Too Much of a Good Thing

 I don't know if any of you caught this news today, but Ridley Scott has decided that after Prometheus is finished and ready to show, he's going back to the world of Blade Runner. The initial reaction across the internet seems to be jubilant - not only are we getting Scott's return to the Alien series, but he's following it up with another adventure in the world of Replicants. Whether Harrison Ford's Rick Deckard is involved or not is unclear, but it seems to wed earlier news of a sequel or prequel to Blade Runner being "in the works" and solidifies its status as a "must see." I guess.

 Please don't misinterpret my hesitation - I'd rather have Ridley Scott revisit that universe than someone trying to mimic him or to see a pale imitation. I'm just not sure that I really want or need another Blade Runner movie; especially a Blade Runner movie that follows a new Alien film. It's been made clear by people close to the production and critics who saw the presentation at Comic Con that Prometheus is not simply a "science fiction film with some Alien DNA" but is, in fact, a prequel to Alien. Not maybe, not in an obscure way, but that it simply is, and 20th Century Fox is playing coy with that fact. As an outside observer, I need only look at the costumes, set design, or officially released photo to tell you this isn't just a movie "similar" to Alien. And that's not a bad thing - Ridley Scott and James Cameron often talked about returning to the series, so it's nice to see that one of them did. It's in 3-D too, which might sound studio mandated (and hell, it might have been) but one only need look at Scott's cinematography to see why a sense of depth could be result in something very special.

 I'm looking forward to Prometheus, make no mistake; but following a return to one triumph with the return to another triumph - albeit a long fought, hard to win one - seems unnecessary to me. What I enjoy about Ridley Scott is his willingness to try all sorts of different types of films, successful or not. Despite superficial comparisons, Kingdom of Heaven and Gladiator aren't at all alike, and he made Black Hawk Down, Hannibal, and Matchstick Men in between. None of those movies are historical epics or science fiction classics, or even necessary all very good (I'm on the record hating Hannibal). I don't want to speculate too much here, but Scott is wrapping up Prometheus after a string of moderately successful films (Body of Lies, American Gangster) and a few out right flops (A Good Year, Robin Hood). Could it be that working on another Alien film, something well celebrated and hotly anticipated, has given way to wanting to continue working in territory he's lauded for?

 Because I would know. Because any of us would know other than Ridley Scott, but I don't imagine that's actually why he's interested in Blade Runner nearly thirty years later. He hasn't really made anything vaguely sci-fi or fantasy since Legend, so two in a row is a bit surprising. The Alien films have always opened themselves up to other avenues of exploration, but I don't even know where another Blade Runner film would go, or would need to go. I'm satisfied not knowing what happened to Deckard and Rachel, and as much as Battlestar Galactica has moved to give me something else to associate Edward James Olmos, I can imagine how he might figure into a new Replicant hunter's story. Or something.

 Honestly, I can't decide whether I'm less interested than most because there doesn't seem to be a purpose for more Blade Runner or because Ridley Scott is so keen to do it on the heels of making Prometheus. It's like he's reliving his early filmmaking days, but with stories we already know and treasure. One sounds promising, but two might be too much of a good thing...

The Netflix Dilemma.

 While deleting and re-installing Netflix on the Blogorium PS3 last night (it had something to do with being "unable to connect"), I had a moment of two to mull over the whole "price raising" (some call it gouging) situation the company announced earlier this month. It wasn't popular, and I'm sure they're catching hell for it, and I suspect many Netflix subscribers will leave when the hike takes effect in September.

 Me? I'm on the fence. Truly I am, and while my knee-jerk reaction was "raise your prices? to hell with you jerks!" I did settle down and consider that I was paying $12 a month for unlimited streaming and one DVD or Blu-Ray at a time. If I tried to buy any of the movies or TV shows I was taking full advantage of, I'd be spending a lot more than that a month. That's a fact, even if you really want to get into the nitty gritty of hunting like a madman online for the best possible price and then tacking on free Two Day Shipping (which is, by the way, actually a 68 dollar yearly fee on Amazon) or dropping another three to seven dollars for next-day delivery. Netflix offers a certain convenience with instant viewing and deliverable discs. Their movies also don't go "dead" twenty-four hours after you rent them, like Playstation Network's rental system, and you don't have to download them, so that's another perk. You can stop watching something and pick up where you left off - also nice.

 The flipside(s) are also totally valid, and I can't do a much better job than this piece, entitled Dear Netflix: Drop Dead. You're going to find out a few things you probably didn't know about the streaming service in there, the least of which is that Showtime's currently airing series aren't coming back to "Watch It Now." HBO series probably never will. Netflix arbitrarily pulls movies from the Instant Queues, often with little warning, which sucks, but I always viewed the "watch it now" part of the service as an added bonus - it was something I could use in addition to my DVD rentals.

 Now that I need to consider paying for both, I'm torn. It's not the random dropping of movies or the lack of some TV shows, which I guess sucks. It's not the movies that end up "pan-and-scan" in an era when "Full Screen" finally means something very different, although that also sucks. It's not even the considerable disparity between what Neftlix offers in their disc-based and streaming-based plans, with the 28 day holdover on new releases which are also now barebones discs, which sometimes really sucks. I can get past most of that. The question becomes "do I use both of them enough to merit paying 60% more?"

 That's the catch; the streaming allows me to watch televisions shows, which I am habitually unable to keep up with as they air (the exception is Doctor Who). I've been able to slowly but surely make it almost to the end of Battlestar Galactica thanks to Neftlix Instant Queue. I will finish the series by the end of the summer, something I was unable to do picking up seasons while working at a used book store as the show aired. Then I can start on Luther and Sherlock, two BBC series I've wanted to look into. Netflix just added Mad Men, a show I've been wanting to watch but haven't yet, and now I have a year to catch up on the four seasons before the fifth starts. And there's The League, and Louie, and Archer, FX shows I've caught in fits and bursts. Being able to watch The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Futurama, Arrested Development, Better of Ted, Top Gear, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and a host of other shows at any time is also a perk, since I no longer have any of those DVDs and can't afford the Blu-Rays.

 I also was able to watch Exit Through the Gift Shop, Double Take, ThanksKilling, and (sigh) Monsturd through the streaming option, movies I might not be aware of otherwise or might simply have forgotten about. I understand that Rubber is currently available, so can imagine The Troll Hunter won't be far behind. Netflix is very good about picking up smaller, independent films and putting them on their Instant Queue before the discs are available. They're very good with new releases from Criterion, which saves all kinds of money.

 On the other hand, I can't watch all of the excellent Doctor Who DVDs on Netflix. I can watch some of the episodes, but not all of them. I can't watch any features, and as many of you know, the Cap'n is something of a supplement junkie. Classic Doctor Who DVDs go above and beyond the call of duty for every story when it comes to extras, so I like to rent the discs for that. Also, they rarely "pull" movies from my DVD queue, something I can't say about their Instant. I don't need three discs at a time, but I don't really want to drop the Instant service. I use both of them, and while the cost isn't excessive, Netflix has a ways to go before it's justifiable to pay for each one as its own entity.

 So I'm on the fence right now, as I suspect many of you are. The other options aren't thrilling, unless I just give up and risk being sued for illegally downloading all of the things I want to watch. That's not cheaper by a long shot. If you have suggestions, I'm all ears, gang.

Two Reasons I Don't Always Understand Geek Culture

 The Cap'n is, unavoidably, a geek. While I don't always identify as such, it's hard to write on a blog where you adopt the moniker of a demon from The Exorcist and plaster artwork of Dr. Re-Animator and The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman on the page. I try to mix up the content, but let's be honest here: after devoting a weekend to a "virtual" version of a horror film festival I usually host in person, I bounced back with a documentary about what Conan O'Brien did after NBC dropped him for Jay Leno. While I haven't read many comic books in the last year, I still watch movies about them, and am looking forward to Joss Whedon's The Avengers.

