Movies I want to see as of December 20

White Dog: How many movies on operant conditioning are there? After being released on the 2nd, it’s only just recently become available on NetFlix. (They’ve been offering it, but it’s been on “short wait” status for weeks.) Now if I can get through Prince of the City, I’ll finally be able to see it.

Last Year at Marienbad: An art-house classic of the 60’s, now impossible to find. Criterion Collection is working on a DVD release, but I’ve been waiting on it for months and they still haven’t announced a release date. Come on!

Ballast: I’m not sure what the plot is. But Roger Ebert gave it a rave review, and the few images I’ve seen from it look stunning. (I love overcast days; the light is always beautiful.)

A Girl Cut in Two: Contender for “Most Misogynistic-Sounding Title Ever?” Yes. But it sounds sexy and suspenseful. Hence, I must see it.

Let the Right One In: While everyone else at my high school goes to see Twilight, I’m enthused for a much grimmer-sounding, more brutal vampire film. Unfortunately, chances of it coming to theaters around here are slim, thanks to its Swedish origins and unlikeliness of being nominated for Oscars. Sniffle.

Rachel Getting Married: Being described as like a wedding you wish you could attend? I must see it.

The Wrestler: Darren Aronofsky making an unstylized movie? Mickey Rourke giving what’s considered the best performance of his career? Marisa Tomei getting naked again? Everything about this movie makes me want to see it more and more.

Milk: First off, it’s Gus Van Sant, who’s been making some very interesting movies lately. Second, it’s in San Francisco, a city I’ve fallen in love with. Third, it’s getting major Oscar buzz. I only hope the last one isn’t a “sorry about Brokeback Mountain” thing.

Slumdog Millionaire: More Oscar buzz! Plus hyper-stylized visuals! And a love story! Recommended by many! Exclamation marks!

My Winnipeg: Guy Maddin is my kind of oddball filmmaker, and My Winnipeg sounds like it will live up to Brand upon the Brain! in oddness. (Horse heads frozen above the surface of a lake? A soap opera with every episode starting with a woman talking a man off a ledge? The destruction of the newest parts of a hockey stadium while the old parts mysteriously stay up? Whee!)

"Diva," the Meridian Collection, and color correction

So Lionsgate (why is it just one word?) has begun a new DVD line called the Meridian Collection. Going by the name, the only conclusion I can come up with is that they're hoping to take a slice of the Criterion Collection's market. All I can say is, you need a lot more than that.

So far, they've released two movies: "The Red Violin" and "Diva." I've yet to see "The Red Violin," but would like to. However, I have the "Diva" DVD out from the library, and... dear heavens.

I'll give them one thing: They certainly have a thing for making impressive DVD covers. Both are striking, and catch your eye in a way that's not totally Criterion-like, but not the usual DVD way, either.

Putting the "Diva" DVD in and turning the player on, I remember one of the little details I love about Criterion: They don't waste time. When you put a Criterion in your DVD player and press play, it takes you straight to the menu. No FBI warning, no overblown company animation, just the menu. Here, we get an FBI warning, the Lionsgate company logo animation (with an additional bit of animating for the Meridian logo), and a disclaimer about the commentary not reflecting Lionsgate's opinions. I have to ask, how often do commentaries contain opinions that somebody says, "Is that really what the company thinks? I'll sue!" (I also find it even funnier when they go so far as to say that all the content, even the movie itself, doesn't reflect their opinions. That's just amazing.)

Furthermore, the menus on Criterions aren't overly elaborate. There's usually not much animation, and what little there is is done subtly. When you choose to go to the movie, or another menu, it also takes you straight there, with no animation to transition. Here, we get silly transitions and an animated menu (of a chase scene from the movie). This may seem like I'm being nitpicky, but let's face it, if they are trying to be a high-end DVD collection, they need to be different from other overblown DVD packages. Criterion has the right idea: Less is more.

I choose "play movie." Thankfully, there aren't more disclaimers; it takes me straight to the movie. And that's where my jaw drops.

The movie looks awful. There's a green tint to the opening scene; the flesh tones don't look right. Again, I sound nitpicky, but I get the feeling that with a copy of Final Cut Pro, I could've done a better job color-correcting than they did. Compare it to a Criterion: Their early days apparently had some iffy image quality (notably on the first edition of "Salo," which also had a green tint, much more pronounced than here), but nowadays, their DVDs look pretty much flawless. Looking at "Before the Rain" earlier, I was struck by how clear it looked. With "Diva," it looks like the DVD of "My Dinner with Andre," which is a seriously damaging flaw. It looks like they used a poorly-managed print for the transfer, which would already be bad enough. The fact that Rialto Pictures had a restored print struck makes the picture quality even more absurd and sad.

I went to DVD Beaver today to investigate. They pointed out other flaws that I would never have noticed (horizontal stretching, for example). In their comparison between three different DVDs, they recommended an earlier edition from Anchor Bay over the Meridian; judging from the images, it looks tons better. I notice that NetFlix has the Anchor Bay edition's cover for the movie image. Perhaps I should check that one out.

