I confuse all these movies: The Sixth Day, The Seventh Gate, The Sixth Sense, The Twelfth Gate, etc.
Strangely, I am not confused about The Fifth Element, Seven, or Twelve Monkeys.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves confuses me, but for different reasons.
I saw Star Wars Episode III at 12:01 this morning, and although I’m not going to say anything about the movie now, I will say that my theater experience (having nothing to do with the movie) left a lot to be desired. First of all, there was a lack of nerds. I mean, people dressed up in Star Wars costumes, with plastic light sabers and such, and all that which would make seeing Star Wars at the first publically available time on opening night (or should I say opening morning) the most fun time to see the movie. There weren’t really any interesting people in line at all, it seemed. Perhaps, having often been in Hollywood or Westwood or populous places where such movies are a big deal among fans, I am spoiled in this regard, so nevermind. Because I saw the movie in El Monte. Why? Some of my friends happened to be seeing it there and invited me along, so I thought, sure, I’ll still live if I only get a few hours of sleep tonight. That’s the first-of-all. The second-of-all is that I was sitting to the left of a very large man, and I’m accustomed to booting people off the armrests so I can have them (”all your armrest are belong to us”), but this person overflowed onto the armrest so that it was his body which was taking it up, not his arm. And the seats were very narrow. The movie began 15 minutes late because some kid was raffling off a couple movie posters and didn’t start doing so until the time the movie was scheduled to begin. He didn’t have a microphone so it was hard for anyone to hear him, and he insisted on reading all 16 digits on each raffle ticket rather than just the last four and waiting while people climbed over seats to have their tickets checked under the light emitted from his cell phone, since he had no other light, then sent back to their seats because the numbers didn’t quite match. I’m not sure who arranged this. Actually it was part of a charity club of some sort, because this kid along with some others went down the line before the movie collecting money. I wanted to donate a dollar, like they were asking for, but I didn’t have a bill, so I fished out four quarters from my wallet. I gave one of the kids my quarters, and evidently he thought I must have been asking for change, because he gave me a dollar bill back. I said no, I don’t want change, I’m just giving you a dollar, so I gave the dollar bill back to him. And then he gave the quarters back to me, and I was thinking, maybe you just don’t want quaters, but he had taken the quarters from me the first time, so I assumed he could take quarters and tried giving them back to him, but he wasn’t paying attention anymore. Disorganized people. I kept my quarters. So the movie started 15 minutes late, and the show progressed without incident, but then, the second the movie ended and the main theme song starter to play and the credits started, literally that second, someone shut off the projector and turned on the lights in the theater. I know a lot of people don’t stay for the credits, and I was thinking about not staying this time because it was late and I’ll probably see the movie again with another group of friends, but it’s the principle of the thing. The theater shows the credits. If you walk out, you walk out with the music playing and the flicker of the screen at your back lighting the way. Maybe the projectionist was upset because the movie was a late showing and had started even later because of the antics of the raffle kid. I don’t know, but that’s no excuse, because no matter how many people walk out, you still show the credits. That’s how movie theaters work and that’s the expectation you have when you buy tickets. My friend and I went up and knocked on the projection room door and there was no answer (scared?), but thrashing the projection kid or whatever we were going to do wouldn’t have accomplished anything anyway, because the pervasive lack of professionalism had already left a bad taste in our mouths. Actually I’m personally placing a black mark in my black book next to the City of El Monte due to all of these issues, but particularly its dearth of nerds or otherwise interesting people. El Monte is a suburb east of Los Angeles. (Urban sprawl. Blegh.)
I saw Sideways. I had trouble sitting through the movie, but that has nothing to do with the movie. I knew it wasn’t an action movie going in, rather, a reflection on life. Reminicent of Adaptation, another movie about coping with midlife crisis. Not really crisis. A realization of one’s mortality. A realization that one has lived the greater portion of life and has come through with dissatisfaction in the level of one’s accomplishments, whether they be material or internal. Am I the person I ideally envisioned myself to be? No, and why not? My life is half gone, and yet, what do I have to show for it? Why do I seem to have so little power to change who I am?
