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The USPS is dressing mailboxes up like R2-D2.

(via Scribbling.net)

I've mentioned it before: Akiva Goldsman just isn't that great a screenwriter. And he's proven it again. Why do you keep hiring him, Hollywood????

So, after seeing him at the Oscars and looking at Da Vinci Code stills, I have to wonder: What happened to Tom Hanks that made his head inflate to twice its original size and his hair to become some sort of frightening, independent organism?

I was at the mall, buying some books, and I decided, "Hey, why not see a movie?". The movie I decided to see, for no good reason, was the new Harrison Ford vehicle, Firewall. And boy, it was bad. I mean, it was bad. I'm not even going to talk about the plot all that much, because you know how it works out. Suffice it to say that Seattle and its outlying rural areas have spectacular wi-fi coverage.

And yet, for all that, I don't feel cheated out of my eight dollars or depressed that I've helped this movie's box office take. Why? (CAUTION: SPOILERS, like you really care.)

This display at Toy Fair 2006 has just blown my mind.

It was hard not to go into Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride with high expectations. After all, The Nightmare Before Christmas was beautiful to look at, had good characters, really funny, and had great music. Given the same group of creators, plus the likes of Johnny Depp & Helena Bonham Carter, you expect great things. Sadly, Corpse Bride doesn't live up to said expectations.

I just saw The Constant Gardener on a whim. Ralph Fiennes gives a fantastic performance. Which is the best I thing I can say about it. The screenplay is obviously having a hard time keeping a complex story short, and it does so by sacrificing information like who the hell all these characters are and how they relate to anything that's going on. The directing starts out strong but gets more choppy & ridiculous as time goes on. There's a moral that's rather heavy-handedly delivered in the end a la cautionary 40's tales like I Accuse My Parents. And then there's the takeaway message of the whole thing, which is, essentially, "People Suck". At least, that's what I took away from it.

On the upside, I have happy music to make it all better.

Check out this article about a panel from the San Diego Comic-Con. More specifically, take a look at the last sentence of the fourth paragraph.

Discuss.

This quote from the introduction to Chris J. Miller's amazing Unauthorized Chronology of the DC Universe actually explains my feelings on Star Wars quite well:

How true that is.

My big realization last night (which will indicate how slow my life has been) was that, as opposed to the opinions of my fellow moviegoers, I really have no problem with Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Sure, the romantic leads had no chemistry and parts of the dialog were clunky, but:

• It added new features and history to the Star Wars universe, and, in the end, that's all I asked for.


• I've long since had to deal with the fact that The Courtship of Princess Leia is technically canon, so, really, enjoying Episode III was nothing.


• The Emperor's theme still puts a chill down the ol' spine.


• This just makes me giggle with delight:

  
  

I finally sat down and watched Stanley Kubrick's version of The Shining the other day. I have to say, the experience was pretty dang disappointing. Some technical qualms aside (could the music get any more intrusive??), my biggest problem with this movie has to be with Jack Nicholson. He feels entirely miscast in this.

Oh, sure, the man can do psychosis real well, so he shines in the second half of the movie. The problem is that a lot of the horror of the story comes from the fact that a loving (but fallible) husband and father is corrupted and driven mad by an evil hotel. In the book, that comes out really well--it's by far some of Stephen King's best work. In the movie, however, Jack never seems very loving. In fact, he just seems to be barely tolerating his family's existence in every scene he's got with them. In his very first scene with them, driving through the mountains, the look on his face makes you wonder why he doesn't just rip off the steering wheel and go all "Heeeeere's Johnny!" on them right then and there.

This persistant state of freakiness that Jack has going on sabotages almost every interaction between him & his family. Scenes between him and his wife which were supposed to emphasize the horror/tragedy of his growing madness instead made me wonder "Why did she marry this freakazoid in the first place? He's obviously a complete nutcase". Likewise, the fact that his son goes anywhere near him completely baffled me. And that was at the beginning of the movie, when he's supposed to be perfectly sane and pleasant. His presence, his demeanor, his everything just scream "I'm gonna go crazy at my earliest convenience" and that ruins any possibly suspense or horror the movie could generate. And that, in a horror movie, is about the worst thing that could happen.

But, hey, it's got Scatman Crothers in it, so that's something.

PIXAR, superheroes, and Brad Bird, director of The Iron Giant, all come together in one movie: The Incredibles. Is there any way this movie could not be good? The answer, to risk using a double negative, is no. In fact, The Incredibles isn’t just good, it’s fantastic. It is easily one of the best movies I’ve seen this year and one of the best movies PIXAR has turned out yet.

