Wes Anderson does Star Wars?

Oh, trick titles. You do so much good work.

An interview with perennial QT favorite, Wes Anderson. The money is the toss-off about a Han Solo backstory. I wold pay feature price to see that short in a theater.

DEADLINE: Star Wars was among the films that influenced you early on. What would the world get if Wes Anderson signed on to direct one of these new Star Wars films Disney will make? 

ANDERSON: Well I have a feeling I would probably ultimately get replaced on the film because I don’t know if I have all the right action chops. But at least I know the characters from the old films. 

DEADLINE: You are not doing a good job of selling yourself as a maker of blockbusters. 

ANDERSON: I think you are reading it exactly right. I don’t think I would do a terrible job at a Han Solo backstory. I could do that pretty well. But maybe that would be better as a short.

Also, since we're in the neighborhood, here's Conan O'Brien's take on Wes Anderson's take on Star Wars:

Movies April 2011

The A-Team (2010)

Good enough at the outset, but problems set in like an evening mist. Ok, so Mr. T having a nonviolence epiphany in jail, this is a nice twist. I don't think any of us expected a real attempt at character arcs. But by the end of the move his arc is... a repudiation of nonviolence? An embrace of killing as a problem solver? Also, at the climax of the movie, Face is doing the planning and Hannibal is doing the lying. Wha wha what? Did some pages get mixed up?

The villains were fantastic though. The theatrical CIA agent and his inept stooges along with the sociopathically professional security contractor were comedy gold -- separately, but especially together in the car. We watched that scene twice.

Date Night

I'm trying to put my finger on what's off about this movie, and I think the problem is a slapdash plot obscured and illuminated (in the medieval monkish sense) by excellent comedians and quality production values. Not good enough to recommend, but not bad enough to hate. You make the call, sports fan.

Movies March 2011

The Wire, Season 1, Disc 3

I like the Wire, but I don't like-like the Wire like everyone else seems to.

Dogs Decoded: Nova

Part of an ongoing experiment where we try to figure out what our dogs are thinking.

Sukiyaki Western Django

Genres collide! Unsatisfyingly!

Futurama, Season 5

Freakonomics

Based on the book of the same name.

Man, Woman, and the Wall

This movie is so Japanese.

The Princess Bride

We watched this, and then watched it again with William Goldman's commentary on. Not too revealing, but now I can say I did it. The dialogue still sparkles in this movie. I've occasionally thought as I watched this movie, that I don't think it could be successfully remade. It's not a just-perfect movie, but the chemistry and joy in its inception and production are non-reproducible. In the commentary, it was flattering to get William Goldman's validation, saying roughly the same thing.

2012

About as dumb as we thought it would be. Yep, about that dumb.

Arrested Development, Season 3

I never watched the whole 3rd season in order, so I decided to do that. Still funny, but the humor was starting to wear thin. As long as I'm heretical about people's favorite shows, I'll say that maybe it's just as well that this show ended when it did. Now it will always be James Dean, and never fat Elvis.

Soul Eater, series 1

Netflix just added a mess of anime, and I've been sampling. So far, this is the only one that's made it past the first episode for me. The story is standard, but the design sense is odd, and there's a pretty readable pattern in the way manga/anime builds stories that I'm trying to internalize. Anyway, it's fun, and the characters seem one-dimensional at first, but the story starts to builds depth into them as it goes.

Movies February 2011

Pixar Short Films: Vol. 1

That was fun.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Yet another Terry Jones film that looks wonderful, and has some smashing ideas, and still seems like someone left out a couple pages of crucial exposition before the end sputters in. The guy is so consistent, I gotta think he's doing it on purpose. But Why? WHY?

Cartoon Noir

I love animation, but I guess I have to make an exception for this.

I Am A Sex Addict

The title. The title pulled me into this one when I was sick at home and cruising Netflix one day. It's an autobiographical documentary about a guy who finds out he has a sex addiction. It's interesting to notice where he was embarrassingly self-revelatory, and where he glossed.

