#movies

For as long as I remember, I have been a fan of the Beatles.

But in my youth, that love may have expressed itself...in unnatural ways.

For instance, I can remember in 1979 or 1980 watching Sergeant_Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band repeatedly, almost obsessively on HBO.

Haven't seen it in the intervening 30+ years.

I noticed at some point in the none-too-distant past that it had showed up on Netflix, and I felt compelled to watch it...you know, For Science.

I would say that it hasn't aged well, but really, it wasn't good from the very moment it was released. Mess doesn't describe it---this may be the Plan 9 from Outer Space of musical movies.

Still, I will commend to you the three actual good parts: Earth, Wind & Fire performing "Got to Get You Into My Life", Aerosmith performing "Come Together", and Billy Preston performing "Get Back". They all come later in the film, so I recommend judicious use of the fast-forward option.

Oh, wait, I nearly forgot! You also shouldn't miss the utterly inexplicable group reprise of the title song at the end of the film---it includes, among others, Curtis Mayfield, Heart (though---I'm not making this up!---they only show the male members of the band; I saw these three rock-and-roll guys who seemed a little familiar, and it wasn't until I read the credits that I realized why I couldn't place them, because, you know, they're the least identifiable members of that band), Stephen Bishop (as the Awkwardest White Man In The Universe---you'll know which one I'm talking about), Rob Lowe (sorry, no, that's a young Robert Palmer), Johnny Winter, Tina Turner, a very confused Carol Channing...and a host of others.

It is magnificent in its randomness.

Mike.

Hey, it was the 70's, so maybe it wasn't that unusual, but all of the men in Alien were surprisingly old, at least compared to what I would speculate would be the case now: at the end of the year of it's release (1979), they were, in order:

• John Hurt - 39

• Yaphet Kotto - 40

• Tom Skerrit - 46

• Ian Holm - 48

• Harry Dean Stanton - 53

There's only two guys on that list who were younger then than I am now. Harry Dean Stanton is just shy of 90 these days.

The two female actresses, Veronica Cartwright and Sigourney Weaver, were both 30, which seems not entirely out of line with what casting for the movie might look like today.

Has our movie culture just become that much more youth-obsessed in the intervening decades?

(Incidentally: one of the members of the "World Securty Council" in The Avengers was played by Jenny Agutter)

Apparently some people didn't like, or at least did not look upon Quantum of Solace with anticipation.

I think they express their issues concisely and amusingly in this proposed theme song.

Personally, I thought many things about it were very beautifully presented---the chase that opens the movie may be the finest one ever done in a Bond film; it certainly takes my breath away---though the overall plot is...weird. Not the "water is the next great resource to control" part, which actually makes sense to me, but the "there is a great big pervasive conspiracy" bit that is supposed to drive the whole film, but doesn't quite cohere enough to work as its engine.

I should also point out that I think the point of the title is quite obvious in light of the last scene of the movie. Am I the only one?

I'm not sure Erik the Viking necessarily counts as a great movie by any metric, but when I noticed it had appeared on Netflix, I immediately dropped it in my queue.

I remember having a great deal of affection for it a couple of decades ago, when it first came out---though I probably haven't even thought of it since college---so it seemed worth watching.

It's certainly not without some virtues; the story isn't as quite as fluffy as you might expect (however you might regard the Pythons, they're not intellectual lightweights, just silly), and the actors do what they can with a script that is certainly geared for laughs---the moment when Erik and company are trying to take in the differing notion of life on Hy-Brasil is played a little broadly, even though the point it's making about cultural assumptions is pretty funny.

"What, all the time?"

I do remember thinking at the time that no one as attractive as Imogen Stubbs should have as old and frumpy a name as that. I still believe this to be true.

It actually reminded me, in production quality, of another film, from another Python, from the same year, that I had recently watched again. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen showed up on Amazon Prime not long ago, and one Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago I watched it.

The commonality is reasonably strong. I think it's fair to say that both embraced their limitations, and decided that if absolute realism was not possible, they would dispense with it entirely.

In fact, the Dragon of the North Sea reminds me of nothing so much as the leviathan from Baron Munchausen.

I guess it shouldn't surprise me that, upon reviewing it, Baron Munchausen no longer seemed as amazing and riveting as it did 20 years ago. Seeing Uma Thurman 19-year-old tits was as delightful as might be expected (however briefly), but otherwise, the scatter-shot quality of the storytelling seemed much more apparent to me than it did in 1989.

