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Oh. Hell. Yeah.

I went and saw a 9:00 a.m. showing Saturday morning, not because of any fanboy "gotta be first" mindset about it but because it happened to be available, I'm an early riser, and, well, D isn't. And since she had no interest, it was a nice happenstance.

First off, I must be honest. I went in slightly jaded. There's been this huge incessant buzz, "Oh, Ledger should get an Oscar for this!", and I was reading this with a sense of "WTF, it's fucking Joker, man? That's not Oscar material...."

Oh, how wrong I was.

Ledger's Joker makes Nicholson look like a fucking chump, and that's saying a lot for what was probably one of the best "villain" performances in the whole heap of Batman flicks out there. Nicholson's Joker exemplified "crazy", but Ledger's Joker actually went the next step past that to "insane".

I don't want to say too much, for fear of spoiling it for people, except to say ...

At 2h30m, it had the potential (as I was walking in) to be "too long". I thought to myself, "they edited it long to put as much Ledger material in there as they could, the bastards! They couldn't find the heart to edit out 'bad' material".... again, oh how wrong I was. It was over before I realized it, and there was very little that I looked at and wondered "why did that survive the editing process?"

Overall, this is, hands-down, the best Batman flick of the franchise, and quite possibly one of the best comic translations ever. (It's a toss-up between this and Iron Man for me right now, I see reasons both of them could lay claim to the title).

Go see this. Now. Wherever you are whatever you're doing. Call in sick, leave early, play hookie, whatever it takes. You won't be sorry. Unless you get fired. Then maybe you will, but don't blame that on me.

On the train ride back and forth to work, I find myself watching a crapton of movies from Netflix. One movie I'd been meaning to watch for a while, and finally got around to on my commute home tonight, was Air Guitar Nation. Put simply, it's a documentary about two American competitors making their way to the World Air Guitar Championships.

Yeah, seriously. There is such a thing.

Now, along the course of the film, I come to genuinely want David "C-Diddy" Jung to win. Partly, because he's a seemingly genuine dude, but also because his signature song, which he consistently nails when all the stops must come out, is Play With Me, by Extreme (from the Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure Soundtrack).

That's mostly because that song is a killer air guitar track, as anyone who could see into my bedroom during my junior or senior year of high school could attest.

It may seem weird to watch a bunch of people "not playing any instruments", but it was surprisingly entertaining. There's all these performers, with their stage personae, and it all just works.

Seriously, you should get this DVD.

Last night, I ended up (finally!) watching Children Of Men. I'd been meaning to do so for some time, but it's a pretty dark movie, and not really D's cup of tea, so it'd just been forever until I could actually watch it.

The basic gist of it is that it's the year 2027, and humanity has been infertile for over 18 years. Primary schools are abandoned shells of their former selves. Faced with its own slow, agonizing extinction, societal norms have pretty much broken down around the world, except in Britain, where an iron-fisted "Homeland Security" keeps the peace. In the midst of this, one man - through a quirk of fate - gets saddled with protecting the world's first pregnant woman in years from the various forces who want to exploit her for their own purposes.

This movie is a really interesting blend of "bleak despair" with "raw undirected hope". Add to that some awesome cinematography (some of its longest running-shots are in the six minute range!!) and you've got a film that is both interesting to watch, and interesting to get engrossed in.

If you haven't seen this yet, definitely check it out.

Have you not yet seen Superbad? Why not?

D and I went to the late-show tonight, after punking out two or three weeks in a row.

Oh. My. God. Seriously, one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. It may actually dethrone my previous all-time favorite watch-it-a-thousand-times comedy from its throne.

Whatever you're planning on doing tomorrow, call them and cancel. Go see Superbad.

By now, you've almost certainly seen the mysterious trailer for the new, untitled, seemingly Top Secret, movie from J.J Abrams (Lost, Alias). If you didn't go see Transformers (I didn't), and you haven't seen one of the pirate copies on the way, Google for it and then come back. So far, the only versions online are pirated cell-phone videos, but occasionally some of those are pretty decent in clarity.

Seriously, this thing is marketing genius. The trailer gives you nothing to work with, other than "something really nasty happens in midtown Manhattan and, oh, also on Liberty Island," as the head of the Statue of Liberty comes careening down a New York City street.

What's the premise of the movie? Not a clue.

Theories, of course, abound. It's the upcoming Voltron project (which some sources say will take place in New York City)... it's a new Godzilla movie (again, which was also slated to come out in 2008)... it's a movie tie-in for Lost (maybe that button-pressing thing really does have consequences outside the island)... maybe it's something completely new and fresh and something we're not expecting.

The one thing we can be sure of is that a big chunk of the film-loving Internet populace is all abuzz wondering "what the heck it is", something that would never have happened if the trailer had followed the standard "show us the 90-second movie summary start to finish" formula we've grown accustomed to.

The man's a genius. He'll get way more marketing mileage out of this trailer than anything else he could have done.

I loved the original, which had put a whole new face on the tired old zombie movie.

And while the sequel seems, well, different, it seems different in a "Holy shit that's going to kick ass" way, not a "My god what do you mean the Immortals are aliens!? Are you fucking high!?!" kind of way.

Go check out the trailer for 28 Weeks Later.

Or, if you just want to watch the crappy-quality surely-soon-to-be-yanked YouTube version, click below...

