Archive for May, 2009
451 – Up
When a slight misunderstanding threatens to force elderly Carl Fredrickson (Ed Asner) into a retirement home, the wiley old coot decides to go for broke, attaching thousands of balloons to his house and floating off to the jungle wilds of South America. Trouble is, a little kid named Russell (Jordan Nagai) is also along for the ride, which doesn’t quite play out the way Carl intends it to. This Disney/Pixar instaclassic is a lot of fun, especially in 3D, with charming, realistic characters, sweeping vistas, and a straight-arrow message that’s neither muddled nor heavyhanded.
Now, you gotta know this upfront: I love 3D animated films. It’s not like the old days, where the makers would try so hard to make the 3D exciting and amazing that they forgot to make a movie behind the effects. What happens nowadays is that the creators write an awesome, fun movie and then toss dollops of 3D effects to accentuate the story, rather than distract from it. (Or, as sometimes would happen, detract from it.)
So maybe I was an easy mark, but I thought Up was outstanding. Ed Asner, as the cranky old man who’s lost his zest for life, turns in a pitch-perfect performance that’s both endearing and curmudgeonly. Of course, the animation is so detailed that you can count the hairs on Carl’s chin as the days progress, but the Pixar gang did a great job in showing the various expressions on the faces of the human characters here, something I think they’ve been slow to develop well. (The toys in Toy Story, for example, looked great, but Sid the neighbor kid did not appear to be fully formed.)
The story itself is an adventure on the order of Indiana Jones, if Indy were a septugenarian with the physical prowess of an eggplant. The unlikely duo winds up in South America, all right, but they encounter more than just trees and rocks. Every animated film needs a villain, and here we get the luminous Christopher Plummer as a thought-dead old-time explorer who’s been holed up at the very spot Carl wishes to visit. Plummer does evil pretty well, I think, especially for a Canadian. (They’re kindly, peaceful folk, you see.)
Compared with recent 3D movies, I’d put Up a little higher up than Monsters versus Aliens, but not much. The sweet ending, although expected, packs just as strong an emotional punch as it would if you couldn’t see it coming. And certainly the intended audience for this movie won’t care about nuances; the kids in the theater where I saw this raved about it, keeping in awed silence for much of the film – except when Big Fun Wonderful Things were happening, when they erupted with raucous jubilation.
***
450 – Religulous
Posted by frothy in Religulous on May 30, 2009
The prevailing problem with Religulous is that it’s neither funny nor provacative. I mean, it does try its best to poke the angry beaver that is organized religion, but for the most part it fails to evoke anything stronger than consternation and irritation. Bill Maher is far too smarmy, too full of himself, smirking his way as if everything’s a big joke that only he’s in on. You get the feeling that Maher desperately wants to be like Michael Moore, who – love him or hate him – works hard to prove his points. Maher seems content with just doing cut-rate standup.
There really isn’t a lot else that can be said about a psuedodocumentary about religion. Maher can’t keep out of his own way, constantly interrupting his interview subjects with witless, almost mirthless humor so that they can’t even make their points cogently. Where Moore might allow his subjects to rant on and on, allowing them to either make their case or his own for him, Maher doesn’t seem sure whether he wants to laugh at his subjects or discuss religion with them. He comes off as abrasive, obnoxious, and thoroughly condescending, and it’s the latter that really kills the mood.
Maher’s lofty pontifications would carry more weight had he exhibited even the tiniest amount of empathy for his oppontents’ – and essentially everyone in the movie is his opponent, save for his film crew – point of view. An honest discussion on what religion means in the 21st century would have had far more merit than a blanket “everyone who believes in God is crazy” mantra that serves no one other than the self-aggrandizing host.
**
Not on DVD? Why not?
By now, most movies have been released on DVD, but there are still many notable stragglers. I keep a list over at the IMDb of movies that I’d like to see that Netflix doesn’t (yet) carry. Some of these are on DVD now (just not carried by NF), and some were on DVD in the past but are no longer available in that medium. Some have never, ever been on home video, not even VHS.