Still, it's amusing to see some of the people no one knew then who were in the films. Of course, Sarah Polley was the little girl in Munchausen, and she's gone on to do a thing or two. And I actually remember Joie Brun pointing out Sting's cameo.

More surprising to me was recognize Ray Cooper, whom Chet and I were to see playing on tour with Eric Clapton the next year. And finally, Erik includes a young Samantha Bond in what appears to have been one of her first movie roles.

I'm not saying that either one is a bad way to spend a couple of hours, but as with so many things, the intervening time hasn't been entirely complimentary---whether because my tastes have changed or become more sophisticated, it's hard for me to say.

Definitely a movie worth your time. Kevin Clash's story is wonderful to witness, the way his obvious passion took him to exactly where he wanted to be. If you're like me, the insight into the backstage part of how Muppet productions work is intensely interesting.

But none of that is really what stuck with me.

The idea that a large percentage of make-a-wish children want to meet Elmo makes perfect sense to me--if he's so firmly associated as a source of gentle, physical, unconditional love, and you're sick and in pain and everyone around you seems unhappy, of course that's what you would wish for. And yet the idea of doing that even once would terrify me for reasons that I suspect many could understand: what if I couldn't provide what a child needed? How could I stand knowing that this child will be gone before his or her time, and soon at that?

You know. Cowardice.

It reminds me of a piece Peter Sagal wrote a few months ago about visiting Walter Reed, and how, visiting the first soldier he was scheduled to see:

As I listened, I tried to focus, and control my own feelings of horror and dismay, and my growing urge to walk out of the room and tell the Sergeant, patiently waiting outside, that I could take no more and needed to leave now. (The sergeant told me later that this does happen.)

His story is a bit of a tough read, but it's well worth it, too.

This one from Tor.com:

On it's 3D-ness:

Weirdly, because it's exactly the same as a normal Michael Bay movie, the 3D camerawork seems almost understated, because there's none of the usual “wooooooo, look at the threeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-deeeeeeeeee” foolishness. It actually makes his visual compositions a little more legible; being able to see what's going on in a Michael Bay action scene is a novel experience, even if what you're seeing confirms your prior thesis that what's going on is giant robots beating the crap out of each other.

And the coup de grace:

This should not be confused with my thinking Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a good movie. It's absolutely, categorically not. Calling it a movie is giving it too much benefit of the doubt. Michael Bay is engaged in a parallel medium, using all the equipment other people use to make movies, but creating something that bears only cursory resemblance to actual cinema. It's a mechanism for stealing the brain's car keys, forcibly duct-taping the pleasure center's accelerator pedal to the floor, and sending the whole nervous system flying toward a cliff. While on fire. It's very possible to enjoy oneself in such a state, but it's equally possible to feel assaulted.

The funny thing is that I actually now, through a total accident of, "What, that's an open-box you have that's an upgrade from the TV I wanted?" own a 3-D TV. Not that I have any intention of actually using this feature, but it's there.

From a review of Transformers: Whatever the Subtitle Is on Bleeding Cool

The main action of the film revolves around the good guys slowly coming to understand the monstrous improbability of the villains' plan while Bay smashes all his action figures together and makes the smaller ones say annoying Jar Jar Binks stuff.

Heh.

It had slipped my mind that last weekend while Anne was out of town, as part of my Festival of Dubious Movies, I also watched Kick-Ass.

In its comic-book form, this was the title that finally made me realize that I mostly don't like Mark Millar's writing. It's not sarcasm-over-a-layer-of-caring like Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan). It's not dark and compelling like Frank Miller in his heyday (Elektra: Assassin, The Dark Knight Returns). It's not dense like Alan Moore (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), or deep and beautiful like Neil Gaiman (Sandman). It's not convoluted and mystical and self-referential like Grant Morrison (The Invisibles, Doom Patrol). It's not clever (even if it never quite delivers) like Brian K. Vaughan (Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina). It's really just middle-of-the-road superhero comic stuff--the sort of thing that Geoff Johns (Green Lantern) or Brian Bendis (Avengers) do, and do pretty well--but with a big old helping of super-violence.

Mark Millar is the comic book world's answer to Alex from A Clockwork Orange. I don't even bother to look at anything he does anymore.

Anyway, I did watch the movie, and actually kind of enjoyed it. Yes, it was absurdly violent, but some of the details they changed from the original gave it more humanity, more empathy, than the comic book ever displayed.

