88 Minutes

After we started watching this, I found that it was nominated for a Razzie last year for both Worst Picture and Worst Actor.

It didn't win either, and sometimes the Razzies are way wrong, but this time I'm with them on the Worst Picture part. Hard to believe that a psychological thriller with Al Pacino in it could be so utterly uninteresting, but it was. Not only is it impossible to care about any of the characters in this show, but--well, the basic premise is that Pacino's character gets a phone call from an old enemy and is told that he has 88 minutes to live--and before the movie is half over, you find yourself wishing they would speed up time and make good on their threat, just to get it over with.

Neither of us were able to sit through the whole thing. Don't know whodunit, and don't care.

All About Eve

Hadn't seen this one in a long time, so when I came across it at the library I thought I'd give it another try. In retrospect, I won't stay that I wish I hadn't, but I will say that I don't think I'll need to see it again for another couple of decades.

I have a great deal of respect for Bette Davis, but I'm not quite sure why. I've never been crazy about her looks or any of her characters or anything. And she turns in a solid performance here as a self-absorbed star actress, so the movie didn't do anything to change my opinion of her one way or the other. For what it is, though, and for the times in which it was released, I guess the movie remains indestructible, as does Ms. Davis.

Best Part: George Sanders as the self-serving unscrupulous drama critic Addison DeWitt. I've always enjoyed listening to him ever since I first heard him as the voice of Shere Khan in Disney's The Jungle Book. Marilyn Monroe also has a few lines in this show, and--as it was before they made her into Marilyn Monroe(TM)--she looks gorgeous and is fun to watch.

Howl's Moving Castle

In earlier days I felt that detectable changes from one frame to the next were a hallmark of cheap animation. This was especially true in animations produced for television: Hanna-Barbera may have been the most commercially successful animation studio ever, but for Heaven's sake! Do they HAVE to keep lowering the bar so @#$%#@$ far?

Once they had lowered the standard, they were copied and things only got worse. Watch an episode of Pokemon, for example, and the technique is--well, I'll just say that the cutting of corners to make the animation process cost-effective is plainly evident.

The previous result for me has been a knee-jerk dismissive reaction anytime the animation wasn't perfectly smooth. If they were putting fewer than 24 fps on the screen, somebody didn't care enough.

But then I started watching Miyazaki films. Quite often--maybe always--the transition from one frame to the next is evident. But if the drawings are beautifully executed with great care, does it matter so much? In this case, since so many of the drawings are executed by only one person--and since the result is soulful and thoughtful and magnificent in so many other pleasantly surprising ways--I'm finding a new ability to ignore frame counts.

This film, in particular, is beautiful. I found the story rather convoluted and a little disappointing in its complexity, but that's my only complaint. It's definitely on my to-own list.

what have I done to deserve this?

Picked this up from the World Cinema section at the public library. Any description I write wouldn't do this film justice, so I'll just copy the notes from the DVD jacket:

"Gloria is a cleaning woman and housewife who is addicted to amphetamines. She lives in a crowded apartment with her miserable taxi driving husband (who once forged Hitler's diaries), her two teen sons--one who is selling drugs, the other sleeps with older men--and her crazy mother-in-law who keeps a pet lizard. Driven by despair, Gloria sells off one of her sons, accidentally kills her husband and sets into motion a nightmarish chain of events in Pedro Almodovar's absurdist black comedy."

Excellent synopsis. Excellent movie. You have to be in the right frame of mind for this sort of absurdist black comedy, but if you are, this is hilarious. I've heard of some of Almodovar's other films (Talk to Her, All About My Mother), but this is the first thing of his I've seen. Can't wait to see the others.

Kiki's Delivery Service

Kiki's Delivery Service was the first Miyazaki film I ever saw, and we just got it from the library again. It's been a couple of years since we first saw it--the twins didn't remember it at all--and I found it even better the second time around.

The film begins as Kiki, a young witch, decides that it's time for her to leave home and try to make her way in the world. The rest of the film is about her trying to get settled in her new life, and the adventures that happen to her along the way.

One of my favorite things about Miyazaki is the way that he will stir together disparate elements from past history and, because the story is already dreamlike, the elements seem to fit effortlessly, as if they always belonged together. The cars in Kiki's new town all seem to be from about the mid-1930s, and there is a dirigible in the story, but there are also transistor radios, and television. The locals regard Kiki as more of a remarkable surprise than a fright; nobody is horrified to see her flying around on a broom. And the message behind the film is a powerful favorite of mine.

The only downside to this movie is that Kiki's cat, Jiji, was voiced by Phil Hartman. I never heard of Phil Hartman until he became famous for the wrong reason, and I can't listen to his work here without being saddened by that. Sigh.

Castle In the Sky

I feel as if there's not much to say about this film. Anyone who enjoys animation probably already knows about Hayao Miyazaki and all the things that make his stuff wonderful:

- unpredictable storylines in fantastical settings

- traditional (i.e., hand-drawn) animation, with computers used only rarely

- magnificent artwork

and that, until recently (due to age), he drew many of the frames and usually checked every single frame himself (over 100,000 for a single film). And people who aren't familiar with Miyazaki are not likely to appreciate his stuff until after they've seen a couple.

If you haven't seen his stuff before, this is a good one to start with; also, Kiki's Delivery Service or My Neighbor Totoro. He won a richly-deserved Oscar for the stellar Spirited Away, but some might find it less accessible than the others.

One other item: we just got this one from the library, and it was wonderful, but it's from 1986 (not released in the US until much more recently). I confused it with his more recent Howl's Moving Castle, which we haven't seen yet.

