Archive for Movies
January 22, 2006 at 4:07 am · Filed under Movies
You find some interesting stuff on the Comcast OnDemand at four in the morning, such as this. It’s an extremely earnest message short about a girl who doesn’t quite fit in with her peers at school. Susan Jane thinks the other kids laugh and make fun of her behind her back, but they don’t! They think she’s stuck up because she never talks to them, but she’s just shy!
This seems to have been meant to be shown in schools. There are even discussion questions at the end:
- Do you know a boy or girl like Susan Jane?
- Does your group ignore boys and girls like her?
- What can a boy or girl like Susan Jane do to make friends?
- How can the group help boys and girls like her?
This dealie is not particular good; these may be the worst child actors ever, or they are tied with Corey Feldman. It is mildly interesting because it was directed by Herk Harvey, who went on to make Carnival of Souls, the Salt Lake City horror movie from the ’60s.
The Outsider actually plays like the prologue to 13 Going On 30, a film which is much better than it should be, and which Jessica watched, rapt, while sitting on the coffee table.
I am happy to count The Outsider toward my life movie quota, which I may get around to explaining here for those who don’t already know.
It seems that you can see this film for yourself at the wonderful archive.org.
January 20, 2006 at 2:18 am · Filed under Movies
It’s a ‘57 Plymouth Fury that has a(n evil) mind of its own. Again, I’m the last one to get on the (evil) bus to see this. I am (evil) sorry.
I didn’t find it particularly scary, but I mostly enjoyed it. I did find the language between the teen leads to be rather salty for the mid-1980s. I thought that was more of a ’70s thing, but the trend survived to here, at least. It is interesting to note that the main boys, Keith Gordon and John Stockwell, have had reasonable success as directors in recent years. Stockwell does surf movies like Into the Blue and Blue Crush and Blue Watery Blue Blue. Gordon has gone a bit artsier, including the latest incarnation of The Singing Detective, Waking the Dead, and the terrific Vonnegut adaptation Mother Night. The female lead, Alexandra Paul, went on to become the least-endowed woman on Baywatch.
So, the car is really really mean, and it has the ability to repair itself when it gets wrecked. The pre-digital effects that make this work are pretty cool. Apparently, they used high-power vaccums to implode the cars from the inside, and then they just reversed the footage, so the car appears to heal. The effect is kind of like how a Joan Rivers plastic surgery must be.
The movie starts and ends with George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone.” Man I hate that song. I guess it sort of works here.
January 20, 2006 at 1:44 am · Filed under Movies
To celebrate the opening day at the Sundance Film Fest: Another one of those movies that everyone else saw before I did. You can’t really pretend to know anything about late-20th-century film if you haven’t seen this. Okay, up until now, I was pretending. I was a sham. I’m not anymore. Shout it from the rooftops: I know something about late-20th-century film!
So why is SLV (directed by Steven Soderbergh) important? Well, it was the first “independent” film really worthy of the sobriquet that made a big splash outside of the festival circuit, and sort of swooshed Sundance-the-event and Miramax-the-company into prominence on its coattails. Made for about $1 million, it grossed about $25 million at the American box office, where it was seen by everyone who aspired to know anything about late-20th-century film, present company excluded.
I knew the premise: a half-nice, half-creepy guy (James Spader, big surprise) gets off on making videotapes of women talking about their sex lives, and it ruins Andie McDowall’s marriage to Peter Gallagher. Well, Peter Gallagher ruins his own marriage by affairing with Laura San Giacomo, who happens to be Andie’s sister.
It’s a pretty nice little film; lots of intensity from the four actors, without feeling play-y. This is what Closer should have been, was trying to be, and utterly failed at.
I was really fascinated by the success of Spader’s character’s sad-sack approach to intimacy with women, rather than trying to bed them, he just asked them to tell him and his camera their most deeply-held secrets. And they did. I wonder if this would have changed my approach to romance in the ’90s if I had seen this movie way back then. It probably would have, and it’s kind of scary to contemplate.
I have always maintained that Andie MacDowall is a terrible actress who happens to show up in some darn fine movies (c.f., Groundhog Day, Short Cuts, The Player, Four Weddings and a Funeral). She’s actually fairly genuine in this; I would venture to say that the role is close to her own persona, but that’s idle speculation meant to prop up my decades-old supposition. I gotta admit, she’s good here. Of course, on the down side, SLV lead directly to Green Card…
You will note that I have capitalized this film’s title, contradicting the “official” film title. You will need to sue me, mr. soderbergh.
January 18, 2006 at 12:18 am · Filed under Movies
I had only the vaguest notion of where this phrase originated until I caught this film on the TCM tonight. God is not really anybody’s actual co-pilot here; the WWII fighters that Col. Robert Lee Scott flies are strictly single-seaters. But Scott (played by a non-descript Dennis Morgan who eerily anticipates Bob Crane’s irascible Klink-knocker in look and demeanor) finds religion in the skies, as he blasts the Japanese out of them.
Nothing too drastic plotwise or dialogwise here. The aerial combat footage (of which there is quite a bit), however, is stunning and entirely engaging. Watch out also for Alan Hale as the garrulous priest, eerily anticipating in look and demeanor his son, The Skipper.
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 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.
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