I wouldn't want to spoil things for anyone, but the comic book chooses to make Big Daddy's death a result of pointless bad choices on his part. At a certain age, I probably would have thought that much more impressive than I do now, but now it just seems cruel, and all it brings to the story is a sheen of nihilism that I find banal and unattractive.

Have I mentioned that I don't find Mark Millar worth reading?

It's still not a movie I would care to see again, or really recommend, but it's not actively bad. And Nicholas Cage finally found the part he was born to play: a knock-off Adam West portraying a knock-off Batman. It's at least as weird as his performance in Vampire's Kiss.

the fool who makes the bad movies, or the fool who watches them?

While Anne was gone, I spent my Saturday afternoon doing the thing I always seem to do while she's away: watching bad movies. And boy were some of them bad.

First up, Resident Evil: Afterlife. Remember: if the Director is married to the Lead Actress, the movie is going to be horrible. Yeah, sure, you can come up with a couple of possible exceptions--Much Ado About Nothing, perhaps (though it still had Keanu Reeves in it), maybe others--but in general, you're in for bad news. In fact, this fourth installment in the already-three-movies-too-many Resident Evil franchise amazes me in that it even got made. That there's a fifth on the way leads me to despair.

Second, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, which fascinated me in its utter badness. I expected to watch the first five minutes, snigger a bit, and then move on to something at least watchable, but the level of spectacular trashiness this displayed fascinated me. And with actors who should know better: Dennis Quaid? Joseph Gordon-Levitt? Jonathan Pryce? I mean, is there any way this could have read well on the page? No. I just can't imagine a paycheck big enough. Maybe I need a drug habit to understand, or something.

Finally, Salt, which wasn't actually bad for what it was, though I saw the twist coming from pretty much the moment Liev Schreiber showed up. I'm fairly certain I didn't remember it from his slip on The Daily Show, but you never know, sometimes my brain files away things in odd places.

I sometimes wonder at the pathology of my addiction to bad movies. Is it that I find so few of even the movies people consider "good" to be of interest, I figure it's better not to get your hopes up, just watch things you know are going to be bad? Is it the sort of car-wreck fascination of trying to understand why anyone would watch this movie and enjoy it? I dunno, but I should probably see a doctor.

Nobody does it quite as well as Pixar. The Minions amused me, though.

The original was the first thing I ever recorded on our TiVO, something on the close order of 9 or 10 years ago (I probably just jinxed my HDs, and should expect them to fall over any moment, I fear).

Still, I should have known better. Jennifer Connelly looked good and tried hard, but everything else in that movie sucked.

I caught a chunk of this movie while channel surfing a week or two ago--from about 15 minutes in for about 20 minutes--that seemed pretty decent, so I TiVO'd it.

I am not all that discriminating a movie viewer--which is funny, because I don't bother to watch them very often, either--and I have to say, this was horrible.

I mean, it would be cruel to suggest that this movie actually killed Sidney Pollack, but I was thinking just that an awful lot, especially toward the end.

Sadly, IMDB suggests that, in fact, it may have been Pollack himself who was responsible for some large part of its horribleness:

The original twist ending involved Silvia Broome having made up the idea of the assassination in order to blackmail a political official from causing genocide in Africa. Although director Sydney Pollack signed on for that draft it was one of the first things he had changed. This in turn changed a lot of the structure of the script so Scott Frank and Steven Zaillian were brought on to doctor it up.

About the only overused thriller trope that it didn't indulge in was having the principals sleep with one another; everything else was straight out of "Thrillers for Dummies", and big wodges of the dialog landed with the wet thud of a movie critic jumping off a building in despair.

Thinking further on it, I think the thing that made me give the film a chance was the fact that the bit I stumbled across included Lyle Lovett's "If I Had A Boat".

But Tonto he was smarter
And one day said kemo sabe
Kiss my ass I bought a boat
I'm going out to sea

somehow the Wachowski Brothers succeeded in making a movie of Speed Racer that was even more creepy and inexplicable than the original cartoon series.

What I don't understand is why they thought they would ever make any money off of it.

Ah, the things we can't see. A number of silly things filmed on a ridiculously high-speed video camera, and then slowed down so we can perceive the things that normally see continuous.

I don't think I've watched any significant portion of Animal House in two decades or more. But I happened across a note in Wikipedia's page on Robert Cray that notes that he was the bass player in the band performing "Shout" at the party.

