Film and Crayons
This is a strange sort of question, but does anyone understand the "colorization" movement? The process of taking black and white films and arbitrarily colorizing them?
Ted Turner had a hankering to do just such a thing in the mid-eighties when he started buying up movies like crazy to air on his "superstations", TNT and TBS. For a while, he'd just have his team go in and make color where there was none on classic films. Finally, directors like Orson Welles and Frank Capra raised such a stink about it that he stopped and the issue seemed put to rest.
But Sony didn't get the memo somehow. They've been putting out dvds for the last few years, starting with Three Stooges shorts, in colorized form. Then they went back and colorized black and white tv shows, and in defiance of the ghost of Capra himself, released It's A Wonderful Life in color.
Lately the new trand is to drop old Ray Harryhausen movies like 20 Million Miles to Earth, It Came from Beneath the Sea, and Earth vs the Flying Saucers in newly colorized forms. Legend Films has been offering public domain films like Carnival of Souls, Reefer Madness, and Night of the Living Dead in similar fashion. To be fair, many of these offer both black and white and colored versions, but the whole process puzzles me.
I understand there's a stigma against black and white films. I've seen it, and I've heard people say they'd never watch a movie that wasn't in color because it's "old" and "boring". Getting around this sort of ridiculous blanket statement is difficult enough, but I've never heard anyone who wouldn't watch a movie in black and white suddenly change their mind because it was artificially colored.
If you've never seen a colorized film, please do check one of the above titles out. The first thing you'll notice is just how off-kilter it looks. Skin tones never look right, the sky always looks a little too bright, and primary colors stick out like a sore thumb. It's not easy to mask the greyscale on black and white films, so the artists often overcompensate, creating a reality that's too removed from "normal" color films. Click here to check out some images that have been "colorized" and see what I mean.
Maybe it's just me being confused, but nothing about the process ever made sense. It isn't merely that the colorizing makes a film more artificial than it already would be, but it doesn't seem to change the stigma of an "old" film in the minds of people predisposed to avoid them. It's A Wonderful Life and A Miracle on 34th Street still air every Christmas and they're always in black and white. The color or lack thereof doesn't really impact the quality of the movie.
Personally I couldn't imagine watching Carnival of Souls or Night of the Living Dead in color. A big part of why they work is the stark black and white photography, and as you can see in the photos linked above. At the same time, I don't really have a problem with tinting silent films, particularly if that's what the director had in mind. Since a particular system of color tints correlated to what time of day it was in film (blue being night, for example) it can be helpful. Nosferatu doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you see Count Orlock in broad daylight after all.
Recently I talked about Frank Darabont's The Mist, which is offered both in black and white and in color. It was shot in color, and to be honest, sometimes one works, and sometimes the other is better. The black and white does a great job of making interior scenes more claustrophobic. Dodgier cgi effects are less noticeable on a grey scale, but the primary effect (the mist) doesn't play at all in the beginning of the movie anymore. It's just a window with opaque white outside. All of the nuance of shooting mist in color is lost. Later in the film things kind of even out, but I have to say that it's a trade off.
Are you in favor of colorizing films? Does it interest you, or does the heightened artificiality provide a new way to watch movies? Inquiring minds await your thoughts.
***EDIT***
Future Cap'n here with a few additional thoughts.
After some discussion with others, it becomes clear that keeping black and white films in black and white is actually beneficial if for no other reason than it removes the distraction. The reason The Mist becomes more claustrophobic is because you can't allow your eyes to wander and look at items in the grocery store. Everything is a shade of gray, so you are, in effect, forced to see what the director is presenting to you.
I talked recently with a professor of mine who first saw David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly in black and white by accident. He had no idea the film was supposed to be in color but the end result was that he found the movie more disturbing. Unable to look away or be distracted by the makeup nuances, his eyes were forced to focus on what Cronenberg intended audiences to see.
The Cap'n is sorely tempted to buy a black and white tv set (on the cheap, of course) so that I can run similar tests on other films. It would also be fun just to have a black and white television in the house for people to look at curiously. Using the settings on color tvs to achieve a similar effect just doesn't seen to work.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Friday, April 10, 2009
The Cap'n Presents: Best of the Blogorium Chapter 3
Blogorium Review: Southland Tales
A few weeks ago, Neil sent me a message saying that he’d decided to go see Southland Tales before it left theatres. When I asked the natural response to this, "why?", we had a reasonably long discussion about the film, the pros and cons of post-Donnie Darko Richard Kelly, and about how he could just wait and watch it on dvd. His main point was this "Either I’ll totally hate the movie or I’ll be crazy for it" (that’s a rough approximation as I no longer have the message but you get the idea).
Neil ended up not seeing Southland Tales; instead, he watched In Bruges*.
Tonight, after leaving work early (due mostly to not being able to focus on anything and asking customers the same question repeatedly), I decided to scratch my morbid itch and watch this hotly contested film. Southland Tales was booed atCannes
Darko Heads immediately declared it a work of genius that haters were simply "not getting"; everyone else seemed to have pretty serious problems with the movie.
Which camp did I fall in?
As though it would surprise anyone that I’m in the latter camp, except that this movie doesn’t just have serious problems; it is a serious problem. Nothing works in Southland Tales as a movie. Most reviews simply try to ignore the plot, which is the easy way for fanatics to say they "didn’t get it", but I can give you a pretty good synopsis based on the various movies Southland Tales is trying to be:
Imagine if any of the asshole "philosopher" characters in Waking Life were asked to remake Doctor Strangelove, Strange Days, and Donnie Darko and roll them all together into a commentary on the state of affairs in America, let’s say two years ago (when the film was actually made, as opposed to released).
So you can expect cheap shots directed at the Patriot Act, George Bush, Big Oil, and a particularly shitty joke concerning Karl Rove and banking. You can also expect exagerrated Orwellian overtones and "Big Brother" references plus tons of jabs at reality television, celebrity culture, and politicians.
On top of that, take a handful of different plots and counterplots to overthrow said Big Government by "Neo-Marxists" who alternate between blackmail and staged assassinations in order to "Stick it to the man" or, in one instance, to taser John Larroquette in the balls (true story).
Since we haven’t covered all of the bases here, let’s give everyone a ridiculous name and we still haven’t gotten to the part about the rift in the Fourth Dimension that causes time travel and duplicates of characters in order to give some kind of "weirdness" factor in order to wrap things up.
Finish things off with Justin Timberlake constantly narrating, telling us things we a) didn’t need to know, or b) aren’t necessary to the story, plus frequently quoting the book of revelations. Other characters quote "The Hollow Men" and "The Road Not Taken" over and over again, well beyond the point they would be significant.
Except that none of these elements work together. At least, not in this movie. What’s so strange about Southland Tales is that so much of it will seem familiar to you because all of these ideas have been used to better effect before (obviously, since I can name three clear origin points for Southland Tales, all of which are better movies) and that as hard as Kelly tries, he just can’t make Tales cohere into anything but a jumble of half baked ideas and literary references.
I sometimes fear that Lost is going to end up this way; like Tales, Lost relies of frequent referencing of philosophers, authors, and scientists in the narrative of the show, usually surfacing in the book a character is reading or in the name of someone introduced (eg Locke, Rousseau, C.S. Lewis, Minkowski, Hume, etc). Southland Tales has no shortage of ideas it’s drawing from, but nothing coherent ever emerges, which sadly could also be what Lost ends up doing.
It amazes me that so many comedians are in this film, particularly because none of them seem to know what tone to play for: Amy Poehler is obviously shooting for comedy, but Nora Dunn and Cheri Oteri don’t seem to know what they’re doing. Jon Lovitz acts like he’s been cast as the villain of a Bad Boys movie, and Wallace Shawn is just doing his schtick, which is funny, because Curtis "Booger" Armstrong and Mad TV’s Will Sasso play it straight as an arrow. Kevin Smith, despite wearing makeup that kind of sort of makes him look like Orson Welles in F for Fake, sounds exactly like he always does.
Even Dwayne Johnson is totally lost in this movie, alternating between super cool "Rock" mode and nervously twitching his fingers funny guy, which doesn’t make any kind of sense when he says things like "I’m a pimp. Pimps don’t commit suicide" (by the way, his character is not that of a pimp).
Please feel free to jump on me for not having read the graphic novels, which apparently is the only way to "appreciate" the movie, since the film is parts 4-6 of a story, but I sincerely doubt that it would be useful in getting through the first thirty minutes of the film, which are so godawful and exposition heavy that I nearly turned it off. After that, I sat in semi-amazement, thinking "gee, this works so much better in other movies than in Southland Tales."
Maybe the longer cut helps (it might at least explain the Janeane Garafalo shots near the end), but I sense that three hours of Southland Tales would only be more flailing around in the dark, trying to make this mess congeal. Richard Kelly might want to learn how to tell a story before he tries to make his own Doctor Strangelove**, because you have to understand structure before you make fun of it. before it left theatres. When I asked the natural response to this, "why?", we had a reasonably long discussion about the film, the pros and cons of post-
* Future Cap'n gives Neil props for choosing wisely. If you haven't seen In Bruges by now, do it post haste.
** oh, did i not mention this is supposed to be a comedy?
A few weeks ago, Neil sent me a message saying that he’d decided to go see Southland Tales before it left theatres. When I asked the natural response to this, "why?", we had a reasonably long discussion about the film, the pros and cons of post-Donnie Darko Richard Kelly, and about how he could just wait and watch it on dvd. His main point was this "Either I’ll totally hate the movie or I’ll be crazy for it" (that’s a rough approximation as I no longer have the message but you get the idea).
Neil ended up not seeing Southland Tales; instead, he watched In Bruges*.
Tonight, after leaving work early (due mostly to not being able to focus on anything and asking customers the same question repeatedly), I decided to scratch my morbid itch and watch this hotly contested film. Southland Tales was booed at
Darko Heads immediately declared it a work of genius that haters were simply "not getting"; everyone else seemed to have pretty serious problems with the movie.
Which camp did I fall in?
As though it would surprise anyone that I’m in the latter camp, except that this movie doesn’t just have serious problems; it is a serious problem. Nothing works in Southland Tales as a movie. Most reviews simply try to ignore the plot, which is the easy way for fanatics to say they "didn’t get it", but I can give you a pretty good synopsis based on the various movies Southland Tales is trying to be:
Imagine if any of the asshole "philosopher" characters in Waking Life were asked to remake Doctor Strangelove, Strange Days, and Donnie Darko and roll them all together into a commentary on the state of affairs in America, let’s say two years ago (when the film was actually made, as opposed to released).
So you can expect cheap shots directed at the Patriot Act, George Bush, Big Oil, and a particularly shitty joke concerning Karl Rove and banking. You can also expect exagerrated Orwellian overtones and "Big Brother" references plus tons of jabs at reality television, celebrity culture, and politicians.
On top of that, take a handful of different plots and counterplots to overthrow said Big Government by "Neo-Marxists" who alternate between blackmail and staged assassinations in order to "Stick it to the man" or, in one instance, to taser John Larroquette in the balls (true story).
Since we haven’t covered all of the bases here, let’s give everyone a ridiculous name and we still haven’t gotten to the part about the rift in the Fourth Dimension that causes time travel and duplicates of characters in order to give some kind of "weirdness" factor in order to wrap things up.
Finish things off with Justin Timberlake constantly narrating, telling us things we a) didn’t need to know, or b) aren’t necessary to the story, plus frequently quoting the book of revelations. Other characters quote "The Hollow Men" and "The Road Not Taken" over and over again, well beyond the point they would be significant.
