Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: At the movies
Where you get your ideas . . .
Apropos of Dean’s discussion here, I thought this was interesting:
Harlan Ellison isn’t my favorite person, but he did have cause to be pissed, IMHO. I remember both Outer Limits episodes well, and the Bob Culp story (Demon With A Glass Hand) had more than a passing resemblance to the Terminator storyline. Plus they have a witnessed record of Cameron’s admission of plagiarism. Cameron got off easy and Ellison deserved a lot more than $65 – 70,000.
D.
Alice vs. Alice
I suspect few of my readers are familiar with American McGee’s Alice, a ten-year-old video game which was in the opinion of many* an instant classic. Tim Burton’s Alice will, naturally, garner far more attention; it’s big box office, features “sexiest man alive” Johnny Depp, and has twin virtues of being an expensive special effects flick and the product of Tim Burton’s mind. But does Burton’s Alice really deserve such a disparity of focus?
Consider:
1. McGee’s Alice: badass. Burton’s Alice: nice ass.
Maybe. It’s a Disney movie, after all — we see a bit of Mia Wasikowska’s neck and that’s about it.
2. McGee’s premise: an insane Alice returns to Wonderland to regain her sanity. Burton’s premise: an inane Alice returns to Wonderland to dodge a marriage proposal from a chinless lordling.
3. McGee’s message: Guilt is a bitch. But find some way-cool weapons (such as the brutal croquet mallet, jackbombs, and the ever helpful vorpal blade) and you can slaughter physical manifestations of your guilt to your heart’s content. Burton’s message: It’s okay to be your own woman.
Yes, it’s a feminist movie, and I would have cheered the ending had not Burton (through the proxy of Johnny Depp) indulged in that cretinous dance routine.
4. McGee’s soundtrack: from Chris Vrenna — dark, moody. Unforgettable. Burton’s soundtrack: um . . . forgettable.
Okay, I’m running out of compare-and-contrast steam. Alice wasn’t a bad movie, just a disappointing one. I’m of the same mind as critic Amy Biancolli, “But its single biggest failing — an affront to Lewis Carroll and the charms of nonsense literature — is the fact that it makes sense.” Biancolli doesn’t quite get Carroll’s Alice, though. For me, the charm of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was the delightful conflict between the hallucinatory action and Alice’s proper, no-nonsense response to it. McGee captured that aspect of Alice; Burton didn’t.
There was a lot of bizarreness in the movie, but not the good kind of bizarreness. Why does the White Queen prance and mince? Why do the Mad Hatter’s eyes keep changing color? And why the strong sexual subtext between the Mad Hatter and Alice? If Burton had run with that, well, fine. Instead, he gave us bits and clues, as if an entire plot thread had been edited from the screenplay — but not completely.
Oh, one other thing: it strikes me as wrong, somehow, for any Alice-inspired story to be predictable. This movie wasn’t 100% predictable. 98%, perhaps?
I know, I know. Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch.
D.
*My son and me, to name two.
The seven worst best pictures ever
Inspired by Huffington Post’s “Nine Worst Movies Ever Made,” I thought it would be fun to shine a spotlight on the worst films that have won an Academy Award for Best Picture.
I thought it would be easy to find nine, but I was wrong. Turns out I just haven’t seen that many films. (As much as I wanted to include Forrest Gump on this list, I figured it wouldn’t be fair, since I haven’t actually seen the movie.)
The Hitler YouTube meme
Are you familiar with the YouTube meme of taking the famous Hitler rant scene from Downfall and inserting novel subtitles? Here’s a good example:
I’ve lost track of how many of these I have watched. Hitler gets banned from Xbox Live; Hitler gets a girl pregnant; Hitler reacts to a ban on KFC nuggets. There must be hundreds of these. There’s even one in which Hitler rants against the proliferation of Hitler rant videos. Seems like anyone and everyone with video capture and editing software has made a Hitler rant video. Some of them are brilliant, some atrocious.