That, plus the always amusing scene of Donald Sutherland dissing John Milton seems worth a re-watch.

...that in the movie Shampoo, the music that is playing when Carrie Fisher meets Warren Beatty is none other than Paul Simon.

Ah, life imitates art.

Superbad was, to my high-school experience, what Dazed and Confused was to Anne's.

And 1.6 instances of the word "Fuck" per minute. Heh.

"Just McLovin. That's badass."

First, Helena Bonham Carter is on track to be the bad-guy in the next Terminator movie. Which is frigging bizarre and inexplicable. I mean, Christian Bale has been in enough stuff like that (Reign of Fire anyone?) that I didn't bat an eye--but other than Planet of the Apes (which I've always assumed was the casting equivelent of a mercy-fuck for Tim Burton), HBC has generally steered clear of quite such popcorn-y movies.

But if that weren't enough, she's replacing Tilda Swinton. Weirder and weirder.

This must be one frigging magical script, especially given that the director, "McG" has done nothing to suggest that he's not a hack.

The movie amused me, especially Paul Reuben's death scene, but there's something about the TV show that never grabbed me. And although I liked Serenity I haven't yet actually gotten around to watching Firefly.

I am a very, very bad consumer.

Furthermore, I was not entirely pleased with the end of Joss' run on The Astonishing X-Men. I want my superhero comics to be brainless, loud and immature, not glorious, beautiful and heart-rending. Besides, what is it with killing off the female characters? Someone should look into this.

Nonetheless, I find myself awaiting July 15th, and the arrival of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

You know, I like the novel Dune, and I even have some affection for the 1984 film version, as horrifyingly flawed as it was, and thought the Sci-FI Channel miniseries was decent (the sequels covering Dune Messiah and Children of Dune were better, IMHO).

But fook, those are all arguments against the world needing another film version of the novel.

Specifically, is it weirder that someone is making a movie of Radio Free Albemuth or that Alanis Morissette has just been announced as having joined the cast

Most of H.P. Lovecraft's best works with something that is maybe a little odd, becomes decidedly strange, and then slowly descends into madness.

That pretty much described my reaction to seeing that 1) there was a film supposed to be released this year called Cthulu, based on Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (though the screenwriter seems to be suggesting in this interview that gay people are more aware of the horrors of small-town life than us straights, which seems somewhat myopic), 2) it had Tori Spelling in it.

I caught the first couple of episodes of "Life" and found it intriguing enough to drop a Season Pass in the TiVO.

Some things are a little overdone--they seem to believe that every episode requires a scene where Charlie is able to make a nigh-magical connection with someone they need to talk, presumably because of his time in prison--but hopefully the writers will see fit to abandon those more obvious tics.

Only time will tell if the writers have actually created depth in the character, or just the illusion of depth--at two episodes in, they're still in the "hinting at bigger, deeper things" stage.

Anyway, I mostly gave it a chance since I liked Damian Lewis immensely in Band of Brothers. Imagine my surprise in going to IMDB and finding out that he's both British and younger than I am.

as they all seem a little tepid...but maybe the the appearance of Stardust on the big screen will get me to finally go out and buy the original comic.

And who knows, maybe I'll just go see it for the helluvit.

But what got me to write this entry (the first in far too long) is that I ran across a review in the Austin Chronicle that made me laugh with the first line:

"Fairies wear boots," recalled a sage and seasoned wise man whose name eludes me at the moment, "I tell you no lies."

The man whose name alludes him would, of course, be Ozzy Osbourne, since the line comes from the (eponymously named?) song "Jack The Stripper/Fairies Wear Boots" off of Paranoid

As shown at right, Netflix is suggesting I should get The Last King Of Scotland because I liked Little Miss Sunshine. One suspects their algorithm contest has not borne the sweetest fruit.

OK, that was mostly to get your attention, but I do find it interesting that in both of the recent movies about Truman Capote (Capote and Infamous, Harper Lee--who was born in 1926, and thus 33 at the time of the events in each film--was portrayed by a woman at least a dozen years older than she was.

I mean, what's up Hollywood, did you forget you're supposed to cast younger? Not that I'm complaining, it just seems bizarrely atypical.

Anne and I have had a copy of this out from Netflix for, I'm not kidding you, three months. We finally got around to watching it last night.

To say that I'm glad I didn't grow up in a small town--I spent a fair amount of time in small-ish towns, but always as a transient outsider--is perhaps obvious.

