Unnamed Movie Meme
Continuing with the Light 'n' Fluffy content, Larry at Welcome to LA offers us a movie meme:
September 9, 2008
September 8, 2008
Godzilla Meets His Fans
Because it's turning out to be kind of a silly day anyhow, I thought I'd post this charming behind-the-scenes photo of Godzilla taking time out from his busy filming schedule to shake some hands and sign some autographs:
More great Godzilla photos here, if you like this sort of thing. And you know you do...
September 4, 2008
Metropolis Rediscovered!
The previous entry reminds me of an item I meant to post some time ago but let slide, another story about a cinematic treasure turning up in an unexpected place. This time, it's a complete print of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, which has not seen in its long-form version for 80 years.
Unseen Film Footage of Marilyn Monroe Up for Auction
I love stories like this: behind-the-scenes film footage of Marilyn Monroe playing with Tony Curtis on the San Diego beach location for Some Like It Hot has surfaced... in Australia, of all places. It's a two-and-a-half-minute reel of 8mm that was shot in 1959 by a sailor Marilyn had met and invited to the set; the reel, still in its original Kodak box, was passed on to the sailor's daughter after his death, and she's now putting it up for auction, ostensibly because she thinks it "might be of some significance to the film world." (Um, yeah, and the fact that similar amateur footage of Marilyn on the set of The Misfits was auctioned for $60K earlier this year had no bearing on this magnanimous gesture? Sure...)
Regardless of the motivation behind the auction, I hope the footage is made available to the public after the sale. I'm not a huge Marilyn fan -- I've never bought into that particular cult of celebrity, for some reason -- but I do enjoy glimpses of the stars "off-stage," as it were, especially from the days before behind-the-scenes material was commonplace. Also, Some Like It Hot is one of my favorite films, and this footage is reportedly in color, which will be interesting to see as the movie itself is black and white.
It just amazes me that treasures like this are lurking out there in people's attics and closets...
[Incidentally, the photo up there at the top has nothing to do with this story, aside from it being a picture of Marilyn Monroe, but it's one I've been meaning to post up for a while. It amuses me to see that even an icon of the stature of Humphrey freaking Bogart was still just a guy, and got caught doing exactly what any other guy would do if they found themselves sitting next to Marilyn Monroe...]
September 3, 2008
The Man Behind the Dreaded "Floating Head" Movie Posters!
As with so many other things that were much, much cooler twenty or thirty years ago, movie posters these days are pretty uninspired. It used to be that even the lowest-budget drive-in fodder was advertised with beautiful, colorful painted-art collages. That was before Photoshop and rock-bottom-line thinking took hold in the industry, though. These days, the dominant aesthetic -- if you could call it that -- is all about headshots of the cast. Here's a video introduction to the master of that particular craft:
See more funny videos at Funny or Die
Oh, yes, another classic collectible is born.
I think I'll stick with the vintage stuff, thanks.
Via.
August 14, 2008
Five Movies Meme
I've found another movie meme over at Electronic Cerebrectomy, and like SamuraiFrog, the proprietor of that fine web establishment, I just can't resist a halfway-decent movie meme. So...
August 11, 2008
Movies from Books Meme
I've missed out on a lot of intriguing memes lately because I haven't had the time to comment on lengthy lists of stuff, so when I spotted a fairly short one over at SF Signal, I figured I'd better grab it. It's about sci-fi movies based on books...
[Update: Looks like I was having a moment of extreme dumbness when when I posted this last night -- instead of doing as the third rule asks and italicizing only the movie titles for which which I started the book but didn't finish it, I italicized all of the titles. Because they're titles and you're supposed to italicize those. Doh! Anyway, they're fixed now, if it matters to anyone...]
The Rules are Simple...
Just for fun, here's the prologue from Escape from New York, which explains the premise behind the film:
As I said in the previous entry, this was pretty mind-bending stuff when I was a wee lad. It still raises the hair on my arms, to be honest. It's perfectly executed, with its combination of groovy early-80s synth music, imitation computer graphics (hand-drawn animation, I believe), and the perfect female voiceover artist... not to mention the tongue-in-cheek irony of "Liberty Island Security Control." It's a bloody shame Hollywood has forgotten how to make solidly entertaining B-grade fare like this, which was well aware of its basic silliness but still managed to somehow be thought-provoking and cool, unlike most of the A-level spectaculars we get nowadays.