With the wild success of the first two Harry Potter movies, the anticipated success of the third, and the success (to a lesser extent) of kids' books like Holes and Ella Enchanted, it appears studios are ready to mine any and all popular chidren's book for The Next Hit Movie.

Case in point: Tonight at 7PM CST, ABC is showing an adaptation on A Wrinkle In Time on "The Wonderful World of Disney". I have hopes, but I'm prepared to have them dashed, if for no other reason than the actors look nothing like the characters I'd always imagined--Mrs. Which and Mrs. Whatsit being the prime offenders, but I keep looking at their Meg and thinking "But where are her glasses???". It's shallow, I know, but there you go.

Over on the actual movie side of things, Disney's decided to produce The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Now, I know it can be done: the BBC (or someone over in the UK) put together miniseries of the first three books, and they worked all right, as long as you didn't mind the Dr. Who-esque special effects. My main curiousity is whether they actually do plan on adapting all seven books. Given the way that "The Chronicles of Narnia" is included in the title and the movie industry's joy in franchises, I'd say so. Which begs the question: What will they do with The Last Battle? Is Disney prepared to put a dandied-up version of the book of Revelations onto the big screen nationwide? Only time will tell, I guess.

Finally, in case you were wondering, there are no signs yet of new adaptations of Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain. Whether this is a good thing or not, I leave as an exercise to the reader.

I like Roger Ebert's reviews a lot. He always tries to look at the individual merits of a given movie and rate it according to how much he enjoyed it, rather than how said flick stacks up to Lawrence of Arabia. In fact, that's half of what he discusses in his excellent review of Shaolin Soccer. The other half is about an odd, funny movie that everyone should see.

That's all I had, actually.

You may now go about your business.

Hellboy's a fun movie. Not High Art, by any means--just a good time at the movies. And really, what more can you ask for?

Hanging out with some friends this afternoon, the conversation turned to movies. One of our group asked an interesting question: what movies should she, being Japanese, see in order to be more versed in American pop culture?

Thinking off the top of my head, and seeing as how she teaches at the U of M, I said that Star Wars, A Fish Called Wanda, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and The Princess Bride would be a good start. At the very least, she'll know what movies her students may be referencing. But what other movies would you recommend?

I just read Diana Wynne Jones' book, Howl's Moving Castle. It's a delightful little fantasy about a young woman who, being the eldest daughter of three, is of course fated to set out to make her fortune and fail (success always falls on the youngest, you see). Needless to say, her outlook feels a little bleak. But when a jealous witch turns her into an elderly woman, she's forced to finally go out into the world to find a way to break the curse. Which is, of course, when the fun begins.

After I finished it, I wondered if anyone was going to turn it into a movie. After all, they seem to be turning "young readers" books I like into movies left and right. I also wondered how the heck they'd do it. Turns out, good ol' Hayao Miyazaki's going to show me. How cool is that?

So, while looking some obscure bit of movie trivia up on IMDB the other day, I came across the entry for screenwriter Akiva Goldsman. This man appears to be the go-to guy for adapting things to the big screen.

But, more importantly, this man is responsible for writing some of the most heinous crap of the last decade. I'm speaking, of course, about Batman Forever, Batman & Robin, and Lost in Space. I was utterly astounded to find out they were all written by the same guy. It's like some sort of hat-trick of suck.

And then what does he do? He adapts A Beautiful Mind and wins an Oscar.

This seems horribly, horribly wrong. This man should not be honored! He should be shunned! I'm not saying A Beautiful Mind was a bad movie--it wasn't half bad for a re-imagining of an actual, living, person's life. It doesn't matter. I don't care if you've written the screenplay that brought peace to the Middle East--if you wrote Lost in Space, you're disqualified from winning anything, ever!

So, what's next for our Master Adaptor? Why, Aasimov's I, Robot, of course. As a geek, I'm sorely torn. Great source material, Screenwriter of Doom. But then I have to take into account that it's going to be directed by Alex Proyas, who's done some really cool stuff (gotta love Dark City. And it features Susan Calvin. So Lord only knows how it's going to turn out. The fact that it features Will Smith doesn't help: for every Men in Black, there's a Wild, Wild West. Guess I'll just have to cross my fingers, plunk down my $5+, and find out in July.

