Remember my post a short while ago about the goofy 1980 B-movie space western Battle Beyond the Stars? I just figured that post represented a pleasant trip down geek memory lane for me and maybe a few others who recalled that obscure film. I certainly never figured that Battle was any kind of going concern.
Well, guess what: Battle actually is a going concern. It’s being revisited, in the form of a prequel comic book!
I am so going to read this.
Details here. The world needs more space opera comic books!
In honor of Valentine’s Day, here’s a post about…movie kissing! Mary Robinette Kowal lists ten “most passionate kisses”. It’s a nice idea for a list, but I wasn’t wowed much by her choices — there’s no way those talentless drips from Twilight belong anywhere near such a list. So, in the grand tradition of things, I’ll offer my own list! (She draws from fantasy films, where I’ll be drawing from movies far and wide.)
10. Jack and Rose on the prow of the Titanic, in Titanic.
I still love Titanic, and I think this moment — when Jack shows Rose what it’s like to almost fly above the water — is one of the movie’s very best moments. The kiss is beautifully done: Rose has to twist her head backward to kiss Jack, but the best touch is how, after they’ve been kissing for three or four seconds, she lifts her hand to his neck in a touch of intimacy.
9. Melvin kisses Carol poorly in As Good As It Gets.
It’s a goofy, awkward, uncomfortable kiss…and then, after a few seconds of reflection, Melvin says, “I know I can do better than that!” And does.
8. When Harry and Sally finally kiss in When Harry Met Sally…
I still love this movie…and I’ve just realized that I haven’t watched it in several years. I need to rectify that.
7. Aladdin gets an assist from the Magic Carpet in Aladdin.
Aladdin’s just returned Princess Jasmine to the palace, and he’s not sure how to say goodbye — so the Magic Carpet suddenly rolls upward, pushing Aladdin up so that his lips meet Jasmine’s, and both their eyes shoot open before surrendering to the moment.
6. Any time that Lloyd Dobler kisses Diane Court in Say Anything.
Every one of the kisses in this movie is acted with emotion that matches the scene. This movie is one of the great screen romances, period.
5. Aragorn and Arwen unite at last, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
I know, a lot of folks have a problem with Liv Tyler as Arwen, but I was never one of them. What worked here was the expression of complete befuddlement on Aragorn’s face as he tries to convince himself that Arwen is, in fact, alive and well.
4. John Book and Rachel Lapp can hold it in no longer, in Witness.
This is one of the greatest moments of release of pent-up sexual tension I’ve ever seen.
3. Rick and Ilsa’s last kiss in Paris in Casablanca.
Rick and Ilsa kiss several times in the movie, but the last one during the Paris flashback is utterly haunting, the way Rick is happy, but Ilsa is tormented by (what we’ll soon find out) the knowledge that her husband is not dead after all, and that she must break Rick’s heart. She lets her arm fall to the table, her fist knocking over her glass of champagne; and then, fade to the train station where Rick gets her note.
2. The curtain goes up on the Prime Minister and Natalie in Love Actually.
People who don’t like Love Actually are weirdos.
1. Han kisses Leia farewell in The Empire Strikes Back.
They grab one last kiss before Han is grabbed by the stormtroopers and pulled onto the carbon freezing platform. It’s followed, of course, by one of the best cinematic love exchanges in movie history. Best ad lib ever!
(By the way, my “worst” kiss in a piece of filmed entertainment happened in the old CBS show Beauty and the Beast, when they did a lot of teasing in the media about an upcoming episode that would feature Vincent and Katherine kissing…only to have them freeze-frame, and then have their “souls” come forward out of their bodies and kiss. I thought it an incredible copout.)
Battle Beyond the Stars is a movie that seems to confound expectations. If you watch it expecting a good movie, you’ll be disappointed. But on the other hand, if you watch it expecting a bad movie, you may be disappointed in the other direction.
Battle came out in 1980, one of a string of flicks to come out in the years after something happened in 1977 to suddenly make the entertainment industry think that there was a market out there for science fiction, especially in the form of explodey-spaceshippy-goodness. Battle was produced by Roger Corman, the king of the low-budget movie who nevertheless also served as a talent scout for later Hollywood geniuses, the most notable being a special effects artist who designed the spaceships for this movie and who later went on to bigger things. His name? James Cameron.