But then I'm well on my way to grumpy-old-manhood, and I suppose this is just another case of getting uptight at the damn kids playing on my lawn...
August 1, 2008
The Scouring of the Shire
A couple years ago, I took note of a new housing development in Bend, Oregon, that was to be modeled after the bucolic Shire of Tolkien's (and Peter Jackson's) Lord of the Rings. I recall being both intrigued by and dubious of the project, writing at the time that:
...it would be the ultimate in geek bragging rights, I suppose. "Hey, look, I live in a hobbit hole!" But ultimately, it just seems a little too contrived to be desirable...
Turns out everybody else agreed with me. Today, I read the bank is foreclosing on The Shire. Only two homes (of a planned 31) have been finished, and only one of those has actually sold. The developer behind the project, Ron Meyers, is quoted as saying, "Some people were turned off by living in 'Disneyland.'"
Um... yeah. You didn't think of that before you took out massive loans and broke ground? And you didn't consider that the sorts of people who might like to live in a Disney-style re-creation of a fictional place probably don't have the income to buy million-dollar homes? Seems to me that folks who have that kind of scratch are usually interested in something a little less... gimmicky.
Somebody didn't do their market research, it seems...
July 26, 2008
More Metal
Ever since I stumbled across that trailer Thursday, I've had the movie Heavy Metal on the brain. Not an entirely unpleasant situation, but definitely a little outside my usual obsessions...
Anyway, I tried talking about it to a few of my friends at work and found, much to my surprise, that this movie doesn't seem to be very well remembered. I didn't expect the kids in the office to know about it, but even the older guys could only scratch their heads and say they think they saw it and they kind of remember it, but not really. And here I've believed all these years that it was a minor touchstone for my generation, not on the level of Star Wars or even Tron, but at least equivalent to Caddyshack. Once again, however, I seem to find myself the Lone Keeper of Obsolete Pop Culture.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised in the case of Heavy Metal. It's not exactly a great classic, even by "cult classic" standards.
July 24, 2008
It's Your One-Way Ticket to Midnight
Today is Pioneer Day, a Utah state holiday commemorating the arrival of the first Mormon settlers here in the Salt Lake Valley. If you're from around here, you know what it's all about, but for my out-of-state readers I should explain that this day is basically an end-of-the-month do-over of the Fourth of July: we have a big parade in the morning, then picnics in the park, carnivals, day-long activities for the kids, and finally, fireworks at night. (There are some who grumble, in fact, that Utahns make a bigger deal of our local founder's day than our nation's Independence Day and that this indicates there's some lingering whiff of treason in Mormon culture. Personally, I think folks just like fireworks and parades.) Anyway, most of the state's population seems to have the day off... but not me. Nope, I work for The Man. Which means I'm sitting at my workstation, same as always, trying not to listen to the drums of the marching band a mere half-block away...
You know, on these hot summer days when responsibilities keep me inside drudging away at my desk instead of out playing as I'd like to be, my mind tends to wander back to my carefree adolescent years, when all I really had to think about was the anticipation of getting my driver's license and the beguiling, inscrutable mystery of girls. Oh, and of nonsense like this:
That's actually a trailer for the late-90s home-video release of Heavy Metal, not the original theatrical version from 1981, but as I recall the vintage advertising wasn't too different. You have no idea how exciting this movie looked to me when I was twelve. An R-rated cartoon? With aliens and starships and rock music and the possibility of... boobies?! It was utterly mind-blowing... and of course, there was no way my mom was going to let me see it, not with that R rating and those danged cartoon boobies. The innuendo in Moonraker had been bad enough. And so it was a long, long time before I would see Heavy Metal in its entirety (I think I was in my twenties before I finally caught it at a midnight screening), and naturally, after all those years of build-up, it turned out to be something of a disappointing mess. Ah, but the images and the music... man, that stuff lives on in my memory as a touchstone of all that was simultaneously cool and tacky about the early '80s.
Yeah... summer days in 1981...
From somewhere outside my office, I can hear that the parade carries on...
July 23, 2008
In Lieu of an Actual Entry...