D and I went to see Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan last night, up in Albany (the closest place it was showing in its semi-limited engagement at the moment. (Another trivia: the only movie with a longer title than the Borat movie is Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, by one word).

Anyhow, up until the buzz for this movie came out I had no idea who Borat was, who Ali G was, or any of this. I'd never seen Da Ali G Show on HBO, so I was completely clueless. D gave me a crash-course, assisted by some Ali G reruns on HBO, and I was all over going to see this. :-)

It is seriously one of the funniest movies I've ever seen in my entire life. Words simply cannot do it justice. Go see it right now. Seriously, get out of your den or home office and go see this movie. Now.

This afternoon, I skipped out of work early and caught a matinee of Superman Returns.

First off, Brandon Routh as the Man Of Steel -- pulls it off without a hitch. He is Christopher Reeve resurrected in looks, mannerisms, you name it. If there is another movie, he will be able to start making Superman "his own" with no problem, and the transition from the old to the new will be not even noticeable.

Without giving away any of the plot elements, the story was well written, and more importantly, it completely ignored Superman III as well as Superman IV: The Quest For More Money Peace. Although a touch long with a running time of 154 minutes, it didn't feel long. There weren't any scenes that you look back on and say "My god, he should have hired an editor" (unlike that recent cinematic albatross, King Kong... not all movies have to be three hours, Peter, honest!)

Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor? Nailed it. He has exactly the right proportion of "calm, intelligent rationalization" and "cold, vicious ruthlessness" that Luthor must convey. Gene Hackman did a fine job, but his Luthor was more campy than creepy. Spacey's Luthor has his campy moments, make no mistake, but he's a villain you can honestly say could theoretically exist, and worse, would be extremely scary to encounter.

There's some interesting plot points that reveal themselves late in the movie, and there's clearly sequel potential being left open, in any number of ways.

Go see this movie. Right now. Seriously.

While I was out at VMWare training last week, I had an opportunity to check out some movies on pay-per-view (no, not those kinds of movies! Get your mind out of the gutter).

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

This wasn't a bad movie, although it seemed to sort of drag in parts. I suppose if I'd read the books as a kid, maybe this would have been as "cool" a movie as Lord of the Rings was to all of us Tolkien fanatics. In the end, though, with them going through the whole "grow old, come out of the closet young" thing at end, it just seemed too,... I dunno... trite.

Good Night and Good Luck

Wow! Holy crap was this a good flick. The parallels between the media involvement in politics during the McCarthy era and their involvement now -- "wow". Just completely over-the-top blew me away. Everyone should see this movie.

"V" For Vendetta

My future brother-in-law and I went to see it together. We saw this movie in DC, an area that was obviously "affected" by 9/11 terrorist attacks. (In fact, I saw it at a movie theater about three Metro stops from the Pentagon where the terrorists hit). I'd be really curious to see how this movie "plays" at another location like, say, LA or Seattle, somewhere completely outside the "direct effects" zone of 9/11. It's odd to spend the entire movie cheering for the terrorist. Clearly, there's an attempted parallel between right-wing USA politics and the right-wing politics of the UK as portrayed in the movie, which makes you feel even more weird for doing the "cheering for the 'bad' guy" thing. If nothing else, it makes for a very thought-provoking conversation-starter on what it means to be "bad", and whether or not that's all really relative to "whomever seems to be in charge today." (which, I should point out, is something I've said repeatedly...heck I even did a paper for my Terrorism class last Spring comparing Revolutionary War colonists to terrorists) Definitely worth seeing, but be prepared to feel like some of your internal views are challenged, or that you might even feel "dirty" after walking out, depending on your personal worldview.

This morning, while D slept, I watched a movie I'd heard a lot about, called "Primer". The basic gist of the story is that a couple of engineers working on something completely unrelated, accidentally create a device that is capable of taking a user back in time, with some perfectly non-fantastic requirements (the box must have existed and been operational at the "early" time, so that it could draw back whatever was inside it at the "later" time).

After they discover the capability, there follows a long, semi-technically sound set of criteria for "how they behave" when they go back in time, most of which they're doing so that they can profit from stock trades on high-volume/high-return stocks on a given day. (The theory that they'll make money, and since it's already high volume, their puny amount won't have any significant impact on causality). They respect causality, they limit their contact with the outside world so as not to have doppelganger issues (e.g., when you see one of the two people running through the day a second time), they seem to understand what it is they're messing with.

It does lead to some great quotes, though, like "Are you hungry? I haven't eaten since later this afternoon."

It was shot on, literally, a $7,000 budget. There are no fancy special effects. The story is key here, in every sense of the word. I won't claim to have "gotten it all" the first time through. π was another movie that was like that, except that even on future viewings that didn't even begin to hold the appeal for me to figure it out. In this case, I'll probably watch it once or twice more before I send it back to Netflix.

With a movie like this it's tough to say a lot about it without spoiling the plot. They discover limited time travel. They exploit limited time travel. This much anyone could get from reading a basic plot summary. Figuring out what to do with it, both in terms of personal fulfillment as well as in terms of ethical and moral dilemmas, is what makes this film interesting.

This is "science fiction" in the truest, most pure sense of the phrase -- it is a fictional story about what science might conceivably permit, and uses that not as the centerpiece of the story, but as a means of touching on other allegorical issues.