 However, I don't always understand my geek brethren; there are things about the internet in particular - the nesting place of the "geek" - that seem counter-intuitive to what people claim they want. Today I'll take a look at two things that don't really make sense to me, especially in a time when "geek" culture seems to be getting everything they want from major studios and television networks. I'd normally do four, but the first two were so long that I thought I'd cut it in half.

 1. "We want to see it, but we're not going to go see it!" - I call this the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World effect, although you could just as easily replace that with Kick-Ass, Serenity, Your Highness, or a dozen or so other movies designed specifically for a geeky demographic. You can't throw a rock without hitting someone complaining about how Hollywood is constantly recycling, remaking, or re-imagining something from the 1980s. Now, it is true that this happens with increasing regularity, in part because people go see these remakes. I mean, why not? They already know the title, vaguely remember the story, and it beats going to see something else.

 The chatter is loud and not necessarily without cause, but then when a project that comes out that ISN'T a remake, re-adaptation, retooling of something we've already seen, or even just not another "reboot" of a series we're invested in, the same geeks crying out suddenly get very quiet about putting their money where their mouths are. I was very, VERY hard on Scott Pilgrim fans in particular because instead of going to see the movie they constantly hyped as "finally, something that isn't like everything else," they instead stayed home and complained about how stupid it was that people went to see The Expendables instead. It's not Sylvester Stallone's fault that you didn't go see you new favorite movie, nor is it Julia Robert's fault with Eat, Pray, Love. I have tried to move away from using Box Office figures as a barometer for anything, but if you read "geek" coverage of Scott Pilgrim vs the World after the first two weeks, you'd think that it was hovering right below the aforementioned films. Nope. Scott Pilgrim vs the World came in behind The Expendables, Eat, Pray, Love, The Other Guys, and Inception. Inception is, by the way, an exception to the rule, although the "it was overrated" chants are getting louder every week.

 Mind you, it's not just Scott Pilgrim: Sucker Punch, a film that caters to geek fetishes, was also widely ignored by its target audience. Serenity, a film based on Joss Whedon's short-lived Firefly, apparently had a legion of fans called "Browncoats" who went to the free screenings the summer before the film came out, and then were so enthusiastic that they didn't go see it again. Or tell their friends to see it. Or tell anyone to see it, even though you'll be hard pressed to find a Firefly fan who won't talk about Serenity until they're blue in the face. So if you're this enthusiastic about a film, this excited for an alternative to the "same old thing," something directed to the very vocal internet, why is it you're happy to let the film die a lonely death in theatres, complain about the films people went to see while you stayed home, and then wait for the Blu-Ray? Eventually they'll stop listening to your pleas, stop catering to your whims, and then you're left with the same old thing.

 Don't believe me? Look at Universal: they're smarting from the Scott Pilgrim debacle, coupled with big losses for Your Highness and modest returns for Paul. Now that Comcast bought the company, they've already put Guillermo Del Toro's At the Mountains of Madness on indefinite hold, and have delayed further development of Ron Howard's adaptation of The Dark Tower series. These are two highly sought-after geek adaptations, and considering how much muscle they have behind them, the reason they've been put into development hell has a lot to do with the "We want to see it, but we're not going to see it" precedent.

Normally, when Guillermo Del Toro wants to adapt H.P. Lovecraft in a big budget, R rated horror film in 3D with the backing of James Cameron and star Tom Cruise, a studio isn't going to say "no" to that. Del Toro is the only "x" factor there, with his critically popular but financially modest films, including Universal's disappointing Hellboy II: The Golden Army. The argument was that Universal was concerned about the "R" rating, but it's not as though high profile projects with an "R" rating haven't performed well for them. The concern seems to be that the geeks clamoring for this film might not bother showing up (again), so why invest that kind of money when the precedent says there's no good reason to?

 The Dark Tower series is even more ambitious: Howard wants to adapt the entire series, split up between films and a running TV series that would bridge the movies. Javier Bardem is virtually a lock for Roland, and yet Universal is hedging about "the budget." Why? Again, because even with someone as reliable as Ron Howard and his long time producer Brian Glazer, there's concern that the people who claim to want to see this (the geeks) might be so fickle that they just won't show up. It's killed potential series before: just look at The Golden Compass, or Push, or Jumper, or I Am Number Four. Relative quality aside, those were designed to be "first chapters" in longer narratives, and they probably will never be. Even the geekiest of all geek properties, Tron Legacy, was met with derision by geeks and Disney is debating how much of a budget cut a third Tron will get, if they make it at all.

 It turns out that "if they build it," geeks won't come. Even if they love it. That boggles my mind. The negativity surrounding "bad" films is understandable to a point, but if you're just going to blow off genuine olive branches from people who speak your language, what exactly do you expect to be on the big screen next time?

2. TV Wasteland...? - We live in a time where television is littered with "geek" friendly shows: zombies, alien invasions, dinosaurs, time travel, super heroes, galactic battlestars, and even a "monster of the week show" that's really just about monsters. Oh yeah, and Doctor Who is back. So is Futurama. And yet, week after week, I come away enthusiastic from another episode of a show I enjoyed only to find the internet is littered with nit-pickers complaining about how that great episode was actually "underwhelming" or "lame." I was just looking to see if I missed some small detail, but instead have to wallow through criticism of the "revelation" that ended season six of Doctor Who (okay, the first half). How The Walking Dead is "boring" or "not what we wanted," etc.There was a television show about THE TERMINATOR, and all people did was complain about it.

 I'll freely admit that the ending of The X-Files and Lost disappointed me, and I've made it clear why, but one of the reasons I try really hard not to critique individual episodes before the show is over is because I like to give the creators the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they are making it up as they go along, maybe not. Thanks to the internet, I now know that by the time I get to the end of Battlestar Galactica, more likely than not I'll feel cheated. I didn't want to know that, but shy of never visiting any "geek" site and totally avoiding my friends, it's almost impossible not to be inundated with negativity during a period where networks are actually catering to the audience that shouts the loudest. It's no surprise that shows don't last long when the feedback they see is negative. I'm already worried about Torchwood: Miracle Day, the return of a series I thought was really finding its footing, because the buzz around the first few episodes is not good. Ugh.

 This is hard for me, because I realize that I am essentially complaining about complaining. I'm throwing my two cents into a bottomless pit of negativity, but I just don't understand what's going on here. This is as good of a time to be a geek as humanly possible, and instead of celebrating it, there's a ceaseless echo chamber of backhanded compliments and outright hostility directed at people like us, who grew up watching the same movies we did, and are now trying to represent that point of view for the rest of the world. Now we're at a point where Patton Oswalt (perhaps with tongue in cheek) is suggesting that geek culture "needs" to die so that we can learn to appreciate our roots. The relative quality of films and shows are no longer important, because they all "suck" to people who can shout the loudest. When asked for an alternative, they ask for something and then blithely ignore the result.

 I don't understand you, geeks. I am trying. I thought I was one of you, and I tried to make my own rules clear: there are movies I am interested in and ones I'm not. I'll try to branch out every now and then, and whenever possible not look at gift horse in the mouth. I know that movies like Machete and Black Dynamite and Hobo with a Shotgun were catered to my demographic, and while I maybe didn't love everything about all of them, I try to be clearer than "it just sucks and you suck if you like it." I genuinely wanted to understand what it was about the Saw films that people gravitated towards - it didn't work for me, but obviously they have a strong following. I will ceaselessly sound the horn for films that I think people would really like; films you might not see or know about otherwise. I didn't ask for Scott Pilgrim, so I didn't see it, but I sure as hell was enthusiastic about Tron Legacy and I sure as hell saw it in 3D on an IMAX screen. I backed that geekdom up, and I need to do the same for The Tree of Life soon.

 To close, I don't want to criticize the internet critics, the home of geekdom in its many forms. I just want to understand what's going on here: it's an almost unprecedented time to enjoy having geeky interests, so why is the target audience ignoring it in droves, flooding message boards, and unleashing on people for not doing it for them? 

