Category Archives: movies

You can’t take the sky from me

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Okay, so here’s the story.

I was a fan of Buffy/Angel. I got into Buffy late, but with some coaching from my dear friend Stephanie, I was able to catch up. I watched Buffy faithfully through to the end, but missed the last season of Angel (scheduling conflicts).

I’d heard all the buzz about Joss Whedon’s new show, Firefly, but never did get the chance to see it when it was on the air. Partially because, as we all know, it didn’t last long, and partially because the premise didn’t sound all that appealing to me. (A Space Western? Really? Hmmm…)

Well, I finally watched it, and I’m SO glad I did. It seemed like everywhere we went, someone was telling Rand and me that we had to watch Firefly and we had to do it now. Recently, the series was selling on Amazon for cheap, so we picked it up. And since our regular season shows were dying down, we found the time to watch.

Spoilers may follow. Proceed at your own risk. 😉

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Reading, watching, listening

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Reading: Current read is Tantalize by Cynthia Leitich Smith, who so happens to be a sorority sister. Cool! I should finish that today.

Recently finished Size 12 Is Not Fat by Meg Cabot, the first in her “Heather Wells Mysteries” series. As I’ve said many, many times, Meg Cabot is always a great read.

I also finished Coal Run by Tawni O’Dell. O’Dell writes stories that are set in the general area of PA where I grew up…not precisely where I grew up, but in the “hey, we played them in football” area. She writes really well about tragedy and dysfunction, creating flawed but utterly human characters.

Also continuing to read and enjoy Daredevil.

Watching: I finally watched the last few episodes of Veronica Mars that TiVo saved for me. I liked the last couple of episodes for an end to the season…but if the show doesn’t come back for another? (the CW is still dangling a shred of hope over our heads…) Then the last episode was unmercifully cruel. Bah.

Movies…I haven’t seen a new movie in the last little bit, but Rand and I watched This Film is Not Yet Rated over the weekend. It seems like we watched a whole bunch of stuff, but I’m having trouble remembering what…oh well.

Listening: As you may have noticed, I’ve been on a bit of a Dixie Chicks kick. TiVo recorded their appearance on Austin City Limits, which was pretty cool. I’m still loving “Taking the Long Way.” 🙂

Watching, watching, watching

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Yeah, I’ve been doing a lot of watching. Reading will pick up a bit once the semester winds down!

I’m not sure I’m going to hit everything I’ve watched recently. I’ll encourage Rand to refresh my memory if necessary!

On DVD

Stranger than Fiction…it got tepid reviews, but I have to say that I rather enjoyed it. The story was clever, it was told well, it had a satisfying ending, and Maggie Gyllenhall was adorable.

The Passion of the Christ…I told Rand I’d watch it if he’d skip the Jesus beatings for me. He’d seen it when it came out, I hadn’t. It was very, very Catholic. Many images were exact replicas of the Stations of the Cross that you see hanging on the walls of Catholic churches, except the movie images were bloodier. There were moments worth seeing, but I still thought it was mostly gratuitous and not really necessary. Give me Jesus Christ Superstar any day.

Shaun of the Dead…I loved this movie! I loved the way it played with your expectations. I loved that it was both genuinely funny and genuinely scary. I loved the way Shaun went from being a hapless loser to being a hero. Yeah, there were a couple of moments when I had to turn my head, but overall, I just adored it.

Let’s Go to Prison…I wouldn’t have seen this if hadn’t been made by Bob Odenkirk, who I know is funny. I enjoyed it. It was subversive and subtle and indeed very funny. Will Arnett was pretty much Will Arnett, but he does it well.

At the movies

Grindhouse…Actually went to the theater! I really enjoyed the first feature, Planet Terror, which was directed by Robert Rodriguez. It was great fun. It starred Freddy Rodriguez and Naveen Andrews (yum!) for one, and Robert Rodriguez really kept his sense of humor about him. I’d watch this movie again. The fake trailers were hilarious.

And then there was Death Proof. Sigh. I’m not a Quentin Tarentino fan to begin with, but I think he’s become more insufferable, if that’s possible. His movie was deadly serious, and not really all that good. I was bored. I was bored during a dramatic car chase that had a girl clinging to the hood of one of the cars. Tarentino’s dialogue wasn’t even very good. It was tedious and pointless. It wasn’t clever. It wasn’t funny. He’s obviously in love with the sound of his words. I’m not.

On TV

Ooh, these last few episodes of Lost have been fantastic. I’m completely riveted! I’m back into waiting on the edge of my seat to see what happens next.

Rand and I have watched all 6 episodes of Andy Barker, PI and found it quite fun. I knew, though, not to get attached. It’s already gone buh-bye.

Looking forward

New Heroes next week. Yay!

