These Futurama movies have been disappointing

There, I said it.

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is a bad movie

There, I said it. 

UPDATE: Slumdog Millionaire is alright, I guess, but it's no great shakes. 

Discuss

"Let the Right One In"

Absolutely the best vampire movie I have seen in years. It really succeeds despite being a vampire movie. It's very Swedish, which in this case is a good thing. I can't really tell you why you need to go see this movie, but you need to go see it as soon as possible.



Here is some random bits of the film that I liked. None of these are the main reasons you need to go see the movie, of course, because like I just told you, I can't really tell you that.

* The characters hang out at the "Sun Palace."

* With one exception, the CG effects are incredibly subtle, yet effective.

* You find out the right and wrong ways to try to murder someone and/or to hide a body in Sweden.

* You find out the absolutely wrong way to try to commit suicide in, well, anywhere

Good news to you I'll tell

It makes the electorate ripe for Sen. McCain's populist message, Mr. Hart said, recalling the classic movie, "Network," where TV news anchor Howard Beale urges viewers to proclaim, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore."

"John McCain has become the Howard Beale of this election," Mr. Hart said. |The Fever Swamp|

The thing is, Beale was off his rocker when he said that, and had previously pledged to commit suicide on the air. Moreover, one of the points the movie is making is that being mad as hell doesn't do much good, since anger is as easy to manipulate and market as anything else. Easier, really.

But, you know, any port in a storm.

Friday reviews

Braid (video game)



It's about time travel. It's a moving watercolor painting. It's a poetic reinterpretation of Super Mario.

If you have an xbox, you have to try this game. The demo is free. Go. Do it now.

Burn After Reading (movie by those guys)

It's funny, it's awesome. Unless you feel that they should only be doing the dark movies like Miller's Crossing (my favorite) and No Country for Old Men, you will probably like it.


Fringe (TV show starring Joshua Jackson¹)

I thought this was the promised American version of The 11th Hour. But no, it's just the X-Files with an old-school cranky Doctor Who thrown in (They know it, too. they defensively bring up Doc. Who references just to distance themselves from it.... It's weird.)

Oh, and spoilerz alert. It's pretty clear the Doctor Who guy cloned and/or designed his son, who will of course be the key to the whole "pattern." 

Blech.
------

1 -- These days, he wouldn't last one minute on the Creek.

Bellman culture watch

Item: Mongol and Hellboy II are both excellent eye candy with annoying plots.

Item: Bud Light's new advertising slogan, "Endless refreshment from start to finish", describes a state of affairs which is not conceptually possible.

Item: "Real Vice Cops Uncut" is not the title of of a porn movie.

Discussion question

Suppose you are watching a movie on DVD and find that from time to time you need to rewind because you've lost the thread. Suppose further that it is not an art movie. How many times would you allow this to happen before moving on to other diversions?

"The Incredible Hulk" really sucks

I'm sorry to report that it is far worse than the Ang Lee version. This does not bode well for the proposed Avengers movie.

How does it suck? Let me count just a few of the many ways:

* The action pieces are boring, poorly composed, and full of jump cuts that were probably supposed to mitigate the CGI, but succeed only in making it hard to see what's going on.

* The character's motivations, especially for the most important decisions in the movie, were nonsensical.

* Tim Roth is probably an understated supervillain in real life, but other than his, the acting was really bad.

* The Hulk's CGI face was expressive enough to reveal that even its acting was terrible.

This is just one blogger's opinion. Have you seen it? What did you think?

Great news!

Chev Chelios (pictured) appears to have survived that fall! Or perhaps this is set in an alternate universe. Either way, according to IMDB, Jason Statham is attached to the sequel of one the finest pieces of cinema of the 21st century. I give you Crank 2: High Voltage:

Chelios faces a Chinese mobster who has stolen his nearly indestructible heart and replaced it with a battery-powered ticker that requires regular jolts of electricity to keep working.

Presumably the bionic heart has been constructed by Dwight Yoakam. Excelsior!

There and back again

I have to say that I don't share Ross Douthat's skepticism about the upcoming Hobbit movie. It might be that from a sci-fi/fantasy lit perspective The Hobbit is "a tasty appetizer" while The Lord of the Rings is "a rich-beyond-belief main course." But so what? The link between literary merit and suitability for film is anything but direct. From where I sit, The Hobbit's comprehensible and contained narrative is a point in its favor on the book to film tip.

Also, all true geeks of a certain age know that what really needs to be worried over is whether Jackson's Hobbit will stand up to the animated masterpiece.

Arctic Tale

Meh. Do not go to see this movie. Even if it's free. Even if it's really hot out and you don't have air conditioning at home and the fire department showed up at your office because the air conditioner on the roof caught on fire. Do not go see this movie.

Did the Simpsons sell out?

Ben Adler is disappointed that the Simpsons movie isn't as liberal as the show used to be. I think that a) he's misremembering the show, and b) he's got an odd take on the movie. He doesn't provide a lot of examples to back up his contention that Simpsons have "sold out,"* and the ones he does provide don't hold a lot of water. Click past the jump (by which I mean, click "Read More") to see some spoileriffic rejoinders.



1. Lisa is no more of a busybody than she was in the show, and she gets a typically cool response from the shortsighted Springfieldians. Even the lady who owes her slams the door in her face. Typical yellow trash.

2. Despite this, Lisa nearly saves Springfield. If it weren't for Homer, the town would never have been en-domed.

3. Mr. Adler objects to the EPA chief being made the villain rather than, say, the Sec Def. But I don't think he'd mind if the movie had poked fun at a specific EPA chief (such as Christie Whitman). There is simply no reason to think that an EPA chief in a (Simpsons version of a) Governator administration would be an actual environmentalist. In fact, Cargil admits he's only in it for the power.

