last week i was kvetching about monday’s late-winter snowstorm and subsequent single-digit temps. today it’s nearly 65 degrees at 9 a.m. yay, march.

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atheists are responsible for the dwindling percentage of christians in the united states. (maybe they’re eating them?) and i should move to vermont. except for that cold thing.

nifty charts here.

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almost everything i read online this weekend was about death and dying. one friend’s father passed away in late february. another friend’s mother, over the weekend. my great-uncle, on thursday. g’s grandmother was hospitalized with chest pains. then a friend’s dog had to be put down. isn’t spring supposed to be a time of rebirth?

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as i tweeted on saturday, the best time to watch watchmen is the 9:00 showing. with the coming distractions and a run time of 163 minutes, it means you’ll be out of the theater at five to 12:00. freaky. even freakier: billy crudup’s blue CGI dingle, which doesn’t dangle much.

great flick, btw. and fantastic use of leonard cohen on the soundtrack (and muzak tears for fears), but other people differ. (contains some spoilers.) although i have to ask: how do you put together a 3-hour movie set in 1985 without a single duran duran song? they’d released duran duran, rio, and 7 and the ragged tiger by that point!

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i’m not much of a batman fan, but the first issue of neil gaiman’s two-part “death of” is storytelling at its finest. and what a story it is.

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and finally, in news of the sane, today obama will “issue a presidential memorandum aimed at insulating scientific decisions across the federal government from political influence.” the circular argument about that itself being political influence that will affect scientific decisions aside, it’s good to see obama continuing to dismantle the politicoreligious machine of the bush administration.

from his prepared remarks:

“This Order is an important step in advancing the cause of science in America. But let’s be clear:¹ promoting science isn’t just about providing resources — it is also about protecting free and open inquiry. It is about letting scientists like those here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it’s inconvenient — especially when it’s inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda — and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.”

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¹ am i the only one who would be happy if obama excised “but let’s be clear” from his vocabulary? i’m getting tired of being lectured at.

streets of fire has an amazingly hysterical cast. rick moranis and willem dafoe? diane lane and bill paxton? amy madigan? damn. 1984 was a great year for randomness.

i caught most of the deer hunter last night. there’s nothing much i can say about it that hasn’t already been said by people with far greater access to the language of criticism, so i’m not going to try. suffice it to say i like it much more than apocalypse now, of which i caught the redux version last week. (and talk about a director’s cut that adds nothing to the original movie.)

i decided to read up a bit on the filming of the deer hunter this morning, as i was curious if the deer killed in the first third of the movie was actually shot (and following my curiosity about the water buffalo in apocalypse now that gets macheted to death).¹ and as one thing so often leads to another on teh interwebs, i found myself reading the AFI top 100 list from 2007. and i was surprised at how many i’d seen. which led me to posting them here. bold i’ve seen and liked, italics i’ve seen and disliked, plain text i haven’t seen. comments where comments are warranted.

top ten are above the fold. going through this, i’m tempted to run the frequencies on actors, decade, and directors – and to run a chi-square to see if there are any correlates to what i like.

1. citizen kane – had to watch it for MC66. while i loved the cinematography, the storyline bored me.
2. the godfather – i don’t care much for any of the godfather movies. it’s fun to watch a very young pacino, but that’s about it.
3. casablanca
4. raging bull
5. singin’ in the rain – i’ve never seen it all the way through in one sitting, but i may have seen the whole thing, in pieces. not sure, though.
6. gone with the wind
7. lawrence of arabia – i’d probably like it better if i hadn’t run it – twice during my stint in the film society. it’s seven reels on a 16mm print. seven reels, people.
8. schindler’s list
9. vertigo
10. the wizard of oz

(more…)

someone in hollywood thinks it’s time to re-do the crow. i’m not a brandon lee groupie (anymore), but c’mon. really?

holy shit.

hamlet 2 is the funniest damn thing i’ve seen in years. and i watch a lot of movies.

first: the first part is todd-solondz-funny-uncomfortable (acid is a very powerful drug).

and b: the second part is piss-your-pants-laughing-funny (where are my pants… and underwear?).