Superman/Shazam!: The Return of Black Adam

A misnamed series of four DC universe shorts featuring Superman and Shazam, the Spectre, Green Arrow, and Jonah Hex respectively. Uniformly excellent. In the first one particularly, the creators seem to revel in their freedom from violence censorship that colored most of Warner Brothers' DC animation. I have never seen such loving attention in animation paid to punches -- gut punches, kidney punches, slow-motion punches to the face detailing the spit that flies out of a mouth.

Batman: Under the Red Hood

Remember that story from the comics about Jason Todd coming back from the dead to bedevil Batman? This is that in moving picture form.

Exit Through the Gift Shop

I like street art already, and so I was surprised, because this wasn't that. It was about a guy who knows street artists. A watchable, enjoyable documentary.

Ip Man

A high quality, but not life-changing martial arts movie.

Die Hard

This movie is underappreciated. Not that people don't like it, just not as much as they should. I don't recall watching another action movie with so many twists and visual bits and gags executed so deftly. I want to study the script for this flick. So much to learn.

Movies January 2011

Work and rampant volunteerism took all my giveadamn for the last quarter of 2010, so no formal record of movie watching was kept. I probably watched 900 films a month during that period. No one will ever know now.

But this month, I'm trying again!

The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Toy Story 3

Hercules Unchained (MST3K)
These things are less fun watching alone.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
Good stuff.

Jab We Met
M and I love it when the local access channel shows clips from Bollywood musicals as music videos. Streets of people dancing, and a guy or a girl singing about chaste love, while moving in a way that is the entire opposite of chastity. delightful! So we looked on Netflix for Bollywood musicals and found this one. Yay!

Blue Like Jazz movie: the hail mary works

A few months ago, I posted about Steve Taylor doing a Blue Like Jazz movie. Gonna do some sudden follow-up on this.

Today, while procrastinating on a freelance gig, I found this article at the Atlantic, Blue Like Jazz: The Quest to Get Christians to Laugh at Themselves. The article compares the Evangelical Christian community's pugilistically earnest film attempts with Jewish and Catholic films, and portrayals in said films. So, ok, interesting.

It also tipped me off to the late breaking news on the Blue Like Jazz movie. I don't really have the time to build this up like this story deserves, but it's a good story, so I'll just cut and paste from the Atlantic article:

After a year of fundraising, Miller—who's written a total of five Christian-themed books and is part of an Obama task force on absentee fathers—was still $125,000 short. He decided to give up. Last month, he wrote a post on his blog declaring the project dead. Blue Like Jazz would not be made into a movie.

But it didn't stay dead for long. Two 24-year-old Miller fans launched a page on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter to solicit donations, and within a week and a half, they'd raised enough money to make the movie. Miller and his supporters then set a new fundraising goal: $200,642, so the film would beat wannabe Facebook-killer Diaspora as the highest-grossing project in the history of Kickstarter. Late this week, with just three days to go before fundraising ends and filming begins, the movie surpassed this milestone—as of Friday morning, backers had given a total of more than $203,000.

Holy shit. $200k isn't a huge number in movie-making terms, but the solid gold nugget in the middle of this interesting bit comes later in the article:

The movie's inability to fit into a pre-existing category helps explain why Miller and his collaborators had so much trouble coming up with the money to make the film. "You're sort of pissing off both sides," Miller says. "Hollywood hates it because we don't have our head up our ass, and the church hates it because we don't have our head up our ass."

200k+ worth of Christian-owned dollars said they're tired of movies made by people with heads in asses. That's news, friend. The real test will be how many Christian-owned dollars show up at the theater/DVD outlet. But this is a fine score for a pre-test.

Reminds me that there's an audience for my projects too.

There's one day left to donate at this point. You can still get in on the fun. Only $3000 gets you dinner with Steve Taylor and Don Miller. As a lifelong cheapass, I'd fork out that money if I had it.

Also, just go visit Don Miller's blog because there's some interesting stuff there.

