Here’s a post that didn’t post at the end of August, because I was too lazy to do all the two-line reviews:

Feverishly hacking away at the mountain of editorial assistance required to bring SpikeTV’s Surviving Disaster to a television screen near you starting next Tuesday, Sept 1, and every Tuesday thereafter for the next ten weeks.

In June, we had a little time off and I went off to edit a feature film shot on the RED, The Selling, written by and starring Gabriel Diani (who you can hear in episodes of Better Radio, my sci-fi sketch comedy radio show (re: podcast) ).  It’s great, by far the best feature I’ve worked on so far.  Spooky and funny in turn, it’s a haunted house story that’s more inconvenient for a real estate agent than it’s terrifying for a family.

While I was working on that, I was also watching:

-Public Access – Bryan Singer & Christopher McQuarrie’s first movie.  Not exactly…good.  Reminded me of Sex, Lies, & Videotape a bit.  And there’s the formative version of the big twist they’d get right the next time around.

-Jandek on Corwood – Documentary on a musical recluse.  Not at all as interesting as its own subject.

-Zombie Girl – Same problem, different cause.  I’d suspect this was shot without a plan, and pieced together from the footage, which is a much less likely route to a captivating doc.

-Man on Wire – I probably would have been way more into this one if I’d seen it cold, a year ago when it was new, instead of hearing all the details all over the place in advance.  It was, however, a fun inaugural run for MustacheTV.

-Captivity – Kim Bauer Gets Kidnapped: The Movie.  Snooze.

-Push – Why aren’t original movies about superheroes any good?  What’s the exception to this rule?  Is it because (almost?) all of them try to break from comic book tradition with the edgy, raw, gritty idea of using superpowers in order to be lazy?

-The Great Debaters - Good, but pretty by-the-book example of one of these.  Also, I think it had some anachronistic stuff about Hitler and WWII that wouldn’t've happened yet at the time the movie takes place.

-The Hurt Locker –  This was pretty good, but also kind of a cheat.  What’s more exciting in a movie than the stock moment of ‘will the bomb be defused in time?’  And this movie is a huge collection of those scenes!  I did wonder though, about what they might have been saying with the spent cartridge floating and bouncing in slow motion, and why they bothered to set it 5 years ago when it probably wasn’t written that way, with all its references to things that didn’t exist 5 years ago.

-G.I. Joe – I was never at all a fan of G.I. Joe back in the day, so I went into this one not knowing who anyone was.  Thankfully, they make it easy on newcomers by putting one of everyone on both teams.  I wonder if the toys were just repaints of the same figure.  It’s been a good year for animation, so this is far from getting the ‘one of the best animated movies I’ve seen this year’ joke.  Still, way better than Transformers, even if I did doze off for a bit somewhere in the middle.

-Funny People – First Apatow movie I’ve seen.  Good thing they didn’t call it ‘Good Actors.’  I liked it overall, especially from the perspective knowing a bunch of upcoming comics.  That Jonah Hill guy though; yuck.

-District 9 – Cool movie.  Loved it less than the popular response.  Close as we’ll get to Half-Life: The Movie.  Still don’t like when mock docs don’t commit.  Hope, like Cloverfield, they’ll have the guts not to take the bait on a sequel.

-District 13 – Action parkour fighting movie!  Kind of like Escape From Paris.

-District 13: Ultimatum –  The sequel to action parkour fighting movie!  I actually liked this one even better for the most part.  Crazy and more elaborate fights, flashier parkour chases, and an even more disappointing ending!

-Ponyo by the Sea – Hot on the heels of the original, Studio Ghibli’s anime remake of last year’s action hit Taken is a terrific retelling.  It hits the beats of the original while still adding something new to the father’s relentless search for his missing daughter.  The casting for the English dub was well done, and the recruiting Liam Neeson to reprise the original role is brilliant.  The primary difference in this version is that the girl is overcome with Hugo’s Disease.  I don’t think anything I’ve seen in the theater this year so far has gotten as much laughter as this did.

-Last of the Mohicans – the 1936 version.  AND

-Last of the Mohicans – the 1992 version, which is a remake of the 1936 edition, not a fresh version of the book.  I thought I’d start a series here on double features, but it’s been a while since I saw these, and I was surprised by how lousy they were.  Even more so, how the movie doesn’t seem to be about the Last of the Mohicans (who, by the by, aren’t extinct).

-Inglourious Basterds – this was fun to see, the way it’s always fun to see more from someone who has such a distinctive mark on their movies.  And it was fun to see the audience around me not-enjoying it, from the walk-outs to the guy who kept complaining that scenes didn’t make any sense and it was too much work to read the subtitles.  I liked the way it would make silly concessions and then double back on them and turn out to be clever.  I wonder how much it changed since it’s premiere at Cannes, since Ebert’s review didn’t seem to apply to the finished cut.  Also, one gets the sense that the clan of Basterds were only included as an excuse to use a title QT loved on his movie about something else entirely.

8 or 9 out of 17 this round.

Deliberately let this lay a while.  Starting back in with the easy post.

