with 'films' tag
we went to see ratatouille last night, and it met every one of my expectations. brad bird really is a genius when it comes to animation.
most of the previews before the movie were real clunkers (mr. bean’s holiday was the worst), but the trailer for the simpsons movie was great to see on the big-screen. i can’t wait for the film
the picture is of me as a simpsons character, more or less, thanks to the official movie site. my wife celia made one too.
now it’s not like i have a shelf of simpsons toys in my bathroom, but i am a pretty big simpsons fan. the directv dvr in our bedroom is set to record episodes, and i will often watch one while i’m waiting for celia to finish her nightly routine.
25 days!
knocked up is very funny, with rich characters and fantastic acting. but the plot is strikingly unsurprising. it doesn’t drag the movie down, but it is disappointing how weak the story is in comparison to everything else. and seth rogen could not be more perfectly suited to the lead role. so much so that while the 40 year old virgin ratcheted up steve carell’s career, i don’t think the same will happen for rogen.
the rebel, or dòng máu anh hùng , was the closing night film at the vc filmfest 2007, as well as the winner of the grand jury prize for narrative films.
the film is amazing. it is set in 1920s vietnam, where the french have hired vietnamese agents to hunt down the rebels who are fighting for independence. there is a lot of action, and all of the acting is fantastic. unlike a lot of the wuxia films that have been popular recently, the fight scenes aren’t too over-the-top, and the plot is actually reasonably credible and well-developed.
john august does a great job of explaining the problems in spider-man 3. he doesn’t point out how egregious the scenes of peter parker acting cocky were, though. people who say this is better than either of the previous two have something wrong in their heads.
300 is gory (but not as ridiculous as sin city was), stylish, and fun. and almost as homoerotic as professional wrestling.
*thud*
the other day, my fiancée celia said she was surprised that i hadn’t been writing anything about what she’s been working on. the biggest reason is just that i’m not sure how much i can say — she always obfuscates things and i wouldn’t want to screw things up by saying the wrong thing about the wrong person.
early in the whole writing process of her current project, about the time we were getting our engagement party together, i was fixing some rice krispie treats in the kitchen area of my old loft. i heard this thud which sounded exactly like a body falling on concrete. when i turned around, i saw she was sprawled out on the floor. my first thought is that it was a very odd pratfall, but once i got over to make sure she was okay and it was clear she had fainted, it became a lot less funny.
she has been fine since then, even through six more months of rewrites. and now she is once again close to the finish line (and it looks like it might not move once she reaches it this time) — until it moves on to the next stage and there are more rewrites.
i read most of the iterations of the script, except for the last few. it is interesting to see the process, and to see how it compares and contrasts with the types of projects i’ve done. unsurprisingly, i guess, you see the same sorts of dysfunctions (problems with decision making, shifting deadlines, communication breakdowns, etc).
she has been off at dov s-s simens two-day film school this weekend, and then it’s time for one more round of script polishing before it goes out to be read by important people.
i don’t think that deal means what you think it means
so blockbuster and the weinstein co. have announced that blockbuster signed a deal to be the exclusive renter for weinstein co. films.
too bad there is no such thing as rental rights. i suggest some of the people involved may want to read up on the first-sale doctrine.
all i can see this meaning is that netflix will end up paying less favorable rates for the weinstein co. films that they choose to stock, and weinstein co.’s less successful films will have even poorer distribution. but if weinstein co. releases a successful film and ever sells it on dvd, there is no way that netflix is not going to carry it.
more movie review catch-up
- gridiron gang: totally predictable but still fun.
- all the king’s men: a big waste of talent.
- little miss sunshine: finely honed indie road picture.
- talladega nights: the ballad of ricky bobby: knee-slapping funny without being mean.
- world trade center: remarkable restraint from oliver stone.
miami vice: beautifully shot, but otherwise pedestrian.
where is that monkey, i need to shoot something
pirates of the caribbean: dead man’s chest: bad guy is terrible muppet.
the illusionist: biel’s ass is only magic.
two more movies, ten more words
the devil wears prada: stanley tucci has great taste.
rebel without a cause: dated, but still a classic.
ten words, two movies
nacho libre: very sweet, quite funny, nacho!
an inconvenient truth: we are all boiling frogs.
five-word movie review roundup
- mission: impossible iii: better than expected, except cruise.
- black hawk down: great, but everyone looks alike.
- x-men: the last stand: please really be the last.
i like being tragic
the joy luck club is just a little too drippy, and the non-flashback portions haven’t aged well (and are the drippiest). but i’m told that watching it has put me several months ahead into understanding my new family-to-be.
love actually is one of those sprawling ensemble pieces that just doesn’t quite gel. we watched it so i could see the scene with the gospel choir at the wedding in the beginning of the movie, which is a clever little scene.
the most photographed city in the world
my fiancée celia and i went to go see los angeles plays itself at the egyptian theatre the other night. it’s a documentary about how los angeles has appeared in films over the years, and the writer/director is pretty critical of how the city is portrayed.
i had seen praise for the film, but i don’t think it quite lived up to the hype. a lot of the film footage is of questionable quality, the narration can be fairly tedious at times, and it’s just too long. the few film clips showing the now-gone richfield building did make my heart skip a beat.
i’d say it is still worth seeing if you can find a screening and you’re a nut about los angeles, but it’s not a must-see film if you’re more casual in your interest.
you were the prettiest one there
friends with money is like crash without all the tedious racial posturing. which means that it is a movie with the narrow westside los angeles mindset, and as the movie goes on you’ll develop the strong desire to kick every main character in the head.
we went to this when we didn’t make it into the mission: impossible iii premiere. we just ended up getting a couple of crappy t-shirts from that.
movie review catch-up
better luck tomorrow is a jumpy little independent film (picked up and released by mtv films) about some asian-american high schoolers who end up running a criminal enterprise on the side. what made it a little more jumpy for me is that i was tired and nodded off periodically. (not because of the movie — i was tired!)
ray is a great biopic, and jamie foxx does a great job portraying ray charles.
a bronx tale is a fun coming-of-age story set around gangsters in the bronx. it was written by chazz palminteri and directed by robert de niro, so you can sort of guess at the tone and quality.
breakfast at tiffany’s is undeniably a classic, but now that it has been a month or two since we watched it, i find that i can recall very little of it. (except mickey rooney’s performance, which is best forgotten.)
i’m not picking, i’m scratching
there are a few funny gags lurking within the benchwarmers, but jon heder certainly can’t carry the movie on his napoleon dynamite schtick, and you know there’s trouble when rob schneider is your macho male lead, supposedly married to molly sims.
if you’re not willing to sound stupid you don’t deserve to be in love
a lot like love is a little gem of a romantic movie, although i see now that it got really bad reviews when it was released. amanda peet is great, ashton kutcher doesn’t stink up the place, and it all fits together remarkably well. there’s a lot of little details and moments in the film that feel right, and make it easier to suspend some of the disbelief about how the lives of these two can keep intersecting.
