Longtime readers know that I love a good romantic comedy, and the trailer for this one makes me want to be there on opening night.
I can’t wait!
Yarrr….
I haven’t seen Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides yet, but I plan to. We’re big fans of the Pirates movies here at Casa Jaquandor, and we’re looking forward to this one.
However, I’m reading a lot of tepid-to-hostile reviews of the movie, which might give ma pause, except that many of these reviews are clearly written by people who probably shouldn’t be seeing the thing in the first place.
Example, from Associated Press
With the (unexplained) absence of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley this time around, Depp’s Sparrow is now front and center — he’s almost the voice of reason — rather than the bejeweled and eyelinered clown riffing in the corner, commenting on the action.
“Unexplained” absence? It’s only “unexplained” if you didn’t bother paying attention to the ending of the previous movie.
And there’s this, from Roger Ebert, whom I almost always respect:
Before seeing “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,” I had already reached my capacity for “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, and with this fourth installment, my cup runneth over.
Look. I don’t care if it’s your job to review movies or not, but if you can honestly lead off your review by saying “I never wanted to see another of these again”, then maybe you just should have recused yourself from reviewing it for your paper this time out. This kind of thing is as mystifying to me as when newspapers run reviews of science fiction books written by people who state up front that they don’t much like reading science fiction.
And the other thing I see a lot is referrences to the previous two Pirates films as too confusing and hard to follow, complaints for which I have absolutely no sympathy. In fact, if you couldn’t follow those two movies, then I have to wonder just what kinds of movies you can follow.
I don’t know if I’ll like On Stranger Tides or not, but that’s not the point. I’m just tired of seeing movie reviews like these, which will stake claims to being “objective” in their assessments while betraying a clear ignorance of the subject matter on one hand, or an outright chip-on-the-shoulder on the other, both of which give the lie to so-called critical “objectivity”.
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100 Things I Love About Movies (a collection of memories)
I love movies. I always feel like I don’t see enough movies, but I have seen a lot of movies, so I don’t think I’m a complete blockhead about movies. Anyhow, Michael May and Jason Bennion both did this, so I need to do this as well. It’s just a list of one hundred memories I have from movies. Some are from specific movies; others are specific movie-related memories I have. This is not a “Top 100”, though, and the numbering is just an organizational thing, not a ranking of any kind. (Although not entirely…I’m sure, as I start writing this, that Number One will end up being related to Star Wars in some way.) If I write this list again tomorrow, I am sure that I could come up with another 100 things I love about movies. Movies rule!
Here we go….
100. “I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you’re looking at me like I’m nuts!” (When Harry Met Sally….)
99. “How did you manage to give me flowers and be President at the same time?”
“It turns out I’ve got a rose garden.” (The American President)
98. The couple in front of The Wife and I at Titanic. The guy was sitting still, but the lady was all over him. It was really bizarre, the contrast of her enthusiasm for making out with his apparent ambivalence.
97. Puss-in-Boots throwing up a hairball in Shrek 2. (You can’t tell me that movie wasn’t written by people who live with cats!)
96. The Ride of the Firemares from Krull:
95. Sean Connery as King Richard I (the Lion Heart) at the end of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
94. “I don’t understand pressure? Well, flip you!” (The edited-for-teevee version of The Breakfast Club, with “flip” substituted for “f***”.)
93. At the end of Witness, when the cops are all there on the Lapp farm sorting things out, an emotionally and physically exhausted John Book is leaning against a police car smoking a cigarette.
92. In ninth grade English class, we did a unit on mystery stories, reading, among other things, The Hound of the Baskervilles. I talked my teacher that year into showing Dial M for Murder in class. At first, my classmates tittered and giggled a bit at some of the “old movie” type stuff, but they got engrossed pretty quickly…especially when Grace Kelly grabbed the pair of scissors….
91. Seeing Pulp Fiction the day after I watched Siskel and Ebert rave about it on their show, but before word-of-mouth had taken hold of the movie: the theater was empty except for me. Seeing Pulp Fiction again, three weeks later, when word-of-mouth had done its work: the theater was packed.
