http://mymovie.medialife.org/ Brian's informal notes on the movies he sees en-us Copyright Brian Miller, even the weird stuff. http://mymovie.medialife.org/?action=movieDetails&movieID=2131 Eh, sometimes you just want something light. I remember thinking that Favreau as a UFC fighter looked funny and hey, crazy parents, right? It was what I thought it would be... I laughed when Vince Vaughn saw the baby spit-up and said he had to get away or else he'd throw up too. Unfortunately, Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon have zero chemistry so I thought this movie was going to be The Break-Up Part 2 and when they got back together at the end (spoler!) I didn't buy it at all.

Good to see Steve Weibe make a cameo though. Playing video games and experimenting with men nonetheless! Actually, all of the cast was pretty great... and most of the script probably read really funny. Just a shame that it didn't come off funnier http://mymovie.medialife.org/?action=movieDetails&movieID=2131 Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:16:56 GMT http://mymovie.medialife.org/?action=movieDetails&movieID=2130 Funny. Great cast. Kinda forgettable though. Like it'll leave soon. Funny while it lasted nonetheless.

This gets me to thinking: What makes a comedy timeless. There seems to be a ton of comedies - mostly starring one of "The Frat Pack" - that are undeniably solid and make me laugh but ultimately don't stand out enough to come to mind when someone asks for a funny movie recommendation. Yet other films like Blazing Saddles, Raising Arizona, and Anchorman have no trouble differentiating themselves for me. I think that although the specific taste might differ for everyone (I don't get the Tommy Boy love but plenty do), I think there's a common line in the sand for all of us. Weird phenomena ... So for whatever reason, although I liked this movie and laughed a lot, I can already feel it leaving my memory banks where inexplicably Carl Spackler remains forever http://mymovie.medialife.org/?action=movieDetails&movieID=2130 Mon, 22 Feb 2010 05:42:13 GMT http://mymovie.medialife.org/?action=movieDetails&movieID=2129 So Avatar... Finally saw it! Couple things:

-glad I saw it at the IMAX. The visual fidelity really is the star of this movie. Everything I saw on the screen looked real even though I'd probably guess 95% of it wasn't. That's really astounding.

-Why do I think 3D televisions will fail? Because even in a friggin IMAX theater with amazing 3D technology unfolding before me (the best 3D I've seen to date... I'm still holding out for a chance to see Dial M for Murder theatrically though), I still FORGET that I'm watching it in 3D like 40 minutes in. By the end I was actually suspicious that the film had somehow become less 3D. I had to take my glasses off to make sure it was still blurry. Is it technically awesome? yes. Did I ultimately feel like it brought me into the movie more? Nope, at least not consciously. Maybe I'm wrong and if I watch it twice more one in 2D and them immediately again in 3D I'll realize that it is indeed a massive improvement, but how is Panasonic going to sell that to people? "Don't believe your brains, 3D really IS awesome!"

-blue? really? I love the scale of the aliens but why did they have to be blue cat-people? And however Zoe Saldana looks in real life, as a Navi she looks an awful lot like Jessica Alba. And there's not a single creature with hair on this entire planet? I don't understand why people get depressed because Pandora isn't real when literally everything on the planet could kill us for sport. They couldn't have thrown a dog or mouse in there or something? And I get that the forest is phosphorescent but still... Blue? Blue people with cat faces? Do I really have to overcome this hurdle to enjoy the multitudes of other stuff that is awesome in this movie?

-The antagonist was also a let-down for me. He seemed like if Billy Zane was a terminator. I really miss the relative complexity of Michael Biehn in The Abyss or Paul Reiser in Aliens.

-I know it's sci-fi and everything, but the shallow masking of us raping native americans and killing our mother gaia is a little grating to me. I've already noted this (probably with WALL-E or the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still), but somehow I have no problem swallowing allegories on nuclear war, racism, class systems, or religion; but the environment gets to me. Go preach to China and Africa and Russia about your goddamn carbon footprint and let me have my goddamn air conditioning on when it's hot outside.

-Anyway, did I mention the visual fidelity? Awesome. And all of Cameron's technology was also great. He has a gift of thinking the futuristic stuff out enough to make the gadgets seem used-in-real-life practical rather than just futur-y.

-Fuckin Celine Dion.

All in all I liked it a lot. Thankfully this isn't Titanic Part 2 like I thought it might be. I'm really curious to see how it holds up in Home viewings... which is pretty cool. It seems like more and more these days movies are made more for TV than theaters; I think it's safe to say Cameron's trying to fight that trend.

Most of all, I'm kind of relieved that I liked it. Not sure if I LOVED it or anything, but this saves me a lot of debates. i was really getting nervous there that this would be another Titanic and I'd be forced to argue against Cameron, who I usually love (unlike Micah, who seems to hate with a passion). So... oh right, the story.

It was alright. Honestly, a ton has already been said about its genericism and similarity to District 9. I think that 12 years ago this story was much more "advanced" than it is today. I think maybe just the concept of the avatar and the process would tweak way more sci-fi geeks back then before the explosion of the internet and general disconnecting effect it's having on us. And the environment wasn't as big of a deal back then so maybe it would be seen as more forward-thinking and less on the green bandwagon (at least to me). Either way though, the story's pretty basic and nothing to really write more than a paragraph about.

