Category Archives: Movies

Star Trek: Not All That.

Saturday I was talked into seeing the new Star Trek movie by my girlfriend and two of our friends who had already seen it. I saw a trailer a while back and thought, “That looks sorta cool,” but that’s as far as my thoughts on the movie went. I’m not a Trekkie. I was too young to enjoy the original series, and not interested enough to enjoy TNG. DS9 and Voyager didn’t do much for me and I quickly lost interest in both for different reasons. I tried the pilot of Enterprise and did not enjoy it. The movies were either mind-blowingly bad (I’m looking at you, Time Traveling To The 80s Whale Movie) or extended episodes that tried too hard.

But that’s ok, there’s nothing to say that by being a geek I *must* like Star Trek.

A bunch of my friends watched the reboot of the Trek franchise on Thursday and Friday and they gushed so much I was afraid they might start leaking. It currently enjoys the insane Rotten Tomatoes freshness rating of 95%. So I figured that the reboot must be doing something right. I was willing to give the movie a chance, my girlfriend didn’t exactly need to twist my arm to get me to agree to watch it.

So let me start with the good: Lots of in-jokes and fan service for the Trekkies. Lots of references for enthusiasts of the various series. Lots of explosions. Lots of fights where Kirk gets the shit kicked out of him. (Seriously… He doesn’t win a single damn fight and I bet his ribs were broken by the end of the movie.) And Simon Pegg is excellent in everything he does. Even when he was an extra on Land of the Dead.

The bad: The majority of the drama was built using an uber-dramatic score, a hand held camera to give everything that “realistic” look, and blurred out pans to other actors for reaction shots instead of cuts. The bad guy was a plot device that was forgettable other than using him as a method for getting the crew together. New Spock – total douche. New Bones had some great moments but his “Damn it, I’m a doctor not an X,” lines were pretty ham-handed. (The ham-handed scene was pretty fucking funny, though.) The opening scene with a pregnant woman being wheeled past explosions as she was going into labor was funny and lame – I kept imagining studio execs scribbling all over the script and saying, “We need to raise the stakes!”

I did like the movie. It was entertaining. The action was fun, if over the top. I just don’t think it was the second coming of Star Wars like people are saying. The reboot will end up making enough cash that a sequel is guaranteed, and I’ll watch it. But this wasn’t a movie I feel a desperate need to own or watch again.

I secretly enjoy Pride & Prejudice.

There. I’ve been outed.

I was never exposed to Austen as a child. My first real introduction to Pride & Prejudice was through a girl I had something of a crush on; her sister informed me it was her favorite movie, and I purchased the BBC mini-series DVD set for her as a present. This act is probably directly related to our now being married, so I suppose I owe something akin to gratitude to the work. My wife, like countless others I’ve since met, loves Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy. Bridget Jones’s Diary would not have made sense at all had I not known about this particular fascination that many people seem to have.

I suppose she enjoys Jennifer Ehle’s Elizabeth Bennett as well, but I must say that I’ve heard about her less. ^_-

At any rate, the work has grown on me. I’ve seen the BBC version many times (albeit never at my own behest), as well as the newer movie and the original 1940 version, which has its own charms. I even went so far as to read the book. ^_^ Recently, though, the magic of the public domain has caused another book to be written. Credited to Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, it proclaims itself: The Classic Regency Romance – Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! Pride and Prejudice and Zombies arrived at my door yesterday, so I’ll let everyone know how it holds up soon.

Canon fodder

“Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They’re just an interpretation, they’re not a record…”

–       Leonard Shelby, Memento

Given Hollywood’s propensity for mining old ideas for new revenue streams, we’ve all heard these complaints at one time or another:

They’ve ruined my favorite childhood memories.

What right do they have to change that?  It was fine in the original!

They raped my childhood.

The last one in particular jumped out most recently in a discussion reproduced here in The Basement, spurred by the issue of a new toy from the G.I. Joe movie being released this summer.  That would ostensibly be the same G.I. Joe that was a cartoon series from the mid-1980s.  Which was itself little more than episode length commercials for the G.I. Joe toy line being issued by Hasbro in 1985.  Said toy line being itself a retooling of its own toy line from the late 1960s that was eventually renamed Adventure Team when Hasbro opted to downplay the war theme of the toy in the wake of the Vietnam War (this according to Wikipedia, so take with a grain of salt).

As you can see from the long history of the franchise, a creation can sometimes undergo multiple revolutions over time, if the core idea is marketable but the current approach doesn’t appeal to the present audience/market.  And this is just from a franchise that was commercially successful.  One that didn’t have marketability may wind up being reborn as something completely different, bearing only the same name from one conception to another.

The question criticism such as Sam’s raises is at what point is the fan’s personal investment great enough that fan service can or should potentially trump creative license with an established character or franchise? Continue reading →

Book vs. Movie: Let The Right One In.

Books that get adapted for the silver screen usually get a bum deal.

Books that are written based on a movie are even worse off.

Let’s look at how Let The Right One In faired.

I read John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel before I watched Tomas Alfredson’s movie. I do this with most the books that get adpated into movies because I usually prefer the book to the movie. The only movie I’ve enjoyed more than the book was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The book was fantastic, but the movie was just enthralling on a level that the book couldn’t match.

Basic plot of Let The Right One In: a 12-year-old boy who gets picked on befriends an apparently 12-year-old vampire girl. Hijinks ensue. But in the slow, dramatic sort of way. No one throws a pie.

The Book: A slow paced horror. The translation was really odd in places, but I was able to look beyond that. The writing wasn’t very captivating but the story was interesting. The plot took place over about a month and brought in many groups of people who were bound together by random events. It was well done and all of it served to progress the plot.