90. Many, many hours spent perusing film music sections at record stores.
89. Movie scenes putting me in the mood for specific foods. One example: there’s a scene in The Fugitive where Harrison Ford is studying evidence he’s gathered over a carton of Chinese takeout. I went straight to my local Chinese joint after the movie ended.
88. Speaking of food: popcorn! Glorious, wondrous popcorn. My love of popcorn knows few bounds. I can barely process the notion of a movie without popcorn. (In an episode of Good Eats, Alton Brown was snortingly dismissive of the kind of popcorn popper that I own. Well, as much as I love Alton Brown…screw him! I love the popcorn my popper makes, and if that means that I own a one-task kitchen gadget — something I usually try very hard to avoid in my kitchen — so be it. Harumph!)
87. “I would never hurt you, Margaret.” (Dead Again, a wonderful thriller from 1991 that nobody seems to talk about much these days. Just a delicious film that I watched over and over again in college, each time making sure that someone was in the room who hadn’t seen it, so I could watch their reactions to the film’s revelations as it went on. Love this movie!)
86. “Desolated, Mr. Bond?” “Heartbroken, Mr. Drax.” (Moonraker, my first ever James Bond movie. I wanted to see it because it was set in space and had laser pistols. I ended up being a James Bond fan for life.)
85. Seeing The X-Files: Fight the Future. I liked the movie a lot, but it’s particularly memorable because it played in my hometown at a theater which I refused to frequent (because the theater sucked). So The Wife and I came to Buffalo to see it…and experienced stadium seating in a theater for the first time.
84. I can’t remember what movie I saw that day, but once I was exiting the theater after seeing an afternoon show, and on my way out, I overheard a theater customer demanding her money back from the manager, not for any technical mishap or service-related issue, but because she hated the movie she had seen. I thought that was pretty amusing; my attitude on such things has always been, “You takes your chances.”
83. The Palace Theater in Olean, NY. It was probably a gorgeous place at one time, but by the time we moved to the area, it was a run-down dump. I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark there for the first time. The Palace was eventually demolished when it was determined that it would take Trumpian levels of money to bring the building back into any semblance of compliance with local code. I can’t remember what’s on the site now — there’s a boring Eckerd’s or Rite-aid or some such thing near there, but I can’t remember if that’s the site where the Palace was or now. The Palace was also the one theater I can recall where I never once had popcorn during a movie, because their popcorn was dispensed by an ancient-looking vending machine.
82. The morning after Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom came out. I hadn’t been able to go the night before (because I was being punished for having done something stupid that I don’t recall…but I probably deserved it). Of course, every one of my damn friends who had seen it had to tell me how awesome it was. Jerks, all of them. Jerks!
81. The look on Charlie Allnut’s face when he wakes up and realizes that Rosie has poured all of his whiskey out into the river. (The African Queen…which I really really really need to see again.)
80. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Still my favorite of the Original Series films. I saw this in college opening night, with a couple of friends and The Girlfriend (later The Wife). But on that night we’d had a concert in Cedar Falls, IA — the second installment of Wartburg College’s annual Christmas with Wartburg pageant. When the concert was over we changed very quickly and high-tailed it to the theater in the nearby mall. I loved the movie, and I got positively misty at the end, when the film closes with the signatures of the original cast members appearing on the screen, one by one, ending with William Shatner’s.
79. The nerdy kid trying to buy a pint of liquor in American Graffiti.
78. The first time I ever realized, while watching it, that I was seeing a crappy movie: some flick with Gary Coleman as a homeless kid who could predict horse races. I’m not bothering to look up the title.
77. The first foreign film I ever saw was a Fellini picture called Ginger e Fred, which is about a once-popular dance duo (who made their name impersonating Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) reuniting thirty years later for a teevee variety show. We saw it at an art-film house in Pittsburgh. I don’t really recall the movie much at all, but I don’t remember disliking it.
76. “Stop blowin’ holes in my ship!” (Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl)
75. “Why didn’t you tell me who you were?”