steve coogan: brilliance.

oh, and jeff - nyagha nyagha!

looks like hollywood is up to its usual brain-dead imitation hijinks. college has already been done: it was called PCU, and had jeremy piven. PCU is the superior movie – because it had jeremy piven. (no, i haven’t seen college. but trust me on this. jeremy piven, like tiger balm, makes everything better. and no, that isn’t a strange comparison. i’m sure jeremy piven would feel great rubbed into my back and thighs. because they’re sore from workouts. right.)

and now i see a new flick coming over the horizon: sex drive. the blurb i received describes it thusly:

Loveable underdog IAN (Josh Zuckerman) is the last American virgin. At least that’s how it feels to him now that he’s 18, about to go to college, and losing girls to his 14-year-old brother. Ian’s always been the nice guy, the best friend … never the boyfriend. But his luck finally seems to be changing when he meets DANIELLE. She’s everything he’s ever wanted in a girlfriend – fun, sexy, and she really likes him. There’s just one problem. She lives in Knoxville . And he lives in Chicago . And she thinks he’s the Brad Pitt-lookalike he’s pretending to be on Facebook. At the urging of his best friend, LANCE (Clark Duke), Ian decides to confront his fear of rejection when Danielle makes him the offer of a lifetime: “If you drive all the way for me, I’ll go all the way for you.”

In the spirit of such classics as AMERICAN PIE, THE SURE THING and SUPERBAD, this wild romp follows Ian, Lance and their third musketeer, the spunky and gorgeous tomboy, FELICIA (Amanda Crew), as they set out in Ian’s older brother’s beloved ’69 GTO. Despite many hilarious setbacks on the road, including a stop-off at an Amish rave (who knew the Amish could party?), Ian finally meets his dream girl … but things don’t turn out quite as planned. Along the way, Ian discovers that while he’s prepared to go the distance for sex, there might be something even better a little closer to home.

apparently “in the spirit of” now means “blatantly ripping off.” the sure thing was a thing of beauty (and not just in a pre-plastic-surgery-nicollette-sheridan kind of way). and john cusack. brilliance. (john cusack and jeremy piven have apparently been in 10 movies together, but perfection was really attained only in the brief shining moment of grosse pointe blank.)

i honestly can’t think of anything worse than an american pie/the sure thing mashup.

wait, yes, i can. the intersection between bacon-flavored dental floss and personal lube.

it pretty much had to be. opening night tickets sold out nearly a month in advance. biggest opening ever. on its way to knock titanic off its pedestal. and todd seavey, whose movie tastes i usually find quite reliable, gushed in an email that it was the best superhero movie ever.

the dark knight nearly put me to sleep.

at least, the first half did. things picked up once the poorly-written girlfriend was out of the picture, and blue-screen magic made half of aaron eckhart’s head look like the mummy. but overall, i found it dull. pointless (although it was much improved by the joker’s declaration that that pretty much was the point). maybe i’m hopelessly dim, and i needed it explained to me. but just over an hour into it, i could’ve happily left the theater and not had more than a passing thought for what i missed.

so it’s a good thing i didn’t – because it’s a great second half. it’s the reverse of the problem with full metal jacket¹ – as though the writers had a great denouement, but couldn’t figure out how to get there. and it’s uneven: besides dragging whenever heath ledger is off-camera (and i’m not just saying this because i think he was dreamy²), one key chase sequence³ in the movie was so poorly conceived as to be laughable. it stands out all the more glaringly because the rest is pretty tightly written.

i’m thinking this is just a bad superhero season for my tastes. other than iron man (which i’ve seen twice in the theater), i could easily have waited for the dvds (for the incredible hulk, hellboy 2 and the dark knight).

UPDATE:

because i amuse myself, i am editing this to include some of my email comments to todd, who compared my lack of enthusiasm for the dark knight to my similar lack of enthusiasm for the first LOTR movie. warning: minor plot spoiler included.

was i the only one hoping that the joker was lying about how the ferries were wired, so that each was holding its own detonator? and then, when the big con threw the detonator out the window, was i the only one hoping the smarmy suit would blow the ferry full of “innocents” sky high?

as far as billionaire industrialist playboys go, i think i’d take downey’s stark over bale’s wayne. with stark you get the feeling he’s having fun; with wayne it’s just another mask he has to wear. and oh, the weight of it all.

