movies – Page 7

A movie you don’t like as much as you think you do

That’s it! I’ve had it with people who say that The Godfather Part II was as good as or better than the original.

Let’s get this out of the way right now: The Godfather was a supernaturally good movie. The story, the characters, the performances, the settings, the cinematography, the editing, the music
— everything came together perfectly, as if Francis Ford Coppola made a deal with the devil.

Part II? Lots of that was great, too. Numerous memorable moments. “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart!” De Niro as the young Vito — incredible. But does it add up to much more than the sum of its parts like the original? No. Most of its flaws are with the plot, which is at times confusing and inconsistent. For instance, I have never been able to find anyone able to answer these questions (warning: spoilers follow):

Continue reading “A movie you don’t like as much as you think you do”

(Bat|Super)man Returns

Thanks to Netflix, I saw Superman Returns a few days ago. (It was pretty good, but I had some problems with it. Maybe in another blog post.) In the story, Superman has been absent from Earth for some years; the “Returns” in the title refers to the fact that he’s back.

This made me think of 1992’s Batman Returns. What “returns” in that movie? Nothing; Batman hasn’t been away since the events in 1989’s Batman. On the contrary, in that title, “Returns” refers to the fact that it’s been three years for the audience since the last Batman movie. Batman “returns” to moviegoers. (Or perhaps, more cynically, Batman provides “returns” on the studio’s investment. Hard to be too cynical about the studio [Warner Brothers] and the franchise that famously required director Joel Schumacher to make Batman & Robin “more toyetic.”)

It’s an annoying case of breaking the fourth wall with the film’s title — a trend begun, ironically, with 1978’s Superman: The Movie, closely followed by Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979. Hey — we know they’re movies. (Or, excuse me, motion pictures, as the case may be.) Tell me what happens in the movie. Fight Club, 12 Angry Men, Run Lola Run, those are movie titles. In a movie called Superman: The Movie, I’d expect to see Superman busting film-industry crooks on a studio backlot in Tinseltown.

The Batman and Star Trek franchises continued offending with Batman Forever (which can be interpreted no other way than as the producers thumping their chests in an “I’m king of the world!” moment) and Star Trek: The Next Generation (“next” after what? after the last time you folks watched a Star Trek TV show, that’s what). I’ve always found it strange that none of the gatekeepers of pop culture ever raised aesthetic objections to badly chosen titles like these (until now, of course, if we can agree to call me “gatekeeper”), whose conflation of the real and imaginary threatens to take the viewer out of the fictional world even before they step in.

I was pleased to see that the [Superhero] Returns title template has been redeemed by having “Returns” refer to events in the story. Maybe now we can work on redeeming …The Next Generation by having the story be about the actual children of characters from a prior story. Ugh, maybe not.

What brings you here?

Herewith, a selection of search-engine queries that resulted in hits on this blog, according to my server logs.

watch neighbor undress; exploratorium; fizzies pulled; thailand’s greatest hits; what happened to fizzies tablets; what are the three kinds of mammals; violet incredible pez; watching neighbor undress; “new rabbi”; Rosh Hashanah; “the federation trading post”; persian candy floss recipes; “citric acid” science pop candy; supine lady; lesbian sex; ursula.sex; how to explain the theory of crystallization to third graders; evil cats; i feel like crying; Comcast Removes West Coast Feeds; boycott disney & abc path to 911; raiders-of-the-lost-ark Pirates-of-the-caribbean; “name the moon” greg; Reality an space-time; “francis heaney”; “smut shack”; squeamish cure; doggie style sex; webby awards; amy linker; cynthia nixon; quarks tangles; “mill valley pediatrics”; “dildo with suction”; proposition moveon endorsements; hypothermia kim; steve elliot bdsm; “instant soda”; trish gee wordpress; song meanings splashdown; “yours yours yours”; fligth to mars; “lesbian vampire fiction”; “needed a diaper”; disney fingerprints; fizzie drink discs; ben kenobi obgyn; linux backup s3; melissa kaplan sings; “adam stoller”; splashdown catalogue; “santa claus ain’t”; vote to boycott abc disney path to 911; joe costanzo; doggie style sex positions illustrated; Fizzies drink tablet recipe; “jack mccoy”; charteris; tune out, turn off; incremental jungledisk; “no fireflies” long island 2006; vampire lesbian; Thai Pilot; boisterous laugh audios; simpsons ulysses; sephardic pirates kritzler; backup osx hardlink incremental; karma slave karaoke; voyager pale blue dot send back the image; comcast digital artifacts; Con Edison; What year did the sitcom premiere I dream of jeannie; Recently got digital cable still receiving all premium channels; joseph costanzo, jr.; Superman reversing time; three kinds of meat; video koyaanisqatsi koyaanisqatsi; chabad palo alto; 9/11 personal; “Calculatrivia”; viscera at&t.