• 3 Dev Adam, Death Warrior, The Eliminators, and Hands of Steel – 4 of the fine feature films, at least half of which are Turkish, presented to me via Doc Mock’s Movie Mausoleum, an internet show that combines a big of the ol’ Ghoulardi and a bit of the MST3K via a bunch of UCB-LA guests.
• Hearts of Darkness and Coda – two documentaries about Francis Ford Coppola, shooting Apocalypse Now and Youth Without Youth, as shot by his wife, Eleanor.  It’s understandable that FFC would feel like some of the footage might make him look bad, but there was nothing particularly damning or shocking in-context, and having read Eleanor’s book Notes, not too many surprises.  Strongly recommended to fans of the series Firefly, for Brando’s read on the line “I swallowed a bug.”
• Mr. Majestyk and The Mechanic – a Bronson double feature at the New Beverly.  The Mechanic is almost completely great.  Bronson badassing around as a professional hitman, and an ending that made the whole theater cheer.  Mr. Majestyk features Bronson as a melon farmer with a disinterest in taking any guff from the local hoods.  Contains graphic scenes of violence done to watermelons.
• Sunset Blvd. and Queen Kelly – amazing that I hadn’t seen Sunset Blvd yet, since I have it on DVD, and may have even been assigned to watch it at some point.  A cool double feature, Queen Kelly is the film Norma makes Joe watch in her living room.  It was an actual film Gloria Swanson had made (but not completed) as her own career was in decline, and was actually directed by Erich von Stroheim.  The restoration was kind of boring, actually, but still neat.
• Animal Crackers and Duck Soup – another New Beverly double feature!  I’d wanted to see how the Marx Bros played with an audience, since they worked out a lot of their material on stage in advance of filming, and left the same pauses for laughter on the screen.  If anything, the pauses weren’t long enough and there were lines I couldn’t hear.  There was a lot of great stuff in both, but I’m especially curious about the things that looked like mistakes and improvisations, and whether they were or not.  Groucho’s occasional asides not to the camera, but to someone just off camera, the bit where at the end of a long take he gets his character’s name wrong and they work it in, and Margaret Dumont just laughing away during Harpo’s closeups in the card game, to name 3 examples.
• Life with the Dice Bag – a largely uninteresting and unflattering homemade doc about tabletop RPG fans.
• Hoop Dreams – an exciting and surprising doc about two young would-be NBA stars, via Hulu.
• Last Tango in Paris – at least watching this helped me to get a reference made in a recent issue of The Bugle.  Also via Hulu.
• Hellboy II – I didn’t really like the first one, but I think I like this one better.  I haven’t read the comics, but maybe it’s more true to the source material than the original, which was more or less Men in Black 3.  Even more surprising, how good Seth McFarlane’s character was.
• The Man with Two Brains – the earlier flavor of Steve Martin comedy, this had at least 4 or 5 really stand out gags that I really really liked.  Murmuring, and a bit about retiring, and the 19th century Indian rubber vase.  Steve Martin has made a lot more comedies (and more of them were actually good) than most (all?) of the actors coming up in that era that we remember as comedians, I think.  Your Robin Williams?  Your Eddie Murphy?
• The Horribly Slow Murderer With the Incredibly Inefficient Weapon – I thought I’d heard of this somewhere before, but I couldn’t say where.  It seemed like it just had to go on my list, a title like that.
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine – Even though the previous three X-Men movies were mostly about Wolverine, this one adds in some additional contrary backstory.  It’s pretty much bound to be a wash though, since we know he a) lives and b) won’t remember anything that happens.  I guess I kind of appreciate making Sabretooth less of a caveman.  Curious waste of deadpool though.
• Terminator Salvation – this movie isn’t anything.  It’s not even bad, it’s just a big empty naught sign.  Nothing happens, no story is added to the existing mythos, and there is no reason why the audience might care about anyone on screen, nor are they challenged to at any point.  Supposedly the title meant something before folks started meddling, and while the ‘real ending’ that was removed after someone told the internet last year might have been intriguing, that would have ended up seeming pretty out of place in the final product.
• Le Voyage dans la Lune – always good to learn about the hard sci-fi and special effects masterpieces that have gone before, to better understand those coming soon, to a theater near you!
• Star Trek – is one such example.  This movie was way better than it deserved to be.  I hadn’t previously thought of Abrams as a good director (nor a bad one, his notoriety simply isn’t based in directing) but this was so well made that I barely noticed it was written by some guys that write things I don’t like at all.  I found myself agreeing quite a bit with this article about the movie.
• Up – oh boy did I ever like this movie!  I missed a free screening due to foolishness beyond my control, but I got out on opening day (but not on the first attempt – lots of sold out screenings near me) for a 3D screening.  I can’t remember the last movie I enjoyed so much in a theater.  I went in knowing almost nothing about the plot except what the teaser trailer revealed (a house and some balloons) and got the most adventurey, violent, sad, delightful, funny Pixar feature to date.  Even the short that preceded it (Partly Cloudy) was simultaneously touching and laugh out loud funny.  Also perhaps the best use of 3D for storytelling purposes I’ve seen so far (some scenes in the 3D cut are just in 2D, because that’s what serves the story).  Can’t say enough nice things about it.  With the expanded 10 nominees, even with the animated feature category, this deserves a best picture nod.  The only downside is that 3 of the next 5 announced Pixar releases are sequels.  They’ll probably even be good, but when a director can do such great work with original IP, it seems like a waste to go back to wells already tapped.
• Moonwalker – I think I’d seen this before, but it wasn’t on the list.  I’ve been a Michael Jackson fan almost literally all my life, and with his scheduled return to performing in two weeks, I sure thought I was going to get to see him live in a big crazy world tour next year.  Alas.
• Moon – This is terrific, but not getting a very wide release, I think.  You should keep an eye out to see if it’s going to turn up near you.  Very solid, interesting, and fun all by itself, but even more so to someone who happens to be writing stories about a guy stuck in space alone lately.  Bonus points for the robot, for including some of my own inside jokes by chance, and for making the ‘answer’ a reasonable extrapolation of events, not a mind-bending twist.  The movie is not about it’s “twist,” which is why it’s given out fairly clearly fairly early.

Seems to me most flicks I see lately fall into one of three categories, and that they mainly break down by era of production.

I’d say that it feels like the majority of films produced nowadays feel unsatisfying.  I suspect it’s to do with trying to break from the formats and conventions that have come before, and I couldn’t say whether the uncomfortable feeling comes from having the accepted norms broken or from the new breed of filmmaker still struggling to find the next thing, which perhaps hasn’t quite hit yet.

The convention they’re escaping seems especially prevalent in films from, say, the late 1960s through the late 1990s, a generation back.  These are movies with strong, well-defined three act structures, and beats you can absolutely feel adhering to the campbell-style hero’s journey and whatnot.  

Perhaps the former group represent the democratization of film, the era in which I can have a video camera in my monitor here, while the latter are the film school generation.  And if so, then the generation they followed and broke with are the pioneers – the first generation of filmmakers to have access to film technology as we’d generally still think of it today.  