Movies September 2010

30 Rock
Watched a lot of scattered episodes this month from all three seasons, thanks to Netflix on demand. This show is so weird and funny and wonderful, and Netflix tells me it is going away from on-demand at the end of the month. I'm a little asea at the thought of it.

Yojimbo
Had a Kurosawa day this month. I think I had seen Yojimbo before, but I didn't absorb it like I did this time. Seems like the first time I watched, it late at night, and slept through some of it. That seems to happen to me a lot. Anyway -- great movie. I recommend it, awake OR asleep.

Sanjuro
I watched this a few years ago, thinking it was Yojimbo and not understanding it. I read up on Akira Kurosawa's career after this viewing, and discovered that this was a script he had already written, but adapted to put Sanjuro in after Yojimbo was a big success. That makes sense to me, because Sanjuro feels like a different kind of movie, more of a caper flick than the wily anti-heroism of Yojimbo.

Jericho, season 1, disc 2
The compelling:annoying ratio drops on this disc as compared to previous efforts. But we'll keep watching, probably.

Popotan
A short anime series about three girls who live in a teleporting house for some reason? And every episode, they find some way to show a girl's naked anime boobs. The primary compulsion to keep watching is the mystery of why these women live in a teleporting house, but I'm probably not going to finish watching before I just look on the Internet and find the conclusion to the story myself.

The Girl from Monday
The Internet suggests that director Hal Hartley is an indie movie bigshot. This near future sci-fi dystopia ditty is maybe sort of a misfire. Sabrina Lloyd is pretty though.

Iron Man
What a fun superhero movie. Just a lot of fun.

Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman
Not a Timm/Dini/Radomski Batman story, and it shows.

Tales of meta-change

Tomorrow I start my new job.

I've been working at Circle Thrift for six or seven weeks part-time as a way to stave off unemployed anxiety. I sorted clothes and ran the register and behaved cheerfully toward customers.

I loved it. The situation was unsustainable, but if it hadn't been, I would consider making a career of it. There were colorful characters and bizarre goings-on every day I worked. I could have told a story every day.*

So at first it seems strange to me that I didn't. Didn't write or draw or sew during this time. I composed blog entries some days, but they never left my neurons. I didn't even track the movies I watched last month. (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and some other stuff.)

Instead, I volunteered. Since July, I've further embedded myself in responsibilities among my church. It's been surprisingly non-creative. Attending meetings, returning phone calls, head down, concrete, task-oriented, unreflective. Combined with a hang-clothes-handle-money retail job, there was lots of do, little doo-dah. Not my style or strength, but there kept being one more thing that needed doing. So I kept doing it.

Now I'm starting a new job, a shift from anything I've ever done professionally. Not writing. Not editing. It involves mental health clients, so I don't know how much I'll even talk about it here. Probably lots of stories, but discretion will be at a premium.

I'm also starting to read tips and lists and crap that I won't link to about blog posting. I'm spontaneously looking at new ideas for monsters. The YA novel I lost track of a couple months ago has wandered back in. Creative ventures seem to be re-emerging.

Things are changing around here. That's probably the takeaway. I'm excited by recent prospects, yet for all the change, it seems like no relief from the pinball life. The categories of change seem to be the things changing now. My change is changing.

I think I'll have more to say about that soon.

*Slumming it is underrated. A job you exceed grants a marvelous attention surplus.

Movies July 2010

Chocolate
Maudlin, but the final fight scene was worth the price of admission. I don't even know how you'd plan a fight scene on the side of a building... it was fantastic to watch, and eminently stealable for D&D.

Battlestar Galactica (2003 miniseries)
This has ageda little? But it's still quite good. Looking forward to watching the first couple of seasons again with M,

Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths
Dwane McDuffie keeps knocking these out of the park, scriptwise. Every other aspect is also quite good!

The Last Airbender
"Your exposition is here, Mr. Shyamalan. Where d'ja want it?"
"Oh, just put it anywhere."

Shiri

A Korean action movie that was pretty good! Recommended.

Superman Doomsday
Pretty disappointing.