“Because I knew what would happen. All ‘mergers and acquisitions’, no ‘lust and tequila’.” (Working Girl)
74. The second time I saw Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, there was a guy in his 50s in the theater a few seats away from me and up a row or two. He had the best time seeing that movie I’ve ever seen anyone have. He was laughing at the funny parts, he cheered the “hero” parts, and when the bad guy shoots Henry Jones Sr., he yelled out, “Get him, Indy!” It was hilariously awesome, seeing someone enjoy a movie that much.
73. When the Star Wars Special Edition re-releases happened in 1997, there was a guy at the ticket counter demanding a refund because he didn’t realize that these were re-releases of the original movies. He’d thought he was about to see Episode One or Episode Seven or something.
72. Sophomore year of college, the second time I watched Casablanca. Roger Ebert has long held that the second viewing of Casablanca is always more effective than the first, and I tend to think that he’s right. I liked the movie the first time I saw it, during summer between my freshman and sophomore years. Watched it again four months later, though — and was so blown away that I would watch it every Sunday, after the early football game, for the next month and a half.
71. “We grew up in peacetime.” (Hear My Song. A movie I really need to see again.)
70. My single favorite expletive of all time: “Oh, fuck-wank-bugger-shitting-arse-head-and-hole.” Delivered with sterling perfecting by Bill Nighy in Love Actually, a movie which I love to the point that if you say something bad about it, I will fight you. That’s no lie.
69. If you don’t think this is the best song ever, I will fight you. That’s no lie. (I’m of the opinion that Will Farrell could read aloud from an automotive parts ordering book and make it comedy gold.)
68. The Daughter was all of a month old, if that, when we went to visit The In-laws. The Wife and I decided to take advantage of a bit of free babysitting to actually go see a movie by ourselves, so we went to see the Disney Tarzan. Not a great choice for two new parents who are still skittish about the whole baby thing, because in the first five minutes of the movie, there’s a baby whose parents are killed horribly, and two parents whose baby is killed horribly.
67. “Well, there’s something you don’t see every day.” (Dr. Peter Venkman on the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, Ghostbusters)
66. Demi Moore in Ghost. And not just the scenes where she’s wearing overalls, either. Loved her in that movie.
65. Buffalo Bill stalking Clarice Starling in his basement, seeing her through the night-vision goggles…and when his hand enters the frame, reaching out for her, from his POV. I’ve never heard so many people scream at once in a movie theater.
64. Se7en, which is a masterpiece until the ending, when it flies off the rails more spectacularly than any movie I can ever remember.
63. “Are you Hootie?”
“No, I am not Hootie.” (Jerry Maguire)
62. “I like to think that the last thing that went through old Norden’s head, other than that bullet, was to wonder how in the Hell Andy Dufresne ever got the better of him.” (The Shawshank Redemption. I could probably do a list of 100 Things I Love About The Shawshank Redemption.)
61. I first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey at a science fiction convention in Portland, OR. I was nine years old, and I didn’t really understand the movie all that well. Or so I thought. Later on I would realize that I had understood quite a lot of it and just hadn’t realized that I’d understood quite a lot of it. This was my first experience with science fiction that wasn’t space opera. I still prefer space opera, but there’s room in my SF life for the other stuff.
60. I wasn’t all about space movies, sci-fi, and action-adventure as a kid. I went to see Coal Miner’s Daughter with my mother because I genuinely wanted to see Coal Miner’s Daughter. And I liked it, even being eight or nine at the time. I remember being terribly upset that the nice lady who helped Loretta Lynn early in her career, a Patsy something, died in a plane crash. That’s not fair, dammit!
59. Across the Universe. I adore this film.
58. Another sign that I was the weird kid: I saw Gandhi in theaters when it came out, twice. It made quite the impression.
57. Other movies I remember seeing at the afore-mentioned Palace Theater in Olean, NY: Blade Runner, The Right Stuff, La Bamba, The Princess Bride, Roxanne.
56. “Lina, you’ve never looked lovlier!” (Cosmo Brown (Donald O’Connor) to Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen), after Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) has missed Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) with a cake and thrown it into Lina’s face instead, in Singin’ in the Rain.)
