Movies

Finally rented. Wasn’t impressed by the characters. The plot was so concatenated that the characters suffered. It turned into “Lyra the Cranky Lying Girl Who Gets To Do Whatever She Wants.”

Also, movie!Lyra is a bona fide Mary Sue, complete with her own theme song. Other characters stand around talking about how wonderful and awe inspiring she is, and the end credit music was enough to wake me up.

I want a bear with Ian McKellan’s voice, however.

Finally got round to watching the movies. This particular movie has quoted Star Trek, LOTR, and collected assorted plot coupons familiar to anyone who’s kicked around sci fi movies for very long. Plus a really funny weapons interface that dangles the crew member in a 3D/holodeck thingie… picturing Worf using it resulted in gigglefits.

His Dark Materials: Golden Compass

Do not click if you don’t have broadband/dsl - otherwise, yay! His Dark Materials! Lyra looks like a little Lizbee! It has Daniel Craig! Squee!

I went to Old Town to frolic with a friend yesterday, and got back this morning. Then I looked at the car, which seemed relatively clean other than some road spatter, and thought about washing it anyway - you can tell it’s still new when I actually want to wash the thing.

Instead, however, I sprayed it down with some of that “quick detailer” and gave it a rubdown with some clean towels.

I cannot believe I have not yet contracted black lung. The air here must be as hideous as rumor has it — I got a lot of black schmutz off what appeared to be a white car. You could see the difference between the parts I had wiped and the rest of the car - definitely grayer on the uncleaned bits.

I think I will be applying another coat of wax, post haste. Oy.

In other news, ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ is, while extremely graphically violent, a good movie. Predictable in some respects but still very impressive. I had read blog reviews ranting about “too much of the war” and “not very much fantasy.” I think the fact that it’s not an American movie explains a lot of that; there are subtle bits, like the watch, and believable behavior on all sides rather than caving to stereotypes. Friend and I debated afterward about whether it was all fantasy on the part of the girl, or if the faun and the rest were real. You’ll have to decide for yourself. Beware if you’re squeamish, though. I closed my eyes sometimes. Fortunately there’s enough warning to do that.

This was one of those surreal movies that you only understand when you reach the very end.

My comment to my friend: “I didn’t know Hugh Jackman could do a full lotus.”

It was either that or they had a body double from the waist down. He also looks… different bald.

Anything coherent is a potential spoiler, so I leave you with breadcrumbs. The fountain of youth. The tree of life. The queen of Spain. Lots of cutting back and forth to different points in time. Pretty woman, Hugh Jackman, and beautiful special effects. If you liked the brain-twistiness of time travel movies/episodes, sentimental romance that lasts for all time, and Hugh in any mode of dress (the costume people must have had a ball with him), this movie is for you.

I bet you don’t even remember this movie.

I bet I won’t remember it tomorrow.

Lots of pretty scenery, lots of actors in warpaint and/or grubby clothing, minimal dialogue, lots of voiceovers, and did I mention the scenery? I nearly fell asleep in the opening credits.

I’ll try to make it nonspoilery. Certainly, no one could possibly expect any surprises in this, anyway. Take the first movie, add in tentacles, loads of barnacles and mussels and assorted sea creatures all spackled together in humanoid form, magically exploding barrels that ignite like dynamite when a lead ball hits them, impossible ships that get where they’re going in no time at all, faux cannibals, and an undead monkey, and there you go. Oh, and the really daft hamster ball/wheel nonsense. Throwing a bunch of people into a huge sphere and rolling them down miles of cliff, hill, jungle and rock/dirt faces, only to have them emerge without broken bones, concussions and crushed internal organs? Right. Wasn’t even funny when I saw in in Mortal Combat, and became less so with every stupid movie that tries it. The best version I’ve seen was in the Incredibles. And that was SUPPOSED to be a cartoon about people with impossible super powers doing impossible things. So it worked.

What am I saying? PotC is in fact a live action cartoon, except, after the fact? when I am not under the spell of Depp’s jazz hands and wild mascara festooned eyes? I can only shake my head. I didn’t like Elizabeth this time, and I didn’t care much for Will either; they’ve lost the naivete that made their characters interesting the first time, when it was all about figuring out how to make it in the pirate world. Now they’re jaded and confront the circumstances they are thrown into with a sort of ‘here we go again’ air. The end of the movie was a big fat HUH? and not of a good sort. Instead of looking forward to the third, I am now also jaded, and recognizing that yes, I will see it, and yes, it will be somewhat enjoyable, but I’ve seen it before - in the first two movies and in other movies.