But older movies are being (re)released on DVD all the time now, so it’s only a matter of time (one hopes) before all of the oldies are on DVD. Or Blu-Ray, as the case may be. So here’s a list of the movies I’d like to see on DVD (in no particular order).
What’s your list?
1. Blood and Donuts (1995)
2. Open Season (1995) (not the cartoon)
3. Tollbooth (1994)
4. Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me (1992)
5. Rubin and Ed (1991)
6. Buried Alive (1990)
7. Impulse (1990)
8. The Carrier (1988)
9. Ground Zero (1987)
10. Salvation! (1987)
11. The Wansee Conference (1984)
12. World War III (1982) (TV movie)
13. Tuck Everlasting (1981)
14. Murder by Natural Causes (1979) (TV movie)
15. The Big Fix (1978)
16. Between the Lines (1977
17. Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000
18. The Deadly Tower (1975) (TV movie)
19. The Legend of Hillbilly John (1974)
20. A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1972)
21. Fillmore (1972)
22. Skin Game (1971)
23. Taking Off (1971)
24. Unman, Wittering, and Zigo (1971)
25. Wild Rovers (1971)
26. The Mind of Mr. Soames (1970)
27. Tropic of Cancer (1970)
28. Who’s Minding the Mint? (1967)
29. The Night Walker (1964)
30. The Brain (1962)
31. Wild River (1960)
32. The Devil’s Disciple (1959)
33. The Great Man (1956)
34. The Night My Number Came Up (1955)
35. To the Ends of the Earth (1948)
36. Ride the Pink Horse (1947)
37. The Macomber Affair (1947)
38. The October Man (1947)
39. These Three (1936)
Pics of the new Nightmare on Elm Street
Posted by frothy in News/Rumors on May 28, 2009
Can be found here.
That’s Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy Krueger, albeit from the side. Iconic fedora is there, but the striped shirt is the wrong color. Or maybe he changed shirts at some point. This is apparently a flashback scene of ol’ Freddy hanging with little kids on a playground. Hard to imagine a creepy-looking guy like this being allowed near kids without parents throwing a fit. (Of course, in this case they’d have some cause, huh?)
Another Nine trailer – doesn’t this look interesting?
It does look intriguing. Very stylish, it has a sci-fi bent – and a postapocalyptic one, to boot
Streaming hard-to-find movies online
Posted by frothy in Miscellaneous on May 27, 2009
Via Wired, I came across The Auteurs, a site that lets you stream movies to your PC without a third-party addon (like Netflix), for $5 apiece.
There are a lot of hard-to-find films on here, and there are also all (I believe) of the Criterion Collection movies. Many, many uberclassics.mm
Whedon responds to Buffy rumornews
Posted by frothy in News/Rumors on May 27, 2009
Tarantino to “tweak” IG, and wait! Buffy gets a reboot?!
Posted by frothy in News/Rumors on May 26, 2009
To no one’s surprise, Quentin Tarantino is going to reedit Inglourious Basterds, even though it apparently did well at Cannes. It’s long, but not tooooo long, and he still has creative control. Apparently he rushed into making it, relative to his other, long-gestating projects, and the result is a film that, well, needs to be edited. As I said before, I didn’t think the trailer looked very good at all, but we’ll see.
In OTHER news, though, there’s a strong rumor that the movie version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer – which started the whole BtVS trend, dontchaknow – will be remade as a reboot of the Buffyverse. Joss Whedon, who created the Buffy characters, won’t have anything to do with the new movie. The old one, you might recall, starred Kristy Swanson instead of Sarah Michelle Gellar, and it featured such luminaries as Luke Perry, Rutger Hauer, and Donald Sutherland. This reboot will apparently give the makers a chance to link the TV Buffyverse with the movie Buffyverse, somehow, although the characters of Spike, Willow, and Xander won’t be around – this one will focus on a new, younger Slayer. Because, you know, Sarah Michelle is wayyyyy too old now, right?
Now me, I liked the movie and never saw the series (other than bits here and there). On the other hand, there are now millions and millions of people who think the series is THE BEST THING EVER OMG and would go see this – and then be disappointed, since it’s gonna be done by the same people who did the first movie, which Buffyphiles pretty much disown.