I’m ($this->self, not Person::self) about a quarter of the way through my life. Not halfway. Half of halfway, not considering the fact that I plan to live more than one hundred years. I’m just trying to get into the minds of the characters in the movie. It also reminded me of Fight Club, and for a second I had a thought that the two main characters, and here I should mention that I’m bad with names because I just saw the movie and it ended an hour ago, and yet I can only remember one of the two main main characters’ names. Jack, and… I had to look it up. Miles. Well, a name like Miles isn’t exactly so memorable, right? Because it’s not a name you hear nowadays. Is it short for something? I thought, maybe Miles and Jack are the same person. Just like Edward Norton and Brad Pitt in Fight Club. I’m not even going to try and think of their names in the movie. I mean, I already tried and failed. There we go, I looked it up. Tyler Durden. I knew that. I’m decent at crossword puzzles, would you believe it? Well, at least, I can currently do up to most of the New York Times’ Wednesday puzzle, because for the most part they do in fact increase in difficulty over the week. Miles did puzzles, in the movie. There was one scene where he was doing a puzzle and it showed the puzzle close-up for about five seconds, and I found myself grabbing a number and looking over to look up its clue, but of course the puzzle disappeared from the screen before I had a chance to really see anything. (I bet aficionados are going to get their hands on the DVD and freeze-frame the crossword puzzle close-up and actually solve the puzzle. Or they’re going to determine what day that scene was actually probably filmed on by finding the real issue of The Times wherein that particular puzzle, edited by Will “Take Off” Shortz, appeared.) Much like credits scroll by too fast to read them or take in any of the names and what they’re for, although most people don’t care. Surprisingly many stayed in the theater for the entire credits, this time.
I feel like my writing style, right now, is similar to that of Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. (It was before I revised this and inserted all these parenthetical remarks.) I’m writing my thoughts as they occur, with no desire or effort expended on cleaning up the sequence of thoughts or forming them into more sequentially coherent paragraphs. Would you believe I’m a programmer by trade? A program is the epitome of something with structure and order. A program also represents going off on tangents within tangents within tangents, as functions call other functions and so on. But each function eventually returns to the function which called it. It’s fun to do that with a conversation which has taken a vast number of turns, also. I’ve done that with friends, but I don’t think they’re as aware of the programming metaphor. Unwinding the stack, you could say. “How in the world did we get to be talking about that?” And then you trace it back to the very beginnings of the conversation, which is perhaps an exercise in memory, which is fun. Sometimes I have a good memory, believe it or not. Just not for names, unless I make it a point to remember them.
This reminds me of The Neverending Story (the never-ending (not really) book). How Atreyu left all of his material possessions behind when he was transported into the story. Because we aren’t our possessions, and it’s good to remember that. It’s good to remember that “you can’t take it with you”, which refers to death, but you can’t even take yourself with you when you die. At least, it would be nice if you could, but I believe that’s wishful thinking and we should enjoy our lives here on this earth. The house is burning down around us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t admire the view.
I like Sandra Oh. I haven’t seen her in anything else. Her “maybe you should spank me, then” line is cliche, or maybe I’ve just heard it said too many times. Ha ha.
I don’t appreciate wine tasting more after seeing this movie. The characters could have shared a passion for, say, model airplane building. Or anything. Also, I didn’t see any cheese being tasted, and generally I understand that wine and cheese are tasted hand in hand. The lack of cheese in the movie, with the exception of the aforementioned line, was very disturbing to me.
Anyway, let’s unwind the stack. Cheese. Wine tasting. Sandra Oh. Fresh starts are nice. The house is burning down around us, but we can still admire the view. The Neverending Story. Fight Club. How for a moment Jack and Miles seemed like maybe they were two aspects of the same person. Remembering names. It gets a little fuzzy, here, and I think I’m just about back to the beginning, at least when it comes to the substance (what there is of it) of this article. Oh, yeah, midlife crises. Sideways.