Except that none of these elements work together. At least, not in this movie. What’s so strange about Southland Tales is that so much of it will seem familiar to you because all of these ideas have been used to better effect before (obviously, since I can name three clear origin points for Southland Tales, all of which are better movies) and that as hard as Kelly tries, he just can’t make Tales cohere into anything but a jumble of half baked ideas and literary references.
I sometimes fear that Lost is going to end up this way; like Tales, Lost relies of frequent referencing of philosophers, authors, and scientists in the narrative of the show, usually surfacing in the book a character is reading or in the name of someone introduced (eg Locke, Rousseau, C.S. Lewis, Minkowski, Hume, etc). Southland Tales has no shortage of ideas it’s drawing from, but nothing coherent ever emerges, which sadly could also be what Lost ends up doing.
It amazes me that so many comedians are in this film, particularly because none of them seem to know what tone to play for: Amy Poehler is obviously shooting for comedy, but Nora Dunn and Cheri Oteri don’t seem to know what they’re doing. Jon Lovitz acts like he’s been cast as the villain of a Bad Boys movie, and Wallace Shawn is just doing his schtick, which is funny, because Curtis "Booger" Armstrong and Mad TV’s Will Sasso play it straight as an arrow. Kevin Smith, despite wearing makeup that kind of sort of makes him look like Orson Welles in F for Fake, sounds exactly like he always does.
Even Dwayne Johnson is totally lost in this movie, alternating between super cool "Rock" mode and nervously twitching his fingers funny guy, which doesn’t make any kind of sense when he says things like "I’m a pimp. Pimps don’t commit suicide" (by the way, his character is not that of a pimp).
Please feel free to jump on me for not having read the graphic novels, which apparently is the only way to "appreciate" the movie, since the film is parts 4-6 of a story, but I sincerely doubt that it would be useful in getting through the first thirty minutes of the film, which are so godawful and exposition heavy that I nearly turned it off. After that, I sat in semi-amazement, thinking "gee, this works so much better in other movies than in Southland Tales."
Maybe the longer cut helps (it might at least explain the Janeane Garafalo shots near the end), but I sense that three hours of Southland Tales would only be more flailing around in the dark, trying to make this mess congeal. Richard Kelly might want to learn how to tell a story before he tries to make his own Doctor Strangelove**, because you have to understand structure before you make fun of it. before it left theatres. When I asked the natural response to this, "why?", we had a reasonably long discussion about the film, the pros and cons of post-
* Future Cap'n gives Neil props for choosing wisely. If you haven't seen In Bruges by now, do it post haste.
** oh, did i not mention this is supposed to be a comedy?
Thursday, April 9, 2009
The Cap'n Presents: Best of the Blogorium Chapter 2
A list of movies I regret seeing
(Or, forgot seeing, which is almost as bad. Some of them will include brief comments, but many speak for themselves.)
Loser - Does anyone even remember this movie with Jason Biggs and Mena Suvari? It's really not very good and deserved to fail (as it did), but I thinkCranford and I kinda let it wash over us one night at park place. I have to remind myself I even saw it.
Highlander: Endgame - Memorable only because Evan left in the middle of the movie to go get his other can ofSapporo
Bless the Child* - Kim Basinger and a little girl that looks like Dave Mustaine. That's all I came out of Bless the Child with.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen* - As bad a translation from one medium to another as there's ever been.
Godsend* - Now, I'd think something with Greg Kinnear, Rebecca Romign-Stamos, and Robert FREAKING DeNiro would be better than this, but it isn't. To this day, this is the movie Adam and I refer to only as "the film that can't be named"
8mm
Dude, Where's My Car?
Idle Hands* - My memory of Idle Hands is that no one could remember quite who's idea it was to see it. Out of six people, no one would own up to it.
Jeepers Creepers*
Bio Dome
AceVentura
Mission
The Matrix Reloaded - So bad that Barrett and Nathan took a cigarette break in the middle and missed nothing.
The Matrix Revolutions* - So bad that Adam fell asleep and I went to the bathroom and we still missed nothing.
Vampire Men of the Lost Planet (or world... whatever)
Urban Legends (but not, strangely, Urban Legends: Final Cut)
Incubus* - I don't care how drunk Adam was on BEAST, Incubus still required copious fast forwarding to be considered a waste of time.
Thirteen Ghosts*
Scream 2 - Phillippi's tirade, dissecting the film scene by scene afterwards, was considerably more entertaining.
Godzilla (1998)
Lost In Space
Alien Vs Predator
The In Crowd* - Also known as the "movie with people who look like people who look like celebrities." For example, there's a guy in The In Crowd who looks like Skeet Ulrich, who in turn looks like a poor man's Johnny Depp. Get the idea? Clones of bad look-a-likes.
Austin Powers in Goldmember - If I hadn't paid for the ticket, Barrett and I would've walked out.
America
Identity
3000 Miles toGraceland
Bridget Jones's Diary
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
Freddie Got Fingered - Here's the deal with Freddie Got Fingered; it's not as bad as you've heard. It's not even worse, but it is a waste of time to find that out.
Gigli* - Adam going insane and the sheer stupidity of the dialogue could maybe convince me to tell you never to rent it. Otherwise I'll just forget it, thanks.
American Pie 2
American Wedding
Moulin Rouge - I hate that movie. Every frame. It saddens me that Ewan McGregor, Jim Broadbent, and Nicole Kidman were in it. It saddens me that Baz Lurhmann hasn't been killed brutally and is still making movies. Really, truly, I loathe Moulin Rouge.
Scary Movie 2
The Secret Window*
Swordfish
Valentine
Cabin Fever
House of 1000 Corpses* - The only man who can defeat Doctor Satan is Doctor Jesus, which made Adam lose his proverbial shit. The low light of birthdays, even with good company.
Dungeons and Dragons*
Final Destination 2*
Hollow Man*
Men In Black 2 - Sometimes a bootleg is still a ripoff. Even if your rommate made the bootleg.
The Mummy Returns
Night of the Living Dead: 30th Anniversary DVD recut - Don't ever buy this. If you see Night of the Living Dead with a grey cover and the words "30th" and "Anniversary" near each other, kick the dvd as hard as you can and demand the store destroy it.
The One
Phish: Bittersweet Motel
Resident Evil*
The Honeymoon Killers - Armageddon aside, this is proof the Criterion is not infallible. In fact, this waste of time doesn't deserve the coveted 200 spine number. I call shenanigans.
Sherrybaby
Bandidas - People buy this at work for exactly the same reason you think they would. Put Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz on the cover and they will assume it's the motherload of hotness. Or, perhaps it's a lot of Steve Zahn and terrible jokes. Perhaps.
Snakes on a Plane - I'm sorry people, but it was BORING. The cardinal sin of schlock movies. Don't give me that "but it's Sam Jackson" crap either. S-U-C-K-E-D.
Art School Confidential - Oh, ha ha. That's very clever. Make all the jokes everyone makes about art students, Terry Zwigoff, but in a movie devoid of any true wit. Between this and his director's cut of Bad Santa, Zwigoff is rapidly losing my faith in his "outsider" perspective in comedies.
Running With Scissors
Funny Games - You know what, since the remake is the exact same movie but in english, go see it, and you'll understand why I hated it so much the first time around.
A Prairie Home Companion
Lonesome Jim
Silent Hill
Return of the Living Dead 4: Necropolis
Ellie Parker - Naomi Watts helps her friend make the worst low budget film ever.
Dead and Breakfast* - Shaun of the Dead for theUS
Godzilla: Final Wars
Nothing
Havoc - Turns out there's actually a story between Anne Hathaway getting naked. Too bad that story is about spoiled teenagers pretending to be gang bangers, and then learning their lesson when they meed real gang bangers. No, really; it's an after school special with Ella Enchanted's knockers and Bijou Phillips getting DP'ed.
Exorcist: The Beginning*
Duck! The Carbine High Massacre
The Amityville Horror (2005)
Hellraiser: Hellseeker (6)
Jersey Girl - It really is terrible, and I only saw pieces of it while flipping through the channels. Kevin Smith writes the worst "crowd" scenes ever.
The Crow: Wicked Prayer - So much potential to be good-bad: David Boreanaz, Edward Furlong, Danny Trejo, and Tara freakin' Reid! In a Crow movie! And from the director of Six String Samurai. And still, it was a chore to sit through.
Ghosts of Mars* - That fucking train...
The Forgotten
Van Helsing
Funny Ha Ha - I had to watch it for a film class. Let's take Slacker, a movie I already don't like, but take out any sensible camera work and any semblance of intelligent dialogue, and let our actors improvise most of their "relationship argument" scenes. Better yet, let's just say: Slacker, but with less going for it.
The Time Machine - Wait, did I see this movie? I think I didn't. I think I stood in a parking lot for two hours. Yeah, that's the ticket.
Anything with a * indicates that things were made slightly more bearable with the presence of a) Adam, b)Cranford , or c) both.
There are some really bad movies I'm not putting on this list, because some things are made better with company, but for the most part, all parties involved in almost everything on this list would agree that they'd like to have the hours of their lives back that they lost wasting time on this dreck, this cesspool of cinema.
Sometimes I'm glad I saw something awful just because I was curious. Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist is a good example. The movie itself isn't much better than Exorcist: The Beginning, but it was worth watching to see how differently two movies can be made using the same touchstones, and yet suck in different ways. I don't regret watching Deep Blue Sea, or The Replacements, or even Snuff, which we didn't even finish.
But sometimes you look back and say "man, I could've been doing something better with my life than watch that, but instead I paid money for this. I'm really stupid sometimes."
Please take this into consideration before going to see something that sounds really bad, I ask of you. Believe me, there are better things to be done, and even if you want to stick with movies, the good ones beat the bad ones most times. And if you want an enjoyable bad movie, please just ask me. I have plenty.
(Or, forgot seeing, which is almost as bad. Some of them will include brief comments, but many speak for themselves.)
Loser - Does anyone even remember this movie with Jason Biggs and Mena Suvari? It's really not very good and deserved to fail (as it did), but I think
Highlander: Endgame - Memorable only because Evan left in the middle of the movie to go get his other can of
Bless the Child* - Kim Basinger and a little girl that looks like Dave Mustaine. That's all I came out of Bless the Child with.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen* - As bad a translation from one medium to another as there's ever been.
Godsend* - Now, I'd think something with Greg Kinnear, Rebecca Romign-Stamos, and Robert FREAKING DeNiro would be better than this, but it isn't. To this day, this is the movie Adam and I refer to only as "the film that can't be named"
8mm
Dude, Where's My Car?
Idle Hands* - My memory of Idle Hands is that no one could remember quite who's idea it was to see it. Out of six people, no one would own up to it.
Jeepers Creepers*
Bio Dome
Ace
The Matrix Reloaded - So bad that Barrett and Nathan took a cigarette break in the middle and missed nothing.
The Matrix Revolutions* - So bad that Adam fell asleep and I went to the bathroom and we still missed nothing.
Vampire Men of the Lost Planet (or world... whatever)
Urban Legends (but not, strangely, Urban Legends: Final Cut)
Incubus* - I don't care how drunk Adam was on BEAST, Incubus still required copious fast forwarding to be considered a waste of time.
Thirteen Ghosts*
Scream 2 - Phillippi's tirade, dissecting the film scene by scene afterwards, was considerably more entertaining.
Godzilla (1998)
Lost In Space
Alien Vs Predator
The In Crowd* - Also known as the "movie with people who look like people who look like celebrities." For example, there's a guy in The In Crowd who looks like Skeet Ulrich, who in turn looks like a poor man's Johnny Depp. Get the idea? Clones of bad look-a-likes.