Scott Pilgrim Snark

The Cap'n is going to keep this very brief because a) I haven't seen Scott Pilgrim vs. The World*, and b) I've already spent the better part of Thursday reading blogs, Facebook posts, internet analysts, and reviewers get into why it doesn't matter that Scott Pilgrim made 10.5 million dollars in its opening weekend, because The Expendables will be forgotten and isn't any good blah blah blah.

Everybody who reads this already knows how I feel about The Expendables (in short: it's a good but not great movie that was entertaining and mostly achieved what it set out to do), and you've already seen how I reacted to the dismissive or quasi-disappointed reviews. You also know that I frequently make jokes about the way that Box Office performance equates to the quality of a film, and on occasion have stuck up for movies that I didn't feel like got a fair shake**. So I get where people are coming from.

That being said, there is a very simple reason that Scott Pilgrim vs. The World came in fifth last weekend (not third, which is how some people are framing it, as though The Expendables and Eat, Pray, Love were the only movies Pilgrim came in behind. The Other Guys and Inception were third and fourth, respectively): the vocal contingent online didn't go see the movie. It's that simple. That could always change in the coming weeks (I mean, Avatar didn't light the world up in its first weekend), but people didn't turn out to see the greatest movie this year (etc). Period.

And to be clear about something, this is not a movie where exposure was strictly online; until last Friday, TV viewers were bombarded with ads for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. At least three times during practically every show I watched last week (and that includes Futurama, Louie, Sportscenter, That Metal Show, and Man vs. Food, so it's not strictly "geek"-centric) there was an ad for Scott Pilgrim. There was an 8-foot standee at the Regal 14 in Santa Fe, and posters everywhere. It's not like folks didn't know this movie was coming out August 13th. They simply chose not to see it.

Frankly, the Cap'n was surprised: I fully expected that when we went to see The Expendables on Friday night that we'd be in the less crowded theatre. It sure seemed like every other person we saw in line was going to see Scott Pilgrim, but I guess that wasn't the case.

I'm fine with people speaking out on Scott Pilgrim's behalf. What I don't really like is people shitting all over the competition (not necessarily the article in question, but the comments to be sure) because the movie "underperformed" - and believe me, the studio is looking at it that way, even if the fans aren't. I've lamented many a film in the past that "underperformed" - Grindhouse, MacGruber, Crank: High Voltage, and Serenity, but I try not to blame it the other movies (the glaring example is in the footnotes). I have, in the past, ribbed fans of Watchmen and Kick-Ass or lamented the (to me) inexplicable popularity of Transformers and Friday the 13th, but there's a simple rule that wins the day: if people don't go to see a movie, however good or "groundbreaking" it is, and it was marketed out the wazoo, people are going to ask "Why?"

Instead of being unhappy that Scott Pilgrim vs. The World didn't "perform" as well as four other movies last weekend and accordingly bad-mouthing the other films (especially The Expendables, which is its own punching bag for other reasons), do something about it. Go see the movie this weekend. Tell all of your friends and take them to see it. Look, the Cap'n HATED Kick-Ass, and I may have relished a bit too much that nobody went to see it, but I openly admit that it has a devoted fan base of people who are buying it on DVD and Blu Ray, and I myself saw the light about Drag Me to Hell and couldn't be happier that it found its audience on home video.

In short, it's time for some tough love: stop your whining and do something about it. If you think Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is the best thing since sliced bread, mobilize your readers and excite your friends about the movie. Fans of Avatar did it, so surely you can too. Just don't ask the Cap'n to join, because I think I'll be watching Piranha 3-D this weekend, and I'm really not in the mood to hear about how that movie is "inferior" to Scott Pilgrim if you don't get off of your asses and put your enthusiasm to good use.


p.s. Just so the Cap'n is not accused of simply "making this up," I refer you to a handful of post-mortems or reviews, including a discussion thread from referring to MTV's article, a much more reasonably disappointed reaction from someone who watched both films, the DVD release list page from Ain't It Cool News where Harry bemoans the success of Miley Cyrus' The Last Song compared to Scott Pilgrim, C.H.U.D.'s review and box-office take on Scott Pilgrim, and Vern's review of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, which directly addresses Hitfix, Ain't It Cool News, and C.H.U.D. I also recommend you check out comments, forums, and talkback areas, including the Hitfix one listed above to see what the general fan reaction is.

* I like Edgar Wright. I like everything I've seen Edgar Wright make, including Shaun of the Dead, Spaced, Hot Fuzz, "Don't", and the student film he made that's an extra on Hot Fuzz. Nothing about Scott Pilgrim makes me want to see the movie, despite the above sentence.
** For example, I gave the Zac Efron vehicle 17 Again some guff for beating out Crank: High Voltage, even though there's honestly no reason to be surprised that happened.

The Expendables post-script

I realize that it's very easy to beat up on The Expendables, for reasons mentioned in the review (there's basically no story to speak of, unless you count the Missing in Action by way of Commando story arc) and it's true that expectations are almost impossibly high for people who are going to see this (believe me, I just read a review that essentially argues the exact opposite position of what I wrote), but I still don't necessarily feel like arguing from expectation is necessarily fair. I brought up Snakes on a Plane in the review because Snakes on a Plane DOES NOT deliver on its ludicrous promise at any point in the film. It just doesn't. And I was not kind to Snakes on a Plane, but it wasn't because of the expectations, but rather from the fact that the movie was so uninteresting from beginning to end.

The Expendables has, admittedly, issues: while the car chases and intercut fights between Austin / Stallone and Li / Statham / Daniels are handled well, half of the Jet Li / Dolph Lundgren fight is a blurry mess of legs and foreground objects and Terry Crews is criminally underused (the reasonably bad acting by Randy Couture can be overlooked because of how little of the film he's in). I disagree, however, that Eric Roberts needed to play Munroe as a scenery chewing ham, or that this movie is really intended to be some kind of "send off" for the action films of yonder (or its cast, for that matter).

Since I actually know the person who wrote the aforementioned review (or at least, had a few classes with him), I'm not going to suggest that he's missing the point of the Schwarzenegger scene (which is, in fact, the "wish fulfillment" moment people assumed the running time of The Expendables was to constantly provide), or that Rourke's unfortunate speech is less about providing subtext in a ham-fisted way and more in keeping with Stallone's propensity to have one mopey speech (at least) since Rocky Balboa. Yes, it is a groaner, but I also knew it had to be there in the wake of Rambo, which balances speeches and crowd pleasing gore better. There's at least less proselytizing in The Expendables.

I also know that the reviewer is a big fan of the Crank movies - as the Cap'n is too - but where we differ is that I think they work too hard to undermine the tropes of action films in order to appear "better" than their subject manner. I brought that up in my Expendables review because Stallone isn't making a movie that's trying to be postmodern action; he's simply making an action movie that most people feel like they've outgrown. That being said, this is a theatrical extension of the so-called (and sometimes justifiably called) "inferior" DTV action film movement.

I get that it's not cool to enjoy a movie that relies on recycled tropes and that doesn't always deliver on something the ads promised ("Some movies have one action star. This movie has THEM ALL"), but it's hardly as bad as what passes itself for "action" most of the year. I get that Shoot 'Em Up, The Transporter, Crank, and the Bourne movies are where it's at now, but Rambo was as good as many of them and better than some. The Expendables may not be there, but I'll take a little irony-free action every now and then, warts and all.

Recuperation

Greetings, readers. The Cap'n is finally back and reporting live from Blogorium Headquarters in New Mexico. I'm still a little jetlagged and need to take a nap before The Expendables tonight*, so instead of something substantive, I thought I'd share a list of movies that would be more entertaining with the word "Squid" in the title. Enjoy.