I highly recommend it for anyone who enjoys that sort of thing.

Last night, we had my parents over to exchange Giftmas presents, since D and I will be out of town on Christmas Day proper. Among the things I got from my parents was a DVD I'd been waiting for the release of, Godzilla: Final Wars.

With D at a hair appointment this afternoon, I got some quality "male time" in front of the big-screen, watching everyone's favorite nuclear-powered-dinosaur open a can of whoopass on everyone and everything he came across.

Final Wars was made as a "going away party" of sorts, with nearly every monster from the Godzilla flicks putting in an appearance, even if that appearance lasts like 30 seconds with Godzilla one-shotting them into a final, permanent death (for instance, he decapitates Gigan on the first try.. no matter how you spin that in a future movie, it's a hard death to come back from).

Final Wars, planned as the last Toho-made Godzilla movie "for the foreseeable future", sought to give the fans some form of closure to it all. Amusingly, the 1995 "Godzilla vs. Destoroyah" was viewed by Toho as "the end", with the rights then ending up in U.S. hands, with distasterous Roland Emmerich "Godzilla" (see a great review of that). With their beloved monster neutered and turned into a Jurassic Park escapee, Toho decided "that couldn't be the final send-off for the big guy" and went back to their script-writing.

Anyhow, to make a long blog entry short, this movie starts out a little slow, but winds up with some serious nuclear-powered whoopass which any fan of the Big G will be happy to curl up with on Christmas Morning.

Last night, I went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, since D was out of town, and she had said she had less-than-zero interest in seeing it.

There's been a lot of talk about how much "darker" it is than the Gene Wilder film, "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory". Yes, it is very much a darker film than the Wilder film, but it's important to note that "Willy Wonka" and "Charlie" are both adaptations of Roald Dahl's novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Dahl writes fairy-tales of a sort, the same sort as originally written by the Brothers Grimm -- the sort of fairy tale that isn't afraid at all the scare the living shit out of a kid in order to make a point.

Dahl's book was just as dark as any of the original Grimm Brothers fairy tales, and Tim Burton's revisiting of the story finally does the book justice. Certainly, the Wilder version was "passable", even "fun", but Burton's version stays more true to Dahl's original work, and the quality shows.

Deep Roy as (all of) the Oompa Loompas was some of the best casting in the movie, although really every one of the actors in question was extraordinarily good at getting into their roles.

I'm not sure I'd take really young children to this movie (as I saw some people doing) but it's definitely something not to be missed.

Yesterday, I took a day off from work to run some errands and to see Batman Begins.

The summary in three words: It was great.

As a film designed to be a prelude to a new series of Batman movies, there's a lot of backstory to cover, and they do a remarkable job of both telling what seems to be rather dull information (but which, obviously, all makes Bruce who he is), without actually losing the attention of the viewer.

The new Batmobile? Bad-ass. As one of the characters in the movies even says, "I gotta get me one of them..."

If you haven't seen it yet, go see it. It's probably the best telling of the Batman story to date, even beating out Tim Burton's "not bad at all" version.

Is there someone out there who honestly believes that the original Poseidon Adventure wasn't good enough and needs to be re-made?

Keeping it all in the extended body, for those who are truly anal, but it should be pretty much spoiler-free.

Tonight is the 34th Annual Key Art Awards. If you're not in the industry, or a true film-geek, you've likely never heard of these before. They honor the folks who do all of the marketing materials for movies -- trailers, posters, TV spots, ad campaigns, you name it.

Anyone who's ever gone to the movies with me knows what a trailer-hound I am. I love movie trailers, mostly because I can totally respect how much work is involved. In fact, in some ways, they're harder than the films they advertise. The trailer has to tell the story in two minutes -- that is, tell enough of the story to capture and retain the interest of the viewer, but not so much as to completely make seeing the movie worthless.

Even more interesting, though, is that Don LaFontaine is getting a lifetime achievement award tonight. LaFontaine is to the movie-trailer industry what Harrison Ford is to the movie industry. You're almost certainly familiar with his work, but never knew his name. LaFontaine is the guy who does the voiceover work for just about every good movie trailer you've ever seen (including parodying himself in the Hitchhiker's Guide trailer).

Of course, I doubt enough of my readers are film-geeks to appreciate all of this, but I felt like giving up some space to congratulate LaFontaine on getting the award.

So since D&D didn't happen this evening, Big George and I went to go see Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. I'd read the bad reviews, I'd read the glowing reviews.

Was it different than any other iteration of the Guide (radio, TV, books)? Sure. What else would you expect?

Was it better? In places.

Was it worse? In places.

Was it good? Yes.

Should I see it? Yes. Decide for yourself, but I found it enjoyable.

Amazon lists the run-time of the Fellowship of the Ring Extended Edition at 208 minutes. Likewise the Two Towers extended version. Return of the King Extended clocks in at 250 minutes.

208 + 208 + 250 = 666

Sweet. Wonder if that was intentional on Peter Jackson's part.

Yesterday, I watched the movie I had rented, "Saved!". At first glance, you might just see "oh, it's about all these über-Christian bible-thumpers attending one of those Baptist Bible-School High Schools," and pass it by.

DO NOT DO THAT!