Inception

Christopher Nolan does movies I want to see, so I wanted to see this. I enjoyed it, but I didn't just loooove it. It was a smidge too intricate for movies, too much expository work. That level of plot intricacy works in novels, but movies have a ceiling, I think. Also, Lady or the Tiger endings have been frustrating since immediately after "The Lady, or the Tiger?". I think Cobb never made it back out. But maybe... maybe he did?

Jericho, season 1, disc 1

A short-lived, pretty good TV drama about life post-nuke attack in the U.S. of A.

Observations:

• Jericho is far too racially integrated to truly exist in Kansas.
• The black guy's character is so aggressively mysterious I want to punch him through the television.
• This show seems to have the same curious hiccup that other genre-esque dramas have: The writing staff appears to have more show to fill than quality to spend. Some storylines and arcs are suspenseful and challenging, while others in the very same episode are dumb as doorknobs.

We'll keep watching though.

Helvetica

I like fonts, but this documentary failed to hold my interest. This seemed pitched more at insiders than outsiders. Every once in a while, a moment of "oh, that's interesting," would take you off guard, but then it would switch to some aged German or Swiss man saying something dry.

Surrogates

Relentlessly mediocre. I was sort of interested in seeing this last year in the theater, but not interested enough to do anything about it. Now I know why. This movie spent all its money on Bruce Willis and marketing, not necessarily in that order. It had scenes that in all senses -- script, acting, lighting, camera work, scenery, and more -- looked like were lifted from the "how to shoot an '80s action TV series" handbook. The story was workmanlike in its conventionality.

Movies June 2009

Legend of the Drunken Master
Early Jackie Chan. He hasn't hit his stride yet here, but he's still fun to watch.

Avatar: The Last Airbender, season 3
While working on the A:tLA card game a few years ago for Upper Deck, I watched all of season 1 and part of season 2 to get up to speed on the show. I liked it for the rich setting, well-written characters, comedy, and unexpected twists. So I jumped at finishing the series on Netflix, finishing season 2 and watching all of season 3.

I love this show more than ever now. It transcended children's entertainment, and the love its creators invested in it shows. Plus, the M. Night Shymalan version comes out next month, and it's nice to be reacquainted with the characters before that hits.

Master of the Flying Guillotine
More kung fu classic cinema.

Mystery Team
This movie about boy detectives who solve a real adult crime was pretty fun. I watched it because I'm becoming a fan of Donald Glover, who wrote for 30 Rock, stars in Community, and is part of the Derrick Comedy group. Maybe not a great movie, but a fun movie.

Death Note
The Japanese movie base on the manga about a guy who finds a notebook with the power to kill whoever's name is written in it. And the cat and mouse to find him once the police figure out it's weird murder. I've never read the manga, but the movie was good diversion. Above average. Kept me interested.

Death Note: Last Name
The second part? I guess? See above.

Connected
A short film about people after some apocalypse. Tense and well done. You can watch it now.

JCVD
Jean-Claude Van Damme is the Rodney Dangerfield of the action movie star set. Some pathos. Some comedy. Pretty fun.

Steel Magnolias
Nice dialogue.

The Karate Kid (2010)
And we close with modern Jackie Chan. You know, this was fine. The best part was Jackie Chan beating the mean kids up. The rest was nice enough.

Movies May 2009

The Office, season 4

The Office, season 5

Once Upon a Time in the West
A great western. I just watched it and I already think I probably need to see it again.

The Empire Strikes Back

The Twilight Samurai
5 Stars. Not a martial arts movie in a Bruce Lee sense. Very little swordplay. But moving and sweet.

The Return of the Jedi

The continued work of awakening

I dreamed last night that I heard Steve Taylor died, so I Googled him to find out if it was true, and to my horror -- surprise twist! -- there was no mention of Roland Steven Taylor on the Internet at all.

Now that I'm up, I don't know why that was horrific, but in dreamworld, this was like taking the final exam for the class you forgot you signed up for. OMG serious.

On awaking, I immediately went downstairs and let the dog out and checked my email. Sometime later in the morning, I checked on Steve. Nobody panic.