Catch That Squid
The Squid Stays in the Picture
The Squid that Wore Tennis Shoes
Any Which Way but Squid
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Squid
The Squid Rider
The Squid and the Squid
Fistful of Squid
The Squid, the Bad, and the Ugly
Tango & Squid
Small Town Squid Bar
Erasersquid
No Country for Old Squids
Darby O'Squid and the Little People
Night of the Living Squid
A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 4: The Dream Squid
I Walked with a Squid
The Squid Around the Corner
The Quick and the Squid
Gore Met: Zombie Squid from Hell
The Old Dark Squid
Squid on Haunted Hill

and, of course

MegaSquid vs. Giant Octopus

I hope you're as embarrassed for reading this as I am for writing it.

* yeesh, how old do I sound right now?

Help a Cap'n Out...

"Hey Cap'n, didn't you say that you would be writing about Inception yesterday? I can't find that entry."

I did say that, and there's no such entry to be found. The reason is twofold: 1) the Cap'n was busy most of Thursday with travel-related concerns (which should not interrupt the blogorium next week, hopefully), and 2) after a cursory glance at readings, theories, and dissections of Inception online, I decided that there was nothing to add that hasn't been covered ad nauseum to this point.

That's actually fine with me; when the Cap'n can enter the words "inception theories" and get nearly 6 million results, I think we can do without another take. I will say that I still think Mal is the weakest part of the film in part because it's an easy out when Nolan needs to create tension between Cobb and the rest of the team (if they exist) and that it falters the most when Ariadne enters Cobb's dream with the way too literal "elevator to deeper levels of the mind" memory sequence. I'd also like to add that people criticizing the film for not being "dreamlike" should refer themselves to the "con" aspect of the film, and the advice given to Ariadne that the mark shouldn't know they're dreaming.

And that's probably enough. It's been covered more eruditely and more scholarly elsewhere, so I'll leave it to those wiser and with more free time than the Cap'n.

---

In other news, I've been trying to come up with something interesting to fill the oft-neglected "Critical Essays" tag. I've been reading other blogs, many from people I know or had classes with, and I can't decide whether some of the negative reactions I've been having are due to disagreeing with some of the assertions made, a reliance on "academic friendly" terminology, or just that I feel like my writing has been slipping since leaving school.

To put it another way, at least twice a day people from all around the world seem to find the blogorium based on doing Google or Blogspot searches related to the Coen Brothers (and specifically the series of essays from the final or the sequence analysis of No Country for Old Men). I think it's great that people find that useful, and I certainly hope that the .edu addresses are citing those essays. The difficulty is that I don't feel myself writing anything like that anymore, or even feeling compelled to write them.

This troubles me, since I haven't been especially happy with the last few reviews (Dinner for Schmucks or The Informant!), but at the same time can't quite find topics that are very exciting to devote some serious time to. I also don't want to bore people with hoity toity analysis or drop five dollar words because that's how one is taken "seriously," and yet that's exactly the field I'm still looking into joining in graduate school.

In short, there's a tricky balance in trying to be insightful and entertaining. I don't want to bore you because it bores me too, but anybody can go to the newspaper and find something like that Dinner for Schmucks review. Rather than challenging myself with non-traditional fare, the Cap'n has taken time out to watch TV shows that readers have been on him about for years (or new stuff like FX's excellent Louie).

I could have seen Cyrus shortly after moving here, but instead saw Predators again*. Earlier tonight, I could have watched any number of the Criterion Blu-Rays in house (which include, but are not limited to The Red Shoes, Close Up, Everlasting Memories, Black Narcissus, The Leopard, Mystery Train, and Red Desert), but instead put on Dirty Harry. Not that there's anything wrong with Dirty Harry, but I'm not exactly going to be turning you folks on to something new when that and Fistful of Dollars get a juxtaposition down the line.

As the Cap'n, I feel like I can be doing better. Right now it seems like I'm coasting, and I'm open to suggestions how to adjust that.




* I didn't review it again because the only thing I really felt like adding is that on second viewing I was free to follow Royce (Adrien Brody)'s strategy more carefully from beginning to end, which does actually make him a little more impressive than Arnold's Dutch.

Blogorium Review: Dinner for Schmucks

While this should come as no surprise to regular readers of the Blogorium, the Cap'n has a tendency to notice that trailers, TV spots, and reviews don't often give potential audiences the right impression of a film. Case in point: Get Him to the Greek, which is a considerably better comedy than the ads would lead you to believe. It's reasonably weak audience turnout reflects how not knowing what kind of movie you're headed into can prevent people from going to see what was, in fact, a rather good film.

Sometimes, the trailers tell you exactly what kind of movie you're walking into, but leave out one or two things that might improve your chances of enjoying the film. Such is the case with Dinner for Schmucks, a film I admittedly had no interest in seeing leading up to its release. Finally, I succumbed to the enthusiasm of my roommate and agreed to catch a 7:45 showing. The film is genial, harmless, PG-13 fare with its share of chuckles, so I certainly don't pretend I hated the film. I did not, however, enjoy it as much as the crowded auditorium at the Regal seemed to, in part because the film is content to aim for the widest possible audience (with one or two exceptions).

The film concerns Tim (Paul Rudd), an up and coming businessman stuck somewhere between the sixth and seventh floor of his office. When a seventh floor executive gets the axe, Tim seizes his opportunity to move up in the ranks by impressing big boss Lance Fender (Bruce Greenwood). To seal the promotion, Tim is invited to the executive dinner, where each Seventh Floor big shot (including Ron Livingston, Andrea Savage, and Daily Show correspondent Larry Wilmore) brings the biggest idiot they can find and parades them around in front of the others.

Tim has a big of a moral quandary about this, in part because he wants to impress his girlfriend Julie (Stephanie Szostak) with the promotion, but is appalled at what he's being asked to do. Fortunately, his fates change when he (quite literally) runs into Barry (Steve Carell), and IRS agent who also dabbles in taxidermy (specifically dioramas involving dead mice), and can't get rid of him. Barry is a world class idiot, an utterly clueless goofball who lost his wife left him for his boss (and mind-reader) Thurman Murch (Zach Galifianakis). Carell plays Barry along a fine line between "trying to help" imbecile and total ignorant asshole; he's usually trying to help Tim, but predictably, everything goes awry.

Dinner for Schmucks is a remake of the French film Le dîner de cons (The Dinner Game), which I must admit that I haven't seen to this point. I'm familiar with the film, as I filed it a few times working at Edward McKay's, but for some reason I never got around to seeing it.

(This actually brings me to a brief digression, because as a film fan and amateur critic, one thing that really causes me a bit of concern is watching a remake without having seen the original film, particularly if the new film appears to be a close reinterpretation. I learned this lesson a few times, but none more glaringly than when I gave Quarantine reasonable praise without realizing it was almost exactly the same film as [REC], but in English. It's a tricky situation, so while I'm going to try to review Dinner for Schmucks on its own terms, when I get around to seeing Le dîner de cons, the tenor of this review might be shifted.)

I could pretend that Dinner for Schmucks pushes the PG-13 rating, but it really doesn't too much. There's the prerequisite "F bomb" allowed per rating, a lot of light profanity, and a lot of tame variations on jokes about S&M, bestiality, and a semi-running gag about Barry "losing" his wife's clitoris. Most of these are tied to supporting characters like Tim's psycho ex-girlfriend Darla (Lucy Punch) or Julie's client, Kieran Vollard (The Flight of the Conchords' Jemaine Clement), an animal obsessed multi-media artist that practices "sexy sex" with women dressed like birds.

The dinner itself is slightly underwhelming, as most of the "schmucks" don't get a lot of time to do their thing: there's the dead pet psychic (Octavia Spencer), the vulture lover (Patrick Fischler), the beard champion (Rick Overton), the blind swordsman (Christopher O'Dowd), and Jeff Dunham. He probably has a character name*, but since Jeff Dunham is playing a ventriloquist with an old lady puppet that makes crass jokes, I'm going to just say it's Jeff Dunham playing himself with a moustache. Not many of them really make much of an impression, since the dinner ends up being more about Barry's showdown with Thurman (who Ron Livingston brings to dinner) over mind control vs "brain control".