Go watch the trailer, and even then you can see that this movie is a pretty biting commentary on the ultra-Christian moral minority. It also has some great performances... for example, Macaulay Culkin, the Home Alone kid, as a cynical wheelchair bound student who develops an affection for the Jewish christian-hating bad-girl who only attends Jesus School because she's been kicked out of everywhere else. Within ten minutes, you basically completely forget any images of him slapping his hands to his face and just accept him in that role.

I rented it, but it's now being added to the wish-list for future purchase at some point in time. Definitely worth checking out.

Spoilers abound, read at your own risk....

This afternoon, still a little sleepy from time-adjustment, and needing to get back to the hotel by 3 p.m., I decided to take it easy and go see The Bourne Supremacy at a matinee.

Interestingly, Supremacy is cited as one of the classic examples of the modern movie life-cycle. The Bourne Identity only grossed $213M on a $75M budget. In "Hollywood Accounting Terms", that's only just barely breaking even. However, in the first four months of its DVD release, it did another $100M. In other words, it was a sleeper hit, that people were willing to buy to see it at home, but weren't as willing to go see it in a theater.

But enough box-office geekdom about the original. What about the sequel?

From a storyline perspective, it's quite good. The reasons why Bourne comes out of hiding to, as the trailers say, "bring this fight to [their] doorstep," are perfectly valid (and, as I watched the opening half-hour of this movie, I realized more than ever that I want Tom Clancy's Without Remorse to be made into a flick).

Obviously, it wouldn't be a Bourne flick without Matt Damon judo-chopping some consular personnel. That goes without saying. The storyline, overall, was good.

I was not a fan of the cinematography, though. Too much of it is shot without a steadicam and I understand the idea of "trying to make you feel like you're there," but really as a viewer I don't want to feel like I'm there, I want to feel like I'm an observer watching whats happening. There were whole fight sequences that I couldn't actually tell "what happened" because the herky-jerky camera movements left me wondering who was holding what and using it against whom.

Overall, it fills the same spot the first movie did -- it's a popcorn movie. Don't go in looking for deep meaning. Don't go in looking for serious mystery, because "who the bad guys are" is telegraphed in the worst way. It's always a pleasure to see Julia Stiles chewing up scenery (and, frankly, she could have done with some more screen-time). If you go in expecting two hours of cheap entertainment with some cool fights, some cool chase scenes, and Bourne getting to beat a couple people up, you'll get what you expected.

I can't review this movie without accidentally including spoilers, so click for more info.

Like many TiVo owners, there's a lot of movies that I really want on DVD that simply aren't available, and so when it happened to air on some movie-channel (or in this case Comedy Central), I TiVo it at "Best Quality", mark it to never be deleted, and then partake of the movie from the TiVo whenever I want to watch the movie.

In a day or two, when the DVD arrives, there'll be one fewer movie on my TiVo like that. I've been waiting for the third movie from Savage Steve Holland, How I Got Into College, to be released on DVD.

Holland's two prior films, One Crazy Summer and Better Off Dead, are classics in their own right, and I was really annoyed at how the third film seemed like it was never going to see the DVD world.

You should definitely check it out. Highly recommended by me... it's not the world's funniest movie, but it will definitely make you laugh, especially if you ever had to go through the college-admissions hell during high school...

Reading Kasia's review made me realize that I should write up a review of my own, having seen it last night and all.

First off, anyone who buys into the "pseudo-science" crap of this movie and really believes that the next ice-age could happen in like a week, needs to have their head examined. Global warming is a myth, one that was fairly thoroughly debunked for all who cared to learn (especially nice touches in that particular show, finding the papers that predicted "global cooling" written a decade or two ago, by the same people now bandying about the "global warming" hysteria).

But, if you can get past the crappy science, and the moralistic beating-over-the-head about something that's not even a problem anyway, then you can get right down to enjoying a bunch of wicked cool special effects. Everyone got a piece of the action in this flick, ILM, Digital Domain, you name it, and it showed.

Great popcorn flick, worth seeing at least once on the big screen strictly for its special effects value. If they could somehow eliminate the lame storyline and just leave the special effects, it'd've been even cooler.

I've been a fan of "The Punisher" comic book from way back. It was one of the first titles I started with as I built up my comic book collection in the early 90's. I enjoyed (and still do) the storyline, which makes you ponder why something like this hasn't already happened -- why there isn't some guy who's got all the training but has gone "off the reservation" and given up on the formal justice system and just takes matters into his own hands with the folks the justice system doesn't seem capable of dealing with.

In 1989, a really crappy version of the story was brought to the big screen, with the central anti-hero of Frank Castle being played by Dolph Lundgren. The only resemblance to the comic books were: (1) the hero's name was Frank Castle, and (2) he killed a lot of bad guys.

George and I went to see the current version of the movie last night. A lot of reviewers have complained about "how much screen time was spent on Frank and Maria Castle's kissing and hugging and such", wondering if maybe it didn't need another pass through the editing room (the movie clocks in at 2h4m after all). I can understand where they're coming from, but it's important to adequately convey the depth of love Frank has for his family, because that love is what pushes him -- after they are fairly savagely taken from him -- to seek punishment.

There are scenes in the movie that were lifting virtually word for word from issues of the comics, and the opening pages of what comic fans will recognize as "The Punisher War Journal" are documented as he writes them. Overall, the movie is extremely loyal to the comic, with only a few cosmetic differences (in the comic, for example, only Castle's wife and son are killed, in the movie it's his whole family).