Eww two

The title of yesterday’s blog post put me in mind of what I consider to be Hollywood’s two greatest readings of the word “eww.”

The first is by Nancy Cartwright as Bart Simpson in the Simpsons episode, “Homer Alone.” Bart and Lisa are consigned to the house of their aunts Patty and Selma for the weekend. Bart rummages through their closet and finds a plastic gun, which he starts pointing around the room going, “Bang! Bang!” Lisa says, “Bart! That’s a blackhead gun!” which prompts Bart to cast it aside with a pronounced, “Eww!”

The second is by Glenne Headley as Trish in the movie Making Mr. Right (the only movie I know of with a character named Glickstein in it, which is not the only reason to check it out). “Ulysses” (John Malkovich) lies in a heap on the kitchen floor, his pants around his knees and his head torqued 180 degrees around on his neck. Trish is in hysterics as she describes to Frankie (Ann Magnuson) how she seduced and made love to him, then he spazzed out and collapsed in that unnatural state, apparently dead. Frankie breaks this news to her: “You didn’t make it with my cousin, you made it with my android.” Trish utters the most memorable “Eww!” in movie history.

Where next, Mr. Bond?

The new Casino Royale is a great movie, not because it shows us how Bond became Bond per se, but because that story is a compelling one. As has been much remarked, this new film is a “bold departure” from the formula of the last four decades, including the entries in the Bond canon that were themselves supposed to be bold departures but weren’t, really (e.g., The Living Daylights). Mick LaSalle gets it right in his review for the SF Chronicle:

He’s a working-class guy who has made his way into upper-class circles but retains some residual coarseness that will never smooth out.

So does Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.com:

We’re meeting Bond near the beginning of his career, just after he’s been promoted to double-0 status, and he’s clearly having trouble putting his thuggish instincts to use in international espionage.

He’s a super agent not because he’s the pinnacle of refined British gentlemanhood, but because he’s emphatically not and sees a chance to be — a tough guy with enough brains to know he can be more than just a tough guy, he can be dangerous, and wants to be. His dedication to Queen and country isn’t pure virtuous nationalism, it’s the dumb, grateful loyalty of a cared-for brute. It rings much truer this way.

In this new Bond is a conflict for the ages, one that can speak to all of us on some level: the struggle to balance our animal nature and our rational nature; to somehow put the id to work in the service of the superego without smothering it altogether, which is something we tend to do in our over-civilized culture. Indeed, watching Bond keeping his snarling id straining at the end of its leash — and occasionally letting it loose — was the primeval pleasure of the original Sean Connery Bond movies. New Bond Daniel Craig embodies that even better than Connery did. (There, I said it.)

This is a fertile new storytelling angle on James Bond. My fear is that, having taken this bold step and won over so many critics, moviegoers, and dollars, the Bond franchise will retreat to safe territory again. But there’s no reason the next story couldn’t expand on the themes introduced in this one. Just to pick one obvious example, a theme for the next film could be “you can take the man out of the jungle but you can’t take the jungle out of the man,” á là Tarzan, or even Pygmalion. Bond, having earned entrée to the high-class world of international espionage, is made to feel out of place somehow because of his humble origin, but in the end learns that to earn one’s place is more authentic than to be entitled to it. (This is all subtext, you understand, while Bond does violent, unsubtle battle with some dastardly mastermind, the world hanging in the balance as usual.)

Four decades of an impassive hero inhabiting a world of spectacular chases, willing women, and gee-whiz gadgets is enough, no matter how much aplomb he brings to the table. Suave and imperturbable may be “what every man would like to be, and what every woman would like to have between her sheets,” and it’s fun to watch for a while, but story-wise it’s not that interesting. Here’s hoping that the most interesting thing in the next James Bond movie will again be Bond’s own psychology.