I saw Battle when I was in fourth grade. It was part of a double feature at the local movie house, the first film being a flick called Starcrash. I’ve never seen Starcrash since, although I do have a downloaded copy on one of my hard drives. Starcrash is legendary for being a bad movie, although I recall liking it when I saw it. Battle was the main event of the feature, though, and I was really looking forward to it, mainly because the nine-year-old me had thought that this trailer just looked awesome:
That trailer had run on a bunch of movies leading up to the release of Battle so I was really stoked when it came out. And when I saw it? Well, I was nine. I loved it. It had aliens and spaceships and lasers and things exploding and a cute girl. I got the soundtrack album, featuring music by a composer named James Horner, and I played that album a lot over the years, wearing it out and grooving to what I thought was the best explodey-spaceshippy movie music I’d heard outside of a Star Wars film. (Of course, my sample size was very small, I didn’t know film music enough to hear Horner’s huge debt to Jerry Goldsmith in the score, and I didn’t know enough about orchestration or performance to recognize a score that was recorded on a shoestring budget and which featured some really bad orchestrations, such as the track “Cowboy and the Jackers” which does things to the trumpet section that may be in violation of several international treaties.)
I saw Battle once more when it showed up on network teevee a few years later, and still liked it, and then I didn’t see it again for many years. I may have caught it in a cable broadcast sometime in the 1990s, but I’m not sure. I didn’t see it again in its entirety until just last week. How does it hold up? Well, movies like this don’t really “hold up” – that’s the wrong way to look at them. I had no illusions that it was some unheralded gem of SF moviemaking, but I was pleasantly surprised that it’s not that bad, either.
So, what about Battle Beyond the Stars, anyway? What’s it about? It’s very simple: The Magnificent Seven in space. That’s it. Literally.
We open with a giant enemy ship traveling through space (at a very slow pace, even though it has six enormous thrusters that are constantly firing).
The ship is ruled by our villain, Sador of the Malmori. Who are the Malmori? Are they a race of aliens? An empire? A family? We’re never told. Anyway, his ship approaches a planet called Akyyr (that’s how I’m spelling it, anyway), which, seeing that it is inhabited by peaceloving folk who only own one spaceship (which is a weather station), decides that he’s going to conquer it. So he hovers his enormous ship over them, projects his enormous face over their heads, and says, “I have come to conquer you.” (This he does after destroying the weather ship, just because he’s evil. The weather ship had been occupied by two guys who display the Akyyrian attitude by greeting an enormous and malevolent-looking spaceship by grinning, saying “Look! Visitors!”, and then contacting it by asking, “Could you identify yourself, please?”)
Anyway, Sador gives the Akyyrians seven days (“risings of your red giant”) before he’ll come back and finish conquering them. Why the delay? Who knows, but it gives the Akyyrians time to send one of their local young men, a boy named Shad (played by Richard Thomas as John-Boy Walton in space), off in the other ship they own, the secret one once piloted by the old blind guy who used to be an adventurer, to round up some help in the form of mercenaries.
The ship Shad flies is probably the single most famous thing from Battle Beyond the Stars. The ship is simply named “Nell”, and sure enough, it’s run by a computer by that name who speaks with the voice of a cranky lady. What’s most memorable about the ship, though, isn’t her personality; it’s her shape:
This ship is one of the more famed B-movie spaceships in movie history. You know you’re talking to a knowledgeable geek when the mention of the movie Battle Beyond the Stars draws the rejoinder, “Oh yeah, the movie with the ship that’s shaped like a pair of breasts!” The ship is more than that, though – it looks like a feline body with female breasts and then a couple of wings where the ship’s guns are, which sweep up and out, spread out to look like…well, it’s a very feminine ship. (And it was designed by a young filmmaker who was cutting his chops with Corman’s production crew, the afore-mentioned James Cameron.)