55. The swordfight at the end of Rob Roy.
54. All the scary scenes in The Exorcist, most of which are set in a brightly lit room. Who needs dark to be scary!
53. At the end of my junior year of college, The Girlfriend (now The Wife) and I went to see Far and Away for our final date until later that summer. (She stayed in Iowa because she had a job; I went home.) That’s the cheesy Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman “Irish immigrants achieve the American Dream” flick. I still have a soft spot in my heart for that movie.
52. I remember the crowd in the theater cheering at the sight of Cowboys coach Barry Switzer glowering after his team lost to the Cardinals at the end of Jerry Maguire. Heh!
51. I was dead set against going to see The Karate Kid. It looked so stupid and cheesy. I was angry at my mother when she dragged me to see it. And then I loved it. Oh well….
50. “People don’t commit murder on credit!” (Dial M for Murder)
49. “That guy’s cropdustin’ where there ain’t no crops.” (North by Northwest)
48. “It’s a hell of a thing, killin’ a man. You take away everything he’s got and everything he’s ever gonna have.” (Unforgiven)
47. Watching Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke more than a year after I fell in love with its score (by Joe Hisaishi).
46. “You guys have dropped enough sonar buoys in the North Atlantic that a man could walk from Greenland to Iceland to Scotland without gettin’ his feet wet, so can we dispense with the bull?” (The Hunt for Red October — perhaps the best script, dialog-wise, ever written for an action thriller.)
45. The impromptu “Tiny Dancer” from Almost Famous.
44. Drew Struzan, poster-artist extraordinaire:
43. “Oh, you English are sooo superior, aren’t you? Well, do you know what you’d be without us, the USA, to protect you? The smallest f***ing province in the Russian Empire!” (A Fish Called Wanda)
42. “Both knew this was a one way ticket
I love you wife” (The Abyss, which I will forever hold to be a criminally underrated SF movie masterpiece.)
41. Dori speaking Whale in Finding Nemo (still my favorite Pixar film).
40. “I Sing the Body Electric”, from Fame. (What Glee could be, if it had any guts at all.)
39. “Leave the gun. Grab the canoli.” (The Godfather — I’m not a fan of the “Mob flick” genre, but this is indisputably an amazing film.)
38. Bob Peak, poster artist extraordinaire:
37. “You Can Fly”, from Peter Pan
36. The first half of Braveheart, up to and including the Battle of Stirling. (The second half is very good, but the film does lose a bit of steam after that first huge battle.)
35. John McClane makes two bullets count at the end of Die Hard.
34. Jerry Goldsmith.
33. “Kirk, I thank you. What you have done–“
“What I have done, I had to do.”
“But at what cost? Your ship, your son.”
“If I hadn’t tried, the cost would have been my soul.” (Star Trek III: The Search for Spock)
32. “I’ll be right here.” (E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial)
31. “Was that over the top? I never can tell!” (The Riddler, Batman Forever — which is my favorite of the first group of Batman films.)
30. John Wayne in Stagecoach, The Quiet Man, The Searchers, True Grit.
29. Superman smiles at the camera, at the end of every Superman movie. (The first Superman is still my favorite superhero movie, ever.)
28. I don’t care if you laugh. I liked The Notebook.
27. Salieri takes dictation from Mozart, in Amadeus. An amazing scene.
This scene is astonishing — the way Salieri is both taking advantage of Mozart and providing him a service; he’s doing both good and evil at the same time. And the way he still has to struggle to understand what is, for Mozart, as clear as day — perfectly illustrative of the film’s theme of mediocrity contrasted with genius, and Salieri’s curse of being just good enough to know how bad he is.
26. “There’s a war on! How is it you are headed west?”
“Well, we face to the north and then real subtle-like turn left.” (The Last of the Mohicans)
25. “You don’t want to be in love, you want to be in love in a movie.” (Sleepless in Seattle)
24. The first appearance of Adult Tristan (Brad Pitt) in Legends of the Fall.
23. The last ten minutes of As Good As It Gets.
22. John Barry.
21. “What do I tell the kids?”
“Tell them I’ve gone fishing.” (Jaws)
20. The opening credits of Saturday Night Fever, which are done in the same font as American Graffiti and Happy Days, but in garish red instead of the happy yellow of the earlier film and teevee show, set in more innocent times.
