Category: movies

I watched The Animatrix this weekend. Since a lot of the people who come to my site from Google are searching for commercial music (ie: that song from the levi’s french dictionary ad). I’ll do the same for The Animatrix before I give you a review. The song that plays over the main DVD menu, and is used in a couple of the shorts is called Supermoves and is on the Snatch soundtrack (among other places). The song from The Kid’s Story and that plays during the closing credits is called Who Am I by Peace Orchestra. It’s on the Memento soundtrack, and the Peace Orchestra album.

On to the shorts. First, I was blown away by the quality of animation in each of them. They’re all a little different, but all gorgeous in their own way. The first was done by the team who did the Final Fantasy movie, and was just amazing to look at. The characters were more refined, and the muscles more accurate than in The Spirits Within (although they used some of the same character models, it’s hard to tell – or at least you get past is quickly). The second two, The Second Renaissance Parts 1 & 2) were absolutely stunning. The rest of them are worth watching for the visuals alone, but my favorite has got to be Beyond. It’s the story of a group of kids who find a glitchy spot in the Matrix in an old abandoned house. Things are wonky in the house, and it’s way too much fun to watch the kids play with conventions like bullet time we saw in the movie. The have a falling contest and stop inches from the ground after jumping off a second story window ledge and others. It was the best play on the physics set up in the movies on the disc.

Overall, it’s fun to watch. The shorts aren’t long enough that you get bored with the story or animation style. And while there are a couple duds on the disk (World Record being the worst), the great and good stuff on the disk more than make up for it.

I watched Miller’s Crossing last night. A couple thoughts:

• The Coen’s have a great feel for language and dialect. The movie is full of great old sayings like “What’s the rumpus?” and “Givin’ me the high hat” that will probably slip into my vocabulary now.

• Jon Polito can chew up the scenery. I have an affinity for character actors, and apparently, so do the Coen’s. Jon Polito is one of my favorites. He’s just great in this movie (he’s got the “high hat” line and you can tell he loves it).

• I saw this movie once about six or seven years ago and back then I didn’t catch on that Bernie, Mink and Eddie the Dane were gay. How did I miss that? (Ok, I can tell you why – I was naive)

• John Turturro is an amazing actor. He pulled off Bernie so elegantly devoid of morals, and subtly adrogynous. It was an amazing performance.

• Albert Finney with that tommy gun and cigar is the coolest old tough guy scene ever.

Oh, and I wish my headache would go away. And, the big thing I miss about using my Mac? I miss Shift+Insert to paste. I really really do. Oh, and did you know you can style lists with a little CSS? I’ve been doing it for years. It’s great amounts of fun, really. Try it. You’ll like it.

Since Senor Eagle asked, here’s how I interpret Spirited Away:

• A little girl and her parents stop on their way to their new house to explore a tunnel they find at a mysterious deadend. They come out of the tunnel to a deserted city block. The dad follows his nose to a beautiful buffet of food. The parents commence pigging out (pay attention, that’s important). The little girl wanders off, and find a mysterious looking bathhouse.

• The girl (I can’t remember her name for the life of me), meets a young boy who tells her to hurry back to her parents and leave before all the lamps come on and it gets dark outside.

• She races back to the restaurant only to find that her parents have been turned into pigs.

• Somehow, and I don’t remember quite how, she ends up working in the bathhouse as a way to survive and find a way to turn her parents back into themselves.

• That’s all I’m going to tell you about the “facts” of the story. It’s a movie you have to feel more than watch. You can watch it for just the gorgeous animation, which is well worth watching, or you can get into it, suspend your preconceived notions of what a movie should be, and have a great time experiencing this world of spirits (get it, Spirited Away?).

• If you want everything in a movie to make sense and a neatly tied up and spelled out ending – skip this movie. Don’t even bother. You’ll hate it.

• If you’re willing to play along and suspend your disbelief (and by suspend, I mean put it way up on a shelf and deny any temptation to bring it back out), you’ll love this movie.

Oh, and don’t forget to nominate yourself for the ugly blog redesign. No, I mean it. If you use the MT Default Templates, you qualify. Not because your site is ugly. The MT Templates are servicable, but they’re so… vanilla. Live a little and get crazy. I’ll help.

I’m a little better. My eyes are a lighter shade of pink and I don’t feel like death warmed over. I feel a little more like death over ice. I saw the band sausages idea over at A Small Victory, and remembered that my friends and I used to do this at lunch in high school. Our rules were a little lenient. We could do bands and song titles, and sometimes threw in movies. I don’t remember any of the ones we came up with (because it was almost ten years ago). But, I came up with a couple new ones:

• Blind Faith No More

• The Grateful Dead Kennedys

• The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band On The Run

• Fatboy Slim Pickins (see, I cheat)

• Pearl Jam Machine

• Land of The Lost Boys

• Daredevil In A Blue Dress (see, movies are easier)

• X-Men At Work (even easier to mix bands and movies)

• Attack Of The Killer Fried Green Tomatoes (and if you cheat cheat)

• Hunt For The Red October Sky

Completely changing the topic, I’ve been watching this show on Trio called Secret Rulers of the World. This funny British documentary filmmaker tracks down conspiracy theories, the proponents and detractors and presents what he sees as the facts. The first two episodes have been engaging and honestly, extremely shocking. Not so much that the conspiracies might be true, but the people he finds and the things they believe just blow my mind. There are fringes in this country who believe pretty much everything. The depth and breadth of craziness is just unreal. I would love to see the guy who does the show track how people go from normal to wacko – how long it takes, who introduced them, was it their parents, etc.

And last night’s Penn & Teller was just hilarious. The whole alien abduction thing makes me giggle.

