So, Omaha and I, as a fun way of remembering Ricardo Montalban, decided to have "Khan night." We took the kids out to Khan's Mongolian Grill, and then rented Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

I had forgotten just how good that film was. It has an 80's aesthetic, but it still holds together well as an action-adventure, as a space opera, and as a Star Trek film. Listening to the costume, set, and ship designers discuss how they negotiated with the director, who was basically doing Horatio Hornblower because he didn't know squat about SF or Star Trek. Ricardo Montalban is glorious as Khan. It was fun to watch the interview after the flick where Montalban talks about the "Khaaaaaan!" scene. He described how he did his scene alone, without Shatner, and Shatner's lines were read by a "sweet-voiced script girl who did not act, and should not act. And here I am trying to be so... It was very hard."

It was fun. The girls thought it was a good flick, although Kouryou-chan was full of questions. "Why this," and "Why that," and so on. But we had a great evening.

Tags: life, movies
Current Mood: giggly

Omaha and I just went to see The Dark Knight, which really is as good as everyone is saying it is. I won't spoil it for you other than to tell you that Ledger, Bales, and Oldman really earned their pay, and it's a shame that Ledger is gone because he really nailed the part well.

On the other hand, I cannot freaking believe this got a PG-13 rating. The violence, especially the interpersonal violence involving knives and so forth, is completely not appropriate even for 13 year olds. There were parents who took their seven and eight year olds into this theater, for the 9:00pm-11:30pm showing for Set's sake, and this movie is completely not for those kids. I hope those parents deal with bedwetting-level nightmares of clowns with knives carving grins into their faces. For weeks.

This only shows how the MPAA is a complete and total sham, from their ratings system to their copyright madness.

Oh, and in the theater I saw a poster for a remake of Deathrace 2000. It's a little out of date, so this time it's just Deathrace. I can only hope they retained the cheese.

Tags: movies, shrill
Current Mood: tired

So, having seen number 2 last night, tonight Omaha and I went out to see Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.

The film proceeds where the last one left off, with Barbossa leading a team with Will and Elizabeth off to the ends of the world to find Jack Sparrow and bring him back from the dead, because only Jack Sparrow knows how to take down Davy Jones.

I'm not going to post any spoilers because doing so would be pointless: there is a plot here, but it isn't the point of the film. You go in to let masters of the genre spend a lot of money poking your pineal gland as hard as they can over and over. The trouble is that you can only poke at it so often before it runs dry, and that's effectively what happens in the end. It is no spoiler to say that there's a huge, amazing battle at the end. That's the whole bloody point, isn't it? But the battle goes on for far, far too long. By the time the most astounding part of the beautifuly costumed computer-generated, green-screen stunted, Hans Zimmer-scored spectacle is before your eyes you've run out of awe. The shock has drained. It's all pretty pictures, but the ongoingness of it has successfully detached you from any emotional investment in the lives of the characters.

You've ceased to care.

This is not to say you shouldn't see it. It is beautifully and magnificently costumed-- oh, the costumes! I love good costume work. (It never ceases to disappoint me when SF writers spend pages and pages impressing us with descriptions of architecture but don't really deliver on the clothes.) The sets are gorgeous, the CGI work quite nice. But when you've started to appreciate the film for its technical delivery, the real point of movie-going has quite failed. And that, unfortunately, is where At World's End leaves you when the credits roll.

Tags: movies, review
Current Mood: exhausted

Omaha and I have been trying to put together a date for going to see Pirates of the Carribean 3, so as part of our preperation we rented PotC2, Dead Man's Chest (nice pun, that). Since my duties to my kid's school had ended at one, we sat down to watch it after lunch. The disc, being a rental, was a bit dirty and scratched, but I swear my cheap, plastic Lasonic player is a bit like one of those old Apple II disk drives: it'll try to play a frozen pizza, and would probably manage to pull some data out of it.

Dead Man's Chest can best be characterized by the caricature of Jack running away from just about everything. That's Johnny Depp through the whole film, running pell-mell through the sets, arms waving, screeching at the top of his lungs.

Hands up if you thought Naomi Harris (the voudoun girl) was hotter than Kiera Knightly.

I've used lj-cut to block off the spoilers. If you've circumvented the lj-cut feature on your friend's list display, consider stopping now.