I guess there are spoilers here… but not so much. You’ll probably enjoy the movie anyway because it’s not about predictability, it’s something you see because you like Jack Sparrow and the idea of PIRATES! and the Kraken! and arrrr, me hearties….

I wanted to like Equilibrium. It has Sean Bean and Christian Bale, pre-Batman. It has black leather. It had no kickass chick, but I could forgive that given adequate plot and/or action.

I didn’t like it. Oh, there was action, but it wasn’t quite what it could have been. There was decent acting. The problem was the plot itself. The world portrayed made no sense at all. The setup is pretty standard sci fi — post-apocalyptic world wherein people are under the thumb of some Big Government Doing It All For The People. Everyone takes a dose of Prozium every time the alarm goes off. This eliminates the cause of all violence, i.e., people’s feelings. Father is on every tv screen, every window, every wall, and a bunch of blimps for good measure, preaching the good word of peace and harmony. While people who squirrel away art and music and refuse to take the drug are hunted down and killed with machine gun toting psychopaths - no feelings, no remorse, just doing my job, ma’am. And this is the part that makes no sense — it’s sort of like those early TOS episodes where Spock didn’t show any emotions, except Nimoy totally couldn’t make his facial expression emotionless consistently, so you got someone who speaks in monotone and pulled these faces…. Except that was Spock. I loved Spock. I believed in Spock. The cast of Equilibrium didn’t even get it as emotionless as Nimoy; everyone shouts angrily, including the head dude, and what I couldn’t get was — head dude is all losing his temper up one side and down the other, why aren’t they shooting him? They turn on other high ranking folk immediately when someone shows emotion. Oh, except when it wouldn’t be convenient for the pot.

Bale is the top dog, the #1 Cleric — sort of a ninja enforcer class with a side order of gun-fu, which is a sooper special martial art used to avoid getting shot while shooting everyone else in sight (they didn’t call it gun-fu, I do). The plot twists were there, but they were of the “yeah, right” sort. Nothing in the world building is convincing enough for anyone who thinks for five minutes. I turned off the documentary on the DVD the instant I heard someone say “the intelligence of the plot” - there wasn’t any. There were guns, and leather, and people in riot gear, and a mu-hu-hahahaHA villain, who didn’t do the laugh but might as well have. Someone could have rewritten the story a couple more times and made a better movie.

Only rent it if it’s free and you’ve seen every other movie in the universe. Unless you’re a die hard Sean Bean or Christian Bale fan. Then I would suggest a drinking game in which you take two hits every time there’s a full frontal face shot of Bale. You should be pickled by the movie’s climactic battle, in which Bale goes Kill Bill on the bad guy’s minions.

Someone actually brought kids to the theater for this. Obviously the parents had no idea what it was about - or aren’t into “age-appropriateness.”

There are differences between the original comic and the movie - things have been updated, substituting virus warfare for experimentation with drugs. Some of the subplots have been rearranged or left out. The Wachowski’s have evolved, the look of the movie is similar but flows differently than the Matrix. All the way around very stylish and skillful with the cuts and scene changes.

Natalie Portman should have had better writing in Star Wars. She’s pretty good in V. Hugo Weaving has a wonderful voice, a fact made even more apparent when we are deprived of any viewing of his face to distract us, and he had some of the most complex monologue I have ever heard. I’ll look forward to the bloopers if they include them on the dvd.

Lots of dark, and violence, and obvious parallels to just about any government that’s gone off balance and sacrificed personal freedom for what they label safety, but is actually another form of violence against the citizens, sometimes culminating in literal violence. I thought it was a little over the top to have the one guy of “unnatural sexual preference” also be the one hiding the Koran in his basement, but in another way it makes sense - accumulating forbidden materials in an age of social repression to assert, however covertly, one’s independence. Without getting killed. And there was lots of killing.

As movies about Something go, this one was well acted, well produced, paced and plotted with a deft hand, and left me wondering who I could re-borrow the comic from.

My roommate was given all of this series on DVD for Christmas. Then he drove off for the weekend, leaving me to my own devices. I’ve seen the last couple of episodes, but starting from the beginning and watching all the way through gives me the fuller picture. I must say that if not for the little voice in the back of my brain screaming “Marty Stu!” I would enjoy it completely.