Anyway, Shad goes off in search of mercenaries he can hire to fight off Sador. On the way he meets a taciturn fellow named Gelt (Robert Vaughn), who only wants a meal and a place to hide from the apparent galaxy’s worth of folks who are after him:
He meets a ship commanded by a group of aliens who have third eyes on their foreheads and who use telepathy to do stuff:
He meets a “Warrior Valkyrie” named “St. Exmin”, played by Sybil Danning:
Given that her screentime involves her looking like this, it’s almost a crime that Danning doesn’t get more of it. She does, however, have one of the goofiest lines in movie history, and boy, does she deliver the hell out of it:
The other girl there is Nanelia (Darlanne Fluegel), who is every bit as naïve about people as Shad is, which makes her a perfect fit for him. She, too, gets far too little screentime, because she’s really cute. I remember her being one of the first females onscreen to impress me with her cuteness. I mean, look how cute she is in that clip, when she giggles at the prospect of learning how to “tingle, tangle, prangle” her new love interest from this warrior in the goofy headdress! Yeah, Nanelia is really, really cute:
Most memorable, probably, is the Space Cowboy Shad recruits who goes by the name “Space Cowboy”, played by George Peppard:
Cowboy is an arms runner who ends up leading the Akyyrian planet defense with the weapons he’d been running to a planet that Sador has just wiped out. Cowboy is extremely cool, although it’s hard not to expect him to grin and say, “I love it when a plan comes together!” But he does have one of the niftiest gadgets I’ve ever seen in a skiffy movie: he has a gizmo on his belt that dispenses Scotch and ice. (Why a Space Cowboy is drinking Scotch and not bourbon is never explained.)
And there are some aliens who are basically actors in rubber suits. You know how it is. Anyway, a big battle ensues (the Battle beyond the stars!), in which quite a few of the recruited mercenaries die heroically before Shad and Nanelia finally figure out how to do Sador in. I know, I just spoiled the movie, but what of it? Who would watch a movie like this and even consider the possibility of a bummer ending?
The clip above aside, there’s some witty stuff in the course of the flick, and one nicely done moment after Gelt (Robert Vaughn) dies, involving Shad’s bargain with him (a meal and a place to hide). There are also some exceedingly goofy moments, and like all B-movies, some of the stuff that happens isn’t explained very well at all (such as a scene in which the telepathic-collective aliens make their own stealth attack on Sador that involves sacrificing one of their own and a transplant of arms, believe it or not).
Of course, we have to have a romance between Shad and Nanelia, and it’s your typical awkward stuff (“Do they have kissing on your planet?”), but at the end, when victory has been won and all that are left are our hero and heroine returning to Akyyr, instead of ending with some neat dialog and some delightful snogging, we get Shad quoting at length from the “Varda”, the sacred text that the denizens of Akyyr are constantly quoting throughout the film. Weird stuff – the kid should be finally taking his big step into manhood, and instead he wants to recite from the holy book of a pacifist planet that sounds like The Art of War.
Battle Beyond the Stars is not a good movie. Nor is it a bad one. If you’re attuned to it and willing to go where it wants to go, it’s a fun little flick, if you’re into movies where the villain who is trying to conquer the planet Akyyr gets to shout in triumph at the end, shortly before his unimagined demise, “Akyyr is mine!”, followed by leading his entire bridge crew in sinister bad-guy-who’s-just-won-the-lottery laughter.
In other words, it’s the kind of movie that can only appeal to your inner nine-year-old. And that’s not a bad thing to be, is it?
As part of “Instead of the Buffalo Bills Theater”, The Daughter and I watched, on three successive Sundays, the Spiderman movies. And in digging through my archives, I found my original post on Spiderman, and my original post on Spiderman 3, but I apparently never posted anything about Spiderman 2! So here, I will rectify that.
(Before I begin, I have nothing really to add to my original posts on the first and third films.)
OK, Spiderman 2. This is, simply, one of the best superhero movies I’ve ever seen. It’s almost right up there with Superman. It’s good because, like the best superhero movies, it inherently gets what its hero is all about. Now, that wasn’t a problem with Spiderman, but where the first film seemed a bit hesitant to allow its hero to really get anywhere, Spiderman 2 had no such problems.
