Blogstuff
At least I think this is in Turkish. I wonder why he has linked to my site? I do not know you, but thank you, friend.
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