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Old 07-23-2005, 09:21 PM   #39
Jake
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Trep, gotta disagree with you about Scorsese's directing on The Aviator, but I'll agree with you on Leo, though I didn't really mind. His accent got to me at first but I bought him as Hughes pretty easly on in the film. I generally loved the Aviator though.


I've been majorly Summering it up in movie land lately.

I guess you guys know what I thought of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

I just saw the Fantastic Four tonight , and I was really surprised to find that I was entertained the whole time through. I've never read a Fantastic Four comic though, and had very low expectations.

I saw Batman Begins twice, because it was good. Not perfect, but very enjoyable. Especially liked the last 3 minutes, with Gordon and Batman hanging out talking by the bat signal. Nice to see a comic book movie adknowledge the post 80's attitudes about the relations between superheroes, villains, and the cities they're 'protecting,' even though the film just gave it passing mention.

Mr and Mrs Smith made me want to leave the theater. It depressed me how forced and trite the "marriage counselor" scenes were, but people in the audience seemed to buy them as genuinely unique and hilarious. I also got tired of them blowing up kitchens and bedrooms pretty fast, and was extremely depressed when the movie revealed that it's way of "amping it up" in the second half was to have the characters blow up a kitchen and bedroom store. Good lord.

War of the Worlds impressed me only because I was actually feeling tense, especially during the middle part. It was the same "only with Spielberg" feeling I got when I saw Jurassic Park for the first time, resulting in me sleeping on my brothers floor that night because it had spooked me out so bad (Man how good is that stuff with the T-Rex at night in the rain early in the film? Holy crap. *swoon*). Even though the ending was vaguely taken from the original story, I thought it was handled badly. I wish they would have shown the reprecussions a bit more. Maybe that's for the sequel, which I hope is called Warer of the Worldser: They're still already here.

The Longest Yard was shit. My feelings on Adam Sandler are mixed but he clearly phoned in this entire film. In Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore, he was genuinely good at taking the piss out of all of the fake bullshit characters, plot moments, and quips in hollywood stories (stuff like the clown at the party falling over and bleeding on the pavement, and lines like 'you eat pieces of shit for breakfast' come to mind), but in this movie they just all slide by without notice or comment, as genuine characters, quips, and story points. Ugh. Chris Rock even showed Adam Sandler a picture of his wife/girlfriend/whatever and told him how he was going to see her when he got out of prison, and then was burned to death like 2 scenes later. This passed without comment from anyone, despite being the shittiest oldest trick in the hollywood storytelling book. Ugh.

I think I saw a couple other notable movies but have forgotten them. Oh I saw Crash which I enjoyed but don't have much to say about it. Million Dollar Baby's goddamn descent into madness tired me out. Yeah cool it took an abrupt right turn from the standard sports movie fare, but PLEASE, people, it wasn't that original or gripping or special. Actually it was kind of "special," but only if you put an "after" and "school" before it. I don't feel the movie at all earned the right in its first 2/3 to make the extreme turn it made in the end. I liked the lighting and general extreme use of black and dark areas as far as the overall look of the film was concerned, though. Howl's Moving Castle was very fun aside from the last stupid 2 minutes.

It's weird how many hollywood movies I've watched lately. I mean, I'm not averse to Hollywood movies - I watch a lot of them - but usually there are plenty of funky things thrown into the mix. At the beginning of the summer I was mixing it up a bit more, and was for some reason a little hawks/hitchcock/noir stir-crazy. Seen earlier:



- The Big Sleep (not as good as the book - the DVD had two cuts of the film, and I watched both... neither edit was all that great to be honest, despite being somewhat entertaining. Neither Howard Hawks or Bogart were at the top of their game with this, which is too bad given the cool source material),

- Suspicion (which was recommended to me as good, but I was only moderately into it... the ending... wtf?),

... And re-watched

- His Girl Friday (so so good. if you havent seen this but enjoy or tolerate old movies, you owe it to yourself to pick this up)

- and the restored cut of Touch of Evil (ditto on the watching this if you haven't seen it. my brain explodes at it's awesomeness even with Charlton Heston playing a Mexican - fat cigar-chompin Orson Welles destroys all)

... and some others which I've now forgotten about.

I'm currently trying to watch the first 3 Romero zombie movies but I hardly have time... Going to the theater is sort of its own thing that's easy to block off and do, but when it comes to watching a DVD in my apartment, I always find other things that I need to do instead of sit in front of my own TV. Weird.

Anyway, I am about 3/4 through Night of the Living Dead and I really like it. I was surprised at how good it is despite being extremely bad. The characters feel real despite their hilarious flatness. Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead are next up in the Netflix queue.





... whoa wrote more than i meant to. hi
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Last edited by Jake; 07-23-2005 at 10:09 PM.
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