Or, we could probably follow the money and see a similar story.  Films today made by corporations that were previously made following an auteur model that followed the studio system.  In either case, I don’t believe that the modern audience is dumber than it used to be.  If anything, it’s more responsive to film on a technical level, more apt to catch shots that would have once been considered subliminal images, simply from being trained by modern TV / commercials.

And yet, even though it’s a popular comment to make, I’d say it is very rare, the modern movie that is worthy of the claim that repeat viewings are necessary “to catch everything.”  Even with the recent popularity of huge twist endings.  For my viewing dollar, it was those much earlier flicks that stand up to or even demand the repeat screenings.  Maybe there’s something inherent to an age in which repeat viewings meant repeat trips to the cinema vs. the present day theatrical release as commercial for home video.  Maybe in a previous age when a studio owned itself and was in the business of making movies they were less afraid of subtlety than the present day conglomeratory edicts of synergy.  

Or maybe, since nearly all strata of movie are made in all eras of cinema, less of the previous generations’ chaff is conveniently available and I happen to have been drawing a bunch of latter day losers.  Here’s the recent rundown:

• Young @ Heart – I highly recommend the trailer for this documentary.  As much as the movie itself, about a senior center choir that sings songs from soul to punk, adheres to the hero’s journey formula, the trailer adheres to the tradition of including the only worthwhile and enticing parts of the film.
• Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet – This was a slightly better music doc, about making music with (mainly) repurposed electronics, like original gameboys (which have a warmer sound).  Naturally, it’s a pretty nerdy cast.
• His Name Was Jason – Because the studios aren’t quite ballsy enough yet to simply release a disc that features all the nudity and kills strung together.
• Rocky III – Hulk Hogan!  Mr. T!  Mick!  Oh, and Rocky, too.  I didn’t realize that the whole “I pity the fool” schtick actually came from a scripted line for a Clubber Lang.  I suspect I still haven’t seen Rocky II, so this is the fulcrum on my Rocky movie scale.  And there’s something to be said for the 80s model of making sequels that says you’re actually supposed to deliver more of what people liked the last go ’round.
• The Thing – I got to six of the items on this list because Hulu just lost a load of features for some reason.  I’d seen the Thing-like episode of a number of other sci-fi shows, especially the X-Files, but it’s a pretty solid and suspenseful movie.  Even the monsters hold up pretty well.
• Swimfan – This is pretty ridiculous.  Fatal Attraction set in high school.  I’m pretty sure it’s not actually supposed to be a comedy, but it’s really silly.   In brief: boy meets girl, boy has sex with girl behind girlfriend’s back, girlfriend finds out and breaks up with boy whilst girl frames boy for a dozen felonies in the space of a week, boy is cleared of all charges and gets back together with girlfriend who seems to have forgotten the one thing he actually did do was cheat on her.
• The Siege – Starring Denzel Washington as himself and Tony Shaloub as an arab.  What if New York City were the victim of a terrorist attack?  It’s pretty simple, actually.  All you have to do is apprehend The Last Cell of terrorists and then terror will be over.  I’m surprised you didn’t think of that.
• Thunderbolt and Lightfoot – This was pretty great.  Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges and George Kennedy are going to rob a bank in the 1970s.  I’ll admit though, I’m surprised more talk show hosts and such don’t keep re-using clips from this movie of Bridges in drag.
• The Final Curtain - Straight to video story of warring game show hosts, with Peter O’Toole and Adrian Lester, aka Hustle‘s Mickey Bricks.  Not, you know, very good, perhaps because they couldn’t decide if they were making a mock-doc or not.
• The Warriors – One gang gets framed for killing a member of another gang by another gang and then has to fight all these other gangs to just get away from the other gang on their way home, where they’ll fight that first other gang?  This is one you hear about a lot, and it seems like the sort of thing you couldn’t do anymore, even if they are apparently remaking it.  The comic book transitions seemed really modern though – I may have been watching the recent rerelease. Also: probably a/the inspiration for River City Ransom, if I had to guess.
• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home – The thing I usually dislike about Star Trek is the strict syndicated maintenance of the status quo.  Episodes end where they began so we can watch in any order.  I suppose there’s a certain amount of story told across the various series as they grew and evolved, but I didn’t realize how much the original film series was telling a continuous story (even though I saw part 6 in theaters for some reason), because this movie didn’t make a lick of sense.  From the opening that chooses to not recap previous films for new viewers but instead to make sideways references to them as a nod to the fans, to somehow inventing an even lazier explanation for time travel than Superman: The Movie.  I did enjoy how this fits into the mold of 80s sequels as well, where other film series run out of ideas and eventually add “In Space!” to the title, this series about being in space goes down to earth!
• Death Race – Statham.  Works as a pretty good video game movie, although not explicitly based on a video game.  Kind of in the Ultraviolet school of moviemaking.  But really, there was no reason whatsoever to have ‘copilots.’  They don’t help, can’t do anything, and apparently the audience can’t even see them.  (There’s the line about how they bring in the chicks to entice viewers, but Statham doesn’t have to wear the Frankenstein mask while he drives, so there’re no cameras in the cars?)
• Monsters Vs. Aliens – Thumbs down.  Too campy.  Animation just doesn’t hold up the competition (everyone’s crosseyed, lip sync is weird).  More overtly gimmicky than most of the recent spate of 3D releases.  (At least the animated movies.  Didn’t see Bloody Valentine or Journey to the Center of the Earth).
• Knowing – Something in this movie makes me not want to give it the thumbs down, but I can’t tell what that something is.  The movie seemed very episodic, with each episode only barely having any bearing on episodes to come.  Oh, here are some fancy effects scenes.  Now back to the mystery.  Now let’s be a horror movie for a few minutes.  Just too scattered.  Maybe the trouble is that we (that is, I) never have any particular reason to care about the characters?  Nic Cage’s one expression isn’t really suited to characters the audience needs to feel something about.
• Lawrence of Arabia – Tremendous!  I would’ve gone right back into the theater and watched this again, if that’d been an option.  I think for all the movies on this list, it can be distilled down to 10% or less (per sturgeon’s law, I suppose) that I’d actually recommend to someone, and this rises right into a spot on that part of the list.