Are there things to like about Dinner for Schmucks? Sure. It's a silly, if predictable, movie with nice touches. Barry's dioramas are frequently amusing, and Carell and Galifianakis frequently make the movie much funnier by virtue of being onscreen together. Paul Rudd is playing a variation on his I Love You, Man and Role Models characters, and he's always watchable as the exasperated Tim. Jemaine Clement is sporting a remarkably similar beard and haircut as Russell Brand, and while he's amusing as Kieran, I couldn't shake that comparison during the film. There's a nice joke involving a potential Swedish investor (David Walliams) and a severed finger, and while the Darla storyline is pretty paint-by-numbers, Punch and Carell have fun during a playful scene that goes awry in Tim's apartment.

Actually, that may be the problem I have with Dinner for Schmucks; while the film is entertaining in a "mass appeal" way, it frequently wants to wander into darker territory but doesn't. I suspect that's due to the rating, but also to the tastes of director Jay Roach (the Austin Powers and Meet the Fockers series), who tends to settle for safer comedies that skirt edgy but never go too far. The result is a generally likable film like Dinner for Schmucks that is silly fun but might not make it into your regular watching rotation. Or mine, anyway. Plenty of people seemed to love it, so don't take the Cap'n's grousing as any indication of what you'll think of Dinner for Schmucks. I'd point most of you in the direction of seeing it, and would not be surprised if you enjoyed it. Just get ready, because it's pretty long; we went to the 7:45 show and got out at 10:00. Even if a healthy chunk of that was trailers, the movie does overstay its welcome a bit.





*He does. In the credits he's listed as "Lewis the Ventriloquist."

The Cap'n Presents His Mixed Tape Film Series Manifesto.

At the risk of making new enemies and alienating people (and really, since the Cap'n is leaving soon anyway, does it really matter?), I've decided I can no longer idly sit by year after year and not say something about the The Mixed Tape Film Series, because while I understand what the programmers are trying to do, it's often maddening how safe and obvious their choices are. Moreover, there's evidence that every now and then they have a flair for "outside of the box" films, which makes the predictability of the bulk of their picks all the more frustrating.

Look, I understand that people love The Big Lebowski. I love The Big Lebowski. I saw it when it ran the first time. This August will mark the THIRD year in a row it's opened The Mixed Tape Film Series. If that's going to be your tradition, then cool, but it's not as though the Coen brothers don't have other excellent comedies that people maybe don't know as well (or that they do; Raising Arizona, for crying out loud!)


Year after year, the Cap'n looks at the lineups at The Carousel and I usually say "meh." It's nothing against the movies being shown, but 90% of the time I a) own the movies or b) saw them the first time they ran. Nostalgia's not a big factor for me, and while there's a tiny allure in seeing actual prints of the film, it's not enough to get me to shell out cash for something I can watch any time for free and / or already saw on the big screen.

I worked for a movie theatre. I own actual trailers (and some fun ones at that: as a gift, I once gave away 35mm trailers for Dancer in the Dark and what's probably a fairly rare teaser for House of 1000 Corpses back before Universal dropped the film), and I get that it's cool to see the real deal and not just DVD or BD's at home. But for some reason The Mixed Tape Film Series just doesn't do it for me, and I think I know why.

Slight digression: While this is comparing apples to oranges, I feel like the Cap'n should express that I feel at least a little qualified to talk about film programming. I put together anywhere from three to five free film festivals a year, and I think carefully about the movies I'm going to show. The goal is almost always to find a healthy balance between what people want to see and what they never knew they'd love. It doesn't always work, and while I'd say that next week's Summerfest is the safest I've ever played it, there are still movies I'm showing that may never be part of a "Midnight Madness" series (but easily could be, which is part of why I take umbrage with the programming year in and year out).

I get that it's popular, and there's a very good reason why: the programmers are offering cinematic comfort food. The biggest problem I have is that the films showing time and time again are the obvious choices. Yes, you're guaranteed to have an audience turn out for a movie every single one of them knows, even if it's being shown again and again (which, admittedly, is a good business model), except that at a certain point the nostalgia factor wears off and the incoming flux of college freshmen can't sustain this.

The Mixed Tape Film Series is in its third year (as best as I can tell), so let's take a look at what they've been showing:

Year One: The Big Lebowski, Reservoir Dogs, The Monster Squad, Friday the 13th Part 3, Rushmore, Edward Scissorhands, Labyrinth (without a "The", go check), Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Oldboy, Riki Oh: The Story or Ricky, Blue Velvet.

Year Two: The Big Lebowski, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Karate Kid, Ghostbusters, Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn, Aliens, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Gremlins, Silent Night, Deadly Night, Clerks, Fight Club, Amelie, The Princess Bride, Big Trouble in Little China, The Thing, Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Robocop, The Goonies.

Year Three (coming soon): The Big Lebowski, The Breakfast Club, Say Anything, 10 Things I Hate About You, Heathers, Donnie Darko, Rosemary's Baby, The Fly, The Silence of the Lambs, Army of Darkness, A Hard Day's Night, Rock 'N Roll High School, Purple Rain, A Christmas Story, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Die Hard, American Beauty, Seven, Boogie Nights, The Crow, Groundhog Day, Dirty Dancing, Harold and Maude, The Color Purple, Do the Right Thing, Labyrinth (again, no "The"), The Neverending Story, Willow, Legend, The Dark Crystal, Dumb and Dumber, Happy Gilmore, Kingpin, Wayne's World, Back to the Future.

If you hadn't noticed, the upcoming Mixed Tape Series is broken into "theme" cycles, like "Back to School," "Horror Classics," "Films that Rock," "Holiday Classics," "90s Classics," "Valentines / Black History," "80s Fantasy Classics," and "April Fool's Comedies." (Transformers: The Movie should be in there somewhere, but I'm going by their official listings).

The first year had some pretty nice curveballs in there, but since then it's been a steady decline into "mass appeal" territory. That being said, I know people who are planning to go to these movies, and good for them. About half are too young to have seen the films the first time, and the other half are nostalgic, so that plays right into the earlier points. Got it.

That being said, there's not one movie in the upcoming year's lineup that I desperately need to see on the big screen. Eventually, more people are going to feel the same way; the cinephiles first, then slowly but surely the general populace, and I'd rather that not happen*.

As I said before, it isn't as though they couldn't (or haven't branched out): despite a fondness for showing Tommy Wiseau's The Room repeatedly, the guys at The Movie Show have also put together the Midnight Madness series (including Summer 'Camp' Classics and Summer Scare-Ousel festivals) which feature a slightly more eclectic lineup.

(Well, okay, not exactly: the Summer 'Camp' Classics consists of Showgirls, The Warriors, The Room, and Predator. I'll grant you the first three, and I understand that Predator is being tied into the release of Predators, but come on. There are much better "camp" classics out there. Xanadu? Forbidden Zone? Cherry 2000? Geez, even Plan 9 from Outer Space is a better fit for this series. Please don't get me started on the Horror one. Kudos for The Brood, but that's about it.)

In the past, they've hosted showings of Troll 2, Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, Sleepaway Camp, Audition and Pieces. Three years ago, The Carolina Theatre had "Grindhouse Double Feature" Fridays (which I believe was tied in some way to The Movie Show) that branched out and introduced audiences to movies they wouldn't see otherwise. It's quite do-able, so why does this feel like the exception and not the norm?

Here's one thing I wondered after perusing The Movie Show's blog: the writers are clearly advocating that more people see movies that didn't get a fair shake the first time around (Grindhouse, Hot Rod, The Fountain), so why aren't you showing them? It's nothing new for film fans (and bloggers) to be passionate about films they think people would love, but the folks involved in The Mixed Tape Film Series are at a distinct advantage: they can actually make that happen.