Saw a trailer for 1408. Stephen King + John Cusack = GOLD! 🙂 Well, that is if they don’t screw it up. And given that neither William Goldman (Misery) nor Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile) is involved, well, the odds are pretty good that it’ll be screwed up. But I’m in anyway.

Hot Fuzz, from the same guys who brought us Shaun, also looks promising.

Busy, busy

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I have a lot of things I want to write about. I also have a bunch of essays I need to read before tomorrow. Bleah.

A fun (if tiring!) weekend was had…both Ookla shows were lots of fun. My parents were in town for the Nietzsche’s show and got to see Rand in action for the first time. They seemed to enjoy it. They also liked Greg Klyma, which didn’t surprise me a bit!

Rand and I have stepped up our Netflix viewing, so I have several movies to report on…among them The Passion of the Christ, Stranger than Fiction, Let’s Go To Prison, ummm….I’m drawing a blank. But there have been a bunch in the past couple of weeks.

I wrote about this at Required Reading over the weekend, but I’ve joined a fun little site called goodreads. Check out my profile here and be my friend! 🙂

Disturbed about Disturbia

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So I was watching TV earlier today, and I saw a promo for the movie Disturbia. Plot synopsis:

A teenager on house arrest starts to spy on his neighbors. He spies on a pretty girl neighbor who gets caught up in his spying, and they begin to suspect that one of their neighbors is a (gasp!) serial killer.

Sound familiar? It should. It’s pretty much the plot of Rear Window. Which is what came to mind when I saw the promo, so I headed to IMDb to check it out. There’s a snarky debate going on in the comments section about whether it’s a remake or an homage, or whether everyone should just shut up and get over it already.

I headed over to the official site, and saw that the screenwriter had this to say:

“One night, as I was driving home from my sister’s place, this idea just popped into my head–a story about a kid who is stuck in his house and begins to notice bizarre things happening across the way. He eventually comes to suspect that his neighbor is a serial killer.”

Uh huh. And you’ve never seen Rear Window.

It’s not that I’m opposed to remakes on principle…yeah, they’re rarely as good as the original, and they’re usually about Hollywood types making a quick buck instead of coming up with something original, but whatever. I only have a problem when a writer pretends the idea was original when it clearly was not.

People adapt screenplays all the time. There’s a whole category for it in the Oscars, after all. But taking someone else’s idea and pretending it was your own? That’s just wrong.

Reading, watching, listening

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Reading: Mostly student work these days…other than that, I managed to do a read-through of my NaNoWriMo novel. I wrote a bit about it at my writing blog, if you care about that sort of thing.

I also skimmed a bunch of grammar-type books to write this month’s Absolute Blank article over at TC. I began reading Spunk & Bite, which you can see along with all the others in our Amazon Store.

I read the first issue of the new Buffy comic, which I did enjoy, but I’m not sure I have the patience for monthly comics. Then again, do I have the patience to wait until it’s collected? Hmmm…

I have a bunch of things I’m looking forward to reading, like Laurie Halse Anderson’s new book Twisted, which was released today.

Watching: I think Lost is the only current show w/new episodes that I’m currently watching. It’s been fantastic lately, if I do say so.

Rand and I finished the second season of MASH last night. (How many more seasons is Frank on? Gah.) Toward the end of the second season, there was an episode that had to be groundbreaking television in 1974, dealing with a gay soldier. I was impressed.

Over the weekend, we saw Catch and Release at the dollar fifty movies. I liked it okay, and cried a bit at the end, but there were a few too many distracting plot holes for me to love it. The movie stars Jennifer Garner as Gray, a woman whose fiance has died just before their wedding. The question I had to keep asking myself was “doesn’t she have any friends? Or family?” It’s possible, I guess, that the answer to those questions is no, but that was never explained. I’m just pretty sure that if my fiance died, my family and friends would be there. I’m just sayin’.

Jen cries like no one else out there, and Kevin Smith was indeed as great as everyone said. Oh, and Timothy Olyphant (of Deadwood) is hawt.

I also watched Mean Girls…Rand had never seen it. 🙂 Oh, and I almost forgot…we watched The Full Monty, which I had seen before, but Rand just bought on DVD.

Listening: At present, I’m listening to KT Tunstall’s Eye to the Telescope, which I finally purchased from iTunes. I *heart* iTunes. And having an iPod. (I like the album quite a bit, too!)

As always, any recommendations are welcome. 🙂

Eden’s 100 Film Meme

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As seen here.

Here are 100 films spanning nearly 100 years. Mark them as PARTLY (if you’ve seen parts but not enough to say “yeah, I’ve seen that”), SEEN (feel free to add +/- for liked/didn’t like it), FAVE (would watch it repeatedly) or QUEUED (if you would like to or intend to see it, via Netflix for example).