It's another of those crazy-making weeks that offers little chance to blog (and naturally, these are the weeks when I seem to have the most I want to blog about -- this is an immensely frustrating situation, believe me), so to keep you entertained until I manage to actually, you know, write something, allow me to direct your attention to Jaime J. Weinman's rationalization of how he can call Moonraker the dumbest James Bond movie ever (even over Die Another Day!) and yet still feel a certain affection for it:
...it's just so very good-natured and unpretentious in its desire to do anything to entertain; it wants you to like it so badly and will do anything to be liked, whether it's repeating the plot of a movie made two years earlier or turning a psychotic killer into a kid-friendly romantic comedy lead. I can't help but be a little charmed by a movie that's so anxious to be loved; today, when a blockbuster movie is bad, it's just loud and obnoxious, demanding our attention rather than giving us beautiful things to look at. Moonraker is like [director] Lewis Gilbert's home movies reel of cool stuff [production designer] Ken Adam built; that's enough to keep it out of Die Another Day purgatory.
For the record, I, too, harbor some warm feelings for Moonraker. It was the first Bond movie I ever saw; my mother took me and a half-dozen of my friends to see it for my tenth birthday. She was mortified by all the innuendo in the dialogue, certain that she would be getting some nasty phone calls from other mothers once my buddies started repeating things we'd heard, but we didn't care about all that mushy stuff -- in those days of the post-Star Wars space-movie craze, we were only there for the shuttles and lasers.
You might also want to check out I Expect You to Die!, an entertaining blog whose proprietor is reviewing one Bond flick a week until the release of the next one, Quantum of Solace, this fall. He's also doing additional commentary on certain related issues, such as the amusing (and dead-on) observation that the Bond-o-verse invariably presents Americans as bumbling yokels, and yet American audiences love the series anyhow.
I hope to be back later today with some thoughts on last weekend's concert experience...
July 10, 2008
This Ought to Be Good...
A number of movie blogs are reporting that Quentin Tarantino's long-gestating World War II project Inglorious Bastards might be finally sputtering to life. My sharp-eyed loyal readers are aware, of course, that I don't much care for Tarantino films, but I find I'm looking forward to this one, for no other reason than to hear the fulminating reactions of the local prude brigades when the word "bastards" goes up on theater marquees all over the valley...
In the words of the immortal Bugs Bunny, "ain't I a stinker?"
July 8, 2008
Kevin Bacon's Birthday and a Footloose Remake?
So, I was just out to my mom's place and happened to catch a few minutes of EntertainmentInsideHollywoodAccessTonight, and what I heard during those few minutes utterly blew my mind: today is Kevin Bacon's fiftieth birthday.
Let me repeat that: Kevin Bacon -- one of my favorite actors, the star of one of my favorite movies (Footloose), the guy who brought to life the quintessential 1980s "rebel with a cause" (Ren McCormack, one of my many heroes during my high school years), the guy who everyone else is only six degrees away from -- has just hit the half-century mark.
And if that isn't alarming enough, they also said that there's a big-screen remake of Footloose in the works starring the tween sensation du jour, Zac Efron.
I'm going to go lie down with a cool cloth on my head now. God, I feel old...
July 7, 2008
Awesome Indy Posters by Eric Tan
Speaking of Indiana Jones, here are a couple of items I meant to post a month ago but didn't get around to:
Life's Tough for an Adventurer...
You know, everybody thinks it'd be so awesome to live a life of adventure and derring-do, but have you thought about the practical considerations, the real-life inconveniences of having Nazis, commies, aliens, zombies, and indigenous tribespeople always trying to punch your timecard? Consider how your simplest daily activities would change if you really were Indiana Jones...
What a pain, eh?
Via.
June 27, 2008
Top 100 of the Last 25
Great, more lists. This time we're looking at Entertainment Weekly's Top 100 Movies and Top 100 Books of the last 25 years. I'm not going to quibble with the actual rankings of these titles, since such things are almost entirely subjective in my opinion. My super-bestest faves aren't likely to be yours, after all. But what I will do is follow in Jaquandor's footsteps and bold the titles I've seen or read, with occasional commentary when I have something to say.
Chick Flicks and Making Men Cry
There seem to have been a lot of "list memes" floating around lately, that is, lists of book or movie titles that compulsive bloggers such as myself then feel, um, compelled to comment upon. Here are a couple I recently picked up from Jaquandor and SamuraiFrog, respectively...
