Suspenders of the Lost Disbelief

rifftraxraiders.jpgLast night I went to see Cloverfield again. Surprisingly, it’s still as good the second time, and I highly recommend seeing it in Digital Projection if possible, because the clear picture and better sound system make it awesome. (Incidentally, if you’re interested in all the backstory and alternate-reality game stuff surrounding Cloverfield, there’s a wiki page summing all of it up).

When I got home, I watched the RiffTrax version of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The casual observer would think these two incidents are completely unrelated, which is why the casual observer is lucky to have this blog to point out the similarities:

Raiders and Cloverfield both have the same basic inspiration at their core: filmmakers paying homage to a pulpy, shallow genre of movies they grew up loving. They’re not spoofs or parodies, or self-important “re-inventions” or “re-imaginings,” but sincere attempts to get the feel of the originals in a contemporary movie.

I’m not for one second saying that Cloverfield is going to become the classic that Raiders of the Lost Ark is. But watching them back-to-back does show what advances we’ve made in self-awareness in the past 26 years. Watching Raiders in 2007 is a little bit like visiting Tomorrowland before the well-intentioned but poorly-conceived rehabs: you’re struck with this weird sense of double nostalgia, seeing a dated homage to an even more dated source. For all the perfect set designs, costumes, props, etc., it feels more like 1981 than 1936. And not just 1981, but Steven Spielberg’s version of 1981.

The most obvious point to make here is that if you’re watching a movie while listening to a bunch of people make fun of it, of course you’re bound to notice flaws. I’ve heard a lot of people say they don’t get the point of RiffTrax for good movies, but for me, making fun of the movie was never the focus of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” or any of the side projects. The movie is just a straight man; it’s an excuse to give a bunch of people 2 hours worth of set-ups for jokes.

For something like Raiders of the Lost Ark, or the Lord of the Rings movies for instance, it reminds me of when I was a teenager and looked forward to the Mad magazine parodies of my favorite blockbuster movie of the moment. It never “broke” the movie, but was just another exercise in fandom. And like those, the RiffTrax makes all the comments a fan would make during the movie anyway — he totally ate that fly! And how DID Indy hold his breath on top of that submarine for so long? (The one that Mad magazine got that the Riffers missed was: how come those snakes are crawling up the other side of the wall and pushing themselves through mortar?)

But there’s still a good bit of Raiders that seems jarring now, if you’re watching it with a fairly jaded, critical eye and not just letting yourself get caught up in the movie: The Spielbergian reaction shots to Alfred Molina when Indy’s grabbing the idol. The odd expository scene with the feds getting lectured on the history of the Ark. Pretty much all of the comic relief moments. And, as the Riffers are quick to point out, the fact that Indy spends 20 minutes smirking his way through a car chase, something that seemed so bad-ass at the time but now comes across as “Wow, Indiana Jones is kind of a douchebag.”

At the time, they all worked to make the movie feel contemporary; now, they just serve to lock it in a time when Spielberg, Lucas, and Lawrence Kasdan ruled the Earth.

I say that Cloverfield is another very earnest action movie, without heavy-handed commentary or clumsy comic relief or pandering to the audience. But watching it after hearing other people talk about it, I’m struck with how high the bar has been raised for suspension of disbelief, how much self-awareness is just built into movies nowadays.

(Very minor spoilers for Cloverfield follow, in case you’re wanting to go into the movie knowing absolutely nothing about it).

It all relies on, and even takes advantage of, the knowledge that the audience is completely savvy to pop culture in general and how movies work in particular. The central gimmick of the handheld camera ostensibly lends an air of believability to the whole thing, but in fact it does the opposite: it distances the audience from what’s happening, keeping it in the realm of fun horror movie instead of just ghoulishly watching real death and destruction as entertainment. It works because we’re all so accustomed to the unreality of steadicam shots that that is now what we perceive as “realistic.”

The character of Hud — well for starters, there’s the fact that it’s the best-named movie character of the last decade, and the name depends on the audience’s familiarity with videogames. (In case you’re not a videogame fan, the “heads-up display” is your health/ammo/etc view in a first-person game, and at this point it’s become synonymous with the camera or the view screen). But making him into a character, instead of just an unseen narrator, was genius for several reasons: 1) It adds another layer of distance, because you know that the guy whose POV you’re seeing is not you, partly because he’s kind of an idiot. 2) The comic relief gets “baked in” to the movie, because you have the cameraman making the comments the audience would usually be making. 3) It adds a layer of “safety” to the movie, because you’re always reminded that somebody is still there with us, filming everything.