I’ll write about this while it’s still fresh in my mind; this review will consist of a collection of random thoughts on The Aviator. This was a long movie. It was hard to sit through, but ultimately rewarding. It reminded me of Requiem for a Dream in how it portrayed mental sickness, and the uncomfortable feeling which that created in the audience.
Either times haven’t changed much, or the movie, set in the 1940’s, didn’t accurately reflect the character of that era (since so much seemed similar to the world of today). That wasn’t the point of it, though, and perhaps this movie, as a look back in time, can be thought of more as a reflection of the way our memories actually work. After all, it’s the people that matter, and if hairstyles and clothing are the only elements in need of change (relative to the present day) to successfully transport us back in time, then those elements as filmed in this movie did the trick superbly.
A number of shots seemed to be computer animated, such as the takeoff of the Hercules, also referred to disparagingly in the movie as the Spruce Goose. Is this the same plane permanently on display near the Queen Mary in Long Beach? I believe so; fodder for future ‘festigation and maybe even a field trip.
In one shot the lenses of Senator Someone’s (but I know it started with a ‘B’) (played by Alan Alda) glasses reflected light in a particular shade of green consistent with a modern anti-glare coating. I don’t think they had that treatment for eyeglass lenses back in the 1940’s.
Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes was convincing and consistent throughout the movie, and we do see a lot of him.
Fittingly, and I can proudly say that because of the following I’m in a small minority of all people throughout the world who will watch this movie, I saw it in an outdoor mall near LAX called Howard Hughes Plaza. That, among other things, sparked my interest in finding out more about the great airlines and aircraft companies of the past and present. I know Pan-Am went bankrupt when I was very young. I’ve flown on TWA several times. I know Hughes Aircraft and McDonnell-Douglas are the two big passenjer jet builders nowadays, though lately I’ve been on a number of other manufacturers’ planes. As someone who’s flown a bit, I’m interested in learning more than the very limited amount I know from reading those brief pieces of airline history they have in the onboard magazine. And that interest having been generated is one measure of the quality of a movie. This being the Internet and all, I could get started right away, but it’s late.
Anyway, I’ll let you know eventually what I find out.
I finally saw this. Cool movie. Random. Has “cult classic” written all over it and inserted at low volume and backwards into the soundtrack.
It’s interesting how one can often ascertain the time period in which a movie was made (or at least in which it’s set) when political candidates are mentioned. Donnie and dad are driving and the radio news mentions Dukakis, so automatically I know this has to be late 1980’s or so.
By the way, Michael Dukakis lost to George Bush because of his name. I had this discussion (jokingly, but you know it’s true) with and with reference to my little sister, who spent last summer writing a book. She completed it and is looking for publishers. It’s a fantasy story intended for a young audience; I’ve read the first few chapters so far and am impressed. She plans this to be the first book in a cycle of five.
Anyway, I had asked her if she planned to use a pen name, and she said no, she wasn’t. I brought up how Douglas Adams, in The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul (I’m almost done with it, Jackie, it’ll be any day now!) describes a certain bestselling author, Howard Bell, who writes utter trash that nobody actually ever gets around to reading, where everyone just buys his books because he has such a consise, authorly-sounding name. So I said, that just as a selling point (to supplement the high quality of the book material itself, of course), she should invent a name with the same Howard Bell kind of ring to it. (One of these days I’ll cease being lazy and actually look and post the quote from The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul (which is sitting right in front of me) wherein Adams actually describes what I just charmlessly attempted to repeat.) You can stop groaning now, too.
What I’m getting at, of course, is that names sell. “Bush” is just one of those concise, presidential-sounding names. Howard Bell. George Bush. There, see, we elected someone with that same name twice.
Amazing visuals, and if all that was done with just actors (and a few props) in front of a blue screen, I’m duly impressed. The lighting of the backgrounds combined with the lighting on the characters almost made this seem animated, Final Fantasy style, though with a huge upgrade to the realism with which the characters moved, because they were, of course, real actors. I had to remind myself of that fact, now and then. The visual quality of this movie is like raytracing… The raytraced scenes at http://www.irtc.org/“>IRTC (Internet Ray Tracing Competition) convey the same feeling.
