So Lawrence and I watched the latest SyFy channel disaster, “Chupacabra vs. the Alamo” Saturday night at the home of our friends who shall remain anonymous. (Thank you, anonymous friends!)
I’m hoping Lawrence will write a review so I don’t have to, but there’s one thing I did want to highlight.
Have any of you tactical operators given any thought to how you’re going to perform your tactical operations with an iPad (or other tablet) in one hand?
Are iPad operations something that’s covered in training these days? (Karl, I sense a great need.)
Blank’s most famous film is another one involving Herzog: “Burden of Dreams” about Herzog and the making of “Fitzcarraldo”.
Margaret Thatcher: LAT. NYT. Battleswarm. I apologize if I seem to be giving her short shrift: my feeling is that everyone who doesn’t live under a rock is aware of her passing, and I am just linking to the obits here for the historical record.
This whole thing is kind of odd, taken in the light of Roger’s April 2nd blog post, where he talks about launching a Kickstarter campaign to bring back “At the Movies”, relaunching RogerEbert.com, and various other projects. I wonder how things went downhill that fast.
And I also wonder what’s going to happen to RogerEbert.com. My understanding is that Ebert et al planned to move the site to their own servers, and off the Sun-Times site. That’s fine. But I went to the site for the first time in weeks yesterday and realized that I wasn’t all that interested any longer; only one of the current reviews was written by Ebert. Many of the others were written by Richard Roper (who I only tolerated because he was on the same show as Ebert), Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Jim Emerson, and other reviewers who I don’t find interesting. I’m hoping the site stays up as an archive of Ebert’s writing (and it’d be nice if it also archived “At the Movies”), but it isn’t a place I’m going to go for movie criticism any longer.
That’s a little mean, but it is also the truth. Let’s end on an upbeat note. Or two.
They don’t make them like that any more. (Actually, they do, but only for the SyFy channel.)
I couldn’t find their “Worst Movies of 1992” show online, but here’s their original review of “Shining Through”, which was their pick for worst movie that year (this clip does include the strudel scene):
Their servers appear to be overwhelmed at the moment, and I have not seen this reported elsewhere. I’m going to give this a bit of time, and will probably have more to say later on.
Also among the dead, Richard Griffiths. Most of the obits I have seen have concentrated on his Harry Potter role, but his full list of credits is even more interesting: “Withnail and I”, “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides”, and “The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear”, along with a lot of TV work.
(I’d kind of like to see “The Brides in the Bath”, simply because the George Joseph Smith case is one of the seminal cases in British legal history.)
Oh, look! New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is re-thinking his hastily passed and poorly thought out gun control measures! It couldn’t have anything to do with his declining popularity, could it?
And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
And if there is no room upon the hill
And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too
I’ll see you in the national recording registry…
(Also: The Ramones first album! “Einstein on the Beach”! “South Pacific”! “Sounds of Silence”! The “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack?)
Last night, we watched The Killing at the home of my friends who shall remain nameless.
I bow to no man in my admiration for Stanley Kubrick. I will happily engage in physical combat with John Gruber and Jim Coudal simultaneously to determine which of us is the greater Kubrick fan, if it comes to that.
I realize The Killing is early Kubrick. I expected it to be a little rough around the edges, and I think it is an important work to watch, Kubrick fan or non-fan. (The Killing pioneered some tricks that you see in more modern movies, such as the non-linear timeline.)
But there’s one big huge problem with the movie: Marie Windsor.
I feel bad about saying this. I’m sure Ms. Windsor was a very nice woman, and she certainly had a long career. But she sucks the life out of The Killing in Every. Single. Scene. She’s. In. Every moment she was on screen, we were thinking “Get this woman off the screen!” The setup and execution of the racetrack robbery is compelling, but Ms. Windsor’s scenes with Elisha Cook drove me bugnuts crazy. They don’t work well as a couple, and Ms. Windsor’s dialogue in particular is just awful; it shoot for smart and clever, and misses by a mile.
This may not have been entirely Ms. Windsor’s plot: Jim Thompson co-wrote the dialogue, and I can easily believe he was drunk off his hind end the entire time he was writing it. But even if the writing is bad, Ms. Windsor’s delivery of it still sets my teeth on edge. I think Lawrence came very close to pulling the pin on this one, solely because Ms. Windsor was driving him crazy as well.
Here are some movies that the IMDB top 250 voters think “Django Unchained” is better than:
“Citizen Kane” (#46)
“Lawrence of Arabia” (#69)
“Return of the Jedi” (#80)
“Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (#86)
“Heat” (#120)
“The Maltese Falcon” (#122)
“Fargo” (#129)
“The Wizard of Oz” (#151)
“Network” (#169)
“The Exorcist” (#204)
Feel free to go through the list and post your own “Django Unchained is better than…WTF?” moments in the comments. I, personally, promise not to refer to you as Grandpa Simpson, though I can’t say the same for other people.