June 13, 2008
Ouch
Quote:
If M. Night Shyamalan's new movie, "The Happening," only cost $500 to produce, was made on scratchy 16mm film and cast the late Bela Lugosi, it would be a thousand times more charming than the utter disaster it is now.
June 12, 2008
The First Sickness Cinema Meme
Another movie meme, again via SamuraiFrog, whose post is only one generation removed from the original source of this one. I'm not familiar with The Sickness Cinema blog, but I like their touch with a meme. So, without further ago, The First (as in inaugural) Sickness Cinema Meme:
Cinememe
I've seen an unusual number of attractive movie-related memes over the last couple of weeks, but, as you may have noticed, I've been somewhat preoccupied with other matters. Still, no good meme can go unmeme'd, so bear with me now as I launch into a veritable orgy of meme-ing. Or something to that effect. Basically, I'm trying to warn you that there's a mess o' memeage coming down the chute. But you probably gathered that already, didn't you?
The first up is a pretty high-falutin' one that I borrowed from SamuraiFrog. What do I mean by high-falutin'? Well, just wait until you see some of the questions and then tell me that anyone but a total film fanatic and/or snob would even know who or what they're about. I don't think anyone would consider me a slouch in the film-buff department, and even I had to look up quite a few of these. Nevertheless, I gave it a shot...
June 6, 2008
Spent My Evenings Down at the Drive-In
Briefly noted, today is the 75th anniversary of the first drive-in movie theater, which opened June 6, 1933, in Camden, New Jersey. I've never been a regular patron of drive-ins, but I have had a few memorable experiences at them -- no, you may not ask me to elaborate on those -- and of course I'm always a bleeding-heart for anything that's both nostalgic and endangered, which drive-ins definitely are. (There are fewer than 500 left today, down from some 5,000 in their heyday.)
Wired.com has a short history of this venerable institution, and local movie critic Sean Means lists the surviving Utah examples on his blog. I recommend the Motor Vu in Erda, for what it's worth; The Girlfriend and I spent a very pleasant evening there last summer with her family, all of whom live nearby. It's a family-run single-screener, charmingly low-budget and down-home feeling.
One moment in particular from that night stands out: as the darkness thickens and a cool breeze begins to rise from the surrounding farmland, I notice a freight train chugging along the benches of the mountain range to the east, behind the screen. It's far enough away that it looks like a black thread with a light at its tip, sliding along beneath the huge, projected face of Johnny Depp, the mournful cry of its horn providing counterpoint to Captain Jack Sparrow's dire circumstances (we were seeing Pirates 3, of course; I have to say, it worked much better as drive-in fare than it did the first time we saw it in a quote-unquote real theater). That, my friends, is one of those rare moments when you start to think time travel might actually be possible, when you find yourself connected by experience to an audience that would've been experiencing more or less the same thing 50 years earlier. Moments like those are truly magical and all-too-rare these days.
May 26, 2008
Guys with Too Much Time on Their Hands
I'm sure you're dying to know what I thought, so here's the short version: I liked Crystal Skull well enough, but I didn't love it. I had some reservations, and some things I wanted to take a couple of days to think about before I posted anything.
While you wait for the longer review -- because I know everyone out there in InternetLand is waiting with bated breath for my humble opinion of a movie you've probably all seen by now anyway -- allow me to entertain you with the following video clip, relayed to me this morning by Brian Greenberg:
People are weird...
Update: Doh! BoingBoing is reporting that this video is a viral marketing campaign from an agency that has the LucasArts games account. And as it so happens, there is an Indiana Jones LEGO game coming out in a couple of weeks to tie in with the release of Crystal Skull. So... it looks like I got taken, kids, used against my will and without my knowledge to spread the word about a product I will see no profit from myself and have no interest in helping to promote. And I have to admit, I'm feeling pretty damn annoyed about that.
In the interest of full disclosure, my own employer has been involved in creating several viral campaigns, but personally, I just don't "get" this sort of marketing. It seems to me that there's something sneaky about it, like you're trying to fool people into listening to a pitch, and very often the pitch is so subtle that the commercial message doesn't come through anyhow. If you have to really dig into the background of a video clip or a web site to find out there's something being sold there, how can you say that your message is being effectively delivered? How many people really exert that kind of effort? And isn't there a potential backlash against the product that's being advertised when people do realize that that funny clip they've been passing around to their friends is just another freakin' ad? I know I'd feel a little bit scammed and a hell of a lot less charitable toward Product X. Just like I'm feeling right now about freakin' Lego video games...