What’s happening, I think, is that we’re looking at the juxtaposition of (A) a stupendous performance and (B) that guy everyone loves to hate. Hitler himself has become so trite as a symbol of evil that it’s considered poor form to resort to a Hitler reference in an argument (see Godwin’s Law). You could try doing something like this with another great foreign language monologue, but if your subject ain’t Hitler, I doubt your video will find much traction.
The film itself, Downfall, is quite good, although depressing. Like most American Jews of a certain age, I was raised on Hitler this and Hitler that. I lost track of how many WWII movies my father dragged me off to. So for me to like a movie about Hitler, well, it says something about quality. Well worth a Net Flix rental.
D.
I’m sorry . . .
. . . but this tickles me.
The creator of this video writes,
The Wilhelm Scream makes these epic movie scenes seem much more polished.
And here’s where it all began.
D.
Why I won’t be seeing Avatar.
Roughly 12 years ago, when director James Cameron first began thinking about the movie Avatar, interested Dipteran scientists downloaded my persona into a six-legged, two-winged biological construct.
I only look like a domestic fly. I'm actually 10 mg of pure, sophisticated intelligence.
My task: to observe and record what transpired at Cameron’s high concept brainstorming session.
My purpose: to exploit rich new sources of bullshit for my Dipteran colleagues.
Knock-off
This morning, I caught the last half of the film Sarkar, Bollywood’s version of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 hit The Godfather. All of the elements are present: an above-the-law boss to whom people appeal for justice; a good son, a bad son; a conspiracy of local criminals to whom the Godfather (or Sarkar) poses a financial threat. The Vito/Michael cognates are Subhash Nagre and Shankar Nagre, played by real life father-and-son actors Amitabh Bachchan and Abhishek Bachchan. That’s Amitabh to the right. I wonder if they were chosen for their resemblance to Michael Corleone’s actor, Al Pachino?
It’s a fun movie, what I saw of it, delightful for its similarities as well as its culture clash differences. For example: remember the scene in The Godfather where Michael has to scramble to protect his father in the hospital? The Don has survived one attempt on his life, and Michael realizes that killers are coming to finish the same job. Imagine that same scene with background music chanting, “JESUS, JESUS, JESUS,” and you’ll have some idea of the surprises in store for you from the Bollywood production. There’s a similar moment during the settling-scores ending montage; in The Godfather, this is accompanied by organ music (Michael is serving as godfather at his nephew’s christening), while in Sarkar, someone sings, “Such injustice, how could anyone tolerate it?” . . . just in case the audience begins to lose sympathy for Shankar, thanks to his new appreciation for violence.
Of course, the point of The Godfather was Michael’s tragic fall from grace. We may understand his crimes, but we’re not supposed to excuse them. In Sarkar, Shankar/Michael becomes an instrument of righteous vengeance rather than a good man gone bad.
Out of curiosity, I searched the tubes for other knock-offs of The Godfather. Surprisingly, Sarkar is it. There have been numerous nods to The Godfather, including The Freshman, Shark Tale, and even Rugrats in Paris, and Bollywood is preparing a comedic version, but other close cousins are lacking.
The other odd thing is that it took so long for another country to crib from Coppola. Thirty-two years passed between the releases of The Godfather and Sarkar. In contrast, it only took Turkey five years to produce the execrable Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam, their version of Star Wars. (IMDB, however, points out, “Two space cadets crash-land on a desert planet, where an evil wizard seeks the ultimate power to take over the world. Although the movie borrows some background footage from Star Wars, the plot is mostly unrelated.”)
Not particularly apropos of this discussion . . . but I found a video that gave me a lot of laughs this morning. Triumph the Insult Comic Dog visits the line of fans waiting to see Clone Wars. Almost good enough to make me watch Conan.
D.
crazy tired
My trainer is vicious.
This one thing she made me do tonight? She had me do pushups on the stability ball (that’s that huge ball, looks like an elementary school kickball on ‘roids), such that my thighs are supported on the ball. Fair enough, but while I’m doing ’em, she’s rocking the ball, moving it back and forth, side to side beneath me — all to improve balance. The pushups are the easy part.