So that’s approximately 4/15 this round.  It makes me wonder if ‘see everything’ is really the right approach.  Sometimes, ‘just see good things’ sounds better.

Lately, I’ve been employed.  I’m an assistant editor on a new program for SpikeTV called ‘Surviving Disaster,’ and I’m really good at it, so it’s going very well.  The assistant editor, in case you were curious, is mainly responsible for getting media in and out of the editing system, which in our case is Final Cut Pro.  So capturing tapes, making the six or more types of media we have incoming play nicely together, keeping everything organized between multiple editors, and doing it without a central server.  Easier done than said, practically, and although production seems like it might be behind schedule, post is now ahead.  Also, if you ever see our main character show up somewhere you are, RUN!  A terrifying experience is just around the corner, and several of your companions may end up dead or badly hurt just to prove a point!  RUN!

I read ‘The Road,’ possibly in part because someone who might be Luke liked it, and because I liked the movie of No Country for Old Men.  I think I liked ‘The Road,’ and I didn’t really question why at the time.  The setting is indeed bleak, but not as depressing as I’d been forewarned.  At some point, the string of events almost become comical, when not horrific.  And there’s a nice current of a father and son relying on each other for different reasons and some of the same reasons.  I did occasionally have to take a step back to parse what I’d just read though, or try to map out who was speaking, since no punctuation will do that to you.

Since reading that, (but not because of it,) I think I’ve been asking ‘why’ more often.  I saw the 1954 version of Animal Farm, a cartoon much more bleak and depressing than that book.  I wondered a little bit why Orwell went with certain names, since in a big blatant allegory the names are probably valuable.  I was also reminded of the multiple reports and projects and essays I’ve done on his other book, 1984, over the years.  I still haven’t read that one though.

I saw The Fisher King, and I now know that some movie I saw a snippet of once, of a kid who wants to go out to play with a guy who’s more interested in having sex with his girlfriend is officially neither Prince of Tides nor Fisher King (I know these aren’t similar movies, but they came out at the same time and somehow got tangled around in an eight-year-old brain.)  I found it to be the least Gilliam-like Gilliam movie I’ve seen, and also the one that dates itself the most.  Seems like trying to ‘modernize’ a classic story really puts down roots into the specific time it was made.  IMDB says Private Parts wouldn’t be for another six years, so I guess there was still a little time before Stern was completely irrelevant.  

The Brothers Bloom, officially coming out this May, is a new movie from Rian Johnson, who made Brick.  I liked it a lot.  Adrian Brody is a con man who’s ready to settle down, quit the game, and have a real life.  Someone else plays his brother, who draws him in for the classic ‘one last score.’ And Rachel Weisz plays Natalie Portman, who complicates things, naturally.  In it’s favor, the movie has a very ‘interactive’ feel to it, in the sense of a 90s adventure game, maybe, where actions have consequences.  If something breaks, it stays broken later, or someone has to fix it.  Also a plus, the curious out-of-time feeling in which the movie is both modern and in the era of the classic con man.  Working against it, the character games do sort of get dropped towards the end in order to handle all the plot that’s been piling up, but the attention to detail never fades (Bloom is always thinking of the Queen of Hearts).

The Room is, to paraphrase a pal, ridiculousity from top to bottom.  Something of a cult phenomenon in LA but more-or-less unknown to the rest of the world (it’s had a billboard up since long before I moved to LA, at the director/writer/star/producer’s expense).  It’s just a crazy pile of nonsense, with eye-bending special effects (his building must be rotating on its foundations, if the green screen work is to be believed), and dialogue that could only be written and delivered by a non-native speaker that has probably still not gotten the necessary foothold on the meanings of certain words.  Like ‘room.’  Very MSTable.  Best viewed with a group, a sense of the absurd, and a pizza, half canadian ham and pineapple, half pesto and artichoke, light on the cheese.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno was better than I’d heard.  The characters speak more like people in a movie and less like characters in Kevin Smith movies do, and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.  I laughed at it sometimes.  It felt…clumsier than previous outings, and I think the popular excuse for that is something like trying to appeal to a broader audience, but I don’t know if that’s true.  It is, more or less, the story of the making of Clerks.  Maybe it needs another viewing someday to figure out what I think.  I don’t think I’ve made it through all the DVD extras on Clerks 2 yet though, and that’s a movie I know I liked.

And then there’s Watchmen.  I guess this left me with more questions than anything else, and I’m about to mainly discuss the ending, since that’s the only part that’s interesting.  I understand most of the condensation that takes place earlier in the story, which does occasionally change characters’ motivations, but I’m pretty sure they remain motivated.  When it was done, my reaction was that it was accurate, but unnecessary.  Was it too accurate for its own good?  Is my opinion that an adaptation -should- shake things up?  And if so, why did the last couple minutes irk me a little bit?  Is my opinion that folks shouldn’t do adaptations?  I’m okay with the general idea of adapting a work from one medium to another:  the audiobook of American Gods didn’t need to change up anything from the text edition, and yet it adds a new dimension.  So what is the point of adaptation?  To retell a story in a way that takes advantage of the strengths of the new medium.  If that doesn’t happen, then the work isn’t an adaptation, it’s a translation.  And the function of a translation is not to impart new meaning but to relay the existing meaning as accurately as possible.  

Watchmen is a story told through comics as well as about comics.  It is regarded as a masterwork because of how thoroughly and intricately it uses its medium.  The reason so many had previously regarded it as ‘unfilmable’ was less to do with whether the technology was available to create Dr. Manhattan, and more to do with why we don’t have filmed adaptations of Infinite Jest, or House of Leaves (and why puzzle-based adventure stories are almost always unsatisfying in the format of a 90 minute film).  So when 98% of the Watchmen film is an abridged translation of the book (showing that the filmmakers concede that a completely accurate reproduction would not be feasible for the theater-going audience), book savvy viewers do not feel that the film earned its deviations from the source.  This is only compounded by the really odd choice to hang a lampshade on the altered dialogue.  Is it supposed to be a clever wink to the in-crowd?  Wasn’t that the whole rest of the movie?  