May 23, 2008
Indy and Me
The funny thing is, I don't even remember seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark when it first came out. That's odd for me, because I can recall the circumstances and specific theaters where I saw every other major landmark film of my childhood: the Star Wars trilogy, the early Star Trek films, Superman, Tron, The Black Hole, hell, even Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. But not Raiders.
May 22, 2008
Drive-By Blogging 7: The Quickening
Sharing a few of the items that have caught my eye in the last couple of weeks:
Today's the Day!
Even as I type this, Dr. Jones is cracking his ratty old whip in theaters across the land and reviews are generally (thankfully) positive. Due to a cruel twist of fate, however, I won't be seeing it until tomorrow night, so all you folks out there who've already been just hold your tongues around me, okay? Okay!
In the meantime, let's all get in the mood with this catchy little ditty:
May 15, 2008
Mormon Horror Movies
Eric D. Snider, a BYU alum who managed to escape from Happy Valley and find happiness and success as a film critic in the Pacific Northwest, still enjoys making the occasional good-natured jibe at the culture he left behind. Today, he offers us his suggestions for a whole new genre of filmmaking: the Mormon horror movie...
[Ed. note: these probably won't make sense to anyone who hasn't grown up behind the Zion Curtain, but trust me, to those in the know, this is good stuff...]
“Children of the Quorum”
“Friday the 31st” (aka “Home Teaching Day”)
“Pet Seminary”
“Enrichment Night of the Living Dead”
“I Know What You Did Last Summer, and I’m Telling Your Bishop”
“The (CTR) Ring”
“Rosemary’s Baby, Which is Her Fourth, and She’s Only 23″
“The Hills Have Tithes”
May 14, 2008
It's as if They're Marketing Directly to Me!
The travel site Expedia really knows how to push my buttons: they're now offering "Indiana Jones Travel Experiences," i.e., trip itineraries to India, Egypt, Italy, China, Jordan, Mexico, Peru, or the American Southwest, all places that have some kind of tie-in to the four Indy movies, and all of course intended to cash in on the marketing push surrounding Crystal Skull. Just book me for one big package that includes every one of these... and curse my movie-fueled imagination!
(Actually, the Southwestern destinations are all within a day's drive of me, so we can forget that one... but the others? One of these days, my friends, one of these days...)
Nice site design, anyhow.
May 12, 2008
Speed Racer: A Future Classic?
The weekend box office results are in, and The Wachowski Brothers' live-action remake of the old Speed Racer cartoon is looking to be a total bomb. Doesn't surprise me in the least, as the previews made it look (to this grumpy old curmudgeon, at least) like a blur of meaningless color and noise that nobody would remember five minutes after leaving the theater, let alone a year from now. Peter David, however, liked the film and has a different prediction of how Speed Racer will fare long-term:
...I realized a lot of this negativism was sounding familiar to me. Too long. Too loud. Too overwhelming visually with lots of mindless sound and fury signifying nothing. And I realized where and when I had heard it all before:
"Blade Runner."
Critics and fans leveled many of the same complaints at "Blade Runner," comparing it unfavorably to other then-popular SF films, and it was crushed at the box office by a powerhouse called "E.T." "Blade Runner" tanked.
Yet over time it was seen as visionary, and its stylings le[f]t an indelible impression on fans and future filmmakers. Any number of dramatic endeavors have the visual stamp of "Blade Runner" upon them. ...I suspect you're going to see tricks from "Speed Racer" showing up in other films in the next years, and it's going to be one of those movies in which, years from now, film students are going to be seeing the basis for many subsequent films.
Well, maybe. You never know what's going to inspire today's kids when they become tomorrow's filmmakers, and it's tough to predict how any given thing is going to look after 10 or 20 years of hindsight. Still, I can see one big difference between Speed Racer in the year 2008 and Blade Runner in the year 1981:
I wanted to see Blade Runner...