But they don't, and I have to stress my disappointment with going for the easy draws. There's an opportunity here to develop something like what goes on at The Alamo Drafthouse in Austin (which is certainly what these events are reminiscent of) where the popular films are more regularly interspersed with movies that don't get that kind of attention but should. After three years, you'd think they'd be more comfortable branching out, but instead it's starting to look like The Carolina Theatre's Summer lineup: predictable and mostly miss-able.

It sounds like I'm bagging on the programmers (who I'm intentionally not calling out by name because I don't know them, they don't know me, and there's no reason to get personal here), and in some ways I am. Clearly they're capable of being more adventurous, and I really wish they would be. The Mixed Tape Film Series and the Midnight Madness Series could be more than they are, and to really build up a loyal and consistent audience over the years, it pays to give them what they want to see AND introduce them to new or "lost" films that keep them excited for the next screening. They can do it, so hopefully this serves as a motivator to do it and not the ramblings of some jaded film geek. Win me over, because I feel like you certainly could.


* Allow me to make my case: since you've already shown Labyrinth, allow me to suggest four perfectly viable alternatives that fit the "theme" - The Last Unicorn, The Secret of Nimh, Time Bandits, and Return to Oz. All equally regarded but often less seen movies that yeah, I'd pay to see projected in a theatre.

Flickering Lights (but in the bad way)

Explanation of technical difficulties:

Greetings, all. For the past week or so, issues with the power in my apartment have made using my computer for extended periods of time difficult. As I'm typing this, the light behind me is once again flickering, and I have few doubts that before I finish getting this entry up, the computer will a) cut off, or b) flicker out but not actually cut off, only to flicker back on shortly thereafter.

In short, I cannot trust anything to stay on very long. I rarely interject "real life" garbage into the Blogorium, because this is for writing about movies, not my day to day crap. My landlord is, not surprisingly, dragging his feet on the matter, so in the meantime I have to make the best of when the PC is working.

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What I can do in the meantime is put up another "From the Vaults". Last night's picture project took me the better part of five hours to put together with all the headaches this wiring has been, so forgive me if I simply cut and paste some "classic" Blogorium from the olden days of Myspace or Livejournal. I will return to normal as soon as possible, and hopefully with the promised A Serious Man review you voted for but don't have yet.

In the mean time, here's some old stuff...

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Excursions into the random, the weird, and the mundane:

Someone called into work today asking if we had the new Mel Gibson movie about Presidential Assassination called Vanishing Point.

Can you pick out what's wrong about the caller's question? Here are some hints:

1) Vanishing Point wasn't released recently, and it's about a cross country car chase.
2) Mel Gibson isn't in Vanishing Point or ANY movie involving Presidential Assassination.
3) Mel Gibson is also not in Vantage Point, which does feature said assassination.
4) Vantage Point won't be on dvd until July 1st
5) The Caller is an idiot.

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However, the John Wayne Westerns at Fox boxed set came in. I know this is probably not of interest to many of you, but it does include The Big Trail, which has a very young John Wayne and one other seriously interesting technical tidbit*:

* I'm about to get VERY geeky about cinema. You may not even be interested.

The Big Trail was a very early attempt to create the "widescreen" effect on a film. Twenty five years before The Robe ushered Cinemascope into theatres, The Big Trail was trying something like what Todd-AO Cameras did and present a western on an "epic" scale. For this reason alone, The Big Trail is something I want to check out. I don't know much more about it than that, other than it's a little bit like Stagecoach or How the West was Won.

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65,929 minutes.

1098.8 hours.

45.79 days.

That's the total amount of unwatched film I have here in the Apartment of Solitude.

Mind you, this is just movies; I'm not including television or stand up or mini-series or anything like that. Just movies.

If I didn't sleep at all and took virtually no breaks between viewings, it would take me 46 days to watch everything here I haven't seen yet. That's assuming nothing else is coming in. I didn't even factor in the times for movies I had seen.

To be honest with you, I'm stunned. It's more staggering than even I thought it would be. In order to see as much as possible, I tend to ferret away movies that I want to / feel like I should see with the promise of "we'll get to it some time soon."

I tried to do this earlier this year but got halfway through and accidentally cleared out the calculator. This time, being very careful, it took me two hours to get through everything here in the house. I'm not even going to think about my Netflix queue, which is in the range of another 440 movies I haven't seen. Strictly going by what's at home, I have a LOT to watch. And most of it is very good stuff I'm just not going to tell you I haven't seen.

Surprisingly, only a small chunk of it is horror. It is true that I do have a large shelf devoted to nothing but horror movies, but I do tend to pick up things I've seen or have a great deal of interest in. Only occasionally do I pick up random stuff like Garden of the Dead or Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter.

TV-wise, I'm just not willing to think about that. The movie running time is daunting enough, so I'd rather not think about the boxes with running times of 16 hours or more right now. Yeesh.

At any rate, I still have a lot to watch, and even more that I don't have here that I do want to watch. I guess it's good that this is what I want to do with my life, otherwise I'd be wasting 46 days (and then some) alone in a dark room.
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So I watched I Am Legend, and the verdict is...

It’s pretty good.

The main criticisms against the film I’ve read elsewhere are pretty much right on the money: the "infected" people look awful and really fake, there isn’t much of an explanation of how the other two survivors get to Neville, and accordingly the very very end is not to palatable. I’ll address those one by one in a moment, but first I want to talk about what DOES work, because when this movie is on, it’s better than The Last Man on Earth or The Omega Man and might even be as good as the Matheson novella.

The first two thirds of the movie works like gangbusters: we’re immediately immersed in a world that feels real, abandoned, and dangerous. Robert Neville’s daily routine is established in ways that feel organic to the plot and not simply "well, here’s what he’d be doing", and the flashbacks are employed in a useful and logical fashion. In this sense, it’s like The Last Man on Earth but without narration; we see, but don’t need to be told. Neville treats his dog Sam and mannequins he places around town like people, but it never seems stupid or trite. This is just how he copes with being alone.

Big chunks of this have to do with Will Smith. It may not seem like the conventional choice, especially looking at the two films that came before I Am Legend or The Quiet Earth, but I think a lot of people forget that Smith started his film career with Six Degrees of Separation, and that when asked to carry a film based on body language and facial expressions, he’s more than up to the task. Considering that his co-stars are a dog, lots of cg creatures, and much later two other people, he grounds the film and keeps it believable, even when he’s hitting on a mannequin.

When the infected / vampire / hemocyte* creatures are introduced, it’s in a way consistent with the story; they are a constant presence at night, first heard and then later seen, and the threat is very real. There isn’t too much scientific mumbo-jumbo to gum up the works, and director Francis Lawrence mines some real tension out of the first time Neville gets stuck in the dark.

But what I liked more than that was the escalating traps that Neville and the "lead" whatever you call it set for each other. Watching the extended cut, I don’t know how I would’ve read some of the things that happen in the middle of the film if I hadn’t seen the "alternate" ending. It wouldn’t make sense to set the kind of traps they set for Neville if they couldn’t reason, or to systematically take away what was important to Robert the way they do.

Anyway, I don’t want to spoil too much, because I think most of you will find things to like about I Am Legend. I will however give you the heads up about some of the problems I have with the film (which aren’t unique from the looks of it):

1. The infected are all CG. In no way at any point do they look like they’re organic to the world around them, nor do they look like they’re actually occupying the same space as Will Smith. It actually reminded me a little bit of the robots in I, Robot, because they have similar body movements. The problem is that I never once believe these were humans who were infected and mutated. The "infected" dogs were more believable than the people, and for the ending of the movie to really work, you need to buy the antagonists.

2. Early into the flashbacks they establish that all bridges to the island (Manhattan?) are being destroyed in order to keep the infection from spreading too quickly, so it’s hard to understand how two people drove in and find Neville at exactly the right moment. The timing of their arrival isn’t so strange, but the way they did it is never even addressed. No one ever asks "how did you even get here", which leads me to

3. This is for those of you who saw the "alternate" ending, and already know what happens. Otherwise, please heed the SPOILER warning. At the very end of the film, Neville, Anna, and Ethan have made their peace with the infected and head north to Vermont (apparently the virus can’t survive the cold) and as we hear a new recorded message from Anna, you can see them driving across a bridge that is in NO WAY damaged. After 90-something minutes of seeing and understanding there’s no way in or out of the island, suddenly they just drive off. It doesn’t make sense, and that kind of cheapens the climax of the film.