What changed and why?  We ditch the monster, because it would take a lot of screen time to set up properly.  Okay.  Maybe a dozen major cities are attacked instead of just one, either to avoid the appearance of 9/11 flavored pandering, or maybe because we’ve seen what happens when just one country gets hit, and it isn’t world peace.  The world isn’t uniting against aliens, or another dimension, it’s uniting against God.  Except, Jon doesn’t get his god-moment in the movie, completing his transformation from human.  Maybe if Jon had said ‘nothing ends,’ it suggests that he -will- be watching or returning to Earth at some point, as opposed to agreeing to leave and keep the conspiracy.  But this means that Veidt has his final moment of reckoning with a human, and one that we know poses zero threat to him.  A fair sight different from the original ending, where Veidt’s story ends in doubt, his confidence put in check by the fear of God.  On the other hand, maybe the lampshade moment is just an update of the same moment, when the Outer Limits similarity is called out.

I kind of hate to even be discussing it at length, since that’s such the thing of the moment, but it left me a little puzzled on my walk home from the theater.  However, on my way back I was able to make a recent dream come true.  I passed a taped off section of freshly poured sidewalk, which I think is a first for me.  And I wrote in it.  Sorry, I don’t have a picture yet, but with luck it’s there forever and I can get a snapshot in the future.  What could I have inscribed on the curb to leave me feeling so self-satisfied?

“Lorem Ipsum dolor sit amet…”

I’m actually up to 1417 by now, but 1408 was a milestone.  The next title / count sync point is 1492, I think.

On the screen:

• Sleuth – thumbs up.  Twisty and turny.  Not entirely sure about that last one though.
• Videodrome – Didn’t like it very much.  I’m pretty sure Robocop addresses the issues here better.
• Fast, Cheap & Out of Control - Didn’t like it very much.  May have deserved more careful viewing, but I didn’t find any individual story or the connections between them that interesting,
• Surf’s Up - Didn’t like it very much.  3D modeling of water has gotten pretty good though.  If you’re going to do a mock-doc, have the courage of your convictions and stick to the format, I say.
• American Teen - Didn’t like it very much.  You took cameras into a school and discovered…the stereotyped characters every program about high school shows us?  Great.  Thanks.  The speculation on whether it was faked is supposed to get people talking, I guess, but why cast doubt on something even less remarkable if it -was- scripted?
• Snuff - Didn’t like it very much.  Pretty much exactly the sensationalist fluff they decry in other films they excerpt.
• Pathology - Didn’t like it very much.  Wanted to, since it was written by the guys behind Crank.  Nice for gore fans maybe.  Awfully low stakes for so much murderin’.
• Time Crimes – Done well enough, but contains just about the minimum amount of story one can tell in a time travelin’ tale.  Should’ve been a short.  The stuff people say about plot holes is garbage though.  There were no other decisions to make.
• Monster Camp – I think it’s hard to cover this kind of material and be fair to the people in it.  Contained a topic I’m hearing a lot about lately that I haven’t heard of very often before: the D&D nerd who fails out of school. Would have benefited from a little time spent showing people enjoy themselves….unless the message was nobody does.  Hm.
• Friday the 13th Part 2 – In which the retcon fest begins.  Jason has lived and aged and started murdering.  Just because.
• The Gamers 2 – Better than expected, although at first I was expecting another D&D-styled doc.  Low budget project actual dramatizes a game of D&D fairly effectively, and represents the in-game world at least as well as the official D&D movie.
• Taken – Representing the ‘take EVERYTHING from them’ genre, the cool thing here is that Liam Neeson can’t even be bothered to actually take everything from the people he hunts.  He’s so single-minded in his task it’s not even truly a revenge story.  A good use of the hip and mod realism in the field of fighting styles – almost no knock down drag out 5-10 minute battles.  If he’s going to keep things moving he’s going to incapacitate the baddies fast and professional-like.
• The Ruins – A good, fun horror in the man vs. nature category.  Trapped on a pyramid with plants that want to eat you?  It’s not going to go very well.  Not well at all!
• Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium – Wonder is the key word in that title.  I do like exposition into a formed world and movies that sustain that world throughout.  The plotting is minimal, so as not to get in the way of all that Wonder and Magic going on everywhere, and that’s just fine by me.  Full of neat ideas brought to life, like the congreve cube.
• Coraline – The best iteration of the Neil Gaiman movie so far.  The 3D was good, although at times it seemed like the frame-rate dropped.  Maybe the whole thing was a slightly slower rate that only showed in moments of high-speed?  Not sure.  Tried to win an auction for a jumping circus mouse, but it ended thousands of dollars more than I wanted to spend.
• Friday the 13th 12 / The Remake – lazy, shoddy work.  This was not a movie that should have tried the realism trick.  I -know- it’s hard to tag a movie like this for nonsensical or unrealistic content, but it’s in the same sense that magorium works that this doesn’t.  It’s not about our reality vs. the movie’s, it’s about the movie being internally consistent.  There were loads of goofy continuity-type glitches, but the problem that breaks the movie is not deciding what to do with Jason.  Is he a clever and military-minded guy who digs tunnels and rigs traps, or the traditional deformed, retarded man-child that can’t tell his mother from this installment’s heroine?  Is he a force of nature or a guy that needs floodlights to hunt his prey? And where exactly does he keep drawing weapons from, anyway? The other plot point that seemed really odd was Trent getting mad at girlfriend Jenna for befriending another dude who looks just like him, but neither of them having any problem with Trent having sex with their pal Bree (whom the other guys in the group know well enough to join on vacation, but find too intimidating to talk to).  Silliness abounds with lighting, water depths, orchestra hits, but for some reason not the kills, which are presumably why someone checks out a movie like this.  I didn’t expect greatness from the group making this movie, but what a mess.
• 1408 – Much better than the trailer suggested.  And much less to do with Cusack’s kid than one might have thought.  Sam Jackson has a fun role.
• The Daily Show – Watching weeks at a time on the Hulu, I have to say I was disappointed in Jon Stewart’s interview with Jimmy Carter.  Sure, he doesn’t have to be in the hard-hitting news business, or spend the whole time talking about the book Carter was promoting, but I was very disappointed to see so much of their time spent covering exactly the same nonsense they bashed the 24-hour-news channels for covering a few days before.  Bad form.