Generally, as different as each episode is in the details, the usual sequence is the standard 1. setup the circumstance 2. complicate things for Horatio 3. someone on the crew is jealous/resentful of him for some reason 4. complicate the situation more 5. complicate them again 6. Horatio triumphs 7. Horatio’s superiors recognize his greatness, as do his subordinates, the jealous/resentful man is dead/has a change of heart, and all is well, let’s have tea and crumpets and salute the brave Mr. Hornblower oh-by-the-way-here’s-a-promotion.

Ioan is pretty, Jamie Bamber is pretty and sounds nothing like his later incarnation, Apollo, and the production quality is quite good. I’m mostly satisfied but would have appreciated less predictability….

Snakes on a Plane (2006)

I’ve seen the icons, the jokes, the quotes - now here’s the summary. Yep. It’s snakes, on a plane. Deadly snakes. And the names… bet the actress playing “iPod girl” looks forward to having this credit on her resume. And I wondered, what’s with the actors with no role next to them? are they understudies or something, or sharing a role with someone?

The alternate titles sound saner than the real one. Of course, there have been B movies named “Flight XXX” before…. So they needed something different, to make it plain that this is no B movie! It’s about SNAKES. On a PLANE.

Oy.

Parrots are wonderfully adaptable creatures, and very smart into the bargain, so it should be no surprise that there are flocks of them living wild and free in various cities around the US. There are flocks of different species all over Los Angeles, for example.

This documentary is about cherry headed conures, and the occasional blue crowned conure or budgie that happens along for the ride, living free on Telegraph Hill in SF. A hippy-ish guy started feeding them, and gradually the parrots came to accept him to the point that they would perch on his head and shoulders and eat out of his hand. Very simply, the documentary tells the story and illustrates it with footage gathered over a long period. Some footage was gathered from other residents of the area and the dvd extras also provide a flock update, a visit to a bird sanctuary where the man’s own birds were sent when he had to move and couldn’t take them.

What struck me most were the people at the beginning, when they show passers-by (probably tourists) come to see the flock feeding. These folks kept asking the guy if they were his birds, if they were tame, and other logical questions you would have when watching a man feeding a bunch of free-flying parrots. One guy insisted that they were not wild birds because he had named them and fed them.

It’s this black and white mentality that I run up against time and time again that drives me nuts. If you name them they are pets. Really? Why do people insist that animals have no place in this world except to be pets or be wild? Why is it that they can’t grasp that, like people, they make friends and have lives of their own? Throughout the documentary the parrots display behaviors that look a whole lot like individual personalities to me. One bird decided he wanted to live inside with the guy - every time it was thrown outside, it cried out and waited by the door until it could get back in. It was pretty clear that all the original members of the flock were former pets, and behaved in ways very consistent with that; the blue crowned conure in particular showed no sign of fear of people, and would let the man hold him. Bittner offered the bird indoor life, and he wouldn’t accept it - so Bittner let him go, and the bird continued to visit with the flock.

Parrots, even the ones we keep in cages or hatch and hand-feed ourselves, are all wild animals. Domestication is something that takes many generations of animals to occur. We are at best making friends with them. You can’t punish a parrot - it will remember and it will act out against you. You can only use positive reinforcement and respect the wild independent nature of the bird. I heard it said that an African Grey Parrot has the intelligence of a six year old child and the emotional capacity of a two year old. I believe it. I also think that many other species have similar capacity.

The documentary made several points about the parrot trade — catching wild birds and forcing them into captivity is wrong, and only results in birds that will never be completely tame. On the flip side, captive breeding programs are sometimes the only hope for a species that is going extinct in the wild due to deforestation. So, while I will tell anyone and everyone never to buy from pet stores, I will also add that captive breeders are plentiful — there are many conscientious backyard breeders who do so out of love for the animals, who go to great lengths to find decent homes for these birds. I wish more people would educate themselves thoroughly before getting any kind of pet; shelters are overflowing with unwanted, unloved animals of all kinds. Not all creatures flourish the way parrots do when turned loose.

This SciFi channel movie featured Catherine Bell, Sam Neill, and some other familiar faces I can’t immediately recalls names for, and Bryan Singer and Rockne O’Bannon (Farscape) were in the production part of the credits, and Roommate brought it home on VHS from his dad’s house. So yesterday, while I (apparently) battled a short bout of stomach flu (Ugh! hate it!), I popped it in.

