They've been saying this for a while now, but I really hope it happens. Here's my little fun fact: Did you know that Alex "Ted" Winter directed Butthole Surfers videos?
I did not. That makes me feel a little better for the guy, because he sure as hell hasn't spent the last twenty years acting.
I believe he spent most of the 90s directing music videos and TV commercials. Nothing that would earn him a spotlight, but probably made him a decent paycheck. I stumble on Bill & Ted's every now and then and it's always fun to watch. It's less like watching a movie made in the late 80s than it is watching a movie set in the late 80s. And hell, it's got such a great message... "Be excellent to each other."
Yeah, I know what you mean. There's no getting around the clothes, but I think the fact that they're in a metal band and therefore most of the music is metal makes the soundtrack seem somewhat less dated (I mean it's still identifiably eighties hair metal, but that's closer to modern music than the synth pop that permeates most eighties movies), and I don't know if it's just because of the time travel plot or not but it neatly avoids most of the eighties high school movie tropes too, and I think it holds up better than most of those as a result. "Put them... in the iron maiden."
Del Toro makes some great creatures. I read an interview with him in the NYer and he made it very clear that monsters were his favorite part of making movies (if I recall correctly). I still get sad when I remember that he was involved with The Hobbit for a while but was booted. I haven't seen The Hobbit yet, but Tolkien adaptations need a new vision and I thought Del Toro could help with that :(((
I haven't been able to find them for some reason, but some years ago there were some leaked sketches of Del Toro's ideas for The Hobbit. You'd probably be interested in digging them up now that you know they exist somewhere.
The Thing (shut up it's a good chunk of my age older than me). Loved it. Brilliant, great story and well-told. A good piece of sci-fi/horror that doesn't feel the need to tell you what it is, and how and why and wherefore. Simple, clean film-making full of deft touches. It also vindicates my decision to purchase one of these a few years ago, albeit in camo green (they make my favourite film-related things).
I watched Black Swan last night. The squick factor was too high for my wife so I watched it alone. I liked it, though I can't really identify with the trials and tribulations of being a prima ballerina. I really loved her dance transformation into the black swan, that was a standout, "Oh cool!" moment.
Last night: After The Thin Man, the second of the five William Powell / Myrna Loy classic detective comedies. For those who don't know, the Thin Man series are the adventures of Nick & Nora Charles, high society gadabouts who solve crimes while being wildly intoxicated at all times. The first one was based on the Daschiel Hammett novel (who also wrote the next two movies) and were based pretty much on him and his long-time partner Lillian Hellman. (Nick Charles, like Hammett himself, was a Pinkerton.) Anyway, it's great. Hammett is one of the godfathers of American crime fiction, and in The Thin Man movies indulges in his love of "let's get everybody in the movie in the same room for the finale" style of murder mysteries. Like all Hammett stories, After The Thin Man has about twenty characters to many and about 90% of the plot is red herrings, but nobody's watching these for plots anyway. The real joy is in the crackling dialogue and the then-subversive look at a married couple who's main bond seems to be based on mutual alcoholism and kicks. (Granted, they had to sleep in separate beds. We'd have to wait for The Flintstones to break that particular taboo.)
FTFY Anyway I watched Inglourious Basterds today for the first time since I saw it in the theater and really liked it again. It brought to mind the discussion we had a few pages back about Howard Hawks. Not the "unpretentious technician who shies away from flashy style" part, which is pretty much the opposite of Tarantino, but the part about Hawks's definition of a good movie being three good scenes and no bad ones really nails Inglourious Basterds for me. There's a hell of a lot wrong with the movie if you think about it: the plot makes basically no sense, the two storylines only connect at the end and then only coincidentally, the "behold the power of film" theme is tiresome and predictable, and for Christ's sake Eli Roth is in it, but in spite of all that the movie really is explicitly a collection of individual scenes, none of which are stinkers and several of which knock it out of the park.
Just finished up watching Bones Brigade - An Autobiography (Netflix/iTunes), a movie put together by Stacy Peralta about the heyday of Powell Peralta skateboards and the Bones Brigade (who to me are Tony Hawk, Lance Mountain, Mike McGill, Steve Caballero, Rodney Mullen and Tommy Guerrero) and their rise through the 80's into the absolute powerhouse of skateboarding that they became. Fantastic movie with some very touching and poignant moments. For someone on the other side of the world, getting access to the Bones Brigade videos was like opening up another world when you consider that being able to even find a skateboarding magazine here was something very rare. These guys were hugely influential on my teenage / high-school years and the flashbacks this movie caused were both terrifying and satisfying. I was always a Bones Brigade kid (yes, I managed to join the club and had the massive sewn patch to prove it) and am grateful for it. Very much recommended. Disclaimer - written by a now 38 year old former-loner who has busted up knees, scars pretty much everywhere, Bones/Hawk t-shirts that he still wears in public and still has (in working order) Tony Hawk and Rodney Mullen skateboards in his garage. He might be biased.