Wouldn't it be funny if Cameron was really good friends with Ed Begley Jr. and he let him read the script a decade ago and Begley came back and was like "Not yet, Jim. The world just isn't ready to listen." And Jim said "But I just made the biggest movie in history and I'm the goddamn king of the world! What excuse can I possibly give to make people believe I'm willingly holding off on my next film for 5, 10 years?" And Ed says "Blame technology." So Cameron says that and immediately half of Digital Domain and untold amounts of people are out of work just because Ed Begley Jr. wanted Jim Cameron's next movie to come out when we were already feeling guilty about turning on our lights at night. Maybe that isn't as funny as I thought it would be a hundred words ago. Maybe I'm just rambling at this point... rambling. http://mymovie.medialife.org/?action=movieDetails&movieID=2129 Mon, 22 Feb 2010 05:37:55 GMT http://mymovie.medialife.org/?action=movieDetails&movieID=2128 So... watching this one again, I did indeed like it more! Still feels pretty fresh though so I don't have much to say. Galifinakis is one funny dude. http://mymovie.medialife.org/?action=movieDetails&movieID=2128 Sat, 20 Feb 2010 11:42:20 GMT http://mymovie.medialife.org/?action=movieDetails&movieID=2127 One of those that I recorded mostly to watch in hd but also somewhat to see again. I'm not sure if i read the book before seeing this the first time (i want to say I didn't) so this time around I got to watch for details since I already knew the plot. Have to say I enjoyed it. Parts of me (specific parts) wish we got more slow-motion close-ups of Malin Akerman in her outfit (it's weird, she totally showed her boobs on Lisa Kudrow's HBO show The Comeback and I never really noticed but now that she's in skin-tight latex she's pretty damn interesting) and the Night Owl dude is not beer bellied like he is in the comic but other than that I thought it was ultra-specific in its adaptation. Pretty cool. I remember hearing that the Hughes brothers were doing From Hell and being unable to imagine how awesome it was gonna be then walking away with nothing to help me from being disappointed due to their adaptation (and stripping away of all societal context), i'm guessing for length. So with this it's pretty refreshing to have everything visualized well, even if it makes for a superhero movie with almost no action.

I'm half-curious to rent the Black Freighter straight-to-dvd just to see how that goes and I imagine the next time I get around to this might be the director's cut to see everything that i'm not aware that I'm missing... but this theatrical cut stands pretty well I think. I definitely prefer it to 300. http://mymovie.medialife.org/?action=movieDetails&movieID=2127 Fri, 05 Feb 2010 05:37:17 GMT http://mymovie.medialife.org/?action=movieDetails&movieID=2126 Huh, I don't know if it was the "director's cut" material (I can't remember what's different about it other than the beginning but there seems to be more with Foxx) or if it's just my second viewing but the film seemed less frantic and a bit more sprawling and cohesive. I remember feeling a bit lost in the plot and torn between what was going on with it and what Gong Li was trying to enunciate the first time I saw this but it came together a lot more for me this time around. I still think that Crocket and Tubbs' dialogue is too much Jaime Foxx and Colin Farrell trying to out-cool one another but I guess that's what Miami Vice is supposed to be. Other than that, something made me like this more...

I still miss some color-correction on the beautiful exterior day shots although the clouds and night photography are superb in a digital way (i guess the days of Thief/Heat/Insider visual polish are long gone. Perhaps Bad Boys 3 will give me my next fix). I mostly rented this for the commentary (which I still haven't listened to) but was happily surprised to be as into the film as I was. yay me. http://mymovie.medialife.org/?action=movieDetails&movieID=2126 Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:25:35 GMT http://mymovie.medialife.org/?action=movieDetails&movieID=2125 The size and placement of McG's "Directed By" credit made me wonder if people who get to direct the third, fourth, fifth, etc. incarnations of a franchise series really think the people who see them will care who made it. People have to know, right? Say you get a gig making Silver Surfer 4. Is there any way that's gonna eclipse Silver Surfer 1? I guess maybe you have to or else why make the movie but... come on.

Anyway, this was forgettably sufficient. Wasn't bad enough to make me angry (although I still like this one the least), wasn't good enough to give me anything in particular to talk about here. I guess the sound design of that one big machine who blows up all the cars was kind of cool... I guess it's also a problem when you're dealing with a movie that basically plugs in a hole from another movie. We know that Connor will rescue Kyle Reese, we also know that - blowing up that building/city or not - the war will continue long enough for Reese to go back in time (this is all thanks to the third film, which reaffirmed the series' fatalistic viewpoint), so really we're just watching pretty explosions here. So that's tough from a story standpoint. I almost would've rather had the film be vignettes from the Terminator universe. Like dispatches from the war. Even with the story they had, they should've spent more time with Sam Worthington and less with John Connor. Again, there's supposed to be this big surprise that he's a machine but we see in the first scene that he's been dead for like 25 years and wakes up covered in mud... How am I supposed to think anything else? But anyway, i chose to read into the machine's experiments a little and why he wasn't self-aware and hybrid rather than just tissue over machine and that part (in my head) was cool...