And slept through two of the six hours of it. But. The parts I remember were pretty good. We’ve all heard the crackpot theories about the Bermuda triangle - aliens, electromagnetic fields, whatever else - and they’re all in there, tossed about in dialogue as the intrepid team of four rents a submarine, helicopters, flies a plane, goes diving, takes a speedboat out into the ocean, and does all those other action movie transportation scenes. The end result (which I won’t spoil) reminded me of a particular Star Trek episode and so at one point rather earlier than they planned, I suspect, I saw the end coming. But. All in all, it would make a worthy rental, especially if you like Catherine Bell. She gets lots and lots of screen time. And all the characters have their backstory, which isn’t thrown in as an aside - most of the backstory has an actual function in the script that doesn’t feel like someone had a six foot shoehorn. Rockne and Bryan did good.

Went last night with a friend. I have to say that visually it was pretty much how I always imagined it, only in living color. I don’t remember whether all the details of the storyline conform to the book - it’s been a long time since I last read it. I reread my paperbacks to tatters when I was a kid, but my favorites of the series were Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Magician’s Nephew. Anyway. I loved all the attention to detail, I loved the score, which complemented the movie and gave it nuances rather than driving the tension like more overtly manipulative scores (I dislike movies that try to make up for deficiencies of writing and/or acting by pumping up the music; they switch me into MST-mode). I loved the Lion. I loved the kids. I saw all the parallels with LOTR and did not care - they’re in the original as well. Shared plots do not bother me; originality is in the execution, and this was wonderfully executed, guaranteed to drop my jaw repeatedly.

I want to hug a beaver now. And a fox, and about a zillion other animals. And Edmund. The movie really brought him to life in a way that the book didn’t; the additional character development was well thought out and actually contributed instead of driving me nuts the way other similar novel-to-movie translations have done.

In short, SQUEE!

The only annoyance was the two girls I nearly bumped into in the lobby after, who were busily comparing the fauns to hobbits. Mundanes. Hmph.

Finally came from Netflix, and OMG what creeeeeeeeeepy oompah loompahs.

It did not help that the guy that played them was the same guy that featured as the legless killer in that X Files episode “Badlaa”. The one who wore fat guys as costumes to move around the world? Yeah. That one. He even had the same angry expression that he had in the X Files. EWWW. I squicked my way through the whole movie. He’s also been in about a million other things as the bad guy.

Depp was creepy as well. I have the feeling that Roald Dahl would have appreciated it. I noted a “Felicity Dahl” in the credits and wondered… and imdb tells me that she was none other than Roald’s second wife, who “Was best friend of actress Patricia Neal until she became the second wife of Roald Dahl, to whom Neal had been married before.” Now, there’s some trivia. (quote from Imdb.com)

As the end wound its way through the warm-fuzzy resolution, Roommate asked if the book ended that way, because we’d heard this movie was closer to the book than the Gene Wilder version. I don’t think so. It’s been ages since I read the book, but it seems to me that the compromise in the movie did not happen… Anyone remember what the end of the book was like? For some reason I think it was closer to the first movie - the ride in the glass elevator, sailing away from the factory.

Apple - Trailers - X-MEN 3 Announcement Teaser - Large

Jean! Jean! Jean! She’s mean! (At least, that sure looks like her, on the right, in the scene with Magneto’s Mutant Army marching forth…)

And there’s Beast, and the dude with the wings… this looks good.

I can sum up my thoughts on the movie in a few sentences without spoilers. Although it’s fairly safe to say anyone going to the movie who’s been reading along is already spoiled.

Previous storylines involved the kids figuring everything out and earning the payoff. This one is the opposite — they do nothing, and in the end Stuff Happens Anyway. I don’t remember the kids being so inactive in the book as they were in the movie, or maybe it’s just more apparent on a screen?

Thing Most Oft Repeated Throughout: THAT WASN’T IN THE BOOK. At least, not that way. I guess squashing it into a two hour movie was harder than it seemed with LOTR.

Jeers to Loud Comment Guy, one row back, for all the WTF? comments. “Oh, it IS him!” ???? Dude. We managed to get the matinee without wriggly squirmy sprogs in every row, and you keep up a running commentary that doesn’t make sense in context? Put the voices in your head to bed, now.

Ron needs a haircut, STAT. Still love Snape. Still want the real Dumbledore back.

The movie, that is.

When it came in its Netflix envelope I couldn’t immediately recall why I’d put it on the queue, so couldn’t defend myself against Roommate’s cries of “what? never heard of it! I don’t like it, waaah!” (Well, not the ‘waah’, but it was in the tone of voice.) I said, “How do you know you won’t like it? Have you liked every other movie you’ve never heard of that I got?”