19. “Go get ’em, Tiger!” (Spiderman 2)
18. “Spiderpig, spiderpig! Does whatever a spiderpig does!” (The Simpsons Movie)
17. The pod race, The Phantom Menace
16. Obi Wan Kenobi, private eye, Attack of the Clones
15. The first time we see Jack Sparrow. Captain Jack Sparrow.
14. The time warp: It’s just a jump to the left! (Rocky Horror Picture Show)
13. Miklos Rozsa.
12. Joe Hisaishi.
11. Yoda and Obi Wan, last of the Jedi, take on the two Sith Lords in Revenge of the Sith.
10. Luke Skywalker comes this close to turning to the Dark Side in Return of the Jedi.
9. “We’re the only ones who know! The only ones!” (Close Encounters of the Third Kind)
8. Howard Shore.
7. All of The Empire Strikes Back.
6. The Lord of the Rings. All of it. I could write a 100 Things post about LOTR alone. (Hmmmm…there’s an idea….)
5. “I love you. I know I’ll never find another girl like you. Will you marry me?” (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.)
4. “I Could Have Danced All Night” (My Fair Lady).
3. Casablanca, and as far as I’m concerned, the greatest single long close-up in movie history.
2. John Williams.
1. Was there any doubt?
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“Two drifters, off to see the world….”
I need to watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s again, because I’ve only seen it once and it’s just silly to allow a film you loved the one time you saw it to go unwatched again. I’ve just read a new book called Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M., by Sam Wasson, about the making of the movie. Interestingly, the book takes a wider view of the making of Breakfast, by showing us the lives of the principals involved in the film leading up to the project that would bring them all together. He gives biographical sketches of Truman Capote and Audrey Hepburn, of screenwriter George Axelrod and costumer Edith Head, of Mel Ferrer and Blake Edwards and many others who came to make the movie. Wasson’s approach is almost novelistic, and if it’s not an exhaustively detailed account of a single film’s production, it compensates for that by being more of a portrait of sorts of the film’s genesis.
It’s not a portrait in which all the particulars look perfect, either. Truman Capote was apparently a fairly odd individual with a train-wreck of a childhood; Audrey Hepburn is seen as something of a tragic figure as well, enduring multiple miscarriages in a marriage that doesn’t appear terribly happy. For all the skill Blake Edwards brought to the film, he is not without fault: he cast Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi. And though he is only in the book briefly, George Peppard — the film’s male lead — was apparently a colossal jerk on the set.
Here is an excerpt from the book, detailing Henry Mancini’s efforts at coming up with a song for the movie…and more specifically, a song for Holly Golightly, Audrey Hepburn’s troubled and wounded character.
For a full month, slouching on the rented piano he kept in the garage, Henry Mancini agonized over the song. What had he gotten himself into? Over and over again, he replayed, again and again, Audrey’s voice in his head. He caught Funny Face [a musical Hepburn had done previously with Fred Astaire] on TV a few nights earlier, and with the short range — her range — of an octave and one, tried riffing on Audrey’s rendition of “How Long Has This Been Going On?” I could cry salty tears….Everything he tried died on the second or third note. I could cry…But for lack of an alternative, he stuck to it. Cry salty…cry salty tears…But the stucking didn’t stick. Nothing did. If Mancini didn’t deliver on this, what would he say to Jurow and Shepherd [the film’s producers], or to Blake [Edwards, the director], who’d had faith in him, who stuck his neck out? Even worse, what would he tell himself the next tim ehe sat down with a pipe at the piano? “You’ll do it, Hank”? There were only so many times his wife, Ginny, could say it to him. Only so many more times he would let himself go on to her about what kind of song this girl would sing. Was a Broadway-style melody actually the right choice for “travelin’ through the pastures of the sky”? That didn’t seem to fit with the private moment on a fire escape. But maybe the blues would. Where have I…Maybe like a jazzy pop thing. Or a country thing. Was that what was in her heart?
This was a time when Holly would cut through the pretense and show, for the length of a song, who she really was beneath all the sophistication. Right: beneath the sophistication. Whatever that sounded like, it had to be simple.