Austin Powers in Goldmember - If I hadn't paid for the ticket, Barrett and I would've walked out.
Identity
3000 Miles to
Bridget Jones's Diary
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
Freddie Got Fingered - Here's the deal with Freddie Got Fingered; it's not as bad as you've heard. It's not even worse, but it is a waste of time to find that out.
Gigli* - Adam going insane and the sheer stupidity of the dialogue could maybe convince me to tell you never to rent it. Otherwise I'll just forget it, thanks.
American Pie 2
American Wedding
Moulin Rouge - I hate that movie. Every frame. It saddens me that Ewan McGregor, Jim Broadbent, and Nicole Kidman were in it. It saddens me that Baz Lurhmann hasn't been killed brutally and is still making movies. Really, truly, I loathe Moulin Rouge.
Scary Movie 2
The Secret Window*
Swordfish
Valentine
Cabin Fever
House of 1000 Corpses* - The only man who can defeat Doctor Satan is Doctor Jesus, which made Adam lose his proverbial shit. The low light of birthdays, even with good company.
Dungeons and Dragons*
Final Destination 2*
Hollow Man*
Men In Black 2 - Sometimes a bootleg is still a ripoff. Even if your rommate made the bootleg.
The Mummy Returns
Night of the Living Dead: 30th Anniversary DVD recut - Don't ever buy this. If you see Night of the Living Dead with a grey cover and the words "30th" and "Anniversary" near each other, kick the dvd as hard as you can and demand the store destroy it.
The One
Phish: Bittersweet Motel
Resident Evil*
The Honeymoon Killers - Armageddon aside, this is proof the Criterion is not infallible. In fact, this waste of time doesn't deserve the coveted 200 spine number. I call shenanigans.
Sherrybaby
Bandidas - People buy this at work for exactly the same reason you think they would. Put Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz on the cover and they will assume it's the motherload of hotness. Or, perhaps it's a lot of Steve Zahn and terrible jokes. Perhaps.
Snakes on a Plane - I'm sorry people, but it was BORING. The cardinal sin of schlock movies. Don't give me that "but it's Sam Jackson" crap either. S-U-C-K-E-D.
Art School Confidential - Oh, ha ha. That's very clever. Make all the jokes everyone makes about art students, Terry Zwigoff, but in a movie devoid of any true wit. Between this and his director's cut of Bad Santa, Zwigoff is rapidly losing my faith in his "outsider" perspective in comedies.
Running With Scissors
Funny Games - You know what, since the remake is the exact same movie but in english, go see it, and you'll understand why I hated it so much the first time around.
A Prairie Home Companion
Lonesome Jim
Silent Hill
Return of the Living Dead 4: Necropolis
Ellie Parker - Naomi Watts helps her friend make the worst low budget film ever.
Dead and Breakfast* - Shaun of the Dead for the
Godzilla: Final Wars
Nothing
Havoc - Turns out there's actually a story between Anne Hathaway getting naked. Too bad that story is about spoiled teenagers pretending to be gang bangers, and then learning their lesson when they meed real gang bangers. No, really; it's an after school special with Ella Enchanted's knockers and Bijou Phillips getting DP'ed.
Exorcist: The Beginning*
Duck! The Carbine High Massacre
The Amityville Horror (2005)
Hellraiser: Hellseeker (6)
Jersey Girl - It really is terrible, and I only saw pieces of it while flipping through the channels. Kevin Smith writes the worst "crowd" scenes ever.
The Crow: Wicked Prayer - So much potential to be good-bad: David Boreanaz, Edward Furlong, Danny Trejo, and Tara freakin' Reid! In a Crow movie! And from the director of Six String Samurai. And still, it was a chore to sit through.
Ghosts of Mars* - That fucking train...
The Forgotten
Van Helsing
Funny Ha Ha - I had to watch it for a film class. Let's take Slacker, a movie I already don't like, but take out any sensible camera work and any semblance of intelligent dialogue, and let our actors improvise most of their "relationship argument" scenes. Better yet, let's just say: Slacker, but with less going for it.
The Time Machine - Wait, did I see this movie? I think I didn't. I think I stood in a parking lot for two hours. Yeah, that's the ticket.
Anything with a * indicates that things were made slightly more bearable with the presence of a) Adam, b)
There are some really bad movies I'm not putting on this list, because some things are made better with company, but for the most part, all parties involved in almost everything on this list would agree that they'd like to have the hours of their lives back that they lost wasting time on this dreck, this cesspool of cinema.
Sometimes I'm glad I saw something awful just because I was curious. Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist is a good example. The movie itself isn't much better than Exorcist: The Beginning, but it was worth watching to see how differently two movies can be made using the same touchstones, and yet suck in different ways. I don't regret watching Deep Blue Sea, or The Replacements, or even Snuff, which we didn't even finish.
But sometimes you look back and say "man, I could've been doing something better with my life than watch that, but instead I paid money for this. I'm really stupid sometimes."
Please take this into consideration before going to see something that sounds really bad, I ask of you. Believe me, there are better things to be done, and even if you want to stick with movies, the good ones beat the bad ones most times. And if you want an enjoyable bad movie, please just ask me. I have plenty.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Slackadasical
Why do I have the feeling this should be playing next weekend?
It's just so... disturbing. Really. I know it should be endearing or sweet, but when I look at Gooby I want to find the nearest exorcist and throw him between the monster and me. *Shudder*
Oh well. Maybe next year.
---
The Cap'n has decided since he's in his new digs and that people haven't quite realized the Blogorium set up shop here that now would be a good time to take a couple of days off. While I'm out of town, I'll share a few more "Best Of" posts from the old digs.
I could always change my mind, and inspiration might strike in Cranpire's Palace, but there's not much to talk about that doesn't involve next weekend. There's quite a bit of pre-emptively "catching up" on homework so the 17th and 18th are free and clear. You'll hardly even miss me, I promise.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to watch some more of Tron and get some sleep. I do love some Tron.
It's just so... disturbing. Really. I know it should be endearing or sweet, but when I look at Gooby I want to find the nearest exorcist and throw him between the monster and me. *Shudder*
Oh well. Maybe next year.
---
The Cap'n has decided since he's in his new digs and that people haven't quite realized the Blogorium set up shop here that now would be a good time to take a couple of days off. While I'm out of town, I'll share a few more "Best Of" posts from the old digs.
I could always change my mind, and inspiration might strike in Cranpire's Palace, but there's not much to talk about that doesn't involve next weekend. There's quite a bit of pre-emptively "catching up" on homework so the 17th and 18th are free and clear. You'll hardly even miss me, I promise.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to watch some more of Tron and get some sleep. I do love some Tron.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
To Boldly Never Sleep Again!
Ladies and Germs, it's official: Bad Movie Night has added an extra day.
Now the Horrendous Marathon of Horrible Horrors will begin on Friday, April 17th, with a special "field trip" to see Crank: High Voltage. We will then return to the Apartment of Craptacularity to continue watching films I couldn't program in on Saturday.
These films might include (but are not limited to):
The Giant Claw
Punisher: War Zone
Commando
Chopping Mall
Bride of the Monster
and many others! I have a whole extra night to pick and choose the worst of the worst from! Huzzah!!!
Never fear, if you can only make it for Saturday's festivities, you still have
Mac and Me
Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky
Batman & Robin
Troll 2
and many other great surprises!
---
I think all of these Star Trek reviews are a ruse to distract us from the free publicity Wolverine was getting. Sure, it's like comparing Apples to Cow Pies but there's not actually a Star Trek movie coming out. Even if it was, the film would technically be an odd-numbered Trek, which automatically means it sucks (go on, defend your beloved Final Frontier. I dare you!)
And to head this off before it shows up, just because Star Trek: Nemesis was a bad even-numbered Trek film doesn't automatically guarantee JJ Abrams gets a good one. The ratio of good even-numbered to bad-odd numbered still outweighs the bad odd-numbered films, even if you hate The Voyage Home.
Of course, all of this is moot because there's no Star Trek movie coming out. Scott Bakula killed that franchise dead, and I liked me some Enterprise.
---
Because this likely got swept up in the mess that was last night's Watchmenevisceration review, I do wish Jackie Earle Harley the best of luck as Freddy Krueger. Of all the possible choices, he does make sense and would bring a menace to Freddy that was missing when Englund went all "yukster" with our favorite child-molesting-burn-victim-turned-demonic-teenager-slayer.
I'm not so sold on these "updating the Springwood teens so they reflect the aughts". Making the Johnny Depp equivalent character now have a podcast and do blogs or whatever the hell it is will only unnecessarily date the film. Look, I know A Nightmare on Elm Street came out in the eighties but clothes aside, those characters could exist in pretty much any time period. I honestly can't remember anything that Depp's character did that made him "eighties", so it seems weird to "need" to update any of them.
Then again, you're talking to the person least likely to watch this "reboot". As I did with Friday the 13th, I'll politely sit this one out so Platinum Dunes can make money off of a "name and name alone" remake and pump out sequels. I know it's hard coming from the guy who said he "wouldn't see Watchmen" then did, but to my credit I've steered clear of Platinum Dunes from Amityville onward. I haven't seen The Hitcher or TCM: The Beginning or any of the other movies I can't remember they made, and I don't plan to.
If I'm going to watch a bad horror movie, it better be about towns named Nilbog or have... damn... I can't ruin The Giant Claw for you... you'll just have to wait for next weekend!
Now the Horrendous Marathon of Horrible Horrors will begin on Friday, April 17th, with a special "field trip" to see Crank: High Voltage. We will then return to the Apartment of Craptacularity to continue watching films I couldn't program in on Saturday.
These films might include (but are not limited to):
The Giant Claw
Punisher: War Zone
Commando
Chopping Mall
Bride of the Monster
and many others! I have a whole extra night to pick and choose the worst of the worst from! Huzzah!!!
Never fear, if you can only make it for Saturday's festivities, you still have
Mac and Me
Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky
Batman & Robin
Troll 2
and many other great surprises!
---
I think all of these Star Trek reviews are a ruse to distract us from the free publicity Wolverine was getting. Sure, it's like comparing Apples to Cow Pies but there's not actually a Star Trek movie coming out. Even if it was, the film would technically be an odd-numbered Trek, which automatically means it sucks (go on, defend your beloved Final Frontier. I dare you!)
And to head this off before it shows up, just because Star Trek: Nemesis was a bad even-numbered Trek film doesn't automatically guarantee JJ Abrams gets a good one. The ratio of good even-numbered to bad-odd numbered still outweighs the bad odd-numbered films, even if you hate The Voyage Home.
Of course, all of this is moot because there's no Star Trek movie coming out. Scott Bakula killed that franchise dead, and I liked me some Enterprise.
---
Because this likely got swept up in the mess that was last night's Watchmen
I'm not so sold on these "updating the Springwood teens so they reflect the aughts". Making the Johnny Depp equivalent character now have a podcast and do blogs or whatever the hell it is will only unnecessarily date the film. Look, I know A Nightmare on Elm Street came out in the eighties but clothes aside, those characters could exist in pretty much any time period. I honestly can't remember anything that Depp's character did that made him "eighties", so it seems weird to "need" to update any of them.
Then again, you're talking to the person least likely to watch this "reboot". As I did with Friday the 13th, I'll politely sit this one out so Platinum Dunes can make money off of a "name and name alone" remake and pump out sequels. I know it's hard coming from the guy who said he "wouldn't see Watchmen" then did, but to my credit I've steered clear of Platinum Dunes from Amityville onward. I haven't seen The Hitcher or TCM: The Beginning or any of the other movies I can't remember they made, and I don't plan to.