And in print:

• High School Undercover - Better than the recent, similar documentary, American Teen, but still not especially good. Mainly covers the boring bits of school with some drugs and sex thrown in to pique prurient interests. All the caution used to protect identities (characters formed from chunked and pressed actual student sweepings!) makes it tough to invest in anyone. The chapter done up like Van Sant’s Elephant (students’ lives intersecting, various events seen through a variety of viewpoints) should have been fun, not a chore. From bookmooch it was delivered, and back unto bookmooch shall it return!

Over in life, the radio program marches on, with another 5 or 6 scenes written in this week to be recorded next week, and a few more would-be writers invited to participate. They, of course, declined. 

I auditioned for a UCB house harold team, expected nothing, and got nothing.  I’m pretty sure I’m just fine with that. Especially because…

…I’m starting a night job with a new SpikeTV program next week.  Glad, in fact, that I didn’t have to choose between what would be a substantial amount of pay for me and comedic advancement.

Oh, and I’m not sure if I like it, but I guess I’m a part of this facebook thing now, whatever THAT means.  The chart that draws lines between people I’ve met who know each other is kind of neat, I guess.  It seems kind of too spread out and inconvenient though.  I’ve been monkeying with it because it’s a new toy, but it kind of feels the same as that World of Warcraft demo, in that it’s designed to keep you logged in and wasting time for someone else’s gain.  There’s consistently a lot to do, but not much of it seems worthwhile.

I’m glad that an actor as good as Andre Braugher makes money acting in studio movies. It’s too bad he doesn’t get quality roles lately though. Rise of the Silver Surfer, The Andromeda Strain, Passengers… The Mist was closest to passable, I guess.

• Find Me Guilty – Lumet. Thumbs up. Uncharacteristically good role for Mr. Diesel.
• Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead – Lumet. Thumbs up. Not as good though. Some of the efforts to be twisty seemed to be overdoing it.
• If I See Randy Again, Do You Want Me To Hit Him With The Axe? – Not great, but worth watching to add such a fine title to my list.
• Daughter – Not very scary, not very short scary short film. I suspect the creator of employing fake symbolism to appeal to professors, and since it got his career rolling, I guess it worked.
• Dear Zachary – a doc from the prestigious MSNBC films. Topped a number of 2008 best lists, went in (as I was told to, and as I generally prefer,) knowing nothing about the content of the movie. I think this is the correct approach, as the sucker-punching, jaw dropping reveal was very effective. Thumbs up.
• JCVD – Another one I recommend that you view in the same manner I did. In this case, that’s bookended by 20 trailers from other JCVD movies and followed by one of his goofiest 90s flicks. Turns out the guy can do some acting, and the audience cheered at all the right parts. I’d like to see it again some time in fact. Thumbs up!
• Hulk Vs. – …Thor was a lot better than …Wolverine, which seemed to be animated to the quality standards of fan art. (Which they rub in by showing classic comic panels of each character at the end.) The Thor segment tells a story worthy of a saturday morning cartoon. The Wolverine segment pushes caricatures of some of the most deadly x-men characters around the screen, all carefully not harming one another. Omega Red has never seemed less scary. Thumbs down!
• The Beach – Not at all what I was expecting, which was something more Cast Away-ish. Very kinda okay, like lots of Boyle movies. Does Leonardo DiCaprio ever play a different character? He seems to turn up as the same guy an awful lot.
• Oktapodi – One of this year’s Oscar nominees for animated short. Pretty good, but I’ll tell you, not entirely realistic.
• Passengers – This movie finds a bush and then beats all around it for many hours. I wish I’d looked at the clock to make a note, but scanning back through the movie I’d say the ‘Answer’ (it’s that sort of movie) occurred to me around 20 minutes in. And then, after another week or so of running time, they actually spent a full 10 minutes (no exaggeration) doing that 30-second flashback you usually get in these kind of movies that shows you all the clues we saw earlier, now in the light of the Answer’s big reveal. I suspect that if you’ve got that much explaining to do, you might not have actually told a story with your interminable pile of scenes that came before. I like Anne Hathaway, but I kind of felt sorry for her each time her attempts to do acting smashed into the brick wall of a male lead again and again. (Here’s hoping he doesn’t drag down Watchmen too.) Despite a 4-second cameo by W. B. Davis, aka C.G.B. Spender, aka the Cigarette-Smoking-Man, thumbs down.
• Medal of Honor: Airborne – on the 360. In much the same way that coin-operated arcade games don’t seem so long when you don’t have to keep dropping quarters to continue playing, the single player ‘campaign’ mode of this game is around 5-6 hours of FPS gaming stretched double or triple through the saddling mechanism of the 360 controller. It’s not a bad game, and you see all the battles one might expect whenever one fights World War II. This is a leftover from my suspiciously-good deal on a 360 console and games.
• 24 – For the first 6 hours of the new season, I’m enjoying the show. I liked how this year’s conceit started out as Jack in the real world. The real world people are baffled by Jack’s decisions, and the threats of the 24 supervillains. Jack’s super powers don’t seem to work on anyone except those villains, although he does seem to be able to infect real world people he meets, bringing them into the fold. For example, the FBI agent who finds his methods deplorable…until she gets a taste of them in action, and half an hour later, her previous moral compass has been thrown to the magnetic wolves. I think we did blatantly see a series of events from one perspective and then another though, and that the producers were telling us that ‘real time’ may not be as important anymore when the scientist kidnapped in the first 5 minutes of the season had managed to assemble the insanely powerful and useful technological macguffin in less than ten minutes.