4. With regards to the plan to blow up Springfield, he writes:

Obviously it is meant to be hyperbolic. But the irony may be lost on the average viewer.

Um, aren't we talking about a Simpsons movie, here?

5. This is where we really disagree, however.

But don't expect to leave the theatre feeling that the film did something larger, something the show so often did in its heyday: using over the top comedy to tell the truth about the real world.

I know that feeling: I get it when watching the Daily Show, sometimes. But I almost never got that feeling from the Simpsons. It was mostly throwaway gags at anyone's expense. If anything, the pervasive social critique was, basically, that people are dumb, yo.

In closing, however, I will present my favorite political joke from the show:

KRUSTY [in the voting booth]: Well, Sideshow Bob did try to kill me... but I'm aching for that upper-class tax cut!

* In fairness, Mr. Adler didn't use the phrase "sell out" in the column. It's in the headline, but I don't know if he writes the headlines.

Dilemma

On the one hand, this looks like just the kind of self-consciously artsy fartsy film that makes me want to soil myself. On the other hand, it's hot today, and if I go to the movies after work my apartment might be tolerable by the time I get home.

I suppose I could go see SiCKO again.

Real real gone

Greetings from the land of super basic cable! In the pop culture wasteland that is my life, one of the few things that keeps me going is that even with super basic cable you can watch good movies. For example, both Jackie Brown and The Big Lebowski are in pretty heavy rotation this month.

But here's something odd. The super basic cable versions of both movies have entire characters cut out. So with Lebowski John Turturro gets screen credit but doesn't appear in the film, and in Jackie Brown, Ordell knocks on Beaumont's door and the next thing you know he's showing the body to Louis. Chris Tucker never makes it on screen.

Even so, it's better than MASH reruns and mostly better than the Ann Arbor Planning Board.

Notes (mostly) on shorts

• How in the world did Binta y la gran idea get a nomination? Leaving aside the fact that it was awful, it was released in 2004.
  
• You would think that, what with youtube and all, we would now be in the golden age of shorts. That doesn't really seem to be so. But I wonder: what are the chances that a great viral video could make it into the Oscar running?
  
• Relatedly, are there technical requirements for shorts? For example, do they have to be shot on film rather than, say, digital video? The shorts I saw this year were pretty obviously distributed in digital format rather than film, and the showings suffered in exactly the ways you'd expect.
  
• The film I saw last year that I liked the best was The Science of Sleep. I can understand why people didn't like the film, but it seems to me that it should have gotten at least some recognition based on the fact that it was visually stunning. Just the other day I was talking to some fully bonded film buffs who not only hadn't seen it, but expressed no interest in seeing it. What's up with that?
  
• Relatedly, you'd think that shorts, or possiblly animated shorts, would be the Oscar category where eye candy was most likely to be recognized, and yet none of the nominees in either category were particularly interesting to look at.
  
• If I had a vote I would have cast it for The Savior, but I'm not really surprised that it didn't win. At the showing I attended, I was falling out of my seat laughing, but nobody else seemed to find the film remotely funny.
  
• It seemed to me that Eramos Pocos was the richest text among the nominated films, but it suffered from being a shaggy dog joke.
  
• Come to think of it, West Bank Story might have been the only nominee with a plot that wasn't a shaggy dog joke. Maybe that's why it won.

James Cameron claims to find the coffin of Jesus

Seriously! Of course,

Crucially, he is not denying the resurrection - as there were no bones in the caskets.

...and hilarity ensues.

Oscar prediction

The Danish Poet in a walk.

Little Miss Sunshine

As long as we're talking about film, I would like to say that Little Miss Sunshine, while not actually bad or anything, does happen to be very trite and manipulative. I thought that perhaps I was the only one in the world whose pants were not charmed right off by the film, but today I read this:

The Top Ten Most Misunderstood Movies Ever Made

8. Little Miss Sunshine

What everyone thinks the message is: Life sucks ass!

What it actually is: Life rules!

I didn’t say you had to agree with the true moral of every movie, especially considering how sappy and mainstream the otherwise-adequate Little Miss Sunshine is, but them’s the breaks.

Despite cramming as much forced familial dysfunction and philosophical cynicism as humanly possible into the first 90% of the movie, the writers make a complete 180 at the film’s climax and decide that, despite the fact that one of the characters is dead and the rest have had their lives ruined in literally every way conceivable, that life is actually pretty neat!

Even if your gay lover left you for someone who now has your job, and even if you can’t realize your dream of becoming a jet pilot due to biological defects beyond your control, and even if your self-help program didn’t sell (thus leaving you nearly bankrupt with two kids to support), everything can be okay if you dance!

If the movie had gone on for another week, most of the main characters would have committed suicide out of depression.

Exactly.

Notes on film

• Children of Men - Honestly, it rocked my world. My only complaint was that the politics were hitting me in the face a little bit too often. Hard to say how that will look twenty years from now, though, when the images of Abu Ghraib aren't quite so fresh. Also, I forgave the film for it's optimism when the fighting started back up. All in all, a must see for anyone with even a passing interest in the cinema of post apocalyptic dystopia.
  
  
• Sgt. Bilko - In the opening scene Steve Martin's Bilko deliberately loses a $500 dollar bet so that he can double the stakes and win, triumphantly, $1000. Do the math.
  
  
• The Big Chill - I liked this film well enough back in the day, but have systematically avoided it for most of the last fifteen years. Seeing it again, now at more or less the same age as the characters, made me wonder why my college buddies didn't all stay so skinny.
  
  
• The Butterfly Effect - I'd say it was unwatchable, but I watched it.
  
  
• Pan's Labrynth - Pretty enough, and maybe worth seeing again, but at first blush the existentialism as answer to fascism stuff seems a little dated and naive.