Movies About Steak Sauce
Friday, April 29, 2011
The Nintendo 3DS: Bring us 3D movies already!
Friday, April 8, 2011
Restarting my blog on film
Monday, January 19, 2009
The best movies I saw in 2008
CQ: This would get five stars just for the extra feature of the "Agent Dragonfly" movie on the flipside of the DVD; it captures that Danger: Diabolik feel perfectly. The entire movie is just so much dang fun.
Idiocracy: Is it a brilliant satire of anti-intellectualistic culture, or a hypocritical crude comedy? Speaking as someone who had to watch a Larry the Cable Guy movie, I put my vote firmly in the satire camp. Not to mention just how utterly, utterly quotable it is ("It's got what plants crave! And I ain't never seen no plant growing out of no toilet!"). Great comedy, severely undernoticed.
Into the Wild: I'm rather amazed by some people who have criticized the movie for glorifying Christopher McCandless. Sure, it doesn't go out of its way to point out all of his mistakes like the book did, but it doesn't make him out to be the Patron Saint of Anticonsumerism like some people would argue. A touching, beautiful film.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: This movie and The Apartment are neck-and-neck in my favorite Christmas movies. Like Idiocracy, it's so very quotable ("I was wetter than Drew Barrymore at a grunge club"), and very funny, with the fourth-wall-breaking being the best part.
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters: A truly stunning biopic. Sure, some artist biopics would show the works of their subjects, but how many would actually adapt them into the story of the film? This, plus the rather avant-garde style, makes it truly astounding.
Oldboy: Probably the best of Park Chan-Wook's vengeance trilogy (Lady Vengeance comes close, and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is simply meh). A remake is in the works, but I doubt that American audiences could take it seriously. After all, violence is sort of fetishized and humorous in American movies; here, it's brutal and disturbing. And since I like disturbing stuff, I like this.
Once: It's sort of funny that Once and Across the Universe came out in the same year; they're similar, yet so very different. Across the Universe went above and beyond the overstated musical numbers and stories of modern times; Once took them both into understated, subtle territories. Both are great movies. Both are worth seeing.
Running Scared: I've been getting into wild, over-the-top action films lately. (More on this later.) Running Scared (not to be confused with the Richard Pryor comedy) is one of the first I saw, and its combination of Refuge in Audacity (there's a subplot about serial-killing kiddie pornographers! A subplot!), hyperstylization and taut suspense puts it on top.
Snow Angels: A few days ago, kids in one of my classes were discussing sad movies. I resisted mentioning this one. A realistic tragedy, and probably the best of David Gordon Green's work so far (the out-of-left-field Pineapple Express not being included, since I haven't seen it yet).
State and
Runners up:
American Graffiti: A great portrait of the 60s.
Iron Man: Between this and WALL-E, I have two favorites of '08 so far.
Shoot ‘Em Up: Like Running Scared, minus any semblance of seriousness and ten times the absurdity.
Shopgirl: Now that Steve Martin seems to only be doing family movies, this may be his last mature movie. Sigh.
Slipstream: Sure, there may be a lot of hyperstylized movies out there, but how many actually have the entire movie rewinding underneath the end credits?
The Court Jester: My first Danny Kaye movie, and it's a damn good one.
The Grand: Yet another endlessly quotable movie ("Mom, if I were a cooking critic, I would give your cooking five stars--five stars which would collapse into black holes and create the biggest gravitational field in the universe").
The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Sexy yet beautiful.
The War of the Roses: A pitch-black comedy, and yet another quotable movie ("There is no winning! Only degrees of losing!").
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Movies I want to see as of December 20
Sunday, September 7, 2008
"Diva," the Meridian Collection, and color correction
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.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
A Literal Medium, or why I hated "Atonement" and its ending
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?
Monday, July 28, 2008
Pixar's 'Up'
"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.