I've been plowing through my Netflix queue, and I thought a couple movies deserved mention.

Question: So, Andy, what have you been doing with your time during your unemployment?

Answer: Well, I've been watching a heap o' movies, the latest one being Bubba Ho-Tep. No, really. That's the name of the movie. Stop looking at me like that.

I really enjoyed this flick. It's got "cult classic" written all over it. Given that this might, in fact, fall into the category of "Andy thinks it's fun 'cause it's campy, but most sane people fear it like the Black Death" movies, I'm not going to say you should run out & see it. Instead, I'll just lay out the facts as I see them, and you can make up your own mind:

Fact 1: The movie stars Bruce Campbell as an elderly man who may or may not be Elvis and Ossie Davis as an elderly man who may or may not be a lobotomized & dyed JFK defending their rest home from an evil, soul-sucking Egyptian mummy. I told you to stop looking at me like that.

Fact 2: The special effects are wonderfully low-budget.

Fact 3: A fight scene between Elvis and a demonic scarab qualifies as some of the most fun I've had at the movies all year.

Fact 4: Bruce Campbell is fabulous.

Fact 5: Ossie Davis is even better.

From that, I figure you can decide whether to run towards or away from your nearest theatre showing Bubba Ho-Tep. I, personally, would recommend towards. But then, that's me. And you know me.

I told you to stop looking at me like that.

Yesterday, I braved the freezing rain and graupel to do some gift buying and take in The Last Samurai, Tom Cruise's latest Epic Film.

My Netflix trial period started today, so I decided to celebrate this new development by watching The Ring. It was billed as a horror movie, but it isn't the when-will-the-killer-strike-next kind of horror that you tend to see these days. Instead, it manages to keep up this impressive level of creepiness during most of its two-hour runtime, leaving you with a rather impressive cumulative case of the willies.

The plot sounds really hokey: There's this videotape that has all these weird images on it. Seven days after watching it, you die. It even starts out looking like a bad slasher movie, but then all the teens die and we move on to our true protagonist, an aunt of one of the teens. After watching the tape herself, she's got seven days to solve the mystery of the tape & avoid a terrible fate. Suddenly, we're no longer in a bad slasher flick, we're in a really creepy mystery/suspense/horror film. And a good one at that.

I'd like to talk about it more, but, y'know, anything I can think to say about it would give away too much of the mystery, and the mystery is 90% of the fun here (I will say this, though: I'll never look at Daveigh Chase, of Lilo & Stitch and Sprited Away fame, quite the same way again).

So, I'll just recommend that you all go see The Ring if you want to watch a good creepy movie. Then tell me, so I can talk about it with someone. And I really want to talk about it with someone.

I didn't really go to see The Matrix Revolutions out of eagerness to see the Thrilling Conclusion To An Epic Trilogy. Rather, I felt resigned to going, knowing I was going to see it to get some sort of closure, and I might as well get it over with. After all, I had long since realized that The Matrix Reloaded had been, in fact, really terrible.

For the last month or so, I've been saying to myself, "Oh, I should write that up in my blog" over and over and over. And have I? No. So, I'm going to get all of it all out my system in one fell swoop, review everything in three sentences or less. And away we go...

Links first:

For Transmetropolitan fans, Spider Jerusalem returns (sorta) in Warren Ellis' blog this week.

Ninja competitions!

And now the review:

I commented a while back that Bulletproof Monk was a mediocre comic and possibly a mediocre movie. Well, now I can say with authority that it is, in fact, a mediocre movie. And this after dumping everything related to the comic, except for the legend of a powerful monk and a dude named Kar.

Jack Chick is making a movie. Who's Jack Chick? Why, he's the guy making Christian tracts in comics form to convert the heathens, warning us away from Islam, Dungeons & Dragons, Halloween, Darwin, Bewitched, haunted houses, Big Brother, and pissing off Israel.

I decided to blow off packing last night & go see Bend it Like Beckham instead. Very good idea. It's an utterly delightful movie. Granted, it's not the most unpredictable movie ever. The plot's about a girl who wants to play soccer, but her parents won't let her--you can map the major plot points with your eyes closed. But the writing is so good, the situations our heroine gets stuck in are so clever, and the jokes are so funny, that it doesn't matter that you know exactly how it's going to turn out--the fun's in the ride, not the destination.

Also helping the experience was the venue, the Riverview Theater. $2 tickets, tasty popcorn (add your own cheese!), stadium seating, and an enthusiastic crowd makes the whole experience a joy. And there's even a coffee shop across the street that's open to eleven on Friday nights. Life don't get much better than that, believe you me.