“Uh. Yeaaaah.”

“Who picked the last movie we really hated?”

“Uuuuuh. Me.”

“Shut up. Watch movie.”

So he did. And he liked it. ‘Crash’ is not airheaded entertainment - you have to pay attention or it lacks any emotional punch at all. It’s about racism, and stereotypes, and all the ways they interact in the same way over and over and play out in the daily lives of people. I got the feeling it was intended to subtly open your eyes, which it did powerfully and slowly, except my eyes were mostly open already to these issues. It had surprising people in bit parts — I almost didn’t recognize Marina Sirtis. It’s sad, tragic, smart and well written, well performed, and produced with a deft hand. It’s about the people of color you see every day and think you know about, but you really don’t.

Heavy, but good. Like cappucino with no sugar. Rent. Think.

Actually saw this in matinee. As a fan of prior, shorter W&G cartoons I wanted to see how a full length feature would work, as usually things that work well in ten minute or less increments don’t translate well. It worked. I enjoyed the ride, even though things were somewhat predictable, and I enjoyed all the puns and bits that were obvious parodies of other classic storylines, like King Kong, Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde, any movie in which good guys/bad guys struggle on a moving vehicle, and some less classic stories like Jurassic Park’s huge-booming-footsteps-jiggle-everyday-objects scene. The hilarity in the details made it worthwhile - Wallace’s love interest dressed as various vegetables, like an ear of corn or carrot; the way Wallace puts together his gallery of customers with eyes that blink in warning (you’d have to see the movie to understand, but it’s a marvelous blend of characterization of Wallace, eccentric and gadget-y as he is, and the respect for the way things really function - instead of just hanging magic portraits on the wall he assembles them out of light bulbs with painted-on pupils and pictures with eye holes).

What I didn’t appreciate were the endless sprog-targeted previews, but that’s part and parcel with movies that appeal to all demographics but are in formats that cater to the younger set. The most irritating thing about them was that several of the movies are remakes of classic movies featuring blended families and all the trials and troubles therein, remade to leave out all the realism and addressing of the actual issues involved, and ramp up the slapstick and hyper-comedic elements until any attempt at emotiional content ends up being a few moments of treacly gack-worthy togetherness at the end. I am speaking of Yours, Mine and Ours, and Cheaper by the Dozen. If you have not seen the originals of these, I recommend them. Fun family romps without burping pigs.

I’ve listened to the soundtrack of this for like, ever, and so I was disappointed in the movie version.

I reassured myself that it was okay, that the whole “stalker as sympathetic character” thing might just work, because there’ve been some sympathetic bad guys I’ve appreciated before. But, no. I had no sympathy for anyone, in fact. PotO the movie lacked a number of things — a really good baritone, for one. Gerard Butler is a tenor. The old worn cassette of the original broadway play that’s on my shelf features a guy I can’t remember with a deep, rich voice that doesn’t alternate between reedy-sounding high notes and bellowing attempts at low notes. Christine’s voice is fine, most of the time. The effects were okay, actually, and the fades to sepia and black and white were nicely done, but… eh. They totally lost me when, beneath the sonorous booming notes of the organ, I heard the telltale wakka wakka wakka of electric guitars, which gave me flashbacks to every 70’s tv show I’ve ever seen. Electric guitars? In a play set in the 1800’s? I should have spent my brain break on an X Files episode.

I worked today, to make up some hours I spent doing school related things during the week. I really wanted this movie to appeal to me, to reward me for forcing myself to file and do bookkeeping while suffering the headache that I’ve had since yesterday morning. But it annoyed me instead. The phantom’s voice is the Main Thing — I just didn’t believe this dude as the phantom. Minnie Driver made an excellent squawking diva, on the other hand….

I’ve been sitting here muxing SVCDs of Carnivale eps while the tv drones in the background. There’s this really idiotic movie on — something about terrorists, a plane, miscommunications, an anthrax bomb, and other randomness. It’s been playing for fifteen minutes since I surfed into it, and already I’ve rolled my eyes ten times. There’s this bomb in a suitcase, y’see, and Our Hero goes through all the agony of tapping into a radio line in the luggage area after the terrorist turned all the phones off, only to get cut off when the bad guy notices the open line, just as the control tower was reading off the number of the container in which the terrorists’ luggage was stored… They have to pitch the luggage out of the plane before they are over land, otherwise the Good Guys Back Home will be forced to shoot down the plane. They manage to connect via cell phone long enough to get the rest of the number, then lose cell phone connection, so once again they don’t know what’s going on — such as there’s a missle heading for the plane right now, since no confirmation that the deadly cargo was jettisoned has been received. So they abort and self destruct the missile just in time… etc. Then they open a zillion suitcases full of underwear and camping gear and random stuff.