(and for people who like to see places they know on-screen, there’s a scene that was shot in cole’s.)
chaos
ask the dust is set in los angeles in the depression, and one of the best things about the movie was the few shots of los angeles, like angels flight at its original third street location. celia thought they should have included more shots of salma hayek’s tits. (and i’m not going to argue with that.)
v for vendetta is entirely unlike ask the dust, but it was also a letdown. subtle as a box of hammers, and i thought it fell short on the action front. but there were a couple of flashy effects that were worth seeing on the big screen.
i haven’t eaten since later this afternoon
primer is a good film, and an absolutely amazing micro-budget independent film. it is probably the best time travel film i’ve ever seen, and it looks incredible for its reported $7,000 budget. the story is a bit confusing, but dealing with paradoxes can be like that.
he’s got burritos and huevos rancheros, too
celia and i watched camp recently, which is about a group of kids at a summer theatre camp where they put on new shows every two weeks, leading up to a big final benefit at the end of the summer. the story and dialogue is pretty painful in spots, but the performances of various musical numbers makes up for that. so if you have even just a passing interesting in musical theatre, you’ll probably enjoy the film.
don’t forget the dash
they were shooting a scene for spider-man 3 at the farmers and merchants national bank last friday. i was in vegas while the actual shooting was happening, but i took some pictures of how they dressed the building. my girlfriend celia was in the neighborhood while they were shooting, and the scene involved someone zipping down on to a cab that had been flipped over. i understand that the real highlight was the little person in a spider-man costume that was hanging out around bar 107. i’m sure she’ll post those pictures soon.
update: celia posted her pictures from the shoot.
stop chasing the mice inside your skull
i was pretty massively underwhelmed by munich. it could have easily been cut in half without losing anything. the film looks and sounds great, of course. the recreation of the kidnapping of the athletes is particularly well done. the review by todd mcarthy of variety pretty much sums up my feelings on the film.
wherever she is, that’s where my home is
celia and i finished watching the notebook last night. the twist to the framing for the story is pretty transparent, but the whole film is redeemed by the chemistry between ryan gosling and rachel mcadams. the scene where they row a boat out among some ducks looks amazing.
they don’t like it either
celia and i saw a screening of transamerica last night, and it is easy to see why felicity huffman got the golden globe and is a front-runner for the oscar. one great thing is that it is consistently a road picture — you keep expecting an issue movie to break out, but it never really happens. it’s about the journey, and fairly universal issues of acceptance and love. it just happens that the protagonist is a pre-op transsexual.
after the screening, there was a q&a with huffman and duncan tucker, the writer/director. one thing that tucker pointed out is that the film parallels the lord of the rings, which is also referenced when a character explains why the trilogy is “so gay.” huffman was very funny, and of course someone asking a question brought up sports night, which i bet she hears a lot.
aftermath
celia and i ate some of the cupcakes last night, and also some of the the best lasagna ever. some generic lactaid prevented me from exploding like a cheese-eating pug.
we only made it through about half of the notebook.
as you can see, i took heed of eric’s reminder about the los angeles flower market, and also added a vase from chinatown to the mix. there were also some tulips that i snuck into her car before she left for work.
it was my best valentine’s day ever, how about you?
it doesn’t stink
celia and i watched blue car the other night, and about all i can remember is that it involved a blue car. other than that, it was a fairly generic first-time-director indie film.
but don’t trust me. i like bubble boy, and this got widespread good reviews.
celia and i watched happy endings the other night, which as a whole falls just a little bit short of its performances and soundtrack. maggie gyllenhaal is particularly amazing, both acting and singing. bobby cannavale is also great as the masseur (with the happy endings). the title cards that comment on some of the scenes are pretty heavy-handed, but at least don’t sink the movie.
like big rolling kegs
hedwig and the angry inch is a brilliant rock musical. hedwig is an east german transexual (almost — thus the angry inch) whose story is told in flashback as she tours with her band in venues in the shadow of the large concerts by the boy who spurned her and stole her songs. the songs are pretty much all works of genius, especially “the origin of love.”
syriana is a tight political thriller, and i think the rumblings about the complicated plot are largely overblown. it all pulls together in the end, and when i think people are responding to is the lack of clear good and bad guys. the performances are all stellar, and the direction is fantastic. there’s a scene involving an accident with a child that is just incredible in how it is handled.
rize is a documentary by photographer and music video director david lachapelle, and it was a real disappointment. it’s a chronicle of the clowning and krumping dance movements in south los angeles, and it veers from self-important and heavy-handed to not terribly interesting. the best-looking parts are entirely too good-looking, like clips from a music video. i think this was most disappointing because it could have been so good in the hands of a more capable documentary filmmaker.
lazy sunday
celia and i went to see capote at the arclight on sunday. it is easy to see why philip seymour hoffman picked up the golden globe for his performance, because it is pretty amazing. i was also really impressed by the sound design (and score) — there was a lot of effective use of just ambient noise.
after the movie, we tried the cream puffs at beard papa at hollywood and highland. they’re very tasty, but they aren’t the same sort of revelation as a fresh krispy kreme donut.
shadows flash in the light
celia and i went to the screening of metropolis at the orpheum last friday. it was the digitally restored version, and this wikipedia article explains the differences from earlier releases.
we got a drink at the broadway bar before the film, and more at the golden gopher afterwards, so the list of downtown bars i’ve actually been to is now a little less meager.