It's got a lot of the flaws I anticipated, but that anticipation is at least partly informed by the existence of this movie--it isn't impossible to see how it would have been fresh and new, oh, you know, around the time I was born. So it's worth seeing, even if only as a historical document.

I must say, though, what the hell happened to Timothy Bottoms? Looking at his bio on imdb, I swear, it seems like this is the only movie he's done (perhaps other than Texasville) that was really worth doing. Weird.

OK, so guest starring on ER would have hardly been a significant feather in his cap, but oh how it hurts to hear that Andre Braugher turned that down to be in the second Fantastic Four movie.

I rented the first one, and still felt a bit cheated. I can't imagine the second would be any better. But who know, I suppose they could really pull out the stops and Do Galactus Right.

So, apparently Christopher Nolan is almost on board to direct a movie version of The Prisoner.

Now I don't really remember much about the original show--even though MTV rebroadcast it while I was in college (I had no TV, and, honestly, I really didn't miss it)--but the lasting impression I have is one of a show playing "hide the ball" with important bits of information to the point of incoherence. While I don't mind that per se--and maybe it wouldn't have seemed so had the show not had a very short run, meaning they perhaps weren't able to explain things they intended to later--I have to wonder how that would play with mainstream movie audiences.

Still, with a good writing team, I would expect Chris Nolan to be able to make a credible go of it.

Seriously, Streets Of Fire is not too good a movie. This may or may not really surprise anyone, but I hadn't seen it in likely 15 years and when I stumbled across the fact that Diane Lane was in it, along with a positively young looking (though 29) Willem Dafoe, well, I decided I had to see it again.

So I fast forwarded through most of it because, well, that's what it deserved. I can dream about you is still a pretty good song, but boy, just not a great movie.

You should read the whole thing (don't worry, it's quick), but the part that made me laugh the most was the last line:

I suspect Patrick wouldn't go as far as me. But he is essentially Small-Time, and I am Internet Jesus.

I don't know that there's any more obvious lead in to Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a movie I heard described as "beautiful people shooting at one another". That does pretty much sum it up, but I think Roger Ebert is right when, in his review, he says:

None of this matters at all. What makes the movie work is that Pitt and Jolie have fun together on the screen, and they're able to find a rhythm that allows them to be understated and amused even during the most alarming developments. There are many ways that John and Jane Smith could have been played awkwardly, or out of synch, but the actors understand the material and hold themselves at just the right distance from it; we understand this is not really an action picture, but a movie star romance in which the action picture serves as a location.

For better or worse, that is it exactly. And I was entertained, even if it was a festival of cartoon violence.

Vince Vaughn, incidentally, seems to have totally jumped tracks in his career. Not that he doesn't do it well, but I wouldn't have guessed he'd end up in this role five years ago.

Tomorrow we intend to watch a movie I will feel much less guilty about enjoying, The Girl with the Pearl Earring.

That long before he was Dumbledore Mk. II, Michael Gambon was the thief in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.

That should creep out anyone who's taking their kids to those Harry Potter movies.

So, I saw the original Batman once all the way through in the theaters. Every other time I've tried to watch it, I've gotten bored or fallen asleep (no, I'm not kidding).

I remember Batman Returns as much because I saw it with Anne and Dave McGhee just before he left town for another co-op stint that was going to keep him out of town beyond when I was planning to graduate (let's be honest about my level of certainty :) as anything else. It was certainly more interesting than the first, but kept a cartoonishness that I found a little off-putting.

I have only vague memories of Batman Forever. Mostly they revolved around how much Tommy Lee Jones should have sued his agent for. Joel Schumacher seemed to me to have no respect for the characters, wanting to make something more in the vein of the 1960's TV show, which also annoyed me. I may have noticed Nicole Kidman's heaving bosom, too.

Batman & Robin I saw during some downtime at Patrick's wedding. I was amused when George Clooney was on The Tonight Show a couple of weeks ago, and Leno made some comment about how Clooney had produced his fair share of dogs, and Clooney made some comment about having given his best shot at killing the Batman franchise.

So--and I say this as someone who's never been a huge Batman fan, really, outside of The Dark Knight Returns--I was somewhat cynical about the level of praise that Batman Begins was getting. I mean, I TIVO Ebert & Roeper, and enjoy their reviews, but I decided their notion of good comic book movies was a bit different from mine when they heaped tons of praise on Spiderman 2, a movie I thought it was OK, but certainly not great.