But truthfully, I think the positives for I Am Legend do outweigh the negatives, and you’re going to enjoy most of the movie, even if it falters a little bit at the end. Oh, and the Bob Marley and Shrek scenes near the end are um, out of place. They aren’t really bad, they just don’t fit in this world.

I Am Legend is a 3 1/2 Stars out of 5 movie, and definitely worth seeing, but I would recommend the "alternate" cut, or whatever is on disc two.

On the "reunited and it feels so good" front:

The Cap'n finally got one of my Out of Print Criterion DVDs back. While it's not Sid and Nancy or Dead Ringers or even a completely gone one like This is Spinal Tap or Tokyo Olympiad, I was happy to find a copy of Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious at a downright reasonable used price. Maybe it's because of the 20th Century Fox boxed set, which also carries alternate editions of similarly OOP Rebecca and Spellbound, but somehow I got Notorious for less than it would have been new six years ago.

Looking at Amazon, it wouldn't be too difficult to get Spellbound and Rebecca at reasonable prices too. Sid and Nancy is still pretty pricey, and Tokyo Olympiad is downright ridiculous at $64 used and $115 new. This is Spinal Tap is comparably silly at $48.95 and $109.99. Many of them aren't so bad any more, as when Criterion loses the rights other companies typically swoop in. Even Hard Boiled and The Killer aren't where they once were (pushing $500), and I bet the guy trying to sell Criterion's old version Salo is going to have his work cut out for him at $68 (to wit: it once sold for $2000 on eBay. Seriously).

The Silence of the Lambs and Robocop have fallen dramatically from where they once were, which is fine because I still have those. If there's one I wish I still had that I don't, it's Bruce Robinson's How to Get Ahead in Advertising, which is baselining around $50 (discount the $20-30 copies, as they're rentals and missing components). Oh, make that two; I had no idea Fellini's Nights of Cabiria was out of print. Damn.

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My goal with Spine Numbers is to no longer try to get all of them (it is, after all, a fool's errand to keep up with a collection that shows no sign of ending), but to seek out the ones I really want and rent the films that sound interesting. For example, right now I'd really like to have Salesman, Peeping Tom, Sullivan's Travels, Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss, Mona Lisa, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Insomnia, Nanook of the North, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, House of Games, and Kind Hearts and Coronets. I wouldn't mind having Night and Fog, La Jetee, Hoop Dreams, The Long Good Friday, That Obscure Object of Desire, The Horse's Mouth, Burden of Dreams, Overlord, Children of Paradise, and The Orphic Trilogy. I don't know that I need Maitresse, Border Radio, El Norte, Dodes ka-den, Bad Timing, I am Curious, or Fishing with John. There are others that aren't occurring to me that fit in a nebulous category of "I'd probably just rent it", but I think you get the idea. My days of being a completist are over and done.

I envy some of you mad men and women out there trying to conquer the collection. I no longer want to be you, although I may have to drop some coin in order to pick up a few of those OOP discs (the Sid and Nancy one is worth it for the commentary track alone, which is comprised of members of the NYC punk scene, many of whom dispute the portrayal of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen in the film). I don't know that I'd ever need the John Woo movies, or even This is Spinal Tap, but I suppose it is nice to know they haven't totally vanished from the face of the earth.

Thus endeth the blathering.

Edu-ma-brain-drain

The Cap'n would like to apologize for the sudden lack of Blogorium Reviews. If this week is any indication, there won't be much time to watch entire movies outside of Monday afternoons. I've seen pieces of movies, digested in bite-sized portions: the first thirty minutes of Moon, twenty minutes of Steven Soderbergh and Sasha Grey's The Girlfriend Experience Commentary, the opening of Che. (Did you know that Weeds' Demián Bichir plays Fidel Castro? I missed that somehow...)

I know that much - if any at all - of the appeal of this blog is the promise of new material six days a week, with trailers on Sunday, so I'm really going to try to keep that up. It's going to be very hard though. Whenever possible, I try to keep this blog strictly about film and occasionally television, so I'm going to limit this school update to just tonight. I had what sounded like a reasonable number of classes with a heavy, if oddly split up, work load. And then I went and did a stupid thing, which was to add an extra class. A class I don't need, because I already took it.

The course material was too interesting to pass up. Yes, I'd been in Senior Seminar last year, and slogged through it, but this year was about religion and gender. Three books are on the agenda: The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology, Omnigender, and Judith Butler's Undoing Gender. I wanted to just sit in and read the books, but the ruling came down from high that in order to get the Senior Seminar experience again, I'd have to take the class as an independent study. And do all of the work, again. Facilitate in-class and online discussions, deliver two oral presentations and three written critiques. Again.

Okay, so that's a pain, but worth the price of admission for source material like that. I did not ask to take over the Religious Studies Club. I said I'd help, but I'm not looking to organize field trips, guest lecturers, and help put the next generation of club leadership in place. That's not my bag, kids. I get worn out organizing Horror Fest. I didn't mind having people over every Thursday night to shoot the breeze and wax religiosophically, but responsibility... mrm.

I don't feel quite as horrible because I manage to cram in far more reviews over the holidays than I'd anticipated, and even got the recaps done before 2010 hit. That's good. I still have a half dozen or so movies that need seeing, and I'd really like to catch The Road before it leaves theatres. I just don't know when that's going to happen. Aside from the Coen Brothers class and next week's triple feature, I don't know when I'll be able to provide you with the kind of regular exposure to new movies that dominated most of December and January.

But I'm going to try. It's a tricky thing, walking away from a project I've been adhering to for the last six years. I apologize in advance if the recaps and reaction to news dominates entries. I'll make a concerted effort to get more "Four Reasons" and "Five Movies" out, and there's a chance you'll see a dry run of a Coen brothers paper I'm mulling over. However, it could get bumpy for a little bit, so bear with the Cap'n.

Maybe it's just that the red carpet hurts my eyes...

Very well then. I will decide the movie theme for the weekend after next. I already have some very good ideas, and to boot, I found not one but two movies for Bad Movie Night in April. They promise to be of comparable quality to last year's entries.

Confession time: I didn't watch all of The Golden Globes last night. In fact, I didn't watch much of the show. Admittedly, I had better things to do, including watching Wings of Desire, but that's not really why I sat most of the event out. Strange as it may be for a film buff to take little interest in the first big award show, I have a perfectly reasonable explanation.

People usually take two positions on the Golden Globes: 1) it's a fun precursor to the Academy Awards where Hollywood types are encouraged to cut loose a little more, or 2) it's a sham, because the Hollywood Foreign Press Association have no actual credentials and their selections for winners are somehow linked to the amount of time they can spend with the stars. To a lesser degree, there are those who watch the show for fashion, like The Emmys, Grammys, or Academy Awards.

I am none of those. I've read the history of the Hollywood Foreign Press, but let's be honest here and not pretend that any awards show, including The Academy Awards, doesn't also appear dubious at times. So that's not really a factor in whether I tune in or not. Over the last few years, I've become increasingly burned out on "award season" and trying to guess who will win and who won't. For that, I turn to Neil because he loves it so. I find predicting the winner and justifying it for yourself is about as good as a coin flip, and in the past few years of Oscar Nights, most people go about 50/50 in predictions.

Strangely, it's not a matter of "Hollywood patting itself on the back", which some also decry. To be fair, awards season is a little self serving, and what I did see last night certainly reinforced that assertion, but Tinsel Town is far from the only club of millionaires giving each other props. Seriously, go check out the awards given at the end of the Football season, to draw a comparison to Big Fan.