As you’ll see, my “old movie” viewing is seriously lacking.

1. Broken Blossoms
2. Metropolis
3. The Phantom of the Opera
4. Un Chien Andalou
5. Nosferatu
6. The Passion of Joan of Arc
7. Pandora’s Box
8. Modern Times
9. It Happened One Night PARTLY
10. Gone With the Wind PARTLY
11. The Adventures of Robin Hood
12. Wuthering Heights
13. Freaks
14. Casablanca SEEN+
15. Citizen Kane
16. Rebecca
17. Kind Hearts & Coronets
18. The Philadelphia Story SEEN+
19. Double Indemnity
20. The Heiress
21. The Magnificent Ambersons
22. Arsenic & Old Lace
23. Rear Window SEEN+
24. 12 Angry Men
25. Sunset Boulevard
26. Touch of Evil
27. Singin’ In The Rain
28. Some Like It Hot
29. On The Waterfront
30. The Night of the Hunter
31. The African Queen
32. Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb SEEN+
33. Psycho
34. Lawrence of Arabia
35. To Kill A Mockingbird SEEN+
36. Mary Poppins SEEN
37. The Manchurian Candidate
38. Judgment at Nuremberg
39. 8 1/2
40. The Graduate SEEN (-)
41. A Man For All Seasons
42. The Hustler
43. The Innocents
44. The Godfather PARTLY
45. Five Easy Pieces
46. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest PARTLY
47. Taxi Driver PARTLY
48. Monty Python & The Holy Grail FAVE
49. Alien PARTLY
50. A Clockwork Orange
51. The Sting
52. Jaws SEEN
53. Annie Hall SEEN
54. Patton
55. The Exorcist PARTLY
56. Harold & Maude
57. Young Frankenstein SEEN+
58. Network
59. All The President’s Men SEEN
60. The Last Picture Show
61. Barry Lyndon
62. The French Connection
63. Rocky SEEN
64. M*A*S*H* PARTLY
65. Halloween SEEN
66. Das Boot
67. Amadeus SEEN+
68. The Elephant Man
69. Blade Runner PARTLY
70. The Princess Bride *FAVE*
71. Platoon
72. Body Heat
73. Die Hard SEEN+
74. Scarface
75. Brazil
76. Henry V
77. This Is Spinal Tap SEEN+
78. Say Anything *FAVE*
79. The Last Emperor
80. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off FAVE
81. Pulp Fiction SEEN
82. The Usual Suspects SEEN+
83. The Age of Innocence
84. Goodfellas SEEN+
85. Groundhog Day PARLTY
86. Leaving Las Vegas
87. Fight Club SEEN+
88. American Beauty SEEN+
89. Trainspotting SEEN+
90. The Nightmare Before Christmas SEEN+
91. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind SEEN+
92. The Pianist
93. A Beautiful Mind SEEN+
94. Million Dollar Baby
95. Kill Bill
96. Children of Men SEEN+
97. United 93
98. Charlie & The Chocolate Factory (Willy Wonka, yes…Charlie, no)
99. Little Miss Sunshine SEEN+
100. Casino Royale

Busy weekend

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Whew! Lots going on this weekend. I saw two movies–Pan’s Labyrinth and Babel. I’ll probably post more thoughts on these later. I will say that, while I liked Babel, I don’t think it was any great injustice that it didn’t win Best Picture. Both movies were dark, but I thought Pan’s Labyrinth was slightly more hopeful and uplifting. I cried during Pan’s Labyrinth and didn’t during Babel, which is not to say that there were not sad, heartwrenching moments during that movie.

Anyway.

brownies

I made Eden’s peanut butter swirl brownies, and for my first attempt at brownies from scratch, I have to say not half bad. I think my pan was an 8×8 rather than 9×9, which made them a little thicker than I would have liked, but they were okay.

books

Sunday was our book club meeting. None of us hated the book as violently as Eden did, but we all basically agreed about the book’s problems. It seemed to me that Coupland couldn’t decide which story he wanted to tell, which resulted in a jumbled, chaotic story with too many loose threads left untied. I’m not sure the four-narrator thing worked so well, because the characters weren’t given distinct enough voices.

The book was very readable…I got through it in a day…but I just kept waiting for something to happen, particularly in Heather’s story. There were moments when I thought I saw where Coupland wanted to go, but I don’t think it quite got there. I think the father/son dynamic should have been more at the heart of the story than it was. I think Hey Nostradamus wanted to be a story about faith and redemption and family, but fell a little bit short.

I did mark a lot of passages that I thought were memorable–this one in particular:

Redemption exists, but only for others. I believe, and yet I lack faith. I tried building a private world free of hypocrisy, but all I ended up with was a sour little bubble as insular and exclusive as my father’s.