Anyway, my expectations were high, and I was prepared to be disappointed, especially knowing that the screenwriter was responsible for the Blade movies, of which I do not have a high opinion--I also note that he worked on The Puppet Masters, and plays a (basically positive) part in the long essay about PM making it to the screen. Christopher Nolan could direct the hell out of the movie, but if it had a bad screenplay, it was still going to suck.

It did not suck.

Not only did it not suck, it exceeded my expectations, high as they were. Sure, Katie Holmes' character could have been a little less of a cypher, or, in fact, acted by someone other than Katie Holmes. And there were various other small things that could have been different.

But, really, I think it succeeded in capturing a huge swath of the character without feeling like it was being crammed full of exposition like a duck intended for fois gras. The look was surprisingly down-to-earth, and Christian Bale is just one hell of an actor.

I mean, from American Psycho to this?

Actually, the really weird thing I notice on IMDB is that at 13, he was the lead character in Empire of the Sun.

Well, I expected watching this movie to be a bit of a chore, and it was. I guess you could argue that such expectations are self-fulfilling, but getting Keanu Reeves to play a character who was originally modelled on Sting--both in his blondness and his Britishness--was just stupid.

That said, Rachel Weisz sold the absolute goddamn fuck out of her role. Shame it was in such an otherwise mediocre movie.

Just a couple of days after Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit goes number 1, Aardman Animation lose their warehouse with props and historical material. Brutal.

We actually went to see the movie on Saturday, with Patrick and Diane. It was enjoyable enough, although I would have to agree with Richard Roeper that it moves along just a little too slowly.

it's interesting to read an article on the process used to restore Bambi for re-release.

I caught this listed on TCM, mostly because of it's proximity in the listings to The Ladykillers. I've not finished it yet, but it occurred to me to look it up on IMDb, which led me to look at some of the external reviews, which led me to this review.

Now I really have no complaint about an organization with a particular bent doing its own film reviews--as long as they don't mind me mocking them if I feel it to be necessary. And, in fact, the review is actually pretty reasonable, even if it does seem to contain some mild moralizing.

(Well, I might mock their list of things-that-might-offend. Where, say, HBO tells you, "Violence; Nudity", they tell you "Brief comic drunkenness; comic depiction of grand larceny." It's really the second that makes me want to laugh.)

No, what mildly surprises and maybe a little confuses me is the notation that this film is:

One of the 15 films listed in the category "Art" on the Vatican film list. A National Catholic Register "Video/DVD Picks" film.

This is, ultimately a film that centers around a crime and its perpetrators and it's on the Vatican film list?

Weird.

Incidentally, I am guessing this is one of the movies that led Robert Heinlein to write, in Double Star (1956):

I needed a face as commonplace, as impossible to remember as the true face of the immortal Alec Guinness.

Well, OK, maybe that was actually about Kind Hearts and Coronets, wherein Alec Guiness plays as many characters as there are other actors.

The combination of channel surfing and googling brings me to The Unholy Biblical Subtexts and Other Religious Elements Built into Superman: The Movie (1978) and Superman II, in The Journal of Religion and Film.

I mean, let's be honest, Charlie's Angels isn't really a good movie by any rational standard. But, the image of Bill Murray and Tim Curry wrestling in padded sumo suits is, as far as I'm concerned, worth the rest of the two hours.

...the White Stripes discussing Nikolai Tesla. I don't know that there is a good way to get across the deep strangeness of this whole movie.

"No, I didn't blow a capacitor, Meg."

So, Saturday night we went to see Caesar and Cleopatra at Playmakers

I was looking forward to it quite a bit. I read the play when I was perhaps 14, and although, honestly, I couldn't remember huge chunks of it--as in almost any of it--a couple of things stuck with me for the last two decades.

One was Britannus, Caesar's Briton slave, obviously intended as a stand-in for a modern (which I believe would be Victorian) Briton, being affronted by the strangeness of other cultures. He is a useful and amusing foil for Caesar, though, as in this exchange:

bq.. THEODOTUS. Caesar: you are a stranger here, and not conversant with our laws. The kings and queens of Egypt may not marry except with their own royal blood. Ptolemy and Cleopatra are born king and consort just as they are born brother and sister.

BRITANNUS (shocked). Caesar: this is not proper.

THEODOTUS (outraged). How!