Why did they rummage through all that luggage?

I would have pitched all the luggage. Forget rummaging through every suitcase. Luggage, or lives? Pitch it all! It MAKES NO SENSE to worry about finding the right suitcase! Shove all the containers out the hatch, already!

And now, magically, the terrorist shot the ILS system, and Our Hero is the only one who can land the plane!

Oh wait! That’s why they rummaged — they found a GPS unit that will save them! Which they found just by coincidence, in a suitcase, no doubt because the writer decided that was the only way they’d find a GPS unit, by concocting this entire sequence in which they must… find… that… specific… suitcase!

Newsflash, Hollywood! Plot devices that exist solely to make life easy for the writer mean the finished product will suck like a Dyson on steriods!

pastes little black cutout of Mike and the ‘bots on the tv screen

Crow: I can make a hat! I can make a pterodactyl!
Mike: To the tower! Rapunzel!
Servo (as terrorist): “Hey, you hostages have been great! Thank you! I’ll be here all night!”

There’s got to be a better pointless form of entertainment.

Lots of smashing, crashing, blazing and vanishing.

Two thoughts in my head as I left the theater:

“What a neat excuse to sit in an air conditioned theater eating popcorn with a friend. Pretty FX! Wow! And that Horatio… er, what was his name in the movie? I forget. Plastic!Horatio will do….”

“Oh, great. Now the ‘net will be inundated with a zillion slash/het fics featuring Mr. Fantastic’s incredible bendy, stretchy plasticy ‘member.’”

Well, it was three thoughts. Bonus thought: “Somewhere, someone’s gonna start a challenge — write the story of how Mr. Fantastic finds a condom that works for him.”

slinks away in shame

I’m trying to watch the episodes I finally downloaded, no thanks to the hard drive crash. I say this because each time I watch I end up listening, since some brain trust has decided that “realism” dictates that everything needs to be filmed in jigglevision.

Dear Camera Operator,

Get a freakin’ tripod. STOP. DANCING. AROUND.

May the key grip and all his minions kick you in the nuts if you don’t.

Enclosed please find the bill for all the dramamine I’ve had to buy. Cash or money order, please.

Sincerely,
Urp! Pass the Bucket!

It’s not the video, either. I’ve seen jerky .avi files — this isn’t that. It’s the swooping camera, the pointless sudden wiggly zooms from a view of drifting ships to… a closeup of the same drifting ships. The racing through the corridors with the camera, giving the film that homey feel of Uncle Bubba chasing your six year old cousins around with the video camera. The panning across blurred views of fighters zinging about, the sudden direction changes — eeef, stop! Stop it, I say! Have mercy on those of us who are already prone to motion sickness!

I’m not certain I even want to keep watching the series. It’s not guilty of the overwhelming unnecessary detail of the latest Star Wars flick, but eugh, I have enough problems with nausea when I get the bad sinus headaches — why do I need this? I shouldn’t have to take breaks every time there’s an action shot.

It’s what Batman movies should have been all along. Forget your overblown villains with technicolor costumes. Forget the batbutts and batboobs and batplastic. I could ignore that the microwave device only vaporized water and did not cause the melting and sparking and painful death that a real one would have, because the rest of the movie was what it should have been.

I am totally Gary Oldman’s fangirl.

Christian Bale did it right. Kudos to him for showing the other bats how it’s done.

*hugs Alfred*

If you’re like me you probably saw the previews and said “eh.” But it’s worth a rental.

Why? Oh, lessee…. Cate Blanchett may not look like Kate Hepburn, but she sounded like her. Alec Baldwin’s pudgy self made a fairly good bigwig, Alan Alda made a good senator, and Brent Spiner showed up too. There were others who had us pointing at the screen going “it’s him! it’s her!” without the ability to articulate just who it was. Gwen Stefani was one of them.

There was a lot of good acting in this one. Even Leo DiCaprio did well. Rent it for the cameos, the love of Teh Hepburn, and the wonder of a millionnaire investing his all in things he believed in.