That’s not even mentioning the self-awareness implicit in basing your story around a bunch of good-looking, self-absorbed 20-year-olds, the type that call each other “bro” and have seemingly never known a world without video cameras, cell phones, and the internet. They’ve seen these stories, they know how they work, so there’s not a lot of staring in wonder while John Williams flares up in the background. Instead, they’re unrealistic people who react realistically — the characters are actually no more or less interesting than the plot and pacing warrants, a bunch of people who are just pretty enough to hold your interest for an hour and a half, but not so deep and complex that the movie grinds to a halt whenever one gets offed.

I have to wonder if a movie like Cloverfield could have been made 10 years ago, and how it would’ve been different. If we hadn’t had Scream come in and wallow in irony and self-reference for three movies, would we have gotten it all out of our system in time for 1-18-08? And is it really even out of our system, or has the bar been raised for how much postmodernism is required in a movie before we’ll allow it to be sincere?

Candid Gamera

Cloverfield_posterI hope nobody else has used that title to talk about Cloverfield, because I’m inordinately proud of it.

This movie is definitely one that benefits from knowing as little as possible about it going in, so if you’re interested in it, I recommend seeing it soon and avoiding trailers and reviews. I’ll just say that it’s excellent, I was literally biting my nails and on the edge of my seat (seriously!) for most of it, and I’m already interested in seeing it again. And there is something at the end of the credits, but it’s not all that great, and probably not worth waiting for.

Now stop reading unless you’ve either already seen it, or are never going to.

Continue reading “Candid Gamera”

Literacy 2008: Exhibition Round 1: Fox Bunny Funny

I’m not including comic books in my meager 26-book challenge for the year — not because they’re not art or they’re not as worthy, but simply because I already read 26 comic books a year. But I still like spouting off my opinions about things, so they’ll go into the exhibition rounds.

foxbunnyfunny.jpgBook
Fox Bunny Funny by Andy Hartzell

Selling Points
Indie comic! Cartoon animals! No words!

Apparent Audience
Illiterate LGBT people.

Actual Audience
Everyone.

Synopsis
The world is rigidly divided into foxes, the oppressors; and bunnies, the victims. This book tells the first half of the life story of a fox who empathizes a little too much with the bunnies.

Disclaimer
I am 100% genuinely and sincerely behind the idea of indie comics. Being a bad artist myself, I’m envious of and impressed by the people who aren’t. When someone can take his artistic talent and expand it into a full story, that’s even more impressive. Having the courage to make it personal and meaningful is even more impressive than that.

All that said, 99% of indie comics just leave me cold. I’m just too much of a cynic to remember the beauty of personal expression, when they so often are nothing more than variations on the theme of “life is hard for me because I’m different.” They never seem to appreciate that life is hard for everyone, because everyone is different, and the paradox that feeling alienated is the one thing everyone has in common.

Highs
The book takes what could’ve been another trite, self-absorbed “journey of self-discovery,” or passive-aggressive complaint about being excluded, and instead shows the universality of alienation and societal oppression. The lack of words and the use of cartoon animals avoids making the theme too narrow in focus — the characters become symbols, the scenes become reminders of events we’ve all experienced.

And it’s much deeper than its title or a first glance at the characters suggests, but also much much lighter, darkly humorous, and more accessible than you’d think from reading reviews that mention symbolism and allegory and sociopolitical commentary. The pacing is inspired, the characters’ expressions are perfect, and there are clever design touches throughout, ranging in subtlety from obvious jokes and funny-animal parody to something as simple as the use of negative and positive space. There’s an attention to detail and world-building that goes all the way to developing what seems like a passive-aggressive religion for the bunnies, where their victimization in this world is rewarded with dominance in the next.

Lows
Occasional lapses in the universality of it, where it’s too easy to just say that it’s an allegory for growing up gay. Which is a shame, because the potential audience for the book is so much wider than that, and there’s a lot in it that invites all kinds of different interpretations. The entire last chapter is extremely interesting visually, but also seems to lose direction somewhat — I’ve got my own interpretation of what the book is saying, but I don’t feel extremely confident that what I’m seeing is what’s really there. And the very end of the book struck me as being sincere and genuine, but also a little trite, when compared to what precedes it.