Jones. Bond Jones.

Reviews for the new James Bond film, Casino Royale, are starting to pour in, and they’re almost uniformly glowing. Even the SF Chronicle loved it! They don’t love anything.

Time was, the Hollywood marketing machine had me squarely in its sights. Any decently assembled promotional campaign was enough to set me vibrating in my socks at the prospect of being first in line to see the latest essential release.

I’m long past that. I’m forty years old now! But I’ve still got a serious jones to see Casino Royale. My sister Suzanne, who long ago surpassed my own once-considerable movie-mavenhood, is coming to visit in a couple of days. She’d be the perfect Casino Royale viewing companion — but she’s vibrating in her socks so much that she can’t wait and is going to see it tonight.

Maybe while Suzanne is here, she can watch the kids while Andrea and I go see it. But Andrea and I get out together so seldom that it’s hard to justify spending two hours sitting still, neither looking at nor talking to each other.

What’ll I do? What’ll I do? (*smack*) Quit whining and do what James Bond would do: go it alone. Parachute in in the dead of night, get in, see the late show after the kids are asleep, get out, get the job done.

Update [18 Nov 12:40am]: Saw it. It rocked.

Afternoon of the living(room) dead

One afternoon in the 80’s my friend Amy asked if I’d like to accompany her on an errand to the apartment of zombie-film director George Romero.

We were in college in Pittsburgh and Amy was housesitting for the famous filmmaker, auteur of the zombie classic (and disguised social critique) Night of the Living Dead and the other Pittsburgh-based “Dead” movies. Naturally I jumped at the chance to see how he lived.

It was an attractive but not especially distinguished apartment in an inconspicuous apartment building not far from CMU. In almost all respects it could have been the home of anyone who could afford the rent on a modest couple of hundred extra square feet of space. But three things about it were notable:

The refrigerator was full of champagne, at least twenty bottles of the stuff.
His vast collection of movies on VHS filled two walls of the living room. I drooled with envy as I read the titles. (Over the years, inspired by Romero’s living room, I too amassed a respectable collection of movies on VHS, or “Crapvision” as James Cameron famously called it. Within a decade those tapes grew all but unwatchable as the recordings decayed. Today you couldn’t pay me to store one tenth of Romero’s bulky old movie collection in my house. Funny how things change.)
Several walls were cluttered with photos from the sets of his films. Many of those photos featured actors in full zombie makeup relaxing between takes. My favorite was of Romero’s young daughter Tina bouncing happily on the knee of one smiling, hideously decaying ghoul.

Crazy life

In my freshman year of college there was just one tiny TV in my dorm. I don’t remember whose room it was in, but one night I was in that room with my stoner friends George and Merle. I’d had a couple of tokes myself and was feeling mellow. We longed to find something to watch on TV so we started flipping channels. I think we thought it would be a goof to find a kid’s cartoon or some other innocent program to view while high.

Our channel flipping halted by unanimous acclamation on something wholly different (and much better suited for our altered state): a riveting closeup of a rocket lifting off in extreme slow motion. Chunks of ice fell from the rocket body as slowly as snowflakes. Panel seams flexed and vibrated. It went on forever, the enormous main stage inching upward out of the frame. Then the rocket nozzles came into view, and even as drastically slowed down as the footage was, the flaming rocket exhaust that shot from those nozzles was still too fast for the eye to follow. Other equally miraculous scenes followed, one after another.

As we learned when a pledge break interrupted our spellbound trance an hour later, we had happened upon a PBS airing of Koyaanisqatsi, a movie consisting of nothing but breathtaking cinematography and a hypnotic Philip Glass score. It provocatively juxtaposes scenes of unspoiled nature against scenes of human society and technology, variously speeding things up or (as in the case of the rocket launch) slowing them down. Its title comes from the Hopi language and means “crazy life” and “life out of balance” (among other similar meanings).

Desolatus rising

It instantly joined the ranks of my favorite movies. A couple of years after this encounter, the repertory movie theater near my college (the late, lamented Pittsburgh Playhouse, not to be confused with the performing arts theater that now uses that name) serendipitously scheduled Koyaanisqatsi for my birthday, and I led a large contingent of friends across town for a viewing. When the Philip Glass choir sings “baah, baah, baah, baah” in the “Pruitt Igoe” section of the film, we sang, “Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob!”