And this one:

Sometimes I think God is like weather–you may not like the weather, but it has nothing to do with you. You just happen to be there. Deal with it.

I didn’t love it, which was disappointing, given how much I enjoyed Girlfriend in a Coma and All Families are Psychotic. But I didn’t completely hate it either. I doubt I’ll ever want to read it again, and I definitely wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who hasn’t read any other Coupland.

Jen’s post, LT’s post, and Eden’s review.

LT hosted the meeting, which meant we got to visit with her adorable kitty, Linus, as well.

linus looking up

The Children of Men

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Finally.

As mentioned, I saw the film version a few weeks ago, which made me curious about the book. I enjoyed the book, though probably not as much as I enjoyed the film, and the two are wildly different.

Theo is the central character in both versions. There is a group called the Five Fishes in both versions, although in the film, the organization is much larger and much more influential. The setting is primarily the same (the book is set in 2021, the film in 2027), and some of the essential elements of the story are the same–humankind is infertile (although in the book, it is made clear that MEN are infertile. still no explanation as to why) and Theo has to help a woman who is miraculously pregnant safely give birth.

The film is much more violent than the book. Most of the shooting, bombing, and bloodshed doesn’t happen in the book at all. The government is much scarier in the film, although the book offers more of a meditation on power and corruption.

The book focuses a lot of attention on Theo’s relationship with his cousin Xan, the Warden of England. It’s hardly a blip in the movie.

And sadly, one of the major questions I hoped would be answered by the book–what exactly does the Human Project do? and does it actually exist?–was an element that was completely new for the film version.

Okay, now I’m going to get to what I liked about the film. I can’t possibly talk about this movie without mentioning those incredible tracking shots. Yes, they really were that amazing, and I still can’t believe it didn’t win the Oscar for cinematography. (This level of film geekery usually escapes me. I think I’ve been hanging w/Rand for too long!)

One of the most powerfully moving scenes in the film involved Michael Caine as Theo’s friend Jasper and a cover version of the Stones’ Ruby Tuesday, by Italian Franco Battiato. I don’t want to say any more about it, other than that it made me crycrycry.

Another moment that moved me came toward the end of the film, watching people living in the midst of of shooting and bombing and horror all around them. I thought to myself, “I can’t imagine living in a world like this,” then immediately thought “There are people who live in a world like this. Right now.” It made my heart ache.

I thought the ending of the movie, while sad, was much more hopeful than the ending of the book. I thought it was brilliantly done, and I highly recommend it. (Be warned, though, that it is heavy on social commentary. If that’s not your thing, you might want to stay away.)

Oscar picks–how I did

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Best Picture THE DEPARTED
Actor in a Leading Role Forest Whitaker|THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND
Actor in a Supporting Role Eddie Murphy|DREAMGIRLS Alan Arkin|LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE (I had Alan Arkin and changed it…)
Actress in a Leading Role Helen Mirren|THE QUEEN
Actress in a Supporting Role Jennifer Hudson|DREAMGIRLS
Animated Feature Film HAPPY FEET
Art Direction PANÂŽS LABYRINTH
Cinematography CHILDREN OF MEN PANÂŽS LABYRINTH (this kind of shocked me.)
Costume Design DREAMGIRLS MARIE ANTOINETTE
Directing THE DEPARTED
Documentary Feature AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
Documentary Short Subject THE BLOOD OF YINGZHOU DISTRICT
Film Editing THE DEPARTED
Foreign Language Film PANÂŽS LABYRINTH THE LIVES OF OTHERS (what? I so didn’t expect that.)
Makeup PANÂŽS LABYRINTH
Music (Original Score) BABEL
Music (Original Song) “Love You I Do” – DREAMGIRLS “I Need to Wake Up” – AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH (this was a total guess, but I was completely sure it was going to be ONE of the three Dreamgirls songs! I was wrong.)
Short Film (Animated) MAESTRO THE DANISH POET
Short Film (Live Action) THE SAVIOUR WEST BANK STORY
Sound Editing APOCALYPTO LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA
Sound Mixing APOCALYPTO DREAMGIRLS
Visual Effects PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MANÂŽS CHEST
Writing (Adapted Screenplay) CHILDREN OF MEN THE DEPARTED
Writing (Original Screenplay) LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE

Anyway, whoo! for me (and Rand!). I got 14 picks right. And although most of the show was a big snoozefest, I was glad I was watching to see Martin Scorsese win. It was pretty obvious when Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Copppola came out to present that he was going to get it.

Other thoughts…I have no interest in seeing The Queen, but Helen Mirren totally made me want to see The Queen. She was stunning. I also enjoyed Ellen’s hosting. Hm. That’s it for now. Maybe more later.