Verdict
More wisdom and insight than I’d ever have expected from a comic book like this, told with confidence, sincerity, and good humor. It’d be an outstanding book even if the art weren’t excellent.

Click in the middle of the Rocking Chair. You’ll thank me later.

find815shot.jpgAt the end of last month, ABC launched a new viral marketing campaign for the upcoming season of “Lost.” It’s an ad for the series’ fictional airline, with a press release announcing that Oceanic would start flying again after the Flight 815 disaster, and a promo website called FlyOceanicAir.com.

And oh no did you see that?!? The website got hacked by a mysterious stranger with some mysterious connection to Flight 815! I am intrigued! Who is this strange whistleblower? How did he manage to hack into a Flash movie? Why did he spend so much time working on jamming-your-signal visuals and sfx in After Effects, instead of just putting his movie on top of the other one? And most importantly: how do you get that constant week-old beard thing going on, anyway — whenever I try it, I go from “late 70s prom photo” straight to “werewolf in mid-transition,” with no roguishly handsome interim.

But ho!, what’s this? Has my eagle eye spotted another URL cleverly hidden inside the hacked transmission? What other, greater mysteries are there for me to unfold?

So yeah, I’m not a fan of the “alternate reality games.” They always devolve into a bunch of internet shut-ins poring over rehashes of puzzles from the back page of Games magazine, all to get to a website that plays ineptly-written videos performed by struggling actors.

But I’ve got to give them credit for this much: at least with this one, they kept the “you’ve stumbled onto a secret part of the internets!” nonsense to a minimum. You don’t even have to enter the “top secret” URL; our man Sam has cleverly hacked flyoceanicair.com to automatically jump to the game site, so you don’t have to pretend you’re discovering anything.

And apparently, he’s hired ABC’s camera and lighting crews to film him as he explores the mystery. I don’t want to tell you how to do your business, Sam, but maybe you’d have more time to find your girlfriend if you didn’t have to look at dailies and have meetings with the composer to make sure you’ve got just the right note of tension in the background music.

But really, the stuff I’m making fun of is the best part of this attempt at an ARG. The thing might not have anything remotely original involved (at least yet), but they cut out the artifice and went high on the production values. So it’s a bunch of “click here” and “find-the-pixel” puzzles, but they’re really nice-looking find-the-pixel puzzles with music and HD video. Hey, it worked for Myst.

And Sam: when you find Sonya, tell her to have that mole looked at.

Literacy 2008: Preliminaries: Lost Horizon

(I read this book over the Christmas break, so it doesn’t count towards the 26 books I’ve resolved to read in 2008. But I have a corollary resolution to post something on this blog every day this year, no matter how short or irrelevant, so I’m cheating and rolling back the date.)

(I’m also cheating by shamelessly stealing Joe’s book review format.)

(Okay, the real post starts right now.)

losthorizoncover.jpgBook
Lost Horizon by James Hilton

Selling Points
The First Paperback Ever Published!

Recommended By
A list of “If you like ‘Lost’, you’ll love these books that inspired it!”

Synopsis
A plane carrying four people escaping from a civil war is hijacked, taking them to the utopian lamasery of Shangri-La.

Highs
The main character of Conway is so well-developed, it’s a surprising jolt to those of us whose only exposure to the 1930s is Hays Code-era movies. “Oh yeah,” you’ll realize, “I guess people back then were capable of intelligence and subtlety after all.” He starts out as a comically heroic stereotype, almost a mythic hero to his former schoolmates. Over the course of the book, you learn that he’s got no interest in being a hero, or in any of the trappings of the west of WWI or the British Empire. And you discover along with him that he’s mastered zen without realizing it.

Lows
Every other character starts out as a stereotype, and remains so. For every passage that challenges your condescending attitude towards popular literature and entertainment of the 30s, there’s another passage that just reaffirms it. And it’s impossible to gauge how impressive the climactic reveal of the secret of Shangri-La would have been when the book was written, since it’s such common knowledge now.

Verdict
Kind of like if Jurassic Park had been written in 1933: An easy but not insulting read, there are plenty of moments of depth, and you’ll probably learn something new. But you can totally tell it was written to be turned into a movie.

Unliterate no more

gtdcover.jpgSince I failed miserably at every single resolution I made last year, I’m going to take it simpler in 2008, and only choose one.

Someone on a message board announced he’s challenging himself to read a book a week this year; I read too slowly and am too easily distracted for that, so I’m aiming for 26 books, or one every two weeks. So I declare 2008 to be The Year of Reading an Unremarkable Amount, Which Is Still Going to Be Quite Challenging For Me. Mark your calendars.