The key to understanding Spiderman, as is the case with all great superheroes, is understanding his regular life alter-ego, Peter Parker. Superhero alter-egos often tended to be people with good and productive lives as civilians in addition to their superhero antics; the central brilliance of Spiderman has always been that about the only part of Peter Parker’s life that is not a slowly unfolding train wreck is his life as Spiderman, and even then we’re not always sure. Peter’s a guy with problems. He’s brilliant and motivated, but somehow he can’t put those two things together into a life that doesn’t involve constantly scraping the bottom of the money barrel, desperately clutching on to – and failing to keep – a job as a pizza delivery guy, failing to keep simple promises like “Sure, Mary Jane, I’ll be there at eight.” Peter Parker’s life is a total, complete mess, and it’s the kind of mess we can easily relate to – well, aside from the spider-powers and being hunted by deranged supervillains stuff.
Spiderman 2 gets all of this. Take its wonderful opening sequence, which has Peter trying to keep the afore-mentioned pizza delivery job. He has to go some clearly absurd distance in some clearly absurd amount of time – something like fifty New York City blocks in twenty minutes with eight pizzas – and he’s on his last chance. Off he goes on his motor scooter, and he’s doing pretty well for a while, until something happens that makes the scooter trip impossible. What’s a guy to do? Why, have Spiderman deliver the pizzas! Of course Peter can traverse the remaining distance in mere minutes, right?
Well…wrong. Even as he web-slings his way across town in minutes, he fails to make the delivery guarantee, the receptionist rolls her eyes and says “I’m not paying for those,” and Peter gets fired. Ouch. And of course, as everyone well-versed in the comics remembers, Peter is brilliant and yet has a hard time in school; he’s ambitious and yet can only find semi-reliable money in selling photos of himself as Spiderman to the Daily Bugle; he somehow can’t manage to get any kind of relationship going with a girl; his best friend has sworn to kill Spiderman; and to top all of that off, Peter makes the acquaintance of another in what will be a long line of brilliant scientist-types who miscalculate in an experiment that goes so awry as to turn them into supervillains. This time, it’s Otto Octavius, whose brain ends up fused with the mechanical arms he’s invented for himself, thus making himself into…Dr. Octopus!
One of the film’s masterstrokes is in how it creates its villain. Whereas in the first film Norman Osborne was something of a loon even before he went all the way around the bend as the Green Goblin, in the second film, Octavius is depicted as not just brilliant, but also warm and very likable. His fall into horrible villainy is a tragic one, even as we can somehow understand his motives after he becomes Dr. Octopus. The first two Spiderman movies really handled their villains well, which is a huge reason as to why they both worked.
So why did I like Spiderman 2 more than the first one? As I noted years ago, Spiderman bothered me not so much in the shortcuts in took in the Spiderman story but in the way it took them. Spiderman 2 commits no such errors along the way. Yes, we’re in movies, so we can’t have everything we’d want in a Spiderman movie, but the film gets all of its little touches right, along the way.
The most important detail to get right in a good Spiderman story is that things never go quite Spiderman’s way. Ever. Things go wrong for Peter Parker most of the time, and on the infrequent occasions when they actually go right, they do so in such a way that not only does it look to everyone else that Peter’s screwed up again, but he can’t even set the record straight without revealing himself as Spiderman. So we have Peter ending up late to Mary Jane’s big acting debut because he had to stop and save some random pedestrian from getting run over by a car along the way. Or, in one of the best tiny moments in the film, in the pizza delivery scene early on, Peter realizes he’s not going to make it. So he ducks into an alley and pops out seconds later as Spiderman, with the pizzas! Yay! Except some random passerby saw him go into the alley and saw Spiderman exit, so he yells out, “Hey! Spiderman stole that guy’s pizzas!” A throwaway moment that illustrates the fact that Peter can never get the credit for anything.
Spiderman 2 also works because it doesn’t commit the somewhat vexing errors with regard to Spiderman canon that the first and third films commit, primarily with respect to Gwen Stacy. Basically, there was almost nothing in Spiderman 2 to distract me from the business at hand. (Well, maybe one thing – the scene where Spidey literally unmasks himself in front of an entire crowd of people. That strained things a bit for me, but I could forgive it.)
Spiderman 3 would go on to commit a pretty impressive number of errors, even though I’ve never been as down on it as most people seemingly are. Nor have I ever been as down on Kirsten Dunst as many people seem to be, either. So basically, I wish the original creative team could come back and continue the work they started.