May 8, 2008
The Greatest Bond Movie Never Made
One of the little games I enjoy is trying to imagine what iconic movie characters would've been like if they'd been played by someone other than whoever made them into icons. For example, I think everyone knows that Tom Selleck would've been Indiana Jones if CBS hadn't held him to his Magnum contract, and that Ronald Reagan was once considered for Bogart's signature role, Rick Blaine in Casablanca. (For the record, I think Selleck would've made a fine Indy, but nobody today would remember Casablanca if Reagan had played Rick. Just my opinion, of course...)
Somewhat lesser known is that Nick Nolte was considered for Han Solo, and that Luke and Leia could just as easily have been played by William Katt (of The Greatest American Hero fame) and Spielberg's one-time girlfriend, Amy Irving, rather than Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher.
One of the most intriguing possibilities, however, is the notion that Cary Grant could've been the original James Bond. That seems startling at first, given the lightweight stuff that Grant is mostly remembered for, but I really think it might have worked. I've long thought that North by Northwest has much the same tone and style as Dr. No, and I believe Grant could've played brutality if the script had called for it. Someone else apparently thinks so, too. Here's a video compilation that gives you a taste of what might have been:
The Audience is Listening
The image you see up there at the top of this entry is a poster I remember well from my younger days, when I was working at that infamous movie theater I've mentioned many times before. You see, back in the late '80s, THX sound was still quite the novelty, at least in these parts, and my theater -- the first in Utah to boast a THX-certified auditorium -- used to heavily promote the system. This item, which the manager would occasionally throw up in one of the one-sheet cases when he didn't have any interesting new movie posters to display, attempted to explain to average movie-goers why sound is a critical part of their viewing experience, and how a THX-certified system enhances that experience.
I was always weirdly fond of this poster. I was proud of that whole "first in Utah" thing and thrilled to be a booster for both my employer and a division of Lucasfilm, a company that at that time could do no wrong in my eyes. And of course it amused my inner fanboy that the little cartoon audience on the poster is watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
I don't know what happened to that poster. A lot of one-sheets from the theater found their way into the hands of me and my co-workers, so I wouldn't be surprised to hear that one of my buddies ended up with it, but if that's the case, I don't know about it. Whatever happened, it eventually stopped appearing in the one-sheet cases, and then I eventually left that job and now damn near 20 years have passed. I probably haven't seen this particular poster since 1991 or thereabouts.
This morning, I happened to run across a source that is selling them. Not reproductions, but actual vintage posters. I was immediately tempted to pull out the credit card, but... it's been a long time since I impulse-bought any collectible stuff with no practical value, and I wasn't sure if it was a good idea or something I'd come to regret. Lately I've been thinking again that I ought to be liquidating some (most) of the crap down in the Bennion Archive (a.k.a., my basement), not adding to it. Unsure of what to do, I called The Girlfriend for advice. I told her what the item was and why it tempted me (i.e., it's both a sentimental relic from my theater days and an Indiana Jones collectible). Here's how our conversation went:
May 4, 2008
This Makes Me Happy
You may have noticed that I'm not always the world's cheeriest person. What can I say? I think too much and life has a tendency of getting me down. But every once in a while something comes along that wipes away all the gunge for a brief time and leaves me, to borrow a phrase some of you out there will easily identify, giddy as a schoolboy:
If you you look back through the archives of Simple Tricks, you'll see quite an evolution regarding this movie. At first, I wanted nothing to do with a fourth Indiana Jones flick. I didn't see any need for one and I had no confidence that G. Lucas could pull it off. My position gradually weakened as filming began and I started seeing stills from the new movie. And now... maybe it's just simple Pavlovian conditioning keyed to a familiar theme song, but this trailer causes me to break out in a big ol' grin every time I watch it... and I've watched it about a dozen times now since a crappy phone-cam bootleg of it surfaced on Friday night. Screw Iron Man, I'm ready for some Jones! Only 17 days to go...