Ever hear of a Bosu? Sort of a half-dome thing. You can stand on it with the flat side up or down, hence the acronym, Both Sides Utilized. Flat side up is the more difficult of the two.
Try touching your toes while standing on the Bosu flat side up. Try reaching down with a weighted bar in your hands, or with one of those heavy medicine balls.
I never would have thought training required so much balance. She’s a great believer in core strength, my trainer. We’ve hardly done any weights at all.
I touched my toes today! (You know, the hard way, by bending over and doing it.) So the question now becomes: what am I training for?
One of these days I should give movie reviews: movies that are great to watch while doing aerobics.
For example,
Rocky with Sylvester Stallone. Five Burly Biceps. I hate Stallone as much as the next guy, but hot DAMN this is a good movie to work out to. I think I stayed on that damned elliptical trainer more than 90 minutes, just to find out how the movie would end.
You mean I have to watch the sequel now?
Or,
Something’s Gotta Give with Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton, and Keanu Reeves. One puny biceps. The plot, per IMDB: “A swinger on the cusp of being a senior citizen with a taste for young women falls in love with an accomplished woman closer to his age.” I’m sorry, but Jack? You ain’t on the cusp of senior citizenry. You a full citizen, pal.
Or maybe they were referring to Keanu?
Anyway, I’m not sure what’s more of a turn-off: the idea of metrosexual Keanu consorting with on-the-cusp Keaton, or the idea of Jack Nicholson consorting with anyone. This movie sucked the life right out of me.
Yeah, I could go on . . .
D.
Let’s test this out
Hmm. Has my audience flown the coop? The only way to find out is to enable comments. Protected Static thinks it’s coincidental that the hacks stopped when I closed B&W to comments, but I’m not so sure. Here’s what I’ve done: I’ve subjected all comments to moderation. I’m not sure that will protect me from code injection hacks, but I’m about to find out.
I’ve backed things up first, just in case . . .
In other news: we watched The Dark Knight on TV last night. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one movie do so much damage to Newtonian physics. Batman gets to fly like a bat, you know, thanks to these itty bitty bat wings in his suit (and I’ve got news for Batman: titanium is heavy). (Oh, and speaking of heavy, the Batmobile must harbor a small black hole in the trunk. That’s the only thing I can figure, since when it collides with the Joker’s semi head-on, it sends the semi flying backward.) And when the love interest, played by oh-so-bland Maggie Gyllenhaal, plummets from a 40-story building, the Bat dives after her, catches up to her, and breaks both their falls . . . how, exactly? Wind resistance on those batty wings, which aren’t even fully deployed?
The script is lifeless. What the hell does this mean? “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” It gets said twice, so it must be important. And then there’s the movie’s big closing line: “Because he’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we’ll hunt him because he can take it. Because he’s not our hero. He’s a silent guardian, a watchful protector. A dark knight.”
WTF? My bogosity meter is stuck in the red zone.
We liked Aaron Eckhart’s Harvey Dent, and had a split vote on Heath Ledger’s Joker. I liked the performance but Karen thought he was too over the top. Definitely better than Jack Nicholson’s Joker, though, which brought back fond memories of Cesar Romero. We both felt the writers could have done more to show “the making of the clown”; as written, we’re given precious little insight into the character.
The movie needed more Julie Newmar
Oh, and while I’m kvetching, Christian Bale’s Batman is lifeless. The voice he provides for the man behind the mask is, what? Some aged rocker after he’s effed up his vocal cords? That got old fast.
My overall rating: three out of four Mehs. I didn’t hate it, but I do feel like I wasted my time watching it beginning to end. I want Michael Keaton back, but I guess that won’t happen. Not unless some production company decides it’s time for an “old Batman” movie — old Batman appeared as a well conceived character in one of the animated versions for TV.
And while we’re on the subject of TV, nothing cinematic compares to
Batman: The Animated Series.
Okay, ready to post. Time to see if fully moderated comments can kill my blog. Of course, y’all will have to make some comments to test this thing out.
D.
Brilliant
What would I do without my son to turn me on to strokes of genius like Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog? From Joss Whedon (you know — Buffy, Firefly). It starts here.
D.