My ongoing resolutions — lose weight, and stop smoking — are still in effect, but I’m going to stop pretending that those are to-do list items I can check off. I’ll keep them in the “necessary life transition” category. I should probably throw “spend less time at work and get more accomplished in the hours I do work” in there somewhere.

The first book for the year is Getting Things Done by David Allen. I’ll get around to it sooner or later.

For want of double-paned windows, the kingdom was lost

beowulftreasure.jpg
I saw Beowulf in IMAX 3D at the Metreon this afternoon. Anybody who has interest in this movie but hasn’t seen it yet for whatever reason, I’d say that 3D, whether it’s the IMAX version or not, is really the way to go. It delivers pretty well on the spectacle, and that kind of thing is pretty much the only reason to leave the house to see a movie these days.

Incidentally, I’ve always liked the pre-show they do at the Metreon’s IMAX better than the actual movie. They start the drums going and light up behind the screen to show you where all the different speakers are; as far as “look how bad-ass we are” marketing goes, it’s pretty cool.

As for the movie itself: did I mention you should see it in IMAX 3D? I think it says something that this one seemed calculated to carry through as a big Christmas season event movie for this year, and the attention has already pretty much worn out. It’s not that bad, in the end; it’s just kind of unremarkable.

The biggest problem is that a lot of the movie is just really, really silly. Not long after Grendel’s mom makes her appearance, it turns into something else, and it becomes pretty obvious that the absurdity of the beginning was intentional. The problem is that the absurd part takes up what feels like half the movie (I wasn’t keeping an eye on my watch, I can only say what it felt like).

You’ve got a bunch of actors from all around the UK and whatever faux-UK part of the US John Malkovich comes from, all done up in CG with paunches added or removed and a fetishistic attention given to moles and hair and stubble. And they’re all so loud that it annoys a really badly-designed Grendel to run in and start bustin’ up the place to get them to shut the hell up already. Then Ray Winstone’s modified head on somebody else’s really modified body comes in and promises to “kill yore mahnstah!” and strips naked for an extended fight scene that seems cut from an Austin Powers movie.

Then a bunch of stuff that’s not directly from the poem happens, and the movie turns into a cross between God of War and a late 90s post-modern liberal thesis on the themes of adultery and the role of man in an ancient poem. It was jarring to see the movie suddenly taking itself so seriously. And I guess if you were just expecting action and spectacle as I was, you could complain about its alteration from hero’s quest adventure story into deconstructionist reinterpretation of the hero’s quest and adventure story itself. But really, Neil Gaiman’s name is right there on the screenplay; being surprised at that would be like going in and being surprised that everything is computer-generated.

The only genuinely weird, complaint-worthy thing about the story is knowing how feminist Gaiman tends to be, and trying to reconcile that with the fact that Robin Wright Penn’s character still just comes across as a dead-eyed, emasculating bitch through the whole movie. Kind of like what you’d get if you crossed Eowyn from The Lord of the Rings with Hillary Clinton.

As I said, the 3D was well done. I’d been a little worried at having to sit through a 2-hour movie all in 3D, but it’s almost never gratuitous or headache-inducing. The CG isn’t quite as creepy as you might think, but for the most part it just seems unnecessary. There are moments where you’ll be impressed, until you realize that you’re impressed that a splash of water looks like real water, or some bearded dude swinging an axe looks like a real bearded dude swinging an axe. A lot of people slaved over a lot of workstations to reproduce something you could get just by turning on a camera.

The more spectacular stuff, that really depends on its being CG, all struck me as extremely competent, but artless. Sure, you need CG to have a guy flying around on the back of a big golden dragon, but in terms of screen time, those scenes are relatively brief and not particularly memorable.

The only scene in the movie where doing it all in CG paid off, was the first meeting between Beowulf and Grendel’s mother. That’s the scene that’s in all the trailers and promotional material. It’s got a great look to it, it feels like an interesting place, and it creates a truly memorable image. (And again, they cross the line into silly when they give her high heels).

But you’ve still got to wonder if it was worth the effort, though. Angelina Jolie looks like an artificially-constructed person anyway, so you’d think they could’ve saved some cash and just put her in a gold bodysuit and started the cameras rolling. And I guess it’s encouraging for all of us chubby, hairy guys, that we now have the technology to turn Ray Winstone into a young buff dude. But if you’re looking for a guy with a weird accent, muscles, and a disturbingly hairless body, I’ve got to wonder why you don’t just cast Gerard Butler or something instead?