But how was it as a movie in and of itself? It was a typical "guy flick". If you're not a comic book fan in particular, the movie still has enough things getting blown up, bad guys getting shot, and bad-ass fight scenes to keep your attention for the two hours you're there.

Thumbs up to Lions Gate for putting the old Artisan version to shame. :-)

I find it strangely cool, that the only movie who seemed to be able to knock The Passion of the Christ out of the #1 spot is a movie whose tagline is "When Hell Is Full, The Dead Will Walk The Earth".

Righteous.

Wow... Jennifer Lopez before she looked like some slut who'd been passed around the gangsta-rap scene, and then tossed over their shoulder like an empty beer can.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I set a personal record today for "the longest a program had sat on my TiVo before I'd ever laid eyes on it".

I recorded Rules of Attraction on 16 August 2003. I only (finally) got around to watching it this afternooon, seven months later.

Pretty wacky flick. I can't believe I hadn't watched it before.

Gojira, or Godzilla as us lame Americans know him, retired several years ago. The belief being that Toho, the production company who had invented him, had "done all that could be done". They then sold a license to create new Godzilla material to a company in the United States, which resulted in the nightmarishly sucky Roland Emmerich version (caution, really harsh language at that movie review, even for me)...

The folks at Toho were, shall we say, unimpressed, and decided that, "that crappy American movie can NOT be Gojira's swansong," and they brought the big lizard out of retirement for Godzilla 2000, which basically followed the same usual story line as every other Godzilla movie prior to the Emmerich screw-up, which meant that Gojira did not bleed, lay eggs, run away from anyone, hide, etc.

Now, apparently content that they have put the Emmerich Nightmare behind them, Toho have decided that it is, once again, time for the big guy to take a bow.

Godzilla: Final Wars will debut in Japan in December, and then in the US a couple months later. It'll basically do what Destroy All Monsters did, bringing Godzilla and all his enemies together for one big badass rumble (and, hopefully, do it without the annoying whiny kid and the "Baby Godzilla" that Destroy All Monsters had).

Yes, I am a geek. I'm looking forward to this more than I am to Episode III.

For reasons I'm not going to go into right now, I had the strangest hankering for a chick-flick this evening. I ended up watching Under The Tuscan Sun.

For me, this movie's initial appeal was just the most basic of its plotlines - the woman who chucks it all and buys a villa in Europe on the spur of the moment. As someone who's often idly looked at foreign real-estate wondering things like "what would it cost me to just chuck it all and live there?", that storyline held appeal.

What I found in addition was just a great story. It wasn't at all what I expected, and I'm glad I invested the time to check it out. :-)

Right here, actually, having just gotten back from the 12:01 Return Of The King showing. It was myself, Little George, and Big Dave. (Mark and Big George were too pussy to go, whipped as they are)

Why couldn't they have changed the name?

Seriously, the "reimagined Battlestar Galactica" on SciFi is great science-fiction. The problem is that because they called it Galactica, I find myself comparing storylines between the old and the new, and really there's no comparison. Aside from the title and some character names, there's very little in common between the two.

Those changes are well-documented other places, and I won't go into them here.

I'll be back, watching it again tomorrow night. Not sure how long it'll survive on the TiVo, though. I've learned to compensate for my "comparitive nature" by just making the occasional snide comment back and forth with Jay via instant messenger. Helps me put it in perspective.

Sometimes you get adaptation that is just really well done, like the made-for-TV version of Stephen King's The Shining.

Then you have the complete other side of the equation, like say, any Tom Clancy adaptation, where if you've read the book it's absolutely painful to watch the movie.

Timeline falls somewhere in the middle. It's a Michael Crichton novel, like Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain.

I have to admit, it's probably been a year or two since I originally read Timeline, maybe more, so I can't speak to specifically how it deviates from the book, but that's probably to my advantage. I hadn't read it recently enough that I was constantly comparing it to the book (nothing chafes people I see movies with more than me gasping aloud at, say, Peter Jackson's butchering of the Lord of the Rings storyline when I see it for the first time... I guess I should be thankful I only have one more opportunity to be disappointed).

It's a good flick. Go see it.

Now to dig out the novel and put it back into the reading queue for another pass.

There's just a shitload of movies coming out soon that look really cool...

Next summer, they're bringing Aliens Vs. Predator (also see the featurette) to life (finally, only been in development hell for about a decade).

Marvel and Artisan are bringing The Punisher to the big screen again, and this one looks to be a LOT better than the crappy Dolph Lundgren version from the 80's.

Shrek 2... goes without saying. :-)

Troy looks positively cool.

Yet another Philip K. Dick short story being brought to the big screen, this time it's Paycheck, which looks like they've managed to capture the feel of the story pretty well, even if it does look like they've altered it a bit.

The other day, while I was in Sam's Club picking up much-needed UPSs for my home theater, I also picked up a movie I'd been meaning to see since it came out... 28 Days Later.

For those not familiar with the movie, here's the basic run-down: Guy wakes up in a hospital bed... hospital is empty... streets are empty. Basically, there's three types of people now.. dead ones, a few (very few) live ones, and ones that got infected with a "rage disease" ...