If I'm going to watch a bad horror movie, it better be about towns named Nilbog or have... damn... I can't ruin The Giant Claw for you... you'll just have to wait for next weekend!
Monday, April 6, 2009
So you did... Watch the Watchmen?
Don't be confused, dear reader. The Cap'n wasn't really planning on watching the Watchmen (as I'd said in an earlier post*) but these things happen.
It was a friend's birthday and he really wanted to see it. He allegedly had passes but not enough for everybody and they didn't pan out anyway but hey we're already there so I might as well see it, right?
"Cap'n!"
Yes?
"Enough of this bull-puckey! Tell us what you thought already!"
What's bull-puckey?
"Don't try to distract me! Review the damn movie already!"
Very well. So the first thing you should know is that I didn't hate the movie. It wasn't some kind of travesty or the sort of movie that climbs out of your tv and takes a steaming dump on the living room carpet. It was watchable and for a nigh-three hour running time, it went by pretty quickly.
Before you start slapping that on the dvd cover with a byline attributing that to yr Cap'n, understand that the above paragraph is almost exactly how I felt about 300 when I watched it. I haven't watched 300 since.
In fact, the only Zack Snyder movie I've watched again was Dawn of the Dead, which I feel is an interesting - if flawed - "alternate universe" take on Romero's film. His other movies, both comic book adaptations, were acceptable but not particularly great movies that did some interesting work and didn't make me angry for spending time with them.
To no one's surprise, Rorschach was my favorite part of the movie. Jackie Earle Haley will make an interesting Freddy Krueger in that Nightmare on Elm Street remake I'm not interested in. He was fun with the mask and surprisingly more interesting without it. Strangely, when Rorschach disappears for a good stretch of the middle of the film, I didn't find myself wondering where he was, but it was nice to get him back when we did.
Everyone else was... meh? Nobody did anything really heinous (unless you count the makeup department's work on "old" Silk Spectre and Richard Nixon... eegah!) but they didn't make much of an impression either. Admittedly, once you see the "blue wang of doom", it's hard not to notice it in the many, many, MANY full frontal Doctor Manhattan scenes. More amusing, actually, were the periodic sequences where Manhattan has shorts on, as though the MPAA said "enough blue wang is enough!"
More than anything, the thing that stands out is Snyder's curious music cues. It's not that some of them were in the book and some weren't, it's more about how overwhelmingly they're mixed in the soundtrack. Aside from a little-too-on-the-nose muzak version of "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" playing in Veidt towers, all of the songs get "Full On Front Channel" treatment, drowning out voices and background ambiance. Only Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" really resonates from a clever opening credits montage.
On the other hand, I'll probably never be able to hear Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" without visions of Super-hero softcore porn in my mind. I'm pretty sure the graphic violence earned Watchmen the "R" rating, so the graphic sex scene is there for... I don't know.
So I guess that I didn't "get" it, since I didn't love the movie or whatever the screenwriter's rationale was. It's not all that hard to follow and condenses what it needs to condense and makes some things a little more obvious than the book, and I guess I'm "meh" about the Squid replacement. Without Tales of the Black Freighter, an argument could be made that it "fits" this version of the film.
All in all, I'm not going to rush out and buy the Super Deluxe Ten Disc Blu Ray Complete Director's Cut with 40 Minutes of Footage and Under the Hood and Tales of the Black Freighter Re-Inserted. Three hours was enough the first time. And I haven't even seen 300 since the first time. That doesn't bode well for Watchmen. But I might watch Dawn of the Dead another time. If nothing else, the first ten minutes are crackerjack.
* I've yet to move it from the old blog to this one, so you'll have to take my word for it until I do.
It was a friend's birthday and he really wanted to see it. He allegedly had passes but not enough for everybody and they didn't pan out anyway but hey we're already there so I might as well see it, right?
"Cap'n!"
Yes?
"Enough of this bull-puckey! Tell us what you thought already!"
What's bull-puckey?
"Don't try to distract me! Review the damn movie already!"
Very well. So the first thing you should know is that I didn't hate the movie. It wasn't some kind of travesty or the sort of movie that climbs out of your tv and takes a steaming dump on the living room carpet. It was watchable and for a nigh-three hour running time, it went by pretty quickly.
Before you start slapping that on the dvd cover with a byline attributing that to yr Cap'n, understand that the above paragraph is almost exactly how I felt about 300 when I watched it. I haven't watched 300 since.
In fact, the only Zack Snyder movie I've watched again was Dawn of the Dead, which I feel is an interesting - if flawed - "alternate universe" take on Romero's film. His other movies, both comic book adaptations, were acceptable but not particularly great movies that did some interesting work and didn't make me angry for spending time with them.
To no one's surprise, Rorschach was my favorite part of the movie. Jackie Earle Haley will make an interesting Freddy Krueger in that Nightmare on Elm Street remake I'm not interested in. He was fun with the mask and surprisingly more interesting without it. Strangely, when Rorschach disappears for a good stretch of the middle of the film, I didn't find myself wondering where he was, but it was nice to get him back when we did.
Everyone else was... meh? Nobody did anything really heinous (unless you count the makeup department's work on "old" Silk Spectre and Richard Nixon... eegah!) but they didn't make much of an impression either. Admittedly, once you see the "blue wang of doom", it's hard not to notice it in the many, many, MANY full frontal Doctor Manhattan scenes. More amusing, actually, were the periodic sequences where Manhattan has shorts on, as though the MPAA said "enough blue wang is enough!"
More than anything, the thing that stands out is Snyder's curious music cues. It's not that some of them were in the book and some weren't, it's more about how overwhelmingly they're mixed in the soundtrack. Aside from a little-too-on-the-nose muzak version of "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" playing in Veidt towers, all of the songs get "Full On Front Channel" treatment, drowning out voices and background ambiance. Only Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" really resonates from a clever opening credits montage.
On the other hand, I'll probably never be able to hear Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" without visions of Super-hero softcore porn in my mind. I'm pretty sure the graphic violence earned Watchmen the "R" rating, so the graphic sex scene is there for... I don't know.
So I guess that I didn't "get" it, since I didn't love the movie or whatever the screenwriter's rationale was. It's not all that hard to follow and condenses what it needs to condense and makes some things a little more obvious than the book, and I guess I'm "meh" about the Squid replacement. Without Tales of the Black Freighter, an argument could be made that it "fits" this version of the film.
All in all, I'm not going to rush out and buy the Super Deluxe Ten Disc Blu Ray Complete Director's Cut with 40 Minutes of Footage and Under the Hood and Tales of the Black Freighter Re-Inserted. Three hours was enough the first time. And I haven't even seen 300 since the first time. That doesn't bode well for Watchmen. But I might watch Dawn of the Dead another time. If nothing else, the first ten minutes are crackerjack.
* I've yet to move it from the old blog to this one, so you'll have to take my word for it until I do.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Doughnuts, do-dee-do-de-do, Doughnuts!
I'm not really sure why it's worth weighing in on the "Wolverine" situation, but I have nothing else really pressing in my "to discuss" column today.
For those of you who aren't movie pirates or don't follow film sites, it appears that thereabouts April 1st, a not-even-remotely April Fool's day joke happened when someone posted 20th Century Fox's X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie online. I don't know where you can find it so please don't ask. I don't care enough about the movie to even start sifting through those channels to locate it. It's out there, I guess if you're so inclined you could find it.
Whether you should or not is totally up to you. Like I said: The Cap'n doesn't care. I don't represent 20th Century Fox and have no vested interest in the film. What I find interesting is the ensuing debate going on about sites like Ain't It Zoul News refusing to accept reviews.
Fox is doing exactly what they should do: hunting down the culprit and arresting the shit out of them. They spent millions of dollars (admittedly, on a movie that people don't seem to like) on this particular film and it was leaked without their permission. Fair enough. Regardless of how I sometimes feel about 20th Century Fox and how they handle their properties, they have the right to protect their investments.
Once upon a time, The Cap'n knew several people who had access to movies before they were available (in theatres or on dvd) and yes, I saw a few of them. I won't lie. American Psycho, Insomnia, Dogma, One Hour Photo, and a number of others. Half of it occurred during the "unprotected Academy Screener" phase and the other half in the early 2000's, when "bootlegs" were chopped in half to fit on CD-R's.
I had a friend get in trouble for distributing movies online when we lived on-campus. Universal apparently didn't care for that, but he had a nice RD and the situation was resolved without litigation. The point is that I understand the "other" side as well; sharing movies obtained online wasn't something done for money but merely to share the movie with others. I can still remember a guy who had a copy of The Blair Witch Project months before it opened locally, so I can see how this is still going on.
What I am a little fuzzy about is the double standard of asking people not to send in "reviews" of a movie leaked online from sites that regularly posted pictures, script reviews, and artwork online only to have it "pulled" with similar legal threats. If the script was sold to the studio, it belongs to the studio, so unless you work for that studio and were paid to "leak" a review, it's stolen property. Please feel free to correct me if this is erroneous.
If you don't want to post reviews of the film, that's fine, but please stop posting other related images or script reviews if the issue is "copyright infringement". Personally, I think things like early looks at Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter or the Tron footage that Disney doesn't seem to be pulling are good ways to create word-of-mouth interest.
Most (if not all) of the movies I was privy to in the past were also things we saw in theatres and bought on dvd. It's the only way I know that One Hour Photo has a different beginning that's nowhere to be found on the dvd, but I don't mind having the "officially" released version. I'm not a movie pirate, nor do I have issue with either side doing what they do (studios and pirates). If you both can "get away with it", so to speak, then by all means do it.
I don't really trust Bit-Torrent and the turnaround these days is close enough that the Cap'n can wait if he doesn't see it on the big screen. I wasn't planning on watching Wolverine so it's pretty much a non-issue for me. I just find the reaction online to be strange, especially from places that pride themselves on "scoops".
For those of you who aren't movie pirates or don't follow film sites, it appears that thereabouts April 1st, a not-even-remotely April Fool's day joke happened when someone posted 20th Century Fox's X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie online. I don't know where you can find it so please don't ask. I don't care enough about the movie to even start sifting through those channels to locate it. It's out there, I guess if you're so inclined you could find it.
Whether you should or not is totally up to you. Like I said: The Cap'n doesn't care. I don't represent 20th Century Fox and have no vested interest in the film. What I find interesting is the ensuing debate going on about sites like Ain't It Zoul News refusing to accept reviews.
Fox is doing exactly what they should do: hunting down the culprit and arresting the shit out of them. They spent millions of dollars (admittedly, on a movie that people don't seem to like) on this particular film and it was leaked without their permission. Fair enough. Regardless of how I sometimes feel about 20th Century Fox and how they handle their properties, they have the right to protect their investments.
Once upon a time, The Cap'n knew several people who had access to movies before they were available (in theatres or on dvd) and yes, I saw a few of them. I won't lie. American Psycho, Insomnia, Dogma, One Hour Photo, and a number of others. Half of it occurred during the "unprotected Academy Screener" phase and the other half in the early 2000's, when "bootlegs" were chopped in half to fit on CD-R's.
I had a friend get in trouble for distributing movies online when we lived on-campus. Universal apparently didn't care for that, but he had a nice RD and the situation was resolved without litigation. The point is that I understand the "other" side as well; sharing movies obtained online wasn't something done for money but merely to share the movie with others. I can still remember a guy who had a copy of The Blair Witch Project months before it opened locally, so I can see how this is still going on.