despite my earlier repair job, my bed broke again this weekend. i’m not going to repair it again and give it a chance for a third strike, so i’m in the market for a new bed now. maybe i should build a bed frame using iron pipe.
i outrank you!
the producers (the original film version) is very funny, but i came into it tainted by the recent version. i can see how people who saw this first, and closer to its original release, can view it with such reverence, but i think there are some things that are better about each version. the thing that really shines in the original are the performances, which are all hilarious. the remake, in addition to adding a number of brilliant musical numbers, has a better pacing and i think it just fits together better.
this shit’s chess, it ain’t checkers
training day is a fine film in the corrupt-lapd-cops tradition. (like the shield, which has its season five premiere tonight.) denzel washington does an amazing job, and the role is nearly the complete opposite of anything else i can remember seeing him in.
training day is also partially set in the part of los angeles that ryan of losanjealous likes (along with hexod.us). gritty, but still sunny.
i dug a hole
the castle is a goofy little australian film about a family fighting to save its home from an eminent domain land-grab to expand the airport they live next to. but it’s really about the quirky family, and their blind geniality, especially the dad’s.
sleeping the big sleep
the big sleep, the 1978 version, is unsurprisingly not as good as the bogart/bacall incarnation. the setting is 1970s england, apparently before the bra had been invented. this version is more faithful to the book (and actually sees the story to conclusion), but the acting is pretty universally flat, if not bad.
2005 in review: films
it’s not the one-a-day pace that some people go for, but i ended up averaging over one film per week. (and more than that, really — i didn’t usually write up anything for movies i watched on the cable networks.)
i’m not sure i would call it my favorite film i watched this year, but pirates of the caribbean: the curse of the black pearl was the film that most impressed me. i’d say eternal sunshine of the spotless mind and der krieger und die kaiserin are the closest to claiming the title of favorite. the station agent, heist, and the 40 year-old virgin were also all great.
- the life aquatic with steve zissou (review)
- house of flying daggers (review)
- sideways (review)
- bendito infierno (review)
- in good company (review)
- be cool (review)
- robots (review)
- melinda and melinda (review)
- sin city (review)
- kung fu hustle (review)
- the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy (review)
- star wars: episode iii - revenge of the sith (review)
- assault on precinct 13 (review)
- assault on precinct 13 (review)
- crash (review)
- mean girls (review)
- batman begins (review)
- bubba ho-tep (review)
- war of the worlds (review)
- butterfly and sword (review)
- the day after (review)
- the day after tomorrow (review)
- charlie and the chocolate factory (review)
- wedding crashers (review)
- carrie (review)
- quatermass and the pit (review)
- equilibrium (review)
- pirates of the caribbean: the curse of the black pearl (review)
- the 40 year-old virgin (review)
- the bourne identity (review)
- the transporter 2 (review)
- eternal sunshine of the spotless mind (review)
- say it isn’t so (review)
- crimen ferpecto (review)
- kill bill: vol. 1 (review)
- kill bill: vol. 2 (review)
- serenity (review)
- corpse bride (review)
- the aristocrats (review)
- madadayo (review)
- o (review)
- heartbreakers (review)
- serenity (review)
- stark raving mad (review)
- spartan (review)
- der krieger und die kaiserin (review)
- artificial intelligence: ai (review)
- saved! (review)
- heist (review)
- elf (review)
- the girl next door (review)
- dodgeball: a true underdog story (review)
- the big sleep (review)
- the station agent (review)
- king kong (review)
- harold & kumar go to white castle (review)
- the producers (review)
- donnie darko (review)
- bad santa (review)
- the chronicles of narnia: the lion, the witch and the wardrobe (review)
hence the weeping
i decided to see the chronicles of narnia: the lion, the witch and the wardrobe because the books are the first substantial series i remember reading (or actually, having read to me, in part, if i remember correctly). the movie was pretty good — the effects were just a notch below the lord of the rings trilogy, the acting was good to great (particularly the girl who played lucy), and even if the world is a bizarre mash-up of mythology and animals, it comes together well.
i suppose you can’t avoid talking about the christian subtext of the plot, but frankly it sailed right over my head. if anything, i think the “magic loophole” that brings aslan back to life comes off as trite.
the three b’s
bad santa is an incredibly profane holiday movie. i really wasn’t expecting much, but billy bob thornton really owns the role of a bad mall santa, and what’s not to like about lauren graham as a santa fetishist?
hungry hungry hippos
donnie darko is an odd film. it is beautifully shot and acted, and i would likely appreciate the story more if i had the patience to watch it again. perhaps the mistake was in getting the director’s cut, which is almost certainly more languidly paced than the original, since it clocks in with an extra twenty minutes.
the producers is very funny.
the universe tends to unfold as it should
harold & kumar go to white castle is one of those movies that is exactly what you expect going in, and hits all the right notes. neil patrick harris has a hilarious cameo as himself.
and this aside from roger ebert’s review of the movie is genius: “Many people believe the names of In 'n Out and Steak 'n Shake perfectly describe the contrast in bedroom techniques between the coast and the heartland.”
kong!
king kong is too long, but i am not sure what you could really cut out without losing something worth keeping. naomi watts does a great job as the beauty taming the beast of kong, and it is almost possible to accept jack black as the producer who brings king kong to broadway (but, unfortunately, only almost). and the effects are amazing, of course.
trains and blimps
the station agent is a quiet movie filled with awkward silences. just my sort of film. there are also some beautifully composed shots, and the acting is top-notch.
wine and film
the big sleep isn’t the film i was supposed to watch last night — it was supposed to be the big sleep, but the wrong version was in the envelope. i’ve seen the bogart/bacall version before, and was curious to see what the 1970s london take on the story was like. now i’ll have to wait for the right version to be sent, but the bogart/bacall version will be more fresh in my mind so i can compare the two.
i finished off a bottle of trader joe’s coastal cabernet sauvignon 2004 along with the movie (and dinner), and it wasn’t terrible for a $4 bottle of wine. but it wasn’t great, either.
and yes, using a telephoto lens to take that wine bottle picture was totally gratuitous.