The entire movie is an homage of sorts to the "zombie horror movies" of the past, and it is exceptionally well done. It could have gone "the way of campiness" but didn't. It managed to stay true to form, and modernize the genre for today's audiences.

It manages to get the 'scare factor' without overplaying the 'gore factor', which is refreshing considering how many "horror" movies confuse "scariness" and "gore".

Overall, a must-own...glad I bought it.

Now this I want to go see (kudos to Andi for posting the entry that made me aware of it)

I went to see Matrix Revulsions this evening. Three words: "Wait For Video".

Lyon's Den got cancelled, a show I thought had a lot of potential.

At least the NBC execs are willing to say, "Our shows sucked.".

UPDATE: Looks like Dragnet got the axe as well. Dammit.

When you have two floundering movie franchises, what's the ultimate solution to the problem? In the comic world, it's known as crossover. In today's movies, it's called Freddy vs. Jason.

Spoilers follow...

When we went to London a few years ago, one of the things we saw in London's theatre district were a couple shows by The Reduced Shakespeare Company, namely their "Complete Works Of Shakespeare (Abridged)" and "Complete History of America (Abridged)".

They were, as you might expect, totally totally hysterical.

Well, now they have apparently released the first of those, the Complete Works of Shakespeare, Abridged, as a DVD for home viewing.

The DVD captures perfectly the humour of the play. It's almost as good as being there (and certainly a lot cheaper than flying to London to go see them).

Tonight, proving that a bored bachelor will find nothing better to do than go see movies when he should be working on his book, I went to go see another evening movie, this time The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

I wanted so badly to like this movie. I wanted to come out of it saying to myself, "Damn, that was cool."

Sadly, I couldn't. The characters were interesting, there was so much to work with, and it was just as though the writers completely squandered the raw material they had to work with. Further, if you weren't the kind of person who reads "the classics", none of the characters would make any sense to you. Show of hands how many people in the average populace know who Moriarty is? Yeah, those two guys in the back of the room who can also tell me what the air-date was for City On The Edge Of Forever, that's what I thought.

This movie was guaranteed to displease. For the literary types, there was nowhere near enough use of that "raw material" that was available to the screenwriter. For the non-literary types, it had to be the most confusing thing on the face of the planet to watch.

Please. No sequels.

I went to go see American Wedding last night, the latest (last?) in the American Pie movies.

Don't get me wrong, it was funny as hell throughout the majority of the movie. That same brand of often-painful funny that sorta has you squirming in your seat in shared discomfort over whatever situation is on-screen that has been present in the first two movies. It had the same, usual, sappy ending. It had an inexplicable appearance by Stifler's Mom, obviously.

But you can tell the series is losing steam. It's not there on the surface, but lurking just below the surface. When you turn to the possibility of "Stifler having emotions and doing things for the love of his friends or the love - not animal lust but love - of a girl," you might, just might be if not jumping the shark, but certainly on the approach pattern to the ramp.

But, all that said, it was a good flick, and I'll probably pick it up on DVD when it comes out.

It's as good a holiday recipe as any that came before.

I was terminally bored tonight, so I headed over to the local multiplex to see the latest in the Terminator series.

I read in someone else's review that the car chase series kicks ass over the one from Matrix Reloaded. I'd agree with that assessment.

Plot was weak, but it definitely had lots of shit-blowin-up, which is what a summer movie is all about.

And while one might say, "I wouldn't want to get between Kristanna Loken (the T-X), and Claire Danes, but I'd disagree. I'd pay good money to get in-between those two.

Errr, sorry. Was that the out-loud voice?

OK, here's a tip for the folks at Universal Studios:

There's a REASON why, once upon a time in the deep dark annals of telephone history, the telephone prefix '555' was reserved and would never be issued for working telephone service.

Apparently, in the new film Bruce Almighty, God pages Bruce, and gives him a seven-digit number to call him back on. Universal's argument is "the film is set in Buffalo. In Buffalo, that's not a working number."

Too bad it is a working number in a shitload of other area codes.

People are getting calls left and right. They did a story about it on the Today show this morning, and there's folks whose phones simply won't stop ringing with lame fucks looking for "god", as though he really has a freaking direct-dial phone number.

A couple of the folks, who get calls at all hours of the night now, are considering suing Universal. I say go get 'em!

You know, I've seen this movie a number of times, and I had it playing on the TV this morning while fighting with an LDAP issue, and it occured to me that the producers completely blew the coolest concept.

I don't want to see the end of the "Human-Dragon War", I want to see the beginning. I want to see flights of Tomcats engaged in air-to-air dogfights against the dragons. I want to see what happened exactly when we nuked the dragons and they laughed at us and said, essentially, "Thank you sir may I have another?".

That's the movie I wanted to see, and while Reign Of Fire is passable in its present form, every time I see it I feel disappointed I didn't get "that other movie".

There's lots of movies coming out this summer. The new Terminator movie, X-Men 2 is already out, as is the first of the two Matrix sequels, but what movie trailer has me sitting on my hands waiting for its release?

Freddy Vs. Jason

Anyone who ever had an argument as a kid over "Who was more badass, Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees?" will finally get an answer to that question this June when the two undisputed Kings Of Slasher Films (well, maybe Michael Myers might try to be a contender, but he didn't have nearly the... panache... of the other two)

It looks like the "usual assortment of teenage victims" are merely a backdrop for a conflict between the two mass-murderers.