Say what you will about populism filmed with stylistic excess; at least that’s an ethos.

nocountrybardem.jpg
No Country for Old Men is about as close to perfect as you’re ever going to see in a movie. Not a single shot is unnecessary. The pacing is perfect; both for the movie overall, and for individual scenes that feel as if they were meticulously orchestrated down to a fraction of a second. Almost all of the performances are absolutely dead-on (the mother-in-law felt like she’d just come in off the set of “Mama’s Family”). The dialogue has a perfect rhythm and it perfectly conveys the character. There are no artificial moments; I’ve heard real people use exactly the same cadences and expressions as these characters. The plot stays completely true to the characters and the theme. The sound design is flawless. The suspense scenes are so perfectly executed, they act as a reminder that yes, movies can make you feel something. The movie has enough confidence to show exactly what it needs to, no more and no less. There are no cheap gimmicks, easy outs, or implausibly pat resolutions.

If any filmmaker other than the Coen Brothers had made this movie, it would probably be his masterpiece. The problem is that it was made by the Coen Brothers, so you have to unfairly compare it to their other movies.

And I ended up disappointed, because it just seems superfluous. They’ve made movies that convey all of the “meat” of No Country for Old Men, in a single scene. We already know they have an almost sadistic sense of how to make the perfect suspense scene; they proved that the second the newspaper hit the screen door in Blood Simple. We already know they can convey despair (Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There), or blind rage (Miller’s Crossing), or coldly senseless violence (Fargo). This movie just felt to me as if it were made by extremely talented filmmakers who happened to be big fans of the Coens. Because ultimately, it’s missing its soul, that spark that separates very, very good work from genius.

Before I’d seen it, a friend described No Country for Old Men as “kind of like Fargo, but not funny.” That’s pretty accurate, except I’d take it even farther and call it the anti-Fargo.

They’re very similar movies. Both are about honest cops in a relatively simple and peaceful environment, being exposed to genuine senseless evil, all because of a basically ethical character who makes a single immoral decision. But where Fargo had moments of humor, No Country for Old Men is almost completely humorless. Where Fargo is ultimately uplifting, No Country for Old Men is relentlessly nihilistic.

One of the criticisms frequently made against the Coens is that they’re too arch, too concerned about the style of their movies to care about real characters. I’ve always thought the opposite: they genuinely love their characters, they like hearing them talk, they like seeing how they react to situations, and they like seeing them come out stronger in the end. (Except for Blood Simple, which is really just a bunch of suspense scenes taking advantage of the fact that all the characters are impossibly dense). I don’t get that sense from No Country for Old Men; they don’t hate the characters, they just really don’t care that much about them at all. I mean, they’re all going to die eventually, anyway, so why bother?

After the final monologue and the cut to black, I just felt kind of cheated. Definitely not because I was expecting a quick and easy resolution (spoiler: there’s not one), but because it just hung there, as if I were supposed to be impressed that it didn’t give me a quick and easy resolution. It struck me as sophomoric, in the literal sense: I felt like I’d just had to listen to two hours of a talented but pretentious college sophomore who’d just discovered Nietzsche.

And I just sat there in the dark, thinking, “Really? ‘Evil is everywhere, and life is random.’ After all this time, that’s all you’ve got to tell me?” For a moment, I thought I saw my father in the distance carrying a horn filled with fire, but as it turns out it was just the usher telling us the movie was over and it was time to leave.

All of this I’ve seen before, and I will watch it all again.

I got back from Thanksgiving to find the “Battlestar Galactica: Razor” movie waiting for me. On a scale of 1 to 10 I’d rate it radical. (For comparison, the episode where they get off of New Caprica rates a holy crap that was wicked awesome, and the one where Starbuck gets kidnapped on a farm rates a 3).

Really, it only earns a “radical” for showing the old-school Cylon Centurions, and for dropping a few bombs as to the overall storyline, with Starbuck’s “destiny” and the Cylons’ plot. But the rest of the movie suffered, because it did the stuff the series doesn’t usually do — show big set pieces and the details of “side” stories. There’s a sequence where a bunch of Cylons attack the Pegasus at a shipyard, and it is pretty impressive, but it mostly serves of a reminder of how well the series conveys an epic space battle without actually showing the space battle.