A couple of years after that, Andrea was at my apartment and we watched Koyaanisqatsi on video. It was the first movie we ever saw together. “And today, that woman is my wife.”

Fast-forward to 1999, the year of money. We learn that a release to DVD of Koyaanisqatsi is being held up by some legal entanglements, and that the film’s director, Godfrey Reggio, is trying to raise the funds to rescue it from ownership limbo. We think nothing of sending a $150 contribution, and in return we get a precious artifact: a private edition DVD of Koyaanisqatsi signed by the director.

Three years later, our son Jonah was born. We plan a big trip east to visit both families to coincide with my birthday and Jonah’s first “half-birthday.” Shortly before leaving California we receive an invitation (thanks to our contribution years earlier) to attend a private preview screening of Reggio’s final “Qatsi” film, Naqoyqatsi (which followed Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi) — in Manhattan, where we’re already planning to go — on October 9th, when we’re already planning to be there — on the Upper West Side, one block away from the apartment of my sister Suzanne’s friend, where she and the friend can babysit Jonah while we attend the screening and the gala reception afterward. Amazed by the way things work out, we attended both.

A culmination: I shake the hand of Godfrey Reggio

Naqoyqatsi was nothing to write home about. (Neither was Powaqatsi, except for the interesting trivia that Philip Glass ripped off some of his own music from that film to reuse in The Truman Show.) And the reception, while visually interesting — a lot of stark white decoration punctuated by hundreds of bright red glasses of Campari — was full of strivers and hangers-on, not the kind of scene that interested two exhausted new parents very much. But the walk to and from the reception, through West Side streets at nighttime, was magical, our first serene alone-together time after months of crazy life.

Greatest hits: The Webby Awards

[Reproduced and edited from e-mail.]

In our last episode, I co-founded the Internet Movie Database. The IMDb team consisted of 15 or 20 film geeks scattered around the globe. We were a “virtual company,” coordinating all our activity via e-mail and the rare conference call. Of all the team members, I was the only one in Northern California and thus became the IMDb’s representative at the first Webby Awards ceremony in 1997.

Andrea and I prepared by shopping for new clothes; the invitation instructed us to “dress swanky.” I wrote and rehearsed an acceptance speech just in case the IMDb beat the other four sites nominated in the Film category.

The dot-com boom had not yet really begun in earnest, and so I was surprised to see that many large corporate sponsors were behind the awards ceremony; several “celebrity judges” had voted on the winners; San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown was the official “welcomer”; and it was slated to be telecast on KRON, PBS, and The Discovery Channel. For a bunch of computer geeks it was an unaccustomed level of attention and glamour, but not unwelcome. With this event, the revenge of the nerds had officially begun.

When I saw all the trendy corporate sponsors with their brands emblazoned here and there at the club, I despaired of our chances of winning. I was sure that the fix was in, and only the moneyed sites would be walking away with the awards. The IMDb was strictly an enthusiast site, not part of a big media conglomerate.

We arrived at Bimbo’s 365 Club a little after 8pm. Being nominees, we were allowed to bypass the long queue of people waiting to get in. We saw a line of limousines dropping off dignitaries. Big searchlights shone upwards to mark the location of the event.

Inside, we received our “nominee” badges and drink tokens. We milled about along with a large number of trendy Multimedia Gulch folks. I’d been to Bimbo’s a few times before, but this was the first time I’d seen all the rooms of the club open and in use.

In the main room, a swing band was playing dance tunes. Andrea and I found a table and had a couple of drinks. I took a last look at my speech, which by now I had comfortably memorized.

The event began. Mayor Brown came out to say a few words about how he loved The Web magazine (which had organized the show), how proud he was that San Francisco was hosting this event, the first of its kind, and so on. He told a couple of good jokes, too, which I promptly forgot. Mayor Brown was something of a national celebrity, and in person it was easy to understand his legendary charm.

The mistress of ceremonies, columnist and playwright Cintra Wilson, then came out, made a few very funny remarks, and got the show under way. Her first rule was that, to keep things moving along, winners would be limited to an acceptance speech of no longer than five words! I tore up my speech — oh well!