If you knew me well in college, you knew I was pretty into Steve Taylor. He was funny, clever, pro-Jesus, and he could do it all in song. My personal ambition sleepwalked through college... I couldn't say I wanted to do what he did. But Steve Taylor was a noise the direction of wakefulness.

Around the time I graduated, he released his best album, Squint, and then traded performing for producing. It was the mid-90s, we were all becoming different people at that point. I started working on Dungeons & Dragons for a living then. We've all been there.

In the mid-aughts I checked in on Steve again, and found he'd gone to movie making. He made a flick starring Michael W. Smith of all people, called The Second Chance. It's a buddy movie about a white suburban pastor and a black inner-city pastor. It's in my Netflix queue now, I'll let you know what I think at the end of the month after I watch it.

And today? Now? He's in Portland working on a Blue Like Jazz movie.

BLJ's author, Donald Miller, is someone else I would have wanted to emulate if his books had been around in college. I'm sort of glad they weren't. They could have misled a sleepwalker.

These days, I get a prickly feeling on my neck when I consider trying to create some piece of art for an explicitly Christian audience. It seems as though it would be easy for me. And financially rewarding. I could do funny, touching memoir for the saved set. I could do a passable Don Miller.

But as I start down that road, I think of Jesus talking:

If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?

A whole chunk of text there, Matthew 5:43-48, has kept me up nights. That bite's got a lot of hard-to-swallow. Jesus tells you to be "perfect" in there. He tells you the rough truth that God makes the rain fall on the righteous and the unrighteous. And to me, he says that writing books for my brothers and sisters is not particularly what I'm called to do.

Look, God has a whole lot of things for a whole lot of people to be doing. I still love Steve Taylor's music and wit, and Don Miller is a decent writer. Don't hear me saying that what they've chosen to do is wrong or subpar or Not In God's Will.

But as my personal ambition rubs away eye boogers and stares into the bathroom mirror wondering when it shaved last, those noises... they're not for me to follow. I don't want to greet my brothers for a living. There's too many other people out there who need introductions.

I am glad Steve is alive, though. Check out his movie blog.

Movies April 2010

The Men Who Stare at Goats
This movie could have been funny, but somehow... maybe in the editing? The jokes just fell flat. It was like comedy archaeology: You could see the bones of jokes. The set up, the punchline, the reaction, they were all there, but the meat was gone. Not funny. I don't understand what went wrong. All those great actors were doing decent work. But then the movie fell flat. Weird.

Whip It
If I were a girl, I guess I'd feel lightly empowered or something after this.

Fringe, season 1, disc 1

This is ok, I guess. The X-Files-y sci-fi of it is pretty cool, but the characters don't do much for me.

The Office, season 2

Netflix on Xbox lets us stream whole seasons of this show. So during protracted illness and unemployment, we watched a hella lot of Office. It's pretty good, although I am thankful that the show becomes less excruciating as it goes on. I had anxiety dreams starring Michael Scott halfway through the season I'm not eager to reproduce.

The Office, season 3
More of this.

Zombieland
This was fun. Pretty fun.

Transformers Animated
The animation here was weird, like, either the Koreans went off-model with impunity, or somebody was trying something "new" that didn't work when it comes to character elasticity. Especially the little girl, who seemed to change shape and proportions at random.

The story was ok though, especially for a G1 man such as myself.

Movies March 2010

30 Rock, season 3, disc 2
"Did Cranston give you my messages?"

Super Size Me

The third in the trifecta of fast food horror documentaries.

Transformers
Didn't care for this movie much, but we all knew that would happen, so let's move on to the interesting part: The way I watched it. Normally, I like to remove all distraction, sit down, and watch a movie in one sitting. I didn't do that here, and I blame 30 Rock. Watching 22-minute TV episodes is delightful. Watch one, you're done, a nice bedtime story or a responsible half-hour filler. Watch two, it's an hour with an intermission. I've gotten used to it. I like it.