Good, but would have been better if there had been less of Jim Carrey and more of Count Olaf. Carrey can’t seem to get out of the way and let his character shine through. In movies where the character was written for him, he’s more successful.

I liked the kids - they were perfect for the roles. And in the outtakes on the DVD, Dustin Hoffman and Cedric have some hilarious bits.

Revenge against whom? What wrong was done in the first place that required revenge? There were hints but no real explanation of why the Sith were so dissatisfied with the status quo. They were in control and the whole universe other than a handful of malcontent Jedi saw Sidious as One of the Good Guys — guess Sidious, like Anakin, grew weary of hiding things. Otherwise why not let the galaxy continue to see certain Sith as good guys and avoid pesky rebellions?

Oy, the craziness of walking around on a spaceship that won’t sit up straight! Of course, how do they decide which way is up in space? All the time Anakin and Palpatine were running, then sliding, then falling down that shaft I was wondering - do they have artificial gravity, or don’t they? They’re not flying away from the side of the shaft, but the ship changes direction and suddenly the wall is the ceiling?

I wondered if the characters weren’t so much acting distressed and angsty as they were trying to save their character while being forced to mouth such clunky dialogue. The only ones who were even partly convincing were Palpatine and Obi-Wan, and when with either of those Anakin managed to improve. “Act like I’m angry/frustrated/distressed? Who needs to act? I hate this line!”

Padme sighing, crying, moping, swooning and dying for no reason? At least her daughter eventually gets to be intelligent. Let’s see — Anakin is chums with the chancellor. Padme sits in the senate chamber and says the Republic is doomed. Then she goes home and cries instead of finding her sekrit hubby and convincing him that his ‘chum’ is bad news? Is this the same chick we saw two movies ago? I seem to recall she wasn’t made of tissue paper before. She could be queen, and senator, and in charge - but she can’t go off somewhere to raise kids by herself. Right.

Was that a C section or a labor-and-deliver? It was so short, yet she yelled so much. Yet the babies looked *perfect.*

Yes, we can fight while surfing down a river of lava and still breathe. We’re Jedi, after all. *eyeroll*

Things I liked: I saw the Millenium Falcon! I want an iguana with gecko feet, big enough to saddle. The saber fight between Yoda and Palpatine was too cool. Ewan! Picturing certain conservatives saying some of the lines given to Sith had its own appeal.

Things I lampooned: Anakin = the black knight? (\Python) “Overuse this sentence construction, I must. Lucas shows the limits of his creative genius, he does.” “Oh Ani… wait, I need to change clothes again, and wear all this jewelry to bed, and you stand over there and watch me brush my hair on the balcony while we read our lines from the teleprompter.”

Most overwhelming: The ships! Everywhere! All around! Too — much — activity — to — enjoy! AAAAH!

Most unconvincing: Anakin’s ten seconds of indecision when he realized that not letting Mace go through with the execution was not wise. He just bounced right up and volunteered for service to the Dark Side. And while we’re at it — the dark side of anything usually pretends it’s really the good side without the label and with less obvious manipulation.

Yeah, Anakin was young, and he kept saying it was for Padme. But that wasn’t very convincing, either. It seemed to me that the movie makers thought him to be entirely motivated by love for her, when a more believable motivation waited in the wings — his ego and his impatience with having to work for power the Jedi way.

Overall impression: It tried to do too much in too little time. It tried to be too many things at once, and ended up failing to do much more than stun with CGI and pathos.

Roommate’s nutshell analysis: “Lucas did better before he had all the special effects at his disposal. He had to tell a story then.”

Yes.

Eh.

I laughed. The movie flowed so smoothly I lost track of time. The special effects were primo. Loved Slartibartfast, and even though he didn’t look like Marvin, I liked the android, too. Ditto the ship, which most definitely did not look like a golden track shoe but was nevertheless tres cool. Mos Def as Ford reminded me of Cat (Red Dwarf), somewhat. Disliked Zaphod. There was lots that does not exist in the book, but that’s okay. Mr. Adams intended it that way, and lots of the book would have been just plain impossible. I think my favorite bit was when they came out of the improbability drive and were all turned to knitted figures. The Vogon/bureaucrats were hilarious. I liked the mice and their tiny animated mouths. Trillian was most convincing. Alan Rickman got the voice exactly right.

Did not like the condensed versions of some classic lines, but I’ll live.

I’d give it… 7 out of 10. It missed opportunities, I think.

Roommate wanted me to netflix Alien v. Predator, and said so with full disclosure that he didn’t expect it to be good. Expectations met.