Meanwhile, Joel Bauman is a wrestler on scholarship at the University of Minnesota. He’s also a musician, and wants to inspire people through his music.
(I wonder: if he wasn’t selling the video on iTunes, would the N.C.A.A. still have an issue?)
In other news: your dog wants steak. Your dog does not want rodent poison. Your dog does not want people feeding it rodent poison, especially if it is in competition at Westminster.
Frankly, I don’t believe the NYT‘s claims here. I suspect they’re being dishonest with the readers. However, I haven’t looked into NFA trusts; I’m not at the point in my life where I’m ready to purchase automatic weapons. (However, my brother and I had a discussion last night, prompted by the existence of “The Sliencer Store” near the movie theater I went to. A silencer for some of my .22LR guns is becoming more tempting.) Are there any readers out there who know more about NFA trusts and are willing to comment?
Speaking of movies, I considered live-blogging the Oscars on Sunday, but I figured my live blog would go something like this:
7:30 PM: Ceremony finally starts.
7.45 PM: First call by a celebrity for “reasonable gun control”. Sod this for a game of soldiers, I’m going to bed.
The one nice thing to come out of the Oscars, in my humble opinion, was that “Argo” started playing at the Alamo Drafthouses again, and at reasonable times. I ended up seeing a matinee showing yesterday.
Yes, it is very much a “Hollywood saves the world” movie, as well as a “heroic Federal employees” movie. Yes, “based on a true story” means that some of the facts have been fudged.
And I don’t care: “Argo” is a good story, well acted, well directed, and just the right length. Of the nominees I’ve seen, I liked it more than “Django Unchained” and (sorry, Mom) “Lincoln”. (I still want to see “Zero Dark Thirty”, but haven’t gotten to it yet. The other movie from last year I was excited about and didn’t get to see is “The Master”, which I think is going to have to wait for DVD.)
I don’t have much to offer as a Bell trial update. I am assuming the court took Monday off, and there doesn’t seem to have been any reported activity on Tuesday. The LAT does have a story datelined today, but it is just a summary of the past week of testimony, focusing on the whole “it was all Rizzo!” defense strategy.
Obit watch: Donald Richie, “prominent American critic and writer on Japan who helped introduce much of the English-speaking world to the golden age of Japanese cinema in 1959”. Among Richie’s works was The Films of Akira Kurosawa, a book I recommend to anyone interested in Kurosawa’s films.
Over a number of years, Raymond Rohauer, a producer and distributor, accumulated prints of a number of films. His collection became known as the Rohauer Library, and contains “more than 700 titles”, according to the LAT.
Why does this matter? Here are some of the things in the collection:
“The Thief of Bagdad” with Douglas Fairbanks, which has been restored and is being released on blu-ray today. (Edited to add: here’s a link to “The Thief of Bagdad” blu-ray on Amazon, but they show it as being released February 19th, not today as the LAT states.)
This post over at Andy Ihnatko’s site reminded me of something I’ve been wanting to blog about. I’m going to put that after a jump, and politely suggest that you read Mr. Ihnatko’s post first, because what I’m going to discuss will ruin his elaborately set up punch line.
S’awright? S’awright?. S’awright? S’okay.
(You know, as a kid, I didn’t get Señor Wences. As an adult, I miss him.)
I disagree with Lawrence on this. Specifically, I found what I’ll refer to as “the third act” (people who have seen the movie should understand what I’m talking about) to be kind of draggy. I think that entire sequence could have been tightened up considerably; I was ready for the movie to be over long before it was over.
Dear Quentin Tarantino:
You’re a good director. Really. Please stop trying to act as well. Thank you.
I was glad to see Zoë Bell in the credits, though I honestly missed her in the movie itself. Maybe one of these days Tarantino will give her the role she deserves.
There is a scene where Django and Schultz have hunted down a wanted man; Django balks at shooting the man in front of his child until Schultz has him read the wanted poster. I thought this was a very clever scene, more clever than I actually expected from Tarantino, for two reasons:
Django has trouble reading the wanted poster. Of course he does; he’s a slave, he probably wasn’t taught to read very well to begin with. There are a lot of hack directors who wouldn’t have thought of developing Django’s character in that way.
That scene also sets up a key plot point much later in the movie, which I won’t spoil here.
Generally: yeah, I liked it, but I would have liked it a little more at 2:15 or possibly 2:30, not 2:45.
Edited to add: For some reason, Lawrence’s comments about this film self-selecting its audience, and comments I expect to get from certain other people, remind me of ham. Don’t know why.
We were busy most of the morning, all afternoon, and on into the evening. But hey! Today is still Tuesday, and we all know what that means! Girl Scout cookies!
(munches another Caramel deLite)
Damn, these are good.
(has another)
(puts up the rest of the box before we eat our way through it)
Oh, yeah, we also have this week’s TMQ to deal with after the jump…
, a book I recommend to anyone interested in Kurosawa’s films.
” blu-ray on Amazon, but they show it as being released February 19th, not today as the LAT states.)