a sport of violence, exclusion, and degradation
dodgeball: a true underdog story is funnier than it should be. none of the acting is particularly good, the plot is about as predictable as it possibly could be, and yet it is all redeemed by actually being really funny. it also has some of the most brilliant cameo appearances in recent memory, including david hasselhoff.
check out that side boob
the girl next door is your classic porn-star-falls-in-love-with-guy, guy-acts-like-a-creep, guy-redeems-himself-and-porn-star movie.
i mean, what porn star isn’t really just a good-hearted girl yearning to pursue a normal guy, fall in love, and step into a normal life?
that’s realistic, right?
cotton-headed ninny-muggins
elf is a fun holiday film. it does a good job of evoking the old stop-animation holiday specials, and jon favreau love of practical special effects (versus cgi effects) really turns out well. and zooey deschanel can sing.
cute as a pail full of kittens
heist is almost exactly what you would expect from a movie of that title from david mamet. gene hackman and danny devito are brilliant, but so is all of the supporting cast, such as ricky jay (who had most of my favorite lines).
the plot is probably the weakest element, but the more i think about it, the better it is. i was expecting a little more flash, but i think the film really pulls off a more moderate and realistic heist.
the dialogue crackles, of course. one particularly great line: “My motherfucker is so cool, when he goes to bed, sheep count him.”
in an odd bit of serendipity, today (and tomorrow?) they’re shooting scenes in my neighborhood for the pilot of heist, a possible 24/prison break/the wire/murder one-style series about a jewelry heist that unfolds over a season. they’re using the farmers & merchants national bank.
speaking of murder one, they finally released the first season and the second (last) season on dvd.
traffik is the 1989 british television miniseries that steven soderbergh’s film traffic was derived from, along with the more recent usa network version of the miniseries, also called traffic.
the miniseries shares two of its three major story arcs with the film version, and naturally is set in britain (and pakistan), rather than the united states. at the time, the series was remarkable for showing the drug trade at such different levels, and what motivated the participants beyond a simple good/evil distinction. i think that has been done better since then, such as in the wire, but traffik deserves credit for breaking the ground.
saved! is a teen comedy set in a religious (born-again) high school. it does a pretty remarkable job of threading the needle of being funny without being too broad or focusing on easy targets.
for the soundtrack (over the opening and closing credits), mandy moore does a cover of “god only knows” by the beach boys, but it falls far short of the original.
jena malone really does look like mary-louise parker’s daughter, too. and on the commentary with mandy moore, it is funny how often she says “gosh” and “totally.”
can you get a human to love them back?
artificial intelligence: ai is no 2001: a space odyssey or e.t. the extra-terrestrial or close encounters of the third kind, but does blend in elements of all of them. it’s beautiful, but it goes on way too long.
i think there are two extremes that can be reached by a story that two brilliant filmmakers have been working on for a very long time: it can be tight, spare, and tell its essential story without a lot of fat. or it can end up too long, too over-thought, and have too many ideas. ai falls too far towards the latter.
there will be a screening of the new film version of the producers at the orpheum theatre in downtown los angeles on december 14, 2005. you can buy tickets online ($50/person for non-reserved seating, or $150/person for reserved seats and a vip reception), and the proceeds benefit la’s best after school arts program.
der krieger und die kaiserin (or the princess and the warrior, as it was titled for american release) is a re-teaming of director tom tykwer and actress franka potente, who also did run lola run together. as you might guess from the title, it has a bit of a fairy-tale quality to it.
it has a totally different energy than run lola run, but it is a pretty amazing film. every scene has a couple of layers to it, and it really doesn‘t fall into any easy genres, although it is a little bit of a heist film, a little bit of a romantic film, and is partially set at an insane asylum, with all the characters that brings with it.
the film is set in wuppertal, germany, and has some scenes of (and set in) the schwebebahn wuppertal, which is a suspension monorail that looks incredible.
spartan is a david mamet film starring val kilmer as a special ops officer trying to track down the daughter of a high-ranking government official. (it’s sort of implied it is the president.) it’s not at all flashy, but i think it also fails to spark. the dialogue is classic mamet, of course.
i stumbled in getting discs in the mail the last few days, so now my flow of movies to/from netflix is all screwed up, and i’ve got one movie to last through the weekend. (i only have one book from the library, too.)
i decided that since i owned the soundtrack, i should actually get around to seeing stark raving mad. (the soundtrack was done by john digweed and nick muir.) it turns out that it is a heist movie where the bank robbery is being done behind the scenes at a rave. it’s a pretty decent heist movie, with a few interesting twists but not too much that comes as a surprise. one of the funniest scenes involves dave foley playing an undercover fbi agent who ends up having another connection to the rave.
listening to a bit of the commentary, the directors seemed very proud of themselves that they had captured the feel of a rave, and while i guess they did a good job of that (not that i would really know), i think groove is a much better-looking film. stark raving mad has a few too many jump-cuts, and the cinematography isn’t as crisp as what i remember from groove.
i took the gold line out to pasadena today to catch serenity before it totally disappeared from theaters, and i’m glad i made the effort. it’s a great film, and a great wrap-up to the series. and given the box-office performance, it appears that may be all it will be.
heartbreakers is a film that somehow didn’t get purged from my netflix queue when i cleaned it up, and then happened to bubble up to the top of the list due to poor queue management. i’m not sure that the film has much of a reason to exist outside of showcasing jennifer love hewitt’s breasts. okay, that’s harsh. it a pretty harmless, if somewhat bland, comedy.
o is a modern take on william shakespeare’s othello. while it is apparently quite faithful to the plot, the setting has been shifted to high school with basketball as the backdrop. it’s quite good, although it isn’t nearly as aggressive as baz luhrmann’s romeo + juliet.
i actually own a copy of the complete works of shakespeare, of which i have embarrassingly read very little. i’ve certainly seen more films based on shakespeare’s plays than i’ve seen as plays. but i would still put myself down as someone who likes shakespeare. go figure.
not bursting into tears
i went up to hollywood to see serenity at the arclight only to find it wasn’t playing. bastards. i almost went to see wallace & gromit: the curse of the were-rabbit instead, but the next showtime wasn’t for almost two hours.