And then — as these things tend to happen — it came suddenly. Three notes: C, G, F. It was promising. Not a song, but a beginning. Staying within the range of an octave and one, and being careful to keep the melody all in the same key — much simpler that way — Mancini turned out the next several notes, all on the white keys. They didn’t sound bad — actually, they sounded good. At first, he went ahead carefully, mindful of not leaping too far beyond his flow, and then, as he gained momentum, proceeded half consciously. Now it was all falling out of him. A moment later it was automatic — he was taking dictation. As if they knew just where to go, as if they had been there many times before, the remaining notes obediently assumed their place on the page. Twenty minutes later, the composer looked up from the piano. The song was written.
The next day, Mancini made a record of it and took it in to Edwards. Blake loved it. Then it was to Paramount to play the tune for Shepherd and Jurow. “Hank brought a 78 record up to our office,” recalls Shepherd, “and he said, ‘Let us know what you think of it.’ He just laid it down and left. Marty and I listened to it and we thought it was terrific.”
“Who do you want to write the lyrics?” they asked.
“Johnny Mercer,” was the reply. Mancini didn’t even have to think about it.
The result, of course, was “Moon River”.
Maybe I can’t hold myself up as any kind of expert, but this surely has to be one of the perfect moments in all cinema. This woman is having a moment all for herself, on the fire escape at the back of her apartment. We first saw her in an elegant black dress, but now she’s in jeans and a sweatshirt with her hair beneath a towel. She has no idea anyone’s listening, and maybe she doesn’t even care; all she is doing is singing this simple tune with its lyrics that are both sad and hopeful. And the setting of the music is so wisely done, the way the muted strings rise up underneath the song in the second verse. Hepburn’s Holly Golightly seems so sad here — but the nature of the sadness isn’t spelled out at all. Does she miss something or someone? Does she feel that her life has gone awry? The film will fill in some of those blanks, but the song is, all at once, sad and hopeful and mysterious.
And that little thing Hepburn does at the end, there, when she’s done singing? When she looks up and sees her upstairs neighbor listening? And without a trace of embarrassment, she just smiles and says “Hi”? That’s one of those Audrey Hepburn moments, the ones that make me want to give her my heart, just because.
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No evil shall escape my sight!
With the exception of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 2, there’s no movie I’m looking forward to this summer more than Green Lantern. I know that after the original trailer was released popular opinion that the movie is going to suck started to calcify, but I actually liked that first trailer…and this footage, abridged from footage that was displayed at WonderCon this weekend, only excites me even more:
Forget Thor and Captain America — it’s Green Lantern for me!
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Notes from the Underside of Pop Culture
Well, not the “underside” per se, I just liked the sound of that. But anyway, a few random thoughts on stuff:
:: The official costume for the new David E. Kelley Wonder Woman show got its big reveal right before I went on my brief mini-vacation! Oh noes! So, what do I think of this?
I’m not a fan. I don’t hate it, but I’m not a fan of it, either. It just looks like what it is: a costume made out of latex, so I assume that the show’s sound editors will have a busy time of it just erasing out all of that nice latex-y squeaking. Frankly, this costume looks to me like what your stripper would show up in — the one you hired to show up to your comic book-loving buddy’s stag party.
And David E. Kelley is writing it. Ugh.
:: I am really liking the way Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is looking.
I’m a huge fan of these movies, of course; in addition to the first one, I loved the sequels as well. I can’t wait for this.
:: I’m also very excited about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (part 2). While in Pittsburgh, we discovered that the ABC Family channel was doing a Harry Potter weekend, showing all of the first five or six films, so there was always some Harry Potter on when we were there. No, we didn’t watch any of them all the way through, but we did catch this “sneak preview” of the forthcoming final film (which includes some standard-type musings from castmembers and the director):
I am generally of the view that the Harry Potter films are actually quite underrated. The bar they’ve managed to clear is really very impressive: a series of eight films, and (thus far) there’s not a dud in the bunch. Especially considering that there have been four different directors, and yet even with the resulting different directorial “touches”, much has been consistent throughout. I tip my hat to the producers for keeping their eyes on the ball for so long.