(BTW, in watching the three Spiderman movies again, I was more favorably impressed with Danny Elfman’s scores with the first two films than I was originally. They’re actually fairly subtle scores, but not as themeless as I had first thought. They’re still not favorite scores of mine, but they’re not bad.)
Last week I learned of the existence of a thing called Star Wars Revisited, which turns out to be a “Fan edit” — basically, some guy armed with a Mac put together his own version of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Well, OK, that’s simplifying a bit — he did quite a labor of love here, actually. Here’s a list of the changes “Adywan” made, using the Special Editions as his base film for moving forward. I was naturally interested in what this was all about, so I tracked it down, downloaded it, and gave it a viewing. I wasn’t exhaustive in watching it; I skipped forward a lot and basically watched what I felt like watching in about forty minutes. So what did I think?
Well, I’m not sure.
There’s some very cool stuff done here, make no mistake. It always surprised me that even when they did the Special Editions, Luke’s lightsaber still looked awful in the “training with the remote” scene. That’s fixed now. Other stuff that stood out? Well, Adywan added the two suns of Tatooine to the shot of the escape pod flying toward the planet. I thought that was kind of neat:
Most of the changes are small — looking at the list, in fact, many of them are things even I, who almost knows the film shot by shot at this point, wouldn’t have even thought of as errors that needed fixing. But even some of those changes are kind of cool, such as the new motion given to the ships during the Millennium Falcon‘s escape from Tatooine.
And this, the first appearance of the Death Star in the film, is pretty cool:
There’s a lot of stuff like that: new effects created by an amateur filmmaker that at this point look, for the most part, right at home alongside all the ILM stuff. There are some really nice new effects shots during the post-Death Star escape dogfight, for instance. And I’m sure most Star Wars fans will most appreciate this version of the film for two simple reasons: the Jabba scene that George Lucas “finished” and put back into the film for the Special Editions is gone again, and Greedo’s finger never touches the trigger of his blaster.
What didn’t I like? Well, for one thing, he completely resequenced the scene in Ben Kenobi’s home, where Luke first learns of the Force. Presumably this was to make the conversation flow better in terms of its topics, but…maybe it’s just that I’ve heard the original scene so many times, but it was horribly jarring. I think the original scene works fine.
There were also some things done with music that bothered me. When I was active on various film music discussion fora, it was funny to note that every time a rumor or report would show up about George Lucas tinkering with the Original Trilogy again, someone would immediately speculate as to whether Lucas would re-do the score of the original film to include the famous Imperial March that would only debut in The Empire Strikes Back. Lucas hasn’t done this, yet…but Adywan does. When we first see the Death Star, there’s the Imperial March, big as life. That bugged me — not only am I used to the film not having the Imperial March in it, but it also removes a key leitmotif from the ANH score at the moment when it needs to be heard the most. Didn’t like that. I also didn’t care for tracking in “Battle of the Heroes”, the dueling music from Revenge of the Sith, into the fight between Obi Wan and Vader. That just didn’t work either for me. Neither did some replacement of music during the Death Star battle.
What did work musically was a restoration of sorts. As the Battle of Yavin starts up, Red Leader says something like “Cut across the axis and try to draw their fire” as the ships engage in battle. At that moment, the score surges into a blazing rendition of the Force Theme in the trumpets. It’s as musically thrilling a moment as there is anywhere in all of Star Wars — but it was dialed down, and the ship engine sounds dialed way up, for the DVD releases of the films back in 2004. Adywan has fixed that, which makes me happy.
And for one last tantalizing thing: he’s re-done the destruction of the Death Star itself. Now, I kind of liked the Special Edition “Praxis Wave” when the Death Star exploded, but it’s gone. What’s really nice here is that Adywan has the Death Star exploding just as it’s firing its superlaser at the Forth Moon:
That’s a nice touch, there.
Of course, the existence of such a film raises the obvious question: how “definitive” is it? Nothing happens in it that changes any kind of Star Wars canon one iota, so is it a matter of viewer taste? Are we entering an era in which there will be more and more versions of films out there? Are we to pick and choose our personal Star Wars?
Hmmmm…first I had to establish just what the “canonical” Disney Princess films are. For the purposes of this quiz, I’ll use the list here. And geez, this question turns out to be pretty hard. I’m going to go with Aladdin, for sentimental reasons (in college, I saw it four times with The Girlfriend (now The Wife)).