And it’s the same for the story. We already knew that Admiral Cain was a bitch, from when she was on the series. The movie just revealed that wait, no really, she was a total bitch. There’s a half-assed attempt by Adama at the end of Razor to say that “I’m not sure I would’ve done differently in her situation,” but that just seemed like a feeble attempt to add depth and moral ambiguity to a character that had neither. And in the end, it made the whole Pegasus story seem smaller and less interesting. The more they show of the spacefights, the more you realize how small and forgettable they are; the more they show of the characters, the more you realize how two-dimensional and unlikeable most of them are, and how all the plot threads are a little convoluted and flimsy.

I mentioned that when I first saw seasons 1 and 2, I saw most of the episodes out of order, and missed a couple. As a result, I had the sense that everything was much larger and deeper than it really is. The show excels at suggesting more depth and scope than is really there; when you watch everything in order, it starts to stretch the plausibility.

For instance, I know that there are only 12 Cylon models, so it makes sense to keep seeing the same ones over and over again. But how come there are over 40,000 humans, but there are still only 4 or 5 people in the military? We keep seeing and hearing other ones, but it still comes back to Apollo and Starbuck being called in as not just the best pilots in the fleet, but the only ones capable of acting as bouncers for a summit meeting, hostage negotiators, mining facility inspectors, secret raids on Cylon Base Stars, etc.

There was a scene in Razor where they assembled the entire good guy cast into one place to stare at a spaceship on green screen, and it was kind of comical. You could almost hear the actors’ cars in the parking lot, their engines still running. This set up a cool plot element for the final season, and it tied into the “web episodes” pretty well, but it still suffered from the syndrome of having about 4 people in the entire galaxy to which everything of any significance happens.

But it ultimately doesn’t matter, of course. I’m still going through the episodes on DVD in order, and I’m still enjoying the hell out of them. I’d feel a little better if we didn’t have to wait until March for the final season to start, but at the rate I’m going, it’ll probably take me that long to get caught up.

In the event no actual movies are available, the Internet may be used as a substitute.

They’ve been warning us for years that the onslaught of digital distribution, torrents, iTunes, rental-by-mail services, and the new entertainment-in-pill-form (not available in some markets) was going to change everything. What they failed to warn us about were all the tragic implications of the entertainment glut.

Case in point: there are currently movies by Wes Anderson and the Coen brothers showing in theaters available for anyone to watch, but I have yet to see either. Instead, I watched The Omen: 666 the other night, just for the sake of getting my Netflix queue moving again. Other stuff I’ve watched since those movies have been released: the unforgivably abysmal Highlander: The Source on Sci-Fi; four episodes of the TV show “Ghost Hunters;” an episode of “Ace of Cakes” (that I’d already seen!); 300 again, only to see if the Blu-Ray made things better (it doesn’t); Superman II, to see if it’s as good as I remember it (it definitely isn’t); and Ratatouille to see the new short (awesome) and to see how long I could last until the objectivist undertones made me turn it off (about 20 minutes).

So I can’t really make the argument that I’m avoiding the theaters because there’s good stuff to watch at home. To be fair, though, it’s usually more exciting to read about movies on the internet than it is to actually watch them. The potential energy of the DOOM trailer could have powered a city, provided that city used engines running on perceived awesomeness. The reality couldn’t have sparked a penlight. So here’s more stuff on the internet about movies!