What I am a little fuzzy about is the double standard of asking people not to send in "reviews" of a movie leaked online from sites that regularly posted pictures, script reviews, and artwork online only to have it "pulled" with similar legal threats. If the script was sold to the studio, it belongs to the studio, so unless you work for that studio and were paid to "leak" a review, it's stolen property. Please feel free to correct me if this is erroneous.
If you don't want to post reviews of the film, that's fine, but please stop posting other related images or script reviews if the issue is "copyright infringement". Personally, I think things like early looks at Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter or the Tron footage that Disney doesn't seem to be pulling are good ways to create word-of-mouth interest.
Most (if not all) of the movies I was privy to in the past were also things we saw in theatres and bought on dvd. It's the only way I know that One Hour Photo has a different beginning that's nowhere to be found on the dvd, but I don't mind having the "officially" released version. I'm not a movie pirate, nor do I have issue with either side doing what they do (studios and pirates). If you both can "get away with it", so to speak, then by all means do it.
I don't really trust Bit-Torrent and the turnaround these days is close enough that the Cap'n can wait if he doesn't see it on the big screen. I wasn't planning on watching Wolverine so it's pretty much a non-issue for me. I just find the reaction online to be strange, especially from places that pride themselves on "scoops".
Friday, April 3, 2009
Hold on, Ricky!
If you're attending Bad Movie Night (and many of you have indicated you are), you should be thanking Borders right now. Since they marked down their dvd inventory 40%, my quest for the "Bag of Badness" became much easier.
Oh, did the Cap'n not mention the "Bag of Badness"?
Funny you should ask, me, because every attendee of Bad Movie Night will be reaching into said bag and pulling out their own terrible, horrible, no good really bad movie to take home. And you will take it home.
If you're wise, you'll use it to make your own Bad Movie Night. That way you can do the same thing to me when I attend (which I promise I will).
What can lucky BMN-ers expect when they reach into the bag? Well, I'd hate to ruin the surprise, but I'll give you some hints:
80s cheese
Double and Triple features
Unnecessary sequels
Keanu Reeves
Giant Monsters
Musicals
Explosions
Martin Short
Are you excited yet? You will be, because I'm not done on my quest yet... There's always Edward McKay's Used Books and more.
---
After watching Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky at home last night, I'm going to spill the beans that it's more than likely the "surprise" movie. This does mean that Punisher: War Zone will only be sampled along with other contenders / offenders.
What Riki-Oh does is take a Peter Jackson movie and drop it into a kung fu film. The gore is there, the heavy synth score, the inventive shots and angles. Hell, even the "final monster" is reminiscent of Dead Alive.
But instead of people with New Zealand accents, you have questionable Mandarin or Cantonese dubbing with subtitles transcribed by a drunken baboon. There will be a drinking game associated with the number of misspelled words, questionable sentences, or outright incomprehensible translations. I promise, those who play will be rather sloshed by the end.
The Story of Ricky is just weird enough and just violent enough to keep you captivated and disgusted for 88 minutes, which is exactly what I could hope for. Why on earth it didn't occur to me before is a mystery.
Consider it my gift to you on the weekend after my *ahem* birthday. Between Troll 2, Mac and Me, The Story of Ricky, and Batman & Robin, you're going to have a very good time. I'm also putting together a trailer reel from Youtube to show between movies, and thanks to Mr. Cranpire, Doctor Re-Animator will be making a return appearance. Perhaps more than once. If Saturday isn't enough, perhaps I'll spill it over to Sunday, and maybe start early on Friday after Crank: High Voltage. I mean, The Giant Claw deserves a shot too.
Off to remove some tags. I'm about four movies away from the perfect "Bag of Badness", and I know exactly where to find the rest. Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.
Oh, did the Cap'n not mention the "Bag of Badness"?
Funny you should ask, me, because every attendee of Bad Movie Night will be reaching into said bag and pulling out their own terrible, horrible, no good really bad movie to take home. And you will take it home.
If you're wise, you'll use it to make your own Bad Movie Night. That way you can do the same thing to me when I attend (which I promise I will).
What can lucky BMN-ers expect when they reach into the bag? Well, I'd hate to ruin the surprise, but I'll give you some hints:
80s cheese
Double and Triple features
Unnecessary sequels
Keanu Reeves
Giant Monsters
Musicals
Explosions
Martin Short
Are you excited yet? You will be, because I'm not done on my quest yet... There's always Edward McKay's Used Books and more.
---
After watching Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky at home last night, I'm going to spill the beans that it's more than likely the "surprise" movie. This does mean that Punisher: War Zone will only be sampled along with other contenders / offenders.
What Riki-Oh does is take a Peter Jackson movie and drop it into a kung fu film. The gore is there, the heavy synth score, the inventive shots and angles. Hell, even the "final monster" is reminiscent of Dead Alive.
But instead of people with New Zealand accents, you have questionable Mandarin or Cantonese dubbing with subtitles transcribed by a drunken baboon. There will be a drinking game associated with the number of misspelled words, questionable sentences, or outright incomprehensible translations. I promise, those who play will be rather sloshed by the end.
The Story of Ricky is just weird enough and just violent enough to keep you captivated and disgusted for 88 minutes, which is exactly what I could hope for. Why on earth it didn't occur to me before is a mystery.
Consider it my gift to you on the weekend after my *ahem* birthday. Between Troll 2, Mac and Me, The Story of Ricky, and Batman & Robin, you're going to have a very good time. I'm also putting together a trailer reel from Youtube to show between movies, and thanks to Mr. Cranpire, Doctor Re-Animator will be making a return appearance. Perhaps more than once. If Saturday isn't enough, perhaps I'll spill it over to Sunday, and maybe start early on Friday after Crank: High Voltage. I mean, The Giant Claw deserves a shot too.
Off to remove some tags. I'm about four movies away from the perfect "Bag of Badness", and I know exactly where to find the rest. Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Cry Baby Cry!!!
The Cap'n needs to preface the following rant by saying the following: I love Netflix. I've been using the service since 2004 and I rarely have problems.
When I do, it's things they can't control like discs getting broken in the mail. Lately, the streaming service made catching up on movies and tv shows much easier with PlayOn. After I bought a PS3 and upgraded to HDTV, I took advantage of the fact they shipped Blu Ray discs out. When they raised the price a dollar for the Blu Ray service, I was cool with that. It's fair; the discs are more expensive than dvds and previously they'd charged nothing extra for it.
Then things started getting weird. Blu Ray versions of movies would disappear from availability for periods of time or altogether. They used to just send you the discs, but now discs have a ring and barcode in the center. And then, last week, they made the announcement that Neftlix would be raising the price on Blu Ray rentals by four dollars.
I know what's happening, and it irritates me. What these developments say is that people were / are switching to the Blu Ray service, trading out the HD discs with their old dvd disc, and sending it back. That's the only thing that explains this recent turn of events. Because Blu Rays are getting cheaper in stores right now. At some places they're actually cheaper than their dvd counterparts.
Yes, Netflix is paying more for the BD discs, but quadripling the extra cost of renting BD's points less to studios charging them and more to unscrupulous customers "swapping" discs out, ruining it for the rest of us. And it's not like they didn't have to buy the dvd first, so this whole situation is stupid. Why buy a twenty dollar movie and then swap out the disc with a service you pay seventeen dollars for when you could just pay five more dollars and get the BD disc?
Am I crazy here? $37 is worth more to pay than $25? Is the Cap'n missing something?
More than anything, I'm voicing frustration here. $22 is still a better price to pay for three movies a month (of both formats) plus the streaming. I'm not going to scream bloody murder until this continues happening and they jack up the price to an extra 10 dollars or 20 dollars because somebody really wants a copy of 2 Fast 2 Furious in HD and decides to pull a fast one on Netflix instead of drive over to Wal Mart.
I suppose it's naive of me to think that people would maybe not try to ruin something for the rest of us in order to save a trip to the store (or back to the store where they bought the movie in the first place). It must be too difficult to find a used dvd store in town which will also have that disc, will pay you money for your dvd which you can put towards the Blu Ray and you can instead rent stuff you aren't sure you want to buy from Netflix. Just a thought.
Now that I'm done with that I'll get off my high horse. I suppose I should just suck it up and expect the worst from people. They're going to do stupid (and counterintuitive) things to save some time, even if it doesn't save them any money.
On the other hand, I would like to thank Netflix for putting all of Red Dwarf on streaming, which saves me $200 (the aggregate cost of all eight seasons or the box, your choice). Also, thanks for giving the option to wait for The Visitor on Blu Ray or just watching it streaming. I'll just pretend the extra four bucks are for that and not the guy who wants Disaster Movie in 1080p on the cheap.
When I do, it's things they can't control like discs getting broken in the mail. Lately, the streaming service made catching up on movies and tv shows much easier with PlayOn. After I bought a PS3 and upgraded to HDTV, I took advantage of the fact they shipped Blu Ray discs out. When they raised the price a dollar for the Blu Ray service, I was cool with that. It's fair; the discs are more expensive than dvds and previously they'd charged nothing extra for it.
Then things started getting weird. Blu Ray versions of movies would disappear from availability for periods of time or altogether. They used to just send you the discs, but now discs have a ring and barcode in the center. And then, last week, they made the announcement that Neftlix would be raising the price on Blu Ray rentals by four dollars.
I know what's happening, and it irritates me. What these developments say is that people were / are switching to the Blu Ray service, trading out the HD discs with their old dvd disc, and sending it back. That's the only thing that explains this recent turn of events. Because Blu Rays are getting cheaper in stores right now. At some places they're actually cheaper than their dvd counterparts.
Yes, Netflix is paying more for the BD discs, but quadripling the extra cost of renting BD's points less to studios charging them and more to unscrupulous customers "swapping" discs out, ruining it for the rest of us. And it's not like they didn't have to buy the dvd first, so this whole situation is stupid. Why buy a twenty dollar movie and then swap out the disc with a service you pay seventeen dollars for when you could just pay five more dollars and get the BD disc?
Am I crazy here? $37 is worth more to pay than $25? Is the Cap'n missing something?
More than anything, I'm voicing frustration here. $22 is still a better price to pay for three movies a month (of both formats) plus the streaming. I'm not going to scream bloody murder until this continues happening and they jack up the price to an extra 10 dollars or 20 dollars because somebody really wants a copy of 2 Fast 2 Furious in HD and decides to pull a fast one on Netflix instead of drive over to Wal Mart.
I suppose it's naive of me to think that people would maybe not try to ruin something for the rest of us in order to save a trip to the store (or back to the store where they bought the movie in the first place). It must be too difficult to find a used dvd store in town which will also have that disc, will pay you money for your dvd which you can put towards the Blu Ray and you can instead rent stuff you aren't sure you want to buy from Netflix. Just a thought.
Now that I'm done with that I'll get off my high horse. I suppose I should just suck it up and expect the worst from people. They're going to do stupid (and counterintuitive) things to save some time, even if it doesn't save them any money.
On the other hand, I would like to thank Netflix for putting all of Red Dwarf on streaming, which saves me $200 (the aggregate cost of all eight seasons or the box, your choice). Also, thanks for giving the option to wait for The Visitor on Blu Ray or just watching it streaming. I'll just pretend the extra four bucks are for that and not the guy who wants Disaster Movie in 1080p on the cheap.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Blogorium Review: Religulous
If the Cap'n has the cornhusker virus or whatever it's called, I don't know how to find out.
Everything seems perfectly all right now. We're fine. We're all fine here now, thank you.