so i got sucked into amoeba records instead. the damage:
- songs for young lovers & swing easy by frank sinatra
- ego tripping at the gates of hell by the flaming lips
- northern star by groove armada
- the antidote by morcheeba
- palookavilla by fatboy slim
i also finally got some reasonable placemats for my kitchen table. next thing you know, i’ll get some dirt and gravel and actually plant the herbs in the portable herb garden in the center of the kitchen table. or maybe that will take another few years.
solid gold
madadayo is akira kurosawa’s final film, about a professor who retires once he decides he can live on the income from his writing, and his former students who honor him with a birthday party each year where he proclaims “madadayo! (not yet!)” when they ask “mahda-kai? (are you ready?)”
there are a few particularly brilliant sequences in the film, but one of the things that really grabbed me was one of the first shots, when the professor walks into his classroom and there is a cloud of smoke hanging in the air.
it is a deliberately paced film, and i’m sure not for everyone, but i really enjoyed it.
steven spielberg has signed up to do three games with electronic arts. no word on whether that includes a steven spielberg’s director’s chair sequel. the smart money is on no.
here is one of the in-game movies. here’s another. this audio is from a recording session for preliminary versions of the game.
the aristocrats is a very funny documentary. i think my favorite rendition of the joke is the one by the mime, although the south park version is also great.
chicken little doesn’t come out until november 4.
no serenity yet, but the aristocrats is playing at the laemmle grande this weekend.
this askmefi question is the latest of a recurring theme of questions. here are some other variations on that theme. (no, i did not ask any of them.)
i wonder if there are other recurring themes on askmefi that would make a good movie.
free museums
twenty-four los angeles museums are free tomorrow, october 1. that includes moca and the japenese american national museum downtown. (spotted by art.blogging.la.)
also, there’s a screening tomorrow night of infamy, a documentary about graffiti artists by doug pray, director of hype! and scratch.
this hasn’t happened in a while: a movie i want to see, serenity, isn’t playing at the laemmle grande. for a small theater, they have generally been good at getting the movies i want to see. maybe next week. (but then that’s when the wallace & gromit film is supposed to open….)
speaking of films, i saw corpse bride while on vacation, and it is pretty much what you would expect from a tim burton animation project. great design, pretty good story, good voice acting from johnny depp and helena bonham carter and others, decent soundtrack from danny elfman, etc. it’s not quite as good as the nightmare before christmas was, and too short, but i’d still recommend it.
the moxie cinema is an independent movie theater that opened today in springfield, missouri. the best thing from this distance is that they blogged the whole experience of opening the theater. it’s a great story. more small businesses should do something similar.
i was a little surprised at how different kill bill: vol. 1 and kill bill: vol. 2 were. the first is much more action-centered, and the second is more character-driven. i have to say i liked the first more — the second just had a few too many parts that were too slow. but the two movies really shine as a pair of complementary works.
my impression of the second is probably also colored by having fallen asleep during the last fifteen minutes. that never does a good thing for my impression of a film, even when it’s just because i was tired and not really the fault of the movie.
when you discuss movies about los angeles, chinatown is likely to be near the top of everyone’s list. it’s playing at the arclight on wednesday as part of the afi at arclight series. there’s also a screening of the player coming up on september 20.
no word on when the crocodile dundee in los angeles screening is.
march of the penguins, which is an apparent bright spot in a lackluster summer for the hollywood studios, started out with what sounds like really terrible voiceover work that was replaced with the narration by morgan freeman.
the most amazing part may be is that this was apparently done at the behest of the studio (warner bros.).
crimen ferpecto is a black comedy from spain about a department store salesman, his rivalry with another salesman to become the floor manager, and his relationships with the women he works with. it is pretty funny, but it doesn’t quite live up to its potential. it has a bit of that classic romantic comedy feel, but it doesn’t keep topping itself like down with love did.
say it isn’t so isn’t as terrible as i thought it would be. it’s not great, but it is pretty competently put together. there was at least one shot where i thought “that looks too good to be in this movie.”
and let’s face it, i’d watch rollergirl read the phone book. and that’s a good thing, because chris klein basically has the acting range of a phone book.
okay, that’s probably too harsh. but i thought it was funny.
eternal sunshine of the spotless mind is an amazing film. i think it is a bit of a travesty that it only won the oscar for best screenplay, and the only other oscar nomination it got was for kate winslet. but i am glad the screenplay won — i had a vague memory that it had lost, which is why i double-checked.
the transporter 2 is exactly what i expected: a totally preposterous action film that was a lot of fun. if you liked the transporter (and i did), you’ll surely like this one.
the 40 year-old virgin is a very funny film. it was another long comedy like wedding crashers, but it also doesn’t really suffer for it. i think it would have been better without the last three or four minutes. there’s a perfect scene for it to end on, and the ones afterward are either obvious or gratuitous. not bad — they just don’t really make the film any better.
re-animator is playing at the egyptian theatre tonight at 7pm, followed by a q&a with the director.
“speaking in my official capacity as a pulitzer prize winner, mr. schneider, your movie sucks.” — roger ebert, reviewing deuce bigalow: european gigolo
equilibrium is a movie that is seems good, but seems to be lacking some vital ingredient. it’s like a loaf of bread baked without salt. it does have a couple of pretty snazzy action scenes, and the underlying idea is sort of neat, if well-worn.
quatermass and the pit is vintage british scifi, with all the good and bad that implies. in the end, i was disappointed by how choppy the story is, with just a few too many leaps of logic on the part of the scientists.
it’s also another one of those films i probably appreciated less than i might have because i fell asleep while i was watching it the first time.
more academy qualification screenings
some more movies being screened at the laemmle grande 4-plex in downtown los angeles. it’s like downtown’s own little documentary film festival.
- abel raises cain: a documentary about alan abel, a grand-scale prankster.
- blitz attack: the andrea hines story: a documentary about the murder of a girl by her 13-year old friend.
- dimmer: a short documentary about a blind teenager growing up in a rough neighborhood in buffalo.
- lady of the house: a short documentary about a feminine young male doing chores in the house he shares with his partner.
- one six right: a documentary about van nuys airport.