CAESAR (recovering his self-possession). Pardon him. Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

I do believe that Heinlein more or less rips off that very line.

And then of course there's the famous Cleopatra-in-the-rug scene.

Still, the bit I was looking forward to most, and, unfortunately, a bit that the producers almost entirely elided, was the address of Ra to the audience.

Quite simply, it is the author haranguing the audience. It is also, as with most things regarding human nature, all too pertinent today. He derides them for their passivity and conformity and ineffectualness, as well as the institutionalized deceit between men and women, much of it in an amusingly opaque way.

I mean, how many other such addresses would include the line:

Hearken to me then, oh ye: compulsorily educated ones.

The producers' clever little rewrite to admonish people to turn off their cell phones had neither the humor nor the wit of the original. I'm quite disappointed that all of the Project Gutenberg copies of the play do not include this address at all.

I won't even go into the blatant historical inaccuracies--though I will note that the explanatory text in the little playbook points out that while Shaw was apparently a rabid decrier of alterations to Shakespeare, he had no problem with hacking up history to fit his desired outcome.

I think the story--which is really an exposition on statecraft, although delivered without the didacticism you might expect--is ripe for the picking in Hollywood.

The rewrite would be easy: A young heiress, suddenly thrust into a position of leadership in the corporation her father ran, becomes involved with an older businessman who helped her father fight off a hostile takeover years before. He teaches her how to wield power effectively, helping her fight off her brother's attempts to take power for himself, but in the end she succumbs to her basically amoral nature as she utterly destroys one of her brothers advisors...

Where the hell is central casting?

OK, I reported before, with some trepidation, about plans to make a move of V for Vendetta.

It has become more interesting in that Natalie Portman may feature in it.

She's an interesting actress--her willingness to get involved in the massive charlie-foxtrot of schlock that is the Star Wars prequel trilogy aside.

I dunno.

Although there is definitely a soft white underbelly of overblown sentiment in this movie, there's also a good chunk of Michael Caine and Robert Duvall appearing to be having--and if you credit Caine's appearance on The Daily Show, having--a lot of fun, along with pretty decent work by Haley Joe Osment, who gives every sign of growing into a credible actor.

I was surprised to find, browsing on IMDb that one of his first film rolls was as Forrest Gump Jr. Oh, well, there's no accounting for coincidence.

Even weirder is to find that the director is planning to write and direct a film of Piers Anthony's A Spell for Chameleon, which I think is just too strange to transfer well to film.

reprint series. In fact, looking over a list of his published work, that's about all I think I was likely to have seen. I'm actually amazed that I've read so little of his stuff, because he certainly made an impression on me.

Well, I've also enjoyed reading Hellboy, with its wisecracking take on neo-Lovecraftian horror, but I just picked that up in the last year.

So, as I said some time ago (before the movie came out in theaters), I wasn't sure how I'd like the movie adaptation.

In fact, I liked it just fine. I don't think it was anything more than escapism, but I'm recovering from straining my back, and there are much worse ways to spend two hours stretched out on the couch. But, and I can't stress this enough, don't try and watch it with a pair of speakers whose cones have succumbed to dry rot. The constant flatulence is distracting.

I do believe we're going to have to go out and buy some new speakers tomorrow.

The Wachowski Brothers will be producing a movie of Alan Moore's V for Vendetta.

Now, V isn't bad--although it's hardly Alan Moore's best work, as it is lacking in subtlety in many spots--but I don't see how they won't do a Constantine on it--and let's face it, that's one movie I'm not intending to see in theaters, if at all.

I mean, to understand one of the first scenes in the story, you have to know what Guy Fawkes Day is about, and in a country where they had to re-title The Madness of King George III because people thought they'd missed the first two installments, well, that's just going to be too much.

I do find interesting this little tidbit:

The project has been around for years, with Romeo Is Bleeding writer Hilary Henkin taking a stab at it at one point, but without success, the trade paper reported.

I mean, that would definitely produce an interesting movie--??Romeo is Bleeding was...different. The scene where Lena Olin has Gary Oldman in a scissor hold from the backseat of his car, and he's obviously loosing control and is going to crash and she's laughing. That's fucked up.

So, I have to wonder, does it ever occur that people in Hollywood set out, ??Producers, to intentionally make a really, really bad movie?