So I watched this movie that way too, without pressure. When I wanted to stop, I got up and did something else. I expect most films to have an emotional arc best experienced in one sitting, but I didn't feel robbed, because it was just a lousy Michael Bay Transformers movie. Go team Jeff!

The Invention of Lying
I love alternate reality, and I love high concept. Even if it turned out to be antithetical to some of my own beliefs, I was ready to be amused and challenged on a long plane flight to Rome by The Invention of Lying. However, this movie had a big, stupid flaw, namely, an inherent unreality that drives a truck over suspension of disbelief. Killed this movie dead for me.

Here's the thing: religion is a part of human existence. Let's start secular and empirical: Religion has shaped culture, history, art, government, and language in every part of the world for every human, everywhere. This is not wispy poetry-and-flowers talk, this is way shit is. Even if you think religion is bogus, it has MADE you in ways you can't control.

So it will be understandably difficult to envision a world without it. You have to rethink everything, including, literally, how you think. What is justice? What is evil? Why wear clothes?

I don't expect Ricky Gervais to have a philosophically defensible rubric here, but some sense that he'd spent some time on the implications would help me like the movie. Genetic advancement? That's your highest imperative? How does anything get done then? Why isn't everyone living in huts? (Because a whole lot of architecture got done because of religion. Architects and engineers are not, historically, renowned for genetic excellence.)

That's the big one. That's the problem I can't get past, intellectually. But then there's another horrible flaw this movie purports: that honesty is cruel. That kindness is only "invented" when someone has the genius idea to lie.

The only reason honesty is ever harsh is because people cherish lies. If you did not, for instance, silently and invisibly nurture the lie that you are OK with losing your hair, then no one could hurt you by calling you "baldy." And in a world where no one lies, there would be no reason to try hurting you. Your deficiencies are fact, not barb. The cruelty that Gervais's character, Mark, endures at his work is dishonest.

Yes, it was played for larfs, but the emotional premise of the movie, one of the reasons we're supposed to empathize with Mark, is that in this world of no lies, people are hurtful to each other with honesty. That kind of internal illogic punches you in the face over and over.

Furthermore, this movie does truthfulness a disservice by suggesting that lies make the world a kinder, richer place. The colors, the lighting, the set design, all suggest a bland, homogeneous, simplistic place. But if you think about the consequences of the absence of deception for even a few minutes, when everything and everyone can only be itself and nothing else -- that would have to be the most varied, colorful, wiggy world you can imagine. Telling lies forces us into being boring, safe, and predictable, not the other way around.

Then of course, there is the poetry-and-flowers kind of stuff that you can't reason around. Love. Art. Feelings. Those things are real and powerful, and impervious to justification. A society that could not lie would understand this implicitly. I suspect a concept as dodgy as "genetic imperative" would be inconsequential as well.

And so, see, I'm putting more thought into this than Gervais seems to have, and the thought I put into it tells me that the movie itself is fundamentally a lie. The setting and premise are so divorced from reality, so bedrock fictional, that it doesn't possess the capacity to enlighten us about the reality we do live in.

I know it's a silly, cheap movie. But I want more. In fiction, we tell wonderful lies to get at wonderful truths. The Invention of Lying doesn't have the capacity to do or be either one.

Movies February 2009

Food Inc.

I think we're trying to shock ourselves into better eating habits. Much more of an unapologetic agenda than King Corn, but not, necessarily, more effective for it.

Oban Star Racers, Alwas Cycle, disc 1
I wasn't sure if this was a children's cartoon when I rented this, but it is. Fortunately, it's a decent one, and very creative. This French/Japanese hybrid produces some lovely images and fun ideas.

Oban Star Racers, Alwas Cycle, disc 2
See above.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

I was struck watching this movie by how REAL everything was, more like filmed plays than modern movie making. In the opening credits, when dude was driving a team of horses down a river, he was out there doing it. There was no green screen, and no close-ups and inserts to preserve budget. They got them some horses and a river and they shot it. Later, when the would-be brides were running away from their families at the end, two of them hid under cows. SO REAL.