The Movie: A slow paced confusing horror. The movie sort of assumed you had already read the book. They dropped many of the supporting characters or truncated their involvement in the main plot. The timeline of the movie was sped up to about a week and a half. There weren’t a lot of clues to be used to help you identify characters. The ending was the same as the book, which I really liked, but they cut out one of the largest points of conflict between the two children (ignoring the whole vampire thing) and only aluded to it with a bizzare vag-shot that made no sense without the context provided by the book.

So, Let The Right One In: better book than movie. Both were very good but very odd. Worth watching and reading, but I suggest picking one or the other and sticking with it.

(I’m told there’s a lot more dark humor in the subtitles for the theatrical release than made it into the DVD subtitles, but what are you going to do?)

Out of the closet basement theater and into the streets

The way I figure it, one has to be hardcore geek about something if they’ll agree to wear a fur coat for it.  In Texas.  In August.

Granted it was for a job, and only the second one I’d ever had, but I still think it says something.  I’d begun working at the discount/second run movie theater that was about 10 minutes from home the fall after I’d turned 16.  It happened to be a Cinemark theater that had been closed for the summer as it expanded from two screens to four.  For the grand opening weekend, they were making a big to-do with balloons, big advertisements…and the Cinemark corporate mascot Front Row Joe out front to greet the kids.

Sadly, ordering the costume from the corporate office didn’t mean corporate also provided a shmuck to wear the damn thing in 98-degree temperatures with 60% humidity.  Which is how I wound up in the suit that first Friday afternoon.  As miserable as the experience was (one friend told me afterwards by the end of the day I was the most lethargic costumed figure he’d ever seen), there were three things about the experience I am thankful for to this day:

1)    That as a weight loss program, it was quick and effective.  I’m pretty sure I lost at least 10-15 pounds sauna style, and being the first person to wear it that weekend, I didn’t have to endure what it must have smelled like by the end of that weekend;

2)    The job was the first I had to provide me free movies as perk.  This would be akin to a drug dealer giving one of his pushers a free ounce of cocaine for every ten he sold;

3)    Because the Internet didn’t exist, I would not have any knowledge of what furries are for another 15 years.  As such, I wasn’t irreparably traumatized at the consideration of what might have been done with/in/on that suit before it came to our theater, and only have to endure the odd shiver down my spine as I consider that time in my life.  Though I must admit typing the previous paragraph leaves suddenly in desperate need for a hot shower to wash away tainted nostalgia.

I digress.

Movies have been the go-to entertainment choice for my family for as long as I can remember.  My parents simply don’t typically do culture on any level outside of that, and within cinematic territory they are almost disturbingly mainstream.  As such, my childhood consisted of a steady diet of celluloid junk food, though some of the classics did manage to sneak their way in.  But for the most part, if it was in the top 10 box office figures for a given year between 1980 and 1990, chances are good I saw it, possibly with my folks.

(Related nostalgia point: nothing is as surreal as listening to your typically uptight Catholic Hispanic mother talking with awe and wonder at the sight of Mel Gibson’s ass after seeing the first Lethal Weapon.  And now I’ve got material for therapy…)

Coming to college and continuing to work in movie theaters helped broaden my tastes and interests.  More genres were readily available to me, piquing my curiosity to explore unheard of names that would become favorites.  I owe an old friend from high school more than he’ll ever know for introducing me to Akira Kurosawa at UT’s Hogg Auditorium.  But couple of funny things happened on my way to full-blown movie geekdom.

I became a repository for a ridiculous amount of useless movie trivia.  I’m particularly skilled it seems at freaking people out by remembering whole scenes from films verbatim, or pulling the title out of thin air from a description as vague as, “It had Kevin Bacon in it and they were doing this thing…”

And I developed (in my mind at least) a reputation as being that guy.  The cranky ijit in the back of the theater muttering under his breath about derivative plot twists and uninspired direction.  How I’ve read better lines in fortune cookies.  You know the drill.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember to stop and dislodge the film can up my ass and remember that is, in the end all just entertainment.  That funny means different things to different people, and that not all people take the same thing away from the same movie.  I have a long celebrated two-hour argument over Fight Club to remind me of that, if nothing else.

And yet, sometimes I feel like declaring yourself a “geek” becomes a cop-out excuse to turn your brain off and blindly accept whatever gets put in front of you without any dialogue or independent thought at work on any level.  Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News probably did as much or more to mainstream film geekery as anybody, and for that I will always be thankful.  

That said, reading his gushing praise of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull made me think that if Spielberg presented Knowles a shit sandwich to eat, Harry would produce a column that gushed over the shade of brown the shit he consumed was and thanking George Lucas for trimming the crusts off just the way he likes it.

I think geekery can be more discerning than that.  Whether that’s true or not is something we’ll be able to discuss in these pages over time.

Enough with the previews.  Fire up the projector.

Disney: Full of Laziness

Disney’s cartoons from the 70s were great. My favorite cartoon growing up was Robin Hood with the animal characters. I watched it until I wore out the tape. Then, a few years ago when I was all growed up, I got it on DVD.

Today, I found this gem through the Magic Of The Internets. It’s a composite of 5-6 different Disney cartoons where they had reused dances and fight scenes almost frame for frame in multiple movies.

From cinematical.com:

Did you ever notice some similarities beyond the love of princesses and their princes? Watching Disney over the years, they all seemed fairly diverse — Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, The Jungle Book, The Aristocats, Robin Hood. But they all have some really recognizable things in common

You had best believe that it took someone with mind-boggling levels of cartoon geekery to catch this.