- the boys of baraka: a documentary about twenty boys from baltimore who attend a boarding school in kenya.
- the devil’s miner: a documentary about a 14 year-old miner who worships the devil.
- the letter: an american town and the ‘somali invasion’: a documentary about a mayor in maine who sent an open letter after 9/11 to his town’s somali residents telling them to ask other somalis not to move to their town.
- the seed of faith: a short documentary about situations where “hope and faith are the key to survival.”
the site for one six right mentions that they expect all of the showings to sell out, so maybe that applies to all of these screenings in general. and here i had figured that they were probably playing to some empty houses just to satisfy the academy qualification requirements.
carrie is a good film to see at the hollywood forever cemetery, although the only time i was ever really conscious of being in a cemetery was when walking out.
the cinespia event was pretty packed — we ended up at the back of the crowd. the walk-in line spiraled in on itself, and it took at least a half hour from getting in line to getting through the door. the lines of cars for the free parking was also pretty incredible, and unless you happened to get a spot right by the exit, getting out was clearly an exercise in patience.
when i was walking back to the subway afterwards, the furthest away that i saw anyone parked was right near gower and de longpre. so if you happen to live right near there, and have not been to a cinespia event, you’ve really got no excuse.
(thanks to shannon for posting about carrie and providing the push for me to go to one of the cinespia showings, which are one of those things i had heard about but never gotten my act together to go.)
the devil and daniel johnston is playing at the laemmle grande 4-plex through monday — at 10am each day.
this must be an oscar® qualifying run, but at first i couldn’t see how running at 10am is “advertised and exploited during its los angeles run in a manner considered normal and customary to the industry.” but this is a documentary, so there’s a rule 12 exception, which just specifies that it has to be run between 10am and midnight for seven consecutive days.
goofy. i may have to check it out this weekend.
i saw charlie and the chocolate factory, and i quite enjoyed it. there are some ways it falls short of willy wonka & the chocolate factory, but it definitely exceeds it in the quality of the special effects. i particularly thought the ending of the willy wonka version was more satisfying. and seeing the other children again near the end was very much a case of one too many special effects.
the gimmick of using one actor for the oompa loompas worked well, but i found it nearly impossible to make out some of the lyrics of the songs, which were amazing aside from that.
yesterday and the day before that
yesterday i watched the day after, the 1983 television movie about a nuclear exchange with the soviet union and its aftermath. it is showing its age, and its a little amazing to think how plausible that scenario seemed in the early 1980s. there was one little throwaway comment that seemed particularly funny given subsequent events — the conflict between the soviet union and the united states is triggered when west germany is cut off (again), and as a group of students are gathered around a radio listening to updates about what is happening, one of the students says they aren’t worried about the conflict escalating because it is just germany — but she’d be worried if it were in the middle east.
i think the thing that is most amazing to me about the film is that just barely twenty years later, i’m working side-by-side (virtually) with a number of amazing developers in and from the former soviet union.
the day before yesterday, i watched the day after tomorrow. there was a lot of hand-wringing about the politics of the movie when it came out, but at its core it is just an old-fashioned disaster flick. it’s not a terrible film, but it certainly doesn’t rise very far from its genre. and it’s hard to take bubble boy in an even slightly serious role.
butterfly and sword is a movie with many flaws, but it makes up for it with some of its over-the-top fight scenes and a few really amazing shots. the editing is really choppy, some of the effects are cheesy, and the plot is just barely coherent. but i’ll forgive all of that for the scene where a carriage is carried into place among the treetops and anchored into place by ribbons that shoot out of it. some of the acting is pretty good, too.
“you make me want to be a better man.” — jack nicholson as melvin udall in as good as it gets, screenplay by mark andrus and james l. brooks
“they say all native californians come from iowa.” — fred macmurray as walter neff in double indemnity, screenplay by billy wilder
if there is one thing that redeems war of the worlds, it is that it is so entirely inconsequential that i will have completely forgotten it by tomorrow. it will be like i blacked out for three hours this afternoon. it sucked so hard that (i hope) my brain will simply purge the memory of it.
bubba ho-tep is a bit of a cult classic, but i have to say i was a bit underwhelmed. a large part of that is probably because i failed to stay awake through the whole thing — twice. so there’s a chunk of the middle/end that i didn’t see.
there are some great moments: the flashback explaining how elvis traded places with an impersonator, the interplay between campbell as elvis and ossie davis as john f. kennedy, and the decoration of jfk’s room.
maybe i’ll have to try again some day when i can make it through the whole film. but for now, i’ve got another 100 films in my netflix queue to work through.
the recent movie crash is being turned into a television series for fx.
batman begins is surprisingly good. i hadn’t really planned on seeing it, but having heard several positive comments about it, decided to give it a shot. it was just a little bit too long, and you could have cut katie holmes out of it without really losing anything important, but otherwise it hit all the right notes. i think what really helped is that the movie is about batman — and he’s not overshadowed by the villians. it was more character driven, like the spider-man films have been. now we’ll see how long it takes them to drive the franchise into the ground again.
the story about how much the producers of mad hot ballroom had to pay for music rights caused quite a furor, but i think some people took an unfortunate focus on the total cost ($140,000) and portrayed that as the outrageous figure. considering the film, through last weekend, grossed over $2 million (and easily looks headed over $3 million), i’m not sure i find that figure ridiculous at all.
it’s the details of the story that are maddening, like trying to get a license for a kid singing the single line “everybody dance now” or emi asking for $10,000 to license the rocky ring tone that the documentary filmmakers happened to catch or having to worry about billboards and frito lay trucks. and here it’s the producers that are part of the problem: by failing to stand up for their fair use rights, they brought the cost upon themselves.
but the endeavor appears to have paid off: mad hot ballroom is already in the top 25 top-grossing documentaries since 1982, and looks poised to make it into the top 20 at least.
the grand performances series that takes place at the california plaza in downtown los angeles is starting up this weekend with two films: mad hot ballroom and double indemnity. there’s all sorts of cool stuff on the schedule, which runs through september. and it’s all free.