Dizzying series of scenes in which we hop around the world meeting characters without hearing their names. Still don’t know them. Rich guy played by the same actor who played the android in the original Alien movie is launching an expedition, as his satellite found a hot spot where there was none. All of this is established in cut scenes that zip by so fast we don’t get any details about anything. They could be showing us satellite images of Aunt Petunia’s back yard pool.

There’s this pyramid under Antarctic ice that seems to be simultaneously Cambodian, Aztec and Egyptian. We know this because a scientist spouts confirmation, and that it predated all three civilizations, and thismustmeanit’sfromatimewhenAntarcticawasn’tundericethatwasalongtimeago. Got that?

Lots of transitional traveling shots. Icebreaker. Snowcats, showing as lights in a snowstorm. Mulder! Scully! No, wait, that was a more interesting movie. Snowcats. Cliff. Old whaling station. Snowcats moving between old buildings. Cut scene - alien ship firing through Earth’s atmosphere. Cut - people marveling at a tunnel drilled into ice. No one asks the logical questions in this movie! There’s a chunk of a roof of a nearby building, neatly burned away in a smooth crescent shape, and from the angle it came from - the sky! Who did this? No one even wants to know. Winches away, and down the ice tunnel they slide into a pyramid where blocks of stone rearrange themselves every ten minutes to create a different labyrinth of tunnels.

We’re shown the alien queen producing eggs, the hatching, the way humans were used to incubate aliens in a small chamber just for that purpose, and oh, I can read these hieroglyphics so well without the years of study that I can regurgitate a whole history of why this is happening. The shots of aliens battling predators is so lacking in what made the original alien movies suspenseful that we MST’d all the way through, barely wincing at the spearings and gore hitting the camera lens. There are no shadows, no creeping in darkness, no stealthy tracking and leaping out upon, no sense of the other — the alien queen runs just like the t-rex in Jurassic Park, which made us laugh. The Alien franchise may just be too overexposed by now to make anything like this work.

Rent if you enjoy cheeseball movies to mock and jeer at.

We went to see this last night. It was Roommate’s last day at Old Job o’ Hell ‘n Damnation, and I thought celebration was due. Plus, who wants to do homework? Why not let it pile up to impossibility?

Anyhow, it was a pretty good movie, if you liked Indiana Jones-type adventures. Fun adventure with some not-so-stereotypical-Hollywood stuff. The hero was wrong as often as he was right about things (”This metal’s too thick, their rounds won’t penetrate, we’ll just wait” bullets/small missles poke holes all around). The sidekick was quirky but not to the point of annoying, and was the actual “defuse the bomb” hero; it was all about the teamwork. The girl didn’t tag along for the entire movie, screaming and trying to run in high heels; she wore sensible shoes and had her own goals and hooked up with the guys just long enough to get where she was going, then the guys realized Bad Men were hunting for her and took off to help. Of course, the guys arrive just in time to save her - it’s the timing in the movie that’s improbable.

This also added one more tick mark on my tally of movies that use “Magic Carpet Ride” in the soundtrack. The soundtrack was off — I realized that unlike many adventures that feature adventure-y music throughout, this one relied on a variety of songs that see regular airplay in addition to bits of original score. It felt somehow unsettling to me.

Cinematography was nice; we weren’t treated to long unnecessary sequences, as scenes transitioned smoothly but succinctly to the next one, without a lot of intervening A Team constructathon scenes — which could have happened several times.

One funky/funny thing: McConaughey tans noticeably over the course of the movie, making his teeth seem whiter and whiter, but the sidekick and the girl stay the same. The tan had to be deliberate on the part of the moviemakers; movies are always filmed out of sync.

The hype was wrong. It’s not about finding treasure in the middle of the desert, so much as it is about all sorts of other things — how governments ignore environmental issues, how dictators need ousting, how irresponsiblity in utilizing Modern Techno Wizardry can create big messes that kill people, not to mention not all insurgents are bad…. The movie is peppered with near-humor and breathtaking shots of the desert, and the admiral our heroes worked for is still on their side even after they blow up his really slick boat. (The boat scene was incredible, btw.) Actually finding the treasure is less and less a focal point in the plot as the movie goes on, until the bad guys are chasing them down and presto! there it is.

Take popcorn and enjoy. Not a lot of gore and blood - violence is of the fireball and jerk-when-hit-by-bullets type. Indiana Jones would have been right at home.