How are you?
---
As promised, I did watch Religulous last night, following a long and arduous fight with the CPU hog that is Norton Anti-Virus (2005). I'd scarcely call it a documentary but it was okay for what it is: Bill Maher propaganda.
It's become difficult these days, particularly with Michael Moore and now Bill Maher and Larry Charles, to identify something as a "documentary". That's where you're going to find Religulous in video stores or wherever they sell dvds these days, but that's not really what things like Bowling for Columbine or Reefer Madness are. They're more like the persuasive papers you had to write in high school, but on film. The opinion in these films is loud and clear from frame one, which is not as evident in something like, let's say Salesman or Hoop Dreams.
Why I think Religulous works in ways that Sicko or Fahrenheit 9/11 do not is that Maher is not writing, directing, and starring in this. Larry Charles (Seinfeld, Borat) is behind the camera, and he exercises some editorial control. The setup is not dissimilar to what Michael Moore does: an interview is set up under false pretenses and then the "host (in this case, Bill Maher) gets in some cheap shots at religious figures of every denomination.
Religulous is full of cheap shots, and its clear at the beginning of the film that some of his "subjects" clearly don't know that this film is attacking religion as an institution. Where I think that Religulous works is that Charles and Maher don't always edit the interviews to make the people look like idiots. More than once Bill Maher is challenged in his beliefs in a way he doesn't respond to. Maybe he can't respond to, I'm not sure.
From the outset, at least, you know why he's doing this; early in the film, Maher explains that he just doesn't understand why reasonable people believe in things he find to be ridiculous (the serpent and the burning bush come up repeatedly). All of the interviews address that in one form or another and once he owns up to what he's doing (or someone knows why he's there) then things get more interesting. It's clear that as he goes along, less people are allowing Maher to "sucker-punch" their religion.
That's not to say that people don't come out looking bad. Muslims get the worst treatment in the film, in a way I found rather offensive. Maher makes it clear he feels Islam is a religion strictly about violence and simply shuts Muslims down when they try to counter his position. I sense he chose people and decided to conduct interviews in such a way that the nuances of Islam are (pun intended) "whitewashed". For Bill Maher to perpetuate the stereotype that all Muslims are violent and their religion is about killing non-Muslims was more than a little tasteless.
His closing monologue is also presumptuous. After doing a survey of things he finds strange (Truck Stop Services, Jews for Jesus, Mormons, Islam, the Vatican, a man who claims to be Jesus reincarnated), Maher launches into a diatribe about how religion is going to be responsible for a nuclear holocaust that kills us, and it's religion's fault because reasonable people are smart enough to make bombs and ruin the environment but too stupid to see things his way. It comes abruptly and undermines the purpose of the rest of the film: to understand religion from and outsider perspective.
In the end, I'm going to recommend it to folks who already watch Real Time. Deeply religious people might find this film to be offensive or just a waste of time. I appreciated that Maher brings many voices to the table, pro and con, and if you've never heard of the Creation Museum you might want to check this out just for that. I studied it a few years ago and it's fascinating in a disturbing way. The Vatican Astronomer seems to agree.
Religulous is worth renting but I'd be hard pressed to call it a "Great" opinion piece, let alone a "documentary". If you feel that religion is a destructive force or that it's ruining the way you live your life, then this movie is for you. For the rest of us, it's interesting but hardly necessary.
Everything seems perfectly all right now. We're fine. We're all fine here now, thank you.
How are you?
---
As promised, I did watch Religulous last night, following a long and arduous fight with the CPU hog that is Norton Anti-Virus (2005). I'd scarcely call it a documentary but it was okay for what it is: Bill Maher propaganda.
It's become difficult these days, particularly with Michael Moore and now Bill Maher and Larry Charles, to identify something as a "documentary". That's where you're going to find Religulous in video stores or wherever they sell dvds these days, but that's not really what things like Bowling for Columbine or Reefer Madness are. They're more like the persuasive papers you had to write in high school, but on film. The opinion in these films is loud and clear from frame one, which is not as evident in something like, let's say Salesman or Hoop Dreams.
Why I think Religulous works in ways that Sicko or Fahrenheit 9/11 do not is that Maher is not writing, directing, and starring in this. Larry Charles (Seinfeld, Borat) is behind the camera, and he exercises some editorial control. The setup is not dissimilar to what Michael Moore does: an interview is set up under false pretenses and then the "host (in this case, Bill Maher) gets in some cheap shots at religious figures of every denomination.
Religulous is full of cheap shots, and its clear at the beginning of the film that some of his "subjects" clearly don't know that this film is attacking religion as an institution. Where I think that Religulous works is that Charles and Maher don't always edit the interviews to make the people look like idiots. More than once Bill Maher is challenged in his beliefs in a way he doesn't respond to. Maybe he can't respond to, I'm not sure.
From the outset, at least, you know why he's doing this; early in the film, Maher explains that he just doesn't understand why reasonable people believe in things he find to be ridiculous (the serpent and the burning bush come up repeatedly). All of the interviews address that in one form or another and once he owns up to what he's doing (or someone knows why he's there) then things get more interesting. It's clear that as he goes along, less people are allowing Maher to "sucker-punch" their religion.
That's not to say that people don't come out looking bad. Muslims get the worst treatment in the film, in a way I found rather offensive. Maher makes it clear he feels Islam is a religion strictly about violence and simply shuts Muslims down when they try to counter his position. I sense he chose people and decided to conduct interviews in such a way that the nuances of Islam are (pun intended) "whitewashed". For Bill Maher to perpetuate the stereotype that all Muslims are violent and their religion is about killing non-Muslims was more than a little tasteless.
His closing monologue is also presumptuous. After doing a survey of things he finds strange (Truck Stop Services, Jews for Jesus, Mormons, Islam, the Vatican, a man who claims to be Jesus reincarnated), Maher launches into a diatribe about how religion is going to be responsible for a nuclear holocaust that kills us, and it's religion's fault because reasonable people are smart enough to make bombs and ruin the environment but too stupid to see things his way. It comes abruptly and undermines the purpose of the rest of the film: to understand religion from and outsider perspective.
In the end, I'm going to recommend it to folks who already watch Real Time. Deeply religious people might find this film to be offensive or just a waste of time. I appreciated that Maher brings many voices to the table, pro and con, and if you've never heard of the Creation Museum you might want to check this out just for that. I studied it a few years ago and it's fascinating in a disturbing way. The Vatican Astronomer seems to agree.
Religulous is worth renting but I'd be hard pressed to call it a "Great" opinion piece, let alone a "documentary". If you feel that religion is a destructive force or that it's ruining the way you live your life, then this movie is for you. For the rest of us, it's interesting but hardly necessary.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Worm! Enemy be thy name!!!
Greeting, blogorium readers. The Cap'n would love to sit here and chat with you about all the wonderful developments from the last four days (including Troll / Troll 2, The Driller Killer, Cat in the Brain*, and a brand spanking new 5.1 surround sound system which augments the fancy schmancy tv in all kinds of ways), but unless this Con-whatever virus is a massive April Fool's Day prank, I desperately need to navigate this four year old copy of Norton Antivirus before midnight.
If my computer is not dead tomorrow I will try to have seen almost all of Religulous and share that with you. Also, Slumdog Millionaire inexplicably showed up via Netflix so I guess I'll check that out.
Also, tomorrow I'm going to have to go on a bit of a tear about Netflix's new Blu-Ray policy, no doubt in part to the less than honest renters who "lose" their discs or swap them with dvds... but tomorrow is another day.
Since I'm going to have to duck out here shortly, I thought I'd bring out "One from the Vault" that may have been overlooked. It's hard to read a post every single day and I expect more than a few of you have missed them. This will be a nice way for me tobe lazy share gems from the past.
Yeah... that's the ticket.
---
From the Fall of 2008:
I now see why so many dvd commentaries are so awful. It was an experiment, sort of: Dr. Adams wasn't all that interested in just another discussion of Sunset Boulevard, especially since half the class never says anything as it is.
So he cued up Sunset Boulevard on the dvd player and said "let's do our own commentary". Mercifully, it wasn't recorded, because when the room gets dark, even the chatty students seem to shut up. Some of them fell asleep (I think).
There were fits and bursts of analysis, particularly regarding the way Billy Wilder was playing with expectations for his second fore into film noir. Sunset Boulevard could, in fact, be considered a proto-neo-noir; much like Ace in the Hole (or The Big Carnival, whatever you've heard it called), Sunset Boulevard is Billy Wilder playing with the conventions of noir in very different circumstances. He subverts and in many cases reverses shots, themes, and motifs established in Double Indemnity (six years separate Indemnity from Boulevard), so it's hard to say it fits cleanly into "classic" noir*.
But that's getting away from the discussion of our group "commentary", which ended up being mostly Dr. Adams pointing something out, one of three of us occasionally piping in noticing something strange (like the connection between Mabel Norman and Norma Desmond in a biographical sense) or pausing to appreciate the deep focus during the coffin scene. Most of the time we just watched the movie. For long stretches I'd want to say something but instead got caught up watching what was happening on-screen and not wanting to narrate the action.
To be honest, I don't know how many of you listen to commentaries, but they frequently fall into one of the two traps I just listed. The other big one is the actor commentary which is generall anecdotal stuff about pranks on the set or "how great it was to work with blah blah blah". Very rarely do you get a commentary track that provides solid technical information, decent analysis of subtext, narrative, or intertextuality.
One of the reasons I enjoy Steven Soderbergh's films so much is that when he records commentaries (for his films or others like Point Blank, The Third Man, and The Graduate), they're frequently very informative beyond "it was really sunny that day". For as bad of a movie as it is, the commentary on his remake of Solaris is endlessly fascinating. Soderbergh is teamed up with director James Cameron (who produced the film), and they have very different styles of direction which leads to a good discussion of the process of adapting existing material and approaches to shooting it.
There are some good commentaries out there, but often they're a lot like the Film Noir class was this afternoon: lots of dead air, sporadic bursts of qualitative content, and two hours better spent watching the film itself. Next time I'll try harder, or maybe MST3K had the right idea all along: riff til you see the credits rolling.
* Yes, that's really the title of the movie.
If my computer is not dead tomorrow I will try to have seen almost all of Religulous and share that with you. Also, Slumdog Millionaire inexplicably showed up via Netflix so I guess I'll check that out.
Also, tomorrow I'm going to have to go on a bit of a tear about Netflix's new Blu-Ray policy, no doubt in part to the less than honest renters who "lose" their discs or swap them with dvds... but tomorrow is another day.
Since I'm going to have to duck out here shortly, I thought I'd bring out "One from the Vault" that may have been overlooked. It's hard to read a post every single day and I expect more than a few of you have missed them. This will be a nice way for me to
Yeah... that's the ticket.
---
From the Fall of 2008:
I now see why so many dvd commentaries are so awful. It was an experiment, sort of: Dr. Adams wasn't all that interested in just another discussion of Sunset Boulevard, especially since half the class never says anything as it is.
So he cued up Sunset Boulevard on the dvd player and said "let's do our own commentary". Mercifully, it wasn't recorded, because when the room gets dark, even the chatty students seem to shut up. Some of them fell asleep (I think).
There were fits and bursts of analysis, particularly regarding the way Billy Wilder was playing with expectations for his second fore into film noir. Sunset Boulevard could, in fact, be considered a proto-neo-noir; much like Ace in the Hole (or The Big Carnival, whatever you've heard it called), Sunset Boulevard is Billy Wilder playing with the conventions of noir in very different circumstances. He subverts and in many cases reverses shots, themes, and motifs established in Double Indemnity (six years separate Indemnity from Boulevard), so it's hard to say it fits cleanly into "classic" noir*.