it took me more than a year to get through it, but i’ve finally seen all of krzysztof kieślowski’s dekalog miniseries. there are 10 episodes, each based (sometimes fairly loosely) on one of the ten commandments. they are all connected by place (a warsaw apartment complex) and some refer to characters and events from others, but each is otherwise distinct.
they are all brilliant, of course.
despite a script by tina fey, mean girls just doesn’t live up to similar films like heathers and clueless. it’s a little frightening that rachel mcadams plays the leader of the popular-girl clique of a bunch of high school juniors — she’s 28. that would also make her about five years younger than amy poehler, who plays her mom in the movie.
another los angeles moment
when i came back from seeing crash, they were shooting a movie near my building — but they were shooting it with a camera mounted on a remote-control helicopter. so there was a car driving around the block, followed by the helicopter, followed by a truck with a camera operator standing on the back of it with a big remote control.
and i thought the shoot up the street from that was interesting — they had cartoon-looking cars with winding keys mounted on them.
i think it is a little amazing how crash fails in spite of its shortcomings. a lot of the situations it sets up are pretty hackneyed (a latina lashing out because she’s been called mexican and really has puerto rican and el salvadoran parents? so not new). but the film pulls them together in an interesting way. and there’s a few scenes that really propel the film to great heights.
assault on precinct 13 is basically a zombie western set in 1970s los angeles. the gang members making the assault have a thin motive and not much of a strategy or a sense for self-preservation. the pacing of the film is pretty slow, but it holds up pretty well — amazingly well considering its budget. it certainly rose above its potential.
assault on precinct 13 is a more typical action movie. it has been relocated from los angeles to detroit, and the biggest problem with moving the setting to the modern era is waved away with a cellphone-jamming magic wand. the bad police officers making the assault are developed somewhat as characters, and aren’t nearly as self-destructive. although the remake/reimagining looks better and has better actors and acting, it doesn’t even rise to meet that potential.
i bit the star wars: episode iii - revenge of the sith bullet, and it’s not a terrible movie. it really does dovetail nicely into the first trilogy. but all the reviews that take shots at the dialogue are deadly accurate. it’s painful.
i think the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy fits admirably into the different iterations of this story (radio show, book, television show, interactive text adventure, and now movie). it is more similar to the others than it is different, and i think it may be the only version where trillian is more than a sketch of a character.
considering how well the movie has done, and the various references to going to the restaurant at the end of the universe at the end of the movie, i would be more surprised to not see a sequel than to see one.
i got the order form for tickets to the last remaining seats events put on by the los angeles conservancy in june and july. i share eric’s disappointment that the orpheum is the only downtown venue being used this year, but it looks like they’ve put together a good program and the hollywood pacific sounds like it should be an interesting venue.
tickets don’t go on sale to the general public until may 6, but since i’m a member i can buy now. if you’re interested in going to any of them, let me know and i can get some series tickets and split them up, or just buy individual tickets for some shows.
i have to admit i was a little disappointed by kung fu hustle, even though it was a really fun film. it’s one of those cases of going into a movie with expectations that just couldn’t be met.
i saw melinda and melinda, woody allen’s latest film, this weekend, and sin city, robert rodriguez’s latest, last weekend.
melinda and melinda was a bit of a disappointment. the acting was all good, but the direction felt a little off for a woody allen film, and it was hard to shake the feeling that the parallel-stories thing has been done better in other films. it was good to see will ferrell in a relatively understated role, and radha mitchell was great as the two melindas. reviewers seem to be consistent in saying the comic side of the story overshadows the tragic, but i’m not sure that i agree.
i don’t have anything to add to the plethora of other sin city reviews, other than to agree that it is a great film. actually, here’s something add: linux and mysql powered the asset management for the film.
twoness
midas world by frederik pohl (another book recommendation plucked from the fork archives) claims to be a novel, but is really a set of short stories that trace the history of the world after fusion power is invented and energy becomes plentiful. all of them are delightful and thought-provoking, but none more so than the first. with plentiful and cheap energy, the economics of the world have become inverted and it is only the rich who have time to work and be truly idle. the poor are consigned to unending consumption, fulfilling the rations they are assigned by eating beyond the point of enjoyment, living in gargantuan homes, and never really accumulating belongings. it is an inversion that seems completely absurd, until you remember the strong correlation between poverty and obesity in the united states. the idea that society is racing against itself in order to consume what it produces is an interesting way to look at the world.
robots, even seperated by decades from midas world, actually hits on a similar theme with its story of robots resisting an evil corporation that is eliminating the supply of spare parts so that they can sell shiny upgrades and consign old robots to the scrap heap. between this film and ice age, i think blue sky studios has established itself as a fairly close second-place to pixar in feature-length computer animation. like in pixar’s films, there is a strong story to complement the visual design and trickery. they’ve certainly proven themselves to not be a one-trick pony.
doing a movie about the movie industry can be rough, especially a sequel to a movie about the industry. be cool makes the dangerous choice of making fun of sequels at its outset, and then proceeds to be a mediocre sequel. there are a few clever scenes, but the whole film is just not nearly as tight as great shorty.
the soundtrack is also pretty pathetic, which is disappointing considering the greatness of the get shorty soundtrack.
a long weekend ramble
my parents were in town this weekend, and we spent almost the whole time doing things around downtown.
the arrived late on friday afternoon and checked into the westin bonaventure. (the person who wrote “the hotel's interior can’t quite match its dramatic exterior” is wrong — the interior of the bonaventure is one of my favorite spaces.) i met them at the hotel, and then we walked down to my apartment, and we had dinner at pete’s café.
on saturday morning we took the los angeles conservancy’s walking tour of the broadway theaters, and had really great luck: in addition to the usual theaters on the tour, the tower theater was opened up, and we caught the very tail end of the performance that celia of 5th and spring wrote about. we ate lunch at clifton’s cafeteria and then went over to the los angeles theater, which wasn’t open during the tour but was open in the afternoon for some reason.
in the evening, we hopped on the red line up to hollywood & vine and walked down to the arclight to see in good company (short review: liked it!) and had dinner at the baja fresh that is part of the new sunset & vine complex. there were a couple of scenes in the movie where you could see the bonaventure in the background, which was a funny coincidence.