Brainstorm is partly cloudy, 30% chance of entertainment
Posted by frothy in Brainstorm (1983) on May 25, 2009
Two researchers (Christopher Walken and Louise Fletcher) discover a way to record and playback people’s actual experiences. Michael (Walken) then uses the system to get back together with his ex, Karen (Natalie Wood), who’s marketing the project, while others use it for more perverse purposes, and the military eventually steps in once they realize the full potential of the devices.
Now, mind you, the idea is that these experiences include all senses – what the person is seeing, feeling, hearing, and even smelling. I’ll let you mull that over for a second. I’m watching a movie in which a system purports to convey the smells other people have smelled. How on earth did the makers of this movie think they could pull this off? Even now, more than a quarter century later, we don’t have the technology – on a mass scale, anyway – to smell things as other people have smelled them. What we’re left with is a little thing I like to call videotape. To show off this invention, the scientists have some guy drive a race car, ride a horse, go down a water slide, and then play them back inside these semi-helmets for investors. Somehow the sights, sounds, and smells get into the testers’ minds, but all we see are video playbacks.
Christopher Walken basically plays every other character he’s ever played, essentially playing himself. Which is nice, in a cheesy sort of way. Louise Fletcher plays a more driven version of Nurse Ratched, for a while. Natalie Wood offers a typically wooden performance in what would be her final film performance – she died during filming. It’s easy to pick on a bad performance when they’re mostly composed of shrieking and crying and clinging and nagging. Wood even does the customary hand-to-the-forehead bit to show anguish. She’s pretty awful. Oh, and Cliff Robertson for AT&T is in it. That’s his official name now.
Compare the movie with a contmporary computer thriller, Demon Seed (1977). Six years later, and the special effects hadn’t gotten much better. It’s all reminiscent of how sci-fi was in the 1950s, with monsters that now look really stupid. Some things just don’t age well (Ray Harryhausen’s effects notwithstanding). In fact, compare with a more-recent sci-fi thriller, Strange Days (1995), in which Ralph Fiennes sells similar recording devices on the black market. Great effects for 1995, and 14 years later they still look good, but Brainstorm’s look silly, even childish now.
The movie is best known for Natalie Wood’s somewhat-suspicious death – she drowned while in the company of Walken and her husband Robert Wagner while apparently snockered. But that’s no reason to revisit this movie. It’s not terrible, just aged less like fine cheese and more like sour milk.
**1/2
I got a bad feeling about Inglourious Basterds
Posted by frothy in News/Rumors on May 21, 2009
I’m not feeling it, you know? Videogum had a brief roundup on what some critics have said (the movie’s already premiered, at Cannes), and the reaction is mixed. Okay, you say, so what? Quentin Tarantino movies usually are of the love-em-or-hate-em stripe, right? But this feels different. Here, let me show you some opinions:
Guardian: (who call it “an armour-plated turkey,” the kind of cutesy, nonsensical shorthand that is the hallmark of a pretentious douche with no real insight): “Quentin Tarantino’s cod-WW2 shlocker about a Jewish-American revenge squad intent on killing Nazis in German-occupied France is awful. It is achtung-achtung-ach-mein-Gott atrocious. It isn’t funny; it isn’t exciting; it isn’t a realistic war movie, yet neither is it an entertaining genre spoof or a clever counterfactual wartime yarn. It isn’t emotionally involving or deliciously ironic or a brilliant tissue of trash-pop references. Nothing like that. Brad Pitt gives the worst performance of his life, with a permanent smirk as if he’s had the left side of his jaw injected with cement, and which he must uncomfortably maintain for long scenes on camera without dialogue.”
IFC: “The film’s two hours and 40 minutes long, and could be shorn of an hour just by picking up the tempo … But I wouldn’t even call “Inglourious Basterds” minor Tarantino — it’s flat-out tiresome, and from a commercial perspective, incredibly dicey. If this is the pony the Weinstein Company has picked, well, bless ‘em, because it’s hard to see this one pulling in crowds once word gets around.”