But that's getting away from the discussion of our group "commentary", which ended up being mostly Dr. Adams pointing something out, one of three of us occasionally piping in noticing something strange (like the connection between Mabel Norman and Norma Desmond in a biographical sense) or pausing to appreciate the deep focus during the coffin scene. Most of the time we just watched the movie. For long stretches I'd want to say something but instead got caught up watching what was happening on-screen and not wanting to narrate the action.
To be honest, I don't know how many of you listen to commentaries, but they frequently fall into one of the two traps I just listed. The other big one is the actor commentary which is generall anecdotal stuff about pranks on the set or "how great it was to work with blah blah blah". Very rarely do you get a commentary track that provides solid technical information, decent analysis of subtext, narrative, or intertextuality.
One of the reasons I enjoy Steven Soderbergh's films so much is that when he records commentaries (for his films or others like Point Blank, The Third Man, and The Graduate), they're frequently very informative beyond "it was really sunny that day". For as bad of a movie as it is, the commentary on his remake of Solaris is endlessly fascinating. Soderbergh is teamed up with director James Cameron (who produced the film), and they have very different styles of direction which leads to a good discussion of the process of adapting existing material and approaches to shooting it.
There are some good commentaries out there, but often they're a lot like the Film Noir class was this afternoon: lots of dead air, sporadic bursts of qualitative content, and two hours better spent watching the film itself. Next time I'll try harder, or maybe MST3K had the right idea all along: riff til you see the credits rolling.
* Yes, that's really the title of the movie.
Monday, March 30, 2009
There's no such thing as a bad movie... right?
Ladies and Germs, it's official!
Bad Movie Night will take place on April the 18th, 2009.
Festivities begin thereabouts 7pm, with the possibility of a field trip to see Crank 2: High Voltage under strong consideration.
I can promise you the following films: Troll 2 (the "Best Worst Movie"), Batman & Robin (worse than you remember!), and Mac and Me (sponsored by McDonald's and Coca Cola!).
In addition, there will be at least one "surprise" movie, a selection of trailers hand picked by the Cap'n, a "holiday special" of some sort, and goodies* for all attending.
Stay for all of the movies... if you dare!!!!
Don't make Terence Stamp Angry! Attend!!!!
---
Otherwise, there's not much to report. I've been watching Vertigo on and off for the past few days and in perusing some articles about the film, I've yet to find any discussion of a theory that occurred to me almost immediately.
After Scottie (James Stewart) has his expressionistic nightmare, he is sent (almost immediately) to a psychiatric facility. Considering the conversation Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) has with the Doctor, it's pretty clear Scottie went catatonic and isn't likely to come out of his state any time soon.
Immediately following that sequence, Hitchcock cuts to a panoramic view of San Francisco, forming an ellipsis of sorts, and dissolves to Scottie out and about like nothing ever happened. There's no causal link between the previous scene and the second half of the film, so I would think it fair to say Scottie never left the facility. Rather, what we're seeing is an extension of his "dream" state; one he lives out the relationship with Judy / Madeline (Kim Novak) until it too collapses.
What's so interesting about this theory is that in the discourse of cinema, Vertigo now anticipates a film like David Lynch's Lost Highway. Vertigo can (and seems to be) read as "this happens because the story presents it as so", but in this alternate reading, the film is suddenly the template Lynch follows in more ambiguous ways. Lynch is more explicit: his literal transformation happens to the male protagonist (Bill Pullman becomes Balthazar Getty) whereas the female protagonist (Patricia Arquette) merely pulls a "Judy" and changes superficial aesthetic appearances.
In the end, the substitutive fantasies of Scottie Ferguson and Fred Madison still collapse in on themselves, not due to fate but instead to a flawed understanding of agency from damaged identites. I'm not saying this is the only way to read Vertigo (or Lost Highway), however I find it a most intriguing connection that was heretofore unexplored.
* I use the term "goodies" very loosely.
Bad Movie Night will take place on April the 18th, 2009.
Festivities begin thereabouts 7pm, with the possibility of a field trip to see Crank 2: High Voltage under strong consideration.
I can promise you the following films: Troll 2 (the "Best Worst Movie"), Batman & Robin (worse than you remember!), and Mac and Me (sponsored by McDonald's and Coca Cola!).
In addition, there will be at least one "surprise" movie, a selection of trailers hand picked by the Cap'n, a "holiday special" of some sort, and goodies* for all attending.
Stay for all of the movies... if you dare!!!!
Don't make Terence Stamp Angry! Attend!!!!---
Otherwise, there's not much to report. I've been watching Vertigo on and off for the past few days and in perusing some articles about the film, I've yet to find any discussion of a theory that occurred to me almost immediately.
After Scottie (James Stewart) has his expressionistic nightmare, he is sent (almost immediately) to a psychiatric facility. Considering the conversation Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) has with the Doctor, it's pretty clear Scottie went catatonic and isn't likely to come out of his state any time soon.
Immediately following that sequence, Hitchcock cuts to a panoramic view of San Francisco, forming an ellipsis of sorts, and dissolves to Scottie out and about like nothing ever happened. There's no causal link between the previous scene and the second half of the film, so I would think it fair to say Scottie never left the facility. Rather, what we're seeing is an extension of his "dream" state; one he lives out the relationship with Judy / Madeline (Kim Novak) until it too collapses.
What's so interesting about this theory is that in the discourse of cinema, Vertigo now anticipates a film like David Lynch's Lost Highway. Vertigo can (and seems to be) read as "this happens because the story presents it as so", but in this alternate reading, the film is suddenly the template Lynch follows in more ambiguous ways. Lynch is more explicit: his literal transformation happens to the male protagonist (Bill Pullman becomes Balthazar Getty) whereas the female protagonist (Patricia Arquette) merely pulls a "Judy" and changes superficial aesthetic appearances.
In the end, the substitutive fantasies of Scottie Ferguson and Fred Madison still collapse in on themselves, not due to fate but instead to a flawed understanding of agency from damaged identites. I'm not saying this is the only way to read Vertigo (or Lost Highway), however I find it a most intriguing connection that was heretofore unexplored.
* I use the term "goodies" very loosely.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
The Two Q's
Aside from a rather unexpected surprise party this afternoon, the Cap'n had a pretty quiet Saturday. I've finally seen 30 Rock, Dollhouse, Testees, and The Simpsons in HD, the latter two thanks to Hulu, the former two thanks to Adam.
However, I'm a bit more interested in sharing my thoughts about two movies that begin with Q, both of which I viewed in the last twenty-four hours: Quarantine and The Quantum of Solace.
Let's begin with Bond, shall we?
I was a fan of Casino Royale; it was a refreshing break from the outlandish-for-all-the-wrong-reasons The World is Not Enough and Die Another Day. Daniel Craig's James Bond was a blunt instrument in need of refining and the gadgets were limited and (somewhat) believable.
Quantum of Solace continues both positive traits from Royale. The gadgets are nonexistent, unless you call MI:6's fancy "wall phone displays" a gadget. Bond never uses anything fancier than a gun, and even then it's sparingly. Craig plays Bond as even more of a brute than in Casino Royale. He's something of a wounded animal, lashing out at anyone and anything in his way. Rather than be coy and smooth talk his way into information, Bond frequently kills the potential informant and is left grasping at straws. This is certainly not the James Bond we knew from decades past.
That may be the reason so many people didn't like Quantum of Solace. The film is more Bourne than Bond, right down to the villain who is stealing water to sell it back to the poor. Pretty far from world domination, but there is promise in the new SPECTRE "evil" organization, Quantum. The inevitable third movie will tell if the Bond team wants to take the series back in the direction of Connery, Moore, and Brosnan, or if we're going to see Daniel Craig in more rooftop chases.
My biggest complaint about Quantum of Solace is that it could easily be about someone other than Bond. The film only loosely connects Dominic Greene (the big bad) to the death of Vesper Lynde from Casino Royale, and any promise of moving further in that storyline is tertiary at best. This could be a Jason Bourne movie, and as much as I enjoy Daniel Craig's take on Bond, it wouldn't hurt to split the difference between Fleming and Ludlum.
Otherwise it's enjoyable and looks great in HD.
---
Quarantine was better than I was expecting, if inconsequential. Having not seen [REC], it is difficult to do an "original" to "remake" comparison. That does not imply I can't judge Quarantine on its own merits.
The Cap'n was mistaken in calling the film a "zombie" movie, although I suppose you could make that argument. Technically speaking, Quarantine presents itself as a film about Super-Rabies unleashed in an apartment building. Like Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead, and The Blair Witch Project, it presents itself as "videotaped" evidence, no doubt to help bolster the "this is really happening" tone.
In that regard, I'd say Quarantine is pretty successful. Unlike Cloverfield which was edited too well to be an amateur filmmaker, or Diary of the Dead which had access to far to many angles to be believable, Quarantine presents itself in long, seemingly unbroken shots. It does add some elements of cinema verite to the proceedings that the other films lack, but the film is not without its problems.
Central among them is the cast. I'd have an easier time believing [REC] over Quarantine because of a lack of familiarity with Spanish actors and actresses. Unfortunately, most of the characters in Quarantine have faces or voices you're going to recognize almost instantly. They include:
Jennifer Carpenter (Debra Morgan on Dexter)
Jay Hernandez (Paxton in Hostel)
Dania Ramirez (Maya on Heroes)
Bernard White (from The Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions)
Greg Germann (Ally McBeal, Talladega Nights)
Columbus Short (Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip)
Johnathan Schaech (The Doom Generation, That Thing You Do)
Rade Serbedzija (Snatch, Eyes Wide Shut, 24)
It would be much easier to take Quarantine seriously if every thirty seconds you were saying "hey look, it's that guy/girl!" Even Doug Jones from Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth is listed in the credits, so when the creepy thing at the very end appears, you've already narrowed down all the other possibilities. That really makes it hard to stick with the story, regardless of how it unfolds*.
Which is a shame because Quarantine could be a neat little horror movie otherwise. The writer / director uses the camera very well and plays some nice tricks with the darkness. Most of the "jump" scares are predictable but tension builds up nicely and occasionally brings a surprise. I was almost into the movie, which is a lot more than I can say for Diary of the Dead.
One point of contention: the marketing of this film is counterproductive as it gives away what is literally the last shot of the movie. Since it's on the cover, on the disc itself, and all over the trailers, you spend most of the movie waiting for the camera to switch to "night vision" and for all intents and purposes, it ends. There must be a better way to sell this movie without giving away how it ends.
---
All in all, not a bad run of movie watching. I've seen better, but to be fair I have (and will) see much worse. Quantum of Solace is not a step back for Bond, I'm just not sure if it's a step forward yet. Quarantine was entertaining enough but constantly distracting for anyone remotely connected to pop culture.
* To be honest, the biggest problem was Greg Germann. I was okay with everybody else (and honestly didn't realize it was Jay Hernandez from Hostel until after the movie) but every time I saw him I thought "you shouldn't be there!"
However, I'm a bit more interested in sharing my thoughts about two movies that begin with Q, both of which I viewed in the last twenty-four hours: Quarantine and The Quantum of Solace.
Let's begin with Bond, shall we?
I was a fan of Casino Royale; it was a refreshing break from the outlandish-for-all-the-wrong-reasons The World is Not Enough and Die Another Day. Daniel Craig's James Bond was a blunt instrument in need of refining and the gadgets were limited and (somewhat) believable.