on sunday, we hit some of the open houses that were part of the downtown living open house (actually we had gone into the eastern columbia building on saturday, and there was also an open house in my building that we checked out). the open house was a little disappointing because most of the properties were still under construction, and there was nothing to really see. (but maybe that was just those we happened to go to — we didn’t visit them all.)
from the south park area, we took the dash out to chinatown to explore that area a little bit, and then had lunch at yang chow. andy richter and his family (wife and kid) sat down at the table behind us while we were waiting for our food.
we took the dash back to my place (or as close as it gets, and then through part of the toy district on foot) to pick up the tickets for the matinee show of as you like it at the ahmanson theater and made it just as they were closing the doors after hustling through the civic center. either the second act of the play is much stronger than the first, or it just took us a while to get into the shakespeare headspace, because we all agreed that we enjoyed the second act much more than the first.
after the play, we went back to the bonaventure and had dinner in the lobby bar (after unsuccessfully trying some of the other restaurants in the hotel).
this morning, we met up again for breakfast, and then walked around a little in the financial district (mostly just sitting and watching the ducks in the watercourt at california plaza). my parents then caught their shuttle back to lax, and i picked up lunch at the happy cow diner at the bonaventure on my way back home. (i didn’t order it, but they have a ½lb. kobe beef burger for about $9.)
it was a very long weekend, and a lot of fun. i recommend any and all of the things we did, especially the walking tour of the broadway theaters and as you like it.
i’ve started putting some photos up at flickr.
i saw sideways last weekend, and i have to say i’m in the camp of people who thought it was good, but don’t quite understand the huge acclaim it has gotten. there were really funny parts, and i like how it ended, but the whole premise just felt flawed to me.
bendito infierno (or blessed inferno or sin noticias de dios or don’t tempt me — you have to love the triangulation of film names for particular markets) was the movie for this weekend. it is a spanish film about a struggle for a boxer’s soul between agents of heaven and hell. the movie is actually a few years old, so i’m not sure why it is back in theaters now. there are a lot of really brilliant concepts in the film, and i’m surprised that there (apparently) hasn’t been an effort to make an american version of the film. it also wouldn’t be a bad concept for a television series.
house of flying daggers is not nearly as good as hero. the sound design is brilliant, though.
i caught the life aquatic with steve zissou last weekend, and it was about what you’d expect for a wes anderson film starring the voice of garfield, bill murray. that is: funny, warped, understated, and elliptical.
holiday seeing wrap-up (2004 edition)
- the aviator
- going into the movie, i knew very little about the life of howard hughes, so most aspects of the story were a revelation. it’s a fantastic film, and it contains some amazing acting, particularly cate blanchett’s portrayal of katharine hepburn.
- meet the fockers
- i went in with pretty low expectations because i had seen some bad reviews, and i guess am still bitter from along came polly, but this was pretty good. i think some of the backlash came from people that adored meet the parents, but i remember thinking that was only just “pretty good,” too. and this one has alanna ubach.
- comedian
- this is a documentary that follows jerry seinfeld as he rebuilds his stand-up act after retiring all of his old material. the photography is great, and it’s a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at a comic’s life. (although seinfeld is no ordinary comic, obviously. it also features orny adams, a lesser-known comic, and the little where’s-orny-now featurette on the dvd is as funny as some of the material in the movie itself.)
a tale of two movies
i’ve watched a couple of recent bill murray movies in the last few days. the first was the lauded lost in translation, which does a great job of conveying the disconnection of being a traveller in a foreign country. i haven’t travelled to japan, so i can’t say how true-to-life that aspect of the story is, but i experienced the disorientation of being on your own in a foreign city with a disrupted circadian rhythm when i was in finland and sweden a couple of years ago, and i saw my own experience echoed in that aspect of the film. but besides really capturing that feeling well and being beautifully shot, the movie doesn’t really go anywhere, and the characters don’t seem to live up to their potential.
the other bill murray movie follows in the tradition of the sibling rivalry story of which cain and abel is probably one of the more familar examples. murray’s character finds himself becoming second fiddle to a newcomer in his household, and in trying to reestablish his dominancy, puts the well-being of what is effectively his sibling in danger, only to come to realize that what he has done is wrong, and he has to put his own life on the line to make it right.
that movie is garfield: the movie. it follows in the footsteps of the disney animated/live-action films like mary poppins and bedknobs and broomsticks and the classic who framed roger rabbit, but also with elements of talking-animal pictures like babe and stuart little.
the garfield character is entirely computer-generated, and is actually pretty good. the animation of the fur is close to on par with monsters, inc.. bill murray was a great and natural choice for the voice, and he doesn ’t disappoint, giving an understated performance that really suits the character.
the performances of the live animals, particularly the dog playing odie, are also pretty amazing, especially in scenes where garfield interacts with the live animals. the technology for doing face/lip replacement for making it appear as if the animals are really talking has certainly progressed impressively since early films that employed the technique. (and is certainly far beyond the peanut-butter-in-the-mouth trick from the days of mr. ed.)
the human actors turn in fine performances, especially in a film where you would think they might be tempted to just phone it in. the character of jon is given a bit of an upgrade for the film, not being quite as big of a doofus as he is in the comic strip. played by breckin meyer, he is just a normal guy that is awkward around the girl he had a crush on in high school, who happens to be garfield’s veterinarian, liz (played by jennifer love hewitt).
i believe this is a bit of a departure from the garfield comic strip canon, where liz is garfield’s vet, but whose only connection with jon is her constant deflections of his advances. without spoiling too much of the plot, the relationship between jon and liz is certainly much different in the film than the comics.
and while the film does preserve a great number of elements of the comic strip (garfield’s love of lasagna, odie getting pushed off of furniture by garfield, and pooky the bear), another liberty that the film takes is in inventing a bad guy, a morning talk-show animal trainer (who is allergic to cats) that takes advantage of the fractured relationship between garfield and odie. the villian is played by stephen tobolowsky, the character actor probably best remembered for his role as ned ryerson in groundhog day. (which, incidentally, is one of my favorite films.)
the film was photographed by dean cundey, which gives me just one degree of separation from the film (since we both worked on steven spielberg’s director’s chair). some of the camera work is quite amazing considering that it wa