Which non-Disney Princess Disney Film is your favorite?
Peter Pan. I’ve always loved this movie, even with the awful racism of “What Makes the Red Man Red”.
Which Disney film makes you cry the most?
Hmmmm…hard to say. None of them really make me cry, actually, although Beauty and the Beast comes pretty close if I’m in the right mood.
Which Disney film makes you the happiest?
The Emperor’s New Groove. That movie is so unabashedly silly that it’s almost like the filmmakers were channeling the spirit of Chuck Jones.
Which Disney film has the best music?
In terms of songs, Beauty and the Beast — that’s when Alan Menken and Howard Ashman were at their best. In terms of score? That’s a little tougher. If we’re including the Pixar films, then Finding Nemo. Thomas Newman’s score for that film is amazing. (For the classic films, maybe Bambi.)
Which Disney film has the best love story?
I’ve always liked the bittersweet way The Hunchback of Notre Dame ends, so I’ll say that one. I haven’t seen the film in a long time.
Who is your favorite Disney Princess?
Cinderella.
Who is your favorite Disney Prince?
Who are the canonical Princes, anyway? Is Aladdin a prince? If so, that’s my guy.
Who is your favorite Disney animal sidekick?
Abu from Aladdin. And it’s not a question, but my favorite sentient inanimate object sidekick is the Magic Carpet from the same movie.
Who is your favorite Disney main character animal?
Main character animal…hmmmm…let’s go with Bernard and Miss Bianca, The Rescuers.
Who is your favorite villain?
Jafar, from Aladdin. For an animated character, he really seems to be one of those wonderful “chewing the scenery” types of film villains.
What is your favorite Disney song?
Oh boy…this is just too hard. My favorite song from all of Disney? That’s like choosing a favorite symphony. I’ll name one, just for the sake of the quiz, but I could name another tomorrow. Yes, I’m stalling.
Hmmmm….
Oh, all right. “Belle”, from Beauty and the Beast. It’s what every great musical needs: a curtain-raising ensemble number that introduces the characters.
What is your favorite Disney villian song?
Geez, these are hard! “Hellfire” from The Hunchback of Notre Dame is very chilling; Jafar’s reprise of “Prince Ali” from Aladdin is also highly effective. I’d go with either of those.
But then there’s “Gaston”…and “Poor Unfortunate Souls”….
What is your favorite Disney animal song?
Is this a song about animals, or a song sung by animals? That’s kind of tough. Hmmmm…I don’t much like The Jungle Book, but I guess “Bare Necessities” is kind of catchy. (I’d have like the movie better if it had just been about the animals, and let Mowgli get eaten by Shere Khan.)
What is your favorite Disney Princess song?
“God Help the Outcasts” from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, even though I suppose Esmerelda’s not a Princess, is she? Hmmmmm.
What is your favorite Disney Prince song?
“One Song”, from Snow White.
What is your favorite Disney Prince/Princess duet song?
Mentioned above, but “A Whole New World” from Aladdin. I love the hell out of it.
What is your favorite Disney love song?
“How Do You Know?” from Enchanted. Amy Adams makes me all kinds of happy in that flick.
It’s always weird when one comes into contact with the way a rabid right-winger views the world; they just don’t see things the way the rest of the world sees them. At all. It’s often breathtaking and creates cognitive dissonance as on the one hand, one tries to formulate arguments against their clearly ludicrous positions, but on the other, one realizes that none of it will work in the slightest.
Case in point: Ben Shapiro’s list of the ten most overrated directors in history. Ben Shapiro is one of those people who thinks that every single thing under the sun needs to be examined for its conservativeness (or lack thereof), often with laughable results. Like this article. Here are some of his more laughable assertions (and most of them are terribly laughable):
On Ridley Scott:
Ridley Scott has, for some odd reason, received accolades that far outpace his actual accomplishments. He’s made one entertaining film, Gladiator, and a host of second rate films masquerading as masterpieces. Blade Runner is a bizarre and massively overpraised mess. Thelma and Louise is liberal tripe, although it does provide the best imagistic summary of modern feminism: two irritating “independent” women driving themselves off a cliff…Then there’s Kingdom of Heaven, which is an homage to the “religion of peace” and a slap at Christianity through and through. Alien is slow. GI Jane is hysterically terrible. Plus, it’s got Orlando Bloom, who has about as much charisma and credibility as Al Gore.