Because, honestly, I can't come up with any other reason that An American Werewolf in Paris would have been made. I scanned it--ah, the joys of TiVo because I have a lot of affection for An American Werewolf in London, an altogether better, if lower budget, movie that, like Logan's Run, has the added bonus of having Jenny Agutter (who, I find, has not actually been in a movie I've seen since 1987) nekkid.

This brings up, an interesting, if trivial, question for which Google has not been able to produce an answer: in the movie, Julie Delpy character's name is Serafine (sometimes spelled Seraphine). In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, one of the characters, who is, incidentally, a werewolf, also has the name Seraphine, although she goes by Angua. So, is the name some sort reference that Google can't find, or is Terry Pratchett inexplicably a fan of the movie (since I believe the appearance of that name only dates back to 1999, a couple of years later)?

(Incidentally, there is a very weird site I stumbled upon in my search, Otaku World. Actually, it's not so much the site that is weird as the fact that they have "a whole section of "paper dolls. One of which is supposedly an illustration of Angua, although it looks nothing like any illustration I've seen before.)

And, finally, one of those weird bits of interconnectedness.

When I was four or five--while my mom and my infant brother and I were living in Birmingham with various relatives while my dad was stuck in Korea for a year (and I don't know how the fuck one maintains a relationship at that distance for that long; three months and a couple hundred miles is tough, I can't imagine that)--I insisted that I wanted to stay up and watch the movie Trilogy of Terror, and that I wouldn't be scared, etc.

(I suspect many people haven't seen the original, but The Simpson's Halloween episode where the Krusty doll comes to life and tries to kill Homer is based on it.)

Anyway, predictably, I was scared shitless. I had nightmares from that movie for years (comments on the IMDB message board suggest others did, too).

The author? ??William F. Nolan, co-author of the afore-mentioned Logan's Run.

Well, first, I'm glad to see William Gibson is back blogging..

But, much more important than that, Peter Weir (whose film The Wave I should probably view again sometime, to see if it's as confusing now as it was when I saw it at 10 or 11) is currently slated to direct a movie of Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition.

Although I haven't re-read it yet, I think PR is probably Gibson's best novel, period. Yes, better than Neuromancer, if, perhaps, less ground-breaking.

Oops, I let my note get synced over before I wrote the entry.

Anyway, the other day I watched Dinner Rush, which is an amusing enough little film. There are many worse ways to spend a couple of hours.

However, I also caught pieces of The Royal Tenanbaums today, and that lookd to be a much more impressive way to spend your time.

Resident Evil, on the other hand, should be avoided at all costs. Milla Jovovich could have done the whole movie naked and I still wouldn't be able to say anything good about it.

I just don't know. I mean, I really have no clue at all. No, that's not true. I have lots of clues, and I have theories and ideas, and they all end up falling apart when I try to articulate them.

Now, I should note that I probably missed the first twenty minutes of the movie, but I'm not unfamiliar with what happens at the beginning, so I don't feel like I'm missing the key ingredient that makes it all work.

I also don't feel like I can say anything substantial without running real risk of ruining it for others, although I'm not sure exalcty how that would work since I don't know that I believe anyone could really come up with a straight reading of this movie.

The fact is, Donnie Darko probably doesn't stand up to specific, detailed dissection, any more than, say, many Phillip K. Dick novels do--for instance, Martian Time Slip, which is brings somewhat to mind (it might bring it more to mind if I remembered it better, but I've only read it once and, well, it's pretty convoluted.

But, like the best of Dick's work, even when it doesn't stand up to careful logical analysis, even when it just doesn't quite work, it's amazing to watch. It's wonderful to see someone try that hard even if they fail spectacularly. And I don't think Donnie Darko fails spectacularly, though I do think it fails in some respects--I can't imagine how it could not.

I will say that it has one moment in it that I found gut-wrenching; I don't know why, but there are occasionaly scenes in movies that make me physically ill. I often feel stupid about it, but there's something in their simple random reality that my mind rebels against.

The car crash in the otherwise mundane Patriot Games is one (in part, I suspect, because I had, a short time before, been in a fairly violent crash, even if I came out unharmed). The final scene in The Piano between Holly Hunter and Sam O'Neill is another. I can't think of any others off-hand, but I suspect you'll recognize the scene I'm thinking of in Donnie Darko when you see it.

Of course, it's now creeping up on Midnight, and I've got work to do tomorrow, so I think I'm gonna check out now. Perhaps I'll type up some "Where's Mike been" updates at the coffee shop in the morning.