Quantum of Solace continues both positive traits from Royale. The gadgets are nonexistent, unless you call MI:6's fancy "wall phone displays" a gadget. Bond never uses anything fancier than a gun, and even then it's sparingly. Craig plays Bond as even more of a brute than in Casino Royale. He's something of a wounded animal, lashing out at anyone and anything in his way. Rather than be coy and smooth talk his way into information, Bond frequently kills the potential informant and is left grasping at straws. This is certainly not the James Bond we knew from decades past.
That may be the reason so many people didn't like Quantum of Solace. The film is more Bourne than Bond, right down to the villain who is stealing water to sell it back to the poor. Pretty far from world domination, but there is promise in the new SPECTRE "evil" organization, Quantum. The inevitable third movie will tell if the Bond team wants to take the series back in the direction of Connery, Moore, and Brosnan, or if we're going to see Daniel Craig in more rooftop chases.
My biggest complaint about Quantum of Solace is that it could easily be about someone other than Bond. The film only loosely connects Dominic Greene (the big bad) to the death of Vesper Lynde from Casino Royale, and any promise of moving further in that storyline is tertiary at best. This could be a Jason Bourne movie, and as much as I enjoy Daniel Craig's take on Bond, it wouldn't hurt to split the difference between Fleming and Ludlum.
Otherwise it's enjoyable and looks great in HD.
---
Quarantine was better than I was expecting, if inconsequential. Having not seen [REC], it is difficult to do an "original" to "remake" comparison. That does not imply I can't judge Quarantine on its own merits.
The Cap'n was mistaken in calling the film a "zombie" movie, although I suppose you could make that argument. Technically speaking, Quarantine presents itself as a film about Super-Rabies unleashed in an apartment building. Like Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead, and The Blair Witch Project, it presents itself as "videotaped" evidence, no doubt to help bolster the "this is really happening" tone.
In that regard, I'd say Quarantine is pretty successful. Unlike Cloverfield which was edited too well to be an amateur filmmaker, or Diary of the Dead which had access to far to many angles to be believable, Quarantine presents itself in long, seemingly unbroken shots. It does add some elements of cinema verite to the proceedings that the other films lack, but the film is not without its problems.
Central among them is the cast. I'd have an easier time believing [REC] over Quarantine because of a lack of familiarity with Spanish actors and actresses. Unfortunately, most of the characters in Quarantine have faces or voices you're going to recognize almost instantly. They include:
Jennifer Carpenter (Debra Morgan on Dexter)
Jay Hernandez (Paxton in Hostel)
Dania Ramirez (Maya on Heroes)
Bernard White (from The Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions)
Greg Germann (Ally McBeal, Talladega Nights)
Columbus Short (Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip)
Johnathan Schaech (The Doom Generation, That Thing You Do)
Rade Serbedzija (Snatch, Eyes Wide Shut, 24)
It would be much easier to take Quarantine seriously if every thirty seconds you were saying "hey look, it's that guy/girl!" Even Doug Jones from Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth is listed in the credits, so when the creepy thing at the very end appears, you've already narrowed down all the other possibilities. That really makes it hard to stick with the story, regardless of how it unfolds*.
Which is a shame because Quarantine could be a neat little horror movie otherwise. The writer / director uses the camera very well and plays some nice tricks with the darkness. Most of the "jump" scares are predictable but tension builds up nicely and occasionally brings a surprise. I was almost into the movie, which is a lot more than I can say for Diary of the Dead.
One point of contention: the marketing of this film is counterproductive as it gives away what is literally the last shot of the movie. Since it's on the cover, on the disc itself, and all over the trailers, you spend most of the movie waiting for the camera to switch to "night vision" and for all intents and purposes, it ends. There must be a better way to sell this movie without giving away how it ends.
---
All in all, not a bad run of movie watching. I've seen better, but to be fair I have (and will) see much worse. Quantum of Solace is not a step back for Bond, I'm just not sure if it's a step forward yet. Quarantine was entertaining enough but constantly distracting for anyone remotely connected to pop culture.
* To be honest, the biggest problem was Greg Germann. I was okay with everybody else (and honestly didn't realize it was Jay Hernandez from Hostel until after the movie) but every time I saw him I thought "you shouldn't be there!"
Mruh?
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button...
The Criterion Collection?
Personally speaking, the Cap'n hasn't seen the film yet. I just couldn't bring myself to spend three hours with something that divided my friends so. I was going to check it out when it arrived on dvd / Blu Ray, but I had no idea it would affect my Spine Number consumption.
Wow, this is going to drive Neil crazy.
The Criterion Collection?
Personally speaking, the Cap'n hasn't seen the film yet. I just couldn't bring myself to spend three hours with something that divided my friends so. I was going to check it out when it arrived on dvd / Blu Ray, but I had no idea it would affect my Spine Number consumption.
Wow, this is going to drive Neil crazy.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Blogorium Review: Transporter 3
It was bound to happen. The Transporter films couldn't sustain momentum forever.
The first Transporter film was breezy with moments of outlandish action (the oil fight, parachuting onto a moving truck), and it moved Jason Statham from supporting parts in Guy Ritchie films to the "Action Star" spot that was largely vacant*. Transporter 2 took everything from the first film and pushed into ludicrous extremes, turning some fans off but ushering others into the next level of action films: Cartoon Action.
Cartoon action films follow a similar violence ratio to mid-eighties Schwarzenegger films but throw logic and physics out the window. Films like Transporter 2, Shoot 'Em Up, and Crank pushed the action film into the world of Looney Tunes physics, increasing the improbability of each sequence until the film was impossible to take seriously. Viewers are generally divided on this trend in action films but the Cap'n finds himself on the "for it" side.
Which is why I was so disappointed with Transporter 3. I would expect a film directed by someone with the last name of Megaton to be more exciting, if not outright ridiculous. Instead, Oliver Megaton, Luc Besson, and Robert Mark Kamen scale back the outlandish signature "style" of the first two films. The end result is, at best, lackluster.
Jason Statham movies, whether starring or supporting, are rarely what you'd call "good" movies (this would include Death Race, Ghosts of Mars, and In the Name of the King), but at least he's generally entertaining in them. In Transporter 3, he has nothing to do and nobody to work with. Aside from returning cast member Francois Berleand, none of the supporting case is interesting at all. The plot is pretty pedestrian: a kidnapping attempt to force the Ukranian Minister to allow toxic waste into his ports.
Frank Martin (Statham) is knocked out and attached to a bracelet that explodes if he gets more than 75 feet away from his car. Also in his car is a mysterious passenger (Natalya Rudakova) and a GPS system telling him where to drive. What should be an interesting gimmick turns bad at two junctures:
1. Valentina (Rudakova) isn't a character so much as she is a set of annoying habits hinging on what the writers need Frank to do next. Sometimes she's grouchy, sometimes obnoxious, sometimes they don't have anything for her to do so she sleeps. The dynamic between Frank and Valentina gets old pretty fast.
2. More importantly, Besson and Kamen (who co-wrote the film) can't figure out many interesting ways to play with the bracelet gimmick. When they do, the results are far from the giddy stunts of the first two film. There's a short bicycle chase when Frank is separated from the car, a way less interesting than it sounds car-on-train sequence, and a moderately interesting way to keep Frank's car from sinking to the bottom of a lake.
The action sequences are few and far between but generally okay. Statham gets to have some fun in a scene where he strips off layers of clothing and uses them defensively against armed attackers. It lacks the thrill of Frank's "Mansion" set-piece in the first film or the oil fight, but certainly beats anything in War. Some of the car chases are fun, but nothing as exciting as the sleazy content of Death Race. Part of the problem is that if you've already seen Death Race and then watch the trailer for Crank 2 that opens the disc, Transporter 3 pales in comparison.
If you liked the first Transporter and hated the second, this might be for you. I warn you that it's trying a little too hard to split the difference between action movie and thriller with less than desireable results, but as a generic action film (rather than a cartoon), Transporter 3 is middle of the road: not too bad but not that great. It's just there.
Fortunately, Crank 2 looks to be an extension of the rather ludicrous Crank, and maybe even further than that. I wait eagerly for the return of Cartoon Statham.
* The Bourne Identity, released the same year, propelled the unlikely choice of Matt Damon into a similar role.
The first Transporter film was breezy with moments of outlandish action (the oil fight, parachuting onto a moving truck), and it moved Jason Statham from supporting parts in Guy Ritchie films to the "Action Star" spot that was largely vacant*. Transporter 2 took everything from the first film and pushed into ludicrous extremes, turning some fans off but ushering others into the next level of action films: Cartoon Action.
Cartoon action films follow a similar violence ratio to mid-eighties Schwarzenegger films but throw logic and physics out the window. Films like Transporter 2, Shoot 'Em Up, and Crank pushed the action film into the world of Looney Tunes physics, increasing the improbability of each sequence until the film was impossible to take seriously. Viewers are generally divided on this trend in action films but the Cap'n finds himself on the "for it" side.
Which is why I was so disappointed with Transporter 3. I would expect a film directed by someone with the last name of Megaton to be more exciting, if not outright ridiculous. Instead, Oliver Megaton, Luc Besson, and Robert Mark Kamen scale back the outlandish signature "style" of the first two films. The end result is, at best, lackluster.
Jason Statham movies, whether starring or supporting, are rarely what you'd call "good" movies (this would include Death Race, Ghosts of Mars, and In the Name of the King), but at least he's generally entertaining in them. In Transporter 3, he has nothing to do and nobody to work with. Aside from returning cast member Francois Berleand, none of the supporting case is interesting at all. The plot is pretty pedestrian: a kidnapping attempt to force the Ukranian Minister to allow toxic waste into his ports.
Frank Martin (Statham) is knocked out and attached to a bracelet that explodes if he gets more than 75 feet away from his car. Also in his car is a mysterious passenger (Natalya Rudakova) and a GPS system telling him where to drive. What should be an interesting gimmick turns bad at two junctures:
1. Valentina (Rudakova) isn't a character so much as she is a set of annoying habits hinging on what the writers need Frank to do next. Sometimes she's grouchy, sometimes obnoxious, sometimes they don't have anything for her to do so she sleeps. The dynamic between Frank and Valentina gets old pretty fast.
2. More importantly, Besson and Kamen (who co-wrote the film) can't figure out many interesting ways to play with the bracelet gimmick. When they do, the results are far from the giddy stunts of the first two film. There's a short bicycle chase when Frank is separated from the car, a way less interesting than it sounds car-on-train sequence, and a moderately interesting way to keep Frank's car from sinking to the bottom of a lake.
The action sequences are few and far between but generally okay. Statham gets to have some fun in a scene where he strips off layers of clothing and uses them defensively against armed attackers. It lacks the thrill of Frank's "Mansion" set-piece in the first film or the oil fight, but certainly beats anything in War. Some of the car chases are fun, but nothing as exciting as the sleazy content of Death Race. Part of the problem is that if you've already seen Death Race and then watch the trailer for Crank 2 that opens the disc, Transporter 3 pales in comparison.
If you liked the first Transporter and hated the second, this might be for you. I warn you that it's trying a little too hard to split the difference between action movie and thriller with less than desireable results, but as a generic action film (rather than a cartoon), Transporter 3 is middle of the road: not too bad but not that great. It's just there.
Fortunately, Crank 2 looks to be an extension of the rather ludicrous Crank, and maybe even further than that. I wait eagerly for the return of Cartoon Statham.
* The Bourne Identity, released the same year, propelled the unlikely choice of Matt Damon into a similar role.
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