Aliens in rhythmic retrospection

This is a 10-minute encapsulation of why James Cameron has been capable of making great movies, even if Avatar wasn't all that hot.

Even 25 years later, Aliens remains fantastic. It looks a little dated now, but the emotional sting of this movie is as sharp as it ever was -- thrilling and scary. The principals don't do stupid things to create tension, and the machinations are logical and intertwine to create an excellent story.

This novelty rap about the whole thing only highlights these truths.



Thanks to boingboing for the heads-up!

Movies January 2009

Inglourious Basterds
This movie defies my normal liked/didn't like dichotomy. I liked parts of it... Brad Pitt is a fun actor who also got the show-stealing part. But like all Quentin Tarantino movies, the gore seemed gratuitous. The movie would have been less shocking, less visceral without it, but I guess I'm not the dude who thinks that's a bad thing.

The fairy-tale bit was subtle. When I would later think about some over-the-top aspect of it, I would remember its "Once Upon a Time" beginning, which helped contextualize things. Overall, this was a well-executed flick, accompanied by great writing and fine acting.

Avatar (3D)
After hearing the rapturous stories of the wonders of Avatar in 3D, M and I decided to give it another chance. She liked it a little more this time, but I liked it even less, because it wasn't a good enough story to hold my interest a second time. I got bored and fidgety at one point, went to the bathroom mid-movie, which is practically against my religion. It's an OK movie -- it's just not a great movie. Like Titanic, people have swooned and thrown money at it. Unlike Titanic, I don't understand the furor from primary sources, not just from a disinterested distance.

Samurai Champloo, disc 5
OK, taking breaks between SC discs loses the flow for me. I'm watching them in a row from here.

Samurai Champloo, disc 6
Only 3 episodes? Aw man. I really like this series.

Samurai Champloo, disc 7
Oh, endings. How often you are not what we wished. I secretly wanted this to end like the samurai revenge flick this promised to be, i.e., dead principals like a Shakespeare tragedy. Considering how smart and mature some of the individual stories were, I thought it might happen! But it didn't happen. I really enjoyed the series overall though, and would happily watch it again some time.

Gilmore girls, season 7, disc 6
Skipped a couple of intermediate season 7 discs, because I didn't like the way the season was going. Jumped back in for the last two episodes of the series. It was ok.

30 Rock, season 3, disc 1
Still pretty funny!

King Corn
I've read my Michael Pollen; I've done the homework. This documentary was fair and clean. There is just nothing sensible about American corn growing any more. Everyone involved knows it, but no one wants to be the bad guy and put the brakes on.

I'm complicit. I love cheap food too. This is what we've done for ourselves, and you have to admit, cheap food is pretty awesome. I'm glad to live in a place and time where I get the benefit of astonishingly inexpensive food. But what good is cheap food that is also nutritionally vacuous?

I used to wonder what thing we didn't see coming would kill my generation. Previous generations smoked or ingested lead. It seemed safe enough until we learned more, and found out those things had a hidden awful side.

I don't wonder any more. Because now I know it's high fructose corn syrup. It kills us early, and it will still be 10 to 20 years before that shit is properly outlawed. And it's in so many things you buy at the grocery store, that it's bloody hard to escape.

And since we've ceded a lot of our food knowledge to giant agribusiness corporations, we can't fend for ourselves as well as we used to. And good food is expensive. Problems. Problems.

The 40 Year Old Virgin
Especially after watching the DVD extras, I have to wonder: Just how much of this movie was scripted? Because it seemed like there was a whole lot of improv.

Movies December 2009

Gilmore Girls, season 7, disc 1
We had heard that this final season of GG takes a quality nosedive due to a lack of Palladinos. This wasn't bad, but it was missing something that I haven't homed in on.

I Am Legend
I had read the meh reviews, but I like sci-fi apocalypse, and Will Smith can be entertaining, and what the hell. On viewing, both M and I agree, its deeply stupid parts mar the whole. Not terrible, but not an experience for willful repetition.

Gilmore Girls, season 7, disc 2
This is where the show gets the worst of all fates... mediocre. Not bad, just miserably average.