Also, why can the T-600's walk up or down those corrugated metal stairs? Those things wobble when my hefty weight steps on them... is it supposed to be super light-weight aluminum titanium alloy? If so, how can they still deform solid-steel beams and shit when they fight each other?

See? If this was a better movie I wouldn't be thinking about this shit... http://mymovie.medialife.org/?action=movieDetails&movieID=2125 Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:26:38 GMT http://mymovie.medialife.org/?action=movieDetails&movieID=2124 It's weird that Armin Mueller-Stahl's upper lip has a Seussian dip in the middle now. Um... this was ok. It's hard to compare to my memory of Da Vinci code because I think I still remember the book more than the movie. Even though i read this one a long time ago, i was surprised to remember several big scenes notably absent in the film. In the big push to fit all the plot in these two and a half hours, there's no time to think about what's going on and what the puzzles even are much less how Langdon solved them or what the solutions even mean. To me, it was very hurried and rushed, possibly in an effort to keep the audience from being bored (like they were in Da Vinci Code) but whatever... These are both pretty hard adaptations that I don't think were particularly successful.

At least Tom Hanks didn't have his hair to supply easy fodder, probably the only reason why this wasn't lambasted as much as the first film. All in all, it was alright. http://mymovie.medialife.org/?action=movieDetails&movieID=2124 Mon, 25 Jan 2010 08:41:07 GMT http://mymovie.medialife.org/?action=movieDetails&movieID=2123 A few years ago, we saw a short at one of Tim League's FantasticFest screener nights that wasn't particularly good except for the fact that it was live-action G.I. Joe guys running around. They played it completely straight even though it was pretty evident that it was just a bunch of friends out in Griffith Park for a weekend, and something about the ridiculousness of the toy line seen in flesh and blood irony-free really worked for me.

And that's how I feel about this movie. Instead of no-budget and amateurish, it's way over-polished and CG-fake. If it were not a G.I. Joe movie, I'd probably completely dismiss it, but instead I buy it. OK, the spuer-soldier suits still didn't do anything for me, but that's just because I never had them in toy form. Everything else somehow seemed excusable because the toys were total 80s excess magic so why not the movie too?

So I'm not sure why I'm choosing to disclose this publicly - it's pretty embarrassing - but why not, right? I played with G.I. Joes at an unacceptably old age. Like, 9th grade. I think they were the last "toys" that I played with, not counting video games. I clearly remember setting up elaborate tableaux of joes mid-combat on the basement carpet, on the basement stairs, on the workbench in the unfinished basement auxiliary room. Fake blood was employed. Leftover Mad Scientist glow-in-the-dark goop made to look like props from my imagination's unofficial G.I. Joe vs. Aliens movie. Screwdriver operations were performed to create a Joe strongly resembling Cable from The New Mutants comic book. And to make matters worse, after setting these epic scenes of carnage up, I would commit them to video, often with character voice-over as I zoomed and fumbled from scene to scene. This was perhaps my geekiest period of development. Now in my defense... I was also getting into horror movies at the time so the fake blood and glow-in-the-dark goop also made for fan-remakes of Re-Animator or Predator... and I also did most of this stuff with my neighbor buddy Cameron... Not that this makes it any less geeky, but whatever. Point is, G.I. Joe was my jam.

Anyway, This movie isn't that great. My little basement scenes were better, but this had explosions enough and although I had to see Marlon Wayans play Riptide, I also got to see Ray Park play Snake Eyes. I do kind of wish they would've stuck to Zartan's original costume or involved the crimson twins somehow (they were a fav of mine due to their zipline accessory) but whatever... dumb stupid Yo Joe! fun. http://mymovie.medialife.org/?action=movieDetails&movieID=2123 Thu, 21 Jan 2010 10:42:57 GMT http://mymovie.medialife.org/?action=movieDetails&movieID=2122 I figured "Hey, there's a few Sam Mendes movies that I haven't seen. I should check them out!" Once again, I should've listened to my growing gut and let this one pass me by. It was shot very well and I guess this is the sort of movie where I'm supposed to marvel at the acting or whatever but no. Sorry, but spending two hours with a fighting couple is not my idea of a good time, even if it's Liz Taylor and Richard Burton (and Winslet and DiCaprio are no Taylor/Burton). An actively depressing movie. I can't imagine anything that someone could say that could get another person to see this movie spoilers in the fake convo below):

Person A: Hey man, have you seen Revolutionary Road?

Person B: No, should I?

A: Oh yeah, it's great! Leonardo DiCaprio plays an unhappy cheating husband to Kate Winslet and they fight a lot but then decide to move to paris and they don't fight as much for a little bit but then she catches pregnant and they decide not to go to Paris after all so they fight more then Winslet dies!

B: sweet. http://mymovie.medialife.org/?action=movieDetails&movieID=2122 Tue, 19 Jan 2010 05:36:28 GMT