There followed a rapid-fire sequence of category and nominee announcements, followed by winners and very quick acceptances. Film was the third category and the IMDb won! I ran up on stage and got a kiss and a trophy. Then I thanked our many thousands of contributors over the past seven years (in almost as many words) and ran off. It was very exciting. As I left the stage, some guy pulled me aside and told me to join the “winners’ circle” in the lounge after the ceremony.

The trophy itself was ugly as sin and tremendously heavy — cubical black base made of solid neutronium, near as I could tell, with a badly-etched plaque stuck on it and supporting a freakish oblong colored glass ovoid, which actually looked kind of cool at one point when I set it down on a table and some light came from behind it. The fifteen winners hefted their trophies around the club like Sisyphus. Some who weren’t careful enough with theirs found that the glass ovoid snapped easily off of the base.

Most of what followed was a blur because I was so thrilled at having won. I do remember the presentation for the best Sex site, though. One of the guys from Bianca’s Smut Shack who came up on stage to accept their award was wearing a Hugh Hefner style robe, smoking a pipe. Big laughs.

After the ceremony, we milled about some more and made our way to the lounge, where several camera crews were at work. Production people from various TV shows asked me to stick around so I could be interviewed. While waiting, Andrea and I met Mayor Brown. He was talking to a woman who had also won a Webby. He asked her in what category she’d won. “Politics,” she said. Mayor Brown turned to me and said, in mock confidentiality, “I want to see the people who won for their sex site!” I thought, “He’d get my vote, if I lived in San Francisco.”

Then I met an interviewer from a Web-related program on PBS. I underwent a very short interview in which I waxed enthusiastic about having won, espoused the IMDb philosophy (i.e., by film fans, for film fans), described the site, and said a few words about the team. I managed to work in much of what had been in my acceptance speech.

A still from The Internet Café

After that, there were two more interviews that were almost identical in content. One was for The Discovery Channel’s web show. The other was for C|net. The Discovery folks told me that my footage would be edited into a segment they’d already done about how the IMDb blows away the corporate movie sites. Some PC magazine reporters spoke to me too.

Andrea and I stuck around for a little while longer as the interviewing wound down and music, dancing, and drinking picked up again. Then we left, drove across town, and had a bite to eat at Mel’s Drive-In — suitable, I thought, since it was the setting for a movie (namely, American Graffiti).

It was great fun. Andrea and I resolved to embark on a career of ingratiating ourselves with politicians, celebrities, and captains of industry in order to get invited to events like this all the time. And in fact we did show up for the 1998 and 1999 Webbies…

(…to be continued…)

Make that seven

Another way I’m like Ken: in today’s blog post he writes, “I find that I think in movie quotes about 45% of the time.”

Huh. Just 45%? Maybe Ken is Bob lite! After all, I was the founding movie-quotes editor of the Internet Movie Database.

Quoting dialogue from movies and TV shows has been a cherished way of life for me since age 10, when it occurred to me to place my tape recorder in front of the TV and grab the audio from an episode of Happy Days.

(It was the one where Herb Edelman plays a house burglar. He breaks into the Cunningham house but is foiled by Fonzie, who correctly guesses he’s not armed thanks to this bit of “prison poetry”: “He who steals with a gun in his hand / Gets ten years to life in the can.” Jesus, do I really still remember that???)

After that I taped and memorized The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother and a Robert Klein stand-up comedy special on HBO, but that was just preparation for the day I smuggled a tape recorder into a movie theater to grab the audio from Star Wars. I memorized every word, every sound effect, every note of music. For years afterward, where other kids would sing their favorite radio hits, I would recite scenes from Star Wars. (And I must say: being so intimately acquainted with the audio of that film gave me an appreciation for just what an accomplishment it was. The visual effects today are dated, but the audio created for Star Wars has never been equalled — which, come to think of it, makes perfect sense coming from the director of the sonically innovative predecessors THX-1138 and American Graffiti.)

As time went by it became clear that I had an aptitude for remembering quotable dialogue verbatim — that is, without the usual minor lapses in word choice and ordering that usually afflict movie quoters — even without the benefit of tape recorders. I expanded my movie-viewing horizons and amassed a collection of favorite quotes. Eventually I offered to contribute them to the maintainers of the nascent “rec.arts.movies movie database” on Usenet. The quality and quantity of my submissions (and my corrections to quotes they already had) landed me an invitation to join the team — a team that later became the Internet Movie Database company and later still got bought by Amazon.com.

(…to be continued…)