( spoilers )

The CGI is kinda weak. I'm not sure why, but it felt hokey in places, and there were some mattes that didn't integrate well into the overall shot. That it used the same gag twice (escape in a rolling barrel, done in grand style) was a bad sign, but that can be forgiven. However, the movie as a whole was entertaining and fun, and I enjoyed it even when it went so totally over the top.

Oh, and stay for the credits. There is an end scene.

Tags: movies, review
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Frost, Black Light Machine

I just watched the new Transformers movie trailer, and okay, I'm gonna say that based on the new trailer this isn't your childhood Transformers but it's not gonna suck. The premise seems to be that the US finds a disabled Megatron under the ice, and they activate him, bringing down the rain of Decepticons onto the world. There are Autobots here on Earth who know Megatron is here somewhere, but they don't know where, so they represent the opposing force.

I will say this, Starscream totally rocks in this trailer. He is not the incompetent boob of the series. The CG stuff has reached cinematic levels; there's no point in admiring it. Either it works or it doesn't, and it seems to work here.

Unfortunately, it is a Michael Bay film. Some of the stuff does look like retread from Armageddon.

So, opening night, anyone?

Tags: geek, movies
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Porcupine Tree, Mute

No one can outrun their destiny.

Look, Mel. I can probably forgive the anti-semitic bullshit. I can understand that everyone carries a little-- or a lot-- of hypocritical bigotry inside them for one group or another, and it is the hypocrisy of keeping it inside all the time while living up to the higher standards of public discourse that make civilization clank along in its ungainly fashion like Frankenstein's Monster.

But get your freaking tagline's grammar right! Okay? "No one can outrun his destiny." Got it? Repeat after me. "No one can outrun his destiny." Singular referent, singular reference. Make sure you get it right before you put it on posters going up in every theater across the planet! Otherwise people really will start to think you really are a bloody idiot.

I'm just sayin'.

Tags: movies
Current Mood: annoyed

"Have you ever heard of the Mexican Butt-Humping Bullfrog?"

If you can, watch the trailer. Seriously.

Tags: movies
Current Mood: hyper

One of the things I would never have expected from George Clooney as a director, a scriptwriter (admittedly with an old pro), and so forth is a powerful, effective movie-- and yet, that is exactly what we get with Good Night, And Good Luck, the fictionalized biopic of Edward R. Murrow's decision to take on Joe McCarthy and make of him an embarassment of the U.S. Senate.

It's filmed in black-and-white and happens almost entirely within the studios at CBS, where Murrow and producer Fred Friendly, and their staff of reporters and writers, assembled a damning portfolio of film clips (made with real celluloid) of McCarthy and his crusade against Communists everywhere: his deceptions, his snide elisions, his callous disregard for the Constitutional processes. McCarthy appears entirely in archival footage, which is how the American people saw him.

The film is amazingly sparse, but never empty: the black-and-white creates a lack of texture that gets filled with the sheer pressure under which Murrow and Friendly operated. Frank Langella plays the president of CBS, and Frank Downey Jr and Jeff Daniels make for terrific reporters.

Obviously, Clooney is making a point about political overreach and arrogance here, but he couldn't have done it in a more effective or more entertaining manner. This is a civics lesson everyone should go see.

And while I'm here, I have to say that I love and adore my wife, who chose to go with me to this film rather than pick some sappy chick-flick or lighthearted comedy.

Tags: movies
Current Mood: thoughtful

The MST3K of the weekend was Jungle Goddess, an offensive little hunk of tripe from 1948, three years after World War II. The plot should be enough:

When a plane carrying the daughter of a millionaire crashes in an African jungle, two pilots set out to collect the reward. They discover that she has become the goddess of a primitive tribe. An insurgent witch doctor and fierce wild animals make escape from the jungle difficult for the trio.

Really though, that's not enough. Start with the idea that she's made a goddess because she's white. That's pretty rude, but then we get to her personality.

One of our protagonists shoots a tribesman. She goes through the motions, as village goddess, of condemning him to death in eight days, "when the full moon rises." The other protagonist goes to her to ask what will happen, and she assures him that she has no intention of doing as the local laws allow. There's this unstated "He only killed a native, it's not like he killed a white man or anything like that."

A real piece of 1940's racism. And what annoys me most is that when I was young, like nine or so (that would be 1975), I loved watching those old Johnny Weismuller Tarzan movies. They're much of the same flavor, terribly unenlightened products of a former age, but now those memories feel tainted and somewhat sickly.

Tags: movies
Current Mood: moody
Current Music: Fiona Apple, Extraordinary Machine