April 28, 2008
The '08 Summer Season: I'm Already Saying "Meh"
The first summer I worked at that movie theater job I'm always yammering on about was amazing. It was amazing for a lot of reasons: I had my first "real" job, I was positively goofy about this particular girl I happened to know, and I was making friendships with a posse of guys I'm still friendly with nearly 20 years later... it was simply one of the best times of my life. But one of the biggest reasons the summer of '89 was so great was that the movies that were running in the background of all those coming-of-age moments were great, too. I've never done the research, so this is entirely subjective on my part, but I can't think of any other summertime movie season that has been so chock-full of flicks that were both (a) immensely successful and (b) so damn good (or at least so really damn enjoyable, which isn't necessarily the same thing). The line-up for the Memorial-Day-to-Labor-Day period that year included: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Batman, Lethal Weapon 2, Dead Poets Society, The Abyss, License to Kill, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, When Harry Met Sally..., and probably a dozen more I'm not remembering right now. There were just so many titles coming out that summer that caught my -- and everybody else's -- attention, and we at the theater were all so aware of what was coming up. I miss being so plugged in to the scene. Or to any scene, really. Every weekend brought some new wonder, some new zap of electric anticipation for both us theater-drones and the patrons queuing up in the lobby. It was an exciting time to be working in the movie industry, and to be a movie fan.
However, at the risk of sounding like a grumpy old curmudgeon who's always going on about how much better things were back in his day, it's been one long, slow downward slope ever since. I still reflexively get excited at the approach of the summer season, but year by year, summer by summer, the ratio of disappointment to awesomeness has been creeping upwards. Worse, it's getting to the point where the upcoming releases aren't even that interesting to begin with. (Of course, this problem isn't confined to just the summer months; The Girlfriend and I used to go to the movies at least once a week, and sometimes two or three times, but over the last couple of years we've scaled back to about once a month. And it's not because we're all that busy -- although we are -- it's mostly a function of how few flicks are coming out that we really want to see...)
Let's examine this summer's schedule (which officially kicks off this Friday with the release of Iron Man) and see what catches our eye, shall we?
Continue reading "The '08 Summer Season: I'm Already Saying "Meh"" »
April 22, 2008
Three Quickies
Before I shut down for the night, three items that caught my interest:
- Roger Ebert, the best film critic still working today, now has a blog.
- Salt Lake has a "disappointing" skyline.
- And if you've ever wondered whatever happened to one of the best-known writer/directors of the 1980s, it seems that these days John Hughes is making like Howard Hughes. Too bad...
Incidentally, does anyone else wonder what Ferris, Cameron, and Sloane are up to these days? I've often had the thought that it'd be very interesting if Ferris has become a burned-out, work-obsessed capitalist and his old buddy Cameron shows up to remind him of the life-changing lesson he taught 20 years ago...
Nah, it'd never work.
April 21, 2008
She's Not Bad, She's Just Drawn That... Well, Okay, Maybe She's Bad
Remember a couple of weeks ago when the hot thing sweeping the InterWebs was those deeply unsettling images of Homer Simpson and Mario as they'd appear if they were "real"? The creator of those images has struck again, this time giving us an "untooned" version of Jessica Rabbit from the classic movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. As one might expect, she's much less grotesque than the other two...
April 4, 2008
Don't Eat the Snow in Hawaii
To my knowledge, I've never really had a genuine, honest-to-gosh nemesis, but I'm beginning to think it just might be Matthew McConaughey. Yes, that Matthew McConaughey, the naked-bongo-playing goodtime-funboy with the perfect six-pack abs and the spotty box-office record.
And why, you may ask, would I elevate this inoffensively goofy would-be movie star to the level of "nemesis"? Well, first, he brought his special kind of blandness to Dirk Pitt, the literary swashbuckler whose adventures I devoured as a youth. Now, according to ScreenRant.com, he may be in line to transform another of my puberty-era heroes into one of his signature sleepy-eyed slacker doofuses (doofi?): Thomas Magnum, a.k.a. Magnum, P.I., the Ferrari-driving, Hawaii-based TV detective played in the 1980s by Tom Selleck.
Sigh.
April 2, 2008
Bob Clampett's Barsoom
You may recall me mentioning a while back that Pixar is adapting Edgar Rice Burroughs' fabulous pulp novels about John Carter of Mars into a mixed live-action/CGI film trilogy. Well, I've just learned they're not the first animators to take a crack at ERB's manly Virginia gentleman who becomes the warlord of an alien world. Another attempt was made to translate Carter to film way back in the 1930s by Bob Clampett, an alumnus of Warner Brothers' famous Termite Terrace and the director of many well-known Looney Tunes shorts (including one of my favorites, Falling Hare, in which Bugs Bunny battles a gremlin).