Citizen Welles

One day I was in the mood for a biography so I picked this one up at random at the Public Library. Turned out to be more interesting and educational than I expected.

And I guess that's partly because Orson Welles turned out to be more interesting than I expected. I've been a fan of Citizen Kane since forever, and of course I knew of the War of the Worlds radio show, but didn't really know much about the guy beyond that. Didn't know anything, for example, about his stage career, which was actually where he got started and began to build a name for himself before the Mercury Theatre radio shows.

The book is very much about Welles as a person, rather than being about The Movie Star or The Radio Star, and gives an interesting look into his personality and his approach to his work. (One of the biggest personal upsets of his professional life, for example, came when he was playing on a Broadway stage and someone from the back of the audience called out, "Louder!" Ever the confident perfectionist, Welles was mortified.)

The easy access of the Internet makes reading a book like this all the more fun. It's easy to find downloadable .mp3 files of many of the radio shows, and there's even some footage of the "Voodoo Macbeth" on YouTube.

Overall, a fun and worthwhile read, even if you're not a Welles fan.

Doubt

Wow wow wow! Theresa and I went to see this last night at the Bagdad, neither of us knowing much about it. I was just blown away by the quality of the writing and the acting. Meryl Streep especially was just incredible, and I already have very high standards for her. Philip Seymour Hoffman impressed me as well. This is the first role I have seen him in that wasn't just a big schlubby jerk, so it was nice to see that he has a little range.


The only complaint I have about the movie was that it ended a little abruptly for me. Some of that I'm sure is that I was enjoying it so much I didn't want it to be over. Really good stuff.

In America

This was just a beautiful movie. I know you've probably all seen it already by now but I got it from netflix a week ago and it has been sitting on my nightstand waiting for the perfect moment to be watched and tonight was it. I really expected it to be much more blunt with the themes of a young family struggling to make their life work in New York but it was about so much more than that. I cried at the end. A lot.

king of kong: a fistful of quarters

mm and i finally saw this and it's real good. a documentary about two men battling for the highest score in donkey kong but really about more than that. even mom and dad will like this.

together

watched this the other day.
hilarious and awesome
check it

Bee Movie

Theresa and I watched this the other night and let me just say, it was appalling. The main characters were annoying, the script didn't bother to use logic of any kind, the big plot device was ridiculous, Jerry Seinfeld was incredibly annoying, and when it was all over I totally wanted my money back. Wondering 'who wrote this piece of crap?' at the end, I watched the credits. It turns out, there were four separate (credited) writers. Not a good sign, fellas. Can you see the tag line in the photo over there? "Honey just got funny"? No, no it really didn't. My advice? Skip it.

Premonition

I just finished watching Premonition, the one with Sandra Bullock where her husband dies and she wakes up the next day and he isn't dead and etc etc. My spontaneous utterance at the end of the movie was "oh my god....what a bunch of preachy crappy garbage!"

Needless to say, I don't recommend.

no end in sight

great. depressing but great.

rocket science

granted this is an indie movie that suffers initially from a surfeit of cleverness and self-aware hip teens and some unnecessary (in my opinion) narration but after awhile i really grew to dig this movie. kind of tender and heartwarming and original.

The Spiderwick Chronicles

Oh boy. Hard to know where to begin with this one. The biggest issues were the glaring inconsistencies in logic. I know it's a kids movie, I know children aren't supposed to have the best judgment, but the errors they made just seemed ridiculous. The basic premise (beware of spoilers ahead) is that there is this book that contains all of the secrets to finding magical creatures in the world and the book is inside this old house that this mom and her three kids moves into and one of her sons finds it. The whole point is to keep the book safe from some scary ogre guy because if he had all the secrets then he would destroy the world. So the boy figures out that the house is protected by some magic something or other and the book is safe inside the house. He sees his brother get dragged away into the forest by goblins and so he goes after them, but instead of leaving the book in the magical safety of the house, he takes it with him!! I could understand this if he was going to use the book to figure out how to help his brother or something, but he doesn't open it one time! Then he finally gets his brother back safely to the house and they decide they have to go into town to find the crazy daughter of the guy who wrote the book and ask her for help, and he takes the freaking book with him again!! For NO REASON.

There was more of this kind of nonsensical BS, but it all adds up to lazy writing. It made the whole suspense of the movie kind of fall apart for me because I was so irritated. The 'feelings' part of the plot was one of the sons waiting for his father to come pick him up (the parents were recently divorced) and then of course his father doesn't show up because, surprise! He doesn't really want his son to live with him. Haven't we seen this particular drama play out about a thousand times already? Now I haven't read any of the books so I don't know if they were just stupid or very poorly adapted. Either way, I'm annoyed. From the drippy dialogue to the unbelievable plot lines, this had to be one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Don't waste your time.

Zodiac

I enjoyed Zodiac a lot. I tend to be partial to serial killer movies anyway (not sure what that says about me, but I don't think it's good), but this one in particular was paced really well. There were sequences where I was actually on-the-edge-of-my-seat scared, and that doesn't happen to me very often. Plus, it's chock full of Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo, and Jake Gyllenhaal...how could that be bad??

Pan's Labyrinth

I just finished watching Pan's Labyrinth on Netflix On Demand. The thing that surprised me the most about it was how bloody it was and how disturbing some of the scenes turned out to be. I expected it to be much more lighthearted than it was, and while technically I suppose it had a happy ending, it was still a little bleak for my taste. Given all that, I'd have to say I can't quite recommend it. Most of you have already seen it anyway, so I don't suppose it matters too much what I thought :)