Saw The Hulk last night. Not too bad. Not too good, either. I'm pretty sure Nick Nolte went utterly insane while making this movie, and Ang Lee just kept the camera running. I've no real regrets at having seen it.

On the other hand, I do have regrets over having seen it at the Yorktown Cinema Grill.

Hey, kids! Nifty movie teaser!

Here's hoping it's better than Daredevil...

Just as Hollywood releases a movie that apparently commits crimes against physics, continuity, and the layout of Venice, they're poised to commit what could be a crime against humanity.

Pirates of the Caribbean is good, goofy fun. The plot wasn't the most coherent thing I'd ever seen, but, in the end, who really cares? It's about swashbucklers fighting evil undead pirates, Johnny Depp playing a madman, and, oddly enough, live action versions of scenes originally performed by animatronic pirates. The effects are fun to watch (the pirates only look undead in moonlight, so there's lots of flipping back & forth), so all is good. Definitely worth a matinee viewing.

More bizarre was the preview beforehand for Haunted Mansion, based on the Disney World ride of the same name. The movie looked fairly typical (Eddie Murphy & family own a haunted mansion), but it points to a disturbing trend of Disney movies based on rides. God help us if they decide to make a movie out of The Mad Hatter's Tea Party.

I'm not sure if I hate this movie or love it. I mean, it makes Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster look reasonable by comparison. And that movie isn't reasonable by any stretch of the imagination.

Vanilla Sky isn't that bad a movie. It's not all that great, either, when it comes down to it. It's obviously trying to be a headtrip of some sort, but it's way too unambiguous to be that much of a headtrip. Maybe I've just watched too much David Lynch, but having a pleasant British fellow pop up 2 hours into the movie & explain everything, removing any challenge this movie presented, just ruins the whole effect of watching a reality-bending psychodrama. Or whatever the hell this movie was trying to be. In any case, between that and the fact that the main character is an ass, I'm left feeling unfulfilled after having watched it. Maybe if I'd watched the original movie, Open Your Eyes, I would've enjoyed it more.

On the other hand, Cameron Crowe did put together a pretty good soundtrack. I actually felt compelled to pause the credits and take down some band names.

Independent of the movie itself was the fact that I couldn't stop staring at Tom Cruise's mouth, since a couple friends of mine had previously pointed out that, instead of having two front teeth, he has a single, freaky, unitooth:

Yikes.

I just finished watching Klute, a 1971 movie starring Jane Fonda & Donald Sutherland. It's the story of small-town detective John Klute and his search for his best friend, who has been missing for half a year.

Except that's not the point, really. Klute & his investigation, quite frankly, aren't that interesting in and of themselves. The mystery is fairly standard and you find out whodunnit about halfway through (by the way, the reason I didn't link to IMDB is because some nitwit decided to give away the ending in the "Memorable Quotes" section).

What makes this movie great is Brie Daniels, a New York call girl who's Klute's only link to his friends disappearance, and her reactions to Klute and his investigation. Jane Fonda does a great job as a woman who can't quite pry herself away from the life she leads, no matter how much she wants to--to paraphrase Pacino, just when she thinks she's out, Brie drags herself back in. Seeing how Brie deals with all the awful things happening to her, and to Klute himself, is the entire point of the movie. It's surprisingly fascinating stuff.

Just got done watching The Italian Job, which was a lot more fun than anticipated. Simply a good caper flick with no pretensions of being deep or about anything besides people stealing a lot of gold. Not to mention a great joke involving a Shawn Fanning walk-on. This movie also reinforces my theory that Seth Green will be the only Buffy the Vampire Slayer alum with a career post-Buffy that doesn't involve bad horror movies.

The only downside to the entire movie-going experience was that the chosen venue was The Carmike Wynnsong 15, which is close to nothing else on the planet. They have a fabulous little deal where the last matinee before 6:00 is only $3.75, but I think I lost more money than I saved after slowly burning up precious gasoline in rush-hour traffic for 50 minutes. It is a testament to the goodness of the movie that, after sitting in traffic for almost an hour, then sitting through 20 minutes of ads & trailers, then finding out two of my friends couldn't make it because the traffic had defeated them, I was back in a good mood within 20 minutes of it actually starting. (I feel I could have punctuated that last sentence better somehow, but I don't really feel like trying.)