Along that line, I’m really going to miss the Potterverse when it’s all wrapped up. It’s just too rich of a universe to be done with! We need more stories set there…just as soon as JK Rowling figures out how to do that without having it be Hogwarts: The Next Generation, or Hogwarts: The New Class, or Hogwarts: The College Years, or AfterHogwarts.
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No. Please oh please, No.
Sequels and prequels to Blade Runner. Come on. What are we gonna do now? See Deckard and Rachel on the run? Or go back in time so we can see what attack ships on fire off Orion’s shoulder look like? Now, I’ve never been as enamored of Blade Runner as many are — visually it’s a staggering achievement, but narratively I’ve always found it oddly uninvolving — but really, Hollywood, No.
I really think it’s only a matter of time before somebody actually makes Brazzaville, the first installment of the ongoing adventures of former bar owner Rick Blaine and his friend, the ethically-challenged Police Prefect Louis Renault.
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Journeys among the fantastic
Some thoughts on some recently seen movies at Casa Jaquandor!
:: When we were moving from Hillsboro, OR to Allegany, NY in the summer of 1981, there was one day on the trip when my mother handed me a book and ordered me to read it. The book was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and I read it in its entirety that day. We started out that day somewhere in Nebraska and ended up somewhere in Indiana. I was riding the Ryder truck with my father; my mother and sister were in the pickup truck which was towing the camper. When we finally stopped at a Holiday Inn in Indiana, my father complained to my mother that he hadn’t been able to talk to me all day, so absorbed was I in the book.
Unfortunately, I never found the subsequent books in the series remotely as captivating, and to this day, Lion, Witch and Wardrobe is the only one of the Narnia books that I’ve actually read. So except for the first movie (previously written about), I bring no assumptions or impressions with me into the films. I actually enjoyed Prince Caspian more than I did Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe; and I actually enjoyed The Voyage of the Dawn Treader more than Prince Caspian.
Mainly, I liked it because, aside from a few moments at the very end, Dawn Treader didn’t seem to take itself as seriously as the previous two films did. This one just felt like more of a fairy tale adventure than Big Important Fantasy Battle Between Good and Evil.
I don’t really have much more to say about it than that, maybe because I don’t count the Narnia books among my favorite things, so I’m not terribly beholden to its message or the faithfulness with which it delivers that message. I’m not invested in whether or not the movie gets its CS Lewis right, or if by extension it gets the Jesus right. I’m trying to think up more to say about the movie, but I just don’t have anything. Voyage of the Dawn Treader is a genial, nice-looking, mostly entertaining fantasy adventure movie. That’s fine with me.
(I could tell that the film was shot with 3D in mind, which made some of the cinematography a bit unpleasant at times. We saw it in 2D, because I think 3D is stupid.)
:: How to Train Your Dragon is a really, really fun movie. It’s just a lot of fun, and it’s got a lot of heart, and best of all, it does things, story-wise, that are actually surprising. I don’t want to say too much about this animated tale about a young boy in a Viking village who befriends an injured dragon, but it’s just a fine, fine movie. It’s a pleasant piece of mainstream computer animation, but it’s also a movie that doesn’t fill its cast with cardboard stereotypes, opting instead for conflicts that are actually fairly complex. The story is your basic “War based on a misunderstanding” tale, but it finds some new things to saw within that framework, and the dragons themselves are a lot of fun to watch. (The main one seems to be more cat than lizard, if that makes sense.)
:: I’ve never been one to believe in the concept of “guilty pleasures”, but damned if I don’t think I have an honest-to-goodness guilty pleasure: the movie Armageddon. It’s utterly ridiculous; it screens like a 150-minute rock video, with its endlessly moving camera; its story makes very little sense. All the movie really has going for it is some entertaining banter amongst the characters, and Bruce Willis in his full-on Bruce Willis mode. Oh God, Armageddon is a bad, bad, bad movie.