According to this guy, the attempt never amounted to much, because Clampett and ERB had a different creative vision than the movie studios -- unthinkable, I know! -- but Clampett got as far as making some test footage, which I now present as a Fascinating Historical Curiosity:
I don't know about you, but I think that stuff looks really cool, very much in the vein of the extremely nifty Superman shorts produced by Max Fleischer in the '40s. The running thoat -- the eight-legged animal -- is especially impressive. Sigh. Yet another item for the "If Only" file...
(Hat tip to Chris Roberson for posting the video first.)
March 29, 2008
Stop! I'm Going to Have to Put You on the Cardboard Game Grid!
Okay, so it seems that the hot new fad sweeping the InterWebs is "sweded" movies, i.e., ultra-cheap homemade re-creations of well-known films using cardboard, tin foil, and household items as props and costumes. The inspiration behind this phenomenon is apparently a Jack Black comedy called Be Kind, Rewind (which hasn't even been released yet) in which a couple of dim-bulb video-store owners accidentally erase their entire inventory of VHS cassettes and then start replacing those movies with their own half-assed reproductions. Which of course their customers love more than the originals, causing the two to be elevated into folk heroes or something.
Yeah, I know, it doesn't sound very funny to me either, but I guess this is the sort of thing the kids are going for these days. And to think our parents didn't get Yahoo Serious! Oh, wait... neither did I.
Anyhow, the aesthetic at work in these "sweded" flicks -- the term comes from one Be Kind, Rewind character's BS explanation that the replacement movies are the Swedish versions -- seems to be "the cheesier, the better." And oh, god, is this stuff cheesy. Not just cheesy, but cheez-ee. I've seen a lot of amateur movies in my time, and even been in a few, but these things strike a new low in sheer painfulness. There is, for example, a sweded version of Star Wars that consists of people wearing cardboard X-wings and TIE-fighter panels chasing each other around a lawn while somebody hums the theme music. I couldn't even finish that one, it was so embarrassing. Click that link at your own peril.
I'll be honest, I think the whole sweding thing is just plain dumb. But for every rule, of course, there are exceptions. The following video, sent to me by my buddy Chenopup, is so audacious, so ambitious, so well-done, that I simply couldn't help but sit in awe as it played for the first time. It's the lightcycle scene from Tron, completely redone in cardboard, Saran Wrap, and stop-motion animation... and it is frakkin' awesome:
Just for reference, here's the original scene:
I'm amazed at how close the sweders got their version to the original... of course, now I want to go watch the real Tron again. Look, it's The Dude in a funny hat!
March 26, 2008
Iron Man-Hulk Crossover Coolness
One element that has so far been missing from every major film derived from a comic book is the sense that the titular hero shares his world with a whole bunch of other superheroes. For example, Spider-Man-the-film gave no hint that Spider-Man-the-character was only one of a vast pantheon of characters who all live in the same world. Superhero movies to date have all been entirely self-contained and, so far as the novice viewer can tell, each tells of the only super-powered person on the planet.
That's not how it is in the comics medium, where the world is lousy with super-powered people and creatures, and any character who is owned by a particular publisher is likely to show up in any other character's book at some point. This is especially true in the case of the so-called Marvel Universe, the shared setting of all the titles published by Marvel Comics, so it is somewhat surprising that all the films based on Marvel titles -- and that would be most of the superhero flicks of the last ten years or so, including X-Men, Daredevil, The Hulk, Ghost Rider, and The Fantastic Four -- have not so far included any crossovers between them. (Actually, I guess it's not that surprising, since crossovers would be meaningless -- if not actually confusing -- for the average viewer who sees only one of these films a year and doesn't know anything about comics.)
But now, in a summer that's going to see two major movie releases based on Marvel titles, it looks like the powers that be are going to throw in the sort of thing that comics fans have enjoyed for years: according to this blog, Robert Downey, Jr., who is playing the title role in the much-anticipated Iron Man, will have a cameo appearance in The Incredible Hulk. There is also some rumbling that another big name who is supposed to star in another upcoming Marvel-licensed flick -- the rumor mill says that it will be Samuel L. Jackson playing the character Nick Fury -- will appear briefly in Iron Man.
I think this brilliant, a nice gesture to comics fans and a good marketing ploy to promote the other movies based on the same universe that will be released around the same time. Now, if they could just somehow get all the movies to meet the same standard of quality...