Technical achievement that Sky Captain was, I hard time sitting still through through it. Maybe because I had just finished digesting my lunch and getting through an associated food coma stage, thereby arriving at the energetic stage, and needed to be doing something other than sitting still in a theater, although mental stimulation (which the movie didn’t provide) would possibly have worked. The characters spoke too slowly and there wasn’t any truly witty or interesting dialog, for example. Jude Law’s character was all right (when he wasn’t talking), but everyone else was annoying, particularly the reporter / love interest (Gwyneth Paltrow). I kept wanting her to fall into a ditch or out of an airplane or at least do something, anything, to get herself put out of the way. Not that I saw any chemistry between the two, either. The "bad guy" wasn’t particularly scary, and the coolest effect in the movie was one of the "good guys" getting fried/melted into an instant skeleton. Sort of like the guys at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
To sum it up: beautiful effects, but a movie ruined by a comic-book style story (fine, if that’s what the writer/director was going for) too simple for even the simplest comic book and mostly annoying characters who talked too slowly and did silly things like spend 30 seconds just standing there kissing when there were 60 seconds left to impending disaster… Wouldn’t that make you annoyed, too? Oh don’t go trying to tell me that sort of thing is sweet, the world was going to be destroyed! How would you feel if the world were blown up because some people were kissing when they should have been saving it?
Y. said "You really haven’t seen Predator before? Where’ve you been all this time?". And I said "You know, the guy in the video store said the same thing to me. Would you guys lay off it?". So this is the movie that started it all, though what ‘it’ is I haven’t really thought about in this context. Featuring Jesse Ventura at his finest ("I don’t have time to bleed") before he gets a large hole blasted through him, and Arnold Schwarzenegger as the stogie-smoking hero, who unfortunately doesn’t make use of the word "stogie" within the movie. I’m disappointed, I really wanted to hear Arnold say something like "I’ll be back, I forgot my stogie".
Besides a little bit of plot silliness (why would Tom Cruise’s character turn out the lights in the building hiding someone he was trying to find and kill, except to make it harder for himself and, more importantly, suspenseful for the audience) and severe character one-dimensionality (but really, the whole thing is an exaggerated view of life, anyway), a decent movie. Three thumbs up (out of four). That’s two thumbs and my left big toe.
After having made fun of it based on its title in what probably was a very unoriginal manner (”Why don’t they just randomly pick two movie monsters, say, King Kong and Godzilla, and pit them against each other, and make a new movie out of that?”), I saw this movie and thought it was great. The title is a bit misleading, at that, in more ways than one: It isn’t so simplistic here as to be just a drawn out Street Fighter- or Tekken-style videogame battle. Who cares about the acting and the plausibility of the story; this movie had a big, encompassing atmosphere, good special effects, and was just fun to watch. (Hey, has King Kong vs. Godzilla been done?)
The premise reminds me of that of System Shock (and the Animatrix, and, well, I’m sure there are hundreds of similar science fiction storylines). Yet, a mighty fine piece of action entertainment. The original books by Isaac Asimov explore the moral implications of having conscious creatures bound to obeyance of the author’s Three Laws of Robotics through short stories wherein robots are confronted with dillemas and conflicting priorities and act in certain (seemingly unexplicable) ways; humans then need to illuminate the choices and actions of the robots leading to further understanding of the inherent strengths and weaknesses of the Three Laws as they are “field tested”. The movie deals with this obliquely and just assumes the laws are perfect as is: Or are they? Not particularly cerebral, but I could watch this movie again.
Interesting psychological study. A movie that will keep you wondering what’s going on, and when it’s done and your curiosity has been fed and satisfied, what the point of it all was (beyond that psych study). If this purports to be a horror movie (I haven’t seen any previews or read any reviews) it fails in that regard, though the actors are convincing and the audience can tell they are scared, and why. The movie plays, in a vague sense, like a close-up view of something strange and unusual, a slice, where the camera gradually pulls back and we finally see the whole object and recognize it in its context. And that’s all there is to it, since it’s hard to identify with the characters or feel other than objective.