Nice editing there; Orlando Bloom isn’t in GI Jane but Kingdom of Heaven, which Ben disses two films previously on grounds that make clear, if you’ve actually seenKoH, that the only way Ben would approve would be if it depicted Muslims as murderous without exception and Christians as holy without exception. And thank God we have the Al Gore reference! Hoo-boy!!
On Michael Mann:
All style, no substance.
That’s always a pretty useless complaint, but it certainly indicates something about Ben that he couldn’t find any substance in Heat.
On David Lean
Everything Lean made is too long by at least half an hour. I know it’s mortal sin to suggest that Laurence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Ryan’s Daughter are anything less than masterpieces, but … they’re all less than masterpieces.
It’s not a mortal sin. It’s just stupid. Kind of like saying Hamlet is “less than a masterpiece”.
On Quentin Tarantino:
I recently watched Inglourious Basterds and marveled at Tarantino’s skill. But he is a gifted high school child given a camera for his birthday, and entranced with his knowledge of cinema. Which means, in simple terms, he doesn’t know how to tell a story.
Given Ben’s all-too-obvious inability to read or watch a story, it certainly seems odd that he would quibble with Tarantino’s ability to tell one. But Pulp Fiction is pure story, brilliantly told. Ben’s babblings about plot make clear what’s happened: he’s failed to understand the movies he’s watching.
On Martin Scorsese:
Goodfellas is similarly disgusting – you feel the need to take a shower after watching. Why anyone would want to spend several hours of his/her life with coke-snorting Ray Liotta and Co. is beyond me. The Last Temptation of Christ is baffling.
Umm…no, it’s really not baffling at all. Unless you’re stupid, that is. As for Ben’s take on Goodfellas, well, I suspect there aren’t enough trees in the world to yield sufficient paper to contain a list of items that make Ben want to take a shower afterwards.
But his Number One choice for Overrated Directors is an utter hoot:
On…
…wait for it…
…oh my…
ALFRED HITCHCOCK!!!
He never made a great film. He was the Stephen King of the silver screen: he made films with great premises, but he never knew where to go from there…North by Northwest relies on the tried-and-true random helpful coincidence to save our hero, time and again. It brings to mind one of Twain’s rules of writing, directed toward Fenimore Cooper: “the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.” Not so much for Hitchcock…Rear Window makes one reach for the fast-forward button.
So many assertions! Stephen King never knows where to go with his stories! North by Northwest relies too much on coincidence for an established fan of 24 like Ben Shapiro to follow! Rear Window taxes his ability to pay attention! Although, I suspect that last isn’t out of boredom; rather, I suspect that looking upon Grace Kelly gives Ben the urge to take one of those showers of his.
AICN reports that John Carter of Mars is now shooting. I loved the first book in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s series when I read it some time ago (note to self: read the rest of those books), and I have to admit to being thrilled at the possibility of a good movie springing from that book. We’re talking serious skiffy adventure here, folks — for all the plaudits heaped on so many great SF novels for their forward-looking and insightful delvings into the nature of humanity and our place in the universe and how we deal with our technology and the threats we face from without and within, sometimes I want a story that can be illustrated thusly:
According to AICN, Sony Pictures has failed to come to an agreement with the creative team behind the first three Spiderman movies on the making of a fourth, so the whole team is out and now they’re planning to reboot the franchise.
Yup, another reboot.
Look, some “reboots” are fine — Batman Begins and Casino Royale both brought fresh direction to their respective franchises. I suppose Star Trek did as well, although I’m less sold on that film than most. But geez, do we need to keep rebooting things? Rebooting seems to be less about creative direction now and more about marketing and money and so on. I know they don’t call it “show business” for nothing, but I’m tired of the whole “Keeping franchises alive by rebooting” craze.
For this flick, will we have to watch Peter Parker get bitten by the spider again? Watch him learn about his new powers again? Lose Uncle Ben again? From the look of things, Sony really really really wants a Spiderman flick in 2011 and will do whatever it takes to get one. Oh well.