Samurai Champloo, disc 4
Good, but Mugen's background story was confusing.

G.I. Joe Resolute
I watched this about three times, studying it. It was built for the Web, in segments, meaning that in addition to telling one large coherent story, it had to tell 7 or 8 coherent miniature stories within that had their own matryoshka doll structure and cliffhangers. The initial setup is so fast and choppy you really don't know what's happening the first time you watch it, but the rest of it flows well enough. It makes perfect sense that they got a comic book writer to do this (Warren Ellis). He's already wired to do this.

The anime stylings were gorgeous, and from the extras I learned a new term for this kind of IP: "military fantasy." Well done, lads!

Sherlock Holmes
Much better than I thought it would be! It was more of a reverse caper movie than a mystery, but man, mysteries are dang hard to do well in film. This was just fine. I like a kinetic self-absorbed genius Sherlock Holmes. And I like most things Guy Richie does. So not only did I not mind the liberties taken, I enjoyed them.

Avatar
Here's my tip from my Lucasfilm days: When advanced press spends a lot of time talking about the technical wizardry behind a movie, it's probably because that's the movie's strong suit. M hated this movie so hard, but I thought it was ok, except that every single thing that happened was as predictable as gravity. There were some fun comparison to Aliens--particularly matching Carter Burke up with Parker Selfridge.

Eh? Separated at birth? Eh? Eh?

Movies November 2009

Samurai Champloo, disc 1
I started watching this on Cartoon Network a few years ago, but never made time for it. The interplay of the late Edo period setting and hip hop is still pretty neat! It distracts me that the English voice for Mugen is the same guy who did Spike in Cowboy Bebop. The voice is too strongly associated with that one character for my ear to just let it slide into another one.

Scrubs, season 1, disc 1
I decided to rewatch this to learn. It's still funny! But what interests me more is how in-your-face the A-B-C plots are for each episode. I rarely notice when TV shows shift plots and acts, because I'm taking it in rather than studying it. But Scrubs just has really obvious set-ups and twists. Normally, obvious is bad, but this time I don't mean obvious = predictable or boring. It's just that when one of these bones of the show happens, it's sticking out of the flesh. Helpful!

Samurai Champloo, disc 2
This story is filling out nicely, and showing more intriguing Japanese history. The sex is strange here, because it's all sit-com sex, i.e., it never happens because of untimely turns of event. Plus Fuu is supposedly 15 years old, but drawn and sexualized older. And even though there was no age of consent in Tokugawa-era Japan, the modern context they made these stories in and the modern U.S. urban anachronisms they include confuse me as I try to figure out whether they're saying something about sex, or just titillating. Regardless of all that, I still dig it.

Samurai Champloo, disc 3
Ditto.

G.I. Joe: Season 1.1: Disc 1
Part research, part nostalgia. It's pretty bad for art, but ok for a 10-year-old's action-adventure fare, even today.

Fantastic Mr. Fox
Fun movie! It's a weird adaption, taking a children's book and making it a story about middle age. But that's Wes Anderson for you. It's no Royal Tenenbaums, but I can love it for what it is just fine.

Return of the King (extended)
Good times with my awesome LotR-loving wife.

Movies October 2009

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Fun! Funny fun! The animation wasn't Disney/Pixar too, which I liked. I like to see different animation succeed.

Spaced, Disc 1
Early Simon Pegg is rough. Didn't like Spaced much.

Where the Wild Things Are
Jonez and Eggers made the movie a thing that the book isn't. Many people's responses to the story are based on that. The movie deals with child-like emotions, but not in a child-friendly way. I liked it, but I'm still unclear about whether I enjoyed it. The hard-edged jostling of children, the monstrous part of childhood, comes through. That was hard to live through the first time... I'm not keen on being reminded of it.

30 Rock, Season 2, Disc 1
More big laffs.

Come Drink With Me
What sounds like a moody European art flick is actually a moody Chinese kung fu flick. It was ok.

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin
The training scenes were fantastic! They're going into my D&D game somewhere.