And yet…I watched the damn thing, yet again. Voluntarily. And I didn’t feel that guilty at all. Except, maybe, in that feeling I get after I have my second slice of cake on my birthday. Of the two “giant rock hitting Earth” movies that came out roughly the same time, Deep Impact is the better movie. But Armageddon is the one I prefer to watch. Even with its horrible script, its cardboard characters, its abysmal scientific accuracy, and its relentless score that pounds away at you with all the subtlety of a brick thrown through a plate-glass window.
:: Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf is a movie I wanted to like a lot more than I did. The film actually has a very good script, by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, and it has an excellent cast. But the film is very nearly undone by its visuals.
The Beowulf story is a familiar one, and the film depicts its world with all of the bawdiness, raunchy behavior, and brutality that one might expect from a PG-13 film. Hrothgar’s hall is being attacked by a horrible beast called Grendel whom no one can kill; enter the great warrior Beowulf, who kills Grendel but then discovers that Grendel isn’t actually the real beast. The story is pretty straightforward.
Zemeckis’s visuals, though, are too often distracting to the point that they ejected me right out of the story. The film is made in the “motion capture” animation style that The Polar Express had formerly exhibited. A lot of people hated the look of Polar Express, particularly the eyes of the characters; I wasn’t one of them, but the visuals of Beowulf really gave me a hard time. Part of it was that there really wasn’t that much of a reason for the stylized look of the film; Polar Express had a “Is it a dream?” quality to it, and the visuals there were influenced by the design of the famous childrens book that inspired it.
There really doesn’t seem to be any reason for Beowulf to be shot in this way, however, and the visual design of the film does a disservice to the earthy tone of the script. Hrothgar’s hall should be a dirty, filthy place, and yet, the film makes it look almost shiny and spotless. Bright fires fill the movie with brilliant yellow light that seems out of place most of the time.
And that’s just the general appearance of the film; Zemeckis also goes for specific shots or effects that draw so much attention to themselves that it detracts from the story. Here’s a perfect example:
Of what use was the spear, sticking that far forward? Or the camera pivot to show that the spear tip is an inch from Beowulf’s eye? The shot is just goofy. And then there’s the supremely silly bit where we see, in flashback, Beowulf’s swimming contest against another warrior. Now, this bit is unbelievably over the top, which may be because the film implies that Beowulf is embellishing this story (he’s telling the tale to someone else as we watch the flashback). He’s swimming at sea, neck-and-neck with the other guy, when he is attacked by a series of sea monsters, each one of whom he vanquishes by stabbing in the eye. Except for the last one, which rears its head from the sea, shudders a bit, and then dies as Beowulf literally explodes from inside the creature’s eye. The whole sequence is just so gonzo, so fake, that even the story’s implication that Beowulf is spinning a web of bullshit doesn’t help. At this point I was actually laughing at the movie.
And there are many other scenes in the film that just look wrong, or that look as though Robert Zemeckis fell in love with things he could do with his camera without ever stopping to consider if those things were a good idea in the first place. It’s a shame, really. Beowulf has a good script. If only Zemeckis had directed it.
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John Barry 1933-2011
John Barry, one of the most distinctive film composers of all time, has died.
Barry could often, for me, be a “hit or miss” kind of composer, but when he hit — which in my experience was more often than not — oh man, did he hit. He’s probably best known for his work on the James Bond series, but Barry had a very long career of composing. He had a seemingly inexhaustible ability to come up with lush, gorgeous melodies, and he had an approach to film scoring that was all his own (and which, sadly, fell out of favor in the 1990s).
I could probably come up with dozens of examples of Barry’s music, but I don’t have time this morning (I’m writing this before work, because I don’t want to go all day without acknowledging his passing), so here are just a few.
Farewell, Mr. Barry.
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Oh, come on, studios!
I can see why movie studios would want to put the clamps down on people who try to put entire movies up on YouTube, but leveling copyright objections at two-minute clips from movies just seems silly. Those clips, when used in blogs and Facebook-sharings and Twitter feeds, constitute free advertising for their movies. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve posted a clip from some movie and had someone comment afterwards along the lines of “Hey, I’ve never seen that but now I think I will!”, I could probably buy a dinner at a nice restaurant, like Mendy’s.
(Which is my way of saying that Universal needs to stop blocking clips of Love Actually. Wankers!)