Making the DVD even more depressing is the Meridian's edition of "The Red Violin." Looking at DVD Beaver's page for that, the image is fantastic. Well, maybe not necessarily Criterion quality (can you tell I'm obsessed with the Criterion Collection?), but compared to earlier editions, it looks brighter, clearer, and much better overall. In fact, they recommended the Meridian over previous editions except in the audio department, where they chose an earlier edition for its DTS mix. Considering that I'm not a DTS guy, I can live without it; I certainly know what I'm going to look for next time I'm at the library. In the meantime, I'm returning "Diva." It's a shameful DVD.

A Literal Medium, or why I hated "Atonement" and its ending

So I had the bright idea to see every movie nominated for Best Picture of 2007. Amazingly, I've found that most of the best movies weren't nominated. (In a year with Bug, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Across the Universe and Into the Wild, what the hell did Juno do that made it better?) Like many other art-hating philistines, I didn't "get" the ending of No Country for Old Men. There Will Be Blood felt unfocused, though I'm sure it would be better on a second viewing (and if I had to see any of them again, that would be the one). Michael Clayton was merely okay, without much really putting it ahead of the pack. Juno... Juno just sucks. (Seriously, is it too much to ask for one character that doesn't talk like a MySpace page?)

I'd saved Atonement for last. This was mainly circumstancial; it was the second to get to DVD, and passed the cheap theaters I saw all but Juno at. So I ended up waiting until I found a copy at my local library to check it out. And... it's pretty bad.

I originally wrote a big long dissertation on the film's flaws, but I've since moved that to the review blog. If you must, read it here.

I'd just like to warn anybody who hasn't seen Atonement and still wants to for some reason, I'm going to discuss the ending. Be warned.

Little Sister has also become a nurse, writing in her spare time. One day, she sees a newsreel and realizes that the real rapist was a friend of their uncle's, who's now married the little girl. Little Sister visits Older Sister and Gardener. They're mad, but advise her on what to do about FLASH FORWARD! (Yeah, it's about as sudden in the movie.) Little Sister is now an old woman, a novelist with Alzheimer's, who's written about the incident in her new novel. In the interview, she reveals the ending of her own book (that'll be good for sales!), and the Big Shocking Twist of the movie.

That scene with Older Sister and the Gardener? It didn't really happen. It was fictional. Both of them died in the war, so she wrote the story's ending to give them the ending they truly deserved.

Excuse me while I throw the disc out the window.

For pete's sake, people. This is just as bad as the ending of The Usual Suspects; I haven't seen that one, but let's face it, everybody knows that Kevin Spacey was Keyser Soze all along. The thing is, he's been telling a story all along where he isn't, which basically means that all of the story he's been telling is in question. What was true, and what wasn't? Roll credits before anybody can figure it out!

That ending, along with the ending of The Sixth Sense, might be responsible for every damn horror movie nowadays being required to have a stupid twist ending. (The worst is likely Perfect Stranger, where after having investigated for the whole damn movie, it turns out Halle Berry committed the murder. This seems oddly relevant.) But you know what I like about The Sixth Sense's ending? Predictable as it is now in retrospect, it made sense. The movie didn't cheat; they went and put little hints in all the way through. Atonement makes no such hint at the ending, probably because it's impossible to hint at.

The thing is, film is a very literal medium. We have to be able to trust that what we're seeing is true, because if it isn't, why are we seeing it? We want to be shown what happened, not what didn't happen.

The ending could have worked if the movie had played fair. If they had admitted that the characters were dead before the fictional scene, I wouldn't have had a problem. But apparently, an honest ending would have been too much to ask for. After all, once they'd come up with such a clever idea, why let anything like an audience's intelligence stop it?

Pixar's 'Up'

It's too bad that Pixar only makes one movie every year. If they could make twice as many, that would be awesome.

"WALL-E," while not their best, was amazing. And now a teaser for their next one, entitled Up, has been released. In spite of the premise of lifting a house using normal balloons being rather absurd (because people who make movies about toys coming to life clearly care about realism), the simple teaser makes me want to see it so much.

Supposedly, there have been people grumbling about Pixar. Apparently, they don't think people would want to see a movie about a senior citizen coping with his wife's death. Ignoring the fact that they're more excited about "Bolt" (a dull-looking 'factory' movie), how do people think that Pixar's off-the-track storytelling will damage them? Right from the beginning of their feature-film output, they've gone as far away from the typical "believe-in-yourself" morals that most animated movies have. Their stories are usually different from the normal ones. Apparently, continuing on this track is bad, never mind how well it's served them before.

I'm sure that they'll hide the story about death in advertising. (The teaser focuses on the much-easier-to-digest idea of a house floating into the air.) But they've done this with their previous movie, "WALL-E." They didn't make it clear in the advertising that I saw that the first 30 minutes were close to silent-film ideals of visual storytelling over dialogue-based. Nobody's complaining too much about that. If anybody can make an odd, potentially depressing story work, it's Pixar.