It won't be Tolstoy, but I bet that'll be ninety minutes of good slasher fun.

I was going to wait, and go on Sunday with a friend of mine. Then I got bored, said fuck it, and went. I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll try to be as vague as possible....

Although it was probably never meant to be as prophetic as it was, The Siege should be required viewing for every politician out there, as well as every citizen who keeps telling themselves that what they're giving up in the way of civil liberties will make them safer.

And while the "end result" in the movie hasn't yet happened in the US, it's not all that far away, we've already got the detention centers, the US citizens held without charges or hearings, military all over the place you name it.

Life imitating art, in the worst possible way.

So I used to visit Coming Attractions all the time, a web site devoted to movie reviews, rumors, you name it.

Turns out that they have now sold out to Cinescape, where they'll run the "Development Heck" portion of the site...

Except that said portion of the site sucks balls compared to the simple, elegant, interface that Coming Attractions used to have.

Time to find a new site to visit, one that doesn't have 4000 images to a page, doesn't require me to run javascript, etc. etc., just to read movie rumors.

As seen on Breyten's blog:

The condensed, slightly parody-like, version of The Two Towers.

It's especially funny if you've actually read the books, including such classic bits as:

TREEBEARD: We have opted, hoom, not to do a damn thing.
PIPPIN: I didn't expect that.
PEOPLE WHO HAVE READ THE BOOK: Neither did I...

Definitely a must-read. :)

OK, first off, if you can still have "spoilers" for a movie based on a 70 year old book, you have issues.

Things that I loved:

Ents are cool. Just how I envisioned them.

How Legolas hops onto the horse via the FRONT of the horse and one hand. My moviegoing friend and I looked at each other in shock and amazement at how cool and amazingly "elflike" that move was, even if it did appear to defy a law of physics or two.

Brad Dourif was absolutely great as Wormtongue.

Although IMDB doesn't list a voice-credit for Treebeard, it seemed to my casual ears far too close to John Rhys-Davies' voice, to the point where it was a distraction to me to the effect of "that's Gimli's voice, not Treebeard's".

(speaking of that, IMDB lists Rhys-Davies' credit for Gimli as "Voice"...hmmm, I wonder whose face that was I saw through the whole movie, then)

The "bipolar Gollum/Sméagol" was done really really well.

Oliphants!

Things I was seriously annoyed by:

Ummm, hey Peter Jackson, Shelob is in THIS book, not Return of the King. I know you wanted suspense between two and three, with Gollum's whispered "She'll kill them" bit, leaving LOTRvirgins to wonder what he's talking about, but I have to believe that Frodo being fucking KILLED would be a lot more suspenseful a cliffhanger, just the way it's described in the book.

I haven't read Two Towers in a while, but I don't seem to recall Merry/Pippin/Treebeard meeting Gandalf in the forest.

It might've been nice to point out that yes, we know they're in Fangorn Forest, but Treebeard IS "Fangorn". It would have added to the "ents are really old as the hills" mindset.

Maybe it was just "overhyped" but for as cool as the Battle Of Helm's Deep was (and for as much screen time as it took up) I wasn't nearly as impressed with it as I thought I would be. Admittedly, Helm's Deep is just a border-skirmish compared to the Battle Of Gondor [come back for the final episode kids!], but for all the hype it was getting, I guess I just expected something more.

... overall, it seems to follow the book fairly well, with the exceptions noted above. I'm sure the four-hour special-edition version (compete rumor mill there, but I'm sure it'll happen in due course) will make it even cooler.

Now to wait until the rush dies down a bit and use that free coupon I got with my FOTR box-set.

Typed, fairly, in real time.

Nice house. Gotta get me one of them.

... and it'll make a nice bachelor pad.

Tony's going to be fucking with a lawyer over it. Tony's a wiseguy and all, but fucking with the attorney homeowner is going to be extremely painful for him

Got a sit-down with Carmine, the shit's in motion, Tony's gonna look like an asshole (because the gangbangers-as-assassins will come out) for popping a Don after the settlement... cuz they will still pop him, because that's how Murphy's Law (and David Chase) work.

Meadow's pretty perceptive, picking up on the Furio/Carmella "non-fling"

My first thoughts on seeing Artie "oh, great, now Artie's gonna find another way to try and cozy up to Tony, playing the 'we're both estranged' card"

He's gonna go through with the hit anyway intentionally. Ballsy.

Paulie's playing the "I was just leading Johnny Sack on" line... the last time I heard that, it was Big Pussy talking about how he was just leading the FBI on. I wonder if he'll meet the same fate. The actor is sick, after all.

I officially hate Tony's ring-tone. He probably does too by now.

I'd love to see Tony actually buy the house and fuck with the lawyer for all of next season. Nice Italian parties, loud, with dancing and music. It'd be great.

Tony's gonna eat the cold cuts from the fridge... isn't that a classic predictor of a panic attack?

How soon til, while Carmella is "away" at a lawyer's meeting, Tony empties all the various caches of presidential-flash-cards?

So now the hit is off, and it looks like a couple good "employees for hire" are going to meet a foul end.

Yup.

Although I have a hard time believing the gangbangers didn't notice the Crapmobile2000 that their killers were sitting in off to the side.