On the topic of Improving My LA Experience, I may have found a solution to the unemployment thing, which seems to plaguing ever more folks around me every day; I’m pondering new living arrangements; I’ve dropped an improv group that wasn’t working out so well for me; and I’m still working on Better Radio. This is taking longer than expected, as usual, between recasting, failed recording attempts, slow post production, and a difficulty in corralling a staff into one place and time. But every day, some new piece of the ten-episode puzzle falls into place. Today’s piece of that puzzle? A fresh segment submission from that glittering jewel in the Italian crown, Z-Rob!

WATCHED a lent copy of Foxy Brown this week. Fun and crazy and interesting to see where the different standards used to be.

READ a copy of How to Cheat your Friends at Poker, presumably by J.D. Richards. I’m inclined to believe that Penn Jillette really did help someone else get their text into print on his good name, because Penn’s never so dull in anything else he works on. Pretty much like reading a bound up handful of old BBS-era textfiles describing how to be a successful cheat with all the usefulness of Steve Martin’s advice on how to get a million dollars and never pay taxes. Don’t know that I really wanted someone to train me at cheating in a game I don’t play, but I wanted more than I got.

WATCHED 21, the Los Vegas advertisement that looked kind of neat in the commercials. I talked with some of the dealers about the movie last time I was there. They said if anything, it was pretty good for the town, since it got more people in thinking they could work the system the movie didn’t actually explain to them.

But I was still surprised by how bad the movie was.

While it ran, I had a litany of complaints, but I thought writing them as it played was corny, and now, minutes after the film ended, it almost completely escapes me. The cheesy 80s score, the paper-thin plot twists, the just enough romantic subplot to fill in a spot in the trailer, the reams of voiceover material that tells us how great vegas is. I guess they just didn’t sell the fantasy of winning a lot of money, since, like poker chips, it didn’t seem like money. They don’t use it for anything, and they don’t seem to have really worked for or earned it, so there’s no reason to care when things go south for the characters, as they inevitably must in order to fulfill the plot formula. There was one fun moment when one character took everything from another character, but that didn’t last.

ALSO, this week I saw a bunch of Robot Chicken, which really loses its fun when it isn’t fresh; the Rifftrax Live short ‘Self Conscious Guy,’ which was good; the start of season 3 of the excellent UK series Hustle, and I synced up the last segment of 2001 with Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes,’ which is like doing Wizard of Oz + Dark Side of the Moon in that it’s kind of neat, but doesn’t really work any more than how most songs will seem to fit most videos.

OH, and I cranked through most of the Google Reader I’d been ignoring for 3 or 4 weeks. Sweet Christmas I wish people proofread their posts. It’s like the /film people are using a speech recognition program, for how often they get simple words and homonyms wrong. Also, even though nobody should have to be told this, if you’re a journalist, or even if you’re just pretending to be one on your blog, the fact that you’re writing the story IS NOT the lead, least of all on your first day on the job. Unless maybe you’re 9. Or 93. Yuck.

Since I’ve been talking movies lately, here’re my advance picks for 2009:

I think these are the most likely to be good and do well:  Up in the Air, The Road, Shutter Island, Thirst, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, Up, Public Enemies, Inglourious Basterds, Brothers Bloom, Avatar

I’d like to like these, they’ve got good things going for them or at least an interesting logline, but most of them also have worrying, possibly movie-ruining elements: Where the Wild Things are, The Wolfman, Shorts, Sunshine Cleaning, Surrogates, Terminator Salvation, Men Who Stare at Goats, Monsters v. Aliens, New York I Love You, Powder Blue, He’s Just Not That Into You (that’s three movies in a row on the interlocking story template of Love Actually and Crash, which automatically makes me hope they’ll be good), Pandorum, Princess and the Frog (c’mon disney!), Push, Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (c’mon Gilliam!), The Informant, The International, Jennifer’s Body, Julie and Julia, Lonely Maiden, Lovely Bones (That’s like 7 in a row I have higher-than-average doubts about), The Fighter, Fighting, Game, Cirque du Freak, Cold Souls, Coraline (even though no other Gaiman movie has turned out well), The Countess, Crank 2, Daybreakers, District 9, Drag Me To Hell (Raimi + Lohman), Edge of Darkness, Escapist, The Boat that Rocked, Bad Lieutenant, Knowing (two with nic cage, with hopefully mitigating elements), Assassination of a High School President, Adoration.

They Probably Ruined These, but they sound like they could have been good, once upon a time: Return to Witch Mountain, Sherlock Holmes, Star Trek, State of Play, Ninja Assassin, Notorious (this doesn’t look anything like the original), Pink Panther 2, Inkheart, Killshot, Leaves of Grass, The Lodger, Friday the 13th, Creation, Christmas Carol, Duplicity, The Box, Astro Boy, 9, Dorian Grey

No Thanks: Wolverine, Soloist, Stepfather, Street Fighter, Taking Woodstock, Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, Tooth Fairy, Transformers 2, Moon, New Moon, Obsessed, Possession, Old Dogs, Ice Age 3, I Love You Man,  Kickass, Land of the Lost, Last House on the Left, Fame, Fanboys, Fast and Furious, Final Destination 4, Funny People, G-Force, Ghost of Girlfriends Past, GI Joe, H2, Harry Potter 6, Donkey Punch, Dragonball, Bruno, Bright Star, Bride Wars, Away We Go, Angels and Demons, Amelia, Agora, Adventureland, 2012, 17 Again, Night at the Museum 2, Nine

That’s 50 hopefuls to 62 doubtfuls.  Pretty darn optimistic of me, since I can barely recommend ten releases from 2008.

But if I did have to pick ten that I saw, they might well be: Wall-E, Wrestler, Keith, Iron Man, Dark Knight, Cloverfield, City of Ember, Burn After Reading, Bolt, and Sharks in Venice.  

I haven’t yet seen the following 2008s that I’ve heard were good, and some may well break into the previous list: Let the Right One In, Timecrimes, Man on Wire, Counterfeiters, Dear Zachary, Appaloosa, In Bruges, Zach & Miri, Boy A, AMONG OTHERS.

They weren’t the best, but I also liked: Be Kind Rewind, Indiana Jones 4, Quantum of Solace, Kung Fu Panda, Seven Pounds, and Vantage Point.