  • There’s a new trailer for Cloverfield (previously just called “1-18-08” or “Untitled J.J. Abrams Project”) that’s not only renewed my interest, but has got me even more excited. The teaser was so indescribably cool that I’d put myself on a media blackout for the movie, afraid that finding out too much about it would pour cold water over everything. But it looks like the “filmed on home camcorder” gimmick is used throughout the entire thing, which is a brilliant idea: it’s a first-person monster movie! I’m predicting it’s the one really great scene from War of the Worlds (the flaming train), repeated over and over again. Or, it’s The Blair Witch Project with a big budget and CGI. But I still have a month and a half to be optimistic.
  • Kevin Smith’s blog has a post about his crush on Seth Rogen and the casting for his movie Zack and Miri Make a Porno that would be so over-the-top gushing and self-effacing you’d think it was impossibly phony, if not for three things: 1) Kevin Smith’s turned self-effacing into an industry; 2) It’s nice to believe that at some level, it’s still possible for Hollywood to break down to just people working on stuff they’re fans of; and 3) Seriously, who doesn’t love Seth Rogen? He’s got pretty much the same aura as Kevin Smith himself, which is that whether his work is brilliant or not, you just can’t help rooting for the guy.
  • For the record, The Omen: 666 wasn’t all that bad, considering. But that may be just because I think the original is one of the stupidest movies ever made. It’s basically two hours of dozens of people telling Gregory Peck his son is the Antichrist, and his being too dense to catch on (“Hmm, no, I’m still just not seeing it.”). At least the remake was slightly more plausible, in that Julia Stiles really did seem like she didn’t like the kid. And Liev Schreiber came across as more of just an uptight overprivileged white guy than a total idiot. So in short, the remake was inessential, but if you’re going to insist on making a remake of The Omen, they did about as good a job as you can possibly do.
  • Rome isn’t a movie, but I feel obligated to mention it again since I was ragging on it earlier. Once you get a few hours into it, it’s really engrossing and very good. The production values were high enough to cancel it after two years, and they remain high throughout. But what really sells it is exactly the kind of thing you only get from episodic storytelling: a story that feels epic and ridiculously detailed, simply due to repetition and the ability to see a bunch of “smaller” scenes. You don’t see huge battles on this show, but you see how the battles affect the dozens of people the story follows. It also bugged me in the first few episodes how much of the stories seemed to be based on random chance or coincidence, but they had Caesar explicitly mention that in one episode, which makes it okay. In fact, that’s one of the themes of the series, how fate pulls Pullo and Vorenus into making a huge impact on Roman history. Plus: frequent nudity.
  • The short film “Your Friend the Rat” that comes on the Ratatouille DVD is excellent. It feels like the Pixar guys got the chance to throw every possible style of animation and art style at the thing, and it’s just bursting with the feeling of a ton of absurdly creative people finally getting an outlet for their talent. It feels a lot like the classic Disney shorts of the 70s, and even a little like “Schoolhouse Rock,” in that it’s not afraid to bounce all over the place in different styles. I think that alone was worth the cost of the DVD.

So this Thanksgiving weekend, I’m in Georgia at my parents’ house without much to do. Am I going to see The Darjeeling Limited or No Country for Old Men or even Beowulf, or am I going to read the same RSS feeds and watch hours of the worst programming the Food network and Sci-Fi channel have to offer? (Note: if you’re the betting type, odds are strongly in favor of the second one.)

Tensions Mount as Rival Factions Set To Conquer Lucrative Making-Fun-of-Movies Territory

cinematictitaniclogo.jpgAstute readers will notice I haven’t been updating this weblog, and that’s because of a desperate attempt to get caught up with work. (That’s what happens when every time you get stuck writing, you run to the safety of The Orange Box and watching Japanese movies from the 80s about schoolgirl detectives). But it’s still my obligation to give a news update in the world of things that are interesting to me:

Joel Hodgson announced a new project called Cinematic Titanic, which sounds like a relaunch of the original Mystery Science Theater 3000 concept. Details are there on the website, but in brief: it sounds similar to what the RiffTrax guys are doing with Film Crew Online, licensing a bad movie and putting out a DVD release with the commentary baked-in.

And considering that Joel Hodgson and Trace Beaulieu are involved, it’s very likely that it’ll be more of a high-concept thing, with an overall storyline and more sketches in between the movie segments. (For RiffTrax and The Film Crew, they don’t try to hide the fact that all their energy goes into the gags during the movie, and the rest is just gravy).

Other good news is that Frank Coniff and Mary Jo Pehl are signed onto the project as well. And they’re planning to release the (first?) DVD before Christmas, and do a live show in San Francisco! But the live show is only open to ILM & Lucasfilm employees. Of all the times to quit working for Lucas, 7 years ago!

I’m sure this will just rub salt in the recently-healed partisan wounds that have divided our nation for so long, and we’ll soon go back to seeing lame “Who’s your favorite? Joel or Mike?” questions popping up all over the place. But for those of us who loved all of MST3k, it’s great news.

Also also: according to MST3Kinfo.com, the last remaining members of the MST3K gang have rebooted Best Brains, Inc. with a weekly animated series about Crow, Tom Servo, and Gypsy. No guesses here as to how that’s going to turn out, but it should be interesting.

Now that making fun of movies is turning into a growth industry, I’ve just got to get my work done so I can listen to the RiffTrax for Raiders of the Lost Ark in time for the new stuff.