Took a break from Christmas movies and documentaries about food... Gets me every single time I watch it.
Last night was The Dark Knight Rises, finally, which I liked very much. Well except that Marion Cotillard was inexplicably in it. But before that, the Howard Hughes tongue-in-cheek film noir His Kind Of Woman. The movie itself isn't so hot, with an incomprehensible plot and average dialogue that was a real let-down after watching a Thin Man movie, but the cast is off-the-charts: Robert Mitchum as a professional gambler in a slump, Jane Russell as a con-woman, and VINCENT PRICE as a matinee idol. So, of course, this is totally worth watching just to see Vincent Price and Robert Mitchum in the same scenes together. And Vincent is a hobby big-game hunter, so he's dressed like John Huston shooting The African Queen for the large chunks of the movie. But the main reason to watch this is because it is mid-century modern furniture porn. There's a bar in this movie that I would happily live in for eternity - a crazy tiki bar in Baja California that looks like Rusty Venture's rec room. And I'm making it my life goal to find the suit that Jim Backus wears in this movie, because holy shit. Jim Backus. You awesome swinger you.
Last night: Sorry, Wrong Number - Barbara Stanwyck plays a wealthy invalid who picks up her phone one night and overhears a convsersation.... ABOUT MURDER!!!! Dun-dun-dunnnnnnnnnnnnn! And then she finds out, through a series of increasingly convenient phone calls, that SHE'S THE VICTIM!!!! Bet you didn't see that one coming, assuming this is the first movie you've ever watched ever. OK, I'm being a little hard on this movie. It's based on a radio play, which explains why everybody decides to use the telephone as a Magic Exposition Machine, but there's enough fun in here to warrant a look for any crime / noir buffs. Stanwyck gives a pretty great performance and is hilariously unafraid to make her character as unlikable as possible, and Burt Lancaster as her husband is his typically awesome self. The direction wildly overcompensates for a script that is about 60% people angrily talking into telephones - the camera whips and pans, ducks under stairs, and in one particularly great sequence pulls backwards out of a second-story window, travels down the outside of the house, and enters through a first floor door. (Made me wonder if Hitchcock remembered it for that similar shot in Frenzy.) On the minus side, there's one segment that features probably the worst narration I've ever heard, where a character literally narrates the thing you're watching on screen as you watch it. Thanks, Wrong Number, but I think I got it.
Fuck all of you. For once I totally got Brian's back on this one. I have a soft spot the size of Saturn for that movie and I watch it every year. But I also really like Richard Curtis. So recent movies I've seen. On the 23rd I saw Love Actually with the wife. 24th I saw Die Hard (still beats it as the best Christmas movie ever) and Die Hard 2 (two Chekov's Guns in the first five minutes - Harlin was trying way to hard, but still fun). And as the big surprise I saw Madagascar 4 with the kids expecting nothing. It's actually the best in a rather excellent series. It's like the writers just went "Fuck it! None of this makes any sense, so let's not pretend". It's surreal and full of well excited slapstick. I laughed out loud several times, which I hardly ever do when watching a movie.
WELL FUCK YOU TOO MAN! Me and my big girly heart like it, but for some reason the idea it's Brian Rubin's favourite movie makes me laugh. I just see his dragonface stuck to the tv while Bill Nighy is telling kids to get drugs for free.
Watched The Secret World of Arrietty today (yes, I'm on a Miyazaki kick, how could you tell?), which is his retelling of The Borrowers. Not a lot to distinguish it from other versions of the same story, but well done on its own merits.
Also finally watched this, which I liked well enough, but wasn't as bowled over by as the previous films.
It was much better on the big screen in 3D seeing as it's one of the few films to actually do 3D well. Without the giant screen and 3D, it's FernGully.
Love Actually is one of my favorite HOLIDAY movies. My favorite movie period is How to Train Your Dragon. ;-)
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. God, this movie. About halfway through you can see everyone just stop trying. And I don't blame them. I don't blame them one bit.
I saw it in the theater after a tasting at Stone Brewing Co. That movie is awesome when you are drunk off your gourd.
Just watched The Fantastic Mr. Fox. And... absolutely hated it. Really didn't expect to, either -- I like Wes Anderson and I like the Dahl book. But it was completely different and not good at all.
I was at my brother and SIL's place for the long weekend and that means SIL's movies. I forget what all we watched, but among them was Ted, which stars Mark Wahlberg and Mila Kunis and Seth MacFarlane as a talking bear and... yeah. It really was just a two-hour long Family Guy episode with some different characters. And I like Family Guy, but how does MacFarlane get away with having three shows and now a movie all in the same vein? This can't last, can it?
Lincoln. It was awesome. Even though I knew that 13th amendment passed, for some reason I was still nervous about it.