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¹ namely, great first half, terrible second half. a fantastic set up with nowhere to go.
² oh, but he was. have you seen 10 things i hate about you?
³ if you’ve seen the movie, you should know what i’m talking about. if you haven’t, i’m not going to spoil the details for you.

james and i went to see the 25th anniversary showing of wargames last night. unfortunately the print hasn’t been remastered and all the reds are faded to hell (i think the opening credits were redone, as they appeared in a jarring arterial blood) leaving behind a much drearier blue-gray world than i remember.

despite the overall image quality, all was fine until the screen inexplicably went dark (right about the time the kids were fleeing helicopters at falken’s¹ goose island getaway), and the movie was replaced by the windows status bar you see above. (apologies for the image quality; the iphone isn’t the greatest at low-light photography.) apparently the flick was being streamed via satellite from cali, and they experienced a total systems failure.²

joshua never would’ve let that happen. he would’ve called back.
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¹ mildly amusing: someone set up a stephen falken myspace page. slightly more amusing: a 1990 overview of wargames in the journal “teaching sociology.”

² although we were told by the theater manager that the outage was nationwide, apparently those who were watching at tyson’s got to see the whole flick (albeit in subpar conditions), while at least one other theater – in indiana – also lost the feed.

some low-level hilarity ensued in the theater, as everyone took the malfunction with surprising good grace (or perhaps not so surprising: the theater was at maybe quarter capacity, and the audience comprised of thirtysomething technogeeks taking in a vintage flick at 7:30 on a thursday night.) there weren’t even too many groans about the technological errors in the movie, such as when lightman pulled the cord out of his phone and watched the game timer continue to count down on his monitor. and we did get 2 free tickets each as consolation, which was good.

james’ comment: “too bad no one has the movie on their ipod.”

the breakfast club on thursday at 7pm, or
better off dead on friday at 9:30pm (possibly saturday at 9:45) or
a midnight showing of the thing on friday, august 8, or
videodrome at 11:30 on the following friday, or
damnit, i’m going to be at burning man when they show aliens.

*sigh* bless you, AFI. a smorgasboard of positively fantastic options to make this former BFS programmer’s¹ heart sing.

hat tip: james
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¹ damn. gotta tell ya, the bfs loses something with such a nice, neat, online presence. i miss the cut’n'glue-stick film bulletin. i miss todd’s reviews.

if you liked pan’s labyrinth, you’ll probably love hellboy ii.

i didn’t like pan’s labyrinth – in between the exceedingly well-done, nerve-wracking and gut-wrenching scenes from the spanish civil war were long, boring, interminable bouts of really dull “magical” realism. don’t get me wrong – i like magical realism. of garcia marquez’ variety, anyway. del toro’s, OTOH, is a real snoozer. perhaps literally – there’s nothing in his movies that i haven’t seen in my dreams. (not my nightmares, mind you. those are usually terrifying hallucinations involving having forgotten my locker combination and not knowing where my next class is.)

so yeah, given i find del toro’s fantastical world of displaced-eye creatures (the funky eyes-in-hands creature from pan’s labyrinth becomes a funky eyes-in-wings creature in hellboy ii) and kitten-snacking trolls (did the old lady play poker with clem and spike?) completely boring, i was ready to leave hellboy ii about halfway through. the story is alternately incoherent and obvious, and filming action sequences really isn’t del toro’s forte. i totally lost interest in the movie. i started twittering. i considered filing my nails. i would’ve gone to sleep if the soundtrack hadn’t been so loud.

which isn’t to say i found it completely unredeemable. in the midst of tooth fairies, fish vendors, giant juggernauts, legless ogre smiths, forest elementals and big gold tick-tock men, what weirded me out the most was that the elf prince bore an uncanny resemblance to tom cruise. a crazed, albino tom cruise.

i can only hope del toro doesn’t write or direct the inevitable sequel.