Now, that’s just two reviews, and I did leave out the positive ones. But, two things, okay? First, none of the positives are glowing, certainly not as positive as these two are negative. Second, these two are some serious reviewers, not like, say, me. I wouldn’t necessarily discount their complaints, is all.
Mentioning the runtime makes sense only if one actually notices how long a movie is dragging on. Lawrence of Arabia was over three hours long, but it sure doesn’t feel like it. But when a movie is dull, making it long just means a long, dull movie, which is infinitely (not really) worse than a not-long, dull movie.
So although I have loved all of the QT films so far to some degree, I have low, low hopes for this one. It looks bad from every angle. I don’t like the theme, and I think the Brad Pitt character looks and sounds ridiculous in the trailer. Unless that trailer contained no footage that’ll be in the movie, I can’t imagine it being all that wonderful. Plus it has Mike Myers (?!?!?) in a serious role (I assume) as a general. And Eli Roth, who’s a director.
Inglourious Basterds -- good GOD, who thought an intentional misspelling would make sense? -- will be in wide release on August 21, 2009.
449 – Angels and Demons
Posted by frothy in Angels and Demons on May 18, 2009
Ron Howard’s followup to The Da Vinci Code is an easy-to-follow, paint-by-numbers mystery thriller that probably would have received little recognition had it a) not been directed by Howard, b) not starred the redoubtable Tom Hanks, and c) used religion as its theme. All three elements contribute to form an overblown, frantic mess that offers little mystery.
Robert Langdon (Hanks), the “symbologist” (not a real position) of The Da Vinci Code, is again the hero here, called into action by the Vatican itself, as four of its esteemed cardinals have been, um, cardinalnapped, just as an Conclave to choose the new Pope is about to begin. At the same time, an experiment at Switzerland’s CERN research center has produced a nifty new substance called antimatter – and it’s been stolen! By, it appears, whoever kidnapped the cardinal. The antimatter’s storage container must be found before midnight, or else the battery will run out, and everyone will be doomed.
So it’s a race against the clock as Langdon and a beautiful CERN scientist (Ayelet Zurer) try to locate the container and save the cardinals. The mismatched duo – will they fall in love? – must match wits with some unseen wacko religious extremist, as well as the head of the Swiss Guard (Stellan Skarsgard). They’re helped by the youthful Camerlengo (Ewan McGregor), i.e., the Pope’s Helper fellow, and the chief of Vatican City’s police force (Pierfrancisco Favino) – or are they? The bad guy could be a good guy in disguise, right? Or did I just blow your mind?
One thing that did bother me a lot about this movie – aside from the faceless, let’s-run-from-clue-to-clue plot device – is that for a movie that’s supposed to be peopled with Serious Folks who revere Important Things, sort of like Indiana Jones and his “it belongs in a museum!” mantra, there’s a LOT of desecration of religious artifacts, often for no good reason at all. Example: Langdon and his gal pal get access to the Vatican’s archives (of course they do) to look at one of Galileo’s original texts. The only one remaining in existance, right? In lieu of translating, they just rip a page out. Much light is made of the mysterious archives, and although I’m not remotely religious, this struck me as particularly disrespectful. Was Howard lampooning the Church, or was he trying to tell a good mystery tale? He succeeded only in doing the former, which is a huge disappointment.
Hanks isn’t bad – better than he was in The Da Vinci Code, anyway – and his hair is less distracting here. He’s every bit as intrepid as you’d expect a Harvard professor to be in investigating a murder, which I’m sure is something that happens all the time to Harvard professors. Probably more than for Yale professors, anyway. So he’s not the problem, or even a problem. An issue, though, is that the characters are so thinly drawn. I mean, when you see two characters who seem a little dodgy, you know one of them will turn out to be not so dodgy, and maybe even a Good Guy after all. “Twists” like that can be spotted too far in advance for my tastes.
If you took the core plot of “24″ and stripped away most of the tension and all of the character depth and added sacrilege, you’d get Angels and Demons. The book, as they say, is a heck of a lot better than the vapid movie version, but you probably assumed that anyway. What you might not have realized is that although this book was a lot better than the Da Vinci Code book, the movie is only marginally better than the DVC on film.
**1/2
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