I think maybe the reason I don't find The Golden Globes interesting is the same reason I find the new Oscar rules so underwhelming: everything gets in. The Globes maximize star power by having separate dramatic and comedy/musical categories, in addition to including television. The Academy Awards recently expanded the "Best Picture" category from five to ten films. This is great, with regard to getting the word out on fine films from the past year, but does it honestly change the fact that one movie is always going to be crowned "the Winner", and in all likelihood something released VERY recently?

To wit: Avatar took Best Picture (Drama) and Best Director. It's been out for what, a month? Nothing against Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart (I love me some Jeff Bridges) and Robert Downey Jr. in Sherlock Holmes (I am well documented in my support of RDJ), but Sherlock Holmes opened on Christmas and Crazy Heart isn't even playing wide yet. I'm genuinely torn about Up in the Air edging out Inglourious Basterds for best screenplay, not only because both are excellent films, but I can't help but think that Up in the Air being a little more recent than August had something to do with the win. Still, love the movie.

The Hangover was a surprise to me, until I saw the competition. Not to slight The Hangover in any way, and I'd love to see the Academy actually nominate something so wantonly dirty for their Best Picture, but it's the one win that really broke the trend. There were a lot of movies not nominated at all that should have been, and that brings me to the other source of ennui for "awards season".

Sony Pictures is making no effort whatsoever to push Moon back into the eyes of awards voters. This is bad for Moon, because I think it's a fantastic film, but also speaks to the nature of what films tend to show up in January and February: ones with big pushes by the studio. If a movie can't afford to have the Weinsteins behind it (or comparable studio support), it disappears from consideration in what should be a celebration of the finest films of the prior year.

If you look at many online "top ten" lists - including the blogorium's - you won't see many of those movies introduced by an A-Lister come March. And I just don't like that, because the best thing Hollywood can do for itself is champion quality films for audiences hungry for them. That's not to speak ill of The Hurt Locker, Up in the Air, Inglourious Basterds, Julie & Julia, The Informant!, or Avatar. I'm just surprised that A Serious Man, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, District 9, and Thirst didn't get more love. Or even Big Fan, which features a fantastic performance from Patton Oswalt. Half of them had one nomination or less.

So yeah, I didn't watch much of The Golden Globes. What I did watch irritated me, and if all the best films of the year come out in December, why is it the rest of us see so many great ones between January and November?


Although, I have to say, Christoph Waltz: Best Supporting Actor. Called that. He owns that category in the Oscars to boot, as far as I'm concerned. Even if you liked nothing else about Inglourious Basterds (and I'd be bummed that you didn't), it's hard to say he didn't rock Landa.

Land of Confusion

The Cap'n has been trying all day to decide if there's enough I want to say about Monsters vs. Aliens to merit a full review, and to be honest with you folks I'm not sure that I have much to add. It's a fun enough movie; a considerably better version of what Igor was trying to do. Igor tried very hard to be a kid-friendly movie set in the world of Universal Classic Monsters and ended up being a mostly stillborn affair. Monsters vs. Aliens is operating on the Classic Science Fiction template, and to be sure it succeeds in putting together variations of The Fly, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Godzilla/Mothra, the Blob, and the 50 foot Woman together to fight alien invaders and giant robots. Throw in a riff on Dr. Strangelove and you have some idea of what to expect, which they reasonably succeed at.

As computer animated films go, Monsters vs. Aliens looks very good, and it has a nice cast. The theme is a tried and true kiddie-trope: an "ugly duckling" variation about learning to accept that you're okay the way you are, and on top of that what you wanted to be may not be so great after all. The movie is amusing and is hampered only with a few truly groan-inducing pop culture references (the ones that spring to mind involve "Axel F" and Dance Dance Revolution), and I guess I had fun watching it.

That being said, I didn't really want to proclaim from the mountain tops that everyone should see Monsters vs. Aliens. It's a perfectly agreeable film from Dreamworks Animation, sitting comfortably between the instantly dated Shrek films and the considerably better Kung Fu Panda. And that's about what I have to say.

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Speaking of "having nothing to say", I keep thinking that I want to weigh in on the NBC Jay Leno / Conan O'Brien situation, or the Spider-man 4 debacle, or even the wildly varying reactions to The Lovely Bones or The Book of Eli, but when it comes to putting pen to paper (or the digital equivalent thereof), I really don't. All of these situations are fascinating to watch and read about as they develop, but there's not much to bring to the table that every other blogger hasn't with greater aplomb. Since those aren't hard to find, I suggest you seek them out, especially if you haven't heard that Sony is re-booting the Spider-Man series after three films (without Sam Raimi), or for some reason don't watch any late night television.

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A final update, one with as much bearing on your lives as anything else today: Moon still hasn't arrived, and according to the UPS tracking code that's because the Blu-Ray was either stolen or irreparably damaged the day they tried to deliver it. I've heard nothing from Amazon (or UPS, for that matter), but since I paid for the movie, it would be nice if there was some indication that another copy would be shipped in the near future.

Okay, I'm off to finish a "personal narrative" for Boston University which is, appropriately, a narrative of my life with film. While I think there are some very good pieces, it's not the kind of thing that makes for Blogorium reading, so if you'd like to be one of proof/quality testers, please provide me with an email address and I'll happily send you the finished draft tomorrow.

Cheers.

Grumbly Growl (more about renting...)

By now, you might have heard that Netflix and Warner Brothers reached a deal this week that will prevent new releases from the studio being available for 28 days after retail availability. Warner Brothers s attempting to increase DVD and Blu-Ray sales by removing all new films from the rental market. Of course, they don't appear to be making a similar deal with Blockbuster or Hollywood video. Perhaps that's because, as I discussed two days ago, Netflix and Red Box are dominating the rental market.

Here's the rub: by not making your recent releases available for a month, I'm less likely to purchase a new Warner Brothers release, and I suspect I'm not alone. Not only will I wait a month and rent other films, but I'll seriously reconsider buying any new Warners release new. Maybe I'll just wait for it to hit the "used" market, on Amazon or at second-run retailers. If they want more money so badly, they made a bad decision by cutting off the rental market.

If you're wondering, "so what? what's another month?", imagine this: if this stunt works, then the other studios are going to follow suit, and assuming that you'd rather drive to Best Buy or Target or Wal Mart to buy a movie you haven't seen. If that somehow works, then they'll start looking at "classic" or top tier titles from the catalog and withhold those, in the hopes you'll pony up another $30-70 for "Deluxe Editions" on top of your Netflix rental price.

I have Netflix precisely because I don't want to buy everything that looks interesting. Sometimes I'd like to rent it first, but if I really like a movie, I'll probably pick it up. If the film is only available to buy, I'll put that film way down on my queue and forget about it. Yes, there are other movies to watch - which is another perfectly reasonable reaction to my grousing - and there are so many of them that maybe users will just bypass Warner Brothers altogether.

For example, there's been a LOT of complaining about New Line (a Warner Brothers subsidiary) deciding to put out The Lord of the Rings films on Blu-Ray in their theatrical cuts, when it's abundantly clear that this is a cash grab. Obviously the extended cuts will be on Blu-Ray some time before The Hobbit hits theatres, so New Line thinks they can sell us both versions when they'd easily fit on the same disc. Now I won't be able to rent them and see if it's even worth the picture upgrade for a month, unless I want to drop $70 for the boxed set. Buyer beware.

This is, in some ways, just a slight annoyance, but it says that the studios are concerned about losing money, and that they're willing to negotiate with the new rental giant to remove films in a way that they aren't elsewhere. Netflix fans are being hosed, Warner Brothers is indicating that money is more important than customer relationships, and the other studios are peeking over the wall to see if the suckers will eat it up. And maybe they will. I don't know. I'm not happy about this at all, because the upside has yet to manifest itself.

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So as to not leave everyone on a sour note, may I present to you this French interpretation of Star Wars.... at least, I think that's what it is...