I wonder if Carmella will bring up Furio, now that they're in the process of slinging mud back and forth?

Holy shit, she did!

He's a dead man. Next season, we'll get a glimpse of Sicily, and watch him get whacked.

Wow, Tony's sorta right. In the last four seasons, all we really ever see Carmella do is bitch and moan at-or-about Tony?

Prediction: Hung jury / mistrial.

I've never known a doctor's office PBX/Key-System that could do *69, but kudos to Melfi for trying

Further prediction: Jury tampering charge in the next go-round as the juror gets a conscience and Witness Protection

The kids are now jockeying for position in the New Order. It's obviously going to go down gender lines

Where are they going with Tony's home-theater gear?

Shit. Bobby and Tony's Slut Sister are now really a thing. The Mafia Whore picks up "Yet Another Piece of Italian Sausage"

Ahhh, so that's where they're going with the stereo equipment! :)

LOL! Dean Martin!

Hmmm, dark alley.. Johnny Sack... Tony... wonder if Johnny's in for an ass-kicking

It's very obvious Johnny's been making plans for shit that hadn't yet come to pass.

The looks of ice those two gave each other spoke volumes.

AJ needs TiVo if he can't pause Junkyard Wars or whatever it was he's watching.

I like how Meadow wasn't even invited to the family meeting. She just happens to wander into it.

For someone who was dissing her father just a few minutes ago, Meadow certainly seems all broken up about Tony leaving.

I think that's honestly the first time I've ever seen Tony wear a baseball cap in the entire four seasons.

It'd be amusing to see snipershots pop the lawyer and the wife from the boat in the dark.

... but the "We know you're awake still, so we'll play the music again for ya" was priceless

It's a war of attrition.. repeated $200 fines for noise, divided into however much money Tony has stashed away? The lawyer will lose.

So what's a guy to do when the soon-to-be-ex-wife is coming by tomorrow morning to start the three-day process of separating the his-and-hers-sets into his-sets and her-sets?

Go see the new movie about the Ultimate Guy. Bond... James Bond.

Parts of it were very predictable.... It's not revealing anything special to reveal there's a mole in MI6, you learn that in the first 5 minutes of the movie... but when I first was introduced to the mole, I was "Aha! They're the mole!", and then it was just a matter of waiting for Bond to figure it out, too, while I sat around feeling quite clever.

John Cleese as Q? Pulls it off without a hitch. I'll always miss Desmond Llewelyn, but "Q" is in good hands with Cleese. The new BondCar has a very cool new feature I want in the next car I purchase, and Halle Berry is .. well, she's Halle Berry, come on. :-)

So it's finally available on DVD, and my copy arrived today... Major League, the perfect baseball comedy. There are more great lines in this movie than any other movie, even the eminently quotable "Bull Durham". The entire rest of the Major League "franchise" (pun intended) sucked ass, but this is the classic. Buy your copy today.

This season looks awesome. That's all I have to say on the matter.

So I'm bored on Sunday evening (because tonight ISN'T the season premiere of the Sopranos like I'd been thinking it would be for the last three days because I flummoxed the date). I see that "next on Starz" is The Princess Diaries. Now, in the "division of assets", I'd immediately thrown this in the "Susan keeps this" pile, because at first glance it drew absolutely no desire from me. But, I'm bored, and my buddy Jay keeps telling me how much (to use his words) "Anne Hathaway is a full-on hottie". (Even though she plays a 15-year old, she's 20, so he's not like a pedophile or anything).

So, I'm bored. She is a looker, so what the heck, it's two hours til Sex And The City, what else ya gonna watch on a Sunday night?

It was a really fun movie. Hector Elizondo has some great lines in it. It's not some classic movie that the world would end without, but it was a good fun two hours.

Think I might have to replace that DVD.

Call me a sports geek, but some of my favorite movies are baseball movies... I'm watching Bull Durham, which is definitely a classic, but I'm equally willing to watch For Love Of The Game, Major League (only the first one!), Field Of Dreams, Eight Men Out, 61^*, and a slew of others.

I'm a baseball geek. I may not be able to remember every statistic and who won what playoff game, but I know my baseball movies.

Last night I saw the new Mel Gibson movie Signs. It was exactly as you would expect it to be: creepy in parts, hokey in parts, with a dash of dark humor here and there when you least expected it. The plot was credible. I won't say believeable, because there's a certain amount of suspension of disbelief that goes on with any sci-fi movie, it's not like you're expected to believe that the aliens have been secretly impersonating humans all this time, or anything like that.

It's not a movie, though, that will "last" well. Lots of movies I can watch over and over again, and I just don't see this movie having that kind of staying power. Once you watch it, it's like "OK, I've seen it, I know the answer to the mystery", and that's it. But it does make for a nice 2 hour excursion.

3 out of 5 stars.

Are there any bad John Cusack movies? OK, there's The Grifters which ranks pretty poorly (I think). I look over his resume, and I have a hard time finding movies which sucked. In fact, while I won't proclaim myself a Cusack FanBoy or anything, I find that good chunks of the movies that are on there are also on my "favorite movies list".

I only think of this, since I'm watching Grosse Point Blank, which ranks pretty highly on said list, and was straining to come up with a bad movie he was in. Think about it... it's tough to come up with one...