The 10 Worst Movies of the Year that I saw include: 7 dreadful things: The Happening, Wanted, Love Guru, Jumper, Eagle Eye, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Blindness, and the nowhere near as bad but still disappointing Tropic Thunder, Clone Wars, and The Bank Job

Movie roundup:

• Zero Day – Z-Rob Day? More authentic feeling than Elephant, funny, and then of course the inevitable happens.
• Idiocracy – Mostly didn’t like it as much as I heard I should, excepting some of the jokes built around following a line of logic through to an extreme, like “the electrolytes (re: salt) plants crave!”
• Slumdog Millionaire – Also less awesome than advertised. Until the (spoiler!) FULL CAST DANCE NUMBER kicks in! Woo!
• Blindness – In which we learn that blind people are worthless. But still not as worthless as women.
• Death Wish II – In which we learn how darn rapey LA is. Or hopefully, was.
• Twilight Zone: The Movie – This movie takes 4 episodes of the classic TV show and makes them boring. It’s almost as if this movie was made in….The Twilight Zone! (ps, thank heavens I haven’t seen any Twilight-zone puns having to do with that vampire nonsense that went around lately)
• The Golden Compass – In which we learn about how repulsive those filthy Egyptians are! Actually, this wasn’t too bad, but it didn’t always seem to be made for the kid audience it was presumably chasing. Also has one of the to-be-continuedest endings ever; too bad they won’t be making the other two. That CG polar bear will never get his bottle of delicious coca-cola.
• Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane – Way better than Snakes on a Plane, hands down.
• Diary of the Dead – Liked it. Wonder if it was supposed to take place on the same day as ‘Night of,’ or if the Romero series isn’t necessarily a continuous chronicle of the same outbreak. There’s audio re-used from the ‘Dawn of’ remake, so maybe it fits in that timeline instead.
• Out Cold – The secret to happiness is low expectations, so I liked this better than, say, co-star Zach Galifinakis suggested I might.
• Bulletproof – This action movie parody starring Adam Sandler is played so straight I’ll bet a bunch of viewers didn’t even notice it was a comedy.
• Over Her Dead Body – It’s Ghost Town except with a girl seeing a ghost girl and dating her dude, instead of a dude seeing a ghost dude and dating his girl.
• Sharks in Venice – Has sharks. Has Venice. Has some other stuff the makers half-remembered from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Ah, Venice!
• Death Wish V: The Face of Death – Pretty confusing, since I haven’t seen DW3 or DW4 yet. Between the lack of rape, the lack of plot-irrespective architecture scenes, and the more creative kills, it practically didn’t feel like a Death Wish at all.
• Seven Pounds – The more puzzling opening section of this was the most fun. Some nice little touches that weren’t explicitly called out, even through the more formulaic second half. Liked it, not sure it would work.
• Strictly Sexual – Two girls hire two guys to be live-in whores. Naturally, love ensues.
• Disturbia – Rear Window. Explains too much. Better than the Reeve remake, I think. Probably one of Ben Savage Shia LeBoeuf’s best roles, but that’s not saying much.

Looks like only 6 or 8 for 17. Pretty mediocre lineup lately.

Say what you will about the Coen Bros., but I really like their nihilistic streak as of late. I didn’t like this as much as No Country for Old Men, but for two movies in a row by people I thought I didn’t like, it’s almost enough to make me want to go back and check out some of their older movies again, in case I’m the one that changed.

I did change my location: I’m in Cleveland for a few weeks. It’s a winter wonderland!

Other movies I’ve seen lately:

Notes from The Day the Earth Stood Still – seen under some delightfully bad projection (“It’s okay Bill, just make sure most of the image is actually on the screen!”). – The helicopters looked weird at all times, but I wonder why you’d assemble a team of the world’s finest scientists and then put them in the air at the expected blast zone. – There was an 800 number on the screen that I didn’t quite catch – The US Dept. of Defense is still using a “mainframe?” Really? Still? – obligatory christ pose – stolen clerks gag – running from the bugs at the end made no attempt to make sense – The big thing here was that 10-15 minutes in I was genuinely wondering when Will Smith was going to show up, and then the movie has his kid in it, talking about how his dad would be fighting the aliens, except that he’s dead. It seems that the entire movie was kind of an elaborate meta joke. – Keanu got to do his matrix birthing scene again, but I think Norm MacDonald would have been as good or better as Klaatu.

Punisher: War Zone – This was an absolute cartoon. Even the kills weren’t particularly interesting or exciting, might as well have been video game footage, except that they lose points for recreating a move from Boondock Saints of all things. Luckily, I mixed up the times on a trip theater hopping, so I walked out around the time the Punisher was punching his wife’s grave in favor of…

Bolt! In 3D! – I do like the 3D in a movie. This one was a bit too long and repetitive, I say. No Meet the Robinsons here. The show-in-the-show scenes were pretty great. Weird that they just lifted the goodfeathers wholesale though. Overall, I liked it, but I would have rather seen the movie that Lilo & Stitch director Chris Sanders was going to make.

The Visitor – This movie offers the message that Yes Man seems to offer, and I’m sure it does a better job of it. It could have ended about 20 minutes sooner with no distinguishable difference to the outcome.

Stuck – For an accomplished director and lead actress, this was surprisingly amateurish. Bleah.

The Mist – I expected to dislike this one. Heard bad things, and the opening was a little Happening-like. But then it was quite good. They just kept doing things I liked. Right down to the ending. Well done.

Ghost Town – First time I’ve seen Ricky Gervais not playing Ricky Gervais. Few directorial things I thought were neat, too. And featuring Alan Ruck (Ferris Bueller’s pal Cameron) in a new spin on the role of Ghost Dad! And (highlight to read spoiler:) a lot of people getting hit by busses, which I always love to see in a movie.

So…5 for 8. That’s pretty good. According to IMDB, I’ve seen about 40 movies released in 2008, but I don’t know that I’ve seen enough that I liked to make a top 10 for the year. I guess I should actually see some of the movies topping everyone else’s lists so I can like ‘em too.