So, I took Jen to see Sweet Home Alabama last night. Oh my, what a crap movie. I’ll start with the two good things about the movie, and then go into the myriad sins it commits. There were three highlights: Candace Bergen, Ethan Embry and Fred Ward, all underused, but they managed to stand out like shiny bits of corn in this turd of a movie.

Ethan Embry played a closetted redneck, and did a decent job playing it evenly and without queening out. It was well done and subtle. Fred Ward was funny and showed why he should get more work than he does. Ms. Bergen was caustic and had some good lines as the mayor of New York, but she ends the movie being completely humiliated, and kind of ruins her character, through no fault of her own.

Now, on to the crap. This movie was equal to the horrible Serendipity in pure shmaltz and predictability. It was horrible. It’s an unspeakable abuse of the sacred romantic comedy formula. In a better movie, there would have been a twist or two, and something that sets it apart. This movie gave me nothing, nothing at all. There was no chemistry between Reese Witherspoon and her not-yet-divorced ex. There was no real drama either. Almost everyone involved slept through the movie, and nothing rises above the level of Lifetime Movie of the Week (alternate title, “Mother, May I Marry a Yankee?”).

If you’re stupid, you’ll like this movie. If you have an IQ higher than 70, and have ever seen any other romantic comedy (both of which are used for this movie as aspiration and hyperbole, not as an indication of the actual content of the film), skip it and go rent When Harry Met Sally, Prelude to a Kiss or even Sleepless in Seattle.

I just finished watching Donnie Darko. I kept thinking of Harvey throughout the film. If you haven’t seen it, go rent the DVD right now. This is an intense moving film. It’s dark, beautifully acted and breathtaking to watch. Jake Gyllenhaal (sorry, I know I botched that, but am too ready for bed to go check the correct spelling) did a marvelous job keeping me guessing throughout. Is he crazy? Is Frank real? What is going on?

I didn’t even really know until I watched some of the deleted scenes; I’m kind of sad that I now know. The movie is better as the journey than the destination. I loved the subtle late-Eighties touches: the music, the clothes (button-fly jeans… oh yes), the references to Back to the Future, the Halloween Costumes (RonaldMania was my favorite). It was so well done, I want to watch it again just for nuance and those little things I missed the first time around.

Back to the Harvey connection. This movie felt like my generation’s Harvery. We have society’s reaction to the mentally ill, and the societal twist. This is Harvery for the cynical Prozac popping Ridalin kids from the Eighties. This is our search for what’s real and true in a world of 30-second issues, fallen idols and missing authority figures. It’s a great film, and one that may keep me up till the wee hours of the morning thinking about it… and don’t watch the deleted scenes if you want to interpret the meaning of the film for yourself.

I can’t believe I didn’t blog about this right after we saw it. Jen and I watched The Royal Tenenbaums a couple weeks ago. If you haven’t seen it yet, drop what you’re doing, rush to your local video store (as long as it’s not Blockbuster) and rent it. Heck, go to your favorite purveyor of videos or DVD’s and buy it.

Ok, wait, come back. I loved this movie. Better yet, it has the most joyful scene I’ve seen in a film in a very long time. Gene Hackman plays Royal Tenenbaum, a real bastard. He left his family 22 years ago, is out of money, and tries to ingratiate himself to his abandoned family by telling them he’s going to die. One of his ploys is to win the love of his two grandsons. I won’t tell you anymore about the storyline, except this scene. The two boys are extremely sheltered by their father (Ben Stiller). Royal thinks this is a tragedy, and takes the kids out to commit some mischief. There’s a three to four minute montage of them committing several misdemeanors around town, driving go-karts around (I think) a high school football stadium (it could be a track), hitching a ride on the back of a garbage truck and throwing water balloons at passing cars. Gene Hackman deserved the Oscar for that scene alone. He and the boys were full of uncontrollable joy and vitality.

If you like True Stories, Bottle Rocket or Magnolia, you’ll love this movie.

I got a free ticket to see a early screening of Austin Powers: Goldmember today. So, if you were planning on plunking down hard earned cash to see it this weekend, hold on a minute. It was hugely disappointing. This is coming from someone who loved the first two and has worked on his Fat Bastard impression since the second one came out.

It has moments of brilliance, but they’re all rental moments. There’s nothing in it worth seeing in the theaters or that you’ll be talking about the next day at work.

Goldmember is the worst character Mike Myers has ever attempted. The accent wasn’t done with any attempt at humor, or even accuracy at all. The Goldmember lines were lame at best. Mike Myers couldn’t hold the Dr. Evil voice at times. It varied from scene to scene wildly. Sometimes it was a parody of the original and sometimes he didn’t even try. The same with Austin. He kept dropping the acccent. Beyonce was annoying. She giggled like a 12 year-old through the whole thing and added nothing to the film. Now, if they had gotten Wanda Sykes, THAT would have been funny.

I won’t spoil the opening sequence, but it was actually entertaining. I can’t believe I’m writing this much on this movie, but here are some things I actually did like in the film. Seth Green was good as Scott. Fat Bastard had a few good lines, and Michael Caine was awesome. He and Seth Green did the only real acting jobs in the whole movie. The rest was almost like everyone slept through making it.

Go see it only if you’re a die-hard fan, can’t find anything better to do, and neeeeeed to eat popcorn in the dark.

My ribs are killing me. I spent all weekend coughing and in a general cold-fueled funk. I’m feeling better today, but the congestion is still here, and coughing hurts like hell.

I did see Heist this weekend. If you like David Mamet, you’ll like this movie. It’s slow-paced for a thriller, but as a whodunit, it’s good. It’s not my favorite Mamet movie. I liked The Spanish Prisoner more, and even State and Main was better, even though it was completely different. Heist had something missing. I’m not sure what it was, but it was missing something important.